Cover for Spirit City - click through to be taken to publisher's website
In his haunting new book, Spirit City Toronto, local artist Aaron Leighton combines photos and drawings to evoke the ancient nature spirits who’ve inhabited the Toronto landscape land for millennia. Now robbed of their flora and fauna, these spirits haunt the corners of an alien cityscape and lament what we have taken from them.
Aaron Leighton has worked for a variety of clients, including the New York Times, Chronicle Books, Harvard Business Review, Target, and Ford. He has also worked as the character designer and creative director for the Emmy Award–winning animated project, The Zimmer Twins.
Toronto cartoonist Dalton Sharp spoke with Leighton at the Second Cup near Yonge and St. Clair about Spirit City, about Toronto, and about the often overlooked impact of nature upon our urban landscape (and vice versa). Below is the first of two parts of that interview.
Dalton Sharp: How long have you been spotting these spirits around town?
Aaron Leighton: I’ve been collecting the photos for three years. With each photo I have an idea of “who” might live there. But I’ve been interested in this subject matter for a lot longer than that.
DS: Did you make up imaginary creatures as a kid?
AL: I was a typical creative kid in a small town. I didn’t fit in, I didn’t like sports as much as the other guys beating the crap out of each other. I spent a lot of time alone, but oddly I didn’t have imaginary friends. I think I was still too much of a realist, though I did have a penchant for fantasy.
I grew up with Star Wars, as most boys in the ‘70s did, and fairy tales. I think those influences planted the seed for appreciating the fantastical and the other worldly. From an early age I was always intrigued with the idea of something wonderful and magical existing in the mundane world. Star Wars is like that. After seeing it as a kid I used to look up to the sky and think, “Wow! It could actually be happening up there! That could be the Death Star up there blowing up.”
I also discovered Ogopogo and Sasquatch as a kid. Those appealed to me more than the fairy tale monsters because they were real. You hear about these things, and they’re in Canada, and it’s great!
DS: And they’re in real time!
AL: There are things living in our lakes. There’s these big apes walking in the forests. That’s crazy for a kid!
Years later, shows like Fraggle Rock caught my interest. I loved that because it’s an old guy’s workshop and one little hole in the corner, and then the camera pans into that hole, and there’s this whole world of weird creatures living inside. That idea has always fascinated me. There’s something that we can’t see, but it’s there, and it makes our normal, boring, bland world a more special place.
DS: When you were working on this book, what came first: the spirits or the spots?
AL: The spot. The spot definitely came first. I enjoy photography as a sideline hobby. I certainly don’t claim to be that good at it, but I’m drawn to the sadder, lonely, forlorn places as I think artists tend to be. I’ve always found beauty in unexpected places—the abandoned parking lots, the parkades, the Gardiner, places that people consider ugly. I just started taking pictures of them as a way of documenting them, and then the ideas started growing. That it would be cool if there were little creatures living here. I’d look at the photo, crop it, and look at it and start imagining what kind of creature would live there. So the photos definitely informed the creatures.
DS: Which I think is probably how it worked long ago: there would d be a place, a beautiful setting, and then the local people would imagine the spirit that inhabits that place.
AL: You’re probably correct. It’s funny you should say that because this project combines a number of my different interests—urban photography, environmental issues, what we’ve done to alter the world to suit our needs.
We’ve removed the forests, and the lakes, and the rivers, and made the landscape inhabitable for us, but what about all the other beings that used to live there? And also in the mythology of indigenous peoples, the idea that there’s a story here that people have told over and over again. The tribes that lived here had spirits that would have inhabited certain areas that would have looked and acted a certain way because of where they lived. The spirits’ power and role would be determined by that place.
Another one of my interests is mythology of indigenous people. They are rich in a way that we are poor, they have many of their stories intact and they understood that nature was more than just a resource to be used. They respected it. It’s something we’ve lost and I’m trying to re-imagine spirits or dense powers that would have existed and that still exist in our temporary society.
I think that we are a mythologically poor society. I think we’ve put all our eggs into the scientific basket, and there’s no room for wonder or extreme possibility. Mythology is seen as an antiquated idea, with no real value to it. I completely disagree. This book is my own little tiny mythology, about my own view of the city, an alternate view of the city. It’s a bit of a lesson too. In my mind these spirits have been here long before we were, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone. They’re just biding their time.
DS: Your ideas on this point, that the natural world will take back the cities, are remarkably similar to what I’ve read from Farley Mowat. He’s convinced humans aren’t going to be around forever.
AL: Really? Well we’re a bit of an anomaly. It’s not my idea, but I’ve read somewhere that the creature that’s closest to a human is a virus, which eventually kills its host. That’s what we’re doing, we’re slowly but surely killing our host. And when we do we’re finished, unless we learn to build cities on the moon, and then we’ll probably do the same thing there, but I don’t want to get too heavy. The book is a vague cautionary tale, but it’s more just a metaphysical look at the city.
DS: Still there is a foreboding to Spirit City.
AL: It’s not a fun book, it’s not something that makes you happy, although the spirits are sort of cutesy, at least at first. The idea is that these creatures are—they’re not angry—but they’re not happy about their lot in life. They have nowhere else to go. They were living in that parking lot when it was a cave, when it was part of the escarpment. Or maybe they lived at Nathan Phillip’s Square, and there was a stand of forest there, ancient trees a thousand years old. They were living in those trees, and now they don’t know where else to go. They are older and more subtle than human beings, and they’ve decided, “Well, we’ll just wait it out.”
My intent was to make them appealing characters, they’re visually appealing, they’re very simple, very geometric, but there is a certain darkness, a somberness to them that I was trying to get across.
DS: It’s interesting because there is a horribleness to the urban landscape, but also a beauty too.
AL: That’s the neat thing about living in a city like Toronto. First, I should say that I bike everywhere, as a lot of people in the city do, and when you bike you see a lot more. You see odd corners you wouldn’t if you were going underground or straight from point A to B. I started going off the beaten path down to Cherry Beach, under the Gardiner. You can ride for miles, finding that beauty in those desolate places. It’s there. Maybe it’s not everyone’s thing, but the city offers a lot of interesting quiet little corners that if you’re willing to go looking for them—they’ll dazzle you. The ravines are another one of my favourites.
DS: If there’s one place in Toronto that the spirits might possibly be content it would be the ravines. We seem to have done the least amount of damage there.
AL: Yes, I agree, but only because we couldn’t. The technology wasn’t there, and probably still isn’t, to build on those slopes of shifty rock and shale, so they just left them. I’d say those places are swarming with spirits. It’s probably like a safe house at this point. Those spirits are still living like they always did. That’s what Toronto would have looked like had we never been here. It’s like a jungle, a wonderful semi-tropical jungle!
Maybe the spirits from the book will go visit their relatives in the ravines, but they’ll come back home, even if it’s to a desolate parking space or a cracked sidewalk corner. The idea of the book was not to show the nature spirits in nature proper, even though it’s really easy to imagine them there, but the nature spirits who have lost their nature in the urban desolation.
DS: Maybe the contented ones—you can’t see them.
AL: That’s right, they’re happily invisible tending the trees and acorns, talking to the birds and that kind of thing.
DS: Do you have names for these spirits?
AL: No, they’re not named. Each file I kept was named from the location, so I’d call one “black wall” or “blue chair.” That’d be sort of cool though, to give them names.
DS: There’s one spirit here that reminds me of an actual god that I don’t know anything about. His name is Cernun, maybe.
AL: Oh, Cernunnos, yes that’s the one.
DS: Was that on purpose or just a coincidence?
AL: Is he the guy sitting on the garbage pile with a twig in his hands?
DS: Yes!
AL: Yes it was intentional. You’re sharp.
DS: He was the one entity I recognized.
AL: Yes, Cernunnos is a Celtic deity. He’s also known as the Horned God, and I don’t claim to know that much about him, but I think he was a protector of animals.
DS: Like Pan?
AL: Like a Celtic Pan or a contemporary of Pan or Dionysius. He was an embodiment of the wildness, ferocity, the unknowableness of nature. I do a lot of reading about mythologies, and he’s the one that always stuck out for me. It’s interesting, you see him showing up over and over again these days, in comic artists’ work, in vinyl toys. The last few years have seen an obsession with deer. I think it might have played itself out now, but deers and antlers…
DS: Which I’ve put into my comics: lots of deer and antlers!
AL: There you go! Why? It’s almost like there are certain ideas and then their time comes and they want to live. It’s like the collective unconsciousness or the collective consciousness of human beings is ready for certain ideas. Right now, the focus is all on green technologies and sustainability, and people finally have realized in the last 10 years that the environment’s important. Imagine that! You can’t just keep destroying the planet. It’s finally filtered down to the everyday consciousness that it’s an issue.
You start to look backwards and ask, ‘How did the people before us handle the environment in a way that’s better than we did?” So someone like Cernunnos is definitely a symbol of an earlier culture that respected nature. That’s maybe an explanation of why this creature is popping up over and over in pop culture. So yes, he’s definitely in there. It’s like a little shout out to him.
DS: I hope it’s a good sign of things to come and not just another icon that’ll end up on T-shirts.
AL: It will and it has, but I think it’s symbolic of something deeper. It’s like in the ’60s when the culture in general was obsessed with New Age stuff, the occult and witchcraft, astrology, drugs, and expanding consciousness. It wasn’t just groups of people in San Francisco and big cities, it was the whole culture. Why? Why did that obsession take hold and burn like that? I guess what I’m saying is an idea can have an effect throughout the whole culture for better or ill.
DS: Speaking of changing the city or the city changing you, I was running along the Don River earlier this summer and was attacked by a Red-winged Blackbird. He was actually pecking the back of my neck! They nest near the ground, and the males are really aggressive. I ended up googling their nesting times and avoided the route for that period. It made me realize that if we’re going to let nature back into Toronto in some real way it’s going to require some give on our part. It’s going to be a bit of an inconvenience. Do you think we’ve got it within us to allow that to happen?
AL: That’s a good question—and a crazy story too. A friend of mine, his apartment is so hot he has to sleep with the door open, and he’s chasing raccoons out of his kitchen with a Super Soaker.
DS: Say what?
AL: Oh yeah, they’re so ballsy they come into the kitchen and eat food off his counter.
DS: That’s incredible.
AL: We live in this big urban megalopolis, but the forest is at the doorstep. We’re really lucky for that. It forces us to look nature in the face, whether we like it or not, whether it’s rats or raccoons, Red-winged Blackbirds, or maybe a skunk that’s living underneath your building.
DS: Or the coyotes, possibly eating people’s dogs.
AL: Coyotes, there’s deer in the ravine, there’s all sorts of stuff in there you know, and it reminds you that we’re not that far away from 500 years ago when that forest out there was dark and it was dangerous. So we’ve built walls, we’ve built our fires to keep it at bay. You didn’t go there at night because you might get eaten. I can’t answer if we have it in us to let nature back into Toronto. I think we’re going to be too busy texting.
DS: Ha!
Part two of the interview will appear tomorrow.
Spirit City Toronto is published by Koyama Press and is available to retailers through the distribution arm of AdHouse Books, Ad Distro. In Toronto, you can buy the book at Magic Pony, The Beguiling, and Lileo.
All art by Aaron Leighton.
Love it.
Reminds me of the yokai in Spirited Away.