iFanboy Upstarts: Emily Carroll

It seems whenever a hot new artist comes onto the scene he’s often compared to previous greats, like calling him “the next Jim Lee” or “the next Steve McNiven.” I’m as guilty of generalizing as anyone, but artists don’t have to be the next incarnation of anyone. They should be their own artist with their own style. And Canadian artist Emily Carroll breaks away from that completely with her storybook style that can veer into both the realm of cute and the real of catastrophic — in a good great way.

Based in Vancouver,  Carroll splits her time between comics and illustration with her day job at DHX Media Vancouver as color artist for the animated series Pound Puppies. Although she’s not a well-known name in your local comic shops, prominent comics writers such as Brian Wood and Joe Keatinge have both name-checked her in interviews with iFanboy. She entered the comics medium in the summer of 2010 when she drew her first proper comic, a webcomic, and just a year later she won the Joe Shuster Award for “Outstanding Web Comics Creator”. She’s created a variety of short length webcomics all over the internet, including the popular horror strip His Face All Red. She caught the attention of the print comics crowd relatively quickly, doing pin-ups for Mike Allred’s Madman and doing shorts in The Anthology Project, DC/Vertigo’s The Unexpected, Flight spin-off Explorer, and Dark Horse’s Creepy.  She has yet to do a proper full-length book on her own, but has kept busy doing illustration work for magazines as well as her own pet projects, doing fan art of video game characters and Dune.

I doubt you’ll find Emily Carroll showing up drawing Marvel or DC’s next super crossover any time soon, but in a way that’s their loss. Carroll’s really made a name for herself in short time, and I’m not the only one waiting (im)patiently for her next big comic.