by VINCENT TINGUELY

Sherwin Tjia's earliest childhood memories are about drawing. "I had an uncle who taught me to draw," Tjia explains. "He'd take my hand in his, and draw for me." His penchant for art took him through art classes at Queen's and Concordia, and led to the wildly successful underground comic strip, Pedigree Girls. "I was addicted to writing them," Tjia comments. "I wrote 12 a day for a while." They appeared in the Concordia Link and McGill Daily, and then a collection of the strips was published by Insomniac Press in 2001. A second collection will be published by Saqi Books in the U.K. this April. "It's an insane comic strip," says Tjia. "But the English, they're obsessed with class issues, which is what my strip mostly targets."

The multitasking Tjia is equally talented when it comes to writing. His early penchant for winning school essay contests led to a first-place poetry prize in Queen Street Quarterly and his first poetry collection, Gentle Fictions, edited by Lynn Crosbie and published by Insomniac. More recently, he's been wowing audiences in Montreal with his massive, 1,000-page collection of pseudo-haikus. "They're not real haikus, it's impostor poetry. But they're addictive too. I like to call it potato chip poetry." A selection (The World Is a Heartbreaker) is slated for publication with Coach House Press, also this April.

Tjia's currently hard at work on a graphic novel, closely based on his popular column in the McGill Daily, The Hipless Boy. "I'm halfway through it," says Tjia. "Making comics takes forever. Something that you could blast through in three minutes took me three days to draw." He's already previewed a few chapters at Words and Music at the Casa, and you can check out Tjia's blog, http://hiplessboy.blogspot.com, for information on upcoming readings, convivial Scrabble meets and the like.