Few people I know still have an RSS reader, ever since Google did us all dirty and essentially killed the entire idea of RSS; as such, I keep an oldschool bookmark list of comics that I open daily. Things that don’t update on particular days, or perhaps are on hiatus, they get opened up along with the more active sites; the cost of doing so is negligible.

And sometimes, that pays off. Achewood has from 25 December 2016 been without a change. Oh, sure, occasionally a note in the header of the page if Onstad had new merch drops, but no new strips.

Until last Friday. A new look and feel to the page. A Patreon with new strips. And an appeal for people to help build the Next Thing. Oh sure, there was an email announcing the latest iteration of Achewood that dropped on Saturday, but that first 24 hours? It felt like I was in on a secret, rewarded for my long, patient, 2322-day vigil. And now we have an answer to the question, What would it take to get Gary to open a Patreon account?

Slowly, slowly I am finding myself drawn back into [web]comics, the discourse around them, and the having of Opinions. A’course, it’s pretty easy to find the will to write when Matt Bors drops you a line.

Readers of this page will know that we at Fleen hold The Nib — edited by Bors, with assistance from Eleri Harris and Mattie Lubchansky — in high regard. It’s a deeply thoughtful, skillfully-curated collection of the best editorial, nonfiction, and journalistic comics from around the world, and they pay.

For some time now, longer pieces from The Nib that were up for reruns have been redirecting to Tinyview, a situation that I noticed but which in my pandemic-induced torpor I did not investigate too closely; today, though, Bors dropped me a helpful explainer which I am more than happy to share with you, as it has as its ultimate goal paying comics creators:

For a few years I have been doing some work with Tinyview, a comics app that runs exclusive comics from an array of creators like Gemma Correll, Sarah Graley, and Brian Gordon.

We’re in the middle of a campaign to raise $25,000 in monthly subscription fees that will allow the site to reach sustainability and offer more comics. (All creators are paid pretty good rates.) The campaign is all on-platform with subscribers, not a Kickstarter or anything, and the goal is fairly straightforward: become sustainable through reader support and build from there.

Those looking for more details can find them here but the gist is the campaign runs until 14 February, as of this writing has raised US$15,519 of the goal, and when Bors says that creators are paid pretty good rates, keep in mind that he’s spent most of a decade now trying to find ways to pay creators like it’s still the heyday of magazine cartooning and folks can make a living at it.

And speaking of doing one’s best to put money into the pockets of creators — new Iron Circus anthology, yo:

Hey, Hey, gang! Spike here, letting y’all in early on:

Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures!

This anthology’s been in the works for months, and the line-up and stories are both ALL-STAR! Whether it’s a tale of our attempts to un-extinct an ibex, centrifugally assisted birth, or one deadline-blowing apocalypse after another, these stories are beautifully illustrated, expertly written, and unbelievably fun. [emphasis original]

That from an email that landed in my inbox right about launch time.

The sharp-eyed reader will note that this one is not being Kickstarted, as Spike — famous early user and vocal promoter of Kickstarter — broke with them last year over their inexplicable¹ decision to go blockchain²; uh, we probably should have covered that here but … 2022, man. Anyway, Spike’s been having success cutting out the middle layer and just running IC’s crowdfunding through Backerkit directly, and the usual profit-share is in effect: for every US$5000 over goal, the page rate goes up by US$5. Shifting away from Kickstarter makes it tough to apply the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II as it relies upon Kickstarter data via Kicktraq, but things launched at noon EST and as of not quite five hours later, Failure To Launch is sitting somewhere north of US$15,000 of a US$20,000 goal.

I think they’re gonna make it to goal in the month remaining before deadline.

Oh, and if you backed it in the first hour? Free domestic/reduced rate international shipping. That’s damn clever, Spike, and just as other publishers have copied the share-the-wealth-with-creators approach you pioneered, I think we’ll see them give backers a similar break in the future.

And just so we’re clear — I’m not promising daily updates or anything. This is gonna take a while. But slowly, slowly, I think things are going to shake loose around here.

Spam of the day:
You know what? I haven’t included a Spam of the day since the end of January 2022, if you don’t count a post from two months later that was all spam. Partly this was because the subjects of the few posts since then didn’t deserve to have spam share the page with them, partly because I got out of the habit.

As near as I can tell, the first Spam of the day ran on 30 May, 2014. That’s about half of the blog’s lifespan. I think it did its job and can rest now.

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¹ Literally. They promised numerous explanations and never came close to coherency.

² We at Fleen are still trying to decide what to do personally about Kickstarter’s idiocy. There is literally no reason to involve the blockchain in anything, but at the same time it’s pretty much impossible to tell how much of that math-challenged bullshit is actually in Kickstarter’s infrastructure. For now, at least, if creators choose to use Kickstarter and that’s the only way to support them on a project, we will do so … but if Kickstarter actually implements this crap? Sorry, creators. Find another way for me to give you money.

Just kidding, I can’t say nous vivons because it’s not really nous that live — this is all down to Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeupin, who is featured here today. It’s been too long, so let’s all be glad that the drought is over.

For the first time since 2020, in Angoulême the FIBD is taking place at the expected time of the year; this marks the end of COVID-related Angoulême controversies¹, which means we can focus again on the non-COVID-related controversies.

Now, many of these happen at or around Angoulême because it is so big that it can hardly avoid being involved in controversies spanning comics of the French-Belgian tradition in general; furthermore, Angoulême tends to get all the mainstream media attention, so people attempting to get media attention will attempt to do so in Angoulême, without this necessarily being the Angoulême organizers’ fault.

But sometimes they bring this on themselves. Case in point: in Fall it was announced everyone’s least favorite pedophilia enabler would be honored with an expo featuring his works as part of the festival. To say the announcement did not go over well would be an understatement, and after a few days of activist pushback the festival announced the cancellation of the expo, ostensibly for security reasons after they received threats. However, the timing of the announcement makes it look more like an out of the situation without angering either party, as a few days seems an awfully short amount of time to actually evaluate their options in terms of heightened security needs in light of these threats. As a reminder to Fleen readers, in 2015 not only did the festival take place not even a month after the Charlie Hebdo murders, but Angoulême that year even had a hastily set up expo around Charlie Hebdo and the murdered cartoonists.

Still, that does not mean it was the wrong decision to cancel the Vivès expo; yet that has not ended the controversy: a number of creators have since then come out in favor of Vivès (no link: I still need some time to mourn my respect for these folks), with something of a generational divide as no young creator appears to have done so. Though it does not appear to fit a naive you can’t joke about anything anymore these days framework either: I do not know of a time when anything comparable to what Vivès did in Petit Paul would have been remotely mainstream (there have been some superficially similar instances, but on closer look these did not compare, e.g.:a background gag as opposed to the main plot).

Another lasting consequence may play out in courts: the exposure appears to have led a state attorney to pay more attention to Vivès’ body of work, as an investigation was formally launched against him since the news of the cancellation, targeting his work on Petit Paul (published by Glénat) as well as two other books, this time published by Les Requins Marteaux: Les Melons de la Colère (roughly, The Canteloupes of Wrath) and La Décharge Mentale (roughly, The Mental Unload, a reference to Emma’s Mental Load).

In more positive news, on the occasion of this being the 50th anniversary of the FIBD, The Beat solicited FIBD memories from a number of professionals, and I was included, though I do not know whether I deserve to be listed along Charlie Adlard, Derf Backderf, Simon Hanselmann, Elyon’s (listed as Joëlle Epée Mandengue), Paul Gravett, or Serge Ewenczyk …

Finally, congratulations are in order to Riad Sattouf for having been awarded the Grand Prix this year. His presidency next year will be coming at an interesting time, as he will have wrapped up his current series (Esther’s Diaries and The Arab of the Future) and surely will try new formats, new narrative techniques, new publishing models, as he has always done in his career.

Many thanks to FSFCPL for his insights, and everybody drop him a line and remind him: he absolutely deserved to be included in The Beat’s roundup. Not to brag or anything, but Beat generalissimo Heidi MacDonald told me once that she wished she had an on-the-ground French contributor like FSFCPL.

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¹Don’t get me wrong, COVID hasn’t gone away; in fact, it is still one of the factors in my decision not to attend this year.

For reasons that are explicated if you just scroll down the page a bit. While the major upheavals of my life last year have largely settled, blogging is like a muscle that requires exercise and habit, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get back into that habit on a regular basis.

That being said, tomorrow marks the start of Year 18 at Fleen, and even if I don’t write anything new and substantive, the archives will always be up as long as there’s an internet to host them. Year 17 might have been a bust, but the first 15.5 years were pretty chock full of writing, some of which I’m very proud of. This marks the 4461st post at Fleen, of which 4107 went out under my name¹.

Some of those got written, received an edit pass, and posted in 15 minutes or so. Some took hours, occasionally over multiple days. Gladwell was completely wrong about the 10,000 hours to expertise thing, but I figure it’s somewhere in that neighborhood; I figure it’s about equivalent to five years at a full-time job.

According to a stats plugin (and forgive me if in the five minutes it takes me to do the math you find filler on this page), there are 3,039,883 total words on this blog, and I’m sure if I cared to dig around in the WordPress source tables, I could query exactly how many of those were on posts by me, not written by somebody else. But for a rough estimate: (4107 -78)/4461 * 3,039,883 = 2,745,503.

That’s somewhere between 2.02 and 3.14 Homestucks. Or about 0.17 Spurges.

In the Dumbrella Hosting² days, there were Project Wonderful³ ads that maybe brought in a hundo (USD) total, which offset some small fraction of the hosting costs. Otherwise, the hosting has been largely borne by Jon Rosenberg as a sideline of the other sites he owns. In the initial 40% or so of Fleen’s history, my pay was I got my beer bought for me at Pub Night, wherein webcomics types hung out at the Peculier Pub in Lower Manhattan on Thursday nights. Since then, it’s been me (and lately, FSFCPL) writing because we wanted to tell you what was on my (our) mind(s) because everybody has a desire to be heard.

Along the way I’ve made friends with some of the best people one could ever hope to meet.

If this is the last I ever write here — and I sincerely hope it is not — I figure it’s enough to say I Did A Thing. And you know what? For today, that’s enough.

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¹ Longtime readers may recall that there were other contributors as well as guest posts in the first couple of years of Fleen, and over the past 4.5 years more than 75 posts have been contributed by Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, most of considerable length and detail, all of considerable quality.

² Ask your parents, kids.

³ Ibid.

I’ve long said that my favorite of Kate Beaton’s work is her next, because she keeps getting better; none of her works have been easily surpassed, but when the stars go cold and the final account of capital-A Art is taken, I think DUCKS: Two Years In The Oil Sands will stand at the peak not just of Beaton’s work, but of autobiography, of comics, and of explorations of what turns people into their worst selves. It is in all things a masterwork, as I knew it would be since those five very tall strips were posted back in 2014. There are spoilers ahead, so if you want to go in cold maybe stop reading now. But if you do go in cold, know that DUCKS is at times a tough read that both clearly tells you where it’s headed and also catches you by surprise. Survivors of any kind of trauma take note.

I’ve been privileged to know Kate Beaton for more than a decade; she has done me many a kindness in that time, in addition to creating some of the best comics ever made and allowing us all to share in them for absolutely free. Sometime in the last decade I was standing in the Webcomics Pavilion at San Diego Comic Con when the word got out that she had posted new comics featuring her mom — what I’ve always called Kate’s momics — to Tumblr and we all stopped what we were doing to read them. I said out loud that I would sacrifice the careers of everybody in that enormous building if it meant momics every day, and I meant it.

Something in those sometimes very simple drawings is the singularly most efficient expression of emotion and emotional truths, whether it’s a confrontation of the myths we tell ourselves to make the right person the hero (with squats), a surgical dissection of fake feminist tropes in comics (sometimes with squats, sometimes without), or a discussion of little known historical figures that we should revere (no squats this time). And they’re never more emotionally resonant than when she’s talking about the life she’s lived.

Which brings us to DUCKS, the story of the two years that Beaton worked in the Alberta oil sands to pay off her students loans; she’s one of a multitude of Maritime Canadians that had to leave home to find work, torn (as she tells us in the opening pages) between the pull of the home that begs them to stay and the need to leave to support themselves and their families as industry after industry has closed up shop and left an entire people behind. If all the Cape Bretonners that had to leave came back, she tells us, the island would sink. As befits Beaton’s very personal approach to comics, DUCKS opens with Beaton introducing herself and her situation; she’s drawn a little less loosely in this narrative interlude, a bit of reality before her usual style asserts itself and her face becomes a little less specific.

Scott McCloud famously taught us all talked about visual accuracy and identification in comics — a more photo-realistic representation of a person, place, or item will give it distance, and one that’s more abstract or cartoony invites the reader to see themselves and their experiences in that representation. The little extra verisimilitude in the opening pages introduces us to somebody else; the little extra abstraction in the remaining 400 pages means that increasingly large numbers of the characters portrayed could be us, or people we know.

So when we follow the story of the oil sands — a place where the dirtiest petroleum in the world is somewhat easily accessible from the surface, which sufficiently high oil prices make it economically viable to rip it from the earth¹ and ship it halfway across the world² so that enormous sums can be made by people removed from those that bear the costs — we are following the story of people in various stages of desperation and need, far from their homes, being paid to do dirty, dangerous work in some of the most inhospitable land on the planet. If one were forced to find but one overarching message in DUCKS, it would be how living in extreme duress changes people, exploring how they became the people they are in the camps and work sites, and the degree to which they became different from who they are at when they’re at home.

Throw a few thousand people together in a place where it’s 50 below in the winter, hours from anywhere, where boredom is often met with drugs and alcohol, where the men outnumber the women by an extreme degree³, where the default state is one of hypermasculine aggression and posturing, and it’s no surprise that things are going to take a bad turn. From almost the moment of her arrival in Fort McMurray, Beaton is subjected to shameless sexual propositioning and the kind of attention that serves as a reminder that she’s not really a full person, she’s a distraction, a novelty, some thing that exists to relieve the boredom of the men in camp and in town. Either that or she’s a humorless bitch and you don’t want to be a humorless bitch, right?

It becomes the inescapable background radiation of her days, just trying to do a job and get through another overtime shift, page after page reducing it to Just How Things Are, so ordinary that although you know it can escalate, you can see it coming a hundred pages off, it’s still going to catch you by the throat when the rapes happen. Knowing the circumstances that she’s in, seeing it coming narratively is not the same as watching Kate disappear from view behind blacked-out panels and reappear with a thousand-yard stare.

The oil sands leave scars, the scars on the earth translated to the bodies of the men that work there, passed along to the women that don’t measure up as independent people with agency. Some find ways to confront the scars and try to heal from them; most take no notice of them or how they were changed. Beaton confides in coworkers, men who don’t get it and react with laughter, women — including her sister, Becky — who share their own stories of rape from life before the camps.

DUCKS won’t let the reader off the hook with the grimly comforting thought that the oil sands are a unique place of danger to steer clear of and you’ll be okay, not when we’re told about what happened back home or at university where the men are supposed to be themselves and not who the oil sands made them. Trauma and regarding others as not full people is everywhere, it’s just thrown into sharper relief some places.

After a reprieve working at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in Victoria — a time when she started creating comics, just before the wider world learned of her work — Beaton is back in the oil sands, watching the balance on her student loan debt tick towards zero entirely too slowly, finally making her way home only to find that the oil sands don’t relax their hold on you that easily. Or, as she put it on the page where the original stories that became DUCKS were first posted, the story … is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans.

DUCKS is, by turns, heartbreaking, enraging, courageous, a call to witness, suffused with small moments of grace and kindness, and the hardest read that you can’t put down once you pick it up. It’s a singular story that belongs to one person and is also shot full of universal truths that we may not want to acknowledge but must. It will, without fail, be attacked by those that don’t want to acknowledge those truths. It is a masterwork, the best book that I wish had never needed to be written, and should be the next item on your to read list.

DUCKS is published by Drawn & Quarterly, and is available wherever books are sold. Kate Beaton is presently on book tour, and if at all possible you should attend one of the events.

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¹ In circumstances that run roughshod over any sense of environmental responsibility and the treaty rights of various First Nations.

² Ditto.

³ In the book, Beaton gives a ratio of 50:1, but has since noted that it was highly variable. Suffice it to say, it’s a highly imbalanced gender situation.

We remembered Ivy yesterday.

It seems wrong to treat her memorial as something to report on, recounting who was there and what they said; we laughed and cried in equal measure, and that if there is any means to continue awareness past the death of our physical form, she felt a lot of love.

I will say this — for the past month, I have tried to express to people that didn’t know her (surprisingly, they do exist) what Ivy was like; I wrote that she didn’t wait to be an old woman to wear purple, but of late I’ve been saying that she approached life with a joy and love for everybody normally only seen in Mr Rogers or Dolly Parton. If the Lamedvavnik truly exist, she was in their number, one of the secret queens and kings of the world, making it a better place by her example. As usual, Rich Stevens had the right of it when he said she was just the most good hearted weirdo ever.

Goodbye, Ivy. You loved me and never failed to tell me so. I loved you, and never said it enough.

I have wondered what it would take to bring me back to this site. I’m so out of the loop with comics, I have no plans to attend any of the shows this year with the pandemic being treated with denial, and I am still not certain if I’ll ever get back into the daily habit. But some things demand our attention and words are all I have to offer.

I woke up to the news:

Ivy Ratafia McLeod
1960–2022

You loved us and told us so.
We loved you and told you so.
Every day.

We love you. We miss you.
We wish it wasn’t so.

Ivy died in a car crash on Thursday, April 28.
She was 61. We were married 34 years.

The kids and I, plus Ivy’s family (and many dear friends) are slowly picking up the pieces. It may take awhile.

Comments off. You don’t have to say anything.♥

That from my dear friend Scott McCloud, whose hurt today I cannot begin to imagine. Everybody that knows Scott knows that they really know Scott and Ivy, because they are inseparable. They are … were, godsdammit … each other’s biggest fans and greatest friends. But then, Ivy was everybody’s greatest friend, the one that you didn’t realize how empty your life was all the times you didn’t see her until thirty seconds after she had to be elsewhere and walked away. When you were with her, you were the center of her attention, her entire world. She loved everybody.

This morning, trying to describe her to somebody that didn’t know her, I finally came to She didn’t wait to be an old woman to wear purple, which I have not yet been able to say out loud without choking up. She approached life with a joy that was a privilege to be around. Ivy, I loved you and I will treasure your memory as long as I live.

I am quoting this spam in its entirety:

wet farts vs dry farts….the smelly truth
From: Death Of Farts <*******@dogbrush.shop>

Do you or a loved one fart more than you’d like? I know some people act like farting is funny, but they cause serious problems for many of us… especially me.

It got so bad that decades before the coronavirus I was forced to “socially distance” and isolate myself because I couldn’t get my gas under control. Then I met a doctor who showed me this 1 thing to do differently after pooping that fixed my farts that same day… getting rid of them for good!

My life will never be the same and I will never go a day without doing this 1 thing after I poop, so if you or anyone you love fart more than you’d like, I can’t recommend anything higher than trying this 1 thing after you poop today >> [emphasis original]

I had to see it, so you have to see it.

But Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin is still running down the news, at least. Give us heed to what he has to say.

I’m writing this because the FIBD at Angoulême was set to be taking place right now. But it isn’t.

It isn’t because the French government announced on December 27th that entertainment gatherings (sport events, cultural ones, etc.) attendance would be capped to 2000 if indoors, or 5000 if outdoors, which wouldn’t have allowed the festival to take place with any semblance of normalcy.

Worse, by making such an announcement merely one month before it was to take place, the government did not leave the festival any opportunity to rework the format so as to make fit under the cap (e.g. as Lyon BD did), even if the organizers had wanted to do so. No, by that time obviously all expenses had been incurred and it was either go or no go, so the only way left was no go.

Then, adding insult to injury, about one week later the government clarified (in the same sense Oceania clarified having always been at war with Eastasia) that the caps would in fact apply to events (concerts, sports, etc.), and not to festivals or to trade shows. We were in fact given the reasoning that the latter would be safer since people wouldn’t be static in those, which makes me question the epidemiological consulting they received.

That came of course way too late to the Angoulême organizers, who had by then announced the festival’s cancellation (and even if they hadn’t, everyone else would have cancelled their plans anyway); I think the only reason this staggering display of amateurism on the government’s part did not get discussed more was that it was overshadowed by the even more staggering amateurism they displayed in the unpreparedness for the schools reopening on January 3rd. But I digress.

The only thing left to do, then, was for the FIBD to announce their new dates: March 17th to 20th, 2022. I still won’t be going, still a bit early for my standards (I’d rather they would have waiting for spring), but I wish them luck.

In more positive news, we at Fleen have learned that starting in February newly issued Belgian passports will feature a comics theme, more specifically imagery from comics from Belgian creators of course: Tintin (more specifically his Moon rocket), the Smurfs, Lucky Luke, Spirou, Largo Winch, Bob & Bobette (known as Suske & Wiske in Flanders), the Marsupilami, etc. If we estimate the life expectancy of this model based on that of the previous one (about 14 years), I say it should be possible, if you move to Belgium right now and apply for citizenship once the conditions are met, to obtain this model before it is itself replaced. But you shouldn’t dawdle.

We at Fleen at the end there, of course, means FSFCPL alone, as the rest of we at Fleen are waaaay behind on comics news and appreciate that he at Fleen is paying attention. We at Fleen (that being, the rest of us who are not FSFCPL¹) thank FSFCPL for his diligence, without which there would be literally nothing here right about now.

Spam of the day:

Deine Freunde verdienen bereits Vor 19300 EUR pro Tag

Google Translate says that this means Your friends are already earning 19300 EUR per day which assumes I have friends and is thus pretty presumptuous.

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¹ Meaning more specifically, Gary. Hi.

Hi. Been a while.

As 15 December is the agreed-upon date for the launch of this blog, and that means yesterday marked the end of the sixteenth year of Fleen, I figured I should mention here at the start of Year Seventeen about why it’s been so damn sparse around here.

I mean, pandemic. That’s been the case forever. But there’s been more unique challenges in … let’s say the back half of 2021.

In rough order, I found out a relative was stealing from my mother (who has dementia and who I don’t particularly get on with but you still don’t want to see anybody exploited, at least if you aren’t a monster), I discovered my birth family (as many of you know, I was adopted at birth; I now have aunts and uncles, a half-brother and new niblings), my marriage came to an end, I moved from New Jersey to Massachusetts, I’ve left behind volunteer EMS, and I’m starting a new relationship.

So, yeah, few things on my mind and not much spare bandwidth. I’m hoping that when the calendar ticks over to 2022 I’ll be able to find some more focus re: webcomics, and to get back to posting here a hell of a lot more than I have been. I mean, Kickstarter, right? Fuck all that, but I’m going to need some time to get my thoughts into a coherent form and get back to the habit of sharing them here. Writing is a skill and mine has been atrophying for a while now, so be patient with me if you would.

If there’s holidays that you celebrate at this time of year, I hope they’re wonderful for you. We at Fleen are almost through the significantly difficult time, and we’ll see you on the far side as things begin to get better.

Thanks,

Gary