On RevolveR

Sequential tectonic shift: REVOLVER by salgood sam
First impressions by Sherwin Tjia

Revolver contains a series of stories primarily focussed on ordinary people moving almost imperceptibly into extraordinary surroundings.

Salgood's drifting vision has an incredible sense of space and freedom. Your eye moves across the page like a constantly moving consciousness, an angel floating through worlds. Usually the dynamic movement of the images themselves direct your vision, like little signposts that bounce you around the worlds Sam has created.

The narratives sometimes unmoor themselves from everyday reality, moving into poetic or existentialist territory, but never loses its grounding in very concrete images.

Revolver plays with how we perceive things, and where we anchor ourselves. This is reflected in the way panels bleed into other panels, if there are panels at all. It suggests that sometimes the dreamworld or the worlds we create in our narratives appear realer than our actual lives, that the membrane between the world we live and the worlds we see ourselves living in is very thin.

Raison d'être

RevolveR is to be an ongoing personal anthology, a venue for me to do my thing, experiment, learn, and vent as I see fit.

As an artist I spent a number of years doing work early in my career, between 91 & 95 primarily, for other people.

But I found that inevitability I differed in my opinions of what made a good comic from my employers. In my youth this caused me all sorts of distress. Like many in my field I had a choice to either put up and 'earn my stripes' of get out and do my own thing.

At first I tried staying, hoping that somehow I'd find the right way to convince someone to see things the way I did.

I met and worked with some interesting people but few of them saw things the way I did and those that did didn't have the clout or the will to make it a reality.

I still work from time to time in the part of the market commonly referred to as the 'mainstream' - But I came to believe that I would have to go it alone to see things done the way I feel they should be.

I've found some collaborators to work with in this, and have also worked on developing my own writing to this end.

It's taken me a few years to get things to where I'm ready I feel to start, and now that I've reached this particular bench mark, I'm setting some new gaols.

The primary goal is to put out two issues of RevolveR a year, each containing a number of short works and installments of longer novel length stories.

Note: due to problems on personal and economic fronts, this goal has already been fumbled :( It's is still the eventual goal, 2 books a year, but I've had to put this personal work on the back burner for most of the last 10 months while I get my life back in order and the books balanced. Look for the next RevolveR to be published in late 2005. .

Wrapped around that is the goal of personal creative growth: I want to reach for something other than contrived standards such as Pop or Literary comics, or remain locked into any genre or form based standard definitions of what a comic can an cannot be or do. Even in the Alt and Indy comix world I feel creators often stay within the boundaries of what is safe from their vantage, preferring to be consistent over exploratory.

That's not to say that I'm going to be putting out a totally wild book of random experimentation with no riym or reason.

Sequential Art is a form of language, languge requers structure to be ledgiable.

But I disagree with a lot of the given rules assumed by many to be fundamental to the medium.

I want to tell good stories in RevolveR. But while doing that there will also be some very specific experimentation. For one thing, at this time I'm giving a lot of thought to structure and layout and the notion that some kind of conventional panel is the best way to delineate time and space in comics. I disagree and the only arguments I've heard against tearing down that particular wall is that it's a harder and more time consuming to construct a page without that tool. Not a reason not to try I think. I do not see the world framed in a rectangle, one thing or moment separated from the next. And my ultimate goal is to put to page a world that I recognise, be it internal or external.

So, I make No promises in regards to consistency or methodology, but rather vow to always strive to put my best efforts into the work and then present it for what it is, good or bad.

Here's to hoping that the eyes of at least a few like minded minds fall upon it.

Much thanks to John O'Brien [author of the rise and fall of it all] and a.j.duric [author of HelpLess and the dreamer of Misplaced] without whom much of this book would not be possible.

Max Douglas - aka Salgood Sam
July 10th 2004

On Salgood Sam

Salgood Sam is Max Douglas backwards.

He currently lives in a very smoky, smoggy, French part of Montreal, drawing, writing, and contemplating investing in a condo development of high-end heated igloos.

He was born up the river in Toronto to an artist and a self styled rebel. Raised in Kensington Market & the Beaches, he never fit in much at school and when he did he was kicked out. Spent the first 27 years of life living in and around the downtown Toronto core. Then, recognising Mike Harris as an ideologue who didn't give a fuck he went apartment hunting in Montreal on the days of action and moved there two moths before the ice storm and blackouts of January 1998.

He works in a number of grassy fields as an artist and has over the last 15 years had work published with DC, Marvel, Paradox, NBM, Calibre comics and numerous Web sites, Magazines, CDs, Books, TV shows, Films, etc...

All things Salgood can be found online at

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