About now as I’m writing this, the last — hopefully not too frantic — polishes are being put on two corners of webcomics, each of which will lead to new and hopefully wonderful things. A third corner is polishing up something different, but we won’t be able to tell how shiny it gets for a while.

• Firstly, this:
  

  Hi everyone. I quit my job today. I will be working on Gunnerkrigg full time now. There will be a proper announcement on Monday.

  Tom Siddell has made the leap into full time comickin’, and I believe all right-thinking folk will agree that he’s going to do very, very well. If absolutely nothing else comes of it (and much will), he won’t have to hold himself to doing three strips on the weekend before allowing himself to relax any longer. Best of luck, Tom, your comics are great and you should feel great.

• Wondercon 2012 opens in a couple of hours, and anybody making the annual trip to San Francisco should first realize they’re in the wrong place, on account of it’s in Anaheim this year. Um, sorry ’bout that. Webcomicky people are to be found there in the small press and main floor area, including (but mostly likely not limited to:

  Small Press

  Table 11 Jimbo Hillin and the Wire-Heads crüe.
  Table 48 Evan “Overside” Dahm and Kel “Sorcery 101and also some fairy tales” McDonald.
  Table 49 Kory Bing, who does many things, as does Sfé Monster, along with Dave Shabet who mostly does Dead Winter.
  Table 51 Party Tymez with Ananth and Yuko and Becky and Frank and maybe you.
  Table 53 Ben Costa, Dean of Iron Crotch studies at Iron Crotch University¹.

  Main Floor

  Booth 452 More keen-ness than you can handle with Keenspot.
  Booth 504 The closest thing to functional adults in our community, Professors Foglio.
  Booth 615 A man haunted by a house move which is still in progress², Dave Kellett.
  Booth 617 Did somebody call for handsome men? Kris Straub and David Malki ! heed your cry.
  Booth 716 The poster children for Kids, Don’t Do That, Danielle Corsetto and Randy Milholland; give ’em both a big ol’ kiss for me.

• Are you the sort that wonders where you can spend your hard-earned entertainment dollar in a month or so? Simple! You should give it to Jorge Cham, who in return will send you The PhD Movie either via stream or DVD! The countdown timer on the movie page is, even as we speak, ticking forward at a rate of one second per second, towards that golden day (15 April) when you can enact this transaction. Yay!

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¹ Since the Shi Long Pang books are published by Iron Crotch University Press, it follows that there would have to be an Iron Crotch University, right? I just want to know what their sports mascot is. I bet its nickname is “Rusty”.

² Prediction: if you ask him how the house move is going, he will likely be his answering with Buuuuhhhh.

Firstly, let me direct you to yesterday’s post, which has a correction; I carelessly misspelled Larry Holderfield’s name and didn’t notice until he was kind enough to post a comment. Mea culpa.

Secondly, this is making the rounds today, about the Canada Customs manga case from 2010. I last brought up the issue about nine months ago in response to Ryan Sohmer’s take on things. Long story short, the case has been dismissed, the accused is again a free man, albeit some US$45,000 poorer in making his defense.

The real reason I wanted to bring this up is because I didn’t want anybody to think Damn child molestin’ perverts gettin’ off on technicalities. The man at the center of the case, Ryan Matheson, got to tell his side of the story for the first time, and there were things in his statement that stopped me in my tracks:

I was charged with possession and importation of child pornography before I was ever even admitted into Canada. The police and the customs officers at the time didn’t know what the material was and called a police investigator to ask for help. The investigator, without being physically present and having no way of actually seeing the images in question, told the police that they were sure that it was child pornography.

To be detained on the word of somebody who can’t see the material in question? That’s … okay, I am going to be careful with my words as I have in the past traveled to Canada for work, and likely will again in the future, and have some experience with the customs and immigration inspectors. That part of Matheson’s account is entirely believable. I’ve been waved through the border within 45 seconds, and I’ve been held for more than an hour and told I can’t possibly be admitted¹.

In both of these cases, I was going to the same place (my employer’s local office) for the same purpose (teach a class) for the same reason (nobody in Canada qualified to do so, or we’d have saved the expense of shipping my ass up there) with the same credentials (a letter from my employer’s legal department stating the regs under which I was coming to Canada, the text of which had been run past the Canadian Consulate in New York). The only difference was the person I talked to, and how much of a bad day he or she had before I showed up. This is not a good basis for determining who to charge with felonies that carry mandatory imprisonment².

Then we got to this part of Matheson’s story:

I politely asked an officer at the police station if I could speak to the U.S. embassy, but she replied, “Are you serious? I don’t think we have that here,” and walked away. I was never able to talk to the embassy, and even when my brother arrived for my bail, he too was denied from seeing me at all.

Yeah, okay, I get it; thanks to the proliferation of American TV, people all around the world try to exercise Miranda rights, not realizing that’s a US thing. But this wasn’t Miranda, this was Matheson being denies his absolute right to consular access, which is guaranteed by treaty. The (shall we say) capricious nature of Customs Canada is lengthy and well-documented, but I’d have expected the police in the national capital (where, after all, the US Embassy is located) to not have tried this shit.

My bail conditions tightly restricted my use of computers and the Internet. My conditions had even specifically named a single company I could work for³, which prevented me from advancing my professional career.

For the record, the defense spent US$75,000 to get to the point that all criminal charges were dropped, and the one regulatory charge that Matheson plead guilty to was dismissed by the judge. The Crown must have spent much, much more than that, only to finally come to the realization that nothing was done wrong by Mr Matheson, no children were protected, society did not become safer. If I lived in Canada, I’d be outraged that my tax dollars were spent so fruitlessly to give the appearance that something was really being done, you bet.

This is why we need the CBLDF/CLLDF. Without their support, Matheson may well have been forced to plead guilty to criminal charges, been imprisoned, lost his means of support, and been tagged a sexual offender for life in at least one country.

Open question then, for Ryan Sohmer and others who have dismissed the work of the CBLDF on these cases where things are murky: any change in your opinion? Do you feel your children/society are less safe, or was this a waste of effort on the part of the Crown? Do you still believe that [E]ven within the comic book industry, there are plenty of other people who need defending to the exclusion of Mr Matheson? Anything you want to say, I’ll run it here, unchanged. Let’s get a dialogue going.

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¹ Which later turned into a a berating lecture on what a huge favor the inspector was doing me by not immediately putting me on a plane back to the States, which eventually turned into Yeah, okay, come on in.

² That would be Matheson’s case again, not mine.

³ What in the actual fuck?

I don’t know about where you are, but it is absolutely gorgeous out today, and I’m almost over my plague. Let’s concentrate on happy stories today.

• There is nothing that warms the cockles of my black heart more than seeing an example of extreme customer service. This could be as simple as acknowledging a mistake and making good; it could be going out of your way to deal with a customer that’s determined to be a jerk¹. Sometimes you didn’t even make a mistake and instead, found a way to do something better; the old way was good, people that you dealt with then were dealt with fairly, but you want to give ’em a little something anyway. That’s where customer service enters the heroic realm², which I saw an example of today.

  Back up a couple of years, and Penny Arcade sold some polo shirts that their more office-job-type fans could wear to work. Nice, understated game controller logo stitched on the left breast, breathable cotton, decent color selection. They sold well. But the PA people weren’t 100% satisfied with them, so after they sold out they went away for about a year for retooling:

  When asked for comment about the improvements made in v2.0, Penny Arcade’s President of Operations and Business Development Robert Khoo addressed the issues seen in v1.0, stating the “the v1.0s had really specific care instructions, because the materials we selected weren’t treated to be preshrunk. Well… it turns out folks hated the idea of dealing with care instructions, so for the v2.0s we switched to a higher quality cotton that shrinks less and is quite a bit softer.”

  So far, so good; product improvement ought to be everybody’s goal. But now that the second iteration of the shirts are coming online, Penny Arcade decided to do something extraordinary: they’ve decided that everybody that bought one of the first version of the shirt is entitled to a free shirt upgrade [PDF]. Short version: cut out the logo on the 1.0 version of the shirt, include it with your name and address on a form, and bam! New shirt.

  No fee, no shipping on domestic orders (US$10 flat for international), and you’ve got until 30 June to take advantage. The new shirts aren’t up at the PA store just yet, but as far as loss leaders go, I can’t think of a better demonstration to your customer base to convey the idea We will take care of you³.

• As I told many, many people⁴ on many, many occasions, I loves me some Digger, concluded or no. Of course, just because Ursula Vernon is out of the regular webcomickin’ game doesn’t mean that she’s off my radar — I follow creators I love into their other, not-webcomicky projects, be those comic books or gallery shows or animation or whatever. The POV and voice of the creator is the important part, not the particular medium they choose to work in today. Anyway: Ursula Vernon.

  She’s the subject of a retrospective in April, on the campus of Lamar University’s Dishman Art Museum in scenic Beaumont, Texas (which I’m reliably informed is about 90 minutes east of Houston or four hours west of New Orleans). Show runs from 4 — 26 April, with a reception⁵ on the 6th, from 7:00 to 9:00pm.

  The show, which is co-curated by Larry “mckenzee” Holderfield[see below], will incorporate local signings, previews of Vernon’s latest Dragonbreath book, and a single-page comic contest for the kids. Details on the flyer (front, back), which somehow neglect to include what might be the show’s centerpiece: a brief history of the Biting Pear. Now all I need to do is get my job to send me to Texas next month.

Edit to add: I inexcusably truncated Larry Holderfield’s name in the original posting; we at Fleen apologize for the mistake.

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¹ May I recommend to you the Nerd of Advice podcast on this very topic?

² And I’m going to acknowledge up front that almost nobody smaller than a mid-sized corporation has the resources to engage in this kind of customer service. That alone doesn’t explain its rarity, as those that do have the resources typically don’t.

³ Where the “we” probably refers mostly to Brian Sunter, who is seemingly everywhere that merchandise and fulfillment occur on PA’s behalf. He’s like a magical shipping ghost made out of Khoo’s sentient shadow.

⁴ That one’s for you, Ivy.

⁵ Read: “Food and booze”.

That would be the one that says, “Don’t scrape webcomics, and especially don’t try to make money off of them with your scraper.” Yes, yes, I know: Blah blah exposure blah blah they put it in my RSS feed blah blah not charging for the comic charging for the convenience. We’ll leave aside the fact that the creators in question didn’t ask for you to be an intermediary between them and their audience, and even leave the fact that so many of them have released their work under Creative Commons licenses that clearly say No commercial exploitation, Bunky. It’s just a dick move to claim that you’re “supporting the creators”, especially in a world where precisely one (1) person is actually doing aggregation right. Let’s let webcomics fan Chris Hanel have the floor for a moment:

Do you support webcomics? Take this one question survey:

1. Do you take the RSS feed of over 90 webcomics, rip the images, put them in your Android app, and then put your own advertisements next to them in order to make money?

Congratulations: If you said “Yes”, then NO, YOU DO NOT SUPPORT WEBCOMICS.

Hanel raised the flag on the latest scraper with a helpful list of comics being scraped. What kills me in all of these recurring instances of scraping is that the creator always acts all noble and says But I’ll remove your content if you just ask me to! So once again for those at the back that might not have heard: Offering an opt-in is morally defensible; requiring an explicit opt-out from being involved in your scheme is not the approach to take if you want to be seen as helpful. Knock it off.

• Let’s just try to find some good in the world today, yes? On the one hand, congrats to the Little Heart comic for marriage equality; I happened to check their Kickstarter page as they exactly met their funding goal earlier today. Can’t say I’ve ever seen that happen before; if I were the sort who believed in luck, I’d take that as a good omen.

  Lots of talent on the book, and the inimitable Christopher Butcher (founder/showrunner of TCAF, manager of one of the world’s great comic shops, smilin’ face of UDON studios, and appreciator of bizarre Japanese Kit Kats) has contributed a heartfelt intro/foreword, a draft of which is available for your perusal. It’s really good.

• Horrible webcomics pun¹ made, adorable shirt available for purchase six days later; film at eleven.

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¹ For once, not attributable to Brad Guigar or David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc)

That sound you hear is merely the damp, disturbing rhonchi¹ that inhabit my lungs. Nevertheless I am again vertical and catching up on the wacky world of webcomickry because I love you people that much.

• Late last week, something new cropped up — on first glance, it looks similar to a webcomics scraper, but it isn’t. Henry Kuo has tread the middle ground between collecting webcomic content in one place, but not overharvesting and costing creators the ad revenue of eyeballs.

  Kuo isn’t profiteering off other people’s work, isn’t stealing bandwidth, and is truly giving people a means to discover and follow webcomics they might not have found otherwise, making him the first person to actually do an unofficial app/site to benefit creators. His logic is nicely laid out here, but you may has well just dive in and enjoy the goodness that is Just The First Frame².

• Following up on a story that broke on a day that was busy with other content: Jim Zub‘s previous announcement of reviving old videogame IP as webcomics has launched, as Sky Kid joins Namco/Bandai properties such as Bravoman, Xevious, and Alien Confidential under the Shifty Look banner.

  To be clear, the four properties (so far) are being comic-ized by both Zub’s UDON studio (Sky Kid and Bravoman), and by the entirely separate Cryptozoic studio (Xevious and Alien Confidential), and Z-Man is only working himself on Sky Kid. Nevertheless, it’s a kick in the nostalgia gland for people of certain ages and habits, and all four comics show a lot of early promise (keeping in mind that they’re each up to about two updates so far). Keep your eyes on ’em, they’re likely to be fun.

• We’ve previously established (in fact, on the same day as Zub’s Shifty Look announcement) that Angela “Jam” Melick is one of my favorite creators because of Reasons³. And we’ve previously established that her second Wasted Talent collection was imminent, which imminence is even more imminent than it was yesterday. That’s because earlier today, she announced that God willin’ and the creek don’t rise⁴, said books will go up for order on this Saturday, 17th March.

  Melick’s run into the usual bumps and interruptions involved in book launch (and judging from some of her hedged statements on her site and Twitter, some more than usual bumps and interruptions were imposed upon her, but parties unknown but upon whom I wish fire and doom), but with any luck this weekend bumps and interruptions will learn that you do not screw with a woman that has her own construction-grade helmet and high-viz vest if you want to remain unscathed. The wrath of an engineer with scathe you right up.

• Finally, Real Life and Comics always interact; they can feed each other, and they can steal from each other, and for those that do them for funsies, it’s important to remember which of those things is the priority. Tony Piro’s been in that dance of priorities for a half-decade with more than 600 Calamities of Nature strips, and today he has to step away:
  

  Today is my last update for Calamities of Nature. And I’ll be perfectly frank about the reasons. My full-time career is in academics, and I need to put everything I have into it if I’m going to have any chance of keeping it that way. As much as I love this comic, I can’t have it taking precious time away from my work. It’s time to move on.

  I’m going to thank Piro for the time he took, for the remarkably clever (in a phsyics geek kind of way) punchlines, for the charts that were illuminating and challenging, and for a point of view that was uniquely his own, even while working in a format that was familiar. You gave us a lot of yourself, and we’ll miss the comics as well as the bits of you that you shared. I suspect that we may see one-offs in the future, but even if that never happens, thanks for what you created.

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¹ At least it isn’t rales. Look ’em up, and give a listen if you dare.

² It’s pretty much exactly what is says on the box.

³ Engineers are a somewhat mysterious tribe, but we are generally a peaceful people.

⁴ As my great-grandmother used to say.

Those of you that perhaps have been wondering where I’ve been for a couple of days, I’ve been sick. In a hotel room in Boston¹, bringing eldritch horrors from beyond sanity out of my lungs and into an unsuspecting world². I’ve been almost entirely off the grid in that time, a fact more than balanced by the twenty or so extra hours of sleep that I’ve managed to cram in there. Tomorrow looks to be similarly disrupted, this time due to travel³. By the time I get home and figure out with my boss where things sit businesswise, it will probably be the weekend.

So screw it, check back on Monday when everybody’s back in proper working order. It’ll probably take me that long just to figure out what I’ve missed in my fever-times. For example, I just saw a comment from reader Unnatural20 (good one) that Lore Sjöberg has managed at least a partial resurrection of the spammer beset Bad Gods, meaning that my favorite Sjöbergian joke construction of all time (“And I’m Dave!” never gets old) has at least some examples back where they can be appreciated. So yay for that.

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¹ To be fair, a very nice hotel room, and the staff have been magnificent the past 48 hours or so as I’ve been holed up, cranky, burning through their supply of Kleenex like a hot truck through butter. Also, when you call them on the phone, they bring you food, no matter how disgusting and disease-ridden you might be. The staff of The Onyx rocks, collectively and individually.

² Before you ask, no, not in the chestburster fashion, but believe me I felt more than once that it would have been preferable to what I actually went through.

³ Although I am once again well enough to engage in the actions of commerce, my client decided that losing 40% of the contact hours meant it made more sense to just scrap the week and try again another time. Can’t argue with that too much, really.

I am sick and spreading my illness to all who come close; I’d sit a little further back from the screen if I were you.

• Worried about the Mayan Doom Prophecy? Rich Stevens has you covered:
  

  For $2,012, I will personally prevent the end of all life on Earth if the Apocalypse occurs on December 21, 2012. No refunds if by some off chance a religious prophecy was misinterpreted and winds up being bullshit.

  Sounds like the best deal since the invention of post-rapture pet care.

• For a rebuttal with today’s sign of the apocalypse, let’s go to Robert Khoo:
  

  For anyone that sells apparel, bad news today. India stopped all cotton exports. Global prices on the white stuff are going up.

  Reuters and the Wall Street Journal treated the story in a somewhat dry manner, but I found a couple of quotes in the WSJ story that may indicate that it’s not necessarily gloom for your favorite t-shirt monger:

  The announcement sent cotton prices on the ICE Futures U.S. exchange higher. But domestic prices will likely plunge, said A. Ramani, secretary of the Indian Cotton Federation. They have already slid over the past year on expectations of a record crop this year.

  This is the second time in nearly two years that India has banned cotton exports in response to concerns about local supplies.

  The front-month ICE Futures U.S. cotton contract, which had dropped from above 200 cents a pound a year ago to less than 90 cents, surged 4.337 cents, or 4.9%, to 92.23 cents midday in New York.

  So let’s recap — cotton prices are up about 5%, but are still less than half what they were a year ago. That drop didn’t result in t-shirts becoming suddenly more affordable, so hopefully a small recoup in prices won’t be used as an excuse to jack up prices now¹. Other analyses remind us that global production and market supply are actually up over last year, meaning this may be a temporary thing.

• Even if we are heading to a hellish future of all life extinguished/slightly higher t-shirt prices, no reason we can’t laugh along the way — Business Insider magazine will have you meet your doom with some insights from Zach Weiner on how he does what he does. Just in time for his birthday², too. Happy Birthday, Zach — by living one more day, you made the BI headline a total lie.

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¹ Since as we all know, large international firms would never engage in such asymmetry in pricing to their profit and the consumer’s detriment.

² Also my sister’s. Happy Birthday, Laura; I hope you’re enjoying those umbrella drinks in the piano bar of that enormous cruise ship you’re on.

Busy, busy, busy. Please enjoy David Malki ! gettin’ all philosophical in this bitch. For those of you that like word balloons, I prefer the punchline in the extended version.

Also, for those of you that like logistics (guilty!), Rich Burlew is doing everything right with his massively successful Kickstart, providing followup progress reports on the massive job of fulfilling all the pre-orders. Also included in that latest report are breakdowns on failed pledges:

So we’ve gotten the final tally for how many pledges went through, and the total of all pledges that were dropped (due to irresolvable processing errors or the like) added up to just $3954.00 from 61 backers. That represents just 0.32% of our final pledge total, or less than one-third of one percent. That is shockingly low; you’ll remember that I allowed for 5% of all the money pledged to drop out due to complications. So congratulations to you: As a group, you have excellent credit. [emphasis original]

Many thanks to Burlew for being so transparent — he’s setting the standard for future campaigns. And I’m sure that Kickstarter and Amazon ain’t complaining today, either:

We also have the final total for how much we paid to Kickstarter and Amazon in fees: $106,799.87, divided up among the two companies in a way that would require more math to explain than I feel like doing. It does represent 11.71% of my completed pledge totals, which is a little higher than I had counted on (10%). Still, given how much extra I had allowed for dropped pledges, it’s not a problem at all.

Holy cats, that’s a lot. Between this and Double Fine, Kickstarter are off to a really good start this year.

Namely, getting things wrapped up for the work client; very little time, and probably none tomorrow. On the other hand, you’ve gotten a couple thousand words out of me already this week, and I imagine you’re good with a light day or two.

So let me give you one thing that’s caught my (rapidly skimming in between work obligations) eye today, as it combines two of my favorite things: respect for fairy tales and Ursula Vernon. She’s offering up some old-school European tales (complete with Aarne-Thompson type codes) with her own commentary, complete with keen observations that sometimes you can’t tell who the protagonist is, who the adversary is, and how sometimes either or both switch back and forth from magnanimous to malevolent, or clever to stupid:

All those who think that the prince will have learned to listen to the absurdly competent Master-maid and will be very sure not to break his promise, raise your hand!

Okay, if your hand is raised, you have failed Fairytales 101. Please report to the office for our remedial class, entitled “Why We Do Not Insult Old Women At Wells And Other Vital Lessons.”

That would be from The Master-Maid, which I’m certain I’ve never read before, but which seemed oddly familiar in places (Aarne-Thompson type 313), and which offers up a casual reference to an unexplained artifact/creature/I don’t know and assumes we should recognize it:

Okay, forget the rest of the story, what the heck is a river-sucker? And how is it so completely common that the storyteller doesn’t even bother to explain—”You know, a river-sucker, jeez, what’re you, dumb?”—as if they’re as common as horses, stables, and porridge.

I don’t know what a river-sucker is, but I halfway expect one to show up in Øyvind Thorsby’s Hitmen for Destiny¹. The other, shorter tale is The Blue Light (Aarne-Thompson type 562, which I recognized as a variation of The Magic Tinderbox), which is a stellar example of story where the “hero” has some real dick tendencies. Good times!

Okay, I lied, one other thing to recommend to you: Lore Sjöberg (proprietor of Wired magazine’s Alt Text, the sadly-offline Bad Gods, and the least creepy white cargo van in the country) has managed to resurrect his most famous endeavour, The Brunching Shuttlecocks! This means the return of most of Bandwidth Theater (including the much-beloved Kitchen Floor²), and many of the Lore Brand Lore comics. Significant portions of his work still await reconstruction after the devastation wrought by particularly malicious spammer/hackers³, but as the world is no longer lacking a short animation featuring a depleted-uranium beholder statue, who am I to complain?

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¹ NB: Øvind Thorsby remains an awesome name, and that Hitmen for Destiny remains … challenging in its art.

² Warning: this short not only contains a depleted-uranium beholder statue, but also two (two!) of the most creative pieces of profanity that have ever been uttered. It’s glorious.

³ Or should that be “spammers/hacker”? Can I get a ruling, Ryan North?