KEN BOESEM
was born in Quesnel, British Columbia in 1971. Blessed with opposable
thumbs, he took to drawing as soon as a mark-making utensil came within
reach. By his teens he was producing a superhero strip called Equity Canada for his high school newspaper and providing designs for everything from notecards to posters and theatrical sets.
After
completing high school, he attended Kelowna's Okanagan University
College where he acquired an Honours BA in English and a Fine Arts
Diploma in Visual Communications in 1998. While there he also
co-founded a student newspaper, The Phoenix, and produced two popular bi-weekly comic strips in the early 90s, Golden Raven and Studies. The latter was later collected in a limited edition by Timberline Graphics and a revised version of the strip ran in Outwords, a Kelowna gay and lesbian publication.
After
moving to Vancouver, working as a freelance illustrator/designer and
substitute high school teacher, he decided to renew his passion for
graphic narrative and created the BARKING RAVEN PRESS imprint.
The imprint's first publication, How God Built Earth, was released in December 2002.
The following year saw the release of Raven Steals the Light, 1918, How to Cure a Broken Heart in 12 Easy Steps and Tangled Web.
Boesem's graphic
art has previously seen the light of day in everything from local
editorial cartoons to elements of a short film for Canada's
premier arts channel, Bravo! Television.
1918, his almost wordless story about the influenza pandemic of 1918, became his first published work in the USA, appearing in the 2003 SPX Anthology. As a result, he was profiled in Maclean’s, Canada’s weekly national newsmagazine.
His work has also been highly praised or otherwise positively mentioned in the Vancouver Sun and Xtra! West newspapers, Broken Pencil and Geist magazines, Drippytown Comics & Stories 003 comic book anthology, Weblog holycola.net, and radio's The Onomatopoeia Show, among others.
He
lives, loves, and laughs in Vancouver, where he fuels
his creative vision with copious amounts of vanilla cream tea at
Melriches Coffeehouse.
Since December 2005, he has produced a serialized bi-weekly comic strip called The Village set in the Davie Village in Vancouver's West End. It appears, sometimes in vivid colour, in every issue of Xtra! West, Vancouver's lesbian and gay bi-weekly newspaper and elsewhere.
