The VanCAF Reader

A (temporary?) home for long-form comics journalism

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BD à BC: An Interview with Alexis Beauclair

by Kim Jooha

Alexis Beauclair and Kim Jooha have talked before. This was part of my interest in bringing them together-- For years Alexis has been making some of the most inventive works in comics that both subvert and champion the form. At the same time, Kim is one of comic's great insightful minds, able to rend meaning from the most challenging works as easily as a child does an Archie Double Digest. As mentioned, their lives in comics have brought them together in the past, perhaps most notably with Kim serving as editor on Beauclair's book "Vanishing Perspective". For BD à BC, Alexis and Kim talked via email about Beauclair's collection "Freefall", forthcoming from Breakdown Press.

-Jarrett Evan Samson

KJ: Alexis, you have created Sci-fi comics since the beginning of your publishing career. What drew you to sci-fi?

AB: Sci-fi is not a goal for me, I would like it to don’t fit into any genre (without all this absurd futuristic technology that will be so cheesy just a few years later :) ). I’m driving toward a no-genre where there are just human bodies (indefinite people) interacting with/in elements or physical laws.

A kind of comic that could be read in various areas of the world and time.

KJ: Even though they have narratives unlike your more minimalist & formalist comics like LOTO (Editions Matiere) or Vanishing Perspective (2dcloud), they still do not have dialogue. Why do you hate dialogue? (just kidding 😂) But on a more serious note: why no dialogue? Is it your practice philosophy? I do love that there is no dialogue, I think it causes the readers to be more active and immersed in your work — but that’s my opinion. I am curious about your reasoning!

It is also kind of 'back to the future' of written language

AB: I love many comics with dialogue but I feel there is something that always disturbs me-- during the reading, I feel my eyes are directly jumping on the words. And I feel the drawing is only in my external visual focus, (you know, when like you are focusing on something in front of you but you also see what is around it, even if your eyes are not jumping on it). It's like the art is in the second layer, less important, just giving a background atmosphere to text, a context. And when I feel this, I feel so bad for the artists who spent so much time on drawing that I don't look directly at, haha.

Visual-only comics are a very different kind of comics. The reader has only visuals to decrypt- it is kind of hard to make it fluid because it is only chosen static images. I love this challenge.

It is also kind of 'back to the future' of written language.

KJ: In addition to being wordless, the comics in this collection feature an anonymous “body”/“bodies”, as I would like to call them, rather than a "character/characters" that are almost like the suspects in Detective Conan (LOL this is also a joke!)

AB: Yes they are bodies for me. They are vehicles. They are more like Tintin, haha. Tintin is a fascinating asexual minimalist character, with no personality, while all other second characters in the comic have strong personalities. It gives the reader a receptacle to sink in and 'live' the adventures.

I like to draw ideas more than representations of something existing. That’s a thing proper to drawing, you can show a human, you don’t need to find a specific one like in cinema.

KJ: Are they all same species? Do they live in the same biosphere? (LOL) On a more serious note, I am curious why you choose them to be anonymous? Not only they do not have names, they are not wearing clothes and, except when needed for a specific story, their genitals and/or other body parts are not apparent- thus, they are neither a naked nor clothed “body”.

AB: My approach is minimalistic, I only focus on things I want to share. I don’t care to be realistic.

It's funny to consider this, it allows us an opportunity to realize drawing comics is a crazy task ! If you decide to be realistic you have an insane amount of things to decide. You have to design everything, including some futile things that are not really needed?

If I want to express “someone is running” I chose to only say this and not talk about his race, or his age, his style of clothes. Sometimes I would like readers to not know if they have clothes or not, but it’s very difficult with line drawings. And I love to draw body curves, since I loved to draw nudes in art school.

I realize now the only thing I specify is gender.

KJ: Your work features a lot of bodily transformations and disembodiment, but they never feel grotesque, gory, or scary. Why bodily transformations and/or disembodiments?

AB: I’m trying to probe the human unconscious. Fascinations always drove me, I love to dig into them. They're so exciting, strange, deep… I’m fascinated by what we call in french “prégnance visuelle”, which means “deep resonating fertile visual force”. Why are certain forms so “prégnante” for the human eyes/brain? Why are geometric or erotic shapes so strong? These questions lead me to question human mechanisms.

KJ: How does the “texture” matter to you? I was fascinated by how you represented bodies and objects in Interface when I first read it in Gouffre. Similarly, could you talk about the material feelings of Interface and Neba Neba? I'm curious how you represented the 3D-ness of things.

AB: I always loved bas-relief. The in-between of 2D-3D is so interesting. It's intriguing how shades, giving volume, give such a sensation of reality. While making it, I realized that a slight imprecision of the line is obvious and uncomfortable, but gradient shades are very forgiving and make it more real very quickly.

I think I always focused on perception, how our inner self connects with the outside world through our sensitive receptors (I see them like holes). So, I’m interested in trying to translate different kinds of perception into the comics medium, how something enters in us. I also feel like there is something deeply connected between visual and touch. Visual sensation gives a sensation of space and so also a sensation of touch, like how the eye can navigate in the white blank/emptiness and can grab the extremity of shapes. The eye catches images.

KJ: Related to both bodily transforms and texture, many of these bodies touch, are submerged in, and become liquid. Why liquids?

AB: Life is fluid! :)

Again, I look for “prégnance”, and fluids are mesmerizing. Do we have this fascination because we connect it to lush, to life? It seems advertisements for milk/cream/coffee/chocolate/etc understand very well our deep reliance on fluids. I totally love this fluid porn on drink bottles... It’s such smooth erotic feelings. I think this is very close to ads with arousing bodies. We are driven by these deep, unconscious, very physical attractions. Fluid is more fun… and nobody will ever think to censor that!

KJ: I love that your works do not have obvious answers and make readers ask questions like I am doing right now. Do you think about how readers would react/read while you make comics?

AB: Yes. I feel I’m more a reading-designer than a comics artist. I’m always looking for in-between, strange, bizarre, undefined, evocation, ambiguity-- and at the same time I’m doing my best to make it very clear and very fluid reading. I love this tension. My motto is : “ligne claire” (clear line) blur

KJ: Is there any difference in making more minimalist/formalist comics in that/other regards? The stories in this collection have a variety of styles- is this intentional? Does it come from the specifics of each story or is it because they were made at different periods and your style has evolved?

AB: Yes, because they were made in different periods of time and evolved. I kept the 3x4 square panel configuration, with no blank separating panels. These are important choices. Lines of 3 give it more of a rolling rhythm, unlike binary/symmetry which is static. 4 panels, because 3 would have symmetry, and to better fit to a good shape of book. Square, to not have to choose between vertical and horizontal and also because it focuses attention in a specific way. I love square photographs. It leads to “imagier”, to symbolism. I like to think of panels like language unity. As well, to never stray from this organization is a stimulant constraint for me.

KJ: Some of the works in Freefall have distinctive contrasting colours (such as Vicious Circle) while some of them are more subdued. How do you approach colouring in your work? Some of the works collected in the book were published in risograph and others were not- how did you orchestrate different printings and colourings when collecting these works?

AB: I self-printed almost all of them on my risograph press. I worked on it like in the old days when artists (or printer employees, with the artist's instruction) had to make black and white transparent sheets for each colour of the CMYK printing. That’s why colours had to be simple tones like pure 100% inking (for example, "Smurfs blue" is 100% cyan) or a combination of 25/50/75% pattern dots (from pattern dots sheets that you cut) to make more subtle colours. So, I’m making things like this, but nowadays with computers and specific (risograph) colours. I make one black and white file per colour (in photoshop), and then I make them with spot colours applied and all mixed together on another software (indesign). I create a lot of back and forth. I like to have a restrained number of colours and to play with combinations, which is also coherent with this printing technique.

The Breakdown Press compilation will be 4 spot colours offset printed and I cheated a bit to have more spot colours. In risograph, the gradients were more organic with the vibrant risograph pattern dots but I like that the offset book will look different. The gradient will be more smooth/cold, and the paper is coated unlike the self-published risograph booklets.

KJ: How is the self-publishing world in France? Is it sustainable? You have also participated in international art book and comics fairs, like Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair. Do you find the self-publishing/indie/art book/risograph scenes in North America and France similar?

AB: I love the generous spirit of the community. The books are usually very affordable, even if they took a lot of effort to make both the content and object. Nobody is here to make money (haha, it would not be realistic!), you have to be dedicated. It is a very free and creative scene. I love the mix of approaches and I think the comics medium found new brilliant forms in this scene, ones not dependent on publishers- so not dependent on mass appeal. The internet also helped a lot to make this niche international, a good result of globalization... Self-publishing (and serialising) was great for me, I was free and I met many interesting artists at fairs around the world. And today, almost all of this publishing work finds a different/wider audience through compilations by publishers (2dcloud, Matière, Breakdown Press).

I can’t say there are differences between Europe and North America, it seems like an international movement to me.

Hopefully the fairs will return soon.

KJ: Do you plan to keep self-publishing your work first?

AB: Today, I have contacts with publishing houses, often friends, so I feel I could go directly to them. Self-publishing demands a special energy...but if nobody is interested, I will definitely make it myself.

Printing and making your own book is also the best way to control every aspect and be happy with the result.

KJ: Finally: any future projects for Beauclair fans?

AB: I’m in a break time from drawing. I needed it. I’m very busy with other stuff, like taking care of our baby and more local projects such as creating a nanobrewery (a new passion) and working with friends on a community café in our remote south of France countryside. It's funny, I was thinking I was dedicated to comics for life but today I really don’t know if I’ll make comics again. I think I’m now more attracted to more minimal art forms, like children's books, drawing series, wooden toys/volumes.

I think it will take a little while to have enough time again for this, and to share... See you there!

[vancafreader]

BD à BC: An Interview with Melek Zertal by Kim Jooha

Melek Zertal is an Algerian-French artist based between Paris and Oakland, California. Zertal’s art combines the best of French and North American independent comics, while distancing from both and making its own. Beautifully illustrated and juxtaposed with their own rhythm, Zertal’s comics talk about things that are unfortunately uncommon in both French and North American independent comics-- the plights and life of an immigrant and queer love. Zertal’s latest work is Together, published by Colorama, which I highly recommend.

Kim Jooha (KJ):How did you get into comics? Were you always interested in comics from a young age, or did you get into comics later in your artistic journey/career?

Melek Zertal (MZ): I started reading / copying mangas as a kid! Getting better at drawing was my way of making friends when I got to my new middle school. There, I met someone who became my best friend and was an absolute killer at drawings; her parents were artists (and her mom is a comic artist). I spent years rummaging through their books, CDs, DVDs, and I owe them a huge part of my cultural education, as well as nurturing my drawing journey, from 13 years old and up. They made me discover Ghost World around this age, and it made me understand that you could convey so many different feelings through comics.

KJ: How would you describe your artistic practice?

MZ: I would describe my practice as sporadic and unprofessional at best, my teenager self’s wet dream at worst.

KJ: Your instagram bio says “Oakland <-> Paris <-> Constantine”. Do you live in three cities? That’s so cool!

MZ: I was born and raised in Constantine, Algeria. I moved to Paris with my close family as a kid and have been living / travelling to Oakland for 5 years now. I don’t spend an equal time in each city but need a regular rotation of the three to feel whole.

KJ: Your art is beautiful and the dialogues are witty, but the subject matters often are not. As someone who has personally had difficult experiences with the immigration system in North America, to be honest I was surprised to find this topic, from someone with lived experience, in an indie French/European comic. Because North Americans do not care much about things outside of North America, when we think of Europe we only think about white Europe. We hear “news” about the migration crisis, or “read” post-colonialism, but especially in comics and indie comics it’s rare to face it directly. Do you think art / comics / indie comics in Europe and North America are less perceptive on such critical matters?

MZ: They're definitely less perceptive on these matters due to the fact that people experiencing them rarely pursue careers in this field. Immigration/colonization history is very different in EU and North America, and the place of minorities in society is also very different. In France, art in general and comics are a big part of our education and upbringing. Every big and mid-level city has its own art school, which are all mostly free. There is almost no financial separation between students of different economic backgrounds, but what does separate them is the social background. We were probably a handful of students of colour in my 600 student school, and probably 4 or 5 students from North-African diaspora - the biggest minority in France.

I guess the funny thing is that I wasn’t mentioning my emigrating to France consciously in my work; I’ve been trying to emigrate to the US for a few years now and it’s been a very complicated process. That’s what I have been writing about… even though our immigration process in France also hasn’t been easy at all.

Maybe off topic but I’ll vent : I’m always mad at North American’s obnoxiousness to the rest of the world lol. I found myself having to “prove” my past, heritage, and history to people who have trouble understanding that racism and colonialism are issues that a lot of countries have to deal with.

A funny thing that I often think about is: most of the people reading and embracing my work are from North America and it might be only due to the fact that I’m mimicking image by image, word for word, what we non American think this country is. I’m taking every cliché that we have on American culture and putting them in a nice bow, and everybody seems to like it. Fiction, auto-fiction, assimilating to a new country’s culture… I feel like I have been in a way prepping my immigration to the US as early as possible by showing that I can speak their language and culture. And I feel like every immigrant can relate to this lol.

KJ: As I mentioned, one characteristic of your comics is the contrast of beautiful and meditative art and witty dialogue. How do you approach the relationship between words and images when you create your work?

MZ: I usually try to find the images before the words. I’ll find a string of images that strike me, that resonate together, and build off of that for the whole atmosphere of the story. Each story is actually just an addition of all the images I’ve stumbled on during the making of the book and which makes it go a certain way. For the text, I’m often writing down sentences and situations on notebooks or phone. Once I have found my atmosphere through the images, I’ll appoint a few sentences that match them and build off of that as well.

So, I’m constantly foraging for words and images, and once the mood board is set, just trying to put every puzzle piece where it belongs.

KJ: There is a sense of mystery in your works. Some narratives end in the middle, and even the narratives with resolutions give readers the feeling that there is more to this work than what they have understood so far. Is it intentional? What do you try to convey to the reader when you make your work?

MZ: The first books I've ever read and been a fan of were Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. I’m a huge fan of mystery in general but there’s this dread that, as a reader, you’ll find out who is the culprit before the author tells you, in which case you lose most or all interest. I’m not very interested in having this burden as an “author”, of holding your reader’s breath to give them a bow wrapped ending that would satisfy them (or not).

My favorite part is what comes before that : characters interacting between them and their environment. Like in those 90s movies that we grew up with, with the status quo before anything happens. For example: in Jumanji, when Peter rides his bike through the street, says hi to everybody in his small town then goes to his dad's factory, or in Home Alone, before the family forgets Kevin. Those parts made me dream way more than the actual subject of the movie. I really want all my books to be this precise moment of naive bliss stretched forever.

What I want to convey is a feeling - a moment - an atmosphere - that I experienced once in my life and cannot transcribe with words. Those moments in time do not have a truth, a lie, a reason to be. They’re just here.

There comes a curation and accumulation of colours, frames, dialogues, to try and capture what I am trying to say. I usually don’t really know if I succeeded myself once the work is done, and can see the bigger picture of it way after the book is done, printed and published. I’m just now starting to like some work I’ve done five years ago, so that’s nice.

KJ: Your distinctive style and form seem to be born out of fusing diverse influences from both European and North American comics in addition to traditional media like cinema. You homage them too (for example, Danslecieltoutvabien and Portrait of a Lady on Fire). Could you discuss your artistic influences?

MZ: My influences are 95% of my work! I’d say most of my work is curating the things I want to use, and the actual final drawing bit is just the thing that is going to tie everything together in a coherent manner. I feel like each one of us is a sum of the things that move them, so my work is just a giant mash-up of this.

I’ve always been very fascinated by US pop culture (watching US shows/movies dubbed in French on Algerian TV as a kid). For influence name-drops, there would be: Daniel Clowes, The X-Files, Nick Drake, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Ween, Henni Alftan, Daniel Johnston, Verner Panton, Bladee, David Lynch, Elliott Smith, Top Chef (only the French one), Alex Katz, Dans Le Ciel Tout Va Bien, Malibu, Hockney, Sammy Stein, Mary Cassatt, Oneothrix Point Never, Stephen Shore,… 99% of them English speaking depressed men🥰 (I could dive on the why haha)

KJ: I love how you utilize the juxtapositional/serial nature of comics. You often juxtapose different styles, forms, narratives, or diegetic space-time. This juxtaposition is not always drastic. You also incorporate sequences with minuscule differences-- like Eisenstein’s Montage theory, these produce effects that are more than the sum of two images/pages. How do you decide what kind of images/styles/forms to put in a specific place in a story and on a page? How do you approach a page design/layout?

MZ: There’s no formula for the dialogue between two images; it’s all luck and a vague gut feeling. Sometimes I don’t fully consciously know why some images work together, but understand the connections way after the book is published. It’s pretty fun not having 100% of the answers to your own work and discovering subconscious choices that make sense way after.

Since I draw most of my “key images” before knowing what the exact story is, I move them around like I would with a photo book. Images that talk for themselves but go a different direction once put together. And in another direction once you add some text! I love this possibility, because that’s what makes comics amazing: you take an image, you add some text, and the end product is different from the sum of its components.

The layout of the page actually dictates its content. I try to create a layout that will work within the page, within the spread, then within the whole flow of the book - the frame needs to have a meaning in the page, the page in the spread and the spread in the book. Kinda like Russian dolls. Then, I see which sequence of images and sentences would fit in this chosen layout… a giant puzzle.

Creating a rhythm is one of my favourite things in the comic medium. You can create a fast paced reading, then cut it with a long focus of an action that would take a millisecond. You can force the readers to pay attention to what you want them to pay attention to, the important details that they would have missed but are important to your storytelling.

KJ: We should talk about the amazing colour of your works. How do you approach colouring in your work? How important are they for setting the mood of your comics, for example? Are they different depending on the ending printing method? Why are word boxes yellow?

MZ: I’ve actually always had a hard time doing colours ! I started using alcohol markers while in school and it really helped me. They are pretty expensive and I had a very limited choice. Found a couple of colours that worked well together, and used them often. Added some accents here and there, and it kind of worked. I’m still working like this, but with a bigger array of colours. Now, after almost ten years, I feel like I can kind of understand what goes with what, next to which colour !

I don’t change the colour choice for the printing end. I’ve found myself working with a lot of risography printers, but it wasn’t really a deliberate choice - just happy luck. It ended up being absolutely great collaborating with people printing differently, with their own style and gear, and seeing how my take on colour was interpreted by them as I do not give colour matching directives.

As for the boxes, they’re here to achieve a color balance when the image doesn’t work by itself. Or, if the layout demands a box, I’ll work the colours around the yellow of the box.

And they’re definitely yellow because of old US comics. It just works so well, they figured it out perfectly!!!!

KJ: It seems that some of your works you painted digitally and some did not. Do you decide the technology depending on the specifics of the work you are working on?

MZ: Yes, as I said markers are pretty expensive - and my favourite brand are only purchasable in the US (they’re so toxic they’re banned in France), so I’m always rationing them for fear of running out.

For the only long body of work I made, I had to use computer coloring, but also because it fit the story: it was a quick paced, funny little book. It did not particularly need the poetry of smudged pencil and blurring and bleeding ink.

But I really don’t like working digitally. I’m trying to find another analog way of working colour, as markers are really not a long term solution.

KJ: As a queer woman, I am just SO HAPPY to read such great wlw love stories in the alternative comics/self-publishing world. Thinking about it, it is weird that wlw/queer women/lesbian comics are not common in our scene. Yes, this is "not a question and more of a comment" LOL. I cannot think of one in the French scene. Do you have any recommendations?

MZ: I'm so sorry I have no idea! This might be terrible to say but I am trying to be as honest as possible: I haven't read that many comics in the past years I’ve been producing them. Like, at all. (Or, just my friends’). This is so bad!!!!! But I can’t, it’s like, too close to home.

KJ: Your work portrays the typical wlw desire of “yearning” so well. How?!

MZ: Thanks! I think I’ve just really suffered of it most of my life and need an outlet for it haha. I’ve always romanticized romance, and felt like it was not made for me from a young age - not the right body type, look, height, or even ethnicity. I could not even understand how people who had something in their life could not be entranced by this feeling.

Is there something more beautiful than to be mesmerized by someone’s unnoticeable habits? and something sadder than it being unrequited?

BUT ALSO, a big part of this is that I just want to be able to show these little things that can make someone connect to another person. The wlw storytelling is the only one I can create, because writing the exact same story and dialogue in a cis heterosexual relationship would not be perceived the same way, due to societal domination dynamics. If I want to convey an atmosphere, a feeling, through dialogues, I have to do it in an ideal world free of those dynamics-- so, without men.

All in all, yearning and unrequited love are really the only subjects that i like to draw about. So probably all of my works are going to touch on it one way or another.

KJ: Every character in your work is unique and so livable. How do you build your characters? Do you think about their backstories? How do you decide their appearance, their hairstyles and clothes? How do you approach writing each character's dialogue?

MZ: I don’t think of the characters beforehand. I usually write down my own fears of what could happen in a relationship : boredom? guilt? anger? sacrifice? And how it would play out if it was a movie. It’s essentially playing Barbie dolls with relationship insecurities, both and none of them are me. That’s also why from one book to another, the characters are not that different. I don’t feel the need to differentiate them drastically, they’re just created for the sake of the situation and dialogue. The hair, skin tone, clothes, stems from the need to be able to read them as two separate characters (and then I have fun with the choice of clothes, but it’s pretty secondary to the story).

KJ: Do you hate McDonalds? (JK, referring to the above scene in Together) But: I can’t believe that you insulted pizza-flavoured chips! Although it’s not specifically pizza-flavoured, ketchup-flavoured potato chips is an iconic Canadian classic. LOL. Have you heard of poutine, another Canadian classic?

MZ: I wrote the pizza-flavoured chip as a joke, as in “it would be the most disgusting thing I could think of at the moment”; I didn’t know it existed!!! But … I’m sorry if I insulted it without trying. I usually try not to insult anything if I haven’t tried it. After I try it, everything is fair game.

I have eaten quite some poutine and it’s just beyond me; why would you drown perfectly crispy fries in thick gravy? Also, I saw Pizzaghetti in Montreal--then I saw a Pizzaghetti slushie at the couche-tard. I wanted to put it in one of my comics but I didn’t want people to think I was erring on the side of the “funny absurd” because -no one would believe that it exists???

KJ: How was Montreal food? Of course it can't be compared to France, but I remember I randomly went to a bakery and had the best croissant of my life. Actually, what do you think of North American food culture? I do love ketchup chips and poutine, but actually the thing I love the most is the diversity, i.e. food NOT originated from North America. You can have so many different cultures' food in a city, and it's a luxury now that I live in a much less immigrant-populated city. I miss Mexican, Middle Eastern, Greek, Chinese, Italian, etc. food soooo much! The only downside in Toronto was that because it's far away from the ocean, the seafood price was high. But I believe Oakland is close to the Pacific Ocean, right? and I bet California has more diverse food in general... but I also assume that for French and/or Europeans, North American food culture would seem... too much (was gonna say "trash" but it might be too harsh* for the official page? I mean, I can't have poutine everyday!

(*Festival Director note: it isn't)

MZ: For Montreal food well… I have very specific memories of my time there.

The first time I spent a good amount of time in Montreal, I visited my aunt, who I hadn't seen in years, and her husband and kids. We were super close when we were living in Algeria but she moved to Canada when I was a pre-teen, so it was great to see the rest of “her” family. I got there the first day of Ramadan, which I'd been very loosely following the previous years-- I love to fast surrounded by family, but by myself at school, not so much. Her husband was an absolute fat-phobic mansplainer, and was telling my aunt to hide the food before she went to work because he couldn’t believe I was able to refrain from eating 8 hours straight lol. I also got a daily TED talk on how to create the next “ANGRY BIRDS” because for him that was the only way I could ever make money.

Anyhow, I discovered maple butter, which is incredible. I would spread it on kesra or khobz dar (two Algerian breads) that I would have made the day prior with my aunt, baking and hiding from her terrible husband in the kitchen :)

The second striking memory I have from Montreal is when I did a 2-week residency at the Jacuzzi Club, a little apparement/residency held by my now-friend Keren. I was very depressed at that time and remember wanting to binge on whatever was not available to me in France. In front of the apartment: Tim Hortons and the (questionable) joy of 24/7. I would go and buy Timbits at 2 am and sit in bed watching Stranger Things-- which then made me want to try Eggo waffles. I had to leave a whole box untouched because it is quite literally cardboard? The same way Twizzlers are plastic? Anyhow, for people who don’t know what Timbits are, they’re just doughnut holes, but I’d never had them before that so I really thought that was their actual name until a year ago- Timbits. I also ate Domino’s for the first time there! I will not comment on this subject though.

As for food in the US, well… I feel very happy in California for sure. All of the international foods are amazing, but it’s also super funny to see how Americanized they are, or to see how Europeanized ours are. Mexican, Chinese and Japanese are my big three in California. You can just never go wrong, even in their Americanized versions. I discovered so many more Middle Eastern foods than we have in Europe, especially Iranian, Iraqi and Yemenite food. Also let’s talk about soul food! Barbecue ribs, brisket, mac n cheese, collard greens, potato salad? I am HERE for it.

What I am not here for on the other hand are Californian prices! I’m sure that seafood is exquisite but I still unfortunately need my two kidneys. One day I went to the restaurant with my partner and cried (this is not an exaggeration, I had tears rolling down my cheeks) when they ordered a 10$ side salad. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had a Californian income® but I still have a really hard time adjusting to the price, and the tax, and the tip. It just seems so out of touch with reality.

I actually have a favourite game when I’m back in Europe! Every time I eat something I play …. * drumroll * “How much would this cost in California?” :)

The things that I miss the most when I’m not in California are Trader Joe’s seasonal goodies, surf and turf burritos, all of the funky barely-FDA-approved health freak stuff, Chinese mom-and-pop donut shops, specialty neighbourhood coffee shops, seltzer (and hard seltzer), shocking people when I put mayonnaise on my French fries (I look them in the eyes and say that I am French, therefore know better. Anyways, fries are Belgian). Mochi muffins from Third Culture Bakery. But above all, In’n’Out.

When I’m in California, I really miss Algerian food and kebabs. Like, European kebabs: mystery minced meat swimming in its grease pool, grilled for god knows how many moons, accompanied by “salade tomate oignon”, and sauce algérienne - spicy creamy crunchy sauce. Its soft pillowy bread and its more than lovely price of 5 euros - 5.5 with a huge French fry portion, 6 with a soft drink. The best drunk food ever created. I miss it so much.

Cheese tip: Trader Joe’s French cheese is the shit. (And their frozen croissants!!) That’s it, that’s our product. Don’t go spend 200% more at Whole Foods for bleh cakey half-moldy milk.

I do miss bread though. Ah, bread…

And obviously the GREAT and AMAZING and CHEAP food that you find everywhere but everybody knows about this so… I think flaunting the price/quality ratio to my Californian friends visiting Paris/Europe is probably one my most toxic traits 😬

One thing that is for sure is that it would be very hard for me to live in a city that doesn’t have a decent immigrant population. Food is the first bond between people, and in my case and many others a very comforting aspect of life when things get tough. It’s super hard being oceans away from your family and loved ones, and recreating/sharing the food they made you love or you discovered with them can sometimes be the only thing to mend a heartbreak. The joy of finding an ingredient/brand /food item you use back home in a far away place is absolutely unmatched!

KJ: Do you like facial peel-off masks?

MZ: I like them as much as they unsettle me, but I’m more of a "forgotten-ripe-avocado-mashed-with-a-black-banana-end-of-fridge-mask" kind of person. But peel-offs are definitely funnier to draw.

KJ: Finally, do you have any upcoming projects?

MZ: I’m currently writing a book with poétesse Christina Svenson about *drumroll* a failed relationship, through the scope of food, my very first passion. It will be published by Perfectly Acceptable Press.

I also would like to do a third book with Colorama, that will be the end of the Fragile-Together combo, this time about the looming breakup.

And lastly, steering away from sad relationships, I’m also working on a mystery ethereal book with Studio Fidèle, not too far from what I started with Sleepless. Ideally with a Las Vegas set, but we’ll see how it goes…

And also working on a tiny clothesline with Studio Fidèle :)

*******

Our sincere thanks to Melek Zertal and Kim Jooha for their time and efforts on this interview! You can follow Melek Zertal on Instagram or purchase TOGETHER from Colorama.

Kim Jooha is a critic, curator, editor, and former publisher of comics. You can follow her on Instagram as well!

[vancafreader]

Fine Art Comics of Canada: Sixties to Seventies - Heart of London, Snore & More by Robert Dayton

Part Two: Scraptures, Snore, and more

The Canadian comic book history book Invaders From the North by archivist John Bell writes “However the first comic book of the period, Scraptures, originated not with the underground press, but rather, Toronto’s literary avant-garde.” Scraptures was by legendary innovative poet bpNichol. Admittedly, writing about this national treasure is a daunting task. If I am so much as a smidge off, people will be on me. bpNichol expanded the boundaries of poetry going into sound poetry, concrete poetry, early computer text, and beyond. Concrete poetry was very concerned with typography and the layout of words and letters on the page, utilizing design and the spaces between the words and the page, even sliding off into other disciplines. Working in sound poetry, bpNichol was part of the collaborative group The Four Horsemen who performed and released a few rare recordings.

Besides being an editor at Coach House Press, the prolific bpNichol co-founded Ganglia Press which published the long-running literary journal grOnk. It ran for 126 issues in a variety of formats, including cassettes, and used various technologies including mimeographs and rubber stamps. It was in grOnk, a publication often mailed out free of charge, that bpNichol released some of his Scraptures.

copyright on this image is held by the Estate of bpNichol, who generously allowed us to use it in this piece.

These Scraptures would turn up in various places besides grOnk and they weren’t always in comics form, the first one that appeared in the lit mag Alphabet in 1966 seems to be concrete poetry. The third one (or ‘sequence’ as he called it) featured spare typewritten text and granite looking shapes, the fifth sequence was a sound poem on a record released by Coach House Press. Later sequences, though, oh my! The eleventh sequence from grOnk 8: August 1967 depicts a frog-like character with his arm in a second panel; characters use panels as an almost peek-a-boo, turning them into a jungle gym as they stretch and contort, speech balloons containing letters from a classic typeset font. bpNichol also released a cartoon study of the frog from Scraptures: ninth sequence, appropriately printed in green ink. One issue of grOnk from 1969 called Pope Leo: El Elope, a tragedy in four letters was written by poet John Riddell with various configurations of those letters typed out, with “puerile drawings” by bp Nichol. This comic book narrative shows Pop Elo assassinating Pope Leo with a knife.

Various issues of grOnk would feature his super-hero Captain Poetry, a fusing of two of his loves, but with the head of a chicken. Captain Poetry would appear on the cover of the concrete poetry anthology The Cosmic Chef, holding up a mound of granite. Turn the page, he has collapsed under its weight.

bpNichol’s first issue of Greaseball Comics came out as series 8 of grOnk in 1970. Blank eyed characters seemingly rendered in felt marker make statements like, “all that is insubstantial and cursed by GOD who divided out tongues!!” ending with a character trapped in a comic panel floating away in multiples. Issue two came two years later, crudely stapled together on long horizontal sheets, replicating the newspaper strip format, this issue featured “Milt the Morph as Lonely Fred.” Morph is an apt name, everything feels free-wheeling and fluid in his comics. Quickly drawn and only four pages yet with immense depth, the letter H floats by (an important letter highlighted often in his oeuvre, the collection An H In The Heart has a poem where he explains that his H obsession may have begun with The Harvey Comics logo and slogan “look for the big H!”) as a bearded character devolves into a single line gently spiraling around the page. There was also the more text-based Grease Ball (note the slight title differentiation from Greaseball Comics) from 1972 with a cover image by Chester Gould of someone being choked, most likely a panel from Dick Tracy and probably used without Gould’s knowledge. This issue reads like a comics fanzine with Nichol getting into the works of Spain, Crumb, Harold Gray, and the violence in Gould’s comics.

In a grOnk mailout he promised another issue of Greaseball Comics featuring “THE TRUE TALE OF TOMMY THE TURK.” Did it ever materialise? In that same mailout he devoted a paragraph to important Canadian comic archivist Captain George’s comic fanzine Captain George Presents, making note of the E.C. Segar Thimble Theater and Frazetta issues. Some issues of grOnk were devoted to being massive full-scale reproductions of Winsor McCay’s gorgeous comics, including Little Nemo and Terror Of The Tiny Tads, printed using Coach House’s own printing press and other tools.

Milt The Morph appears in many of bpNichols’ Allegories which function as single-panel conceptual comics (or, if the word ‘comics’ causes you dismay, visual poems). Poet Donato Mancini describes it as bpNichol’s finest comic work and what he thinks of as being some of his best work overall. Though they may appear crudely drawn, they are quite complex.

Andromeda was a black and white science-fiction comic book magazine published by Silver Snail, which today exists as a much more mainstream Toronto comic shop, that bpNichol would regularly contribute his own writing to along with adapting short stories to the comic book medium. Walter M. Miller’s “The Big Hunger” about space colonization, religion, and longing was adapted in Andromeda issue 5 with art by Tony Meers rendered in a realistic style with monochromatic ink washes. bpNichol’s own “The Bellergon Version”, drawn by Tom Nesbitt in a slightly more cartoony style, uses the fairy tale influences of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Mike Borkent’s chapter Post/Avant Comics in the book Avant Canada, notes that Comic Book Confidential by Ron Mann, a comic book documentary with a focus on underground and alternative comics, is dedicated to bpNichol for helping make the movie happen.

A 320-page collection of bpNichol’s comics was released in the 2000’s by Talon. This collection’s reproductions occasionally cause me to wonder if I need bifocals. Paul Dutton, Nichol’s sound poet cohort in The Four Horseman, wrote a scathing review of the book for Books In Canada stating that they focused too much on scraps, works barely in progress and abandoned, and juvenilia; that there wasn’t material like the hard-to-find Fictive Funnies, Nichol’s comic collaboration with grOnk co-editor and poet Steve McCaffery as well as noting that the “brilliant and sophisticated” Allegories being out-of-print “…is enough to make some of us gnash our teeth.” It certainly isn’t the best introduction to this aspect of bpNichol’s work. For that it would be better to go on a quest to seek out the Allegories printed in love: a book of remembrances, also published by Talon, way back in 1974. As well as An H in the Heart: a reader (McLelland & Stewart), a dense collection put together by poet George Bowering and Michael Ondaatje in 1994 which does contain a couple of the Fictive Funnies, including one where the main character falls through a comic book panel or “…a hole in the narrative sequence...”

In the introduction Bowering wanted the collection to show as much of bpNichol’s range as possible, bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t include the work that didn’t adhere to the printed page. bpNichol wanted to convey (not capture -convey) as much of the world as possible (no, it didn’t all work but hey, it’s a risk) in his short life. One comic selected for the book asks, “What is Can Lit?” as a figure wades through a myriad of overlaid panels with the names of authors Gerry Gilbert, Sheila Watson, James Reaney, and Margaret Avison appearing. In the final panel he answers, “It’s just a question of survival.” This collection contains the playful fumetti comic NARY*A*TIFF featuring photos by Marilyn Westlake of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery with hand lettered word balloons in a bookstore arguing over semiotics and philosophy to the point of physical violence, jokes about government grants and the Western Front are included.

In 2002, some of bpNichol’s comic work was shown at Owen’s Art Gallery in Sackville with cartoonist Marc Bell delivering the opening remarks. bpNichol was a big influence on Jason Mclean’s text zines and Jason was honoured to be included in a group show with bpNichol’s work at The Vancouver Art Gallery. Further, Greg Curnoe’s collection of bpNichol art and poetry booklets were given to Jason by Sheila Curnoe.

bpNichols’ comics fit in quite easily with the rest of his enormous and diverse body of work, only becoming anomalous when compared with the works of other artists. Many of these comics are freely available on his archive bpnichol.ca, funded and run by his estate, Coach House, and Intelligent Machines. Website curator Gregory Betts sees comics as a central aspect of bpNichols’ creative writing noting that his “…concrete poems start as typewriter works (ideopomes he called them), but then become increasingly hand drawn. If you look at a book like Love: A Book of Remembrances (where his Allegories series lives) you see that drawing is major part of his writing. The comics and the concrete become indivisible at a certain point, or at least become manifestations of the same sense of play that he brought to letters, lines, words, and form. His work on cartoon and puppet TV shows (Fraggle Rock, The Raccoons, etc.) all starts to connect, too, rather than just standing as one-offs for money.”

A ‘lost’ sequence of Scraptures (#13) appeared in Snore Comix #2, a comic book anthology released by Coach House in Toronto. In this sequence bpNichol’s interlocking panels grow more and more elaborate with one character crawling its way through the gutters. In another segment, negative space cartoon figures dissolve a dense block of the repeated typeset word ‘lost.’

There were a few contributors to this little red book, perhaps even children. Snore Comix is definitely an art comic. It is so arcane, the reader is given little info, not even the issue number. Issue two’s cover shows two stamped hands pointing fingers at each other: these hands would frequently show up in other issues. The first issue of Snore Comix is from the previous year, 1969, and I am unsure who the contributors for this issue even were, to be honest. A total mystery. Three issues of Snore Comix were released in total.

The Centre For Canadian Contemporary Art website notes that the first two issues of Snore Comix were edited by Jerry Ofo. He was a frequent collaborator of bpNichol’s, having designed the covers to volumes one and two of Nichol’s life-long poem The Martyrology, released by Coach House Press. With issue 3, Michael Tims aka AA Bronson of General Idea took over. Entitled “Bright Things” it featured a ridiculously bright, fake lofty, monarchical-themed cover. This issue channels closely with correspondence art, a movement that Bronson was quite active in.

Many mail artists contributed to this issue of Snore, including Dr. Brute who contributed an enigmatic self-portrait in a leopard print frame. The mail art movement of the 1960’s and 70’s really connected people from all across Canada, normally a large land mass of isolated pockets where East and West rarely meet. A lot of the mail art that was sent definitely had a cartoony element, stemming from the works of the original Master of mail art, Ray Johnson. Artist collective General Idea’s FILE Magazine started as listings for these mail artists to connect, but once FILE became more archly immersed in Glamour and “the global downtown”, Anna Banana took the baton with VILE Magazine. Image Bank in Vancouver (co-founded by Vincent Trasov, Gary Lee-Nova, and Michael Morris, there is an incredible Image Bank exhibit at The Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, running from June 18th to August 22nd, 2021) was literally about exchanging ideas and images through the postal system with artists’ image request lists printed in earlier issues of FILE. These mail artists often went into deep persona embodying names that became signifiers. Anna Banana held a Bananalympics featuring all things banana; Vincent Trasov aka Mr. Peanut dressed as the mascot and ran for Mayor of Vancouver in 1974 garnering over 1,000 votes; Dr. Brute and Lady Brute wore leopard spots and distributed leopard spots through the mail art network. These mail artists from across the nation eventually all converged at the 1974 Hollywood DeccaDance, a mail art awards show done up as an Academy Awards spoof at a glorious Elks Hall in Los Angeles.

Dr. Brute aka Eric Metcalfe went to UVIC in the 1960’s where one of his profs was a part of the Bay area underground comix movement (alas, dear readers, I was unable to get the Prof’s name from him, it’s this Pandemic, I can’t even see the complete collection of Snore Comix alas alas alas). At that time Eric was doing his own Dr. Brute comix featuring much crime and fetishism. With these comix, the panels voyeuristically crop the figures, extreme close-ups of faces, hints of lingerie, odd limbless doctors. Eventually Eric started performing as the persona of Dr. Brute. Along with a few other artists, Metcalfe was a co-founder of The Western Front artist-run centre in Vancouver. For a time, important video artist Kate Craig was Lady Brute and their leopard spots became a part of their performances and installations. Like a virus, these leopard spots were turning the world into Brutopia, being painted on to such places as The Vancouver Art Gallery. When Metcalfe made seminal early video art, his drawings were seamlessly incorporated into his videos such as Sax Island, either as stills or even as settings for the live-action characters. These videos currently reside in the MOMA and NAT gallery collections. As my instructor and mentor at Emily Carr Art College in the Nineties, Metcalfe really believed in interdisciplinary practice and collaboration. For one of my comic zines Bunyon, he encouraged the class to collaborate on a page and even drew a panel himself. My seemingly disparate influences were encouraged in his class.

Other contributors to issue 3 of Snore Comix included Greg Curnoe (who mailed a signed copy with his address on the front to Hairy Who member Art Green), Art Rat aka Gary Lee Nova, Box Arnold aka Bob Arnold, and Ace Space aka Dana Atchley. With a lack of attribution to each piece, it can be tough to parse exactly who did what in Snore, but a few pages feature shark fins swimming around waves of water. This is most probably a reference to The New York Corres Sponge Dance School Of Vancouver (a reference to Ray Johnson’s mail art New York Correspondence school). Formed by Glenn Lewis (aka Flakey Rose Hips who previously did one of the first, if not the first, performance art pieces in Vancouver), these particular mail artists, many of whom would come to form artist-run centre The Western Front, met every week at The Vancouver Aquatic Centre to do synchronized swimming.[1] Humourously, they donned shark-fin bathing caps created by Kate Craig, thus adding an element of playful danger. These caps were later worn by the tuxedo clad male chorus at The Hollywood Decca Dance.

from Snore Comix #3

A few pages feature cardboard boxes talking about art. These were a collaborative effort between Art Rat and Box Arnold, who would do performances in Vancouver using cardboard boxes, sometimes with a cardboard box covering his head. At that time, Art Rat aka Gary Lee-Nova was in regular contact with Coach House founder Stan Bevington with Bevington having printed postcards out of Lee-Nova’s collages.

from Snore Comix #3

When Gary Lee-Nova was invited to be a guest artist/artist-in-residence at The University of Minnesota he brought his colleague artist Bob Arnold along to help with the film and lighting tech. One night, they were smoking a lot of pot and sipping bourbon. Bob asked Gary a lot of questions, including, “What do you think of when you think of America?” Gary replied, “Peanut butter.” Lee-Nova elaborates, “It went on like that. And Bob was doing drawings of just funny things that were in his head, I guess and then I decided to do some drawings of his questions, my answers. And because we're dealing with corrugated cardboard as a way to create quick, easy, inexpensive movie sets. We had some opportunities to draw about cardboard, just silly things. I might have put the drawings and sketches we made in a folder and brought them home and it’s anybody's guess how they ended up at Coach House. I mean, I think I was smoking pot all day every day for most of five years. I quit when I decided to get married and that was ‘72 or ‘73. But all through the late 60’s and into the 70’s we were just constantly bombed.” I asked Gary, “You have no idea how they got into Snore?” and he replied, “I have no idea how they got into Snore.” Furthermore, “I got a copy. It’s just so twisted.”

But why the name Art Rat? “When the correspondence thing, the mail art thing happened. I didn't want to put my Gary Lee-Nova identity out into that. So, I just came up with Art Rat. I'd already experienced enough of the art world to see the impacts that institutionalism was having on the communities. And I was starting to feel like a rat in the corporate maze. And I thought, ‘Wow, a rat -that’s an anagram of art and tar, hmmm what can I do with that?’ So, I made a signature out of it- a rubber stamp signature.”

This persona fit in well with the correspondence art world. “It was just the way that period played out. People were experimenting with identity and exploring identity, realising in some cases that artists really have no identity at all. But they can manufacture identities at will and then drop them at will. So, for me, that's what that was all about.”

Besides contributing to Snore under his Art Rat persona, another of the many parts of artist Gary Lee-Nova’s practice for decades has been making work inspired by Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strip. Both Marshall Mcluhan and William S. Burroughs inspired Lee-Nova deeply, going so far as calling them father figures, he had even corresponded with Burroughs. With the Nancy strip, Gary Lee-Nova used the cut-up technique that Burroughs mastered, a technique previously used by The Dadaists as a party game. “But with Mr. Burroughs it was no game. He was really serious.”

Uncanny Nancy by Gary Lee-Nova, courtesy of the artist

Gary started collecting Nancy strips since the 60’s but it was after being the victim of a car accident in the late 70’s that he used the time to start work on the cut-ups. He elaborates on this escape from the painful after-effects of the accident, “…I was quite content just to sit with comic strip panels and scissors and glue and explore the structure of Bushmiller's realm at that paradigmatic and syntagmatic level where things come together on a horizontal axis, the syntagmatic. And the paradigmatic is on the vertical axis… I was experiencing, like in my face, the linguistic concept of what we call discursive language, speech and dialogue.” Discursive? “Discursive: discourse, conversation. And in linguistics, they give that a special name. It's called syntagm. And the other polarity -it is binary, but it describes two different realms. The other one is, is where all the signifiers are, when we're not using them. Obviously, they're in memory somewhere, and they're organised in terms of things that mean the same, like, education and learning. And things that sound the same, like when I got to Italy, I was able to roam Rome. Things sounding the same, homophones. That's also known as the paradigmatic in contrast with the syntagmatic. In other words, the linear and the mosaic. I was looking at the cut-ups of the Bushmiller panels and finding syntagmatic links that were coming out of various paradigmatic conditions. If I found anything that could be read, even if it was just silly, I acknowledged that this syntagmatic thing was real. And so was the paradigmatic. I just explored it on those terms: linguistics. Charles Schultz had a comic strip about little kids. Bushmiller had a comic strip about comic strips.”

Nancy as a character feels like an icon, a symbol. Even using this cut-up technique, Lee-Nova’s series called “Uncanny Old Gags” -an anagram of “Nancy And Sluggo”- it still seems to get to the punchline. Gary explains, “In terms of learning as much as I could about Ernie the artist, I learned that that he always drew the last panel first. And then worked backward in order to fill in ‘how do I arrive at the gag in this panel?’ It's a very interesting way to work. I think McLuhan had a lot to say about that in terms of detective stories and all those writers in the 18th and 19th century that McLuhan studied, because they are the history of literature. And they had a particular heft in language that other periods didn't have. But McLuhan pointed out that you start with the setup, you get into the setup and because you're able to read, you'll end up untangling something which comes together which should have been clear from the first page, but it isn't clear until the last page, techniques of making use of the discursive.” Ernie Bushmiller worked with precision and clarity. Gary responds, “Absolutely minimalist clarity. They look simple, but they’re not.”

One large silk-screened collage Uncanny Nancy is hanging in the home of underground cartoonist and publisher Denis Kitchen, whose Kitchen Sink Press published five volumes of Nancy, helping to renew interest in Bushmiller’s work. With the working title Uncanny Nancy Can't See Chomsky, Can She?, this piece stemmed from Gary’s teaching of language and semiotics at Emily Carr. “In order to explain some of Chomsky’s ideas about surface and deep structure, I found this weekend strip of Bushmiller's. And it was a magical strip. I actually got busted at one point, I was going out late at night to the newspaper boxes and throwing in a couple of quarters, and then dashing off with a big bundle of Vancouver Sun weekend papers into my arm. This went on for most of the weekend. But late one night, I think I was at 14th and Granville I hadn't pulled them out and bundled them under my arm, but I had the door open. And the Sun truck drives up and said, ‘Are you the guy that's been taking all these?’ ‘Yeah, what are you gonna do about it?’ He said, ‘Well, I don't want you to take those. You put those back. And I'll give you the address of the press place, you go down there and ask for archived material and they'll charge a little bit for each thing that you want.’ -so I got about a hundred. What it involved was cutting out little Nancy's from this particular strip and then exploring how Nancy's from other strips as well as characters from other strips could be placed into very strategic locations in the basic strip and show how a surface structure in its arrangement forced the deep structure to the surface. It really blew my mind and I was able to make slides of all those and walk through it with students and explain how deep and surface structure work in language and speech. And they were pretty pleased. I had some good times with lecture courses around language and semiotics. Most of it was new to them.”

I had heard rumours that Gary Lee-Nova is a member of a mysterious organisation called The Secret Bushmiller Society. Intrigued, I asked him about it. He quietly revealed a pin on his lapel with their logo, Nancy’s face in the center, matching well with his silk Nancy tie. He then regaled me with how he once found an online remembrance page for someone and added to it a made-up story of how the deceased was a member of The Secret Bushmiller Society to the point that some people were playing Five Card Nancy at the memorial service. What is Five Card Nancy? “It's cut up panels. And instead of cut up comic strips in terms of art, it's a game like poker. And you're each dealt about five panels. And then someone who I guess is next to the dealer puts down a panel and then someone else if they got something they think it's a match, they put down a panel and ultimately a strip emerges and some of them are pretty funny. So, I actually fictionalised this for this place where you pay your respects to someone who's passed on. And I said, ‘Anyway, he caught these guys playing five card Nancy and noticed that some of them were palming panels.’ I went on and on and on about what a horrendous screw up this was at this ceremony.”

For years Gary felt alone in his love of Nancy. Believe it or not, there used to be a time where people would openly mock Nancy and its readership! Why????? “They just couldn't read it. They could not understand how to read it. It does look simplistic. But once you dig into, oh, things like prime numbers, things like rebuses, things like anagrams. I mean, Bushmiller was saturated with all that kind of exposure he got in the newspaper industry before he started drawing. And that's what I love about Mark and Paul’s book (How To Read Nancy). It's the kind of thing I'd been dreaming about for years, ‘I wish somebody would put together a really comprehensive study of this man's life because I'm sure it’s fucking fascinating.’”

Mentioning an edition of Art News of artists inspired by Nancy, Gary says, “This little survey pointed out that these people were really touched by Bushmiller’s work and I guess I'm just another one of those artists that were touched by his work.”

A survey exhibition of Gary Lee-Nova’s work was recently held at The Burnaby Art Gallery from January-April 2021 and it included many of his “Uncanny Nancy” works. Four years in the making, this exhibition truly was something special.

Now, where were we? Oh yes. Later editions of Snore Comix went unreleased, including a flip book of drawings depicting Mr. Peanut tap dancing, which eventually came out independently of Snore. Out in the world Mr. Peanut did love to tap dance, often to the accompaniment of Dr. Brute’s leopard print kazoo sax stylings. In 2017, New Documents released a book of Vincent Trasov’s Mr. Peanut Drawings; within this peanut textured book there are over a hundred line-drawings placing Mr. Peanut as a part of ancient art history by having him become a Sphynx, as well as popping up into many wonders of the world.

General Idea’s Shoe Journal by George Saiai was eventually released by Toronto art book space Art Metropole in 2007 and is, alas, now sold out. According to Art Metropole’s website, this ‘consecutive series of drawings and images’ was already printed by Coach House back in 1971 as an issue of Snore, but did not bear Snore’s name when it was released decades later. One of the images in Shoe Journal was from Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy where she is firing a squirt gun at a leg shaped hosiery shop sign. The Centre For Canadian Contemporary Art website states that Snore Comix #6 was to be Vancouver based multimedia artist Gerry Gilbert’s Slug Book. Gilbert often wrote about slugs in his poems, including “The Slug Liberation Act” and even described himself as a slug in his poetry book From Next Spring. As well, he made slug stickers for artist Ace Space’s (Dana Atchley) 1971 Space Atlas. Apart from the topic of slugs, it is uncertain what exactly was going to be in Snore Comix #6.

Snore Comix #7 was to be The Coach House Nose Who’s Who by Jim Lang, who later did the photos for the Coach House poetry book Incognito by David Young. According to 10 Four by Nick Drumbolis, a proof was actually made, containing a photographic print, under the name Some Have Great Nez Thrust Upon Them. A guide to the works of Gerry Gilbert entitled The Gerry Gilbert Gift Catalogue, states that this book contained “11 mounted nose shots.” Writing on an underground comix thread on the cgc comics site, someone named Reverend states that Snore Comix #8 may have supposed to have been IRATA by Arthur Cravan, which was eventually released in 1994. One found internet image of the cover even states that it is “Snore Comix 8” rubber stamped with the ever-present pointing hand telling us to continue. In a Globe and Mail feature on Nicky Drumbolis, who ran Letters, a Toronto bookshop which also functioned as a gallery and publishing house, it is revealed that he was Arthur Cravan, further in keeping with Snore mysteries and guises. Hopefully this does not fully close the door on Snore and that more will be revealed.

Another Coach House curio is Anthropomorphiks by artist Robert Fones. This 1971 book features a whole lot of cartoon drawings and collages of mascots, including Liquorice All-Sorts humanoids purposefully playing tennis, angels surrounding a bipedal Crisco package with halo, The Michelin Man hanging out with tires like he is attending an anatomy lesson, a speech balloon exclaiming, “Mother! May I have another dish of puffed wheat- it’s swell!”, along with original poems by Fones. Featured on the cover is the red and white striped candy mascot Can-D-Man tipping his hat while walking through a collaged backdrop of Canadian nature. Fun fact: Robert Fones would dress up as Can-D-Man and hang out with Mr. Peanut and Art Rat in Queen Elizabeth Park. But, I mean, who wouldn’t? It was a nice day. Fones has done other books of collage, drawings, prose and poetry for Coach House and more.

Some of the earliest graphic novels were published by Coach House before they were even called such things, they released three by Martin Vaughn-James. His first, Elephant, published by new press in 1970, has been called the first graphic novel in Canada but was described on the back cover as ‘a boovie’, presumably a book-movie hybrid. Originally from England, he and his wife Noddy (who all his books are dedicated to), lived in Toronto from 1968 to 1977 until they returned to Europe. All of his graphic novels, along with his cartoons and comic strips for Saturday Night Magazine were from this Toronto period and they all had a very surrealist bent. In fact, the graphic novels often begin with a quote from Andre Breton, the co-founder of Surrealism and author of a couple of Surrealist Manifestos where he defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism.” These graphic novels certainly feel that way, though they are obviously elaborately planned and detailed, like vivid dream recollections. Elephant is wordless for many pages, opening with pages within pages, a container of ink enveloping everything until we drift down to a landscape of irons, the speech balloons are filled with typewritten words of what feels like eavesdropping in on conversations, eggs crack open on to lightbulbs and through all this a bald, bespectacled man works a seemingly mundane desk job until it, too, cracks open. His second graphic novel -or ‘visual-novel’ as Vaughn-James describes it, The Projector, is more refined and effective than the first. Printed on crisp, brown paper, the pen lines are thinner, more delicate, savouring every detail, making everything more life-like as a horse crashes through an elaborate geranium and plummets off a massive skyscraper, soundless yet we feel everything, hand-lettered captions seemingly describing unrelated actions. The bald-headed bespectacled desk-jobber appears again occasionally transforming into a cartoon dog as distorted Disney’s Three Little Pigs linger menacingly nearby. He seems to want escape after a projector speeds by, violet colour injects itself into the black and brown book as a mass of unearthly flowers blossom.

Tiny and more intimate, Vaughn-James’ third graphic novel The Park is more comic book-like with its soft cover. Described as a mystery with its Art Deco font and gold and rose colour scheme, it is indeed mysterious, the two sides of the brain are pushed far apart as the text seem to be disengaged from the imagery, gorgeously rendered scenic exteriors lead to tumultuous interiors -crashing armchairs- and out again as a pterodactyl flies off.

Following that was his most epic and renowned work The Cage from 1975, reprinted by Coach House in 2013. Started in Toronto, much of it was done in Paris, he also writes that, “Visits to the archeological ruins in Yucatan and central Mexico inspired sequences in The Cage.” With a slow zoom of pages peering through a chain-link fence these ruins soon become apparent, he then restores them to their former grandeur shifting back and forth until shifting focus entirely to a small apartment filling with sand. Like a neutron bomb, The Cage contains not a single living being, other than foliage growing in buildings, like Last Year At Marienbad but without characters. One can almost hear the wind howl. The text, properly typeset, is more descriptive, writerly. This truly is his most controlled and breath-taking work. Inside the cover Vaughn-James writes his own manifesto stating, “My purpose is not so much to illustrate reality (as if reality was an object and merely an aesthetic flashlight) but to re-invent it in a narrative form.” The book’s inside cover also states that Vaughn-James was working on a new visual-novel for 1976 but sadly, it seems that never transpired. Vaughn-James later switched to painting and also wrote two novels of prose. He died in 2009.

Many thanks to Jason Mclean, Marc Bell, Judith Rodger, Donato Mancini, Gregory Betts, and Jennifer Cane for their immense help with this piece.

- Robert Dayton

www.robertdayton.com

www.patreon.com/CanadianGlam

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Fine Art Comics of Canada: Sixties to Seventies - Heart of London, Snore & More by Robert Dayton

Part One: The Heart Of London

There was a time where artists were making vast ripples away from Toronto and other outsized hubs. London, Ontario was such a place, all eyes were on it in the late 60’s and not Toronto. The Heart Of London comic book from 1968 was actually an exhibition catalog, an overview of the art that was happening there at the time. Organised by The National Gallery of Canada, this exhibition traveled from London to Toronto, Kingston, Edmonton, Victoria, Charlottetown and, of course, The National Gallery H.Q. itself in Ottawa.

This catalog/comic book consisted of fumetti, comics done using photos for the images. Fumetti was most prominently used in the 60’s by Harvey Kurtzman in Help and Playboy, prolifically in numerous Mexican comic book melodramas, and in Italian comics featuring the masked master criminal Satanik. Heart Of London’s particular fumetti is further stylized by heavily contrasted processing causing colours so bright that they make everything heightened artifice, buzzing as if emanating from a higher plane of being.

Cover of the Heart Of London catalogue

The Heart of London logo in Pepto-Bismol pink is rendered somewhere between Archie and underground comix titles. Above it, The Comics Code of Authority symbol -a comic book mainstay of the day implying that the work is of safe moral quality- has been altered to “National Gallery of Canada”, the institution that made this comic book and exhibition happen. The cover features what appears to be London public workers, perhaps? These men in yellow hard hats casually stand in front of a store with a Coca-Cola logo also coloured Pepto-Bismol pink, Pop Art style, at the city’s main intersection in what very well may be the heart of London.

The comic opens with a quote placed above a looming Brutalist parking lot, huddling various small businesses below it. This quote contains the phrase “heart of London” but it is rather self-deprecatingly not about London, Ontario but London, England in World War One. Sharing a name with London, England has often made this Ontario city the butt of many a joke, ie. “I live in London… (long pause) Ontario” with its population being just over 200,000 in 1968. Named in 1793 by Lord Simcoe, Upper Canada’s first Lieutenant-Governor known for starting the abolition of slavery, he was also fervently British, his vision for Canada was for it to be like England which he looooved, desperately (but stiffly) wanting this particular London to become Ontario’s capital. Alas, Toronto was chosen instead. Related, always related to everything: the term “cosmic consciousness”, the higher state of consciousness, was coined in London in 1872 by Richard Bucke, a psychiatrist and head of The Asylum For The Insane, after he received a blinding vision, illuminating him. Besides being active in asylum reform, Bucke was heavily involved in the arts -the vision occurred after an evening spent reading Romantic poetry as well as poems by Walt Whitman, who he later befriended. Yes, London, Ontario is an eccentric place.

The artists involved in the Heart Of London show were part of what was known as “London Regionalism”, a loose-knit movement of artists who were adamant about residing in London, away from Toronto or New York. Artist Greg Curnoe helped establish some of the very first artist-run centres there. He was an early member and huge proponent of CARFAC, a Canadian organisation that fights for artists to get paid and paid fairly for their work. CARFAC was founded in London by Heart Of London artists Jack Chambers and Tony Urquhart -along with Kim Ondaatje.

Besides Curnoe, Chambers, and Urquhart, the eleven artists in Heart Of London included John Boyle, Bev Kelly, Murray Favro, Ron Martin, David Rabinowitch, Royden Rabinowitch, Walter Redinger, and Ed Zelenak. They are all profiled in fumetti form talking about their practice through speech balloons and captions, along with quick biographical details. Many of these artists were known for their inventiveness, they were influenced by a variety of subject matter -including comic art- without falsely delineating these influences into false boxes of high or low art. They didn’t just make work in the visual art field either. Along with a Hart Of London work-on-paper, Chambers made an experimental film with the same name in 1970. This film intensely shows brutal shots of an abattoir in Spain interspersed with London scenes; it has been described by Stan Brakhage as “one of the greatest films ever made.”  Both Curnoe’s Heart Of London painting from 1967 and Jack Chambers’ 1968 work-on-paper Hart Of London are in the show.

Noted curator and historian Judith Rodger told me that Curnoe’s Heart Of London piece depicts The Forks Of the Thames downtown, “arguably the heart of London” near many of the artists’ studios with Greg’s studio as the main hub or heart of it all. As for the idea of a comic book catalog, it was a mystery until Rodger guided me to Katie Cholette’s PhD thesis Memory and Mythmaking: the role of autobiography in the works of Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe which states that it was the idea of William Bragg, assistant to the director of The National Gallery’s extension services. Cholette’s paper quotes Bragg from the Sept 29, 1968 New York Times’ Arts Notes column, “…The idea was to make a kind of scrapbook, to talk as a group, not individuals. Their work is kind of echoed by the comics—it’s really their bag […] Everyone likes to read comics once in a while, anyway.” Due to its uniqueness, the catalog garnered a lot of press for the show. Beverley Lambert (Bev Kelly in the show) says, “I think we all thought it was pretty neat and it was funny. It got people’s attention.”

When I talked to artist John Boyle about this comic book catalog, he said right away, “It’s too bad that Greg Curnoe isn’t with us anymore, because he was really interested in comic books. And he always did comic book or comic-like drawings from the time he was a little kid.” In the book Greg Curnoe Life And Work, author Judith Rodger’s description of his 1963 painting Myself Walking North In the Tweed Coat could be ascribed to many of his works. “The flat, vivid colours; schematic outlines; and text all come from his love of the comic book.” As well as the inclusion of the name of the newspaper strip Mary Worth in the piece. Another colourful painting casually inserts Dick Tracy into the frame as a representative of one of his interests. Curnoe’s series of cut-out collages were often shaped into cartoony and anthropomorphic forms.

Curated by Pierre Théberge at The National Gallery, Boyle readily notes, “Both Curnoe and Chambers talked up all the other artists who were around in London, and ended up persuading Théberge to have a group show to get a sense of the whole London art scene.”

The comic book itself doesn’t give William Bragg’s name at all, nada. The designer is credited: Roger Duhamel, FRSC, Queen’s Printer and Controller of Stationery, a federal government official, as well as the design firm: Eccleston + Glossop International. All of the photos, however, were done by the late Don Vincent, of whom Boyle says, “He was a friend of ours, of all of us. And a really terrific photographer. And he documented the whole London scene as it unfolded taking photographs all the time of everybody in this show and just of London, his whole life was photography.” Vincent’s work also appeared in 20 Cent Magazine, a delightfully scrappy local art magazine started in the mid-60’s with many of the people in the show, including Boyle and Curnoe, contributing writings and drawings. 20 Cent Magazine sold for 25 cents, ha! Vincent also photographed The Nihilist Spasm Band who are regarded as the first noise-rock band; this amazing, mind-blowing, intense and milk-spurtingly funny act was founded by the late Greg Curnoe, with Boyle and Favro (playing unique guitars that he builds himself) as still very active members over fifty years later. They are unique cultural ambassadors bringing such songs as “No Canada” to the world, having performed in Japan and in Vancouver at The Western Front with poet George Bowering guesting on guitar, and have had a documentary made about them by the late noise artist Zev Asher.

In one of Heart Of London’s comic book panels about Boyle an early issue of the four color MAD sneaks its way in. I asked him if he read MAD, “Yeah. Although that is from the designer. I read MAD, although not madly.”

A very young Boyle states in one of his panels, “The day I can truly defile myself in public, I will have accomplished everything, and I will no longer have a need to paint.” Reflecting today he says, “I still think that actually, and I think I may have succeeded. Because I do still have the need to paint. But I don’t have the need to show it anymore, or to get applause or approval from anyone. And I don’t know how that arose in me. But I kind of had a fair amount of attention and approval and acceptance and shows in fancy places and meeting important people and pleasing art administrators. And I kind of reached the conclusion that most of them aren’t worth pleasing and their opinion was not as good or not as important as the opinions of other people that I happen to know. And I thought they made a lot of mistakes and people that they chose to support. And also, their approval was very fickle. They were very fickle about it because as soon as fashions would change, their eyes were directed elsewhere and the people they thought were geniuses today were no longer geniuses tomorrow. I did kind of lose my enthusiasm for the art world, but not for painting. So, I was mistaken.”

The final pages of this catalog feature a few reproductions of pieces from the show itself, including Bev Kelly’s window paintings which, with its window panels, adapt quite easily to the comic book form, comparable to an ornate and mysterious painted comic page. The layout, however, was a bit fast and loose with one of her works being printed sideways. In her fumetti section she says, “These windows aren’t ‘real’ windows, they are still paintings. They don’t have sashes and you can’t see through them. A real window is to look through, these are to look at.” Painted on canvas, the window pieces used lumber to make the frames of the paintings, carved to look like the ribbed mouldings of window frames.

Bev Kelly was the sole woman in the show and when I asked her about this she said, “I’m very happy that they didn’t concentrate on this issue that I was the only woman. I didn’t want to be known as an artist because I was a woman.” Having recently moved to London from Saskatchewan with her husband, they were warmly welcomed by Curnoe and she would go see The Nihilist Spasm Band play every week at The York Hotel. Her first solo show was at The 20/20 Gallery in London.

She spent the first two years of her life in Biggar, Saskatchewan where the signs read, “New York Is Big, But This Is Biggar.” Being in London changed her notions of places like New York being the absolute cultural mecca. Beverley says, “There was a really vibrant cultural community there. You know what a regionalist Greg was. He really believed, as a lot of writers do, that you should write about what you know, or you should do your art about what you know, including where you live and so on. And, of course, when I started on the windows that was right out where I was living. The first ones were of my house and then I walked around and took pictures of various houses that I thought looked interesting. When I got a studio in London above one of the businesses downtown I used some of the windows there as inspiration for my works. And then when I went back to Saskatchewan, I was very into that, looking around at what is there where you live. I even got a grant to travel around small-town Saskatchewan and look at the local -in air quotes- ‘folk art’ or untrained artists, let’s say, just painting odd things on their house or their property or whatever. So, I went and I did interviews, took pictures of them, and I imagine I must have produced some kind of a report on it because I probably had to for my grant. So that led me into being more observant and looking more at where it’s from and what is around you and that you don’t have to go to some huge, big place to find art.”

Bev Kelly was her married name and she returned to using her original name, Beverley Lambert in the 1970’s. Lambert did a series of three large lithographs for International Women’s Year in 1975 on women’s issues dealing with real news stories that happened on the prairies. Many of these prints were donated to many women’s centres across the country. She has also worked in clay doing an entire main street based on the fictional Saskatchewan town in the humour book Sarah Binks by Paul Hiebert. Beverley Lambert currently resides in St. John’s, Newfoundland where she makes art and is active as a conservator.

Flip the comic over and it is the same but in either French or English depending on where you first started reading!

Boyle comments, “Last night, my wife and I were looking at the Heart of London catalog. She was amazed that this was a National Gallery touring show with a lot of artists who became major artists in the country. And it looked like they were trying to spend as little money as possible by making this skinny little comic book-like thing on newsprint and I think there’s a large measure of truth in that. Because, again, I remember when Greg Curnoe had a big one-man exhibition retrospective at The National Gallery and the catalogue that they did for him was kind of a minimal thing. It was like a paperback book with one colour reproduction and a number of inferior black and white reproductions and basically a list of artworks in the show. And in the same year, The National Gallery did a big one-man exhibition of Donald Judd, the American sculptor, and his catalogue was a huge coffee table book that weighed about 15 pounds and was three inches thick and loaded with colour from beginning to end. And that just, I think, represented a specifically Canadian problem.” When I mention this to Hairy Who member Art Green he responds, “Well, of course, because they’re trying to impress their betters in New York, so you get a job at The Whitney or The Museum of Modern Art. Canada has been an incubator for museum directors since forever.”

Hairy Who catalog page by Art Green, courtesy of the artist

This style of catalog for Heart Of London corresponds nicely with The Hairy Who, another such grouping of artists around that time who were part of “The Chicago Imagists.” Their three Chicago art shows starting in the mid-60’s were accompanied by comic books that also doubled as exhibition catalogs. The Hairy Who weren’t very aware of the underground comics scene then just barely getting started, they chose this method out of creative necessity, printing a glossy catalog was cost prohibitive. Green explains, “And the printing was expensive and not very good. And we didn’t want to have a show that was called ‘Six Recent Graduates’ or something unexciting like that. And so, we realised we all liked comics and we all knew how to do colour stripping because we’d taken silk-screening courses, we figured out we could do it. And it was cheap.”

Delineating further, The Hairy Who made playful art inspired by a wide range of neat stuff. The London artists were well aware of The Hairy Who. In fact, The Hairy Who were even going to show in London at The 20/20 Gallery. Boyle notes, “20/20 was kind of a precursor to the art in the so-called artist run centres, most of which aren’t run by artists anymore. But anyway, it was one of the first and it was all sponsored by local people in London. And I don’t think it lasted longer than a couple of years, but it was a terrific gallery while it lasted.” Many of the artists in The Heart Of London show were active in 20/20, which lasted from 1966 to 1971. Greg Curnoe discussed the show with Hairy Who artist Karl Wirsum, who in a letter to Art Green wrote, “Well, if they go ahead and publish a comic book, that would be all right.” Green notes, “He may have thought that the 20/20 Gallery was more well-funded than it probably was. But it was on, we all agreed to do it. We were looking forward to it.” Green himself left Chicago for Canada in 1969. The 1968 Democratic Convention had transpired and as Green puts it, “Everybody was angry at everybody.” He was dissatisfied with his teaching job there as well, so when offered a job at NASCAD, the art school in Halifax, he leaped at it.

Alas, the show didn’t happen. In a letter to Art Green, Curnoe writes, “We had to cancel The Hairy Who show and a lot of us were disappointed.” Boyle notes, “I suspect that it got caught up in the death throes of the gallery. And they would have had to cancel whatever exhibitions they had coming up.”

Green notes that both London and Chicago are far enough away from the more major centres that artists can, “…be free to go their own way because there’s not much at stake partly and nobody’s paying attention. And I remember the first time I had been in London, we were driving on our honeymoon to Halifax where I got the job. And I thought, ‘I’m gonna stop here and get a Canada Dry.’ I’m driving down what’s the main street that runs north south and pulled into a corner store. And I said, ‘Do you have Canada Dry?’ ‘No, but we got America Dry.’  I have never before or since seen a bottle of America Dry. I bought it and it wasn’t as good as Canada Dry. And, and that’s not a dream. I mean, I have never seen it ever again. But that made me say, ‘Wow, this is a weird place.’”

While Green was teaching at NASCAD, Curnoe came for what Green calls, “One of his annual excoriations, if that’s a word, he would rip them up one side down the other in public, for being a Canadian art school with no Canadians teaching, hardly any, and all yanks -and it was true! And so anyway, they would invite him and it was almost like a ritual. He would be in the public, there’d be 400 students there and Greg would just rip the place apart. I had known Greg, I heard about the show and so on, and we got along fine. And afterwards he’d come up to me and say, ‘Well, how did I do?’ ‘Greg, you’re doing great, but you do realise I’m a yank’, but I agreed with him 100%.” Both Curnoe and Green commiserated on how Canadian art was neglected at the school. “If he had been in Chicago, Greg would have been a member of The Hairy Who or maybe started it. But he was more political, he had to be, and Chicago, the politics were so acidic that you wouldn’t have wanted to be to be involved in it, unless you went in full immersion. And we were decidedly unpolitical. Although we all agreed on the politics of it. We were a collective in the sense that we wanted people to collect us.” On this, Art Green is a tad glib, having made art responding to and criticizing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Both Art and Greg would visit with each other in various Canadian cities: Halifax, Vancouver, Toronto. “Nobody appreciated Greg in Toronto, they went out of their way to un-appreciate him. And luckily, they did put a put up a pretty nice retrospective after he was safely gone.”

Of London, Green notes, “I think that for a period of time. I don’t know how long it was maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours, maybe a few months? Maybe a few years. London, Ontario was most interesting art scene and literary scene in the whole world.”

The propensity for great art still ran in the water there, the stream flowed, there was a continuum and a recognizing of that history. London has some great galleries including Forest City Gallery, founded by Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe, where The Nihilist Spasm Band plays every Monday night.

In 2013 The London Museum held the group show L.O. Today with artists Jason Mclean, Marc Bell, Jamie Q, Billy Bert Young, Amy Lockhart, Peter Thompson, and James Kirkpatrick. Many of these artists are a part of the Canadian Psychedooolic art comic movement that began in the 1990’s, captured and collected in the book Nog A Dod, edited by former Londoner Marc Bell and released by Conundrum/PictureBox. Much of the work in Nog A Dod occurred in Vancouver with a couple of these London artists relocating there, immersing easily, doing a lot of collaborative drawing and art books with other Vancouver based artists. Yes, ‘Canadian Psychedooolic’ was named after the fact by Bell, but we weren’t thinking of ourselves as a movement or a group at the time. Yet all of these art books had an unfettered comic wildness, funny, and expansively playful. And Nog A Dod got out there, impacting and influencing a lot of artists the world over. Furthering the connective tissue, in 2003, The Western Front in Vancouver put on an art show featuring ‘documents and ephemera’ from musical acts The Nihilist Spasm Band, The All Star Schnauzer Band (a somewhat fake band as mail art project involving Bell, Mclean, and Thompson) and July Fourth Toilet, a Vancouver based group that often involves many Nog A Dod and Nog A Dod related artists, including yours truly occasionally wearing outlandish semi-functional semi-nude costumes specially designed by Jason Mclean. The show was curated by Jonathan Middleton, who is now Executive Director at Art Metropole, a Toronto based artist-run centre dealing primarily in artists’ publications.

Getting back to Greg Curnoe. Released in two parts in 1970, The Great Canadian Sonnet contained numerous images by Curnoe. Described as a “Beaver Little Book”, the format was modeled after the popular Big Little Books, distant cousins to comic books so named for being small, square and thick. Big Little Books were marketed to children and featured popular comic, cartoon, radio and film characters of the day in text-based stories with illustrations on every other page. Some Big Little Books had flip-it cartoons in the top corner so one could make the character move. With its second volume The Great Canadian Sonnet does this as well, stating “See ‘em move – just flip the pages” on the cover and, sure enough, in the corner a spot rolls up a hill-like abstract shape transforming into a medley of human faces.

Written by poet David McFadden, Curnoe riffed off lines in his text creating a great many detailed pen-and-ink drawings for the book with titles that included “Proud Possessor Of Meaningful Pain”, “One that will be Truly Loved by the Prime Minister”, and “The Empty Universe” which featured a drawing of a tin of apple juice and a packet of bird seed -the book’s drawings contained many such absurdist pairings. The Great Canadian Sonnet was published by Coach House Press who were -and still are- known for releasing all manner of experimental works including poetry, prose and beyond. Both volumes together weigh in at over 400 pages, with every other page being a drawing by Curnoe.

Many thanks to Jason Mclean, Marc Bell, and Judith Rodger for their immense help with this piece.

Thanks as well to Art Green for use of his respective artworks.

Part Two: Scraptures, Snore and More coming tomorrow, Friday, August 20!

Robert Dayton

www.robertdayton.com

www.patreon.com/CanadianGlam