Sean O'Reilly

Sean O’Reilly is the owner and operator of Arcana Studio, Canada's largest comic book company and also an animation studio.[1]

Through his abilities as a developer of transmedia properties O'Reilly has led Arcana Studio to winning The Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Publisher in their first year, as voted by the retailers and readers.[2] As well, Arcana Studio was nominated for a Harvey Award in its first year, a feat unheard of in the quarter century tenure of the award.[3] O’Reilly is also one of the most prolific independent comic book writers in Canada and his creations have been seen in over 1,000,000 comics published in eleven countries and in numerous different languages.[1]

O’Reilly resides in Coquitlam, British Columbia, has completed two degrees and his Masters and teaches college level courses both in Vancouver[4] and through UCLA[5] in addition to being a Mentor and Scriptwriting consultant for Telefilm[6] in 2008 he won the Top 40 Under 40 Award in Vancouver[7] and won a Moonbeam Award[8] as well as silver in the Graphic Novels & Comics category for the Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards[9] for The Clockwork Girl. In 2013, he won the Playback award for the Top Ten To Watch and Arcana Studio won Most Promising Company of the Year from the Digi Awards.

Notable graphic novels include Kade, which has gone on to be one of Arcana's top selling books. The first series, Original Sun, came out in 2005, followed by Sun of Perdition in 2007,[10] Shiva's Sun (2008), Rising Sun (2009), Red Sun (2010) and Prodigal Sun (2011). Kade has now been published in numerous countries including Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Croatia and Poland. In 2007, O'Reilly wrote The Clockwork Girl with co-creator Kevin Hanna and the steampunk fairytale and the book went on to win the gold medal in the Moonbeam Awards.[11] Sean followed up the success of The Clockwork Girl with The Gwaii after being inspired by the Queen Charlotte Islands. In 2010, Sean wrote a six book series called Mighty Mighty Monsters[12] through Capstone Publishers. The 18 book series Mighty Mighty Monsters lead to three 44-minute animated specials that Sean produced.

Sean produced The Clockwork Girl as an animated feature film which stars Alexa Vega of Spy Kids as the lead character Tesla, as well as Carrie-Anne Moss, Brad Garrett, and Jeffery Tambor.

Arcana Studio's animation division was created by O'Reilly in 2012 as part of his vision to bring the storytelling and artwork of Arcana's vast library of comic books to the big screen. Accordingly, Arcana Studio's animated projects are based on the graphic novels within their library. The animation division's first project was the animated feature The Clockwork Girl, based on the graphic novel, followed by a 13 episode mini-series of Kagagi: The Raven, which aired on APTN in September 2014. This was followed up by the animated feature Pixies in 2015, which included voice actors Christopher Plummer, Bill Paxton and Alexa Vega. O'Reilly wrote, directed and produced Pixies and also utilized his voice acting talents in the movie by voicing the main protagonist, Joe Beck.

In 2016, Sean wrote, directed and produced, Howard Lovecraft and The Frozen Kingdom, the first in the three part trilogy. It was the first animated film adaptation of HP Lovecraft's work. The series was based on the graphic novel series written by Bruce Brown and published by Arcana.[13]

In 2018, Sean directed three animated features The Steam Engines of Oz, The Legend of Hallowaiian, and Howard Lovecraft and the Kingdom of Madness.

Sean O'Reilly is a producer for all of the animated projects produced by Arcana and has written and directed a majority of the projects.