We’re pretty much at deadline if you still want to head to Toronto and the attendant Comics Art Festival therein. Part of what showrunner Chris Butcher’s put together that’s always impressed the hell out of me is how much the city of Toronto is involved in TCAF, and how many events happen around the Fest. In case you’ve been wondering how broad TCAF is, check out the list of associated events.

Exhibitions launched 12 days ago, discussions and salons are taking place, artistic meetups have met up (some with sophisticated adult beverages), gallery shows are opening, academics are convening, book launches are happening, international receptions will celebrate the creators of multiple countries, celebrations of previously-marginalized people, concerts, awards, and a plain ol’ party or two.

Plus comics. You know, for kids.

Oh, and a world’s worth of the best guests and exhibitors mixing it up on five different programming tracks plus (for the first time) portfolio reviews. Everything and everybody significant in comics is converging on Toronto except for the otherwise-ubiquitous Jim Zub who is presently busy gettin’ drunk in Japan¹.

So to whatever degree it is practical for you to do so, get up to The Big Smoke², get you some comics, and if you see Chris Butcher thank him for all the work he does year ’round to make TCAF the best show for its size in the world.

PS: Yuko is going to be there and she is totally going to have an 18+ Stucky minicomic that she and Jess Fink did together and that is the best thing ever.

PPS: I forget how many days it’s been since I mentioned that Meredith Gran last achieved a New Best Octopus Pie Strip, but in any event the clock has been reset to one day and counting. Holy crap, so much story, so much emotion, and the best representation of inner mental state all packed into one image. Eve’s lizard brain is my new hero.

Spam of the day:

Don’t-Take a Cruise! Rent a Yacht! All Budgets & Sizes Available

You have radically overestimated the degree to which I wish to take a cruise, and my recreation budget. I guess thanks for the second half?

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¹ I’m so envious about the stop he and his lovely bride made at Ikebukuro’s owl cafe.

² Southern Ontario version.

I refer, naturally, to this Diesel Sweeties strip from a week or so ago; I’m sure anybody that’s watched the last few iterations of Trek intuitively knows what the punchline is¹, I’m just surprised that Rich Stevens didn’t render it in plqaD script, but if you want to read Maura’s line in the original you can do so here.

Yes, that entire thing amused me enough to mention it after my time away. Deal.

In other news:

• TopatoCon 2 (The TopatoConenning? Electric TopatoLoo?) exhibitor and volunteer applications have been up for a while now, and although the show is still five months away, the first cluster of guests has been announced:
  

  Topatocon would like to welcome special guests @ryanqnorth @badmachinery @SarahCAndersen and @hollyblack !!!

  The Toronto Man-Mountain needs no introduction; John Allison appears on this side of the Atlantic about once in forever; Sarah Andersen’s got a first book is out now, and Holly Black is both a hell of a YA author and a mean cocktail-mixer².

• Okay, I lied — said Man-Mountain does need an introduction, as it was announced yesterday that Ryan North is now — in addition to his scripting duties on The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel — taking over writing duties on Jughead from Chip Zdarsky with issue #9. At the same time, his Squirrel Girl art partner, Erica Henderson will be turning over the Jughead art duties to Derek Charm. Quite a comic book authoring resume our Mr North is building.

  Oh, and if you weren’t smart enough to back North’s first pickable-path Shakespeare book, you might not have noticed that he’s live-playing through the start of his next pickable-path Shakespeare book in the updates of the Kickstart for the last one. So far we’ve determined that Juliet is ripped and is very possibly curious about rooster testicles! Romeo and/or Juliet drops in just about a month on 7 June.

• So I told you I was going to be keeping an eye on Rosemary Valero-O’Connell last month; she’s not disappointed in the weeks since with the work she’s either announced or shared with us. That streak kept up yesterday, letting us see part of her senior thesis³:
  

  The prologue pages of Black Sun Rising, my senior thesis, are now available to read! http://livertaker.tumblr.com/post/144164545963/a-preview-of-the-first-chapter-of-black-sun …

  It’s gorgeous, it does a bang-up job setting mood and expectations (with more than a bit of Emily Carrollesque dread), and makes me want to read far more than these four pages. Rosemary — however long this comic is, find a way to print it in a handsome presentation, mark it up about four times, and sell it to me (and all other right-thinking folk). There is no mathematical possibility that the rest of this story isn’t excellent.

Spam of the day:

Cadence Williams (Google Team) sent you a message:

You know, the fact that you sent me this spam at Google’s own email service but that it doesn’t have a Google return address? Makes me a mite suspicious.

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¹ If not, you can type Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam into the Bing Translator (but it doesn’t autodectect tlhIngan Hol).
http://yellowantphil.com/pIqaD_converter.php

² Assuming we do a drinks competition again this year like last year, I’d want Black, the reigning 86d! champion, to either take a judging role, or join me in hosting/commenting duties.

³ Yep, she’s just now graduating college and this makes her less than half my age and already so very skilled. She’s only going to get better.

AHHHHHHHH:

Oh hey, what? The Abominable Charles Christopher is back.

This is no minor AHHHHHHHH, this is the AHHHHHHHH from deep in your soul, best accompanied by the declaration I’M A SHARK. Karl Kerschl is between projects, Charles Christopher is back, and all is well in the world again.

Oh, yeah, other stuff is going on, too. Like TCAF later this week, which almost everybody in webcomics attends in alternating years¹. And that event reminds me that Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin noticed that the French contingent at TCAF will be more than just Featured Guest Boulet (who, don’t get me wrong, is great):

Yves Bigerel, better known as Balak, renowned inventor of turbomédia (remember about digital comics? He has kept making this stuff ever since) and of the jambon-beurre-based method of drawing the chonchon [NSFW], who, with Bastien Vivès, will be there for Last Man.

Marguerite Abouet, writer of the fantastic Aya of Yop City and Akissi.

Somehow I missed the announcement of Balak and Vivès, and I don’t know Abouet’s work at all, so be smarter than me and seek them out. Also, that video of Balak? Somebody make sure that Rokudenashiko sees it, since it’s right up her alley². I don’t know if the split verdict on Rokudenashiko’s obscenity trial³ would cause some overzealous prig at Canadian Immigration to keep her out of the country, but here’s hoping it doesn’t happen.

PS: AHHHHHHHH.

Spam of the day:

Checkout the latest Cleaning Service Options
Checkout the latest Used Cars
Checkout the latest Varicose Vein Treatment
Checkout the latest CPAP Options

Four spams, one return address. So I’m an elderly person with bad legs, sleep apnea, a dirty house, and a need to hit the open road? Got it.

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¹ TCAF being so popular with vendors and space not being infinite, a couple of years ago showrunner Chris Butcher instituted an every-other-year plan for exhibitors. Some individuals are there more often if they get hosted by, say, a publisher like TopatoCo or Koyama Press.

² So to speak.

³ She was acquitted on charges of displaying plaster casts of her vulva as art, but convicted of distributing 3D printer data files that would allow others to create the same sculptures. The latter hit her with a ¥400,000 (approximately US$4000) fine, which she is appealing.

As for the immigration issue, the customs and immigration folks have long had a bug up their respective butts about what they consider obscenity, especially as regards comics and manga. If anybody traveling to TCAF will invoke their ire, it’ll be Rokudenashiko. On the plus side, if there’s no problems with getting to the show, she can trade kayak stories with Karla Pacheco.

Let’s just wrap this one up and get to the weekend without anything else happening, okay?

• The Doug Wright Awards released their annual slate of nominations, and as in years past I am astonished — in a good way! — that an award program meant to recognize the best of an entire country can get by with only three categories. Given the marathon slogs that many awards presentations can be, this is a refreshing change, and the organizers have put together yet another thoughtful collection of nominees; to wit:

  Best Book

  Michael DeForge, Dressing
  Sylvie Rancourt, Melody
  Seth, Palookaville #22
  Kate Beaton, Step Aside, Pops
  Marc Bell, Stroppy
  Jillian Tamaki, SuperMutant Magic Academy

  Spotlight Award (for cartoonists deserving of wider recognition)

  Ted Gudlat, Funny Ha-Has
  Dakota McFadzean, Don’t Get Eaten By Anything
  Rebecca Roher, Mom Body
  Sabrina Scott, Witchbody
  Kat Verhoeven, Towerkind

  Pigskin Peters Award (recognizing experimental, unconventional, and avant-garde comics)

  Michael Comeau, Leather Vest
  Patrick Kyle, New Comics #6 & 7
  Luke Ramsey, Intelligent Sentient?
  Tin Can Forest and Geoff Berner, We Are Going To Bremen To Be Musicians
  Stanley Wany, Agalma

  Drawn + Quarterly is the dominant publisher of nominated works with six of the total works and five in the Best Book category; Beaton continues her march of many, many nominations for Step Aside, Pops, and Rebecca Roher’s Mom Body is yet another highly-regarded comic first published at The Nib. Best of luck to all the nominees; the Doug Wright Awards will be handed out on Saturday, 14 May at 8:00pm in a ceremony that’s part of the Toronto Comics Art Festival.

• Speaking of TCAF, which is a free-to-attend festival celebration of comics, there’s several other free-to-attend festival celebration of comics in the news: Alaska Robotics Mini-Con kicks off in Juneau, Alaska in the Mendenhall Valley Public Library at 6:30pm local time, continuing tomorrow at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center from 10:00am to 5:00pm. But wait! There’s more!

  Vancouver Comics Art Festival runs next month, 21 and 22 May, at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre. And TopatoCon 2016: The TopatoConenning, has just opened up applications for exhibitors and volunteers for 22 and 23 October, in Easthampton, Massachusetts. That’s four cities, two coasts, one Great Lake, two countries, and more great comics than you can shake a stick at. Start saving gas and/or bail money and make your way to the appropriate venue for Comics Fun Times.

Spam of the day:

Discover Bathtub

I expect the next email to say I don’t know how to discover bathtub and something about grues.

Kind of all over the place today, from the serious and sincere to the … well, you’ll see in a moment.

• Okay, real talk time. The Kickstart for the long-awaited first print collection of Irregular Webcomic followed a pretty standard steep start and long tail, but the tail has been lower than usual, and it’s starting to look like it’s going to be a near thing. 70% of the way there with about 72% of the campaign time gone means that the traditional spike upwards in the last week puts everything to rights, but creator David Morgan-Mar is unwilling to leave things to chance and is engaged in desperate measures: he’s added me as a backer reward.
  

  I will be in New York City on Saturday 18 June this year. With this reward you and one partner/friend can meet me over lunch, talk comics or whatever, and get some spur-of-the-moment hand scribbled comic art by me! I’ll also bring along some random physical goodies related to my comics to give to you! This reward is an approximately 2-hour lunch meeting, and you also get a printed copy of the book, a PDF copy, an MP3 of “It’s Quite Irregular”, and a set of postcards.

  Two backers plus two friends plus me makes 5 for lunch, and also joining us will be webcomic blogger Gary Tyrrell of Fleen.com. [emphasis mine]

  There’s already a pledge to meet up with Morgan-Mar in London later this year and I’ll be crushed — crushed! — to think that I’m not an equal draw. Also, it’s no secret that I want this campaign to succeed, but any rumo[u]rs going around that I will be engaging in “favors” for the pledgers are probably overblown. Probably. Only one way to find out!

• For those who’ve been waiting patiently since January for the opportunity to join iPhone-havers and play Exploding Kittens on your Android phones, wait no more. Seemingly in dual celebration over this release and yesterday’s announcement of an Eisner nomination (his third or fourth, I think), Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman has been crushing all rivals in EK matches today.

  You probably can’t beat him (he’s been playing the game since long before anybody else in the world, remember), but if you want to try watch his twitterfeed for announcements of when he’s playing and the game code. Good luck (you won’t win).

• Speaking of Eisner nominations, Iron Circus Comics President For Life¹ Spike Trotman has declared a day of jubilee to celebrate the fact that her very first solo artist project — EK Weaver’s TJ and Amal omnibus reprint — took a nomination for Best Graphic Album — Reprint. You can get the TJ and Amal omnibus from the Iron Circus shop for 15% off with the coupon code EISNERFYEAH. Go cash in, you lucky people.
• Lastly, the sort of thing that I like to see because it has the potential to make people better, more thoughtful creators: KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed² has posted a piece on how she approached writing a character that started out minor and became a major part of her story mythos, and how she’s changed her approach after realizing that she was Doing It Wrong. Specifically, Spangler’s take on Rachel Peng’s arguably defining characteristic — her blindness — was initially done without (in retrospect, and certainly not from a point of malice) insufficient consideration of what being blind actually means.

  And before a theoretical subset of you start screaming about PC goons forcing a creator to change her story — honestly, if that’s your first thought, the door’s over there and don’t let it hit you — it’s not in response to anybody yelling at Spangler other than Spangler. It’s about having the honesty to assess when you have sufficient experience in a community/culture to represent it properly, and when you have to shift your approach because you realize you didn’t. As Spangler repeatedly states:

  I’m an asshole but I’m trying to do better

  The first part of that statement is a filthy lie, but the second part you can take to the bank. Even if you’re inadvertently an asshole (or not an asshole at all), you can always do better if you’re willing to admit there’s better to be done. Go read it and think about how to do better yourself; and if there’s better I can be doing, please let me know.

Spam of the day:

Join our professional network

No name for this professional network? Nice try, LinkedIn, but you ain’t getting your hooks in me!

_______________
¹ And co-founder of Creators For Creators; application info coming in ten days.

² AKA my buddy Otter.

There was stuff I was going to go into today, like the announcement that Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar is adapting a key plot into childrens book form or that in the run-up to the relaunch of The Nib, Matt Bors is sending out comics in email newsletter form, and Chris Yates is marking twelve years of making Baffler!s. Then the Eisner nominations came out and that kind of swamps everything.

Because webcomics people — and those that came up from webcomics, or run their creative endeavours like webcomics, or likewise have that independent, creator-owned bent — are all over the damn list this year. But there remains a persistent question around what should be the point of greatest interest to readers of this page, namely, what the hell remains up with the Best Digital/Webcomic category? From the FAQ:

For the Best Digital Comic category, works must be longform—that is, comparable to comic books or graphic novels in storytelling or length. Webcomics similar to daily newspaper strips, for example, would not be eligible. Digital comics should have a unique URL, be part of a webcomics site, or otherwise stand alone (not be part of a blog, for instance).

… which seems to be inconsistently applied at best. Most notably, this year in the entirely worthy-of-consideration Lighten Up by Ron Wimberly, as seen at The Nib. It’s six-and-a-half screens tall, each four panels in size; it’s not comparable to either a comic book or graphic novel in length or storytelling. It’s excellent, and I’m glad it’s up for consideration, but there are been dozens — hundreds! — of comparably excellent works that have not been considered for the nomination because the criteria are used to exclude them (except when, as in this case, they’re not). The NCS, for goodness sake, is doing a better job of consistently applying criteria in a way that makes sense¹.

It does a disservice to the nominees to be nominated in such a chaotic fashion, especially considering the quality of the other nominees: Bandette (Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, Monkeybrain/comiXology); Fresh Romance (edited by Janelle Asselin, Rosy Press/comiXology); The Legend of Wonder Woman (Renae De Liz, DC Digital); These Memories Won’t Last (by Stu Campbell).

Not all of those are what we at Fleen would consider webcomics (after all, that’s not the name of the category), so it’s probably time to scrap the not particularly useful category and just let webcomickers compete in the other categories oh wait that’s exactly what they’re doing:

• Best Short Story includes It’s Going to Be Okay (Matthew Inman); Best Continuing Series includes Bandette and Giant Days (John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin; nice job nominating both artists); Best New Series includes The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (Ryan North and Erica Henderson); Best Humor Publication Cyanide & Happiness: Stab Factory (Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, and Dave McElfatrick) and Step Aside, Pops (Kate Beaton).
• Continuing: Best Anthology includes Eat More Comics: The Best of the Nib (Matt Bors, editor; includes Lighten Up); Best Graphic Album — Reprint includes The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal Omnibus (EK Weaver, via Iron Circus Comics Kickstarter campaign) and Nimona (Nicole Stevenson); Best Writer includes John Allison (for Giant Days); Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team includes Erica Henderson (for Jughead and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl); Best Painter/Multimedia Artist includes Colleen Coover (Bandette again … that’s three so far).
• Finishing up: Best Lettering includes Lucy Knisley (for Displacement); Best Publication for Early Readers (up to age 8) includes Anna Banana and the Chocolate Explosion (Dominque Roques and Alexis Dormal) and Little Robot (Ben Hatke), both from First Second; Best Publication for Kids (ages 9-12) includes Baba Yaga’s Assistant (Marika McCoola and Emily Carroll) and Over the Garden Wall (Pat McHale and Jim Campbell); Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17) includes SuperMutant Magic Academy (Jillian Tamaki)².

That appears to be eighteen nominations outside of the Digital/Webcomic dumping ground for webcomickers and webcomicker-alikes, which is surely a record. At least, last year I was astonished how many webcomickers and webcomicker-alikes were nominated and there were a total of eleven. Progress, she is gradual sometimes, but she is relentless. We’ll see how it all turns out when the Eisners are handed out on Friday, 22 July, at SDCC.

Spam of the day:

livesex cams “[…]Fleen: The Elcoertnic Swiss Army Knife For This Topic » ”

If there are cameras broadcasting Fleen World Headquarters to people expecting live sex, I sure hope they get their money back.

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¹ Obligatory disclaimer: I have been involved in the NCS selection process each year that they’ve recognized webcomics.

² I removed nearly every publisher reference in this rather extensive list for space, but I’ll note that BOOM!/KaBOOM!/BOOM!Box are represented out of proportion to their relative size in the industry. Maybe with all this recognition they can expand their distribution/sales and afford to pay some non-sucky page rates.

I think we’re lacking a unifying theme today; let’s just mention stuffs that caught my eye.

• Christopher Butcher — manager of one of the best comic shops on the planet, importer of otherwise-unknown Japanese creators and creations, showrunner of TCAF, self-confessed Canadian, and all-around stellar gentleman — has a treat for us. Not being content with having one kick-ass show poster for this year’s TCAF (by the always delightful Kate Beaton¹), Butcher has announced a second kick-ass show poster by Kazu Kibuishi. Like much of Kibuishi’s work, it’s a mix of Moebius and Miyazaki and it’s gorgeous.

  And, as it turns out, Butcher’s plans originally called for a third show poster, but Fate intervened:

  Unfortunately due to scheduling conflicts our friend Chip Zdarsky won’t be able to produce a planned third poster for TCAF this year.

  This is either a tragedy or a lucky break, or possibly both simultaneously.

• Fresh off of this year’s Emerald City Comicon, some advice for newbie exhibitors from Dylan Meconis, who only wants the best for you. In this case, handy advice about how to set up your table so that people will want to give you money, in one handy diagram. On any other day, Meconis’s pictogrpahic would have been the header image for the day, but Kibuishi has to take that crown today. For your convenience, we have it here for your clicking pleasure; I’ve been around a lot of booths in my day, but the standing mat is always something I forget² about, so it’s helpful even to non-newbies. Thank you, Dylan!
• From the Pingback Desk, we at Fleen see that Morgan Wick has his own take on Homestuck’s up-wrapping, one that is significantly different from ours. Hardly a surprise in that Wick set out to do what perhaps no other writer on webcomics has done: follow and review Homestuck, as long as that would take. I can’t speak to the mind of Homestucks (the uberfans) on the ending of Homestuck (the cultural object) with anything near the authority that Wicks can, as he followed the story through twists, turns, fits, and starts; he has a distinctly different perspective on the meaning of the story — and especially the ending — will have for the long-time reader.

  I can say that it will definitely be remembered as a formative influence on those long-time readers (you pretty much can’t pull down a hefty fraction of a million words and not have it rub off on you), whether they were satisfied with the ending or no. For those now in their teens or early twenties who followed along, it will certainly be as influential as the original Star Wars trilogy was for me³.

  I can also say that Wicks’s assertions notwithstanding, I am neither from Highgarden nor a manufacturer of replicants. Tyrrell has two Rs, dammit!

• Is Randall Munroe the first webcomicker to get name-dropped by the President of the United States? Certainly the first one to do so in person at the friggin’ White House, during remarks about the annual White House Science Fair. Completely and utterly without any sarcasm — Thanks, Obama!

Spam of the day:

Wireless Security Cameras

Would those be the same wireless security cameras whose Internet of Things chips are so insecure that there are websites that now let you stream images of the inside of other people’s homes any time you want? Pass.

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¹ Chronicler of her mom, dad, ponies, and babies, and nemesis of stupid superheroine costumes.

² Your convention center will likely have a concrete floor, and even those with carpeting will not have very thick cushioning underneath.

³ Or, let’s be honest, WKRP in Cincinnati; the Thanksgiving episode is probably the single most important half-hour of culture in my life.

Heya. I’ve got two things for you today, one of which is obviously on-message for this page, one of which is not obviously so but I promise is at least tangentially related. Promise.

• First up, we at Fleen have watched the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (aka MICE, aka MICExpo, aka MassMICE) for a number of years from afar; by reputation it is doing a fine job of upholding the low- to zero-cost, public-facing, comics-oriented Expo tradition (cf: TCAF, SPX, VanCaf, MoCCA Fest, etc) from the campus of Lesley University in Cambridge¹, MA. They always attract a good crowd, the scale and pace of the show is humane, and yesterday they announced the open application period for tables:
  

  Want to show at MICE 2016? Our Exhibitor Application is open May 1-18! http://www.micexpo.org/application/ Send us your comics!

  Individual rates go as low as $60, with a discount for students! But that last bit of the tweet, the Send us your comics bit is important; MICE will be reviewing the work of its vendors to try maintain a balance of new work, new creators, local flavor, and variety:

  While we welcome all to apply and wish we could host all of you, space for seasoned exhibitors (those who have already tabled at MICE several times) will likely be determined by lottery. Thank you for understanding that while interest in MICE grows, our available space stays the same.

  I don’t think I’ve seen a show with an emphasis on the new to this degree before; the larger shows are almost completely driven by grandfathered booth owners and I think that this approach just might make the big shows more interesting and fresh-feeling. It really shows an emphasis not just on comics, but on making the show have the greatest appeal and attraction for the attendees. Doubly so, given that the show is free to attend.

• Secondly, from the science desk, it was announced earlier today that a group of influential Smart People (including Drs Hawking and Jemison) have proposed a project that would send spacecraft² to Alpha Centauri on a mission that would complete potentially within my lifetime. This sort of thing will cost money, so it’s a good thing they’ve got a Rich Guy willing to pony up US$100 million:
  

  [Financier Yuri] Milner is backing the $100 million R&D program necessary to get this to work. Existing technology won’t do; New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft we’ve ever launched, and it would take 78,000 years to get to any of the stars in Alpha Centauri, a nearby three-star system. The plutonium in its power systems alone weighs 11kg and would require staggering amounts of energy to accelerate to the necessary speeds.

  Instead, Breakthrough Starshot plans to build what’s essentially a spacecraft on a chip, which Milner called a nanocraft. A gram-scale wafer will include “cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment.”

  Each device would cost roughly the same as a high-end smartphone to make, allowing a massive number to be sent on the journey, providing some significant redundancy. Milner held up an early prototype during the announcement.

  Propulsion will be outsourced to a facility on Earth. The small spacecraft will be equipped with a light sail, and a phased array of lasers in the 100GW range will provide the sail with enough push to get the craft moving at roughly 20 percent the speed of light in just a matter of minutes. [emphasis mine]

  Let’s repeat that last bit: humans are proposing that we build a swarm of tiny robots with solar sails, accelerate them to 0.2c, and throw them at our nearest interstellar neighbors. Alpha Centauri is a bit under 4.2 light years away; at 0.2c, we’re talking about a stunningly fast 21 years. Allow another 4 years for any signals to return and it’s 25 years to find out what the neighborhood of another star looks like.

  >ahem< Fuck, yes.

  Now, for the webcomics connection — I first saw this story because Jeph Jacques pointed it out and immediately wondered about conspiracy angles:

  “Freeman Dyson, for his part, emphasized that the space between here and Alpha Centauri isn’t empty” HMMMMMM

  Jacques, of course, knows exactly what’s out there: chatty, occasionally snippy robots. And now we’ll finally be able to prove it!

Spam of the day:

Get Burial Life Insurance Options Now

Is this some kind of weird threat?

_____________
¹ Our Fair City. RIP, Tommy.

² Very, very tiny, gram-scale spacecraft, but hundreds of them.

Namely, that the vagaries of San Francisco real estate aside, the Cartoon Art Museum is very much a going concern, and permanent home or no, they are Doing Stuff. Quite a bit of Stuff in the coming weeks, in fact. Let’s take a look.

• A week from Monday (that would be 18 April, in the 2016th year of the Common Era¹), CAM (in conjunction with the California College of the Arts MFA in Comics Program) welcomes cartoonist Leila Abdelrazaq to CCA’s campus. Abdelrazaq will be discussing her new graphic novel, Baddawi, inspired by her father’s life growing up in the refugee camps of Lebanon. The program kicks off at 7:00pm in Timken Hall, 1111 8th Street in San Francisco.
• Three days later on the 21st, CAM continues its Third Thursdays series (this time in conjunction with the Museum of Performance + Design) with a program devoted to figure sketching and performance mapping. This one will tie into MP+D’s current exhibition (through 4 June) Mapping Dance: The Scores of Anna Halprin, a collection of scores and performance videos from the collection of choreographer Halprin (which exhibit itself is a partnership with the California Historical Society).

  That’s an awful lot of institutions working in concert to bring significant and celebrated arts to a wider (and participatory) audience, which in and of itself is an impressive undertaking. If you’ve wanted to improve your ability to represent movement into drawing seeing Halprin’s choreographic scores seems like a good place for inspiration. The event runs 5:30pm – 8:00pm at 893 Folsom Street.

At this pace, there will not be a block or cultural institution in San Francisco that hasn’t done something in conjunction with CAM, and given that comics and cartoons are among the most widely distributed of the arts, that’s appropriate. Drop by either or both events, enjoy yourself, and when you see the donation jar that’s funding a new home for CAM, be generous.

Spam of the day:

Millions Already Awarded – You May Qualify

Oh gosh, is this about something that may have affected me like faulty brakes or a dangerous furnace? Oh. Vaginal mesh implants. Yeah, no, don’t got one o’ them.

_______________
¹ Alternately, the 64th, 6766th, 7524th, 3182nd, 5776th, 28th, or 105th year of (respectively) the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the Assyrian calendar, the Byzantine calendar, the Discordian calendar, the Hebrew calendar, the Heisei era, or the life of the Eternal President of a batshit crazy hermit nation/personality cult. Calendars are weird, man.

Good news for indy and webcomics creators, as TopatoCon 2016 will be free to attend and the NCS Division Awards released their nominations. Two of the three nominations for Comic Books are Giant Days (Max Sarin, although the image that they’re using is a Lissa Tremain cover) and Squirrel Girl (Erica Henderson), and the two online categories are full of excellent choices. Namely, Drive (Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett), The Creepy Casefiles of Margo Maloo (Drew Weing), and Octopus Pie (Meredith Gran, her second nod) for Long Form, and Bouletcorp (Boulet), Kevin and Kell (Bill Holbrook), and Sheldon (LArDK, again) for Short Form. Gonna be some tough choices to make as the NCS membership looks over their ballots.

The rest of this post is about one person I met at MoCCA Fest, and how you’ll want to keep your eye on her work.

At the start, it was the earrings¹. Large, white, vaguely dangerous-looking at first glance. Definitely lethal at second glance, and nervous-making despite the endlessly cheerful demeanor of the wearer. I asked what they were, and she told me — perhaps a little too cheerfully — Bobcat jaws! Like, actual fang-sporting jaws of actual bobcats, the better to destroy her enemies if she has any, which I seriously doubt.

Since I was there I glanced over her table, and as I mentioned before, I stopped when I looked at an open minicomic, the pages of which I immediately recognized. It was If Only Once, If Only For A Little While, open to the second and third pages. I remembered it because at the time I thought the character designs were reminiscent of Adachi Mitsuru’s Cross Game or (dating myself here) Matsumoto Izumi’s Kimagure Orange Road (which, coincidentally, is now finally being translated into English).

I always found their faces to be expressive with an absolute minimum of detail, and the same strengths showed here; it’s like the artist found that diagram in Understanding Comics that shows the continuum of faces, from photorealistic to circle/dots/line and picked out a spot just over the line into the cartoony end and said Here. These are the faces that suit this story.

There’s also the staging of those two pages (seriously, go look at them), particularly with the coiled dragon mural and that one, mostly black panel on page three. They draw your eye in and make you visually circle around that central bit of text: An awful truth is still the truth.

Combined with the bit dialogue at the end of page two (Nothing that exciting would ever happen here), the reader is entirely engaged in the story and primed for — perhaps dreading — the revelations to come. And that’s before you notice the POV shifts and camera angles and distances in the individual panels, each serving exactly the purpose needed in establishing mood and story. Did I mention the skill at which she draws the drape and folds of clothing? Because she gets how cloth works on human bodies. I’ve seen this before, but I know I haven’t given you money for it I said; We need to fix that.

And that was when I met Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.

Details came up quickly — she’s a student at MCAD, getting ready to graduate in the coming weeks; she’s been doing comics for about three years, and oh yeah — she’s also working on her comic book debut, which just so happens to be the much-anticipated Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy crossover. I asked how on earth she’d scored that gig as her first comic book work and with all the sincerity in the world she said I got really lucky.

And that was when I decided I needed to know Rosemary Valero-O’Connell much better.

As I mentioned, I saw a lot of student work at MoCCA, and talked to a fair number of students; some were reticent, some outgoing, all were starry-eyed and optimistic about their forthcoming fabulous careers in comics, except one. Valero-O’Connell was cautious and hopeful and well aware that the comics business is not a meritocracy or even particularly fair. She knows that the deadlines and page rates may border on science fiction², she knows that the business end is capricious and even cruel. She’s ridiculously grounded and ready to do a huge amount of grinding work to establish herself.

And that was when I resolved to follow Rosemary Valero-O’Connell very closely.

It shouldn’t be too hard; in addition to LJ/GA³, I noticed that she did the cover to the new Steven Universe original graphic novel that releases today (co-written by show producer Ian Jones-Quartey, no less). She mentioned that she has projects in the pipeline that she can’t talk about just yet. She is, I hope, working on stories of her own, because I want to read them and see them where they belong — on the shelves of stores, gathering the sorts of notice and acclaim that Raina Telgemeier and Hope Larson and Noelle Stevenson are getting.

And that is why you want to pay attention to Rosemary Valero-O’Connell; she’s seriously skilled today, and she’s only going to get better.

Spam of the day:

The Gene Simmons Company

Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Gene Simmons achieved permanent Garbage Person status on 4 February 2002.

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¹ I should note that the earrings had competition for coolest jewelry of the show; not long after entering the hall I noticed a black, metallic, sculptural necklace on a woman and complimented her on it. The more I looked at it (with her permission, don’t want to be creepy) the more it looked familiar. That looks like a benzene ring I said, indicating the central element, but I don’t know what the things hanging off it are. It’s dopamine she told me, so at least I can still identify benzene. Pretty sure this was it if you want one of your own.

² At one point I begged her to spend some time this week reading everything Katie Lane has written on work made for hire, and to please never undervalue her skills. She knows, and thankfully she’s got an agent looking out for her. And hell if she didn’t luck into the Impossible Thing with this LJ/GA gig — an underpaid (it’s mostly Boom! wrangling the story, so it’s definitely underpaid) WMFH gig where the exposure (reminder, kids: people die of exposure) is actually significantly valuable. This story is going to put her on a lot of people’s radar.

³ To be honest, I’d planned on dropping both Lumberjanes and Gotham Academy because I found the original creative teams to be more to my tastes than the current creative teams; I’ll be holding out at least through the six issues now.