New York Comic Con comes to the Brooklyn Book Festival

The last New York Comic Con was February 6-8, 2009. The next New York Comic Con is October 8-10, 2010. What are we going to do with all the time in between? Plenty.

We've got an amazing one-year-out party in the works for October 8, 2009, and we're going to have a big role to play in the October 9-10, 2009 Radio City Lord of The Rings concerts, but we're going to talk about those events later.

Our biggest event this Fall is the Brooklyn Book Festival, taking place Sunday, September 13.

The BBF is an annual open-air literary event that takes place right outside Brooklyn's Borough Hall. It draws nearly 30,000 visitors annually and features readings and panels from international literary superstars as well as more than 150 booksellers, publishers, and other organizations in a bustling literary marketplace.

And it's all free. The Brooklyn Book Festival is an event put on by Brooklyn for Brooklyn. It's a place for authors, for readers, for creators, for fans, and for families. And we think this is fantastic. As such, this year, NYCC will be hosting a dedicated New York Comic Con Pavilion at the BBF -- bringing a slice of the New York Comic Con to Brooklyn.

Denny O’Neil, Phil Jimenez, and Tom DeFalco are already confirmed to be appearing in the NYCC Pavilion as guests, and they're just the start. Looking at the breadth of our programming at BBF, we're capping off the day with Hip Hop Hearts Anime, a live-performance featuring local DJs focusing on the intermixing of American hip hop culture and Japanese anime. And going to participating companies, the likes of Captain Action, Midtown Comics, Moonstone Publishing, and Disney Publishing are just the tip of the iceberg.

We're at BBF because NYCC is over a year away, but we're also at BBF for two move -- two even more important -- reasons.

First up, it's NYCC's mission to grow our audience, and the "our" in our audience means the audience for comics and graphic novels at large. We want more readers out there. We want more people picking up the latest Iron Man, Wonder Woman, Shugo Chara, and Scott Pilgrim. We want to create new fans of literacy in all its forms, and the BBF is a giant flag that'll attract a whole new audience in a whole new borough.

Second, we want to be good neighbors. NYCC shines a spotlight on pop culture, and we like very much to focus this spotlight on NYC. We love highlighting local talent and working with local organizations including Subway Cinema and The New York Television Festival. We're part of New York, and we want to be involved in it. The BBF is a big step for us, but it's the right step. It's bringing NYCC out of the Javits and bringing some bold new content to an already-awesome festival.

So there you go. New York Comic Con is coming to the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 13, 2009, and I want to see you there. It's a powerful literary showcase, it's a dedicated non-profit organization, it's an important community gathering, and it should be on all your calendars. For more information on the BBF in general, please visit www.brooklynbookfestival.org, and if you're an artist or company who wants to take part in the NYCC Pavilion, give me an e-mail. I'm Peter Tatara, NYCC's Director of Programming, and I can be reached at ptatara@reedexpo.com.

The NYCC Team are big fans of the BBF, and after you go this year, you'll be a fan, too.