Transgender Gravity on a Rink Without Ice: A Toronto Comic Arts Festival Report, Of Sorts

Features

Helen Chazan | June 17, 2025

TCAF 2025 poster by Faith Erin Hicks, color by Lee Loughridge

We stood, the three of us, on the rink without ice, the hard cold concrete floor burning our feet, demanding we sit down at times. Colors flocked to us. We were swarmed by queer attendees, a rainbow of pastel patterns and a wine dark sea of goth styles. Diarmid laughed, turning to Morgan and me - “It seems this table is the transgender center of gravity at this comics festival!”

This was a year of firsts at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (henceforth TCAF) - the first year the festival had ever taken place in June rather than May, and, perhaps more radically, the first year at the festival's new location at the Mattamy Athletic Centre in place of its longstanding home at the Toronto Reference Library. For myself, it was my first year I attended as an exhibitor rather than as an attendee, tabling with my micropress Gynoid Distribution alongside Morgan Sea, a wonderful cartoonist who has been a trans big sister to me since we met at TCAF 2024, and Diarmid Goss, a dear friend and the editor of This One's For Us: A Butch Pin-Up Zine (Morgan and I both have pages in T.O.F.U. but in my extremely biased opinion it is an incredibly lovely zine). This was also the first year TCAF took place in the shadow of American tariffs and draconian new policies on gender identity and travel across the U.S. border, a major source of stress for many international guests.

Table 234 A-B with Morgan Sea, photo by Helen Chazan

There was a sort of slouching terror undergirding the TCAF weekend. In the first place, my arrival to check in on Friday afternoon was accompanied by word that table set-up was delayed until 5pm as the tables were not all assembled on the show floors yet. This was absolutely not the result of poor planning, but the challenges that follow adjustment to a new space. The two floors of Mattamy adapted to the festival were a basketball court and a hockey rink, hardly tailor made for festival arrangements -- neither was the Reference Library mind you, but years of adaptation had built up the space as a home to the festival, albeit one certainly now outgrown. On Saturday, a ceiling leak in the basketball court resulted in a frenzy of rearranged table placements and rapid comic book rescue operations. spacing between rows was a little bit tight - many tabling bemoaned tight squeezes against those tabling opposite and I myself experienced numerous foot traffic jams while ambling about the show on my little breaks. It was a totally new environment, one with much room to grow.

Angela Fanche, Chester Brown, a comics enthusiast, Katie Lane

Many exhibitors from out of town likewise experienced delays, frustrations and anxieties, not with TCAF but with the journey to TCAF. My friends Ian McEwan and Celine Loup, a veritable cartoonist power couple who met at TCAF in 2019, had to drive back from the border to Baltimore and back again after the heightened tariffs on their merch forced them to ship most of their goods to Toronto by mail, an obviously exhausting ordeal. New York City's own enfantes terribles of cartooning Katie Lane and Angela Fanche did not arrive at the festival until around 5pm Saturday, the two having been held up by an absurd delay to their flight. Stories like this are frustrating in isolation but on the whole paint a picture of a comics community that transcends borders yet now struggles to connect to one another under newfound adversities.

Table 251A, Eddy Atoms

It may sound from these statements as if the mood of the festival was grim, melancholic, or anxious. All of these feelings were there, certainly, but from where I stood, at my transgender center of gravity, the mood was exhuberant, joyous, and - dare I say it - full of pride. Where I stood, TCAF 2025 belonged to the queers, especially the transgender queers. Exhuberant mascs in button up shirts, tall femmes in vivid blouses, wandered the hall with armfuls of gay smut and boundary pushing art comics in tow, mixed together carelessly, often one and the same. The joy of reading comics is, after all, one of the simple pleasures of being alive - and as people with pronouns swarmed my table and others to snap up transgender pornography and independent expression, I could not shake the feeling that this comic arts festival was in some way also a festival of transgender life. The revitalized Diskette Press offered fresh small press masterpieces, Eddy Atoms scrawled autographs in the new special edition of Pinky and Pepper Forever, while over in the Marriot Hotel the Canada Comics Open Library's own non-binary icon Jordan Reg-Aelick made space for attendees and exhibitors (including myself) to contribute diary comics to a special TCAF eidition of their lovely Still Zine series.

My impression of TCAF is obviously resplendent with personal bias. No, the book of the show was probably not the second issue of my porn anthology (although I gotta say - it's fucking hot!), nor was it my friend's butch zine. It was probably like, I dunno, Tongues (I love Tongues!). I missed all the talks, all the signings - the only event I made it to was a queer mixer on Friday night. But the transgender center of gravity is powerful indeed, and frankly those outside of it should get used to being wrong: TCAF belongs to trans and queer people. Sure, the guests of honor were luminaries like Kate Beaton, but Kate Beaton's biggest fans are trans men with pink hair wearing rainbow trousers (to the friend I am now describing - hi buddy!). That aforementioned queer mixer, in prior years a cozy little event at the cafe/bar Pamenar, spilled into the street with an unprecedented number of queer guests, excited, confused, and flirtatious as all hell. Over on my corner of the rink, the colors of pride were vivid, constantly moving, and eternally evident, whether they stopped over and streamed past. The future of comics is like the future of everything else — probably not dark, probably not bright, definitely uncertain. But from my transgender orbit, what I could see was a transgender future of comics, of art, pleasure and change, amid awkwardness, amid fear, on the hockey rink with no ice and millions of stories.