Wrapping up another year of link-blogging with the C-List here at Sequential. Thanks everyone who sent in links and everyone who blogged or tweeted about some aspect of Canadian comics in 2011. I try to make note of as much as I can (or as much as I can stand, as the case may be) and appreciate any and all feedback.
So let’s get to it:
Item! At the Stripper’s Guide site, comics historian Alex Jay provides one of his frequent infodumps about a forgotten cartoonist, in this case the Montreal-born Raoul Barré (1874-1932), who created comic strips and animated cartoons in the U.S. and Canada, working on Felix the Cat and Mutt and Jeff shorts as well as his own newspaper Sunday strip, Noahzark Hotel. In Canada, he produced “Les Contes du père Rheault,” a sort of Quebecois Katzenjammer Kids, for La Patrie newspaper.
Item! I love this sort of photo of dollar bin finds and shopping sprees: What cartoonist Rebecca Dart bought on Boxing Day.
Item! Tdotcomics’ Alice Quinn returns with Episode 6 of her video podcast Quintessential Comics. Interview subjects this time around are Toronto webcomics creators Adriana Blake and Brian Evinou.
Item! Introducing, Hipstro Boy.
Item! In U.S. superhero comics news, the fan website alphaflight.net was hacked and infected with malware and has been offline for several months, but may be on the verge of returning.
Item! Speaking of Alpha Flight, the current AF miniseries artist Dale Eaglesham is the subject of the latest Year-End Survey at the Shuster Awards blog. Eaglesham writes briefly about the culture of fear that has taken hold among the workers in the world of superhero comics.
Item! And finally, Gilles Ratier has published his annual survey of France’s comics industry, with many statistics about the number of books published, sales figures, and genre breakdowns. The report is available as a French-language pdf here and is partly summarized in English at the Bleeding Cool site. Worth reading, especially the index, and especially if you’ve ever wondered how many people attend the Angouleme festival (200 thousand), or how many copies of Naruto or the latest XIII volume were printed. In terms of Canadian content, the list doesn’t number Anglo-Canadian creators and lumps Francophone Canadian creators in with French and Belgian, but the latest volume of Le Nombrils by the Quebec duo Delaf and Dubuc (published by Glenat) had a print run of 150,000 books, putting it in the top 20 non-manga comics in terms of printings. Guy Delisle’s Chroniques de Jérusalem (Delcourt) had a first printing of 55 thousand copies and Michel Rabagliati’s Paul au Parc (La Pastèque) hit the French market with 33 thousand copies.
And that’s about it! See you next year in the C-List!