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.

It’s unlikely that you’ve seen anything like the eclectically fantastic art of Jesse Jacobs.

The twenty eight year old cartoonist is known in Halifax for One Million Mouths, a comic strip that has been published regularly in local newspaper The Coast for several years.

If you haven’t read One Million Mouths but Jesse’s name still rings a bell, there could be a few reasons for this. It’s possible you’ve seen one of his self-published minicomics on the shelves of your local comic shop, such as Small Victories, or Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow. If you picked up Sequential’s special edition zine at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this past summer,  you could’ve read a featured interview that Jesse did with Bryan Munn about the varying influences that inspire his work.

Still haven’t hit on it? Then you probably know him as the winner of the first-ever Gene Day Award for Canadian Self-Publishers, an award introduced this year at September’s Joe Shuster Awards. Jesse considers winning the award an honor, though, as he confides to the Fabler in an interview, it did come as quite a surprise.

“Making comics is an isolated past time,” Jesse says, “I spend so much time by myself and by the time I finish a book and put it out I’m onto something else. It was nice to be recognized for my efforts and to know for certain that people liked the book.”

The book he’s referring to is Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow. Blue Winter presents a snowy odyssey through surreal, nature-oriented landscapes largely told from the perspectives of the local wildlife.

“It’s a mini-comic about a love triangle between a shape-shifting blue jay, a human girl, and a normal blue jay,” Jesse says, “Jason, the protagonist, transforms into a boy and brings food back to the forest for all his animal friends. It’s about the desperation of the forest in the wintertime, and true love.”

That he can go from One Million Mouths to producing something like Blue Winter is a good example of the sort of sheer eclecticism that defines Jacobs’ work.

A One Million Mouths comic could literally be anything – from casually dressed bald men courting existentialism in an alien galaxy of swiss cheese planets to a snake finding true love in the warmth of a sleeping monkey’s brain. Variety is the constant, as well as Jacobs’ distinct style of surreal, busy illustration. Each strip explodes with exaggerated detail, squirming word balloons, and flowing patterns -not unlike a stray doodle that took on a life all of its own.

In contrast, Blue Winter, Shapes in the Snow is a unified work. Jacobs’ art is still unmistakably his; filled with a sense of flowing stream of consciousness, and characterized by uniquely distorted impressions of people and animals rather than realistic representations. However, with Blue Winter, many panels are devoid of the noise that saturates One Million Mouths – often the art presents a sort of honest simplicity, reflective of the book’s nature-themed narrative.

“I have a lot of interests, and I draw ideas from everywhere,” says Jacobs, “Above all I enjoy drawing. When I see something interesting, whether it be while out on a walk in the woods, or while watching old movies, I usually try to draw it. In a lot of my smaller comic strips, the words don’t necessarily match the imagery, or do so very loosely.  I have fun working that way, taking rough ideas I’ve written in my sketchbook and marrying them with a weird doodle.”

When working on longer narratives, Jesse often finds himself confronted by a familiar dilemma:

“Inevitably I come to a panel that must be drawn in order to progress the story, and it can be boring to draw. I’m getting a lot better at dealing with that though, and the new book I’m working on has been really enjoyable to draw. It’s important to me to keep the work really fun, because that’s why I make comics.”

Jesse’s love for comics wasn’t the sort of thing that he picked up overnight.  It goes back to his childhood, when he confesses to harbouring a massive stack of Archie comics as a kid.

“My dad used to bring home big boxes of computer paper, and my brother and I would sit in front of the television and draw,” he says, “I used to take about ten pages of computer paper, fold it in half and staple it and make lots of little comics with my characters and get the kids at school to read them. Mostly the drawings and stories were copied from things like Casper and that little dinky dink Richie Rich.”

Originally from Moncton, New Brunswick, it was while Jacobs was attending the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax that he first got started making comics. He put a few books together with a few college friends, which led to his interest in self-publishing minicomics – something that would continue to have an important role in his life for years to come.

It’s important to note here that Jesse self-publishes his comics in the truest sense of the term – all of the money comes out of his own pocket, and he handles every step of production himself. From pen to paper through to photocopying panels and binding the books, there is no middle man here.

While many contemporary independent comic artists tend to gravitate towards the web as the primary distribution channel for their work, Jacobs represents something of a return to form with his adherence to making minicomics.

He feels that the popularity of webcomics as a medium for indie cartoonists hasn’t negatively impacted the minicomic market at all, and has some interesting thoughts to share along those lines:

“Some of my favourite comics right now are webcomics, ” says Jacobs, ” Jesse Moynihan’s The Forming is dazzling. I read it every Thursday as soon as it’s posted. But I’ll still happily buy the book when it comes out. I think if the material is interesting and well done, people are going to want the book, regardless of its web presence.

I don’t think there ever was a huge market for self published comics/zines anyhow. I’ve been to a lot of zine fairs, and I always sell a few books, but I also offer t-shirts and buttons and that kind of junk. In general, people seem to dig that stuff more than a book. People like things they can wear I guess. I’ve made way more money off of t-shirts than making comics. But I like making comics better. ”

These days, Jesse is making comics from his home in London, Ontario.

Jacobs moved to Ontario last year with his girlfriend for educational reasons, and he confesses that he often misses the East Coast.

” I drew the blue jay book when I was living in New Brunswick,” he says, ” and it was very much inspired by my natural surroundings. When I moved here, I didn’t know anyone, so I stayed home a lot and watched a lot of space channel. The comics I made during this time reflect my love of the aesthetics of sci-fi, especially Star Trek. ”

Currently Jesse’s working on another minicomic, a few preview panels from which can be seen below.

“I’m pretty excited about this book, which is as of yet untitled. Although, the pages will be small, I’ve already drawn about sixty with more to come, so it’s going to be the longest story I’ve done. It’s a loose narrative that explores repeating elements and patterns. It takes place in the arctic north and revolves around an Inuit character, a stowaway, and the unsteady relationship of two arctic monsters. It’s about isolation and loneliness and being cold and hungry.”

In order to focus more on finishing his new book, Jesse stopped regularly submitting One Million Mouths strips for the Coast a few months back.

So, you may ask, what’s he up to outside of pouring time and creative energy into the new minicomic? For Jacobs, working on graphic designs for skateboards and spending quality time with his dog is where it’s at.

“I’ve been working closely with a company called Homegrown, that manufactures skateboards from scratch, using all locally produced materials. They put a huge focus on the skateboard as an art piece. And we screen print a lot of prints as well.

Aside from working on that I’ll keep drawing drawings and walking my dog, Desmond, in the woods.”