I'm thrilled to be going to this weekend's MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) Festival, to be held Saturday and Sunday at the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street in New York City. This will be my first MoCCA Fest -- I've been eager to go for years -- and the first time in at least a couple of years that I've been able to attend a dedicated small-press comics show.
The programming sounds terrific, so I expect to spend a lot of time witnessing panels. Once I give my own talk, that is.
It's an ego-booster for me that I get to be the first speaker out the gate: I'll be presenting an abridged chapter from my forthcoming book, The Burning Hand: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Jack Kirby, on Saturday from 11:00 to 11:50am, with the help of my friend and respondent Isaac Cates (of the University of Vermont and Satisfactory Comics fame). Isaac has already given me some inspiring editorial feedback that I'll be thinking about as I bring my book manuscript across the finish line this summer.
The chapter I'll be presenting will focus on Kirby's use of the technological sublime in his comics of the nineteen-sixties and seventies (hence the above panel blowup). I'm looking forward to presenting and discussing it. Hopefully, if you're at the MoCCA Fest on Saturday, you'll drop in for a dose of ecstatic Kirbyana!
(Look out for The Burning Hand from the University Press of Mississippi, academia's leading publisher of comics scholarship, in 2010.)
To top it all off, I'm pleased that I'll be able to hang out at the Fest with friends and colleagues Gene Kannenberg and Kent Worcester, and, who knows?, maybe some other folks too. Expect a TB report next week!
Hey, pay a visit to the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center table while you're there!
Have fun... I've never made it to a MoCCA either but I'd love to be there this year... if only to find out what the "technological sublime" is! (I'm sure you've seen Isaac's guide to "Kirbytech" on the Satisfactory Comics site, right.)
Posted by: Ben Towle | June 03, 2009 at 06:38 PM