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Sean T. Collins On MoCCA Festival 2014
posted April 7, 2014
MoCCA was fun, but i'm totally exhausted now. A two-day show's a grind when you're not five minutes from your hotel room at all times. The impression I got is that civilians were buying -- most of the exhibitors i talked to seemed happy, though not ecstatic -- because it was sort of a spring-awakening show, but people within the field who've spent the long winter months following each other's projects had less they were looking forward to seeing since they'd seen most of it.
Not a lot of debuts, best I could tell -- people probably saving those for Linework and TCAF and CAKE, or maybe just avoiding going too hard here because this was still very much a dip-your-toe-in-the-water iteration of this show for a lot of people.
Very well organized, almost prohibitively so. There was one time that there were so many volunteers and paid security people in the front doors that I had a hard time fitting through.
People have definitely noticed the influx of more standalone images, perhaps a Society innovation; maybe that's the show's identity from now on, though comicswise it's the SPX model of "part altcomix, part webcomics-as-genre, part indy-with-a-y genre-comic strivers."
Honestly, if its only real reason for being is "New York can support another alt-ish comics show six months apart from the Brooklyn show," that's fine.
Tom Spurgeon Responds: If anecdotal evidence as collected through personal conversation is any indication, I think a lot of people weren't so much planning to skip debuts at this show, but missed their deadlines because of the cushion of other shows. In other words, they knew if they missed MoCCA, they'd have a shot at debuting something at TCAF or whatever. That's interesting to me.