Donald Juengling – Memphis Flyer

The Memphis Comic Expo’s 2014 launch was a huge success in spite of unfortunate scheduling.

“We were up against so much,” festival founder Donald Juengling confesses. “There was the Cooper-Young Festival, the Southern Heritage Classic, a Japanese festival. It was like five other big things all at the same time.” Comic book fans turned out anyway to browse the vendor booths and meet their favorite artists and writers.

Memphis Comic Expo

“Our motto is ‘Creators Come First,'” Juengling says, describing his vision for shaping the Memphis expo into something that stands apart from hundreds of similar annual festivals, especially at a time when comic book companies are rapidly expanding their TV and movie universes. “I think there was an appetite for something of this nature,” he says. “There are tons and tons of comic conventions around the country where you can go meet [actors like] Kevin Sorbo or Lou Ferrigno or the dudes from The Avengers. But we’re old-school. When they started these things in San Diego back in the ’70s, it was strictly about comics. And so are we.”

“Well, maybe not 100 percent,” Juengling corrects, pausing to marvel a bit at the mainstreaming of cosplay. “When I was a kid, if you dressed like Captain America and it wasn’t Halloween, you got beat up,” he says, impressed by just how much that has changed. This weekend, June 5-7, expo is bringing in Nicole Marie Jean and other internationally known cosplayers to judge the event’s costume contest.

This year’s guests include writers such as the prolific Cullen Bunn and the multiple Eisner Award-winning Kyle Baker.

Donald Juengling has been immersed in comic book culture for most of his life. He started working in a comic book shop when he was in junior high. Today he manages Memphis Comics & Collectables and was the driving force behind the successful launch of the Memphis Comics Expo earlier this year. This week he’s hosting a different kind of signing event, showcasing a slate of area artists who collaborated on the Juengling-penned graphic novel Bethany’s Song, a multigenerational fairy tale about love, loss, talking trees, heroic woodland creatures, greedy despots, and duplicitous crows.

Juengling started working on the self-published title Bethany’s Song four years ago when he heard himself complaining about comics a little too much.

Bethany’s Song

“I love superhero comics, but the medium is capable of so much more,” he says. “I told myself so many times, ‘Oh, I can do better than that; I can do better than a lot of this.’ At some point I heard myself saying that and had to call my bluff.” Inspired by comic book contrarian Warren Ellis to be the change he wanted to see in illustrated storytelling, he enlisted the aid of area artists and sent out copies of the text. Slowly, pages starting coming back, bringing Juengling’s fantasy to life from different visual points of view.

On Saturday, comic book fans can meet the author and have books signed by artists Anthony Max, Jean Holmgren, and Adam Shaw.

In addition to making and selling comics, Juengling has been busy planning round two of the Memphis Comic Expo. The event that focuses on bringing fans and comic creators together returns in June.

“We’ve got some even bigger names coming in this year,” he says, although he’s not quite ready to make an announcement.