On Saturday, April 19, 2025, the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California celebrates 25 years of comics with the Bay Area cartoonists Paige Bradoc and Peanuts. The event included artist signing, one-on-one conversations with creators, feature panels with Braddock and decades of career in the comics business.
If you’ve never been to the Schulz Museum, you’ll need to be on your bucket list for those who appreciate the comics. In addition to being a beautiful museum honoring the life and work of Charles Schultz of Peanuts fame, they regularly host events with a variety of creators who currently work in the business. There is no well-established institution to celebrate this visual medium as a true art form. So it’s a real blessing to welcome this museum for just a few minutes from your home. Although we didn’t have the opportunity to chat with all the creators at the event, the energy in the room was a positive and celebration of the independent comic creators.
I was excited to talk to people in an environment that was less busy than the convention floor. Compared to the overwhelming mayhem of San Diego Comic-Con, it was easy to browse and chat with the artists who attended. Santa Rosa’s own Tom Beland, best known for his true stories with Chicacabra, was a vow to God and showed off the different kinds of variant covers he created. His heartfelt personal comic has attracted many major critical acclaim, and a sequel to his Chicakabra title is available in his Patreon. It looks amazing, and hopefully we will see it collected in physical form in the future.
The iconic Brent Eric Anderson, co-creator of AstroCity, was on hand to share decades of work. He is known for his character-driven art in superhero comic details. I was fortunate to get the signature “God will kill people,” one of my favorite X-Men stories. Anderson discussed many books that he had finished but remained without a publisher. One of them was a book he wrote with his wife, Shirley Johnston. Shirley Johnston is a graphic novel about Elle Jaguar: Origins, an unknown shapeshifter in Southern Mexico, escorted the Land of the Dead in hoping to be reunited with his parents after a tragic past and supernatural initiation. It looks amazing and I hope that major publishers will have the fortitude to distribute it. Right next door was Eric Martin, known for his beautiful and expressive line work that captured international and local scenes, to share his book travel sketches.
Thien Pham confronted the scene and created a big splash in family style. This is a biographical book that explores food, identity and memory. In addition to working on a final follow-up, he is currently doing art for the comic retelling of the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue Chess match, in which IBM’s computer defeated the famous master. In addition to all the other challenges that arise from creating historical comics of this nature, Tien noted that the physical layout of the Chess Committee must be given special attention to representing the actual movements used by the two competitors.
I recently learned that I recently published an advocate for Eddie Anne of San Francisco. The book combines his experience as an advocate of environmental justice with some incredible design work and visual storytelling, and chats about using comics media to show his work as an activist. Known for drinking in films with the impossible, Julia Weltz is praised for her raw, honest, often humorous autobiographical comics. She said her follow-up book is complete but is likely to be published in 2026.
The day included a panel in the spotlight on Page Braddock, celebrating his extensive contributions to the comics, including the world of Jane in the graphic novel series, children’s books like Stinky Cecil, and his tenure as the creative director of Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates. Braddock was awarded the Sparky Award from the Art Museum of Comics and acknowledged her impact on both LGBTQ+ representatives in comics and the enduring legacy of peanuts. When asked about receiving Sparky, Paige said, “I was extremely honored to receive this award, meaning it means being recognized by the Manga Museum for his work in comics.
