#MLKDay Celebrations: Black Comic Arts Festival San Francisco

Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday celebration, set on the third Monday of January each year, is an evolving event. This day off from work has become a touchstone in the Black community for volunteering, social justice actions, and artistic festivals. On both coasts, in New York City and San Francisco, the long weekend was a reason to celebrate and share the work of Black creators in popular culture’s latest favorite: comics and graphic novels. It was a beautiful day for a comics festival in San Francisco — by which I mean it was cool but not raining after a long lazy weekend, so I was completely in the mood to be surrounded by hundreds of other Black fans of comics and other graphic arts. The event, the Black Comix Arts Festival, was held at the San Francisco Public Library on Sunday and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Monday, both in the middle of downtown and free to the public (yay FREE!). Sunday’s library events centered on talks and Q&As with several Black Speculative Fiction authors, including Ayize Jama-Everett (author of The Liminal War), Nalo Hopkinson (author of Falling in Love With Hominids and editor of Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root), and Nnedi Okorafor (author of Lagoon). As if the comics convention had been split in two, the open hall of artists and vendors was on Monday at the Center for the Arts, where it was blended with other MLK Day events, including a small Black Lives Matter neighborhood protest. The artists and vendors were scattered thro…