The programming for San Diego Comic Con 2013 is starting to go up; Thursday’s schedule appeared yesterday afternoon, and I expect Friday’s later today. In past years, I’ve gone through searching specifically for content relating to, and featuring creators of, the webcomics that are the focus of this page. That was usually good for distilling down to a solid 12 — 15 items per year, put up all at once.

Not doin’ that this year, in part because I wouldn’t be able to put it up until Monday (I’m expecting Saturday and Sunday programming to drop over the weekend), and in part because “webcomics” as a topic isn’t very easy to separate out. Oh, there’s a tag for Web, but the term has expanded so broadly that anything that has a website gets the designation.

In a way, I think this means that “webcomics” won — they’re no longer off in their own designation, everything overlaps with the internet; so instead I’m looking for items of interest to the independent creators that retain ownership in their work and look for things that may be of interest. I’ve also pulled a few items that I felt were worthy of commentary. Onwards.

Thursday Programming
Bringing Digital Comics into Schools and Libraries
12:30pm – 1:30pm Room 24ABC
Not sure why the focus is on digital comics rather than comics in general; creators, this is someplace you should want to get your work and since digital is now an option, that reduces the barrier to entry of schools and libraries wanting heavy-duty binding which might not be in your budget.

Gender in Comic Books
1:00pm – 2:00pm Room 28DE
Interesting balance: longtime industry dudes (Mark Waid, George Pérez) mixed with ladies who’ve made careers very quickly (Kelly Sue Deconnick, Grace Randolph, Meredith Gran). I’m not sure if the choice of panelists is due to demographics, or if it’s a comment on something I’ve believed for a decade now: the future of comics is dependent on the women who will create and read them.

Insights for Independent Creators
1:00pm – 2:00pm Room 9
I’ll be at the gender panel; this one caught my eye because it’s part one of a two-part discussion that (if I’m reading the descriptions correctly) starts out talking about indy comic creation so that you can leverage it into movies. I’m getting kind of sick of the I want to do movies so I’ll use comics as a stepping stone trope.

Digital Development and Marketing Your Comic, Web Series, App or Game: Kickstarter
1:30pm – 2:30pm Room 8
Surprisingly, George Rohac is not on this panel.

Cartoon Hangover: Bravest Warriors, Bee and Puppycat, and Friends
2013 2:00pm – 3:00pm Room 28DE
Lots of webcomics creators intersect with the Cartoon Hangover projects. Please do not ask Ian Jones-Quartey when he’s bringing back RPG World.

Integrating Comics into the Common Core
3:30pm – 4:30pm Room 26AB
Remember what we said up above about digital comics vs comics in general in schools and libraries? Panel includes :01 Books manager Gina Gagliano, which automatically means this is worth your time.

Spotlight on Jeff Smith
4:00pm – 5:00pm Room 9
This is what a twenty-year independent comics career looks like.

Bizarre? Queer? Perfect: Taming the Wild Webcomics Frontier
5:00pm – 6:00pm Room 28DE
Looks like a good set of panelists but sadly, no Erika Moen.

Webcomics Advocates: The Webcomics Gathering
5:00pm – 6:00pm Room 32AB
Quoting here: [T]hey will give any webcomic creators in the audience 30 seconds to promote their comic to the crowd.

Making a Living in Manga: New Trends Worth Watching
5:30pm – 6:30pm Room 26AB
Quoting again: As a generation of North American comics fans who grew up with manga aspire to become comics creators, they’re bumping up against a glass ceiling: a lack of paying publishing options for their work. But a new wave of manga-inspired creators are finding new ways to get published and get paid.
Emphasis on those last two words added by me. Moderated by Brigid Alverson, so it’ll be smart and well-run.

Comic-Con How-To: Kickstartering the Heart
6:00pm – 7:00pm Room 2
Okay, I’m going to quote the entire description to this one and then come back with a question for everybody. Ready? Here we go:

Siike Donnelly and Matt Hawkins — along with guest panelists Olivia Peterson, Jon Schnepp, and Joshua Levy — give you a look into the process of running and promoting a Kickstarter campaign. Learn how to reach your audience directly and put your dream project into the hands of many. Discover the ups, downs, and rewards of believing in your work.

Now the question: Why should you listen to these people? The description doesn’t tell me who any of them are or why I should believe anything they have to say. Google searches are of slight help here, as I believe that Donnelly is an occasional contributor to Bleeding Cool, Schnepp a Hollywood producer, and I have no idea about Hawkins, Peterson, and Levy because the names aren’t distinct enough. I’m hoping that the panel members aren’t the ones that wrote the description, because whoever did can’t speak to effective promotions at all.

Indie Comics Marketing and PR 101
6:30pm – 7:30pm Room 8
Maybe whoever wrote the description for that last panel needs to sit in on this one. Yes, I’m still mad about it.

Family Feud: The Comics Blogging Panel
7:00pm – 8:00pm Room 23ABC
Featuring The Spurge, Heidi Mac, Tony Isabella, Alexa Dickman, and Rich Johnston. Contrary to a rumor that I just made up, the special surprises in the description do not include a cameo appearance by me.

Holliston: Inside the Laughs, Screams, Metal, and Geekery!
8:30pm – 9:30pm Room 24ABC
Two words, everybody: Oderus Urungus.

And, because it will always be mentioned here at Fleen:

The Sergio and Mark Show
2:30pm – 3:30pm Room 8
Sergio Aragonés, Mark Evanier, Stan Sakai, and Tom Luth. For when you need to feel good about life again.

I’m either at the movies, grillin’ up some cow, or riding holiday duty with my EMS crew. Have a good one and we’ll see each other tomorrow.

As much as I said that I wanted every Artist on Strip Search season one, after my beloved Hurricane Erika bowed out I was really pulling for Maki Naro. Maybe it was his whole-hearted adoption of the pineapple motif, maybe it was his comic’s embrace of science, maybe it was the magnificent facial hair¹. His pitch in the finale for Sufficiently Remarkable, a nature show about humans in their natural habitat, just resonated with me, as did the knowledge that we have the same taste in dive bars.

As was entirely inevitable, Naro has launched the Kickstart to get Sufficiently Remarkable off the ground² and as was entirely inevitable cleared his goal in about 12 hours and is (as of this writing) about 160% of goal approaching the 24 hour mark. Applying the Fleen Fudge Factor³ to the Kicktraq prediction puts Sufficiently Remarkable in the US$42 – 84K range, but that doesn’t account for the pull of the higher stretch goals:

How cruel will Naro’s followers be? Hopefully, either US$95,099 or more than US$100,000 worth of cruel.

• Names are being added to the Official SDCC Webcomickers List, but to summarize them here:
  • Ryan North will be at the TopatoCo booth, 1229 & 1328, as well as signing This Is How You Die at the Hachette booth, 1116, on Friday 19 July from 11:00am to 12 noon.
  • Zach Weinersmith will be sharing space with Unshelved at booth 2300 in the Independent Press area.
  • Andrew Hussie will be across the street at the off-site area set up by ShiftyLook.

  In fact, let’s expand on that ShiftyLook off-site piece a little, because they’re going to have a mountain of webcomickers at the outdoor deck of the Gaslamp Hilton, including (in no particular order):

  Andrew Hussie
  Ryan North
  Christopher Hastings
  Scott Kurtz
  Kris Straub
  Zach Weinersmith

  There will also be the ShiftyLook freeplay arcade games, music at night, fun times for all, and some panels over in the convention center. Check out the ShiftyLook page for details (and the SDCC event schedule once it goes up).

• If you are going to SDCC and you skip the Sunday-night parties, or if you aren’t going to SDCC and are looking for something on TV on a Sunday night, FOX is giving Axe Cop a primetime preview:
  

  Tune in to the special primetime preview of ANIMATION DOMINATION HIGH-DEF, featuring AXE COP (9:30-9:45 PM ET/PT) and HIGH SCHOOL USA! (9:45-10:00 PM ET/PT), on Sunday, July 21. In the “Night Mission: Stealing Friends Back” episode of AXE COP, badass crime fighter AXE COP heads out on a special night mission with the help of his partner, FLUTE COP (Ken Marino), and sidekicks GREY DIAMOND (guest voice Rob Heubel), ARMY CHIHUAHUA (guest voice Giancarlo Esposito) and LIBORG (guest voice Tyler, the Creator), when fellow superhero BAT WARTHOG MAN’s (guest voice Vincent Kartheiser) friends go missing. Then, in the “Bullies” episode of HIGH SCHOOL USA!, upbeat and super-positive teen MARSH MERRIWETHER (Kartheiser) learns a valuable lesson when his best friend is accused of bullying. Meanwhile, CASSANDRA (Mandy Moore) gets ready for the “It Gets Better After High School” high school dance.

  Weirdly, nowhere in the entire press release is there so much as a mention of Nick Offerman as the voice of Axe Cop. Bizarre.

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¹ Everybody’s talking about the “beardwall”, but come on — dude’s got a ‘stache worthy of respect.

² Not to mention financially buffer his shift from “day job plus comics” to “leave the day job and make a go of it in comics”.

³ Look at the Kicktraq prediction somewhere around the 24- to 36-hour mark and the final tally will be between one-sixth to one-third of that prediction. But counterexamples abound!

The great thing about the people I follow, and have been privileged to know, is just how nerdy we can all be. Case in point: Dante Shepherd (PhD, Chemical Engineering) wanted to make a point about how silly it is to treat humanities and hard sciences as sitting in opposition to each other, and did so by appealing to the memory of a well-loved¹ cartoon from his youth.

• I hope by now you are all appreciating the gift that Tom McHenry has provided for you and are well on your way to becoming horsemasters. Join us at the pinnacle of society!
• Ryan Estrada wondered a few days ago if anybody was collecting the many, many instances online of thinking that artists should work for free because if they aren’t poor they aren’t really artists, or some such crap. Finding no better repository he’s launched the @forexposure_txt twitterfeed, which is already displaying a handsome collection of The Stupid and reminds us of Stevens Law: People die of exposure. So far, this is my favorite:
  

  I”m [sic] a working letterer for Marvel comics and I still would never expect to get paid for writing and/or art.

  That noise you heard was Chris Eliopoulos firing up the chipper-shredder; whoever tweeted that foolishness will not leave so much as a stain.

• Big Art Sale! Meredith Gran is selling original Marceline and the Scream Queens pages for amazing prices, and Octopus Pie pages at what can only be described as criminally low price point. Go dive in.
• Last thoughts for today — I’m running out of wall space but I just had to. Menquilin, meet Hapytzu.

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¹ If excessively preachy.

Happy Canada Day; what with another national holiday in a few days, it’s pretty quiet which makes it a good to day to note some few items of interest. First, I have a brief story to share with you.

Once upon a time Jon and Phillip shared an apartment in Manhattan and a pair of barstools at the Peculier Pub.

That was the first sentence I wrote in a summary of all that had happened in the electronic pages of Goats (and good glob, that was more than seven years ago … the time, she does fly); the site is in the between-places now, but if you like you can find it in the Internet Archive. Jon being Jon Rosenberg, as responsible as anybody for my being in a position to inflict my opinions upon you lovely people, and Phillip being Phillip Karlsson who for most of the history of Fleen served as the more-or-less publisher by virtue of the services provided by Dumbrella Hosting [link likely to be dead soon].

As is its wont, time has brought changes and Phillip has closed up Dumbrella Hosting; along with this mostly-daily indulgence of me, Phillip provided services for a number of webcomics most well-known creators as well as a good chunk of the code that managed their comments and stores. This may be a good time for you to peruse those links, make sure you have the latest addresses¹, RSS feeds, and suchlike³.

On a personal note, I’d like to thank Phillip for all that he did for Fleen (which is to say, me) for most of seven years. He insulated me from the costs and efforts of keeping what is ultimately a hobby running, and with an uptime that would be the envy of any IT department; I can literally count on one hand the number of down hours the we at Fleen suffered over the better part of a decade.

Jon Rosenberg is very kindly offering me space on his server, and in this way the Ciiirrrrrcle of Life is completed and I return to where I started. If, during the transition phase and after, I prove to be less adept about making everything work than was customary in the past, offer your thanks to the powerful looking man with a chair meant for malefactors, and let me know what’s broken.

• From Christopher Baldwin: the end of Spacetrawler is rapidly approaching, and he’s got a couple of questions for his readers regarding what comes next:
  

  As I wrap up Spacetrawler, and am developing the strip which will replace it, I am planning to stay in the Sci-Fi genre. I have received a lot of praise for doing sci-fi in both a funny and respectably-true-to-genre way.

  What I want to know from you all is: what I can do to do it even better? If there is anything you’d like to see me weave in more in the new project let me know. Also, if you know of any bloggers/podcasts/critics/etc who focus on sci-fi, I would like to write some of these folk to do regular sci-fi critique and ask them the same thing, so let me know who you look to for that kind of info.

  If the new comic is even half as good as Spacetrawler (and I have no doubt it will be much better than that), it’ll be worth your time from Day One. Watch this space for more information.

• Last minute notice! KC Green has been summering in the ancestral land of his people and will be having a public event before returning to the (given how this summer’s going, only slightly) less tornado-prone climes of Western Massachusetts. Specifically:
  

  This Wednesday July 3rd, I am doing a last minute signing at Atomik Pop in OKC at 3pm til 6pm for the Regular Show comic books! I will only have RS issues 1 and 2 on my person, nothing else. Very last minute stuff, but you can still come by and say hi!

  Tell KC that we said hi.

• Latest updates have been made to the webcomics exhibitor’s list for SDCC 2013. Enjoy.

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¹ For example, Brad Guigar² is now preferring www.evil-inc.com to www.evil-comic.com

² He’s dreamy.

³ We at Fleen are concentrating first on ensuring the blog is good, then we’ll worry about feeds, re-hosting email, and such. Please be patient with us.