What do these comic book artists have in common? (Other than that they are all based in Vancouver, BC)

They represent just a handful of the fantastically diverse talents who have contributed to Cloudscape Comics over the years.

Cloudscape is a Vancouver-based comic collective that has published four comic anthologies since their inception in 2008. For more about who they are and what they do, I would direct your attention to this post I wrote profiling the group.

This past year, the folks behind Cloudscape Comics decided to try their luck in the wonderful world of internet crowdfunding. Hey, publishing quality comic anthologies doesn’t come cheap – just ask The Anthology Project.

For their fourth publishing effort, titled “21 Journeys“, Cloudscape decided they wanted to produce a higher quality of book than their previous anthologies. Inspired by books like The Anthology Project Vol. 1, they wanted to release something that would make comic shop perusers take note and really stand out on the shelf.

To that end, they turned to IndieGoGo as their fundraising platform of choice. While they didn’t hit their ideal goal of $7000, they were able to break the $4000 mark – just enough to get the book done the way they wanted.

I recently caught up with Cloudscape Comics’ President Jeff Ellis to talk about the book, which is due out ’soon’ (though no date has been formally set) and can already be purchased in e-book form here.

My chat with Jeff is below:

KD: What can you tell me about how 21 Journeys came together?

Jeff: Well, we had a long planning meeting about what we wanted to do, and we actually ended up with two ideas on the table. Those ideas were either fantasy or travel. Ultimately, we decided that since the last book was sci fi, fantasy is maybe a little too similar. So we thought we would do traveling first – stories involving some sort of ‘journey’ theme -  and then we’d come back to fantasy after.

We had also just finished looking at the Anthology Project, and they had a hard cover full color book, and we thought ‘okay, let’s pull out all the stops on this one and do a full colour travel anthology.’

KD: What have you done in color before?

Jeff: We did Funday Sunnies, which was a 48 page full color book. Which is not nearly as difficult to pull off as a 250 page full color book. Our main problem with the new book was financing.

KD: Speaking of financing, what was your experience with IndieGoGo like?

Jeff: Oh it was really fantastic. We were getting a little worried if we could pay for the printing, and we didn’t have the ability to use Kickstarter because no one in our group has an American bank account.

Angela Melick from Wasted Talent sent me the link to IndieGoGo and said ‘you should be looking into this’.

So we set it up and started doing preorders, and we offered some of our older books as well as some sketches as incentives for donation. It was a little slowgoing at first, but we did hit our target and we achieved enough funding for the book.

KD: Do you feel like sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter can be game-changers for indie comic creators looking to put together anthologies?

Jeff: Absolutely. We’re not the only group that’s finding that if you show people what you’re going to do and ask for the money up front, people are willing to contribute. There are so many recent examples of people setting up an account on one of those sites and doing something that they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.

It’s funny, I had a friend sort of criticize me for using IndieGoGo, and his logic was, ‘well you have a website, and you have paypal – why don’t you do it yourself?’ I think people don’t trust to send their money to an individual. But then sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter add a bit more legitimacy to it. It makes people feel like they can trust where their money is going, and that really impacts fundraising for creative projects in a positive way.

KD: Sites like IndieGoGo allow for contributions from nearly anywhere around the world. Was it a surprise to you at all where some of the donations you received came from?

Jeff: We had a lot of contributions from Australia. In fact, we did a 24 hour event where we stayed up for 24 hours on our U-Stream doing comic jams and selling commissioned sketches, just sort of drumming up support as a last push for the remaining money we needed to hit our target. What was interesting is when we hit about two or three o’clock in the morning, most of our Canadian supporters had gone to bed, but suddenly we had about five Australians on chatting with us. They got us through to about 6am when the Canadians started joining in again.

KD: Now that you’ve done a book in color, do you think you could go back to doing another black and white anthology?

Jeff: It’s funny, if you were to ask Jonathan (Dalton), one of the other board members on Cloudscape Comics, he would say never again. He’d say we’re never doing another full color book.

I say this all the time, but this is probably the best book we’ve ever made. The quality, the art, the revisions we did, the fact that it’s in color – it really is the greatest book we’ve done, but it also logistically was a nightmare. It was more than we’ve ever had to cope with as an organization.  The fundraising alone was a whole other dimension we’ve never had to deal with, and it definitely burnt us out a bit.

Giants of Main Street, the next book, which is fantasy based, is going to go back to black and white. I don’t want to say we’d never do another, personally. I feel like if you give us a chance to rest up, and maybe check back in a year we could give it another shot. I think it would go a lot smoother now that we have the experience under our belts. Everything we’ve ever done was a struggle the first time around and then much easier the next time through.

KD: Speaking more to the content of the book, what can you say about some of the new contributors that are making their Cloudscape debut with 21 Journeys?

Jeff: We cast our net much wider with this book, which is also probably part of what made it more logistically difficult. One of the big ones for us is we have Steve Rolston doing the cover art. Which is really cool, because he’s out there doing Ghost Projekt for Oni Press, he did Emiko Superstar…he’s a veteran of the Vancouver scene and one of my favourite Vancouver-based artists. So having him do the cover was a real treat, and it made us feel like we were doing something right if Steve was up for taking some time out of his day to do some art for us.

A few new people submitted as well, which we were really excited about. Another big get for us was having Miriam Libicki contribute. She’s been working for years independently as part of Real Gone Girl studios and doing her comic Jobnik.

KD: Once the book releases, where do you anticipate people will be able to get their hands on it?

Jeff: This is where we’ve always kind of fallen flat, is distribution. I often comment to people that ‘we make the greatest books nobody’s ever heard of’. We’re hoping with this book we do our Diamond application.

We’re thinking that this could be the book that meets Diamond’s quota. We’ve always been a bit gunshy about that, because we don’t want to burn our bridges early on. We’re also doing e-books, which is huge for us. We believe that digital distribution is a big part of the future of comics, and to that end we’re going to be offering 21 Journeys as well as our last book, Exploded View, as purchasable e-books.

We’re going to sell the printed copies, but also go ahead with the digital books. Worst that can happen is nobody buys it – but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Selling books digitally could be the financial boost we need to help publish future anthologies.

You can purchase the digital version of 21 Journeys here, or go here to download a preview of the book.

For more from Cloudscape Comics, check out their official website.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Even at the most grassroots DIY level of minicomic publishing,  the funds needed to mass photocopy, assemble, and distribute your work can be more than what the casual comic creator is willing to spend. Not to mention the costs associated with getting your work seen outside of your local area. Putting your work online can help, but in many cases the most effective form of word-of-mouth advertising is formed by having a presence at Comic Cons – and shelling out for the booth space, travel fare, and accommodations isn’t always easy to budget for.

Getting involved with a comic collective and participating in the creation of an anthology has long been a preferred alternative for indie creators looking to maximize their exposure while minimizing cost.This makes sense for a few key reasons. Dividing the price to publish and distribute a collection of comics in one volume between a number of individuals is obviously more cost effective than individually publishing and distributing separate projects. Additionally, all it takes is one or two contributors to travel to a given Convention in order to showcase everyone’s work.

That being said, if you aim to publish a high quality anthology that really stands out on the shelves of your local comic shop, while it is certainly more affordable to approach it as a group, the cost can still be daunting. The price of that hard bound, gold-embossed book with the glossy paper that really makes the colours pop isn’t going to be something you can pay for with change scraped out between furniture pillows.  Unless you’re like, P. Diddy or something and you have wads of hundreds stuffed under the velour upholstery.  In which case, you probably could afford to make that book on your own anyway. (For the record, Diddy, I would read it.)

There is a point to this, I promise. I was navigating the harsh digital seas of the interwebs the other day, and I came upon not one but two anthology groups that we have previously showcased on The Fabler Blog that are exploring clever new ways to secure funds for their respective projects.

Namely, these collectives are Cloudscape Comics, based out of Vancouver, BC, and The Anthology Project, which is a less regionalized group with contributors across North America.  For related Fabler Blog profiles on the fine fellows behind these organizations, you can look here (Cloudscape) and here (AP).

Both organizations had the idea to utilize online crowdsourced fundraising tools. Essentially, websites that connect people with interesting ideas together with potential donors up for chipping a bit into a bigger pot for a good cause.

The Anthology Project launched their fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, the self-proclaimed ‘largest funding platform for creative projects in the world’. Their campaign began in the beginning of October 2010 with the goal of raising $7000 to support the production and distribution of The Anthology Project Volume 2 (view their first anthology, which I highly recommend, here).

Kickstarter allows creative-types to promise incentives to their donors based on how much they’re giving. In this case, The Anthology Project crew promised $10 pledges a set of 3 exclusive buttons, $30 the button set plus a copy of the second anthology, $40 the buttons, a signed anthology, a limited edition print, and a printed thank you in the book…. all the way through to a $500 pledge awarding the donor all of the above, plus an original painting done by one of the AP contributors.

By their deadline of December 1st, 2010, The Anthology Project managed to not only surpass their goal, but double it. As of the end of their funding drive, they raised $14,705 from 203 backers.

Cloudscape Comics just launched their fundraising campaign last week, on January 13th. For their crowd funding platform they chose IndieGoGo, which allows for a far broader selection of causes than Kickstarter does with its emphasis on creativity. Indiegogo also supports start-up businesses, charities, movements – pretty well anything that can stem from an idea and requires capital to realize.

With a goal of $7000 to be reached by April 6th, the Cloudscape gang aims to use the money to print 1000 copies of their forthcoming anthology, “21 Journeys”.  You can view their video about the campaign below:

As with Kickstarter, Indiegogo allows for incentives to be awarded at different tiers of donation.  Cloudscape’s list of incentives are posted on the Indiegogo page for 21 Journeys.  Just a few days in, they’ve (as of the time of writing this) already drummed up $895 – a promising start by any standard.

It’s encouraging to see the indie comic industry actively exploring new digital channels that make self-publishing more financially viable, with websites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo each offering a useful service to that end.

However, as with any venture involving money, I also recommend you know what you’re getting into before you sign up for a fundraising campaign. For instance, both of the above sites charge a percentage fee of the total funds received if the target amount is reached. Which is understandable, since they have to make money somehow.

Kickstarter charges 5% of the funds raised if a target is successfully hit. If the goal isn’t reached, no charge is applied. In fact, if the goal isn’t reached with Kickstarter, no money changes hands whatsoever. They have an all-or-nothing approach, wherein all money is refunded to the donors if the project fails to generate enough support to meet the goal.

IndieGoGo only charges 4% if the target goal is reached; however, if the target goal is not met, they will still allow for funds to change hands and charge a 9% fee.

In both cases, the creator of the campaign owns 100% of all ideas associated with their project.

You can view more about Kickstarter’s policies here, and IndieGoGo’s here.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

In keeping with tradition, we’re ringing in the new year by looking at some of the stuff that’s impacted our little corner of the interweb over the past twelve months. This includes some of the news bits the Fabler Blog has reported on, some of the changes and landmarks the main site has experienced, and of course, a Coles Notes list of the interviewees we’ve featured on the site throughout 2010.

Let’s start by talking about The Fabler directly. Our second year online has been filled with small triumphs (and minor road bumps), but a few in particular stand out.

First, our presence at the 2010 Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo was much stronger than at the ‘09 Expo, which was when the Fabler first launched. The 2010 Expo gave us a great chance to network, spread the good word about the site, and nab some pretty nifty interviews in our first (and, to date, only) Fabler Blog video segment. The Expo itself was a huge success last year, bringing in over 20,000 attendees – over twice the amount of the 2009 Expo. We were thrilled to be a part of that.

The Fabler’s next landmark came in May, when the site’s founder, Bruno Steppuhn, took home the Digital Alberta Media Fresh Award for Best Use of Social Media on behalf of The Fabler. You can read more about that in Bruno’s post here.

Shortly after, we launched our first major comic contest, which ran from June 15th to September 15th.  The Fabler gave away a Sony PS3 Bundle, a Wacom Intuos4 XL, and for first prize, a Wacom Cintiq 21UX. Competition was stiff, as many new contributors to the Fabler submitted a diverse and colourful array of sequential entries into the contest, but ultimately there could be only one grand prize winner. The first place finalist was Scott Ferguson, for his comic Scout Crossing.

As a reminder to all interested parties, the second Fabler Comic Contest started on October 15th and is currently still on until January 15th. If you’re interested in tossing your hat (comic) into the ring (upload section), you can view the full rules and regulations here.

To briefly touch on some of the larger news items we mentioned on The Fabler Blog, the year opened with a fresh new lawsuit between legendary comic artist Jack Kirby’s heirs and Marvel regarding copyrights to the work he did on a tonne of iconic comic characters. The latest news on this legal battle is that there really is no news. Honestly. There was a counter-suit at some point, Marvel wasn’t forced to pay damages, the Kirby Estate’s case wasn’t thrown out… It’s all sitting fairly stagnant in judicial purgatory.

In Canadian Comic news, Seth’s George Sprott: (1894-1975) unsurprisingly garnered the Doug Wright Award for Best Book, while Michael DeForge won Best Emerging Talent for Lose #1, and the Pigskin Peters Award went to Marc Bell for Hot Potatoe. Meanwhile, over on the Joe Shuster Awards side of town, Stuart Immonen earned Best Artist, Maryse Dubuc won Best Writer for her work on Les Nombrils, tome 04, and Karl Kerschl’s fantastic comic The Abominable Charles Christopher was named Best Webcomic.

In July, the world of digital Indie comics was changed forever when Zuda Comics announced it was shutting down. Zuda was DC’s online imprint and a place for independent creators to post their works in hopes of earning a publishing contract with one of DC. They were shut down as part of a DC corporate restructuring that also saw half of their staff relocate from New York to California.

This led into a host of additional major industry announcements that came to light around September and October. The Wildstorm Comics imprint was shut down, much to the chagrin of fans of The Authority and Astro City. DC and Marvel announced that their monthly issue comic prices would drop an entire dollar in 2011. Dark Horse announced a new digital publishing initiative, also coming in 2011.

As we venture forward into 2011, the state of the industry seems to finally have some sort of gameplan for adapting to a changing market. That market is of course the digital market, which had grown from an estimated value of around $1 million in 2009 to $8 million in 2010.

The Fabler Blog will continue to have its eye on the industry in this regard, and we’ll post the ‘news that fits’. Whatever that means.

This year you can also expect to see more big changes in store for the main portion of The Fabler, but I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise on that front.

In bringing this, the  first post of 2011, to a close, I would like to thank all of you Fabler fans and comic creators who have brought something to the site over the past year. I would also like to thank you for reading our humble little blog, when the internet is such a big, wide, interesting place.

On that note, for your handy convenience and ready perusal, here’s a list of all the interesting individuals we featured on the blog over the past year:

Gibson Twist (Pictures of You, Our Time in Eden)

Kelly Tindall (Archie Snow)

Ben Steeves (Zom-Ben, Our Time in Eden)

Aaron Leighton (Illustrator, member of Trio Magnus)

Colleen MacIsaac (Minicomic creator and multimedia artist)

Marta Chudolinska (Back + Forth: A Novel in 90 Linocuts)

Eric Vedder (Aardehn, Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors)

Adam Bourret (I’m Crazy)

Ryan Sohmer (Least I Could Do, Looking for Group)

James Turner (Warlord of Io)

Nick Thornborrow (The Anthology Project)

Ethan Rilly (Pope Hats)

Jenny Romanchuk (The Zombie Hunters)

Evan Munday (Quarter-Life Crisis)

Damian Willcox (dorkboy Comics)

Jason Loo and Arthur Dela Cruz (The 3 Second Rule)

Robin Thompson (Vancouver Comic Art teacher, and artist on Champions of Hell)

Jonathon Dalton (A Mad Tea-Party, Lords of Death and Life)

Angela Melick (Wasted Talent)

Cloudscape Comics (Vancouver-based comic collective)

Jim Zubkavich (Skullkickers)

Eric Kim (The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare)

Mike Jasper and Niki Smith (In Maps & Legends)

Noel Tuazon (The Broadcast)

Scott Ferguson (Scout Crossing, Nerf This)

Ty Templeton (Northern Guard)

Danielle Keller (GHOST!, Acid Monday)

Sarah Leavitt (Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, Mother and Me)

Derek McCulloch (Stagger Lee, Pug)

Matthew Dunn (Lonely Monsters)

Scott Chantler (Two Generals)

Rhian Engel (My Life as a Grum)

Jason Bradshaw (Boredom Pays, the Worst in Everything)

Salgood Sam (Dream Life, The Rise and Fall of it All)

-Post Written by Kevin de Vlaming

In addition to their close proximity to Canada’s Western Coastline, they share something else in common; founding membership in a comic book collective by the name of Cloudscape Comics.

I was fortunate enough to recently connect with a few individuals involved with the group. My goal was to learn a little about what they do, what they stand for, and how local comic creators can benefit from collaborating through a collective like their own.

According to Jeff Ellis, current Cloudscape President and a founding member himself, the collective’s reason for being is to promote and assist Vancouver-area comic artists and writers.

“There are a lot of talented individuals living in the city,” says Jeff, “but they’re all working on their own, and it’s much harder to get recognition working that way. Cloudscape Comics is a way to support those individuals.  Secondary to that, we also want to build up the reputation of comics in general – we’re trying to make interesting fictional stories that have a broad appeal, not just for kids and not just for really discerning indie connoisseurs.”

Jeff says that Cloudscape was born out of the initial desire of a few Vancouver comic artists to start up a local collective. Without any real idea where to start, he and a friend created a Facebook Fan page, which ended up pulling in quite a few members. They decided to meet in person at Our Town Cafe in Vancouver, which became a weekly event.

“The next idea that came to us,” says Jeff, “Was hey, we have all of these artists making comics – rather than spending money to do our own individual works why don’t we work together and pool our resources to publish something. That’s where our first volume came from, Robots, Pine Trees and Broken Hearts. It was a 48 page floppy comic, and doing that encouraged us to keep going.”

Angela Melick, author of the popular webcomic Wasted Talent, initially became involved with Cloudscape immediately after graduating from University.

“I was searching for structure in my life before I found a job, and Jonathon Dalton told me about a group he was starting up with these other cartoonists,” says Angela, “I said hey you know, I’ve got nothing better to do, I’m unemployed, and I’m looking to get back into doing comics. So I wrote a story for the group and we actually managed to publish an anthology together, which I think shocked everyone in the community.  As many cartoonists could tell you, anthology groups come together very often, and ninety percent of the time they implode.”

She says that publishing Robots, Pine Trees and Broken Hearts was significant in that it showed the group they could actually pull together to release a quality anthology. In doing so, herself and the other Cloudscape artists also learned a great deal about the publication process  and what they would need to tell artists submitting works in order to  make the process flow more smoothly in the future.

“Since then,” says Angela, “we published Historyonics, which was a long book of history comics, and we published Sunday Funnies, which was a color book  – and that impressed a lot of people, because they didn’t know that color was achievable. Our latest book, Exploded View, we really tightened up on the editorial direction and we’re really proud of the emphasis on story-telling in the book. I think with Exploded View, we really hit our stride as a group. ”

As for the origin of the name, Cloudscape Comics was not the group’s original moniker. Back in the beginning, they called themselves Cumulus  – that is, until they found out there was another publisher in Montreal with the same name, coincidentally also doing comics.

“We decided to rename ourselves,” says Jeff,  “after a long meeting at the comic shop we took a vote and Cloudscape was what we ended up with. I think we were looking for something related to the Vancouver weather, so we came up with a lot of names very cloud and rain related. Precipitation Press was another option. (Jeff laughs)”

Over the course of four anthologies, Cloudscape has built an impressive list of over thirty contributors – including the likes of Camilla d’Errico, Colleen macIsaac, Jordyn Bochon, and Colin Upton, to name a few. (We’ve actually featured both Colleen and Jordyn on The Fabler Blog before – click on their respective names to read the articles!)

Of those contributors, Colin Upton would be the member with the longest hands-on experience in comics. He started making minicomics in 1985, and released his first full-length comic, Big Thing, in 1990. He saw his comics published by Fantagraphics and several other Seattle-based alternative publishers throughout the nineties, before returning to the minicomic format around 2000.

“I remember coming across the first Cloudscape anthology,” says Colin, “and being very impressed with this group of young people who were managing to get their stuff together enough to publish in print.  I particularly appreciated this since so many new comic writers and artists choose to put their stuff online, rather than publish in print.”

Another draw for Colin was the fact that Cloudscape was very story-oriented.

“At the time,” he says, “I was seeing a lot of comics that were what I like to call ‘arty-type comics’. That is, ones that don’t have much of a plot or direction where it seems to be mostly about sketching or drawing, rather than anything story-driven.  So I appreciated that about Cloudscape, that they were story-oriented.”

For these reasons, Colin decided to get involved with the collective. He has contributed to every Cloudscape anthology since.

“Cloudscape allows local comic creators a chance to come together and do something larger than a minicomic,” says Upton, “Also, in my case it allows me to connect with what’s going on in the comic scene these days. Just about all of the artists I knew doing comics in the eighties or nineties have gone on to other things – working in video games, graphic design and the like. It gets quite lonely when you reach my age, having very few cartoonists as your contemporaries.

Not to mention, hanging out with a group of younger people involved with web-publishing and the modern world of comic publishing in general helps me come to terms with those developments I don’t yet fully understand myself.”

The value of connecting with local comic creators is, in itself, a significant benefit to collectives like Cloudscape. As Angela Melick points out, drawing comics can be a very isolated experience.

“One of the greatest things for an artist about the internet is being able to find other artists,” she says, “but being able to do that locally is ten times better. You can actually talk to people informally about the artistic process, and learn from their technique as you’re sitting with them, watching them draw.  Even if you don’t ever publish anything in your group, just finding other cartoonists near you is tremendously helpful for anyone.”

Currently, anyone that is presently living in Vancouver or has previously lived there can contact the group about getting involved.

“All of the contact information is on the website,” says Jeff. “We’re currently trying to keep the anthologies grounded in a West Coast perspective, but we also run comic battles as a weekly feature on our website, and anyone can submit something for that.  We post a theme, and anyone is welcome to submit a comic, then we put it up for a week for everyone to vote on. The winner gets the glory (and possibly a prize, depending if we have a prize ready).”

Jeff says that one major goal for the near future of Cloudscape Comics is to establish a distribution method that can get their anthologies onto shelves in a wider radius of bookstores.  Being a sharp sort of fellow, he acknowledges that this is no small feat.

(For those unfamiliar with the world of indie publishing, distribution is traditionally one of the largest hurdles to overcome – largely thanks to the existing, outdated, and non-indie-friendly Diamond-based infrastructure of distribution.)

The group is also working on tightening their editorial control over the next Cloudscape Comics anthology, Journeys, which would hopefully be due out sometime around next March .

“When cloudscape first started, it was very democratic,” says Colin Upton, “which has its problems. But increasingly they are attempting to up the quality of the book by making editorial decisions and judgements and suggestions. Which is great, because in my experience with editors I’ve dealt with before – even from professional publishers like Fantagraphics – you don’t usually get much feedback. Getting that from the editorial group at Cloudscape really helps you improve your story and see some of the mistakes you might otherwise have missed yourself.”

“We’re really trying to up the ante, creatively, ” says Jeff. “We’re trying to push everyone to write and draw to their best ability, and we hope to make something that could maybe catch some critical acclaim. We’d love to attract the attention of, say, the Shuster Awards.” (hint)

You can find Cloudscape Comics  on the web, and purchase any of their four anthologies to date here. They also have a Twitter account!

Jeff Ellis keeps a personal website, blog, and Twitter account. You should also check out his webcomic, Teach English in Japan, which he does with Jonathon Dalton.

Angela Melick writes this super fun and quirky autobiographical webcomic, and she also has Twitter.

Colin Upton can be found here on the web, and he also updates both his Facebook Page and blog regularly.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Melick had been drawing comics in one form or another for almost as long as she could remember,  and she felt that pursuing an education in engineering shouldn’t be a reason to suppress her interest in that form of art.

It was lucky for us that Angela made the decision to find an outlet on the internet – that simple website collecting her quirky, autobiographical sketches on looseleaf became Wasted Talent, a hugely popular and extremely funny weekly webcomic that’s still updating, 5 years later.

The Vancouver-based Melick has been busier than usual lately, between planning (and starring!) in a wedding, and working on her first solo book.

All the same, she managed to fit in a quick interview with The Fabler for your perusing pleasure – the results of which you may gleefully behold below:

KD: Back in 2005 when you put your first Wasted Talent sketches online, at that time what was the extent of your knowledge about webcomics?

AM: There were a few webcomics that I read, but I didn’t know anyone that was actually doing them.  I knew quite a few cartoonists, but I had never met another webcomicker.

I didn’t really have a good feel for the industry, so my knowledge was very minimal. It was a learn by doing sort of thing.

KD: If you could go back and give your 2005 self advice about the webcomic, what – if anything – would you say?

AM: I would say that someday people are actually going to read it! I think that would have made a difference to me to know.

I might not have been able to put any more time or energy than I did into the comic, (’cause I had almost zero energy to spare on it back then) but I think there would have been a few things I’d have done differently if I had known it would go somewhere.

KD: In the five years you’ve been doing Wasted Talent, what aspects of your experience making it have been the most rewarding for you?

AM: Definitely knowing that people all around the world read it, and that it brings a bit of extra happiness into their lives. I think it’s the only thing I could have done that had the potential to make that kind of impact on other people.

KD: On the flipside to that coin, what aspects of your experience doing Wasted Talent have been the most stressful?

AM: I tried really hard not to make it stressful. It could very easily have fallen into the ‘work’ category of my brain, and because I’ve done a lot to mitigate that it hasn’t been very stressful.

That being said, trying to get out to conventions and missing out on opportunities that I would have had if this was a full time thing has been fairly stressful. I wish I could just jump into everything headlong, but you know, you make trade-offs.

KD: Has it been any easier (or harder) to find time to do the comic and convention thing than back when you started?

AM: It’s gotten easier, probably, because the more you do it the faster you get, and you just learn how to fit it into your schedule. Also the more successful you are at it, the better you get at working the logistics behind it.

So the more I go to conventions, the easier it is to get to conventions – because I have a better idea about what I need to do in advance in order to get there. One of the big learning curves for me was learning that certain things you need for conventions, such as table space and tickets, often sell out up to six months in advance. So you sometimes have to start preparing for a convention literally six months ahead of time. Now that I’ve learned all of that, it’s a lot easier.

KD: What’s your creative process like for coming up with a Wasted Talent strip?

AM: Well, I go out and live my life, right? (laughs)  Then anything something happens that’s remotely joke-like or that I think I might be able to make a comic out of, I put it in my little book.

I have a little book that I carry around with me all of the time, and I just write a little note about what happened. Like, this is the situation, and this could be the punchline. Anything that’s just enough to remind me what it was without being too detailed, ’cause then I might forget what was funny about it in the first place.

When it’s time to draw a comic, I go over my notes and pick the ones that seem funniest to me. I sketch them out, and if it looks good I go forward, and if it doesn’t I try an idea.

KD: As I understand it, you’re planning on releasing your first solo book soon. Can you tell me a little about that?

AM: I would love to! It’s at the printer, and it’s completely finished. What I did was I took the best comics from the University days back at the very beginning of Wasted Talent, and I redrew them.  I redrew about eighty comics, and I put that altogether with a bunch of bonus material – pictures from back then, stories, sketches, and a history of the campus that affects the comics a little bit.

I’ll have preview comics together for Anime Evolution in mid-August, and I expect it to be available for sale online September-ish.

KD: With those eighty comics you redrew, did you alter the dialogue at all, or leave that much intact?

AM: I did for some, because I think I’m a much better writer now than I was then. So there are ways that I was able to improve the dialogue, I took out some sections to streamline it a little better, and made things generally clearer. I left the spirit of the jokes intact.

KD: Is there anything else you’re currently working on outside of Wasted Talent, comic-wise?

AM: I’ve done something for every anthology put out by local comic collective Cloudscape Comics, and I’d like to keep doing that. I love writing short stories.

I’m working pretty hard on a book called Lost Omens, which is a fantasy/sci-fi sort of story that I’ve been working on for a really, really long time. I hadn’t found the time to get it going before – I put about two pages up and then I got engaged. I had to redirect all of my energy into the wedding. Now that the wedding and Book 1 of Wasted Talent are done, I’m hoping rechannel my energy into Lost Omens.

KD: Name a webcomic that you find hilarious.

AM: I really enjoy Questionable Content. That should probably be obvious, but I really enjoy the characters and a lot of people identify with them – I have an inner Hannelore myself.

KD: Name a webcomic that you find inspiring.

AM: I’m really inspired by Der-shin Helmer’s ‘The Meek‘; he draws comics that I wish I could draw. I’m also inspired by Rice Boy, I just love Evan Dahm’s world building.

I also admire Dresden Codak for the art, and Anders Loves Maria for the writing and style.

I’m much more readily inspired than I am driven to laughter, I guess.

For more from Angela Melick, you can visit the Wasted Talent website or follow her on Twitter.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming