The Fabler

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Next month, Gareth Gaudin of Legends Comic and Books in Victoria, BC. will be celebrating a milestone that few comic artists ever reach. As of June, the artist/comic shop co-owner will have been producing one comic strip a day, every day, for the past five years.

Impressive, no?  The Magic Teeth Dailies, as Gareth dubbed the ongoing project, were spawned in 2004 when he made a commitment to himself to produce one comic a day for the rest of his life. The Dailies draw inspiration from everyday events in Gareth’s life.

In the five years since their inception, Gareth has enjoyed significant success in the Canadian indie comic market – most notably in the character of the Perogy Cat, a surprisingly expressive chubby white cat with a pillow-like body and an undeniable charm.  Perogy Cat, who doubles as both the star of the Dailies and resident mascot of Legends, has become an icon unto itself.

Since the character appeared in Day One of the Magic Teeth Dailies, Gaudin has seen over a dozen pictures of people inked with Perogy Cat Tattoos, and has sold hundreds of stuffed Perogy Cat dolls – each hand-made by his wife.

In addition to his work with the Dailies and his involvement with Legends, Gaudin has been a prominent figure in Victoria’s comic scene for well over a decade.

I had the opportunity to chat with the Magic Teeth maestro about the five year anniversary of the Dailies, his thoughts on the Perogy Cat’s popularity, and a perceived decline in Victoria’s indie comic scene (among other things).

The interview is below:

KD: Tell me about the origin of the Magic Teeth Dailies.

GG: For about the last twenty-five years, I’ve been obsessively doodling, drawing comic books and photocopying them, and I did about 100 issues of a zine called Magic Teeth through the nineties.  One of my friends was a professional cartoonist, and he won the Eisner award for ‘Grendel’.  About six years ago he said to me, “you may be a failed cartoonist, but you’re a good painter – you should stick to that.” I hadn’t realized I was a ‘failed cartoonist’, and so it was later that same week that I wrote ‘Day One’ at the top of a page and committed to writing one comic a day for the rest of my life.

KD:  That must have been pretty challenging at times, keeping up a one-a-day quota. I mean, five years of that is a very long time.

GG: Yeah, it gets really hard sometimes, especially if you’re sick, or not at home, or on the road somewhere. We took a five week trip to Europe, and while it was really fun to draw there, it was kind of hard being outside of my comfort zone and still drawing one each day.

KD: Where do you continue to find your inspiration from the strips?

GG: They say there’s a Buddhist mantra about doing something every day for a hundred days, that after that first hundred it just becomes secondary nature, like breathing. And for me, that seems to have been true. Every day, something occurs worth writing about. While sometimes you’re not so much inspired, you just sit down, put your pen to paper, and whatever flows out, flows out. Usually, the Dailies really just write themselves.

KD: The Perogy Cat has become a fairly recognisable character to many people at least partly familiar with Canadian indie comics. How do you feel about having a character that you’ve created become an icon of sorts in Canadian indie comics?

GG: I’m certainly thrilled about it – I guess that’s the point, that you want people to be familiar with your comics. I want it to be more popular, though the hardest part is just getting people to read them.

KD: What have you been doing to get people to read them?

GG: I have a new scheme right now, actually. Since I have a comic store, it’s easy to have a display up front. If I make a pitch to someone asking if they want to read my comic and they say no, I take their snapshot and do a photorealistic portrait of them. Right now I have about 80 portraits on my wall of people who have said no to my sales pitch. I then print out the new portraits of those people in the next issue of my book, so that when I see them again, they’re compelled to buy the book. (laughs) It’s been working so far.

KD: You also have something of a contest going right now involving photos of the Perogy Cat doll. Could you tell me more about that?

GG: Right now we have a contest in the book where people send in their best photo of the Perogy Cat doll taken somewhere around the world. I had a really nice one come in last summer of Perogy Cat on the Great Wall of China, and one woman went four hundred feet down into the ocean with Perogy Cat in a plastic bag – that was pretty cool. He’s going up Mount Kilimanjaro this month.

KD: That’s very cool. Outside of the Dailies, what else have you worked on, or are you working on, as an artist/writer?

GG: I do a lot of portraits of people. There’s a portrait show about all of the British Columbia Premieres going on right now in a gallery, so I contributed to that. There’s a comic book that I believe is called ‘Monkeys Helping Monkeys’ that is a compilation of comic artists doing strips about monkeys for the Jane Goodall Institute, and I’m working on that right now as well.

KD:  So you’re keeping busy! I just wanted to shift the topic now away from the Magic Teeth Dailies and talk a little bit about your perspective of the comic book scene in Victoria.

Before the interview, I asked you about other indie comic creators on the Island, and you mentioned that a lot of the talent that had been out there has since relocated to Montreal. Could you elaborate on that?

GG: Yeah, it seems that every year there’s a new crop of young cartoonists that springs up based around the new term of art school at the University of Victoria, and they all wind up moving off to Vancouver or Montreal and you never see them again.

KD: Why do you think that is?

GG: Most people just want to go where there’s an established community of like-minded artists. It comes and goes here in Victoria, and usually surrounds one of the rooms in the art school – it’s just never very permanent. Maybe, now that I think about it, now that you can save money by putting comics up online rather than spending money on print and books, maybe cartoonists are just in their rooms a lot more and you don’t see them in public.

KD: That’s pretty surprising, considering that we’re talking about a relatively small city which has enough comic book traffic to support four comic shops all on the same block.

Based on your experience and involvement in the scene out there, how does Victoria’s comic book scene compare to Vancouver’s?

GG: Vancouver has a very well organized comic scene. I’d say it’s a thousand times better than Victoria’s right now – it has an infrastructure that we just can’t don’t have here.

KD: Do you feel like Victoria did have that kind of infrastructure in the past?

GG: I think at the peak, in ‘92/’93/’94, there might have been a hundred zines being printed every month. And that was great, like every day you’d have three or four people coming in with their books, and people were supporting that.

KD: What happened? What do you feel it is that changed the Victoria scene from then to now?

GG: Well, one factor might have actually been Kurt Cobain’s death. I could imagine that having something to do with it, being that it was a blow to a lot of creative people that came just around that same time. A lot of bands broke up in April ‘94 because of that, and I’m sure that a lot of zines also stopped publishing then too. It was a complete darkened cloud over creativity in the Pacific Northwest. If I was going to blame something, just of the top of my head, it seems like that might work.

You can keep tabs on the Perogy Cat on his very own Facebook Page. The first 200 days of the Magic Teeth Dailies are also up on the internets, and if you’re going to be in the Victoria area anytime soon, be sure to pop in to Legends Comics and Books and say hi. Just make sure your hair looks nice if you plan on declining Gareth’s offer to read an issue of the Dailies.