The Hipless Boy
Sully

June 2009
ISBN 978-1-894994-40-8
6.75 x 8.25 inches
224 pages, two colours
Graphic Novel
$19.95 CDN / US

Say for a second you’re just a normal person. You live in a hipster neighbourhood but you’re not a hipster. You’re hipless. This the premise behind this collection of interlinked stories done in a graphic novel format that originally found life as a weekly column in the McGill Daily. The protagonist here tries to live his life like an open heart, and a curious cat, meeting and mingling with a collection of Montreal oddballs. He finds love, loses love, learns to like cross-dressing, and finds something else. Along for the ride are his best friends Minerva and Owen. She is a semi-bisexual private-school dropout, he is an art-school fabulist who constantly conjures up new ways to court controversy. Crisp linework resonating with clean writing, the short stories collected here reveal an inter-woven community of new adults, struggling to find families of their own making. With artwork reminiscent of Adrian Tomine’s, this collection’s warmth and humour remind us that the hipless are human too.

“An agent provocateur possessed of almost monstrous talent, Sherwin Tjia has been navigating the edges of Canadian poetry for some time, enthralling and agitating readers with his bizarre and beautiful chapbooks and concept-driven poetry...intense, assured, preternaturally sophisticated.” — Lynn Crosbie

“...hilarious...also filled with raw, biting social criticism.” — NOW

“Sherwin...can melt hearts with the turn of a phrase. He’s blessed with the unusual ability to extract stories from the substance of daily life; he can positively polish the mundane until it shines.” — McGill Daily

SULLY a.k.a. Sherwin Tjia is a poet, painter and illustrator who grew up in Toronto, and now lives in Montreal. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Gentle Fictions, and The World is a Heartbreaker, which was a finalist for the Quebec Writers Federation’s A.M. Klein Poetry Award. He has also compiled two collections of comic strips, Pedigree Girls, and Pedigree Girls Forever. In addition to his writing, Sully has also illustrated two children’s books of poetry — JonArno Lawson’s The Man in the Moon-Fixer’s Mask, and its sequel, Black Stars in a White Night Sky, which won the 2007 Lion and the Unicorn Award. In 2005, Sully was featured in one episode of Heart of a Poet, a TV program that aired on BookTV and Bravo! In his spare time, he organizes Slowdance Nights, Love Letter Reading Open Mic Nights, and Strip Spelling Bees.