Best single page of a crummy comic I bought recently

From Unknown Worlds #39 (ACG Comics) Spring 1965:

The handsomest Doug Wright Awards ever

 am proud -- damn proud! -- to say that I survived TCAF, and The Doug Wright Awards, in one piece this year*. (* more or less.) I've downloaded all of my Wright Awards pics, which will become a longer post later when i get my equilibrium back, but for now I thought I'd share this post-ceremony shot of our host Peter Outerbridge posing with the original art Seth did for this year's Best Book video tribute:   

(An aside: I love how that Nipper pin looks on his lapel. Way better than my 20-year-old MEC backpack)

You can watch mini-Peter come to life in our Best Book video, which was written and produced by the awesome guys at Smiley Guy Studios (yay Denny!):



As for the DWAs, I think it was great this year. The feedback was encouraging; one attendee told me it was "touching, classy and well-executed" while a few Quebec audience members said it was the best comics' awards ceremony they had ever attended.

Everything chugged along nicely, the winners were gracious and Marc Bell's trophy fit him perfectly. More later! I am going to go catch up on Lost....

A world-class blabbermouth

No - this is not a confessional post. This weekend's Globe and Mail featured my review of Wilson, Dan Clowes's new graphic novel, and that's a snippet from it. The short version? I like it,and you should too.

The review (with what looks to be a Ghost-World era photo) is here. Please read it and tell me what you think.

A short Clowes story before I pass out from exhaustion. Clowes was in Toronto this weekend as the special guest at TCAF (aka the Toronto Comic Arts Festival). I attended his talk with the eloquent and well-prepared Mark Medley, during which the cartoonist talked about his dislike of reading reviews of his work. There was a brief discussion of Harry Naybors, Clowes' obnoxious Comic Critic character, which appears in issues of Eightball and later in his book Ice Haven.

The next day I saw that my review was in The Globe and immediately dreaded that i was to be Naybor-fied. Anyways, I bumped into Clowes at The Doug Wright Awards later that night and he made a point of saying he really liked the review and appreciated my take on the book.

Yes -- I know this sounds like Harry Naybors' wet-dream, but it was, in a weekend of great moments, the best one by far. 

Swipe File: Special Spiegelman Edition

One of the best things about the once-great but now mediocre Comics Journal, was their monthly Swipe File column in which they exposed de facto comics plagiarism -- a practice that was, in fact, quite common among superhero cartoonists. Regardless of this, it was always fun and eye-opening to witness the inspiration behind some of your favourite comics, while visualizing a coffee-addicted cartoonist cribbing from an old pulp novel in an effort to meet deadline. 

This all came to mind thanks to this still photo in the New York Times, which I saw yesterday. It's taken from a London play called Enron that's debuting on Broadway later this week. The play is about the financial disaster that was Enron, the once-great and greatly-troubled American energy company. Is it just me, or does it look like someone in set design was a big fan of Maus?:

  

I mean, these two mouse-men are dead-ringers for Vladek and crew, don't you think?

I hereby proclaim this a stone-cold swipe!