As such, the interviews and profiles we feature are generally about comic authors and artists. It didn’t require a hyper intellectual think-tank to  come up with this formula, but we’ve stuck to it all the same (as it seems to make sense).

Too much of the usual, however, can easily become boring.

Which is why this week we are featuring someone who, in fact, does not have any published work directly in comics.

Aaron Leighton is a professional illustrator who specializes in the unusual.

(Okay, so illustration and comics aren’t technically THAT far removed from each other – but really, did you expect I was going to profile a urologist?)

Leighton has been turning his fantastic imaginings of the weird and the wonderful into dollars for over a decade now, since graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1995.

He describes himself as bi-provincial, owing to the fact that his hometown, Lloydminster, is technically in both Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Being the wild provincial swinger that he is, he left the Prairies in 1998 bound for Toronto, and he’s been there ever since.

Leighton’s art is a dynamic mixture of cartoon (non)sensibility and tribal artwork, balancing bizarre doodles against simple symbolism.

“If I had to pick a shortlist of influences,” says Leighton, “I’d say that Picasso and the German expressionists taught me about the possibilities of the abstracted figure, cartoons taught me the power of drawings coupled with humour, and the artwork of indigenous cultures, specifically those of Northern Canada and Africa, taught me not only about the power of simplicity but also how mythology can imbue imagery with meaning.”

According to Aaron, his unique style developed steadily over time – it wasn’t at all something he ‘hit the ground running’ with immediately after Art school:

“The evolution of my illustrative style has been a combination of my natural inclination to fill up a page with doodles and a slow, painful struggle of figuring out how to translate this spontaneous tendency – coupled with the things that influence me – into a visual language usable for problem solving.”

His art has appeared in Maclean’s, PC Magazine, The New York Times, and The Globe and Mail, amongst a wealth of other publications.

With such a variety of clients commissioning Aaron for projects varying from promotional to informative to just plain fun, his creative process can get a little messy:

“I usually start by putting my head in my hands and thinking “How the hell am I going to solve this one?” That blank sheet can be terrifying. But despite the fact that I often find conceptualizing difficult, it always works out. Sometimes it helps to leave the studio and give your eyes new stuff to look at, thereby cutting through the feedback loop of the mind to allow it to come up with ideas instead.”

Leighton has also been involved with ‘interactive broadcast animation project’ The Zimmer Twins as creative lead since 2005.

The Zimmer Twins has a pretty interesting concept behind it; kids can visit the official website and, using a series of various pre-cut background and character animation options, build their own endings to a professionally produced story starter.

The best of those short animation endings would then be aired on Canadian broadcast television network Teletoon.

“Working as the creative director of the Zimmer Twins with zinc Roe (the design company behind the project) was rewarding not only because of the originality of the idea but also in that I was able to collaborate with some talented animators to bring my drawings to life. Also it has indeed been very interesting to see the characters being repurposed to fit the technology as it evolves, from the original animated shorts we did to the more recent apps.”

Despite the preamble I made at the beginning of the post, there is at least one other correlation between Aaron Leighton and the world of comic books: stumble into the right comic shop, and you might actually find a book co-illustrated by Aaron for sale by the name of Equally Superior.

Equally Superior was a collaborative project done by Aaron and a couple of his friends under the banner of Trio Magnus.

“Trio Magnus is the name of an artist collective I am part of, along with my friends Clayton Hanmer and Steve Wilson, both of whom also happen to be extraordinary illustrative talents. We had been sketching and doing group art shows together for years here in Toronto, and somewhere along the line we just decided to try joining forces with a bit more focus in order to create interesting (to us, at least) collaborative work fuelled mainly by beer and Led Zeppelin.”

Equally Superior came about in 2007 when Anne Koyama of Koyama Press asked Trio Magnus if they were interested in publishing a book of some sort.

“We gratefully replied that we were,” says Leighton, “and proceeded to create the book with content from our sketchbooks plus some new collaborative pieces. While not in any way narrative, the book ended up being rude, colourful, funny and extremely bizarre – a perfectly appropriate Trio Magnus creation. We launched it at Design Festa in Tokyo in 2007, and Anne has been tireless in her efforts to promote us since then, getting the book into bookstores and galleries not only in Canada and the US but in Spain and Holland as well.”

Going back a few paragraphs, if that comic shop you stumble into happens to be in the greater Toronto area, you might even bump into Aaron himself.

Aaron has a self-professed love for comics, specifically graphic novels and webcomics.

Among his favorites?

“‘Blankets’ by Craig Thompson, ‘Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth’ by Chris Ware, ‘Lous Riel’ by Chester Brown, ‘Skim’ by Jillian Tamaki, and the work of Guy Delisle and Michel Rabagliati. Webcomics-wise, some of my favorites include ‘The City‘ by DERF, ‘The Perry Bible Fellowship‘ by Nick Gurewitch, and the amazing animated comics of Brad Neely.”

“Aside from the artists above,” says Aaron, “I love the work of my friends such as Clayton Hanmer and Tom Humberstone, as well as a guy I discovered at TCAF last year named Mat Brinkman who does these insanely intricate black and white narratives about monsters and spirits doing battle with each other in magical realms.”

Aaron and the other Trio Magnus fellows will be present and accounted for at this year’s TCAF (Toronto Comic Art Festival), showcasing art from their most recent project.

“Currently,” says Leighton, “we’re working on a series of 6 ft. square collaborative drawings (created with red and black Snowman markers) which we plan to convert to smaller silkscreened prints. We’ll be selling these at TCAF in May.”

He also has a book project in the works due out in time for the Festival, to be published by Koyama Press. Leighton says that it will ‘combine illustration and photography, and feature a variety of homeless nature spirits who, having lost their forests and streams, are forced to live in the back alleys and vacant lots of Toronto’.

“It’s sort of a combination of three interests of mine: folk mythology, environmental issues and urban  photography. Nothing stokes my creative fires like the alchemy of combining ideas.”

For more from Aaron, you can visit his website, the website of Trio Magnus, or stop by his booth at this year’s Toronto Comic Art Festival.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Which doesn’t mean we’re a newsblog. If anything, we’re an expositoryblog – or a selectively focused varietyblog. Maybe a comic-centric infoblog.

But what’s in a name anyway? Definitions only detract from the potential of any form of medium. For all intents and purposes, The Fabler Blog is The Fabler Blog. Nothing more and nothing less.

Although, for the record, we’re not a newsblog.

Right-O, with that established, a few things:
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1.) I would be remiss if I didn’t mention first and foremost the latest aesthetic overhaul to TheFabler.com. That’s right folks,  our home in this here little corner of the internet is evolving.

Click on over to observe the beauty – nay, the majesty – of The Fabler’s latest iteration. I’ll understand if it takes you a few minutes of breathless wonder before you return to peruse the rest of this comparatively humble post.
We even have some sneak peeks into the future of The Fabler posted on our brand-spanking-new About page. Also worthy of mention is the addition of Groups to the site, which you can learn more on at that same link above.

2.) Free Comic Book Day is right around the corner, and coming up fast! Of course, the figurative ‘corner’ here is actually a measure of roughly two months time, but still – I’m sure May 1st will be here before any of us knows it.

In fact, the day (which I personally believe Canadians should petition for to become a nationally recognized holiday) is so fast approaching, the official Free Comic Book Day website now has previews up for this year’s slate of comics.

The lineup is decently impressive. Marvel has an Iron Man/Thor comic written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by John Romita jr. on there, while DC and Top Cow are each using the opportunity to launch major imprint events. DC has War of the Supermen # 0 up, while Top Cow is releasing Artifacts: First Look.

One of the highlights looks to be Dynamite’s Green Hornet # 1, featuring Kevin Smith’s debut take on the legendary character. Another would be the Mouse Guard/Fraggle Rock double feature (the second title I’m oddly excited for), and another still is Fractured Fables – a kid-friendly collection of fairy tales turned upside down by a wildly talented collection of artists/authors. Alex Grecian, Doug TenNapel, and Camilla d’Errico are among the names associated with that last project.

Victoria Day is a fairly cumbersome Canadian holiday that could use the axe. A holiday celebrating the birth day of the current British monarch? The Canada Act was so twenty-eight years ago, people.

Free comics is a much more culturally relevant subject of celebration for modern Canadians.

3.) Back in January I made a post about the lawsuits currently brewing between Marvel and the heirs of Jack Kirby. Somewhere amidst the senseless gibbering I made reference to the ongoing legal woes between Jerry Siegel (original co-creator of Superman) and Warner Bros./DC.

In the latest piece of news regarding the Siegel/Warner Bros. litigation, it seems that WB has chosen to replace its existing outside counsel with Daniel Petrocelli.

Petrocelli made his name originally representing the father of victim Ronald Goldman in the infamous O.J. Simpson murder case. He’s also represented Disney in a licensing battle over the rights of Winnie the Pooh.

If there were a witty correlation I could find between the three cases, you would be reading it right now. Sadly, not the case.

What this means for the trial is that Warner Bros. is essentially baring its teeth and bringing out the big guns. Marc Toberoff, who is representing the Siegel estate in this matter as well as the Kirby family in the aforementioned case, is going to have his hands full in the coming months.

4.) If you’ve scoped around The Fabler Blog before, (and chances are if you’ve read to the end of this post you probably have) you’ve probably heard me gush adoringly about Scott McCloud at some point or another.  My fascination with the works and ideas of Mr. McCloud is so great, it probably even rivals the level of contempt I feel for Boise, Idaho.

Well, that may just be hyperbole.

In any case, Graphic NYC posted on Monday what just might be the definitive profile of Scott McCloud.

Christopher Irving, who wrote the article, is meticulously thorough in detailing the career and ideas of the Understanding Comics’ author. McCloud himself gives ample insight throughout into the background processes behind everything from Zot! to his upcoming 2012 graphic novel, tentatively titled The Sculptor.

Seth Kushner also provides some nifty photos of Scott looking all professorly in front of a blackboard covered in diagrams and doodles.

Why should you read this profile? Because Scott McCloud is one of the most influential minds in comics today, and has vested more time in deconstructing and explaining the nuances of the medium than possibly anyone else alive.

Also because you’ve already wasted at least five minutes of your life reading  this comparatively shallow post, and you will be roughly twenty times more enriched for spending another ten minutes learning about Scott McCloud.
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That’s all for this Wednesday. We have another double-feature of interviews in the works for the next couple of weeks, so check back soon for that double-dip of artist insight.

I now find myself oddly craving Dunk-a-roos.

This is Kevin@thefabler, signing out.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Our Time in Eden, which is written entirely by Twist, is an adult-oriented tale of teenage innocence and naivety lost.

This week, we bring you the other side of the proverbial Our Time in Eden Coin; an interview with Ben Steeves, the artist collaborating with Gibson Twist on the  project.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! Steeves also writes and illustrates his own webcomic about a zombie-by-night superhero named (what else) Zom-Ben.

Zom-Ben, which also features colours by Manny Peters, tells the story of everyman comic illustrator Ben Benson.

Benson is given a mystical bracelet by the Egyptian God Anubis with the ability to transform him into a (relatively) invulnerable zombie. From there, he does what any other comic fan who came into possession of a superhuman ability would do: he suits up, and sets out to fight crime.

Zom-Ben is first a humorous webcomic, second a superhero story with a heavy emphasis on the relationships that hero has in his ‘civilian’ life, and (contrary to what you might assume) the fact that the main character is a zombie slides in as a distant third aspect to the comic.

Zom-Ben has been called corpsetacular, cadaverlicious, and pretty rad. (The last by me.)

But seriously. Both Zom-Ben and Our Time in Eden showcase Steeves’ talent as an extremely capable contemporary comic artist, each presenting a totally different side to his work.

Slam that down arrow key to see the interview with Ben below:

KD: Can you provide a brief insight into what got you into comics and doing comic art yourself?

BS: I always remember having a handful of comics around, from a really young age, probably belonging to my older brother. What got me into comics, though was when I started spending my weekly allowance on the early 90’s Marvel Universe and DC Universe trading cards.

Not only did seeing the cool  characters on the cards inspire me to find out more about them by buying the associated comics, but I’d also create my own characters, drawing them on lined paper, and writing the vital stats on the back. I think my first attempt at doing a full comic was in grade 5, and then my first completed one came in grade 7. I’ve been hooked ever since.

KD: This interview will mostly focus on Zom-Ben and Our Time in Eden, but for those not familiar with your other work, what else have you done pertaining to comics/webcomics?

BS: My first webcomic was called Apt. 24 and detailed the “true” events of living in an apartment with co-writer/artist Colin Turnbull. Sometime after that I started doing a photo-comic starring my action figure collection (because I’m an enormous dork) with Jordan Roherty, which we called Pulp Stiktion. I later started posting Colin and I’s zombie epic Evil Dawn that we’d started in late 1999 and eventually finished in 2005.

I’ve also done guest comics on Gibson Twist’s Pictures of You.

KD: When Gibson approached you for Our Time in Eden, what was it about the comic that made you decide it was something you would like to do?

BS: Gibson originally pitched both Eden and Pictures of You, (this was some time before he started it in its current incarnation on Smack Jeeves) and both were intriguing to me, because they were so different from anything I’d worked on up to that point.

I’d covered super-hero comics, an action/horror comic, and irreverent comedy strips, but Pictures and Eden were both very real, dramatic stories. I’d opted for Eden, citing that Pictures of You seemed very close to Gibson’s personal experiences, etc. and he’d probably pull it off better himself. “His baby”, I called it. Since then I’d always seen Eden as potentially a very important comic: very mature, very dramatic.

Though it features children for two full chapters, there’s nothing childish in its content. Our Time in Eden is hard proof that comics aren’t just for kids.

KD: If you were to pick a single aspect of the story that resonates most with you, what would you say that aspect would be?

BS: The overall theme of Our Time in Eden is the loss of innocence and the difference between what you think your future holds as a child and how things actually turn out.

The fact that I’m currently working at a store and doing comics for free on the Internet, as opposed to being a well-respected member of the professional comics industry at this point, should tell you how much this theme resonates with me.

KD: How do you approach illustrating Our Time in Eden differently from Zom-Ben?

BS: The style I use for both comics is essentially the same cartoony style. I always liked the juxtaposition of my cartoon style with Gibson’s dark writing. But with Eden, I try to keep it more believable by keeping the facial expressions and body language more subtle than the sometimes goofy and over-the-top ones in Zom-Ben.

Definitely I need to be in a different headspace to do each comic. I tend to listen to more moody, less up-beat music when working on Eden, whereas I usually skip to the more energetic stuff on my perpetual iTunes shuffle to do Zom-Ben. Although I feel I do my best work on Eden, it probably says something about my personality that I find it much harder to work on Eden with its more heavy/dark subject matter.

KD: Switching focus more to Zom-Ben now, what is it about zombies that captures your imagination?

BS: Zombies are the only movie monsters that actually get a bit of a scare out of me. With vampire or werewolf stories, they come in, cause some trouble, and by the end the problem is usually solved.

With zombies, though, the stories are usually far more apocalyptic and that’s why I love them: they’re so darn hard to beat! On top of that, zombies are US. They’re our families and friends, the kid who mows your lawn, the friendly guy who helps you take in your groceries.

No one’s gonna fight Grandma off until she’s already close enough to take a bite out them!

KD: With Zom-Ben, any traditional Zombie mythos in the comic seems to take backseat to both Ben’s escapades into super heroics and the relationship-building in his un-undead life. Was that a conscious decision you made about the comic early on, or is that just the way it evolved?

BS: This is absolutely intentional. While I wouldn’t say Zom-Ben is a traditional zombie he does have that infamous hunger.

It was briefly mentioned in one of the early chapters and in the out-of-continuity 24 Hour Comic I did, but it’s more something that will creep up throughout the story than something that’s right there in your face.

KD: Why a superhero zombie anyway? And moreover, to what degree is the character (zombie attributes aside) based on yourself?

BS: There are a lot of zombie stories out there and a lot of different takes on them and “zombie super-hero” just seems like something that’s untouched in general and in comics specifically.

Zom-Ben was actually created out of boredom. I wondered what I would be like as a super-hero what my powers would be, so I blended three things I love: super-heroes, zombies, and Egyptian mythology, and voila!

The power to turn his drawings into reality came from me finding a really strange pencil in real life that looked to be entirely made of metal. I thought “Wouldn’t it be cool if it were mystical and could make my drawings come to life?”

The character is based on a past version of me. He’s very clueless and at the time of his creation I had been making a lot of stupid decisions that put me in some less than desirable situations. Though I can still be fairly absent minded Ben Benson represents that younger, “dumber” me.

KD: You had a recent poll on the Zom-Ben forums to determine who would be the next villain. You’ve also stated that you’d draw anyone who made a donation into the comic, and overall, it seems like having a dialogue with your fans is something that’s important to you.  How important do you feel it is to maintain that interactive element with the people reading your work on a regular basis?

BS: I love fan feedback and, moreover, I love being able to respond to their questions and comments on the spot in the way that only webcomicking allows. You might say I’m addicted to it. Having a dialogue with the people that appreciate my work is important to me because I can show them that I appreciate them as well.

Regrettably, putting donors into the comic became more of a chore than I’d thought, coming up with reasons for other people to be around when a good portion of a chapter is just two people talking alone in a room, etc. So, while it was fun to let the fans see themselves as I’d draw them and in a comic they like, I had to stop doing it.

There will be future polls for new villains, though. I started the Zom-Ben comic for me, to create the stories I wanted to see, but it’s the fans that keep me doing it. Without them I’d have given up on this comic a long time ago.

KD: Last, is there anything else you’re currently working on that you can share some info on?

BS: Aside from attempting to get paying work in the comics industry, there is an Evil Dawn prequel I’ve been developing with Gibson Twist that, as of now, is still on the back burner.

You can check out Zom-Ben for yourself at Zombenstrikes.com, and Our Time in Eden can be found here. For yet more Zom-Ben goodness, you can also head over to the official Twitter feed.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Tindall is no stranger to collaboration with Grecian. Though Proof predominantly features Riley Rossmo as the series artist, Tindall has himself done colours for the title, illustrated a Proof feature story, and he writes and draws his own regular backup stories (which can be found towards the end of each comic).

He answers his phone and asks me to hold while he turns off his background music – Judas Priest, because he says listening to heavy metal while he illustrates helps keep his mind from wandering. Something about the pacifying voice of Rob Halford.

Kelly has been illustrating since he was a just a kid living in a small town in Northern Saskatchewan. As he describes it, he had a knack for drawing early on, and “as soon as you have a discernible talent in a small town, everybody’s like, oh go be rich and famous so we can all say we knew you.”

He did, of course, pursue that talent – moving from Saskatchewan to Calgary to attend the Alberta College of Art and Design.

As I talk to Kelly now, he is living in Montreal, where he moved with his wife two years ago.

He answers my questions with an almost giddy enthusiasm, clearly an individual who is both an astute conversationalist and very eager to talk about something he is passionate about.

We talk about He-Man and TaleSpin, Snow Leopards and pint-size werewolves. And through it all, I find myself thinking, “you know, this guy can really talk.” And I mean that in a good way.

But see for yourself, the interview is below:

KD: What are the earliest things you can remember getting really into drawing?

KT: She-Ra villains. (laughs) When I was a kid we had what we called ‘farmer vision’, which was like three channels we could get on our television. My parents used to rent a lot of VHS, and they used to bring home a lot of He-Man and She-Ra.

She-Ra had the best villains. I didn’t have any of the toys, ’cause they were girl toys and no boy wants to play with girl toys, so instead I drew the villains and cut them out and played with them that way.

KD: Hordak was a way cooler looking villain than Skeletor.

KT: Yeah, he was just messed up. He had like a bat skull, and he was part vampire or something… But there was a bunch of them. There was like a scorpion girl, and there was a girl that had sunglasses and turned into a panther… It was rad, I love that stuff.

KD: After Art College, how did you go about pursuing a career in illustration?

KT: It was dumb luck, and just the right positioning more than anything. I don’t mind talking to people at all, so I just basically make it known that I’m an illustrator, I do the convention circuit, and I talk to a lot of people on the net. From there, the work just comes.

KD: Where did your involvement in comic art begin?

KT: I’ve always loved comics, ever since I was a little kid. Again, the small town thing; my parents’ friends ran kind of like a supermarket/convenience store, and when they used to return comics they’d rip the covers off and just send those back. So they’d end up with hundreds and hundreds of coverless comics in these big long boxes. They’d give me like four or five hundred a shot – old stuff like the origin of Galactus reprints, Alf comics, Justice Society, that sort of thing.

So I was interested in that from an early age, and I just started drawing from there. My parents also bought me a bunch of posters of different Batman stuff, and through that I got to know the difference between the Jim Aparo Batman, the Norm Breyfogle Batman, and the Neal Adams Batman… So that’s kind of where I discovered style too, actually.

KD: Moving into Archie Snow, the main recurring character you feature in your backup stories for Proof.

This was a character you originally created for a series of minicomics a few years back. Where did the idea for the character originally come from?

KT: My friend Mike had come up with a few characters that he just liked to draw for no reason, and I was at a point where I felt like I’d like to start writing some stuff myself. So I said, well, why don’t you let me write this character for you. He said okay, and I came up for this origin story and everything for the character – and he hated it, he absolutely hated it.

I was like, ‘this is pretty good though… do you mind if I do something with this?’ His response was, ‘yeah, whatever’.

So I took different interests I had, like anthropomorphic animals, weird mythology, sword-fighting, gun fighting – and I just mixed it all together, and Archie came out of it.

KD: How has Archie changed from what you originally conceived him as to what he appears as in Proof?

KT: In the beginning, I spent some time trying to figure out the animal that Archie was going to have the head of. I was originally going to give him the head of a Himalayan Bear, but I also wanted a big part of Archie’s origin to relate to flight – because he was originally a commercial pilot before he became an adventurer. Problem was, it was too much like TaleSpin. Kind of a Baloo the Bear as a pilot thing. So I was like okay, I gotta move away from this idea, and that’s how the Snow Leopard thing came about.

Snow Leopards are very noble, they’re predatory, mysterious, and on their own ninety percent of the time… and that just fit with Archie’s character.

KD: Do you have any overarching ideas for where you’d like to take Archie in the future?

KT: The thing about Archie is that he’s not really like a Hellboy or a Proof or anything like that because he hasn’t always been this weird creature.  He’s relatively new to the world of magical things. So he’s got this sky-high BS detector, and has no patience for any of it but it’s just become his lot in life.

I want to get into what kind of person he was before that, and how who he was affected his current attitudes.

KD: Outside of the Archie Snow stories, you’ve done some coloring for Proof, a few other backup stories for the title, and some work on a main Proof feature. How far back does your acquaintanceship with Riley Rossmo and Alex Grecian go?

KT: Well I met them both in jail… (laughs) But seriously. I went to ACAD and Riley was in the class a year behind me in the visual communication program. So that’s where I first met him, and I got to know him from there. Around the time that Proof was starting up, I had finished my first Archie Snow minicomics, and Riley took a look at them and said, ‘well you should work on Proof with us’.

This was months before Proof was picked up, before Image had even indicated an interest in the book.

KD: What can you tell me about Squeak, the graphic novel you’re currently working on with Alex Grecian?

KT: It’s a pretty simple premise: it’s the story of a mouse, a completely average Beatrix Potter kind of mouse, that gets bitten by a werewolf. So whenever it gets dark and the moon comes out, he turns into a two inch long werewolf.

We’re publishing through AiT/Planet Lar, and it’ll be out sometime this year. We’re getting pretty close to being finished, and I’m actually inking part of the last third of the book today. We’re hoping to get it into shops as soon as we can – within a few months would be great.

I really like working on it too, I mean it’s really expressive, there’s lots of energy, and lots of action. There’s almost no dialogue as the characters are all fairly realistic animals – snakes and owls, that sort of thing.

KD: To end the interview on a bit of a different note, if you weren’t illustrating or involved with comics at all, what other career could you see yourself doing?

KT: I actually helped run a theatre before – like an actual ‘theatre’ theatre, where people put on plays – when my wife and I were living together in Saskatoon. One of my first loves was the stage, and I did a fair share of acting when I was living in Saskatoon and when I was living in Calgary. I could see myself going back to doing something like that.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Just a brief update today, concerning Fabler interviews as well as (unrelated) the upcoming Convention season.

We featured our first interview of the year a couple of weeks back with a profile of Gibson Twist, creator of Pictures of You, but otherwise the blog’s been slow to ramp up with 2010 creator features.

The start of a new year marks a renewal of responsibilities, and – in some cases- incites people to refocus their efforts on their work, so the slow ramp up wasn’t unexpected.  Turns out some artists and writers have their priorities out of whack, and talking to a relatively obscure comics blog about their work sometimes comes secondary to actually doing it.

Can you even believe the audacity?

Neither can I, which is why we’re churning out a bunch of consecutive interviews the next few weeks in place of typical blog-opinion fare. Not because I think you don’t want to hear me digress on the Kirby lawsuits or tirade meanderingly about classic characters from the days of early Pulps.

More because you would probably rather hear about the interesting lives of those who regularly churn out the content that breathes life into the industry of making Comics.

Wish fulfilled, Fablerites. Fablerers?

Speaking of interviews, if you’re doing something cool in comics, we operate a non-classist blog – drop me an email at kevin (at) thefabler (dot) com, and I’ll do my best to get back to you about potentially showcasing YOUR work/ideas/art on our little corner of the WWW.

Moving along through February, we’re also growing ever-nearer to the beginning of Comic Convention season. (Which I suppose doesn’t really qualify as a season per se, as the largest Comic Cons in North America take place over roughly a six month span – but if you say ’something season’ is coming, it’s easier to get excited about it. Like how the mere mention of ‘wabbit season’ was enough to get Elmer Fudd all frothy at the mouth, or how the phrase ‘Hockey season’ seems to infect most Canadians with an excitedly aggressive demeanor, and a heightened thirst for beer.)

Among the more significant cons in the next few months are the Emerald City Comic Con (March 13-14) in Seattle, Mega Con in Orlando (March 12-14), Wizard World’s Toronto Comic Con (March 26-28), Wonder Con in San Francisco (April 2-4), and – the festival that I’m most excited for -  the Toronto Comic Art Festival (May 8-9).

To date, we’ve featured no less than nine of the exhibitors appearing at TCAF 2010 in the past year on the Fabler Blog. That, and the ridiculously awesome list of additional indie comic/webcomic talent, makes TCAF our kind of scene. Check out the full exhibitor list here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention our own upcoming event here in Calgary, the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo in April (on the 24th and 25th). I will most definitely be present and accounted for both days of the festival myself, so if you’re going to be attending, hopefully I’ll see you there.

Rumor has it the elusive Bruno Stepphun, creator of the Fabler and brains behind Zensoft Studios, will also be around.

Regrettably, there are no pending Comic Cons in Boise, but I’ll keep you informed if that situation changes.

-Kevin de Vlaming

Archetype [ahr-ki-tahyp] – noun: a typical example of something; the original model of something from which others are copied.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about Jack Kirby that touched on some his contributions to the Marvel Universe of comics, and it got me thinking. Jack was a visionary thinker, and many of his creations grew into modern-day icons – destined to be emulated, satirized, and reinterpreted in countless ways.

Many of the characters that he co-created, along with the creations of such other visionaries as Stan Lee, Joe Simon, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Gardner Fox, became the de facto mold for what people came to expect from comics. This mold would later be resisted by underground comic movements, innovative ‘darker’ takes on character properties, sequential art with underlying social statements, and biographical comics… but even in the resistance it continues to cultivate, the mark left by ‘traditional comic heroes’ is apparent.

Of course, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Incredible Hulk, they weren’t exactly pulling pearls out of thin air. Stories like Jekyl and Hyde had been around for centuries, with tales of the dual natures of mankind going as far back as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster came up with their Man of Steel, anyone familiar with the Greek myth of Heracles would attest that this wasn’t the first invincible ‘Hero of the People’ to go around kicking super-powered villain ass.

The stories that came to define the Golden and Silver Ages of Comic Books were really themselves just new spins on old ideas. Imaginative, well-crafted spins uniquely re-imagined on a 20th century canvas, but still largely patchwork products sewn from the fabric of all the similar stories that preceded them.

But this isn’t what I was thinking about. At least not in the super-big-picture-all-stories-throughout-history-build-on-each-other blah blah intertextuality blah sort of sense.

A lot of these characters and stories don’t need to be traced back to antiquity to find the earlier incarnations that inspired them. Most Golden-to-Silver Age characters – as influential as they would be on our modern ideas of ‘comic books’ – owe much of their own existence to the pulp magazine and newspaper comic strip heroes of the twenties and thirties.

Those thoroughly immersed in the geeky waters of comic book fandom are generally familiar with the legacy and impact of the pulps and early 20th century comic strips. Some characters from the era cemented themselves in such strong iconography that their names are widely known today, even outside of the comic reading populace. Zorro, Buck Rogers, and Conan the Barbarian would fall into this camp.

That same widespread audience might be less likely, however, to draw parallels between the mythos of Batman (created in 1939) and that of Zorro, (created 1919) the wealthy Spanish nobleman who dons a mask and black garb to defend innocents from the corrupt.  Not that I’m implying Bob Kane and Bill Finger shamelessly lifted the concept of Zorro – Kane has openly stated that Zorro was an influence in his original imagining of the caped crusader. This isn’t a closely guarded secret by any means, as is seen in the panel below from Batman # 0 by Doug Moench.

Similarly, the same general public that would recognize the name Conan the Barbarian and identify it largely with a younger, less fluent future Governor of California, would likely be lost if you sparked up a conversation about Kull of Atlantis. Kull was the earlier creation of original Conan author Robert E. Howard, a character whose heroic barbarism and wanton sexual exploits would form the basis of its own sub-genre of pulp magazines and literature.

I think it’s important to continue to acknowledge the cultural contributions made by those protagonists of pulp magazines and classic comic strips that have fallen from the collective consciousness. If not their lasting effects on entertainment in general, then at least their influence on (what are typically seen as their successors) comic books.

Take Doc Savage for instance, a name cited from time to time as a pop culture reference directed towards ‘in the know’ audience members. In the comic book world, Doc Savage has maintained a spotty presence over the years; most recently, he appeared alongside Batman as part of DC Comics’ First Wave miniseries, though he has also had his own limited run titles with Dark Horse, Millennium Comics, Marvel, and Street & Smith. Savage represents a man who has, through science, been pushed to the pinnacle of human achievement, and through it all retained his moral obligations to both his country and his fellow man.

This may sound a little familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of traditional superhero motif, like, say, that of Spider-Man or Captain America.

To approach a (comparatively) more obscure classic character property, Mandrake the Magician could be seen as an early antecedent to the DC Universe lexicon of modern, supernaturally powered superheroes – or in Marvel terms, as an early antecedent to Dr. Strange. Created by Lee Falk, who would later create the character of ‘the Phantom’, Mandrake could cast illusions with particular gestures of his hands – an ability he used to fight everything from common thugs to evils from other dimensions.

Other pulp/early American comic strip heroes worthy of note included The Shadow, The Phantom Detective, Flash Gordon, Solomon Kane, and The Spider, among many others.

The likes of Jack Kirby and Gardner Fox should never be disparaged for their contributions to comics as they exist today, so long as credit is also given to the creators of the pulps and comic strips of the early 20th Century for laying the groundwork.

I guess we could also give credit to Ovid, but let’s stick relatively contemporary here.

It’s pretty nifty that the comic industry itself continues to recognize the impact of these original characters in the form of new comics telling new (or retelling old) stories of their adventures.

It’s also neat (and worthy of mention) that a lot of the titles I’ve mentioned have live action movie adaptations in the works, like Doc Savage and Mandrake the Magician. and Solomon Kane has already been released in France, and you can view an English trailer for it here. There’s even a remake of The Shadow in the works – by Sam Raimi, no less.

Let’s all just keep our fingers crossed on the casting of that last one.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Twist (not his real name, though it is the handle through which all of his creative content is released) is a New Brunswicker who has been active in webcomics for several years. In February of this year, he will be celebrating the three year anniversary of his primary ongoing series, Pictures of You.

Twist describes Pictures of You, of which he is writer and artist, as “a story about the best friends you’ll ever lose”. I would add to that description that it’s a compelling trip down someone else’s memory lane, packed with believable, well-developed characters and just the right amount of nostalgia.

I  say ‘just the right amount’ in that the narrative never becomes burdened in nostalgic sentiment – it’s a spice that Gibson uses to flavor his dish, rather than a base that drowns out the rest of the recipe. Quaint metaphor for the win, no?

Though Gibson has only been active in webcomics for a few years, he used to be involved with paper zine publishing back around the early-to-mid nineties.

“I did that for several years actually,” he says, “and kind of drifted away from it and got into other kinds of writing. I guess I was away for probably about ten years before I got the impetus to do Pictures of You.”

Gibson says that when he started the project, he only intended for it to be around six to seven hundred pages.

“But then as I started rewriting and developing the story and characters further”, he explains, “it more than doubled its length. I envision it now to be more like fifteen to eighteen hundred pages when it’s done.”

Despite his epic ambitions for the page count, Pictures of You is a highly accessible read. Not only is it very possible to jump in at the beginning of any one of the chapters written to date, (though you obviously won’t get as much out of it as otherwise) but Twist has successfully created something that a wide variety of readers could find compelling.

“You know, I always envisioned the story as something that would appeal to people around my age,” says Twist, “that is, mid-thirties, maybe even late twenties. What I’ve been finding more and more however,  is that it also holds a lot of appeal for a younger demographic, like teenagers to early twentysomethings.”

To really get an idea of the unique sort of charm that Twist magically weaves through believable dialogue and sincere character interaction, you’d have to stop by the webcomic’s host site and look through a few panels yourself. Actually, I strongly recommend doing this now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

….

See?  See what I mean?

Depending on where you may have randomly decided to begin reading, you may have noticed that some of the art from Pictures of You is in color, while in other instances it’s entirely black and white.

Gibson started the comic entirely in monochrome, only deciding to add color to new panels as recently as last year. Since then, he has decided to go back and color the original books, one chapter at a time.

“It’s actually been quite interesting to go back and look at not only what I was doing back then, but also how the style changed throughout,” Gibson says of his experience coloring the older pages, “Like seeing the difference, for instance, between what I was doing with black and white at the beginning of Book One, and what I was doing with it at the end of Book Two. It’s also been interesting to see how well the color applied to what was always intended originally to be black and white.”

Twist, whose other activities included (until recently) managing a record store in the town he lives in just outside of Fredericton, is also currently involved with a comic adaptation of a story he had written previously, titled “Our Time in Eden“.

Unlike Pictures of You, Gibson is not behind the art for Our Time in Eden. Instead he recruited Ben Steeves to illustrate the comparatively much heavier, mature-themed comic about loss of childhood innocence.

“It was something I never thought I could turn into a comic,” says Gibson, “Just from the nature of the way I’d written the novel, I’d never really figured it would translate properly into sequential art. I honestly couldn’t say what changed. I was just thinking one day about the story and different graphic aspects of it and it just came to me how I could trim a little here, and add a little there to make it work in a graphic setting.”

As it turns out, Gibson was right – Our Time in Eden works beautifully as a comic. Steeves does a fantastic job of capturing the mood and emotions of the two central characters – the disenfranchised, apathetic protagonist Tim and his long-estranged childhood companion, Ellis.

“With Ben, we have this sort of unusual synergy where we each understand what the other one is thinking and are able to build on the other one’s strengths,” says Gibson of the partnership, “It’s just one of those magical, cohesive kind of relationships that you don’t really find very often, and he’s been a dream to work with.”

The synergy he mentions really does come through in the panels of Our Time in Eden. As a disclaimer to those interested in perusing the comic, be prepared for a story that does not shy away from heightened emotion – reading Our Time in Eden can be a visceral experience, especially in its ability to resonate with those who have ever lost/screwed up a relationship that was important to them. And really, show me the picture perfect android of a person who hasn’t.

Between creating new strips for Pictures of You, coloring the older chapters of that same title, and working with Ben Steeves on Our Time in Eden, Gibson (by necessity) commits a large portion of time to his ventures in online comics.

“I’m motivated by the people who come and visit the sites when they really have no reason to,” says Twist, “as well as the people who have shown me a lot of support and love – a lot of my readers are very loyal. I just feel like I need to live up to their trust in me that I give them a good story without taking too long to tell it. That’s the kind of thing you don’t want to let your readers down with.”

As for future plans, Gibson is currently working on several other comics with other artists that he hopes to see come together in the near future. He’s also working on a releasing a physical, grayscale version of the first two books from Our Time in Eden as well as securing a publisher for the eventual release of Our Time in Eden as a graphic novel.

For more from Gibson Twist, you can find links to his work on his profile over at Smack Jeeves.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

At the other end of the lawsuit, we find… the artist responsible for creating the original likenesses of all of the above properties.

Okay, okay – so as we all know, legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby has been dead and gone for over a decade and a half now. The man who (alongside Stan Lee, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, and several others) helped build Marvel as a major player in the comic industry is not in fact the direct catalyst behind this latest nugget of comic book conflict.

Last September, Jack Kirby’s heirs made it known that they intended to invoke a copyright law which would terminate existing copyright claims to many of the characters Kirby co-created. Apparently, there are certain tenets within the murky waters of rights and ownership legislation that allow an author (or that author’s heirs) to regain copyrights a certain number of years after those rights were initially granted out.

Last year, the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel made headlines with a similar court case. They wound up winning a packet of rights back concerning the Man of Steel, including his origin story, the names of his parents (as well as of the planet Krypton), and publishing rights to some of the earliest Superman appearances in comics. Marc Toberoff, the lawyer who represented Siegel’s heirs, is now onboard helping to defend the Kirby copyright claims.

The big news now is that, as of a week and a half ago, Marvel is suing to render those claims invalid.

And so the soap opera that revolves around creator rights versus those of the major comic book publishing companies spills over into yet another decade.

This daytime drama is one that has been around as long as the very concept of comics as we know them today.

Jerry Siegel’s own struggles with creative ownership go back to 1938, when he and Superman co-creator Joe Shuster originally sold the copyright for the character to Action Comics for a measly $130. After receiving a comparatively tiny fraction of the revenue generated by their creation for nearly a decade, they sued to void their original contract in 1947.

The attempt was met with failure, and for several decades more the creators of the most wildly successful comic character in history continued to go uncredited and underpaid. In 1973 they made another (ultimately futile) attempt to regain rights to Superman, though at least this time the press rallied around their cause enough to effect some kind of change. Warner Communications (who by that time inherited the rights to the character through the acquisition of National Comics) responded to press coverage of the unfair treatment of Siegel and Shuster by offering them each a pension of $20,000 per year.

In addition, they would finally be credited with creating Superman on all Supes-related media. Over thirty years after the event.

After Siegel and Shuster passed away in 1996 and 1992 (respectively), their heirs attempted to reclaim copyrights in 1999 and several times again between 2002 and 2008. It wasn’t until just last August that they actually gained some significant ground in the courts.

Marvel has had its own share of discontent within the ranks of its creative talent to deal with in the past.

One notable example would be Marvel’s infamous tendency to merchandise characters and art created by freelance artists without allowing those individuals any creative control or proportionately reasonable royalties.

In 1991, Marvel experienced a coup of sorts in reaction to this. A number of popular artists then-freelancing for Marvel decided to collectively demand more rights with regards to their creative contributions to the company.

Many are now familiar with how Marvel’s flat-out refusal of their requests led those disenfranchised illustrators to branch off to form their own independent comic company, Image Comics. Those artists were Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portatio, and Jim Valentino.

If you’re starting to get a sense that ‘copyright law’ and ‘creative rights’ are vastly important terms in comics, you’re bang on the money. As an artistic medium historically dependant on complex relationships between publishers, artists, writers, distributors, and everyone else in-between, ‘who controls what’ and ‘who deserves how’ much become paramount questions.

It’s no wonder that many prefer to go the route of self-publishing their creative material.

Establishing creator rights in the comic book industry is such an integral concern to artists that many even got together to draft their own ‘Comic Creator’s Bill of Rights‘ back in the eighties. Scott McCloud, Dave Sim, Kevin Eastman, and Peter Laird were but a few of the big-name creators involved in the Bill’s conception.

The latest case of the Kirby heirs versus Marvel does represent another soap-operatic episode in an industry pointedly prone to such drama, but it is important nonetheless to pay attention to its outcome.

Some are claiming that the heirs are merely partaking in a cash grab now that the window to terminate existing Kirby copyrights is approaching, especially since Hollywood is experiencing a surge of popularity with movies based on comics. It doesn’t help their case that the initial letters of termination were distributed to most of the major production studios in Hollywood, nor does it help that they came on the heels of news that Disney was buying Marvel.

The argument put forth by Marc Toberoff on behalf of the Kirby Heirs is that they are just seeking “proper compensation and credit” for the lasting creative contributions he made to Marvel in his lifetime.

Meanwhile, Marvel claims that Jack Kirby’s creations were all work-for-hire assignments, and thus not covered by laws regarding termination of copyright.

Toberoff has pointed out that, “It is a standard claim predictably made by comic book companies to deprive artists, writers, and other talent of all rights in their work.”

I’m tentatively siding with Toberoff and the heirs here, mostly because I don’t want to see further precedent set against artists (or their heirs) trying to regain some form of artistic control or monetary compensation from corporations that have reaped disproportionately vast profit from their creations.

That being said, here’s hoping that – whatever the outcome – what Jack himself would’ve wanted winds up factoring in at least a little amidst all of the talk of dollars and cents.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

2009 was an eventful year of Canadian comic releases, major label crossover events, and comic industry developments that will have huge ramifications for years to come.

It was also the year that The Fabler, founded by Bruno Steppuhn, was birthed into existence. Which, if you were paying any attention, also meant the launch of the Fabler Blog last May.

Since, as the old adage goes, ‘to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been’, I think it’d be an ideal time to look back at the past year in review.

At least I think that’s how I think the adage goes. I’m not very good with adages. It might alternately be, ‘forget the past and the future, live in the now’. But that works less with what I’m going for here.
Let’s start by taking a brief glance at the Canadian comic landscape in 2009.

Jeff Lemire had a fantastic year. Hey, that rhymes! 2009 saw the release of Jeff’s original graphic novel The Nobody, as well as the launch of his own Vertigo series, Sweet Tooth. As if that wasn’t enough, he also released the collected version of his much acclaimed Essex County Trilogy.

Mariko Tamaki pulled in double honours, winning the Doug Wright Award for Best Book with Skim as well as the Shuster Award for Best Writer for her work on Skim and Emiko Superstar.

Jesse Jacobs and Kate Beaton each also ‘double-dipped’ from the Canadian recognition pool, both earning accolades from each of Canada’s two top comic award organizations. Jacobs won the Gene Day Award for Canadian Self-Publishing at the Shuster Awards, and saw his book Small Victories nominated for a Doug Wright Award earlier in the year. Beaton, the more-internet-famous-every-year creator of Hark! A Vagrant, was nominated for a Best Webcomic Shuster Award and won the Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent.

While new series’ featuring Canadian talent emerged regularly throughout the year, there were three in particular that I feel were especially worthy of mention.

The first was North 40, featuring art by Calgary-based Fiona Staples. This limited series launched in July and concluded in December, and featured a midwestern town overrun by supernatural forces. Aaron Williams wrote a clever story of Cowboy-Western meets Lovecraftian Horror, and Fiona did a fantastic job of bringing those elements to action-packed, panel popping life.

Second would be James Turner’s Warlord of Io. Originally slated for print by Slave Labor Graphics, Warlord of Io wound up as a digital exclusive. You can pick up the first two issues of this uniquely conceptualized space adventure via Comixology, among other places.

Third is, naturally, Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth. As one of the most hyped titles of 2009, the Vertigo-published tale of a young human/deer hybrid in a post-apocalyptic landscape certainly hasn’t disappointed. But then, Lemire isn’t an artist prone to disappointing his fans.

Unlike Jeph Loeb. But that’s another, completely unrelated conversation.

But of course, all of this just barely skims the surface of what 2009 held for the Canadian comics industry.

For all of you non-Canuck Fablers, 2009 has seen its fare share of news in the wider comic industry in general.

The year kicked off with a major announcement from Diamond Comics that some would deem controversial; they were raising their minimum purchase threshold, which would force some of the smaller-name titles out of distribution. The aforementioned Warlord of Io was one of the first comics cut as a result of this action.

Another of the year’s biggest headlines (if not the biggest headline) was Disney’s acquisition of Marvel. Certainly it was one of the most blogged about, with industry commentators putting forth banter as to whether the move would seriously impact the Marvel U, or merely improve distribution options while allowing Marvel complete creative control over its properties. Proponents of the second opinion pointed to Disney’s treatment of Pixar after it bought out the award-winning animation studio as an indicator of how Marvel would also likely be left to its own creative devices.

Both Marvel and DC ramped up the competitive status quo this year as well, each conspiring to use more event titles and ‘major title’ launches to enhance its own share of the comic market.

Marvel re-launched its fan favorite Ultimate Universe, in wake of the cataclysmic events of Ultimatum, while its 616 universe titles spent a year slowly (almost casually) dealing with Norman Osborne’s rise to power with the Dark Reign Event.

DC segued from Final Crisis into its inspired (and highly financially successful) Blackest Night crossover, and while a new Batman emerged in the form of Dick Grayson, Marvel brought the original Captain America back from the dead.

Bringing it closer to home, The Fabler launched at the Calgary Comic Convention in April of this last year. Since its launch as a service geared to help independent comic creators get their work seen on the web, it has built a small (but dedicated) community of initial artists, seen its share of major revamps, and started to find its footing as a long-term platform.

The Blog side of things attempted to establish itself as a news source for interviews with Canadian comic talent, while also providing unique perspectives into the industry and spotlighting the members of its own community whenever possible.

In case you missed any Fabler Blog interviews from the past year, collected for your handy reference below is a list of all of the artists/writers/creators/industry insiders we’ve spoken with to date:

Andrew Johnson (Kingdom, Golem: Small Town Massacre)

Eben Burgoon (Eben 007)

Alison Acton (Bear Nuts, The Faerie Path)

Jesse Jacobs (Small Victories, Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow)

Joey Comeau (A Softer World, Overqualified)

Simon Roy (Jan’s Atomic Heart)

Jake Ekiss (of Indy Comic Book Week)

Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

Jordyn Bochon (The Day After V-Day)

Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant)

Jason Turner (True Loves)

Michael Cho (Papercut)

Steve Rolston (Emiko Superstar, Ghost Projekt)

Doug Wheatley (Star Wars: Dark Times)

James Turner (Nil, Warlord of Io)

Lar deSouza (Looking for Group, Least I Could Do)

Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, Essex County Trilogy)

Jay Bardyla (Owner of Happy Harbor Comics in Edmonton)

Fiona Staples (North 40, Secret History of the Authority: Hawksmoor)

Troy Little (Chiaroscuro, Angora Napkin)

Gareth Gaudin (Perogy Cat, Owner of Legends Comics in Victoria)

Richard Grzela (14u Comics)

Chris Johnston (Jet Pack Mike)

Vicious Ambitious (Calgary Indie Comic Company)

Stay tuned to the Fabler Blog for more 2010 comic goodness! (And more jabs at Boise, Idaho!)

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Andrew Johnson’s art, like his subject matter, is pretty dark and compelling stuff. Johnson has a knack for utilizing high contrast, shadow-filled imagery and tense, often anxious dialogue to create a tone that epitomizes ‘ominous’.

The resident of Auckland, New Zealand, has made a home for himself on the Fabler with his ongoing web-based comic, Kingdom.

Kingdom presents a corporate-controlled future dystopia, with a decidedly gritty, almost noir feel to it. Crooked cops, shady drug dealers, and an always present air of corporate oppression form the staples that define the landscape of Kingdom.

“Kingdom focuses on a non specific city, 12 or so years forward from today,” says Johnson, “where Corporations, with their resources and focus have pushed into the last untapped market, governance of the populace  – producing modern versions of feudal lords, though this is not readily apparent or of interest to most people going about their daily business.”

Johnson says that, while Kingdom may share elements in common with the noir genre, he tends not to see it as such.

“There’s an oppressive atmosphere present within the story,” he explains, “but rather than focusing on some hidden truth that is revealed by tenacity of hero, we’ll be hanging out more with the characters being introduced in the initial 8 and how they’re effected by the actions of Richard Marks – who provides the catalyst for the main incidents that occur.”

An admitted long-time fan of sequential art, Johnson’s first leap into comics took him directly to the web.  In addition to Kingdom on the Fabler, he has a collection of his other work (including Golem) available for perusal over on his website, The Black Gates.

“I love the idea of world building with a couple of pages and a marker. I’m a pretty stock pop-culture geek having grown up on a diet of Magnum PI and the A Team… Throw in that I’ve been working in the interactive/web spaces for a few years now and it was almost a no-brainer I’d get involved with webcomics at some point.”

Interestingly, Johnson does not credit any specific comic or movement in comics as the reason he decided to start making sequential art himself. Instead, he says that the biggest motivator which led him into the industry was simply the state of current technology.

“With the web the cost to distribute content and put it in front of eyeballs is insanely minimal,” says Johnson, “From a printed goods perspective, being this far down the world, shipping goods to and from here costs a fair bit.  With the potential to send files up to the northern hemisphere to get printed and shipped on demand, it felt like a good time to get involved.”

This isn’t to say that Johnson is without his comic book influences altogether. He lists Frank Miller as an artist whose ‘can-do’ attitude has given him inspiration in his work, and, from a narrative perspective, Warren Ellis has left a strong mark on Johnson’s style.

“With Ellis,” he says, “It’s an inspiration gained from seeing his work constantly push against the superhero comics mainstream, more towards the mass market, and his online community experimentation, as well as stories such as Desolation Jones and Global Frequency.  Some of my other influences would be the structure and dialogue of Brian Azzarello’s work, through to density and depth found in the television show The Wire. As a fringe creator, these guys are proof of what’s possible.”

Johnson considers himself a ‘newbie’ illustrator, and at this point in his comics career, he’s having fun experimenting to see what works, and what falls flat.

“Part of the looseness is from the crunch of the deadlines,” he says,  “but in general I love the energy that comes from looser work and with these webcomics. I like that they feel quick, dirty and disposable.”

The interesting thing about catching Andrew Johnson at this point in his artistic career is that you can watch while his art evolves. This is especially apparent with Golem, which is about an inadvertently reactivated killing machine who embarks on a brief (but bloody) murderous rampage through an isolated small town.

As you read from the older panels through to those more recently uploaded, you can trace a steady progression from a more general, traditional style of comic illustration to the distinctively unique, sketch-like renderings seen in Kingdom.

“Regarding Kingdom,” says Johnson, “I think the direction I’m going with the art there provides a grittiness which indicates to us ‘these characters will not be having a good time’.”

After checking out a few panels from Kingdom, one certainly gets the impression that tone- be it gritty or otherwise – is an important element to Johnson’s storytelling.

Kingdom also contains a narrative that weaves in and out of stream of consciousness prose, adjusting accordingly as the story veers from ambiguous labs to deserted towns and darkly-lit high-rises.

“We’re in scene setting mode in terms of characters and the world,” he says, “so it seems appropriate to use such an approach to provide tone. Although when it comes time to crack on with plot, the focus will change. One of the benefits of using a fractured snapshot approach is the ability to change direction tonally with the next update if it’s called for.”

To keep up with the latest story arcs of Kingdom, check out Andrew’s creator comics over on The Fabler. For more from Andrew, you can pop into his main website, The Black Gates.