Bus Griffiths, Now You're Logging
What fun, what fun! How did I never bump into this Bus Griffiths' graphic novel Now You're Logging before this?!? Actually, no, I do know why - because comic books are for kids, dammit, for kids, and I mostly learned about logging in relation to adult lives.
To be honest, comics were never a big part of my life, except for the time spent with my long-ago best friend Matt Jessop, who somehow always had piles upon piles of them. Superhero comics mostly, some Westerns, and I think only a very few of the Archie variety.
At my grandparents there were a few classic novels in comic form, and I loved those (especially Uncle Tom's Cabin, the race relations of which baffled me utterly when I was nine), but if I'd read Now You're Logging back then, my life just might have been different. When I read it now I shake my head at just how formulaic the plot is, and how cartoonish the characters are (which can be a bad thing even when you're reading a comic, I'm convinced), but if I'd been of an age to readily absorb the information about logging the old ways in British Columbia, and to identify with the heroic Al Richards, well, who knows? Maybe I'd have been a logger rather than someone who fights my own nostalgia in every word I write about logging, though with as full knowledge as one can have about the logging industry's connection (both in British Columbia and elsewhere) to local and global environmental shifts.
Over a hundred bucks through ABEBooks, but free for two weeks through interlibrary loan. I wonder if the lovely and talented Harbour Publishing can be pressured into reprinting the 1990 re-edition of this classic volume....
To be honest, comics were never a big part of my life, except for the time spent with my long-ago best friend Matt Jessop, who somehow always had piles upon piles of them. Superhero comics mostly, some Westerns, and I think only a very few of the Archie variety.
At my grandparents there were a few classic novels in comic form, and I loved those (especially Uncle Tom's Cabin, the race relations of which baffled me utterly when I was nine), but if I'd read Now You're Logging back then, my life just might have been different. When I read it now I shake my head at just how formulaic the plot is, and how cartoonish the characters are (which can be a bad thing even when you're reading a comic, I'm convinced), but if I'd been of an age to readily absorb the information about logging the old ways in British Columbia, and to identify with the heroic Al Richards, well, who knows? Maybe I'd have been a logger rather than someone who fights my own nostalgia in every word I write about logging, though with as full knowledge as one can have about the logging industry's connection (both in British Columbia and elsewhere) to local and global environmental shifts.
Over a hundred bucks through ABEBooks, but free for two weeks through interlibrary loan. I wonder if the lovely and talented Harbour Publishing can be pressured into reprinting the 1990 re-edition of this classic volume....
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