Shit is bananas these days, so let’s just step back and have some wisdom from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin on the most hated part of modern computing. It relates to bandes dessinées web, promise.

Good stuff as always, but I have a quibble with one bit — I am less convinced that FSFCPL that no one will want to run vulnerable software, given that there’s plenty of vulnerable, unpatched, unsupported, deprecated, end-of-lifed, and otherwise completely insecure crap out there right now. I suspect that we’ll see Flash persisting for years and never quite going entirely away. But the sooner, the better.

Spam of the day:

These women are willing to do anything at all that you can ever imagine!

Awesome. I’d like the winning Powerball jackpot numbers and a removal of incompetent vandals from the federal government.

One of the great advantages we at Fleen have is the continued willingness of Pierre Lebeaupin — our esteemed Senior French Correspondent — to keep an eye on the French indie/web comics scene (and, more broadly, that of Europe in general) and share his insights with us. And while we at Fleen welcome contributions from anybody who can provide passably-constructed thoughts that don’t take a mountain of editing, the rest of you have a lot of catching up to do before you get to be as good as Lebeaupin is.

We’ll take a gander at his latest look at the relationship between French webcomickers and French Youtubers, but there’s another item to mention first.

• As noted in the past, dashing chalkboard provacateur Dante Shepherd has unmasked himself as mild-mannered professor of Chemical Engineering Lucas Landherr, although he has kept his nom du webcomics for the STEM-themed Science The World series.

  The latest in the series (the tenth, in fact) covers the topic of gene therapy, and is unique in that it’s the first where he’s taken a back seat in creative terms. Previously he’s written scripts and gotten various artists to illustrate; this time, he’s editing the script of one of his students (Zoe Simonson), which was illustrated by another (Monica Keszler).

  The reason I wanted to mention this strip (aside from the fact it released on Chemical Engineering Day … nice try Shepherd, tell me what part of a two-story fractional distillation column gene therapy relates to) is that Keszler (who illustrated a previous comic on refrigeration cycles), is well fascinating. She’s doing a co-op in Germany right now (there’s your European connection), and in addition to studying Chemical Engineering¹, she’s an accomplished digital artist taking a minor in animation. That’s impressive as hell, and I thought you should know.

Okay, take it away, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin:

• After covering the happenings of French webcartooning for a while, I began to notice a pattern: Youtubers were often involved together with webcartoonists, and in a way that I don’t see with English [language] creators, at least not as much.

  You may have seen it a bit through some of my previous contributions, first when Maliki started her ongoing crowdfunding site and in the process of doing so, explicitly credited Youtubers for trailblazing in the popular consciousness the notion that you can make a living from your passion projects; and second when an equal number of Youtubers and webcartoonists were involved in Editions Delcourt’s new collection, Octopus.

  But this is only the tip of the iceberg: for instance, following a number of them on Twitter I often see them in conversation with one another; and thinking about it, I can recall a number of other interactions that really tell a connection between webcartoonists and a subset of Youtubers.

  The most significant one is between Cyprien Iov (usually just Cyprien) and Paka. With 10 million people subscribing to his humor videos, Cyprien is one of the most popular independent video creators in the French web; and Paka has been writing and drawing his webcomic for more than 11 years and 2000 strips², so he has been around. So it was no small event when they released a comic book together a few years back, Roger Et Ses Humains, with Cyprien writing and Paka drawing.

  But this phenomenon is not limited to humor. For instance, Patrick Baud’s channel presents weird, unlikely, but true stories of scientific research, encounters, exploration, etc. And when he published a book of such anecdotes, who did he call to illustrate them? That’s right, webcartoonists such as Marion “Professeur Moustache” Montaigne, Boulet, and a few others. Octopus, as we’ve seen, is another instance of these interactions in the same area of scientific vulgarization.

  Some events also involve the two together: for instance, Boulet is a recurring participant to the Nuit Originale shows of Thomas Hercouët; and to a lesser extent, we have Yves Bigerel’s intervention in La Veillée.

  And that is without mentioning creators who do both, such as Les Kassos (which I’m told are blocked in the US, unfortunately³) where Bigerel is a writer, or Lays Farra, who creates both L’Eclaireuse and C’est Pas Sourcé.

  More generally, it appears that a number of webcartoonists and Youtubers are figuring out at the same time how to thrive as independents, whether it be through publishing books or crowdfunding or other means, and are in this together, one way or another. So I expect such collaborations and links to only increase in the future.

Gary again. The trend that FSFCPL has identified specifically in French webcomickers/Youtubers is analogous to a tendency I see generally in modern creative life — namely, that the limits to how one makes a creative life are falling at the same time that the boundaries between creative avenues blur.

The perfect example being the day I left work in Midtown Manhattan and happened to see an enormous billboard in Times Square drawn by a webcomicker, advertising a stage show featuring an internet nerd-music band, a writer/former teen actor, and a goofball that builds things (and frequently blows them up) to celebrate the scientific method.

The only thing they have in common is that they really liked each other’s work, so why not collaborate across every artistic boundary possible? Why not have a circle of people that do Cool Things that incorporates a radio host, a NASA flight director, a webcomicker who happened to write a book that became a blockbuster movie, and an astronaut (who, if not the poet they keep telling us we should send up, is pretty damn close⁴)? Why, in my youth, did writers only ever seem to socialize with writers, musicians with musicians⁵, actors with actors? Why shouldn’t Chemical Engineers and comics artists be working together?

No good reason that I can see. Thanks for reminding us, FSFCPL.

Spam of the day:

Bizarre Cure Destroys Toe & Nail Fungus

Well, now that I know it’s bizarre, I guess I’ll keep the fungus!

_______________
¹ Which I will grudgingly allow might be as difficult a discipline as my own, beloved Electrical Engineering.

² The only reason I haven’t introduced it by now is that it is 99% corny, untranslatable puns; don’t expect an English version any time soon …

³ Editor’s note: I was able to click through a sampling of the videos in this channel; I can’t say that they’re all available, or will remain so, but they don’t appear to be uniformly blocked at this moment.

⁴ Also: possessor of the most magnificent moustache of modern times. Respect.

⁵ To be fair, musicians also associated a lot with supermodels, although the latter now seem to be more likely to be found around athletes.

Some of it’s newer, some a bit less new, with an oddly common occurrence of the letter F.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a reminder that the folks behind the French take on the venerable insane fight tournament manga series, Last Man, have been working on a prequel animated series. Then funding promises went away, and to finish their work they’re Kickstartering. So this would be a French version of an anime adaptation of an insane fight tournament manga, which sounds awesome on its face before I remind you that Last Man is really good. Campaign page in English, French, and even a little Japanese, so check ‘er out in the next … fourteen days.

  (Also from FSFCPL, word that Boulet has been filling his Instagram with Pokemon shots, starting here; these are the disturbing Pokemon, something that Katuhiro Otomo and Satoshi Kon might dream up after a long night drinking with Cthulhu, the least threatening of which is doing something unspeakable to your cat, the more typical of which needs to be met with giant robots, plural.)

• From Andrew Farago at the Cartoon Art Museum, news of the last CAM public program: Cartooning Boot Camp at the American Bookbinders Museum, 35 Clementina Street in San Francisco. The free (!) program runs both Thursday the 18th (5:30pm – 8:00pm) and Saturday the 20th 11:00am – 3:00pm), offering a showing of the work done by aspiring cartoonists, ages 10 – 16, this summer. The first event is part of the Third Thursdays series for arts institutions in the Yerba Buena Alliance, and sponsors are providing refreshments at both.
• Want to check out the work of an absolute master? Kate Feirtag at the Society of Illustrators wants you to know that they’re putting on major retrospective of Ralph Steadman, chronicler of the great and the low, the everyday and the bat-country insane over his storied 50 year career. The show runs 6 September to 22 October, with an opening reception on Friday, 9 September at 6:30pm (suggested donation: US$15, beer provided plus cash bar) with a variety of events during the six week run. It all happens at the SoI building, 128 East 63rd in Manhattan.
• It’s time for the monthly TopatoCo Drink ‘n’ Draw, with deets at the Facebook page (okay, that one was a stretch). The special guest this month is Danielle Corsetto, who will meet you at Eastworks from 7:00pm – 10:00pm (it’s probably gonna rain, so bring your umbrella) for food, fun, fdrinking, and fdrawing.

Spam of the day:

Do not worry, all your efforts will be rewarded.

That’s reassuring, except for the part where the bulk of this message is in Russian and I’m pretty sure I now owe their mafia a favor.

Some very cool things going on these days.

Item! So KC Green has apparently tapped a vein of discomfort and unease in the popular consciousness, the depths of which were only hinted at previously. In other words, the This Is Fine plush cleared two hundred thousand dollars in its first 24 hours,and if the FFF Mk2 is to be believed, is headed for approximately US$700K to a million damn dollars. Honestly, though, this one is going to be an outlier in terms of predicatability but I think we can all agree it’s about time Green made some money off it.

Item! I don’t know how she does it, I really don’t. The absolutely invaluable Gina Gagliano at :01 Books got home from SDCC and promptly went to work shipping out review copies. I received copies of fall releases Demon (volume 1) by Jason Shiga, Tetris by Box Brown, and Last Man: The Rescue (volume 6) by Balak, Sanlaville, and Vivès. Initial impressions:

• Demon is a lot of fun and sets up the remaining 65-70% of the story nicely; ironically, it’s just finished up as a serialized webcomic, with only the first (of 22!) chapters still online. The first collection will be one of four books, to be released over the next while.
• Tetris is about more than the terribly addictive casual game; it’s about the history and politics of the game industry, the wheeling-dealing that characterized fights between companies at the time (including a fair number that no longer exist), and topics as far afield as the Ziegarnik Effect.
• Last Man: The Rescue barrels along and throws us a last-minute switchup that is even bigger than the one at the end of volume 2. Never — and remember this well, children — never suspect that things are going well when they appear to be going well, and you know there are two more books to go in the series. This one is going to go down in the history of punctured false conclusions and is a gut-punch of Whedonian proportions.

Look for proper reviews closer to release time (October, October, and November, respectively).

Item! Speaking of books due in the fall, I’ve read and re-read my ARC of Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier obsessively, and I’m still thinking hard on it. I’ve said more than once on this page that Kazu Kibuishi would be the reincarnation of Hayao Miyazaki, except for the fact that Miyazaki’s still alive. I refer to Kibuishi’s own take on of one of Miyazaki’s key tropes: fantastical flying machines and an emphasis on the hugeness of the sky.

But there’s another side to Miyazaki, the side where young (usually) girls (usually) find themselves in a world that casually admits the existence of magic. It’s not remarked on, it’s perfectly ordinary in its treatment — and to be honest, that’s the Miyazaki I love best.

Telgemeier is fixin’ to dethrone Kibuishi. Ghosts is nothing less than her Totoro. I’ll have much more to say on this, but I’ll need another five or ten readings first.

Spam of the day:
Multiple spams, actually. They all come in different languages (Russian and Portuguese most commonly), all translate to roughly the same message, all have an untranslatable burst of Cyrillic characters near the end. All purport to be from a 37 year old woman named (variously) Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela, who assures me

I am aware that the so-called MILF you relate positively. I have normal breasts, long legs, fuckable state. Without commitment, nothing. We are in conditional place, having sex

Indeed, Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela: without commitment, we are nothing.

AHHHHHHHH:

Oh hey, what? The Abominable Charles Christopher is back.

This is no minor AHHHHHHHH, this is the AHHHHHHHH from deep in your soul, best accompanied by the declaration I’M A SHARK. Karl Kerschl is between projects, Charles Christopher is back, and all is well in the world again.

Oh, yeah, other stuff is going on, too. Like TCAF later this week, which almost everybody in webcomics attends in alternating years¹. And that event reminds me that Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin noticed that the French contingent at TCAF will be more than just Featured Guest Boulet (who, don’t get me wrong, is great):

Yves Bigerel, better known as Balak, renowned inventor of turbomédia (remember about digital comics? He has kept making this stuff ever since) and of the jambon-beurre-based method of drawing the chonchon [NSFW], who, with Bastien Vivès, will be there for Last Man.

Marguerite Abouet, writer of the fantastic Aya of Yop City and Akissi.

Somehow I missed the announcement of Balak and Vivès, and I don’t know Abouet’s work at all, so be smarter than me and seek them out. Also, that video of Balak? Somebody make sure that Rokudenashiko sees it, since it’s right up her alley². I don’t know if the split verdict on Rokudenashiko’s obscenity trial³ would cause some overzealous prig at Canadian Immigration to keep her out of the country, but here’s hoping it doesn’t happen.

PS: AHHHHHHHH.

Spam of the day:

Checkout the latest Cleaning Service Options
Checkout the latest Used Cars
Checkout the latest Varicose Vein Treatment
Checkout the latest CPAP Options

Four spams, one return address. So I’m an elderly person with bad legs, sleep apnea, a dirty house, and a need to hit the open road? Got it.

______________
¹ TCAF being so popular with vendors and space not being infinite, a couple of years ago showrunner Chris Butcher instituted an every-other-year plan for exhibitors. Some individuals are there more often if they get hosted by, say, a publisher like TopatoCo or Koyama Press.

² So to speak.

³ She was acquitted on charges of displaying plaster casts of her vulva as art, but convicted of distributing 3D printer data files that would allow others to create the same sculptures. The latter hit her with a ¥400,000 (approximately US$4000) fine, which she is appealing.

As for the immigration issue, the customs and immigration folks have long had a bug up their respective butts about what they consider obscenity, especially as regards comics and manga. If anybody traveling to TCAF will invoke their ire, it’ll be Rokudenashiko. On the plus side, if there’s no problems with getting to the show, she can trade kayak stories with Karla Pacheco.

And my goodness, there are things happening that didn’t originate with :01 Books (if you can imagine such a thing): Emily Carroll did the illustrations on a new book that released yesterday; the Jim Zub-penned Skullkickers (with the vast majority of art duties over the past five years and three dozen issues handled by Edwin Huang and Misty Coats) comes to an end as a comic book today, although it lives on in webcomic reruns (where it’s probably got about half a year to go).

But there are two pieces of :01 discussion I wanted to have today.

First, the book that I will be discussing in detail below is the first mentioned here at Fleen to be designed by Danielle Ceccolini, whose hiring I mentioned in conjunction with last year’s New York Comic Con. Some of the review copies I’ve received have Ceccolini designing covers for books that have predecessors in a series, or which are designed with one or more other people; solo standalone books are also in the stack. There’s a long lead time on publishing, and I’m certain that Ceccolini is thrilled to see the first tranche of her designs finally getting out into the world.

Second, that book is The Chase, the third volume of the Last Man series. This is the book where the pattern established in the previous two gets upended, and which sets a new pattern that wasn’t previously apparent.

The upended pattern is that it’s a Eurocomic-style fight-tournament manga; it’s got ritualized fighting elements, but it’s more of a mystery story. The oddly medieval/magical land of the first two books is left behind for a more decaying society teetering on the edge of chaos. It’s not quite a Mad Maxian postapocalypse, more like a failed state that is in a pre-post-apocalypse rut; we see hints that there are more civilized corners of the world where technology is made instead of scavenged.

Other parts of the decaying wasteland motif are turned upside down as well — there are the uncontrolled, semi-mutant “police” and “justice system” that are a thin veneer of pretense over barbarism, which we’ve seen a million times before. But in that decaying world where the cops are literal bandits, did you ever wonder what the firefighters are like?

They’re pretty bestial, but they are determined to help and are willing to enthusiastically run over anything in their way to be of service, even get into a brawl with the cops if that’s what it takes. They’re in the book for three pages, max, and if they’re just as quasi-semi-mutant-pre-post-apocalyptic as the rest of a every-man-for-himself society, they are at least selflessly so. It’s a fresh and hilarious take on the trope, and they are just one of the twists to be seen here in the borderlands.

The new pattern is right there on the spine of the book — at the very bottom of spine, below the :01 log is a thumbnail of the character that dominates the book. It wasn’t obvious before, but book one was really all about young Adrian Velba, book two about mysterious stranger Richard Aldana, and book three is about Adrian’s mother, Marianne.

She was a typical mother looking out for a young kid before; now she’s revealed to be knowledgeable about the wide world, an extraordinarily resourceful traveler, a crazy-skilled (to the point of nigh-suicidal) motorcyclist, and the most dangerous fighter we’ve seen yet. She consistently underplays her hand until things get seriously dangerous, then she hands this lawless pseudo-quasi-semi-mutant-pre-post-apoacalyptic town’s brutal enforcement regime its ass without breaking a sweat. Marianne Velba is not a slightly overprotective mom but rather a rampaging valkyrie who will lay waste to anything that threatens her son or obstructs her path of discovery.

But more importantly, this is her book, no question, making it clear that Last Man is going to have shifting protagonists; maybe book four will give us a new POV character, maybe we’ll rotate back through the three we’ve seen already. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time the series is done it turns out it was mostly Marianne’s story and should have been called Last Woman.

Last Man: The Chase is by Bastien Vivès, Michaël Sanlaville, and Balak, with translation from the French by Alexis Siegel. It releases on 6 October, which should give you enough time to find and absorb Last Man: The Stranger and Last Man: The Royal Cup, and try to figure out where the story is going. As always, Fleen thanks Gina Gagliano at :01 for providing the review copies.

Spam of the day:

Famous Theological Uncovers Church Conspiracy No.6283187

They’re numbering Church conspiracies now? That’s pretty organized.

So hands up if you like insane fight-tournament manga — everything from Dragonball to Yakitate!! Japan¹, where the plucky [young/orphan or semiorphan] hero survives against all odds and the individual fights consist of endless posing and mystic mumbo-jumbo, for hundreds and hundreds of pages (or entire seasons of the tie-in TV series).

Yeah, Last Man ain’t like that.

It’s taken from the model of the insane fight-tournament manga, but the creators are French; the visual designs are halfway between manga and ligne claire, and our POV character isn’t the plucky kid, it’s the ne’er do well from out of town that shows up and grabs the plucky kid for the tournament because the rules say he needs a partner and there’s nobody else around.

That’s Richard; he doesn’t know squat about the town he’s landed in, the nature of the tournament, or the local fighting style; he just heard there’s a tournament and he wants in for his own reasons. He appears to be a man out of time, referencing modern (technological) items that fly over the heads of the pseudo-middle ages locals. And the first time he sees an opponent start to marshal his mystic energies with endless posing, Richard calmly decks him to the shock and consternation of all present. It’s just Not Done!

Furthermore, the story moves fast; in Book One (The Stranger), Richard shows up, partners with young Adrian, puts the moves on Adrian’s mom, and makes it all the way to the quarterfinals. Book Two (The Royal Cup, out tomorrow) continues where the first left off and ends on a cliffhanger indicating that the tournament was not the important part of the story — and that Adrian’s mom is more worldly than she ever let on. Books Three and later will presumably alter the insane fight-tournament manga model further, as that little town and the all-important tournament recede in the rear-view mirrors of a pair of motorcycles² heading out to a world that Richard knows better but which is as mysterious to Adrian … and us. It’s a great read.

Thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 Books, we were able to send some questions to the creators of Last Man — Bastien Vivès, Michaël Sanlaville, and Balak — and are happy to bring their answers to you now.

Our thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01, to Balak, Sanlaville, and Vives, and to everybody that helped bring Last Man to these shores. You can read more about the series (and Book Two, go get it) at the other entries of Last Man Blog Tour, which continues tomorrow at Graphic Policy.

______________
¹ Or even sports manga; if you haven’t read Cross Game you really should, but a single baseball half-inning can take dozens of pages. Then again, other games slip by between panels.

² In a pseudo-middle ages setting, whaaaa?

Or possibly they’re urged to remain calm; the ink ribbon in the teletype here at Fleen Central is really old and faded.

• It appears that the magic has faded, but vague hope may be held out for next week, as Jeph Jacques allows for the possibility of return:
  

  I have a few awesome guest comics left so I will run some more next week! Have we seen the last of #buttrocket???? WE SHALL SEE

  None of which should be taken in a way that causes one to think that Megan McKay hasn’t turned in a terrific strip; it’s adorable, and one could argue more QC-ish than the past four days of gluteal missilry, and should be enjoyed on its own merits.

  Edit to add [6:00pm EDT 20 June 2015]: #buttrocket is too strong to be denied; the strip has mysteriously sprouted three more panels and now features #buttrocket. The #buttrocket panorama will be updated at a later date to reflect this.

• As a consequence of the Cartoon Art Museum getting a lease extension¹, various events at CAM now have different run dates. More precisely, the following exhibitions have been extended to run to the (currently scheduled) close date of 12 September:
  

  Darth Vader and Friends
  Savage Dragon: The Art of Erik Larsen
  The Bronze Armory Showcase
  Songs and Secrets: The Art of Song of the Sea and The Secret of Kells
  Small Press Spotlight on Geoff Vasile

  You’ve still got all summer to make your way to San Francisco and check ’em out.

• Regular readers of this page may recall that from time to time, Fleen participates in blog-based book tours, usually for releases from our friends at :01 Books. There’s one going on now, in support of the second volume of Last Man by Bastien Vivès, Michaël Sanlaville, and Balak, due out Tuesday. If you haven’t read the first volume, it’s basically on the time-honored manga theme of the insane fighting tournament, but done by French creators so it’s over in three books instead of fifteen or twenty.

  There’s a lot going on in the book below the surface, and we’ll have a Q&A with the creators here on Monday, so be sure to come back then. Thanks as always to the incomparable Gina Gagliano at :01 for our review copies, and for doing all the logistical footwork in getting the blog tour set up.

Okay, we’re out of here; enjoy your weekend and remember tell your da you love him this much.

Spam of the day:

thermal & cold polymerization petroleum resin, petroleum naphthalene, tar and thousand-ton capacit

You’re the sons of bitches that lifted my credit card number to try to buy US$7000 worth of industrial chemicals, aren’t you? Only got one thing to say to you.

_______________
¹ Meaning they won’t have to close their doors next weekend.