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.

Hey, welcome back. Try as I might, I just can’t make the stuff I want to talk about today fit into a theme, so let’s just tuck in and see what we got.

• If you read my takes on this year’s Eisner nominations (and I promise, I’m going to talk about the Digital Comic/Webcomic nominees), you’ll recall that I was generally happy with the overabundance of great work recognized.

  However.

  I will say, at the remove of nearly a week, that it’s baffling that the nominations entirely failed to recognize two long-running, critically acclaimed and widely beloved series that wrapped up last year. I speak, naturally, of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm, Rico Renzi, Travis Lanham) and Giant Days (John Allison, Max Sarin, Whitney Cogar, Jim Campbell). Actually, that’s not quite true, as Campbell was nominated for Best Lettering, with Giant Days listed as one of ten titles he worked on. But still — tupping liberty.

  That being said, Allison, Sarin, Cogar, and Campbell¹ kept the band together for Wicked Things (issue #2 due sometime in the future, now that we are gradually making our way into commercial resumption), so the voters will have a chance to make it up next year. Additionally, Allison’s been killing it on the Steeple extended story (wrapped today), with some news of what’s next:

  I have more tales of Tredregyn to tell (“Secret Sentai” and “Showbusiness”), but I’m writing this six weeks in the past (April 29th), so I have no idea where they’ll appear, yet. Maybe the comics industry has come back to life. Maybe we are all living in caves. Hopefully I haven’t caught the covid. Awaiting my fate, I have had no choice to but to begin to draw another exclusive limited web-series event — NEMS — at destroyhistory.com. It begins on Monday June 15th.

  Okay, 1: I have never in my life wanted to read anything based solely on a title as much as Secret Sentai, and B: Allison cognoscenti will recall that Destroy History is the short way to say The Further Adventures Of Shelley Winters In Time (her last adventure involved Hedy Lamarr and her WWII-era invention of spread spectrum coding), so bookmark it now so that you may dig in on Monday.

• There’s been a great deal of discussion about money in publishing in the past sevenday or so, particularly around the topics of who has it, who is offered it, and why most of seems to go to white people. But an ancillary discussion is being had — and keep in mind it was decided to talk about page rates on 1 June well before the world started down either the COVID suckhole or the Gods Dammit White People, BIPOC Have Had It With Your Shit uprising (2020 edition) — around money in comics and such.

  It’s been pointed out that the racial disparities exist here as elsewhere (in terms of money offered and who gets to be the creators/subjects of stories), but also that comics pays a crapload less than prose does². This is for a whole host of reasons, and even if everything were made equitable (which won’t happen unless people talk about it and share their worth so others know what they can ask for), there is an economic limitation on comics that prose simply doesn’t have.

  Paper. What looks good with words alone, and what looks good with words and pictures have vastly different cost bases. You don’t understand that side of publishing economics and neither do I, but fortunately somebody does, and his name is George. He tried to cut his experience-based knowledge down to tweet length, found it was impossible to do so, and slapped up a four and a half page explainer so that you can understand, too.

  The costs of paper stock don’t make the lowballing, crappy WFH page rates, and racial disparities any more acceptable, but if people are going to fight for better pay — and they should! — having all the relevant info is a necessary first step. If nothing else, it’ll provide a quick intro to the kinds of paper that you don’t want to use on your next self-pub project, no matter how much it’ll save you.

SM20 Countdown for 10 June 2020:
2

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¹ Which sounds like an accounting firm of high repute and moderate prices.

² Exception: prose author that dips their toes into comics; similarly, children’s books pay for shit, unless you are a famous person whose name goes on the cover in big letters, with the actual writer and artist’s names much smaller³.

³ Speaking of, a friend of mine was once offered a total of US$300 as WFH to write/illustrate a 24 page kiddie book so that an extremely rich (hefty fraction of billionaire would be my guess) multi-market celeb (music, fashion, film, modeling) could slap their name on it.

My friend said no, the celeb kept asking, my friend milked it for every possible extremely expensive lunch possible. Respect, and fuck that very rich celeb with the mansion and fancy cars and the three-hundo (which is only half as much as class money) offer without even the benefit of exposure. That’s right, it was a no-credit ghost job.

Upheaval! Unanticipated change! Things getting all weird before our eyes without any warning! And also, news from webcomics.

• Speaking of chaos, there’s a lot of noise in the infosphere about Patreon changing its terms; this time, it’s to shift some fees from creators to supporters. The intent appears to be to give creators a more predictable level of support, but it may throw a lot of supporter’s calculations about how much they’re giving to creators into the realm of higher mathematics¹.

  Right now, all I’ve got to go on is secondhand reports from creators (who were tipped off by email today); supporters are said to be notified tomorrow. Although, as Matt Boyd observed re: the we’re telling supporters tomorrow announcement:

  My dudes, you notified them today, just secondhand.

  Speaking strictly as an outsider, I see two forces grappling with each other at Patreon right now: the need to perfect things (this change is framed as benefitting creators; the earlier changes regarding adult content), coupled with a reluctance to get buy-in from affected constituencies. Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t heard about Patreon surveying creators or supporters about possible changes, soliciting feedback, or communicating in a fashion that would get people on board well in advance of changes.

  And this is not a problem unique to Patreon; every company that blows up from little idea to Big Deal has to transition from a pure expression of Founder’s Vision to something with institutional structure and professional change management. Effective communications are one of the hardest things to develop (and honestly, in a platform that stresses connection between creator and supporter, who could possibly think that making separate announcements would work?), and their lack results in situations like we’ve seen in the past few months, where Patreon appears (rightly or wrongly) to be flailing.

  This is not a knock on Jack Conte and cofounder Sam Yarn; very few startups succeed into Big Deal status with the same people in charge, because the skills needed for Founder’s Vision and the skills need for institutional structure and professional change management are very, very different, and almost nobody starts out good at both².

  I suspect that within a year, Patreon will be a smaller operation (particularly in light of Kickstarter’s Patreon-alike, Drip; terrible name, but KS are much, much better at their change management and communications) as further impromptu (or at least, seemingly-impromptu-from-the-outside) policy shifts pisses off the less-invested users. Either that, or Conte and Yarn and the other idea-type folks will step back to an advisory role, and the more mangement-inclined will be in charge. Answers on a postcard.

• I am not going to spoil today’s … you know, I’m not sure what it is. John Allison’s webcomic has run at Scary Go Round dot com since 2002, it’s been the home of Bad Machinery since 2009, as well as various shorts, the first iteration of Giant Days, several throwback and current catch-ups of Bobbins, Destroy History, and probably more that I’m missing. The onetime plan to wrap up the Tacklefordverse was running from the points of view of several of those projects in an overlapping fashion, but heck if I know that it has a single name at the moment. The story arc title is Hard Yards, so let’s go with that.

  I am not going to spoil today’s Hard Yards, but oh man, you need to see it. John Allison has dropped in a single panel that explains goings-on from across the history of Bobbins/Scary Go Round/Bad Machinery, and confirmed what we probably all knew down deep in our hearts — his entire fictional universe has revolved around Shelley Winters, and there’s a reason for everything that’s happened to her.

  If he were to put up a post that this had been his plan all along for the past two decades, I’d be forced to believe him. It explains (in that loopy, logic and causality be damned manner that seems to define Tackleford and the surrounding environs) everything so perfectly. If he were to put up a post that this occurred to him as a neat way to tie everything up and it worked by coincidence, I’d also be forced to believe that; quite frankly, I’m not sure which would be the more impressive creative feat — playing a loooong game, or finding a completely (internally, at least) logical payoff for a bunch of different plots that occurred at many different times³.

  Bravo, Mr Allison, and bravo in advance for Giant Days issue #33, which I will be obtaining and reading later today, but which I am willing to preemptively praise as a matter of faith.

Spam of the day:
Naturally You here is transferred I’d have picked up … but it’s you
I’m going to chalk some of this nonsensicality up to the translation from Russian, but only some.

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¹ And that’s discounting, as one Patreonista pointed out on the Twitters, European supporters who already pay VAT on their pledges.

² Or, alternately, can transition from one to the other. See also: Twitter flailing as @jack’s purity of vision runs up against people willing to exploit structural weaknesses for their own agenda. At some point, purity of vision costs you goodwill.

³ Honestly, it’s like if somebody had come to a conclusion for Lost or Battlestar Galactica that tied everything together in a perfect little bow.

Well, everything except for The Captain Beefheart Story. That one will always stand on its own.

From the depths of Bulgaria (where one is reminded that vampires are biting danger!) to musings over the Forces Sweetheart, things are never quite right for the residents of Tackleford Metropolitan Borough. That, naturally, is why right-thinking folk love Scary Go Round so damn much, and why they should all be perusing John Allison’s fourth collection of SGR strips, The Retribution Index.

Some things you should note as you peruse:

• This book features Allison switching back and forth from his Illustrator mode to his hand-drawn mode; both are beautiful to behold.
• Reading SGR in large doses reminds one that Allison never forgets anything; note the nunnery that is suggested to Amy, which rather than merely being a throwaway gag, becomes a plot point more than a year later.
• This book does not include the story “Oldbourne”, which starts in the archives here; this is a great shame because “Oldbourne” featured my favoritest SGR moment of all time: I trod on Lego! The expressions on Shelley in this strip are a marvel and make me smile every time I think of them; I only hope there are enough smiles left for me in the rest of the book.
• Don’t worry, there are actually plenty of smiles! Especially considering this book covers a period of time when Esther was becoming a more prominent character. Esther’s growth from walk-on extra to mysterious background player to full cast member has been wonderful to behold.
• This book also does not include Allison’s year-end music reviews, or a two-week guest stint that featured some beauteous work; however, this allows plotlines to resolve more quickly, so that’s all right.
• There are some odd printing artifacts on certain pages, where blacks are not entirely opaque. This is actually pretty interesting, as it allows the reader a peek behind the scenes to see what the character models look like in all their layers.
• Finally, as an extra-special bonus, each chapter is introduced and commented upon by Shelley Winters, who is a small friend to all of us. There are trials and tribulations for Shelley in the book, but all is well in the end.

To summarize, this is a pretty wonderful book, and I think that you would enjoy it very much! So please be certain to purchase and read TRI at the first opportunity, and watch out for devil bears.

A quick follow-up to a previous post.

DrunkDuck is back live again. So pop in to their forum and say “Hi” or “Welcome Back”.

Update: It appears to be back live again, again. Shelley Winters has nothing on these guys.

No time to dilly-dally, we’ve got items to discuss.

Spam of the day:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren Wir gewähren Darlehen in Höhe von 10.000,00 € bis 5 Mio. € mit einem Zinssatz von 2%

I’m sorry, when I read German in a spam, I go into a frothing rage much like Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Please take your concatenated devil language elsewhere.

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¹ Whose character arc I’ve just now realized is a pretty good parallel to that of Mike Dowden over at Something*Positive. Randy Milholland and Shaenon Garrity/Jeffrey C Wells are giving me hope that emotionally stunted manchildren can, with the right influences, become capable of empathy and grow into the sort of person that is a good partner worthy of love.

What, no, it’s nothing to do with the weather outside (where the snow is rapidly accumulating and I may or may not make it back to my hotel tonight). It’s to do with the gut-level clench of fear fighting against cautious optimism when John Allison goes from saying (in regard to his characters) as Bad Machinery wrapped up:

Think of this as a Doctor Who-style regeneration in progress. Your friends will be back.

to saying (in regard to his broader shared universe of Tackleford) as the Bobbins revival is close to concluding:

People sometimes ask me why there’s Bobbins, and Scary Go Round, and Bad Machinery, “when they’re all just the same thing.” The answer is, so that I can work out where the line is between these projects, so I don’t have to remember too much, so that I can divide it all up semi-neatly. This last Bobbins story is what happens if I take out all those dividing lines in my head, just so you can see what it looks like. It’s a mess. I’ve started to get emails from people asking for clarification on certain “historical” characters, which suggests to me that it’s time to stop. Time’s pretty much up for the “Tackleverse”, which is why I did it – this is the end of the road for a lot of the characters.

I hope you enjoyed the experiment as much as I have – it’s gone in directions I didn’t expect. At the start of April it will be time for something new.

I am the last person to suggest that Allison (or any other creator) ought to be catering to my whims. If this is the end for many of these characters, I will mourn their departure just as I eagerly await that which April will bring. It’ll be sad, and I know exactly how to react to this — by hunting down people whose obsessive need for continuity have driven Allison to this and wreaking a horrific vengeance. If I have to exist in a world without teen mystery-solvers, fish-men, serial entrepreneurs that speak of themselves in the third person, Devil Bears and Space Owl, then I’m making sure that they won’t enjoy the fruits of their cursed inquiries after filthy continuity.

In all seriousness — if this is the end for Tackleford, let us all take a moment to raise a pint of the best heavy or rough scrumpy (regional) to what may be webcomics longest-running shared universe¹. Things change, after all. We’ll be okay.

Unless Carrot comes a bad end — that happens, I’m going on a spree.

• Following up on the recent post regarding Raina Telgemeier crushing all who dare approach with her mighty sales figures: I’d wondered if the sales of the Sisters/Smile box set was incorporated into the Bookscan numbers compiled by Brian Hibbs. Hibbs was kind enough to chime in with a clarification:
  

  Boxed sets have separate listings. Even though I cut this data out of what I present, Bookscan entries are tracked by ISBN, and the box set has a different one.

  Translation: Telgemeier sold more books than the numbers indicated. In fact, due to the limitations of Bookscan, Hibbs would have us know that she sold a lot more:

  Also worthy of note is that SISTERS sold AT LEAST 2 million copies according to the NYT — I can only present Bookscan data that I have though.

  Remember, that’s in four months, and more than ten times the numbers indicated by Bookscan; I knew there were undercounts from the Nielsen data, but never knew how large they were. To put it another way, for more than a decade, the top-selling ongoing comic book from a major publisher in any given month has probably sold on the order of 100,000 copies² in the last four months of 2104, the total number of copies of the top selling book each month amounted to approximately 837,000 floppies sold; if you bought all four of those books, the total cost to you was probably not too far off of the Sisters cover price.

  In as apples-to-apples a comparison as you could make, Telgemeier outsold that wisecracking webslinger, brooding vigilante, most popular mutant of all time, or scrappy set of survivors of the zombie apocalypse by a factor of two and a half to one if you combine their efforts, or at least six to one compared against single titles. Oh, and that was before we consider Smile and Drama (one of which sold steadily through the year, one of which bumped up in the last quarter). Next time some aging fanboy bitches about the comics industry pandering to [fill in the blank], share that little factoid and watch his head explode.

Spam of the day:

Touche. Great arguments. Keep up the good work.

Will do.

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¹ Okay, okay, it’s the recently-concluded Walkyverse. Work with me, people.

² There are some outlier books in the back third of 2014, with some one-shots, special events, and zillion-variant-cover tricks, leading to some unusually large numbers.

Received: Peloton. Lots of status-quo up-shaking in this stack of Scary Go Round stories, as major players are taken off-stage (Shelley) or changed in fundamental ways (Amy, Ryan, Le Garçon); chaos and silliness ensue, complete with a little Allisonian love for my place of residence. Also, since I pre-ordered, there was a minicomic detailing the ultimate fate of Erin Winters (who was sucked into hell and forgotten by friends & family) … this being SGR and she being a Winters, it turns out pretty acceptably for her.

Two words for you: Beard photos. There is a booth that makes photos of you with a beard. This wonder of modern alchemical science may be found in the vicinity of one Mr David Malki !, Esq., proprietor of the Wonder-Mark etheric humors, and patron of a grand entertainment in honor of said japery to-morrow night in the Beverly Hills of California.

Revelation of the day: Johnny Wander. Why did I not know about this comic before today’s guest strippage and link from Jeph Jacques? I mean Ananth Panagariya is mentioned in these pages enough and I’ve casually followed Yuko Ota’s earlier work even, and it’s terrific enough that I had to do a freakin’ archive crawl today. I do not have time for another webcomic in my day, so please stop giving us stuff as majestic as the ant shower, ‘kay? Thank you.

Me, I’m getting an early start on it.

• As an official mover/shaker in the world of webcomics, I hereby declare Shelly Winters to be the muse of New Jersey. She’s a ginger goddess of wisdom, and all of us who aren’t dead inside love her. If you need a place to stay, Shelley, we have a guest room.
• Why did I not see this until just now? Dirk Schwieger’s brilliant little journal webcomic reprinted in a replica Moleskine (the city notebooks are awesome)? OH CRAP YES.
• Missed it: Several webcomics I read have such a dense and important plot that I leave them to build up 10 – 20 updates and read them in chunks; Shi Long Pang is one, and Rice Boy another. With the climax quickly building, I was on a break and so missed that it wrapped up on Wednesday. I doubt I’ll have time to sit down and re-read all 439 pages from beginning to end in one session, but that’s really what it deserves. Give it a good read-through and if you aren’t sniffling a little at the end, we can’t be friends. Special thanks to alert reader “Hmpf” for letting me know.
• Finally, if Matt Boyd keeps cranking out articles like this one, I’ll have to reconsider my current No, I’m not going to visit a pop-culture trivia quiz site, ever stance. Dammit, Matt — I like that stance.

So small Erin Winters was in a good mood, and then she drank the wrong digestion tonic in Shelley’s room, and now she’s enormous. But wait! Erin was worried that The Boy likes Esther because she’s blossomed, and now she’s got the aforementioned hair, gun show, and bazongas. John Allison, reaching his 1000th Scary Go Round strip, has left us with one hell of a cliffhanger; were it only until Monday before we saw more it would be a cruel wait, but he’s promised us:

In the tradition that you have come to expect – nay, DEMAND, I am setting up a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved for months. Sorry.

Cheeky devil. Worse, over much drink last night at The Pub, Allison dropped no hints whatsoever of what he was planning to do to us. Discreet cheeky devil. Still and all, having produced comics on the web for fully a third of his lifetime, Allison knows that we’ll wait on tenterhooks for the cliffhanger to resolve, because between these stories and forbidden t-shirts, we’re all his bitch.

In other news, Jeff Lowrey, formerly of this page, pointed us towards an exploration of Mystery In Comics. I’m intrigued, and as I mentioned yesterday, I’m curious as to whether or not there are similar legends that lend an air of mystery and myth to webcomics. So if you’ve heard a scurrilous rumor that’s been around long enough and spread wide enough to have elevated itself to the realm of Webcomics Urban Legend, toss ’em to me, and I’ll try to track down the real scoop. Could be disastrous interesting. Very, very interesting..