Hey there. Want to find something cool to read in the not necessarily immediate future, but pretty soon nonetheless? Something in the sci-fi comics domain, mayhap? Then read on ’cause that’s what we’re talking about today.

• Word came back in November that one of Jim Zub’s creator-owned tales would be making the leap from comiXology¹ to print, and now we have a release date. Stone Star Vol 1: Fight Or Flight (discussed previously) comes out from Dark Horse a week from tomorrow at your preferred comic shop, with words by Zub, pictures by Max Dunbar, covers by Espen Grundetjern is US$19.99, and absolutely worth a read.
• You’ll have to wait a while to read it on paper, but Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett launched the Kickstart for the Act III² print collection of Drive, and you absolutely want in on this one. Yes, the price point for a physical book (US$55) is steep, but the previous volumes have been hefty, beautiful hardcovers jam-packed with extras. Sure, you could get the softcover for US$35, but you’d miss out on the dustcover, the ribbon bookmark, the endpapers, the spot UV … which technically the hardcover doesn’t have yet on account of they’re stretch goals, as are the various Tales From The Drive stories³ that have released since the Act 3 book came out, but history suggests that they’ll be unlocked as that’s what happened with the prior two books.

  Look. Campaign went up yesterday with a goal of US$45000 (a high goal, to be sure). As of now, it’s just shy of US$60,000, about US$5000 from stretch goal number 1 (the Gurihiru Tales story), so I’m highly confident the others will unlock. There’s potentially 90 pages of Tales in addition to book upgrades to go, before the campaign ends in a month.

  Storywise, it looks like all the pieces are finally on the board, as LArDK once described Drive as being a three-act story and he’s now upped that to five acts. Oh, and no FFF mk2 predictions on this one, as LArDk has a habit of stealth launching to this Patreonistas, and that throws things off.

• About a month ago, Doug Wilson (about whom we had some discussion back around ’09-’10, and again regarding an unsuccessful Kickstart around ’15, and one mo’ ‘gain in 2017 about a new project, which is immediately relevant) sent along a PDF of his now-completed story, Jack Astro (told you). The story starts as a subversion of the old Heinleinian eleite super-soldier story, and turns into a fairly familiar bumbler-out-of-their-depths story, albeit one that ends a bit abruptly.

  Wilson’s Kickstarting the full story starting Thursday, and while I don’t have any details to give you yet (that whole not yet launched thing), a) it fit the theme today too well not to mention, and b) it’ll certainly be worth your perusal at the end of the week.

Spam of the day:

I am currently running a PR campaign for my client and I would like to request you to share our website [nope!].com on your social media, bookmark it and give us a backlink on your blog fleen.com I will check in a few days’ time and if I do not see a backlink to our site and social signals, I will spam fleen.com with a whole load of toxic link farms that will inevitably drag your site down the rankings.

Just to show you that I am dead serious, please take a look at the backlink profile of this url and note all the spam links being created 24/7. The same destiny awaits your site: [nuh-uh].com

Please do not try to report me or try any monkey business as this will only piss me off and increase the severity of spam going to fleen.com Should you comply, I will reward you with a link on our site.

Thanks in advance. Kind regards

It’s the Kind regards in a blackmail attempt that’s really pissing me off. So, two things:

1. This was sent more than two weeks ago and gosh, I don’t see any drag-down in the search rankings, and 2. Do fuck off. The bitcon-seeking liar threatening to release video of me watching porn, hacked from a webcam that doesn’t exist, was more convincing that this horseshit.

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¹ Occasional reminder that they don’t get links, on account of Amazon’s terms & conditions mean that you don’t actually own any of the comics you purchase from them and screw that noise.

² Which wrapped up just about a week and a half back.

³ The most recent of which, Motherbear, from LArDK assistant Beth Reidmiller, wrapped up just today.

It’s a dreary day here today, and I’m behind on nearly everything I could be behind on, but I’m in a good mood because sometimes, others go out of their way to give you something awesome. I’d like to pass those somethings along, if you don’t mind.

• Firstly, you should be able to still get in on the pre-order for Meredith Gran’s limited-run, full-color printing of the recent Octopus Pie coda. I say should be because in the literal, single minute after Gran announced they were for sale, the Bigcartel store was insisting they were sold out. Too many of us trying to buy at once, I guess!

  As of this writing, it’s still available, but I wouldn’t sit on this until tomorrow if I were you. Valerie Halla’s colors are always great, and the cover colors by Sloane Leong look amazing. Finally, Gran will be signing every copy.

• Secondly, you don’t have to spend anything to get a perking-up today, if you wander over to Oh Joy, Sex Toy for a completely safe for work meditation on embracing the ridiculous in life from Erika Moen’s Patreon. It’s about kohlrabi, and the twists and turns her life has taken by embracing the weirder option at certain key times.

  It’s affirming, uplifting, joy-bringing, and exactly what so many of us need to hear as we slowly wake up to a world where things are necessarily worse than they were yesterday. Plague Years will wear you the fuck down¹, but there’s always room in them (and before, and in the days yet to come) for some Ridiculous in your life. Go read it and feel better about everything for a little while.

Spam of the day:

He decided to go public and his video went viral in record time … People testified this method cured toenail fungus forever after just of couple of days …

Is this the bit where you pee on your feet because ew.

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¹ Moen’s strip may be entirely safe for work, so I have to make up for that here just to create logic.

As we get started, a disclaimer. Shing Yin Khor is a personal friend of mine, and I’ve had at least the outline of this story rattling around my brain for years now, ever since we talked about it as a work in progress over some surprisingly delicious Tex-Mex in Juneau, Alaska. So when I picked up my copy of The Legend Of Auntie Po from my local comic shop last week, I had high hopes and even higher expectations.

Because one should never count out Shing Yin Khor when it comes to a) lumberjack culture; b) foodway stories; c) immigrant tales; and d) delicate, gorgeous watercolors. Combine all of those into nearly 300 pages of story, and throw a little adolescent queer longing in on top, and you’ve got an absolute winner. For those that don’t want the spoilers ahead, get a copy or three, read it until it falls apart and then read it some more.

Actually, the spoilers are going to be kind of light — it’s the 1880s, a logging camp in the Sierra Nevadas, at a time when Chinese workers were both valued for skills in large undertakings (building entire logging infrastructure, or running railroads through the tallest mountain range in the hemisphere) and simultaneously regarded as a plague upon the land, despoiling a nation out of its natural white purity.

Don’t look too closely at everybody that isn’t white, particularly those that the land in question was stolen from, or those whose parents and grandparents were stolen from overseas to work the land. The country has a myth of manifest destiny to construct here.

And that’s really the core of Auntie Po — that myth belongs to anybody that’s trying to make sense of their circumstances, whether it’s in the service of oppressing everybody that doesn’t look like you, or in trying to find a little hope at the end of the day that somebody powerful might be in your corner. Nearly everybody in the story is trying to find that bit of footing, and even the white folks haven’t been around long enough for some to count them as real Americans¹.

So they make up stories — Paul Bunyan was revered by the northwoods loggers? Hao Mei, 13 and full of imagination and stories, knows that Po Pan Yin and her blue water buffalo Pei Pei were even bigger and better. Auntie Po doesn’t just stay with Mei; when need strikes, the other children in the camp — none of the Chinese — call on her and see her, really see her. And if this newer Auntie Po is Black rather than Chinese? Well, myths take on their own lives, adapted by the people that need them and make them their own. And that carries on past the children; by the end of the book the loggers in the bunkhouse argue whose crew cut more lumber — Paul Bunyan or Auntie Po.

Mei’s father, Hao Ah, doesn’t need Auntie Po because he knows who he is — the only cook that can keep the loggers satisfied², and twice the man of the white guy that tries to replace him. Mei learns who she is eventually, too — a girl with dreams of university and learning, and also the best pie maker for miles around — and so she lets Auntie Po go, but others take her up and make her their own. Hels Andersen insisted that the Haos were family to him, and over time he changes that from empty platitude to reality, and so a little of the myth of white supremacy crumbles, at least within one logging camp in one corner of the Sierra Nevada.

It takes a long time for myths to completely die, though — and those that don’t have anything else to rely on (whether that’s true or just what they tell themselves) can fan a myth back to life if even a spark of it remains. There’s not so many loggers out there that might call on Auntie Po, but there are echoes of her, in every burned paper memorial to a Chinese logger that fell at his work, every sealed bottle with a name and birthday inside to give proper identity to an unmarked grave.

She still lives on in whispered stories that Mei let out into the world, and instead of stories of Auntie Po, Mei gets to tell her own story, which is another form of myth. Folk heroes and gods, they say, exist as long as they have believers, and even if nobody believes in Mei but Mei, that’s a big, bright blaze of belief and she will bestride her world like Po Pan Yin towers over the tallest pines. Giant blue water buffalo optional.

The Legend Of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor is a deeply researched³, beautifully illustrated story of a difficult time and place. Any reader that’s willing to learn about/acknowledge the origins and legacy of white supremacy at a tween-age-appropriate level will find a lot to love and a lot to think about here. Find your copy at your local bookstore or comic shop.

Spam of the day:

We are interested in your products. If your company can handle a bulk supply of your products to Cameroon, please contact us.

I can bulk supply opinions on webcomics wherever you like, sport.

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¹ Logging boss Hels Andersen isn’t more than a generation and a half from Scandinavia, and undoubtedly looked down on my the moneyed class that funds his operations. Hell, I guarantee you that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s saintly Ma looked down on the Andersens and other recent arrivals; if you don’t remember her snotty opinions of recent immigrants, maybe don’t give the Little House books to the kids in your life because yeesh, Laura, her Ma, and her daughter Rose were serious nativists and Pa Ingalls was the definition of a failson locust, gaming the system and displacing humans from their land and lauded for it.

² His schnitzel is legendary.

³ If admittedly incomplete; in the afterword, Khor acknowledges the lack of indigenous characters and recognizes that the story of their presence in the logging camps is a story that needs to be told, but not theirs to tell.

Sometimes this page posts about things that are slightly related to webcomics, or on occasion barely tangential to webcomics, and a handful of times completely unrelated to webcomics except by the barest thread. Guess which one we’re doing today?

This is the story of a chair. Specifically, the chair my butt is currently in as I type these words. After years of trying and failing to find a decent office chair for my home office, I eventually went out around 2008 or so and got a middle-tier gamer chair on account of you know who gets some pretty damn good chairs? Gamers.

Fast forward to nowish, and the foam on one of the armrests is disintegrating because it’s been used daily for a dozen years. I called up the company to see about replacements and the model of chair is long since discontinued, but the told me that they looked it up and a particular set of current armrests will fit. It’s US$70, but better that than getting a whole new chair that I don’t really need.

The new armrests don’t in fact fit. The mounting plate that joins the arm to the bottom of the chair has a screw hole in the wrong place, and my choices were return them and let the old rest fall apart, find a machine shop to drill a new hole in 3mm steel plate, or get to experimenting. I was able to detach both old and new arms from their respective mounting plate and the holes for swapping the plates were good so I could put the old plates (which will attach to the chair) on the new rests.

But the old plates won’t fit in a connecting slot on the new rests because there’s an entirely decorative raised section of steel on the plate.

Three hours, every tool I own, a run to the hardware store to get a tool I didn’t yet own¹ and about eight Dremel cut-off wheels later, I’d reshaped the old plate to the point it could slide in and attach to the new rest, got everything tightened and viola² it’s all working again and I can sit here and type to you about webcomics again. Because if you set a problem in front of an engineer that gives them a solution path involving a Dremel, you’d better believe they’re going to get to experimentin’.

Okay, fine, you get two tidbits of webcomics today:

• The Abominable Charles Christopher book 3 kicker now has had sufficient time to warrant a run through the FFF mk2. Let’s call it CAN$160K to CAN$240K, a number which I believe will comport well with the McDonald Ratio once today — day 3 — is done.
• Shing Yin Khor’s latest book, The Legend Of Auntie Po released yesterday and I was quite determined to get my copy today. I am pleased to say that violence was not necessary and as soon as I hit post on this and walk my dog³, I will be digging in.

Spam of the day:

CAREDOGBEST™ – Personalized Dog Harness. All sizes from XS to XXL. Easy ON/OFF in just 2 seconds. LIFETIME WARRANTY.

I have a harness for my dog, in fact. It’s got high-vis reflective tape sewn in, so she’s super visible from the porch when she’s taking her pre-bedtime dump in the yard.

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¹ An Ikea-style hex wrench with a suitably large diameter. They only sell them in sets of ten but it’s only about six bucks and now I have another set of useful tools in the toolbox so that’s all right.

² The least favored instrument in the orchestra. Violists are the classical music equivalents of the garage band bass player, demoted from the instrument that actually gets groupies.

³ Not a euphemism.

One of my favorite things to do is to match up readers with folks whose work might otherwise go unnoticed. I mean, sure, I loves me some Charles Christopher out of all proportion, but not all comics worth my attention (and yours!) come from Karl Kerschl¹. Let’s take a look at a couple of them.

• Payton Francis does comics out of the Twin Cities; a big part of her work is fantasy, and the other big part of it is featuring as many adorable LGBT+ characters as possible. Help Wanted is a modern story, and Wola (Francis does art; words by EC Ibes) has plenty of modern signifiers (industrial shipping, folding aluminum chairs) but simultaneously a mythic set of trappings; they’ve both got a bunch of heart.

  Oh, and Wola is presently Kickstarting its first print collection, which has already surpassed goal and thus is a sure thing at this point. Come for the enticing art, stay for the friendshipping, as the first five chapters — more than 200 pages — get printed in full color for only US$25². And, once you read the book, you can pick up with Chapter Six, which started at the beginning of June. As of this writing the campaign runs for another 69 hours (nice), so hop on over and give it a look while you’ve got the chance.

• I’m pretty sure that’s the first time we’ve mentioned Francis on this page — an oversight, surely, especially given her very assured and very varied character designs — but we’ve mentioned Eben Burgoon a buncha times. Although the wrapping up of Eben07 forever ago robbed this page of one of its favorite running gags, Burgoon has done bunches of stuff since then. Most recently, Tiny Wizards — 10cm tall magic dudes working in a remote truck stop’s food service. It’s been around for a couple of years and Kickstarted a collection, which is now available for all.

  Tiny Wizards #1 — Lord Of The Onion Rings is going to run you US$14, consists of 64 pages of full-page painting, and is very likely the first book ever to be mentioned on this page with a suggested age rating of — quoting here — 10 and under. Indulge your inner child and give it a look.

Spam of the day:

RE: TRACKING NUMBER N° CS476903738

You think your DHL tracking number click here bullshit should featuring a bunch of my non-existent Disney+ subscription is suspended click here bullshit graphics? I think y’all might be a bit confused.

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¹ To whom I profusely apologize, as I just realized that I have missed — by more than six months — the 10th anniversary of the greatest single comic strip in history: Squirrel-Chew.

² The amount of comics and the print quality you get for an extremely reasonably price is one of my favorite things about the current Golden Age of comics we’re living in.

It’s a good news, bad news — or more precisely, bad but narrowly escaped much worse news — kind of day. Let’s start with the good news first.

• The Abominable Charles Christopher Book 3 Kickstart is up, funded in less than an hour, and at the six hour mark is running more than 250%. It’s beautiful, it’s happening, and if there’s not a hardcover at the moment, if things go very well on the campaign¹, Karl Kerschl just might be able to swing it.

  Speaking for myself, I’d upgrade my sketch edition support tier (featuring three softcovers, original art in the latest) to a hardcover sketch edition to match my vol 1 and vol 2 in a heartbeat². We’ll look at predicted funding finish levels in the next day or so, but in the meantime, congratulations to Kerschl, it’s well-deserved; and congratulations to all of us who get to have such beautiful work on our shelves.

• Okay, bad but coulda been much worse news: mere hours after taking an Eisner nomination for Banned Book Club, Ryan Estrada mentioned he was losing his day job and try to make a go of this cartooning thing as his sole form of income. Today, he gave us the details and it is not pretty.

  I’m going to quote this pretty much in its entirety because there is a lesson for everybody in the story:

  I have to leave my library gig because they asked everyone to sign a new contract that says
  -they can demand we stay after work to make new teaching materials for them
  -we have to use the images they demand (and I know they have little regard for copyright)

  Okay, that first point is bad, because fuck you, pay me, that’s why. The second point is worse, as it opens up Estrada and his colleagues to liability. It gets worse:

  -They’d have eternal, exclusive ownership of anything we make and can use it in any way we want
  -We’d accept unlimited and eternal legal and financial responsibility for damages caused by any copyright infringement in the things they demand we make them to use however they please

  I believe that third item should read any way they want, not we want, but the real horrorshow is the fourth. Under no circumstances should anybody, ever, accept legal responsibility for work that you are directed to produce by your employer. But maybe they just don’t realize what a bad ask this is?

  As it turns out, nope:

  I obviously could not sign that, so my employment will end.

  It was two little lines in an otherwise boring and ordinary contract, and after asking questions I learned it was not hypothetical and they intended to make use of it.

  Read your contracts carefully, kids.

  So like, they could say “stay until 9 and make us a powerpoint about Frozen” and then use it in the curriculum at dozens of for-profit schools across the country for years, then when Disney sues make me pay all the damages and legal fees.

  I had to explain to them today that we can’t even make materials using the images in our textbooks, by reverse image searching and finding out how their subsidiary paid for them on shutterstock.

  Too many fellow teachers signed without realizing how ruinous it could be. [emphasis mine]

  So yeah, being without a job is bad, but not reading the contract, not realizing the importance of those two lines, signing and ending up on the hook down the line? Disaster. And anybody what asks you to sign that contract and doesn’t take out those lines when you point out how you can be held responsible for illegal acts ordered by your superiors?

  Run as far and as fast as you can.

  Normally, this is where I’d put links to the store of the creator in question, but if you look up and down Estrada’s site, almost everything is marked Read It Free!, which is not going to help him come October. So here are books that Estrada has sufficient financial interest in³ that buying a copy of them might actually benefit him directly: Banned Book Club; Student Ambassador; Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here.

  He doesn’t have a way to directly send him money, so maybe just post a lot on social media about how much you like his work (pictures of purchases would be helpful), give his agents something to work with.

  And whatever else you do, read your contracts carefully, kids, and also thank Estrada for sharing this object lesson that you might not end up in the coulda been much worse category yourself.

Spam of the day:

Many have the misconception of Buddhism being a religion. Buddhism is really more of a way of life whch can wired our brains positively and see changes in a different light.

Not according to Zach Weinersmith, it’s not.

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¹ Which they appear to be doing at the moment.

² My hardcovers of book 1 and book 2 featuring drawings of a panicky chipmunk and Moon Bear, respectively. Book 3? LUGA. Book 4? So many choices — deranged great horned owl and grandowlet? Andy the bumblebee? The domestic drama with the songbirds, the roleplaying critters, some of Sissi Skunk’s minions hawking Squirrel Chew? So. many. choices.

³ That is, he’s not one of many contributors in an anthology.

Hey, y’all. How ya doing? Good? Good. It’s a drizzly day and there’s a very lazy hound somewhat noisily snoring and it’s giving everything here a more than slightly soporific character. Let us converse for some little while and then have a nap.

• Yesterday, I pointed out a pair of comics-centric events that are taking very different approaches to the (hopefully, persisting) post-pandemic reality. From Massachusetts, an outdoor, spaced-out event; from Long Island, an indoors event that doesn’t so much as mention health protections and shows lots of photos of crowded-together folks.

  Given that New York City formed the centerpoint of the pandemic in this country through its devastating first wave, you’d have thought that a place just the other side of JFK would be more mindful but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

  So how would something larger than Mini-MICE go about an event in the latter half of 2021 while taking due care? Glad you asked, Sparky. Let’s take a look at what CXC has on deck for October:

  CXC 2021 will feature a mix of online & in person events! Our Vendor Exhibitor Expo will be held virtually over Discord, but some festival events will be in person at partner venues in Columbus, OH. Details: https://cartooncrossroadscolumbus.org/?cat=8

  (& check out the poster art by Gabby Metzler!)

  Drilling down into the show website gives us some details:

  CXC 2021 will mark a return to some in-person events following a show that was all online in 2020. Some events will be online only, and several of the in-person events also will be broadcast online. CXC will follow the city of Columbus’s health guidelines and the recommendations of its programming sponsors when determining any necessary precautions.

  We will have more information in the coming months about which events will be in person and how to attend, and how to view online events. Follow us on social media (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) or check our website (cartooncrossroadscolumbus.org) for the latest.

  Good start — acknowledge the fact that things will change in the coming months, set out a model that likely can be made good on even if progress towards reopening stalls, indicate where more information can be obtained. Furthermore:

  One online event will be the CXC Expo, a part of CXC in which creators sell their work to the public. Similar to last year, the CXC Expo will be held online through CXC’s website and Discord Server. We are eager to return to an in-person Expo in 2022.

  “It’s a challenge to plan in our ever changing health and safety environment. We appreciate the flexibility of our guests, presenting partners, donors and audience as we balance our desire for in-person events with proper protocols,” said Jerzy Drozd, CXC’s interim executive director. [emphasis original]

  Further acknowledgement of reality, a nice outreach to everybody with a stake, and a clear assumption of responsibility right from the top¹.

  Additionally, CXC announced its first tranche of guests (Chris Samnee, Victoria Jamieson, Lewis Trondheim, Shary Flenniken) and a new award named for Spurgeon:

  This year’s festival also will mark the debut of the Tom Spurgeon Award, named after CXC’s founding executive director, which will be awarded to someone who is not primarily a cartoonist and whose support of cartoonists and cartoon art enhanced the field in a lasting and measurable way.

  … The award, suggested by Tom’s family, will be a way to honor an individual who has made substantial contributions to the field but is not primarily a cartoonist.

  “The breadth and depth of Tom’s experiences as a journalist, comics historian, and reporter make him the ideal model for an award celebrating the contributions of non-cartoonists to the field,” said Lucy Shelton Caswell, founding curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University and a co-founder of CXC. [emphasis original]

• Speaking of people that enhance the field in lasting ways, readers may recall that we at Fleen are deeply interested in the production work that goes into comics, particularly of the editorial variety. So it was with particular interest that we noted a rather unique manuscript being newly offered:
  

  MAKE YOUR COMICS leaner/meaner/faster/cleaner!
  FILTH & GRAMMAR: The Comic Book Editor’s Secret Handbook.
  Click thru to sign up for more info [various emoji]
  https://kickstarter.com/projects/sxbond/filth-and-grammar

  Better believe I signed up for notification. Bond is a legend in editing circles, and everybody that edits comics (or wants to edit them, or wants to edit them better) should be grabbing a copy while they can. So should everybody that writes about comics, and — somewhat counterintuitively — everybody that makes comics.

  Making comics and editing comics are completely different skills, but understanding what the editor is doing and why they do it? That can only lead a creator to make better comics. If nothing else, it’ll hopefully convince creators that editing your own stuff lies somewhere between impractical and impossible². I suspect that in very short order, Filth & Grammar will belong on every shelf right next to Understanding Comics.

Spam of the day:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch the “DOGE-1 Mission to the Moon” in the first quarter of 2022, with the company accepting the meme-inspired cryptocurrency as payment. Doge has gone up 1161% since early April this year. If you want to be part of this history moment, you can buy Doge coin at Binance here (biggest crypto exchange in the world).

For reference, this was sent five hours after Elon Musk announced that Tesla was getting out of the crypto space.

Elon Musk intends to distribute 25,000 bitcoins. Today I sent 3 Bitcoins to Tesla and received 6 Bitcoins back !!! Bitcoins are returned doubled. The company’s website keeps statistics in real time, who sent and received how many bitcoins in double the amount.
… and this one was sent the day after. Scammers apparently think that crypto enthusiasts are very, very stupid; given that they believe in magic math based on nothing that can be used to purchase upwards of seven different legal goods and/or services at the costs of crippling computer supply chains and hastening the end of human viability on the planet, I am forced in this circumstance to conclude that the scammers are correct.

_______________
¹ Speaking of which, let’s acknowledge the stellar job that Jerzy Drozd did stepping into the suddenly-empty shoes of the dearly missed Tom Spurgeon, and managing the sudden shift to a pandemic-restricted form from practically day one on the job. If CXC doesn’t keep him on in a permanent capacity, every comics event in the world should be competing to obtain his services.

² Says the guy who self-edits … but when I’ve been asked to write particularly important stuff for others, damn right I’ve sought the opinion of editors I trust. The feedback I received on one occasion caused me to completely discard what I had previously considered to be 95% of the way to final and start over in a radically different direction. It made for a radically better piece, for reasons that made sense when I was done but which I couldn’t see at the beginning because — say it with me — you can’t edit your own stuff.

Whoo, those until-two-am EMS calls really put a crimp in the next day. It’s late, so this will be brief, as we share news of a couple of enticing product [pre]-announcements.

• First up Raina Telgemeier is a ways from her next book; turns out that pandemics completely disrupt publishing schedules, which are complex webs of editors, publicity, planning, printing logistics, and supply chains that run from China across the Pacific. Probably isn’t too great for the brain space of the folks that need to put together the books that will be appearing next year and the year after that, either. And then there’s the fact that Raina’s published five monster hits from 2010-2019 and if we want to see the next five, she’s due a breather.

  But even if there’s not a story coming the immediate future¹, there’s still Raina news to keep your eyes on, starting today:

  I’m so excited for tomorrow’s release of ‘Raina’s Day,’ my new 450-piece jigsaw puzzle collaboration with Clarkson Potter! Be sure to check out my website for some sneak-peek photos and ordering information! https://goraina.com/merchandise-puzzle

  That’s a puzzle of cartoon Raina surrounded by all the thoughts that define her, packaged up in a box that looks for all the world like cartoon Raina’s sketchbook or diary. I dunno about you, but I’ve got multiple [grand-] nieces and nephews that are going to go incandescent when they see it.

• It was not two weeks ago when we at Fleen looked at the latest webcomic offering from Karl Kerschl and noted that The Abominable Charles Christopher’s third volume had been a-borning for longer than anybody would want, but that the wait would be worth it. It would be madness to claim that Kerschl took my plaintive observation as the motivation to quickly throw together a full boo design and get a Kickstart set up — those tasks take forever — but what the heck? He announced it:
  

  Abominable Book 3 is finally coming! Check out the @Kickstarter landing page to get notified when it goes live!!!
  https://kickstarter.com/projects/karlkerschl/the-abominable-charles-christopher-book-3

  31 May was a very good day for product announcements, yo.

  We don’t know what form book 3 is going to take, or what timeframe to expect it in, but soon enough we’ll have the campaign launch and get those answers. All I know is I’ve got to make room on my bookshelf for a new hardcover² in the near-ish term. Charles Christopher! A malevolent lion! A shouty and ineffectual Gilgamesh! RPG-fan forest critters, awkward owlets, a cockroach shrink, Vivol the bear, Luga the honest wolf, and Sissi Skunk’s shenanigans! Stick it in my brain.

• Oh, and a followup to Friday: US$580,099, thirty grand above the McDonald’s Ratio, and a full fifty grand above the previous record holder. Dang.

Spam of the day:

We have a special limited offer for you to send unlimited emails. We allow non-permission based emails and you won’t ever get blocked.

You are offering me the opportunity to annoy other people as much as you’re trying to annoy me? And yet you wound up in my spam filters, where I could have easily ignored you forever. You’re not very good at this.

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¹ Which is not to say there haven’t been any stories with her hands in. The death-themed anthology from Iron Circus, You Died, includes a Raina-illustrated story about beloved father, a collection of ashes, and a trip to a theme park that is absolutely not Disney for a surreptitious scattering. It’s heartwarming and hilarious, and Raina makes the most of writer Casey Gilly’s script.

² And, eventually, a fourth book, but we’ll cross that bridge etc.

I speak, naturally of Ngozi Ukazu, who is about to wrap up the Kickstart for the fourth Check, Please! collection, which has cleared the half-million damn dollar mark and which is going up each time I refresh. It’ll wrap about five and a half hours from now (as I write this) and has picked up (again, as I write this) more than US$40,000 today alone, which makes this the third-best day of the fundraising period.

At the launch of the campaign I noted that the traditional predictors (the FFF mk2, the McDonald Ratio) would likely be skewed, what with the atypically high per-backer average contribution (which has actually gone up), the stealth launch, the huge pent-up demand for the last item in a hot property, etc. I warned that the estimates would likely be high, but you know what? They’re not that far off.

Okay, the FFF mk2 having a +/- 5% tolerance leads to some excessively large ranges on high-value projects like this (a full US$300K range), and the lower bound of US$600K was always a stretch¹, but the McDonald Ratio predicted US$550K and it wouldn’t surprise me if we hit it at this point.

In the time it’s taken me to write the last three paragraphs, the total has gone up three grand, and Check, Please! Year Four has surpassed Ava’s Demon: Reborn and has become the most-funded webcomics project in Kickstarter history². The five Check, Please! projects will have between them raised at least US$1.45 million, and there’s still five and a half hours to go. Not bad for a comic about gay hockey bros with big feelings and also pie³.

(‘Nother fifteen hundo in the time it took to write and do the math in that last ‘graf, bee tee dubs.)

Anyways, I’m not waiting around until after 10:00pm EDT to see what the end total is, but I give it a 50/50 chance that today’s total becomes the second highest of the campaign, and and 80/20 chance it clears US$550K in total, thus validating Kel McDonald’s math. I’m sure I’ll mention it sometime next week, but remember: Monday is a holiday in the States, so probably no post. Enjoy your weekend, enjoy the holiday if you’re in a position to celebrate it, and the next time somebody suggests a seemingly-ludicrous story hook, we should all just say, Let’s give it a year and see.

Spam of the day:

Are you and your mate a good match? Find out with a Romantic Compatibility Report, your best resource for a romantic comparison.

Screw your astrology bullshit. We’ve been married for 28 years and I don’t give a damn what your made up report says.

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¹ The backer count and pledge total going up on day two really disturbs things … I’m thinking of looking at an average of the projections for days 1 and 3 in those cases, which would have given us US$637K +/- US$128K, or US$509K to US$765K in this case, which would be on the low end, but within range. Gonna keep adjusting this thing until it accounts for all the strange outliers as well as the typical cases.

² Plus the number three slot for Check, Please! Year Two.

³ Seriously, if you’d suggested to anybody back around 2012 or so that premise would catch fire, people would have suggested back that while gay bros and pie were pretty popular, hockey’s crippling unpopularity in the US would render it the whole thing moot. You can never tell what’s going to grab attention, except for the fact that it’s a damn good comic, and damn good comics will find their audience.

Here’s some more that are coming out in the next few weeks, that you may get in your orders and enjoy.

• We at Fleen have, I believe, been in the tank for John Allison since small times, as the saying goes. He has nary an idea that isn’t going to be amusing as hell, ranging from droll wordplay to flat-out hilarity and back again, frequently on the same page. For much of the past couple of years, he’s let loose with his wilder instincts for absolutely unrestrained stories via Steeple (both in print and in the online continuation).

  Furthermore, throughout his long history of Tackleverse comic-making, he’s found individual characters around whom others accrete and orbit, by which manner all manner of stories may be hung: Shelley Winters, Esther de Groot, Charlotte Grote; by complete coincidence, each of these has been my favorite character of his in turn, often trading the role back and forth and one or another is given pride of place.

  Of late, he’s collided La Grote and The Ginger Ninja with Steeple in Author Unknown and it is a marvel, but come August we’ll get the second Steeple trade, collecting the The Silvery Moon and Secret Sentai story arcs. Mayhap if we’re good, we’ll soon get a third collection, with Christmas With Clovis and the currently-running Author Unknown.

• A little closer to the present day, which is to say the 22nd of June, we’ll see not one but two new releases from :01 Books, which always makes for a good day. The first is from Mike Holmes (at press time, his site appeared to be down, so here’s his Twitter), who’s been making excellent comics with other folks for about forever, but now gets to stretch his legs and show us his solo work.

  My Own World is about being a kid, about not feeling in control, about finding a place where you can be in control, but maybe lacking the meaning of the (so-called?) Real World. It sounds like an up-aged version of Vera Brosgol’s Memory Jars, which should allow for some amazing storytelling and visuals. Introducing a middle grade reader to the concept of there being things that you can’t control and that’s not a tragedy is going to be a tightrope to walk, but I’ve got complete confidence that Holmes will be able to navigate it.

  And perhaps taking a similar tack to My Own World, Nidhi Chanani will be following up her superlative Pashmina with Jukebox, a time travel story about music, searching for meaning (and also your parents), and how life changes (or maybe doesn’t) from decade to decade.

  Readers may recall that my chief complaint with Pashmina was that it deserved about 50 more pages to really delve into the magical-realist conceit, and it looks like Chanani will get that here; time traveling via magic jukebox to the eras of beloved songs offers at least as much room for exploration as finding the history of your family through a shared article of clothing.

  Plus, a) the world needs more books centering brown girls, and b) Chanani has a love of vinyl that impressed former college DJ me, so I think there’s going to be a lot of factual and emotional authenticity for readers to dig into here. Plus, her work is always just so joybringing, even when tinged with fear or melancholy — there’s a natural exuberance to her characters that works really well in the long form.

Steeple: The Silvery Moon releases 4 August to comic shops and two weeks later to bookstores. My Own World and Jukebox both release 22 June to bookstores. The former is highly recommended based on previously-released web content, and the latter pair based on the prior work of the creators. They’re gonna be good, folks.

Spam of the day:

Hi, Would you like a free article for your websit? I’d like to put something together that offers advice to prospective entrepreneurs who’ve experienced past financial setbacks on how they can get their dream business up and running.

My websit is just fine without your fake-ass motivational bullshit. If you knew how to be an awesome entrepreneur, you’d be doing that instead of trying to convince people you know how to do that.