The Fabler

In 2005, an engineering school student named Angela Melick decided to put a collection of funny little comics she had sketched on looseleaf up onto the internet.

Melick had been drawing comics in one form or another for almost as long as she could remember,  and she felt that pursuing an education in engineering shouldn’t be a reason to suppress her interest in that form of art.

It was lucky for us that Angela made the decision to find an outlet on the internet – that simple website collecting her quirky, autobiographical sketches on looseleaf became Wasted Talent, a hugely popular and extremely funny weekly webcomic that’s still updating, 5 years later.

The Vancouver-based Melick has been busier than usual lately, between planning (and starring!) in a wedding, and working on her first solo book.

All the same, she managed to fit in a quick interview with The Fabler for your perusing pleasure – the results of which you may gleefully behold below:

KD: Back in 2005 when you put your first Wasted Talent sketches online, at that time what was the extent of your knowledge about webcomics?

AM: There were a few webcomics that I read, but I didn’t know anyone that was actually doing them.  I knew quite a few cartoonists, but I had never met another webcomicker.

I didn’t really have a good feel for the industry, so my knowledge was very minimal. It was a learn by doing sort of thing.

KD: If you could go back and give your 2005 self advice about the webcomic, what – if anything – would you say?

AM: I would say that someday people are actually going to read it! I think that would have made a difference to me to know.

I might not have been able to put any more time or energy than I did into the comic, (’cause I had almost zero energy to spare on it back then) but I think there would have been a few things I’d have done differently if I had known it would go somewhere.

KD: In the five years you’ve been doing Wasted Talent, what aspects of your experience making it have been the most rewarding for you?

AM: Definitely knowing that people all around the world read it, and that it brings a bit of extra happiness into their lives. I think it’s the only thing I could have done that had the potential to make that kind of impact on other people.

KD: On the flipside to that coin, what aspects of your experience doing Wasted Talent have been the most stressful?

AM: I tried really hard not to make it stressful. It could very easily have fallen into the ‘work’ category of my brain, and because I’ve done a lot to mitigate that it hasn’t been very stressful.

That being said, trying to get out to conventions and missing out on opportunities that I would have had if this was a full time thing has been fairly stressful. I wish I could just jump into everything headlong, but you know, you make trade-offs.

KD: Has it been any easier (or harder) to find time to do the comic and convention thing than back when you started?

AM: It’s gotten easier, probably, because the more you do it the faster you get, and you just learn how to fit it into your schedule. Also the more successful you are at it, the better you get at working the logistics behind it.

So the more I go to conventions, the easier it is to get to conventions – because I have a better idea about what I need to do in advance in order to get there. One of the big learning curves for me was learning that certain things you need for conventions, such as table space and tickets, often sell out up to six months in advance. So you sometimes have to start preparing for a convention literally six months ahead of time. Now that I’ve learned all of that, it’s a lot easier.

KD: What’s your creative process like for coming up with a Wasted Talent strip?

AM: Well, I go out and live my life, right? (laughs)  Then anything something happens that’s remotely joke-like or that I think I might be able to make a comic out of, I put it in my little book.

I have a little book that I carry around with me all of the time, and I just write a little note about what happened. Like, this is the situation, and this could be the punchline. Anything that’s just enough to remind me what it was without being too detailed, ’cause then I might forget what was funny about it in the first place.

When it’s time to draw a comic, I go over my notes and pick the ones that seem funniest to me. I sketch them out, and if it looks good I go forward, and if it doesn’t I try an idea.

KD: As I understand it, you’re planning on releasing your first solo book soon. Can you tell me a little about that?

AM: I would love to! It’s at the printer, and it’s completely finished. What I did was I took the best comics from the University days back at the very beginning of Wasted Talent, and I redrew them.  I redrew about eighty comics, and I put that altogether with a bunch of bonus material – pictures from back then, stories, sketches, and a history of the campus that affects the comics a little bit.

I’ll have preview comics together for Anime Evolution in mid-August, and I expect it to be available for sale online September-ish.

KD: With those eighty comics you redrew, did you alter the dialogue at all, or leave that much intact?

AM: I did for some, because I think I’m a much better writer now than I was then. So there are ways that I was able to improve the dialogue, I took out some sections to streamline it a little better, and made things generally clearer. I left the spirit of the jokes intact.

KD: Is there anything else you’re currently working on outside of Wasted Talent, comic-wise?

AM: I’ve done something for every anthology put out by local comic collective Cloudscape Comics, and I’d like to keep doing that. I love writing short stories.

I’m working pretty hard on a book called Lost Omens, which is a fantasy/sci-fi sort of story that I’ve been working on for a really, really long time. I hadn’t found the time to get it going before – I put about two pages up and then I got engaged. I had to redirect all of my energy into the wedding. Now that the wedding and Book 1 of Wasted Talent are done, I’m hoping rechannel my energy into Lost Omens.

KD: Name a webcomic that you find hilarious.

AM: I really enjoy Questionable Content. That should probably be obvious, but I really enjoy the characters and a lot of people identify with them – I have an inner Hannelore myself.

KD: Name a webcomic that you find inspiring.

AM: I’m really inspired by Der-shin Helmer’s ‘The Meek‘; he draws comics that I wish I could draw. I’m also inspired by Rice Boy, I just love Evan Dahm’s world building.

I also admire Dresden Codak for the art, and Anders Loves Maria for the writing and style.

I’m much more readily inspired than I am driven to laughter, I guess.

For more from Angela Melick, you can visit the Wasted Talent website or follow her on Twitter.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming