Reading Wednesda - TCAF!
Jun. 11th, 2025 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frandroidSo reader, I have to make a confession. Even though I have lived in this city for 25 years, I had never until now visited the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I have known for a long time that it is one of this city's premier alt-culture and print festivals, and it's been held within 30 minutes walk from my place as far as I can remember.
"Over the years, TCAF has drawn prominent names such as Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Daniel Clowes, Junji Ito, Chris Ware, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Chester Brown, Seth, Kate Beaton, Adrian Tomine, Kamome Shirahama, and Bryan Lee O'Malley, and we seek to serve as a platform for international artists to showcase their work."
(I think Beaton was there again this year. I wonder if Chester Brown was also there? I think a new edition of his Paying For It was released to accompany the Sook-Yin Lee film adaptation. Usually they come in for a signing and a panel, not the whole fair, since their publisher is tabling.)
I tried to table once, but tabling is only open to creators themselves. (Plus sponsors, but I once paid $150 to be a sponsor in a fair and that was too much for me, so I wouldn't do it again. Their fee is probably $1000+. Otherwise the most I've paid for a fair I think was $100 and that was a 15% cut of my sales for an anarchist bookfair, an arrangement I can live with. (I know that this is way cheaper than most other tabling fees at other types of fairs.)
I was already planning to finally check TCAF out this year. In previous years, either I felt lazy, I lacked interest, or F wanted to do something else and it didn't take much to convince me to skip. But a few weeks ago I was visiting Expozine organizer Louis Rastelli at ARCMTL, the Montréal-based alt-culture archive, and he told me that TCAF passed Canzine as the premier /zine/ fair in Toronto years ago. Now I know he hasn't attended himself in years if ever (he doesn't really come this way), so I raised my eyebrow, but I was intrigued nonetheless.
So while the fair had been held at the Toronto Reference Library in the past (a phenomenal venue), this time it was being held at the ice rink at the Mattamy Athletic Center, in what used to be known as the legendary Maple Leaf Gardens. (They split the original NHL arena into multiple floors, built a supermarket on the former ice surface (you can still find the "center ice" red dot on the floor, grab a can of tuna and "drop the puck" for a face off, possibly between two cart-wielding customers trying to reach of the fake sales), and then built a NEW ice rink at a higher level, for a smaller ~2,500 seating area. That's where our PWHL team played its first season, though the arena is usually used by the hockey teams at Toronto Metropolitan University. (The Sceptres now play alternatively at the Coca-Cola Coliseum, which can sit 8,000, or at the Scotiabank Arena, which is also the Leafs' home ice.)
Rastelli lied. This ain't great zine fair, this didn't have anything on the old Canzine, or on now Paper Jam, or probably even on Zine Dream, though YMMV there. There are many zines, and many comic zines, but as most of these fairs go, there aren't that many great ones. The good news is that it's a pretty good indie comics fair. However I'm not really a comics guy unless in zine form (i.e. either photocopied, home-printed, or riso (or more rarely these days, with screen-printed covers (riso has usurped screen-printing for that kind of colour/finish)); certainly not glossy, save for raaaare exceptions), and even then I'm primarily looking for good writing first.
I met a few zinesters who I hadn't seen in years, bought some of their zines for my distro. I also discovered some new zines that I picked up for distribution, though not many. I also bought zines and comics wholesale from Silver Sprocket, a SF-based publisher which had come all the way to Toronto. There were many American zinesters, particular from Portland, for some reason? People were remarking that there was a much smaller European presence this year. Possibly a rebound effect of Trumpian antics? Many transatlantic flights do go through NYC, though Toronto is not exactly a backwater. The fair organizers remarked that this was the largest fair since 2019. Maybe it lost some foreign attention due to the pandemic.
I bought a bunch of zines for personal reading, and some microzines for my collection. I love zines which are smaller than the old quarter-letter size (mini) format. I split them in two categories: micros and nanos, the latter which are ~2 square inches or smaller. These are usually labour-intensive zines, halfway between zine and artwork. I don't usually try to carry these for distro, as asking creators to sell these already cheap zines to me at wholesale (50% off the cover price) grossly underscores the amount of unpaid labour put in the zines. These are usually hand-folded, hand-cut, sometimes hand-coloured, sometimes hand-stitched. They really are a labour of love. One nanozine creator this year had a selection of them, all assembled differently. One was simple a long strip folded in an accordion manner, featuring different shrunken reproductions of her drawings of Taiwan cityscapes. Another one was a whole letter-sized sheet with 3 longitudinal cuts, which allowed her to fold it in a serpentine way down to nano size, using the pages to illustrate a developing cicada story along the two sides of the strip, something like 48 pages. Another one was hand-stitched and hand-coloured. At another table, someone else had also developed the concept of cuttings into a single sheet into a single folded strip, though she folded into wide landscape pages. (You can see these three nanos and that landscape one on here, though closed.)
There is a style of comic drawing that is very popular in indie comics these days, especially in fandom comics, and it leaves me totally unfazed. Very cutesy, Disneyesque but not quite, and pretty soulless. Every character is smiling and there just so little tension in these comics. Actually I follow a feed on BlueSky which just reposts anything with the word "zine" in it, and more than half the posts are fanzines with a lot of this type of illustration. There was a lot of that at the fair. Ugh.
There were some seemingly good comics too, but I didn't look at anything perfect-bound, because I've just got too many books already. Also, I know I should not compare indie stuff to mass-market products, but some people sell their stuff for way too much money. I wish people understood that it's fine reaching a proper balance in your production costs so your product remains affordable. If you have a 24-page or 40-page half-letter comic that's all riso, amazing for you, it's pretty; but I'm not buying $20 riso-printed comics from 10 different people. What's worse is that I won't even look at your comic so I won't know if it's any good. Some of the best stuff is the cheapest stuff because these creators understand the math, focus on the core of their product (good writing, good drawings), make it affordable, and it moves copies, which is what you want as a budding artist. Get it in many hands, get good reviews, get nominated for a prize, that kind of stuff. One of the best comics to have come out of Toronto in recent years is Pope Hats, and it started as a black and white comic zine.
Speaking of prizes, connected to the fair was the Doug Wright Awards, Canada's (?) premier (?) comics award ceremony. It was at the Arts and Letters club, a pretty 1920s building (« The building has been described as "an eclectic blend of architectural styles popular at the end of the nineteenth century, combining elements of Romanesque, Flemish, and medieval architecture." ») with stodgy medieval decor. The awards were stodgy themselves. Every time a prize would be awarded, after the winner spoke, you could see their present fellow nominees just sneak away. I eventually followed their example, though not before seeing a 40-something woman earn the "newcomer" award, which she did collect but immediately told the crowd that she's already a well-known comic in Québec, it's just that two of her comics have finally been translated to English (and by her French editor at that, which has started their own English imprint, because no one in English Canadian comics can seemingly read in French, including publishers?). Deux solitudes, indeed.
Anyway. I'll be tabling at an Anarchist Bookfair on June 28, in Ottawa this time. The last zine fair I attended in Ottawa was a disaster, but my fellow distributor Kersplebedeb told me he usually has good sales at radical events in Ottawa, so I'll give the O circle-As a chance. The bus was half the price of the train. Eventually I thought of my old legs, and decided to buy train tickets. I had loyalty points which I used to pay for the baggage fee, because Via Rail sucks like that too now. A train. Baggage doesn't cost a lot of fuel to transport on trains like it does on planes. This is preposterous.
"Over the years, TCAF has drawn prominent names such as Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Daniel Clowes, Junji Ito, Chris Ware, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Chester Brown, Seth, Kate Beaton, Adrian Tomine, Kamome Shirahama, and Bryan Lee O'Malley, and we seek to serve as a platform for international artists to showcase their work."
(I think Beaton was there again this year. I wonder if Chester Brown was also there? I think a new edition of his Paying For It was released to accompany the Sook-Yin Lee film adaptation. Usually they come in for a signing and a panel, not the whole fair, since their publisher is tabling.)
I tried to table once, but tabling is only open to creators themselves. (Plus sponsors, but I once paid $150 to be a sponsor in a fair and that was too much for me, so I wouldn't do it again. Their fee is probably $1000+. Otherwise the most I've paid for a fair I think was $100 and that was a 15% cut of my sales for an anarchist bookfair, an arrangement I can live with. (I know that this is way cheaper than most other tabling fees at other types of fairs.)
I was already planning to finally check TCAF out this year. In previous years, either I felt lazy, I lacked interest, or F wanted to do something else and it didn't take much to convince me to skip. But a few weeks ago I was visiting Expozine organizer Louis Rastelli at ARCMTL, the Montréal-based alt-culture archive, and he told me that TCAF passed Canzine as the premier /zine/ fair in Toronto years ago. Now I know he hasn't attended himself in years if ever (he doesn't really come this way), so I raised my eyebrow, but I was intrigued nonetheless.
So while the fair had been held at the Toronto Reference Library in the past (a phenomenal venue), this time it was being held at the ice rink at the Mattamy Athletic Center, in what used to be known as the legendary Maple Leaf Gardens. (They split the original NHL arena into multiple floors, built a supermarket on the former ice surface (you can still find the "center ice" red dot on the floor, grab a can of tuna and "drop the puck" for a face off, possibly between two cart-wielding customers trying to reach of the fake sales), and then built a NEW ice rink at a higher level, for a smaller ~2,500 seating area. That's where our PWHL team played its first season, though the arena is usually used by the hockey teams at Toronto Metropolitan University. (The Sceptres now play alternatively at the Coca-Cola Coliseum, which can sit 8,000, or at the Scotiabank Arena, which is also the Leafs' home ice.)
Rastelli lied. This ain't great zine fair, this didn't have anything on the old Canzine, or on now Paper Jam, or probably even on Zine Dream, though YMMV there. There are many zines, and many comic zines, but as most of these fairs go, there aren't that many great ones. The good news is that it's a pretty good indie comics fair. However I'm not really a comics guy unless in zine form (i.e. either photocopied, home-printed, or riso (or more rarely these days, with screen-printed covers (riso has usurped screen-printing for that kind of colour/finish)); certainly not glossy, save for raaaare exceptions), and even then I'm primarily looking for good writing first.
I met a few zinesters who I hadn't seen in years, bought some of their zines for my distro. I also discovered some new zines that I picked up for distribution, though not many. I also bought zines and comics wholesale from Silver Sprocket, a SF-based publisher which had come all the way to Toronto. There were many American zinesters, particular from Portland, for some reason? People were remarking that there was a much smaller European presence this year. Possibly a rebound effect of Trumpian antics? Many transatlantic flights do go through NYC, though Toronto is not exactly a backwater. The fair organizers remarked that this was the largest fair since 2019. Maybe it lost some foreign attention due to the pandemic.
I bought a bunch of zines for personal reading, and some microzines for my collection. I love zines which are smaller than the old quarter-letter size (mini) format. I split them in two categories: micros and nanos, the latter which are ~2 square inches or smaller. These are usually labour-intensive zines, halfway between zine and artwork. I don't usually try to carry these for distro, as asking creators to sell these already cheap zines to me at wholesale (50% off the cover price) grossly underscores the amount of unpaid labour put in the zines. These are usually hand-folded, hand-cut, sometimes hand-coloured, sometimes hand-stitched. They really are a labour of love. One nanozine creator this year had a selection of them, all assembled differently. One was simple a long strip folded in an accordion manner, featuring different shrunken reproductions of her drawings of Taiwan cityscapes. Another one was a whole letter-sized sheet with 3 longitudinal cuts, which allowed her to fold it in a serpentine way down to nano size, using the pages to illustrate a developing cicada story along the two sides of the strip, something like 48 pages. Another one was hand-stitched and hand-coloured. At another table, someone else had also developed the concept of cuttings into a single sheet into a single folded strip, though she folded into wide landscape pages. (You can see these three nanos and that landscape one on here, though closed.)
There is a style of comic drawing that is very popular in indie comics these days, especially in fandom comics, and it leaves me totally unfazed. Very cutesy, Disneyesque but not quite, and pretty soulless. Every character is smiling and there just so little tension in these comics. Actually I follow a feed on BlueSky which just reposts anything with the word "zine" in it, and more than half the posts are fanzines with a lot of this type of illustration. There was a lot of that at the fair. Ugh.
There were some seemingly good comics too, but I didn't look at anything perfect-bound, because I've just got too many books already. Also, I know I should not compare indie stuff to mass-market products, but some people sell their stuff for way too much money. I wish people understood that it's fine reaching a proper balance in your production costs so your product remains affordable. If you have a 24-page or 40-page half-letter comic that's all riso, amazing for you, it's pretty; but I'm not buying $20 riso-printed comics from 10 different people. What's worse is that I won't even look at your comic so I won't know if it's any good. Some of the best stuff is the cheapest stuff because these creators understand the math, focus on the core of their product (good writing, good drawings), make it affordable, and it moves copies, which is what you want as a budding artist. Get it in many hands, get good reviews, get nominated for a prize, that kind of stuff. One of the best comics to have come out of Toronto in recent years is Pope Hats, and it started as a black and white comic zine.
Speaking of prizes, connected to the fair was the Doug Wright Awards, Canada's (?) premier (?) comics award ceremony. It was at the Arts and Letters club, a pretty 1920s building (« The building has been described as "an eclectic blend of architectural styles popular at the end of the nineteenth century, combining elements of Romanesque, Flemish, and medieval architecture." ») with stodgy medieval decor. The awards were stodgy themselves. Every time a prize would be awarded, after the winner spoke, you could see their present fellow nominees just sneak away. I eventually followed their example, though not before seeing a 40-something woman earn the "newcomer" award, which she did collect but immediately told the crowd that she's already a well-known comic in Québec, it's just that two of her comics have finally been translated to English (and by her French editor at that, which has started their own English imprint, because no one in English Canadian comics can seemingly read in French, including publishers?). Deux solitudes, indeed.
Anyway. I'll be tabling at an Anarchist Bookfair on June 28, in Ottawa this time. The last zine fair I attended in Ottawa was a disaster, but my fellow distributor Kersplebedeb told me he usually has good sales at radical events in Ottawa, so I'll give the O circle-As a chance. The bus was half the price of the train. Eventually I thought of my old legs, and decided to buy train tickets. I had loyalty points which I used to pay for the baggage fee, because Via Rail sucks like that too now. A train. Baggage doesn't cost a lot of fuel to transport on trains like it does on planes. This is preposterous.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-12 12:47 am (UTC)I think I know the style you're talking about and I'm sick of it. Bah.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-12 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-12 11:01 am (UTC)