Happiness is a warm graphic novel.

[bcholmes]

I went down to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival today. Wow, talk about a lot of people. And the Toronto Reference Library isn't tiny by any stretch of the imagination, but you fill it with a metric fuckton of people, and it's really crowded.

I brought a bunch'a books with me to get signed. I got Jillian Tamaki to sign the copy of Half World that I bought at Wiscon last year. (I got to buy it from Hiromi Goto at a book launch party at the con). My cartooning prof still has my copy of Skim, sadly. It's only been, like, a year. He reads very slowly, I think.

I also visited Michael Cho's table, where I picked up one of his prints of Toronto back alleys. Specifically, the one currently in the first page of blog, just after the picture of Wonder Woman. I also got him to sign his story, "Trinity", in The Best American Comics 2010.

I really wanted to get Kathryn and Stuart Immonen to sign my copy of Moving Pictures -- one of the books I read last year that ended up surprising me the most. And excellent story and gorgeous art. But they kept eluding me.

And Nate Powell signed my copy of Swallow Me Whole.

I think the most fun thing was asking all the artists about their techniques. Was this brush or pen? Is that a wash? You mean all this tone in Therefore Repent is pencil shading?

I picked up DAR and Templar, Arizona (Spike was one of the perkiest artists I met!) I grabbed a comic that I'm not terribly impressed with called Glamazonia, the Uncanny Super Tranny (I believe it's created by a group of gay men). And a book called As We Were.

I ended up attending a panel about race, gender and sexuality in comics and, um, the panel left a lot to be desired, I think. Some of the panelists were funny to listen to, but their discussion about identity issues was lacking in analysis. I asked a question about intersectionality, and I think that the answer I got was "People are more casual these days, so we don't really need that kind of story." Uh, what?

Nonetheless, it was great fun. I got to hang with sabotabby for most of the day. And I have a lot of books to read. And now I want nothing more than to work on comics.