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.

I’ve long said that my favorite of Kate Beaton’s work is her next, because she keeps getting better; none of her works have been easily surpassed, but when the stars go cold and the final account of capital-A Art is taken, I think DUCKS: Two Years In The Oil Sands will stand at the peak not just of Beaton’s work, but of autobiography, of comics, and of explorations of what turns people into their worst selves. It is in all things a masterwork, as I knew it would be since those five very tall strips were posted back in 2014. There are spoilers ahead, so if you want to go in cold maybe stop reading now. But if you do go in cold, know that DUCKS is at times a tough read that both clearly tells you where it’s headed and also catches you by surprise. Survivors of any kind of trauma take note.

I’ve been privileged to know Kate Beaton for more than a decade; she has done me many a kindness in that time, in addition to creating some of the best comics ever made and allowing us all to share in them for absolutely free. Sometime in the last decade I was standing in the Webcomics Pavilion at San Diego Comic Con when the word got out that she had posted new comics featuring her mom — what I’ve always called Kate’s momics — to Tumblr and we all stopped what we were doing to read them. I said out loud that I would sacrifice the careers of everybody in that enormous building if it meant momics every day, and I meant it.

Something in those sometimes very simple drawings is the singularly most efficient expression of emotion and emotional truths, whether it’s a confrontation of the myths we tell ourselves to make the right person the hero (with squats), a surgical dissection of fake feminist tropes in comics (sometimes with squats, sometimes without), or a discussion of little known historical figures that we should revere (no squats this time). And they’re never more emotionally resonant than when she’s talking about the life she’s lived.

Which brings us to DUCKS, the story of the two years that Beaton worked in the Alberta oil sands to pay off her students loans; she’s one of a multitude of Maritime Canadians that had to leave home to find work, torn (as she tells us in the opening pages) between the pull of the home that begs them to stay and the need to leave to support themselves and their families as industry after industry has closed up shop and left an entire people behind. If all the Cape Bretonners that had to leave came back, she tells us, the island would sink. As befits Beaton’s very personal approach to comics, DUCKS opens with Beaton introducing herself and her situation; she’s drawn a little less loosely in this narrative interlude, a bit of reality before her usual style asserts itself and her face becomes a little less specific.

Scott McCloud famously taught us all talked about visual accuracy and identification in comics — a more photo-realistic representation of a person, place, or item will give it distance, and one that’s more abstract or cartoony invites the reader to see themselves and their experiences in that representation. The little extra verisimilitude in the opening pages introduces us to somebody else; the little extra abstraction in the remaining 400 pages means that increasingly large numbers of the characters portrayed could be us, or people we know.

So when we follow the story of the oil sands — a place where the dirtiest petroleum in the world is somewhat easily accessible from the surface, which sufficiently high oil prices make it economically viable to rip it from the earth¹ and ship it halfway across the world² so that enormous sums can be made by people removed from those that bear the costs — we are following the story of people in various stages of desperation and need, far from their homes, being paid to do dirty, dangerous work in some of the most inhospitable land on the planet. If one were forced to find but one overarching message in DUCKS, it would be how living in extreme duress changes people, exploring how they became the people they are in the camps and work sites, and the degree to which they became different from who they are at when they’re at home.

Throw a few thousand people together in a place where it’s 50 below in the winter, hours from anywhere, where boredom is often met with drugs and alcohol, where the men outnumber the women by an extreme degree³, where the default state is one of hypermasculine aggression and posturing, and it’s no surprise that things are going to take a bad turn. From almost the moment of her arrival in Fort McMurray, Beaton is subjected to shameless sexual propositioning and the kind of attention that serves as a reminder that she’s not really a full person, she’s a distraction, a novelty, some thing that exists to relieve the boredom of the men in camp and in town. Either that or she’s a humorless bitch and you don’t want to be a humorless bitch, right?

It becomes the inescapable background radiation of her days, just trying to do a job and get through another overtime shift, page after page reducing it to Just How Things Are, so ordinary that although you know it can escalate, you can see it coming a hundred pages off, it’s still going to catch you by the throat when the rapes happen. Knowing the circumstances that she’s in, seeing it coming narratively is not the same as watching Kate disappear from view behind blacked-out panels and reappear with a thousand-yard stare.

The oil sands leave scars, the scars on the earth translated to the bodies of the men that work there, passed along to the women that don’t measure up as independent people with agency. Some find ways to confront the scars and try to heal from them; most take no notice of them or how they were changed. Beaton confides in coworkers, men who don’t get it and react with laughter, women — including her sister, Becky — who share their own stories of rape from life before the camps.

DUCKS won’t let the reader off the hook with the grimly comforting thought that the oil sands are a unique place of danger to steer clear of and you’ll be okay, not when we’re told about what happened back home or at university where the men are supposed to be themselves and not who the oil sands made them. Trauma and regarding others as not full people is everywhere, it’s just thrown into sharper relief some places.

After a reprieve working at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in Victoria — a time when she started creating comics, just before the wider world learned of her work — Beaton is back in the oil sands, watching the balance on her student loan debt tick towards zero entirely too slowly, finally making her way home only to find that the oil sands don’t relax their hold on you that easily. Or, as she put it on the page where the original stories that became DUCKS were first posted, the story … is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans.

DUCKS is, by turns, heartbreaking, enraging, courageous, a call to witness, suffused with small moments of grace and kindness, and the hardest read that you can’t put down once you pick it up. It’s a singular story that belongs to one person and is also shot full of universal truths that we may not want to acknowledge but must. It will, without fail, be attacked by those that don’t want to acknowledge those truths. It is a masterwork, the best book that I wish had never needed to be written, and should be the next item on your to read list.

DUCKS is published by Drawn & Quarterly, and is available wherever books are sold. Kate Beaton is presently on book tour, and if at all possible you should attend one of the events.

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¹ In circumstances that run roughshod over any sense of environmental responsibility and the treaty rights of various First Nations.

² Ditto.

³ In the book, Beaton gives a ratio of 50:1, but has since noted that it was highly variable. Suffice it to say, it’s a highly imbalanced gender situation.

If it seems like the only updates happening these days are from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, well, you aren’t wrong. It’s partly ongoing pandemic, partly not having the time in the day to run down minor happenings and spin them into 600 words, and partly the realization that if I want there to be another 16 years of Fleen (given that 15 December is the traditional observation date for Fleenmas), I’d have to reduce my writing until I felt compulsion to resume.

And largely some things that I haven’t discussed publicly yet; some of you know the deal, and thank you for letting me share the news at my own pace and discretion. It’s a time of transition for me — don’t panic, nobody’s dying — and things are very much up in the air. I’m not going anywhere, but the pace that I’ve maintained for more than a decade and a half is not, for the moment at least, sustainable. But as long as Stuff is Going On for me, FSFCPL has been more than kind enough to provide us with news from the BD scene¹ and keep the lights on in the interim.

So without further ado, let’s turn it over to FSFCPL for this week’s update.

We weren’t the only ones to pay attention to last week’s story, and further developments call for a followup.

First, creator Souillon (through Maliki) had to put out a clarification to counter a narrative full of shortcuts that was developing in the reactions: in essence, the creator’s message is that, no, their managing to sell these 800 copies in a single day would not necessarily prove the publisher was incompetent for failing to sell these before Maliki intervened, as online selling and traditional distribution tend to be different markets². The real responsible party, if anything, would rather be the culture of overproduction in the current market where everyone attempts to get bigger in order to compete, at the expense of individual creators. Moreover, it would hardly translate to other creators who don’t necessarily have Maliki’s community.

And if I might add, other creators don’t necessarily have the cash on hand for such a transaction (team Maliki directly credit their Tipeee patrons for providing that), and even if they did, they could be forgiven for not willing to risk that much money in a way that may never be recouped, or only years later. Do not underestimate how much of a leap of faith this transaction was for team Maliki.

Second, I made a few shortcuts myself last week in the estimate for when the investment would be recouped.

• The first factor I forgot is the taxman, and not any tax Maliki’s business or any of its principals has to pay, but the tax the buyers do: the value-added tax, or VAT. On books, in France, VAT is 5.5%. Fortunately, we know that Maliki’s added value as a retailer here is 40%, which means that out of the 19.90€ they collect, 19.90 * 40% * 5.5% = 0.4378€ will be remitted to the public treasury, regardless of whatever else happens.

  So the operation would cease being a net loss only once 513 copies (rounding up) had been sold, not 503 as previously implied.

• The second assumption I made was that the book hadn’t earned out: in that hypothesis, we can stop now. But what if it had? In that case, each sale not only results in a net 19.4622€ increase in cash from the viewpoint of team Maliki’s finances, but also in royalties being paid out, this time to Souillon as a creator (fortunately, Souillon is the sole creator in that instance). This is triggered by declaring the sale to the publisher. By their own admission, we know the royalties to be 8 to 12% of the retail price before taxes, which here amounts to 19.90 * (100 – 5.5)/100 * 8-12% = 1.50444 to 2.25666€

  So we can now estimate the number of copies that would have been necessary to sell in order to recoup the initial expense to be between 461 and 477 copies. Still more than half of them, even though team Maliki took almost all the risk here while everyone else was willing to write off this batch as worthless.

  (Of course, there are other factors here, but for which we don’t have information, such as credit card transaction fees; this is the best estimate we can put out with the information we were generously provided.)

Speaking of the batch, Becky was kind enough to share a photo of the 800 books they now have to sign and ship. Individually. Each and every one of them. We at Fleen wish them protection from cramps and other musculoskeletal affections …

Thanks as always to Pierre Lebeaupin for keeping on top of the story. It really is fascinating to see what the differences in publishing are in the European model.

Spam of the day:

Dear Madam, Dear Sir Are you looking for splendid X-mas gifts for your loved ones and friends?

Nope. All about the crappy gifts myself. Thanks for asking!

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¹ Bandes dessinées, you pervs.

²For instance, this is the assumption Oni Press made when they simultaneously published both a Kickstarter edition of Lucky Penny — a Kickstarter which relied largely on the existing Johnny Wander community — and a regular edition for bookstores.

We at Fleen interrupt this [American] holiday weekend of pie with news from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who has a tale of skullduggery. Take ‘er away, FSFCPL!

It all began with a semi-cryptic tweet from Becky, Maliki’s right-hand woman:

We just saved 800 collector copies of Hello Fucktopia. More details soon, but it ain’t pretty.

Hello Fucktopia is a one-shot in the Maliki universe released years back, even a few years before she would declare independence from traditional publishers, intended for older readers (16 and up); in fact, it’s different enough from Maliki’s usual fare that it is signed directly under the creator’s pseudonym Souillon rather than being attributed to her name.

As for the collector, it refers to a larger, black and white limited edition with a few improvements that was released one year later.

On Tuesday, we got the details, and they aren’t pretty indeed. But they also include numbers, and if there’s one thing we love at Fleen, it’s numbers.

One piece of context: in France, there is no direct market for comics, and in fact no channel dedicated to comics. Some of them, such as weekly or monthly anthologies and US comic book TPBs, are distributed to newsstands along with magazines and follow their rules. But all other kinds of comics are distributed to bookshops along with non-sequential-art books, there is no separate channel.

For instance, we can see in the sample summary (third panel) that 17 copies were destroyed in that sample half-year period; it likely corresponds to returns from bookshops (French-only, but you should get the drift). In that case, the copies had been unbundled and unwrapped, which means it’s not necessarily easy to get them back to another retail point in a presentable state¹.

But the 800 cannot correspond to anything but one or more pallets that had never left storage, with unsealed bundles.

Another piece of context: I am not aware of any French law against the publisher directly selling the 800 copies; rather, I believe the prohibition to be contractual: it could be the distributor who has an exclusive license, which means the transaction would have to go through them. Even if the books were still owned by the publisher and the distributor was only housing them.

However, it is by French law that the publisher sets the book retail price, and no retailer may deviate from it by more than 5%.

From the product page, we can therefore obtain the retail price: 19.90€ (±5%). 800 of them at 40% discount therefore amounts to 9552€ (±5%). The 10,000€ quote, then, likely includes a few additional items such as delivery to the far-away land of Brittany.

Finally, as anyone could determine, by the time they would be down to their 297 last copies, or about 37%, of the initial pile, they would have made up their initial investment and anything beyond that would be pure profit.

One last piece of context: as part of our interesting times, there is a paper shortage going on, and that has apparently affected the release schedule of some books, according to conversations this weekend in Colomiers (festival report forthcoming). Surely this sounds like an ideal time to treat paper like a disposable resource, right?

Many thanks to team Maliki for being forthcoming with the financial details of the transaction. We couldn’t have asked for more!

PS: By the end of the day, Tuesday, all 800 copies had been sold in that garage sale.

Our thanks as always to FSFCPL; if any further information comes to light regarding the mysterious very nearly complete loss of ten thousand Euro worth of comics, we’ll be sure to bring it to you.

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¹ Which doesn’t mean the industry shouldn’t try! At Colomiers, most publishers had a bin of discounted books designated as slightly less fresh or some such, sometimes explicitly telling they were philosophically opposed to stripping these books.

I got an email about a new Image series of original graphic novels set in the world of The Walking Dead, which is something that I have zero interest in. Comics, TV, video games, cultural phenomenon, none of it holds the slightest degree of compulsion for me whatsoever. What’s that? It’s the start of a new imprint at Image of YA/middle grade graphic novels? Nice, but still no interest in this book, or the two that will follow it. I’ll keep my eye on the imprint in the future, but I get the feeling it’s mostly going to be spinoffs of Image properties so maybe I get stuff down the line, maybe I don’t.

Except.

Except that the book in question, Clementine, Book One¹, due in June 2022, is by Tillie Walden, and that makes all the difference because Tillie Walden — as previously determined here at Fleen — is hell of rad. Okay, Image, hit me:

It’s a new beginning for Clementine … as she’s back on the road, looking to put her traumatic past behind her and forge a new path all her own. But when she comes across an Amish teenager named Amos, the unlikely pair journeys north to an abandoned ski resort in Vermont, where they meet up with a small group of teenagers attempting to build a new, walker-free settlement. As friendship, rivalry, and romance begin to blossom amongst the group, the harsh winter soon reveals that the biggest threat to their survival … might be each other.

The press release email contains the first eight pages of Chapter One — the splash page of which I’ve shared above — and they are very Waldenesque. Much as I don’t care about The Walking Dead, I’m very curious to see how she works on a non-original IP, and with rights holders that have their own opinions on how the story should turn out. Clementine, Book One releases on 22 June, 2022, and will be the launch title for the Skybound Comet imprint².

Spam of the day:

I wanna Do Bad things tonight b’b free access 4 you only Unsubscribe If you no longer wish to receive

Is this where I point out that the line in the email that says If you wish to Unsubscribe click here is plain text and not a link?

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¹ Apparently, the character comes from a video game adaptation.

² That link doesn’t work yet; I imagine they’ll get around to it presently.

It is one of the most magical days of the year, as today is the day John Allison was born which means (as previously established) it is also the day Ryan North was born. Two such fine members of webcomicdom sharing a birthday? That never happens. Happy Birthdays (Birthsday?) Ryan and John, and many happy returns¹

And it is also the day that I catch up with the latest Iron Circus Kickstart, this one for Real Hero Shit by Kendra Wells. Wells, you may recall, is a favorite around these parts, and the description of RHS caught my eye, especially this bit:

Every day is Spring Break for Eugene, but outside palace walls, he crashes into a hard reality: the system that keeps him safe in his silk-sheeted bed isn’t particularly concerned with the well-being of anyone who isn’t him. Eugene will have to level-up his awareness if he means to be a real hero, and time is running short! [emphasis original]

So that’s sword and sorcery, plenty of queer representation, and a critique of entrenched, generational power structures. Sounds good. Stretch goals include prints and pins, and are about to unlock as the campaign approaches US$40K on a goal of US$15K. It’s a short campaign, having launched the day before yesterday and wrapping up in a mere 9 days more — why hang about when you got books to sell and fulfillment to start hopefully before the friggin’ Post Office gets even more gutted around the start of the year². FFF mk2 says US$53K +/- 10.6K, or somewhere in the US$42.4K – US$63.6K range, but the calculations aren’t built for short runs like this, so we’ll all see whether the Factor or the McDonald Ratio holds true in about ten days.

Spam of the day:

32-second ritual cures back pain (do this tonight)

Is this one of those rituals that you have to like strangle a marmot or you can’t achieve orgasm? Because I’m not strangling any marmots even to relieve my back pain.

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¹ All returns must be accompanied by a receipt.

² The apparently-unfireable hack that Trump appointed to run the USPS has decreed that First Class Mail slow down in 2022, meaning it will get worse by pretty much the only metric that matters — how soon your shit gets to where it’s supposed to. Louis DeJoy can fuck off into the ocean.

There’s some combinations that are always going to work; individual item is incredibly wonderful on its own, and each immeasurably made better when combined with the other. Gin and lime. Bob and Ray. Bugs and Daffy. Jim Henson and Frank Oz.

Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock.

Larson is a writer and illustrator of comics that has spun many a quality tale. Mock is a comics artist and illustrator that has worked with everybody from Archie to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Together, they made the wonderful Four Points books in 2016 and 2017, and since not long after have been working on their next collaboration.

Salt Magic is what The Wizard Of Oz might have looked like if it stayed on the sod-rich prairies instead of flitting off to a fairy kingdom. Based on character designs that Mock has posted over the years, I said it looked like a Hayao Miyazaki collaboration with Jeff Smith’s BONE; I was talking purely about visual aesthetics, but hell if that comparison doesn’t actually work on the story as well. Mild spoilers ahead, but not too much.

There’s a formula to a Miyazaki story — the protagonist (usually a young woman, 10-12 years old) gets swept up in the larger world outside her home. Magic and mundanity both exist but usually there’s a boundary between them, or the two domains are otherwise separate (for example, Spirited Away), or with one ascending the other fading (for example, Princess Mononoke) but some crossover still possible. BONE opted for a world where the fantastic and the ordinary exist and can be travelled between if only you’re willing to walk far enough¹, likely through some inhospitable terrain.

And in Miyazaki’s tellings, at least, the denizens of the magic lands aren’t malicious, per se, but may be misunderstood or have priorities and mores that are different enough at to make them seem antagonistic to the main character. Conflicts are more likely the result of ignorance or misunderstanding that actual aggression. Yes, this is oversimplified, but work with me.

Salt Magic is the story of an Oklahoma at the end of the Great War where there are still witches with very specific domains — the salt witch that wields the titular magic, a sugar witch, the mention of crystal witches — that most people seem to have just forgotten exist. Or maybe they’re just too isolated, to disinterested in the affairs of the ordinary world. To stray into their lands is to encounter risk, perhaps none greater than if they like you.

Which is what’s happened to multiple generations of twelve year old Vonceil’s sod-busting family, though nobody quite figures it out until she does. In her eyes, the greatest crime is that her beloved older brother is returned from war and settling down with a wife who commits the greatest crime Vonceil can imagine: she makes him ordinary. Why couldn’t he have stayed in glamourous Europe and fallen in love with a beautiful nurse and stayed there and she could visit him in that far-off, nigh-magical place?

There’s a saying about getting what you wish for. Vonceil’s brother, Elber, would be the classic hero that leaves home for adventure and returns, but he didn’t find adventure; he found two years of grinding hell in the trenches and carries scars (both visible and invisible) for his troubles. Unlike the Campbellian hero, he hasn’t returned home having achieved a great quest and saved anything or achieved great wisdom; you could say he descended to an underworld of sorts. But as it turns out he did cross paths with a witch, a salt witch, and she loves him though he has spurned her, and the spring that sustains the family farm will run only with salt water until he loves her again.

Did Vonceil’s wish kick all of this into gear? Was it her that caused this to happen? Whether that’s the case or not — and to my eye it’s nicely ambiguous — she figures it’s her job to fix it, as she’s the only one that can see it’s a curse in play and not bad luck. She’s young enough, starry-eyed enough, focused on the horizon enough to slip into the territory of witches and find a way to bargain, to free her brother and maybe unravel her family’s history with witches in the bargain. She pays a price and learns the meaning of sacrifice along the way, but nobody ever quite realizes what she did to bring about peace between the two worlds.

Larson’s writing is sharp and subtle, creating characters in broad strokes and then filling them in with quirks and slowly-revealed detail until they are as complete any any of the great characters in the famous stories. Dorothy, Gawain, Peach Boy, Anansi, the Witch Of The Waste, Ged, Granma Ben, Nausicaä, she’s all of them and more.

Mock’s artwork is the best of her career, with clean, engaging character designs with magnificently expressive faces. They sit in their environments with a sense of heft, and both motion and the effects of magic move about on the page in a manner that’s instantly understandable. Mock and Larson were a formidable team on Four Points; they are five years better here. The only question left when you finish Salt Magic is when they will work together again, and how much better they will be individually and together.

Salt Magic is published by Margaret Ferguson Books and is available wherever books or comics are sold. It’s a magnificent read for anybody old enough to keep their attention through a 200+ page story.

Spam of the day:

Hey! gary.tyrrellyou block me on Whatsapp?! – I am hurt.

The thing I am most upset about in this pornspam is the assumption that I would use Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook, in the first place. Ew.

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¹ Which Miyazaki dabbled in with Kiki’s Delivery Service, where witches just exist in this Europe where World War II never happened and to a lesser degree Laputa where the magic is actually a secret, forgotten technology that proves Clarke’s Law.

For everybody else, there’s the entire rest of the post, which is less time-sensitive than the UK bit. Take it away, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin!

It was always a given that Boulet’s first crowdfunding campaign would make a splash. The only questions were when and how big.

In case you missed it, as a new year’s resolution Boulet set himself a daily strip schedule, as a way to reconnect with the spontaneity of web creation; as a sign of the times, he created them as Instagram vignettes. So even if he has later put them on his blog as well so as not to be solely dependent on Facebook infrastructure, they are quite specific in format (notably, they are narrow enough to be easily readable on handsets).

After a year 2020 where the average productivity was slightly lowered, he surprised himself when he reached update 100 and didn’t stop until May (with a few more in August) — all that in parallel with his breadwinning activities.

Which raised the question of what to do with them.

As he reveals in the crowdfunding video, his publisher, or to be more accurate, the one where he has published his comics blog collections so far under the name Notes, did proactively contact him about, maybe, publishing these?

But not only did he feel these were sufficiently different in format and tone to warrant developing them as a specific project, also times had changed since the last tome: a new kind of publishing house where his promotional efforts would be taken into account, where he would not sign away any more rights (merchandizing, translation, adaptations, etc.) than he strictly needed to, and where he would need to only give up a share of the crowdfunding money proportionate with the work taken off his plate, which was the main obstacle keeping him away from self-publishing? (Note who was agreeing with Boulet in this discussion? Lisa Mandel)

As he put it, it’s as if Fate had sent him a sign. Hence, Rogatons.

After an explosive start that dissuaded me from reporting on the extravagant amount that applying the FFFmk2 would have given (given the lack of track record), the campaign did nevertheless reach 7195 preordered books, or 6759 Books_ecc, putting him among the top crowdfunded French comics creators.

I don’t know if that allows him to be completely independent from traditional publishers (if you think this book just required the 6 months or so of work where we actually saw his strip output, you’re fooling yourself). But he certainly took a giant step towards that.

Meanwhile, he isn’t leaving his historical publishers down so far, as evidenced by the fact that he’ll be in Cumbria this weekend for the Comic Art Festival) where he will sign Notes for Soaring Penguin Press, and by his relaying of the availability of Dungeon in English at NBM Graphic Novels.

As always, we at Fleen thank FSFCPL for keeping us up on the Continental scene. Have a good weekend, everybody, espeically those of you in Cumbria. Oh, and maybe come back sometime over the weekend? I’ll have some news for you then.

Spam of the day:

Summer is here Is your lawn ready?

I’ll note this was sent on 18 September, which is just before the end of summer in the northern hemisphere.

Hey, how are you? Enjoying Canadian Thanksgiving, or utterly ignoring that piece of shit Christopher Columbus? Good, good.

• Let’s start with the big round number, shall we? Take a gander at Jennie Breeden’s strip from last Friday, which doesn’t look like much out of the ordinary. But those of long memory may recall this strip from 8 October, 2001, which just so happens to be the first strip that Breeden uploaded under the Devil’s Panties moniker, and which also just so happens to have been twenty years to the day before last Friday’s redraw.

  There’s not so many folks that keep with webcomics for two decades, and even fewer that operate in the autobio sphere, so let’s give Breeden the requisite congrats for the accomplishment, and note that the next day, and the next, and the next (that would be today), updates went up as scheduled. She’s hit the ground running on Year Twenty One.

• One thing I’ve noticed about C Spike Trotman, Presidente For Life over at Iron Circus/? She sees something good, she grabs it:
  

  TFW you see something on Twitter and sign it like three weeks later because it’s so goddamn intriguing it makes you wanna scream

  It doesn’t hurt that the book in question is by Evan Dahm, who is both very good at comics and has already done books for Iron Circus (if you haven’t read the superlative The Harrowing Of Hell, maybe get on that). Mansion X is exactly the kind of uniquely brilliant weirdness that Dahm specializes in when he’s not telling more serious stories (and sometimes when he is).

  I am less familiar with Kyle Smeallie’s work, but if Spike is grabbing up The Actual Witch Society Of Derrybridge Middle School, I’m gonna say it’s worth attention, even though it’ll be a while before we get to read it. TAWSODMS is due in 2025 (thanks, global supply chain issues), and Mansion X in 2023. We’ll keep you informed of any updates.

• Speaking of Dahm, his long-running meditation on empire, subject peoples, indigenous belief, dynastic power struggles, and a whole lot else, Vattu, is going through some rapid story progress at the moment. Ideas and plots that have been laid in place for years are about to come crashing into each other, as entire peoples are about to find out exactly what a powderkeg of a society they’ve been a part of.
• Also speaking of which (Iron Circus this time), they’re having a Halloween Sale at the moment, with 33% off select titles — generally ones with at least a tangential spooky theme, although it being Iron Circus there’s some sexy stuff in there too — between now and 25 October. Go grab some good comics now, while the postal service is still operating.

Spam of the day:

YOU NEED QUALITY VISITORS FOR YOUR: fleen.com ?

Dude (you know it’s a dude), I’ve already got the best visitors for my fleen.com, ain’t nothing you can give me with your fake account fire hose.

This is too exciting to put off so we are just going to cut to the chase:

I had a bit over 12 hours to prepare something dignified to say about this but instead I am lying in bed at 7:15am going a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a

(Also that I am so proud and happy that The Legend of Auntie Po is a National Book Award youth lit finalist this year!!!)

The fact that the news broke just about the time a plane door was closing and I was in cut off from the internet is no excuse; Shing Yin Khor is a dear friend of mine and I should have been able to hear the a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a in my brain and I apologize to them most sincerely.

The Legend Of Auntie Po as a reminder, is a great favorite of all of us at Fleen as has been since before it was finished, when Khor and I talked about it over Mexican food¹ more than three years before it saw print.

And let us not forget about the previous nominees in graphic form that have been nominated for the National Book Award: the March trilogy, Gene Luen Yang’s stellar American Born Chinese — mentioned here but one post back — and Boxers & Saints, Nimona. Each of them is the best of what comics is, and Auntie Po stands tall next to them.

Year after year, the National Book Awards find the very best in literature, and this year’s nominees are no different. If the stickers affixed to the covers of future printings of Auntie Po say National Book Award Finalist rather than National Book Award Winner, that’s no shame. Then again, how many past National Book Award winners have featured a giant blue water buffalo and the best pie for miles around? Tragically few, and it’s past time to remedy that.

Seriously though, The Legend Of Auntie Po really is that good, and will be a part of the comics canon going forward, and if you haven’t read it yet maybe get on that. We at Fleen wish the best of luck to all the nominees, but maybe a little extra to the tiny gnome who is an absolute fucking rock star that brought us The Legend Of Auntie Po. Shing, I am so proud to call you my friend.

Spam of the day:

Hi, plz stop messaging me in whatsapp ! why you sending me your photos

The very fact that you think I’m using WhatsApp, which requires a godsdamned Facebook account, shows that your victim-identification algorithms are utter shit. Get on my level, spammers.

_______________
¹ I thought it was pretty good; being from LA, Khor thought it adequate. We both agreed that the company was excellent.