Seriously, internet, you need to refine your personal index of suspicion when something potentially outrageous comes across your screen. Take a breath. Consider the source. Ask yourself, Is it possible that maybe this isn’t meant to be taken seriously? And think twice before you decide to make with the complaints and virtual lynch mobs because, well … yeah.

• Let’s talk about something more pleasant, shall we? As noted yesterday, the Hour of Truth is rapidly approaching for R Stevens, and you can follow along his own personal Grand Guignol online. If anybody has access to an emergency services scanner in the Easthampton area, maybe listen for dispatches¹ and let us all know if things go wobbly? Time to smoky, salty, delicious danger is (as of posting), approximately 22 minutes.
• The New York Comic Con is in three weeks, and they’ve done us the service of listing programming, albeit in a pretty inconvenient format. I’ve gone combing through for sessions that are related to webcomickry in general, and have found the following for you; please note that times and locations are subject to change.

  Thursday, 11 October
  Surviving the Public (Unshelved)
  12:00-1:00pm, Room 1A08
  Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum of Unshelved get things off to an early start on Press/Pros/VIPs day, before the show floor opens even, with a keynote on customer service (library focused, naturally) and the immutable truth known to anybody that’s ever dealt with the public: the customer is seldom right.

  Friday, 12 October
  Webcomics – From Hobby to Business
  6:30–7:30pm, Room 1A08
  If you camp out in the room long enough after Gene & Bill, you can see Ryan Sohmer and Lar de Souza recount the story of how they got to a multimedia empire from a humble start in the Canadian comics mines. Bonus: you can probably get Sohmer to talk about his personal ascent into healthy, clean living from the hell of Red Bull addiction. It’ll be like Behind the Music only without Jim Forbes narrating.

  Scott C and The Great Showdowns, from Ripley vs the Alien Queen to Han vs the Green Fellow!
  7:00–7:45pm, Unbound Stage
  Scott C gets the brand-new Great Showdowns book off to a roaring start; this one is going to be so fun you guys.

  UDON Crew: New Titles & Tributes
  7:45–8:45pm, 1A06
  Jim Zub and his studio are all over the damn place these days, what with tribute books, webcomics, licensed properties and every damn thing. The secret to this is that they, like the great and magnificent shark, never stop moving. Okay, they do sometimes (sharks, I mean), but Zub & Co don’t; come find out what they’ve got on tap next.

  Saturday, 13 October
  Kickstarter and Indie Comics!
  4:00–5:00pm, Room 1A08
  Benign Kingdom. George Rohac. Secrets of successful Kickstartering. Just remember one thing: George might teach you everything you know about Kickstarter, but he won’t teach you everything he knows.

  Sunday, 14 October
  I got nothin’.

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¹ Key words to listen for: Man down, smells delicious. If they have to slap paddles on him and shout Clear!, I’ll bet he sizzles.

Speaking of SPX, the theme of the weekend appeared to be YOLO, as chronicled by webcomics own photojournalist, Chris Yates. I … I think it’s a gang thing, you guys. Meanwhile, Kate Beaton rounded out the last of the major comics awards with another win for the Hark! A Vagrant print collection in the category of Outstanding Anthology or Collection, making more plaques, statues, and bricks than I can recall off the top of my head.¹ The award for Outstanding Online Comic went to Jillian Tamaki’s SuperMutant Magic Academy, which I’ll confess I am not familiar with. A perusal of the category nominees revealed a nice mix of ongoing and wrapped-up work, strip-type serials, panel-type loosely-linked semi-oneshots, autobio, and more — a nice balance of form, story topic, and art styles.

• Speaking of SPX, the national passenger rail system was not very nice towards Chris “Doc” Hastings, involving both a broken train on the way there and a cancelled ticket on the way back. He’s safely ensconced back in Brooklyn at last report, and
  able to share some of the other projects that he’s been working on, including the comic book-y treatment for a pitch packet of a proposed TV series, presently raising production costs over on IndieGoGo.

  You really can’t go wrong with a name like Freelance Beatdown, the brainchild of comedic personage Jordan Morris; given the glowing terms that Hastings uses to describe Morris, It’s unlikely that he’ll ever feel weirded out by Morris or his usual partner (and damn good interviewer), Jesse Thorn. Look, I like Morris and Thorn’s work a hell of a lot, I’m just saying that not everybody agrees with me.

• Okay, this is clever: all of Machine of Death (at least, the MoD that’s associated with the first volume), including the full book in three different electronic formats, stage show clips, the entire podcast series, and more, in a customized USB thumb drive for fifteen bucks. I think it’s just a matter of time before all collections of a certain size/complexity (lookin’ at you, omnibus edition of Skin Horse, whenever that happens) will have thumb drives as a delivery option.

  Look, I love me some big-honkin’ collections, I think they’re beautiful to look at, satisfying to read, and indicative of the value that I place on the work contained within; I’ve got collection series on my shelf that number as high as volume eleven. But not everybody has the wherewithal to drop US$50 (to US$100 and up) on the really big collections, so having a cheaper, more physically compact option² is going to be a value channel that can’t be ignored.

  Anyway, to celebrate the thumb-book and other items just now releasing, MoD honcho and Wondermark impressario David Malki ! is having a contest with fabulous cash and merchandise prizes. Dudes, you could end up a trillionaire.³

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¹ Seriously though — what was with blocking my girl Kate, 2012 Eisner Awards?

² Possibly after a delay to not conflict with physical book sales. Even more so, we’re now getting to webcomics that have run long enough, and have enough books in their catalog, that deciding when to let things go out of print becomes an actual concern. Get a bunch of custom-screened (or engraved, or shaped) USB drives, orders come in for various items out of print, copy master files over and drop it in the mail. Once you’ve got the thumbs in house, the rest of production doesn’t have to be an expense of anything other than the time it takes for file-dragging.

³ In Zimbabwe. Actual value as of this writing: US$27,631,942,525.560 in theory, except for the part where Zimbabwe’s currency has been indefinitely suspended from international trade because it’s worth less than the paper it’s printed on; 6.5 sextillion percent inflation will do that.

Let’s see now — network is slowed to a crawl, electrical is intermittently going out (including lights, including in the bathrooms), PAs sniffily holding up fingers to indicate that you simply can’t go that way now, equipment accumulated in the hallways to the point that access to the fire exits is entirely theoretical at this point, and attitude thrown at my students. If it weren’t for the plentiful snack tables set up, I’d be approaching An Incident at this point. And okay, fine, I hate things like the murder of all my loved ones more, but those situations typically don’t occur at work.

So I’m behind on the details of what came out of SPX, aside from the fact that everybody seemed to be selling a mountain of stuff. I can’t give you a numbers breakdown on the latest Homestuck Kickstarter unlocked tier¹ except to note that it’s caused a pretty significant upwards tick in backing. I can tell you that Order of the Stick, Penny Arcade, and TwoKinds remain the all-time top three Kickstarter comics projects, but that’s because Homestuck is classified as a videogame. With US$1.4million and counting, Homestuck has eclipsed all other comics-related endeavours.

So come back tomorrow, hopefully the film crews will be out of here, and I’ll be able to share more, like how Raina Telgemeier has managed to snag the #1 and #2 slots on the New York Times bestseller list for graphic novels, which is normally the sort of thing that requires you to be named Rowling or King or Gaiman. Everybody celebrate by getting a copy of DRAMA to go with their copy of SMILE — it’s seriously that good, and well deserving of the acclaim and sales.

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¹ Although I will say: Homestuck-themed tarot deck? Genius.

Now that Apple isn’t making everybody sit in front of their computers and hit compulsively refresh their browsers every ten seconds, maybe we can talk about some webcomics things?

• Yesterday saw the debut of a very impressive Big Round Number:
  

  It only took 8 1/2 years, but I’ve finally created 2000 puzzles!! http://www.flickr.com/photos/30135689@N05/7980598350/

  Let’s do the math to properly indicate just how busy Chris Yates has been: eight and a half years and 2000 Baffler!s comes to 1.55 Baffler!s per day, and while some of them are pretty simple, that doesn’t preclude monsters like ol’ 2K here, with its more than 550 pieces spread out across nine fields and eight layers.

  In that time Yates was also making ghosts and POOP signs¹ and SLÜGs and t-shirts and prints and the designs for mass-market Baffler!s and the iPad Baffler! app and a few zillion Baffler! commissions not to mention a whole mess of terribly excited photocomics.

  For those interested in seeing exactly how damn much art one can cram into 3105 days, there’s a photo archive for your perusal. If you should see Mr Yates this weekend at SPX, tell him I said hi, be sure to smile for any photos you end up in, and ask him when the hell he sleeps.

• Know who else is gonna be at SPX? Well, a whole damn lot of people, but for the moment I’m thinking about Becky and Frank, who will but a week later make their way back LA-wards for a book launch at the world-famous Secret Headquarters. Tiny Kitten Teeth’s print version has been a long time a-bornin’ but now it’s here and it’s going to be gorgeous and you can get in on the fun of the launch at 3817 W Sunset Blvd (also known as Historic Route 66) in Los Angeles at 7:00pm on Friday, 21 September. Books, prints, fun times, and sophisticated adult beverages will be present in copious amounts.
• Speaking of book launches, (in this case, literally so), I believe it is a matter of public record that this page is fully in the tank as far as Sailor Twain goes, as it is beautiful, and melancholy, and atmospheric in a way that few comics manage. It’s still a few weeks before the very handsome and substantial print collection drops, which makes this the perfect time to note that there will be a special to-do to mark the launch of the book.

  Even more exciting, this celebration will be taking the form of a sunset sailing trip aboard the Clearwater, a replica of the mighty Hudson River sloops of the 18th and 19th centuries. A sloop that was dreamt up, built, and launched by the legendary Pete Seeger² to act as a literal platform to remind people of the need for clean waters in general, and the Hudson River in particular.

  The Sailor Twain Sail departs from the 79th Street Boat Basin in Manhattan at 5:30pm on Friday, 5 October.

• New site, tangentially related to webcomics in that David “It’s!” Willis did the logo, and also because it’s the brainchild of webcomics friend Josh “The Comics Curmudgeon” Fruhlinger. Hail to the Slash [Not Safe For Anything] is devoted to … well, let’s just quote Josh on this one:
  

  2012 has been one of the most homoerotic presidential elections since JFK completely discombobulated DIck Nixon with his sexual charisma live on television. This site is a repository of the same-sex presidential fan fiction our nation needs right now.

  Also:

  [I]n the days leading up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, this civility broke down as a number of nasty political fights broke out. In attempt to stave off further unpleasantness, I demanded that my readers funnel their political passions into Taft/Roosevelt slash fiction, because it was the only thing I could think of off the top of my head.

  This worked better than I could have ever imagined, both in terms of stopping arguments and in producing legitimate masterpieces of Taft/Roosevelt erotica. I always had in mind that, come 2012, I would return to the idea. This site is that return.

  In case you still have some shred of innocence in your soul and are casually wondering if Mr Fruhlinger could really put together something truly depraved and soul-searing, consider this description of the very first entry at HttS:

  Heart and Soul (Cheney/Bush/Cloned Cheney/Crown Prince Abdullah; WARNING: EXTREME HORROR)

  Cloned Cheney. I’m warning you, there isn’t enough bleach in the world to get that image out of your brain. So tread carefully and if y’all will excuse me, I’ll be over here with the jumbo bottle of bleach and the cleansing fire.

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¹ It will remain one of my life’s most cherished memories will be the time I watched Lynn Freakin’ Johnston try to convince a complete stranger to buy a POOP sign. The only thing needed to make that day perfect would have been for that stranger to be wearing some form of “Roadside” clothing.

² One of America’s great social consciences, a musician of incredible importance (largely responsible for the preservation of folk music and the modern development of the banjo), hell-raising for all the right reasons still in this, his 93rd year.

How about: I’ve seen the epilogue of Starslip, and you should, too? Fortunately, you can with the general availability of Starslip’s fifth collection and also a handy-dandy five-book bundle with bonus embroidery. Read ’em straight through and marvel at the möbius strip that K’thris Stribe crafted to twist and turn and end up (almost) where it started.

I was going to be enjoying a lazy, no-pants day but some people had to go and do significant things so fine, I’m writing. Still no pants, though.

• Ursula Vernon became the first person not named Foglio to take a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, for Digger (presumably for volume six, which released last year following the wrapping-up of the story). At press time, Ms Vernon was reportedly in an alleyway delivering a vicious beating to Neil Gaiman. So much for her plan to lose with dignity.

  Lord knows that I’ve written a lot about how much I dig¹ Vernon’s work, so I’m utterly thrilled for her and feel it’s recognition well deserved. At the same time, let us take a moment to acknowledge Howard Tayler, who is one of only two creators² to be nominated in the Best Graphic Story category a mind-bending four times. There is the matter of going 0-for-4 but hey, could be worse³, right?, Along those lines, I have already decided what to get Tayler for his birthday the next time it comes around in 2016.

• Meanwhile, about 2050 miles west of Chicago and the Hugos, news was coming out of PAX Prime during the Q&A with Mike and Jerry (helpfully streamed live to the world) that PAX is going abroad as PAX Prime, PAX Dev, and PAX East are joined by PAX Very South. For those of you that can’t travel to the Far Antipodes, 2013 will also see the launch of a new Scott Kurtz comic, of which details are presently thin on the ground.
• Okay, time to get serious, as one more thing smacked webcomics well in the face over the weekend — the sites hosted by Blind Ferret Entertainment, which include Looking for Group, Least I Could Do, Girls With Slingshots, Something*Positive, Reptilis Rex, Goblins, and PvP [no links, about which more momentarily] were hit by somebody with nothing better to do than to distribute malware. It’s been a long weekend of repairing both damage and reputations (malware warnings are likely to persist from Google and Firefox for some time), and as of this writing, the various sites remain down.

  Combine that with a story that’s been percolating around the tech sphere for the past week that the Java language has a critical flaw that’s been zero-day exploited, and the ultra-rare out-of-sequence patch issued by Oracle has not fixed the problem.

  I’ve written before about my general level of paranoia in browsing — how I do not enable JavaScript on a global basis, and only individually-trusted sites get it enabled; I’ve now turned off all Java plug-in functionality in every browser within my control, and I’m seriously considering removing Java entirely from my computers. I will lose some functionality (fancier presentations, comment ability, etc) in my day-to-day computer use, but maybe it’s not on me to be paranoid.

  Hate to say it, guys, but maybe we don’t need as elaborate, feature-rich layouts for our comics. Trimmed down, more simply-presented sites could be easier to build, faster to load, and generally more secure. It’s going to make some things more complex (including, most likely, the easy slotting-in of ads), but it’s time to start thinking in that direction. I know that nobody’s going to rebuild their websites overnight (and most of you aren’t going to change your browser settings either), but if you should happen to do a redesign, maybe security/reader safety needs to become more of a criterion that it has been in the past.

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¹ I’m so very, very sorry. I blame it on my ever-worsening Guigar Syndrome.

² Technically, a creator team: the writer/artist combo of Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham have been nominated for the current Fables collection four times; various other artists have been on the nominations, but only the *inghams have been on all four ballots.

³ Much worse.

After all, we’ll all be spending the day reflecting on the experiences and history of the labor movement, right? Right!

But that doesn’t mean I can’t take the time to point you all at a funding campaign for the weirdest, most Freudian of all webcomics, Power Nap. What happens when you’re the one guy allergic to stay-awake pills in a world that runs 24/7? You get shunned as a freak, and your dreams start coming to life, smashin’ stuff like there’s no tomorrow. Then you get sucked into those dreams and you have no idea what the hell’s going on and nobody’s telling you anything and maybe you’re about to die because the cruel authors of your fate ¹ find all of this amusing — but this bizarre, disturbing existence you lead looks great in eye-popping color.

Thus, funding campaign. Power Nap Vol 1 will be a Euro-sized digest, 70+ pages, full color (and yowza, do they use a lot of colors), and contain the first three chapters of the ongoing story (including the one that’s presently unspooling before us). Feast your eyes on the comic if you haven’t previously, and if it’s the sort of thing you think deserves support², see if you can’t find some room on your shelf for a physical copy.

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¹ That would be Maritza Campos and Bachan.

² Hint: it is.

The rumo[u]rs are making the rounds regarding Jim Zub’s Skullkickers #17, available tomorrow in fine comic shops everywhere; actually, I’m not sure you can call it a “rumo[u]r”, when you come right out and say it in the solicitation:

Somebody DIES! Or, everyone DIES! There’s lots of DYING! Oh man, it’s some kind of DEATH-fest goin’ around. It’s all epic and brutal and a major character DIES so you better order a ho-jillion copies. No, seriously, someone DIES. Big DEADING in the house. Also: The end of our incredible third story arc. Sweet.

I would have put some emphasis in there, but I think it’s pretty apparent that the takeaway is “major character dies”. Now this being comics, death is a temporary condition, the result of an imaginary story or retconned immediately so that you can have drama but still put things back the way they were. But not if you name is Zub, Sparky. There’s a for-real shocking conclusion, a cliffhanger, and a stack of questions that amount to How the hell is he going to keep the story going for another three arcs after that? Do not doubt the Zub, he will find a way.

(more…)

Scope and scale seem to be slightly askew today.

• This page has, for the better part of a year, been bringing you news on The Bear, the Ryan Sohmer-penned, Becky Dreistadt-illustrated children’s book-in-progress; today, The Bear launched its Kickstarter campaign which still isn’t accumulating backers and dollars to the degree I’d anticipated.

  By which I mean, it’s “only” at 10% of goal in the first five hours or so, meaning the 30 day campaign is pretty much a guaranteed success, but previous Becky-heavy projects have been hitting the US$10,000 mark in about this time. I’m particularly surprised because the backer rewards feature not one, not two, but four Dreistadt original paintings up for grabs, which are normally the sort of thing that go in about ten minutes each, and they’re all (as of this writing) still available.

  I can only attribute this to a lack of the word getting out on this, the last big travel/vacation week prior to work/school life resuming next week¹. Me, I’m stocking up on a couple of these bad boys, give ’em to friends with new sons like I give copies of Blueberry Girl by Gaiman & Vess to friends with new daughters.

• If The Bear’s response is smaller than I’d figured on, it’s nice to know that there’s a balance, and the latest webcomic-related server-wanging came not at the hands of one of the behemoths that manage such things without intention², but at the paws of the modest-sized A Girl And Her Fed. Specifically, a stray mention of The Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie, NSW was enough to make their server fall down and go boom.

  Although I know for a fact that AGAHF creator Ms K Brooke “Otter” Spangler is the sort to feel absolutely horrible about taking down a non-profit, I hope that she finds in herself a little bit of pride that she could muster enough readers that want to contribute to the furry little VD-infected³ buggers as to constitute a “horde”. Assuming you think that koala care is a good thing, give it until tomorrow maybe, and pace yourselves? As of this writing, The Koala Hospital site is up, but throwing some warnings.

• Speaking of unexpected sizing, John Allison returns to the latest case at Bad Machinëry today, and I just want to publicly recognize him for his newest character design revisions. Flip back to the beginning of BM some three years back and compare Lottie and Shauna to what they look like now. This isn’t just artistic drift over time, it’s a deliberate act on Allison’s part to reflect the passage of time as his characters age and mature.

  We haven’t seen Sonny, Linton, or Jack yet, but I’d wager that they’ve upped their gangliness factor by about 40% since the end of The Case of the Fire Inside; by contrast, the first thought I had on reading this morning’s installment was, Dang, Charlotte and Shauna are almost young women. When did they get so old? Then again, I wonder the same thing about my nieces and nephews, my next door neighbor’s kid, and nearly everybody I see, so maybe it’s just me.

  Nah, it’s totally Allison. Nice work, The Englishman.

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¹ Or maybe because this one is in the “Publishing” category instead of the “Comics” category, meaning people aren’t seeing it in their searches?

² Jerry Holkins one wrote that he sometimes fears linking to things he likes might be interpreted as an act of aggression.

³ It’s hard to beat captions like One Direction member Liam Payne said he fears catching koala chlamydia after cuddling a koala that peed on him.

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With the rough cut done and the fine cut approaching, Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are, in mere hours, conducting what I believe is the first test screening of Stripped in LA, at something called “The Marina”, which I presume means something to Angelenos. Guys, I can’t tell you how much work has gone into this film (the last post about the making-of aspects to run on this page was just about one year ago exactly, at which time they had put in more than two years of work), and how much of a splash it’s going to make in the world of [web]comics. Let’s all think good thoughts in the direction of SoCal, oh, let’s say an hour from now. If nothing else, the Dave half of Freddave has a new little one at home and I’m sure he hasn’t slept more than an hour a night since San Diego Comic Con six weeks ago.

• Thing to look forward to #1: We at Fleen have spoken with Magnolia Porter at numerous points since Bobwhite wrapped, and it appears that a collection is finally on its way. Don’t get us wrong — Monster Pulse Porter’s best work yet, and The Good Crook was full of charms¹, but Bobwhite was the first time she really made us sit up and take notice. For you lucky attendees of SPX in three weeks, Porter will have a limited run of Bobwhite: Year One while she completes work on the comprehensive single-volume collection.
• Thing to look forward to #2: In actual fact, I don’t usually discover stuff that I’m super-interested in Kickstarter’s emails with their featured projects², but every once in a while, there’s a damn good one. And as luck would have it, this one is five times over goal after four days (in a thirty day campaign), so it also comes under the heading of “sure thing” for those of you that don’t appreciate the “will they make goal or not?” aspect of KS. Specifically, there’s a customized notebook for comic-making, which combines a class moleskine-style sketchbook with a series of comic references and how-tos.

  I DRAW COMICS is proudly stamped on the cover, and boy, will you ever with one of these in hand. My only disclaimer is that from the (admittedly few) sample pages shown on the KS page, it appears to draw a focus on superhero-type comics, which is understandable given that one of the project coordinators is an artist at Marvel. To the extent that body proportions are solely skewed towards the capes crowd³, it may not help every aspiring comics creator, as so many interesting comics don’t follow the stylistic conventions of the DC/Marvel Wednesday pull-list.

  But I have a hard time believing that even a sketchbook entirely serving the aesthetics of superhero comics would be entirely worthless to non-superhero creators; heck, I may even grab one myself, and I can’t draw much more than stick figures — and not even good enough stick figures that Randall Munroe needs to worry about competition.

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¹ Not to mention the fact that you could see Porter develop as an artist and storyteller as it developed, and my goodness has it been nearly five years since it launched? Yes, it has.

² Which is not to say that projects I’m interested in don’t get featured — it’s just I know about them before the email shows up.

³ And I trust that they have the good sense to not include Strong Female Characters-type bodily examples.