The Fabler

I reach Kelly Tindall for an interview as he is in his studio, busily inking his way through the panels of a new project with Alex Grecian (writer and co-creator of Proof).

Tindall is no stranger to collaboration with Grecian. Though Proof predominantly features Riley Rossmo as the series artist, Tindall has himself done colours for the title, illustrated a Proof feature story, and he writes and draws his own regular backup stories (which can be found towards the end of each comic).

He answers his phone and asks me to hold while he turns off his background music – Judas Priest, because he says listening to heavy metal while he illustrates helps keep his mind from wandering. Something about the pacifying voice of Rob Halford.

Kelly has been illustrating since he was a just a kid living in a small town in Northern Saskatchewan. As he describes it, he had a knack for drawing early on, and “as soon as you have a discernible talent in a small town, everybody’s like, oh go be rich and famous so we can all say we knew you.”

He did, of course, pursue that talent – moving from Saskatchewan to Calgary to attend the Alberta College of Art and Design.

As I talk to Kelly now, he is living in Montreal, where he moved with his wife two years ago.

He answers my questions with an almost giddy enthusiasm, clearly an individual who is both an astute conversationalist and very eager to talk about something he is passionate about.

We talk about He-Man and TaleSpin, Snow Leopards and pint-size werewolves. And through it all, I find myself thinking, “you know, this guy can really talk.” And I mean that in a good way.

But see for yourself, the interview is below:

KD: What are the earliest things you can remember getting really into drawing?

KT: She-Ra villains. (laughs) When I was a kid we had what we called ‘farmer vision’, which was like three channels we could get on our television. My parents used to rent a lot of VHS, and they used to bring home a lot of He-Man and She-Ra.

She-Ra had the best villains. I didn’t have any of the toys, ’cause they were girl toys and no boy wants to play with girl toys, so instead I drew the villains and cut them out and played with them that way.

KD: Hordak was a way cooler looking villain than Skeletor.

KT: Yeah, he was just messed up. He had like a bat skull, and he was part vampire or something… But there was a bunch of them. There was like a scorpion girl, and there was a girl that had sunglasses and turned into a panther… It was rad, I love that stuff.

KD: After Art College, how did you go about pursuing a career in illustration?

KT: It was dumb luck, and just the right positioning more than anything. I don’t mind talking to people at all, so I just basically make it known that I’m an illustrator, I do the convention circuit, and I talk to a lot of people on the net. From there, the work just comes.

KD: Where did your involvement in comic art begin?

KT: I’ve always loved comics, ever since I was a little kid. Again, the small town thing; my parents’ friends ran kind of like a supermarket/convenience store, and when they used to return comics they’d rip the covers off and just send those back. So they’d end up with hundreds and hundreds of coverless comics in these big long boxes. They’d give me like four or five hundred a shot – old stuff like the origin of Galactus reprints, Alf comics, Justice Society, that sort of thing.

So I was interested in that from an early age, and I just started drawing from there. My parents also bought me a bunch of posters of different Batman stuff, and through that I got to know the difference between the Jim Aparo Batman, the Norm Breyfogle Batman, and the Neal Adams Batman… So that’s kind of where I discovered style too, actually.

KD: Moving into Archie Snow, the main recurring character you feature in your backup stories for Proof.

This was a character you originally created for a series of minicomics a few years back. Where did the idea for the character originally come from?

KT: My friend Mike had come up with a few characters that he just liked to draw for no reason, and I was at a point where I felt like I’d like to start writing some stuff myself. So I said, well, why don’t you let me write this character for you. He said okay, and I came up for this origin story and everything for the character – and he hated it, he absolutely hated it.

I was like, ‘this is pretty good though… do you mind if I do something with this?’ His response was, ‘yeah, whatever’.

So I took different interests I had, like anthropomorphic animals, weird mythology, sword-fighting, gun fighting – and I just mixed it all together, and Archie came out of it.

KD: How has Archie changed from what you originally conceived him as to what he appears as in Proof?

KT: In the beginning, I spent some time trying to figure out the animal that Archie was going to have the head of. I was originally going to give him the head of a Himalayan Bear, but I also wanted a big part of Archie’s origin to relate to flight – because he was originally a commercial pilot before he became an adventurer. Problem was, it was too much like TaleSpin. Kind of a Baloo the Bear as a pilot thing. So I was like okay, I gotta move away from this idea, and that’s how the Snow Leopard thing came about.

Snow Leopards are very noble, they’re predatory, mysterious, and on their own ninety percent of the time… and that just fit with Archie’s character.

KD: Do you have any overarching ideas for where you’d like to take Archie in the future?

KT: The thing about Archie is that he’s not really like a Hellboy or a Proof or anything like that because he hasn’t always been this weird creature.  He’s relatively new to the world of magical things. So he’s got this sky-high BS detector, and has no patience for any of it but it’s just become his lot in life.

I want to get into what kind of person he was before that, and how who he was affected his current attitudes.

KD: Outside of the Archie Snow stories, you’ve done some coloring for Proof, a few other backup stories for the title, and some work on a main Proof feature. How far back does your acquaintanceship with Riley Rossmo and Alex Grecian go?

KT: Well I met them both in jail… (laughs) But seriously. I went to ACAD and Riley was in the class a year behind me in the visual communication program. So that’s where I first met him, and I got to know him from there. Around the time that Proof was starting up, I had finished my first Archie Snow minicomics, and Riley took a look at them and said, ‘well you should work on Proof with us’.

This was months before Proof was picked up, before Image had even indicated an interest in the book.

KD: What can you tell me about Squeak, the graphic novel you’re currently working on with Alex Grecian?

KT: It’s a pretty simple premise: it’s the story of a mouse, a completely average Beatrix Potter kind of mouse, that gets bitten by a werewolf. So whenever it gets dark and the moon comes out, he turns into a two inch long werewolf.

We’re publishing through AiT/Planet Lar, and it’ll be out sometime this year. We’re getting pretty close to being finished, and I’m actually inking part of the last third of the book today. We’re hoping to get it into shops as soon as we can – within a few months would be great.

I really like working on it too, I mean it’s really expressive, there’s lots of energy, and lots of action. There’s almost no dialogue as the characters are all fairly realistic animals – snakes and owls, that sort of thing.

KD: To end the interview on a bit of a different note, if you weren’t illustrating or involved with comics at all, what other career could you see yourself doing?

KT: I actually helped run a theatre before – like an actual ‘theatre’ theatre, where people put on plays – when my wife and I were living together in Saskatoon. One of my first loves was the stage, and I did a fair share of acting when I was living in Saskatoon and when I was living in Calgary. I could see myself going back to doing something like that.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming