Oh yeah — #werewolfcomics.

• I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of Johnny Wander Volume 1: Don’t Burn The House Down (available at fine online stores starting next Monday), and I couldn’t put it down. What Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya have created is nothing less than a more modern, authentic-feeling, young-adult (in the sense of being out of college, not in the sense of a “Young Adult” reader) version of Archie.

  Bear with me a moment.

  The thing about Archie comics (and JWV1:DBTHD approximates the size and feel of the Archie digests) is, you don’t need to have been reading for the past 70 years to know that Archie Andrews is Everyteen, Reggie’s a jerk, Veronica’s a snob, Jughead’s most likely asexual, and Betty is freakin’ insane. You can pick up literally any Archie story ever written, and by the end of the story (frequently only six or eight pages) you know who these characters are and what their typical behaviors will be. It’s self-contained, self-explanatory, and above all, as accessible to the first time reader as to the obsessive fan.

  And that’s what maybe sets Johnny Wander, essentially an autobio webcomic, apart from most of its contemporaries. No in-jokes or mythologies, no history that’s needed to read the current update and get a laugh-chuckle in return. Whoever these people are, they’re funny. Reading from the beginning makes them funnier and more “real”, but the barrier to entry is nil, and that is a significant accomplishment. As Yuko and Ananth (one rarely sees them referred to singly, except as a merged hybrid creature) note in the back matter, this c’mon in the webcomic’s fine approach was deliberate:

  Comics like Yotsuba&! have a universal appeal that doesn’t require an ecyclopedic geek knowledge, and that’s what we began striving for.

  Not only did they hit what they were striving for, Yotsuba&! may be the only short vignette model comic that is guaranteed to make me smile more than Johnny Wander. Next time I see Yuko and Ananth (mecha or otherwise), the Beard Papa’s is on me (that sentence actually is grammatically correct, and the shop is right around the corner from my office, yay). Now, exactly do I have to pour ants on to get Volume 2?

• Puppets! Moviemaking! Progress! Steve Troop’s Melonpool photo set (with video coming soon).
• Quite a bit of discussion of some various It Moves! type webcomics; I got tipped off to one that’s particularly implemented in HTML5 (although somewhat hilariously, it doesn’t like my use of HTML5-compliant Opera and recommends I install forbidden-from-my-computer IE9). I’m deeply torn about these (and let me stress I’m not talking about any particular comic right now, just the idea of semi-interaction within the comic offering).

  On the one hand, webcomics, should be open to things you can’t do in print, push the boundaries, I get it. On the other hand, when there’s so much going on, characters moving around, panels shifting and fading, it’s like the comic is driving the reading experience instead of me. It puts me almost irretrievably in mind of an old Life In Hell where young Bongo the one-eared rabbit was asked why TV is the coolest invention ever: When you’re tired, TV does the playing for you. As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Yeah, okay, sometimes the Theme Of The Day doesn’t come together quite as strongly as I’d like. Mea culpa.

• New York Comic Con will be here in just a few weeks, and while the panels & screenings schedule is a little behind anticipated release, we do have at least a few hints of what’s coming down the ‘pike. For instance, the always-entertaining combo deal of Brad Guigar and Scott Kurtz will be doing an intensive, workshop-type session on Sunday morning. The description at Webcomics Dot Com is behind the subscription wall, but El Guigaro Magnifico has the gist of it at his own site:
  

  [A] one-on-one bootcamp for aspiring webcartoonists. Brad and Scott will present a lecture on the art and commerce of webcomics and then take their class through a collegiate-level critique of their work.

  This is a limited-attendance seminar. Students will be asked to bring examples of their work for critique, and be prepared to take and offer constructive criticism in the hopes of bettering each other’s work.

  So, interesting — not a portfolio review, and not seeking to attract attendees so much as participants. Given Guigar’s previously-stated dislike of sessions where the audience involves itself to the detriment of the speakers, the limited enrollment makes sense. If you attend, expect a small room, a large table, no podium, to work with your peers to improve everybody’s work, and for the ending time to be highly flexible. And as seems to be usual these days, Guigar has negotiated a discount on the enrollment fee, with WDC members getting in for $30 rather than the standard $50. Exact time and location to be announced.

• New book alert! Gordon McAlpin (my sporting bet nemesis — and by coincidence that link leads to a post with a picture of a looming Brad Guigar … much like Chickenman, he’s everywhere) has announced that his first collection of Multiplex strips, Enjoy Your Show, is now available for your purchase consideration.

  Unfortunately, ushers will not be walking through the aisles to offer EYS prior to the start of the movie (Will Rogers has that distribution channel locked up, and dead or not, he ain’t giving it up without a fight), so you’ll have to make a quick trip over to his internet-facing booksellery.

• Within yesterday’s DC Comics wholesale restructuring announcement(s) was the somewhat unusual news that Zudacomics is to be closed. Or perhaps more closed than it already was? I know that I wasn’t exactly a fan of the entire Zudaproject, but even I never proposed killing it twice. During the prior … I dunno, pre-closing? anouncement, I wrote:
  

  It’s no secret that I thought that the competition model of Zuda wasn’t the best thing that [web]comics could develop, but everybody I’ve met associated with Zuda has been an absolutely stellar, professional, admirable person. Here’s hoping that in the condensation of the the imprint into regular ol’ DC, the individuals find their way to stable, rewarding work quickly.

  When news of wholesale bloodletting didn’t come through, I breathed a sigh of relief for the Zudafolk. But now that it appears 20% of DC staff may be cut, I would guess that those working at a twice-killed imprint are nervous, and my good wishes go out to them doubly.

• Smut Peddler, comics porn by ladies, is lookin’ for contributors. Details here, a nice long submission deadline (31 December 2011), and plenty of people whose work I like means I have to start thinking up justifications for a future purchase that my wife will accept. Just one thing, though:
  

  And finally, there’s a difference between “porn” and “naked people telling jokes.” We want porn. Filthy porn.

  As the creators of Oglaf [NSFW, yo] will tell you:

  This comic started out as an attempt to make pornography. It degenerated into sex comedy pretty much immediately.

  Ain’t nothin’ wrong with sex comedy. And please, please, do what ever you have to in order to get the Oglafistas in on Smut Peddler. That would rule so hard. Err, so to speak.

Already really late, so let’s hop straight to the Lightning Round!

• TopatoCo have already filled one of their positions (announced last Thursday/Friday depending on where in the world you are), but you can still be their intern, especially if you are:
  

  [R]esponsible, reliable, generally self-reliant, and able to take direction even if you know deep down that what you are doing is wrong.

• The greatest thing ever painted by Jeff Zugale (as of today; tomorrow, the sumbitch will probably blow the doors off this magnificence before lunch) has progressed to the published fanfic stage (not sure where that falls on the hierarchy) for the beneift of Lupus research. Yay!
• Meme in the making? The System impressario Rosscott launched the hashtag on Twitter, and now “Future World Problems” has escalated to illustrated form.
• Definitely meme — draw yourself (or favorite creator) as a three-stage Pok&eacut;mon progression: The Portrait-Dex.
• From the Department of Redundancy Department: I’ve been following DJ Coffman’s e-book off an on for the past three weeks or so since it launched. Still haven’t read it (I’m not a cartoonist trying to make ca$h), and have been curious to see which cartoonists were using it. There’s testimonials and blurbs provided on Coffman’s site, and I’ve followed links to get familiar with some strips that I previously didn’t know. In that list: one “Mark D Ashworth”, who waxed rhapsodic about the benefits Coffman provided to his own efforts, and signed with his (Ashworth’s) site, www.memesink.com.

  Which consists solely of a redirect back to Coffman’s site.

  I like to give everybody the benefit of the doubt — and this could be just a busted link — but given the fairly rapturous praise given to Coffman’s book immediately on launch by people who didn’t seem to actually create comics, gotta say that Ashworth isn’t helping DJ dispel whatever perception existed that the testimonials were empty.

I finally picked up Kazu Kibuishi‘s third book in the Amulet series (see writeups of the first two here and here) this week, and want to talk about it. Be forewarned, though — I’m going to get into spoiler territory in a minute, so if you don’t want to know about what happens in The Cloud Searchers, this would be the time to jump down to the bottom, where there’s something unrelated you might be interested in.

I’m not sure which stage of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey it is where the search for wisdom and ability becomes a bit of a chore, but Emily and Navin are verging on it at the start of TCS. Their mother, returned to health by their efforts in the last book, is along for the ride as they seek to defeat evil and save the land, and moms just don’t always have the priorities that young saviors do. Observe two interactions between mother and son early in the book, on the topics of their new surroundings, and the task of finding transport to a powerful city that may be the only hope for their cause:

Mom: You have to remember we’re on an alien planet. There are all sorts of strange and dangerous things around us.
Navin: Yeah, isn’t it great?

Mom: Is this a bar? My children are not going into a bar.
Navin: It’s not a bar, Mom. It’s a drinking hole.

Seriously, if Odysseus or Coyote or Momotaro had mom along on their quests? Whole lot less exciting stories. That’s before Navin (previously revealed to be the commander of the Resistance army by prophecy) gets busted down to deckhand on an airship; for a young boy who’s spent the prior couple of days flying planes and driving mecha, you’d expect a lot of objection to be a natural reaction. But since getting mom back, since being faced with responsibilities he couldn’t have fathomed a week earlier, Navin just accepts it and proves himself, piloting an airship with spectacular results during a dangerous storm.

Emily is also feeling the need to grow up faster than she’d like; having accepted the role of the world’s protector in the previous book, she learns in rapid succession that the forces of evil have an interest in Earth as well; that her most vicious enemies may be valuable (if reluctant) allies; that using her Stone for defense is much more difficult than for attack (unsurprising — the Stone’s voice has always been one couched in terms of domination); and that there are other protectors in the world, but they’ve been sitting back from the conflict instead of involving themselves.

The remnants of the former guardians of the world have been secreted away in a floating city; they apparently have much better technology and magic than the folk suffering under occupation, and are deciding within their own population who will be in charge once things get sorted out. They aren’t seemingly doing much about getting those things sorted, though (surely to be revealed more in future books — it’s just supposition on my part for now), and for the moment give every impression of waiting for somebody else to clean up the mess so they can get back to their self-ordained role of Being in Charge. Max, a young Stonekeeper from this society lays it out for Emily:

The best of us will be left to govern Alledia. The Council believes that, like me, you have the potential to take a leadership role. Can you imagine what having that kind of power must feel like?

The sheer ordinariness of the smile that Max wore while uttering that last line was as terrifying as any of the expressions of brutality of the more obvious baddies; the Stones talk in terms of power and leading, and Emily’s worth to the world may largely come down to the fact that she doesn’t want the power. These distant would-be leaders may be ultimately as dangerous as the nominal Big Bad, the Elf King.

Ah, yes, the Elf King: prime instigator of the chaos, death, and destruction in the world. Or is he? In the review of the prior book, I wrote:

[W]e learn that years ago, four young stonekeepers gave into their stones and became monstrous creatures; one survived the defeat and imprisonment and attempts to free him from his stone’s influence, and he is now the Elf King that threatens all the world. This nameless, faceless king appears to wears a mask that resembles his stone, a total submission to its will, literally hiding behind it. On a later read, I began to believe that perhaps the stone has so incorporated itself into the king’s being that it has grown and merged with him, and now literally forms the face which the king presents to the world.

Half right on those assessments; the King is wearing a mask, but behind it he’s long since dead and his Stone has kept the corpse moving as a puppet. Rather than the King wearing the Stone as a mask, the Stone is wearing the King as a kind of cloak to hide its own independent existence. Brrr, creepy. The implacable evil armies that have thrown the world into oppression don’t know who (what?) it is that they’re following, and might abandon the fight if they knew. So it’s probably a good thing for the King that he’s got a deadly assassin on the payroll, one who kills minds and memories as much as bodies. Brrr, double creepy.

Perhaps because this volume falls in the middle of the overall story and doesn’t end on an immediate crisis (as with Book One) or achievement of a large goal (Book Two), it feels less like Emily and her family are making progress towards being done with all this struggle. One foot in front of the other, keep heading forwards, end game is still over there somewhere — like I said, adventures can become a chore.

Like all middle-of-the-story books, TCS isn’t quite as satisfying on its own as the previous books, but taken as the transition point to what the story is about to become? When the entire saga is over and done with, The Cloud Searchers could well be the pivotal turning point, the last moment of calm before it all blows up. Now we just have to find out what’s behind those clouds — silver lining, or more storm.

• Promised unrelated note: Girly wrapped up after more than 750 comics and 7.5 years. Congrats to Josh Lesnick on the adventure, and thanks for taking us along for the ride.

I’m not actually in anything approaching the mood of my man Roast Beef up there; I just want that sign for my desk.

• I received something really cool in the mail yesterday — Dustin Harbin had been kind enough to offer a review copy of his Diary Comics Volume 1 (making its debut this weekend at SPX) and I was more than happy to accept his kind offer. But imagine my surprise when I found that the package also contained a copy of Three Word Phrase mini by Ryan Pequin (also making its debut at SPX). That’s a whole 100% more review copies that I was expecting!

  I’m still working through DCV1 (it contains comics for every day from 1 January to 30 June 2010, in many cases getting down to the hourly scale of time), but I can tell you this much — as Pekarian as his daily diary comic is online, it approaches something like poetry when you’ve got between a day and a week staring up from a two-page spread. Time moves quicker and slower depending on how much Harbin wants to get into, and all you can do is follow the tempo changes, nodding your head as he improvises the rhythm.

  On the off chance you don’t find that worth the price of admission (a paltry six dollars for six months of the man’s life!), then consider that he drew a couple zillion Dharbin heads for the inside front cover, and pigment choices, there’s a feeling of looking at a 3-D image without the green and red glasses; your brain is sure that there are dimensions that you can’t quite perceive and it wants to dig in further.

  Ryan Pequin’s mini contains roughly half of the comics that he’s posted online, and needs only two words to convince you it is the best thing ever: President Bird.

• In other news, David Willis celebrates thirteen years of webcomics (across four related, exclamatory titles) by launching a fifth. The worst-kept secret of the past month, Dumbing of Age, is a relaunch/reinterpretation/reboot of Roomies! (which started the whole shebang lo those many years ago). Think of it as having the same relationship to the Walkyverse as the new Star Trek has to the previous iterations of the United Federation of Planets.
• Confidential to everybody going to SPX/Intervention this weekend: You lucky bastards.

Brian “Box” Brown (or Trip-B as he was known in his brief, but well-regarded, gangsta rap career) has released a new webcomic yea upon the internets, Everything Dies. A continuation of/supplement to his print comics of the same name (note to self: must buy issue #3, and #4 is due out soon), Everything Dies concerns itself primarily with The Big Questions of Life, Death, Religion, Faith, ans Suchlike.

On launch day alone, Brown has three stories (each more than 10 pages long) on mortality (i.e.: how he wants his funeral to go), public exhibitions of religious fervor (i.e.: an incomplete Jesus-themed theme park in Arkansas), and the (non-)existence of God (i.e.: what would constitute definitive proof of such).

And, in case a bigger justification for the title of Everything Dies were needed, Brown today wraps up his long-running series, Bellen!, the only way possible: a final declaration of identity and purpose.

• Con season still has a few last hurrahs before it wraps for the year, and two of them are coming up quickly: Intervention and SPX kick off in just over 10 days, and programming info is now available. Intervention’s got more than 75 panels, plus gaming and separate-registration-required workshops, covering a lot of ground.

  If you were, as I was, perhaps a little surprised to see multiple sessions that amount to Gettin’ Laid (Dating Advice from Hot Geeky Chicks, Sex Farm: A D00DZ Guide to Getting Chicks Through Nerdy Enterprise), well, there are plenty to balance it out on the more serious side (Act Locally, Promote Globally: A Conversation with Molly Crabapple, Copyrights for Artists, The Economies of Small Scale, and Revenue Streams: How to Make Ten-Tenths of a Living look particularly promising). Descriptions here, schedules here.

  By contrast, SPX has never been heavy on the programming, preferring to give attendees plenty of time to schmooze and talk with creators (and minimize the chance that you’ll have to decided between panels). You’ve got something kicking off pretty much every half hour, staggered between two rooms (Brookside Conference Room at the top of the hour, and White Flint Ampitheatre at the bottom), with pretty much a laser-like focus on indy comics and their creators.

  Particularly good-looking descriptions include Comics and Worldbuilding (panelists include Evan Dahm, Liz Baillie, Aaron Diaz, Carla Speed McNeil, and Spike Trotman), Telling Stories (with Heidi MacDonald, Meredith Gran, Roger Langridge, and Jon Lewis), and Kate Beaton and Julia Wertz in Conversation (with special guest Dustin Harbin). Descriptions, times, and locations here.

Quick bits:

• Reality TV meets vampires meets furries meets cyberpunk meets book one of The Last Res0rt.
• New twist on the superhero tropes: with mondo-powered beings flying around every damn way, somebody’s going to have to handle the PR and marketing, and that’s where The Hero Business comes in. Of course, who is more evil and venal? The nominal villains, or the skeezy marketing types working for the heroes? Episode 1 done, episode 2 coming soon.
• Launching tomorrow: the all-new home of In Maps & Legends, which had been running on Zuda when Zuda closed up shop.

Got a link in the mail to the preview of an e-book by DJ Coffman. This isn’t a review, since I a) don’t have the entire book in front of me; b) wouldn’t have had to time read it properly since it launched yesterday, and c) it’s not even remotely aimed at me. Ca$h for Cartoonists is bright, colorful, has a busy, eye-grabbing (almost advertising-like … and if there’s one thing ad guys knows, it’s how to hold eyeballs) design, and (as befits an e-book) up-to-the-second. For instance, you can get a discount on website hosting with a code provided in the introductory section, something that would be all but impossible with a traditional ink-and-paper presentation.

The chapters are pretty specific (“Spot Illustration”, “Digital Caricatures”, and “ACEO (Art Cards)” are the first three), and are presented in a detailed, relentlessly upbeat tone. There’s not enough in the preview to see if any of the full book ramps back a bit from the enthusiasm (Here’s how you can do this!) to something perhaps a bit more realistic (Here’s how I did this, you should be able to make it work similarly, but keep in mind that it’s a different economic climate and your mileages of persistence, luck, and talent will vary.), which I hope does happen.

All those copies of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (or more recently, all the How to Draw Manga books) led to an awful lot of starry-eyed kids who were certain that success was imminent; some lost interest or found other dreams, some wound up bitter, and they didn’t have an easily identifiable and accessible author to blame their lack of success on. Here’s the risky bit for Coffman:

A VERY SPECIAL OFFER! For a limited time when you buy the full edition of my ebook, I’m going to make myself available to you for the ?rst 30 days as a Personal Cartooning Career Coach… or Comic Coach… or, well I really don’t have a fancy title for this service, but if you draw comics or cartoons and want to personally pick my brain, or if you’re feeling stuck and need inspired… this is the deal for you!

Why be coached by me? I’ve done just about everything you can do in the cartooning business, from newspaper syndication to full blown super hero comics with a big hollywood producer. Not only have I had a ton of success with my skills, but I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way which I learned from and can pass a lot of knowledge on to you.

ONE MORE THING… You’ll have a chance to get on the AWESOME LIST. What is it? A special email newsletter for buyers of the full edition only, which basically assures this book will never end! I’ll send you updated ways to earn more money with your cartoons and illustrations as they become available. [emphasis original]

I hope that those starry-eyed kids don’t take Coffman’s enthusiasm for a promise, and really hope they don’t read over the most important part of that quote:

I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way

Let’s cut that down one more time for those in the back:

I’ve also failed many times

No book will keep you from having your own failures, starry-eyed kids! Keep that very important bit of perspective in mind while you peruse the lessons! $47 to download, going up to $97 after September 30.

• Speaking of $47, if you had that much to spend but don’t want Coffman’s book, you could get the 2-day VIP package for NEWW 2 and have $2 left over to buy a refreshing beverage. Plain ol’ non-VIP passes are $10, and one-day passes $6, for those that can live without the special-edition NEWW2 Sharpie (not sure I can).
• Speaking of books, Chris Eliopolous pulled a fast one on me with this morning’s tweet:
  

  The book. http://www.miserylovessherman.com/2010/08/26/the-book/

  I can’t be the only one that got his hopes up that this would be another Misery Loves Sherman collection, can I?

The Ignatz nominees were announced earlier today, and I found the honorees for Outstanding Online Comic to be … odd. Maybe more than other comics awards, the Ignatzes vary widely in character from year to year, but like other named-year awards, they’ve pretty much always looked at work for the year before the award: the 2009 award honored work primarily done in 2008, the ’08 award for work in ’07, and so forth.

This year, however, they seem pretty determined that the 2010 award will honor work done in 2010 (which isn’t quite 2/3 done yet). Consider the nominees:

• John Callahan’s Callahan Online is a now-frozen two-week archive of Callahan’s panel gag toons. Frozen, because he died at the end of last month, so anybody looking to examine his work will have those ten panel gags to judge and not much else. Hate to say it, but this feels like an Oh crap, did we honor him while he was alive? afterthought.
• Sarah Becan’s I Think You’re Saucesome is a diary comic that focuses on weight loss. It’s got a taste of Bellen!, here, a bit of Kinokofry there, and reminds me a lot of Stop Paying Attention, so that’s okay. Lots of updates (between 3 and 6 new strips a week), but it only began on March 1st of this year.
• Stephen Gilpin’s The Lesttrygonians features an archive going back to 1998 (!), but only 21 of those strips (weekly, from April of this year) are more recent than October 2000. It’s nice stuff, between a half- and full-page each week, but it’s a small amount of work in a short amount of time; the decade-long hiatus means the older stuff could barely be considered the same strip.
• David King’s Reliable Comics is a bit tougher to parse, temporally speaking — he posted a series of strips done in 2007-2008 between Dec 2009 and Feb 2010. February to April he posted strips from 2009, and since April work done this year, for a total of 26 “recent” strips.
• Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 began at the end of November 2009, and is currently in progress. Of the nominees, it appears to be the only one that features a traditional story, with a beginning, middle, and end; tonally, it feels a lot like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison.

None of this is meant to say That strip shouldn’t win/even be nominated because it’s ____ !; if the jury decided that the best comics work of the past year is heavily skewed towards the past five months, then that’s their call. I just can’t recall any award iteration that took the year quite so literally. I won’t be at SPX so I don’t get to vote, but I like (and this may be a side effect of having the fullest bodies of work to judge) Dawson and Becan quite a lot.

• Speaking of time, Amulet Book 3: The Cloud Searchers is out in two weeks!
• You may have heard that Our Kate (Beaton, that is … look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, son) is about to decamp from Canada for a period of time and hunker down in Brooklyn for a spell. Not content to see what a change of venue will do to her creative side (whenever she travels, she gets a bunch of really good comics from it), Beaton’s decided that she’s going to celebrate her new home by working for the good of others.

  Specifically, she’s joined up with a team of comics types to participate in the 2010 Run for Congo Women (New York, 5K, 25 September), with monies raised going to Women for Women International. Team Comics has their fundraising page here, and they could use your help. Hop to it, people, and Kate, next time I see you I owe you a tasty beverage for being a Damn Good Person.

Quick things!

• John Campbell had an art show. Here are pictures of the art show. Saddening!
• Dave Kellett, Keith Knight, and David Malki ! tried to spell words for charity. Here is the story of how famous and/or beautiful people are favored in our society. Shocking!
• TCAF 2011 applications now being accepted. Right-thinking people regard this as a good thing. Woo!
• The original may have been a hoax, but it’s still comics. Whiteboardery!
• Jeff Zugale did an analysis of “print” vs “web” business models for comics, and found that the “web” model has always been in use. It’s behind the subscription wall at Webcomics Dot Com which is a shame because this needs to be part of the broader conversation. Mayhap the newly vacationed Brad Guigar could be convinced to make this one a freebie?

Longer thing!

At the time I was writing yesterday’s update, I did not yet know what was waiting in my mailbox: a gifted copy of We Are The Engineers by Angela Melick. Considering that the book was announced as pre-order on the 11th and arrived from across an international border (and a weekend!) on the 16th, how could I not read it immediately?

A confession — since I met Ms Melick at NEWW last year, I’ve been a faithful reader of Wasted Talent, but I never read back far enough into the archives to cover her college years, when the inspired-by-life strip began (an aside: were this a movie, it would be touted as based on the incredible true story; since Melick is an engineer, it’s probably best described as slapped a linear approximation transform on what actually happened because crap on a stick, have you seen how messy the real data were?).

Turns out that I needn’t have felt guilty about it, as Melick has gone back to redraw the “best of” several hundred strips and distill down the period when she was still cartooning with improvised materials in margins (again, engineer) into her much cleaner and accomplished current style.

I have often remarked on how Melick (and Kean Soo, for that matter) and I share a bond of common experience. It doesn’t matter that it was different times, different countries, or different disciplines — engineers are an odd folk, and we get each other. Being part of an overworked, high-achieving minority within a much larger university was Melick’s experience, whereas I was part of a high-achieving, overworked, all-nerd school across town from a much larger (but entirely unrelated) university. She studied physical stuff, and I the more intangible (ECE511, I still remember you). UBC engineers built an artificial pond to throw people into, we had the natural variety. A decade and a half of technological and cultural change (not to mention a Y chromosome) separate her experiences from mine, and still — every page of WATE resonates like I was there alongside her.

But here’s the thing — much as engineers like to hold ourselves apart (it’s a comfort to us, having long ago realized we could have had a lot more fun and sex in college if we had picked easier majors), we really aren’t that much different from anybody else¹.

The experience of being a student engineer puts a certain sharp relief on certain aspects of college (our experiences were probably more math-intensive than most), but everybody remembers studying too long, working projects too hard, praying for a curve to kick in and rescue everything. Everybody remembers looking down on another major and wondering how they had it so easy, or a first job and wondering if you’d ever get the hang of things. Everybody had idiot traditions and the revered history of those that came before you.

Whatever your experience of working too hard with others sharing the same goal, you’ll find your memories coming back after reading WATE. It took Proust seven books and a cookie to provoke this kind of involuntary recall, and he didn’t even have one psychotic squirrel in there, so screw him; you won’t be able to write a senior thesis around WATE, but you’ll have a hell of a lot of fun reading it.
_______________
¹ Nah, we totally are.

New Jess Fink site! She said “poop”!

• Okay, this is the sort of story that changes quickly, so by the time you read this it may no longer be an issue. There’s a new webcomic-reading application over in the iPhone/iPad apps store, by one Mr or Ms Reilly Watson. Unlike the last one of these that made a splash in the community, this app does not appear to be a simple RSS feed aggregator — it appears to pull comics from the creator’s site, present it outside of their preferred context, costing the creators bandwidth and advertising revenue (I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, so my apologies if I’m wrong on this one). One more time for those in the back: RSS readers = cool, scrapers = not cool.

  Mr or Ms Watson might particularly want to pay attention to a bit from Robert Khoo at the SDCC Webcomics Lightning Round, as it bears repeating:

  Question: Going back to people taking your content, were you aware of how you have to protect your work always, and is that likely to change?
  Khoo: It’s very complicated, and would take a lot more than twenty seconds to answer properly; we aggressively protect ourselves from people trying to make money off our marks, otherwise we see it as a form of community enabling.[emphasis original]

  And lookee there — Mr or Ms Watson mentions Penny Arcade as one of the ‘popular comics’ included (although I must point out in the service of snark that Mr or Ms Watson seems to have farmed support for the app out to Canadian Google), which means that Mr or Ms Watson is indeed making money off that mark.

  Quick hint to Mr or Ms Watson and all who might follow in his or her footsteps: the Patent and Trademark Office maintains a simple trademark search which shows exactly who owns what. I’ll also point out that trademark owners have an obligation to defend their marks, and that registration means that violators are subject to treble damages. That would be the case here even if the app is just an RSS aggregator, since it’s advertising on a name and identity owned by somebody else. If the app in question is a scraper, Mr or Ms Watson should prepare to share out revenue to the creators who are going to be demanding compensation.

• Oh hecka yeah — Angela Melick, aka Jam, aka Spike Without Dreads, aka my right hand rule homie, has done the crazy and redrawn a bunch of her Wasted Talent college-era strips in order to put her first book together. We Are The Engineers debuts at Anime Evolution this weekend, and goes up for pre-order on the 13th for artists editions, with actual online sales on 18 September.

  For everybody that ever wondered what the crap was going on in the head of the engineers that they know and (let’s be honest — only sometimes) love, Melick is your translator. We’re definitely a breed apart, and she’s our ambassador to the world of people that don’t subscribe to the notion If it ain’t broke, break it and see if you can make it better! We are an oft-misunderstood people, and may consider WATE as a field guide to our mysterious ways.

• Finally, because a few people have been asking — I’m not going to be able to make it to SPX and/or Intervention next month; unfortunately, I’ve got a little too much going on this autumn, and will save my away from home time for NEWW. On the upside, most everybody I would see in Bethesda will be in Easthampton in November, so that’s all right.

  For those of you that are heading to Maryland, Casey Roberson wants you to know that there are hotel bargains o’plenty in the immediate area of the two shows, including a place called Legacy Hotel in Rockville (less than 2 miles from SPX) with single-bed rooms for $68/night. Please note that we at Fleen are not travel service and make no claims about the quality of accommodations. Then again, you could probably get cut by a murderous drifter just as easily at an expensive hotel as a cheap one, so may as well save a few bucks.