Photos to come later, but the highlight of MoCCA this year had to be the mid-afternoon Sunday fire alarms that caused the building to be evacuated in the midst of a 101°F heat wave (38 Celsius for those of you in sensible parts of the world). We got photos of the chaos and firefighter quotes and a full recap starting a little later but for now, we can sum up the show with one word: books.

Lotta books debuted from a lotta creators, books announced for iminent (and not-so-iminent) publication. And the alarms hit 30 seconds after Meredith Gran sold out of Octopus Pie volume 1. COINCIDENCE?

The thing about the Puck Building is, the air-con is from another era. When it works, it drips water to the point that one may be forgiven for thinking that a tropical waterfall is in the area (usually, it seems, directly onto the accumulated Dumbrellites).

When it doesn’t, the lack of openable windows and odd airflow patterns lend a distinctly whiffy character to all ‘n’ sundry. New York City is projected to hit 35 Celsius (95 Farenheit, for you ‘Mericans) this weekend, leading me to regard my hack pseudo-journalist efforts at the MoCCA show as hardship time.

Look for news, photos, and interviews to be more incoherent than normal as I drag my subjects to nieghboorhood watering holes for drinks and on-the-record conviviality. If you’re coming to the fest and want to know what’s on other than “sweating”, The Comics Journal has a handy round-up here.

First and foremost, why did my wedding invitation not look like this? Dibs on the Helpolax!

• Transplant Comics has added Stendec by Cory Osterberg; it’s a weekly black and white gag strip. Also over at Transplant, Adam York Gregory of The Flowfield Unity has just released his second print collection. What makes this one special is … let’s allow Gregory to tell us himself:
  

  I worked as a typesetter and designer for a publishing house for a while, and I know how to set books, but using a couple of the POD services I found that whilst 90% of the time the end product was fine, there would be a few occasions where the printers would mess up — lost pages, bad cropping, someone else’s book appearing in the middle of mine — and since the books are sent directly without me, or apparently anyone else checking them, the first I would hear is when I received an email from a disappointed customer.

  That’s just not on. At least by hand making the book [emphasis Fleen’s] I get to approve every copy. I use a traditional method, stitching the pages into sections (or signatures) and combining them before I add the cover.

  There was a time with these sort of comics when you knew that the person drawing them had very likely stapled your copy together … there is a contact link right there … and I wanted to go one further, I wanted to make each book an individual.

  It just seems to fit the ethos of my comic, the whole hand-drawn ideal translated reasonably well on the web, but in the process I lost something when turning it back into a book. Now, I’ve corrected that.

  Editorial note here — looking at the price of the hand-made book, it is somehow comparable to POD pricing. Well done, Adam York Gregory!

• Recent round numbers: Real Life has 2000 strips under its belt, and Arthur, King of Time and Space has reached four years. Congrats!
• And finally, Cat Garza wants you to know that his latest project (editing the Secrets & Lies anthology) will release at MoCCA in two weeks, in the vicinity of table C27. Old school comics guys, webcomickers, students from the CCS. Drop by and give it a good look-see!

Those three of you reading now that couldn’t get it before — it was due to an actual threat of fire. Awesome. But we’re back online after the timely action of those that supply our parent corporation with bandwidth.

• Hey remember the North Carolina Web Comics Coffee Clatch on the radio thing? The podcast is up, if you missed it earlier.
• Speaking of No’th Ca’olina, Heroes Con will be there in about a month; check out Indie Island for the webcomickin’ contingent, ranging from vets like Malki !, Corsetto, and Kurtz, through to newcomers like Chris Flick. There’s actually quite a list over at the HCII page, so peruse away.
• Speaking of cons, there will be a new one next Tuesday — to celebrate the 500th strip of The Ego and The Squid (and really, aren’t all things better with squid?), creator Chris Andersen is throwing Ego And The Squid-Con 2008. All are welcome to convene in Daddy’s bar in Brooklyn after work (nearest subway: Graham Ave on the L).
• Finally, Mike Russell (the guy is a story-tip machine) wants you to know he’s interviewed Brandon Bolt of Nobody Scores! in The Oregonian. It’s a fun read.

But will the searing pain of a thousand suns deter me from my duties to you? No! But this will be brief.

• Happy Birthday to Octopus Pie. In the future, Meredith Gran’s earlier webcomics will be dissected by scholars trying to find a unique angle for a dissertation, but The OP will be what everybody has a copy of on their shelf. That’s a heck of a long way to come in just one year.
• Hey, lookit that, another MoCCA show coming up. Who’s gonna be there? Besides all the cool people, I mean?
• My fame spreads ever outwards, like unto the ripples in a pond. Today, Ugly Hill (first news story, no permalink); soon all will bow before me. Bwahahaha.

From the top:

• Round numbers: Diesel Sweeties #2000and five years of Wondermark.
• Speaking of those guys: Rich Stevens (and a mess of other cool people, including webcomickers) is at ROFLCon, at the once-prestigious Harvard University. David Malki ! (and a mess of other cool people, incuding webcomickers) is at the Stumptown Comics Festival, in the once-ignored Portland, Oregon. Both events kick off today and continue tomorrow.
• Again with the Malki !: He’s on the podcast of The Ethicist, via the once-respected New York Times.
• More broadcasting: Webcomickers will be invading the once-sedate world of public radio, as members of the North Carolina Web Comics Coffee Clatch descend on the studios of WUNC for an appearance on The State of Things. Tune in or listen to the stream on May 8th at about 12:40pm eastern time, and be sure to call 1.877.962.9862 with your questions. The show will be rebroadcast later that night, then released as a podcast on the site; members of the NCWCCCCCCCCC are also negotiating to have excerpts animated on their website.
• In the hot seat: By the time you read this, Rick Marshall will have his latest webcomic interview up at ComicMix. Paul Southworth of Ugly Hill answers your questions, and I have to note that Ol’ Rick still needs a name for this series; may I suggest Webcomics With Willenholly?
• Life imitates Dinosaur Comics: Ryan North should totally get a commission from that logo design shop.
• And last but certainly not least: Chris Yates of Reprographics has his first book up for pre-order. Titled SET IT TO AWESOME, it features a foreword by Colleen AF Venable and an afterword by David Malki !, which brings us full circle. Looks like I can tell what my first purchase at MoCCA‘s gonna be.

Weekend now. Enjoy it.

Big pictures ahead — only click if you want to see webcomickers up close.

• The Comics Bakery Crew: an apparently baco-vegetarian Kean Soo (L) and Dave Roman (R).
• The Ladies of the Bakery: a between-sessions Raina Telgemeier (L) and Johanne Matte (R).
• Next year, there’ll be a giant inflatable rat outside his table: Brad Guigar (L) defied the forces of stupidity, and Ryan Sohmer (R) defied a union guy that wanted 85 bucks to plug in a lamp.
• My camera was accidentally set on ‘sepia’: An old-timey Scott McCloud. Ask him about the Mayor of Rhode Island sometime.
• Man, that banner behind her is like a perfect (if square) halo: Jennifer Babcock, enjoying the show before teaching kids about webcomics.
• He’s really less mean than he looks: Andy Bell, in a moment of glaring. But he set me up with some sweet vinyl toys without me having to go through blind-box hell, so he can glower all he wants.
• On the other hand, this guy is exactly as serious as he looks: Jon Rosenberg, calculating how much cuter his daughter is getting while he’s away.
• Giant foam horror, or mockery of life?: At least it wasn’t Fat Skeletor. You people seriously owe me one.
• Don’t tell anybody, but I think it may be a trap: Admiral Ackbar chillin’ at the Dumbrella booth.
• Some day, he’ll beg me to use the Sleestak pictures again: A show-weary Rick Marshall, sporting the required facial adornment of journalists on the webcomics beat.

Final tidbit from the weekend: Of the many flyers and givewaways I was handed over the course of the weekend, one particularly caught my eye: Pigtails & Potbellies. It’s a little Calvin & Hobbes, a little Little Dee, and a little bit limited since it’s written as “little girl spends the summer at grandma’s farm” which only allows for so many lazy afternoons with your talking pig. Did I forget to mention there’s a talking pig? Also a pig of an uncle.

There’s fewer than 20 installments so far, and the only complaint I’ve got is that the presentation is a bit weird — click on an update title and it will take you there, but the current strip always dominates the screen space above the fold. The trick is to click on the image itself to isolate it. In any event, this one’s got potential.

But check out Rick Marshall’s writeup of Webcomics: Threat or Menace? from NYCC. I didn’t remember half that stuff.

Lots of stuff happened over the weekend, which is largely still a blur to me. As mentioned last week, I moderated Webcomics: Threat or Menace? on Saturday, during which I was so intent on not sucking that I didn’t really store any of it in long-term memory. Rick Marshall from ComicMix was in the audience and has promised a write-up, but if anybody happened to record it, let us know. For the record, The Frontingest Man Alive said that I didn’t suck, so yay.

The panel consisted of Rich Stevens, Robert Khoo, Richard Brunning (Senior VP — Creative Director for DC) and Jeremy Ross (Director, New Product Development for Tokyopop); Brunning and Ross were very nice guys, not taking the “webcomics are evil” tack that the session description promised (found here), and Rich and Robert were very good about not claiming that webcomics would eat the firstborn children of the dead-tree publishers. We never did get a consensus on threat or menace, but seemed to agree that media are all shifting towards a long-tail, some-degree-of-free, and the old and new schools are going to have to meet in the middle. For more on this topic, come back tomorrow for an interview I did with Joey Manley and John Boeck on where ComicSpace is headed, six months after the big merge.

And on the off change that Jeremy Ross is reading this: you guys really need to get the rights to Kimagure Orange Road.

Others seen around the con: Brian Warmoth, Scott McCloud, Jennifer Babcock (who did a terrific job with the How to Make Webcomics panel on Kids Day), DJ Coffman, Brad Guigar, Ryan Sohmer (who risked a savage beating by defying the convention center union guys who wanted like 85 friggin’ dollars to plug in a light fixture), Chris Hastings, Raina Telgemeier, a healthy-looking Dave Roman, (Dave and Raina did about 83 sessions between the two of them, including a very noisy Avatar:The Last Airbender session that sounded really good through the walls and totally didn’t drown out my session, not that I am bitter), and the Jellabalicious Keen Soo. I was pleased beyond measure to finally make the acquaintance of Amy Kim Ganter and Kazu Kibuishi, and I understand that the inimitable Jonathan Coulton was at the show, but I missed him. If anybody knows JoCo, kindly ask him this for me — What’s Soterios Johnson really like? Besides dreamy, of course.

Finally, Fleen announces the Webcomics Partner of the Year Award to Caroline Guigar, who figured out that Brad was running out of books, and wrangled two toddlers and several boxes, sending replenisment stock on a Greyhound so that Brad would have something to sell on Sunday. If you want to succeed in webcomics, I strongly advise you to find somebody that supportive to help you.

Ladies and Gentlemen, ________ _____ Kellett, daughter of Dave Kellett and Gloria Calderón Kellett. About that name:

I can already imagine a few of you will be e-mailing me to ask what her name is, so allow me to give you my take on that. Both my wife and I have chosen pretty public lives, and in general we’re happy to share a great deal with the world. But I want to give my children the chance to choose the path best suited to them … whether it be a public life or a private life or somewhere in the middle. So, while I have no qualms about posting a few cute, early baby pics — as she’ll look markedly different in a few months, anyway — I want to give her the gift of anonymity to become her own person in life. I know you’ll understand the value of that.

We at Fleen respect the decision of ________’s parents, but using our awesome investigatory skillz we can exclusively reveal that the little tyke has eight syllables in her full name — on those rare occasions when her parents are mad at her and have to escalate to the full name, eight syllables will be awesome. As an “eighter” myself, I can tell you that by the time your parents have spit the whole thing out, they’ve forgotten why they were mad at you!

This means that we’re looking at the first-ever Guest Week at Sheldon next week; Dave’s a pro and managed to put together a great, 13 day story to run around ________’ birth, but let’s give the guy some time to get caught up and recharge.

Well wishes, monetary gifts, and posters of Shakira for the happy family may be sent via Fleen.