Baltimore Comic-Con 2025 Welcomes Andrews, Claremont, Friedlander, Middleton, Mueller, and Ribic
The 2025 Baltimore Comic-Con will be held at the Inner Harbor’s Baltimore Convention Center on October 17-19, 2025. The Baltimore Comic-Con is privileged to announce comics guests Kaare Andrews, Chris Claremont, Barbara Friedlander, Joshua Middleton, Trevor Mueller, and Esad Ribic appearing at this year’s event!. Tickets are now on sale.
Kaare Andrews is a comic writer and artist known for his work at Marvel Comics and his distinctive art and storytelling on characters like Spider-Man, Hulk, and Iron Fist. Kaare is also the creator of the acclaimed series Renato Jones: The One Percent for Image Comics. In addition to his comic work, he’s an accomplished filmmaker, bringing his unique style to both the page and screen. His latest book is Spider-Man: REIGN 2.
Writer Chris Claremont has encountered more success than most writers ever dream of. He is a NY Times best-selling author, been awarded the prestigious Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters by Bard College, his alma mater, Italy’s Yellow Kid life time achievement award, and been inducted into the Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards Hall of Fame. His papers are collected in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, New York.
Chris’s stories are trend-setters for the industry. Although best known for his work on Marvel Comics’ X-Men series where he created the characters of Legion, The New Mutants, Dark Phoenix, Rogue, Gambit, Sabretooth, Kitty Pryde, and Mystique amongst many others, he has also written seminal characters such as Batman and Superman, originated Wolverine, The New Mutants, and Captain Britain for Marvel, and written several creator-owned series. Chris is published world-wide in many different languages. He has authored nine novels. He has spoken at Princeton, MIT, U Penn, and Columbia University, has taught at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, and has appeared on television in the US and abroad. He is the subject of monographs and documentaries. His work has touched millions.
Chris’s initial unbroken 17-year run on Marvel Comics’ The Uncanny X-Men is the stuff of industry legend. During that tenure, he took a lackluster series and transformed it into the dominant, best-selling title in the industry. His run culminated with the launch of the new title, X-Men. The first issue sold over 7.9 million copies. No one has come close to breaking this record. It is a conservative estimate Chris has sold in excess of 750,000,000 comics world-wide.
Chris’s work on the X-Men has brought resounding creative success. The story arc “Dark Phoenix,” with its radical treatment of the story’s central character, paved the way for the reinterpretation of superhero mythos throughout the comics industry. The graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills examines morality in all its guises, adding a sophistication to comics theory, and is the subject of academic papers. He has made Wolverine a household name.
Chris is well known for his progressive treatment of women in a genre that oftentimes relies on stereotype. Active, intelligent, courageous women characters such as Jean Grey, Kitty Pryde, Mystique, Rogue, and Storm have made Chris’s X-Men as popular with women readers as men, a rarity in the comics field.
Chris is equally well-known for his ground-breaking stories that fight prejudice and speak out for inclusivity for all, regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. These themes are highlighted in the “Genosha” story arcs in The Uncanny X-Men, and the “Mekanix” and “Intifada” story arcs in X-Treme X-Men.
Chris embraced mutants as a metaphor for all who are viewed as outsiders by the majority. Such daring, real-world topics are rarely tackled in the conservative mainstream comics industry. Chris took this on at personal and professional risk.
The summer of 2000 saw the release of the feature film X-Men, based largely on material created by Chris. The second Wolverine movie is based on the graphic novel Wolverine by Chris and Frank Miller. The X-Men movie Days of Future Past hews to his story arc. The trend-breaking TV series Legion is based on his characters, as is the movie The New Mutants. Chris’s stories are responsible for billions in movie profits.
Chris’s work for Marvel out in 2021 included a Gambit-Storm five issue miniseries with art by Sid Kotian, and a Night Crawler special issue with art by Rick Leonardi.
Chris is especially proud of his creator-owned work, which includes the historic fantasies The Black Dragon and Marada, the She-Wolf (artist: John Bolton) and the comic book series Sovereign 7. Chris’s prose novels include the science fiction High Frontier series First Flight, Grounded!, Sundowner, the fantasy series Shadow Moon, Shadow Dawn, and Shadow Star (co-authored with George Lucas), and the dark fantasy Dragon Moon. Chris is hard at work on new projects for comics, prose, and film.
Barbara Friedlander is proud to say that she was the first woman to create a character for DC Comics. The comic book was Swing With Scooter. Scooter, a former British musician and rock star, became a staple of the DC Universe for many years, even after her departure. The characters were wonderfully drawn by the great Joe Orlando. These quirky teens were her first children, and they were not unlike her real three offspring that she raised after leaving DC.
Barbara was introduced into the world of DC Romance by writer and editor Jack E. Miller. He taught her the ropes of editing and writing. It’s because of his mentorship that Barbara was able to develop many new characters and new features she developed at DC and which now endure in the DC Romance legacy.
In addition to Jack Miller and Joe Orlando, she had the great fortune of having worked with great artists, editors, and writers and creators such as Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Carmine Infantino, Julie Schwartz, Bob Haney, Irwin Drake, and Tony Abruzo — just to name a few. Sometimes, she feels like the last dinosaur from that magical period of DC Romance in the Silver Age, and she does have some wonderful memories to share.
Lately, Barbara has been writing romance again. She is trying to help to bring it back into the universe as a viable “new” genre. She has a million new ideas and feels romance has a (not so) new voice that is just waiting to be heard!
Joshua Middleton began his career as a comic book artist in 1999, providing illustrations for every major publisher and eventually branching out into animation and film design. In 2005, he began his long-running relationship with DC Comics, illustrating Superman/Shazam: First Thunder before rising to prominence as a premier cover artist on a wide variety of DC titles, including his recent notable runs on Aquaman and Batgirl. His exceptional skill and uncommon range as an artist have earned him his place amongst the very best cover artists in the industry.
Trevor Mueller is a comic writer from Chicago. His latest projects are Nexus Point and Re-Possessed (Webtoon Originals). He has also written the multi-Harvey Award nominated Albert the Alien. He has contributed stories to several anthologies, including Reading With Pictures (Andrews McMeel). He has also self-published several other works including Consumer, Beyond the Pillars, Los Ojos, and The Witches of E Wick Blvd.
Trevor also appears on occasional episodes of the popular web series Nostalgia Critic.
Trevor currently lives in Chicago with his family; his cat, Waffles, might be planning for world domination.
Esad Ribić is a master of modern day comic art hailing from Croatia, with over two decades of working with Marvel under his belt and various independent projects as well. Known for his fantastical painted miniseries such as Loki (2004) and Silver Surfer Requiem (2007) all the way to his more recent penciled works for Thor: God of Thunder (2012, where he co-created Gorr the God Butcher with Jason Aaron), Secret Wars (2015), and the in-progress miniseries Aliens vs. Avengers (2024), not to mention countless painted covers for books such as Fantastic Four (2018) and Conan the Barbarian (2019).
This year’s confirmed guests for the show include: Kaare Andrews (Spider-Man: REIGN 2), John Beatty (Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars), Russ Braun (The Boys), Jim Calafiore (NED, Lord of the Pit), Howard Chaykin (Time Squared), Chris Claremont (X-Men), Becky Cloonan (Somna), Steve Conley (The Middle Age), Michael W. Conrad (Manowar: Invictus), Jeff Dekal (Something is Killing the Children), David Finch (Moon Knight), Barbara Friedlander (Swing with Scooter), Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez (DC Nation), Mike Grell (Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters), Kevin Maguire (Justice League), Laura Martin (Nubia: Queen of the Amazons), Ron Marz (Green Lantern), Adriana Melo (Action Comics), Josh Middleton (Aquaman), Mark Morales (Thor), Trevor Mueller (Albert the Alien), Dan Parent (Sabrina the Teenage Witch), Amy Reeder (Power Girl), Esad Ribic (Conan the Barbarian), Afua Richardson (Kahhori: Reshaper of Worlds), Craig Rousseau (Herculoids), Louise Simonson (The Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special), Walter Simonson (Thor), Joe Staton (Dick Tracy), Mark Waid (Justice League Unlimited), and Maria Wolf (Phoenix).
