We were talking about autobiographic comics. Specifically, why Jason is drawn to them and why to date the bulk of his own comics all fall under the broad ‘autobio’ categorization.

“Even in the worst autobio comics,” he told me, “you can find value in the simple truth that they provide something you can relate to. We’re all human, and just being willing to share an honest perspective on what being human is like and put that out there for others to relate to their own life… making something that people can relate to is what appeals to me most  about it. ”

Jason’s autobiographical comics, which he often posts as short, 4-panel vignettes on his website Boredom Pays, are undeniably relatable. They explore his insecurities and his small day-to-day victories and defeats, just as frequently  containing non-sequiturs about a random thought he had or even just a trivial incident that stuck in his head.

So if even a really bad autobio comic has value, what can be said about Jason’s comics – which are genuinely quite good? His charmingly simple ‘doodle’ version of himself is a Kochalka-esque character that is capable of a deceptively wide range of expressive emotion, and his cleverly-chosen dialogue and introspections are often insightful  – and almost always entertaining. (Some strips  aren’t entertaining simply because they aren’t always meant to be.)

Bradshaw, who has also released several minicomics, is also surprisingly new to comicking. His first minicomic, titled Fragment, was published for distribution at last year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

“It just contained a few comics that I eventually ended up putting in Boredom Pays Issue One,” says Jason, “They were sloppier, not as refined versions of those comics, and I just made it for TCAF last year to give out to people.  Putting together my first couple of minicomics was a really positive experience. I first distributed Boredom Pays Issue One at Canzine last year, and probably the craziest, most rewarding part of that was seeing people actually read it.”

The Toronto-based Bradshaw says that, while he enjoyed drawing as a kid, it wasn’t until he enrolled in Art Fundamentals at Seneca College that he started taking it seriously.

“Growing up, I definitely read a lot of X-Men comics and Spider-Man,” he says, “I used to read the old Todd McFarlane Spider-Mans and stuff. I’d also always get the really gimmicky team-up titles, like the New Defenders or I remember there was one that had a Wolverine/Dr. Strange team-up.

Then when I was in college, I came across Craig Thompson and he had a big effect on me. I read Goodbye, Chunky Rice and Blankets, and from there I swung into all the indie stuff, like Nate Powell, Jeffrey Brown, Ivan Brunetti, and John Porcellino. Those last two are probably my biggest influences right now.”

The inspiration for his own comics can come from some pretty random places, according to Jason.

“Man,  sometimes I just sit down and I’ll like draw a panel of me doing whatever I was doing that day,” he says, “and then I’ll just draw the next panel and figure it out as I go. Sometimes I’ll have something in mind, like I’ll write something down in my sketchbook and just elaborate on it from there. For the most part it just kind of comes to me when I’m doing it.”

Jason doesn’t set any rules or fixed methods for himself to work on his comics, which he says gives him a freedom that he enjoys to sit down and pretty well do whatever he feels like that day.

One curious item you might notice if you read through some of Jason’s diary-styled comics is that there are hardly any featuring any people other than himself in them.

“It’s cause I really don’t like putting words into other people’s mouths or anything, so I stay away from that a lot. But I’m pretty comfortable with what I have to say about myself and who I am. Which I think surprises a lot of people, but it’s not like I’m ashamed of any of it – even though some of it can be a little depressing.”

Jason says that his most recent minicomic, The Worst in Everything, is – true to its name – probably his most depressing comic. Released just a couple of months ago now, The Worst in Everything explores Jason’s “thoughts on work and how much I really don’t like it,” he tells me with a laugh.

“It’s about the fact that I don’t like what I’m doing and yet I still have not left to pursue something more meaningful to me. I guess the comic is mostly about exploring how and why I feel that this is.”

The next minicomic that Jason plans to release is called “Diary Doodles”, and will be a collection of the diary comic strips he has been putting up daily on his blog since September.

I asked him what it is about making minicomics that motivates him to keep publishing his work in print, versus exclusively online. His response:

“I personally would much rather read something on paper than online.  You can take paper wherever you go, for starters, which I guess is something that’s somewhat less of an issue with the iPad. But there are other little things, like the page turn, the little credits and messages you have on the inside front cover, and the design of how the book itself is built. I want to get into screen-printed covers at some point with my own minicomics, because I really like that sort of aesthetic. The first minicomics I really got into were the Little House comics by Drew Weing and Eleanor Davis. They’re just really, really well put together comics with great production design.”

Regarding future projects, Bradshaw says that right now he is in the process of building a website for himself to promote himself as a freelance illustrator. He’s also working on an anthology with a few of friends based around a collaborative concept where one person writes a comic, and the next person in line illustrates it.

“Other than that,” says Jason, “I’ve got some other bigger projects in the pipeline in terms of stories that I’ve had in my head to tell for a while, but just haven’t got there yet.  With some of those future comics I think I’ll be staying more away from autobio, which will be interesting just to try something different.”

For more from Jason Bradshaw, you can visit his blog Boredom Pays or follow him on Twitter.

-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

From an animation about the unassuming friendship between a kite and a bicycle to a minicomic layering fairytale text over the everyday morning routine of an elderly lady, the Alberta-born animator and illustrator has built a solid portfolio largely around the emphasis of life’s simpler pleasures.

Even in the more fantastically-themed minicomics she has worked on, (either independently or collaboratively) whether the setting is a post-apocalyptic snowy landscape or a future where off-planet colonization is a reality, the actual focus of the art is still generally on the simple, relatable quirks that define everyday life.

Strange as that might sound, Colleen actually pulls it off quite well.

However, I don’t want to paint her into a corner here – lest you assume the extent of Ms. macIsaac’s talent begins and ends with the un-extraordinary, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Why, one such example to the contrary could be found in the form of a webcomic macIsaac did collaboratively with Jordyn Bochon. The webcomic – titled ‘May’ – follows the oddly-mannered title character as she sells suspicious ice pops that may or may not be poisoned to children, enjoys a good mid-evening bludgeoning, and generally wears less (or more) clothing than is appropriate.

Bochon, who has the humble distinction of being a 2009 Fabler interviewee herself, wrote the story, and macIsaac brought it to colorful, illustrated life.

The two have actually known each other for going on seven years now, and have collaborated on a number of comics together.

In macIsaac’s own words,

“Jordyn is an amazingly talented lady, and she’s working on a lot of exciting projects right now. I’m proud to know her!”

Well, Fablerites – we’re proud to present an interview with the (also) extremely talented Colleen macIsaac.

Without further ado:

KD: You’ve done some serious cross-Canadian bouncing around; from Spruce Grove to Vancouver all the way to the other coast.

Can you tell me a little more about your adventures in trans-provincial relocation?

CM: I grew up in Spruce Grove, a suburban Albertan city, but went to school in Edmonton; upon graduating high school I moved out to Vancouver to study animation at Emily Carr.

When I finished my undergrad my partner Dorian and I decided to explore a different part of Canada. Neither of us had ever been to Halifax (he hadn’t been East of the Saskatchewan border), but it sounded like a creative and fun city, so we took the plunge and headed towards the Atlantic!

KD: Is illustration/animation/drawing comics a full-time occupation for you, or if not, what else do you do for  work?

CM: I work a number of part-time jobs to make ends meet – I do freelance illustration and animation work, but it’s always an ebb and flow; it’s nice to have flexible employment that I can go back to during dry periods that also lets me take time off when things get hectic.

Right now I’m mainly working as an actor on a historical brewery tour where I wear a costume and pretend that it’s 1863. I also work in a few theatre box offices and at an art gallery from time to time, and I feel very lucky to be working in places that are related to things that I enjoy.

I find that I enjoy working in a variety of places; it keeps me on my toes!

KD: From perusing your work online, I’ve noticed a recurring theme of people presented in context of their everyday life, often combined with a focus on nature and simplicity.

Is this totally off the mark? What can you tell me about what you like to draw the most?

CM: I would say that’s a pretty fair assessment! I feel very scattered in terms of my artwork; there’s definitely things that I keep coming back to when I draw, but I don’t really have a conscious focus with my work at this point.

I enjoy making small and quiet drawings about people going about their lives in their communities, I suppose. I’ve become drawn to the idea of art with a local slant, of connecting to people through geography, and I think that’s a theme I’d like to explore more in the future.

KD: Who (or what) do you consider to have influenced your style the most?

CM: I think the single biggest influence on my style would have to be access to the internet. I tend to spend more time online than I should, looking at the work of artists from hundreds of years ago to people producing amazing
contemporary work.

I’ve never worked at having a specific style and sometimes I fear that’s a big detriment and leaves me too open to influence by what I see around me, but at the same time I think that living in an age when we can call up a million different images at a single click has been a huge boon.

KD: How far back does your interest in comics go? What got you into making them yourself?

CM: I’ve been interested in comics since I was in elementary school and have been making awful little comics since childhood.

In high school, I was lucky enough to get involved with a group of artists who published a trilogy of perfect-bound anthology comics. Once in university I continued on with making little books and sending them out into the world, this time with a collective called The Radar Friends (which included Jordyn as well).

Most of the comics that we made during that time were collaborative photocopied minicomic anthologies, as it made things easier when it came to amount of content and sharing printing costs and table fees at the Vancouver Comic Con.

KD: What sort of comics interest you? What sort of comics don’t?

CM: I’m interested in comics that have a story to tell, comics that challenge me, comics that are beautifully drawn, smart, funny, original, and comics that have a good heart.

I’ve never really gotten into superhero comics, and I enjoy reading comics in longer books or graphic novel format rather than in tiny chunks where the story is broken up into a million different issues. I’m generally willing to give most things a shot.

KD: Where do your ideas for comics typically come from?

CM: I’m a really scattered person when it comes to a ideas….I have many half-finished notebooks with jots here and there about stories that get abandoned halfway through.

I don’t think that I’m a very good writer and I find it extremely difficult to just come up with a coherent story, so a lot of my notes are just scribbling down an idea or an image that I think might be able to be twisted into something.

When I decided to go for it and make a comic I’ll look through the random ideas I’ve compiled and try to make something out of them.

KD: It seems that making Kate and Bradbury was a pretty big focus for you in 2009. What can you tell me about that animated short, and the inspiration behind it?

CM: I originally pitched Kate and Bradbury for the Atlantic Filmmaker’s Coop One Minute Film Scholarship (http://afcoop.ca/omf), which is a really great program where people who have never made a film before get a chance to learn all the steps involved in making a 16mm black and white film.

I came up with the original idea with my partner Dorian Lang, and we fleshed out a storyboard from there. The idea originally germinated in the new bicycle that I had purchased recently and the people who fly kites on Citadel Hill here in Halifax, which is up the street from our house. It was a definite learning experience, but I had a lot of fun with it and I’m happy how it turned out.

KD: Animation-wise, what are you planning to follow it up with?

CM: I’m currently working on a new film that I hope to finish sometime in 2010 about a girl who is obsessed with items she finds on the ground. It’s still in the fairly early stages and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m looking forward to tackling it. It will be about 5 minutes long and animated with watercolours and crayons, and if all goes according to plan I will shoot it on 35mm.

KD: What else are you presently working on, by way of minicomics/illustration projects/et cetera?

CM: I’ve gotten pretty distracted by theatre recently and haven’t been doing as much drawing as I’d like to, but I will probably be attending TCAF this year and I’d really like to make some new comics for that.

I’m in the midst of a whirlwind of projects during March, so I’ve decided I’m going to try and make a small comic every week and then focus on something bigger in April. I’m also slowly edging back into the groove by making some tiny watercolour illustrations based on old photos. There’s so many things that I want to be doing all at once – comics, animation, theatre, drawing, being involved in my community – that sometimes it’s a challenge to fit everything in. I sure enjoy trying, though!

For more about Colleen macIsaac, you can visit her website littlefoible.net or check out her Twitter feed. Below is her animated short kate and bradbury, linked from Vimeo.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

It’s unlikely that you’ve seen anything like the eclectically fantastic art of Jesse Jacobs.

The twenty eight year old cartoonist is known in Halifax for One Million Mouths, a comic strip that has been published regularly in local newspaper The Coast for several years.

If you haven’t read One Million Mouths but Jesse’s name still rings a bell, there could be a few reasons for this. It’s possible you’ve seen one of his self-published minicomics on the shelves of your local comic shop, such as Small Victories, or Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow. If you picked up Sequential’s special edition zine at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this past summer,  you could’ve read a featured interview that Jesse did with Bryan Munn about the varying influences that inspire his work.

Still haven’t hit on it? Then you probably know him as the winner of the first-ever Gene Day Award for Canadian Self-Publishers, an award introduced this year at September’s Joe Shuster Awards. Jesse considers winning the award an honor, though, as he confides to the Fabler in an interview, it did come as quite a surprise.

“Making comics is an isolated past time,” Jesse says, “I spend so much time by myself and by the time I finish a book and put it out I’m onto something else. It was nice to be recognized for my efforts and to know for certain that people liked the book.”

The book he’s referring to is Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow. Blue Winter presents a snowy odyssey through surreal, nature-oriented landscapes largely told from the perspectives of the local wildlife.

“It’s a mini-comic about a love triangle between a shape-shifting blue jay, a human girl, and a normal blue jay,” Jesse says, “Jason, the protagonist, transforms into a boy and brings food back to the forest for all his animal friends. It’s about the desperation of the forest in the wintertime, and true love.”

That he can go from One Million Mouths to producing something like Blue Winter is a good example of the sort of sheer eclecticism that defines Jacobs’ work.

A One Million Mouths comic could literally be anything – from casually dressed bald men courting existentialism in an alien galaxy of swiss cheese planets to a snake finding true love in the warmth of a sleeping monkey’s brain. Variety is the constant, as well as Jacobs’ distinct style of surreal, busy illustration. Each strip explodes with exaggerated detail, squirming word balloons, and flowing patterns -not unlike a stray doodle that took on a life all of its own.

In contrast, Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow is a unified work. Jacobs’ art is still unmistakably his; filled with a sense of flowing stream of consciousness, and characterized by uniquely distorted impressions of people and animals rather than realistic representations. However, with Blue Winter, many panels are devoid of the noise that saturates One Million Mouths – often the art presents a sort of honest simplicity, reflective of the book’s nature-themed narrative.

“I have a lot of interests, and I draw ideas from everywhere,” says Jacobs, “Above all I enjoy drawing. When I see something interesting, whether it be while out on a walk in the woods, or while watching old movies, I usually try to draw it. In a lot of my smaller comic strips, the words don’t necessarily match the imagery, or do so very loosely.  I have fun working that way, taking rough ideas I’ve written in my sketchbook and marrying them with a weird doodle.”

When working on longer narratives, Jesse often finds himself confronted by a familiar dilemma:

“Inevitably I come to a panel that must be drawn in order to progress the story, and it can be boring to draw. I’m getting a lot better at dealing with that though, and the new book I’m working on has been really enjoyable to draw. It’s important to me to keep the work really fun, because that’s why I make comics.”

Jesse’s love for comics wasn’t the sort of thing that he picked up overnight.  It goes back to his childhood, when he confesses to harbouring a massive stack of Archie comics as a kid.

“My dad used to bring home big boxes of computer paper, and my brother and I would sit in front of the television and draw,” he says, “I used to take about ten pages of computer paper, fold it in half and staple it and make lots of little comics with my characters and get the kids at school to read them. Mostly the drawings and stories were copied from things like Casper and that little dinky dink Richie Rich.”

Originally from Moncton, New Brunswick, it was while Jacobs was attending the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax that he first got started making comics. He put a few books together with a few college friends, which led to his interest in self-publishing minicomics – something that would continue to have an important role in his life for years to come.

It’s important to note here that Jesse self-publishes his comics in the truest sense of the term – all of the money comes out of his own pocket, and he handles every step of production himself. From pen to paper through to photocopying panels and binding the books, there is no middle man here.

While many contemporary independent comic artists tend to gravitate towards the web as the primary distribution channel for their work, Jacobs represents something of a return to form with his adherence to making minicomics.

He feels that the popularity of webcomics as a medium for indie cartoonists hasn’t negatively impacted the minicomic market at all, and has some interesting thoughts to share along those lines:

“Some of my favourite comics right now are webcomics, ” says Jacobs, ” Jesse Moynihan’s The Forming is dazzling. I read it every Thursday as soon as it’s posted. But I’ll still happily buy the book when it comes out. I think if the material is interesting and well done, people are going to want the book, regardless of its web presence.

I don’t think there ever was a huge market for self published comics/zines anyhow. I’ve been to a lot of zine fairs, and I always sell a few books, but I also offer t-shirts and buttons and that kind of junk. In general, people seem to dig that stuff more than a book. People like things they can wear I guess. I’ve made way more money off of t-shirts than making comics. But I like making comics better. ”

These days, Jesse is making comics from his home in London, Ontario.

Jacobs moved to Ontario last year with his girlfriend for educational reasons, and he confesses that he often misses the East Coast.

” I drew the blue jay book when I was living in New Brunswick,” he says, ” and it was very much inspired by my natural surroundings. When I moved here, I didn’t know anyone, so I stayed home a lot and watched a lot of space channel. The comics I made during this time reflect my love of the aesthetics of sci-fi, especially Star Trek. ”

Currently Jesse’s working on another minicomic, a few preview panels from which can be seen below.

“I’m pretty excited about this book, which is as of yet untitled. Although, the pages will be small, I’ve already drawn about sixty with more to come, so it’s going to be the longest story I’ve done. It’s a loose narrative that explores repeating elements and patterns. It takes place in the arctic north and revolves around an Inuit character, a stowaway, and the unsteady relationship of two arctic monsters. It’s about isolation and loneliness and being cold and hungry.”

In order to focus more on finishing his new book, Jesse stopped regularly submitting One Million Mouths strips for the Coast a few months back.

So, you may ask, what’s he up to outside of pouring time and creative energy into the new minicomic? For Jacobs, working on graphic designs for skateboards and spending quality time with his dog is where it’s at.

“I’ve been working closely with a company called Homegrown, that manufactures skateboards from scratch, using all locally produced materials. They put a huge focus on the skateboard as an art piece. And we screen print a lot of prints as well.

Aside from working on that I’ll keep drawing drawings and walking my dog, Desmond, in the woods.”