There’s days when I have a lot to say, and there’s days when stories speak for themselves; today we’re in the latter category.

• First up, Erika Moen — cartoonist, force of nature, hell of awesome — dropped some news on us yesterday [the story is SFW, but the side panel ads are probably not] … she’s headed to Sweden:
  

  Oh my gosh, I’m making my first trip out to Sweden!!! If you’re in the neighborhood, please come say hi to me at the Stockholm International Comics Festival this May 20 – 21!!!!

  Or the Stockholms Internationella Seriefestival; if you speak Swedish, hit up the link. If not, here’s the translation, which links to bits about the festival’s Small Press Expo (described as the “official sibling” of the annual event in Maryland), and details on the international guests.

  If I’m reading everything correctly, the SIS will take place at Stockholm’s Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, in Sweden’s only specialist library for comics, Serieteket (here, for those of you that like maps). Free admission, and I think the times are 11:00am to 5:00pm (CET, or GMT+2), on Saturday and Sunday (20 & 21 May).

• On my way back from Comics Camp (start here, if you’ve forgotten, and work forward) I had a layover in Minneapolis, and thus was able to visit with Rosemary Vallero-O’Connell, about whom I’ve written lots over the past year or so. She mentioned that in addition to all the work she’s been doing since graduating last May, she’d been in talks with VICE News to do an interview about work/life balance and the financial end of a creative career. Turns out that it happened, and now you can see it.

  It’s a huge topic (things dealing with money — peripherally or directly — took up many hours at Camp), and not one where all the subtleties can be done in a few minutes. Heck if they didn’t do a damn good job laying out the boundaries of the issues, though.

  I found the most compelling part to be Vallero-O’Connell’s frank recognition that there’s a very fine line to tread, with both too many and too few jobs offering risks. Don’t have enough gigs, you don’t make money and you can’t pay your bills. Accept too many¹ and you risk spreading yourself too thin² or injury — meaning you can’t sustain the money and can’t pay your bills³.

  There’s no grand solution offered — not that there could be — but just acknowledging the challenges is tremendously valuable. Vallero-O’Connell is starting to get a handle on what the career looks like (not just for now, but as a sustainable effort over many years), and seeing her present the quandries and puzzle them out is going to help others find their balance quicker than they would otherwise. Give it a look.

Spam of the day:

KOHL’s: Antiquated Dept. Store…

Are … are you trying to get me to click on your fake KOHL’s gift card by negging them?

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¹ A constant temptation for freelancers, particularly those new to the game.

² Leading to substandard work or burnout.

³ Unspoken in the four minute run time: even if you accept the exact right amount of work, you can’t guarantee you actually get paid what you’re due on a prompt basis, meaning you can’t pay your bills. I’m sensing a theme to the freelancer’s life.

Things are racing to their logical conclusions (i.e.: overfunding) all over the damn place. Let’s have a looksee, shall we?

• Howard Tayler¹ has been grinding out a hell of a complicated Kickstart for just about two years now. The fact that it’s about a year overdue on much of its deliverables² would ordinarily make the prospect of launching another Kickstart suicidal; crowdfunding backers will turn on you when they don’t get what they want. And yet, that appears to not be the case.

  For starters, Tayler and his production team have been communicating with their backers on a regular basis, identifying where work is being done, advising early about hiccups, delays, and the reality of scheduling. In the two years since the Planet Mercenary role-playing game campaign wrapped, there have been 55 updates (call it every other week) to keep backers in the loop. That honest outreach buys a hell of a lot of goodwill.

  The update four days ago let backers know that non-paper items needed for fulfillment are either on hand or arriving within the week, and paper items would be going to print. This puts reward assembly in the late June timeframe, and shipping completion (by my estimates, there are about 3300 backers that still need stuff shipped to them) in July.

  Expectation. Communication. Modified expectation. Happy backers. ‘Taint rocket surgery.

  And that’s why the same day that We’ve gone to print was shared (that would be yesterday), Tayler, et. al., were able to launch a second Kickstarter campaign, for a game master’s screen. This one hasn’t been buried by a host of Oh, this one’ll be a year late too for an important reason beyond the accumulated goodwill: it’s limited. Much like the challenge coin campaign, it’s for a single item, designwork done, limited reward tiers, simple stretch goals, and nearly immediate shipping — in this case, the screens will be shipped in July (possibly concurrent with the PM fulfillment; I can see a lot of backers of the game wanting the screen), and backers will have ’em in time for GenCon.

  And it’s working; we’re in Day Two of the 19 day campaign, with 85% of the US$19.4K goal in hand. More interestingly, as of this writing there’s a significant phenomenon in the reward tiers: 438 people have backed an early bird tier that gets you three big things and three little things (details aren’t important, work with me here) for US$20; 10 people have backed the non-early bird equivalent tier that gets you three big things and one little thing for US$25.

  Either Tayler’s backers aren’t good at reading (which is not characteristic of his demographic) or ten people just wanted to give him more money. That can’t be explained by short campaign lengths, simple reward structures, or short fulfillment times. That’s entirely down to goodwill, and it’s worth more than any six-figure campaign of the past³ or future4.

• I’ve lost track of how many Kickstarts C Spike Trotman has run by now5, but in a lot of ways she runs hers the opposite of how Tayler runs his — there’s a template there, one that she follows every time, tinkering around the edges but not messing with success6. The latest project to get the Spike treatment went live last night, and about sixteen hours later is closing in on US$10K of its US$25K goal.

  As The Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman is about a queer, black teenage girl at an otherwise all-white Christian summer camp; if you’ve not read it, you can get a flavor of it from an autobio piece Gillman did in The Nib last year about her own experiences at Christian summer camp.

  It’s the sort of story that it’s hard to imagine finding a foothold at a publisher other than Iron Circus; queer themes, POC protagonist questioning faith, cast dominantly made up of teen girls, but no magical destiny or powers or adventure? All done in colored pencils, with whole pages given over to wordless (sometimes characterless) landscapes, as many as it takes to set the mood? It’s a damn good story, one that deserves to find an audience, and thanks to Gillman and Spike now it will.

  As The Crow Flies: Volume One will collect the first 270 pages of story (Gillman’s on page #286 now), which constitute approximately the first half of the story’s weeklong structure. Backers can get physical and PDF books, signed bookplates, and for the ridiculously low price of US$100, original story pages. There were commissions available, but they’re gone; but if you’re looking for a speaker, US$1000 (plus travel and lodging) gets you a visit from Gillman, a full day of instruction, and 20 copies of ATCFv1. At US$30K (only US$5K over goal), Gillman adds a side story to the book.

  That’s it — simple, straightforward, the material is all produced and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the book layout is all done and just waiting for a number to be attached to the print run. Oh, and one other thing — this is only the second Iron Circus Kickstart of 2017; Spike’s gonna have plenty more for us before the year’s out.

Spam of the day:

Get up to $15,000 Overnight!

Yes, “ZippyLoan”, borrowing fifteen large from unknown persons in Nevada is absolutely something that does not make me think I’ll end up owing The Mob an extortionate interest rate and possibly a kneecap.

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¹ Evil twin, etc.

² A major component, the 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries books, has shipped, albeit about nine months late.

³ The challenge coins funded at US$155K, the PM RPG at US$349K.

4 By the FFF mk2, the game screens are heading for US$40K +/- 8K.

5 Eleven as of about 9:00pm EDT last night; number twelve is now live.

6 And for five measly bucks, she’ll tell you how to do it, too.

Endings and beginnings today, my friends. Let’s see what’s up.

• It has been some time since we checked in on PostScript, the webcomics that asks what happens after Happily Ever After?, by brothers Graham and Neal Moogk-Soulis. Wonder what’s going on over there …
  

  We are proud to present Testing Day. Testing Day is simultaneously the final PostScript story we are posting here online, and the first of the larger PostScript stories we will tell.

  Testing Day is but a taste of our future plans. You can expect further projects with greater narrative and visual complexity than the online strip format allows. They will not all be in the PostScript universe, they will not all be comics or picture books, and they will not all be funny, but they will be stories we hope you will enjoy. We know we will enjoy them.

  Sounds like it’s time for an archive binge; there’s only about eight years worth of stories there, you can knock that out in a day or two¹. Coincidentally, that’s just enough time to get prepped up, as Testing Day starts this Wednesday, 17 May, and runs weekdays until 1 June. After it wraps, The Brothers Moogk-Soulis will keep the site up, and you can follow news of their projects at PostScript, their twitterfeeds, and various other sosh–meeds.

• Molly Ostertag is making quite the lot of comics these days, what with her art contributions to Shattered Warrior, due out tomorrow from :01², and her ongoing at duties on Strong Female Protagonist and her day job at Disney animation. All that life surely explains the delays on the second volume of SFP, which was supposed to Kickstart last summer, but you know what? I’ll take comics that are done and good looking at whose production isn’t grinding the life out of their creators over comics that are delivered according to my preferences.

  And the wait has paid off: Book Two, y’all. The campaign’s actually been running since I was in Alaska, but it’s still got ten days to go, which means you still have ten days to get in on this. Book One ended on an emotional turning point; Book Two is only going to get deeper into that particular narrative well; even better, this volume will feature Ostertag’s art in full color, which was always necessary to let her bring life to Brennan Lee Mulligan’s words. And if you’re like me and can only read SFP in big, chapter-sized chunks, getting this book will be a particular treat.

• Hey, you know what today is? The first day of Octopus Pie’s eleventh year. Yep, yesterday marked ten years of Everest “Eve” Ning’s evolution from moderately adrift twentysomething to reluctant adult; ten years of watching characters grow (up and together and apart again) and change, never in a contrived way, every last damn strip better than the one before it.

  And the strippiversary is just in time for the big wrap-up and whatever Meredith Gran has cooking in her brain for the next project. I loved Octopus Pie from the first strip, and considering how much better it’s gotten in the past decade, I can only imagine how good future comics from Gran will be, but that’s for later. For now, send her some good wishes if you haven’t already.

• And, because in any list of [web]comickers Jim Zub always comes last³ what might otherwise be the lead story today: Zub’s Wayward — although he’ll be mad at me if I refer to it as solely his, what with the contributions of artist Steven Cummings, colorist Tamra Bonvillain, letterer Marshall Dillon, and cultural commentators Zack Davisson and Ann O’Regan — has been optioned for TV.

  We’ve mentioned the rules of options here at Fleen before … this doesn’t mean that Zub is suddenly fabulously wealthy, or that anything will happen on a set schedule. Manga Entertainment gets the right to try to develop a series (live action or animated, it appears to not yet be determined) for Japanese TV; they may or may not accomplish this.

  What is unusual about this announcement is that Zub and Cummings are specifically named as creative consultants on the project, including development of the initial story treatment along with character and creature designs. That doesn’t happen so often, and say that Manga Entertainment may be more concrete in their plans than many option deals turn out to be.

  Congrats to Zub, Cummings, and the rest of the Wayward crew; it’s always great to see good work recognized, but it’s even better to see good creators rewarded with cash money.

Spam of the day:

Extra 70% Off Ends Soon

Curiously, I am not much in the market for women’s casual wear from Polo Ralph Lauren.

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¹ Assuming you don’t sleep or go to work, that is.

² Short review: it’s good; writer Sharon Shinn has done something pretty amazing in making you understand what leads an ordinary person to become a revolutionary (or, depending on your point of view, a terrorist), as well as making the point that entitled PUA Nice Guys™ aren’t restricted to the human male.

³ Damn you, alphabetic norms!

If there’s one thing that we at Fleen have learned over the years, it’s that Andrew Farago and the crew over at San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum are always planning their next thing, and the thing after that, and the thing after that. For those of you looking to plan our your summer activities in the Bay Area, consider the following:

• The annual summer cartooning bootcamp returns for 2017, this time in the form of three weeklong workshops running half days from June to August. While they put the polish on their new gallery location (at the historic Fisherman’s Wharf), the camp will take place at the American Bookbinders Museum, 355 Clementina Street. The camps are intended for kids 10-15 years old, with basic drawing skills to build on. Sessions will run Monday through Friday from 1:00pm to 5:00pm, at a cost of US$300 per session (US$50 discounts to CAM members).

  The first week will be 19 to 23 June, the second 26 to 30 June, and the third 31 July to 4 August, with more information at the CAM Progams page. Up to five scholarships for underserved students are being offered to each week by the nonprofit Yerba Buena Community Benefit District; registration and scholarship applications are online now. O

  The classes are taught by Ellis Kim of Time Fiddler, and will range from designing characters to writing and drawing a complete story. Each week is independent, but attending multiple weeks will allow students to further develop their skills.

• Meanwhile, submissions are open until the first of June for the first annual Prism Awards to recognize LGBTQAI+ comics and creators, with winners announced at the CAM-presented Queer Comics Expo. Categories for the Prism Awards will include Best Short Form Comic (a full comic), Best Webcomic (initially/primarily published online), Best Comic from a Small to Midsize Press (as self-determined by the applicant), Best Comic from a Mainstream Publisher (ditto), and Best Comic Anthology (a collection of shorter works created by at least three different authors).

  All work should be less than two years old, no submissions (except Anthology) should be longer than 32 pages (and Short Form must be complete, not an excerpt), and submitted in PDF format. They’re only set up to judge comics in English this go around, but look for expansion in future years. There’s no fee, but also no monetary prizes — just the celebration of the community. Needless to say, read the entire submissions page before you send anything off, and if you don’t happen to be LGBTQAI+? I’ma say sit this one out — the rest of the world is there for you.

  The Queer Comics Expo will run 8 & 9 July, 11:00am to 5:00pm, at the SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street in San Francisco. Discount advanced tickets are available for purchase now.

Spam of the day:

Your frequent customer ID came up for a Complimentary $50 Target® charge card

I think that’s pretty unlikely.

Scott McCloud sends the most interesting people to me. In this case, NPR’s National Arts Report, Neda Ulaby. Waaay back at the end of December, she wanted to talk to me about webcomics, particularly the successful Kickstarter of Ngozi Ukazu to print book two of Check, Please!.

So it was that I found myself downloading an app onto my phone that would record my half of an interview, and finding a quiet room without echoes to talk webcomics, self-publishing, creator ownership, and all the other hallmarks of our weird little community. Ms Ulaby and I spoke for about 15 minutes, she figured she might get four for the entire story, and would be talking to other people; I guessed I might get two good quotes in.

Then the current administration happened, and finding four minutes on a national radio network for a story about fictional gay hockey players took up the back burner position. I guessed the story was dead.

Until I got an email this afternoon. I am told that the story will run as part of All Things Considered today, but since local NPR stations run the program at different times and may chop out segments to do local inserts, I can’t tell you when it might run. Check that link tomorrow, you should be able to play it back. I’ve got ATC on in the background here at work, and am listening with bated breath.

So, yeah — that happened.

Update: Looks to be about the 48:00 or 50:00 mark in Hour One. Here’s the story link, on account of my local station cut away to a local story, dammit.

Update 2: The story hook that makes it relevant now? Ukazu’s debuting the book at TCAF this weekend. Go pick it up and congratulate her.

Oh my, so much has happened since I went to Comics Camp. The obvious is that TCAF happens this weekend and everybody will be there ‘cept me, but let’s not ignore other things going on:

• Erika Moen & Matt Nolan are Kickstarting the latest OJST collection (number four!), hit goal about 12 hours in, and are well on their way to rewarding their guest artists beyond their original contracts. At US$50K, each guest artist will receive a shipping box’s worth of free OJSTv4 copies (to sell or otherwise dispose of); at US$65K, their page rates get retroactively bumped by $20/page. Since, as in prior volumes, about a third of the book is guest artists, that’s a pretty significant chunk of wealth-sharing for Moen & Nolan.
• Hope Larson moved cross country (from LA to North Carolina), turned in a book (she’s got one a year on deck for the next few years), and restarted Solo. Busy lady. BTW, I didn’t get Larson’s Compass South / Knife’s Edge collaborator Rebecca Mock to give me any juicy details on the latter book, due out in about six weeks time, despite us being cabinmates at Camp. Journalistic laziness or respect for spoilers? You decide.
• The Eisner nominations are out, Sonny Liew appears to be nominated in every possible category for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and there are now two categories for the comics that appear courtesy of the nets and lasers and electrons: Best Webcomic and Best Digital Comic. The confusion of the Eisner organization with respect to webcomics appears to be as deep as ever, as I couldn’t tell you what qualifies a work in one category or the other¹, and there’s a distinct lack of recognition of ongoing strip-type work that forms the bulk of webcomics. Nevertheless, there’s some good candidates there:
  Best Webcomic
  • Bird Boy, by Anne Szabla
  • Deja Brew, by Taneka Stotts and Sara DuVall
  • Jaeger, by Ibrahim Moustafa
  • The Middle Age, by Steve Conley
  • On Beauty, by Christina Tran
  Best Digital Comic
  • Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
  • Edison Rex, by Chris Roberson and Dennis Culver
  • Helm, by Jehanzeb Hasan and Mauricio Caballero
  • On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
  • Universe!, by Albert Monteys

  And there’s lots of your traditional webcomickers in other categories: Raina Telgemeier for Ghosts in Best Publication for Kids (ages 9-12); John Allison, for Bad Machinery Volume 5, Chip Zdarsky/Ryan North/Erica Henderson/Derek Charm for Jughead, and Ryan North/Erica Henderson for The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl in Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17); Zdarsky/North/Henderson/Charm for Jughead and Lisa Hanawalt for Hot Dog Taste Test in Best Humor Publication; Box Brown for Tetris in Best Reality-Based Work, Jason Shiga for Demon in Best Graphic Album — Reprint; and Brown and Tetris for Best Writer/Artist. Best of luck to all the nominees.

• Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has added DRIVE: Act One to his store, now available in handsome hardcover and slightly less handsome softcover. Honestly, if you’re gonna get this book, spring for the hardcover (because it’s friggin’ gorgeous) unless your name is Mario from Lisboa, Portugal, on account of Mario won hisself the extra copy I had in the Drive Giveaway Spectacular.

  International shipping on this beast (more than 1.25 kg!) is somewhat less than purchase price, and while I may restrict future giveaways to the US only, I’m glad Mario is going to get to enjoy this tome. Unless Customs steals it, because did I mention it’s friggin’ gorgeous? Pretty sure I did. Send us a photo when you get your book sometime between next week and never, Mario!

Return Of The Son Of Spam of the day:

File Your Tax Return for Free

I’ll note that this particular spam (and likely scam) was received the day after taxes were due. Way to be proactive, spammers!

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¹ The latter appears to allow for longer form stories, where the former appears to be for single-shot (but sometimes lengthy) presentations. For example, Bandette and On A Sunbeam (fiction stories) are digital, but On Beauty (which is more reportage/editorial in nature) is webcomic.

And then it was done; breakfast on Tuesday was followed by an all-hands talk about what Camp had meant, what lessons we were going to take with us from this intentional community of weirdos who normally are very isolated for much of their careers¹. What we’d learned and how we’d changed. Here’s the one line I wrote afterwards:

Gods damn, this place is better than a year’s worth of therapy.

(This was not far from where I’d written, for about the fourth time, I am fucking lucky.)

We’re not all going away until the year’s elapsed, naturally; the nature of modern communications and social media means that the impromptu tribe is never more than an hour or two out of communications with itself. The kitchen was scrubbed² and food packed out, luggage gathered and cabins swept³, and the bus loaded with those Campers that were on the 1:30pm flight to Seattle (enough that maybe they shouldn’t all be on the same flight; in the event of a disaster, your average cartoonist is both stringy and not terribly nutritious).

Those remaining — locals, people with later flights — made sure that the remaining stuff (mostly food and ukuleles) got loaded out and away from prying wildlife. Remember I told you that ravens would fly into cars to start poking around? During the packing up process, I closed the gate of a pickup truck’s bed cover; it was opened again so that somebody could add a box o’ stuff and in the five seconds that nobody was directly looking at the truckbed, a raven flew in, grabbed an entire loaf of bread in her talons, flew about 10 meters away, and started snacking⁴.

I was given a lift back to town by Tara (a self-proclaimed benevolent mercenary⁵; she’d worn a lab coat all weekend after the Saturday morning science march at the state legislature building), who showed me around the upper reaches of Juneau, through valleys and hiking trails, and into the historical site of Douglas Island.

Douglas is where the gold mining took place, and as fate would have it, it was just about 100 years to the day of the cave in that closed the Treadwell mine for good; the ruins feature bits of old buildings, old machinery rusted to Hades and back, the occasional intact shell that looks like a place to dump bodies. There’s a beach there, too — built not on sand, but 80 acres of pulverized rock and mine tailings that the gold was pulled from; lots of people walk their dogs there now.

Dinner with the other stragglers, a stupid-early taxi to the airport for a 5:30am liftoff, and then back to a world that is not Camp, not Juneau, not Alaska. I was left with the same feeling that I had the first time I visited New Orleans, where I felt an undercurrent that seemed to say You’re not home, this isn’t America anymore. This is New Orleans and we’re older than America, we’re something different, we won’t ever be the same as places you’re used to. Deal with us on our terms.

Comics Camp is different from every place we came from (even for those locals that just went up the road for a bit to join us), a place built on the people that gathered there for a long enough time to get to know each other, a short enough time to not know everything about each other, a temporary place to recharge us before we returned to our homes, ready to make more.

And now you’ve got maybe an idea of what it was like, except for all the parts that I’m still figuring out, and all the parts you had to be there for, and all the parts that aren’t anybody else’s business. Oh, and in case you might think it’s just an exercise designed to let Pat & Aaron just hang out with friends for a weekend, here’s what the state of Alaska thinks about their promotion of the arts year round.

It’s a hard, largely anonymous task they’ve taken on for themselves, which is helping artists up and down the state — and across North America — to find their people and create more art. Please consider the last seven posts less a massive self-indulgence and more a 10,000 word Thank You to some people I can’t ever thank enough.

Now.

All of us: those that went to Camp, those that were there last year, those that wanted to go and couldn’t, those that figured it wasn’t for them (spoiler: it’s for everybody), those that wouldn’t go near a group outing in a hundred years, every single damn one of us, there’s just one thing left to do.

Time to make stuff.

And come to Camp! We’ve got s’mores.

Confidential to P & M In Juneau: Hey! You’re getting married! There is no limit to the amount of joy that I’m wishing you both.

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¹ And for once, I’m going to consider myself a full part of the cohort; my job may appear to be social on the surface, but it’s actually fairly isolated. Much of my teaching schedule is done remotely, via computer and phone. When I have an in-person class, it’s with students that I’ll never see again. I’ve not had a boss in the same state as me for most of 20 years now.

² I mentioned to my wife, who just got her ServSafe certification, that we were cleaning the (not particularly dirty) freezer and fridge interiors with bleach and she was impressed.

³ Again, my everlasting respect to my fellow Nagoonberry Cabinmates; I don’t think the lights were ever switched on or a full-voiced conversation took place until we were packing up in broad daylight. People came into the cabin with flashlights held in their teeth and an easily-ignored flurry of zipper and velcro noises accompanied the bed-settling routine.

Even the very occasional snores formed a sort of complementary soundscape, like a lightswitch rave without the siren noise. Libby, Angela, Aubrey, Katie, Rebecca, and Kazu, you have my everlasting sleepytimes gratitude, and next time I see you the first round of drinks is on me.

⁴ We decided that such brazenness deserved a sacrifice and I tossed two more slices to the piratical corvid; her beak was full, but she hopped over and snagged up the additional food in her beak before awkwardly flapping off to find a hiding space. Well done, you thieving genius. Remember me when I return.

⁵ Tara, get a website I can point people towards because you are a neat person with lots of knowledge to share and I want to point them towards you so they will get smarter and better.

Comics Camp had people that don’t make comics; there was a lawyer¹, filmmakers, and four of us that decided as Camp was breaking up that we were the non-comics-creating enabling types². Then there were the ones that I think even the comics creators looked upon as opening themselves up to artistic critique in a way that was almost incomprehensible; say what you will, you don’t normally create comics in real time in front of people³.

But the musicians, they’re putting all they have out on display and the feedback is immediate … you either grab the audience and they’re with you or you don’t and they aren’t. It’s a special kind of public vulnerability.

Fortunately, the musicians we had at Camp are all mad-skilled seasoned pros; I’ve come to think of them as a gang of master performers — a Five Man Band that’s been through Rule 63 and doesn’t care about the traditional labels — able to pull off any musical caper you choose to throw at them. I’m giving them their own writeup primarily because of the Monday night sing-along that broke out late, but this will involve performances (planned and otherwise) from throughout the weekend. If you like, you should go look up the work of Seth Boyer, Marian Call, The Doubleclicks, and Molly Lewis. I’ll wait.

I knew Seth Boyer primarily for his collaborations with Call; he’s played guitar in every one of her performances that I’ve seen, but a lot of people know him because a year and a half ago, he did the near-impossible by making All Star by Smashmouth into a legitimately touching song with the help of a grand piano. Like all of his performances that I like best, it’s tinged with sadness and sincerity; even as you convince yourself that it’s going to be played for laughs you find yourself getting swept up in emotional depth you didn’t think was present.

Sure, it’s funny to think of a big beardy guy in a Gone Squatchin’ trucker hat to be singing the most famous I want song of all time, and yeah it starts off with a giggle or two, but Boyer means it all — every bit of longing, every bit of vulnerability. It was a guitar in his hands and the first lines of All Star were almost too soft to notice, then people began to gather and musicians stood next to him, and a few dozen voices rose together on the chorus, following where this bear of a man led. He’s The Emotional Center and he doesn’t care if you believe he looks the part or not.

In a world where the economics and public perceptions of various styles of music were about 87° out of phase with this one, Marian Call would be singing in music halls and opera houses, her crystal-clear voice cutting through arias and Richard Thompsonesque story songs alike, acoustically perfect spaces resonating every note and typewriter clack. In a world that’s 0° out of phase with this one, the people that book music halls and opera houses for some reason look askance at songs about the influx of cruise ship tourists into coastal Alaskan towns, covers of Homestar Runner tunes, and tributes to Shark Week.

That last one’s stuck particularly in my brain, because it demonstrated the other thing I’ve noticed about Call besides her eclectic musicality — her clear vision of where she wants a song to go and how it should be received and engaged by her audience. During Shark Week at the Mini-Con concert (around about 50:30 or so), Call found the precise degree of encouragement necessary to get a somewhat laid back crowd to indulge in (her words) a little bit of bloodlust, please. The song doesn’t work without that enthusiasm, so she made it happen by force of will.

The attention to detail touches everything from her music (notes and wordplay equally) and its message⁴ to the data resulting from a world-wide hashtag she created; the logistics of a performance and minor Camp hiccups all get jumped on and resolved before anybody realizes she was there. In our musical gang, she’s The Fixer.

Molly Lewis is a paradox; happiness and sadness flow from her songs and performances very nearly simultaneously. Ten years ago she put a video up on YouTube of the most improbable ukulele cover the world had seen: Britney Spears’s Toxic, which has since become a mainstay of her concerts; the performance matches her bouncy, joyous approach to music. But in her hands any song under the sun — an examination of Lincoln’s assassination, say — can turn from goofball to melancholy in the space of a heartbeat.

Or, for that matter, she can turn from one song to another and back almost before you’ve realized it⁵, and turn language on its head in service of a gag, pun, or just for the sheer joy of it. Oh, and she has minions now, with at least three or four members of the Republic of the Uke-raine plucking away on strings at any given time. Without question they would follow her anywhere, their marching songs (somewhat jangly, somewhat frantic) the last thing you hear come the revolution. With the quick shifts and reversals — in tone, topic, word choice, everything — it’s clear that Lewis fills the role of The Acrobat.

The Webber sisters — Angela and Aubrey, collectively The Doubleclicks — are quiet until it’s time to not be quiet, reserved until it’s time to color outside the lines, using their natural camouflage until it’s time to show just a bit of teeth and menace. As far as potentially merciless predators go, they’re also extremely considerate cabin-mates, AAAA++ would bunk with again. There’s hidden depths there, in the songs and in the performances, that I think don’t always get their due recognition.

A typical Doubleclicks song will feature themes of awkwardness, introversion, empathy, trying to fit in; if we were all just a little bit better, just a little bit nicer, they tell us, we’d all be collectively a hell of a lot happier. But there’s a spine of steel beneath the calls for kindness — rejection of their desire for basic civility will not result in begging for acceptance, but a quiet, unwavering, very polite screw you. That’s when Angela, who looks like the lady you drop your kid off with at daycare, fixes you with her glare and lets you know exactly what she thinks of as the appropriate response to the challenges of everyday life:

be yourself
count on your inner strength
find your people
hunt the weak

She means it, too.

And the whole time, Aubrey’s been unobtrusively forcing you to reevaluate everything you thought you knew about live music performances; her cello fills in behind every voice and instrument, lending depth and character and elevating the whole, and she does it all on the fly. It’s not a flashy role, the cellist is pretty much never the one at the front of the stage soaking up the love from the groupies; her solid-body cello⁶ kept her from moving around much, tethered as it was to a power outlet so that it could be amplified.

But.

Remember that video up above of Molly Lewis playing Toxic? Sounds great, but what if it sounded even better? Once Lewis started playing on Monday night I watched Aubrey wait a moment, find the chords she wanted, and start to play every other part of that song; it was everything that some insane Swedish pop song producer knows will never be noticed in the video or the single or the remix or the concert performance, but without which it just won’t sound right.

I watched her do that with a dozen other songs, too, extemporaneous fills flowing in ways that you see late at night in jazz clubs but which you don’t usually see in the bowed instruments. And with a prompting of two words from Marian Call — Power Ballad! — she did it during the performance of the brainstormed musical on Sunday night.

Call had come up with the tune she wanted to sing a few minutes earlier; a few scribbled chords were shown to Boyer so he could strum along. Because of the power cord’s length, Aubrey wasn’t able to see those quick notes and so she paused, she listened, and she created a counterpoint⁷ that somewhere caused an insane Swedish pop song producer to quietly mutter helvete. The Webbers round out our Musical Caper Gang as The Muscle and The Improviser⁸.

We’re coming to the end, but for now (someplace, forever) there’s still a dozen and a half nerdy voices singing along to Smashmouth and Britney, Bowie and The Beatles, Savage Garden and Jimmy Eat World, the Crystal Gems and Simon & Garfunkel, led by a musical Voltron that combines to something magical.

Photos

• If memory serves, I’ve now seen Seth Boyer play guitar for Marian Call in Juneau, San Diego, and two or three times on streaming concerts. It’s a delight every time.
• Unfortunately, I didn’t get any shots of either The Doubleclicks’s or Molly Lewis’s sets at the Mini-Con concert. Marian & Seth brought ’em back up to join in on the songs.
• She got the bloodlust going; before her entreaty, maybe five people were doing the chomp, chomp bit. After, it was everybody but the camera operators.
• The shirt reads I’M FAT LET’S PARTY, and there was a sign taped to his back but you kind of had to be there.
• That cello was one of the most beautiful mixes of form and function I’ve ever seen. It goes in my personal museum of design alongside the Zippo lighter, the Fender Strat, and the the Swiss Army Officer’s Knife (the basic two blades, two tools model).
• Superheroes. From Mockingbird #8, written by Chelsea Cain, pencils by Kate Niemczyk, colors by Rachelle Rosenberg, letters by Joe Caramagna, cameos by nearly everybody.

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¹ Light-ning LAW-yer!

² There was a put-your-hands-in and raise ’em up going Whoa cheer and everything.

³ Even Kazu Kibuishi & Lucas Elliott’s livedrawing was solely illustration; there wasn’t a full story being told.

⁴ Take a listen to her latest album, if you haven’t. Pay particular attention to the song order.

⁵ Her performance of Toxic at music night suddenly shifted on the chorus to Love Shack just long enough to register with the crowd, then back again.

⁶ A beautiful instrument that can be played standing, and also she very kindly did not murder me when I mentioned I’d love to take it apart to see how it worked.

⁷ My knowledge of music theory is thin at best; I think I’m using the word I want to.

⁸ Which, as it turns out, isn’t too far off the roles they played in their appearance in an Eisner-nominated comic. Serendipity!

Monday.

Monday was probably the most deep and meaningful day of Comics Camp, but much of it is going to go unremarked upon; this was the day when the assurance that everything was solely for the ears of those present allowed people to open up and discuss things that would not be discussed in public. Plans for future things that may change radically between now and an indefinite then were also tossed around at length. Money was talked about frankly. You weren’t there, my pen was largely still; them’s the breaks.

Certain aspects, however, have had public components, so you get to be pointed in various directions.

Andy McMillan, one of the two Andys behind XOXO Festival, is working on a new project: The Liberty Foundation. Its purpose will be to support independent artists by providing both funding and the tools to turn their artistic practices into sustainable, ongoing businesses; the precise mechanisms by which this will be achieved are still in development, but McMillan will be sharing when he’s ready via Twitter. If you found the Creators For Creators grant of interest, I’d advise you to keep an eye on The Liberty Foundation.

Katie Lane has been mentioned on this page more than once, and she held a Q&A session¹ where anybody with a question about where the law intersects with the arts could get informal advice. Key word there, informal; while Lane is a lawyer, with few exceptions she is not your lawyer and as such was not providing specific legal advice². She did talk generally a good deal about intellectual property, the importance of getting things in writing, and the value of treating legal negotiations as an opportunity to understand the opposing side and come to a place of mutual benefit.

That last bit really struck me; Lane isn’t out to win, she’s out to find a solution that is beneficial to all involved — if only because an agreement that makes everybody happy is less likely to be (expensively!) fought over later. If I lived in Oregon, she’d be my lawyer for everything.

She’s also damn good at explaining things in terms anybody can understand, as when she used a Capri Sun pouch and two water bottles to illustrate the differences between sole proprietorships, LLCs, S-corporations, and C-corporations³. Asked about the one thing to look for in a contract that should be of greatest interest (or ring the loudest bells by its absence), she cited clear terms regarding what rights are assigned and termination of those assignments.

There was ice cream at lunch: spruce-tip in a vanilla base, and blueberry with lemon curd. They were great.

Kate Beaton and Vera Brosgol talked about childrens books. I was most startled by the number of revisions that an oversized book can go through, including the number of versions where King Baby was very much an unlikeable jerk. It takes a lot of work to tread that line where your characters are likable yet interesting. For Brosgol’s case, she noted the value of having characters in your books shout, because when you read to kids they all get to shout, too. She also had her own editorial struggles, especially with respect to word choice; no matter, little kids now know the words samovar and wormhole.

Lucy Bellwood (Adventure Cartoonist!) has been rather open in public about her finances of late (case in point, from earlier this week), and so led a frank discussion on money⁴. You get the same advice that others shared: there are resources out there to improve financial literacy, like Oh My Dollar and Bad With Money, and services that can help you stay on the right side of money issues, like Tax Jar.

Not being a freelancer and having had the advantage of a decades-long professional career, I got a variety of new perspectives on what fiscal reality is like for those who haven’t followed my particular trajectory. Everybody had something to contribute, though, from the just-starting creators being assured that damn near everything is deductible (including Comics Camp, which is professional development if anything is) to my advice regarding credit cards⁵. Also: advice regarding crowdfunding, not getting screwed by clients that want to slow-walk paying you, and the value of learning from those that went before you (cf: Spike’s Kickstarter comic, Erika & Matt’s book Numberwangs [NSFW]).

In keeping with the theme, Pat Race and Aaron Suring talked about the process of developing the idea of Comics Camp, and the development of financial resources that allowed them to make it a reality. The amount of effort they went to put this thing on — twice now! — without bankrupting themselves is pretty damn impressive. They should turn it into a case study on financing arts support and take it on the road as a seminar (with a modest, but realistic registration fee; they shouldn’t be bearing all the costs of making the arts community smarter by themselves).

Dinner was followed up by Katie And Ryan’s Very Serious Talk About Being Funny, with everybody’s favourite Canadians; Beaton and North had run the session at Mini-Con on Saturday, but they talked more about their personal philosophies of humour. Beaton credits writing laugh-chuckles as making her more empathetic, while acknowledging that finding something that makes her laugh prompts her to immediately destroy that joy by picking it apart like a gross sponge. North noted that comedy is one of the two easiest genres to write in, because if you’re doing it right there’s an immediate physical reaction⁶; you can’t make others laugh if you don’t first make yourself laugh.

Then they made us do worksheets. New Yorker cartoons with the captions erased (it would be cheating to fill them all in with Christ, what an asshole), comic strips with the last panel missing (including a series of Cathy strips where you were not allowed to simply write ACK!). It was a tough exercise, and even tougher to come up with something original; there were huge thematic and wording overlaps in the New Yorker captions among those present.

There was a photo op for all the self-identified bearded Campers and short presentations hosted by McMillan — titled Presentations By People Who Didn’t Have Presentations Talky People Shut Up Time — for any topics not covered elsewhen at Camp. This included a fast five minutes from Molly Lewis on Bullet Journaling that I suspect has led more than one Camper down a hole of special pens and washi tape⁷.

During that time I was tapped on the shoulder by Seth Boyer who said he’d heard I mix good cocktails; I gave him something I’d been working on that weekend called the Aurora Georgealis and it prompted a spontaneous Wow! of appreciation that made me feel like I belonged among the artists and creators.

For those of you wanting to make your own, it’s derived from your basic sour:

1 oz liquor
1 oz citrus
1 oz simple syrup

Shake, strain, garnish as desired.

By choosing an appropriate citrus to match the spirit, you have almost infinite flexibility. The liquor I chose was an aged dark rum; earlier in the weekend the citrus was blood orange, but tonight I was using the last of the breakfast juice, which was a combo of orange, peach, and mango. Because it was a bit sweet, I cut back the juice to 3/4 oz and added several squeezes of lime. The simple syrup had been previously dressed with two airline bottles of white rum, lime juice, lime zest, and vanilla, making an impromptu falernum. The name was inspired by Georgina Hayns, whose enthusiasm for the borealis was matched only by her enthusiasm for helping me perfect the recipe.

And then, before everybody slipped away, the music started. I realize that I’m over 1500 words in already and so I’m going to talk about the impromptu singalong and the musicians of Camp in their own post. They deserve it.

Photos
Not so many today; turns out that sitting around talking about serious topics isn’t that interesting, visually speaking.

• Lessons from Vera and Kate: If you’re going to remember one thing when writing for kids who may be reading for themselves or may be read to, it’s that kids are smart. They’ll find the hidden jokes on the page, or the goat that follows the old lady from the mountain to the moon. Not talking down to kids also means not talking down to the adults that read to them, so avoid the fake, pseudo-Suessian rhythms that are going to sound awful when read aloud.

  Also: farts are always funny.

• Two people that present as very nearly effortlessly funny, Katie & Ryan will tell you at length that funny is a muscle that must be trained and exercised.
• I could only come up with three captions, all of which were substantially identical to multiple other people. That means I’m either as funny as professional cartoonists, or I’m astonishingly unoriginal.
• What I was working with. It was fun.

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¹ Titled Lightning Lawyer! You have to sing it, though, for full effect: Light-ning LAW-yer! As a matter of fact, if you’re ever around Lane in person and her name is said out loud, you are obligated to sing it.

² Specific legal advice is not offered in public, and you pay for it.

³ I’ve made my living for a quarter-century by teaching technical topics, mostly by means of creative analogy. This was the best I’ve ever seen.

⁴ Which she introduced (with characteristic enthusiasm) as Money! You want it! What is it? How do you get it? And how can you keep it?

⁵ Three rules: 1. Always pay them off every month; 2. Never accept an offer that’s blind-mailed to you; 3. Don’t pay for the privilege of carrying a card.

That last one I amended in conversation with fellow camper Tara, who was wondering about the Alaska Air miles-earning credit card, but which carries an annual fee. If you can keep to Rule 1 and you get enough miles or other benefits (like free checked bags) to offset the fee, that’s fine. I was thinking more along the lines of the Amex Platinum offer I got in the mail this week, which offers me the exclusive prestige of Platinum (ugh) for the trivial cost of $450 per year. Screw that.

And, full disclaimer, under the assumption that I’m going to any future Comics Camp that will have me, I went and looked at the Alaska Air credit card and figured that it makes sense financially for me (especially after I discovered they fly nonstop from Newark to San Diego, with First Class on Alaska only about $200 more than steerage on United).

⁶ The other is erotica. Ladies.

⁷ Don’t ask.

I’ll be honest; Sunday started a bit stressfully for me; Pat Race had asked me to give a presentation on the history of webcomics, and I was in absolute terror it would devolve immediately into uselessness:

Hey, Ryan North? Remember when you pranked Wikipedia about chickens? That was great. And Kate Beaton, you did a comic where a duck said “Aw yiss”. That was great, too.

And to be honest, I have to this day little memory of what I actually said. I have notes, mind you, that say things like The first webcomics are about as easily identified as the first jazz or punk songs and (double-underlined) Algonquin Roundtablesque!!

I remember my main thesis being that webcomics (aside from being a useless term, but we haven’t come up with a better one yet) is less a medium of distribution and more of an attitude: creator ownership, minimal gatekeeping, merchandising on the back end for scrappy entrepreneurship. It’s an attitude whose technical and business rules are constantly changing, and whose only constant is the ease of collaboration. Not just between cartoonists, either; I remember this bit:

So one day I leave my offices at Bryant Park in Manhattan, and as I walk by the southern end of Times Square, I noticed a full-sized billboard advertising W00tstock 2.0; it’s portraits of a former child actor/writer, an SFX goofball that blows things up for science, a pair of internet musicians/pirate fetishists, and it’s all been done 8-bit style by a quasireclusive pixelsmith.

If Dorthy Parker got drunk with fewer writers and more sculptors, aviatrixes, and telegraphers you’d approximate the degree of cross-media collaboration you have going on now. Instead, you’ve got Marian [Call] including NASA mission controllers in her shows and Molly Lewis gets hired by quasi-respectable party game designers to write a Christmas song about a Hawai’ian goddess with a flying vagina¹ because why the hell not.

Shortly after that, I shifted away from talking and turned it into a discussion session, getting people to share what they saw webcomics as, where they started, what their experiences were; considering that the room contained the likes of Kazu Kibuishi and Ryan North, it seemed a pretty good course to follow. Fortunately, the invaluable Jason Alderman did his thing and sketch-noted the session²; if you follow his twitter, you’ve seen these before when he attends sessions at various conferences. He doesn’t just take notes, he renders the speakers and finds their key points in real time, turning them into the most beautiful recaps imaginable. When you meet him, demand to look through his notebook, because you will very quickly get smarter on a wide variety of topics.

It was a good time; people went out of their way to thank me for the discussion later, and having the first time slot meant I was able to relax for the remainder of Camp … thanks, Pat! Even better, I got to see the next session, where Jeremy Spake and Georgina Hayns (mentioned yesterday) brought out the puppets and armature they’d shown at the Mini-Con, and really got down to details with us. For 90 glorious minutes we learned about fabrication, the CNC and 3D printing techniques used to construct the puppets³, and had our minds blown by the intricate details. Much more about this down in the photos section. Let me just leave you with a quick thought, though — when the stop-motion needs to look especially smooth, there are variant puppets with multiple limbs or whatever so that, say, an arm can be in multiple places at the same time. It’s the stop-motion equivalent of smear animation.

At lunch, I learned just how different life in Alaska can be; Sarah told me about living on an island approximately 100 km west of Juneau, where a fortunate quirk of geography allows a straight line of sight to a cell tower that provides enough internet to permit a freelancer’s life. She consults on land use and conservation policy, mixed with teaching art and movement. The nearest neighbors are 5 km away, and overwintering is a matter of personal choice and preparation. If the apocalypse ever comes, I want to convince her that I’d somehow be useful to her because she represents my best chance at survival.

Figure drawing took up a chunk of the afternoon, as did various project noodlings. Alderman brought along a little hand-cranked music box mechanism and a set of paper sheets that could be punched with holes to specify what notes would be played; think a very small player piano⁴. Call punched one of her songs into a strip and then wondered if it was possible to turn that into a Moebius song. Turns out it was, and the very quiet music became nicely amplified if the mechanism was held firmly against the body of one of the many camp ukuleles. Did I mention that there were 40 ukes delivered to Camp, leading many to take up the instrument? Because that happened.

Raina Telgemeier taught about how to present and get paid to do so; Tony Cliff showed how to snazz up those presentations with fancy flying transitions. Dinner featured the most nutritious cut of steak, and my turn at clean-up meant I missed much of the most significant session of the weekend as Cliff convened the Pacific Order of Onomatopoeia Professionals First Annual Regional Terminology Summit⁵ to decide once and for all how to spell certain sounds in comics. Suggestions were gathered, voting was conducted⁶, and Cliff released the final results [PDF] a couple of days ago. Comics creators, please note that the results linked to are definitive, official, and must be used as shown on pain of looking very foolish.

The last program of the night was the most insanely creative thing I’ve ever been involved in, but I’m going to be purposefully vague; as I mentioned at the start of these recaps, some things that took place at Comics Camp can — should? may? — only exist in the context of the time and place they took place. To delve into them too deeply is to rob them of meaning.

So it was as we gathered to create a musical — a main character was brainstormed, the introductory, “I Want”, villain, and emotional turning point songs were outlined, and we broke into four groups to actually write the damn things. I will show you in the photos section some wisdom from Marian Call, who shared her process for getting that first line of a song written; I think her technique applies to nearly any creative endeavour. Ultimately, I contributed two titles⁷ and one good line⁸.

Just about an hour from the start of the exercise, The Doubleclicks started playing the first song and the others followed as quickly as one musician could sit down and the next stand up. I am being completely honest with you when I tell you that more than one of them has been rattling around in my brain near continuously ever since; they are legitimately that sticky. Surprising everybody and nobody, there was a Hamilton-style rap from Pat Race.

I called it early that night, and so it wasn’t until the next morning I learned the anticipated northern lights were thwarted by cloud cover, but Ben Hatke mitigated the disappointment by teaching people how to breathe fire. In case you ever wondered what mineral oil tastes like, about half the Campers can tell you.

Photos

• Along with everything else, Jason Alderman’s handwriting is extraordinarily neat. Sketchnotes of my talk on the history of modern [web]comics.
• To start our deep dive in the Laika’s finest, let me note that it’s possible to take a photo where just about everybody’s eyes are closed. From left: Jeremy, Kubo, Kubo’s internal armature, Beetle, George, Monkey, Sarah, Kazu.
• The puppets all start with an internal armature; here you have a full-dressed Kubo and his internal structure. You can’t see it but it’s got tensioning screws for each and every joint except for the fingers and the jaw. The fingers don’t have metal inside (too small), but are fully poseable. The jaw isn’t jointed, but implied by the shape of the face plates.
• Okay: faces. They each consist of an upper half and a lower half; they allow for different mouth positions and expressions, and they pop right off. High strength miniature magnets hold the plates in place, and each piece is inscribed with a unique serial number describing exactly what it is. Popping off just the upper face gives access to the eyes and eyelids, which can be individually positioned however you like. Here’s a better shot of the upper and lower eyelids.
• With the face plates in place, seams are still potentially visible — as here, in the bridge of Kubo’s nose — which are removed digitally. George mentioned that on Coraline, Henry Selick argued strongly to leave the seams in, as an acknowledgment of the physical nature of the stop motion creative process.
• The models themselves hide access points for tensioning their armatures, and connection sockets for when the model must be supported externally due to posing; in Kubo or Monkey, it’s under clothing or fur. In Beetle, there are little pop-off panels and bits of cloth where joints meet. Monkey’s fur is made from a four-way stretch fabric which has been impregnated with a silicone; it stays where you pose it. Kubo’s hair is human hair, likewise laced with silicone for posing.
• I’ve over-lit this shot so you can get a good look at the clothing; Hayns said that cloth is a particular challenge because it doesn’t look right at scale without significant effort.
• Everything on these models is poseable. Beetle’s six limbs can move widely enough to draw his bow, for instance. It’s not a different model or a different bow. We were all very careful in positioning the models, despite the fact that they’re meant to stand up to significant wear and rough handling. There’s just so much care in their construction, we couldn’t treat them cavalierly; they are legitimate works of art and the highest craftsmanship.
• Figure drawing; the fellow providing that rock-solid five minute pose (!) is Khail Ballard, and you should read his stuff. Ballard also played the lead in that night’s musical.
• You thought I was kidding about the ukes, didn’t you?
• Voting underway in the wake of the POoOP FARTS debate.
• How to get to that first line, by Marian Call. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

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¹ The fact that I got to nod at Molly Lewis while saying that last part is a highlight of my life.

² Bonus: preliminary sketches of the library kickoff show!

³ Of which there are potentially dozens of each character — and each animator has a precise preference about how much tension there is in the articulation, which presents design challenges you can scarcely conceive of.

⁴ A discussion of which led to me holding forth on one of my favorite topics — how Hedy Lamarr used player-piano rolls to defeat the Axis in World War II and at the same time invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum, which makes your cell phone possible.

⁵ I’ll wait.

⁶ While I did not make any spelling suggestions, I did exercise my voting rights.

⁷ The “I Want” song, Proof, and the villain song, Sweet, Sweet Untraceable Cash.

⁸ Near the end of the first verse of Proof; the music for that song was all Marian Call, the remainder of the lyrics were by her, North, Telgemeier, and Hollis Kitchin, who runs the best bra shop in Juneau. Other groups were headed up by the Webber sisters, Lewis, and Seth Boyer.