Plenty of Nothing

MoCCA Sketchbook III Ken Wong

Maybe I'm over-simplifying, but it strikes me that whereas writers are cruel, artists are cool.  Get a bunch of writers together and watch the backbiting begin.  Get a bunch of artists together and they start drawing in each other's sketchbooks.  Turns out the sketchbook is a common phenomenon at shows like the MoCCA Art Fest, so much so that there are genres, like the kiss book, where the drawings are lined up to look like they're smacking each other on the lips (or the ass).  You can see an example at Hope Larson's site.  One of the biggest buzzes for me was when Ken Wong, whom I later found out is the MoCCA president, came around and quizzed us on our project and where we thought it was going, and then drew this picture in response to our description of Wonderful Hell.  My writer instincts tell me he was collecting evidence for some future discussion about that table with the decorated short stories, on which he'll have to lay down a ruling, but he was way nice about it, and I thought we had been taken seriously.  And, look, she plays for the Cartoonists.  Douglas

MoCCA Sketchbook II Wallace Ryan

MoCCA Sketchbook I

On review I find that ten different people drew in the MoCCA sketchbook.  I apologize in advance to those I don't reproduce here.  And if any of those I do reproduce have copyright issues please contact me and I'll remove the picture.  Ron Crawford is off to France to play a grand-dad in a picture with Mia Farrow.  He looks like he has lived the hippie lifestyle to the fullest, and even showed up at the Art Fest in a Mr Natural t-shirt.  Klein is David Klein, who was shopping around a beautiful graphic novel about a boy who creates a golem during the Holocaust.  That's the golem.  I didn't talk to the author of the bottom picture, but I remember he was wearing a MoCCA volunteer t-shirt.  He draws a mean Batman.

Douglas

The N Train, Queens

Alison Bechdel at MoCCA

My hero Alison Bechdel was drawing portraits in support of MoCCA for a while during the Art Fest.  It's fun to watch how cartoonists hold their pen, to see how they sit and what they do with their other hand.  It's like watching a batter at the baseball game.  Bechdel tends to lean over the page, which would make her vulnerable to an inside pitch.  If I'd been on the ball I would have made a movie to show her in action, but I didn't so you'll just have to visualize this:

Draw draw draw draw
Squint
Draw draw draw draw draw
Squint

Douglas

New York City, Baby!

Wonderful Hell got its launch this past weekend at the fifth annual MoCCA Art Fest on the beautiful, sun-filled seventh floor of the historic Puck Building on the boundary between SoHo and NoHo.  Here we see Douglas McLeod the writer and Anne Fizzard the illustrator, happy to spend time together for the first time since university when they worked on the original Cricket series.  Anne's wearing a t-shirt referencing the St.John's Regatta she designed for a corporate client.  The red and yellow pamphlets are samplers of the longer white copies, and can be used to officiate soccer matches.
Here Anne talks to Wallace Ryan, in the white lab coat, a fellow New York Newfoundlander.  I think you'll be hearing of Wallace. Unfortunately I missed the name of the other fella.  That notebook on the table was for visitors to cartoon in, and about half a dozen did.  That's another post.  Picture three shows the view from our table.  Isn't that a grand space?  It's where they used to put together Puck, the American equivalent of Punch.  That pink thing on the pillar is a t-shirt and not, as Anne was sure, a giant contraceptive device.  I took this picture just at opening time.  Later on it got quite crowded, though not elbow to elbow like the first floor.  Most everybody exhibiting was twenty-something, but there were a few grey-hairs wandering around.  One guy gave me a hard look and said, "Do I know you?"  "Get up to Ottawa much?" I returned.  "I own Cosmic Comics," he said.  "Then I guess you don't," I guessed.  Way to self-promote, McLeod!

Cricket Goes to MoCCA

Some things move in very large circles.  Cricket, the character Anne Fizzard and I developed while working at The Argosy, the Mount Allison student newspaper *cough* years ago, is going to appear at the Art Festival at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, on Broadway, in New York City, this weekend.  We'll be showing our 2006 story Shaolin Cricket and, if we get some jpegs moved around in time, the sequel Wonderful Hell as well.  This image by Anne is from the original series.  Check out the MoCCA website.  We don't show up on the list of exhibitors yet, being late add-ons.

Douglas

Fleur-de-Lys

City Trees

Postal Lion