It’s unusually busy for a Wednesday. Here are some things you may want to observe in the near term.

Today! Okay, we’ve all pulled the odd all-nighter and felt like crap the next day, but do any of us know what real sleep deprivation is like? Unless you’ve been through elite military training (some kind of special forces, or SERE), the answer’s probably no … and even your SOCOM operators might shudder at the thought of 205 consecutive hours — eight and a half days — without sleep.

The story of four guys (of course it’s guys) that did exactly that in service to a medical experiment in the early ’60s (of course it was the ’60s … it would never pass ethical review today) to determine if enough lost sleep would turn a person permanently psychotic is brought to us by Olivia Walch over at The Nib today.

I want to make sure you didn’t miss the word permanently in that last sentence, and I wonder if the investigators were prepared to deal with a subject that wound up permanently damaged.¹ It’s equally fascinating and terrifying, and it’s made me want to trawl all of Walch’s comics … they aren’t all about deranged science experiments, but some are about math, so I’ll take it.

Today! Mary Cagle brings the sequential part of her diary comic, Let’s Speak English! (an account of the 2.5 years she spent in Japan, as an English language classroom assistant in a series of elementary schools) to an end. There may be other strips, but this is the conclusion of the time to return to the States story arc that began here, and progressed through tearful, sometimes painful goodbyes.

It’s been an enlightening, sometimes myth-deflating time following Mary-sensei as she navigated a very foreign culture and all the memorable bits therein. Let’s all thank Cagle for her efforts and encourage her to do her best forever!²

In One Week! Jim Zub’s latest creator-owned comic, Glitterbomb, releases its first issue to comic shops; I talked about it (mostly his artist, Djibril Morissette-Phan, in my SDCC interview with Zub … he is super good at art, you guys), but didn’t tell you much about the book beyond the descriptor Chtonic horror, so let’s remedy that a bit.

It’s a satire of Hollywood. With elder demons, bloody death, and a mid-30s actress who’s not quite good enough to avoid being discarded because she’s no longer 24. It’s about the need for fame, how our society is evolved to deliver it, and what happens when we don’t achieve our dreams.

The first issue doesn’t have anybody acting in a particularly malevolent manner (at least, nobody human), but does feature some really thought-provoking (and guts-spraying) situations about what happens when the desperation to be loved (personally, by the public with their attention) overcomes our social conditioning. It does all of that by page two.

If you’ve ever wondered what will happen to the entire Kardashian clan when the public collectively decides not to pay attention to them any longer, pray (if you’re the praying type) it’s more like Norma Desmond and less like Glitterbomb.

Some Point In The Not Too Distant Future! The Joe Shuster Award nominations (Les nominés pour le prix Joe Shuster 2016) are out, and webcomicky types are all over the place. Names like Fletchter, Immonen (Kathryn), North, Zdarsky, Lemire, Belanger, Immonen (Stuart), Staples, Stewart, DeForge, Tamaki, Chmakova, and Soo are to be found across all categories.

I’ve said to before and I’ll say it again: Canada has the greatest density of comics talent to population of anyplace in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly the world. The Shuster Awards will be presented at a time and venue to be announced, in Fall 2016.

Spam of the day:

Get a free tactical headlamp with an adjustable focusing beam!

Dudes, headlamps are about the nerdiest thing ever, why do you think it’s the key element of Frontalot’s stage persona? You’re just overcompensating your nerdshame by trying to convince me yours is tactical. Show me it’ll hold up to the rigors of a week of mud, rain, sleep deprivation, and explosions, then you can call it tactical.

(Says the guy who actually went and bought these because oh glob, so cool … but I am actually an EMT who has crawled into half-crushed cars, so it’s only half pathetic.)

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¹ For a payout of US$250-$400; somewhere in the US$1800-$2800 today, adjusting for inflation, according to this calculator.

² Insert image of small Japanese children all shouting Ganbatte! in unison.

Where to start? How about here, because it’s always good to see a fresh Paul Southworth comic, and not because of any name-related preferential treatment. Please enjoy the return (after about two years) of Lake Gary.

• Know what’s got a damn-near universal, gut-level meaning to anybody that grew up in the US and swaths of Canada? Sears. It’s just that place with everything, not too exciting, tools right next to teen clothing because why not? And a place that ubiquitous, that mundane, was inevitably going to attract the attention of the 21 Century’s visual depictor of ubiquity, Brandon Bird.

  He launched his Sears Project three years back, Kickstarting a cross-country trip to visit as many Sears locations as possible, to paint representations of them, to capture the Searsness of modern American life.

  And now comes the next stage of Searsification:

  p.s. do you guys know about my Sears event? http://brandonbird.com/

  On Tuesday, 13 September (already established as the most important release day in webcomics), Bird will be doing the most mundane thing you could do after a trip to chronicle mundanity: he’ll be giving a slide show:

  It’s been three years since I embarked on a dangerous quest to document all the Sears stores in the land and in honor of that anniversary I’m hosting a little event next month. Enjoy a slideshow, Sears-themed refreshments, and Q & A with myself and co-Sears tripper Erin Pearce about just what it was like to live on the road in search of Sears. Get a peek at upcoming Sears art and learn what’s next for the Sears project. (Seating is limited, so if you know for sure you can make it and want to reserve a seat, rsvp to brandonbird [at sign] gmail.com.)

  That’ll be the 13th, 8:00pm, at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles (on Alvarado, right near Sunset Boulevard).

• I don’t know if you noticed the Kickstarter for an indie videogame about the feral dogs of Moscow’s subways, but it’s now got two links to webcomics. As a result of unlocking achievements, they’ve unlocked a particular real-life dog as a playable character: Reginald Barkley, loyal pooch of Kean Soo. And last night it was announced that you can also play as KC Green’s Question Hound, which seems appropriate given it’s a game that involves both dogs and fire.

  At least, you may be able to, as Russian Subway Dogs is only about 40% of the way to goal with 23 days to go. There’s other dogs to unlock, though, and for a Canadian outfit, developer Spooky Squid Games would be foolish to not try to entice us with Ryan North’s dog, Chompsky AKA The Dog Who Was Stuck In A Hole With Ryan That Time.

  Let me be clear that I don’t know that they want to include Chompsky, or that either North or Chompsky would be willing to be included, but come on — what is a subway but a very fancy hole?

• Speaking of Green and Question Hound, looks like the long tail is ticking up slightly. In any other campaign, pulling in US$3-6K per day in the final week would be really damn impressive; when you’ve got a first day’s take of US$165K, it kind of gets lost in the vertical scale. Just under four days left to go, maybe ending in the vicinity of US$450K? Neat.

Spam of the day:

My So-Called Life won acclaim for its honest treatment of the issues facing adolescents in the mid-1990’s.

Don’t start. Angela should have gone with Brian Krakow because Jordan Catalano was a dick, and was played by the single most full-of-himself actor in history this side of Shia Labeouf.

Evan Dahm started running illustrations from his forthcoming edition of Moby-Dick about 17 months back, and in that time he’s given us gorgeous art, styled like woodcut illos, heavy and dark and brooding, things of substance and weight. The white of the page is wrestled into submission, the slivers that exist here and there acting as contrast and accent rather than the space to contain the black. They’ve all been beautiful to look at (and you can see the full set at the Tumblr), but today’s art tops them all. No part of the book’s text that Dahm chose to accent with this drawing can be omitted and still give full context and power, so here it is:

Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.

“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.

“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!—stand by!”

I want more than just an illustrated Moby-Dick from Dahm; somehow, somebody make is so that Patrick Stewart reads these textual excerpts as an audio accompaniment.

The other things I saw today were pretty good, too.

• If you make your living by submitting invoices, then you should already know who Katie Lane is; she’s asking for information today, in the form of a brief, two question survey:

  If you have to invoice clients to get paid, I’d appreciate your feedback on two quick questions I have: https://katie240.typeform.com/to/xJyNM6

  The answers she gathers will be used to help construct a course she’ll be delivering come October, aimed at how to draft invoices that will make clients want to pay. I’m assuming this is more subtle than having the invoice stapled to a guy named Rocko The Knucklebreaker, but honestly I’m not sure what could be as effective as him. I guess we’ll have to give Lane her feedback, let her design the course to answer her audience’s most pressing concerns, and then attend to find out what’s to be done. I’ll keep Rocko on speed dial, just in case.

• I mention now (in accordance with longstanding blog policy) that Kate Beaton is the best, and point those of you that may not have had the occasion yet to experience her bestness in person towards a forthcoming event wherein you may sample some of her bestosity. The National Book Festival, put on by the Library of Congress, is kind of a big deal. And in keeping with a mission to bring the most interesting people in literature together regardless of petty distinctions like national origin, the NBF people have prevailed upon Beaton to leave Nova Scotia and travel to Washington DC to talk about King Baby on 24 September.

  The National Book Festival is free and open to the public (with the exception of some high-popularity events, which require ticketing, but still free), taking place at the Washington Convention Center; Beaton will be part of the Children programming track, from noon to 12:30pm, with a signing from 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Between that and SPX happening just a week before (the exhibitor list isn’t up yet, but given her history of being there and her Ignatz nomination this year, I’d say it’s a pretty good bet she’ll be there), the Mid-Atlantic region has never had a better chance to drink in the bestitivity.

• Okay, so I know that Zach Weinersmith uses a repertory company approach to his characters, with certain designs in recurring roles (or, more precisely, to play certain types of roles; he’s like Tezuka that way). But how did it take me until today to realize that the big, philosophical (one might even say navel gazing) discussions always go to the same two kids? Way to make me see patterns in the world, Weinersmith!

  I really should have been able to predict it, given that the same system was used in the SMBC Theater shorts, where it was well established that James Ashby is the worst person ever. Thought you could make us forget by keeping a low profile, didn’t you, Ashby? Well forget it! We at Fleen know you are history’s greatest villain¹, and we will never let go our vigilance, so watch it.

Spam of the day:

You are like one of those “denialist”s. Your comments about the internet are so contradictory to what is happening in the real world that I feel sorry for you. The world is changing. I hope it changes so that there is less stealing in our world.

The link to this went to a Tumblr dedicated 100% to high quality photos of lingerie-clad women’s butts, so I don’t think he (of course it’s a dude) is actually mad at me for something I did here at the blog.

I will note that it appears said butt photos are not by the dude in question, but taken with minimal attribution from around the internet. Oh, irony.

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¹ Need proof? Google search for james ashby and all you get is a cop convicted of murder. Okay, he doesn’t look anything like the James Ashby we’re talking about, but that’s just what he wants you to think.

I’m in a much better mood, and things have happened that allow me to write considerably more than I would have otherwise. Let’s do this.

Recent Past! Yesterday marked eighteen damn years of Jerkcity, which I freely admit is a bit too unstructured for me, but for which I will always be grateful because it was my introduction to Rands, who in real life has taught me more than I can recall about the industry I work in, the people that inhabit it, and how to interact with them. Also, bags and pens. He’s smart like that.

Past, Present and Future! Josh Fruhlinger wrote a book which I enjoyed a great deal, and he has very kindly opened the metaphorical kimono to share data regarding it. The Enthusiast was funded via Kickstarter, and Fruhlinger has done a detailed post on how the money got spent, which anybody considering a crowdfunded project should consider to be a valuable look at what to expect. Read carefully and absorb.

Today! One year ago, Ryan North did the most Ryan North thing possible when he got stuck in a hole and got out by treating it as a text adventure game with all of Twitter as the controlling player. It’s well known that there are no holidays in August, with some countries resorting to making up arbitrary “bank holidays” to make the month less suicidally depressing, so may I suggest that from now on, 18 August¹ be known as Northole Day? We can celebrate by walking our dogs with umbrellas and seeking out holes. Somebody tell David Malki ! to include it in the list of holiday’s for next year’s perpetual calendar.

Also Today! I got my copy of Chester 5000 XYV: Isabelle & George. I will never not love Jess Fink for her ability to mix together real emotion, real pretty pictures, and really hot, hot sexytimes in one story. I think I understand the whole Stucky thing now.

Next Month! It’s just four weeks until SPX rolls around (sadly, I won’t be able to make it, as it will fall in the middle of back-to-back weeks where work sends me to Minnesota), and the Ignatz Awards nominees have been announced. I first saw the slate over at Comics Worth Reading, so props to Johanna Draper Carlson for being on the story early.

What I found especially interesting is the jury members: Tony Breed, Summer Pierre, Keiler Roberts, C Spike Trotman, and JT Most²; There’s a lot of web-first art from these creators, and unsurprisingly the category for Outstanding Online Comic is super strong:

• A Cartoonist’s Diary by Rina Ayuyang
• Just Doing My Job by Gynnis Fawkes
• Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran
• A Small Revolution by Samantha “Boum” Leriche-Gionet
• Vattu by Evan Dahm

That’s an impressively wide range of styles, topics, and presentations, and really no bad choices there.

Other nominees that hail from the wide world o’ webcomics include Melanie Gillman (As The Crow Flies) for Outstanding Comic; Jason Shiga (Demon) and Keiler Robert (Powdered Milk), and various contributors to the Isaac Cates-edited Cartozia Tales for Outstanding Series; Lisa Hanawalt (Hot Dog Taste Test) for Outstanding Graphic Novel; Kate Beaton (Step Aside, Pops), and various contributors to the Sfé R Monster & Taneka Stotts-edited Beyond: The Queer Sci Fi and Fantasy Anthology for Outstanding Anthology Or Collection.

Uniquely, the Ignatzes (Ignatzen?) are voted on by the attendees of SPX, with the votes quickly tallied between end of exhibit hours and the start of the awards ceremony on Saturday, 17 September. Best of luck to all the nominees.

Spam of the day:

30??nimals Surprised By Their Owners Coming Home Sooner

Cute, but why is the same address in Romania sending me pictures of animals, pictures of Asian women, pictures of beautiful vistas, and pictures of “unbelievable fails”?

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¹ No shifting to a Monday or Friday for a long weekend, it has to fall on the 18th.

² I’m not familiar with Most and I’m finding it impossible to Google them, as all the responses refer to Justin Timberlake and headlines like Is this JT’s most awesome video ever?.

It’s sort of like how the one person I’d be interested is finding from high school, my old physical lab partner, is un-Googleable, because her name closely matches the nickname of an old aircraft carrier and all matches are for sailor reunions. Her sister is also un-Googleable, as her name matches too closely with DC superhero Robin. They’ve achieved the dream: no digital footprint thanks to a favorable signal-to-noise ratio.

It’s always Thursdays in the summer doldrums when the news dries up; students aren’t back to college yet, con season is in a lull between major shows, even the occasional artist might take an afternoon to enjoy the weather. But still, things are on the horizon.

For example, the Boston Comics Con is a newish show that’s trying to keep a comics focus. Although it’s giving prominence to media guests (like William Shatner), the biggest draw of the show this year appears to be Frank Miller¹. It’s running from tomorrow afternoon until Sunday, with webcomicky types (and Massachusetts natives) Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb, as well as creator-owned types like Stan Sakai and Terry Moore as guests.

Webcomickers and webcomics-alikes are also starting to make an inroads into the Artist Alley, where you’ll find representatives of the Boston Comics Roundable, the guys behind First Law of Mad Science, Lunarbaboon, Sarah Andersen, Yuko Ota & Ananth Hirsh, and Tessa Stone. With TopatoCon 2: The TopatoConenning off the table this year, it may be the best chance for New Englanders to see webcomickers nearby.

Unless they want to head north, that is. The Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival will be happening on Sunday, in Dartmouth (which is across the harbo[u]r from Halifax, capital of Nova Scotia), and they’ve invited the likes of Ryan North, newly local Jeph Jacques, Kate Beaton, and a whole host of Canadian talent whose names I don’t recognize, but who are in all likelihood very, very good because let’s face it — Canada has a disproportionate number of amazing creators to its credit. If you see Ryan or Jeph or Kate tell ’em I said hi and can’t wait to pet their dogs.

Spam of the day:

40?Hot Cuties Ready To Warm Up The Party

Oh boy, Stock Photos Of Women Showing Cleavage: The Spam!

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¹ Whether or not you consider that to be a good thing is dependent on personal taste.

She had, in the hearts of her numerous fans, entered the territory of the mononymic, like Madonna or Bono or Frank¹, there is no doubt who you are talking about when it comes to superstars². And today there are things to mention regarding Raina [Editor’s note: okay, fine, Raina Telgemeier] that you should know about, at least if you’re out in the Bay Area.

Firstly, Ghosts is rapidly approaching release date, and that means release parties. Green Apple Books in San Francisco (that would be Raina’s hometown) will be hosting such a party at 6:00pm (reading at 7:00pm) on Tuesday, 13 September (that would be the release date), and while they don’t explicitly say that Raina’s going to be at the party, she is tweeting out the event announcement.

Update to add: It’s confirmed now.

In order to bring some order to what’s going to be a busy, busy night, Green Apple are pre-selling tickets which are good for a paperback copy of the book, and have shifted to a location with ample parking and space away from the main store. No doubt other bookstores will be holding their own events to meet reader demand; if you know of one, drop me a line and I’ll share it.

And in the meantime, whether you can get to the release party or not, there’s a display of original pages³ from Smile, Drama, and Sisters at the Berkeley (that would be just across the bay from Raina’s hometown) Public Library Central branch. They’ve even got five original pages from Ghosts, on view in the second floor through 26 August.

Central’s hours and address are at their webpage, and like all libraries it’s free and open to the public. Since it’s a proven scientific fact that you can never have too much Raina, I’d advise everybody in the area to make the trip and look at some pretty damn great pages while we all count down to the 13th. Given the fact that Ghosts is going to have a print run of 500,000 copies (pretty sure that’s a graphic novel record), you should be able to get a copy without too much difficulty, but I’d put in a pre-order, just in case.

[Media Alert] Behold the Instruments of Righteousness in Super Dung

What?

..eon Tactics!

Oh. Gotcha. Not a good place for the subject line to get truncated.

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¹ Okay, there is a little ambiguity here as to which Frank one might be mentioning: Frank as in Zappa, or as in Becky and.

² Also: George.

³ Hat tip: Mark V of Electric Puppet Theatre. Read his comic!

Some of it’s newer, some a bit less new, with an oddly common occurrence of the letter F.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a reminder that the folks behind the French take on the venerable insane fight tournament manga series, Last Man, have been working on a prequel animated series. Then funding promises went away, and to finish their work they’re Kickstartering. So this would be a French version of an anime adaptation of an insane fight tournament manga, which sounds awesome on its face before I remind you that Last Man is really good. Campaign page in English, French, and even a little Japanese, so check ‘er out in the next … fourteen days.

  (Also from FSFCPL, word that Boulet has been filling his Instagram with Pokemon shots, starting here; these are the disturbing Pokemon, something that Katuhiro Otomo and Satoshi Kon might dream up after a long night drinking with Cthulhu, the least threatening of which is doing something unspeakable to your cat, the more typical of which needs to be met with giant robots, plural.)

• From Andrew Farago at the Cartoon Art Museum, news of the last CAM public program: Cartooning Boot Camp at the American Bookbinders Museum, 35 Clementina Street in San Francisco. The free (!) program runs both Thursday the 18th (5:30pm – 8:00pm) and Saturday the 20th 11:00am – 3:00pm), offering a showing of the work done by aspiring cartoonists, ages 10 – 16, this summer. The first event is part of the Third Thursdays series for arts institutions in the Yerba Buena Alliance, and sponsors are providing refreshments at both.
• Want to check out the work of an absolute master? Kate Feirtag at the Society of Illustrators wants you to know that they’re putting on major retrospective of Ralph Steadman, chronicler of the great and the low, the everyday and the bat-country insane over his storied 50 year career. The show runs 6 September to 22 October, with an opening reception on Friday, 9 September at 6:30pm (suggested donation: US$15, beer provided plus cash bar) with a variety of events during the six week run. It all happens at the SoI building, 128 East 63rd in Manhattan.
• It’s time for the monthly TopatoCo Drink ‘n’ Draw, with deets at the Facebook page (okay, that one was a stretch). The special guest this month is Danielle Corsetto, who will meet you at Eastworks from 7:00pm – 10:00pm (it’s probably gonna rain, so bring your umbrella) for food, fun, fdrinking, and fdrawing.

Spam of the day:

Do not worry, all your efforts will be rewarded.

That’s reassuring, except for the part where the bulk of this message is in Russian and I’m pretty sure I now owe their mafia a favor.

Please note the photo of the very handsome, very large Ryan North above, taken from the Instagram of his fellow comic book writer, Marguerite Bennett. Unless I miss my guess, this photo was taken during SDCC, while North was involved in the creation of something very cool that required

1. A significant amount of legal, adult-type intoxicating beverages
2. Tangentially, the efforts of Isaiah Mustafa, aka The Old Spice Guy

The latter item should surprise approximately nobody, given the propensity that both North and Mustafa have for casual shirtlessness. In any event, I can’t tell you yet exactly what North was involved in the creation of, but suffice it to say that it is awesome and hilarious, and when you get to learn about it for reals in possibly two to four weeks, you will wonder why you didn’t guess it on your own because it will make perfect sense. For now, just enjoy the raw, sensuous sophistication fairly dripping from The Toronto Man-Mountain there. Enjoy it, damn you!

• Either Spike was late or I just missed it on Friday, but the latest announcement for what th’heck Iron Circus is publishing in the next year, year and a half is up:
  

  Iris & Angel isn’t exactly new; the first chapter’s already been written by myself, drawn by @littlefroggies, and posted on Slipshine, the subscription adult comics site. But Slipshine came with certain restrictions; monthly quotas, length limits, and the expectation of sex every fifteen pages, to name a few. And while that works for a lot of comics, it wasn’t working for I&A.

  So, Amanda and I are trying something new.

  Iris & Angel is restarting from scratch, and will be released chapter-by-chapter on ComiXology and in the Iron Circus Comics online store!

  This is a new approach for us, and we’re excited to see where it might lead. We’re test-driving a smaller, cheaper, more incremental approach to our comics; inexpensive “issues” of I&A with a nice, low bar for entry for the curious and the freedom to tell the story as we like.

  Serialized smut, y’all. And what smut!

  Iris Moore is a victim of her own success; her small soap-making business has taken off like a shot, but she’s found herself floundering with the financials. With April 15th approaching and her paperwork more hopelessly scrambled than ever, she finally accepts the inevitable: she needs professional help. But where to start?

  A fetish message-board on the internet, of course.

  Iris’ pervy roommate Tate talks her into answering the weirdest personal ad ever posted; a cross-dressing accountant offering tax prep.

  I think I lost count of the fetishes there. This is gonna be great.

• Attention, anybody that’s ever had the self-awareness to ask Am I interacting with a creator in an acceptable way? The fact that you’re asking what correct (that is, most likely to be acceptable/least likely to cause distress) behavior is means that you’re almost certainly good. For everybody else, please see Something*Positive today, wherein Randy Milholland shares yet another story of people having no fucking clue what acceptable observation of boundaries looks like.

  I don’t get it — Milholland is maybe the sweetest person I know and yet he has a bottomless well of stories detailing the most batshit crazy interactions with fans and “fans”. I don’t know how he’s managed to not snap and kill us all, but then again I wonder that about most of the women that have any degree of visibility on social media. It is a legit wonder that the majority of serial killers aren’t righteously pissed-off women.

  Regardless, the lesson remains the same — if you can see even a tiny bit of yourself in Milholland’s comic today (directed at Milholland or literally any other human being ever), then it’s mathematically provable that you suck¹, and you need to stop sucking as quickly as possible. We are trying to have a civilization here people, and you can either be a goddamned grownup or you can please absent yourself from the rest of us.

Spam of the day:

71 Contaminants in your water…are you safe?

On the off chance that I’m not, I’ma guess that I won’t be made safe by your magic drinking straw.

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¹ I’ll be generous and say that perhaps it was the case that you used to suck and have gotten better. In that case, you kind of owe it to yourself to be honest about it, and pay it forward by letting other people know both when they suck, and that it’s possible to improve yourself to the point where you stop sucking.

I has never failed to both impress and terrify me what the webs of personal interconnection can bring about. I was talking with Marian Call and Pat Race after the Space Time show about how we’re in a unique era, where somebody that’s accomplished in one field (say, comics and cartooning) winds up being a mutual fan of somebody in a completely different field (say, landing robotic laboratories on a different friggin’ planet) and they end up finding a space where they can collaborate. It’s like if the Algonquin Round Table had perhaps slightly fewer snarky New Yorker contributors and added in a barnstorming aviatrix, a jazz pioneer, and an engineer or two.

Case in point: outside Kate Beaton’s spotlight panel¹, I made the acquaintance of a woman whose Twitter handle I recognized; our circles of friends (and friends-of-friends) overlap at several points. Her name is Cathy Leamy and she’s making comics in Boston that provide healthcare education². A bit later I was talking with a woman named Lisa Johnson (who sported an ad astra per aspera tattoo³ and had nice things to say about my Figure 1 notebook) and makes satellites in Scotland (where she is far more female, far more brown, far more female, and far more not-Scottish) and then Rich Stevens introduced me to Matt Fraction and then she and Matt hugged and he got her on the FaceTime call to his daughter because they know each other because of course they do. Does Boston Cathy know originally-from-Boston Jen the Satellite Lady? I haven’t had the chance to determine it yet but it wouldn’t surprise me.

The six degrees of separation thing may not ever have been true, but it’s truer than it’s ever been. All of these disciplines intersecting, cross-pollinating, informing each other in a web of smart, accomplished, skilled people who are using the things we love to teach us about other things — things we didn’t know about, and things that we didn’t know that we would love — I truly believe that this is what’s going to hold our culture together in the face of regressive forces that want us all back in distinct boxes with clear labels and hierarchical roles.

Screw labels. Screw roles. I want comics people and music people and writer people and dance people and maker people and doctor people and actor people and human rights people and lawmaker people and food making people and drinks making people and just generally smart, interesting people bouncing the hell off each other in ways we’ve never seen before. The more the merrier.

Except for moustache people. That spot’s taken and I will brook no challengers.

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¹ And if by chance anybody knows the Furiosa I met outside Kate’s panel, she looks like this and her initials are CM, I’ve been trying to email the photo I promised and her Gmail account says it’s over quota. Hey, we’re talking about connections today, somebody here probably knows her.

² Attention, Dante Shepherd: you may want to look her up to compare notes on STEM education via comics.

³ Also one of Newton’s cannonball thought experiment.

It’s been a full three days since Gene Yang graciously allowed me some time in his schedule to talk to him; for the record, I almost begged off because I could see that I would be causing him to delay a much-needed meal, but he was insistent. As such, I kept things as brief as I could and remain grateful for his generosity; his reputation as one of the nicest people on the planet is well-deserved. Also, one of the smartest — he’s got a point of view of his work (particularly his recent work with DC) that he wants to convey, and he knows how to reinforce his point while remaining unfailingly polite. This came up fairly early on in our talk as I asked him for his thoughts …

On Superman vs New Super-Man
A disclaimer to start: I never read a Superman monthly until I heard that Yang would be taking over the flagship title¹, so I had little idea what had been going on with the character in The New 52 continuity.

I read Yang’s run faithfully, but I don’t think it was successful; it seemed to me that Yang wanted his story to go in an interesting direction (he’d been handed a Superman who was fairly depowered and on the verge of having his secret identity outed; Yang placed him in a community of mostly-forgotten gods from around the world, re-enacting their great mythic battles as MMA to sustain a portion of their worship), but was hamstrung by story dictates to tie into what was happening in other books.

Speaking purely for myself, the parts of Superman that seemed most Yangian to me were interesting and entertaining; the rest was confusing and haphazard. I asked Yang if he had felt constrained by editorial restrictions on Superman.

I love being part of Rebirth, he told me. Rebirth is the name of the current DC continuity, now that they’ve blown up The New 52; he had no desire to share any frustration he may have felt with the prior work, he only wants to focus on what’s next, what’s positive, where he thinks he can do good work². New Super-Man, he said, was very satisfying because my talks [with DC] started from building a character.

In case you hadn’t heard, this new character is a superhero built up by a faction of the Chinese government, taking as their subject a teenager who’s a bit of bully and only accidentally heroic (I’ve heard him compared to Spider-Man, in that a teen suddenly has his life changed by superpowers and his first instinct is to exploit it; my reading on the character is he’s more of a Flash Thompson).

The character distinctly isn’t American, or even Chinese-American (the book takes place in Shanghai), and comes from a completely different perspective. What do powered individuals mean to nominally-communist, authoritarian government of China? Yang let on that the antagonists of the series (they haven’t shown up yet in issue #1) will super-powered pro-democracy activists; it’s a far more complex story than just the three (somewhat simplistic) poles of Truth, Justice, and The American Way.

And it’s one that almost didn’t happen. Yang said no when he was first approached to do the book, and wasn’t sure if it would have been done without him. I asked about the possibility of cultural pitfalls if a non-Chinese writer had been assigned the gig (specifically, I wondered how many characters might become inadvertent Cousin Chin-Kees), and he was entirely positive. There are plenty of talented writers that could have done it well, he told me, but allowed that a non-Chinese writer might not have thought to explore the very different nature of Chinese society with the story. He was grateful that DC was giving him reign to explore all the contradictions in that society, the things that most fascinate and scare me. He’ll have some time to explore those ideas, as he’s signed for twelve issues, with a full story contained in the first six.

On other occurrences of the number six
Yang confirmed that there will be six books in the Secret Coders series from :01 Books and was really thrilled to be working with artist Mike Holmes (he can draw in any style, it’s amazing). He’s also working on a nonfiction graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, for :01 now; it’s about basketball team from the high school where he used to teach.

On the differences in scripting styles
Like Hope Larson, Yang is doing a lot of writing for other artists now, but he’s had experience with that in past (I’m recalling at least four or five :01 books where he was partnered with an artist) and like Larson he’s still working on writing for superheroics. His work on The Shadow Hero helped prepare him for the conventions and tropes of supers, but the writing for monthly floppies means that he still has to tighten up the story presentation, and it’s been a transition.

On the future
Yang’s done a lot of work a lot of places — DC, Dark Horse — and had a lot of fun doing it, but he gestured toward the stacks of books at the :01 booth and made a simple declaration that revealed both his career plan and the nature of comics he really loves to make in five words: First Second is my home.

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¹ Disclaimer to the disclaimer: I have, of course, read All-Star Superman multiple times because I’m not a monster. I consider it to be the definitive representation of the character.

² Which reminds me more than a little of Superman himself.