• It’s not hard to understand Nimona coming to an end, as it did some few hours ago; creator Noelle Stevenson is busy with lots of comics projects these days (not the least being the excellent Lumberjanes), and the story always had a beginning-middle-end feel to it. Still, I would have been perfectly happy for chapter 11 to wrap up a book of the story, if you will, and then for another book to start with a new chapter 1; then again, it’s about the story that Stevenson wanted to tell, not the preferences that I may have.

  In any event, 250-odd (sometimes very odd) pages is a good run for a story, and we’ll always be able to read about the adventures of Nimona and Lord Blackheart, and the ethics of “villainy” from the beginning … or in handy print form from HarperCollins in May, which you may preorder for convenience. Oh, and Stevenson is promising a book-only epilogue and if that’s not ongoing adventure, it’s the next best thing.

• Kickstarter news I: Unshelved has a problem — namely too damn many comics to put in print form easily. Ten books worth already, an eleventh on the way, and vansihing shelf space the world over. In order to make as many comics available to as many people as cheaply and easily as possible, creators Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes have opted to take the path broken by Diesel Sweeties a few years back and offer the entire damn back catalog on a novelty USB key, presuming all the funding goals get met.

  Stretch goals will mean that the to-be-released book eleven gets included in the ebook bundle, audio commentaries get recorded by Barnes & Ambaum, and — most importantly — free copies of (as of this writing, at least two) books are made available to libraries. It’s an odd thing, making most of the stretch goals into give more stuff to people that aren’t you rather than make the stuff you get more special, but library folk are generous that way.

• Kickstarter news II: David Malki ! has almost finished the production of nonphysical rewards for the Machine of Death card game, and has a project megapost detailing what’s available now (the audiobook version of the game cards; the game to non-backers via various retail outlets; a downloadable version of the game under a Creative Commons license; new rule variants) and what is yet to come (a downloadable artbook; an MC Frontalot song; an original rules song; various personal appearances) in the culmination of a multi-year project.

  Most excitingly for people like me, Malki ! includes an expenses breakdown and a pretty complete financial accounting of what it costs to put together a project like this, which should serve as critical information for anybody that wants to run their own Kickstart. Please note especially where Postage cost just 0.5% less than Game Production, and consider that some of the production involved complex, handmade wooden boxes that must have cost a bundle, without which post fees would probably have been the single largest expense. How big an expense was postage, at 35.9%? Sending two actual humans (Malki ! and Chun Ming Huang) to China and returning them home safely cost less than 1% of the total expenses.

• Not quite Kickstarter: As noted in the beforetimes, Operation Let’s Build A Goddamned Tesla Museum was only the beginning — a physical site was saved, but millions more would be needed to build up the actual museum itself — a monumental undertaking, even with the real-life Tony Stark on your side. To that end, honorary Tesla family member Matthew Inman is running funding drives for the GDTM in the form of commemorative bricks (as seen at many cultural and educational institutions that do not feature the word Goddamned in the name) and t-shirts (which feature the Tesla Motors logo, by personal dispensation of Elon Musk). It is not too early to do holiday shopping for the nerds in your life, and both shirts and bricks cost a hell of a lot less than Tesla motorcars, just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

really not, of course.

Of course!

PS: Mary I am very sorry if linking to your delightful stories of teaching English in Japan means you have been brought to the attention of garbage-person spammers.

We’ve got something for everybody today. Let’s dig in.

• Own a copy of Ryan North’s To Be Or Not To Be? Like me, did you think that you’d exhausted all the possible story paths last year? Au contraire, as North has been sharing some semi-walkthroughs of the story, at least one of which leads to a story point that I never encountered in my dozens of readings:
  

  It reads as a joke, but it isn’t one: if you do actually perform those calculations at the appropriate time in the book – and you’ll know it when you see it – their result will be a new page number to turn too, at which point you’ll continue your adventure as both Present Hamlet and Just Arrived From The Future Hamlet.

  That’s right: time travel. On the other hand, I did come across a story ending that involved the nature of reality itself, and a massive game of chess. Oh, and if you’re of a culinary bent, I also came across a tasty recipe, which North is also sharing with you:

  You will find yourself in a locked-room puzzle with only a few moves to dispose of the body before being discovered. Direct your choices towards making stew, and in one of the endings you will be rewarded with a really excellent recipe for stew.

• Each year, I know that Faith Erin Hicks is going to come up with a new graphic novel that’s going to knock my socks off, ranging from summer camp horror to high school intrigue, to scares mixed with a new high school to wacky hijinks involving high school and robots to the not-at-all-high-school-related Adventures of Superhero Girl, and many, many more. And today is her birthday! Everybody wish her a happy one, and encourage her to take at least one day off her breakneck pace of book-creatin’ to enjoy herself.
• New! Sweet Bro and Hell Of Jeff start a new weeklong story at Paradox Space. Be sure to double up on your sanity meds before you click.
• New! After a long series of delays while she worked on other projects (you know, little things like Sleep of Reason and Smut Peddler and running a publishing company), Spike is itchin’ to get back to the comic that she made her name on. In fact, a few weeks ago at SPX as I was giving her grief for leaving me hanging on Scip and his swirled cone (April, 2013) and the immediate aftermath (last Christmas), with a shift of scene in January and February she promised that Templar, AZ would be returning this month. With the clock counting down, we saw the news earlier today:
  

  Stream over! TAZ page status: 95% finished, from sketch to colors, in about 10 hours. It’ll go up later today. But my wrist hurts, so yeah.

  I’ve been obsessively refreshing my browser and it’s not up yet, but soon! I’d also like to remind Spike that I am in Chicago this week and would be very disappointed in person if the page did not go up as promised¹.

Spam of the day:

But why don’t you consider the narrow people with the loads of diet routine coke, Kraft meals, melted hen, furthermore cookies?

Melted … hen?

_______________
¹ In case you’ve never met me, that’s not a threat of getting physical; I’ve never met you and I’m pretty sure you could kick my ass. Rather, I would pester her relentless. In the immortal words of Kevin McDonald, I’m a whiner without dignity, I’ll make your life hell! [audio, video]

Man, what’s this about Chicago’s airports being shut down? I gotta fly there on Sunday. Grumble, grumble.

• Clever idea of the day: You Damn Kid’s recent return means that we are getting new strips three days a week and vintage strips (with commentary) on Thursdays — in essence, two entirely different strips. But today, Owen Dunne has combined the two into a form — like Voltron — that is greater than the sum of its parts: the strip-in-a-strip [NB: right now it’s the front page of the site, but by Monday it’ll have a different URL, which I’ll update eventually].

  Original Kid/current father to the New Kid is reminiscing about his own childhood, and clicking anywhere on the current strip will bring up the vintage strip from history 2005¹. Or, if you’re very brave, you can check out the uncensored version [NSFBrain]. Long story short, it’s a clever idea.

• When Dylan Meconis — whom I love more than anybody except probably her wife and maybe her mom — and Matt Bors tweeted earlier in the week about deer porn, I was torn between really wanting to see that and never wanting to see that. As it turns out, some comics at The Nib feature entirely innocuous titles that do not indicate what you’ll be seeing. May I suggest that in future, rather than Prequels All The Way Down (clever wordplay, no argument) [NSFW if you’re a deer], this particular comic be instead called Warning! Lark’s Vomit! Deer Porn!
• Let’s go out on something really excellent: Bad Machinery book 3 exists in at least a few corners of the world, and will hopefully be available through the engines of commerce sooner rather than later. Or, you know, December. Fires! Jack and Shauna’s romance reaches its peak! The Mystery War is over. Get caught up on the story, then get your preorders in because this is the start of Bad Machinery really hitting its stride, with each subsequent case somehow getting even better.

Spam of the day:

walmart

Man, fuck Wal*Mart.

_______________
¹ Coincidentally, Ray got kind of stoned in 2005, making those two strips contemporaries.

What can I can? Sometimes I’m behind the game.

• Julia Wertz has produced some of the most painfully funny/honest comics of the young century under the monikers of Fart Party/Museum of Mistakes; painful in the sense that anybody reading them would find something that resembled their own experiences and spend the afternoon cringing all over again. Growing up is often a process of accepting what an idiot/jerk/asshole you were and being relieved that you aren’t anymore¹.

  For most of a week, Wertz has had a print collection of her cartoons available for purchase (pre-orders, which I missed entirely, have been fulfilled, and it’ll be moving into bookstore channels in the coming weeks). Various editions of Museum of Mistakes: The Fart Party Collection (all of which are signed and doodled), offering various additional bits of art, knick-knacks, gewgaws, and tchotchkes.

• Also how did I never notice this: Zach[ary] Weiner[smith], webcomicker par excellence, sketch comedian, meme wrangler, CYOA author, and children’s book wordbender uses one of two commonly-accepted spellings for [the root of] his last name: W-E-I-N-E-R.

  But when speaking of the male generative organ in slang, he uses the other of two commonly-accepted spellings: W-I-E-N-E-R. Now I have to write a graduate thesis on this non-singular self-image that Mister W holds and its likely impact on the origins of his irreverent — even transgressive humor. Either that, or dude typo’ed his own last name.

• Not a missed item: yesterday, the Society of Illustrators announced the dates and special guests for next year’s MoCCA Festival, along with a shift in venue from the 69th Regiment Armory. In order, then, the show will be 11 and 12 April, guest will include Scott McCloud (fresh off the release of The Sculptor) and Raina Telgemeier (no doubt completing six months on the New York Times Bestseller List for Sisters, and about 150 weeks for Smile), along with Aline Kominsky-Crumb and JH Williams III.

  The new venue is Center 548 on Manhattan’s west side at 22nd, near to the famous High Line, one of the most innovative urban parks in existence. More information as it becomes available, but if you’re of a mind to exhibit, applications will open on 3 November.

• Finally, Jeph Jacques launched his new comic today, which caused a demand that promptly made his hosting fall over. At some point in the future, then, you’ll be able to check out Alice Grove in its permanent home twice a week. Until then, you can check out the mirror at Tumblr, where the first two pages don’t give away very much. Can’t wait to see how this one develops.

Spam of the day:

does vinegar kill spiders

Why would you want to kill spiders? They keep nastier things under control, are interesting as hell, and occasionally hilarious with their HEY! LOOK AT ME! OVER HERE ME! ME! ME! LOOK! behavior. Unless you’ve got a crack spider, or live in Australia. Then again, everything in Australia wants to kill you, so no need to be mean to spiders particularly.

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¹ Of course, that just means that in a few years you’ll be looking back on now and realizing that you were still an idiot/jerk/asshole. With any luck, today is to a lesser degree, and eventually the lag time before you recognize your own idiot/jerk/asshole nature narrows to the point that you can see it in real time and adjust your behavior.

We at Fleen have spoken more than once about (and in this interview, with the key person behind) Make That Thing, the crowdfunding production-and-fulfillment arm of The Topato Corporation. The first part of that descriptor, production-and, is probably the most important, as MTT isn’t just a post-Kickstarter merch-shipping service. To quote MTT Supreme Honcho Holly Rowland on staying in a relatively narrow range of projects¹:

We do what we do, and we do it well. We want to stay “on message”, so to speak, and not fuck around with video games or whatever because we don’t do video games and someone’s massively successful Kickstarter doesn’t seem like a proper testing ground.

But it appears that after a series of print- and plush-oriented campaigns (including some of the very largest in the publishing/comics category), MTT has branched out a bit. After all, Rowland followed up her previous assertion with:

That is not to say that we won’t open ourselves up to it in the future.

Their foray into recorded media started with the Deathmöle album, and now they’re partnering on a documentary film that will be chronicling the effort of building the biggest thing ever:

12 men have set foot on the moon, and getting them there cost $25.4 billion dollars. The last moonwalk ended more than 40 years ago. Two men, Michael and David, are dedicating their lives to creating the next great leap for humanity, and they think they can give us permanent access to the moon for less than a billion dollars.

This is what I love about the Topato family of creators — there’s always something there that will surprise me. And while watching the process of STRIPPED’s production makes me doubt that Shoot The Moon will be finished by Fall 2015³, I would be thrilled to be wrong. Here’s hoping they raise the necessary US$37,000 in the coming month and we can all find out together.

As long as we’re mentioning crowdfunding, check it out: Stand Still, Stay Silent book 1 has already raised US$34,452 of its anticipated US$25K, with a mere 27 days left to go. Since it’s on IndieGoGo and not Kickstarter, I don’t have the data to apply the Fleen Funding Formula, but I’d anticipate it finishing in the US$75K (plus or minus) range. Well done, Minna Sundberg, can’t wait to read the book next summer (she has to finish drawing chapter 4 for inclusion, then printing, then shipping).

Spam of the day: Hello gary! I am looking for a man, i’m 21 y.o. let’s talk? My name is Svetlana, I’m from Ukraine.

Hello Svetlana, what is it like in the bridebasket of Europe?

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¹ To quote the MTT website on project scope:

We don’t know how to make USB toasters or solar-powered flashlights², so we simply won’t take on Hardware, Design, Video Game, or Fashion projects. Other people are better at that than we are. However, the rewards for your project are heavily weighed toward the following:

• Printed materials (books, comics, posters)
• Printed or embroidered apparel items (T-shirts, polos, neckties, aprons)
• Novelties and baubles (stickers, patches, bookmarks, foam swords)
• Other things that don’t involve inventing a new type of manufacturing apparatus

Then we might be a good fit. (You can take a look at the things we sell at TopatoCo.com for an example of the things we make day in and day out).

² The first time I saw that I read it as solar-powered fleshlights and thought Oh man, Erika Moen’s got to get her logo on those.

³ The target date as described on the KS page; to quote their Risks and Challenges:

We’ve been around the video production block many times, but this is the first feature-length production we’ve done. It’s possible we may face delays when perfecting special effects, the score and editing, but we think any extra time spent will make for a better film. Plus, once we’ve got the movie done, sending it out digitally will be a breeze. [emphasis mine]

Utterly no disrespect to the STM team, but a year seems a very short time to tackle the project and I hope they don’t kill themselves in the making.

Looks like late posts this week; gomen.

• In the roughly one year since Matt Bors launched The Nib for Medium, the site has grown with rapidity; there are a couple of regular contributors whose work doesn’t grab me (and at least one who actively, consistently enrages me), a bunch that I like, and a few that I love¹ — I think that probably makes it a very good comics section by any measure, but especially as editorial comics, as it has avoided the trap of becoming an echo chamber.

  Even better, he’s got a budget and those contributors (a dozen or more on a regular weekly basis, maybe 30 or 40 over the past year in all) get paid. If that seems like a fair amount of work, you’re right, and a couple months back Bors hired Eleri Harris as associate editor.

  Apparently, the growth is too much for two people to easily wrangle, as three months later Matt Lubchansky (of Please Listen To Me and New Amsterdam Mystery Company) is now joining up as editorial assistant:

  Matt’s going to be helping me and associate editor Eleri Harris manage our day to day publishing schedule, as well as tweeting on twitter, contributing his own comics, and working with me on a SECRET PROJECT.

  This seems as good a time as any to share Lubchansky’s classic supersomething, Not-All-Man, as well as his Nibby contribution today, about a problem in the atheist community. Lubchansky’s a skilled skewer-er of those that need skewering, always punches up, and has a visual style that’s well suited to making points and chuckles in equal degree. Best of luck to Lubchansky, and we’ll report back on the rumor that Eleri Harris is thinking of changing her name to “Matt” in order to help confuse The Nib’s enemies.

• In other news, the Joe Shuster Awards were presented over the weekend, honoring the finest in Canadian comics / Bandes dessinée Canadien. This year’s recognition for Webcomics Creator / Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web went to Jayd Aït-Kaci with Christina Strain for The Fox Sister. Once again, the Shusters remain both well-curated and an excellent source for discovering new webcomics. And heck, anybody that wins in a field that includes Emily Carroll is well worth your attention; for reference, the nominees are found here.

Spam of the day:

Dearest sweet melissa, all the best sweet finerd! I will be here waiting for you but i hope you will drop by on FB once a while to connect with all of us!

Oh … kay.

_______________

¹ Gemma Correll 4 Lyfe, yo.

Let’s just assume I wrote something cool and erudite about each of these.

• Stand Still, Stay Still print drive went live yesterday, and you can get a copy of SSSS in beautiful hardcover (judging from my copy of A Red Tail’s Dream) for US$55, shipped anywhere in the world. The usual premiums apply for signed bookplates/sketches (cats only, but cats are very important in SSSS), and what the heck — full color, hardcover, nearly 300 pages, and Minna Sundberg has proven her ability to ship and deliver. Get in on this before the IndieGoGo campaign closes on 21 October.
• My evil twin is celebrating 10 years as a self-employed cartoonist with an AMA on one of the less scum-and-villainy-oriented corners of Reddit tomorrow. I’ll be working, so somebody ask him if Howard ever feels the urge to be the good twin for a while.
• So matter of fact as to almost be missed over at Questionable Content:
  

  I am launching a new comic this Thursday

  Presumably, this is the new comic promised in the third milestone goal of Jeph Jacques’s Patreon and holy crap he’s on the verge of achieving the fifth milestone goal. Good for you, Jeph, and can’t wait to see the new strip.

• New Dresden Codak, the first in two months. Aaron Diaz has been pretty absent from social media for some weeks now, and he tells us why:
  

  Sorry for the radio silence for so long. I’d been kind of not dealing with anxiety and depression for the better part of a year, and it reached a breaking point last month. I’m doing well now, but all this has necessitated a limited use of the internet for a while. For the next few months I won’t be available much through social media, so if you need to contact me, please email me at dresdencodak [at] gmail [dottity-dot] com. If you don’t follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, you won’t notice any difference, as I’ll still be updating the comic as always! I’ll also be posting sketches and little content updates on the Patreon blog.

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — depression sucks the life right out of you and good for Diaz finding a way to deal with it; it appears that Diaz’s coping mechanisms must including lots and lots of drawing, because he hadn’t shared much of his usual in-process drawings when he went dark some weeks back. Oh, and as you may have noticed from the quote above, he’s opened up a Patreon, so check that out.

Spam of the day:

Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an really long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr … well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyhow, just wanted to say fantastic blog!

Yeah, that sucks. Also, nice spam links.

Maybe it’s everybody getting back into the swing of things after SPX and XOXO Fest last weekend. Maybe it’s everybody trekking to Austin for MondoCon¹ (where one may find Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott C, and Becky & Frank) or to Portland (they just had XOXO last weekend) for Rose City Comic Con (where one may find Scott Kurtz, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Ethan Nicolle, and the ubiquitous Jim Zub).

Or, to be more precise, those people listed around Rose City are merely the webcomickers who are special guests of the show. Wecomicky exhibitors will also include Christopher Baldwin, Jennie Breeden, Evan Dahm, Sam Logan, Tavis Maiden, Kel McDonald, Bill Mudron, and the various members of Periscope Studio. No doubt others are attending but not listed by their individual names, what with both Dark Horse and Oni being local to Portland, and the Pacific Northwest in general having such an embarrassment of riches in the depth of its cartooning talent.

• Speaking of Dylan Meconis, did you see that today’s update of Family Man was the last page of Chapter 3 and consequently the last page of what will be the second print collection? My copy of the first volume has been sitting lonely on my shelf for four years, and it is thus thrilling news to me that Meconis took the opportunity to announce:
  

  [M]y traditional short break from page updates to start pulling together the print volume. In the meantime, I’ll update with notes on past pages every Friday. If you’d like to know more about something in particular, comment here and I’ll add it to my list!

  I hope to return to page updates in six weeks; you can follow the Facebook page or my Twitter account for alerts.

  Six weeks. Print volume pulled together in six weeks, then the Kickstart and/or preorders, then print time and shipping … I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.

  None of which should take away from just how lovely today’s page is — a cut crystal glass breaking on floor by candlelight. It’s part of a violent moment, but it strikes me as oddly quiet and contemplative — if this were a movie, it would suddenly run in slow motion and the soundtrack would drop low for emphasis. Brava.

• In contrast to the quiet, how about something loud? How about potentially the loudest thing ever associated with webcomics, namely the use of David Malki !’s greatest creation, the Piranhamoose, as a decorative element on a demolition derby² car. When said derbysters wrote to Malki ! to ask permission to include his design, he answered in the only way possible:
  

  I’m dismayed that you have not already completed said car so I can see it. This sounds like the best idea I have ever heard of.

  Click through to the before-and-after pictures. They are — in the literal sense — amazing.

Spam of the day:

September patch adds new levels and gameplay to Steam early access; terrifying new vision of Pac Man now available

That is the greatest subject line ever.

_______________
¹ Whose Guests page is a beautiful piece of design, featuring logos and signatures that turn into actual names when you mouse over ’em — but it’s a pain to determine who’s coming.

² Note for non-American readers: demolition derby is the most American possible of entertainments, where automobiles are purposely driven into each other at speed with the intention of damaging them to the point of no longer being able to be driven. It is loud, stupid, potentially dangerous to all involved, and requires a surprisingly high degree of both engineering and driving skills.

Even though I’ve got excellent, real-time backups, there’s still a moment of uncertainty as my finger hovers over the button that says Update Now.

• Speaking of fingers, mine is doing much better, thanks for asking; if you looked at it today you’d figure I’d had a particularly nasty papercut combined with an overly-aggressive session with the nail clippers. It’s still kinda painful if I get overly exciting while typing, but nothing too terrible. I bring this up because we are approaching open enrollment time for health insurance, and if you’re new to having insurance (thank you, ACA), you may not have had experience with renewing insurance.

  Long story short, there will be a fixed period of time that your insurer will notify you of, and that’s when you have to decide what kind of plan you want for next year. Guys, you want a plan. How much do you want a plan? Consider this — I got my insurance benefit statement for my little trip to the Emergency Department two weeks ago, and if not for that insurance my momentary bout of kitchen stupidity would have cost me nearly two thousand damn dollars.

  So consider this my semi-regular plea that you self-employed folks take the time to investigate this very carefully, because guess what? A cheapo high-deductible plan that’s meant to cover only catastrophes wouldn’t help in a situation like this; until we get this entirely bitched-up system of healthcare delivery properly fixed, you’ve got to have insurance if you don’t want something small to put you into potentially crippling debt.

• So what should I do with all the money I saved on EMERGENCY SERVICES and STERILE SUPPLIES and DRUGS/OTHER¹? How about buying a metric crap-load² of cartoonist interviews? Hivemind filmmaker Freddave Kellett-Schroeder have a limited-time sale going on for all the extras associated with STRIPPED:
  

  STRIPPED SUPER AWESOME DELUXE EDITION

  ON SALE UNTIL FRIDAY! SAVE 39%!
  Get over 26 HOURS of additional content!
  WHAAAAAAT

  Compare to other editions:

  • Basic film: US$14.99 (10 DCPWH)
  • Deluxe Edition (film plus director’s commentary, 30 minutes of various interviews, full Jim Davis interview): US$19.99 (5.7 DCPWH)
  • Bonus Material 1 (Deluxe Edition plus 14 more interviews adding up to 16 hours): US$34.99 (2 DCPWH)
  • Bonus Material 2 (seven more interviews, including a nearly three hour extravaganza with Kurtz, Straub & Guigar, almost 12 hours inall): US$16 (1.3 DCPWH)

  Those numbers in parentheses after the prices are the dollar cost per watchable hours ratios; At US$40 and equal to the content of both Bonus Material packages, the SADE features almost 29 hours of video for less than 75 cents per hour. The only reason to hold off on this is if — like me — you hold out hope for a full release of all 300 hours of footage, in an Ultra Super Awesome Deluxe 75 disc boxed set.

• Speaking of Brad Guigar (and honestly, why wouldn’t we speak of Brad Guigar?), if you’re like me you miss regular Guigar-heavy podcasts. Well, this is your lucky day, because the only thing better than a Guigar podcast is a multi-Guigar podcast:
  

  It’s official. The boys and I are podcasters. Subscribe to “Hey Comics — Kids!” on iTunes: http://ow.ly/BCMLv

  Everybody that always thought those other guys were holding Brad back during Webcomics Weekly, now’s your chance to swim in pure, uncut Guigar: Brad’s teamed up with his sons, Alex and Max, to talk about comics (or honestly, whatever pops into their heads … they are Guigars, after all) and they now have the imprimatur of Apple. Just listen carefully: science has hypothesized that if three or more Guigars end up in simultaneous laugh loops (click here, skip forward to the seven and a half minute mark, and glob have mercy), insanity may be the result.

Spam of the day:

Inspiring story there. What occurred after? Thanks!

nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd.

I’m sorry, what was the question?

________________
¹ The DRUGS/OTHER category featured a charge of one (1) dollar, and hell if I can figure out what it was for. I didn’t get any drugs. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the billing category that equates to you showed up in the ER and sat on a bed was the largest charge; the one that represented the PA fixed your damn-fool finger was a couple hundo less.

² Or 2.54 imperial crap-loads, if you prefer.

We’re going all over today. Hope that’s not a problem.

• The big news, of course, is that the MacArthur Foundation announced its annual fellowship grants — the so-called genius grants — and one of the 21 new Fellows is indy cartoonist superstar Alison Bechdel. When I heard the news of Bechdel’s entirely earned recognition, it occurred to me that we are going to see more cartoonists in future years¹, just as we see cellists and saxophonists now.

  Look around at who is doing interesting work now, and extrapolate to what they’ll be doing in the future; can you deny the possibility of an Emily Carroll or Kate Beaton or Hope Larson getting included in the classes of 2025 to 2030? I can’t. Not to mention the fact that about this time of year I always wonder when the MacArthur people are going to get around to recognizing Scott McCloud² and we are now one step closer to that day.

• Rebecca Clements doesn’t have the time to do cartoons at Kinokofry as much as she used to; a period of time working in Japan and graduate studies in urban planning (not to mention doing her damndest to improve on the sustainability of Melbourne) have kept her from that. But new updates or no, she is somebody whose work will always fascinate me, because she looks at the world differently than most comickers — how things are laid out in the physical world excites her as much as how things are laid out at the drawing board.

  Today, she launched a new blog to talk about her time and experiences in Japan, through the dual lenses of both cartoonist and urban planner, and the first posting has me enraptured. Through the magic of Google Street View, she walks us around her stomping grounds in Yahata (a neighborhood in the Suruga ward of Shizuoka).

  Her Street View photos provide the basis for both textual narration and sketch overlays, making the whole into a photocomic with the theme Let’s go to the Yahata Shrine and see what neat stuff is along the way. I’m certain that future updates at Tadayou Japan will use other visual tools to express what Clements has on her mind, and I can’t wait to read them.

• Drive’s back, Drive’s back, Drive’s back! It’s been months since a burst of updates in the spring, and close to 20 months now since Dave Kellett was able to put regular time into the strip, what with finishing off a major motion picture, having a second kid, and the fact that Drive makes an unfeasibly small percentage of his family’s income for the time it takes to draw. But now he’s gone and launched a per-strip Patreon, hopefully all of those concerns are addressed and we can find out what the heck is going on with the story.

  And we’ve got plenty of story to go, still. Sitting behind me on the shelf are three Drive print collections, which Kellet mentioned to me once could be combined into one larger collection. Three of those larger collections were anticipated to be the length of the story he had to tell (but stories often grow beyond initial expectations. Given where the third book ends, we might be halfway through the fourth book, or not yet to the halfway point of the story (especially considering that each book’s gotten thicker than the one before it). The major players appear to all be on the board, now we have to see what occurs and that is happening again. Hooray!

• Finally, contrary to some vicious rumors going around, I am not a fish monster who lives in a lake, despite the similarity of names. Regard: Gary Fish Monster; Gary Tyrrell. See? Completely different. It is possible that Gary Fish Monster is the result of a “mash-up” of Gary and history’s most tragic hero, Desmond Fishman; only way to find out is to follow what happens in Lake Gary on the tumbls (daily so far, perhaps that schedule changes depending on how interesting life is at the bottom of a lake).

Spam of the day:

Protect and Beautify Your Garage Floor (criminals)

So much potential! Is this a call for criminals to protect and beatify their garage floors? Or perhaps an indictment that those who would protect and beautify such floors (destroying their heritage nature, perhaps?) are reprehensible to the point of criminality? I can’t wait to find out.

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¹ As near as I can tell, she’s the first; the browse-the-Fellows app at the MacArthur Foundation page doesn’t have a category for “Cartoonist” on its picklist, and in a quick browse of all Fellows in the catch-all category of “Arts” i didn’t find any others.

² A campaign I have been on since 2006.