MoCCA Comic Con and Renegade Craft Fair

[Reposted from 6/9/09]

This weekend was busy! Saturday and Sunday we went to the MoCCA comic book convention, which was pretty inspirational. The night before I went to an event for women comic artists held at a bar on Houston Street, so I got to meet some of the artists beforehand. It was a bit silly to be going up to girls and saying "Hey, remember me from last night?" Wink. But it was lots of fun. I met two very talented girls who'd gone to comic book school in Sweden. Åsa Ekström (took me a while to find those special characters!) amazed me by drawing in an incredibly authentic manga style. Who knew that was popular in Sweden? 

I also met a couple other women there whose work I later looked up:

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, who write a cute slice-of-unusual-life webcomic with mythical beasts;

and Natalie R, who has an impressive deviantart account and was very supportive of my drawing efforts.

I also ran into women I recognized at the con, like Bree, who has a fun webcomic that sort of takes the same direction I intended for mine. I wish I had a working scanner so I could keep posting! I have a few things from the weekend that I'd really like to put on it. 

We also saw Randall Munroe (surrounded by fans) and I talked to Jeph Jacques for a while about drawing inspiration. That was pretty much a highlight of the con for me. And he gave me a drawing of Hannelore. 

Then we went to the Renegade Craft Fair, which was huge and full of all sorts of things. I found a lot of the crafts to be similar, and even saw some of the same belts and headbands at different stalls. I feel like maybe the fact that everyone reads the same craft blogs and magazines means that they end up making similar things, or maybe buyers just generally want the same products. But there were a lot of cute things. I'll post some links when I find the business cards I took from the event.

I'm waiting on some photos, and then I'll post some of my new projects, including a Cute...