Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence

There’s a new trend that some creators are taking, mixing published works with online in a fairly short timeframe; no waiting a year for a reprint here! Jeff Rowland is pushing new Wigu adventures as books, then will be making stripped-down content available for free afterwards. Over on Webcomics Nation, Tyler Page’s Nothing Better followed a subscription approach mixed with print copies, but has recently thrown open the gates on his archives and the current content. Go buy the first two issues so he’ll be able to print more.

Nothing Better is the story of growing up and letting go and making that big leap into college — and life, and Page has got it nailed. There’s the disgustingly chipper RAs that you want to bitchslap, the horrors of campus jobs, textbook sticker shock, and the certain knowledge that college is the time you can reinvent yourself. Nobody knows you from high school, you can finally be cool, and someday at a reunion, have your revenge.

Page has also taken the narrative step of setting the story at a religiously-affiliated (though fictional) school, which makes it easy to bring in the fact that when you’re new and unsure of yourself, there’s somebody waiting to recruit you to their way of thinking; it’s been a while since I was in college, but even then, this sort of thing was kind of forceful. Kudos to Page for exploring what many people would just step away from (Do lines like God wants us to be together really work? ‘Cause the rationalist in me thinks it would suck if they did).

The story is developing at a nice pace, with a full page delivered three times a week. Presently, we’re about three pages into issue #5 (about 75 pages in all), so you’re at a perfect point to jump in; there’s enough backstory to get to really know the characters and get good and hooked for future installments. Not to worry, though, Page has a nice fat buffer, having already worked up the cover for issue #6 and part of issue #7’s art. Art which, by the way, equally invokes Terry Moore, Chynna Clugston, and Alex Robinson, none of whom is a webcomicker, all of whom you should be reading. In fact, Alex Robinson provided the perfect taglilne for Nothing Better when he described his own work (to his wife, on their first date) as, “Like Archie with swearing and sex.”

Sounds great to me.

It would be really nice if those could be hyperlinked instead of plaintext… Could someone add some a href tags in there please?

With sugar?

Here at Fleen, we have finally learned the difference between the “Save as Draft” button and the “Publish” button.

Our apologies for the confusion.

St. “Urho” minus six or so letters (the O is kinda off) equals St. Olaf. Of which Nothing Better’s setting is most definitely reminiscent.

Whoo Minnesota pride!

So, Gary, besides beer, is the primary benefit of writing for Fleen that you get to use the royal we with impugnity?

Oh, and congrats to Page for being fleened (better than being fleeced).

Oops. I meant “impunity”.

“Always drop the silent g before adding -ity”. — your third grade teacher

Beer, plus I get to fight crime in my customized Garymobile.

I would so like to see a picture of you in said Garymobile as drawn by Meredith Grans.

Terry Moore dipped his toe into webcomics, at least by Examiner standards, for a while. Kixie turned up online for a while, as well as in Paradise Too!. I think that’s over now, though — last I checked, the domain he was using for the purpose had expired.

[…] Uncategorized Mostly photos this time ’round, and that will wrap up our discussion of MoCCA for the year. Before we get to the pics, profound apologies to both Tyler Page and Ryan Sias. […]

[…] As long as we’re in the mailbag, Tyler Page wrote us the other day with The Big Announcement: Nothing Better has been running online for over a year and many of you have asked when the first trade would be available. The time is now — to bring the story back to print so you can hold it in your hands to read it and store it on your bookshelf like it was meant to be. The thing is, it costs a lot of money to print a book. Money that I just don’t have sitting around so I’d like to do something that could end up being thoroughly embarrassing. […]

[…] Gary, Merch Noticed some good news at !Journalista! this morning: this year’s Xeric Grants have been announced, and we’ve got some webcomics winnners. Given that the Xerics are for self-published dead-tree comics, the focus isn’t on comics that were designed for (and released on) the web, but here we have Tyler Page’s Nothing Better Vol. 1, taken from the webcomic of the same name. […]

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