Herceg Novi Comics Festival (HSF)

The Herceg Novi Comics Festival (HSF) is the biggest comics event in Montenegro, founded in 2007. The 2026 festival is its 20th jubilee edition, running 4–9 September in the Old Town.

The Old Town makes an unlikely and perfect comics venue: stone lanes, small squares and gallery spaces within a few minutes of each other, so the festival becomes a wandering exhibition — you drift from show to show the way you would turn pages. Early September light and the first cool evenings give the whole week an easy, end-of-summer rhythm.

Each year the festival gathers around a hundred guest authors, including winners of the Eisner Award, comics' highest honour — this year's jubilee line-up features Darick Robertson, Dave McKean and other international stars. Exhibitions fill the Old Town, and live-drawing sessions let visitors watch pages come to life stroke by stroke.

The programme runs deep as well as wide: masterclasses for aspiring artists, free workshops for kids, and nightly music that turns the festival into a September evening scene, spilling through the stone lanes after the exhibitions close.

Two decades in, HSF has done something rare: it has made a small coastal town a fixed point on the international comics map, a place where fans queue for sketches beside visitors who wandered in knowing nothing of the art form and leave converted. For collectors and curious browsers alike, the week is a rare chance to meet the hands behind the pages.

Everything is free. Early September is a beautiful, calm moment in Herceg Novi — warm sea, thinning crowds — and HSF gives the town a creative buzz that makes it one of the most distinctive cultural stops on the coast. Six days, 4–9 September, and no ticket needed for any of it.