In the right hands, the power of pen and ink can draw attention to injustice, challenge power structures, and illustrate paths to a better future. These graphic novelists will discuss how and why they use the form to tell important stories about sociopolitical issues that have resonated with adult and teen readers from all walks of life. Kate Beaton’s Canada Reads-winning Ducks is a memoir of her own experience working in the Alberta oil sands to pay her loans, and the devastating exploitation of humans and the environment she found in an industry rarely seen by outsiders. Gord Hill has met the moment with a revised and expanded version of The Antifa Comic Book, addressing the alarming rise of far-right aggression in various countries—as well as the mobilization against it. Moderated by Am Johal.
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KATE BEATON is a Canadian cartoonist from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. A Mount Allison graduate in History and Anthropology, she launched the acclaimed webcomic Hark! A Vagrant while working in Alberta. Her witty, historically themed comics earned international acclaim and helped redefine the landscape of literary webcomics.
GORD HILL (he/him) is an author and illustrator whose previous books include The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book and The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book. He is a member of the Kwakwaka'wakw Nation, whose territory is located on northern Vancouver Island and adjacent mainland in the province of "British Columbia." He has been involved in Indigenous people's and anti-globalization movements since 1990.
AM JOHAL is Director of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement and co-Director of SFU's Community Engaged Research Initiative. He is author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015), co-author with Matt Hern of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018), and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology (2024). He is Chairperson of the Vancouver International Film Festival, a board member with the BC Alliance for Arts and Culture and Vice-Chair of Greenpeace Canada.
