Toronto Comic Arts Festival: Seth, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Adrian Tomine

Christopher Butcher is the Director and co-founder of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, blogs daily at comics212.net, and is the manager of internationally acclaimed graphic novel retailer The Beguiling.

Cartoonist Seth has illustrated several graphic novels including Clyde Fans; It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken; Wimbledon Green; George Sprott and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. He is also the designer of the New York Times bestselling Complete Peanuts collections and the Penguin Classics Edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker. He was the 2011 winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize.

Born in Osaka, Japan in 1935, Yoshihiro Tatsumi began writing and drawing comics for a sophisticated adult readership in a realistic style he called “Gekiga.” Often called “the grandfather of Japanese alternative comics,” he has influenced generations of Japanese cartoonists. Tatsumi was recently announced as one of the winners for this year’s prestigious Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize, for his most recent book, A Drifting Life. In A Drifting Life, Tatsumi uses his life-long obsession with comics as the framework for a complex autobiographical story that is the masterful summation of a fascinating life and an historic career.

Adrian Tomine’s illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire and Rolling Stone, and his stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and An Anthology of Graphic Fiction. Shortcomings, Tomine's first long-form graphic novel, was serialized in his iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13. It is the story of Ben Tanaka, a confused, obsessive Japanese American male in his late twenties, and his cross-country search for contentment (or at least the perfect girl).

Over ten years in the making, A Drifting Life is Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s most ambitious, personal and heartfelt work to date: an autobiography in graphic novel form. Using his life-long obsession with comics as the framework, Tatsumi weaves a complex story that encompasses family dynamics, Japanese culture and history, first love, the intricacies of the manga industry, and, most importantly, what it means to be an artist. Alternately humorous, enlightening and haunting, A Drifting Life is the masterful summation of a fascinating life and an historic career. “Remarkable, amazing…prepare to be blown away.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Celebrated cartoonist and New Yorker cover artist Seth gives us the fictional life of George Sprott. On the surface, George seems to be a charming, foolish old man – but who is he? And who was he? The reader comes to know George piece by piece, through a series of “interviews,” flashbacks and personal reminiscences. George Sprott (1894–1975) is a story about time, identity, loss, and the pervasiveness of memory. Though ultimately this is the story of a man’s death, Seth leavens it with humour, restraint and a light touch. Originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, this greatly expanded and “re-mastered” version is the first publication of George Sprott’s story as a complete work.

Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic and insensitive, his long-term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and, more to the point, it’s wandering in the direction of white women. This accusation (and its various implications) becomes the subject of heated, spiralling debate, setting in motion a story that pits California against New York, devotion against desire, and trust against truth.