Comic Arts Brooklyn

Comic Arts Brooklyn (CAB) was a comic book festival and art book fair organized by the comic book store Desert Island, held annually in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 2013 as a successor to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival (BCGF), CAB focused on self-published, independent, and alternative comics.

Programming
CAB was founded and organized by Gabriel Fowler, the owner of the comic book store Desert Island in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The festival centered around a single-day, artist alley-style exhibition space that featured roughly 200 artists and comics publishers. The days leading up to and following CAB often included affiliated events, such as gallery exhibitions, art installations, and screenings.

Exhibition space at CAB was invitation-only; artists and vendors must either have applied and been accepted, or be invited to attend by the festival's organizers. Admission to the festival was free for members of the public.

History
The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival (BCGF), the predecessor to CAB, was inaugurated in 2009 by Fowler, comics critic and scholar Bill Kartalopoulos, and Dan Nadel, founder of the now-defunct publishing company PictureBox. The festival ran for four years, until Kartalopoulos and Nadel announced in May 2013 that they would no longer organize BCGF. In July 2013, Fowler announced the founding of Comic Arts Brooklyn, to be held in November of that year. CAB was inaugurated on November 9, 2013 at the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Brooklyn, New York – the same venue where BCGF was formerly held, and with many of the same exhibitors – with programming directed by Paul Karasik. CAB does not officially record attendance for the festival, though organizers have estimated the number of attendees per year as being "in the thousands."

In 2014, CAB expanded from one to two days of programming, with the additional day designated for panel discussions. Organizers considered placing CAB on hiatus in 2016, but instead opted to include fewer exhibitors and reduce the length of the festival to its original single day of programming. In 2017, CAB relocated from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church to the Pratt Institute, nearly doubling the size of its exhibition space.

The last CAB was held in 2019, after the planned 2020 show was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event has since been on "indefinite hiatus" due to multiple organizers having relocated from Brooklyn, and the Pratt Institute no longer permitting events held by outside organizations.