It’s a bad idea, responding to comments on stuff that I wrote, especially responding to a review. But I’m doing it this one time.

Yesterday, a commenter¹ left his response to my review of The Prince And The Dressmaker. You can go back and read both review and comment, if you like.

As I said, I have no doubt that the naming of TPATD‘s King Leo, echoing the real-life King Leopold II, was an unintended failure of editing and that neither Jen Wang nor :01 Books would have ever intended this reading; as I said, they have a choice to make for future printings.

Truth be told, I expected pushback on this review, arguments that I was reading things too narrowly or inventing a problem where none existed. I’d have been fine with those. I’m writing because of two arguments that were made in the comment; one refers to the creator’s thoughts, the other deals with history. The first gets a response to clarify, the second gets a rebuttal.

Creator first:

Jen [Wang] could have set [the book] in Ruritania and avoided all the history stuff, but that’s a bit of a cop-out. Was Belgium chosen for its history? I don’t think so, but what did Jen think?

I’m not going to respond to the story-related comments, as it’s opinion territory and I’m pretty sure I made mine clear. With respect to the notion of what Ms Wang thinks, that’s not my job this time around. Had I decided to write a reported news piece on the book, I would have absolutely sought out her response. But I don’t think it’s the place of a review to do reporting of that nature. I welcome the rest of the comics/YA press to ask those questions if they feel that my review is worth following up on.

Now, history:

Alas, that’s history for you. If you go back 50 years into history, everyone is pretty evil. Go back another 50 years and you are looking at the people that the people 50 years ago thought were evil. Churchill was advocating using poison gas against African tribes (more survived than with rifle attacks). Belgium in the first world war, and Belgium was ‘Gallant Little Belgium’ standing up against ‘The Hun’. Conrad gives an idea what was considered ‘fair game’ in Africa.

I’m not saying that Leopold was a good guy, but he was a greatly respected member of the European aristocracy at the time, and his sons may have looked on his African project as little more than a sensible investment, if they looked on it at all.

I’m calling bullshit on every bit of this.

The fact that Belgium was seen as heroic in standing up to an army with equal (or superior) armaments is neither here nor there (and one guess as to why the Congolese who tried to fight their murder and enslavement weren’t seen as gallant). Leopold II’s reputation as a monster was well established in his own lifetime; the very first time the specific phrase crimes against humanity was used, it was to describe his treatment of the Belgian Free State in 1890. Five years into his vile project, still in the ramping-up phase, and we were inventing new concepts in international law to describe what he was doing.

The argument that was just seen as fair game for Africa back then is just this side of saying we don’t get to judge their actions. Guess what? I’m judging their actions. Not judging this particular crime — carried out at the orders of one man with a private army, in just 23 years — is no different from saying Germans just really didn’t like Jews in the ’30s and ’40s. Yes, I’m saying that particular historical handwave is no different than making excuses for the Holocaust.

When the Belgian government, responding to international outcry, forced Leopold II to give up the colony, he required a personal payment of 60 million gold francs. Math time: one franc was 290.322mg of gold, or 0.009334 troy ounces; in 1908 one ounce was US$20.67, so a franc was worth about 19.3 cents. That means US$11.6 million in 1908, or roughly US$283 million (in 2017 dollars) was his personal cut (plus another US$215 million in 2017 dollars for his pet building projects back home).

I don’t give a fuck if his son and daughters regarded his genocide in sterile, economic terms; he worked 10 million people to death and had uncountable others mutilated for his enrichment. Not for the wealth of the state — he’d wanted Belgium to get into the colonial game, the parliament refused, so he did it all himself — not for the good of his nation (as if either of those would have excused this evil), but for his private purse.

Want to argue (and I very nearly do) that nobody would have made the damaging association between Leo and Leopold II? Fine; I’ll mourn the state of history teaching, but fine. Want to say that the suspension of disbelief isn’t stretched too far and that the story stays on the good side of The Disney Line? Awesome; have at it.

But try to say that Leopold wasn’t egregiously bad and anyway it doesn’t matter if he was? I’ll thank you to take that weak tea elsewhere.

tl;dr: Leopold II was a monster by any standard, modern or historical. And the story, by allowing him to intrude, is broken as a result.

_______________
¹ I’ve removed his name from the comment; I am dealing with the substance of what he wrote, not with him, and I don’t want to unleash a mob. If the commenter wants to add another comment, claiming the words, I’ll let it through.

It was always there, all along; it just looked like a series of shorter stories but it really has been one long arc, stretching (as of today) across 6437 strips in 6437 days. And another 800-1000 or so to come.

I speak, naturally, of webcomics own unstoppable machine (and my evil twin), Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary. Following the ups and downs of his quasi-merry band of (mostly well-intentioned) space sociopaths mercenaries¹ through story arc after story arc (currently, Book 18), one could have been forgiven to interpreting it like any of the sprawling SF strips of the past like Flash Gordon — the story is eternal, we’ll loop back around to those characters later, it’s an infinitely prolonged serial.

Except it’s not:

These daily installments are significant, because the current outline for the Schlock Mercenary mega-arc has the story of Tagon’s Toughs wrapping up triumphantly just two and one-half books from today. We’re about halfway through Book 18, and “The End” lands at the end of Book 20. We’re writing our way toward that point right now.

Two and a half books, and coincidentally in 2020, or 20 years from the start (thus the fudge factor in the future strip count above). And an ambitious plan to go with it:

This brings me back around to our 2018 goals. If we release three print editions this year, then the current online volume, Book 18, will end in the same calendar year as the publication of books 13, 14, and 15. Should the schedule work out well, we shall endeavor to do it again in 2019, with Book 19 ending online in the same calendar year as the print publication of books 16, 17, and 18.

You see where this is leading, right? Our ultimate goal is for the print editions of books 19 and 20, the final volumes in the twenty year (seriously, it feels weird saying that) telling of the story of Tagon’s Toughs, to be available at about the same time Book 20 wraps up on the web. Our 2018 goals are tied very closely to our goals for 2019 and 2020, and the next three years can be considered on some level as a single project which fulfills the past eighteen years of work we’ve done.

As I said, ambitious, but I have faith in Tayler’s ability to execute. More precisely, I have faith in Taylers, plural, ability to execute, as Howard’s wife Sandra² is the Dwayne The Rock Johnson of publishing and logistics. I’m pretty sure that efforts at monetizing Schlock Mercenary beyond the odd t-shirt or print-on-demand digest³ would have fallen down without her hand on the organizational tiller … and I’m pretty sure that Howard would agree.

So look for eight books — a full 40% of the 20 year run of Schlock Mercenary — to drop from The Tayler Corporation in the next two and a half, three years. Maybe start budgeting now? And if you’re of the mind that what you really want is a ~7500 page omnibus behemoth edition, start dropping hints into the nearest Tayler ear now. That sort of thing takes time, and the next couple a’ years are gonna be busy.

Spam of the day:

Girls battle for your heart: choose Yuliya or Tatyana

Hey, sketchy Russian/Ukrainian mail-order bride site? You imply I should choose between two women (gross), but you only show one (bad at math). That last part is especially insulting, considering how many world-class mathematicians Russia has produced (like, a lot).

_______________
¹ Pəˈteɪtoʊ, pəˈtɐtoʊ.

² Does this make her my evil twin-in-law, my evil sister-in-law, or my wife’s evil twin? I’m not sure how the transitive property applies here.

³ Not to mention the ability to support a family with four kids (one college tuition down and others looming), a couple vehicles, and a mortgage. There are zero small humans that depend on me for their next meal and I would have been terrified to take the leap that Tayler & Tayler did (as recounted in an SDCC session a dozen years back … damn, I used to do a lot of typing).

Webcomics tomorrow; today belongs still to someone bigger.

The news yesterday could not, in truth, have been unexpected — the death of an 88 year old can never be said to be unexpected — but that took none of its sting. Ursula K Le Guin exited this world yesterday (very much, I expect, on her own terms, as that was how she had behaved for all her preceding days), and we are the poorer for it.

I knew that loss would come some day and I knew it would cause me sorrow because there are those people whom we all agree bear the spark of greatness and wisdom. I knew that some others surely must have felt as I did.

I underestimated by a considerable degree to which Ursula K Le Guin influenced very nearly every single person I know, those who are publicly creative and those who are less so. She existed as part of the background of our lives, so universally present we didn’t remark on it until we marked its absence. It is not possible to compare any one person’s death to another, but in the keenness of loss, she seemed to take her place next to Prince and Bowie. But there was more this time.

As before, person after person spoke of the joy they took in creative mastery, about the comfort they took from a body of work. But beyond they they spoke of how she fundamentally inspired their own work, shaped their ways of thinking, opened their eyes to different ways of looking at the world. It shouldn’t surprise me, this depth of love and loss. It doesn’t; who could fail to love Ursula K Le Guin, after all? And at the same time it does; who could possibly have drawn meaning from her as profoundly as me? Damn near everybody that had ever heard of her, as it turns out.

And there is the comfort I take, that everybody that took meaning and inspiration from Ursula K Le Guin did so in many ways that were similar, and each of us in a direction or two that was singular. The conversation we are now having about what she meant to us is revealing things I might never have found on my own. Without any further words, she directs this conversation and guides us to be better than we were.

And for somebody that stood her ground with cussed determination and brooked no fools gladly, the familiar rest in peace seems insufficient. So revel in stubbornness, Ursula K Le Guin, and forgive us if we don’t get it all as right as we should as quickly as we should. We’ll get there eventually, and we’ll find you were shouting encouragement to us all along.

Spam of the day:

Click for dating online

What percentage of dating profiles do you figure include some variation on Must love Ursula K Le Guin? I’m betting more than there were at the start of the week.

This review has been the hardest to write that I’ve ever done, and probably won’t be displaced any time soon; I’ve long had a policy of writing about work that I could wholeheartedly recommend, rather than trying to discourage people from reading what I thought fell short of the mark. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a book that could come back to positive territory with the change of literally one word.

So I’m going to be very careful to explain my thoughts on this book, and I’m possibly going to fail. It’s entirely plausible that my major criticism would reflect the reading experience of approximately nobody else in the world. I mean no disrespect to Jen Wang (whose work I’ve enjoyed for years and whose Koko Be Good has been a favorite for pretty much the entirety of this decade) or any of the folks at :01 Books (who sent me the review copy I’ve been reading and re-reading for a couple of months now).

Comments are open down thataway, and spoilers are everywhere from this point on.

Okay, let’s get the basics out of the way — The Prince And The Dressmaker is the story of Frances (the dressmaker) and Sebastian (the prince) in fin de siècle Paris; he likes wearing beautiful dresses, she wants to be a fashion designer, they end up working together underneath the noses of Parisian Society and his stuffy parents, who just want to arrange a nice, traditional, royal betrothal.

On the surface, it’s a sweet story with a message about accepting different identities and finding one’s path in life, in full Disney mode (more on that momentarily). A little bit deeper, it’s got flaws — some slight, some more severe. We’ll start at the benign end of the scale.

We know what the Disney version of things looks like, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sebastian is found out as a cross-dresser, flees court for a monastery in shame, and returns to fabulous acclaim in a fashion show that features not just the begowned prince, but his father the conquering military hero king and a platoon’s worth of soldiers, all in fabulous women’s wear.

There’s the Disney mode of fairy tale logic, and then there’s stretching things to the breaking point; the sudden shift of half of Paris society towards accepting the disgraced prince, the willingness of his giant-of-a-man father to appear on a catwalk in an off-the-shoulder haute couture creation thirty minutes after the emotional confession I’m a prince who likes dresses breaks the suspension of disbelief.

There’s a portion of TPATD’s intended audience that needs this message that they can be accepted, but by making it so total, so sudden, so implausible, I fear it’ll be received as but that only happens in fairy tales and make believe. The Disney version has its place, but the entire message was much better conveyed in Molly Ostertag’s The Witch Boy (review here).

For a young reader in Sebastian’s position, nothing that TPATD promises is likely to happen; TWB promises a less happily ever after ending, but one that is conveyed as achievable by mere mortals. It’s the difference between Sebastian got to live happily ever after because he’s a prince so they have to accept him and Aster and his family are working towards acceptance in a way that I could do, too.

Maybe it’s necessary to see the external success (Sebastian is happy and accepted) before being able to imagine the personal (I could be happy and accepted), but it still reads false to me. Or maybe I’m just surprised that Scholastic describes TWB as for ages 8-12 and :01 describes TPATD as for ages 12-18; the former’s message reads to me as more sophisticated than the latter.

The real flaws, however, the stop-me-cold-I-did-not-just-read-that flaws, are probably more down to editing that anything else, and they’re encapsulated in one word: Belgium.

Sebastian is the Prince of Belgium, visiting Paris for the season with his parents. In a couple of places, he and his father each try to pull rank with Parisians of the Third Republic (As your Prince, I forbid you to leave! Return to your servant quarters, now! and I’m the King. This show will go on exactly as they please.), which … yeah, not buying it. Okay, I’ll give that some slack and take it as evidence of royalty used to getting their way forgetting they aren’t in their sovereign lands at the moment.

But I can’t give slack to Sebastian’s father, King Leo.

King Leo, of Belgium, somewhere at the end of the 19th Century. King Leo, who bears a more than slight visual resemblance to Leopold II, who was King of the Belgians at the same time in history. Leopold II, who was perhaps the greatest enslaver and mass murderer of modern history.

This is why you make up little Grand Duchies for your fairy tales.

Leopold II was the brutal son of a bitch who held the entirety of the Congo and all of its people as his personal property. Between the ivory and the rubber he set production quotas that resulted in roughly half the inhabitants of Congo — ten million people — dying at the hands of his mercenary security forces, with uncounted more mutilated to set an example for others. When the Belgian parliament confronted the horrors — and this was the time when the mission of enlightening and Christianizing the brown peoples of the world was seen as right and proper and worth the occasional unfortunate brutality — and forced him to turn the colony over to the nation for management, he had the Congolese archives burned to hide his crimes.

It’s not intentional, but it is inescapable — for anybody that knows the history of Europe and/or colonialism, the name Leo will not evoke a somewhat pushy but ultimately sympathetic figure who only wants the best for his people and his son. It’s not possible for me to separate the unfortunate parallels of Leopold II and Leo; the benign landbound King Triton of the Gilded Age will always appear to me as the evil incarnate butcher that literally inspired the concept of crimes against humanity.

Which leaves me in a peculiar position. There’s so much that’s well done in TPATD; Wang’s character designs are terrific, her fashion designs are both era-appropriate and suitably fairy tale-fantastic¹, the look and feel of Paris is both gritty and glittering. A lot of people love it, and it’s easy to see why. For the right reader, with the right expectations, and the right people to answer the questions about a very bad time in history (questions that may never come), it could become a cherished favorite.

But for the love of God, in future printings change Belgium to literally anything else.

The Prince And The Dressmaker will be released on 13 February from :01 Books.

No spam today.

_______________
¹ With one exception at the very beginning, but it’s for story reasons.

Let’s just dive in, shall we?

MARCH:A Graphic History of the Civil Rights Movement By Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
Cartoon Art Museum exhibition: February 1 – June 19, 2018
Reception with Artist Nate Powell Friday, February 9, 2018

— Andrew Farago, Cartoon Art Museum curator

There are few works of graphic fiction more historically important right now than the March trilogy, and it’s entirely right and proper that the Cartoon Art Museum will be kicking off Black History Month with a tribute to the book. Lewis, Aydin, and Powell are treasures.

By this time next month I will either be happily chugging away, drawing An Embarrassment of Witches pages or I will be trudging through a grim, apocalyptic landscape fighting other plague-survivors over post-dated cans of spam. Hopefully the former.

— Sophie Goldstein

Sophie Goldstein is the creator of multiple amazing comic stories (not least being her collaboration with Jenn Jordan on Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell), so the news that she’s about to break ground on a 200 page graphic novel is welcome, to say the least. Good luck with the book, Sophie, and good luck fighting off the sickness that everybody seems to have right about now.

Starburns Industries Press, the publishing arm of Starburns Industries (the minds behind Rick & Morty, Community, Anomolisa and so much more) are calling for scary stories written by children aged 12 and under!
As a partnering editor for this project, I’m happy to offer mentoring and advice to any young imaginations looking to submit to this paid writing opportunity! [emphasis original]

— Eben Burgoon, onetime man of mystery, alltimes man of comics

If the opportunity of working with a Starburns-associated title wasn’t enough, I think the notion that it’s a paid gig should put things over the top. More information here about submitting stories to the anthology. Again, this is for writers 12 and under, so pass it along to any budding writers you know (who, if they are reading this post themselves, are about to commit the next sentence to memory for future use).

Diamond can suck my taint.

— C Spike Trotman on the least-loved monopoly in comics

Mostly, I just think that anybody that uses the construction verb my taint (for example, noted First Amendment attorney Ken White is known for his motto snort my taint) should be quoted as often and widely as possible. The fact that it’s Spike talking about how Diamond routinely ignores small press and independent comics that could have seen significant sales success and how much she wants them to notice her¹ is hilarious (as is the descriptor of the quote — a dulcet lilt).

The additional fact that it’s in a Vulture article about multiple companies and individuals breaking the comics industry mold of catering to middle aged cishet white dude cape fans is a delight. Give ‘er a read, and be sure to spare a little sympathy for the poor, neglected CWDCF at your local comics shop who isn’t 100% the center of attention any longer.

Like maybe a taint-suck’s worth.

Spam of they day:

Invokana Users Who Lost Toes, Feet or Legs May Have Legal Recourse

The text of this one reads like I should be checking my lower half and counting my toes, feet, and legs to make sure I haven’t suddenly come up short and didn’t realize.

_______________
¹ For those not familiar, Spike is the least likely person in history to worry about whether or not sempai will notice her.

What I think might be the longest read that The Nib has ever put up as a single update ran today; Andrew Greenstone has gone out and done participatory-type things and then done docu-comics on them, and today he brings the story of the days-long post-apocalyptic LARP known as Wasteland Weekend. It’s a cracking good read, and that’s before I consider that I know somebody that’s fought in Thunderdome. Take 20 minutes and enjoy the crap out of it.

• Sometimes, you gotta start ’em young in webcomics; it’s been a week or so and I have shamefully not yet congratulated Randy Milholland and his wife Stephanie¹ on the birth of their daughter. As befits a reasonably private guy (who has attracted some of the worst, most entitled, boundary-disrespecting “fans” ever), Milholland has shared some anecdotes, but no details on the lil’ replicant, so if you’re wondering about name or birth weight, too bad.

  By all accounts mom & child are doing well (indeed, she appears to be mastering skills at a terrifying rate), and I’m sure all of us wish them all the best. Some more than others — KB Spangler did a kickin’ guest strip for Daddy Randy today, whereas I’m just saying nice things about him².

• One of my favorite stories of recent vintage has been Ursula Ver … I mean, T Kingfisher’s Summer In Orcus (okay, okay, they’re the same person, and the TK name normally means a more adult bent to the stories than UV, which are decidedly kid-friendlier; I don’t see a whole lot of age range difference between, say, Orcus and Vernon’s Digger). It hit all the notes I want in a fairy tale (unsurprising, as Vernon/Kingfisher’s prose typically dig their way into my brain and wrap around the primitive structures, resulting in pure emotion³), and I’ve been recommending it to everybody ever since.

  The Kickstarter campaign to print what had been an online-only serial went up in July; the accompanying illustrations Lauren Henderson were gathered, the books (in both hardcover and soft) designed and printed, and fulfillment is happening now. I got my books (hardcover for me, soft for whichever niece or nephew I deem needs it most in the next round of birthdays) today, and I can’t say enough good about them.

  With those who Kickstarted getting their stuff in the mail, look for publisher Sofawolf to add them to their store in the near future. Okay, sure, it’s been available in e-book form for ages now, but you know what? Some books just demand to be held, pages flipped, corners bent, etc. Don’t sit on this one; it’s some of the best work of one of our best wordbenders.

Spam of the day:

Give The Gift Of Music! Rich, Room Filling Sound

I have a friend, an audiophile of note, who have more invested in his pre-amps than my wife and I do in both our cars combined. His speakers have a pricetag that resembles the student loans you take out to go to a top-tier med school. And you know what? In a blind test, I bet they sound better than these rich, room filling sound triangle speakers, but not hundred of thousands of dollars better.

_______________
¹ She and Randy haven’t been public about her surname online, so I won’t be using it here.

² For now; within webcomics circles, my new baby gifts are well-regarded. Speaking of which, Randy, I need your new address.

³ Normally joy, but sometimes rage, despair, and murderlust; whatever the story calls for at the time, really

• The TCAF application jury has ruled, and creators are being notified that they’ll be spending 12-13 May in Toronto; the exhibitor page hasn’t updated yet¹, so I went trawling on the sosh meeds for people saying they were accepted. Caveat: I’m not including waitlisted creators, I obviously didn’t get everybody, and naturally, there will be changes between now and blessèd springtime. But for now, expect to see some (if not all) of (in the order that I found them in my search):

  Rosemary Vallero-O’Connell, Sharean Morishita, Myisha Haynes, Mildred Louis, Taneka Stotts, Sophie Pass-Lang, Tony Breed, Chan Chau, Zainab Akhtar, Awuradwoa Afful?, Irene Koh, Dylan Edwards, Tess Reid, Shannon Wright, Meg Brennan, Jackie Reynolds, Angelica Maria, Allie Kleber, Christopher Sebela, Hope Nicholson, Anoosha Syed, Shing Yin Khor, Jayd Aït-Kaci, Kori Michele Handwerker, Melanie Gillman, Christian Ward, Megan Byrd, Becca Tobin, Sarah Horrocks, and Angel Cruz.

  (A quick perusal of those links reveals the changing face of comics, but maybe it’s a sampling/self-selection error; it may just be that women and POCs are better at saying look at me, I did a thing than white dudes and … yeah, no. Just made myself laugh out loud. It’s going to be a far less male, less white set of exhibitors than you’d find in nearly any comics show. Hats off to the showrunners for looking to the future rather than the past.)

  In addition to the individuals listed above, publishers including Fine OK Press, Retrofit Comics, and the Ladies Night Anthology will be present, and I imagine we’ll also see such TCAF stalwarts as TopatoCo, Koyama Press, D&Q, and :01 Books, all of whom will bring their own creative conspirators.

  And if you didn’t get in this year, remember that even the most well-known creators are basically on an every-other-year basis, and will remain so unless TCAF can find a venue that is 1) central; 2) free; 3) possessing about twice the floor space of the Toronto Reference Library and surrounding venues. So, basically, forever. Congratulations to everybody that will be heading to TCAF, and enjoy the crap out of the weekend.

• Even if you didn’t get into TCAF, there are things you’ll be able to enjoy in mid-May. For one, Shaenon Garrity is now running down horror movies, making an appropriate recommendation for every day of 2018.

  And assuming whatever movies for 12-13 May aren’t enough to distract you, you’ll be able to tell yourself It’s only four and a half months until Amulet volume 8. Kazu Kibuishi announced cover, title (Supernova), and sale date (25 September) yesterday in a talk with Heidi Mac. But there’s no better teaser than from series colorist Jason Caffoe:

  When I first started working full-time on Amulet I asked Kazu about the trajectory for the series and he said “at some point there will be giant robots in space.”
  I 100% thought he was joking.
  He was not. [emphasis mine for giant robots in space]

  Form an orderly queue, and try not to get trampled by kids who will be in a frothy state of excitement for the release.

Spam of the day:

Wait!… We have a Free Sample of Sams Club for you!

You have a little chunk of Sam’s Club on a toothpick for me to enjoy while shopping?

_______________
¹ Nor would I expect it to, less than a day after notifications went out; some people are going to have to decline, the waitlist is going to shuffle … give it a week or so, it’ll be a definitive list.

How’s everybody doing? First full week back to everything? First working Monday of the new year? Mine’s been pretty Mondayish, but it’s starting to look up. Let’s see what we can look forward to in the nearish (and in one case, fairly immediate) future.

:01 Books has shared its Fall 2018 release list, and that includes first looks at some covers.

• For example, Castle In The Stars: The Moon King is the second half of a French BD that is very early-period Miyazakiesque (think Laputa) adventure tale; I’ll give it a review along with the first volume (which is excellent) when it releases (the books are, individually, a little too short to review alone).
• Drew Weing’s Margo Maloo series continues with The Monster Mall, which I suspect will be a more than satisfying successor to the first volume in the adventures of the Monster Mediator.
• And as long as we’re talking webcomickers, :01 announced the newest in the Science Comics series, this one written by science communicator/cute critters comics creator extraordinaire Rosemary Mosco. She’s partnered up with Jon Chad on art for Solar System: Our Place In Space. I’m a little surprised that it wasn’t to do with the sort of stuff you’d find on a terrestrial nature walk (birds, snakes, bugs), since Mosco is known for that, but it will be adorable (because all of Mosco’s stuff is adorable). Just check out her description:
  

  I’m so excited! Here’s the cover reveal for my graphic novel with @jon_chad. It’s about space, how it’s ok to be both brave and scared, and A NERDY SNAKE IN AN IMPROBABLE SPACE SUIT.

  Oh, and it’s out September 18th. Sorry, I should have mentioned that but I got distracted by the snake (his name is Mr. Slithers).

  Did I say she was known for things like snakes? Never doubt Mosco. She’ll probably work in bird parts somehow.

• The big reveal, though, is the cover of the first combined volume of Check, Please! from :01; subtitled Hockey, it’ll cover the first two years of Ngozi Ukazu’s delightful (and zeitgeist-tapping) gay bro college hockey players love story (with pie). This is gonna sell a zillion copies.
• And not all of the books have gotten the tweet treatment yet, but the announcement contains news of the third Nameless City book (The Divided Earth) by Faith Erin Hicks, the print collection of Tillie Walden’s On A Sunbeam, the final volume of Secret Coders by Gene Yang & Mike Holmes, a new Cucumber Quest collection by Gigi DG, another Science Comics volume on The Brain, a Zita The Spacegirl box set, the long-awaited next volume in the Walker Bean series, and more. It’s gonna be a busy fall.

And, for those of you that don’t want to wait, Ethan Kocak continues his fascination with elongated critters by launching a new comic. Punchy Punches Everyone is about a hard-boiled mantis shrimp private eye that … well, the title sort of says it all, and mantis shrimp punches are not something you want to screw around with. I’ll be honest here; I’m not sure how long Kocak can keep up the joke, but I’ll be there as long as he manages to do so.

Spam of the day:

[FREE GUIDE] Learn How Bitcoin is Creating Millionaires?

I’m guessing that, much like the California Gold Rush didn’t make many miners rich but did start the fortunes of mercantile empires (and a guy named Levi Strauss) from all the stuff they sold to those chasing fortunes in the gold fields, any Bitcoin-adjacent millionaires are mostly among those that are cobbling together special “mining rigs” out of extra CPUs and video cards they have hanging around and selling them at a vicious markup to those that think they’ll get rich on cryptocurrency.

Get ’em while they’re hot.

• So Gordon McAlpin went and made a Multiplex short (the funding of which was mentioned in the beforetimes), and before we get to that, can I commend him on one thing? The Kickstarter in question launched on 9 April; between that day and when the campaign finished on 8 May, McAlpin posted more than two dozen updates on the project. Since completion of the campaign, he’s dropped more than sixty progress reports. That degree of communication with backers is worth noting and emulating. Okay, back to where we were.

  Judging from the topic lines of the updates (most of which are backer-only), the short is done, seeing as how certain backers go the early-access link a couple days before Christmas. Hooray, project successful, all done, right? Nah, that’d be boring. The campaign was just to get the first short done; now it’s time to release the short wide, get shopped around the festival cicruit, and maybe make more. A very modest US$2000 (you read that right, two stinkin’ grand) will:

  [H]elp fund the film festival run, digital release, and promotion of the Multiplex 10 short film, in hopes of reaching the widest possible audience. Although the Multiplex 10 short film stands on its own, it was conceived as a pilot for a series, and reaching a wide audience will give us the best possible chance of producing more Multiplex 10 videos.

  [O]ffer a physical copy of the short for existing (and new) backers who want them, and to sell at conventions, screenings, and other venues. And …

  [I]f we can raise significantly more than the base goal, we can fund additional 2–3 minute Multiplex 10 webisodes, to be released free online. These webisodes will feature Kurt and Jason (and possibly some other familiar faces) talking about a then-current movie or facet of movie culture

  As of this writing, there’s 11 hours left and the campaign has passed the second stretch goal (US$4K), meaning that the USB cards the short will be sold on are 4GB instead of 2GB, and the first webisode will be made. At US$5K, the USB doubles to 8GB, at US$7K a second webisode gets added; at US$8K the USB doubles again to 16GB, and at US$10K a third webisode is produced. If you want to see any of these things happen, now’s the time.

• It’s less than a month since we noted the up-wrapping and comprehensive collection-printing of Plume;; it’s got another week to go on its crowdfunding and is approaching double its US$25K goal. Today, K Lynn Smith announced that since all the financial stretch goals have been met, there will be one more based on backer count.

  1000 backers means that the book plate used for signing the omnibus edition (alas, the earlier single volumes don’t qualify) will have a fancy spot gloss added to it; this is not something I’ve seen anybody do before, and it’s a neat idea. Spot gloss and other fancy treatments get added to the covers of books, but this is a fancification that’s like a secret between creator and fan.

  Okay, that’s probably stretching the point a bit, but it’s a neat idea, and it may drive backers to up their pledges if they weren’t getting the omnibus, so it’s a smart way for Smith to push upsells. As of this writing, there are 903 backers and a bit more than six and a half days. Let’s see if that count can go up by 11% in a week.

Spam of the day:

IT Degrees with SE

Okay, gotta ask — what in the world is SE? Because I’m being offered IT degrees with it, nursing degrees with it, local hot wives not getting enough sex from their husbands with it, knockoff Viagra with it, and credit scores with it. Whatever SE it, it’s very flexible.

Time to get Caught Up, just in time for whichever holiday you celebrate! Some of this is new, some of this was getting ready to be mentioned when the whole Patreon category four shitstorm blew in. In any event, I hope you enjoy.

• Longtime reader Mark V sent along an email pointing out something I’d have missed otherwise: an interesting post by Andrew Plotkin about … well, a lot of things. Firstly, Plotkin is the programmer that helped Jason Shiga come up with an interactive version of Meanwhile¹.

  Meanwhile, in case you’re forgotten, starred the childhood version of Jimmy from Demon, and was a pick-a-path adventure so complex that it required the invention of a new computer language to keep all the branching paths straight. If you’ve never seen it, you’d have eight or ten story paths you could follow on any page, leading to a colored thumb-tab on the side of the page, leading to the next page without requiring printed instructions like GO TO PAGE 37. It was a work of art. It also lent itself to computer-based implementations like whoa.

  Now that we know who, let’s talk about the what; Plotkin talks about starting a new job, about his many creative projects, and about all the insanely cool things he has/is/will be/wants to resume worked/working on. He’s exactly who we want to be out there, making neat stuff. And he spends a good deal of the post talking about the tax bill coming up for a vote in the Senate tonight, and how it pretty much guarantees there will be no more independent creatives like him in the new tax regime.

  If you love comics, love games, love art, do remember this (those of you in the US) and make it just one more reason that you make sure you register to vote and then fucking vote out the vultures that admit they’re only in power to benefit their donors.

• But because we, as a species, retain the ability to look past imminent doom towards a somewhat distant future and make plans, please know that MoCCA Fest 2018 applications are now up over at the Society of Illustrators site. The deadline is 31 December, so a little less than two weeks. MoCCA Fest will take place 7 & 8 April, returning to the Metropolitan West events space, hard by the USS Intrepid on the west side of Mahnattan.

  It’s a bit off the beaten track, but there’s good food and snacks at Met West, it’s only $5 per day to get in, and the panel venue remains the swanky Ink 48 hotel around the corner. I’ve been to every MoCCA Fest that there’s been, and I’ve covered every one for the years Fleen has been in existence, so I’ll be sure to see you there.

• Another Kickstarter fulfilled — this time, Anatomy Of Animals by Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett — another chance for those of you that didn’t get in on the campaign to get caught up. And unusually for a Kickstarter that’s just finishing up shipping, AOA is already in Kellett’s store, and may I point out for less than I paid for it during the crowdfunding campaign?

  Yup, it appears that I have subsidized latecomers, as it cost me US$30 + S/H for my copy, and LArDK is now selling them for US$29.99. A sucker is me, right? Well, okay, I did get a spiffy stretch goal in the form of a Gandalf Airlines fridge magnet, so I guess I’ll let Kellett off the hook this time. But there’s something I want you to do for me:

  LArDK included a flyer in the box, with a coupon code for the Drive book on one side² and an advert for the Sheldon Store on the other side; you can see it in the photo up top. But what’s that? Computer, zoom and enhance!

  

  Announcing now: show me proof that you tried to order Crisco, lettuce, or a 40-lb tub of Ovaltine from Kellett’s store, and I will give you a dollar; on the Crisco, that’s a 21 cent profit, my friend.

Spam of the day:

I saw you tweeting about reading and I thought I’d check out your website. I really like it. Looks like Gary has come a long way!

Everything is, in fact, coming up Gary.

_______________
¹ Launching on Steam in a month’s time.

² Not sharing that code; it’s not up to me to give y’all a 30% discount.