The most magical day of the year, or maybe two or three days of the year? And I’m being serious — for something that has the potential to bring down the entire site, to be able to log in with the otherwise-unused admin account, press a button, and have things patch to the next release without a hitch? That’s pretty damn impressive, even if it’s not really anything to do with webcomics.

Also only webcomic-adjacent is our main topic today. Longtime readers of this page will recall that one of the many friendships I’ve been privileged to make in my 15+ years of semi-abusive opinion-mongering is that of KB “Otter” Spangler¹, creator (and still writer) of A Girl And Her Fed², person that I can call on if I ever need to make a problem “go away”, and wrangler of the most wonderful words. Let’s be clear about this — I love her for her magnificent mastery of profanity and euphemisms, for her endlessly amusing goofball dogs, for the stash of Thin Mints with which I have been plied, but most of all for her words. She not only writes up a storm, she edits other people³ whose words I love and makes their words (and maybe yours?) better.

But we are here today to discuss Spangler’s words; I think I’ve had an alpha-read of each of her novels and while I have made the odd observation or suggestion here or there, I am usually too engrossed to to nitpick. Her latest series is cosmic sci-fi and features a galactic-level intelligence that is also a child and has discovered humanity. For thousands of years, its favorites (who’ve come to be known as Witches) have been given the ability to ask for galactic-level intelligence skills to be brought to bear, which may as well be magic. Thing is, said child godling is easily distractable, sometimes alarmingly literal, and can’t do everything — think about the most wonderful, eager-to-please Golden Retriever puppy you’ve ever known.

Now imagine it with near omnipotence. Mind that tail underfoot.

By luck and circumstance, the Witches have learned to direct that raw power and potential to shepherd the expansion of hairless plains apes to countless worlds, and mostly oversee shipping and logistics.

What? What else are you going to use near-instantaneous travel across galactic arms for? Stuff’s got to get from world to world, and supply chains are tricky even with a child godling making things just happen. Then there’s the simple fact that people faced with various inhospitable worlds can either try to change the world to fit the people, or they can change the people to fit the world. Because it’s cheaper, a thousand gene-tweaked versions of humanity exist, and where there are obvious differences, somebody is going to decide they’re superior to somebody else. Same shit, different millennium.

In Stoneskin, the newest Witch tries to wrap her mind around the sudden shift in her life — from a backwater, hardscrabble world to one of the galaxy’s political elite in an instant, with very little time to get up to speed. And out today, the followup: The Blackwing War, where it becomes quickly apparent that for every reason the Witches have to prevent a war of extermination on the part of genetic supremacists there may be an equally good one to keep out of it, province-sized extermination camps or no.

Spangler’s writing of the human condition is sharp, her hopes and her cynicism for the potential of humanity brought to bear with words that range from scalpel-sharp to blunt instrument as the situation requires. You’ll hold your breath along with Tembi Stoneskin as she tries to find a way forward that will save everybody, knowing all the while that it simply isn’t possible. There are unknowable minds in the galaxy that cannot be understood, and the worst of them are about 2 meters tall, more or less, bipedal, and like to dress up in black leather uniforms.

Start with Stoneskin, then grab The Blackwing War, and dive into Spangler’s back catalog while waiting for the next one to come out. Whichever book it may be, in whichever series, it’s going to have some fantastic words.

Spam of the day:

Hello, my name is Tyrell , I wanted to personally reach out to you today hoping we could potentially partner together.

I only partner with other Garies Tyrrell, and that’s two Rs, dammit.

_______________
¹ She doesn’t really go by Otter any more, but she did when her number first went into my phone so she’s now Otter forever.

² I love all the variations on your art in the strip over the years, Otter, but the smartest thing you ever did was partner up with Ale Presser to do the pictures of Act III.

³ I would pay good money to read a full-length Vernon original draft with Spangler’s edits in situ.

Hey, thanks for that time off. As readers of this page probably know, I traditionally spend the end of April at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp, which means I’m largely off the grid for a week or so. And as anybody probably knew, the entire world is full of canceled or postponed events, and Camp was one of them. Big sads all around.

But Pat Race and Aaron Suring, the stellar fellows behind AK Robotics, Camp, and numerous other projects, got a brainstorm that at least some part of the Camp experience could be improvised online. It was a last-minute thing because of other stuff they had front-burnered, but it came together. Over the space of five days nearly three dozen sessions occurred, mostly on Zoom, with Camp alumni and would-have-been first-timers coming together to form the intentional and intensely weird community that coalesces around Camp each year.

I already had vacation time blocked out for Camp that left me with no work obligations, so I decided to replicate the Camp experience as much as possible — between the round trip to Alaska and the fact that there’s no internet at Camp itself, I opted to step back from social media and the news¹ for the same period of time that I would have been gone anyway. The only question is if it would succeed the way that people really needed it to.

Yes, Zoom sucks² and we’ve all got Zoom fatigue, but it worked; it worked to the degree that during the opening session, which was mostly just people introducing themselves, saw attendance go up during the nearly 90 minutes it took for everybody to say hi. It worked to the degree that people who were supposed to attend Camp for the first time raved about the virtual experience and have had to recalibrate their expectations for the real thing being even better. There may not have been campfires, drizzle, ravens, and s’mores, but it worked.

There were skills demos, hangout time, socially distant boardgames, and one memorable presentation on the evolution of orcs in fiction, games, and fanart (from the original evil and pretty racist sword-fodder to he big to the modern pinnacle of he big and horny³). There are plans for a zine of favorite recipes (a quaran-zine full of cui-zine, if you will). People that might not have been able to make it regardless of pandemic got to attend. Relationships were established and re-established. Cats and dogs showed up on camera. By my estimation, at least a half-dozen people were logged in every hour the Camp events were running.

I’m not sure there’s a lesson here other than one that we all already know — human connection is important — but it’s worth reiterating. Every year at Camp I give a variation of Lesson One that we teach to Lil’ Baby EMTs — You are the most important person in the world, your safety and well-being are paramount, you cannot help anybody unless you first take care of yourself — and I’ll admit that this year I was saying it as much for myself as for anybody else that needed to hear it. The theme kept coming up, at discussions of [waves hand] all of this, of economic realities, of cooking, pretty much nonstop: I don’t want to ask for help. Other people have it worse. I’m doing okay.

Everybody that said it was sincere, and everybody that heard it was also sincere in stomping on that shit and saying Stop. It’s okay to ask for help. Any kind of help. And the thing is, I’m pretty sure that everybody was, at some point or another, on either side of that exchange. There’s a lot of self-denial going around, mixed with a lot of (in many cases, frustrated) desire to help others.

There’s room for a lot of intentional and intensely weird communities out there, and I encourage you to find and/or found them as you need to. For some of you that will mean applying to #ComicsCamp next time it comes around. For others, it will be grabbing friends and friends-of-friends and getting online and just hanging out being awesome/stupid together. For all of us, it will be a step towards a better frame of mind while we’re still taking rainchecks on the in-person connections we’re all so desperately craving.

Oh, and if you did want to take a whack at forming your own community — online for now, maybe IRL later — Pat and Aaron are full of excellent ideas and have worked out a lot of wrinkles. Maybe they could add a We advise you on community building and support tier to the Alaska Robotics Patreon⁴? Regardless — take a deep breath, make some contacts, and go lift each other up. The world and all of its bullshit will still be here when you get back, but the burden will be a little bit lighter.

Spam of the day:
I was going to include the email I got offering me quick turnaround on mortuary body racks, but that one got me so mad that I called the company to yell at them for spamming something so inappropriate, and it turned out that one of the other Garies Tyrrell (who thinks my email is his email) was supposed to be the recipient. So not evil spam after all!

_______________
¹ As much as I’ve written here in years past that Camp is a place that gets my head on straight, I have to acknowledge the act of stepping away from the shouty echo chamber is a big contributor to that rejuvenation.

² It’s also a tool I’ve used all day, nearly every day, for more than two years at the day job. I like to think that my Zoom wrangling skills helped make it suck a little less for the virtual Campers.

³ It was the mostly hilariously WHAT-filled ten minutes of the past decade.

⁴ Which could use your support, or maybe take a look at the prints, shirts, comics, calendars, postcards, and other stuff at their shop, which they won’t be able to take to/sell at conventions, or out of their store in Juneau, which is likely seeing its entire tourist season drop to zero.

But a week in which The Nib finds its existence is in upheaval-slash-transition is anything but rational. That being said, better late than never with the news: Gene Yang’s next book has a release date. We’ve known about the title (Dragon Hoops) and the elevator pitch (the story of the basketball team from the high school where Yang used to teach in Oakland) for years — he shared them when we spoke back in Aught-Sixteen.

But now we get the full launch announcement, in Entertainment Weekly¹ no less, with quotes from Yang and a set of preview pages. Yang’s art has lost no steps in the years that he’s let others do the drawing (Sonny Liew on The Shadow Hero, Mike Holmes on the Secret Coders series, Gurihiru on the Avatar: The Last Airbender series, various artists on Superman and New Super-Man), and the story …

The story’s different. It’s not just the story of the basketball team at the Oakland high school where he used to teach, their history, and their run for a state championship. It’s a story about his relationship to comics and creativity, to teaching, and to sports. It’s treading into Raina Telgemeier territory and that is terrific news. Yang put a lot of himself into the stories in American Born Chinese but this time he’s literally on the page, captions talking to the reader about what’s going through his mind as he acts out his life on the page.

It’s particularly an interesting tack to take, making Dragon Hoops not just about the team, but also his struggles to find a story — then finding a story just across campus in the gym — while simultaneously admitting that he’s never been a sports guy and actively shies away from the culture of captial-S Sports. I think it’s not coincidence that Yang breaking out of his comfort zone would have coincided with his term as the fifth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, where his efforts were summarized in his Reading Without Walls Challenge:

• Read a book about a character who doesn’t look or live like you.
• Read a book in a format you don’t typically read — graphic novels, poetry, audiobooks, plays.
• Read a book about a new subject you don’t know much about.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this theme in Dragon Hoops; we’ll all find out together on 17 March 2020, when 448 pages (!) of comics wisdom drops from :01 Books.

Spam of the day:

Thank you for registering at Hotel Tino – Ohrid

Blah, blah, click the link, set up your account, blah. Ordinarily, I’d chalk this up to a clumsy attempt to get me to go to a virus-ridden hellsite, but it appears to be a legit business. Looks like one of the other Garies Tyrrell has forgotten again that my email is not their email. Hope they get their reservation honored.

_______________
¹ Remember when a new graphic novel announcement would trickle out with maybe a small mention in Publishers Weekly or at The Beat? Now it’s the Los Angeles Review Of Books, or EW, or Premiere, or some other mainstream culture publication, if it’s not Washington Post or New York Times. Don’t ever tel me that comics as a medium is dying.

Know who we haven’t heard from in a while? Eben Burgoon. Longtime readers may recall that through the first half of Fleen’s history, we frequently noted happenings in Burgoon’s spy spoof, Eben07, in an appropriately purple prose. Then Burgoon and his compatriots moved onto B-Squad and he even gave me beer themed to his webcomic.

Burgoon’s been doing workshops and Maker Faires from Northern California (his normal stomping grounds) to as far away as Vilnius, Lithuania (no, really), the breadth of which made me wonder if he’d really gotten all that spycraft and secret mission tendency out of his system. Apparently not; Burgoon’s partnering with Starburns Industries to bring B-Squad back:

Starburns Industries Press sets its eyes on remastering an independent series, B-Squad, from indie darling author Eben Burgoon and a rotating roster illustrators and artists that change issue to issue.

B-Squad shares the ridiculous and dangerous missions of an expendable team of misfit mercenaries ranging from pop-culture riffs to cut from whole cloth oddballs. The bargain-bin commandos tackle leftover assignments of other more respected mercenary groups. SBI Press’s run begins with a remaster of the series debut Conspiracy in Cambodia, originally independently published in 2013, written by Burgoon and illustrated by Lauren Monardo.

In the spirit of a Saturday morning cartoon block, each B-Squad book serves as home for brand new tangential comics like [B-Squad illustrator Michael] Calero’s Monster Safari” and Burgoon’s newest creation about six-inch tall wizards trapped in the fast-food culture of a remote truck stop titled Tiny Wizards.

The remastered books are rounded out with activities, puzzles, and bonus content in homage to dentist office staples like Highlights magazine and ZooBooks.

No word as to whether or not the remastered B-Squad will feature Goofus and/or Gallant. You (where you is taken to mean folks in/around the Sacramento, California area) can ask him at the next workshop he’ll be running, on three Tuesdays in February (12th, 19th, 26th), at the Crocker Art Museum.

Spam of the day:

Account Name : ANDREW FARRINGTON
Account Number : [redacted]
IMPORTANT – YOUR PAYMENT CARD IS NEARING ITS EXPIRY DATE

Weird, why would you send something for Andrew Farrington to me? Then again, this might not be spam, but the latest in a long line of Other Garies Tyrrell sending their emails my way. Usually that’s easy to clear up, but I’ve had to resort to using the British tech press to shame Ryanair over their persistent screwups. Fun!

As promised yesterday, we have a second dispatch from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, still in the Greater Toulouse region of France. Take it away, FSFCPL!

A mere two weeks after the Colomiers comics festival, Toulouse was hosting the Toulouse Game Show or TGS, and since this is a show that Maliki’s Souillon regularly attends (though he and Becky skipped it this year), I thought it would be worth checking out. Yup, time for another four-hour train ride to Toulouse …

While the TGS has video games content, it is more general than that and is best thought of as a marketplace for pop culture paraphernalia (taking the whole of the Parc des Expositions de Toulouse), much like any other anime con. In it you could find apparel merchants, steampunk accessories dealers, retrogaming preservation associations, a lot of cosplay of course¹, diorama creation clubs, a food court, booths for many webseries, etc.

And the TGS did feature comics content, and not just Ankama (found in pretty much every anime con in France, Belgium, and possibly Switzerland). I did not spot any creator I previously knew about, so it seems webcomics have not significantly invaded the TGS so far, but this also means everything was new to me. In particular, the fanzine scene was well-represented.

Still, the comics presence was not sufficient to have a dedicated section or artist’s alley, with most comics booths being next to one of the steampunk accessories dealers. Not that there is anything wrong with mixing comics with steampunk), but the TGS and other such conventions could make themselves more attractive to both comics creators and comics fans by dedicating an area to comics, in my opinion.

I am still catching up on my haul of comics bought there (work has been hectic lately), but I was already able to note the variety of approaches the creators I met there have with the web. In some cases, the pages were initially posted online, such as for Blue Bird’s Oath. Other creators put books as a whole on Mangadraft after the fact, keeping the latest print-exclusive until its successor comes out. And some creators barely have a web presence at all.

So while I am not done with my assessment, this trip to the TGS is already a net win to me², and I will keep an eye on it, especially as it provides a view of indie comics outside that of Paris or Brussels, and which is itself nevertheless different from that of Colomiers: I found no overlap at all.

Thanks as always to M Lebeaupin; when we at the US branch of Fleen eventually make it to France, we’ll have a much better idea of where to go for comics³.

Notspam of the day:

I keep getting email for other Gary Tyrrells (Garys Tyrrell? Garies Tyrrell?). If it’s important, I try to sort things out, but it doesn’t usually work. This morning, I got an invoice for lintels from Perth, Australia. As a special holiday treat, I’m sharing a typical reply:

Hi Wanita,

Wrong person. Bunch of Gary Tyrrells around the world (at least two in England, maybe three in Ireland, two or more in Oz, and one electrical contractor in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, US) think my email is their email. There’s also a sort-of famous Gary Tyrrell in California, but he’s cool. We had lunch together once.

I have not ordered any lintels from you. Truth be told, I’m not 100% sure what lintels are. I mean, I visited Australia once but what with the bridge-climbing, wine-touring, wombat-petting, and Great Barrier Reef snorkling, lintels didn’t come up at all. I’m sure your lintels are very nice, though.

For the record, I also do not have a Peugot that needs service in the Lakes District, have an order for a Brexit-supporting cloisonne badge to be delivered to the Scottish Borderlands, owe registrations fees on a vehicle in Dublin, have a Jurassic Park Smash ‘n’ Throw T-Rex on order at a toy shop in Kildare, have plans to fly between Ireland and Eindhoven, hold a Lawson’s card in Melbourne, or hold any interest in various contracts and requests-for-bid for electrical jobs. Oh and I don’t have a warranty on tires in California, but that wasn’t the Gary Tyrrell that I know, so at least one more?

Please contact your guy and update your records. Tell him Gary said hi.

Gary
The one in New Jersey

_______________
¹ Among the characters spotted: Arthur, king of the Britons with his personal coconut knocker, a T-Rex, two ghostbusters of opposite genders, and a wheelchair-riding Aquawoman.

² Not to mention everything else you can do there, such as eating takoyaki, buying retro games (be sure to have your console so you can check they work: you’ll have a hard time returning them otherwise), or attending a panel by the competitive Puyo Puyo playing community.

³ Other than Belgium, that is. Several of the best English language collections in comics shops I’ve ever seen were in Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp …

This post has almost nothing to do with webcomics. Almost, mind you. We spoke about comics at one point during lunch, which if either of us were seeking to deduct the cost of the meal on our taxes, would have surely satisfied the relevant requirement.

I get ahead of myself, though. That picture up above is of Garies Tyrrell. Longtime readers of this page may recall the Garies t-shirt discovered by Evan Dahm, Yuko Ota, and Ananth Hirsh, and the wisdom derived from it. You may even remember Evan Dahm wearing the Garies t-shirt in direct proximity to myself at New England Webcomics Weekend 2, making for even more Garies.

But today, I had to distinct pleasure of having lunch with the gentleman seen above, who m I had never previously met in person. His name is Gary Tyrrell, which he both spells (that’s rare) and pronounces (even rarer) the same way I do. There are others out there, other Garies², but to date this is the greatest concentration of Garies in general (and Garies Tyrrell¹ in particular) yet seen. Only if Dahm could have been persuaded to lend me the shirt could there have been more Garies, but I was afraid to try. Some things are Not Meant To Be.

And the best thing about there being another Gary, one who is approximately my age (at least, we attended college in the same decade), who also trained as an engineer, who also is on the record as liking beer and being from the East Coast, from a family of six children, and nerdy by nature? Google confusion. It’s been some time since I had to apply for a job, but when the next prospective employer goes to look for either of us, they won’t know if it’s Gary Tyrrell or Gary Tyrrell that they found. Sweet, sweet plausible deniability.

Thanks very much for your indulgence, and we’ll be back to topics that are more directly related to webcomics next week.

Spam of the day:

The lowest cost way to cool off this summer is right here. Enjoy cold air with a press of a button This weekend will have record high heat. This device will keep fresh and cool. VERY limited stock order yours now

An air conditioner. You’re describing an air conditioner. We’ve had them for 120 years (Carrier’s electrical units), and precursors for nearly 200 years (Faraday’s ammonia experiments), more than 250 years (Ben Franklin’s experiments), more than 1200 years (Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, who had water-driven fans and fountains), or nearly 2000 years (human-powered rotary fan A/C in the Han Dynasty).

_______________
¹ Gary Tyrrells? Garies Tyrrells?

² Including a Gary Tyrrell in the UK whose car dealer sends me warranty information; a Gary Tyrrell in Ireland, where the vehicle registration authority sends me his renewal notices; a Gary Tyrrell in Australia, whose supermarket sends me coupons; a Gary Tyrrell in Scranton, whose business partners send me proposals and contracts; and a Gary Tyrrell in Southern California whose tire dealer sends me receipts. The Gary Tyrrell of the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band trombone section (pictured above, right) is the only one who doesn’t think that my email address is his email address.

Few final thoughts on this year’s iteration before we wrap up the coverage.

• Funniest and most heartwarming thing: during the annual NEWW Awards ceremony (which wrapped up the weekend), showrunner Meredith Gran announced that the fine folks at Squishables had provided a number of their enormous stuffed animals as giveaways, but wasn’t certain how to determine recipients. A suggestion from the crowd resulted in a half-dozen arm-wrestling matches for honor and prizes (a distant view of which can be seen in the bottom row of photos, immediately to the left of the bemused Jeff Rowland). During the goodbyes, many of the champion arm-wrestlers were seen to be giving their prizes to other attendees who had kids. Awwww! Also, do not ever challenge Abby Lehrke to arm-wrestle, as she will school you like Stallone.
• Documentary evidence of the weekend continues to issue forth, of the illustrative and photographic varieties.
• Best webcomic recommendation coming out of NEWW, via Spike: Ectopiary. Dang, this thing is pretty.
• Not NEWW: via webcomics überfan (seriously, his reading list puts mine to shame by an order of magnitude) Michael Kinyon comes a pointer to a series of strips building up to today’s Remembrance/Veteran’s Day: Crowbar Benson depicting actual letters home from The Great War, letters of some impact.

But before we get started, let me point out that Jeph Jacques is doing his level best to displace John Allison as the reigning King of Fan-Fiction. Okay, so Jacques did his in-strip, but you can’t tell me that he didn’t enjoy writing this:

Also Hermione and Ginny were both 25 years old and NOT married to Ron and Harry because the epilogue at the end of the last book is STUPID and NEVER HAPPENED.

Which eventually leads to:

So they totally had sex, and it was the most amazing sex in the history of wizarding or muggles or even Space Wizards (who had a lot of sex but it was really bad sex because they were all evil).

• Speaking of Jeph Jacques, I have now a copy of Questionable Content Volume 1, which came with the news that Jacques plans to do a similarly-sized book every nine months or so until he’s caught up. Look for Volume 2 around San Diego time.
• Speaking of John Allison, I picked up his newest book at NEWW — the very limited, convention-only A Feral Flag Will Fly. I enjoy Bad Machinëry to the extent that, although we are presently getting a five-days-a-week Esther story (and Esther is my absolute favorite SGR character), I find myself counting the days until BM and those mystery-solving youths return. AFFWF has soothed my soul until the wait is done.
• Completing the book-buying trifecta, I now also have a copy of Howard Tayler’s sixth Schlock Mercenary collection, Resident Mad Scientist. Much like AFFWF and QCv1, RSM features an oversize trim, a good “in the hand” feel, and a story that is richer, funnier, and more enjoyable for being presented in large chunks. Excellent reads, all three.
• Not full books, but still from NEWW: I purchased David McGuire‘s latest mini, Marty’s Big Day (no link, sorry), the story of a cat having the best first day as cat ever — fifteen minutes in, he’s on furniture scratching duty and they think they’ll move him up to shedding and hairballs within a week! Lots of fun, and an excellent use of McGuire’s clean, heavy-lined, angry-eyed style.

  Also on the mini front, Sophie Goldstein was kind enough to give me copies of her two minis (again, no link), one a collection of hourlies from her time teaching English in Korea (dated 2009-2010), and one a pair of stories about her father (dated 2006).

  The art styles are obviously different (you have to go simple on hourlies), but each fits the tone of the book. The father stories are particularly strong, recounting a visit to Goldstein’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother and a terrifying dream of monsters (with her balding, bespectacled, utterly badass father to the rescue). Very different from her work on Darwin Carmichel, very moving work.

• Recurring theme at NEWW: Garies. There exists somewhere a picture of Evan Dahm in the Garies shirt, standing next to me for the absolute maximum amount of Garies. The only thing that could have increased the Gary-count would be if I had been wearing the GARY shirt, but as we all know, that may well have resulted in a Gary singularity.
• Speaking of singularities, Mr Dahm was on a panel with Mr Diaz, Ms Spike, Ms Baillie, and Mr Riley on the topic of worldbuilding; an audio recording of said panel is now available, which saves me the trouble of typing up my notes.

  But be sure to particularly pay attention about halfway through when the topic turned to the nature of comics itself, and particularly the ability of comics to present background information and foreground information simultaneously and in appropriate weightings, something all but impossible in prose. Heady stuff from people who have clearly thought about comics.

• Finally, some of the discussion I had with David Malki ! regarding Machine of Death is now public: agreements have been agreed, and MoD is due in bookstores across the US in the next three weeks.