The Fabler

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

The exact amount of published art that I have distributed is zero, and I have yet to write a comic of my own.

With these qualifications in mind, I am now going to presume to tell you how to be successful in comic books.

Well, I’m not actually going to tell you that. No one can tell you that. If there was a magical club secret to finding success in sequential art and storytelling, it would have been leaked on a messageboard somewhere long ago. Then flamed. Then defended, flamed again, and, if it this hypothetical leak occurred anytime in the last year or so, tweeted.

Then it would have gone from tweeting to trending, and been retweeted and subsequently reposted across the blogosphere. The indie comic scene would have exploded overnight in a glorious flash of social-media-fuelled industry enlightenment.

…But, seeing as how that did not in fact occur, we’ll assume that if there ever was such a secret, it died sometime before the age of digital technology.

Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to spout some thoughts at you, the reader, regarding observations I’ve made about the industry. With the disclaimer intact that I am neither a successful writer of comics nor an artist myself, I daresay that some of these observations might still be helpful to those aspiring to be the above.

(Don’t worry, the creator interviews are still an ongoing feature – posts like this aren’t the new exclusive standard for The Fabler Blog. In fact, in the coming weeks we’ll have some lovely interviews posted with such talent as Michael Cho and Jordyn Bochon.)

In my opinion, one of the single most impressive things about the Canadian comic book industry is its ability to generate self-sustaining communities. Be they online forums like Canadiangeek.com or Maple Ink Comics, collectives such Transmission X, or simply groups of artists getting together for their local Comic Jams – community is at the heart of Canadian indie comics.

Rightly so. It makes sense for individuals with any form of shared interest to find ways to grow through interaction with each other. Writers’ circles meet to bounce ideas off of each other when hammering out new prose, structural engineers rub shoulders at conventions to network, and anarchists hold book fairs to exchange perspectives. Well, anarchists of the Western post-modern variety, at least.

With indie comics, community is less of a supplementary tool, and more of a basic necessity. Independent comic books still lack the large, varied market that, say, indie music or even small press novels attracts. Without that market, and without an adequate distribution system beyond Diamond, (which is balanced very much against new indie creators) it’s no easy task to get your work out there and seen. This is especially difficult for those looking to produce traditional, physical copies of their work rather than operate solely in a digital medium.

The best route an aspiring indie comic artist can take, (providing that artist is set on paper copy publication) is to find other artists and collaborate on an anthology. A comic anthology is easy to flip through, relatively cheap to mass produce when you have a group of people pooling funds, and it introduces you to other local writers/artists, opening the door for future collaborations. Regular collaborations with the same individuals might lead to the founding of a local publishing company, like Calgary’s Vicious Ambitious.

Forums such as the ones I listed above are making it far easier to track down local creators than ever before; as are individual blogs, Facebook groups, and collectively maintained news blogs such as Sequential. As more and more artists realize the importance of maintaining an online presence, it’s near impossible to find comic creators that are totally unreachable via the web

As comic artists increasingly turn towards webcomics as a more financially viable mode of publishing effectively, you might think that the importance of community lessens. It doesn’t cost a ton of money to get a website up and running, complete with a unique domain name and a decent amount of server space. And once it’s up there, it’s there to be searched the world over, transcending the geographical limitations of small press print runs.

This is, of course, incomplete logic. Why would people search for it in the first place? How would you pull in enough initial traffic to generate buzz about your webcomic and get that initial word of mouth going?

The talented artists over at Transmission X have found a collective approach to solving this problem. In 2007, a pool of top-notch Canadian illustrators and cartoonists founded the organization to jointly promote each other’s work on the internet. Many of them, such as Karl Kerschl and Cameron Stewart, had already achieved a significant level of popularity in the industry – but by joining up with other creators to form the Transmission X webcomics portal, they combined their individual fan bases into a larger audience.

In this case, the fans themselves benefit just as much as the comic creators. Where once they would have had to rely on word of mouth to discover new artists and their work, by visiting any one of the TX artists’ sites they now gain access to a full range of varied, quality webcomics served up on a virtual platter.

You may have noticed that I’m pretty optimistic about the sense of community in Canadian comics these days. Examples like the Transmission X collective, social media bridging ties between artists, the increasing popularity of regional cons and expos, and the ongoing dedication of blogs like the Shuster Awards and Sequential make a pretty good case for a positive perspective of the industry. But don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all daffodils and shiny pennies. (Is that even an expression?)

In fact, if you wanted to hear another point of view about the industry, I could direct you over to The Comic Book Bin to a post Hervé St-Louis wrote last October titled, “The State of the Canadian Comic Book Industry“. In it, St-Louis laments a lack of unity between the individual, geographically divided communities across the country. There is definitely some truth to this, as well as to his assertion that there is still a sense of division between Anglophone and Francophone comic networks.

I guess my optimism comes from the unabashed enthusiasm I often hear from Canadian artists when the subject of community comes up. After all, that’s where my views in this column are largely coming from – the impressions I’ve been getting from the talented Canadian illustrators and cartoonists that I’ve talked to who are trying to make some niche for themselves in the comic book industry.

Whether you’re in Gatineau, Guelph, Victoria, or Edmonton, and whether you’re printing small run minicomics or e-marketing your webcomic, community is an important ingredient to your success. In Canada, it seems to me that we’re lucky to already have a number of successful comic-related communities, and a growing number of tools and resources to help build more.