Let’s also say you have a well-rounded social sphere of other, equally talented artists, and you’d like to showcase what you collectively could produce.

You have no experience self-publishing, but what you lack in experience, you figure you can make up for in sheer dedication and persistence.

What do you do?

If you’re Nick Thornborrow (or any of the other creative minds behind The Anthology Project), you round up your friends and put together a hardcover collection of the most diverse, colorful, and imaginative stories you can come up with .

That’s just what Thornborrow & Co. did with The Anthology Project: Vol. 1, which released this past April – just in time to showcase at TCAF and the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.

“We just wanted to provide a venue for these artists,” says Nick, “We knew that this group of talented individuals could produce amazing work, so the idea was really to get everyone together and have a book to show for it at the end of the year. There’s something nice about being able to do this on your own with your friends.”

Nick, along with Joy Ang, was one of the two editors responsible for putting the book together.

According to Nick, the biggest responsibility attached to his role was “corralling all of the artists and just getting everything organized”.

Most of the artists, who were predominantly graduates from the Alberta College of Art and Design as well as Sheridan College in Ontario, already knew each other. The only contributor with experience as a professional comic artist is Connor Willumsen – the rest work miscellaneous jobs in the animation or video game industries.

“It was kind of something we dove into headfirst,” says Nick, “Just figuring that people had done it before, so it shouldn’t be impossible. We basically did all of the necessary research as we went along.”

To his credit, the anthology turned out fantastically well.

The Anthology Project Vol. 1 features a diverse selection of stories from fifteen talented artists.  They range between short and playful vignettes to introspective reflections, even featuring a particularly poignant story about a polite dung-headed leader of forest animals.  That’s literal dung. (His head is made of poop.)

“I don’t think I could pick any one favorite story,” says Nick, “it’s like asking ‘who’s your favorite child?’ Not that I birthed these stories, but they’re all really close to me after a year of seeing them from their infancy. They each have their own charm. Connor’s is wild because it uses the short format so well. It doesn’t try to tell anything epic, it’s just this really quirky sci-fi story and I like it for that. But then, Joy Ang’s comic fits a really well-constructed decently long narrative into the short format and it’s beautifully drawn and really well told.”

In addition to housing a truly well-drawn collection of stories, the book is beautifully hardbound with a gold foil imprinted cover. At the risk of sounding like any more an infomercial, the high quality of the publication really does grab you right from the moment you pick it up.

” We wanted a really nice looking book right from the beginning,” says Thornborrow, “On the very first week that we started putting it together, we made a trip to Happy Harbor Comics in Edmonton just to look at books for their production value. We gravitated right away towards Drawn and Quarterly’s hardcover volumes, like Seth’s Wimbledon Green. ”

Volume 1 of The Anthology Project can be purchased in several comic book shops, both across Canada and in the States.

So far, the book has been entirely self-distributed.

“We’ve been literally cold-calling comic shops that we couldn’t get to on our own, and then in Calgary and Edmonton we just drove from store to store pitching the product and getting people excited about it. It’s such a massive undertaking to do on your own, and it was something we underestimated going into this.”

In addition to co-editing the book, Nick also contributed his own story – an alternative, Western take on the classic Dickens tale A Christmas Carol.

Thornborrow presently works as an artist for the Edmonton-based video game company Bioware.  He can trace his interest in comics back to age ten.

“I guess the first comic that I really fell in love with was (Jeff Smith’s) Bone, back when it was published in the back of Disney’s Adventures magazine. I’d been reading comics before that, but that’s the first one that got me going to the comic store regularly when I found out that it was published in black and white standalone instalments by Smith’s Cartoon Books imprint. ”

As far as an Anthology Project: Volume 2 goes, Nick says that work on the next book “may or may not have already started”.

For the sake of being optimistic about seeing a sequel to this stellar collection sooner rather than later, I choose to assume this means the next book is, in fact, already in the works. Feel free to also assume at your own risk.

Nick says that the next Volume will open up the selection of artists beyond the circle of friends that came together on this first project.

“We’ve had people email us and that kind of thing,” he says,  “and right now we’re looking at sending out some invites for the second volume and seeing what happens.”

You can order The Anthology Project: Vol. 1 directly from The AP website.

For more from Nick, you can watch him answer a few questions from yours truly on-location at the Calgary Comic Expo here.  He also keeps a blog, which you could check out for more samples of his own art.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

I would like to extend a gigantic thank you to everyone who has helped so far in building this blog as a resource for Canadian indie comic artists & writers to learn more about their fellow comic-creatin’ canucks.

Of course, over the three months that the site has been live we’ve only just skimmed the tip of the iceberg.

Bruno could tell you more about the overall vision for The Fabler and how the blog will continue to help to promote the interests of independent comic talent. For my part, I wanted to take the opportunity to ramble a little about some observations I’ve made with the interviews I’ve done to date, explain a little about my motivations for the format I went with, and introduce some changes I’ll be making in the future with my own column here on the Fabler Blog.

Ramble ramble ramble, blah blah blah. That sounds a lot more boring to type that it sounds in my head.

For those of you paying attention, there are a few consistencies you’ll notice across the posts I’ve done with my column here so far. The obvious fact is that they all feature interviews with Canadian comic talent; most indie, a few with some very major credentials behind them. You’ll also find that I approach the interviews with a ‘big picture’ sort of take on whoever I’m talking to, whether that’s Jay Bardyla on his experiences running Happy Harbor Comics, or Lar deSouza on the reasons he first got into caricature drawing.

This avoidance of too much emphasis on purely ‘newsy’ content is very much on purpose, and there is, in fact, a reasoning to it. Fundamentally, we don’t want to be a redundant news outlet. For news on events and releases in Canadian indie comics, you can go to any number of sources. I personally would recommend the Sequential newsblog, and not just because they put in a good word about us recently – Sequential has been one of my favourite sites for news about the industry long before I started my column at the Fabler.

It’s been my goal to write about how people came to be successful (at least relatively so) doing what they love, in hopes that when people read these articles and interviews, they’ll be inspired to do the same themselves. This doesn’t mean I overlook their recent work entirely – quite the opposite, actually, since connecting the dots between where an artist is now and where they began is crucial in attempting to convey a sense of how they’ve managed to fit themselves into the industry.

So far it’s been a blast talking to some of the most gifted comic book talent Canada has to offer. From the Vicious Ambitious boys here in Calgary to Gareth Gaudin and Perogy Cat out in Victoria, and further out east to Doug Wheatley in Winnipeg and Troy Little in Halifax, everyone seems to have something unique and interesting to offer on the subject of comic books. It’s humbling, really, since most of these creators have more talent in their left foot than your average, part-time pseudo-comic-journalist (see artist’s interpretation of a part-time pseudo-comic-journalist below, courtesy of Conor Geoghegan).

In fact, many of these individuals have had so much to say on the matter that I’ve had to reluctantly edit much out from the final posts. That’s really saying something, since some of the interviews to date have surpassed the 1500 word mark – a cardinal sin itself in online journalism.

I’ve had some pretty fantastic unpublished discussions about the state of indie comics, the future of webcomics, alternate ideas for breaking into the industry, and a whole whack of more stuff. That’s right, a whole whack even, with stress on the ‘H’ sound.
It seems that there are a few subjects (like the ones mentioned above) which are on everybody’s minds right now. Going forward, my column will begin to feature my own blurbs on those topics, as well as whatever else comes to mind that’s remotely relevant to the indie comics industry. Don’t furrow your brow in keenly poignant disappointment yet though, the interviews will still be there!

The other change we’re going to be introducing, both in my posts and elsewhere on the Fabler Blog, will be North American content not limited exclusively to the Canadian comic book scene. I still plan on making the larger emphasis in my own posts and interviews on artists and writers North of the border, but there will definitely also be some branching out.
I know Bruno has some more news ahead for the Fabler itself, but I’ll leave that to him to talk about in the (hopefully) near future.

In conclusion, rock. And thanks for reading so far.

Jay Bardyla loves comic books. You can tell this much from just a few minutes of conversation with the comic shop owner/Alberta comic scene supporter.

The former Ontario local has been involved in the comic book community in Alberta since he first moved to Edmonton in 1996. In 1999, he opened the first Happy Harbor Comics, which was original a Direct Sales Outlet rather than a full retail store. By 2009, Happy Harbor expanded to encompass four retail stores across Edmonton, winning such distinctions as the 2007 Joe Shuster award for Best Canadian Comic Store and 2008 Finalist for the Will Eisner Retailer of the Year award.

“Every day I wake up, I go to work,” says Jay, “I hang out with people who are customers, I tend to always talk comics when I’m at home watching T.V… I had career paths that I had tried in my life before, and they didn’t pan out. I made this life for myself now, and I’m pretty happy with it. I can’t for a minute think of what I’d be doing right now if I wasn’t involved in this business.”

Up to this point I’ve focused this column on comic creators and publishers – and while Jay could be considered both, as he is a writer himself and has (through Happy Harbor) published a number of anthologies, the reason I approached Jay for an interview was due to his contributions to the province’s comic scene.

It seems to be impossible to hold a conversation about the comic community in Alberta without either Jay’s name or Happy Harbor coming up. In the decade that he has been running Happy Harbor, his efforts in co-running the online forum Canadiangeek.org, publishing the open submission anthology Tales from the Harbor (Vol. 1 -4), organizing a shwack of annual community events, and establishing a support system for local creative talent, have led to Jay’s name becoming almost synonymous with Alberta comic book culture.

“It wasn’t necessarily something that I thought that I needed to try and build,” says Jay about his efforts to help cultivate a healthy comic community, “it was something that I wanted to be a part of. For my own personal benefit, I wanted to learn how to become a better writer and I wanted to make comics and meet artists, so ingraining myself in the community was a matter of personal benefit.  Being that it was something important to me, and I had the space and the opportunity to provide the conduit/forums for people to come together, why shouldn’t I do that? It’s beneficial to everyone, the community as a whole.”

Jay says that his initiatives to help build a community out of Edmonton fell into the grander scheme of Happy Harbor’s business model.

“I thought, ‘what can I do that’s cool and different, and that will keep people engaged in their hobby?’ We wanted to transcend just being a store, and being involved in the community was an important part of that for us.”

These days, the community is thriving. To Jay, one big indicator of this is a shift in community interaction from the virtual world to becoming more ‘face to face’.

“In today’s society that’s the inverse of how things seem to work,” says Jay, “Things tend to start with a handshake face to face and then break down into nothing but virtual contact and communication, whereas the Alberta community has gone in reverse. People have been learning about each other virtually through forums (Canadian Geek in particular) and then connecting in person.”

Canadian Geek was created as a starting point for locals to begin communicating with each other. Jay realized that you can only have so many people coming through the Happy Harbor stores at one time, and getting everyone together all at once was generally not a realistic goal.

Jay also credits the Tales from the Harbor anthologies as being an important component in bringing together members of the current comic community.

“People who were involved in the book were obviously picking up a copy for themselves,” says Jay, “and they were now getting exposed to everyone else’s work. So first you have the forum, which is the virtual world, then you’ve got actual published material that people can see and get an idea where the other creators are coming from, and now you have the final step where we’ve moved into the realm of people coming face to face and beginning to pitch ideas and critiquing each other’s work and that kind of stuff.”

It would be difficult to deny that Alberta’s comic community has reached an impressive level of cohesiveness.  This is something that Jay acknowledges enthusiastically, adding that the benefits to having this kind of community are numerous.

“It’s that, ‘hey – I’m not alone’ feeling these days. These people all know each other, and they’re all supporting each other. Another thing we’re accomplishing through this is legitimizing the past time in the eyes of the general public. The average person doesn’t look at someone who says ‘I make comics’ with a whole lot of seriousness, and they might potentially be a little dismissive of them. But now you can go back and say, ‘I make comics’, and they’re like ‘oh are you part of that collective that helped raise thousands of dollars for big brothers and big sisters?’ – ‘why, yes I am’. So you’ve got a little bit of validation, and it’s nice to get that every once in a while.”

When asked about whether he plans to open a Happy Harbor location in Calgary, Jay’s response is tentative.

“We do, though obviously with the change in the economy there’s a lot of positives and negatives to consider before moving forward with something like that. We’re still just discussing things, and being careful about what we want to do.”

He explains that taking a tentative approach isn’t just a matter of being fiscally responsible, but also based out of a desire not to aggressively barge in to a market that already has many longstanding comic retailers.

“That’s just bad business. The analogy often is, ‘the pie is only so big and everyone has a slice, and the only way you expand is by taking someone else’s slice’.  Happy Harbor’s approach has always been, well, why don’t we just make a bigger pie? One of our biggest business objectives is to try to find ways to grow the market. How do we get people who aren’t reading comics, or who don’t know about comics, or who stopped reading comics – how do we bring them in?”

Over the course of the past year, many comic shop owners like Jay have received a boost in this department from a source that might previously have been considered unlikely – Hollywood. Jay refers to the recent surge in comic-to-movie adaptations as ‘free advertising’, using the example of the Watchmen trailer’s impact on sales last summer.

Jay says that prior to the release of the trailer, Happy Harbor sold 3- 5 copies of the seminal Alan Moore graphic novel a month. After the trailer hit theatres, that number increased to 3-5 copies a day. Interestingly enough, he says that the comics which have benefited most from the Hollywood comic adaptations are, like Watchmen, mostly properties that moviegoers were initially unfamiliar with. This means movies like Iron Man, the Hulk, or Spider-man don’t necessarily increase sales of the respective matching franchises. Often instead, the attention presently afforded to comics in the media will bring fans into shops looking for something new.

This attention has been a large factor in helping the comic industry cope with the recession, though Jay says the economy has still taken its toll on how Happy Harbor approaches ordering new material.

“It’s always a delicate balancing act, because of the slow creeping of cover prices and the amount of additional titles that the big two (Marvel and DC) keep introducing to the market. You have to be savvy about what you bring in, and what you push onto your customers. While the comic industry is still relatively healthy and stable these days, it’s taken a lot more work these past eight to ten months to maintain that balancing act.”

Jay cites the volume of comics being sold on eBay and through auction houses like Heritage, as well as the fact that more and more key books are breaking sales records, as indicators that people are still willing to spend money on comic books despite the economic downturn.

He says that it’s becoming easier to focus on the business side of things these days, thanks to other members of the community stepping up to lead new initiatives.

“It’s getting so that all I have to do is pretty much keep the door of my store open so that people can come in and sit down and have the space as a community to use. Instead of being the idea guy and the provider, I’m more and more the provider – when I’m needed. Which is pretty cool, since that also means I can start looking at making comics myself again.”