Photograph by Emily MacDonald. Graphic by Lily Cowper/The Concordian
Superhero fans rejoice! The Concordia Comic book club is back in action.
My friend showed me his huge comic book collection, it was quite a marvel.
Concordia Comic Book Club executives Emily MacDonald, Liam Quraeshi, and Wade Maddin explain all there is to know about comics.
“I think it started when I found my dad’s collection of comics. He had them in the basement and one time I was down there I found them all. It was quite a sight to see,” Quraeshi recalled. “Before then I never really bought any comics, so seeing all these varieties of ‘Spiderman’ and ‘X-Men,’ I became very interested in that whole world.”
Maddin explained that his early years of collecting were very much influenced by the cartoons that he watched at the time.
“A lot of the cartoons I watched growing up were all stuff like Batman. I was also a big fan of the Avengers TV show back when that was a thing,” Maddin recalled.
Just as each member became interested in comic books in various ways, their safekeeping methods differ as well.
MacDonald, who has been interested in comics since the age of 14, keeps her comics stored in four big boxes.
“I have a few hundred, like individual issues. In the comic industry the stuff that you keep the comics in is called a bag and board.
Quraeshi, on the other hand, uses the knowledge that he has acquired as a history major and applies it to the safekeeping of his collection.
“The best way to preserve any sort of paper, writing and comics included, is to keep them in a nice dry and dark area. Too much light can damage the comic by draining the colour. If the area is too moist, the paper kind of smudges a bit and they can get stuck together,” Quraeshi explained.
Quraeshi also advises any new comic collectors to have paper dividers in between each and every issue. This is for purposes of organization as well as to protect the condition of the actual issue.
In terms of the value of comic book issues, The Concordian was able to learn more about what makes comics valuable.
“Supply and demand is a big factor. Whenever there is a relatively small amount of a certain item, value increases. In some cases it can differ, a good example is the ‘Action Comics 1,’ it’s not only one of the first detective comics but it also debuts one of the most popular superheroes, Superman,” Quraeshi said.
Quraeshi, along with his two other colleagues, is eager to spread his passion for comic books with new members. Potential new members can join the Concordia Comic Book Club Discord server and their other socials through this link.
The first of its kind in Canada, the club will bring a whole new industry to the university
This year, a new club is arriving at Concordia. The first of its kind in Canada, the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) will allow the immersive story-telling industry to make ties with our university.
Mitchell Stein, the President and founder of Concordia’s TEA club, has been a passionate member of the TEA for a while now. As the main association relating to the immersive storytelling industry, it was high time we set up a TEA club in Canada.
“Things that you’ll see in Orlando, Florida or in California, at the Disney or Universal parks, a lot of them have been created in Montreal themselves. So we’re hoping to partner with a lot of those companies to bridge the gap between students and the industry,” said Stein.
Themed entertainment touches any subversive and interactive storytelling experience. An example that most will be familiar with is a Disney theme park, where guests — the audience — are transported into an entirely different universe.
Stein goes on to explain that Concordia is the perfect setting for this club to make its debut to Canadian students.
“What we were hoping to do is tap into the creative and technical side at Concordia because there are so many great [creative and technical] programs. [Many] people don’t know about this really incredible industry,” said Stein.
However, Stein is well aware of the challenges that are associated with this year. A pandemic makes it difficult to get the word around.
“We’re still really new, so I’m still learning the ropes of marketing a club, especially digitally … But so far, everybody we’ve told about it has been very passionate.”
The club will expose students to an industry that isn’t well-known to many.
“We had a lot of interest with the creation of the club, and I think that so many programs and clubs are interested in these types of things — understanding technology, creativity and immersive storytelling is always something people are interested in,” said Stein.
Although the themed entertainment industry seems far away, Stein ensures that the creation of this club will open the door for students.
He said, “Something that people always told me was to get involved in the themed entertainment association. Because it is the biggest organization that represents the industry, and everyone who works in the industry.”
The TEA club at Concordia will bridge the gap between companies and students by building relationships. Stein explained that he has already reached out to companies based in Montreal, and is looking forward to working with them.
“A lot of students don’t even know this industry exists, they might know of Disney or Universal, but they don’t know of these jobs that are right in our backyards.”
From esports to cheerleading, the clubs at Concordia have a lot to offer
For many students, a big part of the university experience is joining a club. Participating in any club can help students gain resume-worthy skills, build new and long-lasting friendships, and really just make life at university more memorable.
Clubs are facing hurdles to engage new students and continue their legacy during this “new normal” year. The Concordian spoke to several Concordia clubs to ask how they’re adjusting to the changes the pandemic has brought on.
The Concordia Debate Society was able to quickly switch their weekly meetings to an online platform when quarantine began. Violet Maxfield, Vice President of Internal External for the club said that she was able to continue participating in the debate practices even when she moved back home to Boston in March.
Maxfield said the adjustment has been challenging for new members.
“For people who don’t know what debates are like in person and they’re just there online, it’s just more difficult, because it doesn’t feel as fun as it normally does,” she said.
Omar Salem, Vice President of Training for the Concordia Debate Society, added to the issue, saying, “now our biggest concern is trying to keep them engaged, and trying to adapt our program … so it’s more encouraging to the more novice debaters.” Salem explained that meetings on Discord are organized to help answer questions and guide new recruits.
“We’re trying to tailor those meetings … so that they’ll be able to learn, improve, [be] more professional, and gain some more expertise.”
Debate teams operate in a structured style, with two opposing teams having 15 minutes to prepare and present arguments that are either for or against a motion. Motions can be on any topic from philosophical to scientific, said Salem.
The team practices in weekly online meetings on Discord, and sometimes on Zoom, to prepare for tournaments against other universities. Isaac Finkelstein, the Executive of Communications for the Concordia Debate Society said, “the pluses are that anyone can join from anywhere, and it’s more convenient.”
For the Concordia Esports Association, the transition to a completely online platform was not as easy as it may seem. President of the Concordia Esports Association Patryk Surowiak argued that it would be wrong to assume gamers haven’t been affected by the changes in the pandemic, saying, “People could say it didn’t affect us at all but in reality, it has made a major difference.”
Surowiak lamented that they cannot bond together like they did in previous years. Last year the club hosted a watch party for the League of Legends World Championship, which started at 7 a.m., and 150 students attended.
He mentioned that the yearly CSU club fair was an event where he would be able to meet and recruit new members.
“We can’t participate in the yearly club fair and make these friendships, bonds, and connections with people who want to join on day one, we have to interact with them solely through online.”
Now the club needs to advertise through alternative platforms, which they didn’t need to before. Surowiak said part of the difficulty in reaching out online is because not everyone will actually read their emails or social media posts.
The Concordia Esports club has a Discord server with about 700 active participants. The club also has teams to participate in collegiate esports leagues that compete against other universities.
This year, the esports club will help fill in for the missing in-person sports by partnering with Concordia Recreation to host three different online intramural leagues with video games such as League of Legends, Valorant, and FIFA20. The competitions are open to all, and require teams to sign up online.
For the Concordia Ski & Snowboard Club (CSSC), an online version isn’t possible. President of the CSSC, Luke Martin, said they were brainstorming options for the new year.
The CSSC is open to Concordia students and Montrealers alike, and in non-pandemic years club members paid a $10 deposit fee to purchase discounted trips to ski resorts. These weekly one-day trips transported about 100 people to the mountains, with the club even offering some longer weekend outings on occasion.
Martin said they were thinking of possibly becoming a ski ride share “where people can use us as a mediator to get people to go skiing.”
“We are still planning on running trips but just with less people to be properly socially distanced,” Martin added.
Martin said they are waiting to make any concrete decisions. First they need to see how the pandemic will unfold during the winter and if the resorts will be able to open.
The logistics of organizing and planning online events is also an issue that the Concordia Real Estate Club (CREC) is facing. The club’s main events of the year will most likely go online, along with the club’s “CREC talks,” a recurring event where one or two guest speakers talk to students about the real estate industry.
One of their big events is a yearly conference about the real estate industry. CREC Vice President of Marketing, Camille Hamel, argued that it’s difficult to give continued attention to an online conference the same way you do an in-person one. For that reason, they will host the event over the course of a few days.
“It’s really hard online to really connect with people, to engage them, for that reason we are going to hold the conference on different days,” Hamel said.
Hamel said that the CREC isn’t just about connecting students to the real estate industry, it’s about creating a welcoming community space for students.
“It’s so important at uni to have close friends to meet people, because sometimes it can get very overwhelming, just for your general motivation, and also mental health. It’s so much help to have people.”
The Concordia Cheerleading executive team for the 2020-2021. Picture courtesy of the Concordia Cheerleading team
Creating that environment on an online platform has its challenges. Yasamin Fawzi, President of the Concordia Dance Club said that the team is focusing on moving to a digital platform.
“Some people embrace, some people don’t, and it’s hard to guarantee attendance with things that are online,” said Fawzi.
The dance club used to organize weekly classes that featured a different dance style every week, and members could show up to any classes they were interested in. With COVID-19, Fawzi said the club is considering Zoom dance classes, and possibly renting studios off-campus for dance classes, where a limited number of members attend.
But the real issue is their legacy: the club is only two years old and both the founding members will graduate this year. On this, Fawzi said, “we obviously have to keep the club alive after we graduate.”
The Concordia Cheerleading team shares the same concern. Monica Knaapen, one of the two captains of the Concordia cheerleading team, said, “when we eventually leave the team and the other vets leave the team we want to basically have a legacy … [that] we’ve established something concrete.”
The club is four years old, and became an ever-growing presence on and off campus, with the cheerleading squad performing at WE Day in Montreal in 2018 and for the first time at halftime at a Stinger’s football game last year. Before that, the team cheered exclusively on the sidelines.
The team captains said they are looking into doing Zoom cheerleading practices. Co-captain Arianne Bellerive mentioned that they still want newcomers to feel a welcoming club experience despite the circumstances, saying, “we want the new girls who come to feel like you’re a part of something. Just because it’s not like what it’s been in the past years, nothing is normal right now, so we want them to feel like it’s a team.”
There’s been a number of chess clubs at Concordia over the years, but as it often happens in university, members graduate or move on without passing the club down to other students.
Chess Club Concordia is a brand new club that was created and given club-status by the CSU back in October 2019 thanks to its four executives and establishing members — Nick McNulty, Sami Noun, Liam Douglas and Adam Luqman Hakim Bin Mohamed, alongside Roman Zelensky who joined as an executive shortly after– petitioning.
The four executives (pictured in feature photo) of the club held a tournament on Jan. 16 to decide who would represent Concordia at the Canadian University Chess Championship on Jan. 18 and 19 in Waterloo, Ontario. After the last checkmate, the four members heading to Waterloo include executives Luqman, Noun and Zelensky and member Jason Chan.
“We had to create a whole new club,” said McNulty as he took one of my pawns off the board. “Concordia has probably never participated [in the tournament]. I think this is a great opportunity to maybe get our asses kicked, but that’s not the point. The point is telling the world that Concordia has a chess club. We’re trying to garner more interest.”
I sit across from McNulty for a game while we talk. There are about six games going on at once, with a couple of people watching some of the more interesting matches. Some are regulars, others are brand new to the club or are just sitting down for the love of the game.
A player asks me if I’m doing a Vienna Game opening move. I quickly reassure them that there is absolutely no strategy involved in my gameplay.
“I was in chess club when I was in elementary school,” said McNulty. “Once I met Sami (Noun), he asked if I played, and we started playing online. Chess is a lot of study and memorization, but also it’s intuition and speed. It’s a matter of sensing what’s going to happen.”
The long table where all the games are being played is extremely social. Players swap opening move strategies, laugh at a viral video of World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen beating a player in five moves, compare Lichess scores, and discuss their favourite online chess personalities like Eric Rosen and Chessbrah.
Photo by Matthew Coyte
“If we win one game at the championship, that would be pretty nice,” said Douglas. “It’s not about winning so much, it’s more about us just being there. Hopefully in the future we’ll go to more tournaments that are maybe a bit closer.”
Both McNulty and Douglas talk about the community of chess players that they’ve found since helping start the club.
The club has participated in a couple of open tournaments over the past couple months. “The turnout for open events at the library is actually quite numerous,” said Noun. “It’s not five or six, but open events we get 50 to 60 people who stop and play and ask questions.”
The club doesn’t have funding from Concordia to pay for the trip, so the four executives will be paying for the trip themselves.
“Right now we’re only going to send four people because we’re worried that we’re not going to get the money we’d need [to send two teams],” said McNulty. “We’re told that special funds requests open in February, and we’ll hope to be reimbursed later.”
As McNulty traps my king into a checkmate, an onlooker reassures me by telling me that I only lost because I made bad moves.
“Chess is pretty frustrating sometimes,” said McNulty. “Especially if you want to get good at it for some reason.”
Campus chapter returns after hiatus, presents conference Feb. 19
Concordia’s chapter of Amnesty International is happy to be back on campus and planning a conference featuring the Canadian head of the francophone branch of the organization and a prominent human rights lawyer on Thursday, Feb. 19.
Started in 2011, the chapter went defunct several years later after the staff moved on and there were insufficient replacements.
Since restarting the group last semester, Edith G. Lebel, the president of Concordia’s chapter, has rebuilt it into an organization with some 50 volunteers and a full executive staff. The effort has paid off to the point that they’ll be heading a general assembly in March to vote in future governance. They’ll also be working on simplifying the constitution to make it more flexible for members.
“There’s a lot of clubs at Concordia. It gets a bit difficult to be seen,” she said of the competition for student support. “It’s more about visibility [and] people are really interested in Amnesty—they know the name.”
Lebel calls the talk on Thursday the group’s main event of the year. It is meant to be an informal discussion with the audience featuring two prominent members of the organization: Dr. Francois Larocque, associate professor of Law at the University of Ottawa and the lawyer who appeared before the Supreme court in the trial of Zahra Kazemi, a photojournalist who is said to have died while incarcerated by Iranian authorities.
The second guest will be Béatrice Vaugrante, executive director of the francophone branch of Canada’s Amnesty International, who will be speaking on her career in the fields of corporate social responsibility, poverty, and human rights.
Another topic visited will be that of Amnesty International’s current campaign for Raif Badawi, the Saudi activist who was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison on charges of apostasy for criticizing Islam.
Aside from that, the group is busy planning or advertising enough events in the city to make up for its down time.
“For me the purpose of amnesty has always been in terms of raising awareness and making a change,” said Lebel.
Student groups cater to BitCoin, international relations and diplomacy
You may not be aware of it, but the Concordia Student Union (CSU) recently helped to establish a few more student clubs. This week we’ve decided to present to two of them.
Concordia Bitcoin and Crypto Society
Unless you’ve spent the last few years under a rock, you’ve probably heard or read about the digital currency that is Bitcoin. If by any chance you are intrigued or genuinely interested by this innovation, you’re in luck: the Concordia Bitcoin and Crypto Society (CBCS) is here to satisfy your curiosity. By talking about it, working with it or just thinking about the countless possibilities of crypto-technologies, CBCS strives to help Bitcoin enthusiasts increase their working knowledge on the subject.
CBCS’ first planned event will take place on Feb. 17 and will involve participating in something that everyone’s inner child can enjoy: a scavenger hunt. As described by the CBCS Executive Officer Olivier Brochu Dufour and Financial Officer Andreas Leoutsarakos, “the main purpose of this event is to spread awareness for the club and to give Concordians their first experience with Bitcoin.”
Throughout the year, the club will also be hosting informative sessions, meetings for people interested to work on projects related to crypto-technologies and even a screening of the documentary The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin. CBCS will also try to work towards eventually implementing a Bitcoin ATM on campus and the possibility to pay with the digital currency at some of Concordia’s shops. They’re even looking into using Bitcoin to pay tuition fees.
For some, Bitcoin and other crypto-technologies can be labeled as unsafe and even questionable. Dufour and Leoutsarakos say that one of their missions is to address those misconceptions and work on informing the public about how Bitcoin is not the uncontrollable chimeric internet creature that some pictures it to be.
“As Bitcoin technology matures and its applications become more varied, concerns with its legitimacy will dissipate and its true value to humanity will shine through.”
So for all Bitcoin enthusiasts, CBCS is now the place to come to with all your questions and inquiries.
Concordia Committee for International Relations and Diplomacy
The Concordia Committee for International Relations and Diplomacy (CONCIAD) aims to raise awareness about international affairs and represent the school in related events. Notably, the club plans to participate with other Concordia organizations to arrange social events like talks and in-house simulations. The club is notably going to participate in the 13th annual National Model African Union Conference in Washington D.C.
According to CONCIAD president and founder Madiou-Adnane Barry, the club was created to allow “Concordia students to participate in diplomatic simulations other than the ones offered from Model United Nations.” It also caters to everyone going to Concordia, not just PoliSci students. They are looking to reach out to people who have something interesting to add to the various conversations and topics usually addressed in international affairs simulations.
With founding members experienced in Model United Nations and other similar diplomatic activities, the simple motivation is to “leave a trace of Concordia wherever we end up going.”
For more information on CBCS or their upcoming scavenger hunt event, visit cbcs.club. For more information on CONCIAD, visit facebook.com/conciad.
