Hey. So I have to travel I-95 — aka Satan’s Own Highway — alter this afternoon, the Friday before a long weekend. This is gonna be brief.

SPX has revealed its programming slate, and it appears to be the usual (i.e.: high on quality, low on quantity). Each day will feature two rooms of programming, one with events on the hour, the other with events on the half hour, from midday on. Highlights include:

• Saturday at noon the slate kicks off on a high note, a combined spotlight panel on Kate Beaton and Noelle Stevenson.
• Food, man, food. Tasty Comics will be about the intersection of food and comics, with Robin Ha, Jade Lee, Eric Colossal, and Jessi Zabarsky, moderated by Lauren Jordan. Get hungry at 1:30pm.
• Comics are for everybody, and the straight white dude hegemony is starting (oh so slowly) to fade. Black Art Matters (with Darryl Ayo, Ron Wimberly, Whit Taylor, and Spike Trotman) drop some truth at 2:00pm, and Queer and Here to Make Comics! (Anna Archie Bongiovanni, Yao Xiao, Hazel Newlevant, and Kevin Jay Stanton, with Dylan Edwards moderating) reveal the secrets of the dreaded Queer Comics Agenda¹ at 6:00pm.
• Sunday starts off as well as Saturday, with the first panel on sexy, sexy times and the message that Erotic Comics are for Everybody! (Sarah Winifred Searle, Anna Bongiovanni, Paul Reinwand, and Spike Trotman, under the loving guidance of Jess Fink) at 12:30pm.
• Scott McCloud. 1:00pm. Come for the second half if you can’t drag yourself away from the sexy times.
• Comics and the internet will be the focus of Dear Internet: Today I Made a Comic. Now What? at 3:30pm; join Molly Ostertag, Aatmaja Pandya, Matt Bors, and Comixology’s John Roberts, with Jen Vaughn moderating.

Have a heck of a weekend, Statesians. Maybe I’ll see you on Monday, maybe not.

Spam of the day:

Download Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star Movie.

I wouldn’t watch that shit with your eyes, my friend; I ain’t gonna watch it with mine.

______________
¹ Make comics while queer.

Three things that I want to bring to your attention today. Honestly, no one of them is any less important than another, so let’s just dive in.

• The Cartoon Art Museum may be closing the doors of its present location in a couple of weeks, but they’re not closing for good. Furthermore, they’re going to engage in their mission of making the cartoon arts available to the widest possible audience until the very last minute. To that end, please note that they have named their cartoonist-in-residence for the (abbreviated) month, and it’s Ben Collison. He’ll be presenting on Thursday, 3 September, from 2:00pm to 5:30pm at CAM on his techniques for making comics with ink and coffee (attention: R Stevens). And now to 12 September, CAM is having a moving sale, with nearly everything in their store’s stock going for 20% – 40% off sticker price. Anybody in San Francisco should drop by 655 Mission Street and browse, or just give them your best regards.
• This page keeps a weather eye on the New York Times Best Seller List for graphic novels, and notes with approval that the latest iteration of same is still 50% occupied by Raina Telgemeier, but also notes a surprise in the #10 slot. Debuting on the NYTBSL is Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, which readers of this page may remember was reviewed by Fleen when it debuted nine years ago. It’s unexpected, but that I got to thinking — just as MAUS and Persepolis make reappearances on the list about this time of year every year as school resumes and they become part of the curriculum, it appears that American Born Chinese is becoming part of the canon and being studied.

  Yang’s no stranger to the NYTBSL, but I imagine it’s a great feeling to see his first, most autobiographical work finally recognized. Also, there’s the whole bit where the Times didn’t have a Best Seller List for graphic novels when American Born Chinese was released, as it undoubtedly would have sat on the list for a good long while otherwise. In any event, congrats to Yang for what’s got to be a heartwarming return to the school year, and watch this space for the inevitable news that Secret Coders (due for release in four weeks) has been added to the NYTBSL.

• This page also keeps an eye on Kickstarter campaigns and the management thereof. I’m pleased to note that on Saturday, the very best writeup of how to plan the financial end of a campaign — the so-called Kickstarter Math — that I’ve ever seen was released to the world. And it’s not for a webcomic, or a comic-comic. Marian Call, singer, songwriter, adventurer, bon vivante, and life partner of the repeatedly-mentioned-on-this-blog Pat Race, has a Kickstart going on right now to release her next album, which is down to the last two days. She’s well over goal and into stretch territory, and a big part of that is the planning that she put into the crowdfunding effort. Go read her post right now if you’ve ever thought about Kickstarting anything, particular the bit about modeling multiple levels of success and running a full set of numbers for each.

  Or possible do that a little later, as it appears that her host is down at the moment, possibly due to the twin loads of people rushing to give her money (she runs a sponsorship program in addition to Kickstarts) and to absorb her wisdom. Oh, and listen to (and buy!) her music, because she’s got a hell of a voice, a great sense of what makes a good song, and can channel everybody from Bowie to the Brothers Chaps.

Spam of the day:

This Test Shows How You’re Going to Die

I already know how I’m going to die. TRUCK.

Ready for some cool stuff? Let’s do this.

• I’ll confess, when TopatoCon announced that it was shifting venues from the hotel/conference center to Eastworks, I had some trepidation regarding one of the cooler things that was on tap. To quote TopatoCo/Make That Thing/TopatoCon honcho Holly Rowland:
  

  [T]here will be table service that will bring you beer and chicken fingers.

  But that was in the context of a hotel! Would there be such amenities at Eastworks? Then again, the event schedule involves at least two separate sessions on Saturday that involve booze (one of which, I will be speaking), and now today comes further news:

  Hey! You! Do you like beer? We’re going to be hosting local beer tastings all weekend at the TopatoCon bar! […] Free with admission!

  I don’t have the capability for emoji here on Fleen, but there were no fewer than six emoji of frosty beer mugs in that tweet. And maybe we’ll get table service after all.

• I’m not sure what’s going on in the November/December timeframe in Austin, Texas, but it appears that the traditional season of Webcomics Rampage is shifting to earlier in the year this year. Dragon’s Lair — comic shop extraordinaire and WR sponsor — has announced that this year’s Webcomics Rampage (the seventh such) will be 16 – 18 October, with 14 confirmed guests so far. I hear that Austin’s really nice in October, and hope that running just a week after New York Comic Con doesn’t keep them from adding another webcomics luminary or two.
• This page has mentioned in the past the efforts of Katie Lane to help get creative types paid, including classes she’s run on that very topic, on multiple occasions. Today, I’m pleased to see that Lane is expanding her efforts and making it even easier for you to learn the skills you need to not get screwed on your work:
  

  The Ace Freelancer’s Guide to Getting Paid goes on sale next week! http://www.acefreelancer.com

  Before you follow that link, check out the tweet and the gif embedded therein; Katie Lane wants you to get paid.

  Okay, now click through and sign up for the next class session on how to get paid. If you have a history (and be honest with yourself) of falling into the trap of thinking that you’re overcharging, and how it’s not good to be pushy, and if you’re just patient they’ll surely get around to cutting your check sometime this century — you know, the lies the people who employ freelancers are trying like hell to transform into conventional wisdom — you can sign up for the super-duper version of the class that includes a one-on-one consult.

  Your work has value. Even if you aren’t charging much, you damn well have the right to be paid the amount agreed upon, in the timeframe agreed upon. The sob story being pushed by the people who agreed how much/when to pay you does not change your basic needs (i.e.: food and shelter) and you can cut through the bullshit and get what you are due.

  Like everything else in your career, getting paid is a skill, and investing in developing that skill will reward you for the duration of your working life. Look over the syllabus. Look over your billing history. Look inside yourself. And then do what you gotta do to get paid.

Spam of the day:

Though this is not recommended, you could wish to look around to be able to lenders until you are capable of amass just how much you will need from multiple small loans

Somewhere, Spike is preparing to nail a copy of Poorcraft’s chapter on debt and borrowing to the forehead of the sumbitch that wrote this spam.

[tap, tap] This thing on? Trying to figure out if what I think was a shift of PHP will keep WordPress running; Brad Guigar ran a guest piece from Phil Hofer at Webcomics Dot Com a couple days back; it’s behind a paywall so I’m not going to quote it, but it’s something you should look into. Pre-emptive apologies if I break anything here.

• In the meantime, y’all saw the announcement from Hope Larson yesterday about her collaboration with Rebecca Mock, right? Cover and story for Compass South are at Comics Alliance, which looks to combine Larson’s always-sharp writing with Mock’s lush art¹, which is going to be an absolute delight in combination. Best news: it’s the first book of a series! Worst news: because of print lead times, it’ll be summer 2016 before we see it. You know what? It’s a fair trade.
• It appears that I will be presenting at TopatoCon, alongside Frank Gibson and TopatoCo’s own Holly Rowland on the topic of cocktails (see yesterday for details). Guys, I am so excited about this. Come see us nerd out on booze-mixing! Learn my feelings on falernum! Ice! Stirring vs shaking! And if you’re very good I’ll share the recipe for the Pineapple Maki which is made in a pineapple and is delicious.

  The original session title, Let’s Drink About It with Harrison and Bowman, now seems inaccurate, so I’m going to suggest Frank, Gary, and Holly Save Boozemas as a substitute. Presumably it will take place same time/place (Saturday, 26 September, 5:00pm — 6:30pm, Room One), but stay tuned here for any possible updates.

Spam of the day:

Bartender was very friendly and made… I’ve come here on many occasions for dates as well as business lunches/dinners. The atmosphere is cozy and relaxed and the decor is beautiful and…

If you can’t tell me what the bartender made, then never darken my email inbox again.

_______________
¹ I love Larson’s work and think she’ll go down as one of the most important comics artists of the century, but her art style can tend to the sparse. I don’t want to say it’s minimalist, but she definitely gets across her ideas with a high-contrast, let-the-reader-fill-in-the-details-in-their-brain approach. Mock’s art is more detail oriented, perhaps less restrained?

So about the time that I was writing about Ryan North starring in a webcommerical for arguably terrible computer vendor Lenovo, North was answering a philosophical question. Namely, Can Ryan North, a giant of a man, find a hole so deep that he cannot get out of it? The answer apparently being Yup, for about 40 minutes, which was Storified for the historical record.

That would not be the end of it.

The Internet, having been entranced by North’s ordeal (we do, as a culture, seem to have a fascination with people stuck in holes), was not letting go. First The Guardian reported it as a fairly straight news item, almost no smirk detectable. The Toronto Star joined in this morning, and a text adventure produced last night allows you to replay the entire thing ZORK style. As usual, the final word was provided by Rich Stevens, who noted that North got into the hole with his faithful hound Noam Chompsky:

@ryanqnorth The fact that your dog stood by and let you fall down the well leads me to believe his philosophy is …

LASSIE FAIRE

Now let’s all put our heads down and think about this for a while.

In other news:

• Dammit, a program at TopatoCon that I was really looking forward to (cf: yesterday) is canceled due to the presenters not being able to attend. We’ll miss you, Chris and Benjamin. Now, because I am helpful, and because I have spent a number of years slowly learning from one of the best bartenders in the business, I’m willing to volunteer to fill in for Ben & Chris and run the session on the history, theory, and practice of cocktails. There will be a number of people at TopatoCon who are at least as knowledgeable about mixed drinks as I am, and I’m sure we can do a credible job. Showrunners, how about it? Let’s save Boozemas!
• While we’re talking about comics and drinks, you’ll find both at the Cartoon Art Museum’s Night of 1000 Sketches, a fundraiser to benefit their move/celebration of 14 years at their location in The Mission. Artists from around the Bay Area will be drawing (and drinking), sketching for attendees in exchange for donations (US$10 and up) to the moving fund. Details on tickets and such will be forthcoming, but the date will be Thursday, 10 September, so mark that on your calendar now.

Spam of the day:

Make all your fantasies come true. Personal Preview expires 08/18/15
Ashley Madison is the top rated married-dating company in the U.S., dedicated to your pleasure.
PS: We have been featured in Maxim, USA Today, and Sports Illustrated!

I know that I mentioned this particular spam earlier, but given that the 10GB data dump of Ashley Madison’s userbase occurred earlier today, this is an especially bad time to be trying this particular attempt to … what? Get me to sign up to an entirely insecure service?

Oh, and that PS should include other locations you’ve been features, like Krebs On Security, Techdirt, and the twitterfeed of Securitay. Sucks to be you.

Tuesday as busy day? Very odd.

• We start, as we have done with increasing frequency over the past five months or so, with TopatoCon, on account of they keep announcing stuff. Today it’s fact that ticket sales are now live and the preliminary programing schedule is now up.

  There are some unfortunate conflicts in the schedule, such as Saturday afternoon when the Let’s Drink About It guys will be talking cocktails (oooh!) at the same time that Christopher Hastings will be leading a workshop on writing sketch comedy. This is tragic, because Hastings is a creative mixer of drinks and would greatly enjoy the LDAI session, but one can’t have everything (I’ll go there on your behalf, Chris, promise).

  It’s also ironic that on Sunday afternoon, there will be discussion with Wes Citti and Tony Wilson about how to Play Nice With Others at the same time that David Malki !, Spike, Kate Leth, and Randy Milholland will be talking about how Internet People are basically dicks who’ve forgotten how to Play Nice With Others.

• Speaking of small conventions heavy with indie-type creators, SPX have announced the Ignatz Award Nominations for 2015, and there are a couple of names that stand out. Specifically, Jillian Tamaki is all over the damn thing (and deservedly so), with nominations for Outstanding Artist, Outstanding Anthology or Collection (both for SuperMutant Magic Academy), and Outstanding Story (“Sex Coven”, from Frontier #7).

  Other webcomics types include Emily Carroll for Outstanding Artist (Through the Woods), Sophie Goldstein¹ for Outstanding Graphic Novel and Outstanding Comic (both for The Oven), and Box Brown for Outstanding Anthology or Collection (An Entity Observes All Things). The category of Outstanding Online Comic itself has nominees

  • Lilli Carre, The Bloody Footprint
  • Lauren Weinstein, Carriers
  • Rebecca Roher, Mom Body
  • Blue Delliquanti, O Human Star
  • Ariel Ries, Witchy

  Best of luck to all the nominees. The Ignatz Awards will be presented at SPX, 19 September, in Bethesda, Maryland.

• Speaking of longtime webcomickers who are looking to spend more time making webcomics and less time at the day job (okay, we weren’t, but work with me), David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) is about to join your ranks. Having spent more than a dozen years making more than a dozen comics with literally an infinite number of updates, Morgan-Mar has decided that the drudgery and unrewarding nature of the day job² is less fun that making comics and other creative things, and you can help make it possible:
  

  News: Hey folks, I have good news! I have talked with my manager and HR department at work, and confirmed that I can reduce my working hours to 9 days per fortnight. That means I could spend one full day every two weeks making more creative stuff!

  But I have a mortgage and bills to pay, and am very risk averse. So I have posted a goal of raising US$750 a month on Patreon to partly offset my resulting loss in income. If I can reach this goal, I will make this move and dedicate a day every fortnight to making more comics, books, podcasts, videos, and other cool stuff. This will include raising the number of new Irregular Webcomic! strips to 4 per week.

  And if I can get to the dream goal of $1500 a month, I can quit my day job one day per week, and Irregular Webcomic! will return to a full 7 new strips per week. Spread the word! And please consider supporting my Patreon. Thank you to all of you

  For reference, Morgan-Mar is presently at just under US$450/month, or 60% of the way to goal. And honestly, if there’s anybody that should be able to be a full-time creative, it’s Morgan-Mar. The dude’s got more ideas per cm³ than anybody else on the planet. I can’t wait to see what he can come up with when he can spend full days on his ideas instead of a stolen hour or two.

• Kickstarts? Kickstarts! Alina Pete is doing a card game based on the concept of the tarot, sitting about 18.5% of goal as she comes into the back third of the campaign time. This one needs a big bump if it’s gonna get made. On the other end of the spectrum, Ryan Sohmer is looking to make three books of Least I Could Do and is about 35% of the way to goal since launching yesterday. The Fleen Funding Formula (mk II) doesn’t apply to either project due to the low backer counts, where predicted results and actual results diverge violently.
• I have serious problems with Lenovo these days due to their terrible, terrible decisions re: privacy-invading design decisions in their consumer line of laptops, so they are very lucky that Ryan North is a likable dude with an adorable dog and he’s willing to promote their ThinkPad line⁴. I am sorry to say that I don’t trust the company you are promoting, but we are still cool, Ryan.

Spam of the day:

Do you have any tips for rookie blog writers? I’d certainly appreciate it.

Footnotes, man. Readers dig footnotes.

_______________
¹ Goldstein is also listed as a member of the Jury, but please note two things about the Ignatz rules: the Jury is anonymous, even to the other members, during the nomination process, and while Jury members may not nominate their own work, there is no prohibition from one Juror’s work being nominated for an award by his or her fellow Jurors. I trust that Ms Goldstein recused herself from any decision that would have resulted in her own nominations.

² Working on image-processing for a corporate research arm and helping to set the ISO standards for image definitions. Such boring and unappreciated scut-work! Might as well work retail.

I almost said all of that with a straight face. Next time for sure!

³ That’s a “power of three”, or cubic centimeter, not a footnote.

⁴ Which line doesn’t seem to have been affected by Lenovo’s terrible, terrible decisions — which is actually even worse, because the ThinkPads are mostly aimed at corporate customers that are best able to detect and mitigate such terrible, terrible decisions. The consumer-grade laptops that Lenovo sold pre-compromised are hitting the demographic least able to defend themselves. Never buying another Lenovo product, but man, Chompsky’s cute.

TopatoCon, that is. For starters, there’s more names on the exhibitor’s page — I noticed Kevin Budnick, Gillian Goerz, Jonathan Griffiths, Phil Kahn, and Stacey King in addition to the previoiusly-announced guest below the cut — and there’s news of a pre-con concert!

TopatoCon proudly presents:
THE DOUBLECLICKS
FEATURING MOLLY LEWIS

To kick off our convention weekend, we’ve invited some of our favorite musicians to play a concert that’s open to the public!
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

8 p.m., Doors open at 7:30
Academy of Music Theatre
274 Main St
Northampton, MA 01060
TICKETS

$15 General
$12 Students

Purchase at the box office, by telephone at (413) 584-9032, ext. 105, or click here to order online.

Reminder: this is before the con even starts, and you’re entertained; further, those that have never seen The Doubleclicks or Molly Lewis before can sample their (considerable) talents and have the opportunity to meet them the next day (although Lewis isn’t listed on the exhibitor site yet, I doubt she’s getting out of town immediately after the show) and buy all their stuff. That’s at least a win-win, possiby a win-win-win-win.

In other news there’s a pair of comics that tell stories about being in comics. The first is from Maki Naro, and tells of his righteous irritation at yet another “contest” for illustration/comics pros that amounted to spec work; he actually submitted it to the contest-holders in question, which I think is brilliant and laudable. The other is from Faith Erin Hicks (h/t: Heidi Mac at The Beat), and tells of how you can only break into comics by knowing the secret handshake and living in a big city oh wait no, that’s not how it works. Both of them are worth your time.

Spam of the day:

You are requested to claim your pending commission
payout in the amount of $7,302.29 earned since
you registered for our programme.

Best regards,

“Ashley”

Bite me, “Gary”

(more…)

There are a couple of offshoots of webcomickry in other realms of expression that caught my eye today, plus the list of SPX exhibitors is live. Let’s go down the list, shall we?

• I had never heard of the Rorschach Theatre before today; it’s in Washington DC, and since 1999 have been less of a place and more of an event. See, Rorschach turned its lack of its own space into a sort of mission statement and found ways to tailor productions to the various spaces that hosted them. They’ve got performance space these days, but still treat the innovative use of space as a sort of calling card.

  And if you’re innovative about space, you get to stage things that wouldn’t necessarily fit on a traditional stage, like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, or their next production: TRUTH & BEAUTY BOMBS: A Softer World. The recently-wrapped bit of surreality has been adapted to live performance (with previews starting 4 September and running until 4 October, reservations now open), and given that this is about as experimental as theatre can get, the costs of mounting the production need covering. Think about it: usually plays start from things like a script and characters¹, but they’ve got twelve years of webcomics to adapt.

  Which is where you come in; starting, oh, now-ish, you can help defray the costs of playwrights, actors, designers, directors, stage crew, technicians, fight choreographers (!), costumes, props, construction, insurance, etcetera, etcetera, via that most webcomickish of all mechanism: the Kickstarter. The play is going on regardless; the funding from the campaign will help to backfill the company coffers so that they can do innovative work like this in the future. Want tickets? You can get a pair at the US$50 tier (actually cheaper than directly buying the tickets). There’s t-shirts, meet-and-greets, and friggin’ walk-on roles up for grabs.

  If you ever wondered how Emily Horne & Joey Comeau’s work could somehow be made weirder, this is the answer, and now we all have the opportunity to show the creators that they aren’t making a huge mistake. I’m not going to be in DC anytime soon, but heck if this isn’t the sort of thing that makes me smile — I’m kicking in ten bucks, will you?

• Marian Call has been mentioned on this page previously, because when you put her musicality together with partner Pat Race, you get all kinds of cool nerdery. I’m still not over how awesome Space Weird Thing was, and now Call & Race are back with a new video that features Marian Call (in the role of Marzipan) and Marian Call (as Strong Bad) in a note-perfect cover version of Sensitive to Bees from Strong Bad Sings and other type hits, which I have an actual copy of. Whatever you are doing right now, stop doing it and go watch the magic. It’s magical.
• As mentioned above, the SPX exhibitor list is now up, and there are both a number of web-/indy-comics types, as well as people that will be bouncing from Bethesda up to Easthampton for TopatoCon the following week. In addition to special guests like Kate Beaton, Noelle Stevenson, Gemma Correll, Matt Bors, Scott McCloud, and Spike, SPX will include people such as Aatmaja Pandya, Amanda Scurti, onetime Fleen contributor Anne Thalheimer, Anthony Clark, Audrey (and presumably also Jamie), Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson,

  [inhale]

  Blue Delliquanti, Box Brown, Carey Pietsch, Carla Speed McNeil, Catie Donnelly, Chris Yates, Clay Yount, Colleen Venable, Danielle Corsetto, David McGuire, Dustin Harbin, Eric Colossal & Jess Fink, Evan Dahm, Isabelle Melançon & Megan Lavey-Heaton, Jeffrey Rowland, Jon Rosenberg, KC Green, Matt Boyd, Meredith Gran & Mike Holmes, Molly Ostertag, Penina Gal, Rachel Dukes, Dave Roman, Ross Nover, Sam Bosma, Sara McHenry & Tom McHenry, Tony Breed, and Yuko Ota & Ananth Hirsch. Check ’em out, tell ’em I said hi, and let me know who I left off the list.

Spam of the day:

In days gone by, should you stood a bankruptcy or even a foreclosure, getting approved with an car finance was like pulling teeth

Days gone by? Are we talking like the pre-lidocaine era?

________________
¹ Oh please, oh please, let ASW recurring character Ryan North be part of this play!

The fine folks behind the next great webcomics-centric convention (that would be Holly and Sara) released a bit more information, including an updated exhibitor list, information on where to stay, and transportation options. Let’s dive in.

On the Exhibitor page I spy a few new names, including Z Akhmetova, Lex Cornell, Shelby Cragg, M Dean, Sarah Tacey, and Jim Zub. There are some corrections as well, with the former Skullmandible now listed as Cohen Edenfield (Skullmandible), and Kori Michele as Kori Michele Handwerker. Also, Jeph Jacques has confirmed that he will be there after all. Compare to the previous exhibitor list, which is below the cut.

Also, the hotel listings and directions are now up, the latter of which includes something that I’ve never seen before: a con-provided rideshare forum, so that if you happen to be passing by one of the airports or rail stations, you can maybe pick somebody up for a cut of gas money and tolls.

Naturally, one should take all possible precautions in utilizing this method of transit, as this discussion between showrunner Sara McHenry and exhibitor Dante Shepherd shows:

So far two TopatoCon exhibitors have signed up on the attendee rideshare spreadsheet. Working with cartoonists is fun and cool always

Will I have to mention that my truck does not have AC and I like to stop to give drifters rides too if I sign the list

I think that’s an assumed level of risk.

(Dunno if I’d trust that Shepherd guy if I were you — he claims to have a pseudonym to separate his comics from his academic career, but how much do we really know about him?)

Still to come: programming, events, and fun things to do in town. Stay tuned to this page for information as it become available.

Spam of the day:

Protect Your Deck from Winter,

As soon as I get a deck, I promise to get back to you so we can protect it from winter in the middle of August.

(more…)

Well, no, not really, but that was a concentrated burst of good stuff I got to talk about last week, so maybe I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Then again, nostalgia is a disease, so let us look forward, not backward¹.

• Speaking of nostalgia, I got to spend some time on Saturday night with an old friend in an old familiar place; the Peculier Pub is not only a key location in the history of Goats, but it’s the location where more than ten years ago Jon Rosenberg gently strongarmed me into starting this here blog².

  Sharing beer and scotch with the soulkeeper was a too-uncommon-these-days treat, and we even got to talk a little webcomics along the way. Namely, Jon is fired up for his forthcoming Tales of the Drive guest story for Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, and his reason for doing so can be summed up in one word: Nosh. Everybody I’ve spoken too about TotD seems to be Noshphilic, so if LARDK ever gets to make, say, a Drive movie or series, we know who the first action figure will be.

• Also at the drink-up: once and future associate editor of The Nib Matt Lubchansky and I got to talk about the impending funding-out of The Nib’s print collection, Eat More Comics. Specifically, we spoke about how Lubchansky had been drawing all the custom portraits for high-value backers that afternoon.

  More specifically, we spoke about our priorities in stretch goals (Lubchansky wants to see backers get bonus exclusive comics from Zach Weinersmith, R Stevens, Gemma Correll, and Matt Bors; I want to see the higher page rate for the creators). Even more specifically, Lubchansky is grateful for the efforts of Make That Thing on the production/fulfillment end, as it means that Eat More Comics will premiere at SPX³ and he won’t have to mail the damn things from his apartment. Everybody feel good for Matt Lubchansky!

• From Heidi Mac, news that the Society of Illustrators has announced a new venue for the 2016 MoCCA Fest, seeing as how the very neat space they found this year is being chopped up for condos. Next year the Fest heads uptown to Metropolitan West, which is an event space that seems classy, airy, open, and will no doubt get chopped up into condos sometime in 2018.

  Panels will (as they were this year) be held at a nearby upscale hotel — this time, Ink48 (which being part of the storied Kimpton chain, is a place that knows how to treat people right). Metropolitan West is at 46th Street across the street from the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, and Ink48 about two blocks away at 11th & 48th. That corner of the island isn’t especially well served by subway, meaning that the streak of slight inaccessiblity for Manhattan shows remains intact.

Spam of the day:

Natl Gun Assoc, “You Must Have This [flashlight] to Survive a Crisis”

I’m a little surprised and suspicious that the National Gun Association wants me to have a flashlight more than, you know, a gun.

________________
¹ Upward, not forward, etc, etc.

² For which I will be in equal measure grateful and resentful for the rest of our lives.

³ A mere 38 days after the campaign ends, possibly less than a month after the Kickstarter check clears.