If you were around Yonge and Bloor this weekend, you probably noticed that the short walk between the Toronto Reference Library and the Marriott Hotel was crowded with cheerful volunteers directing hoards of people clutching bags bursting with shiny new graphic novels, manga, and comic books. The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) welcomed 20,000 people to its thirteenth year in the city, all coming together to celebrate the comic arts.
In its short history, TCAF has made a concerted effort to include those traditionally excluded from the comic arts industry, most notably women. At the kick-off event on Friday evening, featured artists Lynn Johnston and Kate Beaton discussed the obstacles they had to face as women entering into the comics industry.
Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant meets with a fan. Anjana Kamalaharan/THE VARSITY
Beaton, a Nova Scotia native and author of the web comic and book Hark! A Vagrant, stressed the importance of female role models. She explained that the women who might have influenced her growing up were “tucked away,” either working in animation, for greeting card companies, or similar behind-the-scenes positions where they were hardly accessible as artistic idols to young women. She does, however, cite Lynn Johnston as one of her few female inspirations.
Johnston, author of the comic strip For Better or For Worse, has had a long and successful career. Recently retired, she spent 30 years writing her internationally syndicated strip. At its height, For Better or For Worse was being published in 2,200 newspapers across the world.
Johnston’s rise to fame in the 1970s, in an industry where comic artists were made or broken by syndication contracts, is simply not possible anymore. She confesses that if she were in her twenties now, she might not have attempted to enter the comics industry.
“I don’t know if I could deal with the nastiness of mean tweets and anonymous messages,” she said. In Johnston’s experience, it was the artist’s syndicate that dealt with the public’s response to their work.
Similarly, many of the younger artists at TCAF mourned the loss of past communities that fostered their budding artistic skills. On a panel about how the internet has affected the comic arts industry, web comic artists KC Green and Jess Fink regretted the passing of Drunk Duck and LiveJournal, and the communities that existed on and around those sites. While both artists are still active online, the nature of the web and its relationship to comics has changed significantly in recent years, as the comics industry is now heavily based on web content and subject to the frenzied pace of the Internet.
Some artists expressed concern with the way that the comic arts exist online today. Despite being extremely saturated with content, sites like Tumblr, for example, may not be the best places to find quality work.
Beaton remarked that one’s best work may not necessarily be the most popular online. Instead, she quipped, “it’ll probably be something that references Benedict Cumberbatch.”
In spite of this nostalgic undertone, the atmosphere of TCAF was one of excitement. Amidst the dozens of publishers, illustrators, writers, and thousands of visitors to this year’s festival, it seems there has never been a brighter or more exciting time to get involved with comic arts.
Beaton expressed hope that “there are new mechanisms in place” for artists to find their way online. Active on Twitter and Tumblr, it seems she remains optimistic about the power of the internet to foster new, flourishing communities for comic artists.
Correction: Friday, March 16, 2014: A previous version of this article indicated that TCAF was in its thirteenth year. This was incorrect. The festival is now in its eleventh year.
