Happy Anniversary!

Celebrating a few milestones.

This week, we’re marking a few important milestones!

Well, first of all, it’s the one-year anniversary of this Substack! Thanks to everyone who’s come along for the ride! And for those folks who have joined more recently, this is how it all started… (Here’s a link to that original post.)

My house!

This month, it’s also the twenty-year anniversary of me living in my house in Ramsay. Wow! That’s been another long journey. Here’s a page from the drawing book back in 2004, about that big event:

“Fixer-upper” indeed. My house, which was built in 1911, definitely needed some improvements. But it had so much character!!

(By the way, I just found an old Ramsay newsletter comic from 2013 that features this same view of my old kitchen!)

I made some cosmetic improvements - like this ceiling mural in the living room. Those were fun, but they didn’t change the fact that the house really needed some major renovations!!

Eventually, those big renovations happened. Thanks to wonderful local contractor Dapper Built, my house eventually joined the 21st century! (Here’s a work-in-progress picture from back in 2020.)

I was dreaming of having a big 20th-anniversary house celebration party this month, but it looks like that isn’t in the cards. So thanks for celebrating with me here!

Curious Calgary is one year old!

It’s also the one-year anniversary of a zine project I started last year with Calgary’s independent journalism outlet The Sprawl. Here’s a tweet from last October, when I was finding spots to put the very first zine, while visiting Toronto!

One year later, we have thirteen zines (which you can find here on The Sprawl website), an Innovation Award from the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association, and a few zine workshops under our belt! Here’s a picture from a workshop just this week at the Sparrow ArtSpace in Bridgeland.

Artist in Residence stuff!

Speaking of that zine workshop: this October, I’ve been having fun being part of Panel One’s Artist residency at Sparrow ArtSpace. Members of the Panel One Comics Collective are there every day, working, workshopping, just hanging out, and exhibiting, too. The residency is still going on till the end of the month… check it out!

And since we’re talking about artists in residence, here’s an update about another artist in residence program. This week, the Government of Alberta announced its new Alberta Artist in Residence: Edmonton’s Samantha Williams Chapelsky! Congrats to Samantha on her appointment. (Here’s a video of the official announcement from earlier this week.) The Alberta Artist in Residence is a one-year position, presenting artists with the opportunity to work on something big. It looks like Samantha’s going to do an amazing project.

I was pleased to learn a little while ago that I was on the shortlist for this cool position, along with a few other folks whose work I am excited to learn about. You can find out about them here on the Government of Alberta website.

I’m kind of intrigued by the fact that, on that website, someone has put me down as a “Writer/illustrator, animator and graphic recorder.” I have no idea where that description came from. Yes, I’m definitely a graphic recorder. But I don’t know about any of those other things. I make comics, which takes a mix of writing and drawing (I’m not sure that I’d call it illustrating?). Some folks have told me I’m a cartoonist, which has never sounded like the right word, because I think cartoons are Saturday morning animated shows for kids. But ok, I can handle cartoonist. And… animator? I really don’t think that’s in my job description. On the other hand, when I was asked to make a short video explaining why I applied to be the Alberta Artist in Residence, I did attempt some very simple animations. Here’s the video I made!

I’m looking forward to working on more Alberta stories in the year ahead, and sharing some of them with you here on this Substack! Thanks for joining me to celebrate these anniversaries!