Comic conventions can be weird places, even for comics fans. I'm in Toronto at the 2005 Canadian National Comic Book Expo to arrange an interview with Cameron Stewart, the artist behind CATWOMAN, SEAGUY and - most recently - Grant Morrison's insanely thrill-powered MANHATTAN GUARDIAN. I'm too stunned and bewildered to find him, though. There's a degree of nerdiness on display here that even a lifetime of comics buying - and a lifetime of writing phrases like "Grant Morrison's insanely thrill-powered" - has failed to prepare me for. It's like geek nirvana, Narnia and hell, all rolled into one.

At the autograph tables, the usual group of clowns, C-listers and goth hangers-on have assembled for their jollies. There's Marina Sirtis and Tim Russ from STAR TREK. And Kevin 'HERCULES' Sorbo. And Clive 'LORD OF ILLUSIONS' Barker. When I arrive, Margot Kidder - Lois Lane from the old SUPERMAN movies - is talking to a man dressed as a bottle of Listerine. She hasn't drawn much of a crowd yet. Instead the focus of attention is on another, much younger Lois Lane: the pretty but plastic-looking Erica Durance, who plays the same character in SMALLVILLE. Kidder seems more interested in the Listerine guy. "C'mere," she beckons to him. "You're looking pretty swell."

This year, the Expo is sharing space with several other conventions: a sci-fi convention, a gaming convention, an anime convention and the 'Festival of Fear', a horror con. Across the hall from Kidder and Durance, about 100 guys - and one surprisingly non-nerdish girl - are competing to win a card game called WORLD OF DARKNESS: DARK CHRONICLES, with a first prize of $10,000. Downstairs, the SUPERGIRL cover illustrator Michael Turner is giving an arts and crafts lecture titled 'Drawing Babes' - sort of Tony Hart meets BARELY LEGAL. The room is a sea of black t-shirts, PVC and man-sweat. Approximately one in seven people is dressed as an elf.

Cameron Stewart, meanwhile, seated at a signing table in the centre of the convention room, is looking incongruously dapper. Dressed in a striped black jacket, the 29-year-old Toronto native and comic book illustrator is frenetically signing books and drawing sketches for fans. He does one of Batman. He does one of Catwoman. He does one of Dr Doom. When I creep up to say hello, he's drawing a picture of a bloodstained shark holding a sneaker in its mouth. A single speech-balloon emanates from the shark: It says "WOOF!"

"Conventions kill me," Stewart sighs when we meet for coffee the following afternoon. "It's a constant stream of people, and you don't even get time to eat. I think I might have had one Twix bar the entire day. Everybody comes up to you to talk, or for a sketch, or to show you their portfolio, and you have to give them all the same level of enthusiasm. It's great that I don't have to spend the whole day twiddling my thumbs, but by the evening, it's exhausting."

And then there's the matter of the pirates. "I don't do full body figures anymore," Stewart says. "It's too time consuming. Plus, they started showing up on eBay. Which annoys me. Artists do convention drawings as a token of appreciation for the fans, for supporting our work, for being a customer, and it's kind of disheartening to see your stuff sold on the intenet the next day. I did a search on eBay and found at least five or six of my drawings selling for $50-$100. I've actually become savvy at noticing that now, because rather than bring up their sketchbook, some people will come armed with a fresh sheet of Bristol board, and give you very specific instructions - you know, like 'Can you give me a full-body drawing of Batman?' Now I know exactly what that means. So I just do a quick little head instead."

Stewart is something of an anomaly in Toronto's comics scene, which is defiantly indie and 'zine-centric. (Famous locals include Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Dave Sim and Seth, and there are regular visits from the rest of the D&Q/Fantagraphics royalty.) By contrast, most of Stewart's work is done for DC.

"It's really weird," Stewart says. "I've wanted to work with Grant Morrison since I was about 14. He was one of the first comic writers - as opposed to artists - that I really took notice of. I remember standing in line at the Silver Snail [a famous Toronto comic shop] for him to autograph ARKHAM ASYLUM, years ago. It was December and I stood for two hours outside in the freezing snow. So it's a strange sort of thing, going from being a fanboy to having a book where both our names are on the cover. It's very strange, but I'm happy."

Oddly enough, it was at a comics convention in San Diego that Stewart got his big break: "Again, I was in line to have my comics signed by Grant - JLA this time - and I showed him some of my fan art, of Batman and The Invisibles and stuff. Also, I had this comic I self-published called RED NOSE BLUES. Actually, it wasn't even self-published. It was just photocopied and stapled."

All Stewart wanted, he says, was to make a few connections, and get some constructive criticism. "Grant looked at my stuff and said, 'This is great, you should talk to my editor because we don't have an artist yet for the third volume of THE INVISIBLES.' And I freaked out, because this was like my favourite comic. My first day at San Diego with my portfolio, and here was my favourite writer telling me I may have a chance to work on my favourite comic. So I gave his editor, Shelly Bond, my card, and then I went home abuzz."

The reality, however, proved disappointing at first. "After the convention, there was two of months of nothing, and I basically gave up," Stewart says. "I thought Grant had been nice to me just to get me the hell away from him. Then I got a phone call from a DC editor who wanted to hire me on another book."

The other book, however, wasn't exactly the hottest property in town. "It was SCOOBY-DOO," Stewart says. "I was crushed. SCOOBY-DOO is my secret shame. Still, I thought I could make something out of it, do haunted houses and bats and scary trees and ghosts. You know, cool stuff. But it turned out to be a story about a witch in a baseball diamond. And I really hate baseball. Plus, I totally screwed it up. It was an eight-page story and my first professional gig and I was three weeks late. I really, really botched it."

Still, that was 1999, and Stewart's been in the business ever since - first, collaborating with Morrison on THE INVISIBLES - and then SEAGUY and MANHATTAN GUARDIAN. It was on Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke's CATWOMAN revamp, however, that Stewart really made a name for himself, perfecting his densely compacted art style, equal parts Chester Gould and LOVE AND ROCKETS.

Jaime Hernandez is a huge influence on him, Stewart says. "I don't have any formal training, so I learnt by copying other artists, especially Jaime and Brian Bolland. At home, I would copy the poses and rendering from Brian's ANIMAL MAN covers, but change the costume details, so when I went to school I could pass them off as original drawings. I would always leave them just a little bit unfinished - like, I wouldn't do the hand - and people would come up to me and say, 'Did you just do that? Wow!' When in fact I'd just spent four hours the previous night making this painstaking forgery. So basically, I just learnt to draw by copying."

CATWOMAN was Stewart's breakthrough book. "I got a lot of praise on CATWOMAN from fans because it was so dense," he says. "They were like, 'Wow, you crammed so many panels into one page, it really feels like you're getting your money's worth.' But what people don't realise is, a lot of the time you do that out of necessity, because Ed Brubaker would write so much. I was like, oh my god, how am I going to fill all this action in, so I would end up having to draw all these tiny boxes, just to get the all characters and the action beats perfect. As a result, you had these pages with fifteen or twenty panels on them."

"I can't lie," he admits. "It was really frustrating. When you're working on a 22-page comic, constrained by that little space, it's a nightmare. I would have loved to do maybe 25 pages one month instead, just to breathe a little more. The unexpected plus side was, we got a lot of acclaim for the style of the book, all the tiny panels and dense storytelling, so it worked out for the best regardless - even if it was mostly unintentional. My natural impulse isn't to draw like that, like Chris Ware and his millions of tiny little panels. I much prefer to draw large, maybe three panels on a page."

One of the reasons for the success, he says, was that CATWOMAN was moving away from being, in Stewart's words, a "typical sex-bomb-bimbo character".

"Ed and Darwyn modernised all that. What I've always wanted to do is work that's appropriate for all ages, for men and women. Superhero stuff tends to be so male-oriented, written by men for men, so it's nice to balance that out a bit. Comics need to steer away from being this unfortunate boys' club."

Stewart is gradually branching out from his DC work. In 2002, together with five similarly inclined artists and designers (Steve Murray, Ben Shannon, Roberta Carraro, Chip Zdarksy and Kagan McLeod), he set up a studio on College Street, tentatively assembling themselves as a collective with a faux-pompous title, The Royal Academy of Illustration and Design. (The group's crest logo features a shark and a birthday cake.)

"We were all working from home and pretty much hating it," Stewart says, as he leads me to their studio, where Shannon is busy sketching. "The freelance lifestyle is very much solitary - too much sleep. You become a hermit. You work all day, and then eat, and then sleep, and you never have a social life."

"It's like," Shannon tells me, "How much can one man sleep?"

Right now, excluding a project for Vertigo which Stewart is "very excited about" but can't really mention ("I've gotten into trouble shooting my mouth off before"), he and Toronto comic writer Ray Fawkes - "an honorary Academy member" - are currently working on a book for the indie publisher Oni Press.

"It's based on a group of characters we originated, the Apocalipstix, a kind a post-nuclear JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS," Stewart says. "I'd much rather get away from the superhero stuff and be doing my own, creator-owned material like this."

Stewart and Shannon don't see any conflict between working in the comics mainstream and the independent field, with its tendency towards memoiristic, autobiographical books.

"Comics is such a small industry," says Shannon. "It's not like in music, where you routinely get accused of selling out if you pick up a larger audience. In general, comics people are genuinely happy for the success of their friends."

"I don't think there's any tension there," Stewart says. "You can have the capacity to read and enjoy both indie autobiographical and mainstream superhero comics. I just don't think I'd want to write autobiography. My life's really not that interesting."

Paul Isaacs is a freelance writer living in London.

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