Canadian comic creator festival returns today with new vigor

Canadian-made comics are celebrated at the Panel One Comic Creator Festival.

In an era of Hollywood-infested comic cons, the Panel One Comic Creator Festival in Calgary, Alberta offers a show that puts all the attention on comic creators in Canada. I spoke with Joey Gruszecki, President of Panel One.

What is Panel One?

Panel One is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion and advancement of Canadian comic book creators and artists at all stages of professional development, from hobbyists to professionals. In addition to our various programming and community building activities throughout the year, our primary focus is on the annual Panel One Comic Creator Festival. 

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Quick Hits | AWA, GlobalComix partner on ‘Lesser Evils’

Plus: news on United Workers of Seven Seas, censorship attempts in Michigan, FurnaceCon and more.

Brooklyn’s local BKReader spotlights Lesser Evils, a new comic series from AWA Studios that is set in the NY borough. The comic debuted digitally earlier this week on GlobalComix, as part of a “Global First” localization partnership between the online comics platform and AWA. GlobalComix plans to release it in multiple languages, including English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Hindi.

“It’s not just going digital first, it’s going Global First,” said Christopher Carter, founder and CEO of GlobalComix, in a press release. “We believe that when companies go digital first, they are no longer constrained to the same up-front investment costs of physical market validation, distribution, supply chain, required for localization and global audiences.”

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Baltimore Comic-Con plans to return in October

The annual comic convention will return to the Baltimore Convention Center for a live show Oct. 22-24.

The Baltimore Comic-Con has announced plans to hold its next in-person show over the weekend of Oct. 22-24. They’ve also announced a preliminary guest list.

This will be the BCC’s first live show since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down. With changing CDC guidelines and more people getting vaccinated in the U.S., it isn’t surprising to see conventions start to ramp back up.

“The current status of the U.S. is migrating from a very conservative posture to a much more open approach to gatherings,” their statement reads. “We continue to be in contact with the Baltimore Convention Center staff, and all signs point to our ability to having our event this fall.”

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CCI responds to criticism of their planned Thanksgiving weekend event

The new statement questions whether a November event would even be feasible.

Comic-Con International has issued a clarifying statement about the Comic-Con Special Edition convention they announced over the weekend. They also attempted to explain why they chose Thanksgiving weekend for the event.

This weekend’s announcement was for a smaller convention that would be held Nov. 26-28, though few details were shared. Part of the reason for the event would be to “shore up our financial reserves and mark a slow return to larger in-person gatherings in 2022,” CCI said in their original statement.

The announcement received some backlash, however, from creators and fans; this CNBC story rounds up several pieces of feedback from Charles Soule, Dan Slott and others, who question why they would schedule the event for Thanksgiving.

“My family missed Thanksgiving last year because of the pandemic,” wrote Dan Slott. “This year, we’ll all be vaccinated. There’s no way I’d be attending any event instead of spending that time with them. Even if everything were magically back to normal. I can’t imagine others feeling differently.”

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Comic-Con Special Edition to occur Nov. 26-28

The first live event held by Comic-Con International since 2019 will take place at the San Diego Convention Center over Thanksgiving weekend.

Comic-Con International has announced the dates for their first live event since the COVID-19 pandemic started — Comic-Con Special Edition will occur Nov. 26-28 at the San Diego Convention Center, kicking off on the Friday that follows Thanksgiving in the United States.

Details on badge costs, programming, attendance capacity and other details are still being finalized, but part of the goal is to help raise money not only for CCI but also the local San Diego business community — both of which have been hit hard by the pandemic due to a decrease in in-person events and the tourism they bring.

“While we have been able to pivot from in-person gatherings to limited online events, the loss of revenue has had an acute impact on the organization as it has with many small businesses, necessitating reduced work schedules and reduction in pay for employees, among other issues,” said David Glanzer, spokesperson for CCI. “Hopefully this event will shore up our financial reserves and mark a slow return to larger in-person gatherings in 2022.

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Comic-Con International will be virtual again this summer

CCI plans to hold a smaller, in-person event in San Diego this fall.

Comic-Con International has made it official — there won’t be a live convention in San Diego again this summer. Instead, CCI has announced a three-day virtual Comic Con@Home event, like they held in 2020, with plans for a smaller, three-day in-person convention in San Diego in November.

“Never could we have imagined what the world experienced in 2020 and continues to experience today,” the statement reads on their website. “While we are buoyed by the rollout of the vaccine and the growing number of individuals being inoculated, it appears that July will still be too early to safely hold an in-person event of the magnitude of Comic-Con. For this reason, we have made the challenging decision to postpone Comic-Con 2021 as an in-person gathering until our 2022 dates, and once again hold this year’s celebration as the free online Comic-Con@Home. Unfortunately, the challenges of this past year and the multiple postponements of our two largest events have left us with limited financial resources, so this year the online experience will be reduced to a three-day event, spanning July 23-25, 2021.”

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Looking Back | COVID and Comics

The COVID-19 pandemic made 2020 a bumpy year for the comics industry.

Today we kick off a series that looks back at the biggest news trends of 2020, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic and how it impacted the world of comics. Watch for more posts all this week.

COVID-19 was already on the radar when I attended C2E2 on the last weekend of February 2020, but it was still just a vague shadow in the distance. There were only a handful of cases in the U.S., but we knew more were coming. Some folks Tweeted that they wouldn’t be hugging or even shaking hands, but most people went ahead anyway, happy to see old friends after a long winter apart. The folks at McCormick Place put in extra hand sanitizer stations. And since China was already coming out the other side of their epidemic, I spoke to a couple of publishers about how the brief shutdown over there had affected their schedules. Like many of the 95,000 attendees, I roomed with friends I hadn’t seen in months, had lunch and dinner with more friends, attended panels in rooms that held 200 or more, and walked around the crowded convention floor.

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New York Comic Con goes virtual for 2020

Just like everyone else.

As you probably expected, ReedPop has announced that they are canceling the in-person New York Comic Con and will hold a virtual event instead.

“We are thoroughly disappointed that we can’t gather together, in-person for the New York Comic Con we love to build and our fans love to revel in. We look forward to this weekend all year long, just like you, and with this being our 15th edition, we were particularly excited. I will miss walking up and down artist alley and seeing friends that I’ve made since we were in the basement at the Javits Center,” said Lance Fensterman, President of ReedPop, in a press release. “While this year will definitely be a different experience, we are going to look to bring the best and most engaging event to our fans, exhibitors and studios through our partnership with YouTube.”

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Emerald City Comic Con canceled for 2020

A live convention, which was postponed to August, is now off the books for this year due to COVID-19.

It seems like such a different time now — compared to all way back in March, when Emerald City Comic Con had to decide whether to move forward with their annual convention or postpone to a later date. They opted to postpone, looking toward the end of August as their new dates, and became the first major comic book convention to be affected by COVID-19.

Three months later, everything else has been canceled, too, to the point that the surprise is gone when you hear about another event that won’t move forward. But ECCC has officially announced that the convention won’t go on as planned in August. Instead, they’re planning to hold a digital event, with the hopes that a live convention can occur next March.

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CCI postpones WonderCon

Convention, originally set for April 10-12, will be ‘postponed until a later date.’

Comic-Con International has announced they are postponing this year’s WonderCon, their annual spring convention in Anaheim, California. This year’s convention was scheduled for April 10-12.

“To protect public health and slow the rate of transmission of COVID-19, the California Department of Public Health announced a recommendation that gatherings and events of more than 250 people should either be postponed or cancelled. Comic-Con (organizer of WonderCon) will abide by this recommendation,” the organization said on their website. “Therefore WonderCon Anaheim, scheduled for April 10-12, 2020 in Anaheim, California, will be postponed until a later date.  We will begin processing refunds in the coming days.”

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Comics Lowdown: MoCCA postponed due to coronavirus

Plus: News about WonderCon, Jim Lee, Webtoon, Dark Horse and more!

Events: New York’s MoCCA Arts Festival, originally scheduled for April 4-5, is the latest event to be postponed due to the novel coronavirus, which has now been declared a pandemic.

“While New York is not officially calling for events of large gatherings to be canceled, many have been and we do not know what the next few weeks will entail. We recognize the amount of work and finances our exhibitors put into their tables and are trying to minimize the burden on them,” The Society of Illustrators, who puts on MoCCA every year, said in a statement.

They added, “In the meantime, we have made the decision to move forward and continue to judge the Awards of Excellence. In addition to the cash prize and Wacom tablets for Gold and Silver medalists, the Society will feature the award winners in an exhibition at the onsite Gallery we build at MoCCA Fest.”

A new date for the two-day festival has not been announced. It joins the Emerald City Comic Con, South by Southwest, E3, the London Book Fair and countless other events that have been impacted by COVID-19.

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‘High Comedic Value’: A bit of truth in every drawing

In the brand-new ‘Alley Cats’ feature, Suzette Chan spotlights webcomics artist Husein.

Welcome to Alley Cats, a new feature by Suzette Chan that focuses on one of our favorite parts of any convention — Artists Alley. Chan spoke to some of the many talented craftspeople and artists at the the 2019 Calgary Expo in late April. This is one in a series of six.

Husein has been drawing a comic per week for the last five years, and has been doing comic conventions for almost as long. This year, he added a new element to his booth: the craft of drawing people as pop culture icons–badly!

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