Donald Trump Is Oppressing Me!

He is preventing me from acquiring the Canadian comics collectible I crave!

Last year, the Canadian government issued a booklet of four postage stamps honoring important Canadian cartoonists. I used their publication as an excuse to write a little something about each of the honorees. Canada Post just released an additional six stamps in this series. I was eager to order a set for myself, but encountered this notice when I went to the Canada Post website:

“Due to U.S. customs changes, we can’t accept purchases with a U.S. destination right now. We are actively working on a solution.”

OK, just because the United States is being unreasonable doesn’t mean I can’t write about six important Canadian graphic novelists. When I wrote about Canada Post’s last graphic novelist stamp set, I suggested an additional sixteen Canadian cartoonists who I thought were worthy of being honored with a postage stamp. Four of the six stamps in this new set were among those I recommended, which makes the two I didn’t suggest, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, of particular interest to me. In the case of Bryan Lee O’Malley who is primarily know for Scott Pilgrim, it is obvious that he should be honored—I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t think of him when I made the earlier list of suggested cartoonists. But I was very curious to see Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, a cartoonist I had never heard of before. I’m eager to use this post to learn a little more about him. Going in alphabetical order, here are a group of Canadian graphic novelists that Canada Post has selected to honor with postage stamps this month.

Like last year’s group of graphic novelist stamps, each stamp honors a specific graphic novelist and one of their graphic novels. Kate Beaton depicts herself reading her autobiographical book Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. Ducks was published in 2023 and was quite a surprise when it came out—her previous work had been silly, erudite comics involving history and literature in a series called Hark! A Vagrant. That series of comic strips gave one the impression that Beaton was a college lit professor on a lark. With Ducks, Beaton presents us with a very different different face—it is a memoir of her time working in the oil sands of Alberta to pay off her student loans. While Hark! A Vagrant reflect a cozy, middle-class world of academia, Ducks depicts a rough, working class world of oil field workers. It is not a work environment that is particularly welcoming to women. Beaton was raped while working in the oil sands.

Jimmy Beaulieu is a French-Canadian whose book Non-Adventures is a collection of autobiographical stories. It has not been published in English unfortunately. But there are two Beaulieu books in English that I know of, Suddenly Something Happened and My Neighbor’s Bikini, both of which I recommend. Both are drawn in an invitingly loose pencil style that gives them a warm, personal feel. Both are light-hearted sex comedies (Suddenly Something Happened is autobiographical)—Beaulieu has a gift for drawing extremely sexy but somehow attainable female characters. (Comics is not good at this. Many female comics characters are drawn as unattainable fantasy sex objects—at least those female characters drawn by men.) Despite subject matter that is utterly different, his obvious pleasure in drawing the women of his desires reminds me of the great American comic strip artist from the first half of the 20th century, Roy Crane.

Guy Delisle is a French Canadian cartoonist who has produced twenty four graphic novels since 1996, of which 14 have been translated into English, including the one honored in his stamp, Chroniques de Jérusalem which was translated as Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Delisle spent a year living in Jerusalem with his family—Delisle’s spouse Nadège is an administrator for Médecins Sans Frontières. His family connection to an international NGO sends Delisle across the globe, giving him many opportunities to be a travel writer, but his work as an animator has also sent Delisle to unexpected locations, such as Pyongyang, where he was sent to supervise a group of North Korean animators working on contract to produce a French kid’s show. He wrote about this in Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. About half of his travel chronicles detail the mundane details of making a life in a strange new country, and the other half consists of Delisle’s observations of life and politics in the countries in which he finds himself. Delisle is a wry miniaturist who is never displays how he feels, beyond a sense of being slightly put out by circumstance. Deslisle is something of a Monsieur Hulot-like character in his own stories.

In the late 80s and early 90s, a group of Canadian cartoonists helped to revolutionize the art form. This group included Chester Brown and Seth, who were honored in the 2024 Canada Post graphic novel stamp set. Joe Matt in usually included in this cohort, but he was an American working in Canada. The fourth and in some ways most artistically significant of this cohort was Julie Doucet, a French-Canadian woman who started drawing her own self-published comics zine in 1987 called Dirty Plotte. (Plotte is apparently a French Canadian slang term for “cunt”—critic Anne Elizabeth Moore entitled her book-length study of Doucet’s work, Sweet Little Cunt.) These zines were seen by the editor for Wierdo Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Doucet’s career as a professional cartoonist was launched. It was through her work in her comic series Dirty Plotte that I became familiar with Doucet’s work—her cartooning is frank about her own sexuality and biology (there is an unusual amount of menstruation in her comics) and is drawn in a crudely expressionistic style that looks tough on the surface, but becomes warm and inviting the more you live with it. The book honored in the stamp is barely a graphic novel, but it’s hard to say what it should be called. She depicts herself holding the French edition of Journal. In English it goes by the title 365 Days: A Diary. It is a daily diary in collage and drawings from November 2002 to November 2003.

Bryan Lee O’Malley got his start in comics in the early 2000s. His big breakthrough was Scott Pilgrim, a story of a Toronto slacker in his early 20s having romance problems. He is unsuccessfully pursuing an American girl Ramona Flowers—at this point it could be a slice-of-life story about early adulthood, but O’Malley layers it over with a fantasy element (Scott Pilgrim must defeat Ramona’s seven super-powered “evil exes” to win her heart) and a vibe from video games. Not a gamer myself, I found myself a bit confused when I first tried to read Scott Pilgrim, but after 20-odd years of passively absorbing video game lingo from the cultural ether, I think I can handle it now. Scott Pilgrim was adapted into an extremely entertaining movie by Edgar Wright in 2010.

Of the six graphic novelists honored by this series of stamps, I had never heard of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. On his stamp, Yahgulanaas depicts himself as a character from his graphic novel, Red, A Haida Manga. The story tells of dramatic events among the Haida Gwaii people who inhabit some islands off of British Columbia. I can’t tell based on descriptions I have read online if the story takes place before or after the Haida were contacted by Europeans. Yahgulanaas uses an art style native to the Pacific Northwest known as formline art, which is a way of organizing a drawing into curvilinear spaces. The formlines on each page connect to each other in a way that if all the pages are laid in a grid, the formlines form faces that may remind one of the kinds of faces one sees on totem poles. The formlines divide the action of the story in a way similar to the way that panels do in most comic books. Yahgulanaas has contrived an excellent way to combine the indigenous art of the Pacific Northwest peoples and the art of comics.

Between you and me, I don’t use postage stamps very often. While the United States Post Office has issued stamps honoring classic comic strips and superheroes, I don’t think they have ever honored graphic novels in the way Canada has in these two sets. What graphic novels and which cartoonists do you think should have postage stamps issued in their honor? Make your nomination in the comment section!

Furthermore, I am of the opinion that for the good of America, Trump must release everything related to the Epstein case, resign, and then be a quiet piggy.

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