Tuesday, January 10, 2012

MeCAF 2012 announces Featured Guests!

This year's Maine Comics Arts Festival will be held on Sunday, May 20th in Portland, Maine. We are very pleased to announce our first two featured guests.

Kate Beaton, creator of "Hark, A Vagrant" !

Hark! A Vagrant takes readers on a romp through history and literature—with dignity for few and cookies for all—with comic strips about famous authors, their characters, and political and historical figures, all drawn in Kate Beaton’s pared-down, excitable style. This collection features favorite stories as well as new, previously unpublished content. Whether she’s writing about Nikola Tesla, Napoleon, or Nancy Drew, Beaton brings a refined sense of the absurd to every situation.

In just four years, Beaton has taken the comics world by storm with her non sequiturs, cheeky comebacks, and irreverent punch lines. With 1.2 million monthly hits on her site—500,000 of them unique—and comics appearing in Harper’s Magazine, the National Post, and The New Yorker, her caricatures of historical and fictional figures filtered through a contemporary lens display a sharp, quick wit that knows no bounds.

Kazu Kibuishi is the author and illustrator of the popular Amulet graphic novel series for young readers, including Amulet 1: The Stonekeeper, which was honored with the Rhode Island Children's Book Award in 2010 and the Pacific Northwest Young Readers Choice Award in 2011; Amulet 2: The Stonekeeper's Curse; Amulet 3: The Cloud Searchers; and Amulet 4: The Last Council.

Copper, his popular web comic, was published in January 2010. Kazu is also founder and editor of the Flight Anthologies, a critically acclaimed comics series, as well as the creator of Daisy Kutter: The Last Train, a winner of the YALSA Best Books for Young Adults Award in 2006. Born in Tokyo, Kazu moved to the U.S. with his mother and brother when he was a child. He graduated with a degree in Film Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara, and then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. He currently lives with his wife and son in Alhambra, and works full-time as a comic book artist.