Dunno about you, but for me this first weekend of June is gonna be all-EMS, all the time. It’s time to get smarter and practice the skills you hope you never need, which is a time-consuming process. If you have anything to announce between now and Monday, maybe drop me an email or I’ll probably miss it. What kind of anything? Oh, you know, new comics, appearances, that sort of thing.

• New comic! Maybe nobody has had a hand in more different webcomics — and certainly more updates, given that mezzacotta has an update in its archive for damn near every day from the Big Bang until today¹ — than David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc), and since he wrapped up Planet of Hats a few months back, he’s obviously ready to start another².

  Thus, a note at the bottom of Irregular Webcomic t’other day about the next project:

  Eavesdropper is a new, original webcomic story.

  It is a collaboration between Darths & Droids authors Andrew Shellshear and David Morgan-Mar. Andrew is writing the story and David is drawing the artwork.

  The comic will launch on Wednesday 14 June, 2017, and update weekly every Wednesday.

  That’s all we know so far. And since Morgan-Mar himself is about to embark on a couple weeks overseas travel with limited email access, that’s all we’re going to know until just before Eavesdropper, uh, drops. Morgan-Mar’s art chops have come a long way since he decided to learn how to draw, and given his tendency towards paronomasia (look it up), there’s a better than even chance that the title refers to clumsiness around actual roofing features.

• Those in Ann Arbor, Michigan have a treat in store at the Downtown Library: an exhibit of Ben Hatke’s original artwork launched yesterday and runs through 31 August, in conjunction with his upcoming appearance at Ann Arbor Comics Art Fest (formerly the Kids Read Comics Festival). A²CAF³ runs Saturday and Sunday, 17 and 18 June, at the Downtown Library, and is free and open to the public.

  Hatke will be featured at a reception on Friday the 16th from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, and again at a Q&A on the 17th at 4:00pm. On the off chance that the firebreathing creator of Zita the Spacegirl, Nobody Likes A Goblin, Mighty Jack, Little Robot, Julia’s House For Lost Creatures (and much more) doesn’t catch your fancy, A²CAF will also feature appearances by Zach Giallongo, Kean Soo, Katie Shanahan, Lee Cherolis, Raina Telgemeier, and many more. Did I mention that it’s free? It’s free.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Okay, technically as far back as 1 January 9999999999999 BCE, which is about 73% of the way to the Big Bang. Close enough.

² He’s the embodiment of the notion that it’s not hard to come up with ideas, it’s hard to find the time to act on them.

³ That’s A-sqaured, not a footnote.

Thursdays, man. Thursdays.

But I would feel absolutely terrible if I didn’t at least point you to some very good news for Molly Ostertag; we’ve mentioned the recent Kickstart for the second volume of Strong Female Protagonist and also the release of Shattered Warrior, two projects on which she ably handles art duties.

But Ostertag doesn’t get to tell a story visually as well as she does — even when written by another — unless she’s a hell of a strong story composer herself. Getting to write as well as illustrate a full graphic novel was just a matter of time, with Scholastic doing the honors in publishing the upcoming The Witch Boy (on, appropriately enough, Halloween Day). I haven’t seen an advanced copy or anything, but I’m pretty damn confident that it’s going to be great.

I’m not alone. Seems the development team at Fox Animation has similar opinions:

Fox Animation has preemptively picked up the feature film rights to The Witch Boy, an upcoming graphic novel by Molly Knox Ostertag.

[The] Witch Boy centers on 13-year-old Aster, whose family raises all their girls to be witches and boys to be shapeshifters. Anyone who dares cross those lines is exiled. The boy hasn’t shifted, and he’s fascinated by witchery. When a mysterious danger threatens the other boys, Aster knows he can help … but as a witch. With the help of a non-conforming friend, Aster will have to find the courage to save his family while also be true to himself.

I’m not sure what I’m more delighted by — that the gender metaphor will resonate in a bunch of 8 to 12 year olds, that the rights were obtained this early, or that it’s Ostertag’s solo debut. I’ve said it about other creators and it applies here as well: as good as Ostertag is in her mid-20s, I can’t wait to see how damn good she’ll be in her mid-30s. There are going to be some gods-damned amazing comics dropping every friggin’ week by the time Scott McCloud’s target year for a female majority in comics — creators and readers — arrives¹.

We’ll include the obligatory disclaimer that rights/options/etc don’t mean that anything will happen quickly (or at all)², but you know what? Fox had to write Ostertag a check. Her name recognition just went up, meaning that her next publishing contract negotiation just tilted a bit more in her favor. She wins, we get to read The Witch Boy no matter what, and it’s a sunny day out. I’m declaring victory and going out to walk my dog.

Spam of the day:

Club Access LocalMILFsMHP Ad-Partner

On the one hand, Nnnnnope. On the other hand, I’m kind of curious what MHP stands for.

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¹ 2024, according to McCloud. I’m on record that he was wildly pessimistic in thinking it would take that long, and pessimism is not a characteristic I normally ascribe to him.

² Given the current state of book challenges and censorship attempts, I can see a story about witchcraft and a boy wanting to engage in Girl Things will rile up the fundamentalist outrage machine. Bring it.

We’ll get the sixth one out of the way first.

• I woke up today with one of my all time favorite Something*Positive strips at the forefront of my brain, and wanted to go read it again. Here it is — Lizard-Happy. Man, what a great little moment Randy Milholland wrote there. I’ve loved this strip since I first read it what, two or three years ago?

  Nope. More than seven. How the crap did this strip run more than seven years ago and it feels so much more recent? Pretty sure this is proof that time is accelerating, a situation for which the laws of physics make no allowance¹.

  The conclusion is clear: physics — mayhap the universe itself — is broken, and all is about to come crashing down. Time, space, mass, energy all coalescing into a monobloc and everything we’ve ever known or love erased not just from existence, but probably from ever having existed in the first place.

  Not sure how that happened, but it’s probably something one of Milholland’s very performative I used to be your fan until I found out [something completely irrelevant] type followers did, just to spite him². Either that, or I’m just older than I thought.³

• Five things, then. Katie Lane⁴ dropped one hell of a resource on the creative community via twitterage earlier today:
  

  New Post!! 5 Things to Know Before You Sign Your Publishing Contract

  Which turns out to be the first of five topic-specific emails from an online training course that Lane is offering on understanding publishing contracts. The First Thing is this:

  In any publishing deal, you’re in charge. That’s because a publishing contract is you giving the publisher permission to use your work. They need permission and you’re the only one they can get it from.

  Man, I love that; no matter how a publisher may try to spin things to where you act out of fear, the lesson is that it’s not a failure to say no; it’s an inalienable right, and your ultimate protection. Key thoughts from Lane:

  Every term in the contract is a request:

  • May we have the right to make merchandise?
  • May we publish your book for a royalty that’s 10% of the cover price?
  • May we have the right to publish the next book you write?

  Just because they ask doesn’t automatically mean you have to say yes. With every request for permission in the contract, ask yourself:

  • Do I want to give them this permission?
  • Do I trust the publisher to use these rights effectively?
  • If I give the publisher my permission, and I don’t like the results, what options does the contract give me?

  [emphasis original]

  Much more, as the kids say, at the link. The Next Thing will be Only give them the permission they need, and can use, but if you want to see that, Lane requires you to do something. I’m not saying that she’s following the smack dealer model of first taste’s free, but to get Things Two through Five, you’ve got to sign up for the course. And if she is, she’s a pretty bad smack dealer, because the entire course is free. If you’ve ever signed a contract, may sign a contract in the future, or are possibly signing a contract right this very minute⁵, jump on that link and get smart.

Spam of the day:

Check out hotkate97
Kate posted naked pictures and selfies of herself so you can decide if she has the type of body that you would be willing to make love to. Her selfies and pics will be available for you to view until tomorrow morning around 10:15. Kate is allowing you to see her naked pics until tomorrow: Again, Kate is not wearing clothes in any of these pictures that she wants you to view.

Whoever is sending out emails for hotkate97 is more than a little desperate.

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¹ Trust me on this, I just read all about what time is.

² They flock to him, like nobody’s business. I think he needs to hand out more beatings, as a warning to others.

³ Nah, definitely the broken universe.

⁴ Light-ning LAW-yer!

⁵ To whatever degree the concepts of past, future, and present mean anything now that Milholland pissed off that used-to-be-reader and got spacetime all broken, that is.

Things just seem to get weird on the day after a Monday off. Case in point: Penny Arcade had something going on earlier today, where if you (from my experimentation) didn’t set the URL to include both the secure https:// connection request and include the www. prefix, you got redirected to some educational company. I’ve been over their site and can’t figure out what the hell they do, but it sure isn’t comics about vidjagames.

Anyways, the P-A tech wizards seem to have done their thing; I notice that leaving off the https://www. now causes the missing URL elements to be added back in, and no more redirects. Fun!

I also had a nontechnical blow-up, in the sense that some unexpected things came together from different directions. On the one hand, The Other Gary Tyrrell informed me that we now apparently share an IMDB credit: him to being part of a particularly ridiculous sports event, me for being part of a particularly Malkidian short film¹ and apparently there’s an actual actor in there from a low-budget slasher short. So that put Malki ! on my radar today.

Then I saw today’s Wondermark and its technobabble materiel du jour, “Tyrellium”. Contrary to what you might be thinking, this is not a reference to either me or The Other Gary Tyrrell, because of Tyrrell’s First Law². It must be related to the Tyrell Corporation. Anyway, two Malki ! attention-grabs in as many days probably primed me to read Wondermark a bit more closely than typical, as I saw a terrific story about how he (that would be David Malki !) wound up contributing to a neat alternate reality game-type deal for Disney. It’s a nice discussion on how creativity can take many forms, and I recommend it to you.

Spam of the day:

Wear Glasses ? Your Eyes Are Headed For Serious TROUBLE

Oh no! Glasses secretly destroy your sight, according to this spam I got that talks about QUANTUM VISION.

I swear, scammers, please find a word that indicates your claims are utter bullshit besides quantum. It’s embarrassing.

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¹ Ten years ago? Sheesh.

² Two Rs in Tyrrell, dammit.

Two tweets of interest, from Sam Logan:

15 years of Sam and Fuzzy! That’s a long time on the internet. 3 years older than YouTube, 2 older than Facebook, 4 younger than Google.

Today is Sam & Fuzzy’s 15th birthday, but I got YOU a present! It’s a free e-book copy [of] Volume 1. Spread and enjoy! http://gumroad.com/samandfuzzy

Fifteen years is forever in internet times. To give you an idea of how much Logan is giving you, each of the first five collections are normally US$9. Bonus: as part of the anniversary special you can get volumes 2-5 for US$10 or more; for US$20 or more, you also get the giant omnibuses that comprise all of the first thirteen years of the strip. If you haven’t read Sam & Fuzzy, this would be a good (and economical!) time to start.

Spam of the day:

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Jag är ledsen, jag läser inte svenska

To be fair, he’s waiting on a previously-announced thing to happen so he can tell us about it. Hopefully soon, because a day without Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin is a day without sunshine¹.

• But we shall persevere, particularly when we have wisdom (cloaked by humor) from Boulet. It’s not the latest English-language post at Bouletcorp, but rather (at the time of this writing) the third most recent. It’s about who comics creators are, and why they do what they do, and neatly encapsulates the French tendency of webcomics towards autobio², as Boulet contrasts his own work with that of colleagues Zviane and Lewis Trondheim.

  From there it becomes nothing less than a meditation on the nature of creativity (and the importance of random, dumb circumstance above technical skill, education, hard work, and pretty much every other conventional wisdom indicator of success) and concludes that comics artists (quoting here) are all freaking platypuses. As with everything from Boulet, it’s a delight.

• Book Corner time: coming next month (20 June, to be precise) from :01 Books is a delightful young-readers-plus-their-parents book from Benjamin Renner, The Big Bad Fox. Pre-order it now. The story is simple enough: a fox who can’t ever manage to snag a chicken (his friends the rabbit and the pig slip him turnips so he doesn’t starve) is convinced by a wolf to steal some eggs and raise chicks to adulthood for an easy meal. Genius!

  Until the chicks aren’t afraid of the Big, Bad Fox, because he’s mom. And the fox (who isn’t really big or bad) gets to like (love, even) his surrogate children. Hilarity ensues. The entire thing reads like a Chuck Jones cartoon (Renner, an animator, took an Academy Award as one of the three directors of Ernest & Celestine), with a style to match. The dog, charged with protecting the farmyard, looks a bit like a heavy-lidded Question Hound at his This Is Finest as he does the absolute least possible to manage the drama around him. The wolf is menacing in a slouchy way, and the fox is …

  Okay, the original French title, Le Grand Méchant Renard, is suggested by Google Translate as The Great Evil Fox. But that key word — méchant — has several meanings listed: bad meaning wicked, mischievous, nasty, evil. But also bad meaning mediocre, incompetent. Bingo. The fox is Wile E Coyote: rangy, mangy, prone to failure the more elaborate his schemes get, motivated more by hunger than malice, but ready to find a spark of empathy and take the hard way out (a pretty savage beating by the chickens, trained to ninja-like lethality) if it means sparing “his” children distress (or a noshing by the wolf).

  It’s charming, funny, and turns more than one expectation on its head³. Many thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 for the review copy, and even more thanks to :01 for continuing to bring the best of French comics to these shores.

Spam of the day:

Beat Insomnia: The Fastest Way To FallSleep

I close my eyes and then I sleep.

_______________
¹ Which, coincidentally, it is here. Overcast, spitty rain, which is thankfully predicted to clear for the holiday weekend. Oh, yeah, Monday’s a holiday, probably no post then.

² As previously explained by FSFCPL; we just can’t quit him.

³ By the end, the fox and his kids play “Fox and Chicken”. He plays the big mean chicken, they play terrified foxes, fleeing for their lives.

In case you hadn’t seen it, NPR Books is compiling a summer reading list, with an emphasis on comics and graphic novels, and they want our¹ input! Even better, they acknowledge the existence of webcomics

What can you nominate?

Long-running series comics: Choose a distinct story arc or a well-known run by a particular writer or artist. So, rather than just nominating The X-Men, pick something like the Dark Phoenix Saga. Or if you like Matt Fraction (and who doesn’t?) you could nominate his run on Hawkeye.

Single issues: Because we know someone’s gonna be mad if we leave out Action Comics #1

Graphic novels and trade paperbacks: Persepolis, The Invisibles vol. 2, Blankets, a single volume of your favorite manga — if it’s available in a standalone form, have at it!

Newspaper comics: May be nominated as a whole. Get your Bloom County on!

Webcomics: May also be nominated as a whole. [emphasis mine]

But don’t go totally crazy; they ask that you limit yourself to five choices, which is gonna be hard. For me, I think I’m going to go with Drive by Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran, Motor Girl volume 1 by Terry Moore, Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier, and … argh. Vattu? American Born Chinese? The Last Halloween? Hark! A Vagrant? Finder: Third World? Usagi Yojimbo: Daisho? Starman Omnibus volume 6? Be a complete dick and suggest the entirety of Homestuck, but especially Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff?

I think it’s gonna have to be The Great Outdoor Fight. What do you think people should be reading this summer from the world of web/indie comics? NPR will only take the top 100 suggestions for the official list, but we can suggest any damn thing we want to amongst ourselves; drop your comments at the link below.

Spam of the day:

1 Weird Trick I Wish My Ex-Boyfriend Knew (Uncensored)

This is gonna be something with goji berries and açai, isn’t it?

______________
¹ In the sense of anybody that can fill out an online form; Fleen readers aren’t, in this case at least, special.

Let’s see what some folks are up to, yeah?

• Magnolia Porter is one of the people you really should know. Her comics are great, and she’s just the nicest, most adorable person ever. Nobody doesn’t love her and if they do, screw them. I was a bit bummed to see that Monster Pulse is on hiatus this week — but not excessively, she doesn’t work for me, I will accept her offer of free entertainment at whatever schedule she finds appropriate — but then she turned around and more than made up for it with a new comic, a whole chapter’s worth dropped all at once.

  Sensitive Soul is, not to put too fine a point on it, manga. The heroine ranges wildly between sweetness & light and white-hot fury. The mysteriously hunky stranger is instantly loathed, then she decides he his the titular sensitive soul and must be redeemed/pursued. It’s only a matter of time before Dottie (the main character) starts going gooey over the fact that Cal-sempai smiled at her.

  None of this is meant as critique. Porter is clearly having the time of her life telling her story in well-established patterns, and it’s a hoot¹. She’ll release Sensitive Soul in chunks as she’s able, which will be made easier if you care to download the chapters on a pay-what-you-want basis (minimum: one measly buck).

• The pay-what-you-want model is definitely attractive to creators whose revenues in advertising aren’t pulling in what they used to (so many ad blockers, so many reposts to Reddit or Imgur or Tumblr or other mis-spelled services), and can’t ride out the considerable wait between books and the chance to recoup some living expenses. There’s a nice explication of the whole changing model for pro webcomickers presented by Chris Hallbeck on Twitter today:
  

  Back when I first started making comics on the internet everyone came to my website to see them. Now people read my comics in many different ways. Instagram, tumblr, twitter, Facebook, mobile apps and many others I probably haven’t heard about yet. I think this is great! I want as many people as possible to read my comics the way they want. The only hitch is this is my full time job and the way I support my family. My main source of income is through the ads displayed on my websites. Now that people’s reading habits are changing, my ability to buy food and pay bills is shrinking.

  That’s the text for the first four panels, in case you’re disinclined to click the link. The last two panels introduce Hallbeck’s fans to the other mainstay of income in a world of reader casualness and ad blockage — Patreon. Hallbeck’s hardly the first webcomicker to try to get his reader base (which is incredibly variable — a widely retumbled comic could hit 40 or 50 thousand eyeballs, but few of those could be called regular readers), but he’s probably the first to have this note on his Patreon:

  Want more now? If you become a patron to Chris Hallbeck, you’ll immediately get access to as many as 714 patron-only posts.

  Seven hundred and fourteen? That’s crazy. And if even 1% of those Tumblrinos decides to kick a buck a month to Hallbeck (and that’s a pretty crappy return rate), he’ll more than replace declining ad revenue. Here’s hoping for a pretty crappy return rate instead of an extremely crappy one.

• Ryan North announced a new comics project, but I think I’ma give this one a pass; it’ll take the form of a 2-page backup story in a limited run series that I really don’t care about, but hopefully they’ll sell the completed story in some form down the line.

  It sounds really good, though, so Marvel came pretty close to getting me to spring for five issues about Inhumans, but four bucks an issue is too much to ask when I’m only there for two pages. Inhumans: Once And Future Kings starts in August, and if it’s the sort of thing you might be interested in, North’s backups featuring LOCKJAW, canine master of time and space! [emphasis original] ought to push you over the edge.

  Seriously, though — make this a one-shot with some of Hannah Blumenreich’s Spidey stories and I’ll pay cash money so fast it’ll make your head spin.

Spam of the day:

Grace Jones [incomprehensible Cyrillic text]

Yeah, don’t think that Grace Jones — the most fabulous person alive — is spamming me in Russian. Try harder.

______________
¹ Also a hoot: a hidden Achewood gag, which I hope Porter turns into a habit. That golden action is so crunchy.

Lotta signing creators going to be happening at the end of the week/start of next, mostly in conjunction with the NCS Awards weekend extravaganza, this year touching down in Stumptown, USA. I can’t recall a similar event happening at NCS gatherings in the past, but Portland is a pretty comics-intensive town so if this were going to be introduced, it makes sense to do it this time out.

Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett will be repping webcomics at the big signing event on Sunday from 1:00pm to 4:00pm at the Hilton Portland, ‘long with other independent creators like Andrew Farago of the Cartoon Art Museum, Scott Kurtz, and Shannon Wheeler. The fact that most of the signers will be syndication types shouldn’t keep you from going if you’re in town; I met a lot of them the year I went to the Reubens Weekend and they are almost exclusively really funny and cool people¹.

Along the same lines, Meredith Gran will be signing on Friday evening, at Portland’s Books With Pictures, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Gran, one may recall, lived and worked in Portland for a couple of years some time back, and also happens to be nominated in the Reubens for Online Comics — Long Form (along with Kathleen Jacques and Ngozi Ukazu). Speaking of which, today’s Octopus Pie appears to open the possibility that the imminent conclusion of the strip will end with the earth swallowing all the main characters. Perhaps Eve will become monarch of Brooklyn Below? I’d be cool with that.

And bringing things back around to the start, LArDK is also appearing in Portland in conjunction with his own nomination for Online Comics — Short Form (along with Sarah Andersen and Ruben Bolling²). Best of luck to all the nominees, and have fun in Portland. Tell everybody I said hi.

Spam of the day:

Discover the Lowest Rates for Burial Coverage

Pffft. I’m gettin’ shot out of a cannon and covering a wide area in my essence. REVEL IN IT, PEASANTS.

_______________
¹ Pretty sure the one guy who was a dick to Jon Rosenberg is dead now.

² Who may have an unfair advantage vis-a-vis his name.

It’s a good time for nonfiction books written by webcomickers — Kelly and Zach Weinersmith have Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything coming out, uh, soon-ish. Ryan North has something he’s working on along these lines that I can’t talk about yet. And Jorge Cham beat them all to the punch by partnering with actual particle physicist Daniel Whiteson to produce We Have No Idea: A Guide To The Unknown Universe, out now.

Cham asked me if I wanted a copy for review and it showed up at my doorstep about 47 hours later; Cham and Whiteson may claim to not know about the wider universe, but heck if they haven’t mastered negative-time shipping. I’ve been digging through WHNI since I received it and it is one hell of a sticky book¹. It’s also weirdly encouraging, as I’ve never felt so energized by accepting how little I know.

There’s a hell of a lot of mystery out there, from the smallest subatomic particles (Why are there as many as there are? Why do some appear not to be used for anything? Are there smaller particles inside them?) to the grandest cosmic scale (Dark matter: What is it? Why does it not interact with us? Why is there so much more Dark energy than dark matter, and in turn much more dark matter than ordinary matter like we’re familiar with?). Each gets explored in turn, laying out the limits of what we know and how much more we don’t².

Even better are the really weird questions that make you think Whiteson and Cham are just messing with us. For example, What is space? Hint: it’s not just the lack of stuff; best guess is that space is, itself, stuff, but not stuff as we know it. Lack of stuff doesn’t bend, or stretch, or wobble like space does; if you’re starting to get a headache³, just take a look at Cham’s cartoon that analogizes space as being sorta-kinda like Jell-O (they call it “space goo”, perhaps to avoid any unpleasant trademark issues⁴), it helps.

All of the cartoons help, in fact — key concepts can be gotten across remarkably quickly with a scribble or two in ways that pages of explanation (or mathematical formulae) just don’t get at. They’re funnier, too. It’s been a while since I read as broad a general-interest science book that I felt goat both the details (as required) and the big picture (without losing scope) as right as this one. It’s probably my favorite since A Brief History of Time, which had about 100% fewer cartoons and terrible puns.

It’s also more hopeful; no matter how much I enjoyed ABHOT, you can’t get past the point it’s by Stephen Freaking Hawking, Smartest Guy In History, and when he talks about mysteries and unknowns, the immediate reaction is Welp, we’ll never know.

Cham and Whiteson are clearly super smart (and between them, have at least two more PhDs than I ever finished), but their approach is infinitely playful, leaving the reader with an optimistic outlook of Sure, we don’t know now, but look how much we’ve figured out in basically an eyeblink of human history and if these two goofballs can explain it to me, imagine what all the really smart people in the world can determine!

Go get We Have No Idea, and catch the book tour if you possibly can. It’s the most uplifting description of ignorance ever, because now we (the humanity-wide we) realize how much is left to discover. Discovery’s the fun part; it’s like playtime for your brain.

Spam of the day:

Better than_Viagra? Tell-us-Where-to-Send your_Bottle!

Your product is called Phallyx? For real? Little on the nose there, don’t you think?

_______________
¹ I’d plowed through the first 120 or so pages when my neck began to hurt from hunching over it at a table with poor ergonomics; it took a couple hours to realize it.

² And that’s just the stuff we know we don’t know, never mind everything that we don’t even know we don’t know. Nevertheless, it’s as stirring a call to explore and discover and learn as I’ve read in a long damn time.

³ Alternately, reaching for your weed card and getting ready to gesture wildly and mutter Whoa.

⁴ An avoidance noticeably absent in their cavalier use of Lego and Legos in early chapters, thus potentially angering the international corporation most interested in ensuring that their trademarked term not ever become generic.

When the Danish assassins come, Cham and Whiteson and their copy editor will realize too late they should have referred to LEGO bricks (possibly with a few dozen ® and ™ trailing along).