Tagged: Mocca

Mike Gold: Tales To Diminish

Gold Art 131016I’ve been going to big-time national comic book conventions for 45 years. This amazes me because I can’t imagine doing anything for 45 years. I’ve got a very short attention span.

The first major shows were run here in New York by Phil Seuling, and they were wonderful. Just about everybody in the industry was there, surrounded by more fans than anybody thought existed. In 1968, attendance was around 300 people – 300 fanboys, virtually all fan boys, virtually all asking themselves the same question: “You mean, there are 299 others who are just like me?”

The following year, Seuling’s comic con grew to over a thousand, and many think twice that. Attendance continued to grow like Hank Pym on crack. Conventions proliferated to the point where, perhaps a decade ago, they started attracting extremely serious “support” from the sundry media industries and running a comic con became big-time business.

So this past weekend, 45 years and three months after Phil’s first, we had the New York Comic Con. Numbers are all over the place, but the show sold out some time ago. Evidently, some 135,000 people showed up – if true (and we’re not counting guests, pros, speakers, and press), then the New York Comic Con attracted a larger audience than the San Diego Comic Con, but, to be fair, both are severely limited by a lack of floor space and a lack of navigable aisles.

That’s not all NYCC has in common with SDCC. If you want to buy a Chevy, you could do it on the convention floor. If you want to insure your new car with Geico, you could do that as well. If you want to find out if you’ll get a parking space anywhere near the convention center the next day, there was a psychic there who might advise you accordingly.

Whereas NYCC had an enormous amount of media attractions and booths and panels, SDCC still has more because, essentially, Hollywood moves down to the border during Con week. Nonetheless, it is clear that NYCC shares at least two things with SDCC.

The first is that the aisles are clogged worse than Chris Christie’s arteries. If you’re trying to go from aisle 100 – where the ComicMix booth lived – to Artist’s Alley, it was a 20-minute walk, with the wind. If the Javits had decent taxi service, I would have considered using it. 135,000 people in the building built to comfortably house half that many at best means “you can’t get there from here.” There are lots of friends I wanted to see but couldn’t get to without borrowing vines from Tarzan.

The second is that neither show has all that much to do with comic books. NYCC still beats SDCC on that front, but only by a very narrow margin. It’s an autograph show, it’s a media frenzy, it’s a celebrity clusterfuck.

I believe I went to six major shows this year. Of those, I personally enjoyed only three, and those are the three I always enjoy. The MoCCA small-press show in Manhattan is always inspiring – it’s a two-day affair full of youth, creativity and energy, and it only requires one day of my life. The Heroes Con show in Charlotte North Carolina is truly about comic books. It’s large but it’s very well managed, and Reed Pop!, the people who put on both the NYCC and Chicago’s C2E2 (and who seem to know very little about comics and clearly care even less) should go out there and take notes.

My favorite show remains the September Baltimore Comic Con. It’s been growing steadily and attracting enough pros and decision-makers to sink the Titanic. It’s all about comics – strictly comics, to repeat myself for the sake of emphasis. The Harvey Awards dinner always is one of the highlights of my year, and it would be even if they didn’t hand out the best swag-bag that one can barely lift, let alone carry.

This year the Reed folks added something to their NYCC. They had chips on all the badges. You had to stand in line until a staffer scanned your badge with an iPad in order to verify your legitimacy. That’s annoying, but it’s even more annoying to leave the place. You had to stand in line for another chip scan in order to get out of the building. If you left at the end of the show day, it could take you a half hour to get from your last roosting place on the floor to the scanning line and then to the door.

I don’t know what would happen if your badge came up invalid when you were leaving. What would they do? Throw you out?

That would have been faster.

THURSDAY MORNING: Dennis O’Neil

THURSDAY AFTERNOON: The Tweeks!

 

Dennis O’Neil Is Not Jules Feiffer?

O'Neil Art 130418So there I was, standing in…no, make that sitting in for Jules Feiffer at MoCCA, a two-day long expo-type event sponsored by the Museum of Comic Art and held at the big armory on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Talk about your bait-and-switch…folks come expecting to see and hear one of our era’s defining and multifaceted talents, a man who has done exemplary work in cartoons, playwriting, screen writing – an innovator and astute observer of manners and morals, a social commentator…This is the giant they anticipated and instead they got…me. Sitting, not standing, on a platform with Peter Kuper, Gabrielle Bell and Paul Levitz. talking about comics and the counterculture.

It’s a big and pretty complex topic and Jules Feiffer – the real Jules Feiffer – might have done it justice. Me – not so much.

Though the kind of comics I’ve been professionally involved in were a far stretch from the innovative, angry, and occasionally profane “undergrounds” that emerged from the turmoil of the Sixties, I guess the superhero stuff I did qualifies as at least marginally countercultural because, after the witch-hunting Fifties, comics of any ilk were not respectable. (Didn’t the Catholic Digest say they were trash? Weren’t there public comic book burnings? Didn’t that some senator or other hold hearings about them?) But, though we did hiccup out a bit of social satire/commentary here and there, we were never in the business of putting it to the man, making granny blush, calling for revolution.

Okay, maybe Feiffer didn’t work those sides of the street, either. Not exactly. But the kind of humor he practiced in his eponymous feature, first in The Village Voice and later in syndication, helped create the societal climate in which authority could be questioned – even mocked! – and the nooks and crannies of our national psyche theretofore ignored by our purveyors of comedy could be acknowledged and explored.

Now, some 55 years later, we can watch Louis CK push in the same direction.

Feiffer’s been on my radar since the aforementioned Fifties and I don’t know who put him there. Somehow, in St. Louis, attending a Jesuit university, I came into possession of Sick Sick Sick, a paperback collection of Feiffer’s early Voice pieces and…well, it wasn’t the brain-wrencher that Kerouac’s On The Road was to be, or, in a very different way, Salinger’s short stories were. But I thought it was funny and it was differently funny and that difference hinted at something out there, beyond the limits of school and parish and neighborhood, something past the boundary of the Mississippi, something that would be good for me to know.  Something that would nourish me.

Something that eventually put me onstage with Bell, Kuper, and Levitz, filling a seat meant for Jules Feiffer and grateful for the opportunity.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Mike Gold: Me MoCCA Mike

Gold Art 130417

Well, it’s convention season once again. This statement doesn’t mean as much as it used to, when there actually was a convention “season.” Now it pretty much runs from the beginning of spring (Glenn was at WonderCon and will be posting his pictures sometime before next year’s show) and ends the following March at San Francisco’s MegaCon… give or take.

My schedule includes Chicago’s C2E2 next week, maybe Heroes in Charlotte in June, San Diego in hell, Baltimore in August and New York in October, held each year at the only spot in all Manhattan that is inaccessible to humanity. For me, it started last week at one of my favorites, New York’s Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art, a.k.a. MoCCA Fest.

Being in our back yard, ComicMix was well represented: Vinnie Bartilucci, Glenn Hauman, Adriane Nash, and Mike and Kai Raub. Traditionally, Martha Thomases is in attendance but this year the she was in Japan at the time and the commute would have been a bitch.

I enjoy MoCCA because there it covers the widest spectrum of self-published, small-published, and web-published “independent” comics. If your thrills are limited to capes and masks from the Big Two, this event would either bore you… or transform you, opening your eyes to all sorts of really interesting stuff people do with our coveted medium. So if you’re into comics, it’s certainly worth a try.

If you could bottle the enthusiasm in the room, you’d have enough energy to replace Chernobyl. By and large, these people aren’t getting rich, although some make a living and others would like to eventually. They’re there out of their love for the comics art medium and to employ our unique storytelling concepts to communicate their stories. Each time I’m there, and I think I’ve been to eight or nine of their shows, I come away renewed and rejuvenated. So up yours, Ras Al Ghul.

Despite the quantity of behatted hipsters, this isn’t necessarily a young person’s show. Fantagraphics, perhaps the leading bookstore publisher of these sorts of efforts, was well-represented, as was Abrams and other staid outfits. While trying not to be overly creepy in my contacts with the younger folk, I also hung out with fellow geriatrics including Craig Yoe, Denis Kitchen, J.J. Sedelmaier, and Paul Levitz.

It comes as absolutely no surprise that of all the shows I attend, MoCCA routinely attracts more women per capita. Well, having made that statement I might have just put the kibosh on that, so let me say there isn’t as much semi-naked cosplay as I see at capes shows. I suspect that this is because the show is all about your desire to express yourself and tell your own story and not so much about who was the Avenger villain who crossed over into Amazing Spider-Man #214. (No, no; don’t Google that – I pulled it out of my ass.)

A high-point was when Vinnie, Glenn, Adriane, Mike, Kai and I semi-inadvertently all wound up at the Popeye’s Fried Chicken across from the venue. There was a point when ComicMix had actually taken over the joint. I’m glad to say that we didn’t spontaneously burst out in rousing song – MoCCA isn’t a science-fiction convention.

As it turns out, this column is sort of a crossover. My friend and fellow columnist Denny O’Neil was also there, and he will be waxing poetic about his MoCCA experience tomorrow, same-Bat-Time, same-Bat-Channel.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

 

MoCCA closes their Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art

  • News
  • July 10, 2012

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) announced yesterday via a press release that they will be closing its physical location effective immediately.

The SoHo museum, currently at 594 Broadway, New York City’s only cultural institution dedicated specifically to celebrating the comics medium, recently celebrated its tenth anniversary.  While the physical space is closing, plans are afoot to continue MoCCA in a new incarnation.  An announcement of MoCCA’s future arrangements will be forthcoming by the end of July.

Current memberships will be honored at the new venue, as will table renewals for MoCCA Fest 2013.

MoCCA’s website has been scrubbed of all previously upcoming events.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Celebrating Will Eisner

Well, I didn’t see you at the Will Eisner panel/celebration, held last Thursday, March 1st, at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, which, if you need to ask, is located at 594 Broadway, New York City, in the district known as SoHo. (And if you did need to ask…let’s just say that any comics reader, casual or otherwise, who is in lower Manhattan and has not yet visited MOCCA, and continues not to visit MOCCA just may have condemned themselves to an eternity of having Seduction of the Innocent read aloud to them by Bobcat Goldthwait.)

But back to the panel/celebration: you weren’t there and we didn’t miss you because we had what was pretty nearly a full house and that was gratifying. The “we” to whom I refer was three people who knew, or knew a lot about, Will, who died in 2005; Judy Hansen, Karen Green and your humble servant. Moderator was the always reliable and excellent Paul Levitz, so pertinent questions were asked, both of the panelists and the audience (of which you were not a member). I left knowing more than when I came, and I suspect that most of the other folk there did, too. I was particularly interested in Ms. Green’s discussion of Will’s business practices, which helped confirm my belief that Will Eisner was what Mark Twain wanted to be: a successful capitalist as well as a superb storyteller.

Did I mention gratifying? For openers, it’s always nice when someone of genuine merit gets recognized, especially when that person was a friend. And the fact that the venue for such recognition exists is nice, too. It indicates that the (always) artificial demarcations between “high” and “low” culture are going the way of the dinosaurs, and some would say, amen and about time.

(But not you because you probably wouldn’t be where amen and about time was being said.)

It might be possible, humbly, hat clutched in whitened fingers, to suggest that respectability does not always benefit what becomes respectable, but that is a pretty damn complicated topic for another occasion.

As we comics geeks continue our gradual trek toward the nicer parts of town, and the world outside our borders comes to recognize that the great comics guys – Eisner, Jack Kirby, Walt Kelly, and, no doubt, young others who are too busy at their boards to wonder about plaudits…these guys were as accomplished in their ways as Dickens and Michaelangelo were in theirs, we’ll have further opportunities to pay them the homage they deserve Is a televised awards ceremony too much to expect? Oh lordy, I hope so. (As I told you last wee, televised awards shindigs are, I boldly state, post-industrial versions of the Inquisition.)

Not that any of this concerns you. Awards? Panels? Not for you. You’re too busy watching Cops reruns. Bad boy bad boy.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

 

The Point Mocca Recap

The Point Mocca Recap

A new facility and a great turn-out for the MOCCA Art Festival in New York – we’ve got your recap plus the newest comic publisher happens to be Uncle Sam, Peter Jackson got his ticket to ComicCon and Marvel gives us some Strange.


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MOCCA presents Watchmen movie a day early with premiere of “Art of Watchmen”

MOCCA presents Watchmen movie a day early with premiere of “Art of Watchmen”

  • News
  • February 15, 2009

Want to see Watchmen before mere mortals? Can’t get into the MTV "Spoilers" show? Now you have another way, plus you get to see an art show and help out MoCCA while you do it.

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is presenting a Special Advance Screening of Watchmen on March 5th, yes 5th, plus a VIP reception and Watchmen Portraits book signing event. The evening begins with a reception at MoCCA for The Art of Watchmen exhibition, continues with an advance screening of Watchmen, and concludes with an author signing of Watchmen Portraits by Clay Enos. On view will be photographs by Clay Enos of the Watchmen movie cast, Watchmen-related photos from director Zack Snyder’s "war-room" and original artwork from the graphic novel by Dave Gibbons.

Tickets are available by visiting or calling MoCCA, Tuesday – Saturday. Tickets are $100, or $75 for MoCCA members. All proceeds from this special event go to support MoCCA programming.

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