Meet Kelly Turnbull | Animated Series Director & Comic Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kelly Turnbull and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kelly, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
I’m originally from Northern Canada, just a few hours inland from the Hudson Bay. So the part of the country where the snow starts falling in September and doesn’t stop until June (or at least that’s how it was when I was growing up, who knows what things are like with the climate these days) It was a Manitoba Hydro corporate town, so most people were either Hydro employees or people there to support Hydro families (school, hospital, grocery store, that kind of thing), and the majority of people lived in housing you rented from your employer. I usually tell people our two main exports there are hydroelectricity and Canadian Stereotypes.

My parents moved up to the North because they were offered teaching jobs through a program that hired staff for schools in remote communities and figured they’d move back to Southern Ontario after a year or two, but ended up nesting and spending their entire careers up there. My dad got hired as a science teacher for a school that had just built a new lab, so it was completely his space that he got to dress up with all his eccentricities and he didn’t want to leave it. He understood that kids up there were inevitably going to skip school if they wanted to check their trap lines or go on hunting trips with their families, so he’d offer them extra credit if they brought him skulls from animals they caught for the lab. He had a huge curio cabinet full of skulls and articulated skeletons from pretty much every animal people hunt in the province. He even has a wolf pelt a kid’s dad gave him for being “the best teacher his son ever had.”

I think a lot of people hear stories about what it was like growing up there and just focus on the “it was really cold and remote” and think it must have been terrible, but it was a pretty unique experience I’ve grateful to have had. You had endless forest that went off as far as you could imagine in every direction to run around and play in, beaches we could walk to in the two months of the year it was warm enough to swim. Fishing, cabins, snowmobiles, sledding hills, perfect meandering rivers for canoeing, Northern Lights most people don’t get to see outside of a photograph, and those summer nights where it never feels like the sun goes all the way down. It also made a big exciting event out of all sorts of things people in cities take for granted. Like, if you know someone going to the town four hours away that had a Wal-Mart, that was a party. People found wild ways to make their own fun. I remember calling my dad in after I’d moved to Toronto to tell him about a festival I was going to, but he was down at the lake with people racing snowmobiles on the water like jet-skis. All I could think was “wow your thing sounds so much more fun than my thing.”

As for how it impacted the person I am now, I think it made me into someone who values having experiences. Or even just finding the exciting angle to otherwise mundane tasks. Sometimes it feels like if you never want for entertainment and don’t have that perspective on finding the fun wherever you can, looking at all the amazing things available to do in a city like LA can feel like staring at the fridge when you’re bored and snacky and complaining there isn’t anything to eat.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
When I was a teenager I really wanted to get into comics, but ended up in animation because it seemed to have a clearer path to get from “high school student in the Canadian Subarctic” to “making things that go on tv”, which I guess did end up being the case. I got a Bachelor of Animation at Sheridan and have been working pretty consistently in television animation since about 2008. The Comedy Central series, Ugly Americans, was one of the first shows I worked on and it had a gap in the middle of the first season while the network made up their mind about whether they wanted more episodes that I used as an opportunity to start up a webcomic. Sheridan really hammered home the volatility of the animation industry we were about to enter, so I figured that it could be sort of like my “employment insurance” for those times I was out of work. This was that Wild West webcomics heyday in the early 2010’s, so there was also the real potential for a webcomic to be a foot in the door for “serious” comic work, too.

I came up with a strip called Manly Guys Doing Manly Things about a temp agency that reintegrates ludicrously macho action heroes into society that I entered it in a competition for a paid webcomic contract with the Escapist. I didn’t win, but it was kind of the fan favourite so I launched it on my own site in early 2010. It was very much a product of the webcomic scene of that era where everyone was making fun of video games and general nerd culture, so it thrived in that environment. Jokes like “what if Kratos had to sell TV’s at Best Buy?” Or “what if the Big Daddies from Bioshock worked at a daycare?”, that kind of thing. I actually got kicked off my first webhost because the traffic on update days didn’t just crash my site, it crashed every site their service was hosting. Which sucks and I felt bad about, but also admittedly kind of proud of.

Honestly, though, a big part of what motivated me to got into webcomics was realizing I only did one piece of personal art for myself through the entire first leg of my Ugly Americans contract. When you work in animation you inevitably pick up a little bit of everything you work on, but if you don’t have a personal project to ground yourself with it can be easy to default to your employer’s house style and start to lose your unique sensibilities. That’s something I’ve been pretty proud of through my career in animation, I’ve worked on a ton of shows for all sorts of different audiences in a multitude of styles, but at the end of the day I’ve always been able to come home and draw personal comics that are uniquely and recognizably “mine”.

I came down to LA in 2010 and spent about a decade living in the country on work visas. That presented its own challenges, because sometimes they say “jump” and if you don’t say “how high” they say “hm, well, if you can’t do the job…” I broke my drawing arm in a motorcycle crash at one point and ended up boarding two episodes of an action show with my arm in a sling to avoid getting booted out of the country (while also keeping my webcomic updating!)

Related to that but also for a host of other reasons I ended up putting Manly Guys on hiatus in 2018. I had a lot of ambitions for my career in animation that kept getting punted down the road to work on “after I was don’t with my webcomic”. I wanted to apply for directing positions, I wanted to pitch shows, I wanted to do something original that wasn’t tied to pop culture references. I was getting burnt out, the art was suffering, the audience was enjoying it less. I think the culture of the time was making it less fun to work on as well. “What if a guy casually brought a bunch of AK-47’s to McDonalds?” was more of a silly absurdity in 2010 than it was in 2018. I had some time off of work so I got on my motorcycle and rode up to Seattle, and somewhere along the way I had an epiphany like “I’m so tired of making this comic, I’m so tired of making fun of other people’s things. I don’t want to make fun of things, I want to make my own things.”

I am actually in the process of overhauling the Manly Guys site to be home to a new Manitoba-based cyberpunk biker comic I’ve been working on the past couple years. I don’t think it’ll have the same reach as a video-game-jokes comic did in 2010, but I’m really proud of how it’s coming along and it makes me happy to work on, so that’s what matters to me the most.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
When people are visiting and want to see all the LA things, I like to do a day in the Pershing Square area where we get lunch at Grand Central Market, see The Last Bookstore, and hit up some of the bars around the area. I always love to bring people to The Wolves because the decor is so cool, it feels like a Bioshock level or something. Clifton’s is also great when it’s actually open.

I like to do a day where we go to one of the museums like LACMA, the Natural History museum, the Academy Museum, the Tarpits, Museum of Jurassic Technology, something like that. Depends on whatever that particular friend is hyperfixated on.

If they want to do one of the theme parks, I’ll usually pick Universal. I think it’s got the best balance of price, stuff to do, and how easy it is to get to.

I’ll usually do a day in Little Tokyo to eat, browse shops, check out whatever gallery Q-Pop has going on, play the UFO catchers, that kind of thing. Make sure you show them Fugetsu-Do and remind them it’s a hundred and twenty years old.

Gotta do a day at Santa Monica and Venice because everyone in LA for the first time wants to see the beach.

I know Hollywood is super touristy, but I worked in that neighbourhood for years so I like to bring people to see Amoeba and whatever Hollywood/Highland stuff they need to get out of their system. I took a friend to Beetle Bar for her birthday once and we had a great time watching the Addams Family themed cabaret show.

This is kind of cheating, but if they don’t mind driving out to Barstow I like to take people to Calico Ghost town. It’s kind of hokey, but I always end up having a fun time there, and Peggy Sue’s 50’s diner is a great lunch stop. If it has to stay in the city I’d probably say one of the hiking trails, Turnbull Canyon is supposedly LA’s most “haunted” hike and it’s not especially spooky but you get a great view from up on top of the hill. The Murphy’s Ranch trail has some cool stairs cut in the side of the hill to climb around on and all sorts of great structures and junk heaps covered in great graffiti. I think the actual Ranch building finally fell over, but there’s still a lot of cool stuff to see left standing.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My whole family has been a huge support, but I’d like to thank my Aunt Susie for sending me all sorts of underground comics she made and picked up at local cons around Vancouver when I was a kid. When you see those hand xeroxed indie zines when you’re that age, they really make you think “wow, anyone can make comics! I could make comics!” in a way big manicured superhero comics don’t.

Website: http://manlyguys.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coelasquid

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-turnbull-462b6215/

Twitter: https://x.com/coelasquid

Other: https://bsky.app/profile/coelasquid.bsky.social

Image Credits
Photographs by Brandon Glazer, all illustrations by Kelly Turnbull