For a second year, Northeastern will host the daylong festival filled with workshops, presentations and activities for kids who love graphic novels and comics.
The Boston Kids Comics Festival is returning to Northeastern University for a second year and the event is set to be bigger than ever before.
The free event will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 8, at the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex on Columbus Avenue.
Northeastern partnered with the Boston Comics Art Foundation to bring the event to campus for the first time last year, attracting over 1,000 visitors to the Curry Student Center.
This year promises to outpace that, with 1,300 registered a week ahead of the event, said Hillary Chute, a Northeastern professor who helped bring the event to campus.
“We felt the fest really aligned with Northeastern’s mission in terms of public humanities,” said Chute, a distinguished professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern, whose work focuses on comics and graphic novels.
“One of the things that’s really important to me about the Boston Kids Comics Fest is that it’s a free, public, daylong book fair,” Chute said. “It seems like a really good fit for Northeastern, not only because of the public-facing aspect, but because faculty across Northeastern are interested in comics.”
Chute herself became involved with the festival when she met with Tony Davis, one of the co-founders who also runs “The Million Year Picnic,” a comic book store in Harvard Square that is the oldest of its kind in New England. Chute, along with graphic and information design professor Thomas Starr, are contributors to the event.
Davis started the festival in 2018 with local library director Meena Jain and graphic novelist Jonathan Todd, who recently released “Timid,” a graphic novel about his family’s move to Boston in the 1980s.
“The founders of the festival are all Boston artists and shop owners and librarians who are interested in the inclusivity of comics,” Chute said. “The idea of kids being part of the community of comics is something that’s really important to the festival. … We’re really trying to accommodate all different kinds of kids who want to show up and participate in the festival.”
This year’s festival will have over 40 tables of exhibitioners, including a section with local youths selling their own comics. There will be signings from Maris Wicks, Liniers, Nick Bruel and Colleen AF Venable, and workshops and presentations on how to make your own comic strip (from drawing to layout). There’s also a meet-and-greet with costumed superheroes and a session for adults on how to use graphic novels as teaching tools.
To accommodate a diverse array of needs, the festival will also have a quiet drawing space and a calmer space where guests can take a break from the festival to work in peace or regroup.
Graphic novels are growing in popularity, especially among children. The School Library Journal found in a survey that the popularity of these types of books have increased 90% at school libraries, whether it be manga-style works or graphic adaptations of novels and humor books.
Northeastern feeds off this with professors across disciplines incorporating comics into their instruction, whether it be Chute teaching a class on the graphic novel or Northeastern distinguished teaching professor Luke Landherr who uses comics as a teaching tool in their chemistry engineering courses.
“Northeastern has become a location where this emerging form is really being taken seriously,” Chute said. “So (hosting the event) seems like a really good fit for Northeastern, not only because of the public facing aspect that Northeastern has as part of its mission, but because faculty across (departments) are interested in comics. That’s been really thrilling to see.”
