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.

Jay Bardyla loves comic books. You can tell this much from just a few minutes of conversation with the comic shop owner/Alberta comic scene supporter.

The former Ontario local has been involved in the comic book community in Alberta since he first moved to Edmonton in 1996. In 1999, he opened the first Happy Harbor Comics, which was original a Direct Sales Outlet rather than a full retail store. By 2009, Happy Harbor expanded to encompass four retail stores across Edmonton, winning such distinctions as the 2007 Joe Shuster award for Best Canadian Comic Store and 2008 Finalist for the Will Eisner Retailer of the Year award.

“Every day I wake up, I go to work,” says Jay, “I hang out with people who are customers, I tend to always talk comics when I’m at home watching T.V… I had career paths that I had tried in my life before, and they didn’t pan out. I made this life for myself now, and I’m pretty happy with it. I can’t for a minute think of what I’d be doing right now if I wasn’t involved in this business.”

Up to this point I’ve focused this column on comic creators and publishers – and while Jay could be considered both, as he is a writer himself and has (through Happy Harbor) published a number of anthologies, the reason I approached Jay for an interview was due to his contributions to the province’s comic scene.

It seems to be impossible to hold a conversation about the comic community in Alberta without either Jay’s name or Happy Harbor coming up. In the decade that he has been running Happy Harbor, his efforts in co-running the online forum Canadiangeek.org, publishing the open submission anthology Tales from the Harbor (Vol. 1 -4), organizing a shwack of annual community events, and establishing a support system for local creative talent, have led to Jay’s name becoming almost synonymous with Alberta comic book culture.

“It wasn’t necessarily something that I thought that I needed to try and build,” says Jay about his efforts to help cultivate a healthy comic community, “it was something that I wanted to be a part of. For my own personal benefit, I wanted to learn how to become a better writer and I wanted to make comics and meet artists, so ingraining myself in the community was a matter of personal benefit.  Being that it was something important to me, and I had the space and the opportunity to provide the conduit/forums for people to come together, why shouldn’t I do that? It’s beneficial to everyone, the community as a whole.”

Jay says that his initiatives to help build a community out of Edmonton fell into the grander scheme of Happy Harbor’s business model.

“I thought, ‘what can I do that’s cool and different, and that will keep people engaged in their hobby?’ We wanted to transcend just being a store, and being involved in the community was an important part of that for us.”

These days, the community is thriving. To Jay, one big indicator of this is a shift in community interaction from the virtual world to becoming more ‘face to face’.

“In today’s society that’s the inverse of how things seem to work,” says Jay, “Things tend to start with a handshake face to face and then break down into nothing but virtual contact and communication, whereas the Alberta community has gone in reverse. People have been learning about each other virtually through forums (Canadian Geek in particular) and then connecting in person.”

Canadian Geek was created as a starting point for locals to begin communicating with each other. Jay realized that you can only have so many people coming through the Happy Harbor stores at one time, and getting everyone together all at once was generally not a realistic goal.

Jay also credits the Tales from the Harbor anthologies as being an important component in bringing together members of the current comic community.

“People who were involved in the book were obviously picking up a copy for themselves,” says Jay, “and they were now getting exposed to everyone else’s work. So first you have the forum, which is the virtual world, then you’ve got actual published material that people can see and get an idea where the other creators are coming from, and now you have the final step where we’ve moved into the realm of people coming face to face and beginning to pitch ideas and critiquing each other’s work and that kind of stuff.”

It would be difficult to deny that Alberta’s comic community has reached an impressive level of cohesiveness.  This is something that Jay acknowledges enthusiastically, adding that the benefits to having this kind of community are numerous.

“It’s that, ‘hey – I’m not alone’ feeling these days. These people all know each other, and they’re all supporting each other. Another thing we’re accomplishing through this is legitimizing the past time in the eyes of the general public. The average person doesn’t look at someone who says ‘I make comics’ with a whole lot of seriousness, and they might potentially be a little dismissive of them. But now you can go back and say, ‘I make comics’, and they’re like ‘oh are you part of that collective that helped raise thousands of dollars for big brothers and big sisters?’ – ‘why, yes I am’. So you’ve got a little bit of validation, and it’s nice to get that every once in a while.”

When asked about whether he plans to open a Happy Harbor location in Calgary, Jay’s response is tentative.

“We do, though obviously with the change in the economy there’s a lot of positives and negatives to consider before moving forward with something like that. We’re still just discussing things, and being careful about what we want to do.”

He explains that taking a tentative approach isn’t just a matter of being fiscally responsible, but also based out of a desire not to aggressively barge in to a market that already has many longstanding comic retailers.

“That’s just bad business. The analogy often is, ‘the pie is only so big and everyone has a slice, and the only way you expand is by taking someone else’s slice’.  Happy Harbor’s approach has always been, well, why don’t we just make a bigger pie? One of our biggest business objectives is to try to find ways to grow the market. How do we get people who aren’t reading comics, or who don’t know about comics, or who stopped reading comics – how do we bring them in?”

Over the course of the past year, many comic shop owners like Jay have received a boost in this department from a source that might previously have been considered unlikely – Hollywood. Jay refers to the recent surge in comic-to-movie adaptations as ‘free advertising’, using the example of the Watchmen trailer’s impact on sales last summer.

Jay says that prior to the release of the trailer, Happy Harbor sold 3- 5 copies of the seminal Alan Moore graphic novel a month. After the trailer hit theatres, that number increased to 3-5 copies a day. Interestingly enough, he says that the comics which have benefited most from the Hollywood comic adaptations are, like Watchmen, mostly properties that moviegoers were initially unfamiliar with. This means movies like Iron Man, the Hulk, or Spider-man don’t necessarily increase sales of the respective matching franchises. Often instead, the attention presently afforded to comics in the media will bring fans into shops looking for something new.

This attention has been a large factor in helping the comic industry cope with the recession, though Jay says the economy has still taken its toll on how Happy Harbor approaches ordering new material.

“It’s always a delicate balancing act, because of the slow creeping of cover prices and the amount of additional titles that the big two (Marvel and DC) keep introducing to the market. You have to be savvy about what you bring in, and what you push onto your customers. While the comic industry is still relatively healthy and stable these days, it’s taken a lot more work these past eight to ten months to maintain that balancing act.”

Jay cites the volume of comics being sold on eBay and through auction houses like Heritage, as well as the fact that more and more key books are breaking sales records, as indicators that people are still willing to spend money on comic books despite the economic downturn.

He says that it’s becoming easier to focus on the business side of things these days, thanks to other members of the community stepping up to lead new initiatives.

“It’s getting so that all I have to do is pretty much keep the door of my store open so that people can come in and sit down and have the space as a community to use. Instead of being the idea guy and the provider, I’m more and more the provider – when I’m needed. Which is pretty cool, since that also means I can start looking at making comics myself again.”

Next month, Gareth Gaudin of Legends Comic and Books in Victoria, BC. will be celebrating a milestone that few comic artists ever reach. As of June, the artist/comic shop co-owner will have been producing one comic strip a day, every day, for the past five years.

Impressive, no?  The Magic Teeth Dailies, as Gareth dubbed the ongoing project, were spawned in 2004 when he made a commitment to himself to produce one comic a day for the rest of his life. The Dailies draw inspiration from everyday events in Gareth’s life.

In the five years since their inception, Gareth has enjoyed significant success in the Canadian indie comic market – most notably in the character of the Perogy Cat, a surprisingly expressive chubby white cat with a pillow-like body and an undeniable charm.  Perogy Cat, who doubles as both the star of the Dailies and resident mascot of Legends, has become an icon unto itself.

Since the character appeared in Day One of the Magic Teeth Dailies, Gaudin has seen over a dozen pictures of people inked with Perogy Cat Tattoos, and has sold hundreds of stuffed Perogy Cat dolls – each hand-made by his wife.

In addition to his work with the Dailies and his involvement with Legends, Gaudin has been a prominent figure in Victoria’s comic scene for well over a decade.

I had the opportunity to chat with the Magic Teeth maestro about the five year anniversary of the Dailies, his thoughts on the Perogy Cat’s popularity, and a perceived decline in Victoria’s indie comic scene (among other things).

The interview is below:

KD: Tell me about the origin of the Magic Teeth Dailies.

GG: For about the last twenty-five years, I’ve been obsessively doodling, drawing comic books and photocopying them, and I did about 100 issues of a zine called Magic Teeth through the nineties.  One of my friends was a professional cartoonist, and he won the Eisner award for ‘Grendel’.  About six years ago he said to me, “you may be a failed cartoonist, but you’re a good painter – you should stick to that.” I hadn’t realized I was a ‘failed cartoonist’, and so it was later that same week that I wrote ‘Day One’ at the top of a page and committed to writing one comic a day for the rest of my life.

KD:  That must have been pretty challenging at times, keeping up a one-a-day quota. I mean, five years of that is a very long time.

GG: Yeah, it gets really hard sometimes, especially if you’re sick, or not at home, or on the road somewhere. We took a five week trip to Europe, and while it was really fun to draw there, it was kind of hard being outside of my comfort zone and still drawing one each day.

KD: Where do you continue to find your inspiration from the strips?

GG: They say there’s a Buddhist mantra about doing something every day for a hundred days, that after that first hundred it just becomes secondary nature, like breathing. And for me, that seems to have been true. Every day, something occurs worth writing about. While sometimes you’re not so much inspired, you just sit down, put your pen to paper, and whatever flows out, flows out. Usually, the Dailies really just write themselves.

KD: The Perogy Cat has become a fairly recognisable character to many people at least partly familiar with Canadian indie comics. How do you feel about having a character that you’ve created become an icon of sorts in Canadian indie comics?

GG: I’m certainly thrilled about it – I guess that’s the point, that you want people to be familiar with your comics. I want it to be more popular, though the hardest part is just getting people to read them.

KD: What have you been doing to get people to read them?

GG: I have a new scheme right now, actually. Since I have a comic store, it’s easy to have a display up front. If I make a pitch to someone asking if they want to read my comic and they say no, I take their snapshot and do a photorealistic portrait of them. Right now I have about 80 portraits on my wall of people who have said no to my sales pitch. I then print out the new portraits of those people in the next issue of my book, so that when I see them again, they’re compelled to buy the book. (laughs) It’s been working so far.

KD: You also have something of a contest going right now involving photos of the Perogy Cat doll. Could you tell me more about that?

GG: Right now we have a contest in the book where people send in their best photo of the Perogy Cat doll taken somewhere around the world. I had a really nice one come in last summer of Perogy Cat on the Great Wall of China, and one woman went four hundred feet down into the ocean with Perogy Cat in a plastic bag – that was pretty cool. He’s going up Mount Kilimanjaro this month.

KD: That’s very cool. Outside of the Dailies, what else have you worked on, or are you working on, as an artist/writer?

GG: I do a lot of portraits of people. There’s a portrait show about all of the British Columbia Premieres going on right now in a gallery, so I contributed to that. There’s a comic book that I believe is called ‘Monkeys Helping Monkeys’ that is a compilation of comic artists doing strips about monkeys for the Jane Goodall Institute, and I’m working on that right now as well.

KD:  So you’re keeping busy! I just wanted to shift the topic now away from the Magic Teeth Dailies and talk a little bit about your perspective of the comic book scene in Victoria.

Before the interview, I asked you about other indie comic creators on the Island, and you mentioned that a lot of the talent that had been out there has since relocated to Montreal. Could you elaborate on that?

GG: Yeah, it seems that every year there’s a new crop of young cartoonists that springs up based around the new term of art school at the University of Victoria, and they all wind up moving off to Vancouver or Montreal and you never see them again.

KD: Why do you think that is?

GG: Most people just want to go where there’s an established community of like-minded artists. It comes and goes here in Victoria, and usually surrounds one of the rooms in the art school – it’s just never very permanent. Maybe, now that I think about it, now that you can save money by putting comics up online rather than spending money on print and books, maybe cartoonists are just in their rooms a lot more and you don’t see them in public.

KD: That’s pretty surprising, considering that we’re talking about a relatively small city which has enough comic book traffic to support four comic shops all on the same block.

Based on your experience and involvement in the scene out there, how does Victoria’s comic book scene compare to Vancouver’s?

GG: Vancouver has a very well organized comic scene. I’d say it’s a thousand times better than Victoria’s right now – it has an infrastructure that we just can’t don’t have here.

KD: Do you feel like Victoria did have that kind of infrastructure in the past?

GG: I think at the peak, in ‘92/’93/’94, there might have been a hundred zines being printed every month. And that was great, like every day you’d have three or four people coming in with their books, and people were supporting that.

KD: What happened? What do you feel it is that changed the Victoria scene from then to now?

GG: Well, one factor might have actually been Kurt Cobain’s death. I could imagine that having something to do with it, being that it was a blow to a lot of creative people that came just around that same time. A lot of bands broke up in April ‘94 because of that, and I’m sure that a lot of zines also stopped publishing then too. It was a complete darkened cloud over creativity in the Pacific Northwest. If I was going to blame something, just of the top of my head, it seems like that might work.

You can keep tabs on the Perogy Cat on his very own Facebook Page. The first 200 days of the Magic Teeth Dailies are also up on the internets, and if you’re going to be in the Victoria area anytime soon, be sure to pop in to Legends Comics and Books and say hi. Just make sure your hair looks nice if you plan on declining Gareth’s offer to read an issue of the Dailies.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Have you ever put down a comic book that you just finished reading, and been so inspired by the world you were looking into that you wished you could experience it firsthand yourself?

Richard Grzela, a Calgarian comic book writer/artist and entrepreneur, has attempted to tap into that desire with his company 14uComics (pronounced “one for you” comics).

14uComics offers a unique service that allows comic books published under its brand to be easily converted to use in role-playing games.

“The idea,” says Grzela, “is to supply enough additional materials – such as maps and detailed character information – that someone could read through a comic, and then integrate it into any role-playing game that’s currently out there. ”

While some companies (such as Palladium Books) have worked comic books into their RPG’s as supplementary material, 14uComics is unique in that it starts with the comic books, then builds the game afterwards.

“When a writer presents us with an idea for 14uComics,” says Grzela, “we approach it very much like a comic book. Then after we understand what the main characters are going to be like and what the stories are going to be about, we look at specific individual details, like ‘If the character was wielding a certain weapon or had a superpower, how would that translate to a role-playing game?’ We start building on those ideas, and make it so that a given character could be integrated into any type of RPG.”

The concept is pretty nifty, and I admit, I haven’t heard anything like it before myself. Grzela credits the idea to found a company like 14uComics to his background reading ample amounts of fantasy fiction and sci-fi novels.

“I found a lot of writers were putting out material that had some inconsistencies, in terms of how an established character would react to a certain situation. Even though a lot of the novels out there were really great, I would often visualize the main character doing something other than what was presented by the author, which potentially might have made the book a lot more interesting.”

Sound logic. That the whole process requires zero investment on the part of the comic creator is a further bonus, to any would-be creative comic talent out there with an interest in seeing your characters worked into RPG format.

Speaking of comic creators, Grzela wears two hats here – in addition to being the central figure behind 14uComics, he has also written and illustrated a number of comic books for release through the company.

The stuff he has published under 14uComics all revolves around a world that Grzela created under the title “Dual Convergence“.

“Dual Convergence is a brand unto itself,” he says, “It’s based in a world that fuses sci-fi, magic, and technology, so that from the D.C. books, you can literally write a story based on any kind of theme or genre that you prefer. Then from there, you could integrate that into a more global gaming system.”

The D.C. lineup consists of the original ‘Dual Convergence’ title, ‘Bonemancer,’ (a title that was rolled out last year) and the latest Grzela project, ‘The Tarnished Legion’.

While Grzela’s ambitiously unique projects have met mostly positive reception, he says that promoting a company like 14uComics can have its up downs.

“It’s an ongoing battle, I guess is the best way to say it,” Grzela reflects, “Some areas of the country will love it, and in some areas it’s so unique that they don’t know if it’s something that they want in terms of being a comic or a game, or what-have-you.”

From here, Grzela is currently in talks with agents and several other businesses about possibly obtaining licensing from an actual role-playing game company, and potentially even working on a script for theatre based on some of the 14uComics’ properties.