Giving the devil’s
toy its due

>>Ian Comishin of KebbeK Racing Skateboards
brings serious speed to the skating scene

MOUNTAIN BOMBING: Speedboarding in Westmount (top),
Montreal’s 2007 Top Challenge (middle), and
Paskapoo Rodeo, Calgary (bottom)

by LUCAS WISENTHAL

Most skateboarders hovering around the age of 30 remember when being a skater meant beatings from jocks and harassment from cops. Ian Comishin is no exception. But ever since he traded his street board for a speedboard, the founder of the locally based downhill board manufacturer KebbeK Skateboards says he’s felt similar scorn from an unlikely source.

“Oddly enough, speedboarding or longboarding or whatever, it’s almost like this derogatory thing to be doing, to a lot of skaters,” he says. “They scoff at it. They just think, ‘Oh, longboarders are guys that are hippies in Birkenstocks, cruising the boardwalks,’ or something like that.”

Comishin, who hails from the Kootenay region of British Columbia, didn’t have longboarding in mind when he founded his first company, PM Skateboards, in 1992. “I had the same dream as everyone else. I wanted to be a pro skater at some point, kind of have that recognition that all skaters are taught to want.”

But then he took stock of the level of skating of the time, he says, “and so I decided that going into the business of skateboarding would mean that I’d be able to keep skateboarding for the rest of my life, like I thought I would if I’d made it in the pro world.”

GRAPHIC TRIBUTES: KebbeK decks

How low can it go

In 1998, Comishin helped his friend, Jody Willcock, produce a line of lowered skateboards called Highway that he’d designed to maintain stability at high speeds.

Comishin says his input was minor, but because he grew up bombing hills, he liked the idea. Willcock eventually sold the boards through a company called Landyachtz. In 2000, Comishin relocated to Montreal, and when Willcock and Jim Ziemlanski followed, the three continued producing them out here. Willcock left shortly thereafter, and in 2001, Comishin offered his own versions of the boards under the name KebbeK, convinced that competition would lend credibility to the concept. “Believe me, if PM Skateboards didn’t go into the downhill skateboard business, we would have gone under a long time ago.”

Though he didn’t ditch the PM name, he soon realized that KebbeK boards were easier to sell. “When I was making PM boards, I had to phone stores and beg them to get them into their store,” he says. “Once we [started] the KebbeK line, stores have been phoning us, begging us to get their hands on them, because we just can’t make them fast enough.”

That’s largely due to Comishin’s emphasis on R&D. While most skateboard companies draw up a shape or simply trace an existing one, order several thousand units from a manufacturer and slap a graphic on them, KebbeK’s slalom and speedboards can undergo years of testing before they hit the marketplace, and Comishin produces them in his own shop. Jim Ziemlanski’s pro model, the JimZ Pro Flushcut, required three years of testing, which meant designing a board, pressing it out of cheap materials and riding it.

They repeated this process every few weeks. The finished product is 42 inches long and 9.5 inches wide, and is made out of 10 layers of plywood (most skateboards are about 31.5 inches long, 7.75 inches wide and seven-ply). Unlike street boards, the trucks (which use a sophisticated kingpin system) mount onto its nose and tail, which are skinny and flat, and are raised just over an inch above it, so that the riding surface is lower than the turning mechanisms. In other words, the board can go really fast—90 or 100 kilometres per hour—without wobbling the way standard boards would. The Flushcut, Comishin says, was the “number-one-selling speedboard worldwide, probably, for quite some time, because so much went into it.”

RIDING WITH THE DEVIL: Dwayne Pereto (in black) and
Ian Comishin (in blue) on des Pins

Nothing wrong with long

The Flushcut and several other KebbeK decks feature graphic tributes to The Devil’s Toy, a 1966 NFB film that showed kids skating hills in Westmount. Comishin and his crew ride the same hills today, albeit at much higher speeds, so it seemed appropriate to depict some of their most daunting sections on the boards they use.

Comishin also experiments with alternative materials like carbon fibres and various epoxies in his boards, something most skate companies shun. “The longboard community is very open to that,” he says. Such is presumably the case when you’re paying $850 for a skateboard (the Flushcut deck itself costs $129 U.S., and an entry-level set-up can go for about $350; trucks can go for $450) that you plan to ride downhill at high speeds for an entire year, or if you need your board to flex properly while you weave around cones.

Despite the boards’ popularity, and though Comishin is careful not to market them as longboards, some skate shops are still reluctant to stock anything longer, wider or more technically advanced than the average street deck.

However, says Comishin, “there’ll be another store down the road that just sort of dabbles in skateboarding, but they’re eager to try your stuff out. For sure, I’d rather my stuff was in there, because they’re not going to naysay the shit to people when they come in.”

GOING ORIGINAL: Ian Comishin

Skaters for life

About half of Comishin’s business is crossover sales. He was surprised when first-time skaters put off by street skating took to KebbeK boards. The learning curve, though, is much quicker. It could take years to become a decent street skater. On the other hand, says Comishin, “we have kids winning races in their second year of downhilling.”

Of course, he initially intended the boards for older skaters who could no longer afford to injure themselves while street skating. “With speedboarding, you don’t fuck yourself up that bad. We’re still skateboarding every day. And so I’ve maintained a way for skaters who want to stay skaters to keep being skaters and not be couch skaters, with video games.”

Skate video games and the mainstream exposure they brought the sport earlier this decade are anathema to Comishin. “All of a sudden, skateboarding wasn’t a counterculture, an underground scene. I had to find a counterculture within skateboarding. Now that I’m basically married to the speedboard side of it, I still feel like I’ve got the original sensation of skateboarding that I had back in the ’80s.”

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