MoCCA bound + Couple of Elfworld Reviews!

I will be heading out to NYC for the MoCCA Art Fest on June 23 + 24! Family Style will be setting up camp with those affable chums Greg Means and Alec Longstreth, the brilliant masterminds behind Tugboat Press and Phase 7 Comics, respectively! It looks like they will have new stuff; Papercutter #5 (great line up for my favorite anthology with Elfworld contributors Kaz Strzepek & Liz Prince, and Bwanna Spoons, who I’m trying to get into Vol. 2!) and another part of Alec’s “life with comics”. Yay! I am trying to have a mini-comics version of the first chapter of the François/Jonas epic fantasy colaboration, Root & Branch, and of course the still fresh smelling Elfworld.

The reviews are starting to come in for good or ill:

From SFist, a local Bay Area general interest blog:
“Overall great art, very good writing, high quality throughout, and cast of indie darlings that are definitely, definitely deserving of more attention”.

From Rob Clough at Sequart:
“The stories that work best here are the sort that take after Lewis Trondheim’s approach in Dungeon. There, the sword-and-sorcery stories are ridiculous but told with a straight face, and the humor comes out of the situations that arise rather than with easy parodic targets. Walking the line between understanding what makes the genre work and how to transcend its limitations isn’t easy, and only a few of the artists in Elfworld got it right to my eyes.”

The one I was waiting for, Tom Spurgeon’s review on The Comics Reporter: “Elfworld, for its part, is almost ruthlessly cohesive. While there’s no one must-have short story within its pages, there are a number of solid shorts, among them one-pagers by Matt Wiegle (please someone give him a solo comic) and his longer, viscerally satisfying adventure story collaboration with Sean Collins “Destructor Comes to Croc Town”; funny and diverting stories from Kazimir Strzepek and K. Thor Jensen, a lovely two-pager by Jeffrey Brown, and fable-like stories from folks like Dalton Sharp that are modest but surprisingly satisfying.”

Sarah Morean had this to say on the delightful Daily Crosshatch: “The familiar art of Liz Prince, Martin Cendrea, K. Thor Jensen and Souther Salazar, among others, is a treat. It’s rare to see an anthology so slim busting with notable talent… The title of the anthology clearly had a huge influence the contributors’ imaginations. Each story contributes to the greater land of Elfworld, which is mapped out on the first page. The map is a clever touch, but there are words on the back cover promising “a swords-and-sorcery anthology” that really only consistently delivers elves. Wizards, trolls, royal romancing, trebuchets, dwarves, and yes, even fairies appear to be missing from the Kingdom of Elfworld’s treasury of tales.”

Click on the links above for the reviews in their entirety!