On April 18, graduating students of Camosun’s Comics & Graphic Novels (CGN) certificate program will unveil their final projects at the Camosun Comic Arts Festival, an annual event celebrating the artistic and literary achievements of CGN students. The event features original student artwork, prints, stickers, and more available to browse and purchase; the festival also includes professional guest comic book creators showcasing their own artwork.
CGN student and Nexus cartoonist Finnegan Sinclaire Howes (see wildthings, page 10) says this year’s student art projects are particularly ambitious, with some students working hard to create several.
“In a lot of past years, there’s been a lot of focus on just making a collection of short stories that aren’t really related and creating just a portfolio of work,” says Howes. “But this year, a lot of us have really pushed ourselves to create full stories of 20 to 30, even one student is making a 48-page, comic. Some people have made more than one.”
Howes’ passion for comics began in early childhood; they cite Robert Munsch’s work, Calvin and Hobbes, and Bone as their inspiration. Howes believes what makes the creative medium so exciting is a unique quality not found in movies, books, or other narrative and visual mediums.
“It’s just a really dynamic medium that stretches the brain in so many different ways. I love it because you get to do so much,” says Howes. “You get to draw it, you get to write a story, and then you get to figure out how these characters look, and then you get to figure out how the scenery looks and how to put in there and how to sequence it in a way that’s pleasing and exciting for the reader.”
Howes has benefited from the program as an artist, notably by sharing a creative and uplifting environment to explore the medium with a collective.
“There’s nothing more beneficial to your art than being able to just do it with other people in a space dedicated for that,” Howes says. “And I feel so lucky to have access to this. “
The experience has also allowed Howes to unlearn perfectionism, a habit that prevented them from creating and pursuing comics for the last 12 years. They give credit to the program’s head instructor for developing a comfortable artistic space.
“The head of the program, Gareth Gaudin, is really fantastic in that he’s… not concerned with us making really good or great comics, he’s concerned with us just making stuff,” says Howes. “And his whole approach is to remove the pressure and expectations that we all already have about our own art, and to just make it something that we can do, and to just encourage us to just do it.”
Gaudin is a life-long local cartoonist, owner of Legends Comics and Books in downtown Victoria, and self-published author of nearly 300 comic books. Over his career, he has seen the legitimization of comics progress alongside him, now moving into what he feels is a golden era of comics being seen as an art form. Gaudin says this embrace has allowed the new generation of cartoonists to prosper.
“My batch of students that are just graduating, all have come to this class with 20 years of social acceptability of their comics, and there’s manga and anime in their lives. So they’ve just been ingesting how comics are made, so… they are all infinitely more talented than I’ve ever been,” says Gaudin. “So I think something very interesting’s going on that if you allow people to read comics and don’t turn them into a secondary literature, they’re more free to create them.”
After many years of public comic book burnings and bannings in the ’40s and ’50s, superheroes were one of few character types left to rule the industry, a genre that Gaudin feels oversaturated the medium. Now, with Marvel and DC shifting momentum away from comics and onto the continued production of movies, Gaudin says the medium has finally been left alone to broaden.
“Comics can be anything now,” he says. “Autobiographies, biographies, slice of life, anything you could possibly want to write about, you can write about in comics. And each one of the students is writing and publishing a new point of view.”
Making a comic book is the first step to making a comic book, says Gaudin; getting the initial, unsatisfactory product finished is fundamental to artistic creation—the second will only exist because the first did.
“The only thing worse than a bad comic is no comic,” he says. “So make comics.”
Camosun Comic Arts Festival
2 pm to 7 pm Thursday, April 18
Free, Sherri Bell Hall,
Wilna Thomas Building
camosun.ca/events/camosun-comic-arts-festival-ccaf