Oh my goodness so many books to talk about.

• You got yer massive sale to make space for a secret project over at Exploding Dog. Seriously, ten bucks for 250 pretty pictures? When people ask you what it’s about, tell them It’s about half a kilo of awesome.
• You got a street date for Jellaby: Monster in the City. April 21st! I’m torn between grabbing this one as soon as it hits the shelves and buying it direct from Kean Soo at MoCCA in June just for the pleasure of handing him crisp money in exchange for his wares.
• You got Howard Tayler crankin’ out a dozen-plus illos a day for the next month so he can provide the drawings for (and publish!) a dungeon-masterin’ book. For those that dated in high school, Tracy Hickman (author of said book) is a big name in circles that feature dungeon masters, so this is a pretty big deal for Tayler.
• You got business majors across the country wanting to get a good look at the books of Topatoco (see what I did there), as we see their talent roster expanded by two names in the past two days (with promises of three more this week). Topatoco’s pretty much in charge of the webcomics merch business at this point, which makes founder/exalted leader Jeff Rowland that most mythical of all creatures in these challenging times: a small business owner who’s creating jobs. I am utterly convinced that each time Rowland falls into fitful slumber he wonders How the hell did this happen?

There’s even a few non-book things going on; think of them as “stages of a webcomics life” sorta thing.

1. (Re-) Birth: I met Shoolhouse Daze creator Mike Ciccotello at a bookstore event in my town about two years ago. He’s gotten his strip into a major college paper (with a circulation of 17,000+), experimented all over the place, taken hiatus to retool and sharpen his skills, and now relaunches better than ever tomorrow, April 1st. Get in on the new ground floor, y’all.
2. Difficult teenage years: Help Desk turns thirteen damn years old today. And it hates you! You never understood it! It wishes you were dead! If you really want to infuriate Help Desk, pay attention to it in public in front of its friends (the RSS feed is particularly handy for this).
3. Starting the career: As of yesterday, Daisy Owl creator Ben Driscoll has left the world of “paychecks” and “benefits” to make his living by his wits and his webcomic. For now, signed strip prints are all that he can sell you, but let’s hope that we see a nice, beefy collection in book form soon.

Look at that, we’re back to books. Enjoy the rest of your day.

In no particular order.

• Not getting into comic shops even with a Xeric grant. Correction time, kiddies! Box Brown contacted us to let us know that Diamond are hold Xeric winners to sales order minimums, but
  

  If the book doesn’t quite meet the minimum they will take it into consideration because of its status as a Xeric Grant. But, there is no hard and fast number. It’s mostly going to be case by case basis I would imagine.

  Translation: tell your local comic shop you want a copy of Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing.

• Listening to your own voice; Brian Carroll of Instant Classic goes musical, taking the lead as Author Donathan in a singalong installment. Along the same lines, watching yourself on video is also disturbing — I say “uh” way too much in this video from NEWW panel #1 (more panel video without my verbal stumbling at BDC).
• Being afraid for your job because you do a webcomic. Check this out (author’s name and webcomic name redacted):
  

  My webcomic is my 5th-grade-potty-humor-and-dick-jokes outlet, and I love being able to share the things I create or find funny with the world; however, I’m employed by the US Government.

  I’m sure many employers would look down upon a site or comic like mine which proudly displays my name, and the Government thinks it much worse. No one who is offended in power has seen my site yet, but it just takes one higher-up to see what I’m doing and either fire me or force me to make a change.

  I’ve contemplated going back and re-signing my comics with a pen name so I can feign ignorance, and I’ve even thought of taking the site down completely. Neither of those ideas sound fun or fair to me. I was wondering if any persons familiar with law could help me figure out how to distance myself from edgy material for work purposes while still being attached to it creatively. Can they legally force action upon me? Will a click-through EULA (I hate those things, but if it works) protect me? What about a link to an EULA that informs people that by viewing the page, they agree?

  It would be wonderful to find help with my situation, and I think it’s interesting to think about how something like comics can affect people who still work at a desk job for a living.

  We’ll preface this with the obligatory I Am Not A Lawyer, and note that anybody that relies upon me for legal advice/expertise is probably even more boned than they thought. That being said, my understanding is that there’s not a lot you can do. Over the past decade or so, protections for individuals expressing personal opinions or creative works vis-a-vis their bosses punishing them for such opinions/works have been … eroding. The fact that you work for the government may actually work in your favor, though, as the Bill of Rights is specifically written to describe relations between citizens and the government (as opposed to citizens and business). A’course, to get to the point where that distinction actually helps you could require years of lawyers and court dates.

  If you’re really worried, adopting a pen name might not be a bad idea (c.f.: “Clay” vs “Hard” — various identities used by the creator of the now-gone Sexy Losers in response to perceived risk of doing things under his own name), if only for peace of mind. It’s a fine line, though — you’ll probably take another job at some point in your life, and employers know about Google, too (as luck would have it, there’s more than one “Gary Tyrrell” in the world, and one of the other guys is more famous than me).

  That being said, nothing’s ever gone from the internet and there’s no way to retroactively wipe those pages, what with the Wayback Machine and all. The best advice I can think to give you is, if you feel that doing your webcomic leaves you open to sanction, be sure that you never update on contribute to it from work, and can document it (i.e.: keep your server logs). Don’t even visit your own site during work hours. Good luck with the dick jokes, and if anybody reading this actually is a lawyer, feel free to provide advice that’s actually worth something.

• To wrap on a happy note, how about one thing that is the opposite of disturbing? In Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport/Aéroport International Macdonald-Cartier d’Ottawa (at least at the terminal that sends you to Merica after pre-clearing Customs & Immigration) you will find a cardboard stand in the RELAY magazine shop, chock full a’ BONE color volumes. This cheered me immensely and actually makes me feel generally good about the future (or at least the future of those travelling through gates 1-13 of YOW).

So after a few hiccups, the live-from-Webcomics-Weekend episode of Webcomics Weekly is available at webcomics.com. Webcomics, webcomics, webcomics, webcomics! Listening to it sparked a few memories from the recording session and kicked my brain into one of those rapid streams of thought that I feel compelled to share (plus I have only a short time today before I have to get on a plane and these thinky pieces don’t require a lot of links).

At about the 34:30 mark, the discussion of what a new-model publisher could provide to the world of webcomics gets brought up (it’s similar to the model I’ve referred to as Aduz in these pages).

This put me in mind of the initial steps towards that model that have been/are being taken by Topatoco and ComicSpace. To my eye, Topatoco is running itself as a boutique service, where CS (with its hosting, and integration with other business services planned, and its open call for partners in the shirt business) is looking more like a high-volume/economies of scale operation; my suspicion is that both models have the potential to succeed simultaneously in their only-slightly overlapping spaces.

This, in turn, put me in mind of something that Steven Cloud said in the Print/Web/Bear panel — in response to Chris Hastings telling us that he knows how Dr McNinja will end, Cloud took a contrary position. BOASAS, he said (and this is an inexact quote because I was moderating instead of note-taking), is a barley-disguised discussion with himself that will die when he does. This, still further in turn, put me in mind of Cloud’s earlier statement that he doesn’t make money from BOASAS — it’s the job that he hates that pays the bills.

That, finally, brings me to my point. Webomics (and more generally, the internet; I had this conversation with my master’s thesis advisor back around 1990) is an inherently democratic medium; the barriers to entry are so low that everybody has a chance to be heard. This isn’t to say that all voices are equally loud — like it or not, <insert Famous Person here> is always going to have more hits/friends/followers/whatever than you — but the opportunity for any random person (“you”) to reach a receptive audience far outside your immediate physical place exists in a form that was inconceivable only 20 years ago.

But that reach doesn’t mean that everybody has an equal chance of capturing the lightning in a bottle that will make them (modestly) rich and/or (partially) famous.

For some time now, the promise of webcomics (at least to me; your mileage may vary) has been the potential for so many more voices to be heard than would through traditional channels; all you needed was the raw talent, and that would win out. But you know what? There’s a hell of a lot of talented creative types — writers, actors, singers, dancers, sculptors, storytellers, take your pick — and history has always seen fit to ensure that 99.9993% of them will never make a living at their chosen form of expression.

Take the wannabes and the self-deluded out of the equation (even though it’s the cattle calls that drive American Idol — lack of talent as entertainment, how meta can you get?) and leave only the truly skilled and you’re still looking at long odds. Maybe somebody in LA can answer this one for me — how many card-carrying members of SAG, AFTRA, WGA, and the other creative organizations ever get to quit the cater-waiter job?

I’ve been looking forward to the triumph of the professional for so long that I’ve overlooked this basic law of nature: your talent is just one part of the equation, along with luck, timing, good genetics¹, and a bunch of other things out of your control. The number of people who can make a comic into a career (or who could if they cared to, cf: David Morgan-Mar PhD, LEGO®™©^etc) is both much greater thanks to the internet and more finite than we would all like.

Which sort of brings me back to that first point of discussion, and how the success of webcomics opens up opportunities for supportive businesses. Is the sphere of revenue-producing webcomics going to be relatively limited, resulting in boutique approaches to a modest number of potentially-high earners? Or will it be broader and more readily reward the approach that casts a wider net? The success of one camp (the creators) will necessarily intertwine with that of the other (the providers).

My mind’s not made up, but I forsee a discussion over much beer with Eric Burns-White, Xaviar Xerexes, and other members of the webcomics punditry at next year’s NEWW. In the meantime, your thoughts, please.

_______________
¹ Good looks less necessary for webcomics success than many other creative fields, but probably couldn’t hurt.

Since I got on Twitter, I notice that my titles are looking distinctly tweetlike. It’s been a bit tricky adjusting to the whole brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit approach, given I’m not usually very breve in these parts. Navelgazing over, let’s get this thing underway.

• Lost in the flurry of weekend activity, an interview by Milton Griepp with Phil Foglio that took place at the Studio Foglio booth during New York Comic Con; it was an interesting process to watch Griepp start the conversation with a skepticism that a living can be made by giving things away, and finish it by clearly thinking deeply on the possibilities of the future.
• Also lost in the catch-up from the weekend, a list of new webcomics discovered — for the most part, these were the result of creators coming up to me and saying, Check out my work and I hope you enjoy it. It’s by no means a comprehensive list, just what struck my fancy today (by a statistical fluke, I was handed contact info by men and women in about equal measure, but it’s three separate comics by ladies that I’m presenting here).
  • The Glass Urchin — autobio comics featuring the cutest lil’ hedgehog you’ve ever seen, with occasional anger issues and a boyfriend who needs some lessons
  • Sex, Drugs, and June Cleaver — more autobio, though perhaps skewed towards how live should go rather than how it does; there’s a Devil’s Panties-like feel to this one, with its awareness of comics and their creators, which is hardly a bad thing
  • Wasted Talent — still more autobio, this time with added engineering! Recognizing each other is why we wear the ring, yo
• 1000 strips at Starslip? Surely not! It seems like it just launched … oh … nearly four years ago. Dang. Time flies, etc.
• Finally, from the mailbag, “Casey” wrote:
  

  This might be interesting to your readers, we launched the first original iPhone comic last week on iTunes. While other companies are reformatting printed comics, we took the plunge to create an original serialized series called the Super Kaiju Hero Force.

  If you’d like to know more about it please feel free to get in touch with me or see the press release at our site.

  Somebody’s going to have to check me on this, but aren’t some of the comics at ClickWheel original to there? Or is it just some CW-exclusive updates? If my sinuses were less filled with contagion, I’d go check on that but today you’re on your own. Investigate, report, discuss. Regardless, I don’t have an iPhone or Touch, so I can’t tell you how good the comic is — a version for those of us (which would be the vast majority of the planet) lacking those devices might be a good idea for the future.

Let’s finish with NEWW™ first:

• Remember those awards videos I told you about the other day? The ones hosted by Jeph Jacques? Now you can see them and judge for yourself why he needed a beer in hand to watch ’em.
• Lots of good coverage of the weekend out there; I’ll particularly point you to Marshall Willenholly’s writeup at MTV Splash Page. The thing about Rick’s reportage is I didn’t remember half the stuff that happened when I was caught up in it instead of making notes. For example, the only thing I recall from the Webcomics Newlywed panel was saying:
  

  Should we use the classic Bob Eubanks question? Where’s the most interesting place that you’ve ever

  … before Holly Post interrupted with:

  My kids are sitting in the front row!

  (classic, but misquoted, answer: That’d be the butt, Bob.) But Marshall was paying attention and got some good detail, and is pushing a lot of good comics to the civilians that haven’t learned their way around our world. No pics of that panel, unfortunately, but others are below the cut.

• Likewise, something I didn’t even notice missing from NEWW™ in all the business was the charity auction — half the money going to the Webcomics Kiva team, and half to rennovation of a local bike trail. Time and logistics kept it from occurring, but it’s coming online (watch this space for details).
• Speaking of webcomics charity, the Karen Ellis benefit auction is now up and running. She’s got a place to live, a panic bag, and some flatpack furnishings, but the need is both great and ongoing.
• Titans of Small Town: Hastings, North, Onstad, one night only in Brooklyn. Ticket information now up.

(more…)

Three hours sleep, not all my clothing arrived with me, technical problems at the client gig, and more. Forgive me if my planned, witty discussion of Howard and Phil joining Kate in being up for major awards, and how the other webcomics show kicks off this weekend (for the fifth time), and how the gang at Digital Strips interviewed the crap out of everybody at NEWW™ (including a hack webcomics pseduojournalist) doesn’t happen.

Instead, photos from NEWW™. Enjoy.

• The Eastworks building was unaware of what was about to hit it: dancing behemoths and webcartoonists fueled by liquid rage and greasy food. Ten minutes in, the crowd was in disarray, fleeing from the brain-eating fury of Krishna Sadasivam, David Willis, and Spike.
• Wait, did I day “brain-eating fury”? I meant, “polite sketch-providing”, from Randy Milholland, Paul Southworth, Angela Melick, and many others who didn’t have the common courtesy to be in focus.
• The Print vs Web vs Bear panel featured Chris Hastings, Jon Rosenberg, the beard of Steven Cloud, Commissioner James Gordon Hastings, and a crowd suitable for a biblical epic. You’ve seen the photos of the Webcomics Weekly panel from others, so please enjoy the sensual stylings of Ryan North as he entertains visitors to our American shores, and the cutest photo of the weekend — a mutually starstruck Rene Engström and Karl Kerschl.

Join us tomorrow when I’m more awake, and we’ll show how it’s all fun in games until somebody loses an eye, how Scott Kurtz got to fight crime, and Ryan North holding delicious meat.

The free half. The breaking point was (Dumbrella Hosting principal, Fleen publisher, and guy who buys my beer) Phillip Karlsson looking at my Twitterless state (and phone that just makes phone calls) dismissively and asking what it’s like in 1997.

Day Two of The Very Webcomics Mazola Orgy was mercifully quieter than Day One. Of all the good ideas associated with NEWW™, Webcartooners don’t do mornings was the best, and things didn’t kick off until noon. There were panels (many thanks to the panelists of “Webcomics Newlyweds”, who made my moderating job look easy by being so damn funny), and sketching, and a slow bleed as creators had to leave to make flights.

Those that were able to stick around to the Offical End were treated to an award ceremony that featured hilarious video, a reenactment of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, a host who was not given an advance look at the video, and the following categories:

• Best Letterer: Rich Stevens, for Diesel Sweeties
• Best On-Line Digital Comic: Chris Hastings, for The Adventures of Dr McNinja
• Most Ants: KC Green, for everything he does
• Historical Inaccuracy Award: Kate Beaton for her history comics (award accepted by Emily Horne)
• Memorial Award: Paul Southworth, for the dearly missed Ugly Hill (award accepted by Jeph Jacques)
• Best Sandwich: Holly Post, for her success at feeding guests and volunteers all weekend
• Most Fucked Up and/or Delicious: Joey Comeau, for his entire body of work
• Superstar: “All Of You” (awwwww), with Ryan North designated to accept on behalf of all of us
• Best! In Show: Danielle Corsetto, for her foofy dress

The best news of the show came at the end of the awards — Webcomics Weekend will be back next year, and with any luck, as good as this year. I realize that it’s customary to say that next year will be better than ever, but honestly? I don’t see how. This event morphed from Let’s have a get-together and keep it casual to Okay, I’ll take care of the fire marshal’s concerns if you can research con insurance in a remarkably short period of time. Registrations filled in two days. I got three dozen sketches (on the theme of Beards and Moustaches) and still managed to miss Rob DenBleyker, John Keogh, Dorothy Gambrell, and about a zillion others. If there had been space, there easily could have been 1500 attendees, judging from reports of the stand-by list. And it was all free to the participants.

It couldn’t have happened without the incrediblly time-compressed efforts of Meredith Gran, Rich Stevens, Jeff Rowland, Holly Post, Vincent LaBate, Jeph and Cristi Jacques, and everybody else in the Dumbrella/Topatoco orbits. It couldn’t have happened without the enthusiastic cooperation of the Eastworks building owner and management. It couldn’t have happened without the volunteers who ran the video equipment, made sure that guests were well supplied with food and drink, and directed traffic in the parking lot. It couldn’t have happened without the creators willing to come in from all corners of the country (and the world!) with little expectation of making enough money to cover the trip.

It couldn’t have happened without you, who care enough about this nascent medium to come tell these creators how much you love their work; next time you see Ryan North, ask him to hold the award for a few minutes because you damn well earned it. It’s going to happen again, and if we catch lightning in a bottle, things will be a little smoother, a little less improvised, and maybe have as charmed an existence as this first one. Watch for the announcements, mark your calendars, line up your vacation days, and I’ll see you there.

Okay, this is gonna be fast because I still have to pack up, get checked out of the hotel, and get back to day two of the fun. In all honesty, things went better than any reasonable person could have expected for day one of an untried convention with an untried staff. Despite the occasional hiccup or missed communication, everybody involved — organizers & staff, exhibitors, and attendees — all seemed to be determined to pull together an enjoy the hell out of themselves. In every way, this determination was successful.

Half an hour before the official open, the first floor of the Eastworks building (where many of the exhibiting creators were set up at tables on either side of a wide hallway) was packed and the crowd didn’t let up for two and a half hours. Almost immediately I ran into Krishna Sadasivam and he innaugurated the new, super-sized Moleskine obtained for this weekend; the theme — beards and moustaches.

The lull came as two heavily-attended panels took place at the same time on the second floor: t-shirt designing (with Rich Stevens, Jeph Jacques, Chris Hastings and Ryan North) and live drawing on the Cintiq (with KC Green) were packed and by all accounts hilarious. My theory is that the hilariousity is a natural consquence of putting very funny people in front of an audience and getting out of their way. For example, I was asked to moderate the first panel of the show (“Print vs Web vs Bear”) a few minutes before it started, and was thrilled to see that the speakers (Chris Hastings, Jon Rosenberg, and the beard of Steven Cloud) had attracted a crowd that filled the 100 chairs and the 100 place standing room. Then again, it didn’t hurt that Commissioner James Gordon Hastings was busy being adorable during the panel.

Similarly, the Halfpixel panel (where they recorded the next Webcomics Weekly in front of a live audience) was possibly the funniest 90 minutes of podcast ever (and ended up with Dave Kellett pulling a Yoko and breaking up the band), and the second panel I moderated (“Drawing From Memory”) ran entirely on the strength of David McGuire, David Willis, and Kris Straub’s ability to build tension and anticipation an audience that couldn’t wait to see what they had drawn (with luck, McGuire will be posting photos). Long story short, if you ever want to torture Willis, give him the task of drawing one of his own characters (Ultra-Car, for those of you playing at home) in fifteen seconds or less.

The day ended up with the greatest thing that’s ever happened in webcomics — rather than trying to decide where to take fifty creators and volunteers to eat (and split the bill) — the Topatoco secret weapon known to the web at Tallahassee Econolodge (real name witheld to protect the innocent) arranged for a dinner spread (and beer!) to be brought in to the Eastworks building and got the money collected well in advance. As the collected creators ate in a building constructed in the 1880s, the possibility arose that everything might collapse and webcomics would be wiped out with only Kate Beaton, John Campbell, John Allison, and Penny Arcade to carry on and rebuild our lost civilization (you read it here first — Kate Beaton is the Secretary of Agriculture of webcomics).

The feeling of community that’s so often found in webcomics was almost tangible in the room; I watched more sincere mutual admiration going on than ever I’ve witnessed. Looking into their eyes, I could see every creator in the room getting fired up and determined … If this person thinks so well of my work, I have to absolutely bring my best work and be worthy of this respect. I saw the basis of decades worth of weekends, conventions, symposia being laid, and every person in the room felt privileged to be there at the start; in 15 years when the new up-and-coming talent wants to know why the assemblage of webcomickers has sushi at the Saturday night gathering, the answer will be “Because we did it at NEWW™ ’09.”

Time for Day Two. Pictures when I get to ’em.

Rhetorical question: is there anything better than retiring to a bar which is installed in a series of tunnels made from massive hand-hewn granite blocks, sitting in a fine leather chair, and drinking scotch with a constantly-shifting parade of webcomickers and fans?

That was the scene in Northampton, MA last night, as the crowds of people with “Webcomics Weekend” stickers made their way from cafe to bar to comic shop to bar to diner to bar to bar to bar in the informal Pub Crawl event.

Creators noted in attendance so far include (and this is off the top of my head, and the hotel’s wireless is slow, so get your own links) Meredith Gran, Rich Stevens, Jeff Rowland, Jeph Jacques, Vincent LaBate (our able hosts for this weekend), Chris Yates, David Willis, KC Green, Spike, Sam Brown, Randy Milholland, Rene Engström, Dave Kellet, Brad Guigar, Scott Kurtz, Kris Straub, David Malki !, Bill Barnes, Gene Ambaum, Karl Kerschl, Ryan Sohmer, Rosscott, Magnolia Porter, Eric Burns-White (okay, he’s best known for Websnark, but he did The Adventures of Brigadier John Stark so I say he counts, dammit), Jeff Zugale, Andy Bell, Jon Rosenberg, Chris Hallbeck, Danielle Corsetto, Jorge Chan god I can’t believe I’m just now remembering Jorge and oh crap I’m forgetting so many T Campbell, Cameron Stewart, Sam Brown, Ryan North, Joey Comeau, Emily Horne, Steven Cloud, Braden Lamb, and I’m certain that I saw Rob DenBlyker too. Probably spoke to him, but crap if I can remember more than the outlines of what’s happened since I arrived yesterday afternoon.

So there you go — the greatest assemblage of webcomickers known to man and it isn’t even officially started yet. These people are my chosen tribe, and it’s still a little overwhelming.

So here’s a travelling thought for you all — I picked up Lars Brown’s North World volume 2 (which you can find serialized online) last week, but just had a chance to read it. It’s a lot of fun, it builds on vol1 nicely, and I can’t tell you too much because the book includes things that haven’t happened in the webcomic yet.

But let’s just say that it’s a nice job of telling Conrad’s story, that it sets up volume 3 by having a deep cast of interesting characters, and that it’s a clever inversion of the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey — sometimes, the interesting things happen when you stop hunting monsters, come back to the ol’ hometown, and become an accountant.