Alt-Comix

Out There by Alan Hunt. A contributor to Exclaim, and someone who wanted to be a comic maker until Drawn & Quarterly offered to publish him and he learned what they offered. He still shares illustrations on his Insta

Assorted Bumblenut books by Marc Ngui. I considered him the most technically skilled and hard-working artist of that time. Very prolific and very precise cartooning. Also on Insta

Shrimpy and Paul by Marc Bell, who has gone on to larger success

A book by prolific creator Lorenz Peter

A zine by Chris Hutsul, who was a cartoonist for Eye Weekly for a while. Last I heard he was in advertising, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had art shows going on occasionally too.

A book by Amanda Crawford

Stay As You Are by Brad Yung, a smart, social comic.

Spork by John Perlock. He went on to be a magazine illustrator, to the best of my knowledge

A comic by Patti Kim, who was a major zinester in the 90s. Her zines were an influence on me making zines myself during high school.

One-Way Glass by Ryan James. His book was mentioned in the letters pages of Peepshow, which gave him a solid profile

Books by Tim McGregor. He had a neat retro rockabilly sensibility

Don’t Touch Me, a comics zine by Dave Howard, who ran the Toronto Comic Jam, and still might

Random copies of the Comic Jam collections. Al Bunce was a star, and still posts on Insta

My own book, Square. Ultimately I made 20 issues, but only four while in Toronto, and a decade between issues 4 and 5

And a bonus pic, Joe Matt’s Sketch Jam Book, chock full of famous 90s alt cartoonist he roped into contributing.

Comics for Life

Cat-Eyed Boy vol. 1, by Kazuo Umezz

Let me preface this by saying, I’m not a Junji Ito fan. I was promised he was sick and twisted, and I’ve read four books, and I found them goofy more than anything. So I’m not a horror guy in general. That said, the guy that Ito puts on a pedestal (I’ve read) is Umezz.

I dig Umezz’s work a lot. I’ve read most of the Drifting Classroom (a modern day elementary school is sent to the post-apocalypse!), the first book of My Name is Shingo (a sentient robot!) and all of Orochi. Orochi was an anthology book about a woman who travels town to town witnessing suspense and horror stories, not unlike 50s EC books with the Cryptkeeper and the like, mashed with that 60s TV genre where a hero finds a new town each week. She lightly interacts with the characters in the stories.

I thought that’s what this was. For the first two stories, that’s what it is. The Cat-Eyed Boy hides in the attic watching stories from afar and commenting on them. Then in the third of the five stories, he becomes a protagonist and remains one for the next two. He is a Cat-Eyed Boy, he just has cat eyes and people hate him as a monster because of it. The stories are baffling, much like 50s and 60s American comics can be. People take logic leaps that probably would have been weird when it was written in the 60s, they state their feelings and fears to spell things out. I.e. a politician tells his friends that now that he’s been elected, he no longer has to pretend to care about the cost of living; he will soon die of course.

The book is also layered in yokai concepts. Yokai has been in tons of Japanese media, I won’t explain that here, but Wikipedia should have a good yokai explanation if you’re unfamiliar with it. Things that are incredibly abnormal are treated as obviously normal. I found the whole thing delightfully surreal. A standout was a fight with a shadow-self that you can’t run away from.

I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together, Maurice Vellekoop, 2024. Random House Canada

I’ve loved Maurice Vellekoop’s work since I first saw it in Drawn & Quarterly, and I loved his first collection, Vellevision, when I got it in the 90s. The reason I loved it was that it felt happy. So many indie books were depressing and cynical, but Vellekoop’s work was light and pleasant. I wanted more. He wasn’t really a comic artist though, he was an employed illustrator doing comics on the side out of passion. I waited patiently for his next comic book, and that’s taken about 30 years.

I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is his memoir. It’s incredible. At a certain point, we can’t keep ranking books, but this is instantly part of the great comics canon. It’s not leaving my library.

The book has four parts:

childhood

university

unhappy adulthood

healing into a happy adult

I don’t know if that’s a spoiler, that the book is about his journey into being a happy person. That’s not how the book was publicized. And it was one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever read. I think most people can relate. If you were happy out of the gate after school, either you won the emotional lottery, or you’re delusional. I think most people struggle to become the people they wish to be, and we all have our journey. This is his.

Vellekoop gets into his neuroses; as a child, as a teen, as an adult. And he bares a lot of difficult truths about himself. I considered his comics in the 90s ‘happy comics’, and he portrays himself as a frustrated, uncomfortable person during that period, even while having good friends and social networks. It’s personally revealing along the lines of D&Q stablemate Joe Matt, but without making comedy of it. I imagine some parts were enormously difficult to put to paper.

But, the book never once feels like homework, which “serious” books often become. Because his creative instincts always have a touch of Disney in them, the book feels light until the emotional hooks sink in. It’s very smooth storytelling. Not every ‘great’ book has to be a chore to read.

He uses a sort of id and ego cartoon motif throughout, and it seemed quaint enough early on, but by the end, it has become an important part of the narrative. I don’t want to spoil it, but I think it’s one of the cleverer narrative devices I’ve seen in comics. I’ll just say that rarely has a design change inspired so much of a statement on inner change.

I really worry that this book will be brushed off as a ‘gay book’, because that’s how books featuring gay people can get labeled. I hope the comic world has mostly moved beyond the concept that a gay main character means the book is intended for a gay audience. This is a book about a gay person, but it’s a human story. A very human story. I related to this book at a very core level. I also contorted myself to fit what I thought others expected me to be, to the detriment of myself, something I’m still dealing with, to be honest, though I think I’m over the hump. His journey and how he tells it is worth reading.

The Dancing Plague, Gareth Brookes, 2021, Published by SelfMadeHero 

I was stunned with how good this book is: a historical fiction set in the 16th Century, told in a style reminiscent of 16th century illustration. Brookes writes a narrative about a woman named Mary, who is touched by God and is labeled possessed by the Devil. She inspires a Dancing Plague at many points in her life. This is based on historical records of the time. 

None of it is explained, it works as a sort of Christian magical realism.

Brookes uses pyrography (burning the paper) throughout the book, and embroidery to help illustrate the visions and magical aspects. 

As a reading experience, it is challenging. We aren’t used to comics that read this way, and for the first third I was not sure exactly what I was following. He also shifts back and forth between 1508 and 1518 or so, which was disorienting. If a book has a chapter set in 1918, then the next in 1908, yeah, those are ten years apart, and very different years. But the difference between 1518 and 1508 seems like ten minutes, from the perspective of a reader in the 21st century. Once I got adjusted to his rhythm, I was all with it though. 

Often when I read something recreating a past era or even a foreign culture, it puts your own understandings into relief. You recognize some things as being very human experiences, and other things as being very arbitrary evolutions of a society. I’ve been living in a foreign country for twenty years, so maybe I’m more sensitive to the experience than others. Here, he writes of how an area dealt with a plague beyond their comprehension. We lived through one of those too, in 2020. People didn't take it well. These folk don't take it well in very different ways.