It’s been a few months since we launched TheFabler v1.5 and admittedly so, we’re never going to get it right the first time every time. That’s where you come in!

First I would like to thank all those who have helped us with your feedback, submissions, and participation. Your opinions, thoughts and ideas are firepower to our cause! To summarize some of what we’ve heard so far…

– I registered for the site but have not received my activation email.
– Comics can be created by more than one person.
– The Flash Viewer is slow and doesn’t always work properly.
– I don’t understand what TheFabler.com is when I first visit the site.
– Updating comic submissions is clunky.
– I’d like to submit more than just 10 pages of a comic.

We’ve heard you and are continuing to listen to you. Between now until the end of December, we are working on fixing some of the above mentioned based on your feedback as well as committed to completing our 2009 roadmap goals. So over the course of the coming weeks, expect updates to the site with some radical changes! With your help we can continue to improve on the existing features of the site as well as add new features that will benefit you.

2009 Roadmap:
We had quite a bit planned this year for The Fabler, and we’re coming near the end of this years plan. Our goal was to create the core features of the site that would help establish an online community where comics can continue to thrive in their traditional form and in emerging digital mediums. To quickly establish who our “community” is, it’s you! You the comic creators (writers, artists, small press, etc.), you the fans (readers, collectors, reviewers, etc.), and you the retailers (grassroots stores, franchises, etc.). These major components include:

1. A Free social platform that comic creators can showcase their work to the rest of the world in an easy to use environment.
2. Simplified, cost effective self-publishing solution (print on demand & digital direct to market distribution) for creators with traditional format comic products.
3. Retailer Network where creator owned properties can have an opportunity for shelf space, and retailers can manage these products from a single source.

2010 Roadmap:
1. TheFabler.com will launch our very own weekly regularly updated comic.
Q. What does this mean?
A. Founders of Thefabler.com have come up with our own stories to tell and we’d like to share them with you. We’ve been working hard on a story that we think everyone can enjoy which will consist of 2 pages updated each week.

2. More Blog content!
Q. What does this mean?
A. New columns, more interviews, reviews, how to’s and more!

3. Fabler Publishing Inc. will open it’s doors with a submission program.
Q. What does this mean?
A. It’s apparent that we love comics. The building of a sophisticated custom social website to support them should be evidence enough. We also value the resulting creativity in this powerful visual storytelling medium. We are prepared to explore this creativity with you in support of creator controlled properties. We want to hear about your ideas. Submission program details and guidelines will be announced in early 2010.

4. TheFabler.com will launch a global localization and distribution campaign.
Q. What does this mean?
A. To put it bluntly, North America isn’t the only landmass with comic creativity on the planet. We’ve had interest and requests from creators, retailers and fans alike in other countries to support their cause as well. In 2010 we will start localization efforts to enable Thefabler.com to be multi-country friendly!

The roadmaps that we’ve outlined is a 40,000ft view of what’s in store. We’ll be making more detailed announcements each month on what’s in store for TheFabler! In summary, we’re dedicated to creating an online environment where comics, and the imaginations they can inspire can continue to thrive. Oh, and don’t forget, We really do love comics as much as ______________________________________________.

The digitalization of comics in the Internet Age is a phenomenon that’s both purposeful and totally unsure of itself. Like a blind rat that smells cheese, for instance.

Or, if you’d prefer a simile that’s more appropriate and less cynical, like a young Clark Kent first coming to terms with the awesome power and corresponding destiny that is his birthright. The reality of the digitalization of comics, of course, lies somewhere in between – as its driven by neither the sheer greed of the rat or the transcendental power of destiny. It’s driven merely by a need to adapt as the flow of technology continues to radically reshape the world of the comic-book-buying audience.

Last week, major Japanese publishing company Shueisha, Inc. announced that it would begin selling manga in e-book format designed for mobile phones in the US next spring. You might be familiar with Shueisha as the publisher of a little-known manga franchise by the name of ‘Dragon Ball’, or alternately by one of their flagship magazines, ‘Weekly Shonen Jump’.

Shueisha is also a parent company to Viz Media, which is recognized by many North Americans as the channel through which the majority of Japanese manga comes to the U.S. and Canada.

Shueisha’s announcement, which was first reported by NHK (Japan’s public broadcasting station), is but the latest in a series of developments prompting the comic industry further along in its digitalization.

On October 30th, Marvel Comics announced a partnership with four separate companies to begin distribution of their comic library on the iPhone. As CBR reported, titles both new and old would be available to fans on the iPhone and iTouch – from classic Spider-Man issues to Joss Whedon’s semi-recent run on Astonishing X-Men.

Marvel had precedent in releasing digital content through a mobile platform. This past summer they rolled out their first very own motion comic, Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Spider-Woman, which was available for download through iTunes.

Just last week, Marvel doubled its motion comic lineup by adding the first episode of Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men to its purchasable downloads on iTunes. For the uninitiated, a motion comic essentially takes the panels from its source material and applies a toolbox of animation effects – a zoom here, some cut-and-paste closing eyelids there, and gratuitous image morphing to make it appear as if a character is turning. Add some enthusiastic voice-acting and overlay a score, and you’ve created a motion comic.

Both Shueisha and Marvel are a little behind on the curve with the whole comics-on-your-phone idea, as DC has had motion comic versions of Watchmen, Batman: Black and White, and Superman: Red Son available on iTunes for over a year now.

Now that the proverbial ice has been broken for comics in the mobile phone market, new motion comic announcements pop up with a frequency that’s increasing all the time. In October, Udon released a motion comic version of Streetfighter: Round One. This past Monday, a Buffy motion comic was confirmed, based on the Dark Horse comic series Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight.

Yes, a new dawn has come for comics in the digital age. Or rather, a dawn is in the process of coming. It’s lumbering on ahead with a gait that could accurately be described as ’shambling’.

If we overlook the vast staggering of each major companies’ break into the mobile digital media market, the fact that the comic industry only just began to get its feet wet a full year after the release of Amazon’s Kindle (first released in 2007) is telling of its uncertainty of the digital marketplace.

In fact, portable e-books were available a year before that on the Sony e-Reader. On top of this fact, many unlicensed scans of comics were available for download (if you knew where to look) for viewing on the e-Reader. An entire market was created solely devoted to scanning, translating, and editing Japanese manga into English. Those are called scanlations, if you’re curious.

Since the bulk of this post has been preoccupied with talking digital comics, it might seem obtuse that I haven’t mentioned webcomics yet.

Let’s do that now.

Webcomics have been around, in one form or another, since the mid-nineties. Several of the individuals I’ve interviewed here on the Fabler Blog have been churning out webcomics since as early as 2003.

Yet the major comic companies didn’t start making efforts in earnest to cater to the webcomic-reading demographic until 2006/2007.

DC launched Zuda, its webcomic imprint, in 2007. That same year, Marvel launched Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, which is a subscription-based service that grants account holders access to an archive of thousands of Marvel issues.

When I say that the digitalization of comics is ‘purposeful’, I mean that there is a definite path which the comic industry is on. There is a clear progression from point A to point B and through to point C. This progression doesn’t preclude the end of comics as we know them, but it does show that digitalization is happening.

It has to, since a large portion of the market has shifted its method of consumption to the digital world. This is the cheese.

The Clark Kent simile I made at the beginning of this post refers to the potential of these technologies to give comics a greater relevance in today’s society. Not in terms of content; countless brilliant comic writers and artists are already positioned on the cutting edge of creative culture. Motion comics, mobile digital comic libraries, and websites geared to support networks of webcomics are but a few ways that the medium of comics can become more relevant to contemporary trends in society.

Holy preachier sounding paragraph than I intended, comic fans! Not to mention probably obvious to many of you with more than a passive interest in the industry.

I have faith that the comic industry is slowly, stubbornly, beginning to realize what’s up. As is often the case in comics, indie creators and grassroots movements have been paving the way for the larger publishers to hop on the bandwagon. The bigger boys are now taking a more proactive stance towards digitalization, and really, we’re only better for it.

Excelsior, indeed.

(Go ahead. Ask)

Why, it’s all about utilizing the web-based resources you have at your disposal. There ’s some obvious potential for redundancy here with my post about social media, so I’ll clarify:

There are a vast amount of services out there, available to both fans and creators of indie comics. Some of those services can be viewed as social media tools, which aid primarily in networking and building lines of communication with an audience. In fact, many of them, such as illoz and illustrationmundo.com, fall under this category of overlap.

I want to speak more broadly to the resources that are available for comic fans and creators, as a way of bringing together my posts about the online communities out there as well as the aforementioned social media type sites. Wrap all that daintily up with a bow of shameless self-promotion for the Fabler, and we’ll call it a trilogy of posts. Like Lord of the Rings, only instead of questing through Mordor to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom, we’re stumbling through the internet in hopes of finding some way to understand the landscape of modern comics.

Now come those three magic words that every imaginative person, young or old, delights to hear:

Let’s start cataloging!

(Bear in mind, we aren’t looking to build a comic book bible with one post – the following links are intended to be used as starting points, not a definitive list of all important comic-related websites ever created)

INDUSTRY NEWS

When you need to know what the haps are, where do you go? Urban Dictionary probably, to look up the sorely outdated term ‘haps’.

If, however, you’re looking to hear about new developments in comics that effect YOU, or for the latest updates on your peers, your favorite comic artists, or that guy down the street who snubs his nose at you when you ask for the latest Marvel Comics… look no further.

Comic Book Resources – You’re going to get a lot of mainstream comic coverage with CBR, but the quality of content as well as the sheer number of exclusives make it my personal recommendation for an ‘overall’ news site. Plus, the Robot 6 blog is not only awesome, it provides one of the best non-automatic comic news aggregating services on the net (with Comics A.M.)

Sequential Tart – A webzine published by women which highlights the influence of women in the industry. Consistently excellent coverage of a varied set of areas.

Sequential Spiltink – An excellent source of news pertaining to all things Canadian and Comic-related. Provides Coast-to-Coast coverage of local events, Canadian creator developments, and whatever else your eager little heart might be curious about.

The Joe Shuster Awards Blog – The Official Blog for the Joe Shuster Awards. They update with surprising frequency about coverage of Canadian creators working in the industry. Some overlap with Sequential may occur.

Inkstuds – Podcasts covering the indie/alternative comic book industry! Inkstuds is based out of Vancouver, and is well known for providing entertaining, informative dialogue on the contemporary comix industry.

The Comic Book Bin – An alternate comic news outlet which tends to be a bit more eclectic with what they write about. Indie creators and Canadian creators pop up quite often here.

MAKING FRIENDS

What’d I say about the importance of community? (Answer: It’s important.)

Forums are an ideal way to connect with peers and other like-minded individuals in the field of comic books. Assuming I don’t have to explain how networking can introduce you to contacts that later prove helpful in advancing your career, building connections can also open doors to swell collaborative projects. Everybody likes the dollars to value ratio of a good anthology.

The following websites are a sampling of some of the great comic-related forums populating cyberspace:

Digital Webbing, the  CBR Forums, and Concept Art all provide some excellent opportunities to talk comics with fellow aficionados.

Whitechapel – Warren Ellis’ personal circus of social banter. Filled with comic creators, comic fans, and people you would generally not leave your children alone with.

Canadian Geek – A website I’ve mentioned here before, Canadian Geek was founded by Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor Comics and largely serves as a discussion board for Western Canadian comic creators.

LEARNING FROM THE PROS

Anything you’re trying to do has likely already been attempted, thought of, planned, or failed at by someone somewhere. Well….that sounds prohibitively cynical, so let’s instead say; whatever you are trying to do with comics, someone else probably has their own experiences with doing something similar.

Comic creators are all over the internets. Their chosen livelihood dictates they attempt to shamelessly pimp their art and ideas out through whatever means at their disposal, so it would actually be really counter-productive for one to maintain no webpresence at all.

Many of these individuals have blogs, sketchblogs, Twitter accounts, or deviantArt pages in which they often share peeks into their creative processes. Such insights can be invaluable to  those of us still struggling with finding our own roads to success.

Scott McCloud – I’ve talked amply about Mr. McCloud’s work, you’ve heard his name dropped time and time again; go check out what the creator of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Zot! has been up to lately. I guarantee you’ll find it interesting.

Scott, obviously, isn’t the only comic creator who has a blog. A solid resource for blogs/websites maintained by Canadian comic creators can be found here at:

Links to Canadian Creators at the Shuster Awards Blog

Many comic creators can also be found on Twitter – the following two sites provide (incomplete) directories to some of the comic community voices in the Twittoverse.

The Twitter Comic Book Master List

and

List of Alternative Comic Creators and Publishers

EXPOSING YOURSELF

There are a number of ways to go about this. Here, we’re primarily concerned with methods that don’t land you any jail time. Ha! Zing!

Ok, I’m talking about getting yourself out there. Your art, your comics, your portfolio as a whole. There are a number of websites that are geared to the end of helping you get where you need to go.

Some of which are below:

illoz and deviantArt are both websites which allow users to essentially post their art portfolios for the world to see. Of the two, deviantArt has a decidedly more ’social networking’ flavor.

illustrationmundo.com – This site is a bit harder categorize. It’s a community-oriented that allows you to showcase your art, your blog, and your multimedia portfolio, and it’s also chock full of helpful features such as the ‘Ask a Pro’ section and an on-demand slideshow of illustration images from Flickr.

Project Wonderful – In website founder Ryan North’s own words, ‘Project Wonderful is an ad network that doesn’t suck’. PW offers adspace (often on comic-related websites) based on an auction-based system that emphasizes ad display time and location over the pay-per-click ad services you see elsewhere. Many successful webcomics advertise through Project Wonderful.

the Fabler – I warned you there would be a plug in here somewhere. Seriously though, the other section of the Fabler (not the section mostly filled with junk written by yours truly) exists to help comic creators gain exposure for their work. It’s the whole point of the Fabler – to make it easier for you to upload your comics, get them seen, and (hopefully) have some constructive dialogue about them. To find out more about the Fabler itself, I wholeheartedly recommend you check out this post by website founder Bruno Steppuhn.

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.

I find it interesting, as I’m diving deeper and deeper into the business; I would like to clarify two very major points. I will say that my friends, Riley Rossmo, of Proof, Jim Zubkavich, of Udon Entertainment, and Salgood Sam, of the Sequential blog (and various other cool works), helped me realize this during my adventures in Calgary, to the east in Toronto, and quite recently in the last few hours as I wake up in Montreal, coffee not quite yet in hand, before I write this.

The first note I want to point out is that in all of this is the point of thefabler.com. We are trying to create a place to both enable and maintain Creator Owned Comics. There seems to be muddy lines in “indie” comics, where print on demand, print quality, poor cartoonist artwork, expressionistic visual storytelling, etc, seem to leave a bad taste in some peoples mouths, and for that matter make it relatively difficult to define. In fact these mediums and outlets aren’t low quality at all. I recently purchased a book in a Montreal store (Planete BD), called, “Drowtales: Moonless Age,” by a team of very skilled fabler’s who come collectively all around the globe. Salgood Sam also did a very good job and pointing my nose to some mainstream comic artists and writers, including himself, that create very awesome black comic self published books such as the very rare, “Revolver.” The guys at Transmission-X have created an opportunity where they can tell their own stories in the midst of their more sanctioned works. These in fact help push the boundaries of visual storytelling and can become opportunities for trade paperbacks you may see in the future. Will most of these see the light of the high volume offset press then to the big screen? Maybe not in the very near future, but they do help fuel the passion for this unique industry by everyone from the upper escalon to the outskirts.

Despite all the flash, dazzle, alternative press, distribution opportunities, blah blah, we may throw your way, our goal is to adhere to your best interests always. I’ll make a point that we’ll do our very best to support and you as creators, small press, fans, and retailers in your path to success. I assure you also that we will probably get it wrong. I say this because it’s important that you, our community knows, that you have a voice and we do, and will continue to listen, to your ideas, suggestions, or even concerns. That’s not to say we can implement the farm, but we will do our very best to remain conscientious of that which we do put in place.

Secondly, there is no secret war between what would be “indie” and mainstream. I want to thank Diamond, Marvel, Red 5, Arcana, and the guy down the street from my house. If you take a hard look at the playing field, you’ll realize that one evidently could not exist without the other. Creator Owned Comics, allow new talent opportunities in the books from mainstream that you may very well read religiously. I’d have to say that one of my favorites so far is “Proof,” by Alex Grecian, and Riley Rossmo. The dedication and passion of these two rising stars is astounding. Marvel closing their open submission policy wasn’t a slap in the face to upcoming talent, but a way of saving costs through economic turmoil, to an industry mechanic that wasn’t functioning as intended. They are right when they say not everyone can be at the top. Otherwise we’d all be there. But don’t give up hope. A friend said to me recently, discover and know what your good at, but let passion drive and define you (okay I interpreted and paraphrased a little. Thanks Jim). To make it to the top takes a complex combination many elements including little luck. Understanding however in your journeys as a cartoonist, a comic artist, a writer, a retailer, an events creator, etc, regardless of your current professional stature, though we can’t all be Scott McCloud’s, Todd McFarlane’s, or Neil Gaimen’s, there is a place for you somewhere in this industry.

As The fabler, we may open a few doors from time to time. Thanks to all you loyal fans that frequent our pages, and for you new guys out there, expect to see some interesting things as even we The Fabler, find our place in this sea of opportunity.