The Toronto Comic Arts Festival mounted its biggest weekend this year since 2019, overcoming logistical and geopolitical uncertainty to draw an estimated 28,000 attendees June 6–8. Authors, publishers, and readers gathered in a convivial atmosphere that felt like a homecoming despite an unplanned venue change: with renovations underway at the Toronto Reference Library, TCAF’s home since 2009, this year’s festival was staged in the historic Mattamy Athletic Centre, once home to the Toronto Maple Leafs and now a multi-use facility at Toronto Metropolitan University.

But as the festival approached, concerns over U.S. border policy overshadowed questions about how TCAF’s roots would transplant from the library stacks to the ice rink. Organizers fielded questions about gender designations on identification documents and whether these could expose them to scrutiny at the border. TCAF even organized a virtual session with immigration lawyer Catherine Glazer to address them.

“We’ve had so many cancellations,” festival director Amie Wright told PW, citing cross-border travel as the primary obstacle. “The festival has built a strong reputation as an inclusive space—a lot of transgender and queer creators feel at home at TCAF.” She added: “This is a time when we want to platform those voices. And this is yet another way that those voices are being minimized, unfortunately.”

For all that, more than 315 exhibitors filled Mattamy’s ice rink and basketball court, including 44 publishers. Exhibitors enjoyed more elbow room than in previous years, but lanes between tables were crowded with festival-goers perusing offerings from publishing houses big and small as well as independent artists. TMU basketball championship banners hung over tables of photocopied zines, mini-comics, and all manner of DIY merch, while readers thumbed through graphic novel finds in the arena seating overlooking the ice rink.

Headliners at TCAF this year included Kate Beaton, Guy Delisle, newly minted Doug Wright Award winner Maurice Vellekoop, and Captain Canuck creator Richard Comely. Friday’s Word Balloon Academy facilitated career development sessions for comics creators at the nearby Courtyard Marriott, and this year’s fest also saw the return of Libraries & Education Day, which gathered 125 librarians, scholars, and educators at the TMU Library.

With the topic of British artist Rebecca Burke’s recent detention and deportation from the U.S. coming up during multiple panels, the need for international community-building emerged as one major theme of the weekend. “Building supportive, uplifting community—it's the thing I've heard in almost every panel,” assistant festival producer MJ Lyons told PW. “It's a horrible moment, but we’re coming together and helping each other through it.”

A panel moderated by American Library Association president-elect Sam Helmick looked at protecting young readers’ access to stories written by historically marginalized voices, with participants drawing parallels between Alberta’s pursuit of new and likely more restrictive guidelines for school libraries and book challenges across the U.S. “Too bad we don’t have a tariff on censorship,” quipped Betsy Gomez, of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom.

Programming input from Matthew Noe of the Harvard Medical School Library, meanwhile, shined a light on graphic medicine. Noe pointed to titles at the fest foregrounding individual experiences wit health and wellness, including Rachel M. Thomas’s Shrink: Story of a Fat Girl (Graphic Mundi), a nuanced riposte to prevailing discourses on body image. “There are so many creators at TCAF engaging in the work already,” Noe told PW. “Part of the benefit of having us here and talking to publishers is trying to convince them to market these books as relevant to health and medicine. We’re gaining some traction.”

TCAF boasted a number of titles available ahead of their street debuts. Drawn & Quarterly sold copies of Eagle Valiant Brosi’s tragicomic coming-of-age story, Black Cohosh, and previewed advance copies of Cannon, Lee Lai’s follow-up to her acclaimed Stone Fruit. Additional debuts included the first volume of Quino’s Mafalda (Elsewhere Editions), a beloved Argentine strip available in English translation for the first time, and Endsickness (Conundrum), Sofia Alarcon’s collection of eco-anxiety parables.

Scholastic, in its first TCAF appearance, reported solid sales for Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series. Pantheon sold out of Anders Nilsen’s saga Tongues, Vol. 1, a new edition of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, and titles in their Let’s Make! cooking series. First Second celebrated the launch of its sister imprint, 23rd St. Books, showcasing Anna Meyer’s Saint Catherine. Fieldmouse Press reported good sales for Bread Tarleton’s Soften the Blow, centered around transgender wrestling, and Noah Schiatti‘s Ambiguous Blu, a story of adolescent isolation and secretive disordered eating, while Paige Hender’s The Confessional, an Art Nouveau–style vampire tale, was a strong seller for Silver Sprocket.

Montreal author Boum signed copies of The Jellyfish at the Pow Pow table, and on Saturday received the Nipper award for emerging talent. She noted with amusement that although Jellyfish is her breakthrough in English translation, “I’m old news in Quebec.” Pow Pow founder Luc Bossé estimated that French-language titles made up about 40% of his TCAF sales, which he credited to a combination of Toronto’s French-speaking community and language learners.

If there were doubts about what Wright called “the first edition of TCAF on ice,” the festival’s highest attendance numbers since the pandemic indicate that readers are willing to follow. “The reference library is a gorgeous building,” Alex Hoffman of Fieldmouse told PW. “But this venue seems to be working just fine.” And Sid Sharp, author of Bog Myrtle (Annick Press) put it like this: “I didn’t think I’d like it. But I like it.”

Ultimately, attendees agreed, the venue matters less than the content. “The comic scene in Canada is vibrant," Hoffman said. "I come here just as much to buy books as I do to sell them."

This article has been updated with further information.