As Calgary Comic Expo spokesperson and co-organizer Steven Hodges points out, “The comic industry these days has made it so that you can pretty much live and work wherever you want to.”

He further goes on to say that, “It’s important to recognize those Canadian comic creators that choose to stay to work and live in Canada. From Fiona Staples, to Cary Nord, to Riley Rossmo, we have some fantastic talent that are making names for themselves in the industry and I’m very happy that they  are still in our own backyard.  When we found out that the Shuster’s were coming to the Calgary Expo we were very excited, because of that strong contingent of Canadian creator talent here in Western Canada.”

To bring you up to speed, The Joe Shuster Awards for Canadian Comic Book Creators just held their 7th annual awards ceremony here in Calgary at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.

The JSA’s recognize outstanding achievement in the field of Canadian Comic Books, with a distinct emphasis on the creators rather than the works. For instance, categories include “Outstanding Cartoonist” or “Outstanding Artist” rather than focusing on the individual works those artists and cartoonists released over the past year.

Kevin Boyd, current Director and one of the original co-founders of the Awards, says that the JSA’s are important because they show Canadian comic creators that the community they live and work in is aware of what they do.

“Jason Bradshaw, who is one of the nominees for this year’s Gene Day Award,” says Kevin, “he didn’t even realize he was nominated. Someone just picked up his book and said this is really good, I’m putting it in for evaluation. Emily Carroll, who won the award for webcomics, had no idea how she got nominated for an award. And I think this recognition really matters to those people. We can easily get lost in the larger shuffle of the North American scene, so I think it’s nice for these Canadian creators to know we appreciate all of the work they do.”

Boyd says that the Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association originally came together back when he was working on the Paradise Toronto Comic Con, an event helped found with Peter Dixon of Paradise Comics.

“While I was doing that,” he says, “James Waley, the former publisher of Orb Magazine, came forward and said, ‘I have an idea, why don’t we do an awards event for Canadian comic creators?’ So we sat down and thought about how this would work, and we decided to look at the people working in the industry rather than the comics themselves.  So that’s the original genesis of the awards, then Tyrone Biljan, who does our A/V, came in, and Mark Askwith from Space gave us some great advice. Then it just evolved over the years from there.”

This year’s awards marked the first year the ceremonies were held outside of Toronto. Ajay Fry and Teddy Wilson, hosts of the television show innerSpace, served as the presenters and this year’s winners included the likes of Fiona Staples, Koyama Press, Francis Manapul, and Tin Can Forest – among others.

Also at this year’s awards, famed Comic Creators Chester Brown and Calgary’s own Todd McFarlane were inducted into the Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame.

Though neither could be there for the ceremonies, fans in attendance were treated to an enthusiastic speech on behalf of Todd McFarlane by his Dad, Bob.

“That was amazing,” says Kevin Boyd. “I was at home last weekend just watching a movie and I got this phone call, ‘Kevin it’s Bob McFarlane, I’m coming out to Expo! The kid’s too busy – buying baseballs or something. I want to come out and I really want to see how it is these days. I remember coming out to the Expos in the old days when Todd used to be a fan.’ Then he came back after and said, ‘This is amazing. It’s so much better, and it’s so great to see an event like this just flourishing’.”

When asked about how he felt this year’s awards went overall, Kevin’s feeling were mixed:

” It’s funny, organizing and all of the work that you put into it, it’s almost disappointing when the thing happens and you’re like, ‘Oh I wish it happened like that, or we had done things that way.’ But the feedback I’ve been receiving is great, so we must have done something right. I have little things that I want to fix for next year but I think overall we have a structure that works well for the ceremonies.”

Among the little things Kevin would have changed?

“I would have had the presenters pause a little bit between the names of the nominees. It felt like we were really rushed through that. I would have also looked at getting someone else to do the Chester Brown presentation – I was really quite nervous. ”

He also says that this year’s awards being held outside of Toronto won’t be a one-time thing.

“I like the idea of them rotating,” says Boyd. “I don’t want us to be known as the Toronto Awards. We’re Canadian, we’re a national awards organization. The thing about Canada is how incredibly huge this country is.  We’re a hugely diverse country, and we’re all coming at comics from different perspectives. And I would like to bring the JSA’s to each of those regions and be exposed to each individual community and perspective. I’d love to see if there’s an event in Vancouver that would work well with the Shuster’s.  I think we’re looking at Montreal next year, at the Montreal Comic Con. I’d like to do one at Fan Expo, which is another show I work on, but in that case I would be hesitant because I have so much work to do with Fan Expo that I’d feel I wasn’t giving the Shuster’s due diligence.  Maybe Halifax too, if we could find a setting there.”

Just because the next Joe Shuster Awards are a full year away, don’t imagine that Kevin won’t have his hands full planning for next year’s already.

Says Boyd: ” I’m out there constantly looking for information on who’s doing what, when it’s coming out, what’s going on in the scene at this point, who’s books are being optioned for movies or television, what new publishers are launching…all sorts of things along those lines. Then on top of that you’re fact-checking credits, making sure you have everything right – oftentimes Marvel and DC will switch something after the fact, and they don’t list colorists so it can be pretty intensive trying to find who colored what. Basically Robert Haines and I work on it almost every day. He works on retailers and the Gene Day self-publishers while I work on the overall releases. Between that and spreading the word about the JSA’s, getting people on board, finding people for the nominating committees… it never seems to stop.

The roller coaster ended on Saturday for this year, and we’re already talking about how the ride’s gonna work for next year.”

I count myself among those already looking forward to the 2012 Joe Shuster Awards.

For more information on the JSA’s, as well as a complete list of this year’s nominees and winners, you can visit their official website at joeshusterawards.com.

Thanks to Kevin Boyd, Robert Haines and the rest of the JSA team for recognizing outstanding work in Canadian comics, year after year!

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Now put that premise into the capable hands of Montreal-based artist Alex Fellows, a comic creator so talented he was nominated for a Doug Wright Award in the Best Emerging Artist category and then nominated again for that same award six years later.

Toss in a dash of surrealism alongside some genuinely interesting use of colour to convey tone and mood, and congratulations! You’ve successfully whipped up a steaming fresh batch of Spain & Morocco, the graphic novel currently being serialized online by Fellows over at www.spainandmorocco.com.

Cooking metaphors aside, Spain & Morocco is a fantastic read.  The characters are well-defined and marked by the kind of honest human flaws that mean they aren’t always likable, but they are, for the most part, relatable.

Fellows’ art is top-notch as well.  The expressions of those aforementioned characters are brought to vivid life in pencil and ink, while watercolor paints capture the mood and setting of the world they inhabit with inspired creativity.

It should come as little surprise that this project has been a long time in the works.

Fellows, who formerly was best known for his graphic novel Canvas, has been working on Spain & Morocco in one form or another since 2003. After Canvas was released by Fantagraphics Books in 2004, word got out that he was working on a follow-up project titled ‘The Unmoved’.

“From 2003 to 2007,” says Fellows, “I worked on a graphic novel which is basically a black & white version of Spain and Morocco. It was 110 pages or so, and it was called ‘The Unmoved’. It featured the same lead characters and the same basic setup. I originally proposed it to Fantagraphics, but they turned it down, so I put aside doing any comics for a few years.”

In the interim Fellows worked on animations (including this stellar animated video for a Deerhoof song), as well as a children’s picture book and some prose writing. Then a few years ago, he stumbled across his old pages from ‘The Unmoved’ and decided he would scan them and put them up online.

“I started touching up some of the pages so much,” he says, “that I finally gave up and completely redrew one. Then I realized that if I was going to juxtapose pages I was redoing with pages I had done six years ago, it would be pretty distracting to the reader. So I basically started re-doing the comic I had finished, but with watercolor, and I was really enjoying telling the story again. And this time I had the advantage of having a first draft.”

On account of the time Fellows has invested into this project, he says that his influences have changed regular over the course of its conception.

“For a while, I was reading the last Martin Amis novel, ‘The Pregnant Widow, which is about young people spending the summer in Italy trying to have sex with each other, and it was making me re-consider some of the scenes I was writing. Then the other day I was listening to the new Radiohead album and an idea for the story popped into my head. I guess whatever I’m looking at or reading, for better or for worse, makes it into my comics.

I’ve also been looking at Winslow Homer’s watercolors to try and skimp even the smallest smidgen of his sense of color and light and put it into my work.”

Despite the creative and notably skilful use of color seen in Spain & Morocco, Fellows says that painting is actually the step that requires the least amount of time in his artistic process.

“This is because I’ve been thinking about it the entire time while pencilling and inking,” he explains. “It takes about one to two hours per page. I usually work in big washes and I avoid using too many different colors. I try not to bog down the story with over-rendering, although I’m afraid I crossed that line in some places. I’m always re-thinking how I should be painting this comic. Sometimes I feel it’s too sloppy, then sometimes it looks too uptight.”

I mentioned that Spain & Morocco has a surrealist element to it. This is by no means a pronounced or regular aspect of S&M, so much as it is a tool that Fellows employs on occasion to help us get more into the heads of his characters.

“I like trying to convey what somebody is feeling through some kind of comic exaggeration or through expressionist drawing,” says Fellows. “Every day you see people walking down the street and it’s clear that their thoughts are elsewhere; having an imaginary argument with their boss, remembering something from their childhood, working out some plan to murder their neighbor’s dog… In the case of Spain & Morocco, my way of showing a fantasy or a memory without using a cloud-like thought balloon above the character’s head is just to integrate it into the setting. I try not to use it too often because it can be pretty self-indulgent.”

Alex Fellows’ work on Spain & Morocco has earned him an acknowledgment from this year’s  Doug Wright Awards in the form of a Best Emerging Artist nomination. Fellows says that he is “really happy to have a Doug Wright nomination, even if it is for ‘emerging artist’ again.”

“I guess the committee really liked my work,” he says, “and since I don’t have a book out, emerging artist was the only category they could fit me in. In any case, the Toronto Comics Art Festival is a really great convention and the Doug Wright Awards ceremony is very nice, so I’m looking forward to it.”

I also asked Alex if anything from Spain & Morocco was based on his own experiences’ backpacking around in foreign countries. His response:

“I went on four backpacking trips in my twenties, all of them with not much money. One of them was in the South of Spain, then across the water to Morocco, but the trip (S&M characters) Walt and Dan are on is pretty different than mine.

When I try to directly use an experience of mine it always turns into fiction. I feel more concerned with sticking to the story I’m telling rather than stitching together a string of backpacking anecdotes. Hopefully, the autobiographical bits I have put in are seamless with the fictional ones.”

Outside of Spain & Morocco, Fellows is currently seeking a publisher for a children’s picture book he has completed titled ‘Kelvin the Weather Boy’.

“I worked on ‘Kevin the Weather Boy’ full-time for nearly five months thanks to a grant from the Quebec Arts Council. Writing for children was a lot harder than I thought.  It means towing the line between talking down to the reader and talking about subjects that are way over their head. But I’m happy how it turned out. ”

Speaking of children, Alex currently divides his time between illustrating, animating, and raising a young child of his own. Contrary to what you might think, he insists this actually helps in maintaining an effective work/life balance:

“I’m more productive now that I have a child, a wife, and a full time job, believe it or not. When you’re working under the threat of your child suddenly waking up crying from his nap, you don’t dilly-dally as much. Sometimes I’m half-awake at the drawing board, but it just gives you a different perspective on things.”

For more from Alex Fellows, you can visit his official website, check out his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

You can find Spain & Morocco here.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

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

Actually, it’s an adjective that means ‘morose’; somewhere between ‘glum’ and ‘grim’. It’s also the stage name of Graeme Shepherd, an electronic musician from Leeds, and a botnet which sends billions of pharmaceutical spam emails out on a monthly basis.

For the purposes of this week’s artist profile, a Grum is a cartoon character with stick legs and a distinctively unique shape that lives in a ‘fantastical world, where anything and everything can happen’.

“A Grum is basically just a simple-shaped character,” says Rhian Engel, creator of the comic strip My Life as a Grum, “I came up with them when I was just doodling one day. My wife was having a bad day, and I drew a little story with these characters, and that’s where the idea started from.”

My Life as a Grum is a weekly webcomic that is also currently in syndication in the Red Deer Advocate (a daily newspaper based out of Red Deer, Alberta, Canada). The comic centers around the day-to-day adventures of Squib, an impulsive little fellow with sloped brow and a knack for speaking his mind, and his best friend, all-around-good-guy Pat.  Throw in an assorted cast of oddly-shaped characters, each with their own distinctive personality, and you have My Life as a Grum.

According to Engel, who is Red Deer-based himself, the comic as we know it started as a book.

“I was doing the book with a-page-a-day regime, and that worked at the time,” says Engel, “But then when started looking to do some marketing for the project, I did some Grum strips. And the strips actually wound up working better than the book itself did, which led me into doing that instead.”

Rhian’s decision to pursue newspaper syndication was based out of a desire to find creative ways to expand his readership.

“It’s hard for people to find your stuff on the web if you’re not spending the money to advertise,” he says, “which at the time, I didn’t have. So I adopted an ‘anything in anywhere’ approach to broadening the strip’s horizons and just get it out there.”

Engel says that the Red Deer Avocate was looking to re-modernize their comics’ page, and he took the opportunity to pitch My Life as a Grum as a modern comic strip that would add a different touch to the section.

If you look at any of his weekly Saturday comics from the Advocate, you’ll notice that Rhian’s current strips have a decidedly ‘all-ages’ appeal. This wasn’t always the case.

“The book was actually geared towards a more adult crowd, and so were the original strips that I did,” says Engel, “When the Advocate looked at my strip they said that they thought it could work, but some of the adult content I had in my older comics might exclude a portion of their readership. So that’s what led me to the all-ages approach.”

My Life as a Grum works well as an all-ages comic strip. The colourful characters, clean, crisp linework, and the uniquely imaginative world of the Grums all lend themselves quite well to a comic that’s really a lot of fun to read.

That being said, Rhian’s older, less content-restrictive strips still contain some of his most entertaining work.  I would recommend taking a browse through the archives to get a better idea of what the land of the Grums is really all about.

My Life as  Grum stands out as a well-drawn comic that obviously conveys the passion its creator has for the medium. A passion that is also evidenced by the fact that Rhian Engel is also the former owner of Widowmaker Comics and Collectibles, a comic shop that he ran in Red Deer for just shy of five years, prior to it shutting down on account of the recession.

“Right from when I was a child, I had a love for the medium,” says Engel, “I mostly read standard superhero, Marvel sort of stuff as a kid, and expanded my horizons beyond that as I grew up. That love for the medium was what prompted me to open up Widowmaker.”

When the recession hit, it became harder and harder for Engel to bring customers into the store.

“When you’re struggling to save money, one of the first things to go is your entertainment budget. That’s pretty well what it felt like happened to us. When everybody started tightening their purse strings, their comic budget was one of the things they cut back first.”

Rhian does have plans to open another comic shop in the future. When he gets to that point, he says that he would like to open a shop in a larger market and approach the industry on a much bigger scale than he did with Widowmaker.

“It’s a tough market to crack,” he says, “especially when you’re competing with existing stores that already have a history with local consumers.  Unless you have something that you’re bringing to the table that’s completely different, it’s a difficult industry to get into.”

Engel has plans to ramp up the updating schedule for My Life as a Grum in the coming weeks, moving back in to a daily format instead of a weekly. He’s also steadily exploring more syndication options for My Life as a Grum.

“I’m always looking for new ways to get my comic out there,” says Rhian. “If there’s an interested party, I’m always interested in new publications for My Life as a Grum.”

For more from Rhian Engel, you can check out the official website for My Life as a Grum.

-written by Kevin de Vlaming

When people are forced to adjust to periods of significant change, we often turn to familiar comforts while we struggle to adapt. Such comforts could be as simple as a phone call home, or time spent observing old traditions with a loved one.

Which is why the most jarring of changes are often those that affect our most familiar, static comforts.

Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother And Me, opens with an anecdote about how the author used to suffer from nightmares that only her Mom could make go away.

In it, she compares herself to Madeline from the popular children’s books, and equates her Mother to the kindly and ever-watchful character of Miss Clavel. At that point in her life, her Mother was a constant that she could always find comfort within.

After her Mother, Midge, starts exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s Disease, the lives of Sarah and her family are permanently altered as they struggle to cope with something no one could possibly plan for.

Tangles revolves around the journey of Sarah’s family as they try to make sense of an impossible situation. Their story is shared through a web of memories and retrospectives, woven together by Leavitt’s sparse, emotionally-expressive style of illustration.

After recently reading through Tangles myself (in one sitting no less!), I can attest that it really is a powerful book. I would add the disclaimer that it is not for the emotionally fragile, unless of course you are okay with the likelihood that this book will bring you to tears.

That being said, Tangles is not just one long, depressing story of loss by any stretch of the imagination.

The relationship that Leavitt portrays between her and her Mother is one filled with love, mutual dependency, and a fierce protectiveness that’s speaks volumes about the nature of family. Even at some of her Mother’s most advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, moments of happiness still manage to shine through.

Ahem… So ends the book review component of this post. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to meet Sarah Leavitt, who is herself Vancouver-based, at the Calgary launch party for Tangles this past Monday.

The wonderfully personable Miss Leavitt agreed to sit down with me and chat about her inspirations, the reception she has received for Tangles so far, and her experience putting together an original graphic memoir.  Although Sarah has published prose, poems, and minicomics in the past, Tangles is actually her first published book.

“When my Mom got sick,” Sarah says, “I was really obsessed with recording everything. I had my journals and sketchbooks, and I would often doodle little things that she was doing. I started taking writing classes, and I wrote some poetry as well as some essays about what my family was going through. One time my sister and I were talking about the really stupid stuff that people had said to us when they found out my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I made that into a comic that was later published in Geist magazine.

After she died in the Fall of 2004, I spent a month house-sitting for some friends to get out of my house. I was sitting in their attic with all this stuff spread out around me, and I decided to put all of the notes and sketches together in one place. This writing teacher of mine saw what I had put together and said, ‘I think you’ve found your medium’.”

According to Leavitt, her teacher’s advice made sense. She realized that the graphic medium really would be the most natural way for her to tell the story of her Mom’s experience with Alzheimer’s.

Leavitt had already began to explore a growing interest in comics. She had illustrated a few minicomics, some of which were published in Modern Dog, and had found a collection of comic creators working in the medium that genuinely inspired her.

“I started out reading Maus and Persepolis,” she says, “and from there I got into Seth, and I really like Louis Riel by Chester Brown.  I love Kim Deitch – his work is so detailed and fantastical, but simultaneously edgy.

I was also very inspired by Miriam Engelberg, who wrote a graphic memoir called Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, and Brian Fies, who wrote a webcomic called Mom’s Cancer that was later collected as a book. I actually wrote to Brian when I was trying to sell my book, and he has been so amazing – he blurbed my book and he has really been super helpful.”

Sarah admits that setting down to write a full-sized graphic memoir as her first published book was daunting, but she says it helped that she didn’t realize how much effort it would actually take.

“I think it was good that I didn’t really know,” she laughs, “because I probably wouldn’t have done it. I did my first version of Tangles when I was doing my MFA for Creative Writing at UBC. It was much shorter and rougher than it is now, and I submitted it to a publisher who promptly rejected it. I realized that I was going to have to redraw every single page, and so I did.

I went from drawing on 8 1/2 x 11″ sheets of paper to full 12 x 14 bristol board pages. I drew everything with pencils first, and went over them with technical pen.  It was a real learning process, from trying to figure out how to scan and realign everything to even just something as small as getting the format right for the font.”

After her first rejection, Leavitt hired an agent, and, armed with a polished version of her original story, wound up connecting with Freehand Books. Freehand wound up publishing the book, which was released this past September.

One of the reasons that Tangles is so successful at evoking a strong, lasting emotional response is because of Sarah’s unflinching candidness in telling her Mom’s story. Not long into the book, it becomes  clear that this is a very intimate look into the lives of Sarah and her family.

“I never thought of doing it otherwise,” says Leavitt, “I don’t think I would want to do it if it was less honest. I didn’t want it to be a rosy story about ‘my mom was sick and we all pulled together and it worked out’, because it didn’t. I wanted to show that there were ways in which my family was really awesome and we all worked well together, but there were also ways in which we kind of sucked. It took us a while to try to figure out how to deal with the situation, and I think that’s true for anybody that’s ever had to take care of anybody with Alzheimer’s.”

When I mentioned to Sarah that it certainly takes guts to put such an intimate perspective of your life out there for the public to read, her response was a modest one:

“I think a lot of it is denial. A friend of mine messaged me on Facebook and said they had seen copies of my book in a bookstore in Vancouver after it released, but before I had my official launch. Then it hit me that, wow, people can go in there and read about me who don’t know me at all. Strangers are going to be reading my book!”

Of course, it isn’t just Sarah’s life that readers of Tangles are privy to. The story also predominantly features her father, her sister Hannah, and several other individuals who are either extended family themselves, or friends of the family.

Sarah says that the response she has received from others that were in the book has been overall positive so far.

“My Dad has been kind of stunned by how people talk about him. He just did what he had to do, and he took care of my Mom in this really beautiful way.. I’ve told my Dad things that people have said to me about him after reading it, and he’s been like, ‘wow, it’s like I’m a character in a book!’ and I tell him, that’s because you are a character in a book’. ”

Tangles has been met with enthusiastic reception, pulling in strong initial praise in addition to being shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize.

Some highlights for Leavitt have included meeting her idol, Lynda Barry, who admitted to having cried when she read Tangles for the first time, and having a totally broad and varied group of people tell her that they took something of value from her graphic memoir.

“I think it’s really cool when people connect with it that don’t have my same experience.  It’s especially cool when people read it that don’t normally read graphic novels. There was this older gentleman at an event in Edmonton, who I would guess was in his seventies, that came up to me and based on my book asked for a list of graphic novels that he could check out at the local library. I thought that was fantastic.”

As far as the response Sarah has received from individuals that read it and also had a loved one diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she says that it has been pretty intense.

“People just come up to me and tell me these really beautiful, often personal, things about their family members, or they come up and thank me for talking about the subject. I have also had a few people come up to me that were just crying so hard they couldn’t really talk.”

I asked Sarah if she could have every person who reads her book take at least one thing away from it, what she would want that one thing to be.

Her response:

“I would like them to feel moved in some way. I guess it’s what most artists want, but it is a significant thing to me if my work could have the power to move someone to tears or to laughter. ”

For more from Sarah, you can check out her official website or view more about Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother And Me over at Freehand Books.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

I mean, sure they managed (using black magic and wizardry) to congest Crime and Punishment down to a palatable 85 pages of overview, and yes, Jane Austen is a lot more sensible when you don’t have to muddle through hours of haughty 19th century prose.

Still, do you ever find yourself thinking that they really could have gotten where they were going a lot faster?

Enter Ontario-based comic artist Eric Kim, who answered a resounding ‘yes’ to the above question. To prove that any classical narrative could effectively be reduced to two-to-four panels of dialogue, Kim set about putting to shame one of literature’s greatest icons; the Bard himself.

“My friends and I were all sitting around, having some drinks and watching movies,” Kim says modestly of the project’s humble beginnings, “At some point in the night, someone mentioned Scott McCloud and the notion of condensing a narrative into two panels. It sounded pretty ridiculous, so I tossed off a two-panel version of Hamlet. Turned out it to be pretty funny, actually. My friends all thought it was pretty hilarious, so I kept it up.”

From there, Eric embarked on an epic two-and-a-half-month quest to translate all of William Shakespeare’s plays into glorious, two panel comic book form. That’s right, Every. Last. One.

The results were collected and published Eric Kim’s new book, The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare. I’m delighted to say that Kim’s friends were right to encourage him – his collection of masterly rendered stick-man drawings and modern takes on Shakespearean dialogue are truly, ridiculously funny.

Any author that describes the first part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the dialogue “Holy shit! I’m a donkey!”/”Well shit! Let’s get it on!” has my vote of confidence.

“It’s weird,” says Kim, on the reaction he’s been receiving from Shakespeare fans, “It’s all been pretty positive. I think it’s because I’ve made an adaptation that doesn’t dumb down the material, and in some cases, actually incentivizes (is that a real word?) the reading of the work. I hate Shakespeare. And now I want to go read “A Winter’s Tale” because of how people have responded to it. It’s kind of fascinating.”

Hate, perhaps, is a strong word. As the dedication to the source material would indicate, Kim’s research on Shakespeare’s works alone shows his appreciation for the legendary author.

Says Kim:

“I’ve read Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. Basically anything that was required reading for high school. My appreciation for Shakespeare is pretty superficial.”

Thank goodness for Wikipedia.

Despite Eric’s extensive research, some plays still proved harder than others to Coles-size into accessible versions of Shakespeare.

“The hardest to summarize was the last one in the collection, Cymbeline,” says Kim. ” It’s a lot of plot to compress into two panels, so that mostly became just two people summarizing everything. Well, I guess most of them are about two people summarizing everything.”

If only Will Shakespeare lived to see the Twitter generation. He certainly could have learned a thing or two about getting to the point.

The easiest play to summarize, says Kim, was Hamlet.

“I know that play pretty well, so I was kind of sad when it was over. I think that it has more of the intent of the book at heart: to compress what people already know and put it into a humourous context. The lesser known plays tend to read more like summaries, which is fun too, but sort of aside from the initial intent of the work.”

I also asked Eric about his influences outside of the Elizabethan area in putting together the book. Specifically, I was curious if he was inspired at all by fellow history-reinterpreter Kate Beaton.

“I have a huge admiration for her work, and also for her depth of knowledge about so many figures in history,” he says. “You can see her passion in it, as well as all the little things that bother her in recounting of history, I think. In comparison, I think I tend to care about literature, so history is just to lend context to the work I’m reading. Admittedly, most of my reading is pretty much pop-culture stuff. I’m pretty fascinated by sci-fi in the mid-eighties. But when I need to research, I go into it.”

Eric says his modern inspirations fall more in the camp of xkcd.

“If it were written by Larry the Cable Guy,” he adds. “I think that Kate Beaton’s writing is much more clever and far less profane than mine.”

Kim’s not entirely sure if he would ever extend the two-panel author concept beyond Shakespeare:

“I’d always pictured this to be sort of a one-off thing. Though I’ve really considered making a “safe for work” version. Ultimately, I’d hate to be pigeonholed as someone that just does this one joke over and over again. There are many things that I’d like to pursue, as my editors at Oni Press are well aware.”

Unfortunately, at this time he can’t say much about his current work with Oni Press. Whatever it is, it has been big enough to keep him from updating his Transmission X webcomic, Streta, for several months now.

“I think I’m going to have to let that one go,” Kim says of the sci-fi webcomic, “I’ve been rewriting Streta ever since I went on hiatus, and it’s just not lining up right. I think I’m freaking myself out, thinking that people want more than what is there. But on top of that, all of my fears as a writer, they’re being realized. I have to stop until I can see where I’m going again. I don’t think it’s going to happen by November, ultimately. I’m not sure when it’ll happen.”

Sad news for Streta fans, indeed.

The good news is that whatever Kim’s working on for Oni Press, he reassures us it will be interesting. And until then, there’s always The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare – which you should probably pick up from Kim’s online store as soon as possible, if you haven’t already.

Consider it doing your brain a favour.

For more from Eric Kim, you can check out his various works on his official website, view recent art updates on his blog, and follow him on Twitter.

While you’re at it, here’s a rad illustration that he did for VENT, UDON’s 10 year anniversary anthology:

-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

The 3 Second Rule, a webcomic by Jason Loo and Arthur Dela Cruz, is not your typical buddy comedy.

‘Buddy fiction’, as I’m pretty sure nobody calls it, is both a plot device and a genre onto itself. You’ve seen it countless times in the movies, in books, and even in mainstream comic books (think Power Man and Iron Fist). Yet something about the genre keeps consumers of popular culture coming back.

Perhaps it’s what buddy fiction tells us about the true nature of friendship. Or maybe it’s just something we can all relate to – after all, isn’t life just a series of interactions between different personality types trying to find some common ground?

Answer: it’s neither.

Buddy fiction is popular because it’s fun, plain and simple. And when it’s done right, as it is with 3 Second Rule, it can deliver an entertaining, fast-paced narrative with room for both characters to meaningfully grow and develop.

The 3 Second Rule follows the adventures of a very serious, dedicated hit man named Axel and his debonair counterpart Shane.  Axel is the silent gun, Shane the charismatic socialite. You could imagine the sort of dynamic that unfolds.

So what sets it apart from every other buddy comedy?

Arthur Dela Cruz, who writes the strip, has this to say on the subject:

“My original plan was to do a straight forward buddy comedy in the same vein as films like Bad Boys, Lethal Weapon even Pineapple Express. You know, heavy action starring two guys who are constantly at each other’s throats. However, I do tend to write serious subject matter and lean towards the darker side of drama and comedy, so you’ll notice the scripts will veer to back and forth between light and dark comedy, but the action is always consistent.”

In addition to the interesting contrast of light and dark humor, Dela Cruz provides a solid, compelling story that goes beyond much of the more cliché buddy comedy fare you might stumble upon.  But this shouldn’t be much of a surprise, since he came to the project with ample experience in comicking.

“I freelanced as a colourist and designer for the likes of Image comics and Oni Press,  among others,” says Dela Cruz, “before I mustered enough courage to pitch my first ever comic Kissing Chaos to Oni Press at the turn of the century. (2000). At that point I worked on Kissing Chaos in print form for a few years. Because indie comics doesn’t often pay ALL the bills, I would freelance as an illustrator and writer to make ends meet, which I still do to this day.”

In addition, Dela Cruz has been affiliated with web comic collective Transmission X with his digital Kissing Chaos strip, titled “Til I Die” (currently on hiatus).

But of course, only half of the credit for The 3 Second Rule can be attributed to Arthur. His creative partner, Jason Loo, not only draws the comic but helps with creating dialogue.

On his own background in comics prior to 3 Second Rule, Loo has this to say:

“I was self-publishing mini-comics prior to the collaboration. I did a series called Popper Cosmix which was my homage to Tezuka about two aliens that visit Earth to become superheroes. I also self-published a teen runaway-turned paramilitary drama graphic novel series called AWOL’d.”

Arthur and Loo met at a comic convention years ago. They were mutual friends of Eric Kim, and wound up seated at tables on either side of him at the con.

“When I found out we both live in Mississauga, that’s when our friendship developed,” says Loo, “We’ve been going to life-drawing classes and discussing about each other’s work since then and Arthur brought up the idea of us collaborating at one of our lunch meetings. He had a bunch of story ideas and it was after a year talking about a collaboration when we started the buddy-hitman-comedy 3 Second Rule.”

Artistically, Loo says that he’s been drawing a lot of his inspiration for the comic from action flicks and European comics.

“I find the European artists pay a lot of attention to detail especially with the backgrounds. These comics have a great sense of cinematography.”

Another influence behind the comic which Loo lists is… Mexican wrestling?

“I went through a Lucha Libre phase when I was drawing the first chapter,” he explains, “and I thought it would be cool to have Axel wear a Luchador mask during his hits. The skull represents Death, but the yellow adds the flashiness of a Luchador.”

Both Dela Cruz and Loo attest that creating the strips for 3 Second Rule comes as the result of a meticulous process.

“I prefer to finish two months worth of backlog so I can focus on other comic projects,” says Loo, “But Arthur could be busy with his freelance work and I’d find the new script for the next chapter a week or two before the entire backlog is up on the site. So I’ll spend 2-3 weeks pencilling, inking, lettering an entire chapter (that’s worth two months of backlog), then work on my other comic projects, look at the calendar and tell Arthur to have the next part of the script ready, then 2-3 weeks of crunch time again.”

Dela Cruz compares his end of the process to his experience writing Kissing Chaos:

“Kissing Chaos, both in print and online with TXCOMICS.com, is a very personal, almost diary style comic, laced around a fictional narrative that provides the backbone for what is basically stream of conscious writing.

The 3 Second Rule is completely different, in that it’s very meticulously planned. So, often, when I’m caught up with my freelance work my scripts will be delayed, as Jason mentioned. With Kissing Chaos, I could very much feel my way through the story, and produce work on the fly and it will still fit tonally within the framework of the series. However, The 3 Second Rule requires a lot of time to execute the story as planned. So apologies to the fans for the sporadic schedule!”

The end result of all of Arthur Dela Cruz and Jason Loo’s efforts is a webcomic that highlights the best parts of ‘buddy fiction’.

3 Second Rule is fun, well-written, and artfully drawn. Though the majority of the early strips focus more on developing Axel, both he and Shane shine as strong individual personalities sharply at odds with each other.

And you know… I think there’s a little bit of both characters inside each and every one of us.

“I think I lean towards Axel sometimes,” says Jason Loo, “because we both come across as shy and quiet. But when I find my comfort zone around people I don’t know (and maybe after a drink or two), I can be just as social and loud as Shane.”

What about you, dear reader? Are you more quiet, contemplative killer? Or loud, sociable womanizer?

On that note, you can check out 3 Second Rule over at www.kissingchaos.com/3s/. You can also find Jason Loo and Arthur Dela Cruz on their respective web-pages.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

The Ontario-based Munday is a long-time comicker, with his interest in the medium dating back to the comic strips he used to create for his school paper at the University of Waterloo. That segued into a few early self-published comics, but it wasn’t until last year that he published his first full graphic novel.

Quarter-Life Crisis: Only The Good Die Yung was released in April of last year, with a premise that’s both genuinely unique and distinctly Canadian.

According to Evan:

“QLC is a book about a post-apocalyptic Toronto in which only the twenty-five year olds have survived.  The first book follows two brothers who live in the box above OCAD and try to survive on their own. ”

In Munday’s post-catastrophic vision of a not-so-distant future, the 25 year olds have divided into territorial gangs. Only The Good Die Yung follows the adventures of the two brothers as they struggle to fend for themselves without  themselves getting mixed up in the gangs that rule the streets.

Evan describes it as Mad Max meets Scott Pilgrim, though I definitely picked up just a hint of a Warriors vibe there as well. Mostly the ‘neighbourhood-based street gangs at the root of a new social hierarchy’ bit.

“Probably my most direct inspiration came from reading Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books,” he says, “I loved the way he was able to make Toronto such an exciting setting. I also really liked how he was able to blend a love story that’s sort of heartbreaking, really, with this hilarious, videogame fantasy world.”

Munday’s story is definitely a mixed-bag adventure that avoids dwelling too heavily on the more depressing tonal elements common to post-apocalypse stories.

In his own words, Evan describes it as, “one of the more fun post-apocalypses out there.”

Nobody said global catastrophes of epic proportion couldn’t be a swingin’ time.

Quarter-Life Crisis was entirely self-published and distributed.

The publishing, Evan says, was the easy part. As a publicist employed at Coach House Books, he paid to make use of the onsite printing presses.

“In terms of distribution,” he goes on to say, “That’s been the difficult part. It’s mainly doing shows, selling it through the website, and a lot of just going from store to store and soliciting the book in person. Which is why it’s currently much harder to find outside of Toronto.”

Despite its relatively limited availability, QLC still managed to impress a few of the right people – garnering itself a nomination for this year’s 2010 Gene Day Award for Self-Publishing.

In addition, Evan says that he was pleasantly surprised at this past weekend’s Toronto ComiCON Fan Appreciation Event to find his book had built its own fan base.

“There were a lot of people asking me about book two, so it was nice to know that there are people actually interested in seeing a second one.”

Fans of Only The Good Die Yung will be pleased to hear that Munday is already well along with the second title in what he intends to be a limited series of Quarter-Life Crisis graphic novels.

“The plan is to make it a four book run,” says Munday, “with each roughly the same size as the first (which was 124 pages). The idea is for there to be four books to tell the story in quarters, keeping up with the quarter theme. ”

As for details about book two in the series, Evan confides that he’s a little nervous about how fans will receive it on account of a decision that he made to switch up perspectives between the two volumes.

“The second book focuses on the Rogers, this paramilitary group from the first book that have taken a bunch of police riot gear and set up base at the Sky Dome. They’re kind of these big baddy authoritarian types in the first book, and in this one the narrative shifts to one of the Rogers characters that was really only a minor character before.

So the focus is now on her as a main character, and the main characters from the first book are still there, but now they’ve become supporting characters in this story.”

Outside of Quarter-Life Crisis, Evan currently has a few other projects in the works. One that I feel I absolutely have to mention – for obvious reasons – is ‘Super-Villain Erotica’.

“A friend of mine,” says Evan, “a poet named Natalie Zina Walschots, had written a manuscript collecting love odes to all these different super-villains. Doctor Doom, Green Goblin, the Joker – all these famous comic book villains. She’s currently looking for a publisher, and I agreed to do up ten initial drawings and do more if it gets picked up.”

Munday mentions that he’s worried legal issues may prevent his drawings from ever being published, but on the bright side, having them out at conventions has been a successful way of bringing traffic to his table.

“It’s a really interesting turn, too,” he adds, “I mean when you go to cons there are all these pin-up drawings of female super-villains everywhere, and you just don’t see the male super-villain erotica. Stuff like Magneto in the shower, or Joker holding a really strategically positioned Jack-in-the-Box. ”

So who is the sexiest male super-villain?

Evan argues Lex Luthor would have to take the mantle, adding, “Though Doctor Octopus was the most fun to draw. But he’s not what I’d call sexy. ”

Post-apocalyptic street gangs and Magneto’s naughty bits aside, Evan Munday has a couple of other big projects slated for release in 2011.

“The first is a young adult novel for ECW press called The Dead Kid Detective Agency,” he says, “It’s written work with no illustration, and it’s about a girl and her five dead friends who combine their skills to solve mysteries around her town.  The hook is that each of the dead kids is from a different era in Canadian history – so it’s edutainment as well.”

The second project is a graphic novel that Munday will be illustrating for author Elyse Friedman titled The Laws of Motion, which is due out sometime in Fall of 2011.

For more from Evan Munday, you can visit his website, www.IdontlikeMundays.com.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

I’m gonna go ahead and stop you before you embarrass yourself by saying ‘Chuck Norris’. I would however, accept Simon Pegg, Woody Harrelson, or Bruce Campbell.

Although for my money, I’d go with Jenny Romanchuk – author and artist of the epic webcomic The Zombie Hunters. Why?

Have you seen how much zombie ass this girl kicks?

Well, not exactly Jenny herself, but the fictional Jenny Romanchuk who serves as one of the lead protagonists in The Zombie Hunters. That’s right, she wrote herself into the story alongside several of her friends. As she explains in her website,

“This isn’t about ego fluffing, this is fun, and I am unashamed to proudly show off that I would rather be running around bashing in zombie heads than boring old daily life.”

I find myself inclined to agree with her position.

But the reason that I would choose Jenny over Woody or Bruce isn’t simply because her two-dimensional alter ego swings a mean shovel. In creating the universe of The Zombie Hunters, Romanchuk undertook a massive task that required building its own world history, complete with detailed facts about its inhabitants – both living and non.

“I have about ten notebooks and binders filled with TZH notes,” says Jenny, “not to mention about 30 different notepad files. They’re all filled with information about the world, how everything works, and about everything from zombies to wastelander culture to life on ARC. I have some of that info on the website, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg.”

The undead post-apocalypse world that she came up with was not your typical ‘Night of the Living Dead’ zombie fare, either.

“I knew for a fact that the classic ’slow zombie’ just… wouldn’t last in the modern world,” she says, “It’d be a problem for a little while, but I’d say give it a month and it’d all be over pretty quick. People aren’t as dumb as Hollywood makes them out to be.”

Instead, Jenny came up with a detailed bestiary of lethal undead classes that make the traditional ‘crawler’ zombies look about as threatening as mildly disgruntled geriatrics.

“I wanted to create something that would give the survivalist buff the run for their money,” says Romanchuk, “For the zombie classes in particular I drew inspiration from a variety of sources. I realized early on that the normal zombies are pretty easy to take care of, so I wanted to kick it up a notch.”

Jenny says that she often avoids watching movies or reading stories in her own genre, instead opting to draw inspiration from actual human history and real survival stories.

So let’s see… Survivalist buff, check. Vast knowledge of potential outbreak scenarios, double-check. Skeptical take on the traditional ’slow-zombie’ mythos, check again (hey, I’m all for it if the zombie Armageddon comes one shuffle at a time, but it just makes sense to be prepared for the worst).

If she can wield a shovel half as well as her Zombie Hunter avatar, then we’re really in business. Though they do say half of doing something is being able to visualize yourself doing it…

Probabilities of real apocalypse aside, it’s easy to see how Romanchuk’s dedication to The Zombie Hunters has evolved into being a full time job.

“These days TZH takes up ALL of my time,” she says, “Right now I’m having to cover a lot of responsibilities for the book and for the business, so I haven’t been able to put as much time into the artwork for the actual pages. Hopefully when things settle down, I’ll be able to put more time into the comic itself, which will mean more updates!”

The current update schedule is ‘every Monday and sometimes Thursday’. Over the three years that The Zombie Hunters has existed, Jenny has built a dedicated following of fans that eagerly await each new update. Hordes of zombie survival enthusiasts regularly fill the Zombie Hunters’ forum, each sharing the common interest of finding out what happens next to the characters that Romanchuk has created. (Or adapted to comic form, as the case may be.)

“The people who read TZH usually express an interest in RPG’s, books, and videogames that pertain to the post apocalyptic genre, and a lot of them are into various ‘survivalist’ hobbies,” says Jenny, “Many of them are or have been in the military themselves, or play simulated war games like air soft, paintball, or military re-creations. Those that aren’t into modern combat often favor things like medieval reenactments or similar interests. People who enjoy these sorts of activities are usually into ‘world building’ – they need to know everything about a subject, and want to know that a storytelling world has all the details mapped out”

It is no happy accident that Romanchuk’s writing appeals to this demographic. According to Jenny, the process of building the TZH world and story has been heavily informed through analyzing her fan base:

“When I first started this comic, I had no idea about what kind of audience I would attract. After I went through my Graphic Design courses, I realized how I could analyze the audience and look at the work objectively. This allowed me to better tailor the strip, the site, and my writing style to reach that audience. Because of all these audience factors TZH has evolved into an expansive, detailed, and elaborate world with a lot of dimension to it.”

The elaborate world she has created just recently hit a new milestone: over the past year, Jenny has been taking preorders for the first printed edition of the Zombie Hunters series. A gauge on the left-hand side of her website has tracked progress of the preorders as they drew near a pre-determined target that, once it was hit, would mean the release of the book.

“The per-unit costs of printing a smaller run are prohibitive,” explains Jenny, “I wanted to be able to create a good, quality book. And those aren’t cheap to make- just getting the presses set up and running off the proofs involves fees of a few thousand dollars, and that’s something you have to do even if you only print a single book.”

Anxious fans no longer have to wait for their quality copy of The Zombie Hunters: Book 1. Just last week, Jenny announced on her website that the preorder mark hit 100%.

“I’m feeling nervous,” says Jenny about the book’s pending release, “I hope everything turns out okay, and that people like it. I want people to be happy with their purchase, despite the wait.”

With her meticulous dedication to The Zombie Hunters, I’m sure there is no cause for worry. Now if you were stuck in a zombie apocalypse with no one by your side but an aging internet meme, then I’d start to worry.

You can find the ongoing tales of The Zombie Hunters at www.thezombiehunters.com. Jenny also keeps a professional portfolio of her illustration, a livejournal, and you can follow her on Twitter.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming