Text/Book, the Toronto Standard‘s books column, is written by Emily M. Keeler and Chris Randle, plus occasional guests.
Last Saturday night, in conjunction with this year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, several Doug Wright Awards were given out for the best Canadian cartooning of 2011. I probably shouldn’t say much more about the ceremony itself, because I was on the DWAs nominating committee this time and am thus officially neutral yet massively biased, but I was struck by something my fellow critic Jeet Heer said while presenting the Best Emerging Talent gong to Montreal’s Ethan Rilly. Rilly’s Pope Hats is an irregular cartoonist’s showcase, in the tradition of seminal alternative-comics series like Eightball, Hate and Optic Nerve, which barely exist in those dimensions anymore; as Heer noted, the format has gone out of favour of graphic novels (or “comics with a spine”) and artfully designed anthologies. The only exception is the self-published minicomics that spread around events like TCAF itself in the manner of risographed cold germs. I contracted at least a dozen.
Nathan Bulmer’s Lil’ Chris Ware combines two familiar uses of the form: minicomics mocking Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (Seth, Joe Matt and Chester Brown created a notorious one) and minicomics mocking other cartoonists. Given that the great Ware has acknowledged Schulz’s influence on his own similarly depressing work, Bulmer could be drawing his half-asleep subconscious. He even captures Ware’s almost pathological self-deprecation, albeit displaced through a dying Lucy. It’s like some musician putting a joke cover on the B-side. Even more unauthorized appropriation can be found in Josh Bayer’s Suspect Device anthology (two issues, so far), where scores of artists detourne Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy characters to gory and antisocial ends. Each page begins and closes with a decontextualized panel from the original strip, which lends them an uncanny sense of continuity, as if Bushmiller were playing exquisite corpse and the cadaver started shambling around.
Much as I enjoyed seeing Nancy blow up her school, one of my favourite TCAF discoveries was devoted to subtler formal play. Hellen Jo’s new zine Deep Cut delves into the possibilities of a single image, the luxuriantly black mass shown on its cover. In what might as well be the comics equivalent of real-time, a slender hand emerges from underneath the inky locks, snipping away until the naked girl it belongs to is sporting Grimes hair. Then the blot streams back out of her face, into a shag piled even higher than before. 24 hours having passed since the last one, Michael DeForge had a new minicomic for sale as well, the second part of his ongoing Kid Mafia serial. (You can read #1 online for 50 cents.) The title contains the entire premise – pimply teenage dirtbags with tragic facial hair and their own mob operation – but the mundaneity surrounding DeForge’s central concept somehow makes it feel stranger still.
Michael Comeau’s Hellberta #2 may not be a strictly defined minicomic – its prequel had a publisher and everything, Koyama Press – but it reads like a zine. The first Hellberta won the 2012 Doug Wright Award for best experimental or avant-garde comic, and I had the pleasure of writing the citation for its melange of “loving pulp, comic occultism and political outrage.” In that previous issue, Comeau pitted a vengeful Wolverine against corporate polluters, corrupt RCMP forces, B-movie Crucivixens and a papal-garbed Stephen Harper; here, the borrowed Marvel superhero makes his mostly-wordless flight through “an environment intolerant to the queer and weird.” A satirical outburst, a physical art object and a story where someone barks “the amputation store is open for business,” Hellberta #2 displays the fixations many younger, genre-affectionate cartoonists are working through in a singular aesthetic. And it’s a better Wolverine comic than Marvel will ever print.
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Chris Randle is the culture editor at Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @randlechris.
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