Welcome to a New World
I am not really sure where to start, maybe this best is how Brad Layden and I met, that would be the logical step. Problem is we don't ever remember not knowing each other. We grew up together as best friends, but its probably closer to say we are brothers. so maybe the place to start is our journey of love for comics.
Growing up in a small town Brad and I had really only had one place to buy comics and that was at the Mayfair Corner store. The Grover's ran the store and are responsible for us developing our love for comics. For that I will always be grateful. We would get out of school and race to the store on Wednesdays to get the latest issues of Batman, Superman, Spider-man, X-men, or any of the other comics that they would bring in. We would spend what ever we could on these, race home read them and trade them back and forth, diving into those worlds.
As we got older and got our driver's licences we drive into the nearest city Red Deer and go to a store called Bookworm's for our comics. I remember going into this store for the first time it was a tiny dark store, old carpet on the floor that had been installed 20years ago. It was a used book store that had a small area of comics, that we would quickly gather the ones we wanted and rush to the till and pay and get out. This is what comic collecting was like back then it was just on the cusp of the crazy 90s explosion and comics in our little conservative part of the world was still looked down on as books for kids. We didn't care though, we loved them.
Brad and I would do what almost anybody I know that reads comics, we would create our own characters, and stories. Some times it would be pretty much a rip off of characters that already existed. Like the character Webs who was pretty much spider-man in a different costume, or other more elaborate characters with different abilities and crazy names. We would day dream about what it would be like to work in comics full time.
Fast forward a few years and I had gone and moved to Calgary, to take an 2D animation course, well in Calgary I was able to go and visit different comic shops, less like the little tiny dark used bookstore in downtown Red Deer, but bright stores with not only comics from north America but around the world, that I would pick up these different titles and marvel at the crazy different art styles and stories.
Well in one of these shops I saw a flyer for someone who was starting up a company in Calgary and was looking for artists and writers to help make books. I called and talked to the guy, he said that he was going to have a meeting and that I should come by with my portfolio, I was thrilled, I asked if a friend of mine could come along who was a writer, he said "sure". I called Brad immediately after and told him about this, he was in. We went to this open meeting of sorts, and both came out with a jobs, so to speak. Brad was going to write couple of books for the company, and I was going to ink another book. This is it we were going to make comics, we went to one of the first comic cons in Calgary in a school or something. The company couldn't get a booth inside, but they set us up out front of the doors at a table. I think this is kind of when we thought this was going a little side ways but hey we were going to make comics, living the dream. Then like so many indie publishers this one just sort of started to slip away before anything ended up seeing print.
Brad and I would go on with our lives, fast forward a bunch of years, life has happened, we both have gotten married to wonderful women. We have had kids,(Brad has 3 and I becoming a father once so far). We started taking about our kids reading comics and being interested in the medium, and how we never really realized our dream of creating a comic together.
We started discussing how its easier now more then ever to create, print and publish your own books, and why not do something together, create something that our kids could read, something we would read also. So it started, we began brainstorming and talking and ideas started to form. Slowly what had started out as one comic is now becoming a whole new world, with fun and interesting characters. We aren't looking to take over the world we just want to make something that two kids out there might find and fall in love with our comics.
Thanks
Chad Scott
and
Brad Layden
