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

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

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

What do you do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To his credit, the anthology turned out fantastically well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

This is a point that Marta Chudolinska drives home with her graphic novel Back + Forth: A Novel in 90 Linocuts. Back + Forth, originally published last October by The Porcupine’s Quill, was just recently announced as a finalist for this year’s Doug Wright Award for Best Book.

It presents a story that examines the relationship between time, geographic place, and our sense of self-perception. If that sounds vague, it’s because it’s meant to be – one of the advantages of structuring a narrative based purely around visual impressions is that it allows much to be left to the reader’s (or more accurately, the viewer’s) interpretation.

Marta credits Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author as a significant influence on her ideas about creating a wordless narrative.

“I think the best part about it,” she says in an interview with The Fabler, “Is that people can bring their own interpretations to the story, and see something that maybe I didn’t intend or connect to something that I didn’t think was there. I also like the potential for emotional resonance – it’s sort of like when you’re adding words to something, you’re taking away from the power of the image. Without words, the image is allowed to become so powerful it can smack you in the face with the emotional charge of it.”

The emotional resonance of Marta’s images in Back + Forth certainly succeeds in carrying across the struggles with identity, sexuality, and isolation depicted within its pages. Beyond that, the powerful imagery she concocts also serves as a sort of melancholy love letter to two distinct Canadian cityscapes – Vancouver and Toronto.

“I had this desire for a few years before I made Back + Forth to make a book that celebrated Canadian places, and Canadian cities,” says Marta, “I had been reading Douglas Copeland, who was writing about Vancouver, and I thought ‘this is so cool that somebody’s writing about Vancouver instead of choosing an American city’.  Also I really wanted to create a story about Toronto because I haven’t really encountered many, and I thought there was really a lot of potential to use it as a setting.”

As is indicated by the title, Marta’s first major foray into graphic novels is also unique in that it is composed entirely of linocuts. To choose to take on a project like this and do it entirely with lino-carved prints falls into an ‘epic endeavour’ category in my books.

“I think part of the reason I was able to pull of the project,” says Marta with a laugh, “Is that I didn’t know how much work it was going to be. I mean it was in my last year of studies, and I also did a thesis in drawing and painting so I did a fully body of work for that in addition to doing the book. The last few months of that whole process were absolutely insane.”

When asked if she’d do it again, Marta doesn’t dismiss the idea.

“I think that finding that exact motivation might be hard again,” she says, “But maybe getting involved with a publisher or just having a really, really strong idea would push me to do it.”

Chudolinska, who says that the book was largely based on her own experiences, describes her initial reaction to the momentum generated by Back + Forth as amazement.

“When I first started the book, it was very much a personal project. I made it on a small scale by myself, and then talked with the publisher, and I didn’t know what to expect from my first published work. Just seeing it slowly build up into what it is now and then seeing it nominated for this award has been very, very amazing.”

Regarding the Doug Wright Award for Best Book, Marta is up against such major Canadian comic creators as Seth and Marc Bell – a fact that she says she considered ‘jaw-dropping’ when she initially found out that she was shortlisted.

“Even before I found out about the shortlist,” Marta says, “One of the first things that really amazed me was when my publisher forwarded the request to me from the Doug Wright Awards asking for several copies of my book to review.  It said something like, ‘please send five copies to the head of the jury, Chester Brown‘. For me that was like, ‘holy crap, Chester Brown is gonna read my book’.”

Achieving recognition from the comics art community is especially significant to Marta because of her longstanding interest in comics herself. Marta says she has been reading comics since she was a little girl.

“I fricking love comics,” she states, “I was born in Poland, so I had a bunch of Polish comics – my brother had a bunch of Marvel superhero comics and I ate that stuff up too. I read Archie comics like crazy, and my Mom would actually threaten to take them away when I was spending too much time reading them.”

In recent years, Marta has moved more away from serialized comics and into the realm of graphic novels  – she also says that she doesn’t read so much superhero fare anymore, with a few exceptions.

“I also read a lot of webcomics,” says Marta, “I have an extremely long list of links to comics that I check regularly. There are probably about ten people whose webcomics I follow daily.”

Some of the webcomics Marta visits daily include Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat and Girl, Gunshow by KC Green, and xkcd by Randall Munroe.

Her top picks in graphic novels include Epileptic by David B., The Lagoon by Lilli Carre, Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan, and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth – among many others.

As for what’s next from the wonderfully talented Marta Chudolinska, she is reluctant to divulge specific details but does have this to say:

“I do have an idea for my next book, which has fermenting in my brain for probably the last two years or so. I’m really not sure how it’s going to manifest, but I’d really like to do a project based on my family history. My family immigrated to Canada from Poland in the early 90’s and I’d like to explore that, as well as some of their history in Poland. I’d like also to explore the different perspectives on history I’ve learned between attending Polish school on Saturdays and what I learned in regular Canadian public school.”

For more from Marta Chudolinska, you can check out her sketchblog and a blog she keeps specifically for news about Back + Forth.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

As such, the interviews and profiles we feature are generally about comic authors and artists. It didn’t require a hyper intellectual think-tank to  come up with this formula, but we’ve stuck to it all the same (as it seems to make sense).

Too much of the usual, however, can easily become boring.

Which is why this week we are featuring someone who, in fact, does not have any published work directly in comics.

Aaron Leighton is a professional illustrator who specializes in the unusual.

(Okay, so illustration and comics aren’t technically THAT far removed from each other – but really, did you expect I was going to profile a urologist?)

Leighton has been turning his fantastic imaginings of the weird and the wonderful into dollars for over a decade now, since graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1995.

He describes himself as bi-provincial, owing to the fact that his hometown, Lloydminster, is technically in both Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Being the wild provincial swinger that he is, he left the Prairies in 1998 bound for Toronto, and he’s been there ever since.

Leighton’s art is a dynamic mixture of cartoon (non)sensibility and tribal artwork, balancing bizarre doodles against simple symbolism.

“If I had to pick a shortlist of influences,” says Leighton, “I’d say that Picasso and the German expressionists taught me about the possibilities of the abstracted figure, cartoons taught me the power of drawings coupled with humour, and the artwork of indigenous cultures, specifically those of Northern Canada and Africa, taught me not only about the power of simplicity but also how mythology can imbue imagery with meaning.”

According to Aaron, his unique style developed steadily over time – it wasn’t at all something he ‘hit the ground running’ with immediately after Art school:

“The evolution of my illustrative style has been a combination of my natural inclination to fill up a page with doodles and a slow, painful struggle of figuring out how to translate this spontaneous tendency – coupled with the things that influence me – into a visual language usable for problem solving.”

His art has appeared in Maclean’s, PC Magazine, The New York Times, and The Globe and Mail, amongst a wealth of other publications.

With such a variety of clients commissioning Aaron for projects varying from promotional to informative to just plain fun, his creative process can get a little messy:

“I usually start by putting my head in my hands and thinking “How the hell am I going to solve this one?” That blank sheet can be terrifying. But despite the fact that I often find conceptualizing difficult, it always works out. Sometimes it helps to leave the studio and give your eyes new stuff to look at, thereby cutting through the feedback loop of the mind to allow it to come up with ideas instead.”

Leighton has also been involved with ‘interactive broadcast animation project’ The Zimmer Twins as creative lead since 2005.

The Zimmer Twins has a pretty interesting concept behind it; kids can visit the official website and, using a series of various pre-cut background and character animation options, build their own endings to a professionally produced story starter.

The best of those short animation endings would then be aired on Canadian broadcast television network Teletoon.

“Working as the creative director of the Zimmer Twins with zinc Roe (the design company behind the project) was rewarding not only because of the originality of the idea but also in that I was able to collaborate with some talented animators to bring my drawings to life. Also it has indeed been very interesting to see the characters being repurposed to fit the technology as it evolves, from the original animated shorts we did to the more recent apps.”

Despite the preamble I made at the beginning of the post, there is at least one other correlation between Aaron Leighton and the world of comic books: stumble into the right comic shop, and you might actually find a book co-illustrated by Aaron for sale by the name of Equally Superior.

Equally Superior was a collaborative project done by Aaron and a couple of his friends under the banner of Trio Magnus.

“Trio Magnus is the name of an artist collective I am part of, along with my friends Clayton Hanmer and Steve Wilson, both of whom also happen to be extraordinary illustrative talents. We had been sketching and doing group art shows together for years here in Toronto, and somewhere along the line we just decided to try joining forces with a bit more focus in order to create interesting (to us, at least) collaborative work fuelled mainly by beer and Led Zeppelin.”

Equally Superior came about in 2007 when Anne Koyama of Koyama Press asked Trio Magnus if they were interested in publishing a book of some sort.

“We gratefully replied that we were,” says Leighton, “and proceeded to create the book with content from our sketchbooks plus some new collaborative pieces. While not in any way narrative, the book ended up being rude, colourful, funny and extremely bizarre – a perfectly appropriate Trio Magnus creation. We launched it at Design Festa in Tokyo in 2007, and Anne has been tireless in her efforts to promote us since then, getting the book into bookstores and galleries not only in Canada and the US but in Spain and Holland as well.”

Going back a few paragraphs, if that comic shop you stumble into happens to be in the greater Toronto area, you might even bump into Aaron himself.

Aaron has a self-professed love for comics, specifically graphic novels and webcomics.

Among his favorites?

“‘Blankets’ by Craig Thompson, ‘Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth’ by Chris Ware, ‘Lous Riel’ by Chester Brown, ‘Skim’ by Jillian Tamaki, and the work of Guy Delisle and Michel Rabagliati. Webcomics-wise, some of my favorites include ‘The City‘ by DERF, ‘The Perry Bible Fellowship‘ by Nick Gurewitch, and the amazing animated comics of Brad Neely.”

“Aside from the artists above,” says Aaron, “I love the work of my friends such as Clayton Hanmer and Tom Humberstone, as well as a guy I discovered at TCAF last year named Mat Brinkman who does these insanely intricate black and white narratives about monsters and spirits doing battle with each other in magical realms.”

Aaron and the other Trio Magnus fellows will be present and accounted for at this year’s TCAF (Toronto Comic Art Festival), showcasing art from their most recent project.

“Currently,” says Leighton, “we’re working on a series of 6 ft. square collaborative drawings (created with red and black Snowman markers) which we plan to convert to smaller silkscreened prints. We’ll be selling these at TCAF in May.”

He also has a book project in the works due out in time for the Festival, to be published by Koyama Press. Leighton says that it will ‘combine illustration and photography, and feature a variety of homeless nature spirits who, having lost their forests and streams, are forced to live in the back alleys and vacant lots of Toronto’.

“It’s sort of a combination of three interests of mine: folk mythology, environmental issues and urban  photography. Nothing stokes my creative fires like the alchemy of combining ideas.”

For more from Aaron, you can visit his website, the website of Trio Magnus, or stop by his booth at this year’s Toronto Comic Art Festival.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Twist (not his real name, though it is the handle through which all of his creative content is released) is a New Brunswicker who has been active in webcomics for several years. In February of this year, he will be celebrating the three year anniversary of his primary ongoing series, Pictures of You.

Twist describes Pictures of You, of which he is writer and artist, as “a story about the best friends you’ll ever lose”. I would add to that description that it’s a compelling trip down someone else’s memory lane, packed with believable, well-developed characters and just the right amount of nostalgia.

I  say ‘just the right amount’ in that the narrative never becomes burdened in nostalgic sentiment – it’s a spice that Gibson uses to flavor his dish, rather than a base that drowns out the rest of the recipe. Quaint metaphor for the win, no?

Though Gibson has only been active in webcomics for a few years, he used to be involved with paper zine publishing back around the early-to-mid nineties.

“I did that for several years actually,” he says, “and kind of drifted away from it and got into other kinds of writing. I guess I was away for probably about ten years before I got the impetus to do Pictures of You.”

Gibson says that when he started the project, he only intended for it to be around six to seven hundred pages.

“But then as I started rewriting and developing the story and characters further”, he explains, “it more than doubled its length. I envision it now to be more like fifteen to eighteen hundred pages when it’s done.”

Despite his epic ambitions for the page count, Pictures of You is a highly accessible read. Not only is it very possible to jump in at the beginning of any one of the chapters written to date, (though you obviously won’t get as much out of it as otherwise) but Twist has successfully created something that a wide variety of readers could find compelling.

“You know, I always envisioned the story as something that would appeal to people around my age,” says Twist, “that is, mid-thirties, maybe even late twenties. What I’ve been finding more and more however,  is that it also holds a lot of appeal for a younger demographic, like teenagers to early twentysomethings.”

To really get an idea of the unique sort of charm that Twist magically weaves through believable dialogue and sincere character interaction, you’d have to stop by the webcomic’s host site and look through a few panels yourself. Actually, I strongly recommend doing this now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

….

See?  See what I mean?

Depending on where you may have randomly decided to begin reading, you may have noticed that some of the art from Pictures of You is in color, while in other instances it’s entirely black and white.

Gibson started the comic entirely in monochrome, only deciding to add color to new panels as recently as last year. Since then, he has decided to go back and color the original books, one chapter at a time.

“It’s actually been quite interesting to go back and look at not only what I was doing back then, but also how the style changed throughout,” Gibson says of his experience coloring the older pages, “Like seeing the difference, for instance, between what I was doing with black and white at the beginning of Book One, and what I was doing with it at the end of Book Two. It’s also been interesting to see how well the color applied to what was always intended originally to be black and white.”

Twist, whose other activities included (until recently) managing a record store in the town he lives in just outside of Fredericton, is also currently involved with a comic adaptation of a story he had written previously, titled “Our Time in Eden“.

Unlike Pictures of You, Gibson is not behind the art for Our Time in Eden. Instead he recruited Ben Steeves to illustrate the comparatively much heavier, mature-themed comic about loss of childhood innocence.

“It was something I never thought I could turn into a comic,” says Gibson, “Just from the nature of the way I’d written the novel, I’d never really figured it would translate properly into sequential art. I honestly couldn’t say what changed. I was just thinking one day about the story and different graphic aspects of it and it just came to me how I could trim a little here, and add a little there to make it work in a graphic setting.”

As it turns out, Gibson was right – Our Time in Eden works beautifully as a comic. Steeves does a fantastic job of capturing the mood and emotions of the two central characters – the disenfranchised, apathetic protagonist Tim and his long-estranged childhood companion, Ellis.

“With Ben, we have this sort of unusual synergy where we each understand what the other one is thinking and are able to build on the other one’s strengths,” says Gibson of the partnership, “It’s just one of those magical, cohesive kind of relationships that you don’t really find very often, and he’s been a dream to work with.”

The synergy he mentions really does come through in the panels of Our Time in Eden. As a disclaimer to those interested in perusing the comic, be prepared for a story that does not shy away from heightened emotion – reading Our Time in Eden can be a visceral experience, especially in its ability to resonate with those who have ever lost/screwed up a relationship that was important to them. And really, show me the picture perfect android of a person who hasn’t.

Between creating new strips for Pictures of You, coloring the older chapters of that same title, and working with Ben Steeves on Our Time in Eden, Gibson (by necessity) commits a large portion of time to his ventures in online comics.

“I’m motivated by the people who come and visit the sites when they really have no reason to,” says Twist, “as well as the people who have shown me a lot of support and love – a lot of my readers are very loyal. I just feel like I need to live up to their trust in me that I give them a good story without taking too long to tell it. That’s the kind of thing you don’t want to let your readers down with.”

As for future plans, Gibson is currently working on several other comics with other artists that he hopes to see come together in the near future. He’s also working on a releasing a physical, grayscale version of the first two books from Our Time in Eden as well as securing a publisher for the eventual release of Our Time in Eden as a graphic novel.

For more from Gibson Twist, you can find links to his work on his profile over at Smack Jeeves.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Andrew Johnson’s art, like his subject matter, is pretty dark and compelling stuff. Johnson has a knack for utilizing high contrast, shadow-filled imagery and tense, often anxious dialogue to create a tone that epitomizes ‘ominous’.

The resident of Auckland, New Zealand, has made a home for himself on the Fabler with his ongoing web-based comic, Kingdom.

Kingdom presents a corporate-controlled future dystopia, with a decidedly gritty, almost noir feel to it. Crooked cops, shady drug dealers, and an always present air of corporate oppression form the staples that define the landscape of Kingdom.

“Kingdom focuses on a non specific city, 12 or so years forward from today,” says Johnson, “where Corporations, with their resources and focus have pushed into the last untapped market, governance of the populace  – producing modern versions of feudal lords, though this is not readily apparent or of interest to most people going about their daily business.”

Johnson says that, while Kingdom may share elements in common with the noir genre, he tends not to see it as such.

“There’s an oppressive atmosphere present within the story,” he explains, “but rather than focusing on some hidden truth that is revealed by tenacity of hero, we’ll be hanging out more with the characters being introduced in the initial 8 and how they’re effected by the actions of Richard Marks – who provides the catalyst for the main incidents that occur.”

An admitted long-time fan of sequential art, Johnson’s first leap into comics took him directly to the web.  In addition to Kingdom on the Fabler, he has a collection of his other work (including Golem) available for perusal over on his website, The Black Gates.

“I love the idea of world building with a couple of pages and a marker. I’m a pretty stock pop-culture geek having grown up on a diet of Magnum PI and the A Team… Throw in that I’ve been working in the interactive/web spaces for a few years now and it was almost a no-brainer I’d get involved with webcomics at some point.”

Interestingly, Johnson does not credit any specific comic or movement in comics as the reason he decided to start making sequential art himself. Instead, he says that the biggest motivator which led him into the industry was simply the state of current technology.

“With the web the cost to distribute content and put it in front of eyeballs is insanely minimal,” says Johnson, “From a printed goods perspective, being this far down the world, shipping goods to and from here costs a fair bit.  With the potential to send files up to the northern hemisphere to get printed and shipped on demand, it felt like a good time to get involved.”

This isn’t to say that Johnson is without his comic book influences altogether. He lists Frank Miller as an artist whose ‘can-do’ attitude has given him inspiration in his work, and, from a narrative perspective, Warren Ellis has left a strong mark on Johnson’s style.

“With Ellis,” he says, “It’s an inspiration gained from seeing his work constantly push against the superhero comics mainstream, more towards the mass market, and his online community experimentation, as well as stories such as Desolation Jones and Global Frequency.  Some of my other influences would be the structure and dialogue of Brian Azzarello’s work, through to density and depth found in the television show The Wire. As a fringe creator, these guys are proof of what’s possible.”

Johnson considers himself a ‘newbie’ illustrator, and at this point in his comics career, he’s having fun experimenting to see what works, and what falls flat.

“Part of the looseness is from the crunch of the deadlines,” he says,  “but in general I love the energy that comes from looser work and with these webcomics. I like that they feel quick, dirty and disposable.”

The interesting thing about catching Andrew Johnson at this point in his artistic career is that you can watch while his art evolves. This is especially apparent with Golem, which is about an inadvertently reactivated killing machine who embarks on a brief (but bloody) murderous rampage through an isolated small town.

As you read from the older panels through to those more recently uploaded, you can trace a steady progression from a more general, traditional style of comic illustration to the distinctively unique, sketch-like renderings seen in Kingdom.

“Regarding Kingdom,” says Johnson, “I think the direction I’m going with the art there provides a grittiness which indicates to us ‘these characters will not be having a good time’.”

After checking out a few panels from Kingdom, one certainly gets the impression that tone- be it gritty or otherwise – is an important element to Johnson’s storytelling.

Kingdom also contains a narrative that weaves in and out of stream of consciousness prose, adjusting accordingly as the story veers from ambiguous labs to deserted towns and darkly-lit high-rises.

“We’re in scene setting mode in terms of characters and the world,” he says, “so it seems appropriate to use such an approach to provide tone. Although when it comes time to crack on with plot, the focus will change. One of the benefits of using a fractured snapshot approach is the ability to change direction tonally with the next update if it’s called for.”

To keep up with the latest story arcs of Kingdom, check out Andrew’s creator comics over on The Fabler. For more from Andrew, you can pop into his main website, The Black Gates.

One major role of the comic book artist is to bring a world that would otherwise exist only in the imagination to visual, almost tangible, life.  When countless fans have a very fixed preconceived idea of what that world consists of, based largely on the hundreds of books of literature that have documented it in the past, the artist’s task becomes that much more daunting.

Doug Wheatley, who has been a professional comic book illustrator for fifteen years, faces that task on a regular basis. The Winnipeg-based artist, who has in the past done work on such titles as Superman: Last Son of Earth and Blade: The Vampire Hunter, has spent the last six years working heavily on one of the most well-known franchises in the world – Star Wars.

“Dark Horse first contacted me to do a Star Wars cover,” says Wheatley of his beginnings on the legendary franchise, “then about a year and a half later they got back in touch with me and I talked to them about doing more Star Wars work. I had already done some work for Dark Horse on Aliens, and a while before that on a comic series they put out based on the videogame Mist.”

In the time since then, Wheatley’s Star Wars credits have included work on the titles Star Wars: Empire, Star Wars: Republic, Star Wars: Dark Times, Star Wars: Legacy, and an official comic book adaptation of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. This is in addition to several other one-shots and covers he has done within the franchise.

Though Wheatley didn’t get into the Star Wars novels growing up, he credits the movies as having a significant impact on him when he was a kid.

“Just like there’s a Y generation and an X generation, I think there’s a generation that should rightfully be called the Star Wars generation,” says Wheatley, “Since I’ve been working on Star Wars, I’ve ran into a lot of people that saw the original movie at the same time I did, which was around age eight. Seeing it at that age has a profound effect on the rest of your life. If you can imagine something so new and fresh that captures the excitement of Flash Gordon and the sci-fi trends of the day in film form – it’s huge.”

If indeed there is a Star Wars generation, they have never been found wanting for more content.  There has been more Star Wars media – be it in books, comics, cartoons,  etc. – than almost any other franchise in history.

“By nature, I research what I do,” explains Wheatley, “If I’m working on Superman, I research Superman. When I did Aliens, I was working on a title that had its own fan base that would cite you if you didn’t do the right thing at the right time. But none of that was like working on Star Wars. The reality of what happened to me with the Star Wars gig, is that I found out really quick that I had a lot of catching up to do.”

According to Wheatley, working on the Star Wars titles for Dark Horse has been like a crash course in how to effectively illustrate what is, essentially, historical fiction.

“Almost every time I got a new script, the writer would lift this rare alien race that was used in some minor novel way, way back when. There’s no real visual reference for something like that, so I’d have to get on the net and look for somebody who did some sort of drawing based on that alien, or somebody who had a more detailed description about it. Just something that would give me a clearer path to getting it right, so that I didn’t have to hear from the fans later saying, ‘you got it wrong’.”

Wheatley says that the biggest baptism for him (working in the Star Wars universe) came when he did the Episode III comic book adaptation. He was involved in the project from a very early stage, and became immersed in the creative process as long as a year and a half before the movie actually hit theatres.

“Having the privilege to see it develop, and to be in the middle of drawing something and get a call from someone saying, ‘this character has changed, we’re sending you the new design’ – you learn a lot about how it’s all put together.”

On the flipside of this coin, Wheatley says that it was occasionally intimidating to pencil characters that had yet to be even seen in a film. At one point he was actually instructed to illustrate General Grievous, before he had seen any point of reference. This would have required him to literally make up an image of one of the main villains that would be in Episode III. Fortunately for Wheatley, he was able to push for some solid visual cues before committing to a drawn character design.

Skipping forward to his current work, the latest book that Wheatley has been working on is Star Wars: Dark Times. Dark Times is an ongoing series that has been written by Mick Harrison since its debut in 2006. The series, now in its fourth plot arc titled Blue Harvest, has received steady critical acclaim since its inception – thanks both to Harrison’s creativity and Wheatley’s incredibly detailed art.

“I honestly think Mick is a brilliant writer,” says Wheatley, “Every time I get one of his scripts, he breathes so much life into these characters that I feel very challenged attempting to even come close to interpreting everything. Time is not on my side, and I often think to myself that in order to capture everything he’s got in there I would need at least two years per arc.”

Wheatley isn’t exaggerating when he says that time is a luxury he doesn’t have. Between his work on Dark Times, his work on a few other projects that he can’t speak about yet, and time set aside for his kids, he often finds himself stretched pretty thin.

“I have two kids that I absolutely love, and any free time that I can pull out of every week goes to them,” says Wheatley, “and it is a challenge. One thing that I’m working very hard on is resolving some deadline issues I’ve had with Dark Times. I am frantically and very intently working on ironing those out, and I’m very close to doing that – it all comes down to the fact that I want to draw so much from the material, and it being Star Wars means it’s already labour intensive.”

Wheatley is of course referring to the high level of detail and research that goes into a Star Wars comic as opposed to, he gives as an example, a Superman comic.  To do Superman, Wheatley says he would go through two or three seminal Superman books, pull some images central to Metropolis for reference, and, to be thorough, look at some photos of the New York skyline to help with realism.

To do Star Wars, Wheatley often goes through books upon books for reference, pouring through novels and fan illustration, checking and double-checking his sources for detail and accuracy. Tedious? Some might think so, but it’s clear that Wheatley loves what he does.

One thing that Wheatley would like to change in the future, is to break out of the pigeonhole he sees himself as having been put in as an exclusively science fiction artist. With a career that has been spent largely illustrating aliens, space emperors, vampires, and interterrestrial civilizations, Wheatley says that he’d like to have the opportunity to get involved with more superhero fare.

“I grew up on Chris Claremont’s X-Men, on Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Marc Silvestri,” says Wheatley, “That’s what I learned to draw from. I would love to do a run on one of the X-Men books, just because that’s what I grew up on. I’ve also been a huge Batman fan, ever since I read Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was the first Batman I ever actually read. I would absolutely love to have the chance to do more than just a pinup for that character, for Gotham City.”

Being a Batman fan myself, I feel compelled to say that I’d love to see a Doug Wheatley run on the caped crusader.

For those of you interested in following what Wheatley’s up to in the meantime, you can check out his blog, or Myspace page.