 My name is Nick Kanyaf and I am the founder of the Boston Comic-Con, and I am also the founder and head promoter of Wicked Comic-Con, sort of formally the Boston Comic-Con. My name is Kirby. I am one of the organizers here for Wicked Comic-Con. Back in 2007, I was part of the team that started Boston Comic-Con. After 2016, the show was sold and we kind of took a hiatus and now six years later we're back with Wicked Comic-Con. My name is Bob Shaw. I am involved with Wicked Comic-Con, helping bring in the comic artists. I help book a lot of the vendors in here, help with developing a lot of the branding. We were called the best comic artists show in America. We're back to reclaim the throne. I want Boston to be excited about comics again. All my life I've been a huge comic book fan. I grew up reading mostly Marvel comic books in the 70s. I was a big fan of Batman and Captain America. In 2007, I happened to notice that Boston didn't really have a major comic-con and I went to a good friend of mine, Jimmy Talbot, who owned and operated the local comic book shop where I grew up and framing him. It was Bob City Comics at the time. It's now Bedrock Comics and he's passed the torch to his protege, Jack LaFever. We started this small show in 2007. The first show was a one-day show. It was on a Sunday. It was in about 10,000 square feet. We put about 1,000 people through the door. As we were building this show, it really was always about the love of comic books and those characters. It was always a comic book, comic book art-centric show. Ultimately, the show grew from 2007 from 10,000 square feet and 1,000 people to 2016 when we sold it to three days, 50,000 people, 150,000 square feet, the second largest publicly held event in the city of Boston. People always say, cheese, how did you do it? I'd like to tell them it's because I'm the smartest guy in the room, but nobody would believe that. I think it was a timing thing. We started the show in 2007 and 2008. A little movie came out called Iron Man. That was the beginning of Marvel Studios. I give a lot of credit to Hollywood because Hollywood took all these characters that were formerly underground characters and made them mainstream. The fan base for these comic cons grew exponentially beyond the comic book collectors like myself. You started to see a far more diverse crowd of people coming who were introduced to these characters by the medium of television and movies. Of course, you still had your original fans that loved these characters from the comic books. In 2016, we sold the show to a group called Fan Expo. They're the largest comic con promoters in the world, I think. They have something like 18 shows. I retired from the comic con world. My staff, who's been with me since day one, have been hounding me since the day I left to come back. I kept saying, no, no, no, thank you. Time passed six years later. Here we are. They asked me again. For some reason, I said yes. I think I said yes because what I noticed was, I think there's a little fan fatigue out there. I think comic cons have become very formulaic and very celebrity-centered. I said, if I'm going to do this, let's go back to the roots of the original Boston Comic Con. Let's make it all about comic books, comic book art, comic book creators. Of course, throwing a little bit of cosplay for fun because who doesn't love dressing up as a superhero or an anime character? I'm back. I guess well rested after six years. Looking forward to building once again the best comic show that Boston has ever seen. Our last show together as a team was in 2016 at the Seaport World Trade Center. Conversation in earnest probably started in 2020 towards the tail end of it where I started beating these guys about the head and shoulders because you know what, when you have something good and something so good and so pure and it honors the area it's from. This has been our city and it was our city for ten years and yeah, the show got sold and things happened. Fan Expo is a different beast than we are. They run a fantastic show. They don't run a comic show. We run comic shows. It's an interesting terminology, comic con, right? And back in the day, comic con was really just about comics. In over the years with Hollywood and all the celebrities popping in, that became what was the standard for comic con. But we kind of believe that a true show of comic con should be focused on the creators. Like the one who made the comic books where the movies and the shows were based off of. And that was always our core mission to always focus on the talent which were the comic creators, the writers, the editors. We put them on the front stage and over the course of years that's what drove us. And then that's what we're trying to bring back. A show that is designed for the fans of comic book creators and artists. So you're not going to really see any Hollywood celebrities at our show and that's where our roots are. So we're going back to our roots and that's what's going to drive these shows. And hopefully with our inaugural show, the fans will see what we're doing. And I think that's one of the best things about our show. They know what we brought before. And so we're just bringing that back. Well, Wicked's kind of like the most Boston word we could think of. The original name we had thought of was Wicked Boston Con. But we went with Wicked Comic Con. So it was just the name I was scribbling out. I was trying to come up with all sorts of names for Boston. I was like Bean Count, Comic Con, Hub, Comic Con. And I'm just like, I think I'm overthinking this. It's just Wicked. Wicked Comic Con. My name is Kimberly Shaw. I'm one of the organizers for Wicked Comic Con. I do full plans and I did table sales for the eventors and the artists. What do you say about your journey with Comic Con? I'm married into it. I'm married Bob. He had such a love for it. And then I started doing conventions with him with our business Comic Arts. And Jimmy ended up needing help with doing the volunteers at that time. And we kind of volunteered to help him. So it just kind of went from there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love it. It's pieces of me and I can look back and just think of the Phoenix. What I've come out of, what I've become. Well, what you see here is the line for Wicked Comic Con. This is the very first queue line we're having. Our lovely fans have waited. They waited patiently. They showed up early and we're about to deliver for them. My name is Patricia Oriana. I love going to conventions because I really like seeing everybody's cosplay. I love going to the vendor booths that have like the unique items to buy. Like they either make it by hand or it's just really rare to get. I'm the first person in line. I went up to the registration, but then they brought me over to Kirby. Kirby just put in here. And he also gave me a shirt. It's a really nice shirt. I'm Pat Covey. I am the organizer for anything cosplay related as well as after-hour activities. Make it so that way if you're in costume, you have a good time. You have a space that's dedicated to you, so instead of going around and maybe accidentally going into the vendor area and knocking something over, you've got a space that you can hang out in that you can enjoy, get good shots of your costume. And if you want to showcase it during the costume contest, you can sign up and enter it into the contest to showcase the amazing work that you did. My name is Raymond Ramis. I'm from New Bedford, Massachusetts. And I've been an artist my whole life. Also, I'm a martial artist and it was the sword, the blade sword that really got me into the dressing up as blade. One of those things where it's like, okay, well, if I could put a sword on my wall, what would it be the only thing I could think of was the blade sword? And eventually I found it and it came with a harness. So I said, you know what, it'd be cool if I could, you know, make a costume to go around the sword. And that's what I did for Halloween. My name is Scott Hamilton, aka Hamilton's. And I draw caricatures. My first Comic Con experience, I actually wasn't drawing. I was selling toys and cards and not drawing at all. And I got bored. So I took out my pencil and paper and started drawing myself to keep the time. And somebody saw me doing it and asked me to draw them. And at the end of the day, the father of the first kid I drew bought all my stuff and said, I should be drawing. I've been doing it ever since, 30 years. This is my 30th year. So I started Boston Comic Con when it was at the Hancock building and it was these folks doing it. And now it's come full circle. They're doing it again. And then they're starting from scratch, putting on a show they know people want to see, a show that artists want to be at. A lot of shows it's just so other stuff centric I go to a show and just not enjoy myself. But I'm glad to see that people that love comics and treat people right are doing another show. My name is Simon Fisley. I'm a comic book artist. And I'm a general artist. I do fine art work, design for computer games, design for movies and mostly comics. I'm here in Boston to do a science and books, meet the fans, have some laughs. That kind of thing, right? I mean, Boston is probably one of my favorite shows because I like Boston. And it's not very far away. And they've got some great galleries, lovely city, lovely people. And it's the people who live in... What do you call Bostonites? What do you call yourselves? Oh, okay. Bostonians. Okay, Bostonians have a great humor. Very dry, cut in straight up kind of humor, which I like. I like you guys, so I enjoy being here. Okay, I never read books, I read comics. And you find a lot of youth learn through comics as opposed to just reading stuff, because it's boring, isn't it? When you read these words, you've got pictures to go with. That makes more sense, you know? My earliest experience with comics would probably be when I was about, like, 9 or 10, 9 or 10 years old. The kind of stories that I was into was more the regular superhero stuff, like Spider-Man, Batman. I was revered into the television show. So when I would see that there were books that were connected or related to the TV shows or about, I would always, like, gear towards those. Like, I would read those. It was always about superheroes. Being a mild mannered person and then being able to change your identity into a superhero and save the world. I always thought that was, like, unique and special. When it comes to comic-cons, I've been to them all. I've seen them all. I've been to the biggest, I've been to the smallest from, you know, from book-cons like this, the San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic-Con. And the best thing about these kind of kinds is, like, I feel like they're more for the customer, more for the people. When it comes to, like, books and the culture itself and being able to learn about these characters from the start, you know what I mean? It's not about, you know, the showcase. It's not about the big show or celebrity and television and movies. It brings them back to the roots of it. So that's why I always enjoy coming to these things because it's a little more laid-back. Although there's a ton of people here, it's still kind of laid-back and it feels like family, you know? My name's Corinne Howell. I am a comic book horror artist. I draw a lot of horror. I do a lot of demon-lady, sexy demon-lady ladies. Anything that's sexy, creepy, and disgusting, that's all me. I would say when I was in elementary school, I got really hard into, like, anime. So I started drawing, like, Dragon Ball Z and Full Metal Optimist and all that stuff. And then as I got older, I realized, like, hey, I can actually do this as a job. And I started just drawing more darker, angsty stuff because, oh, my God, teenage angst. But, yeah, it just kind of started as a kid, kind of progressed from there. As a person who is struggled and still sort of struggling with accepting who I am and being proud of it, it's learning that it's okay to draw these things. You don't need anybody's permission. And you can draw whatever you want. You can make it whatever you want. And I'm passionate about the dark side of things, so I leaned really hard in that and I started feeling happier about myself. But, yeah, I don't need anybody's permission. And no matter, even if it's my family, my parents saying, like, you should draw something cuter and lighter for once. No, I don't want to. That doesn't make me happy. My name is Ben Templesmith. Ben Templesmith. And I do art for a living. You may know of a film called 30 Days of Night, which was actually adapted from the first comic I ever did. It's about vampires in Alaska, before the Marvel films and before Twilight Ruin Vampires. It came out 2007. So that was my first comic, and then I had a career because of that. My grandfather was a printer, and I had these extra bits of paper lying around so they were just fun to draw on. And I liked dinosaurs, so I did a lot of dinosaurs. But, yeah, it wasn't really for anyone except me, and that's how I still do my work. It's not for anyone else, usually. It's for myself first, and if anyone else likes it, then they can come along. I don't work for the corporations too much, so they're all self-motivated projects that I do, where I create everything from scratch. I do a lot of horror comics and science fiction type stuff. Comic books have given me every single thing I have and have had that are precious in life. I have two important relationships in my life. One is to my wife, and the other, the other is my mistress, which is art. So I wouldn't have had one without the other. So art kind of comes first. My name's Sarah Richard. I'm a comic book cover illustrator. I'm recently a writer, I guess. But, yeah, I've been working in comics probably for like 10 years or so, mostly on My Little Pony for seven years, and kind of transitioning a little bit more into all the dark spooky stuff that I've loved so, so, so much. When I first started doing conventions, it was very much more like this. There wasn't really celebrity-heavy shows. They'd have a few celebrities come in, but it was mostly comic artists. So this is just like a whole boatload of nostalgia, basically, to have like a real creator, artist-focused, at a con is awesome. It's really, really cool. So for the longest time, I worked on My Little Pony for like seven years or so. So I did a lot of work for IDW on the covers. I think I did about 100 covers or so for IDW. But I've always kind of had this love for like a dark spooky, but sweet macabre kind of thing. So that's kind of where this comes from. This is Rick and Morty, a cover I did for Rick and Morty. So my rep brought these over. These are really early sketch cards, like 2012. So forever ago. It's really cool to see where my style was at, at that point, and then kind of where it comes. See, it started doing like necklaces here. They're all original paintings, but my, believe, 24th grade grandfather was a miniature painter for Elizabeth I. So it was kind of one of those really neat family history things my mom found, and I wanted to kind of give it a shot. Now I need glasses. Yeah, so this one right here, it's called a lover's eye. This one as well is a lover's eye. So back in the time before, you know, like in Victorian times, you didn't have a selfie or you didn't have a picture of your significant other. You would have somebody paint their eye. So you would be able to take their eye with you wherever you would go. So it's kind of like the old timey version of a lock screen of like someone you love. Well, I'm a man of many introductions, but I could go as Joey Business today, affiliated with the Bell Time Club and also the Smart Tank Revolution podcast. Why I'm here, I'm a comic nerd, best thing in the world, and I just picked up some pretty rad prints. Like this is based off of obviously Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn and then WandaVision and just the animated series Poison Ivy. I'm a comic book person first. The movies have kind of taken the thunder from the comic books, so therefore it's nice to see it the spotlight put back on the artists because they're the people that make this all possible. The medium exists because of the people inside there. My name is Amy Reader. I'm a comic book artist. I also write my stories these days. And I've been working for more than 15 years in the industry. Working for Marvel, DC Comics, and Image Comics, and yeah, I don't know. It's a really fun job and I get to just kind of be a kid for the rest of my life, which is good. I was good at drawing, but I mostly copied photos, so I was like doing photo realism. And I thought that, you know, I just had this talent, but I wasn't a real artist because I couldn't think up images and actually make them look good. And then it wasn't until I went to college and then graduated and then started reading books and stuff that I was like, oh, I bet if I treated this like it was school, which I'm good at, and actually thought of art as a skill that can be learned, that you can be smart enough to learn, that I could, maybe I could figure this out and I did. I thought good really fast as an adult and luckily, before I knew it, I was able to find work and it's crazy to me that I could have missed out on that whole thing and just been a completely different person. I was raised really conservatively and the expectation was that I was going to be a mother and that that was my role. So I also kind of had to keep my head and have my parents feel like, are you sure you want to do this? And I think as soon as I got published, they were cool with it. They understood that it's not, that other people actually want to see my stuff. But besides that, I try not to think of it as much like a business because it's so personal. The more that I think that it's something I have to do for work instead of just doing something that I love, the more it becomes a chore and I don't want to do it. So I work a lot on just keeping myself happy, keeping myself mentally stable and from there, that's when I make art is when I'm healthy and happy. We do tend to be underappreciated, the artists and creators of comics, but we are the ones where all the ideas begin and that's the part that I like is that even though we might not get paid as much, we might not get as much recognition, we get to come up with the things that do become movies one day. And in my case, I helped create Moon Girl and she's going to have her own cartoon on Disney Plus this summer. So it's always really exciting to get to be involved in it from that end and I always love it when a convention understands the importance of us, the idea generators. Hello, my name is Alitha Martinez and I draw comics. I've been drawing comics for 21 years. I've worked for everyone from Marvel to DC. My main first book was Iron Man and my current book is Nubia and the Amazons. You Me and Ever is my creator-owned title. I get to work on it in between my day job, which is normally Marvel DC stuff. I must say that this year has been a year of firsts for me. I finally got to draw Superman. I'm the first of my kind. I hear tell that I'm the first woman of color to draw flagship titles for both Marvel and DC. When I first started, they used to say, you don't draw like a girl. Some of my early work, Iron Man, X-Men. So this is where I began 21 years back when they let the animals off the arc. Doing Marvel voices. I've been doing most of it since the beginning. Then they switched me over to Marvel Communicado, which is great that I got to do a huge Spider-Man story in the back. But I must say, every time I draw this character, I mess up that costume. I messed up big time this time because I drew entirely the wrong costume on him. So they had to go with his old black and white, this old costume because, you know, they changed his costume recently. So they said, this happened before, but they let me redesign his costume, design a special costume for him in this book, one that supported his heritage. My name is Sean Murphy. I work for DC Comics and I write and draw Batman. I used to trace He-Man action figures as a kid, and I would color them in different colors because I thought He-Man was cool, but I think I could do better. And I would just trace the action figures and just color them with prions. And when I was in kindergarten, I started to realize that I had a knack for art where a lot of kids didn't. It's a lot to work for yourself, work from home, and to be self-motivated. And especially if you're doing it and you're not making money at it at first, it's definitely, there's a lot of reasons to quit when you're working for yourself. And I try to think of it as more of a marathon and not a sprint. If I can have a B-plus day every day, that's probably pretty good. Every now and then I'll have an A-plus day. Sometimes there'll be D-plus and that sucks, you know, but I try to take breaks, try to be patient. You know, you're working on a book for a year and it doesn't come out for a while, so I think this job requires a lot of patience. Whether you're a writer or you're an artist, I'm just trying to find your voice, basically, and your art career is sort of your journey to try to figure out what that thing is. I have the absolute deepest gratitude to the Boston fans. And those fans include the attendees, they include the artists, they include the vendors, they include the cosplayers. I can organize a show, I can put a show together. I can create a show, but the show is made by the people that participate in it. It's made by community. You know, the Boston Comic Con didn't go from a thousand people to 50,000 people in nine years because, you know, it was a one-man show. It was the entire community of Boston, of New England coming together and creating this community. And, you know, these people have been, you know, they've given us so many kudos over the years. Boston Comic Con actually grew to be considered to be the most comic book-centered show in the country. It was considered to be the greatest comic book creator show in the country, and all the comic book creators love this show. Wicked Comic Con is going to continue with that legacy. I can't do this alone. I can't do this with just my staff. You know, if you want Boston to once again have the show that you want, you know, you have to help build it. You have to tell us what you want, what you love, what you don't love. You've got to spread the word. You know, this is a community thing. We have to work together. So, again, you know, this thing could not happen without comic book fans in all shapes and sizes.