If anybody from the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is handling press info for the upcoming MoCCA Art Fest, I think your email is broken. Contact established! Yay! Also, we’re only a few weeks out, and while the webpage for the Fest has this year’s show poster, the bulk of the information there is still for last year’s show.

Seriously, I love the MoCCA show (and am looking forward to the new venue like nobody’s business), but without at least a list of exhibitors and preliminary schedule of programming, people are going to start to get nervous about whether or not they should come by.

In fact, the one event that I’m certain is going to happen in conjunction with MoCCA is unofficial — Hope Larson would like comickers of the lady persuasion to drop by a get-together the night before for sophisticated adult-type beverage imbibing, cupcakes, and art, art, art. Ladies and Ladies, I give you Drink & Draw Like a Lady. I’ll be wandering around looking at your sketchbooks the next day, where I hope to see amazing art that magically becomes looser, scribblier, and drunker as the pages flip by. Also, if there are any cupcakes left over, I’d be happy to ensure they don’t go to waste.

Lightning Round!

• 100 strips at My Fuzzy Nuts!
• The Ego and The Squid fundraiser for friends to get married in space!
• Tom Mason interview with Miles Grover of Thinkin’ Lincoln!
• I finally get to see Star Trek tonight!

Okay, that last one doesn’t have anything to do with webcomics, but I don’t care. Deal.

I dropped into ye olde locale comicc shoppe yesterday and noticed a small item in the latest Comic Shop News; issue #1143 is their once-a-month listing of everything that’s due to hit the stores next month (that is, June). And in that set of listings (photo above), I noticed something. See it now?

• Also found yesterday: the first Applegeeks book from Dark Horse was on offer, then in my bag, and eventually my home. It’s got to be the heaviest trade paperback yet made from a webcomic — really dense color on weighty paper stock … hefting this makes you feel like you’re reading something substantial.

  Then of course there’s the time scale — these strips date to 2003/2004, prompting one to remember that Ananth Panagariya and Mohammad Haque have been at this a loooong time … and succeeding (sometimes inadvertantly) since the beginning.

• Also also to be found yesterday with a suitable webcomicky tie-in: Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #1. Here’s the deal — I really don’t read superhero comics. There will be exceptions, naturally; Warren Ellis‘s name on the spine will always pique my interest, and I’ll buy just about anything by Amanda Conner because she’s a sweetheat and I adore her sense of character design.

  And Chris Eliopoulos, who may have cornered the market on getting corporate-owned characters to lighten the hell up and be funny. Case in point, L&TPA, which serves to get all the goofball animal characters in the Marvel continuity and send ’em off on an adventure. Even better, Karl Kerschl did the cover! If the Big Two made more comics like this, they’d get a lot more money from me.

• I know that I shouldn’t have to ask, and forgive me for doing so, but I couldn’t live with myself if by some chance you had been missing out on this. Everbody is reading the collaborations from Laserpony Studios, right? Take one part Anthony and one part Emily, mix well, and let the magic happen.

Wow, it seems like just yesterday that Alexander Danner told us all about the Massachusetts Library Association’s conference, and the attendant graphic novelry thereunto? More on same from Raina Telgemeier, this time with a perspective from the microphone side of some of the panels.

• Dresden Codak update, with an unofficial declaration that today is Literary Technique Day, Vocabulary Day, and Cross-Tabulation Day all in one.
• Neil Gaiman wrote something that’s not about webcomics at all, something that I’ve read five times since he posted it last night, something that you (here, I’m using you in the sense of a creative individual with people who consume your work) that you should point out to members of your audience who bitch about your work not being what they want it to be.

  In the context of a reader asking if it’s unreasonable to be annoyed that George R. R. Martin doesn’t release books in a series more promptly, Gaiman opines:

  I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this:

  George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

  This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now. [emphasis original]

  The piece goes on for a bit after and you (and here I’m using you in a broader sense than before that, one that encompasses each and every individual reading this, including you personally) should go read it in its entirety right now because it’s a beautiful piece of writing besides being a lovely manfiesto on the proper relationship between creator and audience. Should I be on the wrong side of that line in future, please be sure to point me back to Gaiman’s essay.

Also known as Happy Day, Awesome Day, and This Is Why I Have Internet Day. After six months, we get a lateral story jump to the fate of a hat, and a suspiciously-familiar giant. Even better is Ramón Pérez’s news on updates:

I found some folks were often confused with the two page updates on Tuesdays of days passed. So I’m going to try something different and spread the updates out over two days. So, for the foreseeable future (we’ll see how it works out) updates will be on TUESDAYS and THURSDAYS with a page going live at 12:01 am on each day.

That said, this week, being that I’ve been away for a while, there is going to be a new page everyday this week till Friday! So please return tomorrow, Thursday and Friday for more kukuburi! [emphasis mine]

That sound you hear? Webcomics fans doing the happy dance. Speaking of long-absent webcomics, I’m probably the last person to point out that Platinum Grit updated, but to be perfectly honest I had to go re-read most of the previous chapters to remind myself what was going on. Gonna have to go buy the print version, oh darn.

• So, Rupert Murdoch has decided the way to save his media properties is to declare the end of the internet as we know it. Specifically, he’s decided that micropayments are the new black. Given that there’s some experience over here vis-a-vis a content type that tried micropayments vs. giving stuff away, you’d think they might have enquired as to the viability of this plan. Should we tell him?
• From Alexander Danner, a report on the Massachusetts Library Association’s annual conference week, with a final day full of panels specific to graphic novels & webcomics. I was going to point you to some excerpts from his con report, but it’s too good to chop down to a pull-quote. Lot of context, lot of good stuff about where the comics medium (in all its forms) is headed. Miss it at your peril.

Let’s jump in, shall we?

• Will the world ever tire of telling Kate Beaton how much she rocks? Not this corner of it. Nor, apparently, the corner that included TCAF over the weekend, as the Doug Wright awards for outstanding Canadian cartooning were awarded on Saturday, and our Kate took the award for Best Emerging Talent. Everybody feel good for Kate!
• Speaking of TCAF (I so have to go in 2011), much coverage may be found around the nets, but I particularly liked Christopher Bird‘s take on things, especially this bit:
  

  ITEM! At one of the panels the various panel members were playing “what indie band is each cartoonist.” IE, “Peter Bagge is R.E.M.” I mention this because Scott McCloud’s daughter said that Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics would be the Ramones, because “only the words change.”

  Bird doesn’t say which daughter it was, but Sky and Winter are both pretty quick, so we’ll award them each ten awesome points and a piggyback ride from Mr North.

• Back today: Anders Loves Maria! Rene Engström has said that she’s moving into the end-story, which is both awesome and horrible. I want to know where these characters end up, and I don’t want the story to be over.
• Man, David Willis should just be given the entire Sunday comics page (except for Doonesbury, Pearls Before Swine, and FoxTrot) to do with as he wishes. Once again, he funkily hits it out of the ballpark.
• Internet Jesus is pretending to want to know about your webcomic, and has declared it Webcomics Week at his forums in celebration:
  

  You do a webcomic? Tell me about it here. Not more than one or two images, please, or else the thread takes forever to load. Don’t forget the bloody link.

  Do not disappoint the man — he wields the Chair Leg of Truth.

• Finally, Valerie D’Orazio does a supremely good job of not falling down laughing as she points us all to maybe the stupidest thing said today about the internets:
  

  “If you give away your premium content for free, you are basically hastening your own demise, signing your own death warrant,” said Laura Martin, a media analyst with Soleil-Media Metrics.

  Forget our little online funnybook stories — the counterexamples on this one are too numerous to list. Unless, as I suspect, her audience is made up solely of people that do not actually produce any premium content, but merely make their cut by charging huge percentages of eventual retail for basically moving said content from place to place, in which case, it ain’t the giving-away that’s signed those warrants, it’s called progress.

Got my press credentials for San Diego Comic Con! I’m a real (fake) webcomics (hack pseduo-) journalist now. Also, a real boy, and a model for emulation. You doubt? I received this very day a LiveJournal posting that is just this side of Help us, Obi-Wan Garyobi, you’re our only hope. Yep, gonna be one a’ them days. Continuing the “wooo” theme, is there anything more “wooo” worthy than seventeenth century raps and/or freakouts? I say Booo! to the thought that there could be.

You know what? It’s the first sunny day after a solid week of rain and drear. Let’s finish this up quick.

• New podcast for your listening pleasure, from the fertile minds of Jamie Noguchi, Marty Day, and Rosscott. I haven’t heard it yet (that dang job thing getting in the way again), but I note that the minds behind The Wonderful World of Webcomics have actually recorded four podcasts prior to this, their first release into the wild. Getting better at the podcasting skills, or merely building up a buffer? Either way, it bodes well for your listening pleasure.
• Jimbo Hillin (and if you can’t trust a guy named Jimbo, who can yo trust”?) writes to tell us:
  

  The Visual Effects Webcomic, Wireheads, is coming up on it’s third anniversary, this May 15th. We just passed through the 300 comic mark last week. Also, we’re looking forward to unleashing the Zombie Bunnies on the hordes of unsuspecting comickites at Comic-Con again this Summer. Look for us on the back aisle of Small Press, table S-13 against the wall.

  I knew it! I wasn’t at SDCC last year, but I knew it was infested with zombies. All con-goers are advised to take prudent and adequate precautions against the walking dead.

• Finally, new webcomic, presented here as an object lesson — if you draw and draw and draw, your art will improve. We see here the difference that less than two months of regular updates will make: at first, stick figures, getting more primitive by the day. Three dozen strips later, still not going to be mistaken for a member of the photorealism school, but definitely cartoony characters that belong to the creator rather than just anybody. Our collective hat off to Evan Diaz for sharing the progression with all of us. Also, something about those facial expressions I really like; there’s a real sense of manic energy there.

When last we left our intrepid heroine (nearly six months gone!), she was leaping into the vast unknown and had just learned the snail’s name. What’s that, you don’t know Kukuburi? For shame — get caught up before it returns on May 12th! Everybody else, mark your calendars for the big day.

• Scott McCloud gets a day’s downtime at home in the midst of his neverending travels, and does he sleep in like a normal guy? Nope — he takes a swipe at the shape of nearly everything and/or engages in equine necromancy. Interesting implications when designing your next website, though. The shape of the screen part, not the dead horse thing. Ew.
• So it seems that the ongoing crisis in newspapers has prompted people from the boardrooms to the beat to opine that the solution to all broadsheet woes (though nearly everything’s tabloid size these days) is to start charging for online content. Over here you got Rupert Murdoch, head of NewsCorp (and owner of MySpace) declaring war on free content. Actually, that’s slightly exaggerated; he actually said:
  

  The current days of the internet will soon be over.

  So that’s all right, then. For a more in-the-trenches perspective, I give you David Simon’s testimony before the US Senate; before having a hand in creating two of the best TV shows ever, Simon was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. His prescription is:

  “An industry-wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base”, allied to relaxing anti-trust laws and help with enforcing copyright.

  So if newspapers all go paid (and I’m not convinced at this time it can happen), whither webcomics¹?

  Will we see them get in on all that sweet, sweet subscription revenue? I find it telling that it’s tough to find webcomics still using subscriptions these days. Will free carry a stigma as people wonder how much it can be worth if nobody pays for it? Or will free content become even more popular in a world where more of online has costs associated? I’m tending towards that last one, but would love to hear any developed counterarguments. Tell me what you think, people.

_______________
¹ Yes, yes, you could argue that every syndicated comic also appears on the syndicate’s website, and that subscription fees are necessary to gain unfettered access to the archives. And yes, just this week we’ve talked about how the distinction isn’t properly between medium of publication, but between corporate-owned and independent creators; all of that takes too long to qualify outside of a footnote that you obsessive types are reading, so for all of that we’ll use the shortcut term webcomics.

You still see a long-trending retreat from subscriptions in webcomics, with the significant exception of adult content, where the subscription has the added benefit of providing cover in the form of age verification. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go browse through the no-longer-subscription-walled archives of Digger.

So first it looked like Diamond had told Box Brown that Xeric winners would not be held to their order minimums. Then Diamond clarified their position and said that minimums would apply, but with some flexibility. Today, Brown was told (and has paperwork to prove it) that Diamond will be carrying Love Is A Peculiar Type of Thing, so tell your local comic shop you want a copy for the June 3rd release date. Oh, and hooray!

• Speaking of LIAPTOT, which started over at Top Shelf 2.0, which is the webcomics branch of a very good dead-tree comics company. Similarly, Zuda has been positioned as the webcomics branch of a different dead-tree comics company, and for those of you thinking about submitting, Valerie d’Orazaio linked to an interesting post from a Zudacompetitor about the Zudaexperience. Bottom line, the advice given would be helpful to anybody making the leap from dead-tree to web (or more precisely, corporate to creator-owned/indy), and can be generalized to apply to more than just a contest experience.
• My friend Brett sent me a link to a webcomic I’ve been enjoying the crap out of the last couple days: the experimental series known as 2D Goggles goes all difference engine on us with the totally awesome adventures of Ada, Lady Lovelace. Thrills! Spills! Swashbuckling adventure! And Babbage totally hates musicians, as confirmed by a completely different creator! Start at that first link and work your way forward as Ada kicks so much ass and Twitters about it (and fie! Fie, I say, upon Johanna Draper Carlson for finding it before I did).
• Finally, I don’t think I’ve linked to Odysseus the Rebel before today, even though I’ve been enjoying it for some time; it casts the most famous of human tricksters as a rebel against the cosmological model of his time. This Odysseus has no need of gods, and determines to live and die without them. This is deeply amusing to some of the Olympians, but Poseidon and Hermes realize something: it’s a change in how one man (and eventually, all of them) perceive their place in the universe, which is very threatening to divinities who are used to worship. It runs MWF until the story ends, which is getting to be pretty soon now, so get caught up to the story and watch it wrap up in the coming weeks. Good stuff there.

Oh man does it feel good to be back in the swing of things. A whole bunch of stuff went by in the past ten days that I’m never going to catch up on, so I’m declaring an Informational Amnesty and giving myself a pass. If you sent in email about something that happened in that timeframe, I’m very sorry that the moment has passed. From here, we look to … THE FUTURE.

• In the immediate future, the biennial Toronto Comics Art Fest runs this weekend, with a slew of indy- and web-type comickers in attendance (and even more that’ll be there for the fun of walking around). Tell everybody I said hi.
• In the even more immediate future (like, now), there’s a new webcomics meme that’ll be especially resonant for those of you that grew up in the northeastern quarters of ‘Merica: it’s Fudgie the Whale week! For those of you going Wha?, Fudgie the Whale is one of the theme ice-cream cakes you can get from Carvel ice cream shops, one of the finest of all Zombie-American-run corporations, and a beloved cultural icon in its own right.
• Even more now-ish, something for all you webcomics consumers of merchandise to consider: US postal rates are going up next week, so if you get your buying in now, you can maybe save a couple bucks on shipping.
• Finally, in that part of the future that is so immediate that it slips back and actually becomes the past, it’s been a good week for webcomics books arrivals — Octopus Pie volume 3 (An Interstate Oasis), Phables volume only (Who Needs Trees When You Have Green Awnings?), and Kate Beaton volume one of God I hope many (Never Learn Anything From History) have all arrived in the past week, and were invaluable in trying times. Particularly wonderful are the personal connections I feel for these three books:
  • I own two pages from the Octopie book
  • I have heard the story about Brad Guigar losing his shit in traffic in person
  • I have dibs on one of the originals in NLAFH if Kate Beaton ever decides to sell her originals (and in the meantime, the paper stock is so heavy, it’s practically an archival print on each page — were it not sold out, I could buy another copy and carefully cut out every page, giving myself suitable-for-framing wall decor)

  Seriously you guys these books are so good, you should buy the first two right now and subscribe to the Topatoco Twitter account to learn when NLAFH is back in print, or pick up one of the copies reserved for MoCCA or TCAF, which brings us full circle to … THE FUTURE.

Thanks to everybody for their well-wishing over the past week; my siblings are out of the bad part of the hospital (the part that ends in “intensive care”) and into the good part (the one where boredom and crappy food are the big headaches). I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but I want to take a moment to thank Brad Guigar and Kate Beaton for seeing to it that you were kept busy last week.

Normal posts (to the extent that we’ve ever had anything normal around here) resume tomorrow.