• Renee French custom-painted this Dylan Sprouse vinyl figure; plus the usual drawings etc. at her blog; plus we like this photo on Sprouse's website for obvious reasons
• "The Strangest Story You Ever Heard in Your Life" continues at Splog!, the Sergio Ponchione Lost Objects Gallery blog, plus an illustration at Mondobliquo
We're thrilled to present the Fantagraphics guide to the 2011 MoCCA Fest, happening this weekend Saturday, April 9th and Sunday, April 10th at the Lexington Avenue Armory in New York City! Print this out and use it as your shopping checklist and your weekend schedule!
First off, take a look at all the amazing new releases that we will be debuting at the show! Many of these books won't be in stores for several more months, and copies are limited, so make our table your first stop, or risk missing out!
Secondly, check out our jam-packed schedule of awesome authors who will be signing at the Fantagraphics table over the weekend. Not only will they be signing our books, but several of them will be bringing previews of works-in-progress!
update: George Chieffet will be unable to join us on Sunday, but John Kerschbaum has been added to the 1:30 pm slot that day!
another update: Tim Kreider will be joining us on Saturday afternoon at 2:30 pm before his panel at 4:30 pm!
All this and more awaits you at the Fantagraphics booth, located at #J1, J2, K1, K2.
And finally, get a gander at all these great panels! If you haven't already heard from The Daily Cross Hatch, they've added a second room this year, and they'll be doing more one-on-one conversations like the ones with Gahan Wilson and Peter Bagge listed below! You won't want to miss it!
Saturday, April 9th
11:30 am // Teaching Comics:Jessica Abel joins fellow panelists Bill Kartalopoulos and Tom Hart in a discussion from reading for content/visuals, to teaching how to “read” their visual rhetoric, to thinking about how to tell a story visually, what makes comics worth teaching? (Room A)
1:30 pm // Building a Book, From Start to Finish: Mark Newgarden moderates a panel with Stephen DeStefano (as well as Ben Katchor and Lauren Redniss), with an exploration of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making a book. (Room A)
1:30 pm // Gahan Wilson: Playboy and Beyond: We explore the long, storied career of satirist Gahan Wilson. (Room B)
2:30 pm // Volunteer of the Year: Peter Kuper will present Al Jaffee with the Klein Award! (Room A)
2:30 pm // Dash Shaw and Brecht Evens in Conversation: Dash Shaw and Brecht Evens are among the most prodigious and prolific young artists working in comics today. Both began publishing ambitious work while still in school, and both have since gained notice for their lush, inventive, and thoughtful comics. (Room B)
4:30 pm // The State of Editorial Cartooning: Brian Heater presents a panel with Tim Kreider (along with Ruben Bolling and Ted Rall) on the trials and tribulations of creating political cartoons in 2011. (Room A)
5:30 pm // MoCCA Presents the Cross Hatch Carousel: Cartoonists and voice actors perform live comics readings, featuring our own Michael Kupperman and Ted Stearn, as well as Jeffrey Lewis, R. Sikoryak, Kate Beaton, Lisa Hanawalt, Julie Klausner, and more. (Room A)
Sunday, April 10th
12:30 pm // Almost True: Calvin Reid leads a discussion on where autobiography and fiction collide with Gabrielle Bell and Leslie Stein (and Joe Ollmann and Pascal Girard). (Room A)
1:30 pm // Peter Bagge: A History of Hate: Brian Heater spotlights Peter Bagge, in a one-on-one conversation with one of alternative comics’ most influential and enduring voices. (Room B)
1:30 pm // The Enterprising Will Eisner: Charles Brownstein leads a panel with Jules Feiffer, as well as Denis Kitchen and Paul Levitz. Come learn about who Will Eisner was as an entrepreneuring artist in a time when New York was the center of the commercial art universe, and how his art was shaped by that environment. (Room A)
3:30 pm // Ink Panthers Live: The popular podcast live, with special guests, like John Kerschbaum. (Room B)
Excellent and welcome news: On his The Ruined Cast blog Dash Shaw announces: "The 13th volume of Wholphin, the McSweeney’s quarterly DVD anthology, will have my 2009 IFC series The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. on it." That's artwork from the animated series in the lower quadrant on the cover there; of course, much more artwork from the series, as well as a bunch of Dash's short stories, can be found in our companion book of the same name, and the series is still available to watch at IFC.com.
On The Ruined Cast blog Dash Shaw posted this page from his story "Blind Date 3" appearing in the next issue of Mome. Looks like a bit of a stylistic departure from the first two "Blind Date" strips. If you're not already familiar, yes, these are comics adaptations of actual episodes of the TV show Blind Date and yes, they're as funny and weird as you think.
• This is just a small portion of the catstravaganza that is Drew Weing's back cover for Papercutter #15 from Tugboat Press (he's also in the issue) — see the whole thing at Drew's Here There Be Monsters blog
• The volume of terrific sketches by Tom Kaczynski at his Transatlantis blog has really kicked up; there's also publishing news from his Uncivilized Books concern
• Plug: "The Comics Journal: long known as a magazine where you can look at never before released sketches from R. Crumb next to essays about Wonder Woman’s bondage past next to in-depth interviews with superhero comics auteurs next to oral histories of underground dudes you didn’t even know you were interested in until you read about their entire lives. We could go on that tangent forever, but instead we’ll just direct you here to pre-order." – Sam Hockley-Smith, The Fader
• Plug: "In Mezzo and Pirus’ King of the Flies, characters who die in the first volume... come back to watch over the still-living – lovers, friends, mothers. Mezzo and Pirus’ undead are able to travel to Mars in the blink of an eye, and then back to the David Lynchian small-town that is the story’s main setting. Liberated from physical constraints, they are frustrated, morose, angry, holding onto grudges. ...Mezzo and Prius... have created a darkly erotic and blackly humoured book that, days after finishing, I’m still thinking about." – Shawn Conner, Guttersnipe
• Plug:Los Angeles magazine features Freeway by Mark Kalesniko in their latest roundup of books of local interest
• Interview:The Daily Cross Hatch's Brian Heater continues his conversation with Stan Sakai: "Originally, I had wanted to do a series inspired by the life of a 17th century samurai named Miyamoto Musashi, but — he’s regarded as one of the great swordsmen in Japanese history, but one day I just drew a rabbit and Musashi became a rabbit. Instead of Miyamoto Musashi, my charcter was Miyamoto Usagi — 'usagi' means 'rabbit' in Japanese. The 'Miyamoto' part I kept as an homage to the original Musahi, but everything else is pretty much original."
• Profile:Variety recently talked to Dash Shaw about his artwork in the feature film Rabbit Hole — here's a scan, uploaded by Dash
• Feature:Mike Lynch posts scans of a "How to Draw Buz Sawyer" article by Roy Crane from a 1969 issue of Cartoonist PROfiles
• Unpaid product placement: Jordan Crane's Uptight #4 makes a cameo appearance in Kevin Church & Benjamin Birdie's relaunched webcomic The Rack
![Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition [Pre-Order]](components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=da59bbd52a0f01b7d7ac43c39e4deffd.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout= "Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition [Pre-Order]")
![Uptight #4 [January 2011]](components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=7e51829bf28c5857d6f2efdcaa2b0508.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout= "Uptight #4 [January 2011]")
