Mike Dawson Comics

Just returned from my trip to Angouleme yesterday, and wanted to post the bulk of my pics while it’s all still fresh in my mind. I am kind of a crappy photojournalist, and almost never take any pictures worth posting. I got very few pics of the festival itself, or any of the great art that I saw, or many of the people I met and spent time with. But, here’s the best of what I did manage to capture:

Alex Robinson and I signing books at the Rackham table.

“Velo!” is French for Bicycle.

A drawing from the Blutch exhibition.

I bought this little figurine of Nikita Khrushchev waving his shoe from a store in Paris.

Two days after Angouleme I took a train trip with Alex Robinson and Kazimir Strzepek to a great comic book store in Lyon called Experience. The owners treated us extremely well, treating us to a wonderful lunch, a tour of the city, and freedom to desecrate the ceilings of their store with our doodles. They have a lot of cartoonists already on the ceiling, but the only other Americans I spotted were Jeffrey Brown, Craig Thompson, Dash Shaw, and Keith Giffen, so I felt like I was in great company.

Kaz works on his doodle. My drawing of Ace-Face is visible at the top. I wrote my daughter’s name, Orli, on Ace-Face’s arm, but to my great shame, I misspelled it, Orly, which I am blaming on the proximity to the airport in France.

Alex’s pic near the entrance.

Here we are at lunch!

And here’s that same scene from the other direction. The man at the back is actually at the table next to us. His face turned an alarming shade of red as he drank his wine and ate his meat on his lunch-break. We were told this was a common look in France.

Seated next to the red-face man, towards us, is Cecile Mac Lennan, who does publicity work for Rackham, and took care of us a great deal of the time while we were there. She’s a delightful person, and a lot of fun to talk to. I am fascinated by the fact that her favorite TV show is The Wire (which I also love), since it’s a show that’s challenging enough to follow when English is your first language, let alone your second.

Me and Kaz in Lyon.

Me, Kaz, Alex, and our guide, Stephane. Stephane and Alex got into a heated debate about the value of the Pixar movie “Cars”.

Aliza is thrilled to finally be somewhere where there are no comics.

Kaz, Peter Kuper, Rackham publisher Latino Imparto, and Serge from Editions çà et là. This was from a signing back up in the Paris area.

And finally, one morning in Angouleme, I bought a bag of dates to eat, and someone took a picture of me holding them. I realize now that it kind of looks like I’m holding up a pair of testicles.

The final three pages in the MONDAY chapter of TROOP 142 are posted. Check them out.

This is nice timing, as I’m off to the Angouleme Festival in France next week. It’ll be good to have a little break, before I get back into it with the next chapter, TUESDAY.

If anyone is going to be at Angouleme, I will be signing every day at the Rackham booth. There are also some bookstores signings planned for Paris and Lyon the following week. My good friend Alex will be at each of those appearances too, so I imagine we’re going to have a pretty good time.

Super Heros, a comics shop in Paris, made this ex-libris bookplate to insert into French copies of Freddie & Me. They sent me a box of them. They’re really nice.

This is a picture I took at TCAF of my table. I never got around to posting any of my TCAF pics, but most of them weren’t very good anyway. I might need a better camera, or maybe I just need to read the manual to find out how to take less blurry photos.

Look how cute Orli is!! She drinks out of a straw!

In this week’s episode Alex and I discuss whether or not I am really a fan of the band Rush, our various old-man ailments, and a little bit of post-game on the big MoCCA arts-festival this past last weekend. Comments welcome!

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I’ll try to talk a little bit about MoCCA on this week’s episode of The Ink Panther’s Show. I took it easy this year, heading home after dinner each night, and getting into the new David Mazzucchelli book, Asterios Polyp, which I bought early Saturday morning. My biggest regret of the show is not getting this signed when I had the chance.

Picture credit: Gary The GazBomb Gretsky

In response to my last post, where I suggested free admission for attendees of the MoCCA comic con in NYC later this summer, someone pointed out to me that the festival serves as a fundraiser for the museum, which is a good point. I am all for MoCCA raising funds, and it’s correct that charging admission helps them along that goal. It made me think, maybe the issue isn’t MoCCA’s door policies, maybe it’s just that it’s a shame that New York doesn’t host a comics arts festival that celebrates cartooning, and is free to the public, like TCAF.

It seems to me that the city is big enough to handle another art-comics festival… maybe in someplace like, Brooklyn, for instance. Like, possibly at the Brooklyn Library, right at the top of Prospect Park there, for example. A nice Spring-time international comics festival could do well there, I’d imagine! There’s plenty of space in there for exhibits and panels and all that stuff.

Come on, people-who-might-organize-such-a-thing! Make it happen!

My main “takeaways” from the TCAF show in Toronto that I attended this past weekend:

- Come on MoCCA! Let the public come into the show for free!! TCAF does it. Seriously, it’s so much better letting attendees just walk in off the street. I don’t think there were really any quiet points during the show in terms of crowds, and it seemed like it wasn’t all the same faces. And, for real now, it’s so much nicer. Can’t you make enough money off of the artists paying for the tables and the refreshments that you can sell to all the crowds? Think of all the extra refreshments you’d be able to sell, with all those extra crowds coming in, who – come to think of it – will have extra $$$ in their pockets anyway, since they got in for free, and are totally going to be more likely to buy a $3 bottle of water.

- “Curating” the show is kind of cool. In direct opposition to their approach to the general public (see bullet point above), TCAF doesn’t let just anyone get a table at the show. It didn’t feel like they were super-hardcore exclusive about it, but it seemed like they were trying to manage the guestlist to keep it strong. And it really was. It wasn’t the largest convention I’ve ever been to, but it was probably the densest in terms of quality artists/comics.

- I liked that there were only 3 categories at the Doug Wright awards. It made the three winners seem a little more special, when basically there’s just “Best Book”, “Emerging Talent”, and an award for Unusual/experimental books.

- As a followup to the above bullet-point though, I have to throw out a mild criticism to the fellow who read the “appreciation” of Kate Beaton, the cartoonist who won in the Emerging Talent category. Come on guy, it’s not cool to talk about how the winner was so far and away better than the other three schlubs who just lost the award.

- Speaking of Kate Beaton, from what I gathered, she totally deserved to win in this category, as all of TCAF loves her work. I met her on Friday night, and she seemed nice, and now I am going to familiarize myself with her work. Also, is it significant that she’s a webcartoonist, and she just won a pretty major award? That seems kind of significant to me.

- Here are the cartoonists/comics folks at the show who I am still too shy to go up and say “hello” to and just tell them that I like their work: Seth, Chester Brown, Maurice Vellekoop, Chris Oliveros, Yoshihiro Tatsumi… basically I am just totally intimidated by the Drawn and Quarterly set.

- Thanks to Cheese, Miss, Dave, Brian, and Kevin for being great company on the to-and-from flights. I am a notoriously bad flyer, but it made me feel better not being the worst one in the bunch.