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