Listen to the drops of rain against your window flickering a staccato rhythm. Hear the Spanish guitars strumming by the campfire, blowing the cobwebs away. Sailors humming a shanty as they pull into harbour, while nearby, the beat of the drum at the potlatch. Now imagine the slow pull of orchestral strings, followed by the hypnotic drone of a sitar. From beneath, an old synthesizer accompanies Inuit throat singers as they create a wall of sound. DJ’s from Japan scratch their records for the drop of a Latin hip hop verse. The Balkan brass section flourishes and the Norwegian metal bassist grinds. The banjos rise and the didgeridoos soar. All the sounds of the world converge into a sound so immense that it can been seen by the naked eye! But this is not the true finale, only the overture to Cloudscape Comics’ latest anthology: Swan Song.

Swan Song will be a music-themed comic anthology communicating the beauty and power of music through numerous styles. This full-colour anthology will feature stories about the innumerable effects that music can have on human beings and how it can change our world in uncountable ways. The stories may take on any mood (comedic or serious), be fictional or non-fictional, and may explore any genre (in both the narrative and musical sense), as long as the story features music as a central theme.

The anthology will pay $50/page to be divided equally among the particular story’s contributors. Stories must be no longer than 9 pages long (and an odd number of pages), and at least one of the main contributors (either the writer or artist) must currently be living in or have previously lived in British Columbia. The book dimensions will be either 10” x 10” or 12” x 12”, to emulate the shape of a record sleeve. To apply, please submit a general synopsis of the story, a full script, your biography, and 4-5 samples of comic art (on any topic) to [email protected] by Wednesday, February 1st, 2017.