Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence

It might be that Carly is doing essentially fan comics of her own shared creation (using a Beatonesque strip format), it might be because everybody and their dog are taking turns drawing the Strong Female Characters™, usually tagged on Twitter as #strongfemales, or because there’s now a suggested tagline for the SFCs that sums up everything about mainstream superhero comics, or maybe just because there’s now a Tumblr dedicated to Susan, Georgia, and Queen. Mostly it’s because every new person that sees the phenomenon gets caught up in it and grabs others to say Check this out, you’ll love it. Also, because Chris Sims has the right idea.

In other things I noticed on Twitter that don’t have to do with Strong Female Characters™, I noticed a brief-yet-telling exchange between Christopher Butcher and Jim Zubkavich:

It’s kind of amazing how little interaction the webcomics half of my twitter feed has with the “mainstream comics” half, and vice versa.

Webcomic folk aren’t even curious about the strange comiXology troops scouting the blasted barren lands of Pay-For-Contentia. :)

I do find that odd, yeah.

After the rapprochement between the web and mainstream wings of comicdom at this year’s Reuben Awards, it is a little unusual to not have seen that conversation continuing in the weeks since. Then again, I meet somebody new, it takes a while for the conversation (without booze) to get to be spontaneous. I’m guessing this is a bit of inertia until everybody figures out who everybody else is online and continues that conversation. Hoping so, anyway.
Let’s end on one of my favorite sources of laugh-chuckles: SMBC Theater and the casual collection of reprobates found there; it takes a certain kind of comedic fearlessness to have no hesitation whatsoever in regularly presenting yourself as a completely horrible person, and yet everybody I’ve met in conjunction with the SMBC shorts is a really nice person¹. The bad news is that there will be fewer SMBC Theater shorts for the time being — one a month instead of the customary one a week.
The good news is that it’s because the SMBC Theatricians will be spending their time working up an ongoing webseries with higher production values; Zach and James explain it all here². Naturally, this is the sort of undertaking that requires a more substantial budget that the SMBC troupe have had to work with in the past, leading to the traditional Kickstarter campaign.

Short form: your contribution over the next six weeks means the possibility that next year you get to see James Ashby blown up in outer space. Please give generously, as it is entirely possible that this is the only way to destroy him³.

_______________
¹ Except James; I’ve re-evaluated my earlier position and decided that he would totally kill me at the first opportunity.

² Warning: contains James. Do not believe anything this man tells you, he is pure evil.

³ Either that, or nuke his site from orbit, but that’s got some messy collateral effects I’d prefer to avoid.

In the weeks following Kate/Randall/my talk at the Reubens…the conversation has most definitely continued: Just by phone and email rather than forum and blog. It’s been nice.

[…] Found via Fleen […]

[…] time back we noted that the merry troublemakers at SMBC Theater were trying to Kickstart a new web series with an actual budget. A few days back they made their goal five times over, leading to the wherewithal to make an online […]

[…] and I didn’t want to stress it. Anywho, Brence was able to give me some good news about the forthcoming sci-fi web series — new equipment has been obtained, shooting planned out, and principal photography will […]

[…] With the exception of James Ashby, who has been previously established as history’s greatest […]

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