Los Angeles’ New Comic Art Festival Raises Questions

The Hollywood Reporter announced there’s a special convention taking place in the next 2 months in Los Angeles, primarily for artists. Unsurprisingly, the guests include at least a few pretentious modern scribes: The world of comic art is being elevated to new heights thanks to the medium’s prominence in the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts. Now, two comic art representatives are launching a two-day fete that seeks to keep the art form’s momentum away from the days of hunched-over collectors thumbing through unprotected pages in Tupperware crates in the basements of bargain hotels. Taking place Nov. 7 and Nov 8 at Los Angeles’ gilded and storied Biltmore Hotel, the inaugural ICON Festival of Comic & Narrative Art will be a two-day celebration of original art by some of the most popular and influential contemporary comic book artists working in the medium. Superstar artists Nick Dragotta, who currently pencils the industry’s top-selling Absolute Batman for DC, Daniel Warren Johnson, the Eisner-winner behind last year’s Absolute Batman Annual no. 1 and the recent Transformers for Image, and Invincible artist Ryan Ottley will be among those on hand to take part of the show, whic...