Tragedy Strikes: An Oral History of Guelph’s Groundbreaking Comic Book Company
by BK Munn
(Note: This article originally appeared in Tales of a Guelphite #1, published in 2018 by Fenylalanine Publishing.)
It may seem hard to believe now, but once upon a time there was a comic book company in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Way back during the "Grunge Era" of the early 1990s, the wonderfully named Tragedy Strikes Press produced a series of punky, arty, comix that had a big impact on the indy comics scene in North America and around the world. Bankrolled by a comic shop and run by a group of art school rebels, the company published comics from as far away as New Zealand and launched the careers of some of the most visionary cartoonists of the last 30 years. In business for a brief-but-glorious 3-year period, the company managed to birth 5 separate titles and a total of 21 issues before fulfilling its destiny and fading to black in the Spring of 1993, right around the time Dinosaur Jr. was releasing Where You Been and Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were all anyone was talking about. Along the way, it printed early work by the likes of Marc Bell, Mike Allred, and Adrian Tomine.
Tragedy Strikes Press started with Nick Craine’s The Cheese Heads, inspired in equal parts by the Black & White comics boom that brought the world The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and by the 80s surge in adult-themed comics like RAW, Love & Rockets and Canada’s own Mr. X and Yummy Fur. Craine’s Cheese Heads were a gang of trenchcoat-clad nihilists (with exposed Swiss-cheese brains, of course) who were involved in mysterious, violently surrealist doings —in many ways the most 90s comic ever! From these humble beginnings, the young company next published Michel Vrana’s Reactor Girl, an anthology that started as a self published zine but quickly grew to become a showcase of international comics art. Very soon, three of Reactor Girl’s contributors, Carol Swain (UK), Dylan Horrocks (New Zealand), and Jay Stephens (Canada) had their own comic books: Swain’s Way Out Strips, Horrocks’ Pickle, and Stephens’ SIN.
The company seemed poised for great things, but after two years it was all over. Editor Vrana left Guelph for Montreal but continued publishing some of the TSP titles with his own Black Eye Productions. Swain and Horrocks became critically-acclaimed graphic novelists, and Stephens parlayed his edgy comic book series into a career creating Emmy-winning animated tv shows for kids.
How did all this happen? And why did it happen in Guelph? Now the story can be told, the tale of Tragedy Strikes Press, direct from the cartoonists in their own words!
1. NICK CRAINE.
Nick’s The Cheese Heads #1 was published in March 1991, running for 6 issues until November 1992. Since then, Nick has become a successful musician and producer, music video director, and professional illustrator. His most recent books are the 20th anniversary edition of the Hard Core Logo graphic novel and an illustrated book for kids, 5-Minute Hockey Stories.
Nick Craine: I grew up on Carden St. living above what was then the Hong Kong Restaurant [now Wok’s Taste]. Just downstairs and to the south was Card’n’Comics. Landing in a scuzzy apartment in downtown Guelph with a comic book store just up the block was like a dream. I lived at the comic book store so much that the owner, Shane Kenny, started sending me on errands to buy sandwiches from the Treanon Restaurant, to restock the shelves, and organize the backstock. At the age of 11 years old I had my first job working for $5/hr cash or $6/hr trade. Shane was the first person I met with first-hand experience in the art world and art school (he may have gone to art school for a year —I can’t quite remember). I envied his steady hand, the way he could hand letter all the signage in the shop. He would hold these juried art competitions in the store where you had to reproduce an existing comic book cover (I won 1st prize for my embellishment of Frank Miller’s RONIN). I would stare at all the entries and hope and wonder that I might get the validation I was seeking. Shane was a surrogate father figure in this period.
Shane and his wife Linda had 2 children, Robin and Liam, and I was their babysitter! As high school began to come to a close, I remember Shane describing this idea he had for a comic book that was totally through the lens of Roger Corman. He called it, “Attack of the Killer Cheeseheads from Beneath the Planet of Urzatz Rangers.” I don’t remember much of the back story to his vision but I found it very entertaining to listen to and loved feeling the positive attention that Shane was offering.
During the course of grade 11, I started volunteering at the University of Guelph’s newspaper, The Ontarion, and there my cartoonist career awkwardly began with a weekly strip called, “The Cheese Heads.” I was planning on self-publishing a small run like the Dishman comics by Guelph cartoonist John McLeod, but Shane was very enthusiastic and thought this was worth pursuing as a full-on publishing venture. He and Linda offered to bankroll the publishing house and run it out of the basement of the comic book store (now called Collage and located at 30 Wyndham St). I’m fuzzy on the exact timing of things but somewhere in there we formed a company called Tragedy Strikes Press named for a drawing of an exploding city bus that adorned my portfolio for years. We printed 2-3000 copies of The Cheese Heads #1 at the same printer that printed The Ontarion. At the time I was hyping on Raw Magazine and decided to print the cover with this radical off-register effect that I thought was cool. Most people thought it was a mistake. In hindsight, I suspect self-sabotage was guiding that decision. But there it was. It existed. We had distribution through Andromeda, Diamond, Last Gasp and a handful of others. Who knows how many we sold?
1st year art school was a bust but I met Michel Vrana. Together, Michel and I made a comics anthology insert for the school paper with an EC vibe called Itchy Tales. Michel was already successfully bankrolling his own darling anthology called Reactor Girl named for his own cool cartoonist effort, a sweet postmodern petite protagonist named Reactor Girl. I think he put out 2 or 3 issues of the mini and they were smart, and carefully designed and demonstrated a real love of the medium.
After flunking out of art school I took off to London England with my girlfriend, selling copies of Cheese Heads #1 on the streets in Camden Town. The local comic shop took notice and started selling them too. Somehow, I met Paul Gravett at a book show in Reading I think. Paul wanted to know all about Chester Brown. Regretfully I hadn’t met Chet at that point and didn’t have much to tell. Nonetheless Paul invited me to participate in Alan Moore’s epic collaboration known as “The Worm.” My contribution is terrible of course but how cool was it to be in a room with this crazy comics stunt going on? While in England, I got to understand the lay of the self-publishing land and two voices really stood out: Carol Swain and Dylan Horrocks. I ended up meeting Carol and asked her if she’d provide a back-up story for Cheese Heads #2. I never met Dylan as he is based in New Zealand, however I got ahold of his fantastic FOX comics through Paul Gravett who I think was publishing him at the time.
By September/October TSP was in full existence. Shane and Linda offered me a salary and hired Michel Vrana to be the managing editor and we began to plan the roll out of a full-sized anthology of Vrana’s Reactor Girl. The second issue of Cheese Heads came out in November. We were a fully functioning publishing company now with Vrana’s amazing design smarts to lift the production value of the comics. We began printing the comics at Preney Print & Litho of Cerebus fame. I was just starting to actually learn how to draw. Cheese Heads #3 came out Jan '92. It was really weird. There was a dude smoking bugs. I don’t know where all this was coming from. It was a dream come true. By June of 1992 we were cookin’.
The super-talented Jay Stephens was in his first year during Vrana’s final year at OCA [Ontario College of Art, now OCAD University]. Stephens’ work was featured in the original Reactor Girl minis and when the book made the jump to TSP, Stephens’ awesome work stood out. You could see in his first issue the beginnings of all the brilliant tributaries that he would go on to investigate in his fantastic career to come. Way Out Strips was launched in May. Pickle was launched in December. 1992 was busy. I think we were printing 3000 copies per issue. I have no idea what we sold. I’m sure that SIN was the bestseller, though. It was a magical time. I wish I could do it over again. I would take myself less seriously and not be so tortured. The books were fabulous. In our own way, I feel like we were elevating the medium with our Canadian-ness. We were getting letters and I remember getting a piece of fan art from Michael Allred who was doing his Graphic Muzik with Caliber and that provided me a huge ballast of validation that fuelled me for a long time. Michael’s career exploded with Madman back when one of the TMNT guys founded TUNDRA.
Cheese Heads #6 was partially completed but never came out. I don’t remember exactly how it all played out but I don’t think we made it into 1993. The sales could not support the company and there were too many forces weighing on us and on the comic shop. Tragedy Strikes Press was eating cash. More than one person commented on the demise of the press that we should have called ourselves something like, 'Healthy Profit Margin Press" or some such thing!
2. DYLAN HORROCKS.
Dylan’s short comics stories started appearing in the 4th issue of Reactor Girl (August 1992) and the first issue of his Pickle was published in December 1992. Nine more issues of Pickle were later published by Black Eye, serializing the award-winning graphic novel Hicksville, about a small town in New Zealand that is secretly the centre of the comic book universe. He has gone on to have work published by Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics, and even wrote Batgirl comics for awhile!
DYLAN HORROCKS: I’d been handing out copies of my Pickle mini-comics to cartoonists and publishers that I met at comics events. But the contact with Tragedy Strikes came about through Paul Gravett (the former editor of Escape Comics, among countless other things). Michel Vrana and Nick Craine (if memory serves) were visiting the UK in late 1991 or early 1992 (my memory of the details here is vague, so Michel etc can probably correct things) I think for the UKCAC convention? Paul introduced me to them over a beer and I gave them copies of the Pickle mini-comic. We chatted for a while and then went our separate ways. Paul is always doing this, by the way: bringing comics people together, pointing work out to publishers, sparking productive collaborations. Anyway, a few months later, I returned to New Zealand, and for a while I was difficult to contact —sleeping on friends’ couches, with no fixed address or phone number. One day, my father received a mysterious fax addressed to me. It said something like “Dear Dylan, We are interested in publishing Pickle as an ongoing—“ and then the fax machine had jammed and the rest of the message came out looking like a barcode: unreadable vertical lines. I had no idea who it was from or anything. Eventually I was able to decipher the number it had come from and worked out it was from Canada. I dimly remembered Paul Gravett introducing me to some Canadians, so I called him and he confirmed their identities. I finally made contact with Michel Vrana and enthusiastically agreed [Pickle #1 came out December 1992].
My memories of that time are complicated and intense. I was in the middle of a personal crisis: trying to decide whether to live in New Zealand or England (I travelled backwards and forwards between them a few times); my girlfriend and I broke up, then got back together, then broke up again; I was dirt poor and surviving on the kindness of friends and family, and meanwhile, I was trying to put together my first solo professional comic book. Half that issue was made up of existing work (from the mini-comics etc), and the rest was drawn on friends’ kitchen tables and floors in NZ and England. Putting that first issue together was one of the most exciting things I’d ever done, and it happened while the rest of my life was in absolute chaos. I was so relieved when it actually came out, and around then, things settled down: I moved back to New Zealand for good, got back together with my girlfriend (we’re now married and have two grown-up sons), and was hired by a bookstore in Auckland. Phew!
From memory, I mostly dealt with Michel (and a little bit with Nick?). I don’t remember any direct contact with Shane. They were a joy to work with: enthusiastic, helpful, endlessly patient with my inexperience and the hassles of long-distance communication in a pre-internet age (made worse, of course, by my lack of fixed address at the time). They also sent me copies of Nick’s Cheeseheads and Jay Stephens’ Sin, and I loved them both. It was an exciting place to be published. I had a vague sense of Shane being the financial backer, with Michel and Nick as the hands-on publishers (especially Michel). But I was far away in NZ, so I didn’t really know how things were organized. I always assumed Jay was also part of the team —it seemed like Guelph was this hot-bed of cartooning talent, and Tragedy Strikes had grown out of that. As for putting out an issue, the contents were left entirely up to me, with lots of faxes back and forth to sort out design details, etc. I then sent the artwork over to Canada and they turned it into a comic.
I have no idea what the sales numbers were like. This is all pre-internet, so it took a while to get any response, but I dimly remember a nice (brief) mention in The Comics Journal, and a slow trickle of letters and postcards from other cartoonists. By the time we’d done a few more (under the Black Eye imprint), I’d had really gratifying feedback: some of my favourite cartoonists (like Chester Brown and Seth) had praised Pickle, and I was in touch with a bunch of really exciting young voices who became good friends (people like Jon Lewis, Tom Hart, Megan Kelso, James Kochalka, Ed Brubaker, and of course Jay Stephens and Nick Craine). It felt like being part of a new movement in comics —even though I was on the other side of the world. Michel Vrana was an important supporter of that scene.
Despite the ominous (even ill-fated?) name, Tragedy Strikes was a huge turning point for me. Pickle #1 launched my career, gave me an opportunity to do exactly what I wanted to do with comics, and introduced me to an inspiring community of fellow cartoonists. I came in near the end, I guess: one issue of Pickle, a couple of Reactor Girl contributions, and then they folded. If Michel hadn’t followed up with Black Eye, things might have been very different for me, but as it turned out, the end of Tragedy Strikes was just the beginning. I’m enormously grateful to Michel in particular, for taking a chance on Pickle, and for putting out Hicksville right at the end of Black Eye’s own lifespan. He was a great champion of personal idiosyncratic comics, and became a good friend. I keep in touch with Michel, Nick and Jay via social media, emails, and in person when I get over to Canada. I even stayed with Michel the last time I was in Toronto. It’s always a thrill when I see new comics and art from Nick or Jay. And any mention of Guelph gives me a warm, happy feeling. So I guess Tragedy turned out pretty good in the end.
3. JAY STEPHENS.
Jay began publishing with Tragedy Strikes in the first issue of Reactor Girl in December 1991. He got his own comic book series with Sin #1, June 1992 and that series ran for 5 issues, until February 1992. Jay turned several of his comic book characters into tv shows, including JetCat (Nickolodeon), Tutenstein (Discovery Kids), and The Secret Saturdays (Cartoon Network). He has made comics for DC (Teen Titans) and Chickadee and Owl magazines. He has also drawn the newspaper comic strips ODDville and Oh, Brother! His latest project is the Canadian superhero series Arrowhead, published in True Patriot Comics.
JAY STEPHENS: Michel Vrana saw my sketchbooks when we were roommates in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he was editing the comics issue of the Ontario College of Art newspaper, and asked me to contribute. That was my first printed comic, so I began printed life like a spoiled little shit with a publisher attached. The comic was probably about a dolphin named Kerplunk. Kerplunk dies at the end. The OCA comics issue (Itchy Tales?) had to be reprinted, it was so popular, which lead Michel to the idea of printing up our own little comics, independent of the Art School. Reactor Girl was born as a hand-silkscreened anthology mini-comic (with hand-stitched binding and occasional glued-on googly eyes) and it sold out at the nearby Silver Snail ... I believe we were one of the first mini-comics they ever carried. Then, suddenly, Nick was telling us Shane wanted to make it into a 'real' comic book.
I was more of the team mascot and cheerleader. Nick Craine from Guelph had been the Art Director and co-instigator of Itchy Tales, with Michel as Editor, and they retained those titles as we moved forward. I voiced opinions about everything always, and they didn't seem to mind. Sin was an organic growth from the anthology that was ill-conceived and idiotically ambitious, but the best fun I've ever had drawing. I had too many fucked up ideas for a few pages per issue of RG, and so we talked each other into producing a bi monthly series. It reflected my sketchbooks at the time: Mad Magazine-ish solo anthology with fake ads, tasteless gags, and delusional semi-autobiography that all connected into one larger fever dream. Drugs were involved.
I got lots of fan mail and also surprising support from other cartoonists, which kept me going. I think we sold between one and two thousand copies of each issue?, but you'd have to check with Michel. We were paid! It was a success, but we didn't feel successful ... it still seemed so small and personal, like I was trading mixtapes and demos with friends, or something. The three of us talked in high-pitched baby voices around the office ... we were idiots. But we were idiots with ambition and boundless ideas and energy ... it could have been grand.
I believe the comic shop, Collage, that Shane owned was having financial difficulties that resulted in his pulling the funding for our pulpy little empire. We all just moved on with Michel at the head of Black Eye Productions, a little older and wiser for the shake up, and all of us a little more serious about the work. TSP was like being in a young band. We had nothing but raw ideas and energy, no thoughts of playing to an audience, touring around comic conventions selling our little hotcakes. It was fucking terrifying, but I'd already been through scarier shit. These were my new art friends, and this was my new path, and I never looked back. Seeing my garbage chicken-scratches in print drove me to draw better, faster, too.
I think Nick had the hardest time switching gears. He had known Shane since childhood, and Nick had brokered the whole deal. But we all eventually just drifted with Michel over to Black Eye Productions. I think Michel called and said TSP was over, but did I want to keep doing SIN with him. Just like that. Then he moved to Montreal. I moved back to Toronto for a bit, before resettling in Guelph with a marriage and two babies. We grew up and moved on, but never completely lost touch. Nick and Michel are like family to me. Which means I remember to call them once- or twice-a-year to ask them how they're doing. Because I'm awful.
_______________________________
UPDATE BY BK MUNN:
And the rest is history! Michel Vrana went on with Black Eye to publish more comics by Dylan Horrocks and Jay Stephens, as well as work by Matt Madden, Tom Hart, Jason Lutes, Jeremy Eaton, and more! Black Eye's original run was from 1993 to 1998. It returned just over twenty years later in 2019 to publish the final issue of Dylan Horrock's Pickle (#11) and since then has reestablished itself as a boutique indy publisher of crowdfunded comics. Jay Stephens published his award-winning horror series Dwellings through the revived Black Eye. Besides Pickle and Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks went on to a bevy of comics projects, including the graphic novel Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. Nick Craine went on to create two graphic novels based on the films of Bruce MacDonald, Dance Me Outside and Hard Core Logo: Night of a Thousand Punks, and, besides a brief stint inking Mike Allred's X-Statix comics at Marvel, most recently published a new comic, Parchment of Light: The Life and Death of William Shakespeare.
