festival BD de Montréal 2025

 I had the chance to walk around the comic book festival today for a couple hours, only the second time I was able to go. It was a little wet but still great to see what must be 2 km of kiosks promoting not just comics but the artists who make them, especially local artists. 

This is nothing like a comic con, it's much more grass roots and no one dresses up and no big studios are here promoting the latest super hero movie. Graphic novels are taken seriously here and there is a huge variety of content to see from commercially published books to those made at the copy centre to children's stories, to political tale, horror, sci-fi, slice of life, humour... you name it. 

There wasn't a lot of original artwork on sale so what i saw was really good and many artists were there in person to sell their books. Book stores and local comic book stores were well represented. I noticed there were a large number of formats being sold from limited edition beautifully designed hard covers and boxed sets to self published works. Almost no toys, movie posters or any of the other trappings of conventions now aimed at the general public over serious art fans looking to see more than just big commercial efforts. There seemed to be more English books this year but they also just might have stood out to me more since i usually don't see English books normally for sale. The people there were mostly men as these things usually are but not too much of an imbalance. The artists were really diverse - racially, age-wise, and it was a very open and welcoming and atmosphere. English and French were pretty evenly balanced as well. 

Memorial project: Tomorrow is Another Day

 

My friend Ralph had a long, maybe 10 year project, he worked on. It was a sequel to his favourite film, Gone with the Wind and he wanted to tell that story basically as a graphic novel or comic book and include as many old Hollywood stars from the film's era into his new story. They had to be around and available to David O Selznick when a second movie would have been made. He used the technique he used in making his renowned paper doll books, drawing out each page on letter sized paper, inking it and then making a copy of the cleaned up artwork to paint with watercolours. This had the extra step of typing out the dialogue for the thought balloons and then attaching them to the finished art before making colour photocopies to produce the final version of each page. 

Sadly my friend did not understand you can't sell a new story based on someone else's copyrighted work so this giant effort could never been professionally published and it was a huge disappointment for him. He showed its and pieces of the work to people but almost never the entire thing despite people, like me, begging him to. I wanted to scan the original art and put into a self published book using the company Blurb so he could see what it might have looked like as a "real"  book and even have copies made for his friends. That wasn't something I could get him to sign on to though. 

Now, after his passing his good friend Dan has spent a lot of time scanning a copies of the entire project he managed to get Ralph to give him so that i can fix it up and make that blurb book and a PDF version for his loved ones. 

This will take a LONG time. I did take the page I thought might be the most challenging and make it usable. I worked on the colour and straightening out the scan but the most difficult part was the text, especially the long list of movies stars listed. Some of the names were unreadable. So I removed all the text except the title by hand and recreated the art beneath it so as to have a clean image to put more readable text over. I hand typed the replacement text and researched names I could not read well to be reasonably sure they were the names Ralph wanted and then re-arranged the placement of them so the names could be a little larger and easier to read when printed. 

On top is the finished page so far and below is the original scan and the page after I removed the text. This isn't nearly the most interesting or exciting page in the book but I think it will be (I hope) the one needing the most work to prepare it for printing. I would have had a full age just for the names so they could be a decent size but this is as far from Ralph's original design I am willing to go.