Info
Biography
Howdy.
My name's Ben Woo. I was born in Halifax and have lived in several different places around Canada and the States. I'm currently based in Burnaby, BC, where I'm working on a Master's degree in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. I'm a student who is aiming on becoming a full-time academic.
My primary research interest is comics. I've been a fan since I read my first John Byrne Superman comic as a kid, and I feel really privileged to be living -- and coming up through the academy -- just as comics seems on the cusp of really breaking through as a legitimate medium of artistic expression and a legitimiate field of scholarly study. This is a really exciting time to be a fanboy. I'm mainly interested in comics from a couple of different perspectives: cultural studies, history/criticism, and (meta)theory. As my undergrad degree was in film studies, I'm also intrigued by the linkages that can be made to film theory. Some other areas that I enjoy looking at are: Canadian popular culture, postmodernist and poststructuralist theory. Check out my on-line essays for some of my work.
My next big academic project is going to be an exploration of the representations of identity in Canadian comic books. I want to look at the different ways that the comics have shown what it means to be Canadian.
I'm also an amateur cartoonist. I use the pen name "weatherwise" for my comics, mostly because I thought it would be helpful to maintain some distance between my academic and creative work. I try to keep doing bits and pieces of cartooning, though my main output is the weekly comic strip "American Robots". And, of course, I still dream of doing the Great Canadian Graphic Novel some day ... but, um, I'm not holding my breath. I'm part of a collective of Canadian cartoonists called Bent Comics.
I've put my curriculum vitae on-line, if that's the sort of thing that interests you.
Site
What the hell is "borealism," you ask? It's a way of describing a phenomenon that seems to recur again and again in Canadian culture (though, it's not exclusively Canadian). If you're interested in reading more about it, you could look at my essay "Images of the North: Borealism and Identity in Canadian Comics". I was still working on that when it came time to register a domain, and figured it was memorable enough and it didn't get very many hits on Google, so it stuck.
I designed the site and wrote it in uEdit. I had some help with implementing some of the trickier parts of the layout from my pal Johan Herland, who also wrote the pywebcomic programme that automates the comics on the site.
The site uses stylesheets quite heavily. Some of the resources I consulted while putting it together were:
Hope those are helpful to you.
Contact webmaster@borealism.com with any questions or concerns about this site.
