This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Vlad is entirely correct. Is SO cool.

But mostly because I feel like it, dammit.

• David Malki ! is in the mood to give stuff away, and you’re in a position to take advantage. For the obsessive completists out there (cough, cough), Malki ! has announced that his new series of “cast cards” — little plaques of what appears to be fiberboard, with a colorful, Wondermarkesque character attached to the front — is about to get larger, thanks to the introduction of a subscription program at his Patreon. But there is also a new, non-subscription-based card that some of you can get for free right now:
  

  If you own five or more Wondermark books, you are a Library Ace right now! You qualify to get one of these cards, for free, to commemorate your great achievement!

  To claim your card, take a cool picture of your five (or more) Wondermark books. I wanna see what you got, and show your collection to other people too!

  Then: tweet your picture with #libraryace, and tag either @malki or @wondermarkfeed. (And make sure you’re following one or both of of those accounts, so I can DM you your claim instructions once I see your post!)

  And if you don’t own at least five Wondermark books, Malki ! is coincidentally running a 13-day sale in advance of Wondermark’s 13th anniversary; it’s also approximately the 10th anniversary of the Machine of Death (the original Dinosaur Comics strip was run in December of 2005, but the idea for an anthology of MoD stories dates to about this time, 2006), so you can get MoD stuff for cheaps, too.

  Specifically, you can get any three Wondermark books for eighteen dollars, and ten bucks will get you either MoD anthology, the base card game, or the expansion set. Everything’s at the Wondermark store until 9 March.

• We at Fleen have mentioned Josh Fruhlinger’s delightful debut novel, The Enthusiast, on several occasions. It was the hit of the publishing season among people that heard of it and bought it and read it and enjoyed it; now those same people can drag their friends to the just-announced Enthusiast book tour, which will take Fruhlinger to four cities of personal significance.

  He’ll start on 26 April in Washington, DC (where the book takes place), then making his way to Baltimore (Frulinger was a longtime Charm City resident, including the time he wrote the book), Brooklyn (home of his cover illustrator, Matt Lubchansky, plus who doesn’t want to visit Brooklyn in the spring?), and finishing in Buffalo (home of the future Josh Fruhlinger Birthplace National Monument) on 5 May. Come meet Fruhlinger (enthusiastically), get your book signed (enthusiastically), shoot the shit about Mary Worth or whatever (enthusiastically), and let other people know where your enthusiasms lie.

Spam of the day:

We have had so many people wanting to help run or support blood drives for Free Tickets to the Vans Warped Tour, our staff is working over time. All free tickets will be earned and set up with the blood centers. With this many of you committed to helping, it’s going to take us a couple weeks to sort through everyone and connect you to running blood drives.

Why am I being offered a shot at free and VIP tickets for the Warped Tour? Oh shit, did I sign up to run a blood drive and forget it? Do I have to be a sneering, hipster-glasses-wearing, Day-Glo snakeheaded Medusa to qualify? That’s what your email implies.

Correction The entry appears below originally and mistakenly ran yesterday; there was no strip on 23 February 2006, leaving us all in a cruel, two-day interval where we did not know what happened after Ray ripped a guy’s face off. We at Fleen regret the error and run the correct entry below with the appropriate image above

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray faces up to what he’s done. Watching Cody Travis eat heavily sauced pastas cannot possibly be more unpleasant than that pun I just dropped, I’m so sorry. Let’s just go check out The Tenmen and forget I said anything.

• We are nearing the end of the 30 day campaign for the Smut Peddler Double Header, and my initial guess that the books would clear US$150K (and therefore page rates of US$130) has come true, what with the balance sitting at US$152K as of this writing.

  The per-backer average continues to exceed that of the prior two Smut Peddler Kickstarts, although the backer count is about a third lower than that of SP1024, so the total for these two books will likely fall short of that tome’s US$185K. The midpoint of the projected finish for this campaign was US$162.5, and history shows that Spike’s audience is more than capable of making up nine grand in six hours, but we’ll see. In any event, hooray porn, many people are going to be very happy some time around the end of summer.

• And looking back a year to the batshit insane success of the Exploding Kittens Kickstart, part of what Matt Inman, Elan Lee, and Shane Small said as that funding wrapped up was that they expected to spend two years or more on the project. Now fulfillment is done (and has been for half a year or so), but we got some inkling of what the EK team is up to on (where else?) Twitter:
  

  Psst … #TheCrate is now open http://explodingkittens.com/thecrate

  Following the link, The Crate is described as:

  The Crate is our Secret Club.
  If you get in, we’ll send you cool prototype stuff we’re working on.
  FOR FREE.

  Between now and 11:59pm CST on Friday night, if you catch their attention with a special professment of love for the Exploding Kittens, you get in. This looks to be an ongoing endeavour and shows every indication of going past the promised two years (we’re coming up on the end of Year One, anno kitten, after all). More details at The Crate’s site, but at this point, I’d say an entire line of casual card-type games are in our future. Go nuts.

• Not Kickstarter related, because not everything is Kickstarter related: Nimona — right beloved by all who have read it — has been included in the nominations for the 2015 Nebula Awards, specifically for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.

  It appears to be the only work of comics in any category (unlike the Hugos, the Nebulas do not have a category for words + pictures), and the Andre Norton Award appears to be the most hotly-contested (every other category has six or seven nominees, the ANA has nine), so Noelle Stevenson is by definition a longshot … but given all the other prestigious awards she’s been nominated for (and the Eisners are still pending¹), Stevenson’s no stranger to tough competition. Here’s wishing her luck, because it really is a damn good book.

Spam of the day:

Monster Energy Women’s Ultra Mixer brings together like-minded musicians, artists and media tastemakers in entertainment, lifestyle/fashion/health/fitness/sports/business as well as women that are key industry players in an intimate setting. The evening offers a unique opportunity for a small group to meet and share ideas with other women working in entertainment that are ultra-connected as well as re-unite with friends.

Two things: first, the boldface-underline is original and consistently used in the original email. Second, they want me to RSVP to an event strictly limited to 40 people, for moving/shaking/tastemaking women in the entertainment industry.

Should I tell them?

_______________
¹ Yes, yes, she was nominated last year, for Best Digital/Web Comic, a schizophrenic category that mashes up presentation and format. I think the Eisner voters might actually understand what they’re voting for if Stevenson gets a nomination in a print category.

Correction The entry that originally ran below should have run tomorrow; there was no strip on 23 February 2006, leaving us all in a cruel, two-day interval where we did not know what happened after Ray ripped a guy’s face off. We at Fleen regret the error and have indicated the deletion below and replaced the image above.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray faces up to what he’s done. Watching Cody Travis eat heavily sauced pastas cannot possibly be more unpleasant than that pun I just dropped, I’m so sorry. Let’s just go check out The Tenmen and forget I said anything.

• The thing that I love about Kate Beaton’s work — as if there were just one thing, but let’s pretend for a moment — is how often I end up learning as much as laughing. I count myself fairly well versed in history and for every Matthew Henson, Miyamoto Musashi, or Emperor Norton that I know about, there’s a Catherine Sui Fun Cheung¹, Dr Sara Josephine Baker, or Tom Longboat that I’ve never heard of.

  Today she tops them, bringing us the story of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who was probably the first person to argue for LGBT equality. In 1867, when he had to come up with his own word to substitute for the now-commonplace homosexual because the latter hadn’t been invented yet. As Beaton notes, I only found out about him last fall, which is surprising and also sadly not surprising; I’m certain that pretty much none of us would have found out about Ulrichs without her cartoon today. It’s the most optimistic, affirming thing you’ll read today.

• There’s also optimistic and affirming in the work of Meredith Gran — lots of it, in fact — but the characters that feel that optimism and affirmation might insist that there’s none to find. As previously noted, Image Comics is doing a comprehensive reprint of Octopus Pie from the beginning, and that process starts tomorrow with Octopus Pie, Volume 1, which I will not be buying.

  But this is only because I already own it twice, in the form of the original three self-published books (subtitled A Brooklyn Drama, A Brownstone Companion, and An Interstate Oasis, which between them comprise chapters 1-12), as well as the Villard-published There Are No Stars In Brooklyn (chapters 1-12 again, plus the bonus story The End Of The World; while I’m not above buying a story twice, I draw the line at three times².

  I also have the self-published Listen At Home With Octopus Pie and Dead Again, which between them cover chapters 13-38, meaning that I need not pick up Volume 2 or Volume 3 (due at the end of March and April, respectively), and may pick up with Volume 4 at the end of May which will print stories never before collected.

  Four volumes in four months! This is the ideal situation for somebody that needs to catch up with the best ongoing story of the past ten years. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Meredith Gran gets better every single update, and however good you thought her storytelling was, it’s so much deeper and richer than you thought. Grab V1 tomorrow, and put the others on your pull list.

• Apropos of nothing, today’s Wondermark (number 1200, as it happens) is entirely true to life, in that it closely resembles the struggle I’ve had over the past five months to get Verizon to fix my DSL (which escalated to them pooching my landline to the point it isn’t usable whenever it rains). The only difference being I haven’t (yet!) reached the creepy old crow, but then again I expect to find one when I get high enough in the corporate complaint structure. Webcomics be damned, getting satisfaction from a company that’s been happy to cash my checks is my new hobby.

Spam of the day:

Please accept this Panera Bread gift

I don’t eat at Panera Bread because, ironically, their bread is awful. Really ought to be better at what’s right there in your name.

_______________
¹ With a bonus appearance by Beaton’s best running gag — Top Gun and beach volleyball.

² Although it appears that Volume 1 will be better than TANSIB on the key issue of sparklebutt; V1 has it, TANSIB doesn’t. Then again, my copy of ABD is better than either of the other two as it has sparklebutt made from glitter and highlighter that Gran did by hand.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; I believe that Sound And Motion is getting up from his Downward Dog or some such.

It’s nearly the weekend and by way of advance notice, the next couple of weeks look to be a little weird. My teaching schedule next week will be to accommodate students who are variously located in Holland, India, and Australia. The week after that is jury duty (one day or one trial; really hoping for the former). Starting the week after that will be a fairly lengthy period of travel. Apologies in advance for any interruptions.

• However, the day I anticipate sitting around in a room waiting to find out if I’m part of a jury, I intend to catch up on some reading. Stacked up and waiting to be read: no fewer than four review copies from the good folks at :01 Books (by Ben Hatke, Tony Cliff, Faith Erin Hicks, and James Kochalka¹). I’ve also got a PDF of the second part of Sophie Goldstein’s House of Women (the first part of which garnered a 2013 Ignatz), which Ms Goldstein was kind enough to send along. Everybody else in the jury room can stare glumly into their phones, I’ma get my comics on.
• I’ve expressed this before, but I really need to learn to draw one of these days. And, were I not on jury duty, I just might spend that week in San Francisco² seeing as how the Cartoon Art Museum is kicking off their latest education program on Thursday, 3 March, at 7:00pm. To be more specific, Mark Badger will be running a class on drawing, in conjunction with CAM, each Thursday night in March.

  Mark Badger’s Just Draw is for older teens, adults, runs two hours per session, held at the temporary educational space in the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center at 275 Fifth Street. It’ll cover everything from four-page minis to the four hundred page magnum opus, with a veteran cartoonist/teacher (thirty years and fifteen years, respectively) for the low, low price of US$200 (US$175 for CAM members), with enrollment available here.

• Now that the thirteen part travel halfway round the world and get married epic is done at Johnny Wander, Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota are getting ready to drop their next project on us, and it looks like a doozy. It’s tempting to think of them as one Voltron-like single entity, but they are actually separate people! And sometimes they work on their own projects! And starting Tuesday, the latest of these will begin serialization. Let’s let Hirsh tell us all about it:
  

  Beginning next week we’ll be running the first chapter of IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED, a comic I’ve been collaborating on with Tessa Stone and Sarah Stone! I’ve worked with Tess previously on BUZZ!, a graphic novel about full-contact spelling bees (available through Oni Press). Tessa currently does Not Drunk Enough, and Sarah Stone has worked on a huge range of projects, including Transformers: Windblade!

  We’ll be running the first chapter on Johnny Wander, at which point the comic will migrate to its own website. The first four pages will run on Tuesday, and then we’ll post a comic per update like normal.

  One chapter to get us hooked, eh? I’m onto you, Hirsh, and if your previous collab with Tessa Stone wasn’t so good, I’d be getting the hell out of here before you got your greedy hooks in me. But BUZZ! was good — very, very good — and so I’m willingly coming back to you. I trust you’ll make it worth my while.

• And, from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin:
  

  Sorry, it turns out my reference for [the end of Notes on paper](http://fleen.com/archives/2016/02/17/happy-returns-of-the-day/) was outdated, as more recently Boulet indicated that « [Volume 9 was a “pentimento” after I planned to stop after volume 8](http://www.bouletcorp.com/#answer54) » and that he even had extra pages that would end up in a volume 10, where we are today. It is probably best to consider each volume of Notes as being potentially the last, while leaving open the possibility of future volumes, much like these singers who always claim this is their last tour but can’t seem to actually bring themselves to stop.

  Duly noted; on the plus side, we’re gonna get several hundred pages of Boulet, so that’s all right. Have a good weekend, everybody.

Spam of the day:

Keep your bait possibilities different by pking a couple dozen leeches just in case.

Gotta say, leeches are a welcome respite from the slutty moms in my area that want to have sex with me. Pretty sure that combination of words has never been uttered in any context throughout human history.

_______________
¹ Which is in all likelihood the greatest book in history.

² Okay, not really — if I don’t get picked for trial, I have to head to Dallas for work later that week.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We discover who has a gigantic and deep-seated fury at the world.

• Here’s the thing about webcomics — as a wide-ranging method of distribution featuring every possible type of story and creator, whoever you are, you’re going to be rubbing somebody the wrong way. The best-known creators attract the greatest scrutiny, naturally, because a wider audience also gives you a greater chance to be exposed to somebody who just isn’t going to like you. Nobody is universally liked¹.

  Except Anthony Clark.

  His strips delight everybody; he’s the go-to colorist in webcomics; in person he is the sort of person that makes you think to yourself How can one guy be so damn likeable?² A friend of mine who reads webcomics but is mostly what you’d call a webcomics civilian expressed once that any day that started with a new comic from Clark was automatically a good day. And let us not forget the greatest expression of back-and-forth jam comics to ever exist, the Anthony Clark-Emmy Cicierega collaborations known as Laserpony Studios.

  And as of today, Clark’s been doing his Beartato comics for ten years. Beartato, Reginald, Harrison, Gary, and the other agents of whimsy came into public at the same time as The Great Outdoor Fight was running — they could not be any different, but they are just as enduring and delightful to read. Happy Anniversary, Anthony. Your comics are good and you should feel good.

• Via the twitterfeed of John Kovalic comes the news that the the John Locher award (for student editorial cartooning) is now open to webcomics and graphic novelists. Any full-time students between the ages of 17 and 25, you have until 15 April to get in your application, and since opportunities for editorial cartooning are thin on the ground, may I suggest you also drop a line to Matt Bors in anticipation of The Nib’s revival later this year?
• A correction and an additional bit of info from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, as regards our mention of Boulet yesterday:
  

  A quick dispatch to let you know that Soaring Penguin Press is, shall we say, incentivizing preorders of the first volume of Boulet’s “Notes” by offering his 24-hour comic the Gaeneviad to the first people who preorder.

  Speaking of which, I’m afraid the ten volumes of Notes are not really “and counting”, as Boulet announced some time ago he would keep doing notes but no longer collect them on paper after volume 10 (sorry, I can’t find the reference at the moment).

  Well, that’s both terrific and disappointing new, respectively. For those who didn’t see it, Gaeneviad is online here, and like his earlier 24 hour comic, Darkness, it’s a delight. Not really a surprise, really, since everything he does is a delight.

Spam of the day:

Look what I found growing in your stomach!

What the hell are you doing in my stomach? Get out of there!

_______________
¹ If you’re thinking of Ryan North as an exception, I have it on good authority that some find him to be disturbingly tall, unrepentantly Canadian, and a setter of bad examples to our youth with respect to holes.

² There is a speculation that Clark being so likeable could theoretically make him unlikeable to a certain sort of deeply insecure and damaged person, but to date the existence of such people remains unproven. It’s possible that CERN would have to get involved to find anyone of such a sour disposition.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Still waiting for the Fight to start; things really kick in tomorrow, though.

• Ordinarily, I’d have run the story that linked to the art as the first item, but this is too big to go anyplace but the lead slot; I trust that Kate will understand. Re: our call two days ago for book purchasers to push Raina Telgemeier from holding 60% of the New York Times Best Seller List to 70%; that didn’t take long. Thanks, book purchasers! Now hold on until Ghosts comes out and make it 80%!
• Now then: Kate Beaton, who all right-thinking folk regard as a treasure and one of the very best creators in both comics, and in any creative medium from the Great White North. Beaton was tapped to provide a show poster for TCAF, and it’s a beaut. More than all the geekly references, it’s also terrific because the message could not be any more clear: TCAF¹ is for everyone. Be sure to thank Beaton when you see her at the Toronto Reference Library on the 14th & 15th of May.
• I got a press release and some sample pages from a guy named Derrick Johnson recently, and I wasn’t going to do much with it — another first release of a webcomic in print form, I see those literally every day, and mention only the ones that grab me in the eyeballs and don’t let go. But something about Johnson’s missive did grab me, and I wasn’t sure exactly what for a couple of minutes. Then it hit me:
  

  I’m a comics creator, that posted comics regularly to my website for a 4 year period in 2007-10. After a long hiatus, I decided to collect the best strips from that time and self-publish a book, The Best of Colored Comics, Volume 1.

  Everybody catch that? 2007-10. Comics creators (like artistic types of all sorts) that I know have a definite tendency to be their own worst critics. The most well-balanced of them can stand to look at their most recent work without berating themselves, but maybe on an 18 month rotating cycle. That is, today’s work is pretty okay, anything from last year is barely adequate, and older than 18 months is fit only to be burned. Of course, 18 months from now, today’s work will fall firmly into the burn category. Thus does skill push itself to improve, on the back of total neuroticism.

  So to read that Johnson worked at Colored Comics for four years, then to set it aside for five with plans to print, then to resume? That’s an act of supreme bravery. The samples that Johnson sent along, I can tell which are older and which are more recent; the new comics on the site reveal that regularly updating or no, Johnson’s been practicing and improving. I can’t imagine what it was like to go through work almost a decade old to prepare it for print, but it’s the most self-challenging and fundamentally optimistic act I’ve seen in quite a while.

  Confidence is a major part of creativity, the feeling that putting a part of yourself out there won’t come back to bite you in the ass, that the random cruelties of a thousand internet griefers won’t drag you down. So yeah — if you’re looking for what early work (that improves as you read it, and gets better still past the end) looks like, Derrick Johnson’s your guy. Here’s hoping he continues to develop without falling to the 18 month neurosis, because I want to see just how good he gets. The Best of Colored Comics, volume 1 is US$15 from Johnson, and pay what you want at Gumroad. Check ‘er out.

• Oh, and 4000 is a hell of a big number, minus maybe a couple dozen guest strips, plus more than 700 for the newspapers. Happy Big Round Number Day, Rich Stevens. You’re a goddamn inspiration.

Spam of the day:

Discount COSTC0 MEMBERSHIPS

So I’ve gone from being on the sexy MILFs spam list to the bootleg warehouse-club membership spam list? Guess it’s just a matter of time before I end up on the oatmeal-and-diabetes-meds spam list, then the prepaid funeral services spam list. Welp, it was nice knowing you.

_______________
¹ Indeed, comics, and nerdery, and all fandoms you can think of.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; I suspect that SoRod is napping while Beef makes plans.

• We have mentioned several times the fact that Yuko Ota & Ananth Hirsh’s Lucky Penny (long delayed by repetitive stress injuries in Ota’s drawing hand … so she taught herself to draw with the other muthascratchin’ hand) is approaching publication. Should be here next month from the good folks at Oni Press), and to celebrate, there’s a contest that could net you three (three!) copies of Lucky Penny, if you’re funny enough:
  

  Make up a steamy romance novel for Penny to read for a chance to win copies of Lucky Penny! #LuckyPennyPicks

  See, Penny reads terrible-slash-awesome sounding romance novels (excerpts of which have been shared), and if you come up with the best title for a novel out of Penny’s collection between now and Sunday (Valentine’s Day!) at 11:59pm PST, you could get a copy of the standard edition of Lucky Penny, plus copies of the Kickstarter-exclusive softcover and hardcover editions. Details at the Oni blog, along with the rest of the rules. Think up your best romance novel title (nothing too creepy or rude but definitely suggestive would be my advice) and good luck to all.

• The Cartoon Art Museum continues its traveling roadshow of events while it is between permanent locations; as in the past several months, the Third Thursday of February (that would be the 18th) will see CAM set up in the new location of the American Bookbinders Museum at 355 Clementina Street in San Francisco. Fun starts at 5:30pm and runs until 8:00pm, and will feature live art demos, trivia, food & drink, and is free and open to the public. Creators on hand this month will be Myisha Haynes, Melissa Pagluica, and Liz Mayorga. Check out their work — lots of great looking stuff there.

Spam of the day:

Breaking Story: Trump has been taking a ‘smart pill’ – you have to read this..

If this is Trump on smart pills, I don’t want to see what he’s like when he runs out.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; Beef is undoubtedly deciding who among the gathering hordes will be invited to roll with Son of Rodney.

So much going on, I barely know where to start. Let’s just go in the order of when I scribbled notes to myself.

• Longtime Friend o’ Fleen Eben Burgoon started in [web]comickry with spy spoof Eben07, then moved onto action-adventure spoof B-Squad (and, almost uniquely among creators, managed to repurpose a failed Kickstart into success with the first volume). He’s back with more weird deconstruction of the ragtag-team concept as B-Squad volume 2 launched on the ‘starter yesterday. I was going to write about it yesterday, but honestly when C&H dropped their immediately megasuccessful card game¹ on the world, any other new Kickstart was just gonna be overshadowed and so I pushed back a day.

  And B-Squad didn’t deserve that, so here we are today. One day in, 38 to go, sitting at about 16% of goal, as Burgoon pairs up with five artists to tell five stories and also deal with the worst writing constraint in history: each story, at least one character is going to kick it, as determined by a die roll that Burgoon must then adapt to. They say that writing is about killing your darlings, but what if you put work and love into a character and then the die says they gotta, well, die? Help make it all a bit less painful for Burgoon by at least making financially worthwhile for the creators to deal with the challenge and heartbreak.

• The ongoing endeavour that is trying to figure out who the heck gets a table at SPX hits a significant date soon; the curated portion of the floor is being allocated, and soon the showrunners will know exactly how many spots will go into the table lottery. Want to exhibit but not specifically invited? Check it:
  

  On February 12, 2016, the lottery registration will become available and the lottery registration period will last between February 12 and February 26, 2016.

  The lottery registration will take place through a web page on the SPXPO.com website. We will provide basic instructions on this page that can also be viewed in the FAQ section below.

  Each lottery registrant will receive an e-mail containing their own randomly generated 6-digit number that you will receive within 48 hours of registering for the lottery.

  Once the lottery registration period is completed on February 26, 2016, we will have a digital coin flipper to determine whether we sort the random numbers by ascending or descending order. The lottery registrant list will then be sorted by random number according to the coin flip, and those tables above the capacity threshold will be selected to exhibit at SPX 2016. The order of the tables below the capacity threshold will determine the wait list. [emphasis original]

  Got that? Friday is the day to start looking at the website for lottery applications. This is a much better system than the frantic rush to apply that SPX used before the lottery system, meaning that timestamps and postmarks and checks received don’t determine who gets in. Two weeks, same chance whenever you apply, and hope to see you in September.

• For those wondering, Queen of Comictopia Raina Telgemeier has topped off a recent move back to San Francisco with the release of the fourth of her newly-colored Baby Sitters Club adaptations and whaddaya know, it’s entered the New York Times Best Seller List in its first week. In slot #1. With five other books (Smile, Drama, Sisters, and two other BSC volumes) in slots 2, 5, 7, 8, and 9. Okay, book purchasers, let’s get that last BSC book on the list so that Telgemeier can have 70% of it to herself (until Ghosts comes out and she hits 80%). It’s her world, comics, we may as well acknowledge it.

• The Nib, lost to a reorg at Medium, has pretty much been Matt Bors’s singular focus for the past eight months or so. First it was the Kickstart to reprint the best of the site, and much of the time since has been dedicated to finding a new home for editorial cartooning on the web that pays. Good news dropping this morning, then:

  First Look Media today announced that they have partnered with award winning cartoonist Matt Bors on his irreverent comics publication, The Nib. Formerly part of the online platform Medium, The Nib will re-launch this summer through First Look Media as an independent daily publication and online newsletter.

  Great news, in fact, but why do I recognize that name, First Look Media?

  Bors will remain editor of The Nib as it joins First Look Media’s family of media properties including The Intercept, reported.ly, and Field of Vision.

  Ohhhh, right, The Intercept — that’s Greg Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the people that brought Edward Snowden’s leaks to light. Damn, this is going to be a match made in heaven, with adversarial journalism committed in both words and pictures. It’ll have been a year spent Nibless, but before long we’re going to have voices back that we haven’t seen as much lately, in one place, both delighting and enraging me, and (most importantly) getting paid. That’ll do, Matt. That’ll do.

Spam of the day:

say hello to these naughty and wild milfs

Why, for the love of all that you might find holy, why would you send me a spam trying to intrigue me on a sexual basis and then write that spam in ficking Comic Sans?

_______________
¹ As of this writing, above US$400K on a US$10K goal, with more than 8700 backers. The FFFmk2 predicts a final funding in the US$1.5million (plus or minus call it US$300K) range, which would be frankly insane if not for the example of Exploding Kittens last year.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Running credit and the relative merits of recumbent Tai-Chi.

• Well, that was fast. Between morning break and when I caught up at lunch, the lads over at Cyanide & Happiness launched, funded (about 30 minutes later), and continue to overfund (as of this writing, by about a factor of nine) a Kickstarter for a card game, Joking Hazard. Short version, it appears to be an in-person, competitive version of the C&H random comic generator. It’s Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity with pictures. It’s going to fund a million dollars (we can do a proper prediction when the Kickstart’s not two and a half hours old.
• As a quick reminder, the Smut Peddler Double Header Kickstarter is about halfway through its run, and is just shy of US$100,000. What’s more popular? A somewhat rude card game, or hot, hot pornography? Reminder: it can be both! Success of one need not come a the expense of the other.
• Going back to 2011, I’ve been keeping an eye on Tyler Page’s slowly-evolving Raised on Ritalin, a memoir-slash-exploration of mental health issues (specifically, ADD/ADHD) in comic form. It’s been released in chapters approximately 3 – 4 times a year, and today’s latest update bears both the tagline What does the future hold? and a notation that the next chapter will be the last. It’s been a long, sometimes painfully honest story that Page has shared with us, and while I’ll be sorry to see it go, I’ll be happier to know that he got such a monumental project finished and in shape. It’s worth a read from the beginning.

Spam of the day:
Compare and contrast —

local moms need easy sex

and

local mom in need of some very hardsex

Firstly, get your message consistent as to the hardness of the needed sex. Secondly, if you want to make people think of sex, stop using the word mom in any context in my direction because ew.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Beef recounts the history of Rodney Leonard Stubbs and becomes Ray’s fight roadie. It’s like those Canadian Heritage Minutes, only with the Great Outdoor Fight.

And in other news, today I can top Beef’s 127 days since the last dumbest workplace sentence (making a total of 3780 days, I would suppose), namely:

Let the students each bring their own laptop; they’ll surely work with the educational landscape and they’ll be able to do the course exercises with no problem.

That is sass in the main and also why I don’t get a proper lunch today and you don’t get a proper post today, or maybe tomorrow, as a two-day class that’s packed to the gills has had an enormous hole blown in it that’s not yet resolved. Oh, and if anybody knows the son of a bitch that invented Comic Sans the doctrine of Bring Your Own Device, please point me in his general direction. I understand he wants to taste the curb.

But I can’t leave you with nothing, so please enjoy (as a followup to yesterday’s discussion) a graphic of all 157 titles from the first ten years of :01 Books; click to embiggen, naturally, and let me know how many of them you’ve read. I think I’m at 101 (and, to be fair, some of the books on the list aren’t out yet). Not bad, still a ways to go.

Spam of the day:

(That is the common thought among ladies. These types of workouts are what allow Matthew Mc – Conaughey to keep his body lean and sculpted.

I am not qualified to declare what is or is not the common thought among ladies.