Went to the MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) Art Festival at the Puck Building today with Erica, which was both business and pleasure. We were both looking for pretty much the same thing—women comic artists—so it was a good excuse to see each other, and it was interesting on several levels. She introduced me to a couple of artists she knows from Yuricon, and we both handed out either business cards or advertisements (in Erica's case). I haven't been to a comic con before, and I suspect this one is a bit different from the New York Comicon or the standard ones elsewhere in that it was mostly independents. Top Shelf was the biggest outfit there. I half expected to see Dark Horse too, but I guess once you've sold your soul to signed on with Lucasfilm, you're not really an independent anymore. Nor were Marvel or DC anywhere to be seen. Houghton Mifflin was there, as were Pantheon Books (a Random House division), Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Alternative Comics, and Ad House Books, but that was it for the "big" houses. The rest was refreshingly independent.
There was just about everything else too, from fanboys and fangirls to the struggling pros on the verge of the big time, many in both categories producing some really fine work. And it was really heartening to see that about a quarter to a third of the tables were occupied by women—and not just chicks there supporting their boyfriends, either. Here's a couple of my new favorites, including a print & webcomic I'm now totally hooked on:
- Tyler Page's Nothing Better—What happens when an atheist punk party chick and a straight-laced religious girl wind up as roomies at a Christian college (Jen Ouellette can probably answer this too)? Really nice art and a pretty realistic portrayal of those undergraduate beer and big questions nights. The story in the first comic is a dead ringer for the first night of my sophomore year, when my new roommate got completely trashed on on the trashcan punch.
- The Devil's Panties: "It's not Satanic Porn! Honest!"—But it's fun. And you have to love it just for the title.
- Miriam Libicki's Jobnik—Her semi-autobiographical comic about a Jewish American girl in the Israeli Army. Plus a fascinating essay on Israeli women soldiers as fetish objects.
- Elizabeth Genco's Streetfables—What Charles de Lint's stories might look like if he wrote comics.
- Stef Lenk's wonderfully bizarre art.
- Christine Norrie's Breaking up, for Scholastic's Graphix line.
- Emily Pohl-Weary's & Willow Dawson's Violet Miranda: Girl Pirate—All that's missing is Johnny Depp.
- Denise "Coffee" Ozker's Fragile Ego minicomics.
- Marguerite Dabaie's Unsichtbares/Sichtbares—a really subversive little piece exploring images of femininity from 1930's catalogues and using them to tell a story about cross-dressing in Nazi Germany.
- Vanessa Satone's Wasted Minds.
- Abby Denson's Night Club.
One of the things I was thinking about and actually observed in looking at so many women comic artists, is the how differently women portray themselves from the way men portray women in comics. When they're not drawing stick-figured fashion models (which the illustrators seem to do more than the women who call themselves comic artists) or big-eyed manga characters, most of the "cartoon" women drawn by women are much more realistic. Miriam Libicki is a great example. Her Jobnik soldier looks solid in her army fatigues. Tyler Page's college girls (and guys) look as normal as anyone you know. "Coffee" Ozker's Fragile Ego characters are just people too. Now click on over to the Foglio's Girl Genius (a comic I adore, BTW). Agatha dresses very modestly, but half the time in the early comic the poor girl's running around in her (equally modest Victorian) underwear with lots of cleavage showing. To be fair, Agatha's probably the least offensive example I could name. She's cute and smart, but it's mostly about the smarts, which is not true in general of other female characters drawn by men. The acronym BBB (Big Breasted Bimbo) may have been coined to describe the covers of pulp SF books, but it applied equally to most comicbook women. So it's refreshing to see more authentic portrayals.
I'm also a little tempted to go back tomorrow and browse around just looking at the zines alone. As a bookmaker, it's always cool to see what other people are doing. One of the little treasures I found was a handmade piece for which I coughed up forty bucks to a very shy young woman named Molly Goldbloom (I may have spelled it wrong since she could hardly bear to speak up to tell me how), who'd made this fabulous bat book. It's printed on both sides and made specifically with feathered edges to look like a bat; the wings unfold to reveal a compartment on the body that opens out into an accordion fold covered in death's head moths. It's a sort of ghoulish little book, but really clever, and worth the money, since it meant hand making the paper bats as well as all the gluing and folding and drawing. Lots of work.
And catching up with Erica was, of course, lots of fun, though we seemed to be having a bad food day somehow. I won't go into the specifics, but it was a little odd that the wait staff in the Noho Star managed to drop more crockery in the hour we were there than probably happens in a week. At the very least, though, it was a pretty successful schmoozing trip and a way fun afternoon.
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