Brian “Box” Brown (or Trip-B as he was known in his brief, but well-regarded, gangsta rap career) has released a new webcomic yea upon the internets, Everything Dies. A continuation of/supplement to his print comics of the same name (note to self: must buy issue #3, and #4 is due out soon), Everything Dies concerns itself primarily with The Big Questions of Life, Death, Religion, Faith, ans Suchlike.

On launch day alone, Brown has three stories (each more than 10 pages long) on mortality (i.e.: how he wants his funeral to go), public exhibitions of religious fervor (i.e.: an incomplete Jesus-themed theme park in Arkansas), and the (non-)existence of God (i.e.: what would constitute definitive proof of such).

And, in case a bigger justification for the title of Everything Dies were needed, Brown today wraps up his long-running series, Bellen!, the only way possible: a final declaration of identity and purpose.

• Con season still has a few last hurrahs before it wraps for the year, and two of them are coming up quickly: Intervention and SPX kick off in just over 10 days, and programming info is now available. Intervention’s got more than 75 panels, plus gaming and separate-registration-required workshops, covering a lot of ground.

  If you were, as I was, perhaps a little surprised to see multiple sessions that amount to Gettin’ Laid (Dating Advice from Hot Geeky Chicks, Sex Farm: A D00DZ Guide to Getting Chicks Through Nerdy Enterprise), well, there are plenty to balance it out on the more serious side (Act Locally, Promote Globally: A Conversation with Molly Crabapple, Copyrights for Artists, The Economies of Small Scale, and Revenue Streams: How to Make Ten-Tenths of a Living look particularly promising). Descriptions here, schedules here.

  By contrast, SPX has never been heavy on the programming, preferring to give attendees plenty of time to schmooze and talk with creators (and minimize the chance that you’ll have to decided between panels). You’ve got something kicking off pretty much every half hour, staggered between two rooms (Brookside Conference Room at the top of the hour, and White Flint Ampitheatre at the bottom), with pretty much a laser-like focus on indy comics and their creators.

  Particularly good-looking descriptions include Comics and Worldbuilding (panelists include Evan Dahm, Liz Baillie, Aaron Diaz, Carla Speed McNeil, and Spike Trotman), Telling Stories (with Heidi MacDonald, Meredith Gran, Roger Langridge, and Jon Lewis), and Kate Beaton and Julia Wertz in Conversation (with special guest Dustin Harbin). Descriptions, times, and locations here.

Quick bits:

• Reality TV meets vampires meets furries meets cyberpunk meets book one of The Last Res0rt.
• New twist on the superhero tropes: with mondo-powered beings flying around every damn way, somebody’s going to have to handle the PR and marketing, and that’s where The Hero Business comes in. Of course, who is more evil and venal? The nominal villains, or the skeezy marketing types working for the heroes? Episode 1 done, episode 2 coming soon.
• Launching tomorrow: the all-new home of In Maps & Legends, which had been running on Zuda when Zuda closed up shop.

It appears that typically, Scenes From A Multiverse’s weekly voting pulls in about 3000 – 3100 ballots, but this week’s (as of this writing) is nearly 1000 votes below that usual response point. Is everybody too busy heading to Baltimore Comic-Con or FanExpo Canada? Or would a certain presence on the ballot (as of this writing, leading by a mere 25 votes) actually be depressing the turnout? Much as I’m flattered by the attention, I’m horrified to think what Rosenberg might think up to do to “me” if “I” wind up this week’s “winner”.

• From internet über-meme to adorable plush: the LOL WUT pear (more properly, the Biting Pear of Salamanca, as dreamt up by Digger creator Ursula Vernon) is now squishy, adorable, and up for pre-order. Delight your friends and possibly horrify small children!
• Ever since the whiteboard resignation letter hoax (discussed here), I’ve been thinking about what constitutes comics and what doesn’t. Obviously, there’s got to be words and pictures, but sometimes the balance really tips one way or the other. Is there a magic point where there’s too few words or too few pictures to count? Or is it just a matter of Without even these few {words|pictures}, the meaning of this would be irreparably changed?

  In particular, I’ve been thinking about Hyperbole And A Half, which you might call a blog with spot illustrations, or might call comics. I’m leaning towards the latter, since the pictures are definitely structured to tell the story. I don’t know a dang thing about creator Allie Brosh except for what I read here, but dang if I don’t want to read more.

Got a link in the mail to the preview of an e-book by DJ Coffman. This isn’t a review, since I a) don’t have the entire book in front of me; b) wouldn’t have had to time read it properly since it launched yesterday, and c) it’s not even remotely aimed at me. Ca$h for Cartoonists is bright, colorful, has a busy, eye-grabbing (almost advertising-like … and if there’s one thing ad guys knows, it’s how to hold eyeballs) design, and (as befits an e-book) up-to-the-second. For instance, you can get a discount on website hosting with a code provided in the introductory section, something that would be all but impossible with a traditional ink-and-paper presentation.

The chapters are pretty specific (“Spot Illustration”, “Digital Caricatures”, and “ACEO (Art Cards)” are the first three), and are presented in a detailed, relentlessly upbeat tone. There’s not enough in the preview to see if any of the full book ramps back a bit from the enthusiasm (Here’s how you can do this!) to something perhaps a bit more realistic (Here’s how I did this, you should be able to make it work similarly, but keep in mind that it’s a different economic climate and your mileages of persistence, luck, and talent will vary.), which I hope does happen.

All those copies of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (or more recently, all the How to Draw Manga books) led to an awful lot of starry-eyed kids who were certain that success was imminent; some lost interest or found other dreams, some wound up bitter, and they didn’t have an easily identifiable and accessible author to blame their lack of success on. Here’s the risky bit for Coffman:

A VERY SPECIAL OFFER! For a limited time when you buy the full edition of my ebook, I’m going to make myself available to you for the ?rst 30 days as a Personal Cartooning Career Coach… or Comic Coach… or, well I really don’t have a fancy title for this service, but if you draw comics or cartoons and want to personally pick my brain, or if you’re feeling stuck and need inspired… this is the deal for you!

Why be coached by me? I’ve done just about everything you can do in the cartooning business, from newspaper syndication to full blown super hero comics with a big hollywood producer. Not only have I had a ton of success with my skills, but I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way which I learned from and can pass a lot of knowledge on to you.

ONE MORE THING… You’ll have a chance to get on the AWESOME LIST. What is it? A special email newsletter for buyers of the full edition only, which basically assures this book will never end! I’ll send you updated ways to earn more money with your cartoons and illustrations as they become available. [emphasis original]

I hope that those starry-eyed kids don’t take Coffman’s enthusiasm for a promise, and really hope they don’t read over the most important part of that quote:

I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way

Let’s cut that down one more time for those in the back:

I’ve also failed many times

No book will keep you from having your own failures, starry-eyed kids! Keep that very important bit of perspective in mind while you peruse the lessons! $47 to download, going up to $97 after September 30.

• Speaking of $47, if you had that much to spend but don’t want Coffman’s book, you could get the 2-day VIP package for NEWW 2 and have $2 left over to buy a refreshing beverage. Plain ol’ non-VIP passes are $10, and one-day passes $6, for those that can live without the special-edition NEWW2 Sharpie (not sure I can).
• Speaking of books, Chris Eliopolous pulled a fast one on me with this morning’s tweet:
  

  The book. http://www.miserylovessherman.com/2010/08/26/the-book/

  I can’t be the only one that got his hopes up that this would be another Misery Loves Sherman collection, can I?

It started off so innocently, with an unsolicited tweet from Jon Rosenberg:

@fleenguy when you read tomorrow’s SFAM, you may have a question. The answer to that question is “Yes”.

Which naturally left me wondering what the question should be; top contender when I went to bed was, Will you buy me a case of hard liquor and a cupcake for my birthday? Then this morning, the full impact of what Rosenberg meant became apparent: I am Gary!

With those three words, the question obviously became, So Jon, is this a naked attempt to get me to pimp your new reader-participation voting rules for Scenes From A Multiverse, debuting tomorrow (Thursday 26 Aug 2010, that is), in the hopes that my little seemingly-genderless cosmic-unicorn-destroying avatar will finally displace the hated Sciencemaster Adler from his throne?

So, yeah. Everybody be sure to vote for “Gary” in the next poll. And damn you for your manipulative ways, Rosenberg. I shake my fist at you in impotent rage, thusly!

• In other, less me-abusing news, ’tis the season for webcomickers to travel o’er the oceans wide, landing in the far antipodes. Cases in point: Howard Tayler, who leaves for Melbourne on Saturday, and is doing a meet & greet to celebrate; also, Kaja & Phil Foglio, who are already in Fair Oz and did a signing in Sydney, and will be kicking around various corners of the continent for the next ten days-two weeks. Could it be a coincidence that Foglio & Foglio and Tayler are Down Under in the same time frame as the 68th World Science Fiction Convention (this year in the form of AussieCon4), where they are nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story? Could be, rabbit. Could be.
• Speaking of conventions, Baltimore Comic-Con hits this weekend in Charm City, with the Harvey Awards again containing a category for Best On-Line Comics Work, with mostly the usual suspects nominated. Special props to Scott Kurtz who will again be hosting the awards (and who killed last year), and who is openly campaigning for votes this year (which, let’s face it, everybody does). If Kurtz doesn’t win, I’m imagining a scene like that at the Emmy Awards almost 30 years ago when Eddie Murphy had to announce that he lost in his category, looked straight into the camera and deadpanned, They told me if I hosted, I was gonna win.
• Lastly, Where the Typos Og heads off into the sunset before wearing out its welcome; Sylvan Migdal’s various projects always go out when at their creative peak, so that’s good. For those more interested in the creator than the specific project, Migdal’s new series starts 6 October at his website.

I’m starting to see why great swathes of people go on holiday for the entire month of August — nothing is happening. And by “happening”, of course I mean something mind-blowingly crazy-go-nuts in the world of webcomics, where everybody just seems to have their heads down gettin’ their work done. For a hack pseudo-journalist, it’s depressingly sane … even the Great Keenspot Reorg went by without a peep. Let’s see if the mailbag has anything cool.

• Cool Thing #1: Katie Sekelsky (last mentioned in the context of the Union of Concerned Scientists cartooning contest, where voting is still live) has unveiled a clever piece of merch; designed for con-going lady creators of things and ironic dudes, the I Am My Own Booth Babe t-shirt is now available for your babydoll shirt-wearing needs.
• Cool Thing #2: Curious about how to price originals? So was Jason Dobbins (who, in the interests of full disclosure, has sworn undying loyalty to my facial hair) of Tales of the Eighth Grade Nothing, so he let the market decide. This auction was too brief to follow (hitting the Buy It Now price well before it was scheduled to end), leading to a valuable lesson: Don’t undervalue your work with a too-modest strike price. No guarantee that this would have gone higher than the BIN price, but no guarantee that it wouldn’t have either.
• Cool Thing #3: Two years, two hundred comics, really awesome, cartoony style: Bear Nuts is right at the magic point where you can jump on and get a full, satisfying story without spending all week catching up. And to think that it all started with humping, humping hippos.
• Cool Things #4 and 5: New interview with :01 Books supremo Mark Siegel on Sailor Twain, conducted by John Walsh at the site of his historical webcomic, Go Home Paddy, with which I was not previously familiar and which is quite good. Bonus!

Best thing I’ve seen today? Creators taking a whack at each others work. Case in point — John Allison provided the pencils to this Bad Machinëry strip to Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz. End result — a painterly rendition of panel one.

Even better, Mr A has provided the pencils to that strip for all and sundry, so have your own go at inking Lottie and Shauna; I have it on good authority that other creators are passing pencils back and forth, so with any luck we’ll see more of these little treats in the coming days. If nothing else, this is the sort of exercise that stretches creative muscles, making all involved better artists.

Actually, the best thing I’ve seen all day is a set of dispatches from Afghanistan that drivers refused to take Steven Cloud, Matt Bors, and Ted Rall through bad country overland, which forced them to take a flight over the zone they were most likely to get murdered in. They’ve safely left Kabul and will be examining the region around [redacted] up as far as the [redacted] border, and maybe take in a movie.

Photos and a few cartoons by Cloudy at his Flickr page, and how astonishing is it that I’ve had back-and-forth email exchanges with him in the middle of a contested, severely under-infrastructured nation? With any luck, they’ll be crossing into Iran in about two weeks, a bit thinner, hairier, and riper than when they left, but not any worse than that.

Update for breaking news: Of course, I title a post about how quiet it is half an hour before NEWW news drops. Third tranche of guests, and tickets go on sale Thursday.

There are so many webcomics that don’t get mentioned here very much — naturally, as I am only one guy, I can’t keep up with everything that’s created. In a few cases, though, there’s comics that I read and just don’t think to write about, since I tend to focus on the new, novel, and unusually good updates — and some strips just operate at a high level of consistent quality and not have unusually good updates that stand out from the rest (coincidentally, these tend to be strips that cartoonists regard as favorites). Thus, an unforgiveable paucity of mentions of strips like Three Word Phrase, Cat Rackham, and others.

When these consistent high-performers do sink into my thick skull, it tends to be because they’re wrapping up, like the recently-concluded Order of Tales, the about to conclude Bellen!, and today’s conclusion to Ellerbisms. There’s no flash, no fire, no big AND THEN, A NATION BONDED THROUGH THE POWER OF LAUGHTER here — it’s just another day for Marc and Anna, one with some highs and lows, some stupidity and forgiveness, and all the stupidity and grace that tells you this is how life actually happens. Marc Ellerby will continue to make comics (Chloe Noonan looks amazing), and the really good comics will continue to be really good whether my satisfaction at reading them makes enough of an impression to write about them or not.

• In other news, progress on NEWW 2 proceed apace, with lots of news likely to break rapidly in the coming weeks. Intervention continues to rack up sponsors and guests o’ plenty, and seems set to make a major splash for a first-year con. Hotel block deals are up in the next week, and remember — you can drift between Intervention and SPX, which is literally 2 km down the street.
• Big Round Number Alert: 300 strips at EROS INC, which despite the name is not an adult-oriented affair; it’s about a nice Jewish girl that finds herself working for an eternally-old agency that matches people up (she got recruited because the little cupid guys they used to use are lazy buggers).
• Not exactly webcomics, but what the heck: Girls Drawin’ Girls sends some of its crew on the road to the Cartoon Art Museum‘s bookstore next Saturday from 2:00 to 5:00pm. Visitors will be able to watch the artists at work and look through previously produced pinup projects. The press release doesn’t explicitly say so, but I’d wager if you wandered over, you’d get to talk shop with the Girls (draw-ers) and possibly the Girls (draw-ees).

The Ignatz nominees were announced earlier today, and I found the honorees for Outstanding Online Comic to be … odd. Maybe more than other comics awards, the Ignatzes vary widely in character from year to year, but like other named-year awards, they’ve pretty much always looked at work for the year before the award: the 2009 award honored work primarily done in 2008, the ’08 award for work in ’07, and so forth.

This year, however, they seem pretty determined that the 2010 award will honor work done in 2010 (which isn’t quite 2/3 done yet). Consider the nominees:

• John Callahan’s Callahan Online is a now-frozen two-week archive of Callahan’s panel gag toons. Frozen, because he died at the end of last month, so anybody looking to examine his work will have those ten panel gags to judge and not much else. Hate to say it, but this feels like an Oh crap, did we honor him while he was alive? afterthought.
• Sarah Becan’s I Think You’re Saucesome is a diary comic that focuses on weight loss. It’s got a taste of Bellen!, here, a bit of Kinokofry there, and reminds me a lot of Stop Paying Attention, so that’s okay. Lots of updates (between 3 and 6 new strips a week), but it only began on March 1st of this year.
• Stephen Gilpin’s The Lesttrygonians features an archive going back to 1998 (!), but only 21 of those strips (weekly, from April of this year) are more recent than October 2000. It’s nice stuff, between a half- and full-page each week, but it’s a small amount of work in a short amount of time; the decade-long hiatus means the older stuff could barely be considered the same strip.
• David King’s Reliable Comics is a bit tougher to parse, temporally speaking — he posted a series of strips done in 2007-2008 between Dec 2009 and Feb 2010. February to April he posted strips from 2009, and since April work done this year, for a total of 26 “recent” strips.
• Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 began at the end of November 2009, and is currently in progress. Of the nominees, it appears to be the only one that features a traditional story, with a beginning, middle, and end; tonally, it feels a lot like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison.

None of this is meant to say That strip shouldn’t win/even be nominated because it’s ____ !; if the jury decided that the best comics work of the past year is heavily skewed towards the past five months, then that’s their call. I just can’t recall any award iteration that took the year quite so literally. I won’t be at SPX so I don’t get to vote, but I like (and this may be a side effect of having the fullest bodies of work to judge) Dawson and Becan quite a lot.

• Speaking of time, Amulet Book 3: The Cloud Searchers is out in two weeks!
• You may have heard that Our Kate (Beaton, that is … look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, son) is about to decamp from Canada for a period of time and hunker down in Brooklyn for a spell. Not content to see what a change of venue will do to her creative side (whenever she travels, she gets a bunch of really good comics from it), Beaton’s decided that she’s going to celebrate her new home by working for the good of others.

  Specifically, she’s joined up with a team of comics types to participate in the 2010 Run for Congo Women (New York, 5K, 25 September), with monies raised going to Women for Women International. Team Comics has their fundraising page here, and they could use your help. Hop to it, people, and Kate, next time I see you I owe you a tasty beverage for being a Damn Good Person.

If there were such a thing as “Followup Friday” around here, that is.

• It’s been a long slog to get all the dies just right, but everybody that can’t afford a Chris Yates original Baffler! puzzle/object d’art just got a budget alternative. Fully a year after the deal was made and nine months after it went public, Ceaco’s first three licensed Baffler! designs have been announced for release this October. Everybody that has a grandma that loves doing puzzles? Your holiday shopping just got a little easier.
• Busy guy these days, Jim Zubkavich is; finished up that ninjariffic series o’ comics from the spring, and now has a new series from Image due next month. Given Zubkavich’s history of quality work, that alone would be worth a mention, but the fact that said new series is titled SKULLKICKERS and described as sword and sassery? Icing on the proverbial cake, my friends. Grab yourself a copy and revel in the kicking.
• Following up on the American Apparel story from the start of the month, there are two words you never want to hear about one of your vendors: going concern. This is because it’s pretty much a given that those two words only ever get used following the words it is not certain that [name of business] can continue as a. It’s rare that a company that uses the Two Words O’ Death avoids either ceasing business operations and/or bankruptcy, and thanks to a financial filing yesterday, those are pretty much the only choices AA has left. As is usual in these cases, Kai Ryssdal’s got the lowdown.
• Finally, a reminder that the Dallas Webcomics Expo number 2 (Electric Boogaloo) will be this weekend, and remember that there’s that art auction to benefit sick kids, so bring cash and lots of it.

Quick things!

• John Campbell had an art show. Here are pictures of the art show. Saddening!
• Dave Kellett, Keith Knight, and David Malki ! tried to spell words for charity. Here is the story of how famous and/or beautiful people are favored in our society. Shocking!
• TCAF 2011 applications now being accepted. Right-thinking people regard this as a good thing. Woo!
• The original may have been a hoax, but it’s still comics. Whiteboardery!
• Jeff Zugale did an analysis of “print” vs “web” business models for comics, and found that the “web” model has always been in use. It’s behind the subscription wall at Webcomics Dot Com which is a shame because this needs to be part of the broader conversation. Mayhap the newly vacationed Brad Guigar could be convinced to make this one a freebie?

Longer thing!

At the time I was writing yesterday’s update, I did not yet know what was waiting in my mailbox: a gifted copy of We Are The Engineers by Angela Melick. Considering that the book was announced as pre-order on the 11th and arrived from across an international border (and a weekend!) on the 16th, how could I not read it immediately?

A confession — since I met Ms Melick at NEWW last year, I’ve been a faithful reader of Wasted Talent, but I never read back far enough into the archives to cover her college years, when the inspired-by-life strip began (an aside: were this a movie, it would be touted as based on the incredible true story; since Melick is an engineer, it’s probably best described as slapped a linear approximation transform on what actually happened because crap on a stick, have you seen how messy the real data were?).

Turns out that I needn’t have felt guilty about it, as Melick has gone back to redraw the “best of” several hundred strips and distill down the period when she was still cartooning with improvised materials in margins (again, engineer) into her much cleaner and accomplished current style.

I have often remarked on how Melick (and Kean Soo, for that matter) and I share a bond of common experience. It doesn’t matter that it was different times, different countries, or different disciplines — engineers are an odd folk, and we get each other. Being part of an overworked, high-achieving minority within a much larger university was Melick’s experience, whereas I was part of a high-achieving, overworked, all-nerd school across town from a much larger (but entirely unrelated) university. She studied physical stuff, and I the more intangible (ECE511, I still remember you). UBC engineers built an artificial pond to throw people into, we had the natural variety. A decade and a half of technological and cultural change (not to mention a Y chromosome) separate her experiences from mine, and still — every page of WATE resonates like I was there alongside her.

But here’s the thing — much as engineers like to hold ourselves apart (it’s a comfort to us, having long ago realized we could have had a lot more fun and sex in college if we had picked easier majors), we really aren’t that much different from anybody else¹.

The experience of being a student engineer puts a certain sharp relief on certain aspects of college (our experiences were probably more math-intensive than most), but everybody remembers studying too long, working projects too hard, praying for a curve to kick in and rescue everything. Everybody remembers looking down on another major and wondering how they had it so easy, or a first job and wondering if you’d ever get the hang of things. Everybody had idiot traditions and the revered history of those that came before you.

Whatever your experience of working too hard with others sharing the same goal, you’ll find your memories coming back after reading WATE. It took Proust seven books and a cookie to provoke this kind of involuntary recall, and he didn’t even have one psychotic squirrel in there, so screw him; you won’t be able to write a senior thesis around WATE, but you’ll have a hell of a lot of fun reading it.
_______________
¹ Nah, we totally are.