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Montrealer LEANNE FRANSON took a five-year break not long ago from drawing her minicomic Liliane, Bi-Dyke, a series based on her own life. Two compilations, Assume Nothing and Teaching Through Trauma, were published by British small press Slab-O-Concrete in the late '90s before the publisher abruptly folded, leaving Franson in the lurch. The creator of these edgy comics investigating bisexuality and gender flux turned her energy to successful children's book illustration. Among other jobs, she worked on 13 editions of Ripley's Believe It or Not books, where she did her own fact checking. Fellow cartoonist David Kelly got her started writing comics again, first by soliciting work for his publication Boy Trouble. This led to a new Liliane book, Don't Be a Crotte (Dansereau Editeur, 2004) -- roughly, "don't be a shit" in Quebecois French -- in which "bourgeois capitalist Liliane" hires a friend to wash dog drool off her walls and parses a befuddling conversation about identity politics. Lately Franson has been writing 20-page stories on such topics as female-to-male transgender issues and "passing," drawing six panels a day and publishing them on the Web site liliane.keenspace.com.

ANDERS NILSEN has been drawing birds for a long time. Little birds, often in flocks. Social birds, sparrows probably. Sparrows that talk. But these aren't the sort of happy animals that made Walt Disney rich. Nilsen's visionary Big Questions comic book series has grown increasingly dark since its inception as a self-published minicomic in the late '90s. Its birds encounter crashed airplanes, bombs, and skeletons. One is eaten by an owl. The bomb explodes. What does it all mean? After a Xeric grant in 2000, Nilsen's comics started sporting color covers. Now he has a new book -- Dogs and Water -- published by Drawn & Quarterly (www.drawnandquarterly.com), the Montreal-based publisher of Joe Sacco, Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, and others. Here there are no birds at all. Instead, the grim, existential, and nearly wordless tale follows a backpacker, accompanied by a teddy bear, through the tundra on a road to nowhere. Nilsen himself lives in Chicago in a house overlooking a park that is home to black squirrels and "worm-eating seagulls," where he ponders big questions. For more about Nilsen: www.margomitchell.com/thc/an.htm.

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