So one of the things I’ve been working on recently, which I hope to mention more fully shortly, has required me to think about webcomics ceators in terms of what they do that isn’t webcomics. That’s a terrible sentence, so just consider the panel held at NYCC 2013 titled Beyond The Webcomic wherein Kate Beaton, Christopher Hastings and Ryan North talked about how they were bursting with creative impulses beyond just webcomics. Or, as I put it in a piece of writing that you may be able to read some day:

Having won their toehold in one medium, creators expanded outward into prose, children’s books, animation, short films, feature films, theater, sketch comedy, new media, games, apps, and academia; if there was a channel for expression, webcomics creators moved into it, applying the habits of hustle and invention that they’d developed. Whatever the next disruptive change in comics might be, they weren’t waiting for it to show up and leave them behind; they were going to go find it and make it theirs.

I kinda like that paragraph; the original even has a footnote in it, because that’s how I roll. It’s been on my mind because of the recognition that webcomics creators have been getting for things they’ve done that aren’t webcomics, like the news that STRIPPED is going to Angoulême, or the fact that two webcomickers have made the list of Best Books of 2014 at The AV Club. And before you say, Yeah, we know, you wrote about it the same day as the STRIPPED thing, this isn’t about comics. It’s about (what some would call) book books, without those filthy, degenerate pictures that cheapen everything.

Well, kinda. One of the honorees is What If? by Randall Munroe, based directly on the webcomic of the same name, but it’s more a general nonfiction book than a comic. At least, there’s not a story there. But the other is The Martian by Andy Weir; it’s his debut novel, but he previously created both Casey and Andy and Cheshire Crossing, making him a webcomicker since small times (although not for about six years or so).

We’re just at the start of this expansion, with tremendously creative people who feel no need to be creative in only one mode of expression (c.f.: also on that list at The AV Club was Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, aka frontman of The Mountain Goats), and I say it’s a great thing. I create neat things is an even better way to describe your job than I make cartoons and put them on the internet.

Spam of the day:

Do you suffer from KIDNEY DISEASE?

No. Next!

Know what’s even better than Chris Hallbeck achieving the ur– Big Round Number (aka “1000 strips”) for Maximumble? The fact that he did it on a secondary strip. Recall: Maximumble (and its companion, Minimumble) are offshoots of the long-running The Book of Biff, which has itself accumulated 1902 strips back to the start of 2006. Add in the more than 500 Minimumbles and today’s achievement isn’t so much a 100th strip as it is a 3449^th. That’s a lotta damn cartoons, and congrats Mr Hallbeck.

• I’ve spent more than one moment of my life over the past 18 months or so trying to figure out exactly how Erika Moen approaches her work on Oh Joy, Sex Toy, and I think I’ve finally got it nailed down. In talking to Laura Hudson in the hallowed pages of Wired¹, Moen is gleeful, patient, instructional, and above all, evangelical. She’s got a mission to spread the good word about sex & reproduction, and all the myriad aspects of how they work and why we should enjoy them. Sex is fun is a simple truth that waaaay too many people need to be reminded of, and Moen’s just the one to do it.

  Plus it led to this exchange on Twitter:

  Deleted joke about Erika liking her old sex toys best: “she discovered that the things she wanted the most had been inside her all along”

  @laura_hudson Booooooo

  @dmeconis @laura_hudson YOU TAKE BACK THAT BOO RIGHT NOW, MECONIS.

  I live for moments like that.

• You know what I like to see? Kickstarters that run more smoothly than the creator anticipated; it helps when the creator’s done the crowdfunding production/fulfillment dance before, or when they’ve built in very generous timelines to be sure as to succeed, but it’s still a thrill². Now I don’t want to put pressure on, or set a creator up for unrealistic expectations, or maybe cause a jinx that makes a container ship founder at sea. But! It appears that Evan Dahm has had some unexpected good luck in the production of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:
  

  Received the bookplates today and they look PERFECT. And I got proofs a little while ago, including some prints of individual pages to check the color. I was anticipating some back-and-forth on that, but in fact we are GOOD TO GO. Paying for the print run later this week!

  That’s great news — you pretty much never hear of a print run going with so little difficulty; there’s always several rounds of corrections and fixes, which can take weeks or months. The fact that Dahm (who has a keen eye for artwork and no patience for poor print jobs) struck gold on the first go-around is great news. The fact that he gave himself six months (from end of campaign in November to promised delivery date in May) to make good on his obligations doesn’t hurt. Underpromise and overdeliver and you’ll have happy customers.

Spam of the day:

Your children being privy to Safe Eyes monitoring their online activity will cooperate in undertaking healthy discussions that what exactly is safe and what on earth is unsafe.

You’re creeping me out and I don’t even have children. Stay the hell away from my entirely theoretical children.

_______________
¹ Hudson convinced her bosses to run the story on the basis of it’s kind of like talking about gadgets.

² Like all crowdfunding backers, I’m due some rewards waaaay past their promised dates. Out of the 40 projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter, I’d estimate maybe a third delivered as promised on time; 36 of the 40 have promised delivery dates in the past, with 8 of them yet to completely or partially fulfill, going back as far as early 2012.

There are people that you know in life, and then there are people that are the best people that you know in life — people who you want to be around because they exude sheer joy in whatever they are undertaking. Undertakings that you want to be a part of, or at the very least consume& with gustosup1;. Several such people are up for discussion today.

• Firstly, today is the anniversary of the birth of two gents I normally only see in San Diego at the Festival du Nerds each July. MC Frontalot makes the songs that make you want to move, is arguably the inventor of an entire category of music, and travels the world like a bespectacled and headlamped Pied Piper. Jon Ferocious J Sung chronicles the lives of dogs, marshals vast armies in battle, boldly goes, and engages in unholy beveragalogical experiments. Both are worth seeking out in whatever form you find easiest, and you should engage wholly in everything they create, with the exception of the candy corn-laced vodka that Ferocious came up with that one time because ick.
• Secondly, this is the time of year that serious organizations make serious lists of the best of various things, books being no exception. Today I note that ur-serious organization NPR have come up with a listing of the best books of the year, a significant fraction of which are of the graphical variety. There one may find appropriate amounts of love heaped upon the likes of Raina Telgemeier², Gene Luen Yang, Emily Carroll, Stan Sakai³, and Chort Zubaz. Hooray for validation!
• Thirdly, the first part of a two-part interview onthe past and future of the Adventure Time comic is now up at Comics Alliance; it’s a conversation between CA’s Chris Sims and real-life pals Ryan North (outgoing AT writer) and Christopher Hastings (incoming AT writer). You can sense the Friendship right there on your screen, it practically oozes out of the internet into your lap.

  That went someplace a little more disturbing than I’d intended. As a palate-cleanse, how about the news that Ryan North will be writing a back-up story in the forthcoming officially-licensed Bill & Ted comic book? Or perhaps the two new pages of Squirrel Girl #1, available for preview sans words? Or the fact that Slate named Midas Flesh (by North, with Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb on art) as one of the unjustly-overlooked books of 2014, which is another example of serious people recognizing webcomics and kind of drags us back to “secondly”.

• You know who I wish did a whole lot more work, like just about every hour of every day? Nicholas Gurewitch, whose The Perry Bible Fellowship exists almost like a perfectly-preserved specimen in amber. It’s unchanging, and wonderful, and everything he’s done since PBF regularly updated is likewise wonderful. And now there’s a new thing, and it’s up to you to make sure it sees the light of day: Notes on a Case of Melancholia is Gurewitch by way of Edward Gorey, and will only make its way to my hands if some number of you help put the Kickstarter over its goal; as of this writing, it’s sitting at about 80% of the requisite US$25,000 which means it’s going to succeed, barring some odd set of circumstances I can scarcely conceive of. Of particular note in the upper tiers of rewards: original Gurewitch sketches, original art from the book, and PBF originals. It’s like a macabre dream come true.

Spam of the day:

Download Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star Movie.

Under no circumstances should you do this. I get that spam only works if you assume the recipient is a little dumb, but this would require absolutely brainlessness to subject yourself to that actual movie product.

_______________
¹ With one tragic exception, to be noted momentarily.

² About whom enough good things simply cannot be said.

³ Who essentially is a webcomicker that happens to distribute via floppy-paper comic books and who — honestly — has remained at the top of the quality game for longer than many of his readers have been alive.

Where to start, where to start? How about with the bad news? If you sell e-books to customers in Europe, 2015 is looking really damn complicated for you; I first saw the rising concern — honestly, panic would be justified — on the twitterfeed of Ursula Vernon, and the entire nasty situation is nicely summed up by KB Spangler on her blog. If you live in Europe, maybe buy your e-books before 1 January, because it looks like it will be prohibitive for all small producers (on either side of the Atlantic) to legally sell them to you after.

If you sell e-books, or e-anything, you will want to do some careful research between now and the end of the year, although my suspicion is that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (or the equivalent agency in other EU countries) can demand all the not-properly-collected value-added tax from a non-EU seller as loudly as they want, and unless you have money stashed in a European bank (or visit there under your own name), they may not be able to collect very effectively. Maybe? Nobody knows, which is the frustrating and scary part.

The rest of the news is better, I promise.

• For the first time, Emily Carroll is selling original comic art pages via auction, running until next Monday. Correction: this Monday, i.e.: today. Act now!
• TCAF is launching a pop-up store at the Toronto Reference Library for the holiday season, with the grand opening the day after tomorrow in conjunction with the debut of Just The Tips — the potentially hazardous sex advice from the back of each issue of Sex Criminals. Chip Zdarsky will be there to, uh, spread the love starting at 6:00pm, and regular store hours will start on Thursday at 9:00am. In the new year, the pop-up will convert to a regular retail space, presumably offering the best of comics from Toronto and elsewhere.
• Speaking of Toronto comics, Jim Zub has dropped more publishing financial data on us, detailing the entire sausage-making process that is the creation and selling of Skullkickers. Once again, ignore Zub’s extreme generosity at your peril — he’s sharing usually-proprietary information so that you need not flounder about and fail.
• Speaking of proprietary information, Chris Yates is giving away all his trade secrets; with a steady hand, some spray paint, and practice, you can make your own Baffler!s. Of course, he’s got ten years experience, so your knockoffs are gonna suck; you should just buy some of his instead.
• Speaking of buying, David Malki ! announced last night his annual perpetually uninterrupted flow of time-style calendar for 2015 is now up for sale, in the usual limited edition. Don’t delay if you want one, because only a lucky few will get the opportunity.
• There’s a really good interview with Randall Munroe in British tech journal The Register from the weekend; I’m a fan of El Reg, but if you’ve not read them before, there’s a fair amount of British nerd vernacular. A glossary of Reg-speak may be found here.

Spam of the day:

I was just looking at your site and see that your site has the potential to become very popular. I just want to tell you, In case you didn’t already know …

Wow. Very popular. Not sure how I’d deal with fame; poorly, I’d expect.

The past 24 hours have brought reworkings of three classic stories to me, and darn if they aren’t all wonderful.

• Firstly, Rebecca Clements has, as noted not long ago, been busy with many things besides comics for a while. Fortunately, she’s got quite a backlog of comics that can be read and re-read. One of those older stories has now been released as an e-book, namely, an attempt at retelling Jack and the Beanstalk from memory, for one Australian dollar (or more! you can give more!) over at Gumroad.

  Clements was kind enough to send me a copy for review and it’s the most interesting take on Jack I’ve ever seen — all the elements are there — eventually — but suffused with the loopy, Seussian logic and visual style that Clements is known for. Oh, and a couple of bad words — including the dreaded F-hyphen-hyphen-hypen bad word — so give it a read through before sharing with a youngling, yes?

• Secondly, because I backed the Kickstarter, Evan Dahm sent me the PDF version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to tide me over until the hardcover gets released in the new year. It’s nearly 200 pages long, a completely faithful, word-for-word presentation of L Frank Baum’s original, with Dahm’s utterly charming drawings of Quadlings, and Kalidahs, and field mice, and all the other things that you never knew about if you only watch the movie.

  Once fulfillment on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has wrapped up for the Kickstarter backers, Dahm will surely place the book on sale, so start budgeting now. It’s gorgeous inside and out.

• Thirdly, Zach Weinersmith was exceedingly kind and shared an extra-early sneak preview of Augie and the Green Knight in PDF with me over the weekend. And all I can say is Wow.

  Okay, basically there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are familiar with the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and those who are not. If you know the story already, seeing it told from the side of the Knight (and that of the very brave, very clever, very rambunctious Augie trying desperately to make sure nobody ends up dead) brings new depths to the story. If you don’t know the story already, you’re going to want to hunt it down because the retelling is wonderful in its Weinersmithiness, and now you need to find out if all those long-dead poets are as good at wordslinging.

  Okay, fine, it’s a story that’s been remembered for half a millennium because at least one of those poets was really, really good; but would he have ever written something like this?

  The squire located a few common fauna -— a frog, a newt, and an amphisbaena. One of those animals may sound unfamiliar, so if you’ve never seen a frog, it’s like a goat, but with the head of a lizard and the body of a grasshopper. The newt was a cauldron-ready cooking newt, and the amphisbaena was pretty much your run-of-the-mill amphisbaena.

  The full-page color paintings and B&W spot illustrations by Boulet (including the aforementioned amphisbaena) are, naturally, wonderful. The typography and design are physically pleasing to the eye¹ and make each page enticing and help propel the story along. The book is written in a way that will appeal to both the child that hears it and the adult that reads it aloud; a somewhat older child may be able to read it solo, but may also ask an adult to read it well after she can manage for herself. It’s an experience that’s best shared.

  Augie and the Green Knight will go up for sale after the Kickstarter backers are in receipt of their books, probably by late winter or early spring 2015. Once again, start budgeting now, because these retellings of classics deserve to be on the shelf of the kid (or kid at heart) you love most.

Spam of the day:

Many people think that if they are not spending long periods of time out in the cold, it does not really matter what they are wearing on their feet.

Augie knows this, and wears ½ of a Quadruboots. With stars on them.

_______________
¹ Supplied, Weinersmith informs me, by Michael David Johnson².

² As if the book weren’t appealing to me enough, Weinersmith has included copious footnotes, and even a footnote to a footnote. My heart.

Sometimes things pop into your head out of nowhere; for example, last night I suddenly and inexplicably found myself wondering, How’s that Iron Man thing going? Time, flies, arrow, banana, etc.

• For those youngsters out there, The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge is one of the enduring traditions of webcomics; launched nearly a full year before this here blog, it sought to answer the question How long can a webcomic creator go without missing a regular update? Those looking for bragging rights ponied up an entrance fee of US$20, and last creator standing gets the pot, minus contributions to the CBLDF and the HERO Initiative (originally the ACTOR Comic Fund). 56 creators entered (including such longrunners as Jennie Breeden, Chris Cosby, and Scott Kurtz, as well as superstars like Natasha Allegri).

  Three (maybe four; there was a question about 18 months back about a possible disqualification that doesn’t seem to have been resolved) competitors — including Brad Guigar, who doesn’t even look like his official competitor portrait anymore¹ — remain in the running, more than five hundred weeks and 2500 updates² after the start of the competition. I’d ordinarily suggest maybe the remaining three (four?) Iron Men declare a mutual satisfaction and walk away splitting the money, but anybody that’s managed a minimum of five updates a week with no skips for almost ten years (mark your calendars for the week of 9 February, it’s gonna be awesome) isn’t going to take split the pot like gentlemen as an option.

• Never part of the TDGIMC (as near as I can tell), Ryan Estrada nevertheless has reason to contemplate the passage of years today, as it’s his birthday. I note that his latest creative endeavour — Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here — has passed the two-thirds funding mark over on Kickstarter. Maybe we get there by the start of next week, Spike reveals some of the (as yet secret) stretch goals? Yeah, it’s a little shameless, launching a Kickstart the same week two of the principals have birthdays, thus making it easier to prey on your emotions. That’s life in webcomics, and neither Estrada nor Spike are above using every trick at their disposal to make a project succeed. May as well give ’em the five bucks, they’ll wear you down eventually anyway³.

Spam of the day:

Following that, the President and Prime Minister joined the First Lady and Vice President in a St Patrick’s Day Reception at the White House for the one year anniversary of vintage shop Byronesque

I must be tired — I read that as the vintage shop Bronyesque and then I shuddered.

_______________

¹ Brad, update your competitor’s bio picture, please. You’re so much more handsome than you were. Then again, a Google Image Search for “similar pictures” lists a portrait of Jack Kirby as the first match so maybe just keep it? Then again, when you search for “Brad Guigar on GIS, you don’t see that Kirbyesque bit, but you do see pictures like this, to which I can only say Yowza.

² For reference, I wrote about the competitors reaching 200 weeks and 1000 updates in 2008.

³ All hail our new international leaders.

The hotel I’m at has an in-room heating system that sounds like a lawn mower having a tonic-clonic seizure when it cycles off, so I’m short a couple hours of sleep right now. Nevertheless, I have found Things, Things that are worth celebrating today.

• The second piece I ever posted at this here thang — goodness, nearly nine years ago! — concerned the output of Lore Sjöberg, whom I have always foudn to be frighteningly cleverfunny and an all-around stellar fellow. So it gives me no little joy to announce that after various problems around hosting/spamming bastards, Sjöberg has resurrected one of his sites, Bad Gods, and you know what that means: I get to gorge on Bandwidth Theater! Rudolph! Overmom! Lousy Transformers! And, of course, the depleted-uranium beholder statue that goes GRAAAGH! Dig in and enjoy, y’all.
• It’s been perhaps six months since David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) became the first known successful webcomicker to launch a new comic with the express intention of learning to draw. Planet of Hats has reached the end of season one of Star Trek, and he’s recapped the 29 installments so far with one panel from each.

  It’s wonderful watching the art improve — particularly the staging of elements within panels and the expressiveness of the bodies of characters (Morgan-Mar could never have managed the sneaky-sneaky posture in this strip even two months ago), and I hope (as I’ve expressed to him via email) that when he reaches the end of the 79 episodes of classic Trek, he continues with some particularly stinkeroo episodes of later series. I believe that Planet of the Joggers should do nicely.

• Know what’s better than a book launch party? A sexy book launch party, such as that which will happen on Sunday, 7 December in Portland to celebrate Hurricane Erika’s first collection of Oh Joy, Sex Toy. Free exclusive print! 10% discount on toy purchases! Erika’s favorite dear perverts! And on a personal note, I will pay you five American dollars if you go to the party dressed as the Anal Safety Snails. You know you want to.

Spam of the day:

Do you know that you can copy content from other websites to your blog and they will pass copyscape test and google will see them as unique?

Yeah, you know who does that? Dudes who suck. Sure as hell ain’t my scene.

When I think of the spirit of raw entrepreneurship in comics — that do whatever it takes to make it scrappiness — I think of two people who take very nearly opposite approaches. Today, we’ll be talking about Spike¹; she’s the master of logistics, wrangling ever-growing numbers of creators onto her anthologies, setting deadlines, making arrangements for projects sometimes a year or more in advance, and doing it all for the absolute minimum cost and maximum return spread as widely as possible². She knows how to do things in a frugal fashion, and having sufficiently shared that advice with the world, she’s now giving it away for free, so she’s a damn philanthropist as well.

Did I mention that today is Spike’s birthday? And that in celebration, she’s giving all of us a present? Yesterday she launched her latest Kickstarter, for the sequel to Poorcraft, dedicated to the notion of traveling on the cheap. Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here, years in the making, is once again illustrated by Diana Nock, and written by perhaps the most intrepid wanderer that comics has ever known, Ryan Estrada³. He’s been everywhere, man. In other words, she’s chosen the two best people to work on this project, and it deserves your support.

As of this writing, we’re at just about 24 hours since launch, and close enough to 40% of the US$15,000 goal as makes no difference. More importantly, the nearly 400 backers are overwhelmingly pledging at the low reward levels (US$500 tier [cover cameo]: 1; US$250 tier [interior cameo]: 1; US$150 tier [special thanks]: 0; US$25 tier [retailers only, five hard copies]: 1; US$18 and under tiers [various combos of hard and soft copies, possibly including the first Poorcraft]: 369), so while this will not be a record-setting pledge total, it’s going to be a project with mass support (or it won’t be a project at all). Go wish Spike a happy birthday, and snag yourself a copy of Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here.

Spam of the day:

This will be enough time that it will take to become free of debt all you need to do is visit the online site with the money lender you happen to be thinking about looking for a loan.

NO. Want to know why I’m saying NO? Spike’s gotcha covered, Sparky … start here and read forward to learn about the lowlifes that would prey on you. Then go back to page one and read the whole thing. As a reward, you can read the first thirty pages of Wish You Were Here, which Spike is posting one page a day during the Kickstarter campaign.

Note that you’ll have to mess around in the archive to find things; on the main Poorcraft site, pages are numbered backwards from the most-recently-added, so page 1 of WYWH is at http://poorcraft.com/page/2 today, but it’ll be at http://poorcraft.com/page/3 tomorrow. You’re smart, you’ll figure it out.

_______________
¹ For reference, the other is Rich Stevens; the guy comes up with an idea on Monday, puts it up for sale on Tuesday, takes it back down on Wednesday, and is dropping the packages in the mail on Thursday. Offhand whimsies become major sellers, sudden sales and clearances keep things fresh, and he approaches merchandise like it was guerilla warfare.

² Want to quantify it? Taking the published bonus schedules from the anthologies and multiplying by the number of contributors, you get US$17,550 for Smut Peddler 2012, US$7800 for Sleep of Reason, and US$40,000 for Smut Peddler 2014 for a total of more than US$65,000 over the past two years that she could have kept (she’d already paid her contributors) but instead spread around.

³ It is perhaps worth noting here that I first met Ryan the night before he walked out of San Diego Comic Con and across the border into Mexico, to start a commune dedicated to cartooning. That was more than seven years ago and he’s never stopped moving for very long since (although getting married seems to have rooted him to one spot for the past couple of years; then again, it’s in South Korea, a country that features a language that I don’t believe he knew how to speak before showing up).

Nothing but people who are making the comics industry great today; it’s a good time to be a reader.

• I know that you must have seen this already, but damn, I’m mentioning it anyway.

  This page has mentioned the New York Times Best Sellers List for paperback graphic novels more than once in recent weeks; we noted the debut of Sisters by Raina Telgemeier and Amulet book six by Kazu Kibuishi on the list, approximately three months back. We also observed with some glee the occasion of Kibuishi and Telgemeier making up a full 50% of the list all by their lonesomes two weeks ago; that phenomenon is still in effect, as Sisters, Amulet book six, Smile, Drama, and Amulet book one are all still on the latest iteration of the NYTBSL.

  What’s different is the relative positioning of the books.

  Specifically, Raina Telgemeier holds the #1, #2, and #3 spots on the 23 November list, released yesterday, ahead of obscure books like The Walking Dead and Persepolis. I don’t believe that this feat has ever been achieved by any single author on any portion of the NYTBSL, much less for books with a cumulative 207 weeks of bestsellerdom. Which just leads me to one question — with some three dozen comics-based movies on the release schedule in the next five years, who is going to be first studio exec to be smart enough to drive a dump truck full of money up to Astoria and the front stoop of Ms Telgemeier?

• Most of a month back, I noted that BOOM! Studios would be launching a Munchkin tie-in comic, with the omnipresent Jim Zub contributing backup stories for John Kovalic&rsquo’s tender art mercies. What I didn’t notice at the time (and what’s not emphasized even at BOOM!’s own website) was who else is on the book. The non-backup stories will include writing by none other that Tom Siddell of Gunnerkrigg Court, and Kovalic will be joined on art duties by Rian Sygh and Mike Holmes. That’s a lot of webcomickers on one book, which shouldn’t have surprised me, given that it’s from BOOM!. Fleen apologizes to Siddell, Sygh, and Holmes for the delay in recognizing your contributions, and we are now looking forward to Munchkin even more than we were.

Spam of the day:

Ofttimes, the word jewellery is related to womenfolk. However, for hundreds of years men have sported some form of jewellery

True story — earlier today, I accidentally purged the spam folder instead of carefully curating which of the latest batch should be held for consideration as Spam of the day. Oh no, I thought to myself, what will I do if I don’t get more spam? Turns out, it wasn’t really a concern.

Where to start, where to start? How about in Yorkshire? I love their pudding.

• Convention Season is almost done, with what I think is the last sizable comics show of the year going on in Leeds this weekend. Actually, the Thought Bubble Festival runs this entire week, but the bulk of the events are in and around the exhibitors/panels event this weekend on 15-16 November.

  Webcomicker (and related independent artist type) guests of Thought Bubble include Natasha Allegri, Danielle Corsetto, John Allison, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson¹, Boulet, Emily Carroll, Gemma Correll², Darryl Cunningham, Hope Larson, Phil McAndrew, and Cameron Stewart.

  Additional webcomics types who will be exhibiting in the various venues include Rembrandt le Compte, Tom Siddell, Marc Ellerby, Paul Duffield, Lucy Bellwood, and many, many more. Tell them all I said hi.

• As long as we’re talking about conventions, Howard Tayler³ wrote up a bit about a medical emergency that happened at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, DC, this past weekend. His part in resolving the issue was minor, but utterly necessary: nobody else and taken the initiative to simply report the person in distress to those that could help. He did, and in short order the situation was resolved. As Tayler put it:
  

  I’m an Eagle Scout. I can staunch bleeding, and feel for a pulse. I can do the Heimlich, and though my CPR skills are rusty, if I’m the only guy around who can do it, I’ll do all I can. But the critical skill in this particular situation, and in most of the convention medical emergencies I’m likely to run into, was the ability to speak clearly.

  Oh, and the ability to decide to speak.

  I concur with everything that he said, with the exception that you shouldn’t let your CPR skills get rusty. Going into a place with a lot of people (alternately, hanging out in the bar until the wee small hours)? Note the exits, where any public AEDs may be, and where the nearest place to get assistance (hotel reception, security post, whatever) is. That’s all. Oh, and take a CPR class, it ain’t rocket science⁴.

• I mentioned Gemma Correll and The Nib up above; news comes from that esteemed aggregator of comics (esteemed because they pay) that they’re doing a calendar for the coming year if only they get enough orders. Your favorite Nib contributors will be illustrating obscure holidays, so if you ever wanted to see what Rich Stevens would do with National Fetish Day⁵, now is your chance. As of this writing, 183 more orders are needed over the next 15 days, or no calendrical joy for you.
• Speaking of funding/pre-orders, Kel McDonald is now crowdfunding the first volume (of two) for her omnibus reprint of Sorcery 101, which will be a 750 page book covering the first five years of the story. Guys, that book is going to be friggin’ huge, and McDonald is offering it up as a backer reward of as little as US$30 which is insane.

  Oh, and did we mention that she had to redraw more than 450 pages because in their original form they weren’t suitable for print? Or that she’s hired colorist par excellence Mary Cagle to apply her magic? Let’s repeat it once more: thirty bucks for 750 pages in color is stupidly cheap.

• Finally, speaking of crowdfunding and colorists, Ed Ryzowski does color duties for a bunch of your favorite webcomics and now he’s Kickstarting a new self-published comic book series. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend a comic project for something new to be created, but I make exceptions for creators who’ve proven themselves on other work, and Ryzowski counts by any measure.

  Season of the SHARK issues 1 to 4 will chronicle what happens when your underfunded espionage agency has to sell video rights to reality TV in order to do its work. It’ll be released digitally starting in December, with special low pricing for you early adopters. Honestly, this one looks like a hoot.

Spam of the day:

Get away from the traffic cone orange you envision, and type in the world of tangerine, bronze, burnt orange, gingery undertones and also the calla lily.

Lots of gingers in the UK. Just saying.

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¹ As part of their Capture Creatures debut tour.

² She’s rapidly become my favorite regular contributor over at The Nib.

³ My evil twin, etc.

⁴ Didn’t take a class and somebody’s got no pulse? Call 911, or the appropriate emergency services number wherever you are. Open the shirt, make a fist, put in the center of the chest midway between the nipples. Wrap your other hand around the fist. Lock your elbows and push down hard and fast and don’t stop. Substitute somebody else in every two minutes because you’re gonna get tired. Now go take a class.

⁵ Or possibly Erika Moen, Zach Weinersmith, Gemma Correll, Matt Bors, Jen Sorensen, Brian McFadden, Eleri Harris, Andy Warner, Matt Lubchansky, Liza Donnelly, or Scott Bateman.