With the tax permit thing behind us, anticipation for the MoCCA Art Fest is beginning to take on serious momentum. Although we don’t have a floor map of exhibitors (and to be fair, not every convention does that), we do have a list of webcomickers who now know their table assignments and have shared them with us below the cut. We will update the list as we hear from more creators.

Update to add: new info!
Speaking of MoCCA, Neil Swaab will be premiering his new Rehabilitating Mr Wiggles book (that would be #3) at the show; after the weekend, it will be available via Amazon and some comics stores in New York and California, starting on 1 July. If you want it before then, your only real option is to buy directly from Swaab’s store or come see him in person this weekend.

Finally, don’t forget to Drink and Draw Like a Lady, if you are a) a lady, who likes to b) drink and c) draw. Dudes, you will have to find a way to contain their disappointment at not being ladies once again.

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So, do you read Mark Evanier‘s stuff? He’s been in various parts of the comics/animation/TV/you name it industries for longer than a lot of you have been alive. He’s a consummate storyteller, and very, very funny. He’s also scary-smart, in that way you only become after having seen a lot of mistakes (some of them yours) played out in front of you. I’ve been reading his stuff for a long-damn-time.

But Krishna Sadasivam linked to a piece of Evanier’s that I hadn’t read in way too long, and it’s too good not to share. In fact, if the only thing Evanier had ever written was The Speech, he’d still be one of the smartest observers of the entertainment biz that’s ever lived. If you’re creative, dream of being creative, or really do anything of any sort whatsoever, and want to break into your Dream Job, you need to read it. Don’t worry that it’s nearly ten years old on the web (and far older if you know Evanier in person) — it’s timeless.

• MoCCA information is coming fast and furious these days — an exhibitor list is now up (webcomics-related types include ACT-I-VATE, various Dumbrellites, Comics Bakery, Lucy Knisley, Kate Beaton, David Malki !, Spike, Meredith Gran, various New Jersey reprobates Canadians tall dudes, New Zealand expats, and viewers like you), and programming information is below the cut. My apologies to anybody I might have missed — too many names on that page. Also of interest is a new piece of information this year — where to eat in the neighborhood (although it’s on the same page as the sure-to-be-horrifying news that there is no WiFi at the venue).
• And for those of you who like awesome comics, please join me in wishing Digger creator Ursula Vernon a very happy birthday.

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Good news first.

• You people can still surprise me. Case in point, the following email received on Tuesday evening from Joshua Jericho:
  

  I wanted to offer my first double-stack comic for the top image for Wed’s post if you’re interested. I realize it’s last minute and I don’t really have any ‘news’ to go with it — but I think it’s a great comic myself (and I’m only 112% biased). So, if you have nothing else immediate please consider me! Either way, thanks for considering and keep up the great work!!

  Joshua, that’s the most blatant self-promotion I can recall in a long time, and such moxie must be rewarded — your image would have appeared yesterday, but for breaking news of great import (c’mon, Wigu), but I trust a day late is still good enough. For any other self-promoting creators who might try the same, sorry … Joshua got there first, and that’s the only time we’re going to honor this particular request.

• Scary Go Round book 7, Peloton, is up for pre-order. The first 400 orders will receive a special mini-comic of the adventures of the now-erased-from-existence Erin Winters.
• Speaking of books, here’s one that is (for the moment) theoretical, but worth your investigation. Phil and Kaja Foglio have, for going on two years now, been running the early-to-mid-90s Buck Godot story, Gallimaufry. It’s now approaching the end, which means we should see it collected in a nice, fat trade edition soon. Given the sheer insane goodness of the Buck Godot tales, you should definitely be reading if you haven’t been (it’s never too late to start), and should begin saving for the book. It’s only fair.
• The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art are starting to send around information about this year’s Fest to we pixel-stained wretches, so perhaps my pique-ishness over them not replying to enquires was premature. Good to see that things are on the ball, and forward to the show.

Okay, the bad.

• Think idiotic oppression over your reading material won’t affect you? Think again. Overzealous prosecutor + some of the links over there to the right = you in federal prison for up to 15 years. Next show you’re at a show with a CBLDF table, a few bucks in the donation can would be good — even better, take out a membership and make your voice heard.

TCAF doesn’t have a monopoly on the “CAF” suffix when it comes to comics shows. For instance, this past weekend was MeCAF, the Maine Comics Art Festival, which is in Portland (the one in Maine, not the one in Oregon, which has its own very nice comics festival).

It was the first in what will hopefully be an annual series of MeCAFs, so the website is pretty much that of the organizers, Casablanca Comics of Portland. Fine con reports have gone up in the past few days from Heidi MacDonald, Alexander Danner, and Kean Soo. By all accounts, it was a fine/fun show, and Soo let slip a hint of his next project now that the Jellaby books are done: the adventures of a fact-checking octopus. This has got to be years from arrival in stores and I want to read it yesterday.

• Book signing! David Malki ! of Wondermark fame will be signing in Los Angeles on June 17th; more precisely, in Beverly Hills; even more precisely, at the terribly swank Crescent Hotel. If memory serves correctly, the Crescent has served as the site for previous webcomics book launches, which means it may be in contention as the new official swank hotel of webcomics, if the current titleholder doesn’t step up its game.
• Scott Campbell wrote to say howdy; this was dang cool, because his work is so very, very good. And now you can share in the goodness, as he’s now the author of Double Fine Action Comics and will hopefully have copies to bring to MoCCA. PS: Scott Your work is awesome please make it easier to find and maybe put it in your store because it’s not there.
• Neither book, nor fest: Wigu returns!

If anybody from the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is handling press info for the upcoming MoCCA Art Fest, I think your email is broken. Contact established! Yay! Also, we’re only a few weeks out, and while the webpage for the Fest has this year’s show poster, the bulk of the information there is still for last year’s show.

Seriously, I love the MoCCA show (and am looking forward to the new venue like nobody’s business), but without at least a list of exhibitors and preliminary schedule of programming, people are going to start to get nervous about whether or not they should come by.

In fact, the one event that I’m certain is going to happen in conjunction with MoCCA is unofficial — Hope Larson would like comickers of the lady persuasion to drop by a get-together the night before for sophisticated adult-type beverage imbibing, cupcakes, and art, art, art. Ladies and Ladies, I give you Drink & Draw Like a Lady. I’ll be wandering around looking at your sketchbooks the next day, where I hope to see amazing art that magically becomes looser, scribblier, and drunker as the pages flip by. Also, if there are any cupcakes left over, I’d be happy to ensure they don’t go to waste.

Lightning Round!

• 100 strips at My Fuzzy Nuts!
• The Ego and The Squid fundraiser for friends to get married in space!
• Tom Mason interview with Miles Grover of Thinkin’ Lincoln!
• I finally get to see Star Trek tonight!

Okay, that last one doesn’t have anything to do with webcomics, but I don’t care. Deal.

Let’s jump in, shall we?

• Will the world ever tire of telling Kate Beaton how much she rocks? Not this corner of it. Nor, apparently, the corner that included TCAF over the weekend, as the Doug Wright awards for outstanding Canadian cartooning were awarded on Saturday, and our Kate took the award for Best Emerging Talent. Everybody feel good for Kate!
• Speaking of TCAF (I so have to go in 2011), much coverage may be found around the nets, but I particularly liked Christopher Bird‘s take on things, especially this bit:
  

  ITEM! At one of the panels the various panel members were playing “what indie band is each cartoonist.” IE, “Peter Bagge is R.E.M.” I mention this because Scott McCloud’s daughter said that Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics would be the Ramones, because “only the words change.”

  Bird doesn’t say which daughter it was, but Sky and Winter are both pretty quick, so we’ll award them each ten awesome points and a piggyback ride from Mr North.

• Back today: Anders Loves Maria! Rene Engström has said that she’s moving into the end-story, which is both awesome and horrible. I want to know where these characters end up, and I don’t want the story to be over.
• Man, David Willis should just be given the entire Sunday comics page (except for Doonesbury, Pearls Before Swine, and FoxTrot) to do with as he wishes. Once again, he funkily hits it out of the ballpark.
• Internet Jesus is pretending to want to know about your webcomic, and has declared it Webcomics Week at his forums in celebration:
  

  You do a webcomic? Tell me about it here. Not more than one or two images, please, or else the thread takes forever to load. Don’t forget the bloody link.

  Do not disappoint the man — he wields the Chair Leg of Truth.

• Finally, Valerie D’Orazio does a supremely good job of not falling down laughing as she points us all to maybe the stupidest thing said today about the internets:
  

  “If you give away your premium content for free, you are basically hastening your own demise, signing your own death warrant,” said Laura Martin, a media analyst with Soleil-Media Metrics.

  Forget our little online funnybook stories — the counterexamples on this one are too numerous to list. Unless, as I suspect, her audience is made up solely of people that do not actually produce any premium content, but merely make their cut by charging huge percentages of eventual retail for basically moving said content from place to place, in which case, it ain’t the giving-away that’s signed those warrants, it’s called progress.

Got my press credentials for San Diego Comic Con! I’m a real (fake) webcomics (hack pseduo-) journalist now. Also, a real boy, and a model for emulation. You doubt? I received this very day a LiveJournal posting that is just this side of Help us, Obi-Wan Garyobi, you’re our only hope. Yep, gonna be one a’ them days. Continuing the “wooo” theme, is there anything more “wooo” worthy than seventeenth century raps and/or freakouts? I say Booo! to the thought that there could be.

You know what? It’s the first sunny day after a solid week of rain and drear. Let’s finish this up quick.

• New podcast for your listening pleasure, from the fertile minds of Jamie Noguchi, Marty Day, and Rosscott. I haven’t heard it yet (that dang job thing getting in the way again), but I note that the minds behind The Wonderful World of Webcomics have actually recorded four podcasts prior to this, their first release into the wild. Getting better at the podcasting skills, or merely building up a buffer? Either way, it bodes well for your listening pleasure.
• Jimbo Hillin (and if you can’t trust a guy named Jimbo, who can yo trust”?) writes to tell us:
  

  The Visual Effects Webcomic, Wireheads, is coming up on it’s third anniversary, this May 15th. We just passed through the 300 comic mark last week. Also, we’re looking forward to unleashing the Zombie Bunnies on the hordes of unsuspecting comickites at Comic-Con again this Summer. Look for us on the back aisle of Small Press, table S-13 against the wall.

  I knew it! I wasn’t at SDCC last year, but I knew it was infested with zombies. All con-goers are advised to take prudent and adequate precautions against the walking dead.

• Finally, new webcomic, presented here as an object lesson — if you draw and draw and draw, your art will improve. We see here the difference that less than two months of regular updates will make: at first, stick figures, getting more primitive by the day. Three dozen strips later, still not going to be mistaken for a member of the photorealism school, but definitely cartoony characters that belong to the creator rather than just anybody. Our collective hat off to Evan Diaz for sharing the progression with all of us. Also, something about those facial expressions I really like; there’s a real sense of manic energy there.

So there the wife and I were in Brooklyn on Saturday night with nothin’ to do; might as well go see some major personalities of the webcomics world, we figgered. Thus, we found ourselves at 303 Grand St in the Williamsburg section at Titans of Small Town, with Ryan North, Chris Hastings, Emily Horne & Joey Comeau, and the remote telepresence of Chris Onstad.

Other webcomickers in attendance included Jon Rosenberg, Andy Bell, and a shockingly beardless Steven Cloud (all accompanied by their lovely wives). Organizer Tim Hwang (between the dapper dudes) was busy and everywhere during the evening; look for a talk with him here later in the week once he’s caught his breath.

The show started with an open mingle, allowing patrons to enjoy the art on the walls and meet the creators. For example, I was able to hear Comeau’s story about the book launch party for his new novel in Toronto earlier in the week, where the venue’s front door got jammed and the owner of the building had to kick in the glass. The Q&A featured a wide variety of questions, with choice quotes laid out below. Afterwards, a projector was set up and through the magic of the internet, Onstad participated in a chat with whoever wanted to type in questions.

Actually, now that I think of it, there’s no proof it really was Chris Onstad. It could have been an elaborate ELIZA-like program … the Ontological Natural Statement Turing-compliant Automated Dialog-o-matic or some such. Anyway, O.N.S.T.A.D. shared anecdotes about “his” favorite wine (whatever gets the job done) and amusing things “his” “daughter” did. Hopefully, the chat transcript will be made available and we can all decide if it passes the Turing Test or not.

In the end, the assembled creators collaborated on a piece of art on a large sheet of paper attached to the wall; it was unfinished at the time that I had to leave, but it featured both SPACEMEN RIDING DINOSAURS and MORE DINOSAURS, so you know it was awesome.

In conclusion, Titans of Small Town was a great success, and judging from the conversation Hwang, Rosenberg, and I had (on the topic of who should be invited to headline at the next one of these) (KATE BEATON, KATE BEATON, KATE BEATON DAMMIT), it will certainly not be a one-time deal. The End.

Overheard during the evening:

That grass looks like it came out of children’s storybook; Mike Krahulik has mentioned wanting to do a children’s book, and given what I’ve seen of the Penny Arcade’s attempts at kiddiebooks (and things that look like kiddiebooks), I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m ready to purchase that effort the day it’s published.

In other news:

• Long before I met Dave Roman, I was captivated by one of his many projects — in this case, a collaboration with John Green called Teen Boat; after all, how many things combine the angst of being a teen with the thrill of being a boat? (By the way, a Teen Boat Safety Note: please do NOT go to teenboat-dot-com unless you seek to lose your employment) Anyhoo, the recent Teen Boat Dreamboat video has now gone high-quality, which you can enjoy over at the Vimeo site in all its musical glory.
• Hey kids, do you like the originator of Estradarama (alternately, the theoretician behind Estradanomics), the globetrotting adventurer (and confessed Ryan) Ryan Estrada? And have you managed to work your way past the heavyweight (and frankly horrific) interface at Zuda? If you answered “Yes!” to both, you may be interested in Estrada’s contribution to this month’s Zuda-off, The Kind You Don’t Bring Home To Mother. This page is on record as not being thrilled with Zuda, but having previously read through TKYDBHTM, it’s a real kick and you will likely enjoy it.

Events!

• Those of you in Toronto will have the opportunity to hear panelists including Kate Beaton, Emily Horne, and Ryan North at the Keep Toronto Reading Web Comics Panel at the North York Central Library tomorrow at 6:30pm. Moderated by Christopher Butcher of The Beguiling, organizer of the upcoming biannual Toronto Comics Art Festival and generally smart guy.
• Those of you in New York can enjoy North, Horne (with her partner in madness Joey Comeau), Chris Hastings, and Chris Onstad at Titans of Small-Town (as of this writing, some tickets appear to still be available). Doors open 6:30pm at 303 Grand in Brooklyn. If I see you there, we can compare notes to see if Hastings is still tired from the night before, when fiance Carly Monardo is featured at My Plastic Heart’s New Moon show, interpretations of the Chinese Zodiac, at 6:00pm, downtown in Manhattan.

Finally, a dip into the mailbag for an intriguing email. Y’all remember Ben Heaton? He did Terror Island with Lewis Powell for a couple of years, has been running Request Comics since, and is likely at least one of the official keepers of The Ham Project. Ben sent me an email, which I now share with you:

Remember when Randy Milholland asked Something Positive readers to match his yearly salary in donations, and they totally did? I’m going to see if Request Comics readers can pull that off too.

I’m unemployed, so the target value is $0.

If you want to support request-based photocomicry, come check out the donation drive here. Even if you donate nothing, that’ll go a long way toward my goal. Especially if you donate nothing.

I’d note that donation drives really only work once, so here’s hoping that Heaton gets his $0; if you’ve got nothing to donate, it’s hard to think of a better place to not give it than to him.

Emerald City Comic Con runs this weekend, and about the time you read this everybody I know in webcomics (almost) (not really) is on their way there. According to various twitterings, most of them are either delayed until further notice or on the Turbulence Express from Hell, so be kind when you drop by to say howdy. Additionally, rumor has it that Aaron Diaz will have a pre-order going for the long-anticipated, limited-edition Hob hardcover. If you say hi, remind him that my name should be at the top of that list.

• Small-Town (perhaps it should have been Tiny-Towne, or Sinkytowne?) is a little more crowded today, as Emily Horne & Joey Comeau are added to the lineup of talent. One night only in Brooklyn! Woo!
• Happy Birthday! Josh Lesnick’s Girly has been running for six years (and considering it’s an offshoot of the earlier Cute Wendy, you could credit it with a bit more age still. By amazing coincidence, today’s strip is #665, which is an awful lot of sixes for a strip that just happens to be six.
• Happy Birthday! David Willis has now been variously obsessed with toys, cartooning, Transformers, Transformers wiki, toys that transform from one shape to another, pie-throwing, and an awesome fiance (bonus points if you pronounce that word like Holly Hunter did in Raising Arizona) for 30 years. Congrats on living past your twenties David, and remember: it’s all a downhill slide into decrepitude and senescence from here. Have some cake to celebrate! Aw, heck … cake for everybody!