The Richmond Indie Comics Expo on Nov. 13 will feature established artists exhibiting alongside VCU students and alumni. (Photo by Kevin Morley courtesy VCU)
The ballrooms in the Virginia Commonwealth University Student Commons will soon be festooned with fantasy, crammed with color and mighty with manga.
The third Richmond Indie Comic Expo, set for Nov. 13, isn’t a comic convention. It’s a comic creators’ convention. The free expo features VCU alumni and current students setting up alongside local comic artists to showcase their work. And for those attendees interested in learning about comics as an art and an industry, there are educational panels and workshops. One of the talks this year, for example, will explore comic lettering.
“It’s like a farmer’s market, except, instead of produce, they are selling art,” says Bizhan Khodabandeh, the VCU illustration professor who, along with fellow professor Kelly Alder, helped to kick-start the expo, which is now entirely run by students. “It’s one of the few venues where you’ll get to read these different kinds of books. And you can get the artist to autograph it and talk to them about the art.”
“We’ve got fantasy and sci-fi and horror, and then we have people exploring history and science or current events,” adds VCU senior Alexander Tyree, this year’s lead RICE organizer and the editor-in-chief of VCU’s student-run comic anthology, Emanata. “You can put anything in a comic, and you’ll see that at the expo.”
More than 130 artists will be on display, Tyree says, adding that, of the scheduled vendors, 40% are alumni, 25% students and the rest local comic creators with no VCU affiliation.
Comic Arts Richmond organizers Francesca Lyn and Christine Skelly (Photo courtesy Francesca Lyn)
Comic Arts Richmond, another showcase for independent comic creators, is slated for Dec. 10 at Strangeways Brewing.
“RICE is a student-run organization, and we’re independent,” says CAR co-organizer Francesca Lyn, who teaches gender studies at VCU, including a course on gender in comics. “There is some overlap, of course, because the comics community is pretty tight-knit. We are geared toward independent comics, so there will mostly be comics creators, particularly those doing self-published work.”
As with RICE, there will be a lot of fantasy on display at the second CAR showcase, as well as takeoffs on Japanese manga, but there will also be more small-scale, personal work.
“It’s big. I taught a class on autobiographical comics last semester,” Lyn says. “A lot of the comics that people consider very important, not just within comics circles but in the mainstream, are autobiographical. Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ Allison Bechtel’s ‘Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy,’ Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ … those are all about lived experiences.”
Lyn says her favorite work by Richmond’s emerging comic creators reflects that kind of style. “There’s definitely a wider range of subject matter available now,” she says. “The difference is the accessibility. You are able to get a copy of these things a lot easier. And the way in which we can access things virtually also makes it different.”
If you attend these showcases, one thing will be clear: Comics isn’t a boy’s club anymore. There are just as many female or nonbinary artists as male, and they often explore topics beyond the Marvel Universe.
“The biggest names out there are DC and Marvel,” says Diana Thien, a VCU graduate who works in animation design and one of last year’s RICE organizers, “but there’s so much more that comics have to offer in terms of genre and representation. I’m not much into superheroes. I’m inspired by what I started reading, slice-of-life stuff, mixed with fantasy, drama and supernatural ... character-based stories that focus on relationships.”
Fellow 2021 RICE organizer Claire Deely, who identifies as nonbinary, will exhibit ’70s underground-flavored work this year at the expo. Deely says independent comics “can be a fantastic medium for marginalized creators that haven’t been included in the mainstream comics industry. Here, we get to share those stories that historically haven’t been heard in a lot of media.”
Richmond Indie Comic Expo: Nov. 13, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Commons at VCU, 907 Floyd Ave.; free
Comic Arts Richmond: Dec. 10 , noon to 5 p.m. Strangeways Brewing, 2277A Dabney Road; free
