Sunlight beaming through high windows into the expo showroom. The event mascot, a yellow, inflatable, arm-flailing tube man’s cheek-to-cheek grin spreading contagiously to me. A toddler in their parent’s arms, holding a colorful button from one artist’s booth as they point across the room at another. These scenes greeted me at the Old Pine Center in Philadelphia as I entered the fifth annual Philly Comics Expo, hosted by Gina Dawson and Tom Marquet, proprietors of the much-cherished comic shop and gallery, Partners and Son. A young but strong expo brimming with talented artists, publishers, enthusiasts, collectors, and comics journalists, in addition to the usual marketplace for conversation and commerce, for the first time this year a programming schedule, curated by Sally Madden, was added to the roster. Eye-catching art styles—ranging from crude to crafted and orbiting all around those words—spilled from each table in the form of comic books, graphic novels, prints, original artworks, vintage pieces, erotic anime Phillies baseball t-shirts, if I were rich and self-spoiling, I would’ve cleaned out each booth.
Over 150 audience members filtered through the auditorium to observe, panels, interview and performance, while hundred more populated the floor of the main hall. Vendors were kind and excited to talk one-on-one or artist-to-child-or-punks-clad-in-flannel about the work they were promoting, as generous with their time at their tables as they had been in creating the printed work that brought them here. Vulnerability and humor saturated the stories for sale on the event floor, providing us a glimpse into the way their minds work, the way they humor themselves and others in a world that not providing them with the level of acclaim or comfort their efforts may deserve.
all photographs by Brent Galen Adkins unless otherwise noted- ed.
Despite the event's size and caliber, 165 tables of comics and wares, cartoonists traveling in from London, Toronto, Connecticut and Walnut Street plus five hours of cultural programs, and appearances from industry titans (including Diane DiMassa, Charles Burns and Ben Passmore), with free admission and a $10 exhibitor table fee, PCX remains accessible and unpretentious. The annual event ensures the culture-seeking and comics-creating communities are reliably infused with new work, which, to paraphrase Toronto-based veteran comics-event organizer Paterson Hodgson, is the reason for these events in the first place.
It’s really the beauty of these human connections and shared mornings in a community-center-turned-expo-floor that bring us here together on a perfect-weather autumn Saturday in the heart of Philadelphia. We don’t do the things we love because we think they’ll lead us to a home with walls insulated with greenbacks and crypto thumbdrives, we do them because we have something we need to express and we believe it’s worth taking the time to express them properly—that comic may last a year or a century, but the heart of PCX is building upon the never-ending dialogue of relationships we need to keep this culture alive.
The post The Never-Ending Heart-to Heart: a gallery of PCX 2025 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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