SNUBDOM

My brand new 64-page Conundrum Press graphic novel/memoir Gesticulating Gentrification is having it’s official Montreal launch this weekend at MCAF (Montreal Comic Arts Festival)!

From the Conundrum Press description: A graphic memoir about housing insecurity! Cartoonist & musician Rick Trembles grew up in the suburbs of Montreal, in the house his father, Canadian Golden Age cartoonist Jack Tremblay (Crash Carson), paid for as a commercial illustrator. Encouraged by his father’s cartooning, inspired by underground comic artists like Robert Crumb, & propelled by the DIY ethos of the burgeoning punk scene, Rick gave in to his own natural drive to create & built a life full of art & music. But the comics industry had changed since Jack Tremblay found success, & Rick followed his heart into alt-comics. Mainstream cartoonists were already making less money, & alt-comic artists were making even less from their art—if anything at all. When Rick first moved out, he couch-hopped from one messy band rehearsal space to another, finally settling on a small apartment above a pool hall, where he worked on zines & wrote music—until he wasn’t able to make rent. This is just the first stop in a series of insecure housing situations made worse by gentrification. In Gesticulating Gentrification, Trembles provides a close & honest look at the challenges faced by people living in precarious housing, the constant threat of being forced out by gentrification, & the social & health problems that result from all of it. But this graphic memoir isn’t only about social issues—it also provides a rare glimpse at a bygone version of Montreal & the DIY culture that thrived there.

I’ll be signing at Conundrum Press table D31 on St-Denis street (which will be blocked off for the event) Friday, May 23 from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm, Saturday, May 24 from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm, & Sunday, May 25 from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm. Scheduling info HERE

I’ll also be part of an MCAF panel of cartoonists called “How to Kill a City: Housing Crisis & Comics” on Saturday, May 24 from 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm at Espace La Presse C21, Section C. It’ll be moderated by Cecil Castellucci & the guests, besides myself, are Shaghayegh Moazzami (Les coquelicots de Ridgewood), & Eleanor Hannon (Citymouse). More info on this event HERE

Next stop, Toronto, for the official TCAF launch (Toronto Comic Arts Festival)! See you all everywhere!

$20.00 CAD, 11 x 8.5 inches, 64 pages, black & white, trade paper, available from Conundrum Press HERE (more sample images from the book at that link)! As of today, it’s also at the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore if you’re in Montreal.

“Entertaining & compelling! A great story! Totally brilliant! A great book! Genius! Really!” -Robert Crumb

“A harrowing read & an important cultural record” -Montreal Review of Books

In all of their 45-year career, Montreal post-chunk bland THE AMERICAN DEVICES have never officially played an outdoor show, so this is gone be their Woodstock, mango! Dew Take The Brown Flaccid! Joining them on the bill are the delegates of psycho-delicate delinquency RETAIL SIMPS (with former Devices guitarist Chris Burns), & starting the evening off will be sunshine smugglegum schnappsters BON SEQUITUR (with former Sacral Nerves & Nuppeppo guitarist Johnny Deck)! NOTE: During this Summer-of-Glove, because of construction, Marché Des Possibles shows have been taking place just a few steps nearby the original site at MDP Sur De Gaspé (5705 Ave De Gaspé). Acid Brown The Take Do, Winnie-the-Peeyew!

In honour of ornate sixties psychedelic posters, I made an unreadable one for the occasion! Click on it to hexpand your horizons!

Bonus Prismacolor® sketch!

Double-launch October 26 @ Sala Rossa (4848 St Laurent Blvd) w/Crabe just in time for Halloween! First up is a limited edition American Devices vinyl release of 200 copies of “The Game We Never Win” B/W “Interlarding” from great Montreal label Celluloid Lunch Records, who also released archival recordings of the first 1979 incarnation of the band The D-Vices last year. New 45 comes in a Risograph-printed sleeve featuring a Howard Chackowicz cartoon. We even made a slick music video for Game which you can see HERE or by clicking on the Cups Von Helm “Princess of Power” cape image at bottom.

As Celluloid Lunch boasts in their promo: “These two new tunes are the Devices in top form, whittled by time to the essential 4-part unit. Both songwriters deliver in their respective lanes, & the rhythm section kicks the can along with inventive gusto. In a warped world, American Devices’ oeuvre would be life-bending fodder for international bonehead punks, b-movie fanatics & prog nerds alike, but in this reality, they are banished to a profitless deal on the world’s least respected underground record label. Lucky for us, misery loves company.”

Dedicated to our late founding drummer Cups Von Helm (RIP June 2023). Click HERE or on the cover art below to give the tunes a free listen & make an order. Also available at fine Montreal shops like Phonopolis, Sonorama Disques, Café Disquaire180g, Le Vacarme, & Sonik.

In 2021 one of our favourite Montreal bands Crabe asked us to come up with several separate riff cycles & then recorded us playing them. They also asked me to make up a French story I could narrate over the end. Then they mixed everything together & sang over it, creating a Frankenstein monster called “2020” (give the tune a free listen & make an order HERE or click on Crabe’s Marc-Olivier Cartier album cover art below). And the cherr(ies) on top? Not only are we gonna interpret this thing live at the launch of our vinyls… but so are Crabe! Three interpretations in one night! The vinyl version that never existed live (from the LP they’re launching called “Visite Du Temple Inné”), then two different live versions! DO NOT MISS!

Pictured below: Cups Von Helm’s official handmade “Princess of Power” cape that he wore at shows & that Wrob wore in our new music video.

After months of working on it on & off, I’m happy to announce the completion of this brand new 20 X 40 inch acrylic canvas painting for my long-running God’s Cocksuckers series! I started this series back in 1988 with several line-art submissions to Montreal indie comic Core, & when it folded I switched to painted canvas versions for various exhibitions. Now I make one every ten years, although some years I’ve created several. I’ve amassed about a dozen of them by now. I even made an animated film version of one of these. Time for a retrospective exhibition? This one’s dedicated to Montreal cartoonist/artist Henriette Valium partly because he passed away in 2021, but also because the series began in the spirit of excessive art, which he was at the forefront of. Back in ’88 many of us cartoony types had fun trying to astonish each other with the most sacrilegious, cluttered doodles we could come up with. This particular instalment’s divided into eight separate 10 X 10 canvases linking together to form a whole as a conceptual take on the claustrophobic compartmentalization of significant events that may mark one’s life, whether they be difficult situations or pleasant ones. FOOLED YA! Don’t tell anyone, but the ACTUAL reason it’s divided up into eight pieces is because my stupid sardine can apartment is too cramped to work on 20 X 40 canvases! For exhibition & price inquiries, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com. (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

“THE BEST COMICS ARTIST IN ALL OF NORTH AMERICA ON THE TOPIC OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.” -ROBERT CRUMB

The Weakly Dispatch series came into being pre-plague 2020 after friends kept nagging me to go back to autobio, so I kicked it off by celebrating charges being dropped on a garbage infraction & hoped to continue with more lighthearted fare. No such luck! Episode 2 was written the day before Quebec announced its first Covid case. Then came lockdown & Covid hijacked the strip since that’s all that was on my cooped-up mind 24/7 just like everyone else. But it isn’t just about the pandumbic! It’s also about (self)cancel-culture, beating off, gentrification, social upheaval, Spam™ (the luncheon meat), cartoonist eulogies, “pinkwashing,” crappy landlords, arrested development, dystopian speculative sci-fi, noisy neighbours, cockroaches, “Karens,” stunted musicians, gated communities, teeth grinding, & of course vaccines. After several of which, by late-2021, exasperated & inoculated, I swore I’d never draw another instalment until Covid was outta the picture. As we all know, the plague’s still very much with us as of this date, so that spelled the end of its run. At least for now, that is. 144 full colour pages from Conundrum Press! Includes a foldout map & a very unusual intro by one of the most influential cartoonists in the world; Robert Crumb! Sample panels below!

Official Montreal launch/signing in booth B23 @ MCAF (Montreal Comics Arts Festival) on St-Denis between Gilford & Roy, May 27, 5-7pm, May 28, 2-3pm, & May 29, 3-4pm.

Additional Montreal signing at the Drawn & Quarterly store June 14 at 3 PM (211 Bernard Ouest).

Official Toronto launch/signing at the Conundrum Press table @ TCAF (Toronto Comic Arts Festival) June 18 from 4 to 5 PM & June 19 from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM.

This freaks me out! A million years ago my dream was to release our tunes on vinyl. It took 4 decades but thanks to Celluloid Lunch Records, The D-Vices finally have a brand new physical 45 for sale taken from their original 1980 demo! This is the earliest version of the band I’m currently in that’s been active ever since then, The American Devices. It features founder Phil Nolin on guitar/vocals who left in 1980, hence the name change, & it sounds way different than our present lineup. Some context: My first 70’s punk band The Electric Vomit had just broken up & Phil wanted to start a new band so he recruited me on bass. Vomit drummer Guy Lapointe also joined up. Is it New Wave? Is it No Wave? (PS: I’m the one with the vibrator in my coat pocket). Free listens, more background info, & deets on how to purchase digital & physical versions at the Bandcamp page HERE

In the mid-90’s, I had recently become roommates with Archive Montreal founder Louis Rastelli, who was just starting up his Montreal DIY zine Fish Piss, & he needed content so I began the series REPRESENTED IMMOBILIZED for him. It was after a midnight move away from my crumbling apartment down the street & I had to store most of my belongings in my parents’ basement where I grew up as I was looking for a new place. While gradually bringing all my childhood belongings back into my new digs, it started triggering memories from my past. Worried about them smudging from memory as time wore on, I took the opportunity to document them as a series of cartoons. Conundrum Press has just released the complete collection of these strips! And as a bonus, included within these pages is my 2015 one-shot mini-comic ONE MINUTE WORRIES, all about trying to make it through a whole month broke on just pennies. The book also boasts an extensive three-page intro by CanLit royalty Heather O’Neill. Sample pages & purchasing info HERE

Come interact with me about my new book during a live Zoom session affiliated with TCAF (the Toronto Comic Arts Festival) on May 9. I’ll be joined by Conundrum cartoonist & drummer for my band The American Devices, Howard Chackowicz, plus cartoonist David Collier & the subject of his latest Conundrum book, legendary Toronto first-wave punk promoter Gary Topp. Info HERE

Also; RSVP via Facebook the official Strange Adventures bookstore launch where I’ll be doing a one-hour interactive Show-&-Tell live on Instagram May 12 HERE

This year (& month) marks the 40th anniversary of the world’s most favourite Canadian band THE AMERICAN DEVICES. We had new songs we wanted to unveil & planned to do some live shows to celebrate, but then you-know-what hit the globe. Well, I’ll be damned if we’re gonna come up empty-handed for this momentous event so I commissioned 100 of these limited edition jewel-like die-struck sandblasted lapel pins with antique finish & butterfly clip to celebrate! For only 10 bucks (postage included) I’ll ship you a pin in a zip-lock baggie with an official signed & numbered Certificate of Authenticity, plus a signed, hand-drawn cartoon rendition of the band by yours truly! And if anyone in my Montreal vicinity wants the pin just by itself & can meet me in person for a safe transaction, I’ll knock it down half price to 5 bucks! Email me NOW for deets on how to order this once-in-a-lifetime one-of-a-kind giftie at ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com! Click on the image below for film footage of our little army of lapel pins!