Mountains loom, penning in the protagonists. Cowboys are stalked by a deadly predator. Cute furry animals attack. Our homes inspire and motivate us...but houses often haunt.

In "Alberta Comics: Home" Alberta story tellers present their take on home in this curated collection of short comic stories. Along with my fellow editors, Alexander Finbow and Emily Pomeroy, I gathered together some of the most talented comics-creators in Alberta for this collection, fifty-eight of them in total. I got to do the cover art, and some of the book design too. Our big beautiful beast of a paperback is 224 pages long, comprised of 43 awesome short stories. It was published by Renegade Arts Entertainment, a small indie publisher based out of Canmore, and printed in Canada by Friesen's, out of Winnipeg. All of the contributors have been paid for their amazing work.

We got rolling on this project when all the events and comic conventions these artists rely on were suspended. The theme is "Home" because we wanted to give people a platform for the real-life stories that have come out of the last few years, but we also wanted to leave room for all the other genres too. There's fantasy, horror, historical-fiction, sci-fi and more. You're confronted with invisible beings, crisis' of self, and post-apocalyptic bicycle-punks! A pilot crawls from the burning wreckage of a place. Hikers on a Scottish mountainside hunted by an insatiable creature. A woman turns into a table for a hundred years to escape her homophobic family. We created a book that will serve as a guide to nearly the whole of the Alberta comics community. We want people to be able to walk into bookstores, search online, and visit comic expos knowing exactly which local artists and writers they'd love to visit, and perhaps support.

These storytellers dug deep, pondering what constitutes a real family, how we find comfort, what normal looks like, and whether we even need normal in our lives. Slice-of-life and fantastical fiction mix together with humor, adventure, scares, romance and more.

Here's the full who's-who-in-Alberta-comics-list of creators who contributed:

Jillian Fleck, Theresa Wong, Kat Simmers, Ryan Danny Owen, Spencer Estabrooks, Jarett Hartnell, Janice Blaine, Aaron Navrady, Naomi Fong, Debra King, Cam Hayden, Josh Rose, Lyndon Radchenka, Chris Coucher, Jeff Martin, Jackson Gee, Derek Evernden, Chris Peterson, James Davidge, Chris Twin, Sam Hester, Brett Munro, Crista Honey, Nick Johnson, Shannon M. Reeves, Randi Hamel, Sho L. Uuhara, Sylvia Moon, Steven Charles Rosia, Rick Overwater, Dario Crrasco Jr, Stacey Bru, Kelly Tindall, Mary Haasdyk, John Vooys, Maria Stoian, Zachary Wild, Sean Seamus McWhinny, Simone Stehouwer, Mike Hooves, Luke Moore, Emma McCaul, Jacqueline Huskisson, Rixby Elliot, Henry Hays, Darryl Sinclair, Savannah Tries, Corey Lansdell, Allan Wincup, Chris Michaud, Caanan Grall, Morten Kristiansen, Nicole Gruszecki, Shawn Fehrenbach, Zach Schuster.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read about the new book!