MoCCA Recap

Sooooo MoCCA was this past weekend, so the 555 crew drove up to table and sell our wares. One of the best things about comic conventions is the drive there, this time no exception, with conversations about robocop, 90's comics, talking about new projects and riffing off each other and getting hyped about what we expect the show to be like and what we want to buy.

I tabled again with Peter Lazarski and Mike Turzanski, the partners in slime. When doing comic cons, it might just be me and the type of east coast cynical/sarcastic take on life i'm used too, but its always a day long game of cracking jokes at attendees. You just HAVE to rip on someone when they spend 10 minutes reading all your books and not buying anything followed by the awkward

'thank you' and walk onto the next table. Mike Turzanski is the most quick-witted zinger-bringer i have ever tabled with, he had me cracking up all day on his observations of passer-bys. As for the art pete and mike killed it yet again with there own line of t-shirts and posters, and of course the 'what the fuck, is this serious?' art-object book zine comic thing, last year it was a screen printed found record with mikes band, a xeroxed zine of weird drippy drawings, and a poster, THIS YEAR they had a collaborative, extremely weird and trippy stream-of-conscious comic that each had a unique one-of-a-kind cover by them, with a neon sticker of a facial part, i of course picked the best out of the bunch titled 'look whos eating cream part IV'.
me n mike

and they also premiered to the greater-comic-region Hope Mountain the Rochester NY based free comic tabloid which i'm also in. making it the table comic that relates us all.

and of course philly has secret prison 4 which we all know and love here at 555-COMX.

and Smoke Signal (brooklyn) and Kuti (finland) joined forces and blew us all out of the water with a partial full color split, giant unfolded tabloid. I love them all and i must say that i think that every city and group of artist-friends should have a free tabloid to distribute, it raises awareness of the kind of awesome shit thats going on in comix to the general public as well as being the best type of comic stock to collect, newsprint! The paper changes color after periods of time!

This year i deliberatley didn't buy anything (i got bills to pay!) which made me miss out on a ton of great artists, i didn't even get a chance to meet peter bagge, and i was sitting across from the fanta table! oh well. i did however manage to procure a lot of trades.
The best stuff i had handed to me was all from the RISD table, apparently there was 9 of them all sharing a space, and at seperate times between the 2 days i had 4 of them come over and give me some of the best and weirdest screen printed comics ive seen in a while.
i especially love heather benjamins hardcore hairy porn comics she has, great shit! as well as thomas toye with a completely 2-color screenprint throughout the whole book story of puking on geometric shapes to make pizza.

another amazing feet of craftsmanship is 3 mini-comics held together by a cardboard monster head called the monster town books by Pranas t. Naujokaitis

a great international encounter was with Cynthia B. that publishes Golden Shower magazine, a great dirty sex humor comic rag in portugese, i can't read it understand the words but reading the images theres some great talent there.

Another one of my better trades of the weekend was ROM (yes, that ROM) by Josh Bayer. Josh is a new contributor to Secret Prison, which was the first place i saw his work, which im in love with! He's got such a raw, just throw the ink on the paper, dont give a fuck, type style, at least thats how i read it. great stuff.


Saturday was spent mostly behind my table, i only briskly walked through the floor trying to stop and chat with some of my comic-peers i only see at this show. Lunch consisted of a Modello tall-boy across the street with Ian Harker, Lance Hansen, and Sindre Goksoyr (of Dongery fame). MoCCA is always good to see whats new in the world of some of some of the euro-comic scene and Dongery always has the best new comics on display representing Norway. Rest of the day was a grind of sales pitches and making fun of people, at the end of the day me Box, his lovely lady Sarah, and Lance went to the hog pit and got some meat to eat with a bucket of pbr. always fun to go out with cartoonist friends however i do see the irony of travelling to another city just to hang out with the same cartoonists i usually eat and drink with in Philly, oh well, we GET each other, dig?

Sunday at MoCCA seemed like the usual hung-over cartoonist fest sharing stories of the night before. Again i tended to stay put most the day and only venturing out to talk to friends and try to approach people about PACC. i got this lovely watercolor portrait of myself done by Sally Bloodbath, who, for the record moved to NYC from Philly, just to realize Philly is better and now shes moving back. you heard it here first, finer cartoonists prefer the taste of Philadelphia over New York City!


i also got 2 baby mini-comics from Kate Fajardo, some funny stuff from the future of cartooning.


MoCCA this year for me however was more about spreading the word about PACC then anything else, which i believe i successfully did, i even sold a few tables. I see a lot of people complaining about the steep prices and the difficulty of making money or even breaking even, and i do 100% agree, if it wasn't for me selling tables for my own show i would have just maybe made table money, but no way make travelling, eating and drinking in NYC money however. Will the surge of cartoonists bitching about the prices make MoCCA lower them? probably not, it'll probably just crop up with newer and fresher faces more willing to lose money as the years go on. i will of course be there next year.

The drive back to philly was another great time, spent with Jake Alvarez and Lance Hansen having very detailed conversations about weird-sex stories and different types of shit and shitting. As i walk the streets of Philly a lot of the times i think 'wow this city is such a shithole dirty crime infested hell hole', but after a weekend in giant ass new york its always good to be home. although i must say new york is waaaaay cleaner of a city then philly, its weird to see streets not completely littered with trash.