One good, one bad today.

• Let’s start with the good news! Jeff Smith has been a webcomicker since before there were webcomics; when BONE started, indie self-publishing basically was webcomics, ging direct from creator to audience, without editorial or corporate intermediation. For a while in the past decade, he was a webcomicker literally, with a little project called Tüki: Save The Humans, which updated a couple times a week at his website, and was collected into a couple of floppy comic reprints. It won an award along the way that I was of two minds about, but then again — so was Smith.

  But Smith’s been prone to repetitive-stress injuries, and he was instrumental in the establishment and execution of CXC, which is more than a half-decade of work now, and Tüki’s planned hiatuses stretched longer and longer. He’s just a draw-an-issue kind of guy, not draw-three-pages-a-week.

  Or at least he was — from an announcement today:

  And now this year, the 30th anniversary of BONE #1, I’m going to announce my newest self-published project: Tüki: Fight For Fire [transcribed from video]

  No more webcomickin’, no more single-issue-at-a-timin’, Smith’s done Tüki as a full-length graphic novel that is all ready to go for a July release (which would have been a nice SDCC debut, had there been an SDCC), the actual 30th anniversary month. But because he and publisher/wife/general boss of a person Vijaya Iyer absorbed lessons about the webcomics model and Kickstarter and all of it nearly a decade ago, Smith’s doing something new: T:FFF will be Kickstarted. The campaign goes up on 4 May (mark your calendars), and I imagine we’ll get more details on the book between now and then.

• A’course, in a good news/bad news situation, there’s always got to be bad news, and hooooboy is this one bad:
  

  COVID-19 vaccine site in Northern California closing for two days to host anime event

  What.

  One Facebook commenter suggested SacAnime labeled its event a “swap meet” rather than the more typical “convention” to circumvent the state’s COVID-19 restrictions. Under the state health department’s reopening framework, convention center events are supposed to remain closed in all counties — but swap meets can proceed at up to 50% of normal capacity in counties classified in the red tier of COVID-19 activity, as Placer is.

  WHAT.

  You know what? Let’s take the most generous possible interpretation and pretend this isn’t causing a disruption to vaccinations. It’s a hell of a stretch, but let’s pretend. Why in the everloving godsdamned fuck are you holding a mass-attendance event at a time when we’re on the verge of a third — hell, maybe fourth — wave of COVID and we’re in a godsdamned race between vaccination and variants? Why are you holding a for-damn-sure superspreader event?

  I saw on Twitter a comment that anybody that wants to go to a con this year should be allowed to, but in doing so they give up the right to attend any for the next year, so that those of us who have prioritized the public good over but I wanna don’t have to put up with them once it’s safe to be in groups again. I think that’s wrong.

  I think it should be three years.

  When this pandemic is over, if you were somebody that just had to have your animes at the expense of everybody else’s safety — or you protested masks because freedom, or you required indoor dining — do yourself a favor and never admit that around me. I’ve had way too many patients that were way too harmed over the past year, it’s your fucking fault, and I will lay upside your head with a Halligan bar and not feel even a little bad about it.

Spam of the day:

Dos and dont’s for a healthy liver

Even more than the fact you’re about to try to steal from me based on bullshit fake science, I’m am offended by your apostrophe use. What the hell are you even trying to do? Fix that shit, will ya?