Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dave mckean, entertainment, home bound, Ian Wood, jeff lemire, webcomic

Home Bound, Sweet Home Bound

Published Sat, 07 Dec 2013 12:00:11 -0600

Last updated Sat, 07 Dec 2013 16:27:02 -0600

Robert Schwager writes:

I'm sitting here with one of the creators of a new webcomic "Home Bound" and by 'here with' I actually mean nothing of the sort, more just Facebook chatting. Ian Wood is a pretty busy guy. At 22 he is working on a masters in Bioinformatics and scripting/illustrating his new web comic with his friend Sam 'SGC' Chan. This gives him enough free time to sleep and occasionally eat. Ian's art has the sort of impact that veterans of the field attempt. It's stylistically messy, stark and detailed. The black and white has a dramatic contrast to the vibrancy of the colors. SGC keeps the story moving with a minimum of wordiness, and with a fast pacing that seamlessly ties together with Ian's art.

RS: Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. When I first saw your comic listed I was…oh hum, another web comic. But this…this was something else. After reading this, I guess I have to ask…why haven't I seen your work anywhere else?
IW: If you're asking about where my previous projects are, my early ones were all horrible and I make a concerted effort to hide them from people. I finally self-published my fourth project last year, a collection of short comics entitled "Before Colour TV, Everything was in Black and White." I only printed 100 copies and I'm almost out. And now I'm on this, which stemmed entirely from a story written by Sam. It's a very different narrative from my other work, in a far better way. Sam is a brilliant writer.

RS: What's this about?
IW: It's a post-apocalyptic story in which a town is sustained by a mysterious box that falls from the sky every morning and is swallowed up by the ground every night. One day everyone has disappeared except for one little boy.

RS: People have called your style something like early Jeff Lemire?

IW: Well he's definitely one of my influences. Essex is a constant inspiration storytelling-wise; that and a borrowed copy of McKean's 'Cages' from the library are what really got me started with creating comics What are you plans for this book? We've been extremely surprised by how much positive feedback the webcomic has gotten. We mostly just wanted to have this "out there" as an example of our work, but we would definitely like to take this to print if the interest is high enough.

RS: How about in the future? Any plans for this Dynamic Duo?

IW: We've talked about it and we'd like to do a serial comic that would see monthly print distribution. The thought of organizing all of that on our own is pretty scary though so we'll just have to see what happens.