Comic book festival offers array of activities

Credit: Courtesy the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival.

Credit: Courtesy the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival.

Credit: Courtesy the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival.

Credit: Courtesy the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival.

When you visit the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival this weekend, take a moment from your comic-buying, workshop-attending, panel-viewing and collectible scarfing to check out the crowd.

Odds are you’ll see as many men as women and as many not-so-young guests as teens and young adults, all of whom share a passion for comics culture and offer visible proof that comic books long ago overcame their stereotype as throwaway juvenile entertainment.

This year’s festival, which runs from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday at the Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road, offers both fans and potential fans a survey of all things comics, including the chance to meet comic creators, attend workshops and how-to sessions, buy books and comics collectibles from vendors, and even watch live performers and take in a screening of Tim Burton’s “Batman.”

Admission is free, but VIP packages — which include a VIP badge, a gift bag containing comics and other freebies, and a limited-edition poster — are available for $5. VIP registration is restricted to 150 people and must be done online (www.vegasvalleycomicbookfestival.com). VIP package proceeds benefit the Las Vegas-Clark County Library Foundation.

Scheduled guests at this year’s event include: Writer/artist Howard Chaykin (“American Flagg” and “Black Kiss,” as well as contemporary treatments of “The Shadow” and “Blackhawk” for DC Comics and “Satellite Sam” for Image Comics); Chris Staros (Top Shelf Productions); Russell Lissau (“The Batman Strikes!”); Spencer Brinkerhoff III (Studio B3); the Fillbach Brothers (“Star Wars: The Clone Wars”); Ben Saunders, an English professor at the University of Oregon, who will present a program called “Batman’s Shadows: 75 Years of the Dark Knight”; Brian and Kristy Miller (Hi-Fi Colour Design); and Nick Mamatas (Viz Media).

Also scheduled to participate are Las Vegas-based artist and comic book creator Deryl Skelton and the group Very Awesome Girls Into Nerdy Activities. Live entertainment will be provided by “nerd-folk” band Hello, the Future! (aka Nicole Dieker), and Kyle Stevens of Seattle-based “indie nerd/geek rock” band Kirby Krackle.

Vendors will include comic book stores and comics-related craftspeople, and the daylong schedule of events will include how-to-draw sessions, superhero mask making and the chance for aspiring artists to have their work reviewed by professionals.

Suzanne Scott, a festival organizer and performing arts center coordinator for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, says the festival will include events for children and the entire family. That, she says, is in contrast to the event’s early years, when it probably was targeted more toward adults and teens.

“However, last year we had a lot of families,” she says.

Scott calls the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival the longest-running comic book event in Southern Nevada. Saturday’s festival will mark its seventh annual edition and its first year as a stand-alone event.

“It started out as part of the Vegas Valley Book Festival,” Scott notes. “When we joined the book festival, we were looking for a niche that had not been quite filled yet with the book festival.”

Then, when book festival organizers moved this year’s event up two weeks — to Oct. 16-18 — comic festival organizers decided to stick to their usual first weekend-of-November slot, she says.

“One of the interesting things is, we had a table (at the Book Festival), and we had a couple people saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to head over to the library (for the comics festival).’ ‘Oh, no, no. Two weeks’ time.’ And we also heard a lot of people say, ‘We’re really happy, because going to both (on the same day) was too much.’ ”

The first Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival drew about 800 people, Scott adds, “and last year it was around 3,400. So it has grown.”

This year’s programs will include workshops about breaking into comics, digital color and Web comics and a presentation about the history of the Comics Code Authority. Also scheduled is a presentation by filmmakers Patrick Meaney and Marisa Stotter about women in comics that will include the showing of a portion of their documentary “She Makes Comics,” which looks at women who helped to break down the gender walls of the medium at a time when comic books still were a male-dominated industry.

Producer Meaney has produced several documentaries about comics creators and comics-related topics.

“I’ve always really liked comics and loved reading them,” he says during a phone interview, “and I just kind of fell into this niche of making movies about comics, which has been really cool.”

Meaney and producer/director Stotter have “been shooting over the past year, and we’re pretty much now wrapping it up,” he says. “We’ll provide 20 minutes or so at the (Las Vegas) festival.”

Meaney says one reason he and Stotter wanted to make the film was to inform a wider audience of the key contributions women have made to the medium even since its early days.

For example, “one of the biggest franchises in comics for many years has been X-Men,” he says, and “the three people most responsible for popularizing X-Men in the ’70s” were (male) writer Chris Claremont and Marvel Comics editors Louise Simonson and Ann Nocenti.

“You could also look at (editor) Karen Berger at DC,” Meaney continues, “who was responsible for bringing in Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. Karen opened the door to more progressive material and fostered those talents that had such importance.”

Yet, Meaney says, “for a long time, until recently, a lot of readers and creators of comics were just men and that’s still the stereotype to some degree. But in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s there were a lot of women working behind the scenes at the books, in some cases writing the books, and it’s something I don’t think people are necessarily aware of.

“Like, the publisher of DC in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s was Jenette Kahn, who was hugely influential. She said, ‘Why don’t we do books that are a little more complex and adult and responsible?’ She was bringing Frank Miller to DC, which led to ‘The Dark Knight’ and led to the culture that created (Moore’s) ‘Watchmen,’ and those are, obviously, huge properties.”

For their documentary, Meaney and Stotter interviewed more than two dozen women. What do those women think as they look back on the evolution of comics and their own contributions to the medium?

“I think it really varies from person to person,” Meaney says, and many — particularly those who worked in the ’70s and ’80s — “are kind of surprised to see that people are still reading the stories, let alone that movies are being made out of them or that they’re getting so much acclaim. I think that people at that time thought of comics as something disposable.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280