The Fabler

This week, I had the pleasure of chatting with one Evan Munday – comic creator, illustrator, book publicist, and all-around fan of post-apocalypses.

The Ontario-based Munday is a long-time comicker, with his interest in the medium dating back to the comic strips he used to create for his school paper at the University of Waterloo. That segued into a few early self-published comics, but it wasn’t until last year that he published his first full graphic novel.

Quarter-Life Crisis: Only The Good Die Yung was released in April of last year, with a premise that’s both genuinely unique and distinctly Canadian.

According to Evan:

“QLC is a book about a post-apocalyptic Toronto in which only the twenty-five year olds have survived.  The first book follows two brothers who live in the box above OCAD and try to survive on their own. ”

In Munday’s post-catastrophic vision of a not-so-distant future, the 25 year olds have divided into territorial gangs. Only The Good Die Yung follows the adventures of the two brothers as they struggle to fend for themselves without  themselves getting mixed up in the gangs that rule the streets.

Evan describes it as Mad Max meets Scott Pilgrim, though I definitely picked up just a hint of a Warriors vibe there as well. Mostly the ‘neighbourhood-based street gangs at the root of a new social hierarchy’ bit.

“Probably my most direct inspiration came from reading Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books,” he says, “I loved the way he was able to make Toronto such an exciting setting. I also really liked how he was able to blend a love story that’s sort of heartbreaking, really, with this hilarious, videogame fantasy world.”

Munday’s story is definitely a mixed-bag adventure that avoids dwelling too heavily on the more depressing tonal elements common to post-apocalypse stories.

In his own words, Evan describes it as, “one of the more fun post-apocalypses out there.”

Nobody said global catastrophes of epic proportion couldn’t be a swingin’ time.

Quarter-Life Crisis was entirely self-published and distributed.

The publishing, Evan says, was the easy part. As a publicist employed at Coach House Books, he paid to make use of the onsite printing presses.

“In terms of distribution,” he goes on to say, “That’s been the difficult part. It’s mainly doing shows, selling it through the website, and a lot of just going from store to store and soliciting the book in person. Which is why it’s currently much harder to find outside of Toronto.”

Despite its relatively limited availability, QLC still managed to impress a few of the right people – garnering itself a nomination for this year’s 2010 Gene Day Award for Self-Publishing.

In addition, Evan says that he was pleasantly surprised at this past weekend’s Toronto ComiCON Fan Appreciation Event to find his book had built its own fan base.

“There were a lot of people asking me about book two, so it was nice to know that there are people actually interested in seeing a second one.”

Fans of Only The Good Die Yung will be pleased to hear that Munday is already well along with the second title in what he intends to be a limited series of Quarter-Life Crisis graphic novels.

“The plan is to make it a four book run,” says Munday, “with each roughly the same size as the first (which was 124 pages). The idea is for there to be four books to tell the story in quarters, keeping up with the quarter theme. ”

As for details about book two in the series, Evan confides that he’s a little nervous about how fans will receive it on account of a decision that he made to switch up perspectives between the two volumes.

“The second book focuses on the Rogers, this paramilitary group from the first book that have taken a bunch of police riot gear and set up base at the Sky Dome. They’re kind of these big baddy authoritarian types in the first book, and in this one the narrative shifts to one of the Rogers characters that was really only a minor character before.

So the focus is now on her as a main character, and the main characters from the first book are still there, but now they’ve become supporting characters in this story.”

Outside of Quarter-Life Crisis, Evan currently has a few other projects in the works. One that I feel I absolutely have to mention – for obvious reasons – is ‘Super-Villain Erotica’.

“A friend of mine,” says Evan, “a poet named Natalie Zina Walschots, had written a manuscript collecting love odes to all these different super-villains. Doctor Doom, Green Goblin, the Joker – all these famous comic book villains. She’s currently looking for a publisher, and I agreed to do up ten initial drawings and do more if it gets picked up.”

Munday mentions that he’s worried legal issues may prevent his drawings from ever being published, but on the bright side, having them out at conventions has been a successful way of bringing traffic to his table.

“It’s a really interesting turn, too,” he adds, “I mean when you go to cons there are all these pin-up drawings of female super-villains everywhere, and you just don’t see the male super-villain erotica. Stuff like Magneto in the shower, or Joker holding a really strategically positioned Jack-in-the-Box. ”

So who is the sexiest male super-villain?

Evan argues Lex Luthor would have to take the mantle, adding, “Though Doctor Octopus was the most fun to draw. But he’s not what I’d call sexy. ”

Post-apocalyptic street gangs and Magneto’s naughty bits aside, Evan Munday has a couple of other big projects slated for release in 2011.

“The first is a young adult novel for ECW press called The Dead Kid Detective Agency,” he says, “It’s written work with no illustration, and it’s about a girl and her five dead friends who combine their skills to solve mysteries around her town.  The hook is that each of the dead kids is from a different era in Canadian history – so it’s edutainment as well.”

The second project is a graphic novel that Munday will be illustrating for author Elyse Friedman titled The Laws of Motion, which is due out sometime in Fall of 2011.

For more from Evan Munday, you can visit his website, www.IdontlikeMundays.com.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming