With even more characters and drama than a comment thread, Toronto’s streets burst with lively stories and action – at least when people stop for long enough to tell them. Much like the filmic anthology of From Paris with Love, the local comic collection Toronto Comics has strung together an array of stories from the writers and artists who cross paths with our steely city.

Friends Andrew Stevenson, Nelson da Rocha and Malcolm Derikx, who met at Ty Templeton’s Comic Book Boot Camp, created the first edition of Toronto Comics after five months of collaboration with fellow students. It was so successful, Toronto Comics Volume 2 will be released at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on May 9.

“The audience response has been amazing,” Stevenson says. “At conventions, folks are excited to see familiar faces and familiar places, and the comic stores we spoke to have been very supportive of local comics.”

In a city filled with such villainous caricatures as the Ford’s and fables like the ghosts who roam High Park, comics seem like an ideal medium for telling Toronto’s many stories.

New contributors joining this volume include Sam Noir and Chris Yao, as well as JM Frey, a local sci-fi author entering comics for the first time with her condo vampire story Bloodsuckers. Other entries range from the re-telling of true to life tales like the SS Noronic disaster (Picture Canadian Heritage Minutes without the embarrassing dialogue) to more fantastical fare like an imagining of post zombie fallout Toronto in Mark Foo and Xan Grey’s Home.

More than just a CN Tower postcard, the series benefits from its gleefully geeky celebration of Toronto. With a Kickstarter page that is well past funded, fans of comics and the city, can anticipate more.

“We want to make Toronto Comics an ongoing platform for new creators to find their way into the industry,” Stevenson says, “and the support of indie veterans and the local community will help us make that happen!”

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