Leeds Comic Con

Yesterday I attended the Leeds Comic Con, this was the first time I’d been to anything like this and it was a real eye opener. As you would expect there were lots of people dressed up in costumes of their favourite comic book characters and the atmosphere was very friendly. The festival was split into various different buildings around Leeds with different activities going on but the main venue was split between the Saviles Hall and the Royal Armoury building. At first I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of stalls packed into one room and the amount of people, but after doing a couple of laps of the venue to establish where I wanted to go I soon found my feet. As I described in an earlier post there were some really big names there including illustrators from both Marvel and DC Comics and many different illustrators for Super Hero comics, Sci-Fi and Manga. Apart from these obvious stalls there were also a great many stalls of artists selling their own hand made merchandise including t-shirts, badges, zines, jewellery, figurines and masks. There were also a few children’s book illustrators and writers over at the Armories building including Sarah Mcintyre and Gillian Rogerson who were running a Madcap Pirate Drop-in art workshop where everyone was welcome to create piratey pictures and comics. After doing a lot of walking around between the two buildings I found that people were really easy to talk to and were also happy to impart their knowledge on how to get started in the business and this gave me the perfect opportunity to do a little networking and show my portfolio around. There was an epic fail on my behalf that I didn’t have a business card with me, but I wrote down my email address for all the people that asked for my card.