Editor’s note: So a week ago, Howard Tayler — webtooner, husband, father, onetime software industry small-m mogul, and generally godly fellow — made his way to that modern-day debauchorama known as Las Vegas. What could make an upstanding gentleman brave such a den of iniquity? The opportunity to learn ways to better his craft and business at a weekend seminar that brought together people from the worlds of syndication, gag cartooning, strip cartooning editorial cartooning, and webcomics.

Sanity intact, no quickie annulments on file with Clark County registrars, hopefully zero warrants, and an unknown number of trips to New Rock later (word to the wise: don’t count on your bad deeds “staying in Vegas”), Tayler was kind enough to sit down in our virtual studios for a chat about the experience. That is to say, we’ve been bouncing emails back and forth, and today Fleen is happy to present the first portion of that interview.

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Hey, lookit that: Todd the Squirrel is being … well, Todd … and pissing off a classy lady-squirrel. We’re a long way from the first Achewood strip, nearly as long a way from when Todd was first introduced, and the denizens of Achewood have had many ups and downs in the meantime. It’s been a stellar eight years, where one can say without hyperbole that the worst, most perfunctory Achewood is better than most anything else being created today, and that the best achieve a kind of weird poetry. Fleen thanks Chris Onstad for taking us along on the journey.

• If I worked out the math correctly, today is both the five year anniversary of Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots, and tomorrow will be strip #800. To celebrate, today’s installment features nightmare horrors from the deepest recesses of Hell (aka clowns). Yay? But then there’s this: half off original strip art through Sunday Friday, sorry!. Some of my favorites are already gone, dangit.
• Speaking of “dang”, news comes to us this day that come Spring (northern hemisphere) next year, Little Dee will be wrapping up after nearly five years (no blog permalink, but it’ll be there for a while):
  

  I am sad to tell you all, but I will be ending Little Dee in early spring of 2010 (exact date not yet set). I have loved drawing and writing Little Dee, and love the characters. But I feel it is time for me to try new things.

  I first started thinking about it summer of 2008. I realized that I was feeling I had told most of the tale of Little Dee and her friends, and that I have other stories outside of them to tell, more characters and worlds to create. And that I loved Dee, but if I didn’t make sure I had new paths to walk, that I would one day wake up and feel stuck and feel it a burden. I never wanted that.

  We at Fleen love Little Dee (the strip and the character), and will be sad to see both go; but if there’s a clean conclusion to her story of life in the woods with the critters, then it’s all good. Her story had a beginning, a reeeaaallll long middle, and now it will have its end. To lighten the mood, what say we start a pool about how the strip will end. Be the first to comment with a short description of how you think the strip will wrap up, like Dee talks or Dee finds her parents again and if you’re right, you win the admiration of your peers and the thanks of a grateful nation. I’m gonna take Vachel finally snaps (art direction by Quentin Tarrantino). Don’t believe me? Check out the first strip here, or the fifth one here; that boy’s a cauldron of seething rage.

  But in Dee’s place, something new will rise. We’d heard the rumor of an adorable sci-fi comedy strip with lasers, but now Baldwin has a site and progress reports up for Spacetrawler, and it looks like he’s getting script feedback/edits from a bevy of talented people, including webcomics mainstays Dylan Meconis and Mike Russell. Sign up now, avoid the rush.

• If you don’t follow them regularly, you might not know that there are a couple of media analysis places that generally get things right. Yesterday, one of them — MediaShift from PBS, focusing on digital media — turned its eyes on webcomics and the mechanics of indy-art businessin’, and spoke to some familiar names. Worth checking out.