Results tagged “comics”

Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people who were way cooler than Torontoist came out to the Gladstone Hotel to see the 175 independent publishers, artists, and writers at Canzine, Canada’s largest zine fair and festival of alternative culture. The day-long event was organized by Broken Pencil, the quarterly magazine dedicated to all things underground culture and the independent arts.

In 1993, CPG (Community Programs Group) began publishing The New Jr. Jays Magazine, an eclectic mix of baseball, sci-fi, health and safety tips, and overt product placement. The magazine was designed to develop the Jays’ younger fan base, and featured comics, baseball articles, interviews with fans and players, and movie, book, and video game reviews. For only five dollars a year, Jr. Jays club members received four issues, a personalized membership card, and several Topps baseball cards. In the words of Ed Conroy, the publisher of The Magazine, a monthly magazine for kids, and a former Jr. Jays writer, "You couldn’t make something like this today."

Evan Munday’s Quarter-Life Crisis: Only the Good Die Yung is the first book in a new graphic novel series set in a post-apocalyptic Toronto where only twenty-five-year-olds have survived. In this dystopian future, mindless robots control Queen’s Park, a vile organization runs the Rogers Centre, and brainless thugs in bad suits roam Bay Street. (This is fiction, right?) The story is told from the perspective of Harper Yung, a former record-store clerk and quintessential hipster. Since the disaster, he and his brother Aaron have taken refuge in the "box of doom" over the ruins of OCAD, and the two stay alive by scavenging for copper to trade with the Rogers, a paramilitary outfit that controls most of the resources left in the downtown core.

* Kei cars are street legal in Canada, and can be purchased right here in the GTA from a few dealers including this great little place out in Scarborough.

"Nothing ever ends," the bright blue Doctor Manhattan tells Adrian Veidt towards the end of Watchmen, the seminal graphic novel about costumed heroes. Consistently emotionally unaffected, Doctor Manhattan thinks in purely logical terms, and Veidt, the world's smartest man, has (spoiler alert!) just killed millions in an elaborate plot intended to rescue a deteriorating world. For the first time, though, Veidt seems in some small way insecure about whether that end justified the means, and asks Doctor Manhattan if he "did the right thing," because "It all worked out in the end." "'In the end'?" Doctor Manhattan replies, "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."

This weekend, the Toronto Reference Library’s bespectacled old ladies of Saturday morning cartoon fame were replaced with another near-sighted crowd. Trading cat’s eye glasses for black horn rims, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival crowd, several thousand strong, dominated at least the first two floors of the behemoth library.

The Watchmen movie has been released to moderate success and every other person on the street has a copy of the graphic novel in their low-slung messenger bag. Michael Cera, the quirky playboy of lady hipster hearts, is in town filming the Scott Pilgrim movie. Now is a better time than ever to come out and let your comic flag fly. Side-by-side with a documentary festival, book festival, and photography festival, the fourth Toronto Comic Arts Festival (or TCAF) animates the city this week.

The news that they're filming the Scott Pilgrim film in Toronto now has more immediate relevance than simple pride that a locally shot film will actually be set here, with the casting call for extras now open. If you've ever wanted to be brutally judged against the hipster ideal, now is your chance, with the Craigslist listing asking for performers "18 to 27 years old (up to 29 years if you have a youthful look)" that can "pull of [sic] an INDIE ROCK LOOK!" and have "slim, skinny builds with interesting faces and looks." Positively, they do note "hundreds of people are needed," though we're sure competition will be tough enough that it will be difficult to even reach the go-see stage. Still interested? Check the listing for full instructions, and if you already think you're out of luck, remember you can pick up the latest volume of the comic—Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe—at all good comic shops starting tomorrow. (via radiomaru.)

Every Wednesday, Torontoist receives transmissions from the travel log of Gleebax, the alien Urbanaut, as he explores the foreign land of Toronto.

Every Wednesday, Torontoist receives transmissions from the travel log of Gleebax, the alien Urbanaut, as he explores the foreign land of Toronto.

Every Wednesday, Torontoist receives transmissions from the travel log of Gleebax, the alien Urbanaut, as he explores the foreign land of Toronto.

Every Wednesday, Torontoist receives transmissions from the travel log of Gleebax, the alien Urbanaut, as he explores the foreign land of Toronto.

Every Wednesday, Torontoist receives transmissions from the travel log of Gleebax, the alien Urbanaut, as he explores the foreign land of Toronto.

LECTURE: Dr. Marianne Sommer of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is giving a lecture called "Popular Primates: A Time-Travel Through National Geographic." The talk is a reflection on the history of National Geographic, and how public interest in primates has been shaped since the publication's inception in 1888. Hosted by broadcaster Erika Ritter. OISE (252 Bloor Street West), 6 p.m., $20.