I wanted to bring a couple of blogs to your attention. Because pals share that sort of thing.

Does anyone care about this whole debate about women working in comics? If you’ve been out to a convention in the past few years and caught a Q & A with editor-types from any of the larger publishers, chances are you’ve heard it addressed.

The assertion is that, despite a swelling demographic of female comic book readers, the major label comic book industry remains by and large a ‘boys club’. Granted, you do have your Gail Simones and Pia Guerras blazing trails through the pages of comicbookdom, but is that indicative of any larger shift in the industry’s mindset?

I don’t even know if you’d really call it a debate. More a possible issue that is brought up often, though is rarely addressed as opposed to being merely redirected.

Anyway, so Tim Hanley of Bleeding Cool has been tracking weekly statistics of all of the women with credits on DC or Marvel and posting them up on his blog. Condensed monthly versions of these stats, which he has been compiling since the start of 2011, can be found on Bleeding Cool under the blog heading ‘Gendercrunching‘.

He just posted the first of two special iterations of Gendercrunching, in which data is analyzed concerning women working in comics over the last fifteen years.  Part one entails a good, hard look at DC from 1996-2011. His conclusions?

” Now, over the past 15 years, I think it’s fair to say that the number of women who read comics has increased. Books like Y: The Last Man, Fables, and Alias have been good gateway books for guys to get their friends/girlfriends/wives/sisters/what have you into comics. People everywhere are noticing more women at comic book conventions and in comic book shops. But at DC Comics, the overall percentage of female creators has pretty much stayed the same…

… They’re not getting worse… they’re not actively excluding women and becoming more of a boy’s club. But they’re not getting better, and that’s disheartening. You stay the same by just not trying.”

As it turns out, people do care. Check out the full post here.

If you’ll refer back to my second paragraph in this post, you will notice that I mentioned two blogs I wanted to pal-share.

The second came to my attention via Sequential, and features an ongoing history of Canadian comic books.

Comic Syrup is written by Rachel Richey, and it provides a thorough post-by-post breakdown of significant Canadian comic publishers, titles, and artists – from Active Comics on.

Speaking of Canadian comic creators, I also wanted to mention a new trade paperback out this week from none other than artist Fiona Staples (North 40, Mystery Society) and scribe Andrew Foley (Cowboys and Aliens, The Holiday Men in The Massacre Memorial Day Sale).

Done to Death tells the story of an editor sick ‘TO DEATH’ of derivative vampire stories – so sick that she takes it upon herself to personally murder the worst of the would-be writers out there. Meanwhile, a real vampire who doesn’t quite fit the romanticized vampire mould seen in big budget Hollywood flicks embarks on a personal vendetta of his own.

Robot 6 has a massive preview of the book, which you can check out here.

Rad? Rad.

Stay tuned for some neat-o interviews and possibly…just possibly… some big-time announcements coming down the pipes from The Fabler.

But only possibly.

-Posted by Kevin

Is it a book? Is it a collective? Is it a movement?

I had questions, and Gerald had answers.

This interview is especially significant for two reasons, the first being that The Fabler has collaborated with Mr. Garcia to release a print-on-demand book for the Artist Block Party.  The book is titled ‘Illustrated Classics’, and it marks The Fabler’s first official foray into the wonderful world of print-on-demand.

As you might have expertly gleaned from the title, Artist Block Party Vol. 1: Illustrated Classics is a collection of illustrated reinterpretations of classic  stories. Within the pages of Illustrated classics, you’ll find Canadian artists’ depictions of everything from Baba Yaga and Frankenstein to The Odyssey and Swan Lake.

The second item of significance is that the proceeds from this book go towards the Alberta Literacy Fund and the Eugene Ouchi Scholarship Fund (for students attending the Alberta College of Art and Design).

What we have here is collection of beautifully drawn illustrations by passionate Canadian artists in support of education and literacy. How could I not talk to Gerald about such a wicked cool idea for a project?

That interview is below:

KD: How did the Artist Block Party originally come about?

GGG: There has been a small community of artists between Calgary and Edmonton that have been in contact with each other for a number of years, and I’ve always wanted to see us all come together for a group project. So I thought I’d throw this out there and see who would respond, and it worked out really well. Thirty people answered the call, and twenty people made the deadline in time to make it into the book.

KD: What can you tell me about the significance behind the name, Artist Block Party?

GGG: It brings connotations of being a collective – and incidentally, communism, but hey.  It’s all about being part of an equal group, and working things out as a group.

KD: You mentioned a ‘community of artists’ based in Alberta. How did you connect with these artists – how did you all come together?

GGG: We’ve had forums set up, Maple Ink in Calgary and Canadian Geek in Edmonton, and we’ve been in contact through those for quite a long while. It started with the 24 Hour Comic Challenge when we set up a list of contacts to get more people involved, then after that it took off from there as people started doing collaborative projects together, and scheduling meets which led to the local drink and draws.

KD: Vol. 1 of Artist Block Party is also a fundraising effort for the Eugene Ouchi Scholarship  Fund and the Alberta Literacy Fund. What can you tell me about the decision to donate proceeds from the book to these endeavors?

GGG: Eugene Ouchi was one of my instructors at Alberta College of Art and Design, who passed away just last year.  I’ve always been impressed with the sheer number of students that have benefited from his tutelage, and te scholarship is a way to honor him. The idea is that it would go to a student that is both deserving and in need of extra financial assistance.

Regarding the Alberta Literacy Fund, I’ve just always been a strong proponent of the Calgary Public Library. I spent a great deal of my childhood at the library, and I think as a result my love of books is something that’s just always going to be there. I think that’s important for people to have.

KD: Why did you choose to make the first volume a collection of illustrations as opposed to a sequential anthology?

GGG: The sequential book will come. I figured with the one page format it would be easier to manage all of the artists on shorter notice, which is how this book came together.

KD: What story did you choose to reinterpret for your submission to Illustrated Classics, and what can you tell me about why you chose it?

GGG: I chose to do Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti.  I’ve always been a fan of the Pre-Raphaelites and I’ve always been interested in poetry, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe – all of that. It came together out of that.

KD: We touched on your plans for a sequential anthology in the future. Can you elaborate any more on where else you would like to see the Artist Block Party go from here?

GGG: I want it to continue to be an opportunity for artists that have never had anything printed to have something tangible to share with the world.  I would like to see the Artist Block Party do something annually, or even bi-annually. I think that would be great.

KD: What’s the personal incentive for you in bringing together the creative community for projects like the Artist Block Party?

GGG: I felt like in my own experiences as an artist, there really weren’t many avenues available for me to choose from to get my work out there. I guess I just want to make that first step easier for other artists in that same position, and to get more people out there in general.

KD: Is there anything else you’re currently working on as an artist outside of this project?

GGG: Outside of this, I like to draw for my kids. They ask me to draw things for them every day,  and I get quite a lot of joy from that.

Thanks to G. Gerald Garcia for taking the time to chat with me about the Artist Block Party!

You can visit his blog here, and you can find Artist Block Party Vol. 1: Illustrated Classics available for purchase here on The Fabler. (All proceeds go to the Alberta Literacy Fund and the Eugene Ouchi Scholarship Fund)

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

The Vancouver, BC local has only been doing comics “in earnest” (her words) since last May, but already she has been featured on The Comics Reporter, Robot 6, Scott McCloud’s Blog, Comics Alliance… I could legitimately keep going for some time, but instead I’ll finish by mentioning that Emily is also up for a Joe Shuster Award this year and she is currently collaborating with Eisner-nominated group The Anthology Project on their second volume.

Whoo…. That’s some condensed resume. And to think, the reason it took Emily so long to take the plunge into comics is because she “didn’t really think (she) was good enough to do them”.

“Then last May,” she says, “I decided I actually wanted to try doing it. I’m friends with a few people who do comics, and so I kind of gave it a shot as a sort of mini-project just to see if I could actually finish one. And the response I got from that encouraged me to make more. ”

Carroll, who studied classical animation at Sheridan College in Ontario, first gained widespread web-notoriety when her delightfully horrifying webcomic ‘His Face All Red‘ made the internet rounds around Halloween last year. If you haven’t read it yet, you should absolutely do so immediately.

Her knack for telling a creepy story speaks for itself. From her shrewd choices of imagery and language to the overall color tones and wispy, understated characters, Emily creates an atmosphere that successfully pulls the reader into her tacitly unsettling world.

“When I was a kid, I was always drawn to scary stories,” says Carroll. “I was particularly very influenced by the Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark books (written by Alvin Schwartz). The stories themselves weren’t necessarily that scary on their own, but the illustrations (done by Stephen Gammel) made them just terrifying. So those sorts of stories impacted me quite a bit, and my Dad also used to tell me these urban legends that probably weren’t entirely suitable for kids. The ones I liked the best were ‘the babysitter and the man upstairs’ stories; the ones that could happen to ordinary people, where it was something that ‘really did happen to a friend of a friend’.”

His Face All Red is a relatively short narrative that tells the story of a man whose envy drives him to do an unspeakable thing… and the sinister repercussions that he faces as a result.

Emily says that the idea for the story came from a late-night radio show in the States called Coast to Coast AM, which largely deals with UFO reports, paranormal events, and other generally strange occurrences.

“A few years ago,” she says, “there was this infamous story that was told on Coast to Coast AM that later grew into its own huge mythology. It was about a guy named Mel who called in to talk about a hole that he found on his property which he claimed was bottomless. He threw things down there, and he never heard them hit anything. He uncoiled rope down, but it never seemed to be far enough…

That concept of this bottomless hole stuck with me because I thought that was a very simple, scary concept, where the only way to know what was at the bottom would be to go down yourself. But then once you go down, how do you get back out? So that was a big inspiration, and I was also writing this story about brothers hunting a beast in the words that wasn’t really going anywhere. I put the two ideas together, and that was sort of the genesis behind the project.”

Among the other projects you will currently find scattered throughout Emily’s blog is an illustrated dream journal that she kept for the months of November and December of last year. Carroll, who has kept a written dream journal for years, decided to use four panel illustrations in an attempt to take a snapshot of some of the more predominant images and themes she found herself writing about.

“The dreams themselves are so complex and have so many details that I basically picked for each panel just a beat or an image that I remember reacting to the strongest. Dreams aren’t going to have a defined narrative, right? So I just picked out the elements I decided were the most significant.”

Emily has a collection of new dream journal comics that she has been working on over the past couple of months which she intends on posting soon. She also has a few words of advice to anyone aspiring to keep their own dream journal:

“Don’t edit yourself when you’re trying to recap what happens in your dreams. You can’t effectively convey all of the senses that occur to you in a dream, so don’t try to make sense of it when you write about it. Just write it all down, even though it doesn’t make any sense, so that you can come back to the individual elements and try and remember what impressions they may have had on you.”

‘Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter‘ is another comic you might find on Emily’s blog that has an interesting story behind it. Posted on Valentine’s Day this year, this short webcomic is somewhat unique from Carroll’s other work in that it doesn’t have a creepy or sinister undertone.

It tells the story of a shape-shifting goddess and the silver-haired mortal girl that catches her fancy, and has that special folklore-ish quality of feeling simultaneously foreign and familiar; a story that you already know before you read it, but still manages to keep you guessing.

“That was inspired by a project I had done a few years ago with my girlfriend, Kate Craig,” Emily explains. “We’d actually created two different civilizations just for fun, as kind of a world-building exercise. We each worked on our own civilization for about a month, without telling the other anything about them. At the end of the month we decided to work out what the first contact between our two worlds would be like. Out of that I started working on the mythology of that world I had created, which was based largely on Viking mythology. I decided to try and do a ’sweeter’ sort of comic than what I had done to date, so I wrote a romantic myth from that world and posted it to coincide with Valentine’s Day. It has a lot to do with ‘threes’, all throughout it.”

Although Anu-Anulan is thematically quite different from her other comics, her unique, eye-catching approach to illustration is consistent across the board. When I asked Emily about her artistic method, she had this to say:
“It’s really uncomplicated,” she says, laughing. “Generally a lot of my stuff is done on the computer. I use a tablet to sketch it into Photoshop, where I also ink, color it, and put in flats. One of the things I do to make it look a bit more natural is I have inkwashes that I have done on illustration board and then I scan them in and apply them to Photoshop as a layer of flats so that it gives them a texture. For the comics, I draw in pencil and ink on bristol with a nib pen so that it kind of has that jagged quality to it and bleeds a bit. Otherwise they’re colored the same as everything else on the computer.”

Carroll says that the large positive response she has received for her comics was a bit overwhelming, at first.

“I definitely wasn’t prepared for all the attention that things have received,” she says. “It’s fantastic, and that Shuster nomination is incredible. It’s been a little surreal because I’ve been drawing cartoons and things for ages, but I’ve only just recently started getting into comics. When I did Hare’s Bride or His Face All Red, it was like, ‘my friends will like this, I’ll put it online’ – then to get such a big response for them was really amazing.”

One of the places I randomly saw Emily Carroll’s name pop up was on none other than the videogame developer Rockstar’s official blog. This is perhaps unsurprising, given her admitted love for videogames and the Flickr site she has filled with illustrations as testament to that affection.

I challenged her to name some of her favourite videogame releases from the past year or two:

“Probably my favorite game last year was Red Dead Redemption. I’ve always been a fan of Westerns, and to have a game that was not only a Western but a really good Western was amazing. Even the DLC that they put out for it at Halloween was so awesome. Dragon Age, that series I love. I’m also a huge fan of the Uncharted series, I really loved Fallout: New Vegas… and still love, because I haven’t beat it yet. You can just wander for hours on end in that game – I had to stop myself from playing it too much.”

As we all wait anxiously to see what Emily Carroll will turn her sights towards next, she does have a couple of hints as to future projects.

“I’m working on a collection of minicomics for TCAF,” she says, “which will hopefully also be a webcomic I hope to put up in early June.”

She also has a comic in the works for The Anthology Project Vol. 2:

“It’s another fairy-tale sort of comic. It’s an original story playing on some familiar fairy tale themes, and it’s a bit more light-hearted and funnier, I guess, sort of, than some of my other comics (Spoiler: no one goes missing or dies). Also, it has no dialogue in it, which was kind of fun. The characters speak, but they speak in pictures.”

For more from Emily Carroll, you can visit her blog, her yet-to-be-constructed website, her Livejournal, or her Flickr page. You can also follow her on Twitter!

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Whether you’re interested in buddy comedy action stories or anthropomorphic cats performing historical reenactments of the American revolution, there’s likely a webcomic creator out there doing something that speaks directly to you.

This week’s interview features Ontario-based artist Adriana Blake, who writes and draws a webcomic with its own unique niche market; Fall on Me, which she has been cartooning since February ‘09, explores the lighter side of day-to-day newlywed life.

Unlike many contemporary webcomics, Fall on Me is persistently upbeat, unapologetically cute, and shies away from dark humour or the ’serious’ aspects of emotionally-vested human interaction. Mostly consisting of brief anecdotes from Adriana’s relationship with her real-life husband Alex, Fall on Me is silly and at times touching – and that’s all it needs to be.

Blake’s comic sets itself further apart from the host of webcomic fare out there for two more reasons. One, her art really is superb. Super clean linework and expressive, memorably drawn characters make Fall on Me really stand out.

Two, Fall on Me has a dual identity: to Spanish readers, it is known as Cuenta Conmigo. The Venezuela-born Blake does a version of each and every strip in Spanish.

Though she lives in Milton, Ontario at present, she was raised in Venezuela, and then spent her adult life living between Canada and Texas.

I talked to Adriana about her decision to pull dual-language-duties on her webcomic, her thoughts on  writing a comic that is defined by its ‘cuteness’, and what sort of comics she read while growing up in Venezuela.

The interview is below:

KD: The first thing I wanted to ask you was, why a webcomic? What was it about webcomics that compelled you to start Fall on Me?

AB: For one, I think webcomics have made it much easier for comic creators to get their work seen by a larger audience. That definitely appealed to me, and it goes also for the level of technology out there with other things like Twitter and Facebook, which help with spreading the word about your webcomics even more.

That isn’t the only reason I chose webcomics as my medium – it was also about being able to get feedback to my work immediately – which I thought was pretty cool.

KD: How did Fall on Me begin?

AB: The topic of the comic actually came up by accident. Alex and I didn’t live together prior to being married, so a lot of stuff that I considered funny kept coming up in our relationship which I had never experienced before. As these little things started to accumulate I thought ‘these are funny, I should start writing them down’  – I saw the potential they had as material.

I didn’t know if it was going to work as I thought, so I drew my first one as a test and put it out there. I liked how it turned out, so I drew a second one, and it just kind of kept going from there.

KD: Growing up in Venezuela, were you interested in comics back then at all?

AB: I loved comics and I loved reading. When I was a kid I read a lot of the old school Donald Duck, MIckey Mouse, and I was all over the Funnies in the newspaper.

Storytelling as a whole has always been a big part of my life.

KD: How did your interest in doing your own comics develop?

AB: I wanted to have a comic project of my own for a long while, but the lack of having a story to tell held me back.

Back in High School my first attempt at approaching comics was just through the mainstream. Checking out superhero comics or whatnot, and trying to emulate drawing those. Which were quite embarrassing, actually, and I wound up throwing those drawings out.

At the time I wasn’t really aware of comics being produced in any other way.

KD: Fall on Me is, at its heart, really just a cute comic about the little day-to-day things that you and Alex share. What is it that motivates you to embrace this ‘cute’ approach to the strip so wholeheartedly?

AB: It’s easier for me to share the funny and cute stuff that happens to us rather than the deep serious stuff.  The funny/cute is what motivates me to jot stuff down in my little journal and want to share it with the world.  It’s also made me a lot more appreciative of my marriage, as I’ve been able to record these silly little moments that we would have otherwise forgotten about.  And with FoM being an autobiographic comic strip, I don’t feel too comfortable putting THAT much of our private life out there.

I know there are plenty of webcomic creators who have no reservation of sharing every little detail of their lives and it’s truly admirable, but personally I’m not on that page, at least not for this comic (I’m not that brave?).  Whether that may or may not change overtime, we’ll have to see.

Also, I think it’s a reflection of not just our relationship, but also my own illustrative style. If you look through my work outside of Fall on Me, I do tend to prefer drawing the cutesy stuff.

KD: Was it initially strange for your husband to adjust to being in a webcomic, and how does he feel about it now?

AB: Surprisingly, he adapted to it very quickly and I don’t think it phased him. He sometimes made a face when I told him about feedback I received on the strip. Like I told him how a fan said, ;oh, your husband’s my hero’ and he looked at me like, ‘what? what do you mean?’. He was a bit surprised that some people would say those things about his character in the comic strip.

Overall he’s been very supportive, and I remember at first how I used to ask him whenever I made a comic if it was okay to write about certain things that happened. He never said no, and these days I don’t even really consult him anymore. There’s just never been a problem.

KD: One of the unique things about your webcomic is that you publish it in both English and Spanish format. What prompted your decision to do this?

AB: First of all, most definitely to reach a wider audience. Also a good chunk of my relatives speak only Spanish and not English, so I felt it would be unfair if I published everything in English and leave them out. Whoever else in the Spanish speaking community also reads as enjoys them is really a bonus. I’ve actually received quite a bit of response from that end of my readership.

It’s all been really amazing the sort of response we’ve had overall.

(I asked Adriana about the sort of split between the readers of her English strip and her Spanish strip, and she informed me that she has about 3-4 times more visits to Fall on Me than Cuenta Conmigo.  She added that, “I was surprised at how many more English readers I had, since the Spanish readers tend to comment more and be generally more interactive.”)

KD: You were just recently out at the Wizard World Toronto Con, and I read on your blog that you got to meet some of your Fall On Me fans.

What is it like for you knowing that you have this fan base, and what they’re interested in is really just the way you actually interact with your husband on a day-to-day basis?

AB: Well, the Wizard World Con is a more mainstream event, so while I brought my books and whatnot in case anyone would be interested, I was surprised to have people I had never met before come up and say they read Fall on Me.

Actually, one of them was a reader from Mexico which blew me away in itself. He was asking if I had any books for sale in Spanish, which I felt super bad about because I just didn’t think I would have someone come up and actually request that.

KD: You now have over two hundred strips of Fall on Me and two collected Volumes (100 strips per collection). As far as comics go, is Fall on Me all that you’re currently working on, or do you have anything else in the works that you can speak of?

AB: Unfortunately, no. It’s not that I haven’t thought about doing something else. It’s just that nothing has really sparked my imagination to take up. So for now, I’m just sticking with Fall on Me and playing it by ear as far as anything else on the side goes.

I still draw on the side, like I do my little pinups or illustrations, but as far as storytelling goes nothing yet. I’m open to ideas as they come up.

For more Fall on Me, you can visit the official website or check it out en Español.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

It stands out as a fresh new example of the stylistic horizons that only a comic book could explore while, narratively, it presents a unique approach to exploring questions of meaning and existence

These are just a couple of the reasons why I was extremely excited to talk to Ray Fawkes about his new graphic novel, One Soul.

Fawkes is well-known for his ages comics’ Apocalipstix, which he wrote and Cameron Stewart illustrated, as well as Possessions Book One & Two. In addition to being a two-time Joe Shuster Award nominee in the “Outstanding Canadian Writer” category, Possessions Book One: Unclean Getaway earned him a nomination for a YALSA award from the American Library Association.

He also wrote the comparatively much darker comics Mnemovore, Spookshow and Black Strings. In the case of the latter two and Possessions, Fawkes assumed the artist mantle as well.

One Soul, which he wrote and illustrated, tells the story of eighteen different lives that all share the same soul. Each of the eighteen stories is told simultaneously, by way of eighteen dedicated panels;  nine on each page of a two-page spread, each following a different character.

If one of the eighteen lives ends before the others, for the rest of the book that panel goes black.

You’ll have to wait until July to get your hands on a copy of this innovative new comic, but for now, you can read what Fawkes has to say about it below:

KD: How would you describe the premise behind One Soul, in eighteen words or less?

RF: ONE SOUL: Eighteen’s people’s lives, from birth to death, across time and around the world – together telling a single story.

KD: You started this book by writing, drawing, and lettering the first fifty pages (in what could only be described as an act of faith) before submitting it to Oni.

What is it about this story that made it so important to you that you were willing to make that first step entirely without publisher backing?

RF: Well, first off, I come from a DIY background – I’ve put out a few self-published pieces – so it wasn’t hard for me to start out under the assumption that I was going to be producing and publishing this book myself. In fact, I often write scripts without a publisher’s commitment, and occasionally start drawing the books as well.

One Soul in particular, though, is a book that struck me as impossible to pitch in writing – there was no way to demonstrate how the book was going to work until someone could hold a portion of it in their hands and experience it the way it’s meant to be read. It was my good fortune that I had the chance to present it to the editors at Oni Press once I had put together enough of it to demonstrate how the whole book was going to work – and that they reacted so positively to it.

As far as the story goes – it’s the story I feel I need to tell. I can’t say it plainer than that. I’m one of those writers who feels the stories curling in the gut and feels the imperative to get them out.

The moment I conceived of this one, I knew I had to create this book, and I knew that I would undertake whatever effort or expense was necessary to complete it and put it out.

KD: What can you tell me about some of the characters whose lives you explore in One Soul?

RF: I’m not going to answer this one in too much detail, because watching the characters grow from infancy and develop into their adult selves – with the surprises, both pleasant and disappointing – is part of the experience of the book.

Here’s some of what readers will see: warriors – both bloodthirsty and reluctant, healers – both competent and helpless, teachers – both wise and cruel. Altruists, egotists, criminals and victims. Human beings.

KD: What sort of research was involved with putting together a book like this?

RF: There was a fair amount of research involved in the early stages of this book: setting research, to make sure I had the time and place pinned down for each character, costume research (of course), and some reading to ensure that the roles the characters played fit well into their settings. It all boils down to a lot of reference reading and image sourcing – work that I hope allowed me to construct a framework that supports the story invisibly, without creating any jarring mis-steps.

That said, I’m sure there are people out there who will make an effort to point out my mistakes.

KD: Artistically, what did you have in mind when you came up with the style for One Soul?

RF: I needed the art to be cartoonish enough to generalize the characters, but detailed enough to create a feeling of connection and sympathy for them. A black and white, fairly detailed “clean line” approach seemed most appropriate.

KD: How do you feel your approach differed in this from your previous illustrative work?

RF: I tend to try to vary the style of my illustrations to match the feel of my books and best convey the atmosphere of the script. ‘Possessions’, an all-ages comedy series I create, is illustrated in a much more spare, saturday-morning cartoon style. If I were to do a horror story, I might work with a looser, darker, spattered style.

KD: Is it strange for you to switch gears between working on a project like One Soul and doing something kid-friendly like Possessions?

RF: Not in the least. I find it relaxing to switch gears! Especially when I can switch from something as serious as ‘One Soul’ to a light, silly romp like ‘Possessions’, or vice-versa.

KD: Speaking of your ongoing projects, can you say anything about what stage of development ‘Junction True‘ is in?

RF: I can’t say much about it right now. Vince Locke is creating the artwork for the book – each page is fully painted – and it’s in progress. I’m hoping he’ll be done this year, and the book can make its debut as soon as possible after that.

KD: Is there anything else you have on the go or in the works that you can speak of?

RF: I’m working on the next volume of ‘Possessions’, of course, and heading back to the shelves to see which of my other pieces to do next! After finishing ‘One Soul’, I took a couple of months off just to rest and think…and now it’s time for me to lay the groundwork for the book that will follow…

ONE SOUL debuts in July from Oni Press. For more from Ray Fawkes, you can check out his official website or follow him on Twitter.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Now put that premise into the capable hands of Montreal-based artist Alex Fellows, a comic creator so talented he was nominated for a Doug Wright Award in the Best Emerging Artist category and then nominated again for that same award six years later.

Toss in a dash of surrealism alongside some genuinely interesting use of colour to convey tone and mood, and congratulations! You’ve successfully whipped up a steaming fresh batch of Spain & Morocco, the graphic novel currently being serialized online by Fellows over at www.spainandmorocco.com.

Cooking metaphors aside, Spain & Morocco is a fantastic read.  The characters are well-defined and marked by the kind of honest human flaws that mean they aren’t always likable, but they are, for the most part, relatable.

Fellows’ art is top-notch as well.  The expressions of those aforementioned characters are brought to vivid life in pencil and ink, while watercolor paints capture the mood and setting of the world they inhabit with inspired creativity.

It should come as little surprise that this project has been a long time in the works.

Fellows, who formerly was best known for his graphic novel Canvas, has been working on Spain & Morocco in one form or another since 2003. After Canvas was released by Fantagraphics Books in 2004, word got out that he was working on a follow-up project titled ‘The Unmoved’.

“From 2003 to 2007,” says Fellows, “I worked on a graphic novel which is basically a black & white version of Spain and Morocco. It was 110 pages or so, and it was called ‘The Unmoved’. It featured the same lead characters and the same basic setup. I originally proposed it to Fantagraphics, but they turned it down, so I put aside doing any comics for a few years.”

In the interim Fellows worked on animations (including this stellar animated video for a Deerhoof song), as well as a children’s picture book and some prose writing. Then a few years ago, he stumbled across his old pages from ‘The Unmoved’ and decided he would scan them and put them up online.

“I started touching up some of the pages so much,” he says, “that I finally gave up and completely redrew one. Then I realized that if I was going to juxtapose pages I was redoing with pages I had done six years ago, it would be pretty distracting to the reader. So I basically started re-doing the comic I had finished, but with watercolor, and I was really enjoying telling the story again. And this time I had the advantage of having a first draft.”

On account of the time Fellows has invested into this project, he says that his influences have changed regular over the course of its conception.

“For a while, I was reading the last Martin Amis novel, ‘The Pregnant Widow, which is about young people spending the summer in Italy trying to have sex with each other, and it was making me re-consider some of the scenes I was writing. Then the other day I was listening to the new Radiohead album and an idea for the story popped into my head. I guess whatever I’m looking at or reading, for better or for worse, makes it into my comics.

I’ve also been looking at Winslow Homer’s watercolors to try and skimp even the smallest smidgen of his sense of color and light and put it into my work.”

Despite the creative and notably skilful use of color seen in Spain & Morocco, Fellows says that painting is actually the step that requires the least amount of time in his artistic process.

“This is because I’ve been thinking about it the entire time while pencilling and inking,” he explains. “It takes about one to two hours per page. I usually work in big washes and I avoid using too many different colors. I try not to bog down the story with over-rendering, although I’m afraid I crossed that line in some places. I’m always re-thinking how I should be painting this comic. Sometimes I feel it’s too sloppy, then sometimes it looks too uptight.”

I mentioned that Spain & Morocco has a surrealist element to it. This is by no means a pronounced or regular aspect of S&M, so much as it is a tool that Fellows employs on occasion to help us get more into the heads of his characters.

“I like trying to convey what somebody is feeling through some kind of comic exaggeration or through expressionist drawing,” says Fellows. “Every day you see people walking down the street and it’s clear that their thoughts are elsewhere; having an imaginary argument with their boss, remembering something from their childhood, working out some plan to murder their neighbor’s dog… In the case of Spain & Morocco, my way of showing a fantasy or a memory without using a cloud-like thought balloon above the character’s head is just to integrate it into the setting. I try not to use it too often because it can be pretty self-indulgent.”

Alex Fellows’ work on Spain & Morocco has earned him an acknowledgment from this year’s  Doug Wright Awards in the form of a Best Emerging Artist nomination. Fellows says that he is “really happy to have a Doug Wright nomination, even if it is for ‘emerging artist’ again.”

“I guess the committee really liked my work,” he says, “and since I don’t have a book out, emerging artist was the only category they could fit me in. In any case, the Toronto Comics Art Festival is a really great convention and the Doug Wright Awards ceremony is very nice, so I’m looking forward to it.”

I also asked Alex if anything from Spain & Morocco was based on his own experiences’ backpacking around in foreign countries. His response:

“I went on four backpacking trips in my twenties, all of them with not much money. One of them was in the South of Spain, then across the water to Morocco, but the trip (S&M characters) Walt and Dan are on is pretty different than mine.

When I try to directly use an experience of mine it always turns into fiction. I feel more concerned with sticking to the story I’m telling rather than stitching together a string of backpacking anecdotes. Hopefully, the autobiographical bits I have put in are seamless with the fictional ones.”

Outside of Spain & Morocco, Fellows is currently seeking a publisher for a children’s picture book he has completed titled ‘Kelvin the Weather Boy’.

“I worked on ‘Kevin the Weather Boy’ full-time for nearly five months thanks to a grant from the Quebec Arts Council. Writing for children was a lot harder than I thought.  It means towing the line between talking down to the reader and talking about subjects that are way over their head. But I’m happy how it turned out. ”

Speaking of children, Alex currently divides his time between illustrating, animating, and raising a young child of his own. Contrary to what you might think, he insists this actually helps in maintaining an effective work/life balance:

“I’m more productive now that I have a child, a wife, and a full time job, believe it or not. When you’re working under the threat of your child suddenly waking up crying from his nap, you don’t dilly-dally as much. Sometimes I’m half-awake at the drawing board, but it just gives you a different perspective on things.”

For more from Alex Fellows, you can visit his official website, check out his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

You can find Spain & Morocco here.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

For the subject of this interview, we chose an extremely talented, Montreal-based comic artist who has previously had an established degree of familiarity with The Fabler.  The first 16 pages of his comic collaboration with John O’Brien, ‘The Rise and Fall of it All’ is currently among the roster of showcased comics on the main site.

In addition, he is the creator of Sequential, the Canadian comic book newsblog. Since we often feature Canadian comic book creators and/or news pertaining to the Canadian comic industry here on the Fabler Blog, there is often some overlap between content on the two sites. To further expand on that connection, he actually interviewed Fabler founder Bruno Steppuhn for a post on Sequential back in August.

I am speaking, of course, of Salgood Sam. To give Salgood a brief bio, he is a former Torontonian who became involved in the comic industry at a very young age. Much of his early twenties were spent illustrating titles for Marvel, including Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, from their  Epic Comics’ imprint, and Saint Sinner, under Marvel’s Razorline imprint.

From there, Max left comics for a while to work in animation at Nelvana Studios  (also based out of Toronto) and Cine-Group (in Montreal). Around the late 90’s he became involved with organizing local Toronto Comic Jams, a tradition he brought with him to Montreal in 2000. Sequential itself was born in 2002 as an evolution of his then-blog about the Montreal Comic Jams, NonSequiturs.

He self-published a (Doug Wright Award nominated) anthology of stories called RevolveR in 2004, and in 2007 he illustrated Therefore Repent!, a graphic novel written by Jim Munroe. You can also find his work in the comic book anthologies Comic Book Tattoo, Popgun 4, and Awesome 2: Awesomer.

For the purpose of this interview, I wanted to speak with Salgood about two of his current projects, The Rise And Fall Of It All and Dream Life. As I mentioned, a segment of The Rise and Fall Of It All can currently be seen on The Fabler, and it is a collaborative project with John O’Brien that has been in the works for some time now.

It focuses on the story of Eliot, a Chicago-based office worker who, after he loses his job and joins the ranks of the unemployed, is faced with the knowledge that he has no real, tangible sense of identity. Eliot forms a connection with a jazz musician named Elmo on the streets of Chicago, and through their friendship gleans a greater understanding of where he fits into the world. New colored pages of The Rise And Fall Of It All are currently being posted on Salgood Sam’s RevolveR blog.

Dream Life marks Salgood Sam’s contribution to the Transmission X webcomic collective. Though it is currently on hiatus until January 15th, (Act 1 finished on Dec  18th, Jan 15th is the beginning of Act 2) Dream Life is a regularly updated webcomic with some seriously surreal undertones about the subconscious and an interesting initial concept. In Salgood’s own words:

“Dream Life began as a conversation between friends…  Cracking wise about what kind of adults (Charles M. Schulz’s) Peanuts characters might make we were inspired to play with the idea of using the cast as a constraint for a contemporary black comic narrative about our peers, and ourselves; Each character beginning as a Peanuts archetype that we would then age and play with, borrowing from our own lives and our friend’s to flush them out.”

An interesting premise, to be sure. As the project evolved, the story came to be told in a shifting perspective between five core characters as they weather their own miniature, individually-tailored life crises.

Artistically, Dream Life represents Salgood Sam at the top of his game. Each page is really a pleasure to take in, whether it be a lovingly-crafted rendition of something as mundane as a late wake-up call or an extravagantly fantastic image from one of the characters’ diverse dreamscapes.

Ah, but enough preamble. The interview itself is below:

KD: I understand that you originally planned Dream Life as a graphic novel. What can you tell me about that, and how it came to evolve into the regularly updated webcomic it is now?

SS: It’s still meant to be a graphic novel, but doing it also as a webcomic seems to be the most efficient way to get it out there and get it seen. Trying to sell a graphic novel is always a challenge, particularly so with this book. Whenever I talked about it to a publisher, it was difficult to get them to take it very seriously because the first act is pretty much thirty pages of silent dream sequence before anybody even says anything.

So that element of Dream Life has made it difficult to get publishers on board, and I thought, if I’m going to be doing it on my own anyway, it would be nice to get some form of immediate, ongoing response to my work on it as I go.  There was a brief period where I thought to myself, do I want to play it close to the chest and keep it to myself until it’s done, or do I want to put it out there?  The fact that it’s a three hundred page book, which would mean it would be a long time spent keeping it to myself, plus I don’t particularly enjoy working in a void like that, led to my decision to put it online as a webcomic. It was the combined incentive of having a discourse with an audience, building an audience as I go, and possibly attracting the attention of a publisher just by putting it out there.

KD: How did you end up connecting with Transmission X to release Dream Life under the TX collective banner?

SS: I’ve known them for quite a while. I believe I initially met them through Steve Murray and Ben Shannon, who used to share space with them at RAID studio. They’re all incredibly talented individuals, and even though I left Toronto we all kind of came up in the same scene there with a lot of common perspectives and common connections. When the TX thing started, I was really interested in jumping in with them, it was just a question with what. Plus at that time, it was just the people who were physically in the studio and I was no longer in the same city.

Then as they expanded, and as I came to the point where I had something, I talked to them a lot and the interest was there. Then Ramon Perez told me, ‘you know, we’re totally into it, you just have to be ready to post something every week’. Which was just intimidating enough to make me hesitate at first, so I went ahead and completed the first big chunk on my own to get the point where I felt confident enough to say, okay, I could deal with that sort of commitment.

KD: That’s right, by last year’s TCAF you already had the first act out published as a forty page minicomic. At the time you did that, you were actually months ahead of your update schedule with the webcomic. What sort of buffer are you running these days?

SS: Right now I’m pretty much right on top of it, and I’m working on the end of this chapter. I’m trying to hopefully stay four or five pages ahead of myself, which is about a month of updates.

KD: Getting a bit more into the content of Dream Life, the story you’re telling rotates through a group of core characters under the initial concept that they would represent archetypical future versions of the core Peanuts cast.

As you worked further on the project, was it any harder to stick to that original character concept? Where else did you pull inspiration from in defining the traits of these characters?

SS: I like the idea of playing with that constraint to a certain degree, but it’s a self-imposed constraint and I’ve never been that much of a stickler. So I didn’t try to be absolutely faithful to it, instead using that concept as a source of ideas. Also, originally when I came up with the concept for this project it was myself and a collaborator, my friend Jonathon. The two of us started satirizing ourselves and our friends by playing off of the Peanuts archetypes and saying, ‘well who do we know that’s like Linus, or who do we know that’s like such-and-such?’

Then we borrowed character traits from ourselves and our friends and added those to the characters. It ended up as a hybrid between something that satirized Peanuts, and something that satirized our friends.

KD: It seems that Dream Life has allowed you the opportunity to really have a lot of fun experimenting with your approach to sequential art in itself. Your layout rarely follows a set pattern; I get the feeling you revel in utilizing nifty devices like different color schemes to indicate different character perspectives, or creative angles for panel perspective.

To what degree for you is Dream Life an exercise in experimenting with different sequential techniques?

SS: On the topic of color, his was originally going to be a black and white project. One of the reasons it ended up color is because a lot of the book is about different states of mind, and I found that the most powerful tool I had to indicate that was with color.

Experimenting with my art is something I’ve always done, quite compulsively, actually. Early on in my career when I worked for commercial publishing, that was a problem for me.  I never liked doing things in some sort of set, inflexible way – which strictly speaking, is a lot more efficient when you have to meet a deadline. If you do four versions of a page trying to figure out how to approach it from a creatively different angle that still works, deadline issues become a problem.

Dream Life is a very personal project, and since there’s no editor involved, I get to make my own calls on how I would like to experiment with it. I have no problem using a strict grid or a conventional tool, but if I think there may be a way to do the job better, I’ll take the time to explore my options.

KD: Dream Life deals extensively with realms of the subconscious, a fact that is reflected in your fluid, shifting, often surreal approach to its art. Where did you pick up this interest in exploring the latent and manifest elements of the human psyche?

SS: It probably had something to do with my upbringing. Carl Jung was a huge interest of my father’s,  and to quote one source, he was a ‘legendary acid dealer’, so the whole ‘consciousness-twisting’ thing was a pretty big part of my landscape growing up. My father died when I was really young, and there’s a whole host of ideas that he was really into that I was sort of indoctrinated in before having a chance to be conscious of that. Later in life when I started reading up on this stuff myself, it was kind of weird recognizing the stuff I read from my Dad talking about it when I was a kid.

KD: Let’s move into The Rise and Fall of it All. This project is a collaboration between yourself and John O’Brien, and from what I read about it on RevolveR, you began work on it back in 2006. Can you briefly go over the history of that?

SS: I think it goes back even further than that. John’s a jazz musician and multimedia artist originally based out of Chicago, though I think he’s in Minnesota now. During the nineties, he ran a headhunting agency and paid his bills being a talent scout for IT companies. The IT industry apparently experienced a boom in the late nineties in anticipation of the ‘millenium bug’, which then busted at the turn of the decade. So he saw a lot of people lose their jobs, and while some people can bounce back from that, some others – depending on their circumstance or inclination, can get lost in the cracks.

John wanted to tell a story about someone who fell between the cracks. Someone who didn’t have a clear role of who he was to begin with, but after he loses his job, he winds up directionless and on the streets of Chicago. It’s there that he meets a Jazz musician named Elmo. One of the touchstones for Elmo is based on this group (that isn’t that well documented) called “The Ben-Ishmael Tribe,” a tri-racial tribe of people who made a home around Lake Michigan before it was colonized. These are displaced native groups, escaped slaves, and indentured servants who bonded together to make this amalgamated group.

Chicago was built somewhat around this tribe, who refused to work day jobs and weren’t really interested in a paycheck, but would still exchange their services for food or necessities. They later became targets of the eugenics movement, and many were sterilized. Over time, the tribe dissipated and ceased to be known as the Ben-Ishmaelites, and their culture effectively became lost.  This jazz player on the street, Elmo, is portrayed as a surviving descendant of this group.

KD: What appealed to you about this story?

SS: I like the story because it is about someone defining their relationship with society on their own terms, rather than the terms that society presents to them. The story is about Eliot, a lost person who doesn’t know how he fits into society, and Elmo, who through meeting him helps Eliot redefine his relationship to society and build and identity that he can have pride in.

For me, creatively it’s also interesting because all John gave me was a long piece of prose. There’s no script, so I can just take his prose -which almost has a lyrical quality – and come up with my own visuals for them. And the research has been really interesting, I mean I didn’t know who the Ben-Ishmael Tribe was at all before reading about them for this project.

KD: I also noticed that some of the finished work has a set of companion audio files that can be played along with it. Is that just the original prose that he wrote for The Rise and Fall of it All? And is that John doing the reading himself?

SS: The first main one, for the first completed fifteen pages, is actually an actor that John O’Brien used to employ back when he was a headhunter in the kind of jobs that the character Eliot has.  His name is John Fuhr, and he’s also the physical model for Eliot.

Part of the concept for this was for it to be a multimedia project with a projectable version with crudely animated art, and the idea was for John O’Brien to go on tour with John Fuhr, who would provide a live action performance while the projected component was played. Originally, John wanted me to do this entirely as a projected version, and I said I would be interested in doing it also as a book. Done in such a way that it could also be projected, so that we could all sort of have our cake and eat it too.

John is currently working on the project in a live-action film format, and he’s also rewritten the script multiple times. I’m still working with the original prose, which means that there are now multiple permutations of Rise and Fall of it All in existence.  John, being a jazz musician, has been very open and encouraging about me taking the ball and running with it for my own version of the project.

For more from Salgood Sam, you can check out his blog, Facebook Page, or follow him on Twitter.  You can find Sequential here.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Two Generals, which just saw first publication this past October 26th, has already received a barrage of media attention.  It has been profiled on the main page of CBC.ca, featured on MSN, netted him an interview on The National Post, and was seen in a TV segment on CBC’s The National. Combine this with planning a release party at the J.A. McIntosh Armoury in Cambridge, Ont., doing a cover story interview with Canadian literary magazine Quill & Quire, and maintaining an ongoing blog about the process involved with creating the book and… well, you start to get an idea why Scott’s free time may be at a premium as of late.

Which is why we were excited that he agreed to do a quick Q & A for us here on The Fabler.  Which awards Scott the “gentleman AND scholar” distinction, in my books.

Two Generals marks Chantler’s first journey into non-fiction, providing a historical account of his Grandfather Law Chantler’s experience in World War Two. Prior to the book, Scott was known for his work on the Three Thieves series as well as the critically acclaimed collected Northwest Passage.

While Two Generals presents a detailed depiction of the conditions for Canadian soldiers during the Second World War, it also tells a story about the friendship between Law Chantler and his best friend Jack Chrysler.  Interesting to note: the roots of this graphic novel can be traced back to Scott stumbling upon his Grandfather’s war diary purely by accident, and many of the details of the story were filled in when Jack Chrysler’s widow’s daughter contacted him with a collection of supplementary letters and photos.

Read on, for the full interview with Scott Chantler:

KD: How would you describe the premise behind Two Generals to someone who wasn’t as interested in the historic aspect of the narrative?

SC: It’s a more emotional book than most people seem to have expected. And really, the whole idea was to do a story about friendship. The fact that it plays out on such a large historical stage is really just set dressing; as I’ve said in other interviews, the story would have been largely the same if it had been about my grandfather and his friend climbing Mount Everest. It’s their relationship that’s the most important thing.

KD: When did you first consider turning your Grandfather’s story into a graphic novel?

SC: I only considered it after having so many people suggest it to me. When I would tell people about all of the personal WWII memorabilia I had, they would invariably suggest writing about it. At first I was horrified by the idea, but began to warm up to it the more I thought about it and researched.

KD: How well did you know Law Chantler during his life? Would you say that you were close?

SC: I was 25 when he died (in 1997), so we had an adult relationship and were close, yes.

KD: To what degree was making this book about you building a better understanding for yourself about what sort of man your grandfather really was?

SC: I had a pretty clear understanding of who he was already. And also a good general idea of what he had gone through in the war. The real motivation was to retrace his steps in as much detail as I could, to see just how closely I could recreate his experience. Out of curiosity, I guess, and an interest in making sure that information wasn’t lost.

KD: As I understand it, the story of how this book came together is quite a tale in itself. From the chance discovery of your grandfather’s war diary to Jack Chrysler’s widow’s daughter contacting you with the letters that helped supplement your research…

Did you at any point consider putting your own experience researching the book into the graphic novel as a sort of companion narrative?

SC: I decided quite early on that I was going to try to keep myself out of the book as much possible. I didn’t want to just rip off the structure of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, and it’s not as if my grandfather and I had some complicated relationship to untangle. I wanted it to be my grandfather’s story, not mine.

I am detailing the research and production of the book in a blog, though, which can be found at www.two-generals.com.

KD: What was the hardest information for you to procure while you were doing research for Two Generals?

SC: There are some things that I *never* found out, such as how my grandfather and Jack Chrysler first met. There’s also an officer mentioned near the end of the book, Capt. Jim Fawcett, who I was never able to find a photograph of…his appearance is invented, unfortunately (I put off drawing that page until the very end, just in case something turned up.)

KD: Throughout your research, did you speak with any actual veterans from WW II?

SC: Yes, I spoke extensively with a veteran named Col. Douglas Barrie, who had been a friend of my grandfather’s during the war. They were both the same rank (lieutenant) and were both platoon commanders, so they shared many of the same experiences. Col. Barrie died late last year, unfortunately, but his contributions to my research were exceptionally helpful.

KD: How did you artistically approach Two Generals differently than your previous graphic novels?

SC: I wanted this book to really get across the waiting, the fear, and the claustrophobia of preparing for war. So I was even more precise about timing that I usually am in my work. I don’t usually put so many panels on a page, but I went with nine panel pages to really slow down the tempo. And put them in a grid to create a highly regular, military-style rhythm.

There’s also the matter of colour, which is used more symbolically in Two Generals than in any of my previous books.

KD: Based on images I’ve seen of the finished book, the design looks fantastic – was it your intention from the start for the finished work to look like a diary itself, or did that come about much later?

SC: That was completely the idea of the book’s designer, Jennifer Lum. When we had the meeting about design, she had the whole thing worked out. I really just had to wait for her to stop talking so I could say “yes.” She gets the full credit for that one.

KD: As a final question, what sort of material can we look forward to seeing up on the Two Generals Blog in the coming weeks?

SC: Never-before-seen historical photographs, comparisons of reference pictures to finished panels from the book, excerpts from my grandfather’s diaries and my other research materials, behind-the-scenes anecdotes about where and how I discovered which pieces of information, and whatever else I think might be interesting to people.

It’s going to be fun and interesting, and people should read the book and then come to the site and follow along!

For more from Scott Chantler, you can visit him on his official website, follow him on Twitter, or visit the Two Generals blog.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

We tracked down Derek McCulloch, award-winning writer of the graphic novels Stagger Lee and Pug, for an interview about… well , just about everything under the sun.  We touched on both of the aforementioned books, his work on the upcoming Vertigo title Gone to Amerikay, and chatted at length about his comic career thus far.

And an interesting career it has been. Some background:

Derek first started writing regularly in the early 80’s, and alongside paul Stockton, founded the Edmonton-based indie comic publishing company Strawberry Jam Comics in 1985.

He wrote and published his first comic series’, To Be Announced and Night Life, during the time that Strawberry Jam Comics was active. While both received positive reviews, the success of the combined Strawberry Jam titles weren’t enough to keep the company from folding in ‘92.

Fast forward fourteen years later.  No, you didn’t misread that – McCulloch was then totally absent from any comic scene to speak of until 2006, when he released Stagger Lee with artist Shepherd Hendrix. FOURTEEN YEARS, people.

Stagger Lee, which was published by Image Comics, is the story of “Stagger” Lee Shelton – an actual person who, in 1895, walked into a bar on Christmas eve and murdered William “Billy” Lyons. The event was retold and reinterpreted in a number of songs, becoming a significant item of American folklore.

Since every version of Stagger Lee’s story is different, McCulloch’s book cannot be said to be a fully historically accurate interpretation of  events, but it did make for an incredibly engaging read.  McCulloch’s re-emergence into comic books netted him nominations in the 2006 Eisner and Eagle Awards, and won four Glyph awards – including Best Writer and Story of the Year.

After the success of Stagger Lee, Derek wrote a series of stories for the comic anthology PopGun, and released a children’s book titled T.Runt! in 2009. His most recent graphic novel, Pug, was just published by Image Comics this past July.

Pug is another period piece, this time set in the late fifties-to-early-sixties. The book, which was illustrated by Greg Espinoza, tells the story of a down-and-out former boxer who could have been great. Due to one particular bad decision he made in his life,  the boxer – Jake Mahoney – lost everything, and when we meet him he is living entirely on the kindness of his burlesque-dancing girlfriend, Kitten KaBoodle.

His next major project will be the original graphic novel Gone to Amerikay, which will be published through Vertigo Comics and features artist Colleen Doran. Little is currently known about the upcoming work, except that it will be 150 pages long and tells a multi-generational story about Irish emigrants to the United States.

It should be noted that while he has his roots in Ontario and Alberta, Canada, McCulloch is presently a Canadian living abroad. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

Derek was (graciously) quite thorough in his responses to my interview questions, so I’l let the interview speak for itself from here. Without further ado,

The Fabler Blog’s in-depth interview with Derek McCulloch:

KD: The earliest comics that I could find that were written by you were the Strawberry Jam titles that you worked on in the mid-to-late eighties.

Had you written anything prior to that?

DM: Written, yes.  Published, no. I wrote a lot of really lame science fiction stories in the early 80s and sent them to places like Analog, F&SF, and Isaac Asimov’s Magazine, and thankfully none of them were ever accepted, though I did get one or two nice rejections.  Mostly, though, where I got my practice was in APAs.  APA, for those who’ve never heard them term (the great majority, I’m sure), stood for amateur press alliance.  They were a form of collective fanzines and a kind of primitive pre-Internet social networking device.

I belonged to about fifteen different APAs at one point, and I developed a lot of terrible writing habits that I still have to this day.  But it also connected me with a lot of people who made a big difference in my life.  Strawberry Jam Comics actually grew out of an APA I started, GALACTUS.  A lot of other people involved with Strawberry Jam were members of GALACTUS, like my partner, paul Stockton, Mike Bannon, who drew To Be Announced, and others.  You could say accurately that all the horrible fan fiction I wrote for APAs in the early 80s were the necessary precursor to the theoretically professional comics work I did for Strawberry Jam.

KD: What comic books would you say were the most pivotal in inspiring you to pursue comic writing yourself?

DM: I probably first thought about writing comics in the mid-70s when I was a tweener addicted to Marvel Comics.  My comics writing heroes at that time were Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, and Doug Moench…and Stan Lee, though he wasn’t actually writing comics much anymore by the time I started reading them.  He was the inescapable voice of Marvel, though, so even though I only knew his writing from back issues, I thought of him as a major role model.

By the mid-80s, when we started Strawberry Jam, I had discovered Cerebus and dropped out of the superhero mainstream.  Cerebus was really the only comic I was reading at the time, and it was the one great inspiration that all of us involved in Strawberry Jam had in common.  Dave Sim’s creative and business approaches laid out the playbook we tried to follow…trying to tell new kinds of stories, trying to find new ways to tell them, and doing it all ourselves with a post office box for a business HQ.

I got attracted back to mainstream comics briefly by Alan Moore, when he was doing Swamp Thing, and later Watchmen.  From Hell was probably both the last comic I followed and the last comic to have really influenced me.  I was very conscious of it as a template for historical fiction in comics when I was writing Stagger Lee.  For the most part now my inspiration comes from other places—history, music, movies, and everyday life.  Other than writing them, comics don’t play much of a part in my life at all these days.

KD: After Strawberry Jam Comics folded in ‘92, it is my understanding that you took an extended hiatus from comicking that lasted roughly a decade.

Was this a true hiatus, or were you still somewhat active in producing mini-comics or stories for anthologies during this time?

DM: It was a true hiatus.  Strawberry Jam and my first marriage both happened to break up in the same general period of time.  My then-wife had been very involved in everything I did in comics, and my personal, social, and business lives were all pretty closely entwined.  It wasn’t a sudden switch-turning thing, but it gradually occurred to me that the six or seven years I’d spent living a very comics-dominated life hadn’t given me much of a return.

I wasn’t even reading comics at that point, so it was a very natural thing to just absent myself from the scene, particularly because I was very nomadic in the 90s.  I bounced around a lot.  I was in Vancouver for a bit, and Las Vegas, and wound up in New Orleans for several years, part of a scene that had more to do with bar crawling than comics.  It was the perfect place to be rootless and single and unhappy, and I started writing again there, in prose.  I wrote a cycle of autobiographical fiction stories and didn’t do anything with them.  They weren’t work for the ages, but in the process of writing them I finally came to a clear understanding of what my authorial voice was.  Years later, I self-published a collection of them with some other stories, which the morbidly curious can find here.

KD: What was the catalyst for bringing you back into the comic industry as an active participant?

DM: Around 1998, I decided it was time to take another crack at comics.  I don’t remember why I decided that.  I guess enough time had passed and I had an itch to be in print again.  I didn’t exactly work hard to scratch it, though.  Greg Espinoza and I were working on a proposal for a series called The Good Fairy that went nowhere.  The next year, I had the idea for Stagger Lee, as well as the initial ideas for Pug and Displaced Persons (which has yet to be completed).  I started working slowly on all three of them, initially planning on doing the rounds with proposals, and later deciding that I’d self-publish Stagger Lee and use it as my new calling card.

In 2000 I made the acquaintance of Charles Brownstein, who’s now the head of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund but at that time was between engagements.  We ended up working at the same place and spending a lot of time having long conversations about writing.  I told him about the various things I was working on, and he said that Stagger Lee sounded like something that would interest Eric Stephenson at Image.  I was so fixated on the idea of self-publishing at that point that I had a pretty lukewarm reaction to the idea, but Charles was persistent, and persuasive.  He introduced me to Eric, I reverse-engineered a proposal for the book, which was already written and had about twenty pages of art in the can, and Stagger Lee had a home.

KD: Stagger Lee marked your triumphant return to the medium, earning you significant praise as a writer as well as a number of awards and nominations.

To what degree was the success of Stagger Lee instrumental in your continued work in comics?

DM: That’s a difficult thought to contemplate, but given that I was already working on two other books before Stagger Lee saw print,  I’d have to guess I would have kept trying as long as people would let me.  And probably beyond that, given that I’ve always been willing to self-publish if I needed to.  I’d rather not need to at this point, but the option’s always there.

I will say that I was pretty sure Stagger Lee would get at least some positive response.  It’s a fascinating vein of Americana to build a story around and it’s the kind of stuff that wasn’t being done enough in comics, so even if we’d done a terrible job at it I think we’d have got points for trying.

KD: Let’s talk about Pug. You take a unique narrative approach to this title – weaving together two stories from past and present in a manner that mirrors the format of a traditional boxing match.

Did you have this approach in mind right from the outset, or did the idea come out as you were fleshing out the story?

DM: It’s hard to remember after 11 years, but I think the structure was one of the first things I had for the story, that it would be exactly 59 story pages made of 15 three-page “rounds” and 14 one-page “rest period” flashbacks.  A lot of other things changed about the story over 11 years, but that structure was always a given.

It’s counterintuitive, but a lot of the time it works that way for me…that I have in mind a structure I like and find the best way to make the story conform to it.  It probably doesn’t sound organic but in practice, it is.  For me, anyway.

KD: I read in an interview you did with Newsarama that your father was an amateur boxer.

Did Pug have a more personal  connotation for you due to that connection?

DM: Absolutely.  The book is dedicated to my dad.  He used to try to interest me in sports in different ways when I was a kid, but I was a hopelessly sedentary bookworm and couldn’t have been less interested in the Grey Cup or the fortunes of the Leafs.

The boxing stuff was always interesting to me, though.  I think the only sporting event I can remember willingly watching was Muhammad Ali’s rematch with Leon Spinks.  If my dad never boxed or I’d never known about it, I suppose it’s possible I would have thought of a boxing story at some point but I doubt it would have captured my imagination the same way.

KD: Both Pug and Stagger Lee – as well as Gone to Amerikay, to my understanding – are historical works that portray snapshots of different eras.

What’s the allure to you of working on stories with a non-contemporary setting?

DM: I just love stuff from before my time.  I like old movies and old slang and old clothing and signs and packaging and what have you…all the little markers of a living culture.  I’m not sure why it is.  Maybe it’s because it’s easier to get a big picture look at something when you’ve got a vantage point of decades, or centuries.  The world could use a big sweeping narrative about the nature of racism in America today, but I find it a little easier to get a handle on what it was like in 1895.

The other thing that all three books have in common – along with Displaced Persons if it ever gets finished – is that they actually depict multiple time periods.  Stagger Lee has flashbacks that go back to the 1860s and Pug takes place in both 1962 and 1956.  It’s a little difference, but I crucial one.  I’d kind of like to write something that doesn’t jump back and forth in time just to show I know how to do it, but I like it a lot as a device.  It lets you take a more complete look at a person or a place or a story if you see it in one time and then again at another and then another, and make the triangulation between them.

We’re all a construct of our own pasts, the sum total of all our decisions and experiences and happenstances.  I think you need a macro view to get at that.

KD: What other eras do you think you would like to visit in your future works?

DM: My main period of fascination is from the late 1800s through to the end of World War II.  For whatever reason, I particularly like stories about New York in that period, stuff like the Godfather movies or novels by people like E.L. Doctorow or, moving upstate to Albany, William Kennedy.  I don’t know where this fascination comes from – I have no personal connection to New York and was never even interested in visiting there until business finally took me there a few years ago, but give me a book that tells a tale of corruption centered around the demolition of Penn Station and I’m happy.  I have a couple of things in mind that fall into that category and I hope one day I’m able to get to them.

I also have a big big story in mind that takes place where I live, in Oakland, over the course of about 60 years, but I’ll have to be a much bigger name than I am if I ever want to sell it.  Either that or go back to self-publishing.

KD: What can you tell me about your experience writing Gone to Amerikay?

DM: It was my first time working with an editor, which is something that gave me trepidation going in.  I’d had a long time to grow accustomed to calling my own shots, and I’d heard a lot of horror stories about editors in comics.  I’m happy to say it couldn’t have been a better first editorial experience.  Joan Hilty, the editor on Gone to Amerikay, has been stellar.  She and I went through about four drafts of the initial proposal together before she pronounced it ready to submit.  She was incredibly sharp and had great story sense.  Every note I got from her was soundly reasoned to make a genuine improvement in the story.  More than a couple of times, she pointed out stuff that I’d thought about changing but had left alone out of laziness or complacency or whatever…it’s incredibly valuable to work with someone you can trust to catch you and call you on it if you’re cutting corners.

Regrettably, Joan was a victim of the recent round of layoffs at DC.  Colleen and I were both devastated to learn that Joan would not be able to see the book through to publication.  Gone to Amerikay would not be what it is without Joan Hilty.

KD: Can you tell me anything about how the project came together in the first place?

DM: It’s a long and tangled story, but the brief version is that Colleen and I did a story together for Comic Book Tattoo, the Tori Amos anthology that Image put out a couple of years ago.  We found we had a great working rapport and were both really happy with the finished story.  I had an idea for another book and asked Colleen if she wanted to work with me on it.  She said sure, and moreover she knew that several editors (including Joan) were keen to have her do a project in the style she’d invented for Comic Book Tattoo.  For the long and tangled reasons that I won’t go into here, there were several large mutations along the way in both in the book concept and the art style, but what we’ve ended up with is, I think, something really special.

It’s too bad I can’t share any of Colleen’s pages with you.  It’s a complicated book and she’s really risen to the challenge. It’s extraordinary work.

KD: What else are you working on these days? Is there anything else you have in the works/on the horizon that you can speak about?

DM: I’m working on an anthology for Image, a half dozen stories based on an existing literary property.  I can’t say any more than that yet, but it’s a labour of love and I’m working with another bunch of wonderful artists.  Ron Turner, whom I haven’t done anything really substantial with since Strawberry Jam, is acting as art director.  I’ve written four of the six stories right now and am just seeing the first pencils on it.  No idea when it will be complete and out, but it’s the largest comics thing on the horizon right now.  And it all takes place in one time period, so there you go.

I’m also co-writing the book for a musical to be produced off-Broadway in New York sometime in the next year or two.  That probably sounds kind of left-field and I guess it is, but it all ties together eventually.

For more from Derek McCulloch, you can visit his website, check out his Stagger Lee blog, or stop by The Derek McCulloch Experience on Facebook.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

When people are forced to adjust to periods of significant change, we often turn to familiar comforts while we struggle to adapt. Such comforts could be as simple as a phone call home, or time spent observing old traditions with a loved one.

Which is why the most jarring of changes are often those that affect our most familiar, static comforts.

Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother And Me, opens with an anecdote about how the author used to suffer from nightmares that only her Mom could make go away.

In it, she compares herself to Madeline from the popular children’s books, and equates her Mother to the kindly and ever-watchful character of Miss Clavel. At that point in her life, her Mother was a constant that she could always find comfort within.

After her Mother, Midge, starts exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s Disease, the lives of Sarah and her family are permanently altered as they struggle to cope with something no one could possibly plan for.

Tangles revolves around the journey of Sarah’s family as they try to make sense of an impossible situation. Their story is shared through a web of memories and retrospectives, woven together by Leavitt’s sparse, emotionally-expressive style of illustration.

After recently reading through Tangles myself (in one sitting no less!), I can attest that it really is a powerful book. I would add the disclaimer that it is not for the emotionally fragile, unless of course you are okay with the likelihood that this book will bring you to tears.

That being said, Tangles is not just one long, depressing story of loss by any stretch of the imagination.

The relationship that Leavitt portrays between her and her Mother is one filled with love, mutual dependency, and a fierce protectiveness that’s speaks volumes about the nature of family. Even at some of her Mother’s most advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, moments of happiness still manage to shine through.

Ahem… So ends the book review component of this post. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to meet Sarah Leavitt, who is herself Vancouver-based, at the Calgary launch party for Tangles this past Monday.

The wonderfully personable Miss Leavitt agreed to sit down with me and chat about her inspirations, the reception she has received for Tangles so far, and her experience putting together an original graphic memoir.  Although Sarah has published prose, poems, and minicomics in the past, Tangles is actually her first published book.

“When my Mom got sick,” Sarah says, “I was really obsessed with recording everything. I had my journals and sketchbooks, and I would often doodle little things that she was doing. I started taking writing classes, and I wrote some poetry as well as some essays about what my family was going through. One time my sister and I were talking about the really stupid stuff that people had said to us when they found out my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I made that into a comic that was later published in Geist magazine.

After she died in the Fall of 2004, I spent a month house-sitting for some friends to get out of my house. I was sitting in their attic with all this stuff spread out around me, and I decided to put all of the notes and sketches together in one place. This writing teacher of mine saw what I had put together and said, ‘I think you’ve found your medium’.”

According to Leavitt, her teacher’s advice made sense. She realized that the graphic medium really would be the most natural way for her to tell the story of her Mom’s experience with Alzheimer’s.

Leavitt had already began to explore a growing interest in comics. She had illustrated a few minicomics, some of which were published in Modern Dog, and had found a collection of comic creators working in the medium that genuinely inspired her.

“I started out reading Maus and Persepolis,” she says, “and from there I got into Seth, and I really like Louis Riel by Chester Brown.  I love Kim Deitch – his work is so detailed and fantastical, but simultaneously edgy.

I was also very inspired by Miriam Engelberg, who wrote a graphic memoir called Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, and Brian Fies, who wrote a webcomic called Mom’s Cancer that was later collected as a book. I actually wrote to Brian when I was trying to sell my book, and he has been so amazing – he blurbed my book and he has really been super helpful.”

Sarah admits that setting down to write a full-sized graphic memoir as her first published book was daunting, but she says it helped that she didn’t realize how much effort it would actually take.

“I think it was good that I didn’t really know,” she laughs, “because I probably wouldn’t have done it. I did my first version of Tangles when I was doing my MFA for Creative Writing at UBC. It was much shorter and rougher than it is now, and I submitted it to a publisher who promptly rejected it. I realized that I was going to have to redraw every single page, and so I did.

I went from drawing on 8 1/2 x 11″ sheets of paper to full 12 x 14 bristol board pages. I drew everything with pencils first, and went over them with technical pen.  It was a real learning process, from trying to figure out how to scan and realign everything to even just something as small as getting the format right for the font.”

After her first rejection, Leavitt hired an agent, and, armed with a polished version of her original story, wound up connecting with Freehand Books. Freehand wound up publishing the book, which was released this past September.

One of the reasons that Tangles is so successful at evoking a strong, lasting emotional response is because of Sarah’s unflinching candidness in telling her Mom’s story. Not long into the book, it becomes  clear that this is a very intimate look into the lives of Sarah and her family.

“I never thought of doing it otherwise,” says Leavitt, “I don’t think I would want to do it if it was less honest. I didn’t want it to be a rosy story about ‘my mom was sick and we all pulled together and it worked out’, because it didn’t. I wanted to show that there were ways in which my family was really awesome and we all worked well together, but there were also ways in which we kind of sucked. It took us a while to try to figure out how to deal with the situation, and I think that’s true for anybody that’s ever had to take care of anybody with Alzheimer’s.”

When I mentioned to Sarah that it certainly takes guts to put such an intimate perspective of your life out there for the public to read, her response was a modest one:

“I think a lot of it is denial. A friend of mine messaged me on Facebook and said they had seen copies of my book in a bookstore in Vancouver after it released, but before I had my official launch. Then it hit me that, wow, people can go in there and read about me who don’t know me at all. Strangers are going to be reading my book!”

Of course, it isn’t just Sarah’s life that readers of Tangles are privy to. The story also predominantly features her father, her sister Hannah, and several other individuals who are either extended family themselves, or friends of the family.

Sarah says that the response she has received from others that were in the book has been overall positive so far.

“My Dad has been kind of stunned by how people talk about him. He just did what he had to do, and he took care of my Mom in this really beautiful way.. I’ve told my Dad things that people have said to me about him after reading it, and he’s been like, ‘wow, it’s like I’m a character in a book!’ and I tell him, that’s because you are a character in a book’. ”

Tangles has been met with enthusiastic reception, pulling in strong initial praise in addition to being shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize.

Some highlights for Leavitt have included meeting her idol, Lynda Barry, who admitted to having cried when she read Tangles for the first time, and having a totally broad and varied group of people tell her that they took something of value from her graphic memoir.

“I think it’s really cool when people connect with it that don’t have my same experience.  It’s especially cool when people read it that don’t normally read graphic novels. There was this older gentleman at an event in Edmonton, who I would guess was in his seventies, that came up to me and based on my book asked for a list of graphic novels that he could check out at the local library. I thought that was fantastic.”

As far as the response Sarah has received from individuals that read it and also had a loved one diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she says that it has been pretty intense.

“People just come up to me and tell me these really beautiful, often personal, things about their family members, or they come up and thank me for talking about the subject. I have also had a few people come up to me that were just crying so hard they couldn’t really talk.”

I asked Sarah if she could have every person who reads her book take at least one thing away from it, what she would want that one thing to be.

Her response:

“I would like them to feel moved in some way. I guess it’s what most artists want, but it is a significant thing to me if my work could have the power to move someone to tears or to laughter. ”

For more from Sarah, you can check out her official website or view more about Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother And Me over at Freehand Books.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming