Image courtesy of Nadia Halim
It’s true that Toronto is no Angouleme, host city of the great comics festival that bears its name, and, sure, it’s not Montreal, but little by little, Toronto has become a pretty good place to live for comics lovers, fans, aficionados, and, most of all, cartoonists themselves. We have great stores that support the community, such as The Beguiling, The Silver Snail, and Hairy Tarantula. In fact Toronto has over 20 comic shops. We have great conventions like TCAF, the many giant conventions of Hobbystar Marketing, Anime North, and the Wizard World Toronto Comicon. We have Canzine, the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, Word on the Street, and the IFOA. Plenty of places to hawk your wares, pick up some good work, and connect with other artists to find out how they do what they do.
We also have The Joe Shuster Awards and the Doug Wright Awards, two of the biggest Canadian Comics awards for cartoonists, both of which raise awareness and support one of our most valuable resources – our cartoonists.
Toronto has become a good place for cartoonists to learn and practice their craft. We have Maxx the Mutt and the Toronto Cartoonist Workshop. We have the Toronto School of Art and even OCAD. We have the good ol’ Toronto Comic Jam for kickin’ back and drawing with your friends and a pint. There’s Dr. Sketchy’s , the Toronto Subway Sketch Group Blog, Speakeasy and sometimes the occasional SketchCrawl.
But if you are a cartoonist and you are trying to follow your dream, there’s a good chance that you are starving. I mean, sure, you may occasionally get paid $200 for an illustration of someone else’s idea that took you two hours to draw, but you’ll only get paid $50 for a comic page that cost you two days of sweating to create from nothing. In the end, this is not enough money to help you become a great cartoonist because to do so you need to read. You need to read and study the great work of other cartoonists, and read a lot of it, and the fact is you can’t afford to buy every manga, BD album or graphic novel you think you should read
Luckily, Toronto even has an answer for that. It’s called the Toronto Public Library.
Go on, take a look. Go to the TPL search site and see what you find. Challenge it. You can read all the backlists of your favourite established artists you know you should have already read – without spending a penny. Aritsts like Chester Brown, Seth, Julie Doucet, Ben Katchor, Roz Chast, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Gilbert Hernandez, Lynda Berry, Charles Burns, Joe Sacco. Why was E. C. Segar’s Popeye so popular? Read it and find out. Read your Kazou Koike for heaven’s sake. Read the legend that is Osamu Tezuka, or Hayao Miyazaki. You often hear of how film influences comics – well, read the comic artist that was so popular that he changed film in the 1950s. Read Milton Caniff. Dave Sim would respect that.
And if you need to browse – because we all need to browse, you just can’t get the feel of a great graphic novel online (can you?) – and you think they’re going to kick you out of The Beguiling for pawing all their books and not buying anything, then go to the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina and peruse their vast collections of comics and graphic art. Paw all you want. Oh, and now all Toronto Public Library branches have wifi. You can even bring your coffee. And they won’t kick you out when you finish the cup.
Great article! Thank you for the plug for Toronto Public Library. We are big fans and supporters of comics – and the amazing community of artists who create these works.
We were proud to host the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) in 2009 and are very excited to host it again on May 8/9, 2010, at Toronto Reference Library.
As part of our month-long Keep Toronto Reading festival in April 2010 (www.keeptorontoreading.ca), we will host two comics-related programs with our long-time partner, The Beguiling.
Stay tuned for more info. It’s going to be an exciting year at Toronto Public Library for comics lovers, artists and supporters.
Just an FYI, there’s also the annual Polaris sci-fi and fantasy convention in July, which also hosts the annual Constellation Awards.
Great article. In addition, the Archives and Special Collections at York University Libraries has been acquiring rare graphic novels, associated ephemera, a large comic strip collection (reprints) and various other special items of interest to scholars, comics aficionados and cartoonists with historical interests.