Johnnie Christmas, Megan Kearney, Cole Pauls: Prairie Comics Festival Hybrid Event

Prairie Comics Festival is an annual, free to attend event held in Winnipeg that celebrates independent comic creators on the prairies, and across Canada. Join festival organizer (and comic creator) SM Beiko in conversation with 2023 festival guests, Johnnie Christmas, Megan Kearney, and Cole Pauls. A Q&A will follow.

Johnnie Christmas is a #1 New York Times Best Selling graphic novelist. His 2022 middle grade graphic novel debut Swim Team earned a spot on the National Book Awards longlist, a Coretta Scott King Award Illustrator Honor and a Harvey Awards nomination. Swim Team is currently a nominee for the Barnes & Noble Children's Book Award and for the Silver Birch Award. Johnnie is currently hard at work on two new middle-grade graphic novels for the HarperAlley imprint of HarperCollins. He was also the writer/co-creator of the Image Comics sci-fi series Tartarus and Crema, a haunted romance published by Comixology and his book Firebug earned a Joe Shuster Outstanding Cartoonist nomination. He also co-created the series Angel Catbird with celebrated writer Margaret Atwood and adapted William Gibson’s lost screenplay for Alien 3 into a critically acclaimed graphic novel of the same name. His credits also include co-creating the pre-apocalyptic thriller Sheltered. A graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, earning a BFA in Communication Design/Illustration.

Megan Kearney is a Toronto-based cartoonist with a background in animation. She works as a writer, illustrator and educator, and is a frequent guest at conventions across North America. Her clients include television studios such as Temple Hill Productions and Sinking Ship Entertainment. In addition to her award-winning original works, she has contributed to licensed properties with Scholastic, Disney, and many others. Her most recent title, Swan Lake: Quest for the Kingdoms, released from Harpercollins, was a Kirkus Starred Review in 2022. Her next book, Corpse de Ballet, is expected to be published by First Second in 2024.

Cole Pauls is a Tahltan comic artist, illustrator and printmaker hailing from Haines Junction (Yukon Territory) with a BFA in Illustration from Emily Carr University. Residing in Vancouver, Pauls focuses on his two comic series, the first being Pizza Punks: a self contained comic strip about punks eating pizza, the other being Dakwäkãda Warriors. In 2017, Pauls won Broken Pencil Magazine’s Best Comic and Best Zine of the Year Award for Dakwäkãda Warriors II. In 2020, Dakwäkãda Warriors won Best Work in an Indigenous Language from the Indigenous Voices Awards and was nominated for the Doug Wright Award categories, The Egghead & The Nipper. His most recent comic collection is Kwändǖr.