PROGRAMMING
Organized by Gabe Fowler of Desert Island
Saturday 11/14
12:00-12:50 - Visionary Universes: Jim Woodring in Conversation with John Kelly
1:30-2:20 - Queer Lineages & Modern Life: Alison Bechdel and Caroline Cash
2:45-3:35 - Surreal Humor meets Domestic Chaos: Lisa Hanawalt and Emily Flake
4:00-4:50 - Rievel Goes To Boomtown: An Acoustic Comics Reading
5:15-6:15 - The Kickstarter Live Draw with Linnea Sterte, Natalie Andrewson, Box Brown & More!
Sunday 11/15
12:00-12:50 - Kurtzman’s MAD: Art Spiegelman and Gary Groth in Conversation
1:30-2:20 - Architecture of the Page: Chris Ware and Françoise Mouly in Conversation
2:45-3:35 - Subterranean Comics in 2026: Austin English, Max Huffman, Sam Seigel, Lale Westvind
4:30-6:00 - John Vasquez Mejias Presents Young Lords of NYC
BEC is delighted to announce our 2026 programming slate! Panels will take place in the lower level of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, with the entrance to the panel room located just down the block from the main entrance to the festival.
Like our main event, all panels will be open to the public and free to attend, but you must reserve your spot with a free ticket at the links below. Standby space will be available on a first-come, first-served basis for those without a ticket. Look out for way finding signage at the entrance to the programming room!
SATURDAY, november 14
12:00-12:50 - Visionary Universes: Jim Woodring in Conversation with John Kelly
Join visionary cartoonist Jim Woodring for a conversation with writer and critic John Kelly about four decades of work mapping the Unifactor, Woodring’s hallucinatory, morality-driven dreamscape populated by his iconic character Frank, mischievous deities, and surreal architecture. Working almost entirely without dialogue, Woodring uses meticulous pen-and-ink drawing to explore subconscious fears, spiritual transcendence, and complex narrative logic. Woodring and Kelly will trace his evolution from self-published minicomics to landmark works including Weathercraft and Congress of the Animals, discussing his creative process, giant dip pens, visionary experiences, and the possibilities of silent storytelling.
Jim Woodring is an award-winning cartoonist, animator, and fine artist living on Vashon Island, Washington. His many honors include The Stranger’s Genius Award for Literature.
John Kelly is a comics historian, editor, and historian whose writing on graphic literature and alternative press culture has appeared in arts publications and anthologies.
1:30-2:20 - Queer Lineages & Modern Life: Alison Bechdel and Caroline Cash
MacArthur Fellow Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Dykes to Watch Out For) joins Ignatz Award winner Caroline Cash (PeePee PooPoo) for an intergenerational conversation about queer cartooning, autobiographical truth, and underground publishing. Across different generations and forms, both artists have documented queer life, personal history, economic realities, and changing cultural landscapes. They’ll discuss the evolution of LGBTQ+ comics, from serialized newspaper strips and graphic memoir to zines and contemporary indie comics, as well as the relationship between memoir and satire, DIY publishing, and the ways comics can preserve personal histories while engaging with politics and social change.
Alison Bechdel created Dykes to Watch Out For and the graphic memoirs Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength. A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow and Eisner Award winner, she is a Professor in the Practice at Yale.
Caroline Cash is an Ignatz Award-winning Chicago cartoonist and illustrator known for her risograph zines and PeePee PooPoo. Her work explores queer life, youth culture, and economic precarity. In 2026, she became the cartoonist of the syndicated strip Nancy.
2:45-3:35 - Surreal Humor meets Domestic Chaos: Lisa Hanawalt and Emily Flake
Cartoonists Lisa Hanawalt and Emily Flake explore the absurdities of daily life, bodily anxiety, parenting, and creative survival. Hanawalt is known for her lush, anthropomorphic watercolor worlds and work on Tuca & Bertie and BoJack Horseman, while Flake combines sharp single-panel cartoons and graphic essays with an idiosyncratic take on everyday life. Their conversation will span print illustration, gag cartooning, graphic literature, and television, examining how artists develop distinctive visual voices while navigating commercial work, family life, anxiety, and the cathartic possibilities of grotesque humor.
Lisa Hanawalt is a cartoonist, illustrator, and animator who created Tuca & Bertie and served as production designer and producer for BoJack Horseman. Her books include My Dirty Dumb Eyes and Coyote Doggirl, and her latest graphic novel, I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, published by Drawn and Quarterly.
Emily Flake is a cartoonist, writer, and illustrator whose work regularly appears in The New Yorker. She is the author of Joke in a Box, and That Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette of the Awkward Hug and founder of St. Nell’s Humor Writing Residency.
4:00-4:50 - Rievel Goes To Boomtown: An Acoustic Comics Reading
Rievel Goes to Boomtown is a multimedia performance and “visual comix EP” by award-winning cartoonist and animator Bianca Xunise. The project combines animated comics with live, improvised music, following a group of adventurous rats through a striking black-and-white sequence. As the animation unfolds, guitarist Mercurio builds an acoustic score in real time, creating an interplay between image, sound, rhythm, and emotion. The performance brings together two DIY traditions—underground comics and independent music—to explore how live sound can transform the experience of sequential art.
Bianca Xunise is a Chicago-based illustrator, writer, and educator, and an NAACP Image Award and two-time Ignatz Award winner. Their graphic novel Punk Rock Karaoke was named a best book of 2024 by the New York and Chicago Public Libraries.
Mike Mercurio is a punk musician and guitarist associated with the underground bands Mania and Bad Sons. He performs live music for Xunise’s animation projects and organizes DIY music events.
5:15-6:15 - The Kickstarter Live Draw with Linnea Sterte, Natalie Andrewson, Box Brown & More!
Linnea Sterte (A Garden of Spheres), Natalie Andrewson (Dreaming In Color), and Box Brown (WTF Is a Podcast with Marc Maron, Legalization Nation) unite for a live draw and Q&A session that will not only sketch out their amazing processes, but also dive under the cover of their Kickstarter art books and projects. Come. Watch the magic. And maybe take home some original art. Moderated by Kickstarter Director of Comics, Collectibles & Music, Sean Edgar.
Linnea Sterte is a comic artist from Sweden, multi-Eisner Award nominee, Angouleme Prix Revelation and Ignatz Award winner, and famous for drawing frogs in her Kickstarter-funded book A Frog in the Fall published by Peow2. She's the author of Stages of Rot, World Heist, Cat Cafe and A Garden of Spheres, and contributed to a handful of other comic projects over the years. Her latest book, The Prisoners on Dozmary Craig, will be debuting at BEC. This will be her second time visiting New York.
Natalie Andrewson is an illustrator, comic artist, and Riso printmaker from North Carolina, currently living in Los Angeles. Her narrative work includes the graphic novel adaptation of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, published by :01 First Second, art book Dreaming In Color, published by Peow2, and various self published, riso-printed comics. Natalie specializes in creating fantasy worlds and characters full of vibrant color.
Brian “Box” Brown is an Eisner Award–winning author whose comics have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, and New York Magazine. His books include the New York Times–bestselling Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, Tetris: The Games People Play, Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman, Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America, Child Star, and Accidental Czar (with writer Andrew S. Weiss).
sunday, November 15
12:00-12:50 - Kurtzman’s MAD: Art Spiegelman and Gary Groth in Conversation
Art Spiegelman and Gary Groth discuss the legacy of Harvey Kurtzman and MAD, and its lasting influence on alternative and underground comics. Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist best known for Maus and a co-founder of RAW, while Groth co-founded The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books. Together, they bring decades of experience documenting, publishing, and shaping the history of American comics.
Art Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and graphic novelist best known for Maus. He co-founded RAW with Françoise Mouly and has been a major figure in comics history and criticism.
Gary Groth is the co-founder of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books. He has spent decades publishing and writing about alternative and independent comics.
1:30-2:20 - Architecture of the Page: Chris Ware and Françoise Mouly in Conversation
Chris Ware and Françoise Mouly discuss the architecture of the comics page, the relationship between drawing and design, and the possibilities of print. Ware’s intricate books, including Jimmy Corrigan and Building Stories, treat the page as both narrative and physical object. Mouly’s work as co-founder of RAW, art editor of The New Yorker, and founder of TOON Books has shaped how comics and illustration reach readers across generations. Their conversation will explore visual design, publishing, editorial collaboration, and the evolving role of comics in contemporary print culture.
Chris Ware is an acclaimed graphic novelist whose works include Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories. His honors include the Guardian First Book Award and multiple Eisner Awards.
Françoise Mouly’s work with RAW, The New Yorker, Little Lit, TOON Books, and RESIST! has shaped how comics reach readers across generations. In her new book, The New Yorker: Cover to Cover, she presents some of the 1600 covers she has overseen in her 33 years as the art editor, including many by Chris Ware. Their conversation will explore visual communication, publishing, editorial collaboration, and the evolving role of comics in contemporary culture.
Artist and publisher Austin English brings together Lale Westvind, Max Huffman, and Sam Seigel to examine the state of underground and experimental comics today. The panel explores how independent cartoonists push the physical and aesthetic boundaries of the medium through self-publishing, unconventional narrative structures, and distinctive visual languages. The artists will discuss their creative processes, influences, distribution networks, and the continuing role of small-press culture in an increasingly digital media landscape.
Austin English is a Brooklyn-based artist, cartoonist, and publisher. He runs Domino Books, an independent press and distributor focused on underground print culture. His work includes Gulag Casual and Meskin and Umezo.
Lale Westvind is a multi-disciplinary artist, living in central Pennsylvania making comics, animations, paintings and sculptures. Her comics have been published internationally in Kramers Ergot (US), Strapazin (CH), Lagon Revue (FR), La Cruda Negra (ES), The Lifted Brow (AU), and Hidden Champion (JP). They have self-published over a dozen comics books and two anthologies. They are the author of Grip, Grand Electric Thought Power Mother, Hot Dog Beach and Void Packer. Lale Westvind has a passion for motorcycles, movement and working with her hands. Her work is known for its explosive movement and color. She teaches animation part-time at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Her new books Hax Memora from Breakdown Press (UK) and Void Packer #5 (Self-Published) are debuting this fall.
Max Huffman is a Chicago-based cartoonist whose work synthesizes mid-century illustration, absurd comedy and geometric abstraction into a paranoid, writhing mass. His debut graphic novel Dogtangle was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2025. His comics Them-Shaped Clouds (Cram Books, 2025) and Cover Not Final(Adhouse Books, 2021) were nominated for Small Press Expo's Ignatz Awards and they both lost. As an illustrator, his commercial clients include the Doughboys podcast and the band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. His newest project is the serial Business Park, published under his own Motion Utility Graphic imprint.
Sam Seigel - Born in God’s great city of San Francisco in the year 2000, in a hospital, Sam Seigel is a cartoonist and painter living and working in New York City. Her work originated in small self-publishing presses and through the encouragement of friends who insisted she draw comics. Through gallery exhibitions and comic symposiums, we have watched Sam Seigel traverse and trudge through the vast and unforgiving landscape of the comic world. What began as a humble pursuit has since consumed her very being. The passion is now fatal. God bless.
2:45-3:35 - Subterranean Comics in 2026: Organized by Austin English
John Vasquez Mejias presents his costume and puppet show Young Lords of New York City, a performance about the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican-led organization that emerged from a Chicago street gang and became a major political force in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Combining puppetry, costume, and live music, Mejias brings this history of radical organizing, community activism, and Puerto Rican political identity to the stage through the language of comics and performance.
John Vasquez Mejias is a printmaker, comix artist, and puppeteer. His woodcut novelette The Puerto Rican War is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His graphic biography Lolita Lebrón: Puerto Rican Revolutionary is forthcoming from Fantagraphics in 2027.
4:30-6:00 - John Vasquez Mejias Presents Young Lords of NYC