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The comic book field, it has been noted elsewhere, sometimes bears a striking resemblance to Canada.
Think about it. The comics are a middle-aged medium --in existence for far longer than, say, TV or computers-- that have never quite managed to make the leap into full artistic self-confidence.
Ideologically comics are a divided land, two nations in the bosom of a single country (so to speak). There is the full-colour nation of the superhero, inhabited by multi-million dollar publishing giants like Marvel, DC, Image and Malibu Comics; and there is the grand duchy of the alternative press; where small, iconoclastic publishers like Montreal's Drawn & Quarterly Publications quietly endeavour to expand the horizons of the medium.
These conflicting sovereignties rarely meet except at comic book conventions and on the order forms of the major comic book distributors. Often their needs are at cross-purposes, as the huge lines and periodic hype extravangzas of the large publishers soak up precious industry capital and crowd marginal alternative comics off the shelves.
None of this has discouraged a small but dedicated core of young Canadians from making their mark in the field. Often more obsessed than simply ambitious, they are possessed of a sense of mission and purpose that carries them through the lean times and public incomprehension about their calling ("Okay, you draw funnybooks, but what do you do for a living?"). They are often fiercely protective of their creative and entrepreneurial freedom, and quietly proud of what they do.
Comics, at last, are standing up.
And so are the people who create and sell them.
The huge American superhero machine sucks most of the talented Canadian creators in that discipline south. John Byrne and Todd McFarlane --native sons of different generations originally hailing from Calgary-- are two of the most successful superhero artists in the history of the medium.
McFarlane, 33, is the creator of the horror/superhero series Spawn and is one of the founding members of the Image Comics cooperative that split with Marvel Comics in the late 1980s. He is reportedly a multi-millionaire.
Alternative creators have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming multi-millionaires (as do most superhero artists for that matter, but that's another article) but rarely have to leave Canada to find a publisher or a following.
Through Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc., his own Kitchener-based company, Dave Sim has been self-publishing Cerebus since 1977. An extremely complex and engaging series fast approaching its two hundredth issue, Cerebus is simultaneously the longest running alternative comic and the longest running Canadian comic in history.
More to the point, Sim's uncompromising resistance to the corporate style, his championing of creator's rights and his promotion of self-publishing have made him a role model for many of the creators who have followed in his wake.
Chester Brown, 31, award-winning dean of Canadian alternative cartoonists, began his career in the early 80s self-publishing mini-comics on a photocopier. Yummy Fur, his brilliant --but completely indescribable-- comic book was eventually picked up by Toronto's Vortex Comics, a Brigadoon-like publisher which periodically disappears down a wormhole, only to reappear in a completely different guise months or years later.
Fortunately for Brown, Vortex published Yummy Fur as a regular black and white comic during a relatively stable period in the company's history, for a remarkable 24 issues, actually.
"I'd always been one of those kids who was the best artist in his class," says Brown, explaining his attraction to the medium. "I also enjoyed writing, and comics is a medium in which one can both write and draw. The medium is very appealing to someone who has stories they want to tell and express oneself visually at the same time."
Two years ago, Vancouver-based Brown jumped ship from Vortex Comics and brought Yummy Fur to Chris Oliveros' Drawn & Quarterly Publications in Montreal. Recently Yummy Fur completed its long run and Brown has begun work on a new series entitled Underwater, which he feels is more reflective of his current work.
Currently he is one a bare handful of alternative creators --Canadian or otherwise-- who are actually able to make comics work a full-time career.
"I wouldn't call it a comfortable living, but I'm making a living at it," he says. "My bills are all paid, I'm not in debt, and I can pay the rent.
"I would discourage people from entering the field if they're only looking to make a lot of money, unless they want to draw superhero comics," he adds. "And even then it's not certain that they'll reach the level of people like Todd McFarlane.
"But if comics are their obsession, then there's no discouraging people."
Brown's Drawn & Quarterly colleague Seth (no last name needed) is thoughtful when asked what attracted him to the comics medium.
"That's a tricky question," he replies. "By the time I had decided on cartooning, I was too young to be weighing the values of one medium against the other. "I find comics to be much more satisfying than illustration because it's a narrative storytelling medium. And it's a better medium to be in than film, which is also narrative, because it's cheap. It's just you and a piece of paper."
Though he claims he went through the same superhero-doodles-in-the-notebook-phase as every other adolescent male in North America, even a quick look at Seth's autobiographical Palookaville comic immediately tells you that his sources come from another time and place.
There's a little Charles Schulz and Peanuts, a smattering of Hergé's Tintin, but mostly there's the New Yorker magazine of the 1920s and 30s, an admittedly odd influence for a cartoonist not yet 30 himself.
"I got completely involved with the old cartoonists of that era," he says. "There are even a whole range of sub-New Yorker cartoonists that I'm interested in. There were hundreds of gag cartoonists in those days, some of whom were pretty interesting, all of whom are very obscure now."
Contrary to expectations, Seth claims that he found it quite easy to break into comics. A chance assignment on Vortex Comics' flagship title Mister X established his reputation early on, although he admits that he is still mystified about exactly how that job came his way.
"In retrospect I don't know what the publisher of that comic was thinking. I was too inexperienced. It seems like it was almost a decision of convenience, he needed an artist and I was there."
Seth, who also works as a commercial illustrator, repeats Brown's warnings about money and alternative comics. Children's books or commercial illustration are more lucrative and prestigious, he says, if that's all you're interested in. But the alternates have their own unique appeal.
"Autonomy is the definite advantage," he claims. "You have total control over your own work, and if even if you don't have a publisher, self-publishing is not impossible. You can take a project of your own and control it from beginning to end."
Fiona Smyth, 30, would agree with much of what Seth says, except that bit about storytelling. Smyth is the creator of Nocturnal Emissions, a deliberately surrealistic stream-of-consciousness comic from Vortex that makes Chester Brown's work look positively transparent by comparison. She has been concerned in fact, that lately her work has gotten too straightforward and accessible.
"I got pulled into a straight storyline at one point, but after issue #5 things are going to get quite obscuro," she says. "I like to read linear stories in other people's work, but I don't like to do it myself. It's not what I'm striving for."
Primarily a fine artist and illustrator, comics are something of a sideline for Smyth and she enjoys playing with the medium and standing her readers' expectations on their heads.
"Maybe I'm going to alienate myself by going in this direction, my comic might end up looking very much like a sketchbook. Hopefully people will get it, but I'm not too worried if they do or don't. It's just another extension of expressing my art.
"It's a cheap medium," she says, echoing Seth. "People can afford a comic where they might not be able to buy a $1,000 painting. Comics don't have that hoighty-toighty arty-fartiness. It's instant gratification in your hands and anybody can pick it up. It can travel around the world in the way that my art can't.
"My comics have gotten to Australia and Ireland and the UK and all over the US. I couldn't have reached anywhere near that number of people with my artwork."
Smyth quickly brushes off any suggestion that the male dominated comics field discriminates against female creators.
"I haven't felt any kind of ghettoization because of being a woman artist," she claims. "If anything I've noticed that if there's any kind of write-up about comics, women are always mentioned as some sort of 'new discovery.' I find that annoying because women have always been in comics."
Claude Lalumière comes at alternative comics from the other side of the equation. Owner of Nebula and Danger! bookstores in Montreal, Lalumière, 28, is often the only source in the province of Quebec for many obscure and not-so-obscure alternative comics. This is a staggering fact when one considers that the Greater Montreal region alone possesses more than 70 comic book specialty shops.
"Most comics retailers don't really know comics and have no love of the medium. They're just in it for quick money," he claims. "They're not able to distinguish between quality non-mainstream comics and amateur non-mainstream comics, so they don't carry them at all. I focus on that part of the market, which I know is really ignored."
"Neither of my stores are comic book stores," he stresses. "They're book stores that happen to sell comics. I sell them the same way I sell books, I don't approach them as periodicals. I'm trying to attract people who are readers."
Lalumière emphasizes that though he runs a tight and profitable ship in a business sense, it is his underlying understanding and love of the material that he sells which has made him successful.
"In anything that you undertake, if you do it just for the money, I don't think you'll accomplish much. I just want to be able to make a living doing something that allows me to sleep at night. This works. I don't encounter gigantic moral dilemmas over it and I'm actually quite successful. I've got two stores and six employees."
Launched in Spring 1990 with the first issue of his flagship Drawn & Quarterly anthology magazine, Chris Oliveros' Drawn & Quarterly Publications has grown dramatically in the last four years. The publisher of six regular black and white comic books and the Drawn & Quarterly anthology book/magazine, D&Q has become the Canadian, or even the North American, alternative comics success story of the 90s.
Run out of Oliveros' apartment over a kosher butcher shop in Montreal's grungy-trendy Plateau Mont-Royal district, Drawn & Quarterly promotes a relentlessly personal style of comics, like those created by Chester Brown, Seth and Julie Doucet. The majority of the company's titles are in some way autobiographical or at least inspired by the cartoonist's personal life.
Like most people in the field, Oliveros is passionate about comics as an art form, but he remains frustrated by public reaction to the medium.
"People are familiar with Garfield and Superman and Mickey Mouse and they don't know what to make of work by Robert Crumb or Chester Brown," he says. "I've actually seen people get very hostile to Drawn & Quarterly, and yet these are the same people who might go to alternative films or read alternative magazines."
Despite incomprehension from the general public, Drawn & Quarterly has found its niche and secured a committed, core audience which has allowed the company to flourish and grow. Now publishing many of their titles in upscale paperback book formats, Drawn & Quarterly is challenging the primacy of Seattle's Fantagraphics Books as the most important publisher of alternative comics in North America.
"One of the major positive points about the comic book direct-sales system is that it's really opened up the doors to anyone," he explains. "You don't have to have a lot of money to start a publishing company and keep it going.
"You can't do that in movies. You can't do that in magazines. You can't even really do it in books because the distribution channels are closed. Alternate comics have that punk ideal, where anyone can do their own thing. This is the only medium which still maintains that esthetic."
"When I started to do comics, I didn't expect to go anywhere with it," Julie Doucet explains in her soft-spoken, French-accented English. "I knew that it was impossible to get published in French here in Quebec."
Doucet did eventually manage to publish a number of stories in very small-press fanzines and mini-comics, but the embryonic French-language comics field in Quebec --which manages to produce two or three hardcover albums a year-- had no real place for her.
It was only publication in the American magazine Weirdo, edited by legendary underground artist Robert Crumb, which gave Doucet the beginnings of a following. Dirty Plotte (which can be roughly translated as "Dirty Slut"), her regular English-language comic from Drawn & Quarterly, has since made her something of a cult figure.
Surprisingly soft-spoken and reticent in person, Doucet's comic art is often controversial and fearless. She confronts difficult issues like sex, violence, menstruation and male/female issues head on in a fearless way that is completely belied by her real persona.
"I really don't do it on purpose," she explains, almost apologetically. "I just do what comes naturally."
An occasional illustrator, Doucet largely lives by her comic book work. Surprisingly, like Smyth, she also says that she has never experienced overt sexism in the alternative comics field, and that in fact the majority of her readership is still male.
"The only way to get published is to work hard and send your stuff around," she says when asked about breaking into the business. "Considering that I'm doing what I really want, it's worth it.
"Working with Chris Oliveros is nice. He never tells me not to do things. He never censors me. I'm free. I'm really free."
In the final analysis, comics are a schizophrenic business. Creators are often torn apart by mutually exclusive impulses, never quite sure whether they reside in the domain of art, publishing, or junk-bond speculation.
These young creators (in the broadest sense of the word) have made their choice. They may have sacrificed the prestige of working in a better known discipline, or the money and recognition of the mainstream comics world, but they know who they are and where they're going.
Most of all, they know why they're going.
For the love of comics.
Canuck Comics: A Guide to Comic Books Published in Canada, John Bell, ed. (Matrix Books, 1986).
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Artform, Scott McCloud, (Kitchen Sink Press, 1992).
Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics, Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette (Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1993).
Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 5550 Jeanne Mance St., #16, Montreal, Quebec H2V 4K6.
Vortex Comics, P.O. 173, Sanborn, New York 14132 USA (Brigadoon resurfaces again!).
Nebula Bookstore, 1452 rue St. Mathieu, Montreal, Quebec H3H 2H9. (514) 932-3930. email: nebula@cam.org
Danger!, 3968 boulevard St. Laurent, Montreal, Quebec H2W 1Y3. (514) 286-2998. email: nebula@cam.org