The third annual MoCCA Festival, held the weekend of June 26—27 in New York City, focused on small press and self-published comics and graphic novels; mainstream American super-hero comics and manga were almost entirely absent from it. Newspaper and magazine cartooning does have some presence, and this year's Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival award went to popular New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, who had a signing for her new cartoon collection, The Party, After You Left (Bloomsbury). And there was a table devoted to books by Internet comics artists like R. Stevens, creator of the self-published Diesel Sweeties.
This year the festival expanded to two days and while the general mood was upbeat, some exhibitors suggested that MoCCA might be growing too fast. Few of even the prominent indie presses could afford a table at the Harvey Awards banquet, and there was the usual grumbling about booth setups. More seriously, although sales were strong, some presses told PW they weren't that much higher than last year's one-day show, while booths were double the price. It's clear that finding the right balance among indie presses, corporate comic strip syndicates and so-called mainstream comics publishers remains an ongoing process.
Nevertheless, fans packed the floor. Craig Thompson (Blankets) made an unannounced appearance at the Top Shelf table to sign autographs. Top Shelf didn't have many major book debuts at MoCCA, but was selling plenty of its backlist. Fantagraphics debuted an oversize hardcover by Gary Panter, Jimbo in Purgatory, and the company sold out its 40 copies within 20 minutes, while 150 copies of Daniel Clowes's new Eightball flew off the shelf inside of an hour.
The Drawn & Quarterly booth had some long lines for author signings, including Seth and Chester Brown, but none longer than for Adrian Tomine's Scrapbook. Alternative Comics' Jeff Mason was singing the praises of his signing schedule, which brought attention to new titles by Adam Sacks (Salmon Doubts) and Alison Cole (Neverending Summer).
Beyond the big indie presses, the festival's most impressive debut was Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze: Sacrifice (Image), the second volume of his history of the Trojan War. Last Gasp Distribution's table was the only one that had copies of the Chris Ware—edited comics anthology McSweeney's #13, and it was selling briskly. Byron Preiss, publisher of ibooks, noted that Blacksad, Vol. 2 was selling especially well and pointed to significant interest in the kids' comic Amelia Rules!. Vanguard Productions did well with Edge, an anthology of work by such high-profile creators as Neil Gaiman, Jim Steranko and Dave McKean.
There were a few notable self-published titles, in particular books funded by the Xeric Foundation's self-publishing grants, such as Samuel Hiti's End Times/Tiempos Finales and Neil Kleid's Ninety Candles. And the talk of the show was a pair of new titles (the Early Years, Volumes 1 and 2) by a very young cartoonist, six-year-old Alexa Kitchen (Denis Kitchen's daughter) at the Kitchen Sink booth.
