Getting back into the swing of work, a bit behind, so perhaps you’ll forgive me if I point you towards some things that I’ve noticed over the last little bit and forgo the more thinky things like the Harvey nominations?

• For starters, we’re coming up on the opening of We Love Webcomics at Doublepunch Gallery in San Francisco. It’ll feature the works of incredibly, almost stupidly talented people. Quite frankly, it would be worthwhile to attend if it featured no more than three random Showdowns, any two Rebecca Clement whimsies, and Natasha Allegri’s tribute to Snooki. As it turns out, I have no special knowledge that any of those things will be present, but then again, you could substitute just about anything by Campbell, Clement and Allegri and have it rock, not to mention the work of Furuichi, Green, Jonathan, and more. Those in the westerly climes, do check it out for us, yes?
• Late-breaking realization #37: by not attending SDCC this year, I am missing out on obvious purchasing opportunities. Under normal circumstances I’d be picking up copies of the new Chainsawsuit, Starslip, Scenes From A Multiverse, Penny Arcade, Super Stupor, Drive, and Flight collections. Just the shipping on all of these books is almost enough to justify the flight and hotel costs for the week¹. That’s not even considering that I wouldn’t be able to pick up the newest Schlock Mercenary and Digger books, since Tayler and Vernon won’t be there either. Gonna be an expensive July….
• Doing me the favor of not having a new book that needs purchasing, the ever-mysterious E Burgoon passed some information to us² regarding some of his(?) recent semi-covert activities. Of greatest interest is the fact that Burgoon has worked a deal with the seemingly-legitimate front organization friendly local comic shop, Empire’s Comics Vault in Sacramento, to offer seminars designed to bring more artists and writers to webcomickry. It’s possible that there may even be video of the first of these for your edification and/or viewing pleasure in the near future.

Okay. Going slightly off script here for a moment; I think that I’ve calmed down enough to approach this rationally and not go on the written equivalent of a tower-based shooting spree. A few hours ago I read this:

[Blog] : One chapter ends, another begins… http://www.mindpollution.org/2011/07/05/one-chapter-ends-another-begins/

… which lead to the unwelcome news that Rick Marshall, consummate comics reportage pro and relentless booster of webcomics, has been let go from this position at MTV Splash Page (no link, because screw them). Rick’s way too much of a gentleman to see this as anything but an opportunity to explore new projects, but I’m not. I’m going to say that MTV are foolish for not realizing what a resource they had (Rick’s Rolodex is deep and broad, and his interviews revealed a knowledge of comics to match); keeping him on a blog with the too-narrow focus of comics-meets-movies-and-TV was understandable when that was all that MTV had in the way of comics coverage, but not asking him to helm their dedicated comics blog (MTV Geek; again, no link because still screw them) was shortsighted in the extreme³.

So, if you’re looking for somebody that exemplifies journalistic best practices and has a deep and abiding love of comics and all they do, drop Rick a line — he makes the rest of us that dabble in banging out copy look bad, while making the medium, its creators, and fans look very, very good. Anybody that’s lucky enough to snatch him up will be lucky to have his talents working on their behalf.

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¹ It is very, very expensive to ship to the Fleenplex.

² Via the traditional dead-drop, as befits his(?) strict adherence to the best practices of tradecraft.

³ Which should not be construed as a criticism of anybody that MTV did invite in to work on MTV Geek. There’s some good work being done over there, but I think you’ll forgive me if I decline to read it in future.

So, I gotta renew my CPR certification this weekend, do some community events with my EMS crew, or I’d be totally heading to conventions, one or the other, on opposite sides of the continent for my convenience.

• For those of the Canadian bent (or with a current passport, mine’s in renewal right now), there’s the Calgary Expo, featuring the likes of Cameron Stewart, Danielle Corsetto, Dave Kellett, Kris Straub, Lar deSouza & Ryan Sohmer, Scott Kurtz, Tarol Hunt, and the TopatoCo Crüe (including Chris Hastings, David Malki !, Emily Horne & Joey Comoeau, Ethan Nicolle, Jeffrey Rowland, Jeph Jacques, Kate Beaton, KC Green, and Ryan North).
• For those of you that don’t have Calgary in your plans, there’s MFTWWorld¹ — Philadelphia, featuring Christopher Baldwin, Colleen AF Venable, and hometown boy Brad Guigar, who’s debuting his latest Evil, Inc collected volume, which only just arrived.
• Instead of hitting the shows, I believe I’ll be mixing up some drinks at home, with the help of some new recipes from my fellow cocktail-enthusiast, “Doctor” Chris Hastings. Seems that Saveur magazine has been contracting with a series of cartoonists for recipes in comics form², and Doc’s just went up — an exploration of ginger-themed mixed drinks, which I am assured underwent extensive and rigorous quality testing.

  There’s both classics and original recipes, one of which, the GingerJack, makes liberal use of Laird’s bottled in bond straight apple brandy [PDF] (aka “the good stuff”). It’s been confirmed that Hastings’s recipe for the GingerJack is original, as I was present when he was introduced to Lisa Laird Dunn (the 11th generation of Lairds to head the family distillery), who confirmed that she’s heard of no such use of her product before, and that it sounds “delicious”. I’m gonna count that as proof — 100 proof, to be exact.

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¹ Megan Fox Tits Wolverine, the truth-in-advertising name for the magazine once known as Wizard, whose successor company runs this and a million other “comics” shows.

² Check out last week’s contribution, by Dorothy Gambrell, for chocolate ice cream with chili peppers. Yum.

Kindly allow me to point you towards some words of note, then get the hell out of Dodge for the weekend.

From Christopher Butcher, mad genius Kit Kat enthusiast and TCAF showrunner, a wrap-up of this year’s show:

TCAF 2011 was our third annual show, and our third year partnering with [the Toronto Public Library], and it was clearly another successful partnership. TCAF at Toronto Reference Library reinforces the core ideals of the Festival: that it’s a free event, that it’s about the books, and that it is open to everyone—not just the comics initiated. While I think all involved agreed that the library was more than a little crowded at times on Saturday afternoon, it never stopped having a great, friendly vibe and an amazing energy. Those are the reasons that we partner with Toronto Public Library, and those are the reasons that we’re going to be working together again in 2012.

There’s no TCAF without great creators and works of art to celebrate, and so we’d like to thank all of the cartoonists, publishers, writers, artists, and other agencies that took the time to exhibit and present at TCAF 2011. This was our most diverse and international fest yet, with creators from 12 different countries around the world presenting a variety of idiosyncratic worldviews through the comics medium.

… and important dates for next year’s:

TCAF 2012 will be continue to occur at Toronto Reference Library and The Bram and Bluma Appel Salon — and now it comes down to when. After much discussion internally and with TPL staff, we’ve decided that TCAF 2012 will occur on Saturday May 5 and Sunday May 6, 2012. Exhibitor Applications for 2012 will open on Monday, August 1st at www.TorontoComics.com.

That’s all. Enjoy the hell out of your weekend.

Warm, bright, sunny, low humidity, and just hours after an anxious afternoon/evening of tornado watches. Oh weather, can you be any crazier/more wonderful?

• It’s less than a week until three books by noted webcomickers drop — one may stoke anticipation for Anya’s Ghost, Astronaut Academy, and Level Up here, here, and here, respectively. Come Tuesday, you can find out if I was right about them or not¹.
• Heroes Con kicks off this weekend (starting tomorrow, actually) in Charlotte, NC, and while their website seems to list a considerable number of guest cancellations (including Frank’n’Becky and Tyson Hesse), one has to expect a certain amount of last-minute plan changing and it’s nice to know in advance of the show rather than be disappointed, yes? In any event, Fleen Faves heading to the show include Danielle Corsetto, Dustin Harbin, David Malki !, Carla Speed McNeil, Andy Runton, Dean Trippe, Joel Watson, and Jim Zubkavitch. Tell ’em I said hi.
• If you find yourself in the opposite of North Carolina (generally agreed by most authorities to be Toronto), you can still get your fill of webcomics people, as Ryan North² will be speaking tomorrow night on comics as part of a lecture series that invites people from completely different fields to talk on completely different things to spark creativity. As the website of The Treehouse Group states:
  

  3 people × 3 topics = 1,000 ideas

  North will be joined by John Paul Morgan (speaking on the process of invention) and Nathalie Desrosiers (speaking on Twitter and civil liberties).

• Finally, it has been established in the past that if there’s one thing that gets under the skin of Kate Beaton, it’s that comics cliche of the woman twisting her spine to show of breasts and buttocks simultaneously (and a rightly-so under-skin getting, as it’s a truly ridiculous and pandering pose). Exhibit A.

  It has also been established that when something does get under the skin of Kate Beaton, that something is in for a cartoon dope-slapping. Exhibits B, C, and D. Just in case you ever wondered, Huh. Can cartoon high-heeled shoes ever truly be sarcastic? the answer is “yes”.

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¹ I was.
² The linguistically pedantic amongst you may object to the term “webcomics people” being applied to Ryan North, who forms but one webcomics person. However, these pedants are overlooking the fact that Ryan North easily qualifies for a plural term, much like how the Queen of England uses “we” and “us”. Ryan North is, after all, both the Toronto Man-Mountain and the Nexus of All Webcomics Realities. Deal with it.

Slow, but awesome. We’ll just put a few things here and call it good.

• There were webcartoonists at this weekend’s NCS Reuben Awards, and lo it was good. Dave Kellett, Kate Beaton, and Kris Straub all gave their takes on the evening’s goings-on, with Scott C contributing both semiphotobombery and a killer sketch of Scott Kurtz (seriously, Scott’s drawings of people look more like those people than the people themselves do). For deeper analysis, Straub had some pretty inspiring thoughts; it was terrific to watch all of this happen (at a distance), and it’s thrilling to see that the long Print vs Web cold war has had its Nixon goes to China moment. Things only get better from here.
• Speaking of Kate Beaton (which one cannot do too often), Drawn and Quaterly has released the cover of her next book, due in October. It’s pretty.
• Correction to a post last week — I remarked that there were five contenders left in the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, which turns out not to be correct. Michael Payne has pointed out that although Mike Stevens is still listed as in the running on the main DGIMC page, in the forums it is confirmed that Stevens fell out of the competition on 19 May. We at Fleen regret the error and congratulate the four remaining competitors: Payne, Andrew Rothery, R Smith, and Brad “Ladies, Please, He’s Taken!” Guigar. One may note at this time that the remaining four could opt to split the prize money and still come out more than ten times ahead of their original $20 buy-in.

Okay, so apparently there’s a better answer to the big question of How do I get noticed? from yesterday’s posting than the one I came up with. Consider: Raina Telgemeier, her husband Dave Roman, Becky Dreistadt and James Kochalka (and who knows how many more) are all webcomickers, and were all born today.

Add in TopatoCo impressario Jeffrey Rowland (born four days ago), Dead Winter’s Dave Shabet (born three days ago), and TopatoCo Vice President of Kicking Your Ass Holly Post (born two days ago) and you’ve got a sure-fire method for gettin’ noticed — simply go back in time and convince your parents to give birth to you sometime between 22 and 26 May. You’re welcome.

• Love [web]comics? Live in or near San Francisco? Want to talk comics with a couple of high school teachers? For those of you that are scratching your heads at that third item, would it help if I mentioned the teachers in question are Thien Pham and Gene Luen Yang, creators of Level Up, a YA graphic novel that got the Fleen Seal of Approval? Yang and Pham will be appearing at Cartoon Art Museum on 25 June (that’s a Saturday) from 1:00 to 3:00pm for a cartooning workshop; they’ll be talking about their collaborative process, signing books, and drawing with attendees. Free with paid admission to CAM, which is like seven bucks (three, if you’re under 13 years of age), so go grab some lunch and make a day of it.
• Latest autobio comics to catch my eye — Breena Wiederhoeft’s Easel Ain’t Easy² — which has the loose, scribbly style that makes everybody in it look like somebody you know. As Wiederhoeft is yet another Portland-based cartoonist, it’s amusing to cross-reference the sense of place you get from EAE against that of, say, DAR! (hint: there’s a lot more dicks and farts in DAR!).

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¹ Third week of August.

² Know what else ain’t easy? Pimpin’.

There’s a lot of hoo-ha about how the world is Definitely Going To End On Saturday, No Really, We Mean It This Time. Since I predominantly work in New York City, I’ve been a target of people who firmly believe this and want to desperately save my soul before the big unraveling hits this weekend. But, as webcomics has shown us, every day can be considered the end of the world, with or without any degree of religious involvement.

Either those comics will smugly amuse you come Sunday (when the world doesn’t end), or they’ll be among your last happy thoughts in a short and hellish existence before the end of all things (when the world does). Either way, you win by reading them now. Oh, and if you do end up being bodily assumed into heaven? Don’t worry, you still have time to pre-book your pet care.

• Assuming that it’s not wasted effort to make future plans, may we point out the launch part for Dave Roman‘s Astronaut Academy ([A] delight to read from start to finish — Fleen Book Corner) will be on 11 June at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn? Given the kids-friendly (but by no means kids-exclusive) nature of AA, the fun starts early at 3:00pm, and goes until 10:00pm. There will be comics-making workshops for the kids, snacks, and general party times with one of the nicest guys to ever make comics.
• As long as you’re making plans that will take past the weekend to come to fruition, can I mention one that will probably mark you as a better person, and therefore less likely to end up in an eternity of torment? ‘Bout a year ago, I pointed you to a webcomics charity run by Elena “Yamino” Barbarich of Sister Claire fame (and, like seemingly half of the young guns of webcomickry, she was a fellow student with my niece Colleen at SCAD).

  Oftentimes, these efforts are one-offs, meant to help alleviate the pain of a specific event, but Ms Y has kept it as an ongoing effort, with more creators joining in and a permanent focus on Kiva as the beneficiary. And speaking of Kiva, as of this writing Team Webcomics has made an even 4000 loans totally more than US$162,000 since its inception in Feburary of 2009, putting the group in 57th place out of more than 18,000 groups in terms of total money lent. Well done, people.

• Finally, if you’re looking for something that will probably have no effect whatsoever on your being a good person or not, but which will likely amuse the heck out of you, may I suggest the TCAF 2011 Machine of Death Draw & Guess spectacular, now in amazingly life-like video? Why, yes, I believe that I may.

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¹ “A branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind.”
² “Theology dealing with salvation especially as effected by Jesus Christ.”

Yesterday was Draw Cat Rackham Day, and now that it’s over the accounting can finally begin. As of press time, Steve “Monstro” Wolfhard has collected more than 100 Cat Rackhams into a Flickr set, and a Twitter search on draw cat rackham shows dozens if not hundreds of references and contributions since Anthony Clark kicked it off yesterday morning. Naturally, messing with the search terms a bit (say, searching on just “cat rackham”) significantly expands the results set, to the point that we may never see all the Cat Rackhams.

In the meantime, please enjoy my favorites (so far), starting with the aformentioned Clark’s drawing, and wonderful drawings by people whose first names link to their own sites and whose family names link to their Cat Rackhams: Graham Annable, Vera Brosgol, Emmy Cicierega, JP Coovert (is that a Rich Stevens cameo? Dude loves cats like nobody’s business …), Joe Decie, Aaron Diaz¹, Dustin Harbin, Stephen Heintz, Mark Luetke, and Kean Soo.

Completely unrelated to anything else, I received an email through that contact link over there to the right that left me scratching my head:

Hi Gary,

I’m writing to let you know that we posted an article, “50 Healthy, Low-Cal Cocktail Recipes for the Aspiring Skinny Girl”(http://redacted). I just thought I’d share it with you in case you thought it would appeal to your readers.

Thanks for time!
Ken Martin

First of all, you’re welcome for time, Ken Martin! Thing is, I’m having trouble figuring out why you thought my audience were particularly interested cocktail recipes that feature abominations like diet soda and Splenda (may as well throw in some Pucker and make it the trifecta of things no right-thinking person wants anywhere near their booze). Also, I’m doubly curious why you’re building a link farm on a site that purports to be a supplier of information on nursing schools.

If only you had given me some plausible reason to pass your internet ad dollar chasing attempts on to my trusting readers. Next time, provide an opportunity to help the recently-deposed president of Ivory Coast move $90 million to the US with a generous share for an honest person willing to provide a Social Security Number and bank account number, and we at Fleen might be able to help.

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¹ The Latin Art-Throb.

That photo is one dromaeosaurid away from being Randall Munroe‘s worst nightmare. Then again, how can you hate the clade that gave us Bambiraptor?

• For those of you that didn’t make it to the Save Yourself, Mammal! launch party this past Sunday, there is photographic evidence of the fun that you missed out on. The book is still listed at the same link as the just-concluded pre-order it’s been shipping for a couple of days now over at Breadpig; presumably the coming weeks will bring sales points at Zach Weiner’s Internet Weinerporium, aka his TopatoCo storefront.
• Via the mailbag, from Noel:
  

  Friday May 13th is going be the second Dialogue Free Comics Day. It’s when we encourage webcomics to concentrate on the visual side of things and post a comic with no dialogue in it. We had a great response last year and are hoping for even more this year.

  I’ll be honest, I missed this being A Thing last year, but the idea intrigues me. The date of Friday was set on 20 April, but I have only recently heard that this was going around, so I’m unsure how big a response there will be from creators, but it’s a really interesting idea. One of those stretch your cartooning muscles type exercises, even.

As some of you may know, I teach for a technology company. Today is the first delivery of a new course, and there are a million little things going wrong that, if not cleaned up, will kind of make the rest of the week not … happen. As such. You may well imagine that paying customers want the entire week to happen, seeing as how they paid for it and all. So, short on time.

• Luckily, I can just point you to any random tweet that mentions hashtag #tcaf from the past 48 hours or so (or check out the pictures), and you can get an idea of what Christopher Butcher and his crack staff put together. No lie, I gotta get up to Toronto next year, since I’ve never heard anybody (exhibitor or attendee) with any serious complaints about the completely free show. Well done, everybody from TCAF.
• On the but what’s happening now front, may I present the return of F Chords? It’s been a little less than two and a half years since Kris Straub wrapped up the first side of the story of Ash and Wade, two aspiring and/or itinerant musicians from Austin. As anybody who remembers records (they were these big things made out of vinyl that existed before CDs, kids) will recall, there’s always at least two sides to an album (and sometimes more, if it was a multi-disk set), which means we’ve finally flipped the vinyl over for the rest of the music. Story. Look, forget the tortured analogies; it’s back and it’s funny, okay?
• Speaking of tortured, did you catch the big damn story twist at Spacetrawler today? I don’t think that Pierrot and Krep are dead, since it’s unlikely Nogg would know about their “final” conversation unless they related it at a later point, and he hasn’t actually told Mr Zorilla that they died, and refers to them in the present tense. No, the big damn twist deals with one of the fundamental secrets of the Eebs, which leaves (I’m guessing) at least two more (spoilers ahoy, BTW):
  1. Why do they brain-clamp themselves, knowing it renders them a slave species?
  2. What is the secret of the spacetrawlers? Remember, Yuri apparently knows, which maybe means she is more Eeb than human now, if they were able to tell her.

  Put it all together, and I’d guess we’re about at the 1/3 mark of the overall story, just about the point where what we thought was the major obstacle/goal of the story gets revealed as a trivially small bump in the road and all the characters go Oh, shit when they realize what’s actually in front of them. Sounds good to me.