If you’re a reader of Randy Milholland’s Something*Positive (and if you aren’t, what the hell is wrong with you?), you may recognize that combination of words. Old Familiar Faces is the name that Milholland gives to miscellaneous strips, not following regular characters and plotlines, that he runs at the end of the calendar year or running over into the beginning of the next year — a palette cleanser of people we see only rarely¹ (and Silas). He’s done this thirteen times so far.

We’re about to hit fourteen:

S*P Year 14 will end Wednesday. Related, my comic will be 14 years old tomorrow.

If you’d told me back in the early days of 2002 (I started reading not long after Choo-Choo Bear was introduced; he’s now nearly 39 years old and still thriving) that Something*Positive would not only survive this long, but be the most heartfelt, heartbreaking, ideal example of what living, breathing (and sometimes dying) characters in a long-running comic could be, I wouldn’t have believed you. Surely not that marvelously nasty, sarcasm-laden bit of nihilistic joy and cruelty to all (friends and enemies alike, but especially friends).

But something happened along the way. It’s become a continuity strip of the sort that almost existed on the comics page. Mostly, continuity strips change very slowly, with every plotline essentially resetting back to baseline. Kids might be born, but they’ll take decades to age a year. You saw a more realistic approach to the passage of time in, say, For Better or For Worse, but the reset-to-baseline tendency was always going to win². Don’t even get me started on Funky Winkerbean³.

No, if there’s a predecessor to Something*Positive, it’s probably Doonesbury; characters we started with become less relevant each year, as their younger friends, new lovers, and children (some of which we’ve seen since birth) become the centers of story and strip. Only Uncle Duke and Choo-Choo Bear will always be there.

So happy early strippiversary, Randy; I’d guess that you didn’t think you’d still be doing this either. May your characters grow and change and live their lives (until they don’t) for exactly as long as you have these stories to tell.

Speaking of old familiar faces, KC Green dropped a bombshell on the world last night:

ah heck, heres da scoop: shmorky and i are making adult swim ID shorts out of old gunshow strips

just 10 right now including “this is fne” which is what they wanted first. short bumpers for tv and online

.@sashmorky is knockin em out of the park with animating them. and i got to work with @danasnyder for doing a voice also

I’ll let you guys in on a secret: I’ve seen one of these, the famous This Is Fine. I’ve see it with KC doing the voice on a scratch track, and Dana Snyder (Master Shake, Al the Alchemist) doing the final voice. It’s glorious work that Shmorky did on the animation, a perfect match to Green’s comic sensibilities.

Kudos to [adult swim] for seeking out the actual creator of This Is Fine instead of treating it as a spontaneously-generated meme that nobody originally thought up (maybe they could do dickbutt next). Further kudos for finding an animator that would do Green’s work justice. Can’t wait to see the other nine bumpers online, and on my electric teevee machine.

Spam of the day:

McDonalds releases a new healthier menu! Try it now with this $100 Gift!

I can’t even being to fathom what a hundo of McDonald’s foodlike product would look like. Pass.

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¹ Consider the most recent OFF strip, wherein we re-meet a character we hadn’t seen since strip #2.

² Nobody escapes home and family and you will marry your high school sweetheart and/or buy the house you grew up in. Only roadside whores ever left town.

³ Wherein you will return to your hometown and stay in the high school orbit forever, or at least until you’ve passed your existential misery onto the next generation and die.

From cancer.

One may recall (if one is so inclined) that about two weeks ago we at Fleen reviewed The Enthusiast by Josh Fruhlinger¹. I’m happy to report that the book launch party took place two nights ago in LA to apparently great success², and that fulfillment via the magical pixies at Make That Thing appears to be well apace.

That means you get to buy it now. Fruhlinger has a dedicated page at his Tumblr for the book with the full range of samples (chapter 1 at Medium; a recording of Fruhlinger reading chapter 3) and a link to Gumroad for those that like e-books. For those that hate trees and want to see them dead³, you can get a copy inscribed on mashed and reconstituted tree-flesh at TopatoCo, in either paperback or hardcover.

It’s a cruel twist of fate that the TopatoCo sales didn’t go up until deep into the shipping deadlines period, but what ya gonna do? What ya gonna do is order up a book, then get Josh Fruhlinger to sign that bad boy next time you’re in the same place as him, that’s what.

And yes, we’re a bit light on news today, but I suspect that will be the case for the next two weeks or so. Heck, you’ll probably be too busy to read it anyway, so don’t feel bad if you just want to catch up on January fourth.

Spam of the day:

Victoria’s Secret Christ.

I am having a hard time parsing those words. Is that something like Buddy Christ only with fewer stigmata and more push-ups? Anything less disturbing in the spam filters?

Pet cats Flaming to be able to “Crazy Train” simply by Ozzy Osbourne Could be the Simply Catharsis You may need Nowadays. And so, devoid of additionally ado, in this article it truly is: 35 moments connected with cats and kittens flaming to help “Crazy Train” by means of Ozzy Osbourne!

That would be no, then.

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¹ Spoiler alert: we liked it.

² At least, no reports have been received of underage guests drowning in their own vomit. The rules for success are different in LA.

³ I might be better inclined towards trees if they’d stop having sex in my respiratory passages, causing sinus headaches and misery and friggin’ vertigo.

Let’s just check in with some people we like today. You might even call this nothing more that follow-ups on things we’ve mentioned previously but it’s my damn blog and that’s what I feel like doing today.

• Last week at this time we at Fleen mentioned that Kate Beaton had teased us with the first news of her next childrens book, King Baby. From Publishers Weekly, we can now add a more complete cover image (above) and some details like exactly how long we’ll have to wait to get the book (272 days; look for it on 13 September). I’m confident in predicting it will be at least as wonderful as The Princess And The Pony¹.
• Also mentioned in the past week was the news that the Cartoon Art Museum is engaging in all of its usual activities (classes and such) that it always has, except for the have a physical space where people can come see art thing. A’course, the San Francisco real estate market being what it is, they’re gonna need some cash to get back into that particular habit, so it’s a good thing that one of the things they’re still doing is their annual fund drive:
  

  [CAM is] thrilled about all of the opportunities that lie ahead as we develop plans for the museum’s next chapter. During our search for a new home, the museum is continues to offer innovative educational programs, events and exhibitions through new partnerships with local museums and libraries.

  Help us provide the best in original cartoon art and educational programs by contributing to our Annual Fund today! Thank you in advance for your 100% tax-deductible gift.

  Send your money via their support page, or for those of you that still write checks, you can send ’em to PO Box 566 in San Francisco, CA, postal code 94104-0566.

Spam of the day:

This is to inform you that you were among the lucky beneficiary selected to receive this donations award sum of Eur 350,000.00, as charity donations/aid from the Qatar Foundation held in Doha, Qatar, to promote your business and personal Interest.

Yours Sincerely,
President of Qatar Foundation.

Odd that a Gulf emirate would denominate in Euros, but whatevs. Send half to the Cartoon Art Museum so they can get a new home, and half to Kate Beaton so she can have a herd of fat ponies.

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¹ Which, per a conversation a little while ago with my sister, is my youngest niece’s favorite book ever. Nobody tell her that she’s gettin’ a special present for Christmas.

See yesterday, grrr. I won’t be able to say as much as I’d like, and let’s not try to get pictures up, but there’s things I want to point you towards.

• Via Ryan North from yesterday, news that basically every comic creator from Toronto is having a party:
  

  What are you doing this Thursday night [editor’s note: that’s the day after tomorrow, 17 December 2015]? I sure hope it involves coming to The Fifth-Ever Beguiling, Dinosaur Comics, Squirrel Girl, Jughead, Kaptara, A Softer World Holiday Party 2015!!

  Details at the link. Secret Santa, y’all.

• Via the Boston Comics Roundtable, news that there’s still a month to submit to their their upcoming science-based comic anthology, Boundless. Deadline to submit is 15 January 2016, with full submission guidelines here.
• Kickstarter has had more than a few high-profile projects go bust in its time, sometimes for reasons outside the control of the creators, sometimes likely because projects were too ambitious and they couldn’t see that, sometimes possibly because they were big ol’ scams. They commissioned a report about fulfillment, which you can read here, and definitely should read if you’re a creator or backer. Basically, everybody.
• Compare and contrast the uncultured swine declaration (from Mort at the very beginning of KC Green’s The Anime Club) with the ignorant swine declaration (from the unnamed character in today’s SMBC by Zach Weinersmith, but you’ll have to press the big red votey button to see it). Discuss.

Spam of the day:

<blinky hearts emoji />Jody29 wants to Golf with you!<blinky hearts emoji />

I don’t play golf and I doubt the very well-upholstered and very naked young lady pictured really does want to ‘tee off’ with me.

I need somebody on the inside that is willing to help me burn your employer to the ground.

Because the new DSL modem that they sent me? Piece of crap. Every five days I have to reboot the friggin’ thing because wifi stops working. The eleven year old modem I had before a month ago? Rebooted it like twice a year, normally after power spikes.

Today, in the middle of using it — in the middle of the work day, no less — the wired connection to my desktop goes out. Swapping the cable (it’s old, but it’s not like a cable that’s protected from motion and yanking spontaneously goes bad) did nothing, as did switching the cable to different ports. Connecting the CAT5 to a laptop with wifi disabled also resulted in no internet, to the point that the computer couldn’t even see the router interface. When 192.168.1.1 isn’t responding over cable but wifi is fine, it’s a friggin’ hardware issue and not something you need to line test or have me reboot my friggin’ computer over.

You guessed it — modem reboot fixed everything. And you’ve already guessed how my call with first level customer support went. A replacement will be here in a couple of days (day 30 of the 30 day warranty, yes!), but until then my posting may be irregular. Mea culpa, and for those Verizon employees that may be reading this? Your modem’s bad and you should feel bad.

Continuing from yesterday, The AV Club has more comics that they want you to know about, this time of graphic novels, one-shots, and archive-style reprints.

Webcomics types recognized include Lucy Knisley (for Displacement), EK Weaver (for the omnibus edition of The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal, published by Spike’s Iron Circus Comics), Ron Wimberly (for Lighten Up, originally published at The Nib and reprinted in Eat More Comics), the various contributors to The Nib (for Eat More Comics, which some would consider redundant with the last item, but Wimberly’s piece was good enough to be called out on its own), Noelle Stevenson (for — do we really need to remind you? — Nimona), and Kate Beaton (for Step Aside, Pops).

That’s more than a quarter of this list of 25, which combined with yesterday’s haul comes to just about 30% of the 50 comics recognized. Well done, all ’round.

• And while we’re running down lists of immensely skilled creators, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has released a new list of contributors to his Tales of the Drive shared-universe series. If I recall correctly, we knew that Zach Weinersmith was going to be doing a story, and that Ryan North would be writing one.

  Not sure if we knew that North’s artist would be Tony Cliff, and it’s definitely news that Karl Kerschl (ooh!), Jeph Jacques (I hope it’s about AI rights), Lar deSouza (due can draw anything), Meredith Gran (is there a Brooklyn in the Second Spanish Empire?), and Evan Dahm (dude can draw non-humans better’n anybody) will be contributing. I figure that’s enough to cover then next couple of years and make one hell of a print collection.

• News of all the announced contributors to the revived MST3K has set my head a-spinning. I wouldn’t call myself a hardcore MiSTie, but I love this tendency we seem to have these days where enormously creative people in one field seem to gravitate towards enormously creative people in other fields, like a post-millenial version of the Algonquin Round Table, with less emphasis on the literary and possibly even more drinking.

  Just look at the list! Pendleton Ward! Rebecca and Steven Sugar! Adam frickin’ Savage! I saw on another list that Paul and Storm would be part of the project, and of course we’ve got Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt — the cross-pollination of pure imagination is going to be a wonder to behold. It’s something we spoken about here in the past, where a creator need not be just one kind of creator for their entire career, and I think it means we’re in for a golden age of guerrilla entertainment.

No good spam today. Maybe Monday.

One thing you get at this time of year is a plethora of Best Of The Year lists, as everybody that talks about cultural artifacts reviews what we’ve seen and what we’ve loved. It’ll be nonstop on the best movies, TV, music, books, comics, and suchlike for the next couple of weeks, and each year that goes by sees our weird little corner of the culturesphere become a little more prominent.

Case in point: The AV Club (which I trust above all other review sites) released today its list of their favorite comics of 2015, and creators from in and around webcomics are all over that thing. Out of 25 properties so mentioned, we find current and former webcomickers honored for print comics: Cameron Stewart (for co-writing on Batgirl), John Allison (for creating and writing Giant Days), Sopie Campbell (art on Jem and the Holograms), Kate Leth (for writing Power Up), and Ryan North (for writing The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl).

Is it a coincidence that these comics come from a primarily female point of view, with main characters almost entirely women¹ and a less-than-total emphasis on solving problems through fisticuffs. There’s lots about the value of relating to others on a personal level, and an overwhelming respect for empathy in all these books. Okay, I don’t read Jem because I’m not in the age cohort for it to be For Me, but the rest are all terrific.

The honors don’t stop there, with actual webcomics also getting nods: Berkeley Breathed (for the revived Bloom County), Blue Dellaquanti (for O Human Star), and Meredith Gran (for Octopus Pie). I’m on record that Bloom County was a product of its time, and think that Breathed may be getting recognized more for what he represents than anything else. Dellaquanti and Gran, though? They’re doing the best work of their careers, and Gran especially has been on an ever-better upward slope for about two and a half years now. OHS and OP have always been about character above all else, and both are delving deep into what makes us who we are; in this way, they are very much of a piece with the creators recognized above.

Most importantly, let’s look at aggregate influence; our webcomics and webcomics-adjacent creators list is responsible for 8 of the 25 total honorees — a full third of what a well-read panel of comics readers thinks is the best of the year comes from our neighbors. Add in the rightful recognition being given to the likes of Nimona, The Princess and the Pony/Step Aside Pops, The Sculptor, and more, and it appears that the creator-owned world has established yet another peak level of acceptance for the sheer quality of their work.

This is what I always hoped for ten years ago² when I started writing this blog — not that we’ve hit the Promised Land yet … let’s make sure that these great creators are making a decent living with the possibility of the occasional non-working holiday and well-deserved retirement someday — but I’ll confess that I didn’t think it would happen this soon. We’ve come a long damn way.

Spam of the day:

Rent a Private Jet in style!

Dude, the only people making more modest livings than your average webcomic creator are your hack webcomics pseudojournalists. This gig costs me money. I’ll rent your private jet after I win the lottery that I don’t play.

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¹ Power Up and Squirrel Girl being possible exceptions; in the former, half the main cast are women, one’s a dude, and one’s a fish of indeterminate gender. But the topic of the book is Magical Girls, and the dude is dressed like Sailor Moon. In the latter, there’s been an introduction of supporting characters that are male (Koi Boi and Chipmunk Hunk), but the titular SG, her squirrel Tippy-Toe, her roomie Nancy, and Nancy’s cat Mew are all ladies. The villains tend to be dudes though.

² Holy crap, I’ve spent a decade of my life on this? If I ever do a word count, I’m going to cry, aren’t I?

It’s maybe the most melancholy holiday song ever written — a little mournful, a little slow, and perfectly befitting the mood as toutes les bandes desinée-web watches shipping deadlines pass and thinks to itself, Time for a breather. You get a Kickstarter message here or there that says Last chance to update your shipping address! or All backer rewards should be in the shipping channel by now!. Maybe a note about upcoming reductions in posting frequency until the festivities are done. You know — mid-December.

• Some are even slacking off on drawing new strips entirely, but a) have the best possible excuse reason, and b) a buffer that reaches past the next equinox, so that’s okay. In fact, let’s look at the complete family portrait since It’s Babies!! (two exclamations for two babies) a week ago: proud parents David and Maggie Willis, reasonably (if temporarily) content human children Dash and Chase¹. I am as non-theist as they come, but that picture of mom, dad, kid, and other kid is a goddamned miracle, and I will fight any man-jack that says different. Happy first Christmas, kids. Stay warm.
• Some are feeling the spirit of Janus, who looks both back at the year finishing and forward at that yet to come. Some are looking further down the next year than others, as plans become announcements become action become (eventually) delightful books by Kate Beaton featuring King Baby, ’round about the equinox after the last one we mentioned. Lots of equinoxes and babies today, huh?

  Anyway, I suspect that the title-not-yet-revealed King Baby book will be at least as charming as The Princess And The Pony was. Dare we hope that this time next year will feature King Baby plushes to go along with the Fat Pony plushes? Okay, given that King Baby is based on Beaton’s nephew that might be weird, but imagine when he grew up and you got to tell him There are a few thousand well-worn and well-loved plushes in this world that exist because of you. That might be worth some weirdness.

Spam of the day:

If unable to spot the C0MMERCIAL.Advertisement under? Try to inspect this url.

Pardon me if I don’t click a link explicitly described as a commercial for a personal injury lawyer. I mean, unless it’s the greatest lawyer commercial ever. It’s almost as good as Chuck Testa.

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¹ Or maybe Chase and Dash? I mean, babies are all pretty much interchangeable, right?

Quick tip: if you’re ever in one of my classes and I say that when you’re asked to set a password in a particular product’s installation that you should write it down because if you forget it you won’t be able to do the rest of the week’s exercises and it will take more than my entire friggin’ lunch break to fix your mistake so that the rest of the class is massively behind and I become both hungry and cranky? Please do that or I will hate you.

• The Cartoon Art Museum may not have a proper home, but that doesn’t mean that it’s quiet. Curator Andrew Farago informs us that they are continuing their tradition of Winter Break cartooning classes for those Bay Area parents looking for something for their kids to do during the day. 28 Dec, 10:30am to noon is the parent & child class on Space Heroes, with an adult class from 1:00pm to 3::00pm. Same times on the 30th, with the morning given to a parent & child class on Cartoon Critters and the afternoon class given over to teens on the topic of character design. Kid classes are US$10, teen & adult classes US$35, with discounts for CAM members. All classes take place at 275 Fifth Street in San Francisco, with tickets available at those links.
• Kickstarter alert: Steve LeCouillard of Much the Miller’s Son (focusing on a bit player of the Robin Hood mythos, which appears to be offline) and Dreadful Sirens (sexy, sexy pirate ladies, as written by Karla Pacheco, so there’s like actual — but tasteful! — penetration of sexy pirate ladies) has launched a crowdfund for his current project: Una the Blade. Think single mom Red Sonja, with the added motivation of wanting to protect a couple of toddlers she’s got in tow. This is gonna be good.
• La bande dessinée est mort, vive la bande dessinée! Or, Brad Guigar is getting out of the comic strip model of webcomics for the half-page graphic novel model of webcomics, while indulging his current tendency for classy porn. Which, let’s face it, is what pays the bills these days. Guigar’s probably thought about how to approach webcomics with respect to what the market is looking for, what will pay, and what’s creatively interesting. He’s put in Jim Davis levels of hard-nose businesslike thought, and he’s shifting his model for at least the third time since I’ve known him. Watch this very carefully, even if you don’t read his comic (maybe especially if you don’t read his comic).

Spam of the day:

Too bad we must return them.

Quit being greedy, it’s somebody else’s turn.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

• Longtime readers of this page will recall that Ryan North (once and future, resurrected from beyond exploding) is one of the living avatars of webcomics, one of the trinity of the Nexus of All Webcomics Realities. He’s kinda a big deal¹.

  He’s also getting attention outside the world o’ webcomics, what with a nice shout-out from The AV Club yesterday, specifically mentioning the first Dinosaur Comics print collection, Your Whole Family Is Made Out Of Meat². And laster this week, North will be interviewing Randall Munroe live on stage in Toronto regarding Munroe’s new book, Thing Explainer. It looks like a lot of fun and if I were in Toronto I’d totally go there!

• Longtime readers also know that I do my blogging primarily at lunchtime, in and around my day job. Day job blew up when I had just finished with that paragraph, so that’s all you’re getting today. More tomorrow, God willin’ and the creek don’t rise (as my grandmother used to say).

Spam of the day:

Old Saint Nick: bring back the magic and excitement when they open there very own personally addressed letter from Santa himself!.

Unless this letter comes from the main character of Nicholas Was by Neil Gaiman, not interested. Hail Satan!

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¹ Not the least because he’s like two meters tall. That is (per the novelization of Star Wars I read as a kid in 1978, before even the infamous Holiday Special) the same height as Darth friggin’ Vader.

² The review of which is maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written for this site.