And why not?

• First up, a quick point over to the current Steeple storyline — Clotted Crime by name — and a news item from John Allison yesterday. A name from the hallowed past is being shared and that caught my interest:
  

  Kelly Vivanco has done the cover for the upcoming Clotted Crime part 3, but that is not all.

  I’m not sure what caught more of my interest, to be honest. Kelly Vivanco is the creator of Patches, a much beloved and long-hiatused webcomic that is still online for your delectation and enjoyment. Patches went on hiatus about the time Vivanco started producing what might be called fine art¹. Any time I come across Vivanco’s name, I take notice and fall in love with her work again. A cover page for Part 3 of Clotted Crime will be welcome indeed.

  But then there’s the second part of the newsbite, where Allison says that Vivanco has gone and done fan art of a previously-unknown bit of Tackleverse lore:

  She has also submitted some archival pictures of Tredregyn’s sole all-merman folk outfit of the 1960s, TENTANGLE.

  And the images are everything about her work that I love. Go check them out, and check out Vivanco’s work more generally if you aren’t familiar with it.

• Secondly, let us compare and contrast two upcoming comics events. On the one hand you have CXC, kicking off tomorrow and running through Sunday. On the other hand, you have the SDCC special event thingy — they’re calling it Special Edition — over [American] Thanksgiving weekend. The former is remote and online. The latter is in person.

  Nobody knows what SDCC/SE will look like or how many people might be there — badges are on sale now, a marked contrast to normal SDCC iterations where they sell out instantly — and thus it’s hard to make a case why one should attend, but it’s easy to make the counter-case:

  It is too soon for an in-person event, particularly one that takes place on the busiest travel weekend of the year², doubly-particularly since many people did not get to gather with family last year and just might be able to this year.

  CXC will be taking place in a combo of mostly virtual and a few in-person events at The Billy (which will also be available online). The schedule is packed with Zoom, YouTube, and Discord channels, the guests are lined up, and it’s free. CXC is a no-brainer. And, in a completely different way, so is SDCC/SE.

Spam of the day:

No matter if you have a big bust or small bust, this is the best wireless bra that looks great under clothes while feeling like loungewear.Cooling Bra Pro can actually have a great impact on your life.

I, uh, do not have a need for such a foundation garment. Thanks?

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¹ Which I once described as moody, dreamy, whimsical-on-the-verge-of-disturbing paintings and that they reminded me of fairy tales, at the moment just before everything starts to go seriously wrong.

² Meaning that large amounts of people injected into the travel stream will interact with the greatest number of other people, making disease vectors all the more effective.

Those of you that follow Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson in their various endeavours may know that they’re in the midst of a continent-hopping trip that took them from their home base in LA to New York, London, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, and they still have parts of Europe and then Japan to go¹. Those of you that follow them may also know that Becky paints about 300 of her watercolor/gouache paintings a year, which makes for a challenge when so much of your life is taken up with travel, conventions, and suchlike. So it’s good to know that even on vacation, when the muse strikes Becky’s gonna paint the everloving heck out of that muse, and it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the sketchbooks and notebooks full of words and pictures that they’re presently filling will make for one hell of a travel story and I can’t wait to see it.

• Speaking of paintings, I just learned of an art show that I had to share with you. Way back in the long-ago, there was a wonderful webcomic called Patches by the equally wonderful Kelly Vivanco, which went on hiatus at roughly the same time that Vivanco started producing moody, dreamy, whimsical-on-the-verge-of-disturbing paintings².

  If you find yourself in the Greater Los Angeles area on Saturday, you may want to head to Culver City, as Vivanco will be opening the latest solo exhibition of her paintings at Thinkspace, which is found at 6009 Washington Boulevard. The opening reception (read: snacks and booze) runs from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, and the show itself will be up for three weeks.

• Anybody have an eBay account and a sense of justice? Firstly, observe Mary Cagle’s really wonderful Kiwi Blitz, say this page right here, and note the young lady with the hat and the artificial leg. Secondly, this eBay offering, which features a suspiciously similar young lady with a hat and an artificial leg for sale, and which is not offered up by Mary Cagle. Next up, the Report Item page, which requires an eBay account, and where one can (I imagine) notify eBay that Mr or Ms Vinylcustom is violating the rights of an independent creator. Remember the rules, kids: be factual, and be polite.
• Kickstarter roundup: TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST is just over a week into its campaign and closing in on US$200 large³, the Johnny Wander bookstarter needs to think up more stretch goals for its last four days, as it’s blown past the last one. Also, I saw that Neil Gaiman retweeted the Kickstarter twitterfeed, and I said to myself, Self, that sounds familiar:
  

  The beautiful blue businesswoman Gabrielle explodes from Claire’s toilet and informs her she’s pregnant with the new Messiah.

  And indeed it was, which is how I learned that Sister Claire has a Kickstarter going to print the first eight chapters (or roughly 200 pages) of relentlessly cute and just the right amount of blasphemous webcomickry for your reading pleasure. I see that creator Elena Barbarich (or Yamino, if you prefer) has reached about the 86% mark in about three days, meaning she’s statistically certain to make goal⁴ and surpass it. Oh, and obligatory disclaimer: Ms Barbarich, like seemingly half the kids I know in webcomics these days (cf: Gibson, Dreistadt) went to college with my niece, so there’s that.

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¹ Even better, they managed to hop across the Hudson while in New York and visit me and my wife, on account of they are awesome people.

² They’ve always reminded me of fairy tales, at the moment just before everything starts to go seriously wrong.

³ It helps if you read that in the voice of Rodney Dangerfield when he shouts Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!

⁴ Fun fact I learned at the B9 panel at NYCC this year: Cindy Au (Director of Community for Kickstarter) shared some statistical information that included the number 1/3. Projects that fail typically do not get anywhere near goal, and almost never make it even 1/3 of the way to goal; projects that make it to 1/3 of goal almost always go on to meet or exceed goal. Neat!

I mean, Happy New Year!

I usually get a little contemplative at the New Year; it seems a decent opportunity to both survey the past year and think about changes for the coming one. It was about a year ago that I was first put in touch with the Fleen folks (read: Gary), and so I thought maybe this post ought to take a quick look back over the previous year, as a refresher on what I read and liked. I think I’ve learned a fair piece about webcomics over the course of 2007, and I have some favorite webcomics finds from the year. I met a whole lot of webcomics folks (and I finally met Jeph Jacques, and the world didn’t end). I survived MoCCA, didn’t get sued, and ended up with a lot of t-shirts. So, yeah. Go webcomics!

But in reading through the archives, my first thought was Holy crap! I completely overwhelmed myself! I figured I’d go poking through the archives, review a little, and try to come up with a witty year-end round-up kind of thing, especially after reading ComixTalk’s People of Webcomics 2007 list (which struck me as kind of a weird list; I’ll leave more discussion to you folks and to Gary, but…yeah, weird, no?).

My math skills are not the awesome, but in the past year it looks like I wrote about nearly 40 different webcomics. I’m not counting the ones I just mentioned in passing or name-checked more than once, or the ones with which I was familiar before picking up this gig. Of these forty-odd, a few, like Tom Humberstone’s lovely Vented Spleen and Juan Santapau’s breathtaking The Secret Knots, are ones that I visit from time to time; they aren’t daily updates. Natasha Allegri’s Normal Life is another. One series ended–Mike Luce’s quirky, funky Fite!–and a handful of the other columns were either about one-shot series, like Israel Sanchez’s Saturday, or the body of work of one artist (such as Mark Burrier or Sarah Morean).

There are, however, a few with which I’ve kept up on a regular basis, and I was trying to figure out why that was. Why those webcomics? I mean, I like webcomics. I spend enough time on the internet; it’s not like it’s tricky to navigate. But in looking back through the archives, I found that there were some that I really enjoyed, like Kelly Vivanco’s Patches, that just fell out of my head (or my browser, I guess). There are a few others that I’m not following, just because the narrative didn’t catch my eye the same way the visuals did. But what I realized is that the ones I follow most regularly are either the ones with feeds, like Box Brown’s Bellen!, or ones that update once per week (cue Teaching Baby Paranoia) and I can remember to check back in. One of my favorites, Matthew Reidsma’s High Maintenance Machine, actually started selling original art within the last month; I could not resist.

I’ve actually spent the time since Thursday, when I was originally going to post, re-reading many of these webcomics, like Karen Ellis’s astounding Planet Karen, one of my favorite finds from this year, and catching up with the series I’ve missed (holy crap, Scene Language, I missed you! & congrats Corey Marie & Tod!). And, actually, I think that’s apt: instead of spending time writing about them, I’m actually closing the year reading them.

I can’t wait to see what 2008 brings.

Lately I’ve been wondering about some of the less tangible elements of webcomics. I’ve thought a fair bit about how webcomics appear in different contexts; what happens, for example, when webcomics surface at academic conferences, in classrooms, as coloring books, or printed out and taped to your computer monitor (weird, maybe, but it happens) or your fridge. What happens when the webcomics you follow go on holiday or hiatus (for whatever reason, but having kids is a really good one–congrats, folks!) and so you get guest strips (over 18 on that last link please, though I know you’re all gonna click it now)—which I kind of adore—instead? I’ve been thinking about fair use and copyright, in part due to the idea of printing webcomics for later use (be that reading or for the classroom or whatever), and the relative advantages and disadvantages of publishing online and offline.

I had to laugh a little when someone recently described me as “old school� in my publishing tastes; he was right, of course, but it got me thinking about, basically, why do I like what I like in webcomics? What qualities, if any, do these works share with each other? Do they share those qualities with comics that I enjoy offline? (Shouldn’t they?)

Because while my enjoyment of these works isn’t solely due to the context in which I encounter them, or experiencing the works in question, or even hobnobbing, in the archaic verb sense, with the folks who create them (though, embarrassingly, I quite literally squealed with delight recently at seeing new pages of this work-in-progress) those things are each in their own ways a bit of a factor. If someone goes to the effort of putting a book in my hand, it’s way more likely I’m going to look at the website they’re promoting and spend some time, you know, reading it. It’s actually how I got into at least one of the webcomics I now follow (smart marketing, you!). But, in truth, since the only thing I’m losing is a little time, clicking on a link isn’t really all that difficult. It seems more to be A) what keeps me reading that day and B) what hooks me enough to click on it again and again (lather, rinse, repeat).

So, to this end I tried a little experiment this week.
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