It’s mostly about books today. Books and disappointment.

• I think the historical record is pretty clear: I love Erika Moen’s work. I love DAR!, I love Bucko, I love Oh Joy, Sex Toy, and I love Hurricane Erika herself. I am also on record as digging me some Star Trek — all varieties! — so when I say that today’s OJST update physically pained me, it’s not because of dislike of the artist, the topic matter, or the blatant Trek fangirlism. I am fine with all these things.

  It was the puns. Oh, glob, the puns. Erika, you’re better than this. Because if there’s one thing that I’m also clear on — the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me: I will die in it at the stake — it’s that Brad Guigar is not a role model. Tastemaker and teacher without compare? Sure. A sexy, sexy man? Oh mais, oui. But he has a bad boy side, and he is an unrepentant paronomasiac who should be shunned for his bad example. Erika. This road leads only to one place: Dad Jokes. Just say no before it’s too late.

• Speaking of DAR!, Ms Moen rather prominently held a close-out sale and ditched her remaining stock of books 1 and 2, closing out her sales of those items on 30 September. You can still get them as PDFs, but if you want a dead-tree version, you’re out of luck unless you want to try to convince me to give up my copies¹ or brave the secondary market. Except that maybe you’re not out of luck!

  For those of you that missed it, Minna Sundberg put twelve copies of A Red Tail’s Dream up for sale which immediately sold; the fact that they immediately sold isn’t the interesting part, but rather where they sold. Like an ever-expanding roster of creators, Sundberg’s a member of webcomics advertising/services collective The Hiveworks, which has been hinting at getting into retail merch sales. Well they’ve soft-launched that storefront, and if Hivemill is sold out of ARTD, they’ll likely get some more in future, and oh look — copies of DAR! volumes 1 and 2 also for sale.

  Hivemill’s soft launch has been very soft; this is first I’ve noticed it although it appears to have been in operation since the summer. Look for more stock to show up there as affiliated creators who don’t want to do their own shipping (or who aren’t already associated with TopatoCo) start shifting stocks in advance of the upcoming holiday season. Having more people out there doing order fulfillment on behalf of webcomickers can only be a good thing.

• Speaking of books, I shamefully neglected to mention that I picked up a copy of Strong Female Protagonist book 1 by Brennan Mulligan and Molly Ostertag. I really like SFP but it’s one of those comics that I just can’t read in twice-weekly updates; getting 200 pages of wonderfully chunky story is just what’s needed, and I enjoyed the crap out of it.
• Finally, let’s just admit that nobody knows how to end a book (with attendant hiatus) on a note that makes you want to read more now than Kris Straub. Broodhollow’s second book (subtitled Angleworm, starting here and running for one year) ends with Zane in maybe the worst circumstances since his arrival in the weirdest corner of West Virginia, and there we will have to sit until (likely) January. Take the time to read through the collected story arc and start saving, because when the inevitable print collection becomes available, you are going to want this one.

Spam of the day:

At the beginning of for each and every, the type of publicaddress announcer attempted using mightily toward fuzzy laptop computer Mexico was previously dealt the right fight about communities which have each blended 17 history.

Wha … fuzzy laptop computer Mexico? Is this related to that one very bad Gundam series where various countries fielded giant robots shaped like the laziest ethnic stereotypes and the Mexican Gundam had a giant robot moustache and giant robot poncho and giant robot sombrero? Because that shit was straight-up racist.

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¹ Ain’t happening.s Dream