Busy evening. A t-shirt infringement was discovered, PvP went all ’50s on us, an entire Canadian election took place, and I opened my mail. Let’s take them one at a time, shall we?

• David Malki ! discovered a new low in design rip-offery, as an online storefront by the name of Tanga.com [no link for them!] not only appropriated two of his designs, they actually duplicated the descriptive ad copy word for word.

  Words fail me. You could almost argue independently coming up with the same gag concept, but that? That’s just lazy. Mr Malki ! recounted the sad affair via Tumblr, and went further to talk about what makes for a good implementation of ideas on shirts vs a bad implementation. I think it’s essential reading, as it gets pretty much to the core of what makes references to popular culture more or less worthy; key points:

  Why is this a big deal? Artists, myself included, make pop-culture references in our work all the time, and borrow ideas from other artists shamefully. Sometimes I do both at once — using artwork I didn’t draw to make jokes about a movie I didn’t create.

  Largely, it’s the difference between imitation and commentary.

  [one vendor’s] tees provoke a feeling of identification in the viewer, while [another’s] tees provoke a feeling of discovery.

  As a culture, we typically place a premium on creativity and integrity. That’s why it delights us when a creator makes something clever and new, but offends us when someone copies the work of another and profits unfairly from it.

  We may not really care that the shirt saying “I like turtles” isn’t fundamentally saying anything except “I’ve seen an internet video.” And the designer of the shirt isn’t making any creative statement beyond “Have you seen an internet video? Buy this shirt, then.”

  Do I think it’s fair to take Futurama clips and recut them into a shot-by-shot remake of The Godfather? Yes, I do. I think it’s interesting and it’s creative and it advances the culture. Do I think you should be able to sell a DVD of that? I think that decision should be left to the Futurama rights holder, who may feel that it damages the commercial prospects for their own original work — but if they don’t feel that way, or (in a perfect world) if it wouldn’t at all affect the commercial prospects for the original work, I say go for it.

  What I do find distasteful is a disregard of the rights of others for a purely profit motive. That, I think, should be stamped out when it occurs for the benefit of a creative culture generally. Artists need to feel that they can be free to create and put their work out there without fear of being ripped off. If ripoff artists are rewarded, or even just ignored, then artists suffer.

  I’m glad that our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a ripoff is to call it out and shame it. I think we’re right to feel proud of someone coming up with a new idea, or creating a new combination of old ideas, but bored or sickened by the same old lazy references being regurgitated for profit. Don’t tolerate it! Having high standards pushes the culture forward faster.

  As I am writing this, Malki ! is reporting that Tanga removed his ad copy (how nice of them) and have purged critical comments on the matter from their site. At this time, he is actively receiving communications from them, and if any new information comes to light prior to publication, we’ll go back to it.

• Scott Kurtz continues with his exploration of the golden age of strip cartooning by doing this week’s LOLBAT strips in 1950s Raymond/Toth/Drake style, which makes me glad that I plunk down a couple of bucks every other month to buy Dave Sim’s Glamourpuss. In between the plentiful shots of crazypants rambling, Sim explores the technical aspects of art from that era of cartooning, and it’s been an education to learn both how those master artists worked, and how hard it is to draw in that idiom successfully. Kurtz is never better than when he’s stretching himself, and this is a heck of a stretch. I’m loving it.
• So yeah — most every Canadian I know is via the world of [web]comicking, and they seem to be pretty unanimously gutted about Harper getting his majority back. It’s completely lamesauce, and I hope that those of you going to TCAF from these southerly climes will buy one of your hosts (in the sense that all of Canada is your host) a stiff drink so that they can medicate away the pain. You know that some of the TCAF programming is actually in a bar, right? Your gesture of solidarity could hardly be more easily accomplished.
• About three weeks back, I had the occasion to remark via twitter on one of Paul Taylor’s original art auctions — specifically, the auction of the art for a strip a month earlier that had featured in a recent write-up of how he handled some particularly dark material in Wapsi Square. I didn’t get it, but hey — that’s life.

  Except that I did. Right after the auction closed, a reader (coincidentally also named Paul) emailed to say that he had both won the auction and noted my interest in the piece, and wanted to send it to me. Five-plus years into this opinion-mongering experiment, I’m still taken aback when people I haven’t met tell me that they find my blogging to be informative and/or entertaining.

  To actually receive a gift from a reader in this fashion (as I did yesterday) leaves me utterly gobsmacked — especially since the gift-giver isn’t promoting anything or seeking attention for his own creative efforts. It’s enough to make my low and suspicious heart grow three sizes today. So thanks to Paul, and to everybody that’s ever told me they like what I do here; it’s appreciated more than I could ever adequately express.

Yesterday saw the announcement of not one, but two webcomics book collections that will debut at TCAF; the creators will be there, smiling for two days while undoubtedly selling out of their stash of readables, so I’d advise against waiting until end of day Sunday to make your purchases.

• First up: Chester 5000 XYV, the super-sexy, nearly wordless Victorian smutparty (and I mean that in the bestest way possible) from Jess Fink. A year and a half ago, it was announced that Top Shelf were picking up Chaz and friends, then a looong time went by before the release date got locked down. What wasn’t known before: it’s a hardcover! A shiny, shiny hardcover. Obligatory disclaimer: Chester contains numerous, clear, totally hot depictions of wang and lady-bits, frequently meeting each other to great, sweaty effect. It’s getting warm in here.
• Also coming out yesterday: the new Dr McNinja collection (originally slated for June release, then 18 May) is now set to drop in Toronto, and go on general sale on 11 May. Christopher Hastings is having a few site problems right now, so I can’t show you a picture from the bonus story (by Benito Cereno and Les McClaine) that Hastings has been waiting to show the world for an entire year. Let’s just say it features the entire McNinja clan driving heavily armed snowmobiles, with the exception of Doc’s sidekick, Gordito. Gordito, as always is riding his faithful ‘raptor, Yoshi — and Yoshi is driving a heavily armed snowmobile. The next twelve days cannot pass quickly enough.

Fleen congratulates Hastings and Fink¹, and encourages all attendees of TCAF to buy so many of their books. Buy them so that Fink and Hastings have to worry if they need to explain to US Customs why they’re carrying so much cash money into the country.

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¹ It is a rare treat to be able to write about Fink and not have to mention whichever lowlife is stealing one of her designs this week. The countdown to the Todd Goldman “accidental” release a Chesteresque design starts now.

Also: severe weather outlook day in the greater New York City demographical region. Yeesh.

• Okay, I don’t draw at all, and even I found the promo video for TCAF to be cool beyond all measure. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a beautiful discussion of drawing tools from a double handful of Canadian cartoonists, with a simultaneously jaunty and haunting score behind it. Everybody involved with this (and other aspects of arranging/presenting TCAF): you are wonderful. Everybody going to TCAF next weekend: I hate you, because I have to go to the dentist instead. That “everybody going” bit, by the bye, includes a significant slice of webcomicsdom, making my hatred not a real thing. You should totally go, and I’ll wish you well as my jaw cramps up.
• Speaking of video, (Dr) Jorge Cham hit us up with another of his occasional forays into academic filmmaking, but instead of a trip report (as with his New Mexico State University videos), today’s features audio from a pair of theoretical physicists talking about dark matter, their impromptu lecture given translation and interpretation by Cham’s drawings being interactively animated on-screen¹.

  It’s remarkably informative; I had a pretty good grounding in physics from my nerd school days and still had trouble wrapping my head around the (admittedly new, evolving, and still somewhat self-contradictory) ideas of dark matter, but I have a much clearer understanding now. I’ll go so far as to say that this is the greatest bit of webcomics physics education since (Dr) David Morgan-Mar derived Maxwell’s equations in a non-scary fashion; that bit had formulas and symbols and so might appeal to a bit more than today’s more intuitive piece, but they’re both wonderful. Hats off to Cham, guest lecturers Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng, and to Morgan-Mar on general principles.

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¹ If you found any of the animated info went by too quickly to read or absorb, Cham has thoughtfully provided all twelve of the pages from the short here.

Let’s reward the situation with slight webcomics news.

• Steve Jackson Games, which has been in the business of making nerd entertainments roughly forever (hands up everybody that played Car Wars instead of dating at any point in your personal history), also has a history of intersection with webcomics. For instance, numerous webcomickers have contributed cards to the Munchkin series of games, and Dork Tower creator John Kovalic is practically the SJG house illustrator. Now anybody can join that rarefied group of talents:
  

  Do you publish a webcomic? Are you a Munchkin? Do you like . . . GOLD PIECES?

  We will be running a month-long contest for webcomics that refer to the Munchkin game. At the end of the contest, the SJ Games Men in Black (our demo team, hundreds strong) will vote on the winners.

  Short version: prizes up to $1000 for the judged portion; a parallel contest will be open to public voting, but given that such a scheme gives an advantage to already-popular webcomics, this contest will be for donations (again, up to $1000) to the creator’s favorite charity. The mechanics and rules are here, but several items should be called out for your attention:

  2. You may use images or representations of the Munchkin game, characters, logos, or monsters as long as you acknowledge that Steve Jackson Games retains ownership of the characters and monsters depicted [SJG provides boilerplate text for this, and will allow reprints of these comics in collections with the same acknowledgement].

  5. If your comic burns out the eyes of our staff members, it’s out of the running. We have no doubt that some of you have the power to squick some of us. Please don’t.

  8. You must be cool with worldofmunchkin.com linking back to all entries, and permanently hosting copies of the winners with links back to their regular sites.

  9. The contest begins on May 1, 2011 and ends on June 1, 2011.

  10. The e-mail entry must be sent to SJ Games by noon (Austin time) on June 1, 2011. Please include your name, address, and e-mail address.

  11. Employees, immediate family members of employees, MIBs, contractors, or freelancers of SJ Games may enter the contest but are not eligible to win at higher than Honorable Mention level. If ineligible people do something cool, we’ll celebrate it — we just won’t write you a big check for it. We might hire you afterward if you’re not careful.

  Item #11 is what will keep Kovalic from winning automatically, so that’s good. Personally, I think you should get bonus points if you can work in Wil Wheaton somehow, but it’s not up to me. Check out the full set of rules and create something amusing.

• I apparently spoke too soon yesterday about Wondermark‘s birthday passing unremarked-upon; starting today, and continuing for a massive eight pages, David Malki ! presents the Nominally-Essential Tinkerer’s Handbook, which appears to be what you get when David Malki ! attends a machining class and then freebases a two-year backlog of MAKE.

  This massive creation is, naturally, in addition to tonight’s live stageshow which — we have just learned — will feature cake. Birthday cake, as today marks six months since the release of Machine of Death (which is like 17 years in human time). Fun! Excitement! DJ Malki !-Malk ! droppin’ fat rhymes! And if you can’t make it in person to Holllllywood’s Fake Gallery, you can take advantage of the livestream here, starting at 8:00pm Pacific (UTC -7). The only thing you’ll miss out on not being there in person is the magnificent, personal magnetism of Malki ! (I think it’s some kind of pheromone) and the other performers.¹

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¹ And the cake. Delicious, delicious cake.

Many things today:

• The Hugo Award nominations are out and as expected, Schlock Mercenary (by Howard Tayler, aka my evil twin) and Girl Genius (by Phil and Kaja Foglio aka the most charming people in the world) both have print collections up for Best Graphic Story. It’s worth noting that Tayler is also nominated in the Best Related Work catgory for Writing Excuses, a podcast that he produces with Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells.

  Rounding out the webcomics-related activity, Randall Munroe has been nominated as Best Fan Artist, which seems an odd fit, but it’s apparently been a category with a history of odd fits so that’s all right. Those with memberships (excepting the “Child” category) to the World Science Fiction Convention (this year in the form of Renovation in Reno Nevada) are entitled to vote on the winners, to be presented in August. Fleen congratulates the webcomicky nominees.

• Blank Label gets a little larger today as Gordon McAlpin (aka my sporting bet nemesis) brings Multiplex into the fold. In terms of visual style, storytelling style, and update schedule, this seems like a nice, complementary fit for BLC’s current members, Kel McDonald, Spike, and David Willis. Welcome aboard, Gordon.
• I see on my regularly-consulted 2011 edition of the Wondermark calendar that today marks the 8th birthday of Wondermark. One wonders if such an odd confluence of inputs — Victorian era woodcut art, David Malki !’s persistently clever wordplay (with the occasional foray into sac ants for variety), and a sense of go-for-broke creativity — could have been predicted to persist for so long and to have birthed opportunities for so many side projects. Curiously, no mention of this milestone appears on the Wondermark site, presumably because Malki ! is too busy putting together the last elements of tomorrow’s Machine of Death Live Stage Spectacular.
• We’re down to less than three hours until the second set of Chris Yates original webcomics-series Baffler! puzzles go on sale. This week’s haul includes an adorable kitty by Becky Dreistadt, ninjas by Sam Logan, and entirely SFW Chester by Jess Fink, a leapin’ McPedro by Danielle Corsetto, a typically bulgy-eyed pug by Dave Kellett, a pixel T-Rex by Ryan North, and an all-business Sheriff Pony by Jeff Rowland, all of which may be seen here. My favorite part? The cactus-shaped piece (a Yates trademark) in the McPedro puzzle. They go on sale today at 4:00pm Mountain Time (UTC-6) at the Baffler! store.
• Pre-orders are up for Zach Weiner’s first SMBC collection, Save Yourself, Mammal!. Given more than 2000 strips in the SMBC archive and this being the first collection of said strips, it’s of necessity taking a best-of approach. Which means that you’ll find no eh, it was okay strips included just because they fell in the same week as a couple of real rib-ticklers (the non-continuity aspects of SMBC make this fairly easy to do).

  As previously noted, 100% of the profits from SY,M will go to Donors Choose to fund classrooms across the US and help support the development of the next generation of tech nerds; what I didn’t see mention of before is that the book is being released under a Creative Commons license (specifically, Noncommercial 3.0 Unported), and that given the books have to be ready for the launch party in just under two weeks, your pre-ordered copy should ship starting a mere two weeks from today. All hail Weiner and the mad geniuses behind breadpig, because they know how to get things done.

Logistical note: work will, for the next couple of days, take me to the premises of a large financial institution that shall remain nameless¹ and which will provide me no net access aside from what I eke out on my phone. Minimal, severely delayed, or entirely absent updates are anticipated, and we at Fleen thank you in advance for your patience.

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¹ But the name rhymes with scold man; snacks, which sounds like notes that could be expanded into a pretty interesting update in a story-oriented comic, possibly Skin Horse.

Holiday weekend for some. Short day at work for others. Last day before weekend EMT duty for me. Let’s do this.

• Advance notice: John Allison has a holiday week coming up, and might like to feature the work of talented, less-known webcomickers at Bad Machinëry. Send him an offer (but please, no finished artwork) via the electronical mail addressing system designated john at the domain scary go round, which is a dot-com, with the subject line “strong>Better Than The Breeze Through The Twigs.
• Short notice: Super Art Fight, like the doom-proclaiming supervillain in a capes-and-punching comic, returns once more to wreak havoc. Those of you in Charm City can drop by The Ottobar (aka the villain’s secret volcano lair) tonight to get in on all the shenanigans. Doors at 9:00pm, show at 9:30, twelve bucks to get in and enjoy the mayhem.
• I spent some time yesterday telling you at length why Anya’s Ghost is the best comic of 2011. What I didn’t tell you is that the good folks at :01 were also kind enough to drop me an advanced copy of Level Up by Gene Luen Yang (words) and Thien Pham (pictures). Spoilers ahead, y’all.

  Appropriately enough for a book that concerns the education of its protagonist at length, both Pham and Yang teach high school when not making comics. Also in the amazing coincidences department, Yang and Pham dedicated Level Up to their brothers, both of whom work in medicine and thus fulfill the role of “good Asian sons”.

  And that’s what the book is really about — expectations placed on Dennis Ouyang from a young age to be a good son, to “eat bitterness” and become the doctor he is expected to be. Expectations that stand in stark contrast to his entirely ordinary kid desires to play Nintendo, desires he puts to the sides as he is expected to, until his father dies of the same disease that felled his own father. Dennis discards the expectations and falls into the videogames he denied himself and doesn’t surface for another three years.

  That’s when things get weird. Having discarded one life for another, Dennis careens back and forth between the extremes of games and medicine, each time he rejects one for the other he loses one of his lives in the metaphorical videogame that is his life. It’s only when he runs out of lives and opts to Play Again? that he realizes you can’t live your life solely for yourself, nor solely to the expectations of others. The realization comes after a reveal as to the true nature of the (rather bossy and obnoxious) angels that have been herding him towards his destiny, angels that might be a psychological manifestation of guilt, but might be real.

  Much like Yang’s American Born Chinese, Level Up is all about the experience of growing up Asian in America, but this time it’s less about the expectations of society and the struggle to fit in around the casual (and not-so-casual racism) found there, and almost entirely about family and the expectations that originate within the walls of home. It’s thoughtful, it’s revealing, and it’s got a lesson that every YA reader should take to heart. Also, it’s got the rarest of all things — an extended, non-gratuitous poop gag. Kids are gonna love it, and adults will see things that escape the younger readers. Level Up releases on 7 June, is a quick-reading 160 pages, and comes highly recommended.

There are some webcomics books that I should like to commend to your attention. I also have a couple of non-webcomics books (at least, not directly webcomics books, but by creators with webcomics in their histories) that I will be commending to your attention at some length in the coming days. Oh yes, I shall.

• If you are like me, then you enjoy little in this life as much as the work of John Allison. Bad Machinëry (I do like the look of the children’s adventure story books denoting the chapters) is a delight, and the earlier Scary Go Round was an integral part of my daily entertainments. It’s over, it’s done, but even Allison can’t resist revisiting logical story hooks, thus last year he took a peek back in time as “Dark” Esther de Groot went to university and encountered an entrenched power structure that can only be dealt with by punchings. It is mathematically equivalent to awesome, and it is now available in non-electric form for a piddling £4 plus shipping. Actually, I’m not sure that four bob is piddling, what with the US dollar tanking and all. Ah, hell, in for a pound, in for more pounds, because you can personalize for another eight quid.
• As long as you’re breaking out the plastic, may I recommend you save some for the forthcoming new edition of Rice Boy? It’s been sold out for some little time now, but Evan Dahm’s Kickstarter to fund the new printing has achieved approximately 250% of goal (with three days left to go); per Dahm’s twitterfeed, the excess funds raised means that the new printing will number 3000 books, instead of the 1000 in the first printing. For those that enjoy the finer things (or those that already own Rice Boy and are obsessive completists), there will be a first-ever hardcover edition, in a limited run of 200 books.
• Know what else today needs? An anthology. The Couscous Collective put out the FOREST themed volume (their first) at APE), and they’re following it up with the SPACE themed volume, which launched last weekend at Stumptown. For those of you that might fondly recall Narbonic, Shaenon Garrity (Radness Queen of the East Bay) has included the first original Narbonic in five years. For those that like to plan ahead, the next Couscous collection will be on the theme of OCEAN, and will continue the twice-a-year, APE-and-SPX schedule.
• Not book, but worth mentioning: anybody that had doubted that Robert Khoo had managed to whip Penny Arcade into a real business, consider the most recently-announced Child’s Play fundraiser: a golf tournament. There will be beverages and snacks and powered carts, but please remember to adhere to the expected behavioral norms of the golf course. Nobody wants to be that guy that embarrasses everybody else.

There’s a new interview with Robert Khoo over at Bitmob. It’s pretty brief and it doesn’t really cover new ground, but it’s got the basic information about Khoo, his role at Penny Arcade, and how things got started & grew from there. It’s the sort of thing that needs to run somewhere about once a year, because there’s always going to be new readers that don’t know the story yet. Sort of like how every update to your comic will be somebody’s first time, so you’d better have something that appeals to the new reader.

We haven’t seen an outside really do the in-depth interview that crawls inside Khoo’s skull yet (although I suspect that if such a thing exists, it would look a lot like a transcript of 100 or so appearances by Khoo in PATV, reconstituted into a single narrative whole), which is likely a function of time. Khoo is constantly in motion, and there are Bond supervillians that work fewer hours in a week¹.

Someday, when he retires from the PA job (in the month or so I give him before he gets bored and dives into the next 100 hour/week long-term project), maybe I’ll get Robert to sit down with me and a bottle of very good liquor and pick his brain on everything from business strategies to hiring practices to the finer points of wrangling creative types. In the meantime, we can put together our mental models; just remember, Robert is always one step ahead of you. Always.

Short Takes:

• Rigby the Barbarian creator Lee Leslie (who I know I’ve written about, but for the life of me can’t find in our archives at the moment) writes to let us know that he’ll be one of the creative team on the new Image comic, SCREAMLAND, with the first issue dropping in June. Interesting hook on this one: what happens to all of the monsters that used to star in the classic monster movies, now that their careers are over?
• Last summer, we told you about an upcoming Ryan Sohmer comic book project called Messiah, about the latest in a series of would-be saviors called by The Big G to do some holy work. I was afraid I’d missed it, but Sohmer tells me that he’s working on the end of the series now, which means when it launches, all six issues will be done, meaning it’s a new comic book title that won’t have late issues. I know! Weird!
• Stumptown happens this weekend, with a panel on Sunday I’d like to commend to your attention:
  

  12:00-12:45pm
  National Cartoonist’s Society — Join syndicated cartoonist Matt Bors for an peek inside the most prestigious organization for cartoonists: the National Cartoonist’s Society. Joining the discussion are syndicated cartoonist Jack Ohman, Jen Sorenson, and Scott Kurtz. [emphasis added]

  For the love of Darwin, somebody videotape this.

• Let’s end with a bit of housekeeping, if you’ll indulge me: I’ve had a number of requests that I check out comics recently, both new and celebrating milestones, that aren’t going to be written up here. While these included extremely basic (bordering on crude) work that’s not yet worth mentioning (and it’s gratifying that I’ve never really had the problem that other commentators and reviewers have had with creators who think that reviews are legally required to be gushingly positive — I write about what grabs me and people don’t seem to take it personally when their work doesn’t grab me), there’s a second major reason some of these comics aren’t ever going to get a writeup:

  I can’t see them.

  If your hosting is so intermittent, or so slow that your site doesn’t render in a reasonable amount of time, or if it’s so browser-specific in its coding, or so dependent on Javascript (or Flash or similar technologies) that it won’t display anything in bog-standard HTML (and here’s a hint: I don’t turn on script execution for sites I don’t already know and trust), I am not going to see your comic. But it works fine for me is not a valid protest — you are not your target audience. But nobody else has a problem with Javascript or Flash or whatever is not my problem. This is how I browse to minimize the possibility of drive-by nasties infecting my computer, and it’s not negotiable.

  From time to time I’ve seen creators post to their blogs or newsboxes or twitterfeeds that they’ve done some changes to their sites, and Could everybody please take a look and see if there are any issues and tell me what browser and O/S you’re using? That’s a site I’m going to read. So yeah — don’t make it difficult/impossible for me to read, and I’ll give your comic a look. Still no promise I’m going to write it up, but you’ve got to get over that first hurdle first.

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¹ Then again, it’s relatively easy as a Bond supervillian to knock off early, you have all those minions to do the detail work. If Khoo ever got an army of minions, I’d expect the UN to be receiving unauthorized transmissions from a hidden volcano lair at regular intervals.

So the next tweet generator is making the rounds, and I think it cries out for mash-up with this week’s other source of existential horror, Chicks With Steve Buscemeyes. Webcomickers being the perverse lot that they are, I expect to see fumetti mixing the two by the end of the week. As the AV Club would have it, Check your boners at the door.

• In far less disturbing news, may I point you towards Sin Titulo? I try not to be anxious between updates (that is, after all, what RSS is for, and the irregular updates mean that I get to go back and re-read vast swaths to catch up with the story again and gosh what a burden to dive deep into such good comics), and that patience has been rewarded. Regard: not one, but two updates on consecutive days. Lo, Cameron Stewart did smile upon us, and it was good.
• Looking down the guest/exhibitor list, it almost seems like last weekend’s MoCCA Festival was just a webcomics warm-up for this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Fest. It’s certainly the case that no city goes as all-out for their local comics show as Portland, evidenced by the involvement of the mild-mannered mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, who is secretly SAMDROID, compellingly handsome local superhero. Somehow, I don’t see Bloomberg doing that when NYCC comes around¹.
• Know who’s gonna be at Stumptown? Well, yeah, lots of people, but for the moment I’m thinking about Sarah Glidden, who will be doing the special guest thing. She’s also got the start of a followup to her acclaimed How To Understand Israel In 60 Days Or Less, in the form of a 21 page preview of her next work of investigative/documentary comics. Namely, The Waiting Room, about the experiences of Iraqi refugees in Syria, which is presently hosted by Cartoon Movement (editorially curated by Matt Bors), himself no stranger to the less hospitable places in the world. Compelling stuff.

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¹ Although if there were a big Washington, DC comics show, I’m pretty sure that Biden would be there. Just ask R Stevens if you doubt that he’s some kind of train-themed superhero.

Meredith Gran, at the Pizza Island panel, in response to the question, “How will the studio defend itself in the zombie apocalypse?” — I’m gonna die.

I trust that puts all of the zombie nonsense to bed once and for all. What else can we learn from this year’s MoCCA Festival?

• It’s easy to spend a lot of money on good stuff. In the photo up there, one may find mini-comics by Box Brown (Everything Dies 4, 5, and 6), Sophie Goldstein (her work apart from Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell is simultaneously more moody and more lighthearted, with one mini dealing with the pitiful few survivors of a global holocaust, the other with a mildly disgruntled cat), Kel McDonald (partnering with Marie de France to do a take on a fairy tale of the sort that used to exist prior to Grimm and Disney prettying them up — secrets, betrayals most foul, and righteous vengeance involving a de-nosing) and the NERD Comics collective (on the theme of Darwin).

  One may also find books by Sylvan Migdal (Curvy 1 and 2), Collen AF Venable & Stephanie Yue (Guinea PI: Pet Shop Detective 3), and Evan Dahm (Order of Tales 3). One may additionally find prints from Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, along with a small piece of evidence that I am fated to die by TRUCK. That’s right, David Malki ! had an actual MACHINE OF DEATH into which I willingly placed my hand and received my fate.

• Nearly all of the above (as well as those without wares that I had not yet purchased) spoke of what’s coming up — Migdal’s new comic will feature a Victorian lady dealing with planet-destorying space opera; Malki ! spoke about the expected rush of audition tapes for the rapidly-approaching MoD live stage show; Dahm spoke about the scope and scale of his current storyline (Vattu will be larger than any Overside story yet seen), as did Latin Art-Throb Aaron Diaz (Dark Science will be longer than Hob, but not ridiculously so).

  Ota & Panagariya may be announcing a very interesting print in the future, so keep your eyes peeled for that. The newly-free Frank Gibson promised numerous amazing projects with Tiny Kitten Teeth (and life) partner Becky Dreistadt. Scott C is busily brainstorming new Showdowns every day, and Tracy White and I had nice talk about How I Made It To Eighteen.

• You meet the nicest people at these things; waiting in line for the Pizza Island panel, I met a charming young man named Zach who will shortly be launching a new webcomic that sounds intriguing, and may have a niche to itself. Think Bryant Paul Johnson’s now-wrapped Teaching Baby Paranoia, only actually true. Alternately, think documentary, but shorter and less investigatory than Darryl Cunningham‘s muckraking (and I use that word in the most complimentary sense).

All in all, quite a lot for one day. What else is going on in webcomics today?

• Long run: Achieved! Chris Daily’s Striptease (which bears the distinction of being the first webcomic whose creator I ever met, waaaay back at the first MoCCA Festival, speaking of closed circles) hit 1000 strips today. Ten and a half years (more or less), radically changed art styles, a cross-country move, a collaboration on a second strip (itself more than four years old at this point) and a marriage can’t keep the true-hearted webcomicker down. Well done, Chris.
• Return: Achieved! Karen Ellis’s long-hiatused Planet Karen (fewer than a half-dozen updates since November of 2009) popped back today, with the promise of maybe more strips in the future? PK had been one of my favorite autobio webcomics, and I do hope Ellis is able to find the time to keep up with it.
• Free Stuff: Achieved! Dave Kellett’s self-published Sheldon collection, Literature: Unsuccessfully Competing Against TV Since 1953 (which you may have heard got an Eisner nod last week), probably isn’t in as many hands as some of its competition for Best Humor Publication, so Kellett’s making it easy for Eisner voters to read. Got a data connection? Got 12 MB of free drive space? Voting in the Eisners? Then download a PDF of Literature here so that you can give it due consideration.

  I’m guessing that there’s no way for the download server to know who’s actually an Eisner voter and who isn’t, so Kellett’s essentially giving his book away for the next couple of weeks (there’s precedent, as when Ursula Vernon was nominated for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition back in 2006, Digger was subscription-unlocked to allow voters to examine her work). If you’re taking advantage of the freebie and like what you see, won’t you consider buying a copy? I’m sure Dave (and his young daughter, who likes things like food and shelter) would thank you.