I’m heading down to NYC for the MoCCA Comic Festival this weekend. Come see me at the CCS or IKJK table and check out the variety of comics my friends and I have been making. I’ll have comics to sell at these tables, some from my shop and some not. However, my super-recent work will be featured in 3 different anthologies:

My 14-page story called “First Flower” is in the latest IKJK anthology, Future.The comic began as a reaction to James Thurber’s “The Last Flower,” which can be read online here, though reading it in print is a nicer experience. “First Flower” is a time-traveling adventure that follows two hopeless romantics (one from the past, one from the future) who are obsessed with a tulip-shaped flower. I had a great time playing with page-layout and panel-repetition in this story. Above is page 7 from the comic. Read more about the anthology here.

Taffy Hips will debut issue #7 at MoCCA, too! My adorable neighbors Chuck and Melissa will have comics in there, a bunch of inspiring cartoonists will be in there, and the final version of “Head-aches” will be in there, too.

Chuck co-edited CABOOSE with Max—look at that amazing cover they collaborated on! This free newspaper features a bunch of White River Junkies along with artists like David Libens, Alison Bechdel, and John Porcellino. It is a gorgeous publication and I’m happy to see The Cannibal comic in print!

I had a super-wonderful time at MoCCA! I got to meet lots of artists and bought and traded for some lovely comics. For example, here’s all the stuff I traded or that was free…

I’m just super-inspired by all the work I found. My plan is to chat about some of the work I got at MoCCA on my blog. First off, I thought I’d discuss the comics I received that incorporate collage. I kind of let my fingers wander on the keyboard and let my mind flow…so apologies for the badly-written sentences that follow.

Clara Bessijelle
The Lobster King’s cover like a Golden Age Marvel comic with Renaissance super-heroes, created using collaged pencil-drawings on paper. Charcoal-rubbings showing different textures, all sorts of mark-making. No ‘post-production’ editing, rather the editing is what is interesting, with cut out people appearing over a beach scene, a chair placed into a living room, or photo-copied eyes appearing over different folks. I love the line, “Sometimes a feeling can infect a whole group of people.”

Gil Gentile
Laid out on graph paper, but no love for panel-organization; instead a maze is constructed with cut-up comics (he told me Ranma 1/2 comics appear in there) for cut-out elf teenagers to traverse. They talk about making a video-year book, one saying “I’m just doing it to be able to put it on my application to the Joe Kubert School,” and “I feel like there is, like this confused gang…with lofty goals. But we have this laundry list of demands they handed to us.” These elves live in a strange, pop-world and I wonder if they’re talking in code about making comics, about breaking rules, about the reasons to create something different?

Dunja Jankovic
Ego #4!? Musings and stories told poetically. The first, Metamorphosis, seems to be about the thoughts of constructing a picture—calming your mind in order to focus. “I should make a dotted shadow on my second page. It will go well with the stripe stripes stripes and dots.” And then later, “I guess it’s hard for me to relax. I can’t find my focus.” Maybe this comic is about not needing a focus–about the joys of brainstorming and exploration. Like what you see when you close your eyes and imagine what your head should look like. Ideas like different materials, odd shapes invading your brain.

Sam Gaskin
Yoko Ono in “Motherly Love,” a little photo-copied zine by one of my favorite cartoonists. A torn Archie(?) comic plus a cut-out blown-up drawing of Yoko Ono decorate the cover. Walking through her weird house Yoko encounters many sights, including a rubbed relief drawing of foreign coin and a repeated telephone-photo. It is still a narrative, though, with Yoko hoping to see her son but being stopped by “mental obstacles, manifesting themselves,” like we are seeing Yoko’s interior house and psyche. Many directions, pop-culture references, and images that entice my brain.

The first dudes I traded with at MoCCA were the guys at One-Percent Press. I’m a big fan of these 4 and I always look forward to seeing their new comics:

Joe Lambert lives just down the block from me and always plays soccer on Sundays (he’s one of the fastest players!). Everyone’s waiting for his awesome books to be finished, so in the meantime he teases us with cute little mini-comics and contributions to different anthologies. The image above is from Caboose, where his comic appears opposite mine. Maybe you can tell how, instead of traditional panels, he uses trees, telephone poles, and hills to provide the ‘panel breaks.’ It’s a really fun, fluid reading-experience, and it’s just one of many ways Joe likes playing with cartooning.

JP Coovert graduated alongside Joe from CCS a few years ago, and while he works some mainstream gigs I love how he’s a mini-comic maker at heart. His super-cute art is deceptively simple and inventive, with cool speech bubbles and solid layouts. It’s also perfect for the all-ages stories he tells, such his recent mini, Heavy-Handed. An artist’s arm grows gigantic, so the guy goes on a quest to…kill a monster? Sure! Along the way he meets birds who speak in hieroglyphs, a rock-man with ‘rocky’ text, and a turtle-monster who speaks with hearts over the ‘j’s.

Alexis Frederick-Frost was my Publications teacher last year and I still see him a little as a “teacher-dude.” I immediately get immersed in the worlds he creates in his comics, which have a 19th century European flair to them. He’s got this fluid line that’s so elegant and fun, too. His stories often take unexpected turns into more-interesting territory. This is definitely true in his most recent comic, Courtship of Ms. Smith, concerning a female spider who always eats the gentlemen who court her.

Ahh… James Hindle! Little Wolves was my favorite mini I received at MoCCA. I really enjoy the way James composes a story and love pondering his design choices. I could go on but I’d just be drooling.

So, I’m glad I got to hang out with these guys at MoCCA. They are all so friendly and really committed to cartooning. Check out their websites and JoyTeeth, where the One-Percent guys, myself, and other friends post sketches!