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non-florilegium

MOCCA Roundup
Okay, so Big Apple was a bust and the shuttle bus never materialized, with the Big Apple dimwits failing in the basic task of being able to locate a vehicle their PA system was insisting was present. They didn't really care, and boo sucks to them. But MOCCA was great, far better organized, and full of better stuff.

I met a lot of people, got sketches from favorites Brian Lee O’Malley and Paul Hornschemeier, and go to chat up The Comics Curmudgeon. So that was wicked fun. Anyway, everyone who was there ( = most of you, or at least ali_wildgoose, emsariel, erinfinnegan, ogreteeth, froglartbge, ikyoto, kitryan, oneangryrabbit, samgrrrl, sumanah, thatphilguy, & thecomicman) should give a report, especially on the books you got, so we can all know what to read and what to bleed. Here is my report:

One of the happiest surprises at MOCCA was a comic everyone else has already read, Mighty Skullboy Army (Euralis's recommendation). The art is great, with a clean line and a self-consciously adorable character design. Like everything else in the world (ho hum) it has monkeys and robots, but manages to be engaging and amusing with them, instead of just trotting them out in a pornographic, "you must like it! it has monkeys and robots!" manner. I'll definitely be picking up the trade at work.

Also exciting was getting some early work by Kazimir Strzepek (it's hard to ask for this guy's comics by name). Strzepek does the graphic novel Mourning Star, part one in a series about post-apocalyptic goblins, which everyone should read, but I got some of his minicomics work, "Spaz" and "Basilisk". "Spaz" is an uneven collection of minicomics about three roommates, an identification figure, a loudmouth, and an anthropomorphic cat, which is sometimes good and sometimes pretty typical for the genre, but always with excellent art. "Basilisk" was better: originally appearing in the Elfworld anthology purchased by erinfinnegan (and for which I mocked her--oops!), it features a great story at once an homage to and parody of D&D-type fantasy.

It's probably easier to get away with stupid fun in a mini-comic than trying for substance and failing to reach it in six pages. Dave Savage's "Terror of the Erotic Chainsaw Fantasies of the Vampire Cheerleaders" is a fat, poorly-drawn lowbrow mini that's still funny in a sub-Johnny Ryan way, if you're into that sort of thing (which I am). (The title is reminiscent of a masterpiece published years ago in Pulsar.) Better, although only slightly less intentionally stupid, is Andrew Lin's "My Life's Work," each page of which features a strange story in sixteen small panels. An example: Two leaves are talking and one says he's depressed because he can imagine a better life, perhaps as a tree or a bird. He demands the other leaf, hitherto content, exercise his imagination, and the second leaf assents ("OK, even thought it will make me as sad as you") and spins out a fantasy that as a space commando he might fight lizard men and steal drugs from futuristic drug lords. Then both leaves pause and wistfully imagine what might have been. That's good stuff!

One of the pitfalls of minicomics is that they're often full of frufru artsy nonsense. Mikko Vayrynen's "Collected Works" straddles the line between actual stories and artsy-fartsy ("the RAW line," we call it), only sometimes successfully. On the other hand, he gets bonus points for being Finnish.

Scandinavia had an unaccountably healthy presence at the con, and I got some work by Jason, everyone's favorite (challenge: name another one) Norwegian cartoonist, not yet available in the states. There were several issues of his comic Mjau Mjau there, but most of them were written in, you know, Norwegian, so I picked up a silent issue only partially already published here. I also got two Norwegian anthologies, and the one I read was pretty good (which for an anthology means far above average).

Another anthology I got was an issue of Manual Comics' Mauled, featuring a cephalopod cover. Like most anthologies, especially those that aren't big enough to feature "name" cartoonists the way Mome and D&Q can, it's got more misses than hits, and some of these allegedly true tales are clearly not true, but it has some good stuff, especially the opening story, which tells the fates of the sailors of the torpedoed USS Indianapolis starting with a shark banquet and moving backwards through time and catastrophe, a somewhat tired technique used especially effectively here.

I was happy to see exhibiting at MOCCA my old high school acquaintance/nemesis (? who can remember?) and current small-world-style octofriend Matt Bayne, whose mini comic Knights of the Shroud is illustrated in a pleasing Linda Medley-style. Unfortunately, I did not pick up enough to get more than a rough idea of the story, some kind of medieval action-girl tale that had froglartbge worrying unnecessarily, but I'll be catching up on line.

A surprisingly clever cross between stupid fun and art object is Sindre Goksoyr & Kristoffer Kjolberg's trademark-defying Gyro Gearloose adventure designed to look like an airline safety card and actually chronicling the travels of hero and villain flip-books style, until they meet in the middle. I guess it's titled "Lisboa4 Safety on Board"? Anyway, I have no idea where it came from or why, but I'm glad to have it.

I hope everyone picked up the freebie "Nature Comics," which is actually just an ad for the PBS show, but manages to have art by Mark Schultz, R. Kikuo Johnson, and Rick Veitch, which would make it worth paying for.

My big disappointment this year was the Michael La Riccia's Xeric winner Black Mane, not a reference to the Dave Cockrum character but rather an overly earnest autobio comics about impotent rage. The art is not bad, but like Bill Sienkiewicz's run on New Mutants, it just does not work for comics, starting out so jittery and wild that when the raging Black Mane id-stand-in appears there's no wilder it can go. For a comic that's half fantasy, it is disappointingly literal, simply a collection of vignettes in which La Riccia is confronted with alpha males he is powerless against (Black Mane is the fantasy alter ego who ekes out an imaginary revenge). Autobiographical comics are hard to make good, but one key is that they simply cannot feel this safe and earnest.

I got a lot of other stuff too, but haven't read it all. Faux Choose Your Own Adventure Book/Kierkegaard homage Neither Either Nor Or looks especially good.

In addition to, you know, shopping, I got in a few panels. The Fletcher Hanks panel, which required rising at an ungodly Saturday-morning hour was kind of geared towards people who had not already read the book in question (I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets), and could not possibly have suffered from more technical difficulties, but had a few insights and showed some unpublished art.

The Joe Matt interview was interesting because it really kept returning to the same question, which was not really a question.

Interviewer: You know, if you stopped masturbating so much you could get your comics out on time
Matt: It's not worth it.

Seriously, you would not believe how often this came up.

Finally came the Nordic Animation screening. A lot of it was clips from movies I wish I could have seen more of, but the best two were Finnish shorts, the pantyhose one and the horsie one (I can't find the screening list at the moment). Lest I be accused of Finnophilia and prejudice, ogreteeth and Lisa can back me up here.

Tangentially related was the art show at Giant Robot I went to with ikyoto, kitryan, and thatphilguy (and a guy I know named Ken who for some reason I'm always running into) featuring R. Kikuo Johnson, Jeffrey Brown, some rare non-wanky work by Anders Nilsen, and others. There was even free ice cream, although there probably will not be if you go see the art, which you can. Unfortunately, Giant Robot is apparently a place for hipsters, and should therefore be punished.

So MOCCA was awesome. The end.