For the subject of this interview, we chose an extremely talented, Montreal-based comic artist who has previously had an established degree of familiarity with The Fabler.  The first 16 pages of his comic collaboration with John O’Brien, ‘The Rise and Fall of it All’ is currently among the roster of showcased comics on the main site.

In addition, he is the creator of Sequential, the Canadian comic book newsblog. Since we often feature Canadian comic book creators and/or news pertaining to the Canadian comic industry here on the Fabler Blog, there is often some overlap between content on the two sites. To further expand on that connection, he actually interviewed Fabler founder Bruno Steppuhn for a post on Sequential back in August.

I am speaking, of course, of Salgood Sam. To give Salgood a brief bio, he is a former Torontonian who became involved in the comic industry at a very young age. Much of his early twenties were spent illustrating titles for Marvel, including Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, from their  Epic Comics’ imprint, and Saint Sinner, under Marvel’s Razorline imprint.

From there, Max left comics for a while to work in animation at Nelvana Studios  (also based out of Toronto) and Cine-Group (in Montreal). Around the late 90’s he became involved with organizing local Toronto Comic Jams, a tradition he brought with him to Montreal in 2000. Sequential itself was born in 2002 as an evolution of his then-blog about the Montreal Comic Jams, NonSequiturs.

He self-published a (Doug Wright Award nominated) anthology of stories called RevolveR in 2004, and in 2007 he illustrated Therefore Repent!, a graphic novel written by Jim Munroe. You can also find his work in the comic book anthologies Comic Book Tattoo, Popgun 4, and Awesome 2: Awesomer.

For the purpose of this interview, I wanted to speak with Salgood about two of his current projects, The Rise And Fall Of It All and Dream Life. As I mentioned, a segment of The Rise and Fall Of It All can currently be seen on The Fabler, and it is a collaborative project with John O’Brien that has been in the works for some time now.

It focuses on the story of Eliot, a Chicago-based office worker who, after he loses his job and joins the ranks of the unemployed, is faced with the knowledge that he has no real, tangible sense of identity. Eliot forms a connection with a jazz musician named Elmo on the streets of Chicago, and through their friendship gleans a greater understanding of where he fits into the world. New colored pages of The Rise And Fall Of It All are currently being posted on Salgood Sam’s RevolveR blog.

Dream Life marks Salgood Sam’s contribution to the Transmission X webcomic collective. Though it is currently on hiatus until January 15th, (Act 1 finished on Dec  18th, Jan 15th is the beginning of Act 2) Dream Life is a regularly updated webcomic with some seriously surreal undertones about the subconscious and an interesting initial concept. In Salgood’s own words:

“Dream Life began as a conversation between friends…  Cracking wise about what kind of adults (Charles M. Schulz’s) Peanuts characters might make we were inspired to play with the idea of using the cast as a constraint for a contemporary black comic narrative about our peers, and ourselves; Each character beginning as a Peanuts archetype that we would then age and play with, borrowing from our own lives and our friend’s to flush them out.”

An interesting premise, to be sure. As the project evolved, the story came to be told in a shifting perspective between five core characters as they weather their own miniature, individually-tailored life crises.

Artistically, Dream Life represents Salgood Sam at the top of his game. Each page is really a pleasure to take in, whether it be a lovingly-crafted rendition of something as mundane as a late wake-up call or an extravagantly fantastic image from one of the characters’ diverse dreamscapes.

Ah, but enough preamble. The interview itself is below:

KD: I understand that you originally planned Dream Life as a graphic novel. What can you tell me about that, and how it came to evolve into the regularly updated webcomic it is now?

SS: It’s still meant to be a graphic novel, but doing it also as a webcomic seems to be the most efficient way to get it out there and get it seen. Trying to sell a graphic novel is always a challenge, particularly so with this book. Whenever I talked about it to a publisher, it was difficult to get them to take it very seriously because the first act is pretty much thirty pages of silent dream sequence before anybody even says anything.

So that element of Dream Life has made it difficult to get publishers on board, and I thought, if I’m going to be doing it on my own anyway, it would be nice to get some form of immediate, ongoing response to my work on it as I go.  There was a brief period where I thought to myself, do I want to play it close to the chest and keep it to myself until it’s done, or do I want to put it out there?  The fact that it’s a three hundred page book, which would mean it would be a long time spent keeping it to myself, plus I don’t particularly enjoy working in a void like that, led to my decision to put it online as a webcomic. It was the combined incentive of having a discourse with an audience, building an audience as I go, and possibly attracting the attention of a publisher just by putting it out there.

KD: How did you end up connecting with Transmission X to release Dream Life under the TX collective banner?

SS: I’ve known them for quite a while. I believe I initially met them through Steve Murray and Ben Shannon, who used to share space with them at RAID studio. They’re all incredibly talented individuals, and even though I left Toronto we all kind of came up in the same scene there with a lot of common perspectives and common connections. When the TX thing started, I was really interested in jumping in with them, it was just a question with what. Plus at that time, it was just the people who were physically in the studio and I was no longer in the same city.

Then as they expanded, and as I came to the point where I had something, I talked to them a lot and the interest was there. Then Ramon Perez told me, ‘you know, we’re totally into it, you just have to be ready to post something every week’. Which was just intimidating enough to make me hesitate at first, so I went ahead and completed the first big chunk on my own to get the point where I felt confident enough to say, okay, I could deal with that sort of commitment.

KD: That’s right, by last year’s TCAF you already had the first act out published as a forty page minicomic. At the time you did that, you were actually months ahead of your update schedule with the webcomic. What sort of buffer are you running these days?

SS: Right now I’m pretty much right on top of it, and I’m working on the end of this chapter. I’m trying to hopefully stay four or five pages ahead of myself, which is about a month of updates.

KD: Getting a bit more into the content of Dream Life, the story you’re telling rotates through a group of core characters under the initial concept that they would represent archetypical future versions of the core Peanuts cast.

As you worked further on the project, was it any harder to stick to that original character concept? Where else did you pull inspiration from in defining the traits of these characters?

SS: I like the idea of playing with that constraint to a certain degree, but it’s a self-imposed constraint and I’ve never been that much of a stickler. So I didn’t try to be absolutely faithful to it, instead using that concept as a source of ideas. Also, originally when I came up with the concept for this project it was myself and a collaborator, my friend Jonathon. The two of us started satirizing ourselves and our friends by playing off of the Peanuts archetypes and saying, ‘well who do we know that’s like Linus, or who do we know that’s like such-and-such?’

Then we borrowed character traits from ourselves and our friends and added those to the characters. It ended up as a hybrid between something that satirized Peanuts, and something that satirized our friends.

KD: It seems that Dream Life has allowed you the opportunity to really have a lot of fun experimenting with your approach to sequential art in itself. Your layout rarely follows a set pattern; I get the feeling you revel in utilizing nifty devices like different color schemes to indicate different character perspectives, or creative angles for panel perspective.

To what degree for you is Dream Life an exercise in experimenting with different sequential techniques?

SS: On the topic of color, his was originally going to be a black and white project. One of the reasons it ended up color is because a lot of the book is about different states of mind, and I found that the most powerful tool I had to indicate that was with color.

Experimenting with my art is something I’ve always done, quite compulsively, actually. Early on in my career when I worked for commercial publishing, that was a problem for me.  I never liked doing things in some sort of set, inflexible way – which strictly speaking, is a lot more efficient when you have to meet a deadline. If you do four versions of a page trying to figure out how to approach it from a creatively different angle that still works, deadline issues become a problem.

Dream Life is a very personal project, and since there’s no editor involved, I get to make my own calls on how I would like to experiment with it. I have no problem using a strict grid or a conventional tool, but if I think there may be a way to do the job better, I’ll take the time to explore my options.

KD: Dream Life deals extensively with realms of the subconscious, a fact that is reflected in your fluid, shifting, often surreal approach to its art. Where did you pick up this interest in exploring the latent and manifest elements of the human psyche?

SS: It probably had something to do with my upbringing. Carl Jung was a huge interest of my father’s,  and to quote one source, he was a ‘legendary acid dealer’, so the whole ‘consciousness-twisting’ thing was a pretty big part of my landscape growing up. My father died when I was really young, and there’s a whole host of ideas that he was really into that I was sort of indoctrinated in before having a chance to be conscious of that. Later in life when I started reading up on this stuff myself, it was kind of weird recognizing the stuff I read from my Dad talking about it when I was a kid.

KD: Let’s move into The Rise and Fall of it All. This project is a collaboration between yourself and John O’Brien, and from what I read about it on RevolveR, you began work on it back in 2006. Can you briefly go over the history of that?

SS: I think it goes back even further than that. John’s a jazz musician and multimedia artist originally based out of Chicago, though I think he’s in Minnesota now. During the nineties, he ran a headhunting agency and paid his bills being a talent scout for IT companies. The IT industry apparently experienced a boom in the late nineties in anticipation of the ‘millenium bug’, which then busted at the turn of the decade. So he saw a lot of people lose their jobs, and while some people can bounce back from that, some others – depending on their circumstance or inclination, can get lost in the cracks.

John wanted to tell a story about someone who fell between the cracks. Someone who didn’t have a clear role of who he was to begin with, but after he loses his job, he winds up directionless and on the streets of Chicago. It’s there that he meets a Jazz musician named Elmo. One of the touchstones for Elmo is based on this group (that isn’t that well documented) called “The Ben-Ishmael Tribe,” a tri-racial tribe of people who made a home around Lake Michigan before it was colonized. These are displaced native groups, escaped slaves, and indentured servants who bonded together to make this amalgamated group.

Chicago was built somewhat around this tribe, who refused to work day jobs and weren’t really interested in a paycheck, but would still exchange their services for food or necessities. They later became targets of the eugenics movement, and many were sterilized. Over time, the tribe dissipated and ceased to be known as the Ben-Ishmaelites, and their culture effectively became lost.  This jazz player on the street, Elmo, is portrayed as a surviving descendant of this group.

KD: What appealed to you about this story?

SS: I like the story because it is about someone defining their relationship with society on their own terms, rather than the terms that society presents to them. The story is about Eliot, a lost person who doesn’t know how he fits into society, and Elmo, who through meeting him helps Eliot redefine his relationship to society and build and identity that he can have pride in.

For me, creatively it’s also interesting because all John gave me was a long piece of prose. There’s no script, so I can just take his prose -which almost has a lyrical quality – and come up with my own visuals for them. And the research has been really interesting, I mean I didn’t know who the Ben-Ishmael Tribe was at all before reading about them for this project.

KD: I also noticed that some of the finished work has a set of companion audio files that can be played along with it. Is that just the original prose that he wrote for The Rise and Fall of it All? And is that John doing the reading himself?

SS: The first main one, for the first completed fifteen pages, is actually an actor that John O’Brien used to employ back when he was a headhunter in the kind of jobs that the character Eliot has.  His name is John Fuhr, and he’s also the physical model for Eliot.

Part of the concept for this was for it to be a multimedia project with a projectable version with crudely animated art, and the idea was for John O’Brien to go on tour with John Fuhr, who would provide a live action performance while the projected component was played. Originally, John wanted me to do this entirely as a projected version, and I said I would be interested in doing it also as a book. Done in such a way that it could also be projected, so that we could all sort of have our cake and eat it too.

John is currently working on the project in a live-action film format, and he’s also rewritten the script multiple times. I’m still working with the original prose, which means that there are now multiple permutations of Rise and Fall of it All in existence.  John, being a jazz musician, has been very open and encouraging about me taking the ball and running with it for my own version of the project.

For more from Salgood Sam, you can check out his blog, Facebook Page, or follow him on Twitter.  You can find Sequential here.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Check out the entire line up here: http://sequential.spiltink.org/?p=4044

Also featuring great work by Salgood Sam, and Howard Wong!

Thanks once again to our friends at Sequential!

The exact amount of published art that I have distributed is zero, and I have yet to write a comic of my own.

With these qualifications in mind, I am now going to presume to tell you how to be successful in comic books.

Well, I’m not actually going to tell you that. No one can tell you that. If there was a magical club secret to finding success in sequential art and storytelling, it would have been leaked on a messageboard somewhere long ago. Then flamed. Then defended, flamed again, and, if it this hypothetical leak occurred anytime in the last year or so, tweeted.

Then it would have gone from tweeting to trending, and been retweeted and subsequently reposted across the blogosphere. The indie comic scene would have exploded overnight in a glorious flash of social-media-fuelled industry enlightenment.

…But, seeing as how that did not in fact occur, we’ll assume that if there ever was such a secret, it died sometime before the age of digital technology.

Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to spout some thoughts at you, the reader, regarding observations I’ve made about the industry. With the disclaimer intact that I am neither a successful writer of comics nor an artist myself, I daresay that some of these observations might still be helpful to those aspiring to be the above.

(Don’t worry, the creator interviews are still an ongoing feature – posts like this aren’t the new exclusive standard for The Fabler Blog. In fact, in the coming weeks we’ll have some lovely interviews posted with such talent as Michael Cho and Jordyn Bochon.)

In my opinion, one of the single most impressive things about the Canadian comic book industry is its ability to generate self-sustaining communities. Be they online forums like Canadiangeek.com or Maple Ink Comics, collectives such Transmission X, or simply groups of artists getting together for their local Comic Jams – community is at the heart of Canadian indie comics.

Rightly so. It makes sense for individuals with any form of shared interest to find ways to grow through interaction with each other. Writers’ circles meet to bounce ideas off of each other when hammering out new prose, structural engineers rub shoulders at conventions to network, and anarchists hold book fairs to exchange perspectives. Well, anarchists of the Western post-modern variety, at least.

With indie comics, community is less of a supplementary tool, and more of a basic necessity. Independent comic books still lack the large, varied market that, say, indie music or even small press novels attracts. Without that market, and without an adequate distribution system beyond Diamond, (which is balanced very much against new indie creators) it’s no easy task to get your work out there and seen. This is especially difficult for those looking to produce traditional, physical copies of their work rather than operate solely in a digital medium.

The best route an aspiring indie comic artist can take, (providing that artist is set on paper copy publication) is to find other artists and collaborate on an anthology. A comic anthology is easy to flip through, relatively cheap to mass produce when you have a group of people pooling funds, and it introduces you to other local writers/artists, opening the door for future collaborations. Regular collaborations with the same individuals might lead to the founding of a local publishing company, like Calgary’s Vicious Ambitious.

Forums such as the ones I listed above are making it far easier to track down local creators than ever before; as are individual blogs, Facebook groups, and collectively maintained news blogs such as Sequential. As more and more artists realize the importance of maintaining an online presence, it’s near impossible to find comic creators that are totally unreachable via the web

As comic artists increasingly turn towards webcomics as a more financially viable mode of publishing effectively, you might think that the importance of community lessens. It doesn’t cost a ton of money to get a website up and running, complete with a unique domain name and a decent amount of server space. And once it’s up there, it’s there to be searched the world over, transcending the geographical limitations of small press print runs.

This is, of course, incomplete logic. Why would people search for it in the first place? How would you pull in enough initial traffic to generate buzz about your webcomic and get that initial word of mouth going?

The talented artists over at Transmission X have found a collective approach to solving this problem. In 2007, a pool of top-notch Canadian illustrators and cartoonists founded the organization to jointly promote each other’s work on the internet. Many of them, such as Karl Kerschl and Cameron Stewart, had already achieved a significant level of popularity in the industry – but by joining up with other creators to form the Transmission X webcomics portal, they combined their individual fan bases into a larger audience.

In this case, the fans themselves benefit just as much as the comic creators. Where once they would have had to rely on word of mouth to discover new artists and their work, by visiting any one of the TX artists’ sites they now gain access to a full range of varied, quality webcomics served up on a virtual platter.

You may have noticed that I’m pretty optimistic about the sense of community in Canadian comics these days. Examples like the Transmission X collective, social media bridging ties between artists, the increasing popularity of regional cons and expos, and the ongoing dedication of blogs like the Shuster Awards and Sequential make a pretty good case for a positive perspective of the industry. But don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all daffodils and shiny pennies. (Is that even an expression?)

In fact, if you wanted to hear another point of view about the industry, I could direct you over to The Comic Book Bin to a post Hervé St-Louis wrote last October titled, “The State of the Canadian Comic Book Industry“. In it, St-Louis laments a lack of unity between the individual, geographically divided communities across the country. There is definitely some truth to this, as well as to his assertion that there is still a sense of division between Anglophone and Francophone comic networks.

I guess my optimism comes from the unabashed enthusiasm I often hear from Canadian artists when the subject of community comes up. After all, that’s where my views in this column are largely coming from – the impressions I’ve been getting from the talented Canadian illustrators and cartoonists that I’ve talked to who are trying to make some niche for themselves in the comic book industry.

Whether you’re in Gatineau, Guelph, Victoria, or Edmonton, and whether you’re printing small run minicomics or e-marketing your webcomic, community is an important ingredient to your success. In Canada, it seems to me that we’re lucky to already have a number of successful comic-related communities, and a growing number of tools and resources to help build more.