Speaking of Canadian artists, check this out:

John Weldon returns to his comic roots
Bill Brownstein, The Gazette
Published: Friday, July 25 [2008]

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/columnists/story.html?id=c86aaeae-e743-43bc-a8fa-4615e4c60479&p=1


Here's an excerpt of that article:

John Weldon has come full circle. The Oscar-winning Montreal animator has returned to his artistic roots: the comic book.

Weldon still ranks as one of the National Film Board of Canada's most celebrated and respected animators. Among his two dozen creations are the cult favourite Log Drivers' Waltz and Special Delivery, which earned Weldon a trip to the Oscar podium in 1979 to pick up the statuette for Best Animated Short...

The comic-book thrill stayed with him throughout his tenure at the NFB. Rather than spend his retirement years tooling around the garden, he started drawing again with a vengeance and created a new comic book series, Ashcan Alley, which revisits some older themes and characters"...

-snip-

I don't think John has a purple character, but he does have a blue one:

"In the last copy of Ashcan Alley, there's a telling frame featuring two of Weldon's favourite characters, Father Blueberry, a defrocked priest who has lost his religion, and Andromeda Vanguard, a lovably scattered artist. After checking out Vanguard's latest canvas, a mystified Blueberry laments to Vanguard: "I don't get it!" To which the artist replies: "You're not supposed to get it. It's ART!"

This is a not-so-subtle shot at the pretensions of the art world. "Let's just say I've run into a lot of art in my life," Weldon says with a sigh. "Much of it has been incomprehensible, even when it's my friends who have done it."

-snip-

[my bold font for emphasis]


Here's the blue clicky to the Mudcat thread about John:
thread.cfm?threadid=113021&messages=8
BS: John Weldon   

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That thread has contact information to purchase your very own copies of John's comic books.

Congratulations, John!