Many comics conventions are basically trade shows focused on selling books and memorabilia, but this weekend’s Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) was founded in 2010 to focus on the artists—with creators selling their own works and presenting talks and workshops. The free-admission event has grown so that now it attracts creators from New York to Texas to California—including this year Vera Brosgol (“Anya’s Ghost”), Jim Woodring (“The Frank Book”), and Keith Knight (“The K Chronicles”). But at MICE’s heart are artists working here in New England. Below (in alphabetical order) are eight local artists to meet at MICE, which runs tomorrow, Oct. 20, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 21, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., at University Hall, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge.
Special festival guest Charles Forsman of western Massachusetts is a three-time Ignatz Award winner and creator of “The End of the Fucking World,” a coming of age story of two teens that’s complicated by the fact that the boy harbors sociopathic fantasies and begins to act on them. This year, Netflix adapted it into an original TV series.
K C Green—the western Massachusetts artist behind the “This Is Fine” comic turned meme for our obliviousness in the face of our world burning down all around us—also does other stuff too. Like “Little Comis 4,” debuting at MICE, featuring “short gag comics about computers, weed and coffee.”
Caroline Hu, a Somerville biologist and cartoonist, is debuting “The Little Scientist #1,” billed as a fantastical allegory of a young scientist wandering into a magical forest where she begins to transition from a child’s wonder with the world to a professional scientist.
Katie Langlois of Haverhill debuts “Have A Nice Day,” her collection of awesomely gonzo “comic diaries and doodles about a human person trying to be alive.”
Andrew MacLean of Salem, a special featured guest of the festival, is the creator of “Head Lopper” (Image Comics), about the quests and adventures of a Viking warrior and the decapitated head of a witch.
Boston cartoonist Ansis Purins’s comics recount the adventures of an uptight woodland park ranger, elves, and a nature-loving zombie.
Boston cartoonist Karl Stevens’s latest collection “The Winner,” drawn in his signature sharply realist style, offers semi-autobiographical musings—at times rueful, at times funny—on everyday boredom, the meaningless pain of life, drinking, the struggles to get his art recognized, and the patience of his wife.
Beatrix Urkowitz of Providence draws surreal fables rendered with her signature (in the words of the AV Club) “bulbous figures, amorphous shapes, and goopy tracts of opaque colors.”
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