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

This week we don’t have a grand amount of news kicking around the site, and we’re between interviews with a few choice comic creators and artists that we’ll be featuring in the coming weeks.

So in this lull, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank those of you who’ve been following us to date, and give you a little update on where we’re at, both as a site and a blog.

If you’re experiencing a nagging sensation of deja vu, it’s probably because I posted something similar roughly 100 days into the Fabler Blog. Since it’s been another hundred and some-odd days since that, this is somewhat appropriate.

Though we’ve been around since last April, in a lot of ways the Fabler is still just getting its bearings. Like a newborn in its first year of life, we’re still all puky and uncomfortably soft on the back of our head. That is to say, we’re working on building a solid direction.

The main portion of the Fabler is still in Beta development, though it has undergone some radical aesthetic changes and as we speak is being improved with yet more fine tuning. We’ve had a handful of talented artists share some of their creative material, and we anticipate seeing more and more stream onto the site as we go into ‘010.

As always, Bruno Steppuhn is the go-to person for news about developments with the Fabler itself. I know he has some interesting ideas that we’ll see rolled out in the near future, so keep your eyelids peeled for that.

We’ve had some super fantastic artists and writers agree to let me barrage them with questions over the last few months, including the pleasantly quirky Jesse Jacobs, A Softer World writer Joey Comeau, and soon to be high profile up-and-comer Simon Roy.

We also threw our hat in to the pool of organizations and individuals supporting Indy Comic Book Week. Which, by the way, is coming up fast! Aspiring creators and indy mainstays alike, you should probably check out the ICBW website, if you haven’t already. Increased exposure + helping local comic shops increase revenue on a Diamond Comics no-ship week = an eruption of awesome.

Interview-wise, I’ve tried to retain a focus on Canadians operating in the field, but we’re very open to featuring the creative talents of anyone anywhere on the globe.

Except for Boise, Idaho. We don’t showcase artists from Boise.*

We’re looking in the coming months to profile some of the contributors we’ve had on the Fabler. So if you’re a contributor and you’re looking to have your brain publicly poked, drop me a holler at kevin (at) thefabler.com. Or if you’re not yet a contributor, signing up is as easy as clicking here right now.

You could also use that address if you’d like to let us know what you’ve thought of the Fabler Blog so far. In the interviews I’ve featured here, I’ve tried to strike a balance between summarizing featured talent to those potentially unfamiliar with the interviewees, and keeping it interesting for those who’ve heard artists X’s backstory fifty-odd times already.

The focus is generally the same: who this person is, why you should (or shouldn’t) care about them, why they do what they do, and what they consider ‘good’ to mean in terms of comics or comic industry developments. The results I’ve gotten from this interview starting point have been consistently positive.

No one ‘falls in’ to comics; everyone I’ve talked to that’s operating in the medium in one way or another is extremely passionate about what they do, and everyone has a different take on what a comic can be or what it can mean to different people.

In this sense I’m pretty fortunate to have such a diverse base of creative individuals to pull opinions and perspectives from.

In any case, to avoid rambling further, I should probably wrap up by saying thanks again for reading the posts and checking out the art on the main site.

Rock.

-Kevin de Vlaming

*The Fabler, The Fabler Blog, and myself actually have no problem showcasing artists from Boise. This line was facetious and intended in no way as a slight against Idaho’s proudest gem.

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.