Please note the photo of the very handsome, very large Ryan North above, taken from the Instagram of his fellow comic book writer, Marguerite Bennett. Unless I miss my guess, this photo was taken during SDCC, while North was involved in the creation of something very cool that required

1. A significant amount of legal, adult-type intoxicating beverages
2. Tangentially, the efforts of Isaiah Mustafa, aka The Old Spice Guy

The latter item should surprise approximately nobody, given the propensity that both North and Mustafa have for casual shirtlessness. In any event, I can’t tell you yet exactly what North was involved in the creation of, but suffice it to say that it is awesome and hilarious, and when you get to learn about it for reals in possibly two to four weeks, you will wonder why you didn’t guess it on your own because it will make perfect sense. For now, just enjoy the raw, sensuous sophistication fairly dripping from The Toronto Man-Mountain there. Enjoy it, damn you!

• Either Spike was late or I just missed it on Friday, but the latest announcement for what th’heck Iron Circus is publishing in the next year, year and a half is up:
  

  Iris & Angel isn’t exactly new; the first chapter’s already been written by myself, drawn by @littlefroggies, and posted on Slipshine, the subscription adult comics site. But Slipshine came with certain restrictions; monthly quotas, length limits, and the expectation of sex every fifteen pages, to name a few. And while that works for a lot of comics, it wasn’t working for I&A.

  So, Amanda and I are trying something new.

  Iris & Angel is restarting from scratch, and will be released chapter-by-chapter on ComiXology and in the Iron Circus Comics online store!

  This is a new approach for us, and we’re excited to see where it might lead. We’re test-driving a smaller, cheaper, more incremental approach to our comics; inexpensive “issues” of I&A with a nice, low bar for entry for the curious and the freedom to tell the story as we like.

  Serialized smut, y’all. And what smut!

  Iris Moore is a victim of her own success; her small soap-making business has taken off like a shot, but she’s found herself floundering with the financials. With April 15th approaching and her paperwork more hopelessly scrambled than ever, she finally accepts the inevitable: she needs professional help. But where to start?

  A fetish message-board on the internet, of course.

  Iris’ pervy roommate Tate talks her into answering the weirdest personal ad ever posted; a cross-dressing accountant offering tax prep.

  I think I lost count of the fetishes there. This is gonna be great.

• Attention, anybody that’s ever had the self-awareness to ask Am I interacting with a creator in an acceptable way? The fact that you’re asking what correct (that is, most likely to be acceptable/least likely to cause distress) behavior is means that you’re almost certainly good. For everybody else, please see Something*Positive today, wherein Randy Milholland shares yet another story of people having no fucking clue what acceptable observation of boundaries looks like.

  I don’t get it — Milholland is maybe the sweetest person I know and yet he has a bottomless well of stories detailing the most batshit crazy interactions with fans and “fans”. I don’t know how he’s managed to not snap and kill us all, but then again I wonder that about most of the women that have any degree of visibility on social media. It is a legit wonder that the majority of serial killers aren’t righteously pissed-off women.

  Regardless, the lesson remains the same — if you can see even a tiny bit of yourself in Milholland’s comic today (directed at Milholland or literally any other human being ever), then it’s mathematically provable that you suck¹, and you need to stop sucking as quickly as possible. We are trying to have a civilization here people, and you can either be a goddamned grownup or you can please absent yourself from the rest of us.

Spam of the day:

71 Contaminants in your water…are you safe?

On the off chance that I’m not, I’ma guess that I won’t be made safe by your magic drinking straw.

______________
¹ I’ll be generous and say that perhaps it was the case that you used to suck and have gotten better. In that case, you kind of owe it to yourself to be honest about it, and pay it forward by letting other people know both when they suck, and that it’s possible to improve yourself to the point where you stop sucking.