wonderdick
news and links from around the web on the subject of Canadian comics:
Item! Mike Winters comics appear in Edmonton’s VUE weekly, Vice Canada, and online under the “Cartoon Machine” banner. Now he has a comic book compilation coming out, featuring his totally unsympathetic cast of characters and mini-strips like the frankly-disturbing Chubb, the slacker adventurers of Daggers and Dexterity, and Toronto hipster Wonderdick. National Post interview from last year.
Item! Chris Randle interviews Geneviève Castrée for Random House’s Hazlitt literary magazine: “Maybe there are cartoonists out there who work really hard on perfecting their style. It’s hard for me to relate to, I just sit down and although it comes out better as the years go by, I don’t really practice. Whenever I try to draw from life I feel like I can’t shake off the way I draw, my personal quirks. It just comes out that way. If anything I feel like I have more control over my hand-writing. That has changed more over the years.”
Item! D+Q has scheduled the next giant issue of Seth’s Palookaville series for the Fall and promises “This issue features 30+ pages of “Clyde Fans”, 30+ pages of an autobiographical sketchbook story called “Nothing Lasts”, and the debut of Seth’s rubber stamp diaries (Seth has been keeping a diary for a few years now and since he realized that he might be redrawing some of the same figures over and over again he created rubber stamps as a time-saver.” You can read a preview of the new autobio strip from the issue here.
Item! Patrick McEown’s debut graphic novel Hair Shirt, originally published by UK outfit SelfMadeHero in 2011, now has North American distribution through Abrams and hits book stores and comics shops this month. My memory of the pdf I read of this two years ago is quite pleasant and I look forward to revisiting its dream-like imagery and great colouring in the flesh.
Item! Artist, zinester, roller-derby champ, and part-time comic shop clerk Ange Drystek talks about her vision for the re-christened Kazoo Print Expo, for which she is the chief coordinator, to the University of Guelph’s Ontarion newspaper: “As far as the tablers go we have zine artists, comic artists, print makers, screen printers, there’s people with small art-books and photo art-books,” said Drystek. “There’s an illustration art magazine from [Guelph-Toronto] coming called Carousel [and] there’s Impress, a small comic-illustration company based out of Toronto that do a lot of art-books […] I went to school for studio art (I just graduated last spring) […] and the whole process was aiming for me to be a fine artist and I really had this disconnect,” said Drystek.” The way that I see art is not white gallery walls and pristine [work] and things sold for thousands and thousands of dollars. I really don’t like that gallery systems. What I want is for art to be more accessible, a little more practical and maybe a little bit more commercial. This gives people the opportunity to sell their work on a smaller scale.”
Item! My new favourite cartoonist is Connor Willumsen. While you may know his Marvel Comics work (Punisher Max), he is becoming better known for his sci-fi, pseudo-surrealist online and small print-run comics. Most recently, Willumsen finished up a highly-recommended mind-blowing cyberpunk insta-classic. As he notes, it’s “published in a scroll format at the Study Group Comics website, which was arranged by Zack Soto […] I started this comic while taking Frank Santoro‘s Comic Book Correspondence Course for Comic Makers last year.” Willumsen is also interviewed at Sam Weber’s Your Dreams My Nightmares podcast.
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