On Sunday, June 22, New Yorkers lined up for hours to buy a big blue brick of a book—but it wasn't Harry Potter. The must-have book of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art's second annual MoCCA Art Festival was Craig Thompson's years-in-the-making, 600-page graphic novel Blankets. Publisher Top Shelf debuted both the softcover and limited-edition hardcover versions at MoCCA; within three hours, staffers had sold all 30 copies they'd brought of the $75 hardcover, and were blowing through piles of the paperback (which Thompson was on hand to sign).
Considerably bigger than last year's debut festival, this year's MoCCA packed well over 2,000 paying visitors into Manhattan's Puck Building. (Next year they'll either have to find a bigger facility or spread the event over two days.) MoCCA works a little bit differently from most comics conventions: there are no mainstream comics publishers here, precious little manga and almost no other merchandise on hand. Instead, the focus is on the art-comics scene, and its small presses and self-publishing cartoonists. There were a few panels and presentations: notably, this year, Art Spiegelman accepted the museum's lifetime achievement award, and first-generation underground cartoonists Phoebe Gloeckner, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Denis Kitchen and Jay Lynch participated in a panel called "Rebel Visions." Mostly, though, visitors mobbed the 125 tables where publishers and cartoonists hawked their wares.
And the mobs were buying. Fantagraphics had shipped in from Asia a carton of the ultra-deluxe $35 hardcover edition of Chris Ware's Quimby the Mouse; all copies were purchased within minutes. By the end of the day, the Fantagraphics table was half-bare—attendees had cleaned out of almost everything, from the new collection of George Herriman's Krazy Ka t to Jim Woodring's coffee-table-sized The Frank Book.
Alternative Press had a big table that served as a catchall for its associated cartoonists (most of whom were on hand to sign) and their projects. Publisher Jeff Mason previewed a couple of debut graphic novels (Sara Varon's Sweater Weather and Lauren Weinstein's Inside Vineyland) and also sold a bunch of older but not widely distributed books, such as Orchid, Sparkplug's Eisner Award—nominated anthology of stories adapted from Victorian sources.
Drawn & Quarterly showed new paperback editions of two books it had previously published in hardcover, Seth's It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken and Debbie Drechsler's Summer of Love, and fielded lots of questions about Chris Ware's forthcoming sketchbook Acme Novelty Datebook. Soft Skull Press's table focused on its cartoon titles, including the debut of Fly's book of subculture portraits, Peeps. In the world of alternative comics, self-publishing is a viable option, and young creators like Tyler Page (whose Dementian im-print has published two thick volumes of his Eisner—nominated Stylish Vittles series) were able to sell their books to visitors who can't yet find them in many stores.
Perhaps the densest crowd, though, was clustered around four tables at the back of the hall, featuring a group of artists and publishers loosely associated with Highwater Books and Providence's Fort Thunder collective. Kramers Ergot Four, an enormous and gorgeously produced 330-page volume from Avodah Books, sold almost 200 copies at $25 each during MoCCA; the full-color book features work by Ron Regé Jr., Anders Nilsen, Lauren Weinstein, David Heatley, Souther Salazar and Jeffrey Brown, all of whom were present and selling their own comics, chapbooks and graphic novels, too.
Brown's new autobiographical graphic novel Unlikely (Top Shelf) had a considerable buzz around it; he was also selling a little sketchbook called Maybe We Could Just Lie Here Naked Holding Each Other for a While but Not Have Sex, which probably says more than you want to know about his aesthetic. The Highwater group also sold a pile of the third volume of Dan Nadel and Peter Buchanan-Smith's $25 anthology The Ganzfeld (published by Monday Morning), featuring essays by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Lawrence Weschler alongside experimental comics and graceful design.
Among all these small publishers, there was one large conventional publishing house at MoCCA. Doubleday was promoting its now-suspended graphic novel line (after Will Eisner's forthcoming Fagin the Jew, the line will be "on hold"). Lance Tooks and Jason Little were on hand to sign the Narcissa and Shutterbug Follies, respectively, which were the first books released from the line. There was some speculation on the floor about the possibility of other traditional prose-book publishers getting into literary graphic novels; but for now, distribution alliances like Fantagraphics's deal with W.W. Norton and Drawn & Quarterly's agreement with Chronicle seem more likely.
