The fourth annual Denver Comics & Arts Festival is making a grand return at a new venue. On Saturday, May 9, Schoolyard Beer Garden will serve as host to over 100 artists, publishers, and vendors showing off indie publications, graphic novels, and visual arts of all sorts. The event, like the DeCAFs that came before it, is free and open to everyone.
DeCAF is the brainchild of a trio of stalwarts in the local indie arts scene: erstwhile Westword artist Karl Christian Krumpholz, Jeff Alford of Wigshop, and Eddie Raymond of Strangers Publishing. The three saw an opening in the slow but certain demise of the much-missed art-festival DiNK (Denver Independent Comic & Art Expo), one of the many local casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic and all the challenges and changes it brought. This year’s event features celebrity guest Brian Posehn, along with fellow comedian J. T. Habersaat, courtesy of sponsor and local comic-book haven Mutiny Comics. Posehn and Habersaat will be selling books and signing stuff from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Mutiny Comics table.
Despite owning Strangers Publishing and helping to organize DeCAF, Raymond says he didn’t grow up as a comics kid. “I sort of fell perfectly into that initial manga boom of the early 2000s,” he recalls. “I was one of those kids who would sit on the floor in the manga section at Borders and just read for a while.” But comics called, and he began working with and for some national comic cons on the organizational side of things. In that, Raymond began reading what he calls “the hits,” like Darwyn Cooke’s Batman and New Frontier. “I was slowly getting into it, and then in 2019 discovered underground comics.”…