My respect for Kristofer Straub’s Starslip Crisis jumped a couple of notches while I was reading his second collected volume, Sparkling Diplomacy. The book covers the daily strip from October 19, 2005 to May 22, 2006, and lays the foundation for the titular crisis that forms the spine of the overall story.

The actual cause and nature of the crisis aren’t revealed in the strips contained in this book (I guess you’ll just have to buy book 3 when it comes out), but the seeds of it are there. What looks like a slight, throwaway gag about men and women remembering conversations differently takes on a whole new significance in the light of later events. What appears to be a bit of background detail will play a crucial and dramatic role months later. All these hints were always there — they’re just easier to see when reading the story in big chunks (literally so — as in the first collection, the strips in SD are printed larger than their own-screen equivalents, making those small details easier to notice).

Once again, Straub has added commentary and biographical info on the dramatis personae throughout the book; especially in the case of Lord Murdertron, these are helpful in understanding the characters better. Add in the usual top-notch job from Straub in keeping the story (and the funny) rolling along day after day in the context of a larger dramatic story arc, and you’re left with a must-read. Sadly, there is one down note in an otherwise wholly-enjoyable collection: Straub has opted to keep his barely-concealed, vicious character assassination of T Campbell in the collection, slightly marring an otherwise sterling effort. He makes up for it by including his contribution to the Blank Label Comics Hurricane Telethon, so we’ll let it slide this time.

Lulu did their usual bang-up job on the printing, although it appears that they’ve moved to a less-white paper stock; other Blank Label books have a brighter white on the page, where SD is a somewhat muted cream color. Restful, but brighter might have been better.

What can I say? It’s Flight 3, it’s awesome, it’s got megatalents like Kazu Kibiushi and Kean Soo and Phil Craven editing. Every piece in the book is breathtakingly beautiful to behold.

But it’s taken a bit of bit of a turn this time around. It seems that creators that did light-hearted whimsy in Flight 2 go for something grimmer this time around, and vice versa. Michael Gagné’s Inner Sanctum in F2 featured a little alien-planet fox in a rollicking adventure that was a little dangerous, but all turned out well. In F3‘s Underworld, the fox struggles heroically only to die at the end, and be reborn as something harder. In F2, Bannister presented Dust On The Shelves, a meet-cute story with the love of your life in a comic store; F3‘s So Far, So Close is an almost meet-cute, with the participants parting ways forever.

Kean Soo’s Last Things Last (F2) is a heartbreaking autobiographical story about letting go a loved one; Jellaby: The Tea Party (F3) is lighthearted and fun. Most startling, however, is probably newcomer Azad Injejikian’s Polaris, which starts as a quiet story about a little girl who’s different and just wants to be accepted … and ends with the destruction of all humanity. Great story, though.

So call the theme of F3 “Let’s mix things up” and accept that you’re going to love it. Also, kudos to the entire crew for getting a major publisher, Ballantine, behind F3; it was a coup two years ago to get Flight published by Image, as it put the book into every comic book shop in the country. Ballantine, though — they can put F3 into every bookstore, period. The wider distribution is only going to bring more people to this work, and that’s a great thing.

Finally, thanks to Injejikian, Kibiushi, Johane Matte, and Rodolphe Guenoden, who were kind enough to sketch in my copy at San Diego — inks over pencils, y’all. These people are artists.

As pointed out by Jeff Rowland, (And now Allison)there is a wiki with drinks and drinking games related to webcomics. The drinks are themed for a selection of possibly more well known webcomics, and may or may not actually be for human consumption.

I think there would be hours of amusement browsing a wiki such as this. But, alas, there is more to this wiki than mere amusement:

This website is intended as a tool for the gathering and organization of information related to the publishing of a book or books for commercial purposes.

All information entered by users, whether registered or anonymous, is considered to be an uncompensated contribution to the project.

Owners of copyrighted or other content submitted through this website grant to Phillip Kahn the unconditional and unlimited use of that material for all manner of publication.

It’s a derivative work, a spinoff, a tribute. Phillip Kahn seems to be a webcomic podcaster, involved in the policy of the WCCAs, and it seems he’s trying to make a book to capitalize on webcomic success. The idea that contributions are uncompensated says that he’s trying to be compensated.

Interesting. Very Interesting.

Edit: An earlier version of this post had content that was based on mistaken assumptions; Phil Kahn was kind enough to provide further information, and Fleen regrets the error.

Girly makes me uneasy.

Six comics in sexual harassment becomes a joke, in the form of an unwanted suitor who believes his penis is his only redeeming quality. The “joke� is reoccurring.

Girly makes me angry.

In the first part, the main plotline is both how Winter and Otra (“Girly�) come to be leader and sidekick, and then friends, and then lovers – as well as the downfall of El Chupacabre. Chupacabre is described as a lover, pleasurer, eater, and penetrater of women.

The first time a woman walked onscreen and then down a dark alley, I was expecting rape. Rape is defined as “sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usually of a female.� The woman was grabbed, and for all her scream of surprise or terror (most likely terror) turned into pleasure, as indicated by the hearts around the sound effect, it was rape.

Winter and Otra obviously don’t see it as a problem – they go after the elephants. The news doesn’t see it as a problem; Women being found naked runs as the secondary story.

I could dismiss this all as a satire if at the conclusion of the story the lesson didn’t fall so flat.

Winter says he’s been doing the right thing, in the wrong way. She proclaims that he has been practicing sexuality haphazardly, leading to guilt and resentment. But what about the common feeling of violation? Of shame? Of disbelief? Of fear and self-blame?

And then there is the statement that Chupacabre never attacked anyone. He was irresistible, and so they just submitted. Does this excuse him? Consider real life attacks – could a rapist claim that they just submitted? Could it be true? Would it make it any better?

Chupacabre was finally driven out of town by Winter and Otra. And I stopped reading.

The entire first part of this comic is a giant thumbs up to sexual harassment and rape. Joking about rape makes the act of rape a joke. Make a joke about murder, and you’re not likely to be patted on the back in the bar for doing it. Make a joke about rape, harassment, etc., and you may just be a local hero.

Or a webcomic creator successful enough to have a book published.

Two ways to check out ‘Mega’ webcomics this week, going back through all your favorite gags. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll remember the good times.

First up, Diablo the Chicken’s megaGAMERZ 3133T is going into reruns. Started on 22 June 2005 and ending not quite a year later with the Deathrumble, you’ve got an eye-popping 49 self-contained storylines and a cast of dozens (including my personal favorite, Fishapod). Given the tremendous demand to see them again, Diablo has added one to the year, and opted to rerun the entire series from the very beginning. No revisions or redraws, no commentary track, just pure gamery goodness. Hop on board now while you can and enjoy the thrill ride.

And secondly, Megatokyo released volume 4 this week (following a shift from Dark Horse to CMX, an imprint of DC Comics), covering chapters 5 (starting 25 February 2004) and 6 (ending 1 August 2005), you’ve got a year and a half’s worth of strip, plus various side-stories, fillers, and sketches.

However, this is not a review, given that everything included only accounts for about three days of story time, it’s hard to say whether or not the story is progressing without reading the entire damn thing. Some day, Fred Gallagher will finish MT and reading it all in one go will either prove to be very satisfying or deeply disturbing. Neither outcome, however, will shift anybody from their present opinions on the man and his work, so if you like MT assume you need this book, and if you don’t, assume your ten bucks would be better off contributing to the purchase of Tezuka’s Phoenix, volume 7.

My buy-list for SDCC is getting longer, as in addition to Kristofer Straub’s second Starslip Crisis book, there’s a new comprehensive volume of Wapsi Square coming from Paul Taylor. Big, beefy bargain books, too, clocking in at 180 and 160 pages respectively.

Speaking of Blank Label, Steve Troop has a new gig doing puppet videocasts over at Kevin Smith‘s site; the link to Troop’s video wasn’t working on Tuesday, but since he’s scheduled to run on Friday’s, I imagine that makes sense. Also worth noting is a list of fairly impressive names that Smith has contributing to his relaunched site: Fred Hembeck, Paul Dini, and the cast/crew of Scrubs will be bumping elbows with Troop at the website Christmas party.

Given how long Troop’s been at this game, that makes him an overnight success after a decade-plus of grinding effort — our sincere congratulations to him, and wishes for future ass-kickery.

Inverloch and Earthsong being published isn’t exactly recent news, but it hasn’t been talked about here. Megatokyo has been at the book game for a while now, and Fred is on book four. Inverloch and Earthsong both went through a revision process — in fact, you can view the newly drawn pages of Earthsong as “redux” pages on the internet. Inverloch has used redrawn pages as incentives.
Megatokyo included the original art in all of the editions. (I own the first one. I bought it on impulse while in Ann Arbor, squeeing over the fact that I was that close to someone that did webcomics. Little did I know, a year later, I’d be writing for Fleen.) It does, of course, include editions and bonuses. And in reading Fred’s rants, he went through a lot of trouble to make the comics the correct ratio, let alone revise the drawings.

All three works mentioned are aiming for the same thing: an epic storyline. They want to tell a story. So, why the different approaches to publishing? Creators out there, what would you do? Readers and fans, what is it that you prefer?

I’m still gross and sick and barely functioning today. I spent most of the weekend sleeping and heavily medicated. I did not leave my bed long enough to read any comics online, sorry guys. No good news today; I’ll try again tomorrow.

While being pathetic and whiney all weekend, I did get a chance to read through my new copy of Candorville’s book Thank God For Culture Clash which arrived on Saturday morning.

The book is wonderful funny and filled with all our political woes and missteps from the past several years. I like how Darrin Bell deals with race too, a subject that makes anyone who finds the jokes funny instantly uncomfortable with themselves. Bell tells us in no uncertain terms to get over ourselves, we look ridiculous. I am already plotting a serious plan to convince the super-conservative newspaper of my city to bring Candorville to their pages. We’ll see.

I bet the book will be even better the second time I read through it when I’m not stoned on decongestants and Nyquil.

The thing you have to understand about Howard Tayler is, he’s basically the same guy as me. Okay, he’s got a passle o’ kids and I’ve got a dog; he’s a Latter-Day Saint and I’m a nonthiestic humanist (that’s me in the crosshairs); he bears a startling resemblance to Tycho and I don’t. But we were born a few months apart, we’ve been married to our respective wives about the same length of time, we’ve both worked extensively in tech, we both drive New Beetles, and I suspect that we have a similar love of pie — and if that’s not enough to make us brothers under the skin, then I don’t know what is.

And it’s obvious that we both really like the concept of DVD extras, as his first collection of strips, Schlock Mercenary Under New Management, is chock-full of the print equivalent of commentary tracks, mini documentaries, and deleted scenes. Tayler’s pretty well known for these commentaries within the bounds of the daily strip — you’ll learn about the logic behind his various sci-fi constructs and doo-dads, and get an occasional lesson in practical geology if you aren’t careful (you may also discover that in the future, he’s taking literal pot-shots at your place of residence).

Following on the DVD analogy, the book is the equivalent of a reference-quality disc, with heavy glossy paper (seriously, this is the heaviest stock I’ve ever seen in a webcomics book … there is some serious heft here), deep colors, rich blacks, with an occasional transfer artifact somewhat distracting from the overall presentation (that is, somebody needs to clean the printing web a bit better as there were some ink smears around the margins, but thankfully not on the main images). If there were a soundtrack to the book, it would have those reassuring little sci-fi spaceship background noises interspersed with some BLAM and ommminous hummmmm in 5.1 surround.

Storywise, SMUNM goes from March 9 to August 23, 2003, covering four arcs of a year-plus long story (which we are promised will continue in the next book); you could just read it online, but the book has a distinct advantage in that it’s easier to navigate. The latest website redesign eliminated the drop-down box that allowed a browser to jump to particular story points; Tayler has mentioned his unhappiness with this particular feature loss, so hopefully we’ll see the capability back soon.

In the meantime, SMUNM is exactly what you want from lighthearted SF — no big heavy morals or using the far-flung future to address pressing issues of our day, just a bunch of weird people wandering the galaxy and blowing up other weird people. Can’t ask for more than that, and with pre-orders done, it goes back on sale today.

So the fine men and women of the United States Postal Service finally got me my copy of Howard Tayler’s first Schlock Mercenary book today (postmarked the 15th, I swear they were faster when they sponsored Lance), so look for a review in the coming days. Also, if rumors are to be believed, the long-awaited and completely non-controversial The History of Webcomics may be dropping in the next day or so; that one will probably take a bit longer. And today, it’s City Limits, the latest webcomics-artists-anthology, this one edited by George Rohac and Katy Ullman.

Like its predecessors, Flight and Disposable Parts, there’s a theme to this collection, although perhaps a bit less abstract than stuff flies or robots. CL focuses on a fictional city made up in a room full of creators at last year’s Otakon (many of whom may be seen here), which leaves a bit of room for crossovers — a bit of background gag in one story becomes a foreground plot point in another. This is a nice touch, and it would be nice to see if these little nods become a regular feature of creator anthologies.

Like all anthologies, it’s going to be somewhat uneven in tone and style, and no two people are going to agree on what the best parts are. You got horror (funny from Mookie Terraciano, creepy from Dan Kim), dumb action movie fun (in three parts from Brian Caroll and two from Ryan Estrada), science fiction (from Bob Gandy and Haque/Panagariya), and so forth. There’s probably something here to your taste and something that makes you go meh.

One thing though, and all future anthology editors should take note: not all the work reproduces equally well in the B&W printed medium. Justin Eger’s moody, somber story is well served by Rickey Winrick’s art in Reunion which probably looks great on a screen or color repro, but here the shading is muddled a bit around the edges. Similar issues and a distracting pixelation affect the splash pages of Bob Gandy’s contribution, No Moving Parts. By contrast, Mohammed Haque does his usual magic in Disconnect — the man knows how to get the thinnest lines and subtlest shading differences to display clear and sharp.

And if you clicked on those links above, you probably can’t see the flaws that I mentioned — maybe it’s an artifact of paper, maybe it’s to do with the source materials not having a high enough resolution, maybe it’s just that somebody produced a pre-press master on a day with an “R” in it — but it seems a shame that the image quality isn’t uniform throughout. No idea how to fix that, but there’s lots of people that read this that have prepared work for press; perhaps they could enlighten us.