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

Vancouver-based artist Jason Turner has been working in webcomics for longer than many even knew the industry existed.

Turner, whose online work gained first gained attention thanks to early endorsement by Scott McCloud, (of Zot! and Understanding Comics fame) is perhaps best known for the graphic novel True Loves. The two volumes of True Loves, which were originally published as weekly webcomics, tell the story of a modern romance between two Vancouverites. Both volumes were co-authored with his wife, Manien Bothma, and published by New Reliable Press.

The second volume can currently be seen in its entirety on Turner’s website, the jason turner project – alongside an impressive array of additional comics that he has published exclusively online.

When Turner began posting his first comics online back in 2000, titled Down at the Black Box, webcomics were far from the mainstream-celebrated that phenomenon they are today. The concept had been around since the early nineties, though for the better part of the decade the audience was largely peer-based, and the online communities growing around them were still relatively small.

At the time, Turner had been independently producing comics for already almost a decade. His body of work consisted of fifty or so zine comics, many of which he often exchanged with others in the zine community via mail. His leap from offline to online comic publishing came roughly at the same time as Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics, which led to Turner’s involvement in the online community surrounding McCloud’s experiments in webcomics. Sharing links to his work with that community are what originally brought him McCloud’s attention, and subsequent ongoing encouragement.

Since then, as webcomics have grown into the pop culture mainstay that they presently are, Turner has had ample opportunity to build on his own ideas about webcomics and carve a niche for himself in the world of digital sequential art.

Turner was kind enough to indulge The Fabler with an interview about (among other things) the release of the second True Loves graphic novel, how he manages to keep the digital content he churns out fresh, and what we can expect next from the prolific creator.

The interview is below:

KD: To start somewhere recent, you just finished your collection of online two-panel comic strips titled ‘Another One Hundred Page Project‘. Can you tell me a little bit about the One Hundred Page projects, and the idea behind them?

JT: In general I enjoy doing these projects, doing “x” each day. It is a way to get myself to do something, and gives a structure for me to work within. So for instance at one point I did these tarot-ish cards, and would draw one each day on my break at work, about the general themes of my day, and I kept going until I had a deck’s worth of them.

The One Hundred Page Project came out of seeing a nice little sketchbook at an art store, noticing it was 100 pages, and thinking it would be perfect for a “project”, as 100 pages is a good amount. Substantial, but not impossible. I didn’t really have a clear plan of what I would draw, just whatever came into my head when I sat down to draw. Like many of my projects, I draw straight into ink, which is a little like drawing without a net. Often I would just draw things that happened to be around me. Or like with my card project, try to draw something to represent the essence of important events from the day. Later on I got on a roll of drawing ideas from a comic story I was building in my head.

KD: The Another One Hundred Page Project and its predecessor are obviously just two parts of a bigger body of online work you’ve been building with ‘the jason turner project’.

Say someone who isn’t familiar with your work expresses an interest in what you do, and asks you what webcomic you would recommend they start with. What do you tell them?

JT: Well, some of the older autobiographical things I did are pretty accessible, like Cooler, the Cottage or My Stupid Week. I suspect quite a few people end up starting with the two Blue comics – Bright Morning Blue and Blue Double Double, due to Scott McCloud’s endorsing them. I am pretty happy with how those two came out (although I always pictured them as being just the first two parts of a larger epic). Or something like the 24hr comic Ditched, which has a self-contained complete narrative. And people tend to enjoy True Loves, though only the second volume is currently online.

KD: Looking back at the sizeable collection of webcomics you’ve created over the past few years, the first word that comes to mind about your approach to online publishing is ‘relentless’. (This is followed closely by ‘inspired’).

Where do you turn to for inspiration? How do you keep churning out fresh ideas for comic content?

JT: I certainly don’t feel relentless! I am always feeling like I haven’t been drawing nearly enough! Also, I have quite a few things from my old site that I haven’t transferred over…

For inspiration I look at the things around me. I roll things around in my head when I walk especially, so my walking to work is a fertile time for me (especially if I have already had some coffee). The story I mentioned drawing scenes from in Another One Hundred Page Project was inspired by my fascination with alleyways. I walk down the one behind my house each day on my way to work, and so that is more or less where this fantastical story would take place. I enjoy twisting and transmuting things in my life into a more fantastic form.

KD: Earlier this summer you and your wife celebrated the release of a collected edition of True Loves Vol. 2 through New Reliable Press.

I’ve heard True Loves called “one of the most Vancouvereque comics you could ever come across”, and you and Manien yourselves have acknowledged the importance of the locale in the narrative. What is it about Vancouver that makes it such a perfect place to tell the story of (central protagonists) True and Zander?

JT: Actually Vancouver came to True Loves before True and Zander! I had been trying to think of very Vancouver-specific comic to pitch as a weekly strip for a local paper. One day I asked Manien if she wanted to help me come up with characters for this Vancouver romance story I was thinking of, and there our writing collaboration started.

Many people have asked me if the story is autobiographical, and it is not. It is however very much set in the parts of Vancouver we have lived in, the places we enjoy going to, “our Vancouver.” So it is a perfect place for the story because it is a place we know and love.

KD: As I understand it, you’ve already begun writing the third volume of True Loves. With the first volume about True and Zander getting together, and the second about their later-relationship trials living together, can you shed a little light on where yourself and Manien aim to take the next chapter?

JT: We are still pretty early in the scripting right now, and I never like to say too much about what is going to happen. Some life changes occur which will make True and Zander do some stock-taking and soul searching.

I will say that as we continue writing together our stories are getting better, and each time in we get to know the characters better. We are also trying to have a clearer idea of the overall shape of the book this time.

KD: Based on your own experience working with webcomics, what are some ways that you would say the transition from physical minicomic to online webcomic has affected the average Canadian indie comic creator?

JT: It just allows more people access to your work, and makes it easier to connect with like-minded people. In the zine days the connections were through magazines, or reviews in other people’s zines, or zine fairs. It was all much slower! And so with the internet it is easier to find comics to read, though a little overwhelming, since there are so many out there. Also you can do colour for no extra charge online.

KD: Do you foresee yourself anytime in the future ceasing to produce print versions of your comics altogether?

JT: To a large extent I have. Since I started putting my comics on the internet I have only produced a few zines. Though print versions do allow you reach different people. A lot of folks I know don’t read comics online, and so if I don’t do print editions of things, they lose touch with what I am doing. So it is good to have something in print for local conventions, and for bigger shows like APE, SPX and TCAF. And having the True Loves book out there reaches different people too. People get it from the library, which is exciting to me.

KD: To bring the interview to a close on a note more directly related to your own material, what new directions would you like your work to explore in the future?

JT: Working on True Loves has taken up most of my drawing time for quite a few years now, and so I do have quite a backlog of ideas that I have not been getting to. I have various things from a low key story about comic fans, to a fantasy story, to a science fiction thing, to a Twin Peaks-y story. Many different things! Also Manien and I are always threatening to do a “sexy thriller” after True Loves is done.

To find out more about Jason Turner, check out his webpage at the jason turner project.