TORONTO TOONS IN: m@b creator draws us into comic arts fest
BY GUY LESHINSKI
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAULA WILSON
This is the transcribed text from Eye Weekly, March 27, 2003
Frankly, it’s time this city got its due. Everyone knows Toronto the Good, the Big, the Pooper-Scooping. But what about the due you earn from spending two decades at the vanguard of an industry like independent comics? We begat three of its best practitioners (the holy trinity of cartoonists Seth, Joe Matt and Chester Brown) and one of its finest stores, The Beguiling on Markham Street, crouching under the glare of Honest Ed’s billion bulbs. Yet Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and even our flighty French neighbour up the 401 get more respect in comics circles than our fair burg.
Well, that’s about to change. This weekend marks the first Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF); only this ain’t one of those conventions you need a Klingon headgear for. Here the focus is on independent artists doing personal work, each one hand-picked by the organizers. Sure, there’s stuff for sale, but also public readings and signings, displays, even panels and discussions, including one on the history of comics in T.O. Some of the best in the biz are here, trumpeting their medium, and our city, to every comic-reading cranny.
Leading the charge is local sensation Matt Blackett, creator of m@b — “Matt B” to those in the know, which includes the thousands who have bought copies of the self-published mini-comic. Or maybe you’ve seen his designs in The Hockey News, or on posters for Car Free Day and Tooks Gomburg. In a very short 29 years, Blackett has spread himself further than a gymnast with rickets. He’s even made money from his handwriting, with a font he sold to a British software company.
But for nearly five years, m@b has been his baby — a quasi-diary in which Blackett makes silly-sweet reports out of three-panel comic strips and the undulations of his urban life. His 60-page collections stock shelves around town every month, and pop up at www.mattbcomic.com, a site which draws a respectable 4,000 hits monthly.
The booklets look like bits from newspapers funny pages. Only, instead of zipping a gag, they limn a moment, a m@b moment, odd or mundane, like a snippet of overheard dialogue or an exchange with a stranger, the kind of moments each of us experiences daily. In them, Blackett finds poignant allusions to love and life, which he weaves through each book along with a cast of familiars — his ex, his super, a random transient — in a landscape subtly dotted with Toronto landmarks (Soundscapes, Atomic Pizza).
Not many comics are written like a journal, says Blackett. “People can relate to it. It’s like talking to a friend at a bar.”
Behind m@b’s gentility, however, is a marketing acumen that makes Blackett’s cartooning peers look like Girl Guides hawking cookies. The hard slog for self-published cartoonists usually begins at a comic jam or convention, where you push your latest product to fellow artists, or by trying to impress the wigs at publishing houses like Top Shelf or Drawn & Quarterly. Not for Blackett. “I haven’t really immersed myself in the comics community,” he shrugs. “I get intimidated or ‘have things to do,’ so I could never get to it.”
Instead, he throws a party, a big one, each time an issue is ready. He borrows a loft and hires a magician to conjure in the corner, or books a nightclub and gets his rock-band friends to play. Each new m@b becomes a massive (and massively attended) event. He moves units by the thousand every month, and gets fan mail from across the city: envelopes stuffed with cartoons or plasticine or gratitude for rescuing readers from depression. So many back orders have poured in that Blackett has compiled his early issues in a single, 200-page volume, the self-published Wide Collar Crimes, which makes its debut at the TCAF’s inaugural event on March 28 at the El Mocambo.
“What always impressed me most about [Blackett] was the unique way he got his work out there,” says Peter Birkemoe, co-owner of The Beguiling and the big cheese at the TCAF. “This consistent model of promotion for comics hadn’t been done before. In a world with lots of cartoonists doing work and struggling for a following, he’s doing something unique. And it works.” He calls Blackett “the perfect guy to anchor this festival. We wanted a big event,” Birkemoe says, “and he can carry it off.”
The Blackett bash includes sets by rockers Gentleman Reg and Raising the Fawn, putting the festival on a rollicking pace. But m@b is just the tip of the cross-hatched iceberg, the first stroke in a weekend that will teem every comic lover into a pool of warm saliva.
More than 50 top-flight cartoonists grace the TCAF on March 29: local heroes like Ho Anderson, the aforementioned Big Three and Marc Ngui, who’s collected his Zake Meadows strips in a new book. Kakashi creator David Mack makes an appearance, as does Vancouver’s Marc Bell and several members of New York’s famed Meathaus collective, all of them showing, selling and signing their work at Trinity St. Paul’s Centre. There’s a symposium and “inclusive art show” at the Tranzac Club and an evening of readings, music and talk on all things comical — all covered by the $20 festival pass.
It’s a lot for one day. But then, it’s been a long time coming. “There’s a long history of great cartoonists living in Toronto,” says Birkemoe. “And there’s a large spectrum of cartoonists here with a real fondness for the city.”
Like Matt Blackett. “There’s a lot of great stuff going on in this city for people willing to take risks, to go out and see something new,” he says. “There’s a wonderful underbelly, all this great stuff in Toronto’s cultural gutter.”
