Presenting the MoCCA Festival 2010 Panel Lineup

Well, here it is. It’s been a few months of pitching, scheduling, switching, and begging, but we’re finally ready to announce what we believe to be—panel for panel—one of the strongest festival programs in recent memory. Of course we may well be too close to this whole thing to be sufficiently objective—that, dear comics fan, is ultimately your call.

Those who caught the official guest announcement two week back have a pretty good idea of what we’ve lined up for MoCCA 2010. We’ve got some truly blockbuster names involved (Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, and Jaime Hernandez), some comics dark horses (yes, that Bill Ayers), some cartooning legends (Al Jaffee, Jules Feiffer, Arnold Roth, Gahan Wilson), and a great assortment of some of the best cartoonists working today.

In two weeks since that announcement, we’ve put on some final touches, hammered out the details of a few final panels, and added some more great names to the list. Below you’ll find the official lineup, including panelists, moderators, and start times. All of the panels take place in the main panel room of the 69th Regiment Armory, unless otherwise noted.

Certain information, as ever, is subject to change. And in a couple of cases, we’re still actively in the process of adding panelists. And, keep in mind, we’re not finished yet. MoCCA is still more than a month away, and we’ve still got some surprises up our sleeves.

In the meantime, I’m proud to announce the offical lineup of panels for the 2010 MoCCA Art Festival.

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MoCCA Announces Official Festival Guest List

There it is, the poster for this year’s MoCCA Festival, in all of its hi-res glory. A smaller version made its way through the blogosphere yesterday, but look: lots more pixels! Click the image to see it displayed full-size. This year’s poster was designed by Bottomless Belly Button’s Dash Shaw, who also designed the program cover and the official MoCCA 2010 t-shirt.

The announced names for the show, thus far is as follows:

Bill Ayers, Kyle Baker, Gabrielle Bell, Kim Deitch, Emily Flake, Tom Hart, Dean Haspiel, Jaime Hernandez, Kevin Huizenga, Paul Karasik, Neil Kleid, James Kochalka, Ward Sutton, Peter Kuper, Michael Kupperman, Hope Larson, David Mazzucchelli, Frank Miller, Josh Neufeld, Rick Parker, Paul Pope, Henrik Rehr, Alex Robinson, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, James Sturm, R. Sikoryak, Jillian Tamaki, Raina Telgemeier, Gahan Wilson and Craig Yoe.

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2009 Ignatz Award Winners List

We’ll keep this one quick and dirty—after all, we are pulling the results off of our roommate Heidi McDonald’s Twitter feed (this time with fewer typos, god willing). I was at the Ignatz Awards last night, naturally, but I had a still camera in one hand and a video in the other, and until Wordpress’s telekinesis liveblogging plug-in comes out of beta, frankly I’m not willing to take the risk.

Check out this year’s list of winners, after the jump. Congratulations to all. [Pictures and video to follow]

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Introducing Upcoming Events: The Cross Hatch Calendar

The more astute amongst you have no doubt noticed a relatively recent update to tab list on top of the Cross Hatch’s homepage in the form of Upcoming Events. The page is an attempt on our part to pull together listing of indie comics-related events happening across the country.

The events are listed on the Google Calendar plug-in. More information—like address, times, and guests—can be accessed by clicking on said events.

We’re hoping the feature will become a handy little resource for everyone within the community, but, in order to keep the calendar rolling, we’re going to need some input from you. If you know of any alternative comics events in your area (we’re mainly focused on the US, but we’re certainly willing to make exceptions), please drop us a line at: crosshatchdispatch@gmail.com.

Thanks, and please help us spread the word.

–Brian H.

San Diego Comic Con ‘09: An Indie Survival Guide

The 2009 San Diego Comic Con will mark my first year in attendance as a member of the press. I’ll actually be representing my day job at the show—the blogs editor for PCMag.com—which, at the very least, should offer something of a unique perspective for a comic convention that has grown into so much more than simply that. For my part, I’ve been planning my attack for months now, and yet the thing has somehow managed to sneak up on me. Hotel rooms and flights were booked seemingly forever ago, but in all that time, floor plans, panels, and interviews have largely remained a mystery—until now.

The past week has seen a glut of information about the show, which, for better and worse, is shaping up to be precisely the manner of star-studded clusterfuck we’ve come to simultaneously love and dread—but let’s be frank for a moment, at the end of the day, who among us wouldn’t want to share some cubic tons of recycled air with folks like Tim Burton and Matt Groening?

Of course it can be a touch difficult to find what you’re looking for in amongst the barely-controlled chaos of those four long days at the San Diego Convention Center, so we put the call out to indie cartoonists and publishers, asking where they’ll be, what they’ll be doing, and what they’re showing off this year at Comic Con. Check out the rundown after the jump—and oh yeah, don’t forget to breathe.

[Oh, and we'll be updating up until Comic Con, so if you’d like to see yourself on the list, drop us a line at dailycrosshatch@gmail.com]

–BH
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MoCCA Festival 2009 Preview

It seems hard to believe, but yet another Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art Festival is nearly upon us. This year the ever-expanding indie comics convention’s festivities will be moved from the that old mainstay, The Puck Building, to the larger Regiment Armory, 25 blocks uptown.

In honor of the event, which will be held this weekend (June 6-7), we asked some of the artists in attendance to let us know what they’ll be showing off.

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The Cross Hatch Rehash: Book Expo America 2009

I had the rather brief pleasure of stopping by Box Expo America at the Javits Center in Midtown Manhattan yesterday, with the goal of documenting the infiltration of emerging technologies on the showroom floor for my day job. You can find that report in its entirety over at Gearlog.com—the short version, for those who just don’t have the patience to click through to a tech blog, is that, save for a small patch of carpet labeled the “New Media Zone,” there was hardly an ebook reader to be found on the premises.

The news was a touch better for the comics scene, however—though, for the record, the majority of the sequential art publishers present were also ghettoized, in this case it was into a small Diamond Distribution row. All said though, there was a fairly strong showing under the Diamond umbrella, including booth for Dark Horse, Image, Oni, IDW, and Marvel. A brief chat with Dark Horse’s Jeremy Atkins confirmed that—contrary to expectations—the second day of the show was bustling.

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Stumptown Preview

Lucky for those Portland, Oregonians and people with frequent-flyer-miles – not so lucky for us stranded on the east coast and elsewhere in the known universe – the highly anticipated Stumptown Comics Fest begins this weekend with panels, workshops, and parties galore.

After the jump, check out a rundown of this weekend’s festivities.

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Easter Sunday at The KGB Bar, New York, NY

Curator Tom Hart referred to it as something of a ramshackle version of R. Sikoryak’s Carousel—a New York indie comics institution of sorts. It’s a fairly apt description, but over the past few years, the Hart-curated Easter Sunday Comix Reading at the KGB Bar has lovingly stumbled into become a tradition in its own right, a gathering for the unreligious, the non-Christian, and the otherwise holiday orphaned members of the New York sequential art community.

The Hutch Owen artist has seemingly begun to take a certain amount of pride in the unpredictability of the show’s form, which last November, at the Thanksgiving version of the reading, produced Matthew Thurber’s now-infamous scroll reading of 1-800-Mice, a fantastic, if not especially environmentally-sound take on the show’s traditional slideshow format.

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So, About Yesterday…

If there’s one thing to be learned from this current economic climate, it’s that opportunities in the business world are fleeting. It’s with that in mind that I must tell you with a heavy heart that, a day after first announcing our deal with Wizard Magazine, this rollercoaster ride of a relationship must draw to a close. Our time together has seen its peaks and valleys, its Red Hulk references, and Mountain Dew/Shaun White cross-promotions—but you know what, I don’t regret one damn moment of these last 24 hours.

Some have pointed to the fact that our roman candle-esque partnership coincided with April 1st—perhaps there’s something to that coincidence, I can’t really say for sure. In the meantime, The Daily Cross Hatch will be returning to the x-treme sports-free world of indie comics coverage.

Before I go, I’d like to thank a few people. First and foremost, the fine people at Pepsi-Cola, whose broad and delicious line of thirst quenching beverages have taught me once again how to live and love. And, of course, Tony Fleecs, the dirty hippy indie cartoonist who crafted the brilliant Nubby re-imagining that graced the banner and this post. Tony contributed to the anthology Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened and is the author behind Tell Them Johnny Wadd is Here. You can check out his work here.

To the rest of you, thanks, and keep on doing the Dew.

–Brian Heater