The Beguiling is a comic shop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It specializes in underground and alternative comics, classic

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

reprints, and foreign comics. It has built an international reputation for focusing on and promoting non-

superhero comics Superhero comics are one of the most common genres of American comic books. The genre rose to prominence in the 1930s and became extremely popular in the 1940s and has remained the dominant form of comic book in North America since the 1960s. Su ...

in the superhero-dominated North American comic book market. The store has made effort to promote comics culture in Toronto by organizing the annual

Toronto Comic Arts Festival The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) is a comic book festival held annually in Toronto, Ontario. Founded in 2003, TCAF has grown to become one of the world’s largest festivals dedicated to the promotion and appreciation of comic arts. Pro ...

(TCAF) in coöperation with the Toronto Public Library, which also hosts Page & Panel, a nonprofit shop to support TCAF. The Beguiling also runs a sister store, Little Island Comics, the first North American comic shop aimed exclusively at children.

History

Founded in 1987 by Steve Solomos and Sean Scoffield on Harbord Street near the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, The Beguiling quickly built a reputation for the diversity of its stock, focused on art-oriented, avant-garde, underground and alternative comics—"anything that is even peripherally comic book-oriented", according to current owner Peter Birkemoe. In the earliest days, much of the store's income was made through mail order, as the material it dealt in was not mainstream. It also built a reputation for stocking the works of

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...

s such as Chester Brown and Julie Doucet, whose comics most stores would not handle due to the controversial nature of their contents. Well-known Toronto-based cartoonists such as the trio of Brown,

Seth Seth,; el, Σήθ ''Sḗth''; ; "placed", "appointed") in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mandaeism, and Sethianism, was the third son of Adam and Eve and brother of Cain and Abel, their only other child mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible. A ...

and Joe Matt became associated with the store, and sometimes depicted it in their comics. Others such as Jay Stephens made it their shop of choice. In 1998, Solomos and Scoffield decided to devote their time to creating art (and later

film production Filmmaking (film production) is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, starting with an initial story, idea, or commission. It then continues through screenwriting, casti ...

), and ownership was passed to Peter Birkemoe and Shane Chung, who expanded operations. In 1992 it relocated to a two-floor

Victorian Victorian or Victorians may refer to: 19th century * Victorian era, British history during Queen Victoria's 19th-century reign ** Victorian architecture ** Victorian house ** Victorian decorative arts ** Victorian fashion ** Victorian literature ...

building in

Mirvish Village Palmerston-Little Italy is a neighbourhood in central Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its boundaries, according to the City of Toronto, are by Bathurst Street to the east, Bloor Street to the north, Dovercourt Road to the west and College Street to th ...

in Toronto, and has since branched out into selling to libraries, organizing the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and running two more locations: Little Island Comics, which caters to children; and the nonprofit Page & Panel in the Toronto Public Library. By 2017, 50% of its sales were to libraries across Canada. Plans to redevelop Mirvish Village as condominiums pushed The Beguiling to find a new location. It moved 3 January 2017 to a location at 319

College Street College Street may refer to: *College Street (Kolkata) *College Street (Toronto) * College Street (Sydney) *College Street (York) College Green is an open space in the city centre of York, England. History The green lies within the historic pr ...

, near the University of Toronto. The new location has since grown to about double the floor space of the previous one.

Description and reputation

The Beguiling is "a store with an agenda", according to Birkemoe, and has been derided for some for its perceived elitism, which stems in part from its sponsoring of ''Crash'', a journal of comics criticism that mainly condemned bad comics. Others, such as comics historian Charles Hatfield, have praised the store for its sense of history, saying, "You always leave the shop with a larger sense of what comics are about." The Beguiling is patronized by an international audience. The store has made the top five retailer list in '' The Comics Journal'', and among the awards it has received, it shared the inaugural Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award in 1993, and it won the Joe Shuster Awards' Harry Kremer Retailer Award in 2010.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival

In 2003, Peter Birkemoe and Chris Butcher of The Beguiling first organized the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF). Unusual in the world of comics conventions, TCAF is a free-admission event. It focuses on alternative and independent comics, but includes other creative arts besides comics. Rather than being like a traditional comics convention, it is patterned after European festivals such as

Angoulême Angoulême (; Poitevin-Saintongeais: ''Engoulaeme''; oc, Engoleime) is a communes of France, commune, the Prefectures of France, prefecture of the Charente Departments of France, department, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of southwestern Franc ...

, and the American Small Press Expo.

Little Island Comics

As most North American comic shops focus on teenage and adult customers, and The Beguiling itself mainly on adults, the owners wanted to fill a void by opening the first children's comic shop in North America, and possibly the world. Little Island Comics opened 6 September 2011 at 742 Bathurst Street in the Annex, close to The Beguiling. The shop was designed with children in mind, with bright colours and shelves at child-height. When Mirvish Village closed in 2017, so did Little Island; several of the staff moved to Page & Panel. Little Island Comics re-opened at 323 College Street in February 2018, next to The Beguiling's new location there.

References

External links