Small - Sequential

page 1
An Interview with Jillian Tamaki
By Dave Howard
page 4
In Defence of God-Awful Comics
By Dalton Sharp
page 5
Canada outside of archetypes:
An appreciation of David Collier’s
‘Chimo’
By David Hains
page 6
Grey Zone: A Conversation
With Mark Laliberte
By Dalton Sharp
page 8
'The Listener'
by David Lester
Reviewed by BK Munn
page 4
Dakota McFadzean's Dailies
‘Here kitty kitty kitty’
‘God Comics’
‘Infinitely-falling baby’
page 5
‘People Around Here’
By Dave Lapp
page 6
‘ASTRONAUT’
By Samara Leibner
page 8
‘GOOD BUSINESS’
By Simon Roy
Articles
page 9
'MID-LIFE'
by Joe Ollmann
Reviewed by Salgood Sam
page 11
'Book of Hours: A Wordless Novel
Told in 99 Wood Engravings'
by George A. Walker
Reviewed by BK Munn
page 12
'Out of Our Minds'
Written by Melissa Auf der Maur,
Tony Stone and Kevin McLeod
Illustrated by Jack Forbes
Reviewed by Robin Fisher
page 14
'Paying For It'
by Chester Brown
Reviewed by Tom Spurgeon
page 16
On Message: A Conversation With
Joan Thornborrow Steacy
By Dalton Sharp
Comics
page 12
‘ENTROPY’
By Aaron Costain
page 17
31 THINGS THAT MAKE
CONNOR WILLUMSEN THE
CAT'S PAJAMAS
By Robin Fisher
page 20
Get to know the Doug Wright
Awards Nominees: 8 questions
awnsered by 12 creators
page 23
'The Raven'
By Lorenzo Mattotti & Lou Reed
Reviewed by Salgood Sam
page 24
A consideration of
Bus Griffiths’
‘Now You’re Logging’
By Brad Mackay
page 28
32 New books
& Events listings.
page 25
‘Another Honest-to-god
true life adventure’
By Ty Templeton
page 14
A four page preview
of ‘The Listener’
By David Lester
page 27
‘The Gutter’
By Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
page 18
‘Dream Life’
By Salgood Sam
page 28
‘Chess’
By Fiona Smyth
page 22
‘Office Stories’
‘Tony the sexual ghost
& Farmer Joseph’
‘Philosophical Phunnies
starring Julius Peeny’
By Nick Maandag
Foreword
Sequential is closing in on its
10th year online promoting the
Canadian comics business. The
Comics publishing world has
changed a lot in that time, much
of it for the good.
For the last three years we’ve
presented this limited print edition
of the site as a companion guide
to TCAF, focusing on New Books
and some of the creators you’ll
find around the festival.
In the back of this edition you’ll
find a list of new books being
presented at the show, and a few
events and parties.
There’s a whole lot of book
reviews this issue, and some
pretty juicy interviews. And of
course a sampling of comics from
a number of Canadian creators.
Have a great comics festival,
and don’t be shy about talking to
the various creators behind the
tables, that’s why they are here!
Max aka Salgood Sam
Publisher
Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 2.5
1
Masthead
Publisher
Max Douglas aka Salgood Sam
salgoodsam.com
Assistant Editor
AJ Murphy
Contributing Editors
BK Munn
frequential.blogspot.com
David Hains
novastealth.com
Dalton Sharp
daltonsharp.com
Contributing Writers
Dave Howard
davehoward.ca
Tom Spurgeon
comicsreporter.com
Robin Fisher
cartoongal.com
Brad Mackay
bradmackay.com
Contribiting Artists
Dakota McFadzean
dakotamcfadzean.com
Dave Lapp
childrenoftheatom.com
Samara Leibner
samaraleibner.com
Simon Roy
robot-blood.blogspot.com
Aaron Costain
aaroncostain.com
David Lester
thelistenergraphicnovel.wordpress.com
Salgood Sam
www.dl.txcomics.com
Nick Maandag
laffdepot.blogspot.com
Ty Templeton
tytempletonart.wordpress.com
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
mny.ca
Fiona Smyth
fionasmyth.com
Special thanks to our sponsors
for making it all possible!
This years sponsers are:
The Dragon
www.thedragonweb.com
The Beguiling
www.beguiling.com
Koyama Press
koyamapress.com
AdHouse Books
www.adhousebooks.com
Squidface & The Meddler
squidfaceandthemeddler.com
Conundrum Press
www.conundrumpress.com
THE LISTENER by David Lester
thelistenergraphicnovel.
wordpress.com
The Doug Wright Awards
www.wrightawards.ca
& K6C POSTCARDS
k6cards.tumblr.com
This is the third edition of Sequential Pulp
the special print edition of
sequential.spiltink.org
An Interview with Jillian Tamaki
By Dave Howard
Graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2003, Canadian ex-pat
Jillian Tamaki has since become a hugely successful New York illustrator, as well
as a much respected comics creator.
Her first graphic novel, 'Skim' (with writer Mariko Tamaki) won the 2009 Doug Wright Award for Best
Book the 2008 Ignatz Award for Best Graphic Novel, make the 2008 Best Illustrated Children`s
Books List with the New York Times, was nominated for four Eisner Awards, and was noted as the
one of the Best Books of the year for 2008 in both Publisher`s Weekly and Quill and Qure.
This year she is nominated for the Doug
Wright Awards’ Pigskin Peters Award, for her
petit livre Indoor Voice, a collection of informal
comics and drawings published by Drawn and
Quarterly. I was very fortunate to have a short
email interview with Jillian last week about her
approach to art and her influences.
Hanuka's work and that included 'Bipolar', the
comic he makes with his cousin Asaf. Later, when
I made the conscious effort to educate myself on
making comics (2004), I learned the most from
Chester Brown, Michel Ragabliati, Julie Doucet,
Will Eisner, and Dan Clowes. I got most of those
books out of my local library branch.
Did you have any favourite comics growing up?
When you signed on to doing 'Skim', was
there any prep work you did, any comicsI read a lot of Archie comics, plus the comics related research or other artists you looked to
that were in the newspapers. My parents really
for inspiration or guidance?
liked The Far Side, Calvin and
Any artists you went to or
Hobbes, & Herman, so we had
"...as I get older, I
whom you read when you
some of those anthologies become less impressed found yourself in a jam?
in the house too. I copied the
with drawing and am
"Punk Accountants" Far Side
I was never "signed" to doing
more deeply moved
cartoon for my dad's birthday
'Skim'. It started off as a 24
by ... straightforward
(he is also an accountant).
page collaboration between
When I was a teenager, my
myself and my cousin…
narratives. To be able
sister and I liked to cut up
there was no book deal. It
to tell a compelling
Archie comics and make
was initially released by a
story is so much more Toronto zine called "Kiss
collages with the balloons or
difficult than being
sticking them on new images.
Machine". But to answer
It's still a fun thing to do.
the question… probably,
able to draw badass
but I can't remember now.
pictures."
Growing up, were comics a
My ignorance and lack of
kind of guilty pleasure, was
formal training was probably
it something you embraced openly, or not a good thing, actually. I just did the best I could,
that important to you?
and approached it with the skills as I had… as a
I didn't really analyze it. In fact, when we were designer and an illustrator. I just read tons, as I
promoting 'Skim' in 2008, people would ask what mentioned. That was my education.
comics I read as a kid and I was just like, "Eh, 'Skim' is a master achievement--Seth has
I didn't really read comics". I had completely said in the past, much 'Writing' that is
forgotten that I read a TON of comics and I credited to the 'writer' actually comes from
really enjoyed them. I just didn't view them as how the panels and pages are laid out on
important or significant at the time.
the page--it is this graphic language that
I'm sure there are many, but am there any often conveys as much of the story as the
particular cartoonists or artists or designers dialogue--can I ask about your collaboration
or illustrators or writers or directors you with Mariko, your balance of who does the
admire, whom you can say had some layout the storyboarding? Not to take away
from Mariko in any way, so much of the story
influence on your work or approach?
comes graphically, it feels as if you shouldI became interested in comics at the very end -and more comics artists in general--get a
of my degree at the Alberta College of Art and credit as writer too.
Design, where I was studying Design and
Illustration. I became obsessed with Tomer Mariko and I are a good pair because she's an
amazing collaborator… she trusts my instincts
http://mutantmagic.com
2
and lets me build upon the foundation of her
story. She's never dictated to me or insisted
upon a change because it didn't fit the image on
her head. She will also suggest visual images.
To call myself a "writer" is potentially confusing–
we learned the hard way that these words are
actually quite powerful. Anyway, I'm in favour of
the term "creator" or "co-creator". It's the most
satisfactory term that encapsulates the comicsmaking process… ours, at least.
Can I ask about your use
of photo-references in the
production of 'Skim'? Did you
take pictures and draw from
them, especially in the Toronto
suburb of Scarborough? Your
work is wonderfully flowing, is
there any advice you can give
about drawing from photoreferences?
I mapped out generally what
I wanted to do, then traveled
to Toronto to shoot specific
reference. Most of it is from
around the St.Clair-Christie
area, where my sister was
living at the time and I was staying. That trip was
pivotal to my own mindset and I'd never attempt
to do a book about a specific place without
visiting it. Photo-referencing should support the
story and make the details vivid. That said, tooheavy reliance on photo reference is very bad
and should be avoided.
On your blog you mention working with
students - can you tell us what you are
teaching and where you are teaching it?
How has the experience been for you, does it
interfere at all with your creative process?
I teach second year drawing for illustrators at the
School of Visual Arts in New York. It does not
interfere with my creative process, in fact I have
to admit that, as frustrating as it can sometimes
be, it has made me a more critical, thoughtful,
and inspired individual. To see people make
discoveries about their own process (I try to
stress that what one learns in art school is not
a technique, but a process) is deeply rewarding.
Plus, these are 19 and 20 year-old kids… they're
showing you what's new and cool before it
becomes mainstream.
Are there any rituals, habits, processes
or other things you go through in order to
maintain your inspiration?
I have encountered this question often lately
and I'm always a little confounded by it. Most
of my creative friends are never at a loss
for inspiration…. they are at a loss for time,
resources, or struggle with the "business-y"
constraints of the job. But if you gifted them a
week of free time, they'd be able to fill it easily.
It's like that saying, "Only boring people are
bored".
You say you are grateful your foundational year
was spent in a Fine Arts environment, and has
shaped the way you think about images, make
images, and your understanding of Illustration:
how is it you think about images, and illustration?
That's a really huge question. I will only say that
I do believe Illustration can be smart and have
content, but Illustration is not Fine Art. They
are different worlds, with different histories,
communities, objectives, and constraints. The
exist in the world for different reasons. I was
trained as a commercial artist and I've long
given up feeling conflicted about that. That's my
philosophy and that of my husband, Sam Weber.
But we speak often about how that seems to
be changing… the nature of Illustration and
its place in society. Not even out of art school
10 years and it seems like our outlook is quite
curmudgeonly and dinosaur-like.
Rebecca Kraatz
Is there any advice you can offer other new
cartoonists? Any experience you can share
for even newly established cartoonists,
maybe around contracts or keeping your
vision?
I dunno, just make some comics! Seems like the
best time ever to be a comics artist… think of
all the ways you can get your
work seen. If you want to be a
cartoonist and are not making
comics, you're just lazy or
crippled by fear. Which are
two huge problems. As for
established cartoonists, who
am I to tell them anything?
I've only been doing this for
6 years!
Your Penguin Classic embroidered book covers are
amazing [see facing page].
Can I ask how you came
about with the job offer, can
I ask where the inspiration
came from for the concept?
I did some embroidery, because it was simply
something I wanted to try, and put it online. I'd
worked with Penguin's Art Director, Paul Buckley,
as an illustrator before, and he happened to
see my embroidery just as he was pitching
the "Threads" project. So it was fortuitous.
The inspiration was simply my love for those
books, the freedom assigned by the project and
the stitching effects I had been experimenting
with in the medium. Again, similar to comics…
I'm untrained in that medium, but I think that
ignorance has been beneficial, in a weird way.
You're a little more fearless if you don't know
you're committing cardinal sins.
Philippe Girard
Do you have any favourite contemporary
cartoonists, anyone you've read recently
who you liked?
I'm drawn to comics for different reasons.
Visually, I'm excited by weird comics that look
strange and unusual. I like Jungyeon Roh,
Sakura Maku, Dash Shaw, Brecht Evens, weird
manga and stuff. But as I get older, I become less
impressed with drawing and am more deeply
moved by more straightforward narratives. To be
able to tell a compelling story is so much more
difficult than being able to draw badass pictures.
So I'm in awe of people like Chester Brown,
Lynda Barry, Michel Ragabliati, Seth, Hope
Larson, or Tatsumi. I still do love me a fucked up
art comic though.
Looking at your wonderful petite livre 'Indoor
Voice', it seems lovely and freeing to sketch
unabashedly - do you keep a sketchbook
with you at all times? Do you sketch often?
How vital is it to you?
I don't sketch every day. But there's rarely a
day where I don't make something. Right now
I'm trying to teach myself how to quilt. But yes,
the sketchbook is completely essential. As I tell
my students, you rarely will make breakthroughs
–lateral steps– on projects.
You have a new project with Mariko Tamaki
coming up, is there anything you can tell us
about it?
Mariko and I are working on a new graphic
novel, Awago Beach Babies. It is no way related
to 'Skim'. Sequel, prequel, or otherwise. Mariko
is in the writing phase right now and I'm just
patiently waiting.
D.H.
Find Jillian online at www.jilliantamaki.com
3
In Defence of God-Awful Comics
By Dalton Sharp
Last Month
A friend was complaining that her co-workers couldn’t get a table at TCAF. “Well, what do you
expect?” I replied, “it’s a curated event.” “But it’s the perfect event for them.” “Not really, since the
key-note speakers, who set the tone for the event, are the likes of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.
Your friends do superhero parody...and not the kind that probes the human condition.”
A Few Weeks Later
I read a Jeet Heer article on the modern tendency
to declare everything curated.
He writes, "You...find curated movie reviews,
curated albums and curated comic-book
collections, among other wonders. In its broad
sense, curated connotes carefully crafted, wellselected, value-added, discerning, contemporary
and aware".
“Shit. Guilty.” I thought. Is TCAF curated? I guess,
maybe. Vetted? Ummmm, no. I’d say “space
restricted” is more likely the reason it’s hard
to get a spot. No problem, there are dozens of
open-call comics shows and zine fairs. Certainly
no one who’s seen the bulging zine shelf of the
Beguiling, the comic shop behind TCAF, could
accuse them of leaving any creators behind.
“It was a good
read. Lots of
depth, lots of
great imagery.”
But as for the wider idea of curation in comics...
There’s two thing cartoonists don’t expect. They
don’t expect to be edited, and they don’t expect
to be curated. The former is a bit of a continuing
disaster. The latter, I kinda like, because I like
it mixed up, I like it rough, poorly-selected,
undiscerned.
Is this true? Your stock market returns are just
as good throwing darts at a list of companies
as they are from careful selection based on
thorough research. I’m not sure, but I am sure
it’s way more fun to dart-method it! And if you do
hit a gem, you’re into some Excalibur shit, Divine
intervention. That’s always a good story.
— COMIC ATTACK
(LOS ANGELES)
A graphic novel by
Last Year
David Lester
I met a publisher at a zine fair last year. “Check
out this anthology I edited. It’s wildly uneven. I
don’t really choose between who goes in and
who doesn’t, so I apologize in advance if some
of these strips read like sandpaper.”
“But you have to choose.”
“You have to choose” I thought, “because you’re
running a publishing company and stake your
name on the quality.”
A compelling tale of complacency, art, power,
and murder that changed the course of history.
In THE LISTENER, two stories collide: the rise
of Hitler and a woman artist searching for
meaning in the art of Europe. David Lester is
also the guitarist in rock duo Mecca Normal.
Arbeiter Ring Publishing • www.arbeiterring.com
LitDistCo (Canada) • AK Press (USA)
ISBN: 9781894037488 • $19.95
I, on the other hand, am not running a publishing
company, stake my name on nothing, and have
a taste for everything comics. Everything. The
way Anthony Bourdain encourages you to taste
as much different food as you can, I would
encourage you to taste as many comics as you
can.
Last Weekend
In a cavernous late night used book store I’m
searching through the history shelves, when
I think, “it’s been a while, where the Hell’d my
friend go?” He’s on the top floor--comics and
magazines. This is the place I should never go,
because I will buy...something...God-Awful. And
so I do. Superman number 256. Superman fights
Tiger Woman. This is supposed to be disposable
kiddie culture at its worst, except it’s not.
The cover is an art lesson in eye movement.
Everything is simplified except for a tight circle
of space that includes Tiger Woman’s intricately
drawn hair and Clark Kent’s suit.
The inside story is less successful, but the crazy
uninhibited storytelling--a man transformed into
a fighter jet, a circus performer who believes
she’s a tiger--is certainly the raw roots of the
more sophisticated comics that will flourish in
the 90’s on. Only the most strange movies or
novels could make the dream-like jumps in logic
that are routine in comics.
Today
I’m busy laying out the next anthology. It’s a
mixed bag, uncurated, but it’s all kinda wonderful.
Comic anthologies don’t sell. Readers voted
with their wallets, they prefer singular stories.
So I’m relaxed, this isn’t about sales, it’s about...
collision maybe? Compare and contrast, atom
splitting. Comic-making makes leaps when
it’s jumping around, slamming into things. And
you need some kind of freedom field for that to
happen. You need un-curation.
Continued on p.7
4
Canada
outside of
archetypes
An appreciation of
David Collier’s ‘Chimo’
By David Hains
Critics love to categorize
things and Canadian books
often get sloted one of two
types. The hinterland
or the metropole .
Published by Conundrum Press. 7×10 / 136 pages - $17
ISBN 1-894994-53-1 & 978-1-894994-53-8
It’s a dichotomy seen in some of Canada’s best
and most representative works: The hinterland
in Alice Munro’s town of Jubilee ('Lives of Girls
and Women') and the metropole in Michael
Ondaatje’s Toronto ('In the Skin of a Lion').
The tendency to describe Canada and its
identity as a tension between a different kind
of two solitudes, the rural and urban Canada, is
quite appealing. After all, as Canada’s identity
evolves and leaves behind its rural, self-reliant
image and moves towards the multicultural city
growing pains will emerge. This comparison
tells a nice story, but it is a simplified and
incomplete picture.
Of Canadian cartoonists, one who focuses
more than most on Canadian nationalism and
uniquely Canadian stories is Hamilton’s David
Collier. Collier’s comics fuse the urban and
rural. For him, these elements are intertwined
and not disparate. His latest book, ‘Chimo’,
(Conundrum Press) features several Trudeauesque images of him kayaking on Lake Ontario.
The foreground is a pastoral scene as Collier
rehabilitates his knee that was injured in a
Canadian Armed Forces training exercise. By
getting in touch with nature, Collier taps into
a nostalgic Canadiana. But this gives way
to the background, where the industrialized
skyline of Hamilton looms large. In this image,
Collier captures how so-called rural activities
are inflected and incorporated into an urban
environment thereby showing how the typical
separation of the two is flawed and inadequate.
In some of Collier’s previous comics he
embraces this blurring more explicitly.
In a short comic entitled “And it’s
all in the Same City” in ‘Hamilton
Sketchbook #2’ Collier approaches
water’s edge, kayak paddle in hand.
He spots a groundhog near what
seems to be an industrial barrel and
asks the naturalist’s credo, “What
would Ernest Thompson Seton do?”
The answer is obvious to Collier that,
like Seton, he must draw to catalogue
and capture the environment he
sees. For Seton (most famous for the
original ‘Boy Scout Handbook’), the
environment was different. Growing
up in Toronto in the late 19th century
he would escape the city by visiting
the Don Valley Ravine and drawing
what he would see for hours on end. Collier
catalogues something different. Rather than
isolating nature he shows it in its contemporary
context, which includes the industrialism of
contemporary Hamilton.
Accurate reflection of events is part of Collier’s
mission as a cartoonist who focuses on nonfiction. His art is well-suited for this; his Crumbinfluenced line art looks like some of Seton’s
simpler work, enabling the expressiveness of
faces to communicate the tension of events
as they arise. Much of this tension comes from
the changing nature of things around him. In
‘Chimo’, these include how the armed forces (a
symbol of Canadian nationalism), evolve since
his first enlistment and his changing needs
and desires upon entering middle-age. These
are complicated, nuanced issues that inform
someone’s individuality. ‘Chimo’ doesn’t end
with a set resolution—we don’t see Collier head
off to Afghanistan or deliver nicely packaged
wisdom at the end. It’s a book about the journey,
how that journey is difficult and that no matter
the introspective powers at your disposal, some
things won’t be neatly resolved.
Collier’s work acts as observation more than
problem-solving. In this way, he is like Seton,
standing at a distance and assessing the
environment that influences the structure of
his life. Unlike Seton, Collier actively includes
the combined tensions, giving a more complete
picture of the world that he lives in. It may not be
reassuring and convenient like the archetypes
of the hinterland and metropole, but it’s honest.
D.H.
5
GREY ZONE: A
CONVERSATION
WITH MARK
LALIBERTE
By Dalton Sharp
Mark Laliberte works in Photography, collage,
illustration, and computer-based sound composition.
He’s exhibited and performed in galleries across
Canada and the USA, and in print including carousel
magazine which he designs and is one of major forces
behind. He’s long played with comics imagery and
recently published 'Grey Supreme', a experimental
narrative art book, with Koyama Press. Dalton Sharp
talked to him about this and other things in Febuary.
W​here did you come up with the title 'Grey
Supreme'?
The grey zone between art forms is what I’m
interested in. I’m a practicing visual artist and comics
is an interest. Increasingly there are people crossing
those lines. Those overlaps interest me. That grey
zone, so I just like the term. Not White Supremacy or
Black Supremacy, but Grey Supremacy.
There’s a history of ‘gallery artists’ taking imagery
from comics, like Lichtenstein. It seems there’s
more artists now entering the form itself and
going through the mechanics of making comics
instead of just taking individual images. Do you
have any theories about why that’s happening?
I think that Lichtenstein’s an interesting example in
terms of art history, because he approached comics
as this novel thing and did some interesting things
with it, but always very much positioned himself as a
visual artist slumming in this sort of lesser medium.
And that proved to be false in a way right? Comics
have their own legacy. I think when people look to
other mediums now they do it with a different intent.
High and low isn’t as crucial. Nowadays it’s from a
genuine connection to these minor histories, and I
think the results on the surface may look the same.
But the intent, and depth of where they can go is a
lot different.
What’s your attraction to comics?
I’ve dabbled with comics since my teens. I was born
in Windsor which is very close to Detroit, it was an
interesting area for the underground comics scene.
One of the main reasons was because [of local
printer] Preney Print and Litho. When the black and
white boom happened in the late '80s and early '90s
everything in North America was being printed in
Windsor, shipped out and never really coming back.
I remember realizing that all these books that were
hard to find were being printed in my hometown.
They explained to me that you can’t buy from us
because we’re just printing, but I developed an early
fascination with print, and with what was going on in
comics, and it sort of became a habit to visit them.
They would give me offcuts of Cerebus the Aardvark
phonebooks and things like that, and as an artist
they eventually became my landlord. I lived in the
same building that they stored the books in so I​could
always sort of sneak down, and peak at what was
being printed, and use the material as necessary.
At the same time as an artist, I was breaking away
from comics and becoming interested in photography
and collage and sound. As I took on all those new
streams, the idea of sequential language was always
an interest for me…and collage, which is sort of what
comics to me act as. From panel to panel there’s a
kind of mental collage happening.
I was talking to somebody involved in film. [She
told me] you could never do [what comic panels
do] in a movie, it would flicker. I had always
thought of comics moving like movies, but they
don’t.
6
Film is based on a [fixed] pacing of time, 24 frames
a second or whatever it is. Comics can continually
change pace between panels. An artist can be pacing
a certain way, and then between two panels jump 100
years or whatever, or back and forth in time, so it’s
irregular.
There has always been a divide between
superhero comics and the rest of the medium.
Now with comics breaking into the art world…
do you think there’s a possiblity of another divide
opening?
I don’t pay much attention to mainstream comics,
but I know that there are more than just superheroes
in that market. Similarly in the alternative market
there are superheroes…people playing with the
mythos from the last 20 years, and doing some really
interesting things with it. And then there’s all the rest
of the stuff, and I think it can probably divide quite
evenly into mainstream and non-mainstream.
The divide you’re maybe talking about is…when
someone makes a comic there are only so many
potential venues for the work. Certainly the printed
form has been one, but also now the internet has
become one, and perhaps the gallery has become
another. It’s kind of like another form to apply the
work to, and people are starting to play.
I wish there wasn’t as much of a divide. I don’t really
read superhero comics anymore, but there’s a rich
history there. T​alking about 'Swallow', the first story
[in 'Grey Supreme'] the idea of the book for me is…
Anne [Koyama of Koyama Press] asked me to do a
kind of one-shot project, and I had seven or eight
things we could’ve done. She liked a lot of the work,
and I thought it might be interesting for me as an artist
to treat it as a bit of a challenge and create a template
for myself to work within. So I started to think of the
idea of doing a yearly book, and what I actually
ended up doing, what I’m planning on doing is taking
projects that don’t seem to have larger homes and
can maybe live within eight or twelve or twenty-four
pages and work within the context of a series.
So every issue there’s going to be a different few
works and they may connect to comics directly, or
they may connect not at all. On this issue there’s the
two projects: one which is a photo print experiment
('Double Rainbow'), and the other which is a series of
drowning cartoons ('Swallow').
Will the other projects always be sequential?
I think it’s interesting because of where Anne is going
with her press. I think the success [Michael] DeForge
has had has really passed the press on to the comics
audience pretty firmly, and I think Anne is trying to
capitalize on that a bit, so more and more she seems
to be putting out comics proper. But there are a lot of
things she’s released that are kind of like art books
and, not that there’s a huge difference, but my book
exists somewhere in between.
I guess I’m sort of maybe thinking about capitalizing
on that same thing, looking to works that I have
already completed that are a bit more sequential.
For the second issue at least, I might try to push the
sequential element. I don’t have a plan past that.
D​id you consider doing this as a poster project?
Not really. These could easily be prints in a gallery.
For both these projects I felt like print was the way
to go. Koyama press is edging increasingly towards
comics from a bit of a left field position, and it’s sort
of right where I wanted to be with that work. I thought
that that audience could really look at it, particularly
the front project, and see the kind of cartoon language
and be interested in the idea of the series--what’s
going to happen next?
With 'Swallow', there was sort of
a battle going on here between,
a number of elements. Water
and air, and that double space.
Did you see it as a conflict…?
A conflict between?
Between different
water, air, dying?
forces…
the drowning hand, either it’s resonating or it’s
an innate fear that we carry…what are you doing
with the repetition?
I​ ​ guess repetition to me is an important part of my
practice. I bounce around a lot as an artist. When
people ask me what I do, I introduce the idea that
I consider myself project-based, so I’m not really
medium specific, but rather I’m context specific or
idea specific. Repetition is a way I
play through an idea. Sometimes I’ll
do one, and it’s like that’s enough, but
sometimes, something seems to have
a lot more…leg room or whatever.
And the way for me to explore that
is to do a second and a third… So
for 'Swallow' it’s always water and a
hand and that’s really it, but within
that I felt there was a lot of room. I
came out with a second book…do you
know this? (Holding 'Brickbrickbrick',
a book of ‘brick poems’, images of
many different cartoonists’ styles of
rendering brick walls.)
marklaliberte.com/projects/brickbrickbrick.html
In a lot of my work on the whole I
have an interest in the life/death
theme. These drowning cartoons
are very fun for me to do, you
approach water, you have a
hand, two great things to play with--how many times
can I work that through? I'm interested in looking
at mortality, but rather than doing it in a way that’s
connected to religion or to spirituality I’m looking at
it from a pop perspective and a surface perspective.
Like Bugs Bunny, violence can happen to cartoons,
but nothing really every happens to them. I think
there’s a sense of that in this work, but at the same
time there’s maybe a sense that these cartoons are
really drowning.
T​here was a play I saw about ten years ago called
'Lucky Strike'. The actors played out pulp movie
scenes, stuff you would see in a Humphrey Bogart
movie. They just repeated these motions over
and over and over again, imprinting an image. I
was thinking there was sorta the same dynamic
going on with Swallow. There’s something about
Continued from p.4 - In Defence of God Awful Comics
Un-curation is like a great night club, let’s call it the
Darwin Room. A place where you can check out other
artists and have a crazy freedom to fail. To throw
things up on stage, take your lumps, get booed,
applauded, to have some fun. The seriousness
that has started to pervade comics commits the
cardinal sin: it is uninteresting. It’s uninteresting in
its earnestness. God keep the God-awful comic zine
racks (a few feet from the beautiful art book comics),
the college newspaper comic sections, the low-sale
free-for-all anthologies.
This is not to say that comics should remain small
and marginalized. The opposite. Comics, like any art
form, need to be voracious with ambition, or become
irrelevant.
And comics are currently voracious, getting noticed
by the wider world. Movies look desperately and
gratefully to comics for ideas. Band gig posters
routinely outsell the music. Cartoonists see their
breath on the mirror of real pop culture. Comics are
not quite a corpse yet.
In The Future
I suspect there’ll be few record stores? Few book
stores? Comics are rising only because so much
is sinking around them. Movies and music are tap
water: free, ubiquitous and glamour-less. One thing I
suspect will be around for a long time: the coffee table
book. And comics can coffee table book themselves.
It’s happening.
They’re not comics, they’re graphic novels, very
ornate, very considered and very designed. Books
are tree flesh, and they feel great. It’s this uniqueness
that may keep comics around. This uniqueness, this
seriousness, the “comics as art objects” may sustain
comics, but it could make them a whole lot less fun.
I heard of it. Unfortunately I haven’t seen it.
I'll introduce it to the context here. It’s a project I
worked on in the background for seven years. At
some point I realized it had the potential to be a book.
I phrased these as visual poems, but it has a huge
connection to comics and illustration. A poem for me
is like a wall--a small form and the words are perfectly
placed within the context of how it exists on the page.
It’s a very beautiful thing, and the way it builds I’ve
always imagined this rather a bit like the way a brick
wall builds. So taking that metaphor I just started
playing with other comic artists’ bricks.
I could find just a few bricks sometimes. I tried to mimic
their hand and turn it into a singular field, and over a
period of about seven years I developed about 100
or 150 works. But again, looking at repetition, it’s all
Continued on p.10
Last Weekend
In the cavernous book shop, “it’s so beautiful” I
say running my hand over a shiny beautiful comics
collection. This thing is curated, very considered.
“And so scratched, and beat up.” This book has sold
well I think. These few copies are only here because
they’re damaged.
In about 40 minutes I’ll wander to the top floor, and
my friend will show me Superman number 256. I’ll
fall in like with it, and buy it for $1.99. He actually
shows me two Superman number 256s. The one in
better shape for $4.99, is less interesting without the
creases and folds.
TCAF Weekend
I have to get this anthology into the hands of that
publisher. She’s gotta check out this kid. His stuff is
so crazy strong. Like unbelievably strong.
The book as a whole is as uneven as a wave pool,
but man, there’s some great stuff in amongst the...
wave pools are fun! There isn’t the high without the
low, you need the bounce, you need to be all in.
Comics as “Rock ‘n Roll” Metaphors Are God Awful
How many bands have you never heard of? Could
your favourite band have developed without them?
Without opening for them? Without screwing around
with them, without knowing of them? Maybe. What a
boring show that would be.
D.S.
Find Dalton online at daltonsharp.com
www.samaraleibner.com
7
The Listener
by David Lester
Arbeiter Ring Publishing
304 pages
ISBN: 9781894037488
Reviewed by BK Munn
It’s funny where comics can take you and what
sort of far-reaching effects comic art can have.
Take cartoonist Walter Trier, for instance. A
Czech Jew who emigrated to Germany to work
as a cartoonist in 1910, Trier’s career roughly
coincided with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi
party.
Trier worked for satirical magazines like Simplicissimus
churning out caustic anti-Nazi political cartoons in a
disarmingly charming storybook style, alongside such
artists as Thomas Heine and George Grosz. Trier fled
Germany in 1933, worked on anti-German propaganda
during the 40s in London, and spent the rest of
his life in well-deserved semi-obscurity, drawing
New Yorker covers and goofy 1950s advertising for
Canadian peanut butter producers from his home
near Collingwood, Ontario. If you squint a little,you
can kind of read Trier’s life as an object lesson
in the power of political art. Simply put: because
people like Trier stood up to Hitler, the Nazis were
eventually defeated, and the liberal mosaic was
left to flourish in peaceful post-war Canada where
our greatest political decisions
became what brand of peanut
butter to buy.
Which brings me to David
Lester’s new graphic novel 'The
Listener', a fiction that essentially
reverses the trajectory of Trier’s
life, charting the imaginary
course of a Canadian artist
who revisits the nightmare of
Nazi Germany and realizes the
need for an artistic practice back
home that is politically engaged,
historically informed, and placespecific.
'The Listener' is a political work
of art about the importance of
making political art. The novel
tells the story of Louise Shearing, a Canadian
sculptor living in the UK who has a crisis of faith
after one of her works inspires an activist who falls
to his death in the act of hanging a political banner
off a building. Wracked with guilt, Louise gives up
her art and drifts aimlessly through Europe, studying
sculpture, engaging in brief affairs, and eventually
meeting an elderly German couple who tell her of
their experiences during Hitler’s rise to power in
the ‘30s and the crucial 1933 election in the tiny
German state of Lippe (population 100,000).
This little known historical footnote forms the core
of the book: Louise listens to the tale of how the
Nazis, through backroom dealings, intimidation,
violence and murder, co-opted the leadership
of the conservative monarchist DNVP party and
effectively stole the election, paving the way for
Hitler to assume the German chancellor-ship and
then to win the federal election a few months later,
ushering in the Third Reich, The Holocaust, and
World War Two. These events are largely narrated
from the point of view of the old couple, Marie and
Rudolph, who as DNVP activists and newspaper
workers in Lippe experienced first hand the
stormtrooper tactics and propaganda of the Nazis
and are haunted by their failure to halt or even resist
Hitler’s ascendancy and the horrors that follow.
Transformed by Marie and Rudolph’s story and
their subsequent remorse, Louise is able to return
8
to Vancouver and her work as a radical artist with a
renewed sense of purpose.
This bare bones synopsis belies the artistic skill and
depth of research Lester brings to the book. The
tale of Germany’s last free election is told in minute
detail but in a format that largely avoids dry textbook
exposition in favour of conversation and confession.
The story’s pacing is leisurely and Louise’s journey
from disillusion and despair to the point where
she stops running and picks
up her tools again is told in a
decompressed, naturalistic way.
At the same time, Lester uses an
arsenal of graphic approaches
to illuminate everything from
the subtle changes in Louise’s
inner moods to the high drama
and terror of streetfighting,
suicide, and assassination.
This is done with a variety of
visual references to the art and
styles of the 1930s, including
German Expressionism, film
noir (everything from a poster
for The Third Man to the use
of light and shadow), Picasso,
and the insertion of Nazi
political cartoons and headlines.
Moments of vertigo are
illustrated using a Carmine Infantino meets Marcel
Duchamp approach, while political meetings recall
scenes from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Like Louise, David Lester makes art from a left
perspective. Louise’s sculptures celebrate The Paris
Commune and anarchist guerrilla Nestor Makhno,
while Lester, who has provided the shiver-inducing
guitar hooks for seminal punk duo Mecca Normal
since 1984, has had a long career as a painter,
poster artist and graphic designer on projects as
diverse as Emma Goldman tributes, DOA record
covers and the design of BC Bookworld magazine.
This work ranges from traditional agitprop to more
multihued reflections on art and social justice
issues, and 'The Listener' benefits from this catholic
approach. There are black and white political issues
in the book but Lester navigates through them with
attention to everyday detail and human stories. The
book is awash in a sea of half-tones and grays that
are more in the service of storytelling, natural light
and emotional states than any Ditko-styled moral
imperative or mandate. Thus, scenes of Hitler
talking to aides while on the toilet in 1933 and of
Louise imagining the ghosts in a concentration
camp sixty years later use the same tones, but
one scene is claustrophobic and framed in black
while the other is wide open with lots of white,
symbolizing the difference in the two perspectives.
In a similar way Lester draws a parallel between
MID-LIFE
By Joe Ollmann
Published by Drawn and Quarterly
184 pages
ISBN: 9781770460287
Reviewed by Salgood Sam
Joe Ollmann has been amusing us with
sharp and cynical humour for a long time
now. And I’ll freely admit to being a biased
reviewer. I was first introduced to his work
in the '90s when my roommate presented
me with one of his zines after a Toronto
small press fair and told me it was the
most brilliant thing he’d read.
He was often prone to overstatement, and I didn’t
quite have my roommate’s unbinding appetite for
biting gen-x humour. But Joe won me over. Over
the years, his perspective has shifted and his work
has matured. So it’s probably not surprising I can
relate to another 40-year old today as well as I did
when we were both 20-something.
In his latest, 'MID-LIFE' Joe takes a strip out of
his own hide again, depicting John–a fictional
version of himself–as a overworked, under-slept,
compulsive and beset father struggling to keep
up with a second family while trying to maintain
his relationship with the children of his first. Mostly
successfully, but he’d never believe that if you told
him.
In the midst of this he develops a crush on a punk
pixie turned children’s performer and tries despite
himself to set up a rendezvous with her via his
job at a pop culture magazine. There is a fully
realized secondary story flushing out the object
of his obsession’s life, making the moment of their
meeting all the more deliciously uncomfortable.
Joe’s fictional persona John reminded me of a mid
life version of John Cusack’s protagonist in 'High
Fidelity', Rob Gordon. I should say they really are
not the same people. But that struggle against the
demands and responsibilities of life, fought through
a desire for casual sex is as strong a theme here.
This and the running inner monologues, it kind
of made me think of 'MID-LIFE' as a “what if we
returned to Gordon’s story 15 years later?”. Only,
Gordon is surrounded by cat shit, and no longer
sees himself as a desirable guy. Indeed he thinks
he’s a creep. And he’s too damn tired to make
lists.
Continued from p.8 - Review of The Listener
the death of the protester inspired by Louise’s art
at the beginning of the book and the murder of a
journalist by Hitler’s thugs in the flashback near
the end of the book. Both scenes are broken up,
jump-cut style, with panels illustrating the creation
of a drawing, with panels alternating between
violent moments and the counterpoint of relatively
banal movement of a pencil on paper. In the first
scene, Louise makes sketches for her next project,
oblivious to the fact her art has inspired a tragedy.
In the second, Hitler sketches Eva Braun while a
political murder is enacted in his name. In this way,
the binaries and parallels of the story are made
explicit: political art can be used for fascistic as well
as socially progressive means but it is dangerous to
neglect or ignore it.
In contrast to its more subtle approach to political
metaphor, 'The Listener' wears its historical research
on its sleeve, with quite a bit of actual quotes and
great dollops of art history ladled onto its pages and
wedged into everything from chapter headings to
snatches of lovers’ conversation. As well, Lester’s
Joe’s strength has always been in his dialogue
and characters. Despite using a lot of short hand
and satire, he seldom gives us two-dimensional
subjects. Even his least attractive bit player is
often human if not likable. A big part of this is
his art. It’s raw and rough, but I’ve always found
it really effective within his stories. It embodies
the anxieties, self-loathing and frustrations his
characters are often dealing with well. Joe always
does shambling wrecks like John well. But Sherry
Smalls–the children’s performer–manages to be
perfectly cute, and then effectively angry punk pixie
when called for. I know Joe doubts his ability to
depict things like that–pretty girls namely--but he
pulls it off. And far from some kind of foil, she has
as much depth and credibility--not to mention as
many issues and anxieties–as John does.
This is the longest story Joe’s undertaken so far.
Past books have been collections of short stories,
or “really long short stories”. Now that his son is
getting older I hope he’ll find the time, and the
sleep, to do more like it. I’ll be looking forward to
them. If I had a complaint it was that I missed the
novelty I felt when I first read Joe’s comics nearly
20 years ago. Having read them for as long as I
have there was much of this that was a familiar and
a logical evolution. But really that was all the more
fitting.
A very worthy read, I give it four out of five cat
poops, but I don't want to give him a big head or
anything.
S.S.
Originally published online 12.APR.2011
choice of computer generated word balloons and
text is often at odds with his meticulously composed
pages and panels, and is especially bewildering
when considered alongside the hand-drawn
representations of historical posters and headlines
which appear throughout the book and show that
the artist possesses a definite fluency and skill in
lettering. Some of the computer-set balloons have
a jauntily angular, ransom-note-meets-Rodchenko/
Constructivist look to them, but most just seem
awkward and jarring. However, these are slight
quibbles. Lester’s drawing is wonderfully expressive
and the book is an intense and well-structured look
at a forgotten pivotal moment in history that uses
the medium of comics to revisit that time and
propose an antidote to generalized political malaise
and anomie. In this sense the book is a fitting tribute
to the work of Lester’s cartooning precursors who
fought the good fight in the 1930s, as well as a
modern call to arms.
BK.M.
Originally published online 19.APR.2011
See page 14 for a four page preview.
9
Continued from p.7 - Grey Zone: A Conversation
With Mark Laliberte
about repetition, about the changes between them.
The sequence is really important to the book, and
I’ve clustered it into seven or eight sections. So this
section is brick walls that are incomplete in some
way, and in this section there are elements within
the context of the bricks, just subtle things, graffiti
tags, things like that. They’re really quite modeled,
but at the same time speak to the language of the
artists that I’m working with. I felt they fit better in
the poetry world than in the comic world, but yeah,
in terms of repetition I think it’s a prime example of
how I make work.
You would never get this sensibility coming
from mainstream comics, yet it really reveals
something about the style or the essence of
what comics do.
Someone wrote about it on the Comics Journal and
he looked at it from the perspective of comics and
the discussion…he seemed to really get the project.
And then there was discussion between the readers
and the writer of the review. It’s all really interesting
to me.
It’s probably a good example of why people with
a gallery sensibility should be welcomed into
comics for as long as they want to stay.
I did send Dave Sim some of the work just to see his
opinion on it. He really…I mean I guess I shouldn’t
have expected anything more. It was really kind of
like, “oh this is sort of interesting that the art world
is slumming.”
Ouch.
My understanding was that Gerhard was
responsible for the backgrounds and Dave Sim
did the characters, so I titled it 'Gerhard'. Dave
said, “oh no, I do a lot of the backgrounds too.” I
left it Gerhard because that’s my prerogative. He
definitely felt it was not of the comic world, which
I guess it isn’t.
It’s his point of view. It’s interesting because it’s
sorta like distilling each artist's stylistic DNA.
That’s exactly what it’s like.
You were saying about the spirituality…what
was that again?…about the spirituality without
the religion…
I’m interested in looking at mortality through the lens
of pop culture. There’s an artist named Bill Viola I
find quite interesting. He’s a video artist. All his work
looks at mortality but very much from a spiritual side
of things. I think he was in some way an influence
on me, even though it doesn’t necessarily show in
my work.
The idea that a sustained look at mortality through
artwork could work without being…that it could work
and that it could grow over time with you as you age.
I’ve always been very interested in pop culture, and
it made sense for me to use it as a lens. It’s more
interesting than history or spirituality for looking at
that. Pop culture has a tendency to be very surface,
so there was a definite challenge. I’m still working
through that as an artist.
You’re talking about mortality in a…are you
approaching it with just curiosity or dread or is
it a positive or a negative or…?
It’s this huge question mark. I’ve tried to approach
it in different ways, at some point in all of those
ways. Maybe having all those things happening
simultaneously is where the work sort of resonates
the strongest. I made a series of momento mori,
which is latin for, “remember thy death”. A lot of
the symbolism the painters would use--rotting fruit
on at able, a skull, melting candles--those are all
historically memento mori. I did a series of 100
10
sandblasted drawings on granite with skulls all
found in pop culture. Some of them are from
comics, and some of them are from album covers
and t-shirts and art history.
It’s interesting because pop culture is sort of
notoriously not looking at death.
Was it well received. I’ve shown it several times
and I guess that’s about as well received as artwork
tends to be. I think if there was a next step it would be
outdoors, like in a park or somewhere permanent. I
just did a comic-oriented thing for the TTC for a bus
shelter on St. Clair. It’s a collage piece of four long
horizontal glass panels. They’re based on a little
experimental comic I did about a year and a half
ago. It’s just like a comics explosion.
D​oes it read sequentially?
We were talking about reading the panels in
between…instead there’s depth between, almost
like layers. It’s like a comic that’s been shaken
around. Any time I’d used letters it’d have to be
something like an ‘H’ because it was glass that you
could see on both sides.
I’ve never even heard of it.
It debuted very quietly. They were just installed in
December.
I don’t know accidentally or on purpose, but [this
issue of Grey Supreme] has kind of stumbled on
an Old Testament sequence here with the flood
and then a rainbow…was that accidental?
I guess so. Merging those two works into one book
was more about the possibilities of the thirty-two
page space. I hadn’t really seen that relationship.
It’s an interesting one. They’re both natural
phenomenon to do with water. I actually thought
it was funny that rainbows are supposed to be
this promise from God not to flood again, and in
your photo the rainbow ends at this big pit, which
is threatening to fill up. That’s right outside my
window here. When I moved to this building it was
a completely open field for a very long time. The
condo thing is happening in Queen West.
I noticed.
So they were digging and it was taking forever and
it was just a pit and this rainbow happened. It was
goofy, but it actually looked quite beautiful and it
was like, “I’m just going to take some photos on
my roof here.” One of the photos just really looked
perfect, like that rainbow’s coming out of the pit,
and then it was like, “okay well what do I do with
this?” At some point I had the idea it would probably
look nice to print it, tint them, and print a kind of
rainbow sequence with the repetition. That’s where
the “Double Rainbow” comes from.
And then shortly before the book comes out there’
s this weird internet meme and it’s titled 'Double
Rainbow'. So yeah, that bugs me.
So you came up with the 'Double Rainbow' title
before that meme?
Y​eah! The project was probably done for about a
year and a half and I just had never printed it, and
when I went to print it people were like oh, 'Double
Rainbow'! Is that a reference to…” and obviously it’s
not, but yeah that’s…
Ha ha!
A​nd that’s another interesting thing about pop
culture right? Certain things are bigger than others
and you have to sort of…
You’ll never get away from that one. Ha ha.
Y​eah, exactly.
D.S.
Find Mark at www.marklaliberte.com
Grey Supreme at koyamapress.com
Posted on 16.FEB.2011 originally online.
Book of Hours:
A Wordless Novel
Told in 99 Wood
Reviewed
Engravings
by BK Munn
Porcupine’s Quill $19.95
ISBN 978-0-88984-335-6
George A. Walker is well-known as a teacher, designer and
book illustrator who also makes woodcut art
in the tradition of Frans Masereel and Canada’s Laurence Hyde.
Previously, he edited a collection of classic woodcut artists, 'Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic
Novels' (Firefly, 2007), and through his teaching at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto
has mentored a new generation of artists working in the same medium.
His latest work, 'Book of Hours: A Wordless Novel Told in 99 Wood Engravings', engages with that
tradition most directly, presenting a woodcut novel of his own and placing it in a continuity of graphic
narratives that deal with social and political issues of grave import and artistic significance, in this case
the traumatic attack on the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001. Walker states his
intention in the book’s preface:
“Other artists like Goya and Picasso have used
political anxieties as topics for their work, but what
sets the 'Book of Hours' apart is its lack of words
and its sequential narrative. I was inspired by the
work of Frans Masereel, Lynd
Ward and Otto Nückel; they,
too, struggled with similar
injustices and documented
their world in a narrative of
images. There are no words
to describe 9/11’s devastating
impact and transformative
power in our collective
consciousness –but perhaps
there are yet images that can
communicate the impact.”
In 'Book of Hours', Walker
presents a series of portraits,
tableaus, and public and
private moments, depicting
the imagined likenesses of
workers in the World Trade
Center office towers going about their business
in the 24-hours before the events of 9/11. The
organizing principle he uses is that of the ticking
clock, in this case represented by the face of a
digital clock rendered in Walker’s meticulously
carved method (the images were initially drawn in
ink on blocks of maple, then reverse-carved using a
variety of tools before being inked onto paper using
a press). The repetition of the dark inky clockface,
with its rubber-stamp, nth-generation-photocopy
look, is our only guide through the book, the only
repeating image, each time-stamp bracketing a
series of mundane, time-of-day specific events (the
last minutes of sleep in the morning, commuting,
working in the office, eating lunch in a food court,
and so on) as practiced by a group of people
representing a cross-section of ages, genders,
colours and classes.
The plot of 'Book of Hours' is simple. The book
opens with a woodcut of the World Trade Center
and quickly transitions to views of its occupants.
We see these people enact the routines of the day,
going through the motions of work and its social
interactions and obligations. The narrative, such as it
is, pursues this chain of barely-connected moments
for 132 pages to the end of the first day (11:11 PM)
and resumes again the next day (6:32 AM), following
the same pattern. The pattern repeats, but with a
sudden, stunning difference: at the 8:46 mark of the
second day the image is of the heavily-shadowed
twin towers and an approaching jet, pictured
suspended in the sky just before the moment of
impact. The following 6 images are slightly more
anxious versions of the images from the previous
day, as office workers shrug
their shoulders, point, and
talk to security guards –one
image even shows a figure
bent over a photocopier,
seemingly oblivious to the
mounting chaos above. The
final two pages represent
a more radical shift in tone,
befitting the tragic events they
depict: the penultimate image
is of a dramatically lit figure
recoiling in horror, perhaps
from the unseen threat of fire
or the approach of the second
plane, depicted in the book’s
final image, time-stamped
9:02 AM, a closer and more
detailed version of the
previous plane-and-tower tableau with the addition
of finely-detailed black billowing smoke.
The rest of the story, it is assumed, we know
and have experienced ourselves, in one form or
another. The fire. The falling man. The collapse.
The recovery. Afghanistan. Iraq. Bush. Obama.
Lives ended. The world transformed.
Walker’s focus is on the moments of ignorant calm
and pedestrian clockwork routine that precede
these storms and egos, and to this end his series
of woodcuts depict, and through the act of depicting
achieve, a sort of sublime existential boredom,
tinged with inevitability. His subjects are marking
time until the apocalypse, metaphorical stand-ins
for their fellow countrymen and perhaps for all of us
who sometimes live moment to moment, day to day,
without thought of the march of history, the greater
doom that approaches and the time when our own
clocks will stop their forward motion.
Overall, the book’s design is quite effective; from
its somber black endpapers and Smyth-sewn
binding to its majestic pacing and labour-intensive
production of images, the whole artifact, with the
possible glaring exception of the discordant use of
an actual photograph on the cover and frontispiece,
gives the impression of a deliberate and thoughtful
composition, very much in keeping with the book’s
themes of time and reflection.
Continued on p.13
11
Out of Our Minds
Written by
Melissa Auf der Maur
Tony Stone and Kevin McLeod
Illustrated by: Jack Forbes
Reviewed by Robin Fisher
There is plenty to admire about
Melissa Auf der Maur. Freed from
the shackles of her 90’s music
career, she is currently promoting
her new multimedia project ‘Out of Our Minds.’ Based on a bit of lyric
that came to her one night, “Out of our minds, and into our hearts,
standing by.”, 'OOOM' consists of a full length album, a half hour film
and a comic.
MAdM’s goal is “...to connect with people and
I love music and film and stories and visual
arts and paintings and I’m inspired by all these
things in one.” ([email protected]/)
In interviews she’s incredibly passionate about
'OOOM' (Out Of Our Minds).
I respect that she’s challenging herself in new
ways and formats. As well as revamping the
rock star paradigm. 'OOOM' is ambitious and I
applaud that, but so far, of this living organism
of art that she intends to keep adding to over
time, the only thing that stands out for me is the
music.
I was excited when I read about MAdM’s latest
creation as it was to include a comic. Since the
album’s release last year though, details about
the comic have been sparse. My comic guy
discovered issues at Forbidden Planet New York
and I shelled out the 16 bucks. (After shipping. It
comes with an ep, bookmarks and a signature.)
While waiting for the book to arrive, I checked out
illustrator, Jack Forbes’s website, thehebrewgod.
com. The art seemed
to be of the same ilk
as MAdM’s short film,
which I had seen at
The Musee de Beaux
Arts, JW Waterhouse
exhibit. (There were
faint
echoes
of
Waterhouse’s work in
Melissa’s film.) Anyway,
the comic arrives and
I’m honestly..... really
disappointed.
Illustrated in 2009, the
'OOOM' comic is 12
pages long, done in
black, cream and red.
There is no dialogue
or text, except for
the 'OOOM' lyrics at
the beginning of the
book. It has the visual
appearance of a high
school final assignment
and the subtlety of the
same. Initially touted as a graphic novel one has
to wonder if Melissa was also disappointed by the
end result.
The nicest thing I can say is that some of the
panel shapes/layouts were innovative, especially
the page with the Witch going after the second
Viking with the heart in the background.
As for the plot, it jumps around. There are three
specific time periods but I learned that from an
interview. Visually there seems to be only two
time periods in the comic. There is 1000 AD,
12
with two Vikings and a Witch and there is what I
guess is now, though it has a decidedly '50s feel
due to fashion and hairstyle. The past deals with
a robbery and an injury treated. The present: a
car crash and a heart ripped out. It’s all rather
obvious and exudes Angsty Young Feminist in
College themes.
There are other things that bug me about this
comic. Things I’d like to address directly to the
creator.
Dear Melissa Auf der Maur
Why was 'OOOM' impossible to find in Montreal,
your home town? I’ve seen interviews where you
extol the virtues of Montreal, how come you didn’t
use a Montreal artist for your comic? Seriously,
you can’t go five feet in Montreal without bumping
into one, and the majority of them are really
good.
Being an internationally renowned photographer
with a show in Washington DC right now at the
National
Geographic
Museum, why didn’t
you do a fumetti comic?
You wouldv’e had all the
control you desired.
You categorize yourself
as a feminist, of being a
woman in a man’s world
(The Music Industry), why
didn’t you use a female
cartoonist?
You’ve also talked about
how this is the era of
you going solo, being an
independent woman on
your own, yet you had
male co-writers and a male
illustrator dominate your
comic. I mean you were
in a band that continually
proved: “Sisters are doing
it for themselves.” What
happened with that ideal
in regards to your comic?
Finally, how could you let something so halfassed be associated with your name? No really,
you are Melissa Auf der Maur. The MAdM.
The Only woman to play Heavy Mtl last year,
You also connivinced Glenn Danzig to sing his
first duet ever, with you. You are a Hard Core
Rock Goddess and your ideas deserve to
better represented then by this 'OOOM' comic.
I expected better and really, there is no reason
for 'OOOM' not to be the amazing project you
wanted it to be.
I hate writing bad reviews; unfortunately I agreed
to write this one before I saw the work. I don’t
see the point in tearing someone down when
they’ve worked hard at something. But a friend
of mine, who has quite the reputation as a nasty
reviewer, once said something to me I’ll never
forget. Bad comics offended him. He felt it
was his right, as someone who paid money on
these items, to force the artist to take a long,
unattached look at their work and make it better.
Sometimes you get better because you realize
the critic had a valid point. Sometimes you get
better out of spite. Either way, You Get Better
and your product gets better because of it. If
'OOOM' is an art microcosm, accepting ideas
and creations on a continual basis, I think the
time to do 'OOOM' issue #2, has arrived.
Continued from p.11 - Book of Hours:
A Wordless Novel Told in 99 Wood Engravings
continuity between these cuts, we are left on our
own to fathom exactly what it is we are seeing.
Select portraits (usually the ones that have more
of a photographic rather than impressionistic feel)
have a superfluity of background detail and depth,
others are all foreground, with barely hashedin lines standing for a cubicle wall or street of
buildings. Some sequences achieve a mimetic
perfection by archiving the diversity of workaday
boredom, while still others seem like they are
striving to knock us out of our somnambulistic
state through jarring intrusions
of extracurricular titillation and
office romance. I’m thinking
here of a trio of woodcuts
that jumps from a realistically
rendered,
cubicle-dwelling
Dilbert-type posed beside his
computer to a dramatically-lit,
pin-up style woman with arched
back and pointed breasts to an
expressionistic close-up image
of a man kissing a woman, her
hand snaked around his neck
while the air above them is filled
with cloud-like curlicues. The
sequence of images is confusing
because it is unclear if they are
connected in a direct way. Are 'Dilbert' and the
pin-up queen kissing in the final image? Is the
whole thing a masturbatory daydream? Is it even
a sequence at all or just a random juxtaposition?
These are some of the minor questions 'Book
of Hours' confusingly provokes while leading us
through its moments-minded narrative.
Walker achieves this balance through controlled
variety. Some pages are made up of simple fluid
lines with generous helpings of deep blacks and
shadow, while others are complex beaver dams
of short, lightly-etched marks. Some images are
stand-alone, frozen seconds of time, others are
actually part of short two or three page sequences
featuring a repeating character or scene.
One such sequence, a diptych
of a security guard looking bored
and then smiling and pointing,
appears early in the book as sort
of a guidepost to our experience.
Another, a triptych, featuring a
pair of lovers traveling down a
corridor, engaged in passionate
lovemaking, and then sleeping
in each others’ arms, is the
last group of images from the
first day, and one of the few
emotionally compelling moments
in the book.
This lack of real engagement
with the people depicted in
'Book of Hours' is its greatest strength but also
a weakness. Through these sketches we can
identify with the universal nature of structured
activity and banality that most days are made
up of, but it is difficult to empathize deeply
with a nameless, almost generic office worker,
whether briefly glimpsed in a crowd scene or
painstakingly rendered in portrait form. Who are
these people? What do their faces look like when
laughing or arguing? Where are they coming
from, where do they think they are going? What
are their hopes, dreams, fantasies, nightmares?
Part of this disconnect lies in Walker’s approach,
which is to represent each moment as it’s own
separate world, with no place-specific signposts
or seeming continuity, either in terms of nongeneric objects, distinctive personalities, or
strong stylistic markers.
Flipping through the book, the impression is of a
jumble of unrelated people and scenes, with only
the rare establishing exterior “shot” of the towers
and the ticking clock to unify it all. There is no
overwhelming collective style to the individual
pages: some of the portraits and group scenes
have a slanted, expressionistic look, calling to
mind the agonized, dramatic heroes of Lynd
Ward, while others have all of the style and
emotional impact of rejected clip-art from an
office newsletter. Some of these tighter, more
static images look like they have their basis in
photographs, posed portraits with the subjects
staring out at the artist “camera” or reader, while
others seem candid or cropped from larger
panoramic views.
The looser, sketchier figures often depict actual
movement, with radiating lines indicative of
action, transition or heightened emotional states,
but since there is very little in the way of focused
R.F.
This book seems to be only available with the
album, we were unable to find ISBN and price
info - order it via this site: xmadmx.com
Walker writes in his preface that besides drawing
attention to the human cost of political decisions
while critiquing our “complacent adherence” to
routine and comfort, he is also reminding us that
there is a political aspect to representation and
a power dynamic implicit in creating and viewing
images, asking “Who is seen and who is not
in 'Book of Hours'? Who is doing the seeing?”
Looking at his woodcuts, we are compelled to
wonder, from what point of view do we engage
these images, as omnipotent artist and reader or
as fellow officemates and subway riders? Where
are we in these pictures?
There have been other works of sequential art
that have dealt with this subject matter, such as
Art Spiegelman’s highly personal and political,
but ultimately flawed, 'In the Shadow of No
Towers'. 'Book of Hours' struggles mightily to
present a thoughtful, dignified response to 9/11,
using the silent tools of the woodcut to address
the unspeakable, eschewing melodrama,
sentimentality, hyperbole, and even coherent
narrative for a largely unemotional, documentarystyle prelude to the horror of the attack. Maybe
at this far remove from the event itself we may
be ready to experience it objectively, through
something like the filter of Walker’s hand-carved
poetics of boredom.
BK.M.
Find George A. Walker online at
www3.sympatico.ca/george.walker
Originally published online 11.MAR.2011
13
A preview of 'The Listener' by David Lester
Arbeiter Ring Publishing
Reviewed
by Tom Spurgeon
Paying For It
by Chester Brown
Published by Drawn And Quarterly
Hardcover, 292 pages, May 2011, $24.95
9781770460485 (ISBN13), 1770460489 (ISBN10)
I felt myself at a disadvantage throughout the entire
process of reading 'Paying For It', Chester Brown's longawaited graphic novel about his becoming a john and
how that part of his life developed over a lengthy period
of time. I have no interest in prostitutes, less interest
than that in the issue of prostitution and sex work, and
can muster only the tiniest bit of prurient intrigue for
watching how a cartoonist of whom I'm a fan orients
himself to the aforementioned.
That's going to sound like a protestation, but I
genuinely mean that I lack a fundamental interest in
that specific subject matter. In his introduction, Robert
Crumb describes in some detail a woman of his
acquaintance revealing she did escort work and the
personal shockwaves within that circle of friends that
followed: that's the kind of thing that's unfathomable to
me. I assume I know a woman or two in that position,
and that I know a lot of men with experiences like
Chester Brown's. What I don't know is a lot of people
that have detailed their experiences and everything
related to them to the extent Brown has here.
The most fascinating sequence in 'Paying For It' for
me didn't involve a single naked woman
or the sensible peculiarities revealed
by the veteran comic book maker as he
unfurls the operational workings of such
enterprises from the consumer's end. What
I enjoyed most was a few panels where
Brown tries to orient himself to the fact he'll
soon move from the home of one-time lover
and longtime friend Sook-Yin Lee. Buffeted
by very understandable waves of grief,
Brown gathers himself, pounces on a brief,
inexplicable flash of happiness and pins
it to the white board of his consciousness
like an amateur entomologist. I've read
that section four times now. It feels much
more intimate than any time the cartoonist
depicts himself in the sexual act, more revealing, even,
than when Brown suggests we take a second look at
his actions throughout this work for the implications
of a surprising, final-act twist. The greatest strength
of 'Paying For It' comes in its facilitation of these tiny,
off-hand moments, less its ability to bring us the world
in which Brown moves than the manner in which he
processes what he sees once he gets there.
Off-key moments that yield worlds of meaning: that's
the unique opportunity afforded by a cartoonist of
Chester Brown's caliber. Brown has long been one
of comics' most important and vital creators, and was
maybe the last great cartoonist of his generation to
roar into the consciousness of art comics readers like
some sort of highway-jumping prairie fire, witnesses
to the unique strengths of his work testifying to the
devastating wonders of what was going on two or
three hills over. He may be the last giant of the form
to emerge where the scramble to encounter the work
in question involved print testimony and a long car
ride. Brown's talent allows him to depict anything
in comics form--any single thing--and have each
moment we spend in its company feel as remarkable
as other cartoonists' giant space battles and hearthealing moments of emotional catharsis. One of the
most exciting moments in comics in the last quarter
century was discovering that Brown's comics could be
as affecting and powerful depicting the mundane as
they were bringing to life sentient penises, parachuting
monsters and bristling, impatient messiahs. Any major
work by Brown should be seen as a key, celebratory
event in any comics-reading year in which one appears,
and 'Paying For It' fits that bill without question.
14
Brown is a master of quiet insistence. Much of his
work is about orienting the body, frequently depicted
as full figures rather than partial or suggested ones,
to oppressive outdoor spaces, insidious interior blacks
and, no less dramatically, other people in the room.
No cartoonist draws odder images that so quickly
register as normal, and no one in the narrative arts
makes such routinely inexplicable story decisions
that one accepts for the authority with which they're
introduced. Crumb notes that Brown portrays himself
in 'Paying For It' as having almost no visible emotions:
the face of his cartoon avatar is cut into an impassive
mask. This seems stridently counter-intuitive, in that
one would think a graphic novel about a controversial
subject like prostitution might lean on the most
humane, emotionally accessible depiction of its lead.
Brown always makes his own way, though, and that
way rarely provides comfort to the reader. There's a
jittery undercurrent to Brown's work that shimmies to
the surface at odd and unexpected times, a queasy
energy unlike anything else in comics.
That noted, it's always enormously fun to read Brown,
and 'Paying For It' proves no exception. There's little
I can write that will ever do justice to the enormous
visceral pleasure that can come with spending time in
Brown's version of reality. One could argue that 'Paying
For It' is a very good book about prostitution but an
amazing work about adult friendships and turning 40.
Brown makes a few folks just standing around talking
look like a miracle, a scene in a café like a matter of
great lifetime import; the cartoonist knows that many
of the key instances in life come during conversations
held while moving towards moments of much less
significance. Whatever the comics equivalent of saying
you'd watch a certain actor read a phone book might
be, that's Chester Brown. He has become like noted
influence Harold Gray in that you can fairly check
out of the story at hand, sort of leave the details of
the narrative at the side of the road, and settle into
an extended appreciation of watching figures slice
through a variety of environments in ways that affords
them dignity and purpose above and beyond the
details of their motivations and desires.
There is something deeply comforting about a
cartoonist so willing to play by a set of rules, even
when they seem arbitrarily selected. In the tidal
wave of different experiences presented between the
engages
that
topic, for instance
his certainty that
most people will
understand exactly
what he's talking
about, that's as
informative
as
the
confessional
element itself.
cartoonist and prostitutes in 'Paying For It' that is the
book's centerpiece--a choice almost no other comics
creator could have made without creating something
that somehow lasciviously winked at the reader and
become unreadable, even inhumane in the doing so-Brown's ability to give each encounter narrative weight
in some memorable way, even if he pushes through his
depiction of that encounter very quickly, makes us trust
him more as an advocate for both those experiences'
mundane qualities and their transformational effect on
the cartoonist. Sex may never be all the way a normal
experience for people; yet if everything's as strange as
it is in a Chester Brown comic, then maybe nothing's
all that outside of consideration when it comes to open
consideration, processing what it means, accepting
what other people value in specific permutation that's
offered to them.
The problem with having a disinterest in the general
subject matter that informs 'Paying For It' isn't that prior
knowledge and passion is any sort of prerequisite for
enjoying art on a topic--something even less true with
Brown's comics--but that in this particular case Chester
Brown seems passionately interested and invested
in the issues he raises and one may eventually feel
left behind. 'Paying For It' is far from over when the
cartoonist has his last, enlightening, words-and-picture
discussion of his personal experiences with one of
his close friends. In a manner familiar to those that
have experienced past works of extended inquiry by
Brown, 'Paying For It' offers up pages upon pages of
appendices and notes, observations both personal and
derived from key works encountered during research.
These pages make up a significant percentage of the
overall work, and I think any appraisal of the book has
to engage what they say and how they say it. Working
together, the notes and the comics push 'Paying For
It' past an extended march through Brown's personal
story and into a work of advocacy concerning many of
the issues involved. I think this may have been done to
the work's overall detriment.
Brown is unapologetic to the threshold of argumentative
passion--or whatever Brown's dispassionate yet
invested equivalent might be--on these matters.
It's clear that he's thought about them a great deal.
There are revealed any number of fun, pleasurable
and insightful elements to the supplementary material,
from Crumb's opening salvo to the photo of Brown
that caps things off. A significant amount of humor is
brought to bear throughout, particularly in some tiny
drawings into which Brown places arguments with
which he doesn't agree. Brown is such an idiosyncratic
cartoonist that his notes and commentaries delight
through off-hand descriptions of narrative choices that
no other cartoonist on earth would have made; such
curt, matter-of-fact declarations duplicate the unsettled
energy found in the work. Even an off-hand comment
like how he chooses to portray Sook-Yin Lee's hair
in one scene can set the reader's mind racing, or a
description of whose participation he chose to drop
from a discussion. Seth enters into the work as an
authorial voice, and his is a welcome, bracing, solicitous
presence. There's one set of notes that informs the
comics narrative a great deal, about a certain burden
Brown felt in his encounters with attractive women
until he started seeing prostitutes. It may be the key
to understanding the work. As is the case with similar
scenes in the comic, it's as much the way that Brown
None of these
positive
qualities
makes it any easier
to accept some of the underlying arguments. That
wider political and cultural issues are engaged in the
first place never feels like a necessity. A lot of what
Brown declares in the appendices seems derived from
boilerplate political and moral theory the cartoonist
may take as self-evident (a libertarian conception of
personal property, for instance), while readers may
not see things exactly that way or at least may wish to
object to a point here or there. These ideas are then
filtered through a personal set of circumstances that in
their usage here comes perilously close to suggesting
Brown's situation as portrayed is a universal one.
When 'Paying For It' functions as a comics-format
documentary about how Brown's way of moving
through the world is improved by his employing
prostitutes, it accrues effectiveness in a variety of
ways. We like Brown, or at least come to respect
the unadorned honesty with which he describes his
personal journey, the way his worries and fears are
resolved. As much as he seems to have benefited
from his current choices, we celebrate that he was
able to secure these things in his life. It's hard not to at
least be sympathetic to those choices coming Brown's
way without penalty or stigma, that current law may
needlessly restrict a range of human experiences that
includes Brown's.
This is a far cry from what comes through in the
essays: that Brown's orientations might somehow be
the basis for policy and cultural change, that all stigma
is correlative, that the removal of cultural discrimination
afforded paid sex is the difference between the world
we live now and a world that functions a bit more like
Chester Brown. When the cartoonist moves away from
his own experiences and into broader proclamations
about the nature of romantic love and assertions
that more frequent monetary remuneration in sexual
relationships will somehow ease relationships
between men and women, it's hard to engage with
what he's saying beyond being certain he means it.
To put it more directly, even for someone not invested
in the general subject matter, many of the broader
arguments fail to convince. That they represent issues
that can be argued, even passionately so, doesn't
seem all that remarkable an endorsement in the Age
Of The Internet. Give me scenes like the one where
Brown argues with Seth over the issues, seething and
impatient with Seth's answers and his own, desperate
and human in wanting to make and win such
discussions, over any number of facile dissections
of each argument's actual merits. Within the context
of a personal narrative, seeing Brown dismiss the
possibility of abuses as things he doesn't himself see
has a revealing, human quality; pushing past such
arguments in a more standard mini-essay on the issue
itself seems way more problematic.
Chester Brown remains now and forever a magnificent
cartoonist, and in 'Paying For It' his comics should
make all sorts of readers from all sorts of points of
view consider arguments they may never have given
the time of day otherwise. Part of me wishes that
things have ended there; another part feels churlish
in saying so.
T.S.
Originally published online
@ comicsreporter.com
10.APRIL.2011
15
thelistenergraphicnovel.wordpress.com
By Dalton Sharp
On Message:
A Conversation With
Joan Thornborrow Steacy
Set against Toronto’s fledgling Queen St. West art scene in the 1970s, 'Aurora Borealice'
follows Joan Thornborrow Steacy’s journey from shy self doubt to full engagement with
a rapidly changing world. The autobio is told through the fictional character of Alice, who
meets Ken Steacy (Joan's real life future husband and Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Famer)
and his comic-obsessed friends Paul Rivoche and Dean Motter.
Branded as stupid in grade school, Alice finally friends Eric McLuhan, a teacher who recognizes her talent. The
CN Tower is being built, Marshall McLuhan is lecturing, and everything seems possible.
Dalton Sharp spoke with her by phone from her home in Victoria.
To start off could you tell me a bit about how this
project came about?
Umm.. oh boy…
Sorry to be so broad!
It's been in my mind for quite a while, and when the
graphic novel medium came on my radar I realized it
was perfect to articulate this story. Then it was, “okay,
can I do it?” That's the question.
I did a book for my Dad’s 100th birthday in 2006,
Dalton: (The life of "Junky Jack" Thornborrow: a
Century of Hardship, Laughter, and Recycling) so
that gave me the confidence to do my own book as
a graphic novel.
Was it a true graphic novel or sorta an illustrated
story?
It was an illustrated biography. I had
to think about all the stories he told me
when I was a young girl that stayed in
my mind; I had this visual for them.
Basically the book is each decade…
his life coming over from England as a
boy, and then emigrating to Hamilton,
and all that… I made it into little slices
of his life and then illustrated them,
these stories.
I thought it was funny in the book where Alice is
annoyed by comics, meanwhile the story of her
life is actually being told in graphic novel format!
It's kinda ironic. Trying to communicate something in
words and pictures--I did find it very fulfilling and I’m
totally addicted now.
Oh great!
Yeah, too bad it took me this long, but anyways... I've
had many careers along the way, but this I find the
most interesting.
"I don’t know if you
can imagine being
in school and being
bored out of your
skull and not doing
very well and failing
and failing and failing because it just
wasn’t interesting to
you and then…"
And he lived to see it which was
remarkable and I had an opening in
Waterdown, the town I grew up in.
Friends, family and people who were
just curious about this book came, and it was just an
amazing experience. I think that really solidified my
confidence in myself to move on to the next level,
which is what I'm doing now with 'Aurora Borealice',
so yeah...
Cool.
I felt that both projects were exactly what I needed in
this time of my life. Writing has always been difficult
for me, but I think I was ready to do it. I had a lot of
determination to pull it off.
Why'd you choose a graphic novel rather than a
book or film or...
16
I've never been really a fan of mainstream comic
books, but when graphic novels came into existence I
said, “oh my God this is it! I love it. I love it. I loved the
quirky little drawings that people drew, that were very
sincere, that were just wonderful, not highly polished
and rendered. Then I just started doing my own.
Ken is a very good sounding board.
When I do find myself in a box and
I can't get out of it, and I'm not sure
how to proceed I do ask him for
help.
Sometimes if he tries to come in too
soon, when I'm still kinda working it
through that's not good, but he is very
helpful in many ways.
It's really convenient to have a
comics guy right there.
Yeah, my editor, and art director, and
I get to sleep with him!
Ha ha! Editors with benefits! Ha ha.
It is good in a lot of ways, but I need to make sure he
isn’t the dominant influence on me, because this is my
work, y'know?
There's a scene in this book where Ken is upset
because his drawing partner (Paul Rivoche) has
drawn him as a sort of Neanderthal and I thought
it was an interesting scene, because it shows that
depicting people can be a double edged sword...
were you nervous drawing people that were real...
wondering what the reaction would be?
I've always drawn little drawings of different situations.
Whenever I'd go on a trip I'd do some little drawings of
that trip, little highlights and I just figured, “well, they’re
just my little personal drawings.” I wouldn't want to
show them to anyone beyond my self and friends.
Yeah I was very nervous. I presented Eric McLuhan
with a copy of it last summer when I was in Toronto
and I mean, it was like, “oh God you're going to love it
or hate it. I hope I didn't make you look dorky!”
Then I realized well that’s my style and I should just
go with it. When I started reading graphic novels
like 'Paul Moves Out' and 'Blankets', and Raymond
Briggs is one of my big influences, I saw that he kind
of drew similar to the way I would draw and I thought,
“well okay, um, let's try to make a story.” It was very
challenging to put dialogue in, but seeing that I was
married to Ken Steacy for 35 years, and I've been
around comics for that long, that really provided some
of the background that I needed to do this.
He went away, and I was holding my breath on this,
and I got an email, and it was just amazing high praise!
I was flabbergasted, and so pleased, and so relieved.
You can imagine.
What was his verdict?
Yeah.
Paul Rivoche, some of the pages...he has not seen the
whole and I don't know what he's going to think. I tried
to get a hold of him last summer and it didn't happen,
so I'm just holding my breath on that one too.
Continued on p.18
13. He likes to use a pencil because “...a pencil
reproduces in more interesting ways, they're really
limiting.”
14. I find his stories to be sneaky, in a good way.
15. 'Explanation for Sator Stuff', 'Blackhold' and
his weekly comic 'Everett' have to be seen to be
believed. So go....now, www.connorwillumsen.com
16. His colour work will blow your mind.
17. He has appeared in 'The Anthology Project' 1 &
2, 'Pood' 1 & 2, 'Vice Magazine' Website, 'Texture
Magazine', 'PopGun' and has done covers for 'Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'
31 THINGS THAT MAKE CONNOR
WILLUMSEN THE CAT'S PAJAMAS
By Robin Fisher
1. Pay attention to the spelling of his
name. No E in Connor and no IAM or O in
Willumsen.
2. He is a new breed of cartoonist. Driving himself
to create everything he can think of with everything
available to him. I like to think of him as a Super
Cartoonist.
3. He was taught by his idol David Mazzucchelli at
The School of Visual Arts in New York after winning a
scholarship.
4. He is humble and strikingly aware of his career and
his goals.
5. He is not afraid to show you his mistakes. His blog
has his school assignments up for anyone to see.
6. Everything he does comes out so beautifully rendered
or deftly organic, it's hard for me to say if he even makes
mistakes.
7. He uses oil, pencil crayon, pen, ink, pencil, watercolour,
pretty much anything he can get his hands on.
8. He uses the computer quite skilfully. The internet is
a portfolio venue, a lab and a place to post his weekly
web comic, and the most effective advertisement tool.
His computer is also a colouring instrument and a layout
dictator, but yet he physically hates sitting in front of it.
9. He's a charming prairie boy with the “aw'shucks”
attitude of being born and raised in Calgary, Alberta.
10. He calls graphic novels and trade paperbacks,
“Books”
11. He went to the Alberta College of Art & Design where
he took a graphic design course and learned about
discipline and work ethic, as well as the structure and
rules of art and design, rules that he plays with daily.
12. He is currently working on a DC title with Kurt Busiek
called “Witchlands.”
18. The dialogue and text that appears in his work
are visually and audibly, succinct and artful, as well as
pleasing to the ear.
19. Young enough to be influenced by Paul Pope,
Sammy Harkham and Chris Ware with an eye to the
masters like Moebius, Barry Windsor Smith and Alex
Toth. He's a savvy dude.
20. 'Hot Brunette' did not happen to him.
21. A crème brulee doughnut got him the job at the 'Vice
Magazine' Website. He did 'Energy Box', his take on
superheroes, done in pencil crayon. It was delightfully
crude and real.
22. Likes to think about how language is used now and
in the future.
23. Refuses to create “storyboard” comics.
24. He likes to post a music track with some of his art
posts on his blog. He wants you to have “something
nice” when you visit the site. I appreciate the aural
immersion to his art and besides, Mingus vs. Eisner =
classy!
25. He likes to draw the mundane, the surreal and
heads.
26. He is adroitly capturing the silent secret moments of
childhood in 'Everett'.
27. I constantly marvel at his sense of perspective. It's
absolutely refreshing.
28. Sees puppets, costumes and video in his future
creations.
29. Some of his comics actually unfold slower than a
Jason Lutes comic.
30. “Everyone needs to realize what kind of power comic
books have when they're not being watched. You can
do anything.”
31. Super Cartoonist.
R.F.
Robin Fisher is the host
of the The Onomatopoeia Show
www.cartoongal.com
17
Continued from p.16 - On Message: A Conversation With Joan Thornborrow Steacy
By Salgood Sam
Um, I'm curious about these...so over the
years you were drawing wherever you
happened to be in a sketch book?
Queen St. and I don’t know if you caught
this...Laurie Anderson is a street musician,
there's Glenn Gould in there...
Well, they were just watercolour paper or
something small.
Oh I didn’t...I caught...uh, the one's I
recognize is Nash the Slash...was that
that panel?
I did it a little comic strip back around 1980, I
guess it would be before I had my son. There
was a trip that we took to BC, we were living
in Toronto at the time, but we went to visit
Ken's parents and Dean Motter and Cathy
came on this trip down to California with us,
right after Mount St. Helens blew up. In fact it
blew up while we were there.
Wow.
So I just recorded that trip in pictures, not a
lot of words but…
What size were you doing them?
81/2"X11" I guess. And then there was a trip
to New York that I did, not a lot of pictures
that I did, but enough to capture...it's better
than photographs I found... Just little details
and stuff like that.
The reason I'm asking is that in the
novel there's so many little details about
things, y’know, like just little…the way
the streetcar looks, or a particular street
in Toronto looks... I think that would
probably feed in... looking at a series of
drawings that you've done over the years
would help that out.
Yeah, I had to do an enormous amount of
research and one thing that really helped
with this is I have 1976 Eaton's Catalogue
that had everything imaginable! It was the
best reference that I ever had and…
That's a great idea actually for reference!
It’s funny. I hate to name drop, but Douglas
Coupland gave this to me, and he didn't
know I was working on this graphic novel at
all, but I had it for a while, and I thought it was
really cool and everything, and then I finally
realized, “oh my God I've got this book! I've
got the perfect reference--I’m going to use it.”
It's better than the internet.
Yeah it's almost impossible to remember
those fashions.
Yes and the furniture, and the stereos, and
the rugs, and the tacky things on the walls.
The '70s was unbelievable, bell bottoms, the
cars and everything…
You don't remember it until you actually
see it, and then you’re like, “oh yeah, I
remember.”
Totally. Yes, it was a great resource. The ugly
hair too…
But yeah, there's an awful lot of work getting
all the details. There’s a scene walking down
18
Yes.
I didn't catch everybody! I had no idea.
There's a cameo of Ken and I in present day.
That's awesome!
I just thought, “Alfred Hitchcock, he does it
all the time!”
Yeah, ha ha.
Puts himself in his work, so I thought, “okay
so there we are, and then there we are
young in the background.
I noticed some things in that panel, but
not everything by a long shot. It's really
packed!
You can get away with that. You can put in
all sorts of details that you may not catch
on the first reading, and the same with my
Dad's book, I’ve put all sorts of stuff that I
intentionally embedded into the works.
It’s a lot of fun. Ha ha.
Yeah.
Even the little details like the Kraft Caramel
commercials that I had forgot about.
They’re permanently etched into your brain,
and you can't get them out. Bonanza!
Everybody watched Bonanza. Everybody
watched the same shows. You'd get on the
school bus and discuss what everybody
watch the other night. It’s a very different
world from what it was then.
They stick with you. And they're our
background, the stuff we don't pay attention
too much, but it certainly has an effect on us.
That's what intrigued me about the McLuhan
thing.
I don't know if you can imagine being in
school and being bored out of your skull and
not doing very well and failing and failing and
failing because it just wasn't interesting to
you and then...going to art college and I had
Eric's class… It was just mind expanding, so
fascinating.
It stayed with me and I still read his books.
So Eric was like a mentor to me all along,
he still is, a very good friend, I mean it's just
remarkable to have a colleague, friend, like
that. Somebody to have to talk to about all
these interesting things that are out there in
our world today, technology and the changes
that effect our behavior.
Looking back, writing
this graphic novel,
looking at the challenges
you had…was it painful
to write it, or was it
satisfying?
It was painful, satisfying…
I guess like anything, the
harder you work at it the
greater the pleasure of
finishing it. There were
times when you just want
to jump off a cliff, “is it
working? I don't know!”
Did you have to take
breaks from it or...?
In the book someone is saying eventually
TV isn't going to be the dominant...at the
time it was the dominant medium...but it
wasn't always going to be, at that time it
was sort of a revolutionary thing to say…
I mean it was so much a part of our...
You couldn't imagine anything else.
But now with so many technologies coming
so fast, I think its an amazing time for people
to...I mean in a sense the whole literacy
thing, there’s a new kind of literacy we need
for lack of a better word. There’s a quote by
Marshall McLuhan I was going to put it in the
book, but I lost it for a while. Then I found it.
He says,
“when the globe becomes a single
electronic web with all its languages
and culture recorded on a single tribal
drum, the fixed point of view of print
culture becomes irrelevant, however
precious.”
Hmm, it's true. It's kind of scary at the
same time. It's really powerful too.
More than we realize our brains are being
changed because of [technology], and in
some ways good and some bad. It's always
been that way. It’s still fascinating for me and
I think if anybody wants to tackle McLuhan
you just stay with it, work hard at it, and you'll
get a lot from it.
Yeah. Some of the ideas of his, where he's
talking or being quoted in the book, I had
to sorta pause and absorb it. Ha ha.
Exactly. That's what it was like having Eric
as a teacher and listening to McLuhan talk.
You're just, "wow that was sorta interesting, I
have to sit down for a minute and think about
that one!" He always made you think.
Eric's class finally tapped into my thinking
abilities, which were always there, but never
igniting. It was just what I needed at that
time.
Am I right in saying that self doubt is the
enemy in this story. You're sorta doubting
yourself…a lot of that is coming from
teachers, but the cure is kinda this one
teacher too...Eric...it sort shows a way out
of that.
Finally somebody with some credentials
believed in me right? They talked to me like a
peer. That was really kind of uplifting for me.
You have to wrestle with
it at times, and if it's not
working you just have to
take a walk and let it filter
through and be patient
with it. But I did finish it!
I'll just ask a final cheese...like it's the
cheesiest question...do you believe in
fate..and the reason I ask is there are
things that come together in the story
that seem so perfect…your relationship
with the McLuhans, the CN tower, which
is a communications beacon that's being
built, how things come together…it's like
it was kinda written to be a story, if you
know what I mean.
The story of me meeting McLuhan, and my
whole thing with literacy and the tie-in with
the whole literary ground being overturned
by the technology... When I think about it
more I think, “Holy! There's really something
here, and that's gotta be explored,” and I
think, “yeah, fate, somehow…”. I don't know
if you ever read the Goethe quote...
How does it go?
Goethe is a German philosopher, and it's
a quote on commitment, it's one of my
favourites, I have it on my drawing table
here.
“Until one is committed, there is
hesitancy, the chance to draw back.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and
creation), there is one elementary
truth, the ignorance of which kills
countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits
oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that
would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from
the decision, raising in one's favor all
manner of unforeseen incidents and
meetings and material assistance,
which no man could have dreamed
would have come his way. Whatever
you can do, or dream you can do,
begin it. Boldness has genius, power,
and magic in it. Begin it now.”
That really stuck with me, and it’s so true.
Yeah, the struggle is just to commit.
It’s hard but it's...follow through with it and
keep with it even though you may have times
when you fall. If it’s strong enough and has
integrity...you believe in it yourself - then you
will finish it.
D.S.
Originally published online
01.MAR.2011
19
For seven years now
The Doug Wright Awards
has helped recognize the best
in Canadian comics.
The non-profit organization has served as a
survey of some of the most interesting and
innovative comics being done in the country,
often highlighting the work of future stars.
In order to help our readers get up to speed on this
year’s slate of finalists, Sequential drafted a list of
questions for the nominees and emailed them off.
Pascal Girard, Ginette Lapalme, Maryanna Hardy,
James Stokoe and Pat Shewchuk & Marek Colek
could not participate for various reasons. We wish
them the best and you should look up their work
along wi h the rest. Look to the end of this survey
to find out how to find all the creators online.
Joining us is David Collier who got his start in
comics in Robert Crumb’s 'Weirdo'. His book
'The Frank Ritza Papers' was nominated for a
Doug Wright Award for Best Book in 2005. His
latest book, 'Chimo' published by Conundrum
Press, is an account of Collier’s decision to reenlist in the Canadian army at age 40.
Aaron Costain is part of the disreputable
comics jam collective ‘Team Society League’.
His self-published work, 'Entropy' is a reworking of creation myths, both modern and
ancient. The latest instalment, Entropy 6, is
debuting at TCAF this year.
Michael DeForge is a freelance illustrator and
draws the comic series 'Lose'. The third issue
is launching at this years TCAF. The second
nominated for "Best Book" this year, and the
first resulted in Michael wining the 2010 Doug
Wright Award for “Best Emerging Talent.”
Alex Fellows’ first two comics were with
Fantagraphics. 'Blank State' appeared online in
2002. He received a Xeric Grant for 'Canvas',
and it was co-published by Fantagraphics.
Currently, he is serializing a new graphic novel,
Spain & Morocco online.
Kathryn Immonen has been making things
up for more than twenty years. Best known
for the sleeper hit miniseries 'Patsy Walker:
Hellcat' she’s worked for both DC and Marvel,
In 2011, she embraced Captain America’s
first love interest, French Resistance fighter
Peggy Carter in 'Captain America and the First
Thirteen'.
Stuart Immonen has drawn thousands of
pages for most of the publishers in the comic
industry from Archie to Rip Off Press. Primarily
known as a superhero artist he also co-created
the science fiction miniseries 'Shockrockets'
with Kurt Busiek. He is currently drawing
the Marvel summer event series 'Fear Itself'
written by Matt Fraction.
Together the Immonens presented their
creator-owned webcomic 'Never as Bad as You
Think' in a 2009 hardcover edition published
by BOOM! Studios. And 'Moving Pictures',
released by Top Shelf to wide acclaim in May
2010.
Keith Jones started drawing spaceships and
ant farms at a young age. His print publications
include the art book 'Bacter-Area' and the
graphic novel 'Catland Empire'.
Patrick Kyle is the Co-founder and Co-Editor
of 'Wowee Zonk', a comic anthology dedicated
to showcasing non-traditional Canadian
20
comics. His comic book series 'Black Mass'
has been described as "satisfying like finding
an unopened beer in the park." The fifth issue
will debut at TCAF in 2011.
Nick Maandag is a veteran of photocopied
mini-comics. His latest book, 'Streakers' is
about three men--menial workers by day,​​​​
dedicated streakers by night--​​​​​in search for t​
heir Holy Grail,​‘the perfect streak’. 'Streakers'
won a publishing Xeric grant and has been
nominated for a Doug Wright award.
Seth Scriver’s work has appeared in
publications and in gallery shows around the
world. Currently he and Shayne Ehman are
finishing 'Asphalt Watches', a feature length
animated film. He has two books published:
'Weird Woods' by Third Drawer Down in
Australia, and 'Stooge Pile' published by Drawn
and Quarterly for their Petit Livres series.
Jillian Tamaki is the author of two books,
'Gilded Lilies' and 'Indoor Voice', and the coauthor of the acclaimed graphic novel 'SKIM.'
She has three past nominations for the Doug
Wright Awards, including one for the win, with
Best Book in 2009 for 'Skim', along with her
cousin and co-author Mariko Tamaki.
Chris Kuzma is teacher's assistant at the
Ontario College of Art and Design, he’s also
one-third of the 'Wowee Zonk' art collective.
Past clients include 'The New York Times',
Viceland.com, 'Maisonneuve', 'EYE Weekly'
and numerous other magazines in Canada
and the US.
And now, the questions!
What does being nominated for a Doug
Wright Award mean to you?
David Collier: A chance to fill in this survey.
Aaron Costain: It's pretty exciting to be
nominated! The past winners of this category
are some of my very favourite cartoonists:
Michael DeForge, Kate Beaton, Jeff Lemire,
Bryan Lee O'Malley! What a pedigree! And
just to be recognised along with the other
incredibly talented nominees is a real honour.
Michael DeForge: It means the world to me!
It is an incredible honor to be nominated
alongside so many other cartoonists whose
work I love.
Alex Fellows: It means some people agreed
that they like my work, which means a lot to
me. The jury and the other nominees are
pretty impressive too.
Kathryn Immonen: It's an incredible surprise
and an honour. It also means that I'm working
in an industry that makes room for me, and
everyone else, to not only actively pursue
work that is wildly divergent but to also be
recognized and rewarded for it.
Stuart Immonen: During the course of its
realization over a number of years, our book
felt like a very private thing, so it's been a
revelation to know that people have read it,
and moreover liked it. It's our fondest wish
to continue to pursue personal projects like
this, and the award nomination is profoundly
encouraging in that regard.
Keith Jones: I am excited to be nominated...
it’s nice to be recognized for what you do.
Chris Kuzma: To be chosen by and nominated
alongside such talented comic artists is a
tremendous honour.
Patrick Kyle: The Doug Wright Awards in
September 2006 were one of the first comic
book related events I attended upon moving to
Toronto. I was oblivious to what was going on
in comics at the time so attending the awards
was undoubtedly culturally enlightening for
me. I feel really honoured to be recognized by
the institution that in some ways spurred me to
follow the path that I have.
Nick Maandag: Sweet, sweet approval and
validation. A boost to my self esteem.
Jillian Tamaki: It's a pat on the back for some
good work. A series of little pats on the back
in life is what prevents us from all committing
suicide.
What was the last comic you read and what
did you think of it?
David Collier: Ethan Rilly's 'Pope Hats'. I liked it.
Aaron Costain: I just finished Shigeru
Mizuki's 'Onwards Towards our Noble Deaths',
which I thought was pretty good. I found i't
a nice counterpoint to the recently released
'Buz Sawyer' collection, which painted the
Japanese as one-dimensional bad guys, and
a good companion piece to 'Barefoot Gen',
which showed what life was like on the home
front. The art was good but the story seemed
to lack focus; I think that Mizuki spread himself
too thin narratively, with too large a cast of
characters and no real central protagonist. I
am especially looking forward to the release of
Mizuki's 'NonNonBa' and (hopefully) his 'Yokai'
comics, which are what he's really known for.
Michael DeForge: The latest issue of 'Pood',
which I bought yesterday. It's sweet--Ines
Estrada and Hans Rickheit had my favorite
pages this time.
Alex Fellows: I just put some old Mad
Magazines from the mid '80s in my bathroom
reading rack. Man, that is a strong roster of
cartoonists. It's strange that the strip I hated
the most as a kid, Dave Berg's 'The Lighter
Side of...' is the one that made me laugh the
most as a grown-man.
comics can succesfully, entertainingly be. I first
encountered his work with a Japanese edition
of 'Benkei in New York', which I bought for the
illustrations alone. I couldn't even discover
his name. Years later, I flipped through 'The
Walking Man' and immediately knew it was the
same artist. He has such a delicate approach,
even with lurid subjects.
Keith Jones: 'Vengeance Squad' issue
#1 (Charlton comics) It wasnt as good as
'Manhunter 2070' (DC showcase #92) I read
five minutes prior though...the artwork in both
these issues is great though...Pete Morisi
drew 'Vengeance Squad' 2-6 but #1 is drawn
by someone else....looks nice and pulpy crisp
though....Joe Staton made a nice 'Mike Mauser'
story in the rear half....'Manhunter 2070' was
great...drawn by Mike Sekowsky who I always
enjoy...nice prison planet storyline.
Chris Kuzma: 'Paul Goes Fishing' by Michel
Rabagliati. A wonderful, funny, heartwrenching
book. I was completely engrossed.
Patrick Kyle: I'm reading an anthology right
now called 'A Graphic Cosmogony' published
by Nobrow Press. It features work by a handful
of atypical comic artists and their take on the
creation of the universe. It's a really beautiful
and well put together book.
Nick Maandag: 'Mid Life' by Joe Ollmann. I
really enjoyed it. It was refreshing to read a
humorous comic. And I didn't expect it to come
from Drawn & Quarterly.
Seth Scriver: I was reading the first book
of Doctor Tezuka's 'Buddha', there's 7 more
jumbo books and everybody's dead by the end
of the first one.
Jillian Tamaki: Chester Brown's 'PAYING
FOR IT', which I got at MoCCA yesterday. I am
chewing it over. I'm also waiting for my husband
to finish reading it so we can discuss it.
What's something most people aren't aware
of when it comes to making comics?
David Collier: You've got to keep it entertaining
to make a living.
Aaron Costain: Other cartoonists know
this, but I don't know if people realise what
backbreaking work it takes to produce a comic.
It can take days to draw what takes the audience
seconds to read. The process is laborious with
the writing, thumbnailing, penciling and inking,
not to mention the production side of things.
It's a hard sell to convince your partner that all
the hours you put in are worth the final result,
but I think they are.
Michael DeForge: How you end up consuming
a high percentage of meals that begin with the
word "Insant."
Alex Fellows: A lot of work goes into making
a comic just plain comprehensible. When you
read a comic and you can tell which character
is taking, what emotion they're expressing,
and what environment they're in, it's already
somewhat of a triumph.
Kathryn Immonen: I must be honest. It
was 'Tintin, Les Cigares du pharaon'. It was
terrific. Again. Of course. Before that, one of
the volumes of Stan Drake's 'The Heart of
Juliet Jones'. You can't do much better. My
non-recreational comics reading is often less
inspiring.
Kathryn Immonen: That it's a job.
Stuart Immonen: I'm reading Volume 1 of Jiro
Taniguchi's 'A Distant Neighborhood'; it's rich
and subtle and quiet in a way that perhaps only
Keith Jones: That it takes forever to finish.
Stuart Immonen: Probably the time
requirement; apart from animation inbetweening, I can't think of a work-to-result
ratio that is less favourable. Lots of jobs are
harder-- achieving enlightenment, for example-but usually come with greater rewards.
Continued on p.22...
21
www.dl.txcomics.com
Chris Kuzma: The time and dedication
it takes.
Patrick Kyle: Every artist has an
idiosyncratic approach and I'm not sure
if there's a broad statement I could
make to really answer the question.
I think most people aren't aware of
literary and avant-garde comics.
Most people immediately envision
superheroes when you mention you
make comic books.
Seth Scriver: They're supposed to be
funny.
Jillian Tamaki: That many of your
favourite cartoonists have day jobs.
If you could tell your younger self
something you've learned from
comics or otherwise, what would it
be?
David Collier: Put work in to some
serious academic anatomy studies.
Aaron Costain: Start drawings comics
NOW. Also: read and metabolise some
of those great old-timey cartoons.
Michael DeForge: To worry less about
"finding my style."
Alex Fellows: Hey young Alex, don't
be so uptight. Be looser. People would
rather see you express yourself and
have fun than stress about doing
something "perfect".
Kathryn Immonen: That the guy you
meet when you're seventeen is going
to turn out be a better thing that even
you had thought, which is saying
something. And don't drop chemistry...
or French.
Stuart Immonen: My younger self
knew who Ozymandias and Genghis
Khan were because of comics. He
knew about WWII and Mesopotamia
and the Opium Wars-- I'm not as smart
now as I was then.
Keith Jones: Get cracking kid! Its long
and slow so better dive in ASAP or else
SLAP SLAP SLAP
Chris Kuzma: Loosen up.
Patrick Kyle: Stop trying to make
something and make something.
Nick Maandag: You will not make
a living from it. But keep doing it
anyway.
Seth Scriver: I wish my younger self
could talk to me and tell me what to do
right now.
Jillian Tamaki: Have I learned
anything from comics? My younger
self would be surprised I was making
comics. It was never something I was
really, really into. Any zines or comiclike things were made in a completely
flippant, unthinking way, just for fun.
What's a favourite convention
memory or story of yours?
22
David Collier: Driving Chester Brown,
Julie Doucet, Joe Sacco, Chris
Oliveros and my wife Jen down to the
San Diego Comics Con from Meltdown
Comics in L.A. in an old Saskatchewan
farm truck.
The nominees for Best Book
Aaron Costain: Well, this just recently
happened at MoCCA: I was watching
John Martz's display (we were
sharing a table), when his new Star
Trek-themed caught the attention of a
certain rotund young man. He started
freaking out, shouting "Oh my God!
Oh my God!", taking deep sips from
his slurpee between exclamations
(his teeth were stained pink from the
drink). He fell to his knees in front of
John's table, shouting and moaning,
slurping from his cup. His friends
were consoling him, telling him that
he was okay, when he abruptly got up
and left, not even purchasing the print.
He never came back for it, either.
Michael DeForge: I met Joe Matt
at a Toronto comic con when I was,
like, 13 or something. He was tabling
with Seth and Chester Brown. He was
at first afraid to sell me his comics
since they weren't age-appropriate,
but I bought them anyway. Those
Peepshow issues were probably
my very first alternative comics
purchase.
Alex Fellows: I used to go to
superhero comic conventions at
the Delta Hotel in Montreal on
Sunday morning. The streets were
completely at that time, but I was
really excited about meeting the inker
on 'Doom 2099'
Kathryn Immonen: I don't know if
it's a favourite exactly but last year,
I'm in the executive lounge in a hotel
in Sydney, not having slept for more
than 24 hours. I'm trying to focus on
the labels of foreign yogurt because
I need to eat something almost as
much as I need to sleep but I keep
getting distracted by Lou Ferrigno's
bicep which is both right next to and
bigger than my head. Then Stuart
comes around the corner and says,
"The Groosalug is here." Things just
got odder from there.
Stuart Immonen: The time in France
when a "fan" tried to jump over
the table to punch me in the nose.
Actually, the least said about it the
better.
Keith Jones: Meeting my wife.
Chris Kuzma: Every time I meet
Jillian Tamaki at a convention, I fawn
over her like a goofy fanboy. Now
we're nominated alongside her!
Patrick Kyle: MOCCA in 2008 was
kind of ridiculous and great. Chris
Kuzma and I went down to hand out
some promo copies of the first Wowee
Zonk right after we finished it. The
day before the show it was obscenely
hot out and we spent something
like 12 hours wandering around
Manhattan. After that we ended up
getting hammered in St. Marks. The
day of the event Chris could barely
walk and I thought I had sun stroke
or something. We stumbled around
the show looking and feeling horrible
handing out books to really confused
people.
Nick Maandag: One time I made out
with a drunken female. That was fun.
Seth Scriver: I thought Jim Woodring
was a bum with some photocopies but little did i know
that they weren't photocopies and that he doesn't have
a bum, just kidding he has a bum, a big bum.
Jillian Tamaki: Running around Comic-Con with Eric
Nakamura from Giant Robot taking as many pictures
with cosplayers as possible.
What comic(s) are you excited to read this
year?
David Collier: I was excited to read
'Ruts & Gullies' by Philippe Girard,
'Mid-Life' by Joe Ollmann, 'Indoor
Voice' by Jillian Tamaki, 'Acme 20'
by Chris Ware, 'Market Day' by
James Strum and the new editions
of Jacques Tardi's work published by
Fantagraphics.
Aaron Costain: Like most people, I'm very
interested to read Chester Brown's 'Paying for It'.
I'm extremely excited for the collected 'Big Questions',
by Anders Nilsen, even though I've already read all the
single issues. I'm also a huge 'Love and Rockets' fan,
so 'New Stories #4' is high on my list. And I can't wait
for Steve Wolfhard's 'Cat Rackham' book and 'Lose #3'
by Michael DeForge, both from Koyama Press. I'm
always looking forward to any number of classic comic
collections--'Little Orphan Annie', 'Moomin', 'Popeye',
etc. but the Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson classic
Disney books look especially great.
Michael DeForge: 'Paying For It'.
Alex Fellows: The new Chester Brown 'Paying For
It', and maybe some old comics, like something by
Harold Gray. Hopefully, Chris Ware will put out another
sketchbook.
Kathryn Immonen: I'm waiting for Jacques Tardi's 'It
Was the War of the Trenches' to arrive in the mail. I'm
pretty excited about that.
Stuart Immonen: Brian Wood has cryptically mentioned
some upcoming projects--I'm all over his work. Skillman
and Soriano's 'Liar's Kiss' also looks amazing.
Keith Jones: I’m excited as everyone else in the world
probably, to read Chester Brown's new hooker lifestyle
book.... also the Bushmiller 'Nancy is Happy' book... in
the "hunt to find" category I would love a copy of 'Hot
wheels #1' with artwork by Alex Toth....digging around
for 'Land of the Giants' gold key comcis as well.
Chris Kuzma: Zach Worton's 'The Klondike', Chester
Brown's 'Paying For It'. I know it's from last year, but I
am still trying to get my hands on a copy of 'the Monster
anthology'. Also, I'm still waiting for someone to produce
a collected Pogo anthology.
Patrick Kyle: I'm looking forward to Chester Brown's
new book.
Nick Maandag: 'Paying For It' by Chester Brown! I've
been waiting for years. The anticipation's killing me!
Seth Scriver: The rest of 'Buddha' and some dollar
books by jonny peterson
Jillian Tamaki: Well, I WAS most excited to read 'Paying
For It', but I just did that. Lynda Barry's collected works,
which D&Q is publishing in the Fall, looks exciting. Also,
Sakura Maku's 'Dark Tomato'.
What are you hoping to get out of TCAF?
David Collier: My portrait painted by Scott Waters.
Aaron Costain: Like most cons, the real fun of TCAF
is hanging out with your out-of-town cartoonist buddies.
Thankfully, TCAF is great about organising social
activities, which most other shows tend to ignore. I also
love meeting readers and finding out how they perceive
my comics.
Michael DeForge: I like meeting up with friends of mine
who I only ever get to see at conventions like this!
Alex Fellows: Meet some cartoonists, buy some stuff,
maybe get inspired. I'd also like to refine my 'raise the
brow, nod, and walkaway' technique after lingering at
some cartoonist's table for a few moments.
Kathryn Immonen: As always, really looking forward
to spending time with friends and colleagues that we
only ever see at shows and the occasional wedding.
And shifting a lot of copies of Moving Pictures
through Top Shelf and Centifolia with
AdHouse.
Stuart Immonen: Among comic
festivals and conventions, TCAF
has the most convivial atmosphere;
we've had such a great time in past
years getting to spend time with old
friends and enjoying the opportunity
to meet new ones. Last year, we spent
hours with Will Dinski--oh, put him down
for "recognition and attention"--at the Top Shelf
booth and had a wonderful experience. We got to finally
meet Marc Ellerby and Jamie McKelvie, both fine young
Britons. It goes on... actually I really wish it did, but we
all need to go home and make stuff.
Keith Jones: Party and bullshit.
Chris Kuzma: Hanging out with all my comic book
friends. Also, a ton of new books.
Patrick Kyle: I just want to have fun and hang out. I
used to be so curious and thrilled to see new work at
shows. Unfortunately now I kind of feel like I've seen
everything! I'd love to be blown away by something
totally new and unique.
Nick Maandag: A good time.
Jillian Tamaki: Brecht Evens.
Right, that’s all we can fit! Good luck on awards
night everyone!
Questions were writen by David Hains, the article was
editied by David and Max Douglas.
The 2011 Doug Wright Awards will be presented Saturday
May 7. Hosted by writer, director, comics fan and film
star Don McKellar. Featuring a live career-spanning chat
conducted by Seth (Clyde Fans, George Sprott), with
2011 Giants of the North Hall of Fame inductee David
Boswell (Reid Fleming: World’s Toughest Milkman).
Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto
7:00 p.m. (door open at 6:30)
Here’s a list of links to check out the creators with.
David Collier is elusive online, but a good google hunt will yield results.
Alex Fellows’ Spain & Morocco online at
www.spainandmorocco.com.
The Immonens can be found worldwide at
www.immonen.ca.
Visit Jillian Tamaki at jilliantamaki.com
Aaron Costain’s Entopy series can be read at
aaroncostain.com
Michael DeForge lurks behind www.kingtrash.com
Keith Jones keeps www.nobodyland.com
Patrick Kyle makes it easy to find him at
www.patrickkyle.com
Seth Scriver has peanutbreath.com
Chris Kuzma is handlily at www.chriskuzma.com
And Nick Maandag runs around nakid on
www.laffdepot.blogspot.com
And the absentees:
Pascal Girard - www.paresse.ca
Ginette Lapalme - www.ginettelapalme.com
Maryanna Hardy - maryannahardy.blogspot.com
James Stokoe - orcstain.wordpress.com
Pat Shewchuk & Marek Colek - tincanforest.com
23
The Raven
Lorenzo Mattotti & Lou Reed, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe
Hardcover, 9" x 9", 188 pages. Price: $22.99 US
ISBN-13: 978-1-60699-444-3
Reviewed by Salgood Sam
For Lou Reed the project started as
a suggestion from a stage manager.
He wrote a play around the writings
of Edgar Allan Poe before and
after shows while on tour. He put
on the play with Robert Wilson,
and released an album. Seeking
to publish an illustrated book, Art
Spiegelman suggested he look at
the work of Lorenzo Mattotti. The
result is a beautiful set of illustrations
and somewhat narrative expressive
poetry.
Mattotti’s work is fairly unique in
the comics world, but he only has
one of his many feet in that land.
He is a renowned painter and
fashion designer. An illustrator with
an architect's training and eye for
structure. His diverse interests
and background probably in part
lends itself in his comics work to
his distinctive ability to break with
convention while still rendering
stories as coherent as they are
unconventional and lovely.
But Raven is not a comic. The text is
mostly given a separate space from
the images, Mattotti’s work plays off
and interprets Reed’s re-imagined
Poe. There is some narrative here but
it does not feel like the point of it to
me reading the PDF review copy. You
could easily flip back and forth through
this book to read it as a sampling of,
two -- three? -- accomplished artists
works.
Reed’s Poe is interesting. I’m not
exactly an expert in poetry but I've
read a fair bit, and this was of the
better but not ground breaking. An
ode to Poe it reads to me as the back
story to it’s creation suggests.
”I wrote before after and during
our rehearsals. It was inspiring
and having the genius template
of Poe made this a verbal
emotive joy”
So I take it as a labour of love and
pleasure by an artist who was having
fun more than pushing boundaries.
Mattotti’s art I think is the more
adventurous aspect of the book, but
it also reflects the comfortable, dark
and playful note of the writing.
This is a very beautiful book, and
poignant, unsurprisingly given the
source material much preoccupied
by death and mortality. While it’s
not trivial I also don’t think it says
anything new about the subject. But
it does what it does with considerable
skill and facility, and a fair bit of raw
honesty
I’m not sure if anything else was
intended by it, being a fan of Mattotti’s
narrative work I was hoping for more
of a narrative beast. But I enjoyed this
work and look forward to getting my
hands on a copy of the printed edition
when it’s presented at TCAF.
S.S.
Order the book from
fantagraphics.com
A consideration of
Bus Griffiths’ Now
You’re Logging
By Brad Mackay
When it comes to great overlooked
comics, there are few greater (or more
woefully overlooked) in my opinion than
Now You’re Logging. First published in
1978, the burly classic is noteworthy for
a couple of reasons: 1) it’s acknowledged
as being one of Canada’s first graphic
novels and, 2) it’s one of the few graphic
novels to tackle the logging industry, or
any industry, in such a thoughtful and
affectionate way.
Taking its name from early 20th Century logging
slang, 'Now You’re Logging' is an honest-togoodness, roll-up-your-sleeves, working man
of a comic. Which is not a surprise given its
author: Bus Griffiths, a self-taught cartoonist
and career outdoorsman from British Columbia
who relied on logging and fishing to pay the
bills.
A hard-wrought gem of a comic, Griffiths’ 'Now
You’re Logging' manages to evoke the workingstiff spirit of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor
and Justin Green’s Sign Game while having an
unmistakable—and improbable—resemblance
to the art of Howard Cruse and Tom of Finland,
the infamous homoerotic artist. (I think my pal
and fellow comics scribe Bryan Munn summed
this up nicely when he called Griffiths “a sort of
porno woodsman icon.”)
Yet despite this book’s
historical significance
and ample charm,
Now You’re Logging
has flown beneath the
radar of most comics
publishers. It’s been
out of print for more
than 20 years, forcing
the price of an original
hardcover copy into the
$250 range and, more
importantly,
pushing
Griffith’s life’s work into
the margins of Canadian
history. It’s not like the
man doesn’t have fans
in high places.
I first heard about 'Now You’re Logging' around
2001 via Seth and Peter Birkemoe, who
spoke of it as if it had talisman-like powers.
An improbable comics confection that had
the ability to renew one’s faith in the medium.
It took me until this past Christmas to finally
get my hands on a roughed-up library copy of
the book, and I’m happy to say that it met—
exceeded—even my vaulted expectations. But
first, a little back-story is in order.
Gilbert Joseph Griffiths was born in Moose
Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1913 and moved to B.C.
when he was 10, where he became a full-blown
nurtured fan of comic strips. As a teenager he
aspired to a career as a newspaper cartoonist,
but when it didn’t pan out he turned his
talents to a job illustrating farm equipment for
catalogues. During the Depression he began
logging to make money, a skill he apparently
picked up as a 12-year-old when he would fell
trees around his neighbourhood for pocket
change.
The Second World War brought Griffiths an
unexpected second shot at making comics. Left
jobless after a mill where he worked shut down,
he spotted an ad from a local comics company
who were seeking original comics. His pitch to
Maple Leaf Publishing about a crew of loggers
in the 1930s caught their eye, and he began
producing a series of short (eight-page) stories
called “Now You’re Logging” for the company’s
Rocket anthology. He produced several of
these (and began a cowboy storyline) before
being assigned to work the woods by the
provincial government.
His brief comics career was little more than a
fond memory when his logging comics were
unearthed in the 1960s by the Provincial
It’s probably no surprise that Griffiths is less
effective when it comes to depicting female
characters. His story threatens to leap of its
tracks when he introduces Debbie, a love
interest for Al, who holds as much interest as a
muck stick. Luckily, these romantic diversions
never last long, and soon you’re thrust back
into his brawny action-packed world.
Once described as a “husky, clinker-built barrel
of muscle and sinew,” you get the feeling that
if Griffiths were alive today (he died in 2006)
he’d be the kind of guy who’d needle other
cartoonists at conventions. “Acme Novelty
Library?! Clyde Fans!? What kind of comic
book titles are those?! Get the hell outta my
face you goddamn whistle punks!”
Museum of B.C., who welcomed them into
their archives as important chronicles of the
province’s industrial past. The attention from
this led an editor at B.C. Lumberman magazine
to reprint one of the “Now You’re Logging”
comics as an educational pamphlet—and then
offered to pay him to create more.
These subsequent pamphlets, which Griffiths
took a five-year sabbatical from logging and
fishing to work on, formed the basis for the
collected hardcover edition of Now You’re
Logging that was published in 1978.
The book tells the semi-autobiographical story
of Al Richards (a stand-in for Griffiths) and Red
Harris, two men learning the ropes of “trucklogging” during the Depression. Unfolding
over the space of a year, the narrative strings
together a series of adventures which see
the loggers survive peril after peril. This is no
exaggeration.
Logging was one of B.C.’s most dangerous jobs
during the 1930s and the men who did it for a
living enjoyed a larger-than-life reputation, and
were unchallenged in their toughness. Griffiths
definitely enshrines logging and loggers, but
he shies away from overtly lionizing anyone
here. He clearly understands the poetry of
physical labour, and manages to convey it on
practically every page of this beautiful, brusque
and bizarre comic.
As he follows the adventures (and budding
bromance) of Al and Red, he packs each page
and panel with period-specific details; whether
it’s the ceramic coffee mugs (no handles) or the
leather gloves, which were specially designed
for climbing trees. And no machine goes
unexplained. His description of the “steam
donkey,” a mobile engine used to haul timber
onto trucks, is particularly memorable.
This obsession with technical details consumes
the narrative at points, but it makes up for it
by energizing some of the action set pieces.
One sequence where Al and his crew attempt
to move a steam donkey across a raging river
is set up with enough technical details to make
Dan Zettwoch giddy.
Then there’s the writing. Griffiths writes like
some kind of backwoods Raymond Chandler:
lunch boxes are “nose bags”, shovels are “muck
sticks”, and snuff is either “snooze”, “Swedish
conditioning powder” or “Scandihoovian
dynamite”. The characters job titles range from
“choker men”, “whistle punks” and “donkey
punchers” while the dialogue is peppered with
bits of random like “It was colder than a timber
tycoon’s heart.” (This lingo is meticulously
catalogued in glossaries at the bottom of each
page.)
24
His stated goal with his labour of love was to
make the definitive graphic novel about 1930s
logging. If a more noble cause in comics
exists, I’m having trouble thinking of it. One
only wishes that a publisher would see fit to
give some new life to this odd, wonderful part
of comics history.
B.M.
25
26
27
32 Books to look for @ TCAF 2011!
'Paying For It' by Chester Brown. Hardcover, B&W 272pages, $25.95 CDN
Published by Drawn & Quarterly. ISBN: 9781770460485
'Lucille' by Ludovic Debeurme. Softcover, 544 pages. $29.95
Winner of the René Goscinny Prize and the Angoulême Essential Award.
'Lychee Light Club' by Usamaru Furuya - Softcover, B&W 320 pages, $21.CDN
Published by Vertical Inc. ISBN: 978-1935654063
'The Raven' by Lou Reed & Lorenzo Mattotti. Hardcover, colour, 188pages. $22.99
Published by Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-1-60699-444-3
'The Band' by Mawil. Softcover, 6×9, B&W, 80 pages, £8.99 Approx $14.99 CDN
Published by Blank Slate Books UK. ISBN: 97887906653156
'Home and Away' by Mawil. Softcover, Full Colour, 100 pages, £11.99 Approx $19.99
Published by Blank Slate Books UK. ISBN: 9781906653224
'THE NEXT DAY: GRAPHIC NOVEL' Written by Paul Peterson & Jason Gilmore.
Illustrated by John Porcellino. Softcover, 104 pages, B&W, $16.95
Produced & Published by Pop Sandbox. ISBN 978-0-9864884-1-2
'Fear Itself' by Matthew Brown, Softcover, 202 pages, B&W $15.
Published by TRIP publishing ISBN 978-0-9864712-3-0
'Blood Blokes' #1 by Adam Cadwell. 24 pages, B&W, $5.CDN
Limited self published printing of 100 copies.
'Wolves' by Becky Cloonan. 24 pages, B&W with a silk screened cover.
1st printing of 1000 copies. Signed and numbered
'Cat Rackham Loses It' by Steve Wolfhard. Softcover, 32 Pages, Colour. $5.
Published by Koyama Press. ISBN 978-0-9868739-2-8
'The Accidental Salad' by Joe Decie. Softcover, B&W, 36 pages. £5.99 Approx $9.99
CDN Published by Blank Slate Books UK. ISBN: 9781906653507
'LOSE' #3 by Michael DeForge. Softcover, 32 pages, B&W. $5.
Published by Koyama Press. ISBN 97-0-986739-1-1
'Chester 5000', by Jess Fink. Hardcover, 144 Pages, $14.95 (US)
ISBN 978-1-60309-066-7 – Diamond MAR11-1269. FOR ADULTS ONLY
'Island Brat' By C. Frakes. Softcover, 48 pages, B&W. $5.
Printing funded by Koyama Press. ISBN 0-9816909-5-5.
'Killing Velazquez' by Philippe Girard. Translation by KerryAnn Cochrane.
200 pages B&W. $20 ISBN 1-894994-54-X / 978-1-894994-54-5
'True Story' by Mike Holmes. Paperback, B&W, 232 pages, $24.95 US/CDN
Invisible Publishing. ISBN 978-1926743110
'The Cloudy Collection' Featuring Ed Emberley edited by David Huyck
www.cloudycollection.com - www.koyamapress.com
'The New Ghost' by Robert Hunter. Softcover, 24 pages. $11 US $12 CDN
Published by Nobrow Press ISBN: 978-1-907704-14-7
'Centifolia' 1 & 2 by Stuart Immonen. 96 pages & 32 pages. $19.95 US
AdHouse Books V1: ISBN 978-1-935233-13-8. V2: ISBN 978-1-935233-14-5
'Even The Giants' by Jesse Jacobs. Softcover, colour, 80 pages, $9.95
Published by Adhouse Books. ISBN 978-1-9352331-0-7
'Colour Me Busy' by Keith Jones. Softcover. 24 pages, B&W $5.
Published by Koyama Press. ISBN: 978-0-9868739-3-5
'Snaps' by Rebecca Kraatz. 144 pages, B&W. $15 US/CDN
Published by Conundrum Press. ISBN: 1-894994-55-8 / 978-1-894994-55-2
'Salt Water Taffy: Caldera’s Revenge' by Matt Loux. Softcover, B&W, 96 pages, 5.99$
Published by Oni Press. ISBN-13: 978-1934964620
'Jabberwocky' by Isabelle Melançon. Softcover, 40 pages, B&W. $12.00
Published by TRIP publishing. ISBN 978-0-9864712-5-4
'Raio Que Te Parta!' by Carlos Santos. Softcover, 68 pages, B&W. $15.
Published by TRIP publishing. ISBN 978-0-9864712-4-7
'Liar’s Kiss' by Eric Skillman. Hardcover, 120 pages, $14.95
Diamond code: FEB11-1167 - ISBN 978-1-60309-070-4
'Aurora Borealice' by Joan Thornborrow Steacy. 96 pages, B&W, $15.
Special TCAF debut edition of 50 copies. Signed and numbered
'Welcome to Oddville' by Jay Stephens. Hardcover, Colour, 88 pages, $14.95 US
Published by Adhouse Books. ISBN 978-1-935233-08-4
'Hell Lost: The Silent Sun' by James Turner. 56 pages. B&W,
Limited self published printing of 100 copies. $5 CDN.
'ROOT ROT' A forest themed anthology co-edited by Michael DeForge and Annie
Koyama. Book design by Diana McNally. Contributors: T. Edward Bak, Derek M.
Ballard, Chris ‘Elio’ Eliopoulos, Inés Estrada, Jason Fischer, Bob Flynn, Lizz Hickey,
Jesse Jacobs, Hellen Jo, Joseph Lambert, Robin Nishio, Greg Pizzoli, Jon Vermilyea,
Angie Wang, Mickey Zacchilli, Dan Zettwoch. Softcover, 72 pages, Colour. $12.
Published by Koyama Press. ISBN 978-0-9784810-9-4
'Frankie Pickle and the Mathematical Menace' by Eric Wight. Hardcover, B&W, 96
Pages. $12.99 CND. Published by Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing.
ISBN-13: 978-1416989721
Parties
The Second Annual Official TCAFête! Date: Saturday, May 7 Time: 9pm to Late
Location: Pauper's Pub, 2nd Floor, 539 Bloor St. W.
$5 Cover/Free for TCAF Exhibitors & Volunteers 19+
TCAFabulous: Queer Mixer. Date: Saturday, May 7 Time: 6:30pm - 9pm
Location: Crews/Tango, 508 Church St.
Events
The 2011 Doug Wright Awards ceremony. Date: Saturday, May 7
Location: Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas Street W.
An Evening at the IIC with Lorenzo Mattotti. Date: Monday, May 9 Time: 6:30pm
Location: Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 496 Huron St.
“ZOO” J-Film Screening & Discussion with Usamaru Furuya.
Date: Monday, May 9 Time: 7:00pm
Location: Toronto Underground Cinema, 186 Spadina
28
W W W. A D H O U S E B O OK S . C O M
ART ILLUSTRATION
BOOKS COMICS
INTERVIEWS
TORONTO CANADA
SquidfaceandTheMeddler.com
HOUSE IS
WHERE THE
HEART IS
Celebrating 9 years with 3 Canucks!
• Even the Giants by Jesse Jacobs
• Welcome to Oddville! by Jay Stephens
• Centifolia V1 & V2 by Stuart Immonen
plus some good ol’ USA thrown in too...
• Remake Special by Lamar Abrams
• The Downsized by Matt Howarth
• Duncan the Wonder Dog by Adam Hines
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