Montreal publisher Pow Pow Press’s latest offering is a double bill featuring two of Quebec’s most beloved creators: Pascal Girard’s Pastimes and Cathon’s Fruit Salad. Both books collect comic strips about the authors’ daily lives.
Pastimes is a collection of the wry diary comics of Pascal Girard, who is one of Quebec’s best known cartoonists due to his multiple English-language releases with Drawn & Quarterly, including Petty Theft and Rebecca and Lucie in the Case of the Missing Neighbor.
Here, Pascal turns his wry sense of humor to the rhythms of everyday life: oddly existential conversations with his 4-year-old daughter, awkward encounters with his friends and neighbors, and his often challenging day job as a social worker in a hospital, where he comes face-to-face with his fears of mortality.
Fruit Salad explores the oddball world of Cathon, the creator of multiple previous graphic novels with Pow Pow Press, including The Pineapples of Wrath and The Adventures of Sgoobidoo. In this new book, Cathon mixes hilarious observations of her life as a cartoonist and illustrator in Montreal with wild flights of fancy, quirky memories, and emotional interludes to open a window into the unique mind of a contemporary creator.
Many of the strips in both books were originally posted in French on the authors’ respective Instagram feeds, a form of serialization that Cathon finds creates a sense of connection between her and her readers.
“It’s interesting, the people who follow me on Instagram, they have an intimate connection with me, and with my work, because these strips are about my everyday,” she notes. “They see me in my home, with my friends, and I think that creates a closeness that I find really cool. Sharing the comic strips on social media became a way to interact with my friends and readers, to make them laugh and get quick feedback on something I had created, without having to wait months or years for a book to be published.”
The pocket-sized books, which were previously published in French by Pow Pow, share a retro graphic style inspired by vintage comic strip collections, a design choice that reflects continuity with earlier newspaper strips.
“I know that strips aren’t the most popular genre these days,” explains Pow Pow Press founder Luc Bossé. “But for me, I love them, as I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes, Charlie Brown, and Mafalda.” Behind its simplicity the comic strip format hides surprising depth, notes Bossé: “It’s not easy to master this genre, but I think Pascal and Cathon are doing it the right way. Yes, they’re funny, but sometimes, they make you reflect on life in only a few panels.”
The new English-language collections are translated by Robin Lang and Helge Dascher (Fruit Salad) and Aleisha Jensen (Pastimes).
Both creators were drawn to strips as a counterpoint to their longer graphic novel creations.
“I always come back to the 4-panel strip format since the beginning of my career,” explains Girard. “It’s just a satisfying format that allows me to accomplish something from start to finish in an hour or so. It’s a good exercise to have while I am working on longer form stories.”
When asked what he finds funny, Girard notes that he is inspired from what is around him: “Often very dumb stuff, and situations I see in my daily life.”
Cathon echoes Girard’s sentiments that strips can be creatively liberating: “When I started drawing comic strips regularly around 2017, it wasn’t with the intention of turning them into a book. It was more of a side project I did alongside creating my comic books and children’s books, something I could do quickly and without pressure, and that I didn’t really take seriously.
“I’ve been writing in diaries since I was a teenager, and the strips serve much the same purpose for me, i.e., to remind me of little fragments of conversations or micro-events that made me laugh or moved me, and that I would quickly forget if I didn’t put them down on paper,” Cathon explains.
As she continued to create her shorter comic strips, Cathon realized that she was inadvertently building a larger, coherent body of work.
“After a few years, I was surprised to learn that some of my colleagues preferred my comic strips to my ‘real’ books, and I realized that they had become an important and legitimate part of my work,” she says. “After several years, the number of strips I had accumulated naturally led me to consider the possibility of compiling them into a collection.”
And now that the books are seeing the light of day, the authors are delighted, as Cathon notes: “It is very satisfying to see all these stories brought together in the form of a book, after having long thought that these strips would only live in social media archives and sketchbooks stored in my library.”
The Beat is pleased to unveil a look at exclusive excerpts from both Fruit Salad and Pastimes.
From Pastimes by Pascal Girard (translated by Aleisha Jensen):
From Fruit Salad by Cathon (translated by Robin Lang and Helge Dascher):
Pow Pow Press will publish both titles on November 5. Pastimes and Fruit Salad are currently available for preorder via Lunar Distribution.
