Baltimore Comic Con! 5 Reasons to Attend theComic Book, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy Convention!

The Baltimore Comic-Con is celebrating its 26th year.

Dates:
October 17-19, 2025

Show Hours:
Friday: 1:00 p.m.- 7:00 p.m.
Saturday: 10:00 a.m.- 7:00 p.m.
Sunday: 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Cool and Dynamic Independent Publishers and Small Presses

Giancarlo Esposito

When I meet him. I am tempted to call him "Dean Big Brother Almighty" from his role in School Daze.

The Mandalorian, Breaking Bad, The Boys, Captain America: Brave New World

Giancarlo Esposito is an American actor, director, and producer. He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian carpenter and stagehand father from Naples, Italy, and an African American opera singer mother from Alabama.

He is well known by television audiences for his iconic portrayal of drug kingpin ‘Gustavo “Gus” Fring’ in AMC’s critically acclaimed Breaking Bad, for which he won the 2012 Critics’ Choice Award and earned a 2012 Emmy nomination.

Esposito can be seen reprising his role of ‘Gus Fring’ on AMC’s Better Call Saul, which has earned him a 2019 and 2020 Emmy Award nomination in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series as well as a 2023 Critics’ Choice Award win in the category of Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. The show has been nominated in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2022 for an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Drama Series and for the 2019, 2021, and 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards in the category of Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series Award. The show was also nominated for a 2023 Golden Globe Award in the category of Best Television Series – Drama. The sixth and final season of the series concluded airing in 2022 and includes Esposito’s television directorial debut for episode 606 for which he won a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series.

Esposito can also be seen starring in Francis Ford Coppola’s alternate-history sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. He can also be seen in the Netflix and Russo Brothers’ film The Electric State as well as joining the Marvel Universe in Captain America: Brave New World, out February 14, 2025.

He can also be seen in theaters in A24’s Maxxxine, the third installment of the X trilogy from writer-director Ti West, opposite Mia Goth, which released on July 5, 2024.

Esposito was most recently seen in AMC’s Parish, where he is also an executive producer. The series centers on ‘Gracián ‘Gray’ Parish’ (Esposito), a family man and proud owner of a luxury car service in New Orleans. After his son is violently murdered and his business collapses, an encounter with an old friend from his days as a wheelman resurfaces old habits, sending Gray on a high-stakes collision course with a violent criminal syndicate. The series premiered on March 31, 2024, on AMC and is available to stream on AMC+.

Cos Play

Chris Claremont

He is a NY Times best-selling author, been awarded the prestigious Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters by Bard College, his alma mater, Italy’s Yellow Kid life time achievement award, and been inducted into the Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards Hall of Fame. His papers are collected in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, New York.

Chris’s stories are trend-setters for the industry. Although best known for his work on Marvel Comics’ X-Men series where he created the characters of Legion, The New Mutants, Dark Phoenix, Rogue, Gambit, Sabretooth, Kitty Pryde, and Mystique amongst many others, he has also written seminal characters such as Batman and Superman, originated Wolverine, The New Mutants, and Captain Britain for Marvel, and written several creator-owned series. Chris is published world-wide in many different languages. He has authored nine novels. He has spoken at Princeton, MIT, U Penn, and Columbia University, has taught at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, and has appeared on television in the US and abroad. He is the subject of monographs and documentaries. His work has touched millions.

Chris’s initial unbroken 17-year run on Marvel Comics’ The Uncanny X-Men is the stuff of industry legend. During that tenure, he took a lackluster series and transformed it into the dominant, best-selling title in the industry. His run culminated with the launch of the new title, X-Men. The first issue sold over 7.9 million copies. No one has come close to breaking this record. It is a conservative estimate Chris has sold in excess of 750,000,000 comics world-wide.

Chris’s work on the X-Men has brought resounding creative success. The story arc “Dark Phoenix,” with its radical treatment of the story’s central character, paved the way for the reinterpretation of superhero mythos throughout the comics industry. The graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills examines morality in all its guises, adding a sophistication to comics theory, and is the subject of academic papers. He has made Wolverine a household name.

Chris is well known for his progressive treatment of women in a genre that oftentimes relies on stereotype. Active, intelligent, courageous women characters such as Jean Grey, Kitty Pryde, Mystique, Rogue, and Storm have made Chris’s X-Men as popular with women readers as men, a rarity in the comics field.

Chris is equally well-known for his ground-breaking stories that fight prejudice and speak out for inclusivity for all, regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. These themes are highlighted in the “Genosha” story arcs in The Uncanny X-Men, and the “Mekanix” and “Intifada” story arcs in X-Treme X-Men.

Chris embraced mutants as a metaphor for all who are viewed as outsiders by the majority. Such daring, real-word topics are rarely tackled in the conservative mainstream comics industry. Chris took this on at personal and professional risk.

The Summer of 2000 saw the release of the feature film X-Men, based largely on material created by Chris. The second Wolverine movie is based on the graphic novel Wolverine by Chris and Frank Miller. The X-Men movie Days of Future Past hews to his story arc. The trend-breaking TV series Legion is based on his characters, as is the movie The New Mutants. Chris’s stories are responsible for billions in movie profits.

Jose Luis

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez was born in Spain and began drawing comics professionally in Argentina at age 13. In the 1960s, he drew romance titles for Charlton Comics. Garcia-Lopez came to the U.S. in 1974 and started working for DC Comics, drawing series such as Superman, Batman, Hawkman, Tarzan, and Jonah Hex. His other notable work includes Atari Force, Deadman, New Teen Titans, and On The Road to Perdition. Since 1982, Garcia-Lopez has designed and pencilled the definitive versions of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and many other characters for various DC Comics style guides, which are created for licensees only. His style guide art has been seen on countless DC Comics licensed products and is still being used today.

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