New graphic novel takes a look at a troubled era
Christie Pits riot centre of Jamie Michaels' second full length book
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This article was published 11/12/2017 (2883 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Local author Jamie Michaels is reviving a little known, but familiar, story of resistance in his new graphic novel, Christie Pits.
Michaels is the founder of Dirty Water Comics, the local publishing house behind Christie Pits. The 120-page graphic novel examines the circumstances and people leading up to the 1933 riot that took place at the Christie Pits baseball diamond in Toronto: Adolf Hitler had just become the chancellor of Germany, Jewish and immigrant communities in the city were facing discrimination and persecution, and sports games were becoming theatres for political demonstrations.
When a flag with a swastika was flown by members of the Pit Gang, a baseball team with Nazi sympathies, after beating a predominantly Jewish team in a semifinal game, a six-hour riot ensued with hundreds of people participating in a brawl, possibly the biggest in Toronto’s history.
Michaels, who lives in Osborne Village and has a master’s degree in fiction from the University of London, said he wanted to recount the events in a historical fiction to make an important part of Canada’s past accessible to a new generation of readers.
“I think Canada as a country really wants to represent itself as open, multicultural and tolerant, but we’ve got a lot of stains on the record of our past,” Michaels, 29, said.
“I think fiction is such a great window into a real time and a real feeling of that time that you can create through dynamic characters and interactions.”
Christie Pits is Michaels’ second full length graphic novel (his first Canoe Boys was published in 2016) and is illustrated by Winnipegger Doug Fedrau. It is being funded through a Kickstarter campaign that wraps up on Dec. 15.
Though Christie Pits is a fictional representation of the period, Michaels said the imagery, the story, and many of the characters are inspired by historical accounts.
“All my characters I’ve created, but the universe they’re existing in will give you a real feeling of how Toronto operated and existed in 1933 and the characters that I’m using are based off real slices of life.”
With Fedrau’s black and white illustrations setting the scene, the novel features different characters in each chapter, allowing the reader to get a look at the historical context from various perspectives and a more nuanced understanding of how thousands may have met at a ball diamond for a common purpose, Michaels said.
“The idea behind Christie Pits is to give you the feeling of a neighbourhood,” he explained.
“When you’re looking at an event so massive — before social media, before Twitter, before even the home phone was assumed — what forces could bring 10,000 people out to fight in the streets? There’s going to be a multiplicity of factors, so I wanted to capture the tensions at multiple strata of society.”
Fedrau, in his debut as a comic illustrator, said it was important to fairly portray the period Michaels imagined and worked from many Depression-era photos.
“I’m sort of history nerd, too, it’s an interesting story and it’s one that I’d never heard before and I thought it was a big piece of Canadian history,” he said.
The 43-year-old chose to stick with a cartoon, Tintin style as reference to the ’30s and to establish a familiar relationship with the reader.
“It’s stylized so that the characters can be relatable. I did quite a bit of research on comic book illustrating in general and… the more simply a character is designed the more relatable they are,” Fedrau said.
For more information about Christie Pits or to support the project go to dirtywatercomics.com