Illustration by Evan Munday.

On a cold mid-February afternoon under overcast skies, a school bell rings. The halls of Toronto’s Agnes Macphail Public School flood with children dressed in puffy jackets and schoolbags. Although a swift exodus befalls most schools at day’s end, Agnes Macphail still pulses with high-pitch chatter. Students linger in the foyer while others flock towards the school’s library. Amidst the rows of bookcases and computers, a group of students, ranging from grade six to eight, sit around tables as they talk animatedly and await the start of their book-club meeting.

The students burst into cheerful greetings as Diana Maliszewski, Agnes Macphail’s teacher-librarian, walks into the room. Dressed in a black cardigan, white dress shirt, and black pants, Maliszewski sits at the table amongst the intermediate students.

“So, which book are we going to talk about first?” Maliszewski asks. The children’s voices overlap and echo throughout the library. The group settles on Raina Telgemeier’s Smile, a paperback book boasting a turquoise-coloured cover and a yellow smiley face.

“I have to warn you,” Maliszewski says, “I didn’t get a chance to read this one.” The students erupt into playful jeers. “I know, I know,” Maliszewski says, hands on her face in mock embarrassment. “But it’s okay because you guys can tell me all about it.” The children rifle through the pages as they talk excitedly about the novel. “I read it twice,” chirps one girl seated to the right of Maliszewski.

During the club meeting, a group of boys amble into the library and linger in front of a shelf of colourful books. “I’m sorry guys, but the library’s closed. We have a club meeting going on,” Maliszewski says apologetically. The boys groan. “I know. I’m sorry, but I’m glad you guys love this place. I really am.”

Students jokingly scolding their teacher for not reading; children looking crestfallen when told the school’s library is closed. It plays like an episode of The Twilight Zone, one that parents and teachers across the country would love to see replicated. But what accounts for the kids’ enthusiasm is the type of books they’re reading: graphic novels.

Maliszewski is one of the few teachers in Canada who dedicate a student club to graphic novels. But she is one of a growing number of educators and literacy advocates who believe the often-misunderstood genre could be the key to unlocking literacy for reluctant readers.

A staggering 48 percent of Canadians over 16 struggle with poor reading skills. Literacy is commonly measured on a five-level scale, with levels three and up considered adequate to function well in contemporary society. The Canadian Council on Learning estimates that 12 million Canadians do not meet that standard, meaning they cannot cope with many basic reading tasks — things like interpreting simple graphs, reading short text, and integrating pieces of information. The absence of such rudimentary abilities make it difficult to complete high school, acquire new job skills, or even decipher a medicine label.

The current statistics are bleak, and the number of adults with low literacy is actually poised to increase by 25 percent over the next 20 years just based on population growth. Literacy organizations, parents, educators, employers — everyone is looking for new ways to get Canadians excited about reading and improve these troubling numbers. But there’s little hope for change — unless we try something new.

Although an avid reader as a child, Maliszewski didn’t discover graphic novels until her adult years when she took the course “Comics and Graphic Novels in Schools and Public Libraries,” at the University of Alberta, where she received her masters degree in the teacherlibrarianship program in 2010. The genre quickly hooked her: “The skies parted and the light shone down,” she says.

She joined the TinLids Greater Toronto Area Graphic Novels Club, a group of educators and publishers who gather to discuss the educational potential of graphic novels. In 2004, Maliszewski established a graphic novel section at Agnes Macphail’s school library. “It took off like a rocket,” says Maliszewski. “It was insanely popular, especially with the boys. A whole bunch of people just loved it.”

More and more graphic novels have ascended to respectability in literary circles lately, but the whiff of pulp entertainment — given the genre’s roots in 20th century comic books — has tended to make teachers wary of their usefulness. For every Pulitzer-winning Maus, Art Spiegelman’s haunting allegory of his Jewish ancestors fleeing the Nazis, or Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s poignant adolescent memoir of revolutionary Iran, there seemed to be thousands of mindlessly violent, sexually retrograde, and narratively bankrupt superhero yarns. Novels are regarded as educational and nourishing; comic books as depraved trash.

Of course, there are also plenty of lousy books without drawings in them. As the depth and breadth of good graphic novels available has grown over the last few decades, some educators have started to see how a more visually dynamic presentation can boost reading skills without feeling like a chore.

In an article entitled “Expanding Literacies Through Graphic Novels,” [PDF] comics scholar Gretchen Schwarz argues the benefits of using graphic novels as a way to expand and strengthen literacy skills. Schwarz says graphic novel readers have to pay attention to conventional literary elements of plot, character, and dialogue as well as interpret visual elements such as colour, shading, panel layout, and even lettering style, making graphic novels an engaging and sophisticated form of reading.

Maliszewski also believes the combination of word and image can help reluctant readers who have short attention spans or problems visualizing. “Comics are great for so many different areas in which people have struggled with literacy issues,” she says. “They’re the great equalizer because they’re enjoyed by kids who are not strong readers as well as kids who are strong readers.”

At 70, Ellen Szita knows firsthand the perils of low literacy skills. While growing up in Brighton, England, Szita was relegated to the “D” class throughout school because of her difficulties with literacy. When Szita was 13, a teacher unexpectedly asked her to solve a math problem during class. Unable to read, Szita froze.

The teacher ordered her to stand in front of the class. “You’re not even trying to do this,” he bellowed. Szita stood motionless as the teacher insulted her in front of the other students. As she walked back toward her desk, the teacher grabbed the blackboard eraser and threw it at her head. A year later, Szita dropped out of school.

After immigrating to Canada at age 18, Szita eventually moved to Vancouver, married, and had four children. For decades, she hid her literacy difficulties from her family. When her children asked for help with their homework, Szita asserted she was too busy. She couldn’t understand her children’s report cards and dreaded parentteacher meetings.

The one time Szita did meet with one of her children’s teachers, she dressed up and emphasized her British accent as a way of masking her challenges with literacy. “I would tell the teacher, ‘Oh, yes I understand,’” Szita recalls. “But I didn’t understand what the teacher was even saying. She was talking about algebra. I never even heard of the word ‘algebra.’ I didn’t know if she was talking about English or math.”

The turning point for Szita emerged after she and her husband divorced in 1979. Unable to support herself, Szita searched for employment. She applied to two jobs but was fired from both because of her low literacy skills. By 1987, Szita’s psychiatrist diagnosed her as dyslexic and referred her to the Victoria READ society, a non-profit organization that helps youth and adults develop and hone their literacy skills.

There, at age 46, Szita accomplished something she thought improbable: she learned to read.

As a way of promoting literacy awareness, Szita spent years sharing her experience at speaking engagements with high schools, colleges, universities, prisons, and other organizations. In 1994, the Governor General presented Szita with the Flight for Freedom Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literacy for her advocacy work. Today, Szita is the chair of the Canadian Adult Literacy Learners, an arm of a non-profit organization called the Canadian Literacy and Learning Network that supports provincial and territorial literacy coalitions across Canada.

For Szita, graphic novels and comics contain engaging and compelling stories that can encourage reading and learning amongst those with low literacy skills. Szita believes comics are an effective teaching tool that can help children and adults perceive reading as something to enjoy, instead of dread. “I think it’s a huge help,” says Szita. “You need to be happy about what you’re learning and if it’s interesting, it’s going to make a huge difference.”

Scott Tingley, a grade-three teacher at Riverside Consolidated School in Riverside-Albert, New Brunswick and founder of comicsintheclassroom.net, noticed the difference in his students’ attitudes toward reading and writing after he used an Owly comic by Andy Runton and a Monkey vs. Robot picture by James Kochalka as story starters for a grade one and two class he taught five years ago. Prompted by his students’ enthusiasm, Tingley incorporated a comics section in his classroom. “I have kids reading them all the time and I have kids from previous years coming over to borrow them,” says Tingley. “For some, comics are a joy to read. They can’t get enough.”

In his 12 years of teaching, Tingley has never encountered a student who didn’t enjoy creating comics. “At the early years they are so used to joining their drawings with their words that comics come naturally to them,” says Tingley. “I don’t try to trick kids into thinking they aren’t writing when they are creating comics; on the contrary, I make sure they are keenly aware that making comics is just another form of writing.”

While Tingley and Maliszewski use graphic novels and comics primarily in elementary school settings, the genre is equally pertinent in other educational stages. Guy Demers, an English teacher at Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School in Vancouver, first thought about using graphic novels and comics in the classroom during the mid-1980s when they started to mature as an art form.

His first attempts at using graphic novels in the classroom occurred after he noticed a few of his students struggled with reading. He gave the students copies of Usagi Yojimbo, a comic series created by Stan Sakai. “It got them so excited about reading that they burned through all 20 volumes that were out at the time,” says Demers. “They started reading books along the same lines.”

The medium is finding uses in post-secondary education too. Rob Heynen, a professor in York University’s program in social and political thought, is one of the many professors at the university who has used graphic novels as course material. In his fourth-year course, “Visual Culture: Histories, Theories, and Politics,” Heynen incorporated Alan Moore’s Watchmen, an influential deconstruction of the superhero narrative, into his lecture on comics and graphic arts in popular culture.

Heynen says graphic novels, which depend on the reader’s ability to interpret and create meanings out of sequential images, are a useful way to develop a person’s literacy skills. “Even for people with low levels of literacy, images are still things that they can read,” he says. But Heynen believes the types of literacy skills required for graphic novels is different from that of traditional prose material, although both are related through their use of text. “They’re two different kinds of literacy in a way,” says Heynen.

However, Maliszewski says the idea of graphic novels as a “transitional medium” is one of the stigmas hindering the genre. “It’s a little elitist to say comics will lead us to ‘real’ reading,” says Maliszewski. “If you just read comics, that’s okay. Your parents might not think so, but it really is.”

Graphic novels still labour under the stigma toward comic books that swept North American culture in the 1940s and ‘50s, when censorious researchers sounded alarms over comics’ sexual and violent content. Most notable was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book, The Seduction of the Innocent, which dubiously but sensationally correlated real-world “deviant” behaviour with the kind of crime stories depicted in pulp comics of the time.

Although that kind of moral panic is no longer widespread, Maliszewski says she still encounters misconceptions about the genre. She overheard a fellow teacher proclaim that all manga (the massively popular Japanese comics) are pornographic—decidedly not the case—and still runs into resistance from teachers and librarians who believe sex and violence is still pervasive.

In general, the feedback to Maliszewski’s graphic novels collection has been positive, but not without some controversy. Some parents complained their kids only borrowed graphic novels and dismissed more traditional prose books.

Guy Demers says he also hears complaints that graphic novels, by adding visual elements, rob readers of the ability to imagine a book’s narrative themselves. “This is the comment that, to me, speaks to the general public’s ignorance of the form,” he says. “Would Citizen Kane have been better as a book? Would the Mona Lisa have made a better poem? It’s a different form and needs to be examined on its own terms.”

If the stigmas and misconceptions about reading graphic novels are common, the ones facing people with low literacy are even more widespread. Advocates believe illiteracy is a silent epidemic, misunderstood or, more commonly, simply ignored. Canada, for instance, is one of the few developed countries in the world without a national reading strategy. “The general public still doesn’t understand literacy and what it means to have low or poor literacy skills,” says Lindsay Kennedy, senior manager at the Movement for Canadian Literacy. But the social and economic effects are deep and widespread: low literacy is strongly associated with poor health and poverty. “When your literacy skills are low, you’re at risk,” says Kennedy.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A common misperception is that people with poor literacy cannot read at all, which is seldom the case. Far more common is low literacy, in which people can glean the bare minimum from a text. “Literacy is very much like a muscle,” says Kennedy. “If you don’t use it at all, you tend to forget how to use it.”

The Canadian government’s failure to address the country’s low literacy levels isn’t just a disconcerting issue for literacy organizations; educators like Maliszewski are also rallying for awareness and change. A national reading summit in 2009 assembled educators, librarians, academics, and publishers alike to discuss plans for a Canadian national reading strategy.

Although Maliszewski supports this movement, she says one of the problems the summit faced was the “prioritizing of literature,” which placed so-called “alternative reading materials,” such as graphic novels and comics, below that of traditional prose. She’s troubled by the implications of that.

“If you want to have a national reading strategy, you can’t be elitist about what people are reading,” says Maliszewski. “Reading comics is still reading. And depending on the comic, it’s really sophisticated reading.”

While the idea of graphic novels and comics as a legitimate means to combat low literacy levels in Canada is still contentious, there are educators across the country hoping people will see the merits of the graphic novel genre, in its ability to act both as a link to many other kinds of reading, and as a fulfilling and meaningful pastime in itself. Maliszewski wants to see all kinds of reading “not just tolerated, but celebrated.”

With so many Canadians facing literacy problems, and all the attendant difficulties that follow, it seems irresponsible not to try. Lindsay Kennedy believes the stakes are about as high as they can be: “Literacy is about giving people power. It’s about giving them freedom.”

The winners of the 2010 Great Canadian Literary Hunt are now all online for your reading pleasure, and we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to the hard-working judges who read through the entries to select this year’s winners. (Just a reminder that we’ve got a handy megalink to all the winning entries at http://2th.is/10HuntWinners.) Our thanks to these talented writers, artists, and poets: we couldn’t do it without you.

UPDATE: The one person who was — mortifyingly — left off this list of people deserving thanks is Stuart Ross, our fiction and poetry editor, who reads every single entry that comes in, helps recruit judges, and supports the contest throughout its almost year-long production process. The only explanation I have for why he wasn’t thanked in this note originally (and that’s still no excuse) is that he’s so instrumental to the contest that we tend to take his guidance and assistance for granted. For that, Stuart, I apologize. Thank you.

We would also like to thank contest coordinator Natalie Samson, who made the whole contest run smoothly this year. Our thanks, finally, to the volunteers who helped make the contest happen: Chantal Arseneault, Claudia Calabro, Luke Champion, Brianne Diangelo, Stef Duerr, Katie Findlay, Claire Haist, Heather Hogan, Kelli Korducki, Allen Kwan, Cory Lavender, Robyn Letson, Jesse Mintz, Vanessa Parks, Anne Thériault, Chris Sorenson, Melissa Wilson, and Ashley Winnington-Ball. Thank you!

Here are your judges for the 2010 contest:

Short Fiction

Gary Barwin is a writer and musician in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, most recently The Porcupinity of the Stars. His website is garybarwin.com.

Jenn Farrell is a Vancouver-based writer and editor, and two-time winner of the Vancouver Courier fiction contest. she is the author most recently of the short story collection The Devil You Know.

Nicole Markotic teaches creative writing at the University of Windsor, and is the author of the novel Yellow Pages and the poetry collections Connect the Dots and Minotaurs and Other Alphabets. Her chapbook more excess won the bpnichol Poetry chapbook award.

Poetry

Alice Burdick is a Nova Scotian poet. Her second major poetry collection is Flutter, which focuses on the small things and important moments of semi-rural life.

Dani Couture was born in Toronto and raised on a number of Canadian Forces bases. She is the author of two books of poetry and is currently working on her first novel, Black Bear on Water.

Jim W. Smith is the author of half a dozen books of poetry and chapbooks. He founded the poetry magazine The Front, and its spinoff, Front Press, published the work of many of Canada’s most important poets. He now works as a lawyer in Toronto, where he continues to write.

Graphic Narrative

Jeff Lemire was born and raised on a farm in Southern Ontario, which inspired his “Essex County” trilogy of graphic novels. He is the author of The Nobody and Sweet Tooth, and in 2008 won the Joe Schuster award for Best Canadian Cartoonist and the Doug Wright award for emerging talent. See his work at jefflemire.com.

Evan Munday is a comics illustrator in Toronto. He is the author of Quarter-Life Crisis, about a post-apocalyptic toronto in which only the 25-year-olds have survived. His website is idontlikemundays.com

Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian illustrator living in Brooklyn, New York. She has published three books of art and comics, including Indoor Voice, published by Drawn and Quarterly. Visit her at jilliantamaki.com.

“Just a matter of skill, that’s all!” Archie Andrews’ first words (said as he stood precariously atop his bike) may have seemed spontaneous in 1941, but 70 years have imbued the line with more weight than a supersized chocolate malt. The comic world’s most famous redhead proved to be not only adept at bicycle acrobatics, but also at juggling women. He’s also suddenly emerged as something unexpected: a culture warrior.

Ostensibly about a gaggle of teens from Riverdale, Archie comics are buoyed by the hero’s love triangle with two chipmunk-nosed teens: best friends Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. The former is marketed as the quintessential girl next door and appeared alongside Archie in the comic’s premier issue. Betty remained Archie’s sole female interest until April 1942, when Veronica slinked into the frame.

Betty and Veronica have been feuding over Archiekins for seven decades and, until recently, there appeared to be no end in sight. But on May 15, 2009, it was announced that the eternal 17-year-old had finally made up his mind. While everyone believed Archie would settle for dependable and—let’s face it—less exciting Betty, he surprised fans by deciding to marry Veronica. In so doing, Archie subverted society’s traditional view of what makes a good wife.

Betty and Veronica are both feminine archetypes, as two-dimensional as the comic book world they live in. Wholesome, domesticated, and devoted to her beloved, Betty Cooper is the era’s perfect wife. Created by Bob Montana in the wake of the Great Depression, Betty comes from a world where no one has ever burned a bra, and only men work outside the home. Years later, the rise of feminism added book smarts and auto mechanics to Betty’s roster of domestic talents, but her unabated crush on Archie subverted even these liberated pursuits. She was often found under the hood of his jalopy, for instance, or sitting one of his exams.

Veronica Lodge is the closest thing Montana ever got to a femme fatale. Well travelled and sophisticated, the buxom brunette comes from the richest family in Riverdale and is appropriately spoiled to the core. As a girl who has always been indulged, Veronica treats even her lovers like possessions she can dispose of at will. She often “borrows” Archie away from her best friend, Betty, for example, because what Ronnie wants, Ronnie gets.

The girls are obvious Freudian archetypes: Betty represents the “Madonna” and Veronica is the “whore.” Freud believed that for some men, a wife acted also as a mother—a “Madonna” figure—which keeps him from being sexually attracted to her. He reserves sex for the “whore,” for whom he does not develop feelings of love. Thus, he is destined to love a woman who can’t satisfy him sexually, while he’s sexually satisfied by a woman he can’t love. Despite decades of feminist critique, our popular culture is still filled with these simple characterizations—with Betty and Veronica being one of the longest-running examples (and most resistant to progress). Archie refers to Betty as his best friend, a confidante with whom he is extremely comfortable, the first person he contacts when he needs an ego boost. On the other hand, Archie is powerless when it comes to Veronica’s feminine wiles. Ronnie uses her sex appeal to manipulate her freckle-faced paramour—much like the “whore” who dominates the sexual side of the Madonna-whore complex.

The general outrage and surprise at Archie’s decision to marry Veronica has proven that we still buy into Freud’s Madonna-whore complex. Western pop culture still deeply believes that conspicuously chaste, non-threatening, compliant girls next door, like Betty, make “good wives,” while more outspoken, willful, and liberated Veronica-esque vixens are only worthy as mistresses. Astonishingly, Archie has turned out to be more progressive than his fans, overturning such archaic dualism. In this case, it’s not a matter of skill; it’s just a matter of looking beyond two dimensions.

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.

Jillian Tamaki

Last year, on October 21, Jillian Tamaki got a phone call from her cousin, the Toronto-based writer-performer Mariko Tamaki. Their muchloved co-creation Skim had made history by becoming the first graphic novel nominated for a Governor General’s Award, in the Children’s Literature (Text) category. Skim, loosely about sexuality, teenage alienation, and Wicca, had already received a torrent of praise and would later make the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books list. Now it was in the running for Canada’s pre-eminent literary prize.

But there was a snag. The Canada Council for the Arts had only nominated Mariko, who wrote the text. Tamaki, whose signature sketchy, half-finished illustrations filled the book’s pages, was not included in the honour. The writer was the author; the illustrator was not. “Obviously, I was extremely disappointed,” Tamaki writes in an email — the Brooklyn-based Calgary expat gently insisted on an online interview because she is “a bit phone shy.” “I suppose it can be argued that one could read the text and look at the illustrations of a children’s book separately, but that’s impossible with a graphic novel.”

A few weeks later, on November 12, genre heavyweights Chester Brown and Seth published an open letter to the Governor General’s Literary Awards, condemning the council’s exclusion of Tamaki and its implicit misunderstanding of how graphic novels work. “The text of a graphic novel cannot be separated from its illustrations because the words and the pictures together are the text,” they wrote. “Try to imagine evaluating Skim if you couldn’t see the drawings.” The council responded that it was too late to change the nomination, and the award eventually went to another work. But the letter — co-signed by a cadre of comics luminaries — quietly marked a touchstone in the uneven cultural ascent of the graphic novel.

Page from Skim by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Click to enlarge

“In a tiny way, I believe the letter nudged the comics community and the book community together, at least in Canada and albeit briefly,” Tamaki says. “It’s not often they have a dialogue. For about a week, we were talking about the nature of storytelling in this medium, which is unfamiliar to new readers.” Graphic novels have proven lucrative as blockbuster film adaptations, though literary approval remains more elusive. “But the book world is obviously making some big statements by nominating graphic novels in its more traditional categories,” Tamaki adds. “It says a lot, since I believe that some still probably believe that comics will never be ‘legitimate’ literature.”

It isn’t surprising that a medium marked by egalitarianism between art and text might turn off the word-focused lit world. “We forget that as ‘comics people’ sometimes: there is a large segment of readers who are picking up their first graphic novel and learning how to read them and judge them,” Tamaki says. Brown and Seth are right that it is impossible to imagine Skim without Tamaki’s drawings. One crucial moment is entirely wordless; the eponymous narrator kisses her adult teacher in a tangle of woods, the school faintly visible in the background. This illustration takes up a full two-page spread.

Despite Skim‘s success, Tamaki still considers herself a “comics newcomer.” She is an editorial illustrator by trade, whose list of clients includes the New York Times and the Guardian, as well as Canadian outlets like the CBC and The Walrus. “Illustrators are interpreters of others’ ideas, and I enjoy that challenge,” Tamaki says. “But oftentimes there is not a lot of yourself in illustration work.” Tamaki, though, is everywhere in Skim, in every pained adolescent expression and looming empty space. Her contribution escaped the Canada Council for the Arts, unaccustomed as it was to a foreign format. But her presence stays with the reader.

He may refer to them as “funny books,” but Ho Che Anderson views comics as a serious, socially redeeming art. The Toronto cartoonist has authored a number of intriguing titles in the past decade, but none so potent as KING, a graphic novel trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King Jr. The three volumes, which appeared between 1993 and 2003, were commissioned by Seattle-based publisher Fantagraphics. Dark, moody and not always flattering of its subject, Anderson’s interpretive biography was hailed as “rare and vital” by time.com. The 34-year-old artist will release another Fantagraphics book, a supernatural thriller called Scream Queen, next spring, and is currently seeking a publisher for Corporate World, a graphic novel he describes as “a sci-fi blaxploitation action-adventure epic.”

How politically motivated were your parents?

My mother not so much; my father very much so. Anybody who names his son after Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara has obviously got politics very much at the centre of his psyche. It’s tempting to say he was militantly black, but that’s not how I see it. He was never anti-white, by any means. He was always very much pro-black, like, “Please, let’s bring ourselves up beyond the level we’re at.” For a lot of years, that was something I kind of rebelled against—being overtly politically active. But it filters through in the stuff that I do, whether or not I want it to.

How would you characterize your own political drive?

It only goes as far as my work. I’ve thought about hands-on activism in the past, but it’s just not me. I admire people who get out and protest and speak out. I admire them more than anybody. But it’s not really part of my makeup. So the only way I can tackle this stuff is through the stories that I tell. That being said, black people have a certain burden put on them right from the start. Just by virtue of living on this continent, you have to be political. It’s just unavoidable. I’ve always sort of resented that. I’ve always sort of wished that I could be granted the freedom to be as irrelevant and superficial as the rest of society, if that’s how I choose to live my life. But that’s never really been much of an option.

In the first volume of KING, you wrote that you didn’t want to be known as the chronicler of black rage in comics. At the same time, you said that you’re driven to tell black stories. Do you see that as a contradiction?

Actually, I do think it’s a bit of a contradiction. Part of me feels like white folks have the opportunity to tell their stories all the time, and it’s accepted. I sort of feel like there’s enough white people out there telling their stories, and I’m not really sure why I should have to tell their stories as well.

How much has racial equality progressed since King’s death?

The same problems that existed historically are still there to a large extent. I think inherently there is systemic racism at play. It’s built into the very framework of this society. I think it’s possible to get beyond it at some point, but I don’t fully see that it has happened today. Just because you see Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell in the White House, do not assume that all is right with the world and equality has been achieved.

Andre Mayer is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in Toronto Life, The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Magazine and eye Weekly. As yet, he has no books to plug.