Fantasy List Incomplete Without Morgaine
By Dan Brown So TIME magazine has come out with a 100 Must-Read Fantasy Books special edition and I’m unimpressed. I know the list isn’t meant to be the final world on the topic. However, there’s one omission I just can’t forgive: C.J. Cherryh’s greatest heroine, Morgaine. There are the usual suspects – books by Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis made the cut – as well as a number of contemporary works chosen with an eye to diversity. But to not include Morgaine – featured in four of Cherryh’s many novels – feels like a slight to fantasy fans. It left me wondering how young the big brains are who drew up the magazine’s list, because judging from their choices, they seem to think there weren’t any powerful women in fantasy fiction before about the year 2000. I first encountered Morgaine a few years after 1976’s Gate of Ivrel was published. I read her adventures on the front porch of the Baptist parsonage in Poplar Hill during grade-school summers, and she made an immediate, deep impression on my developing imagination. Not because she stood out. The truth is, I was already familiar with many kick-butt female characters. I got my notions of how women leaders should be portrayed from Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in Star Wars and the likes of Thundra in Marvel’s Fantastic Four comics – Thundra could go toe-to-toe with the Thing! Morgaine was just so . . . cool. Eerie. Mysterious. Dangerous. If you haven’t read the tetralogy in which she stars, treat yourself. She’s the last surviving member of a team charged with sealing a series of gates connecting a crumbling interplanetary empire. She’s like Batman in the sense that her mission is to create a universe in which she is obsolete. The gates transport people not only between places, but also eras. So things like this can happen: A foe can use a gate minutes before Morgaine rides through on her war horse. When she exits, she is on a different world hundred of years later, where the descendants of her enemy regard her as a long-lost legend. Morgaine is utterly committed to her quest, and wields a sword called Changeling, which has a gate at its tip. She uses the high-powered blade to send entire armies into the void of space, her conscience seemingly untroubled by the mass killing. Her frost-white hair marks her as possibly a member of the evil race that originally invented the gates. The foil Cherryh uses as the reader’s point of entry into the story is Morgaine’s servant/bestie/possible love interest, Vanye, who is always urging her to be compassionate, which doesn’t come easily for Morgaine. Like I said, Morgaine wasn’t an exception in my mind. She was a big part of the template for me, showing how women characters could be multi-faceted and exciting. Which is why I soon read other Cherryh novels, such as the Pride of Chanur series. It was only later in life I looked back and said, “Oh, hey, all of those stories feature women as the central character. Cool.” If the purpose of TIME’s fantasy special edition was to spur debate, then it will fulfill its mandate. But contrary to what TIME’s editors might have readers believe, pop-culture fans have been grooving on strong female characters for some decades now. By the way, next year marks 50 years since Morgaine’s first appearance. Wouldn’t it be awesome if a streaming platform (say, Netflix) honoured the anniversary by adapting Cherryh’s work into a TV series? It would be a whole lot cooler if they did. (If you have any must-read fantasy novels you’d like to recommend, I’d love to hear about them in the comment box below!) Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Take A Graphic Trip Across Canada
By Dan Brown In honour of our national holiday, and as a way to protest the tariffs from our southern neighbours, many Canadians are travelling in their own backyard this summer. But what if you aren’t in a position to make the trek? Then take a trip across Canada – in graphic-novel form. That’s right, you can go from coast to coast to coast by reading the work produced by our dominion’s many talented comic creators. So here are suggestions for how to acquaint yourself with the regions of this great nation by looking through the comics set in those places. The East Coast: No trip to the Maritimes would be complete without a shipwreck, so let’s start our journey with Call Me Bill by London graphic novelist Lynette Richards. It’s a mystery, it’s an adventure story, it’s a reclaiming of an LGBTQ figure from the past – and it all begins with a maritime disaster off Nova Scotia, where Beal Art grad Richards lives in Terence Bay. I also recommend D.Boyd’s Denniveniquity and Chicken Rising, which cover Boyd’s formative years in Saint John, which is the city in New Brunswick – the one in Newfoundland and Labrador is St. John’s. Got it? La Belle Province: My first suggestion is Michel Rabagliati’s Paul Up North, part of which takes place during a snowstorm in Laurentian cottage country. And of course, the title character didn’t wear his winter jacket: There is no more Canadian predicament than that! As for the Montreal portion of our cross-Canada tour, I’m proposing Are You Willing to Die For the Cause?, which recounts the early years of the FLQ’s reign of error (the would-be liberators targeted Canada Post mailboxes with their homemade bombs). It was drawn and written by publishing house Drawn & Quarterly founder Chris Oliveros. Ontario outside Toronto: First stop, Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, which lovingly recreates the evocative landscape and taciturn people of Southwestern Ontario. Also recommended is Walter Scott’s Wendy, Master of Art, which is set in Hell, a small Ontario city that has an awful lot in common with Guelph. Toronto: Yes, I agree with you, there are way too many graphic novels set in Canada’s largest city. So instead of inundating you with a long list of options, I urge you to hunt down Matthew Blackett’s Wide Collar Crimes, a collection of comic strips that were published in Eye Weekly in the early 2000s. No other comic evokes the absurdities of life in Toronto like Blackett’s work does. The Prairies: So there’s Shelterbelts, set in a rural Mennonite community in Manitoba, as well as Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, which likewise attempts to capture the vastness of the landscape. I know this might be a stretch, but for Saskatchewan I recommend any Superboy adventure pencilled by artist Tom Grummet in the 1990s – in an interview at that time, he told me the wheat fields he drew near Smallville were patterned after the farms outside the window of his Saskatchewan home. Alberta: Since the tar sands are so important to Canada’s economy, you will want to check out Ducks, Kate Beaton’s account of her two years working in Northern Alberta’s oil patch. This story is not for the faint of heart, so definitely not suitable for young readers. British Columbia: Worth hunting down is the New Yorker’s cartoon edition from Dec. 28, 2020. That issue features the short graphic story Junban from Jillian Tamaki, and is adapted from her grandfather’s notes. The six-page reminiscence covers the same themes as George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, and achingly calls to mind the Fraser River of the past. The North: Finally, we come to the land of the ice and snow! You may have an easier time getting a hold of Scott Chantler’s Northwest Passage – set in Rupert’s Land – than the anthology of Nelvana of the Northern Lights stories put out by Hope Richardson and Rachel Richey in 2014, but it’s worth it. Taken together, these two selections offer bookends of Canadian comic-book culture, starting in the Second World War with the Canadian whites and moving up to the current day with talents such as Chantler. Yes, this list is incomplete! That’s by necessity. That’s also why I’m looking for suggestions from readers like you in the comment box below. What books would you add to the list? Let’s hear them, as well as a brief description of the parts of this country they represent. And happy Canada Day! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Memories of Call the Office
By Dan Brown It’s every Londoner’s birthright to rock out at Call the Office. And now it looks like a new generation of Forest City youth will get to exercise their birthright. According to a report in the London Free Press, the seedy watering hole — where I spent many a night in my teens and early 20s -- is to be reopened after the bigwigs at City Hall sign off on renovation plans. I call that a good-news story. As you may have guessed, I’m a Call the Office fan from way back. It looms large in my memory. I may have seen Iggy Pop at Kipling’s, Meatloaf at Dr. Rockit’s, KoKo Taylor at the Other Side of Five, and Cowboy Junkies at Centennial Hall, but it was Call the Office where I witnessed more live music than at any other joint downtown. The Legend Killers always put on a memorable show. Hopping Penguins raised the roof many a sweaty evening. And the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir was a guaranteed good time. There’s something about dive bars that naturally attracts young men (you will be unsurprised to learn I was reading a lot of Charles Bukowski in those days). Oh, and for the record, the proper nickname is “Call the O,” not “the Office,” even if the latter led to many unintentionally funny exchanges along these lines: Female acquaintance: “Where’s Dan tonight?”Male friend: “He’s at the Office.”Female acquaintance: “Wow, I didn’t even know he had an office job. He’s always working.” If you read the same Norm De Bono article, you’ll have heard the dormant bar’s owner has plans to put in a rehearsal space upstairs, an elevator, maybe even a washroom fit for human use. It won’t be the same. And that’s OK. I’m sure there is enough residual magic still sprinkled around the former York Hotel, which has been shuttered since pandemic times, to light up the stage. What do I see in my memories? There was that one bouncer who looked like John Belushi. He was awesome. And then the other bouncer who had the same haircut as Don Henley on the cover of End of the Innocence. There were street creatures we saw only at Call the Office. One, my drinking buddies and I nicknamed That Drunk Guy because, well, he was perpetually hammered. There was also Tall Alternative Guy and a whole crew of players in a drama playing only in our shared imagination. We saw them nowhere else. And yes, we sweated it out at shows featuring every future Canadian headliner: Crash Test Dummies, the Tragically Hip, Rhetostatics, you name it. I guess that’s what people are referring to as the Cassette Era now. Little did I know, but future friends like Gord Mood were at some of those same concerts. Nor do I know where we got the cash for all those Labatt 50s, which among our group of friends was called “Stinky.” You would put a loonie down on the pool table and if you and your partner had the magic touch, you could ride it all night. We also saw the Phantoms, which was rumoured to be a former Doors cover band. During my reggae phase, we saw Lazo and Satallites multiple times. And when the Gruesomes came through London on their farewell tour, I saw them at the Friday-night show, then came back for the Saturday-night show as well. Their bop I Need You still rings in my ears. One time one of the Ramones was scheduled to play, but the show was cancelled when he couldn’t get over the border. We stewed on the patio, drinking our cold bottles of Stinky. My Strathroy District Collegiate Institute classmate Tom Nesbitt was the lead singer for the Others, and their version of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown inhabits a special place in one corner of my mind. White Punks on Funk seemed to be the house band, along with mainstays Julia Propeller. Those evenings generally went like this: Me and my buddies would go to GTs for what we called First Call, then stopped at the Wick for cheap draft before heading across York Street to our destination. The fun began in earnest when the band hit the stage. Now a new day is dawning for Call the Office and a younger generation will make memories of their own in the same spot where I came of age. I hope you have fun, kids! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Delisle Goes in new Direction with Muybridge
By Dan Brown Muybridge is a funny, thought-provoking portrait of a little-known historical figure that represents an interesting departure for Quebec comic maker Guy Delisle. Delisle, who lives in France, originally made his name with travelogues – like Pyongyang – and his volumes about sloppy parenting. In Factory Summers, he told the story of his teen years. With the exception of 2017’s Hostage, he has not focused on a main character other than himself. Now comes Muybridge, an inventor who was unknown to me before now. Published this spring, the new release is a biography of one of the pioneering minds who helped usher in the age of the photograph, as well as moving pictures – Englishman Eadweard Muybridge. I loved it. I should put my cards on the table: I feel the same way about pretty much all of Delisle’s output. His work has always been strong, in my opinion. And Muybridge – the book, not the man – may also be a bridge to a new kind of storytelling for Delisle. The most interesting bits of the narrative are the parts where Deslisle admits the historical record is incomplete. He does the best he can to recreate Muybridge and his times, but there are moments when he calls attention to the constructed nature of his account. There’s also no question Delisle imbues his central character with some of his own traits. That’s part of the fun. At one point, Delisle says the death of Muybridge’s wife “must have weighed heavily on him,” yet he doesn’t know for sure what he was feeling in that moment. Muybridge was one of the key innovators who helped solve a hotly debated question in the 1800s: Do a horse’s four hooves all leave the ground at the same time when the animal is at full gallop? You and I are used to a media-saturated world in which there are movies about horses, and races like the Kentucky Derby are televised. So keep in mind this was a period when good, old-fashioned painting was only gradually losing its status as the most important representation of reality. The story begins with the advent of early photos such as daguerreotypes. The same guy was also the accused in one of the most sensational murder trials of his day. In Delisle’s telling, he is tenacious and adaptable. Dealt a setback, it’s only a matter of time before he rises again. Along the way, Delisle refuses to play at omniscience in his narrative, reminding the reader multiple times of the gaps in his knowledge. On an early jaunt to France, for instance, Delisle depicts Muybridge peering in the window of a camera studio. Delisle asks, “Is that when he began practicing photography? We don’t know.” (If you’ve ever read Alice Munro's short stories, you’ll have noticed the same kind of narrative uncertainty, so it may be one of the writing quirks that marks Delisle as distinctively Canadian.) Muybridge lived from 1830 to 1904. We may think of those decades as somehow uneventful or idyllic, but it was an age of rapid change. It saw the invention of mass-market photography, recorded music, the paint tube, motion pictures, naughty photos, the phonograph (if the book has a villain, it’s Thomas Edison, who doesn’t come off well), impressionism, colour photography, and animation. I also enjoyed the parts in which Delisle uses comic panels to represent individual frames of a moving picture – he even gives a nod to the film The Matrix as one source of inspiration, driving the point home that Muybridge’s contributions were foundational. As I said, I wasn’t aware of Muybridge until I picked up the book. I recommend it. The truth is, I don’t believe there’s a person or topic Guy Delisle couldn’t make interesting. If you haven’t read his stuff, check him out. This comic creator is a national treasure. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Make The Bay Stripes Affordable Again
By Dan Brown I have a brilliant idea. Humble, right? But bear with me. It’s my belief Canadian Tire has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to honour Canadian culture while making an honest buck at the same time. The folks who run Canadian Tire can do so by making the Bay stripes affordable again. Let me explain. You may have heard how the iconic hardware chain recently bought the intellectual property of another retailer, the now-defunct Hudson’s Bay Company – or the Bay, as it was known to my generation of Canadians. Maybe you read about the Bay going out of business, or even went to one of their stores, like the location in Masonville Place, in search of last-minute bargains. The Bay has been imploding in public for the last few months, but my point here isn’t to heap scorn on the bosses for running the venerable department-store firm into the ground. I’d rather focus on the future. For the reported low price of $30 million, Canadian Tire now has the rights to the Bay’s intellectual property, including its iconic green, red, yellow and indigo stripes. If you’re of a certain age, like I am, you would recognize the pattern instantly. They’ve appeared on all kinds of Bay wares, most famously its blankets – the history of which predates Canada itself – but also coats, mittens, book bags, and other items such as coffee mugs. In a way, the Bay’s iconic stripes are even more Canadian than the maple leaf. But in the last few years, the Bay has had a tough row to hoe. They were losing ground to internet retailers, and instead of going populist – like, say, Walmart – they purposely went upscale, alienating many customers, including yours truly. Before the bankruptcy sale, I hadn’t been to a Bay store since about 2009. I’m not rich enough to shop there on the regular for stuff like clothes. Say what you will, but I can’t justify spending $100 or more on a shirt I can get at Winners for $20 or something similar at Goodwill for less than $10. The Bay tried to capture affluent shoppers, and in the deal they priced items with the stripes on them out of the reach of most of us. They gambled by going upmarket, offering merch the average Canadian couldn’t afford, and the result is a firm that was founded in 1670 has finally reached the end of the road. Here’s where Canadian Tire comes in. The tire retailer can breathe new life into the stripes by offering items that aren’t overpriced. Besides, expensive stripes would look out of place in Canadian Tire stores since it’s not that kind of place. Everyday people still shop at Canadian Tire. Canadian Tire is all about utility, so pricey, upscale merch wouldn’t make sense on their shelves. This is the company whose mascot is Sandy McTire – the “flinty” Scot always looking for a deal. Why do I care? Because in a very real sense, the Hudson’s Bay stripes belong to every Canadian. I’m not saying we’re owed cheap deals, but I am urging Canadian Tire to heed the example of the Bay and not emulate it. The Bay targeted the Richie Riches in this country, and where did it get them? That strategy is surely one of the reasons contributing to their demise. Canadian Tire has defied the odds by thriving in the age of online shopping. If the brain trust that runs Canadian Tire stores is smart, they’ll find a way to sell us nostalgia at a price point we can all afford. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
GNG Assembles to Talk Mister X
By Dan Brown SPOILER WARNING: This column contains plot details from Dean Motter’s Mister X: The Modern Age, so stop reading right now if you value surprise! Here’s the lowdown on the most recent meeting of the L.A. Mood Graphic-Novel Group, which was held Saturday, June 14. The book: Dean Motter’s Mister X: The Modern Age, which collects all of the Mister X stories published by Dark Horse Comics. The discussion: The full range of opinions was represented around the table. There were people, like me, who love the book. There were others who felt meh – who didn’t give the book a thumb up or down, but a sideways thumb. And there were some who didn’t even feel motivated enough to finish reading the 360-page tome. Gord Mood, L.A. Mood’s co-owner, argued for including Mister X on the 2025 reading list at our January pitch meeting. He is among those who love it. Gord also brought some examples of Motter’s early work from Media 5 when he was a student at Fanshawe College. (Late Town Crier Bill Paul published that sci-fi fan publication.) I knew very little about the character beforehand. Knowing it had been praised for blending film noir, Art Deco and German Expressionism, I was expecting something ponderous and pretentious. Wrong! In my view, it’s an amazing graphic novel. DC can only wish that Batman were as cool as Mister X! It takes place in Radiant City, where it always seems to be 4 a.m. Its nickname is Somnopolis, because of the large number of residents who can’t sleep. The title character is possibly one of the original architects who founded Radiant City, it’s never made clear. The closest he gets to revealing his identity is when he states, “I want to fix my city. I want it to run as designed.” The problem? The city’s architecture is driving its residents insane. None of this, of course, is meant to be taken literally – which Gord’s business partner Carol Vandenberg touched on when she mentioned the humour of the book. The key, for me, was to not take anything in the book at face value. I appreciated how Mister X is a riot of invention. Some members of the group pointed out the many references in the story. For example, one robot who shows up is an homage to Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still. 1984 is referenced, as well as CanCon icon Nash the Slash. The characters have the clipped speech of detectives in films from the 1940s: “You’re the man without a name,” an interrogator tells Mister X. “That’s what I’m called,” the mystery man replies. Even better, Motter adds his own creative touches, elevating The Modern Age to a level above a mashup. Mister X is an insomnalin addict, meaning if he doesn’t feed his habit, and falls asleep, he will automatically die. There are insomnatoriums on each block. Zombycillin is a drug that can bring the dead to life. Pscychetecture describes the style of buildings in Radiant City and how they torture the human mind. Further reading: Instead of reading, I would say watch Blade Runner or episodes from Batman: The Animated Series, as well as Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie. L.A. Mood’s Graphic-Novel Group meets the second Saturday of each month. Next month’s selection is Roaming, by cousin creators Jilliam and Mariko Tamaki. We continue our streak of Canadian books established in recent months! We’ll reconvene July 12 at the gaming tables in the store at 11 a.m. All are invited to come join the discussion! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
