Interview with Chris Studabaker on Fablewood

by: 1hitwonder 6 months, 5 days, 7 hours, 51 minutes ago 11

1hitwonder: I read through the Fablewood Anthology you sent me and loved it!  How did you become involved with this project?

Chris: William Ward had approached me about it early on.  As the talk got to be more serious I offered to build the website because I really thought we needed one.  Ape Entertainment was really interested in Williams’s proposal and we thought that we should take outside submissions for the book and the website would help us do that.  Soon after we started it was cool to be able to Google Fablewood and find mentions of it in people’s blogs.  I would read someone’s blog and read about how they were thinking of submitting something and I would post a reply like, “YES! You really should, your stuff is cool!” I can’t recall right now how many of the submissions we received actually made it into this volume.

1hitwonder: So we can expect a second volume of stories?

Chris: It really depends on how this first volume does.  I think there are a lot more of the submissions we received in the second volume so we really hope the first one does well and we can go forward with putting out the second volume?

1hitwonder: Did you also design the title graphic along with the website?

Chris: No actually that was done by JP Ahonen.  That graphic is actually one of the reasons I got involved in the first place.  I loved the clean look of it and the use of white space.  It seems sort of innocuous at first and then you get closer and it’s this weird sort of drawing with a lot of detail.  We worked together on the publication design.  The title page and credits keep the look of his title design going.  We started off trading e-mails and I would send him some of the layouts for the inside of the book and he would respond back, “WOW!  This is exactly what I had in mind!” It was really cool to randomly get hooked up with a guy in Finland and when you are trading ideas they are saying that what I had in mind was exactly what they were also thinking!

1hitwonder: Tell me a little bit about your contribution, “Under the Midnight Sun.” Where did this story come from?

Chris: Well I grew up on a farm and I had the idea to write a story about the world around us from it’s perspective and it thinks and feels about what is going on.  I think we have seen stores form the trees point of view so I wanted to go a different direction and do the store of the shadows perspective.  I thought it would be a neat way to examine our own dreams and how we deal with not being able to achieve them sometimes.  The premise is of an impossible dream.  You have the shadow of tree that dreams of being able to see the sun. The story started as an eight page prose of mine.  One afternoon I just started writing and ended up with eight pages in one afternoon and was actually really happy with it.  The prose helped me get the idea onto paper and when I showed it to Dusty they moved on it right away.

1hitwonder: Fablewood is billed as a collection of fantasy stories.  Have you always been a fan of fantasy?  Did you think that the fantasy genre needed some new life?

Chris: Well as a kid I was a fan of the superhero comics of course. Then I got out of comics for while.  I got back into them in college when I was reading Gaimen and Moore, it was like a fresh breath for me.  I was amazed you could do the kind of things they were doing in comics.  I started thinking of what I could bring to the table that was unique.  Bradbury is my favorite author and as I was studying writing in college these both inspired my writing and my exploration of writing from various perspectives.  Now I am more into the independent comics.  I can find more diverse subject matter and style there. I don’t think there is enough of the fantasy work out there and we wanted to do something in that genre but with our own spin on it.  So when I read William’s original proposal it really rang true with me.  The proposal was about doing a fantasy book but not fifteen different version of Conan or Red Sonja.  It said in big letters, let’s do FANTASY!  We wanted to stretch fantasy.  More The Invisibles, Swamp Thing, and Sandman and less swords in a metal bikini.  We saw fantasy out there but not in a big way unless you were really looking for it.  We had people that were really interested in it and since we could not find what we were looking for we decided to put it out ourselves.

1hitwonder: You also worked on “Our Endless Numbered Days” for Fablewood with Aaron Minier and Jeremy Mohler but that one is not in this first volume.  How did you meet up with those two and will we get a chance to see it in the second volume?

Chris: I actually met Aaron in college, he is really the reason I got into making comics instead of just story writing.  I was studying film and literary story telling at the University of Saint Francis School of Creative Arts in Fort Wayne, IN.  I came across these random drawings on a table outside one day and loved their comic style I thought to myself, “I gotta find who did these!” So I started asking around, there were not a lot of people doing this kind of comic art, and eventually met Aaron.  He was a really cool guy and gave me a link to his website where he was working on a short story that he was writing and drawing, I don’t think it ever saw the light of day though.  He mentioned that he really didn’t like writing and wanted some help so I jumped in, I’m a writer!  We found we had a lot of the same interests and he said he was making a book for his senior project and wanted me to write up a couple of ideas for him.  I got to work immediately and wrote up pages of ideas; he was pretty floored by my excitement.  OEND was my first time working with Jeremy Mohler.  He and William had worked together in the past and as William saw the artwork and story coming together for OEND he said he thought it needed some color so get got us in touch with Jeremy.  The story is about a “Deviant” and comments on the creation process for fantasy stories.  Its written from the perspective of a fantasy world where a writer is writing a story about a world like ours.  With all the submissions we got for Fablewood we would have a had enough for a 250 page book.  The second volume was planned from the beginning so we just could not fit it into the first volume but it will be in the second.  Ape Entertainment has been very supportive so we hope the first volume does well enough to ensure the second one gets out.

1hitwonder: Going back to Under the Midnight Sun, what was it like hearing it was nominated for the Day Prize?

Chris: Awesome!  It was actually my fiancé’s uncle that submitted it for consideration.  He is into comics as well and very supportive of my work.  He told me about the SPACE convention and Dusty and I had just finished the book a week before the submission deadline so it was very surprising to hear that we were nominated.  I went to the SPACE convention for the first time this year.  Unfortunately Dusty could not make it, he was on tour with the band 18 Visions doing their tattoos as they toured!  I had taken a small run of the Fablewood books to spread around to the other independent artists and fans and got a great reaction.  One lady came up to me and said she did not have any money but asked if she could trade for a copy of her husband’s book.  About a half hour later he husband was back at my table and said that the book actually made his wife cry, he just thought I should know.  It was amazing to know that what we made had that kind of affect on someone.  It really makes the whole thing worthwhile.

1hitwonder: So what is next for you or what are you working on now?

Chris: Well I am a letterer and product manager for Blue Water productions.  It is a great way to learn the production side of things in addition to the artistic creation side.  I think its important for artists and writers to see that printing side of the process.  You don’t need to understand it perfectly but it is really important to have that collaborative environment so that everyone knows about the other areas of production.  I get to see a lot of books and put that final polish on them that hopefully gets them picked up off the shelf and not put back.  I am working on a mini series that is coming out early next year.  It’s about a Valkyrie character and the importance of fate in regards to Norse mythos.  For a story with the Norse backdrop its more focused on the religion as apposed to fighting.  The writing is more in the direction of Sandman but not written as well of course!  I am also working on another project with Aaron.  It is a collection of interconnected short stories dealing with people, time, maps, and dreams and has been a lot of fun to write.

The entire book is great! Not being a fantasy guy this comic really turned me on to the genre. The stories are engaging and the art is top notch. I believe that everyone that is a comic fan should pick up this book and read it...TODAY! There is something for everyone in these books, and the stories exists on multiple levels that is hard to find in many of the main stream comics. By far one of the best books I have read this year. BELIEVE IT!

Thank you to Chris for taking the time to talk to us.  Check out Chris’ site to see what the man is about!