The comic, which saw wider distribution via publisher AdHouse Books in 2009, introduced us to roommates Frances and Vickie. Vickie is an alcoholic party girl, and Frances is ostensibly your average, down-to-earth type just looking to eke out a living in the world. Except of course for her numerous idiosyncratic behaviors – like, for instance, maintaining an ongoing dialogue with a fictional ghost named Sarsgaard.

At the time of my interview with Ethan, he was working on a graphic novel follow up to his well-received debut effort.

Now, nearly a year and a half later, his sophomore effort is available for purchase from select comic retailers as well as directly from AdHouse.

It’s not the graphic novel he had originally planned, but instead a 40 page second issue installment in the Pope Hats series. The book is also far less surreal, even going so far as to abandon the character of Saarsgard entirely.

Both of these changes reflect the new confidence that Rilly has found in his artistic voice.

Pope Hats # 2 may not be voluminous in nature or feature talking ghosts, but what we are given is presented with purposeful sincerity and a unique sort of human empathy. As Frances Scarland works her way up the corporate ladder as a law clerk in a high-pressure firm, the reader is given a candid glance at the abstract thought processes that separate people from worker drones.

Throughout her bouts with insomnia, exchanges with an obsessively intense new boss, and experiences on the rollercoaster ride that is living with Vickie, Frances is consistently a very real, relatable character.

The look and feel of Ethan’s art is similarly more polished. Solid, confident linework and memorable cityscape imagery establish a visually distinct backdrop against which Ethan’s characters casually live out their lives.

Ethan was kind enough to field a few more interview questions for The Fabler, ranging in topic from his decisions involving Pope Hats and thoughts on having Chester Brown moderate the book launch,  to his own current comic book picks and preferences.

Read on for more words from Ethan Rilly, writer and artist of Pope Hats Issues 1 & 2:

KD: I wanted to ask you about your decision to take Pope Hats back to a shorter, issue sort of format rather than do the graphic novel you had in mind back when we last talked.

You did an interview with Squidface & The Meddler where you touched on this, but could you elaborate a bit on what it was that just didn’t jive with you when you were working on that?

ER: Yeah. I probably shouldn’t have talked about it in the first place. I’m usually a pretty quiet guy.

It just didn’t feel right in the end. It’s a basic thing to step back from whatever you’re working on and ask, “Would I enjoy reading this book?” Unfortunately, in comics, you have to complete a fair amount of work before you can get a straight answer from yourself.

Abandoning the thing wasn’t difficult. It’s like trying to cook a new exotic recipe and messing it up. Just because you put effort into it does not make it good. But you learn from the experience, presumably.

KD: When you decided to scrap everything and take a fresh approach to this book, what was the first thing you established the new issue would focus on?

ER: I can’t remember exactly. I knew that the central character Frances was a law clerk and I wanted to flesh out her environment.

KD: As a whole, how was the experience of writing and illustrating Pope Hats # 2 different from the first book?

ER: It was more deliberate and intensive. Plus I did the second issue while I was living in this great apartment above a storefront on Bloor St. in Toronto. I had a big window facing the street, which was ideal for natural light and overt people-watching.

KD: What can you tell me about your decision to omit Sarsgaard from the second Pope Hats issue? Do you feel like any of your fans from the first comic were really choked about his absence?

ER: I think my interests simply changed over the lapse between issues. I haven’t really received negative feedback about switching gears. People who read the second issue seem to immediately get it.

It was never my intention to do a story with a really obvious hook. I don’t want to be that guy that does hundreds of books about a talking animal or whatever. For me, doing a straight-up fictional story is challenging enough.

KD: In addition to the feature story, Pope Hats # 2 features a trio of shorter vignettes. Speaking to the longer of the three, where did the Gould Speaks short comic idea come from?

ER: I was curious about whether I could capture the contained atmosphere of a very long bus ride. It’s a weird mixture of excitement and routine for people in long distance relationships. Time passes very slowly. It seemed like an impossibly boring thing to depict, and for some reason I found that intriguing.

KD: Hey, so Chester Brown did your comic launch event! How was that?

ER: Chester came onstage with a clipboard covered with post-it notes and opened with, “So Ethan, when was the last time you paid for a prostitute?” Ha ha. I figured it would be the only opportunity he would have all year to come out in public and not mention prostitutes, but no. Anyway, he was very gracious and asked challenging questions. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple months, so the whole thing was fun and conversational. Obviously, his work is monumental to me.

KD: What comics/books are you reading/consuming yourself these days?

ER: Matt Forsythe let me read the proof of his upcoming Comics Class book a couple weeks ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Publisher Annie Koyama has excellent taste. My friend Nick Maandag’s self-published book Streakers will be shipping through Diamond soon and it’s a wonderful oddball humour book. I came late to the Sublife books by John Pham, but I read them recently and they made my brain explode.

What else? I came back from the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco with a big pile of stuff, including Mike Bertino’s Trigger from Revival House, two issues of the smut anthology The Thickness, co-edited by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, and the obligatory Charles Bukowski books and Cometbus zines from City Lights. When you’re a tourist, it’s okay to act like a tourist.

To pick up Pope Hats #2, visit AdHouse Books here. You can also visit Ethan’s website to see some of his additional illustration work.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

You may have heard of him as ‘that guy who co-wrote the Cowboys and Aliens graphic novel, and then subsequently had his name unattached from anything remotely relating to the property and, later, film’.

Which I wouldn’t be miffed about at all if it happened to me.  <cough>

Alternately, you might have been fortunate enough to read one of his less widely distributed original comics, like Parting Ways (drawn by Scott Mooney and Nick Craine) or The Holiday Men in The Massacre Memorial Day Sale Massacre (art by Nick Johnson).

If you were really, REALLY lucky you may have even read one of the five issues from a 2006 vampire satire miniseries he did alongside (then-budding) comic star Fiona Staples. The miniseries, titled ‘Done to Death’, told the two distinct yet inexorably linked stories of a serial-killing editor out to rid the world of bad writers and a vampire so antithetical to Anne Rice, it would make Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise choke on their sweet goblets of blood.

Don’t fret too much if you missed this fantastic foray into the de-romanticized modern mythology of vampires. It may have taken five years, but Done to Death has been resurrected as a collected trade paperback available now from IDW Publishing.

Judging from the widespread indoctrination of vampire misinformation rooted in such ’sexy’, ‘emotionally gripping’ franchises as True Blood and Twilight, the collected edition of Done to Death comes not a moment too soon.

Done to Death is original, witty, and wickedly entertaining.

So don’t fret too much if you didn’t already know Andrew Foley

You will.

A good place to start would be the following interview I did with Mr. Foley when I caught up with him in Calgary after his signing at Another Dimension Comics.

Without further…whatever. Check it:

KD: Hey, you just finished a mini-tour during which you promoted Done to Death in comic shops in Saskatoon, Edmonton  and Calgary. How did that go?

AF: It was pretty fantastic. I was surprised because I sort of assume nobody’s interested in my work, so getting out and seeing people and hearing that people like it is always a real thrill. Even if I’m not always entirely certain that I believe them.

KD: Done to Death has an interesting publishing history. How did you get from doing those original issues with Fiona in 2006 to seeing it published through IDW just this year?

AF: Well basically, we did the original five issue series through a small press publisher called Markosia and we wound up having different views as to how the property should proceed. Eventually we came to an agreement where the rights came back to Fiona and I and we then basically… waited for a while, for the right opportunity to come up.

I was building up the resources to self-publish it if it came down to that, but then in 2008 at a conference in my hometown of Edmonton, I met (then-assistant-editor-now-associate-editor) Rachel Edidin from Dark Horse Comics.

We talked a bit and got along quite well, and I passed her a few comics to read. Then we kept in touch and sometime later she sent me an email asking if I’d ever thought about doing a Done to Death collection. I said ‘why yes, yes I have!’

She passed Done to Death up the chain at Dark Horse, but ultimately it got spiked for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. So Rachel then passed the book along to IDW editor (now also writer) Mariah Huehner, and shortly thereafter a publishing deal followed.

KD: Once Done to Death found a home with IDW, what was your experience with that company?

AF: It was surprisingly easy. Suffice to say, I expected them to want more than they actually did want in terms of media rights and it’s just really been a very easygoing relationship. There’s been nothing we wanted to do with the book that they haven’t allowed us to do, and Fiona and I still own and control our property.

KD: You originally wrote this book in 2006, which is before True Blood and Twilight and the whole modern vampire explosion. What was going through your head when you came up with the concept behind the vampire satire that is Done to Death?

AF: It basically stemmed from two ideas that I had been carrying around for a while. One of them was that whole notion of an editor getting so many bad vampire submissions that she starts killing the people responsible. My first paying job in the comic industry was as a submissions editor for a company, so that’s exactly where that idea came from.

The other idea, the ‘loser vampire’ came from my own concept of what vampires should be and where that deviates from stuff like Interview with the Vampire or The Hunger or now Twilight. Pretty much everybody represents them as these tragic, romantic figures, which felt off to me. I always thought of vampires as falling in the horror genre instead of the romance genre. I think part of the problem is also that I was friends with a lot of people in the goth community, and they would keep handing me these books by Anne Rice or whoever and telling me ‘this is the best book ever, you have to read it!’ Then I just kept feeling underwhelmed in the face of those high expectations.

If I’d gone in thinking, ‘this is gonna suck’, I probably would have come out the better for it. When I saw the Twighlight movie and didn’t want to actively pry my eyes out with a fork, that was a win for that movie because really, I was expecting to want to do that. I mean it’s terrible,  I don’t like what the books or the movie have to say, and I don’t like the acting – but – it wasn’t as grotesquely offensive as it could have been, had I had higher expectations.

KD: So was the character of Andy really a realization of what you’ve thought all along that vampires should be like?

AF: When I sat down and thought about making a vampire story, I wanted to focus on what is still scary about vampires despite the romanticized image that’s out there. They don’t look at humans with lust, they look at them with hunger. They eat people. When you look at how vampires are commonly portrayed as leaving these sanitary puncture marks in the neck, it loses that impact.

So when I was doing Andy, I wanted him to really be a creature that was devoid of empathy and just saw people as either a means to an end or, mostly, just as food.

KD: What can you tell me about your relationship with horror fiction and your interest in writing it?

AF: I do have some horror ideas that I’m working on, and I do have an affinity for the genre. The flip side to that is that I don’t personally really like being scared. I actively avoided horror movies until I was eighteen, then the first horror movie I watched and paid attention to without actively wanting to run away from it was Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. This sort of laid the groundwork for what I want out of a horror, which isn’t really to be scared so much as to satisfy a morbid fascination.

It’s just the idea of using disturbing, interesting imagery not to get a ‘boo’ sort of reaction but to examine ideas that could be unsettling without being the lowest common denominator of shock value.

KD: I know you’ve been pretty vocal in the past about how much you dig Fiona’s art on Done to Death. What is it about her style that you think complements your own approach as a writer?

AF: There’s an expressionistic quality to her work that isn’t photorealistic but is consistent in her work, so the world she draws remains consistent.  She’s basically just the ideal collaborator, and my only issue regarding Fiona is really with the rest of the world and how long they took to notice her. This might actually mark the first time in history that I was ahead of the curve.

KD: What else can you talk about outside of Done to Death that you’re currently working on?

AF: Well I’m working on a collaboration with another Calgary artist named Daniel Schneider. It’s an all-ages family adventure about a jester who goes off on a quest to fix this curse for a princess that causes her to cry uncontrollably.

While he’s on this journey, the jester comes across basically all the traditional fantasy archetypical characters turned on their heads. So the warrior who is a great hero to the local villagers because he killed a bear, but everybody fails to mention that the bear was really old and basically just fell down dead. Or the troll who has the soul of an artist and spends all of his time building sculptures of bridges.

That book will be called Fools and Madmen, and that’s the next comic thing I think I’m going to get done.

Many thanks to Andrew for the interview! For more from Andrew Foley, you can visit his official website.

-Interview by Kevin

What do these comic book artists have in common? (Other than that they are all based in Vancouver, BC)

They represent just a handful of the fantastically diverse talents who have contributed to Cloudscape Comics over the years.

Cloudscape is a Vancouver-based comic collective that has published four comic anthologies since their inception in 2008. For more about who they are and what they do, I would direct your attention to this post I wrote profiling the group.

This past year, the folks behind Cloudscape Comics decided to try their luck in the wonderful world of internet crowdfunding. Hey, publishing quality comic anthologies doesn’t come cheap – just ask The Anthology Project.

For their fourth publishing effort, titled “21 Journeys“, Cloudscape decided they wanted to produce a higher quality of book than their previous anthologies. Inspired by books like The Anthology Project Vol. 1, they wanted to release something that would make comic shop perusers take note and really stand out on the shelf.

To that end, they turned to IndieGoGo as their fundraising platform of choice. While they didn’t hit their ideal goal of $7000, they were able to break the $4000 mark – just enough to get the book done the way they wanted.

I recently caught up with Cloudscape Comics’ President Jeff Ellis to talk about the book, which is due out ’soon’ (though no date has been formally set) and can already be purchased in e-book form here.

My chat with Jeff is below:

KD: What can you tell me about how 21 Journeys came together?

Jeff: Well, we had a long planning meeting about what we wanted to do, and we actually ended up with two ideas on the table. Those ideas were either fantasy or travel. Ultimately, we decided that since the last book was sci fi, fantasy is maybe a little too similar. So we thought we would do traveling first – stories involving some sort of ‘journey’ theme -  and then we’d come back to fantasy after.

We had also just finished looking at the Anthology Project, and they had a hard cover full color book, and we thought ‘okay, let’s pull out all the stops on this one and do a full colour travel anthology.’

KD: What have you done in color before?

Jeff: We did Funday Sunnies, which was a 48 page full color book. Which is not nearly as difficult to pull off as a 250 page full color book. Our main problem with the new book was financing.

KD: Speaking of financing, what was your experience with IndieGoGo like?

Jeff: Oh it was really fantastic. We were getting a little worried if we could pay for the printing, and we didn’t have the ability to use Kickstarter because no one in our group has an American bank account.

Angela Melick from Wasted Talent sent me the link to IndieGoGo and said ‘you should be looking into this’.

So we set it up and started doing preorders, and we offered some of our older books as well as some sketches as incentives for donation. It was a little slowgoing at first, but we did hit our target and we achieved enough funding for the book.

KD: Do you feel like sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter can be game-changers for indie comic creators looking to put together anthologies?

Jeff: Absolutely. We’re not the only group that’s finding that if you show people what you’re going to do and ask for the money up front, people are willing to contribute. There are so many recent examples of people setting up an account on one of those sites and doing something that they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.

It’s funny, I had a friend sort of criticize me for using IndieGoGo, and his logic was, ‘well you have a website, and you have paypal – why don’t you do it yourself?’ I think people don’t trust to send their money to an individual. But then sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter add a bit more legitimacy to it. It makes people feel like they can trust where their money is going, and that really impacts fundraising for creative projects in a positive way.

KD: Sites like IndieGoGo allow for contributions from nearly anywhere around the world. Was it a surprise to you at all where some of the donations you received came from?

Jeff: We had a lot of contributions from Australia. In fact, we did a 24 hour event where we stayed up for 24 hours on our U-Stream doing comic jams and selling commissioned sketches, just sort of drumming up support as a last push for the remaining money we needed to hit our target. What was interesting is when we hit about two or three o’clock in the morning, most of our Canadian supporters had gone to bed, but suddenly we had about five Australians on chatting with us. They got us through to about 6am when the Canadians started joining in again.

KD: Now that you’ve done a book in color, do you think you could go back to doing another black and white anthology?

Jeff: It’s funny, if you were to ask Jonathan (Dalton), one of the other board members on Cloudscape Comics, he would say never again. He’d say we’re never doing another full color book.

I say this all the time, but this is probably the best book we’ve ever made. The quality, the art, the revisions we did, the fact that it’s in color – it really is the greatest book we’ve done, but it also logistically was a nightmare. It was more than we’ve ever had to cope with as an organization.  The fundraising alone was a whole other dimension we’ve never had to deal with, and it definitely burnt us out a bit.

Giants of Main Street, the next book, which is fantasy based, is going to go back to black and white. I don’t want to say we’d never do another, personally. I feel like if you give us a chance to rest up, and maybe check back in a year we could give it another shot. I think it would go a lot smoother now that we have the experience under our belts. Everything we’ve ever done was a struggle the first time around and then much easier the next time through.

KD: Speaking more to the content of the book, what can you say about some of the new contributors that are making their Cloudscape debut with 21 Journeys?

Jeff: We cast our net much wider with this book, which is also probably part of what made it more logistically difficult. One of the big ones for us is we have Steve Rolston doing the cover art. Which is really cool, because he’s out there doing Ghost Projekt for Oni Press, he did Emiko Superstar…he’s a veteran of the Vancouver scene and one of my favourite Vancouver-based artists. So having him do the cover was a real treat, and it made us feel like we were doing something right if Steve was up for taking some time out of his day to do some art for us.

A few new people submitted as well, which we were really excited about. Another big get for us was having Miriam Libicki contribute. She’s been working for years independently as part of Real Gone Girl studios and doing her comic Jobnik.

KD: Once the book releases, where do you anticipate people will be able to get their hands on it?

Jeff: This is where we’ve always kind of fallen flat, is distribution. I often comment to people that ‘we make the greatest books nobody’s ever heard of’. We’re hoping with this book we do our Diamond application.

We’re thinking that this could be the book that meets Diamond’s quota. We’ve always been a bit gunshy about that, because we don’t want to burn our bridges early on. We’re also doing e-books, which is huge for us. We believe that digital distribution is a big part of the future of comics, and to that end we’re going to be offering 21 Journeys as well as our last book, Exploded View, as purchasable e-books.

We’re going to sell the printed copies, but also go ahead with the digital books. Worst that can happen is nobody buys it – but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Selling books digitally could be the financial boost we need to help publish future anthologies.

You can purchase the digital version of 21 Journeys here, or go here to download a preview of the book.

For more from Cloudscape Comics, check out their official website.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Kill Shakespeare is a twelve-issue comic book series published by IDW which follows the conceit that Shakespeare’s characters all exist in the same universe, and further to that, they are aware of the Bard and his ability to alter their stories.

But then, you probably already knew that. So far, Kill Shakespeare has been met with enormous success – both critical and otherwise. It has been profiled on CBC’s The National, discussed on BBC’s The Strand,  and reviewed in The New York Times – among other places. The series creators garnered a nod from the Joe Shuster Awards for Canadian Comic Book Creators, and – most recently – they were announced as nominees for a Harvey Award.

You don’t need to know a hawk from a handsaw to be able to spot the passion evident in this group’s work  (last lame Shakespeare joke, I promise). Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery, the co-creators and co-writers behind Kill Shakespeare, came up with this idea to redefine the Bard’s body of work through a new, graphically-imbued, lens, and committed wholeheartedly to bringing that idea to the masses in a big way.

In fact, both Anthony and Conor left behind high profile jobs in media in order to dedicate themselves full-time to this project.  A jarring lifestyle choice for two dudes with no prior experience making comics, to be sure. (Series artist Andy Belanger is the only member of the three with a background in sequential art.)

Cover artist Kagan McLeod and colourist Ian Herring are the additional members of the KS art crew, and between these two and Andy, they’ve succeeded in bringing Shakespeare’s characters and settings to compellingly vivid life.

To bring you up to speed, over the course of the story so far we’ve seen Hamlet dispatched on a dubious mission to find – and slay – his creator. Along the way, he has been confronted with romance, revolution, and betrayal at the hands of a full cast of Shakespearean rogues, heroes, and pretty well everything in between.

Now, as we approach the release of the final issue (which is due sometime either in late July or August), several thing have become apparent:

One, Del Col and and McCreery made a promise with the premise of Kill Shakespeare, and they intend to keep it. Shakespeare is no longer an abstract figure in the context of the book – the Bard has been revealed, and the stage is finally set for a conflict between creator and creation.

Two, Shakespeare can still be relevant to popular culture. Who knew?

And three, though the comic series nears its end, Kill Shakespeare is far from finished – at least if Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery have anything to say about it.

Which, as you may have guessed, they most certainly do.

Several weeks back, I was fortunate enough to catch up with Anthony, Conor, and Andy at the 2011 Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.

The resulting interview is below:

KD: With Kill Shakespeare, it seems like you’ve nabbed yourselves an incredibly diverse audience. You’ve had Shakespearean scholars approach you about it,  and you’ve been featured both in main stream media as well as on websites more directly geared to comic enthusiasts.

When you’re writing about content so rooted in classical literature, to what degree is keeping it accessible to all those different demographics a priority to you?

Conor: I think it’s the top priority, in that if you don’t create something that people want to get involved with – and in the case of comics, read and look at – then why are you doing it? That doesn’t mean you make it stupid or dumb it down, but we definitely want it to be accessible and something everyone can get excited about.

I think the only reason people don’t consider Shakespeare accessible is because of the language. The stories, despite the fact that they’re some of the most complex narratives ever written, are still fundamentally accessible in themselves just because they’re so well written.

KD: We’re coming into the last few issues of the series, where Shakespeare himself finally becomes a tangible character in the book.

Did you find it any more difficult to strike that balance between accessibility and writing to the more existential themes that have sort of been there in the background throughout?

Anthony: I don’t even know what existentialism is. (laughs)

No, because really Shakespeare is just another character unto himself. We’re not trying to go too meta with this and do the whole, ‘if the creator meets his creations will the whole world explode?’ bit.

We do play with religious themes, and the question of ‘what happens when a God reappears and how do the devout react to that?’  So that’s kind of important, but at the end of the day it really boils down to Shakespeare as a fascinating character and what reactions he brings out in the other characters.

KD: For Anthony and Conor, you guys had no experience in making comics prior to this. It seems like doing this project, getting out to all of the Cons, and just immersing yourself in comic book culture would have been one heck of an introduction to the world of comics.

What has that been like for you?

Conor: I had a little bit of exposure because I worked at Silver Snail Comics in Toronto, which is arguably the largest comic shop in the country. I managed it for all of one day.

I was actually somewhat familiar with the comic culture side of things and the fans, but the interesting thing for me was learning the business side of things. It’s probably one of the most friendly and relationship-driven industries I’ve been involved with.  But then one thing people have commended us on is that, being as we’re both business students, we bring a sort of rigor to our business approach to this project.

I think a lot of the people we’ve met in the industry respect that we’re charging at this as a business rather than just as a hobby. This is one of the reasons we love working with Andy, because from our perspective, he’s really one of the most business-focused artists in the game. He’s very aware that this is a market, and he keeps it in mind with his art that he’s trying to satisfy an audience.

KD: Now that you’re coming to the end of your run on the Kill Shakespeare comics, where do you guys feel like you’ve been the most successful with the series?

Anthony: I think we’ve been the most successful with the existentialists.

Actually, we’ve been getting a lot of pick-up from theatre people and Shakespeare fans that have never read comics. That’s the most fulfilling for us, when we get someone who’s never read a comic and comes from the theatre and just loves the stage or loves Shakespeare. .. When they come up to our table at a Con and tell us about how apprehensive they were before they picked it up, and now there they are asking us for more, and asking us to suggest other titles.

It goes the other way as well, when we get comic fans who were never that into Shakespeare deciding from our books to explore those plays, those original stories.

And teenage girls. We’ve recently discovered that a lot of teenage girls are reading the books. Which isn’t that surprising, since Shakespeare has traditionally appealed to both sexes, and in this case a lot of them are currently studying him in school. Plus we have some strong female characters in the books, so we hope that holds some of the appeal.

KD: This next question is geared towards Andy. What can you tell me about your own process in interpreting the scripts Anthony and Conor send your way, and how you put your own personal touch on the art?

Andy: I tend to take the scripts they send me, and make them into something more warped than I think they would have imagined. I might do something on a page of art, and they would look at it and go, ‘you are bizarre’. In issue 11, they told me, ‘this character transforms into a giant monster’ and that’s all they said.  Then I took that and came back with something really freaky and terrifying, and I think they thought that was really weird.

Anthony: No, we already knew you were weird. That’s why we work with you.

KD: To expand on that, what’s the communication like between you as you work out what the final art is going to look like?

Andy: Each step I do a layout stage, a pencil stage, and an ink stage, and we have a meeting at the end of each of those stages. We go through everything and just chat about what was in their head, what was in my head. And sometimes we butt heads, but sometimes we also call each other genius.

Doing comics is a lot like film directing. There are some things a director is really good at, and some things they aren’t. And those are the situations where you need to play off the skills of everyone else involved with the project.

KD: Can you say anything yet about what you’ll be doing next with the Kill Shakespeare property?

Conor: Sure, one of the things we’re doing next is we’ve received funding for developing a feature film for Kill Shakespeare. We’ve also been chatting with a couple of companies about doing a really neat mobile game, and we’ve also been chomping at the bit to continue this as another comic series as well. This series is going to answer the question of does Shakespeare really exist, and if he does, is he an evil wizard or benevolent god? It’s also going to tell us what choice Hamlet makes when confronted with that, and what the consequences of his actions are on the world.

However we end this instalment, there’s still this world that needs to roll on. And whether Shakespeare is good, bad, or doesn’t exist, all of those things could make for an interesting scenario of what’s next.  So we’re really excited to keep playing with these characters.

KD: That does sound exciting! Moving on to end the interview with a bit of a different question…

Anthony: Is the question about existentialism?

Is it, ‘does this interview really exist?’

KD: I think we already know the answer to that.

This question can be fielded by any one of you:

If you could work on any existing property in comics, what would it be and why?

Andy: I’ll answer that, and honestly I have tonnes that I’d like to work on. Obviously I’d like to do Batman,  and I’d like to do Ghost Rider, Thor… Stuff to satisfy the kid in me that grew up reading those comics.

If I had to pick one, I would love to write and draw a Ghost Rider story.

For more from the creative team behind Kill Shakespeare, check out their website/media hub at www.killshakespeare.com

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Is it a book? Is it a collective? Is it a movement?

I had questions, and Gerald had answers.

This interview is especially significant for two reasons, the first being that The Fabler has collaborated with Mr. Garcia to release a print-on-demand book for the Artist Block Party.  The book is titled ‘Illustrated Classics’, and it marks The Fabler’s first official foray into the wonderful world of print-on-demand.

As you might have expertly gleaned from the title, Artist Block Party Vol. 1: Illustrated Classics is a collection of illustrated reinterpretations of classic  stories. Within the pages of Illustrated classics, you’ll find Canadian artists’ depictions of everything from Baba Yaga and Frankenstein to The Odyssey and Swan Lake.

The second item of significance is that the proceeds from this book go towards the Alberta Literacy Fund and the Eugene Ouchi Scholarship Fund (for students attending the Alberta College of Art and Design).

What we have here is collection of beautifully drawn illustrations by passionate Canadian artists in support of education and literacy. How could I not talk to Gerald about such a wicked cool idea for a project?

That interview is below:

KD: How did the Artist Block Party originally come about?

GGG: There has been a small community of artists between Calgary and Edmonton that have been in contact with each other for a number of years, and I’ve always wanted to see us all come together for a group project. So I thought I’d throw this out there and see who would respond, and it worked out really well. Thirty people answered the call, and twenty people made the deadline in time to make it into the book.

KD: What can you tell me about the significance behind the name, Artist Block Party?

GGG: It brings connotations of being a collective – and incidentally, communism, but hey.  It’s all about being part of an equal group, and working things out as a group.

KD: You mentioned a ‘community of artists’ based in Alberta. How did you connect with these artists – how did you all come together?

GGG: We’ve had forums set up, Maple Ink in Calgary and Canadian Geek in Edmonton, and we’ve been in contact through those for quite a long while. It started with the 24 Hour Comic Challenge when we set up a list of contacts to get more people involved, then after that it took off from there as people started doing collaborative projects together, and scheduling meets which led to the local drink and draws.

KD: Vol. 1 of Artist Block Party is also a fundraising effort for the Eugene Ouchi Scholarship  Fund and the Alberta Literacy Fund. What can you tell me about the decision to donate proceeds from the book to these endeavors?

GGG: Eugene Ouchi was one of my instructors at Alberta College of Art and Design, who passed away just last year.  I’ve always been impressed with the sheer number of students that have benefited from his tutelage, and te scholarship is a way to honor him. The idea is that it would go to a student that is both deserving and in need of extra financial assistance.

Regarding the Alberta Literacy Fund, I’ve just always been a strong proponent of the Calgary Public Library. I spent a great deal of my childhood at the library, and I think as a result my love of books is something that’s just always going to be there. I think that’s important for people to have.

KD: Why did you choose to make the first volume a collection of illustrations as opposed to a sequential anthology?

GGG: The sequential book will come. I figured with the one page format it would be easier to manage all of the artists on shorter notice, which is how this book came together.

KD: What story did you choose to reinterpret for your submission to Illustrated Classics, and what can you tell me about why you chose it?

GGG: I chose to do Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti.  I’ve always been a fan of the Pre-Raphaelites and I’ve always been interested in poetry, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe – all of that. It came together out of that.

KD: We touched on your plans for a sequential anthology in the future. Can you elaborate any more on where else you would like to see the Artist Block Party go from here?

GGG: I want it to continue to be an opportunity for artists that have never had anything printed to have something tangible to share with the world.  I would like to see the Artist Block Party do something annually, or even bi-annually. I think that would be great.

KD: What’s the personal incentive for you in bringing together the creative community for projects like the Artist Block Party?

GGG: I felt like in my own experiences as an artist, there really weren’t many avenues available for me to choose from to get my work out there. I guess I just want to make that first step easier for other artists in that same position, and to get more people out there in general.

KD: Is there anything else you’re currently working on as an artist outside of this project?

GGG: Outside of this, I like to draw for my kids. They ask me to draw things for them every day,  and I get quite a lot of joy from that.

Thanks to G. Gerald Garcia for taking the time to chat with me about the Artist Block Party!

You can visit his blog here, and you can find Artist Block Party Vol. 1: Illustrated Classics available for purchase here on The Fabler. (All proceeds go to the Alberta Literacy Fund and the Eugene Ouchi Scholarship Fund)

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

As Calgary Comic Expo spokesperson and co-organizer Steven Hodges points out, “The comic industry these days has made it so that you can pretty much live and work wherever you want to.”

He further goes on to say that, “It’s important to recognize those Canadian comic creators that choose to stay to work and live in Canada. From Fiona Staples, to Cary Nord, to Riley Rossmo, we have some fantastic talent that are making names for themselves in the industry and I’m very happy that they  are still in our own backyard.  When we found out that the Shuster’s were coming to the Calgary Expo we were very excited, because of that strong contingent of Canadian creator talent here in Western Canada.”

To bring you up to speed, The Joe Shuster Awards for Canadian Comic Book Creators just held their 7th annual awards ceremony here in Calgary at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.

The JSA’s recognize outstanding achievement in the field of Canadian Comic Books, with a distinct emphasis on the creators rather than the works. For instance, categories include “Outstanding Cartoonist” or “Outstanding Artist” rather than focusing on the individual works those artists and cartoonists released over the past year.

Kevin Boyd, current Director and one of the original co-founders of the Awards, says that the JSA’s are important because they show Canadian comic creators that the community they live and work in is aware of what they do.

“Jason Bradshaw, who is one of the nominees for this year’s Gene Day Award,” says Kevin, “he didn’t even realize he was nominated. Someone just picked up his book and said this is really good, I’m putting it in for evaluation. Emily Carroll, who won the award for webcomics, had no idea how she got nominated for an award. And I think this recognition really matters to those people. We can easily get lost in the larger shuffle of the North American scene, so I think it’s nice for these Canadian creators to know we appreciate all of the work they do.”

Boyd says that the Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association originally came together back when he was working on the Paradise Toronto Comic Con, an event helped found with Peter Dixon of Paradise Comics.

“While I was doing that,” he says, “James Waley, the former publisher of Orb Magazine, came forward and said, ‘I have an idea, why don’t we do an awards event for Canadian comic creators?’ So we sat down and thought about how this would work, and we decided to look at the people working in the industry rather than the comics themselves.  So that’s the original genesis of the awards, then Tyrone Biljan, who does our A/V, came in, and Mark Askwith from Space gave us some great advice. Then it just evolved over the years from there.”

This year’s awards marked the first year the ceremonies were held outside of Toronto. Ajay Fry and Teddy Wilson, hosts of the television show innerSpace, served as the presenters and this year’s winners included the likes of Fiona Staples, Koyama Press, Francis Manapul, and Tin Can Forest – among others.

Also at this year’s awards, famed Comic Creators Chester Brown and Calgary’s own Todd McFarlane were inducted into the Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame.

Though neither could be there for the ceremonies, fans in attendance were treated to an enthusiastic speech on behalf of Todd McFarlane by his Dad, Bob.

“That was amazing,” says Kevin Boyd. “I was at home last weekend just watching a movie and I got this phone call, ‘Kevin it’s Bob McFarlane, I’m coming out to Expo! The kid’s too busy – buying baseballs or something. I want to come out and I really want to see how it is these days. I remember coming out to the Expos in the old days when Todd used to be a fan.’ Then he came back after and said, ‘This is amazing. It’s so much better, and it’s so great to see an event like this just flourishing’.”

When asked about how he felt this year’s awards went overall, Kevin’s feeling were mixed:

” It’s funny, organizing and all of the work that you put into it, it’s almost disappointing when the thing happens and you’re like, ‘Oh I wish it happened like that, or we had done things that way.’ But the feedback I’ve been receiving is great, so we must have done something right. I have little things that I want to fix for next year but I think overall we have a structure that works well for the ceremonies.”

Among the little things Kevin would have changed?

“I would have had the presenters pause a little bit between the names of the nominees. It felt like we were really rushed through that. I would have also looked at getting someone else to do the Chester Brown presentation – I was really quite nervous. ”

He also says that this year’s awards being held outside of Toronto won’t be a one-time thing.

“I like the idea of them rotating,” says Boyd. “I don’t want us to be known as the Toronto Awards. We’re Canadian, we’re a national awards organization. The thing about Canada is how incredibly huge this country is.  We’re a hugely diverse country, and we’re all coming at comics from different perspectives. And I would like to bring the JSA’s to each of those regions and be exposed to each individual community and perspective. I’d love to see if there’s an event in Vancouver that would work well with the Shuster’s.  I think we’re looking at Montreal next year, at the Montreal Comic Con. I’d like to do one at Fan Expo, which is another show I work on, but in that case I would be hesitant because I have so much work to do with Fan Expo that I’d feel I wasn’t giving the Shuster’s due diligence.  Maybe Halifax too, if we could find a setting there.”

Just because the next Joe Shuster Awards are a full year away, don’t imagine that Kevin won’t have his hands full planning for next year’s already.

Says Boyd: ” I’m out there constantly looking for information on who’s doing what, when it’s coming out, what’s going on in the scene at this point, who’s books are being optioned for movies or television, what new publishers are launching…all sorts of things along those lines. Then on top of that you’re fact-checking credits, making sure you have everything right – oftentimes Marvel and DC will switch something after the fact, and they don’t list colorists so it can be pretty intensive trying to find who colored what. Basically Robert Haines and I work on it almost every day. He works on retailers and the Gene Day self-publishers while I work on the overall releases. Between that and spreading the word about the JSA’s, getting people on board, finding people for the nominating committees… it never seems to stop.

The roller coaster ended on Saturday for this year, and we’re already talking about how the ride’s gonna work for next year.”

I count myself among those already looking forward to the 2012 Joe Shuster Awards.

For more information on the JSA’s, as well as a complete list of this year’s nominees and winners, you can visit their official website at joeshusterawards.com.

Thanks to Kevin Boyd, Robert Haines and the rest of the JSA team for recognizing outstanding work in Canadian comics, year after year!

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

The Calgary Comic Expo, which has steadily been growing in both size and attendance since its birth in 2006, was this year extended from a  two day Saturday/Sunday event to a full three days. Friday being an ‘advance sneak preview’ day, before some of the larger media guests (read: William Shatner) arrived at the Con.

They additionally opened up the Expo to include the Stampede Corral itself, which is a significantly sized arena-style venue,  and to increase the overall size of the event grounds to something much larger than seen in previous years.

Somewhere in these new changes, a swarm of planning issues and miscellaneous ‘bumps’ have seemed to start popping up with routine frequency. For instance, I could have taken it as a sign of things to come when the very first panel I dropped by on Friday – a Q & A with Hellboy creator and ‘guest of honour’ Mike Mignola – seemed to fall flat several minutes in due to audio issues.

The issues? Paper-thin walls between panel rooms letting roaring applause and music flood in from the neighbouring panel, a conspicuous absence of microphones to aid Mike and the moderators in being heard, and repeat announcements on the loud speaker nearly every five minutes that there were still Photo Ops available for Shatner.

To Mignola’s credit, he powered through the panel as best he could and with an admirably resilient positive disposition.

Other issues have included: organizers routing attendees back and forth due to miscommunications about what panels should lineup where; frequent bottlenecking due to there only being one corridor linking the main hall to adjoining events’ rooms; late-starting panel guests and scheduled events; horrifically organized photo ops; etc, etc.

But then, these could all be seen as growing pains as Calgary adjusts to its largest pop culture expo taking on a life of its own. As it has grown in size, so too has its recognition spread as one of the larger North American Comic and Entertainment conventions.

I mean, for the first year ever, DC Comics has had its very own booth at the Calgary Expo. There was even a DC Nation panel featuring top writers and artists from the DC Universe talk about their plans for their respective post-reboot properties.

The DC Nation panel, for the record, didn’t reveal anything new. In fact, it seemed the panel guests (which included Jimmy Palmiotti, Gail Simone,  Francis Manapul, and Jeff Lemire) were constantly walking on eggshells for fear of ’spilling too much’. What I did take away from it is that Jeff Lemire’s new Frankenstein series is going to kick serious ass, Palmiotti’s vision of Jonah Hex in a crime-riddled turn of the century Gotham City is positively inspired, and Gail Simone’s Batgirl (Barbara Gordon once again!) has a funky new costume that in some way features new technologies more ‘relevant’ to current times.

Another sign of the Calgary Comic Expo growing in repute was the presence of The Joe Shuster Awards for Canadian Comic Book Creators, which were presented this evening for the very first time outside of Toronto.

The Joe Shuster Awards deserve some special mention in this post, and I’m going to give it to them.

I was a little disappointed in the turnout for this year’s awards, which I suspect was at least partially due to their being scheduled at the same time as the Costume Contest. The latter event has long been one of the biggest crowd-drawing events at the Expo. Comic fans missed an engaging, interesting event that not only celebrated the achievements of some of Canada’s top contemporary talents (more on that in a bit) but also inducted both Chester Brown and Todd McFarlane into their Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame.

In the case of Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, who is himself originally from Calgary, his father Bob was present to deliver an inspired acceptance speech of behalf of the legendary comic artist.

Regarding this year’s Shuster Award winners, I have to say there were a few (not unpleasant) surprises. While Fiona Staples picking up the award for Outstanding Cover Artist came as little shock (she has certainly earned it), it was interesting to see Tin Can Forest beat out such influential contenders as Darwyn Cooke, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Jeff Lemire to take home the award for Outstanding Cartoonist.

Tin Can Forest, which is Mark Colek and Pat Schewchuk, won for their graphic novel Baba Yaga and The Wolf. Baba Yaga and The Wolf marked their second book, and it was published by Koyama Press. I was glad to see them win the award for their truly outstanding effort – perhaps equally as glad as I was to see Koyama Press win the award for Outstanding Publisher.

Other award-winners this year included Julie Rocheleau for Outstanding Colourist; Scott Chantler’s Three Thieves Book 1: Tower of Treasure in the Comics for Kids category; Émilie Villeneuve for Outstanding Writer, and Francis Manapul for Outstanding Artist.

I was super-stoked to see Emily Carroll awarded for Outstanding Webcomics Creator – though she was up against some stiff competition in the category, (Kate Beaton, Karl Kerschl, Salgood Sam, etc) what she’s currently doing with her webcomics have impressed me like few others have.

Though Shuster Award Show hosts Ajay Fry & Teddy Wilson (of Inner Space fame) did an admirable job of keeping the ceremonies lively and engaging, it was also neat to see a variety of additional presenters participate. Former winner of the Harry Kremer Award for Outstanding Retailer Jay Bardyla (Happy Harbour Comic) was on hand to present this year’s award to Planete BD from Montreal, Quebec.

Shuster Awards Associate Director Robert Haines awarded the Gene Day Award for Self-Publisher’s to John Martz for Heaven All Day, while Kevin Boyd, the Executive Director for the Awards, gave a compelling insight to the life of Chester Brown.

It was also a treat for (comic legend in his own right) Ken Steacy to give an introspective into the life and times of Todd McFarlane.

Going into the third day of Calgary’s Comic Expo, I have high hopes for more quality events and panels with – hopefully – a lot less of the ‘hectic mess’ element prevalent over the first two days.

I’ll also be making my interview rounds – so, Fabler followers, you can look forward to some interesting individuals being profiled here in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, stay frosty. Or something.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Volume One of their comic book collection came out just over a year ago, and it was met with some of the highest praise I’ve seen for an anthology in a long while. In fact, it even earned them an Eisner nomination (The Eisner Awards, if you’re currently scratching your head in confusion, are kind of like the Oscars for comic books. Or as A.P. editor Nick Thornborrow says, “The Oscars are like the Eisners for movies.”)

The attention they received for their first book comes as no surprise – for a group that had never put together anything like an anthology before, they managed to turn out a remarkably high quality book. Everything from the book’s eloquently bound cover to the variety of stories therein stood out as a singularly impressive effort.

Riding on this praise for Volume 1, Thornborrow and co-editors Joy Ang and Sam Bradley set their sights on making a second Volume. While their first release was, at its core, a collaboration between a group of acquaintances and friends, Volume 2 would expand their circle of collaborators to include artists they follow and admire. Additionally, they made the decision to use Kickstarter (a crowdfunding site where independent projects can petition for financial support from the internet at large) to help raise money for the book.

Their original Kickstarter goal was $7,000. When they blew that target away with a week left to spare before their deadline, they ambitiously set their sights at the $14,000 mark. The final number Nick, Joy and Sam managed to raise from Kickstarter was $14,705.

Volume Two of The Anthology Project released on May 4th, 2011, feauring contributions from such artists as Emily Carroll, Sam Bosma, Jake Wyatt, and Aurélie Neyret.

I caught Nick and Joy between appearances on the Comic Con circuit for a quick chat about the two Volumes of The Anthology Project released to date. That interview is below:

KD: It’s been just over a year since you released the first Volume, and I just wanted to talk about that for a minute before we get into Volume 2.

How do you feel the reception to Volume 1 met or exceeded your expectations?

Nick: I’ll speak for myself here, and say that I don’t know if I had any expectations going into this because we had never made a book before.  It’s been kind of overwhelming, to be honest. It’s just been so positive, and then discovering this comic community at the same time has been an incredibly encouraging experience.

Joy: I think the same goes for me. We didn’t really know what to expect, but getting feedback from people who bought the book and then came up to tell us  they liked it at conventions was very encouraging. I think it helped us feel we were on the right path.

KD: Congratulations, by the way, on The Eisner Nomination. What are your thoughts on finding yourselves competing for one of the most widely-recognized awards in comic books?

Joy: I was pretty blown away. To be honest, I didn’t think we would even be considered. Then getting that email pretty much made my year.

KD: What sort of things did you learn from the experience of putting together the first book that helped with doing the second Volume?

Nick: I guess it was just being more flexible, rolling with the punches, that sort of thing. During the first one we found we were having to shift deadlines because, well, life happens and all of these artists have full time jobs on top of doing submissions for these books.  So having to work within that was a big learning curve for me, personally.

Joy: I took care of most of the design work and dealing with the printers, and this time that was definitely a lot easier. I knew what format to give them, we had all of the business stuff sorted out, we had an import number…whereas for the first book we really didn’t even know where to start at first.

KD: How did you come by all of the artists that contributed to this volume?

Nick: I think we sought of all them out, with the exception of a few referrals.  A lot of the new artists were people whose blogs we followed, but we were too shy to ask to do the first volume.

Joy: That’s actually another thing that made it easier to  do Volume 2. People already knew we could put out a book, so I felt that made them a bit more willing to join in.

KD: Tell me about your decision to use Kickstarter to raise funds for this project.

Nick: We turned to Kickstarter because we felt it was a great way to reach a wider audience. Kickstarter is great for that, especially if you land a spot on the front page and suddenly you have all of these eyes on your project.

You can establish an audience pretty quickly, rather than wait and hope they find your website. It’s a great service for creative types like us.

KD: This is another case where it seems like your expectations would have been blown away by the results. Doubling your original goal of $7000 is a pretty big achievement  -

What did the difference of $7000 to $14000 actually mean to you in terms of how it affected the production and distribution of the book?

Joy: We actually had half of the amount we needed for production already saved up, so it just meant it was less money out of pocket for us, which was a big help. Not having that extra boost would have made the first few months of distribution a lot more stressful for us. Also having more funds meant we could increase the volume of books, which was helpful because the higher the volume we ordered, the less the books cost us to produce.

KD: Was there ever a point where you considered finding a publisher to put out Volume 2, as opposed to doing the whole thing independently?

Nick: We did seek out publishers and we had a lot of warm responses, but we found for the most part a lot of publishers aren’t super excited about printing an anthology. This is basically because of copyrights and legalities involving paying the contributors. Also we wanted to have total control over the book, because we’re all micro-managers and that was something that was important to us.

KD: Did you run into any unexpected challenges with Kickstarter, or was the whole thing a pretty smooth process beginning to end?

Joy: It was actually really smooth.  I was kind of anticipating something going wrong, because it is mostly an American site, and you need an American address and bank account…so I was initially worried, but it all worked out pretty well without complication by the end.

KD: On the sort of scale you guys are operating on now, between the Expo’s, Kickstarter, managing submissions from a bunch of people you didn’t really know beforehand… at any point did this become like a full time job to any of you?

Joy: (laughs) Yeah, actually. I quit my full time job last year, and I was just freelancing. For the last four months of 2010 this became, basically, my new full time job.

KD: If you were forced to name a theme to the two Anthology Project volumes you’ve released, what would that theme be?

Nick: We wanted to create a platform for the artists that we love to tell stories. These guys are all fully capable of doing their own thing, but then when you say ‘let’s put a book together’, that gives them the incentive to make something new that we would have otherwise never seen.  I guess the theme is that The Anthology Project is a stage, it’s a platform for artists to tell the stories they want to tell that otherwise might not have been told.

KD: I asked you this the last time we talked, and of course I have to ask it again: What’s next for The Anthology Project, above and beyond this new volume?

Joy: We’re definitely looking into doing a Volume 3, though we are also planning for a bit of a breather. There should be one in the works at some point, let’s say.

To find out more about The Anthology Project, or to get your hands on Vol 1 or 2, you can head over to their official website.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

The webseries, titled Murdoch Mysteries: Curse of the Lost Pharaohs, struck me as an innovative blend of live action and a sort of animation that is very motion-comic-esque. Curse of the Lost Pharaohs is intended as a companion series to the actual Murdoch Mysteries television series’ fourth season, and expands on the adventures of Detective William Murdoch and his quirky companion, Constable Crabtree, as they solve cases for the Toronto Police Force.

A thirteen episode online-only series of animated/live action adventures is an interesting vessel for a show set in the 19th century.

Jay Bennett, one of the producers behind the webseries, told me that the decision to bring the animated portions of Curse of the Lost Pharaohs into the mix was a practical one.

“By using animation it allowed us to go anywhere and do anything,” says Bennett. “We could go to the Pyramids in Egypt, fly over Niagara Falls in a hot air balloon and stage a ship battle at sea. Normally you only see this scale in Hollywood 100 million dollar films, but with animation in our tool kit, we were able to achieve this scope on a very limited budget and I think the results are fantastic.”

I was curious what motivated the producers to head-hunt a well known comic artist for this project, so I asked Jay what it was about Manapul’s particular style of art that singled him out as a good candidate for the show.
“As the story itself was a “larger than life” interpretation of Murdoch Mysteries,” Bennett replied, “I felt a strong, heroic animation style that matched the actors interpretation of the characters would fit best and give us the smoothest blend between mediums. Over the last several months of working together, the images he creates continue to blow me away.”

It might be relevant to note that this isn’t Francis Manapul’s first gig as an artist working with a Canadian television show. You may have also seen him as the resident artist on Beast Legends, a show about a team of researchers and creative types who travel the globe following stories of fantastic creatures and mythical beasts.

I talked to Francis about his experience making the Murdoch Mysteries webseries, how he ended up working as a ‘comic artist for TV shows’, and how he manages to juggle his time between this sort of thing and his work for DC Comics.

That interview, for your viewing delight, may be found below:

KD: How did you get involved with Curse of the Lost Pharaohs?

FM: Jay Bennet just emailed me out of the blue. We’d been talking about doing some work together but my schedule never really matched up. It just so happens that when this came up I had some free time, so we had a meeting and that was pretty much it!

KD: What’s the extent of your involvement with this project?

FM: Initially I was coming on to direct the art and oversee the illustration and the animation. But I actually ended up illustrating and storyboarding the thing myself as well!

Me and Jay would have a meeting and go through the script and storyboard the scenes and how they would work out. We already had the audio and we knew exactly how much time we would have between each video. So we had to make sure we tailor made each scene to that timeframe.

KD: Were you a fan of the show beforehand?

FM: You know, I can’t say that I had seen the show beforehand. I had only just seen commercials and stuff for it before Jay contacted me – I wasn’t too aware of what it was about beyond that.

KD: So what did you have to do to acquaint yourself with the characters and such before you started storyboarding?

FM: Luckily they had already shot the video content for this online series, so I could sort of see how the setting was and how the actors were acting. Jay was kind enough to give me stacks of dvd’s of the show so I could get caught up and see what it’s about – just sort immerse myself in this world, and you know, it’s a pretty funny show. I remember seeing the original TV movie (that preceded the series), and it was a very different take. Very serious in tone. This one can still be serious, but it usually has a very tongue-in-cheek approach to its subject matter, which I found interesting.

KD: What were the biggest challenges for you in approaching the art for this project?

FM: The biggest challenge was that I’ve never done anything like this before, and they haven’t either. It was a completely new learning experience from both ends. We had to economize the amount of illustration we did, but at the same time make sure that we were properly prepared for the animators to be able to break in and do all sorts of movement with those still images. The only way to do that was to draw every single element on a different layer, which was something I was not accustomed to.

It was a much bigger undertaking than I had initially expected, and it was actually the first time that I did all of my illustrations completely digital. After the second or third episode, I realized that drawing this thing traditionally was not very conducive at all in terms of a proper timeframe. Working the different layers using a computer, and using Photoshop, was a lot more deadline-friendly and I think it was also better for the animators because you’re able to zoom in 200-400% on a digital illustration and have it look nice and crisp whereas if you do the same to something that was drawn on a fairly large piece of paper, you’re going to start seeing the grain of the paper.

KD: To compare this to your approach to comic art, what would the level of digital integration you would use be for a comic like The Flash?

FM: Well with The Flash, I would do traditional pencils and ink, and then I would do watercolour grey tones on my pages. Then once I scan it in, before I send it to my colourist, I actually digitally colorize my work. It sounds weird, it sounds like I’m coloring it but I’m not. I’m just changing those grey tones to sepia tones or to blue tones depending on the scene to create the proper mood, then the colourist knows what sort of colour scheme to jump from.

You know, if I wasn’t doing those watercolours on my artwork, I would seriously consider doing more of my illustrations digitally. It’s fun, it’s very different, and I think my inks have never looked so slick than on Murdoch Mysteries. Of course the other side of that coin is that traditional illustration has that personality to it that the ‘perfection’ of digital art can’t really achieve.

KD: Curse of the Lost Pharaohs comes not too long after Beast Legends, another TV show you were involved with as an artist. Was pursuing this sort of crossover between comic art and television intentional, or did things just sort of pan out that way?

FM: (laughs) Things just sort of panned out that way. It wasn’t anything I pursued, for lack of a better term I sort of fell ass backwards into both projects. To me as an artist it’s always fun to do different things and push myself to try stuff I’ve never tried before. With Beast Legends, I’ve never spray painted a wall in my entire life and yet there I was…spray painting a thirty or forty foot wall after just learning to use a spray can fifteen minutes before we started shooting. With Murdoch Mysteries, because of what was called for, I had to use digital means for the illustration.

And while a lot of these opportunities definitely push me artistically, I think that being a comic artist has a sort of specialized versatility to it because really you’re just using art to tell stories in a very specific way. Once you have that concept down pat, that you’re using art to say something rather than just paint a pretty picture, then you can adapt to different mediums.

KD: How do you find a balance in how you manage your time between stuff like the Murdoch Mysteries webseries and Beast Legends, and keeping up with your DC Comics obligations?

FM: Well luckily Beast Legends ended way before Murdoch Mysteries, and the thing was… I’m sure you’re well aware of what’s going on with the DC Universe right now (more about that here and here), and because of the shake-up there were some holes in my regular comic book schedule. I would work on my comic book pages in the studio during the day, then I would go home and work on the Murdoch stuff, or I’d do it over the weekend. It just came at a good time because I had that bit of a gap, and I was able to use Curse of the Lost Pharaohs to keep drawing.

But now with the new responsibilities I have with DC, I think I’ll be focusing just on that.

(What Manapul is referring to is his new job sharing both art AND writing duties with Brian Buccellato on The Flash, beginning with the relaunched issue #1 in September)

You can watch Murdoch Mysteries: Curse of the Lost Pharaohs here, and more from Francis Manapul, check out his website, deviantART, or follow him on Twitter.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

The Vancouver, BC local has only been doing comics “in earnest” (her words) since last May, but already she has been featured on The Comics Reporter, Robot 6, Scott McCloud’s Blog, Comics Alliance… I could legitimately keep going for some time, but instead I’ll finish by mentioning that Emily is also up for a Joe Shuster Award this year and she is currently collaborating with Eisner-nominated group The Anthology Project on their second volume.

Whoo…. That’s some condensed resume. And to think, the reason it took Emily so long to take the plunge into comics is because she “didn’t really think (she) was good enough to do them”.

“Then last May,” she says, “I decided I actually wanted to try doing it. I’m friends with a few people who do comics, and so I kind of gave it a shot as a sort of mini-project just to see if I could actually finish one. And the response I got from that encouraged me to make more. ”

Carroll, who studied classical animation at Sheridan College in Ontario, first gained widespread web-notoriety when her delightfully horrifying webcomic ‘His Face All Red‘ made the internet rounds around Halloween last year. If you haven’t read it yet, you should absolutely do so immediately.

Her knack for telling a creepy story speaks for itself. From her shrewd choices of imagery and language to the overall color tones and wispy, understated characters, Emily creates an atmosphere that successfully pulls the reader into her tacitly unsettling world.

“When I was a kid, I was always drawn to scary stories,” says Carroll. “I was particularly very influenced by the Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark books (written by Alvin Schwartz). The stories themselves weren’t necessarily that scary on their own, but the illustrations (done by Stephen Gammel) made them just terrifying. So those sorts of stories impacted me quite a bit, and my Dad also used to tell me these urban legends that probably weren’t entirely suitable for kids. The ones I liked the best were ‘the babysitter and the man upstairs’ stories; the ones that could happen to ordinary people, where it was something that ‘really did happen to a friend of a friend’.”

His Face All Red is a relatively short narrative that tells the story of a man whose envy drives him to do an unspeakable thing… and the sinister repercussions that he faces as a result.

Emily says that the idea for the story came from a late-night radio show in the States called Coast to Coast AM, which largely deals with UFO reports, paranormal events, and other generally strange occurrences.

“A few years ago,” she says, “there was this infamous story that was told on Coast to Coast AM that later grew into its own huge mythology. It was about a guy named Mel who called in to talk about a hole that he found on his property which he claimed was bottomless. He threw things down there, and he never heard them hit anything. He uncoiled rope down, but it never seemed to be far enough…

That concept of this bottomless hole stuck with me because I thought that was a very simple, scary concept, where the only way to know what was at the bottom would be to go down yourself. But then once you go down, how do you get back out? So that was a big inspiration, and I was also writing this story about brothers hunting a beast in the words that wasn’t really going anywhere. I put the two ideas together, and that was sort of the genesis behind the project.”

Among the other projects you will currently find scattered throughout Emily’s blog is an illustrated dream journal that she kept for the months of November and December of last year. Carroll, who has kept a written dream journal for years, decided to use four panel illustrations in an attempt to take a snapshot of some of the more predominant images and themes she found herself writing about.

“The dreams themselves are so complex and have so many details that I basically picked for each panel just a beat or an image that I remember reacting to the strongest. Dreams aren’t going to have a defined narrative, right? So I just picked out the elements I decided were the most significant.”

Emily has a collection of new dream journal comics that she has been working on over the past couple of months which she intends on posting soon. She also has a few words of advice to anyone aspiring to keep their own dream journal:

“Don’t edit yourself when you’re trying to recap what happens in your dreams. You can’t effectively convey all of the senses that occur to you in a dream, so don’t try to make sense of it when you write about it. Just write it all down, even though it doesn’t make any sense, so that you can come back to the individual elements and try and remember what impressions they may have had on you.”

‘Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter‘ is another comic you might find on Emily’s blog that has an interesting story behind it. Posted on Valentine’s Day this year, this short webcomic is somewhat unique from Carroll’s other work in that it doesn’t have a creepy or sinister undertone.

It tells the story of a shape-shifting goddess and the silver-haired mortal girl that catches her fancy, and has that special folklore-ish quality of feeling simultaneously foreign and familiar; a story that you already know before you read it, but still manages to keep you guessing.

“That was inspired by a project I had done a few years ago with my girlfriend, Kate Craig,” Emily explains. “We’d actually created two different civilizations just for fun, as kind of a world-building exercise. We each worked on our own civilization for about a month, without telling the other anything about them. At the end of the month we decided to work out what the first contact between our two worlds would be like. Out of that I started working on the mythology of that world I had created, which was based largely on Viking mythology. I decided to try and do a ’sweeter’ sort of comic than what I had done to date, so I wrote a romantic myth from that world and posted it to coincide with Valentine’s Day. It has a lot to do with ‘threes’, all throughout it.”

Although Anu-Anulan is thematically quite different from her other comics, her unique, eye-catching approach to illustration is consistent across the board. When I asked Emily about her artistic method, she had this to say:
“It’s really uncomplicated,” she says, laughing. “Generally a lot of my stuff is done on the computer. I use a tablet to sketch it into Photoshop, where I also ink, color it, and put in flats. One of the things I do to make it look a bit more natural is I have inkwashes that I have done on illustration board and then I scan them in and apply them to Photoshop as a layer of flats so that it gives them a texture. For the comics, I draw in pencil and ink on bristol with a nib pen so that it kind of has that jagged quality to it and bleeds a bit. Otherwise they’re colored the same as everything else on the computer.”

Carroll says that the large positive response she has received for her comics was a bit overwhelming, at first.

“I definitely wasn’t prepared for all the attention that things have received,” she says. “It’s fantastic, and that Shuster nomination is incredible. It’s been a little surreal because I’ve been drawing cartoons and things for ages, but I’ve only just recently started getting into comics. When I did Hare’s Bride or His Face All Red, it was like, ‘my friends will like this, I’ll put it online’ – then to get such a big response for them was really amazing.”

One of the places I randomly saw Emily Carroll’s name pop up was on none other than the videogame developer Rockstar’s official blog. This is perhaps unsurprising, given her admitted love for videogames and the Flickr site she has filled with illustrations as testament to that affection.

I challenged her to name some of her favourite videogame releases from the past year or two:

“Probably my favorite game last year was Red Dead Redemption. I’ve always been a fan of Westerns, and to have a game that was not only a Western but a really good Western was amazing. Even the DLC that they put out for it at Halloween was so awesome. Dragon Age, that series I love. I’m also a huge fan of the Uncharted series, I really loved Fallout: New Vegas… and still love, because I haven’t beat it yet. You can just wander for hours on end in that game – I had to stop myself from playing it too much.”

As we all wait anxiously to see what Emily Carroll will turn her sights towards next, she does have a couple of hints as to future projects.

“I’m working on a collection of minicomics for TCAF,” she says, “which will hopefully also be a webcomic I hope to put up in early June.”

She also has a comic in the works for The Anthology Project Vol. 2:

“It’s another fairy-tale sort of comic. It’s an original story playing on some familiar fairy tale themes, and it’s a bit more light-hearted and funnier, I guess, sort of, than some of my other comics (Spoiler: no one goes missing or dies). Also, it has no dialogue in it, which was kind of fun. The characters speak, but they speak in pictures.”

For more from Emily Carroll, you can visit her blog, her yet-to-be-constructed website, her Livejournal, or her Flickr page. You can also follow her on Twitter!

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming