I see from the permanlink generator in WordPress that this would have been the third time I’ve used the same title, so time for a rewording!

• Today marks the long-awaited return of Spacetrawler, and Christopher Baldwin’s off to a great start, mixing some tragedy, some backstory, and a pefectly-paced payoff gag. Welcome back, crew of the IA Starbanger GOB Spacetrawler, we’ve missed you. And in a related note, the run on Anna Galactic was miscalculated and runs another three strips, hooray! Even better, the Kickstart to print Anna Galactic has cleared the 50% mark with more than three weeks to go.
• [C] Spike [Trotman] has a problem — a mishap over the weekend resulted in a busted Cintiq, depriving her of the very lifesblood of a modern cartoonist’s career. When unexpected expenses come your way, there’s only one thing to do: sell your employee’s organs declare a sudden sale, and Spike’s opted to do so by putting slightly knocked-around copies of Iron Circus books on discount and offer up the savings to you.

  Held off on getting a copy of Smut Peddler and worried you’d missed your shot? If you’re willing to put up with some flaws that don’t affect the reading experience at all, now’s your chance to remedy your oversight and get Spike back to comickin’.

• I missed a couple of books when I was talking about the excellent fall release season last week: 13 September has another must-read book dropping, The Creepy Case Files Of Margo Maloo, a collection of the first 100 or so pages of the Drew Weing webcomic of the same name. And 6 September sees the latest from Ben Hatke, Mighty Jack; both are from :01 Books, with review copies kindly provided by Gina Gagliano.

  What I found interesting about them is they’re both stories about young boys discovering a world of monsters and creepy things, both partnering up with a more competent girl of about the same age. In Margo Maloo’s case, it’s played more for laughs and the occasional lighthearted creepiness, as evidenced by the fact that the titular heroine isn’t a monster fighter or monster slayer — she’s a monster mediator.

  She knows what’s under the bed is a person (granted, a ten foot tall person with enormous teeth and horns, but a person nonetheless) with just as much right to the closet as the kid who lives in the room. She finds the compromises and solutions without too much drama — possibly because in the past she brought the drama hard. The monsters are terrified of her, as are kids with sense.

  In Jack’s case, he just wants to enjoy his summer, but a rare burst of responsiveness from his autistic sister Maddy drags him into a protector role — the garden they planted is full of magic — or maybe alien¹ — vegetation and there’s a dragon wandering about full of cryptic warnings and doubting that he’s a real Jack. Because he’s the one from all the stories: Jack and his beanstalk, Jack the giant-killer, Jack the house-builder, Jack who rules winter and Jack who is nimble.

  An early teens kid in the borderlands between the suburbs and the farms, with an overworked mom and withdrawn sister isn’t a hero — until Lilly from down the block (who swordfights in medieval recreations with her brothers) takes and interest in his challenges and adopts the role of teacher/coach. There’s some alien magic involved, but a lot of it comes simply of caring: Jack wants to impress Lilly (he likes her), take care of his sister (he doesn’t want to spend the summer taking care of her while Mom’s at work, but he still loves her), and not disappoint his mother (and also, if she finds out he grew a dragon she’s going to kill him).

  It’s a potent metaphor for growing up, particularly in the first Hatke male protagonist²; girls face different challenges navigating the throes of maturity (indeed, Lilly presents as the same physical age as Jack, but seems older, wiser, and more capable). The first of a series (but no word yet on when we can expect the next one; given that :01 announced it’s upping its output from 20 books/year to 40, I’d imagine not too far in the future), Mighty Jack ends on a cliffhanger and a promise as Jack gears up to defend his home and family. Darn beanstalk creatures didn’t think he was a Jack? He’ll show you a Jack.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Cameos from some lovable rogues out of Hatke’s Zita The Spacegirl series pretty much cement the alien interpretation.

² Per the dedication page, Hatke and his wife have five daughters, so it’s no surprise he’s spent so much of his career drawing kick-ass girls.

We as a society have obviously done something seriously wrong, in that the latest New York Times Best Seller List for graphic novels (paperback) shows only one title by Raina Telgemeier: Smile, in week #218, at slot number 9. It’s hard to argue with the top three slots being taken with the three volumes of March by Rep John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, or with Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese getting some love (ten years after release, but there was no NYTBSL for graphic novels ten years ago), but still¹!

Then again, Ghosts is due on 13 September, and the list starts ramping up a couple weeks before launch day (remember, it represents sales to the retail trade, and the list runs early — this week will be published on 28 August, but represents sales ending 13 August). What I am saying here is that we should expect to see a run on All Things Raina in about two weeks.

And in any event, the next six weeks or so is going to be a glorious time for webcomickers in print — the second volume of Secret Coders by Yang and Mike Holmes releases on 30 August; Ghosts will be joined on the 13th by Kate Beaton’s King Baby and Mervin the Sloth Is About to Do the Best Thing in the World by Colleen AF Venable & Ruth Chan to form The Best Tuesday Ever.

Then a scant three weeks later we’ll see the first volume of Jason Shiga’s Demon on 4 October, and Box Brown’s Tetris a week later on the 11th. I’ll be reviewing as many of these as I can between now and release day(s)².

In the meantime, I’ll note that we’re halfway through the crowdfunding campaign for KC Green’s This Is Fine plush and looking at an astonishing 10,366 (as of this writing) backers and US$370,770 (ditto) in funding. This is more than 1000% of goal, and heading for a finish somewhere around 750 thousand damn dollars³. I can’t wait to see the bump that occurs in the last three to five days.

Spam of the day:

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What.

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¹ Also contributing: the annual return of Persepolis, as various college classes that use it (also MAUS) stock up for the new academic year.

² Obligatory disclosure: Gina Gagliano at :01 Books sent me copies of Paths & Portals, Demon, and Tetris; Raina gave me an advance review copy of Ghosts, and Kate gave me a copy of King Baby. I still have to track down a copy of Mervin.

³ Using Kel McDonald’s rule of thumb: first three days equals one third of final total. Per Kicktraq, Green raise approximately US$265K in his first three days, yikes

I’m in a much better mood, and things have happened that allow me to write considerably more than I would have otherwise. Let’s do this.

Recent Past! Yesterday marked eighteen damn years of Jerkcity, which I freely admit is a bit too unstructured for me, but for which I will always be grateful because it was my introduction to Rands, who in real life has taught me more than I can recall about the industry I work in, the people that inhabit it, and how to interact with them. Also, bags and pens. He’s smart like that.

Past, Present and Future! Josh Fruhlinger wrote a book which I enjoyed a great deal, and he has very kindly opened the metaphorical kimono to share data regarding it. The Enthusiast was funded via Kickstarter, and Fruhlinger has done a detailed post on how the money got spent, which anybody considering a crowdfunded project should consider to be a valuable look at what to expect. Read carefully and absorb.

Today! One year ago, Ryan North did the most Ryan North thing possible when he got stuck in a hole and got out by treating it as a text adventure game with all of Twitter as the controlling player. It’s well known that there are no holidays in August, with some countries resorting to making up arbitrary “bank holidays” to make the month less suicidally depressing, so may I suggest that from now on, 18 August¹ be known as Northole Day? We can celebrate by walking our dogs with umbrellas and seeking out holes. Somebody tell David Malki ! to include it in the list of holiday’s for next year’s perpetual calendar.

Also Today! I got my copy of Chester 5000 XYV: Isabelle & George. I will never not love Jess Fink for her ability to mix together real emotion, real pretty pictures, and really hot, hot sexytimes in one story. I think I understand the whole Stucky thing now.

Next Month! It’s just four weeks until SPX rolls around (sadly, I won’t be able to make it, as it will fall in the middle of back-to-back weeks where work sends me to Minnesota), and the Ignatz Awards nominees have been announced. I first saw the slate over at Comics Worth Reading, so props to Johanna Draper Carlson for being on the story early.

What I found especially interesting is the jury members: Tony Breed, Summer Pierre, Keiler Roberts, C Spike Trotman, and JT Most²; There’s a lot of web-first art from these creators, and unsurprisingly the category for Outstanding Online Comic is super strong:

• A Cartoonist’s Diary by Rina Ayuyang
• Just Doing My Job by Gynnis Fawkes
• Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran
• A Small Revolution by Samantha “Boum” Leriche-Gionet
• Vattu by Evan Dahm

That’s an impressively wide range of styles, topics, and presentations, and really no bad choices there.

Other nominees that hail from the wide world o’ webcomics include Melanie Gillman (As The Crow Flies) for Outstanding Comic; Jason Shiga (Demon) and Keiler Robert (Powdered Milk), and various contributors to the Isaac Cates-edited Cartozia Tales for Outstanding Series; Lisa Hanawalt (Hot Dog Taste Test) for Outstanding Graphic Novel; Kate Beaton (Step Aside, Pops), and various contributors to the Sfé R Monster & Taneka Stotts-edited Beyond: The Queer Sci Fi and Fantasy Anthology for Outstanding Anthology Or Collection.

Uniquely, the Ignatzes (Ignatzen?) are voted on by the attendees of SPX, with the votes quickly tallied between end of exhibit hours and the start of the awards ceremony on Saturday, 17 September. Best of luck to all the nominees.

Spam of the day:

30??nimals Surprised By Their Owners Coming Home Sooner

Cute, but why is the same address in Romania sending me pictures of animals, pictures of Asian women, pictures of beautiful vistas, and pictures of “unbelievable fails”?

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¹ No shifting to a Monday or Friday for a long weekend, it has to fall on the 18th.

² I’m not familiar with Most and I’m finding it impossible to Google them, as all the responses refer to Justin Timberlake and headlines like Is this JT’s most awesome video ever?.

It’s sort of like how the one person I’d be interested is finding from high school, my old physical lab partner, is un-Googleable, because her name closely matches the nickname of an old aircraft carrier and all matches are for sailor reunions. Her sister is also un-Googleable, as her name matches too closely with DC superhero Robin. They’ve achieved the dream: no digital footprint thanks to a favorable signal-to-noise ratio.

It’s definitely one of those days, when nobody around you is capable of following even the simplest directions. So let us talk about webcomics, that I may regain some sanity. There’s some things we mentioned in recent times“>recent times that are come to fruition that I would share with you.

• One may recall that The Nonadventures of Wonderella has been offering up slacky delight for approximately forever. More specifically, 11 days from today (that would be 26 August 2016) marks ten years of Justin Pierce chronicling the events around Wonderella, Wonderita, Hilterella, Jokerella, Wonderella’s mom, Jesus (Lamb of Hosts), Dr Shark, and the other residents of a cape-common world gone … not mad per se, but vaguely annoyed. Add in the five years that that Pierce ran the much-missed Kilroy & Tina at Modern Tales (RIP) and you’ve got a seriously long run of weekly (or better) comics and it’s time for a shift.

  We mentioned all of this back in May when Pierce announced it, but it seems like a good time to remind y’all that the 27th will be the last weekly Wonderella; thereafter, Pierce will be updating whenever he’s got a story to tell — might be a page, might be five or ten. If you’ve enjoyed the world’s greatest superhero (with the world’s greatest idea), maybe take the time between then and now to drop Pierce a line and tell him so?

• Toward the end of June, we noted that Anna Galactic (the third? I think it’s third and Yontengu the fourth) scifi (mostly) comedy (mostly) webcomic by the prolific Christopher Baldwin would shortly be wrapping up and Spacetrawler returning. At the time he wasn’t much more specific than sometime in August/September, but if you’ve been following Anna, you know that she’s in the endgame, and while there’s a reasonably happy ending for our protagonists, it comes with a side helping of every other human in the cosmos is dead (oops).

  Endgame enough, in fact, that Spacetrawler will be relaunching next Monday, 22 August! And to celebrate the end of Anna Galactic, the traditional let’s print the completed story Kickstarter went up today. Baldwin has set an extremely modest goal of US$4000 (his last Kickstart, for One Way, was unsuccessful¹, and he’s gone even lower on his ask this time), of which about a quarter is covered so far. It’s a simple, straightforward campaign: you can get a postcard, a PDF, a book (signed or unsigned), or two books (signed or unsigned). No crazy rewards, no stretch goals, just order up here if you like his stuff. PS: His stuff is very likable, so go like with money.

Spam of the day:

Your Mechanical Engineer Training Options — Graduate with strong job prospects

Oh son you seriously did not just try to get an electrical engineer to click on your scam for fake credentials as a mechanical engineer. The only thing more insulting is if you tried to entice me to become some kind of chemical engineer².

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¹ In a lot of ways, One Way was the least Baldwin-like of his SF projects — there was some real philosophical heaviness to it, a sense of resignation that contrasted heavily with the serious-but-leavened-by-goofball-antics Spacetrawler.

² Hi, Dante.

She had, in the hearts of her numerous fans, entered the territory of the mononymic, like Madonna or Bono or Frank¹, there is no doubt who you are talking about when it comes to superstars². And today there are things to mention regarding Raina [Editor’s note: okay, fine, Raina Telgemeier] that you should know about, at least if you’re out in the Bay Area.

Firstly, Ghosts is rapidly approaching release date, and that means release parties. Green Apple Books in San Francisco (that would be Raina’s hometown) will be hosting such a party at 6:00pm (reading at 7:00pm) on Tuesday, 13 September (that would be the release date), and while they don’t explicitly say that Raina’s going to be at the party, she is tweeting out the event announcement.

Update to add: It’s confirmed now.

In order to bring some order to what’s going to be a busy, busy night, Green Apple are pre-selling tickets which are good for a paperback copy of the book, and have shifted to a location with ample parking and space away from the main store. No doubt other bookstores will be holding their own events to meet reader demand; if you know of one, drop me a line and I’ll share it.

And in the meantime, whether you can get to the release party or not, there’s a display of original pages³ from Smile, Drama, and Sisters at the Berkeley (that would be just across the bay from Raina’s hometown) Public Library Central branch. They’ve even got five original pages from Ghosts, on view in the second floor through 26 August.

Central’s hours and address are at their webpage, and like all libraries it’s free and open to the public. Since it’s a proven scientific fact that you can never have too much Raina, I’d advise everybody in the area to make the trip and look at some pretty damn great pages while we all count down to the 13th. Given the fact that Ghosts is going to have a print run of 500,000 copies (pretty sure that’s a graphic novel record), you should be able to get a copy without too much difficulty, but I’d put in a pre-order, just in case.

[Media Alert] Behold the Instruments of Righteousness in Super Dung

What?

..eon Tactics!

Oh. Gotcha. Not a good place for the subject line to get truncated.

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¹ Okay, there is a little ambiguity here as to which Frank one might be mentioning: Frank as in Zappa, or as in Becky and.

² Also: George.

³ Hat tip: Mark V of Electric Puppet Theatre. Read his comic!

It may have been mentioned by somebody in the past forty or so years that one of the great ironies of San Diego Comic Con is you don’t get to read many comics. Thanks to travel before and after, I missed two weeks at the local comic shop, and thanks to the owner having to take a sick day, today will be the first day I’ll get caught up on books since the middle of July. I’m really looking forward to reading Hope Larson’s take on Batgirl (issue #1 released on 27 July), but I’m not been Larsonless in that time.

Because I finally went and picked up a copy of her newest graphic novel (art by Rebecca Mock), Compass South. We spoke about it during our interview in San Diego, where I was particularly struck by the generosity she shows towards her collaborators (which is a recurring theme with Larson; cf: her Twitterfeed today). Unusually for me, this review is mostly spoiler free, as I find myself wanting to talk about some overarching structural choices more than the particulars of the story.

The first book (of two) in the Four Points series (we’ll get Knife’s Edge next June) is a quick, engaging read that left me with a nagging feeling as I read it. Twins — Alex and Cleo — get chased out of 1860 New York, heading for San Francisco; there’s criminal gangs, child-sellers, pirates, tall ships a’sailing, an overland crossing in Panama, a perilous trip ’round the Horn, and a goal of the mythic city of San Francisco. There’s mistaken identities and assumed names and impersonations. There’s blackhearts chasing treasure, evil-minded small men chasing a girl disguised as a boy, and a missing father full of mysteries.

And there was something there at the back of my mind saying You’ve seen this before, but where?

Then it hit me. It’s not that Larson took from any particular story, or any particular genre even (the idea of mid-19th century boys adventure magazines get namechecked, which is particularly frustrating if you’re a girl that doesn’t want to be constrained by gender expectations); it’s that she has tapped into the same themes and tropes that Shakespeare used.

Two sets of twins? Check. Ships in peril and pirates? Check. Missing parents and missing children? Check. Mistaken identities? Check. Everybody meeting up and working out where they were and how they got there? Check. Girls disguised as boys? Check. Shakespeare built his most popular plays — on story cores that had been part of song and myth for millennia. They’ve persisted for so long because they each capture our imagination in particularly strong ways; old Will knew that grabbing one trope was good, but piling on two or three was better, and Larson’s gone further by grabbing four or five.

It’s perhaps inevitable that Compass South would leave me with echoes of The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and more. In lesser hands, it would come off as derivative or gilding the lily. Here, it’s almost subconscious and makes for a compulsively readable story.

Much has been made of the similarity of comics and movies, but Compass South makes me think that the stage is a better comparison. The stock characters of comics — mysterious playboy/nighttime hero, the youthful ward, the alien with powers beyond those of mortal men, the angsty teen thrust into responsibility — are just as recognizable as the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte — the doomed lovers, the evil prince, the hidden twins, the unscrupulous businessman, the unrepentant villain, and the jolly comic relief — that Shakespeare appropriated and made central to the theatrical world. Larson’s combined the two traditions, and it makes for a cracking story that enriches both¹.

Spam of the day:

New roof! Get work done cheap!

Sorry, just put one in. Had a dumpster in my driveway for two weeks and every damn thing. Also, of all the things to cheap out on, the part of the house that keeps the weather out is probably not the best candidate.

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¹ Or perhaps three traditions — in addition to comics and theater, there’s the literature of the time. More than one character in Compass South is more than a little Dickensian, including a guy who’s very possible Fagin’s second cousin twice removed (in temperament, if not not actual relation). I’m now thinking that maybe why I never cottoned much to Dickens is that he drew from the same tropes as Shakespeare, but trying to express everything solely in words instead of visuals, he becomes bogged down and overly verbose. Now I really want to see what an original graphic novel by Dickens would look like.

Several brief items for you today, as I am observing the first really nice day in forever and that’s pulling on me more than webcomics at the moment. You know how it is.

• KC Green seems to finally be hitting the long tail portion of the This Is Fine plush campagin but I’ll note that so far today even though new support is but a trickle of the past two days, it’s still more than US$18K and 500 people. I wonder if we’ll see a bump from outside his usual audience when tomorrow’s New York Times — which has an arts section story about Green, This Is Fine, This Is Not Fine, and the plush — hits widely.
• Speaking of Green¹, he was the first to point me to another Kickstarter, that for the first print collection of The Meek by Der-shing Helmer. Three chapters of the longrunning (abeit with sometimes lengthy interruptions) adventure quest, with fancy upgrades to the book and bonus material on deck (Helmer’s working with Taneka Stotts — who’s done a number of successful projects — on the production end). Given the sometimes sporadic update schedule on The Meek, a book is probably the best way for new readers to get on board, so get to pledgin’.
• Latest news on the TV adaptation of Kris Straub’s Candle Cove: Deadline Hollywood reports that SyFy will premiere the series on Tuesday, 27 September. Set your TiVo now for maximum scares.

Spam of the day:

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… nevermind. Alhtough they are using the same picture as the Russian dating site spam was using.

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¹ Fans of The Meek now believe me to be in full Dad Joke mode. They’re not wrong.

Some very cool things going on these days.

Item! So KC Green has apparently tapped a vein of discomfort and unease in the popular consciousness, the depths of which were only hinted at previously. In other words, the This Is Fine plush cleared two hundred thousand dollars in its first 24 hours,and if the FFF Mk2 is to be believed, is headed for approximately US$700K to a million damn dollars. Honestly, though, this one is going to be an outlier in terms of predicatability but I think we can all agree it’s about time Green made some money off it.

Item! I don’t know how she does it, I really don’t. The absolutely invaluable Gina Gagliano at :01 Books got home from SDCC and promptly went to work shipping out review copies. I received copies of fall releases Demon (volume 1) by Jason Shiga, Tetris by Box Brown, and Last Man: The Rescue (volume 6) by Balak, Sanlaville, and Vivès. Initial impressions:

• Demon is a lot of fun and sets up the remaining 65-70% of the story nicely; ironically, it’s just finished up as a serialized webcomic, with only the first (of 22!) chapters still online. The first collection will be one of four books, to be released over the next while.
• Tetris is about more than the terribly addictive casual game; it’s about the history and politics of the game industry, the wheeling-dealing that characterized fights between companies at the time (including a fair number that no longer exist), and topics as far afield as the Ziegarnik Effect.
• Last Man: The Rescue barrels along and throws us a last-minute switchup that is even bigger than the one at the end of volume 2. Never — and remember this well, children — never suspect that things are going well when they appear to be going well, and you know there are two more books to go in the series. This one is going to go down in the history of punctured false conclusions and is a gut-punch of Whedonian proportions.

Look for proper reviews closer to release time (October, October, and November, respectively).

Item! Speaking of books due in the fall, I’ve read and re-read my ARC of Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier obsessively, and I’m still thinking hard on it. I’ve said more than once on this page that Kazu Kibuishi would be the reincarnation of Hayao Miyazaki, except for the fact that Miyazaki’s still alive. I refer to Kibuishi’s own take on of one of Miyazaki’s key tropes: fantastical flying machines and an emphasis on the hugeness of the sky.

But there’s another side to Miyazaki, the side where young (usually) girls (usually) find themselves in a world that casually admits the existence of magic. It’s not remarked on, it’s perfectly ordinary in its treatment — and to be honest, that’s the Miyazaki I love best.

Telgemeier is fixin’ to dethrone Kibuishi. Ghosts is nothing less than her Totoro. I’ll have much more to say on this, but I’ll need another five or ten readings first.

Spam of the day:
Multiple spams, actually. They all come in different languages (Russian and Portuguese most commonly), all translate to roughly the same message, all have an untranslatable burst of Cyrillic characters near the end. All purport to be from a 37 year old woman named (variously) Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela, who assures me

I am aware that the so-called MILF you relate positively. I have normal breasts, long legs, fuckable state. Without commitment, nothing. We are in conditional place, having sex

Indeed, Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela: without commitment, we are nothing.

Please note the photo of the very handsome, very large Ryan North above, taken from the Instagram of his fellow comic book writer, Marguerite Bennett. Unless I miss my guess, this photo was taken during SDCC, while North was involved in the creation of something very cool that required

1. A significant amount of legal, adult-type intoxicating beverages
2. Tangentially, the efforts of Isaiah Mustafa, aka The Old Spice Guy

The latter item should surprise approximately nobody, given the propensity that both North and Mustafa have for casual shirtlessness. In any event, I can’t tell you yet exactly what North was involved in the creation of, but suffice it to say that it is awesome and hilarious, and when you get to learn about it for reals in possibly two to four weeks, you will wonder why you didn’t guess it on your own because it will make perfect sense. For now, just enjoy the raw, sensuous sophistication fairly dripping from The Toronto Man-Mountain there. Enjoy it, damn you!

• Either Spike was late or I just missed it on Friday, but the latest announcement for what th’heck Iron Circus is publishing in the next year, year and a half is up:
  

  Iris & Angel isn’t exactly new; the first chapter’s already been written by myself, drawn by @littlefroggies, and posted on Slipshine, the subscription adult comics site. But Slipshine came with certain restrictions; monthly quotas, length limits, and the expectation of sex every fifteen pages, to name a few. And while that works for a lot of comics, it wasn’t working for I&A.

  So, Amanda and I are trying something new.

  Iris & Angel is restarting from scratch, and will be released chapter-by-chapter on ComiXology and in the Iron Circus Comics online store!

  This is a new approach for us, and we’re excited to see where it might lead. We’re test-driving a smaller, cheaper, more incremental approach to our comics; inexpensive “issues” of I&A with a nice, low bar for entry for the curious and the freedom to tell the story as we like.

  Serialized smut, y’all. And what smut!

  Iris Moore is a victim of her own success; her small soap-making business has taken off like a shot, but she’s found herself floundering with the financials. With April 15th approaching and her paperwork more hopelessly scrambled than ever, she finally accepts the inevitable: she needs professional help. But where to start?

  A fetish message-board on the internet, of course.

  Iris’ pervy roommate Tate talks her into answering the weirdest personal ad ever posted; a cross-dressing accountant offering tax prep.

  I think I lost count of the fetishes there. This is gonna be great.

• Attention, anybody that’s ever had the self-awareness to ask Am I interacting with a creator in an acceptable way? The fact that you’re asking what correct (that is, most likely to be acceptable/least likely to cause distress) behavior is means that you’re almost certainly good. For everybody else, please see Something*Positive today, wherein Randy Milholland shares yet another story of people having no fucking clue what acceptable observation of boundaries looks like.

  I don’t get it — Milholland is maybe the sweetest person I know and yet he has a bottomless well of stories detailing the most batshit crazy interactions with fans and “fans”. I don’t know how he’s managed to not snap and kill us all, but then again I wonder that about most of the women that have any degree of visibility on social media. It is a legit wonder that the majority of serial killers aren’t righteously pissed-off women.

  Regardless, the lesson remains the same — if you can see even a tiny bit of yourself in Milholland’s comic today (directed at Milholland or literally any other human being ever), then it’s mathematically provable that you suck¹, and you need to stop sucking as quickly as possible. We are trying to have a civilization here people, and you can either be a goddamned grownup or you can please absent yourself from the rest of us.

Spam of the day:

71 Contaminants in your water…are you safe?

On the off chance that I’m not, I’ma guess that I won’t be made safe by your magic drinking straw.

______________
¹ I’ll be generous and say that perhaps it was the case that you used to suck and have gotten better. In that case, you kind of owe it to yourself to be honest about it, and pay it forward by letting other people know both when they suck, and that it’s possible to improve yourself to the point where you stop sucking.

It’s been a full three days since Gene Yang graciously allowed me some time in his schedule to talk to him; for the record, I almost begged off because I could see that I would be causing him to delay a much-needed meal, but he was insistent. As such, I kept things as brief as I could and remain grateful for his generosity; his reputation as one of the nicest people on the planet is well-deserved. Also, one of the smartest — he’s got a point of view of his work (particularly his recent work with DC) that he wants to convey, and he knows how to reinforce his point while remaining unfailingly polite. This came up fairly early on in our talk as I asked him for his thoughts …

On Superman vs New Super-Man
A disclaimer to start: I never read a Superman monthly until I heard that Yang would be taking over the flagship title¹, so I had little idea what had been going on with the character in The New 52 continuity.

I read Yang’s run faithfully, but I don’t think it was successful; it seemed to me that Yang wanted his story to go in an interesting direction (he’d been handed a Superman who was fairly depowered and on the verge of having his secret identity outed; Yang placed him in a community of mostly-forgotten gods from around the world, re-enacting their great mythic battles as MMA to sustain a portion of their worship), but was hamstrung by story dictates to tie into what was happening in other books.

Speaking purely for myself, the parts of Superman that seemed most Yangian to me were interesting and entertaining; the rest was confusing and haphazard. I asked Yang if he had felt constrained by editorial restrictions on Superman.

I love being part of Rebirth, he told me. Rebirth is the name of the current DC continuity, now that they’ve blown up The New 52; he had no desire to share any frustration he may have felt with the prior work, he only wants to focus on what’s next, what’s positive, where he thinks he can do good work². New Super-Man, he said, was very satisfying because my talks [with DC] started from building a character.

In case you hadn’t heard, this new character is a superhero built up by a faction of the Chinese government, taking as their subject a teenager who’s a bit of bully and only accidentally heroic (I’ve heard him compared to Spider-Man, in that a teen suddenly has his life changed by superpowers and his first instinct is to exploit it; my reading on the character is he’s more of a Flash Thompson).

The character distinctly isn’t American, or even Chinese-American (the book takes place in Shanghai), and comes from a completely different perspective. What do powered individuals mean to nominally-communist, authoritarian government of China? Yang let on that the antagonists of the series (they haven’t shown up yet in issue #1) will super-powered pro-democracy activists; it’s a far more complex story than just the three (somewhat simplistic) poles of Truth, Justice, and The American Way.

And it’s one that almost didn’t happen. Yang said no when he was first approached to do the book, and wasn’t sure if it would have been done without him. I asked about the possibility of cultural pitfalls if a non-Chinese writer had been assigned the gig (specifically, I wondered how many characters might become inadvertent Cousin Chin-Kees), and he was entirely positive. There are plenty of talented writers that could have done it well, he told me, but allowed that a non-Chinese writer might not have thought to explore the very different nature of Chinese society with the story. He was grateful that DC was giving him reign to explore all the contradictions in that society, the things that most fascinate and scare me. He’ll have some time to explore those ideas, as he’s signed for twelve issues, with a full story contained in the first six.

On other occurrences of the number six
Yang confirmed that there will be six books in the Secret Coders series from :01 Books and was really thrilled to be working with artist Mike Holmes (he can draw in any style, it’s amazing). He’s also working on a nonfiction graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, for :01 now; it’s about basketball team from the high school where he used to teach.

On the differences in scripting styles
Like Hope Larson, Yang is doing a lot of writing for other artists now, but he’s had experience with that in past (I’m recalling at least four or five :01 books where he was partnered with an artist) and like Larson he’s still working on writing for superheroics. His work on The Shadow Hero helped prepare him for the conventions and tropes of supers, but the writing for monthly floppies means that he still has to tighten up the story presentation, and it’s been a transition.

On the future
Yang’s done a lot of work a lot of places — DC, Dark Horse — and had a lot of fun doing it, but he gestured toward the stacks of books at the :01 booth and made a simple declaration that revealed both his career plan and the nature of comics he really loves to make in five words: First Second is my home.

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¹ Disclaimer to the disclaimer: I have, of course, read All-Star Superman multiple times because I’m not a monster. I consider it to be the definitive representation of the character.

² Which reminds me more than a little of Superman himself.