Because you can never have too much John Allison, whether it involves the extended/extensive Tackleford continuity, or his other projects, two bits of recent news caught my eye and make me happy.

First, from BOOM! Studios associate editor Jasmine Amiri, word that Giant Days, Allison’s side-story of Dark Esther at university, has been extended from six issues to twelve, with a new combo edition of the first two issues to catch up late arrivals. This is particularly good news because Giant Days issue #3 is recently out, and the third issue is often the make-or-break point.

Issue #1, people buy that¹; issue #2, they’re still deciding if they’re going to keep buying it or not; issue #3 is where the drop-off is going to occur, if it occurs, and maybe there’s no issue #4 and up. It’s a scary place to be, even when you’re doing a miniseries rather than an ongoing².

On the other hand, it’s also where limited or miniseries get extended, or converted to ongoing — if memory serves, Lumberjanes and Samurai Jack both got their runs bumped up off the back of issue #3. If another couple issues of Giant Days show solid numbers and growth and BOOM! wants to pay Allison (and artist Lissa Treiman) a fair price to keep it going, I’ll be the happiest geek with a Wednesday pull-list.

Then Allison had to go and make me even happier:

I’m reprinting Murder She Writes, just re-read it while proofing. Not to sound conceited, but that was a nice piece of work.

Murder She Writes was one of the “in-between” stories that Allison used to break up the long story arcs of Bad Machinery; they tended to be very silly, very Shelley-centric, very good, and very absent from the archives once they went to print. The fact that it’s getting a reprint gives me hope of someday seeing a comprehensive omnibus collection of the in-betweens and latter-day Bobbins strips, basically because I am a huge completist and will make room on my shelves for the totality of Allison’s oeuvre³.

Okay, Friday afternoon — enjoy the crap out of your weekends, people, or I’ll be forced to shove Giant Days into your brain until you do.

Spam of the day:

The company founded in 1985, has total assets of RMB1.52 billion, occupies a total area of 800,000 square meters, and employs 3,000 staff members, including 98 senior engineers and technicians and 319 mid-level engineers and technicians.

That is oddly specific information about your company; too bad you never told me what they do with all that money, space, and expertise.

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¹ If only because speculator types are hedging their bets that in 20 years, they might be sitting on the equivalent of Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27, or Amazing Fantasy #15 and cash that sucker in for a million dollars.

² If you aren’t reading Carla Speed McNeil & Alex de Campi’s No Mercy, what the hell is wrong with you? If this gets cancelled from low sales and I don’t see the end of the story, I’m taking vengeance on all of you bozos.

³ Also, somebody at Marvel should pay Allison to do a She-Hulk/old-school rollerskates-armor Iron Man team-up to get racked next to The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl; you know it would be the best comic book ever.

It’s been odd, the past half-week or so: The Nib has been quiet, with no comics more recent than three or four days, a sad echo of what was the best congregator of editorial comics, story comics, confessional comics, comics journalism, and just plain comics¹ that we’ve seen come down the pike for a good long time. And they paid. We knew the end was coming, but it’s still disturbing to see the final week’s entries getting older. There was a new comic from (once and possibly still) site editor Matt Bors today, but it wasn’t his usual editorial work, more a randomized snark.

In a way, it’s a perfect companion to the new focus that Nib overlords at Medium want — more social, less contextual, more likely to be shared and digested in a quick bite than require some time and thought. Said overlords changed their minds about what they wanted from The Nib once, maybe they’ll change them again — or at least decide to take a hands-off approach to Bors’s editorial vision. Maybe he can get the band back together. Maybe it wasn’t just a fleeting moment that we’ll never have again. At least they went out with sharp elbows and some of their best work even as the lights were being turned off.

Happier notes:

• If ever somebody doesn’t get why Oh Joy, Sex Toy [Not Safe If Your Work Is Insufficiently Awesome] is wonderful, show them today’s strip. I don’t know if I’m more in love with Erika’s description of the doodad² or the illustration of the pokébattle³ at the end, which she has seen to provide a mostly SFW version of at her twitterfeed. I don’t need a device that tracks how I’m doing my Kegel exercises, but thanks to this comic, I kind of want one.
• Speaking of things I didn’t realize I wanted: of all the webcomickers that have drifted away from my daily attention, probably none has been so neglected as Marc Ellerby, creator of the long-wrapped Ellerbisms. I don’t know what it is — I like Ellerby’s work a whole lot, but if I don’t actively pay attention to him, he just slips off my radar for embarrassingly long intervals. The upside to this is I sometimes find in my absence, he’s completed entire works of comics that I get to enjoy all at once.

  Or maybe I’m lucky enough to catch a retweet of an announcement, such as this morning when Ellerby let us know that Gumroad has pay what you want pricing for Ellerbisms and Chloe Noonan. Ellerby’s Gumroad store is here and there I learn — holy crap! — that Ellerby is also illustrating for the Ricky & Morty comic book (makes sense — his style is right up the R&M alley). So go give him some attention and — more importantly — money.

• I am behind on the news that Lumberjanes is being made into a movie; I could claim that I wanted to wait a couple of days to see if there would be any women assigned to the early creative effort, like pairing up with (or replacing) the screenwriter, but nothing since the news broke last week. That’s not really it, though — I saw the news last week and inexplicably didn’t write about it. Anyway. Lumberjanes is great, and if somebody on the inside can confirm something that I’ve been wondering about since the news hit — do Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, and Shannon Watters get paid as a result of the rights sale, or just BOOM!? — then all will be well (assuming I get the answer I want, namely, yes, the ladies are cashing big checks of screw this! money).

Spam of the day:
No quote, but a story. I got an email from a PR firm (bad start) that obviously just sent out a blast to every blog it could find regardless of relevance (gettin’ worse), asking me to consider covering the story of a 72 year old opera singer who is recording her first album and has only eight days left on her Kickstarter to reach funding. But the thing that tells me that this PR flack that I’m not going to name is very bad at her job is the fact that she didn’t include a goddamn link to the goddamn Kickstarter.

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¹ Man, I’m gonna miss having Gemma Correll delivered straight to my brain.

² A FitBit for your ClitBits.

³ Of course it’s Squirtle. I see what you did there, Erika.

Because it’s not a person, there’s no body to bury … and if it were, it’d be the type of person to claw its way out of the grave and snack on the mourners at the funeral for maximum surprise. Joey and Emily are just spontaneous like that.

So here we stand: after one thousand two hundred and forty-three perfect little pillows of hope/despair, melancholy/sanguinity, sexiness/moresexiness, Emily Horne and Joey Comeau leave behind the project that has brought them some measure of internet fame, some measure of internet wealth¹, and critical adoration. Tomorrow’s going to be a less weird place, knowing that they aren’t conspiring together to put exactly the right words and photos together for maximum discomfort, disturbance, and serenity².

Instead, tomorrow they’ll be conspiring together to come up with exactly the right mix of comics for their retrospective collection, Anatomy of Melancholy, the Kickstarter for which will be open for another three hours or so (as I write this). At present, the campaign sits at a hair over US$230,000 which is a good 25 grand higher than the FFFmk2 predicted; it appears that they never added a stretch goal that amounted to We get to choose the good ramen for once, which personally I would have loved to have seen. It’s never good when a Kickstart fails to meet its obligations to backers, but if ever two people were perfectly suited to take a quarter-mil (minus fees) on the lam and never be heard from again, I’d say it’s Joey and Emily. It would be perfect.

But alas, everybody is gonna get exactly what they paid for, and Horne & Comeau will hopefully make a modest profit, but never enough to make up for the dozen years of toil and privation. Thanks for sharing what was inside you, I’m sincerely sorry it didn’t make you rich and famous, and remember — when faking your own death to make off with the money, the secret is to cut all ties with friends and family³. Just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

Bosley Special Anniversary Offer

Seriously, hair replacement? I need hair replacement less than I need to drop 26 pounds for bikini season. The only spam I’ve gotten that’s more wrong-headed was the one with the return address Racy Ukrainian Girls and the subject line Russian Girls are Pursuing Western Bachelors, Communicate Free Today Only. Russians and Urkainians are not the same, idiots!

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¹ That is, minimal, but neither of them starved to death or died of exposure.

² Except for the fact that they hit a stretch goal and will do five comics randomly over the next year.

³ I know Ryan says he can keep your secret, but he’ll slip up. Safer to just disappear.

• Every year, I resolve to remember the cluster of webcomicker birthdays that occurs at the end of May; since I’m already well into the missed the start and try to remember next year, bozo phase, I’ll point out that today is the co-birthday of Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman, as if they could be any more adorable together. Additionally, it is Becky Dreistadt’s birthday, yesterday was Holly Rowland’s, and about three-four days back was Jeffrey Rowland’s¹.

  So happy [recent, in some cases] births-day, Jeffrey, Holly, Raina, Dave, and Becky! You are all awesome people.

• Speaking of birthdays, I think I’ve got the upcoming birthdays of my youngest niece and nephew covered; I received over the weekend my copies (one to keep, one to give away) of Evan Dahm’s² Wonderful Wizard of Oz adaptation, and with any luck the next couple of weeks will bring my copies (one to keep, one to give away) of Zach Weinersmith and Boulet’s³ Augie and the Green Knight.

  Here is my question: given those two books, which would you give to the younger sister, and which to the older brother? I’m leaning towards Oz for the older brother (as he’s just about old enough to read it for himself) and Augie for the younger sister (as she’d need either one read to her, and Augie’s such a kick-ass hero and it’s never too early to start that habit in nieces).

  I imagine that they’ll both end up reading (or having read to them) both books, I’m just wondering if anybody out there who’s maybe read the PDF backer copy of Augie or Oz has a definite idea of age ranges. Help me out, peoples, and make a couple of little kid birthdays happier.

Spam of the day:

Shed 25lbs of bellyfat for bikini season,

You really sent this to the wrong person; to get rid of 25 pounds from my abdomen, you’d have to remove at least four major organs.

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¹ Not so weird that such a cluster occurred; at one point in the past, there were three separate people (me being one of them) on my EMS agency with the same birthday; it’s just a matter of time until you get these coincidences and duplications.

Heck, some day I’m going to start a business with another Gary Tyrrell just so we can confuse people that call up the main phone line. Can I speak to Gary Tyrrell? Which one? The one that went to nerd school. Which one? The one that likes beer. Which one? The one that pronounces his last name like “Ferrell”. Which one? The trombone guy? Please hold for Mr Tyrrell.

² Who, by the by, yesterday started rerunning his seminal series Rice Boy with commentary over at Tumblr. Read it again for the first time!

³ Who, by the by, will be having his French-language books released in English, starting next April and continuing for the next half-dozen years or so. Goo news for those of us who can’t get enough Boulet.

I’ve been waiting for my copy of Skin Horse volume 5 for ages now¹, which I should note is not the same thing as being late. Ms Garrity and Mr Wells wisely put plenty of time for fulfillment into their crowdfunding plan, and the book which was due in May 2015² arrived yesterday, on time and as promised. I love that phrase, about as much as I love checking the box on my Kickstarter Backed Projects page that says Got it! By the way, of the 40 projects I’ve backed with delivery dates not in the future, this makes six that are late³, which is a pretty damn good record as far as Kickstarts go.

I’m particularly happy to receive this book because while Skin Horse is one of those comics that I read daily (indeed, I’m grumpy if I don’t get to read it daily for some reason), I get much more out of it in big chunks; receiving the new book means I get to read two full story arcs in one sitting, and given the way the story is resolving at present, volume 5 ends on the record scratch that marks the big reveal at the end of the second act of the overall story. That means that I probably won’t get more than seven or eight books in the full story and that makes me sad — but then again, I was sad when Narbonic ended and now I have faith that whatever Garrity and/or Wells do next (jointly and severally, as the lawyers say), it’ll be well worth my time.

Okay, Monday’s a holiday in the States; I expect I’ll have something to say about the NCS division awards (I don’t get a vote, but I’m very happy to see Danielle Corsetto and Minna Sundberg in their respective categories and am rooting for them), but otherwise you likely won’t miss much if you don’t come back until Tuesday. Have a good weekend, everybody!

Spam of the day:

Hi my name is Olivie and I just wanted to drop you a quick note here instead of calling you.

Feel free to try to call me, but understand two things:

1. I answer the house phone, which lacks caller ID, with a cheery Ahoy-hoy! which weirds most people out.
2. I will string out cold-calling telemarketers like yourself as long as possible, figuring that while none of you scamming bastards will ever stop calling (given that you’re already ignoring the Do Not Call list), I can at least cost you money by wasting your time at least as much as you’re wasting mine.

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¹ The first rule of Webcomickers Having Kids is it puts a crimp the schedules of my entertainment (both free and paid), and thus is to be discouraged. The world, alas, must be peopled, so they get a pass for now.

² Also due this month: Evan Dahm’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz adaptation, for which I have tracking info that indicates it is presently on a truck in my geographical vicinity. I’ma call that one fulfilled on time as well.

³ One of which is moderately late, and I believe affected by West Coast dockworkers strikes; three are about a year overdue, two for reasons out of control of the creators; the last two are more than two years late, one of which I expect to see in the next couple of months and one of which I’ve mentally written off. Oh, and there were some on other platforms, but mostly it’s Kickstarter for me.

Hey, everybody! ‘Dja miss me? It’s going to take a day or two to get fully back into the swing of things, so today is mostly about me getting caught up on things that happened while I was gone.

• Going furthest back you may or may not have noticed that Jillian Tamaki did an interview with The AV Club about SuperMutant Magic Academy, This One Summer¹, her episodes of Adventure Time, and more. It’s a great conversation and I recommend it to you if you hadn’t seen it before.
• Howard Tayler² has been running a fairly massive Kickstart for an RPG to be set in his Schlockiverse for the past month or so; the management of expectations and stretch goal announcements have done well to make the traditional last-week bump in backers and pledges into more of a last fortnight, as well as causing that rarest of things on the Long Tail: an uptick in funding predictions.

  As I write this line, the Planet Mercenary campaign will be wrapping up in about five minutes, somewhere in the vicinity of US$350,000 (or 777% of goal)³. For reference, the Fleen Funding Formula Mark 2 would have predicted a whopping US$206K — US$309K which he’s handily exceeded. Well done, Tayler and partners, and enjoy the massive pile of creative output that you’ll be engaging in for the next year or so.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, Spike Trotman launched her latest on Friday; as mentioned in the before times, she continues to alternate anthology topics, with a Smut Peddler followed by a specific genre, followed by more porn, and then another genre. It’s Sci Fi’s turn, and New World (specifically dealing with the topic of cultures coming into contact/conflict) is off to a rousing start.

  From launch on Friday to nowish, it’s reached 102% of the US$20,000 goal, meaning we’re now into the Iron Circus Comics Overfunding Bonus Plan: every contributor (or contributor team) just earned a US$50 bonus on top of the page rate they’re already been paid with another US$50 for each additional US$5000 on the campaign. For references, the bonuses paid for Smut Peddler 2012, The Sleep of Reason, and Smut Peddler 2014 were US$650, US$300, and US$1700 (!), respectively.

  In any event, four weeks left to make Spike write as large a check as possible to her incredibly skilled list of contributors; given the FFFmk2 prediction of somewhere between US$55K and US$83K, would be on the order of US$400 to US$650 a pop (which would be in line with the bonuses pad for TSOR and further proving the point that porn is innately more popular than anything else). This is why people want to work on Spike’s books — she pays, then she pays more.

• Finally, Zubday — that regularly-occurring holiday that happens every Wednesday when there’s a new Jim Zub comic (or two, or more) on the stands — comes early this week. That’s because today is Zubday Prime, aka Zub’s birthday. Early reports are that Zub is spending the day much like any other: planning to take over the world writing and editing and merchandising and designing and generally making comics. In other words, a good day. Happy Zubday, everybody.

Spam of the day:

send 10,000 blog comments Fee just $ 100
send 100,000 blog comments Fee just $ 800
send 200,000 blog comments Fee just $ 1200

Yes, please, let me give you money to make the percentage of my life spent on crap comment pruning even greater than it already is.

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¹ Which — goodness! — is a year old now. Time sure does fly.

² My evil twin, etc.

³ Actual total: 5,312 backers for a total of US$348,641, or 775% of a US$45,000 goal.

I believe that I am well on record that Raina Telgemeier is the most important person working in comics today, and if the industry wants to really grow they should be watching everything she does and emulating it. I thought she’d reached a pinnacle when she had three books on the New York Times Bestseller List, then specifically the top three slots on the list¹.

Pfft, old news.

As her publisher, Scholastic, noted via tweet earlier today, Telgemeier has added the first of the reissued-in-color Baby-Sitters Club books to the list, meaning she now owns the top four positions all by her lonesome².

I am through being astonished, and will no longer be surprised at anything Telgemeier manages to pull off.

If I remember a-right, the BSC books are being re-released at six month intervals, which should mean that we’re never more than half a year from something new with Raina’s name on the cover between now and her next original graphic novel in 2017. Could the entire four-book BSC stay on the list along with the other three? To be (inevitably) joined by that next OGN? Could we actually see between five and eight Raina Telgemeier titles hogging the NYTBSL, to the point where — in order to maintain any relevance — it’s repurposed as a list of the best selling paperback graphic novels specifically not by Raina Telgemeier? No bets, my friends, no bets.

Fleen congratulates Telgemeier and reminds an industry that lurches spasmodically from line-wide-crossover-that-changes-everything to line-wide-crossover-that-re-changes-everything: this woman is single-handedly eating your lunch, half of your dinner, and is in the process of repossessing your coffee machine and all the good snacks. Adapt or die.

Reminder: Next week is my internet hiatus. I’ll be back online and posting again on the 18th.

Spam of the day:

Yes! Finally something about Michael Kors.

Weirdly, although I have mentioned His Orangeness several times over Fleen’s history, including once within the past two weeks, this particular spam was left on a post that didn’t mention Kors at all. Feel free to insert a paraphrase of Kirk telling Khan that he keeps … missing … the target.

¹ Since then, the order has been shifting back and forth, but Smile, Drama, and Sisters have been holding strong.

² Rest of the list? Cece Bell (El Deafo), Victoria Jamieson (Roller Girl), G Willow Wilson (the second Ms Marvel collection), and Jillian Tamaki (Supermutant Magic Academy), all aimed squarely at girls. Only two books could be said to be “traditional” comics — the fourth Saga collection and a resurgence of the nearly 30 year old Dark Knight Returns, probably because they just announced Miller would be doing a second sequel. Figure it won’t be off the list in a week.

I believe that I mentioned recently that David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) very kindly offered me my choice of original strips from Planet of Hats and how I chose the ur-“Planet Of” episode of old-school Trek: Patterns Of Force, aka Planet Of The Nazis. Well, my friends, that strip successfully wended its way from distant ‘Straya to deepest New Jersey, and I have learned a few things:

• Morgan-Mar works at a fairly standard size — the four-row, twelve-panel strip took up two sheets of drawing paper, approximately letter/A4 size.
• Morgan-Mar does not screw around when it comes to protecting art — the two sheets of art paper were sandwiched in two sheets of plain paper, which in turn were sandwiched in what appears to be the carefully-excised cardstock-and-vinyl covers of a three-ring binder, which package was bound up by five strips of duct tape. The end times could come and that artwork would have survived all the vagaries of Armageddon.
• I’ll share a visual once the original strip runs so as not to steal Morgan-Mar’s thunder; today’s update at Planet of Hats is Return to Tomorrow, which means Patterns of Force is next. However, Morgan-Mar also announced today that he’s skipping next week as he’ll be on vacation, so it’ll be another week.

All of which leads to one inevitable conclusion: Morgan-Mar will be away next week and I now know his home address. The opportunities for mischief boggle the mind!

I think the best would be if I broke into his house and photographed myself covered in all his LEGO bricks, American Beauty style. The fact that he also knows my home address doesn’t really bother me since the only thing here to photograph himself covered with is one very lazy greyhound.

While I’m making my way Down Under on my errand of chaos, here’s what everybody else in webcomics will be doing:

• Approximately half of them will be going to TCAF, where the fun at the Toronto Reference Library starts on Saturday, but where comic-related events are already happening around town. The other half of webcomics will be there next year; they have to alternate because the TRL can only contain so many awesome folks at once.
• Brad Guigar¹, it’s been previously established, will be spending the weekend at his home-town Megan Fox Tits Wolverine show, where he hope that people will not be confused by the proximity of his booth and that of Mr Burt Reynolds. Brad’s prepared a little guide to help you keep them straight.
• Those few who won’t be at TCAF this year, planning on being at TCAF next year, or trying to tell the difference between one of the sexiest men in American history and Burt Reynolds will be checking out some numbers: there are Kickstarts for Oh Joy Sex Toy and A Softer World to consider², both of which are well on their way to meeting or exceeding the previous (successful) Kickstarts for each creator team, respectively.

  A final bit of math: what are the odds that Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan could get Emily Horne & Joey Comeau to do one last ASW next year as an OJST guest comic? That would be the very, very best, but I put it at maybe one in seven. Or, for the ultimate guest strip, make sure there’s some LEGO models in the photos, and whatever kind of sexy business is happening in the main field of vision? Over to the side is laughing Brad Guigar, approving of the hijinks all you wacky kids are getting up to. I’ll put that at one in several million, but I can dream, can’t I?

Spam of the day:

Personalised Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star comes already framed.

Unless it comes with an original horned Grinch on the back side, I ain’t interested.

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¹ Rebel, loner, heartbreaker.

² They each funded out in less than a day and meet the criteria for Fleen Funding Formula predictions (>= 200 backers in that first 24 hours), so let’s call it US$84K to US$126K for OJST and US$136K to US$204K for ASW.

Because it was more or less a year ago (okay, a year less about 17 days) that Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan launched the Kickstart for the first volume of Oh Joy, Sex Toy, which (above and beyond its financial success) was notable for a couple of reasons:

• Taking a page from Spike’s playbook, stretch goals directly benefited guest contributors by increasing payments to them — and that higher page rate is still in effect.
• Nolan and Moen shared a detailed breakdown on how all the financials for OJST vol 1 went, and followed up with more data on how their career making sex toy review comics actually works. I love it when successful creators provide details like this.

Which is to say The Hurricane and Matt¹ are good ‘uns, and their success well-earned.

And wouldn’t you know it, it’s time for a new, larger, second volume of OJST, with the campaign over here just past the one hour mark (and pushing 15% of goal) as I type this. From the project description, Moen & Nolan are plowing some of the money they made on the last book back into this book, so they’re in the slightly precarious position that if they just make goal, they’ll actually be out a chunk o’ change, so let’s not let that happen. They’re running simple on this campaign, with essentially no stretch goals — simple means you get your Big Book of Happy Educational Smut faster, and they’ve already locked in those higher page rates thanks to last year’s campaign. Plus you’ve got seventeen guest contributors, along with some brand new comics and essays.

Quick side note: Fleen will be going dark next week. There’s a family wedding coming up with lots of events planned and while that will only be a couple of days, it occurred to me that I haven’t been seriously offline in maybe 20 years (certainly not in the nearly 10 years I’ve been writing here) and I’m gonna do it. Oh, sure, I’ve taken time off before in exigent circumstances, but I was reachable; I intend to be as off-grid as I can manage this time around. Emails will pile up, comics will go unread, entire subcultures centered around Twitter shitfights will be born, rise to prominence, and fade away before I come back to you on the 18th. So if you’ve got something going on next week, now would be a good time to let me (that would be gary) know (at this website, known as fleen, which is a dot-com) ’cause come the weekend, I’m going cold turkey for a week.

Maybe. We’ll see how the withdrawal symptoms are.

Spam of the day:

Changing your Facebook status from “In a relationship” to “Single” is a childish involving “sending a message” in the partner since got angry at your sweetheart. Even though this immature act is a lot more often done by girls involving anger from the moment, in order to make a little impact on you, really are millions some men that I’ve noticed attempt that too.

I’m not on Facebook so I have no idea what you’re whining about, but I’m sure it’s super important.

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¹ That sounds sorta like a Saturday morning cartoon, doesn’t it?

• So applications for TopatoCon have closed, but they just opened for MICE, which is a show I keep hearing more and more good about. If you think you could arrange to be in Cambridge, MA¹ — across the river from the somewhat better-known Boston² — in the middle of October, this may be something you want to look into.
• Yeah, I know — you’re waiting until the overeager crowds have quieted down before seeing the new Avengers³, you already binged on Daredevil, and have no idea what to watch that’s comics-themed this weekend. Might I recommend STRIPPED, which has joined Netflix and is now available for convenient in-home streaming?
• So I got my copy of Cuttings in the mail yesterday, and it is expectedly gorgeous inside, but in and among the anticipated delights are some things that surprised me. One thing, however, surprised me more than anything else — more than the variety of styles and genres that Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh can work in, more than the amount of money I want to give them to see some of their as-yet-unrealized stories, more than the fact that when a wrist injury sidelined Ota’s right hand, she started drawing her comics with her left and quickly achieved mastery with it.

  And that thing is that Ota can not only draw better with her non-dominant hand than most people will ever draw period, but that there is a page included where she does gesture drawing with her right and left hands simultaneously. What the hell. You should buy all their stuff because anybody that can do that deserves your money.

Spam of the day:

Have you ever thought about creating an ebook or guest authoring on other sites? I have a blog based upon on the same topics you discuss and would love to have you share some stories/information.

You’ve linked to eyelash enhancers, and as I am widely reputed to have the best eyelashes in all of webcomics pseudojournalism, I don’t see why I should lend you any of my hard-won credibility on the eyelash front.

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¹ Our Fair City; requiscat in pace, Tommy.

² Don’t worry about the show not being in Boston — it’s not a big college town.

³ Alternately: you couldn’t get a sitter.