More than 2,000 people packed the San Francisco Main Library for the inaugural Pride in Panels queer comics festival in 2024.
“The first festival just wowed everyone with how well it did,” says Pride in Panels co-organizer Laura Gao.
The expanded biennial event returns Sunday—including complementary readings, workshops and discussions on Friday and Saturday—while remaining free for exhibitors and attendees.
“All of it is way beyond our initial passion project. We’re thrilled that the community really supported us and wanted us to continue to grow the festival,” says Gao, a San Francisco resident who wrote 2022’s “Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American” and 2025’s “Kirby’s Lessons for Falling (in Love): A Graphic Novel.”
Gao, a faculty member of California College of the Arts, says Pride in Panels stemmed from a discussion she had with Justin Hall, a fellow CCA professor, and Avi Ehrlich, founder of Silver Sprocket, an indie comics publisher, shop and gallery in the Mission.
“There’s a vibrant community of queer comic creators here in San Francisco, but why wasn’t there any single event where we could celebrate that community and bring everyone together?” Gao says.
Partnering with the SFPL James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center team, the organizers turned their idea into a one-day festival. Gao says, “…. Every single exhibitor told me it felt like a sea of hugs from the entire Bay Area,” adding, “I want to not only repeat that, but make that feel as strong and as intense as it was [then].”
New this year: A place on the library’s second floor where artists will show and sell their work, satellite events at Balboa Theater and Silver Sprocket; and mini grants to 20 comic creators.
“…Our No. 1 priority is to get as many diverse voices and stories in the room as possible, no matter the grounds that they start off on,” says Gao about the grants. “We definitely hope to offer more as the festival grows.”
The festival’s Spotlight Panels feature queer and trans comic creator Lee Lai, author of the graphic novel “Stone Fruit” at 3 p.m., and, at 1 p.m. Rupert Kinnard, creator of “Cathartic Comics,” the first continuous strip centering on Black characters: the Brown Bomber, a gay superhero, and his lesbian sidekick, Diva Touché Flambé.
Kinnard began his cartoon as a student at Cornell College; the strip was later featured in “Just Out,” a queer news publication he co-created in Portland, Oregon. When he moved to the Bay Area in the 1980s, “Cathartic Comics” was published by LGBTQ+ outlets San Francisco Sentinel and The Bay Times. It also found a home in the SF Weekly, where Kinnard worked as an art director.
“That was the first publication that the strip ran in that catered to a general community, as opposed to being ghettoized within the queer community,” he says. “SF Weekly was absolutely the place where the strip flourished.”
Kinnard, now in his 70s and living in Portland, adds, “At one point, I realized how unique the voice coming from the strip was. There weren’t any strips out there that were talking about homophobia in communities of color and racism in the gay community and other communities, or comic strips that championed the rights of lesbians or of women in general.”
“It tackled a lot of subjects that wouldn’t normally be featured,” he continues.
“I’m a really big champion of the idea of comics as an art form to inform people about the lifestyles and the struggles of marginalized communities,” says Kinnard. “It’s a format that reaches people, whereas if I talked about being gay, African American, and paraplegic in an essay, I don’t think it would be as available for younger people to digest.”
In 2025, Kinnard published “Ooops…I Just Catharted!: Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics.” He says putting the retrospective together gave him a better sense of his artistic journey over the decades.
Looking forward to returning to San Francisco, he says, “Now I have the opportunity to, in some way, present a love letter to the Bay Area for the part it played in the development of the strip and the support I got and the incredibly creative community that I felt I was a part of when I was living there and working for the alternative press,” Kinnard says.
For Gao, the festival comes at a time when marginalized communities feel increasingly targeted.
“It can be a pretty scary and harrowing place if you’re an immigrant, if you’re a person of color, if you’re a queer person or trans person, or Black or Indigenous,” she says. “We want to come out and show everyone, ‘Hey, we’re not afraid to stand together, to all be in this room, to shout our stories to the ceilings.’”
Pride in Panels runs from noon to 5 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Main Library, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco. Visit prideinpanels.org.