Host Your Own Comic Con
In October 2023 I had a crazy idea: what if I hosted our campus’s first ever Comic Con event? I work at a middle school in a suburban district in Texas and graphic novels, manga and comic books are by far the most popular titles checked out every year from my library. It doesn’t hurt that I have such a robust collection thanks to serving on the Mavericks Graphic Novel Reading List Committee through the Young Adult Round Table in TLA for several years. We received many boxes of books throughout that time and I was able to put many of them in our library.
You’ll notice the top three books checked out in November 2023 were graphic novels and the list went on from there.
Hosting a literacy event like this was a huge undertaking, but one I was ready to meet head on. I scheduled the date for May 14 so we would be done with state testing and I wanted it to coincide with my Scholastic Buy One, Get One Free book fair to promote summer reading. I wanted to host a true Comic Con event, including everything you would see at a con such as author speaking events, vendor booths, activities for my students to participate in, photo booths, a cosplay contest, gaming, food trucks, mascot costumes for students to take photos with and prizes galore! This was going to take a great deal of organization; luckily that is a definite strength of mine. However, what is a weakness is asking for help. I felt like I could take this on all on my own. Big mistake. Huge. But more on that later.
Our visual flyover map of the inside locations of booths, activities, prizes, etc. in the Library, choir room, iPad technician HUB, and Cafeteria.
This is the outside aerial map of the food trucks, library RIOMobile, and Alamo Rolling Video Games rental. As you can see our parking isn’t great so I worked with the church across the street and they allowed parking for the event.
I decided to name the event UniCon because our mascot is a unicorn. Around January I got the idea to include our elementary schools that feed into our middle school. I was lucky enough to get authors Adrianna Cuevas, Gume Laurel, PJ Hoover and Gabriela Epstein to attend the event for free. Gabriela lives in Austin and could only come in the morning. Deciding which of my students would get to hear her speak was daunting and a scheduling nightmare for classes so I worked with the feeder school elementary librarians to see if they could arrange buses to bring their 5th graders to the event.
It was around this time our 5th graders had visited our campus to see where they would be going to middle school. They get a tour lead by National Junior Honor Society students, cheerleaders and dancers welcome them in, they see the fashion show of what to and what NOT to wear, etc. Many parents of incoming middle schoolers told me that their children were scared to come to middle school. In the past I’d heard nervous, anxious, excited, etc. but never flat out scared. This was alarming because we want kids to be more excited than not to come to our school. After seeing Gabriela’s presentation at Librarypalooza in San Antonio, I knew she would be perfect to host our incoming 6th graders. I worked with BookPeople, an independent bookstore in Austin, to get preorder copies of books by all the authors. They shipped ahead of time and the authors signed their copies on site when they arrived.
A huge thank you goes to Tenzan Studio, 3D Print Genius (a freshman at our high school who makes his own 3D printed creatures and sells them at our local Farmer’s Market) and PJ Hoover who spent most of the day selling and sharing their inventory with our students.
Once I had everything scheduled with Gabriela in the morning speaking in the Choir Room to our 5th graders in 3 groups of 20 minutes each from the feeder elementary schools (there are 4). Then I put together the vendors, afternoon authors and stations students would have to complete in order to go to the Prizetopia area. They got a stamp card of 10 stamps when they entered the event. We had 20 stations where they could get their card stamped for completing the activity. Once they got 10, they got to go to Prizetopia where they could choose a free graphic novel/manga/comic book, toy, sticker, balloon, candy, etc. They could complete an unlimited amount of cards, but my students only had their 50 minute class period to do it during the day and/or 1.5 hours for the event after school.
Me (Mario) with Babysitter’s Club graphic novelist Gabriela Epstein at UniCon 2024
During the day only my middle school students could attend UniCon. *The 5th graders got to attend while two out of the three groups were waiting to hear Gabriela speak and then they’d all rotate. I ran a report in Destiny to see which of my students checked out graphic novels, manga and/or comic books throughout the school year. Those are the students who received invitations to attend during their Reading Language Arts class period the day of UniCon. I created a spreadsheet and had tabs by grade level, as well as by teacher and class period so there was no confusion as to who was invited and where they were supposed to be at a certain time of the day so the front office could locate them easily. The day of the event, teachers gave their students a wrist band that allowed them entry into the event and gave them a stamp card. Luckily I have a lot of library aides (27) and they signed up for shifts throughout the day to work various booths, wear the costumes, help with authors, etc. I worked with our Art teachers to get volunteer workers for our face painting booths as well. One of our clubs (Anime Club) wanted to host a booth all day to share about anime and manga so their members signed up for shifts with their club sponsor. Our instructional coach helped during the 5th grader visits because there were so many kids. I also had a few PTA volunteers, as well as the elementary librarians and 5th grade teachers helping do crowd control during the time they were there.
Kim Stroud, our Instructional Coach, hanging with Chewbacca and Leonardo the Ninja Turtle from Merry Mascots.
One of my 8th graders dressed as a unicorn for UniCon!
In 6th period I asked two of our Math teachers (it was their conference period) and the theater teacher to judge our cosplay contest. I had sent a Google Form out to the entire campus via my Canvas course and asked them to choose their character ahead of time and agree to the rules. A few even cosplayed as a character they created for their own manga! MJ (far right) won 1st place and an Amazon gift card. There were gift card prizes for 2nd and 3rd as well. Here is the rubric I used for the judges. Students had to walk the red carpet and strike a pose their character would at the end of the carpet.
Towards the end of the school day the food trucks began showing up. I had posted a few months prior in our campus’s PTA Facebook page asking for recommendations and got a lot! As you can see above on the map we had a good variety of types of food, even cotton candy!
In 7th period, we had Adrianna Cuevas and Gume Laurel, both Latinx authors, speak to our Emerging Bilingual students to show them how they grew up speaking Spanish and how they used it to their advantage. We did two sessions of that in the Choir Room so all 88 EB students could attend.
Authors Gume Laurel III and Adrianna Cuevas signing books at UniCon.
After school from 4:30-6PM is when I invited all the feeder elementary schools, our high school and my middle school students, especially since not all had been able to attend during the school day. This is when most of the craziness (besides the 5th graders visiting) took place. My space feels big because of the windows, but when you have hundreds of kids and parents in the space, it definitely feels small for sure. The event could not have happened without the volunteers, both student and adults. From the NJHS or Student Council members who worked to my library aides to the authors who donated their time to come out to my campus teachers who worked after school in costume to the food truck vendors to the booth vendors to our PTA who paid for the gaming truck and donated their time to our public library bringing the RIO Mobile and librarians out to sign up kids for library cards to our School Resource Police Officer for directing traffic and helping the food trucks park to my feeder elementary librarians to the other side of town’s middle and high school librarians who helped all day! This was a group effort and we didn’t have any big issues.
Our choir allowed us to use their room for the author visits so we promoted their Choir Pop Concert at 6:30 after our event. While they were practicing our mascots got in on the fun!
I had two students who really wanted to do a lightsaber battle. One already had the Darth Vader costume and I purchased the lightsabers from TEMU cheap. The other student made her own costume and I bought a few accessories for her to be a convincing Rey.
Noah and Maya in their Star Wars gear, ready to perform their lightsaber battle!
We also hosted a cosplay contest for the littles after school, again for Amazon gift cards. This is our winner!
We had press come out, from our district social media team to the local Herald Zeitung newspaper. However, since I was just inviting our side of town (the unicorn side) I began to feel guilty after the fact and, way before, if I’m being honest, because we would have librarian meetings and I would pull our side of town over to meet about UniCon, leaving our new dragon campuses (in the fall our district will have two high schools for the first time ever so we had to get a new mascot for them). So after talking with my elementary lead librarian we are going to change it for next year to call it MythaCon so all of our 9,000+ students in the district are involved. What that looks like, I have no idea. I’m working on it this summer, but I already know I’ll need a committee with lots of volunteers to help me organize, contact others, deal with scheduling, social media, etc. I spent over $2500 of my own money to make this event happen and I cannot do that again, nor do I recommend it. I also received a Donor’s Choose grant for the decorations. I got the books for Prizetopia donated through ARCs and other books that had been sent to me for review on my bookstagram account. I also used Scholastic dollars to purchase books from their catalog, the BOGO book fair and my biggest elementary feeder school donated lots of books and prizes as well. I already had lots of the station and booth materials from hosting Makerspace for years so that helped some. But there are a lot of things you don’t think about until it gets closer and since my budget had mostly been spent in the fall, it was hard to judge what I would need until it was almost time. As this was the first event, I learned a lot, but also over-prepped so I wouldn’t be caught by surprise as much as possible. *Tell me you have anxiety without telling me you have anxiety.
Here are some resources I used that I haven’t mentioned above. Please feel free to use any you’d like! Reach out if you have any questions, as I’m sure I didn’t answer everything. Thanks for following my UniCon journey and be on the lookout for info about how I’m going to host MythiCon coming in 2025!
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