Small Press Expo has announced the International Special Guests for SPX 2025. The show takes place on Saturday, September 13, and Sunday, September 14, with programming and workshops about the amazing world of independent comics as well as an exhibitor floor featuring over 500 creators.

Additional Special Guests will be announced over the next few weeks.

SPX 2025 is honored to have the following creators as Special Guests to this year’s show:

Carlos Sánchez

Carlos Sánchez is appearing all the way from Barcelona. His debut graphic novel, Rune: The Tale of a Thousand Faces, which he will be signing at the event, became the first graphic novel to win a Waterstones Children’s Book Prize category award in the history of the prize. It has also been shortlisted for Best Graphic Novel at The Week Jr. Awards 2025. It won Best Graphic Novel at the British Book Design & Production Awards, 2024.

His forthcoming book, Rune: The Tale of the Obisidian Maze also published by Flying Eye Books, is due for release in 2025. 

Ingrīda Pičukāne

Ingrīda’s Pičukāne’s new book Feminae Explorarum is a selection of comics, often set in vibrant forest worlds, inhabited by women engaged in quiet, personal acts of exploration. Blending myth and realism, the stories embrace states like menstruation, drunkenness, and solitude as meaningful experiences rather than trivialities. The forests are neither untouched nor idealized—they are tangled spaces of nature and human debris, magical and reflective. Ingrīda Pičukāne challenges expectations of femininity, offering a richly subjective and feminist perspective on what it means to truly observe and exist.

Lee Lai

A LAMBDA Award winner and breakout fiction sensation returns with a darkly funny slice of friendship strife.

Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape—not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. In high school, they were each other’s lifeline—two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.

In Cannon, Lee Lai’s much anticipated follow-up to the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a slice of what Lai has on offer.

Štěpánka Jislová

Štěpánka Jislová is an award-winning comics artist based in Prague and the cofounder of the Czech branch of Laydeez do Comics, an international organization that promotes female comic artists and their work. Jislová collaborated with Czech writer Tereza Čechová on the 2021 Muriel prize–winning Bez vlasů, later published by Graphic Mundi in English as Bald. Her new graphic novel Srdcovka (the original Czech edition of Heartcore) received the Muriel Award in three categories in 2024, including the main prize.

Joonas Sildre

Joonas Sildre is the author of the graphic novel “Between Two Sounds,” which tells the story of the acclaimed Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The graphic novel follows the celebrated Estonian composer through the cultural, political, personal, and spiritual upheavals that led to the distinctive style that made him the most performed living composer in the world. It is based on years of research and close collaboration with Arvo Pärt himself. The English translation of the book was published in 2024, bringing the total number of languages in which the book has been published to nine, following its original 2018 release. In the US, the book has received three top awards from the independent publishers’ associations.

Kit Anderson

Kit Anderson’s short stories have been published by Parsifal Press and collected by Avery Hill in the graphic novel Safer Places. Kit lives near Zürich with her partner and tiny dog where she enjoys walking in the woods and making comics about memory, nature, and wizards sometimes, too. Her latest graphic novel is the science fiction adventure Second Shift

Vivianna Maria Stanislavka

Vivianna is attending on behalf of publisher kuš! – she has been featured in multiple kuš! anthologies. She’s also bringing a limited edition zine for those who regularly delete their internet search history. Warning – she will doodle in your books! 

kuš! (speak koosh!) is a comic art publisher from Latvia founded in Riga in 2007. It is most well known for its signature pocket-sized anthologies and its mini-kuš! series. Kuš! popularizes comics in a country where this medium is practically non-existent and to promotes Latvian comics abroad.

Marc Torices

Horrifying and hilarious, Cornelius the dog is a spectacular trainwreck—you just can’t look away. 

Cornelius is a fumbling loser, the butt of everyone’s jokes. When his friend Alspacka is kidnapped, the subsequent criminal investigation turns into a dramatic and emotional ordeal, upending Cornelius’s life. Torn between his desire to be a writer and his immense guilt over his cowardly role in Alspacka’s abduction, Cornelius is a classic Faustian figure: an aspiring artist so hungry for success that he will pay any price.

Exquisitely drawn, Cornelius’s kaleidoscope of styles pays homage to the comics medium, an unabashed love letter to the form itself. Translated from the Spanish by Eisner Award-winner Andrea Rosenberg, Marc Torices’s critically acclaimed and award-winning Cornelius is mesmerizing in its originality.

Rachel Coad

Rachel Coad will be at SPX showcasing both her 2023 book NEW YORK CITY GLOW and 2025 release, STRAY CATS AND BAD FISH, Silence of the Eels, as well as her illustration work.

London 1977. A fish called ‘Creasy’ lives in the cistern of the men’s room at the Holborn tube station. He’s a key player in London’s underworld. His nemesis Ratty from Spitalfields is gaining power. Ratty’s money launderer disappears, all animal appendages’ point to Creasy.

Punk is here, and punkfish rule the waterways of London. Coked-up eels, a lion finds his purpose, and a fish improves his art collection.