Detail of "2005 of the Top 3000" (2005) by Olia Mishchenko. Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario, image courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

“A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” Karl Marx noted. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Born in Kiev in 1980 and based in Toronto since 1997, artist Olia Mishchenko uses a paraphrase of this passage to situate her work. Bees perform a collective algorithm larger than any individual, while architects are engaged in singular imaginative play, a poesis, that brings forth something new. The tension between the plan and the realized built form—the translation of thought into reality—is a creative crucible, like the battle between paint and canvas, ink and paper, body and field of play.

But whereas Marx falls firmly on the side of the architect and human imagination, and thus allows architects more of the Fountainhead-style self-congratulation that can make them so obnoxious, Mishchenko’s whimsical renderings of collective construction are just as unstable as the buildings being erected in them. Or are they even buildings? In work after work, armies of tiny cartoonish figures—running children, dogs, people on bicycles—enact coordinated but uncanny undertakings, building and playing, laughing and working, leaving behind piles of materials, tools, ramps, walkways, and rickety towers as they venture across sometimes long horizontal vistas of creation. The details offer ambiguous and sometimes disturbing narratives. Who are the children? What are the structures for? What is the social system that calls them forth?

I have one Mishchenko drawing, untitled like all of them from this period, and in it there are no figures at all, just an apparently abandoned minaret fashioned of waterwheels, boxes, and large canisters full of clothing. Is it a dump or a supply centre, a folly or a shrine? And where are the usually busy figures, with their game boards and ladders and rope pulleys, their walking sticks and trunks of hewn wood? The absence is provocative. Mishchenko doesn’t celebrate architecture, she investigates the very idea of shared space, of public meaning, of makers and made. In their lighthearted manner, these joyous political artworks offer fresh sketches of the place where individual identity meets its collective other.

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.