Cross-Canada comix newz check-up.
Item! Publishing a Kate Beaton calendar is such a good idea it kind of looks like a no-brainer in retrospect. They look great! Beaton is shaping up to be the Jim Unger of the 2010s (in a good way).
Item! The National Post “reports” on where Chester Brown lives, where he used to live, and where he really wants to live:

When I lived in Kensington in the late ’90s, it was … almost as if I knew the neighbours around me. I still like to hang out in the park at Augusta and Denison. Everything is still on street level, everything is on a human scale.

Item! Chester’s classic Ed the Happy Clown has just been re-released in graphic novel form by D+Q. Two good reviews here and here. I particularly like R.Fiore’s take:

Shock elements tend to lose their charge over time because the shocks depend on contemporary attitudes that are subject to change. Brown’s outrages remain outrageous because he approaches them not with a youthful sense of moral certainty but with the deadpan matter of fact detachment of someone who finds the world essentially mysterious. His approach is of one who has not yet passed judgment.

Item! The book is also noted in Macleans. I like their list of cartoonists Chester has inspired that follows a recounting of the reaction to Brown’s recent Paying For It:

“With the iron still hot, literary Montreal comics house Drawn & Quarterly decided to strike again, reissuing Ed the Happy Clown, the book that defined Brown’s early career—and won the Harvey award for Best Graphic Album in 1990—in a hardcover, note-appended edition. Since 1989, when the graphic novel was first published by now-defunct Toronto comics publisher Vortex, it’s been a cited influence for countless giants in the comics industry, including Seth, Chris Ware, Craig Thompson, Dan Clowes, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Anders Nilsen.”

Item! There is a preview of Emily Carroll’s next print comic, a contribution to Dark Horse’s revival of the 1970s horror anthology Creepy, up at Comic Book Resources:

Uncle Creepy doesn’t need a summer vacation when he can spend the time scuba-diving through comics’ darkest, murkiest waters. In this issue he’s surfaced with a batch of our most fearsome features to date, as Doug Moench and Kelley Jones (Batman: Unseen) continue their tale of Lovecraft insanity, Doselle Young (The Monarchy) delves into the murderous side of parallel universes, Emily Carroll (His Face All Red) brings horror from a spooky kitchen knife, and more, plus a classic reprint from Creepy magazine.

Item! Jillian Tamaki reminds you: you’ve got great personal style!
Item! Kid Koala is profiled in the Vancouver Sun on the subject of his new graphic novel performance piece and his daughter’s obsession with My Little Ponies:

The 37-year-old turntablist/DJ better known as Kid Koala is now a father of two girls, Maple and Ruby, the latter born just a few months ago.
“I’m impressed by Maple’s ability to differentiate them [the ponies] by just the colour of their hair,” San says of his three-and-a-half year old daughter. “She probably gets it from me because people call me on that all the time: ‘How do you differentiate between all your records?’ ‘Oh, I can just tell from the colour of the centre sticker or whatever.’”
San’s latest project, Space Cadet, the soundtrack to a graphic novel of the same name, was admittedly inspired in part by Maple’s birth…

Item! The latest from publisher La Pasteque is Evan Evans, the first solo graphic novel from cartoonist Laurent Kling, previously responsible for Les rois du pétrole with collaborator Vincent Bergier. The new book is billed as an homage of sorts to the vaudeville cinema of Laurel and Hardy.
Item! Lastly, Conundrum Press’s Andy Brown has let slip the news that Kerry Byrne’s Lillian the Legend graphic novel will be translated in France by Editions L’Agrume.