MoCCA 2013 - Who Are You?

Getting excited now, we're all booked for the forthcoming trip back to New York and the MoCCA comic festival! We really enjoyed last year's show meeting the likes of Jason and Tom Gauld but this year sees some changes with the show now under the control of The Society of Strip Illustrators who took over MoCCA last autumn. Thankfully the handover and communication has been very good with little apparent disruption to its organisation.

While they hadn't made any inital radical changes to the show, the last few weeks have seen things gathering pace with the preparation of a specially produced shows brochure, now called a 'journal' featuring an image and blurb from each exhibitor, so look out for ours based on the cover gallery below.

They have also started a tumblr feed which is regularly featuring exhibitors (including a certain Accent UK back in January which I somehow missed!) and news on the show including the inaugural Awards of Excellence to be awarded at the show whose announcement of has (finally) got the US comics reportage excited in the event!

The essence appears to be that heavyweight (in terms of comic industry stature!) judges, Karen Berger, Gary Groth, Nora Krug, David Mazzucchelli and Paul Pope will stalk the exhibitors hall on the Saturday, select their favourite publications, debate them and that evening announce the winners of the most outstanding work on show....gosh....no pressure then!

The show runs the first weekend in April and this year's guest of honour is Bill Griffith of Zippy the Pinhead fame!

(Zippy [who else?] the Pinhead by Bill Griffith)

I only really know of him from his entertaining section of Ron Mann's late 80's comic documentary 'Comic Book Confidential' which among other things showed said live action Zippy in his bestest housecoat out shopping and generally being happy while singing that annoyingly catchy tune, "I'm Zippy - Who Are You?". It will be interesting to see the man behind the man himself!

 

Bill Griffith has also recently been mentioned by Robert Crumb through a collection of Robert Crumb's interviews and comments on other artists and various cultural figures such as Jack Kerouc, Jean Paul Sartre, Hugh Heffner (!), Moebius and others. For a fascinating insight into Crumb's thinking and much, much more see the excellent 'Crumb on Crumb' collection here.

 

Did I mention that we're getting excited about MoCCA!!