How to use this Page

Kids Comic Con, the annual NY-based event celebrating kids and comics, will have a variety of activities at this year’s NYCC, including a SuperhEro Day at Ronald MacDonald House and panels showcasing what kids, comics and cons can do together. Kids Comic COn founder Alex Simmons will be at all the events. Here’s all the info via PR:

On Saturday, October 4, in anticipation of the big NYCC weekend, Ronald McDonald House New York City will host SUPERHERO DAY, an event being co-run by the KCC team. At this special private event, everyone’s a hero! In addition to inviting its own guests, Ronald McDonald House is also opening its doors to the patients and families of neighboring children’s hospitals. The Ronald McDonald House will be decked out in super-heroic fashion and there will be many giveaways available including free comic books and movie posters. Other activities scheduled for the event include:
• Opportunities to meet law enforcement officers
• Costumed hero characters on “patrol”
• Autograph signing with Dark Knight author Brandon Snider
• Cartoonists doing free sketches
• Archie Comics Station
• Face Painting Station
• Giant Superhero Balloons
• Dylan’s Candy Bar Station

In addition to co-running the event, KCC will also have their own Kids Comic Con Station where artists including Jim Salicrup, Suzannah Rowntree, Chris Giarrusso, Diana Leto and Soriah Chavel will offer free sketches to the children.

On day one of NYCC, KCC co-founder Alex Simmons takes part in the panel, Comics to Expand Your Brain: Educational Graphic Novels in Public and School Libraries. Simmons and his fellow panelists will discuss graphic novels focusing on math, science and historical events as valuable tools for the classroom or library that can help educate as they entertain. The panel takes place on Thursday, October 9 from 4:00-4:45 p.m. in room 1B03.

On Saturday, October 11 members of the KCC Roadshow return to NYCC for an encore presentation of the well-received panel from last year’s NYCC, Creatively Energizing Your Students with Comic Books and the Arts. The panel will explore how to utilize popular entertainment to inspire and empower youth to learn and express themselves in unique ways, taking a look at how comics, performance, and music can be used in classrooms, libraries, and after school programs to engage students.

Included on the panel will be such Kids Comic Con luminaries as:
• Leslie Carrara-Rudolph (puppeteer and voice of Sesame Street’s Abby Cadabby)
• Noel MacNeal (Writer, Director, Puppeteer, voice of Bear in the Big Blue House)
• Ray Felix (Executive Director of Bronx Heroes ComicCon, educator, Broadway/movie/TV art director, comics writer: A World Without Superheroes)
• Diana Leto (Designer/Production Artist: Sesame Street, artist for Cave Girl comic strip and IDW’s My Little Pony comic book)
• Alex Simmons (KCC co-founder, educator, playwright, comics writer: Archie, Tarzan, Scooby Doo)
• Paul Castiglia (comics writer-editor-historian: Archie, Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)
• Mike Lopez (educator and moderator of the panel)

Special guests on the panel will be Abby Gerdts, Director of Programming for Artists Striving to End Poverty and various artists from the initiative. The panel takes place from 11:15 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in room 1A05.

Alex Simmons closes out the KCC-related programming with his popular Sci-Tech Heroes workshop which he has given at several past events. The workshop explores the amazing world of science through the imaginative realm of comics. Kids will examine the powers of a popular hero, and then create their own hero or villain based in real science. Their characters must be able to create a natural disaster… or survive one. It’s a fun way for kids to see the possibilities of the future, and their place in it as Creators, Inventors or Explorers. The Sci-Tech Heroes workshop blasts off on Saturday, October 11 from 3:15-4:15 p.m. in the Family Room HQ – 1C02

“KCC’s primary goal is to promote reading, creativity, and exploration in kids’ lives,” said Simmons. “Now more than ever it is imperative that young people embrace a continuous flow of positive ideas, skills and outlets for their thinking as well as self-esteem. Since 2007 our annual Kids Comic Con event has introduced thousands of kids and families to the power of imagination and creativity,” added Simmons. “Our road shows have traveled from Upstate New York to Miami to Senegal in Africa. We continue to provide interactive programming to Ronald McDonald House NYC and partner with them, and others, in its fight for children against cancer.”

Archie Comics will be celebrate its 70th anniversary with Archie #625. The thirty-two page comic book hit stores on September 28th. For a first look at the issue, follow this link.

Here’s more from the release: “The special issue, written by noted educator Alex Simmons and veteran Archie artist Dan Parent, reveals that a friend of Archie and the gang has a family member with cancer, and because of treatment, may have to move. The Archies then band together to provide help for their friend and get them a spot at the Ronald McDonald House, so they won’t have to leave Riverdale.”

Proceeds from the issue will be donated to the Ronald McDonald House. This charity provides temporary housing to pediatric cancer patients.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A few moments ago, Jan Shaeffer, the executive director of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children and a friend, called with stunningly sad news about a beautiful young woman—this young woman—whom I'd interviewed and photographed last fall. She had been living in the Ronald McDonald House adjacent to St. Christopher's Hospital, and as part of an annual report project, I'd sat with her a few days shy of Halloween and talked about her life and the ways in which it had been shaped by cancer. She had moved me immeasurably, as I had then written here: The way she spoke with honesty of what was passing her by. The fierceness with which she approached her own survival. Her determination to get well so that she could return to a hospital one day not as a patient, but as a nurse.

Today I learn that she did not win her battle. Today I am remembering her alive.

Last night I sat at dinner with a gorgeous 15-year-old girl who told me just part of her story. The tumor that first appeared when she was 13. The tumor that returned. Her last eight months lived inside the walls of a hospital, and, at night, within the gracious, truly good rooms of a Ronald McDonald house.

She didn't, she said, remember the color of her own hair.

She hasn't gone home, not one day, in the past eight months.

Her wig was black.

Her skin was porcelain.

She will be, she said, smiling, then taking true pleasure from the thought, Snow White for Halloween.

We fashion heroines for our novels, we tread up and down the street of our own worries, and out in the world all around us are people like this young woman who are living lives we can't imagine, living those lives gracefully.

I got on a train. I took a ride. I crossed the tracks, beyond myself.