The Kids’ Comic Con is a family event, held annually at Bronx Community College. It features workshops, special guests and plenty of comics and graphic novels, all with the purpose of celebrating and supporting comics’ youngest readers.

Attendees will be treated to a wide variety of guests, including comic book creators, editors and publishers.

For aspiring young cartoonists, the Kids’ Comic Con offers workshops in how to write and draw comics. Additionally, professional writers, artists and editors will be conducting portfolio reviews to offer supportive advice and tips for improvement to budding comic book artists.

The Kids’ Comic Con will feature a comics marketplace, where vendors will display the breadth and diversity of comic book and graphic novel offerings available to kids. There will also be a special reading area where kids can hang out and read comics.

The 2010 Kids’ Comic Con will be held at Bronx Community College in New York on April 10. Admission is free for attendees aged 17 and under, $5 for all others. For more information about the Kids’ Comic Con, please visit the official website.

The first convention was held in April 2007 and based on reactions of the attendees and those set up at it, Kids’ Comic Con became an annual event. Each show since then has grown, and now there have been KCC events from Buffalo to Miami, and others have been inspired to stage similar events on the local level.

Guest creators, publishers and editors include Ali Kokmen and Random House Del Rey (manga), Andrew Arnold (Adventures in  Cartooning), Archie Comics, Ashanti Freeman, Brian Leung (Kidjutsu), Carl Craig, Chris Giarrusso (Mini Marvels), Danny Fingeroth, Dave MacDonald (Hamster Sam), Dasanbooks, Dave Roman (Nickelodeon magazine), Derek Bacharach (SimplySuperheroes.com), Big Fly Creative Works, EthiDolls, Emotes.com, Fiona Robinson (The 3-2-3 Detectives Agency), Gary Camp, Geoffrey Hayes, James Sherman, Janna Morishima, Jessica Weiss (Geezerville), Jim Salicrup (Papercutz), John Gallagher (BuzzBoy), Jorge Medina, Ken Wong (Pandora’s Box), Kerry Milliron and Random House for Kids, Kevin Pyle, Leigh Stein, Marc Nobleman (Boys of Steel), Misako Rocks (Detective Jermain), Mark Mariano, (Happyloo), Maurice Waters and ECBACC, Michael Wright, Michael Tauss, Museum of Comics and Cartoons (MOCCA), Neil Numberman (Joey Fly, Private Eye), N. Steven Harris, Paul Castiglia, Paul Castigliano, Peter Gutierrez, Phyllis Novin, Raina Telgemeier (Babysitter Club), Ray Felix, Rick Parker, Samuel Vera, Scott Cunningham, Scott Gimple (Disney’s Fillmore), Sergio Clavijo, Nanci Lilly, Shawn Atkinson, Soriah Chauvel (Captain KC), Toon Books, Will Torres (Valkyrie), and Yali Lin.

Alex Simmons, who created, developed and promotes the KCC, is one of those guys who just can’t stop doing creative things, and frequently they involve helping other people. It came as no surprise to those who know him when he started kicking around the idea that became the Kids’ Comic Con.

Over the past 20 years he has written (and in some cases also created) a number of juvenile mysteries under a variety of pseudonyms for many well-known publishers. He has also penned two educational documentaries and several stage plays. One of his plays, Sherlock Holmes & the Hands of Othello, received critical praise and was published in Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama, published by Signet/Mentor Books.

He wrote three movie novelizations for Disney and three biographies for Steck-Vaughn (including one on Denzel Washington). As voiceover talent, he can be heard on a wide range of projects from O’Henry Bars, to podcasting financial information for DeLoitte and Touche. Among our favorites, he created the critically acclaimed character BlackJack for comics, and he has also traveled the country as a guest speaker and teaching artist. Along the way he developed and conducted creative writing workshops (prose, comics, journalism, and playwriting), as well as consulted on a number of creative arts programs and curricula for children.

Currently, he serves as the Arts In Education Director for the Children’s Art Carnival (NYC), and sits on the board of the New York State Alliance for Arts and Education. He is affiliated with the Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art, and is also a member of the New York Writer’s Workshop.

In other words, in his spare time, he dreams of sleeping.

Last year he told Scoop that the idea for the Kids’ Comic Con sprang out of the part of his mind that fondly recalls going to the circus, seeing magic shows, attending comic cons, and watching kids’ TV shows  back in his “first” youth.

“I’m going through my second now,” he laughed. “I loved the fact that there was something there just for us, like a huge special club where you had to be a child or a teen to truly enjoy it. Kids I knew would read comics and discuss, or argue about characters, storylines, power sources, science fiction versus fact, etc., each time a new issue of our favorites came out.”

He said it was almost an “Oprah-like” book club even if they didn’t know it.

“The material charged us up, and some of my friends actually pursued careers in science and such because of their love for certain comic book characters,” he said.

Simmons said that as comics became more adult oriented content-wise, and most indies were given a chance to express themselves on things that related to their age group, he watched comics for kids almost vanish from the planet.

“It was not so much that there weren’t any — there were less, and what was there could not be seen for all the smoke and mirrors of the flashier, sexier material.  Thousand children were losing one of the best early stages of casual and enjoyable reading.  They were losing some of the arena in which their imagination soared towards their future, ethics, mythology, art, and so on. And the industry was losing reader, which meant revenue, which meant many new young (and old) artists were losing one of our greatest audiences.  I wanted to bring some of that back,” he said. “So after years of trying to do it with established conventions, I found a venue and a team to do it on our own.”

Now that comics are being seen as actual literature, and with educators and parents using them to encourage and engage reluctant and/or challenged readers, Simmons said the time was right for Kids’ Comic Con because those same folks are looking for ways to of stimulate the imagination.

Before really getting started with KCC, he spent about four years talking to convention promoters to see if they would undertake something like he envisioned. 

At the time several felt the audience was not there or it would not be cost effective, he said. A real degree for frustration came from talking with different comic artists, editors, retailers, and fans, all of whom recognized the desire for a similar event.

“Then I met Eugene Adams, Director of Educational Outreach at BronxCommunity College. After he saw me conducting my comic book workshops and panels with some of the schools he worked with, he made the mistake of asking me what else I wanted to do,” Simmons said. “Once the college agreed to let us to do a kids’ comic book convention on their campus, the planning began. I listed what people, workshops, panels, events, and supplies we would need.”

He said he and Adams spent weeks on the phone gathering information, coordinating, and communicating the vision.

“A friend of mine, Maurice Waters, of East Coast Black Age of Comics Con, became a valued advisor, as his group had already produced five comic conventions of their own,” he said.

His plan was not to attempt anything big the first time out. 

“I figured on asking 10 to 15 of my friends in the business, and we expected about 50 to 100 people from the immediate community would attend,” he said.

Once the word about the show hit the internet, though, he was flooded with emails. 

“By the time our doors opened that beautiful April morning in 2007, we had over 45 comics professionals waiting to meet greet and interact with over 800 patrons. People who could not attend donated books and other materials to give away to the children who attended, so no child left our event that day without a bag full of stories to read,” he said.

“The euphoric atmosphere that existed among the artists and publishers after the event ended was inspirational. We’d seen the books in the hands of the children.  We’d seen the light in their eyes, the curiosity and smiles on their faces.  We’d witnessed the empowerment people (children, parents and educators) took away from the workshops and panels we had provided. We had to do it again,” he said.

Since then, the show has continued to grow. And if Simmons has anything to do with it, it will keep doing so.