Aisles were bustling at the Society of Illustrators’ Museum of Comics and Cartoon Arts Festival 2025, or SI MoCCA Fest, which drew almost 7,000 attendees to the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City March 15–16. Independent creators sold zines, prints, minicomics, and merch shoulder-to-shoulder with small and mid-sized publishers including Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics, New York Review Comics, Silver Sprocket, and Uncivilized Press.

Chelsea, where the pavilion is located, is a locus of NYC art schools, and students came out in force at a show that saw a number of art and design graduate programs take out booths to attract enrollment. The environment felt welcoming and celebratory, with stalwart indie cartoonists who have attended the show for decades reuniting with friends and colleagues and young aspiring artists encountering their professors sitting behind tables hawking their minicomics. Again this year, RisoLab, a division of fellow sponsor the School for Visual Arts, set up a demonstration allowing attendees to print their own art on one of its Risograph machines.

Headliners included Charles Burns, Jaime Hernandez, Anders Nilsen, and Adrian Tomine, who were joined by such emerging international cartoonists as Boum, María Medem, Chloé Wary, and Linnea Sterte, who drew the festival’s poster art. The festival has “always been international,” said Society of Illustrators executive director Arabelle Liepold. But this year in particular, the German-born arts administrator looked to build on that reputation, bringing global voices together in what felt like a show of solidarity among artists in a fractured political landscape. Featured guests were supported by partner organizations including the French, Swedish, and Spanish consulates.

While the show offered a kind of “escapism” from the news, per Liepold, current events were very much a highlight of the official program. Australian-Chinese dissident artist Badiucao opened the show on a panel alongside Cuban-American political cartoonist Edel Rodriguez titled “Dissidents in Exile.” Often called “the Chinese Banksy,” per his publisher, Liz Frances of Street Noise, Badiucao spent his time outside SI MoCCA guerilla postering a bright red caricature line-up titled “New World Order” showing American resident Donald Trump aligned with profiles of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At the show itself, he was on hand to promote his graphic novel debut, You Must Take Part in Revolution. The speculative tale about Hong Kong in 2080, cocreated with journalist Melissa Chan, has been “pre-banned” in China, Badicuao said, disappearing before his eyes on Chinese-based AI search.

“As a Chinese political artist, we used to look up to the democracy in America as a kind of beacon shining the way for China…but witnessing what’s happening in America is a huge disappointment,” Badiucao told PW. “It’s really a peculiar time to be in America and from the perspective of a Chinese dissident, knowing the way rights are stripped away from people, to tell the American people that this time might be different. You really need to defend your democracy.”

Other programs at the show ranged from sessions on comics and ecology to “Color, Composition, and Emotion” and varied professional development offerings programmed with SVA, such as the eminently practical “I’ve Graduated, Now What?” The goal, according to longtime SI MoCCA programming coordinator Bill Kartalopoulos, is to maintain an “intelligent, functional cultural event” to get creators and readers alike “thinking about comics in interesting ways, and hopefully foster productive conversations between people who are uniquely here in this same space.” He added: “SI MoCCA has a strong retail core, and that economic engine keeps the show going. But we also take very serious the fact that it’s organized by a mission-oriented nonprofit, and MoCCA as a festival is itself a cultural event that serves the community.”

At an afterparty held at the SVA Flatiron Gallery on March 15, the fest announced the winners of this year’s SI MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellence, an honor that comes with a cash prize nicknamed the “M prize” after the late political cartoonist Timothy Patrick “M.” Moynihan and funded by his former schoolmates. (A pop-up exhibit of Moynihan’s work greeted visitors at the mouth of this year’s show floor.) Though the prize is a decade running, the memorial behind it was newly brought to the fore this year during a time when political cartooning and journalism are under increasing threat of government censorship. The award is unique in that a jury comprising three judges attends the first day of the show for five hours and then convenes to select winners solely on art on display that day—primarily comics and illustration work but in this year’s case also a set of felted plush toy animals.

This year’s winners are:

  • Natalie Andrewson, Dreaming in Color (Peow2)
  • Linnea Sterte, World Heist (Peow2)
  • Connie Myers, Big Gamble Rainbow Highway (Cram)
  • Huahua Zhu, The King's Warrior (Bulgilhan)
  • Lucky Pocket Press, Knapsack
  • Ellen Lindner, Lost Diamonds Part 3 (Birdcage Bottom)
  • John Vasquez Mejias, The Puerto Rican War: A Graphic History (Union Square)
  • Bill Roundy, The Bees Knees
  • Keith Knight, Keefer Madness!
  • Johnny Dombrowski, Over the Top
  • Yasmeen Abedifard, When to Pick a Pomegranate (Silver Sprocket)
  • Jennifer Xiao, Puff plush toys (Mango Town)
  • Bianca Xunise, Punk Rock Karaoke (Penguin Random House)
  • Christina Lee, Smart Talented Hot Personality
  • Michael Deforge, Holy Lacrimony (Drawn & Quarterly)