Broken Frontier

One of the best parts of being part of a comic book collective is all the artists you get to meet, and among the many idiosyncratic artists that I've become friends with is Colin Upton.

He's a fascinating guy. A generation older than the rest of the Cloudscape team, he started making comics in the 1980s and became an important part of Canada's developing independent comics scene. He was prominently featured in John Bell's Invaders from the North, a book that analyzes the development of the Canadian comic book, and in Bryan Talbot's The Naked Artist, a collection of weird and wonderful stories about numerous prominent comic book creators, such as Jeff Smith and Grant Morrison.

Much of Colin's work is minicomics, little comic booklets that he prints himself and circulates throughout Vancouver. They are often autobiographical, dealing with various personal situations such as Colin's struggle with diabetes, frustration over the Vancouver Olympics, and observations about events he witnesses around him. However, he has also gone farther afield, such as creating post-modern fantasies that revolve around extended metaphors or parallel history parodies that trace the fictitious invention of minicomics by Communist revolutionaries in the 30s.

Colin is a terrific writer and artist, with fine comic timing and strong insight, but perhaps the most enjoyable thing about his work is that it's all him. Not only does he write and illustrate it, but he produces all the little booklets himself, entirely a one-man job, and each one a raw and uninhibited expression of a feeling or experience.

The shortness of each story becomes a strong part of its appeal because it very clearly and concisely represents a very particular scene in his life or a thought that crosses his brain. Here's Colin talking to a doctor about his diabetes, here's Colin musing about the inukshuks people build at Stanley Park, here's Colin watching the crows in the park, ...  

Part of the great power of comics is their ability to share an intimate moment with the reader through word and image. Some of the greatest comic books (“Maus,” “Persepolis,” “Fun Home,” etc.) have been autobiographical, perhaps because of the comic's ability to serve as snapshots in people's lives. That is what Colin's work does and why it is so engrossing.

More about Colin and his comics can be found here.