I made the first Building 108 cartoon entirely by myself in 2016. This time around I’m teaming up with artist Raphaele Bard. I got to know Raph in 2015 at the Montreal “Dump & Draw” comic jams she puts on every Saturday night at a bar near my place called Notre Dame Des Quilles. Local cartoonists take over a table near the can, drink lotsa beer & either doodle inside their own sketchbooks or contribute to exquisite corpse comic strips that get passed around. In fact, over time we’ve amassed so many pages of these improvised stories that we collected them all into a hundred-page book being made available as a perk on our crowdfunding page. Last year, silkscreen master & cartoonist Simon Bossé asked me to contribute to Journal L’Étiquette, the massive newsprint comics paper he puts out periodically with the place he works at, Brasserie Dunham. I drew my contribution at NDQ & asked Raph to colour it because her palette & technique are exquisite. The only requisite was that the story had to do with beer. Your wish is my command, Simon. It only took me ten-and-a-half beers to draw. (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).
Raph is gonna kill me for this but I found these loose inspirational sketches she did for the next Building 108 so much fun that I had to share them. She’s a professional storyboard artist, some of her work can be seen on Teletoon as we speak, & it shows, with these quick studies she just tossed off in a couple minutes while brainstorming. Here’s a background art idea for a sperm bank crime scene sequence we’re planning:
And here are some ideas she had for a sequence that’s gonna take place in a snooty fashion shop called Callipygian’s (look it up, it means “having well-shaped buttocks”) which is run by, what else, pigeons with nice butts. Get it? “Pygian’s”?
And it completely blows my mind that renowned oil painter Peter Ferguson contributed to our list of perks with this one-of-a-kind painting of the dilapidated house that our post-apocalyptic mutant characters live in. You can own your own beautiful signed gicleé print of it if you contribute to our campaign!
Here are my extremely loose thumbnail sketches detailing the whole new “Building 108: Barnacle Bill The Tailor” show scene-by-scene. But don’t look too closely, now! No spoilers allowed!
So please visit our official crowdfunding page HERE where you can view the first Building 108 cartoon in it’s full three-minute entirety made available for the first time since it opened for Anna Biller’s fantastic “The Love Witch” back at Fantasia Fest 2016. Plus you can read lots of info about what we’re aiming to do story-wise, who we’re gonna get as voice actors, & check out all the insane perks we’ve set up for you. We’re offering to have you pie us in the face full of live worms for crying out loud! And someone already paid for Raph to get one! Doesn’t anybody want ME to get a noggin fulla creepy-crawlies?
