Okay, one April Fools, because Emily Carroll’s work is too spooky for some people, she made the ending of her critically- and popularly-acclaimed His Face All Red less mysterious and spooky.

• Congrats to the nominees in the NCS division awards for long- and short form webcomics. Repeat nominee (and past winner) Vince Dorse for the now-concluded Untold Tales of Bigfoot, Harvey- and Eisner laureate Mike Norton for Battlepug, and Minna Sundberg for Stand Still, Stay Silent are showing the world what you can do with long form; Danielle Corsetto’s just-concluded Girls With Slingshots, Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic, and Rich Powell’s Wide Open are the esteemed representatives of the short form.

  I should also mention that in other categories — graphic novel, gag cartoons, editorial cartoons — you’ve got indy- and webcomics types like Jen Sorensen, Jillian Tamaki, Mike Maihack, and Liza Donnelly recognized; between that, and seeing the animation categories recognize The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Song of the Sea, and Over the Garden Wall, it appears that new, bold works are getting their due consideration. I’m not a member of the NCS, but I’m pulling for Sundberg and Corsetto over in webcomics; best of luck to all the nominees. The NCS awards will be handed out at the NCS Reubens Weekend in Washington, DC, Memorial Day Weekend.

• Congratulations as well to Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh for wrapping up Lucky Penny yesterday. It’s been a goodly while since Johnny Wander was an autobio/diary strip, and while we’re going to be getting strips about Ota’s trip to Japan in 2014, I doubt it will ever entirely be autobio again. Nevertheless, Lucky Penny was a damn good read, and the fact that it got completed despite Ota’s frequent wrist impairments¹ is a monument to either work ethic or stubbornness to the point of insanity. Read it again from the beginning, and look for it in print when it’s released.
• The first guest of TopatoCon 2015 has been announced and it’s all-around great cartoonist KC Green, whose new comic (on which we speculated yesterday), He Is A Good Boy, is a now running and hitting on all the familiar Greenian themes — a semi-likeable protagonist, the requirement to grow up despite the desire for things to stay the same, a deep ambivalence (bordering on loathing) about things staying the same, and sudden outbursts of profane (yet I suspect utterly earned) fury. Oh, and the main character is an acorn who doesn’t want to go plant himself. It’s gonna be a good one, folks.
• Zach Weinersmith has his hand in so many projects it’s tough to keep up, but one that he keeps circling back around to is BAHFest — the Festival of Bad Ad-Hoc Hypotheses — which aids the cause of science literacy by getting science types to laugh at themselves before going back out to show the world what is and what is not science.

  Weinersmith will be talking to public radio’s Science Friday this Friday about BAHFest, which is sure to be the most amusing segment until this year’s coverage of the IgNobel Awards. Check here for local NPR stations, and then with that local station to see if they run the show live 2:00pm-4:00pm EDT; alternately you can listen to SciFri segments at their website following the broadcast, or via iTunes.

• Some day, Randall Munroe may tire of elaborate, experimental comics that act as crowdsourced idea factories, but today is not that day. Start clicking and don’t forget to eat at some point.

Spam of the day:

Mayo Clinic Study-Eradicate Diabetes

While more plausible than your previous attempt to hook me in by claiming NASA had figured out the cure for diabetes, I still somehow doubt the truthfulness of your claim. I’ve been up to the Mayo Clinic for work, and I’ve rarely met a group of people so dedicated to their work² and you know what? They have an actual public affairs office, one that does not announce major medical breakthroughs — and a cure for diabetes would rank up there with the polio vaccine and the eradication of smallpox in terms of medical breakthroughs — by direct-emailing me at my blog on webcomics. Try harder, you horrible people.

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¹ Finding herself under doctor’s orders to not use her right hand, she taught herself to draw just as well with her left, which she then promptly injured from overuse so the right wouldn’t be jealous. She’s gotten better about pacing herself but make no mistake — this is a woman that can draw better than you with either hand.

² In the main lobby there is a display case showing the gifts that they give you for your 5th anniversary working for the Clinic, 10th, 15th, etc. They went all the way up to sixty-five friggin’ years, which I believe is the definition of dedication.