One of the casualties of the pandemic, event-wise, was the annual Queer Comics Expo, which is sponsored by the good folks at the Cartoon Art Museum. It should have taken place back in May but you know, everything. One of the features of the QCE is the annual Prism Awards, which are now being presented virtually and open to all and sundry:

Prism Comics, Queer Comics Expo and the Cartoon Art Museum are excited to announce that the 2020 Prism Awards will be held virtually as a two-day livestream celebration event free and open to everyone online. Held Saturday and Sunday, September 19th and 20th from 2:00pm — 5:00pm Pacific time, the event will feature panels with the finalists and judges leading up to the awards ceremony!

Details on how to tune in will be released soon. For updates on the September 19 & 20 celebration RSVP through cartoonart.org/calendar/2020prismawards to receive reminders and the information to join. You do not need to RSVP to attend. How to watch will be shared by all three entities, Prism Comics, Queer Comics Expo and the Cartoon Art Museum, through social media and press.

That from the email that CAM sent me, which also included a list of the Prism Awards finalists. Some names that you will surely recognize are to be found there:

• The Webcomic nominees are The Girl that Can’t Get a Girlfriend by Mieri Hiranishi, Cafe Suada by Jade Sarson, and Magical Boy by The Kao; the fact that two of the three nominees are on aggregator sites (Webtoons and Tapas) says something about the shifting nature of webcomics as a whole, I think.
• The Short Form nominees are In Search of Absent Pigments by Alex Assan and Lin Darrow [Editor’s note: the nomination only lists Assan, but Assan’s own site credits Darrow, so I’ve included them here], Pseudo Slut Transmission by Emma Jayne, and One Day Out by Ina Bestari.
• Longer form individual stories are broken up by the size of the publisher’s reach, so there are two groupings. Small/Midsize Press nominees are Trans Girls Hit The Town by Emma Jayne (a 2019 Ignatz winner), Lemonade Summer by Gabi Mendez, and Stage Dreams by Melanie Gillman. The categories are a little fuzzy, as Pseudo Slut Transmission is only about six pages shorter than Trans Girls Hit The Town, which was counted as a minicomic for the purposes of Ignatz categories.
• The Mainstream Press nominees were certainly spoiled for choice this year, but ultimately settled on Bloom by Kevin Panetta & Savanna Ganucheau, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable & Ellen T Crenshaw.
• Finally, the Anthology category consists of Come Together edited by Tab Kimpton and Alex Assan, Heartwood edited by Joamette Gil, and Shout Out edited by Steven Andrews.

Five categories and fifteen nominated works means that a two-day virtual event can give great, huge gobs of time to each of the nominees. If you weren’t familiar with a particular work, by the end of the weekend you surely will be. Oh, and take a gander at the announcement and scroll down to the bottom, where you’ll find a list of all 27 judges plus the organizing committee; there’s lots of great people involved.

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If you don’t follow my Twitter, you maybe don’t know that we had a rough couple of days here at Fleen Central, after our dog (a smallish and very sweet-tempered greyhound) got attacked by an off-leash dog during her Thursday evening walk. She’s had surgery to repair her ankle (the same one that she broke to end her racing career) and she’s very much back to her regular behavior, except that she’s on two weeks strict rest.

That means no jumping, running, zoomies, bouncy play, getting and down from furniture (the couch is her favorite place in the world). While greyhounds are notorious for sleeping 20 hours a day and being very, very lazy, there’s generally ten minutes of intense activity in there. She’s being very good, but we have to keep an eye on her every hour we’re awake to make sure she isn’t doing something she shouldn’t. It’s taking up some time.

So I have three brief items today, and a submission from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin for you tomorrow. After that, we’ll hopefully have her in a calm enough routine to get back to reading webcomics widely.

• Firstly, the third print collection of Stand Still, Stay Silent is now Kickstarting. Minna Sundberg continues to put out one of the most lushly beautiful webcomics in existence, and the previous volumes of SSSS have been impressive in their quality and entirely worthy of the material inside the covers. On day 3 with 27 to go, it’s sitting a bit over 500% of goal, so at this point, it’s a pre-order. Oh, and if you speak French, maybe give this one a miss — as Sundberg noted the other day:
  

  [V]olume 3 will be published by Akileos publishing in French this autumn, so unless you specifically want the english version you’ll be able to get that one cheaper and faster.

• Secondly, KC Green posted the 32nd chapter of his adaptation of Pinocchio, and it’s getting back to parts of the story that we in modern culture are familiar with. That is to say, body horror with a dash of moralizing about Always Being A Good Boy Or Shit Will Happen To You And You’ll Deserve It. Four more chapters to go.
• Thirdly, holy crap, Megatokyo turned 20 years old on Friday. I’ll confess that I lost the plot years ago (and in my less charitable moments wonder if Fred Gallagher has as well), but one must acknowledge the perseverance that allows a creator to put together 1584 strips over two decades. Now that he’s passed the big Two-Oh, maybe he’ll invest in some ink.

Spam of the day:

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I host a number of house centipedes and jumping spiders (along with the occasional mantis) in the walls and baseboards of my house. They do a remarkable job of keeping everything else under control.

It’s a sad day when stereotypes raise their ugly heads in the world of webcomics. The saddest part being, they hurt those that hold those prejudices the most.

• I speak, naturally, of Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett and his campaign to print not one, but two new Sheldon collections simultaneously. That’s a message that’s worth discussing, but unfortunately LArDK gets side-tracked into a shame spiral over his choice of facial hair. Moustaches are not just for quarrantine, LArDK, they’re for life. Let go of your hate, find enlightenment, and realize that in this (as in so very, very much) your wife is correct.

  As for the rest of you, I’m certain that if the campaign goes well, it’ll help LArDK to a better place, and let him come to embrace what is objectively one fine lookin’ ‘stache that he’s rocking¹. Fortunately, success looks pretty certain; as of this writing, the funding is north of 83% and pretty likely to pile up some stretch goal improvements².

  If you’re interested in some thick books (each is more than 200 pages, which a quick glance at my bookshelf means they’re 50% larger than the previously biggest Sheldon collections) to be delivered around December (just saying, you could knock down some holiday shopping now) at an eminently reasonable price³, you’ve got until 10 September to pony up.

  Do it for the moustaches.

• In non-moustache news (we do that sometimes), have you seen that Jorge Cham has been working on a TV show? I hadn’t? I think the first he mentioned it was about a month ago, which I missed. Then about two weeks back, he mentioned that he’d talked to the Television Critics Association in advance of the premiere, which I also missed. Look, a lot happens on Twitter these days and I’m trying to moderate my doomscrolling, okay? The TCA tweet showed up in my feed today and now I’m caught up.

  A quick flip between Twitter accounts revealed the original May 2019 press release, from which we will now quote:

  Today, PBS KIDS announced the animated series ELINOR WONDERS WHY, set to premiere Labor Day 2020. ELINOR WONDERS WHY aims to encourage children to follow their curiosity, ask questions when they don’t understand and find answers using science inquiry skills. The main character Elinor, the most observant and curious bunny rabbit in Animal Town, will introduce kids ages 3-5 to science, nature and community through adventures with her friends. This new multiplatform series, created by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson and produced in partnership with Pipeline Studios, will debut nationwide on PBS stations, the PBS KIDS 24/7 channel and PBS KIDS digital platforms.

  So this is what Cham and his We Have No Idea co-author Daniel Whiteson have been up to — they’ve been players in the hurly-burly world of Hollywood, power players in the production of televised entertainment, a seamy industry that has line items for cocaine and hookers in its budgets. Oh, wait, it’s PBS Kids? Never mind, that’s an entirely different seamy industry that has line items for tote bags and googly eyes in its budgets.

  In all seriousness, Cham and Whiteson have spent the past forever spreading knowledge about the universe we live in, how it works, and why we know what we know (and, crucially, what we don’t know … yet). The character designs for Elinor Wonders Why are cute, the lessons are imparted in a gentle fashion (check out a preview episode here), and if they aren’t exactly dealing with the hard science facts of their book, they are teaching basics like how senses work and how animals and plants behave, as well as mentioning prominent scientists.

  More importantly, they’re teaching logical thinking and the idea that problems have solutions that can be solved; that last idea frequently escapes people far older than Elinor‘s target audience, so the sooner we get the idea into kids, the better.
  Elinor Wonders Why debuts on PBS Kids (and maybe your local PBS station, but they don’t all run the same programming) and online on 7 September.

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Those are … disturbingly specific.

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¹ No longer subject to tricks of the light that make him look like J Jonah Jameson, the moustache in question is well on its way to Hadfieldian proportions.

² Not going to do a FFF mk2 calculation, as LArDK does early notices to his Patreon backers, with special discount tiers available to them for the first 24 hours of funding, before opening things up to everybody else. Perfectly legit technique, but it throws off the math.

³ 400+ pages of print edition for US$45 (plus S+H) means less than 12 cents per page, and with an average of two strips per page, less than six cents per laugh-chuckle. Giving up just one a’ your five buck fancy coffee drinks means you get more than 83 punchlines.

Yeah, looks like I did math after all.

There are, if my math is correct, three things to look forward to next month. The first and most important, of course, is seeing what Demi Adejuyigbe comes up with on the 21st. If you’re not familiar, check it out here, here, here, and here, and watch the Twitter thread on the day (It’s a Monday this year).

• But nearly as important is SPX, which will be going virtual this year. Along with the distancing required, there a delay in getting information on the page, with the exhibitor, guest, and programing pages still to appear. But one aspect of SPX that is inextricably linked with the festival is up to date, and it’s a doozy.

  The Ignatz Awards are, famously, voted on by the attendees of SPX. Attend on Saturday, walk the floor, talk to creators, drop your ballot in a box before you leave. Between the close of the hall and the awards ceremony, volunteers work through the dinner hour to count the votes and prepare the presenters for what’s easily the most democratic comics award out there.

  There may not be any ballot boxes, or a floor to walk on Saturday, but the Ignatzen will go on, and the most democratic comics award is opening itself up to an even wider electorate:

  Sign up to vote for the 2020 Ignatz Awards!

  In exchange for your Name and Email Address, we will send you a 2020 Ignatz Awards Ballot. We will never sell, loan or give this list to a 3rd Party. SPX keeps its emails to a minimum, so we will not Spam you either.

  [Editor’s note: the folks in charge of this year’s deeply flawed Eisner voting might want to get in contact with the Ignatz folks, see what a vote-by-mail looks like. It would be vastly preferable to what they’ve been doing.]

  I’ve requested my ballot, and hope that you will as well. There’s a plethora of great comics released all the damn time and this is your chance to recognize the best of the best.

• And have we all remembered that this September is when Ryan North’s adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five — with line artist Albert Monteys and colorist Ricard Zaplana — comes out in September? Specifically, the 9th. There’s a first look out today and while I’m not familiar with Monteys’s work, the designs in that preview look well matched to North’s sensibilities (which, it goes without saying, mesh perfectly with Vonnegut’s very serious absurdism). Order yours now, avoid the rush.

Spam of the day:

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I should note that Gmail marked this message as dangerous before they delivered it to me, meaning that they well know what an open sewer YouTube can be, and if somebody wants to pay you to watch videos, they’re probably a godsdamned Nazi. Pass.

There are a couple of kinds of ATTENTION that we want to talk about today. In both cases, take the lesson of how you want to pay.

• So I got a notification that the latest Girl Genius book-kicker was going up, on account of I’ve backed all of the previous books. I went by Kickstarter and saw an implausibly low number of backers and dollars (3 and US$140, respectively) and thought there was no way that I was in quick enough that I would be backer #4. Then I saw that the campaign was canceled, and an update from Kaja Foglio:
  

  I hit the launch button and then saw that the campaign was set to end in SEPTEMBER instead of in August. There was no way to change that, and I panicked and cancelled the campaign. I then had to go make a new clone of the whole thing. SO…The proper Sparks and Monsters campaign will be going live in the next few days, just as soon as it’s approved (again) by the Kickstarter team.

  So yeah, learn something new every day — Kickstarter won’t let you make changes once the campaign goes live, which I guess makes sense. The having to re-submit and re-approve it seems like something could be automated, a kind of accounting for whoopsies to say Look, it’s exactly the same but I changed this one typo but yeah — any loophole, eventually somebody will find a way to exploit it for nefarious purposes.

  Trust me — as a guy who has to edit his own stuff and who will go back to a piece that he’s read and linked literally dozens of times and still will find a typo or missing word, there’s no substitute for getting your most anal-retentive friend to look at your Kickstarter without any foreknowledge, and then report back on what they find. In this case, pretty much no harm done, but an annoyance that Professoressa Foglio surely didn’t need, particularly after her recent bout with bacterial colonization that landed her in the hospital. Double check everything, folks, and then get somebody else to triple-check it.

• When a creator tells you to hang on, there’s gonna be an update delay because multiple pages will go up at once, you in the next update, you PAY ATTENTION. They are cooking up something rad. Oh, sure, there’s sometimes oversized updated that take your breath away that casually drop without any notice (Meredith Gran was especially good at these), but when you feel a story climax coming on and there’s a notice of delay? That’s gonna be good.

  And when they deliver early? Buckle up.

  That, naturally, is the latest four pages of Kill Six Billion Demons by Tom Parkinson-Morgan (or Abbadon as he styles himself on the pages), which is what would happen if Old Testament apocrypha, New Testament eschatology, Medieval demonology, and half a liter of grain alcohol were thrown together and the results were emblazoned on the side of a van¹ blaring the heaviest metal known to science. And I mean that in the best way possible.

  It is the latest twist in the championship round of a gods-and-demons fighting tournament that has been going on roughly as long as a season of Dragonball Z, only with loads less posturing and delay, and way more character development. It’s the moment that one of the seven gods of the universe — one who’s just as full of himself as that face in panel four indicates — is caught by surprise just when he’s certain that he knows exactly what’s going on. It’s a living embodiment of the dictum If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, with the caveat that there’s more than one way to kill a god. If you’ve not been reading the story you’re liking clearing time in your schedule to go back and start from the beginning.

  And if you have been reading, and following the very intricate and thought-out plot development for the last few hundred pages, I’m not sure what there is to say other than Great Googly Moogly. Shit just got kicked to the next level, and it’s only going to get wilder from here on out.

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¹ Chain wheel optional.

Faith Erin Hicks has done a lot of graphic novels, and is one of the most reliable writer/artists we have working today; whatever the topic, whatever the genre, the book is going to be pretty to look at, consist of pages that serve the needs of the story, be cartoony enough to convey a range of action and moods, but not so much as to overwhelm the characters. One of her earliest works was The War At Ellsmere, and she’s recently reworked the visuals and tweaked the title, resulting in One Year At Ellsmere. The folks at :01 Books¹ were kind enough to send me an advanced review copy, and so we’re going to talk about it.

This is going to be a less than usual review (the original is a good dozen years old now, so you know what? it’s too late to worry about spoilers), and more a series of thoughts on what’s different. Hicks is not merely re-releasing an earlier work, but re-editing, or re-cutting it. Maybe the best analogy would be how some of the Star Trek series have been released with their SFX redone with modern technology to look good in resolutions that are commonplace today.

And then there’s the title; the story of a scholarship student arriving at a prestigious private school and being targeted by wealthy Queen Bee girls, there’s a definite shift in emphasis from The War to One Year. The former implies that Juniper was engaged in a period of conflict which ended; as she’s the protagonist, she presumably prevails. The latter implies that Juniper made it through a year, but there’s more in front of her, and the antagonists will surely not just tuck tail and leave her alone in coming years. It’s the difference between a one-and-done bad time in your life and the more complicated reality that you don’t solve all your problems in middle school.

Hicks hasn’t completely redrawn Ellsmere, although there are fairly obvious differences between War and Year; in the back matter she shows a pages-long process of redrawing the background of the opening splash page, finishing with a side-by-side comparison between an original page (at right) and the redrawn version (left); the inking is much less heavy — a practical consideration as Year has picked up an expert coloring job by Shelli Paroline — but there are other differences as well. Although Juniper is less redrawn than the tableau in front of her, she is different — her posture is less stiff, and crucially she’s reoriented on the page to a more forward position. In the original, she’s hanging back, in the redraw, she’s moving into the unknown. Even the looming tower in the distance is left perfectly geometrical and seems more plausibly real in the new version.

And although it’s not really obvious from behind, Hick’s style has evolved from rather Scot Pilgrimesque in War in the past dozen years. Reading one of Hicks’s later books — Pumpkinheads or an installment from The Nameless City, you know what Hicks’s style is like. Pick up a copy of War today and you’ll do a doubletake before you necessarily recognize the art as hers, much like suddenly seeing an original model sheet for Bugs Bunny. Hicks has almost split the difference here, bringing character designs into her modern style while retaining elements of the original, particularly around the eyes.

The story is as sharp as ever, but the reworking/remastering/rewhatever of the art makes it look more assured, resulting in an even stronger narrative impact. If you’ve got a copy of War on your shelf, strongly consider picking up Year, and if you don’t have it already, there’s never been a better time to read what is basically the exception to the rule that artists shouldn’t worry about going back to redo completed work.

One Year At Ellsmere is available in bookstores now; it’s highly recommended for anybody that would appreciate a go away to school and deal with bullies story that unlike, say, Harry Potter, doesn’t have 1000+ pages of bloat before you get to the end of the story. So basically, everybody.

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_______________
¹ They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but do me a favor and check out Collen AF Venable’s cover design vs the original and tell me which has more shelf appeal.

The Eisner awards presentation went up last night, with Phil LaMarr doing a nice job of providing context and hopefully making all the nominees and winners feel like this is significant thing, even with the distance required.

It was a nice touch that the Hall Of Fame inductees (near the end of the program) were given the opportunity to make video acceptance speeches; I’m wondering if the Eisners will reach out to the winners of the 32 regular categories and give them the same opportunity.

Of the six inductees voted in (Nell Brinkley and E Simms Campbell were the historic inductees chosen by the jury), Alison Bechdel, Stan Sakai, and Louise Simonson spoke on their own behalf; Maggie Thompson accepted for herself, but also her late husband Don; Howard Cruse died last year and his award was accepted by Ed Sedarbaum, his husband. Bill Watterson declined to send an acceptance, but honestly — if you had the chance to have an award accepted on your behalf by Sergio Aragonés instead of public speaking, you’d probably do so, too.

Of the 32 regular categories, I called a couple closely-contested decisions, including Ebony Flowers (Hot Comb) for Best Short Story and The Way Of The Househusband, vol 1 as Best Humor Publication. I never did get around to looking at the digital/web nominees (on account of … yeah, everything), but we should acknowledge Chip Zdarsky and Jason Loo (Afterlift) as Best Digital Comic, and Erica Eng (Fried Rice Comic) as Best Webcomic¹.

But let’s talk about some Fleen favorites from last year:

• Raina Telgemeier took both her nominated categories — Best Publication For Kids and Best Writer/Artist for Guts.
• Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me touched three awards, with Mariko Tamaki getting the Best Writer nod (which included other works for the year), as well as Best Publication For Teens and Best Penciller/Inker for Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.
• Tillie Walden was up for three awards, and lost out on the lettering award to Stan Sakai² (who’s literally been winning Eisners since before Walden was born) and the writer/artist award to Raina, so no shame in either of those. But I imagine that’s made up for the fact that Are You Listening? took Best Graphic Album — New, marking at as the best, single new graphic novel of the year which … damn.

Kindly consider that of the 32 categories and 43 named winners³, 23 were women (25 men and 28 women if you count the Hall Of Famers). Black women, queer women, young women, old women, women going back to the dawn of cartooning are the major force in the creation of comics, and the people that make them — including the people that make cape comics that can only recycle storylines and try to maintain sales with endless reboots, variant covers, and line-wide crossovers — recognize them as the best in the medium.

And given that Walden and Valero-O’Connell are still in their mid-20s and getting better — not to mention teaching and inspiring the creators of tomorrow — none of that is changing anytime soon. That keening sound you hear in the distance is the increasingly-irrelevant cohort of manchildren that want comics to be their boys-only club that never changes, and their tears are delicious.

Weirdly, they didn’t announce the Spirit Of Comics Retailer Award in the video, but just as weirdly, they only announced the short list a couple of days ago; the website does mention that Sergio López of Nostromo Sevilla in Seville, Spain was recognized. That makes two years in a row for shops from Spanish-speaking countries, which is just another change for the better — comics is a worldwide artform, and the more people from different backgrounds about, the better it is for all of us.

Spam of the day:
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_______________
¹ As a reminder, Best Digital Comic appears online in comic book format, and Best Webcomic is a longform work created for viewing online, neither of which necessarily describe a lot of the best work being done on the web, which is why Matt Inman keeps getting nominated for Best Short Story, I guess.

² Who had a very good virtual night; Sakai also took the award Best Archival Collection/Project — Comic Books, for the hardcover/slipcased edition of the complete Grasscutter story from Usagi Yojimbo.

³ I’m omitting translators in this count.

And also because it deserves its own post, naturally

Rosemary Mosco does the best comics about the natural world; this is a fundamental truth. And more people than ever are going to get a chance to share in her Nature Wisdom, because Gina Gagliano at Random House Graphic has signed Mosco and Binglin Hu to a chapter book about a mole and a vole exploring their natural world, then suddenly getting transported to the city. Wild critters in the city? Gee, I wonder if Mosco has anything to say about that.

Expedition Backyard is due in 2022, and I’m going to just recommend you pre-order it now, because it is gonna be great.

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Couple of Howards to talk about today. Weird how that works out.

• I’m either one day late or two days early on this, but there’s something fairly tremendous is going on with my evil twin:
  

  Calling it: 6pm, July 21, 2020, I finished inking the last Schlock Mercenary strip of my 7,345-day run of daily-without-fail updates.

  Except I got the math wrong. 7,348. Because Friday is still three days off.

  I speak, naturally, of the fact that Howard Tayler, the indefatigable machine of webcomics, was working with only a two day buffer.

  Oh, and the 20 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 5 day streak, that’s important too.

  MET will be taking some well-earned time off and some overdue attention to his health, which has been challenging for some time now. And I want to be very clear about something as I add my congratulations to those of pert-near everybody: Howard, buddy, evil twin from a mirror dimension, you waited too long to take these three months. I think that somewhere along the line the idea of having a single, uninterrupted story became more important than it should have, and you neglected yourself to a degree you should not have.

  And while Tayler is being lauded for his achievement — and rightfully so! — we, all of us who are holding up this achievement and maybe shifting our expectations a little bit to the no skip days ever side of the spectrum need to remember that behind that beloved strip we never want to wait for an update from? There’s one or more people whose obligations is first and foremost to their own well being.

  I’m guilty of over-emphasizing the streak aspect of Tayler’s longevity in webcomics as much as anybody, and wish I could go back to every anniversary or Big Round Number when I extolled his achievement and excise however many mentions of and he did it without skipping any days, with its unspoken, not serious (but not entirely unserious) subtext of now get back to the drawing board, Comic Boy, and entertain me.

  You done good, Howard. I expect that you are going to sleep in until next Tuesday or so, and I expect everybody that is making noise about the capital-A Achievement to resolve to purchase stuff from his store, as well as to resolve that we don’t place such expectations on his next project, or any other creator, ever again. Deal? Deal.

• Speaking of misplaced emphasis, I want to point you to the most clueless, self-proclaimed Kickstarter expert of 2020. Dude (of course it’s a dude) emailed C Spike Trotman with a mealy-mouthed, faintly negging description of the latest Iron Circus Kickstart, offering to make it successful.

  Spike. This Spike, who apparently would be incapable of making a success from a horror anthology by Abby freakin’ Howard without taking the extremely important step of … paying some rando thirty five bucks.

  Don’t be this guy. And get a copy of The Crossroads At Midnight which, granted, has a pretty hefty shipping charge associated but it’s also 380 damn pages long full of Howardian goodness unsettling creepiness. Maybe don’t read it alone in the dark.

Today In SDCC@Home:
The virtual show floor is live, which allows you to click on a booth’s exhibitor and see if they have any merch specials. Panels start in a couple of hours (as I write this).

Spam of the day:

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Ooooh, a UV gizmo with a rechargable battery! Know what’ll sterilize and clean (those are actually different things) my room in 30-60 minutes? Me, with a rag and a 10% bleach solution in a bucket.

Scared by fancy percent-type numbers? Get a bucket of water, add bleach until it smells about twice as strong as the chlorine a pool. Wipe surfaces, allow to air-dry at least four minutes. Kills everything you’re promising plus more stuff including the novel coronavirus. Used exactly this method last night to clean up all the blood that a trauma patient with a head injury thoughtfully left on our stretcher cushion.

Hi. Some stuff has been going on since we at Fleen have been away. Let’s try to ease back into it.

Near as I can tell, San Diego Comic Con has still not, institutionally, recognized what a fiasco the Eisner voting data leak was. My hiatus coincided just about perfectly with the deadline I gave CCI’s Communications & Strategy office to respond on the record, a deadline which was blown, and an office that still has not deigned to reply.

But they are talking plenty about what’s going on for Comic-Con@Home, complete with a schedule of panels. We’ll come up with a (likely very brief) list of what looks most interesting and run that tomorrow, so you can make plans to connect to sessions starting on Wednesday afternoon¹.

There will also be some sort of live virtual exhibit hall running from Wednesday through Sunday, but not many details as to what that means. Here’s the gist:

You’ll find company listings, exclusive products for sale, promotional links, and a whole lot more. The Exhibit Hall will be available for all five days of the convention.

That sounds almost like what I was advocating for back in June:

[I]f you could come up with something that lets an attendee produce a verifiable payment, then talk with a creator for five minutes while watching merch get personalized, you’d have something replicating the experience and providing a value-add for so many people who’ve watched their income tank this year.

Related question: is there a mechanism that provides for con exclusives, something that gives people a chance at their favorite variant stuff but keeping eBay churners from snapping everything up?

That being said, creators I’ve seen who are promising interaction with people during the SDCC dates, including the ability to watch your purchases get personalized, don’t seem to be pointing people towards the SDCC site. Case in point: Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett is doing instant-send Zoom links² if you make purchases during specific hours (1 hour pre-dinner on Wednesday night, 1 hour midday on Thursday and Friday, and four hours in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday; all times PDT).

Jeff Smith is taking pre-orders and scheduling times for visible sketching via Facebook Live, which it looks like anybody can watch. And that’s about it, actually. I haven’t found anybody else replicating the fan interaction experience at a distance, which makes me think that SDCC hasn’t devised and destributed a mechanism, leaving exhibitors to work it out themselves.

In non-quasievent news:

• Achewood has gone full academic: please enjoy a video conference presentation on Achewood and views on masculinity by Ken Alba of Boston University. It’s an intriguing, well-supported thesis, and apart from the abstract’s characterization of xkcd³, there’s pretty much nothing to disagree with here.
• Oglaf, book 3. The strip keeps getting funnier and ruder from week to week, and your order at Tier 4 and up will contain many stickers and multiple KS-exclusive Sithrak tracts because Stretch Goals. I love the (previous editions here) and when I win the lottery I’m going to buy a few zillion of those and leave them in the bathrooms of every highway rest stop I can find.

Spam of the day:

Strangest Japanese “sex” practice

Oh spammers, how I missed you.

No, wait, the complete opposite of that. And may I say, those scare quotes are doing a lot of work.

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¹ Presumably, San Diego time, which is GMT-7.

² Watch the video if you want to see LArDK’s adorable weiner dog, Ollie, doing adorable things.

³ In which Achewood is contrasted with, quote, XKCD, Penny Arcade, and the other ‘manly’ webcomics of the aughts, which just confused the hell out of me. That description is Just Sick as Hell in a way that not even a 3-cell D Maglite can compensate for.