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Normal History Vol. 314: The Art Of David Lester

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 31-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

The winter 2015 issue of Geist magazine features an article by Connie Kuhns called “Strange Women” about Vancouver’s music scene in the 1970s—”a time when it was a radical concept to claim a musical space for women, when coming out as a feminist was a daring admission … ”

On page 45, there’s a reference to the singer in the Moral Lepers meeting David Lester in Vancouver after she’d seen his “large, colorful” Emma Goldman poster “in every single anarchist squat in London.” Currently (nearly 40 years later), David is working on a graphic novel about Emma Goldman’s life in Toronto, where she died in 1940. I made a video about the storyline of the new book. Mostly I made the video because he’s the kind of person who works on his projects with such intensity that I’d never get to see the guy if I didn’t barge in with a project of my own. Interviewing him on video.

Before the Emma Goldman book comes out, his fantastic comic The Battle Of Ballantyne Pier will be published in 2016 in a compendium of labor-related graphics. David created the Ballantyne Pier project as a challenge within a set amount of time. I was totally amazed with the excellent drawing and the fact that he put the whole thing together in some crazy amount of time—like five days or something. While mere mortals are catching a movie or tidying up the garage, he created this 12-page comic about his grandfather’s experiences during a time of labor strife on Vancouver’s waterfront in 1935.

“Drilling” from Dovetail (K, 1992) (download):