The Fabler

Veteran  indie comic company in Calgary lets loose the Rocket Juice

Building on the success of their horror-themed comic anthology Pumpkin Juice, Calgary based indie publishing company Vicious Ambitious just released their latest collection – a series of sci-fi themed stories compiled under the title Rocket Juice.

You could say that Vicious Ambitious are veterans of the Calgary comic scene. They’ve been churning out independently financed, self-published comic books since 2003, when label founders Johnny Luu and Nick Johnson decided that the local comic industry could use a little ‘creative stimulus’.

“The idea was just to broaden the community in the Calgary industry,” says Luu, (pictured)

“It was an outlet for us to produce books, to do the stuff that we love, and to show that here in Calgary there are people just as passionate about comic books and art in general as there are in larger Canadian cities like Vancouver and Toronto.”

From there, Luu and Johnson rounded together a posse of like-minded local talent that included Drew Geremia, Vince Smith and Steve Gervais.

“When we first started the company,” says Johnson,  “part of the reason that we got five guys all together was so that if we all pitched in for an anthology, it wouldn’t be so individually expensive to take it to the printers.”

Enter obvious puns about the ‘ambition’ this group of Calgary artists and comic enthusiasts must have had going into a project like this. Whatever you want you call it, the company has managed to stick to their proverbial guns since day one – five anthologies, several individual works, and a few line up changes later, Vicious Ambitious are still around making waves on the Calgary comic book map.

The current V.A. line up includes Nick Johnson, Vince Smith, Chris Peterson, Steve Gervais, Conor Geoghegan, and Gord Cummings.

“Every year the process to put together the anthology gets a lot tighter,” says Smith, who writes the V.A. published series Nobodies, “and at the same time we’re still trying new things with the expo and the company itself. I like the fact that it’s our own thing, and we’re our own editors, managers, and bosses. ”

Rocket Juice features contributions from V.A. members Johnson, Geoghegan, Gervais, and Smith, with additional contributions from C. Eric Peters, Chris Desiatnyk, Ryan Brown, and Ian Pond. The collection begins, however, with a guest story from local pseudo-celebrity, (largely thanks to her work on Secret History of the Authority: Hawksmoor and brand new Wildstorm title North 40) Fiona Staples.

The black-and-white anthology explores a love story that disrupts the time-space continuum, the adventures of a genetically engineered ninja-monkey-space-courier with a package that’s more trouble than it’s worth, and several other tales more or significantly less along those lines.

The V.A. fellows stand behind the anthology as their best work to date.

“We’ve been doing these anthologies so regularly for five years in a row,” says Johnson, “now we’ve all had the practice, and we’re much better story tellers than we used to be.”

With their teeth cut on their experiences with the V.A. anthologies, Johnson and Co. are now aiming to individually work towards some longer stories.

Vince Smith’s series Nobodies, which just released its first issue, is projected to be a 100 to 300 page epic when all’s said and done.

“I’m like the Katsuhiro Otomo of the group,” Smith says jokingly, “I do very long stories, plus I’m an animator.”

Co-founder Johnny Luu, who left Vicious Ambitious to pursue a career in 3d animation and visual effects in Vancouver, remains optimistic about what the group has accomplished and what he believes they can accomplish in the future.

“The first year when Vicious Ambitious came out, it was tough,” says Luu, “Nobody knew who we were, and it was hard to get our name out there. But then we just worked at it, and through the anthologies and shows like the Calgary Comic Expo, I think we really showed people that a small group of people living in Calgary could independently succeed in putting out comics. I think it helped the local comic industry because people saw that and decided to be just as ‘ambitious’. Ha – that’s kind of corny.”

So what can we expect by way of an anthology next?

Johnson and the guys have a few ideas  already – including an erotic anthology titled Love Juice, a collection of westerns named Cactus Juice, or even potentially an anthology with the header ‘Maple Juice’. They have yet to decide whether that last one will be focused on “Canadian history, told awesome” or whether it’ll wind up as a breakfast-based anthology.

I’m hoping for a retelling of Canadian history featuring breakfast cereal mascots. “Captain Crunch leads the expansion of the Hudson’s Bay Company into the Western provinces”, or “the Red River Colony is founded by Sonny the Cuckoo Bird”. In a perfect world…