The new webcomic by David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) launched today, and it shows great promise. Lagies and jenglefenz, I give you Planet of Hats, a week-by-week recap of Star Trek episodes! One can only hope that Morgan-Mar sticks with the strip after the original 79 episodes, so we can get TNG episodes like Planet of the Joggers.

• It’s been pretty common knowledge for a while that ReedPOP, the folks behind New York Comic Con and C2E2, partners of the various PAXes, and a bunch of other shows, have been planning a second show for New York City, one that actually focuses directly on comics rather than all the extraneous bits that often seem to be crowding the comics parts out of ostensible comic cons.

  But for the life of me, it’s only been in the past couple of days that I’ve really seen much about Special Edition NYC; an actual comics-centered show would be welcome, the North Pavilion of the Javits Center is a sizeable but reasonable space, and it could provide a high-traffic alternative for east coast webcomickers. This is one to watch.

• Kickstarts! On the one hand, the Doug Wright Awards — honoring the best in Canadian cartooning, with honors that are exceedingly well-curated and do not bog down into dozens of overly-specific categories — could use your help holding the annual awards ceremony (in conjunction with TCAF) this May. At present, they’re about 25% of the way to their (very modest) CDN$6150 goal.
• On the other hand, David “It’s!” Wills, creator of the Walky- and Dumbiverses, is (as of this writing) about 14 hours in and 96% of the way to funding the third Dumbing of Age collection. Willis-related Kickstarts are always interesting for the overfunding rewards that include extra comics for everybody.
• On the other other hand, I just thought I’d mention the fact that Smut Peddler 2014 is now over US$80,000, which means an extra US$650 per creator/creator team. Only 25 days to go, which means it’ll almost certainly touch US$100K, eclipsing Smut Peddler 2012, and providing creator bonuses over a thousand dollars. Hooray for porn!

The biggest missed opportunity of my life was when I attended the Chris Onstad/Great Outdoor Fight signing at Bergen Street Comics (RIP) and Clover Club, and when he asked who I wanted sketched in my copy I neglected to say Ramses Luther Smuckles. True story.¹ Anyway, The Man With The Blood On His Hands is back, with inner piece and advice for safer motoring.

• I’ve been obsessively reading and re-reading each installment of Kate Beaton’s latest reminiscence of her time in the Alberta tar sands, Ducks, as they’ve been released over the past week or so. All five parts are now collected in one place and they are mandatory reading.

  The tar sands are fraught with political controversy and subtext (in both Canada and the US, as it’s tar sands oil that will be shipped if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved), but Beaton’s story is — as always — focused on the people who find themselves at the center of the great events rather than the events themselves:

  It is a complicated place, it is not the same for all, and these are only my own experiences there. It is a sketch because I want to test how I would tell these stories, and how I feel about sharing them. A larger work gets talked about from time to time. It is not a place I could describe in one or two stories. Ducks is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans.

  As much as I love her takes on history and literature (I don’t think better one-off comics exist than Beaton’s takes on on Musashi and Henson), the autobio comics are the pinnacle of Beaton’s craft. I could read her conversations with her younger self, or the small moments with her parents, or stories from Fort McMurray (which read like a war veteran’s tales of survival) for the rest of my life and never grow tired of them.

• Happy Tenthiversary to Chris Yates, who has been constructing the world’s most colorful, creative, and baffling puzzles for ten years now. To share the joy, it’s free shipping (US & Canada; discounted elsewhere) on Baffler!s all month, with free lucky cactus toys in every order. And as long as we’re doing the numbers, it appears that the highest-numbered Baffler! on Yates’s site is #2899, meaning just about 290 puzzles a year for ten years, or an average of one Baffler! every 30 hours. Watch them fingers around the scroll-saw blade, Chris, and keep puzzlecutting like a madman.
• The Harvey Awards are now accepting nominations for the best of comics produced in 2013; I’m sure that you can think of some that deserve consideration, but allow me a moment of politicking if you will — if you sumbitches don’t nominate Something Terrible for every damn category that it would qualify for, you suck.

  A quick scan of the ballot would suggest Best Cartoonist, Best Letterer, Best Inker, Best Colorist, Best Cover Artist, Best Single Issue or Story, Best Online Comics Work, Best Biographical, Historical, or Journalistic Presentation (Any Book, Magazine, Film, or Video That Contributes to the Understanding of Comics as an Artform), and Most Promising New Talent² as plausible categories. I’m sure you can think of other works deserving of notice, but this one’s an imperative. Go. Do.

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¹ I did get a very nice sketch of Cornelius Bear so that’s all good; it’s just … I could have had a sketch of Ramses Luther Smuckles!

² Okay, Dean Trippe’s not exactly a new talent here, but that hasn’t stopped anybody in the past.

On Friday I was wondering if the new center aisle configuration would work at MoCCA Fest and it turns out, it sure did. You walked up the stairs and into the hall, jogged around the Society of Illustrators table (perhaps taking the time to marvel the surprisingly short line for Fiona Staples) and there you had it in front of you — an aisle designed purely for travel, with access to nearly the entire show floor. It was brilliant, as long as you didn’t get caught up in any of the mooring lines for Charlie Brown.

Speaking of, Charlie Brown was not the best thing above eye-level in the hall — it was the navigational signs that were found at each end of each rank of tables, which made getting around the show trivially simple one you realized one little thing: the booth numbers on each signpost represented both sides of a fabric divider line. I’m pretty sure that one small change to the signs (maybe a horizontal variation on the u-turn symbol) and they’ll be perfect.

One could argue that the signs weren’t even really needed in a venue as small as the 69th Regiment Armory, but you know what? Nobody’s ever done signposting this well before, in a large venue or a small one, and maybe now we’ll see more shows taking up the idea. Yeah, it’ll take some detail-oriented planning, but dang was it a nice touch.

Speaking of detail-oriented planning, I want to recognize Neil Dvorak of Easy Pieces Comic for putting together the best table design I’ve ever seen. Nothing about the look-and-feel of table C8 existed but that it provided the impression that you were in Dvorak’s world now, and everything beyond his immediate proximity was the noise of the outside world and wouldn’t you rather be here where it’s nice and civilized?

It worked on me, and I was happy to pick up a packet of his individual, brief, conceptually linked comics and associated ephemera, which have left me with the impression of a documentary work looking at an askew world of bizarre happenings, corporation/cults, and one man’s search for sense in it all. If Welcome to Night Vale was crossed with a ’50s-era social hygiene film and existed in craft paper envelopes, it would look like Easy Pieces.

So that was my big discovery of the show. Along the way I was lucky enough to talk with some terrific creators about what they’re doing; this list includes (but is not limited to):

• Noelle Stevenson had a stack of the debut issue of Lumberjanes, in advance of the official launch this week. It’s great book.
• Tom Siddell came all the way to America and had a continuous stream of people bringing his (very large, very heavy, thus he didn’t bring any himself to sell) books to be signed, and to purchase his minis and artwork. If you missed out on your chance to see him, he’s got a meet-up tomorrow night in Manhattan. You’ll know it’s him because he looks exactly like his avatar.
• Magnolia Porter’s Sugar Crash mini is funny and heartfelt, and perfectly in keeping with her work on Monster Pulse. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Porter writes early teens better than anybody else in webcomics, because they reflect the fact that growing up isn’t a matter of age, it’s a matter of practice.

  Her characters try, and they fail more than they succeed, and sometimes they’re stupid and sometimes they’re mean (and they know that they shouldn’t be and don’t want to be, and yet it still happens) and slowly they become somebody new. Siddell and John Allison and damn good, but Porter is the best. The only thing that would make Monster Pulse better at what it’s trying to do would be an easily-found link to her store on the main page.

• Evan Dahm is approaching the end of Book 2 material for Vattu, but his next project will more likely be his illustrated Wizard of Oz project. Scott C has a new book releasing in a few months, Hug Machine; it’ll be his first children’s book as both writer and artist, and it looks terrific. David McGuire is approaching the point in the story when he can give us a new Gastrophobia collection.
• Box Brown has now signed his first copy of Andre The Giant: Life and Legend, mine to be precise. He’s starting to the feel the excitement in the run-up to release in a month, and expressed his appreciation for his editor at :01 Books — It was a big help to have somebody that doesn’t know wrestling to point out what would be confusing to ordinary people.
• Speaking of :01 Books, Gina Gagliano expressed the excitement that everybody is feeling over Scott McCloud’s next book, due out sometime next year. I bumped into Colleen Venable on the floor and thanked her for being my favorite book designer¹ and she very kindly gifted me a copy of the last book in her Guinea Pig: Pet Shop Private Eye series because she is awesome.
• Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell’s print version is in the process of being manufactured, which is the only reason I didn’t buy a copy from Sophie Goldstein; I did get the chance to talk to her about how unsettling I found her contribution to The Sleep of Reason. Seriously creepy, people.
• Ben Costa and Phil McAndrew were kind enough to sign books of theirs that I brought with me (as did Siddell; Dahm, Stevenson, and C signed their illustrations in my copy of To Be Or Not To Be — three down, a zillion to go).
• Jaya Saxena, Matt Lubchansky, and Maki Naro seemed to be having more fun than anybody else on the floor. There’s a lack of awkwardness and effort that I observed in them talking with people who both sought them out and those who casually wandered by; even those in the convention grind for a decade may not have mastered that skill, or find that it requires considerable effort. Somehow, they’ve managed to become comics creators (that most solitary of endeavours) without losing the trappings of sociability; this must be stopped before they accidentally destroy comics.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that I ran into Brigid Alverson and Johanna Draper Carlson — two of my favorite people on the ink-stained wretch side of things — outside the Armory and we took some pictures together. After that, I completely missed seeing them again on the floor. Oddly enough, I’ve never met up with either Brigid or Johanna by intention; we always just seem to bump into each other, which is part of how I know it’s going to be a good show. Ladies, it’s always a pleasure.

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¹ Of all the things I never thought I’d have a “favorite” of, but dang if her work for :01 Books doesn’t grab me and make me want to read inside.

I trust that I’ll see you there? We’ve already mentioned that many fine creators who will be in attendance, but somehow missed including David McGuire on that list so let’s address that now: David McGuire will be at MoCCA Fest, at table C5.

The longtime readers among you may recall that I don’t usually list table numbers with regards to MoCCA, since the venue is essentially one large room, but there are two others in particular I want to share, and one thing in general.

The first particular is Magnolia Porter, who is sharing table space with Tom Siddell at G5, and not at table A8 (as she is listed on the MoCCA exhibitor’s page). The second is Evan Dahm, who is at table C3, but who by rights should be at table B9, no? Let’s see if we can make that happen next year.

The general thing is the layout of the floor. In the years that the Society of Illustrators has been running the show, MoCCA Fest has been dong a bang-up job. The taller backdrops last year made for a smart-looking show floor, and this year they’re making another big change: the aisles are turned 90° to their previous orientation. In past years, entering from the main staircase on Lexington, a MoCCAgoer would duck around the showrunner table and then head up the center aisle of tables

Now, they’ll be heading into a center travel aisle, with exhibitor aisles branching off to the left and right. I can’t help but suspect that this may distribute showgoers throughout the hall more uniformly upon entrance. I’ll be sure to watch the traffic patterns.

Guys, this is the last time I’m going to mention STRIPPED for the immediate future, except to update you as to how they’re doing in their goal to become #1 on iTunes today. As of this writing, they’re sitting at #5 in Documentaries and #59 overall; considering some of the biggest and most acclaimed films of last year are newly released and sitting in the #1 and 2 slots overall, it’s going to be some tough sledding. I’m confident, however, that they can surpass that Belieber “documentary” with your help..

Honestly, it’s a masterpiece, it’s out on iTunes today, it’s out lots of places tomorrow, and if you love comics you owe it to yourself to watch it. I’ve watched it through multiple times now, I keep noticing new things and I know there’s more there still (for example, the credits acknowledge the kind permission received to include an Oglaf [NWFNearlyEveryW¹] strip, and I haven’t spotted it yet. I wonder which one such goodly-hearted young men as Freddave could possibly have used.

In other news, happy strippiversaries this week to Christopher B Wright and K Brooke Otter Spangler who this week are celebrating, respectively, 18 and 8 years² in the webcomics mines³. After you’re done with STRIPPED, spend some time with their archives.

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¹ If you’re at work and it’s okay for you to click that link to Oglaf, I want to know if you’re hiring.

² Brooke, please have permalinkable blogpostings some day. For those wondering, the two links in that image go here.

³ Coincidentally, both of them are also making serious inroads in the world of e-books.

If you should wander by the Periscope Studio booth at Emerald City Comic Con (that would be number #1214), do be a dear and find Dylan Meconis and high-five the everliving crap out of her for me, will you? Because her longform webcomic, Family Man, just got nominated for a frickin’ NCS division award, alongside some luminaries as Jenn Manley Lee’s Dicebox, Eddie Pittman’s Red’s Planet, and Jeff Smith (who just happens to be one of the all time giants of comics) for Tüki Save The Humans. Dag, yo.

Over in the short form category, you can find Jim Horwitz’s Watson, Ryan Pagelow’s Buni (my favorite of the three), and the New Yorker online comics of Mike Twohy. The last one strikes me as a little weird (or perhaps redundant), as Twohy is also nominated in the category for magazine gag cartoons, which raises the possibility that the same cartoons seen in the magazine and online could be separately recognized in two divisions. Since the divisions handle nominations separately, the NCS may need to draft policy in the future to deal with such situations.

[Edit to add: NCS President Tom Richmond has clarified the matter in the comments– Mike Twhohy’s nominations are for works that appear in different media and they do not overlap. We at Fleen apologize for the confusion on my part, and thank to Richmond for the clarification.]

And to round out a good day for webcomics, Emily Carroll’s Out of Skin racked up yet another recognition, as it has been nominated in the Doug Wright Awards for the Pigskin Peters trophy.

The Doug Wright Awards will be given out in conjunction with TCAF on 10 May, and the NCS awards at the Reubens weekend in San Diego on 24 May (with special guest “Weird’ Al Yankovic).

Despite what it may look like, today is not merely an excuse for me to tell an amusing college anecdote. That’s just the bonus.

• On a long-ago episode of Webcomics Weekly (I don’t recall which one, so have fun searching), the strapping four lads agreed (that was what stuck in my mind — all four of them agreeing on something) that you can’t really put out a professional quality webcomic without engaging in some degree of commercialization and money making. If you were that degree of professional in the making and content of your comic, the argument went, it was inevitable that you would be making some amount of money from it.

  I always thought that was too reductive a world view, considering that people like David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) exist who have produce pro-level webcomics with no desire to make a living (or even pocket money) from them. The comic is its own reward, regardless of desire to follow a comics career¹.

  I bring this up because I’ve been thinking a lot about a piece written earlier this week by Liz Greenfield (creator of the much-missed Stuff Sucks, now lost to time) on the value of non-profit comics:

  Over the past seven weeks I’ve been in Bristol, working closely with a dozen amazing individuals to write a graphic novel. We did it in record time and the resulting manuscript is impressive. It’s full of true stories and fantastic lies and imagination. It’s the most exciting and bravest work I have been involved in yet and I can’t wait to share it with you, but I will have to draw it first.

  It’s safe to say the past eight weeks of workshops and the process of writing using physical theatre exercises, improvisation techniques, group workshopping etc. has altered my practice forever. One thing that emerged was the advantages of non-commercial work – this project is being supported by the Arts Council of England and the Arnolfini in Bristol – over work whose end goal is to satisfy sales targets and generate profit for the writer, artist, publisher.

  I’m aware that most of my colleagues in comic books aren’t familiar with this model of creating, as these opportunities are still fairly new and far between (outside of France and Belgium, who subsidise comics as any other art form with generous grants, residencies, prizes, awards).

  If you’re in the same boat as me, maybe the reason you haven’t made a change is you’re waiting for someone to swoop in and bind it and put in on the shelves of a library/bookshop. My advice is: don’t. Don’t give way to a fantasy and let it stunt you growth. Don’t labour robotically under the illusion that someone will recognise your determination and see through all the levels of artifice you guard it with. This work should be made of doubts and hope and insecurities and love, or not at all. If you’re going to hate your job, at least find one that pays properly.

  It’s worth a read, and Greenfield invites her fellow art bastards to add their opinions on personal and not-for-profit projects.

• Speaking of (very) personal and (potentially) not-for-profit projects, one of those comes to a fairly big denouement in a few hours, as Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder have a public unveiling:
  

  Try to spot the guy who’s a nervous little nellie for his premiere tonight.

  STRIPPED has its public gala premiere in about six and a half hours (as I write this), and if you cock your ears in about eight hours towards LA, I’m pretty sure you’ll hear sustained applause, as well as four years of tension and stress suddenly releasing in Messrs Schroeder and Kellett. If your ears are especially good, you might make out some of the questions and answers that follow, but as I’ll be on EMS duty I won’t be able to relay them to you. Anybody attending the premiere want to share the experience? Drop me a line.

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¹ Perhaps analogous to the experience of a visiting professor of history when I was in college. Being an engineering school, we only had one professor of history and when he went to Japan for a year on a fellowship a replacement was found from a large state university a few hours away. Halfway through fall term he stopped suddenly in the middle of class (War, Revolution & Society 1789 — Present; being the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, he was playing it for all it was worth) and said I just realized something. You guys are all engineers and scientists, but you’re doing the same work that I would give to history majors and you’re all doing well. You’re doing as much reading in a ten-week quarter as they would in a 15-week semester. He paused, then continued, What the hell?

We explained that although none of us would be historians or use what we learned in our careers, we just enjoyed it; taking a 400-level history class (or literature, or psychology, or whatever) was like a hobby for us, since it would be the one class that term without math.

Also, it gave us an opportunity to write papers, which allowed for some serious pranking possibilities. Having nothing better to do one night, my buddy Thrice² and I wrote up a fake first page for a paper on All Quiet On The Western Front that used outrageously out-of-context and artificially conflated quotes to prove that Remarque was a bloodthirsty, warmongering proto-Fascist who regarded life in the trenches as one long, drug- and booze-fueled, dude-on-dude sex party. The real paper started on page two.

² AKA John Costain Knight III. Not very much later, he was serving on board an aircraft carrier ensuring that the nuclear reactor didn’t unexpectedly go boom!, which is exactly the sort of responsibility you want to give to a guy that you’ve seen drunkenly throw up after midnight in a booth at Hardee’s. On the other hand, the John C Stennis never went boom!, so I guess it all worked out okay.

It’s nearly time for Emerald City Comic Con in the city with the needle that reaches to space. Half of webcomics will be there, what with TopatoCo throwing down a challenge to all and sundry:

We are outgunned and outnumbered but we believe we might win. Maybe. We have street smarts and gumption and all that. We will have STUFF. We will have THINGS. We will have surprises. We will have the WILL TO SURVIVE. But most importantly, we will have friendship. And street smarts.

Also the power of Emily Horne & Joey Comeau (badass tattoos), Aaron Diaz (once beat up a gang), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, Tyson Hesse, Jeph Jacques, Kate Leth, Sam Logan (demolitions expert). David Malki !, Ryan North, Dante Shepherd, and Chris Yates (uses power tools like, all the time).

Opposing them will be the combined forces of David Willis, Joel Watson, the C&H crew, with various assists from Jennie Breeden and her stompy boots, Angela Melick and her 3D printer, Periscope Studios and special asskickers Amy T Falcone & Abby Howard, and the Guigar/Kurtz Axis of Awesome.

Trying to stay above the fray and avoid casualties, one may find vision-impaired mustelids, representatives of the local mad genius, Blerch control, and library communities, a strange attractor of fantrolls, and makers of potentially-killer robots from an isolated lair.

Wondering why they’re surrounded by weirdos, Evan Dahm, Kory Bing, and Magnolia Porter will seek to keep a sense of normality in a 10 meter radius of their booth, which will surely fail due to the proximity of Human Beard Randy Milholland and his handler/convention wife, Danielle Corsetto. Plus whoever I missed.

Don’t even get me started on the programming, where you’ll find Dean Trippe talking about Something Terrible, as well as many of the aforementioned exhibitors. Oh, and that Dave Kellett will be at the Unshelved booth, with STRIPPED DVDs for sale.

Me, I’ll be home in New Jersey, wishing such a great show with so many great people weren’t a continent away. Dang.

There’s a couple of instances of people making fanart, and then the fanart being co-opted by others, and there’s a lot of discussion — light, heat, some signal, lots of noise — about both.

• Case one: the now apparently-resolved case of Anita Sarkeesian and Tamara Gray’s rendering of Princess Daphne, discussed at length on the second episode of Surviving Creativity. The best thing about that episode of SC¹ is the acknowledgment that some actual legal expertise is required (something missing in most internet discussions of trademark, copyright, and fair use), and the promise that Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire will be joining them to add that expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Katie Lane is smart, and that next episode will be mandatory listening for all independent creators.

  Case two: before Gigi DG launched Cucumber Quest, she had a webcomic called Hiimdaisy, which combined fan art and parody of video games (as near as I can tell, I never read it and Ms DG took ’em down some years ago). There’s presently a Kickstarter campaign to continue the work with an explicit acknowledgment that it’s inspired by Ms DG, although it’s a new artist. Ms DG is aware, but is distancing herself from, the project².

  My take on the whole thing is if you wanna do fanart, then do fanart, nobody can prevent you from drawing whatever you want. But it seems a bit classless to make your fanart an extension of somebody else’s visual style (and to trade on their name), and it seems to skirt all the legalities to raise money in order to make your fan-thing.

  Sure, sure, you say it’s non-profit (not that those are two magic Get Out Of Copyright Jail words), but you say that the bulk of the funds your raising are for the purchase of a Cintiq and somebody’s keeping that toy when this is all said and done. Better apply any and all overages in the funding to a legal fund, ’cause that right there is the sort of thing that gets people sued. Each day that goes by increases the odds that the project gets canceled, either by a come-to-his-senses Renard, or (more likely) by Kickstarter.

• Weird that two different second-order It’s somebody else’s intellectual property incidents would pop up in so short a time frame; despite my opinioneering in the last item (it need not be said that I am not a lawyer, but that opinion would inform my thought process if I were a member of a jury, which is possibly just as important) my real thought on the matter is this: it’s better to have your own ideas.

  Case in point: Karl Kerschl, who could spend all day drawing Other People’s Stuff if he wanted to, but who clearly allows the OPS to take up hours that aren’t taken up with his own work. The Abominable Charles Christopher is some of the best work of anybody’s career, and nobody can tell Kerschl what he can or cannot do with it.

  And what he’s doing with it today is announcing preorders for the softcover edition of Book 2 of Charles Christopher. Let me be blunt: the only reason for this to not be on your shelf is if you already own the hardcover. You’ve got perfectly good blood plasma you aren’t using, sell some of that and put in your order.

• And in further praise of coming up with Your Own Stuff, the aforementioned Steve Hamaker shared something on the twitter machine today:
  

  My wife, Jenny Robb interviewed Bill Watterson for the upcoming Calvin & Hobbes exhibition at the @CartoonLibrary. http://library.osu.edu/blogs/cartoons/2014/03/20/new-interview-calvin-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-and-cul-de-sac-creator-richard-thompson-talk-libraries-comics-and-the-creative-process-with-ohio-state/ …

  Jenny Robb is the curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State, and as such has probably been around more magnificent comics art than anybody else currently drawing breath. She’s frighteningly smart, and she’s scored the Watterson half of what’s actually a double interview, the other half being done with Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, conducted by exhibit curator Caitlin McGurk. Read them both here, and if you’re anywhere near Columbus, Ohio and don’t go see the retrospective while it’s running, we’re through. On the off chance that you’re not anywhere near Columbus, Ohio, kindly remember that you have two kidneys for a reason.

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¹ The disappointing part of the podcast was that colorist supreme Steve Hamaker was part of the discussion and was sorely underutilized. If you’re going to have him on, let’s hear about his creative process! Guests can add a hell of a lot to a discussion when the topic is something they’re involved in, otherwise it’s just kind of unfair to them.

² Although project creator Jack Renard takes a different tack on this, presenting the project has having DG’s tacit approval.

Got a calendar handy? You’re going to need it.

• Today If you missed out on any of the Benign Kingdom merch from the various B9 Kickstarts, and you like saving shipping when ordering other webcomics merch, good news! As of now-ish, all the Benign Kingdom books are available via TopatoCo.
• Monday, 24 March Specifically, 9:00am PDT, when registration for what is likely the first webcomics-related athletic event opens up. That would be the Beat The Blerch runs — 10K, half marathon, full marathon — springing from the imagination of Matthew Inman and his paean to running, The Blerch. The runs themselves will feature:
  • “I Beat The Blerch in 2014” tech shirt¹ and medal
  • Large quantities of birthday cake at every aid station along with Nutella and magical grape beverages
  • There may or may not be actual Blerchs in fat-suits chasing you throughout the race

  While it’s true that Inman will have a Blerch-themed book coming out about ten days after the run, I don’t believe that promotional concerns are uppermost in his mind. There are certainly ways to promote a book that will require less time and effort over the next six months (not to mention the fact that Inman will be running himself), and the fact that he’s still looking for sponsors tells me this is more of an Inman thing than a thing with an Andrews McMeel budget behind it.

  Besides, Inman’s got a history of taking on big, weird, wonderful projects, and organizing a mass of webcomics readers to wheeze their way around forested trails seems a perfect fit with his sensibilities.

  Also, this:

  We won’t charge you to download your race photos after the event.

  I gather that’s a huge annoyance with lots of “serious” race events, and tells me this is more about the fun and hell of it than anything else. Blerches (blerchen? blerchi?) will be beaten in Carnation, Washington on Sunday, 21 September, times TBA. From the information shared so far, I feel confident in declaring that this event promises to be the highlight of the September 2014 timeframe in the Pacific Northwest.

• Saturday & Sunday, 5 & 6 April Specifically, 11:00am to 6:00pm, the annual MoCCA Fest will kick off at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, for the low, low price of five bucks a day at the door. The show has been through a lot of changes — the overwhelming majority of them positive — in the years since the Society of Illustrators took over MoCCA’s assets and mission, and I expect this year to continue the upward trend.

  The exhibitor list is up now and includes the likes of Darryl Ayo, Elena Barbarich, Nick Bertozzi, Box Brown, Scott C, Ben Costa, Evan Dahm, Chris Giarusso, Sophie Goldstein, Dean Haspiel, Matt Lubchansky, Phil McAndrew, Sylvan Migdal, Maki Naro, Magnolia Porter, MK Reed, Jaya Saxena, Tom Siddell, Noelle Stevenson, and many more.

  Also many fine publishers of words and pictures, and the goddamn Jack Kirby Museum. Oh, and the usual contingent of creators from various Scandinavian countries will be present, along with educational institutes and a few zillion other awesome people I haven’t mentioned. See you there.

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¹ I don’t believe that is a typo of tee shirt; apparently, active people have things called tech[nical] shirts” which are like tee shirts, but better.