And when I do, I have two Turnpikes (Pennsylvania and New Jersey) to deal with on a Friday afternoon. That’s it, never seeing home again, I had a good run. In the meantime, consider the following:

• The Joe Shuster Awards get respect ’round these parts for consistently having a strong slate of candidates, and being restricted to very few categories. The 2015 iteration was posted on Sunday but it’s only in the past 24 hours or so that the comics press has noticed on account of they were given out at the Forest City Comicon of London, Ontario and it appears to have been lightly attended by said press. Collectively, we suck.

  There were three honorees from the world of (approximately) webcomics this time around, with Outstanding Cartoonist / Auteur going to Bryan Lee O’Malley for Seconds, Outstanding Webcomics Creator / Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web to Nicole Chartrand for Fey Winds, and This One Summer continuing its romp through awards season with Outstanding Writer / Scénariste going to Mariko Tamaki. Congratulations to all the winners.

• It’s been said a lot that being a webcomic creator means that you have 10,000 bosses that would need to fire you in order to lose your job, but also that having one superfan who’s willing to buy your stuff is more important than a thousand of them. I can only imagine what having a billionaire fan means, although I suppose we could ask Matt Inman about his buddy Elon, and today it appears that Randall Munroe has a fan named Bill.

  Bill Gates, that is. Never hurts when the actual richest guy in the world name checks you:

  I’m a fan of Randall Munroe, the guy behind the Web comic XKCD and the book What If?. I’m also a big supporter of the effort to end polio. So anything that combines Randall and polio eradication is great in my book.

  Here’s a strip Randall drew for us in honor of World Polio Day. I got a kick out of it and thought I’d share it with you.

  Sometime in the recent past, Gates passed the threshold where he has not been in charge of Microsoft longer than he was in charge of it, and I for one am thrilled, given that his free time these days is spent on things such as eradicating polio. At some point in the future people will forget how Gates made his money and only marvel at how much of it he gave away; I can’t think of a better thing to spend it on that causing this particular extinction, and if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is looking for another pernicious evil that needs extirpation, may I suggest squirrels? Okay, fine, not as icky as, say, ticks, but that’s part of their evil — they look all innocent and fuzzy and then BAM! Murder city.

• I was listening to NPR this morning and heard a story about how the United Autoworkers basically started with a strike in Flint, Michigan that involved the National Guard and improvised weapons. Here’s hoping the grad students at the University of Missouri highlighted in today’s PhD have a listen to that story and find a way to accomplish the same. Not sure they’re going to set up industrial-strength slingshots and wang door hinges at riot cops, but they have other weapons. Like, say, if the riot cops all submit essay tests and the grad students mark ’em up with extra red ink.

  Kidding aside, the grad students (and adjunct faculty) are the only thing holding together the college educational system in a lot of schools, and they’ve had the crap exploited out of them for far too long. I hope they light an organizational fire that resolves at least some of their legit grievances.

Spam of the day:

Too bad we must return them.

Yeah, but what are you going to do with five gallon of ticks?