Upcoming Toronto Group Show

I’m focusing for the next little while on creating and finishing some new work for a 3-artist group show I’ll be participating in from August 23 to August 29 of this year (2012). The above image has nothing to do with it. 

The venue is at Bloor and Ossington in Toronto. More details will be posted soon.

Leisure Now Sold at Silver Snail

Leisure comics are now for sale at Silver Snail. If you don’t like shipping charges you can get a copy of Leisure #1 there for $5+tax. Silver Snail is a store I grew up going to along with The Beguiling. It has a great selection and the staff are friendly and helpful. It’s located at 367 Queen Street West between Spadina and John. 

Special thanks to Kody, who works there and who insisted on paying for an issue I tried to give to him as a thank you for carrying Leisure. Thank you Kody.

Comics: Philosophy and Practice, University of Chicago

TCAF 2012

I enjoyed TCAF as much or more than last year and I got a chance to talk to Seth and Chester Brown again, which was nice. I also talked a bit with Jeff Lemire, Mike Holmes, Joe Ollman, Noah Van Sciver, and the creators of Spera. It was an inspiring day and I acquired some good books and some good minis. 

So the Davenport Perth Spring Fair went well. I forgot to get a photo of my table but I was happy with how it looked. I got some T-shirts and some buttons made and they did well, especially the former; I'll have to make a bigger run next time. I also got some fancy prints done of the above pieces so people can email me if they're interested.
Thanks to my friend Mia Skye for telling me about the event and to everyone who purchased things.
Thank you especially to Evan Doherty for being so generous with his time, skills, and resources; lately I don't get much done without him.
For further information on Evan Doherty, read his informative About page from groupofevan.ca:

GroupOfEvan is a  one-person decision-making collective founded in the interest of promoting and preserving the continuity of Evan Doherty’s creative online identity.

Evan Doherty is and has always been a moderately creative person with a host of critical and imaginative powers. He is not your typical directionless art school dropout. In fact, he is a directionless art school graduate. He has a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design and the will to figure out how to use it. It is currently living with his parents who, after all, paid for the thing. Maybe they can figure out how to get it to work. It might be one of those objects like in Harry Potter that only reveals it’s use in times of crisis. It will help his mom to escape from a really pompous giant earthworm or something. Anyway, Evan has always enjoyed making things up. The things may take the form of stories, photos, videos, cartoons, puppets, t-shirts, cocktails, stir fry, songs, websites, personal brand statements, reviews, essays, sculptures, paintings, messes, comics, lists, greeting cards, bicycles, charts, drawings, jokes, complaints, mistakes, wikipedia hoaxes, decisions, costumes, logos, desktop wallpaper, ads, forced memes, slogans, etc.

Evan longs to one day become “heavily influenced” by surreal science fiction novels, absurd sketch comedy, avant-garde art installations, 1960s garage rock, conspiracy theories, internet ephemera, and broken electronic machines. Someday he may achieve this. In the meantime, his influences remain unconscious, and thus, unknown to him. In short, he is mysterious but also strangely normal. His worldview is best expressed as the colour “pale fluorescent green.”

Evan usually brings a unique mix of wrong assumptions and bad methods to every problem he encounters which may result in absurd and unforeseen solutions. He hopes to prove that this can be desirable in certain situations. Evan has recently completed a course of study in the realm of “Children’s Entertainment” and hopes to find expression for his special ideas inside the minds of human children. As a living filthy sticky sponge that is clogged with meaty chunks of information absorbed over the course of 30 years, Evan thinks he understands the following things pretty well: secrets, humour, art, psychology, magic, advertising, time, explanations and solutions for things, vagaries, the occult, and so on. Evan Doherty: experimental media producer and innovative collaborative supermonster.

 Two things to say in this post:

 Firstly, I now have some of my art for sale in an online gallery: www.start-gallery.com. I was going to wait until I had more pieces on it before mentioning it here but the site just put up this banner with my name on the homepage and I wanted to document the blessing for all eternity. I’ll have 4 new pieces up there by the end of May.

Secondly, I’ll be tabling at the Davenport Perth Spring Fair on Saturday, May 5 from 10am-3pm. I’ll have copies of Leisure #1 for sale as well as some other things I’m working on (I’ll post a more comprehensive list when those are done.)  

I’m hard at work on Leisure #2 and I have about 13 pages I’m happy with. I’m hoping to have it printed before Canzine. 

Also: Stop by my friend Jason Bradshaw’s table at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival next weekend; his Boredom Pays series spurs me onward and its content and style has recently earned him a second Schuster Award nomination.

Thumbnails

Anais Nin Illustration

Of Human Bondage by Farley Somerset Wong

Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage is the story of Charlie Parish, a young Yorkie-Chin bought by a middle class, Western family. Many insist that Parish is a thinly-veiled portrait of the book’s author, Farley Somerset Wong. “This is a novel, not an autobiography, though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention,” the author once stated. Still one can’t deny the similarity of the book’s protagonist’s name to its author’s.

Plot Summary

From the outset, Parish struggles with issues of cultural disparity and shyness. Charlie’s Chinese Cantonese heritage is at odds with his new family’s Japanese cultural practices and Canadian influences. Furthermore, while he appreciates the wit and intelligence of the all-woman household of the Ritsukos, he is intimidated by their extroverted manner and prefers to seek solace in solitary activities such as art and poetry.

The new family often treats Charlie as an instrument for their entertainment, dressing him in humorous costumes, laughing, and taking photos to be shared with the neighbours. Charlie finds these experiences degrading and the wounds to his self-view inform unfortunate choices later in the story.

One such “dress up” session haunts Charlie above all others. He is bound with balloons around his collar which inhibit his movement. The Ritsuko women laugh uproariously, seeing him as a delightful caricature of a popular new singer, known for her extravagant costumes. This painful moment reinforces Charlie’s bleak philosophy. Life seems to him a series of thefts: firstly, that of his biological family, then, that of his dignity, and, finally, that of his belief in romantic fulfillment.

“God gives us the world which can be divided into chunks. He takes one chunk here, another there, and before you know it, everything you were born with is taken.”

Charlie attends behavior school and falls inexplicably in love with an unsightly and vulgar Cairn Terrier by the name of Loraine. His strange passion for her alienates his pathetically small group of friends as they cannot turn a blind eye to her tactless use of expletives.

Events worsen when Charlie’s uncle, William, suffers a decline in health. William had encouraged Charlie’s interest in art and had inspired Charlie with eloquent similes about the young nephew’s poetry and William’s own passion for painting. When William’s right eye develops Primary Glaucoma, the aging dog’s extolment of art and its transcendental qualities happen with less frequency and conviction.

As Charlie’s creative pursuits provide less and less satisfaction, and as those who had once inspired him become less enamoured with life, Charlie becomes embittered, moreso than he thought he ever would.

Criticism

While many champion Wong’s seminal novel as a masterpiece of modern prose, others have criticized it as a drawn-out, self-indulgent, personal essay with “Life sucks” as its thesis.

The Magic of Brush

My fear of brush and ink is lessening and I’m embracing what I feel is a more expressive future.

Kali Illustration and some Leisure News

I was recently hired to do an illustration for use in an independent Canadian documentary. Titled, Karmageddon, the film casts some light on the life of Western Buddhist yogi Bhagavan Das. A popular figure in the sixties, he partly came to the general public’s attention after being featured in the book Be Here Now.

The illustration I did depicts Kali, a hindu goddess Das identifies with. Kali is usually depicted standing atop Shiva, holding the decapitated head of the demon Raktabija.

Even though this is quite different from what I usually paint, it was an enjoyable project overall and the client was great to work for. Most images I looked at of Kali seem to be done with airbrush but I used acrylic for my final stage.

I dropped off some issues of Leisure at the renowned Beguiling comic store in Toronto on Markham Street yesterday. If you don’t want to pay shipping costs, or you want to put my name in the Beguiling clerks’ brains, buy a copy from them; my comics are on the first floor in the zine section.

If you buy a Leisure issue from them send me an email saying so so I can keep track of how many are still there. Thanks friends.

Tumblr

I made a tumblr to widen my net. It seems like tumblr gets a lot more traffic than Blogger. I'm going to try and keep the both the tumblr and this one updated at the same time but sometimes it seems like too much of a hassle. Peep my tumblr now and then if it seems like nothing new is being posted on here:

http://timcomrie.tumblr.com/

Leisure Issue One Completed and Available!

Hey friends I'm ever-so-excited to say that the first issue of my autobiographical comic Leisure is finally printed and available for sale through this blog (on the left-hand sidebar). I printed it once before to hand out at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival but this new printing is much nicer. I scanned the images at a higher resolution and put more care into their placement on each page. I also decreased the size to make it look that much cleaner and easier to read. Lastly, I added some refined versions of strips I posted to Facebook as well as a brand new one. All told, this version has twice the content of the first printing. My friend and fellow cartoonist, Jason Bradshaw, was extremely helpful to me in this endeavour so a special thanks to him if he's reading this.

Here is a link to a short preview of the comic:

http://leisureissueonepreview.blogspot.com/

I've drawn several pages for the next issue so check up on here for updates about that.

Also, feel free to write to me with any questions or comments at timcomrie@gmail.com.

"Onwards and Upwards!"

-Wesley Krpan