In Pictures: Fan Expo Canada 2025 Day One

Fan Expo Canada, Toronto’s biggest comics and pop culture show is now underway. It’s one of North America’s largest shows and this year it runs from Thursday August 21st to Sunday August 24th. Here are my pictures from the first day:

 

Someone has created a character called President Pumpkin in reference to you-know-who. The spectre of economic downturn and tariffs looms over this con as it did with our con back in the spring. I assume that most of us are in for tough times ahead, so I don’t know if people are spending as much — I felt the opening day crowd might have been a smidge thinner than last year.

There are always replica vehicles on display. Here we have a couple from Back to the Future and Ghostbusters, as well as various types of light sabers:

Promotional media displays included a ride for Paramount+ and a pretty neat giant card display for Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the ‘Alone Zone’ promoting Wednesday, and the gaming area:

Some of the people in the Artist’s Alley include Stephen Platt, Klaus Janson (in front of his recreation of the cover of Daredevil #179), the Wordburglar, and Tom Grummett with a fan (Marc Azulay) who brought a production transparency from The Adventures of Superman #505 to get signed. In the north building, none of the big TV and movie guests had yet arrived, so I took photos of some of their booths where handlers and other staff were setting up.

The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art was here, along with a couple of their grads who have gone on to practice in their fields; one of them being J. P. Buzio.

I had extended chats with renaissance man GMB Chomichuk, who works in film while also being a writer and an artist and an enthusiast in regards to printing. I showed him the comic art pages I’d brought to trade (more on that below) and he pored over them, marvelling at the visible corrections and production marks. Usually, I post pictures of wonderful Golden Age and Silver Age comics I spy, but this time, I’ll post pics of actual silver collectibles with Golden and Silver Age images on them! In the eBay booth, one vendor was selling pure silver weighted limited edition collectibles both in collector card size as well as comic book size.

I don’t really collect comic books anymore — I just like to read them. I do, however, like to collect things from the production process of comics (especially pre-digital artifacts) including pages of art. Usually, art dealers don’t come north to Canadian cons but since Jim Lee is making an appearance here, his art rep, Albert Moy, came up to accompany him. Moy has one of the most valuable high end selections of comic art available. Most of it costs small and large fortunes and is out of my affordability, but Moy had a couple of lesser-priced pages written by Alan Moore and drawn by Rick Veitch. The first: a page from Supreme. The second is a page from Greyshirt, a character featured in Tomorrow Stories. For both of these, I traded a pinup of Concrete by Paul Chadwick and put a little money on top (also below).

There are lots of amazing pics I could have taken of the artwork on display/sale by Moy, but here is a brief sampling of work from Steve Bissette, Lee, Frank Miller, Brian Bolland, and Barry Windsor-Smith: