Virtual Helsinki Zine Fest 5.-6.9.2020

I decided to follow Helsinki Zine Fest as much as I could during Saturday. This year it was held entirely online for obvious reasons, so it was easy to attend it through Youtube’s livestreams and Zine Fest’s own Discord server. 

Zine fest had interviews with Sophie Labelle and H-P Lehkonen, drawing livestreaming with other fellow comic artists, quiz shows and virtual comic launch events. There also was a possibility to go and join on hanging out in Discord servers’s conversations and talking about comics overall. Sounds pretty much like any other convention in real life - only there was less walking and you could follow and attend everything from anywhere you want. You could just be in bed and watch the stream under the covers if you wanted to (or was that only me? I guess not).

The program I looked forward to the most was definitely Vain Sarjakuvaelämää, which parodies the Finnish music show Vain Elämää, but instead of making song covers of other artists, the comic artists are making “covers” of other’s comics (I've watched a lot of Vain Elämää back in the days as well, so...) The program had several of my favorite comic artists whose works I’ve followed for years, so this definitely was the thing I didn’t want to miss. One “main” comic artist, three other comic artists drew the main artist’s comic characters. The interviewer asked the main artist questions about their journey of becoming a comic artist and what it is like to publish comics on the web and how the scene has changed in the webcomics field in the past 10 years (spoilers: it has quite a lot). I’ve been also doing webcomics basically for over 10 years (about 15 years to be exact), so it was interesting to hear what other professional artists’ views are like.

The event was really easy and chill event to attend to, and didn't require much energy to enjoy and chat with people for a little bit. Overall, the Zine Fest was held really well with lot of interesting content for both comic artists and readers.

This is me when people say webcomics aren't valid form of making comics.