When the comics go to the museum

Last night Caitlin and I joined Flash Rosenberg at an opening of the NeoIntegrity show at MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) at 594 Broadway. From Hogarth to video, it filled every wall, column, and baseboard and left nary an inch between each item. While this made the show feel somewhat like walking into a manic double page spread of a superhero smack down, for this particular viewer it lead to dizziness and the occasional padded chair helped me recover.

I loved seeing original art, complete with pencil ghost lines and the crunch of pen over paper for Maurice Sendak and Edward Koren, "Seuss" drawings in pencil, Roz Chast water coloring photocopies of the original drawings (as Flash does), Allison Bechdel's ink line, and so so much more... Also a fun show of R. Sikoryak's process for adapting classics into comics.

I met lovely staff, curators, a fascinating woman who studies graphic novels and medieval manuscripts, and a man who paints covers for The New Yorker.

I do hope the "museum" gets to grow from a suite to a building with abundant galleries. Imagine the rooms devoted to Batman, Will Eisner, Posy Simmonds, William Blake, Charles Addams, Disney, 8-page "bibles"(of which I could contribute a few of my uncle's collection), Jules Feiffer, our own Flash Rosenberg... but please with more space, a bit more room around each piece of art.

Great show, go!

(Inspires me to think of how I'm going to create my graphic novel...hmmm...)