I hope you don't mind me choosing to skip over a couple of your questions.
1) Tell us about your story and what inspired it.
The story that I contributed ("The Tea Party") features the characters from my
Jellaby series. Two kids and a monster sit down to have a nice little tea party, but things don't go quite the way they plan.
Most of the story was actually written and drawn in the week after last year's San Diego Comic-Con. The idea for the story came to me on the flight over from Toronto, and as I was hanging out in the LA area with Kazu and some of the Flight crew for a week, they certainly influenced and helped me tighten up my story as I was working on it. I had a lot of fun trying out new things and bouncing ideas off of them as I was working on the story. It was definitely the first comic I wrote and drew while I was 'on the road,' so that was pretty interesting.
3) Did FLIGHT’s movement to Ballantine Books affect how you approached your contribution?
I don't think I was consciously thinking about it, although after having stories in the last two books, I was definitely more aware of the fact that I needed to keep pushing myself in order to raise the quality of my own work.
5) One of the noticeable evolutions of FLIGHT seems to be the move from a more animation influenced look to that of a storybook style. Did anything or anyone have a particular influence on you work for FLIGHT, whether it be personally or artistically?
For me personally, it really felt like Tony Cliff's story ("Old Oak Trees") set the tone as we were starting out this time round. Seeing his first couple of inked pages as they came in really gave me that much-needed kick in the pants for me to get working on my own story. And although I don't know how much influence each of us had on one other's work, there were certainly some common threads running throughout a number of stories in the book. Maybe it was a subconscious thing?
6) One of the strongest things the Flight anthology has going for it is its sense of community in drawing so many creative people from different walks of life all under one banner. How has this implication of convergence influenced you or affected your work?
It's really taught me the value of hard work. Knowing that a large majority of the artists on Flight these days are balancing day jobs and families, and are still managing to find the time to produce these great stories really made realize how much of a slacker I can be sometimes. I mean, Michel Gagné's work ethic is
insane!
7) What’s next for you following FLIGHT?
Well, I'm now working on finishing out my Jellaby graphic novel, which was just picked up by Hyperion Books to be published as a two book series. It's pretty exciting actually, as I'm moving away from the day job so that I can work on comics full-time! It's something I never thought would actually happen.
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