My favourite annual comic gathering, Toronto Comics Art Festival, is around the corner.
TCAF seems to get a little bigger and better with each edition, and 2012 seems to follow the rule.
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been able to attend the fest Friday evening kickoff event, and I’m particularly jazzed by this year’s panel lineup: Jeff Smith, Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon. Smith is the creator of the wildly successful series Bone. I stumbled upon Brazilian twins Ba and Moon on Umbrella Academy (Dark Horse) and followed them to the award-winning mini-series Daytripper (Vertigo), easily one of my favourite books of 2010.
You can visit this page to review the full list of featured guests. But here are four noteworthy Canadian guests:
Aislin: There are few political cartoonists whose work is as widely distributed as Terry Mosher. He’s the cartoonist for Montreal newspaper The Gazette, but his work has appeared almost everywhere. And he’s won numerous awards. I met Mosher during my Maclean’s magazine years. He’s a fantastic guy always willing to go the extra mile. Check out his talk if you have the chance. He has lots of share.
Nova Scotia native Kate Beaton will be around. (Congrats on her nomination for this year’s Doug Wright Best Book award category. Good luck to all the nominees.) She’s been getting a lot of press recently. Her webcomic Hark! A Vagrant won the Harvey Award in 2011 in the online comic category.
Quebec City-born Guy Delisle will visit from his home in France to launch his new graphic novel, The Jerusalem Chronicles (reviews here and here), answer some questions in a Q&A and screen a short film documenting a year of Delisle’s life creating this book. If the event isn’t sold out yet, I might try to make it out.
Finally another Montrealer, Michel Rabagliati, will be on hand. When I read my first Rabagliati book, Paul Moves Out, my immediate impression was of comic art rooted in European comics history of bandes-dessinees. A real strong piece of work. I’m looking forward to picking up one or two more of books.
Comic Book Junkie 