Today, I’m going to talk about some of the books I got in San Diego — two of which were provided by the authors for free, so feel free to take that into account as you read my impressions.

• First up, Wapsi Square book 3, The Timekeeper’s Daughter, has convinced me I may have to stop reading Wapsi Square on a daily basis. Because holy crap you guys, it’s so much better in collected form. This is where the mythology and universe-building of the strip really takes off, and Paul Taylor’s story (of which I suspect we’re getting to see maybe 20% of what’s in his head) just doesn’t have the same impact on a day-to-day basis as it does reading a couple years worth at once. We’re at that midpoint to the story, where the heroes (who are all heroines) finally realize what they’re up against, but do not yet have any idea how to achieve their goals.

  Understand, I’ve been reading Wapsi for more than half a decade now, and it was only on finishing TTD that it really hit me: for the world to be saved, there are going to be casualties. Sacrifices. Bubbly Monica and flaky Shelly will bear the costs of the universe getting to continue, and that’s a pretty big tab to settle. Taylor only has about three years to wrap things up before the Mayan calendar resets in 2012 and everything we know … just … stops … and starts over again a few dozen millenia ago. I liked Wapsi Square in small doses, but I really like it in big chunks.

• Next, the first collection of Punch an’ Pie, and understand: here be spoilers. What we have heah, is failure to communicate. Angela loves Heather. Heather loves Angela. They bite the bullet, move in together, adjust to each other, meet families and co-workers and never quite get into the habit of talking to each other instead of past each other. The tension of unresolved (even unacknowledged) issues ramps up so slowly at first, and then just becomes part of the background noise of who these characters are, that when the in-retrospect-inevitable breaking point is reached, it hits like a punch in the gut with the added insult of a pie to the face.

  And that’s how far creators Aerie (words) and Chris Daily (pictures) planned things with Pa’P — nearly eight months of strips to get Angela past the first grownup relationship to the first grownup crisis so that the strip could really start documenting the process of actually becoming a grownup. It’s slightly cruel to end the book there, where the crisis that breaks down Angela will hang with the reader until the second (and later) volume(s) can tell how she gets put back together again.

  It’s a hell of a cliffhanger, and anybody that reads through to the end will doubtlessly want to know what happens next. It’s online, Bunky, but if you read the book then rush to that link, you owe it to the creators to set aside some money for the purchase of the next book, when it becomes available. Many thanks to Aerie and Chris for providing the review copy.

• Lastly (but not leastly), I’d like to talk about Randy Milholland’s second comic book presentation of Super Stupor (so far available to those that pre-ordered it, hopefully available to all and sundry soon, ’cause it’s really good). The first SS strips made me laugh, as Milholland (who’s simultaneously one of the sweetest, funniest guys I’ve ever met, and the possessor of maybe the evilest sense of humor ever) brought his skewed worldview to bear on the cliches of superheroics.

  Then came the fourth strip, and with it the definitive rebuke to one of the laziest, most disturbing cliches in modern capes comics (and more broadly, much of the popular arts) — that’s when I knew that something special was bubbling up, and it prompted me to hound Milholland until he agreed to sell me the original art.

  But while the dissection of supers worked well in short, mostly-disconnected one-shots, the comics really pull them together. And surprisingly to me, the most prominent theme in SS #2 isn’t about turning the cliches on their heads; it’s one of the most honored (and poorly used by lesser writers) traditions in the world of capes: redemption. A villianess wants to change for the hero she accidentally loves. A hero wants to make up for his derelictions while in the arms of a villianess. A third- (if he’s lucky) or fourth- (if he’s being honest with himself) string hero wants to do what’s right, no matter how much of a fuckup he thinks he is (which is nearly as much as some of his colleagues believe).

  It’s remarkably well done, with a depth of character that caught me by surprise but shouldn’t have. After all, Milholland is the master of presenting us with characters that should be rightly loathed, then organically dragging them kicking and screaming (and us along with them) into people that we can’t help but like. They’re trying, in both senses of the word: trying to be better than they are, and often trying our patience at the same time. SS#2 is a nice, fat comic book, and the best use of five bucks I could have had at the convention had Randy not gifted me with a copy.

  Beg, borrow, or steal it, and if you like capes comics and want to see them do well, send copies to every editor you can find at the big publishers — this is how superheroes should be done (and they’ll really like the back-up story, a nastily hilarious bit about a sentient, evil tumor that provides weak-egoed types with sentient, evil cleavage or a sentient, evil package; very, very funny, and very, very wrong, especially Arch-Angela’s last line).

You may have seen the list of SDCC programming events went up late last week, but did you notice that this year the programming is searchable by keyword? Some of what shows up under keyword webcomics is stretching the definition a bit, but we’ll run a list of sessions likely to be of interest to webcomickers a bit later this week. In the meantime, some things to keep you occupied:

• Book four of Digger has gone to press, and can be in your hands in consideration of a small amount of money. Two tranches of signed copies will go on sale here at 8:00am and 8:00pm CDT (UTC-5) on Wednesday.
• In case you didn’t see the picture I tweeted from the book launch party Saturday afternoon, Jon Rosenberg’s newest tchochke is in the prototype stage and should be available at SDCC. “Doughboy” courtesy Goats, Chris Yates, and Nikki “Bride of The Dreamcrusher” Rice.
• Some of you may have seen the announcement in Shaenon Garrity’s Livejournal earlier today, but I was conflicted about bringing the news up, lest a deluge wash away her husband, Andrew Farrago, aka curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. However, Mr Farrago assures me he can handle a flood or two, so read on if you’d like to be part of a museum exhibit on webcomics:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum explores the digital revolution in its latest exhibition, Monsters of Webcomics, a showcase of some of the best and boldest work published on the World Wide Web.

  Cartoonists choose to work on the Web for many reasons. For some, it’s an opportunity to reach readers directly without going through editors, publishers, or syndicates. For others, it’s a chance to explore the artistic possibilities of the Web, whether that means working in a format that would be impossible in print, tackling subject matter most comic-book publishers won’t handle, or taking advantage of the rich palette available with digital coloring. Others simply want to share their comics with as many people as possible.

  The comics by the ten artists featured in this exhibition run the gamut from four-panel comic strips to full-length graphic novels and include comedy, drama, history, science fiction, and sociopolitical commentary. As varied as this work is, however, it represents only a very small sample of the comics available on the Web.

  If you are a webcartoonist and would like to participate in the virtual gallery component of this historic exhibition, please e-mail C.A.M. Curator Andrew Farago at gallery [at] cartoonart dot org.

  Let’s be perfectly clear — the roster of featured artists is set, anybody that emails to say Me! Me! Over here, pick me! and is accepted will be part of the online presentation only. That being said, your reputation could do worse than for your name to be found via future Google search in proximity to Jesse Reklaw, Kate Beaton, Phil and Kaja Foglio, Dorothy Gambrell, Nicholas Gurewitch, Jenn Manley Lee, Dylan Meconis, Chris Onstad, and Spike.

  So if you think that in that august company your webcomic need not feel ashamed, by all means drop the museum and line and make yourself known. It’s a big world out there, webcomics, and your strip is a part of it.

‘Nother day, ‘nother book goes up for pre-order — Starslip volume 3 this time — and Topatoco scores another client. Honestly, it might be easier these days to tell you when Topatoco doesn’t pick up a prominent webcomic as a client. Understand I’m firmly of the opinion that Topatoco is one of the best thngs that a webcomics creator not determined/business skilled/time-blessed enough to run their own merch line can have in their corner, and I’m still surprised by how rapidly (yet smartly) they’ve grown.

I’m really wondering how long it will be before a boutiuqe internet-creator merchandise company becomes a legit media company with a reach and influence equivalent to, say, Dark Horse. Best guess? Five to ten years. Three years if Jeff and Holly can find somebody to keep Weedmaster P occupied. I think I’m going to have to ply them with liquor in San Diego and see what I can get them to commit to on the record.

In other news — and if I’m asked about this in the future, I will deny it all — reports now indicate that a major trove of intelligence data are nearly compiled, and should be complete in less than a week. The shadowy (perhaps fictional, perhaps they only want you to think he’s fictional) operative known as Agent Eben07 has been linked with a dossier of information dating back more than 40 years that could have lasting impact on the world’s geopolitical situation. All are encouraged to … did you hear that? Listen carefully — burn everything, and I was never here! The one-eyed dog barks at midnight! The one-eyed dog barks at mi~~

See, today was going to be easy. The last twelve hours brought the announcement of two webcomics book-launch parties, which combined with reminders one already in the news would give me a post that writes itself. Quick compare and contrast (slightly grimy basement bar with vengeful barmaids vs. Preview Night party at San Diego Comic Con complete with DJ vs. the beautifulest of the Hollywood beautiful people sipping effortlessly elegant drinks by a fire), throw in an offhand title about how there ain’t no party like a webcomics book-launch party (why yes, I am the whitest guy on the planet, thanks for asking), boom, finished.

Add a quick addendum about how (speaking of San Diego Comic Con) Alice Bentley is again compiling a list of webcomickers in attendance (and since nobody’s mailing me their info to run, Alice is once again our best resource … please drop a comment in her LJ) and we can all get on with our day.

Then John Allison had to go and get all newsworthy:

This is a brief announcement to say that Scary Go Round will be ending in September. The eighth collection will be the last. Goodbye is the final story. I’m sure a lot of you had worked this out already.

Well, shit.

If your claw-like fingers are rending your clothes to rags as we speak, I would ask you to be calm. I have a new project in mind and, like the transition from Bobbins to Scary Go Round back in 2002, it won’t all be new, all different. I could probably have got away with making the change with no fanfare at all and kept the name the same.

Oh, well that’s all right then.

I don’t want to talk about my new project yet as it would spoil the current story, but you can rest assured that there will be plenty that you recognise about it. I’m not sure about the exact end date of Scary Go Round, and there may be something transitional in between, but expect no interruption in service.

I take great pleasure from entertaining and surprising people, writing and drawing are a continual source of joy to me and I will endeavour to do both for as long as I am able.

I actually left a bit out from what Allison wrote, about the economics of webcomics and how the landscape has changed for even one of the long-respected exemplars of the genre. All those who take interest in this medium and its vagaries will find it required reading.

Know what’ll perk you up today? NUNFIGHT! Okay, very little to do with webcomics (aside from the fact that this little gem ran on The Sound Of Young America, which is very webcomic–friendly, and that it’s crying out for webcomickers to draw their impressions of the battlin’ nuns — that’s right, I’m calling for a meme to get started here), but dang is it funny.

Okay, webcomics:

• Ima come right out and say it: one of the highlights of my day is Skin Horse, because what can possibly be wrong about a webcomic that deals primarily with paranormal-managing government bureaucrats who subtly recall the less-well-known Oz books and gets regularly cranked up to about 14 on the Insane-o-Meter? Unstoppable zombies, talking dogs, killer robots, crystalline entities, baby cobras that only want hugs, opera-loving silverfish, a likely-undiagnosed-Asperger’s brain transplanted into a military airframe, and a transvestite psychologist who bags all the babes?

  And it’s drawn by Shaenon Garrity, the one person able to compete with Ryan North for the title of Nexus of All Webcomics Realities? The first year’s worth of strips are collected into a book which is now set for pre-order and it is worth your time and money so much that it hurts.

• Everybody saw that the latest round of Xeric Grant awardees got announced last week, right? It’s not always the case that the Xeric winners have been sharing their work online (either before or after the grant), but in this crop it appears that Adam Bourret and Joshua Smeaton have made their work available for your perusal. Please enjoy Bourret’s I’m Crazy and Smeaton’s Haunted.
• Do you know any DJs in San Diego? Tweet @topatoco if you like to work parties.

Look, just nobody do anything important & time-sensitive today, okay? Okay.

• Report on the first meeting of the extension chapter of the North Carolina WebComics Coffee Clatch, via TS Holden in Boone, NC:
  

  It went well, we had a thin crowd (to be expected) but ended up moving from the coffee shop to Mellow Mushroom, where there was pizza and beer. We talked for a good four hours about all kinds of subjects, from the very practical to the extremely obscure.

  Evan [Dahm] and I will be sure to figure out the next meeting further in advance so that we can get the word out better. We’re also considering having the next meeting in a more centralized town (for Western NC) such as Asheville or Hickory.

• Joseph Hewitt is putting together a book for the sake of family togetherness:
  

  It’s been a long eleven months since the birth of my son, Sean. With the help of many great guest artists I’ve managed to keep Ataraxia Theatre going (mostly).

  I’ve just released a print collection of Voles of the Dusk. This is my first wide release print venture in well over ten years. The book contains three stories — Voles of the Dusk, Scum Hive, and The Vole that Dare Not Speak its Name. It’s 84 pages long, color cover, black and white inside. All proceeds from the book are going to my family to help them afford a trip to Korea to see Sean.

• Anthrocon kicks off this weekend (hi, Ursula!), so allow me to point you towards what may be the most stylishly designed furry webcomic/grpahic novel — Five Glasses of Absinthe. “Egypt Urnash” (that’s what the email return address says; it’s written by Nick Brienza and drawn by Spümcø escapee Margaret Trauth) promises:
  

  Five Glasses of Absinthe is an adult fantasy inspired by French New Wave films, 70s prog-rock album covers, and the simple joy of drawing lots of smart, sexy people in really happening boots.

  Be aware that some of the smart, sexy people will have animal ears and tails (and/or engage in sex, presumably of the smart variety). Not really into the whole “animal people get it on” genre, but the visual style is striking; give it a once-over if you’re not at work.

Okay, that’s gonna do it for now; gotta get busy with the whole “taking off early the day before a holiday” thing that is the god-given right — nay, the holy obligation — of all Americans who toil for The Man. There may be beer in the immediate future, beer and cupcakes.

So here’s the deal: the new Goats book, Infinite Typewriters is available everywhere today. If you ordered a copy, it ships today. If Random House were kind enough to send you an advanced copy (as they were with me), you’ve had it in your hands for a few weeks now. And if you’re cheap, you can read the whole damn thing online starting about here. Simple process, right? Book, read, review, post.

But it’s not. Goats wasn’t the first webcomic I read, but it was pretty early on. It was the first webcomic that lead to me being involved in the medium and with the creators as I am. Many are the beers that I have had with Jon Rosenberg, many are the times that inadvertant physical contact has sent him recoiling in horror, and it is a factual matter that I sold him my soul about four years back (I got a dollar for it!). It’s in large part because of Jon’s prodding that Fleen exists today. There are gags in the book that spring more or less directly from conversations that I took part in. Hell, it’s pseduo-canonical that I’m a character in the strip, and Jon and I even share a birthday. Objectivity is not possible in these circumstances.

Which is a shame, really, because I love this book and want to be able to tell you objectively why you should buy it. But I can’t, so take everything with the requisite open-pit mine full of salt.

Faced with the very messy task of disposing of (depending how you want to count) either six and a half years (pre-reboot) or one and a half years (post reboot) of continuity, what took me 800 words to summarize Jon neatly pulled together in 8 pages (which I guess means the whole pictures/words things is off by a fact of ten). Faced with a jumping-on point to the story that was originally in black and white, he went back and recolored. Staring a rights-clearance issue in the face, he dug deep into his show tunes loving heart and rewrote lyrics and made them funnier. Realizing that every scene is better with Steven Cloud in it, he was added (Soviet historical photo style) where previously he had not been.

I’m saying that Jon Rosenberg is flexible. If it serves the joke, he’ll follow any slender thread of potential as far as it can possibly go, past the ridiculous, beyond the absurd, to the batshit insane.

And damn him, it all works. If you’ve grown up in a certain timeframe, if you voraciously consume science fiction and fantasy stories, and if you find yourself simultaneously engrossed within and repulsed by the conventions of those stories, this book may as well be the sacred tome of your tribe. If you’re not of that particular flavor of industrial-world 21st century geek, you can still marvel at the audacity of taking what had been a stellar example (and perhaps was the progenitor) of the two-guys-sitting-on-a-couch school of webcomics, and turning it into a dimension-spanning epic with all of reality at stake, and still making it funny.

Yet, somehow, Jon’s the same loveable, squisy-hearted guy he’s always been (for certain values of ‘loveable’). Regardless, he’s given us a tremendous story that’s still careening wildly out of control, and now I get to read a sustained high point again and again even when my mousing hand’s wrist-hurt disease is flaring up. And if that ain’t a great way to blow a Tuesday afternoon, I don’t know what is.

Very little time today, so let’s jump to it:

• Howard Tayler starts his tenth year of daily cartoonin’ (with no skipped days or guest strips) over at Schlock Mercenary tomorrow. Wow.
• David Malki !‘s release party for the newest Wondermark book is Wednesday in the city of angels.
• In light of Brigid Alverson’s thoughts on the Eisner nominees for Best Digital Comic (i.e.: webcomic), and how they pretty much don’t rely on anything that would be unique about the web, please consider the Andrew Hussie guest strip at Dinosaur Comics today. Take your time.
• Finally, if you wanted to get a copy of Kate Beaton‘s newly re-available book, get it quickly. The review panel at The AV Club (for my money, the best collection of media commenters and reviewers on the planet) got their mitts on it and were pretty damn effusive:
  

  The young Canadian artist has turned a history degree into a non-stop laffs-generating machine, as her book Never Learn Anything From History (TopatoCo) illustrates; the great leaders, military figures, artists, and philosophers of the past are her usual subjects, but they’re usually portrayed as consumed by petty ego and expressing themselves in the freewheeling, dismissive argot of snotty adolescents. Add to that a keen sense of the absurd (in her footnotes, Beaton herself cannot explain why a weeping Napoleon stuffing his face with cookies while Josephine carries on a wild affair is so damn funny, but it is) and you’ve got a book full of comics that are generally hilarious even for those who don’t fully recall the history behind the stories. Beaton’s art is likewise impressive; her neat linework and terrific grasp of simple caricature and facial expression sells a lot of the best strips, including Sasaki Kojiro meeting an undignified end, Jane Austen and Nikola Tesla being pestered by their fans, and Lord Byron muttering “Bitches, man” to a grieving Percy Bysshe Shelley. A-

Whoo, lots of book news for you today — Raina Telgemeier‘s SMILE is now street-dated for February, Hope Larson‘s Mercury for early January, Chris Baldwin’s third Little Dee collection went off to the printer yesterday, and Chris Hastings (helped ably as always by Kent Archer, Carly Monardo, and Anthony Clark) will soon be able to give us a date for the third Dr McNinja collection. Note to self: buy more bookshelves.

• Everybody see where Penny Arcade has a job opening posted? As of this writing, it appears that applications have probably passed the 500 mark.
• So for those of you wondering if you could ever have enough comics shows in your life, there’s a new one on the block: this October will see the first iteration of the Long Beach Comic Con, perhaps filling the void of the defunct Wizard LA show. New show, unknown at this time how the “feel” of it will play out, but I was encouraged by this bit from the show’s homepage:
  

  We love everything about the medium and the message – from Silver Age bottle cities, to indy mini-comics based on poetry. We want you to experience it all. That’s why we’re lining up more than the trendy guests and sneak peeks that Hollywood wants you to see (though we’ve got that, too!).

  We’re getting the best, the coolest, the most experimental and the … well, quite simply, the grooviest stuff we can.

  West coast creators of indy/web comickry, take note.

• If memory serves correctly, one of the criticisms that Mr T made about the state of webcomics in his book (three years back, which is about 37 lifetimes in this medium) is that too many webcomics didn’t take the opportunity to provide more cultural context for their world-wide readerships.

  I wasn’t convinced that such ambassadorships are a necessary thing to occur, but the argument came back to me as I started flipping through Odori Park, which tells the story of an American/Japanese couple and their multilingual toddler, and which bears absolutely no relationship to the life of the creator, who is part of an American/Japanese couple with a multilingual toddler.

  Specifically, I thought that this comic might make both me and T happy in its approach to such cultural issues — they’re addressed, but in a nicely organic way that serves the story rather than being explicit exposition. Hooray for middle grounds, and check out Odori Park — it’s good. (time from publication to T showing up in the comments starts: now!)

Edit to add: TIME! 13 days, 9 hours, 34 minutes. You’re slipping, T.

So I’m picking up comics yesterday, getting ready to enjoy the hell out of Box Brown‘s Love Is A Peculiar Type Of Thing when I notice it on the wall behind the registers: the DVD of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Yes! Having seen Joss Whedon as the special musical guest at the recent This American Life movie theater event, I couldn’t wait to hear Commentary! The Musical. Okay, change of plans — read LIAPTOT on the train home (a trifle rushed, but one must), and then the DVD goes in.

Except Erika Moen ruined it.

Waiting for me at home was a copy of her new book: DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary Volume One. I had resigned myself to not getting a copy until SPX, when I could look Moen in the eye, thank her for her awesome work, and maybe get a sketch. And she went and made all that unnecessary with her very kind gift, complete with a sketch that’s beyond awesome in its moustachery. I’m still gonna get a copy from her at SPX, because I know this is a book that, when lent to others, comes back late and in significantly more worn condition. The next copy will be the loaner, this one is mine and you can’t have it.

But now — no Dr Horrible for me. Sad face lasted about twelve seconds until I realized this meant that I now had two diary-style collections in front of me, and the opportunity to look at them both at my leisure was overwhelming.

Both LIAPTOT and D:ASGTSCDV1 tell the stories of their creators, but they come at those stories from different perspectives. Box Brown’s work is filtered through the perspective of Ben, who isn’t Box, but isn’t quite not-Box; there’s a nice one-pager in the book (from which the cover image is taken) that talks about how the fictional character Ben had things more together than the real Box — in love, sober, happier.

And it talks about how Box is becoming Ben. The character that started as not quite so much a stand-in for the creator and more of a metaphor is possibly the real-er of the two, or at least of the unseen Box Brown that speaks with a disembodied voice throughout the book. By the end of the book (and its slow, fits-and-starts progress towards the realization that all of us are just making life up as we go along), it’s tough for me to decide whether Box or Ben is the metaphor.

At times, the journey is melancholy, at times it’s guarded, at times it’s revealing or hopeful, and it gets a zillion bonus points for appropriating a Frank Zappa lyric for a comic title. It’s a masterful piece of introverted storytelling, and if more people (not just comics creators) were able to look at themselves and tell these kinds of stories, we’d probably have fewer therapists and social workers.

In contrast, D:ASGTSCDV1 works from a fundamentally an extroverted point of view; while Erika Moen does talk a great deal about what makes her tick, I think it’s fair to say that hers is a story of living in your skin rather than in your mind. Her comics celebrate experiences, whether they’re happy or sad, miserable or joyous, simple or complicated, and (recurringly) sensual in every meaning of the word.

Moen wants you to know how much she’s attracted to women and (confusingly at first) one guy. She wants you to know that she burps, farts, bleeds, and poops. She has sex, she has compulsions, and strippers dig her. Above all, she has a life that is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and always met head-on in a full-bore attack that says Show me what you’ve got, and I’ll show you mine.

In lesser hands, it would be too revealing, too narcissistic, too much like watching unavoidble “reality stars” go on and on about themselves. From Moen, it feels like you’re sitting next to your most energetic friend, the whirlwind that doesn’t sit still before she starts in on the caffeine, and she wants to tell you about her day and hear about yours and don’t leave out the good stuff.

Reading D:ASGTSCDV1 is likely to leave you slightly out of breath, like you’ve been on a really good roller coaster called The Erikanator, and as luck would have it, there’s no line so you can go ride again. Oh, and Erika? Damn right, twinsies! Rest of you, don’t worry about it — she knows what I’m talking about.

MoCCA Updates!
Press access has come through, so in addition to everything mentioned previously this week, I’ll be able to see:

• Darren J. Gendron: table 410
• The Timony Twins: table 332
• Transmission X: tables 708 and 709 (everybody tell Cameron Stewart how awesome Seaguy was)
• Johanna Draper Carlson, Heidi MacDonald, Rick Marshall, and other fellow pixel-stained wretches, wherever we may be; maybe we ought to set a place to meet, guys?

Finally, there was one other item in my mailbox yesterday — a notice that the post office needs my signature so that I may claim THIS.

Notice in my mailbox that a parcel is awaiting my signature at the post office … a parcel from Ryan North, containing the only thing better than a grappling hook. Hell, yes.