This is a particularly fun week for comic/anime/zine festivals across Canada. Let’s get into it!
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
Saturday August 18, 11am – 6pm, Queer Between The Covers, Centre St-Pierre, 1212 rue Panet
A festival supporting queer bookstores, zines and creative modes of production. Queer Between the Covers is part of Pervers/Cité, the radical antithesis to Divers/Cité (Montreal Pride). This is a particularly important festival for Montreal’s queer community as the city currently lacks a permanent queer bookstore. Vendors include Arsenal Pulp Press, the queer-positive sex shop Venus Envy, Elisha Lim, Hungry Bottom Comics and many others. There are also a number of intriguing events taking place before, during and after the fair, including a collaborative zine project by poet Jese Gordon and artist Jonathan Reid Sévigny that deals with “coming of age, gender-fucking and sexual power-play”; a talk by self-proclaimed “gay nerd” Oliver Peacock on queer comics, and a reading salon at 7pm over at Le Cagibi (5490 Blvd. St-Laurent). If the usual Pride events aren’t your thing, or you’re simply looking for a great selection of queer vendors from across Canada, you should definitely swing by Queer Between the Covers and check it out.
TORONTO, ONTARIO
Tuesday August 14, 8pm, Dragnet Magazine/EW Reading Series Present All-Star August, Duffy’s Tavern, 1238 Bloor Street West, PWYC
The terrific online literary magazine Dragnet has teamed up with the equally rad Emerging Writers Series for a late-summer reading soiree. All readers have had work published in a previous issue of Dragnet, and they include Claire Battershill, Andy Sinclair, Laura Hartenberger and Jesse Boyce. Click on each reader’s name and you can read the piece they wrote for the magazine. What a fine event on a balmy Tuesday summer eve, when the air is redolent with the smell of beer-soaked carpets and waning bliss.
DARTMOUTH, NOVA SCOTIA
Sunday August 19, 11am, Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival (DCAF), Alderney Landing, 2 Ochterloney Street
Oh my God, it’s the first-ever Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival, hosted by the estimable and world-renowned Maritime comic book shop Strange Adventures. So far, exhibitors include the delightful Mike Holmes, YA goth-artist-author Faith Erin Hicks, Marvel Comics’ Wolverine and X-Men artist Nick Bradshaw, Patrick Burgomaster and many others. Keep your eyes on the DCAF blog for more information and updates.
VANCOUVER, BC
Vancouver’s newest festival is an anime festival, and it sounds amazing (and I’m not even a huge fan of anime.) There’s three days of speed dating, a cosplay cafe, an anime swimsuit contest, console wars, contests, a viewing room, an artists alley, workshops on everything from how to write fanfiction to making indie games, an exhibitors hall, and appearances and signings by Vincent Corazza, Sugar Beard, Jessica Nigri, Sarah Edmonson, Katie Griffin, and Sam Logan. A portion of all ticket sales will be donated to the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation.
KINGSTON, ONTARIO
Friday, August 17, 8pm – 11pm, Mouthy: Summer Lovin’, Sleepless Goat Cafe, 91 Princess Street, PWYC
The amazing Mouthy monthly storytelling series based in Kingston gears up again for a night of summer stories: summer romance, road trips and revelry but also the dog days of summer and summer bummers. Stories can be fact or fiction, yours or someone else’s, and of course you don’t have to tell a story to attend – just come and listen.