Fifty-six years ago today, Expo 67 closed its gates. I feel nostalgic about it, even though I wasn’t born until the next year.

For my birthday, I bought myself this little Expo 67 “ornamold” souvenir tray. Why does this long-past event capture my imagination so much?

In a word, it’s hope. The fair represented a vision of the future that worked, that included everybody, that was fun — and all of it was wrapped up in the best Mid-Century Modern architecture and design the world could offer.

Was it perfect? Hardly: There were cultural gaffes (the “Indians of Canada” pavilion was designed by white people, although it did showcase some potent statements on colonialism by indigenous artists) and there were questionable shortcuts in its construction (16,000 kilograms of the toxic pesticide dichlorodiphenyldichloroethane were dumped into the St. Lawrence River to make sure there’d be no pesky ‘shadflies’ that summer).

Still, wouldn’t it be nice to go to an all-encompassing event like this… and believe it?

Several cultural critics have said a variation on, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of late-stage capitalism.” I’m not here to argue about socioeconomic theory, I just pine for the kind of hopeful vision of the future that Expo 67 represented.

What are you nostalgic about? Or, stated differently, if there were an world exposition today about a better future, what would you like it to show?

I’ve been drawing cartoons all my life, but I’ve never actually done a comic strip — you know, the “newspaper funnies” four-panel sort of thing. That style is what I’ve always aspired to in the way that I draw, but… I dunno. I didn’t know how to write them, or something. It eluded me, so I did decades of other stuff in the meantime.

Well, at the start of this year I made myself a new sketchbook (many new projects start with me making a book of some kind), and I formatted it for a landscape, four-panel type comic strip.

I had the premise already in mind because I’d drawn a kind of prequel story for the Charlottetown Comics Club’s publication “Modus” last year. But this project had a couple of non-rules from the start:

• This comic strip was just for me.
• I wasn’t going to think at all about what I’d do with it. In fact, I was allowed to choose never to show it to anyone!
• I was going to do it entirely on paper — nothing digital. That was partly to save time, partly to remove the urge toward perfection that digital makes possible/imposes. Mostly, though, it was because I love just working with pens, pencils, and watercolour. This was going to be made during offline me-time. (Plus it would mean growing better at cartooning, since I couldn’t “fix it in post”.)

At Comics Club recently, Tyler clarified that the group wouldn’t be publishing anything together for this year’s zine fair; everyone was making their own thing. “So what are you making?”, he challenged me.

I knew immediately. And I managed to fill the last page of the sketchbook during my “Noodle & Doodle” session last Saturday, then went home and set about scanning all the pages. (Oof!)

This weekend, I manually imposed all those images into a printable saddle-stitch layout (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, I’ll just say that it was hard to do), and today I created a cover. Now I’ve got copies crawling out of my printer…

Maybe I shouldn’t get attached to achievements, but… this feels exciting, and damned good.

The Charlottetown Zine Fest takes place on November 4, 2023 at the Charlottetown Library Learning Centre.

Craig had Alexa play “Happy Birthday to You” this morning; I came downstairs to a table full of presents.

My food processor broke a few months ago, so my present from Craig was a spiffy new blender/processor. It’s quite a bit more powerful than what I had, though, so I accidentally made hummus soup. Whoops!

Take two (Saturday morning):

Hm, that’s how I wanted to compose the first panel, but in so doing I’ve made myself left-handed (which I’m not). Ah well, take some points off my creative licence.

As for the last panel, it’s a tricky balance, finding the free time to do the creative work I like to do, but also not feeling like I have to produce things all the time — that it’s okay to just rest.

I was thinking about that this week, how I’m jealous of people like my husband who just do their work without this feeling like they have to get somewhere with it, to get famous or any of that bunkum. At this point, that’s not what I’m after, but in any of the creative arts, I feel that’s the standard we’re held to: “Oh, would I have heard of you? Is your work acclaimed/in shops/in galleries?”

Nobody ever says, “Oh, are you a famous dentist?”