A Hazy Shade of Winter

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NOW is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by packing our bags and books and MK Reed and heading off to RIPE, dammit. That’s the Rhode Island Independent Publishing Expo, which really should be RIIPE. We had a little too much fun the last time, if you remember. Funny, our lone criticism of last year’s show was that it was in the dead of summer. While that did add a bit of humor to the name RIPE, it also meant the kids were out of school. Providence being the home of Brown and RISD and the birthplace of Fort Thunder, we should all be looking to corrupt the youth. Now’s our chance. Hide your kids, etc.

MK herself has served as our celebrity comics mule on a couple of our trips to TCAF. Why she agreed to that is anyone’s guess, considering the thrill of getting through customs. There’s no such danger this time around. More importantly, this will be MK’s first ride as an actual Secret Acre.

We’ve been doing a lousy job of keeping the cat in the bag, but MK Reed and Farel Dalrymple‘s Palefire will be heading your way this fall from yours truly (via Greg Means, the captain of Tugboat Press). Obvi, we love MK and Farel (and Greg). Go on and have a look at this dang cover right here…

Palefire

Not bad, huh?

While we were hibernating and eating the paint off the walls – and all the Secret Acres artists were reeling from the realization that everyone else knew society was a lie the whole time, and they played the game, anyway – life went on without us:

Panel Patter and Rachel Loves Comics loved Corrine Mucha‘s Get Over It! The LA Review of Books was way into Corinne’s latest, too. Graphic Novel Resources celebrated Get Over It! for their Will Eisner Week, and Unshelved couldn’t put it down. Whit Taylor and Foreword Reviews even put Get Over It! on their Top Ten lists.

There were other Best Of things, like Sean Ford, whose Only Skin got some kind words from Andy Wolverton, getting his current series, Shadow Hills, on to Rob Clough’s besties list for the Comics Journal. Mike Dawson‘s Angie Bongiolatti made its way on to Rob Kirby‘s and MariNaomi‘s 2014 favorites. Baltimore’s City Paper and the Chicago Reader both counted Edie Fake‘s Memory Palaces among the best reads of the year.

As for Edie, the Hammer Museum put the spotlight on him and his work for Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, and if you watched the Slap all the way through and didn’t blink, you saw his artwork for Scratchpad’s logo at the end of every episode. Theo Ellsworth had his own showings at Giant Robot and his hometown Missoula Art Museum (which is still going), and he was the subject of a lovely short film here. Even better, Theo’s second book of his Understanding Monster trilogy was selected for the Society of Illustrators Comic and Cartoon Art Annual, alongside Edie’s Memory Palaces and Corinne’s Get Over It! See? It all comes full circle.

Speaking of the Society of Illustrators, they’ve finally gone and moved the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival, better known as MoCCA. The ever-evolving MoCCA is moving out of the Park Avenue Armory this year. After all our whining and bitching, we might miss ye olde Armory, but the new digs are quite fancy.

We’ll babble more about MoCCA when we come back here with our RIPE wrap-up. If you have the means and the time, get yourself to Providence. We’ll be in the beautiful Ship Room at table 5. There will be snacks.

Your Pals,

Barry and Leon

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