This dayin Great Outdoor Fight history: The presence of tick-pimps, boilbacks, and yard-sleepers quite frankly raises as many questions as they answer. Such as, how many were made into cowboy sauce? I’m going to guess 250-300.

• We’re getting down to the end times here — from issue #1 in September of 2010 to issue #100¹ in August of last year, to the final wind-down of the rerun as a webcomic, Jim Zub’s Skullkickers is reaching a milestone. For the first time, it’s going to be complete for all new readers; a significant portion of his audience never picked up the dead-tree floppies, and only knows Skullkickers as a webcomic; for the first time, it’s going to be there as a complete story, with no new updated on the next Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

  It’s the comic where he really made his bones and his reputation as a journeyman that can write anything for anybody, 1000 pages a year. It’s the comic that launched a series of tutorials on creator-owned comics, whether the economics of such, tricks for promotion, pitching, you name it. In a lot of ways, it’s always going to be the Zubbiest comic of his career¹ other works since have incorporated some of the madcap insanity of Baldy and Shorty (okay, Rex and Rolf), and have tried to do as ambitious things with the nature of stories, but only here did all of it come together.

  I’m just saying, Wayward and Thunderbolts and Samurai Jack and Makeshift Miracle and Baldur’s Gate and Pathfinder and Batman and Figment and all of the others? Excellent writing, in every genre for every possible audience, but they lack something essential. They have far less mayhem, far fewer crotch-kicks, and as a result are thus only partially Zubby. Zubbish? Zublike? Whatever the adjectival form of Zub is, less of that. He set out to tell as big a story as he could², with as much fun as possible along the way, and he succeeded admirably. It’s a Zub world, and we’re lucky to be living in it.

• One really cool thing about Skullkickers was how Zub treated the character of Kusia, the elven assassin. She wasn’t just the major female character, but just generally a more competent and likable character than the putative leads. In a testosterone-fueled genre (six of them, actually), she was the rational touchstone, and she got to argue that just because the eternal archetypes of adventure are male shouldn’t mean that there’s no place for women protagonists. Then she dragged the eternal archetypes into something resembling gender parity and it was cool.

  I’m thinking about this, because it’s rare for male cartoonists to actively seek out reasons to have female protagonists³ but female cartoonists aren’t so blind to the ability of women characters to anchor a story. It’s not even so much that women cartoonists create women characters at the expense of men — it’s that they know that including a mix of both reflect the real world, even when nearly every form of entertainment and social interaction results in dudes thinking women are overrepresented and dominating a story when they hit a ratio of about 1 in 4.

  And seeing as how it’s International Women’s Day, The AV Club has done us the favor (as in past years) of pointing out some great women in the comics and cartoon sphere that you may not be familiar with (not to mention names that you should already know — like Fiona Staples, Emily Carroll, Kate Beaton, Jillian Tamaki, Raina Telgemeier, Eleanor Davis, Meredith Gran, Emma Rios, and Noelle Stevenson — who are recapped in the intro). As is happening in a lot of capital-c Comics, women are making the biggest inroads into indie and webcomics because there’s nobody there to tell them they can’t or that there’s no audience for their stuff.

  Read the article; get to know the names. In a couple of years, these ladies will be as dominant as the now-familiar creators in the intro. Don’t believe me? Take note of the fact that DC Comics lost its position as the biggest vendor of graphic novels last year to Scholastic. And Raina Telgemeier by herself was responsible for about 6.5% of all comics sold through bookstores last year. Sisters and Smile are bigger than Batman, and all the women coming up now are going to get to the top by walking past increasingly less-relevant cape comics. Rock on, ladies; you rule.

Spam of the day:

Gorgeous Kitchens – Check it out.

Attention Brett g Porter; it’s not XTC or Zappa or Pynchon, but I believe this is of interest to you.

_______________
¹ The precise moment when he shifted his professional name from Jim Zubkavich to Jim Zub is less important than the debut of Skullkickers #1; that is the moment when he shed his former identity and became who he is.

² With, it should be noted, the likes of Edwin Huang and Misty Coats, without whom the end result would lack a significant amount of Zubness. He has a knack for picking collaborators that get him and bring out all that he envisions in his brainmeats.

³ cf: Zub’s Wayward, where the current group of nominal heroes is 4 women (or at least female monster-type creatures) and 2 men; the major antagonists are one each male and female with a male junior villain. It feels ordinary in the context of his story, but it’s far from common in comics.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We learn that most esoteric of all knowledge, the maximum recommended period of time that a bird should be in the back of a dude’s car.

A pair of long-time dudes in webcomics have been at their website code lately, and it’s instructive to see what they’ve done.

• On the one hand you’ve got Howard Tayler¹, proprietor of Schlock Mercenary’s spiffy new site, which he set out to make intuitive and easily navigable (just try the arrow keys from any strip). The design is responsive, rearranging elements as I switched from laptop to tablet (both orientations) to phone (ditto).

  Particularly nice was the way that the strip becomes scrollable within a frame on the phone, while the site stays still around it. The design reveals a lot of Tayler’s approach to life; it’s immaculately built², and he credits the engineer that did the coding to his specifications. It makes me think how Tayler started life as a music producer, and parallels the relationship between producer and audio engineer as they come up with the perfect hit.

• Rich Stevens is punk rock, all the way. He’s accomplished much the same thing (the strip is easily readable on every device and orientation), but he’s done all the work himself and while he may not have the most elegant solutions, Diesel Sweeties 3.0³ does everything it needs to do as simply as possible.

  Seriously, take a browse over and open up the HTML source (probably ctrl+u in your browser) and look at the 253 lines of simple HTML that run everything. Count up all the places that the <script> tag doesn’t appear. It took him about three weeks, but as he declared on his podcast, the goal was to be able to update the site anywhere in the world with a text editor and a phone. Im’a say he probably succeeded.

But regardless of which of them is Steely Dan and which is The Clash, they’ve arrived at the same place even if they accomplished their goals by diametrically opposing means. Their websites are adaptable, responsive, reasonably extensible for the foreseeable future, and utterly lacking in comment sections. Getting shit done using the most appropriate tools at their disposal without waiting for an interdepartmental design review working group to focus-test things to within 2.54cm of their lives? That’s the most webcomic thing of all.

Spam of the day:

Great Rates on European Dream Vacations

I thought that said Great Dates on European Dream Vacations and momentarily figured the horny moms in my area were upping their game if they wanted to take me to Europe. This is much less interesting.

_______________
¹ My evil twin.

² I almost said taylered, but I have some pride left.

³ DS 1.0 starts here and runs for 4000 strips; at strip #3000 he shook up the status quo and created a USB drive of all 3000 strips. After #4000 he shook up the status quo (there’s about a six month time jump between the #4000 and today) and relaunched as DS3.0. 2.0 is for suckas.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; Ray is napping off all those sporkfuls (sporksful?) of Christian Brothers.

We had a bit of snow earlier today, but it’s melting off in the sun. Let’s talk about what the deals are, and head into the weekend.

• Kazu Kibuishi is no stranger to the New York Times Best Seller list, and if he spent less time at #1 for Amulet volume 6 18 months back, well, that’s probably because Scholastic made the inexplicable decision to release it on the same day as Raina Telgemeier’s Sisters¹.

  But Kibuishi’s done something that I can’t recall seeing before: he’s debuted Amulet volume 7 at #1 on both the hardcover and softcover lists; given the cliffhanger that this book ends on², expect to see it pop back up when the eighth volume releases sometime next year.

• Hey, you know who else is no stranger to the Times Best Seller list, but who hasn’t done a book for — goodness! — nearly five years? Vera Brosgol. She’s been busy as heck with Laika Studios, contributing to some of the most original and imaginative films in decades. But we’ll be seeing more of her own work soon:
  

  Today is my last day at Laika. I’m leaving to work on my own projects! I will miss these guys so so much. T_T

  Brosgol was one of the first people I met in webcomics, before I started blogging even, back when Return To Sender³ was still updating, and I’ve adored her work from the beginning. Leaving a place of tremendous creativity (the sort that’s got to rub off on you) to work on her own stories again? This is the best possible news.

• Mark your calendars for the tail end of October:
  

  What if I told you to mark October 22-23rd on your calendar, because those are the dates of TopatoCon 2016? WHAT IF

  I would say Yes, please and start scheming as to how we could make last year’s competitive drink-making session even better. I made a drink in a pineapple, people, and kept up the small talk while competitors wrangled ingredients, the kindest of which was pop-boba. What would make for a good successor? An Iron Chef type format⁴? Something more educational? More samples? Answers on a postcard, or at least in the comments below.

• Speaking of conventions, a schedule change to this weekend’s In-Store Convention Kickoff: Jim Zub and Nathan Fillion/Alan Tudyk will be swapping timeslots, with the former now at 4:40pm and the latter at 6:30pm (all times EST). Please adjust your day planners accordingly.

Spam of the day:

Protect Against Identity-Theft

I suppose you mean to educate me by means of direct experience, seeing as how Gmail has helpfully labeled your email with Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information.

______________
¹ Which remains on said list to this day, 78 weeks later, along with Drama (135 weeks), Smile (194 weeks), and the latest Baby Sitters Club reissue (5 weeks). She’s released her 70% stranglehold on the list, but I make it even money she regains it and possible pulls off the eight-peat once Ghosts releases in the fall.

² And it’s evil, I tells ya; the story is also so full of major twists and turns that I don’t know how to review it — even with my usual warnings of spoilers — without recounting the entire damn thing in detail. Suffice it to say that Kibuishi has lost none of his chops, has kicked the story into even higher gear than it was, and guaranteed that the wait for the last two books of the series will be the longest wait in the lives of his many fans.

And when volume 9 finally hits, I’m taking a day to re-read the entire thing at once. It’ll be glorious.

³ Since shuttered, and the domain obtained by persons of low intent. Only browse via Wayback Machine, and go no further than 2006. Some day, Often and Colette will reveal the rest of their story to us; in the meantime, they live in my heart and memory.

⁴ If we can figure out some way for me to shout allez biberonner, I will die a happy man.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I choose the believe that the retired band teacher is a warning of what things may be if Scrooge Ray does not mend his ways. In this case, by beating down on a bunch of long-time dudes and not embarrassing his dad.

So this is late, but I only came across it yesterday when visiting my friendly local comic shop to pick up this week’s books¹; it appears, much like the webcomics stay-at-home “convention” known as ComfyCon, the comics industry has put together a virtual con that will be broadcast to comics shops this Saturday, 5 March. It appears this is even the second time it’s happened, who knew?

The In-Store Convention Kickoff, as it is named, suffers from one stunning disadvantage, which is that the flyer they produced for handout in comics shops doesn’t mention their website. There are references to Facebook and Twitter, which eventually lead to the site, but that was a hell of an overlook.

Fortunately, it appears that the rest of the arrangements are better thought-out. The idea of having to go specifically to a store to participate is pretty clever, driving attention and potentially sales to those stores; there are even exclusive comics that only participating stores can order. There’s also a wide variety of guests that will be part of presentations and panel discussions, from (if I counted correctly) nine different publishers plus a toy company, not to mention the obligatory media guests (Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk).

Best of all, they found people that webcomics fans ought to be interested in: Hope Larson, Christopher Hastings, Ryan North, and Jim Zub will all get time in the program, although whoever thought that 10 – 15 minutes is enough time for Hastings, North, or Zub to be interesting and charming and erudite and entertaining as hell is kind of dumb. Then again, its not like they were singled out — the only sessions longer than 15 minutes are the DC Comics panel (45), the BOOM! Studios panel (30), and the Marvel panel (45). Hope Larson’s part of the BOOM! panel (what with Goldie Vance getting ready to launch), so there may actually be time to say something, given that there are four other people speaking with her.

To be honest, the scheduling and durations [PDF] are a bit concerning. The very short times (along with the disclaimer that times and schedules are subject to change) makes me wonder if some of the less well-known guests might serve the role of cushioning to allow for last-minute shifts in the big names (your Matts Fraction or Kellys Sues DeConnick, for example, who themselves are only allocated 15 minutes total what the hell people). A technical issue here or there, might they decide to cancel somebody with less industry pull than Brian Michael Bendis or Dan Didio to get back on schedule²? That would be unfortunate.

Those caveats aside, it’s an ambitious eight hours planned, and I’ll be curious to see how it turns out. If you have questions for any of the creators, you can tweet them to #ConKickoff2016.

Spam of the day:

These astronomers gathered X-ray data utilizing the orbiting Chandra X-ray
Observatory and brightness information from
one in every of TSU’s automated telescopes in southern Arizona, hoping to measure the age of
the star.

It’s really less spam and more free verse.

_______________
¹ Book of the week: Giant Days #12, where John Allison cliffhangered me and made me sniffly for Esther DeGroot, my favorite of all his creations. Except maybe Shauna and Lottie when they’re fixing time and space.

² Also a concern: there are few breaks allocated between sessions³. Things go over? Maybe there’s a cushion before the next session, maybe not. Somebody’s in the middle of a great story? Next person doesn’t get their ten minutes. I think there may be an overestimation as to the reliability of streaming software on the various computers of 37 different people.

³ Specifically, there are 26 events scheduled, with nine irregularly-spaced breaks:

• Opening keynote speaker Jim Lee ends at 12:15, the Dynamite panel starts at 12:20
• The Dynamite panel ends at 12:35, the Valiant panel starts at 12:40
• The DC panel ends at 1:50, Skottie Young starts at 1:55
• The Top Cow panel ends 3:25, Dan Jurgens starts at 3:30
• The Dark Horse panel ends at 4:20, Ryan North starts at 4:25
• Fillion & Tudyk end at 4:55, the Marvel panel starts at 5:00
• The Marvel panel ends at 5:45, the Zenescope panel starts at 5:50
• Jim Zub ends at 6:45, Mike Deodato starts at 6:50
• The IDW panel ends at 7:45, closing keynote speaker Kevin Eastman starts at 7:55

It appears that if you are a publisher with a panel or if you are a very famous person, you can run long. Everybody else is out of luck. And yes, by this measure Jim Zub is a very famous person; glad I’m not the only one that thinks so.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I remain conflicted to this very day what the most disconsolate part of this tableau is — the smallness of the snack tent? The underwhelming nature of the “feast”? The lone spork? They could have at least made some “Dinosaur” Potato Chuds.

• It was in the early morning hours of yesterday — having twins means he’s on Baby Duty until 5:00am — that David Willis launched the Kickstarter for his fifth Dumbing of Age book, which funded out before he went to sleep. Hardly surprising, as the prior four DoA books have funded like clockwork (at rates of 273% to 370% of goal), although I don’t recall one funding out in less than eight hours before.

  It also doesn’t hurt that Willis puts together his books and sends out his stuff on time; as a result, he generally increases his backer count by about 600 folks from book to book, meaning the just under 700 backers and 177% achievement on a US$22,000 goal (as of this writing) is just an ordinary outcome for him. Checking out the ol’ FFFmk2, we’re looking at US$120K to 180K, which would be in the range of double his previous best funding level.

  Then again, he’s already go more backers than his first collection, and will likely come up with 2 to 3 times as many by the time the campaign ends in 28 days; if the per-backer averages hold, he’d be looking at US$78K to US$117K, and he hasn’t yet unlocked all the stretch goals, the things that convince people to move from intangible rewards to physical rewards. It appears that the twins need not worry about starving before their first birthday.

• Something else that need not be worried about? That Fleen readers will be uninformed about the goings-on in Eurocomics, thanks to Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who has a choice recommendation for us:
  

  Tim from acupoftim.com draws pages about a number of matters, from his admiration of Maddox to what became of Totoro to figuring out what the deal is with these darn squirrels, but he is best known for stories on his various workplaces and coworkers, published in Quotidien Survival.

  He also had a side blog, Glauque-Land, where he publishes photos of his explorations of various urban ruins and other abandoned buildings. Which caught the interest of a Flammarion imprint, and today they are releasing a book of his photos, with accompanying text and illustrations he created for this purpose.

  Maybe more interesting than the publication by itself is the story he published (as comics on his site, of course) of the whole process from his side, especially his attempts to keep a level head and dealing with not being in control of everything. Check them out if you can read French.

  My French is rusty, but you ain’t need to read French in order to see what the squirrels are up to — no good is what. Doesn’t matter if they’re French or otherwise, squirrels are not to be trusted. And curiously, this appears to be one area where animals outside Australia are more dangerous than those inside Australia … this should indicate how incredibly evil and malicious the little brush-tailed bastards really are.

Spam of the day:

Verizon Services FREE 30-day HBO NOW® trial – Let the binging begin

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No. Get bent, Verizon. I’ll let SquirrelCo put their lines into my house before I upgrade my service with you.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray is getting a bit full of himself with Beef and showing depths that, if not quite hidden, reveal insight into his heritage. Also, we learn all there is to know about Bob Raffles.

• If I didn’t have a strict policy about what goes at the top of posts where there is an anniversary strip from the Great Outdoor Fight, I know for an absolute fact that today’s post would be the results of me playing around with my new favorite online toy. Which toy? I hear you ask — let’s let Kate Beaton fill you in:
  

  now you can actually play with my @TorontoComics paper doll! torontocomics.com/news/announcing-the-kate-beaton-digital-paper-doll/

  Yes! The delightful show poster that Beaton did for TCAF is now interactive, complete with music, encouraging voice-overs, and screenshot capability. And in case the pictures are just too darn small for you, creator (and TCAF staffer) Kim Hoang made a fullscreen version available at her site. Just don’t blame me if you’re playing dress-up for the rest of the day.

• It’s Will Eisner Week, an annual recognition of the innumerable contributions made to comics by Will Eisner, timed to coincide with his 6 March birthday¹. Events are going on around the world between now and next Monday, and the good folks at the Cartoon Art Museum aren’t letting a little thing like a lack of gallery space keep from recognizing the master and his works. CAM invites you out to Mission: Comics and Art (2250 Mission Street, San Francisco) on Sunday for their celebration.

  The centerpiece of the event (which runs 2:00pm to 4:00pm) will be a panel discussion between prominent Bay Area creators Steve Englehart, Al Gordon, John Heebink, Mario Hernandez, and Steve Leialoha, free and open to the public. For those that might have favorite stories and characters created by these longtime pros, there will be a signing that follows immediately after. And heck, it’s The Mission, so I imagine people will be going for drinks after.

Spam of the day:

Prevent Your Fatal Heart Attack: Watch For These Signs

Sorry, but for some reason I don’t believe that “Princeton Health” (is that supposed to make me think you’re actually University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, or possibly Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, which is the fictional hosptial from House?) really has an email address at mkvtqh2.[redacted].xyz … call it a hunch. Try harder, spammers.

________________
¹ Eisner would have been 99 this year, which means you should start planning on how to celebrate his centenary next year, oh, now-ish.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; there was no 29th of February in 2006.

Please forgive any autocorrections that remain.

• Happy twelfth birthday to my Evil Twin, Howard Tayler. It’s gotta be rough only having a birthday every four years, but aging at one fourth the rate of the rest of us is a decent tradeoff. He’s youthful to the point that I suspect he may actually be aging backwards. In any event, may I suggest that you celebrate by reading his entire archive from the beginning? If you read four strips a day, you should be done by the next time his birthday comes around.
• It entirely makes sense that The Woz is starting a comics convention in Silicon Valley. It makes even more sense that a passel of Bay Area webcomickers will be doing a podcast panel together On whether a webcomickers can form the basis of an arts career. The panel in question will take place at high noon on Sunday, 20 March at the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con, in the San Jose Convention Center’s Room 2. New shows are always an unknown factor, but I’m guessing that the well-known geek tendencies of The Woz, plus the fact that he’s pretty damn rich, give SVCC a better than even shot at being well-run out of the gate.
• Well, dammit. I had a whole bit here about how Thought Bubble had announced its first slate of guests, including Faith Erin Hicks and The Toronto Man-Mountain, but a mis-timed choice to pay attention to the jury room manager means I wiped it accidentally. Look, just get your tickets for Leeds the first week of November (with the comic convention proper on the 5th and 6th); the middle part of England is nice then.

Spam of the day:

This is Genovera Killings. I’m in town. SHALL WE MEET Gary Ty Rrell?

Well gosh, how can I say no to somebody that says she saw my pictures on Facebook and needs a real cutie to give her “luv” and also is totally named like a James Bond femme fatale that fucks dudes to death? Sign me up, totally legit Russian dating site!

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Vlad is entirely correct. Is SO cool.

But mostly because I feel like it, dammit.

• David Malki ! is in the mood to give stuff away, and you’re in a position to take advantage. For the obsessive completists out there (cough, cough), Malki ! has announced that his new series of “cast cards” — little plaques of what appears to be fiberboard, with a colorful, Wondermarkesque character attached to the front — is about to get larger, thanks to the introduction of a subscription program at his Patreon. But there is also a new, non-subscription-based card that some of you can get for free right now:
  

  If you own five or more Wondermark books, you are a Library Ace right now! You qualify to get one of these cards, for free, to commemorate your great achievement!

  To claim your card, take a cool picture of your five (or more) Wondermark books. I wanna see what you got, and show your collection to other people too!

  Then: tweet your picture with #libraryace, and tag either @malki or @wondermarkfeed. (And make sure you’re following one or both of of those accounts, so I can DM you your claim instructions once I see your post!)

  And if you don’t own at least five Wondermark books, Malki ! is coincidentally running a 13-day sale in advance of Wondermark’s 13th anniversary; it’s also approximately the 10th anniversary of the Machine of Death (the original Dinosaur Comics strip was run in December of 2005, but the idea for an anthology of MoD stories dates to about this time, 2006), so you can get MoD stuff for cheaps, too.

  Specifically, you can get any three Wondermark books for eighteen dollars, and ten bucks will get you either MoD anthology, the base card game, or the expansion set. Everything’s at the Wondermark store until 9 March.

• We at Fleen have mentioned Josh Fruhlinger’s delightful debut novel, The Enthusiast, on several occasions. It was the hit of the publishing season among people that heard of it and bought it and read it and enjoyed it; now those same people can drag their friends to the just-announced Enthusiast book tour, which will take Fruhlinger to four cities of personal significance.

  He’ll start on 26 April in Washington, DC (where the book takes place), then making his way to Baltimore (Frulinger was a longtime Charm City resident, including the time he wrote the book), Brooklyn (home of his cover illustrator, Matt Lubchansky, plus who doesn’t want to visit Brooklyn in the spring?), and finishing in Buffalo (home of the future Josh Fruhlinger Birthplace National Monument) on 5 May. Come meet Fruhlinger (enthusiastically), get your book signed (enthusiastically), shoot the shit about Mary Worth or whatever (enthusiastically), and let other people know where your enthusiasms lie.

Spam of the day:

We have had so many people wanting to help run or support blood drives for Free Tickets to the Vans Warped Tour, our staff is working over time. All free tickets will be earned and set up with the blood centers. With this many of you committed to helping, it’s going to take us a couple weeks to sort through everyone and connect you to running blood drives.

Why am I being offered a shot at free and VIP tickets for the Warped Tour? Oh shit, did I sign up to run a blood drive and forget it? Do I have to be a sneering, hipster-glasses-wearing, Day-Glo snakeheaded Medusa to qualify? That’s what your email implies.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; I imagine that the residents of 62 Achewood Court are starting to gather around Téodor’s computer.

Typing this via phone because I still don’t have phone or network. Reminder: Monday, I have jury duty and may not be able to post.

Spam Goddamned lie of the day:

Thank you for choosing Verizon, we appreciate the opportunity to serve you.

First of all, you have a monopoly, there’s no choice at all. Second, you have nothing but contempt for your customers and appreciate nothing but the multiple billions of profit you make each quarter. Lastly, fuck you.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: no strip; the Tenmen are rocking it, though.

Three (3) returns to form that I wanted to mention today, as three (3) of my favorite webcomickers release evidence of getting back to their roots after far too long away. Plus one technology story because sometimes things don’t fit into the theme neatly.

• First up, Karl Kerschl wrapped up his contributions to Gotham Academy with issue #12 back in December, leading people like me to wonder when we’d see new updates to The Abominable Charles Christopher; as he told me about 18 months ago, he’s got about a year of storyline left to go, and that means he’s got just about the perfect amount of time to finish the story, put together Book 3, and debut it for the Summer 2017 con season.

  Granted, he hasn’t made any formal announcement yet, but why else would he be drawing critters? It could only be more obvious if this fox were instead my beloved Luga, or perhaps Sissi Skunk. Time will tell, but we at Fleen are cautiously optimistic.

• It’s been too long time since Boy On A Stick And Slither was a regular thing, with bursts of strips in Spring 2015, pre-Summer 2011, and Halloweenish 2010 tiding us over. Steven Cloud, beard-haver extraordinaire and world traveler of renown, is signaling that public-type drawing is perhaps becoming a regular thing again. Instead of comics leading to a punchline or a philosophical point, Cloudy is Instagramming space bases and dream houses along with the occasional cryptozoological treatise. These drawings will make you find your inner 11 year old dreamer.
• Rich Stevens, having hit 4000 comics last week, has been running some of his favorite comics from days past (with a plan to do so for a couple of weeks) while he retools and decides how to relaunch. He doesn’t seem to be talking about a reboot (which he did before, in conjunction with his foray into syndication back around Aught-Seven) so much as redoing his infrastructure. What will make his comics look as they should on a phone or a tablet, as you can no longer count on everybody browsing by with a monitor at least 1024 pixels wide?

  He’s been talking about the need to rework his site with adaptability in mind on his podcast with Danielle Corsetto, and he’s determined to make things as simple and functional as possible. I believe I heard him mention a standard of being able to update with a text editor and a phone — no fancy CMS for Stevens, no sir; I only just hope that the need to make things look good on phones doesn’t mean we lose out on strips like this one¹.

• What may turn out to be a decent method of distributing longer comic book-type comics to phones (with the promise of payments to creators, but I guarantee it’s not updateable with a text editor) gets off to a start today: Stela is all about mobile delivery, and that is the entire extent of what I know about it because it’s not launching with an Android version. Somebody with an iPhone let me know if it’s worth anything because hell if I know.

Spam of the day:

Thank you garytyrrellat Red Lobster SurveyPartners!

Why am I being invited to Red Lobster? Oh shit, did I fuck someone good and manage to forget it?

_______________
¹ We will leave his uncharitable attitude towards New Jersey to the side for the moment.