Industry City hosts huge comic art event again

For an industry often defined by caped heroes and major publishers, the Brooklyn Independent Comic Showcase (BICS) offers something different: a space where emerging artists, hobbyists, self-publishers, and longtime professionals redefine what comics can be.

The fifth annual Brooklyn Independent Comic Showcase took place at Industry City in Sunset Park this past April. The two-day event, which featured over 450 tables manned by independent comic book creators, writers, artists, and publishers, saw over 10,000 comic fans and casuals alike pour through the refurbished industrial space adorned with row after row of eye-catching art.

The annual showcase began in 2021, when event director and co-founder Aynsley Leonardis (then just 22) set out to create a space where emerging artists she met at the School of Visual Arts and St. Mark’s Comics could put their work on display. “I thought ‘There has to be an entry point for these people to get into the industry,’ because it’s notoriously quite hard,” Leonardis told the Star-Revue. “So it’s been really powerful to watch a lot of people who just had vague ideas take them and materialize them into something that they can show off and sell at the showcase.”

Leonardis credits the growth of the event over the last five years to the diversity of the medium, a fact often overlooked due to the mainstream popularity of superhero comics. “There are people who maybe don’t really like comics that much who stumble into this show and they didn’t know comics could even look like this,” Leonardis said. “Now, maybe they’re fans. Maybe they go browse the indie racks at their own local comic store. Even if they just come back next year, we’ve made a new comic fan, and that’s super exciting for me.”

There was an astounding variety of exhibits on display — from comics to prints, zines to memorabilia — with something to attract the attention of any attendee. Some tables were run by young creators and students eager to step onto the scene, while others featured veterans of the industry seeking to carve a path of their own after long careers working for major publishers, including the Star-Revue’s own Dean Haspiel. “When you’re a kid you want to be a cartoonist and you become one and it’s the dream, but then it slowly becomes a job,” Haspiel said. “So I changed course in 2023 to become my own publisher so I could reinvent what comics meant to me and access the joy of making them again.”

The event also pushes creators to develop new work. Comic artist Tony Wolf, for example, brought together more than 40 contributors — including Peter Kuper — to produce a protest art book opposing the Trump administration in just five weeks, with proceeds benefiting the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is a volatile time, but the nature of art is to push back in times of fascism, authoritarianism, and government overreach,” Wolf said.

The work of comic artists and writers can often be a solitary business, but conventions like BICS provide an opportunity for friends and colleagues whose lives and careers have intersected over decades to reconnect. “It can be a very lonesome sort of endeavor,” Josh Neufeld, an award-winning comics journalist and educator, told the Star-Revue. “But an event like this is great as someone who’s been in the industry for a long time. I know a lot of people from different stages of my career, and it’s always so fun to see them and compare notes.”

Neufeld shared one such reunion with Haspiel, the two of whom have been friends and collaborators since they met as classmates at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Arts. As a longtime educator teaching young artists the craft of making comics, Neufeld was also in the unique position to watch his current and former students grow and carve paths of their own.

They are still comics
“It’s really amazing just to see the continuity of the profession continuing despite all the changes in technology, despite all the changes in how we make comics, and despite all the changes in the types of comics people want to read,” Neufeld said. “When I was younger, older and more established cartoonists would always help me out, and now I have the opportunity to do the same thing. I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about this industry.”