MONDOmagazine

By Kerry Freek

Over a month ago, I talked with comic book artist Brian Evinou about self-publishing his new action comic, Lucy Legacy. Back in those days, Brian was on tenterhooks (calm exterior, giddy insides) about receiving his shipment of 500. Since then, his long-awaited project has arrived from the distant shores of Quebec, and now Lucy Legacy is available all over Toronto (The Beguiling, Labyrinth, The Hairy Tarantula), Oshawa (Worlds Collide), and Ottawa (The Comic Book Shoppe), plus he even brought Lucy to Fan Expo and Comicon — hardcore.

We met over beers at Clinton’s to discuss beating up aliens, making a comic, and taking realistic boob measurements. Oh, and Brian told me that the Scott Pilgrim movie will be a “distinct creature” from the comic series, and that each format will have a different ending — is that considered a scoop?

MONDO: This is your first time publishing a book, right?

BRIAN EVINOU: Yep. It’s the first of many, though! I already have another comic that’s 31 pages in the bag. I hope to have that one published by Christmas. After that, I have a web comic idea that I’m really excited about.

MONDO: So you’re done being excited about Lucy Legacy?

BE: Yeah, right now I’m at a really cool part in my next project — it’s so exciting! You know how your new ideas really grab a hold of your brain? Comics take a loooong time, though. At this stage, if I wasn’t at work or hanging out with my girlfriend or playing hockey, I’d be sitting in my apartment drawing. That would be like 7 p.m. to like 2 a.m. to finish a page.

MONDO: What’s the comic about?

BE: Good question. Lucy Legacy is about a girl who, uhhh…

MONDO: Who has large breasts.

BE: Yes. That wasn’t really meant to happen. I guess my Id just took over, and she got pretty big boobs. But my girlfriend works at a bra store, and she made sure that it fit well and that the cup size was all good. Lucy’s okay; she doesn’t have back problems yet. [Conversation takes a turn for the worse here. The phrase "muffin tops" is discussed.]

Anyway, Lucy Legacy is about a girl who pretty much has to clean up the mess. It’s an action comic. It’s what I think comics should be. Broad and exciting. When you have a drawn medium, there’s no sense trying to go for photo-realism. You might as well go nuts — that’s what comics do well, and that’s what I try to do with Lucy Legacy. It’s pretty much being more of a drawing type and less of a writing type. It’s more what I

wanted to draw, and I guess that happened to be a short-skirted girl who beats up aliens and runs around the city.

MONDO: Does she ever actually beat up the aliens using her boobs?

BE: No, that never happens. And I took great pains to avoid certain cheesecake things that kinda bug me in comics: there’s never an upskirt kick or anything like that. You never see her panties. You might be able to see down her top a bit, but it wasn’t designed to be that way. I’m a big fan of pin-up and cheesecake in certain things, but at the same time I don’t think that your female heroes need to be overly sexualized all of the time.

MONDO: What’s up with the hockey stick?

BE: Lucy finds out about her sister being knocked out of commission, and she’s at school at the time. She doesn’t really have much to choose from, so when she goes to her locker, she grabs what she has at hand and makes the best of it. She’s like the MacGyver of female heroines.

MONDO: Let’s talk a little bit about colour.

BE: I got my friend Stephen Daggitt to paint the cover for me. He’s a fantastic talent and you should check him out. He’s a location designer. He’s kind of a digital painting savant. I’m super happy with the result. My friend Julie Faulkner helped me put together the book. She just launched a web comic called Promises Promises — it’s fantastic.

MONDO: How long did you work on Lucy?

BE: It started as a 24-hour comic at Scott McCloud’s 24-Hour Comic Challenge, and I did the first twelve pages there. Then I decided to finish it, which happened on Christmas Eve. But then I looked back on the pages I’d done at the Comic Challenge — I’d only spent an hour on each page, so they were pretty shitty. I had to re-draw them. I was also working on a few other comics at the time, so I didn’t wrap it until about

April. It took about three months to do those first twelve and some extras (including my buddy Nat Meissner’s comic; he’s disgustingly talented).

MONDO: Tell me about self-publishing. Did you ever think about shopping Lucy?

BE: I am going to send a completed version of it to both major and minor publishers. Self-publishing is expensive, very time consuming, and very rewarding. You get to choose how everything is done, all by your specs. It’s pretty wicked in that way. It’s definitely a grassroots thing — there are success stories, for sure, but they’re few and far between. I published 500 copies of Lucy, and I’d be very happy to move 100 of them by the end of the summer. It’s a great way to get your name out there. Self-publishing gives you control and satisfaction — and I think it looks pretty professional!

MONDO: Hey, what did you do in school (after O’Neill, where we both went to high school)?

BE: Well, at O’Neill, of course, I was the art superstar of my year. [We reminisce about subsequent high-school art superstars.] After high school, I went Sheridan for a year in the art fundamentals program.

I wanted to do comics all my life, but I knew that’d be an unrealistic way to make money, and, at that point, I wasn’t good enough to do comics. I decided that animation would be this amazing thing that I loved, as well, that I could get into and make a living. So I took a year off and went to Algonquin in Ottawa for their animation program — I learned storyboarding, life drawing, animation, computer programs, etc. For the last four or five years, I’ve been working in the animation industry. It’s been a perfect jump-off point for comic books, because you learn everything you need to know to do a comic book, like pacing and storyboarding.

MONDO: So you’re working at an animation company right now?

BE: Yep, I’m working at Nelvana in Toronto.

MONDO: The big polar bear?

BE: Exactly it. It’s THE animation place to work in Toronto. They did Care Bears, Beetlejuice, Eek the Cat… right now we’re doing Willa’s Wildlife, Spliced!, and My Friend Rabbit. If you were five years old, you would know them all — and love them.

MONDO: Does animation inform your style?

BE: Yeah, I have a cartoony style. I don’t have like a Jim Lee, heavy detail kind of style. It’s solid structurally, which is huge in animation. I’m definitely interested mainly by comic book artists now, but the animation programs and studios that I’ve worked in have perverted me.

In comics, I look up to fellow Canadian Bryan Lee-O’Malley. In fact, the entire end scene in Lucy Legacy was going to be an homage to the initial cut scene in Ninja Gaiden where these two ninja warriors face off in a field — they run at each other and jump, strike, and land, and then one of them falls dead. But then Scott Pilgrim 4 came out, and he had that exact homage as the ending! Instead, the Lucy cover is an homage to the cover of Ninja Gaiden.

Livejournal is a great source of inspiration for me. It’s a great community of comic book artists on there. They all post works in progress. LJ for any up-and-coming comic book artist is awesome, along with blogspot.

Other big influences: Paul Pope, known for his inking — he’s like the Mick Jagger of comics, he’s amazing. He once did a very sexy cover [Ed: very sexy, indeed!] for EYE Weekly when TCAF was happening: “My brush is like an electric guitar…”

MONDO: Some day, not too far from now, you can say something similar! “My brush is like a girl’s ponytail… a hot girl’s ponytail.”

BE: Yeah, haha. With nice swaying hips. Anyway, the list goes on… there’s Moebius, Pierre Alary; I cut my teeth on John Byrne and Chris Claremont’s famous X-Men run.

MONDO: How did your love of comics begin?

BE: At the Oshawa Centre, there used to be a grocery store where the Sports Centre is now, and there I bought Uncanny X-Men #227.

MONDO: Oh, dude. So specific! That’s awesome.

BE: Yeah, it was the very start of the Fall of the Mutants story arc — it was frigging amazing. That’s when I started buying comics. I forced my dad to drive us to Ken’s Comics every weekend, and when that shut down, I went to Unicorn Comics (which is now Worlds Collide) and I spent a lot of money at those places. I still spend a lot of money at those places — though now it’s more The Beguiling and Labyrinth. Those places are great. The Beguiling especially is a great supporter of independent comics. There’s a lot of places that want to support independents, but it’s not very viable, since what moves is the Marvel and DC stuff. If they can find a little shelf space, that’s perfect. Even Silver Snail has an entire shelf of independent comics.

MONDO: Other arty endeavours?

BE: I do watercolours. My girlfriend does non-erotic semi-nudes in watercolours, and when she does her watercolours, I watercolour with her. Animation, of course, is an art, and I do that 40 hours per week. Oh, and I have my guitar, but I play it worse and worse everyday.

MONDO: Ultimate dream?

BE: To be able to do comics for a living. To be able to not have to work on terrible cartoons like God Rocks or Caillou ever again.

MONDO: Can I publish that?

BE: Sure. Maybe only God Rocks, ‘cause Caillou’s all right [giggles]. Caillou paid my bills when I got out of college.

MONDO: What’s God Rocks?

BE: It was about a group of anamorphic rocks that were in a band that rocked for God. They were rocks that rocked for God.

MONDO: Like actual rocks?

BE: Yeah, like rock-men and rock-ladies. They had names like Gem and Chip. The animation was limited, and the storylines were exactly what you’d expect from Christian television studios. They had this episode w

here they went to an island and turned these savages to God with their rockin’ songs. Of course, this is just what these poor indigenous people needed, right?

MONDO: You’re all business, Brian. Any plans to do some PR for Lucy (aside from this interview)? What about distribution?

BE: I’m a lameoid. I read all these books about how to self-publish. There’s Diamond Distributors, which is the main way comics are distributed to comic stores. But they have a minimum sale and it’s in the thousands now… so they’ve kind of destroyed independent distribution. And they have a monopoly on comics. Everybody has to ship through Diamond, pretty much. Because of that, I didn’t really do much about distribution — I’m sad about that, but I’m hoping that word-of-mouth gets around and people will see it. Small-scale distribution! It’ll be available from my blog and livejournal — five bucks, wow!

MONDO: “Wow!” It says so right on the cover.

BE: That’s the shape of the Nintendo seal of approval.

MONDO: Nerd.

Check out Brian’s new work, process drawings, and Lucy proceedings here and here. He’ll also be at the upcoming Word on the Street.