We have to start with Molly Ostertag’s news. Readers will recall that her Witch Boy series is a modern marvel that everybody should read and pass on to other to read. And today we found out that Netflix is making it not just into a movie, but a musical:

Netflix To Release Animated Musical From Oscar-Nominated Director Minkyu Lee

The Witch Boy will also feature original music by the Grammy-nominated sister trio Haim. Maria Melnik writes the script with Roy Lee, Miri Yoon and Ryan Harris producing. Vertigo Entertainment produces the feature and Netflix releases.

Ostertag’s … honestly, happy doesn’t seem like a big enough word for what Ostertag is with respect to the production. Elated? Ecstatic? Joyous? What caught my eye the most, though, is the combo of the teaser image in the Deadline story and this bit from her tweet thread:

Seeing the way [Lee] connects to THE WITCH BOY and is transforming it for film, with thoughtfulness and care and artistry, has legitimately been the honor of my creative career. When I saw his first drawings of Aster I cried. I think you all will love this movie [purple heart emoji] [emphasis mine]

This will not be The Witch Boy exactly as shown in the book, a straight implementation designed only to appeal to existing fans¹. It’s an adaptation to another medium, one that has its own strengths and weaknesses apart from comics — comics are not just storyboards, people! — and will look and play out differently than the original.

That image seems to feature an older, more citified Aster than we’ve seen before, and the story may aim for a different age range than the original books. This is all good, and if you have any doubts, read what Ostertag said again. If you love the original (and glob knows I do), the originals are still there on your shelf and won’t change even if this turned out to be a fiasco — which, to be absolutely clear, I don’t think it will be.

It’s something new, with a different set of creative hands and different points of view on it, and it is absolutely going to piss the right people off. Can’t ask for anything more than that. Oh, and note to self — figure out when you need to subscribe to Netflix. Given the lead time on animation, it’ll likely be a while.

Other good stuff today:

• Did everybody see Nancy today? That last panel is a legit brilliant idea.
• I’ve made more of a thing about it over on social media than here, but I’ve really been digging the art on A Girl And Her Fed since creator KB Spangler² did the third act time jump and handed the drawing off to Brazilian artist Ale Presser. I mentioned at the time that Presser had both recently given birth and defended her doctoral thesis, and I may have mentioned at one point that she was soliciting survey input for that same thesis.

  Not long ago³, she contacted me with the actual output of her thesis, including the video of her defense [in Brazilian Portuguese] and the full text [PDF, also Brazilian Portuguese], but with something that you, dear reader, may find useful. The dissertation is full of data and analysis, but its conclusions are a guide to making comics for small-screen devices, and it’s both chock-full of good advice and also available in English [PDF]. Also, Messers Guigar, Kellett, Kurtz, and Straub: is this the first appearance of How To Make Webcomics in a bibliography? Maybe!

Spam of the day:

Exposed NASA-Funded Report Sends Shockwaves Through The US Population

They release those like twice a month, only they’re about anthropogenic climate change so people like you that start emails Dear Patriot ignore and downplay them.

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¹ Lookin’ at you, first couple of Harry Potter films.

² Disclaimer: I am personal friends with Spangler, of the post-bail-and-help-you-hide-bodies variety, I did the foreword for her first AGAHF collection, and have served as an early reader for ten or so of her novels. She’s rad.

³ Pandemics and new small humans means things take a while.

Something you may not know about me is that I don’t do anything that’s not on my schedule. It’s not necessarily written down anywhere, but there’s a definite to do list that runs my life, and if I put something on that list it will happen. For decades now, I’ve put certain pieces of media on my mental list with the intention of experiencing it.

This has the side effect of making me, essentially deathless until I reach that landmark. Death (the capital-D death that Gaiman told us is actually a Goth cutie and Pratchett told us SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS) will show up for me and I’ll be able to say¹ Sorry, not on my list of stuff to do today, and I have things I’ve committed to do still. Get back to me later².

In the past, I’ve used future events like the end of BONE, the end of Strangers In Paradise, and the completion of Digger when they were a suitably distant number of years away — can’t get a hideous disease, can’t walk in front of a bus, gotta see how it turns out. Today, I have a new one.

Readers of this page may have noted that I love the work and the person of Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, who is skilled out of all proportion with her youth and just a wonderful human being in real life. For years she’s hinted at where her creative drive was pushing her, not telling me too much (understanding that there are always detours in the creative career’s route) but definitely letting me know that her current projects were leading towards something. Something like this:

Aaaand it’s been announced!! The 12th House is the book that I got into comics to make and I couldn’t be more excited to finally get to talk about it publicly! It’s my first solo book of this length & every page I’ve pencilled so far is the best I’ve ever drawn. Coming in 2023!

I firmly believe that all the stellar work that Valero-O’Connell has produced since we met not quite five years ago has been for its own sake, but also to sharpen her skills for The 12th House. She’s always had an unusually clear perception of what her career would look like, and knowing when to tackle That Story That’s Been Waiting To Be Told is something that too many creators don’t have a good handle on; we all know new storytellers determined to launch their career with a 500 page epic before they’ve developed the chops to handle something like that.

But after seeing Valero-O’Connell’s artistic development and consistency on book-length stories, and the storytelling skills she’s developed on mid-length work, I have every confidence that this book will be landmark of the form. It doesn’t hurt that she’s got :01 Books’s Calista Brill on editing; she’s one of the best in the business, and this is entirely of a piece of :01’s entire philosophy: develop relationships with creators, not with specific IP or series. This won’t be the last of their partnership, I’ll warrant.

So thanks very much, Rosemary, my friend — you’ve single-handedly ensured that I will make it past the midpoint of my 50s, and as long as you keep announcing new books, I will be for all intents and purposes be immortal.

Spam of the day:

We have a surprise for UPS Customer.. ..

Strangely, I’m not most offended by the nakedly fraudulence that’s fairly dripping from this subject line. I’m most offended by that crime against ellipses.

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¹ Maybe think? Or some form of telepathy?

² Which is actually a role that she was halfway to fulfilling from damn near our first meeting.

Find little bits to center yourself when things feel overwhelming. Got some of them for you today, one of which will explicitly provide coaching to shed those stressors because I’m a giver.

• I’m not even sure when I first read The Perry Bible Fellowship, to be honest. I think it was probably sometime around Skub, with Nicholas Gurewitch’s severely random absurdities mostly lurking in the back of my mind until Weeaboo embedded itself in the lingo — something that not many of us can claim to have done — which was before this blog had even launched. But here we are, 20 years on, and Gurewitch is still cranking out new comics.

  What’s that? You didn’t realize that there were new PBF comics, tied to the 20th anniversary and not linked to/from the archives? Well, well, well, looks like somebody’s adherence to unfairly-disregarded technologies like RSS finally paid off! Because if you were subscribed to the PBF’s RSS feed, then you would have received links to two new comics on Sunday and Monday, both collaborations (with Twistwood and Extra Fabulous, respectively).

  Will there be more? Will the Part 1 bit in the title of that first comic portend more to the story? Maybe! Gurewitch works in mysterious ways, and we would do well to pay attention.

• Hey, are you looking for good comics, and have a few bucks to put towards the purchase of said good comics? And are you the sort of person who is generally patient (say, in waiting for a Kickstarter campaign to complete), but also decisive (on account of a limited number of rewards going quickly will require you to make a commitment quickly)? And, maybe most importantly, do you love doggos?

  Then allow me to point out that Haley Boros is back for the second January in a row with a Kickstarted comic about her three-legged dog Rusty’s fantasy adventures, only this time Rusty is joined by her new good dog, Ginger. Three Legged Tales: The Good Knight is a Make 100 project, with strict limits on the physical rewards, of which a fair number have already been claimed. The campaign launched earlier today and is just over 50% of the way to goal, so there’s still time, but don’t sleep on it. The doggos will never forgive you if you sleep on it.

  Just kidding, of course they’ll forgive you. The doggos love you.

• One of these days when I have an operating time machine, I will of course go back in time to see what the dinosaurs looked like¹, and definitely to check out how awesome the pterosaurs were — I want to see these flying giraffes in action. But after I got back from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, I would definitely stop by springtime, 2013 and let Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan know that their new sex toy review comic would end up, in between reviews of fuck couches and butt toys, as a vehicle for solid mental health information.

  I am specifically noting today’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy which — superficially, at least — appears to have nothing to do with sex. The Stress-Response cycle isn’t about gettin’ it on, it isn’t about making hot dudes kiss, but it is about the health of your most important sex organ — your brain.

  Moen has been really open about her mental health challenges in the past, but this is more than her typical here is what I’ve gone through maybe you can recognize yourself in it, too; instead, it’s a discussion of here is something that we all go through (because we’re hardwired to do so and that hardwiring isn’t doing us any favors) so here’s how to improve your coping skills, and I urge you to stop whatever you’re doing right now² and go read it.

  Then go pick up a copy of the book it’s synopsized from, Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle by Emily (PhD) and Amelia (DMA) Nagoski, available wherever you find books. Disclaimer: I am personally acquainted with Emily Nagoski³ and have always found her to be super smart; unsurprisingly, when teamed up with her twin sister, the pairing is even super smarter. Anyway, to bring it back to comics, drop some thanks to Nolan and Moen for being such generous advocates for mental health, even when it doesn’t seem to have a sexy angle — if you want to get it on, you have to get your head on right first, yeah? Yeah.

Spam of the day:

Message for: fleen.com, Owner/CEO or Marketing Department

Got some bad news for you, buddy. We’re an autonomous collective, or possibly an anarcho-syndicalist commune, consisting of me. I spend a lot of time in meetings arguing with myself over points of procedure.

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¹ I believe that if R Stevens had written that strip today, it would have referenced not just the color of the dinosaurs, but also the feathers, and possibly the chonkiness.

² Uh, readin’ your blog, Gary. Duh.

³ Who just so happens to be romantically euphemistic with R Stevens from two footnotes up. There are no coincidences in life.

For anybody that pays attention to Young Adult and Middle Grade books (and gosh, can you pay attention to [web]comics and not pay attention to YA and MG?), there was a lot of chatter in your social media feeds, as the American Library Association Midwinter meeting is where the awards for the best of media for youth are presented. The most prestigious awards are the Newbery Medal (for most outstanding contribution to children’s literature) and the Caldecott Medal (for the most distinguished American picture book for children), but there are a whole swathe of what are properly termed the Youth Media Awards, including the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, Sydney Taylor Book Award (for books and teens that authentically portray the Jewish experience) and the American Indian Youth Literature Award (awarded in even-numbered years).

And anybody that reads this page knows that comics have been making deep inroads into the realm of literary awards, and the YMAs are no exception. We’ll start with Michaela Goade’s Caldecott for her work illustrating We Are Water Protectors (words by Carole Lindstrom) — a book that’s already been recognized with the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, is a Kirkus Prize finalist, and was listed as a best book of the year for the New York Public Library, School Library Journal, NPR, and Publishers Weekly¹. It’s been my pleasure to know Goade (how many times do I have to tell you how much Comics Camp enriches lives?) and to become familiar with her work, and I cannot think of a more deserved recognition.

But let us note that other [web]comics folk are all over the YMA categories, and I recognize that I’ve probably missed some here and there — Gene Yang’s absolutely stellar Dragon Hoops is Printz Honor Book², Displacement by Kiku Hughes was an APALA Honor Book³. I also noticed Kent State: Four Dead In Ohio by Derf Backderf as one the recipients of the Alex Awards, which are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults.

I would be remiss not to note that multiple wins by All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team, which is one of five Newbery Honor books, one of three Sibert⁴ Honor books, and a finalist for the YALSA Award For Excellence In Nonfiction. The full list of winners and honorees can be found here [PDF], and you can find the full presentation for replay here [A/V]. Fleen congratulates all the winners, but reserves the right to give Goade the biggest high-five the next time we see her.

In other news of good work:

• Julia Kaye would like you know that her second book, My Life In Transition, a collection of her autobio comics (a sampling of which can be found here) is about to release. It’ll be nearly 200 pages of comics goodness, go for US$14.99, and will be out on 16 February, so get your pre-orders in now, if you please.
• If you read Skin Horse — and if you don’t, why the hell don’t you? — you could tell that the story is building up to a finish. It’s been thirteen years since I recommended you read it from the very first strip, and rarely have I been so correct; but all good things come to an end, and yesterday Shaenon Garrity⁵ and Jeffrey C Wells⁶ made it official that the wrap-up is coming this year.

  Ish.

  Maybe.

  It’s flexible.

  Look, the story is gonna go where it’s gonna go, plus Wells has to figure out where to shoehorn my ass into the narrative on account of I splurged for one of the We Write You Into The Comic tiers on their latest book-kicker because I think I knew this might be my last chance. The story has taken wide digressions and loops from its original plans — go back through the archives, hit all the Sunday process strips, and see how many times Garrity and Wells say This started off as something completely different or We just couldn’t work this in so we dropped it over the past baker’s dozen of years — while still remaining true to the vision that was there from the beginning⁷.

  And having tortured the English language to the breaking point in that last sentence, I’ll just remind you — it’s never to late to do an archive trawl and get in on a great story. Join us now, so we can all be weepy together later when it’s done.

Spam of the day:

Hey, I just opened a hydroponic hemp farm here in Miami, Florida. It’s the first of it’s kind of this size. I was wondering if you would be interested in writing an article about our farm to help us or if you offer paid advertisement articles on your website?

Hey, Box? I think this is yours and came to me by accident.

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¹ It’s not hard to imagine that if it were an even-numbered year, We Are Water Keepers may have taken the American Indian Youth Literature Award for the very best writing and illustrations by and about Native Americans and Indigenous peoples of North America. Lindstrom (a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe) and Goade (a member of the Tlingit and Haida peoples of Alaska) drew on their own traditions, and those of the original peoples from across the continent.

² The Michael L Printz Award recognizes the best book written for teens strictly on literary merit; the award went to Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story), and Dragon Hoops was one of four additional honorees.

³ The sole honoree alongside winner This Light Between Us in the Youth Literature category. I never did get a review of Displacement written as it fell during a personally bad time last year, but it’s a hell of a good account of generational trauma and memory set against the crime perpetrated against Japanese-Americans in World War II.

⁴ Given to the authors(s) and illustrator(s) of the most distinguished informational book published in the United States in English.

⁵ Mistress of Funk and Tiki, and Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities, Greater San Andreas Fault Regional Division.

⁶ A sharp writer in a flat cap who keeps a pretty low profile, actually.

⁷ Makeouts and animals in hats. It’s the highest of high concepts.

This post keeps asking you to submit.

• T’other day, we pointed you at the NCS awards submission process, and we have another one today, but I’m actually of two minds about this one. As we all agree, the Eisner Awards are the most prestigious comics awards in North America, and you should definitely submit your work for consideration, the guidelines to which are found here¹ [PDF].

  On the other hand, the administration of the Eisners was revealed to be deeply, deeply broken, from start to finish, and nobody associated with the Eisners or Comic-Con International (a California nonprofit public benefit corporation) would answer a single damn question about what went wrong, why it went wrong, how long it had been going wrong, or which steps they’re taking to keep it from going wrong in the future. There has been, as near as I can tell, no substantive communication on this matter, and therefore I must conclude no recognition of the legal obligations they have with respect to this data breach.

  With my day job hat on, I cannot in good conscience recommend anybody agree to participate in the Eisner voting process until there’s a metric fuckton more disclosure provided. But hey, voting isn’t for months now, so submit and hopefully they’ll unfuck themselves? I mean, that’s all we can do for now. I’ll keep on the story as I’m able to.

• Let’s bring up the mood a little; something that I can wholeheartedly recommend that you submit work to — although it’s somewhat niche — is the Graphic Medicine Review, which will be making a call for submissions shortly. In this ongoing Plague Year-Plus, damn near everybody has a story about their personal intersection with the medical system and health outcomes, so I expect to see you considering this, people. For more info, contact Matthew Noe or A David Lewis².
• But Gary, I hear you cry, what if I have a great piece of comic work that doesn’t involve COVID and I don’t trust the Eisner process? Good question, and by way of answer may I suggest you look at the Cartoonist Studio Prize, now in its ninth iteration, and renowned for both its blessed simplicity (two categories: print and web, that’s it) as well as its choice to recognize comics greatness with cold, hard cash? This year, in addition to the traditional one thousand US dollars, the winners will also receive a Wacom One tablet.

  As in past years, the CSP is presented by The Center For Cartoon Studies, but it appears that the media partner is shifting from Slate magazine to The Beat.

  Creators may submit no more than one work per category, which must have been released in calendar year 2020, and your deadline for submissions is 15 February. Please read through the full set of guidelines and the submissions forms for print [PDF] and webcomics [Google form] for more information.

  The nominations list will be released in April, and the two winners announced shortly after.

Spam of the day:

Bitcoin price will be $ 38500 in 5 days

As I write this, one Bitcoin goes for USD30,201.20, and is down approximately 26% from its high 13 days ago. Might want to turn in your prognosticator’s card there, Sparky.

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¹ Interestingly, they are talking about tentative categories, which is not something I can recall seeing previously. I guess if they decide to not have a category you submit in, try not to take it personally?

² Some day, he hopes to be The David Lewis.

What, I’m the only one that remembers mid-’80s Saturday Night Live?

Just a heads up that tomorrow’s post may be somewhat incoherent as I intend to be day drinking in celebration and I don’t think I’ve ever written one of these things when under the influence of sophisticated adult beverages.

• For starters, I see (by way of Boneville) that Comic-Con International — the folks behind SDCC, Wondercon, and APE — are putting on educational panels on the third Thursdays of each month, starting the day after tomorrow. The first will be titled Comics For The Littlest Readers, featuring Jeff Smith, Andy Runton, Jenni Holm, Debbie Huey, and Dan Santat, with more information forthcoming.
• And it wouldn’t be January without the Young Adult Library Services Association releasing the annual listing of Great Graphic Novels For Teens; I’m a little late on that one, but it’s been a year already in just 19 days.

  Readers of this page should recognize Fleen Faves like Almost American Girl, Go With The Flow, Snapdragon, and Superman Smashes The Klan¹, in the Top Ten but there’s plenty of great work on the full list.

  That list includes — but is by no means limited to — such stellar work as Astronauts, Banned Book Club², Dragon Hoops, The Daughters Of Ys, Giant Days, The Last Halloween, Witch Hat Atelier (which was denied a debut and featured creator slot at TCAF last year, boo COVID), and many, many more. Gonna guess you can pick up any three books off the list at random and find at least one all-time fave in that sample.

• Now, I’m not saying that younger readers should be kept from stories of fighting fascists — see Superman and his Klan-smashing above — but maybe the new original story from Matt Lubchansky isn’t the place to start them out. Lubchansky has announced pre-orders for their new, highly cathartic, 64 pages of guilt-free satire of what the hard right think of antifascists, The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook.

  And if full-color Nazi-pummeling isn’t enticing enough — and as you know here at Fleen we always say If you see a Nazi, punch a Nazi — orders from Silver Sprocket have the option of including an embroidered patch (limited to 300) or Antifa challenge coin (limited to 100).

  I don’t have mine in hand (yet), but ever since my evil twin launched the webcomics/challenge coin thing³ some years back, I’ve gotten a number of these wonderful little tchotchkes, and one thing they have in common? They are solid lumps of brass and thus perfect for hucking at the skulls of fucking Nazis, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Neoconfederates, those assholes that ruined the OK sign and the word boogaloo, and all other associated CHUDs, the better to make them cry. Still time to get in on that.

  Do it for the children.

Spam of the day:

1 Weird Diet Trick Heals Vitiligo Fast

Oh, so a visible condition that has been known since antiquity had a simple solution that all of humanity has somehow missed out on, except for this one rando who discovered it? Right.

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¹ I have the strongest urge to re-read that right now and I don’t know why. What about Superman punching stupid white supremacists right in their stupid white supremacist faces could possibly have such a hold on me right now?

Yep, that’s a stumper.

² I also want to pull out this story of running an authoritarian (and his wannabe authoritarian daughter) the fuck out of power. Weird!

³ At least, I didn’t see anybody making challenge coin-alikes prior to Schlock Mercenary in 2013. If I’m wrong, let me know!

Before we get started, I believe that birthday Version 1.0 release anniversary wishes are in order to everybody’s favorite robot pal, R Stevens. Selfless and giving entity that he is, he’s celebrated with a great new pin design in limited quantities that ships for free starting tomorrow. Fuzzy nightmare pals forever!

• I got my copy of The Nib’s latest print collection, Greetings From The Wasteland in the mail today, and it’s great. For starters, the collection of political cartoons is in large part arranged by creator, so all of your Pia Guerra cartoons are together, all the Gemma Corrells, all the Kendra Wellses, etc.

  Sadly, there wasn’t enough space to dedicate to the entire story of the future wasteland cartoons of editor Matt Bors — there would have been no room for anybody else — which, if arranged in the correct order, form a single, coherent story¹. But that’s hardly a surprise, given that they had four years of daily cartoons from dozens of cartoonists (15 of which get featured sections) to curate and only 200 pages to play with. Get yours now.

• We are facing down the second year of disrupted in-person events, but if there’s one thing comics-as-a-community has gotten good at, it’s finding ways to shift to virtual gatherings. Thus, the Cartoon Art Museum would like you to know that uncontrolled pandemic² or no, there will be some form of Queer Comics Expo and some way to announce the annual Prism Awards:
  

  Awards will be presented to comic works by queer authors and works that promote the growing body of diverse, powerful, innovative, positive or challenging representations of LGBTQAI+ characters in fiction or nonfiction comics. The goal of the Awards is to recognize, promote and celebrate diversity and excellence in the field of queer comics.

  The Queer Comics Expo launched as an annual event in 2014 as a celebration of queer culture and to promote diverse queer representation in comics, animation, and other great ways to tell our stories. QCE also serves as a fundraiser for San Francisco’’s Cartoon Art Museum. This year the event will take place May 15-16, 2021. Applications to participate as a creator or presenter for 2021 are OPEN until Monday, March 15, 2021 and will be NOTIFIED by Thursday, April 15, 2021.

  You can submit for both the QCE and the Prisms by browsing to cartoonart.org/qcexpo. Submissions for the Prisms are open until 28 February, with finalists announced at QCE (15-16 May) and winners announced over the summer. Categories include Best Short Form Comic, Best Webcomic, Best Comic From A Small To Midsize Press, Best Comic From A Mainstream Publisher, Best Comic Anthology, and Best Comic For Young Readers (new category).

  Category-specific requirements vary, but in general all submissions must have been first published in calendar year 2020, be in English, and have prominent LGBTQAI+ themes or be a strong allegory to the queer experience. See the entry form for more details.

Spam of the day:

This professor plugged his house to Earth’s core… that can harvest the power of Earth’s core making him 100% energy independent.

Yeah, I don’t have the patience to explain the concept of “electrical ground” to this spamming asshole, but I attended nerd schools — as an undergrad and grad — for six years specifically to learn that the Earth is where electricity goes to die.

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¹ Really, Bors said it himself. Two comics more recent than the book provide the bookends. By the way, their names are Gorm and Tinsel.

² Seriously, people, stay the fuck home, wear a mask, and make people that you know who won’t do those things feel your wrath until they decide to stop killing the rest of us.

Boy, 2020 is the season for long-ago strips to come back. We already saw the return of Dr Kathy Peterson’s Kidnapped By Gnomes, which was on the downswing at the dawn of the last decade. About the time taht KGB was 2.54 centimetering towards hiatus, Bob Scott was launching Molly And The Bear, about which I said:

[I]t occupies a spot midway between Little Dee (in that a kid and an animal interact in an all-ages appropriate manner) and (of all things) the Least I Could Do Beginnings strips on Sundays (which have a very similar, ’60s-era gag cartoon feel to the artwork).

Turns out that since that day eleven and a half years ago (!), Scott has continued with the strip, although it went on several lengthy hiatuses and less-than-regular periods of updating, ironically right around the time of that post. But it’s been publishing at least 5 days a week (sometimes 6, and often 7) since November of 2018 (although much of that was curated reruns; the current run of new strips goes back to August of 2019). There was a strip collection in 2016 under the old title and a new one is a-bornin’ under the strips current title, Bear With Me. From an email from Mr Scott:

My Bear With Me webcomic has a new strip compilation book being published by Hermès Press that will be out January 2021. This is the second book.

The book is currently in pre-order at a US$10 discount off the US$60 price; considering it’s a 250+ page hardcover and Hermès concentrates on archival-quality reprints of classic strips, that somewhat steep price looks justified. If you know somebody that’s got a liking for the classic comic strip laugh-chuckles, take a run through the archives (starting here) and decide if a few zillion strips will keep your loved one busy and indoors until we’ve got a handle on the pandemic.

In other news that’s about as far from the Scott’s strip as it is possible to get and still be in webcomics, I was mightily intrigued by something Matthew Nolan said in the news below today’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy. A fair amount of it was about some Numberwang he and Erika Moen have run on their latest Kickstarter, which has led to a pay bump for their guest contributors:

From now on, we’ll be paying folks $140 a page (each comic is 4-5 pages long), and $160 a page for returning artists. As always, all the work done for OJST is creator-owned, so artists keep all the rights to their work. It’s still a long way from a professional Marvel or DC rate, but we’re still pretty proud. For just two nerds running a lil ol sex-ed webcomic, the idea that we can now pay $700-$800 for a comic is amazing.

It might not be Marvel/DC money (or heck, it might be), but considering some of the downright exploitative rates I’ve seen some of the mid- and small-size publishers offer, it’s laudable. But the intriguing part isn’t that Moen & Nolan are awesome people who are doing their damndest to support the community in a rent-and-groceries way; it’s an almost throwaway addendum in two lines:

With that in mind, we are constantly hiring for guest comics.
More of a hubaballoo to come about that in the next few days =)

Creators, I’m going to say that it’s worth your while to keep an eye on Nolan and/or Moen’s social media accounts. When they mention the possibility of a hubaballoo, I start paying attention.

Spam of the day:

Good day my friend I see you moving around my house. You looks nice ;). Do you would like to meet?

Is this some kind of scam trying to say my house is your house? Because this house comes with a deer problem in the backyard and a greyhound that is a butt sometimes.

There is a post coming on Wednesday that I need you to know that I wrote a solid damn year ago, and have had scheduled to run all that time. It is, even now, looming both on the horizon and in the shadows, waiting to reveal itself. It is an example of my dedication to the important things in life, and I hope you appreciate it.

Speaking of looming …

You know who can loom menacingly with the best of them? Conan. We all know what he’ll say if you ask him what is best in life, but it’s slightly less known that if you ask him what’s second best in life, he’ll tell you that the menacing loom is pretty awesome.

The 240 character limit doesn’t often allow our best modern interpretation of Conan to loom a lot, but you know who writes a properly-looming Conan? Jim Zub. He took over the regular Conan title back in February, got two issues out, and then comic publishing fell over thanks to pandemic and Diamond deciding to not do its job while continuing to charge money at every end of the distro channel.

It’s been a long road to get series started up again; Ryan North’s Power Pack five-parter was supposed to start back in the first half of the year and be done by now, but only got issue #1 out about 10 days ago. Similarly, Karla Pacheco’s run on Spider-Woman¹ was delayed some months, but it running pretty regularly now. In other cases, existing series have been indefinitely delayed.

Presumably, somebody in an office somewhere decides when to resume interrupted series, using whatever priorities they have in mind that are mysterious to the rest of us. For example, the last two issues of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run on Black Panther — like the last two issues of his run, period, as it’s due to wrap with issue #24 — still haven’t released, and over at Dark Horse, Matt Wagner’s latest Grendel series has been stalled at issue #4 with no resumption in sight. But Conan finally resumed in October, meaning that the first four-issue Zub arc is now complete.

Not that reading four issues in February, March, October, and November is ideal, mind you, but if you were looking for an awesome story, started reading said awesome story, and then forgot about the awesome story while the world went over a cliff, one could hardly blame you. But it’s done, so maybe go back and read the start of the story as you get caught up on the back half. Or wait until March when it gets collected in the trade (which will include this first story arc plus the next two issues), but I’m pretty sure Zub would appreciate you reading it now.

Spam of the day:

>>>> BlackFriday – Top 20 Gadgets for 2020 <<<< 50% OFF Mega Sale :)

You’re a little late there, Champ. You tried. [thumbs-up emoji]

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¹ Which is terrific if you like your superheroes blowing up helicopters and punching mutant dinosaurs in the face.

Hooray! My Four Seasons Total Landscaping shirt from the drunken recesses of Shing Yin Khor’s celebratory id has arrived, and that means I am giving a chunk o’ money to Fair Fight, which Stacey Abrams founded to combat voter suppression in the state of Georgia. I promised to match donations up to US$1000 and … okay, I get it. It’s been a long four years and you’re tapped out. It wasn’t much that I got informed of, but I like nice round numbers, so I rounded my contribution up to five hundo.

And now, let’s talk webcomics.

• Molly Ostertag remains one of the finest writer/artists we have in comics, and I am very much looking forward to her next book. While I was sad that the Witch Boy series has concluded, it told the story that Ostertag wanted to tell, and I know well that she’s got many more stories in her. Thus, my excitement yesterday when I saw a cosplay photo of a character from the cover of Ostertag’s next book. The excitement that drives people to invest in a story, knowing it’ll speak to them, based on the creator’s track record? That’s intoxicating and joyful.

  And it reminded me that I didn’t mention Ostertag’s next book when it was announced over the summer on account of [gestures] everything. So look for The Girl From The Sea on 1 June 2021, hopefully when we’ll all be able to walk into bookstores freely again.

• It was not quite two weeks ago that I noted that one of Jim Zub’s typically strong creator-owned stories was hopping from Amazon’s clutches comiXology to print, but he didn’t let me know at that time that he was about to launch a second chapter to that selfsame story. Which he did. Today:
  

  STONE STAR Season 2 Begins!
  Last year, Max Dunbar and I launched a new creator-owned series as part of ComiXology Originals and now we’re back for Season 2 of the series.

  Espen Grundetjern has brought his stunning colors once again and Marshall Dillon’s lettering continues to dazzle. Our creative team is having a ton of fun building out this world and setting the pieces into place for even more cool stuff to come.

  You can pick up Stone Star‘s entire first story arc at comiXology for two bucks, or grab the first issue of the second arc for three. Have at it.

• Scott C jigsaw puzzles, Scott C jigsaw puzzles, Scott C jigsaw puzzles. On sale starting 1:00pm EST (GMT-5) Friday at the Scott C shop.

Spam of the day:

This brew is a powerful painkiller, without opiates, or addictive effects. Once used for everything, from painful toothaches to leg amputations…

The fact that you are trying to tell people to forage for whatever plant it is you’re basing this on is only slightly less astonishing that the fact that you’re expecting people to find a reason to imagine they’ll be amputating their own legs.