This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Uncle George, and we discover that although Ray dug down deep to find he truly was Blood of Champion, he was ready to bribe his way out of the Fight the minute it became necessary (or at least attempt to). Ray contains multitudes.

We’re heading east today, to the continent of universal health care — that would be most of the rest of the world, Gary — and borderless borders — a contradiction in terms! — and ancient wines, beers, and cheeses¹. Europe!

• Our first stop is in France, cradle of so many of the arts (comics not the least of them) and home of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. One may recall that about a month ago I mentioned that Stela — the new mobile comics delivery platform — was getting a lot of attention and precisely zero release on Android, so I wasn’t able to offer up anything resembling a review.

  But! FSFCPL is in the iDevice fold, and Stela has recently released a French version, and he’s shared some thoughts on it for you. Key takeaway points:

  [O]nce you use it it becomes clear Stela’s purpose is to publish comics that embrace the 5 centimeters (that’s about 2 inches, for the metrically-challenged) width of today’s smartphone screens.

  That’s good, but Lebeaupin notes that Stela is really designed for handsets; viewing comics on an iPad means the comics are just scaled up, which makes for funnily huge lettering.

  These are comics that are native to that world: the panels are only as wide as the screen (nary a vertical gutter in sight) and can only extend vertically, but they can do so as much as desired because they are read by vertical scrolling. A panel may not necessarily fit on a screen (at least on an iPhone 5/5S/SE; I haven’t checked on the larger models)! An iPhone 5 screenful is a common size, but most of these comics have widely varying panels sizes, and anyway have conversations for instance that extend over multiple screenfuls: they don’t follow a pattern of identically-sized pages. The result is a very fluid flow and a reading experience that is meant to be fast. [emphasis mine]

  Bolded because I think that’s probably the most important selling point of Stela, however it should be balanced against another discovery:

  [I]mages are loaded dynamically and present a spinner if your scroll too fast before they have had time to load, as is traditional in iPhone apps: prioritize the flow, even if that means betraying some implementation realitie

  And some of the decisions (both technical and economic) are a bit bewildering:

  The comics are updated chapter by chapter (which make for checkpoints as well); the economic model is that the first chapter of each story is free, and you can get a subscription (using Apple’s in-app subscription system) to read after that. It is a single subscription global to the app, not per-series, so it works a bit like an anthology series. Comics are always loaded from the network, which bothers me a little: there is no way to preload while on WiFi to avoid eating into your phone data allotment, and no way to read at all if you are off the network. iPod Touches exist, you know. [emphasis mine]

  And depending on your inclination, those might be the dealbreakers right there — let your subscription lapse and you have nothing to show for it — as you’re only given access to what you’re reading right now. Stela is less a comics app than a comics rental platform; those that like to own their media (digital or otherwise), take note. And as always, thanks to FSFCPL for his review.

• A bit futher east and north then, to the land of sauna and tango and linguistic anomalies — I’m speaking naturally of Finland — and Minna Sundberg. We at Fleen have been big fans of Ms Sundberg’s since we saw the crowdfunding campaign for the very pretty book of her first comic, and that regard has only grown since she launched her ongoing magnum opus, Stand Still, Stay Silent. Readers of this page will recall the fact that SSSS took the NCS Division Award for Online Comics — Long Form last May.

  And she’s been cranking out between three and five full pages a week (along with the odd interchapter hiatus of ten days or so) 879 days since November of 2013 — 500 pages in total as of today — making her one of the most productive cartoonists working right now. A page of comics written, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered in less than two days for nearly two and a half years? Sundberg is an unstoppable comics machine, and shows every sign of reaching Sergio Aragonés levels of speed and skill while still in her mid-20s. I can’t wait to see what she’s like in another decade.

  Happy Big Round Number Day, Ms Sundberg. Your work is great and you should feel great.

Spam of the day:

Implant-Providers

Damn it, I told you people I neither need nor want breast implants!

Dental Implants You Can Afford

Oh. I’d say Never mind but I don’t need dental implants either. Gots all ma teeths, don’t need fangs or tusks or anything like that.

______________
¹ Now we’re talking.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I remain conflicted to this very day what the most disconsolate part of this tableau is — the smallness of the snack tent? The underwhelming nature of the “feast”? The lone spork? They could have at least made some “Dinosaur” Potato Chuds.

• It was in the early morning hours of yesterday — having twins means he’s on Baby Duty until 5:00am — that David Willis launched the Kickstarter for his fifth Dumbing of Age book, which funded out before he went to sleep. Hardly surprising, as the prior four DoA books have funded like clockwork (at rates of 273% to 370% of goal), although I don’t recall one funding out in less than eight hours before.

  It also doesn’t hurt that Willis puts together his books and sends out his stuff on time; as a result, he generally increases his backer count by about 600 folks from book to book, meaning the just under 700 backers and 177% achievement on a US$22,000 goal (as of this writing) is just an ordinary outcome for him. Checking out the ol’ FFFmk2, we’re looking at US$120K to 180K, which would be in the range of double his previous best funding level.

  Then again, he’s already go more backers than his first collection, and will likely come up with 2 to 3 times as many by the time the campaign ends in 28 days; if the per-backer averages hold, he’d be looking at US$78K to US$117K, and he hasn’t yet unlocked all the stretch goals, the things that convince people to move from intangible rewards to physical rewards. It appears that the twins need not worry about starving before their first birthday.

• Something else that need not be worried about? That Fleen readers will be uninformed about the goings-on in Eurocomics, thanks to Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who has a choice recommendation for us:
  

  Tim from acupoftim.com draws pages about a number of matters, from his admiration of Maddox to what became of Totoro to figuring out what the deal is with these darn squirrels, but he is best known for stories on his various workplaces and coworkers, published in Quotidien Survival.

  He also had a side blog, Glauque-Land, where he publishes photos of his explorations of various urban ruins and other abandoned buildings. Which caught the interest of a Flammarion imprint, and today they are releasing a book of his photos, with accompanying text and illustrations he created for this purpose.

  Maybe more interesting than the publication by itself is the story he published (as comics on his site, of course) of the whole process from his side, especially his attempts to keep a level head and dealing with not being in control of everything. Check them out if you can read French.

  My French is rusty, but you ain’t need to read French in order to see what the squirrels are up to — no good is what. Doesn’t matter if they’re French or otherwise, squirrels are not to be trusted. And curiously, this appears to be one area where animals outside Australia are more dangerous than those inside Australia … this should indicate how incredibly evil and malicious the little brush-tailed bastards really are.

Spam of the day:

Verizon Services FREE 30-day HBO NOW® trial – Let the binging begin

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No. Get bent, Verizon. I’ll let SquirrelCo put their lines into my house before I upgrade my service with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• And, from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin:
  

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

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

Spam of the day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Except Anthony Clark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spam of the day:

Look what I found growing in your stomach!

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

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

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

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: The weekend saw our several-times-noted episode of Beef recounting GOF lore¹, and the revelation that Beef is not Frederick H Coca-Cola. Today, Polish sausages and pencil necks.

Once again, we have new from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin; I’m excited to see what he drops us from the continent, the coverage the that rest of us here at Fleen provide is decidedly English-centric (and within that subset of the world’s comics, primarily focused on the US/Canada). The French language has an enormous tradition of comics, more than any other culture except perhaps Japan, and not speaking it fluently (or having time to look things up) has restricted our coverage to either stupidity explosions and whatever cool thing Boulet is doing now.

Also, FSFCPL’s contributions make for less typing, so that’s a bonus. Here’s today’s news from the world of bande dessinées (nouvelles du monde de la bande dessinée):

I got news about a newly released, let’s say, digital comics experiment called Phallaina. Start downloading the app right now, it’s a bit big, and run it as soon as it is downloaded, as it needs to process its own resources for two additional minutes.

While the page is in French, the app has both French and English text, and there is an English teaser trailer (however, the press kit is inexplicably only in French). While they say it’s optimized for tablets (and I have played with it on my iPad), it is also legible on an Android phone (Galaxy S II), though (as some also also report) I indeed had to kill it the first time and it worked the second, so you should have what it needs to experience it.

They claim it’s the first « bande défilée » (literally, “scrolling band”, while sounding like « bande dessinée »), but (besides, of course, the Bayeux Tapestry) I remember http://www.nevermindthebullets.com/ (still online, amazingly enough for a promotional creation) doing the pretty much the same thing, and with web technologies to boot. On the other hand, Never Mind The Bullets has movement everywhere in no discernible pattern, which makes it more confusing than anything; Phallaina is much better done in my opinion.

I have never heard of the author, and I can’t bring you much in the way of context, other than it has the backing of France Télévisions (through the domain: francetv.fr, the credits, etc.), which is nothing less than France’s public TV corporation (think France’s BBC, though restricted to TV).

News via Boulet. I swear, I’m trying to diversify my sources: I now follow a dozen French webcomic authors and related people (some on a secondary Twitter account), and yet all the interesting stuff comes via Boulet.

I can pretty safely say that I never would have heard about Phallaina without this note from Lebeaupin, even though I follow Boulet in English. I’m going to see what’s up with Phallaina first chance I get, and can’t help but wonder if this becomes a platform for more creators and more stories. I can’t help think of what McCloud’s My Obsession With Chess would look like optimized for a modern mobile presentation. Is this me coming around on infinite canvas? Maybe we just needed a way to make the idea not tedious in implementation and technology is finally catching up.

As usual, Fleen thanks Lebeaupin for his contribution. Going to have to create a tag for posts he contributes to for easy future reference.

Spam of the day:
I’m putting this one behind the cut because it is so awesome I couldn’t find an excerpt to quote. I have to run the entire damn thing verbatim.

(more…)

What a week, what a week. Let’s recap the things that have happened and call it.

• This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip. Ray’s probably dealing with his hat guy to ensure he has the proper hat, and he and Beef are packing up the motorcycle and sidecar for the trip to The Acres.
• The entirely delightful Rene Engström has, indeed, resurrected Anders Loves Maria with remastered art. Compare, if you will, the first two installments against the original version. There’s better pacing for the gag, better sense of space, better use of panel count and size to establish the time. There’s also — crucially — a shift from steam forming a heart in the original final panel to Maria looking gobsmacked. There’s an entirely different emotional payoff in this strip, a revision that could only come from a creator that is looking back with a better sense of who her characters are/were in hindsight, instead of just discovering them. I suspect the swing from idyllic love story to relationship trainwreck¹ and back again is going to have a different timbre (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) this time around. I’m looking forward to reading my favorite [SPOILER ALERT] ultimately heartbreaking story again for the first time.
• Ian Jones-Quartey has been mentioned many times on this page; he is, perhaps, best known for his work on Steven Universe and other collaborations with Rebecca Sugar, but before that he did minis, animated and directed various shows (including The Venture Brothers and Adventure Time), did some kick-ass minicomics, and (oh yeah) a little thing called RPG World². He’s been back-and-forth with Cartoon Network with his own projects (such as Secret Mountain Fort Awesome), and reported been working on a secret project.

  That project has been revealed: CN has picked up his Lakewood Plaza Turbo not as a series, but as their first property outside of broadcast. Specifically, it’s the centerpiece of a mobile game, OK K.O.! Lakewood Plaza Turbo, and the start of an ambitious new direction for the media empire. Now follow me on this: if you’re a network that’s taking a big gamble, making a move that has not been made before by any network, you are not going to make your first project (the one that determines whether or not this gamble goes forward) on somebody you don’t have total confidence in.

  And that confidence appears to have been well placed, as OKKO!LPT currently scoring ratings of 4.5/5.0 on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. There’s probably no good way to determine how many times it’s been downloaded since launch yesterday, but given that the percentage of people that rate downloads is pretty low, having a few hundred (damn near universally positive) ratings in a day means it’s doing pretty well.

  This isn’t a one-off; it’s the start of a new business model for CN, and likely the start of a franchise for Jones-Quartey. Congrats to him, to his team, and to everybody that’s having fun beating stuff up in OKKO!LPT. And if you aren’t one of those people, let me point out that it’s free, so there’s nothing but download time keeping you from playing. You’re welcome.

• In case you missed it, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin continued his How to curse in French lessons in yesterday’s comments. Don’t say we never taught you anything worthwhile.

Spam of the day:

Your website has to be the elcoertnic Swiss army knife for this topic.

I’m putting that on my next round of business cards.

_______________
¹ Go back through the first run of ALM writeups on this page and you’ll see I spent plenty of time sniffly over those two crazy kids, and plenty of time wanting to boot one or both of them in the skull for being so stupid and cruel. Usually Anders, though — I suspect this time around the motivations for his behavior will be a little more emotionally deep and little less just him being a dick.

² Reminder that you do not ask Jones-Quartey when RPG World is getting finished. Every time he’s asked, he pushes the return date back another month (current estimate: February 2038).

But I haven’t studied French since high school and we never got to the rude words so I’m trusting them on this one. But I digress.

• The FIBD in Angoulême apparently decided that all of the idiocy it went through in the runup to this year’s festival wasn’t enough, and decided that as long as there are pooches to screw then par Dieu, they were gonna screw ’em. It seems ridiculous to say, but the big awards ceremony at Angoulême kicked off by presenting fake awards to unsuspecting creators and then pulling the metaphorical rug out from under them because … comics?

  The invaluable Brigid Alverson¹ has the best summary of the events, including a reasonably heartfelt apology from the host who perpetrated the cruelty, and the quote from FIBD president Franck “there are no notable women in the history of comics” Bondoux declaring that the conteremps is all our fault because they got caught being enormous dicks instead of being able to pretend it didn’t happen². Oh, wait, I was paraphrasing … the actual wording was The problem is the dictatorship of the tweet.

  No kidding, I’m wondering who in the world of comics will be willing to show up next year. The only thing I can see that will prevent name creators from abandoning Angoulême in droves is for Bondoux and his entire staff to be replaced (bitterly complaining, of course, that nobody can take a goddamned joke). I’ve always wanted to see the FIBD in person, but now you couldn’t pay me to go.

• While we’re in Europe: Rene Engström has been largely absent from webcomics for a number of years; Sofa Rap Art got taken down a while back due to the intervention of evil scammers, and last we heard from her and partner Rasmus Gran, they were expecting a child. Engström’s telling us what having a toddler around is like in her Hourly Comics today (starting here), and we have news that her most famous comics work is on its way back:
  

  Starting on the 4th of February, 6 years to the day the series first ended, I will be republishing Anders Loves Maria with both old and new content.

  The schedule will be roughly 1-2 pages per week initially.

  New ALM, y’all. Read it again for the first time, hooray!

• Speaking of February anniversaries:
  

  .@dinosaurcomics is 13 years old today! I HAVE A TEEN.

  IF YOU HAD REPRODUCTIVE SEX WHEN I STARTED MY COMIC YOU COULD ALMOST HAVE A TEEN TOO

  Congratulations on your strip anniversary Ryan and also for not making the passage of time seem creepy at all!

• And to finish things up, the inimitable Dante Shepherd (so don’t even try imit him!) has taught me about a concept that kept me from ever taking a second class in thermodynamics back in my college days³, one that befuddles the bejabbers out of more than a few baby engineers: fugacity.

  His latest science comic is the one that gave him the idea for a series of scientific-concept comics in the first place, the reason that he went out and got a grant to produce ’em, so it’s kind of a big deal. Hey, Dante, let me know if you want to get around to talking about Nyquist’s ratio or Shannon’s Figure 1 for the next set of science comics. They can’t all be about smelly stuff in tanks and columns.

Spam of the day:

Our processing center is waiting for your response

A response on a VA loan that I don’t have because I wasn’t ever in the military? Yeah, you’re gonna be waiting a while longer.

_______________
¹ Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin has yet to check in, and we’ve been asking him to deal with a lot of complete and utter stupidity and I completely understand if he wants to give this one a miss in the interests of mental health.

² As I said, my high school French is rusty, but I can make out the meaning of Bondoux insisting on le droit à l’impertinence.

³ Aside from the fact that electrical engineers were only required to take one thermo class, and one fluid dynamics class, and there’s no rational reason to take any more of either. I bet he hasn’t taken even one class in communications systems, so he shouldn’t be getting too full of himself.

The inestimable Pierre Lebeaupin was good enough to leave an extensive comment on yesterday’s post on the dumbassery surrounding this year’s Grand Prix d’Angoulême. It was too good to be potentially overlooked, so I’ve copied it here. Please enjoy this bonus post for today.

A message from the Fleen French correspondent …

• The FIBD published a communiqué telling that they are going to “without removing any name, reintroduce names of female creators in the list of nominees” (via everyone in France including mainstream media; Robot 6 post. Take it for what it’s worth, especially the communiqué is still quite on the defensive in this correspondent’s humble opinion.
• Analysis from Isabelle Bauthian, via Boulet’s twitter; my translation:
  

  I had an inkling for a detailed article on this absurd lack of any female creator name on the list of nominations for the FIBD Grand Prize, but I am swamped with work, which is probably a good thing as it will avoid me a few blood tension spikes. So, we’ll make it short:

  • No one is asking for strict parity (about 12% female creators in the field. We’re not completely dumb), nor even quotas.
  • Yes, there is a good choice of influent female creators in the generation of some of the nominees (even just in manga, seriously …).
  • No, you don’t just have to “wait for society to change”. Society has already changed and the leading bodies in many domains do not correspond to it, that’s the very issue.
  • I do no condemn men unconscious of their “privileges”. We all are to some extent, or have been. But I find it fundamental that people can make their biases known to them.
  • To raise awareness the presence of discriminations and consciously correct them is not “favoritism”. Favoritism is what created them in the first place.
  • The decision from Riad Sattouf [correspondent note: first creator, and probably only one at that time, to have withdrawn in protest] forces respect (possibly even admiration), but I can’t help but witness that “feminist men” are considered classy, but “feminist women” are considered damn nuisances.
  • YES, this selection is also 100% white and Asian [correspondent note: and this argument doesn’t even stand if we consider Riad Sattouf, precisely, who is half mid-eastern, this is even the whole basis of “l’arabe du futur”]. I don’t know the percentage of black authors in comics [correspondent note: originally put as “bd”] (it seems to me very low in France-Belgique but I could be wrong) [correspondent note: it might even be illegal to make such statistics anyway], nor, among them, which ones have gained enough influence to earn a Grand Prize, but the fact is the FIDB is barely starting the earn its “I” [correspondent note: stands for “International”] and it should put a light on ALL comics [correspondent note: originally put as “bande dessinnée”].

    Let me remind you that, as late as last year, people would bemoan the presence of manga creators in the selection. If African author collectives have ideas to improve this situation, I am certain that a bunch of female creators will support them, individually or through their collective. But here, right now, this is not the case, so thanks for wanting to save the world but let us start with helping those who are struggling against an issue rather than tell them to shut up because they are not the only ones with a problem, thank you very much.

  • Yes, creators have other issues, starting with an iniquitous reform of their retirement pension system and, especially and more complex, their increasingly lowering revenues. The good news is that talking about the lack of women in the selection does not prevent from tackling those. The bad news is, if we stop talking about the lack of women, it will start becoming apparent that the bulk of your actions for “authors in general” just amount to complaining on Facebook.

    So don’t blame us for multiplying the struggles. Rather thank us for putting a veil on your passivity (And if I’m wrong concerning you, let me remind you that the SNAC is recruiting, hey, friends. Punchy, coordinated and exhaustive actions are not set up in 15 days between 10 voluntary suckers).

  And on that, allow me to take my leave, I’m going to go ahead and improve the percentage of “women’s books” to be published in 2016.

Now from the correspondent analysis:

• Gotta concur on the somewhat parochial aspect of the FIDB, in particular your correspondent was not particularly aware of the general importance of EW as compared to, say, Megan Fox Tits Wolverine [Editor’s note: how we at Fleen refer to that onetime exemplar of comics news, Wizard magazine], so he wouldn’t be particularly surprised if the head of FIBD wasn’t either. Not an excuse, but not a scandal either.
• Double checked his comments on Le Monde and Télérama, and yes, he did actually say that in the original French. His comments about Tintin and Pilote are disingenuous, in particular, given that the most late breaking of the nominees broke out in the 90s, while both Tintin and Pilote went under in the 80s.
• Raina Telgemeier (haven’t checked the other female creators you mentioned) may indeed however be of a later generation than any of the nominees; it’s indeed not about creators “running around today” (except, as Télérama mentioned, for Zep in 2004 …). Takahashi-san however would certainly qualify by that measure.

A number of things would have been covered yesterday, but were delayed because of a god-damned disgrace¹. Let’s point out some things have come to light regarding the Charlie Hebdo incident, then we’ll play catch-up. If this is all too depressing for you, there will be a regular post up in a little while.

• Via Brigid Alverson, news that a fifth cartoonist, Philippe Honoré, died of his wounds after the attack. I couldn’t find a photo of Honoré that’s freely usable, so let me direct you to this page at The Guardian that features him in a composite of some of the victims.
• In fact, stay at The Guardian for a moment longer, because they are the first place I’ve found that lists all the dead, which I’m going to quote from at length:
  

  The 12 victims of the attack have been identified. They are: Charb — whose real name was Stéphane Charbonnier, 47, artist and publisher of Charlie Hebdo; Cabu — whose real name was Jean Cabut, 76, Charlie Hebdo’s lead cartoonist, who was honoured with the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest civil decoration, in 2005; Georges Wolinski — Tunisian-born artist, 80, who had been drawing cartoons since the 1960s, and worked for Hara-Kiri, a satirical magazine considered a forerunner to Charlie Hebdo; Tignous — whose real name was Bernard Verlhac, 57, was a member of a group of artists called Cartoonists for Peace; Bernard Maris — known as “Uncle Bernard”, 68, was an economist and wrote a regular column for Charlie Hebdo; Philippe Honoré, AKA Honoré, 73, a cartoonist who had worked for Charlie Hebdo since 1992 and drew the last cartoon tweeted by the weekly only moments before the massacre; Michel Renaud — a former journalist and political staffer who founded a cultural festival, who was visiting the Charlie Hebdo offices from Clermont-Ferrard; Mustapha Ourrad — a copy editor for Charlie Hebdo of Algerian descent; Elsa Cayat — Charlie Hebdo analyst and columnist; Frederic Boisseau — building maintenance worker; Franck Brinsolaro — 49-year-old police officer appointed to head security for Charb and father of a one-year-old girl; Ahmed Merabet — 42, a French Muslim police officer and member of the 11th arrondissement brigade.

  Since yesterday, I’ve read a number of pieces that verge on saying some variation of Well, they provoked it/deserved it/were terrible people; everybody getting on a high horse and declaring that they aren’t going to mourn for racists, sexists, or whichever -ists it is for you, be so kind in your calculus of who is worthy and who isn’t to consider that this was a varied group of individuals. Thank you.

• In fact, anybody that has formed an opinion of what Charlie Hebdo is or who these people were based on something you’ve seen that was copied from something else, which was based on something somebody heard, please acknowledge that you’re reacting from a place of emotion and — and I use this word precisely — ignorance.

  I didn’t comment on the content of Charlie Hebdo and the motivations of those who published and contributed not because I agreed with it, or disagreed with it, or am afraid to do so, but because I didn’t read it (my French is nowhere near good enough, nor my sense of Continental irony) and I’m fundamentally unfamiliar with the nuances.

  Fortunately, Pierre Lebeaupin was kind enough to provide some of that context in a comment on yesterday’s post, which I found extremely valuable and am reproducing here in its entirety:

  Since you decided to focus on the cartoonists who died today, let me expand on them a bit.

  Cabu! Oh my God Cabu. Where to start? By the fact he coined a word (beauf, meaning a narrow-minded average French) which is now in all French language dictionaries? By his extensive career stretching back at least 50 years? By his prowess at both caricature and comics (Le Grand Duduche, in particular)? He is, basically, a fundamental French cultural reference. Period.

  Wolinski was the reference for political cartooning in the French communist movement, long officiating at l’Humanité, the official paper of the French communist party. Among his many accomplishments, he once received the Grand Prix in Angoulème. One of his most famous cartoons read:

  Well-off Father (crying): Our daughter engaged to a one-eyed, lame negro jew!
  Well-off Mother (crying): Jesus Mary Joseph!
  Daughter: Be kind, dear, don’t tell them right away you are communist.

  Charb was pretty much the soul of Charlie Hebdo, illustrating the covers most of the time, to the best of my knowledge, as well as contributing many of the interior cartoons (as far as I know, I did not buy Charlie Hebdo) and serving as the magazine’s editor. He did work for other publications, but his recent career is pretty much synonymous with Charlie Hebdo itself.

  I am not familiar with Tignous and his work, most unfortunately.

  Lastly, among the names released as being among the dead is economist, contributing the Charlie Hebdo as such, Bernard Maris, who also officiated in various other media, such as France Inter (France generalist public radio channel).

  For Fleen, this was French correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin reporting from Paris; to you Gary.

  Nous vous remercions de votre rapport, Pierre.

That’s all. Try to be good to each other.

_______________
¹ My recollection is that Jerry Holkins used this descriptor to describe the events of 11 September 2001, and the economy of his phrasing has always stayed with me; however, the Penny Arcade text posts don’t go back that far so maybe I’m making it all up.