The Women’s Healthy Environments Network (WHEN) rolled out a campaign on May 16, 2010 in Toronto encouraging people to return bath, beauty, and cleaning products that contain harmful chemicals in return bins placed around the city.

The campaign centre on a comic strip with two adult women, Suzie and Georgia.  The strip begins with Georgia applying makeup.  Her friend, Suzie, walks into the washroom in cleaning garb.  Suzie warns Georgia about the chemicals in her make up and convinces her to return her bath, beauty and cleaning products to the WHEN return bin.

An interesting part of this project was printing the strip on 57 x 27.5 inch bin wrappers.  I like seeing comics in other display formats besides books and screens.

An information card was also designed as part of the campaign.  The card lists common chemicals in bath, beauty and cleaning products and healthy alternatives to them.  Each card is business card-sized, making them convenient to store in a wallet or purse when shopping.

Kerri Brock from WHEN collaborated with me on this project and was happy with the outcome. She said:
“Michel took WHEN’s concept and brought it to life using a simple yet effective comic strip element.  This not only allowed for immediate visual identify to help break through the communication clutter, but also supports the nature of the campaign which is to educate and raise awareness on household toxins.  Suzie and Georgia will become WHEN’s archetype for this issue, and we have received great feedback to date about the use of the comic concept. Well done Vec Royale [Illustrative Studio].”

Lower Your Doses! is just one of the many non-profit initiatives WHEN is doing to improve women’s health.  Find out more about WHEN’s other initiatives at www.womenshealthyenvironments.ca

This year was Premières Lignes’ first time at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF). The publishing cooperative was one of the few French language comic book publishers at the festival.  Nevertheless, we did sell a few books and many of the francophones that passed our table were pleasantly surprised to see comic books and graphic novels in French.

The festival was organized and efficient and was housed in the Toronto Reference Library, offering a clean and spacious area for festival goers and exhibitors.  A few members of Front Froid, a comics publisher from Montréal, joined Premières Lignes’ table.  It was a great opportunity to become better acquainted with the Toronto comics scene.

Marc Tessier snapped the photos below.  See more photos of Premières Lignes at TCAF on Marc’s blog. All photos © Marc Tessier 2010.

TCAF: http://torontocomics.com/
Marc’s blog: http://likeanacidtrip.blogspot.com/2010/05/tcaf-on-road-part-4.html