2009 was an eventful year of Canadian comic releases, major label crossover events, and comic industry developments that will have huge ramifications for years to come.

It was also the year that The Fabler, founded by Bruno Steppuhn, was birthed into existence. Which, if you were paying any attention, also meant the launch of the Fabler Blog last May.

Since, as the old adage goes, ‘to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been’, I think it’d be an ideal time to look back at the past year in review.

At least I think that’s how I think the adage goes. I’m not very good with adages. It might alternately be, ‘forget the past and the future, live in the now’. But that works less with what I’m going for here.
Let’s start by taking a brief glance at the Canadian comic landscape in 2009.

Jeff Lemire had a fantastic year. Hey, that rhymes! 2009 saw the release of Jeff’s original graphic novel The Nobody, as well as the launch of his own Vertigo series, Sweet Tooth. As if that wasn’t enough, he also released the collected version of his much acclaimed Essex County Trilogy.

Mariko Tamaki pulled in double honours, winning the Doug Wright Award for Best Book with Skim as well as the Shuster Award for Best Writer for her work on Skim and Emiko Superstar.

Jesse Jacobs and Kate Beaton each also ‘double-dipped’ from the Canadian recognition pool, both earning accolades from each of Canada’s two top comic award organizations. Jacobs won the Gene Day Award for Canadian Self-Publishing at the Shuster Awards, and saw his book Small Victories nominated for a Doug Wright Award earlier in the year. Beaton, the more-internet-famous-every-year creator of Hark! A Vagrant, was nominated for a Best Webcomic Shuster Award and won the Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent.

While new series’ featuring Canadian talent emerged regularly throughout the year, there were three in particular that I feel were especially worthy of mention.

The first was North 40, featuring art by Calgary-based Fiona Staples. This limited series launched in July and concluded in December, and featured a midwestern town overrun by supernatural forces. Aaron Williams wrote a clever story of Cowboy-Western meets Lovecraftian Horror, and Fiona did a fantastic job of bringing those elements to action-packed, panel popping life.

Second would be James Turner’s Warlord of Io. Originally slated for print by Slave Labor Graphics, Warlord of Io wound up as a digital exclusive. You can pick up the first two issues of this uniquely conceptualized space adventure via Comixology, among other places.

Third is, naturally, Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth. As one of the most hyped titles of 2009, the Vertigo-published tale of a young human/deer hybrid in a post-apocalyptic landscape certainly hasn’t disappointed. But then, Lemire isn’t an artist prone to disappointing his fans.

Unlike Jeph Loeb. But that’s another, completely unrelated conversation.

But of course, all of this just barely skims the surface of what 2009 held for the Canadian comics industry.

For all of you non-Canuck Fablers, 2009 has seen its fare share of news in the wider comic industry in general.

The year kicked off with a major announcement from Diamond Comics that some would deem controversial; they were raising their minimum purchase threshold, which would force some of the smaller-name titles out of distribution. The aforementioned Warlord of Io was one of the first comics cut as a result of this action.

Another of the year’s biggest headlines (if not the biggest headline) was Disney’s acquisition of Marvel. Certainly it was one of the most blogged about, with industry commentators putting forth banter as to whether the move would seriously impact the Marvel U, or merely improve distribution options while allowing Marvel complete creative control over its properties. Proponents of the second opinion pointed to Disney’s treatment of Pixar after it bought out the award-winning animation studio as an indicator of how Marvel would also likely be left to its own creative devices.

Both Marvel and DC ramped up the competitive status quo this year as well, each conspiring to use more event titles and ‘major title’ launches to enhance its own share of the comic market.

Marvel re-launched its fan favorite Ultimate Universe, in wake of the cataclysmic events of Ultimatum, while its 616 universe titles spent a year slowly (almost casually) dealing with Norman Osborne’s rise to power with the Dark Reign Event.

DC segued from Final Crisis into its inspired (and highly financially successful) Blackest Night crossover, and while a new Batman emerged in the form of Dick Grayson, Marvel brought the original Captain America back from the dead.

Bringing it closer to home, The Fabler launched at the Calgary Comic Convention in April of this last year. Since its launch as a service geared to help independent comic creators get their work seen on the web, it has built a small (but dedicated) community of initial artists, seen its share of major revamps, and started to find its footing as a long-term platform.

The Blog side of things attempted to establish itself as a news source for interviews with Canadian comic talent, while also providing unique perspectives into the industry and spotlighting the members of its own community whenever possible.

In case you missed any Fabler Blog interviews from the past year, collected for your handy reference below is a list of all of the artists/writers/creators/industry insiders we’ve spoken with to date:

Andrew Johnson (Kingdom, Golem: Small Town Massacre)

Eben Burgoon (Eben 007)

Alison Acton (Bear Nuts, The Faerie Path)

Jesse Jacobs (Small Victories, Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow)

Joey Comeau (A Softer World, Overqualified)

Simon Roy (Jan’s Atomic Heart)

Jake Ekiss (of Indy Comic Book Week)

Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

Jordyn Bochon (The Day After V-Day)

Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant)

Jason Turner (True Loves)

Michael Cho (Papercut)

Steve Rolston (Emiko Superstar, Ghost Projekt)

Doug Wheatley (Star Wars: Dark Times)

James Turner (Nil, Warlord of Io)

Lar deSouza (Looking for Group, Least I Could Do)

Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, Essex County Trilogy)

Jay Bardyla (Owner of Happy Harbor Comics in Edmonton)

Fiona Staples (North 40, Secret History of the Authority: Hawksmoor)

Troy Little (Chiaroscuro, Angora Napkin)

Gareth Gaudin (Perogy Cat, Owner of Legends Comics in Victoria)

Richard Grzela (14u Comics)

Chris Johnston (Jet Pack Mike)

Vicious Ambitious (Calgary Indie Comic Company)

Stay tuned to the Fabler Blog for more 2010 comic goodness! (And more jabs at Boise, Idaho!)

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

One major role of the comic book artist is to bring a world that would otherwise exist only in the imagination to visual, almost tangible, life.  When countless fans have a very fixed preconceived idea of what that world consists of, based largely on the hundreds of books of literature that have documented it in the past, the artist’s task becomes that much more daunting.

Doug Wheatley, who has been a professional comic book illustrator for fifteen years, faces that task on a regular basis. The Winnipeg-based artist, who has in the past done work on such titles as Superman: Last Son of Earth and Blade: The Vampire Hunter, has spent the last six years working heavily on one of the most well-known franchises in the world – Star Wars.

“Dark Horse first contacted me to do a Star Wars cover,” says Wheatley of his beginnings on the legendary franchise, “then about a year and a half later they got back in touch with me and I talked to them about doing more Star Wars work. I had already done some work for Dark Horse on Aliens, and a while before that on a comic series they put out based on the videogame Mist.”

In the time since then, Wheatley’s Star Wars credits have included work on the titles Star Wars: Empire, Star Wars: Republic, Star Wars: Dark Times, Star Wars: Legacy, and an official comic book adaptation of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. This is in addition to several other one-shots and covers he has done within the franchise.

Though Wheatley didn’t get into the Star Wars novels growing up, he credits the movies as having a significant impact on him when he was a kid.

“Just like there’s a Y generation and an X generation, I think there’s a generation that should rightfully be called the Star Wars generation,” says Wheatley, “Since I’ve been working on Star Wars, I’ve ran into a lot of people that saw the original movie at the same time I did, which was around age eight. Seeing it at that age has a profound effect on the rest of your life. If you can imagine something so new and fresh that captures the excitement of Flash Gordon and the sci-fi trends of the day in film form – it’s huge.”

If indeed there is a Star Wars generation, they have never been found wanting for more content.  There has been more Star Wars media – be it in books, comics, cartoons,  etc. – than almost any other franchise in history.

“By nature, I research what I do,” explains Wheatley, “If I’m working on Superman, I research Superman. When I did Aliens, I was working on a title that had its own fan base that would cite you if you didn’t do the right thing at the right time. But none of that was like working on Star Wars. The reality of what happened to me with the Star Wars gig, is that I found out really quick that I had a lot of catching up to do.”

According to Wheatley, working on the Star Wars titles for Dark Horse has been like a crash course in how to effectively illustrate what is, essentially, historical fiction.

“Almost every time I got a new script, the writer would lift this rare alien race that was used in some minor novel way, way back when. There’s no real visual reference for something like that, so I’d have to get on the net and look for somebody who did some sort of drawing based on that alien, or somebody who had a more detailed description about it. Just something that would give me a clearer path to getting it right, so that I didn’t have to hear from the fans later saying, ‘you got it wrong’.”

Wheatley says that the biggest baptism for him (working in the Star Wars universe) came when he did the Episode III comic book adaptation. He was involved in the project from a very early stage, and became immersed in the creative process as long as a year and a half before the movie actually hit theatres.

“Having the privilege to see it develop, and to be in the middle of drawing something and get a call from someone saying, ‘this character has changed, we’re sending you the new design’ – you learn a lot about how it’s all put together.”

On the flipside of this coin, Wheatley says that it was occasionally intimidating to pencil characters that had yet to be even seen in a film. At one point he was actually instructed to illustrate General Grievous, before he had seen any point of reference. This would have required him to literally make up an image of one of the main villains that would be in Episode III. Fortunately for Wheatley, he was able to push for some solid visual cues before committing to a drawn character design.

Skipping forward to his current work, the latest book that Wheatley has been working on is Star Wars: Dark Times. Dark Times is an ongoing series that has been written by Mick Harrison since its debut in 2006. The series, now in its fourth plot arc titled Blue Harvest, has received steady critical acclaim since its inception – thanks both to Harrison’s creativity and Wheatley’s incredibly detailed art.

“I honestly think Mick is a brilliant writer,” says Wheatley, “Every time I get one of his scripts, he breathes so much life into these characters that I feel very challenged attempting to even come close to interpreting everything. Time is not on my side, and I often think to myself that in order to capture everything he’s got in there I would need at least two years per arc.”

Wheatley isn’t exaggerating when he says that time is a luxury he doesn’t have. Between his work on Dark Times, his work on a few other projects that he can’t speak about yet, and time set aside for his kids, he often finds himself stretched pretty thin.

“I have two kids that I absolutely love, and any free time that I can pull out of every week goes to them,” says Wheatley, “and it is a challenge. One thing that I’m working very hard on is resolving some deadline issues I’ve had with Dark Times. I am frantically and very intently working on ironing those out, and I’m very close to doing that – it all comes down to the fact that I want to draw so much from the material, and it being Star Wars means it’s already labour intensive.”

Wheatley is of course referring to the high level of detail and research that goes into a Star Wars comic as opposed to, he gives as an example, a Superman comic.  To do Superman, Wheatley says he would go through two or three seminal Superman books, pull some images central to Metropolis for reference, and, to be thorough, look at some photos of the New York skyline to help with realism.

To do Star Wars, Wheatley often goes through books upon books for reference, pouring through novels and fan illustration, checking and double-checking his sources for detail and accuracy. Tedious? Some might think so, but it’s clear that Wheatley loves what he does.

One thing that Wheatley would like to change in the future, is to break out of the pigeonhole he sees himself as having been put in as an exclusively science fiction artist. With a career that has been spent largely illustrating aliens, space emperors, vampires, and interterrestrial civilizations, Wheatley says that he’d like to have the opportunity to get involved with more superhero fare.

“I grew up on Chris Claremont’s X-Men, on Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Marc Silvestri,” says Wheatley, “That’s what I learned to draw from. I would love to do a run on one of the X-Men books, just because that’s what I grew up on. I’ve also been a huge Batman fan, ever since I read Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was the first Batman I ever actually read. I would absolutely love to have the chance to do more than just a pinup for that character, for Gotham City.”

Being a Batman fan myself, I feel compelled to say that I’d love to see a Doug Wheatley run on the caped crusader.

For those of you interested in following what Wheatley’s up to in the meantime, you can check out his blog, or Myspace page.