On what is shaping up to be a challenging day¹, there’s nothing like the small ray of sunshine that is an unanticipated post from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. Let hear what’s happening on the European side of the Atlantic.

Guess who’s got two thumbs and forgot his keyboard at home last week?

• Quai des Bulles announced they would not hold the festival this year; I can only commend them not only for a decision that was tough to make, but also for giving all stakeholders a full 4 months heads up.

  That leads me to my own announcement: I will not be making any preparations to go to Angoulême in January 2021. Given the characteristics of this epidemic, which has been shown to progress best in closed spaces — you can’t exactly hold a trade show around paper without protecting it against moisture, not in most of France — where people speak or shout a lot, given that summoning thousands of people from the whole French-speaking world (and beyond!) would be an epidemiological management nightmare even if the setting was favorable, and given that I can’t see any validated vaccine production, distribution, and deliverance having been scaled enough to reach herd immunity by that time, might as well declare the whole year starting from March 15th, at least, as a loss for such activities.

  Ouest-France, however, reassures us they will award their prize, to be announced when Quai des Bulles should have taken place.

• Also via Ouest-France (in their print edition), I learned of Nicoby’s latest crowdfunding project, titled C’est la guerre (a reference to how Emmanuel Macron framed the lockdown announcement).

  The contents, his lockdown autobio journal, are interesting, but also interesting is how a publisher is managing the project. We have seen that last year with with tiny and Tall’s campaign, managed by publisher Lapin, and it seems to be gaining traction among indie publishers. We can see for instance the publisher taking advantage of the campaign for some (reasonable) cross-promotion.

  Also interesting is the framing for the campaign: it is presented as an end-run around the glut in bookshop releases that is already occurring as books that should have been released during the lockdown are rescheduled, end-run itself justified by the timeliness of the content. It seems like more and more actors are trying to free themselves from the constraints of fitting in the system of wide bookshop distribution and going direct instead.

• Finally, Maliki’s latest campaign ended with 12,608 copies (10,532 for book 3 proper), or 16647 books_ecc, breaking their own previous crowdfunding record. Never bet against Team Maliki.

As always, Fleen thanks FSFCPL for his reportage from the lands of BD².

Spam of the day:

This new self-defense tool looks innocent… but it will drop a ripped 260-lb. thug in 2 seconds or less and turn him into a whimpering pile.

Big deal. Randy Milholland’s version of Olive Oyl in his Popeye’s Cartoon Club offerings (which, sadly, may be seeing their last update today — write to King Features Syndicate and tell them we want more Uncle Randy strips!) can lay a much bigger brute out by making them feel unloved and alone. Top that, spammers!

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¹ Without going into it too much, a member of my family who’s been declining for years and has been in hospice for the past week is about to die. I will most likely have more to say later.

² That’s bandes dessinées.

Pervs.