Hey, everybody! It’s February 1st, and you all know what that means — it’s Saint Groundhog’s Day Eve! Okay, it’s also Hourly Comic Day and we’ll get to that presently.

• Today is also-also the day that KC Green wraps He Is A Good Boy after 300+ multipage updates of spiral time and inner journeys. Crange may not be a good boy (he’s certainly not the greatest god-damn boy you’ll ever meet), he’s kind of a dick and pretty much inertia personified. But after seeing all the variations, all the Crange, all the Emersons, all the quantum-variant versions of himself, he found a way to start over with some peace, a way to exit the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth, which I’m pretty sure makes him a buddha.

  The big finish starts here. If it’s too weird for you, maybe check out a recent one-shot at The Nib wherein a squirrel gets his comeuppance. None of those acorns are Crange. At least, they probably aren’t.

• Right! Hourly Comic Day! You know the drill, you make a comic that expresses what you did in each hour of the day, ideally within that hour. There’s more of them out there today than a reasonable person can count, but I’ll get you started with ones that I particularly enjoyed: Tony Breed, Carly Monardo, Jeph Jacques, Jean Wei, Haley Boros, Meredith Gran, Colleen Frakes, Abby Howard, Dean Trippe, Christopher Baldwin, Shing Yin Khor, and Lucas Landherr are all on Twitter; Danielle Corsetto opted for Instagram, and there’s a zillion on Tumblr (I’m not on Tumblr).

  But for my money, the best single hourly comic was the first posting from Magnolia Porter, because her comic for 6-7am doubles as that you ten years ago vs you today thing that was going around two weeks back. Oh, and happy day after your birthday, Mags; you rock.

Spam of the day:

Never eat THIS after 7:00 pm (triggers heart attack)

Man, now I’m going to be all paranoid when it’s time to shift the clocks. Does the heart attack food know about Daylight Savings? Or time zones?

First, for many, many people reading this, stay warm. It is dangerous out there.

Second, a bunch of creators you follow live in areas that are deadly cold right now. Many more live places that are merely a hell of a lot colder than they should be, even if those places are not imminent hazards. Which means that i a couple weeks, they’re going to be getting utility bills that cover this period of frigid temperatures.

And you’re going to be seeing things like Uh, got my heating bill and it’s about triple what a normal month would be. Here’s {stuff in my store | commissions open | a pay-my-bill sale | my Patreon | my Ko-Fi | whatever} all over the damn place.

If you can afford it, help ’em out. It’s not a matter of poor planning when what’s hit this week is literally unprecedented, and do you want your favorite creators being able to create, or scrambling to keep the lights on in late February? Thought so.

Again — stay warm. Less than two months to the equinox.

Spam of the day:

– Welcome Gary, Need a Tax Debt Hero?

Oh great, it’s tax scam season¹.

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¹ Said in the same tone of voice that Lily Tomlin used in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse when she muttered. Oh great, it’s Liv. That line killed me.

The American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards have beenhanded out, and Fleen wishes to extend congratulations to all the winners. Of interest to readers of this page, Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please!: #Hockey is one of five finalists for the William C Morris YA Debut Award; over at YALSA’s Award For Excellence In Nonfiction, three of the five finalists carry the text written and illustrated by on the cover, indicating the unique ability of comics to convey complex stories.

Now, a quick bit of quibbling: the Morris award is presented to a book published by a first-time author writing for teens and celebrating impressive new voices in young adult literature, and Ukazu produced three self-published books prior to C,P:#H, which is itself a compilation of her first two self-published books¹. It’s a bit discouraging that the books don’t “count” until an imprint associated with one of the big publishing corporations gets a hold of it².

The idea of debut and first-time is frequently stretched at awards time in all sorts of media (including all over the place in books, music, movies, and comics), and I don’t mean that Ukazu should have been excluded — it’s just I’d like to see acknowledgment that the work was just as good when people did it on their own as when it went through the editorial departments of some very large companies. Congratulations to everybody that got good news out of Seattle this morning — you’re going good work.

Speaking of good work, please keep an eye on Abby Howard at Twitter this week — she’s doing a series of demon drawings, with originals up for sale at Etsy. Howard, of course, draws the hell (so to speak) out of spooky stuff, and she starts things off with a stellar rendition of The Adversary. I expect things will be suitably scarifying for the rest of the week³.

Spam of the day:

in the the video above you will find 2 new ways to make your PACKAGE look BIGGER and last longer In the 12 hrs we are deleting it!

I think they’re saying that they’re going to delete the video, not my package, but you never know.

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¹ Okay, third one is shipping soon.

² Unlike, say, American Born Chinese or SMILE, which existed in printed form as minicomics prior to their book book publication, Ukazu had actual gosh-darned books out there and for sale. Only thing is that they may not have had an ISBN and bar code.

³ Depending on your view of domestic animals, she may have done so just an hour later

There seems to be just a little light at the end of the tunnel, the smallest indication that we as a society will start occupying normal processes again, instead of the whims of a mad would-be king. The sort of thing that means that just maybe we can make some plans without worrying that the ground shifts again by tomorrow. Please Snidely Whiplash totally got busted and didn’t even have time to put on Morning Dress before getting perp-walked.

For those that like that sense of civilization and will be in the Bay Area, the Cartoon Art Museum has some events coming up you may want to check out:

• Jo Morra was born in Uruguay in the 1870s, came to America, and spent his career creating illustrations, comic strips, paintings, sculpture, photographs, maps, and books. CAM will be supplementing the currently-running exhibition, The Life And Times Of Jo Mora (27 October 2018 – 28 April 2019) with a special presentation on Saturday, 23 February.

  Jo Mora At The Cartoon Art Museum And Beyond will see Peter Hiller (author of the Mora’s upcoming biography and curator of the Jo Mora Trust) talking about the exhibition and Mora’s body of work. The talk runs from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, and costs US$8 (advance purchase) or US$10 (at the door), with CAM members admitted free with RSVP.

• The following weekend, CAM’s monthly visiting artist program, Cartoonist IRL, welcomes Svetlana Chmakova (Crush, Brave, Awkward, and other books about the middle grade experience, plus a dozen other works of note). Q&A and signing with Chmakova are free with museum admission and will run from 1:00pm to 2:30pm on Sunday, 3 March. Chmakova’s appearance is part of CAM’s contributions to San Francisco Comics Fest (with more to be announced) and Will Eisner Week 2019.

One of the news-related links up top is to the twitterfeed of KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed; she livetweets administration press events so you don’t have to watch/listen. By coincidence, the first time I mentioned CAM this year, I had sad reason to mention Spangler — her enormous goof of a dog has cancer.

Today, in and around the larger world’s stupidity, she had an update about said goof, and it’s not great¹. So this is your reminder — Spangler has not posted a fundraiser and is not asking for money. But if you have ever heard me rave about her writing and somehow resisted the siren call, this would be an excellent time to check out her store, which is full of words.

If you want to jump into something that’s entirely self-contained and audaciously ambitious, may I suggest Stoneskin? It’s a cracker of a Sci-Fi story about sufficiently-advanced technology that appears to be magic, how the galaxy has crushes on teenagers, and also the importance of supply chains to a star-spanning civilization. You’ve never read anything like it.

Spam of the day:

Jimmymup wrote:

The rest is Chinese characters, but can we just focus on that account name for a second? Jimmymup sounds like somebody was really disappointed that their kid James was not born with wires attached to his arms.

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¹ Full disclosure: the same cancer killed both of my dogs, who due to age and challenges from their dog racing careers, would likely not have tolerated amputation well. I am rooting for this guy to knock cancer on its ass.

[Quick note before the main event: Rosemary Mosco and a host of other creators from :01 Books’s Science Comics line will be at Friendly Neighborhood Comics in Bellingham, Massachusetts on Saturday, 26 January, from noon to 3:00pm. Go see them!]

You have, by now, no doubt heard the news that the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême has, after generally suffering from a couple of years of not having their collective shit together, pulled up their pants and gotten over themselves. That is to say, they have declared Rumiko Takahashi the winner of the Grand Prix, which makes her only the second woman¹ (after Florence Cestac in 2000) and the second manga artist² (after Katsuhiro Otomo in 2015) so honored in the festival’s 45 year history.

Given the depth and breadth of her career, and the numerous creators who’ve established their careers and cited Takahashi as their inspiration, this is both richly deserved and long overdue. For generations of readers around the world, Takahashi is practically synonymous with comics. Nobody can dispute these actual facts, and you’ve no doubt read something very similar to this already.

But have you read the observations of a French lover of comics? Take it away, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin!

So Rumiko Takahashi won this year’s Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême, and this is a significant event in more than one way.

First, it is significant for Takahashi-san herself, of course. While to the French public she needs no introduction, it is expected this will result in renewed exposure to her work, such as through re-edition of her classic works (did you know? It is only after Bill Watterson won the Grand Prix in 2014 that France finally got a French version of the Calvin and Hobbes tenth anniversary book).

Then, it is significant because she’s a mangaka. For a very long time comics professionals of the French-Belgian school have been resentful of manga’s success in France, sometimes openly so, and it is still going on today, to an extent. This new Grand Prix both shows the body of professionals is changing (the profession as a whole contributed to selecting the Grand Prix) and means it is time to put that attitude to rest and accept manga as an integral part of the pinnacle of sequential art; because while Katsuhiro Otomo’s Grand Prix in 2015 might have been misinterpreted as a fluke, Takahashi’s Grand Prix confirms that it isn’t.

It is also significant because she has created a significant body of all-ages comics. While I revere Otomo-san, I am also not going to give Akira to my 9-year-old nieces (or nephews); this celebration of all-ages comics is significant in that, while French-Belgian classics such as Tintin, Astérix, Spirou, etc. could be read by everyone from 7 to 77 years old, as the slogan went, the industry has drifted away from that in recent decades, with most comics bookshops today featuring a split between regular comics and comics for children. This, to me, is an unnecessary segmentation that impoverishes the medium, and we are fortunate to have creators such as Takahashi-san, many of them in manga, that keep supporting the idea of all-ages comics; we can only hope this Grand Prix will cause this segmentation to be reconsidered. In a similar fashion, Takahashi’s work blurs the line between shojo and shonen, weakening that segmentation as well.

And it is most significant because of her gender, of course. Finally we have a second female Grand Prix winner to keep company to Florence Cestac. Remember it was only three years ago that Frank Bondoux attempted to claim the absence of any female creator in the 30 nominees for that year could be in any way justified … and while many of us always knew he was telling de la merde that day³ (with we at Fleen specifically suggesting Takahashi-san as an example of qualifying female creator), this year is the year the supreme court of comics for the French-Belgian circuit handed him down a decisive defeat. Good riddance to that idea.

Our thanks to FSFCPL for his local insight, and congratulations again to Rumiko Takahashi; as one of the aspects of the Grand Prix is that the winner is the President of the next year’s Festival, look for Angoulême 2020 to feature a lot of leggy ladies, short skirts, bountiful hair, frustration-laden slow-burn romance, and the best sight gags since Chuck Jones.

Spam of the day:

The persons shown in photographs in this email may not necessarily be actual users of valentime.com

As you didn’t actually include any pictures, I imagine not.

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¹ Or possibly third; in 1983 an additional tenth anniversary prize was awarded to Claire Bretécher, but it wasn’t the “real” prize.

² Again, possibly third; in 2013, a special fortieth anniversary prize was awarded to Akira Toriyama.

³ An event so obnoxious it resulted in me taking up the mantle of Fleen Senior French Correspondent from then on. [Editor’s note: And we at Fleen are lucky to have him!]

Hey, how’s it going? I’ve taken to keeping a half-full bottle of gin on my desk¹. On the theory that it may help your day to get better, here’s some things to examine and/or plan for!

• Today! Kevin Sonney is a magnificent dude; programmer and Linuxbender extraordinaire, tatted and bekilted con security heavyweight, and certified Disney Princess to whom critters flock. He’s also a persistent podcaster, mostly with wife Ursula Vernon — they cohost Kevin And Ursula Eat Cheap and consume things no mortal should; he is the voice of Reverend Mord on The Hidden Almanac.

  Right now, though, we’re focusing on Productivity Alchemy, which is about — stripped to its most basic — Getting Your Shit Together And Getting Shit Done. It is, ironically, the sort of thing that would paralyze me, as I am definitely the sort of person that would hopscotch from solution to solution, method to method, tool to tool, and obsessively chase achievement badges. My productivity works in fits and starts, and a lot of it looks like Ignoring The Issue At Hand from a distance, but it works for me². Which is to say, Sonney’s probably a lot smarter than me on every aspect of productivity as he’s put a hell of a lot of thought into it, and I’m more intuitive and decidedly nonanalytical about my methods.

  But sometimes I have to beak my own rule to see what’s on Sonney’s mind, and today is one of those days. He’s talking to Howard Tayler — my evil twin — about his approach to keeping life together, and dropping refs to the likes of Jennie Breeden’s The Devil’s Panties, KB SPangler’s A Girl And Her Fed, and Randy Milholland’s Something*Positive. It’s a fun, informative listen and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

• Future! For those whose personal productivity includes future planning, and who also live in the Bay Area, the Cartoon Art Museum wants to help you sort out what to do with the kids this summer:
  

  Cartoon Camp is filled with active creative engagement for older kids and teens who are avid artists enjoying drawing and are looking to build skills. All materials are provided. Find discounts, details and sign up opportunities for museum members on the registration links. Register before camp sessions fill up!

  Classes are designed for the 10-15 year old set with a bit of experience under their belts, with a choice of three week-long sessions. You can do skill-building in the mornings with Mark Simmons, afternoons of group work and studio time with Ellis Kim, or full days to experience both (bring lunch, it’s not provided). There’s also a couple of drawing excursions to local scenic spots.

  Sessions run the week of 17 to 21 June, 24 ot 28 June, or 29 July to 2 August.; morning sessions run 9:00am to 12:30pm and afternoons 1:45pm to 5:15pm. CAM members get 10% off the US$300 tuition (full days are US$550); reserve now before slots fill up.

Spam of the day:

View live security camera feed from your phone

This is advance notice: If I ever give any indication that I have allowed any Internet Of Things™ or “Smart” appliances into my home, that is a sure sign that I have been replace by a pod person, and you should set “me” on fire at the first opportunity.

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¹ Okay, it’s one of those airline bottles on account of my exit-row seat home from Dallas t’other night entitled me to a free drink and that was all I wanted at the time. But still! Hard bitten journalising going on here!

² All the seeming off-goofing is my brain arranging itself into a Cave so I can hit the Zone. Lots of people achieve their Zone via external tools, but mine are on the inside.

Before we get to the Good Thing in the title, I wanted to mention an Auxiliary Good Thing. That is to say, the second issue of The Nib in print is reaching mailboxes — such as mine, today — and it looks great. If you want a copy of this issue, on the theme of Family, you can either go back in time and back the Kickstarter, or you can take out a supporting membership.

Both options give you a choice of digital or print, but let me assure you that like the Death issue from September, Family is beautifully designed, on weighty, satisfying paper and has a considerable odor from the many inks¹ used in its construction.

Okay, the main Good Thing: Word’s been going around for the past few days about how the Eric Carle Museum Of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA, would be running an exhibition on the history of the graphic novel. Out Of The Box: The Graphic Novel Comes Of Age² opens on !0 Febrary and will run until 26 May, and will feature the work of Vera Brosgol, Catia Chien, Geoffrey Hayes, Gene Luen Yang, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Hope Larson, Matt Phelan, David Small, Raina Telgemeier, and Sara Varon.

But wait! There’s more.

The night before (that would be 9 February), there’s an opening reception from 5:00pm-7:00pm, with guest curator Leonard S. Marcus Brosgol, Chien, Krosoczka, Phelan, Telgemeier, and Varon expected to be in attendance. There’s a talk with the same folks the next day (10th again) at 11:00am to officially open the exhibition.

If you want to attend these special events, you need to RSVP, via one of two different methods. For the reception, contact Jenny Darling Stasinos at 413-559-6310 or jennys [at] carlemuseum [dot] org; for the gallery talk, RSVP at 413-559-6336 or info [at] carlemuseum [dot] org. Reservations open today, and run through Monday, 4 February.

Now here’s the kicker — both of those events are for Carle Museum members. If you aren’t one, now’s the time to join. Please note that Amherst is in the middle of one of the greatest concentrations of web/indie comics creators on the continent³, the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, home to Northampton, Easthampton, TopatoCo, Eastworks, the very sexy R Stevens, and at least one creator of Ninja Turtles, so if you’re going you may as well wander around and try to spot background locations from Questionable Content.

It’s not like those folks keep storefronts you can wander into, but if you bump into one on the street, they’d probably appreciate it if you told them I love your work, please accept three dollars cash from me a tip and I promise I will leave you alone and not be a creepy stalker.

Spam of the day:

As Seen On TV + 1 Month FREE!

One of the great improvements in Gmail lately is that images do not automatically load in spam. As there’s no text in this email, only pictures, I literally have no idea what they’re trying to scam me with. It’s awesome.

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¹ I pity the youth of today, who never received a fresh-from-the-ditto machine quiz in junior high, the purplish ink still stinky and damp, making all your penciled answers smudge and tear. Wait, no, the opposite of that, those things were terrible.

² No direct link; at present, that’s on the upcoming exhibitions page, and will presumably shift to the current exhibitions page, and eventually the past exhibitions page.

³ Other loci include Portland, Seattle, the Bay Area, Toronto, Brooklyn, and White River Junction.

Following up on the various calls for entries yesterday, there’s at least two more awards programs that incorporate webcomics in a thoughtful manner, and you may want to consider them.

• The Cartoonist Studio Prize from Slate and the Center For Cartoon Studies is back for its seventh iteration, and the call for entries is open until 31 January. The CSP is fairly unique in a couple of regards — it has only two categories (Print Comic Of The Year and Web Comic Of The Year), it produces shortlists of ten works in each category, and in lieu of a statue it presents each winner with one thousand American cash smackeroos — and has remarkably few barriers to consideration.

  The work must have been first published (or translated into English) in calendar year 2018, online for the web entries. That’s it. Form, genre, topic, length, intended audience age, and all other artificial criteria are not considered. The only real restriction is that current faculty and students of CCS are ineligible.

  Got a print comic you want to submit? The form is here [PDF]. Did your work on the web? You’re gonna go here instead. The shortlists will be announced in March, and winners in April.

• Also open for your entries, the Prism Awards are presented by Prism Comics, the Cartoon Art Museum, and the Queer Comics Expo¹ annually, recognizing awesome comics by queer creators/addressing queer characters and topics. There will be awards granted for Best Short Form Comic, Best Webcomic, Best Comic From A Small To Midsize Press, Best Comic From A Mainstream Publisher, and Best Comic Anthology.

  Submissions must cover work made (or first published) in calendar year 2018, and not previously submitted for the award². Nominees will be announced at the Queer Comics Expo (dates TBA, but April) and awarded at SDCC in July.

  While we’re here, the Prism Comics Queer Press Grant (which is for two thousand American cash smackeroos) is also accepting submissions, with comics of all forms and media considered

  [F]irst and foremost by artistic merit, followed by concerns such as financial need, proposal presentation, and the project’s contribution to the LGBT community. The judges also lean towards projects that are more fully realized — we want to see many pages of sequential art, rather than an idea with sketches. The Queer Press Grant is awarded to an amateur artist who hasn’t yet gotten a mainstream publisher. They are reviewed by the Prism Board, past recipients of the Grant and Prism’s Advisory Board

  The Prism Awards submission guidelines may be found here, and entries are due by 15 February. The Prism Comics Queer Press Grant process is described here, and will take submissions until 1 March.

Spam of the day:

Hi – I came across your website fleen.com and I wanted to see if you have 3-5 minutes to see if I can reduce your payment processing fees? Please feel free to call or email me at 866.303.2558 opt.1

Got some time to kill? Call this guy and waste some of his time.

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¹ Their official site is a Tumblr, and what with the stupidity over there, it may be locked as violating guidelines since anything and everything (but especially LGBTQ everythings and anythings) are being tagged as violating the TOS.

² That seems an odd requirement, but policies of this nature are typically reactive, so somebody out there is apparently doing work in one year, publishing in another, and trying to resubmit for the award again? Lame.

Hey there everybody, how’s the first full week of the year treating you? Good, good. Gonna mention some things you might want to get in on in the immediate term.

Entries! Got a couple of things that are looking for entries at the moment!

• The Eisners have just placed their call for entries, and it appears that one of this year’s judges is an adorable corgi, so that’s good. The rules [PDF] for webcomics/digital comics are slightly clarified, with digital defined as published online in 2018 and webcomic as long-form stories published online in 2018. I’m not sure what the line for long-form is, but that’s okay — the Eisners never have been sure either. Entries close 15 March.
• While we’re talking awards, the NCS has also announced its call for entries for the division awards. As in past years, online comics are divided into short form (think gag panels or strips) and long form (ongoing story), and there’s a new online animation category this year. Please note that the online comics require regular updates, whereas online animation may be a one-shot. It’s a tight turnaround for your entries — they’re due by next Tuesday, 15 January.
• Not an award (at least, not yet), but Iron Circus Supreme Leader For Life C Spike Trotman is celebrating the arrival of FTL Y’All in mailboxes around the world with a call for the next anthology:
  

  Iron Circus’ latest anthology project has been REVEALED.
  YOU DIED: An Anthology of the Afterlife! Submissions open FEBRUARY 1ST!
  Get the details HERE. https://ironcircus.com/you-died

  Let me save some of you some trouble and vicious mocking from Spike: read the submission rules. Seriously, she gets enough of these that if you decide to send something without following the guidelines, it goes out and if you bitch about her not accepting your brilliant jewel, she’ll inflict emotional damage on you for being an idiot.

  There’s enough folk out there that can follow directions to get that US$50/page rate (plus Iron Circus’s bonus structure) and the ability to buy copies for resale at a 50% discount that she doesn’t need to deal with somebody that can’t read and will only waste her time.

Comics! So about nine months ago, Nancy went from a moribund comic strip that primarily functioned as a vehicle for its current artist to draw Aunt Fritzi spank-bank style to the most vital comic since Cul De Sac or even Calvin & Hobbes; Olivia Jaimes is a genius¹. And credit where credit’s due, Universal Feature Syndicate/Andrews McMeel is approaching the revivification of moribund strips in a big, exciting way.

Click on the link for yesterday’s update of Alley-Oop and you’ll get a strip that actually ran in 2013, ending on a cliffhanger. Follow the link for today’s update of Alley-Oop and it’s one panel and an entire creative team later — it’s the promised relaunch with writing by Joey Allison Sayers and art by Jonathan Lemon, a pair of webcomickers who show every promise of being able to do for the Oopster what Jaimes did for Nancy. I’m calling it now: Alley-Oop is (or will be) lit.

Too many people slept on the Nancy creator shift; now is your chance to get in on what looks like a back to the very beginnings reboot of Alley-Oop (it’s strongly implied that most of the strip’s 86 year history was — like Bobby Ewing in the shower — just a dream). Plus it looks like Lemon signs his work with a little lemon with a face on it, and I declare this to be ACCEPTABLE.

Spam of the day:

Me now can last at least 2. 5 hrs and leave their partners please Watch this amazing 2 minute trick that ‘Kills’ ED, leavings your girl satisfied

I am not sure which language the person who wrote this original spoke, but I bet they don’t speak it very well.

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¹ Note to self — set odds on Jaimes a) being nominated for the NCS newspaper strip division award, b) winning it, and c) taking the Reuben Award itself, further cementing Stephan Pastis as the Susan Lucci of the cartooning world.

I’ve got just enough time to establish residency and take advantage of some sweet discounts at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Here’s the deal:

The Cartoon Art Museum thanks its fans and supporters throughout Northern California by offering discounted admission to its galleries throughout the year as part of its ongoing mission to ignite imaginations and foster the next generation of visual storytellers by celebrating the history of cartoon art, its role in society, and its universal appeal.

San Francisco residents enjoy the benefits of a reduced General Admission fee to the Cartoon Art Museum all year long, and the Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to announce that it will extend that same discount to other counties throughout Northern California during select months in 2019.

*Residents of the following counties will enjoy reduced admission to the Cartoon Art Museum during the months listed below*:

March

Residents of these counties are asked to provide a valid photo ID to claim this admissions discount.

January	Napa
February	San Mateo
March	Santa Clara
April	Solano
May	Sonoma
September	Alameda
October	Contra Costa
November	Marin

Yeah, okay, maybe I won’t still be at the Marriott in Alameda County in September (at least I hope not; the red-eye flight home tonight is gonna suck, but at least my dog will be thrilled to see me tomorrow morning). And wherever you live, CAM’s got you covered this month for pay-what-you-want on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00am to 5:00pm. For the rest of the year, the first Tuesday of the month will still be PWYW, so bring the family and enjoy exhibits like A Treasury Of Animation (ongoing), and Emerging Artist Showcase: Thi Bui (through 14 January). There’s really no bad time to visit, to be honest.

In decidedly less good news, KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed shared the following earlier today:

I’m sad to say that Zu, our beautiful goofy big-hearted train wreck of a dog, has metastatic bone cancer. You know him by his Twitter callsign, Shitbeast Prime.

Requisite disclaimer: Spangler’s a personal friend of mine, I wrote the foreword for her first book, and I’ve been bowled over by Zu because he masses nearly as much as I do and has a much lower center of gravity. I’ve also lost two dogs to bone cancer. It’s heartbreaking, trying to find a way to keep them from pain but not rob them of any good days.

Spangler’s not asking for anything, but believe me when I tell you she would move heaven and earth for any treatment that seemed viable, damn the cost. If you like her work (in her comic, which is great, or her novels, which are great, or livetweeting White House press conferences so you don’t have to watch them, which is not great per se, but a damn valuable resource), maybe purchase some of her work?

And if you have a Good Boy or Good Girl of your own at home, give them some extra love; I know that Zu would appreciate it.

Spam of the day:

I have written a tonne of articles on sex toys, bondage and other stuff with which I have some personal experience :D I would like to contribute these articles to your blog as I think that your audience would enjoy reading them and find them useful. I will try to write some articles on famous porn stars and their biographies as well.

Frederic (or is it Anastasia, you use both names in your spam), you offer for download from your site what purports to be porn articles, related photos, and pics of you [presumably engaging in the personal experience you mentioned]. Does that actually work? It’s kind of obvious what you’re attempting here.