Yay. Even better, Soterios Johnson took the time to send me an email debunking the rampant rumors around the region that we were going to be getting 70 – 80 cm of snow this weekend. Rumors be damned, if SoJo says we get a dusting, Mother Nature herself must needs obey. Only good news today!

• How you know Hiveworks is doing something right: they’re well-known enough to be a target of people with nothing better to do. In a recap of last year’s incident, miscreants broke in, did minimal damage, and triggered malware warnings from Google. No malware (never was), and the actual interruption was brief, but warnings may linger. Hey, miscreants? We get it, you’re very clever. Maybe give people that just want to read comics a break for a while?
• Jason Shiga has a new comic, years in the planning, and anything that guy does is more likely than not going to be brilliant. I mean, did you see Meanwhile? Demon starts here, features Jimmy from Meanwhile, has seven pages so far, and will be updating daily. Most interestingly, at the top of the comic is a progress bar, which kicked over from 0% to 1% on page four, making me thing we’ll be getting patented Shiga wonderfulness for the next year-plus.
• Slate’s Book Review and the Center for Cartoon Studies have announced their nominations for the Cartoonist Studio Prize (last year’s winner: Chris Ware’s Building Stories in the Graphic Novel category, and Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona in the Webcomic category), and there’s some brilliant stuff listed there by the likes of Gene Yang, Boulet, Erika Moen, Gabrielle Bell, Emily Carroll, KC Green, and many more.

  I can’t say that I’ve read everything on the list (consulting judge Christopher Butcher has knowledge that is both broad and deep), but everything on the list that I’m familiar with damn well deserves to be there. Even better, the breadth of form, content, and genre is breathtaking; the only thing that some of these nominees have in common is, they’re comics. Winners will be announced next month.

Okay seriously whoever has been wishing for a snow-filled winter like we used to have kindly knock that shit off. The demands of keeping up with weather kept me from noticing details in things I referenced yesterday, so let’s play catch-up.

• Regarding: Ryan North and David Malki ! fighting via the specialized medium of unflattering book covers, I neglected to note that both of these fine gentlemen have webcomics-related anniversaries going on. North observed yesterday:
  

  Hey you know what happened on Saturday? Saturday was February 1st 2014 ALSO KNOWN AS the eleven-year anniversary of Dinosaur Comics! Is that not nuts? It is ENTIRELY NUTS. When I started Dinosaur Comics on February 1st, 2003 I thought the comic would last a month, and at the end of that month I’d change the template to something involving astronauts. But then I ended up liking T-Rex and Dromiciomimus and Utahraptor and thought, “okay, maybe I’ll change templates every two months instead of every month”. And now here we are 11 years later! The moral is: changing templates is a lot of work that can be easily postponed, THE END.

  So congratulations to Ryan North on reaching the eleventh stripiversary (traditional gift: verified Twitter status). Meanwhile, Malki ! (perhaps due to a lack of self-confidence due to the fight with North) neglected the opportunity today to put up the 1000th Wondermark strip. See? Last Friday: number 999. Today: previously-seen artwork¹ that graced the front matter of Emperor of the Food Chain, the most recent Wondermark collection. Come on, David Malki !, give us strip number 1000! Do it for the children.

• Regarding: the 90 year time jump in Stand Still, Stay Silent, I was entirely too focused on the time jump in question and did not look more carefully at Minna Sundberg’s demographic profile of Reykjavík after decades of pandemic:
  

  Population: 41 750
  Immunity rate: 11%

  Now granted, Iceland is not a large country, containing perhaps a third of a million people all told², the capital city containing on the order of 120,000 of those people. According to Sundberg, that population is a third of what it was at the start of the “rash illness”, even though they closed their borders almost immediately and likely came out better than any other nation on the planet. One little caption, so many deaths, and still the risk exists for 89% of those few. Good thing they’ve got geothermal power, so that the capital of the known world will have some semblance of technology remaining.

• Regarding: I completely missed it yesterday, Drew Weing has a new webcomic! The Creepy Casefiles of Margo Maloo will update Mondays, and the first four pages are already live, tossing us headfirst into a young boy — perhaps ten or eleven years old³ — into a new city, a new home that is definitely haunted, and no small amount of complaining about those facts. Keep your eyes on this one, it’s likely to be a masterclass in comics creation.

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¹ Make no mistake, it’s gorgeous and disturbing at the same time.

² By contrast, the county I live in has nearly three times the population, less than 1% of the geographical area, and 100% fewer volcanos, geothermal pools, and construction projects detoured by the presence of elves.

³ That’s the third eleven of this post. Weird.

Anybody reading this on the other side of the Atlantic from me? Or just immensely wealthy? Some things to keep an eye out for.

• Firstly, the annual Festival de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême is getting ready to kick off again, and while my high school French is a little rusty, I’m pretty sure that it starts on Thursday (30 January) and runs until Sunday (Saint Groundhog’s Day). There’s literally no way for me to look for all the names that might be there — Angoulême is enormous, with more than 200,000 attendees each year, and 6000 to 7000 pros there to meet them.

  It adds up to more than five times the population of the host city, and takes over much of the public space. To put this in scale, for San Diego Comic Con to be as large in absolute terms, it would have to roughly double attendance; for it to be as large in relative terms, some five million people would have to descend on the city.

  Doing a quick scan of the creator present (okay, I cheated and used the English site; creators listed along with publisher/booth-owner name, which will give you locations here), one finds indy-, euro-, and web-comickers like Derf Backderf, Frank Santoro, and Dash Shaw (with Ca Et La), Scott Campbell (with Cambourakis), Boulet and Lewis Trondheim (with Delacourt Delcourt [per Pierre’s correction in the comments; merci, M Lebeaupin]), Alison Bechdel and Joost Swarte (with Denoel Graphic), Alec Longstreth(with L’Employe du Moi — Belgique Wallonie Bruxelle), Bannister (with Glenat), Ben Hatke and Mo Willems (with Rue de Sèvres), and literally thousands more whose names I missed or whose work I’m not familiar with.

  Scott Campbell, by the way, will be there to promote and sign Les Grands Duels du Cinéma, which activity he will continue in Paris from Tuesday the 4th to Sunday the 9th at various venues.

• As long as we’re in France, let’s move up the Channel a bit until we come to Belgium, and Ghent (I loved visiting Ghent, particularly the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb at St Bavo’s Cathedral¹ and the fortress known as The Gravensteen²), where local animation studio GridFX is making a number of interesting projects. But lots of medium-sized cities have local animation studios, and lots of them are making interesting projects (even if few of those interesting projects have the cachet of, say, The Triplets of Belleville).

  GridFX caught my eye because partway down the story — almost in passing — was a bit that mentioned they were the studio that snagged Michel Gagné’s The Saga of Rex, as presented in a half-dozen installments over the run of Flight. Gagné will be directing himself, which will probably turn out pretty damn well considering he’s directed four shorts, and has an extensive resume including some of the best animated films of the past two decades³. Here’s hoping that when Rex is done, it will be seen in more than the occasional arthouse.

• Finally, let’s finish across the icy North Sea, where it appears that the Machine of Death co-editors have been sidelining as Norwegian contract killers. Because that’s normal.

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¹ I am possibly the least religious person you will ever meet, and this painting damn near made me believe in the whole High Church, early Renaissance conception of God and Christ and all their saints. It’s that transcendent, and all I could think looking upon it was Human hands made this, somehow.

² Designed by a Spanish king to establish his claim to Ghent specifically by looking as menacing as possible. From the row of guildhalls on the opposite side of the canal, it looks like the backdrop for a death metal music video, even in bright sunlight.

But then you look behind you at those guildhalls, and the cafes and bars and people enjoying a damn good beer and you think Okay, you can be badass all you want on that side of the water; we’re good over here. What I am saying is along with Bruges and Antwerp, I love the crap out of Ghent and find it a wonderful place to be.

³ Visual effects animation: The Iron Giant; animation on the tasting sequence: Ratatouille; special effects consultant: The Incredibles; development artist: Brave. For those that look back on them fondly, there’s also credits on Space Jam and Star Wars: Clone Wars, but I never saw them.

I was already going to be writing about Kickstarter campaigns when Scott Kurtz made a damn good observation on Twitter:

It’s interesting to follow “pay me to make a webcomic” Kickstarter campaigns, and 6 months to a year later, see who actually DID anything.

The first thought I had was Man, Scott’s very possibly talking about personal friends and acquaintances in that statement; I hope they don’t get mad at him. My second thought was, No, actually, I hope they’re smart enough to take his observation to heart. I suppose that’s why when I have (rarely) backed a Kickstarter that’s designed to launch a comic; I’m always looking for something concrete up front (which, if I get it, tends to bode well for an actually-regular webcomic).

The Last Halloween? I got some pins and a recipe for Sadness Brownies¹. Sufficiently Remarkable? Digital goods, including an audio recording of creator Maki Naro telling a terrible joke. Those were all I convinced myself I was ever going to get, and not only did I get them, but both comics are updating according to schedule, pretty much².

Others … haven’t done so well, either at launching at the promised time³, or at keeping updates coming; I really don’t want to get into names, mostly because for any that I might mention, there were probably three others that weren’t even on my radar. Not that I have much reason to complain about campaigns that I didn’t back (I’ve cut waaaay back on my Kickstarter habit in the past few months), but it’s something to always keep in the back of your mind — Does this project owner convince me that he or she will be able to get/keep their act together?

Let’s talk about some Kickstarts that I have confidence will be made good on in a timely fashion, then:

• Update! Dean Trippe’s magnificent, haunting, win-all-the-awards Something Terrible has six days to go; it’s a little under US$35,000 (of a US$6400 goal) at this writing, and closing in on the US$36K stretch goal of an added epilogue and fancier book design. He’s dead in the middle of the Fleen Predicted Total, but I would be happy to have underestimated this one.
• Update! My buddy Otter’s wonderful, funny, tense novels-to-audiobooks project is over goal, approaching the stretch goal where we can get the audiobooks on a cool USB drive, and pushing towards the stretch goal where Braille conversions (and donations to libraries serving the visually-impaired) happen. It’d be cool to get bonus stories and challenge coins but let’s get that Braille conversion done, yeah? Little more than three weeks for that to happen.
• New Kickstarter! Jesse Thorn, impressario of the Maximum Fun empire, wants to have a conference of independent creators in LA later this year, and that’s going to cost some US$120,000. Aside from the fact that Thorn’s various podcasts have given props to webcomics on numerous occasions (and that MaxFun’s merch is handled by TopatoCo), one of the keynote speakers at the Make Your Thing conference (for that is its name) will be webcomics own Kate Beaton. She may be branching out into other areas of creativity, but comics about history and literature and her younger self will always be where she started.

  And crap, look at the other people gonna be there: Jay Allison, Jane Espenson, Chris Gethard, Merlin Mann, Vernon Reid (!), and John Vanderslice were just the names that jumped out at me the most. Word is trickling out, which is why MYT is currently sitting at 2% of goal, with a predicted finish around 65%, but we’re only three hours in and I hope to see that much higher by this time tomorrow.

  This one deserves some traction, but I fear that the relatively high price points for the campaign — US$25: stickers, thank you email, update announcements; US$100: add video access to the conference and a t-shirt; US$400: add a ticket to the conference and gift bag — are going to be a sticking point. For a three-day professional-type conference US$400 is actually pretty realistic, but how many small-scale creators are going to be able to drop four hundo (plus travel expenses)? I hope this one makes goal, but ask me again in a couple days if it will.

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¹ Which might be the bestest brownies I’ve ever had. Well done, TLH creator Abby Howard!

² Within experimental error, given year-end family obligations, technical issues, etc.

³ Granted, Kickstarter has a long and hallowed history of things not happening when they were supposed to, but there’s a lot less lead time involved in getting a website up and running, even a rudimentary one and getting stuff made by vendors on the other side of the world then shipped to me so I can ship it to you (even before you encounter completely unpredictable events like ships turning back when partway across the Pacific).

Sometimes,you just need something that was amazing and hasn’t been seen for a while to be public and prominent again.

• I don’t believe that I have written on this page before about a trip I took to Belgium and Holland maybe … fifteen years ago? Sounds about right. While in Brussels, my wife and I visited the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée, and in and around all the Hergé exhibits (the whole town is a celebration of Tintin), and the other great Eurocomics (around the corner from my hotel was a mural of Blake et Mortimer that took up the entire side of a building¹), was one small piece of art that was clearly the centerpiece of the entire museum.

  Gertie.

  One precious, thin to the point of near-transparency original image (not even a “cel”, as this predated the use of celluloid for animation) from Gertie the Dinosaur, drawn by Winsor McCay nearly a century earlier. Much of what we recognize as comics, and maybe the entire idea of animation, derives from McCay and Gertie the Dinosaur. Heck, it’s a marvel that any of the film still exists, given how little of the silent film era was preserved. But Gertie has never been entirely forgotten, and she’s getting her due courtesy of The Toonseum for her one hundredth birthday:

  Gertie toured the vaudeville circuit in 1914 along with creator Winsor McCay in a unique show combining a live on stage performance and animation. The show wowed audiences, and left them bewildered at what was dubbed one of the great wonders! That vaudeville circuit would have brought both McCay and Gertie to one of Pittsburgh’s many theaters. Now almost 100 years later Gertie returns to Pittsburgh.

  On February 8th, kids can come watch Gertie in action on the screen again and learn about the world’s first of film’s dazzling dinosaurs. Gertie will also be showing off some of her classic cartoon friends on screen as the ToonSeum kicks off our year-long Century of Animation.

  Gertie screens at 1:15pm, followed by quick classes in cartooning and flip-book making, and the dinosaur part also gets its due attention:

  In addition you can explore Gertie’s dinosaur friends including T-rex, Apatosaurus, Velociraptor, and many more from Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Enjoy activities such as measuring teeth and claws, dino foot print stamping, and much more.

  The Carnegie Natural History Center’s Dippy the Dinosaur will be celebrating his 150th Birthday later this year, so look for other events with Gertie and Dippy coming up soon. (It has long been rumored that Dippy and Gertie are an item!) The event runs from 1pm-3:30pm on February 8th at 1pm at the ToonSeum. The cost is $8.00 per child (general admission) and $3.00 per child (members). Adults are free.

  Personally, I think that Gertie might be related to Professor Science, and the velociraptor mentioned may actually be Utahraptor going incognito; naturally, there is only one T-Rex.

• You know what kinda looks like a dinosaur, but not really, but kind of? Jellaby. Okay, J’s a monster, what with the tiny little horns and wings and all, but work with me here. Because this lets me keep to the theme of welcome returns and the subtheme of dinosaurs and announce that after too long a time out of print, Jellaby volume 1 is coming back:
  

  OMG you guys! JELLABY v.1 is coming back into print! This is awesome news! Yay @CapstoneConnect & @keansoo!!! -kjc

  At least in Canada? Amazon’s US site doesn’t recognize the book, but their Canadian site claims it released last week, even though it appears to not be releasing until March? Look, it’s got a new subtitle, a new cover, and a new foreword by Kazu Kibuishi, so find every kid that you know and get them a copy (even if you have to import it from Our Friends To The North) because Jellaby is great.

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¹ I gather that there is more than one in Brussels.

PS: Aaaaaahhhhh!!

Holy crap, this thing is big — physically imposing, heavy enough to be a cause of death if rapidly applied to the base of the skull, and it even smells imposing. Thank you Mr Malki !, this will keep me busy roughly forever. So busy, in fact, that everybody else today gets quick updates instead of long writeups.

• The latest wine-learnin’ class from Kristen Siebecker¹, spoken of in the beforetimes, is upon us², with an emphasis on winter-friendly wines at 7:00pm on Thursday, 30 January, at West Elm in Chelsea. As is her custom, Siebecker has extended a discount to those using the code EMAIL10.
• Herr Doktor Professor Dante Shepherd is about to celebrate a Big Round Number at Surviving The World, and we at Fleen would like to wish him a hearty congratulations a day in advance. Tonight he may be partying like it’s strip #1999, but tomorrow he erupts into the rarefied company of those that have achieved 2000 strips. If my math is correct, he will be one of a literal handful³ of PhD-holding webcomickers to achieve such a feat⁴.
• Dave Kellett put up a future plan for himself today, and what jumped out at me was item #6:
  

  6.) MYSTERY PROJECT: In about 2-4 years, when things calm down a bit, I’m also going start on a new “mystery” project. I can’t say much about it, other than to say… it’ll channel a very different side of my creativity, it’ll take me about a year to complete, and that it’ll be super fun to do.

  It caught my eye because the last time Kellett put up future plan for himself, not quite four years ago, item #4 jumped out at me:

  4.) MYSTERY PROJECT: In addition to Sheldon and Drive, I should mention that I’ve started up a third project that I’m very excited about, but which I can’t really talk about yet. I know, I know…it’s sounds very third-grade of me to bring up a project that I can’t talk about. But here’s what I can say: I’m very excited about it, it’s my first collaborative piece since the “How to Make Webcomics” book, it both is and is not comics-related, and I think it’ll be right up your alley, when it comes time to announce it. More than that, I can’t say. But good things are a-comin’.

  That mystery project turned out to be STRIPPED, which is now so close I can taste it. One can only speculate what this mystery project will be, only we already know that it’s not a film as he took care of those possibilities in item #5. Damn, Dave, you ain’t got to conquer every creative medium known to the species.

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¹ Whose name would apparently translate as they becker from the original German. Names aside, Kristen pretty much put together the first MoCCA Festival, laying the groundwork for all that has occurred since.

² And by us I mean those of us who are within easy travel of Manhattan, and of legal drinking age, and have a desire to up their wine game.

³ This would be a cartoon-style three-fingers-plus-thumb hand.

⁴ Also, while Jorge Cham has on the order of 1700 strips, he’s also got a feature-length movie, so I’m counting him. Deal with it.

I just have a few brief items for you today; sorry, they can’t all be 800 words paeans to new comics that I’ve fallen in love with.

But heck, since we just mentioned Stand Still, Stay Silent, I’ll note that about the time I was discovering Minna Sundberg’s new (and magnificent) comic epic, SSSS was joining up with Hiveworks. Yesterday while reading the latest online rerun of Skullkickers, I noticed a blogposting that Jim Zub had that day shifted his hosting to Hiveworks. Thinking back about a month prior, Maki Naro announced that Sufficiently Remarkable had joined up with … Hiveworks.

Earlier in the year, they chalked up business agreements with Oh Joy, Sex Toy, Girls With Slingshots, Yellow Peril, Gastrophobia, Nemu*Nemu, Girl Genius, Dumbing of Age, Shortpacked! … the list is too extensive to go into here. Which made me think that something I said in a year-end interview with Tom Spurgeon¹, when I thought I was reaching a bit in speculating how quickly Hiveworks could grow.

Turns out they’re growing faster than I thought possible, and providing support in the form of advertising cash money and more to creators. Frankly, I’m astonished how quickly it’s grown as well as how broad the offerings from its clients and affiliates are. At this point, the chief hazard I see for them isn’t survival, it’s growing too large and too quickly; here’s hoping that principals Joseph Stillwell and Isabelle Melan¸on can scale their abilities as the roster grows.

• There’s a nice review of Midas Flesh #1 by Ryan North (words) and Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb (pictures) up at The AV Club today; if it’s a little less gushingly positive than some of the reviews that page has given this creative team, well, it’s a first issue, new characters and story concept, and it’s clear that North dropped into the story quickly, knowing he’s got another half-dozen issues to fill in the gaps. It’s really good, you guys. Plus it’s got a space suit-wearing Utahraptor who needs glasses, what more could you ask for?²
• Quick! Anybody in/around Berkeley, California today? You have a few hours yet to make it over to the Central Library, where Gene Luen Yang will be discussing Boxers and Saints at 6:30pm tonight. About seven hours, to be precise, as I write this. Get goin’.

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¹ Which, uh, I promised I would link when it went live and then didn’t. Look, I just saved you reading 9000 words of me– even though the The Spurge made me sound very smart — over your holidays, you’re welcome.

² Well, I could ask for an explanation how a Utahraptor gets into a space suit without shredding it to rags with his razor-sharp death-claws, but I presume that’s coming around issue 4 or 5.

I have a few things that are coming up, things that you might want to keep an eye on, even.

• For people in … almost any corner of North America, actually, Danielle Corsetto has announced the initial outline of her Girls With Slingshots 10th Anniversary Cross-Continent Road Trip, taking place through most of July and August. More dates and locations are coming, and don’t forget that she’ll be in wildest Kenilworth, NJ for a signing at Wild Pig Comics this Saturday, 18 January, from noon to 5:00pm. Be there or miss out.
• The Hugo Awards nominations are open for those that are associated with this year’s WorldCon in London, UK. The rules surrounding who can nominate and who can vote are somewhat complex when speaking of the Hugos, so please read through all the details here; as often happens at this time of year, a number of people associated with webcomics are eligible, either in the Best Graphic Story category¹, or in other writing categories. My evil twin has put together a list of works he thinks worthy of consideration, both his own and others, for your consideration, and it looks both solid and comprehensive.

  If I might make my own additions to the list, the WSFS constitution states the Hugos are for works of science fiction and fantasy, which I think is broad enough to incorporate Kris Straub’s first Broodhollow collection, Curious Little Thing. For those of you that argue that the WSFS rules don’t say anything about horror, there have been plenty of Lovecraft-inspired works nominated for and awarded Hugos in the past, so deal with it. In the inarguably fantasy-compliant domain Minna Sundberg’s A Redtail’s Dream finished in 2013. Also published in 2013: K Brooke “Otter” Spangler’s AGAHF tie-in novel, Digital Divide, which is a cracking good modern-SF thriller. Anybody eligible to nominate, please give them a read if you’re able.

• And in keeping with the looking theme today, best wishes to Irregular Webcomic creator David Morgan-Mar², who shared with us yesterday the fact that he’s currently waiting out an annoying (but hopefully temporary) condition with his left eye. The fact that Morgan-Mar of all people would have a problem with his vision sits somewhere pretty high up on the irony scale, given that he put his PhD in physics to work in research related to image processing and machine vision, and this his 3000+ plus LEGO®™©^etc-based comics required the mechanical vision of a camera in order to be shared with the world. Yeah, comics are a visual medium, it just seems to me that in Morgan-Mar’s case, everything he touches is a bit extra visual, if you take my meaning.

  Anyway. Take care of those eyes, don’t strain yourself on the research necessary for your Sunday explorations of the history of science (more than 100 of those now, in addition to nearly 3200 comics prior to that point), and if you get any more cool photos of the interior of your own retina, do share because damn, that was neat. Those wishing to share in my get-well sentiments, Dr Morgan-Mar can be reached on Twitter, or at his personal site.

• One last bit — I am now especially looking forward to Something Terrible, as it’s passed the stretch goal to achieve hardcovers. Awesome.

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¹ This will be the first year of the BGS’s five-year existence in which Howard Tayler will definitely not be among the nominees, given he didn’t complete a story-arc of Schlock Mercenary in calendar 2013.

² Quick question: are there any other webcomics creators with an Erd#337;s-Bacon number? Morgan-Marr’s is 6, which is pretty damn impressive. Even more impressive, he has an Erd#337;s-Bacon-Sabbath number (something achieved by only 37 people in the history of the world) of 16, although that site overestimates his Bacon number by 3, giving him a likely EBS# of 13. Damn.

Just before Thanksgiving, the to-date total of Child’s Play stood at US$20 million and I gave them a 50/50 chance of clearing US$25 million by the end of 2013’s campaign. Honestly, though, I thought it was a stretch; it would require the year’s take to be in the neighborhood of US$7.5 million, or about half again 2012’s total, or an amount greater than that raised from 2003 to 2009 inclusive.

Drum roll, please:

Our final fundraising total for 2013 is an astonishing $7.6 million.

The bulk of our donations don’t come in the form of huge grants: the millions are made up of the $10, $20, $50 donations. They come from game marathons, golf tournaments, eBay auctions, and bake sales. They come from the incredible community that makes the tag line “Gamers give back” an understatement. [boldface original]

By the way, that’s up from US$5.7 million just four days prior. So let’s update the numbers, then:

2003: $250,000
2004: $310,000
2005: $605,000
2006: $1,024,000
2007: $1,300,000
2008: $1,434,377
2009: $1,780,870
2010: $2,294,317
2011: $3,512,345
2012: $5,085,761
2013: $7,600,000
To date: $25,196,670

Re: Cards Against Humanity’s 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit and hints of the involvement of webcomickers. There are more than twenty creators whose work has been wrangled into shape (by R Stevens) together in a Sunday Funnies-style comics section.

You can enjoy the entire thing online, if you happen to dig on people like (in no particular order) Allie Brosh, Nick Gurewitch, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Maki Naro, Abby Howard, Anthony Clark, Sam Brown, Jon Rosenberg, Ryan North, Natasha Allegri, John Campbell, Zach Weinermsith, Shawn Smith, Elaine Short, Kris Straub, Megan Murphy, Jana Kinsman, Jess Fink, or John Allison¹.

For my money, though, the best one was from Katie Rice, a wordless, delightfully evil little parable about Santa rewarding good children and punishing bad children. For your money, you’ll just have to browse through, and if you find work that you particularly like, maybe visit the creator and check out their fine wares?

In other news, as I write this, there have been Something*Positive comics for twelve years and eight minutes. Sadly, I can’t claim to have been there from the very beginning, having been tipped off to the brilliance of the pudding cat known as Choo-Choo Bear some time after his first appearance, probably around the time two dangerously violent psychopaths got luchador masks. I guess that means for me there’s only been eleven years, eight months, eleven days, and eight minutes of S*P, and I’ve loved every minute of it.

I have written extensively on this page about how Randy Milholland may be my favorite writer of characters, because they quickly grew out of the caricature stage and into messy, complex, changing (ever so slowly) people, none of whom can be entirely dismissed or despised. All of them, even Ollie, have reasons to empathize with them².

Maybe it’s appropriate that today’s strip features Kharisma, as she’s grown the most of any of the cast³. It’s a messy kind of extended family that Milholland’s built centered on Davan, who I’m just now realizing I haven’t felt the need to describe as hapless for a couple of years now. That’s the way that Uncle Randy works — slowly, incrementally, and before you realize it, those little incidents of not being an utter asshole have assembled themselves into something resembling redemption and self-improvement.

The really amazing thing, though, is that Milholland used S*P as the springboard for multiple other strips, each of which are just as good. Seriously, get the Super Stupor issues and ask yourself (like I do) why Randy doesn’t have major publishers offering him miniseries.

Finally, let me wrap up this by reminding you all that it is your moral duty, on whatever occasion you may actually meet Mr Milholland, to badger him mercilessly until he does the Fluffmodeus voice. You may need to offer booze. It’s a fair trade.

So sorry about that, Randy, and thanks very much for the comics; you — and they — are damn good.

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¹ All of whom, it should be noted, were paid for their contributions, ’cause CAH don’t screw around.

² Okay, not Avogadro, but he’s dead. Also, I’m not sure that Fluffmodeus is actually a sentient being as opposed to free-roaming hallucination.

³ Except maybe Mike, but I’d argue that he’s much further along the way towards being an actual, whole person and Kharisma is very much still a work in progress. Additionally, Kharisma’s growth has largely been by dint of her own personal effort, seeing as how she’s on the wrong and the only good examples she’s got are the ones she can make for herself.