Yes, there are other things to mention, such as the news that TCAF announced another six guests (including Gene Luen Yang), and Christopher Hastings is getting another Marvel miniseries. Those are good bits of news, go revel in their newness.

• Probably nobody on the floor of MoCCA Fest has had as precipitous an upward trajectory as Noelle Stevenson; I first met her two years back when Lumberjanes #1 was fresh on the shelves and Nimona was not yet nominated for the National Book Award or optioned for the big screen. I asked her how she follows all of that up and she mentioned she has a book in development with HarperCollins called Four Wizards¹, as well as a second project she can’t talk about yet. I told her something I told a number of creators — I can’t wait to see what she’s doing in five year, ten years, because she’s just getting better.
• Despite the presence of a booth helper with a name tag reading Gina Gagliano, the beating heart of :01 Books (and the woman who sends me enough review copies to drown an average-size ten year old) was repping the imprint in Houston during MoCCA weekend; no matter, as the booth was in the good hands of Danielle Ceccolini.

  Ms Ceccolini came on board in 2014 to replace departing book designer Colleen AF Venable; print lead times being what they are, it’s only been in the last six months or so that I’ve seen Ceccolini’s name in :01’s offerings, so we’re just starting to get a sense of how strong her designs are (especially given that a number of her designs have been on continuing series — such as The Olympians or Glorkian Warrior — that had an established look and feel).

  Case in point: Faith Erin Hick’s The Nameless City (out today), which sports an absolutely gorgeous design to go with the engaging story. If you ever wanted to read a graphic novel (for, let’s say, tweens and up) that reminds you of all the best parts of Jeff Smith, Hayao Miyazaki, Gene Yang, and Kazu Kibuishi in one book, this is the one for you. Or rather, the first of three for you, since it’s a planned trilogy.

  Between that deal, the numerous Yang offerings each year (including the Secret Coders series with Mike Holmes, second volume due soon), and the Science Comics line, it seems like :01 is on track for a good deal more ambitious a release schedule than their recent history of 18 – 22 books a year. It’s a hell of a lot of work for four people, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that they need more hands to keep their well-deserved reputation for quality.

• Ken Wong was somebody I’d intended to go see on the floor, as the description of his origami comics — comics where the physical, three-dimensional presentation becomes part of the story — intrigued the hell out of me. As it turned out, I walked by his table somehow not noticing the enormous ORIGAMI COMICS banner, but my eye was caught by the cover of what turned out to be the single nerdiest comic I’ve ever read: Bonetti’s Defense — I Know Something You Don’t Know About Swordplay In The Princess Bride. It’s exactly what it says on the cover: a picking-apart of the slight dialogue (and careful choreography) of the epic duel between Inigo Montoya and the Man In Black on top of the Cliffs of Insanity.

  Drawing on what I’d always assumed to be throwaway names (in the screenplay and the original book), Wong finds the historical Bonetti, Capo Ferro, Thibault, and Agrippa and talks about why their teachings are appropriate to the scene in question. And because anything nerdy that you’re nerding out over can never have too much nerding, he finds likely historical referents for fencing masters McBone, Sainct, MacPherson, and Morozzo. Wong even figures out who the most probable inspiration for the Dread Pirate Roberts was.

  It’s not necessary to read Bonetti’s Defense to enjoy everybody’s favorite movie², but it gives a sense of satisfaction to realize how much William Goldman, Rob Reiner, swordmaster Bob Anderson, and everybody else cared to make things right even if only one guy in Brooklyn would ever realize how right they were.

• Not far from Wong’s table, I did the I was going to look for you and didn’t realize you were here and something on the table caught my eye deal a second time, when I came across Azure. In this case, the catch-my-eye factor was provided by a stack of onesies with dinosaurs on them.

  I’m very sorry to say that I can’t find a link on Azure’s site for these because they are adorable and my gosh, did I just have a grand-nephew born like ten days ago? I believe I did, and young Collin is going to be well-equipped with a dinosaur onesie and small prints with dinosaurs on them because you can never start a love affair with dinosaurs too early.

There were students everywhere. I saw tables either officially representing schools, or filled with students who came from particular schools but not in an official capacity, including (but likely not limited to) Parsons, FIT, Pratt, SVA, Syracuse, CCS, Moore, and at least one high school club.

The students themselves ran the gamut from shy and retiring to immensely outgoing; from art student chic to lacking even one piercing or visible tattoo; their work fell into every conceivable genre and style, from I’m mostly inspired by what’s on Crunchyroll this month but haven’t quite figured out anatomy yet to a noir mystery starring snails³.

But there was one (from the far lands of Minneapolis) that stood out from her contemporaries; her work had an assurance, a confidence that I wouldn’t have expected from one so young (and who had only been doing comics for about three years). One whose work I realized I had seen before and (foolishly) had not bookmarked at the time. One who has Big Things happening in the immediate future, and whose future work I am looking forward to as much as Noelle Stevenson’s, one who I think is going to make as big a splash in the industry as Stevenson, Hicks, Telgemeier, or Larson.

But I’m over 1000 words as it is, so come back tomorrow and we’ll talk about Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.

Spam of the day:

Diffuse threats with this recently released technology

You mean I should make them ever less and less concentrated, until they are spread over such a large volume as to be indetectable? Or given the rather rah-rah tactical machismo of your imagery, did you mean defuse? Either way, it’s just a damn flashlight, bunky.

_______________
¹ Or possibly 4 Wizards, or For Wizards; it was noisy and I didn’t ask her to spell it.

² Oh hush, you know it is.

³ The same creator’s other works were all shiny and sparkly, which prompted me to suggest that to my knowledge, nobody has yet combined noir story structures with the Lisa Frank aesthetic and she should get right on that.

Welp, we know why there wasn’t an xkcd on Friday; it’s because Randall Munroe was getting ready to unleash one of his toys on us in the form of xkcd #1663, a slow-moving utterly unique garden simulation where you get to position lights (including color and beam width) and see what grows. It may take hours to see stuff pop up, and no two runs will be the same. For reference, that image up top is from a stock reset of the toy, no messing, after about two hours.

It will take approximately forever to determine all the mechanisms of Garden, but right now it appears that yellow light is required for the short shrub-trees, tall spires, and birdbaths; blue light appears to be necessary for octopuses. Oh, and whatever browser glitch that caused my three-lamp, three-color, balanced layout to reset itself back to stock: you suck.

The rest of this post is the first part of Fleen’s roundup of this weekend’s MoCCA Festival, which I attended on Saturday.

• As I mentioned in my pre-show discussion, a lot of the established webcomics crowd doesn’t do MoCCA anymore; I walked into the Metropolitan West facility¹ — a somewhat modern and spare space compared to last year’s Chelsea location² (then again, the sightlines were pretty good and the climate reasonable; it only really got stuffy for a short while in mid-afternoon, as the rain was ending and lots of damp bodies started to crowd the aisles) — only knowing one person that I expected to see on the floor: Evan Dahm.

  Evan’s deeply artistic, artfully-presented books are a natural for the MoCCA crowd, and he reported the show was going well. He let me know that he’s just approved the proofs for the second Vattu book, and we had a great conversation about the minutiae of that story, its ultimate length (four books), other projects he’s got in the pipeline (nothing I can tell you about at the moment), and our dogs. Mostly our dogs, truth be told.

• Next to Dahm’s table I met Kathleen Kralowec, whose comics are maddeningly bright and intricate, the result of watercolor and marker and absolutely no fear of working in materials that don’t take kindly to mistakes. Check out The Lion And The Roc for a good example of what she’s capable of, and if you see her at a show be sure to pick it up in print, because it’s astoundingly gorgeous.

  It was about this time that I started talking up Pat Race’s Alaska Robotics MiniCon; assuming the first one breaks even and Race is crazy enough to run a show again next year, hopefully a lot of up-and-coming creators are willing to make their way to Juneau.

• A mild correction, lest I leave you with the impression that I made a beeline to Dahm’s table first thing; he was fairly close the rear of the second floor, and while I did start there and work my way down, the first creator I encountered was actually Molly Ostertag of Strong Female Protagonist. We chatted briefly about how hers is the one story-centric webcomic that I cannot read update-to-update, or even chapter-to-chapter; I need to have big chunks of story to dig into, so I was thrilled to hear that the Kickstarter for the second SFP collection will launch this summer. Hooray!
• I met Bill Roundy at MoCCA last year, and we spent a fair amount of time talking craft cocktails. As it turns out, he remembered me and we continued our discussion about the revival of a once-classic cocktail that had largely fallen by the wayside due to the discontinuation of a key ingredient.

  The Brooklyn is a delight (and strong!) mix of rye, maraschino, vermouth, and Amer Picon — a French aperitif that isn’t made any more. My regular bar found you can do a reasonable substitution with Torani Amer³ and flamed orange peel, but people that remember the old Amer Picon say it’s not quite the same.

  But there’s now a distillery that’s sourced the original ingredients and methods, and people who remember the old Amer Picon say that Golden Moon’s Amer Dit Picon is pretty much identical to the original; Roundy (being a man with his head screwed on straight) rightly sees this as a reason to celebrate, and hopefully The Brooklyn will become popular again.

  He may have had a flask for personal consumption with sharing offered to friends and fellow cocktail enthusiasts. I may be in a position to say that Roundy’s mixing skills are excellent. And it’s not up in his store yet, but his print Still Life With Potential Brooklyn (similar to these) is handsome and will soon be a gift to my regular bartender.

More on MoCCA 2106 tomorrow!

Spam of the day:

Commodities’ “Head-Smashed-In”

I hope that this has something to do with putting commodities barons on the receiving end of the famed Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump and reenacting how it got its name.

______________
¹ After a 20 minute wait in the rain; give a venue security dude a short haircut, suit, and an earpiece and he’s gonna be forcefully shouty when he announces attendess have to leave the vestibule. Which on the one hand, fine, I can absolutely see that having the entrance crowded directly in front of one of the fire exits is an issue.

But on the other hand, it would have been much better to go with Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry, I know it’s raining, but the City won’t allow us to have you stand here in front of the fire exits. If you’re not an exhibitor, please line up along the side of the building and try to stay dry instead of Attention, listen up, you have to leave the building now, unless you’re an exhibitor. Nobody is getting in until you all leave; you must line up in that direction [hand stabby gesture towards the USS Intrepid] now.

That second bit is not an exact quote, but I believe it captures the tenor of the announcement accurately.

² Which featured lots of natural light and roof access; on the other hand, the Chelsea site had a small footprint and required the use of a tight, steep stairway to navigate the upper three floors. MetWest only had two floor, and it was more spacious set of stairs, so that was nice.

³ The owner of the Torani company — they make all those flavored syrups you see in coffee bars — missed Amer Picon, so he came up with his best-effort recreation, which is the only alcoholic offering of the Torani company.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Uncle George, and we discover that although Ray dug down deep to find he truly was Blood of Champion, he was ready to bribe his way out of the Fight the minute it became necessary (or at least attempt to). Ray contains multitudes.

We’re heading east today, to the continent of universal health care — that would be most of the rest of the world, Gary — and borderless borders — a contradiction in terms! — and ancient wines, beers, and cheeses¹. Europe!

• Our first stop is in France, cradle of so many of the arts (comics not the least of them) and home of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. One may recall that about a month ago I mentioned that Stela — the new mobile comics delivery platform — was getting a lot of attention and precisely zero release on Android, so I wasn’t able to offer up anything resembling a review.

  But! FSFCPL is in the iDevice fold, and Stela has recently released a French version, and he’s shared some thoughts on it for you. Key takeaway points:

  [O]nce you use it it becomes clear Stela’s purpose is to publish comics that embrace the 5 centimeters (that’s about 2 inches, for the metrically-challenged) width of today’s smartphone screens.

  That’s good, but Lebeaupin notes that Stela is really designed for handsets; viewing comics on an iPad means the comics are just scaled up, which makes for funnily huge lettering.

  These are comics that are native to that world: the panels are only as wide as the screen (nary a vertical gutter in sight) and can only extend vertically, but they can do so as much as desired because they are read by vertical scrolling. A panel may not necessarily fit on a screen (at least on an iPhone 5/5S/SE; I haven’t checked on the larger models)! An iPhone 5 screenful is a common size, but most of these comics have widely varying panels sizes, and anyway have conversations for instance that extend over multiple screenfuls: they don’t follow a pattern of identically-sized pages. The result is a very fluid flow and a reading experience that is meant to be fast. [emphasis mine]

  Bolded because I think that’s probably the most important selling point of Stela, however it should be balanced against another discovery:

  [I]mages are loaded dynamically and present a spinner if your scroll too fast before they have had time to load, as is traditional in iPhone apps: prioritize the flow, even if that means betraying some implementation realitie

  And some of the decisions (both technical and economic) are a bit bewildering:

  The comics are updated chapter by chapter (which make for checkpoints as well); the economic model is that the first chapter of each story is free, and you can get a subscription (using Apple’s in-app subscription system) to read after that. It is a single subscription global to the app, not per-series, so it works a bit like an anthology series. Comics are always loaded from the network, which bothers me a little: there is no way to preload while on WiFi to avoid eating into your phone data allotment, and no way to read at all if you are off the network. iPod Touches exist, you know. [emphasis mine]

  And depending on your inclination, those might be the dealbreakers right there — let your subscription lapse and you have nothing to show for it — as you’re only given access to what you’re reading right now. Stela is less a comics app than a comics rental platform; those that like to own their media (digital or otherwise), take note. And as always, thanks to FSFCPL for his review.

• A bit futher east and north then, to the land of sauna and tango and linguistic anomalies — I’m speaking naturally of Finland — and Minna Sundberg. We at Fleen have been big fans of Ms Sundberg’s since we saw the crowdfunding campaign for the very pretty book of her first comic, and that regard has only grown since she launched her ongoing magnum opus, Stand Still, Stay Silent. Readers of this page will recall the fact that SSSS took the NCS Division Award for Online Comics — Long Form last May.

  And she’s been cranking out between three and five full pages a week (along with the odd interchapter hiatus of ten days or so) 879 days since November of 2013 — 500 pages in total as of today — making her one of the most productive cartoonists working right now. A page of comics written, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered in less than two days for nearly two and a half years? Sundberg is an unstoppable comics machine, and shows every sign of reaching Sergio Aragonés levels of speed and skill while still in her mid-20s. I can’t wait to see what she’s like in another decade.

  Happy Big Round Number Day, Ms Sundberg. Your work is great and you should feel great.

Spam of the day:

Implant-Providers

Damn it, I told you people I neither need nor want breast implants!

Dental Implants You Can Afford

Oh. I’d say Never mind but I don’t need dental implants either. Gots all ma teeths, don’t need fangs or tusks or anything like that.

______________
¹ Now we’re talking.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; we may imagine Beef and Ray tearing down the road, not yet able to form words.

MoCCA Fest is next weekend, and I’ll be seeing you there, yes? For those who’ve missed the new, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival (presented by the Society of Illustrators) is off tow its third venue in as many years (and its fourth overall), but the SoI folks know how to put on a show and I suspect this one will be as good as the last few, which keep getting subtly better. We’ve seen news about the venue, the show poster, the Guests of Honor, and the programming, so let’s talk about exhibitors that will be there. As usual, I’ve probably missed a few, so let me know of any necessary corrections.

• Time was, MoCCA attracted an exhibitor pool that was heavily concentrated on New York (particularly Brookyln), with a lot of indie and webcartoonists in the mix; longtimers include the likes of Evan Dahm (table I276), Dean Haspiel (A112), Josh Neufeld (same), and Sylvan Migdal (H261, who I must have met at maybe the second MoCCA Fest ever).
• A lot of the original cohort has come and gone, but there are newer indie and webcartoonists (many of them from Brooklyn) who’ll be there, including Rachel Dukes (I268), Jenn Jordan (H261), Aatmaja Pandya (F214), Carey Pietsch (F207), and Alison Wilgus (G231). Heck, some of their generation have become bona fide superstars like the omnipresent Noelle Stevenson (C135).
• Also present since small times have been a strong mix of publishers — Abrams Books (G235/236), Fantagraphics (C136-139), :01 Books (D144), Pantheon (E158/159) — and institutions — Center for Cartoon Studies (E174/175), Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (E160-163), Parsons (J283/284), SVA (A118/119), Syracuse University (E166/167) — dedicated to the craft and perpetuation of comics.
• And one of my favorite parts of MoCCA Fest has been its turnover; there’s always somebody new showing up, with stuff that looks interesting that I haven’t seen before. This year I’ll particularly be on the lookout for Olga Andreyeva (J291), Azure (D146), Alisa Harris (G231), and Ken Wong (I266). I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this list (and the one up above of the newer generation of Brooklynites and allies) is overwhelmingly made up of women; I suspect it will not be too many years before a show like this one has to have a panel that asks what it’s like to be a dude making comics.

Lastly, for any that have energy left over after a first day that’s likely to be packed full, SoI are sponsoring an afterparty/awards ceremony from 7:00pm to 11:00pm on Saturday night, although you need to be an exhibitor, volunteer, Guest of Honor, or otherwise VIP to get in. Fun starts with free beer from Flying Dog Brewery until it runs out (cash bar afterwards) and a small plates buffet; the MoCCA Fest Awards of Excellence ceremony starts at 8:00pm.

Keep in mind that the SoI dates from a time when a skilled trade like illustrators could purchase a fancy-ass building for their headquarters, and they’ve got a century’s worth of neat stuff on display. If you can go, I’d encourage you to do so; if you can’t, I’ll see you on the floor.

Spam of the day:

topkitchenremodeling Gorgeous Kitchens – Check it out.

No comment.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We meet The Man With The Blood On His Hands for the first time.

Is this mathematically the best time to write a blogpost? I think it is! And math is intrinsically linked with science, so let’s get all sciency up in here.

• Item! Comicker/science demystifier Maris Wicks is currently (ha, ha) aboard the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s research vessel Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic ocean. She’s there to help facilitate the dissemination of information of a multi-week voyage to study the phenomenon of rocks on the sea floor that make popping sounds all on their own. They’re a mystery and not easily found, but mere days after setting out and making their way to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, success! Popping rocks were found!

  In all seriousness, this is a great use of comics to convey complex ideas (ocean science, geology, climatology, probably a few more -ologies), as has been shown by Wicks’s own previous and current work, but also by Dante Shepherd’s engineering concepts comics. Keep an eye on Wicks, the R/V Atlantis, the Alvin, and all who sail upon/in them; they’re going to be learning some neat stuff and then sharing so we can learn it too.

• Item! Comicker/science demystifier/filmmaker Jorge Cham is out on tour this week, with visits to CMU and Pitt tonight (How To Survive Grad School), FSU tomorrow (talk, signing, and screening of The PhD Movie 2), and William & Mary on Thursday (The Power Of Procrastination). Details at the respective pages, go tell him I said hi.
• Item! Webcomics power couple Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky are going to have a formal launch for the book version of their world-famous Dad Magazine, with back-to-back events in New York City:
  

  DO YOU WANT TO COME TO A DAD MAGAZINE RELEASE PARTY yes you do they’re on April 26 @astoriabookshop and April 27 at @HousingWorksBks

  The Astoria Bookshop event will run 7:00pm to 8:00pm, and the Housingworks Books event the next night starts at 7:00pm but (intriguingly) has no end time indicated. Could be the party goes on forever.

  Where’s the science? I hear you ask. Shut up, that’s where. Just go and enjoy yourself.

Spam of the day:

Talcum Powder Lawsuit ATTENTION: Ovarian Cancer Patients. Did You Use Talcum Powder?

It might just be impossible for me to have ovarian cancer, and it might just be impossible for people with ovarian cancer to not have used talcum powder since basically everybody has at some point. Might as well ask ATTENTION: Ovarian Cancer Patients. Did You Breathe Air?

I mean, unless you’re implying that they put the talcum powder directly on the ovaries which would not be the dumbest illness/injury thing I’ve heard since becoming an EMT.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Two cats have taken their time going to the snack tent to retrieve some brandy of the gets-the-job-done variety. We’ll pick up with them when they get back.

I think that what I like best about the small-to-medium sized comics shows is the fact that they actually feature comics. So it’s with that in mind that I brin gyou news from three such festival-type shows that you’ll be paying attention to in the coming weeks and months, and one prize that draws from the same creator cohort.

• First up, MoCCA Fest has announced its slate of programming for the 2-3 April show in Manhattan; as was the case last year, panels and programs will be offsite, but included in the cost of your US$5 ticket. Highlights include a Sonny Liew Spotlight (12:30pm on Saturday), Cece Bell on El Deafo (2:00pm Saturday), Making Comics for Younger Readers (with Noelle Stevenson and others; 12:30pm on Sunday), and a Rebecca Sugar Q+A (2:00pm on Sunday). Best of all? The meeting rooms are actually named Helvetica and Garamond.
• Nextly, TCAF has announced four more featured guests, who you’ll find the weekend of 14-15 May. If it seems like three is a small number, consider:
  • They were specifically invited to appeal to kids
  • There were already Kids Guests announced like Kate Beaton and Faith Erin Hicks
  • This brings the total of confirmed guests to more than two dozen
  • They are superstars Alex A (Super Agent Jon Le Bon), Kazu Kibuishi (Amulet), Dana Simpson (Phoebe And Her Unicorn), and Raina Telgemeier (the entire damn comics industry; Sunday only)
• The second half of the SPX exhibitor list — the part decided by lottery — is starting to fill in, as news is being shared around the Twittersphere about who got in and who didn’t. The list will be fluid for some time, with table payments not due for another month, and then backfills taking place between now and the weekend of 17–18 September. Please note that the Exhibitors link at the SPX site is still showing the 2015 lineup, but expect that to change in the next couple of weeks.
• The Center for Cartoon Studies and Slate have announced the shortlists for their annual Cartoonist Studio Prizes. As in past years, there are ten nominees from the world of print comics, and ten from webcomics. As in past years, there are single-shot stories and ongoing series — length, genre, topic, style, audience age, and all the other qualifiers that usual divide nominees into many categories have no place here, only the strength of the work. As in past years, one nominee from each list will be recognized (announcement due on 6 April), and get both bragging rights and — uniquely for comics prizes — a thousand damn dollars.

  Pretty much everything that I saw on the lists that I recognized I nodded Yeah, that makes sense, and I don’t see any particularly weak or surprising nominations. It’s worth noting that D&Q and Fantagraphics dominate the print category, and that three of the webcomics nominees were commissioned by Matt Bors for The Nib before it shuttered its doors halfway through the year, or for its short-lived followup, The Response; I’ve no doubt that if Bors had a full 12 months in 2015 to play with, we’d see more on the list.

Spam of the day:

Check out the profiles of over 30,000 Russian babes. Make these Russian girls fall for your charm.

Okay, nothing special there, we’ve seen this particular flavor of spam before. What propels it into the realm of genius is the name of the alleged sender, Olga. Olga Contrabasist. That is sheer goddamn poetry.

Heck, I’m in a good mood, let’s do another one!

Signs of a Fatal Heart-Attack

I’ma go out on a limb here — 10 year veteran EMT and all, you pick these things up — and say the most distinguishing sign of a heart attack that is not merely damaging but fatal, would be the part where you’re dead.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: There were three, then there were two, and Rudy Cava had some dark shit in his past. All hail the pissed man with goals.

Longtime Friend o’ Fleen and shadowy mystery man Eben Burgoon has been on a bit of a tear recently; we mentioned that he put up a Kickstart for the latest volume of his kill-’em-all comic series, The B-Squad, unfortunately the same day as the Cyanide & Happiness folks put up their megasuccessful card game’s campaign¹. But now that the oxygen is coming back into the room, we can see that B-Squad Volume 2 is a bit shy of goal (that is to say, 45% with nine days to go), and direct people to check it out. Burgoon was kind enough to send a copy of Volume 1 over to the Fleenplex and it’s a hoot. A hoot and a half, even, with cruel twists of fate dictated by literal throws of the die².

Burgoon’s been here before — closing days, goal looking iffy — and he’s always regrouped, replanned, and readjusted to reality, and it’s made him a better creator. He’s also too smart to have just one creative venture define him. Which is why he’s now got a signature beer:

The beer itself is a blonde ale brewed with Sacramento wildflower honey. BEE-SQUAD! SEE! It is all connected!

It’s brewed with California grown barley and blend of 2 hops. It’s a slight twist on their previous blonde ale, but to me it sounds ridiculously & dangerously drinkable at 7.0% alcohol and I certainly intend to leave many an expended pint full bee-hind! [emphasis original; puns unfortunate]

Why has no other webcomic had a signature booze before? Those of you in Sacramento on Saturday the 19th of March (coincidentally the end date for the Kickstarter) will have a chance to ask Burgoon, label designer Sean Sutter, and the brewmasters of New Helvetia Brewing Company in person, as they’ll be having a combination end-of-Kickstarter launch-of-beer party from 3:00pm to 8:00pm. Fun goes down at New Helvetia, 1730 Broadway in Sacto, and fun it will be if the book funds out.

If not, it’ll be a hell of a fun wake, and Burgoon will get up Monday to find the next way to bring his creations to life. Adaptability + booze is pretty much what indie and webcomics are all about.

Spam of the day:

LEGAL NOTICE: You may be entitled to settlement from implantable-mesh

Fun fact: my wife has worked in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries for pretty much her entire career, and so I know that implantable meshes are commonly used for breast augmentation. I haven’t ever had either of those, so I suspect that the authors of this spam may not, contrary to their claims, have actually tailored the message to my unique situation.

_______________
¹ Joking Hazard by name, and I use the term megasuccessful in a precise sense, as it closed earlier today having raised 3.246 US megadollars, or roughly double the midpoint of what the FFFmk2 predicted. Well done, lads.

² There’s a double meaning there; the character whose number comes up on the die will die. If one of them perishes in some kind of industrial die-cutting machine, it’ll become a triple meaning.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray is tired from his rampage and shivering from the cold and loneliness. Some nights are longer than others.

Hell, no! So why should the Cartoon Art Museum stop doing cool things just because The Man says they don’t have a gallery space anymore? Become the ruling body, dude!¹ Or at least check out what CAM has coming up in the next few weeks.

• Next weekend, CAM will be heading down to the South Bay and the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con in San Jose. Curator Andrew Farago will be interviewing Norm Felchle (he works on Spider-Man, Mick Gray (Batman and Robin, Alex Sheikman (Moonstruck), and Ryan Sook (Hawkman and a stack of Buffy titles) in a panel discussion, 10:00am on Saturday the 19th.
• A week later, they’ll be at WonderCon at the LA Convention Center; this time it’ll be Program Coordinator Nina Kester doing panel duties with Comedy in Comics, on Sunday the 27th from 11:30am. Guests will include Kyle Baker (Plastic Man, Why I Hate Saturn, The Cowboy Wally Show, and many more), Ming Doyle (DC Bombshells), Francesco Francavilla (Afterlife With Archie), Agnes Garbowska (My Little Pony), Joe Quinones (Howard the Duck, having to put up with Chip Zdarsky), and Raina Telgemeier².
• June 18th and 19th will see the third annual Queer Comics Expo at the SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, which will also serve as a fundraiser for CAM. In fact, they’re looking for people that want to be part of the fun, with applications for QCE programming, volunteers, and exhibitors open through 31 March. Table rates range from US$15 to US$50 (half or whole, one day or both) and exhibitors can get the application details via qcexpo.tumblr.com/exhibitors.

I can think off the top of my head about a couple museums that do less than this in a year, much less in a couple of months while also juggling a major capital fundraising campaign/real estate search. They’re good folks over at CAM, and you ought to take one of these opportunities to go see ’em. Drop a couple bucks in the donation jar while you’re there.

Spam of the day:

Look 20-Years Younger: Celebrity Method Revealed

Man, I already look 10 years younger than I actually am (and the entire insurance industry apparently thinks I qualify for Medicare, which event won’t happen until the 2030s); if your miracle goop makes me look another 20 years younger, I’m never going to get a drink again.

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¹ I appear to have mixed my metaphors somewhat.

² Do I really have to tell you what she does? Read literally any week of postings here and you’ll come across her.

This dayin Great Outdoor Fight history: The presence of tick-pimps, boilbacks, and yard-sleepers quite frankly raises as many questions as they answer. Such as, how many were made into cowboy sauce? I’m going to guess 250-300.

• We’re getting down to the end times here — from issue #1 in September of 2010 to issue #100¹ in August of last year, to the final wind-down of the rerun as a webcomic, Jim Zub’s Skullkickers is reaching a milestone. For the first time, it’s going to be complete for all new readers; a significant portion of his audience never picked up the dead-tree floppies, and only knows Skullkickers as a webcomic; for the first time, it’s going to be there as a complete story, with no new updated on the next Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

  It’s the comic where he really made his bones and his reputation as a journeyman that can write anything for anybody, 1000 pages a year. It’s the comic that launched a series of tutorials on creator-owned comics, whether the economics of such, tricks for promotion, pitching, you name it. In a lot of ways, it’s always going to be the Zubbiest comic of his career¹ other works since have incorporated some of the madcap insanity of Baldy and Shorty (okay, Rex and Rolf), and have tried to do as ambitious things with the nature of stories, but only here did all of it come together.

  I’m just saying, Wayward and Thunderbolts and Samurai Jack and Makeshift Miracle and Baldur’s Gate and Pathfinder and Batman and Figment and all of the others? Excellent writing, in every genre for every possible audience, but they lack something essential. They have far less mayhem, far fewer crotch-kicks, and as a result are thus only partially Zubby. Zubbish? Zublike? Whatever the adjectival form of Zub is, less of that. He set out to tell as big a story as he could², with as much fun as possible along the way, and he succeeded admirably. It’s a Zub world, and we’re lucky to be living in it.

• One really cool thing about Skullkickers was how Zub treated the character of Kusia, the elven assassin. She wasn’t just the major female character, but just generally a more competent and likable character than the putative leads. In a testosterone-fueled genre (six of them, actually), she was the rational touchstone, and she got to argue that just because the eternal archetypes of adventure are male shouldn’t mean that there’s no place for women protagonists. Then she dragged the eternal archetypes into something resembling gender parity and it was cool.

  I’m thinking about this, because it’s rare for male cartoonists to actively seek out reasons to have female protagonists³ but female cartoonists aren’t so blind to the ability of women characters to anchor a story. It’s not even so much that women cartoonists create women characters at the expense of men — it’s that they know that including a mix of both reflect the real world, even when nearly every form of entertainment and social interaction results in dudes thinking women are overrepresented and dominating a story when they hit a ratio of about 1 in 4.

  And seeing as how it’s International Women’s Day, The AV Club has done us the favor (as in past years) of pointing out some great women in the comics and cartoon sphere that you may not be familiar with (not to mention names that you should already know — like Fiona Staples, Emily Carroll, Kate Beaton, Jillian Tamaki, Raina Telgemeier, Eleanor Davis, Meredith Gran, Emma Rios, and Noelle Stevenson — who are recapped in the intro). As is happening in a lot of capital-c Comics, women are making the biggest inroads into indie and webcomics because there’s nobody there to tell them they can’t or that there’s no audience for their stuff.

  Read the article; get to know the names. In a couple of years, these ladies will be as dominant as the now-familiar creators in the intro. Don’t believe me? Take note of the fact that DC Comics lost its position as the biggest vendor of graphic novels last year to Scholastic. And Raina Telgemeier by herself was responsible for about 6.5% of all comics sold through bookstores last year. Sisters and Smile are bigger than Batman, and all the women coming up now are going to get to the top by walking past increasingly less-relevant cape comics. Rock on, ladies; you rule.

Spam of the day:

Gorgeous Kitchens – Check it out.

Attention Brett g Porter; it’s not XTC or Zappa or Pynchon, but I believe this is of interest to you.

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¹ The precise moment when he shifted his professional name from Jim Zubkavich to Jim Zub is less important than the debut of Skullkickers #1; that is the moment when he shed his former identity and became who he is.

² With, it should be noted, the likes of Edwin Huang and Misty Coats, without whom the end result would lack a significant amount of Zubness. He has a knack for picking collaborators that get him and bring out all that he envisions in his brainmeats.

³ cf: Zub’s Wayward, where the current group of nominal heroes is 4 women (or at least female monster-type creatures) and 2 men; the major antagonists are one each male and female with a male junior villain. It feels ordinary in the context of his story, but it’s far from common in comics.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; Ray is napping off all those sporkfuls (sporksful?) of Christian Brothers.

We had a bit of snow earlier today, but it’s melting off in the sun. Let’s talk about what the deals are, and head into the weekend.

• Kazu Kibuishi is no stranger to the New York Times Best Seller list, and if he spent less time at #1 for Amulet volume 6 18 months back, well, that’s probably because Scholastic made the inexplicable decision to release it on the same day as Raina Telgemeier’s Sisters¹.

  But Kibuishi’s done something that I can’t recall seeing before: he’s debuted Amulet volume 7 at #1 on both the hardcover and softcover lists; given the cliffhanger that this book ends on², expect to see it pop back up when the eighth volume releases sometime next year.

• Hey, you know who else is no stranger to the Times Best Seller list, but who hasn’t done a book for — goodness! — nearly five years? Vera Brosgol. She’s been busy as heck with Laika Studios, contributing to some of the most original and imaginative films in decades. But we’ll be seeing more of her own work soon:
  

  Today is my last day at Laika. I’m leaving to work on my own projects! I will miss these guys so so much. T_T

  Brosgol was one of the first people I met in webcomics, before I started blogging even, back when Return To Sender³ was still updating, and I’ve adored her work from the beginning. Leaving a place of tremendous creativity (the sort that’s got to rub off on you) to work on her own stories again? This is the best possible news.

• Mark your calendars for the tail end of October:
  

  What if I told you to mark October 22-23rd on your calendar, because those are the dates of TopatoCon 2016? WHAT IF

  I would say Yes, please and start scheming as to how we could make last year’s competitive drink-making session even better. I made a drink in a pineapple, people, and kept up the small talk while competitors wrangled ingredients, the kindest of which was pop-boba. What would make for a good successor? An Iron Chef type format⁴? Something more educational? More samples? Answers on a postcard, or at least in the comments below.

• Speaking of conventions, a schedule change to this weekend’s In-Store Convention Kickoff: Jim Zub and Nathan Fillion/Alan Tudyk will be swapping timeslots, with the former now at 4:40pm and the latter at 6:30pm (all times EST). Please adjust your day planners accordingly.

Spam of the day:

Protect Against Identity-Theft

I suppose you mean to educate me by means of direct experience, seeing as how Gmail has helpfully labeled your email with Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information.

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¹ Which remains on said list to this day, 78 weeks later, along with Drama (135 weeks), Smile (194 weeks), and the latest Baby Sitters Club reissue (5 weeks). She’s released her 70% stranglehold on the list, but I make it even money she regains it and possible pulls off the eight-peat once Ghosts releases in the fall.

² And it’s evil, I tells ya; the story is also so full of major twists and turns that I don’t know how to review it — even with my usual warnings of spoilers — without recounting the entire damn thing in detail. Suffice it to say that Kibuishi has lost none of his chops, has kicked the story into even higher gear than it was, and guaranteed that the wait for the last two books of the series will be the longest wait in the lives of his many fans.

And when volume 9 finally hits, I’m taking a day to re-read the entire thing at once. It’ll be glorious.

³ Since shuttered, and the domain obtained by persons of low intent. Only browse via Wayback Machine, and go no further than 2006. Some day, Often and Colette will reveal the rest of their story to us; in the meantime, they live in my heart and memory.

⁴ If we can figure out some way for me to shout allez biberonner, I will die a happy man.