The Ignatz nominees were announced earlier today, and I found the honorees for Outstanding Online Comic to be … odd. Maybe more than other comics awards, the Ignatzes vary widely in character from year to year, but like other named-year awards, they’ve pretty much always looked at work for the year before the award: the 2009 award honored work primarily done in 2008, the ’08 award for work in ’07, and so forth.

This year, however, they seem pretty determined that the 2010 award will honor work done in 2010 (which isn’t quite 2/3 done yet). Consider the nominees:

• John Callahan’s Callahan Online is a now-frozen two-week archive of Callahan’s panel gag toons. Frozen, because he died at the end of last month, so anybody looking to examine his work will have those ten panel gags to judge and not much else. Hate to say it, but this feels like an Oh crap, did we honor him while he was alive? afterthought.
• Sarah Becan’s I Think You’re Saucesome is a diary comic that focuses on weight loss. It’s got a taste of Bellen!, here, a bit of Kinokofry there, and reminds me a lot of Stop Paying Attention, so that’s okay. Lots of updates (between 3 and 6 new strips a week), but it only began on March 1st of this year.
• Stephen Gilpin’s The Lesttrygonians features an archive going back to 1998 (!), but only 21 of those strips (weekly, from April of this year) are more recent than October 2000. It’s nice stuff, between a half- and full-page each week, but it’s a small amount of work in a short amount of time; the decade-long hiatus means the older stuff could barely be considered the same strip.
• David King’s Reliable Comics is a bit tougher to parse, temporally speaking — he posted a series of strips done in 2007-2008 between Dec 2009 and Feb 2010. February to April he posted strips from 2009, and since April work done this year, for a total of 26 “recent” strips.
• Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 began at the end of November 2009, and is currently in progress. Of the nominees, it appears to be the only one that features a traditional story, with a beginning, middle, and end; tonally, it feels a lot like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison.

None of this is meant to say That strip shouldn’t win/even be nominated because it’s ____ !; if the jury decided that the best comics work of the past year is heavily skewed towards the past five months, then that’s their call. I just can’t recall any award iteration that took the year quite so literally. I won’t be at SPX so I don’t get to vote, but I like (and this may be a side effect of having the fullest bodies of work to judge) Dawson and Becan quite a lot.

• Speaking of time, Amulet Book 3: The Cloud Searchers is out in two weeks!
• You may have heard that Our Kate (Beaton, that is … look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, son) is about to decamp from Canada for a period of time and hunker down in Brooklyn for a spell. Not content to see what a change of venue will do to her creative side (whenever she travels, she gets a bunch of really good comics from it), Beaton’s decided that she’s going to celebrate her new home by working for the good of others.

  Specifically, she’s joined up with a team of comics types to participate in the 2010 Run for Congo Women (New York, 5K, 25 September), with monies raised going to Women for Women International. Team Comics has their fundraising page here, and they could use your help. Hop to it, people, and Kate, next time I see you I owe you a tasty beverage for being a Damn Good Person.

If there were such a thing as “Followup Friday” around here, that is.

• It’s been a long slog to get all the dies just right, but everybody that can’t afford a Chris Yates original Baffler! puzzle/object d’art just got a budget alternative. Fully a year after the deal was made and nine months after it went public, Ceaco’s first three licensed Baffler! designs have been announced for release this October. Everybody that has a grandma that loves doing puzzles? Your holiday shopping just got a little easier.
• Busy guy these days, Jim Zubkavich is; finished up that ninjariffic series o’ comics from the spring, and now has a new series from Image due next month. Given Zubkavich’s history of quality work, that alone would be worth a mention, but the fact that said new series is titled SKULLKICKERS and described as sword and sassery? Icing on the proverbial cake, my friends. Grab yourself a copy and revel in the kicking.
• Following up on the American Apparel story from the start of the month, there are two words you never want to hear about one of your vendors: going concern. This is because it’s pretty much a given that those two words only ever get used following the words it is not certain that [name of business] can continue as a. It’s rare that a company that uses the Two Words O’ Death avoids either ceasing business operations and/or bankruptcy, and thanks to a financial filing yesterday, those are pretty much the only choices AA has left. As is usual in these cases, Kai Ryssdal’s got the lowdown.
• Finally, a reminder that the Dallas Webcomics Expo number 2 (Electric Boogaloo) will be this weekend, and remember that there’s that art auction to benefit sick kids, so bring cash and lots of it.

Quick things!

• John Campbell had an art show. Here are pictures of the art show. Saddening!
• Dave Kellett, Keith Knight, and David Malki ! tried to spell words for charity. Here is the story of how famous and/or beautiful people are favored in our society. Shocking!
• TCAF 2011 applications now being accepted. Right-thinking people regard this as a good thing. Woo!
• The original may have been a hoax, but it’s still comics. Whiteboardery!
• Jeff Zugale did an analysis of “print” vs “web” business models for comics, and found that the “web” model has always been in use. It’s behind the subscription wall at Webcomics Dot Com which is a shame because this needs to be part of the broader conversation. Mayhap the newly vacationed Brad Guigar could be convinced to make this one a freebie?

Longer thing!

At the time I was writing yesterday’s update, I did not yet know what was waiting in my mailbox: a gifted copy of We Are The Engineers by Angela Melick. Considering that the book was announced as pre-order on the 11th and arrived from across an international border (and a weekend!) on the 16th, how could I not read it immediately?

A confession — since I met Ms Melick at NEWW last year, I’ve been a faithful reader of Wasted Talent, but I never read back far enough into the archives to cover her college years, when the inspired-by-life strip began (an aside: were this a movie, it would be touted as based on the incredible true story; since Melick is an engineer, it’s probably best described as slapped a linear approximation transform on what actually happened because crap on a stick, have you seen how messy the real data were?).

Turns out that I needn’t have felt guilty about it, as Melick has gone back to redraw the “best of” several hundred strips and distill down the period when she was still cartooning with improvised materials in margins (again, engineer) into her much cleaner and accomplished current style.

I have often remarked on how Melick (and Kean Soo, for that matter) and I share a bond of common experience. It doesn’t matter that it was different times, different countries, or different disciplines — engineers are an odd folk, and we get each other. Being part of an overworked, high-achieving minority within a much larger university was Melick’s experience, whereas I was part of a high-achieving, overworked, all-nerd school across town from a much larger (but entirely unrelated) university. She studied physical stuff, and I the more intangible (ECE511, I still remember you). UBC engineers built an artificial pond to throw people into, we had the natural variety. A decade and a half of technological and cultural change (not to mention a Y chromosome) separate her experiences from mine, and still — every page of WATE resonates like I was there alongside her.

But here’s the thing — much as engineers like to hold ourselves apart (it’s a comfort to us, having long ago realized we could have had a lot more fun and sex in college if we had picked easier majors), we really aren’t that much different from anybody else¹.

The experience of being a student engineer puts a certain sharp relief on certain aspects of college (our experiences were probably more math-intensive than most), but everybody remembers studying too long, working projects too hard, praying for a curve to kick in and rescue everything. Everybody remembers looking down on another major and wondering how they had it so easy, or a first job and wondering if you’d ever get the hang of things. Everybody had idiot traditions and the revered history of those that came before you.

Whatever your experience of working too hard with others sharing the same goal, you’ll find your memories coming back after reading WATE. It took Proust seven books and a cookie to provoke this kind of involuntary recall, and he didn’t even have one psychotic squirrel in there, so screw him; you won’t be able to write a senior thesis around WATE, but you’ll have a hell of a lot of fun reading it.
_______________
¹ Nah, we totally are.

New Jess Fink site! She said “poop”!

• Okay, this is the sort of story that changes quickly, so by the time you read this it may no longer be an issue. There’s a new webcomic-reading application over in the iPhone/iPad apps store, by one Mr or Ms Reilly Watson. Unlike the last one of these that made a splash in the community, this app does not appear to be a simple RSS feed aggregator — it appears to pull comics from the creator’s site, present it outside of their preferred context, costing the creators bandwidth and advertising revenue (I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, so my apologies if I’m wrong on this one). One more time for those in the back: RSS readers = cool, scrapers = not cool.

  Mr or Ms Watson might particularly want to pay attention to a bit from Robert Khoo at the SDCC Webcomics Lightning Round, as it bears repeating:

  Question: Going back to people taking your content, were you aware of how you have to protect your work always, and is that likely to change?
  Khoo: It’s very complicated, and would take a lot more than twenty seconds to answer properly; we aggressively protect ourselves from people trying to make money off our marks, otherwise we see it as a form of community enabling.[emphasis original]

  And lookee there — Mr or Ms Watson mentions Penny Arcade as one of the ‘popular comics’ included (although I must point out in the service of snark that Mr or Ms Watson seems to have farmed support for the app out to Canadian Google), which means that Mr or Ms Watson is indeed making money off that mark.

  Quick hint to Mr or Ms Watson and all who might follow in his or her footsteps: the Patent and Trademark Office maintains a simple trademark search which shows exactly who owns what. I’ll also point out that trademark owners have an obligation to defend their marks, and that registration means that violators are subject to treble damages. That would be the case here even if the app is just an RSS aggregator, since it’s advertising on a name and identity owned by somebody else. If the app in question is a scraper, Mr or Ms Watson should prepare to share out revenue to the creators who are going to be demanding compensation.

• Oh hecka yeah — Angela Melick, aka Jam, aka Spike Without Dreads, aka my right hand rule homie, has done the crazy and redrawn a bunch of her Wasted Talent college-era strips in order to put her first book together. We Are The Engineers debuts at Anime Evolution this weekend, and goes up for pre-order on the 13th for artists editions, with actual online sales on 18 September.

  For everybody that ever wondered what the crap was going on in the head of the engineers that they know and (let’s be honest — only sometimes) love, Melick is your translator. We’re definitely a breed apart, and she’s our ambassador to the world of people that don’t subscribe to the notion If it ain’t broke, break it and see if you can make it better! We are an oft-misunderstood people, and may consider WATE as a field guide to our mysterious ways.

• Finally, because a few people have been asking — I’m not going to be able to make it to SPX and/or Intervention next month; unfortunately, I’ve got a little too much going on this autumn, and will save my away from home time for NEWW. On the upside, most everybody I would see in Bethesda will be in Easthampton in November, so that’s all right.

  For those of you that are heading to Maryland, Casey Roberson wants you to know that there are hotel bargains o’plenty in the immediate area of the two shows, including a place called Legacy Hotel in Rockville (less than 2 miles from SPX) with single-bed rooms for $68/night. Please note that we at Fleen are not travel service and make no claims about the quality of accommodations. Then again, you could probably get cut by a murderous drifter just as easily at an expensive hotel as a cheap one, so may as well save a few bucks.

For those of you wondering, MoCCA Art Fest 2011 (9 and 10 April, at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan) tables are almost available [PDF]. There were a couple years there where applications were only accepted by mail and by hand, and local cartoonists pretty much shut out everybody else, but the note here says:

Registrations will be accepted on a first come, first served basis beginning August 10th by fax (212-254-3590), mail (594 Broadway, ste. 401, New York, NY 10012), email (exhibitors@moccany.org), and in person.

… which ought to equalize things nicely. It was pretty well-run this year compared to last (with a rookie crew of show-runners and unseasonable heat turning 2009 into a sweaty mess), but since I don’t exhibit you’ll have to decide for yourselves if the table costs (below the cut) are worth it.

• Speaking of time-sensitive opportunities, we’re just four days away from Jenny Everywhere Day 2010. In case you’ve forgotten (it has been nearly a year since we mentioned her), Ms Everywhere is:
  

  [A]n open source character created in 2001 by Steven Wintle and the members of the Barbalith forums. She’s free to use by anyone in any capacity they see fit.

  Jenny exists in all realities at the same time and her powers stem from an ability to “Shift” herself and others from one reality to another. Her exact powers/limitations within any given story are up to the people working on it.

  The two things that make her “Jenny Everywhere” are her goggles and her scarf. Every other aspect to her design (including race, body type, hair color, eye color, number of limbs, etc.) are completely up for grabs and fall under the discretion of the creator.

  Create your own interpretation of Jenny Everywhere, and submit on or before the 13th to be part of the fun.

• News in the webcomics-publishing sphere: Chris and Kyle Bolton of SMASH have signed a deal to have Season One of their webcomic published by Candlewick Press (who appear to be new to the comics game, but have quite a catalog of kids and YA books).

  SMASH has a loose-limbed, gleefully frenetic style to the art (not unlike Skottie Young’s work on the OZ adaptations at Marvel) and a breakneck pace to the story, as befits a 10 year old that suddenly finds himself all supered-up. Best of all, with publication (date TBA) all arranged, the Boltons have time to get SMASH season two underway, with serialization starting next month.

• Finally, is there no limit to the depths to which he will sink? Two geekly pursuits stretched and squashed into a four-word pun that strains language to the breaking point? Brad Guigar is a bad man. A very bad man.

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Could it possibly be too early to congratulate Ryan North and Jenn Klug on their upcoming (this weekend) nuptials? No, it could not possibly. In fact, Ryan is such a large man, I suspect that each year will require several days of congratulations on either side of the actual date to adequately express ones appreciation of said marriage. Happy first night of RyanAndJennyMas, everybody.

Also, there will be rad Dinosaur Comics guest strips for a while, such as the above standout by John Allison.

• Breaking news! David Malki ! and Dave Kellett, in accordance with ancient Dave Law (and that community service thing they got slapped with) are raising money for 826 Valencia‘s Los Angeles chapter, 826LA. They are doing so by competing in a spelling bee that allows teams to cheat based on how much money they raise. I’ll let Mr Malki ! explain:
  

  [I]t takes place August 14 in Santa Monica, CA. Keith, Dave Kellett and I are on a team called “The Sweaty Hams,” because we are all men and, well, sometimes things happen. We’re somewhat late-comers to the fundraising game, so we are trying to raise pledges to buy “cheats” so we can be competitive in the event!

  Cheats include passing on a difficult word, buying immunity after spelling a word wrong, swapping places with another team member, and other non-officially-endorsed-by-the-American-Spelling-Association deviousnesses. (See how I used a word that’s probably not in their official lexicon?) We only get cheats — and thus, a fighting chance against the other teams with loads of cheats — if we raise money! 826LA is a volunteer-based organization that helps kids in a number of remarkable and wonderful ways. Will you please help our team with a donation?

  The event is less than two weeks away and thanks to rudderless team leadership we are entering the fundraising race way at the back of the pack. PLEASE DO NOT LET US FAIL IN THIS

  AS WE DO MOST EVERYTHING ELSE [emphasis original]

  Guys, I’m going to be honest here. Neither David nor Dave is necessarily “down” enough with your arbitrary “rules” to spell words “correctly” and if they bomb at this competition it will look bad for webcomics as a whole. They are going to need all the help they can get to keep from embarrassing you personally; even getting a simple one-letter hint costs a hundred smackers, and something tells me they’re going to rely on the Invent-A-Word ploy ($1500 each) a lot. A couple bucks now could save a lot of heartache later.

• New Octopus Pie after Meredith Gran’s book-tour hiatus, and even better — there will be more every Monday-Wednesday-Friday! Also, her studiomate (and Latin Heartthrob) Aaron Diaz has the results of the Dresden Codak Reenactment Contest, meaning it’s been a hell of a productive time at Dunning-Kreger Solutions, Ltd.

I’ve largely completed my SDCC acquired media binge. Selected two-sentence reviews follow:

• Flight 7: Prepare to have your mind blown as Michel Gagné’s Rex folds back on itself recursively, with captions connecting to the next part of the story, found in Flight 2. The rest is simply wonderful, with Kazu Kibuishi adhering most closely to the now largely-forgotten theme suggested by the series title.
• Family Man: Dylan Meconis is very, very good with the art, very, very complete with the footnotes, and very, very evil to leave us on the cliffhanger she did. Give her your attention and money.
• SMBC Theater Goes To Hell: This DVD collection of sketches goes out of its way to convince me that Zach Weiner and James Ashby are the rudest, foulest, and generally worst people in the world, and succeeds. So I guess that’s good for them?
• Koko Be Good Not actually obtained in San Diego because Gina Gagliano assured me a complimentary review copy would be waiting for me at home and it was. Jen Wang’s story of finding out that what you think you want isn’t always what you really want has been haunting me, and is easily the best thing I’ve read since Tracy White’s How I Made It To Eighteen; highest recommendation, obtain on day-of-release if you enjoy things that are awesome.

Edit to clarify: the SMBC Theater DVD was given to me by the creators, and to add previously-missed links.

So the tradition of webcomics-attended convention attracting the attention of emergency services continued, with Otakon seeing the Baltimore Convention Center evacuated due to a reported kitchen fire. Alarms were struck about 2:00pm local time, with people re-entering about 40 minutes later.

Just to make things perfectly clear in case you’re ever in one of these situations: “evacuated” does not mean “out of the building and onto the sidewalk”. It means “far enough clear of the building that everybody behind you can also get out.” If there’s nobody behind you, keep walking anyway — the collapse zone on a building is larger than the building’s height.

In other, non-crisis news:

• I got a really interesting email from a gentleman named Derek Sivers over the weekend; he was previously the owner of CD Baby (from whom I have made purchases) and presently has a couple of ventures. One I would commend to your attention: MuckWork, taglined assistants to do your uncreative dirty work, so you can do what only you can do. It’s designed specifically for musicians near as I can tell, but it’s verging on territory that your pro-grade webcomicker might find useful, for when the running-the-bidness side of things is taking away from the creative side. While you’re checking out MuckWork, you might also find a fascinating read in the form of how Sivers decided to sell and how he essentially gave the multimillion dollar proceeds to charity.
• Ten years of mad science? Saturday marked the anniversary of Narbonic. Congrats to Shaenon Garrity, who also wrapped up pre-orders on Skin Horse book 2 on Saturday with precisely twice the necessary amount. Ms Garrity, you remain Radness Queen of the Greater Bay Area.
• Did anybody else see this? Pearls Before Swine proved that online can provide a needed complement to print strips. The 2 August update depended on a gag that was impossibly small to read in my newspaper (yes, I actually still get one), but the Comics Dot Com site offers a zoom feature (although it’s not obvious at first — you have to hover over the image and have Javascript active) that actually made the gag visible.

  Now I may subscribe to a newspaper, but I’m easily 20 years younger than their core demographic and my eyes ain’t that bad yet — I can’t imagine anybody was able to appreciate this joke that doesn’t read the comic online. For all intents and purposes, Stephan Pastis may as well have just submitted a strip to papers that said Go to this URL or don’t bother. [editor’s note: in case that strip goes away or gets locked behind a paywall, here’s a copy]

• Ben Franklin knows: Chucks are universally comfortable.

For reals, there is almost nothing guaranteed to make me smile as much as Kate Beaton’s take on Wonder Woman. And with it comes the news that she’ll be contributing to Marvel’s Strange Tales II anthology. Let’s see what else is coming up, shall we?

• Otakon is coming up, oh, tomorrowish, and lots of webcomics folk will be involved. On the Official Guest List we find Clarine Harp, anime voice actress & producer, and the real life counterpart to Something*Positive’s Aubrey. In San Diego, I met the real life version of Jason (also in that strip), found him charming, affable and pretty much like strip Jason, so draw your own conclusions. Randy Milholland tells me that his readers sometimes approach Ms Harp very politely, utter some kind words, and back away without making eye contact, possibly in fear of their lives. I want to see that happen in person some day.
• J Baird of the Create a Comic Project also sends along a list of webcomics-related programming events at Otakon, including two he’s running on manga-making and the use of comics in literacy. Full details after the cut. Lots of webomickers in the Artists Alley, as well (and even some that will be squatting boothspace with others); tell ’em I said hi.
• Here’s a name that long-time readers may recall: Øyvind Thorsby; creator of the nearly 600-installment Hitmen for Destiny, which upended the notion that art is necessary to a webcomic with its weird, compelling story. Thorsby is back with a new webcomic — onewhich features neither three-and-a-half dimensional fight scenes (click forward for about a dozen strips) nor throat-inflation fetishism (at least, not that we get to see) — called Lies, Sisters, and Wives. It’s a complete story in 34 strips, and it reminds me of nothing so much as a French bedroom farce — think Feydeau’s A Flea In Her Ear with enormous heads.

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SDCC wears more heavily on my aged, stooped body every year, so please forgive the lateness of this post; it’s also going to be a big one, to cover my travel tomorrow, and then I can see about actually reading webcomics again. I’ve fallen a bit behind in the last five days.

• First up, news from Zach Weiner, who was at his booth with fellow SMBC Theater principal James Ashby. It was a bit odd meeting Ashby, as he’s specialized in playing some monumentally unlikeable characters on SMBCT, and I found him to be affable, funny, and not at all somebody who would kill me at the first opportunity. Probably.

  Weiner and Ashby presented me with a copy of SMBCT’s first DVD compilation, and it looks like an hour and a half of pure, distilled fun. I can’t say for certain, since the netbook that I’m travelling with has no optical drive, but it’s getting watched at the first opportunity. Weiner also shared the news that one of his previous projects (Captain Excelsior, with Chris Jones on art) is getting a book release via IDW — look for it in October, or heck, just pre-order it now.

• Speaking of pre-orders, I bumped into Ben Costa of Shi Long Pang, who was kind enough to gift me with a copy of his brand new (you can still pre-order, actually) first book. All I can say is hoo, the Xeric grant gives you a lot of options when it comes to printing your book. It’s got a gorgeous, solid visual appeal, the colors are vibrant or subtle as required, and the paper stock is thick and satisfying. It even smells good. This is going to require a leisurely read to provide a more worthwhile review, but for almost 200 pages, full color, in hardcover? $20 is a steal.
• Speaking of new print ventures, Ryan Sohmer had some interesting news about his first non-comedy comics work. BOOM! Studios will be publishing a Sohmer-penned, Jean Diaz-drawn 6-issue series (with the possibility of ongoing) called Messiah. Sohmer described it as the story of an ordinary guy called by God to be the new messiah — but not the first one. Turns out, God’s been calling messiahs for millenia, but gives them free will to redeem and save the world or not. Capitalizing on Diaz’s work with Mark Waid on Incorruptible, Waid may end up editing Messiah, which would just slightly be a good thing.
• Speaking of good things, Jeff Zugale came by to talk about some of his projects, and has said that there are discussions for a print/poster release of The Greatest Painting In The History of Art.
• The Webcomics Lightning Round panel produced a lot of information in a very brief timeframe; to keep this page from bogging down, the “transcript” (it’s not a word-for-word of what was said at the panel, but it’s as close as I can make it) is below the cut, and it’s a long ‘un. Groundrules: Brad Guigar, Robert Khoo and Scott Kurtz were given 20 seconds to answer each question, with no repeat answers — if one panelist agreed in essence with another, he just said so and moved on. Answer durations were enforced by Airhornsworman official timekeeper Erika Greco (PA designer extraordinaire), who cut off the panelists with an insistent WOOOP if their actual answer went on too long.

  The panel was held in a room with a posted capacity of 500, and was pretty much full up; however, it became apparent during the panel that a portion of the audience were camping out for a LOST panel that was being held next in the room. This earned multiple digressions onto the topic of LOST by Kurtz, each of which led to at least one forlorn LOSTie slinking out of the room, presumably upset by spoilers. That was awesome.

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Okay, no photos and limited links — it’s just too painful fighting with the spare wifi available to me, which frequently achieves speeds measurable in the double-digit KB/sec. The hub of nerdery and modern cultural passions is in a location that runs on dial-up. If there are errors of formatting, I’ll fix it later.

• The thing about Nick Gurewitch is, you never know how much of what he’s doing is a put-on. He started his presentation with the immortal words, “Does anybody have a laptop? Can it burn DVDs?” and proceeded to put the final technological touches on his talk there in the room. Okay, that was probably real.

  To fill time while the DVD burned, he started with an open Q&A, which was punctuated by a very polite conversation with an attendee to one side of the room who was engaged in a very loud cell phone conversation.

  If you were to script out a scene with a clueless person having a loud, interruptive conversation in an inappropriate setting, and then having to explain to the person on the other side of that conversation that he was being told to stop having this loud, interruptive conversation, and made it feature the most socially graceless protagonist acting in the most socially graceless manner possible? What actually happened in room 5AB would be rejected by the script editor for being too cliched and stereotypical.

  I honestly don’t know if that was a real socially awkward person (and how many of those do you find at Comic Con?) or a minor entertainment for our benefit; call it 50-50 either way.

  The actual presentation led to conclusions that were drawn so broadly and so obviously for laughs (yet so seriously, earnestly, and in the manner of most academic papers I’ve read) that Gurewitch was clearly having fun with us — but like most of his works, there was a kernel of truth at the center that was fascinating and insightful.

  Namely, in a multi-panel comic (and this is extended to final scenes/shots in movies and other staged entertainments), the final panel is a summation of all that goes before it. It encapsulates all of what previously happened and could in many cases stand alone as a single-panel gag. This perspective hadn’t occurred to me previously, and has had me looking at comics more carefully since yesterday; it’s an interesting idea and maybe an universal phenomenon.

  Gurewitch also dropped some hints about his current projects: his next book will be a graphic novel “the size of a wallet”, done with a “scratching” technique that hurts his hand; as a result, production is a bit slow, and it’s due out at “some future Halloween.”

  He also shared some cartoons that he’s finished for the BBC’s online arm (produced through a subsidiary of Endemol, the UK-Dutch production company that owns massive entertainments like Survivor); these are due to go up next month under the series title Sometimes This Happens, and they are hilarious (particularly the ones set in outer space, and one featuring a bear animated by the awesome Rebecca Sugar).

  Gurewitch is also writing a lot of movies, has just finished a draft of a feature film, and is likely to do some comics sooner rather than later — he has ideas sketched out that need to be finished. Likely none of those comics will be what he described as the most awful idea for a comic [he] ever had:

  A giant penis and a giant vagina say “let’s fuck”, and they have little human beings where genitals would be, and the little people have a sophisticated conversation.

  Nicholas Gurewitch, ladies and gentlemen — there’s nobody else like him.

Booth busytimes kept me from the other presentations I wanted to see, but there was plenty happening to make up for it.

• The California Board of Equalization — aka the tax collector, aka The Man — was on the floor at the start of the day, and presumably throughout show hours. They were checking vendor’s permits, getting descriptions of offerings and employee counts, and generally making sure that the state will get its cut. This is the first time I’ve seen them at Comic-Con, so vendors that haven’t had an encounter with them (and by “they”, I mean a very nice guy with a tablet computer and a moustache), keep your paperwork handy.
• I was lucky enough to see Karl Kerschl when he found me at the Dumbrella booth; as he isn’t boothing this year, it was probably the only way I would have run into him. As you may know, he and fellow Transmission-X studiomate Cameron Stewart are just back from St Petersburg on a research trip for their current project, a comics adaptation/extension of the Assassin’s Creed videogame series.

  The three-issue comic is due out in the fall, and Kerschl says they will likely be working on it extensively until end of the year, then hopefully have more time for creator projects. Projects like clearing the backlog of sketch editions of the Abominable Charles Christopher books (he’s got about 100 still to do, and working on them as fast as he can — believe me when I say it’s worth the wait, because what Kerschl calls a “sketch” is unbelievably delicate and complex and beautiful), and Stewart’s newly Eisner-minted webcomic, Sin Titulo. Naturally, Stewart’s most serious competition for the Best Digital Comic award was Kerschl, which will doubtless lead to happy good times back in their Montreal studio.

• Erika Moen, fans, rejoice. DAR! is deeply missed, but she gave me the lowdown on the two (two!) new projects that she’s working on, which should see online debuts in the coming months. The first is a “dick and fart joke murder mystery”, and the second a young-adult graphic novel featuring ayoung woman whose sketchbook comes to life. I’m not sure I can think of a better story hook for a graphic novel than fighting ones own sketches to save the world.

  In both cases, she’s collaborating with a writer, and in both cases the early art that she was gracious enough to share with me is some of the best comics work she’s done in her career. Also, she’s selling original pages from DAR! for ridiculously low prices; I came this close to buying the original of Junk Waxing Party, and still might if I can find a safe way to transport it. Even if it doesn’t go home with me, I now know why the dude at the junk waxing party has a squirrel on his head. Good times.

Up today: Webcomics Lightning round at 5:00pm in room 8; Robert Khoo, Brad Guigar, and Scott Kurtz answer questions on all aspects of webcomicking without bogging down in details and rat-holes. I’ll be trying to get as many notes as I can.