We’re looking at a pair of nonfiction, largely non-narrative :01 Books (and thus the concept of spoilers doesn’t really apply) today, both of which have been out for a while but which haven’t gotten write-ups because of [waves hands] everything.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I held off on reviewing Maker Comics: Grow A Garden (words and pictures by Alexis Frederick-Frost, released 25 February) because I wanted to try out some of the suggestions in my own annual, smallish garden endeavours and see how things worked compared to previous years. And I held off on Science Comics: Crows (words and pictures by Kyla Vanderklugt, released 24 March) because I was going to bring it and make observations of the ravens of Juneau at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp, only that didn’t happen.

Grow A Garden‘s up first, with a framing story about garden gnomes at the garden gnome version of Hogwarts, including the obligatory reveal of the evil professor up to no good. It’s cute, it serves the purpose of providing a rationale for lecture-like content (a similar approach was taken in Falynn Koch’s baking contribution), but it’s not why you’re here. You’re here to learn a bit about dirt, how to make compost (although you’ll likely have to wait until next year to see how it turns out), how to start seedlings and keep them comfortable, and about the things you might do that will mess up your plants.

On these scores, Grow A Garden is a resounding success, particularly in the way it finds MacGuyver solutions to gardening needs. Fancy drainage posts aren’t needed, you can drill a hole in the bottom of any can or container and give it a good cleaning (unless it held paint or other complex chemicals). Cold frames are complicated, but you can clip together a couple of those transparent shields for window wells.

And that seedling you started that is all atrophied right at the dirt line and falling over? Damping-off disease, from cool, wet conditions and soil fungi¹. Once I get my stuff in the dirt outside² (fortunately I started them a bit late this year, otherwise they would have been outside for the polar vortex and hard frost we got on 7 May, what the heck), I’ll be able to try some of the pest control recommendations. Grow A Garden won’t turn a kid (or an adult) into a master gardener in a season, but it’ll give you some time to get your hands dirty and build up some skills, and we could all use a distraction along those lines.

Crows, subtitled Genius Birds, does a bit better with its framing story. It features a flock of crows that use planning, stealth, tools, and misdirection to steal food from Buddy the dog, with one of their number taking Buddy for a walk around town in search of more food. Along the way, Buddy gets taught about crow vision (color perception into the ultraviolet), memory (faces, circumstances, etc), tool use and fabrication, problem solving, counting skills, vocalization, family dynamics, and brain structure, as the POV crow explains how awesome crows are to an eager (but not genius) audience.

Both Buddy and the nameless crow (well, Buddy refers to the crow as Crow, but there’s never a proper introduction) are pretty expressive characters; mention digging or the park or friends or praise him and Buddy is all excited, ears and tail and eyes doing the talking. Crow, meanwhile, uses some distinctly non-corvid eyebrows and primary feather finger-guns to indicate emotion and reaction.

Crow’s also got a pretty healthy sense of self-esteem (I’m the smartest crow in the world, which would put Crow on par with about a five year old human), a sense of mischief, and an occasional streak of dickishness. It’s Crow that orchestrated the heist of Buddy’s food, earning the gratitude of their family for the feat; a’course, Crow ate far better than they did with Buddy’s help, meaning Crow simultaneously put one over on the flock, pillaged multiple garbage cans, suckered Buddy into all kinds of mischief, and got an ego boost in the process.

Honestly, it might be a bit much, except for the fact that I’ve seen ravens — close cousins of crows, after all — act pretty much like Crow just because they can. As the foreword (by corvid scientist John M Marzluff) reminds us, it’s not a coincidence that crows and ravens are part of myth and religious belief around the world, sitting on the shoulders of All-Father Odin, saving Israelite prophet Elijah, or being regarded as the creator spirit of numerous indigenous groups.

Both books are appropriate for any readers that have the patience to sit and plow through 100 pages at a go; Grow A Garden is useful as an activity guide for let’s say 10 and up with supervision as individually necessary. As always, we at Fleen thank everybody at :01 Books for the review copies.

Spam of the day:

Keep America’s Great

Keep America’s what great? And no, I ain’t clicking on your identity stealing link so I can get my (quoting here) free New Donald Trump gold $1,000 Dollar Bill, whatever the hell that’s supposed to be, not even to blow my nose in. I was going to do something far ruder with your Trump thing, but kids might be reading today’s post.

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¹ I’d noticed this in the past with some of my bean seedlings, and was more careful about overwatering this year as a result. Only one seedling out of 24 damped off this time!

² The gnomes recommend starting from seed with two seeds in a pot and then culling the smaller prior to transplant; I’ve traditionally started with two seeds per cup in a pressed-paper egg carton, but never culled. Wondering how that will turn out.

There’s nothing like getting an unexpected letter to raise your spirits¹. During the Alaska Robotics Camp @ Home event at the end of April, I hosted a session of the ever-popular Talk About Whatever You Want For Five Minutes; there were quick presentations on Mastodon, food manga, English paper piecing, marble sports, and more. I led off with a quick five minutes on cocktail making², mixing along as I spoke into Zoom, then enjoying the fruits of my labors for the rest of the hour.

Lee Post was watching. Something you need to know about Post is that he sketchnotes, much like fellow Camp alum Jason Alderman. He mentioned he enjoyed my talk, and then I got a Post-card (I’m so sorry) in the mail yesterday with six panel version of my five minute talk and I am in a good mood as a result. Let’s see what’s going on in the world today, if we can’t maybe elevate your mood as well.

• I almost picked a different image for the top of the post today, because how could I not love Erika Moen talking about ordering a Small, Flat 7-Up, No Ice, Two Inches High, for $19? [CW: boobs] She regrets nothing, and she’s gonna write it off on her taxes because she is a boss. Also, she is a woman who not only owns an axe, but will use it if necessary to stop the beeping of her hideous CO detector. [CW: dying appliance battery and ensuing madness]
• Now live: Ru Xu’s Saint For Rent, Volume 1 Kickstarter. We’re about a day in and about 25% of the way to goal, which bodes well; there was a contraction of Kickstarter spending for a bit there (not the least evidence being the layoffs at Kickstarter; thankfully their union negotiated one hell of a decent severance package), but I think we’re going to see a bit of a bounce-back, particularly for projects that result in a tangible reward (i.e.: a book, whether print or PDF) at a reasonable pledge level (i.e.: US$25 or under).

  Note that Xu³ has done something very smart, given the determination of Screamy Orange Racist Grandpa to kill the USPS — the pledge levels for physical rewards are only for the items; shipping will be calculated later, closer to actual dispatch time. Given that postal rates may be all over the place or we as a nation will be in an Unconstitutional, postal service-less state, this is the only way to guarantee not taking a bath and losing money hand over fist with a successful campaign.

• Hey, remember Pizza Island, the studio of amazing cartoonists in Brooklyn? Where you could find in one room Meredith Gran, Julia Wertz, Kate Beaton, Domitille Collardey, Lisa Hanawalt, and Sarah Glidden? They closed up shop near a decade ago, and have gone on to do amazing work. Of late, they’ve halfway gotten the band back together, starting up a WordPress blog under the PI name and letting us know what they’re up to — Gran, Wertz, Beaton, Collardy, Hanawalt, and Glidden are all listed as participating, along with Karen Sneider. As Beaton says, it’s been a heck of eight years
• Hey, did you know that VanCAF is running online programs this week, in conjunction with TCAF, Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival (aka DCAF), Festival DB de Montréal (aka MCAF), and Quebec BD under the collective identity of #CanCAF? It’s true! Yesterday there were interviews with Gene Luen Yang, Sloane Leong, Leslie Hung, and Matt Fraction, today there are YouTube sessions with Karensac, Aron Steinke, Steenz, and more.

  Rest of the week will see podcasts, demos, and conversations with everybody from Michael DeForge to Junko Mizuno. Of particular interest are the Publishing Comics With Kickstarter panel (YouTube, 16 May 11:00am presumably PDT) with Jeff Ellis, Lucy Bellwood, Hannako Lambert, and Haley Boros, and the Webcomics panel (also YouTube, 17 May at 3:00pm pPDT) with Alina Pete, Kory Bing, Sam Logan, Angela Melick, and Jephy McJacquesface. Check out the programming page, and keep an eye on the hashtag to see what else the Canadian CAFs have in store for us.

Spam of the day:

1 Bathroom Trick That Kills Diabetes

No, no, that’s not how it works. Bathroom tricks are always about how to clean grime and soap scum out of tile grout, not diabetes. Get with the program.

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¹ In a minute, you’ll be mad at me for that pun.

² I called it Three Drinks In Five Minutes and based it around the idea you need to balance the key flavor components: sweet, sour, and bitter, with your preferred booze in the center. I started from the classic Negroni (1:1:1 gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari), noting that you could sub in other liquors (bourbon makes it a Boulevardier; applejack makes in an Avenue A) or liqueurs (Aperol is distinct from Campari) for a wide variety.

Then I introduced the idea of adding one part citrus (lime would do well if it were gin based, especially if you changed the Campari to something like Suze), and finally kicked it up another notch by mentioning egg whites. Three master recipes, and I got to call James Bond an idiot for insisting on martinis being shaken. It was fun times.

³ Or possibly George, who manages Xu’s business. Smart guy about the Kickstarts, that George.

There are places in this world that are constituents of nations, yet apart; they end up traded between empires and yet somehow remain unchanged. In North America, the best example is New Orleans; New Orleans stands on its own, not part of America any more than it was part of New France or New Spain. It is older than America, wilder, and stays a part of America only out of a sense of bemused sufferance.

Across the ocean, there was a people that occupied great swathes of the continent and the islands to the west, its people living with the sure knowledge of the fae folk and the way they interfere with the lives of humans. The great empires came to displace them — although the empires were sometimes kept at bay by a hero or two and the help of a magic potion — and the people were displaced, pushed to rocky places, hard by the hazardous sea: Scotland, Ireland, Brittany.

The stories are old, in these pushed-to places, and the promise no easy morals. There are punishments for being wicked, but also for turning your face away from the wickedness and pretending it doesn’t happen or isn’t your problem. The Daughters Of Ys is based on one of those old stories, and it has a new graphic novel adaptation from :01 Books, who were kind enough to send me an advanced review copy¹. There’s almost nothing we’re going to say here that isn’t on the back cover or the first five pages, but you may still consider there to be mild spoilers.

It’s written by MT Anderson², who has a fine ear for dialogue. The words that come from his characters sound just a little bardic, a little musical, a little fairy tale-formal, but at the same time natural feeling. It’s easy to imagine them being told around the fire, with just a touch extra dramatic emphasis and the promise this what my grandmother said she saw and heard.

The art is by Jo Rioux (past winner of the Joe Shuster Dragon Award for Cat’s Cradle, her debut graphic novel), and it is a marvel, combining the effects of pencils and pigments, and looking just a little like a cross between ancient vellum illuminations and tapestry embroidery. All of her characters look just a little bit haunted nearly all the time, except for the times that they look like there’s a hunt going on. Of course, sometimes they are hunting, and sometimes they are hunted.

Nobody in the book comes off entirely well, and only one character seems to have a full understanding of what his life actually is — that a blessing that keeps him fed each day is actually a curse. The story is set in what sounds like a made-up place, but is eventually revealed to be real; the now-ancient city of Quimper, the cathedral, the bishop, King Gradlon of Kerne all are or were part of the Brittany landscape. In a country whose names persist to this day (and across the Channel in Cornwall as well), who’s to say if the submerged city of Ys is legend, or a long-repeated object lesson for kings and princesses³ to learn how their forbears failed.

My copy of The Daughters Of Ys by MT Anderson and Jo Rioux says that it releases tomorrow, 12 May, but the website lists the release date as 11 August; I got the book in the Spring 2020 collection of advanced review copies about three weeks back, so it may have been pushed back for pandemic reasons. If you have to wait another three months to read it, let that fuel your anticipation, because it is very, very good. Consider it a top choice of gift for yourself of the reader in your life, let’s say age 12 and up.

Spam of the day:

File has been corrupted

No, see, you have your tenses wrong. If I click on your link then my files will become corrupted. Future, not past.

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¹ As it’s not the final version released to shops and libraries, the usual disclaimers apply: there may be differences between my copy and yours, but this story feels complete. I didn’t find any issues in production that required correction.

² Whose The Astonishing Life Of Octavian Nothing you may recall took the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2006, the year that American Born Chinese was nominated; no shade, Octavian Nothing is an astonishingly good book, and Anderson followed up with a graphic novel finalist of his own in 2018: The Assassination Of Brangwain Spurge. Dude comes up with the best names.

³ In the legends, the daughter, Dahut, is immodest, immoral, and consorting with otherwordly powers; she’s clearly the villain of the tale. Anderson gives her a sister, Rozenn, to spread the consequences around. If Dahut falls because her hands are bloody, Rozenn is too concerned with keeping hers clean by intentional avoidance. Their father has a temperament that mixes both daughters, feigning innocence of crimes while demanding the spoils.

By which I mean 2020 is a good year for Matts over at The Nib. First, Matt Lubchansky was the finalist for the Herblock Foundation’s annual prize for editorial cartooning (although the promised gala at the Library of Congress was postponed, perhaps indefinitely, from April due to friggin’ coronavirus), and now Matt Bors has been revealed as a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

I know it’s traditional to say that it’s an honor just to be nominated, but look at the other names on the ballot: Lalo Alacaraz, Kevin Kallaugher, and winner Barry Blitt have between them dozens of awards, including previous Pulitzer finalists, Herblock Foundation awards, Thomas Nast awards, and others in the US and Europe. Bors himself was a Pulitzer finalist in 2012, and took the Herblock award that same year. It’s a distinguished group, and if Matt & Matt haven’t gotten the actual Big Prize form any of these outfits for their work at The Nib, they’ve got a damn impressive track record of recognition and something maybe more important.

That would be the respect one gets from one’s peers for paying cartoonists for their work. When the news broke yesterday, I could scarcely keep up with the heartfelt congratulations from Nib contributors, because they know that Bors and Lubchansky not only have keen editorial eyes and will give them a place to present their work, but they’ll also provide the cash money that makes cartooning a more viable career.

Speaking of viable careers, here’s a just-released book you might want to check out, from a cartoonist that’s got an body of work like nobody else. Lucas Elliott draws things under the sea. Sometimes that’s a warrior starfish, and sometimes it’s manly mermen. We’re here about the starfish today:

FRIENDS!

I’m happy to finally announce BATTLE STAR #2 is finally available for purchase through my shop!! I had hoped to have these ready for #eccc, but life happens.

Head to my shop, http://lucaselliottart.storenvy.com to get your copy!

#art #comic #storenvy #alaska

The life that happened was, naturally, COVID-19 disrupting the crap out of everything, so his journeys to ECCC and VanCAF (and the commerce that would have happened there) didn’t/ain’t gonna happen. But you can jump in on a comic that has right here (along with some earlier work, it’s all great). If you don’t want to take my recommendation, perhaps you’ll check out his A-Z Star Wars fanart challenge, his Revenge of the Fifth fanart¹, or follow his daily contributions to daily contributions to #MerMay.

And, at some point in the future when we can all get together in groups again, should you meet Elliott in person, do not be scared of his massive beard. He is a gentle sort, and rumors that smaller friends and fans have been devoured by the beard and never seen nor heard from again are almost certainly not true. Probably.

Spam of the day:

We’d like to introduce to you our explainer video service which we feel can benefit your site fleen.com.

Huh. I could spend the US$159 to get a 0-1 minute video telling everybody I’m awesome and also explaining what this “blog” is about, or I could give that money to creators in exchange for their work. Decisions, decisions.

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¹ What can I say, dude likes Star Wars.

Sometimes, you know the wait is gonna be worth it; there’s your favorite creator, tossing notes on the sosh-meeds, cryptic hints to those not at a sufficiently high Patreon tier. They’re working on something, and based on past evidence, it’s got you in a state of anticipation.

Enter: Danielle Corsetto.

She’s done some neat stuff since Girls With Slingshots wrapped in — my goodness! — 2015 (uhh, spoilers at the link if you didn’t read it five years ago). There’s the I-refuse-to-believe-it’s-dead diary comic, 32, and she wrote a sex ed comic for a year over at Webtoons, but that meaty, longform, character-driven narrative has been her behind the scenes project for a couple years now. On Friday, she let those not Patreonizing her in on the news:

Unlike GWS, Elephant Town is going to be a long-form graphic novel! So it’ll be shared online every Monday in chunks of 2-5 pages (depending on the scene – I don’t wanna leave people mid-conversation, waiting a whole week for a character to finish their thought!).

I won’t say too much about the premise, but it’s about life in my little town of Shepherdstown, West Virginia, through the eyes of four characters who don’t know each other … yet.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — Corsetto is at her best when Shepherdstown is involved. She may not have ever made it the location of Girls With Slingshots (actually, it had to be somewhere in central New Jersey, not too far from New Brunswick), but it was, or near enough. The presence of The Meck made that clear enough.

So here’s the deal: enough pages as makes sense go up on Mondays at Patreon. Because of the Current Situation, the first four chapters will be free to read, going to a dedicated site as chapters finish. US$2/month lets you read pages as they go up, US$3/month lets you vote on small details in the comic¹, and US$5/month gets you all the behind the scenes process and progress stuff. So basically your Patreonage means you get to read it early. Oh, and you’re all going to order the book when it becomes available, right? ‘Course you are, on account of you’re not a jerk.

The link for Elephant Town² redirects to Corsetto’s Patreon, to a filter for the appropriate posts, so that’s probably the easiest way to see it. I’ll add the (to be named) site for the free chapters to the sidebar when it’s announced. In the meantime, jump in on the first few pages of Chapter 1, and let’s get to speculating exactly who these two characters are, and who they don’t yet know.

Spam of the day:

[long block of text]
Mrs. Jane Roberts
Acting Manager of First National Bank Limited, South Africa (F.N.B.)

Wow, a good, old-fashioned 419 scam from Africa! Okay, not a Nigerian prince, but asking for US$250 as a processing fee to get the US$2.1 million just waiting for me? That scam is so old school, it drives a yellow bus with gothic arch windows.

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¹ Think What’s in the picture frame, here are your choices and not Which way does this incredibly important plot point go from here? The key word is small.

² Although, disclaimer: It worked for me over the weekend, today it’s timing out without the redirect working.

You see, Thursday was the day I was scheduled to fly to Juneau for Alaska Robotics-sponsored MiniCon and #ComicsCamp. Friday would be spent hanging with the best people in the world, enjoying the ambiance of a world-class coffee shop, ice cream shop, knitting supply shop, state museum, distillery, lingerie emporium built into an old bank building complete with heist target-style vault and/or Italian restaurant. Saturday would be the con, and then the bus ride out to Camp. Ravens would taunt me, and hopefully bears would keep their distance. I’d be home again a week later.

And then the world got its reminder that sickness is never all that far away. Tickets and hotel reservations got refunded, backpack and sleeping bag got put away again. Camp friends got commiserated with. We’ll be back, but it’ll be a while and we’re all very bummed, particularly (I’d imagine) the people chosen to attend for the first time, who have to put off their integration into our weird, welcoming, intentional community until whenever the world gets its collective shit together.

It was the right call; no matter how supportive of the creators it is, no matter how much it helps newbie artists develop their careers, no matter how many people in Alaska would benefit from the public events¹, none of that is worth the risk of immiseration and sickness that just one asymptomatic individual could bring to Juneau² (and visitors could bring back to the corners of the state).

So yeah, little bummed today. Fair warning, I may spend Thursday getting very drunk in order to feel properly sorry for myself about the whole thing. Or maybe I’ll just go back through the 30,000 or so words I’ve already written about Camp, and spend the day texting and calling the people I’m missing.

But even on these blah days — and let’s be realistic, none of us is running more than about 70% of how we should on our best days — there’s encouraging bits to help us navigate. Today, it’s Amulet creator Kazu Kibuishi³, who’s put a long out of print book up for free downloading. The idea was to get Daisy Kutter to a publisher and back into print, but right now he figures it’s more important to get it to people that need to read it than it is to shop it around for eventual re-release. I’m going to keep that lesson about what’s more important in mind for the next while.

Spam of the day:

Using the Covid-19 epidemic to share Jesus

Hail, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, Satan.

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¹ Not the least being, each year every school in Juneau gets visits from creators. There’s not a lot of author and artist visits that make it up to southeast Alaska (much less the rest of the state), and folks come from all over to participate.

² People with complex health challenges are routinely advised to fly to Seattle for care. It’s not the place you want to stress critical care capabilities.

³ A regular Camp denizen and my cabinmate my first year there; I learned more than a year later that once while sleeping he and Rebecca Mock intercepted and squished a spider that was descending towards my face and so I owe them each a life debt.

:01 Books held a day-long series of online chats on Saturday, and a couple hundred people came. Titled Comics Relief, it was bookended by casual talks between :01 creators and imprint director Mark Siegel, with a series of how-to sessions in the middle. Given the limitations of the format, Siegel’s casual talks, which went wherever the conversation preferred, were the most successful parts of the day, with the exception of some technical glitches¹ of the sort that we’re all becoming accustomed to these days.

Speaking for myself, I found a particular comfort in several things that Gene Luen Yang said in the conversations; in the first, he spoke how he was doing mini comics, sleeping twelve to a room at cons and losing money on everything he published at the time he met Siegel, and eighteen months later I had to rent a tux for the National Book Awards ceremony, where American Born Chinese was the first graphic work to be nominated.

And in the last session, as Yang, Siegel, and Ukazu were talking about how much of an influence Avatar: The Last Airbender has become, Yang talked about being a high school computer science teacher, listening to students talk about A:TLA instead of working and thinking it sounded cool, but not getting in on the conversation. After Derek Kirk Kim loaned him the DVDs of the first two seasons (and watching the third as it aired); a few years later, the creators came to him to write the comics that would bridge Aang’s story and Korra’s.

He didn’t come out and say it, but the lesson is inescapable: there’s a lot that’s getting ready to happen, no matter how behind the curve we are at the moment, and some of it will be doing something you love a lot. We can’t all be Ambassadors or MacArthur Fellowship geniuses, but there’s still stuff out there to take joy from coming down the pike.

In other news:

• Brad Guigar, sexy man about town, is jumping into the web-presence game, and he’s doing it in the form of a professional development seminar for the Graphic Artists Guild. His teaching gig may be on hold what with all the colleges being closed, but you can hear what twenty-plus years of cartooning online has taught him.

  If you’re a GAG member it’s free, and non-members can connect for US$45; if you’re a subscriber to Guigar’s Webcomics Dot Com, he’s got a coupon in the members area good for US$15 off. The session kicks off at 2:00pm EDT (GMT-4) on Wedensday, 22 April. The seminar will last an hour, with Q&A to follow.

• Speaking of Guigar, the latest episode of Comic Lab has a pretty extensive discussion about keeping a cartooning business going in times of quarantine. For a different view, check out Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s announcement about their delayed Oh Joy, Sex Toy Kickstarter; they run one about this time every year, and they’ve looked at the uncertain climate (particularly the unsettled state of the US Postal Service) and decided putting it off for a month is the most responsible thing they can do.

  So this is your reminder that if you like comics, it’s probably time to not just toss what you can afford to your favorite creators², but also to call your elected officials and insist on measures to ensure the ongoing stability of the USPS. Repealing the nakedly antagonistic requirement that they pre-fund pensions and insurance 75 years in advance — they have to pay today for the retirement of employees who won’t even be born for a decade! — would be an excellent place to start.

Spam of the day:

Urgent news about metformin

Yes, spammers, I am quite certain that my old friend Jim (who was best man in my wedding, 27 years ago next week), is urgently emailing me with your bullshit. Thing is, you misspelled his name, in a way that particularly annoys him. So yeah, you kind of pooched that one.

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¹ Ngozi Ukazu’s audio was unreliable and delayed, and Lucy Knisley never got her connection quite working (although we all got to see her rather disinterested cat snoozin’ in the background. Hi, Rhino!).

² I haven’t received it yet, but I’ve decided that when I get the stimulus check, it will all be going to comics creators.

Now that it has, we can spend some time rearranging that week in July, be mad for the opportunities lost, and start to move on. And bonus? No hotel rodeo to negotiate this year.

In the meantime, let’s consider some good news:

• The Excellence In Graphic Literature Awards have spent the past couple of days releasing the names of winners, and they’re nearly ready to announce the Book Of The Year. But so far they’ve shared the following:
  • Children’s: Akissi: More Tales Of Mischief by Marguerite Abouet and Mathieu Sapin.
  • Middle Grade (Fiction): White Bird: A Wonder Story by RJ Palacio.
  • Middle Grade (Nonfiction): Guts by Raina Telgemeier.
  • Young Adult (Fiction): Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T Crenshaw.
  • Young Adult (Nonfiction): King Of King Court by Travis Dandro.
  • Adult (Fiction): The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis.
  • Adult (Nonfiction): A Fire Story by Brian Fies.
  • Mosaic Award: recognizing a work that serves diverse, underserved audiences, Kiss Number 8 by Venable and Crenshaw.
  • Book Of The Year: Not yet announced as of publication time. I’ve been stalling, hopingn they’d announced before I hit Publish but nothing yet. We’ll update when we know; wouldn’t bet against KN8, though.

    Update to add: White Bird by Palacio.

  Congratulations to all the honorees; it’s all terrific work.

• Hey, need something to do this weekend (and yes, it is about to be the weekend)? Matt Bors has you covered. He’s made two print issues of The Nib free to download for the month of April. Specifically, you can get the Family and Empire issues (the second and third of five so far), with comicky goodness from the likes of Alison Bechdel, Emily Flake, Joe Decie, Andy Warner, Keith Knight, Sarah Glidden, Eleri Harris, Kendra Wells, Nomi Kane, Matt Lubchansky, Jon Rosenberg, Gemma Correll

  Paragraph break! That was getting long!

  … Joey Allison Sayers, Ben Passmore, Niccolo Pizarro, Masha Gessen, Whit Taylor, Ellen T Crenshaw, Kasia Babis, Brian McFadden, and more. If you like them and would like to encourage Bors to make more (not to mention getting in on that awesome Nib magazine ink smell), drop by the store and pick up the physical thing.

Okay, see you on Monday with highlights from the :01 Books virtual con that runs tomorrow. Still time to register if you haven’t! But I did just get an email saying that there’s been a huge response and the conferencing solution might actually max out. In which case, wait for somebody else to leave, check out the livestream on the :01 Facebook page, or wait for the recordings to be released. It’s just like an SDCC panel room that gets too full!

Spam of the day:

Why is your website – fleen.com not featured on Google’s first page for most of your keywords?

It is. Get lost.

Today’s example: the Cartoonist Studio Prize, presented as a joint endeavour of Slate magazine’s book review and the Center For Cartoon Studies, currently in its eighth iteration. Year after year, they put together a really strong slate¹ of ten nominees in the category of print, and ten more in web; the shortlists serve as an effective You Should Read This To Keep Up list, and each winner gets one thousand American dollars cash². Folks that you see written about on this page are frequently seen on either list.

This year’s nominees for Best Print Comic are:

• Bttm Fdrs by Ben Passmore and Ezra Claytan Daniels (Fantagraphics)
• Flying Kites by the Stanford Graphic Novel Project (self published)
• Glenn Ganges In The River At Night by Kevin Huizenga (D&Q)
• Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim (D&Q)
• The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis (D&Q)
• Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers (D&Q)
• Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (:01 Books)
• Pittsburgh by Frank Santoro(New York Review Comics)
• Sobek by James Stokoe (ShortBox)
• The Tenderness Of Stones by Marion Fayolle (New York Review Comics)

Part of what I love about the CSP is its utter disregard for length, subject, or genre; if it’s in print and it’s good, it’s on the list.

This year’s nominees for Best Web Comic are:

• About Face by Nate Powell
• Cabramatta by Matt Huynh
• Eat Street Diners Club by Will Dinski
• I Am More Than My Chromosomes by Elísabet Rún.
• Koreangry by Eunsoo Jeong
• Loving My Inner Black Weirdo by Bianca Xunise
• Paranatural by Zack Morrison
• Sleepless Domain by Mary Cagle
• Tiger, Tiger by Petra Erika Nordlund
• Unhealthy by Abby Howard

Again — there’s ongoing series, there’s one-shot autobio/nonfiction, and there’s everything in between. I was a little surprised to see the web version of Unhealthy on the list; not because it’s unworthy — it’s an excellent read — but because it’s only Abby Howard’s half of the longer print version that was a joint project with Sarah Winifred Searle.

If I were part of the jury (and let me stress that I am not), I’d be pulling for Unhealthy, and Laura Dean, which were two of the best things I read last year. But there’s great creators up and down both lists, and as is typical for the CSP, there’s not a name in sight that would annoy me for winning. Congratulations to all the shortlistketeers; the winners will be announced a few weeks.

Spam of the day:

Buy N95 Face Mask and Medical Face Mask to protect your loved ones from the deadly CoronaVirus. The price begins at $1.49 each. If interested, please visit our site:

I didn’t think it was possible to be more pissed off at these bottom-feeding fuckers, but then I noticed the return address on this piece of shit. It was spoofed to appear to come from info (an address that doesn’t exist) at fleen.com.

Like I was going to suddenly give credence to an email claiming to come from a domain I control. That’s just weaksauce.

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¹ I’m so sorry.

² Or about 1.66667 times class money.

Yeah, there was Easter-related stuff, but I was really talking about the burst of Check, Please! updates after Tuesday’s cliffhanger. On the third day, Bitty and Jack took a new step in their relationship and the whole gang was there for the celebratory pick-up game of hockey. On the fourth day, we saw the happily ever after ending — which in any other context would be too pat and twee and cloying — which Bits fucking earned.

There will be ups and downs in the future, but Ransom & Holster will always be best buds, Shitty¹ and Lardo will always love each other, Chowder, Nursey, and Dex will get on each others nerves (and never compel the others to stop), and Bitty’s mom and dad will be thrilled with Jack as a second son². The last episode was an extended Thank You from Ngozi Ukazu to everybody that helped make Check, Please, and to everybody that read it. Everybody feel good for Bitty.

• Okay, more seasonally appropriate perhaps: when I last spoke to Evan Dahm about his upcoming books a year ago at MoCCA, he was getting close to the finishing touches on his graphic novel of what happened to Christ Jesus in the time between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. This story is part of the Apocrypha, and the name given to it is the title of the book: The Harrowing Of Hell. The plan was to have the book out for Easter.

  Yeah, didn’t happen. Even before the novel coranavirus, Iron Circus publisher/supremo for life C Spike Trotman had difficulties, with at least one printer accepting the job and then rejecting it because … I dunno? They didn’t want to be associated with a story about Jesus casting down the gates of Hell and freeing the damned from their eternal torment? Anyway, it’s on track for a release in July, and to both tide us over and to honor the liturgical season, Spike released the first 37 pages on The Grams over the weekend. I’ve mentioned before that Dahm has drawn Jesus in a way that is somewhat self-portraiture; reading the opening scene (the trial of Jesus), Pilate looks just a little like how Ngozi Ukazu draws Holster (I may be obsessing over the CP finale a little). It’s the shape of the head, really.

  Anyway, it’s a cracking good read, and likely to give both believers and nonbelievers a new perspective on the central tenets of Christianity. Start reading here and work your way through some lush, deep, thoughtful pages.

• Hey, confused by everything to do with the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2? How predictions change from day to day, and how the unscrupulous and ignorant will use the confusion surrounding the predictions of experts to try to force us all out of our homes so that billionaires don’t lose of their precious money? Not surprising, as the entire business of predicting how the pandemic will go is reliant on a mathematics that depends on numerous variables, the assumptions for which depend on other variables, the assumptions for which depend on still other variables.

  Which depend on things like testing numbers and causes of death, both of which are lagging nearly everywhere.

  It’s enough to drive one to distraction, and complex enough that even veteran stats-wranglers and mathematic modelers are noping out of the predictions game. But just because the folks at, say, FiveThirtyEight aren’t making any predictions of their own doesn’t mean that they can’t talk about the process and methodology of making predictions. But how to render a complex topic understandable to a general audience?

  [finger snap] Weinersmith!

  A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling will make for an engaging 15-20 minute dive into the math, and why we really don’t know what’s going on, but how each iteration of the model likely gets us closer to explaining reality (although on a lag). One thing’s for sure — reading a plateau or even decline in the number of cases as a reason to open everything up again will fucking get people killed you great orange moron, don’t do it. We need hard, reliable, statistically significant numbers, and that means widespread serological testing. Until then, stay in.

  Maybe re-read the whole of Check, Please while you’re at it? It’s a mood-raiser.

Spam of the day:

Stay protected from nasty bacteria in gyms

It’s not a bacteria, and you shouldn’t be going to the gym. Sheesh, the imagination on this kid!

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¹ Literally my only complaint is we never learned Shitty’s first name.

² Also, Tater will be there being almost as upbeat and innocent as Bitty. Tater’s a good dude.