Last Minute Steps to Pathways That Lead Through Trees

I'm procrastinating. There's a paper I need to write, about the nature of tragedy in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. I have an intense dislike of Willy Loman; I think he's a dummy. I mean, maybe it's not entirely his fault, but he is. He's a dummy. And he's not tragic. I need that to fill 8-10 pages.

Whenever I am faced with writing something that I don't want to write, I end up doing one of two things: I clean (my flat is pretty tidy when there are papers due) or I think about all the other things that I would rather be writing. Sometimes both. When I have to read something that I don't really want to read, I think about all the other things I'd rather be reading. It's like that; I know I'm not alone in this. For example, right now I am dreaming about Christmas vacation, because I want to read comics. I literally can't wait until finals are over, so I can read comics. And write poems! I kind of want to write poems again... (By the way, there's a link on the right side of the page for CV2, which is the journal that just accepted some of Cassidy's poetry. Check it out, because they tell you the themes of the upcoming issues so that you can customize your submissions. The journal is poetry-only, but I think most of us write poems too...)

I'm so going to read this over the holidays - it's
entirely done with watercolours. So cool.

I've been a little out of touch lately, with what's been going on in the world outside the university. I don't even know if there are awesome new comics coming out! I haven't even clicked on the links on my own blog for weeks and weeks now (and it looks like I missed a few deadlines... ) but now that it's the end of the semester and I still need to talk about those other guys who are also cool, and as I am procrastinating at the moment, I'll talk about Drawn and Quarterly, top comics publisher extraordinaire.

This is my brother's publisher. Have I ever talked about my bro's book on this blog? I don't think so. It's cool, it's historical fiction, called The Klondike. It is naturally about the Klondike gold rush. He did the entire thing with a fountain pen tip and a bottle of ink, which I think is amazing, because it's over 300 pages. It took like, five years. That's pretty much all I'm going to say about it. D&Q is really cool; they publish all the cool comics in Canada, mostly stuff that is considered to be literary, like Seth's stuff, and Chester Brown's. Other artists: Daniel Clowes, Matt Forsythe (notorious for a distinct lack of words in his stories...), Jillian Tamaki, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Shigero Mizuki, Kate Beaton, Lynda Barry, and Guy Delisle. And they are based in Quebec, so they have a really strong base of French comic artists too. I think they recently got my bro a French publisher, like, a publisher in France, which is pretty cool. (Le Klondike?) What else can I say about D&Q? They harness new talent, are preposterously supportive (which I think I am discovering about smaller presses), and publish high quality work, stuff that takes comics so far past fanboy superhero stuff, stuff that elevates comics to a whole new level. I mean, superhero stuff is all right (I have a special soft spot for Hellboy comics, which is a different kind of hero, I think), but comics are so versatile, and D&Q is so good for the industry. I mean, that's what I think, anyway.

My bro's comic

By the way, Matt Forsythe and Jillian Tamaki also have blogs and websites that I've linked to in the cool guys list. I've already talked about Jillian, in a previous post, but Matt is an interesting sort of creature. He's got degrees in Journalism and he lived in Korea for a while (in his book Ojingogo, the only words are Korean characters), and he does a whole series of comic strips on one of his pages that are about a comics class he teaches at an elementary school. People who do comics are interesting. I really like his art style a lot. (Click on the link. Do it.)

Recent illustration Forsythe did for The Walrus magazine,
of one of my favourite bands,  Arcade Fire.

End procrastination?