In this case, their announcement of Kids and YA Guests for 2017 (held, as always, in/around the Toronto Reference Library, this year on 13 & 14 May), which includes some huge names: Isabelle Arsenault and Fanny Britt! Svetlana Chmakova! Elise Gravel! Matt Forsythe! Jarrett Williams! And also a huge crew of creators coming with :01 Books, including Scott Westerfeld, Shannon Hale, LeUyen Pham, Faith Erin Hicks, Molly Ostertag, Matthew Loux, Mike Cavallaro, Mike Holmes, George O’Connor, Farel Dalrymple, Box Brown, Penelope Bagieu, and Alison Wilgus, half of whom will have debuts. It’s gonna be a great time in the Big Smoke¹.

Spam of the day:

Monthly curated natural treats and toys for your pup

My dog is presently barking his head off at a pile of squirrel poop. Got that in your curation?

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¹ They call Toronto that, right? I mean, I knew about Cabbagetown being a nickname, but I’m pretty sure I saw Big Smoke somewhere.

My voice, that is. It’s running about 7% of normal capacity, which sucks considering that I teach for a living. Everything is taking twelve times longer than normal¹ and so this is going to be super quick. The inestimable Chris Butcher and the TCAF folks have announced a fresh slate of international featured guests, adding to those previously announced. The full list is hell of impressive.

Okay, back to the interpretive dance to convey SQL permissions exist in a stack of depth one.

Spam of the day:

I must say you have very interesting posts here. Your blog can go viral. You need initial boost only.

I don’t need the blog to go viral; I need my upper respiratory tract to stop be viral. Got anything for that?

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¹ Worse, I have one guy in class that is putting lotion on his hands like every 15 minutes, and it’s got a fragrance that is catching on all the coughed-raw sections of my throat in an extraordinarily painful manner and he won’t stop. It’s like he’s afraid he’ll get the hose again.

Or at least, I feel much better than yesterday. What say we dip into the mailbag?

• It’s been a while since we heard from our friends at the Cartoon Art Museum, so let us all celebrate Will Eisner Week by finding the only way to make comics bigger than looking at Eisner’s influence — namely, by adding in Jack Kirby as both legends will be celebrating their centennials this year:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum celebrates Will Eisner Week with Will Eisner and Jack Kirby: A Centennial Celebration on Saturday, March 11, 2017 from 3:00-5:00pm
  at Mission: Comics and Art, located at 2250 Mission Street, San Francisco. Join us as we discuss the life and artwork of the legendary comic creators Will Eisner (born March 6, 1917) and Jack Kirby (born August 28, 1917). Bay Area comic creators Mark Badger (Batman, Julius Caesar), Al Gordon (Legion of Super-Heroes, Justice League), Justin Hall (No Straight Lines), Mario Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Steve Leialoha (X-Men, Fables), Trina Robbins (Wimmen’s Comix) and Judd Winick (Hilo) will discuss Eisner’s career and the impact that his work had on their own artistic endeavors. A booksigning will immediately follow the panel discussion.

  The thing that I find most inconceivable about this event is that so many creators can talk about the influence that friggin’ Eisner and Kirby had on their work in only two hours¹. You could fill a week, easy.

• I got an email yesterday from Kristina Stipetic, and several things about it caught my eye:
  

  My new webcomic debuted today! It’s called Alethia.

  What it is: a webcomic about robots abandoned by their creators. Scattered groups of robots search for purpose in the factory-cities of their desolate world. It updates with completed chapters instead of page-by-page.

  Why is this interesting? As far as I know, this is the only webcomic to have an animated opening sequence. It’s also simultaneously released in both English and Chinese.

  The bit about the animated opening sequence? Interesting, but I’d be hard pressed to tell if it’s really unique or not, and I’m very much of two minds about blending comics and animation; they have different jobs to do. But the release in Chinese is very intriguing, as is the fact that Stipetic, judging from her About page, not only works in the Chinese language, but lives there as well. More than that, the Chinese version of the comic is presented in a different format than English — the former appears a page at a time, the latter as one tall series of pages comprising a chapter; I wonder to what degree this represents local expectations.

  Additionally, the chapter-at-a-time release is staggered with release on other channels — online will see Chapter Two on 11 March, but Comixology already has up to Chapter Three and Stipetic’s store is up to Chapter Four. This gives me a great deal of confidence that the story will take a direct route from beginning to middle to end, without the digressions that can come from publishing as it’s produced.

  We at Fleen don’t usually promote brand-new comics, but every once in a while something shows a great deal of promise; within the 29 pages of Chapter One, Alethia grows more intriguing and confident, and by the chapter break it’s laid down a number of possible directions and questions to be answered, making it worth your read now, and worth remembering on the 11th for the next chapter.

Spam of the day:

Karla Wants to Share Her Profile with You

I am simultaneously relieved and disappointed that this was not webcomic’s own Professional Horrible Person Karla Pacheco.

________________
¹ Well, that and the fact that they don’t even mention Winnick’s The Adventures Of Barry Ween, Boy Genius. Man, that was some funny stuff.

Obligatory non-political content for those that came for such: the SPX exhibitor lottery is now open, and not terribly changed from the last couple of years except for a simplified process for randomly selecting the winners. Good luck to all, and see you in September.

So. Postcards. Maybe not the best way to communicate your desires with your elected representatives (that would be talking to them in person at a town hall or in their constituent office, although a lot of them seem to be ducking that route presently), but one with some unique advantages. Consider:

• It’s a physical artifact that can’t be ignored. It’s there in front of a member of staff and has to be dealt with.
• Ever since that asshole mailed anthrax around in 2001, all Congressional mail goes to a special facility for x-raying/opening away from legislative offices; postcards can’t hide anything and breeze through the process. Heck, if it’s going to a local office, it probably gets delivered directly without any delays.
• Being open to the world carries a message: here is what I believe and I’m saying it in public; additionally, the design side carries its own message to the many hands (postal workers, political staffers) who can’t help but see an eye-catching design.
• They’re cheap, and while long distance call charges are no longer a thing (ask your parents, kids), don’t forget to factor in the time you spend on hold or with a busy signal.
• For those with anxiety issues, no human stranger to deal with.

But a lot of your basic commercial postcards are not gonna convey that message you really want to send, right¹?

So it’s a good thing that webomickers are stepping up and providing designs. Some are download-and-print-yourself, at least one set is going to be for sale at cost (more on that in a minute), and because Congress apparently still uses fax machines, there’s even a handy item for that particular channel. Let’s dive in:

• From Jess Fink, a super-classy floral design with lots of small symbolic cues: Change! Courage! Compassion! Overcoming hardship! Peace!
• From Howard Tayler (disclaimer: my evil twin), a rather fiestier design that demands attention, in two color variations. He even gives a suggestion as to where you can get ’em printed².
• From KB Spangler (disclaimer: my good friend, and I wrote the foreword for one of her books), a series of wallpapers and icons free for download prompted the thought of printing up postcards and selling at cost; this is not a new thing for Spangler, who regularly gives away the PDF version of her books to readers that can’t afford the purchase price. Also a thing: Spangler’s readers regularly buy multiple copies of her books so that she can afford to give away the excess copies in this manner; in that vein, I promised to pay for 100 people to receive postcards.

  Before I could pull my budget Soros act, however, Spangler announced that an anonymous benefactor paid for the print run, so everybody can buy them for the cost of shipping. For those of you with cash-flow issues, that cost will be literally zero, because I sent Spangler the costs of envelopes, postage, and postcard stamps. Order ’em and they’ll arrive pre-stamped for your constituent-communication convenience.

• From Shing Yin Khor, two offerings: for those that prefer to be completely unambiguous about your feelings, fuck-you postcards³; for those that need a bit more immediacy that the postal system offers, a similarly-themed fax template for crappy Senators.

Lots of options to choose from, and more coming every day. May I suggest that you follow the lead of people noted in this Teen Vogue story that are addressing their postcards to President Bannon? I’m pretty sure I heard that the actual president* thinks that’s a great joke.

Spam of the day:

Dunkin Donuts Stuff

I wonder if they use the word Stuff as equivalent to the Stuf in the ubiquitous Double-Stuf Oreos? Like, there’s just some vat somewhere of the filling they stuff into the various filled donuts? And that’s what they want to shill to me? Ick.

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¹ Although I do like the idea I saw of sending postcards featuring various National Parks, particularly those associated with various unofficial Twitterfeeds.

² I had some postcards printed a while back and can also recommend PsPrint; they’re fast and do quality work.

³ I would pay serious bucks if Onstad surfaced long enough to offer Fuck You Friday postcards.

So I’d heard that this week’s New York Times Best Seller List would feature March mixed in with the real-people books which don’t have pictures, but heck if I can find it. The Children’s lists (which is not synonymous with Graphic Novels either) feature a distinct lack of Raina Telgemeier, and she’s not in the Fiction lists either¹.

But if the paper of record’s Books editor doesn’t think that graphic novels deserve note (and I’m not going to link in her entirely insulting Look, kids, COMICS! quote about March the same week it became the most honored book of the damn year), then we’ll have to recognize the best of [web]comics via other channels. Let this, then, serve as your reminder that nominations for the 2016 NCS Awards close tomorrow, and that there are two separate categories for work first published online: long form and short form. Oh, and you can submit work of another cartoonist, if you think it’s likely to be overlooked.

Either form requires 12 pages of comics be submitted (no physical copies), along with some basic biographical information. And I feel that I should also remind you that I have been involved in the process of selecting nominees since the online division awards were established in 2012². I’d be fascinated to see what changes have been wrought on the membership and direction of the NCS in the years since I sat in on some of their sessions.

Jut be wary of one possible side effect: if you win, you turn into Jon Rosenberg for a year, until the next winner is announced. Unless you’re already Jon, in which case you get to spend a year as Jon-Squared, which is both better and worse than you are presently imagining.

Spam of the day:

GAIN BENEFITS OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA – LEGALLY

While it’s true that the hoops one must jump through to get medical-indicated cannabis in New Jersey are stupid onerous and withholding approved-buyer credentials from those who would benefit from them is idiotic, your offer does not entice me because:

a) I don’t have any conditions that would benefit from weed, and;

b) Having grown up in the same household as my brother and the omnipresent THC cloud that followed him, I can tell you with absolute certainty that for me the chief effect of being even moderately pot smoke-adjacent (as opposed to wood smoke, liquid smoke, charcoal grill smoke, or even cigar smoke) is to experience a significant pain reaction from the resinous layer that immediately forms in my trachea. Alas, there is no epi-pen for this condition.

This may have been due to the extremely crap quality of weed he bought back in the ’80s, but I’m good not finding out.

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¹ One reason why, maybe: the paperback fiction list is now combined print & ebook. Not all graphic novels get a digital release, and those that do are dominated by Comixology, which I can’t tell are or are not included in the vaunted methodology.

² At that time, a single category; since 2013, both long and short forms.

Where to start, where to start? There’s so much evil running around in the world, we need to grab up the positive where we can find it. Let’s dig in.

• You can say what you like about C Spike Trotman — and in the past, a lot of people did, which opinions she catalogued for future reference/vengeance — but nobody can say that when she sets her mind to something that she will half-ass it. She set ambitious goals for Iron Circus Comics for the 2017-2018 timeframe, including more than a dozen new books (well underway) and finishing up a distribution deal (done!).

  Now that she’s got the ability to put IC books in any bookstore in the country, she’s determined to find the best of independent comics that have been overlooked by major publishers, and she’s gonna shove ’em at libraries and the trade until everybody can see ’em. And she’s starting with one of the very best:

  Real Talk: indie and small press comics are the industry vanguard. They set the pace and predict trends; they’re years ahead of the rest.

  But sometimes, that means independently-published masterpieces never get the dissemination, and wider audience access, they deserve.

  ICC wants to fix that. And we WILL fix that.
  Starting in autumn of 2017.

  When Spike says she WILL do something, understand that arrangements are in place, all will be ready to go, and nothing shy of a multi-state near-extinction-level event will derail those plans. The wider world will soon learn what we in webcomics know (namely that Rice Boy is friggin’ brilliant¹), because she is going to shove the books in front of them until they can’t ignore them. Well done, Spike.

• The influence of webcomickers on the next generation of comics creators continues to grow; Jamie Noguchi is getting ready to join the faculty of Montgomery College, and he’s got the purpose of comics down:
  

  I start teaching comics next week at Montgomery College. Lesson 1, comics are about fighting fascism and hate. Done.

  While comics can advance any view desired (cf: Jack Chick was fabulously successful at advancing a particularly hateful POV with his comics), starting the kids off with a charge to uphold a vision (say, Truth, Justice, and what is still The American Way) via their art is a damn good way to start. Within that overarching philosophical approach, there’s lots of room for opinion:

  • Don’t buy Moleskine. They are entirely too expensive for what we’re planning on doing with them.
  • The Canson Fanboy [bristol] pads, despite the terrible name, have blue guidelines printed on the pages to help you measure panels and keep things proportional.
  • Brushes. Welp. If you thought nibs could be confusing, brushes for cartooning will drive you mad.

  I have a feeling that Professor Noguchi’s classes² will learn as much as Professor Zub’sProfessor Gran’s, Professor Guigar’s, and Professor Corsetto’s³ do and/or did. Heck, as alert reader Mark V noted, the legendary Lynda Barry will be teaching at this year’s Clarion writer’s workshop; there’s a lot of talent out there developing the next generation.

  And everybody that doesn’t get to take classes from the pros? Just recall the Jamie Noguchi System and fuckin’ do it all self-taught style.

Spam of the day:
Okay, this isn’t really spam, since it comes to the Fleen email account as a consequence of being on the press list for various cons; it’s a minor comics publisher that doesn’t really overlap with our interests here at Fleen, but gotta recognize them for the subject line:

So a mustachioed skeleton walks into the jungle …

It’s like they know me. So congrats, Alterna Comics, I’m name dropping MR. CRYPT #3 (US$1.99, digital comic book, all ages) as a result of your email. You win.

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¹ Seriously, how do you get a Jeff Smith blurb on your book and not have publishers drive a dump truck full of money up to your front door?

² For extra credit, be ready to discuss your favorite sentai and kaiju series/movies. Trust me on this one.

³ For those that were smart enough to snag up the Girls With Slingshots book 9/book 10 bundle, some of the lessons that Corsetto gave in her cartooning class are in the back. It’s good stuff!

I speak, naturally, of Saint Groundhog’s Day Eve (SGD is the holiest day of the year on its own merits, and not just because it’s the day I met my wife). Lots of hourlies out there, ranging from the mundane to the profane to the heck, yeah! (that last being the contributions of Magnolia Porter’s mom, who isn’t a comics artist but wanted to give it a whirl).

• And, of course, Comics takes many forms, and chalkboariste Dante Shepherd is doing hourlies with small portable chalkboards instead of the great big one in his basement — the equivalent of a quick sketch or individual panel. Well done playing with the form, Dante. And by the way, have you heard of this guy Lucas Landherr who teaches Chemical Engineering at Northeastern and was honored as the outstanding teacher by the American Society of Engineering Education’s Northeast Section (basically New England & Atlantic Canada)?

  There’s a lot of well known colleges in that area, and a lot of engineering programs, and Landherr was judged the one worthy of recognition out of all of ’em. Seems like you and he have a lot in common, Dante; weird how I never see the two of you in the same place at the same time. Anyway, speaking as somebody that teaches in a fashion not too distinct from Landherr, it’s a hell of a tough job, and he’s preparing a hell of a lot of undergrads to do hell of difficult work. Congratulations to him/them/aw heck you know what I mean¹.

• Meanwhile, Saint Groundhog’s Day Eve is also known in some quarters as T-Rex Day, as it was on this day fourteen years ago (!) that T-Rex considered the joys of stomping. Nearly 3100 comics later (some fraction of which are reruns or guest contributions, call it 3000 originals), T-Rex is still pondering the big imponderables. Namely, can you make a dog-based religion even radder (and probably as a result solve all the problems of a pained world) and if so what would that look like?
• And double-meanwhile, a number of comics have made returns in the past two weeks or so, seeking to address the craziness of the world with art; this is why you don’t get rid of RSS feeds, kids. On the one hand, Christopher B Wright brings back Help Desk to talk about authoritarian overreach, and on the other Pontus Madsen has some opinions on the state of our government and found producing comics again to be to his liking.

Spam of the day:

Press forward and recognize images to take into account all content.

I don’t have a forward key, sorry.

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¹ One or the other of Shepherd/Landherr is Batman, the other is Bruce Wayne.

Thankfully, when all seems bleak, a hero appears to save the day!

I am speaking, of course, of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who dropped me an email chock-full of info about this year’s Angoulême Festival. Take it away, FSFCPL!

He included a footnote! That, my friends, is how you get your stuff published here. And also, I must learn more about this Professeur Moustache. Oh, yes, I must.

Spam of the day:

TRUMP: How Americans like you can make money online ($7,197/month)

That is an oddly specific number, but I have no problem believing that he makes a mere seven grand a month (or $86,364 annually). That guy ain’t no billionaire. When he dies and the companies have to be split, his kids are gonna owe into their fourth or fifth reincarnations (most of which, judging by their current behavior, will be as poo bugs).

Things in these (for the moment) United States are getting weird, I wrote to a friend presently traveling overseas, and not the good kind of weird. The least qualified person imaginable for the job of Most Powerful Person In The World appears to be getting more and more unhinged, and we’re possibly less than a week from his hiding under the covers in his special blankey with only people that tell him he’s great allowed in the room.

Traditionally, that stage worked out great for the madder Roman emperors.

I’m thrilled to see that particularly the webcomics community has come together to support those who are, by definition, the most vulnerable in our society: refugees that the regime thought they could beat up on for quickie points among its base; immigrants, some living here for decades, cruelly and intentionally equated with enemies of the state¹; and everybody else caught up in the capricious, arbitrary enforcement actions at our borders².

For those who needed a break from the weekend new, the situation was explained nicely by Sarah Glidden, and since Saturday we’ve seen members of our community at protests and standing witness in airports, and more than a few that are (or have been) trading art for donations to organizations like CAIR and the ACLU.

The responses have been overwhelming; to cite a single case, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (whom you may recall is the new favorite artist of we at Fleen) announced yesterday that she’d give original drawings in exchange for US$20+ donations to organizations defending others. Today she had to put a pause on the offer because in a day, her fans have donated more than US$3000 and time has become a limiting factor.

Others that have made offers, some still open, some finished (for now) include:

• Noelle Stevenson, offering rare commissions (to be repeated in future).
• Box Brown, offering up wrestling drawings until they because neo-Impressionist.
• Matt Lubchansky, now drawing 40 Twitter avatars.
• Ursula Vernon, selling out of her art design pendants (iconic/tribal rabbits) in record time, in support of the International Rescue Committee.
• Jason Shiga doing original drawings of his “hero” Jimmy Yee for US$50+ to the ACLU; as of this writing that one’s still going on.
• David McGuire, Jon Rosenberg, and GOP Teens are all offering chunks of sales for varying times … McGuire’s giving 100% of profits until Tuesday to the ACLU and Cair; Rosenberg’s updated his classic Republicans For Voldemort design with US$1 per going to ACLU, and GOPTeens giving all store proceeds to ACLU until further notice.

That’s just what I remembered reading at some point in the past 48 hours and could find quickly; there’s plenty more out there. And if you doubt that you could have that kind of impact, a hack web pseudojournalist matched $US7800 earlier this month and that guy’s terrible. The collective effort is tremendous — the numbers can’t keep up, but it appears that the ACLU’s average annual online funding was exceeded by a factor of four times in 48 hours this weekend.

We made that happen. You made that happen. And on Fred Korematsu’s birthday, no less.

Fight’s not over, not by a long shot; but in all honesty, I feel more hopeful today than I have for some time. A voice is building across the country and it is saying No. You will not drag us back decades. You will not prey upon the vulnerable. The words we founded our nation on apply to all of us, not just those that have always been privileged. We have distance to go, yes we do, but today the road seems a little gentler and the way a little easier because we are sharing the burden.

One final thought, and I have never been more sure of anything in my life: everybody working together to make this a fairer, kinder, better country and world?

Mr Rogers would have been proud of you.

Also, T-Rex has invented a religion based on dogs and that’s almost as good as Mr Rogers.

Spam of the day:

Gtyrrell Notice N15499

Yeah, no, I don’t believe that FedEx is in the secure electronic message delivery business, so I ain’t clicking on that link. But, wait, what’s that say?

From: Nerys

OMG, is that you, Major Kira? Did you bring the Reliant back via the Orb of Time? Are you the time travelers here to fix the timeline? Hooray!

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¹ I read yesterday of an Iranian-American permanent resident held at the border; his citizenship ceremony was (hopefully still is) scheduled for two weeks from now.

² I read today of a scientist, a Danish citizen by birth, who’s been barred from the US because he performs archeological digs in Iraq. Clearly, a threat to our way of life.

So some things have happened since Friday afternoon; for example, Christopher Hastings wrapped up The Adventures of Dr McNinja without the customary end-of-chapter Final Thoughts. I suspect that this is because there is no Dr McNinja any longer, only Dr Patrick Goodrich, and so nobody to give said Final Thoughts. Not to worry, Hastings’s wife, Carly Monardo, brought a Final Thoughts cake to the wrap party Friday night, and somebody else brought Dr McNinja cookies! They were delicious.

• In other news, a slew of awards for youth literature were announced this morning in conjunction with the big ALA convention going on, and surprising absolutely nobody, March, Book 3 is going to have to find some more room on the cover for more stickers indicating more laurels. Unless I missed anything, March is now the recipient of the Excellence In Nonfiction for Young Adults award, the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Author winner, and the Sibert Medal¹.

  Not to be left out, the Alex Awards recognized Ryan North’s Romeo And/Or Juliet, and Vera Brosgol took at friggin’ Caldecott Honor (again, basically the runner-up to the actual winner, but it’s only the most prestigious award for picture books) for Leave Me Alone! Webcomickers are in some seriously good company this awards season. Can’t wait to see what the NCS, Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards bring.

• How about a moment for just a terrific comic? No huge event, no big conclusion, just an example of excellence on an ordinary day. Boulet is kind of the autobio equivalent of Stan Sakai; the work he turns out is uniformly excellent, comic after comic, to the point that you can lose sight of what an accomplished creator he is. Just as writers on comic books must get tired of writing every month Sakai was amazing, again, do you really need me to mention it, any random update at Bouletcorp is going to be beautiful, funny, insightful, or a combination of all three.

  Thus, last Thursday’s update, which is now making the rounds in English. While we haven’t all dodged that particular bullet, I think we can all appreciate just how horrible it might have been; I’m not even on Facebook and I’m sweating over here. Anyway, on a day marked by excellence all around, a tip of the hat to Boulet for making art that grabbed us all by the panic gland.

Spam of the day:

URGENT Message Regarding Your Outstanding Debt

Oh, no! You mean the US$78 I’ve got on my credit cards this month? I’d best sign my house over to you to manage my debt immediately!

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¹ As a side note, the Sibert Honor books — basically, the runners-up — mostly dealt with themes of governmental oppression in some form or another.

You had one about the White Rose youth movement against Hitler, one about surviving Nagasaki, one about being Japanese Americans being interned during World War II, and one about … um, giant squid. Squid are cool.