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your TCAF report
May. 13th, 2013 11:18 amIt was TCAF time in Toronto again and we went down on Saturday. Got there a little later in the day, so we only had time to buy Kupperman's new Tales book and get it signed. We were in line to get a book from Lisa Hanawalt signed but it got to be time for her to go, so that didn't happen. The upstairs small-press room was filled past capacity and there was a line of folks waiting to get in. I've never seen it that crowded. We went to Kupperman's talk at the Pilot and he did a slideshow reading of some of his comics and showed a new Mark Twain animated short he's produced that will be going online at some point soon; it's pretty funny.
Afterwards we got lunch at our usual TCAF/Yorkville destination, Flo's Diner. We killed some time and then went back over to the Marriott for the Doug Wright Awards, the annual Canadian Comics award ceremony named after the famous Canadian cartoonist Doug Wright.
The host this year was TV's Scott Thompson, you might know him from "Kids In The Hall" or lately from NBC's "Hannibal." I was thinking that the show would be pretty crowded considering the host, but the ballroom in the Marriott was not that large and while it did fill up, it wasn't as packed as I'd thought. To be honest this is the first big comics award thing I've ever been to, and I had no idea how formal or glitzy the proceedings were going to be. As it turned out the whole thing had the air of a high school graduation - lots of friendly applause, banter between guests and presenters, and technical goofs aplenty. We had to endure some fire alarm nonsense at first, too.
Thompson absolutely killed. He gave a good talk about how working on his own graphic novel helped him through his recent bout with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (his hair is back and it's fantastic), but he's far enough removed from the comics world to absolutely not care who he's zinging, whether it's mocking the copy written for the nominees' work or fighting with David Collier for the mic. Awards ceremonies need more MCs like this.
The comics nominated were a mixed bag of autobio and experimental; some of it was to my taste and some of it had me rolling my eyes. Of the works I was unfamiliar with, I think Jacobs' BY THIS SHALL YOU KNOW HIM was the most interesting. Quebecois comics legend Albert Chartier was inducted into the Canadian Cartoonists Hall Of Fame along with some interesting tales of the complete lack of any kind of comics industry in Quebec in the 60s and 70s - apparently returned copies of French comics like TINTIN, PILOTE, etc would simply be shipped to Quebec for newsstand distribution. Unsold copies from Quebec would be then shipped to Haiti, from there to Senegal, etc. It's hard for local culture to thrive in an environment of cheap import product, and this sort of thing goes a long way towards explaining why Canada now has Canadian Content regulations.
I took some photos of the awards and of the event but the camera, the camera is not behaving when it comes to getting the pix out, so photos of Scott Thompson battling David Collier will come later.
It was my full intention to return to TCAF on Sunday, but we wound up getting Shain a new PC and doing some banking and generally going further afield than we'd been expecting. The weather was... well, it rained, and it hailed, and it sleeted, and it snowed, and then the sun would come out, and then it would start the cycle all over again. This is the craziest May weather I've seen so far. Between lunch and the PC and the bank and having to get a new keyboard, it was 9pm before we were back home, and for me that means it was time to get started on my own comics commitment for the week. I was not happy with last week's page, and I think the sequence I'm currently in will undergo serious revision when this is all done, but I'm moving forward and this week's page is a considerable improvement.
And that was the weekend. How was yours?
Afterwards we got lunch at our usual TCAF/Yorkville destination, Flo's Diner. We killed some time and then went back over to the Marriott for the Doug Wright Awards, the annual Canadian Comics award ceremony named after the famous Canadian cartoonist Doug Wright.
The host this year was TV's Scott Thompson, you might know him from "Kids In The Hall" or lately from NBC's "Hannibal." I was thinking that the show would be pretty crowded considering the host, but the ballroom in the Marriott was not that large and while it did fill up, it wasn't as packed as I'd thought. To be honest this is the first big comics award thing I've ever been to, and I had no idea how formal or glitzy the proceedings were going to be. As it turned out the whole thing had the air of a high school graduation - lots of friendly applause, banter between guests and presenters, and technical goofs aplenty. We had to endure some fire alarm nonsense at first, too.
Thompson absolutely killed. He gave a good talk about how working on his own graphic novel helped him through his recent bout with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (his hair is back and it's fantastic), but he's far enough removed from the comics world to absolutely not care who he's zinging, whether it's mocking the copy written for the nominees' work or fighting with David Collier for the mic. Awards ceremonies need more MCs like this.
The comics nominated were a mixed bag of autobio and experimental; some of it was to my taste and some of it had me rolling my eyes. Of the works I was unfamiliar with, I think Jacobs' BY THIS SHALL YOU KNOW HIM was the most interesting. Quebecois comics legend Albert Chartier was inducted into the Canadian Cartoonists Hall Of Fame along with some interesting tales of the complete lack of any kind of comics industry in Quebec in the 60s and 70s - apparently returned copies of French comics like TINTIN, PILOTE, etc would simply be shipped to Quebec for newsstand distribution. Unsold copies from Quebec would be then shipped to Haiti, from there to Senegal, etc. It's hard for local culture to thrive in an environment of cheap import product, and this sort of thing goes a long way towards explaining why Canada now has Canadian Content regulations.
I took some photos of the awards and of the event but the camera, the camera is not behaving when it comes to getting the pix out, so photos of Scott Thompson battling David Collier will come later.
It was my full intention to return to TCAF on Sunday, but we wound up getting Shain a new PC and doing some banking and generally going further afield than we'd been expecting. The weather was... well, it rained, and it hailed, and it sleeted, and it snowed, and then the sun would come out, and then it would start the cycle all over again. This is the craziest May weather I've seen so far. Between lunch and the PC and the bank and having to get a new keyboard, it was 9pm before we were back home, and for me that means it was time to get started on my own comics commitment for the week. I was not happy with last week's page, and I think the sequence I'm currently in will undergo serious revision when this is all done, but I'm moving forward and this week's page is a considerable improvement.
And that was the weekend. How was yours?
