In keeping with tradition, we’re ringing in the new year by looking at some of the stuff that’s impacted our little corner of the interweb over the past twelve months. This includes some of the news bits the Fabler Blog has reported on, some of the changes and landmarks the main site has experienced, and of course, a Coles Notes list of the interviewees we’ve featured on the site throughout 2010.

Let’s start by talking about The Fabler directly. Our second year online has been filled with small triumphs (and minor road bumps), but a few in particular stand out.

First, our presence at the 2010 Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo was much stronger than at the ‘09 Expo, which was when the Fabler first launched. The 2010 Expo gave us a great chance to network, spread the good word about the site, and nab some pretty nifty interviews in our first (and, to date, only) Fabler Blog video segment. The Expo itself was a huge success last year, bringing in over 20,000 attendees – over twice the amount of the 2009 Expo. We were thrilled to be a part of that.

The Fabler’s next landmark came in May, when the site’s founder, Bruno Steppuhn, took home the Digital Alberta Media Fresh Award for Best Use of Social Media on behalf of The Fabler. You can read more about that in Bruno’s post here.

Shortly after, we launched our first major comic contest, which ran from June 15th to September 15th.  The Fabler gave away a Sony PS3 Bundle, a Wacom Intuos4 XL, and for first prize, a Wacom Cintiq 21UX. Competition was stiff, as many new contributors to the Fabler submitted a diverse and colourful array of sequential entries into the contest, but ultimately there could be only one grand prize winner. The first place finalist was Scott Ferguson, for his comic Scout Crossing.

As a reminder to all interested parties, the second Fabler Comic Contest started on October 15th and is currently still on until January 15th. If you’re interested in tossing your hat (comic) into the ring (upload section), you can view the full rules and regulations here.

To briefly touch on some of the larger news items we mentioned on The Fabler Blog, the year opened with a fresh new lawsuit between legendary comic artist Jack Kirby’s heirs and Marvel regarding copyrights to the work he did on a tonne of iconic comic characters. The latest news on this legal battle is that there really is no news. Honestly. There was a counter-suit at some point, Marvel wasn’t forced to pay damages, the Kirby Estate’s case wasn’t thrown out… It’s all sitting fairly stagnant in judicial purgatory.

In Canadian Comic news, Seth’s George Sprott: (1894-1975) unsurprisingly garnered the Doug Wright Award for Best Book, while Michael DeForge won Best Emerging Talent for Lose #1, and the Pigskin Peters Award went to Marc Bell for Hot Potatoe. Meanwhile, over on the Joe Shuster Awards side of town, Stuart Immonen earned Best Artist, Maryse Dubuc won Best Writer for her work on Les Nombrils, tome 04, and Karl Kerschl’s fantastic comic The Abominable Charles Christopher was named Best Webcomic.

In July, the world of digital Indie comics was changed forever when Zuda Comics announced it was shutting down. Zuda was DC’s online imprint and a place for independent creators to post their works in hopes of earning a publishing contract with one of DC. They were shut down as part of a DC corporate restructuring that also saw half of their staff relocate from New York to California.

This led into a host of additional major industry announcements that came to light around September and October. The Wildstorm Comics imprint was shut down, much to the chagrin of fans of The Authority and Astro City. DC and Marvel announced that their monthly issue comic prices would drop an entire dollar in 2011. Dark Horse announced a new digital publishing initiative, also coming in 2011.

As we venture forward into 2011, the state of the industry seems to finally have some sort of gameplan for adapting to a changing market. That market is of course the digital market, which had grown from an estimated value of around $1 million in 2009 to $8 million in 2010.

The Fabler Blog will continue to have its eye on the industry in this regard, and we’ll post the ‘news that fits’. Whatever that means.

This year you can also expect to see more big changes in store for the main portion of The Fabler, but I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise on that front.

In bringing this, the  first post of 2011, to a close, I would like to thank all of you Fabler fans and comic creators who have brought something to the site over the past year. I would also like to thank you for reading our humble little blog, when the internet is such a big, wide, interesting place.

On that note, for your handy convenience and ready perusal, here’s a list of all the interesting individuals we featured on the blog over the past year:

Gibson Twist (Pictures of You, Our Time in Eden)

Kelly Tindall (Archie Snow)

Ben Steeves (Zom-Ben, Our Time in Eden)

Aaron Leighton (Illustrator, member of Trio Magnus)

Colleen MacIsaac (Minicomic creator and multimedia artist)

Marta Chudolinska (Back + Forth: A Novel in 90 Linocuts)

Eric Vedder (Aardehn, Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors)

Adam Bourret (I’m Crazy)

Ryan Sohmer (Least I Could Do, Looking for Group)

James Turner (Warlord of Io)

Nick Thornborrow (The Anthology Project)

Ethan Rilly (Pope Hats)

Jenny Romanchuk (The Zombie Hunters)

Evan Munday (Quarter-Life Crisis)

Damian Willcox (dorkboy Comics)

Jason Loo and Arthur Dela Cruz (The 3 Second Rule)

Robin Thompson (Vancouver Comic Art teacher, and artist on Champions of Hell)

Jonathon Dalton (A Mad Tea-Party, Lords of Death and Life)

Angela Melick (Wasted Talent)

Cloudscape Comics (Vancouver-based comic collective)

Jim Zubkavich (Skullkickers)

Eric Kim (The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare)

Mike Jasper and Niki Smith (In Maps & Legends)

Noel Tuazon (The Broadcast)

Scott Ferguson (Scout Crossing, Nerf This)

Ty Templeton (Northern Guard)

Danielle Keller (GHOST!, Acid Monday)

Sarah Leavitt (Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, Mother and Me)

Derek McCulloch (Stagger Lee, Pug)

Matthew Dunn (Lonely Monsters)

Scott Chantler (Two Generals)

Rhian Engel (My Life as a Grum)

Jason Bradshaw (Boredom Pays, the Worst in Everything)

Salgood Sam (Dream Life, The Rise and Fall of it All)

-Post Written by Kevin de Vlaming

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