Jessica Fong

Jessica Fong is a Bay Area–based illustrator known for her stunning cover art in DC Comics’ GLAAD Award–winning Poison Ivy series. Her artwork blends surrealism with nature, often featuring dark yet beautiful imagery. Fong’s work captures the “terribly sublime,” a theme that is both haunting and aesthetically captivating. She contributes a range of covers for DC, Marvel, Mad Cave Studios, IDW Publishing, Image Comics, Heroic Signatures, and more. Her work can also be found in Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, Critical Role’s Midst series, Fandom Inc, and Marvel Snap.

Matt Forbeck

Matt Forbeck is an award-winning and New York Times–bestselling author and game designer of over 35 novels and countless other books and games. His projects have won a Peabody Award, a Scribe Award, and numerous ENnies and Origins awards. He is also the president of the Diana Jones Award Foundation, which celebrates excellence in gaming. His latest work includes the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game Core Rulebook, The Cataclysm of Kang campaign, and the X-Men Expansion and the Spider-Verse Expansion, plus Hard West 2, Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus, and the Shotguns & Sorcery 5E Sourcebook based on his novels. This summer, look for his latest game book Minecraft: Roll for Adventure: The Temple of the Charged Creeper, written with his son Marty.

Yaya Han

Yaya Han is a cosplayer, designer, and author with more than 20 years of activity in the fandom world. Yaya has made over 400 costumes and has been featured in two U.S. network TV shows, countless magazines, books, newspapers, and online media. Yaya’s work has impacted cosplay profoundly and has helped shape it into a commercial industry. She is the first cosplayer to bring branded cosplay-focused sewing/crafting products to mass retail, and she chronicled the evolution of modern cosplay in the book Yaya Han’s World of Cosplay.

Jim Lee

Jim Lee, the world-renowned comic book artist, writer, editor, and publisher, is currently president, publisher, and chief creative officer of DC. He leads creative efforts to integrate DC’s publishing portfolio of characters and stories across all media, supporting Warner Bros. Discovery’s family of brands and studios. Jim joined DC in 1998 and has overseen many of the company’s highly successful publishing programs, including the Rebirth line of comics and The New 52 initiative that relaunched the entire line of monthly superhero comic books. As part of the revamp, Lee designed and reimagined the new, more contemporary costumes for some of the DC Universe’s most iconic characters, including Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Jim holds a BA in psychology from Princeton University and started his professional career at Marvel Comics, where his work on the X-Men continues to hold the all-time sales record for single-issue sales.

Saturday only

Todd McFarlane

Todd McFarlane is the Emmy and Grammy Award–winning director/producer and creator of one of the world’s best-selling comics, Spawn. He is known for his work on Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man, where he co-created Venom. Todd is co-founder and President of Image Comics and is CEO of McFarlane Toys (which revolutionized the action figure industry), as well as Todd McFarlane Productions and McFarlane Films. Spawn earned a Guinness World Record for “longest-running creator-owned superhero comic book series.” McFarlane’s latest Kickstarter, Medieval Spawn, was fully funded in under two minutes and became the fastest toys campaign to surpass $1M. In 2025, McFarlane is launching nine new comic titles.

Sam Maggs

Sam Maggs is a New York Times bestselling author of books, comics, and video games. Her novels include Star Wars Jedi: Battle Scars and The Unstoppable Wasp: Built on Hope. She’s written for games like Call of Duty: Vanguard, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Marvel’s Spider-Man, and her comics and graphic novels include Marvel Action: Captain Marvel, Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins, and Tell No Tales: Pirates of the Southern Seas. She is also an on-air host for networks like Nerdist. A Canadian in Los Angeles, she misses Coffee Crisp and bagged milk.

Sean Murphy

Sean Murphy is a comic book creator known for work on such books as Joe the Barbarian with Grant Morrison, Chrononauts with Mark Millar, American Vampire: Survival of the Fittest and The Wake with Scott Snyder, Tokyo Ghost with Rick Remender, and the miniseries Punk Rock Jesus. In 2024 he successfully licensed Zorro to create a new book titled Zorro: Man of the Dead, which became a big success on Kickstarter as well in stores. He is also the creator of the Murphyverse, a subcontinuity that serves as the setting for stories featuring Batman that is separate from the main DC Universe continuity. These titles include Batman: White Knight and its sequels, Curse of the White Knight and Beyond the White Knight, which Murphy wrote and illustrated. He’s planning more expansions for his Batman titles in the next few years, one which will feature Batman teaming up with Superman, as well as other JLA members.

Adam Nimoy

Adam Nimoy is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Loyola Law School. He practiced entertainment law for seven years before changing careers to become a television director. He directed over 45 hours of network television, including episodes of Ally McBeal, NYPD Blue, and Gilmore Girls. In 2016, he directed the documentary film For the Love of Spock, the critically acclaimed documentary film about his father, Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy, which was an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival. He was featured in the New York Times article “To Boldly Explore Jewish Roots of Star Trek,” and he published a Father’s Day piece about his relationship with his father for the Boston Globe. In 2024 Chicago Review Press published his memoir The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father Leonard Nimoy.

Saturday and Sunday only

Brian Posehn

Brian Posehn is a writer/actor/stand-up comic. His credits include Disney+’s The Mandalorian, Netflix’s Lady Dynamite, and FX’s You’re the Worst, along with recurring roles on The Big Bang Theory and New Girl. He was one of the stars of Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program. He also appeared on such seminal sitcoms as Seinfeld, NewsRadio, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, The Neighborhood, and Just Shoot Me. His voice-acting gigs have included everything from Scooby Doo and The Simpsons to Adventure Time, American Dad, Bob’s Burgers, and Steven Universe. He also produced and hosted the popular D&D comedy podcast Nerd Poker and co-wrote 45 issues of the bestselling Marvel comic book series Deadpool. In 2018 he released his first book, Forever Nerdy.

Dan Slott

Dan Slott has worked with Marvel for many years, giving fans an action-packed 10-year run on The Amazing Spider-Man! His writing credits include She-Hulk, Avengers, Batman, and The Silver Surfer. He recently finished working on a run of The Fantastic Four and Iron Man. Currently he can be found tangled back up in New York City with Spider-Man and Spider-Boy.

Dan Veesenmeyer

Dan is an artist with over 30 years of experience working in the worlds of animation, toys, comics, and video games, perhaps most noted for his work with X-Men The Animated Series and X-Men ’97. Starting out as a TV animation storyboard artist on X-Men The Animated Series, he continued to work on many shows throughout the 1990s. Transitioning to licensing, he’s worked with several studios and brands including Star Wars Prequels, Batman Animated, and Lego Marvel and DC video games. Currently he is associated with X-Men–related projects for Marvel, Mondo, and Hasbro, producing artwork for toys and apparel.

Mark Waid

Mark Waid is a multiple New York Times bestselling author whose work has appeared in countless languages across the globe. Over the course of his four decades in the comic book industry, Waid has developed characters and written stories for Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, The Avengers, X-Men, Archie, Star Wars, The Incredibles, Fantastic Four, Wonder Woman, Daredevil, Captain America, and almost every other franchise currently enjoying success across all media platforms. Kingdom Come, which he co-created for DC Comics, has become one of the bestselling graphic novels in history.