SDCC ‘26 San Diego’s Comic-Con library card welcomes everyone

San Diego Public Library is marking its 144th year the same way it’s marked the last several San Diego Comic-Cons, with a commemorative library card designed by a local artist, tying the city’s biggest pop culture weekend to the stacks a few blocks away.

This year’s design comes from Keithan Jones, founder of KID Comics and organizer of the annual Black Com!x Day. His card shows a blue-skinned, antennaed family — two kids and an adult, red space boots and all — walking hand-in-hand toward the dome of the San Diego Central Library, pointing and grinning like any other tourists downtown. The alien family isn’t just a Comic-Con-appropriate gag. Jones said the point was to visualize the library’s welcome mat extending to literally anyone, even visitors from another planet, as proof there’s no one the library turns away.

For Jones, the project is personal. He started drawing comics as a kid in 1982, and has said the library was where that habit turned into an education, long before the internet existed to do the job instead. Without money for art books of his own, he spent hours on library floors poring over collections on artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, absorbing what he could for free. That history shapes his read on where libraries fit now. Jones argues that as AI and digital tools saturate everything, people will swing back toward the tangible and the authentic,  starting with books, no subscription or plug required. 

Comic-Con International and the library have run this collaboration for years, tapping local artists — among them Charles Glaubitz, John Jennings, Sarah Wilkinson, and Vince Alvendia — to design a card and matching keychain tag each summer.

Jones’ design is available at 36 San Diego Public Library branches while supplies last, and at the library’s Comic-Con booth (#5523) on the show floor. Any California resident can sign up for a free card and request the design; current cardholders get replacement fees waived through July. Jones himself will sign cards at booth #5523 at noon on Saturday, July 25.

Source: KPBS, Julia Dixon Evans — kpbs.org