![]() ![]() It featured a fictional clan of hillbillies in the impoverished mountain village of Dogpatch, USA. Li'l Abner is a satirical American comic strip that appeared across multiple newspapers in the United States, Canada and Europe. Simon & Schuster, HRW, Kitchen Sink Press, Dark Horse, The Library of American Comics Russell Smith will appear at the International Festival of Authors to discuss Confidence and the city in fiction on Thursday, October 30."It's Jack Jawbreaker!" Li'l Abner visits the corrupt Squeezeblood comic strip syndicate in a classic Sunday continuity from October 12, 1947.Ĭhicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (1964–1977) “I think it just says that you’re honest.” National Post I confess to Smith that I relate to his characters on a fundamental level - despite their debauchery they’re nowhere near depraved - but catch myself, worrying aloud about what it says about me and my moral core that I relate to his two-faced con men. You don’t even need to reveal it.”Īnd despite the subject matter - sex, drugs and their intersections with social status, basically - Smith isn’t cynical enough about secrecy for most of the stories in Confidence to come across as satire, let alone moralistic. His account of a young couple coming down from a high after a rave may to the uninitiated seem otherworldly in its lasciviousness to the initiated, it seems merely accurate. I tell students: imagine what that person’s secret is. You have to search in each story to find what they’re hiding. I think that’s where drama lies. (Gentrification, he reveals, takes place in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale you could guess that if you lived in the city, but Smith consciously avoids naming the city in any of the short stories in Confidence.) He has since carved out a niche for himself as a sort of urban anthropologist, cataloguing the virtues and vices (but mostly vices) of the cosmopolitan set living in an alternate-universe version of Toronto. The author has a history with Toronto’s nightlife, as accomplished as a writer as he is as a denizen of the city’s club culture. Smith comes by his obsession with and understanding of class and social status honestly. I also like to show the fantastic appeal of the seedy.” “We tend to associate vice with a poor class, so I like to show it among a privileged class. “I’m obsessed by class,” Smith says over the phone on Thanksgiving Monday, early in the morning, speaking from his balcony in Toronto (coffee in hand, he points out, by way of assuaging any guilt over conducting an interview on a holiday). If this type of secrecy - keeping things in confidence, as it were - is the through line that runs through the 10 short stories collected in Confidence, Smith suggests that their second unifying trope is class. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. There’s so much going on: his leading man’s cowardice and vanity, all wrapped up in the concern over how ridiculous he’d look fighting in a pair of shiny runners’ tights the fact that Tracy is a white home-owning man in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, consistently frustrated by and somewhat judgmental of his two low-income Black tenants (he scoffs at one for taking a taxi when he knows she’s on welfare) the mere suggestion of running which, as Smith points out, is massively bourgeois in and of itself Tracy’s secret business plan to capitalize on the low incomes of Roma gypsies in his neighbourhood by taking pornographic photographs of them, in order to subsidize he and his wife’s mortgage while they attempt to conceive. It happens in “Gentrification,” in which protagonist Tracy hesitates to break up a fight between his two basement tenants. Activate your Online Access Now Article content If you are a Home delivery print subscriber, unlimited online access is included in your subscription. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt. ![]()
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