The Art Fest is always one of my favorite favorite shows. Always such heart, such energy. It sounds like cliched bullshit, but it’s true. The theme overall was that it was hot as fuck. People were sweating big time — there’s photo evidence on The Beat (thanks, Heidi). I finally got a chance to walk around on Sunday and picked up some stuff that looked good. I’m yet to read any of it, but I’ll make a list tonight of the goodies.

Random Thoughts from the show:

• I always pictured Karen Berger as a brunette. She wasn’t.

• The book I (and Laura, probably) was Alex Robinson’s Too Cool To Be Forgotten. Such a great graphic novel. Highly recommended.

• Related: I noticed this after I saw him walking around, but is it just me, or does the main character in Too Cool To Be Forgotten look EXACTLY like Charles Burns?

• Alex Cox’s mini comic, Camp Staff Tales, was hilarious. I wished there was more — and there is! Here.

• Douglas Wolk was telling me about his Final Crisis Annotations and his FC#1 clarifications using only the information provided in the panels (here). I read the issue last night and then read his clarifications and they certainly made me appreciate the issue more. Check em.

• There were a lot of great editorial illustrators at the show I know from the mag world including: Yuko Shimizu, Jorge Colombo, Sam Weber, Koren Shadmi and some other people I can’t remember this second.

• Famous person I saw, unexpectedly: Michel Gondry. He was doing sketches and signings at the PictureBox table.

• Speaking of PictureBox, they didn’t have any prices (at least that I saw) for the dozens of books they had on the tables. What the fuck? So any time I wanted to know how much something was I had to wave down someone and ask. And then when I don’t buy it I look like it’s only because the price he gave was too expensive. Super lame. Why would you purposely make the buying experience more difficult?

• I spoke with Top Shelf’s Robert Venditti about the movie version of his comic The Surrogates. He, Brett Weldele (artist) and Chris Staros went to the set in Boston recently and spoke highly of the director, the response from the crew, shooting the DVD commentary, watching them shoot scenes for three days and of course, the craft services.

• The after party was a super trendy cluby place. Was a great space, very airy but didn’t seem very MoCCA-like. I’m not complaining though, even though we got kicked out of our booth.

• I ran into the cartoonist Neil Fitzpatrick, who does his comic NEIL JAM. Backstory: Back in college I was the Production Manager (Art Director) for this kick-ass newspaper, The Maneater. We had a comics page and NEIL JAM was one of the mainstays, so it was definitely crazy to see it 6-7 years later.

• Bloggers represent! I saw a bunch: Kevin Church, Chris Mautner, Marc Sobel, Heidi MacDonald, Brian Heater, Jillian Steinhauer, other TK.

• Quote from David Gallaher: “Zuda was the best comics experience of my life.”

• The MoCCA staff seemed to try and be as accommodating as possible. 1) There was an accident at the exhibitor check-in entrance in the morning and there were delays getting exhibitors inside, so they held the line while people got set up. 2) Because it was so hot on day 1, they went and bought some extra fans for day 2 (I personally didn’t feel them). 3. And when everyone had to evacuate because of a fire alarm, they extended the show hours 30 minutes.

• Coolest fashion item: Hope Larson’s custom neckerchiefs for new book Chiggers (which she sold many, many copies of). Second coolest: R. Stevens’s Diesel Sweeties socks.

• I brought my tpb of Cover Girl on Sunday so Kevin Church could sign it. He did.

More Later!