TCAF in TOKYO!

TCAF in Tokyo! The Toronto Comics Art Festival is an annual event held at the Bloor St. Reference Library in downtown T.O. The exhibition features an amazing assortment of independent alternative comic book creators from around the world. The idea is to showcase people working outside the standard comic book genres and conventions such as superheroes in order to explore social, political & personal issues such as class, gender, poetry and biographical issues. In addition to the Toronto TCAF event often travels with the artists to do international expos including events in Tokyo. This past year (2015) I was fortunate enough to take part in the expedition and brought my books to the Kaigai Manga Festa海外マンガフェスタ(Tokyo International Comics Festival).

This comic con was different from anything I have experienced in North America in many ways. The first thing that caught my attention was the size of the artists alley. This section was easily twice as big as Toronto's largest event FANEXPO and was comprised of entirely of independent artists promoting there own creations just like TCAF. In North America (with the exception of TCAF) most of the artist alleys are occupied by illustrators displaying “fan art”. The big difference here is that in Western comics the goal is to get hired by a major company to work on an established character while the Japanese artists are looking to break out with their own fresh creations. In a similar manner to our portfolio reviews the major publishing companies had booths set up check out the aspiring artists work but again the scale and energy here far outweighed anything I've seen at Western conventions and rather than simply critiquing the illustrations these editors were looking for stories. It was really inspirational.

For our booth we had a fairly large display featuring about 10 Canadian artists as well as a section from the legendary Beguiling Book Store. I was fortunate enough to have a number of my short comics translated into Japanese and printed as a single volume anthology. This turned out to be a really good idea as most people picked this issue up first before exploring the English language titles. However much to my surprise some of my English books were the best sellers and I noticed people weren't intimidated but rather excited by the work regardless of their English language skills. There was something magical about sharing the artwork through the language barrier and this was undoubtedly one of my greatest experiences as artist.

Another interesting feature of the comic con was the live drawing demonstrations and celebrity creators. Occasionally I have seen live demos at conventions but they are generally fairly small scale and always a sponsored promotion for some new computer drawing tablet. At the Kaigai they had some big time artists working away with movie sized projections of their work all along the back wall. Not only did giant crowds gather to watch the demos intently but they could be seen from the other side of the giant hall. In addition to the live drawing there were several well known manga artists mixed in among the young and independent creators. 

ART GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

COMIC CON