I never expected to get a shout out for my retrosexual, genre-movie-inspired webcomic in MacLean’s, Canada’s answer to Time Magazine, but it happened. I’ve been taking a couple of courses at the University of Toronto and one of my profs is a highly acclaimed lecturer. He’s the kind of prof where people sneak into his lectures, even if they aren’t in the class, because he composes them like songs. Nick Mount teaches a course that covers literature from the early 1900s to present day, including a graphic novel, a potboiler mystery and poems about sitcoms. I went to college for art, so its nice to be going to university for English lit to get some writing chops too. Close readings have been great in forcing me to really analyze what makes a story worthwhile. If you don’t have the time or money to get yourself into class, you can check out some of his lectures online, thanks to TVO’s program devoted to the lecture: Big Ideas. Click the links to check out Mount talk about T.S. Eilot, Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.

from the article:

Suddenly, Mount projects a garish image onto a large screen above him: it is the cover of another comic book, Smooth ’n’ Natural, a clever homage to the blaxploitation B movies of the 1970s. It is uproariously funny. Mount identifies its creator—he is a student, Brian McLachlan, sitting in the hall, totally surprised that Mount knows who he is or what he does. “Did I just embarrass the hell out of you?” asks Mount, who on the contrary, with a magician’s trick, has suddenly summoned the spirit of his theme—Literature for Our Time, the way poetry and fiction really do respond to the world—and housed that spirit in the shape of one of his own students.