The Beguiling

Story

The Beguiling is a comic shop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It specializes in underground and alternative comics, classic comic strip reprints, and foreign comics. It has built an international reputation for focusing on and promoting non-superhero comics in the superhero-dominated North American comic book market.The store has made effort to promote comics culture in Toronto by organizing the annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) in coöperation with the Toronto Public Library, which also hosts Page & Panel, a nonprofit shop to support TCAF. From 2011 to 2017, The Beguiling ran a sister store, Little Island Comics, the first North American comic shop aimed exclusively at children.HistoryFounded in 1987 by Steve Solomos and Sean Scoffield on Harbord Street near the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, The Beguiling quickly built a reputation for the diversity of its stock, focused on art-oriented, avant-garde, underground and alternative comics—"anything that is even peripherally comic book-oriented", according to current owner Peter Birkemoe. In the earliest days, much of the store's income was made through mail order, as the material it dealt in was not mainstream. It also built a reputation for stocking the works of cartoonists such as Chester Brown and Julie Doucet, whose comics most stores would not handle due to the controversial nature of their contents. Well-known Toronto-based cartoonists such as the trio of Brown, Seth and Joe Matt became associated with the store, and sometimes depicted it in their comics. Others such as Jay Stephens made it their shop of choice.