Which is not to say that I cannot think of anything to talk about today; there are things worth mentioning seemingly everywhere.

• For starters, I’m working up that SDCC 2015 floor map and will get to it later in the week; we’ll also run the traditional guide to panels that relate to webcomics and the webcomics-adjacent. However, I would like to note that comics supercouple Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier are among the Special Guests of the show. That’s not super-surprising, but I just liked the screencap that Roman provided, where they’re in the same row as comics raconteur extraordinaire Mark Evanier and Greatest Living Pure Cartoonist¹ Sergio Aragonés.

  This would also be a good time to note that other webcomicky Special Guests include Allie Brosh, Katie Cook, Matt Inman, Scott McCloud, and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

• Matt Bors promised us that The Nib contraction wouldn’t mean the last of his attentions, and this afternoon brought word of some of his new direction:
  

  Introducing The Response, a new collective of cartoonists of color discussing race, class, gender and culture. https://medium.com/the-response

  The Nib retains its focus on [p]olitical cartoons, comics journalism, humor and non-fiction, and The Response appears to trade the relatively large rotating roster for a tighter group as a [c]artoonist collective on race, class, gender and culture. I can’t help but notice that at least Bors and Keith Knight are were regular contributors at The Nib², leading me to wonder if Bors managed to secure Medium’s funding for something that may become Nib’s sequel/successor down the line.

• Jon Rosenberg³ is one of the first wave of webcomickers, and he didn’t get to stay in the game by turning down opportunities to pry every single potential eyeball towards his work. Come the cool weather, that pool of potential eyeballs is going to go up:
  

  I just got the official okay to let you guys in on a little secret. Goats and SFAM are both going to be running at @gocomics this fall!

  Specifically, the end-stage Goats of The Infinite Pendergast Cycle, starting at the end of 2003, continuing for some 1100 strips, and returning from interruption in the near- to mid-term, it appears. Goats will be joined by SFAM classics, which I’m interpreting to mean the strips Rosenberg likes best, or possibly those that don’t require the GoComics readers to be familiar with the voting mechanism that SFAM launched with, which continued for a couple of years.

  This move makes sense for Jon (and anybody else that can swing such a deal, as Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett did last week with Drive) — if you have a back catalog of material to post, it literally costs you nothing to send files to GoComics for posting. More importantly, for serialized strips like Goats and Drive, if somebody reads the first dozen or so strips and then realizes that there are literally hundreds more available for reading right now instead of at whatever pace they’re getting doled out, that has the potential for some massive archive binges as they catch up to the current point in the story.

  Here’s hoping that Rosenberg and LARDK (and everybody else) have worked out some good ad placements and keep the links to their Patreons nice and prominent. I’m honestly not sure of how many people will make the leap/binge, but every one is a help. Goats launches on GoComics on 19 October, and SFAM on 28 September.

Spam of the day:

Truly programming is nothing but it’s a logic, if you obtain grip on it afterward you are the professional else nothing.
Legendario.

Every word of this is true. I am nothing if not legendario.

_______________
¹ Seriously, take the work ethic of Rich Stevens, the prolific output of Tezuka, the craft of Stan Sakai, the appeal across genres of a combined Jeff Smith, Terry Moore, and Carla Speed McNeil, the pure humor of the Foglios, the longevity of Sparky, the hustle of Spike Trotman, and the peer regard of Miyazaki or Watterson, and you’ve about equalled Sergio.

² I didn’t recognize other names, but I see that three of them — Chris Kindred, Whit Taylor, Ronald Wimberly — had pieces at The Nib that I remember. I wasn’t familiar with Shing Yin Khor, but after reading this piece by her, I want to read more.

³ My first friend in webcomics, official owner of my soul, and generally awesome grumpy dude who is awaiting old age so he can officially yell at youth to quiet the hell down, goddammmit.