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Chris Butcher @ Comic-Con International: San Diego

Some con-goers taking a break at San Diego 2007.

Hey everyone! After my one year hiatus (first since 2002) I’m happily headed back to the San Diego Comic Con July 21st-25th! I love me some comic-cons, and I really love the biggest comic-con the most–it’s just completely insane. I’m planning on writing about and from the show whenever possible, and hitting up all the parties and visiting all the booths and all of it. Keep reading the blog for updates, and if you’re a PR person/rep and wanna invite me to something, feel free to drop me a line at chris [at] beguiling [dot] com.

On that note, I’ll also be working The Beguiling’s original art sales area periodically, located in the Drawn & Quarterly booth (same area as last year I believe). Official PR about that one a little later, once we have the booth number and such.

I’m also quite honoured to be moderating or participating in a number of awesome panels and programs. I’d be delighted if you’d come out and visit, I think they’re all going to be pretty awesome (though all very different):

Thursday, July 22
The Best and Worst of Manga 2010
4:30-5:30pm, Room 3
It’s been a wild year for manga, with new publishers springing up while old ones fade away, and sometimes it seems like the one constant in life is that One Piece will go on forever. Join our five panelists—Deb Aoki (manga.about.com), Jason Thompson (Manga: The Complete Guide), Christopher Butcher (comics.212.net), Tom Spurgeon (comicsreporter.com) and Kai-Ming Cha (Publishers Weekly)—as they talk about the best and worst manga of the last year, the manga they want to see translated, and the most anticipated upcoming releases!

Friday, July 23
Comics Design
3:30 – 4:30pm, Room 26AB
How do pages of art become a book? Six designers – Mark Chiarello (DC Comics), Adam Grano (Fantagraphics), Chip Kidd (Random House), Fawn Lau (Viz), Mark Siegel (First Second Books), and Keith Wood (Oni Press) – discuss what’s involved in the process of comics design, and the importance of design to a book’s critical and consumer reception. Moderated by Chris Butcher (The Beguiling).

Saturday, July 24
Comics in the Classroom
3:30 – 4:30, Room 26AB
Comics are becoming increasingly common in the elementary and Secondary classrooms. But how can teachers incorporate comics into their course curriculums? This panel provides practical strategies for teachers to do just that. Presented by Anastasia Betts (UCLA), Christina Blanch (Ball State University), Deborah Ford (San Diego Unified School District), and Tracy White (NYU). Moderated by Chris Butcher (The Beguiling).

—

See you there!

– Christopher Butcher

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Japan 2009: Harajuku: Kiddy Land, Tintin Shop

I like taking pictures of toys, because I like Looking at toys. Particularly toys that are beautifully constructed, and not stuff you normally find here in North America. Harajuku, fashion and shopping Mecca of Japan, is a place to find pretty-much everything your heart desires, including a huge toy-store (mostly aimed at a female clientelle) called Kiddy Land. In 2008 I took my first trip to Japan and spent an hour wandering around this heavily boutiqued and beautiful toy-store, and I probably spent even longer there in 2009.


View Larger Map

From Harajuku JR Station (the main point of entry for any tourist) you can head east along the major-chain shopping street Omotesando (home of the Omotesando shopping complex) (the yellow one also labeled ‘413’), or head north a block and then head east (turn right at The McDonalds, basically) along the tiny Takeshita Dori, home of high-fashion boutiques, low-fashion boutiques, goth/loli wear, indy/alt/punk wear, and so very much more. For this trip we headed up Omotoesando, circled the entire city back to Harajuku JR Station, and then headed east along Takeshita Dori. It was a very long day… but the photos are pretty great…! Click to…

Continue reading “Japan 2009: Harajuku: Kiddy Land, Tintin Shop”

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I went back to Japan!

Hey! It’s been quiet around here eh? Heh. Sorry. I’ve been… busy. It’s been busy. It’s gonna keep being busy too, but man, things are good. I’m doing lots of cool stuff to make comics better and more interesting and that’s what counts, right?

No? Okay, you’re right. Sorry. I will write about comics some more instead. But first I’m gonna have to do a little bit of self-promotion. I’m on a very cool panel at San Diego, and I’m moderating two very cool panels, and that’s gonna be fun. Plus we’re doing Beguiling stuff there? And September… and October. Man.

So, yeah.

But first: I went to Japan in the week between TCAF and Anime North to buy stuff to sell, and it was a great trip. Here’s me at one of those ground-level train crossings that seemingly only exist in anime, just south of Shinjuku Station.

I still have 3-4 posts worth of material from my Summer 2009 trip too. Yikes!

Anyway, good times, busy times, but I’ll try not to disappear again.

Here’s a shot of me in a Yukata:

Here’s from when I met the awesome/legendary Shintaro Kago and bought some art off of him:

I’ll try and organize something more coherent this week. Thanks for continuing to read/subscribe to this blog.

Oh, and the last two manga milestones of 2009, I’m gonna fish those too.

– Christopher

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TCAF 2010 Wrap-Up!

The 2010 Toronto Comic Arts Festival Wrap-Up

Hi Friends!

My name is Christopher Butcher, and I’m the co-founder and festival director of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF)! As you might know, TCAF is dedicated to celebrating comics and graphic novels and their creators, with a specific focus on all of the great comics that Canadian creators have to offer. I had the pleasure of presiding over our fifth festival last month, and I’m pleased to report it was our most-successful and best-attended yet. Perhaps the best example of this is that TCAF was the number 3 trending topic on Twitter in Canada for much of the Sunday of the show, even beating out Canadian supercrush Justin Beiber. It’s a heartening example of how many people TCAF speaks to, and to their affection for the event.

Rather than send out a big PR, and in keeping with our tradition, on behalf of the staff and executive of TCAF — and whom I thank for their hard work and dedication — I’m sending out the following informal note talking about TCAF 2010 and announcing exciting plans for the future.

Thanks For All Of The Support!

We’d like to thank our partners and presenting sponsors Toronto Public Library for supporting, promoting, and hosting TCAF 2010 at their fantastic flagship location, Toronto Reference Library. By incorporating the gorgeous new Bram & Bluma Appel Salon into the TCAF floorplan we were able to comfortably more-than-double our footprint for 2010, expanding to more than 200 exhibitors and honoured guests, and dozens of comics-related readings and symposiums. The increased space allowed us to easily accommodate a great increase in public attendance — a record high 12,000 TCAF-specific attendees visited the Festival over the weekend (a 10% increase over 2009)! 2010 marks TCAF’s second year of partnership with TPL, and it’s a partnership that reinforces that TCAF is a not-for-profit event. We’ve always maintained that making TCAF free removes a key obstacle – finances – for anyone who might be interested in the comics medium, and TPL continues to be a wonderful partner in that goal.

Of course there’s no Festival without great creators and works to celebrate, and so we’d like to thank all of the wonderful cartoonists, publishers, writers, artists, and other agencies that took the time to exhibit and present at TCAF 2010, it made for a truly diverse and excellent look at the medium of comics, touching on every corner of the medium. Special thanks to featured guests Daniel Clowes, Roger Langridge, Jeff Lemire, Paul Pope, Dash Shaw, James Sturm, Charles Vess and Jim Woodring, all of whom chose to premiere their wonderful new projects with TCAF, and for participating in panels and workshops and presentations and general support.

About The Festival…

TCAF tried a number of new initiatives this year that used Toronto Reference Library in new and unique ways, and we found them to be generally quite successful; our Publisher’s Pavilion was significantly cooler than last year, our Sunday kids area was packed all day, and the new Webcomics Pavilion was busy all weekend! Of particular note were our art installations. The biggest and boldest installation from Toronto art collective Trio Magnus (Clayton Hanmer, Aaron Leighton, and Steve Wilson) was fantastic, featuring a massive installation, live drawing, and a unique and vibrant set-up! Canadian webcomics collective Transmission-X transformed a learning centre into something unique and fun, and the fine folks at indie-lit magazine Broken Pencil and artist group WOWEE ZONK teamed up to create “The Small Press Schooner,” a rotating assemblage of fantastic non- and nominally-narrative artists, producing unique visual works over the course of the weekend. It was a great space with a great vibe and Chris Kuzma, Patrick Kyle, and Ginette LaPalme deserve big thanks for their hard work making it look so good.

At TCAF we’ve definitely strived to integrate ourselves into the rich fabric of cultural events and exhibitions that happen around Toronto, and a big part of that has been the support of the local and national media that help to draw out comics aficionados and newcomers from all corners. Again this year, the Arts & Life section of the National Post newspaper went above and beyond in their coverage of TCAF, running over a hundred Q&As with TCAF exhibitors and cartoonists in addition to numerous feature articles—the kind of coverage they reserve for massive events like NXNE and The International Festival of Authors. Our 2010 lead media sponsor Eye Weekly ran a cover story and many other pages of coverage on the 2010 festival and guest Daniel Clowes, and cross-town rivals NOW Magazine got in on the act with a cover feature on TCAF-debut graphic novel KENK. We also received fantastic coverage from the CBC, Toronto Star, Torontoist, BlogTO, Publishers Weekly, Quill &Quire, Sequential, The Walrus, Comics Reporter, RGB Filter, Open Books Toronto, plus dozens of blogs, thousands of tweets, and a general increased awareness of what we do and why we do it was the end result. Thank you!

We Couldn’t Have Done It Without…

Finally, we’d like to thank some of the organizations and individuals who worked to make TCAF 2010 such an unprecedented success:

  • – Sponsors & Partners Toronto Public Library, Eye Weekly, Owl Magazine, The French Consulate in Toronto, Broken Pencil, The Walrus, HeartsandFlours.ca, and especially The Beguiling Books and Art for their ongoing financial support.
  • – Venue partners The Bram & Bluma Appel Salon, Toronto Reference Library, The Merril Collection/Lillian H. Smith Library, The Miles Nadal JCC, The Pilot, Clinton’s Tavern, Fuzion Lounge, Tequila Bookworm, and The Cadillac Lounge.
  • – TCAF 2010 Poster artist Daniel Clowes, and Drawn & Quarterly’s Tom Devlin for helping us put the poster together.
  • – The staff of Toronto Public Library, Toronto Reference Library, and The Bram and Bluma Appel Salon for all of their work, and especially TPL’s Ab Velasco for his tireless efforts to make TCAF a success.
  • – Our many programming hosts and moderators including Mark Askwith (SPACE), Robin McConnell (Inkstuds), Gil Roth, Matthew Kumar, Jason Thompson, Bart Beaty, Holly Post, Dan Nadel, Robin Brenner, Kathryn & Stuart Immonen, Jeet Heer, Jose Villarrubia, Jason Azzopardi, Scott Campbell and Graham Annable, Larry Marder, Jim Munroe, Walter Dickinson, MK Reed, Brad Mackay, Eva Volin, Matt Forsythe, and Jaleen Grove.
  • – The hosts and staff of The 2010 Doug Wright Awards for throwing a great event Saturday evening.
  • – The staff of The Beguiling for working on their weekend off
  • – Peggy Burns from Drawn & Quarterly for excellent organization and coordination of guests.
  • – Chip Zdarsky for his wonderful maps and expert assistance.
  • – George Rohac for his early support!
  • – Nadine Lessio for the fantastic new web-presence.
  • – The always shrewd advice of Nathalie Atkinson.
  • – Finally, and especially, our volunteers. I’m convinced that we have the greatest assemblage of volunteers of any major comics event, and this year’s crew were efficient, helpful, and praised by all of our exhibitors. Thank you for all of your hard work, dedication, and support, and we hope to see you back again in 2011.

The BIG News…!

Yes, you read that correctly: TCAF will occur annually for the foreseeable future. Save the Date: the next Toronto Comic Arts Festival is on for May 7 & 8, 2011, at Toronto Reference Library. It is once again Mother’s Day weekend. (Thanks, by the way, to all of the cool Moms who came out for the event on the Sunday.)

Our number one request for years now, from our partners, sponsors, exhibitors, attendees, and staff, has been to make the show a regularly occurring annual event. After our trial year, we feel confident that we can accomplish TCAF to our satisfaction on an annual basis. We’ve looked at what worked, and what didn’t, and we’re ready to take all the necessary actions to make TCAF an annual show, even if that means some change.

A big part of going to an annual event is the recognition that we’d like to make TRL our home for the foreseeable future, that we’d like to offer a space for new exhibitors and artists every year but our physical presence is not going to increase much year-over-year, and that the Festival’s landscape and texture must continue to change every year in order to ensure a fresh and exciting event. We’ve always tried to strike a balance between innovations to improve the show and creating a familiar and welcoming experience for exhibitors and attendees, and that won’t change… But some changes will be made to how the show operates and interacts with the comics community in order to create the best event possible. We ask for the support and understanding of all of our exhibitors and attendees going forward in the years to come, and you can expect further announcements this August. We promise all of you reading this: we are committed to making TCAF 2011 our best comics festival yet, and any and all changes we make will be towards that goal.

In Conclusion…

On behalf of myself and the entire staff we’d like to thank all everyone who made The 2010 Toronto Comic Arts Festival such a fantastic success. We greatly appreciate your support, promotion, and most-of-all your attendance at all of our Festival events. We’re looking forward to presenting great shows for years to come.

Best,

Christopher Butcher, Festival Director & Co-Founder
The Toronto Comic Arts Festival

On behalf of…

Peter Birkemoe, Co-Founder

Miles Baker, Assistant Festival Director

Nathalie Atkinson, Media Coordinator

Rob Broughton, Sean Rogers, and Tory Woollcott, Site Coordinators

Kate Dickson and Gina Gagliano, Programming Coordinators

Scott Robins, Kids Programming Coordinator

Andrew Woodrow-Butcher, Volunteer Coordinator

Parrish Kilthei, Tech Coordinator

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What A Difference A Day Makes – Gay Graphic Novels Uncensored?

Timeline:

May 24th: Zan Christiensen posts a great article about possible censorship concerns against gay-centric graphic novels at Apple’s App Store, for the iPad and iPhone.
http://prismcomics.org/display.php?id=1858

June 13th: The New York Times covers the case of ULYSSES SEEN, a graphic novel adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses that had non-sexual nudity edited out after demands by the appstore people. Rage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/technology/14ulysses.html

June 14th, 1:40am: I post a link to Zan’s article at Prism, add a little bit of commentary and additional thinking, call for comment. I feel bad for being behind the times…

June 14th, 10:40am: Tech blog Gizmodo picks up on the story of ULYSSES SEEN and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST censorship.
http://gizmodo.com/5562802/the-latest-examples-of-apples-stupid-editorial-censorship

June 14th, 12:30pm: Awesome Gay Blog JoeMyGod publishes a story on the same issue, based on a reader tip.
http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/06/apple-censors-gay-graphic-novels-but.html

June 14th, 4pm: Gizmodo updates that Apple has apparently reversed its decision and has asked the creators of both ULYSSES SEEN and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST to resubmit the unedited works for approval.

While it shouldn’t have taken a public, multi-site shaming to get Apple’s act together, I’m quite pleased that both sets of creators will get their work to be presented in the format they’d originally intended, and hopefully get a nice little sales boost from all of the attention. I’m glad that whatever small part I played in bringing the story to people’s attention helped resolve the situation, and kudos again to Zan for writing a great article and highlighting an obvious injustice. I hope the Yaoi Press people aren’t similarly left behind…

Which brings us to another issue, as mentioned by my friend Andrew Wheeler this morning:

@Wheeler: Given Apple’s censorship, shouldn’t intelligent liberals adamantly reject it as a publishing platform? Where’d our ethics go? I refer in part to the censorship of comic adaptations of Wilde http://tinyurl.com/37j3q3b and Joyce http://nyti.ms/9HzgFE

Where indeed? Are we really prepared to hand over the keys to the digital kingdom to a company that has to be aggressively shamed into behaving well?
Or should we count our blessings, because there are companies that don’t know the definition of shame who might be in the same position soon (rhymes with Amazon).
– Christopher
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Continued “Censorship” on the iPad – Gay books a no-go

Too racy for Apple? Apparently so... The Importance of Being Ernest, by Tom Bouden.

While I was on my little hiatus, one of the things I did make a point to read was Zan Christiensen’s excellent and lengthy essay on the difficulties that queer creators and queer-themed comics works have had getting accepted into Apple’s iPad app store. I recommend that you go and read it for yourself over at The Prism Comics website, a thriving c0mmunity for queer comics and comics-fans.

In case you don’t make it over there I’ll sum it up for you: There’s a very definite class-system at work in the app-store, and it’s looking very much like queer comics are at the bottom of the heap. The panel to the right there, from Tom Bouden’s adaptation of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest (featuring, naturally, an all-male cast!), was considered too sexy for an 18+ app, and is one of 6 or 7 panels in the book that got it denied from the app-store, all similarly tame (a bare bum, an embrace).

There are lots of examples, plenty of pictures to show just how ‘edgy’ the banned material is (not very much at all), and plenty of the standard Apple denials and non-denials (The Sports Illustrated quote is particularly telling).

The pragmatist in me believes that this isn’t a free speech issue, that this is simply a business making business decisions for itself that I don’t happen to like. But if gay-themed material is being held to a different standard than straight material, particularly if it’s systematic, then it’s both unfair discrimination and quite happily illegal (in most of the world anyway). Looking at the situation, I’d be inclined to start leaning towards the latter. I don’t know why a business would set themselves up as a censor, but if they’re going to, they better start being more transparent and accountable… or it’ll only be a matter of time before they find themselves in a great deal of legal trouble.

Edit: As a brief aside, I would love to hear from publishers if the approval process is the same (or easier) when it comes to getting your comic/graphic novel published through iBooks (Apple’s online bookstore) as getting a stand-alone app published…

– Chris

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Buenaventura Press Closes It’s Doors

Matthew Seiden manning The Buenaventura Press table at TCAF 2009. Photo by Deb Aoki, manga.about.com.

Sad news today, as Alvin Buenaventura officially announced the end of his publishing company Buenaventura Press at the (excellent) group blog Blog Flume, to which he contributes.

“I deeply regret having to take these actions, but the press experienced a devastating financial blow that made it impossible to continue.”

While I do actually have a good handle on what that ‘blow’ was, it’s not my place to say if Alvin doesn’t want to talk about it just yet. The fact that he closed down Buenaventura Press in January and just told the public now implies the level of privacy he’d like, and that’s totally within his rights.

I really liked a lot of Buenaventura’s output–they’re the only North American publisher to have released work by the wonderful Tom Gauld for example, they were the amazing Vanessa Davis‘ first publishers, they took over the publishing duties of the outstanding Kramers Ergot and surprising Comic Art magazine, not to mention all of the other fabulous prints, comics, and books that they released over their short lifetime. They were a regular exhibitor at TCAF and they always put on a fantastic-looking display. They put out good work by good cartoonists, and it’s a shame that there’s now one less publisher doing that. Cheers Alvin, you did great work.

Which brings me to my next point: There are still a lot of awesome publishers around that could probably use a few of your hard-earned dollars in exchange for wonderful comic books.

Buenaventura Press at TCAF 2007. Photo by Jamie Coville.

I don’t want to turn this into a polemic or anything, I’m not trying to guilt or badger you into giving up your money, but I know more than anything how easy it is to get swept along in the day-to-day-discussion of comics, the bullshit Blackest-Night-Siege-Heroic-Age-Brightest-Day nonsense is fun because you can be a part of the conversation online about how terrible it all is, but when it comes to spending money on good books that don’t get as much discussion–but are going to hold up on your shelves and in your comic boxes a helluva lot better down the road–it really is worth your time and effort to check out some of the smaller and boutique publishers out there, because they’re often doing amazing stuff.

And I’m not setting this up as a mainstream versus indie debate–that’s fucking stupid. That’s over. This is about buying comics you like versus buying comics you don’t. And there are a lot of great books out there getting left out of the discussion that are great, that are worth your time. I do my best to promote them here on the blog, to sell them in the store, to give them a platform and an audience at TCAF, but sometimes it isn’t enough and I have to make a direct appeal like this.

So here’s a list of publishers I like, and a book or two I recommend from them; Please support them with a purchase if you can:

AdHouse Books – http://adhousebooks.com/
Recommended: Afrodisiac, by Jim Rugg. The Venice Chronicles, by Enrico Casarosa

Bodega Distribution – http://www.bodegadistribution.com/
The Mourning Star Volume 1 & 2, by Kazimir Strzepek

Conundrum Press – http://conundrumpress.com/
Drop-In, by Dave Lapp.  Ruts & Guilles: Nine Days in Saint Petersburg, by Phillippe Girard.

Drawn & Quarterly – http://drawnandquarterly.com/
Market Day, by James Sturm. Vellevision, by Maurice Vellekoop. Red Colored Elegy, by Seiichi Hayashi. Get a Life by Dupuy & Berberian.

Fanfare / Ponent-Mon – http://ponentmon.com/
A Distant Neighborhood Volumes 1 & 2, by Jiro Taniguchi

Fantagraphics Books – http://fantagraphics.com/
Almost Silent, by Jason.  Artichoke Tales, by Megan Kelso. Ganges #1-3 by Kevin Huizenga.

Koyama Press – http://koyamapress.com/
Lose #1 & #2, by Michael DeForge. A Very Kraftwerk Sumer, by Chris Hutsul.

La Pasteque – http://lapasteque.com/
la Fugue, by Pascal Blanchet.  Jimmy et le Bigfoot, by Pascal Girard.

New Reliable Press – http://newreliable.com/
Horribleville Volume 1, by KC Green.

Oni Press – http://onipress.com/
Scott Pilgrim Vols 1-6, by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Picturebox Inc. – http://www.pictureboxinc.com/
New Enigineering & Travel, by Yuichi Yokoyama.

Pop Sandbox – http://popsandbox.com/
Kenk, by Richard Poplak.

SLG Publishing – http://slgpublishing.com/
Street Angel, by Jim Rugg and Brian Marruca. NIL, by James Turner. DORK Vols 1 & 2, by Evan Dorkin. SQUEE!, by Jhonen Vasquez.

Sparkplug Comic Books – http://sparkplugcomicbooks.com/
Bookhunter, by Jason Shiga. Jin & Jam #1, by Hellen Jo.

Top Shelf Comix – http://topshelfcomix.com/
Alec: The Years Have Pants, by Eddie Campbell. Superfuckers, by James Kochalka. Moving Pictures, by Kathryn & Stuart Immonen.

Topatoco – http://topatoco.com/
Never Learn Anything From History, by Kate Beaton. Adventures of Dr. McNinja, by Chris Hastings.

Tug Boat Press – http://tugboatpress.com
Papercutter Anthologies, by various.

U.S.S. Catastrophe – http://www.usscatastrophe.com/
Pretty much everything they stock is awesome.

…and that’s the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of single-title self publishers doing great work like Carla Speed McNeil and Finder, Jeff Smith and Rasl, Eric Powell’s Chimichanga… hell, tons of creators trying to scrape out a living publishing under a larger umbrella too. Not to mention the many fine retailers like The Beguiling trying to stock and sell these books too.

There are people doing good work, and while it’s tempting to get yourself down when a great publisher disappears, scuff your shoes on the ground and say “shit”, it’s much more productive to remember that there are still folks out publishing great work… and we don’t want them going anywhere, you know?

– Chris

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More on this a little later, but: Wow, good news!

An international coalition of Japanese and American-based manga publishers have joined together to combat what they call the “rampant and growing problem” of scanlations, the practice of posting scanned and translated editions of Japanese comics online without permission of the copyright holders. The group is threatening legal action against 30 scanlation sites.

The effort brings together the 36 member Japanese Digital Comic Association—which includes such major Japanese houses as Kodansha, Shogakukan and Shueisha—as well as manga publisher Square Enix, the Tuttle-Mori Agency and U.S.-based manga publishers Vertical Inc, Viz Media, Tokyopop and Yen Press, the manga/graphic novel imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

A spokesperson for the coalition said the effort shows that Japanese publishers—who license the majority of manga sold in the U.S.—are taking an aggressive interest in combating manga piracy outside of Japan as well as inside the country.

– From the article at Publishers Weekly

Well that’s pretty good news, I’d say…! I’ll probably have thoughts on this later.

– Chris

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More Me Than You’ve Gotten In Months…

The lovely Tom Spurgeon asked me for an interview, following the enormous success of TCAF 2010, and I decided “what the heck,” and went along with it. You can find the interview at:

http://www.comicsreporter.com/

It’s a bit of a long one, and it was almost entirely written between the hours of midnight at 4am, so it is considerably more honest and off the cuff that I originally intended, but I think it holds up okay. I kinda wanna give it another edit, but that’s life.

Originally I was going to save any official commenting on the show until our wrap-up, but as that’s been a while in coming I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to thank our staff and volunteers for all of their hard work, and Spurgeon’s is a pretty prestigious website upon which to send out those thanks. There’s still an official wrap-up coming of course, where we name names… in thanking all the wonderful people who helped out. And talk a little bit more about how things went, and what we’re going to do next time.

Also of note, not sure I mentioned it but there are a ton of photos of TCAF 2010 up online at flickr including my own. Here’s all the tagged TCAF 2010 shots:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/tcaf2010/

Alright, nuff of me. More commenting coming soon.

– Christopher

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Congrats to Jeremy Tankard and Boo-Hoo Bird!

I am sadly, desperately, mournfully behind when it comes to reading my Google Feed Reader (everyone should have one!), and so now I’m scraping May 11th and trying to run through everything…

…But I did want to take a minute out to congratulate my friend Jeremy Tankard on winning The Blue Spruce Award, as part of the 2010 Forest Of Reading Awards, for his children’s book BOO HOO BIRD! It’s the sequel to his award-winning debut Grumpy Bird, and it’s great! I’ve already bought copies for both of my nieces (and a few more besides!) and they’re a real hit. Winning the award puts thousands of extra copies of work into the hands of K-2 kids all over Ontario!

I know I’m kinda off in my own little world a lot of the time (and I’ve missed sooooo many other opportunities to congratulate friends) but yeah, congrats Jeremy! It’s a well-deserved award!

– Christopher
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