This weekend, we jet off to Canada for one of the highlights of our year: the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. With guests including Jillian Tamaki, Pénélope Bagieu and Dave McKean, this year’s show looks like it’ll be as good as ever. What’s more, there’ll be three very special SelfMadeHero creators in attendance: Paolo Bacilieri (FUN), Aimée de Jongh (The Return of the Honey Buzzard) and Chris W. Kim (Herman by Trade). They’ll be signing books on SelfMadeHero’s booth in the Toronto Reference Library throughout the weekend, as well as taking part in some intriguing, star-studded events.
Paolo Bacilieri kicks things off with two pre-festival events:
On Thursday 11 May, he’ll speak alongside Marcelino Truong and Martina Schradi at the Alliance Française (24 Spadina Road, Toronto). The panel, organised in partnership with EUNIC, kicks off at 19:30 and is free to attend. The discussion will be moderated by Lars von Toerne, a journalist for Der Tagesspiegel. Full details are available here.
On Friday 12 May, an exhibition of Bacilieri’s work opens around the corner, at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (496 Huron Street, Toronto). The exhibition comprises 30 original illustrations from FUN, as well as 20 more from his previous graphic novels La Magnifica Desolazione and Sweet Salgari. This is not to be missed. Details here.
On Saturday 13 May, Aimée de Jongh joins Emma Ríos, Christine Wong, David White and Akihide Yanagi for a discussion of what it takes to build a comics community (“Making a Scene”, 11:00-12:00, The Pilot, 22 Cumberland Street).
And shortly after that, as part of the festival’s Canadian Reading Series, Chris W. Kim joins comics giant Seth and Pope Hats author Ethan Rilly as they read from their latest comics masterpieces (“Alt Canada”, 12:15-13:15, Hinton Learning Theatre, Toronto Reference Library).
And, finally, on Sunday 14 May, Paolo Bacilieri is back in action, talking alongside Box Brown, Pénélope Bagieu and Joe Ollmann on a panel focussing on the joys, pitfalls and frustrations of telling real-life stories (“Telling Other People’s Stories”, 13:30-14:30, Learning Centre, Toronto Reference Library).
What more could you want? Well, actually, there’s quite a lot more: check out the full TCAF programme here.
Nominees have been announced for this year’s Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, and it’s good news for Barbara Yelin. Her extraordinary wartime drama, Irmina, has been included in the “Best U.S. Edition of International Material” category.
Set for the most part in the Berlin of Hitler’s Germany, Yelin’s award-winning graphic novel is a troubling drama based on the life of the author’s grandmother. Conjuring the oppressive atmosphere of Nazi Germany, Irmina explores the tension between integrity and social advancement, reflecting with compassion and intelligence on the complicity that results from the choice, conscious or otherwise, to look away.
The Eisner Award winners will be announced at the San Diego Comic Con, which takes place from 20-23 July 2017. You can see the full list of nominees here.
Pieter Coudyzer is well known for his animation work, including the short films Treeand My Heart is not Here. Now, he’s turned his considerable talent to comics – and the results are astonishing. Outburst, released this month, is a disturbing, atmospheric and utterly absorbing debut graphic novel, part coming of age story, part contemporary fairy tale.
Tom is the bespectacled class nerd: introspective, clumsy and myopic. When he leaves his lunchbox unguarded, Tom returns to find it inhabited by ants. When he gazes at the cute girl in class, she responds by sticking out her tongue. And when it is time to partner up on a canoeing trip, he is left to paddle on the river alone…
At home, Tom finds solace in recordings of nature and the wild spaces of his imagination. But when he falls prey to a particularly cruel trick, this imaginative wilderness becomes rampant. It wants out. A moment of crisis marks the flashpoint of a slow-burning metamorphosis.
Italian artist Fabrizio Dori was reading comics at an early age, but like many readers for whom superheroes never really appealed, he lost interest as a teen. Dori, whose graphic biography Gauguin: The Other World is out now, rediscovered the medium in his thirties. It was only then, after studying at Milan’s Brera Academy of Art, that he felt the desire to start making them.
“It’s a strange medium,” he says. “It balances two things [fine art and literature] that are really quite different from one another – things that, in theory, shouldn’t work together. But in practice, they do, and they do well.”
According to Dori, it’s an exciting time to be working in this hybrid form. “Comics is quite a young medium, and it’s going through a transitional phase similar, more or less, to that which transformed the visual arts in the 8th and 9th centuries. During that period, artists were freed from the constraints of their traditional role within society and forged (with some difficulty) a place for themselves in the modern world. Making comics today is challenging, but it’s a special moment, full of opportunities.”
Dori’s biography, the latest book in our Art Masters series, follows the extraordinary life of a man who was by turns a globe-trotting sailor, a brilliant stockbroker and an outcast painter. But it was something else about Paul Gauguin’s life that made him appealing as a subject. “I’m attracted to stories with a mythical and archetypical dimension. This element of Gauguin’s life was the spark that brought the book to life. We’re talking about the story of a man who’s looking for a lost paradise; who finds it; and who, after a hubristic downfall, loses it again.”
Dori developed his ideas in writing before working on the architecture of the story. “I prepare an outline like a musical score; on this I arrange the individual scenes and define the style and the rhythm of the tale. This is a critical phase: if the foundations are not strong, the entire narrative will be unstable.
“The storyboard and script are worked on simultaneously. I imagine and realise the details of each scene at the storyboarding stage. Once that’s complete, I begin work on the final pages.”
The results of this process can be found in the beautiful Gauguin: The Other World, which is available now from all good book shops.
Dancer, civil rights activist, supporter of the Resistance and mother to the “Rainbow Tribe”: Josephine Baker packed a lot into her 68 years. Hers is a life that demands a monumental portrait, and French creative team Catel and Bocquet have kindly obliged: released this month, their latest graphic biography is 500 glorious pages of dancing and dissent.
Josephine Baker was nineteen years old when she found herself in Paris for the first time in 1925. Overnight, the young American dancer became the idol of the era, captivating Picasso, Cocteau, Le Corbusier and Simenon. In the liberating atmosphere of the 1930s, Baker rose to fame as the first black star on the world stage, from London to Vienna, Alexandria to Buenos Aires.
After World War II, and her time in the French Resistance, Baker devoted herself to the struggle against racial segregation, publicly battling the humiliations she had for so long suffered personally.
She led by example, and over the course of the 1950s adopted twelve orphans of different ethnic backgrounds: a veritable Rainbow Tribe. And it was one of her adopted children, Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker, who acted as the Historical Consultant on Catel and Bocquet’s biography, which contains 100 pages of supplementary material.
