Christopher Butcher is the manager and co-owner of The Beguiling, "Canada's finest purveyor of comics, graphic novels and manga", and he really likes comics. He likes them so much, he regularly blogs about comics and every two years, he puts his considerable energies and countless hours toward putting on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, a celebration of the best in creative comics and illustration from North America, Europe and Asia.

Founded in 2003, The Toronto Comic Arts Festival started off small, but has grown considerably with each show. In 2009, the show was hosted for the first time at the Toronto Reference Library in downtown Toronto. Compared to most comics conventions, which often charge admission and tend to attract just comics fans, TCAF was free and open to the public. There were numerous community events preceding, during and after the show, including a gallery exhibit and literary event held at the Harbourfront Centre, a community center dedicated to culture and arts.

I asked Ab. Velasco, Communications Officer for the Toronto Public Library about hosting TCAF for the first time, and he replied, "Well, we’ve always advocated strongly that this event be held at the Toronto Public Library. In past years, we’ve had creators like Seth, Chester Brown, Bryan Lee O’Malley and others do events here, and they’ve been well attended." He continued, "We have a huge and growing graphic novel collection that’s well-loved and frequently circulated, so this was just a perfect event for us.

It’s just a shame that we haven’t had it here earlier!"

By most accounts, thousands, perhaps as many as 10,000 visitors came to the Toronto Public Library to check out the comics and creators that weekend, making it the biggest and perhaps best TCAF to date. I caught up with Butcher on Sunday afternoon in the waning hours of the show, and got his take on its humble beginnings and his hopes for TCAF 2011 and beyond.

THE LONG ROAD TRIP TO TCAF'S BEGINNINGS

Q: This is the first Toronto Comic Arts Festival I’ve ever attended, so I was hoping you could kind of fill me in on the origins of this show? What inspired you to start putting on this show in 2003?

Christopher Butcher: Before I worked for The Beguiling, I was a fan of Small Press Expo (in Bethesda, Maryland). One year, I didn’t have a way down to the show. I knew Peter (Birkemoe) from The Beguiling, where I bought most of my comics. He mentioned that he was looking for people who could drive to go to SPX, so I told him I that I would drive down with him.

While we were in the car, I asked him a kind of innocent question. 'Why are driving to Bethesda? Why aren’t we having a comic book event in Toronto? We have so many great cartoonists; we should be doing something like this here!'

He said, 'Nah, it’s too much work. We can’t do it.. It requires too much organization and we’re too busy. We can do signings, and that’s enough.'

So that was the first hour. And then for the next nine hours in the car, and then the next 10 hours coming back, I badgered him, until finally about halfway through the trip, he said, 'Fine! You want a comics convention? You can do it, I’ll pay for it, and we’ll just do it that way. Done!' And that’s how we started the first TCAF in 2003.

I really liked SPX, but we looked at it and thought, how can we really make this something that all kinds of people will really want to come to? We really tried to model it after a small press book fair. We had this idea of doing it in the public space, someplace where people could just walk in from the street.

We also wanted to curate the exhibitors, and pick people whose work would appeal to a mass audience. And not ‘mass audience’ the way it’s usually meant in comics, where that would mean superheroes, but mainstream readers.

We wanted it to be like if someone walked in from the street, and they were at all inclined to pick up and read a book, or if they appreciated art in any way, I wanted people who were doing that kind of work in the industry to be there.

Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal was an early supporter, in a big way. They got a number of cartoonists to come that first year. But really, everyone that I talked to that first year really got what we were trying to do, that we were trying to present the public face of comics as something that anyone could get into, that you didn’t need to be ‘initiated’ or if you did, that this would be the kind of place where this could happen – we would initiate you.

That was the genesis of it, and every year, I feel like we’re getting closer and closer to our ideal, that perfect comics festival in my mind that people come to and enjoy. Where anyone can show up and find something to their taste. This year is the closest yet – I feel great about the show this year!

Q: Has it met or exceeded your expectations in any special way? I mean, this event is being held in the Toronto Public Library for the first time, right?

Christopher Butcher: I feel like the library as a space as been wonderful. There’s definitely some first year jitters being in any new space, but now that we’ve done it, we know a little better about how the traffic flows. Now for the next event, we’ll be able to pull together something even stronger.

ATTRACTING WORLD-CLASS TALENT TO TORONTO

Q: Is TCAF an annual or biannual event?

Christopher Butcher: It’s a biannual event – it happens every two years. The last one was in 2007, and the next one is scheduled for 2011. But that’s okay!