Andrew Hawthorn preps for St. John’s Comic Arts Festival

Here’s my chat with Andrew Hawthorn, co-coordinator of the 2025 St. John’s Comic Arts Festival, about what attendees can expect at the premiere event.

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Residing in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Andrew Hawthorn is a radio host, author, illustrator, and journalist. His comics have appeared in Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the webcomic On the Bounty – now collected into the book My Milkshake Brings all the Boys to the Yardarm from Heavy Sweater Comics, Newfoundland Quarterly, and the forthcoming anthology Town: St. John’s in Comics. He has also written for CBC News, VOCM Radio, StarTrek.com, Mythology from the Rock from Engen Books, and The 19th Annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, from St. Martin’s Griffin. Andrew is allows the co-ordinator of the 2025 St. John’s Comic Arts Festival.

The St. John’s Comic Arts Festival, or SJCAF, is dedicated to encouraging the reading and making of comics, to platforming local cartoonists and books, to welcoming Canada and the world at large to the St. John’s community through art and story, and above all to making comics exciting and accessible for readers and artists of all ages. The event joins a lineage of comics festivals that grew rapidly over the last 20 years, celebrating comics more as a literary and artistic tradition than a convention capitalizing on fandom. As fun as classic comic-cons are for many people, they aren’t ideal for smaller communities celebrating creator-owned, independent, small press, and emerging artists. That’s what festivals like TCAF, the Small Press Expo, CAKE Chicago, Short Run, CXC, and many others have developed – a celebration of comics that brings people together, and supports comics as an art form at every level.  In this tradition, SJCAF is designed to make the comics community visible, welcoming, and supportive, celebrating comics and bringing people together.

You can discover more about Andrew Hawthorn online at AndrewHawthorn.com and on Instagram at @hawhornandrewj

You can discover more about the St. John’s Comic Arts Festival online at StJohnsComics.com and on Instagram at @stjohnscomics

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