Okay, so this was going to go up today, notifying you that Commissioner James Gordon previously noted on this page as vying for the office of Cutest Dog, was into the semi-final voting and needed your support.

But we’ve recently received word that voting was only to occur Sunday night. The reasons for this are not clear at this time, but screw that. If you’re reading this, I don’t think that it’s still Sunday where you are, but it appears you can vote still for Gordon. As of this writing, Gordon has approximately 5400 votes and his nearest competitor 4000, but this is no time to be complacent; if he makes it to the finals it will put Chris Hastings and Carly Monardo that much closer to paying for their wedding and having something even more important.

That’s actually what I wanted to talk about, if you’ll indulge me. Some people in the contest are pledging their winnings (if they win) to various causes (most notably, to the shelter where week 12 winner and currently second-in-vote-totals Little Bitsy was rescued). There was apparently a lot of talk on the forums of the competition site about whether or not a particular dog “deserved” to win based on where the money might go.

You know what? There’s a lot of places that a million dollars might to a lot of good, more than Chris & Carly’s bank account, more than a shelter. My volunteer EMS agency is perpetually underfunded, and that $33,000/year would make good on our insurance payments (although even at implausibly low rates of premium growth, we’d be falling behind by year 22) but not even come close to clearing our operational expenses (much less capital expenses — you have any idea how much an ambulance costs?).

Point being, the contest itself is, by definition, a frivolous thing. The prize will not Carly and Chris sit back in unearned luxury while poolboys and cabana girls feed them peeled grapes. By itself, it would just about come to married couple only needs one roommate to make rent stage in Brooklyn. But it would give them something most artists can only dream of — a safety cushion to their income for the next couple of decades (head over here for the story of another artist who just achieved the same). There’s a lot of things I’d give a million dollars to in an ideal world, but if one of them is ensuring some talented people (who entertain me for free) don’t have to worry about whether they can pay for health care? That’s a pretty good start.

Frankly, since the rules say that the votes at this stage are only guidance to the judges, I fully expect that the grand prize will go to one of the I’ll give it to the shelter dogs. However, $5000 for making it to the final stage would make a nice dent in the Monardo/Hastings wedding bills, so let’s see if we can start there.

• In other news, damn you, Randall Munroe. My eyes are bad enough without you foisting that monstrosity onto us. I thought I’d never have to see another animated guy working/site under construction GIF.
• For those of you that didn’t listen to NPR’s On The Media this weekend, it was all about the music industry and its current tribulations. Nice piece towards the end of the hour about Amanda Palmer and her contention that artists have to get over their reluctance to say to their audience, I want you to give me money. Those seeking to make a living from their art, give it a good listen.

Okay, it’s not a “report” in the traditional sense, but it surely is the definitive account of webcomics at APE. Kate Beaton once again wins at everything. Also, I very much want one of these thank you.

• In other news, life is getting pretty spookifying, what with Halloween coming up and all (and wouldn’t you know it, I’m on EMT duty that weekend, while all the rest of you will be getting drunk and dressing up like sexy cops, sexy ninjas, and sexy Weedmaster P). To celebrate, Split Lip (the horror webcomic specialists) are releasing a new comic and a new contest.

  The comic, Termites in Your Smile, is the tale of a two-timing law student, the women in his life, and a ghostly, ghastly revenge; the contest involves the giveaway of Split Lip Volume 1 (a sampler of the macabre) to as many as ten lucky winners on Twitter and Facebook.

• Quick followup: K-9Lives, an animated short with webcomic roots did pretty well at the Marbella International Film Festival; let’s let creator Doug Wilson share the news:
  

  K-9Lives was nominated for best animation at Marbella International Film Festival alongside Leonardo by Pixar artist Jim Capobianco, and Body by Zhivko Dimitrov an MA alumni from St Martins College in London.

  That’ll do, little dog-attached-to-a-cat, that’ll do. For more information, see Wilson’s festival diary entries.

• Know who’s always looking out for the community (such as it is)? Xaviar Xerexes. Guy’s gone ahead and created one a’ them resources that everybody into comickry is going to find helpful, a Google Calendar of upcoming comics event-type things; go to the main page at ComixTalk and click on the “Members” tab over to the right.

  Now the thing is, he put the damn thing up, which means that he’s going to become the de facto data entry maintainer guy for this calendar, and that’s gonna suck for him. So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you want to help keep the calendar up to date (that is, you’re amenable to getting flooded with press releases once word of this thing gets out), are a reliable sort (that is, you won’t flake out after saying you want to help) and are a skilled communicator (that is, you can spell and use proper punctuation on a regular basis), go ahead and drop an email via that contact link over there to the right, and I’ll forward the lot of you onto XX-Man.

See that up there? That is the wedding cake of David Malki ! and Nikki Rice from a few years back. It’s not the anniversary of the event or anything, but Mr Press Release (seriously, get yourself on the TopatoCo press release list, because those things that Malki ! writes are freakin’ hilarious; they are the only ones that reward you for reading all the way to the bottom¹) saw fit to share it with the world, and I share it with you because it is the coolest cake ever that could only be improved by the little bride figure kicking one of the black-clad agents of doom in the face.

• Similarly, this world was rocked on this day in both 1976 and 1980 as John Allison and Ryan North were born (or, as rumo[u]r would have it, sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus) in, respectively, Englishland and Canadia. Fleen wishes a very happy birthday to both.
• And blasting forth into the marketplace are not one, but two separate books from Tyler Page. Up first, the second volume of Nothing Better, which remains the benchmark for headin’ off to college storytelling. When last we left our intrepid heroines Kat and Jane, they had just come to the uneasy realization that sometimes the Freshman Roomie Match-o-Tron does a better job than either would be willing to admit; with semester one part-way over, school rhythms starting to gel, and old lives starting to drift further away, the real work of growin’ up in Ermerica can begin. It’s my very next webcomics purchase, you betcha.

  Second, you got The Saga of Rob Harvard, the first publication culled from Page’s daily sketchblog, and the first (only, really) extended story arc from that creative stew. This one is hand-bound and limited to 250 copies, so get it while the getting’s good if you really want it. Both The Saga of Rob Harvard and Nothing Better Vol 2: Into the Wild are available now in the Stylish Vittles store (along with NB volume 1, for those needing to catch up).

_______________
¹ Case in point, from a recent release authored by Mr Malki !:

ABOUT TOPATOCO / www.topatoco.com
Founded in 2003 by maverick cowboy cyber cartoonist Jeffrey Rowland, TopatoCo handles the production and fulfillment of licensed merchandise for over forty independent artists and entrepreneurs. TopatoCo is the exclusive online retailer for dozens of the comics world’s most popular online brands and maintains a commitment to helping content creators worldwide establish sustainable careers from their art. TopatoCo was also the first corporation in Massachusetts to get super scared of a wolf this one time, but in its defense, it was a really scary wolf.

Where to start?

• Perhaps with the almost-overlooked PC Weenies anniversary? Turns out that you won’t be able to see those first efforts, since the current site only goes back to the retooling of January Aught-Eight, but there it is: Krishna Sadasivam’s been using the same characters to poke fun at kohm-puu-tars since October 1998, which is about 93 years in internet time.
• The long wait for new Erfworld strips is finally coming to a close; as of this writing, the site is down (presumably for retooling), but expect to see the new “book” start soon, with a new artist, and a new model: twenty-five pages equals a book, short texty interludes between books; by that model, “Book One” was actually about six books worth (and, coincidentally, will be available from Giant In The Playground early next year in dead-tree form).
• APE happened, and the news was joyous as a sizeable portion of the TopatoCo roster (including all of the ruling junta) plopped themselves in a limo and toasted, Here’s to stumbling ass-backwards into good decisions. Big Apple Comic Con also happened, and the news was decidedly more mixed, with none of the major comics publishers present, one of the two “biggest” draws (Gary Coleman) not showing (that building-super job must have kept him too busy) and the show’s management announcing that next year, BACC will take place the same dates as New York Comic Con (which has made a pretty good name for itself in only four iterations). So, webcomickers — NYCC or BACC, and why?
• Tweeted this AM: Templar, AZ books to be distributed by Last Gasp, which ought to make them available anywhere that artcomix are to be found. Whoa.
• John Baird of Create A Comic Project (oft-featured in these pages) sends word of interest to all New York City area comickers of all stripes:
  

  LearnPlay is looking to bring a series of speakers to Teachers College at Columbia University to speak on the combination of comics and education. The monthly speaker series starts in November and will go through April.

  LearnPlay is TC’s student organization for the research and development of educational games and activities, including comic making. If you’re interested, please contact LearnPlay’s president, John Baird, at jlb2226 at columbia dot edu.

  Okay, everybody else who is not in charge of multiple educational/outreach programs for kids? You’re officially slackers now. Baird’s the man.

And that’s it for today. Nothing else going on in webcomics, nope. Aaaaaaabsolutely nothing. Move along, and don’t bother to click on that completely non-descript link that leads nowhere.

(more…)

Per an email I received yesterday, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is doing a children’s programming track at Big Apple Comic Con (which is going on as you read this), by partnering with the con’s sponsors, MFTW¹ Entertainment. You may insert your own joke about MFTW Entertainment producing anything that child-appropriate here.

• The big Chris Yates secret project list that we hinted at yesterday is now live, and we at Fleen can now reveal exclusively, from a conversation that took place over beers in San Diego, that one of these projects is TRUE. That’s right, the yak that’s going to star in ЖYPMblH HEXeP is named “Batukhan”. Scoop!
• Speaking of secrets revealed, this was all secret yesterday if you don’t follow Kris Straub‘s twitterfeed, but there is now an Ichor Falls book available for purchase, just in time for Halloween. Those with weak constitutions are warned that this books is likely very scarifying, and should approach it with caution. Also, please stay the hell away from that particular corner of West Virginia, no matter how polite the realtor seems.
• You guys have seen Kickstarter, right? Got a project you want to run, but you need funding, so people can pledge to you, and if you don’t get enough nobody pays up anything? Think Grameen Bank for the first world. Friend of Fleen (and sporting bet nemesis) Goron McAlpin‘s using it for a Multiplex book, and he’s now being joined from the webcomics world by Templar, AZ creator Spike as she seeks to revive a project on Modern Livin’ On The Cheap:
  

  Poorcraft is a project I’ve been thinking about for years. No one gets into comics for the money (no one with a clue, anyway), so I got an involuntary crash course in the discipline after I left school. I’ve learned a lot about poorcraft since then, most of it the hard way.

  Over time, I’ve noticed people who read comics are often people who want to make comics. But aspiring creative types are pretty easily discouraged by the specter of the “starving artist.” It doesn’t have to be that way! And not enough people realize that.

  So, I want to make a book. A comic book, naturally. Full color cover, black and white interior, 100-120 pages, with a $10.00 cover price. And at least 75% of that book would be comics. Comics about housing, food, entertainment, education, travel/transportation, health care, and employment, and doing all those things on a dime.

  Diana and myself have a six-month schedule from a successful Kickstart to publishing. Production-wise, the book is already outlined and ready for scripting. The $6,000 I’m asking for would go towards paying Diana [Nock, the illustrator] a fair price for her work, and publishing costs.

  As of this writing, Poorcraft has 71 backers worth nearly $1200 of pledges, a little more than 12 hours into the three-month fundraising window. Oh, and McAlpin will be on Fanboy Radio’s The Indie Show this Sunday, on a Kickstarter-themed broadcast.

• Euro-folks! Talented creators from Transmission-X are going to be stomping around your fair continent, and now there’s tour dates up for Ramón Pérez, Cameron Stewart, and Karl Kerschl (this might explain why Stewart’s Sin Titulo is hiatusing just as we’re hitting big developments, dang).

  Anyhoo, the tour swings through Portugal, France, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, and England, with at least three festival appearances. Quick hint for the happy travellers: one of my all-time top-five comic shops is near the canalfront in Ghent. Bigger, more comprehensive selection of English-language comics than most shops in the US, and then all the bande dessinée. Oh, it was glorious. Speaking of which, block out an afternoon for the CBBD in Brussels, and check out all the public comics art in the city (my favorite: a reproduction of a Blake et Mortimer cover on the entire side of a building.

_______________
¹ Megan Fox Tits Wolverine, of course.

Character art by Scott Kurtz, background art, voices, Blamimation by Kris Straub, inspiration by David Mamet. Welcome to the Harvey Awards, ladles and jenglemints. For a list of Kurtz’s intro gags, see Webcomics.com; I myself will now only refer to that magazine as Megan Fox Tits Wolverine.

• Super Art Fight 5 meets the The Brady Bunch: GO!
• Alternative Press Expo: this weekend, mess o’ webcomickers, including what I believe is the first show with Topatoco‘s new artists on a signing schedule approach. No promises, but this may mean that some famously grumpy webcomickers are less so. Yeah, I know, empty words. Have hope.
• Interviews! Julia Wertz talks with a university-affiliated, independent creator-focused literary review, and Randall Munroe talks books with Comics Alliance (which really has become the best all-around comics info and snark to be found on the webs today).

Let’s get you updated, Lightning Round style!

• Item! Brigid Alverson turns her attention towards webcomics news & info blogging, and I can tell you right now that she’s going to do this much, much better than we at Fleen do. She’s a terrific, well-informed writer, and I urge you all to check her out daily. Just remember to come back when you’re done, ‘kay?
• Item! MoCCA Fest 2010 dates and table availability announced. Back to the Armory, but earlier in the year, so hopefully people won’t be dropping in the aisles from fever & ague. Exhibitor tables are $410 for a full table and $260 for a half until 31 December, with discounts for MoCCA members (hint: membership’s about $35). Prices go up on New Year’s Day, and registrations will be accepted on a first come, first served basis beginning 21 October by fax, mail and in-person (applications on the website). The fax option may help alleviate the problem last year when people from around the country got shut out by locals walking in their applications.

  But here’s my question, because I’m not a creator and have never taken a table anywhere — is that a really high table cost for the size and duration of the show? It seems like it to me. Given all the problems that last year’s show had, I’m guessing that MoCCA has one, maybe two years at most to turn things around and get a really good show together before they start seeing exhibitors abandoning in droves. MoCCA has always been one of my favorite shows of the year, so here’s hoping that they get it really right next April.

• Item! By all accounts, Scott Kurtz killed as the MC of the Harveys. Along the same lines, a very nice, heartfelt, gracious post by Kurtz up today about his re-evaluation of Zuda and his feelings about it. Well done, sir (now I retire to my blogger’s desk and gather up the gold-plated instruments with which to twirl my moustache in a self-satisfied manner).
• Item! Randall Munroe, via sales of xkcd: volume 0, and tickets to his brief book tour, has raised enough money to build a school in Laos. Holy crap.

So let’s get this particular iteration of the Interpocalypse kickin’.

• Seems like a lot of comics are finding their way to mobile devices these days — Howard Tayler, in his recent Fleen interview, talked about an iPhone app for his stuff; I’m getting hit with regular press releases about somebody named “Tyrese” who’s created a comic about an asskicking vigilante who takes no guff (man, where do these original concepts come from) that resembles his creator to a startling degree and is now releasing it via iTunes as a — gahhh — motion comic (insert Clutch Cargo joke here). You got your LOLBOTS, you got your Clickwheel, and now it appears you will have your Erf:

  Erfworld: The Battle for Gobwin Knob is soon coming to mobiles in a partnership with Robot Comics.

  Originally published online under the Creative Commons license, Erfworld is today one of the most popular and heavily trafficked webcomic sites, supported by its own wiki consisting of 5000+ fan-created articles about the Erfworld universe, including a complete single panel annotated archive of the comic that would make a Grant Morrison fan proud.

  Awesome — now I know why the text-only “summer updates” are still going.

  I kid, I kid … the storytelling and world-building that goes on in the “novelization” of Erworld is really quite good. But I want to see the pictures again, dammit.

  Things that made me ask questions — is this the first let’s-get-comics-on-handhelds development group that’s developing for less-widespread devices like Android phones, Nintendo DSi, and Kindle? And is the first development of a complete story (140+ pages) originally formatted for full-screen viewing, to get redone for widely-varying but mostly small screens? At least, that’s what I’m taking from the Robot Comics self-description, ’cause if all they do is shrink down the pages, that’s gotta be one unsatisfying reading experience. As they say, we shall be watching their career with great interest.

• Know what rocks? Anders Loves Maria is back from hiatus (which included a pretty nasty flulike bug colonizing creator Rene Engström). Know what sucks? It’s almost over:
  

  I’m back at work now and ready to give you my full attention, hopefully uninterrupted until the story’s conclusion, some 30 pages or so into the future.

  Okay, let me rephrase that — I am thrilled that Engström is telling the story she wanted to tell, with a definite beginning, middle, and end (and enough flashbacks to spin the heads of the LOST writing staff). I’m not happy that this means that sometime, probably by the end of the year, that I will not have more ALM to look forward to. To have them go on forever, like a soap opera that long outlives its original characters, would be terrible. But to not have Engström’s comics is possibly worse. Here’s hoping that she already knows what the next project will be once ALM wraps (diary comics! diary comics!) and will be ready to launch quickly because Daddy needs his medicine.

• Know what the awesomest part of the recent Dinosaur Comics site redesign is? Blogposts are now tied to comic updates, so I can permalink things like the title of Ryan North’s upcoming ACM address to the folks that made HAL:
  

  So hey what are you doing October 16th-18th 2009? If you’re like me you’re coming to the (free!) ACM Reflections | Projections conference in Urbana, IL! I’m giving a talk! In fact, I’ve got the last talk of the day, entitled “GUYS, LOOKS LIKE IT’S WACKY TIME”, in all caps, just like that. Will it truly be wacky time? Yes, absolutely. You should come!

  Please somebody video this so we can all see what WACKY TIME WITH RYAN looks like. I bet it looks like a kiddie TV show on twenty-eight hours of no sleep!

For those looking for the Howard Tayler interview that was promised yesterday, it’s coming. In the meantime, consider the following, please.

• Speaking of Tayler, changes o’ plenty over at Blank Label’s homepage in the past few weeks. Over roughly the past ten-twelve days, we saw several comics failing to update daily; Paul Southworth’s Ugly Hill leaving the strip lineup and list of comics at the top of the page but not the “Brady Bunch” thumbnail set; the same for Paul Taylor’s Waspi Square; the addition of a link for new member Dave Reddick’s Legend of Bill but pointing to a not-yet active placeholder on the page; and today, the return of Steve Troop (who, by the way, is one of the creators interviewed in that new Calvin and Hobbes sorta-bio)’s Melonpool.

  We at Fleen are have not yet determined if these are programming issues or membership shakeups, but one might reasonably assume the latter: Southworth, at least, has launched his new strip wil Bill Barnes, which would complicate the act of keeping the strip at BLC because BLC is a different kind of collective; to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only one out there that merges the revenues of its members.

  Other high-profile collectives like Halfpixel or Dumbrella are really just a common brand name (aka A bunch of lowlife emo-candyraver drug-addled web-cartoonists I’m loosely associated with. We have a sort of mutual non-aggression pact.) without intermixed finances from things like ads. We may be seeing BLC transforming itself from a corporatized collective (CoCo?) to just the regular kind. Or it could be bugs in the code — I have not received definitive information from anybody in a position to know, and I imagine we’ll all find out what the deal is soon enough anyway. Lesson to take away: webcomics journalism is hard.

  Also, if you’re going to have a collective, think about your lineup changes carefully and always compare them against the most important yardstick of all — Will this make Gary change his morning browsing habits? If so, it’s a bad change because Gary is a creature of habit and his brain takes a while to wake up.

• 24 Hour Comic Day is coming up this weekend! So far, Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub seem to be setting up a Dallas branch of the effort, with KC Green coming into town to join in on the fun. My guess is that all three of their twitterfeeds are going to hilarious once the sleep deprivation sets in. Who else is planning on tempting the gods of caffeine and madness?
• New Yorkers and those who love them: the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, as part of their regular Thursday-night event series, will have a panel discussion tomorrow evening on The Comics Press, including friend o’ webcomics Heidi MacDonald, along with Aaron McQuade & Evie Nagy and Douglas Wolk. 7:00pm at the museum, $5 general admission, free for members.
• Also starting tomorrow (and running through the weekend), the Marbella International Film Festival (that would be Spain) will include in its screening schedule a short based on Doug Wilson’s webcomic, K-9 Lives. In honor of the screening, I’ve been trawling Wilson’s archive (only about 100 updates) of wordless comics. The navigation’s a bit of a pain (driven by drop-down list, be forewarned), but the wordless story of a dog with a cat attached to its buttocks is more entertaining than anything describable by that story hook has a right to be.

‘Cause — you know, sometimes things happen all at once, and sometimes I’m scrambling for stories.

• SPX roundups are available from the usual suspects, with notes from exhibitors ranging (paraphrasing slightly here) from It rocked to It really rocked and I sold all the stuff I brought. Sorry to have missed it — will do my best to attend next year (although apparently, I was there in spirit).
• A’ course, one of the highlights of SPX would be the Ignatz Awards, and Fleen congratulates all of the winners, but particularly Cat Garza for his Outstanding Online Comic, Year of the Rat. Video here if you like, but it appears that there was no gorilla — I’m not sure that I can ever love the Ignatz Awards again without a guy in a gorilla suit !
• Along with the Ignatzen, the Shuster Awards (for outstanding work by Canadian creators — anybody calling them “The Eisners, eh?” will be beaten) happened over the weekend as well; congratulations to the very talented Cameron Stewart for taking the presitigious Webcomics/Bandes Dessinées Web award for Sin Titulo (which you should be reading if you’re not, but if you’re not, don’t start with the latest installment, which will melt your face off), and the very talented Kean Soo for taking the just as prestigious Comics for Kids/Bandes Dessinées pour Enfants award for Jellaby (leaving open the possibility of a followup win next year for the second volume of Jellaby’s adventures).
• Lastly, this weekend saw a confab in Las Vagrus, Nevadruh (organized by Chad Carpenter of Tundra and Bill Kellogg, a marketer) on the topic of success in cartooning. Alan Gardner posted summaries of the presentations, of which one stands out for readers of this blog:
  

  Howard Tayler, the creator of The [viz.] Schlock Mercenary was the last speaker and the lone representative of the webcomic free model. [emphasis original]

  By my count, there were nine speakers, which means that webcomics achieved a record high representation at this gathering, but still — one? Of all the people that have started strips and found success in the past decade, how many have quit their day jobs and gone full-time in print as opposed to web?

  I’m not saying, Print sucks, web is the only model to success! — I am decidedly not saying that — but I think that if you’re going to talk about how to find/keep success in a world where print is rapidly receding, it would be helpful to find more than one person from the (let’s be kind and call it) non-traditional world, for surely many of them have followed different paths and would have different lessons to impart. Particularly because the first sentence in the announcement of said seminar read-and-I-quote:

  Have you ever wanted to know how to succeed in the world of newspaper and/or web comics?

  Just sayin’.