Ladies Making Comics

Ladies Making Comics about the Quebec Student Strikes

missvoltairine submitted:

I and my pal Jane Dough are publishing a book in September about the student strikes in Quebec.

It’s really exciting! There’s going to be personal narratives and a bunch of historical stuff about student and union movements in Quebec, it’s going to be in colour, with hand-printed covers, and each of the 500 books of our first print run is going to be hand-bound. It’s a really ambitious project, and we’re super, super excited to be doing this.

WE ALSO NEED YOUR HELP. We were initially going to publish the book through a local publisher of comics and art books, but after much discussion and consideration, we turned down their offer. There are a few reasons for this, and I’m happy to discuss them privately, but the main one is that its important to us, given how truly awful so much of the anglo media in Canada has been about covering the strike, to have as much control over this project as possible.

Publishing a book, especially a full-colour, hand-bound, super gorgeous graphic novel, is expensive, and Jane and I are broke. We need your help to make this happen. So we’ve started an Indiegogo campaign to  help us gather funds! We are also applying for grants and stipends from community orgs, and planning to have some local fundraisers. We hope to gather at least 5,000 dollars to cover the costs of printing, binding, distribution, and labour. Anything extra we end up with will go towards hiring a translator and printing a second edition of the book in French.

Right now you can see samples from the book on our Indiegogo site; on Monday, we will be uploading some full excerpts from the book, so keep checking back. We have some awesome donation perks that we’re excited to start mailing out.

Hooray for comics!

-Laura Ellyn

Thanks for submitting your project Laura! I’m afraid as an American I hadn’t heard anything about the Quebec student strikes (mais c’est comme d’habitude pour les Américains et des nouvelles Canadiennes, n’est-ce pas?) but I’m happy to spread the word!

And for the curious Anglophones et autre étrangers, here’s Ten Points Everyone Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement.