The point is to make Indigenous languages and cultures in Canada, bizarrely, less foreign and more familiar to young readers. It’s part of a global movement to save Indigenous languages from extinction, an effort that’s having a bit of a moment.
When you open Boundless, a new comic book of short stories by Jillian Tamaki, you have to turn the book sideways to read its first story – “World Class City.” The sparse text, a couple of sentences per page, punctuates the large illustrations that take up the whole two-page spread and leak into the next page as one long continuous image, evoking the passage of time. It’s an unsettling effect, if only because of the subtle discomfort of turning the book.
Dr. Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada jolts the reader from complacency page after page, detail after detail, pushing us beyond individual incidents to an understanding of a bigger picture.
Door weaves the journeys of several human characters – Aydee, Lucas, and Sandra – against a fantastical background of altered states of consciousness (and even states of identity), which seem to involve visits to a world of large, menacing creatures – part myth, part machine, part human.
lise Gravel, a prolific, award-winning artist, has a gift for the next generation of illustrators. Monsters, Italian-speaking octopuses, and worm slippers all grace the pages of If Found… Please Return to Elise Gravel. Gravel’s creations jump off the page in this rendition of the black notebook she doodles in every night. The many different versions […]