A recent Inky Eyes comic book mixer at Alienated Majesty Credit: Courtesy of Inky Eyes
he sign-up sheet at Inky Eyes is chock-full of eager cartoonists hoping to read their work. Whether they read or not, the quarterly mixer and reading series draws artistic storytellers of all varieties to Alienated Majesty, where they fill tables to sketch in the evening’s drink-and-draw portion, or otherwise chat and peruse the shop’s colorful comic selection.
Joseph “Joe” Hohman scratched his signature on the sign-up sheet one of the first times he came to the event. A few months later, the cartoonist, writer, and editor brought Passenger Pigeons to the stage for the first time.
“It’s more like a poetry reading,” Hohman found, contrasting the experience to prose readings he’s done. “You’re controlling the flow of everything, you’re controlling the energy of it.” Clicking from panel to panel on a projected screen, sharing a comic publicly can look like a PowerPoint presentation crossed with a one-person-show table read.
“I went into it thinking that I needed to put my presentation together in more of a performative way,” confirms Hohman. “You want people to laugh and clap.”
Laugh and clap we did – for Hohman and the four other comics on the last Inky Eyes lineup, each with their own visual and presentation style. For the uninitiated, a camp I was firmly in before that night in April, the concept of a comics reading is a little curious. Comic strips, zines, graphic novels – wherever you’re finding the written word enmeshed in illustration – contain countless visual cues. Feeling and pacing are imbued into font, spacing, color choices, and more. The form’s use of onomatopoeias and graphic dramatics come to life in a completely unique way in front of a crowd. When I attended Inky Eyes, readers flipped through their projected panels, narrating the dialogue and sound effects alike, their distinct world-building spilling out of the page. As the evening wrapped up, the sounds of contact information being exchanged and zines being flipped filled the bookstore.
That excited hum connotes success for the event’s founder, Ashley Robin Franklin, and other cartoonists with a can-do spirit like Hohman. “I’m a big believer that if there’s something you want to see in the world and you don’t see it, just make it yourself,” he tells me. He’s referring to the citywide comics anthology he’s noodling on, but that’s a story (hopefully) for another time. Zinemakers everywhere are propelled by this attitude, and the comics community organizers in Austin are taking it a step further.
Franklin got the idea for Inky Eyes following the release of her 2024 horror comic collection, The Skin You’re In, when they approached the decidedly spooky task of doing their first reading. “I am very shy,” admits Franklin. “I’ve always had a fear of speaking publicly.” Practicing for the release event in her publisher’s home of San Francisco, she felt shaky and nervous, but “halfway through I realized I was having so much fun,” she laughs.
Austin, unlike other big cities, didn’t yet have a stage for comics readings. Longing to bring her Bay Area experience back home, that just-do-it attitude struck: Franklin hosted the first Inky Eyes mixer in May 2025. If the ever-lengthening sign-up list is any testament, Austin’s cartoonists are catching on.
“Comics can be such a solitary practice,” says Kat Fajardo, who started her own cartoonist mixer, ATX Comix Meetup, last year, not long before the first Inky Eyes event. When she relocated to Austin from New York, she found herself missing the creative community there. “I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t connected with the right people or just wasn’t looking hard enough,” they recall.
Running into fellow cartoonists at annual festivals, like Lone Star Zine Fest and independent media exposition STAPLE!, told her the people were out there, but Fajardo was looking for a more casual, consistent community, so they started one. The bilingual cartoonist and middle grade author posted online about hosting a comics meetup and crossed her fingers that someone would show. A dozen storytellers filled the coffee shop in February 2025, launching the now-monthly event. A year and a half later, the meeting has spawned a Discord server of over 250 cartoonists, illustrators, and other creatives who use the platform to galvanize each other’s projects and host regular workshops on tabling, publishing, character development – whatever people need. “I think we crave a bit more than just talking to each other,” says Fajardo.
Inky Eyes’ performance component fills the gap. “I love comics reading,” the ATX Comix Meetup founder says. “It’s something that Austin definitely needed.”
Shared Universe
Franklin took notes from similar events she’d attended, and their own reading experience, to craft Inky Eyes’ formula. The first hour of the evening is designated for drawing and drinking, encouraging mingling and sharing work – but really, the founder tells me, it’s for the readers.
“That is for the readers to acclimate to the water, to be in their little bag like a little fish,” she explains, gingerly miming setting a bagged goldfish in a new tank. “I don’t want anyone to get there and be the first person to read and be so scared and not have a good time.”
For non-readers – or at least, for nosy non-cartoonists like yours truly – it’s also a fascinating window into independent comic creation. Many of the stories taking shape in Austin’s scene are autobiographical and each is the product of countless influences, from Sunday Funnies to manga and animated cartoons. In a flurry of drawing and writing, set to each creator’s own stylized tempo, a little window into their brain is born. Even as sketches, the page-bound world reveals an interconnected, sensory-rich storytelling style tying details like the shape of eyes to emotional tenor, or the length of words to speech patterns.
“I’ve always found comics [to be] a really great way to process. That’s part of what comics is for me, is journaling and processing the world,” says Inky Eyes co-host Sammy Ness. She joined Franklin several mixers ago after lending an informal hand to the event. A sign painter in addition to her comic work, Ness’ sketchbook – which she generously lets me peek at while we chat – is tidy and shaded, everyday scenes slotting into yet-invisible panels. Across the table, Franklin’s notebook holds iterative character sketches, creature-based collages, and unbound drawings that will eventually form horror stories or were a part the illustrative work they did for an upcoming middle grade release, The Girl Who Loved Monsters.
Though fans of each other’s work in addition to friends and co-hosts, Ness and Franklin’s styles from start to finish couldn’t be more different. “I think that’s why indie comics are so exciting,” says Franklin. “There’s so much room for experimentation, and also for showcasing those roots, and combining them in this exciting, loving way.”
Like in any form of independent media, plucking out a creator’s inspirations and relishing whatever shared appreciation can be found there, spun in unexpected ways, is part of the joy of engagement. “I love whenever I’m like: ‘Oh, this person is so inspired by Peanuts, and also this really scary horror manga, and also their real life, and also maybe something specific in their culture and in their timeline,’” Franklin says. The list could go on.
Franklin and Ness aim to showcase the variety of independent comic styles at every mixer, inviting readers to cultivate an eclectic lineup for each event. Talking over each other, Ness says: “We always want a mix.”
“Of everything – of type of comic,” Franklin continues.
“The look, the level of experience,” Ness adds.
“Age, if we can.”
“Background.”
“Everything – and also tone,” says Franklin. “I want to make sure there’s somebody who’s funny and there’s maybe somebody [where] this is one of their first comics experiences.”
For their upcoming third-quarter mixer, July 11 at Alienated Majesty, this approach is on full display. Natalie “Nat” Grimm writes a serialized web comic, Teyshas, following two best friends on a beer-fueled trek across the Lone Star State, in addition to creating pop culture-inspired prints she sells at conventions and art fairs. Jessica Orozco is new to Austin. The Sonora-born graphic designer and small-business owner explores many different illustration styles that combine colorfully in Tasty, a humorous, playful strip featuring irreverent clowns. Tomás Díaz Mora has been drawing dialogue-less cats, typically dressed in medieval garb, as @cat.board on Instagram for over 15 years. “That’s 15 years of cats doing all sorts of things, from starting coups to robbing banks to performing acrobatics,” he writes in his bio.
Marc Hess’ debut graphic novel, Coyote Peak, illustrated by Ukrainian artist Ira Bobrovska, is the first entry in a paranormal quest trilogy. After a career in publishing and nature writing, Hess published his first novel, The Gillespie County Fair, in 2019, and, after meeting Bobrovska at a Catalonia arts residency, is now trying his hand at illustrated contemporary adult fiction.
Chelsea Akpan, Saturday’s fifth reader, has a background in animation and a master’s degree in comic creation. The Arlington-based comic found out about Inky Eyes at Lone Star Zine Fest and has been excited for a chance to read to an Austin audience.
“I’ve been trying to do small things to get more integrated into the comic community,” she says. “Comics are such a small community anyways, it’s a small world, and then within Texas there’s only so many people.”
More and more members of that community, from further corners of Texas, are making their way to Austin’s events, adding their pencil, marker, paint, and digital creations to the table of zines, books, posters, and more that greet Inky Eyes attendees each quarter. Akpan’s color-packed, satirical comedy series LOVEFOOL! draws on her lifelong love of animated shows, full of movement and a quick-paced, show-don’t-tell mentality.
“I love to bring that to comic readings and do the voices,” she says. “There’s sound effects, I do voices. I might even have my friend do voices for a couple other characters. I have it paced to where it’s like a cartoon.” Words tumbling into each other, the excitement in the cartoonist’s voice is palpable. You can already start to imagine the full sensory comic reading experience that comes to life when a creator takes a story beyond the page. “You can tell the type of cartoonist you are based on how you read your comic,” Akpan declares.
Franklin and Ness have seen that play out time after time already in Inky Eyes’ year of meetups. “[There are] just like so many different ways to do it, and you can kind of tell where people are bringing that energy from,” Franklin says.
Theatre backgrounds, television fandoms, or poetic stylings that aren’t inherently clear in the physical media show up in the performance of comics. I can’t help but compare the experience to watching a new band – you might’ve heard the shoegaze inspiration in the recorded track, but their love of, say, hair metal only comes out onstage. Even genres that wouldn’t find a home in your headphones can make for an entertaining live experience in this way. Franklin and Ness tell me it’s often the same for comics. Styles they might not reach for on the shelves take on a full-bodied sheen that nearly anyone can appreciate in the glow of the projector.
“Something that would have just maybe not hit as hard on paper reading it alone, it takes on a different light,” says Franklin.
Future Thought Bubbles
Franklin and Ness are really just getting started as they embark on their second year of seasonal mixers. As the local community gathers more frequently, and innovative events pop up around the country – like New York’s experimental, theatre-bending comic reading event, Frog Farm – the Inky Eyes co-hosts figure we’ll be seeing even more from zinesters and cartoonists in the future.
“Literature has had this type of event forever, but it’s really exciting to have this type of community event for the comics community,” Ness says of the reading series. “People are excited to experiment too.” The painterly cartoonist points to readers who have brought live musicians or recorded soundscapes to the meetup, or created props or costuming. “I’m very excited about people who are using the event to kind of push boundaries or make a really interesting performance,” she says.
“We’ve, as a city, cultivated such a great environment for artists and writers to work on their craft and also meet each other,” Fajardo echoes, thinking of the overlap they see in the crowds at ATX Comix Meetup and Inky Eyes – and also the continual trickle of new artists in both spaces. All that mingling and workshopping keeps inspiring new projects, like Hohman’s pending collection of citywide comics and a free community zine highlighting creators and events coming soon from Fajardo and friends.
“You can see ideas morphing and people bouncing things off [each other],” says Franklin. “People are happy and excited to share resources [and information] like how to run a comic festival, or how to use this specific type of publishing equipment.”
The DIY spirit is strong with this corner of independent creation, and all are welcome. As Ness puts it: “You don’t need to buy crazy equipment, or have a degree, or anything in order to make something that is of value in the scene.”
The next Inky Eyes mixer is set for Saturday, July 11, at Alienated Majesty Books.
Credit: Ashley Robin Franklin
This article appears in July 10 • 2026.
A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.