The Emerald City Comic Con kicks off tomorrow (with Thursday a full day for the first time, and long days on the show floor); the question hanging in the air is how everybody’s large-but-not-too-large, still comics-centric comic show will do now that founder Jim Demonakos is no longer associated and Reed POP is fully in charge. There were grumbles last year, and this year could be make or break for the show’s reputation as friendly to all corners of [web]comics.

But still, hard to argue when your Comic Guests contain the likes of Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota, Erica Henderson, Jim Zub, Kate Leth, Unca Ryan and Unca Lar, Lucy Bellwood, Melanie Gillman, Ngozi Ukazu, Ryan North, Taneka Stotts, and Tess Stone (and more comics people listed under Literary Guests, like Emily Carroll, Jen Wang, Kazu Kibuishi, and Vera Brosgol). True, there’s 180 invited comics guests (and a hundred-plus Literary and Entertainment guests), but that’s still a pretty good chunk of representation. More than you’d get at any other four-day major show, at least.

For the most part, those guests will be found in the Artists Alley, along with the likes of Ben Costa, Braden Lamb and Shelli Paroline¹, the gang from Helioscope (your Bellswood, your Meconii, and all the rest of their artistic cohort), Jakface McGee, K Lynn Smith, Ru Xu, Der-Shing Helmer, Tee Franklin, Tom Parkinson-Morgan (aka Abbadon), and Trungles.

Over on the main floor, you’ll be able to catch up with Pat, Aaron, and the rest of the Alaska Robotics² crew (booth 204), Kel McDonald (booth 208), the Cyanide & Happiness crowd (booth 722), Nidhi Chanani (booth 409), Los Professores Foglio (booth 118), Hiveworks (booth 1502), Iron Circus Comics (book 212), Uncas Lar & Sohmer and their merry band of quasireprobates (booth 110), Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett (booth 1116), and the various associates of TopatoCo (which this time around will include Jeph Jacques, Sam Logan, David Malki !, Danielle Corsetto, Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan, Alina Pete, Abby Howard, Catie Donnelly, Tyson Hesse, and Brandon Bird, all on the luxurious skybridge).

All told, it’s more webcomickers in closer proximity than at SDCC or any other large con. They’re well represented in the programming tracks, too, which we’ll make mention of tomorrow.

Confidential to MG: Congratulations! This is going to be great.

Spam of the day:

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I believe we dispensed with this nonsense yesterday, but I confess your company name caught my eye. NoseRoseMedia is a new player in the sphere of consumer credit, but no doubt poised for great things.

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¹ Speaking of, did everybody see the announcement that the Adventure Time comic series is coming to an end with issue #75? And that past contributors — like original writer Ryan North, original artists Paroline & Lamb, and North’s successor Christopher Hastings — are coming back for that final issue, in a get the band back together type deal? Because that’s happening.

² Pat, Aaron, and the rest are awesome people! If you are an awesome person in comics, you should go talk to them, particularly about Comics Camp, which is for awesome people. Many of the people mentioned on this page will be there. There will also be s’mores.

Man, what a great album. It’s got nothing to do with our roundup of great webcomcis du jour, necessarily, but since when have I needed an excuse to go off on a tangent before?

• Trees: Maki Naro teams up with writer/editor Eryn Brown to produce a comic about what we know regarding forests, trees, and their role in climate. As it turns out, not a lot! Beliefs about what happens when you chop down trees (it gets hotter, or maybe colder) have been around since the pre-Enlightenment days, and prominent thinkers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson¹, and David Hume have (much like T-Rex²) had opinions.

  The nascent sciences of meteorology and Forestry argued it over for decades, and modern climate science sees different effects in different circumstances. Turns out questions that revolve around three trillion things over a third of the planet’s land mass are complicated. Then again, that’s the fun of science — there’s always something new to learn.

• Food: Shing Yin Khor has a comic at Catapult that talks about how we speak with food, communicate our emotions with food, find our worth (to others and ourselves) with food; as the tagline says, I have forgotten how to speak two languages. But I have learned this one. It is, like all of Khor’s work, intensely personal, beautifully, delicately illustrated, and demanding of multiple, leisurely readings.

  Take your time with it, let it settle over you, see what half-remembered whiffs of grandmotherly kitchens tickle the upper edges of your nasal passages, where olfactory senses are processed by a bit of your brain that’s not tucked safe behind your skull. When we breathe in aromas, we are experiencing the outside world in direct, chemical contact with the outside world; little wonder it sparks memory like nothing else. Read it, then take a while away, then read it again. You’ll come away know more about both Khor and yourself.

• Tangentially food: KC Green and Anthony Clark deliver one of the best, most satisfying longform webcomics each Wednesday, and they’re ready to put together the second print collection. The Kickstarter for BACK Book 2 is up now, a little less than 10% of the way to its US$20,000 goal and a very simple plan: Books as PDFs, books on paper (new one or both), bookplate is you desire, five books for retailers, and only one extra: a cool pin of a can of beans (there, food, like I promised). Pound for pound, nobody delivers a purer, more satisfying webcomics experience than Anthony and KC, so do go pick up your copy.
• Tangentially trees and food: the invaluable Gemma Correll guides us through a series of charms that will help you deal with the low points of modern life. Online trolls, spam, fake news, and bad Tinder dates all get their due; the charm to deal with unsolicited dick pics features a hot dog on a thorn branch, so there’s the trees and food. I particularly like the wards against clickbait (beads, feathers, and improperly-removed USB sticks, worn around the neck), carpal tunnel (a mouse — the alive kind — bound with cables and black ribbon, placed on they keyboard at night) and eye strain (an infusion of avocado oil, rose quartz, and googly eyes, taken 3 times daily). Find your modern curse and get to banishing.

Spam of the day:

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Dudes, my credit is so good, unsolicited offers have to promise negative interest rates just to get my attention.

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¹ Naturalist Hugh Williamson didn’t think much of Jefferson’s data on weather patterns, seeing as how it consisted of Afk a bunch of Old Dudef if it’f Warmer or Colder than Ufed it to Be.

² Speaking of T-Rex, he makes an appearance in the first panel as the history of trees is explored, from the Carboniferous Period to the present day. He’s looking dapper in his feathers!

The word came yesterday, from C Spike Trotman, about the latest significant accomplishment from Iron Circus Comics:

And the hits just keep coming! Iron Circus’ edition of @evandahm’s Rice Boy scores a starred review in @PublishersWkly!

Firstly, anybody that’s read Dahm’s Rice Boy (and his Order Of Tales, and his Vattu) shouldn’t be surprised, because Dahm is a master storyteller with an entirely unique sense of worldbuilding, as well as a master draftsman. His characters — human and otherwise — have weight … in the sense of their physicality, as well as in the emotional sense. For one of the most respected sources of book review to refer to Rice Boy as an epic of grand ambition, startling choices, and sterling heart makes perfect sense; they only needed to be aware of the book and to have a copy of it in front of them.

That’s a tall order for a single-person creative endeavour to pull off; hard enough to finance a run of books (with or without Kickstarter) and find room for them in your Brooklyn apartment before shipping them out (or more precisely, shipping them to the fine folks at TopatoCo) while simultaneously tracking publicity efforts and trying to work on multiple new stories at once. Few people have that combination of drive, confidence, and willingness to say Hey! Look at this! Just shut up and read it, then you can tell me how good it is. And when you do, be sure to remember the next time I put something in front of you.

Entire Spike; she’s been relentless in building up Iron Circus Comics on the basis first of quality (quality projects, quality collaborators), then quantity. She got the distribution deal that widened ICC’s scope. And now she’s placing books in libraries and in front of the most desirable eyes in the world of pocket reviews. Bookstores and libraries are going to order the snot out of the ICC edition of Rice Boy. It’s a small, small imprint in a big world right now, but ICC is in a spot similar to another small imprint in a big world a dozen years ago:

He laid out a plan that he expected to take a decade, to get comics into the literature end of things, to get them treated as worthy of study and their creators as respected voices. He saw that path as leading to literary awards and wondered how long it would take.

The he was Mark Siegel, and the plan was for :01 Books; you may recall that he beat his ten-year goal of being considered for literary awards (not comics awards, the regular pubishing world’s hoity-toity awards) by about eight and a half years, as American Born Chinese wound up shortlisted for the National Book Award. It’s not one of her goals to be in the awards circuit, but nevertheless I don’t think¹ it be a decade before Spike and one (or more!) of her associated creators are getting into fancy dress for a fancier dinner and the red carpet treatment.

Which is a long way of saying, Congrats Evan and Spike. You’ve more than earned it.

Spam of the day:

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You sent an offer for a psychic reading on the 45th day of the year. That’s not really New Year territory. I’m forced to conclude that psychics, allegedly in tune with secrets of the ancients, are not able to use that 6000 year old technology known as Calendars. It’s like the first thing you go for in Civilization after Hunting and The Wheel. You’ll never defeat Gandhi playing like this.

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¹ Spike’s got this quality I call the cheerfully mercenary outlook on life; she’s much more concerned with getting ICC to a self-sustaining point for herself and her contracted creators than in seeking the approval of others. The Academy could look down its nose all it want, as long as the libraries and bookstores keep ordering copies.

If there is anybody more universally beloved in [web]comics than Raina Telgemeier, I don’t know who that would be. Like, maybe the reincarnation of Mr Rogers was magically soul-bound to Caroll Spinney and then spent a couple of decades mentoring Malala Yousafzi in panel composition and storytelling, you’d be getting close … and Raina would be cheerleading her the whole way. She’s pretty awesome is what I’m saying, and may have said so one or two times in the past.

I’m not alone in that opinion, as anybody that’s seen one of her public events can attest. She’ll be having a meet and greet at the Cartoon Art Museum, in conjunction with the closing of the months-long retrospective exhibit of her work at CAM (the exhibit that, in fact, was chosen to spearhead the relaunch of CAM after two years without their own gallery space).

Things start at 4:00pm on Saturday, 10 March, with a presentation and discussion of the exhibit, followed by a Q&A, then informal time to mingle and interact. To maximize the time for fans to get chat and get photos, there won’t be any signing (that keeps her stuck behind a table), but I bet she’d be fine with you holding up your copy of a favorite book in photos (signed copies will be available via advanced ticketing), or seeing your fanart.

As you might expect, demand will be pretty high for this event, even in her hometown of San Francisco; advance tickets are available at Guestlist for the immensely reasonable price of US$10 for adults, and US$4 (four bucks!) per kid. You can reserve your signed copies of her books on the same page.

And then two weeks later, SF fans will very possibly see her again, as she takes part in the San Francisco portion of the KidLit Marches For Kids. An outgrowth of the March For Our Lives/Never Again movement being led by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the YA community is participating in the national day of demonstrations in favor of gun control. Details about the various marches can be found on Facebook.

This is what happens when you realize that some of the students that have (very quickly, with sorrowful determination) become activists were your readers just a few years ago.

This is what happens when you can’t escape the fact that some of their fallen friends were.

This is what happens when you don’t want that to happen ever again.

So keep an eye out for a local march and let kids worry about when the next book from their favorite author comes out, instead of how to stay alive on a Wednesday. Raina will thank you for it; she’s polite that way.

Spam of the day:

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There is a certain logic to your position, but it does not resemble our Earth logic.

Something great happened in 2011; the folks behind Toronto’s The Beguiling (one of the great comic book shops in the English-speaking world) opened an extension store next door. It was, as far as anybody can tell, the first comic shop dedicated to children and likely remained so for the rest of its existence. Little Island Comics was an act of pure optimism; optimism that the comics industry could produce enough material suitable for kids to sustain a store in one of the priciest cities in the world.

Comics may not be for kids, as the now-cliche headline would tell us, but vast swathes of them haven’t been entirely appropriate for young readers for some time. Grimdarkgrittypouchcape comics were pretty dominant for a couple of decades there, but the big publishers manage to produce some stuff suitable for all ages, and the graphic novel trade has fallen over itself to provide more and more books each year¹. Damn good thing, too, or where will the grimdarkgrittypouchcape comics get their readers in the future, if kids don’t develop the habit today?

And it worked. Little Island was successful until it fell prey not to neglect, or disinterest, or lack of product; it was a casualty to gentrification that tore up a chunk of now-valuable Toronto real estate. The Beguiling managed to find new digs, but Little Island was lost.

Until now.

The Beguiling is pleased to announce the re-opening of Little Island Comics, the world’s first and only children’s comic shop! Offering the widest possible array of graphic novels, manga, and comics for people 12 years old and younger, Little Island celebrates its Grand Re-Opening during March Break 2018 with a slate of creator appearances, refreshments and activities.

Whoa, cool shop returns and refreshments? Give me the deets!

Little Island Comics re-opens in March next door to its parent shop The Beguiling’s newly expanded location at the top of Toronto’s vibrant Kensington Market neighborhood. As The Beguiling enters its fourth decade as North America’s premier comic book retailer, the move to College Street has allowed it to add a gallery and events space, which Little Island will share.

• Next door to the Beguiling again? Check
• Gallery and event space, so that LI’s famed comic-making classes, launches, and events can continue? Check
• Same staff that previously served the all-ages comics lovers of Toronto and beyond? Check

Anything else we should know?

Little Island will offer a 20% discount on all in-print kids comics, picture books, and graphic novels throughout March Break (March 10-18, 2018) to encourage families to dig into graphic novels! The week will culminate in a Grand Re-Opening Party on Saturday, March 17th, with refreshments, drop-in activities, story time, and appearances by such creators as:

Scott Chantler, Naseem Hrab, Brian McLachlan, Ryan North, Kean Soo, Britt Wilson, Tory Woollcott, and more!

Times for the Grand Reopening to come, but I’d keep an eye on their website, Twitterfeed, and on Facebook.

Here’s to many more years on the Little Island; if you’re in (or visiting) Toronto, drop by and tell them we say hi, and wish them every success.

Spam of the day:

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While I appreciate the Canadian content, spammers, this “men’s” doesn’t believe that you will actually be able to get me industrial-strength parkas that normally run near US$950 for US$140. Call me skeptical.

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¹ Note to Marvel, DC, etc: they do this because they like money. Releasing a new Kazu Kibuishi or Raina Telgemeier book is a license to print money because kids love comics if you just give them a chance to.

For example, :01 Books announced earlier today that the incomparable Pénélope Bagieu will be going on tour in support of Brazen starting on Tuesday, 6 March (coincidentally, launch day), and wending her way through eight cities in seven days.

And in a completely coincidental occurrence, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin has thoughts creators and signings. Let’s see what he’s got to say.

I find that the idea of paying creators (who, after all, are not creating when at a show) ties directly into the idea of Shows Not Being Worth It Sometimes; cf: C Spike Trotman and the ever-expanding ECCC:

Looking forward to ECCC, but not thrilled it’s getting longer and longer. Thursday will be a full day this year instead of a preview night. Too many comic cons are going for this size queen bigger-is-better thing, and it’s just exhausting.

One of the best cons I do all year is SPX, which is Saturday, Sunday, DONE. More days doesn’t automatically mean more money.

And I have shit to do! Longer cons means more days trying to run a publishing company from a hotel room, for me. Not ideal.

A big (but not the sole) motivator for ditching SDCC was it began swallowing a week of my life for diminishing returns. I genuinely hope ECCC doesn’t start going down that same road.

Guarantee some income? You’ll see more creators willing to brave the marathon shows. Thanks as always to FSFCPL for adding his cross-Atlantic perspective on what’s likely a universal dilemma.

Spam of the day:

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Your cutesy, intentional typo offends me.

An entirely new work crisis has developed; the only good news is this one won’t steal time for me any later than tomorrow. As it stands, I have time to point you at something interesting, and then back to the crisis.

Rob Balder of Erfworld has bee cranking out a deep story with huge amounts of lore (and terrible, terrible in-jokes) for more’n ten years now. For most of that time, he’s been trying to find ways to pay for the strip’s art contributors and support himself via a non-sucky mechanism. Having finally had it with his ad networks pulling crap that is beneath contempt (pop-unders, sound, fake virus scams), Balder is trying something new. It’s kinda premised on being able to ride what’s likely fake money, but bonus points for a) trying something new; b) to keep crappy ads away from his users, and c) gamifying it.

He’s letting his reader voluntarily mine cryptocurrency:

It definitely worked in alpha. We mined enough Ethereum to be worth it. Not everybody’s computer could manage it, but nobody’s computer broke, and there’s no reason it should have. We learned some things that let us make a plan. Everybody who participated in the test got sent some goodies (thanks Renter, Bandaid, Danielle, Omnimancer & sdub!) and I created the Special: Digging badge for them:

There’s the gamification; Balder’s created a displayable badge within the forum structure at Erfworld, and if you mine Etherium for support of the site, you get the badge, and you get a random chance at other shinies you can show off. He’s got his users organized into teams, with bragging rights associated for the team that does more successfully. He’s got a trading mechanism set up. And a day into the beta, it appears to be working.

I’m deeply dubious that Balder can keep ahead of the crash points and the scams and the instability and rampant thievery that are endemic to cryptocurrency¹. I’m deeply troubled that the environmental overheads in crypto mining (as a whole) are causing measurable and accelerating damage to our commons (ie: Earth) and contributing to global climate change. I can’t fault him for trying, but I also can’t but help hope that he finds something better to meet his costs (and food, and rent) quickly.

Spam of the day:

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Shut up, shut up, shut up, I hate you douchecanoes.

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¹ Although it is hilarious to watch the religiously-fervent cryptobros learn firsthand why financial regulatory schemes exist.

Last week was … buhhh. Let us not speak of last week, but rather move forward.¹ Catching up on news is the order of the day.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a pointer to a story I would have otherwise missed; The Beat has a terrific interview with Pénélope Bagieu, so good that I’m not even mad to discover that Heidi Mac has gone and added her own French-speaking contributor. The interview mostly concerns the soon-to-be-published Brazen (née Culottées), a review of which will be forthcoming here at Fleen.

  Most fascinating was the discussion of the edits that are made to the list of accomplished ladies in different countries, including the fact that the US edition (by :01 Books) omits the story of Indian bandit queen Phoolan Devi. The reason given is need for the book to be YA, which required removing mentions of rape from Devi’s story, which removed much of the impetus for her career of banditry². Lots of good stuff, so go read Bagieu’s talk with Philippe Leblanc.

• From C Spike Trotman, news that the new, Iron Circus edition of Evan Dahm’s Rice Boy is now available in the world (indeed, reports on the wubs indicate people are finding it in stores). Dahm’s first story from the very strange these are alien peoples and cultures, not humans with one feature distinctly different world of Overside are some of the best mythmaking and worldbuilding to be found in any medium, and if you haven’t read any of his stuff, get on that right now. Punch up those sales numbers and maybe we’ll see more ICC-published Overside stories.
• From Steve Hamaker, designer, colorist, and all-around stellar comicker³, news that the second print volume of his webcomic, Plox, is now Kickstarting. Plox, if you’re not a reader, is definitely one of those stories that does better in big chunks that twice a week, so if you’ve been holding off, now’s the time to jump in.

  The campaign has an unusually low backer count for the funds raised so far (he’s just over 51% in the first week of a 30 day campaign), low enough that it’s outside the range where the FFF mk2 works well. The McDonald Ratio does pretty well in these situations, though, and it calls for Plox volume 2 to collect about US$11.7K, which is comfortably over the US$8K goal. The other piece of good news is that the backer averages are a full US$70, primarily because a significant number of people are pledging at the US$150 level for a cameo. You cannot beat super-fans.

Spam of the day:

Patron Initial Coin Offering

Oh, well I’m sure to trust this digital Ponzi scheme because I’m assured it’s on a whitelist.

Actually, I kinda do trust them because their logo is a moustache. Don’t judge me.

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¹ Not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

² Although the story of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee has a similar inclusion of repeated spousal rapes, which were just as much an impetus for her career of social work, justice for women, and rehabilitation of child soldiers. Then again Gbowee was a grown woman and Devi was ten years old.

³ Seriously, have you seen the list of people he collaborates with? Jeff Smith, Terry Moore, Judd Winick, the Flight folks, Scott Kurtz … the list goes on and on.

Let’s just say Monday. It’ll be better on Monday.

Alliteration is the only thing keeping me sane right now.