this is what concerns me:

The Animation Show #4 is coming! (It’ll hit the Bay Area this Friday, at the Lumiere in San Francisco, and the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley).

I remember seeing the very first Animation Show debut in Campbell Hall (in 2003? that era is a bit hazy). Don H. and the other UCSB alums who did his voiceovers gave a great intro and took questions afterwards. (I still have my Animation Show T-shirt from that year’s Comic-Con!)

It was happier times, I guess — ’cause now Don Hertzfeldt isn’t associated with the show he co-founded, like, at all. From his Bitter Films blog, in March:

last week i decided it was time for me to part ways with the animation show. it’s been five years and three tours and some good memories. they have a new tour rolling through theaters this summer and i don’t know what will be in it but i encourage you to go check it out

The show is now entirely curated by Mike Judge. And, uh, you know how I feel about that dude.

Mostly I’m just annoyed that I’ll have to pay two (2!!) admission fees to see both AS#4 and Hertzfeldt’s upcoming i am so proud of you, the follow-up to AS#3’s everything will be ok. Disappointing all around.

Lindsay Robertson at Videogum brings extremely important news: Greg Pheasant, the sometimes-loveable, mostly-hateable inexplicably scab-faced, dirt-biking chicken-decapitating teen bully from last fall’s controversial Kid Nation, got a haircut (!!), and now he’s looking to make some extra scratch by selling his greasy locks on eBay to fund a trip to Australia. From the looks of his obsessively repetitive MySpace comments, there will be fierce competition. Maybe he could turn this into a side business like Jared’s souvenir Bonanza necklaces.

Either way, I’m glad to see Greg is still making himself relevant! I don’t know why there wasn’t more sustained hype around this show. Despite the Double Dare challenges, it was a cute and sincere portrait of Gen-Y middle America (there were noticeably few city folk).

And the drama! Who wants to watch the boring Hills when there are 12-year-olds running from dust storms and burning themselves with hot oil? CBS could probably charge another batch of kids for the New Mexico faux ghost town ‘Nation experience as a summer camp; I assume that would get them around at least some child labor laws…

Anyway. I agree with Lindsay: I’d love to see where these kids end up in a few years with some reunion specials. (I’m pessimistically assuming that is as close as we’ll get to a Jared Nation spin-off.)

My father is on a U.S. State Department-arranged speaking/democracy propaganda tour of universities in China right now. This is what the Q&A was like:

Do your cartoons hurt your personal relationships with the politicians you draw?
No, I don’t have personal relationships with the people I draw.

Do you worry that your drawings will hurt the reputation of someone you have drawn?
No, if one of my cartoons hurts the reputation of a politician that I am criticizing, then I am pleased. (Sometimes the crowd murmurs when I say this. It doesn’t seem to be what they expect me to say.)

Do you ever draw cartoons that are supportive of China?
No, I don’t draw cartoons that support anything. I just criticize. Supportive cartoons are lousy cartoons.

Now that you have visited China, and have learned more about China, will you be drawing cartoons that support China?
Probably not.

He and my mom were supposed to head to Chengdu today but of course, post-quake, they were re-routed. Now they’re spending some extra time in Harbin, “the Moscow of China,” where they still have ample Internet access for IMing while I Google child prodigies — that is, until sight-seeing resumes after breakfast. “We’re going to the tiger sanctuary today, where visitors throw live chickens to the tigers.”

So I guess they’re having fun.

So forget that whole thing about me updating more often and what-not: clearly it was all a horrible lie, and for that I cannot be too sorry, for in my non-blogging time, I have obtained a fantastic, legal apartment in Brooklyn, and I’ve run into all sorts of random celebrities and celebrities-to-me. It’s not quite Gawker Stalker, sure, but those guys suck anyway.

Today I saw Adrian Tomine walking on Atlantic Avenue between 3rd and 4th Avenue. He was carrying a cat in a cream-colored plastic caddy-thing, probably on his way to Hope Vet down the street. Adrian and I had about 15 feet of awkward eye contact, which I’m pretty sure was construed on his end as “Indie-looking girl knows who I am.” Well, you’re damn right, friend.

Incidentally, Adrian will be on a panel at the 92nd Street Y on October 26th at 7 p.m. with Jonathan Bennett, David Heatley, Lauren Weinstein and Ivan Brunetti promoting Ivan’s new book, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction. So attend and be shocked and awed by all the awkward graphic talent - you will not be disappointed.

comics: great and awful, overrated things, shifting cultural paradigms

This past weekend was the annual MoCCA Art Festival at the Puck Building in SoHo. This was the festival’s fifth year and my first, and I had great expectations, having only been to the San Diego and New York Mammoth Manga Comic-Cons before (but dreaming of SPX for the fall, despite Bethesda). I’m not qualified to compare it to past years (though 2006 was clearly lacking a Dan Clowes/Jonathon Lethem conversation, or anything feebly approaching that brilliance), so I should say that while I was not disappointed, and I did indeed procure a great deal of great comics, I was underwhelmed. I did notice that admission this year was the cheapest it’s been since 2002, which could hint at some administrative acknowledgement of a possible lack of particular greatness — or, like, maybe not.

My weekend was spent wandering around the three large Puck rooms filled with tables filled with comics, alternately good and awful, trying not to make awkward, guilt-inducing eye contact with anyone whose work fell in the latter category. The “event programming” was spotty. To celebrate the success of their quarterly anthology MOME (recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review), Fantagraphics had an early run of the new issue for sale, and a panel featuring Andrice Arp, Gabrielle Bell, Jonathon Bennett, Gary Groth, David Heatley and Paul Hornschemeier. It was boring as all hell. I’m a big Gabrielle Bell fan, but she was not at her best, to say the least. No one seemed to want to be there, except the man who asked several questions of the panel, including “How do you feel about porn in comics?” which sealed the experience off really awkwardly, which is to say, it was perfect.

So I guess this is where I’m supposed to make some sweeping generalizations and conclusions about the fest en general. Of course it goes without saying that many good things were available, as they always are, at Drawn and Quarterly, Buenaventura and (yes, even) Fantagraphics. On the more indie front, I’ve never agreed more strongly with Sabrina Jones, who told me in January, “It’s like the early part of the 20th century, everyone was writing poetry – now everyone has a graphic novel or a comic.” I was skeptical, but MoCCA seems to have reinforced this concept for me, in sheer numbers of overpriced crap mini-comics. It was alternately unfortunate and inspiring, and I now feel entirely capable, qualified and excited to do comics again.

For posterity or something, this is the stuff I got, which I’d recommend to all four of you who might read this:
- Baby-sitter’s Club #1, Raina Telgemeier; sweet nostalgia
- Communism button and sticker from Diesel Sweeties/Dumbrella; for “being hilarious”
- Girl Stories, Lauren Weinstein
- Good News!, Mikhaela B. Reid
- Peck, James McShane
- Pencil Fight #1 and 2; a Portland zine
- Pink Popgun War T-shirt, Farel Dalrymple
- Salmon Doubts, Adam Sacks; thanks, John
- Syncopated #2, Brendan Burford and friends; a great compilation of reportage, comics and reportage comics
- Three Very Small Comics V.II, Tom Gauld