Comic Store Owner Lashawn Colvin Dies, Aged 37

Lashawn Colvin, owner of the comic store Comics & Geeks in Montgomery, Alabama, and creator of the Beautiful Soldiers comic from Scout Comics has died, at the tragically young age of 37 this week. Lashawn Colvin was best known as the first black woman to open up a comic book store in the South of the USA, as well as being on the board of the local comic book convention, Urban Nerd Con.

Comics & Geeks opened in 2020, and Lashawn Colvin talked to Bleeding Cool about that part of her life, but the store was closed temporarily around a year ago. At the time, she told me of her plans “Events like the gaming tournaments, karaoke nights, DJ nights, poetry nights, chat and draw nights, movie nights, anime nights, just to name some of the events I want to do. My goal for my store is “COMMUNITY!” Creating a community of geeks and pop culture lovers who want to meet and mingle with other geeks and pop culture lovers. A place where my community for my store is strong and full of comic book lovers.” Online reviews from the store were very strong, only marred by recent ones where customers have arrived to find the store closed up.

She wrote comics such as Elsewhere and edited comics such as Stars and the series American Dreams, had Kickstartered her comic Beautiful Soldiers, which had then been picked up for publication by Scout Comics in July this year. She told me “‘I’ve been working on my debut book since 2013. So to see it come to completion after all these years working on it brings tears to my heart. Happy tears of course lol I have some of the top talents and mainstream artists working on my book like Boom Studios’ Hendry Prasetya who was the lead artist on the Power Rangers title, Uber and The Untamed artist Canaan White, Ed Dukeshire who’s my letterer and has also been the letterer on the Power Rangers title, Sebastian Cheng is making WAVES coloring for DC, Marvel, Image and all the big publishers.”

A service for Lashawn Colvin will be held this Friday, the 7th of October at 2pm at Alabama Heritage Cemetery.