Patrick Delahanty
Patrick Delahanty is perhaps best known as the creator of FanCons.com, the largest source for fan convention information on the Internet. He is also a producer and host for the AnimeCons TV podcast. Prior to this, Patrick was the founder and host of The Chibi Project where, for over 15 years, he was responsible for conducting horrible experiments on anime toys for no good reason.
Patrick is an advocate for fan conventions. He has attended nearly 200 of them and is one of the founders of both Anime Boston and Providence Anime Conference. He has hosted his popular improv event, Anime Unscripted, for over 20 years at over a dozen different conventions in two countries and in five time zones.
In 2014, Patrick used up a little more of his 15 minutes of fame when he and his wife created a custom “Dancing Baby Groot” from Guardians of the Galaxy that went viral.
Back in the 90s, Patrick was the voice of the fighter pilots in the award-winning Macintosh game Escape Velocity and its sequel, EV: Override.
He’s not on Twitter much anymore, so you should follow him on Bluesky at pdelahanty.bsky.social.
Svetlana Chmakova
Svetlana Chmakova is an internationally published, award-winning manga/comics author, with more than a dozen published books and her work translated into over 13 languages. Her comics-making journey started in her early teens, with Svet obsessively drawing random comics pages for stories that barely had a beginning and never really got an end, and could only very generously be called sequential art. Luckily all that pencil mileage wasn’t a waste of effort as it got Svetlana an admission into the Classical Animation program at Sheridan College, where her real comicking training began.
Becoming a full-time artist and writer after college, Svetlana has been doing that professionally now for over 20 years, drawing for animation, how-to-draw books, toy designs, and most of all, comics and manga. Svetlana did the manga adaptation of James Patterson’s “Witch & Wizard” novels and is the author of the fan-favorite manga series “Dramacon” and “Nightschool: The Weirn Books”, as well as the critically acclaimed Berrybrook Middle School graphic novel series including “Awkward”, “Brave”, “Crush” and “Enemies”.
Svetlana’s current series is the middle grade spin-off of “Nightschool”, with two volumes currently out in stores—“The Weirn Books: Be Wary of The Silent Woods” and “The Weirn Books: The Ghost and The Stolen Dragon”. Svetlana’s work is published by JY For Kids, an imprint of Yen Press; her hobbies include eating, sleeping, and buying far more books than she has shelf space.
For more information visit www.svetlania.com