They mostly weren’t art directors, actually.

That is to say, the most interesting panel from the perspective of creators that happened at MoCCA was at the end of Saturday, when Viktor Koen (in association with SVA’s Continuing Education program) spoke with Emma Allen of The New Yorker (she says she’s more on an editor), Matt Lubchansky of The Nib (artist and editor), Will Varner of formerly Buzzfeed (and illustration editor), and Alexandra Zsigmond (actually an art director, formerly full time and now part time with New York Times).

Regardless of what they might call themselves on their business cards, their job is to find creators to make pictures (maybe with words, maybe not) for money. You want to know what they’re looking for, so that you become what they’re looking for, and they want to give you money. So many of you wanted to know what they’re looking for, the room was SRO with possibly more people standing in the margins than sitting.

• Starting from the very broad What are you looking for?, the answers were extremely varied. Allen started off with maybe the one piece of common advice: Be really good at what you do and then we’ll buy it, but there was a lilting, jokey tone to her voice. It’s not enough to be really good if you don’t have a unique way to express it; don’t bother emulating Roz Chast down to the molecular level, since she’s already got Roz Chast.

  Zsigmond isn’t looking for cartoons at all — she wants single images that capture the concept of a potentially long story. Lubchansky is looking for everything from gag panels to pure political cartoons to satire and longform reporting, but in each case it has to be a comic for a reason. Varner was more likely to look for visual essays for longform, but short pieces and humor comics were chosen as much for virality potential as anything.

• Where they find creators is likewise all over the place, but all would agree that having a findable portfolio with your name and email on it, showing enough of your work to get an idea of what you can execute, is key. Social media presence is helpful (Varner, Lubchansky), but your personal audience there won’t substitute for art chops. Zsigmond spends a lot of time trawling sites and print anthologies on art and design, and looking for who artists link to — having a network of people whose work you enjoy/talk about is a good indication of worth.

  Allen is in the unique position of inheriting a job from somebody that had it for 20+ years, in a magazine with a very set style for 90. Her goal of preserving the traditions can run up against finding new voices, but she’s managed to move into longform comics. Her most important question is Who are you excited about?, using creators to find creators.

• Getting the job is just the first task; if you don’t ever get brought back, you don’t have a career. Lubchansky emphasized that people who do good work and are easy to work with (good communication, accepting feedback and direction) will be reused over mad geniuses that disappear at random. Got problems with the gig? Talk to your editor, don’t let it be a surprise.

  Allen countered that overcommunication is also an issue — don’t bury your editor’s email, don’t require handholding every half-step. Zsigmond added that it’s a bad idea to drop surprises — you’ve been through sketch approval with your editor/AD, don’t produce a final piece just before press deadline that’s radically different than what was agreed upon. Varner just doesn’t want you to save all your problems and questions for 6:30 on Friday evening. Space ’em out!

• Asked what makes somebody ready to turn pro, the answers were pretty uniform: be organized, consistent, and able to ask for money with a straight face (Varner). Have confidence in your work, as shown by a body of good work (Lubchansky). Be able to deal with people in a professional manner as you make connections (Zsigmond). Have enough ego and hustle to get out there and sell yourself, be able to deal with rejection and silence, but keep all the ego in check (Allen). Or, as she elaborated, A small group of neurotic sociopaths are really good at it, and I’m lucky to work with them!
• The counter is when does an artist not get work, what are the sins that will keep you in the reject pile? Lubchansky needs to see consistency in your portfolio, that it indicates you can execute on the kind of work you’re pitching. Varner needs to see what you’re good at and doesn’t care where/what form that is (countering the narrative that You Have To Be On Instagram).

  Zsigmond wants to see a dozen or more completed pieces to get a feel for what you do. Allen repeated her emphasis on tone, originality, culture fit. Failing to meet these requirements, or running counter to them, is what keeps you from getting the call back.

Getting the idea that there’s no one path or way to success, and you have to apply yourself to the job you want? That you have to decide how much time you spend on the business of being a working artist, and how much on the creative end? As Allen says, If you’re not making any money, your taxes are easy!, but money comes in handy for those of you that want to pay for things like food and shelter.

Some of the panel are, or have been freelancers, they know that not everybody has the metabolism for that life, but no one part of your career¹ is better or more noble than another. So pay attention to the key takeaways — don’t make people you want to hire you have to Google you; read the guidelines and pitch for things the venue will actually publish; keep your communications (especially follow-ups) professional and brief; buddy up, start an anthology, work your craft and be visible. Or, as moderator Koen concluded: Less bitching, more pitching.

Go get ’em.

Spam of the day:

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Only somebody that hates spam as much as me would buy the services of a spammer, is that it? Get lost.

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¹ And keep in mind that your career is not going to be that of the ’60s cartoonist, who showed up in the city on Tuesday with a portfolio of comics, starting at the outlet with the best rates, then the one with the best donuts, and by the end of the day had sold everything and got on the train home to Bridgeport.

Still talking about people doing interesting work, but no Editor’s note today. Sorry?

• There’s nobody I look forward to seeing once a year like George O’Connor — his Olympians series from :01 Books is a delight of ever-expanding complexity, and we always have a good talk about the more obscure corners of Greek myth. So one more book, with Hestia stepping out of the limelight³ to narrate the story of Dionysus.

  After that, he’ll be busy on his contribution to the World Citizen Comics line, but then he’s allowed for the possibility of looking at the Norse deities, and that should be fun — Loki’s an even bigger jerk than Hermes, and his book was a riot, dick jokes and all. We also discussed the possibility of taking a run at the Egyptian pantheon, but they lack definitive (or at least surviving) accounts, and those that we do have would be tough to adapt to a middle grade book¹.

  His love of the material (and talking with anybody of any age) is infectious. He knows his stuff better than anybody I’ve ever met (like how when Hephaistos caught his wife Aprhodite and brother Ares in flagrante, the original texts state that Apollo and Hermes decided to bust his chops, offering up that they’d gladly be caught in such a compromising position) and always offers up a story I’d never heard before (like how the founder of Athens sprung from the leg of Athena … after Hephaistos, in a creeper moment, got shall we say too excited in her direction²).

  There may be more stories that are thematically linked instead of focused on a single character, as well. And I was pleased to point him in the direction of Meg Hunt at table B124, who was selling bandannas that were screenprinted with mythical beasties; the one with the minotaur practically tells the whole story, which McCloud would tell us makes it a comic.

• Speaking of the B aisle, I saw some of the most beautiful paper art I’ve ever seen at the table of Mäelle Doliveaux of Beehive Books — shadowboxed works of cut paper, one-offs made as special tier rewards for a Kickstarter. Follow this link and scroll down, and see what can be accomplished with patience and a sharp enough blade⁴ to cut paper very cleanly.
• Falynn Koch’s done a couple of Science Comics (on the topics of plagues and bats) and will be one of the early contributors to the new History Comics line, but I was glad to talk to her about her Maker Comic (on the topic of baking). Mostly we talking about how all of the recipes mentioned in the story are given in the back, except for the chocolate chip cookies. Just use the one on the bag is the advice given in character, and there’s a reason.

  That recipe on the bag — any bag, from any maker of chocolate chips — has been refined in the crucible of a million home cooks, perfected until they show off those chips as much as is humanly possible. More than anybody else, Koch opined, the chocolate chip people want you to succeed with that recipe, so that you’ll love the cookies and want to make more and buy more chips. I’m not saying that she got into my head with that bit of wisdom, but I will say that less than 10 hours after we talked, I had a fresh chocolate chip cookie in my hand, and that required navigating the rest of MoCCA, getting home, and doing a grocery run.

• Every year at MoCCA, I see people I’ve never seen before. Some are showing their influences plainly, a table of stickers of popular characters, no indication yet of what stories they have to tell, what characters they would breathe life into. Some are starting to see how to construct those stories, how to make characters that aren’t Naruto with the serial numbers filed off. Each year I see some that are very good, and each year I see about 0.75 of a creator that’s scary good, one that you’ll want to keep your eye on for the future, because they are going somewhere.

  This year, I met her within 10 minutes of the floor opening on Saturday. I made my way to the far back wall to escape the crush of people entering, and at the shared booth for students of Moore College Of Art & Design in Philadelphia, I met Dylan B Caleho. Her senior thesis comic, Don’t Linger In Dark Corners, caught my eye from ten feet away. It’s a damn strong cover, designed to stand out against background noise, and a story that perfectly paces to a cliffhanger, one that demands a full story treatment.

  Fortunately, she’ll get the chance; after graduation, Caleho will be taking a job with a comics press, working the production end of things. It’ll only help her understand how to build comics better, and hopefully she’ll get the chance to show what she can do on a longform treatment of Don’t Linger before long. I mean, she’s going to be showing up on radars sooner or later; my bet is on sooner.

  Just one thing: follow her at the Twitter link above, or her Instagram. There’s a Tumblr that comes up if you search for her that appears to have been taken over by Vietnamese spammers, so don’t go to dylanbeedoodles.tumblr.com unless it’s via the Wayback Machine up to or including 2 Feb 2019, unless you’re in the market for Hanoi-made polo shirts.

Spam of the day:

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Oh, yes, I’m entirely going to click a link to see what pants you want to buy when I don’t sell pants, or even voluntarily wear them. That’s a great idea.

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¹ There’s a lotta semen in those Egyptian myths.

² Yeah, okay, lotta semen in the Greek myths, too. But relatively large numbers of non-semen-based stories to tell, compared to the folk of the Nile.

³ All the records of her that survive speak of modest Hestia, and there’s little about her that does survive. O’Connor considers that intentional — the goddess of the hearth, the one that keeps you warm and safe and isn’t interested in knocking shit down or raping your daughters or killing everything that moves? No need to tell stories about her to paper over the flaws and motivate you to worship, everybody knows them all and loves her.

⁴ In this case, a blade made of photons; she used a laser cutter for this.

[Editor’s note: The rumored history line at :01 Books, as recounted in a footnote yesterday, is rumor no longer. Check out Brigid Alverson with the exclusive on :01’s History Comics, launching next year.]

In which we continue to talk about people working on Cool Stuff.

• At some point we’ll talk about people who were tabling, but let’s start with some folks who were just wandering the floor, free from obligation. Rebecca Mock is doing lots of work here and there, but I was most interested to hear about her current project with Hope Larson, provisionally titled The Salt Witch.

  Think frontier magical realism where witches are needed to make agriculture work in turn-of-the-last-century Kansas and you’re on the right track. Mock expressed hope that people will like it, I told her that given her Four Points track record — where you can see her getting stronger from page to page — that I am fully prepared to love it now, a year or more before it comes out.

• You know who you should definitely have lunch (ramen, if at all possible) with, should the opportunity present itself? Shing Yin Khor. First of all, she’s very compact so she will offer you half of a pork bun because she’s full so hey — bonus half pork bun. Second, she’s always working on something cool.

  Whether it’s a piece of installation art that she can pack up and move to where it will have the most impact or selfies with her new best friend, she’s always got something cooking. In this case, something was a beautiful minicomic of Deathcap and Friends¹ which I think you can only get if she runs into you and hands it to you, which she did. Yay, me.

• Part of why I was glad to find Khor is that about 15 minutes earlier I’d found a mini that reminded me of her, from Elizabeth Gasse of The Society Of Chimeric Creature Studies; I think this is her, but there’s no link on the mini and she doesn’t appear in the MoCCA exhibitor list² to double-check, so I’m not certain.

  Anyway, it’s a small field guide to griffins, premised on the idea that they cross with many types of birds, and so it’s arranged like a birder book — pictures, maps of territory, descriptions of field marks, etc. It’s neat.

• A bit down the aisle from Gasse was Ken Wong, of whom we have spoken previously. His use of origami to tell stories has gotten more elaborate, with this year’s newest offering being a retelling of Who’s On First via flexagon. Specifically, a tetraflexagon, where by flipping flaps in a particular order (its printed in the margins) the one page in your hand becomes four, then rotates back to the beginning.

  It’s a more robust (and more self-explanatory) structure than his earlier hexaflexagon comic, which comes with an instruction sheet, but which also cycles through six pages, some of which are repeated upside-down and backwards from their original appearance, but have been drawn so that they make sense in the new orientation³. We traded stories of other highly original format comics, and I was able to point him at the Möbius comic from last year’s exhibitors, Pain Pals, which he hadn’t seen before.

• About one aisle over, I was approached by Ben Granoff, who reminded me that we’d met years ago, probably introduced by somebody in the SVA class cohort that included Meredith Gran, Ian Jones-Quartey, and Daisy Maguire. He’s working with the ArTechCollective in a program that helps people with cognitive challenges express themselves.

  Some of his artistic partners were tabling through the weekend, and he gifted me with a stack of their stories — character portfolios, superhero stories, how Back To The Future changed a life for the better. The work is heartfelt, and in some cases may be the dominant means for the creator to communicate. The image up top is by an ArTech contributor named Cynthia Soto, and damn if it’s not amazing that somebody can do work that good and also be self-taught.

You know what? That’s a pretty uplifting note (not that there were any downlifting notes) to wrap up on, so we’ll continue tomorrow. Be well until then.

Spam of the day:

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So you’re offering to spam others the way you spammed my comment form, and you’ll do it through the most evil, exploitative gig economy bastards ever, Fiverr? Yeah, screw that.

_______________
¹ Although drawing comics about funipomorphic personifications of depression means that she is weirded out about eating mushrooms in her ramen. Hey, more enoki for me.

² Evan Dahm mentioned that this year, it was apparently self-submitted so if a creator didn’t (or didn’t know to) add their details to the exhibitor page, they weren’t listed. Now I know why the exhibitor page was so sparse!

³ Ever see Gustave Verbeek’s comics with Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo? Like that, only also a six-way flexagon.

[Editor’s note: This has only the slightest bit to do with MoCCA, but it’s time-sensitive. Zach Weinersmith & Bryan Caplan’s graphic novel on immigration releases in October, but it’s available for pre-order starting today. As in the past, Weinersmith is angling to prevail on the Amazon algorithm and offering up rewards for those that do preorder.]

Today’s theme on the happenings at MoCCA Festival 2019 is what people are working on, on account of I ran into a lot of people working on a lot of things. This isn’t necessarily chronological, so don’t look for a consistent passage of time.

• Before I even made it inside on Saturday morning, I ran into Magnolia Porter and Tom Siddell (both of whom are killing it on their respective comics right now), and they’re working on their new, shared life as married folks. It’s a long way from the UK to Brooklyn, but they’ve got tablet, network, and each other. You will seriously not ever see anything more adorable — I am including sleepy puppies trying to keep their heads from drooping in this statement — than newlywed Porter gleefully introducing Siddell to somebody as my husband. I love those crazy kids.
• In the opening minutes, I also ran into Calista Brill, editorial supremo at :01 Books, who is working on everything — walking the aisles trying to determine who should be on her radar, keeping to the ambitious release schedule (they’ve gone from about two dozen books a year to more than twice that in less than two years), launching at least two, maybe three new lines in the space of a year¹ … they’re on the verge of world domination but too busy to slow down for the customary Mwah-ha-ha-ha!
• Just as well they haven’t declared victory, really, since Gina Gagliano is less than nine months from Random House Graphic‘s debut year, with twelve books on the slate and announcements reaching out to 2023, if I’ve paid attention. Less than a year ago, she was thrown into a new job without a staff, an office, or time to catch her breath before having to develop things like a marketing budget (for books that didn’t exist and had no deliverable date because she didn’t yet have any creators under contract yet), and now she can see things starting to happen. Preview material for sales folks, printing press time and shipping containers coming together, all the logistics that assure yes, this is real.
• Evan Dahm is going to be able to show off three, four new books over the coming year; Island Book is just over a month from release, Vattu’s third collection is approaching delivery, and he’s in the final stages of a project for Iron Circus called The Harrowing Of Hell, about what happened to Jesus for those days between crucifixion and resurrection; there’s going to be a collection of shorter works as well. Somewhat appropriately, Dahm will be finishing Harrowing just as Easter approaches; with printing lead times, I’d expect it to release (also appropriately) sometime in the Lenten season next year.

  Asked about what public domain book he’d like to adapt next, he allowed that he’d like to take a shot at The Worm Ouroboros by ER Eddison, but he may be a while before he gets to it; you can’t help but notice that nice, big 1 at the top of the spine of Island Book, so I’m guessing he might be a bit spoken for for the next while.

• Rosemary Valero-O’Connell is working on saying No for a while. Her debut longform work, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (words by Mariko Tamaki; I’ve been reading it obsessively since I got a review copy on Friday), hits in four weeks, and making a 250-plus page book in just about a year, while working on other items at the same time, would tax anybody. After some downtime, she gets to start work on her second longform work, one that she’ll be writing as well as drawing. I’ve said ever since I met her that she would produce astonishing work and just keep getting better; so far, it looks like I’ve been right.
• Colleen AF Venable² has plenty to keep her busy, too. Kiss Number 8 is so, so good³, and her gig directing art for Odd Dot is starting to pay off. I told her that the ringbound easelback presentation for Code This Game! made me angry, because I wanted that innovation to have existed for my college years; she heaped praise on her staff member (she called him one of my inventors) that came up with that design in 30 seconds with an X-Acto) and I begged her to license it. Apparently, every imprint up and down the Flatiron Building is asking if they can use that innovation (I really hope that includes all their cookbooks) and she’s more than happy to share. She’s just happy, period. Collen AF Venable has the proportional happiness of a spider that’s really, really happy.

  And all of that is before she gets to her own books — she’ll be doing a Maker Comic and she’s got a superhero story that sounds brilliant and hilarious and brilliant again, one that will hit right in the spot that the Minx line failed to capitalize on a dozen years back.

• I’d never met Tea Fougner in person before; we wound up geeking out over how wonderful Olivia Jaimes has been on Nancy for the past year. She hopes that seeing the tremendous interest shown in a nearly century-old property will make it easier when she argues to her bosses that she needs to be able to revitalize some of King Feature’s legacy strips with bold returns to what made them great.

  The tributes to Popeye are a start, but we agreed that she needs to just hand that strip over to Randy Milholland and then let him go to town. Either that, or she needs to hop to Disney, work her way up to the appropriate place, and then hand Duckville to Milholland and likewise let him go to Duckburg.

You know what? At least four more people to talk about in this context, plus all the new creators I met for the first time, and we’re over 1000 words. More tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ 2019 saw the start of the Maker Comics line, early next year will see the civic engagement line, World Citizen Comics (of which Weinersmith & Caplan’s book is less a member, more a precursor), and I heard rumors of a history line in the works.

² She gave me her current business card which notes, Yup, That’s My Real Middle Name.

³ Despite some folk asking if it matters that they didn’t read the first 7.

So many people have written about MoCCA Fest 2017, I’m just going to mention some things that I enjoyed hearing/hearing about/discussing. No particular order.

• Meredith Gran tells me that she’s got 15-20 story pages of OctoPie left to go; everybody is getting wrapped up but concedes that there will be minor characters whose arcs aren’t completely finished; given sufficient desire, she said she could spend another year working all of those resolutions. Somewhat similarly, she’s still deciding on what her next project will be. Me, I want Manuel the cat, Olly’s snotty nephew, and the Rock Lobster to fight crime together in New Orleans.
• Gene Yang, Damian Duffy, Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor, and Jonathan W Gray had a hell of smart discussion about the need for diversity in comics to start the programming track. Ironically, this came one day after the Marvel pronouncement about diverse characters not selling, and they were having very little of that claim. Bonus points to Duffy; when Gray threw out an open question about how to make comics more diverse, he replied Well, as the white male, let me solve that racism for you … to big (if slightly knowing) laughs.

  Yang, by the way, is the consummate professional; we spoke very briefly at SDCC last summer and he both recognized me and asked how I was doing when we caught each other’s eyes. I asked him what it’s like being an Official Genius and he noted I still have to do the dishes. I told him to try using his Ambassador For Young Peoples Literature credentials — they must surely offer some kind of diplomatic immunity from sink-based chores.

• George O’Connor and I spoke at decent length about our love of Greek myths; I’m constantly impressed by his ability to take stories that are fundamentally dark, filled with horrific punishments and hubris and death, and make them accessible (without losing that edge of menace) to young readers. He replied that he started reading them at that age (drawn in by the idea of monsters; his design for the hecatonchires as fractal horrors is really inspired) and he turned out okay.

  He’s done some deep dives into the entire corpus of the mythic tradition, too; there’s thousands of variations and contradictions, cobbled together across a millennium or so of varying oral cultic traditions, and he’s trying to come up with a single narrative structure that reconciles them all.

  You can see his approach to getting all the different stories to line up in how the tone of characters has shifted. The first book had avenging young badass Zeus; the most recent volumes have him more harried and put-upon by the responsibilities of running a very fractious family. He’s managed to bring these deities down to a human level¹, which I expect to lead to great things in the next volume — Hermes has become, over the last few books, a smartass verging on bro with a side of complete dick. It’s gonna be hilarious.

• Lucy Bellwood was my first stop of the morning, and we spoke about tying Turk’s head knots, about whether or not the US Coast Guard training vessel USS Eagle counts as a tall ship (Bellwood: It totally does), and about the Riso demo station that was set up at the far end of the hall. I always flatter myself that I have a feeling of what autobio comickers are like before I meet them, but in Bellwood’s case that intuition was pretty much dead on. She’s a woman that loves the open water, lines in her hand, sheets filled with wind above her head.
• Brigid Alverson always make vague plans to meet up at shows we’ll both be at, and never follow through. This is never a problem, because we invariably bump into each other at some point and get caught up then. This time it was coming out of the diversity panel, and we spent a pleasant hour having lunch at the hotel bar, with Johanna Draper Carlson joining us. Less talk about comics, more about other stuff. If you ever meet Alverson, ask her to tell you her One Time It Was My Job To Keep Stephen Hawking Happy For A Couple Of Days At A Conference story. It’s great.
• By the time we got back to the show floor from MoCCA, it had become a wall-to-wall sea of humanity; it was wonderful to see so many people there to search out new comics, but man! I made it back to Evan Dahm&rsquo’s table and managed to introduce him to Mark Siegel (his editor at :01 Books; they’d never met face to face); I have a suspicion that Dahm’s forthcoming Island Book (due early 2019) will be but the first of his collaborations with :01; they’re a perfect fit together.

  As I noted to Siegel, they have a full slate of books with tween or early teen girl protagonists who have adventures!, but they aren’t aimed at girl readers. They’re just aimed at kids of a certain age, and it’s a hell of a valuable thing for boys to read Zita The Spacegirl, or Time Museum, or Space Scouts, and see heroes that don’t look just like them. And what’s Island Book about? A tween or preteen girl (or equivalent, since we aren’t talking about humans here) protagonist that has adventures. Why should kids get all the girl heroes?

• There was also a big push at the :01 table for the second Nameless City book from Faith Erin Hicks (The Stone Heart, and hey, look at that: tween or early teen girl co-protagonist that has adventures); today is its book birthday, and also the announcement that the trilogy will become an animated series. We’ll give that the full attention it deserves tomorrow.
• Sadly, the crowd prevented me from making it back to aisle H, and a print that I saw early in the day and had wanted to purchase. It’s by a young woman named Olga Andreyeva, and it was the result of an accidental pigment spill that she turned into something really unique and beautiful. The rest of her portfolio is great, but the sort of thing that others are doing — videogame-inspired art of great imagination and technical skill, but familiar.

  Eve is spare, conveys a sense of frozen time, and delivers an emotional wallop. It’s absolutely the best thing I saw on the floor this year, and I’m very sorry I didn’t get back to purchase it. Hopefully a few of you go take a look at it (not to mention the rest of her portfolio) and Andreyeva gets more than just my missed sale out of it.

Spam of the day:

This new kitty litter is like having a veterinarian check daily! IT AUTOMATICALLY TURNS DIFFERENT COLORS BASED ON PREVENTABLE HEALTH ISSUES!

On the Top Ten List of things I want to do ever, checking out rainbow-colored magic kitty litter appears approximately zero times.

_______________
¹ Not that any religion has ever invented gods that really behaved better than their worshippers.

That’s because things that are more time-sensitive than MoCCA Fest 2017 recaps happened since last we spoke.

Okay, one tidbit from MoCCA, but mostly because it’ll make FSFCPL happy. Thanks to the good graces of :01 Books editor Mark Siegel I was very briefly introduced to the marvelous Pénélope Bagieu, who was promoting her newest book. Siegel shared :01 will be publishing an English omnibus of her two-volume collection, Les Culottées. The American edition will be titled Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World (available March 2018), and :01 is pretty much her American publisher going forward. Now if they can just get Boulet’s Notes series, I can die happy.

• Speaking of MoCCA (we were so, just most of it will be tomorrow), I’ll be restricting my news to what I got on the show floor, not what was told to me under the influence of sophisticated adult beverages at Jon Rosenberg’s Goatsiversary Party on Friday night. At some point, cool things are coming from the likes of Evan Dahm, Meredith Gran, and Christopher Hastings, but those bits will have to wait.

  Also on hand to help Rosenberg celebrate: Mike Holmes, Chris Yates, Andy Bell, Magnolia Porter, Lucy Bellwood¹, MC Frontalot, and Dilbert creator Matt Lubchansky. There was cake, and we did partake of Jon’s face(s). I highly urge all of you to attend the next one in 2037.

• Speaking of strippiversaries, today marks eleven years of KB Spangler’s A Girl And Her Fed, which has expanded from an intriguing (if eyeless) meditation on civil rights in a time of surveillance to a remarkably prescient webcomic, series of techno–thriller novels, a reinterpretation of Helen of Troy², some high-quality smut (some Patreon locked), and the most patient homeowner in the western world.

  Oh, yes, and she’s also become my very, very dear friend. Some day, when our respective spouses come their senses, she and I will find ourselves single, adrift, and on a twelve-state spree of chaos and destruction, never quite sure which one started the trouble, which one was supposed to bring bail money, and how many times those roles have switched. Happy anniversary, B. I’m proud of you.

• And among all the Goatsiversaries and strippiversaries, there’s one thing even more important: David Malki ! and Nikki Rice Malki are now parents to Benjamin Rice ! (I’m pretty sure the ! only follows the male line). Benji, you are small, but you are the most important thing in the world to at least two people, and I will do my best to make the world less colossally stupid than it can be sometimes. You will grow to be mighty and feral cats will do your bidding. We’re happy to finally meet you.

Spam of the day:

Our team works hard everyday to ensure that we are providing the best possible service for all our customers.
Cordially, Derek Customer Service Representative, Slut Roulette

Man, Derek’s got the best business card ever.

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¹ Whom I had never met before; we had a lovely bar-shout/chat, more discussion the next day, and will undoubtedly have more to discuss at the Alaska Robotics Comics Camp later this month.

² That reminds me: Otter, I spent some time at MoCCA talking with George O’Connor, and he’s going to be looking up Greek Key because he really liked your take on Helen. He’s also all-in on your next Hope Blackwell novel because I mentioned the magic word: chupacabra.

Good news for indy and webcomics creators, as TopatoCon 2016 will be free to attend and the NCS Division Awards released their nominations. Two of the three nominations for Comic Books are Giant Days (Max Sarin, although the image that they’re using is a Lissa Tremain cover) and Squirrel Girl (Erica Henderson), and the two online categories are full of excellent choices. Namely, Drive (Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett), The Creepy Casefiles of Margo Maloo (Drew Weing), and Octopus Pie (Meredith Gran, her second nod) for Long Form, and Bouletcorp (Boulet), Kevin and Kell (Bill Holbrook), and Sheldon (LArDK, again) for Short Form. Gonna be some tough choices to make as the NCS membership looks over their ballots.

The rest of this post is about one person I met at MoCCA Fest, and how you’ll want to keep your eye on her work.

At the start, it was the earrings¹. Large, white, vaguely dangerous-looking at first glance. Definitely lethal at second glance, and nervous-making despite the endlessly cheerful demeanor of the wearer. I asked what they were, and she told me — perhaps a little too cheerfully — Bobcat jaws! Like, actual fang-sporting jaws of actual bobcats, the better to destroy her enemies if she has any, which I seriously doubt.

Since I was there I glanced over her table, and as I mentioned before, I stopped when I looked at an open minicomic, the pages of which I immediately recognized. It was If Only Once, If Only For A Little While, open to the second and third pages. I remembered it because at the time I thought the character designs were reminiscent of Adachi Mitsuru’s Cross Game or (dating myself here) Matsumoto Izumi’s Kimagure Orange Road (which, coincidentally, is now finally being translated into English).

I always found their faces to be expressive with an absolute minimum of detail, and the same strengths showed here; it’s like the artist found that diagram in Understanding Comics that shows the continuum of faces, from photorealistic to circle/dots/line and picked out a spot just over the line into the cartoony end and said Here. These are the faces that suit this story.

There’s also the staging of those two pages (seriously, go look at them), particularly with the coiled dragon mural and that one, mostly black panel on page three. They draw your eye in and make you visually circle around that central bit of text: An awful truth is still the truth.

Combined with the bit dialogue at the end of page two (Nothing that exciting would ever happen here), the reader is entirely engaged in the story and primed for — perhaps dreading — the revelations to come. And that’s before you notice the POV shifts and camera angles and distances in the individual panels, each serving exactly the purpose needed in establishing mood and story. Did I mention the skill at which she draws the drape and folds of clothing? Because she gets how cloth works on human bodies. I’ve seen this before, but I know I haven’t given you money for it I said; We need to fix that.

And that was when I met Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.

Details came up quickly — she’s a student at MCAD, getting ready to graduate in the coming weeks; she’s been doing comics for about three years, and oh yeah — she’s also working on her comic book debut, which just so happens to be the much-anticipated Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy crossover. I asked how on earth she’d scored that gig as her first comic book work and with all the sincerity in the world she said I got really lucky.

And that was when I decided I needed to know Rosemary Valero-O’Connell much better.

As I mentioned, I saw a lot of student work at MoCCA, and talked to a fair number of students; some were reticent, some outgoing, all were starry-eyed and optimistic about their forthcoming fabulous careers in comics, except one. Valero-O’Connell was cautious and hopeful and well aware that the comics business is not a meritocracy or even particularly fair. She knows that the deadlines and page rates may border on science fiction², she knows that the business end is capricious and even cruel. She’s ridiculously grounded and ready to do a huge amount of grinding work to establish herself.

And that was when I resolved to follow Rosemary Valero-O’Connell very closely.

It shouldn’t be too hard; in addition to LJ/GA³, I noticed that she did the cover to the new Steven Universe original graphic novel that releases today (co-written by show producer Ian Jones-Quartey, no less). She mentioned that she has projects in the pipeline that she can’t talk about just yet. She is, I hope, working on stories of her own, because I want to read them and see them where they belong — on the shelves of stores, gathering the sorts of notice and acclaim that Raina Telgemeier and Hope Larson and Noelle Stevenson are getting.

And that is why you want to pay attention to Rosemary Valero-O’Connell; she’s seriously skilled today, and she’s only going to get better.

Spam of the day:

The Gene Simmons Company

Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Gene Simmons achieved permanent Garbage Person status on 4 February 2002.

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¹ I should note that the earrings had competition for coolest jewelry of the show; not long after entering the hall I noticed a black, metallic, sculptural necklace on a woman and complimented her on it. The more I looked at it (with her permission, don’t want to be creepy) the more it looked familiar. That looks like a benzene ring I said, indicating the central element, but I don’t know what the things hanging off it are. It’s dopamine she told me, so at least I can still identify benzene. Pretty sure this was it if you want one of your own.

² At one point I begged her to spend some time this week reading everything Katie Lane has written on work made for hire, and to please never undervalue her skills. She knows, and thankfully she’s got an agent looking out for her. And hell if she didn’t luck into the Impossible Thing with this LJ/GA gig — an underpaid (it’s mostly Boom! wrangling the story, so it’s definitely underpaid) WMFH gig where the exposure (reminder, kids: people die of exposure) is actually significantly valuable. This story is going to put her on a lot of people’s radar.

³ To be honest, I’d planned on dropping both Lumberjanes and Gotham Academy because I found the original creative teams to be more to my tastes than the current creative teams; I’ll be holding out at least through the six issues now.

Yes, there are other things to mention, such as the news that TCAF announced another six guests (including Gene Luen Yang), and Christopher Hastings is getting another Marvel miniseries. Those are good bits of news, go revel in their newness.

• Probably nobody on the floor of MoCCA Fest has had as precipitous an upward trajectory as Noelle Stevenson; I first met her two years back when Lumberjanes #1 was fresh on the shelves and Nimona was not yet nominated for the National Book Award or optioned for the big screen. I asked her how she follows all of that up and she mentioned she has a book in development with HarperCollins called Four Wizards¹, as well as a second project she can’t talk about yet. I told her something I told a number of creators — I can’t wait to see what she’s doing in five year, ten years, because she’s just getting better.
• Despite the presence of a booth helper with a name tag reading Gina Gagliano, the beating heart of :01 Books (and the woman who sends me enough review copies to drown an average-size ten year old) was repping the imprint in Houston during MoCCA weekend; no matter, as the booth was in the good hands of Danielle Ceccolini.

  Ms Ceccolini came on board in 2014 to replace departing book designer Colleen AF Venable; print lead times being what they are, it’s only been in the last six months or so that I’ve seen Ceccolini’s name in :01’s offerings, so we’re just starting to get a sense of how strong her designs are (especially given that a number of her designs have been on continuing series — such as The Olympians or Glorkian Warrior — that had an established look and feel).

  Case in point: Faith Erin Hick’s The Nameless City (out today), which sports an absolutely gorgeous design to go with the engaging story. If you ever wanted to read a graphic novel (for, let’s say, tweens and up) that reminds you of all the best parts of Jeff Smith, Hayao Miyazaki, Gene Yang, and Kazu Kibuishi in one book, this is the one for you. Or rather, the first of three for you, since it’s a planned trilogy.

  Between that deal, the numerous Yang offerings each year (including the Secret Coders series with Mike Holmes, second volume due soon), and the Science Comics line, it seems like :01 is on track for a good deal more ambitious a release schedule than their recent history of 18 – 22 books a year. It’s a hell of a lot of work for four people, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that they need more hands to keep their well-deserved reputation for quality.

• Ken Wong was somebody I’d intended to go see on the floor, as the description of his origami comics — comics where the physical, three-dimensional presentation becomes part of the story — intrigued the hell out of me. As it turned out, I walked by his table somehow not noticing the enormous ORIGAMI COMICS banner, but my eye was caught by the cover of what turned out to be the single nerdiest comic I’ve ever read: Bonetti’s Defense — I Know Something You Don’t Know About Swordplay In The Princess Bride. It’s exactly what it says on the cover: a picking-apart of the slight dialogue (and careful choreography) of the epic duel between Inigo Montoya and the Man In Black on top of the Cliffs of Insanity.

  Drawing on what I’d always assumed to be throwaway names (in the screenplay and the original book), Wong finds the historical Bonetti, Capo Ferro, Thibault, and Agrippa and talks about why their teachings are appropriate to the scene in question. And because anything nerdy that you’re nerding out over can never have too much nerding, he finds likely historical referents for fencing masters McBone, Sainct, MacPherson, and Morozzo. Wong even figures out who the most probable inspiration for the Dread Pirate Roberts was.

  It’s not necessary to read Bonetti’s Defense to enjoy everybody’s favorite movie², but it gives a sense of satisfaction to realize how much William Goldman, Rob Reiner, swordmaster Bob Anderson, and everybody else cared to make things right even if only one guy in Brooklyn would ever realize how right they were.

• Not far from Wong’s table, I did the I was going to look for you and didn’t realize you were here and something on the table caught my eye deal a second time, when I came across Azure. In this case, the catch-my-eye factor was provided by a stack of onesies with dinosaurs on them.

  I’m very sorry to say that I can’t find a link on Azure’s site for these because they are adorable and my gosh, did I just have a grand-nephew born like ten days ago? I believe I did, and young Collin is going to be well-equipped with a dinosaur onesie and small prints with dinosaurs on them because you can never start a love affair with dinosaurs too early.

There were students everywhere. I saw tables either officially representing schools, or filled with students who came from particular schools but not in an official capacity, including (but likely not limited to) Parsons, FIT, Pratt, SVA, Syracuse, CCS, Moore, and at least one high school club.

The students themselves ran the gamut from shy and retiring to immensely outgoing; from art student chic to lacking even one piercing or visible tattoo; their work fell into every conceivable genre and style, from I’m mostly inspired by what’s on Crunchyroll this month but haven’t quite figured out anatomy yet to a noir mystery starring snails³.

But there was one (from the far lands of Minneapolis) that stood out from her contemporaries; her work had an assurance, a confidence that I wouldn’t have expected from one so young (and who had only been doing comics for about three years). One whose work I realized I had seen before and (foolishly) had not bookmarked at the time. One who has Big Things happening in the immediate future, and whose future work I am looking forward to as much as Noelle Stevenson’s, one who I think is going to make as big a splash in the industry as Stevenson, Hicks, Telgemeier, or Larson.

But I’m over 1000 words as it is, so come back tomorrow and we’ll talk about Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.

Spam of the day:

Diffuse threats with this recently released technology

You mean I should make them ever less and less concentrated, until they are spread over such a large volume as to be indetectable? Or given the rather rah-rah tactical machismo of your imagery, did you mean defuse? Either way, it’s just a damn flashlight, bunky.

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¹ Or possibly 4 Wizards, or For Wizards; it was noisy and I didn’t ask her to spell it.

² Oh hush, you know it is.

³ The same creator’s other works were all shiny and sparkly, which prompted me to suggest that to my knowledge, nobody has yet combined noir story structures with the Lisa Frank aesthetic and she should get right on that.

Welp, we know why there wasn’t an xkcd on Friday; it’s because Randall Munroe was getting ready to unleash one of his toys on us in the form of xkcd #1663, a slow-moving utterly unique garden simulation where you get to position lights (including color and beam width) and see what grows. It may take hours to see stuff pop up, and no two runs will be the same. For reference, that image up top is from a stock reset of the toy, no messing, after about two hours.

It will take approximately forever to determine all the mechanisms of Garden, but right now it appears that yellow light is required for the short shrub-trees, tall spires, and birdbaths; blue light appears to be necessary for octopuses. Oh, and whatever browser glitch that caused my three-lamp, three-color, balanced layout to reset itself back to stock: you suck.

The rest of this post is the first part of Fleen’s roundup of this weekend’s MoCCA Festival, which I attended on Saturday.

• As I mentioned in my pre-show discussion, a lot of the established webcomics crowd doesn’t do MoCCA anymore; I walked into the Metropolitan West facility¹ — a somewhat modern and spare space compared to last year’s Chelsea location² (then again, the sightlines were pretty good and the climate reasonable; it only really got stuffy for a short while in mid-afternoon, as the rain was ending and lots of damp bodies started to crowd the aisles) — only knowing one person that I expected to see on the floor: Evan Dahm.

  Evan’s deeply artistic, artfully-presented books are a natural for the MoCCA crowd, and he reported the show was going well. He let me know that he’s just approved the proofs for the second Vattu book, and we had a great conversation about the minutiae of that story, its ultimate length (four books), other projects he’s got in the pipeline (nothing I can tell you about at the moment), and our dogs. Mostly our dogs, truth be told.

• Next to Dahm’s table I met Kathleen Kralowec, whose comics are maddeningly bright and intricate, the result of watercolor and marker and absolutely no fear of working in materials that don’t take kindly to mistakes. Check out The Lion And The Roc for a good example of what she’s capable of, and if you see her at a show be sure to pick it up in print, because it’s astoundingly gorgeous.

  It was about this time that I started talking up Pat Race’s Alaska Robotics MiniCon; assuming the first one breaks even and Race is crazy enough to run a show again next year, hopefully a lot of up-and-coming creators are willing to make their way to Juneau.

• A mild correction, lest I leave you with the impression that I made a beeline to Dahm’s table first thing; he was fairly close the rear of the second floor, and while I did start there and work my way down, the first creator I encountered was actually Molly Ostertag of Strong Female Protagonist. We chatted briefly about how hers is the one story-centric webcomic that I cannot read update-to-update, or even chapter-to-chapter; I need to have big chunks of story to dig into, so I was thrilled to hear that the Kickstarter for the second SFP collection will launch this summer. Hooray!
• I met Bill Roundy at MoCCA last year, and we spent a fair amount of time talking craft cocktails. As it turns out, he remembered me and we continued our discussion about the revival of a once-classic cocktail that had largely fallen by the wayside due to the discontinuation of a key ingredient.

  The Brooklyn is a delight (and strong!) mix of rye, maraschino, vermouth, and Amer Picon — a French aperitif that isn’t made any more. My regular bar found you can do a reasonable substitution with Torani Amer³ and flamed orange peel, but people that remember the old Amer Picon say it’s not quite the same.

  But there’s now a distillery that’s sourced the original ingredients and methods, and people who remember the old Amer Picon say that Golden Moon’s Amer Dit Picon is pretty much identical to the original; Roundy (being a man with his head screwed on straight) rightly sees this as a reason to celebrate, and hopefully The Brooklyn will become popular again.

  He may have had a flask for personal consumption with sharing offered to friends and fellow cocktail enthusiasts. I may be in a position to say that Roundy’s mixing skills are excellent. And it’s not up in his store yet, but his print Still Life With Potential Brooklyn (similar to these) is handsome and will soon be a gift to my regular bartender.

More on MoCCA 2106 tomorrow!

Spam of the day:

Commodities’ “Head-Smashed-In”

I hope that this has something to do with putting commodities barons on the receiving end of the famed Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump and reenacting how it got its name.

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¹ After a 20 minute wait in the rain; give a venue security dude a short haircut, suit, and an earpiece and he’s gonna be forcefully shouty when he announces attendess have to leave the vestibule. Which on the one hand, fine, I can absolutely see that having the entrance crowded directly in front of one of the fire exits is an issue.

But on the other hand, it would have been much better to go with Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry, I know it’s raining, but the City won’t allow us to have you stand here in front of the fire exits. If you’re not an exhibitor, please line up along the side of the building and try to stay dry instead of Attention, listen up, you have to leave the building now, unless you’re an exhibitor. Nobody is getting in until you all leave; you must line up in that direction [hand stabby gesture towards the USS Intrepid] now.

That second bit is not an exact quote, but I believe it captures the tenor of the announcement accurately.

² Which featured lots of natural light and roof access; on the other hand, the Chelsea site had a small footprint and required the use of a tight, steep stairway to navigate the upper three floors. MetWest only had two floor, and it was more spacious set of stairs, so that was nice.

³ The owner of the Torani company — they make all those flavored syrups you see in coffee bars — missed Amer Picon, so he came up with his best-effort recreation, which is the only alcoholic offering of the Torani company.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; we may imagine Beef and Ray tearing down the road, not yet able to form words.

MoCCA Fest is next weekend, and I’ll be seeing you there, yes? For those who’ve missed the new, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival (presented by the Society of Illustrators) is off tow its third venue in as many years (and its fourth overall), but the SoI folks know how to put on a show and I suspect this one will be as good as the last few, which keep getting subtly better. We’ve seen news about the venue, the show poster, the Guests of Honor, and the programming, so let’s talk about exhibitors that will be there. As usual, I’ve probably missed a few, so let me know of any necessary corrections.

• Time was, MoCCA attracted an exhibitor pool that was heavily concentrated on New York (particularly Brookyln), with a lot of indie and webcartoonists in the mix; longtimers include the likes of Evan Dahm (table I276), Dean Haspiel (A112), Josh Neufeld (same), and Sylvan Migdal (H261, who I must have met at maybe the second MoCCA Fest ever).
• A lot of the original cohort has come and gone, but there are newer indie and webcartoonists (many of them from Brooklyn) who’ll be there, including Rachel Dukes (I268), Jenn Jordan (H261), Aatmaja Pandya (F214), Carey Pietsch (F207), and Alison Wilgus (G231). Heck, some of their generation have become bona fide superstars like the omnipresent Noelle Stevenson (C135).
• Also present since small times have been a strong mix of publishers — Abrams Books (G235/236), Fantagraphics (C136-139), :01 Books (D144), Pantheon (E158/159) — and institutions — Center for Cartoon Studies (E174/175), Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (E160-163), Parsons (J283/284), SVA (A118/119), Syracuse University (E166/167) — dedicated to the craft and perpetuation of comics.
• And one of my favorite parts of MoCCA Fest has been its turnover; there’s always somebody new showing up, with stuff that looks interesting that I haven’t seen before. This year I’ll particularly be on the lookout for Olga Andreyeva (J291), Azure (D146), Alisa Harris (G231), and Ken Wong (I266). I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this list (and the one up above of the newer generation of Brooklynites and allies) is overwhelmingly made up of women; I suspect it will not be too many years before a show like this one has to have a panel that asks what it’s like to be a dude making comics.

Lastly, for any that have energy left over after a first day that’s likely to be packed full, SoI are sponsoring an afterparty/awards ceremony from 7:00pm to 11:00pm on Saturday night, although you need to be an exhibitor, volunteer, Guest of Honor, or otherwise VIP to get in. Fun starts with free beer from Flying Dog Brewery until it runs out (cash bar afterwards) and a small plates buffet; the MoCCA Fest Awards of Excellence ceremony starts at 8:00pm.

Keep in mind that the SoI dates from a time when a skilled trade like illustrators could purchase a fancy-ass building for their headquarters, and they’ve got a century’s worth of neat stuff on display. If you can go, I’d encourage you to do so; if you can’t, I’ll see you on the floor.

Spam of the day:

topkitchenremodeling Gorgeous Kitchens – Check it out.

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