NYCC was a low-key, short-duration affair for me this year; other commitments kept me from being there the full weekend, but hey — anytime I can spend shooting the breeze with Brad Guigar about ladies and their disturbing cosplay¹, that’s a good time².

• Speaking of eyeballs, I got some great news from Magnolia Porter about Monster Pulse. “Speaking of” because I led off by telling her how much I’ve enjoyed the current chapter (The Eyeball Kid), and how well she’s nailed the character of the eponymous Kid — he comes across all strong, ruthless, doing whatever he must to survive, but show him a plate of chicken nuggets and he’s just a kid again. Perfect. The good news was that Monster Pulse will run for the next couple of years — no end in sight, which means I get to enjoy this one for a good long time.
• Similarly, Evan Dahm let me know that the nearly 200 pages of Vattu posted so far are the tip of the iceberg — we’re still getting setup, the story has so many place to go, and will be both “the largest story [Dahm] has ever told” and require “more than 1000 pages”. Hopefully, we’ll get printed versions along the way, because I’m not sure if I could wait another 800 pages (at three a week, or more than five years) to give him money in exchange for this story. Especially since he was kind enough to give me a copy of the Vattu: The First Day mini, which I would point you to in his store, only it’s not there. Look, just give the guy money, okay?
• Speaking of talking with creative types and ongoing stories, Jim Zubkavich seemed to get a lot of attention (and well deserved) for various Skullkickers developments, but I was happy to talk to him about Makeshift Miracle. Interesting development — book 1 of the remastered series will pretty much follow the story of the original webcomic/print collection, but after that he sees the story will diverge. Look for an interview with the esteemed Mr Zub in the coming weeks.
• Most interesting talk I had of the weekend was probably with Jon Brence, Ogeeku cofounder and SMBC Theater regular. Zach Weiner was there, too, but he had a nasty case of biological colonization going on and his voice was just terrible 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 complete pretty quickly. There’s going to be a lost of post-production though; this project will feature lots and lots of CGI, the better to find new and interesting ways to destroy James Ashby in space³. Speaking of, James’s new video series with Marque Williams on cheap eating? Check it out if you haven’t yet.
• I was able to have nice long talks with my friends from Dumbrella, which is actually good and bad. Good for me, bad that long talks means that there weren’t people interrupting to engage in fan interactions and commerce, due to the vagaries of floor layout. Dumbrella were given space against the back wall, behind a major Marvel comics installation, which provided a near-perpetual knot of people that were difficult to break through. Dedicated fans found their way back, but casual floor-walkers probably looked at the congestion and went the other way. One person who was able to break through the knot was Cory Doctorow, but I’m told that he wasn’t wearing the goggles and cape. Booo.
• Things learned: Meredith Gran is working on a project with Frank ‘n’ Becky that is going to make many of you go Oooo! Chris Yates continues to make a name for himself in the world of handmade wooden puzzle aficionados, who appear to develop intense loyalties to the few skilled individuals that can do what he does. Jon Rosenberg’s twin sons (Team Babies) have beaten all conceivable odds and turned out adorable; nevertheless, children are expensive (what with wanting to be fed and clothed and all), so do Jon a favor and buy some of his stuff.
• Purchases that I was lucky enough to make: The Anime Club, Amazing Everything, O No Sashimi (except mine is red).
• Finally, I didn’t get to track down or talk to Ramón Pérez but that’s okay, because soon Kukuburi will be back, so very, very back.

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¹ Specifically, one young lady that didn’t seem to be dressed as anything particular at all (or at least, we didn’t pick up the reference), but whose eyes were completely black. Pupil, iris, sclera, the whole thing, inky black. “Nice contacts,” I told her. “What contacts?” she replied. “I’ll rephrase,” I countered, “If those aren’t contact lenses, I’m calling an ambulance for you, because whatever could be causing that couldn’t possibly be good.” She laughed and didn’t die, so I guess that’s okay.

² Yes, yes, I know. We’re wild, self-destructive party animals. Tell the cops to bring the riot squad, there’s no controlling me ‘n’ Brad. Mostly Brad.

³ I suggested spaghettification in a black hole, but I’ll settle for explosive decompression.

As you all know, the first rule of the internet is Never read the comments. Ever. Seriously. But to every rule there is an exception, and for me that’s The AV Club, whose commenters are astonishingly sarcastic and amazingly inventive with their hate when they dislike something. There’s pretty much never a thread where everybody is in agreement; to date it has only happened under two circumstances:

• On the reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a poster purporting to be Jonathan Frakes tells stories about his time on the set, practical jokes, binge drinking, and sexin’ up every woman he lays eyes on; it is universally agreed that Frakes is hilarious.
• The comment thread of the Kate Beaton interview is, as of this writing, nearly 100% people sharing links to their favorite strips and agreeing how great she is.

Oh, did you not know that Kate Beaton got interview by The AV Club? She totally did.

Day One at NYCC report (micro edition, since I was only there for a little while):

That willingness to buy has been on my mind a lot since last night, as I wound up making it to Jorge Cham‘s Rutgers/UMDNJ screening/talk just as the final applause in the room was breaking and a rather small percentage of the audience drifted out. The larger portion surged forward, commerce on the their minds.

Due to some travel difficulties, Cham had arrived immediately prior to the event and hadn’t had time to get organized for post-Q&A sales and signing, so I jumped in to help. I have worked some pretty significant rushes on the register at some damn busy booths during really big-ass¹ comics shows, and I’ve never seen the monetary turnover that I experienced last night. Three sdizeable cartons of books, plus more stock that Cham brought with him in luggage, were gone in about 35 minutes. As the last person in the purchase line shifted to the signing line, there were five books left on the table.

By the time the signing line had worked down, people waiting for friends in that line had bought four of them.

Let me reiterate: there was one book left on the table when we packed up to go eat. As a veteran of years of bookstore experience (high school, college, grad school), I can tell you authoritatively that is the Platonic Ideal of selling, even better than having no books left — because now you’re absolutely certain that nobody who wanted to make a purchase left without the opportunity to do so.

I can also tell you authoritatively that every one of those purchasers will be passing around their copies to friends who couldn’t be there; those that couldn’t afford as many books as they wanted will be hitting up Cham’s store as soon as the next stipend check clears. Come springtime, they’ll be back for the DVD of the movie they just saw.

Cham does a lot of these trips (okay, the movie part is new, but he’s been doing the speaking engagement thing for years now); The Power of Procrastination is the name of the lecture he delivers to these audiences, and I imagine he’s pretty much got it down to a science² by now. But I think he should start working on a new boilerplate presentation.

Every business school in the country, every organization, meeting, and conference of marketers (all of whom should be able to afford a speaking fee at least as generous as that of a graduate student association), should have him come lecture on The Power of Niches. The percentage of the general population that does the even higher education thing is small — about 10% if you include those that hold Master’s and Doctoral degrees. Conventional wisdom would dictate that you want a potential audience that’s closer to the 100% end of the spectrum, but Cham’s purposely limited those that will have an interest in his work to barely double digits.

Within that population, though, Cham’s got the game entirely to himself. Instead of competing with other creators for the coveted 1000 True Fans (the ones that will actually buy stuff), where you pretty much have to be a particular reader’s #1 or #2 favorite, Cham has selected an audience where he’s #1 — nobody else is creating for the audience (which only gets you to “default #1” status), and he speaks to them from an authentic place. They aren’t comics fans — they were surprised that I had come by because webcomics as a general concept isn’t in their experience; they read one comic religiously, and it’s the one that speaks to them.

I heard variations on Every week, there’s something in your strip that’s exactly what I’ve experienced a couple dozen times at that signing table — that’s not something that you can fake. You can’t decide, I’m going to go after the underserved ______ niche and they will automatically flock to me, because that niche will peg you as a fake immediately. That’s the lesson that those B-school students and marketers need to learn, that the niche is important, but the legitimacy of the experience is more so. And hey, having a second niche to yourself can’t hurt, can it?

Many thanks to the organizers of the evening for feeding me, and for a fascinating conversation about cells that have little feet to move around with, how antibiotics get proteins to punch bacteria in their little faces until they leak out their insides and die, linguistic variations in Indonesia and Malaysia, what a monster Jenny McCarthy is, and which genes turn fruit flies gay³. It was great.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some nerds to visit.

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¹ And we’re talking metric big asses here, which are 2.54 Imperial big asses.

² Pardon the pun.

³ Really. Hot dude-on-dude Drosophilia action.

Not going to lie to you, there’s few better ways for a hack webcomics pseudojournalist to start the day than with a link from The Spurge. Although it doesn’t hurt that as soon as I’m done with work I get to spend some time with my peeps¹ at NYCC, then I’m meeting Jorge Cham after the screening of PhD: The Movie at UMDNJ tonight². The things I do on work nights for you people.

So since it’s gonna be a busy evening of webcomickry (also hopefully booze), let’s point you at a few things and call it good:

• Softcover Abominable Charles Christopher! 50 sketch editions available! Pre-order now for mid-November shipping! The economical alternative to the sold-out hardcover which is probably only available at usurious prices on eBay!
• Know whose projects always catch my eye? Larry ‘mckenzee’ Holderfield, because anybody that could pull off a mixture of the Eddas and Cthulhu in woodcuts or “an exploration of the recent travails of Nepal and the Nepalese royal family, depicted as furries” deserves your attention. Listen up, peoples:
  

  I have declared February 11th, the most 42nd Day of the Year, to be Robotmas, in honor of the original BBC airing of R.U.R., the very first televised science fiction program ever, on February 11, 1938. It being the 42nd day of the year is a coincidence, I’m sure.

  There is a website in the offing and I’m hoping to entice my webcomicky friends to play along.

  ROBOTMAS: Celebrate Accordingly!

  If there’s one thing we at Fleen do, it’s engage in various actions accordingly.

• Hot on the heels of his various reboots of DC properties, Aaron Diaz³ has found himself on the other end of the creative exercise: DC (the comics company) have proposed a reboot of DC (Diaz’s Dresden Codak). I particularly love their carefully-considered descriptions of the female characters:
  

  Kim’s just coming out of her shell, so she’s not quite as strongly dressed as the other ladies here, but she’ll come around.

  Alina’s usually dressed like her twin brother Dmitri, but because of her stripper past (a new backstory we’ve added) she’s more confident in herself and dresses like a strong female supporting character should.

  Since she’s probably a D-cup, Vonnie’s the strongest female character Dresden Codak has to begin with.

  If there’s one thing that the world needs, it’s more strong female characters, so here’s hoping that Diaz takes the offered redesigns to heart and incorporates the new Kim, Alina, and Vonnie into his current storyline.

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¹ Is that a thing you kids still say? I’m not implying that I will be spending time with delicious sugar-coated marshmallow treats that can be made to fight to the death in a household microwave.

² Although listed as being at/for the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, the Q&A appears to be hosted by the Rutgers Graduate Student Association. This is because the UMDNJ Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is affiliated with the Rutgers Graduate School via the Joint Molecular Biosciences Graduate Student Association. Aren’t you glad you asked about Garden State educational politics? In any event, 6:00pm tonight, multipurpose room at the Busch Campus Center in Piscataway.

³ The Latin Art- … oh, hell, you know the gag by now.

First, a quick update to our ongoing Who’s Gonna Be At NYCC discussion: Scott C will be at (and have copies of his new book, Amazing Everything for sale via) the Insight Editions booth, #1939. He’ll also have signings/appearances at the Simon & Schuster (#2612) and :01 Books (1730) booths at various times on Saturday, in support of Zombie in Love (S&S) and Nursery Rhyme Comics (:01), respectively. Schedule here, and speaking of Nursery Rhyme Comics, the fine folks at :01 (hi, Gina!) sent me a review copy yesterday and I can’t stop smiling when I look at it. Guys, I need to find a small child available for short-term leasing so I can read these nursery rhymes and thus mold the intellectual development of a small person.

• Once upon a time, there was a man named George Plimpton; he engaged in many acts of experiential reportage, inspired at least one videogame, and was celebrated in song. Oh, yeah, and a great literary journal that he founded had a chat with Kate Beaton, continuing her metaphorical Sherman’s March to the sea of popular consciousness¹. Also, it is entirely likely that this marks the first time that the words alcoholic dickbags ever appeared in the The Paris Review.
• Also from across the Ocean Sea³, Internet Jesus has some words on digital comics (cf: yesterday, this page), webcomics (cf: every day, this page), and some critical points of distinction between them. It’s worth reading the entire thing, but some of his most salient points are made not in the text, but as captions inside images, which I will reproduce here as an amuse-bouche for your electronic media palate:
  • Why people like digital comics: you can charge for them, and they look pretty on an iPad.
  • Why people like webcomics: they’re free.
  • Webcomics are broadcast.
  • (This is the point at which this whole entry just got the hell away from me and became an extended fugue state ramble about the shape of comics and, God, I don’t know, a dozen other things. Abandon hope all ye who read on. It’s not going to get better.) (Seriously.)

  Señor Jesus was wrong on one point — his thoughts may have come from a fugue state, but they are not a ramble, and no hope need be abandoned. There’s quite a lot of Ellis-style cut through the bullshit and say what everybody else is too polite to say about what webcomics are good for, about how digital (paywalled small chunks of story) may or may not do, and where we may see either or both progressing in the future. Read it carefully, set it aside for a year or so, and read it carefully again to see what the passage of time has brought; I’m betting he’s more right than wrong.

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  ¹ At this rate of progress, Beaton will soon infiltrate the culture to the point that the collective neurons used to track things like Snooki and Kardashians will be reduced to scorched earth, the better to be rebuilt to a new and more useful purpose.²

  ² Don’t look at me like that; we both know perfectly well that grey matter is better used to track the delightful exploits of fat ponies and cookie-eating Napoleon than any current inhabitant of People or US Weekly.

  ³ Alternate views of Columbus and his legacy may be found on the internet.

Firstly, following up on the list of webcomicky types to attend NYCC, I missed some. From the comment thread:

You could also add 3 of the 4 Webcomic Alliance members will also be present, Booth P5 & P6.

As well, one may find Jim Zub & Edwin Huang at booth T6; I’m sure Z-man hears plenty about how awesome Skullkickers is, so maybe somebody asks him about Makeshift Miracle? Fleen regrets the oversight, and invites further corrections on people we may have missed.

Does this count as a second followup, or a followup squared? Back in April, Mia Wiesner (of the University of Applied Sciences in Liepzig) wrote to ask for your opinions and attitudes towards digital comics. In June, she shared her preliminary results with us, and yesterday she updated us with final numbers. Let’s get statistical! Or, since there’s a lot of info here, let’s get summarized!

Fleen thanks Ms Wiesner for sharing her numbers.

Not sure why it is that this popped into my head, but as I was listening to the radio this morning, I thought, Scott McCloud needs one o’ them Genius Grant things. See, as I’ve always understood it, one of the hallmarks of the MacArthur Fellows (as they are properly known) is not only are they exceptionally talented and recognized in their fields, but also they are ambassadors for their fields to those that don’t necessarily understand what their chosen endeavours are capable of. Thus, Jad Abumrad is not only one of the most inventive voices in the history of radio¹, he is tireless in expanding the reach of the medium and teaching the importance of radio. And heck, that sounds like McCloud to me, only with comics. MacArthur people, get on that.

• Reading Irregular Webcomic is always a necessary part of my morning, doubly so when David Morgan-Mar wants to share something, as he did today. What we got wasn’t a lecture on physics (as he has done so well before), but a musing on the nature of creativity, and the freedom to do so in the face of the financial constraints we in industrialized countries find defines “adulthood”. Talking of what he and his friends would do if they were immensely wealthy:
  

  [S]pend all day dreaming up weird stuff, throwing ideas at one another, discussing what ones might actually be worth pursuing, and going off and creating them.

  We believe that this almost certainly would produce something worthy of our effort, something that could be shared with the world and that would make us appreciated as artists, or creators, or developers, or whatever you want to call us. Something that people would enjoy seeing, and might even be willing to pay a little bit of money for. It might even be possible to eventually turn a profit, or at least a living out of it.

  I really think we could do it. We’re a bunch of creative and driven people.

  The trouble is, it’s risky to actually quit our jobs and pursue this dream. Really risky. Far too risky for people like us with families and mortgages to seriously contemplate.

  We know there are artists and creators out there who don’t balk at this risk, who take that chance, and try to make a go of this sort of dream. They are very special people. If you see something by one of those sort of people, and you like what they’re producing, show them some support. Show them that their dream can come true, and that they haven’t thrown away a comfortable life in the fruitless pursuit of something they want to do, but to no avail. Show them that the risk was worthwhile.

  The more people like this that find some support, the more creative people who will evaluate that risk as something they’re comfortable taking, and the more cool stuff we will get to see.

• Some of those people will be at the Jacob K Javits Center later this week for New York Comic Con; the show planner has (as of this writing) over 1200 exhibitors spread across 13 pages, so forgive if I missed anybody in the world of webcomicdom:
  • Anime Klub (booth 278) is not to be confused with KC Green’s Anime Club; KC will be wandering the show floor, but I bet you can give him money for a book if he has them. Doesn’t look like TopatoCo has a presence this year, so maybe try the Dumbrella booth.
  • Archaia Entertainment (booth 1546) will have Misery Loves Sherman creator Chris Eilopoulos will be doing some signings over the weekend.
  • Blind Ferret will continue their bid for world conquest from booth 1821.
  • The Cyanide & Happiness will hold forth behind the enormous scrum of fans at booth 1724; SMBC types are often in close proximity to C&H, but I can’t find a booth listing for them (despite their late-night panel on Saturday).
  • Chris Hastings isn’t listed all booth-ish, but he does have a signing scheduled with Dark Horse (booth 1238) on Friday evening at 6:30. I’m guessing you can find him there/then.
  • Dumbrella were there for the first NYCC, and if the world ends they’ll be there for the last too, dammit. Booth 788.
  • Please don’t confuse Evil, Inc (booth 2953) with Evil Ink (booth 1345); the former involves Brad Guigar and his hearty chuckles, the latter the band members of Coheed and Cambria and considerably fewer hearty chuckles.
  • Matthew Inman enjoys his Oatmeal steel cut with a bit of honey. Booth R8.
  • NYC Office of Emergency Management will be representing to all and sundry at booth N233, woo! Just me? Come on, this is cool stuff, people.
  • Ramon Perez wants to get back to Kukuburi more than you can possibly imagine, so please don’t give him any grief over it (at booth N4) — paying jobs have to come first. It’s my understanding the Cameron Stewart will be at the show, but I couldn’t find a listing for him, so this is a good place to try.
  • Evan Dahm will be right next to FrankNBecky and YukoNAnanth Rice Boy at booths P7 and P8, which is damn convenient for me as I have to speak to all of them about plans.

  It will be my goal to speak to as many of these people as possible, but Circumstances have restricted my attendance this year to some time Thursday & Friday afternoons, and maybe a few hours Saturday morning. I will do my best to bring you what news I can from within that timeframe.

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¹ I will stipulate that I know people, even people I like, that don’t care for RadioLab. At least none of them deny the entire Radio Trinity of Jad, Ira, and Jesse. Or the lesser-known Radio Trinity of Kai, Tess, and Steve, who deserve notice if only for being good enough to broadcast under their actual, difficult-to-spell names, something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

For lo, the day long prophesied at Canadian World Domination have come to pass, as our Northern Neighbors have begun their conquest. First webcomics, comrade … then the world.

• Where else to start but with Kate Beaton? In the ten days since the official release of Hark! A Vagrant, Beaton has debuted on the New York Times bestseller list for graphic novels (hardcover) in the top position. Somewhere, the bookish equivalent of Casey Kasem is noting that Beaton is Number one … with a bullet. The bullet, naturally, will be used to enforce Canadian dominance over the unwilling careful stewardship of we poor, blighted ‘Mericans.
• Beaton is, of course, published by Drawn and Quarterly, proud Canadian publishers of quality comics, and inhabitants of Montréal. Also found in the francophone corner of the Great White North — Blind Ferret, home of Ryan Sohmer’s various reaches into comics — webcomics, animation, and even an actual brick-and-mortar comic shop. Never content to rest on his laurels, The 4th Wall is expanding to a second location. 4th Wall East (so named by Sohmer in his twitterfeed) would presumably be closer to the the center portion of Montréal, given that the original is to the west of downtown. Thus, he continues his march on the heart of the seventh-largest city on the continent, the better to seize power.
• A bit south of the border (way south, as far from Canadian as you can get, mostly), Randy Milholland occupies a corner of Texas. It seems a bit obvious in retrospect, but as near as I can tell, today was when he made it official on Twitter:
  

  When I get home, I’ll post pictures of the final prototype for the Choo-Choo Bear plush – which is in production now.

  Excitement! And a promise of quality!

  They’re being made by the same company that makes @dcorsetto’s McPedro plushes

  Here’s where I was going to do a bunch of investigation and fact-checking to confirm my hunch, but Milholland went and spilled the beans in a later tweet, so screw it — all this ties into Canada because Corsetto’s merch (including the McPedro plush)is handled by the aforementioned Blind Ferret, so that’s where Choo-Choo Bear will be coming from, too. Aw, who am I kidding? Huggable pudding cats are enough to even make me forget to be terrified that Sohmer’s reach now extends across the entire United States to the very borders of Mexico. “World’s only superpower” my ass — if he’s conquered Texas, Sohmer is on his way to his very own Bond villain style volcano lair.

So things have been happening since yesterday which suggest connections in my brain. The most obvious, of course, is the untimely (if not unforseeable) death of Steve Jobs, given that much of webcomics as we know it wouldn’t exist if not for the products that Jobs shepherded through Apple. I think the best bit written about him was from Scott McCloud, not just because of its brevity¹, but because I think he captured more of the complexity of the man and less of the myth that Steve strode alone upon the face of computing and made it all by dint of his sole effort:

The story of Steve Jobs and Apple is more complicated than most news outlets would lead you to believe, and there were plenty of great minds that led to the original Mac and that contributed to all that followed.

But anyone who thinks that Jobs’ contributions to society can somehow be reduced to “marketing” or “fashion” betrays a complete ignorance of the power and importance of great design.

Great design can and does change the world. Poor design can and does ruin lives.

To Steve Jobs, and to everyone trying every day to put their own dent in the universe, thank you.

Visual memorialists today include Randall Munroe, Krishna Sadasivam, and Rich Stevens, who knocked it out of the muthascratching park.

Speaking of Stevens, I mentioned the other day that it doesn’t do to ignore him, and his new venture) has shown us why. I’ve written before about how quickly the man can go from idea to execution to done with that, what’s next?, exhibiting that fast, ruthless edge that the small innovator must have to compete against the entrenched corporate behemoth. With the launch of its first offering (or “experiment”, as it’s termed), Lab-Mo-Tory Industries has signaled their approach — get an idea, execute, you either get one or you don’t, and move on to the next thing next month. With the people that Stevens has found to assist in his mad plans², I think they’ll achieve the odd poetry of fast, cheap, out of control pretty easily.

Speaking of poetry, I see that a well-beloved Swedish poet was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It might be a while before another Swede is loved enough at home and abroad, with a deep enough body of work, to take the prize again. It might also be a significantly long time before a comics creator is seen as contributing to the field of “Literature”, but it might just be that those two events are contemporaneous at some Nobel ceremony some decades from now. If so, my money’s on Rene Engström and Rasmus Gran, or at least one of their students. Yes, students — following up on the CUNY class taught by Aaron Diaz³ in early summer, Engström and Gran will be teaching a class on webomics at Malmö University this term. Can’t wait to see what kind of cartoon art they create.

Speaking of cartoon art, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco (which has an appreciation of all things webcomicky) will be holding its annual benefit at Pixar Studios on Saturday, 10 December. Access is a bit pricey ($250 or $500 for Fan and VIP packages, respectively; knock it down by $50 if you’re a CAM member), but you get access to the fabled campus, viewings of pre-production art and screenings hosted by filmmakers. Details, tickets, etc., at the CAM website. If there’s a more focused dedicated group of artists than at Pixar, I’m not sure who it would be, but let’s remember a simple fact: Pixar pretty much was able to make its magic because of the backing and support of a man named Steve Jobs. It all comes back around.

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¹ Let’s face it, Steve Jobs is such a huge idea that you can write pages upon pages and still not come close to adequately describing the man and all that he represented. Brief was definitely the way to go here.

² Rich, have I ever introduced you to Otter? Something tells me you two should talk and make plans for a product launch.

³ The Latin Art-Throb.

The Rules:

1. Consider keyboards to have a definite lifespan and discard them without question at the end of that period
2. If you disregard item 1, never, ever wonder why the spacebar on your twelve year old keyboard has suddenly failed; discard the keyboard without question
3. If you disregard items 1 and 2, never, ever pry up the spacebar to see if it’s something you can fix; what lurks beneath your view is a horror that should never be unleashed, yea, like unto a nightmare that eldritch horrors from outside time have when they can’t sleep¹

So, new keyboard, nice action, bunch of time wasted today so I’m behind². Thus, let me direct you to people from Webcomicdom that are off bein’ smart:

• From the far reaches of the SMBC Media Empire, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith³ have got themselves a podcast wherein they Do Science To It. All manners of science, all manners of it, they wanna have a conversation and make you more clever in the process. The Weekly Weinersmith episode 1 launched yesterday, and I believe we’ll see them on iTunes and Stitcher in the immediate future — possibly in time for episode 2.
• From the far reaches of time, Jennifer Babcock (cf here, do yourself a favor and ignore the comment thread) has made a fortunate habit of working far ahead on C’est La Vie, because she’s gonna spend the next couple of month in Egypt digging up stuff [o permalink, but the announcement is currently on her main page]. Babcock’s perhaps the only person that occupies the middle bit of the Venn diagram that overlaps “Webcomics Creators” and “Egyptologists”.

  I’ve read some of her research and it’s really cool how she’s found things that are essentially comics-as-popular-art from ancient Egyptian times (and no, we’re not talking tomb and temple hieroglyphics). The closest description of them is they’re ceramic plaques that function like McCloud’s Five Card Nancy deck. Comics! Plus, I was able to have a really cool discussion over lunch with her once about ancient Greek ostraka and I knew what those were because of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe. There’s nothing comics can’t do.

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¹ Seriously, it was gross.

² Also, I am possible never eating again. Ick.

³ Heh, heh, they said weiner.

Some of you are subscribes to Webcomics Dot Com, wherein Brad Guigar does his best to enlighten and aid those who are serious about their webcomickin’. On occasion, he writes on something important enough that I feel the need to draw attention to it, and today is one of those days. It started with a notice on the front page of Brad’s own comic yesterday:

I’ve been getting reports that Evil Inc has been delivering an ad that hijacks the reader’s browser, presenting a full-screen ad along with one of those “are you sure you want to leave” boxes that require the user to click a Yes or No.

I hate those things. They invariably lead to scams or deposit nastyware on your computer. I avoid a lot of them by using a browser that lets me control Javascript down to the domain level — the number of sites that I turn on JS for can be measured in the low tens — and I still have to resign myself to getting hit by these parasites every once in a while. It’s for this reason that I do things like banking on a netbook that runs a no-persistence Linux install off a USB key. Yes, I am paranoid.

Guigar followed up on his adventures in cleaning up the payload that snuck through one of his ad brokers today; from the public summary of the WDC posting:

Facebinks.com is delivering a malicious, pop-over ad to Web sites, offering readers a chance to win a free iPad — and implying that the deal is an exclusive offer from that site — even including a deceptive trademark identifier (®) after the site’s URL at the bottom left-hand corner of the ad.

When the user tries to close the ad, another pop-up appears, with one of those “do you really want to leave this site — Yes or No” messages that make you wonder what you’re really answering “Yes or No” to if you click it.

In the end, most users force-quit their browsers and write the site an angry e-mail (and rightly so).

Here are a few tips on making sure your readers aren’t being inundated with annoying ads.

Log-in to read the entire post.

Brad kindly comped me a WDC account, so I’ve read the entire post, but I’m not going to share it here since it is intended for his subscribers. However, I can tell you that he’s done a pretty complete step-by-step of how he dealt with his ad services, and though he was pretty sure that the malicious code came from one of them, he contacted each of them to cover his bases. Just as well, as it appeared that the source of this particular nasty was also found on another ad service, it just hadn’t been causing any problems yet.

Guigar’s most useful bit of advice was probably from yesterday’s appeal, and something that everybody — creator and audience — should keep in mind:

[I]f this happens to you … please alert me as soon as possible. If you can, please include:

A screengrab of your browser window

A page script (fiddler / firebug) of the ad appearing

Any logistical information (time the ad appeared, browser type, page URL, etc).

That information will be useful in helping the ad service track down and nuke the offenders. It’s a delicate balance, trying to ensure that your site isn’t spewing crap through a channel that operates on a certain amount of trust¹ while at the same time not blocking so severely that you don’t make any money. I want to thank Brad for sharing his (unpleasant) experience with the rest of us, and if you were wondering about subscribing to WDC, I’d say this particular tutorial might well be worth the $30 annual fee by itself.

Let’s look at something cheerier, shall we? Kate Beaton drew a couple of comics for Amazon’s book blog, and they’re great. I’m not going to copy the images here (since they’re meant for that site), but I am going to point you to lessons in family dynamics, Plantagenet Style.

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¹ To say nothing of scrubbing comments of linkspam, and dealing with actual attempts to hack boxes, which has hit everybody from the Abominable to the Weiner in the past.