It's Election Time: Picking Graphic Novels for Canada Reads

"If we pick the wrong book, and they read it, they don't like it, they will never read again."

-Georges Laraque on Canada Reads

In the National Post article I posted yesterday, editor Mark Medly asks an interesting question of the comic book cognescenti: “Can you think of another comic or graphic novel that might have been better received by the Canada Reads panelists?” All three conclude that it was the type of book, and not the title- and that any graphic novel would have had a steep climb winning the affection of Debbie Travis.

I say Cooke, Heer and Butcher are giving up too easily. They need to learn from the way Americans do politics: with dedication and a firm belief in magical thinking. I'll leave the attack ads down South, but will adopt the American way of bloviating about "electability." For the uninitiated, that means focusing not on the inherent qualities of a candidate, but whether they're a candidate the public will vote for.

Now, I can't poll the judges of Canada Reads, but I have gleaned the lists of past nominees and winners and listened to a couple of this year's debates. I even thought about reading a few of the past winners, but when I saw Rockbound (2005 winner) described as "The Classic Novel of Nova Scotia's South Shore", I figured I would rather light my hair on fire. I also followed the format of Canada Reads and picked five candidates: quasi-Canadian Joe Matt's Spent, Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's Skim, Seth's Clyde Fans and Julie Doucet's My New York Diary.

Joe Matt- Spent:
Ah, the first sacrifice. While picking books for Canada Reads, I have to keep in mind that these must be books my Mom (a CR devotee) would read, and my Mom does not want to read about masturbation. Joe Matt wallows in his sex life and porn habit. And while it would be a treat to see some Canadian icon (or, at the very least, CBC host) talk about these issues, it will never happen. Furthermore, Joe Matt was only an illegal Canadian.

Jillian and Mariko Tamaki-Skim:

I rather like Skim, and think it did a great job of making the teenaged protagonist sound wry and intelligent instead of precious. But it wouldn't win Canada Reads. For a start, it's too short- and as Cooke pointed out, Canada Reads panelists love getting reading value, which I think they calculate by dividing the number of words by the book's trade paperback price. And I think the judges would also ghettoize it as a Young Adult book. What's the difference between YA and "real lit" books that happen to have a young protagonist? They're YA if the protagonist interacts mostly with people their own age, and "real lit" if they only observe adults.

Julie Doucet- My New York Diary
The Canada Reads folks love books with a strong sense of place. It needs to telegraph that it's a Montreal book, or a salty Maritime tale, or set in a Mennonite farming community in Ontario, to make the cut. And Doucet's book is definitely strong on place- too bad it's an American place. Sure, there are parts in a very recognizable Montreal, but Canada Reads is a little xenophobic. Doucet would get a few points for being French-Canadian, but she briefly defected to our Great Southern Enemy, and is thus dead to the jury. Also, her drawings might make some of the judges feel icky.

Seth-Clyde Fans
If Clyde Fans was a novel, it would probably win. Small-town Ontario, vintage setting, depression seeping from the pages like sebum from pores? That's CBC gold, baby! And Seth already has mad CanCon cred with all those Vinyl Café covers. However, Clyde Fans doesn't offer enough on top of its manifest sadness to overcome its graphic novel status- and Book 2 still needs to be collected.

Chester Brown- Louis Riel

One thing that struck me while listening to the Canada Reads debates is how seriously the judges take their mission (see above quote.) In the first debate of this year's competition, they worry endlessly over whether this or that book is essential. "Essential," I gather from the judges, doesn't have to do with the prose style, but whether the books deal with Important Issues that are Key to Canada's Past, Present, Future or (ideally) D. All Of The Above. And so, The Birth House can be used to comment on modern technology, per Debbie Travis, and The Best-Laid Plans will rescue us from political stagnation, per That CNN Guy.

Well, Louis Riel is a book full of Important Issues. There's the Important Issue of the Métis, the Important Issue of Riel's fraught place in Canadian history, the Important Issue of the fine line that divides madness from inspiration. Also, it's definitely a Manitoba book, and it's fairly hefty for a graphic novel. Length and a sense of place? That feels good in your hands while you're catching up on The Current on CBC. So, if you want a graphic novel with electability, vote for Louis Riel in '12.

Rumble Between the Panels: Canada Reads and Essex County

If you're Canadian and care about comic books, you might have heard: A graphic novel was one of the Canada Reads nominees this year, then was knocked off by the panel on the very first day. And although Essex County still won the People's Choice award, the way the book was treated on air has caused some consternation among comic books fans.

Then again, if there is one group of people known to consternate to the extreme, it's comic book nerds. A certain amount of distemper is to be expected. What is fascinating, though, is how mainstream the debate has come. In a panel printed in the (shudder) National Post, writer Darwyn Cooke gets testy when describing this year's judges:

"There was a British interior designer, an ex-pat CNN talking head, a Native Canadian fifth billed sitcom star, a pop singer/songwriter and so on*. It seems obvious the CBC was more interested in making the group seem like whatever Canadians call a hip celebrity jury than recruiting relevant or critical thinkers."

Cooke and the other panelists (store manager Christopher Butcher and journalist/critic Jeet Heer) shouldn't rend their garments just yet, though. Getting to read this kind of comic book talk in a national newspaper shows that graphic novels are, at least fitfully, seen as something more than raw material for Hollywood blockbusters.

Perhaps denying Essex County the big award is better for graphic novels than slapping that 'winner' sticker on the cover. A win can be seen as an anomaly, barely mentioned and forgotten after a year. Cooke mentions in passing that Fun Home was Time's Book of the Year in 2006, but I doubt that many Time subscribers have picked up a graphic novel since then. By inciting a debate that's picked up by popular media, Canada Reads might have just proven, in spite of itself, that graphic novels are as interesting and valuable as their prose-only relatives.

Tomorrow: I pick up on a Jeet Heer comment from that same article to discuss the "electability" of various other Canadian graphic novels. For the rest of tonight: I go to a concert.

*As my co-worker rightly noted, Cooke left out "energy drink-shilling, Haitian-Canadian hockey pugilist and Green Party member." Or maybe Cooke realized that George Laraque's credentials made him seem kind of righteous.

Book Pile for February 19th

If I actually go through with it and buy an ereader (don't forget the poll to the side!), these posts would be pretty boring. "Oh, look, here's my Kindle. It's just like last week's Kindle, but this week I dropped it on the sidewalk and so the corner is dented. Also, I am reading three new books." Well, until the digital age comes for us all:

1. Not a Book, but Still Awesome: The new Mug of Choice, from Blackbird Studios.

2. The "She's one of the good Mitford sisters, not one of the fascists" Reading: Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford, Leslie Brody.

3. CanCon Reading: The Canterbury Trail, Angie Abdou

4. Current Reading: The Hireling, L.P. Hartley

5. "Shut up, It's Slow Going" Reading: Still The Penguin History of Canada, Robert Bothwell

The Great eBook Question

Confession: I spend all working day making, testing and swearing at ebooks. And then I promptly go home and open up a print book.

I don't even own a dedicated eReader. My iPod Touch can, when needed, be pressed into service as such a thing, although only for short periods of time. The screen's so small it just feels like I'm reading a regular book out of the wrong end of a telescope.

But that (almost) changed today. After a very frustrating afternoon spent undoing my acceptably-designed ePub so it would look passable on the Kobo iPad app, I nearly walked myself and my credit card over to Chapters. I was angry, hungry, and adamant that I would just buy a frikkin' Kobo, and see if my books looked better or (heaven forfend!) worse on the actual device.

However, more fiscally conservative heads prevailed. Also, Chapters closes at 7 here.

Now I'm trying to rationally decide whether it makes sense to get an ereader or not. I'm not one of those people who has a fetishistic attachment to print books. Or a conviction that ebooks are humanity's first step on its quick two-step into ignorance, starting with the Kindle and ending with a Road Warrior-like future, where reality TV has supplanted the opera as the intelligentsia's entertainment of choice and the rest of us just listlessly poke the ground with sticks. And those sticks? They aren't even pointy.

Ereaders have their benefits, from accessibility to price. But I also live within walking distance from a library, where I can get most of the books I want, for free. And those books that I would rather buy, I can't imagine reading on a device. Squinting at some poor graphic novel in PDF form on an e-ink screen? I would rather page through a thousand mildewed pages of a hundred old Archie comics. So, I will put the question to the masses: Do I go bravely into the digital future, or cling the past of wood pulp and glue? Please vote in the poll to the right.

Biutiful, L'illusionniste and Incendies: Three Different Kinds of Depression

For the Victoria Film Festival, I had picked out what I thought was a slate of well-balanced films from the schedule: a depressing Mexico-Spanish movie, a depressing French movie, a depressing French-Canadian movie and... a double bill of a documentary about Filipino exploitation movies, and one of the movies that inspired it.

Tragically, circumstances aligned in such a way that I missed all the Filipino-flavoured T and A. However, I made all three of my depressing movies, so here are my quick thoughts. You might want to pop a Paxil before reading them.

Biutiful: I’m beginning to think that this movie’s director, Alejandro Gonzàlez Iàrritu, hates people. Also, truth, beauty, happiness and the simply joy of children’s laughter. The characters in Babel, Amores Perros and 21 Grams couldn’t seem to escape misery despite all their best efforts. Unsurprisingly, a movie about a career criminal dying of cancer doesn’t take a turn for the sunny either. Javier Bardem is subtle and affecting as the dying man, but both a recurring supernatural theme and an awful scene set in a strip club work against the film’s purposes. As a warning, the movie’s so unrelentingly unhappy that, in one scene, I was worried the sparkler on a birthday cake was about to explode and maim his children. Fortunately, they lived to suffer another day.

Incendies: I went in to this movie thinking it was about the Algerian War. Then I figured I was wrong and it takes place in Lebanon. Well, it turns out it wasn’t about either- the city names are fictional, if strongly inspired by Lebanon. Well, I need to brush up on my Middle Eastern history, but back to Incendies. A set of twins (played by the very unArab Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) are given two letters after their mother’s death, one to be delivered to the father they thought was dead, and the other to the brother they never knew existed. What makes the movie is also what might break it, a big gut-wrencher of a twist that comes in the film’s final act. I felt like the playwright, Wajdi Mouawad, is aiming to make a point about the cyclical nature of conflict. However, that’s a pretty heavy burden to hang on a particular familial tragedy, and a tragedy that relies on a series of almost unbelievable coincidences at that. However, the actress playing the mother- Lubna Azabal- gives an amazing performance as well.

L'Illusionniste: This one comes from the same people who brought you Les Triplettes de Belleville. L’Illusioniste doesn’t quite reach that level- it lacks the foreword momentum and glorious soundtrack that made Triplettes such a treat. But it’s also developed from a script written by Jacques Tati and left unproduced at his death, so if physical humour tempered with melancholy is your bag, go for it.

My next movie might have to involve a talking dog to undo all of this mental trauma.

Project Update

While laundry goes unwashed, I have been keeping myself busy with other projects. Let's check in and see how productive I've been on my extracurricular activities.

1. The Creepy Canada Comic Book

This side project had its origins one dark and jittery night at the local café, as I sat drinking too much coffee and multi-tasking. The multiple tasks amounted to reading a blog post on Eerie Comics, and thinking about the latest ePub conversion I had done at my job. That was a book about the gory and groin-injury-heavy Chilcotin War, and suddenly inspiration struck. At university, the common complaint from all of my American friends was that Canadian history is boring.

Now, that is patently untrue. Canadian history is not boring. After all, we elected a man who conducted seances with his dead mother to lead the nation... twice (well, three times, depending on how you want to count 1926.) We produced the Black Donnellys. We have embraced a sport often leaves blood on the ice. And that sport, my friends, is figure skating.

There is a great store of exciting, blood-curdling tales to be told about this land, and what better way to tell them than in a format mimicking the horror comics of the late forties? I can't draw at all (screw you, depth of field! What have you done for me lately?), which is perfect, because once you get past EC Comics and into Charleston territory, the hired talent barely could either. And I'm taking a screenprinting class, where the point that it's almost impossible to get multiple colours to register perfectly is a repeated often. That's also something crappy horror comics of the day didn't worry about too much either.

I'm screenprinting the covers in color, turning the image into halftones first and then using a roughly four colour process system. The interior will just be photocopied from my black and white drawings. The cover rough is finished (see following) and the stories (The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the Chilcotin War and the Hamilton Torso Murder) have mostly been scripted. My version of the Crypt Keeper is an embittered history teacher, driven to homicidal lengths by the indifference of his teenaged students. I'll probably do about 50 of these for friends and family, so if you want a copy let me know. I can mail things.

2. Die Birdhaus

After many weeks, much frustration (I had to use a HANDSAW to cut the roof) and even more wood filler, my birdhouse is finished.

Apologies to Facebook friends who might have already seen this. I invested too much time on this project already to take another, slightly different photo.

And I didn't even manage to paint the thing correctly. I originally envisioned a green birdhouse with a red and white-striped roof, and dutifully painted on two coats of white paint. Then I went to put on the stripes with the same 1$ synthetic fibre brush I had used on the rest of the birdhouse, by this point a rather stiff and splayed affair. Furthermore, I decided to freehand the stripes instead of sketching them on with a pencil. Naturally, I ended up with bits of pink paint everywhere and no two stripes of similar width and straightness.

So I made the whole thing pink, adding white polka dots with a Q Tip. And still not one of the dots was of the same diameter. Well, that's life. The birds of Guelph should appreciate the effort. As for my next woodworking project? Well, apparently I'm going to be the workshop's shelf monkey!

Bad Timing

Lately, I have been the queen of bad timing. There's probably a tiara waiting for me somewhere in celebration of this dubious honour, but I likely missed the bus to pick it up.

... Much as I missed the bus downtown from Saanichton again last weekend. And so, another hour was spent contemplating the scenic, scenic ranch homes and postcard-ready pick-up trucks of that area. The bucolic vistas were complemented by the steady drizzle of rain. I felt the urge to write an ode to all this natural beauty, but paper would have just torn in the damp and I couldn't remember how to rhyming schemes of sonnets went anyways.

A short history of all the other things I have forgotten and/or missed lately would include my lunch for today, my cellphone, to send money to take care of my cat, various deadlines, the movie I had already bought a ticket for when planning to have dinner with a friend, yoga tonight and to buy conditioner at the drugstore.

And all of this happened in spite of my studious creation and colour-coding of calendars in iCal. It's like the space-time continuum refuses to sense my good intentions and collapse upon itself. Which leaves me with three solutions: 1. Plan to do less, 2. Be better at doing more, or 3. Build my own time machine, so I can keep on going back and doing things over again until I get them right. Good thing I've made my monthly dues chez workshop, then, because I have a flux capacitor to weld.

Overheard in Victoria

Last Saturday night, I was making my way home from a show at 1am. Suddenly, I came upon a herd of young men who had clearly (they were wearing buttondowns) just exited a party (they were drunk.) And then I had the privilege of overhearing the following conversation:

Young Gentleman A: "Guys, this sucks. I didn't get laid tonight. I have to wait until Monday."

Young Gentleman B: "Whatever, dude. You just got postponed, I got nothing."

Courage to the young gentleman who used "postponed." I feel that with your vocabulary, things will work out just fine soon.