The other question is: ‘what do you need to become a successful comic artist or author?’ While again the phrasing might change, the answer to this question is almost always the same: you need to truly love making comics.

Robin Thompson is a comic illustrator, writer, and instructor currently living in Vancouver, BC. And he loves making comics.

Thompson teaches comic illustration workshops for kids and teenagers, and works as an instructor at The Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he teaches similar content to an adult demographic.

“Starting next week I’ll be doing a comics course for teenagers,” he says of his summer teaching plans, “It’s part of a program that gets kids ready for art college so they know what to expect.”

In addition, he has been illustrating indie, self-published comics for over a decade. In 1998, he responded to an ad in the local paper from someone looking for an illustrator for a comic they were working on.

“It was for this comic series called Champions of Hell,” he says, “and the writer needed something dark and scary, and so I did a few sample drawings for him and we’ve been great friends ever since. His name is Ira Hunter, and that comic series is still going on.”

The first comic books that Thompson can remember taking a serious interest in were Alpha Flight and The X-Men.

“I always loved John Byrne’s art,” he says, “I used to sneak my brother’s X-Men comics out of his room when I was younger, and I would read those without him knowing. I used my allowance money to buy Alpha Flight issues from the racks at a local corner store.”

His first-ever foray into self-publishing was a title called The Highlanders, which he worked on with a group of friends from school. (Note: No relation to Christopher Lambert’s movies, other than a recurring theme of decapitation)

“It was about a group of Scottish vampire hunters, ” Thompson says, with a laugh, “It was a hand-made, photocopied zine style book, and we’d bring it to school and try and sell it to people.”

Outside of Champions of Hell, Thompson says he has quite a few projects on the go. His ongoing goal in comics is to challenge himself to continually produce work that’s both innovative and different from his previous projects.

For example:

“I’m a big fan of sharks and there’s no shark comics out there,” says Thompson,  “so I thought, I’m gonna do one! Right now I’m sitting on a shark story that I’ve completed and will at some point in the future be a new book.

I’ve also recently wanted to do a bit more writing and less drawing, so I needed a project for that. I watch a lot of really crappy, crappy movies, and out of that I did a book called the ‘Fifty Worst Comic Book Movies Ever Made’. It consists of my reviews of these horrible comic book movies, and of course I have illustrations throughout the book.

I made that and then a new one that I want to do is nerds of film. Kind of a review book about nerd films.”

Thompson maintains a firmly positive belief in the Do-It-Yourself approach to print publishing, which is reflected in the wealth of projects he currently has on the go. In an era when digital comics have taken a front seat for new comic creators and mass distribution is all but impossible for the indie self-publisher, his optimism is refreshing.

“There’s always a decent market for self-published stuff,” Thompson maintains, “Especially if you’re dedicated enough to getting your stuff out there. That’s what I love about the DIY approach, because you have that opportunity. Not only does it reward hard work, but you can inspire others into adopting their own DIY approach as well.

The more people that get involved, the stronger the DIY market becomes. Of course, we’ll always be the underdogs to the major distributor stuff. ”

When asked about his beliefs as to why this is, his answer comes as a familiar, two word response. If you guessed ‘reverse synergy’, you probably haven’t read many articles here on the Fabler Blog before.

“Diamond Comics,” says Thompson, “If you’re just starting out and trying to get your stuff out there, Diamond Comics will ruin you. By telling a self-publisher that if they don’t sell X amount, Diamond won’t carry their product, they’re basically telling the new generation ‘if you’re not part of the big boys, then don’t even bother.’”

Oddly enough, Diamond Comics’ position in the market actually had a direct hand in Thompson’s decision to start teaching comic art.

“Thanks to changing distribution patterns,” he explains, “It’s not like when I was younger and I could take my allowance down to the corner shop to buy a comic. Now you have to go to a comic shop, and most kids don’t live near comic shops, and their parents don’t often take them there. They might borrow something like Bone from the library or pick up an Archie comic, but that’s about it.

It’s really nice to be in a position to introduce kids to something new that they might never have known they’d like. Sure enough, over the course of teaching kids about comic art and what’s out there, you really see them develop personal tastes of their own in terms of art style and characters that they like.”

Thompson says that another motivation for getting into teaching was that it would provide a venue where he could share his love for the art:

“I decided to put a proposal out there to a community centre for a  drawing class, and they accepted, and I started a drawing class for kids. Word just got around that this is what I do, and I got offers from other community centres to do illustration/cartooning classes with kids heavily focused on comics.

From there, it went from teaching kids to teaching teenagers, and now of course teaching adults at Emily Carr.”

Thompson says the focus of his courses is generally on narrative storytelling, drawing techniques, and inking techniques.

“I don’t want to assume that everyone has the same interest as I do in comics,” he says, “so I try to keep it broad and more general.  Sometimes on the first day I have a slide show with a little bit on the history of comics.

There’s a lot of stuff that a lot of people don’t know. For example, Santa Claus was originally designed from a political cartoonist. They think that Coca-Cola created that image, but it was actually Thomas Nast.”

In his experience teaching, Thompson says he finds that most newcomers to the field don’t realize how much work actually goes into making a comic.

“I tell them to look at all of the names that are credited on their favorite comic book. Oftentimes, they don’t realize that someone’s doing the penciling, someone’s doing the lettering, someone’s doing the inking, and so forth.  When it’s all done by one person, it can be a really daunting task.

Sometimes people can be put off when they realize how much work goes into it. But then, those who put the time in can find it extremely rewarding.”

Thompson’s most important advice for aspiring comic artists?

“Draw every day, and don’t let comics be your only influence. Most comic artists are influenced by something outside of the comics field. For example, I would go sometimes to the art gallery and use the sculptures as models – which I would then draw, and use those sketches in my comic art.”

For more from Robin, you can visit his personal webpage or visit the Champions of Hell website.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

And to all you fans out there! Thanks for supporting our site and featured creators with insight to their work! Your feedback on the upcoming The Sundry Seven, was very encouraging and we hope that you enjoy the story as much as I love writing, and Jay loves drawing it! Our official launch announcement will be this Monday, May 10th! so be sure to check out and discover more juicy details of the story and The Sundry Seven crew!

I’ll give a few plugs to our creative friends this year since they were kind enough to save a few copies of art books and new issues of other cool creative work!

So check out Wild Gunmen, a local zine aimed at Geek Culture (yeah admit it. Your a geek too!) They’ve been online for a while now and just launched their premiere print issue! Thanks to Ed Osborne for giving us a copy!

Another shout out to Sean L. Lefebvre, a former Games Cafe resident, and published game developer, now working on a very interesting video game project with Bella Mechina Studios called, Empires of the Mist.

Also Thanks to Mike Boldt, of Boldtman Studios, an accomplished illustrator. He stopped by and handed us a pristine copy of his sketchbook, which cover valued at $0.25, we’re very proud to have this priceless piece in our collection! Thanks Mike!

Another one goes out to our friends at Blacksheep Studios! Hilary, Tyler Jenkins, & the Vehicle Magazine team is launching their 3rd issue! All locally drawn comics, stories, and advertisements related to comics and comic culture. They’ve also released a video on their youtube showing a very cool animated graphic novel! Thanks for providing The Fabler with quartly issues of such great independent work!

And one last one out to my friend J. Korim, artist on The Sundry Seven, who was so gracious to buy me a copy of, “The Tick, The Complete Edlund.” 400 pages and 12 original issues of pure unadulterated greatness! If you have not read this yet I won’t spoil it for you but after spending two evenings blasting through it, I assure you, that you will not be disappointed! Oh and if you check out Jay’s site be sure to look top left of the page for the best rock riffs, this side of the galaxy!

From an animation about the unassuming friendship between a kite and a bicycle to a minicomic layering fairytale text over the everyday morning routine of an elderly lady, the Alberta-born animator and illustrator has built a solid portfolio largely around the emphasis of life’s simpler pleasures.

Even in the more fantastically-themed minicomics she has worked on, (either independently or collaboratively) whether the setting is a post-apocalyptic snowy landscape or a future where off-planet colonization is a reality, the actual focus of the art is still generally on the simple, relatable quirks that define everyday life.

Strange as that might sound, Colleen actually pulls it off quite well.

However, I don’t want to paint her into a corner here – lest you assume the extent of Ms. macIsaac’s talent begins and ends with the un-extraordinary, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Why, one such example to the contrary could be found in the form of a webcomic macIsaac did collaboratively with Jordyn Bochon. The webcomic – titled ‘May’ – follows the oddly-mannered title character as she sells suspicious ice pops that may or may not be poisoned to children, enjoys a good mid-evening bludgeoning, and generally wears less (or more) clothing than is appropriate.

Bochon, who has the humble distinction of being a 2009 Fabler interviewee herself, wrote the story, and macIsaac brought it to colorful, illustrated life.

The two have actually known each other for going on seven years now, and have collaborated on a number of comics together.

In macIsaac’s own words,

“Jordyn is an amazingly talented lady, and she’s working on a lot of exciting projects right now. I’m proud to know her!”

Well, Fablerites – we’re proud to present an interview with the (also) extremely talented Colleen macIsaac.

Without further ado:

KD: You’ve done some serious cross-Canadian bouncing around; from Spruce Grove to Vancouver all the way to the other coast.

Can you tell me a little more about your adventures in trans-provincial relocation?

CM: I grew up in Spruce Grove, a suburban Albertan city, but went to school in Edmonton; upon graduating high school I moved out to Vancouver to study animation at Emily Carr.

When I finished my undergrad my partner Dorian and I decided to explore a different part of Canada. Neither of us had ever been to Halifax (he hadn’t been East of the Saskatchewan border), but it sounded like a creative and fun city, so we took the plunge and headed towards the Atlantic!

KD: Is illustration/animation/drawing comics a full-time occupation for you, or if not, what else do you do for  work?

CM: I work a number of part-time jobs to make ends meet – I do freelance illustration and animation work, but it’s always an ebb and flow; it’s nice to have flexible employment that I can go back to during dry periods that also lets me take time off when things get hectic.

Right now I’m mainly working as an actor on a historical brewery tour where I wear a costume and pretend that it’s 1863. I also work in a few theatre box offices and at an art gallery from time to time, and I feel very lucky to be working in places that are related to things that I enjoy.

I find that I enjoy working in a variety of places; it keeps me on my toes!

KD: From perusing your work online, I’ve noticed a recurring theme of people presented in context of their everyday life, often combined with a focus on nature and simplicity.

Is this totally off the mark? What can you tell me about what you like to draw the most?

CM: I would say that’s a pretty fair assessment! I feel very scattered in terms of my artwork; there’s definitely things that I keep coming back to when I draw, but I don’t really have a conscious focus with my work at this point.

I enjoy making small and quiet drawings about people going about their lives in their communities, I suppose. I’ve become drawn to the idea of art with a local slant, of connecting to people through geography, and I think that’s a theme I’d like to explore more in the future.

KD: Who (or what) do you consider to have influenced your style the most?

CM: I think the single biggest influence on my style would have to be access to the internet. I tend to spend more time online than I should, looking at the work of artists from hundreds of years ago to people producing amazing
contemporary work.

I’ve never worked at having a specific style and sometimes I fear that’s a big detriment and leaves me too open to influence by what I see around me, but at the same time I think that living in an age when we can call up a million different images at a single click has been a huge boon.

KD: How far back does your interest in comics go? What got you into making them yourself?

CM: I’ve been interested in comics since I was in elementary school and have been making awful little comics since childhood.

In high school, I was lucky enough to get involved with a group of artists who published a trilogy of perfect-bound anthology comics. Once in university I continued on with making little books and sending them out into the world, this time with a collective called The Radar Friends (which included Jordyn as well).

Most of the comics that we made during that time were collaborative photocopied minicomic anthologies, as it made things easier when it came to amount of content and sharing printing costs and table fees at the Vancouver Comic Con.

KD: What sort of comics interest you? What sort of comics don’t?

CM: I’m interested in comics that have a story to tell, comics that challenge me, comics that are beautifully drawn, smart, funny, original, and comics that have a good heart.

I’ve never really gotten into superhero comics, and I enjoy reading comics in longer books or graphic novel format rather than in tiny chunks where the story is broken up into a million different issues. I’m generally willing to give most things a shot.

KD: Where do your ideas for comics typically come from?

CM: I’m a really scattered person when it comes to a ideas….I have many half-finished notebooks with jots here and there about stories that get abandoned halfway through.

I don’t think that I’m a very good writer and I find it extremely difficult to just come up with a coherent story, so a lot of my notes are just scribbling down an idea or an image that I think might be able to be twisted into something.

When I decided to go for it and make a comic I’ll look through the random ideas I’ve compiled and try to make something out of them.

KD: It seems that making Kate and Bradbury was a pretty big focus for you in 2009. What can you tell me about that animated short, and the inspiration behind it?

CM: I originally pitched Kate and Bradbury for the Atlantic Filmmaker’s Coop One Minute Film Scholarship (http://afcoop.ca/omf), which is a really great program where people who have never made a film before get a chance to learn all the steps involved in making a 16mm black and white film.

I came up with the original idea with my partner Dorian Lang, and we fleshed out a storyboard from there. The idea originally germinated in the new bicycle that I had purchased recently and the people who fly kites on Citadel Hill here in Halifax, which is up the street from our house. It was a definite learning experience, but I had a lot of fun with it and I’m happy how it turned out.

KD: Animation-wise, what are you planning to follow it up with?

CM: I’m currently working on a new film that I hope to finish sometime in 2010 about a girl who is obsessed with items she finds on the ground. It’s still in the fairly early stages and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m looking forward to tackling it. It will be about 5 minutes long and animated with watercolours and crayons, and if all goes according to plan I will shoot it on 35mm.

KD: What else are you presently working on, by way of minicomics/illustration projects/et cetera?

CM: I’ve gotten pretty distracted by theatre recently and haven’t been doing as much drawing as I’d like to, but I will probably be attending TCAF this year and I’d really like to make some new comics for that.

I’m in the midst of a whirlwind of projects during March, so I’ve decided I’m going to try and make a small comic every week and then focus on something bigger in April. I’m also slowly edging back into the groove by making some tiny watercolour illustrations based on old photos. There’s so many things that I want to be doing all at once – comics, animation, theatre, drawing, being involved in my community – that sometimes it’s a challenge to fit everything in. I sure enjoy trying, though!

For more about Colleen macIsaac, you can visit her website littlefoible.net or check out her Twitter feed. Below is her animated short kate and bradbury, linked from Vimeo.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Twist (not his real name, though it is the handle through which all of his creative content is released) is a New Brunswicker who has been active in webcomics for several years. In February of this year, he will be celebrating the three year anniversary of his primary ongoing series, Pictures of You.

Twist describes Pictures of You, of which he is writer and artist, as “a story about the best friends you’ll ever lose”. I would add to that description that it’s a compelling trip down someone else’s memory lane, packed with believable, well-developed characters and just the right amount of nostalgia.

I  say ‘just the right amount’ in that the narrative never becomes burdened in nostalgic sentiment – it’s a spice that Gibson uses to flavor his dish, rather than a base that drowns out the rest of the recipe. Quaint metaphor for the win, no?

Though Gibson has only been active in webcomics for a few years, he used to be involved with paper zine publishing back around the early-to-mid nineties.

“I did that for several years actually,” he says, “and kind of drifted away from it and got into other kinds of writing. I guess I was away for probably about ten years before I got the impetus to do Pictures of You.”

Gibson says that when he started the project, he only intended for it to be around six to seven hundred pages.

“But then as I started rewriting and developing the story and characters further”, he explains, “it more than doubled its length. I envision it now to be more like fifteen to eighteen hundred pages when it’s done.”

Despite his epic ambitions for the page count, Pictures of You is a highly accessible read. Not only is it very possible to jump in at the beginning of any one of the chapters written to date, (though you obviously won’t get as much out of it as otherwise) but Twist has successfully created something that a wide variety of readers could find compelling.

“You know, I always envisioned the story as something that would appeal to people around my age,” says Twist, “that is, mid-thirties, maybe even late twenties. What I’ve been finding more and more however,  is that it also holds a lot of appeal for a younger demographic, like teenagers to early twentysomethings.”

To really get an idea of the unique sort of charm that Twist magically weaves through believable dialogue and sincere character interaction, you’d have to stop by the webcomic’s host site and look through a few panels yourself. Actually, I strongly recommend doing this now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

….

See?  See what I mean?

Depending on where you may have randomly decided to begin reading, you may have noticed that some of the art from Pictures of You is in color, while in other instances it’s entirely black and white.

Gibson started the comic entirely in monochrome, only deciding to add color to new panels as recently as last year. Since then, he has decided to go back and color the original books, one chapter at a time.

“It’s actually been quite interesting to go back and look at not only what I was doing back then, but also how the style changed throughout,” Gibson says of his experience coloring the older pages, “Like seeing the difference, for instance, between what I was doing with black and white at the beginning of Book One, and what I was doing with it at the end of Book Two. It’s also been interesting to see how well the color applied to what was always intended originally to be black and white.”

Twist, whose other activities included (until recently) managing a record store in the town he lives in just outside of Fredericton, is also currently involved with a comic adaptation of a story he had written previously, titled “Our Time in Eden“.

Unlike Pictures of You, Gibson is not behind the art for Our Time in Eden. Instead he recruited Ben Steeves to illustrate the comparatively much heavier, mature-themed comic about loss of childhood innocence.

“It was something I never thought I could turn into a comic,” says Gibson, “Just from the nature of the way I’d written the novel, I’d never really figured it would translate properly into sequential art. I honestly couldn’t say what changed. I was just thinking one day about the story and different graphic aspects of it and it just came to me how I could trim a little here, and add a little there to make it work in a graphic setting.”

As it turns out, Gibson was right – Our Time in Eden works beautifully as a comic. Steeves does a fantastic job of capturing the mood and emotions of the two central characters – the disenfranchised, apathetic protagonist Tim and his long-estranged childhood companion, Ellis.

“With Ben, we have this sort of unusual synergy where we each understand what the other one is thinking and are able to build on the other one’s strengths,” says Gibson of the partnership, “It’s just one of those magical, cohesive kind of relationships that you don’t really find very often, and he’s been a dream to work with.”

The synergy he mentions really does come through in the panels of Our Time in Eden. As a disclaimer to those interested in perusing the comic, be prepared for a story that does not shy away from heightened emotion – reading Our Time in Eden can be a visceral experience, especially in its ability to resonate with those who have ever lost/screwed up a relationship that was important to them. And really, show me the picture perfect android of a person who hasn’t.

Between creating new strips for Pictures of You, coloring the older chapters of that same title, and working with Ben Steeves on Our Time in Eden, Gibson (by necessity) commits a large portion of time to his ventures in online comics.

“I’m motivated by the people who come and visit the sites when they really have no reason to,” says Twist, “as well as the people who have shown me a lot of support and love – a lot of my readers are very loyal. I just feel like I need to live up to their trust in me that I give them a good story without taking too long to tell it. That’s the kind of thing you don’t want to let your readers down with.”

As for future plans, Gibson is currently working on several other comics with other artists that he hopes to see come together in the near future. He’s also working on a releasing a physical, grayscale version of the first two books from Our Time in Eden as well as securing a publisher for the eventual release of Our Time in Eden as a graphic novel.

For more from Gibson Twist, you can find links to his work on his profile over at Smack Jeeves.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

At the other end of the lawsuit, we find… the artist responsible for creating the original likenesses of all of the above properties.

Okay, okay – so as we all know, legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby has been dead and gone for over a decade and a half now. The man who (alongside Stan Lee, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, and several others) helped build Marvel as a major player in the comic industry is not in fact the direct catalyst behind this latest nugget of comic book conflict.

Last September, Jack Kirby’s heirs made it known that they intended to invoke a copyright law which would terminate existing copyright claims to many of the characters Kirby co-created. Apparently, there are certain tenets within the murky waters of rights and ownership legislation that allow an author (or that author’s heirs) to regain copyrights a certain number of years after those rights were initially granted out.

Last year, the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel made headlines with a similar court case. They wound up winning a packet of rights back concerning the Man of Steel, including his origin story, the names of his parents (as well as of the planet Krypton), and publishing rights to some of the earliest Superman appearances in comics. Marc Toberoff, the lawyer who represented Siegel’s heirs, is now onboard helping to defend the Kirby copyright claims.

The big news now is that, as of a week and a half ago, Marvel is suing to render those claims invalid.

And so the soap opera that revolves around creator rights versus those of the major comic book publishing companies spills over into yet another decade.

This daytime drama is one that has been around as long as the very concept of comics as we know them today.

Jerry Siegel’s own struggles with creative ownership go back to 1938, when he and Superman co-creator Joe Shuster originally sold the copyright for the character to Action Comics for a measly $130. After receiving a comparatively tiny fraction of the revenue generated by their creation for nearly a decade, they sued to void their original contract in 1947.

The attempt was met with failure, and for several decades more the creators of the most wildly successful comic character in history continued to go uncredited and underpaid. In 1973 they made another (ultimately futile) attempt to regain rights to Superman, though at least this time the press rallied around their cause enough to effect some kind of change. Warner Communications (who by that time inherited the rights to the character through the acquisition of National Comics) responded to press coverage of the unfair treatment of Siegel and Shuster by offering them each a pension of $20,000 per year.

In addition, they would finally be credited with creating Superman on all Supes-related media. Over thirty years after the event.

After Siegel and Shuster passed away in 1996 and 1992 (respectively), their heirs attempted to reclaim copyrights in 1999 and several times again between 2002 and 2008. It wasn’t until just last August that they actually gained some significant ground in the courts.

Marvel has had its own share of discontent within the ranks of its creative talent to deal with in the past.

One notable example would be Marvel’s infamous tendency to merchandise characters and art created by freelance artists without allowing those individuals any creative control or proportionately reasonable royalties.

In 1991, Marvel experienced a coup of sorts in reaction to this. A number of popular artists then-freelancing for Marvel decided to collectively demand more rights with regards to their creative contributions to the company.

Many are now familiar with how Marvel’s flat-out refusal of their requests led those disenfranchised illustrators to branch off to form their own independent comic company, Image Comics. Those artists were Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portatio, and Jim Valentino.

If you’re starting to get a sense that ‘copyright law’ and ‘creative rights’ are vastly important terms in comics, you’re bang on the money. As an artistic medium historically dependant on complex relationships between publishers, artists, writers, distributors, and everyone else in-between, ‘who controls what’ and ‘who deserves how’ much become paramount questions.

It’s no wonder that many prefer to go the route of self-publishing their creative material.

Establishing creator rights in the comic book industry is such an integral concern to artists that many even got together to draft their own ‘Comic Creator’s Bill of Rights‘ back in the eighties. Scott McCloud, Dave Sim, Kevin Eastman, and Peter Laird were but a few of the big-name creators involved in the Bill’s conception.

The latest case of the Kirby heirs versus Marvel does represent another soap-operatic episode in an industry pointedly prone to such drama, but it is important nonetheless to pay attention to its outcome.

Some are claiming that the heirs are merely partaking in a cash grab now that the window to terminate existing Kirby copyrights is approaching, especially since Hollywood is experiencing a surge of popularity with movies based on comics. It doesn’t help their case that the initial letters of termination were distributed to most of the major production studios in Hollywood, nor does it help that they came on the heels of news that Disney was buying Marvel.

The argument put forth by Marc Toberoff on behalf of the Kirby Heirs is that they are just seeking “proper compensation and credit” for the lasting creative contributions he made to Marvel in his lifetime.

Meanwhile, Marvel claims that Jack Kirby’s creations were all work-for-hire assignments, and thus not covered by laws regarding termination of copyright.

Toberoff has pointed out that, “It is a standard claim predictably made by comic book companies to deprive artists, writers, and other talent of all rights in their work.”

I’m tentatively siding with Toberoff and the heirs here, mostly because I don’t want to see further precedent set against artists (or their heirs) trying to regain some form of artistic control or monetary compensation from corporations that have reaped disproportionately vast profit from their creations.

That being said, here’s hoping that – whatever the outcome – what Jack himself would’ve wanted winds up factoring in at least a little amidst all of the talk of dollars and cents.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Andrew Johnson’s art, like his subject matter, is pretty dark and compelling stuff. Johnson has a knack for utilizing high contrast, shadow-filled imagery and tense, often anxious dialogue to create a tone that epitomizes ‘ominous’.

The resident of Auckland, New Zealand, has made a home for himself on the Fabler with his ongoing web-based comic, Kingdom.

Kingdom presents a corporate-controlled future dystopia, with a decidedly gritty, almost noir feel to it. Crooked cops, shady drug dealers, and an always present air of corporate oppression form the staples that define the landscape of Kingdom.

“Kingdom focuses on a non specific city, 12 or so years forward from today,” says Johnson, “where Corporations, with their resources and focus have pushed into the last untapped market, governance of the populace  – producing modern versions of feudal lords, though this is not readily apparent or of interest to most people going about their daily business.”

Johnson says that, while Kingdom may share elements in common with the noir genre, he tends not to see it as such.

“There’s an oppressive atmosphere present within the story,” he explains, “but rather than focusing on some hidden truth that is revealed by tenacity of hero, we’ll be hanging out more with the characters being introduced in the initial 8 and how they’re effected by the actions of Richard Marks – who provides the catalyst for the main incidents that occur.”

An admitted long-time fan of sequential art, Johnson’s first leap into comics took him directly to the web.  In addition to Kingdom on the Fabler, he has a collection of his other work (including Golem) available for perusal over on his website, The Black Gates.

“I love the idea of world building with a couple of pages and a marker. I’m a pretty stock pop-culture geek having grown up on a diet of Magnum PI and the A Team… Throw in that I’ve been working in the interactive/web spaces for a few years now and it was almost a no-brainer I’d get involved with webcomics at some point.”

Interestingly, Johnson does not credit any specific comic or movement in comics as the reason he decided to start making sequential art himself. Instead, he says that the biggest motivator which led him into the industry was simply the state of current technology.

“With the web the cost to distribute content and put it in front of eyeballs is insanely minimal,” says Johnson, “From a printed goods perspective, being this far down the world, shipping goods to and from here costs a fair bit.  With the potential to send files up to the northern hemisphere to get printed and shipped on demand, it felt like a good time to get involved.”

This isn’t to say that Johnson is without his comic book influences altogether. He lists Frank Miller as an artist whose ‘can-do’ attitude has given him inspiration in his work, and, from a narrative perspective, Warren Ellis has left a strong mark on Johnson’s style.

“With Ellis,” he says, “It’s an inspiration gained from seeing his work constantly push against the superhero comics mainstream, more towards the mass market, and his online community experimentation, as well as stories such as Desolation Jones and Global Frequency.  Some of my other influences would be the structure and dialogue of Brian Azzarello’s work, through to density and depth found in the television show The Wire. As a fringe creator, these guys are proof of what’s possible.”

Johnson considers himself a ‘newbie’ illustrator, and at this point in his comics career, he’s having fun experimenting to see what works, and what falls flat.

“Part of the looseness is from the crunch of the deadlines,” he says,  “but in general I love the energy that comes from looser work and with these webcomics. I like that they feel quick, dirty and disposable.”

The interesting thing about catching Andrew Johnson at this point in his artistic career is that you can watch while his art evolves. This is especially apparent with Golem, which is about an inadvertently reactivated killing machine who embarks on a brief (but bloody) murderous rampage through an isolated small town.

As you read from the older panels through to those more recently uploaded, you can trace a steady progression from a more general, traditional style of comic illustration to the distinctively unique, sketch-like renderings seen in Kingdom.

“Regarding Kingdom,” says Johnson, “I think the direction I’m going with the art there provides a grittiness which indicates to us ‘these characters will not be having a good time’.”

After checking out a few panels from Kingdom, one certainly gets the impression that tone- be it gritty or otherwise – is an important element to Johnson’s storytelling.

Kingdom also contains a narrative that weaves in and out of stream of consciousness prose, adjusting accordingly as the story veers from ambiguous labs to deserted towns and darkly-lit high-rises.

“We’re in scene setting mode in terms of characters and the world,” he says, “so it seems appropriate to use such an approach to provide tone. Although when it comes time to crack on with plot, the focus will change. One of the benefits of using a fractured snapshot approach is the ability to change direction tonally with the next update if it’s called for.”

To keep up with the latest story arcs of Kingdom, check out Andrew’s creator comics over on The Fabler. For more from Andrew, you can pop into his main website, The Black Gates.

Remember Care Bears? Those disgustingly cute, fuzzy furballs of moral fibre from the eighties that took the merchandising world by storm?

Chances are, you not only remember the Care Bears but also what they represented to kids; drearily wholesome examples of those values considered essential to a healthy mindset. The likes of Tenderheart Bear, Friend Bear, and Share Bear taught us that with a little compassion, we could overcome anything.

At its root, Care Bears is a concept that is begging to be satirized.

This is where Ottawa-based illustrator Alison Acton comes in, with her weekly webcomic Bear Nuts.

Bear Nuts follows an assortment of dysfunctional cartoon bears as they attempt to eke out an existence in front of hordes of gawking youngsters at the Discount Zoo.

Gone are Friend Bear, Tenderheart and the rest -  in their place would be the sadistic Evil Bear, the self-medicated Prozac Bear, and the flamboyant Gay Bear. Alison draws these unique personalities (alongside a handful of their other similarly ‘unique’ bear peers) with a polished, lively art style that bounces off the panels and sticks in your head for days.

The high quality of art on Bear Nuts should come as no surprise – Acton, who has been drawing as long as she can remember, started drawing the strip after completing post-secondary studies in traditional animation and working for several Ottawa-based studios.

She founded the website Dooomcat Studios with her husband, artist Jim Charalampidis, and created Bear Nuts under the Dooomcat banner. Bear Nuts is, artistically, a collaborative effort between the two – Alison draws, and Jim colors.

Outside of Dooomcat and the webcomic, Acton is a part-time Jiu Jitsu teacher, and a professional animator/illustrator with an impressive array of completed projects under her belt. The most notable of which would likely be her work on Tokyopop’s The Faerie Path, a manga adaptation of the British series of young adult novels by the same name.

Topping off her busy schedule is Acton’s role as a new full-time Mom.

I talked to Alison about balancing illustration with mom-hood, the origins of Dooomcat, and why her next Faerie Path book might not see the light of day (despite the illustration being fully complete).

The interview is below:

KD: What does a typical day in the life of Alison Acton look like?

AA: A typical day now is a lot different than before the baby arrived and something we’re still adjusting to.  I’m lucky that Jim, my husband, also works at home so I have a lot of help.

Right now, I’m not really working on anything but the webcomic, Bear Nuts, and that’s only when Sammy lets me.  I can see routine starting to establish itself as he’s almost 6 weeks now, but I still have way less time than I used to and it did surprise me how much time he needs.  I have lots of ambitious plans of other comics and things I’d like to start but right now it’s all I can do to keep to my update schedule on Bear Nuts.

KD: It mentions on your Dooomcat profile that you work (or worked, since I imagine the whole ‘childbirth’ thing affected this) evenings at a Jiu Jitsu Dojo. Can you tell me a little about that?

AA: I am on mat leave now but I’ve worked part time teaching and doing admin stuff at two local schools for almost 10 years now I guess, holy I’m getting old…

The dojo is great as it gets me out of the house for a bit and gets me some physical activity, all pretty important when you work at home and wouldn’t otherwise get away from the computer or the drawing table!  I also love teaching kids; they can be so much fun and I’ve learned a lot I can put into raising my own little boy.  I also can’t wait until he’s old enough to get in a gi himself.  And I can’t wait to get back into that routine as I haven’t thrown anyone or been thrown in over 9 months and childbirth destroyed my abs.

KD: What was the original logic behind founding Dooomcat with Jim?

AA: Studio Dooomcat was originally a three artist team but plans fell through somewhat.  Jim and I use it as our online portfolio gallery/web site and we list at conventions under that name as we mainly sell art that we create together.  We have a series of prints called “Melees” that’s supposed to be ongoing but baby stopped that too.  I will eventually get back to them as I have grand plans to print some kind of art book some day.  You can see them at dooomcat.com in my gallery.

I’d like to have multiple web comics running at some point, all tied into the studio banner.

KD: Why Dooomcat? Why not Happpycat, or Dooomcow?

AA: I really like Dooomcow, I’ll have to draw that sometime!  I’ve always been good at drawing cute stuff, though there needs to be some kind of edge so it’s not boring.   Plus we like cats so it just fit.  I also have a comic idea for Dooom, but that’s on the pile of stuff I likely won’t get to for a long, long time.

KD: Could you draw correlations between any of the bears and personalities of people you know in real life?

I can definitely see bits of people I know in the various bears.  Inevitably, people at cons will say they know someone who’s just like such and such bear, or they’ll be able to match people to each bear.  I always wonder a little when they say they know someone just like Gimp or Tanked…

KD: Have you toyed much with the idea of adding any new bear regulars to the motley assortment you have already?

AA: There are three more fleshed out characters to be added.  I’m hoping to bring the 10th male out in the next book and then book three will introduce the last two.  I get asked all the time why there aren’t any females but really, what girls would want to live with those idiots?

KD: How did the idea of Bear Nuts evolve from a perverse parody of Care Bears to the ongoing, character-driven collection of stories you’ve built and shared online?

AA: I was working at an animation studio that wanted to do a “My Little Pony” short spoof.  We got laid off shortly after but we knew it wouldn’t be a long break.  Since I had some free time I figured “Care Bears” would be the next logical step.  Unfortunately, the studio eventually closed and nothing happened with the concepts we’d made.  I did have a lot of fun coming up with the bear designs and a friend of ours encouraged me to do something with them.  The comic slowly emerged and my friend, Jason from DMF Comics, eventually helped us out with publishing the first book.

KD: Based on fan response, are any of the bears more popular with readers than the others?

AA: Death bear is overwhelmingly the favorite and I don’t really know why as he’s had the smallest role so far. He’s the only one with “powers” and a natural need to fly solo so I don’t tend to use him too much.  This apparently made him mysterious and intriguing, and led to lots of complaints that I didn’t use him enough!

KD: How did you end up getting involved with the Faerie Path? Was manga an area you previously had a desire to work within?

AA: When the animation jobs in Ottawa all went Flash I submitted some comic pitches to Tokyopop, back when they were still looking for great original manga ideas.  My first editor there contacted me because he liked my art and we went through a couple of tests for other books before I got Faerie Path.

I went the manga route as it was a style that seemed closest to mine and Tokyopop was hiring.  I often get told my art is too cartoony for more serious stories and I can see that.  It doesn’t stop me from making my own cartoony stuff as gory as I can at times.

KD: Are you presently working on the second volume of the Faerie Path, or have you completed illustration on the project?

AA: Volume 2 was finished off at the end of the summer but unfortunately I don’t know if it will ever get published.  I had the great misfortune of having my first published work come out during a recession when publishers and distributers were going under or severely cutting their catalogues back.  I don’t think sales on vol 1 were good enough to warrant a vol 3 and thus vol 2 is in the air.  Perhaps it will come out online some day on Harper Collins’ site or on TP, I just don’t know.  Unfortunately that leaves me out of work.  Fortunately, it’s perfect timing for the baby.

KD: How has your experience working on the second volume differed from your experience with the first?

AA: I changed editors twice with all the upheaval in the industry which was disorienting and disappointing.  I did really like everyone I worked with but the overall attitude in the publishing industry was definitely negative and cast a pall over the whole process.  Vol 2 went faster since I knew what I was doing, but I had way more fun on the first one.  It’s still a great feeling of accomplishment when it’s done: 150 pages pencilled, inked, and toned!  Even if no one ever sees it.

It’s unlikely that you’ve seen anything like the eclectically fantastic art of Jesse Jacobs.

The twenty eight year old cartoonist is known in Halifax for One Million Mouths, a comic strip that has been published regularly in local newspaper The Coast for several years.

If you haven’t read One Million Mouths but Jesse’s name still rings a bell, there could be a few reasons for this. It’s possible you’ve seen one of his self-published minicomics on the shelves of your local comic shop, such as Small Victories, or Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow. If you picked up Sequential’s special edition zine at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this past summer,  you could’ve read a featured interview that Jesse did with Bryan Munn about the varying influences that inspire his work.

Still haven’t hit on it? Then you probably know him as the winner of the first-ever Gene Day Award for Canadian Self-Publishers, an award introduced this year at September’s Joe Shuster Awards. Jesse considers winning the award an honor, though, as he confides to the Fabler in an interview, it did come as quite a surprise.

“Making comics is an isolated past time,” Jesse says, “I spend so much time by myself and by the time I finish a book and put it out I’m onto something else. It was nice to be recognized for my efforts and to know for certain that people liked the book.”

The book he’s referring to is Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow. Blue Winter presents a snowy odyssey through surreal, nature-oriented landscapes largely told from the perspectives of the local wildlife.

“It’s a mini-comic about a love triangle between a shape-shifting blue jay, a human girl, and a normal blue jay,” Jesse says, “Jason, the protagonist, transforms into a boy and brings food back to the forest for all his animal friends. It’s about the desperation of the forest in the wintertime, and true love.”

That he can go from One Million Mouths to producing something like Blue Winter is a good example of the sort of sheer eclecticism that defines Jacobs’ work.

A One Million Mouths comic could literally be anything – from casually dressed bald men courting existentialism in an alien galaxy of swiss cheese planets to a snake finding true love in the warmth of a sleeping monkey’s brain. Variety is the constant, as well as Jacobs’ distinct style of surreal, busy illustration. Each strip explodes with exaggerated detail, squirming word balloons, and flowing patterns -not unlike a stray doodle that took on a life all of its own.

In contrast, Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow is a unified work. Jacobs’ art is still unmistakably his; filled with a sense of flowing stream of consciousness, and characterized by uniquely distorted impressions of people and animals rather than realistic representations. However, with Blue Winter, many panels are devoid of the noise that saturates One Million Mouths – often the art presents a sort of honest simplicity, reflective of the book’s nature-themed narrative.

“I have a lot of interests, and I draw ideas from everywhere,” says Jacobs, “Above all I enjoy drawing. When I see something interesting, whether it be while out on a walk in the woods, or while watching old movies, I usually try to draw it. In a lot of my smaller comic strips, the words don’t necessarily match the imagery, or do so very loosely.  I have fun working that way, taking rough ideas I’ve written in my sketchbook and marrying them with a weird doodle.”

When working on longer narratives, Jesse often finds himself confronted by a familiar dilemma:

“Inevitably I come to a panel that must be drawn in order to progress the story, and it can be boring to draw. I’m getting a lot better at dealing with that though, and the new book I’m working on has been really enjoyable to draw. It’s important to me to keep the work really fun, because that’s why I make comics.”

Jesse’s love for comics wasn’t the sort of thing that he picked up overnight.  It goes back to his childhood, when he confesses to harbouring a massive stack of Archie comics as a kid.

“My dad used to bring home big boxes of computer paper, and my brother and I would sit in front of the television and draw,” he says, “I used to take about ten pages of computer paper, fold it in half and staple it and make lots of little comics with my characters and get the kids at school to read them. Mostly the drawings and stories were copied from things like Casper and that little dinky dink Richie Rich.”

Originally from Moncton, New Brunswick, it was while Jacobs was attending the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax that he first got started making comics. He put a few books together with a few college friends, which led to his interest in self-publishing minicomics – something that would continue to have an important role in his life for years to come.

It’s important to note here that Jesse self-publishes his comics in the truest sense of the term – all of the money comes out of his own pocket, and he handles every step of production himself. From pen to paper through to photocopying panels and binding the books, there is no middle man here.

While many contemporary independent comic artists tend to gravitate towards the web as the primary distribution channel for their work, Jacobs represents something of a return to form with his adherence to making minicomics.

He feels that the popularity of webcomics as a medium for indie cartoonists hasn’t negatively impacted the minicomic market at all, and has some interesting thoughts to share along those lines:

“Some of my favourite comics right now are webcomics, ” says Jacobs, ” Jesse Moynihan’s The Forming is dazzling. I read it every Thursday as soon as it’s posted. But I’ll still happily buy the book when it comes out. I think if the material is interesting and well done, people are going to want the book, regardless of its web presence.

I don’t think there ever was a huge market for self published comics/zines anyhow. I’ve been to a lot of zine fairs, and I always sell a few books, but I also offer t-shirts and buttons and that kind of junk. In general, people seem to dig that stuff more than a book. People like things they can wear I guess. I’ve made way more money off of t-shirts than making comics. But I like making comics better. ”

These days, Jesse is making comics from his home in London, Ontario.

Jacobs moved to Ontario last year with his girlfriend for educational reasons, and he confesses that he often misses the East Coast.

” I drew the blue jay book when I was living in New Brunswick,” he says, ” and it was very much inspired by my natural surroundings. When I moved here, I didn’t know anyone, so I stayed home a lot and watched a lot of space channel. The comics I made during this time reflect my love of the aesthetics of sci-fi, especially Star Trek. ”

Currently Jesse’s working on another minicomic, a few preview panels from which can be seen below.

“I’m pretty excited about this book, which is as of yet untitled. Although, the pages will be small, I’ve already drawn about sixty with more to come, so it’s going to be the longest story I’ve done. It’s a loose narrative that explores repeating elements and patterns. It takes place in the arctic north and revolves around an Inuit character, a stowaway, and the unsteady relationship of two arctic monsters. It’s about isolation and loneliness and being cold and hungry.”

In order to focus more on finishing his new book, Jesse stopped regularly submitting One Million Mouths strips for the Coast a few months back.

So, you may ask, what’s he up to outside of pouring time and creative energy into the new minicomic? For Jacobs, working on graphic designs for skateboards and spending quality time with his dog is where it’s at.

“I’ve been working closely with a company called Homegrown, that manufactures skateboards from scratch, using all locally produced materials. They put a huge focus on the skateboard as an art piece. And we screen print a lot of prints as well.

Aside from working on that I’ll keep drawing drawings and walking my dog, Desmond, in the woods.”

(Go ahead. Ask)

Why, it’s all about utilizing the web-based resources you have at your disposal. There ’s some obvious potential for redundancy here with my post about social media, so I’ll clarify:

There are a vast amount of services out there, available to both fans and creators of indie comics. Some of those services can be viewed as social media tools, which aid primarily in networking and building lines of communication with an audience. In fact, many of them, such as illoz and illustrationmundo.com, fall under this category of overlap.

I want to speak more broadly to the resources that are available for comic fans and creators, as a way of bringing together my posts about the online communities out there as well as the aforementioned social media type sites. Wrap all that daintily up with a bow of shameless self-promotion for the Fabler, and we’ll call it a trilogy of posts. Like Lord of the Rings, only instead of questing through Mordor to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom, we’re stumbling through the internet in hopes of finding some way to understand the landscape of modern comics.

Now come those three magic words that every imaginative person, young or old, delights to hear:

Let’s start cataloging!

(Bear in mind, we aren’t looking to build a comic book bible with one post – the following links are intended to be used as starting points, not a definitive list of all important comic-related websites ever created)

INDUSTRY NEWS

When you need to know what the haps are, where do you go? Urban Dictionary probably, to look up the sorely outdated term ‘haps’.

If, however, you’re looking to hear about new developments in comics that effect YOU, or for the latest updates on your peers, your favorite comic artists, or that guy down the street who snubs his nose at you when you ask for the latest Marvel Comics… look no further.

Comic Book Resources – You’re going to get a lot of mainstream comic coverage with CBR, but the quality of content as well as the sheer number of exclusives make it my personal recommendation for an ‘overall’ news site. Plus, the Robot 6 blog is not only awesome, it provides one of the best non-automatic comic news aggregating services on the net (with Comics A.M.)

Sequential Tart – A webzine published by women which highlights the influence of women in the industry. Consistently excellent coverage of a varied set of areas.

Sequential Spiltink – An excellent source of news pertaining to all things Canadian and Comic-related. Provides Coast-to-Coast coverage of local events, Canadian creator developments, and whatever else your eager little heart might be curious about.

The Joe Shuster Awards Blog – The Official Blog for the Joe Shuster Awards. They update with surprising frequency about coverage of Canadian creators working in the industry. Some overlap with Sequential may occur.

Inkstuds – Podcasts covering the indie/alternative comic book industry! Inkstuds is based out of Vancouver, and is well known for providing entertaining, informative dialogue on the contemporary comix industry.

The Comic Book Bin – An alternate comic news outlet which tends to be a bit more eclectic with what they write about. Indie creators and Canadian creators pop up quite often here.

MAKING FRIENDS

What’d I say about the importance of community? (Answer: It’s important.)

Forums are an ideal way to connect with peers and other like-minded individuals in the field of comic books. Assuming I don’t have to explain how networking can introduce you to contacts that later prove helpful in advancing your career, building connections can also open doors to swell collaborative projects. Everybody likes the dollars to value ratio of a good anthology.

The following websites are a sampling of some of the great comic-related forums populating cyberspace:

Digital Webbing, the  CBR Forums, and Concept Art all provide some excellent opportunities to talk comics with fellow aficionados.

Whitechapel – Warren Ellis’ personal circus of social banter. Filled with comic creators, comic fans, and people you would generally not leave your children alone with.

Canadian Geek – A website I’ve mentioned here before, Canadian Geek was founded by Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor Comics and largely serves as a discussion board for Western Canadian comic creators.

LEARNING FROM THE PROS

Anything you’re trying to do has likely already been attempted, thought of, planned, or failed at by someone somewhere. Well….that sounds prohibitively cynical, so let’s instead say; whatever you are trying to do with comics, someone else probably has their own experiences with doing something similar.

Comic creators are all over the internets. Their chosen livelihood dictates they attempt to shamelessly pimp their art and ideas out through whatever means at their disposal, so it would actually be really counter-productive for one to maintain no webpresence at all.

Many of these individuals have blogs, sketchblogs, Twitter accounts, or deviantArt pages in which they often share peeks into their creative processes. Such insights can be invaluable to  those of us still struggling with finding our own roads to success.

Scott McCloud – I’ve talked amply about Mr. McCloud’s work, you’ve heard his name dropped time and time again; go check out what the creator of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Zot! has been up to lately. I guarantee you’ll find it interesting.

Scott, obviously, isn’t the only comic creator who has a blog. A solid resource for blogs/websites maintained by Canadian comic creators can be found here at:

Links to Canadian Creators at the Shuster Awards Blog

Many comic creators can also be found on Twitter – the following two sites provide (incomplete) directories to some of the comic community voices in the Twittoverse.

The Twitter Comic Book Master List

and

List of Alternative Comic Creators and Publishers

EXPOSING YOURSELF

There are a number of ways to go about this. Here, we’re primarily concerned with methods that don’t land you any jail time. Ha! Zing!

Ok, I’m talking about getting yourself out there. Your art, your comics, your portfolio as a whole. There are a number of websites that are geared to the end of helping you get where you need to go.

Some of which are below:

illoz and deviantArt are both websites which allow users to essentially post their art portfolios for the world to see. Of the two, deviantArt has a decidedly more ’social networking’ flavor.

illustrationmundo.com – This site is a bit harder categorize. It’s a community-oriented that allows you to showcase your art, your blog, and your multimedia portfolio, and it’s also chock full of helpful features such as the ‘Ask a Pro’ section and an on-demand slideshow of illustration images from Flickr.

Project Wonderful – In website founder Ryan North’s own words, ‘Project Wonderful is an ad network that doesn’t suck’. PW offers adspace (often on comic-related websites) based on an auction-based system that emphasizes ad display time and location over the pay-per-click ad services you see elsewhere. Many successful webcomics advertise through Project Wonderful.

the Fabler – I warned you there would be a plug in here somewhere. Seriously though, the other section of the Fabler (not the section mostly filled with junk written by yours truly) exists to help comic creators gain exposure for their work. It’s the whole point of the Fabler – to make it easier for you to upload your comics, get them seen, and (hopefully) have some constructive dialogue about them. To find out more about the Fabler itself, I wholeheartedly recommend you check out this post by website founder Bruno Steppuhn.

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.