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

Tindall is no stranger to collaboration with Grecian. Though Proof predominantly features Riley Rossmo as the series artist, Tindall has himself done colours for the title, illustrated a Proof feature story, and he writes and draws his own regular backup stories (which can be found towards the end of each comic).

He answers his phone and asks me to hold while he turns off his background music – Judas Priest, because he says listening to heavy metal while he illustrates helps keep his mind from wandering. Something about the pacifying voice of Rob Halford.

Kelly has been illustrating since he was a just a kid living in a small town in Northern Saskatchewan. As he describes it, he had a knack for drawing early on, and “as soon as you have a discernible talent in a small town, everybody’s like, oh go be rich and famous so we can all say we knew you.”

He did, of course, pursue that talent – moving from Saskatchewan to Calgary to attend the Alberta College of Art and Design.

As I talk to Kelly now, he is living in Montreal, where he moved with his wife two years ago.

He answers my questions with an almost giddy enthusiasm, clearly an individual who is both an astute conversationalist and very eager to talk about something he is passionate about.

We talk about He-Man and TaleSpin, Snow Leopards and pint-size werewolves. And through it all, I find myself thinking, “you know, this guy can really talk.” And I mean that in a good way.

But see for yourself, the interview is below:

KD: What are the earliest things you can remember getting really into drawing?

KT: She-Ra villains. (laughs) When I was a kid we had what we called ‘farmer vision’, which was like three channels we could get on our television. My parents used to rent a lot of VHS, and they used to bring home a lot of He-Man and She-Ra.

She-Ra had the best villains. I didn’t have any of the toys, ’cause they were girl toys and no boy wants to play with girl toys, so instead I drew the villains and cut them out and played with them that way.

KD: Hordak was a way cooler looking villain than Skeletor.

KT: Yeah, he was just messed up. He had like a bat skull, and he was part vampire or something… But there was a bunch of them. There was like a scorpion girl, and there was a girl that had sunglasses and turned into a panther… It was rad, I love that stuff.

KD: After Art College, how did you go about pursuing a career in illustration?

KT: It was dumb luck, and just the right positioning more than anything. I don’t mind talking to people at all, so I just basically make it known that I’m an illustrator, I do the convention circuit, and I talk to a lot of people on the net. From there, the work just comes.

KD: Where did your involvement in comic art begin?

KT: I’ve always loved comics, ever since I was a little kid. Again, the small town thing; my parents’ friends ran kind of like a supermarket/convenience store, and when they used to return comics they’d rip the covers off and just send those back. So they’d end up with hundreds and hundreds of coverless comics in these big long boxes. They’d give me like four or five hundred a shot – old stuff like the origin of Galactus reprints, Alf comics, Justice Society, that sort of thing.

So I was interested in that from an early age, and I just started drawing from there. My parents also bought me a bunch of posters of different Batman stuff, and through that I got to know the difference between the Jim Aparo Batman, the Norm Breyfogle Batman, and the Neal Adams Batman… So that’s kind of where I discovered style too, actually.

KD: Moving into Archie Snow, the main recurring character you feature in your backup stories for Proof.

This was a character you originally created for a series of minicomics a few years back. Where did the idea for the character originally come from?

KT: My friend Mike had come up with a few characters that he just liked to draw for no reason, and I was at a point where I felt like I’d like to start writing some stuff myself. So I said, well, why don’t you let me write this character for you. He said okay, and I came up for this origin story and everything for the character – and he hated it, he absolutely hated it.

I was like, ‘this is pretty good though… do you mind if I do something with this?’ His response was, ‘yeah, whatever’.

So I took different interests I had, like anthropomorphic animals, weird mythology, sword-fighting, gun fighting – and I just mixed it all together, and Archie came out of it.

KD: How has Archie changed from what you originally conceived him as to what he appears as in Proof?

KT: In the beginning, I spent some time trying to figure out the animal that Archie was going to have the head of. I was originally going to give him the head of a Himalayan Bear, but I also wanted a big part of Archie’s origin to relate to flight – because he was originally a commercial pilot before he became an adventurer. Problem was, it was too much like TaleSpin. Kind of a Baloo the Bear as a pilot thing. So I was like okay, I gotta move away from this idea, and that’s how the Snow Leopard thing came about.

Snow Leopards are very noble, they’re predatory, mysterious, and on their own ninety percent of the time… and that just fit with Archie’s character.

KD: Do you have any overarching ideas for where you’d like to take Archie in the future?

KT: The thing about Archie is that he’s not really like a Hellboy or a Proof or anything like that because he hasn’t always been this weird creature.  He’s relatively new to the world of magical things. So he’s got this sky-high BS detector, and has no patience for any of it but it’s just become his lot in life.

I want to get into what kind of person he was before that, and how who he was affected his current attitudes.

KD: Outside of the Archie Snow stories, you’ve done some coloring for Proof, a few other backup stories for the title, and some work on a main Proof feature. How far back does your acquaintanceship with Riley Rossmo and Alex Grecian go?

KT: Well I met them both in jail… (laughs) But seriously. I went to ACAD and Riley was in the class a year behind me in the visual communication program. So that’s where I first met him, and I got to know him from there. Around the time that Proof was starting up, I had finished my first Archie Snow minicomics, and Riley took a look at them and said, ‘well you should work on Proof with us’.

This was months before Proof was picked up, before Image had even indicated an interest in the book.

KD: What can you tell me about Squeak, the graphic novel you’re currently working on with Alex Grecian?

KT: It’s a pretty simple premise: it’s the story of a mouse, a completely average Beatrix Potter kind of mouse, that gets bitten by a werewolf. So whenever it gets dark and the moon comes out, he turns into a two inch long werewolf.

We’re publishing through AiT/Planet Lar, and it’ll be out sometime this year. We’re getting pretty close to being finished, and I’m actually inking part of the last third of the book today. We’re hoping to get it into shops as soon as we can – within a few months would be great.

I really like working on it too, I mean it’s really expressive, there’s lots of energy, and lots of action. There’s almost no dialogue as the characters are all fairly realistic animals – snakes and owls, that sort of thing.

KD: To end the interview on a bit of a different note, if you weren’t illustrating or involved with comics at all, what other career could you see yourself doing?

KT: I actually helped run a theatre before – like an actual ‘theatre’ theatre, where people put on plays – when my wife and I were living together in Saskatoon. One of my first loves was the stage, and I did a fair share of acting when I was living in Saskatoon and when I was living in Calgary. I could see myself going back to doing something like that.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming