Given that I’ve written twice about Jillian Tamaki in the last thirty days, you can imagine how chuffed I was to meet her at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. The queue at her signing was short but snail-slow. When I finally approached her table, I realised she was inking a different sketch on the flyleaf for each person. So kind! So PR-savvy! But really, SO kind.
I’d brought along my copy of Margi Preus’s Heart of a Samurai , for which Tamaki had done the cover illustration, and she drew me a picture of the novel’s protagonist, a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy. Don’t miss the birds in the background.