It takes a weather eye to bring 100% truth-facts to you, the webcomics-news-craving public, but that’s the kind of clear-eyed mission that we at Fleen pretend to have. Here’s the wheat teased from today’s chaff:

1. Everything I said about Topatoco yesterday is now outdated. Fleen congratulates Rowland for selling out when the selling was good, and hopes that the dumptruck full of money he received is enough to fund both his smiles and his dreams. Edit to add: Disregard.
2. Goats is entering the last of its tween years. This time next year, no more sparkly vampires; instead, Jon Rosenberg will be loathed by his creation an incredible 46 hours every day, eventually dying of a broken heart when it runs off with some jerk webcomic that’s not good enough.
3. Rooby Moon (kindly see here and here to refresh your memories) is revealed this very day as both gone and not gone. Let’s let creator Chris MacNeil explain:
   

   Rooby Moon is not dead, just hovering. I’m a stay-home, home school dad for my two young proletariats. This should make for more time to work, and it does, but I have far too many irons in the fire (all un-paying irons), and I run miserable, feeble, sputtering fires.

   I stopped Rooby Moon last year for what was to be only a few weeks, or (I thought) at most a month, in order to prepare it for submission. Actually I was (and am) preparing a spin-off of Rooby Moon called Ogden’s Pond, which uses those last couple of month’s animal character’s– Ogden, Jebediah, Fletch, etc. This has taken me until now to complete. Who would have thought that writing three lame character descriptions and a cover letter would take half a year? How’s that for procrastinating?

   Of course, my unwillingness to actually be rejected once again by the syndicates is only part of the extreme time lag. I have decided, along with other time-consuming, diversionary edits, to replace the text on the strips for the submission with a digital font– one real drawback to my strip is the panels are busy and wordy, and tend to become a lot of tiny images and small, difficult to read text when reduced to the postage stamp size newspaper comic strips are printed.

   Drawing political cartoons up until the election last fall was also part of the initial stop of work on Rooby Moon. I did 33 of them, not all of which make me cringe as I look them over once again. Some I actually like. The last introduced both a more comic strip feel and a couple of characters that I will probably incorporate into my comic strip work.

   So, to make a short story long, I am still writing Rooby Moon and Ogden’s Pond strips, and am doing the last editing of the Ogden’s Pond submission. I will have new work up soon. If you have made it this far through this porridge, thank you for enduring.

   Thank you for letting know the score, Chris! We look forward to whatever form Rooby (and now Ogden’s Pond) might take, although we suspect that now might now be the best time to try to get syndicated; by rough estimate, the possible market for syndicated comics has contracted by about a quarter since you started your submission packet, and that pace sadly seems to be accelerating. But toss us an URL when all is said, done, and (re-)launched, and we’ll be right there alongside you, enjoying your gorgeous linework.