I’m not an expert on Drawn and Quarterly and I’m not familiar with all of their output but I particularly wanted to recommend those works that I have read from D+Q because they are particular favourites of mine.

From what I can gather D+Q is run out of Canada by someone called Chris Oliveros and his roster of talent includes Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Seth, Adrian Tomine and David Collier.

Chester Brown started out doing a mini comic (folded photocopies on standard paper) version of Yummy Fur, from the look of it he just put anything in it that he fancied. It was very well regarded by the comics professionals that saw it and as far as I know he just spent his time doing the work and waited for the publishers to find him, by the time he signed to Vortex there was already a lot of fuss about his minis. He moved Yummy Fur to D+Q around issue 25 to join Seth and Joe Matt who were personal friends by this point. There are a number of collected works from Yummy Fur, including surreal multidimensional drama Ed the Happy Clown; autobiographical pieces like The Playboy dealing with Brown’s experiences with pornography and I Never Liked You (originally entitled simply Fuck) which is a moving funny account of a particular time in his adolescence when the other kids seem to not be able to decide whether Chester is cool or not (on account of his eccentricites); and The Little Man which collects all the short stories from YF that didn’t form part of another work. Yummy Fur also featured Brown’s often overlooked interpretations of the Gospels which so far remain uncollected. Brown ended Yummy Fur after issue 32 in order to be free of the title but continued a quite similar presentation in Underwater albeit with a radical change in style. Underwater, in addition to carrying on Brown’s gospel stories features the main piece Underwater itself which remains uncollected and has pretty much confused everyone who has read it. Before it came out Brown said it was a study of life from the female perspective but so far it looks like the story of new twins and their struggle to learn to understand language. The confusion surrounding Underwater looks set to persist as Brown has put it on hold to undertake a superb ten part series, Louis Riel, on the life of the Canadian Revolutionary. Currently there are five issues out and they are heavily annotated in what looks set to become a trend in non fictional comics after Alan Moore pioneered it in From Hell.

Joe Matt writes and draws an autobiographical comic called Peepshow and if you thought the masturbation stories in The Playboy were heavy going I suggest that you give Matt a wide berth. Peepshow started life as a series of one pagers – collected in a Kitchen Sink edition and graduated to full comic book format at the time that Matt moved to D+Q. His stories are unusually revealing and scarily depraved as we get to see Matt’s endless obsession with pornography get the better of him time and time again. His book features Chester Brown and particularly Seth as characters as his life unfolds. When he gets hassle from a couple of friends for featuring them in Peepshow with thinly veiled name and apperance changes he includes this exchange in a later issue, along with names and apearances that have subtly changed to (presumably) the real ones. We get to watch as his girlfriend leaves and comes back and leaves again – all over what has unfolded in Peepshow, it’s a bit like a real version of the Truman Show if Truman had been the producer as well as the star. There is only one collection from Peepshow entitled The Poor Bastard collecting issues 1-6 which covers what I have talked about so far. After issue 6 Matt did a four issue childhood story, Fair Weather, possibly inspired by I Never Liked You, it’s all about friends and comic books and bikes and parents and will probably be collected at a later date. Everyone seems to agree that the new direction starting with issue 11, set back in the present day, featuring Seth and dealing with Matt’s porn collection again is a return to what he does best. In a new smaller format and with two colour printing (black and red on white) it looks great too.

Seth has a comics heritage that he is apparently not proud of, having worked on Mr X. which he desrcribes as of "no substance" before he began Palookaville for D+Q. Palookaville started off as pure autobiography, the first three issues being effectively short stories from his earlier life. After that began a remarkably engaging story of Seth’s obsessive hunt for a cartoonist known as Kalo in It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken, available as a collected voume, what Seth does really well is philosophical ramblings so as you get to watch Seth trundle across the country on a train looking for Kalo’s family to interview the top bit of each panel is filled with his musings on a number of things but usually how things were better in the old days. He is also very reflective about most of the small things that he notices on his journeys and it is often these details that get briefly brought to the foreground of the story before being forgotten again. After concluding It’s a Good Life … Seth began what appears to be pure fiction (but I suppose there’s no way to tell) in Clyde Fans. In the already collected part one we get to see the current owner of Clyde Fans, a company that sells fans which doesn’t seem to have done too well out of the air conditioning boom, pottering around the largely forgotten Clyde Fans shop / house alone, regaling himself and the reader with the story of his life the business that his father set up, the life of a salesman and his brother Simon, who stayed at the office and ran the business, whose "chronic inability to cope", our protaganist is sure "would have a name these days". In part two we go back forty years to witness Simon’s first assignment as salesman, painful and charming in his desperate attempts to hit some kind of goal, to prove something. Clyde Fans is remarkably sophisticated, the narrative shift between part One and Two feels remarkably right and the amount of background you have been given in part one, with the only character in the story talking directly to you for four issues makes part two feel charged with an intense realism. Seth’s usual melanchlolia and whimsy show through but his absence allows the world in the story to become more real, suddenly you could be getting this story in any medium and it would be the story that mattered, that’s not always the case with comics. Seth’s established retro cartoon style is enhanced in this series by a new off-white paper. You get the impression that the artists at D+Q have a lot of influence over how their books look, which is how it should be.

Adrian Tomine exists outside of the Seth/Brown/Matt continuity and so far I haven’t seen any cross over of those characters into his book or vice versa. Optic Nerve is like a souped up version of Dan Clowes Eightball with a similar although less jazzy pen style and a similar eye for the weird details of life but with a major difference, all his characters seem about twice as real, as do all his situations, no matter what they may be. Optic Nerve isn’t set in a crazy world, these is deeply personal contemporary fiction. It’s one of those comics that you feel you could recommend to anyone and they’d get something out of it. The first four issues each featured three t ofive unrelated shorts, and are compiled into a collection, Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Since then Optic Nerve has featured one story per issue, yet to be collected. Also available is 32 Stories, the complete Optic Nerve Mini Comics, a collection of Tomine’s teenage minis.

Also at D+Q is Joe Sacco whose war correspondent strips have won awards, critical acclaim and a great deal of media attention. Available are Palestine, in two volumes and Safe Area Gorazde, both from Fantagraphics. Equally respected by cartoonists and journalists Sacco is poised to emerge as a geuine cross over from comics to the outside world in the way that Art Speigelman did with Maus, it is unclear what he will be doing for D+Q and what he will be doing for Fantagraphics but so far his D+Q output is limited to one issue of Stories from Bosnia.

D+Q is also home to Jessica Abel, Archer Prewitt, Dylan Horrocks, Julie Doucet and others.