When Tom met Alison: A Fisher Collection

By Philip Street

From the day the comic strip Fisher first appeared in The Globe and Mail, more than twenty years ago, it was clear that Philip Street had a total command of the medium. As Barbara Klunder writes in her foreword, “It takes a lot of knowhow with a paintbrush to capture an expression, a gesture, with so few lines.”
Street’s world includes the bumbling Tom Fisher, the winsome and strong-willed Alison, the ideal housemates (and mates-to-be?) Ruth and Eugene, Alison’s irascible father, Tom’s gruff boss—and let us not forget Bixby, the robot who imprints itself on Tom after being assigned to him by ad agency Waverly & Mogul.
The 300-plus strips in this compilation carry Tom and Alison from their first meeting through their lovers’ quarrels to their—but no, that would be telling. Suffice to say you may recognize yourself, your friends, your co-workers and the love of your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Street
• Release date: Aug 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370850471

Philip Street

The Fisher comic strip started publication on June 24, 1992, in The Globe and Mail. (A tip of the hat here to Warren Clements, the Globe editor who took it on.) At first Fisher appeared four times a week, sharing the space with Warren's own Nestlings strip. In the fall of 1993 Fisher went to six days a week, and by the time it wound up its run in the newpaper in September of 2012, over 6000 strips had been published. For most of that time the strip was in black-and-white, but when the Globe went all-colour in October of 2010 the comics page followed suit. As the strip begins, Tom Fisher is rather overeducated and certainly unemployed. In his mid-twenties, he has come to ground and is living with his parents... until he decides to move back to Toronto to try his fortune again. (The archive does not yet go back all the way to the beginning, but I intend to remedy that eventually.) He joins a co-op household and looks for work — and for love. The evolution of the story from there has had many developments and a few dead ends. I hope you enjoy it. A disclaimer: Although it's true that the character of Tom is something of an alter ego for me, and that I draw inspiration from things that have happened to me and to other people, the strip is not even close to being autobiographical. Except sometimes.

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