Saturday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival at Our Lady of Consolation Church and Secret Project Robot

In a cold, driving rain - we are already counting the days until we migrate to our winter retreat in the Arizona desert - we trudged across Metropolitan Avenue this afternoon to drop in on the all-day Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, whose main exhibition space was in Our Lady of Consolation Church.

It was really, really crowded, filled with comics, graphic novels and related stuff.

The first table at the door belonged to our favorite neighborhood comics store, the fabulous Desert Island.

As we walked around, we took some pics of the exhibitors and their printed works and the crowds of comics congnoscenti.

Because we were spending the afternoon with our landlady/BFF and her (and our) favorite aunt and then going with them to an early dinner at Il Passatore on Humboldt Street, we couldn't stay for as long as we would have liked.

But we did get to see some of our favorites, including Paping, Dash Shaw, Leslie Stein, Gabrielle Bell, Adam Suerte, Kim Deitch, R.O. Blechman, Ben Katchor, et al.











We're grateful to Picturebox and Desert Island for presenting the festival.
























Unfortunately, we could only just drop in for a moment to the events at Secret Project Robot, which included presentations all afternoon.


You can find really good coverage of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival on some excellent blogs: The Lightening Revolt (R); ArtLoversNewYork (Nancy Smith); Glory, How Stupid (Devin KKenny); The Cool Kids Table! (Rickey); Try Harder (Carrie); Like the Donkey Calling the Dog Big-Headed (Jess Ruliffson); and BabyTiger (Linzi).

Friday Evening in Williamsburg: Gabrielle Bell's "Lucky" at Desert Island

On our way from Dumbo Books HQ to the G train early Friday evening, we made a stop at our favorite neighborhood comic-book store, Desert Island, for the launch party of the new issue of Lucky (Volume 2, Number 2), by the extremely talented Gabrielle Bell, whose work is both wry and knowing, bittersweet and resonant.

Amid the good-sized crowd (the party had just begun) -- of which Gabrielle's kindly uncle saved us from from being the oldest in the room (but he looks younger than us!) -- we waited patiently for Gabrielle to inscribe our book. She apologized needlessly for being slow as she drew a cartoon version of us that was pockmarked, potato-faced, tangle-haired and Dumbo-eared; in other words, it was a perfect likeness!


Publishers Weekly called Gabrielle Bell's book version of Lucky "completely engrossing...even addictive

—because Bell has such a flair for communicating a specific brand of postcollegiate ennui. Her day-to-day existence is a litany of dilapidated rental apartments, low-paying jobs, yoga classes and artistic frustration, but Bell's straightforward storytelling reveals a true poignancy amid the tedium. Far from being depressing, these snippets of daily life in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N.Y., are comforting in their frankness and familiarity; by settling into the rhythm of the artist's daily life, the reader experiences the heft of small victories and simple pleasures. Never laugh-out-loud funny, brief tales of yoga roommate miscommunication, ignorant comics buyers, the anguish of nude modeling, and sex-obsessed, adolescent art students radiate good humor and are sure to resonate with a certain stripe of well-educated, underemployed 20-something comic reader. Lucky is yet another sophisticated, nuanced pleasure.

This week Racked called Desert Island "[a]n adorable, quirky comic book store." We hope you'll visit Desert Island to get a copy of Lucky or some of the other amazing stuff on sale there. Meanwhile, we had to skeedaddle out of there last night to get to J.J. Byrne Park for an 8 p.m. date with Shakespeare. But Lucky's new volume is terrific -- Gabrielle's brilliant take on her MySpace experience alone is worth the small price for it. Isn't life wonderful!