By — Karla Murthy Karla Murthy By — Melanie Saltzman Melanie Saltzman Leave a comment 0comments Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/black-comic-book-festival-draws-thousands-in-harlem Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture celebrated the tradition of black comics this weekend with its annual Black Comic Book Festival. Thousands attended the two-day exhibition in Harlem, which also featured screenings, panel discussions and a cosplay competition. And for fans, it was a chance to meet some of their favorite comic creators and superheroes. Karla Murthy reports. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. Hari Sreenivasan: This weekend, New York Schomburg Library in Harlem celebrated the tradition of black comics with its annual Black Comic Book Festival. Thousands attend the two day exhibition, which also features screenings, panel discussions and a cosplay competition. And for fans both young and old, it's a chance to meet some of their favorite comic creators and maybe find some new superheroes. Organizer: The Black Comic Book Festival will started eight years ago and it was smaller as a start. Now we get about 8000 people. What's been really exciting is to see the ways that black creativity in black culture is being celebrated. Participant: Have young kids come up and get really excited about the books. Is really the point of it all. Our main character is a strong black teenage girl who's getting a team together to help her save the world. Child: There's a comic called the Tuskegee Airmen, and that's my favorite comic. Mother: His great-uncle, my uncle, was a Tuskegee Airmen. It's amazing that my uncle is represented in a comic book. Participant: It's MLK weekend and we think of comics and Martin Luther King is very different, but I think they're both about heroism and thinking about ways that heroes can be everyday people. That hero can be you. Listen to this Segment Watch Watch the Full Episode PBS NewsHour from Jan 18, 2020 By — Karla Murthy Karla Murthy By — Melanie Saltzman Melanie Saltzman Melanie Saltzman reports, shoots and produces stories for PBS NewsHour Weekend on a wide range of issues including public health, the environment and international affairs. In 2017 she produced two stories for NewsHour’s “America Addicted” series on the opioid epidemic, traveled to the Marshall Islands to report on climate change, and went to Kenya and Tanzania to focus on solutions-based reporting. Melanie holds a BA from New York University and an MA in Journalism from Northwestern University, where she was a McCormick National Security Fellow. In 2010, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in Berlin, Germany.