The Cosmic Con

Toronto, 1968. Herbie Weingarten, a teenager in his last year of high school, finds that his uncle Jeffrey, a holocaust survivor, has been taken in by a new religious movement called, “Exalted Consciousness”. The young man tries to extricate his uncle from the group even while his uncle tries to pull him into it. Visit Toronto’s downtown core when Yorkville was a hippy haven, Rochdale College was a centre of the illicit drug trade and bands had names like Intercontinental Ballistic Grapefruit. Watch as personalities are broken down and moulded in the pursuit of power and money by the mysterious Baron Gerhard Von Albrecht. Take a walk along “cult row” from Davenport and Avenue Road through to Yorkville, as pernicious gurus create ugly alternatives within the Age of Aquarius.

This propulsive plot is matched by Kasman’s meticulous and lavish illustrations capturing a bygone era of Canada’s largest city and the seedy characters within.