The webcomics blog about webcomics

Chameleonic

Changes coming at us, changes from the past writ down so we don’t forget them. Let’s do this thing.

  • It’s a bittersweet thing, to see a webcomic wrap up; on the one hand, it’s a triumphant message, as the creator intended, an underline on a section of life concluded and new adventures begun. On the other hand, my Mondays will be less joyous without Angela Melick’s Wasted Talent cluing me in as to what’s happening in Vancouver, in bikes, in swords, in engineering, in battles for thermostatic supremacy, and in general in her life. I’m grateful for all that she chose to share over the past

    Eleven years, five books. A degree, two co-op jobs and three career jobs, five residences, a marriage and half a dozen broken bones.

    She left out swords, but I’ll take it as well as congratulate Melick on her constant growth and reinvention as a person, as well as her last-two–WT-books Kickstarter (which wraps up in about 30 hours as I write, this, and which just hit the final stretch goal of CAN$60,000 of a CAN$33,000 goal). Look kindly on us from your bike orbiting in the sky¹; thank you for always using your powers for good and for awesome.

  • Know who pretty much invented the reinvention game? Actually, that’s not quite right; Fitzgerald was wrong about their being no second acts² and plenty of people make their livings from constant reinvention — your Madonnas, your Ladies Gaga, etc. But one person invented becoming other people so thoroughly, and switching identities back and forth like your or I would switch clothing³, befuddling and bewildering all who observed from near and far.

    I speak, of course, of the dearly missed (although I suspect nobody 100% truly believes he’s dead, even if most of us are 99.997% sure) Andrew G “Andy” Kaufman. Much has been written about him, many stories have been told by people that knew him, and there’s about to be one more. And who better to tell the story of the self-proclaimed Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World and Fred Blassie interlocutor than wrestling superfan Box Brown?

    In fact, it’s such a great idea that they officially announced it today, in Playboy magazine, no less:

    [W]e’re proud to announce the release, in February 2018, of a graphic novel that revisits Kaufman’s brilliant and tragically short career—a career that thrived audience discomfort, confusion and anger, delivered by a man whose death at 35 is still viewed by some as an extremely slow-burning hoax.

    Author and artist Box Brown, whose book Tetris: The Games People Play came out earlier this year, returns to the biographical chops he displayed in his best-selling book Andre the Giant: Life and Legend.

    Two quick notes:

    1. Although the announcement was in Playboy, the book is from Brown’s regular publisher, :01 Books
    2. In case you’re at work and the filters don’t let you click through to the story (and excerpt pages), point out that Playboy has been SFW for nine months now.

    Some of you (including Brown himself) may be too young to remember Kaufman on Saturday Night Live or Late Night With David Letterman and only experienced him secondhand. Take it from those of us that remember — Kaufman was as weird as you’ve heard and weirder still. It suffused him, it ran from every pore in his body. Crispin Glover on his most bizarre day looked flat out fucking normal next to the living contradiction of Andy Kaufman; he contained more lives running simultaneously than anybody before or since.

    Is This Guy For Real?, written and illustrated by Box Brown, will be released in 2018. Pricing and exact date to be announced.


Spam of the day:

Thinking about retirement? Let us help.

Godsdammit, people — I’m old, but I’m not that old. Stay off my inbox’s lawn.

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¹ Anybody who can achieve escape velocity (approximately 11.2km/sec) on bicycle clearly has powers that dwarf those of mere mortals.

² Then again, I think he was wrong about most things, his writing ability chief among them. Yeah, that’s right, F Scott Fitzgerald is a hack, his books suck, fight me.

³ There’s probably a Final Fantasy game mechanic that resembles taking off one life and putting on another.

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