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Labels: art show, exhibits, Montreal, video

Labels: art show, events, events links, Montreal, Quebec

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March 26
The Montreal Comic Jam

March 30
The Monkeytown Comix Jam

Labels: comic jams, events, events links, Moncton, Montreal, New Brunswick, Quebec, social ink

Labels: awards, bd, Quebec

Labels: interviews, Montreal, pod casts, Quebec, radio

When: Saturday, March 21st, 2009. 8pm until midnight.
Where: Clubhouse Japanese Restaurant
255 West 2nd Avenue, Vancouver
Who: Anyone who is of legal drinking age is invited.
How Much: Free. Bring your own pencils/pens. Paper is provided.

As usual, I've reserved the upstairs room at the Clubhouse Japanese Restaurant for the Jam.

If you're drawing with markers that bleed through paper, be sure to either bring a drawing surface or place extra sheets of paper under the paper you're drawing on.

Crosspost as you see fit.

See you there!

Ed

Labels: comic jams, events, social ink, Vancouver

Labels: book launches, events, Vancouver

"it has been decided that putting a show on that weekend
would not be wise. Reasons for this are summer vacations, camp and
cottage season as well as a lack of interest from American dealers and
possible attendees.

I have been in discussions with someone from the Hyatt Regency
(formerly the Holiday Inn) and the only other date they could offer
was our Thanksgiving weekend. The dates we had been looking towards
have been late October and November.

Unfortunately it looks like we are going to have postpone our show for
this year. We will definitely be working towards doing a show in 2010.
With all the upheaval of shows in the next few years (Wizard moving
and canceling shows, and Reed Expositions expanding into Chicago and
moving their New York dates) we will be working on moving into an open
timeslot. Hopefully we will be making our 2010 announcement in early
January of 2010."

Labels: conventions, paradise comicon, Toronto

Labels: bestsellers, comic strips, comics retailers, graphic novels, manga, U.S. superhero franchises

• A blast from the past: Canadian animator, superhero creator, and comic book artist blogs about the golden age of Nelvana and "classical" animation in Canada. As you can see from the Sequential playlist up top, we feel that the Nelvana Rock N' Rule movie was a seminal moment in Canadian culture and punk rock. (this is an old link, but worth checking out)

• Internet sensation, Wright Award nominee, and damn fine cartoonist Kate Beaton is profiled in Maclean's Magazine. Sample excerpt: Beaton herself is defensive of this territory, bristling in fact at the suggestion that CanCon could possibly be dull. "Our history is the march of thousands of people across a continent trying to make a life for themselves," she replies. "How can it be boring?"

• Speaking of the Wright Awards (full disclosure: your humble blogger is one of the organizers of said event), Canada's literary news magazine Quill and Quire has some choice quotes from trophy designer Seth and director Brad Mackay. Quote: Mackay will be handing the job over to actor Don McKellar. "I wanted to step it up a bit this year," (...) Mackay will also be trying to increase the ceremony's entertainment quotient, acknowledging that the awards show could be "really boring"... (Chris Butcher also comments on the nominees here.)

• Not comics but sorta comics? dept: Some people from the Degrassi tv show (which was turned into a series of bestselling graphic novels by J. Torres and Ramon Perez) are involved in a stage production about the adult lives of characters from the U.S. comic strip Peanuts: "Dog Sees God" explores what might have happened to the Peanuts kids once they grow up and enter high school (the play has not been authorized by the Charles M. Schulz estate).

• R.I.P. Carol Phillips. The Winnipeg editor was responsible for the lesbian magazine Swerve, gave space to queer comic strips.

• Svetlana Chmakova's Dramacon manga is being offered through Uclick at the Apple Store. Is this the first paper Canadian graphic novel to be available electronically for hand-held devices? Quote: "We're making Dramacon 1.1 free because it gives us a chance to show off our panel-by-panel reading format with a very popular book from our lineup," said Uclick CEO Douglas Edwards. "The Uclick comic apps offer the slickest and most intuitive comics reading experience on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and we offer the widest variety of titles and genres on the Apple devices.

• Click here to read more on Canadian wrestler/actor James Preston Rogers latest bid to play Thor in Kenneth Branagh's movie production of the Marvel superhero created by Jack Kirby. Rogers' bid for the arian ubermensch role has resulted in a viral campaign (which I guess you're reading part of). According to the National Post, Rogers likens his experience as a bouncer to the thunder god's exile to Midgard as a lame physician.

• Silver Snail is having its annual MARCH BREAK SALE from Monday March
  16th to Sunday March 22nd ... each day is a different sale, one day might be
  20% off action figures, the next might be 20% off books/comics. To
  find out the daily sales, call the store number, 416-593-0889

• International: The Globe and Mail covers the upcoming publication of a collection of S & M illustrations purported to be by Superman co-creator Joe Shuster. Although Shuster was a U.S. citizen living in Cleveland when he first illustrated Jerry Siegel's vision of the Man of Steel, he is often referred to as Canadian because he lived in Toronto until he was 10. This book of pornographic images from the 1950s is edited by U.S. designer Craig Yoe and features images from a series of paperback pulp novels called "Nights of Horror". Although several sources have disputed the authorship of the drawings, attributing them rather to members of Shuster's studio, the book is still very intriguing, especially if it proves that Joe Shuster was a pornographer, making explicit the link between sex and superheroes that has existed as a theme of the genre from the very beginning. (Caveat: the article labels as a "myth" that Shuster was screwed by National Periodicals aka DC aka Warner Brothers out of millions of dollars for Superman. This is no myth. It really happened.)

• Speaking of Joe Shuster: at the Shuster Awards blog, an interview with Oshawa Ontario comics retailer Tim Simms of World's Collide. Simms really likes Thor comics. The blog also offers the first link I've seen to the Obama tribute by Dave Sim (see top image).

• The Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists has an excerpt from a new book by BC policart Adrian Raeside, who recently made a trip to Antarctica.

• Cartoons about Bill Bennett: The B.C. politico W.A.C. Bennett is featured in a new exhibit at the Kelowna Museum. Images by great Canadian cartoonists like Sid Barron, Len Borris and (the still with us) Roy Peterson are featured in the exhibit, which runs to April 28th.

• Bryan Lee O'Malley ran a contest on his blog inviting people to stage their own photos of scenes from the Scott Pilgrim books. Here are the winners.

• Going the recent DC "After Watchmen" campaign to promote their backlist one better, GQ recommends some comics not published by Warner Brothers, including books by Seth and Guy Delisle. I almost wrote "thumbs down for including Mike Allred's Madman" but when you think about it, Madman is almost better than Watchmen because of its honesty.

Labels: C-List, links, Thor

Labels: events, exhibits, political cartooning, Quebec

Filmmaker Don McKellar to host 5th annual Canadian comics awards at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Labels: awards, events, events links, Ontario, tcaf, Toronto

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Labels: conventions, events, Vancouver

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A darkened street, a cry for help and a courageous rescue by... by a super-powered flying man in a bright yellow cape? This can't be good. Will a certain two-fisted mystery man learn to share his city with high-powered interlopers, or is a showdown at hand? What will happen when the city comes to worship... The Golden Idol?

Labels: canadian superheroes, pod casts

BEFORE YOU START
"Someone wrote in another Xeric testimonial that you should not attempt self-publishing and all of this business unless you have no choice. This is really true. It's a tonne of work, there's no money in it, and trying to put comic books out there for public consumption is another full-time job on top of doing the actual (creative) work. I have tried to get rid of my bookish compunctions from every possible angle. I went to art school to learn how to make stuff to put into books. I talked emptily about potential book projects for years. I took a course in book publishing so I could make other peoples' books. I've read a million books looking for one that hasn't been written or illustrated yet. And yet all of this has still brought me here."

Labels: blogosphere, how-to, links, Ontario, tools of the trade, Toronto

Labels: bestsellers, comic strips, comics retailers, graphic novels, manga, U.S. superhero franchises

Labels: art. film, graffiti, Montreal, Quebec, street art

Labels: exhibits, Manitoba, political cartooning, Winnipeg

• Sheridan students need donations to help print their annual art book, which usually has some comics.

• British Beano artist turned Canadian resident David Parsons teaches cartooning class for the kids on during March Break

• Darwin Lee, a painter, cartoonist and graphic designer/illustrator, has died in Chilliwack, BC, age 65.

• At the Walrus blog, Sean Rogers provides a corrective to Watchmania, a well-argued list of comics that are critical of superheroes.

• In a trio of posts, the critic Jeet Heer makes a few points about the Watchmen comic: Heer trashes New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane's misapprehension of comics as art form, then gives the nod to Carter Scholz's 20-year-old critique of Watchmen's crappiness, but then links to Frank Santoro's defense of the book, which basically says that you have to be a true believer (ie, superhero lover) to "get" how radical Alan Moore's comic is.

• For good measure, I'll add this link of a history of the Watchmen, illustrated by Steve Murray for the National Post.

• The Shuster Awards blog features an interview with Terrace, B.C. comics retailer Gerry Matson of Comic Encounters.

• Laurier prof writes book about comics, is "totally looking forward" to Watchmen movie.

• The same writer conducts a retailer roundtable with several Canadian comic book shops.

• IDW to reprint Captain Canuck in hardcover format.

• Seth is interviewed at Toro magazine --the same magazine that partly serialized his still-unfinished graphic novel a few years ago (a message to the wise: track down those rare back issues!).

• Young cartoonist Sara Mayhew speaks at tech conference.

• Quill and Quire examines the jury for the upcoming Wright Awards (full disclosure: I am a Wright Awards organizer)

Labels: C-List, links

Labels: censorship, international, Ontario, Ottawa, political cartooning

Labels: book launches, events, events links, Halifax, new books, Nova Scotia

Another swanky book launch at the D&Q shop!

Praise for White Rapids:
"It's rare to find a book as formally innovative and profoundly lovely as [White Rapids]." --The Onion

"Blanchet's drawings are like sheet music, too, each flowing naturally into the other as they tell the story not only of a singular place and time, but also deliver a subtle treatise about the toll progress takes on human scale." --The Montreal Gazette

Labels: book launches, events, events links, Montreal, new books, Quebec

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Labels: awards, bd, events, events links, Expozine, Montreal, new books, Quebec, zine fair, zines

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