Cover Image: The Canadian Alternative

The Canadian Alternative

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Member Reviews

A broad, expansive and intelligent read about Canadian graphic novels and comics. I hardly expected to see such a level of meaning being developed in this book. Its impressive and provided much food for thought. I appreciated particularly the last essay "Making Space for Making Space" as well as essays on government comics, First Nations comics and my personal favorite Aardvark. I did wish there were more illustrations but I suppose this is incentive to go out and buy some of the books mentioned here.

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I started read this book with no knowledge about the background of comics, especially for Canada. I have always loved comics, but never really read anything that speaks behind the scenes of how it started, what is the philosophy behind it. I expected this book to teach me a lot of new things, and help me see the world in a different point of view, and I wasn't disappointing at all. This is not a book that will deprive you from your sleep at night - in fact, it is one of those books where you read to learn, and it might seem boring at times, but that is only because it is full with information at all times. Wonderful read.

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An interesting and well researched book about Canadian comics. Very interesting if you want to discover new authors or read some very interesting analysis.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley

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You can tell a ton of research went into this book. Each chapter highlights has their own author/piece with thorough descriptions, background and contextual information provided. I was expecting there to be more comics. This piece would work well for someone who was fairly familiar with some or all of these works and wanting to explore more. If you are less familiar it reads pretty heavy.

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This book reads like a masters thesis on US/Canada comparative comics. I was hoping for more comics, and less academic analysis. I also would have liked some side by side comparisons. I found it disappointing, but primarily because I didn’t understand what to expect. The analysis itself was interesting and well-supported

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