[Edited for clarity: Originally, the Takei/Noguchi story appeared immediately below the Diesel Sweeties story. It was pointed out that having a comic dealing with celebrity death before images of a beloved (but elderly) celebrity could cause a mistaken (and panicky) impression.]

The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles is hosting an exhibit on the life of George Takei, and Yellow Peril creator Jamie Noguchi is doing both the show poster, and a bio comic book that will be given away to museum visitors. Neat!

I think we can all agree that Rich Stevens (as is so often the case) has the right of it.

Vermont’s first cartoon laureate, James Kochalka, gets the spotlight treatment, courtesy of Vermont’s public television network.

Mary Cagle’s Kickstart to print Let’s Speak English continues to tromp all over the place, and having met the basic stretch goals, Cagle announced a goal without limits. For reachig US$25,000, five copies of the book would be donated to libraries; since that goal’s been left in the dust, Cagle announced another copy will go to another library for each additional thousand bucks raised.

At present, that puts her at 17 copies. According to the FFF mk2, she’s on track for a finish of US$104-156K, and the McDonald Ratio puts her in the realm of US$103K; in either case, it looks like 80 to 100 libraries are getting free books, y’all.

And that’s it; normally we make fun of a spammer down here, but I’m giving them the day off.

We’ll be back in the new year, talking about webcomics, the people who make them, the people who read them, and whatever the hell else we feel like talking about. One last reminder: I’m matching donations to a series of good causes, so if you’ve donated (or dedicated sales of your stuff) to any of those organizations listed below the cut, drop me a line.

The Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund will close for the year on the 20th of January, so let me know about your giving before the vulgar talking yam¹ takes the oath of office. 2017 probably has no inclination of being any better than 2016, so we’ll just have to kick its butt until it settles down and friggin’ behaves.

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¹ Hat tip to Charlie Pierce, shit-kicker and hell-raiser extraordinaire.
(more…)

Yesterday (Why, it’s Christmas Day, sir!) a friend was surprised by my lack of distress on the Twitters in re: the announcement from Chris Onstad of Achewood’s newest hiatus. Rather than see this as the latest piece of suck in a year just rife with it, I think that it’s an idea that Onstad has eased us into — there have been hiatii before, and a mostly-weekly schedule for the past year has felt like an extended present more than a full-bore return to form. Reading of the toll that Achewood takes on Onstad:

Achewood takes a huge give from its producer. It’s so slippery, so complex, so vast, so old, and I hold it to such a high standard, it becomes all-encompassing. When I do Achewood, I can’t focus on or give enough time to the securities I need to build for later in life, or to my human relationships. [emphasis original]

left me with a feeling approaching a regretful realization of something that had been in front of me all along, but hadn’t realized it. The highs and lows of the characters — all of them in their own rhythms — obviously take a great deal of effort to bring to fruition. I have always known intuitively that to inhabit the brainspace of Cassandra “Roast Beef” Kazenzakis is to flirt with melancholy the likes of which only our most advanced and depressed poets are equipped to confront, but that is not to say that I ever appreciated consciously the sacrifices that Onstad made in sharing that creation with us. And Beef is but one Dude from a single set of Cirucmstances¹.

And after all, Achewood has gone nowhere — an archive of some of the most brilliant characterization of the past two decades still exists; printed copies of the formative years of the strip and its most famous storyline will live on my bookshelf for as long as I draw breath. Need I add that my purchase from the gallery glares down at me as I write this, and that I regularly make Perfect Oven Fries Every Time?

Thank you for the ride so far Mr Onstad; those who read and understand Achewood and those who would begrudge this stepping-awy … well, let’s say that the Venn diagram of those two groups hell of looks like an eight. When the novel is written, when the syrup line extends, when you have no choice but to return to Achewood Court and The Underground, we’ll be here to welcome you with much crispy Stellas.

Oh, and some other things happened, too.

• As was noted last week, Mary Cagle started her Kickstarter campaign for a print edition of Let’s Speak English and promptly blew through her goal about two hours in and (as of this writing, about three hours after the launch announcement) is currently sitting at a tidy 150% of full funding.
• While the traditional etiquette books would have you believe that eight years of marriage is marked by gifts of bronze or pottery, it appears that (as with the prior seven) doodles are an acceptable substitute. Happy eighth anniversary to Ian & Jess McConville.
• Re: today’s Dinosaur Comics rerun is actually true; we also teach baby EMTs to use Stayin’ Alive by The Bee Gees, as it is slightly more positive in outlook.

Okay, that’s it for today; catch you next time something happens, or possibly in the new year.

Spam of the day:

Marissa Cooper (Gmail Team) sent you a message

Because when Gmail’s message team sends me an email on Gmail about my Gmail account they always mark it this message may attempt to steal your identity.

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¹ Although I suspect that inhabiting other characters was likely a tonic — Cornelius, say, or Ramses Luther Smuckles.

Vattu #800.

That is all.

It’s Christamas Eve–Eve–Eve, and even closer to Hanukkah, and everybody’s wrapping up work for the week in anticipation. But on Monday, stuff happens again:

It’s official! The Kickstarter for the Let’s Speak English book collection will go live on December 26th! A Boxing Day Bonanza!

That would be the print collection of Let’s Speak English, the comic autobio of Mary Cagle’s time as an elementary school English-language teacher in Japan. Brief moments from her various days, occasional repeating characters, and a slowly diminishing sense of being a fish out of water are found through the 134 strip (or about two year) run. The only thing I don’t absolutely love about LSE is that Cagle, a world-class colorist, chose to do it in black and white.

Sure, you could say that she’s just following the form of yonkoma, Japanese four-panel vertical comics, and you’d be right; I just think that her adventures in Japan would have been even better with color is all. I’m greedy that way. Since she’s promising us extras in the book, maybe she’ll do as many weekly comics in Japan do, and toss a few full-color pages at the front. That’d be neat.

Regardless, it’s going to be a fun and charming book, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the campaign come the 26th. If we don’t see each other again before then, have a great weekend, have a terrific holiday of your choice, and let’s all get out of this absolute stinker of a year and try to make 2017 less of a trash fire¹.

Spam of the day:

I Like To Play With Toys Productions

Weirdly, this was not porn spam. Crazy, right?

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¹ There is value and nobility in the attempt. And hey, have I mentioned the Six-F lately? Still gathering funds for matching!

As I note every year about this time, people get busy with family, holidays, and taking the heck off from the usual grind — I’m speaking primarily of creators here, but heck, I do it too — and thus the amount of news coming out may not justify a post every day. When I have news, I’ll share; when it’s less than usual, I may condense into fewer days. Expect much of the next two weeks to be slight.

• But before we go, there’s a bit that I really ought to mention. We at Fleen have long observed Let’s go to David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc from afar, and one memorable occasion in the past year, up close across a cafe table in midtown Manhattan. We’ve mentioned that after more than a decade and thousands of updates he produced his first print collection on the backs of a https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dmmaus/irregular-webcomic-burning-down-the-alehouse
  and the able help of Make That Thing.

  What I failed to mention is that said print collection, Irregular Webcomic: Burning Down The Alehouse (a copy of which he gifted to me some months back; it’s an odd experience, reading page after page of just one storyline of Morgan-Mar’s, even though his site is set up to do exactly that if you want) is available for general purchase over TopatoCo way, now that the backers have been fulfilled.

  The fault is mine because if you wanted it for the holidays, that’s basically impossible even if you live across the street from TopatoCo’s work camp state of the art shipping facility for toiling happy labor drones packing elves of pure happiness and light. But you know what endears you to giftees? Saying I am thinking about you at all times of the year, not just the Yule-adjacent holidays and I got you this I’m totally not late for Christmas, honest. It’s worth a shot.

• That thing I was excited about last week? The first part of it happened; the second part requires a confluence of events that are not in my control (including a general state of the world not being crazyballs bonkers) and so I’m not getting into specifics yet. Let’s just say that Scott McCloud’s habit of passing journalists towards me may have resulted in an interview¹ that will possibly provide some quotes and context for a story to run on a major, non-fake media outlet sometime next week. Maybe².

Spam of the day:

Last Chance! Make Christmas Magical for a Special Child

Sure, I’ll totally do that by signing a kid up for your “official letter from Santa” and giving you all their contact information so you can get them into your databases while they’re still young and vulnerable. I am completely that much of a monster.

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¹ With a journalist whose name anagrams to the seasonally-appropriate A Yule Band.

² cf: the world not being crazyballs bonkers, meaning they might get to it the third week of August.

Fifteen years yesterday, and it’s the start of Year Sixteen today; around for five years, more or less before this here page even got started. I speak, naturally, of Randy Milholland’s Something*Positive, a behemoth of a strip in terms of archive depth, dramatis personae, and a complete adherence to the progress of time.

Characters have grown — it’s all but impossible to see Davan as the asshole he was in strip one, for example¹ — and characters have died² and characters are becoming their own people in unexpected ways. It’s all natural and slow and organic, and it remains one of the most emotionally honest works of webcomics, every damn day.

Happy anniversary, Davan, Aubrey, PeeJee, Jason, Fred, and Choochoobear, who’ve been there from the beginning. Happy anniversary, Vanessa, Nancy, PamJee, Donna, Rory, and those that have come later. Happy anniversary, Kharisma, Mike, Monette, Ollie, Kyle, Berenger, and all those who’ve managed to stop being terrible human beings because at the bottom of his grumpy exterior, Milholland has the heart of a true optimist. Happy anniversary, Avagadro, Pepito, Twitchy-Hug, Fluffmodeus, and all the other horrors that whisper terrible things at us (including the Last Trick or Treaters, my favorite of which are the kids that show the horrors what for).

Happy anniversary, Randy; something about you invites the casually entitled to throw more grief your way than any three random webcomickers, and still you send these bizarre, frustrating, lovable characters out to us every week. We’re the better for it.

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¹ Although some might argue he’s merely a different kind of asshole these days.

² We are coming up on eleven years since the most heartbreaking moment of the strip and Fred is still kept from Faye. Worse, he’s getting lost in the past, but

There’s something about the depths of winter, the short days, that makes us seek out family; for some it’s a matter of travel, for some the journey is longer. For nearly all of us, it’s where our strength and hope reside.

• Longtime readers of this page may recall that Brian Warmoth¹ and Rick Marshall² were a couple of guys that Megan Fox Tits Wolverine magazine put on the webomics beat back when they still had a magazine and weren’t busy screwing up their business of comics conventions with penny-ante grifting. Instead, MFTW just criminally underpaid a bunch of writers (of whom Warmoth and Marshall were the most prolific) to build up the magazine’s web presence and then fired them unceremoniously, taking down their stories in the process.

  Both Marshall and Warmoth landed on their feet, though, and have done well for themselves in the intervening years. In Warmoth’s case, very well as of this weekend, as he and his wife, Julia, welcomed their first child into the world — an act of profound optimism in the best of times — at their home in the Bay Area.

  Brian’s one of the sweetest, most genuine guys you’ll ever meet, and the rarest of things in the digital media age: a damned skilled editor who can bring out the best words from his writers, while building up audiences in niche media. I’ve seen the photos and while they aren’t mine to share (nor are the specific details), take it from me that Young Master Warmoth is adorable, and will undoubtedly grow to make his parents proud. Fleen congratulates the newly-expanded family, and wishes them all the best (along with a few uninterrupted nights of sleep).

• But when anybody in webcomics mentions the word family, it’s pretty likely that one idea springs to mind: Kate Beaton is visiting her parents, and at least some of her sisters will be there with their families, and the Best Comics Ever will come about as a result. And that’s pretty much what happened from yesterday, as Beaton made her way to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia from her writerly stomping grounds in Newfoundland. There’s Mom, and Da, and Agnes, of course. Everybody loves Agnes.

  And then Kate shared something more; it was low key and undramatic, as befits the folk of Cape Breton who (one would believe from Beaton’s comics) hate more than anything else the possibility of Making A Fuss. Kate’s sister Becky warned her to be ready, and she reached up and removed her hair. It’s not hair, you realize, it’s a wig and she’s bald underneath. She’s chemo bald and that means … oh, no.

  Here’s the thing — we don’t know Becky; Kate has been extraordinarily generous in sharing her life, and all the Beatons have been willing to be part of that sharing. I can’t imagine that Kate would have done that without Becky’s express permission and it feels real even though we don’t know them because Kate’s always made them feel like they’re right there, we can touch them they’re so close.

  And I don’t know you, Becky Beaton, or Kate’s other sisters, or her parents, or Agnes, or any of the extended clan in Cape Breton³, but I wish I did. I want you to know that everybody that reads Kate’s comics (especially the silly, ordinary family comics) considers every Beaton to be The Best. Love and strength to you, and your family, and laughter too, because that’s pretty much what all the comics since have been about. When there’s laughter in the Beaton household, there’s no room for Fuss.

Spam of the day:

Why Your Soreness is Caused by “Dry Joints”

Are you talking about the solder thing, because that would be the best spam logic leap ever.

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¹ Shown here, right.

² Will, and Holly, shown here, center right in khaki.

³ Well, except for her relative Jeff Smith.

But my Twitterfeed appears to reveal that President Obama didn’t save us, so it up to us to save ourselves. Let this serve as a reminder, then, of two things:

1. The Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund¹ project continues to gather your donations to causes that will help us unravel the causus trumpii; please send me (that would be gary, who can be reached at this here website.com) receipt images of donations to these organizations and I’ll match ’em, up to a total of US$10,000. Creators that have run your own fundraisers, you count; send me your totals.
2. Rich Stevens inadvertently designed the symbol of the resistance over the summer. I’m wearing mine until we have the country we deserve again; anybody feeling the heat can come sit by me.

Weekend. Fresh new hells can wait until Monday, and I’ll do what I can to fight ’em in the meantime.

Spam of the day:

Meet Local Singles Over 50 — See Photos!

Dudes, I’m an upper-income straight white cisdude in what’s about to be a very different America. You’re supposed to be sending me spam about Central European teenagers. If I indulge in a midlife crisis in any other way, I’ll be breaking Trumplaw.

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¹ Six-F from now on.

I don’t want to count any chickens before they hatch — actually, I can’t say that I want to count chickens ever, they’re monumentally stupid birds and counting them sounds really tedious — but I may be involved in something really cool in the next two weeks or so. Fingers crossed, and as so much that involves me and webcomics, if this happens it’ll be because Scot McCloud is in the habit of passing my name on when somebody’s looking for a comment on webcomickry and he’s busy. Your confidence in me is pretty much the greatest reward¹ I have for my sometimes tortured history of embloggenation.

Speaking of tortured history, I believe that I may have mentioned in the past that I’m not entire certain what day you could say Fleen went live. It was definitely December of 2005, and I’d been banking pieces to run on launch day, and I just neglected to pay any attention whatsoever; I’ve since decided to just split the difference and all it the middle of the month, which appears to be today-ish.

Some of what we did at launch (like the contributions of Jeff Lowrey and Nic Carey) have fallen by the wayside. Although it’s mostly been a one-man show, other contributors have popped up from time to time, like the inestimable Anne Thalheimer and the invaluable Pierre Lebeaupin. Some things I thought I would have an abiding interest have faded, while others (like my unholy love of parenthetical thoughts) have persisted².

This is, as near as I can tell, the 3340th post at Fleen in the eleven years since launch, with one more lost to the ages; somewhere close to 3000 of those were written by me. Individual posts range from about 200 words to near 4000; I’ll figure 500 on average and claim northwards of a million words, which is not bad for (mostly) frantic typing at lunchtime³.

Along the way, I’ve discovered on evil twin, found at least three retroactive weirdo best friends from high school, made no great enemies (except for James Ashby, but as history’s greatest villain, I like to think he’s everybody’s great enemy) and read more wonderful comics than I can recall. Most importantly, I’ve been able to tell you (all two thousand or so; honestly, I’m sometimes surprised at the influence people ascribe to me when Fleen’s readership is exceedingly modest) about work that I love and that I think you’d love, too (I think frequently on the speech about the discovery and defense of The New from the end of Ratatouille⁴).

Eleven years, more or less; new experiences still to come. It’s been a blast, and despite every day I despair of finding three sentences to string together, I find myself eager for the next story, the next deadline, the next couple hundred words. See you tomorrow for the start of Year Twelve.

Spam of the day:

My brother recommended I would possibly like this website. He was once entirely right. This publish truly made my day.

You and me both, spammer. You and me both.

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¹ Close second — being told by creators that a review found something in their work that others hadn’t.

² The footnotes came later. My love of Brad Guigar, the blog’s official Sexiest Man Alive, was always there (sorry, Ryan North).

³ Not to mention finding and formatting the screenshots and links, an unknown (but huge) number of which are now lost to rot.

⁴ If you haven’t burned it into your memory and need a refresher, click here .

Possibly also bad, and maybe stupid¹. There’s loads of things going on. To wit:

• The second half of the Calista Brill interview is up at The Beat, and it’s just as enlightening as the first part.
• The first new installment of Kazu Kibuishi’s webcomic, Copper, in forever (the previous installment was April of 2009, before Amulet Book 2 was out) has been released to the wide world, and Kibuishi’s dog-and-his-boy team haven’t missed a step. It’s entirely in character with all the previous episodes, but you know what caught my eye? That hanging lamp, which puts a Schulzian overtone on the vignette. Fred, Copper, don’t be strangers.
• Le Millionnaire est mort, vive le millionnaire: Tony Millionaire announced the end of Maakies today and pointed us all towards his new comic venture, Rickets & Scurvy at about the same time. While not necessarily a webcomic, Maakies has had more than its share of influence on the webcomickin’ world; particularly given the demise of alternative newspapers, the comics that would have wound up there are online these days, in large part to Millionaire and his contemporaries.
• You know how I can tell Brad Guigar is doing good with his ongoing exploration of smut? He’s shutting down a project that probably didn’t take much of his time and from which he clearly derived a lot of dad-joke amusement², presumably due to being busy with the aforementioned smut. Tales From The Con has been running at the Emerald City Comicon site for more than four year, featuring a rotating cast of artists depicting Guigar’s takes on what the con circuit is like from both sides of the exhibitor table. But comes now the news that TFTC is wrapping its run and going out with a new softcover collection of all 250+ strips, available for preorder now
• But the biggest news in webcomics today is also the biggest webcomic I can ever recall seeing from Zach Weinersmith — 62 panels³ of deep-dive on quantum computing (with a writing assist from Scott Aaronson), which is a pretty damn good primer on an entire field of theoretical work, in the form of a parent and teen sex talk. Enjoy a week’s worth of funny and nerdery all in a single sitting, thanks to a burning desire to (as per the secret punchline behind the big red button) make Randall Munroe look like a slacker. Bravo.

Spam of the day:

1 Weird Trick to Regrow Your Hair in 60 Days (it works!)

and

??ir falling out? Want thicker, healthier hair?

Whatever else may be true about me, whatever my sins and shortcomings, I legit have a head full of thick, magnificent hair. I have for reals gotten compliments on it from strangers. If I use either your weird trick or your Keranique™ treatment, I fear it may turn into a replay of The Beard.

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¹ I’m tempted to distill it down to the Zappaesque Dumb all over, an’ maybe even a little ugly on the side, but then I decided not to. PS: Hi Brett and Rich.

² Case in point: most recent strip, which I suppose may be the last.

³ Sure, Weinersmith regularly goes from single panel to a dozen or more, but this is waaaay outside his usual length. Previous similar atypically long single comics: 50 states, 50 slogans, any particular installment of Ducks.