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

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.

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.”