Mac Tin Tac

    (Conundrum, 2004)
™ and © Conundrum

In the early 1990s, Montreal artists Mark Tessier and Stephane Olivier produced a series of five comics featuring work from many of Quebec’s underground artists. The stories originally focused on the humdrum life of “everyman” Mac Tin Tac, but the creators eventually decided to steer their protagonist toward loftier goals. The collection’s setting, Kuskus City, combines the familiar (urban life and job outsourcing) with the unfamiliar (its triune social structure of dominant, blindered “kuskus,” lower–class anthropomorphic bottles and despised, disposable rabbits). While the owners of the economically vital Happy Cake Factory plot to move overseas in search of cheaper labor, Mac Tin Tac works quietly as a mirror maker, using the tears from slaughtered rabbits to reconstruct the “Life Factory” that reflects the true soul of whoever looks into it. The diverse illustration styles of the illustrators may take some getting use to, but the dense narrative requires repeated reading in any event to receive the maximum amount of understanding.

— Joe Trela
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#2

January, 1993
Cover Price: $4.50
1 copy available for $149.98 		 Marc Tessier
#3

December, 1992
Cover Price: $4.00
2 copies available from $4.79 		 Marc Tessier