You’d think after doing this for nearly 10 years, I’d have a better feel for when work was gonna get in the way. Then again, my match says this is the 2663rd posting I’ve made on this here blog, meaning I’ve posted about 73% of the days since launch, so I’m not gonna beat myself up too much over it. Here’s that big news that I promised you.

• I’m assuming that you’ve all seen the big interview with Kate Beaton running at The Comics Journal? It was started at SPX (a place as formative to Kate Beaton, Internet Cartoonist as Cape Breton is to Kate Beaton, Alive Human) and gives a nice recap of how she simultaneously got to be the favorite cartoonist of those who love comics and those who are completely indifferent to comics.

  Personally, I was struck by how things happened for Beaton both very quickly and very slowly — she bounced around between the Maritimes, Vancouver, the Alberta tar sands, and Toronto, becoming a huge deal in webcomics circles while simultaneously isolated from the community. The success of her first pieces of merchandise brought her quickly to full-time pro status, but at the same time she went back to Fort McMurray and the tool crib to retire student loan debt. She exploded in popularity at that time, with her ballpoint-on-printer-paper drawings¹ — uploaded at night from the middle of an environmental moonscape — capturing something in all our hearts, and then found herself an Official Big Deal with her return to the faster pace of metropolitan life.

  See also: her entry into childrens books took a couple of years from suggestion to pitch to launch, and some of her best work comes about from leaving the speed of urban life for the sedate pace of Nova Scotia (cf: any of her family comics). She’s a pile of contradictions, then; she contains multitudes, all of them funny, insightful, charming, adorable. Go read it.

• The other big news I wanted to make sure you all saw came from The Hollywood Reporter; it’s been a while since Ursula Vernon did webcomics on the regular², what with all the kids lit she’s writing, and the modern takes on fairy tales and fantasy, and the podcasting on disturbing events/disturbing food, and all the rest. So maybe you didn’t notice that one of her books got optioned for film by an obscure sometimes voice actor:
  

  Disney has optioned the movie rights to Castle Hangnail, a children’s book by Ursula Vernon, for an adaptation to be produced by Ellen DeGeneres.

  So that’s all right. As noted on this page on several previous occasions, an option doesn’t mean that Vernon is now rolling in huge piles of money; it doesn’t even mean that a movie will get made anytime soon or at all. Lots of things can happen between now and some nebulous point in the future, particularly if Degeneres and Disney decide to go the animated route ’cause dang, that takes time. But it means that Vernon’s more on the radar of the deep-pocketed entertainment industry, that other studios may try to lock up rights to her other works in case Castle Hangnail becomes a monster hit, and each of those things means the possibility of less financial wobbliness than is usually found in the indy comics/indy writer career path.

  Vernon celebrated the announcement by welcoming a new rescued dog into her household and threatening a hack webcomics pseudojournalist who smarted off at her on Twitter. Honestly, she’s probably happier about identifying a new moth in her garden than anything else in the last week, which means she’s unlikely to go the coke and hookers route of other suddenly successful people; Fleen congratulates Vernon on not letting Hollywood change her.

Spam of the day:

****Second email notice***** Sequel to your non response of our earlier letter sent by post to you by to you on behalf of the Trustees and Executors of the Estate of our late client.

Been getting a lot more of these scams lately; bonus points for this actually being a second email and being signed by the same fake lawyer (who claims to be from Zurich but has a Russian character in the middle of his Germanic name and give a UK phone number).

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¹ As Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, her choice of topic (literature, history), posting schedule (irregular), posting location (Livejournal), and drawing materials should have killed any chance of success, but her style, humo[u]r, and raw skill overcame those presumed handicaps.

² As always, I loves me some Digger.