As I note every year about this time, people get busy with family, holidays, and taking the heck off from the usual grind — I’m speaking primarily of creators here, but heck, I do it too — and thus the amount of news coming out may not justify a post every day. When I have news, I’ll share; when it’s less than usual, I may condense into fewer days. Expect much of the next two weeks to be slight.

• But before we go, there’s a bit that I really ought to mention. We at Fleen have long observed Let’s go to David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc from afar, and one memorable occasion in the past year, up close across a cafe table in midtown Manhattan. We’ve mentioned that after more than a decade and thousands of updates he produced his first print collection on the backs of a https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dmmaus/irregular-webcomic-burning-down-the-alehouse
  and the able help of Make That Thing.

  What I failed to mention is that said print collection, Irregular Webcomic: Burning Down The Alehouse (a copy of which he gifted to me some months back; it’s an odd experience, reading page after page of just one storyline of Morgan-Mar’s, even though his site is set up to do exactly that if you want) is available for general purchase over TopatoCo way, now that the backers have been fulfilled.

  The fault is mine because if you wanted it for the holidays, that’s basically impossible even if you live across the street from TopatoCo’s work camp state of the art shipping facility for toiling happy labor drones packing elves of pure happiness and light. But you know what endears you to giftees? Saying I am thinking about you at all times of the year, not just the Yule-adjacent holidays and I got you this I’m totally not late for Christmas, honest. It’s worth a shot.

• That thing I was excited about last week? The first part of it happened; the second part requires a confluence of events that are not in my control (including a general state of the world not being crazyballs bonkers) and so I’m not getting into specifics yet. Let’s just say that Scott McCloud’s habit of passing journalists towards me may have resulted in an interview¹ that will possibly provide some quotes and context for a story to run on a major, non-fake media outlet sometime next week. Maybe².

Spam of the day:

Last Chance! Make Christmas Magical for a Special Child

Sure, I’ll totally do that by signing a kid up for your “official letter from Santa” and giving you all their contact information so you can get them into your databases while they’re still young and vulnerable. I am completely that much of a monster.

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¹ With a journalist whose name anagrams to the seasonally-appropriate A Yule Band.

² cf: the world not being crazyballs bonkers, meaning they might get to it the third week of August.

Possibly also bad, and maybe stupid¹. There’s loads of things going on. To wit:

• The second half of the Calista Brill interview is up at The Beat, and it’s just as enlightening as the first part.
• The first new installment of Kazu Kibuishi’s webcomic, Copper, in forever (the previous installment was April of 2009, before Amulet Book 2 was out) has been released to the wide world, and Kibuishi’s dog-and-his-boy team haven’t missed a step. It’s entirely in character with all the previous episodes, but you know what caught my eye? That hanging lamp, which puts a Schulzian overtone on the vignette. Fred, Copper, don’t be strangers.
• Le Millionnaire est mort, vive le millionnaire: Tony Millionaire announced the end of Maakies today and pointed us all towards his new comic venture, Rickets & Scurvy at about the same time. While not necessarily a webcomic, Maakies has had more than its share of influence on the webcomickin’ world; particularly given the demise of alternative newspapers, the comics that would have wound up there are online these days, in large part to Millionaire and his contemporaries.
• You know how I can tell Brad Guigar is doing good with his ongoing exploration of smut? He’s shutting down a project that probably didn’t take much of his time and from which he clearly derived a lot of dad-joke amusement², presumably due to being busy with the aforementioned smut. Tales From The Con has been running at the Emerald City Comicon site for more than four year, featuring a rotating cast of artists depicting Guigar’s takes on what the con circuit is like from both sides of the exhibitor table. But comes now the news that TFTC is wrapping its run and going out with a new softcover collection of all 250+ strips, available for preorder now
• But the biggest news in webcomics today is also the biggest webcomic I can ever recall seeing from Zach Weinersmith — 62 panels³ of deep-dive on quantum computing (with a writing assist from Scott Aaronson), which is a pretty damn good primer on an entire field of theoretical work, in the form of a parent and teen sex talk. Enjoy a week’s worth of funny and nerdery all in a single sitting, thanks to a burning desire to (as per the secret punchline behind the big red button) make Randall Munroe look like a slacker. Bravo.

Spam of the day:

1 Weird Trick to Regrow Your Hair in 60 Days (it works!)

and

??ir falling out? Want thicker, healthier hair?

Whatever else may be true about me, whatever my sins and shortcomings, I legit have a head full of thick, magnificent hair. I have for reals gotten compliments on it from strangers. If I use either your weird trick or your Keranique™ treatment, I fear it may turn into a replay of The Beard.

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¹ I’m tempted to distill it down to the Zappaesque Dumb all over, an’ maybe even a little ugly on the side, but then I decided not to. PS: Hi Brett and Rich.

² Case in point: most recent strip, which I suppose may be the last.

³ Sure, Weinersmith regularly goes from single panel to a dozen or more, but this is waaaay outside his usual length. Previous similar atypically long single comics: 50 states, 50 slogans, any particular installment of Ducks.

And the dearth of news is hitting hard. Plans are being made for festive fun times — whether that’s Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Day, or the premiere of Star Wars 3.5, everybody’s got somewhere to be in the next fortnight. Deadlines are coming on fast for ordering stuff if you want it in time to wrap and give as a gift (for example, TopatoCo’s judgment of shipping realities is here, and they’ve been at this a long time and have things down to a science; other shops may not be able to get stuff to you as well). The Best of lists haven’t come out yet, the world is still a mess¹, and it’s a slow news day. There’s gonna be more of these until after the first week of the new year, I suspect.

But there’s a nice chunky read for you over at The Beat, where Alexander Lu talks with :01 Books Executive Editor Calista Brill (Part 1 is up now, Part 2 is due sometime today). I’d describe Brill as the secret weapon of :01, except:

• She’s not a secret
• Pretty much everybody over there qualifies as a secret weapon, in the sense that they’re all indispensable, do their jobs quietly, and are super-effective

It says something about :01 Books and the culture that Mark Siegel has put together that the core staff of eight or nine years ago is still there (except for book designer extraordinaire Collen AF Venable, who only left because another publisher offered her an art director job … and she’s still at :01 as an author), and I suspect will be there unless they get head-hunted to head up imprints elsewhere.

They’re staffing up and expanding their publishing pace (roughly doubling both) without sacrificing their famed quality, and Brill’s discerning eye (with respect to both acquisitions and improving books) is a big part of why they’re succeeding. Go read about somebody that works hard while enjoying the crap out of her job, to the benefit of all of us.

Spam of the day:

shoes are a breeding ground for fungus

I guess that’s why you’re trying to sell me knockoff designer handbags instead of knockoff designer shoes?

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¹ Which is why I should issue a periodic reminder about the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund² and how we’re still matching donations. I know a lot of you creators are doing similar things, and I will absolutely match your own efforts.

² Thanks to faithful reader Roo for the suggestion that prompted me to decide on a name.

New book to come, books for the past year getting recognition. It’s a book kind of day.

• While I may be slightly wondering what I’ve got to do to launch big announcements, instead of it going to CBR and Comics Alliance (or to niche, non-comics outlets like Entertainment Weekly and the LA Times), I understand it’s a matter of reach. I mean, well-known webcomicker that I’ve covered extensively gets to launch a new book with a major publisher of graphic novels, you want to get the eyeballs on that. I’m not jealous, I’m not mad¹, I’m just happy I can talk about something I first saw a loooong time ago.

  Evan Dahm has a new book on the way from :01 Books, with the announcement by Oliver Sava at The AV Club. Island Book (for that is its name) is not part of the existing Overside stories, and it’s not an illustrated edition of a classic American story². It’s a standalone story, about a young girl (in the Dahmian sense, which is to say that the people of this story are not remotely human) named Sola who is ostracized by her island-living, seafaring people because when she was little, a monster on a rampage didn’t kill her.

  It seemed to like her.

  And now her fisher-folk think that she’s responsible.

  It may be that you don’t get quite that much from the preview that :01 provided, but here’s where I have a secret to share — I’ve seen the first 25 or so pages of Island Book; it didn’t have a title then, and Dahm wasn’t sure if he was going to develop the story to full length, and in the long run from first idea to publication (it’s not due until winter of 2019³) it will inevitably change. Heck, what I saw amounts to not even the opening scene to establish the need for Sola to head out on adventures on the great wide ocean.

  But what I saw was full of Dahm’s trademark ability to make us care about characters from the get-go, to fill in just enough detail that it’s clear that more (much more!) will be revealed, and to reassure us that the journey will be worth it. Island Story will likely be 250 – 300 pages, meaning it’s a relatively short tale for Dahm. The most exciting thing is that over the next three years he’ll only get better as a writer and artist, and the book will be all the more compelling for it.

• And if you want more to read for the next three years, can I recommend you check out NPR’s annual recommendations (specifically, the comics and graphic novels section)? You’ll find webcomics and webcomickers like Kate Leth (on Hellcat), Kate Beaton (King Baby), Jason Shiga (Demon), Lisa Hanawalt (Hot Dog Taste Test), and the ubiquitous Raina Telgemeier (Ghosts).

Spam of the day:

F?nd the Best Walk-In Bathtub Deals near your city

I didn’t realize that walk-in bathtub deals were so common that there would be a price disparity. Learn something new every day.

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¹ I am glad that Ryan Estrada gives me his exclusives. Thanks, Ryan!

² Speaking of which, get on that Moby-Dick Kickstarter already. It’s five days from conclusion and hasn’t hit goal yet.

³ Which means you’ve got time to read Rice Boy and Order Of Tales, and I’ll give a 50/50 shot that Vattu is concluded by then.

Fun fact, I was in the audience in New York City when This American Life recorded Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Milestones¹ (episode #174, celebrating their fifth anniversary), which was also my introduction to the sick, tight dance moves of OK Go. Not quite anything so momentous today, but still worth noting them.

• First and foremost, let us acknowledge that today marks ten years of Erfworld², by Rob Balder and (to date) three artists: Jamie Noguchi, Xin Ye, and David Hahn (with Ye the current and most prolific of the contributing artists). Balder’s written more than 725 pages of comics since — sometimes literally, since a significant number of those updates are not comics pages, but pages of text with inset illustrations, which take a lot more words than a comic script.

  Along the way, he’s built perhaps the deepest, world-buildiest, detail-richest, backstory and lore of any comics work (not just webcomics) of similar age. Certainly, the entirety of the DC or Marvel multiverse has more nerdly details (or even better, Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder, which at least has an intentional mythology around it, instead of being the side-effect of hundreds of conflicting writers retconning into what’s supposed to be a cohesive whole), but they’ve taken many decades to get there. Along the way, he also pioneered a patronage support model that (if my memory serves me correctly) predated Patreon. It’s quite an achievement for only ten years.

• Regarding yesterday’s reports on Anthony Clark and a mediocre pizza chain, the latest news is that Little Caesar’s have removed the thieved content but have not offered any compensation to Clark. Confidential to Little Caesar’s — the offense didn’t end because you stopped using something stolen from an artist, and you still owe him money.
• Still on the unhappy end of things, Colorist Supreme Steve Hamaker reports that his webcomic, PLOX, is currently down. Really down, as his hosting company managed to lose the entire site. I can think of webcomics sites that have been taken down for various durations by scammers, hackers, and griefers — Bad Gods, Anders Loves Maria, Hark! A Vagrant, The Abominable Charles Christopher off the top of my head — but this is the first time I can think of because of sheer incompetence on the part of a host. Then again, it was apparently GoDaddy.

  Hamaker’s not a web admin, and when your host says Uh we deleted your database k thanks bye even web admins may not have a lot to go on; PLOX will come back, but there will be delays as prior commitments take up his time. Fortunately, Hamaker’s got a Patreon that he can use to push out new updates, and I suspect that supporting him there will help to speed along the restoration of the archives and the design/implementation/launch of the new site (hopefully far, far away from GoDaddy).

• MoCCA Fest 2017, y’all. Saturday and Sunday, 1st & 2nd of April 2017 at Metropolitan West, programming at the local Kimpton Hotel, guests of honor to include Official MacArthur Genius Gene Luen Yang.
• Wonder what Gene Ambaum is up to when he’s not writing Library Comic? How about risking his own personal sanity for your education and edification? Read, if you dare, his review of Sweet Bro And Hella Jeff.

Spam of the day:

?ost Affordable Way To Get A Good Night’s Sleep

Booze? I’m going with booze.

_______________
¹ I met Ira Glass, and Sarah Vowell, and Russell Banks, and Ira’s dad, and Dan Savage, and David Rakoff (who told me he hated me, then decided he didn’t when it turned out we shared a birthday). Earlier that year I was on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (but the archive doesn’t go back that far) and as a result I have Carl Kasell’s voice on my home answering machine, where he reads a haiku of my own invention. It was a good year for me with respect to public media.

² I possibly should have titled today’s post Welcome to Erf, but honestly that was the stupidest line in Independence Day.

Changes coming at us, changes from the past writ down so we don’t forget them. Let’s do this thing.

• It’s a bittersweet thing, to see a webcomic wrap up; on the one hand, it’s a triumphant message, as the creator intended, an underline on a section of life concluded and new adventures begun. On the other hand, my Mondays will be less joyous without Angela Melick’s Wasted Talent cluing me in as to what’s happening in Vancouver, in bikes, in swords, in engineering, in battles for thermostatic supremacy, and in general in her life. I’m grateful for all that she chose to share over the past
  

  Eleven years, five books. A degree, two co-op jobs and three career jobs, five residences, a marriage and half a dozen broken bones.

  She left out swords, but I’ll take it as well as congratulate Melick on her constant growth and reinvention as a person, as well as her last-two–WT-books Kickstarter (which wraps up in about 30 hours as I write, this, and which just hit the final stretch goal of CAN$60,000 of a CAN$33,000 goal). Look kindly on us from your bike orbiting in the sky¹; thank you for always using your powers for good and for awesome.

• Know who pretty much invented the reinvention game? Actually, that’s not quite right; Fitzgerald was wrong about their being no second acts² and plenty of people make their livings from constant reinvention — your Madonnas, your Ladies Gaga, etc. But one person invented becoming other people so thoroughly, and switching identities back and forth like your or I would switch clothing³, befuddling and bewildering all who observed from near and far.

  I speak, of course, of the dearly missed (although I suspect nobody 100% truly believes he’s dead, even if most of us are 99.997% sure) Andrew G “Andy” Kaufman. Much has been written about him, many stories have been told by people that knew him, and there’s about to be one more. And who better to tell the story of the self-proclaimed Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World and Fred Blassie interlocutor than wrestling superfan Box Brown?

  In fact, it’s such a great idea that they officially announced it today, in Playboy magazine, no less:

  [W]e’re proud to announce the release, in February 2018, of a graphic novel that revisits Kaufman’s brilliant and tragically short career—a career that thrived audience discomfort, confusion and anger, delivered by a man whose death at 35 is still viewed by some as an extremely slow-burning hoax.

  Author and artist Box Brown, whose book Tetris: The Games People Play came out earlier this year, returns to the biographical chops he displayed in his best-selling book Andre the Giant: Life and Legend.

  Two quick notes:

  1. Although the announcement was in Playboy, the book is from Brown’s regular publisher, :01 Books
  2. In case you’re at work and the filters don’t let you click through to the story (and excerpt pages), point out that Playboy has been SFW for nine months now.

  Some of you (including Brown himself) may be too young to remember Kaufman on Saturday Night Live or Late Night With David Letterman and only experienced him secondhand. Take it from those of us that remember — Kaufman was as weird as you’ve heard and weirder still. It suffused him, it ran from every pore in his body. Crispin Glover on his most bizarre day looked flat out fucking normal next to the living contradiction of Andy Kaufman; he contained more lives running simultaneously than anybody before or since.

  Is This Guy For Real?, written and illustrated by Box Brown, will be released in 2018. Pricing and exact date to be announced.

Spam of the day:

Thinking about retirement? Let us help.

Godsdammit, people — I’m old, but I’m not that old. Stay off my inbox’s lawn.

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¹ Anybody who can achieve escape velocity (approximately 11.2km/sec) on bicycle clearly has powers that dwarf those of mere mortals.

² Then again, I think he was wrong about most things, his writing ability chief among them. Yeah, that’s right, F Scott Fitzgerald is a hack, his books suck, fight me.

³ There’s probably a Final Fantasy game mechanic that resembles taking off one life and putting on another.

How’s December treating you so far? Me, I’m glad that this absolute kidney stone of a year¹ is coming finally to an end, and also that it appears not to have claimed Buzz Aldrin as it was threatening to do. You’ll have to do better than that to get Buzz, 2016!

Anyway. WordPress is acting up, so here’s a quick rundown:

• You know whose ass 2016 can kiss, on account of she is unstoppable and undestroyable by conventional means? Spike Trotman, that’s whose. Back over the summer she announced what the next Iron Circus Comics anthology would be, and today she opened the call for submissions. Take ‘er away, Spike:
  

  The Tim’rous Beastie anthology project is now open for submissions. We’ll be accepting them between Dec 1st, 2016 and Jan 1st, 2017. The full list of anthology participants will be announced Jan 15th, except in the instance we receive more submissions than expected, in which case this may be extended 1 week to accommodate volume.

  This is an anthology by and for those of us who grew up inspired by Redwall, The Deptford Mice, Rats of NIMH, and other tales of brave and imperiled critters defying their size and place in the natural order. We want to not only channel that inspiration into the medium of comics, but to approach familiar themes with fresh eyes.

  Tim’rous Beastie will be a joint venture, with Amanda Lafrenais as Managing Editor and Iron Circus Comics publishing and distributing.

  Thoughts:

  • With Lafrenais acting as editor on this project, Spike is developing a farm team of creative partners that can be delegated to; this is important given that she’s got like a dozen and a half projects scheduled for the near- to mid-term, and is now coordinating national-scale distribution for ICC. It’s no longer a one-person enterprise over there in Chicago, and she’s building up the talent pool. Ten bucks says in ten years she’s running a company that publishes as many pages per annum as any of the second-tier comics publishers do today.
  • Creators already announced on Beastie include Evan Dahm, Abby Howard, and KC Green, hecka yeah.
  • If you’re going to submit for glob’s sake read the guidelines thoroughly; every time Spike announces an anthology, somebody or other doesn’t follow the rules then bitches at length about how they’re being discriminated against because blah, blah, blah. She’s gotta be sick of that shit by now, and I’ma go out on a limb and guess that anybody that doesn’t follow the rules will find their submission tossed without a moment’s regret.
• Pat Race is tireless in his efforts to bring Art and Comics and Fun to his corner of the world (that would be Juneau, Alaska), and that trend continues tomorrow as his Alaska Robotics Gallery from tomorrow, as his new show (Postcards From Juneau by name) opens with the traditional cheese and crackers. Gallery hours are noon to 6:00pm local time, but I suspect that if you bring Pat a beer, he’ll hang out with you after closing for a while.
• The XOXO Festival — celebrating independent creators of art, technology, society, etc; think TED without the multinational corporate approval — has done a nice job of posting video of its talks and presentations. A new one went up yesterday that’s well worth the half hour it’ll take to watch.

  David Rees has been many things: a webcomicker, one of the first to really dig deep on the War on Terror; an artisanal pencil sharpener; a TV host that celebrated the profundity of the everyday. He’s also an inveterate record-keeper, and in XOXO’s new video, he tells us about his new podcast with This American Life vet Starlee Kine and the economics of the creative life. Specifically, his personal economics, laid bare and transparent to a degree that would make the President-elect melt. There have been really useful peeks inside the monetary curtain from the likes of Dorothy Gambrell and Erika Moen/Matthew Nolan in the past, but the sheer breadth of what Rees shares makes it uniquely valuable. Go watch.

Spam of the day:

Should these be legal? The military recently released technology that is not available to the public.

Okay, one, it they released it then it’s available to the public. Think before you hit publish, people! Two, you’re talking about a friggin’ pair of sunglasses. It’s not exactly the realm of secret technology that could affect national security. Get a grip.

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¹ Fun story — the oldest comic strip I can remember reading is a Doonesbury strip from late December sometime around 1978 or ’79. Mike and Zonker are talking about how bad life sucks and Mike notes that his his grandfather always said This too shall pass about bad times. He and Zonker agree to the sentiment and toast: To the worst of times! To a kidney stone of a year! as a boop-boop heavy disco song comes on the jukebox.

That punchline has stayed with me for near on 40 years now. Comics, everybody.

I hate to rush you, what with this being the busy time of year for so many people, but there’s a couple of things you really can’t sleep on.

• So we’re down to the final week of both Angela Melick’s Kickstart to print the final two volumes of Wasted Talent, and Angela Melick’s weekly autobio webcomic, Wasted Talent. In fact, we’re now at the next to last strip, with The Big Finish hitting next Monday, 5 December.

  One side effect of the strip wrapping is that Melick has decided that continuing to ship merch and books for a discontinued project is not how she wants to spend her copious free time, and so her store will be shutting down:

  The print edition books that are kickstarting now will NOT be available online for sale later on. I will no longer be traveling regularly to conventions to sell print edition books. I will still make convention appearances, but these appearances will be infrequent and selective, and the number of print books I bring will be very limited.

  No definite date for the store shutdown, but it largely doesn’t matter — if she’s not putting the new books in the store, the time to get them is now, via the Kickstarter campaign (which, by-the-bye, is currently sitting at 153% of goal, and stretched to the point where I’ll get a slipcase box for my previous books, so thanks for that). Get them now if you ever intended to get them, and honestly? Given how book 3 ended, books 4 and 5 form a reasonably complete story.

• Another temporary sale event is going on, but this is more in the sense of a pop-up vending rather than the wrap-up of an ongoing enterprise. David Malki ! is using Kickstarter as a straight storefront for his annual calendrical offering — the tenth! — of odd “facts” and odder holidays. Given that these only come up once a year and start their usefulness on 1 January, the campaign is super short: it will run only another six days, for a total of 14 days.

  Other Malkidian wonders are also up for sale at his permanent store, including holiday-[in]appropriate cards and the ever-fun multipurpose cards; given the number of checkboxes on the latter, you can give the same card to just about anybody for just about any reason¹.

Spam of the day:

They are looking for sex now!

Forgive me for my cynicism, but I don’t actually believe that (given the photo attached) a lesser Kardashian sister is attempting through your alleged dating site to have squishytimes with me. Just a hunch.

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¹ Seriously, though. Just one card covers thanks for everything from a commemorative plate of Commander Riker to sex acts, with the duration of thanks lasting from fleeting until the end of all things.

Where to start, where to start, on this drear and wet Tuesday (there are worse things, certainly), oh but where to start?

• How about here: KB “Otter” Spangler is perhaps the person I’ve met via webomics who has had the greatest influence on me; she was the first to ask me to contribute to a print collection (the forward here), the first to threaten me with horrific violence, in many circumstances has been the first to console me on loss, congratulate me on good fortune, smack me when I need it, and generally be the retroactive weirdo best friend from high school that movies and TV tell you you’re supposed to have¹. She also weathers house-related horrors that would crush an ordinary human.

  I’ve been an early reader/kibitzer on each of her novels, and on occasion my nitpicking has been mildly helpful (or at least not actively detrimental). That habit continued with the latest novel — the fourth (of seven) in her Rachel Peng series — which is out today; my involvement in the creation of this latest book may affect my impartiality, so take it with a grain of salt when I tell you that I love her words², unabashedly, and want the entire world to enjoy them.

  Said latest book — Brute Force, available today in a variety of formats — has been somewhat delayed by actual life catching up to what’s supposed to be a contemporary slightly SF plotline, where technology, media, sociopaths, nationalists, and authoritarians blend in ways that society and rules couldn’t predict³. Bad situations and poor alternatives lead to sometimes terrible decisions, and consequences echo both to early books and are left to be resolved in later. There are also dick jokes.

In other news:

• Holy glob, KC Green warned us he was taking a week off of He Is A Good Boy to catch up with other things, but never hinted it was to drop a new chapter of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio on us! Oh, Pinocchio, will you ever stop making bad decisions?
• Interesting! Kel McDonald has a new Kickstart going — nothing unusual there, this is her tenth after all — with a couple of interesting things I’ve not seen before: a) She’s working with an art team instead of drawing things herself with Kara Leopold on pictures and Whitney Cogar providing colors; b) And this is the really interesting part, the rewards for this campaign are entirely digital.

  [Super]Natural Attraction is described as a digital comic series, with the US$5000 goal dedicated to paying Cogar and Leopold for the first 22 page chapter of the story; each additional five grand will provide for another chapter, with ten chapters agreed to by the creative team. With nothing to ship, nothing to manufacture, and the high-tier rewards adding in PDFs of McDonald’s earlier work, this is as close to a no-risk situation for a creator as ever I’ve seen. It’ll be interesting to watch if other creators get on the digital-only bandwagon, and if Luddite obsessive dead-tree collectors (cough, cough) can ever be convinced to join up. If nothing else, it makes the reward structure far more affordable for backers.

Updating the charity contributions matching drive: we have our first suggestion for an improved name for this thing. The Fleen Future Fighters Fund is much better than my initial thought (Welcome To Screwtrumpistan⁴, Population: Us). Anybody else want to chime in?

Spam of the day:

Are you tired of battling the look of the belly bulge and/or muffin top?

AM I? Oh, boy, tell me more about this amazing camisole/bra combo!

_______________
¹ Her love of bad movies is so legendary, I made her a plush sharktopus for her birthday. It was supposed to be for her wedding, but you now how long it takes to sew tentacles on a plush shark?

² Not her writing, mind, but her words. What she does it beyond the mechanical act of arranging words in a particular order according to rules of grammar and syntax; she is closer to retaining the power and might of capital-w Words like might be found in some great wizard tapping into forces primordial and/or primeval. I love your words is a nearly unique sentiment, one that I’ve only ever expressed to one other person, who likewise languagebends in ways that make me swoon.

³ I know, far-fetched, right? Leave out the one bit of implausible technology and the rest is still so improbable it would never happen.

⁴ With a node to KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed, which nicely brings us full circle.

Oh my, but things happened during the extended break time for the blog; the American version of Thanksgiving, of course, but also the travel associated with same (ugh), a birthday of note (that of Jon Rosenberg¹, who is killing it with the Trump comics these days because you have to laugh), some weekend EMT duty, pie, and the gift of a really excellent book that I am enjoying the hell out of.

Oh, yeah, and some webcomics things happened since we last saw each other. Let’s do it.

• Honestly, I expected to see a lot more of this in the cultural media, or even more in the comics media: Alison Bechdel updated Dykes To Watch Out For for the first time in forever. Cultural touchstone, Eisner laureate, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, creator of the source material for a musical that’s garnered literally dozens of awards, and — oh, yeah — MacArthur Fellow, Bechdel was a self-syndicated cartoonist for two and a half decades with DTWOF, which for at least a third of that time meant puttin’ ’em up on the web, which means webcomics. It’s a shame that the prompt for the strip was an act of collective national insanity.
• We mentioned Evan Dahm’s Kickstarter for an illustrated edition of Moby-Dick ’bout two weeks back, and we’re happy to report that he’s about 65% of the way to goal with 15 days to go. We’re even happier to note that he spent some time to share with us his process of typesetting the text, to honor the original material while matching with the illustrations. If you’re a type geek, this is the sort of stuff that makes your heart sing.
• For those of you looking to get books for the younger readers in your life in the upcoming gifting season, Gene Luen Yang (best selling author, MacArthur Fellow, Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature) has you covered, bucko. Thanks to the twitterfeed of Yang’s publisher (and all-around wonderful people) :01 Books, we can all check out a list of five recommendations that Yang made adjacent to an interview in the Washington Post (Post staffers add another dozen-plus, both illustrated and not).
• From over the long weekend, there’s a damn good interview with Sophie Goldstein at Paperdroids. It’s deep on process and light on fluff, so dig in.

Updating the charity contributions matching drive²: as of today, you have donated more than US$1200 towards a US$10K goal. Donations will be matched through 20 January.

Spam of the day:

G?t an SUV with the latest cold weather features

I will never own an SUV, and I already have a small station wagon with all wheel drive, wiper-defrosters, and butt-warmers. What more could I need?

______________
¹ Okay, and me, since Jon and I share a birthday. I may have been born six years earlier, but somehow he’s the grumpy old guy and I’m the grumpy moderately younger guy. Proof of my theory that kids age the crap out of you.

² It needs a catchier name. Suggestions welcomed.