For those looking for the Howard Tayler interview that was promised yesterday, it’s coming. In the meantime, consider the following, please.

• Speaking of Tayler, changes o’ plenty over at Blank Label’s homepage in the past few weeks. Over roughly the past ten-twelve days, we saw several comics failing to update daily; Paul Southworth’s Ugly Hill leaving the strip lineup and list of comics at the top of the page but not the “Brady Bunch” thumbnail set; the same for Paul Taylor’s Waspi Square; the addition of a link for new member Dave Reddick’s Legend of Bill but pointing to a not-yet active placeholder on the page; and today, the return of Steve Troop (who, by the way, is one of the creators interviewed in that new Calvin and Hobbes sorta-bio)’s Melonpool.

  We at Fleen are have not yet determined if these are programming issues or membership shakeups, but one might reasonably assume the latter: Southworth, at least, has launched his new strip wil Bill Barnes, which would complicate the act of keeping the strip at BLC because BLC is a different kind of collective; to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only one out there that merges the revenues of its members.

  Other high-profile collectives like Halfpixel or Dumbrella are really just a common brand name (aka A bunch of lowlife emo-candyraver drug-addled web-cartoonists I’m loosely associated with. We have a sort of mutual non-aggression pact.) without intermixed finances from things like ads. We may be seeing BLC transforming itself from a corporatized collective (CoCo?) to just the regular kind. Or it could be bugs in the code — I have not received definitive information from anybody in a position to know, and I imagine we’ll all find out what the deal is soon enough anyway. Lesson to take away: webcomics journalism is hard.

  Also, if you’re going to have a collective, think about your lineup changes carefully and always compare them against the most important yardstick of all — Will this make Gary change his morning browsing habits? If so, it’s a bad change because Gary is a creature of habit and his brain takes a while to wake up.

• 24 Hour Comic Day is coming up this weekend! So far, Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub seem to be setting up a Dallas branch of the effort, with KC Green coming into town to join in on the fun. My guess is that all three of their twitterfeeds are going to hilarious once the sleep deprivation sets in. Who else is planning on tempting the gods of caffeine and madness?
• New Yorkers and those who love them: the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, as part of their regular Thursday-night event series, will have a panel discussion tomorrow evening on The Comics Press, including friend o’ webcomics Heidi MacDonald, along with Aaron McQuade & Evie Nagy and Douglas Wolk. 7:00pm at the museum, $5 general admission, free for members.
• Also starting tomorrow (and running through the weekend), the Marbella International Film Festival (that would be Spain) will include in its screening schedule a short based on Doug Wilson’s webcomic, K-9 Lives. In honor of the screening, I’ve been trawling Wilson’s archive (only about 100 updates) of wordless comics. The navigation’s a bit of a pain (driven by drop-down list, be forewarned), but the wordless story of a dog with a cat attached to its buttocks is more entertaining than anything describable by that story hook has a right to be.

So we’re coming to the end of Randy Milholland’s month-long everything happens on one day experiment, which not being enough of an artistic challenge by itself, has had the difficulty factor amped up by juggling at least four separate storylines, one of which is a canon crossover with Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots (which, by the way, is celebrating a five year anniversary this week) wedding event. Whew.

Weddings, of course, have a long history in webcomics crossover land, and it’s always fun to see Milholland’s take on another creator’s characters — especially Candy. She’s pure evil. But Milholland (whose work is essentially an optimistic view of humanity, albeit one that hates to admit it) has had plenty of nasty characters of his own — basically, his entire cast are horrible people — and he’s had a tendency to find ways to redeem them, deepen them, or at least give them a chance to prove they aren’t entirely stupid. Of all his vile creations, only Twitchy-Hug and Avogadro (coincidentally, both dead) never earned a sympathetic portrayal, so I’m pretty confident that the hard Candy shell may hide something like a soft, squishy center. Or maybe not. But damn if I don’t want to find out.

• Speaking of vile characters, a real-life example of one kicked in the front door of Ellie Connelly creator Indigo Kelleigh last night, leaving him with an insecure home and not-easily-covered repair work. Want to toss a hearty, karmic, “Screw you” to the would-be burglar? Kelleigh’s got a fundraiser going on, and I think maybe we need to start a petition to the government of the state of Oregon that permits Kelleigh to install a full moat complete with vicious animals.

  Either that, or should the burglar ever be caught, that every reader of his comic be permitted to give him a good, full-swing smack across the face (offer only good to those familiar with the plot and characters, so if you want to be able to punch a complete stranger that desparately needs it, start reading Ellie Connelly today).

• It’s apparently Hans Gruber Day in webcomics today. Was there a memo I missed? I’ll just have to content myself with — RYAN! Yay, he’s back, he’s back, and looking so dapper and … grown up? My mind, she is blown.
• In case you missed the comments thread from yesterday, Howard Tayler came back from the Success in Cartooning seminar (conference? meeting?) with a head full of amazement and ideas; as he’s too smart to put more than a summary of his experiences online when he can get me to type it for him (cue the dancing — it’s not quite the “I got paid three times” dance, but shares many of the same moves), we’ll be doing an interview on What He Learned And Why You Should, Too. Look for that later this week.

‘Cause — you know, sometimes things happen all at once, and sometimes I’m scrambling for stories.

• SPX roundups are available from the usual suspects, with notes from exhibitors ranging (paraphrasing slightly here) from It rocked to It really rocked and I sold all the stuff I brought. Sorry to have missed it — will do my best to attend next year (although apparently, I was there in spirit).
• A’ course, one of the highlights of SPX would be the Ignatz Awards, and Fleen congratulates all of the winners, but particularly Cat Garza for his Outstanding Online Comic, Year of the Rat. Video here if you like, but it appears that there was no gorilla — I’m not sure that I can ever love the Ignatz Awards again without a guy in a gorilla suit !
• Along with the Ignatzen, the Shuster Awards (for outstanding work by Canadian creators — anybody calling them “The Eisners, eh?” will be beaten) happened over the weekend as well; congratulations to the very talented Cameron Stewart for taking the presitigious Webcomics/Bandes Dessinées Web award for Sin Titulo (which you should be reading if you’re not, but if you’re not, don’t start with the latest installment, which will melt your face off), and the very talented Kean Soo for taking the just as prestigious Comics for Kids/Bandes Dessinées pour Enfants award for Jellaby (leaving open the possibility of a followup win next year for the second volume of Jellaby’s adventures).
• Lastly, this weekend saw a confab in Las Vagrus, Nevadruh (organized by Chad Carpenter of Tundra and Bill Kellogg, a marketer) on the topic of success in cartooning. Alan Gardner posted summaries of the presentations, of which one stands out for readers of this blog:
  

  Howard Tayler, the creator of The [viz.] Schlock Mercenary was the last speaker and the lone representative of the webcomic free model. [emphasis original]

  By my count, there were nine speakers, which means that webcomics achieved a record high representation at this gathering, but still — one? Of all the people that have started strips and found success in the past decade, how many have quit their day jobs and gone full-time in print as opposed to web?

  I’m not saying, Print sucks, web is the only model to success! — I am decidedly not saying that — but I think that if you’re going to talk about how to find/keep success in a world where print is rapidly receding, it would be helpful to find more than one person from the (let’s be kind and call it) non-traditional world, for surely many of them have followed different paths and would have different lessons to impart. Particularly because the first sentence in the announcement of said seminar read-and-I-quote:

  Have you ever wanted to know how to succeed in the world of newspaper and/or web comics?

  Just sayin’.

So I’m guessing that the occasional explosion and plume of smoke/flame from over that way would be the trail of destruction left by various webcomickers on their drive south to Bethesda, Maryland for SPX. Those flying are, I’m guessing, about half a rum-and-coke from getting tazed by air marshals.

• For those of you heading that way, look for a small (potentially drunk and/or naked) woman named Bree Rubin and tell her “thanks” for me, ’cause she tipped me to a new webcomic that’s a continuation of a play:
  

  Disgraced Comics is the new off-shoot of Disgraced Productions, offering original online visual dramatic storytelling. And in our first online comic, The Adventures of Max Quarterhorse, you will get to see the first-ever Independent Theater-to-comics crossover. The Adventures of Max Quarterhorse picks up where Disgraced Productions’ 2008 play, All Kinds of Shifty Villains, leaves off. [emphases original]

  The first half of the first ten-page issue of TAoMQ are online now, starting here, and the art (by Miriam Gibson) is damn pretty. Can’t think of anybody that’s done this kind of cross-media use of webcomics yet, so hats off to Robert Attenweiler (creator of Max Quarterhorse) for taking the artistic leap.

• Speaking of webcomics-slash-other-artistic-medium (as opposed to webcomics slash, which is full of Ryan North and Jeph Jacques and squishy noises), the last time I attended SPX (and goodness, was that nearly two years ago), I thought about webcomics as a distinct medium:
  

  We’ve really reached that happy point where the distinction between indy/small press comics and webcomics is largely academic.

  … was the conclusion. Although we at Fleen continue to use the word “webcomic” as a signifier, really, all it signifies is a means of distribution within the larger realm of comics. I bring this up because there’s an interesting discussion about the separateness of webcomics vis a vis comics over at the Transmission-X forums that’s worth your time. There’s a good level of thinkin’ going on, and given that TX are Canadian (and the conversation is in the context of a Canadian comics industry award), it’s exceedingly polite. Nice to see so many people thinking along these lines.

• Finally, quick note that Johanna Draper Carlson (who’ll be trawling the aisled at SPX on Saturday) has caught an interesting tidbit: the Android phone platform (aka “Google phone”) has a new category coming up in its applications market — comics. More than one person declared the iPhone to be an ideal mobile platform for comics (especially of the webbish variety), but the open API and lack of Apple approval at the Android Market may make it an even better platform. I know for a fact that at least one creator designing comics for a mobile generation made sure to test against the Android G1 (which, full disclaimer, is my phone of choice) in addition to the more ubiquitous Jesus Phones and Crackberries. Could be interesting times ahead.

Sick, people, sick!

• Whoops, there’s mini-Grote … had I been paying closer attention, I might have noticed the characters introduced on Monday and Tuesday in Bad Machinëry are the crime-busting youths of Tackleford; with Shauna and Charlotte now present, it appears that BM has settled into a secondary school story (as much of SGR was in the last couple of years, with Esther and The Boy being so prominent). Anybody know how long university lasts in England — if we’re three years on, maybe the older generation are about done with their schoolin’.
• Got my copy of xkcd volume 0 in the mail yesterday; plenty of randomness in the marginalia — page numbers in various bases, code snippets and clues, puzzles o’ plenty to be solved. Me, I plan on sitting back and letting others crack ’em and post their solutions because I’m a lazy, lazy man (but, in my defense, no less a genius than Chuck Jones noted that it takes a smart person to get away with being lazy). Maybe the most interesting part of xv0 is the lack of the traditional copyright page; in its place is a Creative Commons page, with a Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license.
• Curiously enough, this is only one of two books I read last night with such language up front, the other being the first collection of The Glass Urchin by Amy Bogin (who goes by “Ami B.” online), which features an Attribution-Noncommerical-Share Alike 3.0 license. Given that so many webcomickers are releasing strips that appear online for free, I wonder if this will become a trend. Anyhoo, the book debuts at SPX this weekend (thanks for the advance copy, Ami!), which means that I know how the next five strips that will run online will go, because they’re included here. I get to see them and you have to wait, moo ha ha ha.

Sure, there’s awesome stuff in Bethesda, like John Campbell’s debut Pictures for Sad Children book — don’t buy all of them, because the leftovers will go on sale online next week. Oh, and I guess Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz will have a new Dresden Codak book available. And other attendees (missed yesterday) will include Dylan Meconis (tabling with Carol Burrell) with a new print, and Dave Shabet and Evan Dahm getting a last-minute table assignment.

And that’s not even considering Raina Telgemeier giving away two galley copies of her forthcoming graphic novel, SMILE:

I’m also holding a raffle and a contest! I have a few advance-reader galleys of SMILE available, and I’d like to give them away. There are two ways to win:

Raffle! Come fill out a raffle ticket at our table, any time before 4:30 PM on Sunday. I will draw a winner at 5 PM.

Contest! Tell me a horror story about your teeth! You have to come and tell me your story in person, also any time before 4:30 PM on Sunday. I will choose a winner at 5 PM. Most horrific dental story wins.

Man, I have a great horrific dental story, too. I won’t go into it here, because I realize that some people are squeamish; if you have a strong stomach, the short version is below the cut. Suffice it to say, nearly 20 years later I am still fully prepared to run down a respectable member of the dental profession in cold blood in front of his terrified family, then kick my car into reverse and repeat until the cops drag me away.

But I promised you good news for those not going to SPX, and that would be the First Ever Topatoco Tag Sale:

[W]e ain’t no second-rate ham-shop runnin’ T-shirts out the back of an off-label methadone distillery either — we’re the world’s largest graphical internet entertainment licensing firm, and we got literally twenty dozen different designs that we throw away on a daily basis. We are straight-up and down-low professional and the side effect of all this legitimate-businessin’ is that we got tee-shirts in every orifice and stacked up to reach the danged rafters.

Solution? TAG SALE. This Saturday, September 26, we are opening our doors and urging you, a bunch of strangers, to come paw through a giant stash of our clean cotton miscellany. That’s right — the TopatoCo offices will be open to the discount-loving public for a one-day bargain-basement housecleaning hootenanny. [emphasis original]

Note to every random entertainment company that sends me press releases — use the words “methadone distillery” in your boilerplate, and I’m far more likely to run with it.

(more…)

SPX is coming up in a few days and dammit I won’t be there because virtually every cool creator is going to be. You should check out all of the webcomicky people, which list includes — but probably not exhaustively so — the following creators (big breath now): Aaron, Ami, Box, Bree, Bryan, Carla, Carol, Chris, Danielle, Dave, David, Dern, Emily, Erika, James, Jeph, Jess, Joey, John, John, John, Jon, Julia, Kate, Marion, Mer, Raina, Rich, Sara, Spike, Sam, and Scott. Whew!

For added fun, Box Brown has a list of must-buy books, and The X-Man will be wandering the floor on Saturday.

• Know who won’t be at SPX (besides me?) Liz Cusack Greenfield. ‘s been a while since Ms Liz stepped away from webcomics, but that doesn’t mean she’s given up drawing. Behold: magazine spot illos, which I’ll take because I love her stuff so much. Should she ever decide to return to the reprobate-filled world of [web]comics, I’ll be waiting with bells on. On what? I hear you cry. None of your damn business.
• Finally, thanks to Webcomics-dot-com for reminding me: 24 Hour Comic Day is coming up! From the aforementioned w-d-c, thoughts by Trev Wood as to why 24HCD is something you should be in on; read it, accept the wisdome, then stock up on the No-Doz and Jolt cola, sharpen up your Sharpies, and get crackin’ oh my sleep-deprived droogs.

Busy weekend.

• There’s a strip and a half that launched today — half because Bad Machinëry is a continuation of John Allison’s Tackleford Stories, albeit with a “three years later” prepended. Who is this young protagonist that we see? And might his older sister be Charlotte Grote? There’s a similarity there, but I’m not sure. Dang, one update and already I’m hooked by the mystery. Anybody that goes to SPX this weekend (alas, I can’t make it), tell Allison I said, “Well done, good sir!” No improvising, use those exact words only.
• The whole launch, natcherly, would be the hinted-at Paul Southworth/Bill Barnes collaboration, Not Invented Here; it’s not a spinoff of Unshelved, but since we’re in Crossover, Ahoy! territory this week, they at least share a reality (and longtime readers of this page will recall the dangers inherent in such situations). Let’s hear what the writer has to say on the subject:
  

  Since Gene Ambaum and I first created Unshelved, a comic strip drawn from Gene’s experiences as a librarian, people have asked me why I didn’t start a comic strip based on my two decades in the software business. After several false starts it’s finally ready.

  This time around I wanted to write, not draw. I was lucky enough to snag one of my favorite cartoonists, Paul Southworth. Paul is one of the most talented and respected artists in the business, and also a really funny and sweet guy.

  Not Invented Here by Bill Barnes and Paul Southworth runs Monday through Thursday every week. I hope you enjoy it as much as you enjoy Unshelved, and I also hope you’ll tell your friends about both strips.

  (Speaking of which, don’t worry: Gene and I will continue to make Unshelved untli the heat-death of the Universe or until it stops supporting us, whichever comes first.)

  So that’s all right then — I get Southworth on strippin’ four days a week, Barnes gets another project to keep him busy (and trust me — this is not a dude you want to have free time if you value your sanity), and the computer programming demographic (and surely, the computer-savvy nerd demo is underserved at the moment) gets another webcomic, and we’re all happy “untli” the inevitable killing spree. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts, kids!

• Speaking of kids enjoying things, by all accounts the immediate vicinity of Columbus, Ohio had its face rocked off on Saturday by the WEXTRAVAGANZA ( ZA Za za za), which is a much better name than that “It’s Wedding!” thing I came up with. Let’s share a little excerpt of the actual wedding ceremony of David Willis and Maggie Weidner:
  

  May this union be blessed, and may the seven seas echo with tales of your love wherever the Jolly Roger flies. Your fleets are now one, and its sails have unfurled. You may both kiss.

  SMOOCH-O-RAMA

  Fellow pirates, scalliwags, rascals, and buccaneers, I am honored to present Admirals David and Maggie Willis as husband and wife. Yo ho ho, me hearties!

  CANNONS FIRE

  Also, there was gun violence in the middle of the rite. Awesome. Congratulations, you crazy pirate-lovin’ wackos!

Promoting this from the comments because it’s great: Tim Tylor notes that a webcomicista has now achieved the last remaining category of noteworthiness, namely a walk of fame at a mall in Sparks, Nevada. Awesome!

In other news:

• Ha, ha! Webcomic artists have stubbly-shaved heads and pink mohawks and are angry about their success! That Chance Browne, or possibly Brian and/or Gregg Walker, sure has our number! Unfortunately, an estimated 83.95% (with a margin of error of +/- 106%) of their audience has never heard of “webcomics”, so the joke is kind of lost on them! By the way, it’s likely that the link to that strip will be gone in a few days, so head on over to Josh Fruhlinger’s webplace where it will be preserved forever; you can trust Josh — he’s got a place in AV Club Heaven).
• Side note: I was flipping through this week’s CSN and noticed that the Dark Horse edition of Sinfest Volume 2 is due in stores next month (or March, or maybe November?). Memory jogged: Volume 1 was due in June, but I don’t recall seeing it in my local shop (which is normally very well stocked), nor at the Dark Horse booth in San Diego, or anywhere since. It’s certainly listed at various online storefronts, but I’m curious — has anybody seen this book in the wild?
• One of the pleasures of writing for this blog is getting to see new work; I got an email a while back from a creator about a new title launching; I usually let those percolate for a couple months and then take a look at the archive — a goodly percentage never manage more than a handful of updates, so it’s as much a time-investment thing as a work-out-the-new-art-kinks thing. I was sorely tempted to break that self-imposed rule and dive in from the beginning because “Jason” (which was the name signed; the webcomic in question is credited to “Jason Dobbins”) promised to swear allegiance to my moustache (speaking of which, everybody knows about the AMI, right?). But on occasion readers of new comics start writing to me and if a new strip has people interested in it enough to prod me, there’s probably something worth checking out; so though Tales of the Eighth Grade Nothing is only about six weeks and twenty updates old, I went to take a peek.

  First impression: really nice, unified design to the site, which is presented like the front of a classroom — middle school standard cursive letters (seriously, has anybody ever used that uppercase Q except maybe Fred Quimby?) form the upper wall border, a clock ticks off the long minutes until 3:00pm, and the strip itself fills the blackboard. In a particularly clever visual element, the navigation controls are chalkmarks on the board, which makes them an unobtrusive, organic part of the site.

  The art has a little Ryan Estrada here, a little Terry Colon in the heyday of Suck there, (editorial aside: apparently, some content filters don’t like the proximity of the words “colon” and “suck” … I think that the people that decide what’s nasty and what’s not have more depraved imaginations than anybody they’re actually blocking editorial aside over), and a whole lot of chunky linework and very easily distinguished character designs. Honestly, I can’t say enough about artists that bother to give their creations easily-distinguishable silhouettes — it makes reading so much simpler.

  Storywise, it’s a bit too early to tell, but you’ve already got your first-day-of-school jitters, unrequited love, flashbacks to embarassing uncontrolled classroom boners, and hot cruel girls who went to bosom camp over the summer. In other words, I’m breaking out in a mild sweat remembering what a nonstop horrorshow junior high school¹ was, which means I suppose it’s accomplishing exactly what it should and that’s all right.

  Finally, Dobbins is including a soundtrack of his 8^th grade experience, with songs appropriate to the era available in the upper-right corner; the comics-with-soundtrack idea isn’t new (heck, Chynna Clugston built a career on it), but it’s always refreshing. We at Fleen will be keeping an eye on this one to see how it develops. Only possible drawback: Dobbins has such a wealth of material to explore, Our Hero hasn’t yet sat down in 1^st period. This is gonna be a loooong school year.

_______________
¹ Matt Groening once explained why junior high school is the deepest pit in hell: by segregating kids in their formative, “snotty” years, they are both less likely to abuse the smaller children in grade school, and to receive from the high school kids the beatings that they so richly deserve. Unfortunately, this leaves nobody upon which to vent their overflowing evil but each other. Stir, repeat for three years.

Some interesting bits of information have been hitting the aether since yesterday.

• Rumor has it that Paul Southworth is up to something. There are subtle hints scattered here and there, dark rumors whispered in darker places. Then there’s this:
  

  I can’t wait to show you this new strip and website , guys. Oh man oh man oh man not much longer now

  So yeah — screw subtle hints, this is Southworth shouting from atop a pile of overturned, burning cars (comparatively speaking). You Are Dead is nice and all, but the thought of Southworth returning to stripping (insert joke here) with ongoing characters and plots and all is making me happy today. Nothing’s broken today, and it would be kind of weird to launch on a Friday, so smart money says watch Southworth very carefully for the next couple of Mondays.

• In other, more clearly defined, news, it appears that this year’s Estradarama is a no-go; reports that Christmas has also cancelled are premature, and we remain cautiously optimistic. But back to Ryan Estrada, and what’s up with the nascent tradition of guest strip carpet bombing:
  

  Well, I’m very pleased to say there is no Ryan Estrada Day today. There was a lot of criticism of last years’ offerings, and all of it absolutely correct! It was fun as a stunt, but taking 2 months off work to prepare for one day, then being so swamped catching up with my paid work that I can’t draw any other personal stuff for the rest of the year is silly.

  Fair enough; I liked seeing Estrada’s take on so many different characters (both visually and from a writer’s perspective), and I enjoyed the hunt aspect of tracking ’em all down, but you know what? Ryan Estrada is not my bitch, and no desire for free entertainment on my part trumps any decision he makes on his part to engage or not engage in providing said entertainment, particularly not at the expense of paying work. And it appears that the paying work is coming to the fore:

  From now on, I am in the business of making quality work, and trying to make a living off of that work, rather than trying to squeeze it in between commissions. I have a list of projects that I’ll be doing over the next year, and when they’re ready, you’ll get the chance to see them! Here’s what’s in the works:

  • Villain (a new daily webcomic, starting 1 October with a nice fat buffer)
  • Aki Alliance (first half online, second half to be bundled as a graphic novel and submitted to publishers)
  • The Kind You Don’t Bring Home to Mother (animated feature from the comic that lost the Zudacontest by one vote)

• Can there be more than one new sci-fi comedy webcomic? Apparently so, according to Culture Pulper Mike Russell’s Twitterfeed:
  

  Getting sneak peek at Chris Baldwin‘s forthcoming comedy space-opera webcomic. It’s adorable, but w/ lasers. Prediction: hit.

  Adorable and lasers? I’m there.