The Fabler

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Communist robots, Lunar terrorists and a modern Cenozoic age. These are just a handful of the thoughts swirling around in West Coast comic creator Simon Roy’s brain.

Still fairly new to the business of comic-making, Roy emerged on the national scene this past summer with the release of Jan’s Atomic Heart. The title, which Roy wrote and illustrated, was distributed by Vancouver’s New Reliable Press (for more from New Reliable, check out the Fabler’s Jason Turner interview!).

While the title might sound like the name of an eighties synth post-punk band, Jan’s Atomic Heart is actually a sci-fi thriller set in Germany in the distant future.

“It’s about a guy who gets caught up in a terrorist plot in the future,” says Roy, “I’ve had a variety of ways to sum it up, but that’s the most concise, I think.”

The individual Simon is referring to is the titular Jan, who is temporarily inhabiting a robot frame while his real body heals from a particularly nasty automobile accident.

The book follows Jan as he attempts to discover the mysterious significance his robot body has to a serious of terrorist attacks perpetuated on the UN by Lunar separatists.

So all of the elements of an insanely action-packed science fiction adventure are there, right? Cue explosions and exaggerated robot laser battles?

Roy could easily have taken this route with the title, but where Jan’s Atomic Heart shines is actually in its understated, realistic dialogue and soft-lined, poignantly simple artwork. The sincere, straightforward language exchanged by the characters of Jan’s Atomic Heart give it a depth not always present in sci-fi genre work.

Clearly something about the title has resonated with more than a few other comic fans – Jan’s Atomic Heart has been featured favourably on Comic Book Resources, Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader?, and a miscellany of other comic book blogs (such as this one, this one, and this one).

Not bad for a newcomer to comics. Roy credits the positive attitude of peers in the industry as being hugely encouraging in getting the comic out there.

“Everybody’s nice, everybody’s helpful, and everybody’s got something good to say,” says Roy, “It’s been really cool. I’m really impressed just by how friendly everybody is.

Roy, who is originally from Victoria, BC., had little to no experience with Canadian comic communities to speak of prior to his involvement with New Reliable Press. This is a fact he attributes in part to a lack of cohesive comic scene in Victoria (something Gareth Gaudin of Legends Comics has mentioned before on the Fabler Blog)

“I’ve always bought comics and read comics,” he says, “but you know I was never really motivated to even go as far as Vancouver (before doing Jan’s Atomic Heart). It’s been neat meeting all the different cartoonists across the country, and I’m starting to feel a little bit more like part of the community, which is nice.”

For Roy, making the leap from illustrating his ideas into fifty-six pages of comic goodness to actually publishing and distributing his work was a relatively painless process.

“I basically just sent it to Ed (Brisson, owner/operator of New Reliable Press), and he was impressed enough with it to take a risk and publish it. So that part of the publishing process  wasn’t too hard but from there on in it got a little more interesting – just designing all of the covers and the inside covers and, you know, going through different cover designs and trying to fit it more toward what would be appealing to have in the Diamond preview catalogue.”

If you thought the premise for Jan’s Atomic Heart was singularly unique, wait till you hear what Roy’s up to next.

Presently he’s working alongside Turkish artist Nemo Ramjet on a serious of collaborative illustrations based around the  idea of an alternate modern age.

“I’m doing watercolour illustrations,” says Roy, “and an artist that I met over the internet who lives in Istanbul (Ramjet) is doing cave painting versions of those. The art that we’re doing is kind of like, cave painting scenes from an alternate modern age where the dinosaurs didn’t die out and in fact grew to be intelligent.”

Roy explains that in 1982, a palaeontologist named Dale Russell made his own depiction of a ‘dinosauroid’, which is a hypothetical, uber-evolved form of dinosaur. Russel  used the Troodon, an actual dinosaur that lived 75 million years ago in Canada, as a base for the model due to its above average brain size.

“He made this hypothetical intelligent dinosaur look kinda like a scaly green dude,” says Roy, “and basically I met this Turkish artist because he had done a redesign of that. Instead of shaping it like a humanoid, he shaped it more like a dinosaur. I was very inspired by that, and started doodling in my spare time. As the doodling picked up steam, I sent some illustrations to him, and then we started collaborating.”

Roy says that the collaborative illustrations have been coming along at a steady pace, though as of yet they’re undecided on what they’d like to do with the finished products.

“Maybe a book, or something like that,” he speculates.

Somehow, Roy is managing to balance the above project with finishing his second year of the Design Program at Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, and he’s still actually finding the time to work on something else – a seven page story that he intends to submit to Heavy Metal upon its completion. He has a preview of the latter project on his Flickr account here.

When asked if he has any ‘dream franchises’ he’d like to work on in the future, he gives an unexpected response:

“This is going to sound strange, since I don’t really like drawing superhero style content, but the thing I’d like to draw the most would have to be a Dr. Doom story.  I think there’s a lot of cool places that could be gone with Dr. Doom that haven’t even been touched yet. Lots of fun post-soviet stuff with communist robots. It could really be a lot of fun.”

Click here for an in-depth, 22 page preview of Jan’s Atomic Heart. For more from Simon Roy, you can check out his blog and deviantArt.