Pretty sweet being an unpaid hack webcomics pseuojournalist, sometimes. Pret-ty sweet. Here’s what caught my eye today.

• Peace, Good Tickle-Brain is not a webcomic I’ve known of previously, which means I need to have words with one Mister E[ric] B[urns]-White, seeing as how he’s my go-to guy for literary things and P,GT-B is mostly dedicated to Shakespeare. I noticed it today because an older strip (it’s from April) has been linked about in the sosh meeds, and it combines two of my favorite things: Shakespearian plays and flowcharts, to help you find the play that’s right for you.

  And you know what? It works. As I encountered each question I answered in the way that was most appropriate for one of my favorites (Twelfth Night, Merry Wives of Windsor, Comedy of Errors, Henry V, and especially Much Ado About Nothing) and BAM! Arrived at the correct destination each time. It’s foolproof!

  There’s also scads of play-appropriate comics (example: taking a French woman to see the Olivier version of Henry V, a comic which ran on the vigil of Crispian Crispianus), and if that’s not enough for you, check out the Three Panels series of comics (examples of which are linked above). Willy Shakes only ever aspired to create popular entertainment; if he was around today, you can damn well bet he’d be doing a graphic novel adaptation or two.

  On top of everything else, creator Mya Gosling is into rock climbing, which is the closest thing to a sport I’ve ever voluntarily engaged in. Go read the whole site, it starts just about three years back updating twice a week, so there’s a decent (but not forbidding) archive trawl.

• From the mailbag: Web- and indie-comickers Shing Yin Khor, Elan’ Trinidad (previously noted here for his work on God™¹), and Marc Palm, and scientific illustrator Reid Psaltis (dinosaurs!) have communicated to say that they’ve collaborated on illustrations for the weirdest, funnest project I’ve seen in quite a while:
  

  Dream It! Screw It! lovingly mocks the history of Disney theme parks. This art book parody tells the life story of Dipp Disney – Walt’s drunk, dumb cousin with a job for life at Imagineering – through dozens of his Disney attraction ideas rightfully rejected for being too impractical, violent, sexy, insane, or all of the above.

  Words are from humorist and Disney Princesses author Geoffrey Golden, who taglined the project as Rides Too Dumb For Disneyland. Dream It! Screw It! is published by Devastator and releases on 28 September. A release party/reading with free churros will take place at WACKO in LA on 15 October from 7:00pm to 10:00pm.

Spam of the day:

Whats the best thing about Toilet Paper Coupons

I confess, I haven’t given this one a lot of thought.

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¹ Full title: “God™ © 2XX8 *** ***** ****** ******* Incorporated. All rights reserved. God and all related characters, titles, names and documents are trademarks of *** ***** ****** ******* Incorporated. No similarity between any of the names, characters, persons and/or institutions in this deity with those of any living or dead person or institutions is intended and any such similarity which may exist is purely coincidental.”

I was going to call this one Booksday, but it’s not just books dropping today. Ready for the list?

• Leave Me Alone!; words and pictures by Vera Brosgol, from Roaring Brook Press
• King Baby; words and pictures by Kate Beaton, from Scholatic
• Mervin The Sloth Is About To Do The Best Thing In The World; words by Collen AF Venable, pictures by Ruth Chan, from Harper Collins
• The Creepy Case Files Of Margo Maloo (review here); words and pictures by Drew Weing, from :01 Books
• Ghosts (review here); words and line art by Raina Telgemeier, colors by Braden Lamb, from Scholastic

But it’s not just dead tree releases that you should be paying attention to; for those of you that like to listen to things, I have a pair of podcasts of note:

• Big Data episode one from Ryan Estrada, et al, drops today, with the start of a story about a plot to steal the internet. What I find most interesting about Big Data is actually the presence of a seemingly minor character: Manisha, as played by Sasha Roopen. Indian call center representative Manisha was the star of Estrada’s This Is How You Die story, Shiv Sena Riot, then she was the center (or at least the moral center) of Estrada’s Broken Telephone, and now she’s here. She’s the constant of the Estradaverse, definitively linking the various stories into one continuity. Neat.
• Can I Pet Your Dog? episode 60, from Maximum Fun also drops today, with special guests Jeph Jacques and his enormous floof of a dog, Shelby (star of webcomics and the floor of Jeph’s house). Every Great Pyrenees I’ve ever met has been a damn cool dog, and Jacques tells you more about Shelby here, but if you want to know about a dog, you don’t read about it — you listen to that dog’s person/people tell stories about the good boy/girl in question. Even if you’re a cat person, you should give Can I Pet Your Dog? a listen because dogs rule.

Spams of the day:

fantastic franchise opportunity

and

your bankruptcy options

I think it’s probably significant that both of these are coming from the same address.

It’s always a good day when Randall Munroe decides to drop an extra-large comic on us, because he’s usually explaining something super complicated in an easy to understand format. Today: global warming for the past 20 centuries, in a manner that even Congresscritters in the pocket of extraction industries can understand.

• Speaking of unspeakably complex things, David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator)¹ has an announcement for those of you that like puzzles:
  

  This competition involves solving 25 puzzles plus a metapuzzle over a period of a week, during which new puzzles are released daily. The puzzles come with no instructions provided, and are intended to be solved by teams of up to 5 people. The top teams, from anywhere in the world, will win prizes.

  Yep, one a’ those deals, where it helps to have members that know every sports record in history, the subject-verb-object rules of Linear B, Morse code, Braille, five kinds of math most people don’t know even exist, and the names of all 151 Pokemon in the original Japanese². Registration starts today, competition begins in four weeks, and runs for a week. You should read the full rules and especially the solving guide, and maybe tell work you’re taking off that week. Happy puzzling!

• Speaking of puzzling, it’s puzzling that in all of the bits I’ve written regarding the treasure trove of books to release tomorrow, I somehow neglected to include Vera Brosgol’s Leave Me Alone! — about a very perturbed grandmother who just wants to be left in peace with her knitting — is one of those books. You’ve still got a few hours to pre-order it, which enters you for a chance to win an original painting from the book; just email a photo or screencap of your pre-order to Brosgol before tomorrow and you’re in the running.
• Very big news: returning to webcomics (it’s been a long damn time since FreakAngels), Internet Jesus aka Dr Whisky aka Warren Ellis will be teaming up with Colleen Doran on art (their first teamup since Orbiter, I believe), to produce a story called Finality, at the LINE Webtoon platform site. Even more interesting, the news was broken not at a comic site, but at Entertainment friggin’ Weekly. No definite start date for the 26-part weekly series, but damn … EW.

Spam of the day:

Explore Yoga Deals Results

I think you probably sent this to the wrong person. My chakras are awesome, thanks.

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¹ I really need to write myself a macro or something for that boilerplate.

² Alternately, find somebody that decoded all the hidden messages in a season of Archer to reveal a massive Krieger-run Easter Egg conspiracy.

Some days, there’s nothing but good news. Let’s be happy together.

• I don’t know if you saw this yesterday, but Hope Larson (who is one of like four creators¹ whose new project I will buy blind at the comic store) has given comic creators everywhere a gift:
  

  If you want to write comics but aren’t sure how to start, I’ve uploaded the script for Goldie Vance #1 (for free): https://gumroad.com/l/nPdQZ

  You’ve got a hankering to write comics, but aren’t sure how to make that work? Larson’s sharing a complete script, which you can compare against the final issue for like three bucks in the recent issues bins at your local comic shop (or event better, by pre-ordering the first trade, on account of once you read the first issue, you won’t want to stop). And she’s clear about something: this is not the way to write a comic, but it is a way to do so, and a pretty successful one at that, because Goldie Vance is a damn good book.

  There’s not a lot of creators that make it to a measure of accomplishment and see that the most important thing they can do in their careers is to make it easier for the next generation of creators to follow in their footsteps; if nothing else, making younger creators better is going to create competition in the future, so it’s an act of both confidence² and altruism together.

• It is long standing policy at this blog that while many creators are great at what they do, or even unsurpassed at some particular aspect of comics, only one is best with no qualifiers. Kate Beaton is best, you guys. On the off chance I haven’t mentioned it enough recently, her second childrens book, King Baby, is out next Tuesday and now is your shot to pre-order it. It’s charming as hell, I have two copies on order so I can give them to my nieces who have each recently had their first kids (one back in March, one just a few weeks ago — instant cousins!) on account of they aren’t getting the copy that Kate gave me in San Diego because it’s mine.

  Today’s the best possible day to reinforce Beaton’s bestness with that pre-order, by the way, seeing as how today is her birthday. Do you love everything she’s given us, for free, for years and years now? Do you — as all right thinking folk do — know in your heart that nothing is better than Beaton’s comics about her visits home to see family, starring her Mom & Dad? Do you want her to be able to keep making these things? Well, people gotta eat, and since she steadfastly refuses to charge for the Momics, buying her books is the best insurance that she’ll keep delighting us — and again, I must stress this next bit — for free.

  Oh, and keep an eye on TopatoCo, on account of your Fat Pony Plush is about to get a friend. Even if your budget doesn’t allow even small purchases, at the least join with me now: Happy Birthday, Kate, and thank you. You are best.

Spam of the day:

Hi How are you? I must confess that you’re a nice looking gentle man in your Facebook picture.. Are you married?, Can we be friends?????

I’m fine. I don’t have a Facebook account so I fear you’re confusing me with somebody else, but thank you all the same. I am, thank you for asking. Sure, why not?

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¹ The others: Jim Zub, Carla Speed McNeil, Terry Moore. Coincidentally, like Larson, they tell very different stories — format, tone, topic, genre — from project to project.

² Besides, no matter how good the next generation gets at comics, they won’t match Larson at both comics and making ice cream. She’s a flavorbending madwoman.

I envy you; I really do. You get to do something that I never will be able to do again.

You get to read Raina Telgemeier’s Ghosts for the first time; it releases in one week, and I have been reading and re-reading it (in an uncorrected proof, so there may be differences with the final edition) since SDCC. It’s a book that draws a clear contrast with Raina’s earlier work, and fundamentally differs from the usual stories we tell children (particularly the girls). Let’s talk (oh and needless to say, spoilers ahoy).

Ghosts is written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier, with colors by Braden Lamb that range from spookily subtle to eye-poppingly festive. It releases Tuesday, 13 September 2016 from Scholastic’s Graphix imprint. Fleen thanks Ms Telgemeier for the advanced review copy.

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¹ Edit to add: I was reading Ghosts again and the perfect descriptor for Cat in that scene popped into my brain. Her expression reads My life is a sitcom, and they’re just about to juice the laugh track with that womp-womp sound.

² And, in the finest Miyazaki tradition, the heroine of the story gets to fly.

³ It’s a Raina Telgemeier story, of course there’s middle school angst.

Okay, nothing from Marian Call, Hope Larson, or Kate Beaton, and I did meet Marguerite Sauvage, but still. Let’s go with the theme when it suggests itself.

• Where are you going to be between week after next and early November? Because you will want to coordinate your place-being with that of Raina Telgemeier as she does her nationwide book tour in support of Ghosts. As it turns out, I’m going to be in Minneapolis the same time Raina is, and I hope to catch up with her there (bearing in mind that the grind of a book tour is, if anything, even greater than the grind of a show, when we already don’t get enough time to talk)¹.

  Please note that these events are ticketed, and each venue has its own rules, which you should review. Also, I’m hearing that some of the venues are already sold out (or nearly so), so if there’s a Telgemeier fan of your acquaintance² you may want to grab tickets now and work out logistics later.

• Brigid Alverson is one of my favorite people; she’s been doing the [web]comics journalism thing longer (and better) than I have, and as her day job is in local government, we always get to talk about the logistics of emergency services when we run into each other. And that’s pretty much the deal — no matter how many times we say We should make definite plans for SDCC, we always seem to bump into each other at random on the show floor, without fail. She’s got a new interview with John Allison on Oni Press’s plans to do a second reprint format of Allison’s Bad Machinery.

  Now I love me my big, floppy, oversize landscape format Bad Machinery collections, so I’m glad to see that Oni will keep producing them. But the newer, smaller trim size (about 15×23 cm) will certainly be easier to drop into a bag or read in transit, and the cover that Allison shared for the new volume one is gorgeous. I’m not going to buy them all again, but for those that didn’t get in on the large format, the new trim size will be available from March 2017, at a lower price point. Everybody wins.

• Cathy Leamy and I met for the first time in the hallway outside Kate Beaton’s spotlight panel; I recognized her name, but didn’t remember at the time that she’d been mentioned her on the blog before, back when Anne Thalheimer was contributing. Circles inside circles, man.

  Anyhoo, Leamy (as you may recall) does comics that do medical education, so I was happy to see the RSS feed go ping! as she dropped a new one on us, explaining perhaps the single most mystifying, aggravating question in all of modern medicine: Why is the doctor always late for my damn appointment? Short answer: people.

  Longer answer: life is full of friction, because people. It’s a nice explainer, with plenty of acknowledgment of frustration on both sides of the issue, which will hopefully will lead its readers to have a bit more patience, do their best to help keep doctors on schedule, and make appointments early in the day before it all goes straight to Hades.

Spam of the day:

Compare Health Care Providers — Your Landlord’s insurance is only there to cover them and their property…not yours. That’s why Renters insurance is so important!

I think you might have mixed up the parameters in your spam-personalization code. One scam at a time, please!

______________
¹ I probably won’t be able to get from the work gig to the event in time, and if space is tight I don’t want to keep one of Raina’s younger readers; I’ll try to meet up with her for dinner and reviving adult beverages after.

² My wife told me this morning, I read your copy of Ghosts, it was so good; she’s got excellent taste.

Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett put up the Kickstarter for the Drive chapter one collection around midnight Easterly Time, and as of this writing (call it a bit less than fifteen hours in), he’s above US$24K of the US$35K goal. Looking good on the stretch goals (which I’m told will include the Tales of the Drive anthology stories, from the likes of Dylan Meconis, Ryan North & Tony Cliff, Zach Weinersmith, Christopher Hastings & Anthony Clark, and Evan Dahm), looking like I have to clear space on my shelves, etc. Two things I wanted to talk about beyond the fact this is a cool Kickstarter.

• No, three. Three things. Because first, I note that three people have taken advantage of the top reward tier (US$500), which includes the complete eight book Sheldon library, various Drive tchotchkes, and one of the few pages of original art Drive art (the strip has been produced digitally since very nearly the start). It’s a bargain, and quite frankly underprices the Drive art.
• Second, I want to note that LArDK pulled a sneaky launch on the campaign, as there are two reward tiers that he apparently tipped off his Patreon supporters to yesterday, as they were only good on that day. Basically, they got a shot to grab the US$65 tier for US$50 or the $US90 tier for US$75, and a total of 240 people did. Now consider the momentum you get from letting your most ardent fans — the ones giving you money every month — an early shot at a bargain for one day only.

  The FOMO is strong, the campaign goes widely public more than halfway to goal (as of right now, there are 362 backers, meaning two thirds of the backers are from the early access period), and you get to screw with my formulas for predicting final tally all at the same time. Curse you, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett! But seriously — this was a masterful stroke of leveraging an existing support base.

• Third, everybody that actually knows how to run a good Kickstarter (i.e.: not anybody that spams you promising a successful campaign for a usurious service fee) will tell you that a good, to-the-point video is a key part of the campaign. Of course, LArDK has provided one (it’s hilarious, and at 82 seconds in length, gets the point across efficiently), but that’s a given. And it’s super unfair.

  Not everybody trying to Kickstart their thing made a feature film (and a fine looking one at that) and has experienced Hollywood types (director/cinematographer, film editor) at their beck and call. Everybody else that ever makes a Kickstarter video from today forward has to up their game because LArDK just went and blew the curve for you. Email your complaints to screw.you@losangelesresidentdavekellet.com.

Spam of the day:

The DRIVE Kickstarter is finally here! YOU GUYS I’M VERY EXCITED THIS IS VERY EXCITING http://http://DriveKickstarter.com

We get it, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, you’re excited about your book.

It’s always Thursdays when there’s nothing going on — absolutely nothing is happening today.

• I mean, this announcement from Los Angeles Resident Dave Kellett about a hardcover collection of Act One of Drive? Not today — that won’t happen until Tuesday.
• Or this announcement from Rich Stevens about enamel pins? Actually a month old, as they were up for sale at San Diego Comic Con¹.
• And how about KC Green, The Man That Memes Without Even Trying? There’s a new flareup of Dickbuttery at the moment (because there is nothing that can’t be mashed up with Dickbutt), but as we all know, Dickbutt is more than a decade old and has actually been receding from attention somewhat for the past couple of years (scroll down to the update from ten days back).

  The This Is Fine strip is far more recent (being some three point five years old), and is even Kickstarting a plush at the moment, but the final story on that isn’t due for another week², so that’s not about today either.

So yeah, I think we’ve scientifically established that absolutely nothing is going on today. Try back tomorrow, maybe there will be something more.

Spam of the day:

If you have a dog, you must see this!

I have a dog that’s a total goofball, why would I want to see anything else?

_______________
¹ Where the Rainbow Alliance pins were a particular hit, with people buying them ten at a time. It’s the only non-book thing I’ve gone out of my way to obtain from a con in about forever, and it’s really quite handsome. Get ’em now before the C&D!

² If there’s going to be a big push in funding it’s going to kick off between now and Monday … although the huge interest in this one at the beginning means this might be the first webcomics megasuccess that just tapered off funding at the end instead of jumping upwards. This is honestly the flattest, most asymptotic long tail I’ve ever seen.

Okay, one of them’s really a pre-announcement of when a hiatus will wrap, but let’s go with it.

• Ryan Estrada has, for the past forever, been hard at work on Big Data. He announced the project on this page back in April, he started a Kickstarter a few days later to determine how much to release, and he’s been heads-down ever since putting the polish on.

  And now we have a premiere date. The internet radio play about the Caper of the Century and the Keys to the Internet will start releasing on Tuesday, 13 September (the same days as a few other things; it’s going to be a great day for those of us of certain sensibilities); Kickstarter backers will get all nine episodes at once, the rest of us will have to persevere through cliffhangers and plot twists.

• Meanwhile, David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) reached today the end of his webcomic recaps of Old School Trek episodes, Planet of Hats. Or, more properly, reached it again; he finished up the recaps of Star Trek’s run with Turnabout Intruder (ick) back in January. Then he did the end-of-season recap¹ a week later, and gave us a final splash page at the end of the month.

  Then two months later he started all over again with the mid-70s animated series, the 22 episodes of which are what actually finished today. In case you aren’t old enough to have watch the animated Star Trek on Saturday mornings when you were a kid, it was pretty dire, but on average no worse than the third season of the live action show¹.

  And much like a Peter Jackson trilogy, Morgan-Mar had at least one more ending in store for us: although it will be the new year before it happens, he will be tackling the six movies that feature the original Star Trek cast, so we can look forward to the highs of Wrath of Khan and the lows of the execrable The Final Frontier, so that’s all right.

  As of this writing, it appears that Generations is being classified as a nu-Trek film, but who knows? Drop enough in his Patreon on the condition that he recap Darmok or Yesterday’s Enterprise or The Inner Light and I’d bet he’d come around. Even better, give him enough that he’s obligated to make it through all of TNG and DS9 — I’d love to read his take on In The Pale Moonlight or Far Beyond The Stars or even just highlights of Bashir’s bromances with O’Brien and Garak³.

  The thing is, point your RSS readers — it’s still a thing! — at the feed address and see you all on 4 January 2017. You can spend the time until then reading his first Irregular Webcomic print collection, which is being received by backers as we speak.

Spam of the day:

WE’LL PACK AND MOVE YOUR STUFF FOR YOU!

The hell you will. I’m never moving again.

_______________
¹ Hey, if you’re going to borrow a strip’s format from Shaenon Garrity, you include the season recap pages, because they are insane and great.

² Or most of the first season and a half of Next Generation (basically, everything pre-Borg) for that matter. It remains an indisputable fact that only DS9 hit the ground running and stayed there.

³ Shippers, start your engines.

Evan Dahm started running illustrations from his forthcoming edition of Moby-Dick about 17 months back, and in that time he’s given us gorgeous art, styled like woodcut illos, heavy and dark and brooding, things of substance and weight. The white of the page is wrestled into submission, the slivers that exist here and there acting as contrast and accent rather than the space to contain the black. They’ve all been beautiful to look at (and you can see the full set at the Tumblr), but today’s art tops them all. No part of the book’s text that Dahm chose to accent with this drawing can be omitted and still give full context and power, so here it is:

Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.

“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.

“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!—stand by!”

I want more than just an illustrated Moby-Dick from Dahm; somehow, somebody make is so that Patrick Stewart reads these textual excerpts as an audio accompaniment.

The other things I saw today were pretty good, too.

• If you make your living by submitting invoices, then you should already know who Katie Lane is; she’s asking for information today, in the form of a brief, two question survey:

  If you have to invoice clients to get paid, I’d appreciate your feedback on two quick questions I have: https://katie240.typeform.com/to/xJyNM6

  The answers she gathers will be used to help construct a course she’ll be delivering come October, aimed at how to draft invoices that will make clients want to pay. I’m assuming this is more subtle than having the invoice stapled to a guy named Rocko The Knucklebreaker, but honestly I’m not sure what could be as effective as him. I guess we’ll have to give Lane her feedback, let her design the course to answer her audience’s most pressing concerns, and then attend to find out what’s to be done. I’ll keep Rocko on speed dial, just in case.

• I mention now (in accordance with longstanding blog policy) that Kate Beaton is the best, and point those of you that may not have had the occasion yet to experience her bestness in person towards a forthcoming event wherein you may sample some of her bestosity. The National Book Festival, put on by the Library of Congress, is kind of a big deal. And in keeping with a mission to bring the most interesting people in literature together regardless of petty distinctions like national origin, the NBF people have prevailed upon Beaton to leave Nova Scotia and travel to Washington DC to talk about King Baby on 24 September.

  The National Book Festival is free and open to the public (with the exception of some high-popularity events, which require ticketing, but still free), taking place at the Washington Convention Center; Beaton will be part of the Children programming track, from noon to 12:30pm, with a signing from 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Between that and SPX happening just a week before (the exhibitor list isn’t up yet, but given her history of being there and her Ignatz nomination this year, I’d say it’s a pretty good bet she’ll be there), the Mid-Atlantic region has never had a better chance to drink in the bestitivity.

• Okay, so I know that Zach Weinersmith uses a repertory company approach to his characters, with certain designs in recurring roles (or, more precisely, to play certain types of roles; he’s like Tezuka that way). But how did it take me until today to realize that the big, philosophical (one might even say navel gazing) discussions always go to the same two kids? Way to make me see patterns in the world, Weinersmith!

  I really should have been able to predict it, given that the same system was used in the SMBC Theater shorts, where it was well established that James Ashby is the worst person ever. Thought you could make us forget by keeping a low profile, didn’t you, Ashby? Well forget it! We at Fleen know you are history’s greatest villain¹, and we will never let go our vigilance, so watch it.

Spam of the day:

You are like one of those “denialist”s. Your comments about the internet are so contradictory to what is happening in the real world that I feel sorry for you. The world is changing. I hope it changes so that there is less stealing in our world.

The link to this went to a Tumblr dedicated 100% to high quality photos of lingerie-clad women’s butts, so I don’t think he (of course it’s a dude) is actually mad at me for something I did here at the blog.

I will note that it appears said butt photos are not by the dude in question, but taken with minimal attribution from around the internet. Oh, irony.

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¹ Need proof? Google search for james ashby and all you get is a cop convicted of murder. Okay, he doesn’t look anything like the James Ashby we’re talking about, but that’s just what he wants you to think.