From Horses to HorrorCindy Gauthier
Cindy Gauthier is an Edmonton-based artist who is pouring her interest in horror movies into comics. Gauthier is the 11th artist-in-residence at the comics shop Happy Harbor Comics since the store began the program in 2011. She will be working on her comics at the shop every Friday and Saturday until August 11, 2018. I interviewed the gracious Gauthier at Happy Harbor in late June and even got to meet her erstwhile assistant, Nika!
Cindy Gauthier: Well, I was that drawing kid in school. ST: What inspired you to draw when you were a kid? CG: I think a lot of it had to do with my mom. She drew as a kid and she got quite good at it. I would see her draw horses and cowboys, and that got me drawing. ST: What do you remember as your first subjects? CG: I think it actually was horses. I was lucky that my grandparents, and then my uncle, had a family farm. It was about an hour out of town. ST: Did you go to school for art? CG: Yep! In high school, I was lucky to transfer over to the Victoria School for the Arts [in Edmonton]. From there, I went to the University of Lethbridge for a BFA there. ST: When did the horror angle come to you? CG: It came to me early. I kind of blame my mom for that! One of the first movies I remember watching with her was actually Night of the Living Dead. ST: That's a good one to start with! Did it scare you? CG: I don't think the movie itself scared me, but it did have a lasting impact. It was in the back of my head for years, like, "What if there's something coming back from the graveyard down the road?" ST: Did you follow up with watching more horror movies? CG: Yes! ST: And what about horror-related art? CG: Well, the internet didn't really exist when I was a kid!
CG: It was there on and off during my childhood. I spent a lot of my childhood out in Saskatchewan -- not the easiest to get comics out there! It really started hooking for me around the end of high school, beginning of university because I was really into animation at the time. I was taking classes for that. Of course, one of the first steps is storyboarding. That got me looking into telling stories visually, and that got me into webcomics, and that got me into comics proper. I was really lucky to be able to start doing my own long-dead webcomics then. They might still be floating around the internet somewhere, but I'm not sure that they're accessible anymore. I was lucky to get into that community when it was at its peak popularity. I got a lot of feedback really quickly. I got to learn from other creators as they were learning, too. ST: Were you posting regularly? CG: Yeah, especially first-year university: new in town, didn't have much to do, so I did a webcomic! ST: Did you give yourself a schedule? CG: I tried to post weekly; getting in with a webcomic really forces you develop that kind of self-discipline. ST: University of Lethbridge has a reputation of being very modern. Did they get into sequential art? CG: A little bit. They weren't teaching a sequential art class, but a lot of my teachers were able to point me to illustrators and critiqued my artstyle and helped me to develop that. ST: What's the project that you're working on at Happy Harbor? CG: I'm working on the first volume of a series of graphic novels. They're going to be called Posthumous. It's a sci-fi fantasy travelogue centered around two old friends. They're trying to reach the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. For one of them, it was his live-long dream, and he died before he had a chance to do it. Now, he is a zombie and they're trying to get there before he turns into dust. ST: So this goes back to your interest in Night of the Living Dead! CG: Yep! Zombies and skeletons and magic and space ships! ST: As a comics creator, how are you mapping out the story? CG: I know exactly what I want the last page to look like. I know how I want it to end. After that, I'm playing it by ear, going book-by-book. I'm looking to do a series of five books. ST: What do you like to do while you're working in the store as the artist-in-residence? CG: I definitely prefer to be nose-to-the-grindstone working on the final pages. I'm inking them by hand. It's going to be black and white. Hopefully, once they're in, then I'm done. ST: You're doing the lettering as well? CG: Yep. It's all completely by hand. ST: You've done webcomics, but have you done any comics in the print format? CG: This is my first real shot at it. When I was doing webcomics, I was doing them by hand. ST: Were they comic strips or full pages? CG: Full pages. ST: So this is really a continuation of that. CG: Yes. I just like having that extra space. To me, it gives me more room to play around. ST: Have you been able to speak to anyone in the store? Do people come up to you with questions? CG: Oh, yeah! For a lot of people, they're curious about what the whole process is like: how you make a story, essentially. It's been really rewarding. Point them in the right direction and show them that it doesn't have to be hard.
CG: This is Nika. She's a pomeranian. ST: Does she like being an assistant? CG: She gets a little bored of the store, but she likes the attention she gets. She likes this better than being left at home all day! ST: What's your goal for the end of your time as the artist-in-residence at Happy Harbor? CG: I want to have the first volume finished and ready to print. ST: And then then you'll start working on the other volumes? CG: I'll finish writing the second volume. But I'll focus quite a bit on promoting the first. ST: If people want to follow up on this project or your art, what would be the best way to do it? CG: If you want immediate updates, the best way to do it is to follow me through Twitter or Instagram. For more official, finished projects, I would say to go check out my website. ST: Do you appear at conventions? CG: I usually do the Calgary Horror Convention [in June]. This year, I'll be at the Drumheller Dinosaur and Comic Expo [August 18 and 19, 2018]. I'm probably going to tag along with Happy Harbor for Edmonton Expo [September 21 to 23, 2018]. ST: Is there anything else you'd like people to know about Posthumous? CG: Essentially, it's for anyone who's really into buddy comedies!
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