So Chris Onstad made it to the New York Metro area on Friday evening; I had never met the gentleman before (unsurprising, as he keeps a relatively low profile, with even photos of the man being Pynchonesque in their rarity until this year), and found him a capital fellow. I have only one regret about the entire affair, which we will get to presently.

My buddy Brett and I met up with Chris Hastings, David McGuire, and Rick Marshall Willenholly at the bar next door to Rocketship. Our intrepid crew can be seen in this photo from the Rocketship blog report.

As it turns out, the line would wind through the comic shop, into the back hallways, and through a door back into the bar by the time we were done — Onstad, faced with a signing line more than five hours long, wisely fortified himself with all that the very skilled bartenders had at hand.

Finding out that Onstad was signing for five hours really puts the two and a half we spent in line in perspective — in part, it was so long because he took the time to greet every person that came up to him, shake their hand, and talk with them for a minute or two. For that time, the fan in question was his entire focus, which is a remarkably kind act on his part. Having obtained a sketch in my copy of The Great Outdoor Fight, I walked the line backwards and estimated that 150 people still remained at that time.

Things that stuck out during the evening:

• Asking Onstad about his interview with Steve “Ratboy” Inskeep, I was told that it was “weird”. The taping took place at 8am with Onstad in a west coast studio, and inexplicably there was nothing to drink. There was no coffee, nothing in the studio … all I could think was, ‘There’s a warm Sapporo in my car … let’s rock.’ Weird or not, it was great to hear what Ray and Beef’s voices sound like.
• Onstad drew a lot of Roast Beefs, but I chose Mr Bear, based on his self-evident badassery of the past few weeks. Here’s where the one regret comes in — had there been a light turnout and plenty of time to talk without holding up the line, I definitely would have asked for Ray ripping off Cody Travis’s face. But only after I got home did I even think that I should have asked for a picture of Ramses Luther Smuckles. Next time for sure.
• Standing in line just behind Hastings, I was able to observe what two webcomics pros are like when they admire each others work, meet for the first time, and come to the near-instant decision that they need to work on a project togther.
• McGuire has a terrific new giveaway to promote Gastrophobia — a sticker of an entire strip. Stickers I’ve seen plenty, but I think this is the first one I’ve collected with a full story in just a few square inches. Very clever.
• There had been hopes to meet up with Magnolia Porter, but alas we missed each other.
• Onstad confirmed to Hastings the answer to one of the great enduring mysteries of webcomics! Namely, the person in the gorilla suit at SPX07 has now been positively identified! As suspected in some quarters, the gorilla is a prominent webcomicker! Contacted via email for comment, the faux-simian muttered something about getting away with it, if not for those darn kids !

On an unrelated, but no less important note, Fleen wishes a very happy birthday to Meredith Gran. It’s absolutely astonishing that you are only 24 years old and have already produced a body of such good work going back nearly a decade.

I think it’s officially on the way to being a movement now: last week, R Stevens and Sam Brown held an experiment. Noting that there are no longer many shared cultural experiences in a world of thousands of channels and easily-accessed internet porn, they declared that at 8pm EDT on 23 October, everybody should listen to Michael Jackson’s Thriller all the way through.

Time for the second instance of shared culture: tomorrow night, 10pm EDT, it’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars by David Bowie, and you can tweet along with Sam ‘n’ Rich. Give this a few more weeks, and we’ll be talking “watching Apollo 11 land” levels of worldwide shared experience.

In other news:

• Following up on our thoughts about the blurring line between webcomics and episodic games, part two of On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness drops today.
• Just over a year ago, Ryan Estrada and John Campbell launched the Cartoon Commune from Mexico. They’ve moved on from the country in question, but the urge to communally cartoon rises strong, and Estrada has announced Cartoon Commune 2.0 for all your quick illustration needs, with a stellar array of talents just waiting to draw for you.
• Finally, as we hurtle headlong towards the spookiest day of the year — filled with ghosts, goblins, witches, sexy soldiers, sexy devils, sexy catgirls, sexy cops, sexy Ghostbusters, sexy barristas, sexy devils, sexy pirates, and God help us, sexy Alan Greenspan — okay, maybe it’s not so spooky. Unless you’re in Detroit, where Eric Millikin, wrangler of monstrous images extraordinaire, is going to be part of a show of macabre art. The disturbing images of the damned that will haunt your dreams and waking hours until the sweet release of death fun kicks in tomorrow night, at Tangent Gallery/Hasting St. Ballroom. Head over after you finish listening to Ziggy.

We’ll have to see how timely updates can be. In the meantime, there’s a few things to talk about.

• I know that just last week I mentioned that some day ten years of webcomickin’ wouldn’t be that common any longer, and here we have another. But somebody check me on this — would yesterday’s American Elf tenth anniversary strip be the first webcomic that went for ten years on a daily basis? I think it might. While we look around to see if there’s another, please enjoy the AmElf tributes that James Kochalka will be running for the next week or so. First up: if the Elf hung out with Drinky Crow, courtesy of Tony Millionaire.
• Is it just me, or has Tatsuya Ishida become the sharpest sometimes-politcal cartoonist on the internet? He’s been doing a series of strips addressing the current political/economic climate that have been both brutally funny and devastatingly on-target, and done so with the handicap of fitting an existing cast members (with existing personality traits) into his commentary, instead of having the relative luxury of just making up one-shot characters to fit the gag o’ the day. Yesterday, he turned that eye towards the web/print divide, and lo it was good.
• Hey, APE y’all. San Francisco is beautiful this time of year, and it’s not like you had anything better to do the weekend after Halloween except lie around in a sugar coma/hangover (depending on how you celebrate the holiday). See how many webcomics types you can find on the list of exhibitors (not on the list but to be found on the grounds: Meredith Gran). And tell me you don’t want to go see what’s on display from:
  

  The World of Jack T Chick [booth] 564

  Yeah, I thought so.

• Finally, we’ve got a pulp/adventure type comic debuting at Kitty Hawk; much like Freak Angels, we’ll be getting multiple full pages per update, the better to let the story stretch its legs. Even better, the site debuted with a retroarchive going back to the end of July, so there’s enough story to get you hooked. Contacted for comment, co-creator Vincent LaBate promised “controversial sound bites”, which we at Fleen are taking to mean that LaBate is a Man of Opinions that you should be loathe to miss.

  Hop on over and enjoy the gorgeous pictures (there’s something very subtly Alex Robinsonish about the faces that really suits the characters — they look like very distinct people), then stay for the immersive story; aside from one somewhat anarchronistic ninja reference (but hey — webcomics), this one looks like a keeper.

First of all, everybody knows that it’s 24 Hour Comics Day this weekend, right? And best part is, you don’t have to travel because it’s wherever you are.

• Hey, speaking of 24HCD, remember that guy that invented it? Knows bunch of stuff about [web]comics, drove around and talked about it for a while? Over the next few weeks, he’ll be surfacing in Bowling Green, OH, The Bronx, and Miami.
• This New Yorker/webcartooner thing is starting to become a bigger thing. On the heels of the Sandwich Duel comes the Cartoon Off between Farley Katz and Randall Munroe. Topics:
  1. The Internet, as envisioned by the elderly
  2. String Theory
  3. 1999
  4. Your favorite animal eating your favorite food

  Below the entries (in a somewhat wonky Flash interface — it kept truncating the bottom of the cartoons in my browser), Katz has an interview with Munroe on life, xkcd, and stuff in general. In the meantime, we at Fleen anxiously await whatever rivalries Drew Dernavich and Matthew Diffee will provoke with prominent webcomickers.

• Finally, we’re due for a new voice in the webcomics information dispersal game today. Over at The Daily Cartoonist, Alan Gardner will be running a weekly roundup of news from our corner of the medium. The first entry hasn’t launched as of this writing, but when it does, I’ll bet you’ll be able to find it here. Start hitting refresh on your browsers … now!

Hey kids, are you going to SPX? I’m not, dammit, but that shouldn’t stop you from checking out the funnest couple of days in indy-comics (plus, last year they did this chocolate-dipping thing at the party after the Ignatz Awards that was really cool). Stuff to keep an eye out for:

• Kate Beaton, who reminds us that history isn’t just boring and dead, is bringing her first mini to the show. It’s chock full o’ the history and misbehaving Founding Fathers. PS Kate I still want to buy the original of this comic from you. Do it now while the American dollar is still worth something!
• Raina Telgemeier‘s got a new minicomic about teaching kids to make comics which looks freakin’ beautiful. Also, something about babysitting and clubs? I dunno, I don’t see that one going very far.
• Also a stack o’ moustaches. Remember, Willrad for all your rad will needs (and shirts with squid).

Dammit, I put in my Achewood order two weeks ago. Free 7th anniversary shirt until the 11th with $50 order.

Oh please oh please oh please let this agenda be on the discussion list for tonight’s debate

NAZIS, that’s who! It’s time for Wonder Woman Day III, a benefit for domestic violence shelters in Portland (Oregon) and Flemington (New Jersey). As he did last year, Paul Taylor of Wapsi Square is contributing a piece to the art auction. What, Wonder Woman isn’t allowed to wake up with her coffee and fluffy slippers? I particularly like that this WW has the arms to support some serious buttkickery. If webcomickry feels like turning this into a meme, the organizers are apparently accepting submissions for about two more weeks.

• Fleen noticed that three years of doctoring and ninjaing were marked on Monday; we would have run notice of the anniversary yesterday, but there was this big BANDWIDTH EXCEDED thing going on. Still, the entire decision to color Dr McNinja could have been made solely to set up this splash page, and it would totally have been worth it.
• Speaking of DrMcN, Kent Archer, inker extraordinaire, is taking commissions.
• Hey, do you like your stories of time travel, grad students, and wacky antics mixed with a rubbery-limbed, Saturday morning cartoon art style? You might wanna check out Chronillogical, which is at a natural jumping-on point in the story and doesn’t have too deep of an archive to get caught up on.
• Mr Oblivious: It’s like a widescreen, silent movie version of The Far Side, and something about the art reminds me of Roger Langridge. It’s worth the occasional checking-out, if you enjoy the laugh-chuckles.

So let’s try to find some fun where we can.

I should have written about this one yesterday, but I didn’t want it to get lost in all the other stuff. The opera made about this Dinosaur Comic is going to be performed in public. A guerilla group of musicians named Liederwölfe will perform the song of the sinister raccoons at 10pm this Friday, October 3rd, as part of the Pop Montreal independent music festival. So if you should find yourself in the vicinity of 30 Ste-Catherine Ouest, Montreal, and can afford a ticket price of Pay What You Can, you should be there.

Interviews!

• Rick Marshall talks with Sam Brown, who explodes dogs for your amusement.
• Von Allen of The Road To God Knows … talks to Jennifer Contino at The Pulse (Ms Contino is talking to lots of webcomickers these days, and we at Fleen wish to encourage her in this direction).
• Tracy White of Traced (and Ignatz nominee) talks to The XX-Man at ComixTalk. For good measure, White has turned the first Traced comic ever posted into an animation … time to remember your first time GETTING DRUNK.

If you didn’t happen to hear it, a 7:19 long broadcast interview with Achewood’s Chris Onstad is up at the NPR website. Highlights:

• About a minute in, 13.2 million people heard Steve “Ratboy” Inskeep make an oblique reference to cell phone nuts
• Starting around the 2:30 mark, Onstad reads four panels from page 29 (also here) in the voices of Ray and Roast Beef (!)
• An 11 page excerpt is to be found on the website of the highly-respected news organization with the disclaimer:
  

  (Please note that some users might find the language of this excerpt inappropriate.)

Lots of other things today, too.

• Ace Fleen contributor Jeff Lowrey sends us photos of Baltimore Comic-Con with this missive attached:
  

  Don’t really have a bad cosplayer photo, sorry. Best I could have done was a Harley Quinn with a bad camel toe … or a male Green Lantern also with a bad camel toe.

  I think we’re all glad that Jeff spared us. Anyway, check out the Halfpixel dudes (with Jinxlets and without), Danielle Corsetto & friend, and a crowd that seemed curious, but orderly.

• Scoop: Our sources indicate that Brad Guigar (shown in the photos above in a shirt that reveals his firm alignment with “villains”) is going to be getting a bunch more exposure. Starting on Wednesday, Evil, Inc will begin appearing in The Trend, a weekly publication that is direct-mailed throughout the greater Philadelphia metroplex. That’s right — you no longer have to take on the onerous burden of going to the website or buying a copy of the (Philadelphia) Daily News to get your dose o’ Guigar — he’s coming straight to over 800,000 mailboxes.

  The Trend is a weekly publication, and will run six strips in every issue. As he does in his annual collections, Evil-boy will convert the strips to read as continuous narrative. It’ll start with “best of” strips to catch new readers up, then dovetail with the current storyline about the time that other editions of The Trend get the strip in January, meaning 1.2 million people will get exposed to Evil whether they like it or not! Bwahahahaha!

• Finally, on Saturday evening, in the midst of a field and under a dark and forboding sky, Andrew Bell — creator of creepy, disturbing material from the darkest recesses of the imagination if not the bowels of hell itself — plighted his troth. The celebration reportedly included free-flowing alcoholic beverages (aka “demon rum”), dancing (aka “the Devil’s revels”) and a “photo booth” that collected the souls of all who sat within it (Ha! You didn’t get my soul, because I already sold it to Rosenberg for a dollar!).

  The bride, obviously aware of the horrors that await her and fully complicit in Bell’s wicked ways, was radiant, even as the depravity swirled around the tastefully-appointed tables. Two young women, in defiance of God’s will, swore to remove themselves to Massachusetts with all dispatch and “totally get married” to each other. Some of the various webcomickers in attendance mysteriously disappeared, returning later with blank visages, perhaps subjected to sights that Man Was Not Meant To See. There were cupcakes, which were delicious, but which possibly also damned the eater to an eternity of torment from which even death offers no respite. At press time, all guests were believed to be accounted for, and claimed nervously that they had a lovely time.

  In all seriousness, it was the second best wedding that I’ve ever attended (I do have to place my own first), and the most fun I’ve had in ages. I cannot possibly wish Andy and Jackie anything less than the greatest happiness, and urge you all to go check out the really cool guest strips running while they relax in a tropical paradise, lost in sun, sea, fruity drinks … and each other.

That’s how the kids talk today, right? All “cool” and “hep”? Anyway, I noticed that several webcomickers have been taking swipes at the current financial crises here in ‘Merica. For those of you in the rest of the world, short version: we’ll be bartering cigarettes by this time next year. In the meantime, please enjoy the comedy musings of Matt Boyd & Ian McConville, Sylvan Migdal, and Tatsuya Ishida, and don’t forget to tip your waitress.

• New webcomic discovery: Tim Smith, one of the creators of Head In The Clouds, invited me to take a gander at this newish (two months or so) offering. It’s a two-character play, a new microscene staged in each strip, and within those inherent limitations it’s doing pretty well. There’s something about this that makes me think of haiku — very brief, very minimalist in art and dialogue, very clean and expressive. Good start so far, and I’ll be interested to see if the creative spark can be maintained inside the self-imposed structure without it going stale.
• Tommie Kelly has invited me a few times to take a gander at Road Crew, which just hit 100 updates and the end of a storyline, so this is a decent time to mention it. A little expository at the beginning, but it looks like that was just Kelly setting the basis, since there’s been a better story flow since then. At the risk of being slightly cutesy, it’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to F Chords’ Hamlet. Don’t get too excited about the Shakespeare references (after all, being called “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies” sounds grandiose at first, too) — I just mean to say that Road Crew is what happens just off-panel in a story about musicians. Point it out to the roadie in your life.
• Interview with Chris and Kyle Bolton over at The Pulse. I haven’t read SMASH before, but I think I’m going to have to check it out.
• One thing I really enjoyed doing last year (and sadly, don’t have the time to do this year) was be a judge for Webcomic Idol. This year’s judging panel has just been, um, empaneled, with DJ Coffman and Xaviar Xerexes returning, to be joined by newcomers Brad Guigar and indycomics superstar Jim Mahfood (I loved the stuff he did in Oni Double Feature).

  It’s just about a week or so until the call for entries, so put your applications together, and figure out how you’re going to interact with the judging panel. Best guess — DJ will channel his inner Simon, Xaviar will be Randy, and the other two will have to reveal themselves in terms of their judging styles¹.

_______________
¹Brad’s widely known as the nicest guy in webcomics on the planet, so we’ll have to see if he can bring actual critical feedback to these kids with a Cintiq and a dream of making it big. I’ve never known him to look for anything other than the best in people, so one is forced to assume that he’s totally Paula, only less batshit insane. We hope.

Wedding Season: getting married this week are both Jeph Jacques and Andy Bell. Not to each other, but each to a different lady. Fleen congratulates all concerned.

Anniversary Season: today marks 10 years of the Bobbins/Scary Go Round continuity on le web. Also, the return of the dreaded earwig.

Wedding Season: Rich Stevens doesn’t alter the fundamental dynamics of his cast (hmmm, time to update that chart) all that often, but when he does, he goes big. Plus, the tagline at the bottom of today’s Diesel Sweeties will likely be the funniest thing I’ll read this week.