About eight different things ranking from medium-low to apocalyptic on the crappitude scale have made themselves known to me in the past 18 hours or so; so I’m apologizing in advance if my copy-editing isn’t up to standard. It’s just one of those days.

• Speaking of eight different things, octopuses have eight arms, and I’m told that they make a tasty pie filling. No, wait, tentacle pie is disgusting, but Octopus Pie: There Are No Stars In Brooklyn releases today, and that’s the opposite of a terrible thing. Meredith Gran is celebrating with a book release party in Seattle tonight, will be at home base Dunning-Kruger Solutions LTD for a signing tomorrow night, and embarks on her cross-continent book tour pretty immediately thereafter.

  At various stops along the way, she’ll be in the company of Erika Moen, Aaron Diaz, David Malki !, Kris Straub, KC Green, Josh Lesnick, David McGuire, R Stevens, and many more creators, most of whom will have their own book-like wares in exchange for your cash money.

• I have it on good authority that Cameron Stewart is asked an average of eight times an hour if he’s the brother of Twilight starlet Kristen Stewart. After a year and a half of this nonsense, one can understand exactly origin of the dark, troubling encounters that the hero of Sin Titulo. In fact, the latest update is allegedly drawn directly from Stewart’s own reaction to hearing that question for the 8000th time.

  Oh, yeah, and it’s also the 100th update chock full o’ moody, noir goodness; hopefully Sin Titulo will not be too interrupted by the mystery project that he and studiomate Karl Kerschl have been hinting at. Then again, the fact that Stewart does such amazing work in and around the paying gigs (including such high-profile assignments as drawing Batman) and delivers it to my eyeballs for free means I should probably be grateful for whatever happens to arrive.

In our pursuit of truth[iness] in all aspects of our webcomics reporting, we offer the following amendations and apologies.

• In last Friday’s update, we at Fleen neglected to credit David Patton for the tip-off on STLwebcomics. We apologize for the oversight.
• From last Thursday’s post, a recent comment by Agent-X requires some clarification — it was not my intention to express that Rebecca Clement’s Melburnian existence “at a remove” from her colleagues as a slight towards the Australian [web]comicking community. It was, as Agent-X later surmises, a comment on the working relationships that Clement has with numerous cartoonists overseas.

  As Agent-X points out, our modern world of social media and networking does make certain boundaries and distances shrink, but I do feel that there is a benefit to proximity. I have seen too many creators spurred to new heights by a weekend of adjacent tables at a convention (or by regularly inhabiting the same studio space) to think that a good broadband connection is an entirely viable substitute.

  For an example of how quickly a long-standing creative friendship can turn into a rapid-growth environment, witness the changes in Scott Kurtz‘s art in the few weeks he’s been living in Seattle and working in the same offices as Mike Krahulik. Proximity spurs friendly competition and artwork can change by leaps and bounds in such an environment, almost always for the better.

• On behalf of Jon Rosenberg, a clarification — his new, eagerly awaited projects, Scenes From A Multiverse did launch today (actually, he broke his own embargo and launched yesterday) as scheduled, then promptly fell over after his site got wanged by Questionable Content.

  Having seen a pre-release version of SFAM, let me assure you that you will want to check back regularly to see how the repairs are coming along, as it’s both funny and contains a user-driven component that I believe you will enjoy.

  Correction to the Correction: Scenes From A Multiverse is again live.

• Finally, Angela Melick wishes to apologize for the incredibly short notice, but Emergency Contest for Musicians and Video Editors! I am neither, otherwise I would surely be entering.

Carly Monardo’s Webcomic Auction for the Gulf Coast continues to garner steam, with the contributors list roughly doubling in the past 24 hours. Contributions of original art will be accepted through the end of the month, with the auction currently slated for the first week of July.

• Meredith Gran has a book coming out any day now, and the release party will kick off the Spring Signing Tour of America (and a Tiny Bit of Canada) on 22 June in Seattle. 7 – 9pm, Comics Dungeon, NE 45th St in Seattle, with Erika Moen as special co-celebrant.

  The tour then moves to Portland on the 23rd, as Gran and Moen return home, hang with fellow Stumptowner (and Latin Heartthrob) Aaron Diaz, as KrisDavid MalkiStraub ! drop by to play Book Me Harder at the same time. Details and RSVP on the Facebook page.

  The fun will hit other cities as the summer progresses, including Toronto’s The Beguiling, culminating in a triumphant arrival at SDCC. Have pity on her as the miles and list of cities grows, and maybe bring her some healthy snacks or fruit?

• Seen the list of guests for first-iteration con Intervention lately? The phrase “leaps and bounds” comes to mind, and one should note that the first round of Artist’s Alley applications is closing this week. There’s at least 25 tables up for grabs, with the possibility of more being added.

  Keep in mind that Intervention is being held same weekend and about a mile from SPX, so the nexus of [web]comics types in town that weekend will be truly staggering.

• And finally, today’s sign that the Apocalypse is nigh: life imitates art, or at least actual humans imitate Ray Smuckles. Cartilage Head preserve us.

From time to time, this page notes the efforts and work of Ms Carly Monardo, animator on Venture Bros., illustrator, original Dr McNinja colorist, poster designer, superhero character (re-)designer, etc., etc. Well, she’s back, and this is a big one.

Spurred by various fundraisers from creative types to support cleanup and restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, Carly has decided to organize an auction of originals from webcomickers, which was announced Saturday afternoon via Twitter and is just now ramping up. Ms Monardo took time from her busy charity efforts to talk with Fleen about it.

Yes, it’s true — while the interview was being transcribed, Ms Monardo was sending through updates, because creators keep pledging. We’ll wrap this up so she can get back to organizing things.

If you want to get in on the auction and support the best of causes, contact Carly, whose family name is Monardo, and who keeps an email account at the Google-run email service, which is a dot-com.

Re: never getting the hang of same. Things for you to consider in the meantime

• I’m about a week early on this, but the day itself will be a Saturday and I’ll probably forget between then and now; if my sums have worked out correctly, my evil twin will celebrate 10 years of uninterrupted, daily updates here-ish. Well done, Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary (assuming you don’t suffer catastrophic server failure, get hit on the head with a rock from outer space, or see the destruction of the world in the meantime — any of which might actually be in character with the strip in question).
• The New Yorker isn’t the only magazine that sees comics from one of our tribe in the latest issue. Granted, Boating World isn’t known for its cartoons, but it does have a feature on TEEN BOAT in the May issue, to the undouted bemusement of co-creators Dave Roman and John Green.
• I’ll admit it — even though I know that the contestants aren’t really randomly picked up off the street, and that the money they wave at the end is a prop, every time I hail a taxi in New York, I secretly hope that it’s the Cash Cab. Maybe it’s because watching that show, I have a higher incidence of shouting, Idiot! That money is rightfully mine! than even Jeopardy! provokes. So at the moment, I can’t quite decide whether I’m happy or offended that Abe and Preston got picked up by Ben Bailey instead of me; they better hope that they get the next two questions right, or Bailey’s gonna kick ’em out of the cab somewhere around 1996.
• Lecture alert: Huw “Lem” Davies will be giving a talk on webcomics as part of a cultural festival in Leeds, England, UK, at Crash Records. The fun starts Saturday at 4:00pm local time, in the basement, and I’m told he’s got lots of awesome examples from tons (or “tonnes”, if you prefer) of creators. Those in middle England, check it out.

Gary, people say to me sometimes, why haven’t you had kids? The world obviously needs your genetic legacy to be continued, you wonderful man, you.

Because, I reply demurely, I get to not sleep on a regular basis by taking ambulance calls in the middle of the night, and while children will grow out of it, the slightly ill (who will end up in waiting room chairs, whether I wheel ’em in on a stretcher or not) will always be there for me. I don’t have to put them through college, but neither will they take care of me when I’m old and decrepit. I am today questioning whether I made the right life choice. Let’s knock down some news items while I’m still conscious.

• New NEWW guests announced; time for me to make some hotel reservations, I’m thinking.
• As mentioned last week, Hello With Cheese loses artist Bryan Prindiville with strip #250, and today Darren J. Gendron announces the new arteest:
  

  Hailing from the coffee-scented land known as Colombia, Obsidian, or “O” has been working as a comic artist since 2003. He started his own webcomic Commissioned in 2004, which already has over 1,400 pages online.

  Dern and Obsidian met last year at ConnectiCon, which was only O’s second trip to a convention in the USA ever. But because of an invite doled out by Rosscott, O was tempted by the terror of on-panel battle known as Super Art Fight.
  When putting together a short list of artists capable of replacing Prindiville, a brainstorm was held. Essentially, we had to define what worked so well about him as an artist. First, Hello With Cheese was not his first webcomic. He’d already developed his own style long before drawing Tom Selleck was a job description. Second, there was a speed element to it, something that makes Prindiville a formidable heel in Super Art Fight. And third, there has to be a similar sense of humor.

  This mythical short list of artists that dern put together started first and foremost with Super Art Fighters. They’re the best at getting it done fast and funny. But because of O’s extensive history and consistent style and feel on Commissioned, he was the No. 1 Draft Pick Dream.

  And then, he actually said yes.

  Welcome, Obsidian, and speaking of SAF, we’ll note that it’s just turned two years old. Expect bratty behavior and incessant repetition of “Why?” for the next couple of years.

• Nina Paley has been mentioned on this page before, most notably for the free-distribution model she adopted for Sita Sings The Blues. Her experiences with copyright (and copyleft) have prompted her to go back and re-release all of her earlier work under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license, and she’ll be talking about this (and other issues of independent art production & intellectual property) with our friends from the Cartoon Art Museum:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum is honored to host Before Sita Sang The Blues: Spotlight on Nina Paley, the first comprehensive exhibition of award-winning cartoonist and animator Nina Paley, creator of the critically acclaimed animated feature Sita Sings The Blues. This retrospective will feature a selection of Paley’s syndicated comic strips, illustrations, and a series of prints, paintings and behind-the-scenes materials from Sita.

  The exhibition will run from 3 July to 24 October at CAM in San Francisco, with a screening of SSTB on 20 July. Those of you making your way to San Diego down the left coast, this might be a cool place to stop over on the way.

When you teased this, you didn’t tell us it was going to be this amazing. Cry havoc, and let loose the fanfic.

In other news that broke over the long weekend:

• Our Kate continues to tear up the world of cartooning, with contributions accepted by The New Yorker, the first of which is due to hit the newstands today.
• Recently received in the mail: Little Dee volume 4 (now that pre-orders are done, expect it to move to TopatoCo) and Recklessly Yours, the eighth and final Scary Go Round book. Both worth the wait, and your money, and both with quick notes attached — Little Dee will start re-running from the beginning next Monday, with director’s commentary; Scary Go Round strips that wouldn’t reproduce well in the book are presented as PDFs online, but you’ll have to buy the book to find out where, ’cause I ain’t tellin’.
• Speaking of books, Jon Rosenberg’s Showcase Showdown has been in bookstores for a week, and hits local comic shops on Thursday (as soon as I grab my copy, expect a review of the full Infinite Pedergast Cycle); give it a read so you’re all up to speed for Rosenberg’s new venture, which has been mysteriously code-named SFAM. The mystery makes it a better value for your retina-humorgland intersection needs.
• HeroesCon this weekend in North Carolina, and plenty of webcomickers in the Indy Island section of the floor, but heck — you knew that already. For those looking a little further out, Jamie Noguchi will be at SPX with a new minicomic about … well, it’s a secret for now. But I’ve had a peek and can assure you that anybody who enjoys cute cuddly things and/or tales of vicious revenge will enjoy … PANDOOM.

(There may or may not be an update on Monday, depending on how much grilling needs to be done; my guess is: A Lot.)

• Speaking of weekends, start making your plans for the first one of November, because New England Webcomics Weekend just announced its first tranche of guests, including transoceanic visitors Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson and John Allison, as well as transcontinental visitors Aaron Diaz and Erika Moen, ‘long with various out-of-staters MechaYukoAndAnanth, Chris Hallbeck, Danielle Corsetto, David McGuire, Evan Dahm, and Meghan Murphy. Also, some guy who lives upstairs. Many more will be added, and it’s going to be crazy-awesome.
• I’ve been emailing back and forth with Colin Ferguson of Snakehead Games (makers of Star Pirates) for a little while now — as you may recall, Starpirates did a lot of its advertising with various webcomic creators, and Ferguson has had the community on his mind. To that end, Snakehead are offering some recognition to the community, along with fabulous prizes:
  

  We worked with the owners of the coolest online comics to have their communities play in our games. And they did. So we’re throwing a thank you back to the creators of the comics AND their communities. So we already have a first round vote to get 20 webcomics that our community liked. Now we’re going to ask for a round of feedback on their best strip. Best meaning the most “Online Game-y” or “SciFi”. Of course, we’re doing it with a twist.

  What’s up for Grabs?

  1) Cash prize of $1000

  2) $1000 in free advertising on Project Wonderful : www.projectwonderful.com is the way that most comics monetize…and a way we’ve found works for advertising the games!

  Current standings in the polls show a statistically-insignificant difference bewtween Girl Genius, Legostar Galactica, and Schlock Mercenary in the top position, with everybody else a pretty healthy margin behind, so it’s pretty likely one of those three will win a chunk of advertising credit. For the cash prize there’s a pick-a-name-from-the-hat mechanism, so one lucky webcomicker from the list could be having a really good 4th of July cookout beer fund. Good luck to all the contestants.

• It’s been a bit more than three years since I first came across Tracy White’s Traced, and now she’s got a book out; thanks to Gina Gagliano (who sets me up with all the best :01 Books and Roaring Brook Press releases), I have a copy of How I Made It to Eighteen and all I can say is Whew.

  We say things casually — I’m so depressed or I’m going crazy — without any real understanding of what mental illnesses are truly like for those that suffer from them. Whatever the cause (too many drugs, chemical imbalances, bad parenting, childhood trauma, or any one of a million others), the resolutions aren’t easy, and require support from a society that isn’t comfortable acknowledging that such conditions exist. To change the patterns of a lifetime and be taught new ones has to be among the most difficult undertakings a person can be forced into, and White shows just what that process was like for one person.

  Like her webcomic, How I Made It to Eighteen is “guaranteed 95% true”, and it’s a spare, gut-wrenching look at what happens when mental health finally gives way after too long a period of too many stresses, all at the ripe age of seventeen years. Although the names have been changed, White (or “Stacy Black”) doesn’t shy away from the harsh parts of her story — nobody comes through this tale with their hands entirely clean, from the distant and perfectionist mother to the asshole controlling boyfriend to friends that did less than they could, but especially Black herself.

  It’s a remarkable achievement, well served by the very minimalist art and brief text — the largest blocks of words are in the form of responses by Stacy’s friends, answering questions about their friendship, her situation, and how they saw or didn’t see it developing; we learn about Stacy in dribs and drabs from others, while she tells us very little about herself. The reader is forced to fill in a lot of details between the panels and words, trying to make sense of the story with not quite enough input; as Stacy Black progresses towards understanding herself, we progress along with her, and are left relieved that she (and we) made it through the experience. How I Made It to Eighteen demands multiple readings, and will stand as one of the most striking memoirs of mental illness and recovery ever written.

Here’s the deal: Ted Rall will always be an irritating mystery to me.

On the one hand, he does solid, provacative, cartoon-based reportage from places most people would never think of going. On the other hand, he often seems to be provacative purely for the sake of being provacative, making illogical, self-contradictory agruments in online fora. On the other other hand, in person he’s thoughtful, engaging, funny, and interesting. At the same time seeking to support the cartooning talents of the future as trying to roll the industry back to the past, espousing positions both populist and elitist, seemingly more interested in the argument than the solution, my solution for a good long while now has largely been to ignore him.

And now he’s going back to one of the most dangerous corners of the earth, and taking friends along with him:

I’m leaving for Afghanistan the second week of August. I have three goals:

1. Go to Taloqan in Takhar Province, to revisit the place where I spent much of the fall of 2001 during the battle of Kunduz.
2. Visit the site of the construction of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project between Turkmenistan and Pakistan. This is supposed to be north of Herat.
3. Travel to the remote western deserts near the Iranian border where U.S. forces and reporters rarely venture or report from.

We’ll be “in country” one month—that’s the limit set by most media outlets for reporters covering rural Afghanistan, and with good reason. It’s a hard place to travel, not just from a security standpoint but also because of the harsh climate and poor food and lodging, not to mention lack of basic infrastructure (running water and electricity).

We’ll fly into Dushanbe, Tajikistan, obtain permission from the Tajik Ministry of Foreign Affairs to enter the restricted 100-kilometer zone along the southern border with Afghanistan, then drive overland to Taloqan, and head west and then south before crossing the border into Iran.

Travelling with Rall will be fellow cartoonists Matt Bors and Steven Cloud, who apparently didn’t get enough of Central Asia on the Mongolian Death Fun Drive.

I don’t know Bors and I don’t know Rall well, but Cloudy is a friend of mine; although we joked about pre-arranging an epitaph in case he didn’t return from his previous adventure to lands unknown (Steven Cloud, killed by Gypsies, in accordance with prophecy.), I didn’t actually believe that his trip would result in more than border hassles and some damn fine stories. It was also far less likely on that trip that he would be travelling through places where he might be shot by accident or intent.

Like most people, I like to think of myself as being as good a person as my dog believes me to be. I try honestly not to wish ill fortune on anybody, and as much as Rall has pissed me off in the past, I don’t hate him. I wonder how smart travelling through that part of the world (which has a tradition of summertime = war time stretching back largely interrupted for four or five millenia) will turn out to be. I hope that the reporting and whatever insight it provides is worth the risk. And from the bottom of my athiest heart, I wish Cloud, Bors, and Rall the safest of travels in an unsafe series of places. Come back to us whole and well Ted, so you can get back to pissing me off over things that ultimately don’t matter.

On to lighter things.

• New England Webcomics Weekend 2 is go. Add the bird to your twitter for further updates.
• Meredith Gran interviewed by Gothamist on Brooklyn and her forthcoming Octopus Pie collection.
• Re: bottom two rows of panels from today’s Shortpacked! mega-update — oh, that ain’t right.
• Happy birthday to almost everybody!

Friend o’ Fleen and all-around good guy Rick Marshall went and got hisself hitched over the weekend, and thanks to the magic of the Twitters, we got to share some of the good times; for my part, I’m not going to make the usual lame joke regarding Rick’s name in honor of this Very Special Occasion (but when he gets back from his honeymoon — Jet Blue willing — we’re back to business as usual). Congratulations, Rick & Jessica, and I sincerely hope you don’t see this until you’re back from whatever tropical paradise hosts the next two weeks of sun, relaxation, and industrial-grade fruity drinks with weapons-grade little umbrellas in ’em.

• Last week, I made mention (via the delightful Colleen AF Venable) that :01 Books was starting its own webcomics group (or, since they are a publishing concern, I supposed “imprint” might be more appropriate). Ms Venable is back with more information on To Be Continued…:
  

  To Be Continued… or TBC… is what we’re calling our new webcomics serials. So far the list includes Sailor Twain by our very own Mark Siegel, Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil, and Derek Kirk Kim’s Tune (which he’s posting once a week on his journal).

  All of these serials are leading up to a finished published :01 books. Mark and I started TBC… as an experiment of sorts, determined to prove that webcomics won’t hurt the sale of final books but rather the opposite: gaining a much wider spread of readers than we ever would with spine-out books buried in the sea of other spine-out books. If this experiment works out you can be sure we’ll be publishing more of our books this way, serializing them online as we go along.

  There’s really no part of that plan that isn’t awesome — but if we (as a reading public) want to see more books treated this way, we need to make sure that Venable & Siegel have the solid sales numbers to show their bosses that they were right in their gamble. Read these comics online, and if you like them, buy them. As a side note, I expect that any success that :01 Books has in this experiment may lead other publishers to follow suit — everybody bemoans the death of publishing, but I think there’s a future in this curatorial role that can’t ever be diminished. If you drown in a sea of potential webcomics reads (as I do, with all the suggestions sent to me), knowing that somebody at :01 Books (or TopatoCo, or similar future endeavours) thought enough of a creator to deal with them? That goes to the top of my “to read” list.

• Regular readers of this page know that I dig just about everything done by Shaenon Garrity, aka Radness Queen West of the Rockies, and I especially dig me some Skin Horse. Said strip is now coming up on Book 2, and rather than taking the pre-order route, Garrity (and co-creator Jeffrey C. Wells) have opted to Kickstart the project, with the end result that it’s (as of this writing) 121% funded after 48 hours.

  Holy.

  Crap.

  Even more impressive than the speed of the response? Not one pledge is for the minimum of $10; the most common pledge amount (44 out of 72) is for $20, and enough people have pledged more that the average amount is over $50. I think we’ve got enough empirical evidence at this point to definitively describe when Kickstarter is going to be successful — namely, when you’ve got a mountain of dedicated fans who would’ve bought the product anyway, and who get a visceral thrill about being part of the process that enables the product’s delivery into their hot little hands. If you’re wondering if Kickstarting is for you, ask yourself if your audience falls into that category.

• Last thoughts for the day — the Eagle Awards are the main British honor for comics work, and they have both a category for Favourite Web-Based Comic (waaaay down there at the bottom) and a popular vote. If you were so inclined, you can chime in for Freak Angels, Order of the Stick, PvP, Sin Titulo, or xkcd.