The Fabler

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

By now, it’s likely you’ve already heard some of the buzz around Indy Comic Book Week. Though it was just announced a little over two weeks ago, the idea has gained rapid momentum in the comic community.

Word about ICBW has spread largely through Twitter, (using the hashtag #indycomicbookweek) and various blog sites which have taken up the torch to promote the idea.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard about Indy Comic Book Week, essentially it’s an event to promote the work of indy comic creators that will take place in the last week of December.

Diamond Comics has said that they won’t be distributing any new titles on Dec. 30th, the last Wednesday of the year.  A few clever fellows in the industry (Kyle Latino, Jake Ekiss, Vinh-Luan Luu, Paul Milligan and Matthew Warlick) saw this as a prime opportunity, and thought, who better to pick up Diamond’s slack than the grass-roots independent comic creators?

So on December 30th, ICBW is about indy creators lining the new release shelves of their local comic shops with original, locally created content. The comic shops gain a chance to make some revenue in an otherwise dry release week, consumers are treated with greater exposure to some of the non-mainstream comic flavour out there, and independent creators get their own week to promote themselves. Win all around.

We at the Fabler thought this week was such a swell idea that we decided to talk to Jake Ekiss, one of the minds behind ICBW, to find out more about it.

To start, we asked Jake to introduce himself for the benefit of those not familiar with his name or the work of Space-Gun Studios (the organization largely behind ICBW).

“I’m Jake Ekiss, and I’ve been an independent comic creator for about five years now. I started doing a twice weekly webcomic called Space-Gun with Vinh-Luan Luu. Once that was finished we transformed the webcomic into Space-Gun Studios a comic creator studio, added a few more guys to the roster (Evan Bryce, Matthew Warlick) and have been creating various independent comics ever since.”

The origin of ICBW goes back to an article by Kyle Latino that was being passed around which referred to the last week of December as ‘Deadline 09′. According to Jake, Edward Priddy of Hero Foundry passed along a call to arms for the event to Paul Milligan, another member of Space-Gun Studios. The idea struck Jake and the others as an opportunity worth getting behind, and Indy Comic Book Week was born out of a desire to support it.

“We thought it might be helpful to put together a website and blog to help promote the event as well as give creators a place to congregate,” says Ekiss, “Between there and Twitter the idea really started to get some wings. In the last two weeks we’ve officially gone national and have added some participating stores in North Carolina and Michigan.”

The ICBW team is based out of Dallas, TX., where they had originally enlisted the support of a solid slate of local comic shops. For those of you fellow canucks reading this, fear not! It’s just as easy up here to contact your local shop and ask if they’d like to participate.

Since Diamond is also the leading distributor of comics in Canada, the idea of a Comic Book Week designed to promote indie creators who don’t meet Diamond’s benchmark order requirements for shipping is just as relevant up North.

“This year was the perfect storm,” says Ekiss about the appeal of having such a week, “It came from Diamond’s benchmarks raising and some new distributers edging onto the scene in response, then culminated with some wonky UPS holidays that meant Diamond would skip a week of shipping in December.”

Jake makes it clear that ICBW is not meant as a jab at Diamond at all. While he acknowledges that Diamond does present barriers to independent comic creators looking at distributing outside of their local area, he notes that same barrier can become an asset after a comic has found some popularity on its own.

“We don’t want to thumb our noses at Diamond,” he says, “because they do provide a great service. By the same token that service tends to overshadow a lot of other great work that’s out there. This year is special in that we get to have that work, for however brief a time, take a front seat.”

In addition to the promotional support they’ve been receiving through peer networks like Twitter, ICBW has been rolling out press releases to as many news sites as possible. Ekiss says that word has been spreading in fits and starts, as they would have predicted from such a grass roots operation, but overall they’ve been quite pleased with the response they’ve seen.

“Strangely enough the response has been almost universally positive,” says Ekiss, “I was expecting the most resistance from retailers who know that they could be selling more copies of Spider-man than of some indy book. I was pleasantly surprised to see that across the board retailers are supporting the indy and local comic communities. Not one of the retailers we’ve directly contacted has said no. In fact when we’ve approached most shops we barely get through the explanation of what we’re doing before we hear a ‘yeah, we’re in’. It’s been really heart warming.”

Jeff will, of course, be contributing a little something himself to Indy Comic Book Week – an issue from his pulp space opera miniseries, Solomon Azua. The series follows ‘lucky’ galactic adventurer Solomon as he attempts to prove to the universe that he’s more than just a favoured son of lady fortune.

According to Ekiss; “There’s lots of nutty aliens, huge starships and fisticuffs while Sol himself is cut from from the classic vagabond scoundrel cloth. He’s one part Indiana Jones, one part Robin Hood, and one part Danny Ocean.”

For more about Jake Ekiss, you can check out his blog and deviantART page.

To learn more about Indy Comic Book Week, visit the website! If you’d like to help out, you can ask your local comic shops if they’d like to participate, and/or come up with a book of your own to feature on Dec 30th. For shops interested in being added to the contributors list, you can email indycomicbookweek [at] gmail.com. If you’d like to promote your submission for Indy Comic Book Week, you can apply to join their blog and post about it there.