The Fabler

The Fabler Blog is about comics. After two or three clicks around the site, you’ll come to the conclusion that this is a fairly obvious fact.

As such, the interviews and profiles we feature are generally about comic authors and artists. It didn’t require a hyper intellectual think-tank to  come up with this formula, but we’ve stuck to it all the same (as it seems to make sense).

Too much of the usual, however, can easily become boring.

Which is why this week we are featuring someone who, in fact, does not have any published work directly in comics.

Aaron Leighton is a professional illustrator who specializes in the unusual.

(Okay, so illustration and comics aren’t technically THAT far removed from each other – but really, did you expect I was going to profile a urologist?)

Leighton has been turning his fantastic imaginings of the weird and the wonderful into dollars for over a decade now, since graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1995.

He describes himself as bi-provincial, owing to the fact that his hometown, Lloydminster, is technically in both Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Being the wild provincial swinger that he is, he left the Prairies in 1998 bound for Toronto, and he’s been there ever since.

Leighton’s art is a dynamic mixture of cartoon (non)sensibility and tribal artwork, balancing bizarre doodles against simple symbolism.

“If I had to pick a shortlist of influences,” says Leighton, “I’d say that Picasso and the German expressionists taught me about the possibilities of the abstracted figure, cartoons taught me the power of drawings coupled with humour, and the artwork of indigenous cultures, specifically those of Northern Canada and Africa, taught me not only about the power of simplicity but also how mythology can imbue imagery with meaning.”

According to Aaron, his unique style developed steadily over time – it wasn’t at all something he ‘hit the ground running’ with immediately after Art school:

“The evolution of my illustrative style has been a combination of my natural inclination to fill up a page with doodles and a slow, painful struggle of figuring out how to translate this spontaneous tendency – coupled with the things that influence me – into a visual language usable for problem solving.”

His art has appeared in Maclean’s, PC Magazine, The New York Times, and The Globe and Mail, amongst a wealth of other publications.

With such a variety of clients commissioning Aaron for projects varying from promotional to informative to just plain fun, his creative process can get a little messy:

“I usually start by putting my head in my hands and thinking “How the hell am I going to solve this one?” That blank sheet can be terrifying. But despite the fact that I often find conceptualizing difficult, it always works out. Sometimes it helps to leave the studio and give your eyes new stuff to look at, thereby cutting through the feedback loop of the mind to allow it to come up with ideas instead.”

Leighton has also been involved with ‘interactive broadcast animation project’ The Zimmer Twins as creative lead since 2005.

The Zimmer Twins has a pretty interesting concept behind it; kids can visit the official website and, using a series of various pre-cut background and character animation options, build their own endings to a professionally produced story starter.

The best of those short animation endings would then be aired on Canadian broadcast television network Teletoon.

“Working as the creative director of the Zimmer Twins with zinc Roe (the design company behind the project) was rewarding not only because of the originality of the idea but also in that I was able to collaborate with some talented animators to bring my drawings to life. Also it has indeed been very interesting to see the characters being repurposed to fit the technology as it evolves, from the original animated shorts we did to the more recent apps.”

Despite the preamble I made at the beginning of the post, there is at least one other correlation between Aaron Leighton and the world of comic books: stumble into the right comic shop, and you might actually find a book co-illustrated by Aaron for sale by the name of Equally Superior.

Equally Superior was a collaborative project done by Aaron and a couple of his friends under the banner of Trio Magnus.

“Trio Magnus is the name of an artist collective I am part of, along with my friends Clayton Hanmer and Steve Wilson, both of whom also happen to be extraordinary illustrative talents. We had been sketching and doing group art shows together for years here in Toronto, and somewhere along the line we just decided to try joining forces with a bit more focus in order to create interesting (to us, at least) collaborative work fuelled mainly by beer and Led Zeppelin.”

Equally Superior came about in 2007 when Anne Koyama of Koyama Press asked Trio Magnus if they were interested in publishing a book of some sort.

“We gratefully replied that we were,” says Leighton, “and proceeded to create the book with content from our sketchbooks plus some new collaborative pieces. While not in any way narrative, the book ended up being rude, colourful, funny and extremely bizarre – a perfectly appropriate Trio Magnus creation. We launched it at Design Festa in Tokyo in 2007, and Anne has been tireless in her efforts to promote us since then, getting the book into bookstores and galleries not only in Canada and the US but in Spain and Holland as well.”

Going back a few paragraphs, if that comic shop you stumble into happens to be in the greater Toronto area, you might even bump into Aaron himself.

Aaron has a self-professed love for comics, specifically graphic novels and webcomics.

Among his favorites?

“‘Blankets’ by Craig Thompson, ‘Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth’ by Chris Ware, ‘Lous Riel’ by Chester Brown, ‘Skim’ by Jillian Tamaki, and the work of Guy Delisle and Michel Rabagliati. Webcomics-wise, some of my favorites include ‘The City‘ by DERF, ‘The Perry Bible Fellowship‘ by Nick Gurewitch, and the amazing animated comics of Brad Neely.”

“Aside from the artists above,” says Aaron, “I love the work of my friends such as Clayton Hanmer and Tom Humberstone, as well as a guy I discovered at TCAF last year named Mat Brinkman who does these insanely intricate black and white narratives about monsters and spirits doing battle with each other in magical realms.”

Aaron and the other Trio Magnus fellows will be present and accounted for at this year’s TCAF (Toronto Comic Art Festival), showcasing art from their most recent project.

“Currently,” says Leighton, “we’re working on a series of 6 ft. square collaborative drawings (created with red and black Snowman markers) which we plan to convert to smaller silkscreened prints. We’ll be selling these at TCAF in May.”

He also has a book project in the works due out in time for the Festival, to be published by Koyama Press. Leighton says that it will ‘combine illustration and photography, and feature a variety of homeless nature spirits who, having lost their forests and streams, are forced to live in the back alleys and vacant lots of Toronto’.

“It’s sort of a combination of three interests of mine: folk mythology, environmental issues and urban  photography. Nothing stokes my creative fires like the alchemy of combining ideas.”

For more from Aaron, you can visit his website, the website of Trio Magnus, or stop by his booth at this year’s Toronto Comic Art Festival.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming