Where to start, where to start? There’s so much evil running around in the world, we need to grab up the positive where we can find it. Let’s dig in.

• You can say what you like about C Spike Trotman — and in the past, a lot of people did, which opinions she catalogued for future reference/vengeance — but nobody can say that when she sets her mind to something that she will half-ass it. She set ambitious goals for Iron Circus Comics for the 2017-2018 timeframe, including more than a dozen new books (well underway) and finishing up a distribution deal (done!).

  Now that she’s got the ability to put IC books in any bookstore in the country, she’s determined to find the best of independent comics that have been overlooked by major publishers, and she’s gonna shove ’em at libraries and the trade until everybody can see ’em. And she’s starting with one of the very best:

  Real Talk: indie and small press comics are the industry vanguard. They set the pace and predict trends; they’re years ahead of the rest.

  But sometimes, that means independently-published masterpieces never get the dissemination, and wider audience access, they deserve.

  ICC wants to fix that. And we WILL fix that.
  Starting in autumn of 2017.

  When Spike says she WILL do something, understand that arrangements are in place, all will be ready to go, and nothing shy of a multi-state near-extinction-level event will derail those plans. The wider world will soon learn what we in webcomics know (namely that Rice Boy is friggin’ brilliant¹), because she is going to shove the books in front of them until they can’t ignore them. Well done, Spike.

• The influence of webcomickers on the next generation of comics creators continues to grow; Jamie Noguchi is getting ready to join the faculty of Montgomery College, and he’s got the purpose of comics down:
  

  I start teaching comics next week at Montgomery College. Lesson 1, comics are about fighting fascism and hate. Done.

  While comics can advance any view desired (cf: Jack Chick was fabulously successful at advancing a particularly hateful POV with his comics), starting the kids off with a charge to uphold a vision (say, Truth, Justice, and what is still The American Way) via their art is a damn good way to start. Within that overarching philosophical approach, there’s lots of room for opinion:

  • Don’t buy Moleskine. They are entirely too expensive for what we’re planning on doing with them.
  • The Canson Fanboy [bristol] pads, despite the terrible name, have blue guidelines printed on the pages to help you measure panels and keep things proportional.
  • Brushes. Welp. If you thought nibs could be confusing, brushes for cartooning will drive you mad.

  I have a feeling that Professor Noguchi’s classes² will learn as much as Professor Zub’sProfessor Gran’s, Professor Guigar’s, and Professor Corsetto’s³ do and/or did. Heck, as alert reader Mark V noted, the legendary Lynda Barry will be teaching at this year’s Clarion writer’s workshop; there’s a lot of talent out there developing the next generation.

  And everybody that doesn’t get to take classes from the pros? Just recall the Jamie Noguchi System and fuckin’ do it all self-taught style.

Spam of the day:
Okay, this isn’t really spam, since it comes to the Fleen email account as a consequence of being on the press list for various cons; it’s a minor comics publisher that doesn’t really overlap with our interests here at Fleen, but gotta recognize them for the subject line:

So a mustachioed skeleton walks into the jungle …

It’s like they know me. So congrats, Alterna Comics, I’m name dropping MR. CRYPT #3 (US$1.99, digital comic book, all ages) as a result of your email. You win.

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¹ Seriously, how do you get a Jeff Smith blurb on your book and not have publishers drive a dump truck full of money up to your front door?

² For extra credit, be ready to discuss your favorite sentai and kaiju series/movies. Trust me on this one.

³ For those that were smart enough to snag up the Girls With Slingshots book 9/book 10 bundle, some of the lessons that Corsetto gave in her cartooning class are in the back. It’s good stuff!

Know who will always make my day better? Yuko¹ & Ananth², that’s who. Johnny Wander may focus on stories other than autobio for now, but everything those crazy kids touch is great. And last night, they announced a project in keeping with the Kickstarter Make 100 manifesto that I must point you towards.

Presenting the Tarot Riso Printset, a collection of three tarot deck images (if I make them out correctly, Strength, Death, and Temperance) by Ota, done via risograph for that old-school look combined with modern digital convenience and cost efficiency.

Ota’s been creating tarot images in her jewelry designs for a while, and those who want a nice big version of her graphic design (bigger is better than the pendant sizes because you can enjoy it at length without staring at somebody’s chest like a creeper) now have the perfect vehicle to satisfy their itch for pretty things.

As of this writing, 35 of the 100 limited rewards have been claimed. Designs are done, paper’s bought, risograph time arranged. Campaign ends in ten days and the check clears, the spend an afternoon making prints and signing, then the shipping can begin. Quick, no fuss, and backers get an extremely limited-edition set of art prints that will never exist outside this edition of 100.

Oh, and ten minutes ago I got a package from TopatoCo — my copies of Girls With Slingshots, books 9 and 10. If you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do. Try to not let the world burn down while I’m busy.

Spam of the day:

gary.tyrrell, Interested in low in come housing?

Am I? Who isn’t? We’ll all be living there when the economy tanks!

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¹ Ota.

² Hirsh.

So some things have happened since Friday afternoon; for example, Christopher Hastings wrapped up The Adventures of Dr McNinja without the customary end-of-chapter Final Thoughts. I suspect that this is because there is no Dr McNinja any longer, only Dr Patrick Goodrich, and so nobody to give said Final Thoughts. Not to worry, Hastings’s wife, Carly Monardo, brought a Final Thoughts cake to the wrap party Friday night, and somebody else brought Dr McNinja cookies! They were delicious.

• In other news, a slew of awards for youth literature were announced this morning in conjunction with the big ALA convention going on, and surprising absolutely nobody, March, Book 3 is going to have to find some more room on the cover for more stickers indicating more laurels. Unless I missed anything, March is now the recipient of the Excellence In Nonfiction for Young Adults award, the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Author winner, and the Sibert Medal¹.

  Not to be left out, the Alex Awards recognized Ryan North’s Romeo And/Or Juliet, and Vera Brosgol took at friggin’ Caldecott Honor (again, basically the runner-up to the actual winner, but it’s only the most prestigious award for picture books) for Leave Me Alone! Webcomickers are in some seriously good company this awards season. Can’t wait to see what the NCS, Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards bring.

• How about a moment for just a terrific comic? No huge event, no big conclusion, just an example of excellence on an ordinary day. Boulet is kind of the autobio equivalent of Stan Sakai; the work he turns out is uniformly excellent, comic after comic, to the point that you can lose sight of what an accomplished creator he is. Just as writers on comic books must get tired of writing every month Sakai was amazing, again, do you really need me to mention it, any random update at Bouletcorp is going to be beautiful, funny, insightful, or a combination of all three.

  Thus, last Thursday’s update, which is now making the rounds in English. While we haven’t all dodged that particular bullet, I think we can all appreciate just how horrible it might have been; I’m not even on Facebook and I’m sweating over here. Anyway, on a day marked by excellence all around, a tip of the hat to Boulet for making art that grabbed us all by the panic gland.

Spam of the day:

URGENT Message Regarding Your Outstanding Debt

Oh, no! You mean the US$78 I’ve got on my credit cards this month? I’d best sign my house over to you to manage my debt immediately!

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¹ As a side note, the Sibert Honor books — basically, the runners-up — mostly dealt with themes of governmental oppression in some form or another.

You had one about the White Rose youth movement against Hitler, one about surviving Nagasaki, one about being Japanese Americans being interned during World War II, and one about … um, giant squid. Squid are cool.

Any steps forward are a good thing. Hell, at this point I’ll take any day that isn’t a step backwards.

• The thing about webcomics is, no matter how big and audience, or how big an impact on society anybody seems to have, there’s always somebody that’s never even heard of the concept of webcomics and is amazed these things exist. Case in point: Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin pointed me to a story in Venturebeat, of all places, that ties directly into his beat of French [web]comics / bandes desinée [-web] française.

  You may recall that FSFCPL told us about Laurel [Duermael] and her French language autobio comic from Silicon Valley, Comme Convenu, in the context of crowdfunding to print a collection of her webcomics. A crowdfunding that exceeded expectations by about a factor of twenty eight / vingt-huit. Seems that nothing attracts the attention of SV press like success, so Laurel gets a feature about her experiences in startup culture which has to do double duty, explaining not just [web]comics, but also the importance of comics in French culture. And in the middle of that story, one very telling line:

  [Laurel] is now searching for someone to translate the book into English as she is planning her second crowdfunding campaign in early March for the next volume of Comme Convenu.

  If anybody out there is, or knows somebody who is, a qualified French/English translator, do us all a favor and contact Laurel, please. I very much want to read this work, as many volumes of it as there may be.

• I’m going to be pushing the Six-F daily now that we’re down to the last couple of days before it concludes¹. Seems that mentioning it yesterday was a fruitful choice, as the Fund is up more than two thousand damn dollars since I hit Publish not quite 24 hours ago. This is costing me some money.

  Good. Keep it up.

  As a reminder, if you have given any money since Election Day to any of:

  American Civil Liberties Union
  Brennan Center for Justice
  Campaign Zero
  Electronic Frontier Foundation
  International Rescue Committee
  NAACP Legal Defense Fund
  National Resources Defense Council
  Planned Parenthood
  Pro Publica
  Sacred Stone Camp’s GoFundMe
  Syrian Civil Defense aka The White Helmets
  The Trevor Project

  (especially if you’re a creator that had a sale or dedicated a portion of your own profits to these organizations), then email me (gary, who blogs at this here website which is a dot com) because I’m matching your donation. Send the amount, the name of the organization, and how you’d like to be acknowledged (by full name, partial name, or anonymous).

  Matching ends at noon EST on Friday 20 January 2017; all matches will be made in the name of Donald J Trump, except for Planned Parenthood and The Trevor Project, which will be made in the name of Mike Pence.

Spam of the day:

Confirm-Walmart-Order:#7308-Pickup-for-CustomerID-gary.tyrrell- Ready– Mon,-Now!

The only thing that would make me less likely to click on the link in this attempt at thievery is if I thought it actually did some from Walmart and it actually was a US$50 gift card waiting to be claimed. Walmart are evil and fuck them.²

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¹ At least for this year.

² Though very satisfying to type, that’s actually too facile.

Disentangling Walmart from the world economy without hurting anybody other than the billionaires that own it would probably take the rest of my life, so I can’t in good conscience say burn it down.

But I’d be willing to take on the job of carefully taking it apart, burying the remains, and salting the earth so that they never rise again.

Since I spoke to you yesterday, two very cool books have been announced for the near term. Let’s do this.

• There’s a huge trend these days for adult coloring books — no Disney Princesses or sparkleponies here, but abstract designs, tattoo art, great Impressionist paintings and suchlike. Also, it was inevitable for there to be adult coloring books, if you take my meaning and I think you do:
  

  Oh shit, I guess we’re officially announcing it today! :D

  Ready for the sexiest adult coloring book? Pre-order OH JOY SEX TOY: THE COLORING BOOK @ErikaMoen @Plustenstrength! http://bit.ly/2iwR8Ab

  Straight from the pages of Oh Joy, Sex Toy by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan, a color-it-yourself collection of very sexy renditions of the Masturbateers doing all the sexy things they do, will be in comics shops on 8 February (just in time for Valentine’s Day!) from Limerence Press (the sexy division of Oni Press). The great thing about the Masturbateers is that they encompass all shapes, sizes, points along the gender spectrum, body types, adult ages, and degrees of physical ability — everybody is sexy in their own way, and I’ll bet that Moen’s artistic choices have meant a lot of people have seen someone that looks like them portrayed as a sexual person for the first time. Inclusion, y’all: it matters.

• As mentioned last week, Tyler Page’s Nothing Better has been overdue for its third print collection for a while, and at long last it’s here. Lagies and jenglefenz, please allow me to present the Kickstarter for Nothing Better: Great Expectations (Part 1)
  

  It’s been 7 years since the last collection came out though I’ve been sitting on this material for almost two years. I’ve been busy with raising a family, freelance work, and publishing another book [Editor: Raised on Ritalin. So it’s time to give fans what they want in print.

  My goal here is modest – Nothing Better has a small but dedicated group of fans who continue to bug me for more of the comic in print and I’d love to give it to them. So I’m only looking to print 300-400 copies of the book to sell online and at conventions. The book is already done – laid out, designed, and everything. I’ll be working with a great local printer here in Minneapolis so the turnaround shouldn’t be too long.

  The combination of the finished book and the modest goal (only US$1000! Remember what Spike said?) means that Page is only running the campaign for 20 days total, with delivery expected in March, mere weeks after the campaign closes. As of press time, he’s at 41.5% of goal, and a lucky couple-hundred people are going to be able to get a hell of a good book before everybody else. Nothing Better really is that good, so get pledging.

  [Obligatory disclaimer: A review of mine is quoted on the Kickstarter page as a blurb; I have not received any offers or rewards for the use of my words. Also, people that are much more famous than me are also much more succinct than me.]

Spam of the day:

Woman sheds 42 lbs. in 30 days with this simple night-time drink

I’m guessing some kind of horrific toxin.

And on that note, another thing that we’ve seen before: a warning of likely missed updates. I’ll be doing a quick trip that will keep me in motion for much of the next 48 hours, so there may not be a post on Thursday or Friday. I imagine we’ll all manage somehow.

• It’s been a considerable time since we’ve had regular updates at The Last Halloween, and with new characters and storylines introduced in the brief preview back in the Fall, my jonesin’ for TLH is at a high point. There’s been good reasons for the delay, as creator Abby Howard has been working on other projects — projects that pay a damn sight sooner than webcomics do — so this is not a complaint! And, as we learned earlier today, one very large reason for delay is approaching its own end:
  

  AAAAAHH

  Speaking as a backer of the Kickstart to print volume one of TLH, one for whom the book will be the reward for my support, I wish to echo that AAAAAHH because godsdamn is that pretty. Ya done good, Abby, and the decision not to mess around with softcover for this book was briliant That thing looks like a tome of secret and forbidden knowledge.

• Speaking of things coming back into the spotlight, David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc¹ wrapped up his very fun experiment in learning to draw cartoons, Planet Of Hats, back in August. It had taken him about two years (once you account for a two month break) to recap all of the episodes of old-school Trek, including the animated series of my childhood, using twelve panels per hour of story.

  It was particularly fun to see how, when forced to condense descriptions to a few panels and not many words, how silly (or outright bad) some of the old Trek stories were, but also how so many of them can be rightly regarded as classics. And then he was done, no more Original Series stories to tell; he’d decided not to carry the recaps into the subsequent series, and so there was a Trek-shaped void in Wednesdays.

  Until — and I can’t believe I forgot about this until I saw him link it — today.

  Planet Of Hats is back for a final, 12 week run of movie recaps; given the longer nature of the films, each one will get two weeks of recapping, starting today with part one of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This means that in two weeks, we’ll get to see Wrath Of Khan; on the other hand, it means that we’ll have to see Trek V as well (but it’s not worse than some of the third season stinkers … probably).

  There will be plenty of artistic choices for Morgan-Mar to make; for example, ST:TMP is kind of notorious for a couple of things: a scattered crew, a recycled plot, a screaming Chekhov, a transporter accident that was hinted at but not precisely shown⊃2, and a seemingly-interminable fly-around of the Enterprise that took approximately half of the movie’s runtime to conclude. Morgan-Mar is able to dispose of the latter in a single panel that nevertheless hints at the very slow pace of the original³. All in all, a nice way to spend the rest of winter (in the Nothern Hemisphere) or summer (if you’re Morgan-Mar).

Spam of the day:

Read your message before it gets deleted

You’re a psychic — couldn’t you tell on your own I would delete your email without clicking your link?

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¹ I should really program a macro or something for that string; every time I need to type it, I have to go searching through my own archives to make sure I get it right.

² At least not until it was referenced in Galaxy Quest, which is still one of the best three Trek movies ever.

³ And the transporter deal? Pretty tame in the film, low-grade icky here in panel eight, and downright horrifying in the novelization. I know that Reg Barclay took a lot of grief for his transporter phobia in TNG, but keep in mind that this is a guy for whom getting mashed up with another person and turned inside-out while still alive is historical fact.

If you have room on your clothing for pins and don’t feel up to defeating the Empire today¹, you could do far worse than to fill them with a selection from Scott C’s latest offerings. You can choose any four you want from the seven on offer (I’d choose the two dogs, unicorn, and triceratops, myself) for just US$35.

Spam of the day:

My previous post about the financials of creator-owned comics in mainstream retail paints a pretty bleak picture. The risk is high for retailers, creators and publishers, profit margins are thin and making your new comic stand out in a crowded marketplace full of worldwide pop culture icons is an uphill battle at best.

This is … this is the very best machine-generated text meant to slip through spam filters by appearing to be on-topic that I’ve ever encountered. I’m actually impressed, and more than a little concerned that a few more years and I won’t be needed around these parts anymore. We can just get whatever Markhov engine spit this out to post in my stead.

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¹ No pressure! We can’t each fight every fight every day! We have to pace ourselves or the other side will turn our exhaustion to their advantage.

[Edited for clarity: Originally, the Takei/Noguchi story appeared immediately below the Diesel Sweeties story. It was pointed out that having a comic dealing with celebrity death before images of a beloved (but elderly) celebrity could cause a mistaken (and panicky) impression.]

The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles is hosting an exhibit on the life of George Takei, and Yellow Peril creator Jamie Noguchi is doing both the show poster, and a bio comic book that will be given away to museum visitors. Neat!

I think we can all agree that Rich Stevens (as is so often the case) has the right of it.

Vermont’s first cartoon laureate, James Kochalka, gets the spotlight treatment, courtesy of Vermont’s public television network.

Mary Cagle’s Kickstart to print Let’s Speak English continues to tromp all over the place, and having met the basic stretch goals, Cagle announced a goal without limits. For reachig US$25,000, five copies of the book would be donated to libraries; since that goal’s been left in the dust, Cagle announced another copy will go to another library for each additional thousand bucks raised.

At present, that puts her at 17 copies. According to the FFF mk2, she’s on track for a finish of US$104-156K, and the McDonald Ratio puts her in the realm of US$103K; in either case, it looks like 80 to 100 libraries are getting free books, y’all.

And that’s it; normally we make fun of a spammer down here, but I’m giving them the day off.

We’ll be back in the new year, talking about webcomics, the people who make them, the people who read them, and whatever the hell else we feel like talking about. One last reminder: I’m matching donations to a series of good causes, so if you’ve donated (or dedicated sales of your stuff) to any of those organizations listed below the cut, drop me a line.

The Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund will close for the year on the 20th of January, so let me know about your giving before the vulgar talking yam¹ takes the oath of office. 2017 probably has no inclination of being any better than 2016, so we’ll just have to kick its butt until it settles down and friggin’ behaves.

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¹ Hat tip to Charlie Pierce, shit-kicker and hell-raiser extraordinaire.
(more…)

Yesterday (Why, it’s Christmas Day, sir!) a friend was surprised by my lack of distress on the Twitters in re: the announcement from Chris Onstad of Achewood’s newest hiatus. Rather than see this as the latest piece of suck in a year just rife with it, I think that it’s an idea that Onstad has eased us into — there have been hiatii before, and a mostly-weekly schedule for the past year has felt like an extended present more than a full-bore return to form. Reading of the toll that Achewood takes on Onstad:

Achewood takes a huge give from its producer. It’s so slippery, so complex, so vast, so old, and I hold it to such a high standard, it becomes all-encompassing. When I do Achewood, I can’t focus on or give enough time to the securities I need to build for later in life, or to my human relationships. [emphasis original]

left me with a feeling approaching a regretful realization of something that had been in front of me all along, but hadn’t realized it. The highs and lows of the characters — all of them in their own rhythms — obviously take a great deal of effort to bring to fruition. I have always known intuitively that to inhabit the brainspace of Cassandra “Roast Beef” Kazenzakis is to flirt with melancholy the likes of which only our most advanced and depressed poets are equipped to confront, but that is not to say that I ever appreciated consciously the sacrifices that Onstad made in sharing that creation with us. And Beef is but one Dude from a single set of Cirucmstances¹.

And after all, Achewood has gone nowhere — an archive of some of the most brilliant characterization of the past two decades still exists; printed copies of the formative years of the strip and its most famous storyline will live on my bookshelf for as long as I draw breath. Need I add that my purchase from the gallery glares down at me as I write this, and that I regularly make Perfect Oven Fries Every Time?

Thank you for the ride so far Mr Onstad; those who read and understand Achewood and those who would begrudge this stepping-awy … well, let’s say that the Venn diagram of those two groups hell of looks like an eight. When the novel is written, when the syrup line extends, when you have no choice but to return to Achewood Court and The Underground, we’ll be here to welcome you with much crispy Stellas.

Oh, and some other things happened, too.

• As was noted last week, Mary Cagle started her Kickstarter campaign for a print edition of Let’s Speak English and promptly blew through her goal about two hours in and (as of this writing, about three hours after the launch announcement) is currently sitting at a tidy 150% of full funding.
• While the traditional etiquette books would have you believe that eight years of marriage is marked by gifts of bronze or pottery, it appears that (as with the prior seven) doodles are an acceptable substitute. Happy eighth anniversary to Ian & Jess McConville.
• Re: today’s Dinosaur Comics rerun is actually true; we also teach baby EMTs to use Stayin’ Alive by The Bee Gees, as it is slightly more positive in outlook.

Okay, that’s it for today; catch you next time something happens, or possibly in the new year.

Spam of the day:

Marissa Cooper (Gmail Team) sent you a message

Because when Gmail’s message team sends me an email on Gmail about my Gmail account they always mark it this message may attempt to steal your identity.

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¹ Although I suspect that inhabiting other characters was likely a tonic — Cornelius, say, or Ramses Luther Smuckles.

It’s Christamas Eve–Eve–Eve, and even closer to Hanukkah, and everybody’s wrapping up work for the week in anticipation. But on Monday, stuff happens again:

It’s official! The Kickstarter for the Let’s Speak English book collection will go live on December 26th! A Boxing Day Bonanza!

That would be the print collection of Let’s Speak English, the comic autobio of Mary Cagle’s time as an elementary school English-language teacher in Japan. Brief moments from her various days, occasional repeating characters, and a slowly diminishing sense of being a fish out of water are found through the 134 strip (or about two year) run. The only thing I don’t absolutely love about LSE is that Cagle, a world-class colorist, chose to do it in black and white.

Sure, you could say that she’s just following the form of yonkoma, Japanese four-panel vertical comics, and you’d be right; I just think that her adventures in Japan would have been even better with color is all. I’m greedy that way. Since she’s promising us extras in the book, maybe she’ll do as many weekly comics in Japan do, and toss a few full-color pages at the front. That’d be neat.

Regardless, it’s going to be a fun and charming book, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the campaign come the 26th. If we don’t see each other again before then, have a great weekend, have a terrific holiday of your choice, and let’s all get out of this absolute stinker of a year and try to make 2017 less of a trash fire¹.

Spam of the day:

I Like To Play With Toys Productions

Weirdly, this was not porn spam. Crazy, right?

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¹ There is value and nobility in the attempt. And hey, have I mentioned the Six-F lately? Still gathering funds for matching!