Dakota McFadzean -- Book Launch

Wednesday Dec 04 2013 7:00 pm, Saskatoon, Travel Alcove Event type: reading, signing

Other Stories and the Horse You Rode In On (Conundrum Press)

Other Stories and the Horse You Rode in On is a collection of Dakota McFadzean’s comics: short stories filled with yawning skies, dark humour, and quiet ruminations on memory, aging, and time. Drunken gnomes, sensitive teenagers, and a meditative cowboy all wander toward a sprawling, ghost-ridden horizon. McFadzean’s stories have been featured in the Best American Comics anthology for 2012 and in Regina’s Prairie Dog magazine. His minicomic Ghost Rabbit won a Shuster Award and The Dailies was shortlisted for Slate magazine’s Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Web Comic of 2012.

“The wide open prairie of Saskatchewan, the domestication of garden gnomes, the psychoanalytic breakdown of 8-bit video games — into these and other subjects Dakota McFadzean digs with his pen and brush, unearthing truths that discomfit even as they entertain. This collection of his best work to date mashes cuteness into cruelty, hope into resignation, and life into death, leaving us with one slow-burning ball of phosphorescent comics.” — Jason Lutes (author of Berlin)

“McFadzean’s stories depict small town life in Canada in an entirely unromanticized fashion and also contain unexplained elements of magical realism. While there’s a strong streak of naturalism running through his work (the world he creates feels quite solid and real), his character design is looser and more expressive. He allows for a certain rubbery quality of reality that gives him the opportunity to mold and bend it. There’s a sureness to the way in which McFadzean flips from character to character in his stories, each of whom are just trying their best to get by in life without a whole lot of happiness or fulfillment.” — Rob Clough

Dakota McFadzean was born and raised in Regina. In the fourth grade, he started forcing his friends to draw comics for his comics company, Real Foney Funnies, and little has changed since then. McFadzean holds a BFA from the University of Regina, and an MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. He currently lives with his wife in Montreal.

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