Dr. Sketchy's proprietress Molly Crabapple was one of several indie comic book artists and illustrators with a booth at the yearly art festival for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. While I was walking around taking pictures for my Flickr pages, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden showed me the initial pages from the textbook on creating comics they've got coming out early next year, and I bought a new Cynicalman minicomic from Matt Feazell, whose stick figure drawings convinced me during my high school years that I, too, could break into comics. (It didn't quite work out that way, but at least I still get to write about them...)

Over at the Fantagraphics table, I met Michael Kupperman, which gave me a chance to ask him about The Spoily Brats, a new strip he's writing and drawing for the paperback editions of Lemony Snicket's 13-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events. "I have a general idea of where it's heading," he says of the story, for which he's already finished four installments, "but it's still evolving." I commented that, like the Snicket stories themselves, The Spoily Brats had layers of humor that weren't strictly for kids, and thus fit in neatly with Kupperman's own work for mature venues like The Believer. "Kids are smart," he agreed, "and they're able to absorb a lot."

After he went back to signing copies of Tales Designed to Thrizzle, I went to the other end of the Puck Building and picked up that copy of Eddie Campbell's The Black Diamond Detective Agency I've been wanting from the folks at First Second, along with an advance copy of one of their fall releases, Nick Abadzis's heartbreaking graphic novel, Laika. Seriously, when this story about the dog the Soviets shot into space on Sputnik II comes out in the fall, you will be wetting the pages with your tears. I'm glad I waited until I got home to read it, instead of starting it on the subway like I'd originally planned.