Come Make Comics with Me in Banff this Fall!
An opportunity to spend two weeks working on comics in a beautiful environment, surrounded by a cohort of amazing peers.
TL;DR: if you are a cartoonist, you should apply!
I’m hosting a 2-week comics residency along with Bishakh Som and Tom Hart at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada this coming fall and the application deadline is approaching:
📅 Program Dates: October 6-17, 2025
⏳ Application Deadline: May 21, 2025
More about the Banff Comics Residency
This has been a surprisingly difficult post to write because I can’t find a happy medium between “you should do this” versus walking you through every single detail of all our interactions, our outings, our inside jokes, our discussions about comics, constraints, gender, travel, you name it, during this memorable and productive two-week residency in the spring of 2023.
To set the scene: the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, founded in 1933, is a hallowed campus just uphill from the eponymous ski resort in the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. Throughout the year, it hosts residencies of various lengths in a wide variety of disciplines, from dance to sculpture to poetry. It also hosts academic and business conferences (an important part of its funding model).
Bishakh and I were invited to run a first iteration of this residency back in 2023 and the experience still reverberates for the two of us and our 14 residents, most of whom we are still in touch with. It was the first time the Banff Centre had offered comics as a subject for a residency1 thanks to literary arts director Derek Beaulieu, who in addition to being a conceptual poet also has a keen appreciation for comics of all sorts.
Bishakh and I reviewed over 100 applications to select 14 residents (this year there will be 19 residents selected) that we thought were doing interesting work and seemed like engaging and dedicated artists.
And incidentally: virtually anyone can apply, regardless of whether you’ve never published a comic before or you’re a friend and colleague of mine. It’s quite competitive but it’s worth giving it a shot if you’re interested (details here).
Sticking to practicalities for a sec: this is a paid residency but the Banff Centre is able to offer a scholarship to every resident worth about 2/3 of the total cost. So this year’s residency will cost about $1200 Canadian—though that does not include travel.
The comics residency itself is very loosely structured: there are no classes and no particular demands or expectations made of the residents, who are mostly encouraged to come up with their own schedules.
As “faculty,” Bishakh and I both gave craft talks and were generally available to chat with people. We are also expected to fit in at least one 1-on-1 meeting with any resident who wanted one (technically we were both supposed to choose seven each but we ended up wanting to engage with everyone).
At the end of the residency, everyone is expected to participate in a reading on campus. Some people did dramatic readings, others did presentations where they talked about their work process. For me, it’s where I came up with the idea to set my slideshow reading of “Bridge” to an eerie soundtrack (now viewable on YouTube).
Another cool feature of the residency is that we invite an industry professional to join us for a talk and portfolio review. In 2023, we invited Andy Brown of Conundrum Press, who talked about his almost 30 years in indy publishing in Canada. Andy was really impressed by the caliber of work he saw and, as you’ll read below, ended up with a book deal!
This fall, our industry guest is going to by none other than Michel Vraná of Black Eye Books, who happens to have been Tom Hart’s and my very first publisher.
The First Banff Comics Cohort
The Comics Cohort quickly and easily established a casual and friendly rhythm involving studio visits, art material swaps and tutorials, impromptu drawing jams, birthday parties, walks in nature and into town, and many hours spent hanging out at the Maclab Bistro, a few minutes’ walk from Vinci Hall and the nearby hotel-like dormitory building.
This is the part of the post where it’s impossible to convey the richness of the experience. If you’ve been luck enough to participate in a residency before, you may have experienced this heightened, summer-camp like bonding that happens when you put a group of creative people together for an immersive experience like this. I experienced a similarly electric vibe when I lead my constraints residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts back in 2017.
There’s no guarantee that a group is going to click, nor is that a prerequisite for having a successful residency. But I believe everyone was inspired to explore and to push themselves into new territories knowing that they were surrounded by such an encouraging and kind group of peers.
Some people mostly kept to themselves while others were practically arm-in-arm, but we all agreed that this was a particularly compatible and sympathetic group of artists we had assembled.
If you want to see more photos from the 2023 residency you can scroll down a few screens on my Instagram to April 2023. you’ll find some more candids, nature and wildlife, and snippets of residents in their studios (though keep in mind that we’ll be in a different building this year).
Resident work
As I mentioned, I have tried to keep in touch with all the residents and virtually all of them are still working on or finishing up the projects they were able to devote time to at Banff. I want to showcase a few who have printed books in the works:
Courtney Loberg was well into their four-part series, We Don’t Go Through the Angelgrass, and they finished it last year. They have been talking to different publishers about printing a complete collection, something to look forward to, especially as I believe some of the individual self-published chapters are currently out of print.
Stéphanie Jeannet, aka Max Jeann, was making tentative steps on her first comic during the residency, though she already had a striking graphic style and a whimsical approach to narrative. She persisted and the resulting book, Les Aventures de Pétrole, was recently successfully crowdfunded by her Swiss publisher Pépites.club, so keep an eye out for that later this year.
Katarina Thorsen wowed everyone with her immersive studio, which from day one was plastered wall to wall with reference photos and giant charcoal and pastel drawings.
A longstanding artist and educator, this was her first attempt to make a comic and it is incredibly ambitious, conveying the tragic history of an Irish immigrant family in Vancouver throughout the last century.
Andy Brown was clearly impressed, and not too long after the residency was over, he offered to publish Salt Green Death with Conundrum Press.
As it happens, it will be officially released in the coming weeks.
Here’s a blurb about the book I found on the website ;-)
There are several other book deals in progress, new residencies undertaken, and one PhD dissertation successfully defended!
What are you waiting for?
I could keep going, but I think you get the idea: this residency is amazing and very much worth your while. You have almost a month to apply for one of the 19 residencies so I hope you’ll think about it!
📅 Program Dates: October 6-17, 2025
⏳ Application Deadline: May 21, 2025
The institution was still skittish enough about the c-word that they named it “Graphic Novels and Visual Narratives” the first time around so I’m thrilled that Derek was able to name it a comics residency by name this time!
Ahhhhhh I wish I were free then!! It sounds amazing!