Tour Report - Wayward Travelers 2025

For reasons that should be obvious, I cancelled a couple of planned promotional appearances in the U.S. for this year, and decided to replace them with a driving tour across eastern Canada. It began with an invitation to appear at the Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival, with the idea that simply getting there would take me through a lot of other cities with many supportive bookshops and comics stores. With the help of Erika Medina, my excellent publicist at Raincoast Books (who are the Canadian distributor for First Second/Macmillan), a plan was hatched.

The Beguiling in Toronto, Ontario

DAY 1

Starting on August 4th, we (meaning me and my better half, kick-ass comics editor/journalist/scholar Irene Velentzas) loaded up my Jeep Renegade and struck out for Toronto, a mere two hour drive from our home in Stratford, Ontario. The plan hit the first of its very few wrinkles in that short stretch: the first store we planned to visit, Another Story, decided spontaneously that morning to close for the Civic Holiday, despite previous assurances that they'd be open. No problem! That just gave us more time at The Beguiling, one of North America's most renowned comics shops, and a store with which I've enjoyed an association going back nearly 25 years, to the very beginnings of my comics career.

Toronto's Book City in the Beach

After signing an impressive stack of books and chatting with The Beguiling's owner Peter Birkemoe for a while, it was off to Book City in

the Beach. Book City is one of Toronto's great indie bookstore chains. I don't think I'd ever been to the Beach location, but its staff was enthusiastic, friendly, and welcoming. I signed a number of copies of the Squire & Knight and Three Thieves books they had in stock. An old friend from university days, Chris Scholey, who lives in the area, was able to pop in for a quick visit while we were there, which was a nice bonus. I also bought a copy of a book I'd been looking all over for, Christopher Buehlman's Between Two Fires, my only purchase of the trip (Irene, though, was different story...)

Then it was back into the Jeep for the rest of the afternoon as we made our way to the nation's capital, Ottawa, Ontario. We checked into a cheap motel and managed to connect with an longtime industry pal, writer Jack Briglio, for dinner and a few drinks to wind down Day 1.

Perfect Books in Ottawa, Ontario

DAY 2

In the morning we headed to our only Ottawa store visit, at Perfect Books. A really nice little shop with a friendly staff who greeted us warmly. (This, I'm happy to report, will be a recurring theme. Book people are, generally, kind of the best.) They had a handful of copies each of the two Squire & Knight books, which I proceeded to scribble my name in.

We allowed ourselves a couple of hours to look around some the city's historic sites, many of which are very near the store: the Parliament Buildings, the National War Memorial, the statue of jazz legend Oscar Peterson, and the Ukrainian Embassy (which is currently emblazoned with a large banner urging Canadians, movingly, to "Be Brave Like Ukraine.") But we couldn't linger too long. There was a lot of ground to cover, so it soon it was back on the road, headed for Montreal.

Librairie Bertrand in Montreal, Quebec

Somewhere along the route, it occurred to me that I'd never confirmed with the Montreal store that I was coming that day. In fact, I wasn't sure there'd been any communication with the store since they'd first expressed interest to my publicist. Whoops! A quick email to Librairie Bertrand confirmed that there would be someone there, and a copy of each of the Squire & Knight books for me to sign. It's a very classy shop up a short flight of stairs in the heart of historic Old Montreal, a great location that we were sad we had to leave so quickly.

We were similarly bummed to miss out on a planned visit with another industry friend, writer Cecil Castellucci, with whom I was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2018 (for our short story "Ethel Byrne" in the anthology

Mine!: A Celebration of Liberty and Freedom for All Benefiting Planned Parenthood.) Our schedules just didn't quite mesh.

La Maison Anglaise in Quebec City

So there wasn't much else to do except get back in the Jeep and make our way to the next stop of the tour: Quebec City.

DAYs 3-5

We spent a few days in Old Quebec as a mini-vacation, something we'd been meaning to do since I found out Irene had never been (if you haven't, either, you really should...it's the closest thing to Europe you can get in North America.)

But first, we got business out of the way by stopping in at La Maison Anglaise, an English-language bookstore in a mall not far from the hotel where we were staying. I was happy to find they had a variety of my books, including older ones like Two Generals and deep cuts like Bix.

After wearing our tourist hats for the next two days, taking in a bunch of history and more than a little booze and French food, a long, full day of driving took us all the way to Nova Scotia for...

Strange Adventures in Halifax, Nova Scotia

DAYs 6-8

The tour's ultimate goal, you may recall, was to get us to the Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival, and get there we did. Cal Johnston of Strange Adventures put us up in one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed at: Muir in downtown Halifax, which is conveniently right across the street from the store (and also next door to The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, a tourist attraction we wanted to hit while we were there...and did!)

The first day of the festival is for panels, workshops, and other programming. Irene did portfolio reviews in her position as incoming editor for Conundrum Press's Emanata imprint, and for her own fledgling publishing house, Tunnel Vision Press. At the same time, I was on a panel with fellow creators Brenda Hickey (Don't Call Me Sidekick!) and Alexander Forbes (Hobtown Mystery Stories) about world-building in comics. It was a strange subject for me, because I kind of dislike world-building and find it to be nearly always overdone, particularly in the fantasy genre. But it kind of worked for the panel, which led us into a discussion of how much world-building is too much. It was a good, fun conversation. Brenda is a friend, and always a delight. I was meeting Alex for the first time, but he also seems rad.

The second day of the festival is the exhibition day. A big part of the idea behind CAFs (comics arts festivals) is that they have free admission in a high-traffic area where as wide an audience as possible can just sort of stumble into the show (as opposed to old-fashioned comic book conventions, which are very much corporate trade shows that cost an arm and a leg to get into.) DCAF takes place at Alderney Landing, which fits the bill quite nicely. It's where the ferry docks in Dartmouth, but also a farmer's market, galley, theatre and event space, and the public library is also right there. A very smart location.

I spent the day next to the Strange Adventures table, signing and chatting with fans, and generally having a great time. I hadn't been to Halifax since 2007, so it was well past time for a return.

The Monday after the festival was our "off" day to hang around Halifax and be tourists again for a day, which we did. We took in the previously-mentioned Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, as well as one of the three graveyards where victims of the Titanic disaster are buried. We also enjoyed many of Halifax's fine restaurants and drinking establishments, including a lunch with Cal after a visit to the store to sign the shipment of books that didn't quite arrive in time for the festival (whoops!) He gave Irene some advice for Tunnel Vision Press which she really took to heart (maybe more on that in an upcoming blog post.) She also left the store with an armload of books.

DAYs 9-10

Strange Adventures in Fredericton, New Brunswick

Sadly, it was time to start heading home, even though tearing ourselves away from Muir was painful. The two-day trek home was kind of a slog, though the weather mostly cooperated (as it had throughout the whole tour, really) and we did break things up with a stop at the last store of the tour: Strange Adventures Federiction, which was actually the original store before Cal moved to Halifax and made that newer location the flagship of his comics retail empire. We hung out in the store for a while (as we did with all the shops along the way) but were pretty tired by this point and mostly wanted to get back to Ontario and our own bed. Which, of course, we eventually did.

So that was it. Our all-out assault on Canada's east coast would eventually continue with an appearance at the inaugural St. John's Comic Arts Festival, but that's another trip, another story, and another post.

Thanks again to Cal for bringing us out and for giving us rockstar treatment when we got there. And thanks to all the stores who participated in the tour. I love independent bookstores and comics shops, and you should, too. We're living in frighteningly conservative and reactionary times, and while Canada hasn't seen the kind of extremism that's mounting daily across the border in the U.S., it feels like that fire could spread here easily and at any minute (and may already be doing so.) The more that right-wing billionaires and wanna-be authoritarians attempt to control what we're allowed read -- and, by extension, what we're allowed to think -- through social media algorithms and massive, online retail outlets designed to price brick-and-mortar stores out of existence, the worse it's going to be. A society where people aren't free to read what they choose can't be said to be free at all, and the more isolated and uninformed our culture is, the faster it will fall to forces bent on its destruction.

Like librarians, independent bookstores are on the front lines of this fight. Let's help them out. Please support the stores I've mentioned here, or your own local favourites. Shout them out in the comments, here and everywhere. Buy Canadian when you can. And don't let anyone tell you what you can or can't read, think, say, do, or be.