By Tom Spurgeon
* so it looks like there's a festival in Poland starting today. Wouldn't you want to go to a comics festival in Poland if this were possible? I would.
* this didn't really sink in until I was running Collective Memories for FLUKE, SPACE and MoCCA all the same time, but holy crap, there are so many shows you could attend now. You could probably go to a pretty good comics show every other weekend March to September. This is an amazing thing. I say this a lot, but one reason I felt comfortable moving to Silver City, New Mexico is that there were only maybe three comics shows I'd want to attend in any given year. Now there are three some months.
* speaking of the Athens comics show, the crew from Dollar Bin did some interviews at FLUKE. I like those Dollar Bin guys.
* here's nice new site for MECAF.
* go here to pick up items related to the recent MoCCA Festival. I don't know if their availability means that demand was soft or if they just want to blast through their inventory when a show is near its conclusion, but I don't think the former option is a negative -- Society Of Illustrators is using this year to figure out things like the demand for festival-related stuff. For you, though, this is a Michael DeForge t-shirt opportunity.
* here is Gerry Alanguilan with a con report for a show near him. I always love reading events coverage from Alanguilan.
* finally, here's a piece by DWA jury member Natalia Yanchak on deciding to sit on that award's jury, which contains a list of the awards winners. It's on Huffington Post, which works according to a model of not paying its contributors in any traditional sense, so that's not my favorite place to read about an industry that has problem paying its creators. Then again, I guess people read that site with great devotion and therefore writers use it for things like drawing attention to themselves or things they like. So there you go. I'm not sure why I just felt the need to describe Huffington Post as if it came into existence five minutes ago, but what the hell.