Here’s some more that are coming out in the next few weeks, that you may get in your orders and enjoy.

• We at Fleen have, I believe, been in the tank for John Allison since small times, as the saying goes. He has nary an idea that isn’t going to be amusing as hell, ranging from droll wordplay to flat-out hilarity and back again, frequently on the same page. For much of the past couple of years, he’s let loose with his wilder instincts for absolutely unrestrained stories via Steeple (both in print and in the online continuation).

  Furthermore, throughout his long history of Tackleverse comic-making, he’s found individual characters around whom others accrete and orbit, by which manner all manner of stories may be hung: Shelley Winters, Esther de Groot, Charlotte Grote; by complete coincidence, each of these has been my favorite character of his in turn, often trading the role back and forth and one or another is given pride of place.

  Of late, he’s collided La Grote and The Ginger Ninja with Steeple in Author Unknown and it is a marvel, but come August we’ll get the second Steeple trade, collecting the The Silvery Moon and Secret Sentai story arcs. Mayhap if we’re good, we’ll soon get a third collection, with Christmas With Clovis and the currently-running Author Unknown.

• A little closer to the present day, which is to say the 22nd of June, we’ll see not one but two new releases from :01 Books, which always makes for a good day. The first is from Mike Holmes (at press time, his site appeared to be down, so here’s his Twitter), who’s been making excellent comics with other folks for about forever, but now gets to stretch his legs and show us his solo work.

  My Own World is about being a kid, about not feeling in control, about finding a place where you can be in control, but maybe lacking the meaning of the (so-called?) Real World. It sounds like an up-aged version of Vera Brosgol’s Memory Jars, which should allow for some amazing storytelling and visuals. Introducing a middle grade reader to the concept of there being things that you can’t control and that’s not a tragedy is going to be a tightrope to walk, but I’ve got complete confidence that Holmes will be able to navigate it.

  And perhaps taking a similar tack to My Own World, Nidhi Chanani will be following up her superlative Pashmina with Jukebox, a time travel story about music, searching for meaning (and also your parents), and how life changes (or maybe doesn’t) from decade to decade.

  Readers may recall that my chief complaint with Pashmina was that it deserved about 50 more pages to really delve into the magical-realist conceit, and it looks like Chanani will get that here; time traveling via magic jukebox to the eras of beloved songs offers at least as much room for exploration as finding the history of your family through a shared article of clothing.

  Plus, a) the world needs more books centering brown girls, and b) Chanani has a love of vinyl that impressed former college DJ me, so I think there’s going to be a lot of factual and emotional authenticity for readers to dig into here. Plus, her work is always just so joybringing, even when tinged with fear or melancholy — there’s a natural exuberance to her characters that works really well in the long form.

Steeple: The Silvery Moon releases 4 August to comic shops and two weeks later to bookstores. My Own World and Jukebox both release 22 June to bookstores. The former is highly recommended based on previously-released web content, and the latter pair based on the prior work of the creators. They’re gonna be good, folks.

Spam of the day:

Hi, Would you like a free article for your websit? I’d like to put something together that offers advice to prospective entrepreneurs who’ve experienced past financial setbacks on how they can get their dream business up and running.

My websit is just fine without your fake-ass motivational bullshit. If you knew how to be an awesome entrepreneur, you’d be doing that instead of trying to convince people you know how to do that.

And I assure you, it’s for entirely selfish reasons.

You see, the last regular issue of Giant Days released yesterday. The series built on the three minicomics that followed Tackleford goth queen Esther de Groot to university, and told the stories of Esther, Susan Ptolemy, and Daisy Wooten as they became the best of friends. And university in the UK lasts a typical three years instead of the four you get here in the States, so that’s potentially one more year of story time (or maybe 18 issues) of Giant Days that could have been and won’t be.

The again, if Allison were American, the delightful weirdness that was born in Tackleford more than twenty years ago across multiple series would never have been what it was. Americans can be weird, but we don’t have the sense of absurd whimsy — and I use that phrase solely in a complimentary sense — that undergirds British humo[u]r. Sure, we might have gotten Allisonian stories about Mike Bloomberg (the man has an uncanny sense about what the man meant as New York City mayor), but there would have been no McGraw, no Ed Gemmell¹, no stories about vengeful European exes or occasional visits from Shelley or Lottie or Big Lindsey.

It is worth mentioning that Giant Days was a team effort from the beginning, and that Allison’s creative partners made his delightful dialogue and benign chaos sing. Pencillers Lissa Treiman and Max Sarin understand the necessity of exaggerated motion and super-malleable faces when dealing with Allison’s characters, maybe even better than he does himself. Liz Fleming’s inks added weight and energy, Whitney Cogar’s colors made everything lively, and Jim Campbell did the most important thing a letterer can do — he made his work completely invisible, except for when it needed to grab your attention.

The tale, as they say, grew in the telling, from a planned six-issue limited series to ongoing; I’m not sure that there’s anything else I get now with a higher issue count than Giant Days². Allison could have kept it going another 54 issues or more, if he’d felt the desire to; the passage of time was fluid enough that each academic year could have been stretched almost infinitely.

But the charm of the story was knowing that it’s a prequel (Esther left for uni at the very end of Scary Go Round, and Bad Machinery started three years later³ in story time — about the time Esther was finishing school. We watched those child mystery solvers grow from about 11 years old to about 16 or 17. In real-world terms, Esther, Daisy, and Susan have been apart for a half-decade, maybe more. There were hints in Bad Machinery (and the various Bobbins resumptions) about things that must have happened to Esther, we knew where we were heading. It’s easy to get disinvested in a prequel and it’s even easier to get lazy about the story, knowing how it has to end.

But that never happened. Giant Days was a story that got stronger as it went along; literally each issue was better than the one before, each bit of life — small moments and big catastrophes, as Allison described it — thrown at the characters ringing truer, each hard-won bit of growth making us feel for them more than the one before. It’s a hell of a thing to do a comic for five years or so without a bad stretch; it’s considerably harder to continually improve as you go along.

We aren’t quite done with the ladies; around Halloween there will be a double-sized finale issue that catches up with them a year after graduation. I imagine that if Allison ever gets the itch to revisit them, he can find a story to tell in the same fashion, and I will always be there for it. I watched Susan and Daisy and Esther navigate the transition to early adulthood, and I will be thrilled if I get the chance to revisit them as they continue to change and grow, like a comics version of the Up film series.

Or maybe we’ll soon see the last we’ll ever see of them. Like any beloved friends, I’ll treasure the time I got to spend with them and always be glad of more when the stars align. In any event, there will be more stories from Allison and his collaborators, and more new characters to come to love. But nothing he does in the future will diminish the very real accomplishment that has been Giant Days, nor will I ever stop putting these issues into the hands of people that haven’t read them. Thank you, John Allison, Lissa Treiman, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, Whitney Cogar, and Jim Campbell. You done good.

Spam of the day:
Spammers don’t get to share today with the Giant Days crew.

_______________
¹ Who, I can’t believe I’m finally realizing after all these issues, was always referred to by Esther & Co by his full name, never just Ed. He’s like Charlie Brown, if Charlie Brown finally got with the little red-haired girl and she was also a giant Australian muscle-babe who loves and appreciates him for who he is. Well done, you two.

² That’s a bit of a dodge, as both The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Usagi Yojimbo restarted from issue #1 since Giant Days started.

³ And holy crap, ten years ago in the real world.

BOOM! Studios, particularly via its all-ages imprint, KaBOOM!, and its creator-owned imprint, BOOM! Box, are grabbing up the best of webcomics talent for various projects — the Adventure Time ongoing, related mini-series, and spinoff graphic novels started the trend, but it’s continued with Bravest Warriors, Regular Show, Bee & Puppycat, Capture Creatures, The Amazing World of Gumball, Steven Universe, Midas Flesh, Lumberjanes, and more — I can’t keep track of all of the various webcomickers who’ve drawn checks for work on those books, and that’s before you get into the backup stories and such¹. So it’s scarcely surprising to see the news that the BOOM! group has found room for one more.

And — my heart! — it involves perhaps my favorite character in all of webcomics.

Starting in March, we’ll get a six-issue treatment of Giant Days, being the adventures of Esther de Groot at university², from the fertile mind of John Allison. Even more intriguingly, this will be the first time that Allison specifically writes for another to provide the art, having tapped Lissa Treiman. You may recall Treiman from one of Allison’s occasional fan-art events (aka Feats of Strength) from 2008, when she drew positively the finest Desmond Fish-Man known to history.

More than that, I can’t think of an artist who better captured the feeling of Allison’s characters — he treatment of Moon is a little Vera Brosgol, a little Katie Rice (especially in Skadi-mode), and a whole lot of excellent. Her interpretations of Allison’s characters don’t look like he drew them, and that’s a good thing — she’ll bring them to the page in ways that he wouldn’t; he’s likely (even if only subconsciously) writing to her strengths as an artist. It’s going to look great, read great, and give us more Esther, so who could ask for anything further?

Well, I could. Considering the length of the three Giant Days stories we’ve gotten so far, this miniseries will likely double the size of the canon. Also, if I remember correctly, the existing GD stories scarcely make up the first week of uni; we know that Eshter broke The Boy’s heart, we know that years later they are apart, but what happened in the meantime? Here’s hoping that Allison and Treiman decide after six issues that they have a hankering to tell more Giant Days stories, because I’m ready to read every single one of them.

Spam of the day:

Hi, my name is Sherry and I am the sales manager at StarSEO Marketi

Nope. Stopping you right there, Sherry. Nope, nope, nope.

________________
¹ Or consider that BOOM! owns Archaia, who’ve published Gunnerkrigg Court and The Devil’s Panties.

² Once found online, now only in printed form.

Let’s get the crowdfunding items out of the way first, shall we?

• Surprising absolutely nobody, Matthew Inman crushed his BearLove Good, Cancer Bad goal by a factor of eleven¹. All that remains now is for him to take the photo (presumably at the bank, because I wouldn’t want to carry around the price of a house in cash without multiple armed guards); with any luck, the bills will be small enough that they add up to a really big pile of money that Inman can roll around in. That will be one awesome photo.
• Surprising absolutely even more nobodies, Zach Weinersmith is up over 250% of his fundraising goal for Trial of the Clone in the first 36 hours or so. To celebrate, he’s released the first couple of paragraphs of TotC as a public update, which features this beautiful summation of life’s fundamental meaning:
  

  The first emotion you feel in your life is disappointment. Interestingly, it’ll also be your last emotion, and about 80% of the emotions in between.

  Spoiler alert: assuming that Weinersmith is talking about the protagonist of TotC and not you personally, that 80% estimate may be on the low side.

• Surprising, if mathematically possible, negative anybody, running a crowdfunding campaign is not an exact science, and careful planning is a must. Ed Brisson recently wrapped an IndieGoGo campaign for Murder Book 3, and he’s got some lessons to share with you, should you be inclined to learn. Pay special attention to the final accounting of funds about 2/3 of the way down the page:
  

  Of that $2311, here are the expenses:

  • Fees (PayPal, IndieGoGo): $172.39
  • Printing: $1361.92
  • Shipping & Shipping Supplies: $620
  • Money to Artists: $811
  • Total: -$654.31

  Yes. Negative $654.31. [emphasis original]

  If that didn’t catch your interest, you are not paying enough attention to have a crowdfunding campaign.

• Noted at The AV Club in their review of last night’s episode of Adventure Time:
  

  If you did not pick up last week’s Adventure Time #5, you missed one of the best comics of the entire year². Not only do you get a story where BMO pits Finn versus Jake for a cupcake, but there’s an amazingly trippy Paul Pope story in which our duo goes on an adventure through the consciousness of a comic book creator. And Marceline And The Scream Queens comes out next month!

  Well done Ryan North, and pre-emptively well done, Meredith Gran. Speaking of MatSQ, Ms Gran wants you to know:

  oh hell yeah, @badmachinery is doing some Marceline covers! featuring a first look at the Scream Queens: http://boompen.tumblr.com/post/25886238899/hey-dudes-its-shannon-with-freakin-exciting

  For those that don’t know, @badmachinery would be webcomicker extraordinaire and gentleman, John Allison; and more than just a guest cover, he’s doing variant covers for all six issues, which would surely be snatched up at your local comic shop as soon as they hit. This has led to something I haven’t seen a comics publisher do previously³: rather than have violence break out, the Allison covers will be available by subscription only. Single issue here, set of six here.

• Finally, as a combo platter of something I noticed on twitter, and later via comment from the man himself, Ryan Estrada is in fact dropping more comics on us:
  

  Oh, hey how about ONE MORE EARLY MORNING SECRET? http://twitpic.com/a0o9vv #nowwithoscarnominee

  That would be a second shared-setting story anthology, featuring creators justly renowned far and wide. Guys, I’m having to add a sentence so I can link everybody, and I’m pretty sure I missed some. He’s even got the freakin’ Comics Curmudgeon in there!

  And to clarify yesterday’s post, I should have said that I suspected the image of The Kind You Don’t Take Home To Mother meant a full-length treatment of that story, not just a print version of the existing story, which is pretty much what Estrada told us.

_______________
¹ Okay, I may have predicted a factor of twelve and a half, but close enough.

² This is not hyperbole; the done-in-one story was exquisite, easily the best that Ryan North (Nexus of All Webcomics And Also Print Comics Realities, Canadian Directorate) has done so far, and had me snerking out loud during my train ride home from work.

³ By which, I don’t mean, “offer a variant cover for more money than the usual”; there are comics publishers that seemingly make rent money each month by doing nothing but that. What I meant was, in my limited experience (having never worked for a comics publisher, distributor, or retailer), the variant-covers-at-markup normally seem to be pitched to the stores, sometimes requiring the shop to order a specific (large) number of copies in order to be able to also obtain the variant. By contrast, this is pitched to the actual readers.

There are some webcomics books that I should like to commend to your attention. I also have a couple of non-webcomics books (at least, not directly webcomics books, but by creators with webcomics in their histories) that I will be commending to your attention at some length in the coming days. Oh yes, I shall.

• If you are like me, then you enjoy little in this life as much as the work of John Allison. Bad Machinëry (I do like the look of the children’s adventure story books denoting the chapters) is a delight, and the earlier Scary Go Round was an integral part of my daily entertainments. It’s over, it’s done, but even Allison can’t resist revisiting logical story hooks, thus last year he took a peek back in time as “Dark” Esther de Groot went to university and encountered an entrenched power structure that can only be dealt with by punchings. It is mathematically equivalent to awesome, and it is now available in non-electric form for a piddling £4 plus shipping. Actually, I’m not sure that four bob is piddling, what with the US dollar tanking and all. Ah, hell, in for a pound, in for more pounds, because you can personalize for another eight quid.
• As long as you’re breaking out the plastic, may I recommend you save some for the forthcoming new edition of Rice Boy? It’s been sold out for some little time now, but Evan Dahm’s Kickstarter to fund the new printing has achieved approximately 250% of goal (with three days left to go); per Dahm’s twitterfeed, the excess funds raised means that the new printing will number 3000 books, instead of the 1000 in the first printing. For those that enjoy the finer things (or those that already own Rice Boy and are obsessive completists), there will be a first-ever hardcover edition, in a limited run of 200 books.
• Know what else today needs? An anthology. The Couscous Collective put out the FOREST themed volume (their first) at APE), and they’re following it up with the SPACE themed volume, which launched last weekend at Stumptown. For those of you that might fondly recall Narbonic, Shaenon Garrity (Radness Queen of the East Bay) has included the first original Narbonic in five years. For those that like to plan ahead, the next Couscous collection will be on the theme of OCEAN, and will continue the twice-a-year, APE-and-SPX schedule.
• Not book, but worth mentioning: anybody that had doubted that Robert Khoo had managed to whip Penny Arcade into a real business, consider the most recently-announced Child’s Play fundraiser: a golf tournament. There will be beverages and snacks and powered carts, but please remember to adhere to the expected behavioral norms of the golf course. Nobody wants to be that guy that embarrasses everybody else.

Oh, yeah — I update the blog every weekday. Right.

• Missed it, but Dirk Deppey caught it: DJ Coffman‘s got the latest on Platinum/WOWIO non-payments. Key bit that jumped out at me:
  

  [Platinum head] Scott Rosenberg use to say to me a lot “Perception is reality.” He showed a lot of passion for promoting Drunk Duck and letting the creators do their own thing there and not interfere with the site. But now the PERCEPTION is that he did, or somebody there did, see this place as a mine for young creators. Many roped into contracts with that mobile side, not paid … lied to, as the above email suggests. The truth though is that Platinum Studios is poorly, poorly managed. And right now, there’s just no money to be had. They’re holding on for that big deal to come through, and it just might. And that’s ALL they care about. But at what cost?

  So we at Fleen are forced to ask again: have any creators been paid by WOWIO for Q2 yet? Answers on a postcard.

• Okay, whose heart skipped a beat at the sight of photo-rendered “Dark” Esther De Groot? Look for Esther & Sarah’s ‘zine to be all fumetti-stylin’ SGR for the rest of the week.
• A philosophical musing now, prompted by an email from a reader who identifies himself only as “Andrew”, regarding a videogame that I had not heard of (I have no game appliance in my home, and confess my interest in the medium is mostly sparked by new Civ iterations):
  

  I know this is old news, but I’ve barely seen any notice in webcomicsland — Penny Arcade plugged Braid, but no one’s pointed out that the art bears the unmistakable stamp of David Hellman from A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible.

  Unmistakeable stamp indeed, Andrew — the screens I’ve now gone and looked up for Braid are a welcome breath of ALILBTDII-style goodness from Hellman.

  The question occurs to me, can videogames of an episodic nature (like On The Rain-Slick etc., or BONE) be considered a branching or outgrowth or form of webcomickry? Considering that a webcomicish (and yet … more) enterprise like SBEmail is also almost a game-lite (what with all the hidden things to find), we’ve got a really blurry line.

  Looking back to last year’s Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic, the backlash against Steve Purcell was, as far as I can see, motivated more by the extraordinarily sporadic and slight updates, and not by the fact it was essentially an on-rails version of the Sam & Max game. We’ve already established a consensus that webcomics and indy (print) comics have largely merged into one entity — how much broader can the category become? Your thoughts, please.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I choose the believe that the retired band teacher is a warning of what things may be if Scrooge Ray does not mend his ways. In this case, by beating down on a bunch of long-time dudes and not embarrassing his dad.

So this is late, but I only came across it yesterday when visiting my friendly local comic shop to pick up this week’s books¹; it appears, much like the webcomics stay-at-home “convention” known as ComfyCon, the comics industry has put together a virtual con that will be broadcast to comics shops this Saturday, 5 March. It appears this is even the second time it’s happened, who knew?

The In-Store Convention Kickoff, as it is named, suffers from one stunning disadvantage, which is that the flyer they produced for handout in comics shops doesn’t mention their website. There are references to Facebook and Twitter, which eventually lead to the site, but that was a hell of an overlook.

Fortunately, it appears that the rest of the arrangements are better thought-out. The idea of having to go specifically to a store to participate is pretty clever, driving attention and potentially sales to those stores; there are even exclusive comics that only participating stores can order. There’s also a wide variety of guests that will be part of presentations and panel discussions, from (if I counted correctly) nine different publishers plus a toy company, not to mention the obligatory media guests (Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk).

Best of all, they found people that webcomics fans ought to be interested in: Hope Larson, Christopher Hastings, Ryan North, and Jim Zub will all get time in the program, although whoever thought that 10 – 15 minutes is enough time for Hastings, North, or Zub to be interesting and charming and erudite and entertaining as hell is kind of dumb. Then again, its not like they were singled out — the only sessions longer than 15 minutes are the DC Comics panel (45), the BOOM! Studios panel (30), and the Marvel panel (45). Hope Larson’s part of the BOOM! panel (what with Goldie Vance getting ready to launch), so there may actually be time to say something, given that there are four other people speaking with her.

To be honest, the scheduling and durations [PDF] are a bit concerning. The very short times (along with the disclaimer that times and schedules are subject to change) makes me wonder if some of the less well-known guests might serve the role of cushioning to allow for last-minute shifts in the big names (your Matts Fraction or Kellys Sues DeConnick, for example, who themselves are only allocated 15 minutes total what the hell people). A technical issue here or there, might they decide to cancel somebody with less industry pull than Brian Michael Bendis or Dan Didio to get back on schedule²? That would be unfortunate.

Those caveats aside, it’s an ambitious eight hours planned, and I’ll be curious to see how it turns out. If you have questions for any of the creators, you can tweet them to #ConKickoff2016.

Spam of the day:

These astronomers gathered X-ray data utilizing the orbiting Chandra X-ray
Observatory and brightness information from
one in every of TSU’s automated telescopes in southern Arizona, hoping to measure the age of
the star.

It’s really less spam and more free verse.

_______________
¹ Book of the week: Giant Days #12, where John Allison cliffhangered me and made me sniffly for Esther DeGroot, my favorite of all his creations. Except maybe Shauna and Lottie when they’re fixing time and space.

² Also a concern: there are few breaks allocated between sessions³. Things go over? Maybe there’s a cushion before the next session, maybe not. Somebody’s in the middle of a great story? Next person doesn’t get their ten minutes. I think there may be an overestimation as to the reliability of streaming software on the various computers of 37 different people.

³ Specifically, there are 26 events scheduled, with nine irregularly-spaced breaks:

• Opening keynote speaker Jim Lee ends at 12:15, the Dynamite panel starts at 12:20
• The Dynamite panel ends at 12:35, the Valiant panel starts at 12:40
• The DC panel ends at 1:50, Skottie Young starts at 1:55
• The Top Cow panel ends 3:25, Dan Jurgens starts at 3:30
• The Dark Horse panel ends at 4:20, Ryan North starts at 4:25
• Fillion & Tudyk end at 4:55, the Marvel panel starts at 5:00
• The Marvel panel ends at 5:45, the Zenescope panel starts at 5:50
• Jim Zub ends at 6:45, Mike Deodato starts at 6:50
• The IDW panel ends at 7:45, closing keynote speaker Kevin Eastman starts at 7:55

It appears that if you are a publisher with a panel or if you are a very famous person, you can run long. Everybody else is out of luck. And yes, by this measure Jim Zub is a very famous person; glad I’m not the only one that thinks so.

First, scroll down and read about Jaime Hernandez, because that guy rules.

Second, here are some things that are time-dependent:

• Tony Breed is one of the nicest guys on the planet; he was sorely missed at TopatoCon, but with a husband dealing with cancer, he had more important things to deal with. And because complicated diseases can wipe people out financially, friends have prevailed on Tony and Eric to accept a crowdfund on their behalf. This is not optional; give.
• Speaking of TopatoCon, Jeph Jacques had copies of QC book 5 with him there, which the rest of the world will be able to buy the day after tomorrow.
• John Allison shares the news that Giant Days is now an ongoing comic! Happy day, I get Esther deGroot every month!