“There should be an integration of sustainability into student life,” said Jaffe.

Among the most pressing recommendations are renovations for the Shatner building, and an energy audit examining aspects like ventilation and lighting. SSMU wants to implement the Ledership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification standard. LEED would work within existing infrastructure and implement sustainable elements, instead of calling for new construction.

SSMU Council is pursuing multiple sources of funding, including grants, to finance these projects. Jaffe’s research took a holistic approach to sustainability, focusing on how to connect to the needs of the average student.

In addition to a Green Service Point, which would inform students about SSMU projects and about how students can contribute to sustainability, SSMU hopes to make Shatner room 302 a sustainable hub for students, centred around the Midnight Kitchen, which already use the space for its daily by-donation vegan lunches.

Jaffe notes that McGill Food and Dining Services have proved a surprising ally in this effort, including the implementation of “Meat-Free Mondays” and ten Local Food Days a year in residences, as part of the McGill Food Systems Project.

“It was a really nice side of them to see,” said Jaffe.

Most important for students are the possible job opportunities within these projects. As a Management student, Jaffe understands the importance of selling sustainability to apathetic students.

“If you can put value in terms of sustainability, it’s appealing,” she explained. “Green has become logical and inclusive.”

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It’s difficult for a band to get attention when they sing in French, but even more so when they reject the Quebec norm. “There is a very limited francophone star circuit, and it tends to be limited to a certain mainstream category,” says Paradis. “There’s not as much media space for diversity to come through.” Paradis may not have record companies lining up at his door, but the musician, who produces acts including Plaza Musique, and Jef and the Holograms by day, hasn’t lost faith in his work. “What initially gets you into doing music,” he says, “is trying to make what you hear in your dreams, or definitely not on the radio…. Either you choose to abandon it or you keep pushing forward. You keep shovelling clouds,” he says, offering a Quebecois expression.

Paradis moved to Montreal from Quebec City in 2000, after releasing a couple of dark dance tracks in the vein of Kraftwerk. “Now anyone can do similar things with just a laptop, but I still had to synch up tapes with a computer,” Paradis recalls of his efforts in the nineties. He quickly met some musical comrades in Montreal, and they began performing as Echo Kitty. Automelodi was born in 2006; “I really felt there was a new context and new songs needed,” Paradis explained. “I wanted to, not necessarily turn my back on everything, but do something a little more personal, hence the name change.”

With Automelodi, Paradis is trying new things, including writing songs in English. Though their output is almost entirely in French so far, the band certainly isn’t beholden to Bill 101, the law that made French the sole official language of Quebec. “To refuse to sing in English would be like renouncing a musical instrument that I like,” says Paradis; the band currently has two songs in English. While most musicians turn to exotic instruments to achieve a worldly sound, Paradis considers every language a unique instrument that is played differently. “I’ve seen some French web sites that tried to correct our name,” Paradis recounts. “They tried to add an accent. There is no accent. I really wanted the name to be non-language specific; Automelodi could be German or Italian. I would sing in four or five languages if I could.”

Automelodi is influenced mostly by British acts, especially Brian Eno. “Eno didn’t do things in a strictly electronic way, and we also integrate some organic elements, real drums, some guitars,” the singer says of his band’s sound. Automelodi tags itself as electronic, but it certainly falls more in the tradition of eighties synth-pop than contemporary electronica. Organic is the key word here, as their songs don’t sound like something made in a lab, but on a stage. The swooping guitar of premier single “Buanderie Jazz,” played by Patrick Gosselin, recalls Johnny Marr, and the ambience evokes a Joy Division song more than Eno’s compositions. Paradis’s anglo tastes have even affected his Quebec French giving him a bit of an English swagger.

Their influences might be easy to pick out, but Automelodi never sounds tired. They take Brian Eno’s aesthetics to the dance floor and use seductive synths to induce nostalgia for right now. The world of Automelodi is French New Wave soundtracked by eighties New Wave-vaguely sinister but efficiently upbeat.

The EP release show was April 4 at the Green Room. The EP is available for sale on the band’s MySpace and at Atom Heart Records.

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In his new release, Baloney: A Tale in 3 Symphonic Acts, the artist further incorporates music into the story, adding another element to his unique blend of text and graphics. With an orchestration detailed at the start of each chapter, Blanchet manages to make his illustrations into a graphic manifestation of sound. At the book launch last Wednesday, the artist said the idea for the book came from listening to the Soviet-era Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. “His music is renowned for being so over-the-top it’s gross,” says Blanchet, “It’s almost comedic.”

He compared the sound of Shostakovich to an opera, and the plot of Baloney certainly fits that bill. The title is drawn from the book’s lead character, a widower butcher nicknamed for the saddest meat of them all. Baloney the crying butcher resides in a village nested on top of a rocky cliff with his daughter, who has lost a leg, an arm, and her vision. Every night poor Baloney is haunted by nightmares of his departed wife, whose fall from the cliff prompted the town’s corrupt duke, Shostakov, to seal off the town. Baloney desires a proper education for his physically disabled, yet beautiful daughter, while the duke terrorizes the town by regularly raising the cost of heating.

Set in an unnamed eastern European municipality inspired by Shostakovich, the constant wintry gloom of the town recalls snowy Quebec – and the duke, with his heating monopoly, is an easy stand-in for the menace of Hydro-Quebec in White Rapids. Blanchet joked that power is his main pre-occupation; besides having to pay the bills, many of his family members have worked for the power company.

Blanchet says he has received some negative reviews for Baloney, something that may have more to do with the marketing of the book than its contents. Released in English by Montreal-based graphic novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly, Baloney is described as a graphic novel filled with full-page panels. “People just don’t know where to put my stuff,” notes Blanchet. Full-page panels of graphic novels are not so different than the full-page illustrations of picture books, and these seem to be more like the novels. The text is also not divulged through captions and balloons like a comic, but within the artwork or beside it, a trait of picture books. As a graphic novel, it is easy to give Baloney harsh reviews, for it lacks the plot expected of the genre. The form of picture books is more appreciative of art, and this medium allows Blanchet to show off his dynamic skills.

Baloney should be described as a picture book for adults, best read while listening to the playlist. Blanchet’s mixture of silk-screening and computer illustration makes for an interesting showcase of contemporary design. The tragic ending is certainly not for children, and its abruptness may have garnered some criticism; it is incomplete by novelistic standards, but falls in the operatic tradition that inspired the artist. In fact, the tale sits a little uneasily with this reviewer as well, perhaps because the illustrations strain against the confines of the page, begging to be animated and given voice. Still, it’s a testament to Blanchet’s ability that he is able to inject two-dimensional figures with so much vitality.

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Cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley, originally from Ontario, says he conceived the character while he was in his twenties, living in Toronto with a gay roommate and trying to impress his girlfriend. At the beginning of the series, the protagonist, Scott Pilgrim, is 23, sharing a bed with his gay roommate and chasing after an American girl.

When Scott encounters Ramona Flowers, an amazon.ca delivery girl from New York City, it’s love at first sight, as seems to be the case whenever a Canadian meets a New Yorker. Scott learns that to keep the mysterious Ramona, he must defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends in battles reminiscent of old-school video-games like Super Mario and Mortal Kombat. Allusions to video-games and comic books abound, and O’Malley employs these nerdy references both to pander to his audience and poke fun at them. In the latest volume, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, Ramona is clearly peeved when Scott recounts old X-Men storylines for her; nerds will appreciate the reference, and their girlfriends will get the joke.

Scott Pilgrim is an all-too-rare saga mixing humour and action with an absorbing plot and dynamic characters, ensuring that readers come back for more. The comic book references were omnipresent when the series began – Scott’s ex-girlfriend and Ramona battle with samurai swords in the Toronto Reference Library for 20 pages in Volume Two – but by the third book, more emotive scenes – like Scott’s haunting flashbacks to his break-up with his last serious girlfriend – gradually dominate the narrative.

This is most apparent in the newest volume, the fifth and penultimate. By now readers have grown accustomed to Scott’s exploits, so O’Malley puts action in the back seat: Scott’s battles with Ramona’s evil ex-boyfriends barely peek out of the corners of panels as other characters gossip and bond at a party. Here, O’Malley proves that he excels in crafting relatable character moments. A scene of three friends drinking themselves silly might sound banal, but lends a lot more authenticity to characters than any Juno fast talk or pages of introspection could.

Perhaps the main character of the series is in fact the city of Toronto. Scott and company interact with the urban landscape more than anything else, providing O’Malley set pieces for his narrative. A battle to the death in Volume Three takes place amidst “the stark existential horror of [clothing store] Honest Ed’s,” a Toronto staple that confounds visitors and locals alike. By placing his characters in front of real settings, from the shops of Queen St. to bars like Sneaky Dee’s, O’Malley adds authenticity to his narrative. These background details don’t distract from the story, but add to its relatability by showing that the characters live in a breathing world and not some anonymous cityscape erected to fill space.

Just this month, filming for a feature film adaptation of the whole series began on location in Toronto. With indie darling Michael Cera in the lead role and a host of other big-name actors lining up to do their part, the comic is now guaranteed the attention that nerds hoped for with Watchmen. Fans of the series fear the film by director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Grindhouse) will be just another “quirky indie comedy” but that’s really what Scott Pilgrim has been all along, just with manga-inspired visuals and word balloons instead of a hip soundtrack. If Watchmen failed to be a crossover hit because it was sunken in comic’s past, then O’Malley is the ideal ambassador of the art form as of now.

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“I think Western comics have a tendency to overdo the dialogue and sound effects,” says Montreal-based cartoonist Matthew Forsythe.

“I think we got that from Stan Lee,” he says, referring to the cheesy catchphrases that fought colourful artwork for attention in Lee’s Spider-Man.

Composed of both prose and sequential illustration, comics often pose a challenge comparable to subtitled films, as they force readers to alternate their focus between the two.

Like all fiction, comics require a suspension of disbelief, but some of the more absurd elements of the text can disrupt that. At the launch of his new graphic novel Ojingogo at Librarie Drawn & Quarterly last week, Forsythe shared an example by illustrator Jack Kirby. In the panel, the captain of a fighter plane orders his crew to abandon ship, though the reader can see that they are already doing so. Forsythe also recalls that the unrealistic sound effect, announced in red block letters, distracted him from the graphic narrative.

While living in South Korea for a year, Forsythe became entranced with Asian comics’ tendency to blend illustrations with text. This is due as much to style as to the graphic appeal of Eastern languages, whose stylish characters lend themselves to sequential art. The Hangeul alphabet that Forsythe learned in Korea seemed to fit better than traditional Kirby-esque sound effects. “Hangeul is based on the shape our mouth makes when we say it,” explained Forsythe at the launch. “It’s a sequential art in itself.”

Forsythe began his illustration career as an editorial cartoonist for McMaster’s university newspaper. “It was just so cynical and I didn’t want to spend every week doing negative comics,” he recalls, though later he took a similar post at an Irish magazine. “Only when I moved to Korea did I turn things around and get positive.”

Eager to explore Asia, Forsythe ended up in a town outside Seoul, where he taught English in an environment similar to a French immersion school. With little knowledge of the local language, Forsythe found himself using what he calls the “universal language” of drawings to communicate with students.

Forsythe composed Ojingogo while immersed in the pervasive cartoon culture of South Korea. In a country where poop is a popular cartoon property, even signs warning of deadly safety hazards are tinged with cuteness. “They have a greater sense of fun with things we take more seriously,” the artist notes.

Though Forsythe explains that Ojingogo began as a “manga version” of his friend Vanessa, a photographer whose camera gains a mind of its own in the comic, it became a response to the alienation he felt in South Korea. “I wanted to make a comic that was a little cryptic and obtuse because it captures the feeling of being in a foreign country,” he says. “Being around all these people I couldn’t understand, it was like a second childhood.”

Aptly, Ojingogo is suitable for the underage set. Forsythe describe the black-and-white fable as “a Korean-flavoured Alice in Wonderland.” Nearly wordless, except for occasional Hangeul characters, Ojingogo can be flipped through in a few minutes or thoroughly examined on a rainy day. With his North American audience in mind, Forsythe didn’t necessarily intend for the characters to be read, though their graphic simplicity makes them easy to understand. “There’s something cryptographic about Asian languages,” says Forsythe, which makes them useful for expressing quick thoughts and emotions.

The artist is glad to be back in Montreal, where he works for the National Film Board and teaches at Concordia. “French culture is much more connected with Asian culture,” he says. “I can go to the Bibliothèque Nationale and read new translations of manga they don’t have in English yet.”

Though he is currently at work on a non-fiction comic meant to teach Korean, Forsythe hopes to return to the world of Ojingogo. He’s satisfied enough with his new release, though; “The goal was always just to finish a comic that I could be proud of.”

Ojingogo can be found at Librarie Drawn & Quarterly (211 Bernard O). It is 152 pages long and sells for $14.95.

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Children’s books are their own brand of literary rebels: they follow their own artistic and business rules. Unlike their adult counterparts, the intended audience is not the one making purchases, so in order to be successful a book must appeal to a parent’s sensibilities as well as their child’s interest. Louis Pilon, an illustrator who has started his own publishing house, says he markets primarily to parents, though he’s aware of the influence of the child. Fittingly, his company FTH Creations is family-run. His 20-year- old daughter Camille, who illustrates a series of Princess coloring books, elaborated: “I think it’s 80 per cent parents, 20 per cent kids. The colors have to be flashy and things like that so the child points it out to his parent.”

Outside Quebec, kids’ entertainment is generally centered aroundDisney and Nickelodeon. But there’s more room for creativity in the francophone mainstream.

Unlike adult lit, children’s books are shamelessly pedagogical. Anne Renaud, who has published through Montreal-based Lobster Press, writes books and non-fiction titles that are about Canadian history. “It is important for me to find a topic which there are no children’s books about,” she said. “For example, there were no books about the Tulip Festival, and I thought this was important for children to learn.” Her 2004 release, A Bloom of Friendship: The Story of the Canadian Tulip Festival, which was shortlisted for several awards, is a tribute to the Canadian soldiers who died liberating Holland in World War II.

“I know that these books are used in schools,” Renaud said. “I remember sitting through very boring history classes as a kid, so if I can make our history more entertaining to kids I can get something out of it.”

FTH Creations takes an interactive approach to juvenile literacy, publishing mostly activity books. Louis Pilon started illustrating story books after working for a toy company and has been able to blend the two experiences in his new effort. His publications are all trilingual, featuring Spanish on every page as well as the expected French and English. Trilingualism not only expands the books’ market, but encourages cultural exchange. “It’s all the same imagination,” Pilon explained.

Despite provincial success, Pilon is working hard to expand to the rest of Canada and has faced the difficulties of the U.S. market. Mixed reviews in the States have mostly focused on the language, requesting English only. “It doesn’t take away anything from anybody,” insisted the artist.

But ultimately, few people get rich off children’s books. “I have two part time jobs; that is essentially what pays the rent,” said Renaud.

Opportunities for Anglophone authors can be limited in Quebec as well. Though local publications are clearly aware of the multilingual environment, the children’s literature community is fractured along linguistic lines. Lobster Press is the only noticeable English-language publisher for juveniles in the area. There is an association for Quebec writers of juvenile literature, though it is predominantly, if not exclusively, francophone. It’s also easier for an illustrator than an author to find a job, as their work can transcend linguistic barriers. Quebec-bred artist Rogé – an example of Quebec illustrators’ rejection of the corporate realm, as evidenced in his lush acrylics – is Francophone, but has been able to illustrate titles for Lobster.

Children’s literature in Montreal is certainly a brand of its own. Pilon attributes this trait to a special Quebec creative process. “We’ve been exposed to more things,” he insisted, “so we can output things that are more complete. We have multicultural aspects and I think that shows.”

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