I was reflected last week at the Goatsiversary party that given distance, a shift in work location, and general business, I haven’t seen Jon Rosenberg but half a dozen times since a tuxedo-clad weekend in Las Vegas five damn years ago when the National Cartoonists Society first recognized webcomics.

I’ve had the honor to participate in the (ever evolving) process of presenting nominees to the NCS membership for consideration; given that many of them don’t really understand the world of webcomics, this is a similar process that other divisions (notably, animation) undergo — a panel of experts makes recommendations to filter out the less worthy.

The NCS Awards for 2017 announced their nominees today, and I wanted to list ’em here. While I’m only involved in the process of webcomics (short form and long form), there are nominees in other divisions that are of interest to we here at Fleen, and I’m gonna mention ’em.

Online Comics — Short Form

• Sarah’s Scribbles, Sarah Andersen
• Donald and John, Ruben Bolling
• Sheldon, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett

Online Comics — Long Form

• Octopus Pie, Meredith Gran
• Band vs Band, Kathleen Jacques
• OMG Check Please, Ngozi Ukazu

Some thoughts: I will acknowledge that no slate of nominees will ever perfectly reflect my preferences¹. Heck, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with three nominees and only three, or to choose between a perfect three if I could come up with them. While there are things I would see on the lists if I could, there’s nothing here that isn’t entirely worthy, and nothing here that I wouldn’t (were I a member of the NCS) vote for myself on any given day. I’m thrilled to see Ruben (appropriate name) Bolling’s Trump strips from The Nib, and if I might have preferred some other long form stories, I’m thrilled to see Gran recognized for the third time in the very short history of the awards.

I’m also taking it as a sign that the NCS membership (which skews old, white, and male) is changing considering that OMG Check Please is nominated — it’s a strip about gay college hockey players created by a young Nigerian-American woman — and is about as far from the experience of the old guard members as you can get. Change and progress come slow sometimes, but sometimes they leap and bound. I’ll also note that of the Online nominees, four of the six are by women, which is entirely representative of who’s doing good work these days. Now, in other parts of the ballot:

Magazine Feature/Illustration
Jon Adams is nominated; he did the stellar Chief O’Brien At Work webcomics.

Comic Books
Giant Days Max Sarin and Liz Flemming nominated for art; a day after the Tackleford Shakeup, it’s encouraging to see John Allison’s most whimsical work recognized. Stan Sakai also got nominated for Usagi Yojimbo, which is basically the book you want to lose to if you gotta lose.

Editorial Cartoons
Bolling again, and also Jen Sorenson for her work at The Nib, which is top-notch. Matt Bors, et. al., have turned The Nib into a powerhouse of editorial and reportorial cartooning in a remarkably short period of time.

Graphic Novels
Amazingly, Ghosts is not on the list. Can’t fault a slate that includes Rick Geary, Bryan Talbot, and Jules Feiffer, but I wouldn’t want to be the person that forget to send in copies of Raina’s latest.

The NCS Awards will be presented in Portland, Oregon on 27 May. Fleen wishes best of luck to all the nominees.

Spam of the day:

British Bank Branch [text entirely in Cyrillic]

Yes, you are entirely a branch of a bank in Britain. I completely believe you.

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¹ Someday when I am dying and no longer fear the wrath of NCS enforcers² over breaking my promise of confidentiality, I’ll write a tell-all about all the comics I nominated that never made it to the ballot. I believe it will provide a revealing look at what my brain processes were like from the age of 45 or so onwards.

² You ever see former NCS President (and driving force in the establishment of the online division awards) Tom Richmond? Guy could bench-press a Buick. His individual biceps weigh more than I do.

I come not to bury John Allison’s Bad Machinery, but to praise it. For nigh on two decades now, Allison has been telling stories of the weirdest corner of Britain; stories of love and death, birth and re-birth, hellmouths and other hellorifices. Characters have been zombified, erased from existence to rule over nether-realms, and then later come back and ’round for tea like it was nothing. Ryan, Amy, and Shelley have been the major characters for the entire duration, but for the past seven and a half years a clique of mystery girls and boys have held center stage.

Shauna has ruined her eyes reading. Lottie has grown into a take-charge young woman, and the most dangerous conspiracy-buster in the UK (under-18). Mildred has had mad pashes and flirtations with maturity. Sonny floats through life in an optimistically abiding manner, accommodating the love of all from selkie girls to random young lads. Jack was very nearly King of the Mods and somehow still hasn’t been humiliated by his older sister for the last time. Linton is the rock upon which mysteries get solved (even though Lottie and Shauna are loads better at it), but is lately reduced to impotent frustration by rampaging hormones.

Oh, yeah, and they totally changed time once, saving their favorite couple’s marriage and also gender-swapping the Beetles (and possibly The Whom¹) but nobody remembers what it was like when Paula, Judy, Georgina, and Ringo (not to mention Pam Dylan) were dudes. That’s what you get when you mess with the time stream.

Today, after adventures that have seen them grow — from 10-or-so to driving age, from secret crush hand-holding to nearly adult — their stories end. At least, in the current form; Tackleford is still going to be there, the characters are still going to be around, but the story model of six-month-long mysteries built around the core six (plus Little Claire, Colm, Blossom Cooper, assorted family members, teachers, adults, et al) is going by the wayside.

Then again, Allison has retired the characters before, flirting with returns to Bobbins (old days), Bobbins (current times), side stories, comic books that never were, and comic books that totally are. He may yet get the Mystery Six (plus Little Claire, Colm, Blossom Cooper, assorted family members, teachers, adults, et al) back together; weird pairings have happened in the past (Lottie plus Shelley; Shauna plus Amy; Sonny’s dad plus The Boy; Little Claire plus Desmond Goddamned Fishman), after all.

Allison’s numerous side stories and digressions have spun back around to the main narrative, and six young mystery solvers have become a little less young, a lot smarter, and are nearly as old as Esther, The Boy, Sarah, Big Lindsey, and Carrot were when Scary Go Round wrapped up their turn in the spotlight. What with Amy and Shelley (and a while back, Tim) all having kids of their own, it’s just a matter of time before the next generation (and goodness, who is that tiny Peppermint Patty lookalike behind Little Claire in today’s strip?) of weirdness-endurers (or perhaps weirdness-enablers) takes their turn in the spotlight.

It’s goodbye for Lottie + Shauna (maybe my favorite Allisonian pairing, even more than Esther + the Boy), but Tackleford endures. See you back there Monday.

Spam of the day:

Last chance to register for The Who’s Who in Building & Construction SHOWCASE Powered by The Blue Book Building & Construction Network!

There is a guy out there, somewhere around Scranton most likely, that thinks my email is his email. I get bid proposals for electrical jobs that are clearly meant for him, and I’ve wondered how many jobs he’s lost out on because he doesn’t know my email isn’t his eamil. But now I’m getting his spam and my sympathy is gone. Sucks to be you, guy who thinks my email is his email!

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¹ Which is totally not garbage music, Jack. Some King of the Mods you’d make.

• As hinted at yesterday, word came down that the Faith Erin Hicks-penned Nameless City trilogy of graphic novels (the second of which, The Stone Heart, released yesterday) from :01 Books, is going to be an animated miniseries. From io9:
  

  [E]ach book in the fantastical trilogy — which focuses on the adventures of Rat and Kai in the titular city, nameless for the fact it keeps getting invaded and renamed by different warring nations all the time —- split into four-episode adaptations. While there are no other details about the series just yet (like, where it’ll eventually air), Frederator Studios plans to release the first four episodes in the fall of 2018.

  For reference, Frederator are the folks behind Adventure Time, Bee and Puppycat, Bravest Warriors, and other cool things. While it’s true that their existing shows have had a somewhat simplistic design aesthetic, and The Nameless City is visually rich and complex (think Legend of Korra complex), they’ve built up enough animation talent and goodwill that I think they’ll do right by it.

  The animation part is great news, as it will allow for complexity to be rendered economially;it would probably be near-impossible to create a multiple-Asian-inspired-cultures visual palette (the background architecture, clothing styles, and visual details in TNC are full of competing artistic traditions stretching back generations) in the real world.

  It also gets away from what would be an enormous potential for whitewashing in casting. Congratulations to Hicks, colorist Jordie Bellaire, and everybody at :01 Books. I’ll be waiting the next 18 months with bated breath.

• Not that live-action is always the wrong choice. Care to comment on the uses of live action to convey kick-butt young heroic women, noted comic writer Ryan North?
  

  SQUIRREL GIRL TV SHOWWWWWWWWWW

  Okay, to be clear, we aren’t going to open TV Guide and find a listing for Squirrel Girl; the show will actually concern itself with Marvel second-stringers New Warriors, who are younger heroes that mostly you haven’t heard of. Needing some star power to anchor the show, Marvel’s naturally turned to Doreen Green and Tippy-Toe (and please include Nancy, Mew, Chipmunk Hunk, and Koi Boi), despite her not being a member of the New Warriors in comics.

  Doesn’t matter! We’re gonna get Squirrel Girl defeating bad guys with empathy, cleverness, and awesome punching when empathy and plans fail to work. It looks like the show will feature a comedic take (and please include Squirrel Girl’s theme song), will debut sometime in 2018 (and please include little asides to represent North’s alt-text from the comics pages), will run on Freeform (the basic cable channel formerly known as ABC Family, and please find a way to include the Kra-Van, and the Deadpool cards, and Squirrel Girl’s Twitter habit, and Gigantos, and beating up Galactus on the friggin’ moon), so now’s the time to call your cable company and make sure you get it.

• But Gary, I hear you cry, what if I don’t want to wait until 2018 for cool comics stuff in media? Well then, Bunky, you’re gonna want to fire up your podcatcher of choice and check out the latest from NPR’s Code Switch, titled Changing Colors in Comics [no direct link to the show; it’s dated 5 April 2017].

  The culture podcast takes the societal conversation about race as its ongoing topic, and this week they’re talking to Ron Wimberly (I’ll remember his visual essay on skin tones in Marvel characters forever), the Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse in Philadelphia (the first comic shop on the east coast owned by a black woman, it mixes comics and cultural conversation), and some crazy dreamer turned ass-kicker/name-taker out of Chicago named Spike who’s building a comics-publishing empire.

  It’s a hell of a good show and while I know not enough about Wimberly’s work, and have never been to Amalgam, I am pretty familiar with Spike’s career path over the last decade or so.

  She’s broken down the resistance and denigration she got for her attempts at making a business more than once in various public fora, and make no mistake: some of the contempt was because she’s young, some because she’s working in webcomics instead of real comics, and a great big ol’ heaping helping because she’s a woman, black, and a black woman who just doesn’t know her place.

  Listen. Learn. If you ever said to yourself she’d never succeed, and especially if you ever thought she didn’t deserve to succeed, it’s still not to late to smarten up and approach the future with less fear.

  Welllll, not too late for some of her critics. Bunch of ’em were old white dudes back when, are even older now, and are going to die knowing the world left ’em behind. The rest of us can decide that the world changing for the better doesn’t mean we’re suddenly put upon.

Spam of the day:

These 4 Ingredients Can Stop Alzheimer’s?

No. Next!

So many people have written about MoCCA Fest 2017, I’m just going to mention some things that I enjoyed hearing/hearing about/discussing. No particular order.

• Meredith Gran tells me that she’s got 15-20 story pages of OctoPie left to go; everybody is getting wrapped up but concedes that there will be minor characters whose arcs aren’t completely finished; given sufficient desire, she said she could spend another year working all of those resolutions. Somewhat similarly, she’s still deciding on what her next project will be. Me, I want Manuel the cat, Olly’s snotty nephew, and the Rock Lobster to fight crime together in New Orleans.
• Gene Yang, Damian Duffy, Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor, and Jonathan W Gray had a hell of smart discussion about the need for diversity in comics to start the programming track. Ironically, this came one day after the Marvel pronouncement about diverse characters not selling, and they were having very little of that claim. Bonus points to Duffy; when Gray threw out an open question about how to make comics more diverse, he replied Well, as the white male, let me solve that racism for you … to big (if slightly knowing) laughs.

  Yang, by the way, is the consummate professional; we spoke very briefly at SDCC last summer and he both recognized me and asked how I was doing when we caught each other’s eyes. I asked him what it’s like being an Official Genius and he noted I still have to do the dishes. I told him to try using his Ambassador For Young Peoples Literature credentials — they must surely offer some kind of diplomatic immunity from sink-based chores.

• George O’Connor and I spoke at decent length about our love of Greek myths; I’m constantly impressed by his ability to take stories that are fundamentally dark, filled with horrific punishments and hubris and death, and make them accessible (without losing that edge of menace) to young readers. He replied that he started reading them at that age (drawn in by the idea of monsters; his design for the hecatonchires as fractal horrors is really inspired) and he turned out okay.

  He’s done some deep dives into the entire corpus of the mythic tradition, too; there’s thousands of variations and contradictions, cobbled together across a millennium or so of varying oral cultic traditions, and he’s trying to come up with a single narrative structure that reconciles them all.

  You can see his approach to getting all the different stories to line up in how the tone of characters has shifted. The first book had avenging young badass Zeus; the most recent volumes have him more harried and put-upon by the responsibilities of running a very fractious family. He’s managed to bring these deities down to a human level¹, which I expect to lead to great things in the next volume — Hermes has become, over the last few books, a smartass verging on bro with a side of complete dick. It’s gonna be hilarious.

• Lucy Bellwood was my first stop of the morning, and we spoke about tying Turk’s head knots, about whether or not the US Coast Guard training vessel USS Eagle counts as a tall ship (Bellwood: It totally does), and about the Riso demo station that was set up at the far end of the hall. I always flatter myself that I have a feeling of what autobio comickers are like before I meet them, but in Bellwood’s case that intuition was pretty much dead on. She’s a woman that loves the open water, lines in her hand, sheets filled with wind above her head.
• Brigid Alverson always make vague plans to meet up at shows we’ll both be at, and never follow through. This is never a problem, because we invariably bump into each other at some point and get caught up then. This time it was coming out of the diversity panel, and we spent a pleasant hour having lunch at the hotel bar, with Johanna Draper Carlson joining us. Less talk about comics, more about other stuff. If you ever meet Alverson, ask her to tell you her One Time It Was My Job To Keep Stephen Hawking Happy For A Couple Of Days At A Conference story. It’s great.
• By the time we got back to the show floor from MoCCA, it had become a wall-to-wall sea of humanity; it was wonderful to see so many people there to search out new comics, but man! I made it back to Evan Dahm&rsquo’s table and managed to introduce him to Mark Siegel (his editor at :01 Books; they’d never met face to face); I have a suspicion that Dahm’s forthcoming Island Book (due early 2019) will be but the first of his collaborations with :01; they’re a perfect fit together.

  As I noted to Siegel, they have a full slate of books with tween or early teen girl protagonists who have adventures!, but they aren’t aimed at girl readers. They’re just aimed at kids of a certain age, and it’s a hell of a valuable thing for boys to read Zita The Spacegirl, or Time Museum, or Space Scouts, and see heroes that don’t look just like them. And what’s Island Book about? A tween or preteen girl (or equivalent, since we aren’t talking about humans here) protagonist that has adventures. Why should kids get all the girl heroes?

• There was also a big push at the :01 table for the second Nameless City book from Faith Erin Hicks (The Stone Heart, and hey, look at that: tween or early teen girl co-protagonist that has adventures); today is its book birthday, and also the announcement that the trilogy will become an animated series. We’ll give that the full attention it deserves tomorrow.
• Sadly, the crowd prevented me from making it back to aisle H, and a print that I saw early in the day and had wanted to purchase. It’s by a young woman named Olga Andreyeva, and it was the result of an accidental pigment spill that she turned into something really unique and beautiful. The rest of her portfolio is great, but the sort of thing that others are doing — videogame-inspired art of great imagination and technical skill, but familiar.

  Eve is spare, conveys a sense of frozen time, and delivers an emotional wallop. It’s absolutely the best thing I saw on the floor this year, and I’m very sorry I didn’t get back to purchase it. Hopefully a few of you go take a look at it (not to mention the rest of her portfolio) and Andreyeva gets more than just my missed sale out of it.

Spam of the day:

This new kitty litter is like having a veterinarian check daily! IT AUTOMATICALLY TURNS DIFFERENT COLORS BASED ON PREVENTABLE HEALTH ISSUES!

On the Top Ten List of things I want to do ever, checking out rainbow-colored magic kitty litter appears approximately zero times.

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¹ Not that any religion has ever invented gods that really behaved better than their worshippers.

That’s because things that are more time-sensitive than MoCCA Fest 2017 recaps happened since last we spoke.

Okay, one tidbit from MoCCA, but mostly because it’ll make FSFCPL happy. Thanks to the good graces of :01 Books editor Mark Siegel I was very briefly introduced to the marvelous Pénélope Bagieu, who was promoting her newest book. Siegel shared :01 will be publishing an English omnibus of her two-volume collection, Les Culottées. The American edition will be titled Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World (available March 2018), and :01 is pretty much her American publisher going forward. Now if they can just get Boulet’s Notes series, I can die happy.

• Speaking of MoCCA (we were so, just most of it will be tomorrow), I’ll be restricting my news to what I got on the show floor, not what was told to me under the influence of sophisticated adult beverages at Jon Rosenberg’s Goatsiversary Party on Friday night. At some point, cool things are coming from the likes of Evan Dahm, Meredith Gran, and Christopher Hastings, but those bits will have to wait.

  Also on hand to help Rosenberg celebrate: Mike Holmes, Chris Yates, Andy Bell, Magnolia Porter, Lucy Bellwood¹, MC Frontalot, and Dilbert creator Matt Lubchansky. There was cake, and we did partake of Jon’s face(s). I highly urge all of you to attend the next one in 2037.

• Speaking of strippiversaries, today marks eleven years of KB Spangler’s A Girl And Her Fed, which has expanded from an intriguing (if eyeless) meditation on civil rights in a time of surveillance to a remarkably prescient webcomic, series of techno–thriller novels, a reinterpretation of Helen of Troy², some high-quality smut (some Patreon locked), and the most patient homeowner in the western world.

  Oh, yes, and she’s also become my very, very dear friend. Some day, when our respective spouses come their senses, she and I will find ourselves single, adrift, and on a twelve-state spree of chaos and destruction, never quite sure which one started the trouble, which one was supposed to bring bail money, and how many times those roles have switched. Happy anniversary, B. I’m proud of you.

• And among all the Goatsiversaries and strippiversaries, there’s one thing even more important: David Malki ! and Nikki Rice Malki are now parents to Benjamin Rice ! (I’m pretty sure the ! only follows the male line). Benji, you are small, but you are the most important thing in the world to at least two people, and I will do my best to make the world less colossally stupid than it can be sometimes. You will grow to be mighty and feral cats will do your bidding. We’re happy to finally meet you.

Spam of the day:

Our team works hard everyday to ensure that we are providing the best possible service for all our customers.
Cordially, Derek Customer Service Representative, Slut Roulette

Man, Derek’s got the best business card ever.

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¹ Whom I had never met before; we had a lovely bar-shout/chat, more discussion the next day, and will undoubtedly have more to discuss at the Alaska Robotics Comics Camp later this month.

² That reminds me: Otter, I spent some time at MoCCA talking with George O’Connor, and he’s going to be looking up Greek Key because he really liked your take on Helen. He’s also all-in on your next Hope Blackwell novel because I mentioned the magic word: chupacabra.