Found in translation
BY Aimée van Drimmelen
Montreal may have a thriving underground comics scene, but for francophone artists, getting recognition in English Canada isn’t easy.
Andy Brown, founder of Conundrum Press, is aiming to change that. Last May, the independent publisher launched BDANG Imprint as a way to help underground Quebec graphic novels reach a broader audience by translating them into English. “There were all these little zines that were so amazing,” Brown says of first arriving in Montreal 17 years ago, “and absolutely no one in the English world knew about this stuff.”
The imprint’s first title, Line Gamache’s Hello, Me Pretty, is a story about growing up in Montreal in the ’60s and ’70s, illustrated in a folk-art style. It was originally published in French four years ago.
In October, Brown published My Life as a Foot, a series of stories by Richard Suicide set in Centre-Sud, one of Montreal’s poorest neighbourhoods. It’s the first time a collection of Suicide’s work has appeared in book form.
