With EmCity and C2E2¹ behind us, there’s a stretch of festival-type comics shows in April and May², to be found in Chicago², Toronto, and Vancouver. They’re all respected institutions, and they kick off each year in New York with MoCCA Fest.

And if there’s one thing that tends to happen with festival-type events, it’s that organization and details can happen late in the game. Some are super organized³ and down to a science, some we’ll get programming the week of and updates to the exhibitors list almost up to the day of. What I’m saying here is, please remember as we move into festival season that any information we present now, there will probably be updates and addenda in the weeks to come.

All of which is to say, I saw somebody on the Twitters over the weekend remarking that the MoCCA exhibitor’s list was mostly illustrators and not comics folk, but I think that’s just a function of which names are posted to date. As I write this, there’s about 125 entries on the list, with many longtime MoCCA vets not listed (yet), and a typical MoCCA floorplan offering easily twice that many tables. There’s also the fact that some larger exhibitors (such as :01 Books) will have many creators rotating in and out, not to mention the TBA main signing table

So with the caveat that this list will certainly grow over the next couple o’ weeks, if you head to the Metropolitan West event space (West 46th between 11th and 12th, across the street from the USS Intrepid) on Saturday 6 April (11:00am to 7:00pm) or Sunday 7 April (11:00am to 6:00pm) and pay your ten bucks (eighteen for a weekend pass), you’ll get to see Aatmaja Pandya and Alison Wilgus sharing space at table F217, Sara Varon at table D156a, and an unknown number of folks associated with :01 Books at table E162, and likewise some number of folks associated with Czap Books at table H253b. The food court is damn good, too.

There will be more! [Editor’s note: Case in point, there was just an announcement from Iron Circus that they’ll be there.] And just because I don’t recognize a lot of the names on the current exhibitor’s list, that’s not a bad thing! I’ve learned about more new people I want to follow at MoCCA than at any other show, even in the disastrous post-Puck, whole-exec-board-quit, somebody-forgot-to-get-cash-registers-so-they-could-take-money-for-passes, Society of Illustrators-hadn’t-stepped-in-yet years. I expect this year will be no different. So keep an eye on the show page, keep an eye on this page, and if you have plans for MoCCA that haven’t made it onto the official site yet, drop me a line and I’ll share the news.

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¹ Which, also being a Reed!Pop show, is pretty similar in a lot of respects to ECCC, just a week or two later; for my money, CAKE is the webcomicky show in the Windy City.

² Okay, technically CAKE is in June but it’s the 1st and 2nd. Close enough, dammit.

³ Lookin’ at TCAF here, who have information up earlier than pretty much any other show of the year, festival-type, massive pop culture type, or gym-scale one day longbox vendor events. This is because Chris Butcher is not only an organizational machine, he has spent the past decade-plus training everybody that works on TCAF to be the same. Institutional memory and capability are real things, and to be prized when you have them.