CXC 2015 Announces Dates and Guests

First-timer Ohio comics festival Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (also known as CXC) announced a slew of details last week, including official dates for its inaugural celebration, October 1-3, a logo created by Dustin Harbin, and a new website explaining all about the festival. Set up by Jeff Smith, Lucy Caswell, Vijaya Iyer, and executive director Tom Spurgeon, the festival's first wave of guests include Kate Beaton, Craig Thompson, Françoise Mouly and Bill Griffith.

CXC is modeled on film festivals like Sundance and Tribeca, in which the whole city or neighborhood takes part in the festival. Buildings across Columbus will host events, presentations, talks and signings, including (of course) the Billy Ireland Museum, with subsequent events taking place in locations including Columbus College of Art and Design, the Cultural Arts Center, and Columbus Museum of Art.

In addition to being one of the festival's organizers, Jeff Smith will also be a special guest at CXC, and host of a number of events and presentations across the weekend, including talks with Mouly and Art Spiegelman.

You can likely already also sense the hand of director Tom Spurgeon at the helm as the editor of Comics Reporter states the festival's mission as follows:

...to celebrate the diversity of the cartoon arts including animation, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books and graphic novels, and to highlight the city of Columbus and its comics community to the world, working to secure the brightest possible future for the next generation of comics-makers.

CXC 2015 will run from Thursday 1 October through Saturday 3 October, and the website states that applications for exhibitors are now open.