Since we’re in the grip o’ arctic doom here in the Greater New York Mediasphere, may I point you towards the snowiest, frostiest, most chilly (in a toasty hearth with a roaring fire kind of way), Snowflakes? Chris Jones, regular artist for the lovable (maybe) scamps (definitely) in the far-off orphanage decided that “supporting his wife” while she “gave birth” was I dunno, important or something, thus necessitating a short break from drawin’ duties. Three weeks without art? Disaster.

Into the breach: one Christopher Baldwin, who can certainly draw kids. But given the subject matter of Snowflakes, Baldwin has opted to use is somewhat more crazed style, as found in Spacetrawler; check out Wray’s expression in the last panel of today’s strip and tell me she doesn’t have a relative or two crewing the I.A. Star Banger. The frenetic style suits the perpetual motion and near-panic of our favorite orphans to the proverbial T. If you don’t regularly read Snowflakes, these strips act as a stand-alone story, and are a great place to get a feel for the characters.

• Is there anything better than Sexy Batman? Science says no; science also says that as this is being written, Kate Beaton is having Q&A funtimes at Yale University, so I guess if you’re not already there, you’re out of luck, Sparky. Doubly so, considering that Latin Art-Throb Aaron Diaz accompanied Beaton, and is surely visually blending in with the dapper classes. Although as Mr Diaz is missing the typical elbow patches on his jacket, he may be given away as being too well dressed even for an Ivy League campus.
• Something I’ve been meaning to get around to for a couple of weeks now (and thanks to Tony Piro for prodding me via email): Colleen Doran (most recently mentioned on this page in conjunction with her cautionary tales of dealing with publishers) put up a State of the Webcomic posting at the beginning of the year that’s worth your close study.

  For those not sufficiently familiar with Ms Doran’s work, she’s been doing comics a long time — she’s been in print since her teen years, has worked on literally hundreds of titles and characters for nearly every publisher imaginable, and through all that time has continued work on her creator-owned project, A Distant Soil. Much like the Foglios and Carla Speed McNeil, Doran found it expedient to move away from the struggle to self-publish floppy-style comics, and moved ADS online; like her colleagues, she had the advantage of a loyal audience and the disadvantage of a longform narrative with years of backstory. On the other hand, “years of backstory” also means “lots of content that can go up immediately”.

  Naturally, there are no promises or guarantees in webcomicking, no matter how loyal a following you bring with you. It’s been a challenging transition, and Doran’s post is useful because it puts numbers on exactly how challenging — breakdowns of traffic patterns, effects of site redesign, and audience reading habits. It’s the most complete look inside of a metaphorical kimono since the last time Dorothy Gambrell revealed income data. The practical upshot comes near the end of Doran’s post:

  Most of the traffic on the old website was driven by blog posts. Most of the traffic on the new website is driven by webcomic readers. The more attractive pages later in the series account for much of the site’s appeal. Webcomic readers have short attention spans and are unlikely to stick with a site if the first page they see is unappealing. Earlier ADS pages are less likely to grab new readers and keep them. Later pages show a significant increase in staying power.

  Which leads a little later to the payoff line:

  A Distant Soil will run M-W-F through 2011. The sales on the site are up, the site is self supporting.

  That first quote is far more important than the second. Yes, it’s terrific news that Doran has achieved self-support and growth, but the lesson that you need to take away is how hard a process it was to get to that point; how much analysis was necessary to figure out what was going to grab readers and what was going to keep them. There’s no such thing as an overnight success, and once that self-sustenance comes along, the only rational response is to build on it:

  GOALS:

  1) Triple traffic in 2011.
  2) Work part-time on ADS in 2011
  3) Full time throughout 2012. It could happen.

  My money’s on her succeeding, but only because decades as a self-managed artist have honed Doran’s business, promotion, and creative survival skills to the point that the frantic scrambling of a young person’s career actually pays off. Read her story, be prepared to be at least as tenacious and skilled in the non-creative fields if you want to succeed in the creative one.

There’s some useful tools for artists burning up the nets, and on the off chance you haven’t seen them, here they are.

• At the end of last week, a bunch of people were mentioning a wonderful set of photos posted by Nina “Space Coyote” Matsumoto (I first noticed it when Ananth Panagariya tweeted) of athletes. These are all Olympic-caliber competitors, but they look radically different from each other; artists will have to extrapolate out to what non-athletic types might look like, but with this variety to use as models, there’s really no excuse for overly-similar body types.
• Taking that variety to its logical place, Yuko Ota did a lineup of her recurring female characters (dudes will be tomorrow), giving a compare-and-contrast to her cast.
• The big news, though, was from Tracy Butler over at Lackadaisy; just because you’ve got a cast of anthropomorphic felines doesn’t mean that you get to cheap out on facial expressions, and Butler put together an absolutely stellar how-to on making expressions pop. It all comes down to anatomy, kids, and the recognition that you can’t really move one part of your face without skin and muscle tugging on a bunch of other parts (unless you’re Botoxed to the point that you can’t frown, but let’s leave that to the side).
• There’s a similar discussion in McCloud’s Making Comics (which, goodness, is coming up on five years in print?), which goes a bit further in discussing how this brow shape here, combined with that mouth shape there makes a basic emotion, and combining the basic emotions makes more complex ones (my favorite being Surprise + Disgust = Who Farted?).
• In fact, you can take that a bit further into instant expression reference if you follow the link from McCloud’s site to The Grimace Project, which allows real-time generation of faces based on the relative strength of one or two different emotions. Now don’t stop at the bodies and faces; if you go out of your way to not draw hands or feet, everybody’ll call you Rob.
• Convention season is nearly upon us in full force (indeed, Arisia happened last weekend), and planning time is here again. Last year SPX and the brand-new Intervention wound up scarce 2 km from each other on the same weekend (and even found advantages in cross-honoring passes, I hear), but this year they’re on consecutive weekends. Too early to tell if this reduces the audience for either, but tables and guest registration info are now available for both. SPX hits 10-11 September at the North Bethesda Marriott, with a 20% discount on exhibitor tables booked before 1 March. Guest registration is at the door.

  Intervention hits the following weekend, 16-18 September, at the Rockville Hilton, with guest pre-reg at $30 for the weekend. While the exhibitors are more by-invitation than open-application, watch that space for news of open table space later in the year — there’s always some last minute guest cancellations at a show; alternately, you could contact showrunners Oni Hartstein & James Harknell and see if they can hook you up.

First up, the joint Dumbrella/TopatoCo meet, greet, kick up your feet extravaganza planned for the end of the month. I believe all the relevant details are on the event poster, designed by KC Green, but one must note a few things:

1. KC has rendered the webcomickers super adorably (especially the little Chris Hastings, casually scooting over the ice with his hands in his coat pockets, the living embodiment of insouciance), but please note that many of them are larger in real life than shown on the poster
2. KC has done a magnificent job of expressing exactly how homoerotic the main character from Altered Beast (that would be the shirtless dude on the centipede) is
3. KC has mixed his metaphors — yes, it’s frozen times in the snow, thus the AT-AT but Jeff Rowland is in the picture and logically Jeff should be represented by Admiral Ackbar and he’s from a whole different movie and GOD, KC what is the deal

For those of you that don’t make it to Webcomics On Ice (and maybe even if you do), there’s an event the following week in New York; it’s got nothing to do with webcomics qua webcomics, but I thought it worth mentioning. The Most Literary Rent Party Ever is being held at PS 122 in the East Village on 6 February to benefit novelist Charles Bock and his wife Diana Colbert with medical expenses related to the recurrence of her leukemia:

Some 18 writers will be on hand, including Susan Cheever, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Price and Mary Gaitskill, and many of them will be auctioning off their services. Amy Hempel will walk your dog, Ms. Maazel explained over the phone. Rick Moody will write a song for you. And Gary Shteyngart will “buy you a hot dog and flatter the pants off you.” The Cleaver Co., a caterer, is providing its services at a discount; P.S. 122 is donating its space; and the Brooklyn Brewery is contributing free beer. John Wesley Harding, among others, will perform, and Ms. Maazel said there might some booths where for, say, a dollar a minute one could obtain literary advice.

Creators of longform story comics, that last item is tailor-made for you, or would be if the event weren’t sold out (there is a waitlist if you want to try). Mostly, I wanted to make sure you knew about TMLRPE because it reminded me of the sense of community that you get when very creative people (who for much of the time work solo) come together to do something good. Hopefully, you’ll find it as inspiring as I did, as we head into a well-deserved weekend. See you all on Monday.

You know what I don’t talk about enough? Dicebox, by Jenn Manley Lee. It’s right over there in the blogroll, its story is nothing short of brilliant, and the art — so much detail, so much depth to the color, so much work goes into every panel (see the piece written by my erstwhile cohort Jeff Lowrey more than five years ago on this very page), and it’s been going on for so long, one just assumes the brilliance is obvious and takes it for granted. Mea culpa.

Let’s expand on that “it’s been going on for so long” idea a bit, shall we? Book 2 of Dicebox began two days ago, which means that Book 1 is complete, and that means that Book 1 (of a planned four books) can be printed as an undivided single unit. Pre-orders went up on 10 January, and as of about six hours ago (at the time of this writing), Lee reports that more than 10% of the books required to make the print run viable have been pre-purchased.

And you’ve got some choices with those books — much like Dylan Meconis did with Family Man‘s first book, there are different editions at different price-points, with varying degrees of goodies attached. These range from The Simple (US$25 plus shipping, for a signed copy — which one should note is a freakin’ bargain, given it’s more than 300 pages, 8″ x 10″ in size, and probably several new printing technologies had to be invented in order to get the depth and subtlety of color properly reproduced) up through The Sponsor (US$500, with the book upgraded to hardcover, and including a hand-colored tip-in sheet, a print, actual dice in a cup, and your choice of story pages recreated by Lee in watercolor just for you). It’s like a Kickstarter, only without the progress & countdown bars.

Even if you’re only enthusiastic about Dicebox (as opposed to rabidly enthusiastic — there really aren’t any other kinds of Dicebox readers, near as I can tell), you ought to pick this one up. After all, somewhere in the indicia, there will be a mention of where the book was printed, and then all webcomickers will find out which company is willing to print 300 pages at a very reasonable cost, and then we’ll get a lot more full-color, thick books from all of our favorite creators. Win-win-win, QED.

• Speaking of Kickstarter, there’s one I’d like to direct your attention towards, offered by Michael Gianfrancesco, to fund a new comic anthology to be titled Show and Tell, a Comic Anthology about Learning and Teaching. Alexander Danner (who is on the editorial board for Show and Tell, and who tipped me to the story) informs us:
  

  This anthology is part of a larger project that we are very excited about — the New England Comic Arts in the Classroom conference, which will be held March 26th in Providence, Rhode Island. Guests at the con will include Raina Telgemeier and Tracy White.

  Comics, naturally, have an affinity in the classroom, if only to judge by the many uses of them around the world to teach language and literacy. We will be following both the conference and the anthology closely.

• Once more back to Dicebox — if you look carefully around at Ms Lee’s store, you might notice something that most stores don’t have: a blog. It’s pretty short (given that the shop’s only just opened), but having this sort of mechanism within the store itself to communicate with your readers is a pretty damn good idea. Something similar just launched over at the Transmission X storefront, making it easy to note specials, low quantities, sold out items, etc.

  In the past week I’ve noticed creators from Box Brown to Rich Stevens tweeting or posting on their main pages about store special offers (Stevens) or imminent out-of-print status (Brown). But if a customer missed those announcements and just wandered over to the store directly? Just seems to me if it deals with your merch and it’s worth mentioning, it’s worth mentioning again where the merch is presented. Heck, TopatoCo’s landing page focuses on new items, shipping deadlines, special announcements, and whatever weirdness is spilling out of Malki ! today. If they can do it, you can do it.

• Lastly, it’s getting a lot of attention right now — a manifesto on not being a particular type of internet jerk in webcomic form, courtesy of Rosscott and Caldy. See Something? Cite Something has already spawned shirts based on the bottom two images in the flowchart, one of which has been objected to by a copyright owner. Irony? Or ultimate manifestation of the message in the strip? Regardless, it’s been pulled in accordance with the copyright holder’s wishes, and no need for C&Ds or legal threats. So that’s all right, then.

So I got an email about two weeks back — in celebration of several birthdays that are pretty close to each other (one being that of the very sexy Rich Stevens, who turns 34 today), there was gonna be a party at the Eastworks building (lunar base of Dumbrella, TopatoCo, and more comics types that you can shake a stick at) featuring all the arcade games that Stevens and his mailroom minion Melissa have been acquiring in anticipation of opening a cafe/arcade. Said party took place this past Saturday, and there were snacks, and booze, and machines on freeplay, and awesome times to be had. I also picked up an interesting piece of intel regarding a book deal and thought, Huh, that makes perfect sense; in fact, it’s so obvious I must have heard it elsewhere previously and everybody knows it. Hold that thought a moment.

Said intel, it turned out, was not common knowledge, and was broken by The Spurge as a scoop (since confirmed by the principals) this morning, which left me smacking my head in exasperation because honestly, sometimes I don’t even rise to the level of hack webcomics pseudo-journalist. Clearly, I haven’t pseduo-journalised enough, and must pseudo-journalise more. Said scoop, naturally, being that Kate Beaton (everybody’s favorite) has been picked up for publication by Drawn & Quarterly (again, just about everybody’s favorite) for the publication of a fancy hardcover collection of her work. However, the interesting-est part of Spurgeon’s report was, for me, this tidbit near the end:

Beaton’s representative Seth Fishman has sold UK rights to the book to Jonathan Cape, and will further represent the work to international markets.

Which, again, is just one of those things that makes sense. For the past couple of years everybody that speaks English and talks about [web]comics has been raving about Beaton’s work, so why shouldn’t it have appeal around the world? We at Fleen congratulate D&Q and Beaton for their partnership, and Tom Spurgeon for actually having journalistic instincts. For myself, I will just note that I was indulging in a couple of happy–making influences, so perhaps it was inevitable that it slipped my mind.

(By the bye, today being the actual birthday of Mr Stevens, he’s got a free shipping sale until the day is up, and a special story for your enjoyment.)

• In other news that I am not the first person to tell you, the first Dark Horse collection of Axe Cop is wonderful (yes, I’m weeks late, but my local shop just got it back in stock). When the creation of Los Bros. Nicolle was brand new, I wrote the following:
  

  Having thoroughly enjoyed AXE COP episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 0, and 5, I am only left to wonder a) at how good they are, and b) if all of us were that creative at age five and just had it beaten out of us.

  It’s that second thought that came back to me as I was reading Ethan Nicolle’s between-chapter notes in Axe Cop Volume 1 — at one point, he describes his work with Malachai as “a race against puberty.” At some point, Ethan figures, Malachai will lose that anarchic, creative streak (or maybe discover girls) and then there’s no more Axe Cop. Here’s hoping that the feedback and encouragement that Malachai’s receiving means that his imagination doesn’t get tamed.

• Last bit of bears-repeating today — the latest iteration of Super Art Fight hits home turf The Ottobar in Baltimore next Friday, 21 January, at 9pm. And although not a sanctioned event, SAF will be at MAGFest 9 in Alexandria, Virginia this weekend in its portable aspect. Details, as usual, at the SAF website.

Hey, hey, kids! Let’s talk about the last gasps of culture before we’re all buried under wintry death straight out of Roland Emmerich’s wet dreams.

• In LA, far from the impending doom, Scott C[ampbell] will have an exhibition show of his Great Showdowns. For those of you that aren’t familiar, the Great Showdowns feature key moments from movies, a single line of dialogue, and the cutest lopsided grins ever recorded on amphibians, inanimate objects, sociopaths, and hulking killing machines. It kicks in on 4 February at Campbell’s usual LA venue, Gallery 1988, and it’s your opportunity to own one of these marvelous treasures.
• Our friends at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco (also far from the impending no-friction, low-temperature doomathon) will shortly be opening an exhibition (indeed, one might say a definitive retrospective) of the career of a one Mr Berkeley Breathed¹. From the early days of Bloom County to his gorgeous illustrated picture books, Breathed has always been an influence on a generation of [web]cartoonists. Basically, if you’re over 30 and draw a strip, Breathed was one of your inspirations. From Bloom County to Mars: The Imagination of Berkeley Breathed runs from 5 February to 19 June, with the big opening reception on 1 April (details TBA).
• From an episode of a radio show (that would be the stellar RadioLab) on what happens when we die, containing a short story about one possible afterlife (read by the incomparable Jeffrey Tambor), comics artist Blue Delliquanti took some inspiration. Here, then, is a 24 page adaptation of Metamorphosis, a short story by neuroscientist David Eagleman. As much as I enjoyed Tambor’s sonorous, soulful reading of Metamorphosis, I think that Delliquanti’s comic adaptation is even more affecting.
• Not a show in the traditional sense, per se, but the members of ACT-I-VATE are putting together a virtual gallery show of webcomics featuring monkeys (okay, “primates” in the general sense, but I knows a monkey when I sees it) from an astonishingly wide range of talent (from veterans to up-and-comers) as a benefit for the Primate Rescue Center in Nicholasville, KY. It’s called Panels for Primates and it’s operating strictly on a donation basis, so if you like what you’re reading, give the PRC a few bucks, hey?

_______________
¹ Not a typo, but a tribute to one of my favorite Bloom County throwaway gags.

Almost more than one can keep up with today. Let’s dive in, shall we?

• From Tony Piro‘s twitterfeed, news that Calamities of Nature is one of the twelve finalists in the Washington Post’s “Riffy” Awards, webcomics division. One might note that two of the nominees, xkcd and Jesus & Mo are in the running for the overall Best Comic (Any Medium) award.
• Speaking of the Riffies, one might also note that one of the nominees is The Oatmeal, the status of which as “comic” or not formed a great deal of the discussion on the latest Webcomics Weekly. Yet another of the nominees (Scott Kurtz for PvP) has Opinions on this, and outs himself as a curmudgeon in both the podcast and yet another comment thread at The Daily Cartoonist. Even more remarkably, Kurtz and his nemesis, Ted Rall, find themselves in agreement towards the end of said comment thread! In other news, the end of the world has been moved forward from 2012 to next Thursday.
• Book alert — the first Girl Genius novelization (first reported about six months back), Agatha H[eterodyne]. and the Airship City has been in release since the first, but 12 January (which by amazing coincidence is Professora Kaja Foglio‘s birthday) is Girl Genius Day. If you intend to buy the book but haven’t yet, make your purchase that day and make a bit of a splash, hey? After all, there is precedent.
• How does Warren Ellis do it? Today marks the 120th 6-page update of FreakAngels, which makes it the last update to be a part of the fifth reprint collection (each of which consists of 24 updates of 6 pages), which is due for release on 8 February — a mere 32 days from today. That’s called not letting your audiences have to wait to give you money. Granted, Internet Jesus has the advantages of an established name and no backlog of stories to work down, but damn. That’s some organization right there.
• Darryl Cunningham, who did such a wonderful comic about Andrew Wakefield (whose falsified vaccine “research” almost certainly caused children to die of preventable diseases) back in May was well ahead of the curve — the British Medical Journal are reporting on Wakefield’s actions (they mince no words, calling it fraudulent) this week, and Wakefield is finally getting the attention he deserves. Too late for some of those kids, of course, and no matter how thoroughly he’s discredited he will still have those that believe him uncritically (no links, not giving them any traffic), but it’s good to know that investigative cartooning has a valued place. How valued? Cunningham tweeted that the BMJ wants to reprint his cartoon in the student version of their journal. Well done, Mr Cunningham.
• Family News — via webcomics überfan Michael Kinyon (seriously, I read five or six dozen webcomics regularly; he reads several times that), the news that the irregular postings and hiatuses over at Digital Pimp Online are done. Creator Kevin Gleason’s son, Alexander, has had multiple health issues and surgeries in his short life, and now he’s healthy. Congratulations to the entire Gleason family. Oh, and congrats as well to Greg and Liz Dean, who are expecting their first child. If Real Life is a bit sporadic over the next decade and a half, I hope you’ll understand.
• Finally, late-breaking news that Kate Beaton has been invited to Yale University for the purpose of a Master’s Tea Q&A with the The Yale Record. The fun kicks off at 4pm on Monday the 24th, at the Pierson Master’s House, 231 Park St on the campus of Yale.

Yep. Not much going on out there. Oh, wait, there is one thing!

Wonderella creator Justin Pierce and Multiplex creator (and my sometimes nemesis) Gordon McAlpin announced they’re going to do a joint signing in Chicago on Saturday the 22nd. Please note that this is an appearance by creators, so despite what the flyer might imply, Jason, Melissa, Kurt, Wonderella, and Hitlerella will not be there. Dr Shark, though, has been known to make impromptu, unannounced public appearances, so maybe.

Hayao Miyazaki, perhaps the greatest animation director that ever lived (and understand that I have multiple Chuck Jones originals hanging in my home, so I set the bar pretty damn high) turns 70 today. Aside from the fact that I was once close enough to reach out and touch him (I did not), my relationship with Miyazaki is based purely on the astonishingly high quality of his many animated films. His works have made me laugh until I cried, cry until I laughed, and think until my thinker was sore.

Although to the best of my knowledge Miyazaki has never worked in webcomics, it’s entirely meet and proper to salute him today on this page for a few reasons:

• The quality of his work is near-universally acclaimed, and his influence is apparent in the work of many who do produce webcomics
• His approach to his creations is rather webcomicish — although Studio Ghibli is big enough to merit its own museum, it doggedly pursues personal projects guided by almost singular vision, rather than having a market research driven, corporatized approach to its creations
• It’s my damn blog and I’ll salute whoever I want to

We’ll also mention that, in conjunction with Miyazaki’s birthday, the ToonSeum in Pittsburgh is hosting a series of screenings of his movies this month; anybody in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, or that weird little finger of West Virginia that sticks up rudely that hasn’t seen Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, or Princess Mononoke on a bigger-than-TV screen, don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Laputa runs 7pm on Thursday the 13th, Totoro 3pm on Saturday the 22nd, and Mononoke 7pm on Thursday the 27th; admission is by donation.

• Recent long-form comic read-it-in-big-chunks catch-ups: Go Home Paddy, Zahra’s Paradise, Sailor Twain. All are just about to cross that point where getting all caught up is slightly inconvenient. Also, a huge re-reading of about two thirds of A Girl And Her Fed, because … well, never mind why. If you haven’t read it previously, it’s only about four dozen strips since the big jump in the storyline (part one finished, part two is “five years later”, you can get caught up here) and now’s a good time.

  The Guigster made a comment the other day at Webcomics Dot Com (subscription required) that he thinks 2011 will be the year of the longform story webcomic, and with contributions like these, it’s hard to dispute him.

• Finally, the TCAF ’11 website is now live, and wowsers just look at the list of exhibitors. Aside from the minor detail that the partnerships of Frank Gibson & Becky Dreistadt, and Ananth Panagariya & Yuko Ota only list the first half of each team (by coincidence, the writerly halves), there’s pretty much not a damn thing I’d change about this lineup. Now to see if the sovereign nation of Canada will let me across the border.

Grumble! Fortunately, a series of quick, self-explanatory items today.

• Following up on yesterday’s posting, Ryan Estrada (dammit, I’m never living that down) has started posting clips from The Alias Men, this one featuring the vocal stylings of Scott Kurtz.
• From Jess Fink, news of a comics-themed show at the Museum of Sex in New York, including pages from Chester 5000 XYV [NSFW]. The show goes up 13 January at MoSex, 5th & 27th in Manhattan.
• From Child’s Play, news that the 2010 year-end total hit US$2.3 million (or at least within six grand of 2.3 million; alternately, 99.75% of 2.3 million, which I think allows one to round up and not be accused of exaggeration). For those interested, this brings the lifetime total for Child’s Play north of US$9 million.
• For those that have insufficient supplies of adorableness in their lives, Becky Dreistadt has a new sketchblog for presenting her warm-up drawings.
• At long last, Dave Kellett’s sci-fi Saturday strip/Sheldon offshoot, Drive, has its own site. No more skipping through the Sheldon archives a week at a time to catch up on the adventures of Nosh, Steve, and the rest of their motley band of spacefarers.
• Finally, news that Indigo Kelleigh (you may know him as the showrunner of a little comics-related show that, oh, everybody attends) has collected the first “issue” of Ellie Connelly in electronic form for a piddling ninety-nine cents. With Ellie generating some income, this will hopefully make it worth Kelleigh’s while to toss us more pages, which would be a good thing, as it’s a good story. Like, Tintin levels of good, only with little chance of being appropriated by Spielberg for a really scary-looking film adaptation.