Camosun Comics & Graphic Novels students will be showcasing their work at this year’s Camosun Comic Arts Festival (CCAF).
Students who are part of the program will show the comics they’ve been working on throughout the year at the CCAF. The event takes place this year from 2 pm to 7 pm on Thursday, April 17 in the Wilna Thomas Building’s Sherri Bell Hall, located at the college’s Lansdowne campus.
Miles “Mar” Roever is one of these student artists; they’re excited to show their digital art comic, among other pieces.
“I’m doing a 30-page digital art comic… called X Academy,” Roever says. “It’s a fantasy thriller series about these students at two rival schools who are basically living with the consequences of this 3,000-year-old war, and they’re just kind of learning how to get along again. [I’ll also be showing] an art book of the traditional art that I’ve done in our drawing classes this year.”
Previously working as a theatre artist, Roever enrolled at Camosun to learn about making comics.
“I wanted to take some time to train and do comics because what I really want to do is publish my own independent work,” says Roever. “I’ve just been here the past year, learning everything I can about digital art and technique, working on light drawing, and everything.”
Roever grew up reading comics, a key reason they’ve chosen to pursue this medium.
“I mostly grew up with, honestly, newspaper comics. I grew up reading all of the Calvin and Hobbes and Baby Blues,” says Roever. “For some reason, I was a child reading comics about parenthood, and I thought that was so cool. But that was the stuff that I was reading as a kid. And then I grew up and I got into shows like Gravity Falls, that kind of stuff. So that’s probably my heaviest influence.”
Apart from showcasing their comic book and skills, Roever is excited to finally be able to relax and enjoy the work of their peers.
“I’m honestly really excited to see everyone else’s work,” Roever says. “I just think it’s so cool that we all get to do this together and I get to, you know, share my art and then get to see theirs in return.”
Along with Roever, student Declan Reilly will be showing his comics at the event. He consumes the medium in a much different way: by reading manga and superhero comics.
“My dad loves comic books, and I’ve always had comic books around me my entire life,” he says. “And I read all sorts of other comics, like manga—it does not just have to be superheroes… I’m inspired by a lot of Japanese content and stuff like Invincible, which I really like. A lot of Daredevil comics are really cool to me. I like grittier, real-life takes on what superpowers would look like in the real world. Stuff like The Boys.”
Reilly showed this inspiration in the project he’ll showcase in the CCAF: Portal Comics.
“My project, essentially, is about what superpower I personally would want, and I just thought of a quick eight-page story on kind of what heavy superpowers in real life would be like,” he says. “The title of the comic will be Portal Comics because that’s the company name I’ve created. [The] superhero’s name is Portal because he can teleport.”
Apart from working on his comic, Reilly says it’s been inspiring to be in a room full of people with a similar passion to his.
“It’s really awesome to be in a space filled with creative [minds],” he says. “You feel really focused during this course just on improving because there are so many people doing the same thing as you that you’re just getting inspiration from.”
Reilly is grateful that this program helped kickstart his comic-creating journey. He says that if there’s something he wants people to take away from his art it’s that it doesn’t matter which stage of their life they’re in—they should get their dream started.
“I hope when people see my art, they are able to take away that, you know, I’m not a professional artist. But I’m proud of myself that I tried my best,” he says. “I hope other people can kind of take that and use it as inspiration to just start whatever they’re thinking about. Maybe they’re scared to start because they’re worried that it won’t be what they can picture in their head. But once you just start it, then it’ll eventually turn into what you want it to be.”