By Dan Brown.

You can call them cartoons or sequential art or graphic novels or comic books. Whatever term you prefer, I love ’em all.

And I’ll be sharing my enthusiasm for  this special art form on the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games, the venerable London store that serves as the unofficial headquarters for London comic fans, every week via this column. 

I invite you to consider it your once-a-week chance to geek out with me.

How did I get this assignment?

As the tagline at the bottom of this column indicates, I’ve been covering pop culture as a journalist for the last 30 years. 

I’ve had staff positions at such news outlets as the National Post, CBC.ca,  and the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. My freelance work has appeared in places like the Globe and Mail and on MSNBC.com.

From 2012 to 2022 I wrote a graphic-novel column every Saturday as part of my work at the London Free Press, where I had also been a blogger, among many other duties.

I have also, since 2009, been the moderator for L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel club. (Shameless plug: You should check it out.)

But, most important of all, I’m a card-carrying comic lover. 

My starting point is the Marvel Comics of the 1970s and as far as superheroes go, my fave is likely the Thing, the self-loathing, orange-coloured pile of rocks who served as the ace pilot for the Fantastic Four.

I would say I have a major in Marvel and a minor in DC. Even now, DC’s heroes still strike me as emotionally constipated; I was a sucker for the overemotional heroes Jack Kirby dreamed up in collaboration with Stan Lee.

By the time I was a university student in the mid 1980s, the comics world had exploded. In fact, I’m so old, I remember when the idea of comics being used to tell stories with characters other than superheroes was a revolutionary one. 

I would love to go back in time to when I was nine years old and tell my younger self: One day, all those comics you love will be source material for movies and TV shows. There will be so many of them, you won’t have time to watch them all.

So what excites me now? The work of Southwestern Ontario’s own Jeff Lemire. The parody stylings of Bob Burden, the mad genius behind Flaming Carrot. Mimi Pond. Lynda Barry. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. And on and on . . . 

This column will aspire to cover local comics first, meaning those with a connection to Southwestern Ontario and London. Then the rest of Canada. Then the world beyond. Some future columns will be straightforward reviews, others will touch on issues raised by comics. And I am guessing superhero film/TV adaptations will be an unavoidable topic.

I would also love to hear from you and get a dialogue going about the comics scene here in the Forest City. 

One promising sign we have put the pandemic behind us was the reappearance in April of Tingfest, the downtown graphic-art festival that celebrates local creators, so I am hoping the geek calendar of events can finally resume in earnest. (Shameless plug: Have you got your tickets for Forest City Comicon on June 24?)

I also want to know what comics and characters are rocking your world. You can send me an email in care of info@lamoodcomics.ca.

Let’s get this party started!

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.