In keeping with tradition, we’re ringing in the new year by looking at some of the stuff that’s impacted our little corner of the interweb over the past twelve months. This includes some of the news bits the Fabler Blog has reported on, some of the changes and landmarks the main site has experienced, and of course, a Coles Notes list of the interviewees we’ve featured on the site throughout 2010.

Let’s start by talking about The Fabler directly. Our second year online has been filled with small triumphs (and minor road bumps), but a few in particular stand out.

First, our presence at the 2010 Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo was much stronger than at the ‘09 Expo, which was when the Fabler first launched. The 2010 Expo gave us a great chance to network, spread the good word about the site, and nab some pretty nifty interviews in our first (and, to date, only) Fabler Blog video segment. The Expo itself was a huge success last year, bringing in over 20,000 attendees – over twice the amount of the 2009 Expo. We were thrilled to be a part of that.

The Fabler’s next landmark came in May, when the site’s founder, Bruno Steppuhn, took home the Digital Alberta Media Fresh Award for Best Use of Social Media on behalf of The Fabler. You can read more about that in Bruno’s post here.

Shortly after, we launched our first major comic contest, which ran from June 15th to September 15th.  The Fabler gave away a Sony PS3 Bundle, a Wacom Intuos4 XL, and for first prize, a Wacom Cintiq 21UX. Competition was stiff, as many new contributors to the Fabler submitted a diverse and colourful array of sequential entries into the contest, but ultimately there could be only one grand prize winner. The first place finalist was Scott Ferguson, for his comic Scout Crossing.

As a reminder to all interested parties, the second Fabler Comic Contest started on October 15th and is currently still on until January 15th. If you’re interested in tossing your hat (comic) into the ring (upload section), you can view the full rules and regulations here.

To briefly touch on some of the larger news items we mentioned on The Fabler Blog, the year opened with a fresh new lawsuit between legendary comic artist Jack Kirby’s heirs and Marvel regarding copyrights to the work he did on a tonne of iconic comic characters. The latest news on this legal battle is that there really is no news. Honestly. There was a counter-suit at some point, Marvel wasn’t forced to pay damages, the Kirby Estate’s case wasn’t thrown out… It’s all sitting fairly stagnant in judicial purgatory.

In Canadian Comic news, Seth’s George Sprott: (1894-1975) unsurprisingly garnered the Doug Wright Award for Best Book, while Michael DeForge won Best Emerging Talent for Lose #1, and the Pigskin Peters Award went to Marc Bell for Hot Potatoe. Meanwhile, over on the Joe Shuster Awards side of town, Stuart Immonen earned Best Artist, Maryse Dubuc won Best Writer for her work on Les Nombrils, tome 04, and Karl Kerschl’s fantastic comic The Abominable Charles Christopher was named Best Webcomic.

In July, the world of digital Indie comics was changed forever when Zuda Comics announced it was shutting down. Zuda was DC’s online imprint and a place for independent creators to post their works in hopes of earning a publishing contract with one of DC. They were shut down as part of a DC corporate restructuring that also saw half of their staff relocate from New York to California.

This led into a host of additional major industry announcements that came to light around September and October. The Wildstorm Comics imprint was shut down, much to the chagrin of fans of The Authority and Astro City. DC and Marvel announced that their monthly issue comic prices would drop an entire dollar in 2011. Dark Horse announced a new digital publishing initiative, also coming in 2011.

As we venture forward into 2011, the state of the industry seems to finally have some sort of gameplan for adapting to a changing market. That market is of course the digital market, which had grown from an estimated value of around $1 million in 2009 to $8 million in 2010.

The Fabler Blog will continue to have its eye on the industry in this regard, and we’ll post the ‘news that fits’. Whatever that means.

This year you can also expect to see more big changes in store for the main portion of The Fabler, but I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise on that front.

In bringing this, the  first post of 2011, to a close, I would like to thank all of you Fabler fans and comic creators who have brought something to the site over the past year. I would also like to thank you for reading our humble little blog, when the internet is such a big, wide, interesting place.

On that note, for your handy convenience and ready perusal, here’s a list of all the interesting individuals we featured on the blog over the past year:

Gibson Twist (Pictures of You, Our Time in Eden)

Kelly Tindall (Archie Snow)

Ben Steeves (Zom-Ben, Our Time in Eden)

Aaron Leighton (Illustrator, member of Trio Magnus)

Colleen MacIsaac (Minicomic creator and multimedia artist)

Marta Chudolinska (Back + Forth: A Novel in 90 Linocuts)

Eric Vedder (Aardehn, Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors)

Adam Bourret (I’m Crazy)

Ryan Sohmer (Least I Could Do, Looking for Group)

James Turner (Warlord of Io)

Nick Thornborrow (The Anthology Project)

Ethan Rilly (Pope Hats)

Jenny Romanchuk (The Zombie Hunters)

Evan Munday (Quarter-Life Crisis)

Damian Willcox (dorkboy Comics)

Jason Loo and Arthur Dela Cruz (The 3 Second Rule)

Robin Thompson (Vancouver Comic Art teacher, and artist on Champions of Hell)

Jonathon Dalton (A Mad Tea-Party, Lords of Death and Life)

Angela Melick (Wasted Talent)

Cloudscape Comics (Vancouver-based comic collective)

Jim Zubkavich (Skullkickers)

Eric Kim (The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare)

Mike Jasper and Niki Smith (In Maps & Legends)

Noel Tuazon (The Broadcast)

Scott Ferguson (Scout Crossing, Nerf This)

Ty Templeton (Northern Guard)

Danielle Keller (GHOST!, Acid Monday)

Sarah Leavitt (Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, Mother and Me)

Derek McCulloch (Stagger Lee, Pug)

Matthew Dunn (Lonely Monsters)

Scott Chantler (Two Generals)

Rhian Engel (My Life as a Grum)

Jason Bradshaw (Boredom Pays, the Worst in Everything)

Salgood Sam (Dream Life, The Rise and Fall of it All)

-Post Written by Kevin de Vlaming

I’m gonna go ahead and stop you before you embarrass yourself by saying ‘Chuck Norris’. I would however, accept Simon Pegg, Woody Harrelson, or Bruce Campbell.

Although for my money, I’d go with Jenny Romanchuk – author and artist of the epic webcomic The Zombie Hunters. Why?

Have you seen how much zombie ass this girl kicks?

Well, not exactly Jenny herself, but the fictional Jenny Romanchuk who serves as one of the lead protagonists in The Zombie Hunters. That’s right, she wrote herself into the story alongside several of her friends. As she explains in her website,

“This isn’t about ego fluffing, this is fun, and I am unashamed to proudly show off that I would rather be running around bashing in zombie heads than boring old daily life.”

I find myself inclined to agree with her position.

But the reason that I would choose Jenny over Woody or Bruce isn’t simply because her two-dimensional alter ego swings a mean shovel. In creating the universe of The Zombie Hunters, Romanchuk undertook a massive task that required building its own world history, complete with detailed facts about its inhabitants – both living and non.

“I have about ten notebooks and binders filled with TZH notes,” says Jenny, “not to mention about 30 different notepad files. They’re all filled with information about the world, how everything works, and about everything from zombies to wastelander culture to life on ARC. I have some of that info on the website, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg.”

The undead post-apocalypse world that she came up with was not your typical ‘Night of the Living Dead’ zombie fare, either.

“I knew for a fact that the classic ’slow zombie’ just… wouldn’t last in the modern world,” she says, “It’d be a problem for a little while, but I’d say give it a month and it’d all be over pretty quick. People aren’t as dumb as Hollywood makes them out to be.”

Instead, Jenny came up with a detailed bestiary of lethal undead classes that make the traditional ‘crawler’ zombies look about as threatening as mildly disgruntled geriatrics.

“I wanted to create something that would give the survivalist buff the run for their money,” says Romanchuk, “For the zombie classes in particular I drew inspiration from a variety of sources. I realized early on that the normal zombies are pretty easy to take care of, so I wanted to kick it up a notch.”

Jenny says that she often avoids watching movies or reading stories in her own genre, instead opting to draw inspiration from actual human history and real survival stories.

So let’s see… Survivalist buff, check. Vast knowledge of potential outbreak scenarios, double-check. Skeptical take on the traditional ’slow-zombie’ mythos, check again (hey, I’m all for it if the zombie Armageddon comes one shuffle at a time, but it just makes sense to be prepared for the worst).

If she can wield a shovel half as well as her Zombie Hunter avatar, then we’re really in business. Though they do say half of doing something is being able to visualize yourself doing it…

Probabilities of real apocalypse aside, it’s easy to see how Romanchuk’s dedication to The Zombie Hunters has evolved into being a full time job.

“These days TZH takes up ALL of my time,” she says, “Right now I’m having to cover a lot of responsibilities for the book and for the business, so I haven’t been able to put as much time into the artwork for the actual pages. Hopefully when things settle down, I’ll be able to put more time into the comic itself, which will mean more updates!”

The current update schedule is ‘every Monday and sometimes Thursday’. Over the three years that The Zombie Hunters has existed, Jenny has built a dedicated following of fans that eagerly await each new update. Hordes of zombie survival enthusiasts regularly fill the Zombie Hunters’ forum, each sharing the common interest of finding out what happens next to the characters that Romanchuk has created. (Or adapted to comic form, as the case may be.)

“The people who read TZH usually express an interest in RPG’s, books, and videogames that pertain to the post apocalyptic genre, and a lot of them are into various ‘survivalist’ hobbies,” says Jenny, “Many of them are or have been in the military themselves, or play simulated war games like air soft, paintball, or military re-creations. Those that aren’t into modern combat often favor things like medieval reenactments or similar interests. People who enjoy these sorts of activities are usually into ‘world building’ – they need to know everything about a subject, and want to know that a storytelling world has all the details mapped out”

It is no happy accident that Romanchuk’s writing appeals to this demographic. According to Jenny, the process of building the TZH world and story has been heavily informed through analyzing her fan base:

“When I first started this comic, I had no idea about what kind of audience I would attract. After I went through my Graphic Design courses, I realized how I could analyze the audience and look at the work objectively. This allowed me to better tailor the strip, the site, and my writing style to reach that audience. Because of all these audience factors TZH has evolved into an expansive, detailed, and elaborate world with a lot of dimension to it.”

The elaborate world she has created just recently hit a new milestone: over the past year, Jenny has been taking preorders for the first printed edition of the Zombie Hunters series. A gauge on the left-hand side of her website has tracked progress of the preorders as they drew near a pre-determined target that, once it was hit, would mean the release of the book.

“The per-unit costs of printing a smaller run are prohibitive,” explains Jenny, “I wanted to be able to create a good, quality book. And those aren’t cheap to make- just getting the presses set up and running off the proofs involves fees of a few thousand dollars, and that’s something you have to do even if you only print a single book.”

Anxious fans no longer have to wait for their quality copy of The Zombie Hunters: Book 1. Just last week, Jenny announced on her website that the preorder mark hit 100%.

“I’m feeling nervous,” says Jenny about the book’s pending release, “I hope everything turns out okay, and that people like it. I want people to be happy with their purchase, despite the wait.”

With her meticulous dedication to The Zombie Hunters, I’m sure there is no cause for worry. Now if you were stuck in a zombie apocalypse with no one by your side but an aging internet meme, then I’d start to worry.

You can find the ongoing tales of The Zombie Hunters at www.thezombiehunters.com. Jenny also keeps a professional portfolio of her illustration, a livejournal, and you can follow her on Twitter.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming