I spent the majority of my second day at Art Fest floating around the various floors and taking in everything people had to offer. I came away with quite a bit of swag. I spent thirty bucks on Paul Pope’s PulpHope book, which though I was slightly gasping at the price tag for a second, I soon decided that it’s a book that deserves every scent of my money. Just flipping through it overwhelms my senses and will probably take me forever to get through, and just as Warren Ellis said, it should. Pope said to me that he had to cut quite a bit from the book that had something like over 2,200 pages of material he’d been gathering. He worked on it for a year and a half. I said that’s mind-blowing, and he said almost nearly.
In my floatations, I chatted up Tim Leong and Laura Hudson of the fantastic Comic Foundry about my friend Matt Silady’s The Homeless Channel that just got an “A” in Entertainment Weekly. While up on the gorgeous but not crowded seventh floor I ran into Trixie Bedlam and her friends Kristie and Jaime, where I talked Trix into picking up a NYC Mech t-shirt from Ivan Brandon. I talked to Brendan Montclaire and Percy Carey at the DC/Vertigo booth about Percy’s book Sentences and G.Willow Wilson’s Cairo—which is (I guess), a fairy tale police procedural in the current political climate of Cairo, Egypt. That project is definitely something I’ll be on the lookout for to see what Willow does with it. Reason for that is my own trip to Egypt as a graduation present from St. Bonaventure has been the source material for something I’ve been working out since last summer.
Percy Carey, also known as MF Grimm, is probably the nicest guy I met there. I gotta say that was the biggest score getting a three disc-60 track set from him called American Hunger for free. That’s insanity, he was just going around and handing them out. When leaving he said he’d mail Jeremy his. That is unbelievably sick and awesome in my book. I’m loving the hell out of this album, and I don’t listen to rap that isn’t Jurassic 5 or Outkast.
Wondering around some more, I picked up a NYC MECH t-shirt of a robot duck; grabbed a free Dork #11 and Action Girl from Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer’s table; and helped Arthur Suydam’s wife pick up chips and sodas for the people waiting in line for Bill Sienkiewicz’s thing to start to please them while they waited for him to show up, which never happened. This caused the ire of many on the MoCCA staff and volunteers and I personally have to say that you are a Giant Bag of Douche for volunteering to do something for charity and then not only snubbing the charity in the face but also your fans. The last thing I’ll say on this is: didn’t your mother teach you to respect and give back to the people who put you where you are today? Obviously not, but who knows there could be extenuating circumstances.
In terms of parties–I heard the Kaiju Big Battel party was insanity incarnate, but never made it. Don’t watch it, don’t care really. Too tired from four hours of sleep the night before and been running around the festival since 7am the previous morning, so I retired early after the Top Shelf party.
As other pieces of swag that came my way after the festival were Gilbert Hernandez’s Sloth; Mike Carey and Jim Fern’s Crossing Midnight; another Rick Spears book, Pirates of Coney Island; Fred Van Lente’s Action Philosophers (which I hear is hilarious but haven’t read it yet), and a couple of posters that my Dad will like.
All in all, I had a barrel of fun and was glad to do it. I think I’ll definitely be hanging out at MoCCA more. Good people, and good times.
