Kids Graphic Novel Festival returns to The Silver Unicorn bookstore

Once children reach a certain age, they take agency in what books they want to read, according to writer and bookstore owner Paul Swydan.

Children embrace that with an artistic twist at his indie bookstore, The Silver Unicorn in Acton.

On April 20, the bookstore will bring back its Kids Graphic Novel Festival, an opportunity for children as old as 12 to compete with one another by designing their own graphic novel cover.

The event also offers a chance for children and families to shop, supporting a local business that’s survived with great credit to the community, Swydan said.

“We did the first [Kids Graphic Novel Festival] last year and it was a huge success for us,” Swydan told MassLive late last week.“We had over 2,200 people register for it and attend. So we’re doing it again.”

As of Tuesday night, 2,062 people have registered ahead of Saturday’s festival.

Original graphic novel covers are reviewed by the festival’s judge panel. First-place winners receive a $250 Silver Unicorn gift card, $100 for second place and $50 for third place, according to the event description.

All children who enter the contest will get a $5 gift card to the store, but only if they turned in their submission before April 14.

The festival will also feature several locally and nationally known graphic novelists. They include Gale Galligan, Sarah Sax, John Patrick Green, Ray Xu, and Kayla Miller, among others.

What inspired the creation of the festival was how much children gravitated towards children’s graphic novels at The Silver Unicorn, he said.

“There is a whole burgeoning and bestselling genre of graphic novels that are aimed specifically at kids. Definitely not ‘The Dark Knight Returns,’ while we do have that in a separate adult graphic novels section,” Swydan said, referring to the dark, gritty 1986 Batman comic written by Frank Miller.

A look at inventory turns, or the measure of how healthy a book section is, showed that instead of an average of three copies of a book being sold, the turn rate for children’s graphic novels was “robust” at around 10, Swydan said.

“Once we saw that, we expanded the section and waited for the turns to slow down because now we’ve got a larger offering and the turn rate has never slowed down, no matter how many books we keep, kids come in, they buy them up,” Swydan said. “They especially like series of books. They can get to know the characters, the style of art or the author and blow through a whole series. That’s been a big part of it as well.”

With such popularity, Swydan said the festival brings out “how much originality kids have.”

“You never really see it until they put it on paper,” he continued. “It’s easy to talk with a kid and listen to their ideas and you’re like ‘Oh, that’s really sweet.’ But when you see an actual drawing that they made, whether by hand or using digital tools, it’s really just pretty awesome. Last year, after the festival, we put up all the entries for the kids’ cover contest on the wall in the store and people would just come in and just stand and look at it like it was a real art exhibit, which it was.”

The festival is rather new, but the store itself is rather young. The space once belonged to Willow Books, an Acton institution that was around for 20 years, before it closed in March 2017. Swydan said.

Around the same time, Swydan — a sportswriter whose work has appeared in ESPN Magazine, The Boston Globe and Boston.com — was looking for a new challenge, as he called it.

One year later, on March 24, 2018, with the help of other writers and readers, The Silver Unicorn opened.

“When I was still in the sports world, my reading tended to hew more closely to that,” Swydan said of his own reading habits. “I love reading just about everything. I lean more on fiction, sci-fi, young adult [fiction]. Now that we run more than a dozen book fairs a year, I end up reading a lot of picture books and middle-grade books which are books for 8 to 12-year-old kids. And of course, graphic novels.”

The turnout and support for this and other festivals held at The Silver Unicorn shows where things have improved since the “real ‘rubber-meets-the-road’ kind of moment” that the bookstore was where it had to temporarily close during the COVID-19 pandemic, Swydan said.

“Honestly, our community is what sustains us,” he said. “[During the pandemic, we] planned it out as best as we could, we offered free shipping and delivery, and people really responded to that. We got to the point where I was making 60, 70 deliveries a day around town and the neighboring towns we were able to get to because people wanted to see us here. They wanted us to be successful. That really just speaks to the kind of people that live around here. We definitely would not be here without them.”