Marta Chudolinska

Well, here is the last comic I will be posting as Open Book's May Writer-in-Res. I hope you've enjoyed my posts! If you're hungry for more, keep an eye on my blog for future comics and zany drawings. Thanks so much to everyone at Open Book for sharing their web space with me. Keep on reading everyone!!!

Find out more about amazing, FREE! Bike Month events on the City of Toronto's Cycling Events Calendar.

Ciocia= Polish for aunt

A comic about alternative methods for keeping fit.

(Click on comic for larger image.)

After too many days of grey and never-ending rain, finally some sunshine streams through the morning curtains of Toronto. Not daring to loll in bed and miss this opportunity, you vault out of bed, clothe yourself with haste and hop on your bicycle.

Noel Curry, creator of the webcomic DJ Bogtrotter, has decided, more or less on a whim, to proclaim May 14th as "Dialogue Free Comics Day". Not only do I love the audacity of creating new, online holidays, I applaud the idea of makers of webcomics the world over challenging themselves to explore the narrative potential of images. Curry will be collecting all participating comics on this blog, so make sure to visit on May 14th to satisfy all your wordless reading appetites.

P.S. I hereby declare July 11th (my birthday) to be International Drink Grain Alcohols and Shoot Roman Candles at Each Other Day. Celebrate!

April 2010: Having just finished my Masters degree in library studies, as my recent luck would have it, a dear friend of mine, art and craft journalist (though she would argue they are one and the same), Sara Titanic, decided to do a residency at Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island, and kindly invited me to share her studio. So it I happened that I hopped out of academia and landed square in that mystical physical and mental space: the STUDIO.

(STUDIO: A space designated for a maker to make within. SEE ALSO magic, quantum physics, shamanism.)

Each lucky, sunny day of May seems to be flying by at an alarming pace. The upswing of this temporal situation is that any day now we will be in the thick of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. The festival has been bursting the brains of Torontonians since 2003 on a bi-annual basis (until this year which has thrown an annual wrench in the pattern, meaning the last festival occurred in 2009). Claiming not to be a comic convention, TCAF features readings, panel discussions, gallery shows, affiliated book launches as well as exhibitors.

1. The first comics I ever read were in my native tongue. These provocative collections of colourful images and Polish text arrived from an unknown source and into my life to change everything. One particularly inspiring book featured two protagonists, one long and thin, one short and fat, transported into a surreal and magical world on a quest for... tonic water. Yep. There were also several issues of a comic featuring a rather inappropriate monkey called Tytus who often fell into fantastical adventures. My older brother came into possession of a near full run of Thorgal, a Belgian comic illustrated by a Polish artist. The series is a fictional story based on Viking lore in which Thorgal, the protagonist of most issues, is simultaneously a mythic hero and an outsider.

Hello Open Book Toronto and the internet at large!

I am happy to kick off my bout/gout as Open Book's latest writer in residence by informing you about one of the world's most important events: May 1st... Free Comic Book Day. Perhaps, until now, you've associated May 1st with international labour rights or pagan celebrations. Not this year. It's all in the name: free comic books.