In Wanderlust, Megan Speers introduces us to an unlikely heroine who embraces a decidedly perilous but fiercely-independent life among the punks of the third-largest city in northwestern Ontario in the mid-1990s.
Proponents of similar subcultures typically self-identify in any community, so these fifty panels of images could just as accurately represent events in any small city in almost any country in the world in the thirty years since the advent of the Clash, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. The images are wood engravings, carved on blocks made `by scratch' (as it were, in the true spirit of the Do It Yourself ethos) by the artist and her family. The images themselves are then scratched into the surface of the wood, depicting the mostly happy lives that the punks eke out for themselves in the discarded backwater of the Sault that no-one else wants or needs to frequent.
Bush parties on Whitefish Island, dumpster diving for pizza and the anarchist aesthetic, all rendered in the sort of bold, crisp lines reminiscent of Frans Masereel's 1919 classic graphic novel Passionate Journey which depicts a not dis-similar idealistic individual's struggle with destiny and fate in a life that has known its joys, its illusions and its disappointments.
