Sherwin Tija: drawing grown-up characters that would get Archie and the gang all flustered

 
Sherwin Tija – conceptual artist, off-the-wall event planner, writer and cat lover – is gentle yet provocative as he pushes the boundaries of respectability and the expected. The creator of the award-winning, Montreal-set graphic novel The Hipless Boy graciously shared his ideas about comics with NIGHTLIFE.
 

What inspired you to turn The Hipless Boy, a column you wrote for the McGill Daily, into a graphic novel?
I tried to write a brand new thing, but it didn’t work. Turning the column into comics was the only thing I seemed to have the energy to do. You know how sometimes you keep calling someone up to hang out and you’re not sure why? Same thing with projects. It was the one I kept going back to hang out with.

Are you involved in the local comic scene?
Not really. I know of the other artists in my city, but I suspect we’re all kind of introverted. You kind of have to be to be a comic artist.

Comics/graphic novels traditionally either create a fantasy world or document life. Which does your work follow?
The Hipless Boy is part of the autobiographical emo tradition. There was a time when everyone was writing about their sad little lives and their moments of charming victory. I think my book is aligned with those kinds of books.

I read a lot of Archie comics growing up, and I think of The Hipless Boy as a response to that. There are places Archie comics can’t go, like cunnilingus, for example, because they have a mission to be ‘wholesome.’ When I was making The Hipless Boy, I was thinking of it as the anti-Archie comic. Now that I’ve had more time to think about it, it seems more like The Hipless Boy is where Archie comics should have gone. The notion of condoms never comes up in Archie, whereas I think that responsible sex education through Archie comics could be a brilliant move for them. 

In 2011, Conundrum Press publishes Tija’s You Are a Cat, a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style book from the point of view of a housecat.”
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