On the one hand, I hear that Donald Rumsfeld is dead, which means that Death is walking his shots ever closer to Kissinger. On the other hand, it is hot as balls out, miserably so. On balance, I’ll call it a net positive. Let’s move on.

Remember about five-six weeks back and how the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is hosting a retrospective of dog-themed cartoons? There’s been some events added to The Dog Show for next weekend that you might want to look at:

• Saturday, 10 July at 2:00pm EDT, Nomi Kane will be hosting an online seminar on pooch drawing. What are the basics of cartoon dogs? What details can be added to make your best friend’s doodle different from all other best friend doodles? If you’ve got a computer and an hour, you can find out! Have paper and pencil ready, and families are urged to attend together, with advance registration required (hit the link).
• Sunday, 11 July from 1:00pm – 4:00pm EDT, if you’re in Columbus, you can come down to The Billy, where Hilary Frambes will be doing sidewalk chalk art of very good dogs (who are welcome if on leash). Register here so they have an idea of how many folks to expect, and if you’re outside, The Billy’s galleries will be open until 5:00pm, just saying.

  The rain date is Saturday, 17 July, same dog-time, same dog-sidewalk (yeah, okay, that sounded better in my head).

Oh, and because the folks at The Billy want everybody to be able to participate, a reminder: If you require an accommodation such as live captioning¹ or interpretation², please email libevents, which is an account at the Ohio State University, a dot–educational institution, as soon as possible. Requests made less than a week in advance will be more difficult to meet, although they’ll make every effort; if you give them enough notice, you’re pretty much assured of the assistance you require.

Spam of the day:

Hi there are many girls here https://[nope!].co/fN5R

As of 1 December 2020, there are approximately 488 people in a square kilometer in New Jersey³, 23.5% of which are under the age of 18, and 51.3% of which are women. There are many girls everywhere I look, and that’s without clicking on your virus-riddled link.

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¹ More for the Zoom event, you can’t really caption somebody drawing on the sidewalk.

² I imagine they’d be able to work that for either event.

³ Which is also home to more scientists and engineers per square kilometer than anyplace else in the world. In your face, rest of the planet!

But on the other hand, I’m not saying I don’t have nemesis, either.

See, it all comes back to Ryan Estrada, comicker, language demystifier, raconteur, [radio] drama impressario, shamer of cheapskates, and oh yes, Eisner nominee in the inaugural year of the Best Graphic Memoir category (alongside wife Kim Hyun Sook and artist Ko Hyung-Ju) for Banned Book Club. It’s the last item we’re concerned with today.

Estrada is doing something you don’t always see — openly posting on the sosh meeds about who can vote in the Eisners and imploring folks who can to vote for Banned Book Club, and he’s doing it for the best reason of all:

Spite.

Or at least comeuppance:

Time’s running out to register to vote!
You may wonder why I’m so insistent.

Well, a middle schooler named Jerry told me I couldn’t win an Eisner.

It was on the zoom in front of everybody.

Now my whole 6th grade ESL class is following the Eisners to see if Jerry was right.[Fearful face emoji] [Face with open mouth and cold sweat emoji] [emphasis mine]

Oh you did not, JERRY. You did not tell a man who has been thrown from a train, wandered through a drug war, dragged his ass up Kilimanjaro, lit himself on fire twice¹, and slept on a public bench in a gosh-darned typhoon that he is incapable of anything.

Especially not when such a man is unfailingly generous to you, JERRY:

Jerry is actually the cool, smart kind kid in class so he’s not trying to be a jerk he just DOESN’T BELIEVE IN ME.

I stand by my assessment of Jerry and encourage everybody that is eligible to vote in the Eisners to vote for Banned Book Club, so that Jerry can get his head right. Do it for Ryan, Hyun Sook, and Hung-Ju. Do it because Banned Book Club truly deserves both the nomination and the award. Do it to prove a middle school kid wrong and in so doing, strike back at every Jerry that’s not believed in you when he should, as well as everybody in middle school who was so damn certain about something while being so damn wrong.

Do it for spite. Do it so that I, a grown man, do not need to have a nemesis that is in middle school².

If you make, publish, edit, or sell comics, or if you are an academic or librarian that works with comics, you are eligible to cast a ballot for the Eisners until 30 June.

Spam of the day:

Give with Crypto Currency? Why Yes! We are adding it!

This from what purports to be a Christian crowdfunding site, making the claim that they’re emailing me because of my past contributions to somebody raising money to assuage their hurt feelings that they can’t be utter shits towards everybody that isn’t their exact flavor of white supremacist evangelical without getting some mild rebuke for their actions. Or, as they have it, being persecuted. I am very tempted to respond with a hearty Hail, Satan! instead of sending them to the spamhole and reporting them for phishing.

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¹ So far.

² Correctly identified in an old Life In Hell strip as existing only to separate out kids in their maximally snotty years, both to protect the younger kids they would torment ceaselessly, and to spare them from the high schoolers doling out beatings they would so richly deserve. Matt Groening had your number in like 1987 when YOUR PARENTS were in middle school, JERRY.

It’s comics awards season again, and as yet unanswered questions regarding their security and disclosure obligations aside, there’s quite a lot to be excited about with respect to the Eisner nominations this year. The list is simply rife with current, former, and adjacent-to webcomics folks. Let’s dig in:

• Best Single Issue is, to my mind, one of the big ones; it reflects a distillation of all the various crafts of comics into a relatively compact, standalone unit, and says that this is one of the best of the year. Ben Passmore, whose work is on the norms-challenging end of the spectrum, is nominated for Sports Is Hell
• Best Continuing Series has two different Chip Zdarsky titles up for consideration: Daredevil, and Stillwater, the latter of which is a co-creation with Ramón Pérez. Yes, I do believe Kukuburi will return one day. I should also note that Stan Sakai is nominated for Usagi Yojimbo, which remains the epitome of a single creator’s vision across the decades and epitomizes the spirit of webcomics if not the distribution medium. It’s also one of those titles — like Octopus Pie, Giant Days, or The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl to name three — that just gets better every single issue (or story arc) and if you don’t read it you damn well should.
• Best Publication For Early Readers (Up To Age 8) I wanted to note that RH Graphic, who launched under the worst possible circumstances last year, have garnered their first nomination for Donut Feed the Squirrels by Mika Song. They’ve got another a bit further down, and to see that level of quality right out of the gate? Honestly, I think it’s entirely in character for the team that Gina Gagliano put together. Welcome to the critical recognition tier, RH Graphic!
• Best Publication For Kids (Ages 9-12) I really enjoyed Go With The Flow (Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann) and Snapdragon (Kat Leyh) — both from :01 Books, who are a perennial powerhouse in this category — but must also note how very, very much I loved Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru’s Superman Smashes The Klan and damn if I wouldn’t be delighted if a book about an immigrant punching literal klansmen and Nazis in their stupid klansmen and Nazi faces didn’t take this one.

  Particularly in this time of Asian Americans being attacked to satisfy the petty hatreds of the small and vindictive. Put this book in the hands of every kid and adult that loves comics because gods damn Yang just gets Superman, and Gurihiru draws Lois Lane better than she’s ever been drawn before.

• Best Publication For Teens (Ages 13-17) I thought that the second Check, Please! collection (the invaluable Ngozi Ukazu) maybe didn’t have to be set in an age-specific category and probably should be in one of the best book categories, but you know what? They’re kind of chaotic in their requirements, and designating this a teens title means more people will put a story of acceptance in the hands of young folk, so that’s all right.

  It’s going to be a tough decision for the voters, though, because Gene Yang is nominated again for Dragon Hoops, and it’s a spectacularly good book. Plus you have Displacement by Kiku Hughes and A Map To The Sun by Sloane Leong … all of which are from :01 Books. When you have four of the six nominees in a category, you’re doing something right.

• Best Reality Based Work features Dragon Hoops again, and as the jury noted that there were a large number of memoirs in publication last year, they added a new category to contain them. Dragon Hoops could have gone there, but it was a genre-stretching work that played with the nature of comics and (auto-)biography, so probably just as well that they didn’t.

  But you know who did get nominated in the inaugural year of Best Graphic Memoir? Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Ko Hyung-Ju for Banned Book Club, which I believe is the first nomination of completely original work for Iron Circus. It’s almost like Spike Trotman’s got a good eye for great stories.

• Best Adaptation From Another Medium Yang takes his second nomination for Superman Smashes The Klan, as the story was originally told as a radio serial back in the 1940s. He’s joined by Ryan North and Albert Monteys for their adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five which I still haven’t read because Diamond is still not filling new orders, even as it gets foreign language releases around the globe. Get it together, Diamond!
• Best Writer includes another nod for Zdarsky for his work on Stillwater, as well as Matt Fraction for both the conclusion of Sex Criminals and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen (which was wonderfully weird and funny).
• Best Writer/Artist Remember that I said RH Graphic had another nomination this year? Trung Le Nguyen is here (for The Magic Fish ) alongside such prominent names as Junji Ito, Pascal Jousselin, Craig Thompson, Adrian Tomine, and Gene Luen Yang for Dragon Hoops. That’s five nominations for two books if I’ve got my sums right, which seems as dominant a performance as I can ever recall for one person at the Eisners in one year.
• Best Cover Artist has a second nod for Ramón Pérez for Stillwater, which is nice.
• Best Academic/Scholarly Work threw me a surprise, as it would be hard to find a book more in tune with the sensibilities of this page than Webcomics by Sean Kleefeld. Sean’s a really smart guy, and if I can ever get my hands on a copy — the academic titles don’t get anywhere near as wide a print run as the entertainment titles — I suspect I’m going to love it. We’ve been way overdue for a good scholarly look at webcomics, particularly since the first one was a) too early, and b) less scholarly and more anecdotal.
• Best Digital Comic and Best Webcomic remain, as always, mysterious to me. It is worth noting that half of the nominations in the former are from Europe Comics and list translators in the credits; looking beyond North America is an encouraging trend and I hope it continues. In the latter, I’ll note that four of the six nominations are at aggregator sites (Webtoon Factory, Tapas, Webtoon) or Instagram.

  So I wanted to call out Alec Longstreth’s Isle Of Elsi and Steve Conley’s The Middle Age for maintaining the webcomics tradition of having your own damn website, if it’s just a domain that redirects elsewhere, because … well, lots of reasons. Mostly so that the work stands on its own rather than because an eyeballs-maximizing site chooses to elevate it, but also so that if things go wrong you can get your work the hell away from a bad partner and keep it running in a way you control. To me, that’s the central ethos of webomics.

Now then, after last year’s (still insufficiently explained) voting fiasco, there’s a new, two-step process: prospective voters¹ apply for ballot access at https://form.jotform.com/211246268258054; those approved will receive an invitation to fill out their ballot by 30 June. Results will be announced online in conjunction with Comic-Con@Home 2021.

I do not have at this time reason to either trust or distrust the process, so my recommendation last year that voting was not secure does not hold for this year, but I suppose we’ll all find out together if they manage to screw the pooch again.

Spam of the day:

In fact, this oil is the reason Croatian women look 20 years younger than they actually are: And today, you can discover how to remove 18 years of wrinkles without spending a fortune.

That is … oddly specific. Are Croatian women generally so reputed?

_______________
¹ Defined as comics professionals: creators, publishers, retailers, and educator/academics or librarians focusing on comics.

In conjunction with this page’s longstanding contention that almost anything can be a webcomic¹ today we are not talking about words + pictures in the traditional sense, but about stories that lead to amusement and joy in this month of both Pride and re-emergence, in the multimedia sense. Which is to say, The Doubleclicks are throwing a concert.

Pride time, baby, and this time we’re prouder than ever!

Hi would you like to see a bunch of amazing LGBTQ+ people sing songs and have fun in one big show?

Great news, we are producing such a show on June 12. ROARING RAINBOW is a dream come true, a joyful day of queer pride, and a benefit show for excellent organizations who do valuable work for trans youth, all produced and hosted by the Doubleclicks. Please help us support trans kids at this big powerful giant show!

We have gathered the Internet’s favorite queer icons in one place for this banefit concert of epic proportions. Join the Doubleclicks, Rebecca Sugar (creator of Steven Universe), Sydnee McElroy, Rileigh and Teylor Smirl (Still Buffering), Crys Matthews, and SO MANY MORE for a joyful online concert to benefit trans youth.

Check out tickets, extremely cute hats, and so many fun things right now! [emphases original]

That via an email from Laser Malena-Webber, the non-cello half of the sibling duo that wears feelings and nerdery on their sleeves and reminds us that it is okay to be/have those things. Laser and (Doubleclicks cello half) Aubrey Turner are together in the same place at the same time for the first time since the Before Times, and godsdammit, if they’re gonna be this happy they’re gonna make sure you have the opportunity as well.

So starting at 5:00pm EDT this Saturday, 12 June, at your computer or other internet-enabled device, you’ll get to join in with a bunch of rad folks in support of Trans Families and the National Center For Transgender Equality. All are welcome². My guess is that if you’re reading this page, you’re already a fan of at least a couple of the folks on the bill.

Tickets start at US$5.00 for the concert, US$20 for the concert + aftershow + prize package raffle, and go up to US$100 for sponsorship credit, swag, better chances in the raffle, and the satisfaction of making good things happen for other people. Good things like upping the contributions to the beneficiaries, and also subsidizing some zero-cost tickets (by request) to folks that unfortunately find even five bucks a burden. For those unable to attend, there’s some pretty sweet merch on the RR page as well, just scroll down past the tickets.

Okay, thunderstorm’s about to roll in and the power is flickering a little, so let’s wrap it up here. Whether you make it to the show or not, try to spend Saturday afternoon/evening/morning/whenever it might be wherever you might be being a little extra joyful on behalf of those who surely could use some joy in their lives. And in the words of Laser, Rarrr.

Spam of the day:

fleen.com is King but social proof is Queen, and the lady rules the house!

…

…

What.

That’s too nonsensical, spammers. What else you got for me today?

Padre, a real life Angel Whisperer, has been communicating with Angels since he was just a child.

Unless Padre has been communicating with Old Testament Final Fantasy Boss Monster-type angels, not interested. And if he has been, my condolences to Angel for being a gibbering wreck.

_______________
¹ To quote me, Homestar*Runner is a webcomic.

² I don’t want to speak for Aubrey, Laser, et. al., but I’m gonna take a guess that if any terves want to pony up the ticket price and mind their manners and not be complete dickbags about other people being trans in the world, you’ll get to enjoy the show as well.

I also am gonna take a guess that people inclined to tervishness find fun and joy experienced by and in supoprt of trans and gender non-conforming folks to be like kryptonite³ and so they won’t be around.

³ Or possibly like Oz witches find buckets of water. Choose your preferred metaphor, they’re all equivalent.

Hey, y’all. How ya doing? Good? Good. It’s a drizzly day and there’s a very lazy hound somewhat noisily snoring and it’s giving everything here a more than slightly soporific character. Let us converse for some little while and then have a nap.

• Yesterday, I pointed out a pair of comics-centric events that are taking very different approaches to the (hopefully, persisting) post-pandemic reality. From Massachusetts, an outdoor, spaced-out event; from Long Island, an indoors event that doesn’t so much as mention health protections and shows lots of photos of crowded-together folks.

  Given that New York City formed the centerpoint of the pandemic in this country through its devastating first wave, you’d have thought that a place just the other side of JFK would be more mindful but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

  So how would something larger than Mini-MICE go about an event in the latter half of 2021 while taking due care? Glad you asked, Sparky. Let’s take a look at what CXC has on deck for October:

  CXC 2021 will feature a mix of online & in person events! Our Vendor Exhibitor Expo will be held virtually over Discord, but some festival events will be in person at partner venues in Columbus, OH. Details: https://cartooncrossroadscolumbus.org/?cat=8

  (& check out the poster art by Gabby Metzler!)

  Drilling down into the show website gives us some details:

  CXC 2021 will mark a return to some in-person events following a show that was all online in 2020. Some events will be online only, and several of the in-person events also will be broadcast online. CXC will follow the city of Columbus’s health guidelines and the recommendations of its programming sponsors when determining any necessary precautions.

  We will have more information in the coming months about which events will be in person and how to attend, and how to view online events. Follow us on social media (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) or check our website (cartooncrossroadscolumbus.org) for the latest.

  Good start — acknowledge the fact that things will change in the coming months, set out a model that likely can be made good on even if progress towards reopening stalls, indicate where more information can be obtained. Furthermore:

  One online event will be the CXC Expo, a part of CXC in which creators sell their work to the public. Similar to last year, the CXC Expo will be held online through CXC’s website and Discord Server. We are eager to return to an in-person Expo in 2022.

  “It’s a challenge to plan in our ever changing health and safety environment. We appreciate the flexibility of our guests, presenting partners, donors and audience as we balance our desire for in-person events with proper protocols,” said Jerzy Drozd, CXC’s interim executive director. [emphasis original]

  Further acknowledgement of reality, a nice outreach to everybody with a stake, and a clear assumption of responsibility right from the top¹.

  Additionally, CXC announced its first tranche of guests (Chris Samnee, Victoria Jamieson, Lewis Trondheim, Shary Flenniken) and a new award named for Spurgeon:

  This year’s festival also will mark the debut of the Tom Spurgeon Award, named after CXC’s founding executive director, which will be awarded to someone who is not primarily a cartoonist and whose support of cartoonists and cartoon art enhanced the field in a lasting and measurable way.

  … The award, suggested by Tom’s family, will be a way to honor an individual who has made substantial contributions to the field but is not primarily a cartoonist.

  “The breadth and depth of Tom’s experiences as a journalist, comics historian, and reporter make him the ideal model for an award celebrating the contributions of non-cartoonists to the field,” said Lucy Shelton Caswell, founding curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University and a co-founder of CXC. [emphasis original]

• Speaking of people that enhance the field in lasting ways, readers may recall that we at Fleen are deeply interested in the production work that goes into comics, particularly of the editorial variety. So it was with particular interest that we noted a rather unique manuscript being newly offered:
  

  MAKE YOUR COMICS leaner/meaner/faster/cleaner!
  FILTH & GRAMMAR: The Comic Book Editor’s Secret Handbook.
  Click thru to sign up for more info [various emoji]
  https://kickstarter.com/projects/sxbond/filth-and-grammar

  Better believe I signed up for notification. Bond is a legend in editing circles, and everybody that edits comics (or wants to edit them, or wants to edit them better) should be grabbing a copy while they can. So should everybody that writes about comics, and — somewhat counterintuitively — everybody that makes comics.

  Making comics and editing comics are completely different skills, but understanding what the editor is doing and why they do it? That can only lead a creator to make better comics. If nothing else, it’ll hopefully convince creators that editing your own stuff lies somewhere between impractical and impossible². I suspect that in very short order, Filth & Grammar will belong on every shelf right next to Understanding Comics.

Spam of the day:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch the “DOGE-1 Mission to the Moon” in the first quarter of 2022, with the company accepting the meme-inspired cryptocurrency as payment. Doge has gone up 1161% since early April this year. If you want to be part of this history moment, you can buy Doge coin at Binance here (biggest crypto exchange in the world).

For reference, this was sent five hours after Elon Musk announced that Tesla was getting out of the crypto space.

Elon Musk intends to distribute 25,000 bitcoins. Today I sent 3 Bitcoins to Tesla and received 6 Bitcoins back !!! Bitcoins are returned doubled. The company’s website keeps statistics in real time, who sent and received how many bitcoins in double the amount.
… and this one was sent the day after. Scammers apparently think that crypto enthusiasts are very, very stupid; given that they believe in magic math based on nothing that can be used to purchase upwards of seven different legal goods and/or services at the costs of crippling computer supply chains and hastening the end of human viability on the planet, I am forced in this circumstance to conclude that the scammers are correct.

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¹ Speaking of which, let’s acknowledge the stellar job that Jerzy Drozd did stepping into the suddenly-empty shoes of the dearly missed Tom Spurgeon, and managing the sudden shift to a pandemic-restricted form from practically day one on the job. If CXC doesn’t keep him on in a permanent capacity, every comics event in the world should be competing to obtain his services.

² Says the guy who self-edits … but when I’ve been asked to write particularly important stuff for others, damn right I’ve sought the opinion of editors I trust. The feedback I received on one occasion caused me to completely discard what I had previously considered to be 95% of the way to final and start over in a radically different direction. It made for a radically better piece, for reasons that made sense when I was done but which I couldn’t see at the beginning because — say it with me — you can’t edit your own stuff.

Actual events, in public, with people, although let us note that some are being more responsible than others.

You have on the one hand, a community event held in the great state of West Virginia, featuring artists and artisans of all sorts at the Shenandoah Planing Mill in Charles Town on Saturday, 12 June. Among the studio tour artists will be webcomics own Danielle Corsetto, who was the one that first tipped me to the fun. I should note that this is not a comics-specific, comics-centric, or even comics-featuring event; it’s pretty much Corsetto that will be repping the words + pictures crowd, but come on! Iron forging! Log sawing! Leashed friendly dogs welcome! If you’re in the vicinity, it’ll be a hoot, possibly a hoot and a half.

But if you’re looking for something that’s comics-featuring, comics-centric, even comics-specific, look no further than Mini-MICE; from the folks that bring you the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (normally held mid-Octoberish at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA¹) will be going outdoors in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge on the last weekend of August (that would be the 28the and 29th) with 30 comics folks given tables each of the two days; to maximize those able to exhibit, it will be a different cohort on each of the two days.

Applications are open for Massachusetts residents until 28 June, who should be prepared to share new comics work, from 2020 to the present, and have comics be at least half of what you present on the table. The tables, due to distancing policies² will be 3 feet, under a 10 foot canopy, and are being subsidized by the Central Square Business Improvement District.

Restrictions that are presently in place³ mean that there won’t be any programming or live events, but what the heck — it’s gonna be free to attend, so head on over and check out new comics from local creators. Even if MICE is able to come back next year, it would be great to see Mini-MICE recur, and for other festival-type events to adopt a similar, open-air type approach in addition to their traditional presentations.

Contrast, if you would, with the announcement I got in the mail from a Long Island traditional comics show set for Hofstra University’s sports and event center the first weekend of August (that would be the 7th and 8th). As of this writing, there’s no acknowledgement of possible restrictions, nothing about distancing or mask requirements, zilch. I get that there’s uncertainty about what public events would look like in 2 months time, but every photo features large crowds in close proximity … it’s like the pandemic never happened, and I’d submit that’s the wrong message to send.

If this didn’t convince me that the organizers don’t have public health at the front of their minds, the fact that the one announced guest at this time is Dean Cain — who spent some of last summer mocking the idea of having to wear a mask on a plane — would lead me in that direction.

600,000 Americans are dead of COVID, and the deaths are still occurring; around the world, where vaccinations are nowhere near as widespread, things are getting distinctly worse. This pandemic won’t be over until things are safe for everybody, including those who’ve spent the past forever denying reality. To plan for an event is understandable. To make no attempt to change how things are done to a form that will at least acknowledge life was different in the summer of 2019 is just insulting.

Spam of the day:

Your bank account received a payment of $ 346000. Take your money urgently Your card has received a payment of $ 245000. Take your money

This from “michaelwof”, who’s been using a series of French and Belgian email accounts to try to convince me that FREE!! MONEY!!1! is coming my way if I just click on his links. Yeah, no.

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¹ Home to more colleges and universities than you can shake a stick at, despite what Ian said in Spinal Tap.

² Which, let’s face, are likely to change.

³ Ibid.

The relaxation of restrictions for those who are fully vaccinated¹ means that centers of comics scholarship are beginning to make programs and exhibitions available again. The two premiere such institutions are the Cartoon Art Museum and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum; they’ve both been extraordinarily responsible about their re-openings², and each have things going on/coming up. Let’s talk.

• Starting in Columbus, Ohio and The Billy, a new exhibit will open on 19 June and run through Halloween (coincidentally, the same timeframe as the second half of their Pogo retrospective), and it’s on a topic that is likely near and dear to your heart. The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons will be curated by comics historian and cartoonist Brian Walker.

  Before you get the idea that he’s a second-generation guy who only got a syndication gig with a zillion newspapers by inheriting it from dad³, I mean, he is, but he’s also a legit historian. I happened to be in Brussels when the Comics Art Museum was running an exhibition he curated on 100 years of American comic strips, and it was really good.

  He’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of newspaper strips, and if you’re going to do an exhibition on any particular topic drawing from that medium, he’s going to be one of the go-to experts to mount the show. Sure, the description talks about editorial cartoons, comic books, magazine gag strips, animation, and more — they’d be almost hilariously short-sighted to not include Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man, f’rinstance — but the show art clearly focuses on newspaper strips. Finally, Odie gets his chance to shine without that lasagna-swilling bastard stealing the spotlight.

• And over in San Francisco, CAM is offering a free online event this Sunday, 4:00pm PDT, talking about the cartoon counterpart to dogs. Kitty Sweet Tooth: A Conversation with Abby Denson and Utomaru will bring Denson (writer) and Utomaru (artist) together to talk about their new graphic novel for younger readers (available everywhere from First Second).

  The online event will involve a reading, drawing demo, and more; registration for the online event is required but free, and those who purchase a copy of Kitty Sweet Tooth via the registration page will get a bookplate signed by Denson and Utomaru. In the meantime, check out Utomaru’s website (linked above) — the art hits the exact middle point between Harajuku street fashion, Hello Kitty, and Scott Pilgrim — bright, a little chunky, always something else to catch the eye, no matter how many times you look at it.

Spam of the day:

[moneybags emoji x 2] The approval was successful. Hello. Hired you on the Internet.

Those are some of the most terrifying words I’ve ever read.

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¹ And, in parts of the country, the more reckless relaxation of all restrictions.

² CAM is open to the public Saturdays and Sundays with capacity controls. The Billy is open by reservation on weekends (Museum part, but presently closed until 18 June) and by appointment for limited weekday hours (Library part).

³ He is a part of what Josh Fruhlinger has dubbed Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC in recognition of the fact that Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois) and Dik Browne (Hi & Lois, Hagar The Horrible) were close collaborators, a tradition that extends to their respective sons.

The next 6-8 weeks have a stack of graphic novels about to drop and I wanted to spend a little time talking about some of them, and their creators. Some of these I’ll have seen advanced review copies of, some I haven’t, and in any event these aren’t going to be reviews — they’re going to be me talking about stuff that looks really friggin’ good so that you can look for them in your local shops. First up: a pair of creators whose work we at Fleen are big fans of.

• It’s been a while since Vera Brosgol had a full graphic novel, but she’s been giving us amazing children’s picture books since then — Leave Me Alone! and The Little Guys are favorites among the younger members of my family — and she’s about to gift us with another.

  Memory Jars is about a young girl who discovers that she can keep anything in jars, safe and whole exactly as it is now, forever. You never have to give it up, you never have to say goodbye. Or, as Brosgol put it somewhat more compactly, [I]t is about canning and death and yeah — there’s some melancholy in there. If a child is ever to gain an appreciation for the ephemerality of life, the fact that all we know will someday cease, there’s hardly a gentler way to learn that with this book. There’s also jam, so that’s cool.

  Although Memory Jars does not release until Tuesday next week, Brosgol will be doing a live reading and drawing chat thing tomorrow at 7:00pm EDT¹ with LeUyen Pham, with An Unlikely Story of Plainville, MA sponsoring (registration here). Copies of Memory Jars purchased through An Unlikely Story will come with signed bookplates (while supplies last), as will copies from Brookline Booksmith (Brookline, MA). Green Bean Books in Portland has signed and sketched copies; try getting awesome extras like that from Jeff Bezos. You can’t!

• We’re a little further out from the release of Molly Ostertag’s The Girl From The Sea — it’ll be in stores a week after Memory Jars — but there’s still time to get your orders in with your local retailer. If you need convincing, the first scene is up for sneak peek and it is terrific at setting up the story. We don’t know where things will go after these few pages, but we know that there’s all kinds of details about Morgan Kwon’s life that we want to know. It’s master-level storytelling economy and proof that Ostertag really thinks about how to structure a story.

  More proof, if any were needed, is over at Ostertag’s alt Twitter account, which is mostly devoted to gayifying Tolkien — I have been reading the various chronicles of Middle Earth for about four decades and cannot believe I didn’t see just how romantic Frodo and Sam are — where she’s shared some of her process work for her latest short gay hobbits comic.

  Thinking about how to compose the pages, thinking about how to end the story, showing off the things she’s figured out on her own make for a better comic in her character-drive mode. Watch how the basic idea becomes a paragraph of idea outline becomes panels. The thing that I never thought about before but which makes perfect sense in retrospect² is her pacing rule of thumb: if the outline has the word and in it, that means a new panel.

  Well, that and the rule about where the reader’s eyes will progress in the panel and how to guide them. And how panel height conveys time. And how words can indicate physical closeness in characters. It’s almost like drawing a hell of a lot of great comics will make you better at drawing great comics³.

Spam of the day:

1 tsp of THIS forces poop constipation out of you – permanently?

That sounds explosively traumatic and permanently disabling. Maybe just improve your diet and get some live-culture yogurt instead?

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¹ I know the tweets says 3:00pm PDT which would be 6:00pm EDT, but the promo image and registration page say 4:00pmt PDT and 7:00pm EDT respectively, so that’s what I’m going with.

² Getting a lot of that from Ostertag, it seems.

³ And it’s also almost like Ostertag has spent way too much time in Appendix C of The Lord Of The Rings, and knows from the family trees that Sam has an older sister named Daisy. Not that I’d know anything about that.

For the second year in a row — thanks, antimaskers, deniers, antivaxxers, and general covidiots! — the Queer Comics Expo is going to be held virtually, and that means it’s time to get ready for the celebration in the Venn diagram where the circles are marked QUEER CULTURE and COMICS. That little slice of overlap is a lot of fun.

Tickets are on sale now, with a US$10 early bird for those of limited means¹, a US$16 regular weekend pass, and a US$55 VIP package (the latter includes a one year membership to the Cartoon Art Museum, otherwise access is the same regardless of payment level); a little birdie told me that discount code CAMPRIDE will let you save on the costs.

Programming on Saturday kicks off at 11:00am (all times PDT, given the fact that QCE and CAM are San Francisco-located) with a spotlight on keynote speaker Vincent Kao, and follows with the announcement of Prism Awards finalists, panels on mental health, furries, and Thirsty Sword Lesbians (the italics indicate a direct quote). From 6:00pm-7:00pm, there’s and online cocktail party (bring your own) with participants matched up for quick 1:1 conversations about everything.

Sunday programming kicks back in 11:00am again, with discussions involving Paige Braddock & Hilary Price, Latinx queer comics, art demos, body positivity, and more. A full list of speakers is at the ticket link, and the programming will stream at cartoonart.org/qcexpo. For those actually in the Bay Area, the Cartoon Art Museum is open weekends from 11:00am to 5:00pm.

It may lack the around-the-city, multiple-venues approach of the Before Times, but it looks as if it’s gonna be a party nonetheless, and that may be what everybody needs as much as anything. Open your wallet, block out some time, and have fun.

Spam of the day:

The main feature of the new Zoomshot Pro tactical zoom is the possibility of obtaining 4k quality in your photos from a great distance against very defined targets, or for panoramas.

I’m guessing that by describing this aftermarket cellphone camera lens as tactical, you’re hoping that I’m the sort of dude that automatically associates that word with manliness and therefore your toy is a must-have, rather than the sort that took an optics class in nerd school and therefore knows you need completely different kinds of lenses for zoom and panorama imaging. Fuck you for assuming I’m the former.

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¹ And the Cartoon Art Museum, partner and primary fundraising beneficiary of QCE, is asking potential attendees to contact them for other options if ten bucks is too much (email QCExpo at cartoonart, which is a dot-org). They really want you to attend more than they want the money.

… One the other, you got to admire the hustle. Kathy Peterson would like you to know that Kidnapped By Gnomes has hit 300 strips total, if one considers both the before & after of an epically productive hiatus¹, and also that KBG is taking part in the virtual TCAF, including an appearance in the exhibitor room on 13 May from 5:00pm-7:00pm. Two books on sale, a third premiering, and I have to check that my blogroll isn’t actually changed — those little geeks are persistent.

And since we’re talking about the reigning Queen of Hey Remember When That Webcomic Launched, maybe we should mention one of the Kings. A looong time ago, one of the most complex (in terms of topic matter and visuals) webcomics was A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible by David Hellman and Dale Beran. They did maybe the last ALILBTDII over at The Nib, where Beran also posted some heartbreaking comics essays about his experiences as a teacher in Baltimore in times of unrest. He did a book about how the worst areas of the internet shitposted their way to an authoritarian government, too.

And lately, he’s been running a comic that he made during quarrantine on Twitter, about a page a day, starting here. It’s called Arthur Pendlebroke, 1st Level Mage, and it’s seemingly about a guy who finishes grad school and discovers his parents never told him about his invite to wizarding school a dozen years ago, and being the oldest recently-graduated wizard in a world of too many roomies and the gig economy.

I say seemingly because Arthur leaves the story after about four pages and a couple of his friends (one of our mortal realms, one decidedly not) have to hunt him down find him you know what? Hunt him down might actually be accurate. He was supposed to take them on a Trader Joe’s run, and now he’s in a goblin palace, you see. Probably. Might be dead. Might have to kill him. Hard to tell.

It’s a hoot and a half, and I recommend that you read along until you decide, Self, I can’t stand this one page a day pace! and drop the five bucks it’ll cost you to grab the whole thing on Gumroad.

Spam of the day:

Vaccine Shedding Testimonies along with Vax Death and Illness Pics/Videos
[lengthy list of bullshit and Bible verses]

I am going to find you, come to where you are, and shed all my vaccine detritus on you until you are irredeemably contaminated and God hates you. Hail Satan.

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¹ Attending med school and doing a residency would have been enough for most folks, but coming back to doing a webcomic while serving as an emergency medicine doctor during a pandemic? That’s gotta be a record of some kind.