Indie Comics

One of Harvey Pekar's posthumous projects, CLEVELAND, will be published by a new publisher, ZIP, and distributed by Top Shelf. Drawn by Joseph Remnant, one of the Pekar Project artists (shown left and below), CLEVELAND is, as the title suggests, an ode to Pekar's muse, the city of Cleveland, with a history including the Indians, the great Cuyahoga fire and more.

ZIP is owned by Josh Frankel, author of several self-published comics, who is looking to get increasingly involved with the publishing end. Top Shelf will offer publishing and marketing support.

Coming to this year's MoCCA-fest and wondering where to grab a quick lunch to eat in between selling your mini-comics? Look no further! Although considered drab by New York standards, the Rose Hill/Gramercy/Flatiron area surrounding the the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory, setting for MoCCA Fest, still offers a colorful array of authentic, delicious and affordable cuisine from around the world within a radius of only a couple of blocks. (It IS New York City, after all.) Bearing in mind the small budgets of most MoCCA attendees/indie cartoonists, we're going to highlight places where, for $10 or under, you can still get a decent meal -- some of them even prepared by Iron Chef level celebrities. At a few places, if $10 isn't enough for a meal it is still enough for some rare treat that will make your trip one to remember. For dinner you will want to grab some friends and a subway or cab and head to one of the great restaurants of the city, but your lunchtime is definitely covered right here.

Besides being a lovely flyer, several new guests are revealed in this flyer by Craig Thompson, including Diane Noomin and Chester Brown. Thompson's long awaited HABIBI comes out this fall and should be a HOT topic of conversation.

Programming maven Brian Heater has posted the 2011 MoCCA panel lineup. There will be TWO tracks of programming this year, with lots of spotlights -- Al Jaffee, Jerry Robinson, Gahan Wilson, Dash Shaw, Peter Bagge, Pizza Island, Will Eisner -- a Carousel, an animation panel, and looks at most every genre of contemporary indie/alt comix. It's in some kind of table, so we can't reproduce it here, but check it out.

by Brady Russell

S.P.A.C.E. is the Midwest's answer to the Small Press Expo,  founded twelve years ago by Bob Corby, as a show that comics creators without a huge following could afford to go to. I've known about it for a long time and always wanted to go. After attending SPX myself for the first time in 1999, I came home and started Googling creators I had met, and I think it was searching for Suzanne Baumann that I found out about S.P.A.C.E. for the first time. The photos made the show look much smaller, much simpler than SPX, which even ten years ago, at the original location, was a pretty crowded scene.

The Small Press Expo has announced its first guests for the 2011 show and they are all awesome: Roz Chast, Jim Woodring, Ann Telnaes, and Jim Rugg. Maybe Jim Woodring will bring his giant pen!

Nominations for the Stumptown Awards, held in conjunction with the Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland, OR on April 16-17th have been announced. Nominees were selected by a judging panel which consisted of Michael Allred (Madman), Brandon Graham (King City), Laura Hudson (Editor, ComicsAlliance.com), Michael Ring (Owner, Bridge City Comics), and Jason Leivian (Owner, Floating World Comics) and will be presented at the show.

Deadline reports that Jeff Smith's RASL is being developed by SHERLOCK HOLMES roducer Lionel Wigram. The series, the follow-up to Smith's million-selling fantasy Bone, concerns an art thief who jump to different universes to steal priceless works of art, but at a great personal cost.

January wasn’t all bad news in the comics industry as Image had a strong month. Spawn #200 sold a crazy amount of issues thanks to its many variant copies, while The Walking Dead continues to rise and the new weekly reprints did fairly well. The biggest launches were a Darth Vader miniseries from Dark Horse, and IDW’s zombie crossover series Infestation.

A beautiful Peter Kuper poster and the guest list have been announced for this year's MoCCA fest.

A new poster for S.P.A.C.E., the Columbus indie comics show, has just been released. It's by Tom Williams of drawrobot fame.

This spring's Xeric Grant winners have been announced. Founded by Peter Laird, the Xeric is presented to worthy cartoonists to provide them with funds to print their projects. A total of $31,158 was awarded for seven comic book projects.  The Foundation has awarded in excess of $2.4 million to comic book creators and nonprofit organizations since its first grant cycle in September 1992.