On the last weekend of March (March 25-27) authors and readers will hold an international festival of comic books – the Krakow Comics Festival. The organizers of the 11th festival include the Krakow Comics Association, the Provincial Public Library in Krakow and the Krakow Festival Office.

Meetings with artists, lectures, workshops and exhibitions will take place in the buildings of Arteteka of the Provincial Public Library in Krakow, the Potocki Palace and at the seat of the Comics Museum Foundation.

The guests of this year’s festival will be artists from Belgium, Spain and Finland. An important part of the program will be the exhibition of Belgian female comics, realized in cooperation with the General Representation of Wallonia-Brussels in Warsaw. Polish participants will include Maria Apoleika, Aleksandra Herzyk, Tomasz Grządziela and Magdalena Kania.

The Krakow Comics Festival was held for the first time in December 2011.

For last ten years, the Festival has hosted numerous artists from Poland and abroad, including international stars: Anouk Ricard (France), Tony Sandoval (Mexico), Uli Oesterle (Germany), Stephen Collins (Great Britain), Nicolas Wild (France) , Bédu (Belgium), Søren Mosdal (Denmark), Max Andersson (Sweden), Enrique Fernandez (Spain), Miguel Diaz Vizoso (Belgium) and Grażyna and Zbigniew Kasprzak (permanently living in Brussels).

The festival is not only meetings with authors, but also lectures, talks and discussions devoted to various branches of art, from American comics to manga. Every year, the festival is accompanied by a cosplay show (a hobby in which people called cosplayers create outfits and play the role of a comic book character), live painting and very popular comic book battles. An inseparable element of the event is the stock exchange of publishers who prepare their premiere publications especially for the festival.

Adrian Andrzejewski