Dave and Raina's Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2005 Photo Journal:


We decided to fly to Toronto a couple of days early, as we wanted to explore the city and enjoy our birthdays Canadian style. Which meant walking around and eating waffles at the top of the CN Tower.



Dave tries not to get syrup on his freshly printed Astronaut Elementary T-shirt.

Afterwards we wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood enjoying some of the sites like candy-filled hitler toilets on the sidewalk"



Finally we met up with Jeff Smith (Bone) and some folks from Scholastic Canada (Denise Anderson and Scott Robins) for a delicious dinner at Boulevard Cafe.



By the time we made it over to the Beguiling on Thursday night it was already closed. But we got to check out the cool window display.



Friday morning, Raina and Jeff Smith both had separate interviews with Mark Askwith, at the Space Station (the Canadian equivalent to the Sci-Fi Channel). Jeff talked about the recent re-release of Bone in full color published by Scholastic's new Graphix line. And Raina discussed her upcoming Baby-sitters Club graphic novel (also for Scholastic), as well as how she got started and thought on comics in general.



Thanks to some quick editing, the clips of Raina and Jeff were broadcast like four hours later on national Canadian television! Canada is awesome.

We kicked around at the park underneath OCAD¹s funky floating building, watching the clouds go by and relaxing (something we rarely do at home).



Later we headed over to the Kensington Kitchen for dinner with a large group organized by Kean Soo (seen here in the mirror) who along with Hope Larson (left) have an awesome webcomic site called The Secret Friend Society. Also pictured here is Lucy and Matt Forsythe.



Andy Runton and Allene.



Vince and Ryan North.



Carla Speed McNeil.



Saturday morning was the start of TCAF! The show was organized into two separate tents.



We found our table and set up our display in what was dubbed the "Scholastic Children's Tent". Our table mates were Eric Kim and J. Torres (Love as a Foreign Language). Neighbors included the crew from the Flight anthology, Owl Magazine, Darwyn Cooke (who drew one of the event's promo posters)

Here's the Scholastic booth where they were selling copies of the new Bone collection and giving away Bone figurines and "Queen Bee" mini-purses by Chynna Clugston-Major!



Things were a bit quiet for the first couple of hours in the children's tent, but by noon it started to pick up. Some admitted they didn't realize there were other comic creators in the Scholastic tent!



During the corse of the day people like Jeff Smith and Darwyn Cooke gave presentations to full crowds.

Josh Greenhut (posing here with his son) is an awesome writer who is actually mentioned in the most recent "A Series of Unfortunate Event's" book and has been known to be a co-hort of Lemony Snicket.



After the show ended on Saturday, we strolled on up to the Doug Wright Awards ceremony, at the Victory Café, where we watched Bryan Lee O¹malley receive the Best Emerging Canadian Talent award! Those of us who love Scott Pilgrim¹s Precious Little Life are quite proud of Mal! I¹m sure this is the first of many awards this year. After the event, Dave got to meet one of the award judges and presenters, Don Mckeller who is the writer/producer/star of one of Dave¹s favorite TV shows ever, Twitch City.



Then we headed down with Kazu Kibuishi and a bunch of the Flight crew to an all you can eat sushi place on Bloor Street (aptly named Sushi on Bloor), where the service was awful but the kabocha tempura was awesome.



Vera Brogol (Pants Press) enjoys some long awaited Green Tea while R.Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) prays for her safety.



Derek Kirk Kim (Same Difference) and Amy Kim Ganter (Reman Anthology).



The walk signals in Toronto alone are worth visiting the city for. The walk-dude looks like he¹s doing a crazy dance!



A lot of the TCAF show was actually held in the parking lot behind a giant discount store called Honest Eds. Sadly the line of customers waiting for the store to open was far longer than the one for the comics show.



Chris Butcher, one of the shows co-organizers gives Raina a new arm bracelet so she wont get kicked out.



Scott Robins of Scholastic Canada and blog superstar.



Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O'malley.



Corey the creator of the new Oni Press book Sharknife.



Sunday was the only day it rained out of the six days we were in town, even though the weather report had said it would rain the entire time. Luckily this drew folks further into the tents and we had a fun day selling books and talking with friends like Miguel and Ro.



Ryan Sias at the Flight comics table.



Monica R.



For dinner, we joined Eric and J, J¹s fiancé Young, and Miguel for food at the Bedford Academy. Then it was on to the after-party, where we hung out with everyone for the last time untilŠMoCCA, which is in two weeks!





After dinner we stopped by the "closing party" where we enjoyed Frozen Beaver Pops that were passed out to everyone, said our goodbye to our friends and neighbors to the north.

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