I lived in Seattle, Washington, in the early 90s. I was working as an editor for a small comics publisher, Fantagraphics Books. Seattle was in a period of creative ferment (the grunge era was starting), and there were a ton of cartoonists in the general region. I started making pilgrimages to Portland, Olympia and Vancouver. One of the cartoonists from Vancouver I got to know was Colin Upton.
Upton’s thing was minicomics. I can’t say I loved most of what I saw from him, but we did become friends and I crashed in his hovel on visits to Vancouver. His best-known comic at that time was Socialist Turtle, which parodied the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada (an organization which I’m sure was highly mockable). He also worked on a fascinating piece of fantasy called Buddha on the Road (1996). The title was derived from the famous Zen koan “When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” In this weird epic, Satan and the armies of Hell, with the help of a human soldier, wage war on Heaven. It combines medieval descriptions of Hell, Heaven, and various demons and saints into an entertaining story, but it felt a little like Upton showing off that he doesn’t take all this religion stuff seriously. In short, I enjoyed it as the product of a friend of mine, but I don’t know if I would have even noticed it otherwise.
Like all the cartoonists I knew, Upton was far from wealthy. In fact, when I knew him, he was on the Canadian equivalent of SSI for mental problems. It will sound shameful to admit now, but I found this fact about Colin to be fascinatingly exotic. Not the “mental illness” part—the living on welfare part. My middle class existence had wholly shielded me from this aspect of modern life.
Upton and I have been Facebook friends for a long time. Despite his relative lack of production (that I was aware of), I kept up with his occasional social media posts. When he reported that he had been diagnosed with diabetes, I was fascinated to see him change his diet and get skinny. It was a big inspiration for me to do the same thing. I smugly assumed, if Colin can do it, so can I!
About two months ago, Upton mentioned a new book collection had been published by a Canadian small publisher, Conundrum Press. (About whom, more later). I went to Conundrum’s website and ordered it, along with several other books that were also part of its Conundrum25 series.
Upton’s book is called Post-Modern Mini-Comics. It collects several issues of Upton’s self-published minicomics series of the same name—issues 19, 6, 7,9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, and 18. We readers aren’t told anything about what we are reading—I don’t know when these comics first appeared or anything else about Upton. I have a bibliographic soul so this stuff is important to me, but the book works OK without it. Even though it is divided into 10 different chapters (often with fairly different drawing styles or narrative techniques), they fit together. These are 10 little autobiographical episodes, but when read together, are a compelling self portrait of an aging bachelor. I felt profoundly seen.
Upton grew up with mental illness, which he has occasionally depicted in his comics. I don’t know what illness he had, but because of it, he received the Canadian version of social security disability payments. He has thus lived a modest existence as an adult with state support, which is reflected in Post-Modern Mini-Comics. At some point, Upton was diagnosed with diabetes. When I hung out with him in the 80s, he was (like me) a chubby man. But he took his diagnosis seriously and lost a lot of weight. This is visible in the work
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Great God Pan Is Dead to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.