After all the lost time, we’re just gonna start fresh next week. I’ll be spending the weekend celebrating St Groundhog’s Day which, while not as important to me as some folks, marks the weekend in 1991 when my wife and I first met. Y’all be safe, we’ll see each other on Monday.

There’s something that I learned years ago, somewhere between my college radio days and my job teaching, and that’s as much as you fill the space around you with words, nothing you say has as much power

as silence.

Which thought came back to me last night in the venerable Bluestockings bookstore/cafe/activist space on the Lower East Side, which was hosting the first of a monthly series of comics readings. Comics don’t get anywhere enough readings, not like books do, and that’s a shame — with the right sense of timing and a clear enough image projected, there’s real power there. The events folks at Bluestockings kicked things off with a trifecta of work by and about queer people, featuring Bee Kahn, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Beatrix Urkowitz; this page is famously in the tank for Ms Valero-O’Connell and I wasn’t familiar with the work of the other two, so let’s start with them.

Bee Kahn brought an introductory section of a story that was self-published and debuted at FlameCon a while back; now it’s getting a slick reissue from a publisher (they can’t say who yet) later this year. Renegade Rule is the story of four women on a pro gamer team, trying to reach the finals for VR shooter league play. It’s hard to tell where the story will go from the excerpt Kahn was able to share (enough to drop the reader into the VR experience and introduce the main characters and their personalities), but it was more than enough to say this:

Kahn’s comic book caption game is strong. You’d have to get Matt Fraction on his best day to come up with captions that land with the same impact and humor. Remember what I said up above about timing? The text in the word balloons and captions in Renegade was mostly too small to read from the audience, but having to click through to add each balloon and box to the image forced Kahn to delay just a bit and it made each bit of dialogue and especially the captions land with impact. I’m going to be keeping my eye out for this one in the fall.

Beatrix Urkowitz brought four short stories, three of which were about the same character, and which displayed a visual sensibility reminiscent of Tom Hart’s Hutch Owen (maybe a splash of Sylvan Migdal thrown in), with a KC Green-like ability to take a premise, run it as far as you possibly can, and then take it even further. The fourth story Urkowitz shared was about the annoying person we all know, and it was good. The first three were about the lover of everyone in the world.

Specifically, and introduction to TLOEITW and how she feels, followed by a story about the lovers of TLOEITW (ie: all seven point whatever billion of us) and how they (we) feel about the situation, and a third story entitled Everyone Breaks Up With The Lover Of Everyone In The World, where all of us form a gestalt entity to deliver a break-up speech to TLOEITW, who concludes that she’ll go get drunk, but literally everywhere she goes is now populated exclusively with her exes. It was a trip.

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell read one of the three stories from her just-arriving-in-the-mail-to-backers-from-Shortbox collection, Don’t Go Without Me (if you weren’t in on the Kickstart, you’ll be able to order a copy next month). The first story in the collection is the title piece, about a date to a parallel universe where telling stories robs you of your memories. It’s haunting and echoes every mythological tale of not understanding the rules of a place, from Persephone’s pomegranate to those who stay overlong in Faerie. You can read an excerpt of it here.

The second story is What Is Left, previously released as a minicomic; I got a copy at MoCCA and loved it, but reading its sci-fi take on a doomed spaceship propelled by a memory-fueled engine changed by reading in alongside Don’t Go. The former is about finding refuge — literally, in this case — in memories, and the latter about diminution from sharing, and while the stories contrast with each other, they also sharpen and strengthen each other. You can read and excerpt of What Is Left here.

The third story, the one Valero-O’Connell read last night, is Con Temor, Con Ternura, or With Fear, With Tenderness; it asks the question What would you do on the last night of the world? Valero-O’Connell, in the making of booklet that’s a Kickstarter accompaniment to the collection, describes her first comics work as dialogueless, narrated visual poetry, and Con Temor is a return to that form. As the questions posed by the story got more pointed, as the reality that a Proverbial It was building, Valero-O’Connell got steadily quieter, and the room more hushed, the audience almost holding its collective breath.

The conclusion, a cliffhanger following a countdown from three¹, slowed its pace and the silence held as everybody sought their own answers to that question, while the screen was a-whirl with swooping curves and scarcely a straight line in sight. There’s an organic life to her work, one that focuses on things that live rather than things that are built, and it lends a vitality to the visuals that’s all but unmatched. Don’t even get me started on what she does with hair; it’s so good, it makes me angry.

Silences break eventually. The applause for each of the readers was well earned.

It’s like I told Roo², we’re in an age of comics like the current age of television, where it is not possible to keep up with all the good work that’s being made³. But for one night a month, Bluestockings is going to do its best to show you some work you might have missed otherwise, and for that we can all be thankful.

Spam of the day:

As an Airbnb host, you can meet interesting new people and learn about diverse cultures without even having to leave the house.

Weird. I thought the purpose of Airbnb was to scam people and deplete stocks of housing in cities around the world, driving up rents and exacerbating the problem of homelessness.

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¹ One that looks to the reader to fill in the ending, more than any story I’ve read except maybe John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider.

² You may recall that MxRoo named the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund, and that we seem to run into each other randomly. Okay, a comics reading might not be the weirdest place to bump into a longtime reader of Fleen, but on the day that Jon Rosenberg’s son got his life back via surgery? I was in Manhattan on a work gig and walking on the street to lunch when I head somebody call my name. It was Roo, with the news that Jon had just posted that the surgery had gone well. We got a history of being together for awesome things is what I’m saying.

³ Which makes it even more baffling that there’s a cohort of miserable assholes out there who have seemingly devoted their lives to shitting on people making comics they don’t like — comics they think shouldn’t be allowed to exist because they’re about things/people other than the precise interests of said miserable assholes — instead of just reading what they like. They are literally denying themselves the time to read all the stuff they do like in order to try to destroy stuff other people like. Petard-hoisters, the lot of ’em.

When we lost Tom Spurgeon, he left many, many holes. Holes in our hearts. Holes on the internet¹ And a great big hole in a comics show in Columbus, where he was the founding executive director. It was announced a while back that CXC would continue in 2020, no promises beyond that, but it wasn’t known who would step into Spurge’s shoes.

Until yesterday:

Cartoonist and educator Jerzy Drozd has been hired as interim executive director of Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC), the international showcase for cartoon art that will hold its 6th annual festival Oct. 1-4.

Drozd is a cartoonist who leads workshops for children and teens in libraries and schools, and for teachers who want to bring comics to the classroom. He is a founding member of Kids Read Comics, a nonprofit that organizes the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival (A2CAF), and has served as its programming coordinator since 2009. He lives in central Ohio with his wife, Anne Drozd, who is the museum coordinator at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

I’m not sure that there could have been a better choice than Drozd; keep in mind that interim appointments of this nature are meant to be stopgaps, warm bodies that keep things vaguely running until a real leader can be found. Drozd is far, far better than that, based on the reports I’ve had from A2CAF (I’ve not made it there myself) and his existing relationship with both CXC and the Billy Ireland.

Drozd is an accomplished cartoonist solo and in collaboration with his wife, Anne. The only not-entirely-positive thing I’ve ever found about Drozd is that he is partially unGoogleable because there is another Jerzy Drozd out there, a luthier of highly-regarded basses, which pushes comics!Drozd down the results. I can sympathize².

I suspect that this is one of those interim appointments that will turn into permanence some time after Drozd has a chance to show us what he can do with CXC ’20. If you’re going to Columbus in October, do him a favor and thank him for jumping into a giant’s role under terrible circumstances; I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

Spam of the day:

Are you ready to do something about your achy legs?

This one’s about special socks meant to help foot and leg pain. As a guy who’s on his feet pretty continuously in the classroom (not to mention EMT duty), I’ve found the simple (and far cheaper) solution is to wear two pair of socks. Works great.

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¹ For some time, his site was down; it mostly back now, thank Glob.

² Actually, I rejoice. I’ve met Other Gary for lunch — nice guy — and I’ve told him that his somewhat higher profile re: that unfortunate trombone-related incident has done a great deal to keep me off of the Big G’s radar. I’ve done careful pruning here and there to make sure I end up further down the search listings than him (and the unfortunate murder victim), and I hope to someday be further down than the kite maker in the British midlands.

I got the email yesterday from Alert Reader Rob:

Hey, have you noticed that Kukuburi is back? This is why I will never give up RSS.
http://www.kukuburi.com/v2/2020/01/14/one-eighty/

I keep an antiquated browser around solely because it’s got an integrated RSS feature, but as I confessed to Rob, I sometimes prune my feeds when I feel that things will not update again. The last time we at Fleen mentioned a story element from the ever-delightful Kukuburi (by the ever-delightful Ramón Pérez) was probably this piece from May of 2009.

It got sporadic, finally going on hiatus in 2012. Repeatedly since then I hoped for its return (while never criticizing Pérez for concentrating on work that pays), and as recently as two and a half years ago declared my belief it would return some day. And now I can proudly state that the link over there in the blogroll has been updated to say no longer on hiatus, hooray! Let’s love it for as long as it lasts; I’ll be binging the entire archive in the immediate future.

• Speaking of immediate future, Evan Dahm would like to remind you that the most wonderful week of the year starts on Sunday:
  

  Goblin Week 2020 starts SUNDAY #goblinweek #goblinweek2020 https://goblinweek.tumblr.com/post/190290598 …

  Yes, Goblin Week! Wait, you’ve never heard of Goblin Week? I’ll let Dahm explain:

  IT IS A PERIOD OF 7 DAYS WHEREIN YOU MAKE GOBLINS EVERY DAY OR AS MUCH AS YOU WANT WAHTEVER A GOBLIN IS. DONT WORRY ABOUT IT GOD IS DEAD

  You can trust Dahm, he draws the best goblins ever, although I’ll give Ben Hatke the edge in doing goblin voices at story time. If you need to get in the mood, here’s last year’s goblins for your enjoyment.

• Speaking of enjoyment (and here I am talking to comics creators), would you like to enjoy your chosen career while also having the ability to purchase food, clothing, and shelter? Of course you would! But as has been made abundantly clear, page rates for comics have stagnated badly, and taking inflation into account, are significantly lower than they were at pretty much any point since the ’60s.

  Partly this happens because publishers discourage any kind of open discussion of rates and what’s reasonable, leading to the perception that, say, a 200 page graphic novel is worth a US$20,000 advance. That’s a hundo per page, which may take ten or more hours to complete, leaving a skilled professional with a pay rate of US$8-10 an hour.

  Enter Gale Galligan (perhaps best known for taking over the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel adaptations from Raina, whose assistant she used to be) and Ngozi Ukazu (who, given the ubiquity of her gay college hockey bros saga, should need no introduction). Prompted by the current Portfolio Day posts, Ukazu wanted to know:

  When is fair page rates day again? Some comic folks are organizing a hashtag re: avoiding unfair pay and how to know when you’re dealing with ethical compensation.

  Prompting Galligan to suggest:

  Hmmm how about a nice memorable date with plenty of lead-in time to get the word out? How’s your calendar looking on June first?

  Which looked good to Ukazu:

  Is that it? OKAY: June 1st is #FairPageRates day.

  Sorted, and if she’s good with it you should be, too. What will be discussed on Fair Page Rates Day? Galligan has some suggestions:

  SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN. See you June 1st, on #FairPageRates day, where we will be talking about fair compensation for people working in comics and everything that entails

  “Are royalties real, and should I be negotiating them? What’s a reasonable rate for x comic job?” These are all things we can talk about any time of year, but ESPECIALLY June 1, which is now officially #FairPageRates Day.

  Spread the word — 1 June, we talk money, and what just compensation looks like, because some creators that have made it (for varying definitions of making it) are decent people who don’t want to pull up the ladder behind them, they want up-and-coming creators to have an easier, more rewarding path to a career than they had.

Spam of the day:
Massive Holiday Wine Sale get 15 bottels of Holiday Wines
Received on 3 January, so not sure what holiday they’re talking about. The email claims to come from a company in Eagle, Idaho, which naturally reminded me of this.

Hey, running late and sorry about that. Let’s jump into the good stuff.

• Item! Alex de Campi is one of the very best comics writers out there, and she has unerring instincts with respect to who to pair up with on art duties. Don’t believe me? Check out her collaboration with Carla Speed McNeil and Jenn Manley Lee on No Mercy, which made me want to punch characters in the face through the page. So when de Campi tells me:
  

  I’m doing a creator-owned horror thing with @EricaFails this year and I just have to say that 1) she’s the best; 2) her colour roughs are better than most people’s finished pages; and 3) this book is going to knock your socks off. The MOOD and sense of place… immaculate

  I say Welp, have to add that to my pull list when it comes out. Erica Henderson has done some great work since stepping back from Squirrel Girl, with Assassin Nation particularly showing a skill for depicting charlie-foxtrot action leading to severely traumatized bodies. I also can’t wait to see her FCBD contribution to Judge Dredd.

• Item! Readers of this page will no doubt recognize the fact that I absolutely adore the work of Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and take no small satisfaction in seeing the entire rest of comics recognize how very good she is since Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me released. Hooray for Rosemary!

  So I’m more than happy to tell you that Valero-O’Connell will be doing a reading of her work next Wednesday night, 22 January, as part of the launch of a new monthly comics series by queer and trans creators to be held at Bluestockings Bookstore in lower Manhattan. Come say hi to all the readers, Valero-O’Connell will have copies of her latest collection for sale², and enjoy some awesome comics.

  Details at the Facebook event page, and I’ll be certain to keep an eye on future events — it’s tough for me to get out to Brooklyn (where things of this nature usually occur) and back on a work night, and the LES is a lot closer.

• Item! As you may have noticed, I now have in my possession two copies of the first print collection of Junior Scientist Power Hour by Abby Howard¹, which is one more than I reasonably need. Time for a giveaway contest. So by 11:59pm EST on Friday, 24 January, email me (that would be gary) at this here website (that would be fleen, which is a dot com) with a reference to your favorite dinosaur or other extinct critter from any of Howard’s three Earth Before Us titles. I want to know which critter and why you love it so much. Random draw will determine the winner, I’ll be in touch about getting it shipped to you.

Spam of the day:

gary.tyrrell Pay off your mortgage faster and save money!…

I am on track to pay off my mortgage ten years early but sure, I’ll click on your link and give you all my financial information for the possibility of paying it off sooner. [sarcastic thumbs-up emoji]

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¹ Also the original pages to The Most Precious Substance In The Cosmos. When I leave all my original comic art to my alma mater, some of it is going to cause more giggles than others.

² With luck, I’ll have my copy in hand from the Kickstart by then.

I believe that I’m on record that Kendra Wells’s contributions at The Nib are rad. I was reminded of this when Wells’s latest hit the web, along with a parallel thought:

Did you know that one of the reasons koalas are threatened in the wild is that they nearly all have chlamydia? And that the current bushfires hit an island that was the home of the only wild population of koalas that weren’t infected?

Yeah, so that HotCelebrityInfluencer up there in the koala bikini definitely has an STI now. And somebody that’s actually using influencer juice to help out with the devastation in Oz has been bounced from her social media accounts after raising more money that Bezos is donating in exchange for nudes. I’m not sure what lesson to draw from all of this but it’s weird where your brain goes after seeing a cartoon sometimes.

In other news, those of you in the San Francisco Bay area will want to think about heading over to the Cartoon Art Museum this weekend, and returning until mid-May; that’s because George Takei’s graphic novel memoir, They Called Us Enemy — about his personal experience being imprisoned in a concentration camp by the government of his country for xenophobic reasons in defiance of Constitutional rights — is getting the featured exhibition treatment.

Once Saturday rolls around and the exhibition opens, you’ll find details on the Current Exhibitions page, and once 18 May arrives and the exhibition closes you’ll find it on the Past Exhibitions page. For the moment, however, you’ll need to read about it here, so:

The Cartoon Art Museum, Top Shelf Productions and IDW Publishing proudly present They Called Us Enemy featuring artist Harmony Becker’s artwork from the acclaimed graphic memoir written by actor, author, and activist George Takei in which Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. The exhibition includes an inside look at Becker’s creative process, including excerpts from her reference library and never before seen preparatory illustrations.

This exhibition also features a selection of original artwork from the Cartoon Art Museum’s permanent collection, including comic strips and animation from the 1940s, providing patrons with a snapshot of popular entertainment on the home front during the second World War.

Opening reception — during which there are frequently creators present, along with snacks — details to be announced, but we’ll let you know when we find out. Enjoy the launch, I’d be there except I’m on the wrong side of the country and also I’ve got Richard Thompson tickets for Saturday; it’s been more than 20 years since I’ve seen him live, and near as I can tell his finger have lost nothing. If you’re wondering why I’m talking about a 70 year old guitar virtuoso, it’s because he shares a name with multiple sadly departed cartoon/comics virtuosi. Some names are just blessed.

Spam of the day:

Your Wine is Cold – 15 Premium Wines for 70% off PLUS Bottle Ugly Sweater!

Not only does that topic line make zero sense, the body of the email is touting their Black Friday sale — traditionally, the day after US Thanksgiving (this year, 29 November) — but wasn’t sent until 28 December. Are they trying to get me hooked for Black Friday 2020?

Because a recurring theme of the manchildren that want comics that solely cater to their own preconceptions and prejudices is that anything not wholly reflecting their own identity is unnecessary politics that comics were never sullied with previously, goodness, never, a few items reminding you that politics and art — even comics — are inextricably linked.

• Word comes today that there will be a comics adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five releasing later this year, from artist Albert Monteys, colorist Ricard Zaplana, and oh that’s what he’s been working on this makes perfect sense Ryan North on words.

  A scathingly funny indictment of war, Slaughterhouse Five will anger some people just by existing, but then people like them have been angered by Slaughterhouse Five existing in all its forms for the past fifty years, and will anger other people for the next fifty and beyond. The cohort of people determined not to learn the lessons of war are as unstuck in time as Billy Pilgrim. The graphic adaptation is due in September from BOOM.

• A central part of Slaughterhouse Five is protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s unlikely survival of the the Dresden firebombing, which Vonnegut experienced firsthand. There may be nothing more terrifying than fire so widespread and hot that it alters the normal patterns of weather, physics, and reality around it, becoming a wholly unpredictable and uncontrollable entity in its own right. There’s a reason that Dresden and March 1945¹ are shorthands for destruction beyond comprehension.

  Conflagration need not come from war, but human stupidity will certainly be involved:

  As I type this (on Monday 6 January), 25 people have been confirmed killed by the fires, 7 remain missing. Well over 1500 homes have been destroyed, as well as thousands of other buildings and structures. The total area burnt so far is over 80,000 square kilometres, which is larger than Ireland, almost as large as Austria. These numbers will continue increasing for weeks, as the fires continue to burn, unstoppable in the hottest part of summer, as we suffer the worst drought in recorded history.

  Even in places not directly affected by flames, the smoke from the fires is causing hazardous air quality across much of south-eastern Australia. For over a month now, air quality in Sydney (where I live) has been marginal some days, and officially “hazardous” on many other days. Visibility has been down to 100 metres or so because of thick smoke in the air, the sun shines down with an apocalyptic orange glow even during the middle of the day, and the smell of smoke is everywhere. Ash and burnt leaves fall from the sky, even in the middle of the city. Outdoor surfaces, wiped clean, are covered in a fine gritty ash the next day. Hospital admissions are up around 10-15% because of people experiencing increased asthma and other respiratory conditions. Canberra, which is a long way from any fires, has experienced several days in a row of horrible air conditions, with many institutions and government departments shutting down because it’s too hazardous even inside the buildings for people to work.

  That from David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™ ^etc) from his vantage point in Sydney, on the ongoing fire season in Australia — which started four months earlier than usual, exacerbated by climate change-driven drought and high temperatures. The news from Down Under is heartbreaking, with serious predictions that by the end of fire season in March or April, there may be essentially no non-urban space untouched by the bushfires. Places that I’ve visited and loved may not recover in my lifetime.

  And more infuriating is the now repeatedly demonstrated utter indifference on the part of Australia’s senior governmental officials, starting with their sociopathy-demonstrating Prime Minister. Read the whole thing, get mad, and do what you can to express to your own government, wherever you are, that climate disasters aren’t abstract, they aren’t off in the future after senior officials will be safely dead and thus insulated from their effects, that we are well past prevention of worldwide tragedy, and instead playing a game of mitigation.

• And yet, even in the face of ongoing crisis, small acts of utter optimism and hope in the future take place every day. It’s a couple years late (then again, the documentation is a couple years behind the event), but let’s take a moment to welcome Elizabeth Anna Trogdor Breeden to the world, and to resolve to make her lifetime less stupidly hellish than the current trajectory seems determined to be. Vonnegut had a famous benediction for newborns that’s widely quoted, and I’d like to offer it up to young Trogdor with an addendum: God damn us, babies, we weren’t kind and now it’s all on you. I’m sorry.

Spam of the day:

Xone Phone has a smooth appeal that will turn heads due to its slick surface and pleasing texture. Hold The Vibrancy In Your Fingertips

This sounds like it should be covered by Erika ‘n’ Matt when they come back from their break.

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¹ Please, Ryan, I love your work, but do not also adapt the other great narrative work about World War II firebombings. It’s the greatest piece of art that I never want to experience again.

Longtime readers of this page will recall that I never managed to record the actual day of launch; it was December 2005, there were test pieces in the pipe that got released after the fact which muddied the waters, and it was sometime before the 24th because that’s when the Wayback Machine¹ started tracking it.

So some time back I decided that the 15th of December would serve as the official birthday of Fleen, much like how all thoroughbred horses are considered to be born on 1 January regardless of their actual foaling date. The 15th was Sunday, and yesterday I was talking about Tom Spurgeon², so I’m a bit late, or maybe not. We’ll all find ways to cope, I’m certain.

It’s been a ride; at the time I started, Spurgeon had been running The Comics Reporter for a bit more than a year (11 October 2004 is the oldest date I can find via the Wayback Machine), and The Beat a little older (Heidi Mac launched in June of that year, although she didn’t host it herself until 2010, so who knows how much of the early years at comicon.com and Publishers Weekly still exist). CR stayed much the same, The Beat expanded into new areas of interest, with a rotating stable of writers and is maybe no properly described as bloggy any longer. Fleen started with me and Jeff Lowrey (who dropped out about 14 months later), and today it’s pretty much me and Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin when the BD scene needs discussing.

Through that time we’ve sometimes stretched the meaning of webcomics, at the same time lamenting the imprecision and general suckiness of the term. I’ve done some pieces that I’m really proud of, some that I banged out without much planning, a few I’d probably want to take down if I thought about it for a minute; to be honest, I’ve probably completely forgotten the vast majority of what I’ve written here.

When I hit publish, this will be the 3712th post to go out under my name in about 5110 days, which is close enough to 5 posts in 7 days as makes no difference. I’ve been threatened with a lawsuit by an alleged millionaire/artist³, been memorialized in comics, met heroes who’ve become friends, seen friends become household names, determined I have an Evil Twin, raised thousands of dollars for the disadvantaged and deserving, been informed that all of this will be included in the Library of Congress, and found my people.

So we’ll call today 14 years of what Rosenberg assured me would be 300 words a day, that’s nothing, that’s lunch blogging, a false promise for which I will surely extract my vengeance some day. I can’t say how much longer all of this will go on because who the hell knows how much longer anything goes on these days, but the Post-It with my to-do list for tomorrow includes Fleen as an action item. In the meantime, I’m glad to have you along for the ride.

Spam of the day:

Geschäftsnummer- EE 70/218. (Geschäftsnummer- EE 70/218.)

Nee, mach diesen Scheiß nicht.

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¹ Or, more precisely, the current iteration of Fleen. The name was chosen because Jon Rosenberg already owned the domain for the Fairly Large Electronic Entertainment Network, an early webcomic portal.

² Speaking of which, earlier today I learned that the image on yesterday’s post, the artwork produced for Spurgeon’s memorial, was by Julian Dassai (portrait), Laurenn McCubbin (color) and Emi Gennis (letters). The post has been updated to reflect this.

³ I leave it to you to decide if the individual actually deserves to be designated either a millionaire or an artist; I have my doubts about the former and absolutely none about the latter.

Artwork by Julian Dassai, Laurenn McCubbin, and Emi Gennis.

I hadn’t intended to write about Tom Spurgeon’s memorial service when I set out for Columbus on Saturday morning. A memorial service is practically a funeral, and you don’t treat funerals like con panel recaps to share. I would go, I would browse the items in the Tom Spurgeon collection at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (among other things, he donated thousands of minicomics, providing crucial documentation of the most ephemeral side of comics), maybe go through the public gallery.

It was Jeff Smith that started me reconsidering my intent. I think it’s gonna be a celebration he said to me, a short while before the service started. It was, with far more laughter — raucous, spontaneous, joyous laughter; so, so much laughter — than tears, because everybody that spoke had a Spurge story to share, and Spurge just naturally lent himself to funny situations. And celebrations are things that you do share.

So there were the tumblers full of Microns, with attendees invited to write or draw a memory to be included in a tribute mini to come.

There was the rotating series of photos projected behind the speakers, including three-or-so-year-old Tom on a tricycle with a brown paper bag on his head. His mother asked him that day Why the bag? and he replied More fun.

And there was his brother Whit, leading off the speaking order, and introducing each new person, sharing a note from seven year old Tom’s report card: It would be to Tom’s advantage to learn to be more tactful. If he never learned that lesson, or the one about deadlines, nobody on the day much cared. There was much talk about the time Tom was a dick to somebody, mixed with the realization that his criticisms were nearly always correct and something to learn from … and in any event, he was far more free with his encouragement. Regarding deadlines, Whit noted it was entirely appropriate that the first hour of the program has now taken two hours and ten minutes.

We came to say goodbye, and we learned that Tom Spurgeon contained such multitudes that I believe nobody in the room didn’t learn something about him. For me, the most surprising thing was to learn that Tom attended seminary after college; Laurenn McCubbin brought home the inherent contradiction in that bit of history when she said I never saw him as a preacher.

Then, she continued, Tom was a pastor … and we were his weird, heathen flock and it all made sense to me. More than the words, more than the towering intellect, more than the absurdly funny situations that adhered to him, even more than comics, Tom was defined by his love for the people that made comics, that read comics, that loved comics, and he never stopped trying to make their lives better and more fruitful. Who will fill that role, to care for every single person in comics? Evan Dorkin knows the answer — it will have to be us, every single one of us, that takes up the charge, and all of us together will still not do as much as Tom did.

But Tom thought we could. At the end of his mother’s remarks, she shared the concluding sentences from something he’d written a few years ago, to be read in the event of his death. He asked us all to care for one another. Every single person in that room may have wondered who could fill Tom’s shoes, but he knew it couldn’t be just one person.

At his direction, Tom Spurgeon was cremated; his ashes now reside in the Billy Ireland’s permanent collection. When you go to visit the library and museum, you’ll be visiting him. And that, Carol Tyler observed, makes The Billy sacred ground.

Goodbye, Tom. I wish my words were up to this task, but then, I don’t think anybody’s would be. Except yours, of course. You were always good with words.

Spammers don’t get to share Tom Spurgeon’s day.

If you didn’t say Me! Me!, you’re very possibly a liar, or perhaps didn’t hear me correctly. Pizza, people!

If you got a hankering for art to meet politics to meet good deeds, then Shing Yin Khor is somebody you want to pay attention to. I mean, also because they produce heartbreakingly beautiful comics that are painful in their truths, wield tools with aplomb, are actively working to bring capitalism to heel, and are small enough to fit in your pocket.

But set all that aside for the moment; when Khor sees people with less, people in need of protection, plans get made and people wrangled in order to make uplifting art for the purpose of helping because godsdammit, somebody’s got to. On a couple of occasions now, pizza-themed art — some of which is patently and wonderfully ridiculous — has been made and auctioned off to support Food Forward LA, which strives to both reduce food waste and reduce hunger. The third iteration of Project Pizza will run on Saturday:

From 10AM to 10PM join artists Shing Yin Khor and Eron Rauch as they host a draw-a-thon featuring a dozen of their talented friends making art and jamming their faces full of pizza.

Grab a slice (one random drawing), a whole pie (10), or even a party pack (30) to share with friends and co-workers. Preorders open December 12th, and we sell out every year, so stop back by to secure your slices!

You can check out a list of artists expected to participate in the live event, and also some of the art that’s been constructed by remote friends and sent in. A full list of participants is at the Project Pizza page, below the pre-order links. It’s not possible to request particular artists, but at the US$100 support level, they’ll try to direct at least one piece by a favorite artist to you. Also, the first 20 folks to send in a hundo or more get a tiny sculpted pizza. And on the off chance you don’t need one or more tiny pizza arts in your home, they’re taking tips as well — that money goes direct to FFLA without the work of shipping you anything.

Look, I know it’s an expensive time of year, that people got crap jobs and little extra money but consider: ten bucks means 45+ kilos of being saved and distributed. The last event raised more than US$4600, and the goal this year is an even five grand, or fifty tons of food. Just think about it, okay? Oh, and if the you-gotta-have-a-PayPal-account thing is a problem for you, here’s FFLA’s direct donations page; you might not get a tiny pizza, but you’ll help a bunch of people not be hungry, and that tastes great.

Spam of the day:

Now ANYONE Can Learn Piano or Keyboard

I dunno. If my mother (lifelong pianist and church organist) couldn’t manage to teach me, I don’t think your revolutionary, spam-based method will succeed.