Gamut - An important piece of comics and cartooning history
The late 1960s through the mid-90s was a boom time for Canadian animation, and a small, local community college – Sheridan College, founded in 1967 in Brampton, Ontario – and its first president, Jack Porter, were in the perfect position to capitalize on this new and growing industry.
Sheridan College's main Brampton Campus, 1970s. The Cartooning Program was held in the Oakville Campus, which was built in the early 70s. Photo courtesy of Sheridan College
According to a recap on the college’s history, Porter, along with faculty members Bill Firth and Scott Turner, introduced a Visual Arts program to Sheridan in 1967.
The Visual Arts program was one of the most successful in Sheridan’s first year, and the program’s success sparked the creation of a Classical Animation course in 1968, the first of its kind in North America.
As former dean of the faculty of Animation, Arts & Design, Ronni Rosenberg, recalls in an interview on the college’s website: “We had a head start. We were first out of the gate, to develop educational programming at the college level in Animation. This was in the late ‘60s when Sheridan was first founded, and there was no animation industry in Ontario, or much of one in Canada. As a result, we were in a position to co-create the industry by building the educational foundations.”
Based on the success of its animation offerings – some have now called Sheridan the “Harvard of Animation,” and “Disney North” – the college began to offer courses in comic book art and creation in the early 1970s, holding classes in Sheridan’s new Oakville campus.
The new program featured guest lectures by such notable artists as Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson and Mike Ploog, and Will Eisner taught at the school during the 1972-1973 academic year.
A flyer announcing an appearance by Bernie Wrightson at Sheridan College in 1972, presented by "Cartooning & Writer's Arts." Uploaded to a Facebook group by user Tom Vincent
During Eisner’s tenure at Sheridan, he worked with students to create a new 12-page The Spirit comic called The Invader, pubished by the college’s Tabloid Press.
Will Eisner's The Invader, published by Sheridan College's Tabloid Press. Image courtesy of Amazon
In 1975, Walter Hanson, director of the Cartooning and Graphic Story Arts Media Studies program at Sheridan, would work with students on a new endeavor – an annual magazine-sized comic that would showcase both the work of students in the program as well as work from many of the guest lecturers at the college. The annual magazine would be edited by Hanson and published by Sheridan’s Tabloid Press.
And thus, Gamut was born.
Comics historian Brian Campbell wrote an excellent article about the early days of animation at Sheridan and its lead-in to the comics program, including the beginnings of Gamut, and I encourage everyone to read it.
The purpose of this site, however, is to dig deeper into each of the four issues of the short-lived but highly important magazine, to showcase the talents of then-students who would go on to careers throughout the comics, animation and film industries, and to provide more information for those seeking to learn more about Gamut and its creators, as there isn’t much info currently online about the series.
Click on the images of each issue in the sidebar to take a deeper dive into each and discover what made this student showcase such an important part of comics history.
Important note: If you were part of Sheridan College in the mid-late 1970s – specifically faculty or students in the Cartooning Program, or anyone involved in the creation of Gamut – please reach out to me. I’d love to hear and share your stories, art and photos. You can reach me at jesse@gamutmagazine.org.