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LITERARY LOCATION: The site of Calhoun Farm, on Calhoun Road near Tappen on Shuswap Lake.
The Calhoun Farm was first recorded in print as a chapter in artist and heritage expert Michael Kluckner's non-fiction book Vanishing British Columbia (UBC Press, 2005) describing the wartime experiences of a group of Japanese-Canadian families who exiled themselves there, leaving behind homes in Vancouver and on Mayne Island, during the internment years that began in 1942. The Calhoun Farm is also the setting for the early chapters of Kluckner's graphic novel Toshiko (Midtown Press, 2015), which recasts the true story into a Romeo & Juliet saga involving a local farm boy nicknamed Cowboy and a teenage Japanese-Canadian girl, Toshiko. When their romance becomes a scandal and he is thrown out of his house by his racist father, he escapes with her on a freight train bound for Vancouver.
ENTRY:
Involved for decades in the preservation of Canada's old buildings and historic places, Kluckner was the founding president of Heritage Vancouver in 1991. He served as president of the Langley Heritage Society from 1993 to 1998. From 1996 until 2001, he was the British Columbia member of the board of governors of the Heritage Canada Foundation, and served as chair from 1998-2000. He also sat on the board of the Heritage Society of British Columbia during that period. He chaired the Vancouver Heritage Foundation in 2002-3. He received the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 for the contributions made, through books and volunteer efforts, to increasing awareness of Canada's heritage and culture.
Following several years in Australia, Kluckner returned to live in Vancouver in 2010 and two years later published Vanishing Vancouver: The Last 25 Years (Whitecap Books, 2012), an update on his 1990 book, Vanishing Vancouver (Whitecap Books, 1990).
Kluckner lived until 2006 on a nine-acre sheep farm in rural Langley where he raised sheep and chickens and helped his wife, Christine Allen, also a writer, maintain her large cottage garden. He wrote for various Canadian magazines and exhibited original artwork at a Vancouver gallery. The move to Langley in 1993 signaled a change in his painting and writing. "There's a time to fish and there's a time to mend nets," he said. "This is net mending time for me."
Inspired by his travels around the province, Kluckner published British Columbia in Watercolour. "These paintings are done for pleasure rather than politics," he said. "My last book, Paving Paradise, was probably too much of a rant. I realized I don't have to paint big diggers clawing at old houses to carry on my work."
Having travelled for several decades to compile the impressions for Vanishing British Columbia (UBC Press, 2005), Michael Kluckner distilled the multi-faceted province into 12 essential colours: cerulean blue, manganese blue, ultramarine light, Payne's grey, cadmium yellow deep, yellow ochre, olive green, viridian, burnt sienna, burnt umber, sepia and India red. His 160 blue/green paintings of heritage buildings, usually nestled amongst trees and hills, are unmistakably Kluckner.
Inspired by Delacroix and by Japanese sumi-e sketches as a young man, Kluckner has developed a coherent style, using washed-out hues, to match his preservationist aesthetic. Vanishing British Columbia doesn't rescue the past; it invests the ever-ephemeral present with mystique. Unlike some of Kluckner's earlier work, Vanishing British Columbia doesn't feel commercial, and perhaps that's the result of more tasteful packaging, increased maturity or else more remote subject matter.
After a string of 'Vanishing' books in the 1980s, the heritage activist refined his peculiar historical bent that merges academic precision with folksy reportage. The end result is at once charming and useful--a rarity for an art book. Engaging Mark Forsythe's BC Almanac program to serve as his intermediary to the public, Kluckner attracted oldtimers and history buffs to his website. These people supplied background tidbits - 'local colour'- to complement his watercolours, archival photos and Union Steamships memorabilia.
Kluckner's paintings of humble sites such as 'the Brilliant bridge', 'the Dunster store,' 'Wong's Market,' 'the Rolla Pub' or 'the Union Bay Station' were all started out-of-doors, on location, and completed in his studio. Kluckner's subjects are devoid of drama, dignified, at rest, almost invisible unless we are stationary with them. Humans are eerily absent.
His image of Maquinna Avenue in Zeballos shows the Zeballos Hotel, built in 1938, and an adjoining two-storey building that housed one of the town's brothels. The static street scene, complete with parked cars, is non-descript, and yet Kluckner has validated this forgettable scene as a link to a soon-forgotten era. In this way, ghosts are redeemed and we are not trapped in Anywheresville, USA.
Amid architectural details, thumbnail biographies and historical summaries, Kluckner includes human punctuation marks. While discussing two paintings of residential schools since converted to Aboriginal centres (St. Michael's at Alert Bay and St. Eugene's north of Cranbrook), Kluckner recalls a local woman saying to him, "This is where they tried to take my culture away, so it is fitting that it will now help me to get my culture back."
How many people today can remember Siska Lodge in the Fraser Canyon, managed by Fred and Florence Lindsay in the 1950s? After incorporating excerpts from a Barry Broadfoot column, Kluckner quotes a Quesnel obituary that notes Fred Lindsay was a self-published author of gold rush tales who had "a few enemies and a hell of a lot of friends." Perhaps this is what they mean by magic realism. Poof. Fred Lindsay had vanished, but Kluckner, as an artist/magician/historian, has succeeded in plucking him out of a huge hat called history.
Vanishing British Columbia won 2nd Prize for the BC Historical Federation Book Writing Competition. Vancouver Remembered received the 2007 City of Vancouver Book Award.
Kluckner turned a new page for his first graphic novel, Toshiko (Midtown $19.95). Set during World War II, it recalls how Toshiko Yesaki and her cousin were sent to BC's interior from 'Japtown' in Vancouver due to the internment of Japanese Canadians. They go to school and also work on Calhoun Farm near an unfriendly town [Salmon Arm] where most residents view them as enemies. But one of Toshiko's classmates is curious and sympathetic about the exile of Japanese-Canadians, and romance develops.
"Remember Romeo and Juliet in the first term?" she says, during one of their secret meetings. "That's us."
The scandal of this relationship between Toshiko and a local boy, nicknamed Cowboy, who doubles as the novel's narrator, pushes the couple out of BC's interior and back to Vancouver when his racist father objects. The two, love-struck teenage runaways know they will be forced to face the racial, moral and social realities of wartime Canada but they head to the coast anyway.
The Calhoun Farm, on Carlin Road, in the Tappen Valley, near Shuswap Lake, is where Henry and Hilda Calhoun welcomed Japanese Canadian families during the internment. Most were the extended family of Kumazo Nagata of Mayne Island. Kluckner's teenage characters are fictional, but Cowboy's side of the story is partly inspired by an acquaintance, born in 1934, who had worked on the Calhoun Farm in 1952.
The only extant photograph of the Calhoun family, who took in the Japanese Canadians in the middle of the bitter winter of 1942-3, found its way to an antique store in Clearwater, B.C., following the death of Harold Calhoun, the son of farmer Henry Calhoun. Michael Kluckner found the photograph there in the summer of 2003, shortly before the store was razed in a forest fire.
"For the myriad talks I have given about Vanishing British Columbia," Michael Kluckner recalls, "I always ended with the story of the Calhoun Farm and the long route taken by those families, including from a house on Mayne Island and a grocery store on Main Street in Vancouver. And the Calhouns themselves were quite heroic, demonstrating such tolerance and humanity in the midst of a hostile province. The opportunity to revisit that period in a fiction format was a bonus."
As Tom Jones might have said, go big or go home. As a follow-up to his first graphic novel Toshiko set during World War II, Michael Kluckner has hit the fast forward button and created 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery (Midtown Press / Sandhill 2016). Evoking a futuristic West Coast in the wake of a Patriotic War and a pandemic, Kluckner's dystopian wasteland features Detective Sara Fidelia on the trail of a murderer in a ruined landscape. Sort of like Walking Dead Lite meets Raymond Chandler meets cautionary environmentalism. You can't say it ain't original. The genesis, according to Kluckner, was a trip to Cuba in 2012 mixed with the onslaught of news stories about humans wrecking the planet. Impressed by Cuban propaganda, Kluckner created a charismatic Great Helmsman along the lines of Castro or Mao, only his dictator is a Sensei, whose strict environmental laws, including population control, dominate the planet in the wake of global chaos, circa, 2028-30. "Visually," he writes on his blog, "the setting looks like Vancouver, but the only text reference is in a couple of signs; I couldn't resist adding the 'nuclear weapons free zone' sign to one drawing."
Between 2004 and 2015, more than 10,000 demolition permits were issued for residential buildings in the city of Vancouver. As of 2015, an average of three houses a day were being torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Very few are deemed significant enough to merit heritage protection, but Caroline Adderson and other Vancouver writers believed the demoliton of these dwellings amounted to an architectural loss. She therefore spearheaded Vancouver Vanishes: Narratives of Demolition and Revival (Anvil 2015), co-authored with John Atkin, Kerry Gold, Evelyn Lau, Eve Lazarus, John Mackie, Elise & Stephen Partridge and Bren Simmers. The introduction is by heritage artist and activist Michael Kluckner--who has published a book called Vanishing Vancouver--and photographs are by Tracey Ayton and Adderson.
***
The Rooming House: The West Coast in the Seventies
by Michael Kluckner (Midtown Press/Sandhill $19.95)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2022)
In almost painfully authentic evocation of a brief few years in Vancouver’s history, The Rooming House, a graphic novel by Michael Kluckner, covers the early 1970s when young wannabe members of what was then called the ‘Now Generation’ formed the city’s hip community centred around a few blocks of West Fourth Avenue. They lived in nearby communal houses and crash pads in Kitsilano’s many large old homes that had been converted into rooming houses for revenue because taxes were low and the properties weren’t worth developing. This may be hard to imagine for anyone born after 1980, but if you’re of an age to remember those times, The Rooming House is an excellent book to give to children (or grandchildren) who ask, “What was Vancouver like when you were my age?”
This is how it was. Vancouver was a haven for young Americans dodging conscription to fight an immoral war in Vietnam as the richest and most powerful nation on Earth expressed its frustration at being unable to defeat one of the smallest and poorest in a conflict that made no sense to anyone but ideologues. Anti-establishment activists held protests against the war, and free events called ‘Be-Ins’ and ‘Love-Ins’ where peace, love and ecological well-being were promoted. The Georgia Straight, founded in 1967 as an underground newspaper collective, advocated for environmental issues and legalization of drugs and against the bullying right-wing regime of Mayor ‘Tom Terrific’ Campbell, a real estate developer on the make who described the Straight as “filth, peddled to school children.” New York’s Greenwich Village, San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district and Toronto’s Yorkville were counter-culture meccas to which young hippies made pilgrimages, hitchhiking or driving old vans painted like “gypsy” wagons, criss-crossing North America in the steps of legendary 50s Beat Generation rebel writers Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey.
In economical compressed prose in the form of diary entries that are paired on each page with his illustrations, Kluckner zooms in on the adventures of four earnest young people, two men and two women, who typify the callow idealism of the time. He tracks the emotional consequences of their quests to find a meaningful alternative to becoming conformist ‘drones in the hive.’ They drift from Kitsilano communes to crappy jobs in small towns and back to Fourth Avenue to reconnect. There is drama—attending a peaceful ‘smoke-in’ in Gastown ends in beatings by riot police; tenants of the rooming house have to search for a dope stash left by a former dealer; and one rooming house resident has to be cool when encountering a naked housemate who has obviously spent the night with a guy she thought was her lover. And so it goes, very much as it did at the time.
An ensemble cast allows Kluckner to cover a lot of issues from different points of view at the risk of reducing the reader’s emotional investment in a particular protagonist, but that’s obviously the point. Long-running ensemble TV shows provide ‘drama without catharsis’ and in their nouveau roman novels of the 1950s, French authors Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet deliberately discarded fictive conventions of deep characterization, suspense and dramatic resolution. Most of their meticulously plotless novels aren’t nearly as readable as The Rooming House, which owes more to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, The Subterraneans and British writer Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho.
Michael Kluckner’s success as an artist has tended to overshadow his parallel career as a journalist and writer-at-large. In the 1980s, his books of paintings and illustrations, Vancouver The Way It Was, Victoria The Way It Was, Vanishing Vancouver, etc., were on everyone’s brass-and-glass coffee tables in living rooms where Kluckner prints shared the walls with Peter Margraf’s west coast serigraphs. Unlike most historical photographs, Kluckner’s paintings captured and celebrated the scruffy ambiance of Vancouver’s old houses and buildings, conveying the warmth of long human use the way an ancient cracked leather jacket or weather-battered hat comforts the soul.
His interest in Vancouver’s fragile neighbourhood architecture could hardly have been more timely. When he began publishing his books, Vancouver was entering the infamous Decade of Greed—city governments were pursing mega-projects and money-pit extravaganzas like Expo 86 at the expense of the modest human skyline Kluckner was trying to record and preserve. In 1991, Kluckner became the first president of Heritage Vancouver, the beginning of a long public career as an advocate for the preservation of historic structures.
The sign of a real artist in any medium is that they’re always evolving, so it’s no surprise that in his 60s Michael Kluckner began combining his literary and illustrative skills in a series of graphic novels: Toshiko, Julia, 2050: A Post Apocalyptic Murder Mystery and now The Rooming House. At 71, he’s far from done. 9781988242460
John Moore drove a taxi in the early ’70s. His forthcoming book, The Last Reel, will be published by Ekstasis Editions.
***
The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance
by Sharon Rudahl and Paul Buhle, illustrated by Michael Kluckner
(Between The Lines $34.95)
Interview by David Lester (BCBW, 2023)
Following up on the success of The Rooming House: The West Coast in the Seventies (Midtown, 2022), Vancouverite Michael Kluckner has illustrated The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance.
A virtually forgotten piece of political history, The Bund is an important addition to the canon of graphic literature depicting resistance against tyranny.
The Bund was founded in Vilnius in 1897 by a small group of Jewish workers and intellectuals from the “Pale of Settlement” areas in tsarist Russia.
The group organized against industrial exploitation and fought against the murderous Soviet and Nazi regimes. Through all this, The Bund kept secular and progressive ideas alive. Prominent Bundists included Pati Kremer (1867–1943), a Russian revolutionary socialist, and Bernard Goldstein (1889–1959) who helped smuggle in arms in preparation for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Bund was co-written by Sharon Rudahl, a graphic novelist in her own right, and a key figure in the ground-breaking feminist Wimmen’s Comix, an underground comics anthology published from 1972 to 1992, and Paul Buhle, a veteran of work on almost 30 non-fiction graphic novels.
Kluckner’s previous graphic novels are Julia (Midtown Press, 2018); 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery (Midtown Press, 2016) and Toshiko (Midtown Press, 2015).
BC BookWorld caught up with Kluckner to talk about The Bund.
BC BookWorld: Quite a leap from the West Coast in the 70s to tsarist Russia.
Michael Kluckner: The shift in locale and time was interesting. I could say I passed Horse 101 in art school and drew a lot of beards for The Rooming House so I was well-prepared. The image research was fairly straightforward thanks to the Internet. I was able to find photographs (to draw from) of some of the quite minor Bundists as well as the recurring characters like Pati Kremer, Bernard Goldstein, and Lenin of course. The rural Ukrainian and Polish scenes were re-imagined from historic photo sites, and there are photos online of, for example, the tsar’s crown and the Kremlin, which repeat throughout the book in different roles.
BCBW: Your previous graphic novels were in black and white. How was it to work in full colour?
MK: I had been playing around, adding some flat watercolour to black-and-white ink drawings like the “woodcuts” in The Rooming House—colouring them in with patches of watercolour rather than really “painting,”—and it worked out very well. I used a kind of “poverty palette” of umbers and ochres, with a couple of dull greys, for the Bundists and peasants, and a brighter palette of blues and reds for the panels of the aristocracy. I also drew quite a number of cartooned maps using digital colour, for example to show the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine / Poland / Russia where Jews were confined. Showing the geography of their oppression was one of the tasks I wanted the book to accomplish.
Another thing was figuring out Polish, Yiddish and Russian placards and signs for a few of the pages. I didn’t want any English in the graphics. The publisher had a linguist check all of them, I believe!
BCBW: You normally write and illustrate your own books. What was it like collaborating with the legendary Sharon and Paul?
MK: Both were very supportive and Sharon’s script was easy to follow. It became a question of splitting it out into about 100 pages, with the inevitable need to start a chapter on a right-hand page and stage the narrative so that I could use a two-page spread for some important and dramatic moments. Devin Clancy, the production designer at Between the Lines, picked up a few vignettes from drawings and repeated them, even reversed them, on a few pages to enrich the layout. All in all, it was a great collaboration, and so 21st century: Paul’s in the eastern US, Sharon’s in LA, BTL is in Toronto. The first time I saw them was in a Zoom presentation at a San Francisco library in October.
BCBW: Is there a particularly profound moment in the book that stood out to you as a historian and artist?
MK: The book is haunted by our knowledge of the pending Holocaust. The Warsaw ghetto scenes were difficult, as was the page almost at the end where the women and children in Vilna (in Lithuania, now known as Vilnius), in sorrow and with dignity, are being forced onto a truck at gunpoint to be driven to an extermination camp. And, of course, Russia had invaded Ukraine (yet again) just a few months before I began work on the book. Learning more about Imperial Russia and the oppression over centuries of its neighbours, Jewish as well as every nationality nearby, was disturbing. I think the couple of pages I enjoyed drawing most were about Japan beating the crap out of Russia in their 1905 war.
BCBW: Any future graphic novels or book projects in the works?
MK: I’m going back to the future, as it were, with a book called Surviving Vancouver that will be out next spring. It is like my old works of watercolour illustrations and a text mixing historic and current information. Then I may work on a sequel to The Rooming House—I received so many fascinating emails from people recounting their own lives and adventures in the 70s and thereafter. There are more stories to be told, and the graphic novel format works well. 9781771136365
***
Twenty-five years in the making, What’s Fear Got to Do With It? by Ivana Filipovich (Conundrum $18) is set during a single evening at the Richmond Night Market, North America’s largest night market. Two women, Eva and Mia, share the same boyfriend, Max—a feared member of the city’s criminal underground. It is not love that motivates this triangle, but power, money and fear. BC-based Filipovich has had her work published in Slovenia, Sweden and Serbia. 9781772620887
***
Edited by Bevan Thomas and Hannah Myers, Through the Labyrinths of the Mind (Cloudscape $20) is a graphic novel anthology of 11 stories that tackle depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD and other mental heath issues with empathy and understanding. 9781927742204
***
Couches Get Lonely Too (Lulu.com $26) by Sima Elizabeth Shefrin is her entirely embroidered graphic account of living through the Covid-19 years. The book promises humour and wisdom. Gabriola Island-based Shefrin runs a website called Stitching for Social Change, where you can learn about her quilts, community projects, illustrations and workshops, all of which are interlaced with her vision for a better world. Contact: stitchingforsocialchange.ca
***
Mr. Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe (Between the Lines $34.95) is a remarkable collection, both as labour history, and comics history. Mr. Block, a bumbling, boss-loving, anti-union blockhead was created by Ernest Riebe, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The strip first appeared in 1912 in the Industrial Worker. Riebe combined comics and humour to burst the bubble of workers who placed faith in a capitalist system that exploited them. Joe Hill even wrote a song about Mr. Block, to the tune of It Looks to Me Like a Big Time Tonight. The anthology was edited by the Graphic History Collective, with Paul Buhle and Iain McIntyre. 9781771136099
***
Vancouver-based writer and illustrator Claire Lordon’s graphic memoir One in a Million (Candlewick $16.99) tells her story of living with a brain tumour in high school. After multiple surgeries, the tumour was removed. She survived the ordeal thanks to her art and the support of friends. For teens and young adults. 9781536213676
***
Eight years in the making, Phobos and Deimos: Interplanetary high school drama graphic novel by Jonathon Dalton (Cloudscape $35) follows Maida Kilwa, a teenage refugee from Mars. Adapting to her new life on Earth, she navigates high school and a troubling dystopian government. Maida is torn between security and the fires of rebellion. Dalton wrote Phobos and Deimos after teaching in East London for a year and thinking a lot about class and migration. He is president of the Cloudscape Comics Society in Vancouver.
9781927742525
***
Mystery and magic for ages 8-12 in Doña Quixote: Rise of the Knight (Henry Holt $14.99) by Rey Terciero and illustrated by Monica Magaña. A middle-schooler in a small Texas town, Lucia, wearing her grandfather’s magical helmet discovers the town mayor is secretly a shapeshifting beast of Mexican lore. Her parents think she’s imagining things. But that won’t deter her from stopping the mayor from unleashing evil on their town. Magaña lives in Vancouver. 9781250795526
***
Keeping it real for ages 6 to 9, Pup and Dragon: How to Catch an Elf (Sourcebooks/Wonderland $12.99) by Alice Walstead and illustrated by Vancouver’s Paul Gill tells a charming story of two best friends, Pup and Dragon who are trying to catch one of Santa’s little helpers on Christmas Eve—only they have no idea what a Santa is, let alone an elf. Their adventure leads to an understanding of Christmas. 9781728270517
***
Third in the “Paws” graphic novel series for middle graders is Priya Puts Herself First (Razorbill $12.99) by Nathan Fairbairn and illustrated by Michele Assarasakorn. The story revolves around the Baby-Sitters Club for pets, and this time, the team of best dog-walkers in town must overcome personal challenges—Priya’s family is being evicted and Gabby wants to be internet famous. Fairbairn is an Eisner-nominated comic creator. Assarasakorn has worked for Marvel and DC. Both live in Vancouver. 9780593351970
***
Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks (First Second $17.99) follows Alix, a hothead who is desperate to play in the Women’s U18 team, but she must first learn to control her temper. To help, she enlists the calm and poised Ezra, a boy from the drama club. The two become close, but will it be more than just a friendship? Hicks is a Vancouver-based Eisner Award winner. Ages 14-18. 9781250838728
***
Though not BC-based authors or illustrators, Arsenal Pulp Press has issued English translations of Can Dundar and Anwar’s Erdoğan: A Graphic Biography: The Rise of Turkey’s Modern Autocrat ($28.95) and 40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954 ($32.95) by Marcelino Truong, about love, beauty and war in 1950s Indochina.
Erdoğan: 9781551529219; 40 Men and 12 Rifles: 9781551529233
David Lester is a graphic novelist, musician and BC BookWorld designer.
AWARDS:
Hallmark Society of Merit Award, 1992 (Paving Paradise)
Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice Award, 1991 (Vanishing Vancouver)
City of Vancouver Book Award, 1991 (Vanishing Vancouver)
Toronto Book Prize (short list)
Heritage Canada Medal of Achievement
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
The Rooming House: The West Coast in the Seventies (Midtown Press / Sandhill, 2022) $19.95 9781988242460
Here & Gone (Midtown / Sandhill, 2020) $19.95 978-1-988242-38-5
2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery (Midtown Press / Sandhill, 2016) $19.95 9781988242187
Toshiko (Midtown Press, 2015) Price: $19.95 978-0-9881101-7-5
A Year at Killara Farm (Harbour, 2012) Illustrations. (see Christine Allen for full entry) $29.95 978-1-55017-571-4
Vanishing Vancouver (Whitecap, 2012).
Vancouver Remembered (Whitecap, 2006). 1-55285-811-1
Vanishing British Columbia (UBC Press, 2005). 0-7748-1125-0
Vancouver Walks (John Atkin, co-author) 2003
Wise Acres: Free Range Reflections on the Rural Route (Raincoast, 2000)
Canada A Journey of Discovery (Raincoast, 1998)
The Pullet Surprise (Raincoast, 1997)
Michael Kluckner's Vancouver (Raincoast, 1996)
British Columbia in Watercolour (Self-published, 1993)
Heritage Walks Around Vancouver (Whitecap, 1992)
Paving Paradise (Whitecap, 1991)
Vanishing Vancouver (Whitecap, 1990)
Toronto The Way It Was (Whitecap, 1988)
M.I. Rogers, 1869-1965 (privately printed, 1987)
Victoria The Way It Was (Whitecap, 1986)
Vancouver The Way It Was (Whitecap, 1984)
[Caricature: Kluckner, self-portrait]
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2022] "Art" "Architecture"
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Vanishing British Columbia
The Calhoun Farm was first recorded in print as a chapter in artist and heritage expert Michael Kluckner's non-fiction book Vanishing British Columbia (UBC Press, 2005) describing the wartime experiences of a group of Japanese-Canadian families who exiled themselves there, leaving behind homes in Vancouver and on Mayne Island, during the internment years that began in 1942. The Calhoun Farm is also the setting for the early chapters of Kluckner's graphic novel Toshiko (Midtown Press, 2015), which recasts the true story into a Romeo & Juliet saga involving a local farm boy nicknamed Cowboy and a teenage Japanese-Canadian girl, Toshiko. When their romance becomes a scandal and he is thrown out of his house by his racist father, he escapes with her on a freight train bound for Vancouver.
ENTRY:
Involved for decades in the preservation of Canada's old buildings and historic places, Kluckner was the founding president of Heritage Vancouver in 1991. He served as president of the Langley Heritage Society from 1993 to 1998. From 1996 until 2001, he was the British Columbia member of the board of governors of the Heritage Canada Foundation, and served as chair from 1998-2000. He also sat on the board of the Heritage Society of British Columbia during that period. He chaired the Vancouver Heritage Foundation in 2002-3. He received the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 for the contributions made, through books and volunteer efforts, to increasing awareness of Canada's heritage and culture.
Following several years in Australia, Kluckner returned to live in Vancouver in 2010 and two years later published Vanishing Vancouver: The Last 25 Years (Whitecap Books, 2012), an update on his 1990 book, Vanishing Vancouver (Whitecap Books, 1990).
Kluckner lived until 2006 on a nine-acre sheep farm in rural Langley where he raised sheep and chickens and helped his wife, Christine Allen, also a writer, maintain her large cottage garden. He wrote for various Canadian magazines and exhibited original artwork at a Vancouver gallery. The move to Langley in 1993 signaled a change in his painting and writing. "There's a time to fish and there's a time to mend nets," he said. "This is net mending time for me."
Inspired by his travels around the province, Kluckner published British Columbia in Watercolour. "These paintings are done for pleasure rather than politics," he said. "My last book, Paving Paradise, was probably too much of a rant. I realized I don't have to paint big diggers clawing at old houses to carry on my work."
Having travelled for several decades to compile the impressions for Vanishing British Columbia (UBC Press, 2005), Michael Kluckner distilled the multi-faceted province into 12 essential colours: cerulean blue, manganese blue, ultramarine light, Payne's grey, cadmium yellow deep, yellow ochre, olive green, viridian, burnt sienna, burnt umber, sepia and India red. His 160 blue/green paintings of heritage buildings, usually nestled amongst trees and hills, are unmistakably Kluckner.
Inspired by Delacroix and by Japanese sumi-e sketches as a young man, Kluckner has developed a coherent style, using washed-out hues, to match his preservationist aesthetic. Vanishing British Columbia doesn't rescue the past; it invests the ever-ephemeral present with mystique. Unlike some of Kluckner's earlier work, Vanishing British Columbia doesn't feel commercial, and perhaps that's the result of more tasteful packaging, increased maturity or else more remote subject matter.
After a string of 'Vanishing' books in the 1980s, the heritage activist refined his peculiar historical bent that merges academic precision with folksy reportage. The end result is at once charming and useful--a rarity for an art book. Engaging Mark Forsythe's BC Almanac program to serve as his intermediary to the public, Kluckner attracted oldtimers and history buffs to his website. These people supplied background tidbits - 'local colour'- to complement his watercolours, archival photos and Union Steamships memorabilia.
Kluckner's paintings of humble sites such as 'the Brilliant bridge', 'the Dunster store,' 'Wong's Market,' 'the Rolla Pub' or 'the Union Bay Station' were all started out-of-doors, on location, and completed in his studio. Kluckner's subjects are devoid of drama, dignified, at rest, almost invisible unless we are stationary with them. Humans are eerily absent.
His image of Maquinna Avenue in Zeballos shows the Zeballos Hotel, built in 1938, and an adjoining two-storey building that housed one of the town's brothels. The static street scene, complete with parked cars, is non-descript, and yet Kluckner has validated this forgettable scene as a link to a soon-forgotten era. In this way, ghosts are redeemed and we are not trapped in Anywheresville, USA.
Amid architectural details, thumbnail biographies and historical summaries, Kluckner includes human punctuation marks. While discussing two paintings of residential schools since converted to Aboriginal centres (St. Michael's at Alert Bay and St. Eugene's north of Cranbrook), Kluckner recalls a local woman saying to him, "This is where they tried to take my culture away, so it is fitting that it will now help me to get my culture back."
How many people today can remember Siska Lodge in the Fraser Canyon, managed by Fred and Florence Lindsay in the 1950s? After incorporating excerpts from a Barry Broadfoot column, Kluckner quotes a Quesnel obituary that notes Fred Lindsay was a self-published author of gold rush tales who had "a few enemies and a hell of a lot of friends." Perhaps this is what they mean by magic realism. Poof. Fred Lindsay had vanished, but Kluckner, as an artist/magician/historian, has succeeded in plucking him out of a huge hat called history.
Vanishing British Columbia won 2nd Prize for the BC Historical Federation Book Writing Competition. Vancouver Remembered received the 2007 City of Vancouver Book Award.
Kluckner turned a new page for his first graphic novel, Toshiko (Midtown $19.95). Set during World War II, it recalls how Toshiko Yesaki and her cousin were sent to BC's interior from 'Japtown' in Vancouver due to the internment of Japanese Canadians. They go to school and also work on Calhoun Farm near an unfriendly town [Salmon Arm] where most residents view them as enemies. But one of Toshiko's classmates is curious and sympathetic about the exile of Japanese-Canadians, and romance develops.
"Remember Romeo and Juliet in the first term?" she says, during one of their secret meetings. "That's us."
The scandal of this relationship between Toshiko and a local boy, nicknamed Cowboy, who doubles as the novel's narrator, pushes the couple out of BC's interior and back to Vancouver when his racist father objects. The two, love-struck teenage runaways know they will be forced to face the racial, moral and social realities of wartime Canada but they head to the coast anyway.
The Calhoun Farm, on Carlin Road, in the Tappen Valley, near Shuswap Lake, is where Henry and Hilda Calhoun welcomed Japanese Canadian families during the internment. Most were the extended family of Kumazo Nagata of Mayne Island. Kluckner's teenage characters are fictional, but Cowboy's side of the story is partly inspired by an acquaintance, born in 1934, who had worked on the Calhoun Farm in 1952.
The only extant photograph of the Calhoun family, who took in the Japanese Canadians in the middle of the bitter winter of 1942-3, found its way to an antique store in Clearwater, B.C., following the death of Harold Calhoun, the son of farmer Henry Calhoun. Michael Kluckner found the photograph there in the summer of 2003, shortly before the store was razed in a forest fire.
"For the myriad talks I have given about Vanishing British Columbia," Michael Kluckner recalls, "I always ended with the story of the Calhoun Farm and the long route taken by those families, including from a house on Mayne Island and a grocery store on Main Street in Vancouver. And the Calhouns themselves were quite heroic, demonstrating such tolerance and humanity in the midst of a hostile province. The opportunity to revisit that period in a fiction format was a bonus."
As Tom Jones might have said, go big or go home. As a follow-up to his first graphic novel Toshiko set during World War II, Michael Kluckner has hit the fast forward button and created 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery (Midtown Press / Sandhill 2016). Evoking a futuristic West Coast in the wake of a Patriotic War and a pandemic, Kluckner's dystopian wasteland features Detective Sara Fidelia on the trail of a murderer in a ruined landscape. Sort of like Walking Dead Lite meets Raymond Chandler meets cautionary environmentalism. You can't say it ain't original. The genesis, according to Kluckner, was a trip to Cuba in 2012 mixed with the onslaught of news stories about humans wrecking the planet. Impressed by Cuban propaganda, Kluckner created a charismatic Great Helmsman along the lines of Castro or Mao, only his dictator is a Sensei, whose strict environmental laws, including population control, dominate the planet in the wake of global chaos, circa, 2028-30. "Visually," he writes on his blog, "the setting looks like Vancouver, but the only text reference is in a couple of signs; I couldn't resist adding the 'nuclear weapons free zone' sign to one drawing."
Between 2004 and 2015, more than 10,000 demolition permits were issued for residential buildings in the city of Vancouver. As of 2015, an average of three houses a day were being torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Very few are deemed significant enough to merit heritage protection, but Caroline Adderson and other Vancouver writers believed the demoliton of these dwellings amounted to an architectural loss. She therefore spearheaded Vancouver Vanishes: Narratives of Demolition and Revival (Anvil 2015), co-authored with John Atkin, Kerry Gold, Evelyn Lau, Eve Lazarus, John Mackie, Elise & Stephen Partridge and Bren Simmers. The introduction is by heritage artist and activist Michael Kluckner--who has published a book called Vanishing Vancouver--and photographs are by Tracey Ayton and Adderson.
***
The Rooming House: The West Coast in the Seventies
by Michael Kluckner (Midtown Press/Sandhill $19.95)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2022)
In almost painfully authentic evocation of a brief few years in Vancouver’s history, The Rooming House, a graphic novel by Michael Kluckner, covers the early 1970s when young wannabe members of what was then called the ‘Now Generation’ formed the city’s hip community centred around a few blocks of West Fourth Avenue. They lived in nearby communal houses and crash pads in Kitsilano’s many large old homes that had been converted into rooming houses for revenue because taxes were low and the properties weren’t worth developing. This may be hard to imagine for anyone born after 1980, but if you’re of an age to remember those times, The Rooming House is an excellent book to give to children (or grandchildren) who ask, “What was Vancouver like when you were my age?”
This is how it was. Vancouver was a haven for young Americans dodging conscription to fight an immoral war in Vietnam as the richest and most powerful nation on Earth expressed its frustration at being unable to defeat one of the smallest and poorest in a conflict that made no sense to anyone but ideologues. Anti-establishment activists held protests against the war, and free events called ‘Be-Ins’ and ‘Love-Ins’ where peace, love and ecological well-being were promoted. The Georgia Straight, founded in 1967 as an underground newspaper collective, advocated for environmental issues and legalization of drugs and against the bullying right-wing regime of Mayor ‘Tom Terrific’ Campbell, a real estate developer on the make who described the Straight as “filth, peddled to school children.” New York’s Greenwich Village, San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district and Toronto’s Yorkville were counter-culture meccas to which young hippies made pilgrimages, hitchhiking or driving old vans painted like “gypsy” wagons, criss-crossing North America in the steps of legendary 50s Beat Generation rebel writers Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey.
In economical compressed prose in the form of diary entries that are paired on each page with his illustrations, Kluckner zooms in on the adventures of four earnest young people, two men and two women, who typify the callow idealism of the time. He tracks the emotional consequences of their quests to find a meaningful alternative to becoming conformist ‘drones in the hive.’ They drift from Kitsilano communes to crappy jobs in small towns and back to Fourth Avenue to reconnect. There is drama—attending a peaceful ‘smoke-in’ in Gastown ends in beatings by riot police; tenants of the rooming house have to search for a dope stash left by a former dealer; and one rooming house resident has to be cool when encountering a naked housemate who has obviously spent the night with a guy she thought was her lover. And so it goes, very much as it did at the time.
An ensemble cast allows Kluckner to cover a lot of issues from different points of view at the risk of reducing the reader’s emotional investment in a particular protagonist, but that’s obviously the point. Long-running ensemble TV shows provide ‘drama without catharsis’ and in their nouveau roman novels of the 1950s, French authors Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet deliberately discarded fictive conventions of deep characterization, suspense and dramatic resolution. Most of their meticulously plotless novels aren’t nearly as readable as The Rooming House, which owes more to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, The Subterraneans and British writer Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho.
Michael Kluckner’s success as an artist has tended to overshadow his parallel career as a journalist and writer-at-large. In the 1980s, his books of paintings and illustrations, Vancouver The Way It Was, Victoria The Way It Was, Vanishing Vancouver, etc., were on everyone’s brass-and-glass coffee tables in living rooms where Kluckner prints shared the walls with Peter Margraf’s west coast serigraphs. Unlike most historical photographs, Kluckner’s paintings captured and celebrated the scruffy ambiance of Vancouver’s old houses and buildings, conveying the warmth of long human use the way an ancient cracked leather jacket or weather-battered hat comforts the soul.
His interest in Vancouver’s fragile neighbourhood architecture could hardly have been more timely. When he began publishing his books, Vancouver was entering the infamous Decade of Greed—city governments were pursing mega-projects and money-pit extravaganzas like Expo 86 at the expense of the modest human skyline Kluckner was trying to record and preserve. In 1991, Kluckner became the first president of Heritage Vancouver, the beginning of a long public career as an advocate for the preservation of historic structures.
The sign of a real artist in any medium is that they’re always evolving, so it’s no surprise that in his 60s Michael Kluckner began combining his literary and illustrative skills in a series of graphic novels: Toshiko, Julia, 2050: A Post Apocalyptic Murder Mystery and now The Rooming House. At 71, he’s far from done. 9781988242460
John Moore drove a taxi in the early ’70s. His forthcoming book, The Last Reel, will be published by Ekstasis Editions.
***
The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance
by Sharon Rudahl and Paul Buhle, illustrated by Michael Kluckner
(Between The Lines $34.95)
Interview by David Lester (BCBW, 2023)
Following up on the success of The Rooming House: The West Coast in the Seventies (Midtown, 2022), Vancouverite Michael Kluckner has illustrated The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance.
A virtually forgotten piece of political history, The Bund is an important addition to the canon of graphic literature depicting resistance against tyranny.
The Bund was founded in Vilnius in 1897 by a small group of Jewish workers and intellectuals from the “Pale of Settlement” areas in tsarist Russia.
The group organized against industrial exploitation and fought against the murderous Soviet and Nazi regimes. Through all this, The Bund kept secular and progressive ideas alive. Prominent Bundists included Pati Kremer (1867–1943), a Russian revolutionary socialist, and Bernard Goldstein (1889–1959) who helped smuggle in arms in preparation for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Bund was co-written by Sharon Rudahl, a graphic novelist in her own right, and a key figure in the ground-breaking feminist Wimmen’s Comix, an underground comics anthology published from 1972 to 1992, and Paul Buhle, a veteran of work on almost 30 non-fiction graphic novels.
Kluckner’s previous graphic novels are Julia (Midtown Press, 2018); 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery (Midtown Press, 2016) and Toshiko (Midtown Press, 2015).
BC BookWorld caught up with Kluckner to talk about The Bund.
BC BookWorld: Quite a leap from the West Coast in the 70s to tsarist Russia.
Michael Kluckner: The shift in locale and time was interesting. I could say I passed Horse 101 in art school and drew a lot of beards for The Rooming House so I was well-prepared. The image research was fairly straightforward thanks to the Internet. I was able to find photographs (to draw from) of some of the quite minor Bundists as well as the recurring characters like Pati Kremer, Bernard Goldstein, and Lenin of course. The rural Ukrainian and Polish scenes were re-imagined from historic photo sites, and there are photos online of, for example, the tsar’s crown and the Kremlin, which repeat throughout the book in different roles.
BCBW: Your previous graphic novels were in black and white. How was it to work in full colour?
MK: I had been playing around, adding some flat watercolour to black-and-white ink drawings like the “woodcuts” in The Rooming House—colouring them in with patches of watercolour rather than really “painting,”—and it worked out very well. I used a kind of “poverty palette” of umbers and ochres, with a couple of dull greys, for the Bundists and peasants, and a brighter palette of blues and reds for the panels of the aristocracy. I also drew quite a number of cartooned maps using digital colour, for example to show the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine / Poland / Russia where Jews were confined. Showing the geography of their oppression was one of the tasks I wanted the book to accomplish.
Another thing was figuring out Polish, Yiddish and Russian placards and signs for a few of the pages. I didn’t want any English in the graphics. The publisher had a linguist check all of them, I believe!
BCBW: You normally write and illustrate your own books. What was it like collaborating with the legendary Sharon and Paul?
MK: Both were very supportive and Sharon’s script was easy to follow. It became a question of splitting it out into about 100 pages, with the inevitable need to start a chapter on a right-hand page and stage the narrative so that I could use a two-page spread for some important and dramatic moments. Devin Clancy, the production designer at Between the Lines, picked up a few vignettes from drawings and repeated them, even reversed them, on a few pages to enrich the layout. All in all, it was a great collaboration, and so 21st century: Paul’s in the eastern US, Sharon’s in LA, BTL is in Toronto. The first time I saw them was in a Zoom presentation at a San Francisco library in October.
BCBW: Is there a particularly profound moment in the book that stood out to you as a historian and artist?
MK: The book is haunted by our knowledge of the pending Holocaust. The Warsaw ghetto scenes were difficult, as was the page almost at the end where the women and children in Vilna (in Lithuania, now known as Vilnius), in sorrow and with dignity, are being forced onto a truck at gunpoint to be driven to an extermination camp. And, of course, Russia had invaded Ukraine (yet again) just a few months before I began work on the book. Learning more about Imperial Russia and the oppression over centuries of its neighbours, Jewish as well as every nationality nearby, was disturbing. I think the couple of pages I enjoyed drawing most were about Japan beating the crap out of Russia in their 1905 war.
BCBW: Any future graphic novels or book projects in the works?
MK: I’m going back to the future, as it were, with a book called Surviving Vancouver that will be out next spring. It is like my old works of watercolour illustrations and a text mixing historic and current information. Then I may work on a sequel to The Rooming House—I received so many fascinating emails from people recounting their own lives and adventures in the 70s and thereafter. There are more stories to be told, and the graphic novel format works well. 9781771136365
***
Twenty-five years in the making, What’s Fear Got to Do With It? by Ivana Filipovich (Conundrum $18) is set during a single evening at the Richmond Night Market, North America’s largest night market. Two women, Eva and Mia, share the same boyfriend, Max—a feared member of the city’s criminal underground. It is not love that motivates this triangle, but power, money and fear. BC-based Filipovich has had her work published in Slovenia, Sweden and Serbia. 9781772620887
***
Edited by Bevan Thomas and Hannah Myers, Through the Labyrinths of the Mind (Cloudscape $20) is a graphic novel anthology of 11 stories that tackle depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD and other mental heath issues with empathy and understanding. 9781927742204
***
Couches Get Lonely Too (Lulu.com $26) by Sima Elizabeth Shefrin is her entirely embroidered graphic account of living through the Covid-19 years. The book promises humour and wisdom. Gabriola Island-based Shefrin runs a website called Stitching for Social Change, where you can learn about her quilts, community projects, illustrations and workshops, all of which are interlaced with her vision for a better world. Contact: stitchingforsocialchange.ca
***
Mr. Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe (Between the Lines $34.95) is a remarkable collection, both as labour history, and comics history. Mr. Block, a bumbling, boss-loving, anti-union blockhead was created by Ernest Riebe, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The strip first appeared in 1912 in the Industrial Worker. Riebe combined comics and humour to burst the bubble of workers who placed faith in a capitalist system that exploited them. Joe Hill even wrote a song about Mr. Block, to the tune of It Looks to Me Like a Big Time Tonight. The anthology was edited by the Graphic History Collective, with Paul Buhle and Iain McIntyre. 9781771136099
***
Vancouver-based writer and illustrator Claire Lordon’s graphic memoir One in a Million (Candlewick $16.99) tells her story of living with a brain tumour in high school. After multiple surgeries, the tumour was removed. She survived the ordeal thanks to her art and the support of friends. For teens and young adults. 9781536213676
***
Eight years in the making, Phobos and Deimos: Interplanetary high school drama graphic novel by Jonathon Dalton (Cloudscape $35) follows Maida Kilwa, a teenage refugee from Mars. Adapting to her new life on Earth, she navigates high school and a troubling dystopian government. Maida is torn between security and the fires of rebellion. Dalton wrote Phobos and Deimos after teaching in East London for a year and thinking a lot about class and migration. He is president of the Cloudscape Comics Society in Vancouver.
9781927742525
***
Mystery and magic for ages 8-12 in Doña Quixote: Rise of the Knight (Henry Holt $14.99) by Rey Terciero and illustrated by Monica Magaña. A middle-schooler in a small Texas town, Lucia, wearing her grandfather’s magical helmet discovers the town mayor is secretly a shapeshifting beast of Mexican lore. Her parents think she’s imagining things. But that won’t deter her from stopping the mayor from unleashing evil on their town. Magaña lives in Vancouver. 9781250795526
***
Keeping it real for ages 6 to 9, Pup and Dragon: How to Catch an Elf (Sourcebooks/Wonderland $12.99) by Alice Walstead and illustrated by Vancouver’s Paul Gill tells a charming story of two best friends, Pup and Dragon who are trying to catch one of Santa’s little helpers on Christmas Eve—only they have no idea what a Santa is, let alone an elf. Their adventure leads to an understanding of Christmas. 9781728270517
***
Third in the “Paws” graphic novel series for middle graders is Priya Puts Herself First (Razorbill $12.99) by Nathan Fairbairn and illustrated by Michele Assarasakorn. The story revolves around the Baby-Sitters Club for pets, and this time, the team of best dog-walkers in town must overcome personal challenges—Priya’s family is being evicted and Gabby wants to be internet famous. Fairbairn is an Eisner-nominated comic creator. Assarasakorn has worked for Marvel and DC. Both live in Vancouver. 9780593351970
***
Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks (First Second $17.99) follows Alix, a hothead who is desperate to play in the Women’s U18 team, but she must first learn to control her temper. To help, she enlists the calm and poised Ezra, a boy from the drama club. The two become close, but will it be more than just a friendship? Hicks is a Vancouver-based Eisner Award winner. Ages 14-18. 9781250838728
***
Though not BC-based authors or illustrators, Arsenal Pulp Press has issued English translations of Can Dundar and Anwar’s Erdoğan: A Graphic Biography: The Rise of Turkey’s Modern Autocrat ($28.95) and 40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954 ($32.95) by Marcelino Truong, about love, beauty and war in 1950s Indochina.
Erdoğan: 9781551529219; 40 Men and 12 Rifles: 9781551529233
David Lester is a graphic novelist, musician and BC BookWorld designer.
AWARDS:
Hallmark Society of Merit Award, 1992 (Paving Paradise)
Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice Award, 1991 (Vanishing Vancouver)
City of Vancouver Book Award, 1991 (Vanishing Vancouver)
Toronto Book Prize (short list)
Heritage Canada Medal of Achievement
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
The Rooming House: The West Coast in the Seventies (Midtown Press / Sandhill, 2022) $19.95 9781988242460
Here & Gone (Midtown / Sandhill, 2020) $19.95 978-1-988242-38-5
2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery (Midtown Press / Sandhill, 2016) $19.95 9781988242187
Toshiko (Midtown Press, 2015) Price: $19.95 978-0-9881101-7-5
A Year at Killara Farm (Harbour, 2012) Illustrations. (see Christine Allen for full entry) $29.95 978-1-55017-571-4
Vanishing Vancouver (Whitecap, 2012).
Vancouver Remembered (Whitecap, 2006). 1-55285-811-1
Vanishing British Columbia (UBC Press, 2005). 0-7748-1125-0
Vancouver Walks (John Atkin, co-author) 2003
Wise Acres: Free Range Reflections on the Rural Route (Raincoast, 2000)
Canada A Journey of Discovery (Raincoast, 1998)
The Pullet Surprise (Raincoast, 1997)
Michael Kluckner's Vancouver (Raincoast, 1996)
British Columbia in Watercolour (Self-published, 1993)
Heritage Walks Around Vancouver (Whitecap, 1992)
Paving Paradise (Whitecap, 1991)
Vanishing Vancouver (Whitecap, 1990)
Toronto The Way It Was (Whitecap, 1988)
M.I. Rogers, 1869-1965 (privately printed, 1987)
Victoria The Way It Was (Whitecap, 1986)
Vancouver The Way It Was (Whitecap, 1984)
[Caricature: Kluckner, self-portrait]
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2022] "Art" "Architecture"
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Vanishing British Columbia
Articles: 4 Articles for this author
Wise Acres (Raincoast $19.95)
Article
As his 'free range reflection on the rural route,' Michael Kluckner's 13th book is Wise Acres (Raincoast $19.95), a title derived from the Old Dutch term for smartass.
Kluckner's barnyard homage was going to be called Farm Noir "because there's lots of sex and death down on the farm,"; but that moniker was deemed too obscure.
Before Farm Noir, Kluckner--never one to be sheepish about using a pun--figured he'd come up with the ideal title for his sequel to The Pullet Surprise, his story about a couple converting to farm life in the Fraser Valley.
"This one was going to be called Embraceable Ewe,"; he says. "I was sure the implications of sheep-shagging would appeal to the CBC and the Globe & Mail. Bestiality being the last frontier, we thought we could get maximal airtime on Arthur Black.";
Kluckner's second instalment about two plucky urbanites in gumboots is mainly from the perspectives of the barnyard animals. Jethro and Bev are geese; Bruce the duck murders four of his offspring.
As he and his wife Christine Allen try to cope from duck pond crisis to chicken coop mayhem, the sheep enjoy pop songs like 'Born To Be Mild' and 'We're Here For A Good Time, Not A Long Time'.
Ever the wisecracker, Kluckner watches from the sidelines with one chapter called A Ruminant With A View.
He describes how country living has affected his wife's diet. "Christine was a vegetarian,"; he says, "but I've convinced her that chickens are vegetables."; 1-55192-304-1
[BCBW AUTUMN 2000]
Vancouver Walks (Steller Press $16.95)
Article
Vancouver Walks (Steller Press $16.95) by Michael Kluckner and John Atkin is a comprehensive walking guide to appreciating Vancouver's heritage buildings.
1-894143-07-8
[BCBW 2003]
Toshiko (Midtown $19.95)
Article (2015)
Artist and heritage expert Michael Kluckner has turned a new page for his first graphic novel, Toshiko (Midtown $19.95). Set during World War II, Toshiko Yesaki and her cousin have been sent to B.C.'s interior from 'Japtown' in Vancouver due to the internment of Japanese Canadians. They go to school and also work on Calhoun Farm near an unfriendly town [Salmon Arm] where most residents view them as enemies. But one of Toshiko's classmates is curious and sympathetic about the exile of Japanese-Canadians, and romance develops. "Remember Romeo and Juliet in the first term?"; she says, during one of their secret meetings. "That's us."; The scandal of this relationship between Toshiko and a local boy, nicknamed Cowboy, who doubles as the novel's narrator, pushes the couple out of B.C.'s interior and back to Vancouver when his racist father objects. The two love-struck teenage runaways know they will be forced to face the racial, moral and social realities of wartime Canada but they head to the coast anyway. Klckner notes there was a Calhoun Farm, on Carlin Road, in the Tappen Valley, near Shuswap Lake, where Henry and Hilda Calhoun welcomed Japanese Canadian families during the internment. Most were the extended family of Kumazo Nagata of Mayne Island. Kluckner's teenage characters are fictional, but Cowboy's side of the story is partly inspired by an acquaintance, born in 1934, who worked on the Calhoun Farm in 1952. 978-0-9881101-7-5
BCBW (Autumn)
2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery
Review 2017
Reviewed by Mark James Dunn
*
Vancouver historian, artist, and illustrator Michael Kluckner has turned his eclectic talents in recent years to graphic novels, starting in 2015 with Toshiko, a remaking of Romeo and Juliet set in a Japanese internment camp in 1944, followed a year later with 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery, both published by Midtown Press.
Reviewer Mark Dunn takes us to Kluckner's Vancouver after the apocalypse, a walled and fortified city with four gates, a dwindling population of 55,000, and no Internet except a heavily-censored Facebook.
Kluckner's dystopian view of Vancouver is not entirely fanciful. Vancouver city planners talk a good game, trying to compete with Copenhagen for kilometres of bike lanes; meanwhile The Guardian newspaper has just published a story about how and why Vancouver is one of the most unfriendly cities on the planet, a place where loneliness thrives. While Kluckner's dark vision is meant for entertainment, it also serves to puncture the city's self-inflated sense of its own superiority -- Ed,
*
It's thirty years in the future and Mayor Gregor Robertson's oppressive and authoritarian regime keeps Vancouver in a perpetual state of poverty. Sea storms ravage the walled and gated city and force its citizens into shelters. On the plus side, rent in Yaletown and Coal Harbour has never been more affordable.
On the Welcome to Vancouver sign, the population is crossed out and 55,000 is tagged underneath.
In Michael Kluckner's 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery, Vancouver is part of a world government created by Sensei -- a Big Brother type character obsessed with population control who has also, however, led the people of the planet out of a devastating post-war period.
The book also takes a kindly pot shot at long-lasting Mayor Robertson and his Happy Planet company that continues to make organic fruit beverages in the post-apocalypse.
The story follows Sara, a detective investigating a murder within the walls of the city. The narrative follows the pursuit of the murder suspect at the same time as an unlikely romance develops in this dystopian world. Early on we see a woman placed in stocks for being pregnant, right alongside a polluter, and we learn about Pleasant Planet, the free and widely distributed beverage that works simultaneously as birth control and an intoxicant -- as well as a clever nod to Robertson's Happy Planet brand.
2050 is driven by the investigation of a "mort"; near one of the gates to the city. Bodies are common, and the clean-up crew picking up this corpse already has two from the latest storm. The investigation soon partners Sara with John Malpais and a romantic subplot emerges.
Pursuing their only lead, Sara and Malpais, from the surveillance wing of the government, leave the confines of Vancouver for Excursion (present day Surrey), a wild and lawless place where the citizens aren't provided with state benefits and don't follow the teachings of Sensei. People in Excursion seem more interested in free market economics and electric guitars than co-ops and Pleasant Planet.
Excursion is accessible only by a reaction (cable) ferry, based on the existing ones that Kluckner knows well on the Skeena and Thompson rivers, and at Lytton and Big Bar Creek on the central Fraser River.
It's the sharp contrast between Vancouver and Excursion that makes the book feel like a critique of communism, or left-wing politics more generally, in the same vein as Orwell's best-known novels. Life is not good within the heavily controlled city. The people are subjugated and oppressed. There's no Internet except for Facebook -- a terrifying idea!
Vancouver seems really nasty compared with Excursion, which has pubs with beer, Victory Gin, and live music. Only folk music is allowed in Vancouver because the instruments don't need power.
2050's big villain, the Sensei, is an environmentalist, imposing energy restrictions and showing a strong disdain for fossil fuels. On the other hand, the people of Excursion consider building a refinery. Even during the apocalypse, it seems, the energy debate rages on.
Kluckner's graphic novel exists in a fascinating world. We get to see Vancouver from the pen - and pencil - of someone with a deep knowledge of the city's past. Indeed we're given little history lessons throughout. And Kluckner interprets districts like Yaletown, Surrey, and a stretch of Kingsway in a whole new way.
But the book has some weaknesses. The mystery aspect feels a little forced. For a 130-page graphic novel, there's a lot packed into its pages. Alongside the deep history of the universe Kluckner has created, the kind-of-uncomfortable love story, and the investigation, 2050 feels cluttered. Perhaps it could've been stretched into a few graphic novels and the ideas more fully fleshed out.
And maybe the book's size doesn't allow enough time for the story to develop, a narrative compression that makes the characters' motives seem strained and even, at times, a little unrealistic.
The Sensei, the symbol for the regime, feels a little derivative. He's 1984's Big Brother in his control and his personality; Chairman Mao in his glorification of agriculture; and Kim Il Sung and Kim John Il, as well as communist leaders like Stalin, in his cult of personality. One of 2050's biggest flaws might be that it's too clever. The story gets lost in the textual references and allusions.
The narrative is framed by an odd critique of communism, environmentalism, and equality. At one point a character in Excursion, referring to life in Vancouver, says, "there's none of that 'everybody's equal' shit here.";
It made me wonder if ideologies are being critiqued -- or if the work is simply so inspired by science fiction staples that the criticism just slipped in with the characters and the clichés.
Despite these weaknesses, the issues of obsession and surveillance are explored in a fascinating way in the romantic plot of 2050. The entire division of the government tasked with trawling Facebook is terrifying, more so because it has grown out of today's cultures and technologies of surveillance.
Graphic novels often have a writer and an author. Here, Kluckner is both. Compared to the ultra-polished nature of most comics, the greyscale pencil art of 2050 is refreshing both in quality and style. Kluckner's distinctive drawing, all done with 2B pencil on Bristol paper, is quick but effective.
And because the landscapes are familiar, it's fun for those of us who like apocalyptic fiction to visualize Vancouver in ruin. The billboards show propaganda much like those in North Korea today. The slogan, Make Love, Not Babies markets Sensei's population-control policy and is a clear nod to some ideas in Brave New World, where people are distracted and seduced by pleasure.
In the Author's Note, Kluckner lists the books and films that influenced his work on this novel. In the process, he provides a challenge to those who like searching for references, intellectual clues, and influences. Indeed, the intertextuality of 2050 may be its defining characteristic.
2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery has a lot going on. It should entertain Vancouverites interested in science fiction and amuse those curious about where we might be going.
*
A native Vancouverite, Mark James Dunn is studying in the School of Communication at SFU. You can follow some of his work on his website: www.markdunn.ca
*
The Ormsby Review. More Readers. More Reviews. More Often.
Reviews Editor: Richard Mackie
Reviews Publisher: Alan Twigg
The Ormsby Review is hosted by Simon Fraser University. The Advisory Board consists of Jean Barman, Robin Fisher, Cole Harris, Wade Davis, Hugh Johnston, Patricia Roy, David Stouck, and Graeme Wynn.
