What could go wrong at the G20?

The Post’s Steve Murray takes a swing at predicting what will happen at the G20 meeting in the Occupied Region Formerly Known as Toronto.

“Look, I’m just being honest”

This Softer World comic just kind of sums up men, doesn’t it?

Robbin’ Banksy

Torontoist has an update on the Banksy works in Toronto, which have become works in progress when they’re not disappearing.

All the way to nowhere

You may already know Bryan Scott’s work from his blog Winnipeg Love & Hate. Now check out All the Way to Nowhere, his new photo site detailing pics of other exotic locales. When you’re done that, head on over to his store.

“We missed your scent”

This Dinosaur Comics comic combines two of my favourite things: MLS and cephalopods.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2010: Thought bubbles

The Post talks to the artists attending this year’s TCAF, including Dinosaur Comics’ Ryan North.

The Posties offer some advice for writers

Heh.

“If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be in comic books”

Or the third screenwriter on the seventeenth episode of The Fringe.

William Shakespeare has been called many things over the past 400 years, from god to fraud. Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col have an entirely new label. To the co-creators of Kill Shakespeare, a new fantasy-adventure comic-book series they are launching in Toronto this week, the Bard is “one of the greatest aggregators in entertainment history.”

“We would not be able to buy Voice of Fire today”

The Walrus on the National Gallery’s controversial acquisition of Voice of Fire, and how it’s since become “as much a part of the crazy quilt of Canadian culture as the work of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven or Paul-émile Borduas and the Automatistes.”

At $1.76 million, it was the most expensive painting the National Gallery had ever bought. And while it had been on loan to the museum for nearly two years, the announcement of the purchase on March 7, 1990, set off the most intense and fractious debate over visual art the country had ever seen.

Unlike other art controversies of the period — Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in the United States the year before, or Jana Sterbak’s Flesh Dress in Ottawa the year after — this one wasn’t about the scabrous, the scatological, or the profane. Voice of Fire was simply three towering bands of colour: pure, extreme abstraction. And in Canada, anyway, Newman’s critical role in mid-twentieth-century art history was moot; for many Canadians, Voice of Fire was akin to curatorial snake oil. Something that simple, at that price, and by an American? Did it belong in our National Gallery?

“More flags, less heads”

Province cartoonist Dan Murphy takes on Jason Kenney vs. Gayitude in an animated cartoon. Dan Murphy is a national treasure and should be encased in maple syrup to forever preserve him.

Vancouver City: The Inner Life Project

Wow — thanks to the Vancouver Biennale Blog for pointing out this amazing time-lapse music video of Vancouver, courtesy of the Inner Life Project.

5 Hole—Animated tales of hockey erotica

Written by Dave Bidini, music by the Rheostatics and animated by Cam Christiansen. Possibly NSFW but fun.

This must be keeping him up at night

I’ve avoided posting anything about the TTC Sleeper because I try to avoid making fun of anyone on this site. But now people are making awesome of him, not fun! Man, this almost makes me wish someone finds the video of that crazy thing I did in the office that one day….

Maisonneuve interviews Michael Cho

Maisonneuve talks to Toronto illustrator Michael Cho about designing the cover for Penguin’s 25th anniversary edition of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. That would be both fun and daunting, I would imagine.

MC: And it’s moving by so fast. I mean the only concern I had was not being too literal and showing everything as it is in a book. That’s something I struggled with. Again, I looked to some of the themes in the book. For example, the back cover is based on a Caspar David Frederick painting. It’s not a literal transcription of it. It’s based on a scene from White Noise but at the same time the composition echoes one of my favourite painters. Caspar David Frederick has sort of a metaphysical and death-obsessed outlook that’s very German. So it fit some of the content of the book. I was trying to evoke again a lot of the postmodern layering of the book itself.

Cho has more details on his blog, including some concept sketches. I also like his Toronto back alleys series.

“I believe good writing can save bad art”

The Post interviews Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics.

Dinosaur Comics has made North one of the few self-sufficient Web-comic artists in the world, with 90% of his income coming directly from merchandise he designs and 10% from advertising.

“When I started full-time after I graduated, I basically determined that if I sold three shirts a day I could sustain my fabulous student lifestyle, with Kraft Dinner for lunch,” North says.

Get your iSkins on

I just bought a new iPhone, and I’d been wondering how to dress it up until the Post’s Nathalie Atkinson pointed me to Stickstickbangbang, a site that sells artists’ skins for the entire iFamily. You can even upload your own custom designs/art and and start selling them or just print them off for yourself. It’s like Etsy for Apple.

(Pictured above: Rusty Robot skin by Matt Connors.)

Extremely Bad Advice: The New Moon edition

The Post’s Steve Murray offers advice on what to do if your spouse wants to convert you to being a werewolf.

 

STEP TWO In your pros and cons list you have “improved eyesight” as a pro, but you’re just chomping at the tip of the hairy iceberg there. You’ll also have improved smell, hearing and taste! Of course what you’ll be tasting are unsuspecting villagers and your brain will have shrunk considerably, but still! Would converting to Anglicanism give you better eyesight? No. Would converting to Judaism give you a better sense of smell? I would like to say no but I’m terrified of coming across as anti-Semitic, so … maybe? Unless … unless making my Jewish friends seem more supernaturally powerful than Gentiles is anti-Semitic … I … I just don’t know …

 

A double dose of Steve Murray!

Steve Murray has posted a new installment of The Posties and a new Extremely Bad Advice column. You won’t need a flu shot after this double feature!

 

The bottom of the river

I do like the Tom Fun Orchestra and their videos. (Via Drawn.)

Previously:

• Throw me to the rats

“Canadians aren’t good at celebrating their own thing”

Comic artist Seth appears on Q TV to discuss the art of Doug Wright. I could listen to him talk all day.