It’s been a few months since we launched TheFabler v1.5 and admittedly so, we’re never going to get it right the first time every time. That’s where you come in!

First I would like to thank all those who have helped us with your feedback, submissions, and participation. Your opinions, thoughts and ideas are firepower to our cause! To summarize some of what we’ve heard so far…

– I registered for the site but have not received my activation email.
– Comics can be created by more than one person.
– The Flash Viewer is slow and doesn’t always work properly.
– I don’t understand what TheFabler.com is when I first visit the site.
– Updating comic submissions is clunky.
– I’d like to submit more than just 10 pages of a comic.

We’ve heard you and are continuing to listen to you. Between now until the end of December, we are working on fixing some of the above mentioned based on your feedback as well as committed to completing our 2009 roadmap goals. So over the course of the coming weeks, expect updates to the site with some radical changes! With your help we can continue to improve on the existing features of the site as well as add new features that will benefit you.

2009 Roadmap:
We had quite a bit planned this year for The Fabler, and we’re coming near the end of this years plan. Our goal was to create the core features of the site that would help establish an online community where comics can continue to thrive in their traditional form and in emerging digital mediums. To quickly establish who our “community” is, it’s you! You the comic creators (writers, artists, small press, etc.), you the fans (readers, collectors, reviewers, etc.), and you the retailers (grassroots stores, franchises, etc.). These major components include:

1. A Free social platform that comic creators can showcase their work to the rest of the world in an easy to use environment.
2. Simplified, cost effective self-publishing solution (print on demand & digital direct to market distribution) for creators with traditional format comic products.
3. Retailer Network where creator owned properties can have an opportunity for shelf space, and retailers can manage these products from a single source.

2010 Roadmap:
1. TheFabler.com will launch our very own weekly regularly updated comic.
Q. What does this mean?
A. Founders of Thefabler.com have come up with our own stories to tell and we’d like to share them with you. We’ve been working hard on a story that we think everyone can enjoy which will consist of 2 pages updated each week.

2. More Blog content!
Q. What does this mean?
A. New columns, more interviews, reviews, how to’s and more!

3. Fabler Publishing Inc. will open it’s doors with a submission program.
Q. What does this mean?
A. It’s apparent that we love comics. The building of a sophisticated custom social website to support them should be evidence enough. We also value the resulting creativity in this powerful visual storytelling medium. We are prepared to explore this creativity with you in support of creator controlled properties. We want to hear about your ideas. Submission program details and guidelines will be announced in early 2010.

4. TheFabler.com will launch a global localization and distribution campaign.
Q. What does this mean?
A. To put it bluntly, North America isn’t the only landmass with comic creativity on the planet. We’ve had interest and requests from creators, retailers and fans alike in other countries to support their cause as well. In 2010 we will start localization efforts to enable Thefabler.com to be multi-country friendly!

The roadmaps that we’ve outlined is a 40,000ft view of what’s in store. We’ll be making more detailed announcements each month on what’s in store for TheFabler! In summary, we’re dedicated to creating an online environment where comics, and the imaginations they can inspire can continue to thrive. Oh, and don’t forget, We really do love comics as much as ______________________________________________.

(Go ahead. Ask)

Why, it’s all about utilizing the web-based resources you have at your disposal. There ’s some obvious potential for redundancy here with my post about social media, so I’ll clarify:

There are a vast amount of services out there, available to both fans and creators of indie comics. Some of those services can be viewed as social media tools, which aid primarily in networking and building lines of communication with an audience. In fact, many of them, such as illoz and illustrationmundo.com, fall under this category of overlap.

I want to speak more broadly to the resources that are available for comic fans and creators, as a way of bringing together my posts about the online communities out there as well as the aforementioned social media type sites. Wrap all that daintily up with a bow of shameless self-promotion for the Fabler, and we’ll call it a trilogy of posts. Like Lord of the Rings, only instead of questing through Mordor to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom, we’re stumbling through the internet in hopes of finding some way to understand the landscape of modern comics.

Now come those three magic words that every imaginative person, young or old, delights to hear:

Let’s start cataloging!

(Bear in mind, we aren’t looking to build a comic book bible with one post – the following links are intended to be used as starting points, not a definitive list of all important comic-related websites ever created)

INDUSTRY NEWS

When you need to know what the haps are, where do you go? Urban Dictionary probably, to look up the sorely outdated term ‘haps’.

If, however, you’re looking to hear about new developments in comics that effect YOU, or for the latest updates on your peers, your favorite comic artists, or that guy down the street who snubs his nose at you when you ask for the latest Marvel Comics… look no further.

Comic Book Resources – You’re going to get a lot of mainstream comic coverage with CBR, but the quality of content as well as the sheer number of exclusives make it my personal recommendation for an ‘overall’ news site. Plus, the Robot 6 blog is not only awesome, it provides one of the best non-automatic comic news aggregating services on the net (with Comics A.M.)

Sequential Tart – A webzine published by women which highlights the influence of women in the industry. Consistently excellent coverage of a varied set of areas.

Sequential Spiltink – An excellent source of news pertaining to all things Canadian and Comic-related. Provides Coast-to-Coast coverage of local events, Canadian creator developments, and whatever else your eager little heart might be curious about.

The Joe Shuster Awards Blog – The Official Blog for the Joe Shuster Awards. They update with surprising frequency about coverage of Canadian creators working in the industry. Some overlap with Sequential may occur.

Inkstuds – Podcasts covering the indie/alternative comic book industry! Inkstuds is based out of Vancouver, and is well known for providing entertaining, informative dialogue on the contemporary comix industry.

The Comic Book Bin – An alternate comic news outlet which tends to be a bit more eclectic with what they write about. Indie creators and Canadian creators pop up quite often here.

MAKING FRIENDS

What’d I say about the importance of community? (Answer: It’s important.)

Forums are an ideal way to connect with peers and other like-minded individuals in the field of comic books. Assuming I don’t have to explain how networking can introduce you to contacts that later prove helpful in advancing your career, building connections can also open doors to swell collaborative projects. Everybody likes the dollars to value ratio of a good anthology.

The following websites are a sampling of some of the great comic-related forums populating cyberspace:

Digital Webbing, the  CBR Forums, and Concept Art all provide some excellent opportunities to talk comics with fellow aficionados.

Whitechapel – Warren Ellis’ personal circus of social banter. Filled with comic creators, comic fans, and people you would generally not leave your children alone with.

Canadian Geek – A website I’ve mentioned here before, Canadian Geek was founded by Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor Comics and largely serves as a discussion board for Western Canadian comic creators.

LEARNING FROM THE PROS

Anything you’re trying to do has likely already been attempted, thought of, planned, or failed at by someone somewhere. Well….that sounds prohibitively cynical, so let’s instead say; whatever you are trying to do with comics, someone else probably has their own experiences with doing something similar.

Comic creators are all over the internets. Their chosen livelihood dictates they attempt to shamelessly pimp their art and ideas out through whatever means at their disposal, so it would actually be really counter-productive for one to maintain no webpresence at all.

Many of these individuals have blogs, sketchblogs, Twitter accounts, or deviantArt pages in which they often share peeks into their creative processes. Such insights can be invaluable to  those of us still struggling with finding our own roads to success.

Scott McCloud – I’ve talked amply about Mr. McCloud’s work, you’ve heard his name dropped time and time again; go check out what the creator of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Zot! has been up to lately. I guarantee you’ll find it interesting.

Scott, obviously, isn’t the only comic creator who has a blog. A solid resource for blogs/websites maintained by Canadian comic creators can be found here at:

Links to Canadian Creators at the Shuster Awards Blog

Many comic creators can also be found on Twitter – the following two sites provide (incomplete) directories to some of the comic community voices in the Twittoverse.

The Twitter Comic Book Master List

and

List of Alternative Comic Creators and Publishers

EXPOSING YOURSELF

There are a number of ways to go about this. Here, we’re primarily concerned with methods that don’t land you any jail time. Ha! Zing!

Ok, I’m talking about getting yourself out there. Your art, your comics, your portfolio as a whole. There are a number of websites that are geared to the end of helping you get where you need to go.

Some of which are below:

illoz and deviantArt are both websites which allow users to essentially post their art portfolios for the world to see. Of the two, deviantArt has a decidedly more ’social networking’ flavor.

illustrationmundo.com – This site is a bit harder categorize. It’s a community-oriented that allows you to showcase your art, your blog, and your multimedia portfolio, and it’s also chock full of helpful features such as the ‘Ask a Pro’ section and an on-demand slideshow of illustration images from Flickr.

Project Wonderful – In website founder Ryan North’s own words, ‘Project Wonderful is an ad network that doesn’t suck’. PW offers adspace (often on comic-related websites) based on an auction-based system that emphasizes ad display time and location over the pay-per-click ad services you see elsewhere. Many successful webcomics advertise through Project Wonderful.

the Fabler – I warned you there would be a plug in here somewhere. Seriously though, the other section of the Fabler (not the section mostly filled with junk written by yours truly) exists to help comic creators gain exposure for their work. It’s the whole point of the Fabler – to make it easier for you to upload your comics, get them seen, and (hopefully) have some constructive dialogue about them. To find out more about the Fabler itself, I wholeheartedly recommend you check out this post by website founder Bruno Steppuhn.

“Social Media” is an overhyped, misunderstood, and often loaded term that has become THE generic buzzword of the past five years. The overarching term could be used to describe MySpace, Twitter, Blogging, Facebook, Bebo, and countless other digital technologies built around the idea of online two-or-more-way communication.

It is an abstract concept; a poorly defined, multi-faceted idea that many have yet to fully grasp, and even fewer have been able to master.

All the same, as it turns out, the comic community has been among those industries to embrace social media the most wholeheartedly.

Which is why I’m going to use this post to write about how useful social media can be for writers and artists looking to build a career, or even just a grassroots following, in comics (and in doing so, redundantly add my voice to the hype).

A social-media-focused post was inevitable, really. Not only does the phrase keep popping up in any sort of dialogue regarding the current state of the industry, (see Michael Cho on how comic artists are ‘internet hoes’) but it’s the most logical subject to segue into from my last Random Bits post on Community in Comics.

Since we’re dealing with an abstract concept here, let’s break it down to the basics. Assuming you have some grasp on what social media entails, (or you could get an idea what it’s about here, here and here) the aspects of social media we’re concerned with here are pretty well threefold:

Channels that allow individuals to showcase and obtain feedback on their work.

Tools that enhance your online presence by familiarizing the public with who you are.

-and-

Sites or services which provide an opportunity to network with  peers in the industry

Obviously these three aspects of social media often overlap, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll distinguish them for their separate functions.

Who’s using social media?

Everyone. Okay, maybe not everyone, but an impressively large number of the creative minds in comics today have some form of online manifestation capable of interacting with the general public.

For example, a partial list of some of the bigger industry names who tweet would include:

Neil Gaiman, Joe Quesada, Brian Michael Bendis, Warren Ellis, Mark Waid, Dave McKean, Robert Kirkman, Darick Robertson, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Steve Niles, and Marv Wolfman.

To bring it home, there are also plenty of Canadian comic book all-stars dwelling in the twitosphere, such as:

Fiona Staples, Steve Rolston, Karl Kerschl, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Michael Cho, Lar deSouza, Jeff Lemire, Ramon Perez, and Kathryn Immonen.

There are even more Canadian comic book personalities that may not have twitter, but keep an active blog or some other form of web-presence. The Joe Shuster Awards blog keeps a pretty nifty list of links to many such sites right here.

MySpace is something of a dying venue for comic book workers, and Facebook Fan pages – now a staple for many indie musicians – has yet to catch on within the comic book industry. The industry does, however, have some alternate social media channels which at least a few artists have learned to use effectively. But I’ll get to that in the next section -

How are they making the most out of social media?

If you browse through any of the Twitter feeds from the names listed above, you’ll find a pretty similar, fairly simple formula. Take equal parts of industry-related updates, (ie., new art up at xyz.bit.ly!) quirky personal news, (just made the best chawanmushi! Yum!) dialogue with peers, (@joeQuesada had enough Disney/Marvel mashup musical suggestions for the next decade yet?) and response to fan feedback (@kushyloafer thanks for the kind words, next time I promise the ogre’s shoes will be earth-shatteringly huge!).

The point is to build yourself as a real person while networking, build a loyal fanbase who feel like they have an open connection with you, and give people a real-time channel to find out what’s new with whatever you’re working on.  Plus developing a fanbase you can interact with is a two-way street; not only do they get to feel like you’re more than just an unreachable name on a comic they like, but you also get to be privy to some (hopefully) helpful feedback about your work.

Blogs kept by artists and writers work a little differently. Everyone has their own approach to blog content  – Michael Cho keeps a sketchblog showcasing his recent illustration, while Jeff Lemire exclusively publishes news regarding recent releases, and Kate Beaton alternates between providing general life updates and giving between-the-panels insights into her webcomics.

As long as you write about something connected in some way to whatever you’re trying to promote, your blog is accomplishing its goal: connecting the web-browsing masses with your work, and bridging together whatever multiple projects or social media outlets you have through a sort of ‘hub’.

Then you have the multimedia side of social media outlets. Sites like illoz, illustrationmundo.com, and even Flickr have been effectively utilized by comic artists looking to showcase and get feedback on their work.  The Fabler would fall into this category as a site that seeks to assist creators in showcasing their sequentially presented comic art.

Looking for Group artist Lar deSouza notably uses Ustream as a way to communicate with his fans while providing a window  into his creative process.

All of this might seem redundant to you if you’re already among the growing ranks of the web-2.0-savvy online comic community. If so, that’s great, you’ve probably already benefited in one way or another from  keeping a presence on the inter-webs. Alternately, you might be among those who find that even uttering the phrase ’social media’ leaves a bad taste in your mouth, or you could simply be a little intimidated by the directions that self-promotion within the industry is taking.

If the latter is the case, what you need to know is -

Why you should (or shouldn’t) hop on the bandwagon

I think I’ve given a half-decent overview as to most of the benefits social media affords to creators (and aspiring creators) in the comic industry. Those three points I mentioned before tie-in here nicely:

By building an online presence, you make it easier for your work to be ‘discovered’ and you make yourself significantly more ‘reachable’ by anyone interested in talking to you about it.

By showcasing your work online, you allow yourself to grow creatively from the feedback you receive while also having a handy way to display items from your portfolio to anyone even remotely curious about what you do.

By networking through means like commenting on blogs, posting @replies on Twitter, and engaging in dialogues on sites like Ustream, you expand your contacts within the industry and thus increase your likelihood of success within the medium.

All this is straightforward stuff, and comes with a lot of bonus benefits. Following other comic fans/creators in the industry on Twitter can be handy in giving you a good idea what’s going on in the industry, as can hopping around some of the more regularly updated creator blogs out there. Checking out the posted illustrations of other comic artists can often trigger a spark of inspiration for your own material.

I admit that I don’t really have a counter-argument to this. You really should hop on the bandwagon, if you haven’t already. If you’re still a little intimidated, just remember – it doesn’t have to be as big as a revolution in the comic industry, at its essence social media is just another toolkit to help build your name as an artist, a writer, or whatever else you’re aiming for.