Thanks to all who came out to the third Canvas “Sequential Art Meetup - Comics & Visual Storytelling” event at Tokyo Chapter’s gallery on the 22nd! https://tokyochapter.com

This meetup was dedicated to ToCo’s (the Tokyo Collective) first project, titled “hajime”. “hajime” is a zine sharing first impressions of Tokyo through the eyes of seven non-Tokyo-native artists, who told their stories in four pages each.

The event was held at hajime’s exhibition, and five of the seven artists presented about their creative process and the story behind their artwork. Each artist talked about their motivations, inspirations and relationship with the city of Tokyo.

After the gallery tour, the participants sat down for a Q&A session. Questions included the zine making process, how the theme of “first impressions” was decided upon, how deadlines worked in the project, image rendering, how the artists liked to work, and drawing at home versus sketching in public. There was also some discussion and tips on how to create better time lapse videos (thanks, Raul Trevino!)

We also took some time before networking for all the participants to share their impressions of Tokyo in one to five words; this ended up being a great way to show how we all see the same city in very different ways.

We hope everyone enjoyed hanging out and getting to meet fellow creatives, and that you were able to talk stories, ideas, collaborations, and life in general!

The reception to ToCo has been great, and so we will continue with it! If you are interested in participating in the next issue, please keep in touch with Julia Nascimento or Erica Ward!

“hajime” will also be available at Cloud Arts + Coffee’s exhibition “ZINE HOUSE” from the 1st to the 13th of May, if you’d like to pick up your own copy!

Special thanks to Tokyo Chapter for letting us use their gallery and share our “hajime” exhibition for the week!

Guest speakers:
Julia Nascimento
Erica Ward
Naomi Oren (Kittyzilla)
Natalie Bleakly
Michele Laudig

The evening’s attendees (in no particular order):
Luigi Mondino
Gabriel Elmaleh
John Cairns
Marie Wakatsuki
Jess Whitfield
Kate Forshaw
Christopher Piatkowski
Felipe Kolb Bernardes
Raul Trevino
Eric Belisle
Odding Wang

Organizers:
Julia Nascimento
Hengtee Lim