Faster your seatbelt, got some weird stuff for you today.

• Following up on yesterday #1: I was trying to avoid giving unnecessary weight to the issue, but my obliqueness confused some people, so for anybody wondering what the hell I was on about, read this, imagine the reaction from people who live to be angrily offended¹, and take it in the context of this. Thankfully this little blowup has had a relatively brief half-life.
• Following up on yesterday #2: Rich Stevens, as of this writing, is alive and triumphant over bacon in the battle of man vs delicious, cured meats. KC Green got a good portion of the ordeal on video for those that want to see the 32-slice battle in motion.
• Following up on yesterday #3: Not found in the NYCC session schedule (because it’s not a session), news that Anthony Clark, Chris Hastings, and a cardboard cutout of Ryan North, will have a major announcement at the ShiftyLook booth regarding a secret project. Before you ask, I already tried to obtain the cardboard cutout of Ryan for myself, and according to Hastings there are “plans” for it². Booth 3374, Thursday at 5:00pm, y’all.

New stuff:

• I’ve got my copy of the Bucko collection, do you? Maybe I can convince you with a peek at the extra-special bonus material! Namely, the full story of Queen Teri Hurricane Bluray-Devastatah d’Gresham, a thing of power and beauty, but tragically omitted from the online serial. Okay, yeah, you also get the promised three, er four-way, which (spoilers!) turns into a six-way. Dudes, it is so hot.
• Since we’ve previously established that Questionable Content is the locus of all webcomics crossovers and thus exists in all their realities, today’s revelation has … disturbing implications. Namely, that Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham is just another way of spelling Tommy Westphall and webcomics don’t exist. Sorry.
• Speaking of sorry, I’m not sure how many of you might have seen the latest update to the Order of the Stick Kickstarter, where we find out that Rich Burlew had a bad encounter between the tendons of his drawing hand and some broken glass. His wife reports that the surgeries went well and he’s expected to recover all function, but for the moment is pretty hepped up on goofballs, delaying both his strip and the Kickstarter rewards that he’s been producing. We at Fleen wish Burlew a speedy recovery and all the goofballs he needs to hepped up on in the meantime.
• Ordinarily, I’d be wishing a happy birthday to several people active in the [web]comics orbit today, including David Malki ! and K. Sekelsky, but I’m afraid that I can’t today. That’s because today marks the 100th anniversary of Chuck Jones, one of the most formative influences on who I am, and today he’s the only one I can wish a happy birthday despite the fact that he’s not around to hear them. Sorry, everybody else, today is Chuck’s day; feel free to insert a paraphrase of the Saint Crispin’s Day speech here if you like.

_______________
¹ AKA, “Tumblr”.

² Dang.

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’.

_______________
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.

I thought I was so smart this morning before work, figuring out that today’s xkcd is 165,888 x 79,872 worth of pixels, and determining Randall Munroe’s tile naming scheme, which would allow me to explore the entire, massive environment at my later leisure. Naturally, others had reconstructed the entire image before I’d had my breakfast, including at least one zoomable image of the whole damn thing. For the record, I discovered the secret UFO base by manual clicking and dragging. I think the one thing we can all take away from this experience is the fact that Munroe is never bored if he’s got the time to do stuff like this on random Wednesdays.

• Catching up: the Joe Shuster Awards were given out over the weekend; this page is on record that the Canadian comics awards are consistently well-curated in the breadth and depth of their nominees, and particularly find good webcomics to recognize. That streak remains intact, as the Shusters regonized Emily Carroll for her body of work in 2011 as Outstanding Web Comics Creator / Créateur de bande dessinée web exceptionnel for the second year in a row. Following up on his recent Harvey Award win, the award for Outstanding Comic Book Cartoonist / Auteur de bande dessinée exceptionnel went to Ramón Pérez for Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand.
• Looking forward: rumblings in the twitosphere indicate that the time is nigh. R Stevens, in accordance with the unholy pact he made for the sake of US$1332, and is about to eat two pounds of bacon. Much like ancient samurai would have a trusted retainer act as their second when committing seppuku, Stevens has engaged Anthony Clark and KC Green as witnesses to what is to happen, and may glob have mercy on us all.
• Intriguing: TopatoCo are apparently continuing their march to dominate all in their path:
  

  Just submitted an offer to BUY A TOPATOCO BUILDING.

  With George Rohac heading east to represent his employers, the possibility of collaboration — one might say conspirations — between these superstars of webcomics-related success-shepherding exists, and who knows how this will all shake out. I for one intend to be on the right side of history, and I welcome our new, space potato overlord.

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

_______________
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.

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.

_______________
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.

Too many things I talked about on busy days all at once, instead of pacing myself; ah, well — it’s just a couple of days until every pert-near webcomicker east of the Continental Divide makes their way to Bethesda for SPX. So while you’re waiting for that, please enjoy the following:

• PONY COP, the most adorable buddy-cop story of all time, gets the fandub treatment and it is glorious. All we need now are the pulse-pounding third and heartbreaking fourth installments in the PONY COP saga and all will be well in the world.
• Math meets snacks.
• She’s got your number, cat.
• Just guessing here, but I think that the Stretchladder of the Homestuck Kickstarter will be seeing an update on the “new perk” and “???” entries soon. We’re almost certainly going to hit the US$1.25 million level by end of the day, meaning that the game will be available on a physical Homestuck-branded medium¹. If Andrew Hussie is smart (and all available evidence is that he is, very much so), a carefully-revealed tease could pump up the response and drive people to ever-higher monetary support in exchange for exactly the right reward.

  Again, just guessing, but I’m thinking that a response equivalent to that for the SNOUTPACK² (and higher tiers) with the Senator Lemonsout and Pyralspite plushies, could be achieved with the right merch. Imps? Plush cuddle-cthulhu? Bec? Highly disturbing puppets? It’s like a totem lathe card for the making of money.

________________
¹ And if there’s one thing that Rich Stevens has taught us, it’s that custom USB drives will motivate the heck out of your reader base.

² Which has increased by another 50 slots, to 700 backers, selling out as quickly as it’s expanded.

The spiritual/cartoonical heirs of Harvey Kurtzman had their shindig on Saturday night, and as near as I can tell from the winners list, the most calls to the podium were for various Daredevil properties and one Ms Kate Beaton, who won for Best Online Comics Work, Special Award for Humor in Comics, and (most impressively) Best Cartoonist. The exceedingly modest Beaton remarked on her Tumblr:

To have won these awards is touching, and reaffirming, and I was not expecting so much faith in my work, but I thank you for your votes and your confidence. God knows, I am not the greatest cartoonist drawing breath at the moment, but I will try to always improve, and produce the best work I am capable of. I hope that I live up to your present opinion in further endeavors.

Also grateful for all of the wins: Mrs Brad Guigar. See, Brad was Kate’s designated award-acceptor, which meant he got in a lot of cardio sprinting to the podium and back three times, which means that he’s healthier today that he would have been otherwise, and why on earth wouldn’t a healthier Brad be a wonderful thing?

Continuing the webcomicker presence at the podium — Ramón Peréz hasn’t been able to keep up with Kukuburi so much due to the demands of paying work, but since one piece of that paying work was the stellar (and twice-honored) Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand, I’d say that Pérez made the right decision. And rounding things out, Vera Brosgol will always be a webcomiker in my heart, no matter how unfinished Return to Sender remains; she was justly recognized for Best Original Graphic Publication for Younger Readers for Anya’s Ghost, about which this page has had much good to say.

One more thought regarding Maryland’s annual designation as Center of the Comics World: this Friday, the day before SPX kicks off in Bethesda, the University of Maryland (College Park)’s Stamp Student Union will be holding a special panel discussion on webcomics:

“Pixels and Paper: Comic Art in the Digital Age,” is a panel discussion at the Hoff Theater in Stamp on September 14th from 2:00pm – 4:00pm about the creation and dissemination of comics in the digital age.

FREE and open to the public, the panel will converse on a number of topics related to the creation and dissemination of comics using both analog and digital methods, and how those choices are made.

Participants include Sally Carson (Fixpert), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson (Tiny Kitten Teeth), Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), and Rob Ullman (Atom-Bomb Bikini).

Not listed there, but also participating: Holly Post, Vice President in Charge of Kicking Your Ass for TopatoCo. This panel will feature much good information, and probably hugs.

There’s something about Lord Baltimore’s stomping grounds that just grabs hold of comics in September and won’t let go. Three weekends, three shows, serving three different constituencies. Let’s run ’em down.

• Up first, this weekend brings the return of Baltimore Comic Con to Charm City, with its big-name companies in a comics-centric show. With an awards ceremony and Stan Lee, it’s got everything the very largest shows have, with the exception of a million media companies crowding comics off the floor and a non-PDF programming guide. Lotsa people from the webcomicky world listed as showing, including your Brads and Sohmers and Braden & Shellis and Cubes and Speeds.
• One week later, Bethesda hosts the indy- and art-comics types at SPX, with the Ignatz Awards and more webcomickers and their natural allies than you can shake a stick at. I know I missed a lot of people from the list (including repeats from BaltoCon) so give it a good going-over, yes? On the off chance you don’t find somebody you want to meet in person, you can see some of the brainiest comics panels around or hit the handy hotel lobby bar.
• One week on, Intervention hits, also in Bethesda, and less “comics” than “things made on the internet”, with a real focus on programming late into the night, but with a preponderance of webcomics types on the guest list, including some repeats from the prior two shows, and a rare East Coast sighting of webcomics resident West Coast Tiki Queen and one third of the Nexus of All Webcomics Realities¹, Shaenon Garrity, and her Skin Horse writing partner, Jeffrey C Wells.² I don’t know if there’s a lobby bar, but it there is and any of the drinks come in glasses with faces on them, don’t get between them and Shaenon if you value your life.
• A little further in the future, Matthew Inman and the Little Gamers crew will continue webcomics traditions in 2013 by, respectively, presenting at the next SxSW Festival and driving from London to Ulan Bator. Gonna be a busy year next year.

_______________
¹ The other two thirds being The Tall Man and The Smiling Man.

² I’m pretty sure I just set a record for the longest single sentence at Fleen.

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.

_______________
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.

Events that you may find of interest:

• Note to self: wear the T-Rex Stompin’ shirt tomorrow.
• Note to self: if you improbably find yourself in Seattle this weekend, drop by PAX, where one may find Kris Straub doing things, or Wil Wheaton doing things. I’m pretty sure that Mike, Jerry, and Scott doing things, but I haven’t found specific, concise posts by them yet.
• Note to self: if you future-technologically find yourself in Chicago this weekend, drop by Chicon 7/Worldcon, where one may find Howard Tayler doing things or David Malki ! doing things. Again, I’m certain that Los Foglios and Ursula Vernon will be doing things, but not much specificity given by them either.
• Note to self: if you magically find yourself in Atlanta this weekend, drop by Dragon*Con and you know exactly what Jennie Breeden will be doing — blowin’ Old Spice dudes¹ in front of a crowd of screamin’ ladies. Last time, she got a marriage proposal.
• Okay, promised you booze, let’s talk booze. Kristen Siebecker may not be a name that you recognize, but you should; aside from being married to indy comics creator Alex Robinson, she was the one responsible for organizing the first iteration of MoCCA Fest, which was a massive success and became a showcase for webcomickers for years afterwards.

  She’s also a fully-qualified sommelier and is starting a new series of wine-appreciation classes, so if you’ve ever wanted to learn exactly what it was you were drinking and why you liked (or didn’t like) it, you could do a hell of a lot worse than checking out her class.

  Popping Your Cork: Tips For New Wine Drinkers starts at 6:15pm and runs for an hour and a half or so on Wednesday, 12 September at Simple Studios, 134 West 29th Street (2nd floor) in Manhattan. It’ll set you back twenty bucks, for which you’ll get tasted on three wines, learn some useful stuff, and maybe if this becomes a regular event, it’ll take on a comics-maker overtone.

______________
¹ … who are wearing kilts, with a leafblower.