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The Vancouver Art Gallery has defended itself against criticisms that its KRAZY! exhibit has given the city’s comic-book creators and animators the cold shoulder. The exhibit, which opened May 17, features comics, animated cartoons, anime, manga, graphic novels, video games, and visual art. Of the many artists featured in the show, which was produced with the help of six curators selected by the VAG’s senior curator Bruce Grenville, only one—animator Marv Newland—is local.

Local comic-book creator Kaare Andrews, who works largely with Marvel Comics, told the Straight he was unimpressed by the VAG’s exhibit. “Originally I had agreed to kind of help out doing some talks or something for the exhibit, just because I love the medium,” he said, “and I wanted to be a part of it. But there were some comments, especially towards superheroes, that were condescending and snobby.”

Andrews questioned why the Canadian cocreator of Superman, Joe Shuster, was excluded from the show. “Why wasn’t someone like Leonard Wong”—the Vancouver comic-book historian who organizes the Comicon convention—“involved in curating the show?…I think it’s a snobby thing for the art gallery to do, to both disrespect the medium of comics and local comic-book artists and historians.”

“It was never intended to be a local survey,” Grenville told the Straight during an interview at the gallery. “If the show was set up as a local survey, I definitely think we failed. But it was never intended to be a local survey.…The goals and the values and the purposes of the show were very clearly stated—and they’re stated everywhere in the show—that this is an international survey of contemporary visual culture.”

Photographer Jacqueline Feldman, whose nonprofit group Entertainment Media Arts has tried to keep an archive of hand-painted cells from local animator Delaney & Friends in the city, told the Straight she was dismayed by the lack of support for B.C. artists working in the field.

“To fund and support and put on an event like that without first or at any time putting on an event that celebrates, acknowledges, our history of animation and talent is wrong,” she said. “The exhibition was proposed by the Vancouver Art Gallery. It’s not one that they accepted that’s travelling around the world. They proposed it, so they deliberately didn’t extend that to say, ‘And this was our personal offering for B.C.’ ”

Feldman said the exhibition’s lack of recognition for Vancouver-based animators indicated a general lack of local support for the genre’s artists. After a four-year battle to maintain the Delaney & Friends archive in a Vancouver facility, she said she was being forced to send the collection out east.

“We house a collection that we’ve been trying to get support to be able to retain and keep locally. As of December, we had to give it up and it’s going to be processed through to a university in Ontario,” she said, declining to name the university. “The other collections from the other animators have gone to the national archives.”