Heya. Let’s bring you up to speed on some things mentioned recently.

• TCAF! We mentioned the first tranche of Very Special Guests two weeks ago, and we mentioned the International Guests a bit more than one week ago, which means it’s time to talk about the latest additions to the guest roster, the Young Adult Guests¹.

  Joining others (maybe you?) at the Toronto Reference Library on Saturday and Sunday, 11 and 12 May, will be Flavia Biondi (best known for Generations, Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau (Bloom), Renee Nault (the new graphic adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale), Ryan North (you know who he is), Sarah Winifred Searle (the forthcoming graphic novel, The Greatest Thing, due out next year), Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, my review copy of which will hopefully be here soon), Colleen AF Venable² and Ellen T Crenshaw (Kiss Number 8, which is wonderful, review to appear here soon), and Tillie Walden (On A Sunbeam).

  Oh, yes, and how about a few superstars over the Kids Guests? You got yer Raina (her guide to making comics, Share Your Smile, will be out in April), Kazu Kibuishi and Jason Caffoe (I think this is their first joint appearance since Amulet Book 8: Supernova came out). Additions to the Exhibitor ranks since last we spoke include the 5 Worlds team and Shan Murphy; there’s probably others, and I will notice them on the next read-through, or the one after that.

• CAM! A few days back, we mentioned a bunch of stuff happening at the Cartoon Art Musuem over the next month or so; among those items was an exhibition dedicate to the art of A Fire Story by Brian Fies. Fies will be on book tour when the exhibition opens, so it makes sense that he won’t be ther for the usual launch-of-exhibit reception. Or rather, it would make sense, but why give up a good reception? Fies will be there a bit later in the month:

  The Cartoon Art Museum is proud to present an evening with cartoonist Brian Fies on Saturday, March 30, 2019 from 7:00-8:30pm as he discusses his new graphic novel A Fire Story: A Graphic Memoir, depicting the artist’s firsthand account of the 2017 Northern California wildfires. A book signing will follow Fies’s discussion. Advance tickets for the Saturday, March 30 event are available through Guestlist: Fire Story Tickets

  That’s from the email that CAM sent me; the event doesn’t appear to be on their webpage yet. US$10 for the public, free for CAM members.

• Zub! Okay, not an update, but you should know. Jim Zub, his wife Stacy King, and Andrew Wheeler (all of whom will absolutely shark you in a game of We Didn’t Playtest This At All, especially in the presence of presents³) announced that they were given the opportunity of a geek’s lifetime — to create a series of books for younger players of tabletop RPGs to introduce them to the ideas of roleplaying and constructing a seat-of-your-pants story together. Specifically, books for the most hallowed of tabletop RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons. Spill it, Zub:
  

  As experienced DMs/players, it’s easy to forget how intimidating tabletop RPGs can be for people who haven’t played before. These guides lay out the major concepts (class, race, equipment, creatures) in a way anyone can understand and encourage them to create their own stories. Readers can use the material in these books to brainstorm a character and imagine their role in an adventuring party. Get them excited about the possibilities, and then bring them to the gaming table to show them how those initial ideas can really flourish with a roll of the dice.

  The two guides in the D&D Young Adventurer’s Guides, Monsters & Creatures and Warriors & Weapons, release on 16 July, which I believe is the day before Preview Night at SDCC, and just long enough before Gen Con to get out into the public and thoroughly read before heading to Indy. Congrats to King, Wheeler, and Zub for the nerd experience of a lifetime.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ That would be guests of interest to YA and younger readers, not guest who are themselves young adults. I mean, some of them are pretty young for adult humans, but that’s not why they’re in the category.

² I just now realized that her two middle initials, instead of being pronounced aff as I have always done in my internal monologue, could instead be pronounced A-F, because she is in fact Colleen As Fuck.

³ On opposite coasts of North America, DanteLuke Landherr-Shepherd and Ferocious Jon Sung just shuddered and don’t know why.

By now you’ve seen the news that Facebook (no link) has decided that the way to get in on Patreon’s corner of the market is to not do things better, but to do them decidedly worse. Like charge you up to 30% after fees bad and give your stuff away for free at their discretion bad. Oh, yeah, and we own your stuff even if you leave the service bad. That’s bad.

Despite their pronouncement that they’re going to have a “Patreon-killer”, Facebook isn’t going to have anything of the sort; absolutely everybody that’s talked about this thing that isn’t employed by Facebook is screaming about how it’s terrible, and they’re right. All that’s going to happen is that people already on Patreon are going to have a moment of reflection that things could be much worse¹.

The real shot at a Patreon-killer will be whatever the Andys come up with for Drip 2.0 for the simple reason that their offering will be from a public benefit corporation instead of a regular ol’ VC-funded corporation (Patreon) or the most rapacious, grasping, no-value-providing bag of identity thieves in history (Facebook), and so will not have a motivation of bleeding creators for all their worth. Going to call Facebook’s plans dead in the water.

Speaking of Drip 2.0 and public benefit corporations, Drip as it is presently constructed is part of Kickstarter, which is a public benefit corporation. Let’s talk about some recent Kickstarts and get the taste of that Facebook thing out of our mouths.

• It scares me a little how long I’ve been following the work of Matt Boyd and Ian McConville — Mac Hall wrapped more than a dozen years ago, and that was after six years of updates; Three Panel Soul picked up immediately thereafter and has been plowing along ever since, through art style changes, moves, job shifts, a marriage, a kid, and one all-time bit of viral genius². There’ve even been two print collections, and now there will be a third:
  

  For our third volume, we thought it would be good to have three times the number of comics as the first two volumes, up to a total of 300. It really fits the theme. It’s going to be our biggest volume yet, covering the comics published online from late October 2011 to February 2018.

  Dog philosophy, folks. It’s going to be in there. You’ve got 28 days to get in on the campaign, including a rather sweet three-book bundle.

• Know who knows how to use Kickstarter? C Spike Trotman, what with the seven figures raised over 20-odd projects and zero failures. Of late, she’s been bringing some work to the store without waiting for Kickstarts, especially as PDFs, but sometimes you decide to pick new directions because there’s a demand. Enter: How Do You Smoke A Weed?, which will be seeing print shortly:
  

  Twenty-six states in the U.S., Washington, D.C., and the entire nation of Canada have decriminalized or legalized marijuana use, and more are joining the policy shift every year! Dispensaries are popping up everywhere, and experienced users are openly rejoicing—but where does that leave the marijuana newbie, discouraged by years of “Just Say No” disinformation, but curious about what they’ve missed?

  This being an Iron Circus joint, funding started yesterday and reached goal the same day; there’s one simple stretch goal for a better cover. Massive overfunding will just mean more copies sold and more profit to ICC and creators Lin Visel and Joseph Bergin III (collectively, Owlin, and FYI that link contains mostly smut). There’s a fast turnaround on this one, less than two weeks total funding time, but the book will be in the store forever. Some of the sweet extras likely won’t be, so if you’re interested, act now.

• But Gary, I hear you cry, I don’t want to read! If that’s true, you maybe ought to find a different website, because we’re all about the words here, Sparky. But if you’re looking for something less booklike to back on the Kickers, Matt Inman and Elan Lee have come up with their latest mayhem-adjacent tabletop game, Throw Throw Burrito.

  Look, it’s Lee & Inman, there’s gonna be cute and funny cards, weird props, and a ruleset that emphasizes fun over all else. And this time, it’s got fake burritos that you chuck at other people. At an upper tier, it’s got giant fake burritos you chuck at other people and safety goggles. And, it being Lee & Inman, they are using Kickstarter pretty much as market research, and it’s going to be delivered on time. I’d bet they already have production contracts and specs agreed upon, have placed a preliminary run for each thing getting made, and will wait for the funding campaign to finish in 29 days solely so they can with confidence Yes, 50,000 more units of Item A, 100,000 of Item B, send those in the second container load.

  Oh, and stretch goals are (as is the Lee/Inman tradition) participatory, and shipping to the US (minus Puerto Rico & overseas territories) is free; the rest of the world will run you US$8 to US$60, depending on where you live and the size of the package you order. Some of them are ridiculously huge.

Spam of the day:

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Jumper cables? It’s jumper cables, isn’t it?

_______________
¹ Tellingly, not because of anything Patreon’s done to provide that relief.

² Which itself is going on five years old, holy crap.

The real power in Lucy Knisley’s books is somewhat contradictory.

They always make me feel slightly uncomfortable. I won’t call what she does oversharing because she’s less saying Here’s what I did today and more simply living her life in front of us, a page at a time, in a way that it turns out we were there all along, an omniscient third person observer. Whether it’s her life’s triumphs or tragedies, she lives it on the page, I observe, and — sometimes, just a bit — it feels like I’m intruding.

It’s not the case; in fact, it’s pretty much the complete opposite. The emotional charge of her stories is such that to watch that life with her and not be able to offer congratulations or consolation at whatever time in the past is on rewind? It aches. She grabs you by the brain and uploads those feelings straight into your amygdala because instead of intruding, she’s insisting on you experiencing it all along with her. That’s the deal you accept when you crack open the cover — Be ready to commit, her stories tell us, because you won’t be able to casually follow along. The good, the bad, you’re in for all of it.

And in Kid Gloves (out today from :01 Books, thanks to Morgan and everybody there for the review copy) there is plenty of it you’re going to be in for all of. I’m going to try to go light on the spoilers, but they’re there. The biggest spoiler of all is right on the first page — a photo of the child that Knisley refers to as Pal, followed immediately by the scene-setting: Four weeks ago, I had a baby. I want you to keep that fact in mind, because there are going to be times in the next 250 or so pages that you doubt everything about the scene — baby and mom both healthy and well is what we expect from a birth story, but it wasn’t always clear that was going to happen.

Because everything happened to Knisley and her husband, John — a previously unremarkable malformation of the uterus, painful and emotionally devastating miscarriages, friends and family having their own children at times of mourning, cruel and thoughtless interactions with those that should have been supportive, and an OB/GYN that I want to punch in his smug, dismissive face.

They say you forget all the pain of having a kid, a friend once told me when her first was about two months old, otherwise every child would be an only child. She followed up with, Not me! I took notes! He’s never touching me again!¹ There’s more pain than just that of birth here, and Knisley took her own notes — recreating every challenge, laying bare maybe the most fundamental truth about having kids: that it’s an act of profound optimism, looking at the state of the world, at the state of yourselves, to decide I’m going to have a child. Each setback, Lucy and John had to look at the risks and decide, Yes. We’re still doing this. These notes aren’t to talk themselves out of future attempts by reminding themselves of the pain — it’s to communicate to us the totality of the experience.

And that word — communicate — is the central thesis of Kid Gloves. The failures of communication that Knisley chronicles are the source of most of the difficulties in the story. Failure to communicate accurate information about reproductive health and mechanisms². Failure to communicate the fact that one in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage. Failure to communicate women’s stories. Failure to communicate about loss. Failure to communicate with your patient to understand their needs, or even the current state of their health³.

As a culture and society, failure to communicate honestly about all aspects of pregnancy and childbirth instead of wrapping it up in a neat bow and selling the experience on the cover of a glossy magazine in the supermarket checkout aisle.

The same de-romanticization that Knisley brought to travel, food, and marriage is in full force in Kid Gloves. Her stock in trade isn’t stories from her life, it isn’t the fancier and more official-sounding autobiography or memoir, it’s honesty. Honestly, parts of getting pregnant (not to mention avoiding getting pregnant, and everything else that goes along with sex, pleasure, and agency) suck. Parts are awesome. Childbirth? Same deal. Having a newborn? Absolutely the same.

Pal’s going on three years old now, and I’m sure future books will bring the same unvarnished look at raising up a child to be a decent person. Read this book — read all of Knisley’s books — because you want, more than anything, to feel that honest, lived-in truth. It won’t always be easy, but it will always be rewarding.

Spam of the day:

The Drone Is Available At a Discount Price

I ain’t clicking that assuredly malware-infested link, but I am desperately hoping that this is actually talking about bee-type drones. I would absolutely enjoy being on a spam mailing list intended for apiarists.

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¹ They have three kids now.

² Knisley notes that as a Planned Parenthood-trained peer educator in high school, she learned a great deal about dental dams, but not so much about how pregnancy works.

³ I am an EMT that regards pregnancy/childbirth emergencies as nightmare scenarios because there is so little that I can do and so much that can go so very wrong. In more than a dozen years of practice, I haven’t had any patient more than about six weeks pregnant and I am thoroughly relieved by that fact. If I never have a childbirth call, I will be perfectly happy. What I am saying is, I am not a person who you necessarily want to deal with your well-being vis-à-vis pregnancy.

And even I recognize the signs of pre-eclampsia, you stupid, smug dismissive OB/GYN. If we ever meet I will fucking drag your ass into the morgue where they take the women who die in childbirth from seizures and say this happened because you were too godsdamn arrogant to do your job.

Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way. I am a Jersey guy. I wasn’t born there¹ and I bounced around a bit before finding my place in the world at the tender age of three or so. I’ve been away to be educated, and there’s loads of stupid that infests the state, but it’s my place in the world; I’m pretty sure I couldn’t live elsewhere on a longterm basis.

But heck if the Cartoon Art Museum doesn’t make a strong case for the Bay Area sometimes. They’ve always got good stuff cooking.

• Want to brush up on your cartooning skills? Mark Badger will be teaching his Just Draw workshop in four Thursday evening installments at CAM in March; they’re intended for those with a bit of experience under the belts, so let’s say 16 and up. Tuition for the workshop is US$200 (US$175 for members), with RSVPs and payments taken at Guestlist.

  Each session starts at 7:00pm and runs until 9:00pm, on 7, 14, 21, and 28 March, at CAM (781 Beach Street, San Francisco). If you’re not sure about committing to the entire class, Badger’s offering a free preview on 27 February (that’s the day after tomorrow) at Mission: Comics & Art (2250 Mission Street, San Francisco) from 6:00pm to 6:40pm. Either way, bring your sketchbook and favorite drawing implements.

• From 1 March (that would be Friday) until 1 July, CAM’s Emerging Artist showcase will feature a selection of art from Maia Kobabe’s first book-length work, Gender Queer, due in May from Lion Forge. You might remember Kobabe’s contributions to The Nib, or from anthology contributions ranging from The Secret Loves Of Geeks, to FTL, Y’all³. If not, you’ve got the rest of the week to get caught up.
• Two weeks later, Brian Fies will see work from A Fire Story go on exhibition, recounting Fies’s experience with the 2017 Northern California wildfire season, in which Fies and his wife lost everything that didn’t fit into their car. The original webcomic is now a full graphic novel, and if you can’t make it to the CAM exhibition (which runs 15 March to 15 July), you can catch Fies on book tour, which will traverse the West Coast (including stops at the Charles Schulz Museum, which had its own close call with wildfire, and San Deigo Comic Con). A Fire Story releases next Tuesday, 5 March.

Spam of the day:

We overstocked and we want these new design Solar Chargers GONE! We have 223 of our crazy popular “Anytime Charge” Power Packs in stock and today we’re giving them away for free!

The thing in the picture has no discernible solar panels. Pass.

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¹ I was born in the southernmost (emotionally, if not geographically) of the southern states, the birthplace of American Sedition², South Carolina.

² Hat tip to the inestimable Charlie Pierce for that one.

³ The Senior Project, which is one of the stronger stories in the book, and I think tied with Evan Dahm’s Wayhome for strongest art.

The WordPress upgrade process was — uncharacteristically — a little funky. I’ll make it up to you with some extra-good content on Monday. Enjoy your weekend.

So much goin’ on over at the Twitters. Let’s dig in.

• I’ve been re-reading Lucy Knisley’s Kid Gloves (which releases on Tuesday next, and a review of which is forthcoming) and so I was primed for the announcement of the requisite book tour. Good news for those of you in Chicagoland, Brooklyn, DC, Boston, Nashvile, the Hudson Valley, and Athens, GA: you’ll get to see Knisley between Sunday 24 February and Friday 8 March, with later visits on 22 March, 19 April, and TCAF on 11/12 May.

  Bad news for me: the nearest she’ll be to me is Brooklyn on Tuesday (that’s the day of release, no less!) and I’ll be out of town for work in the other direction that day. Check the dates and times in the art and go see her.

• About ten days ago, we talked about the upcoming event about comics and medical education, and how little information was available at the time. A couple days later they made with the info, but I didn’t notice until today. But here’s the deets we didn’t have before:
  • The event is intended for librarians, health education and outreach professionals, and creators working in graphic medicine.
  • It’s a one-day event, 10 April, starting with registration at coffee at 8:30am and wrapping at 3:30 that afternoon.
  • There’s limited registration space, which can be reserved here.
  • Attendees will be encouraged to make comics during breaks and lunch.
  • Seriously, Cathy Leamy and Danteluke Landherr-Shepherd? Go.
• Gumroad, who have been an invaluable piece of the cartoonist’s infrastructure, have decided that if comics are a big part of your business, it makes sense to make more cartoonists in the future. Enter the Gumroad Creator’s Fund:
  

  We’re going to donate upwards of $50,000 (10% of our profits) to creators and creative projects over the course of 2019. Anyone–including you–can apply. When? Now!

  The application is pretty broad, and there’s not much in the way of the criteria they’re using to evaluate applications, but you know what? I don’t see Patreon doing this. Good for Gumroad.

• Finally: this starts heartwarming, veers into the goofball end of things almost immediately, and ends someplace terrible because Brad Guigar is simultaneously dreamy and horrible.

Spam of the day:

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The thermal conductivity of ceramic is, to quote my old material science professor, shitty, and titanium is too lightweight to hold any heat. Put ’em together and you’ve got the world’s crappiest fry pan.

Want to transform your cooking experience with a pan that is not only free of (booga, booga, scary!) “toxins”, but also supplies a vital nutrient into your diet? Get a godsdamned cast-iron pan, get it hot, throw in cold fat, and cook. It’ll cost you about twenty bucks if you avoid the fancy places, and it will last forever. Fuck outta here with your premium technology.

One of which I’ll be giving closer scrutiny, one of which I will view at a distance.

• Distance first: C Spike Trotman’s latest comic features MK Reed partnering up on words,pictures from Clive Hawken, colors from Maarta Laiho, and letters from Ed Dukeshire. It’s called Delver, it’s a five-issue limited series, and it’s a dungeon crawl story filled with the sorts of societal implications thinking that Spike’s known for, and the YA perspective that Reed’s known for:
  

  Delver is my answer to ‘Where are all these abandoned, treasure-laden dungeons coming from, anyway? And what happens when you unload all that loot in the tiny hamlet down the road?’

  Not a lot of dungeon crawls start out with the major threat being gentrification and that is a perspective that I just realized I have been sorely lacking in my genre fiction.

  It’s also on comiXology, which means I find myself of multiple minds about it. It’s all over their service, and various Amazon channels like Kindle. I don’t get comics that way, because I refuse to “buy” media that I do not in turn own.

  When it’s all done, it’ll be available on Amazon print-on-demand, which is fine in that I can get a physical thing that can’t be yanked back, but I’d have to see what the price point for the trade is versus per issue costs. Even then, I’m a big fan of my local comic shop, and getting stories from a de facto monopoly¹ that is bypassing them entirely? I’m deeply ambivalent.

  But dang if that description isn’t right up my alley:

  Temerity, our main character, is a teen girl stuck in the middle of sudden economic upheaval in her very small town, except that her town’s gold rush also involves giant monsters springing out of the ground. She has no idea how to help her family and neighbors with the man-made crisis above ground, and the adults around her aren’t any better at solving problems.

  Delver issue #1 releases today on comiXology, US$2.99, or free if you comiXology Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited, or Prime Reading.

• Closer scrutiny: one of the great things about webcomics is there’s always somebody doing work that is going to interest you that you just learned about. Today, for me, that would be IO Black, and I have absolutely no idea what their webcomic is about or if it’s any good. The work that I’m digging into is a survey on how you get readers, and it’s at the juicy intersection of there was a lot of thought put into this and enough responses to achieve statistical significance:
  

  (Thread) I recently ran a Twitter poll to see how people were finding new webcomics. Thanks to signal boosts, we got nearly 3,000 votes – and the results couldn’t be clearer:

  WORD OF MOUTH – 2118 (70.7%)
  COMICS PORTALS – 523 (17.5%)
  ONLINE ADS – 216 (7.2%)
  OTHER – 139 (4.6%)

  (If you’re wondering, these numbers include “Other” votes that were reassigned to their “proper” category based on the exact voter response. In the interests of transparency, you can find all of that raw data here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OG…)

  OH YEAH, THAT’S THE STUFF. I know that sounds sarcastic as hell, but I genuinely love this kind of data.

  Black goes on in that thread to talk about general lessons to take away, with a deeper dig into the specific topic of discoverability via #hastags. There’s a second thread about what makes for a good #hashtag, and the beginnings of trying to devise one that makes sense for the kind of community interactions that will give visibility and prompt others to pay attention to your work and talk about it.

  My advice? Do what I’m going to be doing in free time for the next couple of days: dig into the poll data, and keep an eye on what Black’s saying. Right now, their twitterfeed is going to be the centerpoint of this discussion.

Spam of the day:

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I’m not sure if you’re asking if I was singing, or if I got singed by something hot, but I don’t believe I’ll click on your link, which appears to send a further spam mail to about 11 different addresses in the UK.

_______________
¹ One that I try to have as little to do with as possible, given that every thing they sell at cheaper prices is based on the immiseration of their workers and predicated on the harvesting of data from me for sale elsewhere. Oh, and with the added benefit of undercutting and destroying a wide range of merchants who can’t compete if only because they are hobbled by old-fashioned things like a workforce that gets bathroom breaks and minimum wage. It has been, relatively speaking, easy for me to avoid doing business with Wal-Mart over how they treat their employees; it’s damn near impossible to keep track of what’s Amazon and what isn’t.

Go on, guess. Congrats to Danielle Corsetto, Monica Gallaher, and Mae S Keller of the sixtynineaversary over at Boo! It’s Sex.

And while I’m here, did you see the notice from Tony Millionaire? It’s been a bit more than two years since he announced the end of Maakies, but all things (including ends) come to an endeventually:

MAAKIES DRINKY CROW! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

MAAKIES REDUX! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

MAAKIES! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

DRINKY CROW! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, till then I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

DRINKY WEEKLY! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

MAAKIES REDUX! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

Drinky Crow Weekly! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

My weekly strip! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

Drinky Crow weekly! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

That’s a tweet roughly every half hour for the past five hours (as I write this), all of which are accompanied by Millionaire’s pet portraits, which are uncreedably¹ detailed and beautiful. Click ’em all and check out the corgis! Or look at his commission gallery, which is what that link in each tweet leads to.

Details about when in March and what platforms are a bit thin at the moment, but does it matter? Maakies is coming back, we’ll get more Drinky Crow, and I say that’s worth a celebratory dook dook dook from all concerned.

Spam of the day:

Long Edgar: All the end, I thought, and suddenly fate gave me a chance ….

I initially thought this was more boner pill spam, but it appears to be a guaranteed wealth system spam instead. Sorry that you aren’t getting any, Long Edgar!

_______________
¹ RIP Frank Zappa and Ike Willis.

Since we spoke last week, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival has announced a slew of new guests, and I’ve gone through the exhibitor’s list to see who-all is gonna be there. Strap in, there’s a lot to see.

On the Featured International Guest list, TCAF have announced Brazilian twin superstars Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon, Daria Bogdanska, Alexandre Clerisse, Aimee de Jongh, Keiron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Nora Krug, and Jamie McKelvie. The Featured Kids Guests are yet to be announced (apart from the previously-announced Lucy Knisley).

Exhibitors on the floors of the TRC will include Boum, Tony Cliff, Danielle Corsetto, Evan Dahm, Blue Delliquanti, Megan Rose Gedris, Maddi Gonzalez, Meredith Gran, Mike Holmes, Kat Leyh, Sam Logan, Mike Maihack, Phil McAndrew, Rosemary Mosco, Shan Murphy, Maki Naro, Ryan North, Sarah Winifred Searle, Ben Sears, Jason Viola, EK Weaver, Alison Wilgus, David Willis, Tory Woollcott, Sophie Yanow, and the terminally-named Jim Zub¹. The list is being added to, and we’ll let you know of who else we notice from time to time.

And you’ll probably find more people you like by checking out the publishers who’ll be on hand, including Cloudscape Comics, Creators For Creators², :01 Books, Iron Circus Comics, Koyama Press, The Nib, Oni Press, Retrofit Comics, and Shortbox³. As we get word of what creators will be with publishers, we’ll let you know.

As a reminder, TCAF will take place Saturday & Sunday, 11 & 12 May, from 9:00am (Saturday)/10:00am (Sunday) until 5:00pm, at the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street. Attendance is free to all events, but some Junji Ito events will require tickets (details TBA).

Spam of the day:

12,000 “Perfect” Shed Plans only for you

While I do have a moustache that, all modesty aside, is pretty impressive, I am neither Ron Swanson nor Nick Offerman. I have no use for your shed plans.

_______________
¹ Rumo[u]rs that Chip Zdarsky will sneak into TCAF to do violence upon Mr Zub so that he may be the last-named comics artist are unconfirmed at press time.

² Not really a publisher, but they’ll be there and that’s cool.

³ Ditto.

Things that you should dig into and just roll around in for a while, because they’re wonderful.

• Firstly, the queen of Weird Shit Just Happens Around Her, Ursula Vernon, has an adventure in the near future. One may recall that four years back, she was part of a coterie — a cohort, even — of artists that made their way to southern Africa and memorialized their safari in an art book. Welp, she (and they) are at it again, heading to Himalayan end of China, again to report on their sojourn in book form. Back ’em now so that you can see the reports of weirdness that will surely follow.
• Secondly, speaking of China, it’s again the Year Of The Pig. And speaking of pigs (and also Kickstarted books), KC Green did a story about a pig in the Tim’rous Beastie anthology from Iron Circus. That story, A Pig Being Lowered Into Hell In A Bucket, is a deep rumination on the nature of sin and redemption, and what place in the afterlife one may expect, deserve, or demand. It’s a quiet (with occasional yelling) masterpiece, one that deals in capital-T Truths. And because Green is a stellar fellow, you get to read it because he put the whole damn thing online, where a bunch of scrolling suits perfectly the very vertical nature of the story. Go. Read. Strongly consider giving him some money because his work is far more than Dickbutt and This Is Fine, and chances are you’ve only seen the merest fraction of it.
• Thirdly, a new graphic novel by Ananth Hirsh and Tess Stone (who did the really excellent BUZZ! ’bout five years back), coming in 2022 from Random House Graphic. I’m really looking forward to this, if only because Hirsh’s writing is tighter, and Stone’s art is cleaner and stronger, than 2015, and given we won’t see this one for another three and a half years, they’ll both be even better by then. Also, because holy damn is Gina Gagliano locking down talent. The industry press had been full of announcements about acquisitions for release in 2020, but now we’re talking late 2022; by mid-decade, she’ll have pulled RHG into position as a fully equal player to Scholastic and :01 Books — original graphic novels will be neatly divided into those three companies, and everybody else.
• Lastly, just block out a chunk of time this weekend to obsessively click the button here. The complete unpredictability of random Achewood panels has long been appreciated, but to marry that random wisdom with the divinatory power of the tarot? Somebody tell Onstad he can have my money if he prints up an Achewood tarot deck; the chief difficulty would be reducing the thousands of richly deserving candidates to the 78 cards in a standard deck. Heck, I’m saying right now the entire entire Swords suit should be Ramses Luther Smuckles, and there’s half the major arcana that could be represented by Cartilage Head.

  Needless to say, I don’t actually believe in any form of fortune telling, but that three-card collection in the image up top? Almost enough to make me reassess that position.

Spam of the day:

Ultrawatch Z: The World’s Strongest Tactical SmartWatch

Congratulations. I never wanted a smart watch, and now that you’ve gone and gotten tactical bro shit all over it, I want one even less. I swear, I can already hear the tight-throated narration that will be used in your eventual commercial.