Ah, December, you look an awful lot like April sometimes. April, some of you may recall, is when both the first Gunnerkrigg Court and second Devil’s Panties books were due; publisher Archaia Studio Press (in conversation with me) revised that to “before San Diego”, and has since been bogged down in financial difficulties. But Jennie Breeden tells us that DP2 now has a release date, which gives one home that GC may see release at the same time. Not willing to leave her books in the hands of others, Breeden has announced pre-orders for DP3 — order it through your friendly local comic shop.

• So last night I heard the Sound of Young America interview with Dave Foley and Calvin McDingly, and now this morning Sinfest continues the Kids in the Hall vibe. Good times.
• Speaking of good times, it occurs to me that within the DC comics milieu, both batdickery and superdickery are accepted terms. Leave it to Wonderella to trump every dick move ever pulled by Bats and Supes put together. That right there is a graduate-level dick move, and why Justin Pierce understands the innate ridiculousness of the superhero genre — all it takes is one self-centered superhero jerk to destroy all that’s good in life in the most cruel and hilarious way possible.

A: AppleGeeks vol1 is up for preorders via Dark Horse (although please note that release is not scheduled until May 2009). The book covers the first two years of the strip (ranging from here to approximately here), plus a new bonus story.

A: Alien Loves Predator has made a fairly consistent return from hiatus, and the latest entry in the ongoing story of the wacky roomies is as loving a tribute to New York City as ever Bernie Hou has produced. ALP has always had a spot in our hearts here at Fleen, being one of the first strips we talked about way back at launch. Welcome back, Abe and Preston.

A: Amy Chilton, from the cover of the forthcoming seventh Scary Go Round book, shows the softcore pornmeisters at American Apparel how it’s done.

Amazing how one thought leads to another somtimes.

• After an absence of nearly a year, Maura came back to Clango having lost some weight. Yet today she appears to be back to her old self (which make no mistake, was a horrible, horrible person). While it’s true that Rich Stevens is capricious and lives by whim, he doesn’t call do-over with his characters without a lot more logic than what we’ve seen so far today. I’m thinking evil twin or evil robot. Or evil robot twin.
• Speaking of Rich Stevens, he’s been getting some merch play on TV, along with fellow creators Jon Rosenberg and Ryan North; courtesy of North’s blogpost [no permalink]:
  

  I also wanted to thank everyone who let me know that Dinosaur Comics stuff is showing up in the background of the new season of The IT Crowd! There’s tons of webcomics stuff there if you keep your eyes peeled: I spotted Rich and Jon and myself and that was only in the first five minutes! If you get a chance to watch this show, I really recommend it. Last season’s opening episode (“The Work Outing”) was a perfect 22 minutes of television, I think.

  And Jeph Jacques apparently sighted Stevens’s Bacon is a Vegetable shirt on basic cable last night. This is the year webcomics storms the breaches and topples the dominant vendors of legible clothing from their mall-fattened thrones, my friends.

• Speaking of TV, the Too Art for TV gallery show kicks off tomorrow evening in Brooklyn, featuring Fleen Fave™ Carly Monardo. Alas, life prevents me from attending, so if you’re there, tell Carly I said hi.
• Speaking of people who are cool, do you like things that are fancy and durable? Do you like helping creators and children? Looking for a last-minute Holiday gift? Then check out the stores at Templar, AZ (where Spike has a blowout sale going — Templar vol 1 is going for as little as five bucks!) and Planet Saturday (where Monty & Kelli Stevens Kane are donating a dollar for every book sold to provide health care to uninsured children). Note for non-USA American readers: Here in Freedomonia, uninsured means No health care for you, so suffer you poor bastard. Our system is built this way for reasons of not being stinky communists and this makes us right with God. Just so we’re clear. Depending on your creator’s shipping deadline, you’re running shy on days to get your swag before your holiday of choice, so get crackin’.

If I don’t miss my count, this makes a total of two Team Force Alpha strips in two years. Ironically, this is not the worst update schedule in webcomics.

• News from across the Atlantic: pre-orders soon on the new Planet Karen book. Karen Ellis has put herself out there in her autobio journal, and the strip is one of the really good new voices of the past year or so. You’re not working tomorrow, so take a trawl through the archives; if you like what you see, watch this space for news of the orders opening.
• Speaking of books and preorders, Danielle Corsetto‘s Girls With Slingshots vol 2 is now available. Buy with vol 1 and get a discount! Hey, Danielle, next time you’re in New Jersey, I got an awesome bar to share with you — they make drinks interesting and strong.
• Trust Jennie Breeden to quote Georgia state jurisprudence on a … pressing topic. This made me giggle out loud.
• Finally, nothing to do with webcomics, but this is too funny not to share with you. Happy (non-Canadian) Thanksgiving, everybody.

Confidential to Noz-Eezin’ in the Hudson Valley: I’m six years older, how do you think I feel? Happy Birthday.

I’ve mentioned previously how Freakangels, by Internet Jesus (with illustrator Paul Duffield), reads better by running several weekly installments (each six pages long) together. Know how it reads even better? As a book. Picked up the trade paperback recently, and damn, but Warren Ellis can write. He’s a master of the show-don’t-tell skillset, giving us bits and pieces of a ruined world without every coming straight out and giving us the whole exposition (not that he doesn’t know how to do exposition up a treat).

And in print, some pages work better than on the screen; check out this four page sequence from the story; in the book, the first two images face each other, as does the second pair. Now consider a few additional facts:

• Freakangels follows a near-total four-panel layout; sometimes it’s splash pages, sometimes it’s one above and two below (or vice versa), but it’s nearly always four panels on the page
• That almost completely blank page has a four-panel grid on the other side of the sheet of paper
• The paper is slightly thin

As a result, there’s a subtle ghosting of panel borders and word balloons that show up translucent behind that big block of white. It turns an image of being lost in the totality of the universe into something more haunting — panels and balloons mean the passage of time and conversation in comics, and they’re going on somewhere just past where (or when) you can grab onto them. It may be an accidental artifact of printing on too-thin paper stock, but damn it looks pretty.

So there you are. We’re nearly the same age, Warren Ellis and me, speak the same language, and have had many of the same historical touchstones in our lives, and yet he turned out to be the kind of person that could think up and spin stories that I absolutely adore and I did not. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all those voices rattling around in his head waiting to get out and for his compulsion to spit them out to where I can read them. Now, who wants pie?

Item the First
I got an email request for my mailing address about a week and a half ago; throwing caution to the wind (it’s not that I mind the occasional flaming bag of poop in the mailbox, but I hate it when they come postage due), I supplied it. As a result, many thanks to Chris Hallbeck, who gifted me with a copy of The Book of Biff #3: Fresh Toast, which is notable for two things:

1. Eyebrows! I’m in stark disagreement with Brad Guigar here, who finds them distracting; I’m impressed by how expressive those unholy antennae are on Biff. But since you want to see Biff with the eyebrows gone — check it, Brad.
2. Dittos! Okay, a bunch of you are too young to remember the ditto, which was an earlier form of paper reproduction much used by schools in my youth. The pages used a wet transfer system with a fluid that was heavy on alcohols and volatile chemicals with a distinctive smell.

   If you got one of those faintly purple sheets and it was still damp, you’d sniff it for the lamest, most low-rent high in all of history. The inks used in TBOB#3:FT must have been formulated in an old ditto spirit distillery, ’cause they brought back memories of pop quizzes, #2 pencils, and filmstrips.

So it’s fair to say that TBOB#3:FT had a significant, visceral impact on me, right from the opening pages. I can’t guarantee that your copy will flash you back to a bored and misspent youth, but it’s worth a shot.

Item the Second
The lads at Unshelved have revealed the winners of the 2008 Pimp My Bookcart contest, and the top winners (out of … it looks like nearly 100 entries) are really amazing.

That foodcart looks just like the real thing (although hopefully it lacks the taxi exhaust, caked-on grease, and unkillable mutant strains of pathogens resulting from untold generations of evolution). The fire engine looks better equipped to handle structure fires than some real apparatus I’ve been around. And the Dr Suess model down the page is both delightfully loopy, complete with a cute ‘n’ cheerful librarian driving it¹.

Item the Third
Zuda got a great deal of attention from me in the time between announcement and launch; my views on the service are pretty well-known, and I haven’t spent many brain cycles on it since then (mostly because the viewer is a nightmare of bad interface design, memory bloat, and severely lack the ability to play nice with my browser of choice).

However, I’ve heard nothing but good about several of the stories that have come out of Zuda, and now some of them are getting the dead-tree treatment. Look for High Moon and Bayou to hit the stores in 2009, and let’s hope that they’re such big sellers that the 1% royalty the creators get actually adds up to real money.

________________
¹ Purchasers of this model are advised that they must supply their own cute ‘n’ cheerful librarian.

Tyler Page’s Nothing Better returns today, and you might say the new semester is better than ever. Ha, I crack myself up sometimes.

• Webcomics Idol is down to five: The Superfogeys, The Book of Biff, Xylia, Newspaper Comic Strip, and Calamities of Nature. Little surprised to see Shi Long Pang out so early, but what are you gonna do? Edit to add: dammit, this is what happens when I try to catch up on things in a 10 minute window. Thanks to Lenny in the comments for setting me straight. On a side note, I’m really enjoying the quality of feedback from the judges this cycle — good, trenchant advice in there.
• David Malki ! did a really good interview with occasional boothmate and once (and future?) webcomicker Nick Gurewitch, but you can’t read it yet. It’ll be in the next PBF book from Dark Horse (due in February), but you can read an excerpt here.
• Lastly, it’s not April Fool’s Day, so I’m forced to take the following from Wes Molbash at face value:
  

  I’ve decided to end YHT.

  This decision was not an easy one, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking it over with my friends and family. 2008 has been a difficult year for me personally, and I believe that now is as a good a time as any to end one project and start working on the next.

  The final “You’ll Have That” strip will be published on Friday, January 2nd, 2009. I hope to tie up as many loose ends as possible over the next two months, and I’ll try my darnedest to post these last strips on time! In February of ‘09 I’ll be launching a new comic feature here at this site.

  Weirdly enough, I don’t think that this is bad news. It’s not a sudden decision, there’s a natural end planned for the strip, and Molebash has clearly found a new project that he’s fired up about — those are all elements that lead to a reinvigorated and even-more creative cartoonist. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

What’s that? Another webcomicker with a Hollywood option? News came yesterday that Agnes Quill by the prolific Dave Roman (with the help of various other creators) has been picked up for development. For those of you new to the game, Dave and his wife Raina Telgemeier are, in addition to scary-talented, two of the nicest people in indy/webcomics you’re ever likely to meet. Between this and the publication pickup of Raina’s SMILE: A Dental Drama, it’s turning out to be a very good year for the kids from Brooklyn Queens dammit I knew that, thanks for the correction, Dave.

But just so we’re all clear, this does not necessarily mean that we’re gonna get an Agnes Quill movie; it means that the producers have negotiated for the right to make such a movie. A’course, Dave gets the financial benefits of that transaction whether or not the movie is ever made (and as has been pointed out before, more than one Hollywood idea-fountain has made a tidy living by not having movies made — options that expire can be resold again and again), so everybody be happy for Dave!

While we’re on the subject, anybody notice this peculiar corinsidence? Word of the Amulet deal came around St Patrick’s Day, Last Blood got announced on April Fool’s Day, and Agnes Quill in the immediate vicinity of Halloween. Look for the next big webcomic/movie deal around Groundhog Day.

• Speaking of Comics Bakery, their frequent convention boothmate (and my EE-knowin’, right-hand-rule-throwin’ brother) Kean Soo sends word that the second Jellaby book (Jellaby: Monster In The City) is now available for pre-order, with a release date and every damn thing. Unfortunately, it’s not until April, but maybe it drops a little bit early? Maybe? In the meantime, enjoy this Jellaby short.
• Finally, in the not quite ten days since the return of webcomics.com under the aegis of the Halpixel lads, there’s been some really good stuff going up. If you haven’t been over there yet, let me recommend particularly Krishna Sadasivam‘s practical tips on using ComicPress, Dave Kellett‘s interview with Karl Kerschl, and Chris Eliopoulos‘s on how you either make comics because you want to, or because you can’t not make them. If the entire community continues to contribute quality material like this, they’re gonna put me out of business and I get to sleep more — sweet.

Hey, did you see this thing over at Octopus Pie where originals are now up for sale? If it’s a strip in the post-digital production period (basically, since August) and you’re the first to hit the buttons, you can have it for 150 clams. If you’re after a strip that’s digital, already sold, or you don’t have that many bivalves, you can get a print of anything for only 25. I made my early holiday purchases — how ’bout you?

Speaking of Octopie, did you notice the style homage over at Bellen earlier in the week? The Boxster is doing his comic in the styles of other webcomics this week and next, leading up to Halloween. A’course, the use of disguises for characters has a long and distinguished history in webcomics. Halloween 2000, anyone?

Finally, I think it’s fair to say that User Friendly doesn’t get much mention in webcomics circles; creator JD Frazer has always seemed to float more in the Linux nerd circles — it’s a classic case of have no general audience appeal. You either live and breathe this stuff and it’s the one bit of cultural ephemera that caters to your tribe, or it’s not for you. There’s a comfortable niche to be occupied being a premiere (or even exclusive) supplier of laugh-chuckles to a tribe — just ask the guys at Unshelved (although a lot more people have direct personal interaction with, and understanding of what is done by, librarians than with the running of an ISP).

But even with a webcomic that exists off to the side (as it were), there are things you have to pay attention to. Case in point: a comprehensive, hardcover, ten-year strip collection. That’s more than 1000 pages (at least, that’s what the ad says … the product description says 1000 strips, but it also says all the cartoons, so I’m believing the page count), and unless it’s on really crappy paper, I’m guessing about 7.5kg of dry weight. If you’re the sort that reads UF (and contrary to what many, even this page, may have said, the strip has improved since it debuted), put on the shelf next to your Far Side or Calvin & Hobbes slipcover editions.

One of my favorite discoveries since I started writing for Fleen was Moresukine, a journal webcomic (named for the beloved notebook it was drawn in) of sheer brilliance by Dirk Schwieger. Finding himself in Tokyo as a translator for a software company, Schwieger issued a challenge — send him tasks to accomplish in Japan, and he would undertake to:

• fulfill these missions;
• in the order they were received;
• regardless of personal interest in the task;
• and draw a comic about each experience

I’ve gone back to Schwieger’s two dozen adventures (which were spaced over a period of six months or so) time and again since then, and now I have in my hands the printed version of Moresukine, which hit the stores this week after a delay of some months (Christopher Butcher noted that the copy he bought from Schwieger at SDCC suffered cropping and printing problems, and speculates that the delay in rollout was to fix these problems). It’s a marvel.

For starters, the physical form of the book is an echo of the Moleskine — a black notebook with the ubiquitous ribbon bookmark (although pasted to the inside of the back cover, not sewn into the binding as in the genuine article), which is a necessity to properly present one of the postings. Schwieger’s journal is faithfully reproduced (minus a few ink smears), complete with the irregularly-spotty blacks in the title block of each new entry — the natural variations from Schwieger’s ink-stamp masthead being pressed into paper.

Especially interesting is the production job of mission #6, Gender, which is presented out of chronological order. In order to preserve the full impact of Schwieger’s visually intricate and interconnected work, Gender was printed on a single sheet and folded over twice. With the story on the hidden inside of this micro-booklet, the outside faces form pages 2 – 4 of mission 8 (Home Story) and page 1 of mission 9 (Para Para). It’s a bit hard to explain, but when you get to Home Story and notice the pages feel thick? Lift up from the bottom and turn the sheet outward on itself, and enjoy Gender. Just be careful folding everything back together again.

Having thoroughly digested Schwieger’s stories as they were posted, I thought that the paperfolding trick would be the only real surprise to be found in the book … it was a pleasure to be proved wrong. A year and a half ago, Schwieger sent his own challenge to ten webcomics creators whose work he enjoys — meet a Japanese person in your home city and have a conversation, then document the encounter in a comic.

Over the next four months, responses came back and Schwieger included them in the back of Moresukine. Even better, I was completely unfamiliar with more than half of the respondents, as they were heavily concentrated in France and Germany. The guest comics ranged from one-pagers from James Kochalka and Ryan North to 8- and 10-page complete stories from the likes of Monsieur le Chien and Marcel Guldemond. There’s a huge variety among artistic approaches and styles in the 10 guests — more than enough to spend days trawling through archives for a new favorite.

In all, it’s a beautiful piece of work, stunningly original, and well worth your investigation. You could just read Moresukine online, but trust me — this is one work of webcomickry where the the weight of a tangible artifact only enhances the experience.