Von Allan, an Ottawa-based cartoonist and comics creator, will be exhibiting artwork from his ongoing comic book and graphic novel series ‘Wolf’s Head’ at the Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC) in Ottawa’s historic Arts Court building. The exhibit will run from September 22nd through to October 20th and will take advantage of DARC’s 2.13m (7ft) LED display. Rather than being a static display of artwork from ‘Wolf’s Head’, the artwork presented at the exhibition will be animated, transforming ‘Wolf’s Head’ into a unique and altogether different format that readers of the series have never experienced before.
“Presenting artwork from the ‘Wolf’s Head’ for the LED exhibit was a wonderful opportunity to experiment and play with artwork from the series,” said Allan. “It gave me a chance to not only animate some of the characters and sequences from the story, but also to recombine my art in a way that is very different than its original presentation in graphic novel form. That part was exciting, but also a challenge: could I reconstruct disparate elements from the story, present it to viewers of the LED display, and still create a narrative flow? That took some thinking and experimenting, but I’m really pleased with the result. I think it will give viewers a chance to see my comics in a unique way. The LED display is different than the ‘normal’ experience of reading comics and I think the reaction of passersby will be fascinating to see. And, of course, the sheer size of the LED display is a big part of the whole experience; no one, including me, has ever seen my art presented that big.”
Wolf’s Head’ features Lauren Greene, a young woman who quits her job as a police officer in Metro Detroit after becoming frustrated with growing police violence. At the same time as Lauren is quitting, a secretive corporation across town has managed to create a seemingly perfect AI for war and profit; however, before the corporation can use the AI, Lauren’s mother, Patty, a janitor at the corporation accidentally finds it. Patty is literally the kindest person the new lifeform has ever met and, as a result, it bonds to her, rejects its purpose and creators, and orchestrates a huge accident to cover an escape. Patty, overwhelmed, asks her daughter Lauren for help. Despite being broke and a bit lost herself, Lauren agrees to help; two humans, an AI, and a dog versus a warmongering corporation.
“One truly unique aspect of the exhibit is that it’s presented without sound,” added Allan. “And so I had to be sure that all of my artwork and storytelling could be followed without sound. In a way, adapting my art to the digital format felt like a bit like it must’ve felt for artists adapting work for the old Silent Film Era. As part of that adaptation, I also got to experiment with the use of intertitles to help connect various aspects of the narrative. In a way, I’m familiar with the idea of intertitles; comics and graphic novels often use words to do exactly this when it comes to panel and scene transitions. But, doing it for the LED exhibit meant that I had to be careful about the number of words used and the amount of time each sentence would show on the screen. The project was a really fun challenge and I’m thrilled to be able to see it on display.”
About Von Allan: Von Allan was born red-headed and freckled in Arnprior, Ontario, just in time for “Star Wars: A New Hope.” The single child of two loving but troubled parents, Von split his childhood between their two homes. Additional information about Von Allan can be found at https://www.vonallan.com/.
About Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC): Digital Arts Resource Centre (formerly SAW Video) is a not-for-profit, artist-run media art centre that fosters the growth and development of artists through access to equipment, training, mentorship, and programming. Our mission is to support a diverse community of media artists empowered by technology, programming, and the exchange of ideas.
Our core principles are independence of expression, affordable access to all, and paying artists for their work. Digital Arts Resource Centre values diversity and actively promotes equity for all artists regardless of race, age, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, or ability.
I was tasked by the ever-wonderful Charlotte Taylor to design the latest poster for the upcoming Emond Park Craft Sale here in Ottawa, Ontario. Charlotte has been shepherding this event for a number of years now and it's always a great deal of fun to participate! And it's extra fun to do the poster art, too! This time the event will have a Halloween tone and I wanted to make sure that theme came across in the poster design! As an added bonus, I also included a quick photograph of the raw pencils and final inks. I don't always work this way, but when I do it does give me a chance to share this art process with you folks. Well, to some extent, at least!
The details of the event are on the poster, but it'll be on Sunday, October 1st from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. Emond Park is in the heart of Vanier, a neighbourhood of Ottawa, and is very easy to find.
The Facebook page for the event just went up, so local folks (and not so local folks) can find additional details at https://www.facebook.com/events/867926031418097. It should be a lot of fun!
Barney Smith of the fantastic StoryComic site (https://www.storycomic.com/) was nice enough to have me on his show! And unlike some other radio/podcast shows, this was actually done live in front of the camera! Video! Shocking!
What is truly amazing to me is that Barney has now done 289 (!) episodes of his show. That’s 289 interviews of all kinds of writers and artists, many working in comics but certainly not everyone, and he does it with humour and grace along with a boatload of great questions, too. And since he’s based in Vermont, he’s also done a special subset of episodes that deal with creative folks that live in that state (I think about 42 episodes in that category). That is one hell of a lot of work and, as I noted to Barney, I’m not sure how he does it. A love of the medium certainly helps and he has that in spades, but still… I get tired just thinking about how I’d handle that many interviews, especially given all of the research and energy that goes into it.
And, of course, The Center for Cartoon Studies is based in White River Junction, Vermont. That’s important because the school, as they note on their website, “centers on the creation and dissemination of comics, graphic novels and other manifestations of the visual narrative” as is one of the few that do that sort of thing in North America. See? How cool is that?!
So, what do we chat about? Well, not only my background in art and comics, but also how I approach telling the stories I do. We’re talking art here (and by art I mean “art” that’s very broadly defined). In other words, there are no right and wrong answers to how one makes art. There are just tools and different approaches and a great deal of learning. Whew, boy, the learning truly never stops and that’s one of the joy (and, okay, one of the occasional pains) about art. I was delighted that Barney was interested in talking about this, mainly because I think it’s one of those things that can kinda get glossed over. In other words, how one (as a creator) thinks about and approaches the story they are trying to tell is very important. It’s very easy to confuse or otherwise lose the reader and, at least for my own work, I rarely want to do it and never want to do it by accident (for those interested, one of my most abstract stories is this older one, that really needs to be read at least twice to really “grok” what it’s about).
And, of course, we take a pretty deep dive into WOLF’S HEAD, my ongoing comics series, too. (and pssst! Don’t forget to check out the new snazzy trailer for it, too!)
I hope you enjoy it! And many thanks to Barney for having me on to talk about a medium I love so much!
Lightly-Edited Transcript
Barney
Smith: Welcome to “StoryComic Presents,” where we interview
amazing storytellers and artists. This is episode 289. I’m your
host, Barney Smith of StoryComic.com.
We’re truly excited to have with us the internationally acclaimed
artist and highly talented creator of “Wolf’s
Head”, Von Allan.
Von Allan: Hello!
Barney Smith: Von, how are you doing?
Von Allan: I am doing good. Thank you very, very much for having
me on.
Barney Smith: This is great. So I read “Wolf’s Head” and I
am really excited to talk to you about that. And so do you want to
give people a little bit of background on how you got into writing
comics and creating stories and also a little bit of your synopsis of
“Wolf’s Head” as well? Because it’s a pretty interesting
story.
Von Allan: Sure, sure. I’ll do both. I’m weird, I think, with
a lot of comic book creators, particularly artists, because I did not
draw as a kid.
Barney Smith: Wow.
Von Allan: I actually came to art very, very late in life. I
didn’t start till I was about 25. And a lot of that was, A) I was
very insecure. And I really felt, particularly as a kid, that artists
were kind of born and not made. And that you sort of knew you were an
artist from when you popped out into the world. And when you did that
you — it’s a cliche — almost being born with a crayon or a
pencil in your hand.
Barney Smith: Right.
Von Allan: I kept that sort of the stereotype that “I couldn’t
do this.” I mean, I drew a little bit as a kid, but it never went
anywhere. And I certainly didn’t grow or what have you. And I wound
up working at a bookstore
when I was around 20 years old, in my early 20s. And it was an
independent bookstore. And I met a lot of writers and some artists
through the course of that with book events and whatnot. And I talked
with them. And it sounds so naive now, but in talking with them —
I’d ask them pesky questions and stuff, because I’m nosy and I
was curious. And it was dawning on me, slowly but surely, that
writers and artists have bad days. And it is not something that
necessarily comes easy to everybody. And yeah, there are the
“Mozart’s” of the world that are geniuses and what have you,
but a lot of people struggle. And through trial and error, you get
stronger as you do this. So you have to maintain discipline, and you
have to learn, you have to have an open mind.
So I basically was starting to absorb this. And I sat down with a
copy of a book called “Drawing
on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards, sort of a
legendary book, and literally started to learn to draw. And I found I
liked it. And I found that her book — and I still fondly remember
that book — has a really interesting way of helping you, as a
non-visual artist, start to learn how to do things in a really —
and it’s amazing because it’s a book; it’s not like you’re in
her class or anything. It’s a book — she has a really intuitive
way of helping you get over a lot of the insecurities and
frustrations that can happen with learning to draw.
So that was the starting point. And I ran into sort of a really
quick quandary after that, because I was like, “okay, I can draw a
little bit. I’m not very good yet. And I know there’s a lot I
still need to learn, like anatomy and perspective and what have you.”
But I want to do comics, because I had a love affair for comics as a
very young kid. I mean, I started getting into comics when I moved to
Ottawa when I was around eight years old. And comics for me were a
significant escape because my mom was not very well. She was dealing
with schizophrenia. There was a lot of mental illness and poverty. I
found comics when I moved to Ottawa, through meeting friends and
whatnot. And I got introduced to comic book stores and I just fell in
love with the medium. But I never… I never thought I could do this.
And when I was starting to work with “Drawing on the Right Side of
the Brain” at the bookstore, I was like, “okay, well, this book
is great, but this is… I don’t know how… I don’t even know
the vocabulary of how to do this.” In the West, I mean, not so much
in France or Japan, obviously, or anything like that. But [comics
have been] dismissed as an art form. And to do comics well, you need
to know figure drawing. You need to know colour for colour work.
Certainly, brush and ink or pen and ink work for inking. Your
perspective, colour and light theory and how that interacts. There’s
just so many things you have to learn and then be able to kind of
create a synthesis with. And that took time. That took a lot of time.
And there were a lot of false starts and whatnot before I started to
get even decent at it. And I look back and I probably showed my work
before I was really ready for prime time. And my initial work that’s
out there was pretty rough, but you learn by doing, you have to put
it out there and you fail. You fall on your face all the time, and
you get stronger and you keep going.
There was something about it. And I can never quite articulate
what it is about comics and about art that — despite the
difficulties and the frustrations and whatnot — didn’t stop me
from keeping going. It took a long time to get to a point where I
feel now, I’m a professional. The quality of the work, I think, is
pretty strong. My draftsmanship is a lot better than it ever was.
It’s just… it was a fight. It was a big fight.
So turning to “Wolf’s Head”. “Wolf’s Head” is probably
my most mature work in the sense of me as an artist. I felt I could
handle a story like this where before I don’t know if I could have.
My earlier stuff was a little bit autobiographical, though from a
fictional lens, and then some kids-oriented stuff, but I was still
struggling. And with “Wolf’s Head,” a lot of things sort of
came together where I felt I could do it. And the story is about a
young woman named Lauren, who is kind of down on her luck and she is
struggling with trying to find herself. She had decided to be a cop
and realized, to her horror, that this is not the world that she
wanted to be in, but she still wanted to help people. [Helping] as
some sort of the most aspirational versions of what policing can be.
And when she realized that [policing] wasn’t “it” for her, she
quit. Quitting meant, “Oh my God, I don’t have any money. I come
from a poor background. What am I going to do?” And just as she’s
trying to work on this stuff, it turns out that her mom — who is
working [as a] low-paid janitor — discovered, to her amazement,
that there is this new life form that she doesn’t really
understand, but what basically turns out to be an early form of an
artificial intelligence.
And one of the things I really wanted to do with the story is not
do a stereotype of [AI]. It’s funny; I started it before all of the
contemporary stuff about AI is in the news, but I wanted to do sort
of like the anti-”Terminator” or anti-”Star Trek,” where
[those stories are] like, “Oh my God, this robot is going to
replace humanity and wants to kill everything.” And I was like, “I
wanted to do a story about an AI that is a baby that’s learning and
growing and actually has a great deal of affection for human beings
and is learning.”
Barney Smith: And so you, did you kind of fall in like, you know,
basically like Asimov’s “Three Rules Of Robotics” in a way for
this AI to follow a bit?
Von Allan: No, I didn’t. I didn’t do it that way because I
started off with the AI. So basically the corporation wants to use
the AI as a war-fighting machine. And what they didn’t really
realize is that this AI has zero interest in doing that and was
already struggling against it. It’s not even to a point — the
Asimov “three laws” situation wouldn’t even apply because it
was designed — or the hope — that it would be used to kill. It
would be used to harm human beings through direct actions.
Barney Smith: Right.
Von Allan: What interested me, when I was sort of brainstorming
the story itself, was I was like, “what happens when somebody —
in this case, a machine — is put into a situation where they want
no part of that. And what do they do when the corporation, in this
case, is not willing to allow them to find their own pathway.” And
a lot of the tension of the story is Lauren’s developing awareness
that the AI actually is decent and that it’s not a trick or her mom
hasn’t made a catastrophic mistake. And Lauren starts to, slowly
but surely, develop a lot of affection for the AI and that affection
is also reciprocated back.
Barney Smith: So, for those that are listening should check out
the show notes. Go to vonallan.com — and that’s a V O N A L L A
N.com — and check out a link to the book “Wolf’s Head”,
because when we’re talking about an AI and we’re talking about
robotics, it’s not like “Iron Giant” or anything or an R2D2.
It’s not an actual physical robot. It’s almost this liquidy kind
of T-1000 situation here.
Von Allan: Yep. Yep. And that was done relatively deliberately to
sort of play with that. I debated, “am I going too far?” But I
think it works, in the context of the story, fairly well that this
thing — and I will see how far I can get with it, but it’s one of
the fun things — was I wanted a baby. To have this not fully formed
thing that you could really, as a reader, judge it too much because
the form of it itself is really indistinct. So, if I hadn’t made it
— well, “Iron Giant” is a good example or any type of classic
robot with “hard edges” or what have you — it might seem more
either malevolent or people might read into [it] more personality.
And I wanted that to be a very strongly developing aspect of the
story that what it is and what it looks like and how it manifests is
sort of fluid because it hasn’t found itself yet. It’s still
working on this thing, with the sort of the loose idea that the
corporation behind it sort of gave it these abilities that even they
themselves can’t quite understand how it happened. One of the plot
points of the book is [that] the man who nominally invented it, a guy
named Jeremy Hamilton, can’t figure out how he did it. So he can’t
replicate it. And he is frustrated to no end that he can’t figure
out why this thing does what it does and not what he programmed it —
or thought he programmed it — to do. And that’s part of the fun
of the story too.
Barney Smith: So it’s kind of like a ghost in the machine kind
of analogy on that too, as well, then?
Von Allan: Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but in some ways,
yeah. It becomes more of a subplot in the series, but this man who is
desperate to be able to recreate this thing because he was sort of,
“okay, fine. This stupid thing is on its own out there. Okay. We’re
going to work to get it back, but don’t worry, everybody, I can
replicate it. I, I, I, oh, I can’t. Oh my God. Like, what do you
mean I can’t.” And then he’s, “well, we’ve got to get that
stupid thing back. And I’m ripping out my hair trying to figure out
how did I got to get this thing work?” And he can’t. So it’s
kind of fun to do!
And what is an antagonist, but an antagonist who’s baffled by
what happened and cannot figure out to save his life. And it’s
fairly existential because he works at a corporation. He is very high
up, but he has people he still answers to. And there is sort of a
running plot is that they have expectations and they want answers.
And he can’t answer them because he doesn’t know what the hell
happened.
Barney Smith: And so talk about the world-building aspect on this.
Is this something that was kind of — almost like the shape of the
AI — was this an organic experience for you as well? Or did you
already have an outline for the full story arc ahead of time?
Von Allan: Yeah. Well, the way I write it’s, it’s a little bit
different. In a way, this is very contemporary. Like a lot of people,
I tend to write in arcs. So I had a pretty good idea of broad stroke
‘beginning, middle, and end’ of where I wanted the story to go.
Where I think I’m a little bit different — and I don’t mean
this in a good or bad way — is I really like the power of
sequential storytelling. So in a periodical comic form, I have a
strong belief that — I guess the technical phrase, a literary
phrase, would be ‘episodic closure’. For the most part, I like
having something in an individual issue have a beginning, a middle,
and an end. So that was not as a blueprinted out or clear cut for me.
I didn’t, so as I approach an issue, that is something I solve on
an issue-by-issue basis. So I had broad strokes of what Lauren’s
situation was, what her mom’s situation was, the situation with the
AI, the situation with Hamilton. But part of the fun for me with
doing the story is it’s not like I’ve scripted out — like in
the case of the first book, like the first collection, the first six
issues, which is what they were — of that story. Each story —
each issue, rather — was sort of built as its own story with enough
threads that continue to build, hopefully, so that by the end of the
book — or the end of issue six — you’re like, “wow, each
stands on its own, but something more is developing.”
I’m always hesitant. I think people sometimes will be like,
“well, if you start referencing titles you like, you can get
pigeonholed of, ‘oh, well, that’s a silver age thing, or that’s
a bronze age thing.’” And it’s not so much that. I like stories
that have episodic closure. And I actually looked back at people like
Charles Dickens for this. When Dickens was writing — people forget
this now — his work was serialized.
Barney Smith: Right, it was episodic.
Von Allan: Yeah, it was very episodic. And one of the concerns he
had — and I did a bit of research on that. It’s very similar to
contemporary serialized comics — is, “okay, I’m going to have
this ongoing thing.” I think “Pickwick” was like over 20, 20
different issues. “So, how do I make sure that people can jump on
board on any type of issue and — on top of it — get something
satisfying so they will hopefully come back.” So I didn’t want to
just look at comics, I wanted to look outside the medium of
comics and go, “okay, well, how have other creators in similar but
different art forms — like prose or literary fiction or what have
you — handle how you do episodic storytelling.” And I kept coming
back to Dickens, because I found actually a fair amount of research
actually has been done on this, where they talked about his —
scholars now talk about how — he was working on building episodic
structure with episodic closure at the same time. And it’s
fascinating to me. It’s endlessly fascinating. And I find it very
interesting that — and I don’t mean to judge them because there
are advantages, too — with the so-called decompressed storytelling,
that that aspect, particularly with modern corporate comics —
Marvel and DC and whatnot — that seems to be a bit of a lost art
form compared to previous decades, where you will often pick up an
issue of whatever and you’re in the middle of a storyline [and]
there’s nothing to orient a new or lapsed reader to help you
understand what’s happening in that story. And often the story
doesn’t have an ending. It has a “things have happened” and you
have to buy the next issue or the next series of issues to get the
resolution. That might be fine for a trade paperback or a graphic
novel collection, but I think it damages somewhat — and to what
degree is an arguable case — but I do think it damages how people
actually interact with the form of comics.
Now that doesn’t mean, and this is why I always have to be
careful and it’s a hard thing. It doesn’t mean that I’m arguing
for every single comic that’s ever done by anybody should be a
beginning, middle, end story. You can read them in any order. No, no,
no. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that there is a way to build
what I would call subplots. I’m not sure if that’s the correct
term, but longer narrative hooks that take longer to resolve, but
still give some degree of closure of a story in a particular issue.
Barney Smith: Right.
Von Allan: And that “Wolf’s Head” is really my first attempt
to put that into practice, to see what I can do to do that. It’s
hard for me to judge it, but that is definitely part of my sort of
storytelling thesis going into it. And I’m pretty happy with it,
but readers will have to be the ones that, as always, have to judge
this stuff.
Barney Smith: Where do you see the future of comics?
Von Allan: I think as a medium, it’s very healthy because I
think there is something about the medium of comics. And one thing I
always like to point to is that it is remarkably democratic as an art
form. Even with something like animation, which in some ways is a
sister to comics, it’s very difficult to do anything but very short
animations by yourself. There are software tools now that are
facilitating that — an individual person could do more — but it’s
very hard. And so I think there, there’s something about the medium
of comics. If you’re working traditionally — paper, pencil, ink,
or markers, or something of some sort, and with some type of way of
scanning it either with a camera or a scanner or whatever — you can
put your work out there. So I’m worried at all about the medium of
comics.
Barney Smith: Okay.
Von Allan: What exactly that looks like, what type of format we’re
talking — if we’re talking print or online and how the panel
arrangements work — that’s a separate issue, but comics — that
sequential nature — I’m not concerned about. The industry,
particularly in the West, is a completely different question. I mean,
there’s been so much just recently, the distribution changes with
the ending
of Diamond’s monopoly.
Barney Smith: Right.
Von Allan: You know, DC first breaking away. And then Marvel not
completely breaking away from Diamond, but going with Penguin Random
House. Image just recently going with Lunar. The industry is in a
great deal of flux. And part of it is if you ever look at the pricing
— and I did a little
essay, about a decade ago now, even a bit longer, just looking at
the prices of what were then contemporary comics against the United
States’ Federal Minimum Wage, and the ability of people
purchase periodical comics and it’s incredibly unaffordable just
from that point of view. And that’s not so much a critique of the
prices of comics; I think some people misinterpreted that. It’s
also a critique on how crappy wages are for people. They can’t
afford to buy literally all that much because I think — correct me
if I’m wrong — I think [the US Federal Minimum Wage] is still $7
and 25 cents. And that’s awful for human beings to actually
live on, let alone buying things for pleasure or what have you.
That’s been just a quantum shift in not only what gets
made, but where it’s positioned and how kids can find
them. Kids are not reliant on going into one of the 3,500 or so comic
book shops; there are a lot of other places where a kid can find a
comic. And that’s wonderful. And I think online — particularly
with platforms like WebToons, but old-school webcomics — is
probably going to do nothing but grow. And that is, I think, very
healthy for the art form.
Barney Smith: What do you enjoy most about being a comic creator?
Von Allan: Honestly, I think the biggest thing is challenging
myself often to see what will happen next. I love learning. One of
the things I find most rewarding about the art form, broadly
speaking, is I like learning as a writer and I like learning as a
visual artist. So, not that long ago I did a deep dive. I found there
was a weakness in my work with some of the way I was approaching
tones and values. And I revamped how I was approaching colour. And I
also revamped more recently — it’s not so much in those issues of
“Wolf’s Head” — how I was approaching using value,
specifically like hatching and some zip-a-tones. I was looking at
both how manga artists and then traditional artists like Wally Wood
and what have you were using it. And I tried to learn, I tried to
explore what I could do with it and how I can incorporate it into my
own style. And I find that always rewarding.
And the same with writing. I’ve learned how — hopefully — to
better approach writing a story and breaking a story and approaching
it both in an episodic way and then in a more arc-based way. The
funnest thing is seeing how an issue is going to turn out.
The best way to define this is by an example. So “Wolf’s
Head.” The first hard cover is the first six issues, [but] I’m
working on issue 18 now of the ongoing series. And those are mostly
on digital format. And where I’m at now I never thought I would be
in [this] narrative place for “Wolf’s Head” when I started
writing issue one. And that’s a lot of fun for me. Lauren has gone
places with the story and the situation with her mom. There is a dog
that’s also a main character in the story — her mom’s dog —
that plays a big role. And it’s just the story. That’s one of the
things that excites me about sequential storytelling is it’s a lot
of fun, and I’ve done it, to do a ‘beginning, middle, and end’
graphic novel that’s designed as such. But sequential
storytelling — figuring out where the story is taking you — is,
for me, always exciting. It’s a great deal of fun. And it’s that
I really think, at the end of the day, is: I wrap an issue and then
I’m like, “huh, geez, okay, I got to figure out where the hell
I’m going with this next. And what’s going to happen and how this
is going to play out. And what are the consequences?” Like, I love
asking questions like that. And that is a truly exciting part of
what, for me, makes comics comics.
And you can capture the same thing in a novel or a film or
whatever. But there’s something about the pace of comics. There’s
something exciting about that magic of how comics go. It’s such a
unique art form compared to so many others.
Barney Smith: What I love about your work is you really do well
with just having engaging conversations between characters. Talk to
us a little bit about how that process is of how you actually write
dialogue for your characters.
Von Allan: Well, the dialogue is actually — this is kind of
funny — one of the things I realized…
When I was working on “Wolf’s Head” — more so than previous
work — I kind of did a breakdown — so this goes also to learning
— I did a breakdown on both comics from the 1960s and different
eras [compared to] contemporary comics. And I did some research to
try to go, “exactly how many words — captions, speech balloons,
even thought balloons — how many words can you put on an individual
comic book page, standard form, American/Canadian-style. What becomes
too much? What doesn’t? What works? What’s the happy balance?
So I started from there and I made detailed notes. I literally
broke down every single page that I would use. Everything from a
splash page to sixteen panels. I sort of worked out, “okay, based
on an overall word count, which is around 235 240 words overall. How
does that break down on a panel-by-panel and balloon-by-balloon
basis?” This is fascinating! Something really interesting has
happened with the medium of comics. And at the same time it started
to dawn on me that artists like Steve Ditko — and even Jack Kirby
to some extent — were often using nine panel pages. Like Ditko was
renowned for it and even Kirby was using six, seven, eight, nine
panels. There’s not a hard and fast rule, but they would often use
a lot of panels. And that’s another thing that has changed
with a lot of contemporary American English-language comics. A lot of
comics are down to three or four panels. So less words, less panels.
Then, of course, one of the big ones is the way the gutter space
is defined. That wonderful space between panels that help you
actually navigate comics. The sequential storytelling of this — and
people like Scott McCloud have written about this quite a bit — is
there’s also been a weird fusion where there’s so many “design
things” and overlapping of panels and almost the elimination of the
gutter space. I would argue [that] in many ways the comics are a lot
harder to read.
Okay, that gave me some “ballparks” of what I needed to look
at. So when I write I tend to overwrite dialogue. So in the editing
process — using all the guidelines I just spoke about — I’ll
tend to bring it back down. I basically did quite a bit of research
and just sort of my own affection for certain authors and whatnot.
You know, it’s sort of the classic — “If I read out loud some
of this dialogue and close my eyes, could I tell who’s talking.”
You don’t want all the characters to sound the same. So Lauren is a
good example; she speaks in a particular way. But her mom has a
pronounced sort of French accent, particularly when it comes to
swearing. So she tends to swear in French. And the two women do not —
hopefully from my point of view — do not, at all, sound alike. And
that sort of carries on. Hamilton has a more — I don’t know if
aristocratic would be the right way — but a more privileged
language. So he tends to use bigger words, not very many contractions
and whatnot. I sort of played this game through it all. And then the
AI — because the AI is a baby and is learning — the AI actually
generally speaks in musical tones. And playing with that was sort of
interesting, too.
So the rhythm of it becomes a — how to say this. The structural
approach is “I’ve got this scene.” Okay, so I’ve written a
scene and I know how many pages I’ve got for this scene. So just to
pick something: I’ve got three pages to do this scene because, when
I broke down the issue, this is what I what I gave it. This is what
this scene has to accomplish. These are the characters that are in
this scene. And this is the thrust of what’s happening — these
are what Lauren wants to do, these are the obstacles she’s trying
to you [solve], whatever. So then it’s trying to figure out the
best way to use dialogue to get across where she’s at, what she’s
trying to do, who she’s talking with, and their situation. And in
the back of my mind, I sort of leave notes to myself constantly, to
remind me. “Does the reader understand what I’m trying to do?”
Because to me — and again, this is not a right or wrong thing.
Comics are art. So there’s no right way or ‘one size fits all’
policy. But for me, I want my comics to be very comprehensible. I
don’t need to read a scene or read an issue and go, “what? What
the hell just happened? Who are these people and what are they doing?
I don’t understand.” So that, for me, is anathema, unless you are
doing it very, very deliberately, you have a very specific point in
mind. For me. There are no rules; it’s up to individual creators to
solve this or to tackle it. But that’s sort of what I think about.
What is the function of the scene? What am I trying to do with the
story? And, you know, how does the dialogue…
And I don’t know. I mean, dialogue is in some ways its own
art. So if you’re asking me, “well, how do you choose?” I don’t
know. The characters…
It sounds good to me. I try to verbalize it and make sure I read it
out loud so that it has its own kind of rhythm and it doesn’t sound
mechanical. It sounds like an actual human being would talk, but
that’s probably one of the hardest things to do.
Was it Cormac McCarthy? I think it was Cormac McCarthy who removed
almost all punctuation —
quotation marks and what have you —
so you very rarely read, “Bob turned to Fred and said, ‘quote,’”
and “Fred said in reply to Bob”…
you don’t get that. He kind of throws you in. And that can
work. With comics, you’re always going to have the speech balloon.
So it’s a different thing. But I never want to lose readers. I want
readers to be able to understand what I’m doing, what I’m saying.
And at the end of the day, my feeling is if somebody doesn’t like
my work, that’s okay. If somebody doesn’t understand my
work and is baffled with it, then I failed. Then I’ve just
terribly failed. And that’ll bum me out for days, because if you
like it or if you don’t like it, but you understand it? Good.
We’re good. If you read it and you’re just like, “I don’t
understand who these characters are. I don’t know. Lauren? I don’t
understand what her motivation is or what she’s trying to do.”
Like that. That’s the worst.
So I try very hard —
and I’m very lucky because my wife is a professional editor and she
works for the government. She’s had a great deal of editing
experience. And so she always is looking at my work and I sort of
pester her with these type of details. And I could get you the issue.
I don’t remember it offhand. But Jim Shooter, back when he was
Editor-in-Chief at Marvel —
actually did in a couple of his little columns —
talked about what, for him and therefore for Marvel at the time, made
a good story. And it was things like, “do characters have clear
goals? Are they trying to accomplish something? Are they failing?”
And on and on and on. And I tend to think about that type of stuff a
lot, to make sure that goals and motivations and obstacles and
whatnot are very, very clear. Not in a hopefully
didactic way or I’m hitting you over the head with it, but in a way
that, if I’ve done my job right, it’s very, very subtle. And the
reader is oriented in a way that they’re never questioning why
these things are happening. I always want things like that to be
very, very clear, but very, very intuitive as you’re going through
the story.
Barney Smith: Let me ask you, Von, if people want to pick up your
book and read this, where’s the best place they could go to right
now?
Von Allan: For the book, for the hardcover, Amazon,
Barnes
and Noble, anything like that, because they have them. They never
stock them deep, which is one of the tricks about being an
independent author. They are never going to have tens of thousands of
them in stock or anything, but they’re easy for them to reorder and
there’s no problem getting it. I know it’s a hardcover. It’s a
bit more pricey, especially as an independent. But if people are also
wanting to try “Wolf’s Head” more inexpensively and don’t
mind reading digital, it’s easy to find on Kindle, as well. And
then, you know, on top of it, there’s excerpts on my website.
And I have also short stories I’ve done and all kinds of stuff like
that, too. So if you people really want to sample for free and just
want to sort of get a sense of how I draw and how I tell stories and
whatnot, there’s all kinds of short stories on my website that
people can take a look at.
Barney Smith: Good. So Von, listen, when you get volume two to
come out, you got to come back on, because you and I can literally
talk for hours.
Von Allan: Yes.
Barney Smith: We can talk for a long time about this and just
incredibly impressed by the fact that, as you said, you’re
basically a self-taught artist and your work is amazing. So
congratulations on that.
Von Allan: Well, I mean, that’s lovely. Thank you. It’s such
an exciting time for comics, and that’s not to say there aren’t
frustrations and there aren’t difficulties with it. But it is such
a wonderful time for comics. And I hope people are just always
reading them and always passing on recommendations —
word of mouth —
because find stuff you love and share the love.
Barney Smith: Because it’s a good point. If you find something
you love, you got to share it.
Von Allan: Yeah. It’s got to spread like an infection. And
again, in the best sense of the word. That’s is one of the things
that I love. And I’m weird because I’ll read stuff from the 1930s
or right to the present. I’ve got my hands on like old Fawcett
Comics right to you [comics] translated from Japanese or Korean or
French and it’s right to the present. Damn, that’s fun! You know,
that is so much fun!
Barney Smith: All right. Well, thank you so much, Von. This has
been great.
Von Allan: Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
I thought it would be fun to share some of the ol’ “process” behind a recent page from WOLF’S HEAD. In this case, it’s the first page to issue 18. And hey, 18 issues in for an indy comic book series is not too shabby, folks.
This page features Lauren Greene and Super Bob Sanchez chit-chatting in a diner in Alberta. The page also builds off of issue 17 and the various struggles that Lauren is currently going through. While I don’t think there’s any “right” or “correct” way of starting a comic, I’ve long been partial to opening with a splash page to get things going. This is especially useful here because the preceding panel in the previous issue was actually very small. So if one is reading these issues in sequential order, it should be fun to leave off last ish with a tiny panel and then start this one with a biggie.
I’ll start with the final coloured and lettered page and we can work backwards to the initial layouts. Oh, one important caveat: while some pages take a bit of visual brainstorming, in this case I knew exactly where I was going (building from last issue, right?) so I didn’t need to do that. That’s often not the case and many pages take a bit of thumbnailing (usually tiny thumbnails) to work out mentally how I want to approach a page. This is often especially true for covers; considerations of logos and whatnot influence how the page might look. In other words, sketching and “mucking about with page design” is a tried and true way to go.
Next are the final inks, including screen tones (or, if you will, Ben Day dots or what I long called “zipatones”). Generally I do not include the lettering in the final inks (well, at least for colour work) and that is reflected here. Inking is one of my favourite things to do and this page was a blast to work on!
Next up are the final tight pencils. There is a bit of visual cheating going on here. I actually rarely rough out a page like this as one individual unit. Rather, I actually do various pencil sketches (and sometimes even inked sketches) on different sheets of paper, scanning them into my computer and finalizing the pencil layout that way. I like that approach, mainly because it allows me to isolate various parts of the illustration and work on that. In this case, the diner is a good example: isolating the perspective drawing from the figure drawing allowed me to play around with some ideas, something a bit harder to do if everything was on one sheet of Bristol board.
The next two illustrations showcase more of what I mean. First is the tighter pencilled perspective sketch of the diner and that’s followed by the very loose sketch (this time with my trusty Tombow brush pen) as I loosely laid down some ideas. These actually follow part of the same process I described here, but in this case I did do a round of tighter pencils rather than just go into final inks because I needed to be sure of a few different things. The trade-off is time, but I felt it was worth it in this case.
Not included here are the separate figure sketches. I generally do loose little gestures, often in ink, and then scan, check, print out, and tighten into final pencils. You can see the final result in that first sketch above.
Some pages are slow, some go surprisingly quick, and this one was somewhere in the middle. It was a lot of fun to do and hopefully starts off issue 18 in an engaging, intriguing, and beautiful way.
UPDATE! While the Amazon deal described below has expired, I have decided to start making my comics freely available to all. Please visit https://www.vonallan.com/p/pirate-von.html for more information and download links!
For a limited time, eight of my comics formatted for Amazon’s Kindle are available for free! These are free anywhere in the world (well, at least those places that have access to Kindle). If you have been on the fence of trying my comics, this is a great way to give them a try. And, if you know people who might like my comics but have never tried them, please pass this along. Sharing is caring and all that and, of course, one can’t beat free.
The titles in question are as follows:
WIZARDS FOR HIRE — CHEAP!
STORIES! 2015 TO 2019
And the first six issues of my ongoing series WOLF’S HEAD. Oh, and please do not forget this: since the first six issues are available for free, buying the entire series in digital format (17 issues!) is now about $12.00 US cheaper than normal. In addition to that, these first six issues also make up the first collected hardcover volume, so if you’d like to try the series out but felt that the hardcover was too pricey, this is a great to “dip a toe in the water.”
I’ll put the links to both Amazon.com and Amazon.ca below. For those of you visiting from other parts of the world, please note that all you need to do is replace the “dot com” or “dot ca” with your own regional domain and you’ll be taken to that Amazon site. For example, if you are in Spain and use Amazon.es, all you need to do is replace the “dot com” part of the link (for example, my author page at https://www.amazon.com/Von-Allan/e/B002BM77EM/) with “dot es” (https://www.amazon.es/Von-Allan/e/B002BM77EM/). And voila! There’s my author page for Amazon Spain!
Well, this is an unexpected treat! A treat so unexpected that I’m going to take a moment to explain it first.
I first wrote the following short story, titled “Sheba the Great!” back in 2004. Almost twenty years ago… the mind kinda boggles at that. Anyway, at the time — and as I’ve discussed in the past — my drawing skills were not that strong. As a result, I wound up deciding to not draw the story. Instead, I shelved the story and moved on to other projects. Fast forward to the spring of 2015. My drawing skills had really improved and, looking around for something to draw, I stumbled across my old short story from, at that point, a decade before. So I did! It was a fun project and turned out really well. I didn’t colour it, but I did pencil and ink it.
And then something kinda goofy happened. I was in the process of working on a number of short stories (you can see some of those here) and once I finished “Sheba,” I moved on to other things. Shortly after that, I wound up having a pretty spectacular computer crash. Now, I back up everything regularly and I try to keep some of my key art files off-site, too. When I restored everything, “Sheba” had disappeared! I remember being extremely frustrated, but I was faced with a quandary. “Sheba” was seventeen pages long. Did I really feel like re-drawing and re-inking the entire thing? I decided that the answer was a pretty firm “No.” Part of that was my frustration, of course, but I also really didn’t feel like going backwards and re-working something I had felt that I already completed. Moving on felt right. And so I did.
Since the past year was pretty chaotic (to say the least) and as the holiday season was approaching, I wound up going through a couple of old hardrives that I had thought had “given up the ghost.” I was able to partially get into one of them and (drum roll please!), I discovered that I did have a copy of “Sheba” after all! What a pleasant surprise!
Looking over my art and storytelling, I felt that the story and my approach to it held up pretty well, all things considered. I wound up having some spare time over the holidays, though, that gave me the perfect opportunity to finally complete it. I spent a little bit of time tweaking a few things here and there (‘cuz, you know, one never stops growing with art). And, of course, it had never been coloured so I needed to do that from scratch. Plus lettering the whole thing, too. I was able finish the entire thing just before New Year’s Eve. That just left it for my erstwhile editor to give the story a final pass and the official “go ahead.” That has now been done. And so, here we are!
“Sheba the Great!” is a light-hearted sci-fi comedy that was a great deal of fun to write and a blast to draw. And it’s probably the oddest story I’ve ever presented you, dear reader. Written in 2004, drawn in 2015, tweaked in late 2022, and finally coloured, lettered, and edited also in late 2022. In other words, different aspects of me, working together across time. Kinda weird, but kinda wonderful!
“Sheba” also wears its influences on its sleeves. In a way, “Sheba” is a love letter to certain stories that I grew up. It’s the best way I have to say thank you to creators like Pedro Henry, Steve Dillon, Harry Harrison, and so on.
I really hope you enjoy it!
Update! I’m very pleased that people are having fun with this story! To thank everyone and to give a bit of content back to the greater comics community, I’m releasing the story as a free download in .cbz format. Actually, I’m doing it in two versions: a low-resolution version and a high-resolution version and both are available through Dropbox. The low-resolution version is here and is about 20 megs in size. The high-resolution version is here and is about 75 megs in size. Oh, once you have downloaded either version, you’ll need a .cbz reader to actually read it. If you don’t have one, Wikipedia has some suggestions right here. As always, please be careful downloading anything that you’re not sure about. Please do your own research to find the one that best fits your needs.
So, there you have it! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing and illustrating it! And don’t forget to visit the rest of my archives. There are a number of other short stories that you can read for free right here. Thanks!
With the holidays just around the corner, I thought I'd take a moment and summarize my two hardcover graphic novels that were recently published. Why? Well, I think that they both are perfect gifts for the holiday season! I'm very proud of both of them. I think they both are the best representations of my art and writing that have ever seen print. Both books are beautiful and I'm extremely pleased with how they both turned out.
Both hardcover graphic novels are available pretty much everywhere in the world. One of the remarkable things that the internet has brought us all is the relatively easy way to find and buy books. I still remember, back in my bookstore days, how tricky it was to actually books. And if one goes back any further, prior to the internet, finding specific titles, especially indy books from indy authors, was extremely difficult. One would have to search local stores, reach out to fellow fans in other towns and cities, and even write to stores in other countries to track down a title. Now? It is so much easier. It really is a remarkable change. For an independent comics creator like me, it is a huge change.
WOLF'S HEAD BOOK 1 collects the first six issues of the ongoing WOLF'S HEAD comic book series in full colour. The graphic novel version is 176 pages long in full colour. And what's it about? Well, here's what my illustrous editor and I wrote for the synopsis:
Lauren Greene is an ex-police officer who turned her badge in after becoming frustrated with the police force's corruption. She's had enough of violence and is thinking about packing her bags and hitting the road to see how she can make a difference out in the larger world, when her mother Patty shows up at her door with a complication. It turns out that Patty's employer — a secretive military corporation — has created an artificial intelligence to fight humanity's wars. Unfortunately for the corporation, the AI fell in love with Patty's humanity and orchestrated its own escape through her. Giddy with excitement, Patty brings the AI straight to Lauren for help, not realizing the danger she's putting herself and her daughter in. But Lauren has dealt with people like this; she knows what they're capable of and she is terrified. Her fears are realized when she and her mother are confronted by corporate goons who want the AI for themselves and are willing to do anything to get it. As Lauren does her best to keep herself, her mom, and her family safe, the tensions over the AI erupt into violence… and suddenly Lauren is on her own.
The new little life form doesn't want to go back to the corporation and Lauren realizes it cannot be forced to live out its life as a war machine. There is already enough corruption, inequality, and violence in the world; the AI has to have a chance to help humanity — peacefully — while figuring out its own existence. Together with the AI, an eccentric cast of friends and family, and her dog, Lauren must figure out her next steps… while keeping herself alive.
And here's a fun little teaser I did that showcases some of the themes and art from the collection:
It really is a fun graphic novel with all kinds of twists and turns. I'm very proud of it and I'm extremely pleased with how sharp the printing turned out.
Unlike WOLF'S HEAD BOOK 1, this is a short story collection featuring some of my favourites. All of these short stories are available for free on this website (you can find the links to each short story in webcomic format here). Frank Plowright also did a great review of the collection at https://theslingsandarrows.com/love-laughter-and-loss-a-comic-collection/.
Here's the short synopsis from the book:
This collection contains nine short stories by Canadian writer/artist Von Allan that, together, represent the best and worst parts of life; love, laughter, and loss. Travel around the world (and sometimes even off world!) with average people, heroes, cowardly adventurers, and even a dog. While these stories were previously published in two periodical collections ("WIZARDS FOR HIRE-CHEAP!" and "STORIES! 2015 TO 2019"), this marks the first time they've appeared in a premium hardcover format.
And here's a teaser image from the collection!
Like WOLF'S HEAD BOOK 1, this short story collection is perfect for fans of comics and graphic novels. The short stories really range in tone and theme and I'm extremely pleased with how they look in print.
So, that's that! Two beautiful graphic novels that fans of comics will fall in love with. If you need a gift for someone (or even just yourself!), please do consider them. You won't be disappointed!
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