Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2026 unveils full programme, and Kendal may never recover
The Lakes International Comic Art Festival has published its full programme for 2026, which means Kendal — a town best known for a confection that doubles as emergency rations for mountaineers — is about to be occupied by several hundred people with ink on their fingers and portfolios under their arms. The invasion runs Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th October, and this year’s festival poster comes courtesy of American guest Bill Sienkiewicz, a man who has spent four decades proving that comic art can be splattered, scraped, collaged and generally assaulted into something closer to fine art than anyone at Marvel expected in 1984.
Opening night, ticketed separately and traditionally the point at which sensible people give up on an early start, is “Asterix vs TinTin”. Comic creators do battle live on stage to prove which internationally-acclaimed hero is superior: the tiny Gaul with the magic soup, or the ageless boy reporter with no visible income, no discernible love life and a dog demonstrably smarter than he is. Menhirs versus moon rockets. There is no wrong answer, only Belgians and Frenchmen who will insist otherwise.
Elsewhere, “An Audience with Bill Sienkiewicz” does what it says on the portfolio, and the National Cartoonists’ Society of America marks its 80th birthday with a bash featuring Bill Morrison, Luke McGarry, Gemma Correll, Jason Chatfield and Colleen Doran, alongside festival guests including Dagsson, Pieter de Poortere, Petteri Tikkanen and the lads from Viz. The NCS and Viz in the same building on the same evening is either a landmark of Anglo-American cultural exchange or a licensing incident waiting to happen. Bring a fire extinguisher.
Frank Quitely turns up for “Frankly Speaking”, which one hopes he does. Chrissy Williams introduces poetry comics with a book that comes recommended by Alan Moore, and in comics an Alan Moore endorsement carries roughly the weight of a papal blessing, if popes had significantly better beards and more snakes. Kate Charlesworth talks Scottish comics; Gemma Plum, Francisco de la Mora and Zara Slattery discuss graphic novels exploring neurodiversity and disability; and Bryan and Mary Talbot join Belgium’s Nina Six for “Shining Through”, celebrating pioneering women Mary Wollstonecraft and Stella Benson. Steve and Luke McGarry return to dispense their usual comic mayhem, which regular attendees will know is a technical term.
Four exhibitions spread across the town. Serge Bloch’s “Not That Into Comics” occupies the Brewery Arts Centre Gardens from 21st September to 8th October, a title that from a French comics giant is either a joke or a cry for help. “Landscapes of Contemporary Belgian Comics” lands at the Abbot Hall from 2nd to 10th October, surveying a scene that has spent the last decade quietly out-experimenting most of Europe. At Cross Lane Projects, “In the Last Passage” brings together drawing, painting, animation, installation and comics by Khaled Jarada, developed between Gaza and Paris from 2019 to 2026, on themes of waiting, memory and exile — it runs to 14th November and it is not the exhibition to breeze through on your way to buy a bag of prints. And in the Warehouse Café, over-18s only, Hugleikur Dagsson and Pieter de Poortere present “Tree of Life”, seven chapters from birth to the afterlife, colour-coded by rainbow and shaded in pitch black. Simple lines, appalling implications, exactly as intended.
The Comics Marketplace fills the Westmorland Campus on Saturday and Sunday with a small nation’s worth of independent creators and publishers, among them SelfMadeHero, Cinebook, Colossive Press, Time Bomb Comics, Quindrie Press, Roger Langridge, Sarah Graley, Darryl Cunningham, Karl Christian Krumpholz and Kate Evans. Budget accordingly, because nobody has ever left one of these with the money they walked in holding. For younger recruits, Little LICAF takes over Kendal Town Hall with the first ever Giant Phoenix Comic Club, led by Phoenix stalwarts James Turner and Robert Deas, plus Marc Jackson’s Room 4 Comics live draw and a weekend-long collage comic extravaganza with Jenny Robins in which scissors and glue turn anything into a sticker. Workshops are free, places are first-come-first-served, and a £5-plus donation per child is gently but firmly encouraged.
Festival Director Julie Tait, on the return to Kendal, reckons first-timers will be surprised by the town and promises “the streets are alive!” Whether that is a description of the atmosphere or a warning about what happens when you put Viz, the Icelandic school of black humour and eighty years of American cartoonists into one market town, we shall find out on the second of October.
The full programme is on the festival website at licaf.co.uk, with an online edition on Issuu and a downloadable PDF. Tickets are on sale now. Pack a coat: it is the Lake District, and the weather has never once read a press release.
