We’ve Only Just Begun

WHAT a long, strange trip it’s been getting our asses in gear for this year’s Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival, aka MoCCA, brought to you by the good folks at the Society of Illustrators.

We’ve got some real history with this show. It was our first show ever, way back in 2008. If you’re counting, that makes it seven trips to MoCCA for us, from the Puck Building to the Armory, from attendees to the steering committee, from Fatal Faux-Pas to Memory Palaces. This year makes nine books we’ve debuted at MoCCA. This is also the first MoCCA since our first MoCCA where we’ll drop two new books, Mike Dawson‘s Angie Bongiolatti and the aforementioned Memory Palaces from Edie Fake (and, if you’re very nice, you can sneak a peek at Get Over It! our TCAF debut from Corinne Mucha).

 

 

So. All that said, what else is there for us to say about MoCCA? What could possibly get us excited about this particular show? A big, fat balloon! It’s a first, for sure. We’re willing to bet that every other con in the world will take a look at a fifty-four foot Charlie Brown and say, “Damn…” God bless the Society of Illustrators for taking us seriously, or at least collapsing under the weight of our incessant whining. This was an actual dream come true for us, like we could die happy, pretty much.

 

 

Another first: both Edie Fake and Mike Dawson are official Featured Guests of the show. You’d think after the much better part of a decade, Secret Acres would have had at least one featured MoCCA guest, but nope, not till right now. We didn’t need to whine about this at least. As Featured Guests, both Mike and Edie will be participating in the show in a couple ways. To begin, Edie put the art together for the MoCCA badges, which are so nice, you’ll want to collect them all. Mike will be cracking wise on a panel with Sophie Yanow and Seth Tobocman about representations of political protest in comics, moderated by Anne Nocenti herself. That sounds scary smart, doesn’t it? (Don’t be too intimidated, Mike! You know what you’re talking about, for sure!) Meantime, Edie himself will appear on a panel on How Comics are Queer, with the other people who made them queer, namely Howard Cruse, Justin Hall and L. Nichols, moderated by Margaret Galvan. You can get more on the MoCCA programming, programmed by none other than Bill K, here.

One last first: for the first time, we have a new edition of a MoCCA debut which is debuting at MoCCA again (Go on. Figure that sentence out; we dare you.). Yes, after several long months, Only Skin by Sean Ford is back in the flesh. Clearly, Only Skin has been hitting the gym hard, because it looks better than ever. We will cop to the fact that the French edition, courtesy of Secret Acres Europe or Editions Rackham, completely beat our first edition of Only Skin to death. This new edition is ready to strike back. It’s a looker.

 

If you’re around, and you’re up for some pre-gaming, we got you covered. First up, you can throw down and/or have a serious discussion with Mike at his Angie Bongiolatti book release party, this Friday night. Mr. Dawson is returning to Brooklyn, if only for a few hours, and to Bergen Street Comics, where once was held the book release party for Troop 142 (and once again, we look back in nostalgia to the days of Brooklyn Mike and Troop 142). If you were there the first time, you have to come back. You won’t believe what’s happened to Mike since he moved to Jersey and quit the Ink Panthers Show! Meanwhile, if you want to prepare for this, you can read all about Mike and Angie Bongiolatti here and here.

 

 

Finally, a bit closer to the eve of MoCCA, on the third of April, Edie Fake will be in New York at Manhattan’s own Bureau of General Services Queer Division. He’ll have his brand new, positively enormous Memory Palaces with him (which it now occurs to us is yet another first, in that it’s the first Secret Acres art book) and he may even have some of the originals to boot. There will be plenty of civilized talk about the origins of the project, but, really, you just need to see this thing.

If you can’t make it out for all this, we understand. You can always get the new books (and other new things like this) in our Emporium. Of course, we’ll back with our rundown of MoCCA v2.1 in a bit. See you on the streets, where the real comics happen!

Your Pals,

Casey and Leon and Barry

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