The End of the Story for Pop Culture Classroom

Pop Culture Classroom — once a powerhouse in the Denver area, especially when it ran the Denver Comic Con/Pop Culture Con for a few years — is closing its doors on January 31.

"There isn’t a good way to deliver this information, so I’ll start by ripping off the bandage," Matt Slayter wrote on the Pop Culture Classroom website in announcing the news on January 17. "If this seems sudden, trust me when I say: the current PCC staff completely agree with you!"

Slayter was hired in August 2018, shortly after the final iteration of what was then known as Denver Comic Con; he was part of the crew that changed the name to Denver Pop Culture Con, to stave off a possible lawsuit from San Diego Comic Con, which considered the term "Comic Con" proprietary. In 2019, the event became Denver Pop Culture Con — which was something of a mouthful. Fans only had a couple of years to get used to it, however; the COVID pandemic cancelled the convention for two years. The event returned as FanExpo Denver, and ultimately was taken over by the international wing of FanExpo.

Slayter had cut his teeth in education. earning an undergrad degree in theater and a master's in teaching grades K-6; he'd spent six years teaching elementary school in New York City and Fort Worth, Texas. He was initially hired by the Denver organization as the classroom programming coordinator, tasked with managing the PCC team of instructors, the in-office classroom space, and the workshops that happened there.

At first, Slayter was one of three members of the Education team, which was separate from the larger convention-focused team. "But before I had completed a year with PCC," Slayter says, "our three-person education team became a two-person education team, and I stepped up to fill the role of Education Program Manager." More changes came to both Slayter and PCC, in a seemingly endless reduction of staff and funding.

Now PCC has finally decided to give it up. "Our financial situation has been less than ideal for a while," concedes Slayter. "The organization had been more-or-less solely funded by Denver Comic Con/Pop Culture Con up until 2020. After losing the anticipated revenue from the 2020 and 2021 conventions, we could no longer sustain our funding of the event, and lost that revenue stream entirely. In addition, due to losing the convention, we eventually changed from a Tier II SCFD (Scientific and Cultural Facilities District) to a Tier III org, meaning we were receiving far less funding, and the funds were no longer unrestricted, limiting what they could be used for."

Slayter adds that PCC attempted to find more traditional non-profit funding sources, seeking grants and contributions from sponsors and individual donors, but it wasn't enough to make up for the reduced SCFD funding.

"Our executive director [Matt Hess] resigned at the beginning of December," Slayter says. "At that time, the board got a more accurate read on the organization’s finances, which were somehow a surprise to everyone, and worse than they or the staff previously understood. The staff was informed on January 8 that the organization would be closing on the 31st, that the organization would be filing for bankruptcy, and that staff would not be receiving severances."
For the remainder of January, Slayter and the other three remaining staff members will close up shop. Meanwhile, Slayter has one last and important request for any past users of PCC: click on “Classroom Resources” on the top of the PCC front page and download everything they can, as soon as possible. "This isn’t going to rescue the organization," Slayter writes on his farewell post on the PCC website, "but once our doors close, it will be a matter of days before we anticipate our website shutting down. We are hoping to find a host for our trove of comics, graphic novel teaching guides, and curricular units in the future. But, as of right now, we do not know if or when that will happen. Their future is undetermined, as is the amount of time you’ll be able to access them. So please, save them for the future, and share them with as many people as you can! If nothing else, we hope that these resources will live on, being passed around between teachers and librarians for years to come."

That's a sad end to to the Pop Culture Classroom story — with all the good the organization did over the past fifteen years, fans believe it deserved a better fate and a longer life. "It’s heartbreaking to see so many of these programs die," Slayter says. "So many of them have grown to high levels of success and impact: our art and literacy programs in schools, libraries, and detention facilities; the Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards, which saw over 250 title submissions from over ninety publishers in 2024 (its seventh year!); Colorful History, which published over eighty issues of educational comics and associated teaching guides; our innovative workshop programs, which taught comic and game creation to learners in the Denver area and beyond."

But all good things must come to an end, even heroic innovations in education. "All I can hope," says Slayter, "is that these programs did some good while they were around."