This month, Picture + Panel confronts the weight of difficult childhoods with Melissa Mendes and Travis Dandro. From rural America's hidden cruelties to urban poverty's daily slights, explore their comics as they transform family trauma and addiction into art that breaks generational cycles. Author and Clinical Psychologist Dr. Christopher Willard will moderate.

All BCAF events are free to attend. If you wish to pay it forward, a $5 suggested donation helps sustain BCAF's comics advocacy and educational programming in the Greater Boston area.

Picture + Panel is a monthly conversation series that brings fantastic graphic novel creators to the Greater Boston area. Discover terrific authors and fascinating stories that combine text and art through conversational confabulation. Produced in partnership by the Boston Comic Arts Foundation, Porter Square Books, and the Boston Figurative Arts Center, Picture + Panel provides thought-provoking discussions for adults about this unique form of expression.

Book sales are provided at the event by Porter Square Books.

Melissa Mendes grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, where she currently lives and works. She started making comics in 2002 at Hampshire College and got her MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies in 2010. Melissa was the recipient of the 2010 Xeric comics self-publishing grant for her book Freddy Stories. In 2014 she began creating and self-publishing the Ignatz-nominated comic The Weight, now a graphic novel, inspired by her late grandfather's life.

Travis Dandro was born in Leicester, Massachusetts. He started publishing his first comic strip, Twerp, in the local weekly newspaper when he was 13 years old. In 1996 Travis graduated from Montserrat College of Art with a degree in fine art. Since then, his comics have appeared in dozens of college newspapers in the United States and Canada, and his first graphic novel, King of King Court, won the Lynd Ward Prize for graphic novel of the year. He currently lives in Belfast, Maine, with his sons.