family's first comic con

We are big fans of libraries in our family. In fact, live near the border between two counties, and we split our library visits between the Lexington Public Library (where we are residents) and the Jessamine County Public Library (where we are not). Luckily, Kentucky library systems tend to be fairly liberal in handing out library cards, so this isn’t usually a hassle (this was not the case in Central Michigan, but that’s a story for another time).

Even though LPL is a bigger library system, JCPL frequently shows up its bigger neighbor. For years now, JCPL has held an annual “Comic Surge” event—a mini comic con with local vendors, artists, and cosplayers. We’ve been meaning to visit a Comic Surge basically as long as we’ve known about it, but it has always managed to conflict with some other October activity.

This year, we finally managed to make things work! We’d been planning to attend for weeks, and even when a funeral came up in the afternoon, we still managed to arrange the day so that we could run by the library in the morning. It wound up being a lot of fun, and I think it will be a must-do event for us for many Octobers to come.

Here are some highlights:

cosplay

Years ago, my spouse picked up a Squirrel Girl costume for some Halloween-adjacent event she was attending. It was a child-sized costume, which was too small for her and (at the time) way too large for a then-tiny kiddo. So, spouse she used the ears and tail for the event and then we put the whole thing away for kiddo to grow into. Since kiddo has always known it was around, and since she read the first two TPBs of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl over the summer, it seemed like an easy way to show up to the event with a costume.

Well, the morning of, it turned out that we’d waited too long, and kiddo is now too big for the costume. This led to some panic and disappointment, but my very gifted spouse managed to deconstruct key parts of the costume and pin them to some of kiddo’s clothes that fit the same color scheme, so we still had a costume. We dressed up a baby kangaroo stuffie as squirrel sidekick Tippy-Toe (it was the closest we had), and called it good.

Kiddo loved it, and she got a lot of attention at Comic Surge. Squirrel Girl is not the best known Marvel character, but her fans really love her, and so I feel like everyone who recognized the costume insisted on flagging kiddo down and making a big deal out of it—in a way that they wouldn’t have for a more mainstream character.

vendors

I love seeing local artists, and I think it’s even more fun at an event where the baseline level of nerdiness is higher than it would be at, say, “just an art fair.” It is odd to have vendor booths at a library, but I’m here for it. The idea of a library doing a comic con is a bit weird, but I’m so here for it. It’s the very model of what a library could be if we’re expansive with our imagination of the mission of a library,

I walked away with another deck to add to my small Keyforge collection and a Star Wars print from a local artist. I wound up getting the deck for free—the guy was selling it for $2 and insisted I just take it when it turned out we’d forgotten to bring cash and he didn’t take cards. The print—Biggs Darklighter, heck yes—was $10, a great deal for a decent quality, large print. The artist was fun to talk to as well: He had fun stories of doing art for actors who come to cons and giving them one copy in exchange for signing another.

Other vendors were fun, too—some weren’t all that impressive, but I love seeing small artists do geeky art, and there was a lot of it here to take in and have fun with.

conclusion

We had a blast, and I think we’ll make this a high priority when October 2025 rolls around. It also made me interested in trying a local con sometime. I don’t know that I’ve attended this kind of event since Star Wars Celebration II back in the early 2000s, and the price tag on some of the events I’ve seen lately has made me hesitant. The whole family had fun here, though, and it seems worth a try to do a bigger, longer event sometime in the future.

• macro
• Relationships
• comic cons
• libraries
• Squirrel Girl
• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
• Star Wars
• Keyforge
• Lexington
• tabletop games
• comics