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

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