We at Fleen have talked a lot about The Nib, the Matt Bors-run editorial (mostly) cartooning subsite at Medium, from its inception to its recent folding-up. Things are happening rapidly over there, and if you haven’t been paying attention, it’s time you did.

Firstly, they launched a Kickstarter to publish a 300 page book containing the best of the 2000+ comics that were published there in the 1.5+ years of operation. And quite frankly, I’d be talking about Eat More Comics even if Bors had promised that every single one of those 300 pages would be filled with comics I hated by cartoonists whose work I despised¹ for a very simple reason, which was stated by onetime associate site editor Eleri Harris, starting about 45 seconds in on the Kickstarter video:

The money we’re asking for is for two things: Firstly, we’re going to compensate all our artists fairly for republishing their work again.

The thing about The Nib that I loved most of all — the reason that you should have loved The Nib when it was still a thing — is that they paid. Cartoonists got paid for the right to publish their work (or in many cases, re-publish work that had already appeared elsewhere); Bors had a budget and he wasn’t afraid to use it. And I don’t know what the contracts for running cartoons on The Nib looked like, but Bors, Harris, and onetime assistant site editor Matt Lubchansky are paying the creators again for the right to republish them in the book. Which led to the second money (so to speak) quote of the video, from Lubchansky, starting about the 1:10 mark:

If we blow past [the funding goal], we’re just gonna make more books and give the artists more money.

We all know that not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t try to get artists to work for free, or to under-pay them by offering crappy contracts that many (especially creators at the start of their careers) feel obligated to sign out of fear of missing out. The only response that a creator should ever have to such an overture is No, pay me.

Unless, that is, the creator is approached by whoever the hell this is arguing with Rachel from What Pumpkin² that they should get to use Homestuck without paying because (variously):

• Other people aren’t asking for money!
• We’re building a BRAND!
• We’re all still young and have never done this before!
• We don’t have any money!
• But our Kickstarter!³

In which case, the appropriate response is Fuck you, pay me.

Getting back to the original point, I don’t think that Bors, Harris, and Lubchansky have ever heard Fuck you, pay me directed at them, and that is reason enough to support Eat More Comics.

The other reason will be that a good showing in the Kickstart will provide direct, measurable numbers on what the support for a site like The Nib is, and how much of those supporters are willing to part with actual money. That can only be helpful to Bors as he talks with other publishers with an eye towards reviving The Nib, seeing as how he’s left Medium. Here’s hoping we don’t have long to wait before cartoonists the web over once again have a site whose mission statement is Hey, can we run your cartoon? We pay.

Spam of the day:

Hmm it appears lile your blog aate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just suum it up what I haad written and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.

No, your first comment was about gold farming in MMORPGs.

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¹ Which do exist on The Nib, which is a point in Bors’s favor — if you’re running a cartooning site that’s mostly editorial and I love/agree with everything you publish, you’re doing a crappy job. Bors does not do crappy jobs.

² I have my suspicions, and there aren’t many Kickstarts going on now that would fit the pattern that the whiny person describes, but since Rachel’s anonymized it I’ll keep my speculations to myself.

³ Repeat after me: Kickstarter is not a magic money machine that you go to as rank newcomers to be discovered and made suddenly wealthy. It’s a way to measure the appeal of products to an audience that you already have. No audience going in means you’re going to receive some hard lessons coming out. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to absorb them, but I’m not overly optimistic.

Slowly, slowly I am finding myself drawn back into [web]comics, the discourse around them, and the having of Opinions. A’course, it’s pretty easy to find the will to write when Matt Bors drops you a line.

Readers of this page will know that we at Fleen hold The Nib — edited by Bors, with assistance from Eleri Harris and Mattie Lubchansky — in high regard. It’s a deeply thoughtful, skillfully-curated collection of the best editorial, nonfiction, and journalistic comics from around the world, and they pay.

For some time now, longer pieces from The Nib that were up for reruns have been redirecting to Tinyview, a situation that I noticed but which in my pandemic-induced torpor I did not investigate too closely; today, though, Bors dropped me a helpful explainer which I am more than happy to share with you, as it has as its ultimate goal paying comics creators:

For a few years I have been doing some work with Tinyview, a comics app that runs exclusive comics from an array of creators like Gemma Correll, Sarah Graley, and Brian Gordon.

We’re in the middle of a campaign to raise $25,000 in monthly subscription fees that will allow the site to reach sustainability and offer more comics. (All creators are paid pretty good rates.) The campaign is all on-platform with subscribers, not a Kickstarter or anything, and the goal is fairly straightforward: become sustainable through reader support and build from there.

Those looking for more details can find them here but the gist is the campaign runs until 14 February, as of this writing has raised US$15,519 of the goal, and when Bors says that creators are paid pretty good rates, keep in mind that he’s spent most of a decade now trying to find ways to pay creators like it’s still the heyday of magazine cartooning and folks can make a living at it.

And speaking of doing one’s best to put money into the pockets of creators — new Iron Circus anthology, yo:

Hey, Hey, gang! Spike here, letting y’all in early on:

Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures!

This anthology’s been in the works for months, and the line-up and stories are both ALL-STAR! Whether it’s a tale of our attempts to un-extinct an ibex, centrifugally assisted birth, or one deadline-blowing apocalypse after another, these stories are beautifully illustrated, expertly written, and unbelievably fun. [emphasis original]

That from an email that landed in my inbox right about launch time.

The sharp-eyed reader will note that this one is not being Kickstarted, as Spike — famous early user and vocal promoter of Kickstarter — broke with them last year over their inexplicable¹ decision to go blockchain²; uh, we probably should have covered that here but … 2022, man. Anyway, Spike’s been having success cutting out the middle layer and just running IC’s crowdfunding through Backerkit directly, and the usual profit-share is in effect: for every US$5000 over goal, the page rate goes up by US$5. Shifting away from Kickstarter makes it tough to apply the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II as it relies upon Kickstarter data via Kicktraq, but things launched at noon EST and as of not quite five hours later, Failure To Launch is sitting somewhere north of US$15,000 of a US$20,000 goal.

I think they’re gonna make it to goal in the month remaining before deadline.

Oh, and if you backed it in the first hour? Free domestic/reduced rate international shipping. That’s damn clever, Spike, and just as other publishers have copied the share-the-wealth-with-creators approach you pioneered, I think we’ll see them give backers a similar break in the future.

And just so we’re clear — I’m not promising daily updates or anything. This is gonna take a while. But slowly, slowly, I think things are going to shake loose around here.

Spam of the day:
You know what? I haven’t included a Spam of the day since the end of January 2022, if you don’t count a post from two months later that was all spam. Partly this was because the subjects of the few posts since then didn’t deserve to have spam share the page with them, partly because I got out of the habit.

As near as I can tell, the first Spam of the day ran on 30 May, 2014. That’s about half of the blog’s lifespan. I think it did its job and can rest now.

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¹ Literally. They promised numerous explanations and never came close to coherency.

² We at Fleen are still trying to decide what to do personally about Kickstarter’s idiocy. There is literally no reason to involve the blockchain in anything, but at the same time it’s pretty much impossible to tell how much of that math-challenged bullshit is actually in Kickstarter’s infrastructure. For now, at least, if creators choose to use Kickstarter and that’s the only way to support them on a project, we will do so … but if Kickstarter actually implements this crap? Sorry, creators. Find another way for me to give you money.

Hi. Been a while.

As 15 December is the agreed-upon date for the launch of this blog, and that means yesterday marked the end of the sixteenth year of Fleen, I figured I should mention here at the start of Year Seventeen about why it’s been so damn sparse around here.

I mean, pandemic. That’s been the case forever. But there’s been more unique challenges in … let’s say the back half of 2021.

In rough order, I found out a relative was stealing from my mother (who has dementia and who I don’t particularly get on with but you still don’t want to see anybody exploited, at least if you aren’t a monster), I discovered my birth family (as many of you know, I was adopted at birth; I now have aunts and uncles, a half-brother and new niblings), my marriage came to an end, I moved from New Jersey to Massachusetts, I’ve left behind volunteer EMS, and I’m starting a new relationship.

So, yeah, few things on my mind and not much spare bandwidth. I’m hoping that when the calendar ticks over to 2022 I’ll be able to find some more focus re: webcomics, and to get back to posting here a hell of a lot more than I have been. I mean, Kickstarter, right? Fuck all that, but I’m going to need some time to get my thoughts into a coherent form and get back to the habit of sharing them here. Writing is a skill and mine has been atrophying for a while now, so be patient with me if you would.

If there’s holidays that you celebrate at this time of year, I hope they’re wonderful for you. We at Fleen are almost through the significantly difficult time, and we’ll see you on the far side as things begin to get better.

Thanks,

Gary

Late night with a dude in crisis in EMT-land. Couple quick items before I try to make up for being six hours short on sleep.

• Tillie Walden is a particular favorite here at Fleen. We’ve talked about her modern books (Spinning, On A Sunbeam, Are You Listening?) at some length, and have made oblique references to her earlier work, published by Avery Hill as the result of a cold-call email and a decision on Walden’s part that it probably wasn’t a scam. She some Ignatzen for them, but they’ve been difficult to track down since the print runs were small and overseas¹.

  So let’s all be glad that Avery Hill have compiled those earlier, hard-to-find works into a single omnibus edition called Alone In Space. The bookplate editions are sold out, but the hardcover is still available and will cost you less than individually tracking down The End Of Summer, I Love This Part, and A City Inside, as well as adding various short pieces from print and the web. Tillie Walden is a staggeringly skilled cartoonist and this should be on your shelf.

• Lots of other stuff should be on your shelf, and now it a terrific time to make that happen. Via the twitterfeed of George:
  

  Graphic Novels went from 9.3% of adult fiction to 20%. Making it the 2nd largest category. Like dang.

  He goes on to note that it’s all lumped together, regardless of genre and a lot of it is manga, but it’s still comics, it’s still fiction, and it’s only going to grow. We live in good times for comics.

Spam of the day:

silent-plug.com

Nope. Deleting that one unread. Don’t wanna know.

Pervs.

_______________
¹ I’d never seen a copy of any of the three until I met Walden at Comics Camp 2019 and she had two of them at her Mini-Con table.

… One the other, you got to admire the hustle. Kathy Peterson would like you to know that Kidnapped By Gnomes has hit 300 strips total, if one considers both the before & after of an epically productive hiatus¹, and also that KBG is taking part in the virtual TCAF, including an appearance in the exhibitor room on 13 May from 5:00pm-7:00pm. Two books on sale, a third premiering, and I have to check that my blogroll isn’t actually changed — those little geeks are persistent.

And since we’re talking about the reigning Queen of Hey Remember When That Webcomic Launched, maybe we should mention one of the Kings. A looong time ago, one of the most complex (in terms of topic matter and visuals) webcomics was A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible by David Hellman and Dale Beran. They did maybe the last ALILBTDII over at The Nib, where Beran also posted some heartbreaking comics essays about his experiences as a teacher in Baltimore in times of unrest. He did a book about how the worst areas of the internet shitposted their way to an authoritarian government, too.

And lately, he’s been running a comic that he made during quarrantine on Twitter, about a page a day, starting here. It’s called Arthur Pendlebroke, 1st Level Mage, and it’s seemingly about a guy who finishes grad school and discovers his parents never told him about his invite to wizarding school a dozen years ago, and being the oldest recently-graduated wizard in a world of too many roomies and the gig economy.

I say seemingly because Arthur leaves the story after about four pages and a couple of his friends (one of our mortal realms, one decidedly not) have to hunt him down find him you know what? Hunt him down might actually be accurate. He was supposed to take them on a Trader Joe’s run, and now he’s in a goblin palace, you see. Probably. Might be dead. Might have to kill him. Hard to tell.

It’s a hoot and a half, and I recommend that you read along until you decide, Self, I can’t stand this one page a day pace! and drop the five bucks it’ll cost you to grab the whole thing on Gumroad.

Spam of the day:

Vaccine Shedding Testimonies along with Vax Death and Illness Pics/Videos
[lengthy list of bullshit and Bible verses]

I am going to find you, come to where you are, and shed all my vaccine detritus on you until you are irredeemably contaminated and God hates you. Hail Satan.

_______________
¹ Attending med school and doing a residency would have been enough for most folks, but coming back to doing a webcomic while serving as an emergency medicine doctor during a pandemic? That’s gotta be a record of some kind.

One of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my purchases of comics was waiting until the March trilogy was complete, as it gave me the chance to purchase all three at once from Nate Powell at MoCCA, and tell him how much his work meant to me. It was a quiet moment at the table, nobody else looking to buy or talk for about ten minutes, and the respect that Powell had for his creative partners Andrew Aydin and Congressman¹ John Lewis suffused the entire conversation.

Powell will forever be associated with March² — rightly so — but he’s done plenty of work on his own for years. For those that need a quick primer, you can find a exploration of how fashion (in the sense of what we want our clothes to convey about us) ties into toxic masculinity and fascism, or maybe a look at people for whom global warming is neither abstract nor in the future. There’s a strong tendency towards thoughtful consideration of complex issues, and a sense of seeking justice in Powell’s work, and all of it resonates with emotional heft, not least because of his tendency towards abstract, implied panel gutters (check out the page previews here, here or here, you’ll see what I mean immediately).

And with a new collection of comics essays³, Powell is talking about his work, the message he wants to share, and the world he wants to see. Save It For Later is the book of the month at The Nib (buy it from them and you’ll get a signed bookplate, while they last), and they’ve got a talk with Powell up at their YouTube channel. Also: Powell in conversation with Eleanor Davis (courtesy of Politics & Prose), and an upcoming Q&A with the Monroe County [Indiana] Public Library on Sunday, 16 May at 2:00pm EDT (register here).

That ten minutes that I spent talking with Powell was an experience that I still think back on — it’s the sort of conversation that makes you want to think hard about things and make decisions that will bend the arc of your life in directions that benefit others. Check out the interviews he’s done, sign up for the session in ten days, and see if it doesn’t lead you in some new directions (which may or may not involve good trouble).

Spam of the day:

Scientists at the Dental Study Institute in New Jersey have quickly run some tests and CONFIRMED the mixture is legit and that it indeed eliminates cavities in a very short time. [emphasis original]

There is no “Dental Study Institute” in New Jersey. There is a Dental Studies Institute, but they don’t have scientists; they are an instructional company that teaches dental practice personnel required continuing education courses. The only test they’re running is on the students, to determine if they learned enough about herpes to get their 5 CEUs.

_______________
¹ And strong contender for Greatest Living American Of The Past Century, alongside Mr Rogers and Dolly Parton.

² And, undoubtedly, Run once it releases.

³ I’m still waiting for my copy, which is also your occasional reminder that Diamond’s entire comics distribution business is extraordinarily craptacular.

Dog continues to improve, I should be able to do proper posting again from tomorrow. In the meantime, we at Fleen congratulate Matt Lubchansky — honored cartoonist, Nib editor, and gentlethem about town — on their just-announced original graphic novel. For those that can’t read the graphic, the meat of the book deal announcement is:

Cartoonist and Associate Editor of The Nib Matt Lubchansky’s BOYS WEEKEND, part autobiographical fiction, part satire, and part SF horror, following Sammie, who a year after they came out as trans must navigate a bachelor party weekend on El Campo, a hedonistic floating wonderland in international waters, while a murderous cult tries to take over the island, to Anna Kaufman at Pantheon, by Kate McKean and Howard Morhaim Literary Agency (world).

There’s a particular format to book deal announcements that is heavy on commas and light on anything else resembling punctuation, but the gist is clear: it’s Lubchansky’s story, and the description sounds great. The rest is the acquiring editor and publisher, the agent and agency, and the fact that the deal was for worldwide publishing rights. Lubchansky has indicated we’re at least a year and a half from release, not least because it’s still being worked on and publishing schedules are such that a release less than 12 months after final manuscript submission would be considered warp speed.

Lubchansky has exactly the cartoony energy in their character designs, and exactly the right anarchic streak to their story work to make Boys Weekend really shine. Looking forward to it like whoa, and we at Fleen will likely have more to mention about Lubchansky’s recent work tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Chilly in your cubicle? This tiny space heater sits on your plug and blasts the heat.

It’s already Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and it looks like the Pacific Northwest fire season has already started. Fuck off.

There’s an awful lot of mentions through the long history of Fleen of Matt Bors — of his editorial cartoons, and of his stewardship of The Nib. Looks like the future will have a good deal less of one, a bit more of the other, and presumably a near-infinite percentage increase in entirely new stuff, as Bors looks for his next pursuits:

After 18 years and more than 1,600 political cartoons, I’ve decided to retire my weekly comic. This is a decision long in the making, one I’ve slowly walked myself up to over the years, and have recently decided is time to commit to. My last cartoon was two weeks ago.

I want to do more nonfiction cartooning at The Nib — the interviews and journalism I have only been able to do in between the cracks of my deadlines — and I’m actively preparing pitches as a writer on some fiction comics. It’s time for me to work in longer formats and dip into all the kinds of comics I love and want to create.

As good as Bors’s editorial cartoons are — and I remain of the same mind that I was on my 45th birthday, wherein I find Bors’s POV to be exactly on point, bringing up a new perspective I hadn’t considered, and completely off base in about equal measure — it’s in his founding and continued nurturing of The Nib that will be his enduring legacy. There will be at least another two generations of editorial and nonfiction cartooning standouts because of the platform that they’ve had at The Nib, one that let them hone their skills and also get paid in American Cash Money. If nothing else, retiring his own weekly contributions opens up slots for other creators to sell and show their work.

And that’s before you consider the folks on The Nib’s editorial staff, who’ve come into their own and will no doubt run other outlets in the future, spreading their skills as well.

And I can’t help but see this move as related to an email I got about a month ago, sent to The Nib’s subscribers, outlining Bors’s desire to grow the site and looking for upgraded subscription levels. A more self-sustaining site will give him the time to look at those other creative avenues; if the best daily anthology of comics work wasn’t enough to get you to break out a couple bucks a month, consider what Bors might do with the time to refine a pitch. The headline today isn’t hyperbole — I very much want to see a book-length story with Gorm and Tinsel; I love those goobers.

Not content to provide the infrastructure with his own site, Bors has still more irons in the fire:

I’ll also be serving as an Advisor for Tinyview, a promising new comics app, where I’ll be bringing in an array of comics across many genres. (You can download it here.)

It’s a measure of the confidence I have in Bors that I’m including that download link for something I haven’t vetted myself. I trust that they will not disappoint. In the meantime, drop over to the announcement on the Twitters and let him know what his work’s meant to you — I’ll bet it’s a considerable amount.

Spam of the day:

Don’t wait, these ED KILLERS are selling like hotcakes!

Okay, I get that you’re trying to sell me a bogus ED (erectile dysfunction) cure, aka boner pills. But when you put it in all caps like that, it looks like you’re offering a product and/or service to kills dudes named Ed, or maybe a product and/or service where dudes named Ed are killers. Either way, confusing.

She was such a skittish, skinny little thing when we got her around two and a half years old, having spent her entire life not more than six months in any one place with any particular people. It took her a while to relax around us and let her goofball personality show from behind the veil of stubborn stoicism. Right now, she’s napping in a sunny patch and waiting for the work day to be done so she can collect her due allocation of skritches and get her walkies in. So that’s all right.

Oh, right, webcomics.

• Subscribers to The Nib, the folks that get the magazine 3-4 times a year, you’re going to want to check your email and maybe your spam folder. They’ve sent you a message that you get to give away one copy of The Nib’s Pandemic issue (in print form, no less!) to somebody that you think would appreciate it. The instructions are in the email that went out to you this morning; me, most of the people I know are already subscribers or contributors to The Nib, so I’m not sure who to give it to.

  Let’s do a contest, then. Send me an email with the subject FREE MAGAZINE to me (that would be gary) at the name of this-here website (fleen), which is a dot-com, and I’ll choose one of you at random to get the issue, a US$15 value and probably the best done by the lauded group of contributors. Let’s make the deadline … 11:59pm MST on Sunday, 28 February, the last moment before my evil twin sees his birthday skipped over because he’s a Leap Year Baby.

  You have to make yourself a promise, though — if you enter the giveaway, you have to ask yourself if you should be a subscriber, or at least buy some stuff from The Nib’s retail operation to help support their mission — to find the best cartoonists in the world and pay them properly for their best work.

• I wrote a while back about Shing Yin Khor and Jeeyon Shim were Kickstarting an interactive game, with prompts to be delivered by email (and physical ephemera sent to high-tier backers), under the title of A Field Guide To Memory. I hadn’t mentioned that the Kickstarter overfunded, that other creators were brought in (and paid!) to enrich the story, and that gameplay had started.

  With today’s email, we’re about two-thirds of the way through a deeply personal, deeply weird, and somewhat unsettling tale, wherein you adopt the persona of a scientific researcher whose mentor — cryptid field evolutionary scientist Elizabeth Lee — has been declared dead after going missing five years ago on a research trip. I have, for the past two and a half weeks, found myself bound up in my personal history with a woman that I never met, who never existed, who may or may not have definitively proved the existence of Dipodomys antilocapra, the Pronghorned Desert Rat.

  I have dug up memories of my own life and that of my in-game equivalent (who is looking for the evolutionary descendants of pterosaurs — they’re out there still, dammit, just like the coelacanth!) and at times been unable to separate them. The game has you write letters and journal entries, keep field notes related to Dr Lee’s work, research animal track patterns and bird calls, dredge up anger and betrayal, and possibly mentor members of the Little Citizen Scientists Club. I will not tell you how to play the game, as it’s highly individualized and therefore there is no right way to play, but I will say this: if given the opportunity, if you are in future days passed a PDF of gameplay prompts (or even physical artifacts like D. antilocapra antler casts) and you come across an email address?

  It works. Send the email. The only thing that isn’t real, as near as I can tell, is the address shown for the Institute for Theoretical Evolutions in Bethesda, Maryland. The Pronghorned Desert Rat, the other cryptids, the bureaucrats keeping you from Dr Lee’s notes and artifacts, the letters from her students and colleagues and lovers? All real, every bit of it, even the parts that are fiction. Especially the parts that are fiction.

  If you’d like to learn more — and perhaps end up with more questions than answers — search the hashtag #FieldGuideToMemory. If nothing else, you’ll see some breathtaking photos of the very lovely artifacts that players are creating as we delve into mystery and self-revelation at a rate of one prompt per day for 20 days.

Okay, have a great rest of the day, and tell the doggo(s) in your life that they are very good dogs because they’re all very good dogs.

Spam of the day:

I tried to find you on google maps, but I couldn’t,

STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MY HOUSE, YOU FREAK.

And the start of this week will largely be the same, sorry. Ortho doc says no lasting damage and doesn’t need to see me again, but I have to go easy on my right hand/wrist so I’m cutting down typing for another day or two. Network is back, snow is largely gone, EMS work turned out better than I expected, so that’s all right.

But I can’t bear to give you nothing today, so please enjoy Gemma Correll’s contribution at The Nib today, which had me laughing so hard I woke up my dog, who was snoozing behind me¹. For that matter, Maki Naro has a great piece up as well on the mutations/new strains of COVID-19 that is as neat a piece of science comicking as I’ve seen this year so far.

Spam of the day:

A new study from Harvard Scientists has revealed that ONE of the following foods is linked to combating Alzheimer’ s and dementia. Can you guess which it is? 1. Red wine 2. Fish 3. Avocados 4. Clams

One of those is a singular food, one is booze, and two are broad animal classifications with almost limitless species variations. I’m going to guess 5. You guys are full of shit.

_______________
¹ This is half faithful hound routine (particularly considering she tends to keep spindly legs and/or tail right behind the casters of my office chair, a position of extreme hazard) and half recognition of the fact that one of the heating ducts runs directly under the floor of my office right behind my chair and thus it’s a warm spot for napping. She wags hi, by the way.