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

Communist robots, Lunar terrorists and a modern Cenozoic age. These are just a handful of the thoughts swirling around in West Coast comic creator Simon Roy’s brain.

Still fairly new to the business of comic-making, Roy emerged on the national scene this past summer with the release of Jan’s Atomic Heart. The title, which Roy wrote and illustrated, was distributed by Vancouver’s New Reliable Press (for more from New Reliable, check out the Fabler’s Jason Turner interview!).

While the title might sound like the name of an eighties synth post-punk band, Jan’s Atomic Heart is actually a sci-fi thriller set in Germany in the distant future.

“It’s about a guy who gets caught up in a terrorist plot in the future,” says Roy, “I’ve had a variety of ways to sum it up, but that’s the most concise, I think.”

The individual Simon is referring to is the titular Jan, who is temporarily inhabiting a robot frame while his real body heals from a particularly nasty automobile accident.

The book follows Jan as he attempts to discover the mysterious significance his robot body has to a serious of terrorist attacks perpetuated on the UN by Lunar separatists.

So all of the elements of an insanely action-packed science fiction adventure are there, right? Cue explosions and exaggerated robot laser battles?

Roy could easily have taken this route with the title, but where Jan’s Atomic Heart shines is actually in its understated, realistic dialogue and soft-lined, poignantly simple artwork. The sincere, straightforward language exchanged by the characters of Jan’s Atomic Heart give it a depth not always present in sci-fi genre work.

Clearly something about the title has resonated with more than a few other comic fans – Jan’s Atomic Heart has been featured favourably on Comic Book Resources, Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader?, and a miscellany of other comic book blogs (such as this one, this one, and this one).

Not bad for a newcomer to comics. Roy credits the positive attitude of peers in the industry as being hugely encouraging in getting the comic out there.

“Everybody’s nice, everybody’s helpful, and everybody’s got something good to say,” says Roy, “It’s been really cool. I’m really impressed just by how friendly everybody is.

Roy, who is originally from Victoria, BC., had little to no experience with Canadian comic communities to speak of prior to his involvement with New Reliable Press. This is a fact he attributes in part to a lack of cohesive comic scene in Victoria (something Gareth Gaudin of Legends Comics has mentioned before on the Fabler Blog)

“I’ve always bought comics and read comics,” he says, “but you know I was never really motivated to even go as far as Vancouver (before doing Jan’s Atomic Heart). It’s been neat meeting all the different cartoonists across the country, and I’m starting to feel a little bit more like part of the community, which is nice.”

For Roy, making the leap from illustrating his ideas into fifty-six pages of comic goodness to actually publishing and distributing his work was a relatively painless process.

“I basically just sent it to Ed (Brisson, owner/operator of New Reliable Press), and he was impressed enough with it to take a risk and publish it. So that part of the publishing process  wasn’t too hard but from there on in it got a little more interesting – just designing all of the covers and the inside covers and, you know, going through different cover designs and trying to fit it more toward what would be appealing to have in the Diamond preview catalogue.”

If you thought the premise for Jan’s Atomic Heart was singularly unique, wait till you hear what Roy’s up to next.

Presently he’s working alongside Turkish artist Nemo Ramjet on a serious of collaborative illustrations based around the  idea of an alternate modern age.

“I’m doing watercolour illustrations,” says Roy, “and an artist that I met over the internet who lives in Istanbul (Ramjet) is doing cave painting versions of those. The art that we’re doing is kind of like, cave painting scenes from an alternate modern age where the dinosaurs didn’t die out and in fact grew to be intelligent.”

Roy explains that in 1982, a palaeontologist named Dale Russell made his own depiction of a ‘dinosauroid’, which is a hypothetical, uber-evolved form of dinosaur. Russel  used the Troodon, an actual dinosaur that lived 75 million years ago in Canada, as a base for the model due to its above average brain size.

“He made this hypothetical intelligent dinosaur look kinda like a scaly green dude,” says Roy, “and basically I met this Turkish artist because he had done a redesign of that. Instead of shaping it like a humanoid, he shaped it more like a dinosaur. I was very inspired by that, and started doodling in my spare time. As the doodling picked up steam, I sent some illustrations to him, and then we started collaborating.”

Roy says that the collaborative illustrations have been coming along at a steady pace, though as of yet they’re undecided on what they’d like to do with the finished products.

“Maybe a book, or something like that,” he speculates.

Somehow, Roy is managing to balance the above project with finishing his second year of the Design Program at Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, and he’s still actually finding the time to work on something else – a seven page story that he intends to submit to Heavy Metal upon its completion. He has a preview of the latter project on his Flickr account here.

When asked if he has any ‘dream franchises’ he’d like to work on in the future, he gives an unexpected response:

“This is going to sound strange, since I don’t really like drawing superhero style content, but the thing I’d like to draw the most would have to be a Dr. Doom story.  I think there’s a lot of cool places that could be gone with Dr. Doom that haven’t even been touched yet. Lots of fun post-soviet stuff with communist robots. It could really be a lot of fun.”

Click here for an in-depth, 22 page preview of Jan’s Atomic Heart. For more from Simon Roy, you can check out his blog and deviantArt.

I would like to extend a gigantic thank you to everyone who has helped so far in building this blog as a resource for Canadian indie comic artists & writers to learn more about their fellow comic-creatin’ canucks.

Of course, over the three months that the site has been live we’ve only just skimmed the tip of the iceberg.

Bruno could tell you more about the overall vision for The Fabler and how the blog will continue to help to promote the interests of independent comic talent. For my part, I wanted to take the opportunity to ramble a little about some observations I’ve made with the interviews I’ve done to date, explain a little about my motivations for the format I went with, and introduce some changes I’ll be making in the future with my own column here on the Fabler Blog.

Ramble ramble ramble, blah blah blah. That sounds a lot more boring to type that it sounds in my head.

For those of you paying attention, there are a few consistencies you’ll notice across the posts I’ve done with my column here so far. The obvious fact is that they all feature interviews with Canadian comic talent; most indie, a few with some very major credentials behind them. You’ll also find that I approach the interviews with a ‘big picture’ sort of take on whoever I’m talking to, whether that’s Jay Bardyla on his experiences running Happy Harbor Comics, or Lar deSouza on the reasons he first got into caricature drawing.

This avoidance of too much emphasis on purely ‘newsy’ content is very much on purpose, and there is, in fact, a reasoning to it. Fundamentally, we don’t want to be a redundant news outlet. For news on events and releases in Canadian indie comics, you can go to any number of sources. I personally would recommend the Sequential newsblog, and not just because they put in a good word about us recently – Sequential has been one of my favourite sites for news about the industry long before I started my column at the Fabler.

It’s been my goal to write about how people came to be successful (at least relatively so) doing what they love, in hopes that when people read these articles and interviews, they’ll be inspired to do the same themselves. This doesn’t mean I overlook their recent work entirely – quite the opposite, actually, since connecting the dots between where an artist is now and where they began is crucial in attempting to convey a sense of how they’ve managed to fit themselves into the industry.

So far it’s been a blast talking to some of the most gifted comic book talent Canada has to offer. From the Vicious Ambitious boys here in Calgary to Gareth Gaudin and Perogy Cat out in Victoria, and further out east to Doug Wheatley in Winnipeg and Troy Little in Halifax, everyone seems to have something unique and interesting to offer on the subject of comic books. It’s humbling, really, since most of these creators have more talent in their left foot than your average, part-time pseudo-comic-journalist (see artist’s interpretation of a part-time pseudo-comic-journalist below, courtesy of Conor Geoghegan).

In fact, many of these individuals have had so much to say on the matter that I’ve had to reluctantly edit much out from the final posts. That’s really saying something, since some of the interviews to date have surpassed the 1500 word mark – a cardinal sin itself in online journalism.

I’ve had some pretty fantastic unpublished discussions about the state of indie comics, the future of webcomics, alternate ideas for breaking into the industry, and a whole whack of more stuff. That’s right, a whole whack even, with stress on the ‘H’ sound.
It seems that there are a few subjects (like the ones mentioned above) which are on everybody’s minds right now. Going forward, my column will begin to feature my own blurbs on those topics, as well as whatever else comes to mind that’s remotely relevant to the indie comics industry. Don’t furrow your brow in keenly poignant disappointment yet though, the interviews will still be there!

The other change we’re going to be introducing, both in my posts and elsewhere on the Fabler Blog, will be North American content not limited exclusively to the Canadian comic book scene. I still plan on making the larger emphasis in my own posts and interviews on artists and writers North of the border, but there will definitely also be some branching out.
I know Bruno has some more news ahead for the Fabler itself, but I’ll leave that to him to talk about in the (hopefully) near future.

In conclusion, rock. And thanks for reading so far.

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.