whazamo

(Original comic: here)

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.

Chimp Up!™, © 2010 Trio Magnus.

For more info on kei cars in Toronto check out Right Drive Inc., where I bought mine. -cton

For more info on kei trucks in Toronto check out Right Drive Inc., where I bought mine. -cton

When Whazamo was getting ready to launch, one of the first artists to get back to us was Jeff Lemire, an amazing Toronto cartoonist best known for Essex County, a haunting graphic novel series about life on a small town Ontario farm. Now he’s back with a whole slew of new projects, including The Nobody , an update on the Invisible Man, the trailer for which you can find here. Though we missed it during May, we knew we had to share it with you now—think of it as the Whazamo bonus track!

Name: Jeff Lemire

Hometown: Woodslee, Ontario

Website: http://jefflemire.blogspot.com...

Role: Cartoonist

Welcome to Rodeo Magic, my new webcomic for Open Book Toronto. It will be running once a week, usually posted on fridays, and will follow the adventures & observations of a comic-loving hick who has relocated to the Big Smoke to pursue his dream of working as a professional creative person. Enjoy!

Two years ago at TCAF, I met a comic artist from the UK named Tom Humberstone. Somehow he was invited to Pen Club (more on this later) where he quickly became a welcomed guest during his short visit. Over the past couple years, he kept in touch with some of the other Pen Club members including Anne Koyama of Koyama Press, and also produced an entire library of comics (a few obtaining critical success in the UK...winning an Eagle Award in '08 for best B&W UK comic). During this time, he also produced a blog inspired comic book about a road trip he took across the States during their Democratic Primaries, called My Fellow Americans. You may wonder, what does a Brit comic dude have anything to do with Canadian comics? Well two things: a very small Canadian publisher, Koyama Press helped Tom out on some of these projects, AND he is thinking about moving to Toronto soon (which would make him a 'Landed Canadian Comic Artist'). Anyways, besides all of this, Tom is a total dude and deserves some press over here in Canada (a place he might be calling home soon).

Name: George A. Walker

Hometown: Brantford Ont. Although I’ve lived in Toronto since 1979. Toronto.

Web site: www.george-walker.com

Role: Illustrator, graphic novelist (Book of Hours); writer (Woodcut Artists Handbook , Graphic Witness ,pub. Firefly Books)(Inverted Line and Images from the Neocerebellum, pub. Porcupine’s Quill); Acquisitions editor of the Graphic Novel Series at The Porcupine’s Quill

Latest Work: Name of Book, Press, Graphic Witness ,Firefly Books, Images from the Neocerebellum, Porcupine’s Quill and an upcoming trade edition of Book of Hours 2011 Porcupine’s Quill

What’s It About in a Nutshell: Visual narratives : the image as text.

Here's a little ditty showing my ritual for creating a comic for Owl Magazine, a great Canadian children's magazine. I do a regular column called 'CTON's Corner' whith this little orange dude and a green blob, named 'Blob'. Its a ton of fun, and allows me a lot of freedom to create. (This comic first appeared in Craig Battle's blog - he is the editor of Owl Magazine).

One of the biggest questions I get asked by people is 'how do you think of a comic'? Well thats a good question.

Name: Brian McLachlan

Hometown: Toronto

Website: www.theprincessplanet.com

Role: Cartoonist

Latest Work:
Ticket To Space , Scholastic Canada

What’s It About in a Nutshell:
After a clerical error, a 13 year old girl gains a chance to go aboard the space shuttle. The space agency tries to make the pre-flight training ridiculously hard that she'll give up and they won't have to put a child into a dangerous situation. Ha! Good luck, space agency!

What first inspired you to create comics or graphic novels?

Way back at the beginning of May I visited a great local Toronto comic book launch of some young, new Canadian creators here in the city. I was so impressed with their work, along with the massive amount of their work, that I thought it would be interesting to hear a bit about them, what drives them, and how they got into Canadian comics.

Generally I'm under the opinion that one shouldn't be interviewed until they're well into their career with much experience under their belt. It is theoretically only at that more senior point in one's creative life that their words & ideas might hold the most value to readers, younger creatives, and humanity in general. In the case of the Wowee Zonk crew, they are all very young and very new, but I felt it was an excellent opportunity to find out what makes new artists like themselves tick, as well as showcase an extremely talented group of (relative) newbies to comics. Hopefully their words, and already massive piles of work, will inspire other Canadian comic makers to get off their collective asses and do some work! I know they've lit a bit of a fire under my butt.

Name: John Bell

Hometown: Montreal-born Haligonian living in Ottawa

Website: http://www.collectionscanada.g...

Role: Comics Historian

Latest Work: Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe (Dundurn, 2006)

What’s It About in a Nutshell:The history of comics and graphic narrative in English Canada, with emphasis on comic books.

What first inspired you to write about comics? I grew up in the 1950s, when comics were a mass medium – and a kid’s salvation.

I'm an unlikely comic-book nerd. I've played rugby. I've driven tractors. I've renovated houses. I've worked on cars. I love beer and eating steak. Plus, I've stopped a run-away team of horses. You might wonder, why am I writing a comic blog for Open Book Toronto then? What the hell does this hick know about comics? Well good question.

Name: Kate Beaton

Hometown: Mabou, Nova Scotia

Website: www.harkavagrant.com

Role: comic artist

Latest Work: Never Learn Anything From History, self published

What’s It About in a Nutshell:A collection of comics, mostly poking fun at historical events and people.

What first inspired you to create comics or graphic novels? It's just been something I've done for myself for a long time, and now for an audience.

What for you makes a comic or graphic novel AWESOME!? Ah that is a hard question, I think it is different for every example.

Name: Marta Chudolinska

Hometown: Toronto, ON (as well as St. John's, NL; Vancouver, BC; Mississauga, ON; Warsaw, Poland)

Website: www.backandforthbook.wordpress...

Role: artist

Latest Work:Back + Forth, The Porcupine's Quill
available at http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com...

What’s It About in a Nutshell:

This past weekend was the comic event of the year in Toronto in terms of the type of comics I prefer. The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (also known as TCAF to comic nerds) happens every two years and is put on by the Beguiling (mentioned before). For 2009, the venue was at the Toronto Reference Library which is huge and sprawling with all sorts of nooks'n' crannies to get lost and hide comics in & around. I had the opportunity to share a table with my artist collective, Trio Magnus, and my first publisher, Koyama Press. We had all sorts of goodies for sale, including a whole wack of great books.