MSU Comics Forum

The Michigan State University (MSU) Comics Forum returns for it’s 2027 triennial event on the last weekend of February 2027 in-person at the MSU Main Library. All events associated with the MSU Comics Forum are free and open to the public. This year we welcome two esteemed keynote speakers:

Our 2027 Creator Keynote Speaker is Jen Wang, the award-winning New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of several graphic novels for young readers including Ash’s Cabin, Stargazing, The Prince and The Dressmaker, In Real Life (co-written with Cory Doctorow), and Koko Be Good. She is also a co-founder and organizer for Comic Arts LA and illustrated the 2027 MSU Comics Forum event artwork. She lives in Los Angeles.

Our 2027 Scholar Keynote Speaker, Margaret Galvan, is Associate Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. In her research, she examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s, recovering artists and their networks. Her award-winning first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (2023, University of Minnesota Press) explores how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism. Her second book project, Comics in Movement, examines how LGBTQ cartoonists built community to support their comics in the 1980s and 1990s, formulating networks that still provide support today amidst a now booming publishing landscape. 

We will also feature an artist alley with dozens of creators showcasing their work, panel discussions with a wide range of scholars discussing their research in comics, and an exhibition highlighting selections from the Michigan State University Special Collections Library (the largest public collection of comic books in the world).

We look forward to seeing you at our 16th MSU Comics Forum in February 2027!

Sincerely,
Ryan Claytor
MSU Comics Forum – Director

The Michigan State University (MSU) Comics Forum returns for its triennially scheduled event on the first weekend of February 2027 in-person at the MSU Main Library, with our creator keynote address taking place on the evening of Feb. 26th, 2027 and our artist’s alley, panel presentations, and scholar keynote address all happening on Saturday, Feb 27th, 2027. Every event associated with the MSU Comics Forum is free and open to the public.

Applications for a table in our artist’s alley and the academic panel presentation call for papers are both available via our Forms page through September 30th, 2026. We welcome all artists and scholars of comics to apply, as there is no application fee, nor is there a fee to exhibit or present one’s work. However, due to demand, we will not be able to accept all applicants.

We look forward to seeing you at our 16th MSU Comics Forum in February 2027!

Sincerely,
Ryan Claytor
MSU Comics Forum – Director

The Michigan State University (MSU) Comics Forum returns for it’s first triennial event on the first weekend of February 2024 in-person at the MSU Main Library. All events associated with the MSU Comics Forum are free and open to the public. This year we welcome two esteemed keynote speakers:

Our 2024 Creator Keynote Speaker is Keith Knight, whose art has appeared in various publications worldwide, including the Washington Post, the New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, the Nib, Ebony, ESPN the Magazine, MAD Magazine, and the Funny Times.
In 2020, the world was introduced to Knight’s work in a whole new way–as the inspiration for the live-action streaming television series, Woke, courtesy of Hulu. Knight served as a co-creator, writer, and executive producer on the show.

Our 2024 Scholar Keynote Speaker, Rebecca Wanzo, is a professor and chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU Press, 2020), which examines how Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries. It was the recipient of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Prize from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society, and the Best Scholarly/Academic Work from the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.
She has also written essays for media outlets such as CNN, the LA Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and the comic book Bitch Planet.

We will also feature an artist alley with dozens of creators showcasing their work. Applications for artist alley tables are available via our Forms page through September 22nd, 2023.

The presenters for our academic panel discussions will be by invitation only this year. We apologize for the change in format, but due to a number of shifts in personnel and physical spaces (our Special Collections Library housing the largest public collection of comic books in the world is moving several floors up, but staying in the main library) we regretfully need to scale back this portion of our event.

We look forward to seeing you at our 15th MSU Comics Forum in February 2024!

Sincerely,
Ryan Claytor
MSU Comics Forum – Director