Emmanuel Filteau is creator of Tales from the Interface. Emmanuel recently launched an Indiegogo campaign which I plan to support. I interviewed him about life lessons he has learned from comics. Check it out.
Hey Emmanuel , thanks for doing this interview for our Dear Tabulit series. First off, when did you start reading comics? Tell us your earliest experience.
Happy to be here! I grew up in a house with a huge library and hundreds of comics. Mostly European. Kindly fades in with my earliest memories really. I liked Lucky Luke and Astérix a lot. My earliest efforts where similar to those types of comics.
How important have comic books or sequential media been in your life? How come?
I didn’t read many American comics as a kid, but I use to carry those big European hardback everywhere. I started making comics by myself very early, I have hundreds of pages of them. I always felt a urge to do it. Not sure why.
Have you learned any personal life lessons from comics? What were they and which titles?
Wow. Hmm. I’m a pretty philosophical person, actually made a comic about that once. I like anticipation comics most of all. I think they teach us so many lessons. But there is one American comic that I really needed at one point in my life: The Maxx, by Sam Kieth. I really really loved it and bought all issues. I really liked the duality of a lot of the characters. How they coped with personal trauma.
Even though it is a fictional story, if there was one life lesson in Tales from the Interface for our readers, what would it be?
There are many “lessons” to be found in my stories. The main story is a science-fiction anticipation story. It shows us what could be, but not necessarily. We always have the power to affect the future.
If one day you decided to be a life coach, what's the one lesson you would want people to know?
Put your butt in your chair and make your dream come true. The world is full of distractions, but you only get fleeting joy from those. It’s easy to be derailed. True creation endures.
Do you have a dream?
There are two takeaways from my interview with Emmanuel. First is we have the power to affect our futures and second, the world is full of distractions. We have to embrace both if we want our dreams to come true.
We all have dreams. But what is the difference between dreams that stay fantasy and those that become reality? The most successful people in the world have the ability to break their dreams down into small steps and just focus on taking immediate action only. In other words, having a short-term action orientation is the difference.
The biggest mistake I see is we think too far into the future. This can be overwhelming. They say that a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. Or when asked, "How do you eat an elephant?" the answer is, "One bite at a time." If we get caught up in the thousands of miles and the entire elephant, we quickly lose the ability to take that first step and bite.
If you are having problems with taking action on your dreams, just think of that first step or bite. Write it down and take action. Don't worry about success or failure. One step isn't going to kill you if you fall flat. In fact, you will learn from it. Ignore failure and everything else, especially all the distractions. In fact, write down all the distractions too and make a plan to ignore them.
Creators like Emmanuel are achieving their dreams one comic frame at a time. Not every frame in perfect yet he keeps going. This is the same way how we can truly be creators of our own futures and dreams in every area of life.
Make sure you check out Emmanuel's Indiegogo campaign. See you next time!