Denver Comics & Arts Festival Returns May 9, Now in a Bigger Venue

The fourth annual Denver Comics & Arts Festival is making a grand return at a new venue. On Saturday, May 9, Schoolyard Beer Garden will serve as host to over 100 artists, publishers, and vendors showing off indie publications, graphic novels, and visual arts of all sorts. The event, like the DeCAFs that came before it, is free and open to everyone.

DeCAF is the brainchild of a trio of stalwarts in the local indie arts scene: erstwhile Westword artist Karl Christian Krumpholz, Jeff Alford of Wigshop, and Eddie Raymond of Strangers Publishing. The three saw an opening in the slow but certain demise of the much-missed art-festival DiNK (Denver Independent Comic & Art Expo), one of the many local casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic and all the challenges and changes it brought. This year’s event features celebrity guest Brian Posehn, along with fellow comedian J. T. Habersaat, courtesy of sponsor and local comic-book haven Mutiny Comics. Posehn and Habersaat will be selling books and signing stuff from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Mutiny Comics table.

Despite owning Strangers Publishing and helping to organize DeCAF, Raymond says he didn’t grow up as a comics kid. “I sort of fell perfectly into that initial manga boom of the early 2000s,” he recalls. “I was one of those kids who would sit on the floor in the manga section at Borders and just read for a while.” But comics called, and he began working with and for some national comic cons on the organizational side of things. In that, Raymond began reading what he calls “the hits,” like Darwyn Cooke’s Batman and New Frontier. “I was slowly getting into it, and then in 2019 discovered underground comics.”

Raymond started his Strangers fanzine in early 2020…just in time for the pandemic to throw existence itself into question. “I ended up running it online as well as sending it out physically,” he says, “and that sort of immersed me in the world of small press.”

By 2021, he transitioned the fanzine into the small-press publisher that Strangers is today; a year later, after a move to Boulder, Raymond heard from Wigshop’s Alford about a possible team-up with Krumpholz in an effort called the Colorado Comics Collective, which would in turn put on a show that would become DeCAF. “It was a nice melding of my passion for small press and my work over the years with comic cons,” says Raymond.

Originally, the trio had big dreams for DeCAF. “We were going to do it three times a year,” recalls Raymond. “We were going to do it up in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. And we did a little of that the first year.” The inaugural DeCAF took place in the back part of the old Mutiny Comics location in Baker, in its last incarnation farther north on Broadway. “It was busy enough that we were like, ‘Okay, there’s interest here.’ The one in Fort Collins was a little less successful, but it was also a learning experience for us. We realized that our lives were a bit stretched already, and maybe doing one a year made more practical sense.”

So DeCAF became an annual thing, and in the years that followed up until this one, it took place at Town Hall Collaborative. “That was a great space,” says Raymond, “but we quickly filled it up. We wanted to continue to grow the show, and Karl discovered Schoolyard, and that just seemed perfect. They’ve been a really great partner so far.”

And there’s a poetry of sorts to an arts and comics event happening at Schoolyard, since the venue sits in the historic Evans School at 1115 Acoma Street. The edifice is impressive in that old-architecture manner, having been built in 1904 in the Renaissance Revival style, featuring ornate brickwork, grand arched windows and distinctive detailing that showed off the artisanship of the time. “It’s a beautiful space,” Raymond says. “They’ve done a great job renovating it. And there’s a sense, having DeCAF in an old public school space, it’s a little like going back to basics for a lot of these artists. Going back to the kind of place where they found their original passion for arts. And probably comics too.”

But in the end, it’s all about the art. Coming out on a Saturday and seeing some cool shit, maybe shaking the hand or getting a sig from the hand that drew it. “Denver has such a strong artist community,” Raymond says. “We’re excited to give them a space to gather and celebrate their stuff.”

The fourth annual DeCAF takes place at Schoolyard, 1115 Acoma Street, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 9; admission is free. For more information, see the DeCAF website.