Comic Arts Brooklyn 2017 Preview: The Pratt Era begins

Tomorrow it’s Comic Arts Brooklyn, wrapping up the New York City convention season with a indie and art comix extravaganza. This year the show moves to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, a much larger venue for both exhibits and panels. The Activities Resource Center where the exhibitors are set up is  “literally the second-largest room in all of Brooklyn at 42,000 square feet, second only to Barclays Center,” so more comics than you know what to do with.

There are also a few shoulder events, including Chris Ware tonight!

Show runner Gabe Fowler was interviewed over at TCJ with more on this year’s event:

Besides the new space, what kind of changes can we expect out of thenew Comic Arts Brooklyn?

One positive change is availability of lecture halls for talks on Pratt’s campus.  In the past years we had difficulty hosting talks anywhere near the sales floor, had talks occurring on separate days, and various other complications.  This year guests can stroll over to the lectures and back to the sales floor in a matter of minutes, which is awesome.  We also have some cool new collaborations happening: painter Steve Keene (most known for Pavement’s Wowee Zowee LP cover) will be mass-producing hundreds of comics-inspired paintings live at the show, and will sell them for $10 each at the end.  Indie video game makers Babycastles will create a big funky installation in the middle of the sales floor with free playable games. Artist and screenprinter Thomas Toye will be printing our festival shirts live at the show for $10 a pop. Desert Island has been making “comic foregrounds” with artists and those will debut at the show (those are painted wooden façades with wacky colorful characters with a hole where its head should be – you stick your head in there and your friend takes your picture).

Perhaps just as notable, Fowler is joined as co-curator this year by 21 year old Matthew James-Wilson, who publsihed Forge magazine. Tom Spurgeon interviewed him to get the lowdown:

SPURGEON: Can you talk to me about that, how the co-curation came about?

JAMES-WILSON: Gabe first talked to be about helping to curate the fair in the spring while we were both tabling a different event in Brooklyn. I think Gabe has been really good about always figuring out how to make the next thing he does even better than the thing he just did, so it seemed like he just needed some help executing the vision he had for the fair this year. The two of us started meeting up more regularly and talking about what we thought a giant comic fair should look and feel like in 2017. I think both of us have a similar work ethic and intention for doing the work that we do, so the fact that each of us approached it from a different background meant we could each bring something different to the table and still have a unified idea of what it should be. I’m so glad to have had the chance to work on it with him, and it’s been such an honor to be a part of an event that has meant so much to me.

You can see the program for CAB here and it’s a sprawling document, with info on programming and more.

In short; CAB is kicking off a new era with new blood, a lot of fresh ideas and guests and I’m pretty darned excited. I’ll have a post with more debuts a bit later on.