Springtime in NYC brings the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art festival: a two-day showcase for all the comic book medium has to offer, with a particular focus on independent publishers and creators. The 2011 fest took place on April 9th and 10th, at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue. Tables and booths filled the main floor, panel discussions took over two rooms in the basement, artists held court and peddled their wares and sparked ideas as attendees swarmed the building. The festival seemed particularly well-rounded this year; programs covering graphic design sat alongside a Batman retrospective and sessions devoted to webcomics and self-publishing.
My own tastes run towards the historical panels, so that’s what I focused on attending. On Saturday, the legendary Al Jaffee was presented with MoCCA’s Klein award for achievement in cartooning, and a conversation followed covering his life and long career. Later that afternoon, there was a Mad Magazine panel (featuring many of today’s “usual gang of idiots”), and Mr. Jaffee there spun tales of the magazine’s history and fired off quips without missing a single comedic beat.
Sunday was a quiter day, and I started it off by attending “The Enterprising Will Eisner”, a fascinating hour that largely bypassed Eisner’s innovations and artistic legacy and instead examined his studio system, publishing history, and lesser-known commercial work. Charles Brownstein (CBLDF executive director and author of Eisner/Miller) moderated, and Jules Feiffer, Denis Kitchen, and Paul Levitz (all of whom had extensive experience working with Eisner) were the panelists. The session was filled with lively discussion, personal anecdotes, and plenty of interesting insights into Eisner’s delicate balance of business and creative concerns throughout his career – his early days of running a production studio, his detour into military and professional commissions in the 60s, and his later years of infiltrating the book market with long-form graphic novels.
Next, I looked in on the Pizza Island panel (which looked like it drew one of the weekend’s biggest crowds), then headed back upstairs and spent the rest of the day wandering the convention floor, looking at all the amazing stuff: new books compiling forgotten classic strips, mini-comics from local artists, deluxe hardbound volumes of new work by both established creators and promising unknowns. Exciting finds included new long-form works by Laura Lee Gulledge and Leslie Stein, the latest issue of Comic Book Comics by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, and archival volumes from Fantagraphics, Drawn And Quarterly, and Yoe Books (which I hope to discuss in detail at a later date). I saw some old friends, spent more money than I meant to, wandered the aisles looking at all manner of amazing and beautiful things, and finally left for home as evening fell, exhausted and gleeful after a weekend immersed in the art and culture of comics.
The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is located at 594 Broadway in New York City, and they feature rotating exhibits and educational programming year-round at that location, in addition to holding MoCCA fest each spring.
Photo of Al Jaffee © 2011 Marnie Ann Joyce