Have I mentioned how very, very much I hate the fact that the comic book industry allows itself one (1) distributor, and they suck in every conceivable way there is to suck? Trick question, as I’ve been on about Diamond more times than I can count, and they continue to suck, particularly in holding onto books for weeks after they’re supposed to be out, which is why I’m only now getting around to The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon Garrity (Narbonic, Skin Horse, etc) on words and Christopher Baldwin (Little Dee, Spacetrawler, etc) on pictures.

If you have read this page to any appreciable degree, you already know what I’m going to say just based on those two names. For everybody else, read on and spoilers ahoy.

Here’s what I love about Garrity (Tiki Queen of the Greater Bay Area and Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities): as good as she is drawing her own stuff or with a writer, I think she’s even better as a pure writer of comics. She has a knack of writing to the strengths of her collaborators, and with Baldwin on board, that means deliciously over the top facial expressions and physical overreactions.

Here’s what I love about Baldwin: no matter how silly or serious the premise, he knows how to compose a panel for maximum effect. Need a moment’s pause to build up the joke? Or perhaps to make the incipient horror land three millimeters closer to the exact center of your brain? He’s there. Need a reaction panel or an environment-establishing shot that’s practically a splash page? Nobody better.

So take a topic that’s rich with visual possibility and which rewards over-the-top genre savvy like whoa, and you’ve got a winner. The genre, in this case, is Gothic Romance novels. Brooding manor lords, dank tarns, empty halls echoing footsteps and secrets, taciturn housekeepers, storms that steal your breath and stop your heart? Haley knows, loves, lives, and breathes them all. It’s all she wants, to be swept up into a grand narrative that involves both heights and wuthering.

She, uh forgot about the lack of indoor plumbing. And how the feckless youngest brother would, in real circumstances, get everybody killed.

All of that is furthest from her mind, though, when she happens to see what appears to be a stranger drowning in the river, and finds herself pulled through the crack between the worlds that she didn’t know to look for. Turns out our universes, plural, are kept apart by kludges and pert-near indentured labor, and these jury-rigged maintenance microworlds have themes. And our world is about to be crashed into and destroyed by a far worse one if she can’t get the gears of reality working again.

Gears which are found in a pocket dimension filled with every cliche, every trope, every element of Gothic Romance. She’d be having the time of her life if everything weren’t trying to kill her (and, by extension, everybody back here on Earth). Fortunately, she knows how to make the rules of gothic romance work for her (declaring at one point she’s not a maiden — a weak, helpless, an agencyless plot point — but a heroine). She knows the rules of how the stories work¹, and she’s going to save everybody at Willowweep Manor and multiple worlds with that knowledge.

She’s also going to watch a taciturn housekeeper punch a bear in the face because it’s Garrity writing. And it’s so rad for us to watch happen because it’s Baldwin drawing.

The story kicks into gear almost immediately, and careens swiftly from near-disaster to damn near-disaster with barely a pause. The threat is consistent within the rules of the story, the action scenes clean and easy to follow, and the gags land lightly on tip-toe, delivering their laugh-chuckles with precisely the right amount of gravity.

Get The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor (available at book and comic stores everywhere, hopefully) for the teen-and-up in your life, but especially for those that have fallen into a Gothic Romance hole and needs to be reminded that stuffy, over-serious stories can be silly, too.

Spam of the day:

Animations In 3 Clicks With The World’s Easiest Full-Auto Video Animation Software!

See, I know animators, and what you’re describing is not something that will automatically create animation because those don’t exist. You’re describing something that produces limited motion like unto the old Under Construction motion images on early webpages, and you intend for them to drive marketing on this site.

For these and surely myriad other crimes, you are my nemesis.

_______________
¹ For example, the villain, in his moment of triumph, must ascend to the highest point available, the better to gloat on the precipice.

If you’ve spent even a minute on this page, you know that it’s the considered opinion of We at Fleen that the best work in [web]comics is being done by women. We’ve discussed this many times, and need not be rehashed here; if you’re looking for logic, start here and work your way through the next … gosh, I dunno, half a million words or so¹ and you’ll find plenty of my rationale. Let’s look at some of that work now.

• Hey, remember back in April when Meredith Gran did us a solid and gave us a coda² to Octopus Pie that we didn’t know that we needed and hoo boy did we need it? Good times. And remember when she offered up a limited edition print run of the story that made her store fall over? Also good times.

  I got my copy this week. It’s so good. The colors (cover by Sloane Leong, interiors by Valerie Halla) popI don’t know if Gran will ever do another print run, but you can read the black and white version here for, I’d imagine, the next forever. Octopus Pie remains one of the few works that just kept getting better, and you should read all of it, like, right now.

• Hope Larson, due to circumstance and timing, is somebody I’ve not seen in person in way too long, which is a shame as I love her work. It’s varied, it’s smart, it always finds something new to say, and we always have fun when we hang out. I’ve been especially taken with her comics work since she partnered up with Rebecca Mock³ for the Four Points series, Compass South and Knife’s Edge some years back.

  So it’s been with great interest that I’ve been following news of the project that’s taken up much of the past couple of years for them — a story of the heartland, with a look that’s equal parts Miyazaki and BONE, and a story that’s Wizard Of Oz if all the magic stayed in Kansas. Pandemic pushed everything back, but now we’ve got the announcement of Salt Magic:

  Hey y’all! Salt Magic by me and @rebeccamock is available for preorder!!!!!!! Out October 2021. https://indiebound.org/book/9780823450503

  Salt Magic releases on 12 October, and will be available at bookstores everywhere. I’m giving this a must-buy recommendation sight unseen; Larson and Mock are each individually that good, but together they’re even better.

Spam of the day:

Bin card creation software to create a Canva Pro account 1 month

I was going to say that I know what those words mean but not in that combination, and you know what? I’m not sure I know what all those words are supposed to mean individually.

_______________
¹ Or approximately one third of a Homestuck.

² And unlike that famous monstrosity of an epilogue (Marigold knew the score), this one was true to the characters and story and the author hasn’t turned into a big ol’ TERF.

³ With whom I bunked during my first year of Comics Camp, and to whom I owe a life debt.

Sometimes, what you want to talk about just drops in your lap. Hooray for late-summer Kickstarts.

• Say what you will about Zach and Kelly Weinersmith, but they get it. They get their audience and know exactly what they are like¹ and are more than ready to dish it up to them. The academia-themed boardgame, Every Else Thinks This Game Is Awesome, has blown through its Kickstarter funding goal in a about four and a half hours (presently it’s sitting at 180% of goal), and will likely be hitting the stratospheric levels associated with a Weinersmith joint, including globs of stretch goals that make the final product awesomer.

  Me, I decided to back as soon as I saw the grad students were represented by interchangeable pawns with no control over their own destiny. All of the rewards where you got to influence or appear in the game are gone, but 943 people (as of this writing) can grab the reward level where a special card signed by the Weinersmiths² is included in the game. This one looks fun, it’s already funded, it’s basically zero risk given prior Weinersmith Kickstarts, so give it a look, yeah? Oh, and check out the video on the campaign page, it features a great variation on the soundtrack record scratch.

• Also up for Kicks and Starts, the 30th — you read that right, three-zero — campaign from Iron Circus, the latest iteration of their ongoing fairy tales from around the world series, Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales: North America. Notably, the stories are told by Indigenous creators, which really should be a given but isn’t yet, so good on Spike and everybody at IC. Then again, Alina Pete has been part of the IC family forever, and is herself a member of the Cree nation, so keeping the stories in the hands of the people they originated with was probably more of a given than at any other publisher.

  Usual Iron Circus deal is in effect: every US$5000 over goal raised results in a US$5/page increase in pay to the creators; as of this writing (a day into the 18 day funding period), creators are making an extra US$40/page, and about to hit US$45. According to the FFF mk2, we’re headed for US$155K +/- 30K in funding; hitting the low end of that range would result in a US$105/page bonus, in an industry where mid-major publishers may pay less than that total per page. We’re more than a full day away from being able to calculate the McDonald Ratio, but it would come to at least US$185K, based on what’s been raised in the first two days³.

Spam of the day:

Tool to read messages from friends on FACEBOOK

That would be FACEBOOK. The purpose of Facebook is to read messages from friends on Facebook.

_______________
¹ Damn you, Sports & Leisure category, damn you to hell!

² And featuring facts about both weiners and smiths.

³ Remember, Kel McDonald’s rule of thumb is the money raised in the first three days of the campaign is approximately one third of the eventual total.

Mea culpa, y’all. The thing that is consuming my time is … hopefully limited in duration. I’d much rather be here for real, and not banging out sporadic quick updates but it’s what I can do for now.

Speaking of, good news for people that follow webcomics:

• Ryan North has announced a new book! He’s describing as the spiritual successor to How To Invent Everything, which is sounding good already. Check it:
  

  HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain has:
  [splode emoj] real-life comic book schemes
  [test tube emoji] with actual science and technology
  [Earth emoji] across 9 viable world domination plots

  It drops Mar 15 2022: preorder now!
  https://bit.ly/RyanNorthBooks

  In a just world, I would have been discussing this work in progress with North at Comics Camp for the past two Aprils, but it is not a just world and I am learning of it the same as you. Those who know North also know there’s isn’t a malicious bone in his body and he is not actually a villain of any kind such as never-captured hijacker DB Cooper, so know that this book is entirely the product of his fertile imagination and not actually any kind of evil plot that you should be worried about. And the illustrations by everybody’s pal, Carly Monardo, should not be interpreted as giving away secret hints as to his nefarious plans. Not even a little.

• The National Cartoonists Society has announced their division awards for webcomics (long and short form), and there’s some familiar names there. As a reminder, I’m part of the committee that produces a voting ballot for the NCS, but the process is such that even I didn’t know the nominees until the public announcement¹, which you can read for yourself.

  The nominees for Online Comic — Long Form are Tom Parkinson-Morgan for Kill Six Billion Demons, Ariel Ries for Witchy, and Tom Siddell for Gunnerkrigg Court.

  The nominees for Online Comic – -Short Form are Mia Nie for Lone Shadow, Rosemary Mosco for Bird And Moon, and Nick Seluck for Heart And Brain.

  There’s not a weak nominee in the bunch and though I may have preferences, I’ll never tell. Fleen wishes good luck to all the nominees, and watch for the winners to be named at the (virtual) 75th Reuben Awards, 15 and 16 October, at NCSFest.com

Spam of the day:

Magic Pants

Unless you are talking about Icelandic necropants, not interested.

_______________
¹ Which I gotta get somebody over there to tell me when they go up because I could have been talking about this weeks ago.

It’s Holemas, everybody, the most Ryan Northest day of the year, when we commemorate that time he got stuck in a hole so bad that it made the international news¹. The traditional Holemas Eve celebration calls for donuts (which have holes), generous slices of Swiss cheese (because holes) perched atop toasts of whole grain bread (which … aw, you get it), and plenty of beer, champagne, soda, or other carbonated beverages — because what are bubbles but mobile holes in a liquid medium?

Nothing. They’re nothing. Which is sort of what a hole is too, if you think about it.

Today is the sixth anniversary of North getting stuck in the hole; I’m not sure if that makes it the fifth or sixth Holemas, and I fear that in the future doctrinal arguments will call a schism among the faithful. Perhaps North can settle it for us and thus prevent bloodshed.

In the meantime, let us all celebrate the descent of North (and Chompsky) into the stygian depths of a hole, and the triumphant rise of North (and Chompsky) back the world above, the better to redeem us all. Don’t look at me that way; actual religions have been founded on stupider premises than a very funny, cool, tall, smart, handsome Canadian guy (and Chompsky) got stuck in a skate park bowl on a drizzly day until Twitter crowdsourced a text-adventure game solution. I for one welcome North’s lessons, that we may all find out way out of our respective holes, be they metaphorical or actual, Chompsky bless.

Spam of the day:
Can you believe that not one spam today mentions holes²? Disappointing.

_______________
¹ I have seen a self-penned biography of North that includes that line. It will never fail to delight me.

² Probably some of the porn spams do, but they’re actually giving me a break for the past week or so.

And you know what? That’s probably for the best. I want to see and be up in the faces of and hug the shit out of all my comics friends¹ but I am entirely cool on the idea of cramming into a sea of humanity to be able to do it. It’s going to take a while to get to the point where I’d want to be in any mass gathering, and that’s not taking into account the fact that we, as a society, have apparently decided to surrender to a godsdamned plague that we were beginning to control because the smallest actions to protect ourselves and others are too much to expect from a freedom-loving people.

I hate those people. They have been trying to get me killed for the past year and a half. I have to treat them when they call 911 and I dearly wish they had decided that the way to show us all that COVID was fake would be to tattoo DNR and I REFUSE ALL TREATMENT on their foreheads.

Where was I? Oh yes, conventions.

So late summer is one of the cooler smallish conventions on the yearly calendar, and although they’re held in New York City, which is requiring proof of vaccination for indoor activities, they’ve decided the responsible thing to do is to punt again this year² and stay virtual. I speak, naturally, of Flame Con, which focuses on queer comics, creators, and readers. Flame Con will take place this weekend, Saturday, 21 August to Sunday, 22 August, from noon to 5:00pm EDT.

As editor extraordinaire (and occasional official Voice Of Popeye) Tea Fougner reminds us, programming is now publicly available:

We’ve got a great lineup of panels on activism and fan involvement in activism, some fun podcasts and performances, screenings of queer entertainment, awesome conversations about gaming communities, and panels from people creating queer content in the comics and SFF world!

Also noting that while virtual FC is free to visit, you can buy tickets to get stuff while simultaneously keeping Flame Con financially viable to conduct in person next year. Zoom backgrounds, stickers, pins, show badges, and more are up for grabs. If you’ve been to FC in the past or want to go in the future, now’s the time to give them a little love.

And for the sake of whatever you find holy, get the damn shot.

Spam of the day:

Our Medical-Grade Toenail Clippers is the safest and especially recommended for those with troubles with winding nails, hard nails, two nails, nail cracks, deep nails, thickened nails etc..

What.

_______________
¹ Who are smart, wonderful people and definitely vaccinated.

² Quoting from the homepage:

While some states are beginning to reopen and expanding public capacities, this does not change the fact that COVID-19 is still a part of our lives. Flame Con has always aimed to be an inclusive and safe space for all. We wouldn’t be living up to that commitment, if we did not carefully consider how the pandemic has impacted our community — especially the most marginalized amongst us. Our first priority is ensuring your safety and well being.

So, we look forward to seeing you online this summer and in-person at Flame Con in August 2022!

They are absolutely correct.

As was mentioned previously, the stuff that is taking up some brain cycles continues. It’s been light posting of and it’s not done yet. Fortunately, it is the depths of summer when very little new is going on.

But that is not to say that nothing is going on, and we have some quick hits from some familiar names.

• Item! Flash sale over at Iron Circus. In honor of Friday the 13th, spooky books are 30% off until midnight CDT today. Stock up while you can.
• Item! It’s been a quiet time for new work from Howard Tayler since Shlock Mercenary ended its 20+ year run, unsurprisingly. But he’s always been more than just a comics guy, and one of those other areas is to the fore presently. Tayler is Kickstarting a new edition of XDM: X-treme Dungeon Mastery, with words by Tracy & Curtis Hickman, illustrations by Tayler, and cover color/additional interior illos by Jim Zub.

  It’s not a new printing, it’s a new, reworked edition, and it’s available until the campaign runs out¹ in four weeks. Three days in, it’s about 95% of the way to a generous US$50K goal, and the FFF mk2 says it’ll end somewhere around US$130K – US$195K. Maybe. The Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II is pretty good with [web]comics projects, less good with others, particularly games related. We’ll see.

• Speaking of Jim Zub (we were, he’s right there two ‘grafs back), he sent around an email pointing out that he’s still sharing his knowledge, and giving even more advice at his Patreon which he is considering renaming to … Zubstack.

  James J Zub, I want you to go sit by yourself quietly and think about what you’ve done. We will not even discuss how you ask visitors to your YouTube channel to watch, like and Zubscribe. Bad Zub, bad. No prize.

  In all seriousness, Zub’s got the proportional drive and smarts of a comics-writing spider² and if you’re making comics, you should be following his voluminous advice closely.

Okay, let’s his the weekend. Hopefully things will be less like they are on Monday.

Spam of the day:

Just a heads-up that I believe the word “tate” is spelled wrong on your website. I had a couple of errors on my site before I started using a service to monitor for them.

Ignoring the fact that tate is not a word, you are correct in that is not spelled correctly. It should have been taint, as in you damn spammers can snort my. Taint, that is.

_______________
¹ And, presumably, some day at conventions if we ever get those again because people will not fucking get vaccinated or wear masks and I’m starting to have to take in COVID patients again and godsdamn are we stupid as a society.

Not that I am bitter.

² Just work with me, okay?

Hey, remember this? Yeah, it was a bit more than I’d anticipated. The fix wound up over-aggressively discarding emails and some stuff that should have come to me was swept up with the flood of spam and destroyed. Good news is the spam flood is now under control, and testing shows that the email address works again.

The bad news is I’m not sure how much I missed in there. I figured out today from clues elsewhere that Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh have launched a new Kickstart for a new “Leeds-sized” (that would be 9″ x 11.5″, which is a good deal larger than the trim size of almost anything else you’re getting) edition of the most recently completed Barbarous chapter.

Readers of this page will recall that Barbarous is great, that Chapter 5 is where the story really kicked in with a bunch of threads¹ coming together to create a very compelling whole. And now that Barbarous is back with the start of Season 2/Chapter 6, this is the perfect time to get the last one into print.

As of this writing, Ananth & Yuko are sitting a few bucks under US$25K (of a US$18K goal), about a day into the four week campaign; they’re actually higher on backers and total amount today over yesterday. The FFF mk2 says they’re on track for US$64K to US$96K which is entirely typical for their projects.

Even better, with Chapter 5 marking the end of the first story arc of Barbarous, Yuko & Ananth are offering the previous four print collections and a slipcover to put ’em in which would be really, really pretty on your shelf. They’re also offering a limited number of original pages (half of them are gone, get on that if you want ’em) at the ridiculously low price of US$250 for Chapter 5 + extras, or US$310 for the entire Season 1 (uh, those are gone). These are valuing a Yuko Ota original page at less than US$200, which is frankly ludicrous. Got them money? Jump on that.

One quick note — the delivery time on this campaign is approximately a year from now, what with printing schedules being thrown into chaos by the once and future pandemic, and with Ananth & Yuko having their business affairs run by George, I would imagine this date was chosen to be very, very conservative; recall that George has a track record of delivering backer rewards sometimes months early.

Even so, that’s far enough in the future that it’s impossible to predict what shipping costs will be like, so the campaign is not charging shipping at this time. You’ll pay that when it’s time to ship, so keep in mind that sometime in 2022 you’ll have to cough up for that.

Okay, that’s it. Webcomics pretty much don’t get better than whatever Yuko & Ananth are teamed up on. Get in on this now, or wait until conventions come back and maybe get a copy then. You’re better off getting now.

Spam of the day:

This year turned out to be very difficult. But we have optimized and reduced the cost of our products! It is almost impossible to find prices lower than ours, the sale is at the cost price level. Watch and be surprised by our super low prices

Your obvious scam might actually be slightly more plausible if you actually mentioned what your alleged products are.

_______________
¹ If you’re a Barbarous reader, I’m so sorry. If not, trust me, that was hilarious/groanworthy.

This book review is a bit different than most that we at Fleen run, and so I’m going to do something I pretty much never do — I’m going to tell you that we are pretty much entirely spoiler free. There’s less spoilage here than you’d get reading the blurbs in the book flaps.

Now that’s out of the way, I want to start out here by saying that if you haven’t listened to the Maximum Fun podcast Bubble, you should do that. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s got a lot to say about unfettered capitalism and the gig economy, the voice acting is great (particularly Tavi Gevinson’s narration), and MaxFun are the audio equivalent of webcomics — they even do their merch via TopatoCo.

That said, if you listen to Bubble and then give a read to the graphic novel Bubble (story by Jordan Morris — creator of the podcast — and Sarah Morgan, with Tony Cliff on art and adaptation, and Natalie Riess providing colors), you’re not going to think it’s the same story. There’s so much missing! Characters, subplots, even the famed Laser Dong¹. It’s so very different.

And that’s okay.

Because this isn’t Bubble the podcast, it’s Bubble the graphic novel, and some things won’t fit with the page count that has to be worked with, and some things won’t work in another medium. There’s a reason why Cliff isn’t credited just for art, but for adapting one kind of story into another kind.

We don’t have tolerance for adaptation, collectively, a lot of the time. There’s a reason why I maintain that the only good Harry Potter movie is #3, because they gave it to a director with a personal vision and style and let him do a movie that was not just a straight recitation of the book. Those first two movies? You could practically hear the studio execs screaming at Chris Columbus to make the movies exactly like the books, don’t screw this up, there are billions at stake here, give the kids what they want. And he did, and they were okay, but only okay. Literalism in adaptation is creative death.

Bubble (comic form) works as a graphic novel because it was designed to be one, not a transliteration of a podcast. It’s different, and either version of the story may be your favorite, and either version may seem to be lacking in comparison. That’s okay, too, because the version you prefer is still there, waiting for you to go back to it at your leisure².

And that’s what’s key here — Morris and Morgan have brought a story that if you aren’t familiar with the podcast version, stands on its own with no problems. Cliff has constructed terrific character designs, and his environments³ and action scenes are easily the equal of anything from his Delilah Dirk series. Riess brings an aggressive normality to the color palette of Fairhaven, then kicks it into otherworldly colors during fights and time in the monster-infested Brush.

Anybody looking for an older-teens-and-up romp should pick up Bubble, but as one annoyed looking father in the story says when told that his gig workers had a pretty fun conversation about cum, Well, that’s inappropriate. We have kids. That’s actually pretty typical of the tone, so you can calibrate the ages of who you want to give the book to from that exchange.

Spam of the day:

A memory storage solution is increasingly necessary for our devices, and PhotoSave gives us everything we need. This memory pen allows us to store files from any device.

You are describing a thumb drive. You can get them at the checkout lane in the supermarket.

_______________
¹ It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it was a key enough part of the story that MaxFun made a pin.

² Alan Moore, once asked if he was upset about a movie version ruining of one of his stories pointed to the bookshelf and remarked that the story was still there.

³ Including dead-on logos for soulless corporate offerings and some really clever visual gags.

Administrative note:

I had to disable the main email account (that would be Gary) for this here domain, because it was getting swamped with spam. Like, turn my back for ten minutes and another 20 making it through. I think I’ve adjusted settings sufficiently to allow it to receive again, but I also had to purge a literal thousand spams so if you sent something and it didn’t get through, try again.

Sorry about that, we’ll try to get back to regular stuff tomorrow.