Book announcements begin next week!

We're less than a month away from one of the most exciting weekends for indie comics--the Toronto Comic Arts Festival! The lead-up to TCAF seems like the perfect time to announce our debut slate of books, so over the next 3 weeks, I'll be telling you about Balustrade Press's 2026 publications. Keep your eyes on your inbox!

If you'll be at TCAF on June 7-8, please come and say hello! I'll be tabling under my own name, Allison O'Toole, and hosting two panels at Word Balloon Academy, TCAF's professional development day. I'm excited to be presenting a Networking for Introverts seminar at 10:40 am, and hosting the annual Indie Publishers Roundtable discussion at 4:00 pm, this year with a focus on the issues facing Canadian publishers.

Both TCAF and Word Balloon are completely free to attend, so I hope to see many of you there!

As a baby small press, I was honoured to be included in this write up about the small press comics landscape by Akira B. of WildStar Press! The others quoted in the article (including Akira!) are huge inspirations, and I hope to be listed alongside them for years to come. Toward that goal, I have some amazing books to tell you about, starting next week!

If you haven't, please check out the Cartoonist Cooperative's Nib & Ink Festival! It's all online and free, with events and a webstore of members' comics! It runs until the end of May, so you've still got time!

There's also still time to order a copy of The Comics Courier #2 over at Kickstarter! I absolutely love what Tiffany Babb and the Courier team are doing; we need more venues for paid comics criticism and journalism. And these writers are some of the best in the game!

And I'll leave you with some indie comics I've really enjoyed recently:

The Fables of Erlking Wood by Juni Ba and Aditya Bidikar

These short stories are so much fun, there's a real sense of play in Ba's cartooning and Bidikar's lettering. Their stylistic approach varies from story to story, which all together form a mosaic, a world I'd love to revisit in future volumes. Reading this gave me the same feelings I got encountering Hellboy short stories for the first time; like I'm being invited to explore a fun and singular world that looks a bit like our own, but more magical!

Dust n Dread by Kieu

Kieu started this horror-Western webcomic last year, and it's become one of my most-anticipated updates every week. The black & white art is enormously atmospheric, and Kieu is a master of facial expression. The characters are endearing with distinctive voices, and the episodic style reveals the story's world organically. It's refreshing to read a genre comic that trusts the reader enough to build the world out slowly, without exposition dumps. It's a really fun read, perfectly executes on both of its blended genres!

If I Had Known... by Lillie J. Harris

A tender, emotional comic about a young vampire for fans of Sinners. A girl too young to comprehend the weight of "forever" becomes a vampire to protect her sister's corpse from body snatchers. Harris put this up on itch unfinished, with descriptions and sketches in place of a few pages. It's a neat glimpse into the creative process for this mixed-media comic that makes it feel looser and more poetic. The the impact of the story is not lessened by its unfinished state!