Where Are The Superheroes? That is the question Lagos Comic Con 2026 has built its entire fifteenth edition around. But walk past the cosplay championship, and the gaming zone, and the answer starts to look less like a costume and more like a microphone. This year, some of the loudest heroics at LCC will happen on panels, not stages built for capes.
Lagos Comic Con returns on Saturday, 12 September, from 9 am to 7 pm, at the Landmark Event Centre in Oniru, Victoria Island. Now in its fifteenth year, the convention has grown into Nigeria’s largest gathering for comics, animation, gaming, cosplay and African pop culture, spread across the Main Stage, Comic Zone, Animation Zone, Nollywood Zone, Creative Campus and Game Zone. Among a packed programme, four sessions in particular are worth clearing your schedule for, and one of them has been two years and two state endorsements in the making.
In 2025, the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy was allocated ₦71 billion. None of it was earmarked for comics. That single figure, more than any speech or endorsement letter, captures the gap this year has been quietly closing.
Since the release of the Nigerian Comic Book Industry Report, published by Bookause Nigeria in collaboration with The African Comics and Cinematic Empire (TheACE), the sector has moved faster than its funding. The Report, built on creator insights, market data, and sector analysis, was formally endorsed by the Oyo State Ministry of Culture and Tourism in July, a decision covered by both Vanguard and The Nation. About a month later, the Lagos State Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture followed with its own endorsement. In the same window, Afroblot, an original Nigerian art style developed by comics creator Erivic Adedayo, has been steadily adopted by artists working outside the country. Recognition, in other words, has arrived. Infrastructure has not. The Report itself names this directly: the absence of reliable data and formal financing, not a shortage of talent or audience, is what continues to hold the industry back.
That gap is the subject of the session drawing the most attention on this list, ours included. It is listed on the official programme simply as “Building Institutional Support for African Comics,” though it is being built toward under the fuller title “From Report to Recognition: Building Institutional Support for African Comics.” The session runs on the Main Stage from 1:45 pm to 2:30 pm, as part of TheACE’s role as the convention’s Official Media and Industry Documentation Partner, and closes with a live presentation of the Report to the Lagos State Ministry on stage.
Six people will be involved. Mrs Nike Quadry-Adebowale, Deputy Director of the Hotel Licensing Department at the Lagos State Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, will represent Permanent Secretary Bopo Oyekan-Ismaila and address the policy and institutional side of the past two months’ endorsements. Nneka Evelyn Ojianwuna, Director of Bookause Nigeria, will bring the publisher’s commercial case for treating comics as a serious market category rather than a niche one. Erivic Adedayo, Convener of Comic Con Ibadan and the creator behind Afroblot, will speak to what it takes to build and export original African intellectual property. Abiodun Lawal, Partner at Heave Ventures, joins as the outside voice, someone who has helped structure investment readiness in other underfunded African sectors, most notably agritech, and is not there to speak on comics specifically, but on what makes any informal sector investable in the first place. Mujeeb Jummah, our Founder, joins as a panellist in his own right, the person who commissioned the Report and built the platform around it, answering the same questions put to everyone else on stage. Peace Echeomuha, a tech and innovation programmes expert and event host, will guide the five through the conversation.
The conversation is built to move somewhere, not simply to celebrate. It opens with Erivic’s account of what building and exporting original work in this space looks like day-to-day, before widening into the industry-level data Nneka’s segment provides, evidence that his experience is structural, not personal. From there, the panel turns to government, pressing for specifics on what the Lagos and Oyo endorsements will mean in practice over the next year, not just as statements of support. Abiodun’s segment follows directly, reframing the entire conversation around a single question neither government nor publishing can fully answer alone: what would it take for banks and investors to treat this sector the way they now treat agritech or fintech. Mujeeb’s segment closes the loop, before the moderator asks every panellist, him included, to name a specific commitment for the next ninety days, on the record.
That closing mechanic matters. A panel that ends in applause is easy to forget by the following week. A panel that ends in five named commitments is not, and TheACE has said it intends to publish a follow-up piece checking on exactly those commitments once the ninety days are up.
Running earlier in the Comic Zone, from 2 pm to 3 pm, “The State of Comic Books in Africa” takes the same underlying question and turns it toward the market itself. Oluwole Teniola Kamsi, Olabayo Enoch Osi, Kenneth Unamba and Olayinka Henrietta Edun will examine sustainability, publishing economics, monetisation, fandom and piracy, the practical, day-to-day version of the structural questions the institutional panel is asking at a policy level. Taken together, the two sessions read less like separate conversations and more like two halves of one argument, one about what government and financing owe the industry, the other about what the industry’s own economics currently allow.
The convention’s title question gets asked most directly in the Comic Zone from 12 pm to 1 pm, in “Can Superhero Comics Survive in Nigeria?” Toluwalakin Olowofoyeku, Jide Martins and Uzo Chiemelu, moderated by LCC Founder Ayodele Elegba, take on the theme head-on: whether homegrown superhero comics have a real, sustainable future in the Nigerian market, or whether the industry’s future lies elsewhere.
For those who would rather pick up a pencil than a panel seat, the Cartoonists Association of Nigeria brings four of its most established voices to the Creative Campus from 3 pm to 5 pm. Mike Asukwo, Morak Oguntade, Victor Asowata and Dada Adekola, cartoonists and caricaturists whose work has appeared across Nigeria’s daily newspapers and magazines, will walk participants through the techniques and creative decisions behind editorial cartooning, caricature and comic art. It is the one session on this list built for doing rather than discussing, and a reminder that everything the other three panels are arguing about- funding, sustainability, survival- ultimately comes down to work like this getting made in the first place.
Elsewhere on the programme, the Animation Zone runs its own throughline across the day, opening at 10 am with Akano Charles Jnr.’s “Heroes, Villains and Everything in Between: The Psychology of Character Voices,” and closing out at 2 pm with “Next Generation: Building Nigerian Animation for Children,” featuring Damilola Solesi, Muyiwa Kayode, Akano Charles, Tonye Faloughi and Catherine Okonkwo.
Winners of TheACE’s Guess the Speakers giveaway, run in the lead-up to this reveal, are already being contacted, with the official announcement scheduled for the day of the event itself.
The Nigerian Comic Book Industry Report is available for public access at thebookausereport.framer.website. Tickets for Lagos Comic Con 2026 are available at lagoscomiccon.net. TheACE will be covering its own panel’s outcomes in a follow-up piece after the event, including the specific commitments each panellist makes on stage.
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