Transcript: Leah Jing McIntosh launches Cannon by Lee Lai (Stella prize shortlistee)

Following tours across Canada, the United States and Italy, acclaimed cartoonist Lee Lai flew to her home city of Melbourne as the first stop of her Australian coast tour of Cannon, her latest graphic novel. The Melbourne launch, on 11 March 2026 at the Crystal Palace & Courtyard, was co-presented with Liminal. Read a transcript of the event’s introduction by Liminal editor Leah Jing McIntosh here.

Hi, and welcome to the launch of Lee Lai’s Cannon. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that we meet tonight on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respect to elders past and present; this land was never ceded; it always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

I’m Leah Jing McIntosh, the editor of Liminal. Tonight, we have the immense privilege of a conversation between Lee Lai and Rachel Ang, two of the most talented comic artists working today. Lee will also do a multimedia reading afterwards! You can pick up a book from our friends at Amplify, Australian’s only bookstore dedicated to books by writers of colour. There will time for books signings and questions after their conversation.

But just before this, I have been asked to launch this book, and it is such a wild pleasure to do so, because I have known Lee for a long time; ten years ago, she was our very first interview subject for Liminal. So much has changed since; in author’s note, she writes about Cannon as a kind of ‘second-coming-of-age’, and it very much feels like I – and so many of us – have grown and become, both artistically and politically, alongside her work.

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Lee’s second book opens in the aftermath of violence; we meet the eponymous Cannon standing in the middle of a restaurant, surrounded by smashed plates and broken chairs. It seems that Lee has upended Chekhov’s maxim: the Cannon has exploded before she has even really appeared.

We cut to three months prior, spend the next few hundred panels or so making sense of what has led to such an upheaval. Cannon is a chef who is entering what she calls the ‘uncool side of her twenties’, working in a Montreal kitchen. The book is slow accumulation of daily pressures and unmet desires. Most of Cannon’s relationships seem like endless exercises in grace and restraint. She works hard in the restaurant’s understaffed kitchen; she cares for a dying family member; she avoids the attentions of her asinine boss; and hangs out with her best friend Trish, whose feelings always seem to eclipse Cannon’s own.  

While reading, I was reminded often of what the poet Cathy Park Hong calls ‘Minor Feelings‘, which she describes as non-cathartic and enduring: feelings like shame, irritation, anxiety, melancholy. These feelings are not generated from major change, but from the lack of it. Hong notes that contemporary literature doesn’t often have a place for these feelings to land; one of the many things that are so special about Lee’s work, is in her ability to draw these kinds of feelings. Much of this comes down to the precision and visual economy of the page: there is such clarity to her lines, and her characteristic compositional restraint, that allows the book to bear the weight of these unresolved feelings – that Hong is talking about. And, as you read, they only grow heavier – through the book’s growing hesitations, deferred conversations and subtle adjustments in posture or expression or distance between characters. (A critic for the New York Times writes in his glowing review of Cannon that the book’s real antagonist is not a character but instead inertia.)

I think this is so affecting – the inertia, or the irresolution, for the most part – because Lee is incredibly good at paying attention to, and drawing the everyday: hands crushing garlic, cracking an egg, or snapping a Tupperware lid shut. We feel the swampy heat of summer, watch as a bead of sweat slowing drips down a face, spot the vegetables peeking out of the top of a tote bag. Her drawings take such pleasure in the textures of daily life, which is precisely where this complex knot of feelings tends to reside. But there is still very much space to breathe. In her author’s note, Lee writes that this book was an exploration of rage, but too of silliness. Which I love, and which feels so true. It is such a mark of talent that she manages both affective registers with great ease. We care about these characters because they are so very imperfect. It is in the silly absurdities that I think she makes the very most of the comics form, so I will leave you to find these moments for yourself.

Just a final note; Lee’s Stone Fruit was previously longlisted for the Stella prize; tonight, across town, it has just been announced that she has been longlisted once more for Cannon (!!) So, with that, please join me in celebrating and launching this brilliant work.