Vepo Studios's blog

Today's Whazamo comic comes from Tory Woollcott, a Toronto-based cartoonist who made her debut with the graphic memoir Mirror Mind: Growing up Dyslexic. Besides being well told, what made Mirror Mind stand out is that it is one of the first stories in any medium that really got across what dyslexia actually is, and how it affects those who struggle with it.

Looking for David Collier at TCAF this year, I found him in a lecture room, drawing cartoons on a wipeboard. Not as part of session--but because “someone needed to fill up that empty space.” The same passion has driven Collier to fill notebooks and eventually the pages of comics and graphic novels since the mid-eighties, in autobiographical essays and other true-life tales.

It's been an amazing month of literary comics here at Whazamo with each cartoonist bringing their own unique approach to the challenge of adapting or representing their chosen book. Of course we're not the first to mix mediums, there are many excellent examples of cartoonists who have been moved to turn prose into comics.

Hyein Lee is an artist to watch. I met her on the indie-press circuit, a quiet kooky girl in ladybug shoes, selling prints of pastel monsters, bunnies and penguins, along with hand-made mini comics. But it was really a short-story that was published in Broken Pencil that caught my attention.

You don't get a lot of comics about poetry, but that's just the kind of artist Marian Churchland is. Her first graphic novel Beast followed a sculptress struggling with the creative process, as she tries to complete the portrait of her shawdowy, and most probably, magical patron.

Cartoonist John Lang is equally at home with editorial assignments as rampaging monsters.

Kalman is a comic book illustrator, and a concept designer for video games, television, those looking for imaginative fantasy or science fiction creations. He has a particular knack for the details that make a genre hero memorable.

Storytelling is powerful. When I asked this week's illustrators to choose a book that inspired them, both went for a favourite from childhood. When else are you more easily pulled into the world between two covers? In Agnes Garbowska's case, a lot of that time was spent under the covers, terrifying herself with the stories of R.L. Stine's classic Goosebumps series.

One of the best things about doing indie-comics is the different artists that you get to meet along the way. Charlene Chua was exhibiting the same year as me once at the Speakeasy Comic Book Show at the Gladstone hotel, a combination of art show and mixer. And mostly what caught my eye were her women.

I met Michael Cho at one of the first TCAFs, where I picked up a tiny mini comic called Night Time. It made an impression; not just the art, but a first person voice that captured the thrill and freedom of being a teenager (it's kind of like Arcade Fire's 'The Suburbs' before 'The Suburbs').