I intend to get out and enjoy it.

• Last night I noticed a tweet from everybody’s favorite, Kate Beaton that lead to a story that is both fabulous news and deeply disappointing at the same time. Barnes & Noble, at their SF/Fantasy blog, honored the 80th anniversary of The Hobbit‘s publication by recounting the story of hour Maurice Sendak almost got the gig to illustrate an edition 50 years ago. Great story, terrible that we never got that and they used that as a jumping off point to imagine how seven legendary artists¹ would also make great partners with Tolkien’s work.

  The seven chosen are Paul Pope, Mary Blair, Dr Suess, Al Hirschfeld, Edward Gorey, Mo Willems … and Kate Beaton.

  This is amazing company to be in, and I can’t say that it isn’t entirely earned. Each of the seven is immediately, uniquely identifiable, each suits their chosen material perfectly, and each would bring a wonderful spin to Bilbo’s adventures. That’s the good part.

  The bad part? Four of the seven — Blair, Suess, Hirschfeld, and Gorey — are dead, and so it’s entirely appropriate for B&N to contract with an artist to do work in their style. But Pope, Willems, and Beaton are all very much alive, and to have somebody else ape their style when they’re around is weak tea.

  Grant Lindahl’s got a pretty good handle on Beaton’s style (I particularly like the spider, which looks like the offspring of Shelob and Fat Pony), but you know who’s got an even better handle on Beaton’s style? Same applies to Willems and Pope.

  Maybe she was busy. Maybe the amount they had in the budget was too little to interrupt her current work. But her tweet reads to me like she wasn’t asked, which is weak tea. To paraphrase a character that every reader of the SF/Fantasy blog should be familiar with, OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?

• Updated Kickstarter numbers for the Girls With Slingshots omnibus, Yuko Ota’s off-hand comics, and Howard Tayler²’s thirteenth (!) Schlock Mercenary collection, according to the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II, and the McDonald Ratio:
  • GWS Omni: US$276K to US$410K (FFFmk2, unchanged since Wednesday); US$357K (McDR, up from US$347K)
  • Offhand: US$36K to US$54K (FFFmk2, up from US$25K to US$37K); US$51K (McDR, up from US$30K)
  • Schlock 13: US$90K to US$136K (FFFmk2, up from US$84K to US$126K); US$120K (McDR, up from US$99K)

  This time next month, we’ll know how they all worked out.

Spam of the day:
_______________
¹ Legendary is their word choice; in fact, the title of the post. Also, by Tolkien’s numerology, this would make the artists equivalent to the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone. Granted, most artists do end up hunched over their drawing boards and don’t always get out into the sun.

² Evil Twin, etc.

Things don’t always work out for the best, but that doesn’t mean that they’re completely unworkable.

• For instance, Thought Bubble — a weeklong celebration of comics in Leeds, UK, that culminates in a weekend comics convention — lost its traditional November dates and had to relocate. Unfortunately, that puts it in close proximity to SPX, which led more than one creator to tell me that they had to choose between doing one show and the other. Thought Bubble’s made the best of the situation, though, and will run their comics show with an impressive list of guests and exhibitors, from both sides of the Atlantic.

  On the Guests list (which is helpfully divided into Writers, Artists, and All on the website), you have webcomics luminaries such as Jon Allison, Darryl Cunningham, Marc Ellerby, Cameron Stewart, and Spike Trotman. The page is laid out with nice big images and names, and each links to a page about the guest — easy to navigate and intuitive to use!

  On the Exhibitor front, Thought Bubble did something I’ve not seen before that I really liked; the show is spread out across different venues, and thus there are multiple exhibitor pages, one per venue.

  Unfortunately, the layout of the pages requires a good deal of effort to decipher — exhibitors are shown by an image, which may be a character, a scene, or a photo. Names are sometimes present, sometimes not, and they’re seemingly arranged alphabetically by URL of all things. As a result, it’s tough to pick out who’s attending without clicking through to every website, which I’m not gonna do. I can tell you that Tom Siddell will be at the Cookridge Street Marquee, and that by chance the comiXology Marquee has a significant number of avatars with names on them.

• In a completely different kind of unfortune, A Girl And Her Fed creator KB “Otter” Spangler has a dying tablet, which makes it hard to draw stuff. By good fortune, however, she was putting the finishing touches on a new novel last week¹, so she’s got a new thing to sell and hopefully get back to the art game. Stoneskin is Hogwarts in space (cosmic beings beyond our ken performing the stand-in for magic) meets trade empires, and it’s a hell of a good read.

  It’s completely different from her other books (set in the world of a single near-future technology, and the societal and political upheavals it causes), but it’s unmistakably Spangler’s writing. Even better, it’s a preface to a planned trilogy, which means I (and you, I suppose) get to read another 750 to 1000 pages of her writing, so yay. It’s entirely worth your five bucks, is what I’m saying.

Spam of the day:

Stop taking the wrong blood pressure drugs and try this out

124 +/- 4 systolic, 80 +/- 4 diastolic, bitches. I once had a cardiologist tell me that I will obviously die of something, but it won’t be heart disease.

_______________
¹ At least, it was a little less than two weeks back when she asked if I wanted to be an beta reader for it. As has been well-established on the page previously, Spangler is a very close personal friend, I love her work, and I wrote the foreword for her first book. I believe that’s us sufficiently disclaimed.

Okay, there’s gonna be a lot of Kickstarter numbers thrown around, but before we get to that, I don’t want to miss out on talking about Ben Hatke’s Book Tour Extravaganza in support of Mighty Jack And The Goblin King. He’ll be hitting eight cities in nine days starting next Monday (25 September) in Portland and finishing up the Tuesday following (3 October) in Winnipeg.

Along the way he’ll be talking with the likes of Lucy Bellwood, Kazu Kibuishi, and Ryan North, so if you’re going to be in Stumptown, Seattle, Monterose (California), Salt Lake City, Saint Paul (Minnesota), Amherst (Massachusetts), Toronto, or The Slurpee Capital of the World, do check out the cities/dates/accompanying cool people.

• I was going to be spending some time today talking about how the Girls With Slingshots omnibus Kickstarter was going and how it was likely to do, but it’s probably not practical to do so. Recall the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II: take the predicted amount of funding for a project from the Kicktraq “Trend” tab at the 24-30 hour mark and divide by four — that’s the base prediction. Then take that amount and divide it further by five — that’s the uncertainty. Thus, a project predicted by the Trend formula to raise US$100K would likely finish in the US$25K +/-5K range.

  But, it’s not good for certain projects — if the number of backers in that first time period isn’t at least 200 or so, it’s not accurate. It’s also not good where there are huge, pent up cascades of money that then drop off because everybody who’s gonna back the project jumped in during the first few hours; the FFFmk2 depends on an organic long tail. In both of these cases, the McDonald Ratio is more accurate: take the total raised in the first three days and that’s about 1/3 of the final total¹.

  The total amount asked for, and the relative pricing of the reward tiers have not, to this point seemed to affect the accuracy of either of these tools. With those caveats out of the way, the McDonald Ratio is premature for the GWS campaign (it’s still less than 48 hours in), but it’ll be above US$347K, because that’s what you’d get by tripling the total as of this writing, and I don’t see many people canceling pledges.

  The FFFmk2 (again, I think this is gonna be skewed) is running US$343K +/- 67K, or somewhere between US$276K and US$410K. There’s just no precedent in the formula for a project that brings in US$116K in less than 48 hours, but it seems a safe bet that the US$50K goal will be met five to eight times over.

• So then I was going to talk about Howard Tayler²’s campaign (launched yesterday) for the thirteenth Schlock Mercenary collection; the high backer count (over 650 as of this writing) and history of successful projects (the formula tends to work better when backers see the creator has a track record) are both good, but the short funding period (only 24 days) makes the McDonald Ratio a bit suspect. Regardless, I’m going to run the numbers and call it US$84K to US$126K (FFFmk2) and north of US$99K (we haven’t had three days yet); call it three to five times goal.
• Finally, well under 24 hours ago (so all calculations are going to be low) the newest Johnny Wander collection went up for funding; fresh off their Ignatz win, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh are printing a collection of Ota’s art from the past five years from those periods when repetitive stress injuries forced her to use the wrong hand. Spoiler: Ota quickly draws better with her non-dominant hand than most everybody draws with their dominant hand.

  This is such a cool idea, made even cooler by the fact that the special edition of the collection will feature a lenticular image of an MRI of Ota’s right wrist, in all of its damaged glory. So, with knowledge that these numbers will only go up, US$25K to US$37K and US$30K are the prediction or comfortably over the very modest US$19K goal (those lenticular effects ain’t cheap, y’all).

By end of the week, all of these estimates will be more accurate, but honestly? The numbers games — which make no mistake, I adore — are less important than the fact that so many great comics are available almost on a whim these days. Take advantage of it as much as you can.

Spam of the day:

porn star $20 and a sandwich and she’d fake an orgasm over Weetabix

There is so much wrong with that sentence I don’t know where to start.

_______________
¹ Named for Kel McDonald, who has run a stack of Kickstarts, and found the rule very useful in her campaigns. However, McDonald tends to run longer campaigns than most — six to eight weeks, typically — and that may skew the prediction high on campaigns shorter than the traditional 28 to 31 days.

² Evil twin, etc.

Wow, I missed a lot in a week; let’s jump in and see what’s up.

• SPX Occurred to the usual great acclaim and positive feelings. Fleen congratulates the attendees and exhibitors on a great weekend, and the Ignatz Award winners in particular. Representatives of webcomics in the winners circle include Der-shing Helmer’s The Meek as Outstanding Online Comic, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh’s Johnny Wander: Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us as Outstanding Collection, Taneka Stotts (editor) and the contributors to Elements: Fire — An Anthology by Creators of Color as Outstanding Anthology, Jess Fink’s Chester 5000 XYV as Outstanding Series, and Bianca Xunise for Promising New Talent.
• Still at SPX, various attendees at the show have stuff to share, now and in the immediate future. Lucy Bellwood¹ released a detailed public accounting on the Kickstarter campaign for her 100 Demon Dialogues book/plush. Sharing numbers like this makes it more likely that newer creators dipping their toes into the Kickstart waters will succeed not only in funding, but in not bankrupting themselves on the expenses post-fundraising.

  As of today, Bellwood is up about US$3500 on US$50,000 raised, an amount which could be shaved down further by unexpected circumstances. But even if everything finishes exactly as measured today, be sure to pay attention to that US$3.5K number, not the US$50K. It’ll be half a year’s work or more by the time Bellwood’s done, and while 50 grand for half a year’s work is a comfortable living, 3.5 grand is not even subsistence living. Anybody inclined to sneer about the huge amounts of dough Bellwood’s rolling in, do have the courtesy to know what the hell you’re talking about.

• Speaking of both SPX and Kickstarter, C Spike Trotman and Danielle Corsetto took time from the show to announce they’re partnering up to bring a comprehensive omnibus printing of Girls With Slingshots to Kickstarter. Corsetto’s got the 2000+ strips, Spike’s got the Kickstarter process down to a science, and later today when the campaign goes live we can all get in on what’s sure to be a handsome volume featuring color strips. Those of us that have all ten GWS books, the first five of which are in B&W, will get to decide how much we need everything to match. Damn you, Corsetto! And damn you too, Spike, for enabling her!
• Missed like a week ago: The 20th anniversary of David Willis’s comics, which started on 10 September 1997 in the Indiana Daily Student, starting a run that would continue through four strips until the end of Shortpacked! in January of 2015. The rebooted version of the Willisverse, Dumbing of Age, launched on 10 September 2010, and continues to this day². If you feel this accomplishment merits some in-person congratulations³, you can see him at Bloomington, Indiana’s Vintage Phoenix Comics this coming Friday, 22 September, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Give him a Damn you, Willis! for me.
• Missed last week: The Homestuck videogame came out and people really love it! It was near five years back that almost 25,000 backers raised almost US$2.5 million to make the game, which has surely been through many design changes and mutations in the time since. But with Homestuck creator Andrew Hussie aided by past and present webcomic creators like Ryan North, Christopher Hastings, Tauhid Bondia, and Kris Straub, it’s not really a mystery that people are very happy with the outcome.

  Even better for those put off by the infamously dense and deep Homestuck, consensus is that you needn’t be familiar with the epic to play the game. Hiveswap is available via Steam or the Humble store with blessedly modest system requirements.

• And finally, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith announced their Soonish book tour; at present, dates in Seattle, Denver, New York, San Jose, Dallas, and Austin have been announced. Check the map and get your tickets now — it’s the first time Weinersmith’s been seen in public outside of BAH!Fest in years, and no guarantee after the book tour he won’t scurry back into his dank cartoonist’s lair, never to emerge into sunlight again.

I think that’s everything caught up. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll have news from across the Atlantic/Atlantique courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin.

Spam of the day:

Bad news is, I must have underestimated the amount of people who wanted to get in … because Ted’s server actually fell over.

This is the most astounding spam of apology, as somebody from “Ted’s Sheds” is making amends for traffic problems by extending for one day only their amazing offer of 16,000 woodworking plans (presumably including plans for the eponymous sheds) for the low, low price of … they don’t actually say. Too bad I don’t need a shed.

________________
¹ Adventure Cartoonist!

² Seven years in, I don’t think we’ve made it as far as midterms in the first semester of freshman year; by the time they graduate, these characters will have changed even more than Willis himself.

³ And heck if there are many webcomickers that have been as consistent as Willis for two damn decades, which include such life upheavals as throwing off a fundamentalist upbringing, a marriage, and the birth of twin sons.

For those who were intrigued by the early descriptions of SPX panels, I should note that the programming schedule is now posted, with speakers including Jillian Tamaki, Eleanor Davis, Tillie Walden, Gene Yang, Keith Knight, and Shannon Wheeler.

Of those, Tamaki and Walden will have book debuts; it’s not listed on the site as a debut, but the English-language edition of Alex Alice’s Castle In The Stars: The Space Race of 1869¹ is on Tuesday and I say that’s close enough.

And then, of course, there are the many, many exhibitors who’ll be in the Marriott Bethesda North ballroom; in roughly geographic order, you should keep an eye out for:

Green Zone
Top Shelf (wall 64 to 67), Iron Circus Comics (wall 72 and 73), Kel McDonald (wall 74), Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota with George Rohac (wall 81), Ngozi Ukazu and Mad Rupert (wall 82), Ru Xu (wall 91A).

Blue Zone
Drawn & Quarterly (wall 1 to 4), Miss Lasko-Gross (table H10A), Whit Taylor (table H14B), Tony Breed (table I3B), Ross Nover (table I10), Natasha Petrovic (table J6), Adam Aylard, David Yoder, Joey Weiser, and Drew Weing, Eleanor Davis (tables K12 to 14), Cartozia Tales (table K8), Lucy Bellwood (table K9), Retrofit Comics (tables L2 and 3), Nilah Magruder (table L6), Shan Murphy (table L10B), Koyama Press (tables M1 and 2), Dustin Harbin (table M4), Carla Speed McNeil (table M7A), Sophie Yanow (table M12A), Toronto Comics Art Festival (table M14), MK Reed (table N1), Gemma Correll (table N2), Sophie Goldstein (N13B), Ed Luce (N14), Fantagraphics (wall 56 to 61).

Red Zone
School of Visual Arts (wall 7 to 8), Colleen Frakes (table B5), former Fleen scribe Anne Thalheimer (table B6A), Liz Pulido (table B8), Zach Morrison (table B11), Jamie Noguchi (table B9), Barry Deutsch (table C13), 2dcloud (tables D1 and 2), Evan Dahm (table D8), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson (table D9), Penina Gal (table D13), Carolyn Belefski (table E4A), Carolyn Nowak (table E6), Carey Pietsch (table E7A), Natalie Riess (table E7B), The New York Review Of Books (table E13B), Liz Prince (table E14A), Falynn Koch and Tucker Waugh (table E14B), Rebecca Mock (table F3A), The Center For Cartoon Studies (table F4), NBM Comics (tables G1 and 2), Tillie Walden (table G3), Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera (table G4), Kori Michele Handwerker and Melanie Gillman (table G5), Adhouse Books (wall 53 to 55).

Yellow Zone
Sara & Tom McHenry (wall 25), Jess Fink and Eric Colossal (wall 28), Danielle Corsetto (wall 29), TopatoCo² (wall 31 to 33), The Nib (wall 34), Meredith Gran and Mike Holmes (wall 35A), Out Of Step Arts³ (wall 44 to 46).

The Small Press Expo runs on Saturday 16 September (11:00am to 7:00pm) and Sunday 17 September (noon to 6:00pm). Admission at the door is US$10 on Sunday, US$15 on Saturday, and US$20 for the weekend.

Spam of the day:

Search for the best gas cards Compare for the best features

What features? You put money on the card, you give it to somebody, they get that much gas. Done.

_______________
¹ Imagine a Miyazaki story with a male protagonist, set in Jules Verne’s Europe, against a backdrop of Prussia’s quest to unify all the German states under their banners (and the threat of an unstoppable fleet of near-space ships as the Romantic period wound down and the Belle Epoque got underway; also, Mad King Ludwig is in it).

It’s a lushly-painted story with a tight story that will be concluded in a second volume; the hdardcover itself is in the dimensions of a children’s book, but clocks in at 60 pages of gorgeous bandes dessinées. Get it for the airship fan you know.

² Including Kate Leth and Abby Howard

³ Including Andrew MacLean, Paul Maybury, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Neil Bramlette.

A review copy of Mighty Jack And The Goblin King was provided by Gina Gagliano at :01 Books; as you might expect, this review will include spoilers.

You gotta give Ben Hatke (comics artist, adventurer, gymnast, archer, fire breather, and a bunch of other things besides) a couple of things: he works fast (more on that in a moment), and he knows how to tie his stories together (also, that). Oh, and he knows how to tell a cracking good yarn.

Mighty Jack released a year ago today, ending on a cruel cliffhanger; yesterday three separate books with his name on the cover were released — two by Ann M Martin (of Baby Sitters Club fame) that he illustrated, and the conclusion to Jack’s story, Mighty Jack And The Goblin King. We’re here to discuss the latter.

Jack, you may recall, is new to the hero business. He kind of made it up as he went along under the tutelage of Lilly from down the block (who’s really much better at the swords and fighting and adventuring stuff, as well as being generally much smarter about things; at that early teens age, girls are much more level headed than boys¹). Magic beans, weird creatures, his sister kidnapped by an ogre at the end of the first book … he has no idea what’s going on, but Maddie is his sister and he loves her and he will charge into whatever unknown fate to get her back.

You see, in those worlds beyond, where magic and space collide, Jack is less a name and more of a title; Jacks are heroes of great renown. To get Maddie back, Jack will have to climb magical plants and defeat giants and he’s just one kid with more ambition than true skill; but unlike all those Jacks from the stories, our Jack isn’t going in alone. He’s got Maddie, and before it’s over he’ll have a classic Shelby Mustang and an army of goblins and a dragon there alongside him.

Most of all he’s got Lilly and her example — she is lost and injured because he was reckless; she defeats the Goblin King and takes his crown (not to mention inheriting the goblin horde that she leads to Jack’s aid); she shows him what the meaning of sacrifice really is.

He feels hurt. He feels loss. He saves his sister (and she saves him in return) and heals the place between worlds and he sees the cost and even if it all works out he feels the sting of his failures. He returns home a bit wiser, a bit more melancholy, sufficiently wealthier (what’s a Jack that returns from the giant lands beyond beanstalk without gold to show for it, after all?), but no smarter about some things staring him in the face².

Things might be getting back to normal, except the goblins declare that it doesn’t matter that King Lilly is going back to her world — Goblins come for her when need³ — and the stranger that sold him the beans back in the first book is hanging around with some familiar friends and they need Jack and Lilly’s help. Nothing too difficult, says the heroine of another series, Just saving the world. Just the sort of thing that calls for a Jack.

And there the circle closes — in that place between worlds, Hatke is able to tie together the casts of Mighty Jack and Zita The Spacegirl and Nobody Likes A Goblin and any other stories he chooses to. All of the heroes — young and old, comic and serious, technological, magical, suburban, other — are part of one story, one that tells us to be brave, be kind, stand by your friends, persevere. Do those things, Hatke tells us, and we can save the world. It’s a heck of a message, one that I think we can all stand to hear as often as he cares to share it with us.

Mighty Jack And The Goblin King is available in bookstores everywhere; get it for your favorite Jack or Lilly (or Zita or Goblin), and maybe give it a good read before you hand it over. All of us, whatever age or condition, we can all be Jacks.

Spam of the day:

No matter who you’re looking for, they’re looking for you too

Hmmm, compelling. But let me counter with another viewpoint courtesy of Jaeger Ayers: No matter how hot you are, no matter how rich, how smart, how cool you are, somebody, somewhere, is sick of your shit.

_______________
¹ Not to mention pretty much every other age.

² Fortunately, Lilly has the gumption — and the advice of a Magic 8-Ball — to act and make the situation clear to him.

³ Although, as Jack notes, they are vague about whether that means when Lilly needs, or when the goblins need.

Readers of this page will likely know a few things about me: I stand second to no man in my admiration for the work of Katie Lane¹, I started in webcomics with You Damn Kid and will wait however long between hiatuses², and I had no real opinion on Pepe the Frog prior to his appropriation by the worst people in America. By extreme coincidence, these three things are all in the news today.

• Katie Lane said it best in a tweet:
  

  I’m tired of creators feeling confused and intimidated when they’re given a contract. So I made a thing. http://bit.ly/2xpFNth

  The thing in question is a free e-course for artists and freelancers on how to read contracts; don’t let the vaguely clickbait wording on the landing page deter you — this is solid information, it’s free, and Lane is undercutting her own professional practice by teaching potential clients to do something that they might have hired her to do for them. She just cares that much.

  So click the link, add your email, confirm your request, and about a minute later the first message will hit your inbox. You’ll get daily emails for the next four days, with advice on how to read a contract³, written for normal people. Why aren’t you doing this? I’m doing this because reading a contract is something I taught myself to do when signing a mortgage and I figure I can always use better info that what I figured out by my lonesome.

• Owne Dunne has been telling the stories of You Damn Kid and associated strips for as long as I’ve been reading webcomics; probably longer. The first webcomics stuff I ever obtained for money were a book, print, and t-shirt featuring the iconic Frog Rocket Wiener, and I’ve been sharing that factoid since at least 2008. He’s done many, many strips since I started reading back in Aught-Aught, or even Ninety-Nine. And while the original launch date of 12 June may have been a bit ambitious, but it’s here at last.

  While I was expecting either Classic style or New style YDK, and would have been thrilled for something related to Nippleshine Manor (RIP), the first animated short comes courtesy of Norman P Function, and concerns Stink Lines, dog adoption, and teaching canines methods of birth control that do not involve chop[ping your] nads off. It’s as exactly as uncontrolled as you suspect.

• There’s very little Matt Furie can do to reclaim Pepe the Frog; he killed Pepe off and Kickstarted to try to revive the positive aspects of the character. Terrible, terrible people, on the other hand, outnumber Furie by about a squazillion to one. One of those terrible, terrible people recently self-published (and later signed a contract with conservative-leaning Post Hill Press) a children’s book starring a frog called Pepe defending his farm from menacing Muslims.

  That shit would not stand.

  The terrible, terrible person behind this book (a vice principal in a Dallas suburb, until all of this hit) admitted to the blatant copyright violation and worked out an agreement with Furie’s lawyers in a very few days. The book has been pulled from Amazon and no longer appears in Post Hill’s Coming Soon section.

  Best of all, the terrible, terrible person behind this book has had to surrender all the money he made from it (a little over US$1500) and, at Furie’s insistence, is giving it to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Furie is a badass, and terrible, terrible people ought not to forget that.

Current fundraising for Houston total: US$100

Spam of the day:

True Wireless Earbuds With Amazing Sound

Man, I’d lose the buds I have now if they didn’t end up dangling from my iPod. Pass.

_______________
¹ Light-ning Law-yer!!

² Hiati?

³ But not advice on what the terms mean; for starters, those vary state to state. You still need a lawyer and oh damn now you know one that’s giving you valuable info for free who would be happy to have you as a client (as long as you’re not a jerk; jerks need not apply).

Hey, the weather is distinctly non-Augustlike and I want to get out there, so how about a couple of quick pointers and we all enjoy the weekend? Got two things to share.

• Great news from Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, who’ve been away from one of their signature creations for too damn long. Capture Creatures has been incomplete and hiatused for too damn long … two years or so by my count. I have theories¹ as to why this is, but Gibson and Dreistadt are too polite to confirm these suppositions.

  But good news:

  Capture Creatures returns in 2018!

  I’ll try to get a confirmation if this is a relaunch, a continuation of the interrupted original run, or something else. Since I’m on the far end of the continent from Gibson & Dreistadt, I won’t be able to use my traditional technique of buying them drinks and hoping they volunteer something². In the meantime, dust off the old issues and refamiliarize yourself with Jory and Tamzen in anticipation. 2018 cannot come too soon.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a little breaking news about the insanest fight manga to not come from Japan, Last Man:

  Last Man [the animated series, last mentioned here] will air in English on [streaming app] VRV starting August 25th [i.e.: today] at 6:00pm ET, and director Jérémie Périn will be a special guest at Crunchyroll Expo [running today through Sunday at the Santa Clara Expo Center).

  As previously mentioned, Last Man (the book series) is batshit insane and good, and the fact that the tie-in series will be available to those of us on this side of the Atlantic is welcome news. Now to wait for the final volumes to get finished, translated, and released because boy howdy! Book 6 ended on one hell of a cliffhanger and I needs me some closure.

Spam of the day:

Free Trial Radar

Whoa, you’re giving away radar? Is that like a cut-down home version to keep track of your drones?

Free Makeup Brush – Claim Yours Now

Oh. It’s like a radar for finding free offers on completely ordinary stuff. Talk about burying the lede.

_______________
¹ Namely, that the chronic disorganization and crappy (not to mention slow-walked) payment model at BOOM! ran into somebody that said no. I surmise that BOOM! is trying to treat the pair as they treat their work-for-hire newbies and don’t know institutionally how to interact with somebody that has the experience and knowledge to enforce their contractual rights.

To be 100% fair, for every BOOM! creator I’ve spoken to that has experience terrible treatment (on the business side, not the editorial side), I’ve spoken to another that has zero complaints and has been perfectly happy. How much of this is luck, or how much it’s BOOM! picking strategically who gets their limited attention³.

² I plied both Dreistadt and Gibson with excellent drinks in San Diego (adjacent to a wall decorated in 3D-printed human skulls, apparently left over from a Rob Zombie video shoot.), and could not get them to tell me anything on the record. As I recall, the conversation went something like this:

All: These are great drinks!
Me: Care to confirm my theories about how you’re getting screwed on Capture Creatures?
B&F: Nope!
Me: Fair enough. Let’s have more great drinks!

That’s some hard-hitting investigative pseudojournalism there, let me tell you.

³ Apparently, there was a time where BOOM! editor Shannon Watters was responsible for literally dozens of titles at the same time. I’ve gone back to pull their publication history and check mastheads, but I have been told by numerous sources that the number was upwards of fifty. That’s five-zero. If true, no matter how short a period, BOOM! was putting the crunch culture of Silicon Valley to shame as fucking amateurs in the field of running their people into the ground.

The thing about webcomics and webcomicky people? Always doing new stuff. Let’s see what some longtime creators are up to.

• Item! Jamie Noguchi has been away from Yellow Peril for a while, thanks to the demands of a young human in his household and the freelancer’s life. We got some really cool George Takei biocomics out of the hiatus, so that’s okay. And it appears that behind the scenes, Noguchi has been working on something related to his one true love.

  I speak, naturally, of tokusatsu, the Japanese entertainment genre featuring rubbersuit monsters and overly dramatic young people saving the world with giant robots, karate, motorbikes, and possibly Spider-man. Noguchi knows his way around tokusatsu, with a series of videos explaining what’s up with the various Rider- and Ranger-type series.

  And the new project? Well, we have to wait another week or so:

  Alright! There we go! And starting September 1, you’ll see what this dumb thing is all about! #tokutember

  I suspect this will be better than the time a pair of puppets slap-fought each other in a train-themed Ranger series.

• Item! Meredith Gran may have wrapped Octopus Pie but that doesn’t mean she’s idle. What would you most like to see from her? If you said a point and click adventure game, it’s your lucky day:
  

  a few weeks ago I started working on a point + click adventure game, my first attempt at such a thing. it’s going to be my next project!

  it’s so nebulous right now that I’m having trouble formally announcing things. I’m not fundraising at this time – just developing

  but I will be updating patreon soon with info about it. at this time I’m really just looking for a sustained income so I can focus on it

• Item! Not only is Vera Brosgol’s new book about to drop, it appears her last graphic novel — the stellar Anya’s Ghost — is going to get the screen treatment:
  

  Soooo here’s a thing!

  The quoted treat leads to a Deadline Hollywood story about the production of the feature film, with shooting set to begin later this year. Everybody feel good for Vera, and wave to her as she sets off for a life of Hollywood glamour.

• Item! Any day that Anthony Clark posts pretty much anything — a comic, a sketch, a picture of a cool dog he met that day — is, by definition, better than a day without Anthony Clark posting anything. What with his wizard-a-day series for 2017 (posted today: #235, Badminton Wizard), there’s been plenty of days better than there otherwise would have been in an otherwise terrible year. And if any of those wizards particularly catches your fancy, but you don’t want to scroll back through a lengthy Twitter thread, there’s now a Wizard Gallery! And you can buy prints of your favorite wizards through TopatoCo!

Spam of the day:

Isabella (91) Don’t Miss To Checkout My~Private~Profile, Hot Photos Inside

It’s possible that the (91) is just indicating that this is the 91st Isabella to send me an allegedly sexy spam, but it’s also possible that (91) is meant to be an age, which makes the similar spam from Leanna (3) especially icky.

On account of I do the majority of my blog writing in midafternoon, and against all past historical precedent, it’s clear skies for today’s solar eclipse. I needed to ease back in anyway, so let’s do this briefly, yeah? Since I’ve been gone, there have been two things I noticed in my greatly-reduced webcomics-attention-paying:

• Ugly Hill! Oh good glob, Ugly Hill! There’s nothing at that link, and even the Wayback Machine has most all of the art missing, but Paul Southworth has brought it back via his Patreon:
  

  ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m re-releasing “Ugly Hill” from the beginning for $5 Patreon subscribers starting Monday, 8/7/17! https://www.patreon.com/southworth

  Add this to the recent revival of Lake Gary and we’re getting what all that is good and right in the world tells us we deserve: hideous Southworthian creatures behaving terribly. And it will go on forever; at five updates a week, it may take four or five years to get through the entirety of Ugly Hill.

• The latest Iron Circus anthology sent out its call for submissions. FTL, Y’all takes as its theme the prompt of a cheap faster-than-light drive — like two hundred dollars cheap — and asks for stories of the situations that result. As readers of this page will recall Iron Circus Benevolent Dictator For Life Spike Trotman runs successful projects that pay (including, historically, bonuses based on how the Kickstarts go), but that she does not suffer fools gladly.

  Got a great idea for the anthology you want considered? Great! Read the damn FAQ first so you don’t waste your time. Then read the damn submission guidelines so you don’t waste Spike’s time, or that of project editor Amanda Lefrenais. I can pretty much promise you that the best looking and most original story in the known universe will be kicked to the reject pile if you don’t follow the guidelines. Submissions close 15 September, and contributors will be announced 15 October.

Okay, time to observe the majesty of the universe.

Spam of the day:

Partner_of_Credit_One_Bank
Find Your Perfect Credit Card!

Wow. They claim to be Credit One Bank in the images included in the email, but can’t bring themselves to maintain that fiction in the return address. They’re really just a partner of Credit One Bank! (they’re not)