My Comics #1: It all starts with a name...

If you're going to start your own comic book company, it all has to start with one thing: the name of the company. Hand in hand with that is, of course, a logo to go with it.

When I was looking around for inspiration for this new thing in my life, almost 20 years ago, I had to look no further than my kitchen doorway. Because there, at any given moment, might sit my cat Ollie. Ollie had this habit of lurking. He'd sit in the doorway, half hidden in the shadows with one baleful (let me amend that to "affectionately baleful") eye fixed on me, watching my every move. Ollie was not only a lurker he was a starer, too...kind of a "sturker," I guess. 

So both the company name and logo came to me pretty quickly. As a kid, we would play all kinds of hide and seek and chase games, late into the night, on the street where I lived. They included a cast of thousands, it seemed (it was a big street, with a lot of baby boomer families), and at the end of the game, when it was time for everyone to come in, we would yell at the top of our considerable young lungs, "ollie, ollie, oxen free!" Looking back, that was probably more of an "All-y" than the name of a cat (or comedy team member). In my case it just fit. I was producing comics that were decidely oxen free (no ox was hurt or killed during the production of my comics...I am incredibly proud of that achievement) and the whole "press" thing just seemed to naturally fit with the whole "ollie ollie oxen free" part.

Before I had the company name and logo, though, I had the title for the comic book I wanted to write, draw and produce: Innocent Bystander. I picked that because for many years I felt like things happened around me, not to me. That's changed a bit, a hazard of growing older, I guess, but in retrospect, I know now that part of that title came out of the way I observe life happening around me. I see odd things where no one else seems to see them. The juxtaposition of a sign with an item, maybe. The awkward phrasing on a hairdresser's window. All of it adds up, I guess. But that logo and company name--coupled with my comic book's title--all clicked for me.

For more on my comics over the years, please click here.

Comments

[Shell]

I have all the comics, the book and a mug ! I consider myself your # 1 Canadian fan :-)

[Pamela]

Well, got all of your comics including the book (signed by you) and the badge of the world tour AND some tiny sketches you sold....will be always my treasures...as a cat and comiclover...