Taddle Creek #32 Comix Supplement

by Ethan Rilly, Dave Lapp, Michael Cho, Jason Turner, Jason Kieffer, Joe Ollmann, Maurice Vellekoop, Corey McCallum, Matthew Daley, and David Collier

Just in time for TCAF this year, the fine people at Taddle Creek have put together a terrific broadsheet comics supplement to their latest volume; seven massive pages of comics for only $2.  I always enjoy Taddle Creek's fiction and reporting, but the way it's embraced the Toronto comics scene is something that's always endeared me to the magazine.

The first strip (shown in the image) is by Ethan Rilly, of Pope Hats fame.  It's about a stained glass artist who is so unhappy with his creation that he feels compelled to destroy it.  This story would not feel out of place in an issue of Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve, as it has many of the same sensibilities.

Dave Lapp, the most regular of Taddle Creek contributors, has a nice strip about an incident from his childhood, when he got in trouble for drawing 'Dirty Drawings' in his classroom.

Michael Cho, one of Toronto's greatest cartoonists, has a nice little piece about a man looking back at his youth, and the way the ever-changing city has cut him off from many of his memories, although that's not exactly a bad thing.  I love his stuff.

Jason Kieffer, who is probably the perfect person to adapt Rob Ford's story into a graphic novel (since it would fit nicely with his Zanta! and The Rabble of Downtown Toronto), adapts an Achomawi legend to the comics page.

David Collier contributes a page of reminiscences about the Toronto Reference Library (home to TCAF), and the joys of looking through old bound newspapers and comics.

There are other strips here, but these are the ones that stood out to me as the most memorable and most impressive.  I hope this is something that Taddle Creek chooses to do again, as I loved it.

For readers outside of Toronto, you can check out the comics here.

Chimo

by David Collier

Chimo is an autobiographical graphic novel from David Collier, who decided, in his early 40s, to re-join the Canadian military, with the goal of traveling to Afghanistan.  Collier was in the army as a young man, and achieved his first brush with success as a cartoonist during that time.

Now, married with a child, he wants to be involved in the Canadian Forces Artists Program, a successor to the glorious Canadian War Artist Programs of the first and second World Wars.  In its original form, the Canadian War Records, under the control of Lord Beaverbrook, sent Canada's best artists (including the various members of the Group of Seven) into the trenches and along the front lines to paint what they saw.  This led to some incredible artwork.

The participants in the modern iteration of this program are not actual soldiers, and therefore are restricted, for insurance reasons, from going anywhere that is actually dangerous.  In order to get to Afghanistan, Collier re-enlisted, and almost immediately blew out his knee in a training exercise.

The bulk of this book is about a man fighting against time, and striving to live life on his own terms, albeit within a highly structured and regimented environment.  The text digresses all over the place, as we learn about the history of skipping rope, and the life story of Jackrabbit Johannsen, Collier's childhood hero and pioneer of cross-country skiing.

I found the book to be very readable, and worked my way through it quicker than I expected.  That no part of this book ever took place in Afghanistan was not the disappointment I would have anticipated it to be.  Good stuff.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13

Edited by Chris Ware

This is the comics issue of McSweeney's, which received a fair amount of attention when it was published in 2004 for showcasing a lot of up-and-coming talent in the arts comics field.  It contains a wide range of short comics and excerpts from longer pieces, as well as a few essays or memoirs about comic books, their history, or their influences on other artists or writers.

The biggest problem with reading this book for the first time six years after it was published is that I've read a lot of the material in here in its complete, finalized form.  This is not really a problem, as I am very happy to return to some of the works here, but it did limit the novelty of reading such a well-produced and designed hardcover with some of my favorite 'independent' artists contained in it.

Ware and company have assembled a very interesting collection, with contributions from people like Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings), Joe Sacco (The Fixer),Charles Burns (Black Hole), Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers), Chris Ware, and Los Bros. Hernandez.  There were also plenty of lesser-known cartoonists included, some of whose work I found irritating, while others were quite enjoyable.

Strangely, there was a very visible Canadian delegation to this collection, with and excerpt from Joe Matt's Spent, David Collier's strips about moving to Hamilton, and a long excerpt from Chester Brown's classic Louis Riel, detailing the death of Orangeman and agitator Thomas Scott, a pivotal moment in Riel's story, and a great example of the genius of that book.

Some of the pieces that were new and interesting to me were Ben Katchor's Hotel and Farm strips, one-pagers that dealt with those two topics; David Heatley's Portrait of my Father; and Kim Deitch's Ready to Die, about a man on Death Row.  I also really enjoyed Chip Kidd's memoir on friendships and Batman merchandise.

Of course, as with any anthology like this, there were plenty of things that I either had no interest in, or just flat-out hated (I'm looking at you Kaz), but overall, this was a very worthy purchase.