But first, for all of you creators and readers in the Pacific Northwest, please stay safe as the murderstorm bears down on you.

• Sad news to start: Amanda Lafrenais lost her brother, Chris Volesky, at the start of the week. Just 27 years old, he died in his sleep. Sudden expenses can damage any family’s economic standing; when it’s for a funeral, the gut-punch is even harder to bear. You can help out at the GoFundMe page that Lafrenais set up.
• It appears that I’ve managed to not mention Cartoon Crossroads Columbus at all this year¹, although I’m pretty sure I mentioned it when The Spurge was announced his intentions to debut last year, following his move to the Columbus area. The goal of CXC is ambitious: to do a stateside version of Angouleme, presumably without the incredibly sexist and moronic executive director (hi, Franck!)

  You’ve got a cluster of super-talented folks up there (Jeff Smith not the least), not to mention Ohio University and the Jenny Robb-curated Billy Ireland collection therein, where a triannual gathering of comics luminaries sets the stage for getting Big Name Folks to drop in. My mistake, too late to urge you to go (unless you’re local), and I’ll try to do better next year.

• We’re down to the final six days of the Check, Please! Year Two print collection Kickstart and Ngozi Ukazu is sitting on more than US$312,000 in pledges, with Kicktraq projecting just about US$400K as a final total. I suspect that a last-minute fan rush (and there are some seriously serious fans of the hell of cute hockey boys, some of whom are also hell of gay) will push it beyond, but we shall see.
• Holy crap, Matt Bors has an actual entertainment industry development deal for The Nib, which is as free-wheeling and unsafe an environment for the notoriously risk-averse Hollywood machine to find itself in as could possibly exist. I can’t wait to see what may (or, given that it’s Hollywood, may not) come of this deal. But either way — Bors has put something important together, and has been noted on this page in the past, he pays his contributors. On that last score alone, I consider this to be nothing less than a karmic reward.
• Oh, yeah, and Chris Onstad made me actually laugh out loud at Roast Beef’s latest blogpost and the description of children whose number two is more like a one-point-three. Holy crap (phrasing), that’s a perfect, perfect, completely gross and still perfect turn of phrase. Bravo.
• Finally, some very skilled people are taking the entire piss out of Cheeto Jesus and you can either purchase a copy, or get one for free with a donation to defeat what he and his Trumpaloompas² stand for. Be sure to listen to the audiobook, too.

Spam of the day:

GET YOUR DREAM BATHROOM IDEAS

My dream bathroom idea is pretty much that the stuff I don’t want goes away without fail. Beyond that, I’m pretty easy.

______________
¹ Thanks to alert reader Ben Cordes for calling me on it.

² Tip o’ the hat to Charlie Pierce, whose formulation I like slightly better than Ken White’s Trumpalos, primarily for its mental invocation of orangeness.

I keep hearing radio stories and reading articles about how there’s this great new book about Tetris, of all things, celebrating the 30 years that the game has been rewiring the brains of Westerners.

And you know what? They’re all talking about the wrong book. Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure that Dan Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect (named for the phenomenon where people hallucinated or dreamed falling Tetris pieces) is a fine book, but when it comes to complex ideas about a fundamentally visual medium, you need a different kind of guidebook.

Enter Tetris: The Games People Play by Box Brown¹, which shows us the (long, twisted, filled with machinations and actual Murdochesque media-tycoon villains) history of Tetris, its creators, and the effect it had not only on the videogame industry (it could arguably be said to have made Nintendo into a household name and killed at least two other companies), but on our actual brains.

Like Brown’s last nonfiction graphic novel, he’s taken a topic that most people would regard as Cool, but how much is there really to say about it? and found depths. He knows when to go broad, when to go deep, and how to let the outsized personalities in the story create their own character development. He finds the story behind the surface that nearly everybody knows, and his simple, chunky art is ideal for expressing something complex and making it relatable².

Which, if you think about it, is kind of perfect for the complex-yet-minimal-on-the-surface Tetris itself. I don’t know if there will be a Tetris effect, but Brown’s book is nearly as compelling and addictive as its namesake.

??????r?nt?t????n???m?s, bad credit OK
translation: cheap rent to own homes

Look-alike letters interspersed with actual roman characters to get around pattern-matching blacklists? You suck for that, but you suck even more for being the most exploitative industry on the damn planet.

_______________
¹ Out today from :01 Books, who were kind enough to supply me with a review copy some months back.

² cf: Chapter Two of Understanding Comics.

Well, that turned out to be less disastrous that it could have (in that the bill was about 10% of the bad outcome, but still greater than most people could throw together on short notice — I’m lucky to have the ability to keep an emergency repairs slush fund without too much sacrifice), but required a bunch of time and it’s still not quite done. Missed a bunch of stuff while I was gone, too:

• Announcement of the monthly TopatoCo Drink ‘n’ Draw, the last for 2016 if my memory serves
• The return of The Abominable Charles Christopher (these pups are going to learn not to screw with Vivol, and if Luga was around he’d knock sense into them)
• The release of Tyler Page’s Raised On Ritalin print collection to the general public (last month when I was in Minneapolis, Page and his wife Cori Doerrfeld graciously had me over for dinner and a lively discussion with our mutual friend Raina Telgemeier)
• An update from France from esteemed Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin (that one’s not time-sensitive and appears below)
• An entire convention

On the other hand, I am around to catch some timely things, like:

• The incomparable Hope Larson (comics maestra, ice cream maker extraordinaire, and caterpillar wrangler to the stars) has found enough time in her schedule (between Batgirl and her next book, out sometime in 2018) to resume Solo¹, or the news that after fifteen years, 4500 strips, and one-and-a-half creative teams, Unshelved is coming to an end next month.
• There’s also word of a benefit for the Cartoon Art Museum (reminder: they’ve been sleeping on the couches of other museums for a while now, and could really use some help getting back to a place of their own) next month, featuring cast members of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra:
  

  Go behind the scenes of The Legend of Korra and Avatar: The Last Airbender with special guests voice actors Janet Varney, John Michael Higgins, Mindy Sterling, Dante Basco and Avatar: Legacy illustrator Dan Parsons. Cosplay highly encouraged! All ages welcome.

  The event will be 19 November, starting at 7:00pm, at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco. General admission tickets at US$28, with premium tickets (which get you an autograph from each special guest) for US$38, with CAM members receiving a 10% discount. Tickets can be purchased via the Friends For Benefits website and are likely going to go fast.

And, as promised:

Team Maliki has just unveiled the first self-published Maliki collection, and to the surprise of absolutely no one they have launched a preorder [French version] for it on a crowdfunding platform called Ulule [English version]. One aspect which stands out is the use of “books” rather than “sum collected” to define stretch goals.

Gary here. That’s a new one on me — I’m going to have to think about how it differs from regular currency-based stretch goals, but it could allow a project with multiple forms of a book (PDF, softcover, hardcover, limited edition, retailer discount multi-packs) to count equally towards stretch goals. Interesting.

[T]here is some precedent for a French comics campaign of this scale, which in fact may be a daunting yardstick to be compared to; I couldn’t cover it at the time, as it was before I took up the mantle of Fleen Senior French Correspondent in January of this year, so this is the ideal opportunity to introduce it as background …

Laurel [Duermael, athough she’s mononymic in her work], while French, lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband, and works there as an illustrator, mostly for Docker. She maintains a comics blog about her life there. Don’t be misled by her seemingly happy style, as she can deal serious blows, whether it is to cover her experience (French-only) dealing with the French consulate in San Francisco, or to excoriate (French-only) French magazine Biba and Little Market for a “competition” that amounted to providing illustration work for little more than exposure (and you know what they say about exposure).

Her blog is currently taken up by a story (only in French so far) titled Comme Convenu [As Agreed] which is inspired by her experience starting out in the Bay Area in a video game startup. Around this time last year, she launched a crowdfunding campaign on Ulule as a preorder for printing the first volume, with a goal of €9167.

It ended up funding in about one hour. After about one day, it was already 800% funded. It ended up funding at 2,860%² (no, this is not a typo). And remember, the story and book are only available in French, so this couldn’t have been tapping in the established English-speaking comics crowdfunding audience.

Of course, Maliki: Blog does not need to reach the same kind of total amount to be considered a success, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up overfunding in a similar fashion.

At present, Maliki: Blog has pledges for 3414 books (on a goal of 1000); as those are spread out across three different quality levels (Classic, Collector, Super Collector), it’s hard to say how much money it represents, but if everybody only opted for the lowest tier, that would be nearly €70,000³. With just over two weeks left to go, Maliki seems like as not to hit €100K.

Spam of the day:

Mighty Dolly

Okay, so they’re pretending to sell me industrial warehouse equipment for moving heavy loads but you know what? If they told me that their dolly product was named Parton, I’d click on the link because Dolly Parton rules.

_______________
¹ I really dig Solo; it’s her most adult (in the sense of acknowledging that being an adult can suck sometimes) and melancholy work to date, I think. In case you were wondering, no Karl Lagerfeld here.

² That would be in excess of a quarter-million Euro. If I have my exchange rates correct, that would have been just shy of US$300,000.

³ Conversely, if they all opted for Super Collector, it would be over €170K; just a €100K margin of uncertainty, no big. Oh, and as of this writing, €1 is a buck-eleven (US$1.1139 to be exact, which there’s no point in being since it’s gonna float).

Ready for the weekend? Me too. Let’s look ahead just a bit, though.

• The 5th of October is gonna be a fun one in comics shops, as it will see the debut of both the original graphic novel Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe (Ryan North and Erica Henderson), but also the reissues with comic shop safe covers of Oh Joy, Sex Toy (Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan) volumes 1 and 2. For added bonus fun, Oh Joy, Sex Toy volume 3 will hit a mere month later, on 9 November.

  The latter is brand new to everybody, what with Moen & Nolan’s deal with Oni Press imprint Limerence moderating the need for a Kickstarter campaign this time². It’s a great time to see webcomics folks in the traditional store channel, particularly since it’s because of such fun topics as a) Squirrel Girl, and b) sexytimes.

• As long as we’re talking about the next couple of weeks, the Cartoon Art Museum continues its outreach and education programs whilst simultaneously looking for new digs. Next up: weekly adult classes on character creation (October 13, 20, & 27) and visual story design (November 3, 10, & 17) at CAM’s temporary educational space, 275 5th Street in San Francisco.

  Classes run for two hours each (6:30pm to 8:30pm), at a cost of US$135 for the public and US$100 for CAM members. Considering individual membership only runs US$45 (US$35 for students), that’s practically the cost of a year’s support there in the discount.

  Oh, and in-session materials will be provided, but you may want to pick up some basic tools (pencils, choice of inking tool, paper, sketchbooks) for homework/practice. The session sign-ups are found at the links above.

So it’s a bit rainy and a bit melancholy and a whole lot Fall-y¹, which is very possibly the best season. Get out there and enjoy it. See you back on Monday.

Spam of the day:

[block of kanji I’m not going to look up Unicode for and paste in individually]/VIRUS DETECTION(SMTP,Trojan:W97M/MaliciousMacro.GEN)

Oh my goodness, a throwaway address in Japan is warning me about viruses on my computer! Whatever shall I do? [hits the delete button, goes to get more tea]

_______________
¹ Note to readers in the Southern Hemisphere: it is so Fall. If you claim it’s Spring, fine, but here it’s Fall.

² This point was previously worded differently, and poorly. The intent is: a Kickstart is well and good, and will meet immediate needs as well as supply a modest inventory for store sales. A publisher means reprints as necessary and enough stock to supply as many comic shops as come calling without the danger of going out of print. Fleen regrets the clumsy construction caused by poor wording.

The Drive hardcover Kickstart has wrapped, and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has come up about eight bucks shy of 300% funding¹, which means we all get fancy endpapers, ribbon bookmarks, spot gloss, dust covers, a stack of e-books, and a download of STRIPPED along with our comics. Yikes, givin’ away the store, LArDK!

When the campaign launched, I noted that Kellett’s trick of giving the heads-up to his Patreon supporters (giving them first crack at limited rewards — very smart) skewed the first-day numbers, preventing my usual analysis with the Fleen Funding Formula (Mark II). Now that it’s all said and done, I’m going to see what the FFF mk2 would have predicted and compare against the actual finish.

To reiterate: the FFF mk2 looks at the Kicktraq projection at the 24-30 hour mark and divides that value by 4 for the midpoint of the projection. That midpoint is further divided by 5 to get the margin of error². That gives Drive a predicted finish of US$110K +/- 22K, or a range of US$88K to US$132K. Actual finish: US$104.7K, or pretty damn close to the midpoint. For contrast, the McDonald Ratio³ predicts US$97K, also well within the margin of error (and likely more accurate for lower-backer-count campaigns). This is the first head-to-head comparison I’ve had for the two tools, and I’m tentatively convinced (ask me again after another dozen trials) that they’re equally useful.

Now starts the long wait for printing and shipping and setting up Gumroad with all the digital downloads; the books should go out around February, by which time we’ll have built up another two or three Tales From The Drive guest stories, and who knows how much more details of the Pilot’s War and the Second Spanish Empire. Can’t wait to see where it all leads.

Spam of the day:

Strathmore Professional — Congratulations! You’ve been selected to Join Strathmore’s Who’s Who Network

Damn, I thought somebody was going to offer me Strathmore paper that I could give to an artist friend. Stupid spammers.

______________
¹ It’s actually closer to three hundo, but eight bucks sounds funnier.

² Futher, the FFF mk2 is only used for campaigns that have at least 200 backers in that initial period.

³ From Kel McDonald’s observation that the first three days equals one third of the final total

Some of these will concern you, some will grab at your sense of empathy, some will intrigue; basically we’re all over the place today.

• I’m very interested to see what the unintended consequences of a new law in California concerning the sales of autographs/autographed memorabilia will do to the major comics shows. Via the twitterfeed of author Amy Stewart, a new law (presumably intended to keep people from buying fake autographs/tchotchkes for big bucks) will require any signed item (think books and art) costing more than five damn dollars (think: everything) to come with a certificate of authenticity with a seven year retention requirement.

  It might be that people at SDCC next year are forced into the charade of selling books/prints/whatever and making the person who bought it then come back for a separate signature. It may be that the “signed & sketched” price variant is actually illegal. It may mean that California-residing creators can no longer supply pre-signed merch to stores (think Raina Telgemeier and the signed copies that bookstores have of Ghosts … they’ll have to dump stock yesterday or risk sanctions that I don’t know how to determine under California’s Civil Code).

  Okay, the summary of the bill indicates that the person signing things is exempt, but resellers appear not to be. Raina can sign a book without recordkeeping, but any comic shop or bookstore with a signed by the author! sticker on books is potentially screwed. California creators/vendors, your thoughts please.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a dispatch regarding a Kickstarter that’s burning up the webcomics category in two languages:
  

  Commit Strip, the strip about the daily life of coders, has launched a Kickstarter for their new book collection, and their first in English, at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/commitstrip/commitstrip-rise-of-the-coders-a-book-about-the-fu. And about 24 hours in they [had] already blown past twice their (admittedly modest) goal. Note that, much like the Last Man campaign, they have rewards in multiple languages but had to set up a separate page for the French description of the campaign as Kickstarter does not support campaigns in multiple languages.

  That last bit surprises me. I wonder if KS would object if you just had a bunch of text in more than one language, or set up support alternating languages but with identical price points and rewards. Certainly that would be a pain; I wonder what our friends to the bilingual north think about this particular feature lack.

• We’ve spoken here at Fleen about Something Terrible, and the burden that Dean Trippe has taken upon himself, because the key thing about being Batman is, you don’t want any other people to have to be Batman. Your trauma defined your adulthood, but you can use that to help others not become as I Am The Night as you wound up; for Trippe, it means making himself available¹ to other survivors of childhood sexual abuse and creating his own impromptu Bat-Family, meeting and offering solace to one person at a time.

  But there’s more people out there than you can meet one at a time that need him, so Trippe’s gone the media route. Last Friday saw the launch of the Something Terrible podcast, hosted by Trippe and no doubt finding its own direction for future episodes. Trippe calls it a mission², I call it a most unfortunately necessary public service that I absolutely will not be listening to; I’m not burying my head in the sand, but in order to keep myself where I need to be to help when necessary³, I need to deal with trauma-bearing people individually, in person, as the need arises. I can’t go seeking them out.

  But those on the other side of the equation, who don’t have my luxury of distancing themselves? Who need Batman to avoid becoming Batman? The Something Terrible podcast is going to be a godsend. Here’s hoping you never have to subscribe.

Spam of the day:

Search For Baby Shower Gifts Options

The one part of the patriarchy and general male privilege that I will gleefully engage in is the general pass I get for baby showers. I know that makes me a terrible feminist, but this is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me. I will die in it at the stake. PS: Benedick rules.

______________
¹ I suspect, on occasion, to his own detriment. Dean, there’s a reason that they tell you to secure your own mask before helping others — if you aren’t well and whole, you can’t be of assistance to them, no matter how much they need it. Don’t overdo it, please.

² A very Batman-like approach to it, I must say.

³ Occasional reminder: I am an active Emergency Medical Technician.

YOU get an event, and YOU get an event, EVERYBODY gets an event to go to!

• In conjunction with NYCC (which, ahem, has decided not to credential me), there will be an off-site, open to everybody pair of events at a branch of the NY Public Library during NYCC weekend. First up: Friday, 7 October in Greenwich Village at the Jefferson Market Library from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Guests include Ryan North and Box Brown. Then on Saturday the 8th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm at the 53rd Street Library, the all-ages panel will include Rebecca Mock and Carey Pietsch. The events are free, but do require registration, so hit the links to reserve your spot.
• No time to bask in the glory of Geniusdom, Gene Luen Yang is on tour for the latest Secret Coders collection — featuring Mike Holmes on art — from :01 Books, starting tomorrow at the National Book Festival in DC. He’ll be bouncing around — New York, Naperville, IL, Cincinnati, Dallas, Albuquerque, and Denver — for the next ten days or so. Locations, dates, and times here.
• Big news for Ben Hatke — Zita The Spacegirl has been picked up for animation by Fox; as she so often does, Heidi Mac’s The Beat has the story by Alexander Lu, who seems to be getting all the good stories lately. There’s hardly a better story for middle grade readers than Zita, so I’m looking forward to the final product. In the meantime, Hatke’s on tour to promote Mighty Jack, starting Monday in Louisville, Kentucky and bouncing mostly around the midwest until 4 October (special congrats to Naperville, which also shows up on Hatke’s schedule). Details and dates here.
• The Check, Please! Kickstarter has passed the three-day mark, meaning we can now compare the FFF mk2 with the McDoanld Ratio — named for Kel McDonald, who predicts that the first three days of funding will equal one third the total — and see how they stack up. Recall that the very steep dropoff after day one (representing fanatical, pent-up, no-delay-brooked demand instead of a more gradual decision to yeah, I’ll back that) throws off the Fleen Funding Formula (Mark II). The day three total is US$206,586, giving an MR value of US$619,758, against an FFF mk2 value of US$750K +/- 150K — approximately in line with each other (at least, in the same order of magnitude); we’ll be able to see which came closer in another 28 days.

Spam of the day:

REPLACE MISSING TEETH IN A DAY!

Dude, if you were able to repair what was shown in that photo (it was gross) in a day, the arc of Raina Telgemeier’s career would have been very different. You lyin’.

I promise, it will eventually become clear why I have a picture of Frank and Ike up top, but if you’re expecting a quote from Thing-Fish, you’re probably on the right track.

• Let’s go to David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator), who notes in the comments yesterday that he’s also blocked from accessing Oh Joy, Sex Toy [NSFW if your work sucks], on the basis of “Pornography”. It’s not an accurate basis, but if you’re gonna block stuff, porn makes more sense than education.

  Morgan-Mar speculates further than his test may have resulted in a black mark on his personnel record, but due to good fortune, it probably only counts as 90% of a black mark, as he’s now only 90% of an employee¹:

  1a. My Patreon campaign has reached the significant milestone of $700 per month. I set this up as a goal to enable me to reduce my salaried working hours from 10 to 9 days per fortnight, freeing up a full day every 2 weeks to make more comics and do other creative activities. The first immediate effect is a doubling of new Irregular Webcomic! output, from 2 strips to 4 strips a week. I have a business trip last week of September, so this change will take effect from Monday 3 October. Thank you to all the patrons who have enabled this!

  1b. To help enable the change to 4 new strips a week and mesh with my time away on the business trip, IWC’s new strip schedule will change from Sunday/Thursday to Monday/Thursday for the week 25 Sep-1 Oct, and then to Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri beginning on Monday 3 October. Other days will be reruns with new commentary.

  Congratulations to Morgan-Mar, and to all that have helped him to make more comics.

• Meanwhile, a long-awaited pair of books is on the horizon, as Danielle Corsetto announced Girls With Slingshots Books 9 and 10, bringing the longrunning webcomic (currently in recolored reruns with director’s commentary) to a conclusion in print. Please note the unusually tight turnaround — there are but ten days to raise the oddly-specific amount of US$10,934. The short duration is so that Corsetto can hopefully get the books to people in time for the holidays.
• As long as we’re at Kickstarter, the campaign for book 2 of Check, Please! is tearing up the site, with more than 2000 backers and US$180,000 pledged in a bit more than 24 hours. The Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II would have us believe that Ngozi Ukazu would reap on the order of US$750K +/- US$150K, but I notice something here that tends to give the formula a bit of trouble:

  There was an enormous first-day surge, and then a tremendous drop-off to day 2 … the same thing happened with the This Is Fine plush, which led to an overestimation. While there’s certainly a history of KS campaigns dropping off after the first day, pent-up demand of this sort tends to skew the math. I’ma wait to see what the McDonald Ratio says after tomorrow and decide if the FFF mk2 needs tweaking, but heck if I won’t be thrilled if Check, Please! actually hits the 750 large.

• Elsewhere on the web, Larry El Santo Cruz has been absent from Webcomics Overlook for about forever, but he’s back! An account of the Blerch Run in Seattle on Sunday, an analysis of Webcomics: Still A Thing? yesterday, and a piece on webcomics, webtoons, and phones today. It’s the middle one I want to talk about.

  El Santo’s a smart guy, and if he’s musing on if webcomics is still a meaningful term, I’m all ears. I got pulled up short, though, when he concluded his comparison of webcomics against its nearest competitors (newspaper strips once, memes now) with this description:

  Webcomics exist in that nebulous undefined region between passing fad and real art, with aspiring artists edging toward the latter. But… due to the market reality, most webcomics are not the best in either field. Too good to be a meme, not got enough to be art.

  I get what he’s trying to say, but to say that webcomics are not got [sic] enough to be art is, at best, short-sighted. To pull up merely the most recent examples of webcomics embodying art — and here, I’m defining that as the ability to convey point of view and emotion, not merely the visual component — consider two Achewoods and one Schlock Mercenary of current vintage.

  Everything you need to know about Ray, Cornelius, and Téodor is encapsulated in that wordplay; the depth of character is staggering, whether you’ve ever visited Achewood before or not. And I’d challenge you to find a bit of dialogue that expresses the costs of soldiering — a topic that is overlooked far too easily while we engage in prominent displays of support for the troops — more succinctly or with deeper understanding than that discussion between an uplifted polar bear, a four-armed alien, and a sociopathic amorphous blob with a sudden attack of conscience. To paraphrase the immortal Ike Willis, I got yo art hangin’, boy².

  Which is me being overly wordy in saying: we settled this a long time ago. Webcomics are comics. Comics are art. The transitive closure is left as an exercise for the reader, as is my instruction that you all bookmark The Webcomics Overlook and pay attention to El Santo.

• Hey, the next Science Comic from Dantecus Shepherr is up, this one dealing with the refrigeration cycle; per the note at the bottom of the comic, the artwork for this one (and the rest of the series) will be part of a gallery show in Belfast, Maine from Friday. Shepherr will be there, so drop in and say howdy to him in the actual art gallery because webomics are art, goddammit.

Spam of the day:

SeniorSoulmates — ???r??R?l?t??n??????t?rt??With a Date

Please do not send me spam for senior citizen dating. I’m not that old, and the hidden control characters in your text make me suspect you’re looking not for old people to get laid, but for old people to steal from with evil embedded code. Drop dead.

_______________
¹ Morgan-Mar’s newsbox isn’t directly linkable, so I have copied all the relevant text.

² ‘long wit a two-week supply of IGNINT McNUGGET, de breakfast o’ champiums!

Okay, so I make it a policy to not read certain comics during the work hours — NSFW means something different to everybody, after all. But a misclick today brought up a blocker when the browser requested Oh Joy, Sex Toy, which is fair enough. Everybody has a right to decide what is displayed in their own environs. But the reason cited — that’s pissing me the hell off and fairly emblematic of so many damn problems we have because America, as a country, is way too hung¹ up about sex. Not blocked for sexual content or situations, not blocked on the basis of explicitness, blocked because sex education is forbidden. This one time, I’ma say Screw you, nanny filter; you suck.

Let’s talk about happier things, any of which should have contributed the header image for today’s post instead of that dumbassery. In fact, let’s have multiple header images because these other items deserve it.

The Ghosts tour rolled into Minneapolis last night and I’ve never seen a crowd of 10 to 14 year olds so physically unable to sit still, they were vibrating at the excitement of being in the same room as Raina Telgemeier. The presentation is a tight half-hour of Ghosts read-along (with audience sound effects), inspirations, past books, and how comics are made. The crowd was larger than what’s shown in the photo by at least a third in that room, plus an overflow room down the hall. The folks at UMinn had the signing down to a science, with numbered tickets being called in groups of twenty, and comics-drawing activities for those waiting. A++++, would attend again.

Boulet’s avatar generator is now an app, with an even wider range of features and expressions. Download the Bouletmaton for Android, and I dunno about Apple but if this means for once we get the app first and the iPhone users gotta wait, I’m fine with that.

Ngozi Ukazu does a hella cute, irregularly scheduled webcomic about college hockey that I can only read about twice a year because I have to read the story in chunks. She had a hella blowout Kickstarter for a Year One print edition last spring, and she’s just blown the damn doors off of the Year Two campaign, launching (as of this writing) in the past three hours and already past 1300 backers and 117 damn thousand American dollars cash money, holy crap.

Speaking of Kickstarter, Brandon Bird just put one up for his latest creative project — I have internally referred to each of these as an Art Thing — and it’s a doozy. Bird wants to make a lowrider dedicated to the late Jerry Orbach: half art car, half statement of purpose for a life lived following your muse, wherever that leads. In this case, hopefully, to an impromptu back-alley competition to see whose Jerry Orbach tribute car can bounce the highest.

Who wants serialied fiction? T Kingfisher, the authorial pseudonym of Digger² creator Ursula Vernon had one of those stories that just wouldn’t go away, and so wrote out 90,000 words and has decided that her Patreon support is such that she can release it for free, Tuesdays and Thursdays (with bonus material on Sundays) until it’s complete. It’s a through-the-portal story, but not the kind you read as kids, which starts with a young girl named Summer — not allowed to do anything thanks to her overprotective mother — being surprised by the sight of a house on chicken legs over the back fence.

Baba Yaga is nobody’s kindly fairy godmother, and when she offers Summer her heart’s desire (or to suck the marrow from her bones … could go either way, really) it’s pretty certain that wherever Summer ends up, she’s going to come back different — sadder, wiser perhaps, very possibly scarred inside or out. Summer In Orcus starts today; read the introduction to get where Vernon’s coming from, then dive into Chapter 1 and join me in counting down to Thursday.

Finally, Tillie Walden picked up a couple of Ignatzen over the weekend (Promising New Talent for I Love This Part and Outstanding Artist for The End Of Summer), and the :01 Books twitterfeed (with whom she has a book coming; :01, not the twitterfeed) tells us that she’s about to start a weekly webcomic on top of everything else. Per Broken Frontier, it’s titled On A Sunbeam, it debuts next Wednesday, the 28th, and will run weekly. It’s early to tell where the story is going to go, but I’m getting a rebellious prep school students in space vibe, which is a combination of words that pleases me.

Spam of the day:

From: Andrea Chamberlin
To: Me, that is to say, Gary
Message: Hi George, Just checking the emails is this a good one for you?

Tom

Every single name wrong. Good job, team. Good job. Lotta hustle.

_______________
¹ Heh … he said hung.

² Obligatory reminder: I loves me some Digger.

You had to be there, but trust me, it was hilarious.

• This is your periodic reminder that Rosemary Valero-O’Connell is my favorite new creator, and we had a lovely conversation last night. She’ll have a very few copies of her latest mini — the first portion of her graduation thesis, which I am dying to see in print in its full glory — available at her table at SPX this weekend; alas, I can’t make it, but you are all instructed to seek her out (table W44) and tell her I said hi. You must also each look at her comics wares, and if you have any sense realize that they are terrific and resolve (as I have) to get her next big project (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, written by Mariko Tamaki, from :01 Books) the moment it’s available in 2018.
• Speaking of SPX, I don’t believe I’ve mentioned who’s going to be there, possibly because it would be easier to list isn’t going be there. Now SPX is the premiere show for web- and indie-comics creators, from the brand new to the fully established, so likely everybody tabling is somebody you should at least considering talking to, but my eye fell on certain names. It’s by no means a comprehensive list, so feel free to point out any I’m missing. In addition to Valero-O’Connell and Special Guests Lisa Hanawalt, Sarah Glidden, and Sophie Goldstein, you’ll find:

  Aatmaja Pandya (J14), Abby Howard (E3A; not to be confused with Abigail Howard at N6A), Amanda Lefrenais (E2), Ananth Hirsch & Yuko Ota (W71), Audrey & Jamie Noguchi (D8), Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson (W32), Blue Delliquanti (E13B), Box Brown (F1-2A), C Spike Trotman (E1), Carla Speed McNeil (G2B), Chris Yates (TopatoCo’s emporium at W33-36), Clay Yount (C8B-9), Drew Weing (L12B-13), Dustin Harbin (W12B-13A), Eleanor Davis (L12B-13), Eric Colossal & Jess Fink (W37), Evan Dahm (F8), Gemma Correll (W79), James Kochalka (F1-2A)

  <inhale>

  Julia Gfröer (C2), Kate Leth (W30), KC Green (with TopatoCo), Kel McDonald (E2), Lucy Bellwood (L14), Maritza Campos (F9A), Matt Bors (TopatoCo, with the new 2017 The Nib calendar), Matt Lubchansky (TopatoCo), Megan Gedris (K3), Melanie Gillman (E14), Meredith Gran & Mike Holmes (W40A), Miss Lasko-Gross (B1-2), Molly Ostertag (M9B), Noelle Stevenson (W83), Rachel Dukes (M4B), Rebecca Mock (H5A), Ross Nover (C8B-9), Sara & Tom McHenry (W39), and Tony Breed (K11A) (whew!).

• One person that’s not going to be there? “Hurricane Erika” Moen, but that’s okay, because she and husband Matthew Nolan are too busy celebrating the announcement of the Oh Joy, Sex Toy [very] adult coloring book, available from wherever you buy comics, but probably only by request because holy mother of glob, there are hella boners on display. Boners for you to color however you want.

  Oni Press imprint Limerence Press is making good on its promise to provide sexually explicit (but legitimately educational) material to the direct market, also announcing a second adult coloring book, and a graphic novel dealing with queer health; Alexander Lu has the details Heidi Mac’s place. The Oh Joy, Sex Toy Coloring Book will be released on 8 February, just in time for Valentine’s Day sexytimes.

Spam of the day:

Belize Real Estate — Amazing Investment Properties: Now Available

Do I look like a self-deluded dickhead on House Hunters International that is demanding a 4000 square foot center-hall McMansion with all the mod-cons for US$75,000 in an overseas location? Because I assure you, I am an entirely different dickhead.