For people who love alternative comics and cartoons, this weekend offers the pop rocks of eye candy: MoCCA Art Festival 2007 is on at the Puck Building.

The fair is sponsored by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, a not-for-profit established to help get children interested in reading, to bring greater visibility to the graphic novel as a literary form, and in general, to show the importance of the art in documenting and interpreting social change. Among the artists on the board of directors are Art Spiegelman (MAUS), Stan Lee (Spider-Man) and Peter Kuper (Stop Forgetting to Remember).

I asked Peter what made the MoCCA Fair special. In an email from Oxaca City, he replied, "Generally speaking, comic conventions are overwhelmingly devoted to fantasy and superhero genre material. For alternative artists, who are already in a tiny subcategory of the art form, those big conventions can make one feel like being a jazz musician at a Heavy Metal festival. For us, MoCCA is an antidote."

In addition to publishers of comics and graphic novels, including Fantagraphics Books, Pantheon, Giant Robot, Drawn & Quarterly, and Houghton & Mifflin, to name a few, independents of all stripes are on board. Among them are Meathaus, a San Francisco alternative artists' collective, Dumbrella, an artists' blog, PictureBox Books, and the century-old Jewish Publication Society.

I also caught up with Jason Sacher, an editor at Chronicle Books and a member of the Meathaus Collective, who had this to say: "I've been both an exhibitor and an attendee of various independent comics fairs (MOCCA, APE, SPX) over the years and I've watched them grow and transform from very comics-heavy insider events to what seems more like full-blown art festivals. There's lots of trading and schmoozing, and people with backpacks full of limited editions stuff to sell. So the joy of these events has become the craft-oriented indie print makers and cartoonists who load their tables with unique one-of-a-kind art objects, screen prints, etchings, etc. The real draw is the one-to-one contact with the artists and the ability to pick up something that you can't get at a comics shop or an online gallery."

And Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics added, "MoCCA is the only place where you can walk into a room and stand a good chance of physically bumping into just about any great cartoonist of the last 30 years, from Jules Feiffer to Art Spiegelman to Gary Panter to Charles Burns to to Drew Friedman, etc. And that's not counting so many exciting up-and-coming artists whose work is waiting to be discovered. There's really nothing else like it." Picture credits: Top, Girl Stories by Lauren Weinstein; middle: from nEuROTIC by John Cuneo; bottom: Stop Forgetting to Remember by Peter Kuper.

On both days, MoCCA presents workshops and talks on an array of subjects from how to apply for grants and fellowships, a roundtable discussion on the state of the arts, and presentations by individual artists, including John Cuneo (nEuROTIC), Kim Deitch (Hollywoodland), and Lauren Weinstein (Girl Stories). The Festival Award, this year going to Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), will be presented on Saturday at 1:30 pm at the MoCCA Gallery. Please check the website for details.

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