Posts Tagged "analysis"

04.May.2012 TCAF Podcasts: “Graphic Bodies” panel, with Kate Beaton & Bryan Lee O’Malley

Sequential’s own David Hains moderated this panle with creators Kate Beaton & Bryan Lee O’Malley. Part of the Bodies/City: A Symposium conference the panel tied that event with the next days New Narrative V presentations [more exclusively comics related than the first days events].  Conversation ran the gambit from what got them hooked on comics to collaborative work with others.

02.Jan.2012 2011: The Year in Review

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2011: The Year That Comics Died

by BK Munn

(Or, The year that comics died, were born again, mutated, limped along in zombie form, and continued dying at the same majestic pace.)

Some notes on the year that was from the vantage-point here at the blog about Canadian comics culture.

1. What is comics, anyway?

For the last 3 months the following books have sat on my desk, waiting to be reviewed on Sequential: Melamine Car Bomb by Mark Connery, OMAC #1-4 by Dan Didio and Keith Giffen, The Klondike by Zach Worton, and Drag Bandits by Colleen Frakes and Betsey Swardlick. So, what do a punk collection of street art collected by doodle-king Marc Bell, a Jack Kirby homage penned by DC Comics publisher Dan Didio and José Muñoz-plagiarist Keith Giffen, a historical graphic novel released by A-List publisher Drawn and Quarterly, and a crowd-funded comic book about transvestite highwaymen edited by indie-cartoonist Box Brown have in common? Fucked if I know.

This is the quandary faced by anyone attempting to get a handle on the world of North American comics, circa 2011. What constitutes comics? Where are comics going and how can one humble little news blog cover the whole thing? It’s a fragmented world, to say the least. Print publishing, including books, newspaper comic strips, and traditional comic books, seems to be on its last legs. A new wave of digital and web comics are heralded as the future and a comics design and art aesthetic dominate our visual culture. What we used to think of as comics seems almost dead and buried, and yet comics in their various aspects have never been more ubiquitous, ambitious, and overwhelmingly beautiful and emotionally powerful (not to mention, financially successful). How do we reconcile the comics industry with “comics”?

In this year of revolution, war, reaction, and financial collapse, comics have been our mirror, our diversion, our comfort, and our despair. Cartoonists have taken to the streets, enlisted in the Canadian debacle in Afghanistan, were bombed, arrested, and fired. Cartoonists made us cry. But outside of very few publications, these events were not reflected in the comics of the past year. Instead we got, for the most part, teen-oriented manga, bestselling zombie comics, superhero reboots, golden age reprints, overhyped non-fiction memoirs, literary adaptations, and young adult fantasies.

2. The Year in Sequential

The highlight of 2011 for the Sequential blog was the Toronto Comics Arts Festival and the publication of the third annual print edition of the Sequential magazine. For TCAF we provided extensive coverage, including a round-table overview, while the print magazine included tons of previews and actual comics highlighting many of the attendees of the festival.

As for the regular blog, Sequential featured a number of interviews representing a diverse cross-section of the comics landscape, including talks with Eugene Zhilinsky and Kimberley Whitchurch, Sarafin, Shannon Campbell of the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival, Rebecca Kraatz, Jesse Jacobs, Benjamin Rivers, John Martz, Joe Sacco, Joan Steacy, Mark Laliberte, Dylan Horrocks, and Nick Maandag. We also offered reviews of books by Maurice Vellekoop and various Koyama Press titles, Lorenzo Mattotti, David Lester, Joe Ollmann, George Walker, Keith Jones, and Steve Ditko. Sequential ranked the Canadian Comics of the Decade, and reported on future books by Emily Carroll, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

In other news this year, the anti-censorship battle continued with the CLLDF incorporating and protecting a manga importer, and the Canadian government stopping the import of books to TCAF.

In publishing, the Marvel Boycott began and spread to Canada, and the company cancelled perennial sad-sack Canadian punching bag Alpha Flight. Jay Stephens ended his Oh, Brother! comic strip, the Xeric grants ended, Udon phased out pamphlet publishing, New Reliable Press ceased operations, and the Comics Code finally died.

In convention news, besides our TCAF roundup, we covered Fan Expo and a number of other events, including Wizard dropping its Winnipeg con, and a new Vancouver event announced its intentions. Venerable comics retailer Silver Snail moved and upstart Little Island opened.

The comics journalism world was rocked by the news of cartoonist and publisher Dylan Williams death, and the illness and hiatus of beloved comics newshound and critic Tom Spurgeon. Wizard Magazine imploded, and The Comics Journal received a new transfusion of talent.

3. “The Comics Industry”: Culture of Fear

I’ve been doing this year end review thing for Sequential since 2006 and the theme every year since then has been how comics, and especially the tiny world of Canadian comics, have been growing from strength to strength, becoming more popular, and becoming more accepted by what remains of mainstream culture. The evidence is always anecdotal, based mostly on industry hype and the generally blinkered view of someone (me) who spends his spare time trolling Google news for tidbits about graphic novels publishing and blog reviews. Even so, there is no denying that, despite some major successes and crossovers in the larger public consciousness, 2011 was also a year of diminished expectations. The new permanent recession economy means that our (that is “the comic book industry’s”) highs will be less high and successes will be less successful. Despite the early Christmas that comic book shops received in the form of a temporary return to 1995-era levels of sales and excitement (not to mention the 1995-era eye- and mind-bruising stories and art typical of the Image-dominated superhero comics of that time) with DC’s “New 52″ initiative, comics sales and the audience in general seems to have been shrinking for years and the trend continued in 2011. We just have to look at the numbers that comics distributor Diamond posts about sales to see how small the traditional “Direct Sales” comic shop market is, with a basic audience of little over 100,000 people in North America for even the bestselling $3 monthly comic book. This is not a mass market but a boutique industry. And that goes quadruple for Canada.

Of course, what I like to think of Canadian comics culture is much larger, even if you don’t include the audience for superheroes, and factoring in the readership for digital and webcomics, people who buy graphic novels and manga in bookstores and take them out from libraries, and those who attend comics and pop culture conventions, the world of comics is much larger than the world of the comic shop and superhero fandom. Larger for certain, but is it 10 times larger?

In regards to the actual economics of the Direct Market in Canada, I can only reiterate what I noted in last year’s report. Within the general downward decline, anecdotal evidence suggests a sort of homeostasis within the comic shop economy. There hasn’t been an avalanche of store closures, but few new stores opened and current owners aren’t exactly buying luxury Batmobiles. Ditto for the larger book market. We haven’t had something like a Borders bankruptcy, but a major Canadian book distributor (H.B. Fenn) did go under, and traditional small bookstores are closing left and right. The print book seems imperiled, yet everyone is still talking about reading and the business of digital.

Indeed, the industry seems to be contracting in very specific ways, with layoffs, book cancellations, and an eye for the corporate bottom line becoming the new norm; recessionary business strategies tailor-made for the tightly-squeezed boutique publishing/R&D organelles that DC and Marvel constitute in the larger Warner-Disney constellations, and within the larger “content producing” industries in general. Most comic creators, as Marvel illustrator Dale Eaglesham noted last week, are working in a culture of fear, wherein it seems the next digital announcement or quarterly report could signal the end of a way of life that has existed for a small number of artists and writers churning out a very specialized form of genre entertainment off and on for 60 years.

In terms of specific publishing enterprises in Canada, nothing really seismic was recorded on the Sequential Richter scale this year; the same handful of English-language publishers (Conundrum, Drawn and Quarterly, Koyama Press) lead the pack in terms of locally-produced comics, graphic novels and related publications, with a few small presses, vanity presses, self-publishers and even large-ish dilettante international concerns shepherding the occasional graphic memoir or young adult fiction to bookstores. And the same is true for Quebec. Sure, many new young cartoonists came out with impressive work and many older lions fought hard to maintain primacy, but the tiny game board on which this artistic to and fro took place remained largely unchanged.

Which brings me to my next category:

4. Newsmaker of the Year: Drawn & Quarterly

Over the past 20 years, Montreal publisher Drawn and Quarterly has evolved from a one-man show responsible for a marginal anthology to a major book publisher with an international roster of artists in its catalog and an industry dominance that puts it in the forefront of comics publishing worldwide and dwarfs at the same time as it inspires its competition locally in Canada. The dream team of founder Chris Oliveros, co-publisher and publicist Peggy Burns, ex-Highwater Books publisher Tom Devlin, and a ragtag cohort of editors, designers, translators, booksellers, and dedicated interns make the modern D+Q a beehive of comics greatness and news-iness.

It’s a trifle unfair, you might mutter, to award a publisher and not one of its individual authors the newsmaker trophy, but when I really sat down to think about it, looking over the past twelve months of comics coverage on Sequential, around the web, in print and other media, no other entity really dominated the consciousness of the Canadian comics imagi-nation. From the announcement of a new Seth book that kicked off the new year to the publisher’s recent crowing about six out of its twenty-four 2011 titles (one-quarter of its output) ending up on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list, D+Q had a banner year in terms of publicity, corresponding sales, and public engagement. Sure, any one of those bestsellers deserves special consideration this year, and any one of their creators would make for a fascinating profile here, but whether it’s the mega crossover success of Kate Beaton, Dan Clowes’s canonization, or Chester Brown’s massive signing lines despite a controversial book about prostitution and Libertarian candidacy, Drawn and Quarterly’s quality control and tireless, Napoleonic-quality publicity efforts are the common thread behind these successes, almost above and beyond the skills and personalities of individual artists. Even tangential stories this year, like Seth’s Harbourfront prize win or the announcement of Conundrum Press signing Michel Rabagliati, are in some part D+Q stories. Seth, Rabagliati, and Conundrum had good years, sure, but D+Q had a better one. The Canada Reads horse race? Jeff Lemire got booted off the island but still sold books; Chester Brown and D+Q got a boost for Louis Riel, without it making it to the island at all.

Certainly, D+Q isn’t exactly leading the charge to publish a ton of hot new talents –people like Emily Carroll, Jonathan Dalton, Michael DeForge, Patrick McEown, and Ethan Rilly are all being published elsewhere– but they still found a place in their schedule for a solid debut by Zach Worton and a successful sophomore effort from Pascal Girard. As well, D+Q’s stable were essentially the stars at TCAF and other big events, and D+Q did keep up with some trends, keeping a finger in every pie whether it was manga translation (a potential book of the year with Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths), classic strip reissues (Doug Wright), webcomics (Kate Beaton), and digital (Chester Brown, initially).

With no close rivals, the publisher looks positioned to continue its dominance of hearts and minds in the years to come, continuing with longterm reprint projects like the John Stanley Library, Moomin, Gasoline Alley, and Nipper, and expanding its catalog to include major U.S. talent like Gilbert Hernandez, at the same time as it maintains its gold standard in terms of Canadian graphic novel production.
—–

5. Awards

U.S. cartoonist Dustin Harbin reports on the 2011 Wright Awards

Every year we can get some sort of sense of the best comics of the previous year by looking at the various awards handed out in Canadian comics in 2011. And the winners were:

The Joe Shuster Awards

National Newspaper Award for Editorial Cartooning

Prix Bedeis Causa

Prix Bédélys

Expozine Prize

Doug Wright Awards

—–

6. Passages

As always, we end our year in review by remembering those who have left us over the previous year, including cartoonists, writers, and cultural critics.

Alvin Schwartz (1916-2011) creator of Bizarro Superman

Norm Muffit (1942-2011) political cartoonist for northern newspapers

Elwy Yost (1925-2011) tv host, film critic, nostalgia pioneer, and comic strip character

Gordon Reid (1936-2011) Calgary political cartoonist

Bob Monks (1928-2011) Windsor historian and cartoonist

Charlie Bell (1916-2011) Regina policart

Clement Sauvé (1977-2011) young Montreal comics illustrator

John Gallant (1917-2011), co-author, Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea

—–

(thanks to David Hains, Robert Pincombe, Salgood Sam, and Dalton Sharp for their contributions to Sequential throughout 2011!)

13.Jun.2011 POD Sequential Pulp III

26.Mar.2011 Rob Granito

Ty Templeton's scathing humorous satire of Rob Granito is one of the highlights of artist responses.

Start with Who On Earth Is Rob Granito? posted March 24 by Rich. Then More Fun With Rob Granito Before MegaCon, Yes Orlando, Rob Granito IS At MegaCon – Pics, Rob Granito Hits YouTube At MegaCon,  When Ethan Van Sciver Met Rob Granito, all posted March 25. Concluding for the moment with Artists React To Rob Granito In The Only Way They Can, posted today, March the 26th. [yep, there's been a lot of posting about this, hasn't there?]

The short of it this Rob guy is producing art and prints that are clear swipes of other people’s work–something you do see in comics but is only tolerated if you credit the work as an homage–and saying it’s his own.

This is on top of what can only be described as a fantastically packed full of lies list of false credits, like saying he drew Calvin and Hobbes for example, or other titles we know full well he had nothing to do with.

Well, buddy…

I think mostly the things i linked to up top cover the bases, i just want to add one note coming from having read this from a friend on facebook posting on Ty Templeton’s wall.

Anastasia Acid PopTart [one of the more obvious victims of Robs swipes] has already contacted Chiller [con] and, at this time, they will not cancel Granito’s appearance. They have been informed of his thievery but say that it is up to the individual artists who have been ripped off to deal with the situation. Anastasia has said that she will possibly go to the convention and present papers in person.

Here’s my very public reaction to this, in the form of a note to all convention managers.

This is not how to handle this. The quote is anecdotal, but if it’s true?

Very bad PR and possibly leaves you liable. You have it on very good word from numerous creators, regardless if they have contacted you personally, that someone is forging their work, selling it as his own at your shows. And furthermore that the credentials he presented you with were faked was well.

If you’re taking money from Rob you’re profiting from fraud. You are also a victim of  fraud. Even if you are providing space for free. You took him on under the understanding this person is someone who did X Y & Z, and they did not. They lied to you.

In either case you most certainly should not be leaving it to creators to do your job for you and police the event. That’s asking to host a brawl and not going to help create the kind of positive event environment that is in your own best interest. And while i’m not a lawyer, I think you are leaving yourself open to legal consequences by taking money from Rob, who is really playing Russian Roulette here with his brushes.

True, artist don’t have tons of money for legal action. So maybe Rob will get lucky with them and never receive a cease and desist letter or get sued by that crowd. Maybe. Perhaps he’ll just get punched in the face.

But the man is claiming to have worked on some pretty big license properties and is selling their copyrighted merch illegally at YOUR shows.

Get ahead of the curve on this one, and invest in some karma. And keep in mind leaving it to creators, Marvel or DC, Bill Watterson or Jim Davis to file suit or papers means probably leaving yourselves open to receive papers too.

Just a thought.

Rob's rip on the left, Ty's work under a DC/Time Warner copyright on the right.

23.Mar.2011 We’ll call this one “max spouts off a bit”

Me and Sam back when i went by Max and this could be called "Sam and Max" Taken at Quantum Comics circa 1994ish by James Armstrong.

Hey ho, always a bit awkward feeling when it come to talking about myself, but along with publishing and sometimes contributing here, I also make my own comics as you probably know, and I edit for the literary journal carte-blanche.org.

I, I, I, blah blah blah.

It’s as a creator that I was interviewed by my old friend Sam Agro for his blog MOVING PICTURES.

SALGOOD VIBRATIONS

SA: Do you think the future of comics lies in digital media?

SS: I don’t think it’s the whole future, but I do think it’s a big part of it. The internet proper is a great entry point for new talent to stretch their legs, get feed back, and learn if they care to. And for more experienced creators it’s a good place to prove something publishers are normally wary of taking a risk on, like unconventional and maybe demanding approaches to pacing and plot. And building an initial interest in a project.

Also, I’ve solely promoted my work online as a comic artist and illustrator, since 1998 or so. And I’d say about 80% of my income has come from inquiries via that.

Then with the new incoming ‘App’ market we have something that may well offer a viable alternative to periodicals, and the problems of overhead and distribution the direct market is struggling with. It’s got a built in monetary stream so that solves that issue, and the new tablets, e-readers and net-books offer an increasingly comfortable reading form factor. Too early to say anything definitive about it but it’s looking pretty viable. Any problems with it I see are more questions of execution and problem solving, than innate obstacles. —>

And as editor at carte blanche I have a shop talk blog post today, catching non-comics readers up with the evolution of the medium over the last 10 years, and addressing the nomenclature of comics, sequential art, graphic novels and graphic fiction.

SHOP TALK: WHAT IS GRAPHIC FICTION?

What I still think of as comics has been going through a time of great change and growth.

When I decided to dedicate most of my time to making them in high school, it was in part because I was being kicked out, and comics were something you didn’t need a degree in. In truth, there were no degrees to be had in comics. If you wanted to learn more about the medium, you studied art, writing, and film, and extrapolated from these different media. If you achieved a professional level of skill there was little worry about competition; I landed my first paying jobs at Marvel after just one serious attempt to get work in the early 1990s.

While I was developing my own skills out on the edges of the scene in the late 1980s, the then lone journal of comics, inventively titled The Comics Journal, called for our bastard medium to be taken seriously by critics, and urged creators to take what they did seriously in order to bring the standards of their work up to where they might merit that attention. —>

While i’m at it i might as well mention an awesome review i got for Dream Life too, over on Webcomic overlook.

10.Jan.2011 The Sequential Round Table: 2010 in Review

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:34 — 0.1KB) | Embed

For our second ever podcast David Hains, Dalton Sharp, Salgood Sam and Dave Howard met up in Toronto to take a look back at the last year. News stories that stuck in our craws, and the books we loved and saw. And then we took a look ahead, in anticipation at some of the promised realeases of 2011.

show notes

78.4 MB (82,255,872 bytes) 53min, 34 seconds.

Opening Music:Dr. John – Comic Book Crazy

Top news 0f 2010

Ho Che Anderson says he’s out of comics.
The Scott Pilgrim Movie and Books.
Koyama Press – Break-out comics publisher of the year
Jeff Lemire and the Essex County Trilogy.

Music: Charlie Winston – Kick The Bucket – Hobo

Books of 2010

His Face All Red by Emily Carroll
Baba Yaga and the Wolf by Tin Can Forest
Make Me A Woman by Vanessa Davis
Wilson by Daniel Clowes
Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata

Music: Al Green – Aint No Sunshine When She’s Gone – Presious lord i’ll rise again

Children of the Atom by Dave Lapp
children of the atom site

Music: Billy Brag – To Have And Not – Back to Basics

Cunundrum press, as another break-out out publisher
of the last few years.
The Inkstuds book [alt link]
David Collier’s Chimo

Music: Skinny Love – Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago

Looking forward to 2011

Paying For It by Chester Brown
The Klondike by Zach Worton
GNBCC by Seth
Welcome to Oddville by Jay Stephens
Even The Giants by Jesse Jacobs
Cat Rackham book by Steve Wolfhard?
Suddenly Something Happened by Jimmy Beaulieu
Midlife by Joe Ollmann
Michel Choquette monster anthology of comics about the the 60′s

Closing Music: Gold Was His Sun – Nick Craine – November Moon

02.Sep.2010 The Art of Compression: Comic Conversations – in CANADAINART

Kenton Smith has a piece on CANADAINART.CA, talking up the form to the fine arts community. It mostly addresses work from Montreal Publisher Drawn & Quarterly.

“Indeed, comics have perhaps never been as diverse, vibrant and exciting as now—for they are no longer possible to pigeonhole. Comics publisher Chris Oliveros, founder of the Montreal-based publisher Drawn & Quarterly, says “the work today is so diverse—everyone has a unique vision.” Insofar as comics can be considered a literary medium, there seems to be no category they’ve neglected, whether memoir (A Drifting Life), journalism (Joe Sacco’s Palestine) or fictional biography (Seth’s George Sprott). Chester Brown wanted to do Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography because, well, who else was doing history as comics? And besides, he explains, “comics’ visual dimension makes a story more engaging, and keeps history from being dull.” – “

09.Jul.2010 Joe Matt, Jeet Heer and Noah Berlatsky Explore ‘Criticism’

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (78.0MB) | Embed

I had been planning to post a review of the Ben Schwartz edited Best American Comic Criticism (Fantagraphics) but hadn’t got around to it. I was going to structure it around what was excluded (Newgarden and Karasik, Scott McCloud) and focus on the Canadian entries (Seth, Chester Brown etc..) But given various reactions going around the Internet, it seems more appropriate to critique the reactions to the book.

Controversy first arose from the granddaddy of polarization, Joe Matt. In a panel about BACC involving R. Fiore, Sammy Harkham, Brian Doherty and Schwartz, Matt criticizes not the book at hand, but the role of criticism.

“I don’t need someone to tell me whether something is good or not”.

To be fair, this isn’t a direct indictment of criticism– he could just mean it’s not for him– but it’s clear Matt doesn’t hold its place in high regard.

On the Comics Comics website, critic and scholar Heer rightly challenges Matt on the role criticism plays in responding to literature. To Heer, criticism is not about giving a thumbs up or down, but engaging in a conversation about the work. I think most people would say this is reasonable, and Noah Berlatsky indicates he does on Hooded Utilitarian. However Berlatsky takes issue with Heer’s broad sense of what qualifies as criticism, which includes interviews. (more…)

05.Jul.2010 Ty’s opinion of the new WONDER WOMAN

02.Jul.2010 500 Years of Resistance

A new graphic novel on the history of colonization in the Americas, by Artist and activist Gord Hill. of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation.

“500 Years of Resistance” presents an alternate view of colonial history in the Americas. It built on his earlier book 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance.

You can listen to an interview with Gord Hill on rabble.ca.

The history of the colonization of the Americas by Europeans is often portrayed as a mutually beneficial process, in which ‘”civilization” was brought to the Natives, who in return shared their land and cultures. A more critical history might present it as a genocide in which Indigenous peoples were helpless victims, overwhelmed and awed by European military power. In reality, neither of these views is correct.

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance is more than a history of European colonization of the Americas. In this slim volume, Gord Hill chronicles the resistance by Indigenous peoples, which limited and shaped the forms and extent of colonialism. This history encompasses North and South America.

30.Jun.2010 MAMA, IS IT SUMMER YET? The Rosedale closes up for now, & Pictures and Words: Graphic Novelists Discuss Their Craft

The 211blog has some great looking books posted from the last few days. Like the look of this one…

Also i’d like to call your attention to Rory’s post about This Ain’t The Rosedale Library. And to the statement from the shop owners that confirms the closure of the Kensington Market location.

We cannot help but feel guilty for disappointing everyone who has demonstrated their hope that we might resolve our difficulties in the short term. We invite anyone who might feel that we have breached their trust in this respect to contact us [email link provided here on the site]
Jesse & Charlie Huisken

It seems things became intractable with the landlord. But there seems to be hope a new location will be found.

“Our only hope is to imagine that the store may reemerge in the long-term. At this point a fundraiser could only be a Pyrrhic victory. We encourage all those who have shown such enthusiasm for the store to consider helping us and stores of our kind but in the future.”

Good luck guys. If anyone spots a good location up for rent, give them a holler eh?

This was first reported on this site here last week.

And it seems there’s word from twitter of another venerable Toronto Comic shop that will be closing as well, I’ll leave it to Dave to tell us first hand.

I’ve been meaning to introduce David Hains, he’s one of our new team members! I’ll do it properly in another post but as you can see he’s already contributed some great content. He joined us just after TCAF 2010.

Jeffrey Brown, Ivan Brunetti, Anders Nilsen & Chris Ware speak about the place of the graphic novel in literature and, more specifically, about their own craft.

Nothing Canadian about it, just a cool clip.

14.Jan.2010 2009 in Review

2009: The Year in Review

by Bryan Munn

Well, here we are a few weeks into 2010 and our annual look back at the past year in Canadian comics news as seen through the Sequential blog. This time around, a shorter review than 2008.

2009 was an eventful year for us at Sequential. Although Max and I both had lots going on with outside projects (little things like relationships, paying the bills, and staying sane), we did our best to keep our fingers on the passionate pulse of comics, as well as maybe contributing in a small way to the overall flow.

The year started with the news that long-running French-language Mensuhell was closing down; in February, we found out that Canadian artists make peanuts; in March, we learned that Guy Delisle was in Israel for his next book; and on and on. (You take a month-by-month tour of Sequential by checking out the links in the sidebar.)

May was the Toronto Comics Arts Festival and for this event we published the first print issue of Sequential, a landmark for this site that hopefully contributed to the discussion in this country and internationally about our favourite artform. Sequential was also on hand for the Toronto Word on the Street event in September, shining our brilliant spotlight on new work by Evan Munday, Willow Dawson, and Jeff Lemire. Hopefully, we’ve helped get the word out about some worthwhile comics over the past year, be they digital or print, free or not-so-free.

For all the talk of recession and economic hard times, the actual effect on the business of comics and comics sales has been hard to gauge in Canada. I’m sure individual retailers have a handle on the numbers, but for the most part, they aren’t talking. Besides a spate of store closings, the news has largely been balanced out with tales of new openings and generally rosy reports from the convention floors. In other retail news, we had comic shop owners as alleged voyeurs and eternally optimistic promoters. (label: comics retailers)

Despite lingering and urgent (I kid, I think) international economic questions such as the pricing controversy, overall, the major comics news of 2009 is that there are so many comics still being published. The predicted apocalypse of print hasn’t seemed to find the publishers of Canadian graphic novels. Conundrum Press and Mecanique Generale are still pumping out small runs of new books by interesting young talents, people still make minicomics, and hundreds of people still work as cartoonists, writers, and artists of some sort in the comics biz. Graphic novels are still a hot publishing story and many Canadians remain at the forefront of the artform. Which brings us to…

1. Newsmaker of the Year: The Cartoonist Seth

Rather than countdown a list of top stories, I’ve tried to choose one story that exemplifies the kind of year it was in comics and Seth fits the bill both because of the amount of coverage he received this past year and what that says about the current state of affairs. Now, as a friend of the artist (full disclosure) as well as fan, I’m tempted to discount the impact he continues to have on comics, but thinking and writing about the subject as I do on an almost daily basis for Sequential, I find it hard to deny that, far and away, 2009 was Seth’s year. A book of the year in George Sprott, combined with several important design and reprint projects, and a touring art show, made it hard to ignore the cartoonist and his work. To begin with, Seth had a monster critically-acclaimed graphic novel on his hands with George Sprott: 1894-1975. Originally serialized in the New York Times, the episodic story of the final hours in the life of an obscure 1970s Canadian television host was expanded into a much longer (and larger) book that had everyone singing its praises. My views on the book are already on record, but the book also made many best of year and best of decade lists, became a relative bestseller, and was well-reviewed in the mainstream press. The subtext of all this attention is that Seth is currently one of the more exciting cartoonists internationally and the attention given to this book really functions as a sort of barometer for the success of graphic novels in general and Canadian comics in particular. The triumph of George Sprott is also the triumph, for better or for worse, of the narrative of Seth as the ne plus ultra of Canadian cartooning: just as Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy became the dictionary definition of comic strip, so too has Seth come to stand for the entirety of the artform in this country. Is his prominence a bad thing for comics? As a spokesman for comic art and ambassador of the Canadian graphic novel, Seth is an articulate double-threat, but his cred often seems to eclipse younger artists and points of view, especially for mainstream journos and lazy bloggers (mea culpa). On the other hand, his position has made him an enthusiastic and effective champion of new comics he finds deserving and for causes, like last year’s Skim controversy, that require an outspoken (and Seth can be very outspoken) figurehead or ringleader. Furthermore, his dedication to all aspects of comic art, beyond his own output, has guaranteed that the disdained and neglected work of several generations of cartoonists has become part of our current cultural dialogue, in turn inspiring and educating modern readers and creators. And I’m not just talking about what something like the Wright Awards, co-founded by Seth, does to highlight the work of young cartoonists. Witness also the ongoing Peanuts repackaging and the new John Stanley Library from D+Q –if not for Seth, would we even be tempted to consider Thirteen Going on Eighteen as one of the greatest comic book series ever? And let’s not forget the ultimate example and vindication of Seth’s diligent advocacy over the past decade, the Collected Doug Wright, a project that neatly sums up of many of Seth’s characteristic strengths and preoccupations, including his cultural nationalism, his care in design and love of great cartooning.

Whether you view his own thoughtful, painstakingly beautiful comics and larger than life character as artistic genius, as carefully cultivated careerism, or a mixture of both, there’s no denying that Seth prismatically represents the current state of comics in Canada. If Seth didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him, if only so we could talk about the rise of the newest generation of Canadian comics superstars like Jeff Lemire and Bryan Lee O’Malley.

(search “Seth” or “Sprott” at Sequential)

2. Awards

Following last year’s debacle over the Skim graphic novel and the Governor General’s Awards, it was heartening to see the French-language GN Harvey, by Herve Bouchard and artist Janice Nadeau win a GG this year. Elsewhere, a wonderful group of books and creators were the recipients of some of Canadian comics’ highest honours. Looking back, it seems we somehow missed reporting on several awards.

First, the Prix Bedelys. They used to have a crappy website, but now they have a blog of sorts so maybe I can keep better track. The 10th annual edition of these prizes, awarding Quebec comics, were handed out in May. There are four categories. The Albert Chartier reprint collection, Une piquant petite brunette won the Bedelys Quebec prize. $1000 was given to Chartier’s daughter. France’s Etienne Davodeau won the Bedelys Gold for his Lulu Femme Nue, Volume 1. Zarli’s Dragon Blanc, volume 2 won the Bedelys youth prize. And the defunct anthology comic Mensuhell, edited by Francis Hervieux, won the Bedelys Fanzine prize.

Although we hyped the Wright Awards and had lots of TCAF links, we never did actually report on the winners. I feel extra guilty about this because I was one of the awards organizers and was on the nomination committee (full disclosure). I try to keep the reporting of Wright Awards news at an objective arms length but I guess this time I kept it too far out there. Anyway, for the record, the winners of this year’s trophies were Skim, by Jillian & Mariko Tamaki (Best Book); Kate Beaton (Best Emerging Talent); and Matthew Forsythe’s Ojingogo (Pigskin Peters Award). Full release at the website.

Ditto the Expozine Prize. At first I thought we missed it, but the prize for the books collected at the most recent Expozine won’t be decided until March. Last year’s prize (2008) was announced on March 3, 2009 in Montreal.

In editorial cartooning, the top policart of the year was the Ottawa Citizen’s Cam Cardow, who won the National Newspaper Award in that category. The other two finalists were Brian Gable and John Lartner.

Luckily, we did manage to report on the Shusters and Bedeis Causa.

Prix Bedeis Causa Winners

Shuster Awards Winners

3. Bestsellers

The Sequential Bestseller List is a semi-weekly attempt at giving you a snapshot of what is popular in bookstores across the country. Using numbers from bookmanager.com, the list ranks Canadian comics in terms of sales through independent bookstores and some comics shops. Outside of Amazon and Chapters ranks or Diamond sales (which don’t separate Canadian from U.S. sales), these rankings are the only publicly accessible indicators of graphic novel and comics sales we have. This past year, lots of manga, Lynn Johnston, Watchmen, newspaper strip collections, and the occasional breakout Canadian book like the Scott Pilgrim series, Red, Skim, and the perennial fave Louis Riel all took turns at the top of the list. (label: bestsellers)

4. Passages

(label: obituaries)

Sadly, several comics professionals left us during the past year. We end our overview of 2009 with a final look back at these passages.

Roy Carless, 1920-2009. Working class editorial cartoonist from Hamilton.

Bruno Laporte, 1964-2009. Montreal cartoonist and proponent of Quebec bande dessinee.

Bob Muirhead, 1943-2009. Editorial cartoonist for the BC Salmon Arm Observer.

Martin Vaughn-James, 1943-2009. Emigre artist created several avant garde graphic novels in Canada.

19.Aug.2009 Random Bits of Not Totally Useless Information Part 1: Community in Comics

New post by the fabler blog’s Kevin de Vlaming about the art of making it big in comics, sort of….

I am now going to presume to tell you how to be successful in comic books.

Well, I’m not actually going to tell you that. No one can tell you that. If there was a magical club secret to finding success in sequential art and storytelling, it would have been leaked on a messageboard somewhere long ago. Then flamed. Then defended, flamed again, and, if it this hypothetical leak occurred anytime in the last year or so, tweeted.

Then it would have gone from tweeting to trending, and been retweeted and subsequently reposted across the blogosphere. The indie comic scene would have exploded overnight in a glorious flash of social-media-fuelled industry enlightenment.

…But, seeing as how that did not in fact occur, we’ll assume that if there ever was such a secret, it died sometime before the age of digital technology.

Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to spout some thoughts at you, the reader, regarding observations I’ve made about the industry...—>>

13.Jan.2009 2008 in Review

2008: The Year in Review
by Bryan Munn

We try to cover all aspects of the art of cartooning and comix here at Sequential, but sometimes its hard to see the big picture in the daily grind of blogging about the various press releases, publishing events and awards presentations that make up the comic book culture of Canada. That’s why it’s important to try to stand back and take a breath once in awhile, and the beginning of a new year is as good a time as any to look back over the past months and ask, ‘what was it all about?’ Of course, being a relatively tiny, amateur operation, Sequential can’t hope to be anywhere near definitive in its coverage and analysis, especially when trying to get a handle on how, as our mandate has it, the “notable international tectonic movements of the Sequential arts” effect us here in our little regional tidal pool. Specifically, how does what’s happening in the publishing world of New York, or in Hollywood, Europe or Japan, determine how comics are made and enjoyed (or not) in our country? This year, I’ve attempted to narrow the focus of this year-end review to a tiny trio of items that hopefully will speak to these questions.

Here are the top stories of 2008:

1. The Economy

(keywords: comics retailers, the dollar)

Whether it was news of the Quebecor bankruptcy, Raincoast downsizing, or discussions by Canadian comics retailers about the dollar and the price of U.S. comics, every other story that we blogged about in 2008 seemed to have an economic aspect to it. Last year, the misadventures of the Canadian dollar were at the bottom of Sequential’s list of trends and newsmakers. This year, the economy is unavoidably first and foremost, even if you take the current round of ‘panic in the streets’-style hand-ringing and headline-writing with an enormous mound of salt. The fluctuation in the dollar that everyone was talking about in 2007 seemed to stabilize at parity with the the U.S. greenback before tumbling down around the 80% mark where it currently hovers. At the very least, this means that U.S. monthly comic books (floppies) are once again more expensive in Canada. As are imported graphic novels and other books. Combine this with the other effects of the recession in Canada (lost savings from the market meltdown, joblessness, and the general anxiety about the stagnating economy) and the effects on the market for comics are bound to be notable. Although I haven’t seen any hard numbers, anecdotal evidence suggests that the book retail market, slowing for a decade, is in a slump, and that book sales, at least through traditional bricks-and-mortar stores, will continue to decline. Of course, graphic novel and manga sales through bookstores have been one of the few growth areas in recent years (to expect endless growth in unrealistic and really one of the causes of the current crisis), so it remains uncertain whether or not these specific categories will decline. Sales of comics and graphic novels through Canadian comic book shops also remain a numerical mystery overall, since Diamond, the U.S. company that controls distribution of most comics product in Canada (and introduced an expensive computerized ordering system for retailers in 2008), does not make separate sales figures for this country available, although a few recent Diamond statements indicate slight (5%) growth in the U.S.-Canada graphic novel market in 2008. According to Brian Garside, owner of Canadian online retailer All-New Comics, several small town comics retailers have shut down recently as prices have risen,which means that, even if sales seem to be rising in some areas, there are likely many overlooked niches where the opposite is true.

How comics publishers will fare in the recession remains unclear. Certainly a larger Canadian publisher like Drawn and Quarterly, which maintains a strong international profile and exports to larger Anglo markets in the U.S. and United Kingdom, is in a better position than the handful of relatively tiny French-language and boutique English-language Canadian publishers, although these publishers are putting the most actual Canadian content into print. It is safe to say that publishers will be cautious, if not exactly draconian in terms of publishing schedules and print-runs. Certain trends are just visible: Internationally, actual new releases by U.S. manga publishers are expected to decline up to 10%, according to one source. Canadian retailer Chris Butcher has some very cogent analysis and predictions about the market for translated Japanese comics in a pair of recent blog posts here and here. Most intriguingly, Butcher predicts a greater synergy between U.S. manga publishers (including the imminent arrival of Japanese giant Kodansha) and the Direct Market. He also predicts that prestige volumes of adult-oriented art manga, pioneered by D+Q with books like Red Colored Elegy and the Tatsumi project are one of the few areas where growth may be possible. Other future aspects of the U.S. publishing industry remain a black box of mystery. U.S. retailers continue to complain about Marvel and DC publishing strategies as they seem set for the foreseeable future.

The economic recession may also effect those actually making a living from creating comics, whether they are political or strip cartoonists working within the ever-shrinking newspaper industry, writers or artists producing work-made-for-hire comics for U.S. publishers, or cartoonists who make the bulk of their living doing illustration for magazine or business clients. Since record numbers of Canadians are doing comics work for foreign publishers, this is shaping up to be a big story. With the slowdown expected to last at least until the end of 2009, this story is not going away anytime soon and we encourage readers to contact us or comment about their own experiences.

2. Skim

(keywords: skim)

This graphic novel by two cousins, cartoonist Jillian Tamaki and writer Mariko Tamaki, was the buzz book of the year, and wins a spot in this annual summary because it personifies a number of 2008′s biggest trends. First, the book is a high quality work, well-reviewed online and in the mainstream press, and a brisk seller, as seen by its regular placement on the Sequential Bestseller List. These facts alone make the book a big story. While there was quite a bit of wonderful comics released in 2008, none had quite the impact of Skim. One of the trends that the book rode to its advantage was the move to larger publishers. The book was published by Groundwood, a major children’s publisher owned by Anansi Press, with excellent international distribution and a strong publicity department. Skim is Groundwood’s first graphic novel but the trend is widespread, involving not only the New York publishers, but also smaller Canadian organisms like Penguin Canada and Kids Can Press. This trend relates to another which Skim embodies: the move to a focus on children’s and young adult comics material at the expense of adult-oriented material. Whether or not this is actually a long-term trend, as commentators like Tom Spurgeon and Eddie Campbell have speculated, there are certainly many more teen-oriented books being issued by traditional book publishers, and Skim is the most high-profile of these. This issue was brought to prominence when Skim was nominated for a Governor General’s award, the first graphic novel to receive that honour. Despite being a mature work of art, embraced by all ages of readers and reviewers, Skim was nominated in the children’s book category and, notoriously, the artist Jillian Tamaki was not mentioned in the nomination. This event resulted in a campaign lead by several prominent Canadian and international cartoonists to have the awards recognize both creators. The campaign had no effect and the book lost out to a prose work, the whole debacle illustrating how, despite widespread recognition and honours, the graphic novel is still largely misunderstood by the publishing industry, even though the best possible people are on the case.

3. Lynn Johnston

(keyword: Lynn Johnston)

Johnston was number one on the Sequential list in 2007 and she remains one of the top comics newsmakers for 2008. Besides her status as the de facto Queen of Canadian Comics –by virtue of the enormous financial success and popularity of her For Better or For Worse comic strip– Johnston makes our list this year almost as much for what she didn’t do. Sure, her latest book collection was consistently in the top ten of the Sequential bestseller list. And sure, she was inducted into the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame, the first woman to be so honoured. And sure, she continued to be a major philanthropist, giving of her times and money to numerous animal, medical, and cultural causes across the country and internationally. But the most significant news story, and the story that dominated comic strip news over the entire year, was the continuing saga of the drawn-out ending of For Better or For Worse and its reincarnation as a reformatted, redrawn, zombie-Frankenstein version of its former self.

Johnston’s decision to continue her strip, after effectively, and with much fanfare and philosophizing, ending it, wrapping up all of the plotlines and halting the Gasoline Alley-like aging of her characters, is significant in several ways. The decision to revisit aspects of the strip using a photo-album format, in essence as a mixture of legacy strip and ‘greatest hits’ package, drew criticism from comics fans and young cartoonists, everywhere from The Washington Post to The Comics Journal Messageboard. Many critics saw the continuation of the strip as unfair to the many cartoonists with fresh ideas and no repeats who have no hope of finding space in the newspaper. As well, Johnston’s partial retirement also marks an end of sorts for an era of newspaper cartooning. She represents one of the last of the generation of creators who began their strips before 1980 and attained the kind of circulation and numbers that are almost impossible to achieve these days, influencing several generations of younger readers and cartoonists in the mean time. With the impending death of print (or at least, the death of print comic strips in newspapers), and the attendant decline in newspaper culture and journalism, Johnston can be seen as sort of a poster-child for old media and a world that is passing. Despite a robust web-presence for the strip and an active, opinionated face in public, the 62-year-old Johnston seems out of touch with the 21st-Century world of webcomics and graphic novels, preferring, as in her interview at the Giants of the North ceremony, to dwell on the past highpoints of her amazing career.

—

General 2008 Overview and Summary

Publishing

Montreal publisher Mecanique generale had the most diverse and graphically innovative line of graphic novels in 2008, while upstart publisher Conundrum released a few gems. David Widdington’s Cumulous Press closed down, as did the extremely long-running anthology and fanzine Mensuhell.

(keywords: publishing, book launches, graphic novels )

Awards

(keyword: awards)

Those seeking a guide to some of the best and the most beautiful Canadian comics recognized this past year could do worse than review the various comix awards handed out in 2008:

Prix Bedeis Causa

Prix Bedelys

National Newspaper Award

Shuster Awards

Prix Expozine

Wright Awards

19.Dec.2008 This Weekend: Holiday Shopping

For many people across Canada, this weekend will be the final opportunity for last-minute gift buying before the December 25th holiday. It has become evident to me over the last few months, based on my careful reading of various blogs and watching Andrew Coyne on The National, that the recession would soon be over if people just bought more comic books. To that end, I encourage Sequential readers who may be considering a purchase of a graphic novel, strip collection, reprint, minicomic, or comic book pamphlet, to check out various features of this blog as an aid to buying a timeless work of art (and just maybe saving the economy in the bargain):

Primarily, you can refer to the Sequential Bestseller List for a guide to books that are popular, based on sales through independant bookstores. As well, you may want to read and contribute to the Sequential Holiday Wishlist, our reader-created “Best of 2008″ feature.

If you are specifically interested in buying Canadian, and since Sequential attempts to notify its readers of as many new Canadian graphic novel releases as possible, this list of publishing news and links may be helpful (caution: it is long). You might also want to try this link for a list of publishers and this link to access all posts labeled with the “comics retailers” label. (You might also want to check out the handy “Top 15 of the Year” list at the French-language Fichtre bookstore).

Remember: Buy Early, Buy Often, and Buy Canadian!

15.Nov.2008 ‘Maybe Next Time’: GGs to Skim

The Globe and Mail’s James Adams has done the journalistic legwork and has dug up a response to the open letter from Seth and Chester Brown to the administrators of the Governor General’s Literary Awards in regards to the slight of Jillian Tamaki’s contribution to the graphic novel Skim, for which her cousin Mariko Tamaki has been nominated in the Children’s Literature –Text category. The open letter argued that the contribution of the artist must be considered equal to the contribution of the writer in a graphic novel –especially one as sophisticated as Skim.

The response, from a spokesperson for the Canada Council, the body that funds and administers the awards, was basically ‘Maybe next time’:

“We’re a little bit late in the game” to either discuss the issue or make the addition, Melanie Rutledge, head of writing and publishing for the Canada Council, said Wednesday evening. But “we’ll take it under consideration going forward. … We’re always wanting feedback like this.”

It seems like this is a mistake on the part of the GGs since the matter basically comes down to credit where credit is due. There are simply two authors of Skim and one of them was left off of the nominations list. This is not a case of an illustrator making a substantial contribution to a text. As both of the creators have repeatedly asserted, the book was a joint effort and it is impossible to consider it as a work of art solely from the point of view as ‘text’ or ‘illustration’. The Governor General’s Awards do not have to create a new category. They simply have to acknowledge the contribution of both creators.

The winners of the awards are to be announced this coming Tuesday.

—
Follow-up: Tom Spurgeon interviews some of the principles at Comics Reporter.

(above: Mariko and Jillian Tamaki by Jillian Tamaki)

11.Oct.2008 comicbookbin : Should Canada Have a Comic Book Industry Policy?

Winding down a late night I noticed Herve has entered another post on the topic of the Comics Industry here in Canada. One I agree with in general sentiment!

I’m a little surprised, as some things he’s said about grant funding in his last post seemed to run kind of counter to this one politically.

I’m also a bit put off by the idea he ends on, which suggests possilby a degree of editorial influence from the state via funding that I’d have to object to fundamentally…

If we agree that Canada should have a distinctive policy for its comic book industry, then the next question is what strategy to must use to enact its policy. Should the Canadian Government and provinces be actively supporting the comic book industry through grants, loans, tax credits, or help for representation abroad? Should for example, a special push be made to create comic books for special groups like children and aboriginal Canadians? In the book world, most type of literature is supported, but material such as cookbooks and travel material are not supported to the same extent as fiction. In the film world, the government does not support pornography, reality television, and game shows. In animation, because most of the contents is geared towards children, there are stricter guidelines and requests for clear overt Canadian contents in the works. In video games, there doesn’t seem to be any oversight over the contents of the products, probably because the job creation aspect is the ultimate objective of the government as opposed to the promotion of Canadian culture.

There are many genres of comic books touching very different target markets, not sound support strategy can be generated without first understanding what it is one seeks to promote. In hindsight, perhaps Canadian comic book readers should take their local industry more seriously and start asking themselves what kind of comic books they would like their fellow Canadians to create.

Hmmm, now that last bit is a bit problematic. I know where he’s coming from – it’s an audience oriented argument – but i think he’s failing maybe to see the implications of making that kind of thinking federal policy.

But, It’s hard to argue with the feeling it be nice to be taken a bit more seriously on some levels by the government. On this i can relate to what he’s saying.

I think to some degree things are moving in the direction wished for already, in a very short time really comics by any name have been getting a lot more attention and credit for what they have to offer.

I’d point out that in all the National, Provincial and City level Grants [none of which were available to comics about just 5 years ago] all to at least some degree – I’m not clear just on how much – have various priority categories already. For example it won’t win you a grant on it’s own – the work has to be up to it competitive standards still – but for some time now in any class of Canadian Council Grant for anything; if you present work that is intended to address Native, Visible Minority, Children’s and Women’s issues or concerns, then that wins you points in the Judging. If you present a credible voice on the subject you fit the profile of one of the Councils’ Mandates to make an efort to give special attention to those groups.

So to some degree we already live in the world he describes, though as far as I know it’s not a Comics Policy per say but merely the mandate.

No argument, depending on the content of it, I’d love to see Ottawa acknowledge comics with an official independent policy.

I have to say I doubt it’ll happen until we make a lot more money than we do – The culture argument he makes is good, I’d say that’s a great angel and I can think of at least one creator who already is doing that for his own work – we do need to do things like that more. But as an industry I suspect we’ll need to show a bit more green to carry it to the heights of a policy.

Personally my own expectations and hopes for more are tempered by reminding myself that there’s a long list of other pressing issues I’d like my government to spend it’s energy on before they get around to trying to pay some formal lip service to my favorite form of story telling and show they talked to the right geeks by making all the right references – So for now I’m ok to settle for counting ourselves lucky we survived the last round of cuts and shuffles at the Council, and gently remind them how much we rock by rocking. And making shure they get the memo of cource.

It would be nice to be taken as seriously as those other mediums. But having my ass kissed is not how I was taught to be a man, if you’ll pardon the macho sentiment. And to some degree it’s in our advantage to be underestimated at times, one of the things that’s made us a powerful subversive form. I can see the lights of a strong argument along that line too.

Also frankly I’d be a bit afraid to see what kind of messages THIS government would ask us to promote abroad in exchange for it’s favor. Think i’ll wait till after the races, to see who it is i’d be writing my letters too.

09.Oct.2008 Supposedly The State of the Canadian Comic Book Industry

Herve at the Bin is at it again. He’s posted an OP ED style piece on ‘The State of the Canadian Comic Book Industry’ which merits linking to, but I feel I should post a buyer beware notice.

“I’ve been covering the comic book industry for years and have always found the level of professionalism and maturity of players involved lacking. Many times, I have written and said that what passes for public discourse in this industry would get all participants fired from their respective jobs, were they in any other mature industry.” – Herve St-Louis

This to me this is ironic as it’s not how i’ve found MOST of the people in the business in my 18 or so years in it, just an annoying minority.

The piece seems to be a little light on facts for the strong opinions it presents, and is rather dubious as a National Overview given it spends 939 of the 2727 word article raging on one small part of the huge loose collection of comics communities based in Toronto and attacks the city in a very predictable conservative mid west way for essentially being big and both commercially and culturally vibrant. Meanwhile he talks about not even half the other cities in the country.

Why is it that people spend so much time bitching about Toronto, while in the same stroke so often talking about no one else very much anyway? Thus themselves only talking about Toronto for so much of their time. Herve does not even tell us anything about what is happening in his own City of Calgary other than to say “…the majority of comic book readers supported American products rather than Canadian ones”.

Me thinks he has something a little narrower to grind than the National state of anything, but I’m not going to waist my time speculating. I will however add a few facts and my own opinions to you perspective

One small definite mistake I’m sure of is that Montreal does not actually have a regular ‘Anglo’ comic jam. Rupert still hosts events from time to time, but he’s bilingual, if not trilingual. I’m not sure which was his first tongue, but today he’s more Alophone than Anglo if you want to get all uptight about it and put everyone in boxes or schools. Bottenberg is the son of a nice pair of German/American immigrants from out east. And while i’m sure he speaks with an accent to my near uni lingual clod hopper ears he’s pretty damn comfortable chatting fast and furious in French and is thoroughly integrated into his corrner of Montreals’ bilingual culture.

But then this also gets to why i find that aspect of the conversation annoying – the constant need to categorize and separate people by language – and specifically which one they spoke first, not what they speak now – seems even more subjective and discriminatory than to do so by race! [to be clear i'm not advocating for the latter but stating something about the former] And yet it’s done often by politicized francophonie wanting to claim oppression or discrimination in this country – again pretty ironic if you think about it.

Some years ago when I hosted the Monthly Montreal Comix Jams what Herve wrote would have been partly true, about it being organized by an Anglo, though the events themselves were very bilingual in attendance.

But after I stopped hosting, over time the Monthly Jams shrank and are now run and attended largely by a small group of mostly francophone cartoonists who used to always sit at a table together in my day and call themselves ‘the French Table’. They run the only regular comic jam in town today that I’m aware of. They seem to have fun still and the shrinking mostly has to do with the current core groups lack of interest in promoting the event beyond sending out usually a very short reminder of the event. Posting no posters or fliers that I’m aware of around any of the campuses or other locations in town that would bring in the new blood. Seems like since they stated a facebook group that’s been changing a little maybe but this is very recent and remains to be seen what will come of it.

The Anglo community, along with the rest of the folks in town these days do however have many ‘Drink n’ Draw’ get togethers, vernissages and signings. They seldom reflect linguistic community boundaries so much as genre and style, and are plentiful! I frankly cant keep up with it all.

There is the grand canard that the Doug Wrights Awards are discriminatory against Francophones. Not to mention he’s writing about them and in the same breath saying the site does not recognize them, quite a trick. You have to ignore them if your going to do that i think but who am i to say. I’ve said all i care to about all that here already.

Another point I’d challenge him on is the degree to which comics are supported by grants in this country, which I suspect is pretty minimal. Much of it is funding for smaller publishers that are NOT economically viable without support which includes most of the French indy press here in Montreal last time I heard.

The Canadian publishing industry as a whole gets help from grants in this country out of market driven necessity! Without it we’d not have a Canadian publishing industry in the shadow of the US and would only be able to put out the most commercial and mainstream content exclusively.

For a few years now the council has funded graphic novels under the writing program but were talking about 4 or 5 grants at the most a year and it’s reasonable to assume not all are totally successful projects in the end. Many of those works would not have been possible without the support either. As a former recipient and later juror, i think i can vouch for the fact that most of what gets funded is work generally felt to need it – in other words to merits creators who want to do something they can’t just get a publisher to fund with advances or find an easy market for.

That being said it would be totally misleading to suggest our comics publishing industry is substantially supported by such funding – most of it makes it or breaks it based on the efforts and sacrifices of a few small publishing outfits and the proximity of the huge US market, for whatever that’s worth these days.

On the other hand, not sure he meant to sound reductionist or just lacks the info readily found here on this site, but local Montreal Comic community – which is huge and decentralized – gets support and acknowledgment from many of the summer festivals and book fairs, not just Just for Laughs.

Pop Montreal, Fantasia, the Fringe Festival, the Jazz fest, the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival and Montreal’s Salon du Livre all have hosted Comics and BD related events and activities.

I’d love to see better, more imaginative stuff going on, but that’s more pie in the sky than dire need. Personally i’ve always thought we are perfectly located to set up an international event here, our own Angouleme one day maybe.

We are also quite aware of the Gatineau scene here, with a lot of new kids coming out of UQO each graduating year. Not the day to day blow by blow but there was quite a bit of excitement in Montreal when the programs at the university there started up. And the Rendez-vous international de la BD de Gatineau, which I’m attending this year as a guest, has been doing nicely as well.

I’m sure there’s some friction between Quebec city and Montreal, but i’ve not heard much about it in some time – mostly that’s between individuals, not the communities. And i kind of doubt it has much to do with any lack of involvement here in the Gatineau scene.

And the Toronto community – which is also huge, very diverse and decentralized – seems to me to be, from the conversation i have there, very aware of what goes on in the country that’s good and worth paying attention to as well. Just as in other large cities with thriving scenes, not so many feel the need to track mediocre work when there is so much great stuff going in your own neck of the woods. But on the whole they get as excited as anyone over the things people else where are up to and have long standing romantic fascination with the Montreal scene.

Not to mention how very much movement there is here in Montreal between Halifax, Quebec City, Gatineau, Toronto and Vancouver and other points. Each city has at least some comic’s community bleed over with the others. Which reminds me I owe Marc Bell a visit; he’s living in Montreal again now, after spending a long stint in BC. He also used to reside in Toronto, and hails from London Ontario originally. The man is an archetypical indy Canadian cartoonist!

Also found it kind of funny Herve would choose of all people to present Canadian advertising guru, Terry O’Reilly as likely to argue “awards are nothing but attempts to make the public care about a product instead of using traditional advertising means” – take the nothing out and you’d be right, but O’Reilly would himself I bet point out it’s a bit more multi faceted than that. They do that job, but they also help support the creators, raise the prestige of a community and the medium they celebrate, and raise awareness of specific books that the public may not even know about, let alone care about. The more elite and prestigious the Judges and selection process for the books, the more effective they are at that job. {see: I believe he implied something like this argument in it’s broadest terms in Season 3, episode 16 of ‘O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion: In Defence of Advertising’ 2008-04-26 }

And since when was any of that bad for the state of the comics industry?

Once more Harvey is casting things in a much more exclusively balkanized light than they really are. I feel in truth it’s a much more fluid and vibrant national collection of communities and scenes, that has it’s spats and chatty cathys, but on the whole tends to mind it’s own business most of the time really.

That given, here’s the link again, feel free to continue the conversation in the comments.

I will say the closing sentiment is positive, in a way at least. I certainly hope he finds more time to cover local stuff, though i hope he’ll learn to differentiate his own balkanized opinions from those of the community at large.

14.Aug.2008 The Doug Wright Awards’ so called ‘Canadian’ language controversy

With a charged OP ed piece by Herve St-Louis, the publisher and editor for comicbookbin.com has kicked off a pretty intense conversation over the question of whether or not The Doug Wright Awards has the “right” to call itself a Canadian award.

Tom Spurgeon has started to act as something of a neutral presenter of the issue, posting several responses to the first posting from St-Louis on The Comics Reporter. And there’s alot of back and forth in the comments of PW The Beat. So far i’ve found the debate very interesting.

I have a problem with the tone taken at the start by St-Louis myself; I feel he was pretty wildly hyperbolic in his analogies, and presents a basically false premise. And he seems upon a little asking around, to be speculating a lot about the intentions of the DWA organizers without information. There was a small amount of communication with our own Bryan Munn informally as a DWA representative on the subject, but it seems St-Louis cut that short and ran with his story.

But from a purely rhetorical point of view, many have made some very good points on the broader subject.

Bryan, who is responsible for most of the posting here on Sequential now, is bowing out of commenting on the debate on our site as he’s closely involved with the Doug Wright Awards, so I’m going to try to keep on top of this for Sequential, work schedule permitting.

I will be thinking on it and perhaps posting my own perspective more in the future but at this time a few things seem clear to me.

First I think that it’s clear the DWA’s present themselves as A Canadian award, not THE Canadian awards. A point made by Brad MacKay but also consistent with my impression of their promotion of the awards. St-Louis’s argument seems to be build a lot on the idea that something other than this is true.

The About page’s first short opening paragraph from the DWA site.

About The Doug Wright Awards

The Doug Wright Awards were established in 2005 to cast a spotlight on the range of cartoonists and comic artists working in Canada.

And, the very relevant last one…

Language of work
[SeqEd:accepted for submissions]

For the first year at least, The Wrights will only consider works that are available in English or are wordless. (French-language works that are translated into English will be eligible.)

And if testimony is required, going back to the first year of the awards, I can confirm from my own discussions with the organizers, that what Brad MacKay says in his official statement as true; That there has all along been very active discussion of how eventually to address the question of, at some point, bringing in a french language category. But that for now they lack the resources to do so. There has been no active discrimination against french creators in anyway, or a flat refusal to address the issue. Only a recognition that they are unequipped to review french language submissions at this time in a manor suited to the standards they set out for the DWA.

And far from being presented as THE Canadian comics award, they are more like A Literary Canadian Comics Award in affect. And yes we could be really precise and call them The Doug Wrights, A Literary English Language Canadian Comics Award, but frankly as precise as that would be, it would be a terrible, terrible name!

OK yes I’m being a little dramatic, but The Doug Wright English Canadian Comics Awards is truly not too much better. So it’s the The Doug Wright Awards, period.

As Hervé points out; hyphenation, and over qualification is a pain in the arse.

The idea is to make the awards appealing, and interesting. Not boring and didactic.

Now It’s all very fine and well to say they could make the contacts here in Quebec, associate with a local award or start a parallel operation.

But it takes two to tango, and speaking as an Anglo, living in Montreal, I have to say the French community here at least, when not too busy with their own things to be bothered, is seldom very welcoming or enthusiastic of this kind of collaboration over all. Nor do they reach out often themselves in a collaborative manner to make such things happen. It’s like herding cats here on both sides of the language divide.

Maybe in Alberta where Hervé lives now, he’s unaware of this. He started out here so he should know. It was true more so when he lived here!

It’s true that in their own language sphere many people have done amazing things to promote local French work to an international French audience. But making the effort to promote their work to an audience that overwhelmingly won’t be able to read it is never appealing to any publisher. Frankly I for one can’t fault them for that.

And far from generally being ignored by English Canada, I and many Anglo’s have come to Montreal thinking we would be able to connect and build bridges with the french community, only to find a wall of often disinterested backs turned on us because we speak French as poorly as many of the Quebecois speak English.

For those who are more engaged and welcoming – and there are many now – it’s shrugs and a lack of interest in general. Not to say it’s always cold, but I have not experienced a culture in a hurry to be embraced by it’s English neighbors. They want more than not to be admired in their own language in their own region or in the EU. For those few desiring more English attention, they look south, like a lot of us here, were there are many many millions more in the audience than here. A practical issues more than not.

I would put it to Herve that this often kind of insular approach, and a love of confrontation and conflict expressed to me by many of my Francophone Montreal peers, and as exemplified by the rather inflammatory examples in his post – Is as much if not more a problem than any active bigotry in the English community…

“If the Harvey Awards, were to refuse all comic books by blacks or women, until they bleached their skin white or undergo hormone therapy to change their gender, it would be clear to everybody that their policy and the support of those awards was morally wrong”

Really? Comparing asking for translations to bleaching skin, AND forced gender reassignment. Was one over the top inaccurate analogy not enough? Hmmmmm.

Numerous times have I inquired locally in Montreal, as to why more effort is not made by French creators and publishers to translate the huge amounts of work produced here into English for the larger North American market. Or why there are so few sites promoting the Quebec community outside of the Francophone sphere.

Coverage and effort has improved, yes, far more of both things happen now than just 5 years ago. But it’s been very, very slow.

And my said inquiries are more often than not responded to with shrugs and the refrain that they rather someone else do the work. They are too busy, it’s as simple as that. No bigotry, no conspiracy, no surprising undercurrent of hate.

I’ve done my own best when I’ve had the time to do so to promote local work, regardless of language, as has Bryan who is I’ll repeat an active member of the DWA organization.

I have tried at some length to recruit contributors for this very site to help cover the Quebec scene, as well as trying to find people on the coasts and in the mid west.

Even Herve’s own site spends most of it’s time reporting on American, English comics. On the site’s menu there is not even a way to filter the posts to view QC or Montreal stories. Just Cunuck. And I invite you to look for yourself to see how many are for French Language books….

It seems to me Herve is asking, demanding, others to confer praise for work he seldom promotes himself. No he does not call himself THE Canadian comic news site anymore than the DWA call them selves THE Canadian comic awards, but then this only furthers my point.

I can understand that there are a lot of bruised egos, as I’m always reminded when I talk to my peers here in Montreal about this sort of thing. It does not come up nearly as often as Herve’s article would suggest but sure, some feel a little left out.

But I have a hard time giving too much credit to said egos, when they do so little to change the situation themselves through constructive positive actions. But rather it seems – when bothered to do anything – prefer to rant at supposed arms length about it. In this case at Provincial length, and without foundation or information speculating in an overwhelmingly demonizing way about the intentions of the ‘Others’ they think someone may perceive themselves slighted or ignored by.

How about this; I’ve not talked to anyone about this so I don’t know if the will or means can be mustered, but say they do and could be. Say someone in QC, or the french community outside of QC cares about this all that much, and wants to do something.

Say maybe the Prix Bedelys have any interest in this, that they take the initiative to put together a jury and reading list for a French language award to spotlight Original French books to the rest of Canada and the English comics reading world and any French readers who may be paying attention, to be presented at The Doug Wright Awards.

They can also help raise funds locally for the prize and to pay for the trophy, and The Doug Wright Awards in turn give them the additional press and attention. The DWA orginization have the current problem of a lack of resources and means on their side addressed in this way.

Maybe as a way to make this a mutual trade – not to besmirch anyone’s best intentions; but the Bédélys trophy is not, well, all that impressive. Perhaps they also might be able to persuade the Doug Wright Awards rather famous trophy builder to help them out as well?

Call it a trade for mutual benefit, and fix the problem by doing something about it, rather than making over the top and inaccurate analogies to civil rights abuses and the intentions of others you don’t actually talk with before speculating on publicly.

But in the mean time, until the French Comics community is willing or wants to be bothered to take on the task of promoting their own work to the rest of the world regardless if it’s Francophone or not, I think it’s a little disingenuous for someone in the to cry discrimination in this manor.

04.Apr.2008 Weekly Bestsellers in Canada: April 3

The Top 50 Graphic Novels in Canada, courtesy of BookManager. The full list is available here. The list is compiled by BookManager based on sales through over 400 independent bookstores. Sales through comic shops and larger retailers like Chapters-Indigo are not reflected in this list. For balance, you might want to try the Amazon.ca and Chapters-Indigo lists. This list has two parts, the top 50 overall and (at the bottom) the top 30 by Canadian creators. I’ve added last week’s ranking in parentheses, with a (-) indicating an absence from the top 50 last week –although books that were not in the top 50 last week were most likely in the top 100, with the possible exception of a few newly published hits

Top 50 Comics and Graphic Novels in Canada

1. (2) Naruto 28, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
2. (1) Fruits Basket 19, Natsuki Takay (Tokyopop)
3. (-) Vampire Knight 4, Matsuri Hino (VIZ)
4. (3) Fullmetal Alchemist 16, Hiromu Arakawa (VIZ)
5. (15) Naruto 27, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
6. (4) Negima! 17: Magister Negi Magi, Toshifumi/Hiroe (Random House)
7. (30) Senior’s Discount, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
8. (11) Death Note 2, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
9. (5) Death Note 1, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
10. (14) Naruto 1, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
11. (7) Naruto 2, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
12. (6) Jellaby, Kean Soo (Hyperion)
13. (9) Death Note 4, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
14. (31) Complete Persepolis, Satrapi (Knopf)
15. (8) Vampire Knight 2, Matsuri Hino (VIZ)
16. (13) Naruto 26, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
17. (10) Naruto 3, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
18. (12) Death Note 12, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
19. (-) Dark Wraith of Shannara, Terry Brooks et al (Random House)
20. (24) Death Note 3, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
—–
21. (17) Garfield Goes Bananas, Jim Davis (Random House)
22. (16) Fruits Basket 1, Natsuki Takaya (Tokyopop)
23. (21) Bleach, Vol. 22, Tite Kubo (VIZ)
24. (-) Naruto 20, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
25. (-) Naruto 19, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
26. (32) Death Note 13, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
27. (19) Death Note 7, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
28. (-) Yozakura Quartet , Suzuhito Yasuda/Satsuki Yamashita (Random House)
29. (18) Vampire Knight 3, Matsuri Hino (VIZ)
30. (-) Skim, Mariko Tamaki/Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood)
31. (20) Dark Tower:The Gunslinger Born, Peter David (Marvel)
32. (38) Naruto 24, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
33. (22) Persepolis 1, Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon)
34. (45) Death Note 5, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
35. (27) Black Cat 13, Kentaro Yabuk (VIZ)
36. (25) Naruto 25, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
37. (43) Authoritative Calvin And Hobbes, Bill Watterson (Andrews McMeel)
38. (-) Naruto 22, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
39. (-) Naruto 4, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
40. (26) Death Note 6, Tsugumi Ohba Takeshi Obata (VIZ)
—–
41. (-) Naruto 23, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
42. (-) Asterix and the Falling Sky,, Uderzo (Orion)
43. (-) Bleach 2, Tite Kubo (VIZ)
44. (-) Watchmen, Moore/Gibbons (DC)
45. (41) Hell Girl 1, Miyuki Eto (Random House)
46. (-) Naruto 5, Masashi Kishimoto (VIZ)
47. (-) Essential Calvin And Hobbes, Bill Watterson (Andrews McMeel)
48. (-) Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons, Bill Watterson (Andrews McMeel)
49. (39) One Piece 17, Eiichiro Oda (VIZ)
50. (23) Vampire Knight 1, Matsuri Hino (VIZ)

The graphic version of Terry Brooks’ Shannara fantasy novels, Dark Wraith of Shannara makes an impressive debut at #19. Likewise a high debut for a Canadian book that has been creeping up the All-Canadian list, Skim, at #30. See here for last week’s list. The pattern that emerges from looking at these lists over a period of weeks is that certain books, especially manga series, continuously jostle with each other, sliding up and down the longer list on the strength of a new volume or a spate of purchases for the kiddies.

The BookManager List is a wondrous, scary place, where everyone from Todd Hignite to Charles Schulz to Dan DeCarlo to Oor Willie to Avril Lavigne duke it out and where one sale in one tiny bookstore can move a book from #999 to #200. This is also the place where you find books by Canadian creators and where our Canadian Top 25 comes from:

Sequential’s All-Canadian Top 30
from BookManager

1. (2) Senior’s Discount, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
2. (1) Jellaby, Kean Soo (Hyperion)
3. (5) Skim, Mariko Tamaki/Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood)
4. (3) Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, Chester Brown (D+Q)
5. (25) The Spirit (Hardcover), Darwyn Cooke Jeph Loeb J Bone (DC)
6. (7) The New Frontier 2 (Paperback), Darwyn Cooke (DC)
7. (-) Paul Goes Fishing, Michel Rabagliati (D+Q)
8. (4) Essex County 1: Tales From the Farm, Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
9. (-) Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe, John Bell (Dundurn)
10. (12) Extraction!: a comix reportage, Tessier/Dubois (Cumulous)
—–
11. (6) Teaching is a Learning Experience!, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
12. (8) The New Frontier 1 (Paperback), Darwyn Cooke (DC)
13. (13) I Never Liked You, Chester Brown (D+Q)
14. (14) She’s Turning into One of Them!, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
15. (19) Keep the Home Fries Burning, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
16. (22) Milk Teeth, Julie Morstad (D+Q)
17. (21) Therefore Repent! Jim Munroe Salgood Sam (NMK/IDW)
18. (28) Scott Pilgrim 4, Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni)
19. (-) Never Wink at a Worried Woman, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
20. (-) Northwest Passage, Scott Chantler (Oni)
—–
21. (-) Just One More Hug, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
22. (-) Zombies Calling!, Faith Erins Hicks (Slave Labor)
23. (-) Middle Aged Spread, Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
24. (9) The BackBench Collection, Graham Harrop (Ronsdale)
25. (10) Last Straw (1985), Lynn Johnston (Andrews McMeel)
26. (16) White Rapids, Pascal Blanchet (D+Q)
27. (17) Albert and the Others, Guy Delisle (D+Q)
28. (15) Essex County 2: Ghost Stories, Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
29. (18) Dramacon 3, Svetlana Chmakova (Tokyopop)
30. (20) Dramacon 2, Svetlana Chmakova (Tokyopop)

I think Zombies Calling! is the only new new book on the list. Everything else has been off and on the list for some time. The top 4 on the All-Canadian list rank in the top 60 overall. #5 ranks at 125 overall. #8 is 360 overall. #14 is 560 overall. #22 is 800 overall. Etc.