MoCCA Fest Pile 4.0

Since the indie/minicomics scene is large, scattered all over the world, and lacks any sort of central review/new issue announcement location (like the old Factsheet 5 was for zines), it's very easy to completely miss good comics. Even just looking at other people's hauls from MoCCA, I wondered if I attended the same event. Of course, there's comics that I've been hearing about for a while, but for unknown reasons never picked them up or even them read on the web. Although I knew about the comics of Julia Wertz and Liz Baillie, I had never read any of their work before MoCCA Fest. Now I'm on a mission to track down more of their work.

Julia Wertz has been drawing the web-published autobiographical comic The Fart Party since 2005, and her second print collection - cleverly titled The Fart Party, Volume 2 - has just been published by Atomic Book Company. Julia writes and draws about the daily frustrations of life, self-loathing, drinking, bodily functions, city life (first in San Francisco, now in Brooklyn), bad jobs, books, music, and anything else. Her comics kind of remind me of myself 15 or so years ago, which may or may not be a good thing.

While The Fart Party is a web-published comic, the printed books contain many more comic than are archived on the site. Plus, you can safely read the printed versions of The Fart Party in the tub without fear of electrocution. Most importantly, you help to support a really good independent publisher/cartoonist.

To give you a sampling of Julia's work, here's the web versions of some of my favorite comics in The Fart Party 2:

• Fog Makes Me Whimsical
• Dustpan Vagina
• Waste of Space
• Drawing in the Attic
• Night Before Moving to New York

And I related to this comic below quite a bit:


Julia Wertz also curated one of my favorite comic anthologies of 2009, I Saw You.

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Liz Baillie is another cartoonist whose work I had heard many great things about, but never read.

I have to make a full confession here: I had been avoiding reading Liz's comics because they involved punk kids. Now, I have nothing against punk music at all - much of it is good, important listening. I've seen many punk shows, bought many punk records, and played punk music on my college radio show. In 1994, I even had the Screeching Weasel logo tattooed on my back. However, for me at least, punk is mainly musical, not political. I love the music, but have found the punk "scene" of the past ten years or so to become somewhat intolerable, full of crusty, trainhopping types who stand out in front of shows and beg for change with one hand while using an iPhone with the other. I've read so many shitty punk zines that I somehow thought that Liz's My Brain Hurts was going to be a shitty punk comic filled with romanticized and whimsical tales of bike riding, dumpster diving, fighting "the system", theft, Free Mumia rallies, and other attempts at rebellion.

However, in the collected My Brain Hurts (includes issues #1 to #5 of the minicomic), there is nary a bike or a dumpster. Yes, 40 ouncers are lifted from a bodgea, and there's punk shows and barfing, but My Brain Hurts should not be labeled just as "a punk comic". These stories about confused teenagers can apply to the teens of any culture or subculture, and Liz has created characters you really do care about. I really need to know what happens to Kate and Joey (pictured below), their parents, and the other characters, and I want to apologize to Liz for not reading her comics earlier because of my anti-crusty punk kid biases. I only hope she collects issues #6 to #10 in another book soon.


Liz has also started a new comic series, a road trip adventure story (with foster kids, not punk kids this time) called FREEWHEEL. Issue #1 left me wanting more.

(See the mocca2009 tag for all reviews.)