So, Child’s Play — looks like I jumped the gun in reporting their totals for the year. Today brings what will likely be the official cutoff of the 2008 seasonal effort, with a total of 1.43 million frickin’ dollars, which well exceeds last year’s take (when the worldwide economy wasn’t being totally bitchcakes). Yikes.

In case you feel like thanking Messers Krahulick and Holkins, you can find them in three weeks time at New York Comic Con, along with such other luminaries as Scott Kurtz, Brad Guigar (somebody remind me to bug him for details about the rumored Phables print collection), various Dumbrellites, Comics Bakers, Slingshot Girl (who I hear is to illustrate one of the stories in the long-rumored Machine of Death collection), a band of fugitive Canadians with a cool ride, and (major thrill for me here) Karl Kerschl and friends:

If you’re in or around the area, please come by and say hello. I’ll be doing sketches, selling T-Shirts and prints and giving away stickers. And probably wandering around a lot. Hey, it’s New York! Even the frigid winter weather can’t keep me from exploring Manhattan.

I’ll also be sharing table space with Cameron Stewart, compatriot and author of Sin Titulo. And if we’re really lucky, Ramón Pérez and Andy Belanger might loiter around long enough to sketch something. That’s half of txcomics right there!

So, wisdom-of-the-crowds time — who else is going to be there that I’ve missed?

Major redesign today at what is now merely “Starslip” without the “Crisis” — complete with new, sleeker character designs (they already appear to be more facially expressive), which only makes sense since they’re in a completely different universe and all. Now we just have to wonder what the big, three-glowy-bits thing at the bottom of Friday’s strip was. It kind of looks like a cross between a Starslip arch, the 2001 space fetus, and one of the Bone cousins.

So despite the fact that I told you all to go to Danielle Corsetto’s New Jersey signing this past Saturday, I’d completely spaced on it myself because I’m an idiot. Until, that is, lazing around my home on Saturday early afternoon, reading Jennie Breeden‘s The Devil’s Panties volume 2 and hitting page 183 where Jennie recounts meeting Danielle at a convention and getting her picture taken with the giant McPedro.

Crap! I exclaimed, and quickly finished a number of household chores I’d been putting off. Then I raced up to Kenilworth, and had a grand time with Danielle until the snow forced the signing to conclude early; if you tried to come by after about 4:30, Danielle feels really bad about it.

Because I forgot my camera (cf: idiot, above), I didn’t get any pictures with Ms Corsetto, and because I already had her two books signed & sketched, nothing new there either. But because Ms Breeden fortuitously left room at the bottom of page 183, Ms Corsetto was kind enough to do a sketch in that space. You’ll have to pick up a copy of DPvol2 to figure out why cartoon Danielle is shocked at her own previous behavior.

Confidential to RS3 in MA: Happy Birthday, and also apparently to PM in Sweden. In fact, Happy Birthday to each and every webcomicker — much like race horses are all assumed to have a birthday of 1 January, I’m declaring 12 January the Official Birthday of webcomickers who are not Jon Rosenberg. Hooray!

We’ll come back to some of it tomorrow. For now, a portion of what broke over the weekend:

• Matt Boyd of Three Panel Soul did an interview with MC Frontalot, the rapper laureate of webcomics.
• Once upon a time, I asked Jon Rosenberg why, if he was going to do Goats four days a week (instead of the more usual three or five), was it Monday – Thursday? Why not Mon-Tue-Thur-Fri, so that the three-day drought between the last installment of one week and the first of the next was only two days? His answer: I drink on Thursday nights, rendering Friday comics unlikely at best.

  Welp, he’s got a house and a child now, and is prepping up three books for release with a major publishing house, and he’s no longer drinking only on Thursdays. As a result of not wanting to die, he’s been forced to cut back to a three days a week schedule, which is really a bargain when you consider that I originally asked my question (v.s.) in the era of single-row, black and white strips instead of the multi-row, color extravaganzas we get these days.

• Hey, do you like things that are fancy? How about webcomics that have new, more functional site designs, including improved archiving tools and resurrected forums? Then check out the new/improved Theater Hopper, which features all of these (and more!) as of this morning.
• Creator sighting! Danielle Corsetto will be bringing girls and slingshots to the wilds of suburban New Jersey on Saturday, and the arctic hinterlands of Canada but a week later. Seeing as how one of these signings is only about 20 minutes up the road, I’ll be doing my best to drop by.
• Of course, if I miss Danielle on Saturday, it’ll be just about a month before she’s back this way — New York Comic Con (having tried a pleasant Spring weekend and decided it was entirely too pleasant) returns to its February timeslot this year.

  Now, this page has griped in the past about various aspects of how NYCC has been run, but I’ll give them this bit of unqualified praise: last night I got my press credentials for the show with absolutely zero hassle. It was the easiest credentialling I’ve ever been through, driven almost entirely by the question, Have you been here as Press before? with an affirmative answer resulting in Okay, here you go. It took all of two minutes, and every big con needs to adopt this model.

  Keeping with my current very good mood regarding NYCC, I’ll note that webcomics will likely have a pretty significant presence, with the lovely Ms Corsetto, Comics Bakery, various Dumbrellites, at least some Halfpixellians, a Canadian or two, and a couple of obscure guys from Seattle all rumored to be in attendance. The NYCC home page also features an advert from Disney’s children’s book group featuring a purple guy with webcomicky roots.

  Programming for the Con isn’t up yet, but the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference taking place the day before looks promising, with the first session devoted to “Comics on the Web”, which sounds a mite familiar. See you there?

Dammit, I suck. The news of the new Webcomic Idol entirely slipped by me:

This years winner of the Webcomic Idol contest is Simulated Comic Product, congratulations and welcome to Bomb Shelter Comics.

As for Shi Long Pang, you left all of our judges very impressed. From the way the comic is executed, to your ability to incorporate constructive criticism into your strips so quickly. You put up one heck of a fight.

But at least I won’t miss a second milestone. Ladies and gentlemens, we’re coming up on 1000 updates of The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge. From Grinder Mike Payne

[The Challenge] began February 28, 2005 with 56 contestants. On December 26, 2008, the nine of us remaining in the hunt for the prize money will hit our 1,000th update.

This means different things to different creators–I mean, Brad Guigar, Andrew Rothery and Ryan Smith were doing their comics before the contest started, and Guigar and Smith ended those comics during the contest only to start up new ones without missing a day. Edward J. Grug III has done many different stories as his daily entries and is now the regular artist for T Campbell’s Sketchies, while I’ve been posting two pages a day in my continuing storyline and am therefore approaching 2,000 pages of comics!

Holy Crap. Seriously, what more needs to be said?

Amazing how one thought leads to another somtimes.

• After an absence of nearly a year, Maura came back to Clango having lost some weight. Yet today she appears to be back to her old self (which make no mistake, was a horrible, horrible person). While it’s true that Rich Stevens is capricious and lives by whim, he doesn’t call do-over with his characters without a lot more logic than what we’ve seen so far today. I’m thinking evil twin or evil robot. Or evil robot twin.
• Speaking of Rich Stevens, he’s been getting some merch play on TV, along with fellow creators Jon Rosenberg and Ryan North; courtesy of North’s blogpost [no permalink]:
  

  I also wanted to thank everyone who let me know that Dinosaur Comics stuff is showing up in the background of the new season of The IT Crowd! There’s tons of webcomics stuff there if you keep your eyes peeled: I spotted Rich and Jon and myself and that was only in the first five minutes! If you get a chance to watch this show, I really recommend it. Last season’s opening episode (“The Work Outing”) was a perfect 22 minutes of television, I think.

  And Jeph Jacques apparently sighted Stevens’s Bacon is a Vegetable shirt on basic cable last night. This is the year webcomics storms the breaches and topples the dominant vendors of legible clothing from their mall-fattened thrones, my friends.

• Speaking of TV, the Too Art for TV gallery show kicks off tomorrow evening in Brooklyn, featuring Fleen Fave™ Carly Monardo. Alas, life prevents me from attending, so if you’re there, tell Carly I said hi.
• Speaking of people who are cool, do you like things that are fancy and durable? Do you like helping creators and children? Looking for a last-minute Holiday gift? Then check out the stores at Templar, AZ (where Spike has a blowout sale going — Templar vol 1 is going for as little as five bucks!) and Planet Saturday (where Monty & Kelli Stevens Kane are donating a dollar for every book sold to provide health care to uninsured children). Note for non-USA American readers: Here in Freedomonia, uninsured means No health care for you, so suffer you poor bastard. Our system is built this way for reasons of not being stinky communists and this makes us right with God. Just so we’re clear. Depending on your creator’s shipping deadline, you’re running shy on days to get your swag before your holiday of choice, so get crackin’.

Although to be fair, I love Dylan Meconis and Erika Moen more. I mean, they do awesome comics like Family Man, Bite Me, and DAR, while you’re the sort that hangs around reading my stuff which quite frankly brings your taste into question.

Anyways. Dylan and Erika are doing a live broadcast later today, and will be answering questions from readers. I’m on EMT duty tonight and can’t participate, so y’all need to step up and make sure it’s the best livecast ever (what I said about your taste above? That was totally about the guy three IPs down from you).

The fun kicks off at 7:30pm Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8), at The Erika Moen Show (brought to you by Ustream), and will run for an hour or so.

Considering that I’m not really a gamer, it’s a bit peculier how very funny I find Penny Arcade. In fact, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins could each kick me repeatedly in the beanbag, and it still wouldn’t counterbalance the intense pleasure I get from contemplating carrot cake soup.

When you’re in the position of being arguably the most influential webcomic in a rapidly growing medium, when your efforts keep (at last report) a dozen-odd people on payroll, and you reach a milestone like ten years of updates, it’s time to kick back and celebrate bad-ass style:

Also, Penny Arcade turns 10 years old today. We’re going to the Olive Garden!

-Gabe out

I’m reminded of a blog post by Ed Roberston of Barenaked Ladies in a tour blog — a friend from back home was hanging with him in LA for a few days, and had apparently expected a non-stop whirl of parties, playmates, and papparazi. Instead, it was evenings of pizza and Playstation, afternoons on the golf course, and a final summation: You guys are the worst millionaire rock stars ever. Jerry and Mike, thank you for being the worst millionaire rock stars of webcomics, and thanks for the laughs.

In other news:

• Ever notice how you never see Howard Tayler and Jerry Holkins in the same place at the same time? Mighty supsicious if’n you ask me. Anyway, “Howard” gave a keynote address in August to the Utah Open Source Conference on “The Free Content Business Model”, which for “Tayler” means webcomicking as a business with actual numbers. A 33 minute long video of the session is now available, and likely of interest to anybody that’s trying to make internet scribbling their livelihood.
• New interview with Greg Carter at Palace in the Sky Webcomic News, on the whys and wherefores of his vampire epic. Also, Carter, Gina Biggs, and James Burns will be on the webcomics panel at 4pm on Saturday at Altanta Supercon.
• URL alert! A site redesign means that Krishna Sadasivam’s PC Weenies has shifted from a .net to a .com address. Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Did you notice this bit at The AV Club, about web features that made the jump to books? It’s in the writeup of Garfield Minus Garfield:

So many webcomics eventually get collected into book form that we decided to leave webcomics as a whole off this list […]

Now I may be a hack pseduo-journalist, but I remember hearing once that in a newspapery context, you don’t use a term without defining it, unless you’re absolutely certain that every member of your audience knows what you’re talking about. I guess that means that we’re ubiquitous now. Keen.

Also ubiquitous on the internets: Porn. Stick with me, I’m going somewhere with this. There’s a particularly schizophrenic approach to sexuality in this country — culture high and low utilizes sex as its lingua franca, but we’re taught from a young age that sex is bad, dirty, nasty, and if done outside of the sacred bond of marriage, will blow your legs off. And judging by the joyless parade of moisture that characterizes most porn, I’m not surprised.

True story: I once stayed in a hotel with a flaw in its in-room movie system; near as I could tell, anytime anybody on my floor ordered a movie, it showed up on one of five channels on my TV (my fellow travellers have terrible taste, by the way — that many people paying for Pauly Shore movies?). I could generally catch about 45 minutes of a feature before somebody else entered an order and displaced the current offering, but all the porn movies were on the same channel. No displacement there — on average, eight minutes after the feature started, the screen would go gray and stay that way until the next order came in. My interpretation — whoever ordered the porn was done with it and turned the channel off; insert obligatory David Bowie lyrics here.

But the real punchline? That major hotel chain, family-run by nice, God-fearing people, almost certainly makes more money off porn than anybody named Hefner or Flynt. And it’s not even fun to watch, much less amusing or (heaven forfend) funny.

Which, in my typically roundabout way, is why I was so happy to receive the following announcement the other day:

Beginning November 15th 2008, Slipshine.net and Studio Zoe, in conjunction with Studio Foglio, are proud to announce that we will be featuring for all of our customers, the works of Xxxenophile by artist and writer Phil Foglio. Xxxenophile is a six volume masterpiece originally released between 1988 and 2000, and has been acclaimed for it’s skillful storytelling as well as beautiful artwork. Xxxenophile has also been nominated for an Eisner award – a great honor for any book in the industry.

These books, brought to you by the wonderful folks at Studio Foglio, will soon be available for a digital purchase at www.studiofoglio.com.

For those of you not familiar with it, XXXenophile was an occasional comic book series by Phil Foglio, a gentleman of the highest calibre, who knows that legitimately funny porn can only improve one’s life (indeed, reports abound of Foglio wearing a “Gentleman Pornographer” nametag on the convention circuit during XXXenophile’s run).

If you’re of the oh-no-I-couldn’t variety, just consider the covers that Foglio designed for the series — my favorite featured a mostly-naked young woman lounging in bed covered in model skycrapers and pagodas while her eager young paramour zipped himself into a Godzilla suit. The imagination would certain lead you from that image towards the prurient, but only after a hearty laugh-chuckle. Hell, I’ll go so far as to say that no matter how serious Foglio gets, the sweet release of laughter is only a page or too away (and if you think that the faces you make during the other kind of sweet release aren’t worthy of a smirk or two, I’ve got a bridge to sell you). Go check out XXXenophile — it’s good, clean (dirty) fun.

• Speaking of triple-Xs, Xaviar Xerexes would like you to know that he’s got a domain up for grabs:
  

  Fright Night began as a big cross-promotional webcomic effort in 1999 and continued in that vein for a couple of years (I took over the organization of it in 2000). Later on, I used the site for “events” sponsored by ComixTalk. More recently it’s been fairly dormant.

  I am never going to have time to properly use the URL and I’d love to see someone else use it. The only hitch is I want to see the existing archives of past events stay up at the URL but otherwise I’m open to ideas on its future use.

  Follow the link for your chance at stewardship.

• Who doesn’t like gallery shows chock full o’ animatin’ talent? Communists and Nazis, that’s who. And even they would love what class act Carly Monardo‘s up to:
  

  The show, called “Too Art For TV 3“, is curated by Venture Bros. Color Supervisor/BG Painter Liz Artinian, and features non-industry work from people in the animation biz. ([website] still under construction; artist bios are in the process of being edited).

  Fleen will be doing its (our? my? gotta work out these pronouns sometime … ) best to be there and bring you a report. In the meantime, make your plans for Friday, Dec 5 at 6pm.

The holiday (or, if you prefer, Holiday) season is upon us, which means it’s time to find gifts for those on your lists. It’s too soon to say how the ongoing brand dilution is affecting webcomics, but I’m cautiously optimistic. During previous economic downturns, movies, comics, and other relatively cheap entertainment did pretty well — golden age, like.

Today, movies and comics are pretty pricey (although I haven’t gone out and adjusted for inflation or anything, I have a feeling that today’s $10.50 movie ticket is more expensive than the 10 cent matinee with cartoon, serial short, newsreels, and a feature) and big-name comics are likewise trying to support creators in a modest manner, which neccesitates a dollars-per-page cover price that’s a little on the high side. But webcomics — they are mostly free and feature creators worthy of your support, especially when you find designs that would be so awesome to have a loved one unwrap on a religiously-signficant morning (tree optional) and wear to services.

• If you feel like getting something a little more … all-ages appropriate? — there are still options. For all that he seems like a cynic with a crippling coffee addiction, Rich Stevens actually has one of the fluffiest hearts I’ve ever known; case in point: video kitties out the wazoo. There is so much concentrated cute here that I’d get diabetes just from the trailer, were it not for the presence of Hitlercat about five seconds in. But rest assured, when that kitten murders us all, it’ll be adorable. I’ll see your adorable kittens Mr Stevens, and raise you greyhound puppies.
• For me, one of the highlights of the last couple Flight anthologies has been the Igloohead and Treehead offerings by Scott Campbell, who you may recognize from the new Frontalot CD cover, or (if you’re in San Francisco) the Imaginary Friends show running at Gallery 1988 (which also stars fellow Flighter Israel Sanchez and nightmare monger Andy Bell). Some new photos from the show are up at Bell’s LiveJournal, and they look great.
• Speaking of the Left Coast, and art shows therein, James Kochalka will be bringing paintings and even a few songs to Giant Robot LA for “Little Paintings 3” on Saturday the 15th at 6:30 pm. The paintings in question are mostly 2″ x 2″, with a few up to 6″ x 6″ (for those of you outside America, that’s about 5 cm and 15 cm, respectively), with the show running until 10 December.
• Finally, Best of the Year lists are starting to show up — Tucker Stone kicks off the annual crop of webcomics tallies at Comixology. I particularly noted item #4 on his “best of” list: Kate Beaton, anything, and everything, by Kate Beaton. Considering that she doesn’t do a comic, per se, it should tell you something about the quality of her work that it gets recognized as often as it does. I can pretty much promise that nobody besides Stone will completely agree with this Year’s Best list, so let’s get bickering.

Christopher Wright’s been at the webcomics game for a long time — Help Desk started on a now-defunct computing website more than twelve years ago, and has been running on its own site for the past nine. In that time, life has interrupted the strip on occasion, and it looks as if it may do so again:

[T]he summary is that I’m running out of money, and as a result I may have to take down EvisceratiNet (eviscerati.net, ubersoft.net, evsicerati.org) for a while until I can afford to resume publishing. There are ways out of this predicament–a sudden influx of money from enthusiastic supporters, a sudden offer of a decent job, a sudden winning lottery ticket–but given the current economic climate I’m thinking the lottery ticket is my best shot.

The full piece is an enlightening read — Wright isn’t begging for support, just laying out the economic facts about how he presents us with Help Desk (and Kernel Panic, and Old Skool Webcomic, and now PCTown, not to mention the editorial sites under the Eviscerati umbrella); basically, he pays to provide these items to us for free, and via that distribution to get things off his chest that need off-getting. Think Thomas Paine with a grudge against Microsoft. And the thing about Paine and his philosophical descendents? You really can’t get them over the urge to shout from the metaphorical rooftops for very long:

If I’m forced to shut down the server due to lack of funds to keep it going, it won’t be the end of the world. This was the risk I took when I made the decisions I did so very long ago, and when you take risks you need to be willing to face those consequences. When I have money again, Help Desk will come back — and hopefully you will as well.

Fleen wishes Wright the best of luck, and should the worst happen, we’ll be waiting with bated breath for his triumphant return to editorializing and muckraking.

• In other news, did y’all in England know there’s a show on this weekend? The one-day-only Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds runs on Saturday the 15th, with the likes of Lil’ Johnny A and Liz Cusack as invited guests, and a whole mess o’ exhibitors including a cat charity. US comic shows get past-their-prime Playmates and Hooters calendar girls, UK shows get cats in need of help — I know which one I’d rather have a booth next to.
• Finally, ’tis the season and all that. Childs Play 2008 kicked off five days ago, and as of this writing has already cleared the $100,000 mark. The economy can be as much of a bitch as it wants to be, and the better angels of our natures will still prevail. Well done, and keep up the good work.