Mireille Silcoff - Urban Animals: A Comic Field Guide

Copyright 2006, 2011 by Mireille Silcoff and Kagan McLeod

English-language translation copyright 1994, 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-622-6

The number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know,

Marcel Proust

H e must have been about seventy years old, and he was always at my gym, no matter the hour. He wore disturbingly small Spandex shorts. He was strangely sinewy. He was on a first-name basis with all the trainers. He probably had hair plugs. He was, in no uncertain terms, The Old Guy at the Gymthe type you can find at health clubs across the country. Anyone who has submitted to the tortures of the modern gymnasium has probably seen this specimen. He was notable, just not yet noted.

It was with this character that, in 2003, a weekly illustrated newspaper column featuring these Urban Animals was born. Seeing The Old Guy at the Gym in print wasnt going to change your life, but something about it was oddly pleasing. There is a certain satisfaction in recognizing something that you never realized you had already recognizedand if you are reading about it in a book or a newspaper, the pleasure is compounded by knowing that someone else has seen it too. Its the same feeling you get when you hear some random song on the radio and find that somehow you know all the words. If a comic strip can claim something so lofty as a purpose, then that of these Urban Animals is that single second where you go, Oh, I know someone like that!

Hippies, yuppies by the time the column began appearing, those categories felt outdated, and brand-land variants such as early adopters had fallen into overexposure too. But there were other in the grand scheme, less major-animals that were ripe for tagging. There was that person who was obsessed with his local neighbourhood: The Localist, the authenticity-fixated type hanging out at the Portuguese or Italian or Brazilian caf, proud that he seldom leaves a ten-block radius, and equally espiable in Brooklyn as in Londons East End or Montreals Mile End. There was also that thirty something dad in the Bad Religion T-shirt, clutching desperately onto his youth, possibly still subscribing to snow-boarding magazines, and expressing a little too much interest in his sons Star Wars figures. Or the woman who had gone over the top self-diagnosing phantom medical conditions on Google and Medline a new, and altogether pervasive, kind of urban neurotic.

Luckily for all of us, the talented young newspaper illustrator Kagan McLeod signed on for the project of turning these animals into characters you can see, adding his remarkable wit to my often questionable humor. If Beastie Dad looks like someone youve noticed, it is a tribute to Kagans knack for knowing exactly what kind of stickers such a type would have peeling off the side of his computer.

Both Kagan and I would like to send a massive rosy bouquet of thanks to Dianna Symonds, who was our first editor at the National Post and gave the column the green light and then saw it through its first year. Also to editors Sheilaugh McEvenue and Sarah Murdoch at the Post for dealing with a sometimes refractive sense of deadline. Thanks as well to Chris Bucci and Doug Pepper at McClelland & Stewart, and to my agent, Ira Silverberg. Also to Michael Kronish, Jonathan Handel, Alana Klein, Rebecca Weinfeld, Jonathan Goldstein, Adam Sternbergh, and Sarmishta Subramanian, whose minds sprung a few of the animals you will find in the following pages.

I would also like to simultaneously express gratitude and apologize to a great number of my friends and my extended family, most pressingly my four parents, who may have found bits of themselves turned into an Urban Animal at one point or another. The day you all decide to get back at me is a day I hope I never see.

And thanks, of course, to the weekly readers of the column, a phenomenally loyal bunch. The hundreds of letters and suggestions you have sent in over the years are constant fuel for Kagan and me. When enjoying this book, please remember that a wicked cackle is what weve been going for all along. If said cackle arises, weve done our job well. And if you find yourself in here, consider yourself lovingly branded.

Mireille Silcoff

N amed his son Paul not after the apostle but after the incredibly awesome and underrated 1989 Beastie Boys album, Pauls Boutique. Knows he is the raddest dad ever. Not only can he get Xbox games before they come out (an old buddy from the Aspen days is now a designer at Microsoft), but at the skate park Beastie Dads still able to pull a Backside Lipslide better than any of the kids. Was once the king of the ramps on the Vans Warped Tour, after all. But then Betty got pregnant, and Beastie Dad injured his hip after downing a bottle of Jgermeister and jumping off the balcony at that Bad Religion concert, so they opened a skateboard/snowboard shop, and, combined with some contract carpentry work, the settled-down-parenthood things turned out pretty cool. Is slightly worried that ten-year-old Pauls lately been saving allowance money to buy The Most Relaxing Classical Music Album in the World Ever! Volume 2. Also, his sons depression over the last episode of Frasier was kind of weird. And whats up with this Dad, could you not pick me up from chess club on your longboard stuff all of a sudden? Since Paul got into that Brontosaurus school (Montessori, Dad), everythings changed. Betty says Paul will come around again, and, until snowboard season starts, Beastie Dad will have to go to the skate park without his little buddy. (Nobody thinks youre too old, honey. If it makes you feel better, you can say its research for the store.)

C ant believe she used to smoke a carton a week in her twenties. Now The Social Smoker can go for days without smokingreally, its no trouble at all. The SS only smokes when she is out at night in appropriately drinky situations. Lately shes been out a lot, not that its becoming a problem or anything. Although she did have one Parliament when she was writing that impossible report yesterday afternoon, but that was just for concentration, and she had one when visiting old puffer Aunt Suzie earlier today, but it was more for Aunt Suzies sake than anything, and then there was last weekend in New York, but in New York