Versequential Comics Poetry by Alexander Rothman

Riches and Wonders

It’s now been a week since MoCCA Festival 2011, and I finally feel somewhat back to normal. As in previous years, the weekend went by in a flash—or maybe more accurately in some sort of demented fever dream, fueled by a week of little-or-no sleep, InDesign-cursing, and severe onset of Stapler’s Wrist. That said, this year felt a lot less stressful at the Tapir Tooth table, which I think speaks to how far we’ve all come since we started doing this.

I was selling my new mini/chapbook, Circulating Drafts, which is available through Etsy (note the new link in the sidebar). I’ll post more material from it soon, but some will remain exclusive to the print edition.

I walked away from the weekend with a light wallet and a small treasure trove of comics. There were way too many great finds to list everything, but here are some highlights.

First and foremost, there were exciting new offerings from my Tapir Tooth compatriots—a gorgeous set of postcards from Andrea Tsurumi, a preview of a Reconstruction-era western by Peter Quach, a collection of Centaur-a-Day postings by Miriam Gibson, and a Pokemon-based collaboration between Miriam and Blūjay.

Art by Meredith Leich

We were lucky to have two sets of talented and friendly neighbors: Meredith Leich and Liana Finck on the one side, the folks at Nerd Comics on the other. (That’s a detail from Leich here. I was struck by how lyrical her work was, and I’m excited to check out more.) A few tables down was Kenan Rubenstein, our neighbor from last year. All awesome cartoonists and well worth checking out.

Art by Anthony Cudahy

I was kind of blown away by Anthony Cudahy’s brushwork (here’s a partial detail, which does not do justice to the work), and totally delighted by Caitlin McGurk’s flash cards to sort out members of the Wu Tang clan—including, of course, our generation’s William Blake, one Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

Cover to Finnish Comics Annual 2011

I splurged on this giant, pink, weird anthology of Finnish comics, which I’m still working my way through. Neat stuff.

There was new work (mostly minis) from a number of my friends and mentors, including Tom Hart, Tom Motley, Jason Little, Jon Lewis, Karen Sneider, Josh Bayer, and C. Che Salazar. I finally caught a panel, featuring young New Yorker cartoonists that included my old schoolmate Zach Kanin.

I’m mooching off Andrea’s copy of Kate Beaton’s new book. The NBM table fed my addiction to Dungeon, the satirical French fantasy series.

Cover to Farm 54

And reaching a crescendo, if I had to pick two clear highlights from the convention, they’d be Joseph Lambert’s I Will Bite You and Galit & Gilad Seliktar’s Farm 54. The former is kind of indescribable, and you should go pick it up right now. (I’ll just say that “TURTLE, KEEP IT STEADY!” has immediately entered our daily usage.) The latter (cover pictured here) is a fictionalized memoir of growing up in Israel, told in dreamy, exquisitely rendered vignettes.

Whew! That’s it for now. Keep an eye out for more revisions, and perhaps an eventual move away from the blog format, toward something a little more focused on finalized content.