Life is accelerating towards next week’s San Diego Comic Con and all the attendant nerdishness therein, if evidenced by nothing other than the nonstop parade of announcement emails sent to me as a member of the press¹. And yet, some things are happening far, far away from Sandy Eggo that I would commend to your attention.

• Okay, it’s probably no surprise that this was me; as noted on this page more than once, KB “Otter” Spangler is a good friend of mine, and I’ve been a beta reader for her series of novels. I’ve been heartlessly pedantic on points of plot, particularly pertaining to the practice of paramedicine and other doctory bits. I like to think that I’ve helped make the final results better, not to mention saving her from a horde of Um actuallys from her readers. I think she’s got a terrific voice — voices, really, as different novels with different POV characters read uniquely — and lots of great ideas.

  But there’s one bit of her writing I didn’t beta-read, and haven’t read at all. She took one of her AGAHF characters and did an action sex comedy (think James Bond with far less internalized misogyny), which is the first of a projected eight novellas. As they concern a character named Josh Glassman, they are collectively known as Joshsmut. You can find the cover of the first entry, The Russians Came Knocking, over here, with 1500 (or so) word installments going up three times a week.

  After TRCK, Spangler will be moving onto new Joshventures as serial episodes, to be collected in book form when each is finished. They are brand new to me (and probably to you), and I suggest we enjoy their ridiculous sexiness (or possibly sexy ridiculousness) together; I’m told that my own travails with tree rats inspired the bit with the squirrels, but I’m not sure what that means.

• Know what we haven’t seen for far too long? A collaboration between Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh. Yeah, yeah, I know, they just finished running the first chapter’s worth of pages from the forthcoming graphic novel Is This What You Wanted, but while Hirsch wrote that, the art is by Tessa Stone and Sarah Stone; the last time we saw Ota illustrating Hirsch’s script was the stellar Lucky Penny.

  So it’s a particular delight to see that today they’ve shared the first four pages of Barbarous, their new graphic novel (with color by JN Wiedle), which appears to be hitting an urban magic vibe. Check out the cover from earlier in the week: talk of glamour (as in magic disguises), mystic energy traces, mention of monsters, and then look at those first four pages, which end nice and cliffhangery. Not to worry, Tuesday’s update will bring another four pages, then I imagine it’ll settle down to Tuesday/Thursday updates until we’re all good and hooked. Subway thefts and shadow monsters? I’m there.

• Two words: The Nib. It’s been running a few comics a week, mostly via email to subscribers and then a notice goes up on Twitter and such (case in point: notices have gone upover the past few hours that new comics are available). They’re ready to relaunch for reals, and there’s gonna be more than just comics on the web. So a few more words: Tabloid size newsprint comics. Hecka yeah.

Spam of the day:

No-More-Crowns Get these amazing low-cost Dental-Implants

Dammit, I thought it said no more clowns and I was all thrilled because nobody likes clowns².

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¹ The only one that I’ve acted on is an offer from the nice folks at DC to interview creators they’ll have, and I lit up at the sight of Hope Larson and Gene Luen Yang, who was a pretty good advocate for his take on Chinese Superman on NPR the other morning.

² Or Boxbot.