The Fabler

Hello ladies, gents, and gender ambiguous followers of the Fabler!

This week we don’t have a grand amount of news kicking around the site, and we’re between interviews with a few choice comic creators and artists that we’ll be featuring in the coming weeks.

So in this lull, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank those of you who’ve been following us to date, and give you a little update on where we’re at, both as a site and a blog.

If you’re experiencing a nagging sensation of deja vu, it’s probably because I posted something similar roughly 100 days into the Fabler Blog. Since it’s been another hundred and some-odd days since that, this is somewhat appropriate.

Though we’ve been around since last April, in a lot of ways the Fabler is still just getting its bearings. Like a newborn in its first year of life, we’re still all puky and uncomfortably soft on the back of our head. That is to say, we’re working on building a solid direction.

The main portion of the Fabler is still in Beta development, though it has undergone some radical aesthetic changes and as we speak is being improved with yet more fine tuning. We’ve had a handful of talented artists share some of their creative material, and we anticipate seeing more and more stream onto the site as we go into ‘010.

As always, Bruno Steppuhn is the go-to person for news about developments with the Fabler itself. I know he has some interesting ideas that we’ll see rolled out in the near future, so keep your eyelids peeled for that.

We’ve had some super fantastic artists and writers agree to let me barrage them with questions over the last few months, including the pleasantly quirky Jesse Jacobs, A Softer World writer Joey Comeau, and soon to be high profile up-and-comer Simon Roy.

We also threw our hat in to the pool of organizations and individuals supporting Indy Comic Book Week. Which, by the way, is coming up fast! Aspiring creators and indy mainstays alike, you should probably check out the ICBW website, if you haven’t already. Increased exposure + helping local comic shops increase revenue on a Diamond Comics no-ship week = an eruption of awesome.

Interview-wise, I’ve tried to retain a focus on Canadians operating in the field, but we’re very open to featuring the creative talents of anyone anywhere on the globe.

Except for Boise, Idaho. We don’t showcase artists from Boise.*

We’re looking in the coming months to profile some of the contributors we’ve had on the Fabler. So if you’re a contributor and you’re looking to have your brain publicly poked, drop me a holler at kevin (at) thefabler.com. Or if you’re not yet a contributor, signing up is as easy as clicking here right now.

You could also use that address if you’d like to let us know what you’ve thought of the Fabler Blog so far. In the interviews I’ve featured here, I’ve tried to strike a balance between summarizing featured talent to those potentially unfamiliar with the interviewees, and keeping it interesting for those who’ve heard artists X’s backstory fifty-odd times already.

The focus is generally the same: who this person is, why you should (or shouldn’t) care about them, why they do what they do, and what they consider ‘good’ to mean in terms of comics or comic industry developments. The results I’ve gotten from this interview starting point have been consistently positive.

No one ‘falls in’ to comics; everyone I’ve talked to that’s operating in the medium in one way or another is extremely passionate about what they do, and everyone has a different take on what a comic can be or what it can mean to different people.

In this sense I’m pretty fortunate to have such a diverse base of creative individuals to pull opinions and perspectives from.

In any case, to avoid rambling further, I should probably wrap up by saying thanks again for reading the posts and checking out the art on the main site.

Rock.

-Kevin de Vlaming

*The Fabler, The Fabler Blog, and myself actually have no problem showcasing artists from Boise. This line was facetious and intended in no way as a slight against Idaho’s proudest gem.