Coming atcha. Coming at-cha. Yeaahhh.

There are a few cool things worthy of note in this week’s comics round-ups found around the web, but before I get to those, I wanted to mention how unbelievably rad it is that Adriana Blake (of the webcomic Fall On Me) took the time to translate my entire interview with her into Spanish!

Blake writes an English version of Fall On Me as well as a Spanish version, called Cuenta Conmigo.  She did the translation so her Spanish-speaking fans wouldn’t feel left out.

As one of my favourite web games to play involves using an online translator to translate paragraphs of text back and forth into nonsensical oblivion, I immediately felt the need to run Adriana’s Spanish version of the interview through Google Translator and back into English.

Highlights included the following excerpt:

“KD: Did you miss your husband was fit to be in a webcomic? How do you feel about it now?

AB: Surprisingly, it soon and I think even flinch. “

As well as these questions that I most definitely asked during the original interview:

“What motivates you to take that approach ’soft’ so full?”

“How do you know you have fans seemed interested in your interaction with your spouse every day?”

Apologies: I am considering joining a self-help group for people disproportionately amused by really simple things, I promise.

Right, and the news:

The 2011 Hugo Award nominees have been announced, which include the nominees for “Best Graphic Story”.

This is the third year that the Hugos have included this category, and this year the nominees include ‘Fables Vol. 13: Witches‘ (written by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Mark Buckingham), ‘Girl Genius Vol. 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse‘ (written by Phil and Kaja Foglio, illustrated by Phil Foglio), ‘Grandville Mon Amour‘ (by Bryan Talbot), ‘Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel‘  (by Howard Taylor), and ‘The Unwritten Vol. 2: Inside Man‘ (written by Mike Carey and illustrated by Peter Gross).

Both Fables and Girl Genius are titles that also popped up on the 2009 and 2010 nomination lists, with the latter taking home the Award each time.  Could this year foretell a Hugo upset? Will reigning champions the Foglio’s be dethroned?

We’ll have to wait until the winners are announced on Saturday, August 20th to find out. Nuts, right?

On the (Canadian) homefront, the Joe Shuster Award just announced their five finalists for the Harry Kremer Award for Outstanding Canadian Retailers.

The nominees are Amazing Stories in Saskatoon (Saskatchewan), Another Dimension Comics in Calgary (Alberta), The Comic Hunter in Moncton (New Brunswick), Comic Readers in Regina (Saskatchewan), and Planéte BD in Montreal (Quebec).  According to the Shuster Awards blog post on the subject, winners are selected based on such factors as “(1) Support of a wide variety of innovative material, (2) Overall appeal of the store and usage of space, (3) Knowledge, (4) Community activity, and (5) Adherence to standard ethical business practices.

The Harry Kremer Award winner will be announced alongside the rest of the Shuster Award winners at this year’s Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo on June 18th. (Speaking of the Calgary Expo, they now have an impressive list of Canadian comic creator guests up on their website – the list includes Fabler Blog interviewees Scott Chantler, Ray Fawkes, Jim Zubkavich and Jeff Lemire, alongside a bunch of other very cool individuals).

I was sad to read that comic publisher New Reliable Press announced this week they would be shutting down after one final showing at TCAF. Ed Brisson, who owns and operates the company, put out the word Monday, citing his desire to focus more on his own work in comics as a primary motivator in the decision.

New Reliable Press has put out a lot of solid titles over the years, notably Jason Turner and Manien Bothma’s True Loves, Simon Roy’s Jan’s Atomic Heart, and the Crime Comics anthology Acts of Violence, alongside the series of anthologies You Ain’t No Dancer.

Ed has said that Jason Turner is making copies of his work available for order online through his website, while other New Reliable titles may be obtained through San Diego-based publishers Poseur Ink.

Bummer, but best of wishes to Ed Brisson and the other creative talent associate with New Reliable Press.

It wouldn’t be civil to end a Fabler Blog post on a sad note, so instead, here’s a little piece of nifty that you might be interested in.

The 900th issue of Action Comics hits the stands today, and if you’ve ever been a fan of the big blue man of steel with a heart of gold, I suggest you head down to your local comic shop at a spritely trot and pick it up.

Action Comics #900 is one hundred pages of epic, featuring a story that DC is billing as the ‘ultimate Superman vs. Lex Luthor showdown’ and a collection of stories from a wicked-cool lineup of guest authors. The author lineup includes David Goyer, screenwriter of The Dark Knight; Damon Lindelof, writer and co-creator of Lost; Geoff Johns, current Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics; Paul Dini, prolific writer for Batman: The Animated Series and a host of other animated series’; as well as Richard Donner.

Yes, legendary director Richard “Superman I and II” Donner. This wouldn’t be his first time writing for Action Comics either – you may recall, back in 2006 he and Geoff Johns teamed up for a run on the title.

I guess all of the kerfuffle is because this issue means Action Comics is the first and only comic series to have published 900 issues. So buying it is like participating in history… but then, technically, so is existing at all…

In conclusion, The Goonies is a wonderful film.

-written by Kevin de Vlaming

We were talking about autobiographic comics. Specifically, why Jason is drawn to them and why to date the bulk of his own comics all fall under the broad ‘autobio’ categorization.

“Even in the worst autobio comics,” he told me, “you can find value in the simple truth that they provide something you can relate to. We’re all human, and just being willing to share an honest perspective on what being human is like and put that out there for others to relate to their own life… making something that people can relate to is what appeals to me most  about it. ”

Jason’s autobiographical comics, which he often posts as short, 4-panel vignettes on his website Boredom Pays, are undeniably relatable. They explore his insecurities and his small day-to-day victories and defeats, just as frequently  containing non-sequiturs about a random thought he had or even just a trivial incident that stuck in his head.

So if even a really bad autobio comic has value, what can be said about Jason’s comics – which are genuinely quite good? His charmingly simple ‘doodle’ version of himself is a Kochalka-esque character that is capable of a deceptively wide range of expressive emotion, and his cleverly-chosen dialogue and introspections are often insightful  – and almost always entertaining. (Some strips  aren’t entertaining simply because they aren’t always meant to be.)

Bradshaw, who has also released several minicomics, is also surprisingly new to comicking. His first minicomic, titled Fragment, was published for distribution at last year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

“It just contained a few comics that I eventually ended up putting in Boredom Pays Issue One,” says Jason, “They were sloppier, not as refined versions of those comics, and I just made it for TCAF last year to give out to people.  Putting together my first couple of minicomics was a really positive experience. I first distributed Boredom Pays Issue One at Canzine last year, and probably the craziest, most rewarding part of that was seeing people actually read it.”

The Toronto-based Bradshaw says that, while he enjoyed drawing as a kid, it wasn’t until he enrolled in Art Fundamentals at Seneca College that he started taking it seriously.

“Growing up, I definitely read a lot of X-Men comics and Spider-Man,” he says, “I used to read the old Todd McFarlane Spider-Mans and stuff. I’d also always get the really gimmicky team-up titles, like the New Defenders or I remember there was one that had a Wolverine/Dr. Strange team-up.

Then when I was in college, I came across Craig Thompson and he had a big effect on me. I read Goodbye, Chunky Rice and Blankets, and from there I swung into all the indie stuff, like Nate Powell, Jeffrey Brown, Ivan Brunetti, and John Porcellino. Those last two are probably my biggest influences right now.”

The inspiration for his own comics can come from some pretty random places, according to Jason.

“Man,  sometimes I just sit down and I’ll like draw a panel of me doing whatever I was doing that day,” he says, “and then I’ll just draw the next panel and figure it out as I go. Sometimes I’ll have something in mind, like I’ll write something down in my sketchbook and just elaborate on it from there. For the most part it just kind of comes to me when I’m doing it.”

Jason doesn’t set any rules or fixed methods for himself to work on his comics, which he says gives him a freedom that he enjoys to sit down and pretty well do whatever he feels like that day.

One curious item you might notice if you read through some of Jason’s diary-styled comics is that there are hardly any featuring any people other than himself in them.

“It’s cause I really don’t like putting words into other people’s mouths or anything, so I stay away from that a lot. But I’m pretty comfortable with what I have to say about myself and who I am. Which I think surprises a lot of people, but it’s not like I’m ashamed of any of it – even though some of it can be a little depressing.”

Jason says that his most recent minicomic, The Worst in Everything, is – true to its name – probably his most depressing comic. Released just a couple of months ago now, The Worst in Everything explores Jason’s “thoughts on work and how much I really don’t like it,” he tells me with a laugh.

“It’s about the fact that I don’t like what I’m doing and yet I still have not left to pursue something more meaningful to me. I guess the comic is mostly about exploring how and why I feel that this is.”

The next minicomic that Jason plans to release is called “Diary Doodles”, and will be a collection of the diary comic strips he has been putting up daily on his blog since September.

I asked him what it is about making minicomics that motivates him to keep publishing his work in print, versus exclusively online. His response:

“I personally would much rather read something on paper than online.  You can take paper wherever you go, for starters, which I guess is something that’s somewhat less of an issue with the iPad. But there are other little things, like the page turn, the little credits and messages you have on the inside front cover, and the design of how the book itself is built. I want to get into screen-printed covers at some point with my own minicomics, because I really like that sort of aesthetic. The first minicomics I really got into were the Little House comics by Drew Weing and Eleanor Davis. They’re just really, really well put together comics with great production design.”

Regarding future projects, Bradshaw says that right now he is in the process of building a website for himself to promote himself as a freelance illustrator. He’s also working on an anthology with a few of friends based around a collaborative concept where one person writes a comic, and the next person in line illustrates it.

“Other than that,” says Jason, “I’ve got some other bigger projects in the pipeline in terms of stories that I’ve had in my head to tell for a while, but just haven’t got there yet.  With some of those future comics I think I’ll be staying more away from autobio, which will be interesting just to try something different.”

For more from Jason Bradshaw, you can visit his blog Boredom Pays or follow him on Twitter.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Let’s also say you have a well-rounded social sphere of other, equally talented artists, and you’d like to showcase what you collectively could produce.

You have no experience self-publishing, but what you lack in experience, you figure you can make up for in sheer dedication and persistence.

What do you do?

If you’re Nick Thornborrow (or any of the other creative minds behind The Anthology Project), you round up your friends and put together a hardcover collection of the most diverse, colorful, and imaginative stories you can come up with .

That’s just what Thornborrow & Co. did with The Anthology Project: Vol. 1, which released this past April – just in time to showcase at TCAF and the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.

“We just wanted to provide a venue for these artists,” says Nick, “We knew that this group of talented individuals could produce amazing work, so the idea was really to get everyone together and have a book to show for it at the end of the year. There’s something nice about being able to do this on your own with your friends.”

Nick, along with Joy Ang, was one of the two editors responsible for putting the book together.

According to Nick, the biggest responsibility attached to his role was “corralling all of the artists and just getting everything organized”.

Most of the artists, who were predominantly graduates from the Alberta College of Art and Design as well as Sheridan College in Ontario, already knew each other. The only contributor with experience as a professional comic artist is Connor Willumsen – the rest work miscellaneous jobs in the animation or video game industries.

“It was kind of something we dove into headfirst,” says Nick, “Just figuring that people had done it before, so it shouldn’t be impossible. We basically did all of the necessary research as we went along.”

To his credit, the anthology turned out fantastically well.

The Anthology Project Vol. 1 features a diverse selection of stories from fifteen talented artists.  They range between short and playful vignettes to introspective reflections, even featuring a particularly poignant story about a polite dung-headed leader of forest animals.  That’s literal dung. (His head is made of poop.)

“I don’t think I could pick any one favorite story,” says Nick, “it’s like asking ‘who’s your favorite child?’ Not that I birthed these stories, but they’re all really close to me after a year of seeing them from their infancy. They each have their own charm. Connor’s is wild because it uses the short format so well. It doesn’t try to tell anything epic, it’s just this really quirky sci-fi story and I like it for that. But then, Joy Ang’s comic fits a really well-constructed decently long narrative into the short format and it’s beautifully drawn and really well told.”

In addition to housing a truly well-drawn collection of stories, the book is beautifully hardbound with a gold foil imprinted cover. At the risk of sounding like any more an infomercial, the high quality of the publication really does grab you right from the moment you pick it up.

” We wanted a really nice looking book right from the beginning,” says Thornborrow, “On the very first week that we started putting it together, we made a trip to Happy Harbor Comics in Edmonton just to look at books for their production value. We gravitated right away towards Drawn and Quarterly’s hardcover volumes, like Seth’s Wimbledon Green. ”

Volume 1 of The Anthology Project can be purchased in several comic book shops, both across Canada and in the States.

So far, the book has been entirely self-distributed.

“We’ve been literally cold-calling comic shops that we couldn’t get to on our own, and then in Calgary and Edmonton we just drove from store to store pitching the product and getting people excited about it. It’s such a massive undertaking to do on your own, and it was something we underestimated going into this.”

In addition to co-editing the book, Nick also contributed his own story – an alternative, Western take on the classic Dickens tale A Christmas Carol.

Thornborrow presently works as an artist for the Edmonton-based video game company Bioware.  He can trace his interest in comics back to age ten.

“I guess the first comic that I really fell in love with was (Jeff Smith’s) Bone, back when it was published in the back of Disney’s Adventures magazine. I’d been reading comics before that, but that’s the first one that got me going to the comic store regularly when I found out that it was published in black and white standalone instalments by Smith’s Cartoon Books imprint. ”

As far as an Anthology Project: Volume 2 goes, Nick says that work on the next book “may or may not have already started”.

For the sake of being optimistic about seeing a sequel to this stellar collection sooner rather than later, I choose to assume this means the next book is, in fact, already in the works. Feel free to also assume at your own risk.

Nick says that the next Volume will open up the selection of artists beyond the circle of friends that came together on this first project.

“We’ve had people email us and that kind of thing,” he says,  “and right now we’re looking at sending out some invites for the second volume and seeing what happens.”

You can order The Anthology Project: Vol. 1 directly from The AP website.

For more from Nick, you can watch him answer a few questions from yours truly on-location at the Calgary Comic Expo here.  He also keeps a blog, which you could check out for more samples of his own art.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Check out the entire line up here: http://sequential.spiltink.org/?p=4044

Also featuring great work by Salgood Sam, and Howard Wong!

Thanks once again to our friends at Sequential!

As such, the interviews and profiles we feature are generally about comic authors and artists. It didn’t require a hyper intellectual think-tank to  come up with this formula, but we’ve stuck to it all the same (as it seems to make sense).

Too much of the usual, however, can easily become boring.

Which is why this week we are featuring someone who, in fact, does not have any published work directly in comics.

Aaron Leighton is a professional illustrator who specializes in the unusual.

(Okay, so illustration and comics aren’t technically THAT far removed from each other – but really, did you expect I was going to profile a urologist?)

Leighton has been turning his fantastic imaginings of the weird and the wonderful into dollars for over a decade now, since graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1995.

He describes himself as bi-provincial, owing to the fact that his hometown, Lloydminster, is technically in both Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Being the wild provincial swinger that he is, he left the Prairies in 1998 bound for Toronto, and he’s been there ever since.

Leighton’s art is a dynamic mixture of cartoon (non)sensibility and tribal artwork, balancing bizarre doodles against simple symbolism.

“If I had to pick a shortlist of influences,” says Leighton, “I’d say that Picasso and the German expressionists taught me about the possibilities of the abstracted figure, cartoons taught me the power of drawings coupled with humour, and the artwork of indigenous cultures, specifically those of Northern Canada and Africa, taught me not only about the power of simplicity but also how mythology can imbue imagery with meaning.”

According to Aaron, his unique style developed steadily over time – it wasn’t at all something he ‘hit the ground running’ with immediately after Art school:

“The evolution of my illustrative style has been a combination of my natural inclination to fill up a page with doodles and a slow, painful struggle of figuring out how to translate this spontaneous tendency – coupled with the things that influence me – into a visual language usable for problem solving.”

His art has appeared in Maclean’s, PC Magazine, The New York Times, and The Globe and Mail, amongst a wealth of other publications.

With such a variety of clients commissioning Aaron for projects varying from promotional to informative to just plain fun, his creative process can get a little messy:

“I usually start by putting my head in my hands and thinking “How the hell am I going to solve this one?” That blank sheet can be terrifying. But despite the fact that I often find conceptualizing difficult, it always works out. Sometimes it helps to leave the studio and give your eyes new stuff to look at, thereby cutting through the feedback loop of the mind to allow it to come up with ideas instead.”

Leighton has also been involved with ‘interactive broadcast animation project’ The Zimmer Twins as creative lead since 2005.

The Zimmer Twins has a pretty interesting concept behind it; kids can visit the official website and, using a series of various pre-cut background and character animation options, build their own endings to a professionally produced story starter.

The best of those short animation endings would then be aired on Canadian broadcast television network Teletoon.

“Working as the creative director of the Zimmer Twins with zinc Roe (the design company behind the project) was rewarding not only because of the originality of the idea but also in that I was able to collaborate with some talented animators to bring my drawings to life. Also it has indeed been very interesting to see the characters being repurposed to fit the technology as it evolves, from the original animated shorts we did to the more recent apps.”

Despite the preamble I made at the beginning of the post, there is at least one other correlation between Aaron Leighton and the world of comic books: stumble into the right comic shop, and you might actually find a book co-illustrated by Aaron for sale by the name of Equally Superior.

Equally Superior was a collaborative project done by Aaron and a couple of his friends under the banner of Trio Magnus.

“Trio Magnus is the name of an artist collective I am part of, along with my friends Clayton Hanmer and Steve Wilson, both of whom also happen to be extraordinary illustrative talents. We had been sketching and doing group art shows together for years here in Toronto, and somewhere along the line we just decided to try joining forces with a bit more focus in order to create interesting (to us, at least) collaborative work fuelled mainly by beer and Led Zeppelin.”

Equally Superior came about in 2007 when Anne Koyama of Koyama Press asked Trio Magnus if they were interested in publishing a book of some sort.

“We gratefully replied that we were,” says Leighton, “and proceeded to create the book with content from our sketchbooks plus some new collaborative pieces. While not in any way narrative, the book ended up being rude, colourful, funny and extremely bizarre – a perfectly appropriate Trio Magnus creation. We launched it at Design Festa in Tokyo in 2007, and Anne has been tireless in her efforts to promote us since then, getting the book into bookstores and galleries not only in Canada and the US but in Spain and Holland as well.”

Going back a few paragraphs, if that comic shop you stumble into happens to be in the greater Toronto area, you might even bump into Aaron himself.

Aaron has a self-professed love for comics, specifically graphic novels and webcomics.

Among his favorites?

“‘Blankets’ by Craig Thompson, ‘Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth’ by Chris Ware, ‘Lous Riel’ by Chester Brown, ‘Skim’ by Jillian Tamaki, and the work of Guy Delisle and Michel Rabagliati. Webcomics-wise, some of my favorites include ‘The City‘ by DERF, ‘The Perry Bible Fellowship‘ by Nick Gurewitch, and the amazing animated comics of Brad Neely.”

“Aside from the artists above,” says Aaron, “I love the work of my friends such as Clayton Hanmer and Tom Humberstone, as well as a guy I discovered at TCAF last year named Mat Brinkman who does these insanely intricate black and white narratives about monsters and spirits doing battle with each other in magical realms.”

Aaron and the other Trio Magnus fellows will be present and accounted for at this year’s TCAF (Toronto Comic Art Festival), showcasing art from their most recent project.

“Currently,” says Leighton, “we’re working on a series of 6 ft. square collaborative drawings (created with red and black Snowman markers) which we plan to convert to smaller silkscreened prints. We’ll be selling these at TCAF in May.”

He also has a book project in the works due out in time for the Festival, to be published by Koyama Press. Leighton says that it will ‘combine illustration and photography, and feature a variety of homeless nature spirits who, having lost their forests and streams, are forced to live in the back alleys and vacant lots of Toronto’.

“It’s sort of a combination of three interests of mine: folk mythology, environmental issues and urban  photography. Nothing stokes my creative fires like the alchemy of combining ideas.”

For more from Aaron, you can visit his website, the website of Trio Magnus, or stop by his booth at this year’s Toronto Comic Art Festival.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Just a brief update today, concerning Fabler interviews as well as (unrelated) the upcoming Convention season.

We featured our first interview of the year a couple of weeks back with a profile of Gibson Twist, creator of Pictures of You, but otherwise the blog’s been slow to ramp up with 2010 creator features.

The start of a new year marks a renewal of responsibilities, and – in some cases- incites people to refocus their efforts on their work, so the slow ramp up wasn’t unexpected.  Turns out some artists and writers have their priorities out of whack, and talking to a relatively obscure comics blog about their work sometimes comes secondary to actually doing it.

Can you even believe the audacity?

Neither can I, which is why we’re churning out a bunch of consecutive interviews the next few weeks in place of typical blog-opinion fare. Not because I think you don’t want to hear me digress on the Kirby lawsuits or tirade meanderingly about classic characters from the days of early Pulps.

More because you would probably rather hear about the interesting lives of those who regularly churn out the content that breathes life into the industry of making Comics.

Wish fulfilled, Fablerites. Fablerers?

Speaking of interviews, if you’re doing something cool in comics, we operate a non-classist blog – drop me an email at kevin (at) thefabler (dot) com, and I’ll do my best to get back to you about potentially showcasing YOUR work/ideas/art on our little corner of the WWW.

Moving along through February, we’re also growing ever-nearer to the beginning of Comic Convention season. (Which I suppose doesn’t really qualify as a season per se, as the largest Comic Cons in North America take place over roughly a six month span – but if you say ’something season’ is coming, it’s easier to get excited about it. Like how the mere mention of ‘wabbit season’ was enough to get Elmer Fudd all frothy at the mouth, or how the phrase ‘Hockey season’ seems to infect most Canadians with an excitedly aggressive demeanor, and a heightened thirst for beer.)

Among the more significant cons in the next few months are the Emerald City Comic Con (March 13-14) in Seattle, Mega Con in Orlando (March 12-14), Wizard World’s Toronto Comic Con (March 26-28), Wonder Con in San Francisco (April 2-4), and – the festival that I’m most excited for -  the Toronto Comic Art Festival (May 8-9).

To date, we’ve featured no less than nine of the exhibitors appearing at TCAF 2010 in the past year on the Fabler Blog. That, and the ridiculously awesome list of additional indie comic/webcomic talent, makes TCAF our kind of scene. Check out the full exhibitor list here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention our own upcoming event here in Calgary, the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo in April (on the 24th and 25th). I will most definitely be present and accounted for both days of the festival myself, so if you’re going to be attending, hopefully I’ll see you there.

Rumor has it the elusive Bruno Stepphun, creator of the Fabler and brains behind Zensoft Studios, will also be around.

Regrettably, there are no pending Comic Cons in Boise, but I’ll keep you informed if that situation changes.

-Kevin de Vlaming