Metal Gods TV Interview

I was a guest on the Rogers TV program Daytime Ottawa. It's a really neat show that I believe has been on air for about a decade now. I've been a guest in the past, but it's been a few years so it was nice to be back.

Update 2026: METAL GODS was an experiment in serialized storytelling, but one I wound up abandoning after 4 issues. While I am still a bit disappointed with how that turned out, it paved the way for much of my contemporary comics, especially WOLF'S HEAD. I would never call it a failure, but I was still learning my craft and trying to work out the tricks of digital publishing. And, of course, ComiXology wound up being rolled into the Kindle platform. That, sadly, was a pretty negative experience and soured my on using Kindle as a publishing platform. But! Hosts Derick Fage and Kurt Stoodley were incredibly generous to have me on to talk about my work and the interview was a lot of fun.

Lightly Edited Transcript

Derick Fage: Welcome back to Daytime Ottawa. Comics! You must have grown up reading comics.

Kurt Stoodley: I was... I read a lot of Archie comics.

Derick Fage: Me, too!

Kurt Stoodley: But I was a Spider-Man guy all the way. As a matter of fact —

Derick Fage: No way! Are you kidding me?

Kurt Stoodley: Hang on a second.

Derick Fage: Look at this!

Kurt Stoodley: Spider-Man wallets, ladies and gentlemen!

Derick Fage: We’re going to introduce you to something even better than Spider-Man.

Kurt Stoodley: Yes!

Derick Fage: Our next guest has an amazing comic that he has released digitally. We’re joined by Von Allan. He is a local writer and artist. Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.

Kurt Stoodley: Hey, Von.

Derick Fage: This is really geared, Von, toward lovers of comic books [who are] adults, right?

Von Allan: Yes.

Derick Fage: Tell us a little bit about the premise of METAL GODS.

Von Allan: It’s for older readers. Some of the stuff I’ve done in the past has been for kids, but this one is definitely for older readers. It’s what I call a metal-themed comic. It’s not a heavy-metal comic, per se, but it is an action-adventure story with a couple, Nick and Louella, who discover that Nick’s parents seem to be mixed up in some type of cult. So, the initial part of the story is about them trying to figure out what Nick’s parents are up to and how to get them out of it.

Kurt Stoodley: Is this an original story that you came up with? You dreamed this one up?

Von Allan: Yup!

Kurt Stoodley: You do wear all the hats when it comes to this publication, right?

Von Allan: Yes, I do. I write, I draw, I do all the colouring, everything.

Kurt Stoodley: Just list off, if you wouldn’t mind, Von, everything you have to do to produce this sort of material? You’re one man doing it.

Derick Fage: Have you got an hour?

Von Allan: Yeah. I write, which means you come up with the ideas. I actually work from a loose outline rather than a full script, but there’s a process I go through. My wife is a professional editor, so she actually helps me quite a bit with that. There’s also a lot of design work. I have to figure out what the characters look like, location design and whatnot. It’s almost like sort of kind of a weird film production side of it. You have to do it really fast because you don’t have a lot of time with the way the production schedule works. Then I do all the layouts; I do the penciling, I letter the damn thing, I do all the final inking, and I do all the colouring, as well.

Derick Fage: I can’t keep up!

Von Allan: Yeah.

Kurt Stoodley: It’s a big undertaking, there’s no question. And this is a digital comic book, yes?

Von Allan: Yeah! It’s kind of weird, because I work in this weird fusion. I do a lot of penciling traditionally on paper and then I scan ‘em in. A lot of the rest of the work is done digitally, on a Wacom tablet that I have, which is really neat and that keeps me going faster and that’s a huge huge thing. In terms of distribution, I’ve had past work that’s been distributed in print, but this time I’ve gone fully digital so people can read it on like iPads and tablets and iPhones.

Kurt Stoodley: Full colour?

Von Allan: Yeah.

Derick Fage: Did you do that for for a better reach?

Von Allan: Yeah. That was the big thing. What I was finding... I was having trouble. I’ve had a lot of really supportive retailers, [but] not enough. So it’s a matter of you spend a lot of time working on a story and then you get “X” number of sales. The sales were never where I was hoping they would be and they come and go. Then you’re getting into other things, like there’s library sales, so it’s just problematic. And then the other thing that became a big issue is colour. Colour is still very expensive for print and I was like, “if I can sidestep that...”

Kurt Stoodley: And get aren’t you producing a more vibrant sort of colour and picture through the internet than you would on paper?

Von Allan: This gets tricky. Print is CMYK. Digital is RGB; that’s what all our monitors look like. So the big thing is there’s a larger spectrum of colour that you can use [with RGB] but, at the same time, it’s sort of a Catch-22. I’d like to see it in print eventually so the colours can’t be so off the spectrum that what is in RGB on your screen looks really different in print. You want something close. So I actually had to figure out ways; “how do you make the colours true in both, so that they look good in print and on screen.

Question: We were showing off our Spider-Man wallets. We grew up obviously loving Spider-Man comics and watching the cartoon. Are you competing against these? What’s your opinion on mainstream comics?

Von Allan: Okay, there’s a lot of superhero stuff I like, there’s a lot of mainstream comics I like. But! Peter Parker launched in the early 1960s, he’s still Spider-Man. He’s still a college-age, [maybe] a little older guy, sometimes married, sometimes they do deals with the devil to get rid of his marriage. I’m not kidding. The big thing about corporate properties like this is that they’re properties now. There’s a constancy with them; they never want them to change too much.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get an awesome unbelievable terrific story. You can. And there’s some amazingly talented people working, but usually what it also means is that they’re going to hit the “reset button” and they’ll go back to a sort of status quo. So you’ll get these weird changes; recently in Marvel and Spider-Man, Dr. Octopus was in Spidey’s body. That was the big thing; they actually had Dr. Octopus take over. Peter Parker was kind of like a ghost. That’s all resolved and Peter Parker is now back in Spidey’s body.

Derick Fage: So then your approach. Is it a completely different approach, where your characters will age and if somebody dies off, they die off. They’re not resurrected.

Von Allan: That’s the idea. I really love Marvel Comics, particularly in the 1960s when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and guys like that. Guys, primarily, because very few women were working in comics at the time. These characters change. You saw Peter Parker as a high school kid, then going into college. You saw almost all the characters aging in real time and the stories would refer to real time. Not anymore.

Kurt Stoodley: You are the co-recipient of the 2014 Corel Endowment For The Arts Award.

Von Allan: Yeah!

Kurt Stoodley: Congratulations! And [METAL GODS] is available online. How do people get it?

Von Allan: The biggest digital distributor in the world right now is called comiXology, comixology.com. They were actually bought by Amazon, which shows you how big they’ve gotten. METAL GODS is with them, so if you punch in “METAL GODS” in a Google search, you’re gonna find it pretty quick.

Kurt Stoodley: And easy to order and get?

Von Allan: Oh yeah. I’m selling them for 99 cents.

Kurt Stoodley: Sadly we don’t have time to talk to Von about the Tony Dungy, Monte Kiffin, and Bud Carson 4-3 Over/Under Defence.

Derick Fage: You’re a huge football fan!

Von Allan: I am!

Kurt Stoodley: You love that defence!

Derick Fage: We don’t have time! We’ll have you back, maybe as we close in on the NFL season. The three of us can do a round table talking football. What do you think?

Kurt Stoodley: Good! I like that, I like it a lot. I’m bringing you in, buddy, I mean it!

Derick Fage: Don’t go away! More Daytime coming up. I think we’re talking pasties.

Kurt Stoodley: Pasty’s next?

Derick Fage: Yeah, I think it’s Pasty’s next. It’s a delicious pie! We’ll tell you more about it with Matt Grant right after this.

Daytime Ottawa on Rogers TV

Here's an interview I recently did on the Rogers Television program "Daytime Ottawa." Co-host Derick Fage and I chat about the Lulu Awards controversy, my graphic novel the road to god knows... and the launch of my new graphic novel Stargazer at Ottawa's Perfect Books in November 2010.

Lightly-Edited Transcript

TL Rader: Alright, the second half of the show coming up is jam-packed.

Derick Fage: It is.

TL Rader: You’re having an interesting conversation with Von Allan.

Derick Fage: Oh, this is great.

TL Rader: This is going to be neat. I can’t wait to hear you guys have your chat.

Derick Fage: He is a Lulu Award nominee. He’s actually been nominated for three of these awards. And these awards, as a matter of fact, are for books, graphic novels, books by women, for women. Von Allan is a man.

TL Rader: I know!

Derick Fage: So you can imagine there’s a bit of controversy around these nominations. And it’s a wonderful book. As you can see, my bookmark, I’m three-quarters of the way through. It talks about a very important topic. The main character, of course, is a woman.

TL Rader: Yeah, he was nominated in like three categories, right?

Derick Fage: That’s right. One of them being Best Newcomer. And I think that’s really the biggest, most controversial nomination so far.

TL Rader: Yeah, because one was for the character or something. So that’s, you know, but the fact that it’s Newcomer, but it’s a man.

Derick Fage: Yes.

TL Rader: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting.

Derick Fage: So it’s going to be a great conversation. I’m looking forward to it.

[Transition Break]

Derick Fage: Welcome back to the show. I want you to imagine there’s a set of awards for comics for women by women. And you happen to be a man who writes a graphic novel, a comic, and is nominated for three of those awards. Well, there is some controversy involved. And Von Allan, the author of “the road to god knows…,” joins us on the show. First of all, congratulations on the book.

Von Allan: Thank you.

Derick Fage: And congratulations on the nominations.

Von Allan: Thank you very much.

Derick Fage: Let’s jump into the nominations.

Von Allan: Sure.

Derick Fage: Right off the bat, before we get into the book, because it must have… Did it come as a surprise to you when you found out? Because you were nominated for three awards, correct?

Von Allan: Oh, yeah. I was aware they… It’s all by popular vote. So I was aware that they were happening, and I mentioned to a couple of people online in like early August that, hey, you know, there’s a chance. Go nominate me. You know, what the hell. I suggested to people that, like, best book and maybe best character. I never thought that it would even necessarily be eligible for any of the other categories. So I’m still a bit stunned how it made the other category that’s the contentious one.

Derick Fage: Well, what’s the contentious one? What’s that other category?

Von Allan: Okay. It’s called the Kim Yale Award, and it’s in honour of a female writer named Kim Yale who died of breast cancer when she was 43, I believe. And it’s been around for a while, around 15 years as far as I know, and no man had ever been shortlisted in that category, I guess. So how I got shortlisted in that, I’m not sure, but as it’s turned out, I guess there was never anything in the statutes of that category that forbid it. It just never happened before.

Derick Fage: Okay. So if you win that award, then we could probably see this explode into even more controversy.

Von Allan: Yes.

Derick Fage: Well, let’s talk about the book itself. I had a chance to read it, and you really tackle an important issue that I think is taboo for a lot of people, but you decided to tackle mental illness. Why did you choose that particular topic?

Von Allan: Well, it was a couple of things. The really pragmatic choice is when you’re nobody and you’re trying to do a first book, you either… in comics, it’s primarily superheroes in North America, so you either do your riff on superheroes. Nobody’s ever heard of you. Why would they read it?

Derick Fage: Right.

Von Allan: Or you do something that’s personal. I used to run a bookstore. I know, regardless of subject matter, regardless of, you know, graphic novel or prose or what have you, how hard first-time books struggle with sales. So you might as well do something you believe in.

My mom was diagnosed schizophrenic when I was a kid. It meant my upbringing, I was a sort of single child — my mom and dad split up when I was pretty young — so it meant my upbringing was kind of unique compared to some other people I knew.

Derick Fage: Right.

Von Allan: And I looked around and I just didn’t see really any other graphic novels or comics tackling this subject matter. So I thought it was important. I thought I could maybe bring a bit of — maybe ‘insight’ is too strong of a word — but I had something to say about it. That’s why I did it.

Derick Fage: Yeah, you can share your personal story. I think what’s really intriguing is that you chose to do it from a female perspective.

Von Allan: Well, that was for a couple of reasons. One is I was really sure that if I did it from, if the main character had been a boy, then it would have been very clear, like, ‘hey, he’s talking about himself. Look, it’s right there. That’s him.’

Derick Fage: Right.

Von Allan: So I didn’t want to do that. The other thing is, as soon as I made the main character, Marie, female, it’s fiction. I could play with time. I could take elements that did happen in my life, but I could compress them into a narrative that actually worked for a pacing of the story. In real life, some of the stuff, really all the stuff happened in the book to me, but it would have happened over a number of years. So trying to make the narrative work just over about a month or so was a big deal when I was writing the script.

Derick Fage: Well, and her character has a best friend throughout this.

Von Allan: Yes.

Derick Fage: That’s a great support to her. Is that something that you had in your life? In your life? In your situation?

Von Allan: I did, but not so much through one person.

Derick Fage: Okay.

Von Allan: So Kelly, her friend, is sort of an amalgam of a number of different people. And that’s actually one of the other reasons why I didn’t want to do it as pure autobiographical material, because I’d have to okay this with people.

Derick Fage: Right.

Von Allan: Like, are you okay? Really? Oh, I didn’t represent you? Well, somebody’s coming at me with a knife, you know, or what have you.

Derick Fage: Right.

Von Allan: So fiction just opens up everything. It allows you to play with stuff. I was able to take some of the best elements, what I would consider the best elements of friends I had. And I didn’t have a large number of friends when I was a kid, and I was a pretty shy kid. But it allowed me to say, you know, these people actually did matter. They do help.

And when you’re going through some of this stuff, and you’re going through it alone, it’s very isolating. So just being able to hang out with a friend, blow off steam on a Saturday, or what have you, in hindsight, I had no idea how much that helped go through some of this stuff.

Derick Fage: Right. The character, obviously the main character, Marie, shows great strength throughout this book.

Von Allan: I think so.

Derick Fage: I mean, she really is a heroine. Did you find that you had that kind of strength when you were going through this?

Von Allan: No, but I mean, I think one of the things I tried to do with the book is, to my mind, the sort of the driving force is Marie’s growing up. She’s around 13 in the story. And the awareness she has, and it’s implied in the story, I don’t come out and say it, is she realizes that her mom’s messed up. She can’t solve that problem for her mom. She loves her mom, her mom loves her, but she can’t fix it for her. So Marie has to learn to let go. And in letting go, she’s learning to stand on her own two feet. And that, to my mind, is underlying everything, is the full narrative. It’s her awakening as becoming an adult.

Derick Fage: Right.

Von Allan: And it’s huge. So I mean, the strength is, it’s that awareness. And that she comes to that, I think is, to my mind, is the best part of the story.

Derick Fage: We’re obviously going to follow this story about the Lulu Award nominations and looking forward to that. You also have another book coming out called “Stargazer.” Which is very different from this one that you did. Tell us about the book coming out in November.

Von Allan: It’s about three young girls. It’s a fantasy. So it’s very, very different. “Road” is very much a slice of life story. So it’s about three girls who find themselves, younger girls, who find themselves magically transported to another planet.

And it’s funny because I wanted to do a story that was very different than “road” that actually still sort of hit on some of the same themes. So actually, what I was just saying, letting go is a huge part. These girls want to get home. Marnie, the main character in that story, is dealing with the death of her grandmother. And her inability to let go is a huge part of that story.

So when I came up with the idea, it sort of echoes “road,” but in a completely different way with a very, very different subject matter.

Derick Fage: Yeah, and I can see it too. Because being in that situation where you’ve got, you know, a family member suffering from mental illness and you’re young, you probably got away from it all by fantasizing, right? And going somewhere else.

Von Allan: I think people underestimate the power of escapism. You know, it doesn’t really matter what it is. Even if it’s crap, you know, it doesn’t really matter. Being able to, you know, on a Saturday evening, curl up with comics or watch a movie or something like that. Or as in “road,” you know, watch wrestling or something. Just to be able to take a break from stuff, take a break from your life and pull back is, I think, incredibly therapeutic.

Derick Fage: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. The book launch coming up in November, tell us when and where.

Von Allan: It’s on November 7th at Perfect Books. It’s a Sunday. And Perfect Books on Elgin Street, 258A Elgin Street at about four o’clock and then we’ll see how long it goes. You know, hopefully lots of people, so it’ll go for a while.

Derick Fage: Well, congratulations. Real pleasure having you on the show. Really appreciate it. If you want to find out more information or follow the story on the Lulu Award nominations, you can visit Von Allan’s website at www.vonallan.com.

Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back right after the break.