New magazine in Saskatoon highlights narrative illustration

Three people in Saskatoon have started a new magazine called Vehicle: the anthology of contemporary narrative. At first glance, it's a high-end comic book, but inside it's something of a combination of a comic, graphic novel and pulp magazine of the '50s like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. It's intended to provide an outlet for people to tell their stories in a number of different ways.

One of the founders, Kurtis Wiebe, is a Saskatoon Transit bus driver by day, but a comic writer in his own time, according to a story in the Star-Phoenix.

"The comic industry is very difficult to break into; you really have to have connections or you just have to have a lot of luck," said Wiebe. "We know that struggle, so we wanted to facilitate people, especially local people, if they had something they wanted to do or a story they wanted to tell. We definitely wanted to help them out with that."

Vehicle, which is launching its second issue (shown) this Friday at the Unreal City comic store in Saskatoon, was started by Wiebe (who acts as editor) and husband-wife team Tyler and Hilary Jenkins of Calgary's Blacksheep Studios (who handle publishing and art direction). An issue costs $5.

Content ranges from comics to short stories to stand-alone art, graphic novels, illustrated poetry and serialized novels.

"A lot of those older pulp magazines had individual stories that we liked the idea of, not just one story all the way through. There were different voices, different styles of stories, different themes, different genres," said Weibe. "But the old pulp magazines were kind of campy stories so we didn't really want to take that element of it. We wanted to take more serious stories and have not just comics."

Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins have already been nominated for a Joe Shuster Award (the comic equivalent of a Juno -- named after one of the authors of Superman) in the self-publishing category. They also sent a handful of copies to Comic-Con in San Diego in July. The magazine is only available in Calgary, Saskatoon and online. Weibe said they eventually want to increase the magazine's size and number of contributors.