New Koyama Press CTON T's are now available for sale! We made two different limited print runs of Metal Bunny (on red), and Ye Ol' Cancer Arm (on slate blue)! Both are $20 each! What a deal! I will have them up in the store soon, but email me if you're interested now. We have most sizes available, including kids!

This is a bit behind the times, but I recently had a table with my fellow Trio Magnusites at this year's TCAF (Toronto Comic Arts Festival) which was a crap load of fun. The festival was HUGE this year and we were lucky enough to secure several walls to give a sneak peak of our latest work... which we have been working on for a show in June at Resistor Gallery. We had small prints made up from the original pieces (which are 6 foot square!) which sold like hot cakes. Damn HOT cakes!

I also did this little interview dealy with the National Post about the show.

Not Your Typical Book about the Environment was given an honourable mention in the Children’s category of the 2010 Green Book Awards (San Francisco)! Yee haa! Good job everyone.

Another great letter from an awesome Owl Magazine reader:

“Owl, Awesome magazine! It rocks! Although, I personally think there should be
more CTON pages.” ^{_{Rocking out, Christian}}

Last Saturday, the Globe & Mail ran a nice review on my latest book project, Not Your Typical Book About the Environment (written by Elin Kelsey). Gotta love reviews where you have to look up the descriptive words in a dictionary (who knew febrile is good?). Here's a blurb from it:

"And who wouldn't be happy with this book's approach to what the disheartened might call the coming cataclysm? Perhaps the jaundiced of eye and sensibility might object to the book's somewhat febrile illustrations and tone, but the jaundiced are not the presumed readers of this book. This is a book for the buoyant young who can and very possibly might change, even save, the world by changing all (or most) of the bad habits that their elders have visited upon it."

The editor of Owl Magazine, Craig Battle, sent me a super nice comment from one of his faithful readers in regards to my monthly Owl column "CTON's Corner":

“Hey OWL! I love your magazine, but I think you should expand ‘CTON’s Corner.’ Kids would love that!” ^{_{— Maddy, 9}}

Recently the boys at Grand Creative asked me to come in and do up a chalkboard illustration for a Flash In The Can (FITC) mixer they are hosting for the judges of the event. Here's a sweet HD stop-motion video of the action:

Time Lapse of GRAND / FITC 2010 Party Mural w/Clayton Hanmer from Grand Creative on Vimeo.

Thanks Luke & Matt!

The fellows of Trio Magnus are presently preparing for a super show sometime in June (?) at the Resistor Gallery. The details are secret at the moment, but here is a taste of some of the work to be shown via a short film shot by none other than Arv Slabosevicius of Ghostmilk Studios:

Recently I mentioned that I was lucky enough to be teamed up with amazingly smart environmental scientist and all-round nice person, Elin Kelsey, to illustrate and design her latest book for Owlkids. Well, Not Your Typical Book About the Environment is now available to pick up! It's a great book to counter-balance all the lame, preachy enviro books that have come out over the past few years, with a completely fresh approach combining intelligent, cool ideas with comic-based, bright, detailed, super fun visuals!

Here's some sweet feedback so far...

"Elin Kelsey has produced a highly engaging book, pointing out surprising connections between kids’ lives and the rest of the planet. The illustrations are fantastic and make a complex subject - conservation and sustainable living - easy to understand. A wonderful book for educating children – and adults – about the environment.”
_{Jane Goodall Ph.D., DBE, Founder – the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace}

“With energetic cartoons and a positive attitude (an opening page promises “not [to] blame you, your baby sister, or your uncle Irving for climate change”), this green guide covers four kid-focused categories: clothing, food, technology, and human actions. Kelsey explores topics including eco-friendly apparel, biomimicry, urban farming, and ecological footprints, while occasional comic-style spreads make surprising connections between the local and the global (“How bees are connected to your burger and world peace”). It's a smart approach, and one that should inspire. Ages 9–12.”
_{Publishers Weekly}

It can be snagged at any of these fine shops online, or at your local bookshop:
Owlkids
Amazon.ca (Canada)
Borders (USA)
Amazon.com (USA)

Things have been very busy here at the studio over the past few months:

Back in January, I completed work on my second book with Owlkids called 'Not Your Typical Book About the Environment', and launches this spring.

FilmCAN.org, an online magazine I helped found a few years back morphed into a production company called FilmCAN NPP Films Inc., and promoted me from designer to Interactive Producer. Our first major project will be The National Parks Project, a 13 part TV series to launch on Discovery HD in about a year. Filming begins May 2010 in national parks across Canada. My involvement will mainly include producing the online interactive experience – stay tuned for more info!

C-Ton, Blob and I recently partnered with Gearshift Films & Emmy-nominated writer Shawn Kalb (Sidekick, Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5, The Cat In The Hat Knows A Lot About That) to develop C-Ton, Blob, and friends into a TV series of their own called 'Billy In B.E.T.W.E.E.N.':

BILLY IN B.E.T.W.E.E.N. is an 11-minute comedic blast from a carbon-dioxide-powered-canon, mounted on the back of a cloned saber-tooth tiger that can play the sax…and will launch into a free-form jazz fusion solo. It compiles the tales and tribulations of one Billy Bannerton, a regular kid who is about to spend an endless summer with his mad-genius uncle, his annoying mad-genius cousin…and thirty-million mad science experiments gone wrong - very wrong under the dome of the B.E.T.W.E.E.N. complex, or as it’s less commonly known: the Bio-domic Engineered Total Work Environment Experiment…Now. (Yeah, they kinda lost steam on the "N".)

Besides all of this, Mike Holmes and his super amazing crew of his new show, Holmes Inspection, renovated our house from December-January due to reasons you'll have to watch the episode for! We are told it should air Thursday May 27th, 2010 @ 8:00pm on HGTV! We can never thank them enough for the work they did and for saving us from our house!