Graphic novelist to lead free workshop for aspiring artists

Jonathan Dyck’s most monumental piece of advice? Start small.

Long before pressing pencil to paper for Shelterbelts, his debut graphic novel — which earned him the 2023 McNally Robinson Book of the Year award and the admiration of Canadian comics luminaries such as Seth (Palookaville) — Dyck was inspired by the windows of opportunity offered by the standard four-panel comic.

“There was this magazine called Carousel, and I remember finding this promotional postcard they’d made that said, ‘Life is a four-panel comic,’” recalls Dyck, 39, who will lead aspiring graphic novelists and comic artists in a free workshop tonight at the Osborne Library (625 Osborne St.).

Each issue of the magazine provided Dyck with ample evidence that the postcard’s statement was true.

“I started looking at their different strips and seeing the range of artistic styles and approaches to that short format, how elastic and expansive it could be, the ways different artists were experimenting with it to tell stories or just to use it as a design prompt. It just expanded my sense of what comics could be,” he says.

So Dyck, whose illustrated work has since frequently appeared in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail and Reader’s Digest, riffled through his sketchbooks to formulate a pitch to Carousel, which published its final edition of “hybrid literature for mutant readers” last December. Dyck polished up a series of drawings from 2016’s Rainbow Trout Music Festival, coloured them digitally, and soon had one of his first editorial strips published.

Across four panels, Festival Season captures the picnic-blanket postures, shifting moods and changing skies of the summer music festival experience from the perspective of a keen observer slightly out of frame. “That particular strip, probably more than any other, gave me a sense of how comics can create a pretty profound sense of mood, even if they’re wordless.”

Dyck’s workshop, organized by the Prairie Comics Festival — Sept. 6-7 — will mostly be informational, but he encourages attendees to bring sketchbooks along with their notebooks. He plans to give a short history of comics in North America, to detail the anatomy of a comics page and to emphasize the close relationship between reading comics closely and making them rewarding for readers.

“So many comics could be greatly improved with a bit of extra thought about how the reader is moving through the panels on the page — whether it’s legible and understandable,” Dyck says. “But you never want to underestimate the reader, who has a lot of agency in how they understand the relationships between panels and how to make sense of what’s on the page.”

Living in South Osborne, the artist, who grew up in Winkler before studying graphic design and illustration at Edmonton’s MacEwan University, is currently in early development on a followup to Shelterbelts, a book-length memoir he’s tentatively titled Privilegium.

“The reason for that title is that Mennonites who settled in southern Manitoba from Imperial Russia negotiated settlement privileges with the Canadian government which were called privilegium,” he explains. “So it’s a memoir that combines some of my own experiences and education about that history with my attempt to represent that history of migration, settlement and the colonial nature of that period.”

Dyck is also making comics for the non-profit Oceans North about the northern Manitoban coastline, focusing on the relationship between humans and beluga whales.

Making and Reading Comics will begin at 6 p.m. To register, visit winnipeg.ca/library.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca