Welp, everybody’s on their way to Toronto for TCAF, where I would ask that all attendees hunt down showrunner Christopher Butcher (above) and give him a big ol’ hug¹. He’s done fantastic things with the show and for the exhibitors, and he should be acknowledged for that. Oh, and if you happen to know Butcher personally, I’ma suggest you just assume he’s in a coma from Monday until, oh, let’s say Thursday.

• For those of you not heading north, or heck, maybe you as well, let’s look to some city-specific comics-things happening in a different part of the world. Unfortunately, work kept me so busy last week when I was in San Francisco, I didn’t have the chance to drop by the Cartoon Art Museum; it’s a terrific place filled with terrific exhibits. Fortunately for all, my lack of available time didn’t prevent the CAM from continuing in its mission, a big part of which is outreach to the community and spreading the knowledge and habit of making comics to as many people as possible.

  To that end, CAM will be running cartooning classes every Sunday in July, with two parallel tracks aimed at kids (7-12) with parents², and independent youth (12-16) who already have some cartooning chops. Kids and parents sessions run 11:00am to 12:30pm, and older kids 1:30pm to 3:30pm, at a cost of US$10/person (kids + parents) or US$35 (US$30 for members) for older kids.

  Supplies are provided (although older kids are encouraged to bring their own portfolios & tools), museum admission included, and the sessions will be taught by Nina Kester (6 and 20 July) and Brian Kolm (13 and 27 July). Check out the scheduled topics for class (Ninja Turtles; Animation; Heroes & Villains; Adventure) at the ticket site (kids+parents; http://guestlistapp.com/events/251868) for more information.

• Yep, called it: Heart of the City continues its love affair with Smile today. Given that Sunday’s strip is probably part of the week’s storyline, tomorrow will likely feature Heart’s mom loving Smile, as all right-thinking people do.

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¹ Alternately, a big ol’ slug of booze. Depending on the state he’s in, it might be more appreciated than the hug.

² Up to two kids per adult; sorry, grown-ups, you need a kid with you to attend.

Oh my goodness I’m not sure which of these surprises I should share first. Coin flip! Okay!

• Raina Telgemeier — previously noted on this page (and all other pages that matter) as one of our cartooning national treasures — graphic novelist par excellence and 100-week New York Times bestselling author, must have gotten a thrill this morning on seeing some respect thrown her way by that most establishment of all cultural endeavours, the syndicated comics page.

  Smile got some love from Mark Tatulli¹ Heart of the City strip for today², and given the setup of Heart and her mom arguing about whether graphic novels count as book books, may continue to have its praises sung for the next day or so. I’m guessing that Telgemeier has got to be feeling pretty great right about now.

• About ten months ago, in the dead of the night, the greatest thing known to mankind up to that time was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. I speak, naturally of Tom McHenry’s Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery, which laid bare essential lessons about the nature of life, and horses, and the importance of mastering your horse. I’m proud to say that I joined the ranks of Horse Masters, and I have the bleeding stump of a little finger³ to prove it.

  Literally and without any exaggeration whatsoever, life could not be any better than when one is horse-mastering.

  Until now, at least for those going to TCAF this weekend, for McHenry has been busy:

  In case you missed it last night, this is a thing that exists for TCAF

  3 glow in the dark buttons, a completely unnecessary full-color instruction manual, the whole game on a horse-shaped USB drive.

  All in this stylish #HorseMaster box: pic.twitter.com/8FNsDIzMGV

  Then I wept, for I am not going to TCAF. But then McHenry assuaged my grief⁴:

  Ordering info for non-TCAF goers will come soon!

  And there was much rejoicing, and the pupae of horses everywhere did swell with quickening tendrils, waiting for the day they could ripen, and escape, and feed.

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¹ Tatulli actually does two strips and while Heart of the City is pretty okay, his silent and subversive Liō may be the most brilliant thing left in syndication.

² That link may go away in the future, so please enjoy the permanently-linked version at the top of this page.

³ Not to mention a drug habit, criminal record, and seared-in memories of too many teeth in a gaping maw to go along with it. These are the prices of ascending to the political and social elite.

⁴ And coincidentally probably removed the need on my part to physically harm one or more of the friends that would go to TCAF, for a true Horse Master would let nothing stand in his or her way of obtaining this treasure; not family, not friendship, not blood. Oh glob, so much blood.

Before we get to some things that are happening in the various places, one piece of catching-up: remember what I said about big items yesterday? I missed one: Anthony Clark has a new sketchbook up for sale that clocks in at nearly 400 pages. It’s pay-what-you want, with a minimum that’s less than a dollar per hundred pages, available at Gumroad and/or Sellfy.

• The Society of Illustrators may have finished up with the actual festival aspects of this year’s MoCCA Fest, but that doesn’t mean that all MoCCA-related activities have ceased until next spring. One may recall that SoI instituted an awards program for work appearing at MoCCA Fest, and the winners are the subject of an exhibit that opened in the Society’s second floor gallery last night and runs through the 24th. Along with the exhibit, two other things are happening:
  

  All materials chosen in the jury’s initial survey will be acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the MoCCA Arts Festival collection, to be expanded annually.

  A Happy Hour and Celebration will take place in the third floor Hall of Fame Dining Room on May 21st beginning at 5pm. A $5 cover charge will go towards the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Fund.

• Oh, and if you’re in New York City on 15 May, there’s a lecture/reception/signing for Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer. Short review (of a copy graciously sent to my by Gina Gagliano at :01 Books): it’s a story that hurts in a real, tangible, maybe-necessary-maybe-not way. I suspect that if I’d been an almost-teen girl at any point in my life, it would ache and resonate even more. Getting to the truths below the surface of the One Summer in question is like having to peel away a bandage and finally let the healing of the wound below finish up.
• Tangentially related, I don’t know if anybody ever looks at the member’s bulletin board section of the SoI website, but you know what I noticed there today? Job listings. Anybody want to head up the Sequential Arts department at SCAD? They’re looking. Brad Guigar, this is your chance to not just teach arts entrepreneurship, but to remake an entire generation of comics kids in your own image. Your boisterous, eternally-laughing image.
• There’s other stuff going on this month in other cities, but let’s just make today about New York and call it good. Original MoCCA showrunner Kristen Siebecker once again breaks out the booze and education for the latest iteration of Popping Your Cork. This time it’s Thursday, 29 May at 6:30pm in Chelsea for a look at wines from around the US. It’s twenty five bucks to register, but because you are reading this page and Kristen likes us, she’s given us a discount code good for 15% off the tuition; just type in FRIEND10 when checking out, and enjoy the fruit of the vine.

Relatively quiet weekend, relatively busy Monday. Let’s do this.

• Oh my, that blew up further than I thought it would; the last four days of Smut Peddler 2014 were in the top six days of the full campaign, and the final total just cleared US$185K, for creator bonuses of a staggering $US1700. Well done Spike, and everybody that loves the porns. Which, based upon the previous SP collection and the Sleep of Reason collection, leads us to the conclusion that porn is 2.8599 times as popular as horror.
• Speaking of Kickstarts, the latest book from Johnny Wander creators Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya¹ has just gone up, meaning you’ve got a chance to get a copy of Cuttings in a handsome hardcover, or an even-handsomer limited-edition hardcover. It would appear that this collection also includes perhaps my favorite Ota/Panagariya collaboration: PONY COP. Everybody jump on this so I can get PONY COP in a handsome hardcover book, please. As of this writing, Cuttings is just shy of 40% of the way to goal, which is just shy of 60% too little. Step it up, people. Do it for the children.
• TCAF, one of the best shows on the comics show calendar, runs this weekend in a now certified crack-smokin’-mayor-free Toronto. Today, the full programming slate was released, with multiple tracks of goodness packing the two days. There’s a full track for children (Kean Soo! Jeff Smith! Dave Roman! Ben Hatke! Raina Telgemeier!² Kazu Kibuishi! And many more!), a Canadian reading series (Tony Cliff! Karl Kerschl!Jillian & Mariko Tamaki! And more!), round tables and interviews and profiles (Lynn Johnston! Chip Zdarsky! Jeet Heer! Box Brown! Spike! Katie Shanahan! Rachel Duke! Mike Maihack! Noelle Stevenson! Kate Leth! Tom Spurgeon! Heidi Macdonald! Kate Beaton! Meredith Gran! KC Green! Tom McHenry! Jess Fink! Faith Erin Hicks! Becky Cloonan! Cameron Stewart! Becky Dreistadt! Ryan North!), and, of course, George.

  If you think I’m linking to anybody other than the mononymic George, you’re crazy.

• Not to do with Kickstarts, Cuttings, cats, or comics arts festivals, and possibly my even mentioning it could spiral out of control and cause the creator in question to ‘splode, but what the heck: Randy Milholland has heard the plaintive cries of his many fans and lo he has smiled upon us. There are finally — even now, unto the seventh generation we have waited — concrete plans for the first Something*Positive collection.

  It is a long way off, and will involve a lot of work on Milholland’s part, which means that everybody that’s ever wanted a copy had better be prepared to step the crap up and make a purchase³ when the time comes.

  And there was much rejoicing.

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¹ Who were apparently cats all this time. Who knew?

² Speaking of Telgemeier, she’s just reached an astonishing 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for Smile. Wowzers.

³ I am speaking here directly to the many, many people that have bitched to Randy over the years that because he did a donation drive to quit his day job and draw the strip a decade ago that they are entitled to as much free entertainment as they see fit to demand from him. Without fail, these people are never in Milholland’s records as actually having donated, but they have a massive sense of entitlement anyway. Time to quit the passive-aggressive games and prepare to finally drop some cash, fakers.

Work informed me yesterday afternoon that I have to be in San Francisco next week, and I’m running around all crazylike doing a million things that need to be done (including figuring out how to get home from the airport after a redeye, as I just saw that the Port Authority will be shutting down the rail link that I use while I’m gone … until July). So all that, and yeah, next week’s posts will be on a Pacific Time schedule.

I do, however, have time to mention two things:

• Today marks eleven years of Wondermark, which would be remarkable enough even if David Malki ! weren’t doing a zillion other things in the meantime, like guerrilla interview films at comic conventions, short films about henchmen, two massive works of anthology fiction, one incredibly complex card game, inventing a new means of animation motion-capture, inventing a new means of teleprompting, engaging in a Bookwar with Ryan North, and making a feral cat into an international superstar. For the best possible simulation of what it’s like in Malki !’s head, open all those Vines in separate tabs and listen to them all play at the same time.
• And I’ll remind you all that — as was noted before in accordance with prophecy — tomorrow night at 7:00pm PDT/10:00pm EDT, the people behind STRIPPED will be hitting play on the movie and livetweeting the experience. Feel free to follow along at hashtag #strippedfilm.

Okay, back to frantic arrangements. See y’all on the left coast.

It has long been an unstated policy of this blog that certain things will always get a mention; some may argue that the list of qualifying items constantly changes to prevent people from gaming the system, and that I’m merely trying to make a system of whim and caprice sound all official. Fine. But right now I am stating that I will always highlight Erika Moen laughing like a supervillain. Always.

In other news:

• Called it. Six days ago I predicted that the Smut Peddler 2014 Kickstarter would clear US$100,000, provide US$1000 bonuses for creators and eclipse the totals of the 2012 edition. As of this writing, the totals of SP2014 are sitting at US$117K (or 588% of goal); the thousand-dollar bonuses were achieved at US$115K, and by any measure I’d say that the first book’s take of US$83K is well and truly eclipsed, having been exceeded by nearly 50%. Oh, and there’s still twelve days to go. Time for the traditional end-campaign uptick to kick in.

  I didn’t calculate the FFF at project launch, but going by the standard formula it appears that the very strong start (some US$30,000 in the first day) results in a high target: somewhere in the US$133 — 266K range, which seems entirely plausible. The real question is, can those creator bonuses hit fifteen hundred apiece (at US$165K)? At this point, I’m giving it a 50/50 chance.

• TCAF alert: depending on the presence of ocean monsters and the cooperation of Customs, there may be two more debut books for those swarming TopatoCo’s table in Toronto:
  

  Ok! Questionable Content Vol. 4 and Three Panel Soul Vol. 2 are now both on boats winding their way across the kraken-strewn Pacific Ocean.

  As we all know, squid love them some comics, and there exists a precedent for boats carrying webomics-related materiel to have to turn back. Here’s hoping the briny deep doesn’t decide to get greedy.

Ah, Easter weekend, when the come out. I gather that there’s an outrageous nomination or two, which judging by the backlash should sink pretty quickly before the World Science Fiction Convention (this year at LonCon) comes around in August. But that is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the Best Graphic Story category, now in its sixth year.

• For the first year, Howard Tayler¹ will not appear on the ballot in this particular category. Not for lack of quality, mind you, but because the storyline that ran throughout 2013 (starting, in fact, on the first of January) didn’t finish until March of this year and was thus ineligible. No doubt Tayler will be back next year (and if he’d be a little more compact in his storylines, the year after that as well).

  One might feel bad that Tayler was unable to keep his unstoppable juggernautery going for a sixth year, but he’s still nominated for his work with Writing Excuses, which won the Best Related Work last year and thus has the potential to repeat. Regarding his inevitable return to the Best Graphic Story, rest assured that it will still be some time before there is another five-time nominee in this category, and there may never be another five-times-in-a-row nominee.

• For the fourth time in six years, the Foglios are back on the ballot, having swept the first three years and taken some time off to give others a chance. But now they’re back with Girl Genius Volume 13, and even if they lose, they’ll still have as many awards in the category as everybody else ever put together. I’d say that they were pretty damn unstoppable.
• But then you have to consider who won last year: Brian K Vaughn and Fiona Staples for Saga Volume 1, which (rightly) dominated a hell of a lot of awards programs. They’re back this year with Saga Volume 2 which — to my reading — was even better than Volume 1 and which is (rightly) dominating a hell of a lot of awards programs this year. They’ve got a lot of momentum behind them, and they may prove to be — dare I say it? — an unstoppable juggernaut.
• I am not familiar with two other nominees, The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who, and The Meathouse Man; but consider that the former was written by Paul Cornell (who wrote perhaps the best, most beloved story of the modern Doctor Who era, the two parter Human Nature/The Family of Blood) and the latter by George RR Martin (perhaps the most-anticipated writer in SF/F), and it would be tough to count either of them out. Each of these two would easily qualify as both unstoppable and a juggernaut.
• Then there’s the last nomination, which is perhaps (due to its form) the most challenging work up for consideration, and which practically defines the term unstoppable juggernaut. xkcd #1190, titled Time, caused a sensation when it was released in March of last year — it played out one static image (call it a frame) per hour, over the course of 3100 hours, or a mind-boggling eighteen and a half weeks². Its scope is tremendous, the pace audacious³, and as often happens with the wildest installments of xkcd, people have built ways of navigating the story.

These are the nominees. Whatever happens, there’s two in five chance that the winner of the category will be — for the fifth time in six happenings — a webcomic. And that is our last unstoppable juggernaut for today.

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¹ My evil twin, etc, etc.

² One might argue in fact that it’s actually a Dramatic Presentation, but which one? The total number of frames makes it Short Form, but its runtime exceeds even the longest of Long Form entries.

³ Just consider the effect if Randall Munroe had up and quit cartooning somewhere in the middle — it would have kept running for perhaps months after he’d otherwise stopped.

Seriously, there was nothing going on today, and then she went and stirred up a discussion about the Eisner nominations from yesterday. Said discussion over at io9 takes the form of Okay Eisner nominating committee, you want longform? Here’s longform webcomics, 51 of ’em, that have never been recognized and should be. It’s not quite a call to the barricades, but it’s close and I love it. Thanks, Lauren!

In the absence of people gettin’ riled up, all I have to point you towards today are two comics that grabbed my attention in a good way:

• Evan Dahm, Vattu page #533: Oh shit somebody gonna get executed by the emperor. Crappity crap.
• Jeffrey Rowland, Overcompensating #1497: Shepherding the company that provides a living to so many creators, like a sort of commercial father to webcomics, has forced Jeffrey into the realm of dad jokes. But dad jokes or no, Rowland’s been making comics again on the regular, and I for one am thrilled. All hail.

That’s all I got — go do something, or send me an announcement, or make some noise. Clearly, I got nothing in the buffer.

Randall Munroe is not just terribly clever, he’s an absolute genius at explaining complex ideas simply. The Heartbleed bug has been all over the news for the past couple of days and almost nobody — either reporting on it or consuming the reports — really knew how it worked or why it was bad. For the definitive translation from geekspeek into human, I refer you to today’s xkcd.

• Speaking of computing, it appears that comiXology is getting bought up by Amazon; I don’t really have a dog in this fight in that I don’t buy through comiXology, but I have to wonder about a few things.

  Will Apple still get their cut of comiXology sales, or will Amazon (maker of the Kindle) sunset those contracts in favor of their own file formats and standards? If so, will we see fewer comics being rejected by Apple’s content police? After all, Amazon doesn’t appear to have a problem with smut, no matter how wacky. Most importantly, is it a good thing to go from a dominant player in a niche industry partnering with a (indeed, the) megacorporation to that dominant player in a niche industry being owned by a somewhat-smaller megacorporation while partnering (perhaps temporarily) with the other?

  Answers: Dunno, Very possibly, and Hard to say but I’m reflexively against media consolidation and concentration.

  For anybody that’s been selling through comiXology, your best strategy remains the same it was before yesterday’s announcement: get what you can from providers, but be ready to shift to another channel if you need to. I suspect that Gumroad and Sellfy may be accelerating any strategic plans they had to deal with this sudden shift in the centers of power.

• Speaking further (probably) of computing but who the heck knows, hotel reservations for SDCC went out yesterday, and a casual inspection of Twitter seems to indicate a lot fewer people getting in than usual. I was tweeting about being done with the process around three minutes after the rodeo opened, and I got my sixth (of six!) choice. I’ve seen reports of people in well under the three-minute mark being told nothing was available.

  For the past three or four years I’ve had no problems getting my first choice, which was a somewhat-smaller, somewhat-off-the-radar, and somewhat-pricey hotel conveniently located in the Gaslamp, even when not so fast on the draw as I was this year. Weirdest of all, my confirmation email tells me:

  You were booked into this hotel because you chose “Book me into any downtown hotel.” when asked what we should do if none of your 6 choices were available.

  … but the hotel I was booked into was one of my six choices.

  That makes me wonder if the choices I made (and the email confirming my request matches my prepared list) actually were the hotels the system looked for. It’s almost behaving like I requested hotels A B C D E F, and the system read my request as B C G M Q T, then just happened to have space at F. I suspect there’s no way to tell, and maybe it’s just some faulty logic on when that You were booked into this hotel because … message got generated. But still — damn peculiar.

• Speaking furthest of computing, those of you on WordPress, have you noticed that since the latest patch to version 3.8.2, the Quick Drafts feature doesn’t work? Just me?

Hecka. Yeah. Now all I need is the limited-edition poster and the book of the film and I’ll be as set as you possibly can be. Freddave, thanks so much for this. Oh, and if you’d like to see STRIPPED on the big screen, there are at least three screenings coming up. Only thing is, the big screen don’t get you director’s commentary, which is on the DVD, so maybe grab that?

• Y’know, Professoressa and Professor Foglio have been doing this comics thing for a long damn time, and they must surely know by now that their fans are going to buy their books, but it’s still got to make you feel good when Girl Genius book 13 clears 100% of funding in something like 16 hours. As always, putting the Foglios on video is a treat and a half.
• Also a treat and a half — quite possibly two treats, if we’re being honest — is the news of a new comic from Steve Wolfhard. Forg the Winter Frog is short, but it’s making me smile like a maniac; here’s hoping that Wolfhard gifts us with more Forg in the future.
• Hey! Do you make comics? Are you in the New York City area? Thomas Crowell, author of a legal reference for filmmakers and a soon-to-be similar reference for comic book creators, will be the guest of the Media Law Collaborative of NYU’s law school on Monday, 14 April. He’ll be speaking on the topic of representing comics creators, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm with a cocktail reception to follow.

  Now it appears that the event is by invite only, which may possibly be garnered via this form. I’m not saying that a bunch of cartoonists can just show up and listen to the law guy and then get free booze, but none of us will know unless some of you try. More likely, you cartoonists will have to point it out to your lawyer or business guy or agent, but somebody you know should be going. If you can’t convince somebody to go, be sure to mention the free booze part.