Here’s my chat with Julian Peters about upcoming graphic novel about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
Julian Peters is a comic book artist and illustrator living in Montreal. In recent years, he has focused primarily on the adaptation of classic poems into comics. With have a master’s degree in Art History, and a thesis focusing on two early graphic novels: Dino Buzzati’s “Poema a fumetti” (“Poem Strip”) and the “The Projector” by Martin Vaughn-James.
Julian recently exhibited at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and he spoke about why it was important to attend.
He talked about his illustration inspirations and why he tends to create for the pure literary genre: “The costumes of the era, the settings, the architecture, the atmospheres of the past — that’s always been fascinating for me.”
Julian talked about the reason for creating a graphic novel about the the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. “It’s one of those few moments people get worked up about in contemporary Canada. But at the same time, like most historical moments of the past, people have only a vague idea of what actually happened and who the main characters involved were. So I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore.”
In the sample work that Julian provided, the dialogue and characters are colour-coded to give a guide to each group in the graphic novel. “It’s a central metaphor for the graphic novel. It’s looking at how war artificially imposes a uniform identity on a varied group of people…It’s difficult for people to see outside of their own viewpoint, their own subjective perspective on the world which literally colours in this case.”
He teaches a course on comic book illustration at the Visual Arts Centre in Westmount. His suggestion for new artists is to “look at the kind of comics you enjoy and start by trying to imitate that style…you’ll inevitably find your own style through that.”
He recently participated in a comics creation workshops in India. Julian said “We ran through the basics of comics creation, then they created a short comic at the end of the workshop. I was very impressed with the results.”
You can discover more about Julian on Twitter at @jpeterscomics and online at https://julianpeterscomics.com/
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