I heard about King-Con just a few days ago, through Becky Cloonan’s blog. A comics convention within walking distance of my apartment, how could I not go?

It was a small con, even smaller (I think) than the first MoCCA Art Festival, but the vendors managed to fill up the lower level of the Brooklyn Lyceum. The Act-I-Vate crew had a table, of course, since a lot of them have studio space in the area. I held back from buying a lot of stuff, since money’s tight, and I’ve still got books from MoCCA 2008 that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I limited myself to a (half-price!) copy of Joel Priddy’s new book, The Gift of the Magi.

One nice feature of the dealer space was a row of benches along one wall, which gave me a place to sit down, pull out my sketchbook, and do these:

That guy in the lower right? Neal Adams.

MoCCA Art Fest was this weekend, NYC’s top event for indie comics. I’ve been going every year since the first one, but I totally forgot to do a list like this last year.

Books

• Octopus Pie volumes 2 and 3, by Meredith Gran.
• Templar, Arizona volumes 2 and 3, by Charlie “Spike” Trotman.
• Piracy is Liberation book 001: Information Wants to be Free by Mattias Elftorp.
• Never Learn Anything From History, a collection by Kate Beaton.
• The Mourning Star vol 2, by Kazimir Strzepek.
• Pretty Little Book by Lucy Knisley.

Floppies

• Inbound issues #1 and 2, a Boston-based anthology magazine by the Boston Comics Roundtable.
• 252-Z: Law of Monsters by Carter Allen.
• The Spring 2009 issue of InkStains, the anthology magazine published by the School of Visual Arts comics department.
• Las Aventuras de ¡Quixote!, by Pat Woodruff. This was also on the SVA table.
• Papercutter issues #1 and 2, a comics anthology from Tugboat Press of Portland, Oregon.
• Yeah, It Is by Leslie Anne MacKenzie Stein. I’m actually not sure whether to categorize this as a floppy or a book, since it’s got an ISBN. I think my dividing line is the binding — this is saddle-stiched, so it’s a floppy.
• Pixu #2, an anthology comic by Becky Cloonan, Fábio Moon, Gabriel Bá, and Vasilis Lolos.

Minis

• Comic-Strip Movies #4: Bury Me Not, by Luisa Felix, who has a pretty good hard-sell technique. Good thing the comic was only 50¢.
• Jobnik Manifesto, a little freebie from Miriam Libicki.
• Harvest is When I Need You Most, Only What You Take With You, and And Don’t Forget the Droids, a trio of adorable Star Wars-related anthology minis edited and designed by Shelli Paroline.
• Sordid City Softcore, by Charles Schneeflock Snow.
• Geraniums and Bacon #5, by Cathy Leamy, who was next to Charles Snow, and laughed at my jokes.

This year was the first in the new venue, the 69th Regiment Armory on 26th and Lex, which has one big internal space, much more convenient than the three smaller spaces at the Puck Building (no link because their website has annoying automatic sound). A bit warm, though. Ran into, jeez, practically everybody, which highlights the superiority of one big space for socializing and networking.

Two or three different people asked me if I had done any comics lately, which has me pissed off at myself for having done practically no comics at all in like twenty years. I clearly in some way emit the aura of someone who ought to be making comics.

Ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon early last week, to take advantage of their Black Friday-through-Tuesday sale. Got a few DVDs I’d been wanting at five or six bucks a pop, a couple books I’d been faunching over, and a Hanukah present for my nephew. As they usually do, Amazon broke the shipment up into four boxes.

Yesterday, the postman rings a few times, and I buzz him in and get a package. bugsybanana and I wind up spending the whole day indoors, so we don’t check the mail till Sunday, when she finds one of those we-tried-to-deliver-a-package-but-you-were-out slips. There’s no mail delivery on Sunday, and only one delivery other days, so the postman must have dragged the two packages out here, handed me one (the heavier one, as it turns out, though neither was particular large or heavy), and then dragged the other back to the depot.

Today I wait around till 3 PM, just in case yet another box turns up. Spend an hour walking to the post office, getting my package, walking back.

There’s a UPS slip waiting for me.

Just noticed this today on the subway:

Isn’t that weird? The Os are sideways, all of them. The N in lean is slightly shaved off on the right edge; compare it to the N in not. And the letters in lean don’t seem to have the same baseline.

What the hell is up with that? I thought it was some kind of pranked-up fake sign at first, but all of the Do not lean on door signs were like that.

Update: Here's a sharper photo on Gothamist earlier this year.

Did some sketching today at the Tea Lounge, which has become one of my regular hangouts. (The one on Union St, not the soon-to-be-closing 7th Ave branch.)

The guy on the left is Howard Bloom. I’ve no idea who the woman on the right is.

Wow, it felt good to do that. It’s like a muscle in my neck has been tense, and now it’s relaxed.

Hey, everybody! The MoCCA Art Fest is this coming weekend, Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm, at the Puck Building, on Houston St a block east of Broadway. Admission is $10/day or $15 for the weekend. Who else is going?

I was digging through a box of still-not-unpacked art supplies, and I found that pocket-sized Winsor-Newton watercolor sketchbook I was so into a couple years back. Flipping through it, I found this doodle, which I apparently hadn’t bothered to scan. I probably drew it while still living in Jersey City.

This page, on the other hand, is from my hand•book sketchbook that I generally carry around with me nowadays. Both these were drawn at Prospect Perk, one of the very many coffee shops to be found in Brooklyn’s North Slope. The woman in the coat was done a few weeks ago; the ink drawing of the seated man a few days ago.

This was a very purchase-light MoCCA for me. I’ve spent the past few weeks sorting through books, packing some, throwing away others, and I can’t look at books now without thinking about the fact that I don’t have space enough for the one’s I’ve already got. And worse for floppies and minis, which I can’t just stick on a shelf.

So my self-imposed limit this years was: No floppies or minis, only books with actual spines. I only bought six or seven, and left them over at the Brooklyn apartment, since why bring them to Jersey City only to box them up and bring them to Brooklyn in three days. So, this year’s MoCCA haul:

Books:

• Sordid City Blues, by Charles Schneeflock Snow, who I also got to chat with.
• Abraxas and the Earthman, by Rick Veitch, an SF treatment of Moby Dick, which ran in Epic umpteen years ago.
• Scott Bateman’s Secret Sketchbook of Shame, by Scott Bateman and shame. I think it’s been a few years since I’ve seen Scott.
• Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, by JP Stassen.
• And two or three other books, which I’ve already forgotten. This here’s a placeholder, and I’ll go back and fill it in at some point when the books and I are in the same state.

I missed out on getting a copy of I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, the Fletcher Hanks collection (about which Coop said “looking at those panels is like eating a whole bag of Cheetos made of heroin.”). It sold out on Saturday.

New subway display
Originally uploaded by Avram Grumer.

I've decided to start using flickr and taking more photos, what with having this handy pocket-sized digital camera and all.

I think you can see all of my photos here. Just a few so far; most of it's fake Nintendo DS game covers.

Took this one today, on the N train. New, all-electronic displays, which ought to solve the problem of a train getting re-routed and having a useless track display.

cthulhia was in town, so we met for brunch and robot lobsters.

Brunch was gonna be at Viselka’s, till I noticed that right across the street was a Max Brenner’s! A chocolate-themed restaurant! Who could pass that up? I’d been meaning to go ever since I first noticed their Union Square location opening up, but hadn’t gotten around to it. So, inside for breakfasts, and even the eggs come with a side of bread and little dishes of butter and spreadable chocolate. And of course, astonishingly delicious hot chocolate for drinking, served in miniature toilet bowls. They’re called “hug mugs”, handleless mugs that you’re supposed to cup with both hands, but jeez, look at the thing! Cthulhia wanted me to write “R Mutt” on mine with a Sharpie.

Then it was off to the Cooper-Hewitt for the Design Life Now exhibit. This was a bit overwhelming — so much stuff! Inkjet-printed silks, electronic slow glass, political cartoons, interactive light-piping floor tiles, and of course the robot lobster. Which I was a bit disappointed by, since it was just sitting still in a case, with a video playing to show it moving.

Last night I went to four different comic shops to get the two new Paul Grist books that shipped this week: Jack Staff vol 3 and Kane vol 6. Cosmic on 23rd had sold out of Jack Staff and never got Kane, but they did have All-Star Superman #6. I went down to St Marks Comics, which had Kane, but they’d also sold out of Jack Staff. Then I remembered that I’d walked right past Forbidden Planet on 13th without checking it, so I walked back, and they’d sold out too. World, I’m happy that Jack Staff is selling well, but could y’all hold back a bit till I get my copy? I walked back down to the NYU Starbucks to rest my feet and read Kane, and then walked up to Jim Hanley’s on 33rd, and they had Jack Staff. Yay! Total distance walked: about four miles.

Today I just walked from the WTC PATH station to Pearl Paint (to pick up a half-pan of Winsor Newton rose doré), and back (3/4 mile each way). And to and forth from home to the Grove St station, which (Google Earth tells me) is almost half a mile each way, so that means I walked five miles yesterday, and 2.5 today, which is why my feet hurt.

And I’ve somehow lost nine pounds since November.

Anyway, Volume 6 is probably my least favorite Kane volume of the series so far. What started out as a straight cop drama (which occasional comic relief) is being invaded by superhero tropes — a military super-solider suit, a blind assassin, etc. And a lot of the issue is given over to repeating Kane’s past history as revealed in other volumes. We get a couple of scenes of Oscar Darke interacting with other crime bosses, but one of them is tangled up with the stupid implausible super-suit plot.

The Jack Staff book is much better. As a superhero book, it’s unabashedly full of goofy and melodramatic superhero elements, and they’re fun as hell. How can you not love a criminal genius named Brain Head? Not to mention the WW2 German supervillain Kapitan Krieg. And all the other usual Jack Staff supporting cast — Tom Tom the Robot Man; the Q Division; the Freedom Fighters; Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter; Detective Inspector Maveryk; the Claw; and best of all, an appearance by Morlan the Mystic (who is clearly based on Alan Moore). As with the earlier Jack Staff books, the various storylines are presented in little pieces, three or four pages at a time, making it a bit of work to keep up with, but also giving the reader very much the feel of reading a whole line of books from a small comic publisher, with little crossovers and meta-plots.

And both books are full of Grist’s top-notch page layouts.

The Nintendo store in Rockefeller Center has some Wiis set up for people to try out. They’re all running the sports disk, which has several different games on it — I saw golf, and I think baseball, and tennis, which is what I played a game of.

Oh, this is so cool! The Wii controller, as some of you may not have yet heard, is cordless, and shaped like a TV remote. It has buttons on it, but for the tennis game you don’t use those for gameplay, just setup. For actually playing, you just swing the thing like a tennis racquet. Since I was playing standing up, I actually moved my body around to set up forehand and backhand swings. It was a full-body videogame experience!

The Wii goes on sale Sunday, but go try it out now for free.