Toronto is a comics town.

With many high profile creators living here, the annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival and other comic conventions, and great comics stores like The Beguiling, the power of storytelling between the gutters is a vibrant part of Toronto’s creative and arts communities.

With hopes to add to that, a group of librarians and comics enthusiasts wants to establish a new permanent space that celebrates sequential art, the Canada Comics Open Library.

“We also noticed the way comics are showcased and catalogued in libraries doesn’t showcase the true diversity of comics, so we wanted to address that in a new system where, in the physical library space, people will be able to see visually how diverse comics are,” says Rotem Diamant, president and founder of the Canada Comics Open Library.

“We have a stickering system for queer comics, and for comics created by Black, Indigenous, people of colour; for comics that deal with mental health and for comics that deal with physical health. We’re trying to make comics more accessible and expose more people to the medium, because people tend to think of comics as an all-encompassing genre that are tied to childhood comics and we believe there is so much more than that.”

The group has a collection and has built a database of Canadian cartoonists, as well as other resources on its website, www.canadacomicsol.org.

The group is also hosting pop-up events at community spaces to drum up support for the initiative and showcase what they would like to do. There is one running Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at The 519 (519 Church St.), which will include a panel discussion on storytelling in comics featuring several local creators including Ryan North, Hana Shafi, Stephanie Cooke and others, comics workshops and an all-day pop-up library showcasing the group’s current collection.

Diamant believes that the Toronto Public Library does a good job with comics — beyond the regular collection, digital comics fans should check out Hoopla, an affiliated app that has a solid collection — but thinks there a few things this new space could add.

“We think the public libraries are doing a good job of getting comics narratives out there, but there is no existing yearlong community space for cartoonists and there are some shortcomings with the standard cataloguing taxonomy that has been inherited in the public library system, so we’re trying to adjust that,” she says.

“We don’t want to compete with the public library system, or spaces like TCAF or The Beguiling, we want to boost comics and get more people into community comics spaces.”

To that end, on Saturday, the Canada Comics Open Library is launching an Indiegogo campaign to raise $85,000 for its first year, estimating about $60,000 will go to rent.

The comics in the library will be part of a non-circulating collection and the group plans to charge an annual $5 membership fee in hopes of making the service sustainable.

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