Jack Dylan makes Montreal look good

Last fall, you might have noticed a spate of Pop Montreal concert posters plastered on hydro poles, lampposts, mailboxes and traffic control boxes around town. Many of these were created by Jack Dylan, a poster artist who moved to Montreal in 2003 from London, Ontario.

Dylan’s style is unmistakable: each of his posters looks like it was plucked from the pages of something published by Drawn and Quarterly. In a single frame, he manages to build characters and convey a sense of narrative. Many of Dylan’s posters reference Montreal’s streets and landmarks; seeing them over the course of a year makes you feel like you’re in the pages of some giant comic book.

This is especially true for the series of five posters Dylan created for this year’s edition of Pop Montreal. Each one depicts a superhero doing something completely banal in a unique Montreal setting: Superman listening to an MP3 player while sitting atop the cross on Mount Royal; The Flash Gordon making out with a perky McGill student in front of the Redpath Museum; Catwoman greeting a cat in a Mile End alley, the distinctive dome and tower of St. Michael’s rising in the background; Wonder Woman sitting, alone, on a fire escape somewhere in Balconville; and, best of all, Spiderman sitting on the Guaranteed Milk Bottle eating a banana and reading the Mirror.

The level of detail and local nuance in these posters is amazing. In the Spiderman poster, you can tell he’s reading the Mirror because “Artsweek” is visible on one of the pages and there’s an American Apparel ad on the back cover. Meanwhile, the Farine Five Roses sign glows in the background. In the Superman poster, every building on the Plateau, from Hôtel Dieu to the old asylum on St. Denis, is perfectly rendered. Any McGill student who has spent hours sitting on the hill in front of the Redpath can recognize themselves in the Flash Gordon poster.

When it comes to his Montreal posters, though, Dylan seems oddly bashful. “I don’t do too much Montreal stuff anymore because I don’t want people to get sick of me,” I overheard him telling someone at the Puces Pop craft fair in October. He does almost as much work in Toronto and Ottawa as he does in Montreal.

One of Dylan’s 2006 posters, in which two hipster women stand in front of poster-covered hydro poles, the dome of St. Michael’s visible in the background, captures this self-effacement perfectly. “I like that guy’s illustrations, but I’m kinda maxed-out on them,” one of them says. “No fucking kidding,” the other replies.