That’s when a pair of books by a pair of webcomickers drop, and they could not be any more different.

• First up, Vera Brosgol continues her alternating pattern of graphic novel with at least some elements of growing up Russian (Anya’s Ghost, Be Prepared) and childrens picture book, sometimes with a Russian feel to the whole thing (Leave Me Alone!), when she releases The Little Guys via Roaring Brook Press.

  It’s about these guys who are little, maybe half-height to a Smurf. They wear acorn caps for hats, they’ve got prominent noses, and I’m not sure if they have shaggy bodies or that’s just beard covering their bodies, but they’re totally charming. And, crucially, the eponymous Little Guys are the villains of the piece. Slowly the tale turns — they are little, but work together (that’s good!) and together they are mighty (admirable!) They meet any challenge (you go, Little Guys) to get what they want (uhhh, maybe slow down, Little Guys?) with the clear message: None for you! All for us! Hand it over to the Little Guys!

  Look, I’m not saying this book is to teach 3-6 year olds about the perils of in-group conformity and out-group oppression and how easily fascistic systems can evolve from seemingly benign messages … but I’m not not saying it. And I’m definitely not saying that this is a story that said 3-6 year olds should be kept from, since inoculation against virulent pathogens (of both the biological and sociopolitical varieties) is a good thing for herd immunity.

  I reserve the right to revise my impressions of Guys, Little and otherwise, once I get my hands on a copy, but in the meantime you can get a look at how such a book gets put together, and to check out Brosgol’s upcoming book tour dates, starting Sunday the 31st.

• Second, Box Brown continues his alternating pattern of graphic novel that’s a biography of somebody related to wrestling (Andre The Giant, Is This Guy For Real?) and sociological examinations, sometimes with a Russian connection (Tetris), when he releases Cannabis via :01 Books.

  Moreso than some of his earlier works, Cannabis depends on its subtitle to give an idea what the book’s really about: The Illegalization Of Weed In America. There’s a brief history of cannabis use going back a few millenia in India, its spread to the Old and New Worlds, and then it hits the meat of the story: how the prohibition of cannabis was an explicit grab for power and social control, largely by the singular efforts of Harry Anslinger, the first drug policy commissioner.

  (If you don’t know Anslinger’s story, On The Media included a detailed profile of the man in their history of the American drug war, which left me with the inescapable conclusion that Anslinger was motivated, more than anything else, by the fact that he was a racist shitbag. Dude basically murdered Billie Holiday, because she was performing her blackity-black music around decent white folk.)

  All of which makes Cannabis a unique book — not a social history of weed, or arguments for its beneficial nature or why it should be legal, but rather an examination of why it was outlawed, and how very much overemphasis on its dangers has come not from medical proof, but from political expediency to oppress the poor and non-white. My review copy was an early, uncorrected proof, so I’m interested to see what the final version looks like when it comes out. In the meantime, you can make plans to catch up with Brown on his book tour, which technically started last weekend at C2E2.

Spam of the day:

99 Free Spins , Instant Access .

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And we all know that when I talk about the Bay Area, there’s just one thing that could mean: party at Shaenon Garrity’s backyard tiki hut! something cool is happening at the Cartoon Art Museum.

As it has in past years, CAM is participating in a museum exchange bonanza, where memberships at one cultural institution are honored at all of them, thus allowing people to see more cool stuff than they’d ordinarily be able to. This year, Member For A Day (taking place on 14 April, that’s a Sunday) will allow CAM members to take in:

• Asian Art Museum
• Berkeley Art Museum And Pacific Film Archive
• Contemporary Jewish Museum
• Fine Arts Museums Of San Francisco (the deYoung is in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion Of Honor is in Lincoln Park)
• Museum Of African Diaspora
• Museum Of Craft And Design
• Oakland Museum Of California
• San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art
• UC Botanical Garden At Berkeley
• The Walt Disney Family Museum

Note that there may be surcharges for special exhibits at FAMSF and the Oakland Museum Of California.

Importantly, the presence of some of the premier museum of not just the area, but of the country (SFMOMA is world class, MOAD is a Smithsonian affiliate) means that CAM is an equal, a legitimate home of scholarship and culture. I find that something that should be repeated every once in a while, as comics still get regarded as unimportant, or lesser — neither art nor literature. I mean, we all saw this on Twitter, right?

My daughter said her LA teacher has officially banned graphic novels from his class. She then asked me to find bags so she could bring hers to school so she can lend them out. A story right from one of @AlanGratz or @allisonvarnes books. #rebellibrarian #banthisbook

Kudos to both mom (for raising a daughter that wants to read and recognizes good reading doesn’t require a particular form) and daughter (who will be running a clandestine library out of her locker — I’m pretty sure this makes her a booklegger in the Leibowitzian sense). Who knows? Maybe the thrill of the illicit will entice a reluctant reader or two even moreso than some graphic novels would have on their own (and GNs are a tremendous tool for getting reluctant readers to engage with books) and it’ll be a net positive.

Mostly, though, that teacher (and some who are cheering him for making kids read “real books”) need to understand — comics are part of the culture and an equal to any other art. Maybe we can encourage that guy to visit San Francisco to see for himself if he needs traditional arbiters of worthiness to give him permission to let kids read what they want.

Spam of the day:
\\ Gay Union News //
Apparently, I’m in the union and didn’t realize it. Are there dues?

Man, you can learn a lot from the Twitters. Sometimes, you learn that an idea you had is already in motion. Sometimes you learn that an idea that nobody had makes perfect sense.

• I swear, when I wrote a week ago about the new line of civic engagement graphic novels from :01 Books and how they should pick up Zach Weinersmith, I didn’t know they already had:
  

  Check out the exclusive cover and excerpt reveal of #OpenBorders by @bryan_caplan and @ZachWeiner, on @PasteMagazine! This nonfiction graphic novel on immigration comes this fall, and is available for pre-order now!

  Weinersmith’s been talking to me forever about the graphic novel he’s been working on that argues in favor of open borders; I think the first time we talked about it here was a good eighteen months ago. In all that time, he never let on it was with :01, but honestly I should have guessed. And today, we have a cover reveal and street date, courtesy of Paste¹ magazine: Open Borders: The Science And Ethics Of Immigration, and 29 October.

  There’s a six page preview over there, too, which quickly establishes the central thesis of the book: that wholly unrestricted immigration is not only an economic good, but also morally necessary. I’m calling the over/under on the number of angry, early morning “executive time” tweets about the book on or around the release at … let’s say four.

• There’s a thing I never knew I needed — that anybody needed — and in retrospect it appears bloody obvious. Jeph Jacques has made a habit of purchasing … unique URLs to redirect to his comic², which is no new thing in webcomics. Jeffrey Rowland showed me a list of all the domains he owned once, and it was a thing of demented beauty; Rich Stevens collects domains like an early ’90s kid collected pogs.

  But Jacques makes use of his redirects, linking them when a new comic goes up; I don’t think he’s used questionablecontent.net in more than a year; on the one hand, most of his aliases are much shorter, and on the other, the fact that a massive, worldwide technological infrastructure was constructed just to allow dildo.pizza to exist is funny all by itself.

  But let’s face it — a gag can only take you so far, and some of those exotic TLDs have noncompetitive registrars; at some point, you gotta cut your losses or find a way to pay for your hobby:

  I have the best URLs in the business, and now you can have a sweet fuckin’ print of them thanks to @topatoco https://topatoco.com/collections/jeph-jacques/products/qc-urls-print …

  This is, I believe, the first poster that needs to possibly come with annual updates. Hey, Jeph, have you considered that? This could be an annual subscription item.

Spam of the day:

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¹ And hot dang, can I just express my admiration for a moment of how the folks at :01 have taken the let’s promote our forthcoming graphic novel game from sending the exclusive to The Beat or CBR and raised it to the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Paste? It sends a message not just about their own offerings when you can say a new graphic novel is not just of interest to the comics world, it is and should be part of the general culture.

² And sometimes just to have. Remember walmart.horse?

I will, to my dying day, maintain that Shaenon Garrity lacks a sufficient sense of greed, or perhaps ego. I say this because she criminally underprices her originals, which is why I’ve gotten several — from both Narbonic and Skin Horse — simply because she’s Kickstarted a book and was willing to throw original strips in at an uncreedably¹ modest price.

Case in point: Garrity and her Skin Horse writing partner, C Jeffrey Wells, are Kickstarting two — two! — Skin Horse volumes, and they are being typically generous on the rewards.

• US$35 Both print volumes, signed and sketched (early bird, limited to 100, but only five bucks more after)
• US$50 Add an original character sketch
• US$150 Add an original prose story from Wells and the original art of a strip from the books
• US$250 Add print copies of all six previous books
• US$300 The 150 tier, plus you get drawn into the story as a character and you get the original art from your cameo²

Thirty five bucks for two color books, signed and sketched? That’s stupidly cheap, and I encourage you all to get in on it, but not because it’s stupidly cheap; because Skin Horse is one of the smartest, funniest, long-con-est webcomics around, and we need to encourage such.

Plus, if we’re very lucky, a stretch goal will get added that will convince Garrity to resume her recap comics of The X-Files, Monster Of The Week, since the Patreon doesn’t seem to be producing on that front.

Speaking of Patreon — and has there ever been a case in the past 18, 24 months where speaking of Patreon was the precursor to something good? — there’s changes a’coming down the pike, which bear all the hallmarks of keeping VC funders happy at the expense of merely being a stable, profitable company. Let’s let Ryan North³ explain this one:

Patreon, a platform that has become measurably worse with each update, is excited to announce an exciting new update! Now it costs you more money.

I love my patrons and I hate that Patreon as a company is so deep into VC funding that they’ll do anything, like last year when they changed everything overnight and then walked it back a few days later. This isn’t a platform you can trust.

Here’s a great thread from earlier this year about why Patreon is getting worse, and why it’ll continue to do so for a long time. I’m very much looking forward to Drip relaunching as a public benefit corp, which will sidestep these issues entirely: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1092846201374892032

Here’s the deal: Patreon will be charging up to 12% of your pledges plus payment processing fees. The fact that they announced this as we’re making changes soon but if you have an account before cutover you won’t get charged as much instead of we’re making changes soon but if you’re already have an account then you won’t be charged as much is fairly screaming that they’re trying to show some kind of subscriber growth to their investors. It is the same make the numbers look good for quarter end bullshit that leads corporations to fire a bunch of people just before they report earnings to make Wall Street happy.

There’s always been a saying around tech — if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product — which Patreon seems intent on inverting: you’re paying for the product and you are the product. Unfortunately for Patreon, they aren’t irreplaceable. Facebook badly fumbled their Patreon-alike, but New Drip is going to peel people off for the simple reason that a public benefit corporation that isn’t beholden to venture capital won’t — can’t — treat its golden-goose user base as an excuse to sharpen the knife.

Spam of the day:

Listen, after my husband just used this.

I think I’m supposed to infer that whatever your husband did, it left you so breathless from the sex that you can’t complete a sentence even when typing a spamvertisement at a later time?

_______________
¹ Love you, Ike Willis .

² At least one past cameo has become an occasional recurring character — KT the zombie sewer maintenance worker.

³ Who, like Garrity, is a Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities.

By rights I should have talked about this yesterday, but then when would we have discussed Too Boat, Too Boner? So today it is.

:01 Books is not resting after two years of transition from a 20-titles-per-year publisher to a 50-titles-per-year publisher; particularly in the wake of Gina Gagliano’s shift to Random House — which I’m sure everybody at :01 would agree is actually a win for the industry, although I’m sure they feel the sting of her absence — they have been expanding not only in volume, but also in focus.

Recall that they are not only the only graphic novel publisher that addresses every age range, as well as one of the few that are actively bringing European comics to American readers¹. They have launched thematic lines of graphic novels — Science Comics, Maker Comics — while also staking their reputation on supporting authors of distinctive voice. It’s not obvious what niche they’ve left unserved.

And now we know: civic education and engagement:

That’s the goal of a slate of new graphic novels from World Citizen Comics, which aim to excite and inform readers about how they can fight corruption in elections, blast fake news with truth-telling, and even battle would-be dictators both near and far through a better understanding of constitutions and the rule of law.

It’s significant that the new sub-imprint was announced in Entertainment Weekly, who tell us that there will be seven books initially, starting in Spring of next year (just in time for a major exercise of the political process here in the US). It’s a new enough endeavour that the :01 and Macmillan websites (as well as that of Roaring Brook Press, of which :01 is an imprint … the lines of hierarchy can get kind of scrambled) haven’t caught up to the news yet. But given the enormous impact of the March trilogy (certainly to be matched by the forthcoming sequel, Run), it appears that it’s a niche that can match up ideas and minds with the intention of doing some good.

World Citizen will feature :01 vets like Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb (on Breaking (The) News by Jennifer Pozner, on modern media culture) and George O’Connor² (on Un-Rig: How To Fix Our Broken Democracy by Dan Newman, on the influence of dark money on politics and policy). They’ll also bringing new folks into the fold, like Kasia Babis (on Re-Constitution by Beka Feathers, about resisting authoritarianism and buttressing the rule of law), who’s been killing it at The Nib.

I’m expecting the tone of the imprint will be something similar to Josh Neufeld’s The Influencing Machine, which is one of the best, densest, but easy-to-read primers on How The World Really Works. As for the future, it’s not like the world will be getting any less complex (or the challenges facing us any easier) after the initial tranche of books is done; we seem to be more open-eyed about the resurgence of authoritarianism around the world than we have been in the past³, but the generations that didn’t live through the last antidemocratic period need to learn history — a history that those in charge may not want them to learn. A line of books made for a general audience (as opposed to political junkies), especially one that’s at least partially pitched at younger readers, will be welcome.

And hey, maybe they look at what Zach Weinersmith is doing in the same sphere (his comic series on the American political system with his political scientist brother, his forthcoming book in favor of open immigration with a prominent Libertarian economist) and we get more of his work in book-sized chunks incisively determining what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it, but with dick jokes. If you’re going to tackle something as serious as the defense of democracy itself, you gotta lighten the mood at least a little.

Spam of the day:

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Fact: I have had a lifelong sensitivity to pressure and temperature changes, which manifests (primarily at night) as a mild case of tinnitus.
Fact: Stay the fuck away from me with a gun. Thank you.

_______________
¹ Even though not enough of you bought Last Man and the series stalled on the most devastating cliffhanger imaginable, damn you all.

² Gotta have a project lined up for when Olympians ends, which will simultaneously be a magnificent accomplishment and a very sad day.

³ Which is damn good, because the last time you had so many aspiring strongmen in so many places, it led to 50 million or so dead people and multiple continents in ruins.

There’s something universal about Kiss Number 8 (words by Colleen AF Venable, pictures by Ellen T Crenshaw), and it’s not necessarily the part you think it is. There’s a lot of the usual growing up narrative, wondering if the person we like feels the same way, or even like-likes in return. There’s the awkwardness of trying to navigate the teens years. There’s more than one LGBTQ identity to be learned, understood, and accepted (which is terrificly well done; for so long, so many didn’t get to seem themselves in fiction, and YA is leading the way in letting those people be seen).

But there’s one bit at the core that I think is the most important part of the story, and it’s been occupying a lot of my brainspace ever since :01 Books were kind enough to send a review copy some weeks back.

(This is where I usually warn against spoilers, but that warning is a little less stringent than usual this time; as sometimes happens depending on the publishing schedule, my review copy is an advance, uncorrected proof. It’s late for wholesale changes to the book, but dialogue or narration or details could be different in the final version that drops next Tuesday, so I’m going to be focusing on big themes, rather than specific bits of plot and character.)

Mads loves a couple of things in life — her dad (especially Sundays at the minor league ballpark after church and kicking his ass at videogames), instant messaging her friends, and … yeah. Lot of uncertainty in your middle teen years. Personal relationships befuddle her, she and her mom don’t see eye to eye, she’s not sure about how, when, or if she wants to romantically pair off (at least in the way that her family, school, neighbors, and church all seem to expect), and then there’s her friends. Because the heart of this story is interacting with friends, but also the phenomenon of the Bad Friend.

Everybody’s had a bad friend, one that’s a jerk until called on it, then you get cast out and don’t even have a bad friend any more. If you’ve got a lot of other friends, that’s survivable (although that friend group may well split). If you don’t have a lot, or they decide that they don’t want to be on the bad side of the bad friend — yikes. The very isolating nature of teendom just got more isolating.

Perhaps even more devastatingly, pretty much everybody has, at one time or another, been the bad friend; the best outcome there is you don’t ever realize it until long after that friendship fades away because then you don’t feel like crap about it in real time. The worst part is realizing you’ve been a jerk, and there’s no way to make things right, and it’s all your fault. If you aren’t the type to be a deliberately bad friend, you spend the next forever cringing at the memory. Mads will suffer a bad friend, but also be a bad friend; she’ll be done wrong by her family’s hard-hearted choices, and also give them legitimate reasons to be angry with her in turn. Nobody’s all good, and nobody’s all bad (except … yeah, there’s some pretty terrible people here).

In Kiss Number 8¹, there’s a lot of bad friends, and a lot of realization on the part of the major characters of their flaws and screwups, past and present. The good ones eventually move beyond them; the less good … well. You know the person that peaked in high school, and they’ll never be as happy, or well liked, or respected ever again? Sometimes it’s later than high school, but there are people that stagnate, never becoming better, their lives defined not by their now-fading-in-the-distance accomplishments, but by their cruelties. Sometimes they’re like that because they’re deeply insecure, like nervous dogs that exhibit fear aggression. Sometimes they’re so damn certain of how right and perfected they are, and how insufficient everybody else is in comparison.

They never say (or at least, never do more than insincerely mouth the words) I was wrong or I screwed up or I hurt you. But when you have the opportunity — the ability to say those things — you have the potential to find forgiveness, growth, acceptance, new loves (of all the classic types, not just romantic love). You can find peers that accept who you are and who you are becoming. On the far side of the fear and hatred there’s a happiness you can carve out for yourself and your loved ones.

Kiss Number 8 is an exploration of the kind of person who has the ability to self-reflect and say Hoo boy, I was an asshole sometimes _____ years ago, I really hope I’m a better person now and mean it, versus the kind of person who simply can’t.

When you can, you not only have the ability to improve yourself, you have the ability to see (and sometimes, gently and lovingly prod) progression in others. Family of birth and family of choice (or at least, parts of each) can grow and flourish, even it if doesn’t look like it now. Old hurts and grudges can heal. Lives can fulfill their promise. And nothing will ever taste as good as a minor league ballpark hot dog on a Sunday afternoon in the company of your nearest and dearest.

That journey by Venable and Crenshaw is heartfelt, hopeful (without over-promising how easy growing up is, for even the luckiest of us) and achingly real. Kiss Number 8 is for everybody that’s growing into who they will be, and everybody who’s realized that continuing to grow is the most important thing we can do. You’ll find it at bookstores everywhere starting 12 March.

Spam of the day:

Check out the video for the issuance of their prize in the amount of – 2288 Eur

I’m not sure that’s a dash. I think the prize is actually negative 2288 Euro.

_______________
¹ So named because Mads has kept track of her kisses, and they’ve been nothing to swoon over so far. There will be more down the line — some friendly, some meaningless, some low-key regretful, some tragic, some Why, Mads, why? and some to leave her sockless.

Once upon a time, there was a guy who made the webcomic Casey And Andy. Then that wrapped up and he tackled a second webcomic, Cheshire Crossing, in big occasional chunks. It was the story of what happened to Dorothy (from Kansas and Oz), Alice (from the English countryside and Wonderland), and Wendy (from London and Neverland), which is a thing that has been tackled by other famed comics writers, but this version had way less underage DP gangbangs.

Then one day he stopped updating. This was about the time he was writing a book that got made into a movie starring Matt Damon, so that turned out okay for him, but some people were wondering if he’d ever get back to his incomplete story.

Wonder no more:

COVER REVEAL! @andyweirauthor’s new graphic novel Cheshire Crossing (illustrated by me!) will be on sale July 9, and available for preorder now: https://bit.ly/2GOsrig

That from Sarah Andersen, who’s made quite a name for herself in comics of late¹, and although her usual style is a simple B&W scribbly line, she’s capable of much more detailed and less cartoony work. So since 2017, she and the guy (okay, okay, Andy Weir) have been redoing Cheshire Crossing in Andersen’s art (let’s be honest, Weir’s art is best described as functional; compare the original to the rework), and now it’s time to print.

The advantage of being Andy Weir and a BFD with a best seller that gets made (very quickly, I’d add) into a Hollywood blockbuster is that you have an agent, and editors, and publisher and you needn’t go the Kickstarter route when Penguin Random House has your back. Given the lead times in publishing, I’d guess PRH has had this contract since before Weir and Andersen started working together, and that there are likely talks in an advanced state about other forms of media to be made, perhaps awaiting only the July publication date (and the negotiations of myriad rights in the US and abroad)

Still. A big-five publisher doesn’t go stomping on properties that could evoke the ire of the likes of Disney, MGM, and the Great Ormond Hospital; even given the nature of public domain, they could make trouble if they wanted. I’m guessing all Is and Ts are both dotted and crossed, and a phalanx of lawyers have crossed and dotted a few other letters for good measure.

Oh, and one more thing — 120 pages for the book? Weir did four issues averaging 24 pages; there’s a good chunk of story we haven’t seen and that’s been waiting for a decade to be revealed. Just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

My name is Aly and I would like to know if you would have any interest to have your website here at fleen.com promoted as a resource on our blog

In accordance with the policy suggested by David Malki !, it will cost you fifty bucks to pitch me on your service.

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¹ Her entire career has been in the time since Cheshire Crossing stopped updating, in fact.

Heya. Let’s bring you up to speed on some things mentioned recently.

• TCAF! We mentioned the first tranche of Very Special Guests two weeks ago, and we mentioned the International Guests a bit more than one week ago, which means it’s time to talk about the latest additions to the guest roster, the Young Adult Guests¹.

  Joining others (maybe you?) at the Toronto Reference Library on Saturday and Sunday, 11 and 12 May, will be Flavia Biondi (best known for Generations, Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau (Bloom), Renee Nault (the new graphic adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale), Ryan North (you know who he is), Sarah Winifred Searle (the forthcoming graphic novel, The Greatest Thing, due out next year), Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, my review copy of which will hopefully be here soon), Colleen AF Venable² and Ellen T Crenshaw (Kiss Number 8, which is wonderful, review to appear here soon), and Tillie Walden (On A Sunbeam).

  Oh, yes, and how about a few superstars over the Kids Guests? You got yer Raina (her guide to making comics, Share Your Smile, will be out in April), Kazu Kibuishi and Jason Caffoe (I think this is their first joint appearance since Amulet Book 8: Supernova came out). Additions to the Exhibitor ranks since last we spoke include the 5 Worlds team and Shan Murphy; there’s probably others, and I will notice them on the next read-through, or the one after that.

• CAM! A few days back, we mentioned a bunch of stuff happening at the Cartoon Art Musuem over the next month or so; among those items was an exhibition dedicate to the art of A Fire Story by Brian Fies. Fies will be on book tour when the exhibition opens, so it makes sense that he won’t be ther for the usual launch-of-exhibit reception. Or rather, it would make sense, but why give up a good reception? Fies will be there a bit later in the month:

  The Cartoon Art Museum is proud to present an evening with cartoonist Brian Fies on Saturday, March 30, 2019 from 7:00-8:30pm as he discusses his new graphic novel A Fire Story: A Graphic Memoir, depicting the artist’s firsthand account of the 2017 Northern California wildfires. A book signing will follow Fies’s discussion. Advance tickets for the Saturday, March 30 event are available through Guestlist: Fire Story Tickets

  That’s from the email that CAM sent me; the event doesn’t appear to be on their webpage yet. US$10 for the public, free for CAM members.

• Zub! Okay, not an update, but you should know. Jim Zub, his wife Stacy King, and Andrew Wheeler (all of whom will absolutely shark you in a game of We Didn’t Playtest This At All, especially in the presence of presents³) announced that they were given the opportunity of a geek’s lifetime — to create a series of books for younger players of tabletop RPGs to introduce them to the ideas of roleplaying and constructing a seat-of-your-pants story together. Specifically, books for the most hallowed of tabletop RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons. Spill it, Zub:
  

  As experienced DMs/players, it’s easy to forget how intimidating tabletop RPGs can be for people who haven’t played before. These guides lay out the major concepts (class, race, equipment, creatures) in a way anyone can understand and encourage them to create their own stories. Readers can use the material in these books to brainstorm a character and imagine their role in an adventuring party. Get them excited about the possibilities, and then bring them to the gaming table to show them how those initial ideas can really flourish with a roll of the dice.

  The two guides in the D&D Young Adventurer’s Guides, Monsters & Creatures and Warriors & Weapons, release on 16 July, which I believe is the day before Preview Night at SDCC, and just long enough before Gen Con to get out into the public and thoroughly read before heading to Indy. Congrats to King, Wheeler, and Zub for the nerd experience of a lifetime.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ That would be guests of interest to YA and younger readers, not guest who are themselves young adults. I mean, some of them are pretty young for adult humans, but that’s not why they’re in the category.

² I just now realized that her two middle initials, instead of being pronounced aff as I have always done in my internal monologue, could instead be pronounced A-F, because she is in fact Colleen As Fuck.

³ On opposite coasts of North America, DanteLuke Landherr-Shepherd and Ferocious Jon Sung just shuddered and don’t know why.

By now you’ve seen the news that Facebook (no link) has decided that the way to get in on Patreon’s corner of the market is to not do things better, but to do them decidedly worse. Like charge you up to 30% after fees bad and give your stuff away for free at their discretion bad. Oh, yeah, and we own your stuff even if you leave the service bad. That’s bad.

Despite their pronouncement that they’re going to have a “Patreon-killer”, Facebook isn’t going to have anything of the sort; absolutely everybody that’s talked about this thing that isn’t employed by Facebook is screaming about how it’s terrible, and they’re right. All that’s going to happen is that people already on Patreon are going to have a moment of reflection that things could be much worse¹.

The real shot at a Patreon-killer will be whatever the Andys come up with for Drip 2.0 for the simple reason that their offering will be from a public benefit corporation instead of a regular ol’ VC-funded corporation (Patreon) or the most rapacious, grasping, no-value-providing bag of identity thieves in history (Facebook), and so will not have a motivation of bleeding creators for all their worth. Going to call Facebook’s plans dead in the water.

Speaking of Drip 2.0 and public benefit corporations, Drip as it is presently constructed is part of Kickstarter, which is a public benefit corporation. Let’s talk about some recent Kickstarts and get the taste of that Facebook thing out of our mouths.

• It scares me a little how long I’ve been following the work of Matt Boyd and Ian McConville — Mac Hall wrapped more than a dozen years ago, and that was after six years of updates; Three Panel Soul picked up immediately thereafter and has been plowing along ever since, through art style changes, moves, job shifts, a marriage, a kid, and one all-time bit of viral genius². There’ve even been two print collections, and now there will be a third:
  

  For our third volume, we thought it would be good to have three times the number of comics as the first two volumes, up to a total of 300. It really fits the theme. It’s going to be our biggest volume yet, covering the comics published online from late October 2011 to February 2018.

  Dog philosophy, folks. It’s going to be in there. You’ve got 28 days to get in on the campaign, including a rather sweet three-book bundle.

• Know who knows how to use Kickstarter? C Spike Trotman, what with the seven figures raised over 20-odd projects and zero failures. Of late, she’s been bringing some work to the store without waiting for Kickstarts, especially as PDFs, but sometimes you decide to pick new directions because there’s a demand. Enter: How Do You Smoke A Weed?, which will be seeing print shortly:
  

  Twenty-six states in the U.S., Washington, D.C., and the entire nation of Canada have decriminalized or legalized marijuana use, and more are joining the policy shift every year! Dispensaries are popping up everywhere, and experienced users are openly rejoicing—but where does that leave the marijuana newbie, discouraged by years of “Just Say No” disinformation, but curious about what they’ve missed?

  This being an Iron Circus joint, funding started yesterday and reached goal the same day; there’s one simple stretch goal for a better cover. Massive overfunding will just mean more copies sold and more profit to ICC and creators Lin Visel and Joseph Bergin III (collectively, Owlin, and FYI that link contains mostly smut). There’s a fast turnaround on this one, less than two weeks total funding time, but the book will be in the store forever. Some of the sweet extras likely won’t be, so if you’re interested, act now.

• But Gary, I hear you cry, I don’t want to read! If that’s true, you maybe ought to find a different website, because we’re all about the words here, Sparky. But if you’re looking for something less booklike to back on the Kickers, Matt Inman and Elan Lee have come up with their latest mayhem-adjacent tabletop game, Throw Throw Burrito.

  Look, it’s Lee & Inman, there’s gonna be cute and funny cards, weird props, and a ruleset that emphasizes fun over all else. And this time, it’s got fake burritos that you chuck at other people. At an upper tier, it’s got giant fake burritos you chuck at other people and safety goggles. And, it being Lee & Inman, they are using Kickstarter pretty much as market research, and it’s going to be delivered on time. I’d bet they already have production contracts and specs agreed upon, have placed a preliminary run for each thing getting made, and will wait for the funding campaign to finish in 29 days solely so they can with confidence Yes, 50,000 more units of Item A, 100,000 of Item B, send those in the second container load.

  Oh, and stretch goals are (as is the Lee/Inman tradition) participatory, and shipping to the US (minus Puerto Rico & overseas territories) is free; the rest of the world will run you US$8 to US$60, depending on where you live and the size of the package you order. Some of them are ridiculously huge.

Spam of the day:

Easy Trick to Reactivate Dead Batteries

Jumper cables? It’s jumper cables, isn’t it?

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¹ Tellingly, not because of anything Patreon’s done to provide that relief.

² Which itself is going on five years old, holy crap.

The real power in Lucy Knisley’s books is somewhat contradictory.

They always make me feel slightly uncomfortable. I won’t call what she does oversharing because she’s less saying Here’s what I did today and more simply living her life in front of us, a page at a time, in a way that it turns out we were there all along, an omniscient third person observer. Whether it’s her life’s triumphs or tragedies, she lives it on the page, I observe, and — sometimes, just a bit — it feels like I’m intruding.

It’s not the case; in fact, it’s pretty much the complete opposite. The emotional charge of her stories is such that to watch that life with her and not be able to offer congratulations or consolation at whatever time in the past is on rewind? It aches. She grabs you by the brain and uploads those feelings straight into your amygdala because instead of intruding, she’s insisting on you experiencing it all along with her. That’s the deal you accept when you crack open the cover — Be ready to commit, her stories tell us, because you won’t be able to casually follow along. The good, the bad, you’re in for all of it.

And in Kid Gloves (out today from :01 Books, thanks to Morgan and everybody there for the review copy) there is plenty of it you’re going to be in for all of. I’m going to try to go light on the spoilers, but they’re there. The biggest spoiler of all is right on the first page — a photo of the child that Knisley refers to as Pal, followed immediately by the scene-setting: Four weeks ago, I had a baby. I want you to keep that fact in mind, because there are going to be times in the next 250 or so pages that you doubt everything about the scene — baby and mom both healthy and well is what we expect from a birth story, but it wasn’t always clear that was going to happen.

Because everything happened to Knisley and her husband, John — a previously unremarkable malformation of the uterus, painful and emotionally devastating miscarriages, friends and family having their own children at times of mourning, cruel and thoughtless interactions with those that should have been supportive, and an OB/GYN that I want to punch in his smug, dismissive face.

They say you forget all the pain of having a kid, a friend once told me when her first was about two months old, otherwise every child would be an only child. She followed up with, Not me! I took notes! He’s never touching me again!¹ There’s more pain than just that of birth here, and Knisley took her own notes — recreating every challenge, laying bare maybe the most fundamental truth about having kids: that it’s an act of profound optimism, looking at the state of the world, at the state of yourselves, to decide I’m going to have a child. Each setback, Lucy and John had to look at the risks and decide, Yes. We’re still doing this. These notes aren’t to talk themselves out of future attempts by reminding themselves of the pain — it’s to communicate to us the totality of the experience.

And that word — communicate — is the central thesis of Kid Gloves. The failures of communication that Knisley chronicles are the source of most of the difficulties in the story. Failure to communicate accurate information about reproductive health and mechanisms². Failure to communicate the fact that one in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage. Failure to communicate women’s stories. Failure to communicate about loss. Failure to communicate with your patient to understand their needs, or even the current state of their health³.

As a culture and society, failure to communicate honestly about all aspects of pregnancy and childbirth instead of wrapping it up in a neat bow and selling the experience on the cover of a glossy magazine in the supermarket checkout aisle.

The same de-romanticization that Knisley brought to travel, food, and marriage is in full force in Kid Gloves. Her stock in trade isn’t stories from her life, it isn’t the fancier and more official-sounding autobiography or memoir, it’s honesty. Honestly, parts of getting pregnant (not to mention avoiding getting pregnant, and everything else that goes along with sex, pleasure, and agency) suck. Parts are awesome. Childbirth? Same deal. Having a newborn? Absolutely the same.

Pal’s going on three years old now, and I’m sure future books will bring the same unvarnished look at raising up a child to be a decent person. Read this book — read all of Knisley’s books — because you want, more than anything, to feel that honest, lived-in truth. It won’t always be easy, but it will always be rewarding.

Spam of the day:

The Drone Is Available At a Discount Price

I ain’t clicking that assuredly malware-infested link, but I am desperately hoping that this is actually talking about bee-type drones. I would absolutely enjoy being on a spam mailing list intended for apiarists.

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¹ They have three kids now.

² Knisley notes that as a Planned Parenthood-trained peer educator in high school, she learned a great deal about dental dams, but not so much about how pregnancy works.

³ I am an EMT that regards pregnancy/childbirth emergencies as nightmare scenarios because there is so little that I can do and so much that can go so very wrong. In more than a dozen years of practice, I haven’t had any patient more than about six weeks pregnant and I am thoroughly relieved by that fact. If I never have a childbirth call, I will be perfectly happy. What I am saying is, I am not a person who you necessarily want to deal with your well-being vis-à-vis pregnancy.

And even I recognize the signs of pre-eclampsia, you stupid, smug dismissive OB/GYN. If we ever meet I will fucking drag your ass into the morgue where they take the women who die in childbirth from seizures and say this happened because you were too godsdamn arrogant to do your job.