When Jeph comes back from his vacation (and happy birthday, Jeph!), I hope to hell that QC becomes all #buttrocket, all the time. Add Christopher Baldwin to the list of awesomest people ever (which presently consists of KB Spangler and Zach Weinersmith).

Who wants to see the floor map for this year’s San Diego Comic Con? Well too bad, because you’re gonna, mister. As usual, you can download the entire thing [PDF], or browse around below for the guide to Webcomics and the Webcomics-Adjacent. If you’ve been before, people that you want to see are mostly in the same places as past years. As always, if there are corrections or additional detail, I will post as I receive them and update here.

As in past years, the floor divides roughly in half where the hall bends about 15° clockwise. Also as in past years, we’ll consider those halves separately.

The Low Numbers
Let’s start over to the right side of the map, which is the side of the building away from the stadium parking lot where so much offsite stuff will be found. It looks like this:

The Webcomics, Small Press, and Independent Press Pavilions are all reasonably accessible from the “B” lobby. Let’s break ’em down.

The Sexy Lagoon
Centered roughly on booth #1332, you’ll find a majority of the webcomickers who will be at the show within about a 1.5 aisle radius; some are slightly outside the orange area, but not too far.

Notes:

• Blank Label is the increasingly-disused name for Willis, Spike, and whoever’s sharing space this year, and if I heard correctly Spike won’t be there this time.
• The biggest bummer about not attending this year will be missing out on seeing my good friends at Dumbrella, who provide me refuge from the floor each year.
• There’s always a rotating roster at TopatoCo; we’ll let you know who’s gonna be there as we become definitively aware.
• Penny Arcade and Blind Ferret have opted out of SDCC; as giving up your booth means waiting a hell of a long time to get another one, this is likely permanent. Correction: Blind Ferret will be attending, but under the Comic Bento name; we’ve noted their inclusion above.

Small Press Is The Best Press
Right by the Webcomics section is Small Press. Here you should find:

From the Small Press section, you’re close by:

Notes:

• Gallery Nucleus will feature arty types when they aren’t hanging out at Mondo down in booth 835. Keep an eye out for your Scotts C, your Beckys and/or Franks, and alumni of the various Flight anthologies.
• No confirmation yet on which webcomickers will be at the BOOM! booth when, but I’d expect a pretty strong rotation.
• A San Diego without Keith Knight is weird, man.

Now head back toward the “B” Lobby into the Independent Press area and you’ll find the area where Unshelved and Axe Cop used to be. Jeff Smith’s totally a webcomicker these days, though — you’ll find him sharing space with the incomparably good Terry Moore at Booth 2109.

Going back to that larger map of the northern half of the exhibit hall. Wedged in between the Marvel and Image megabooths you’ll find Keenspot in Booth 2635.

High Numbers
There’s still some neat stuff if you keep wandering past the video games, Star Wars, Legos, and suchlike.

Give yourself half an hour or so, try not to spend all your money on Copic markers (Booth 5338), and you’ll find both Udon Entertainment (home of such worthies as Christopher Butcher and Jim Zub at Booth 4529); and The Hero Initiative (at Booth 5003). Zub’s Skullkickers cohort, Edwin Huang will be in the Artists Alley at table DD-14, and Katie Cook will be at table HH-17.

Offsite
The offsite components of SDCC just keep growing year after year; the massive parking lots by the stadium and the north end of the Gaslamp, and the field by the Hilton, are likely to host enough to keep you busy whole days.

Spam of the day:

SEO become very hard nowadays, i know what can help you,

If SEO remains very hard for longer than four hours, SEO should seek medical attention.

_______________
¹ Be sure to thank them for making Space Weird Thing.

Because nobody appreciated a running gag like Mr The Forg Frog. He probably also knows how Fozzie spelled jenglefenz, where I am stuck going the phonetic route.

• Well, maybe? It might be a callback, or a running gag. In any event, in his guest strip for Questionable Content today, Zach Weinersmith has taken the ball lobbed by KB Spangler yesterday and run with it. The mind boggles to think of where this ball — that is to say, ass-rocket — ends up. Could this be the end of brave buttprobe¹ 2015-TAYLER-AWESOME²? We’ll find out tomorrow. Oh, and in case you want the extra gag that Weinersmith includes in his comics — the so-called votey — it’s here.
• Some numbers for you: US$55,368 and 1521; those are, respectively, the total funding and total number of backers for the latest Spike Trotman-helmed anthology, New World. This total comports with the Fleen Funding Formula Mark II predication range of US$55K to US$83K, although just barely. Might have to adjust the formula a bit, but it’ll take more data to do so.

  If you want to add in her earlier anthologies — Smut Peddler 2012, Smut Peddler 2014, and The Sleep of Reason, we can add some more numbers, in my continuing quest to determine exactly how much more popular porn is than non-porn in comics anthologies. To wit: US$268,401 vs US$102,293 and 8000 vs 2913 (funding totals and backer totals for the porn projects and non-porn projects, respectively); these give us porn:non-porn support ratios of 2.62:1 (ponying up the dough) and 2.75:1 (asses in the seats). Oddly, non-porn takes the lead in financial outlay per backer, leading US$35.12 to US$33.96.

  Oh, one more number that needs to be considered here: US$400, which is the bonus that Spike will pay to each of her contributors on New World, per the Iron Circus Comics overfunding model. If you had contributed to each of Spike’s anthologies, she would have paid you an additional three thousand and fifty dollars above the upfront page rates, which ain’t a bad piece of extra change.

  Hey, young/up-and-coming talent! Want to get a guaranteed paycheck, show your best work next to some of the best creators in webcomics, and get more money that you were promised³? If patterns hold true, Spike will be announcing another anthology for next year, very possibly porn-related (requiring at least one woman on each creative team), which would skew to the high end on the popularity and bonus scales.

  Start brainstorming now. Read and follow the submission rules. Bring your A-game. If you don’t get chosen, be gracious in public and ask people you trust to critique your work in private so it’s better next time. It’s a golden opportunity sitting out there for those with the skills and drive to do top-notch work. Before you know it, you’ll be one of those best creators in webcomics that the next cohort of young talent looks up to.

Spam of the day:

My family members all the time say that I am wasting my time here at web, however I know I am getting know-how every day by reading thes fastidious articles.

I think I’m gonna have to go with your family, Sport. Get yourself a better hobby.

_______________
¹ So to speak.

² It’s canon, finally answering the question that had left the public puzzled for weeks.

³ For extra level-up points, spend the bonus buying additional copies of the anthology from Spike at the creator’s rate, sell for even more profit at shows.

Which is not to say that I cannot think of anything to talk about today; there are things worth mentioning seemingly everywhere.

• For starters, I’m working up that SDCC 2015 floor map and will get to it later in the week; we’ll also run the traditional guide to panels that relate to webcomics and the webcomics-adjacent. However, I would like to note that comics supercouple Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier are among the Special Guests of the show. That’s not super-surprising, but I just liked the screencap that Roman provided, where they’re in the same row as comics raconteur extraordinaire Mark Evanier and Greatest Living Pure Cartoonist¹ Sergio Aragonés.

  This would also be a good time to note that other webcomicky Special Guests include Allie Brosh, Katie Cook, Matt Inman, Scott McCloud, and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

• Matt Bors promised us that The Nib contraction wouldn’t mean the last of his attentions, and this afternoon brought word of some of his new direction:
  

  Introducing The Response, a new collective of cartoonists of color discussing race, class, gender and culture. https://medium.com/the-response

  The Nib retains its focus on [p]olitical cartoons, comics journalism, humor and non-fiction, and The Response appears to trade the relatively large rotating roster for a tighter group as a [c]artoonist collective on race, class, gender and culture. I can’t help but notice that at least Bors and Keith Knight are were regular contributors at The Nib², leading me to wonder if Bors managed to secure Medium’s funding for something that may become Nib’s sequel/successor down the line.

• Jon Rosenberg³ is one of the first wave of webcomickers, and he didn’t get to stay in the game by turning down opportunities to pry every single potential eyeball towards his work. Come the cool weather, that pool of potential eyeballs is going to go up:
  

  I just got the official okay to let you guys in on a little secret. Goats and SFAM are both going to be running at @gocomics this fall!

  Specifically, the end-stage Goats of The Infinite Pendergast Cycle, starting at the end of 2003, continuing for some 1100 strips, and returning from interruption in the near- to mid-term, it appears. Goats will be joined by SFAM classics, which I’m interpreting to mean the strips Rosenberg likes best, or possibly those that don’t require the GoComics readers to be familiar with the voting mechanism that SFAM launched with, which continued for a couple of years.

  This move makes sense for Jon (and anybody else that can swing such a deal, as Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett did last week with Drive) — if you have a back catalog of material to post, it literally costs you nothing to send files to GoComics for posting. More importantly, for serialized strips like Goats and Drive, if somebody reads the first dozen or so strips and then realizes that there are literally hundreds more available for reading right now instead of at whatever pace they’re getting doled out, that has the potential for some massive archive binges as they catch up to the current point in the story.

  Here’s hoping that Rosenberg and LARDK (and everybody else) have worked out some good ad placements and keep the links to their Patreons nice and prominent. I’m honestly not sure of how many people will make the leap/binge, but every one is a help. Goats launches on GoComics on 19 October, and SFAM on 28 September.

Spam of the day:

Truly programming is nothing but it’s a logic, if you obtain grip on it afterward you are the professional else nothing.
Legendario.

Every word of this is true. I am nothing if not legendario.

_______________
¹ Seriously, take the work ethic of Rich Stevens, the prolific output of Tezuka, the craft of Stan Sakai, the appeal across genres of a combined Jeff Smith, Terry Moore, and Carla Speed McNeil, the pure humor of the Foglios, the longevity of Sparky, the hustle of Spike Trotman, and the peer regard of Miyazaki or Watterson, and you’ve about equalled Sergio.

² I didn’t recognize other names, but I see that three of them — Chris Kindred, Whit Taylor, Ronald Wimberly — had pieces at The Nib that I remember. I wasn’t familiar with Shing Yin Khor, but after reading this piece by her, I want to read more.

³ My first friend in webcomics, official owner of my soul, and generally awesome grumpy dude who is awaiting old age so he can officially yell at youth to quiet the hell down, goddammmit.

So I have a flight to catch, meaning this is going to have to be short; rest assured, each of these stories is worth many more column-inches¹ than I have time to give it right now.

• It’s a great time to be Noelle Stevenson! Hot on the heels of the Lumberjanes movie news comes word that Stevenson’s webcomic, Nimona, is to be an animated feature. You can take your pick of stories — I like the one from io9, personally — it appears that toute les bandes dessineés-web is thrilled for Stevenson, and even more thrilled that more people will get to be exposed to Nimona.
• It’s anniversary time in webcomicsland — Chris Hallbeck realized t’other day that it’s been five years since quitting the day job in favor of comicking, and put together a recapof his best office-themed comics. This one’s my favorite. And Howard Tayler² can probably tell you down to the minute exactly when he quit the corporate world to concentrate on Schlock Mercenary, which strip started on this day in 2000, resulting in 5479 consecutive days and 5479 consecutive strips. You make the rest of us look considerably less industrious than we would appear to be otherwise, Howard — congratulations, you unstoppable machine, you.
• This last piece is less about congrats and more about stop doing whatever you are doing right now and take five minutes to learn something. It’s been fallow times these past two weeks over at The Nib since parent company Medium messed with editorial focus and funding; editor Matt Bors has kept the lights on and run some longer pieces of what I’d call comic strip journalism, and today’s entry by Dale Beran is as good as such comics get.

  It’s a follow-on to his piece on the riots in Baltimore (where he’s a public school teacher) about six weeks ago, on the general topic of how “normal” times in the schools are both a perfect consequence of the situation that prompted the unrest, and a perfect predictor of the next situation. Go and read Warnings and Instructions right now, and the next time somebody tells you how “they” don’t care enough to do well in school, or don’t value education, or need to be willing to work harder to rise above their circumstances, share the link.

Spam of the day:

Hi,i believe t?at ? saww you visited my blg th?s i got here too return the favor?

World of Questionmarks is my new favorite site.

______________
¹ Or, if you don’t live in America, 2.54 many more column-centimeters.

² The best evil twin I could ever ask for.

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

• A couple of people that I follow have mentioned the lack of tools for creators to use in analyzing their Patreon campaigns; of late, I’ve seen people mention a third-party, public-data tool (much like Kicktraq, which I could dig around in all day), but I didn’t see the appeal until Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett told me to check it out. Silly me, I thought that Graphtreaon would only be of use to creators and not have a cornucopia of fascinating data.

  For example, I now know that the top-funded Patreon campaign is pulling in more than US$32,000/month, that if you want to make a mountain of money on the platform, you should be making adult videogames, be Amanda Palmer, or have a massive comics audience (Jeph Jacques and Zach Weinersmith are, respectively, the #26 and and #27 highest-funded creators … outpacing one of Patreon’s own founders, as it turns out; for reference, Alex Woolfson, Tracy Butler, and Tom Siddell are the other comics creators in the Top 50)¹.

  There’s a pretty heavy overlap between the most-backed campaigns and most-funded campaigns, too (with the same project sitting at the top of both lists). I’d love to see a scattergraph of funding rank vs patron count rank and see how closely they correlate (note to self: break out the spreadsheet next week), but I’m seeing a lot of the same names, just in a somewhat jumbled order. Anyway, if you like looking at data, all of this is neat, and we at Fleen thank LARDK² for pointing us as our new toy.

• Speaking of toys, I see from around the web that the floor map for SDCC 2015 has been released³, meaning it’s time to play around with the interactive version of said map. I’ll go through it in the coming week and put together the usual guide to where you can find webcomickers in the wild if you’re going this year.
• BOOM! Studios continues their mining of webcomics creators and properties for their BOOM! Box line of comics (where one finds things like Midas Flesh, Lumberjanes, and Giant Days); this time, they’ve gone to Tyson Hesse of Boxer Hockey to revive his old project Diesel. Given that Boxer Hockey hasn’t updated for a while and as a result its story is incomplete, it’ll be a treat to see Hesse get the opportunity to finish a story without other commitments impinging on his time (he’s been doing comic work — especially Sonic and MegaMan related — all over the damn place; yay for his bank account, but I want to see his stories).

  Diesel will launch in September for a four-issue miniseries, and I’ll note that BOOM! Box minis have a habit of getting extended, so maybe we’ll see more down the line.

Spam of the day:

There is a big chance to go viral.

Man, I hope not; antivirals are expensive.

_______________
¹ Then again, two pieces of human garbage that spent time insulting the crap out of each other before possibly making nice are n the Top 30 with a really high per-backer average, so please don’t conflate dollar figures with quality.

² Oooooh, that’s an unfortunate acronym. Yikes.

³ In past years, I got such news from the press releases, which I didn’t get, which I guess finally answers my question of whether or not I was ever renewed on my credentials. I think that means last year was my last SDCC.

Ideally I’d have a third Scott to talk about, but we’ll make do with two.

• The thing about that photo up there? It was taken about eight months after I first met Scott McCloud, and he was as old then as I am now. He pretty much looks the same, but I’ve definitely got more grey than I did then. It’s maybe not the best photo of McCloud to use, because as anybody that knows McCloud in person (as opposed to via his works) knows that he’s not a solitary creature; he’s half of the indivisible pair known as Scott and Ivy.

  Whether you look back at them as little baby Scott and Ivy (photo by Scott’s Aunt Pat) or as they are today (photo by Lisa Corson for the New York Times), they are mad crazy in love and it’s not possible to separate them in your brain. All of which is to say, Happy Birthday to the youngest fifty-five year old I know. You taught (and continue to teach) us a new way to look at the world and the art we love.

  Also, weirdly, searching for pictures of you on Google results in a considerable number of hits for Bernadette Peters. What’s up with that?

• You love Scott C, right? His paintings (especially the Great Showdowns) are whimsical and full of heart; I’ve got a couple of them on my walls at home and I love them. His books (art books, children’s books) are even more so; C’s world is one where there is no malice, only misunderstanding, and even that can be resolved by staring at your opponent with smiles on your faces.

  He may have hit a career best in one of his most recent pieces — the enormous paean to Mad Max: Fury Road reduces the murderous action of that movie to a casual mid-afternoon gathering, where everyone is just in such a relaxed good mood; it’s the exact opposite of the heavy despair that pervaded much of the movie and yet it’s perfect, goshdarnit. It’s also provided the basis for a peek into Mr C’s methods and approach to painting — check out the process writeup he did, showing the evolution from sketches to final painting. It’s gorgeous.

Spam of the day:

Il est dégueulasse. (désolé je n’avais vraiment pas d’autre mot pour le coup)

D’accord, vous allez devoir être plus précis.

Today’s post is not about spam in that it’s about something that actually is relevant to this page, but which was crafted so poorly as to make calling it out necessary.

Let me back up a moment and take a trip into history. There is an expression in the newspaper biz called burying the lede, where the lede is the leading idea of your story¹, the part you want the reader to take away. When you bury the lede, you hide that key idea in irrelevant information or fail to mention relevant information up front. The greatest possible example of such, the ur-buried lede, was promulgated by the Associated Press a little more than 150 years ago:

WASHINGTON, APRIL 14 [1865] — President Lincoln and wife visited Ford’s Theatre this evening for the purpose of witnessing the performance of ‘The American Cousin.'[sic, ²] It was announced in the papers that Gen. Grant would also be present, but that gentleman took the late train of cars for New Jersey.

The theatre was densely crowded, and everybody seemed delighted with the scene before them. During the third act and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard, which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious until a man rushed to the front of the President’s box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, exclaiming, ‘Sic semper tyrannis,’ and immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across to the opposite side, made his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience from the rear of the theatre, and mounted a horse and fled.

The groans of Mrs. Lincoln first disclosed the fact that the President had been shot, when all present rose to their feet rushing towards the stage, many exclaiming, ‘Hang him, hang him!’ The excitement was of the wildest possible description.

It takes until the third paragraph to get to the fact that Lincoln was shot. Now, while what I’m about to share with you is not that bad, it’s a pretty poor way to write a press release. I received overnight an email with the following subject line:

Press Release: Los Angeles Resident’s Comic Strip Now Available on GoComics

Los Angeles resident sounds an awful lot like The Onion’s Area Man. The fun continues into the body of the release which begins:

GoComics, a part of the Universal Uclick syndicate family, is excited to announce the addition of “Drive” to its lineup of new and classic comic strips, including Big Nate, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Garfield and Peanuts.

Created by Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, the comic strip “Drive” is now available on GoComics. Kellett is an award-winning cartoonist and the co-director of the hit documentary “Stripped”, which includes interviews with more than 70 cartoonists.

The fact that Dave Kellett live in LA is not the relevant thing that we should be discussing, people. The fact that he’s a longstanding creator of multiple strips, has published a dozen collections, been nominated for the highest awards in comicking, and is an award-winning filmmaker who go the first audio interview with Bill Freakin’ Watterson in decades are not less important that the fact he lives in LA.

Note that all those things I brought up are in the release, three paragraphs later, in an attached PDF.

I hate attachments. Best case: I have to download and open and go rooting through to get the information I need to write my story (or, quite possibly, cut-and-paste). Median case: the attachment is a goddamn image (let me be clear, that did not happen here, but it has happened in the past) meaning I have to re-transcribe the information that you want to share with me so I will share it with my readers — making it more difficult for me to tease out this information makes me want to toss your press release (or mock it).

Worst case: you have some hideous virus on your computer and your attachment infects my computer, which is why every other press release I’ve ever received with the relevant information in an attachment has gone straight into the trash and the topic that was meant to be shared died unloved and unmourned. I took the risk in this one case so I could find out if the useful information actually appeared. This will never, ever happen again.

I don’t mean to shit specifically on GoComics (and I’m not naming the person responsible for this steaming pile of failure); I’ve gotten plenty of bad press releases from individuals, and from PR shops both large and small. I just didn’t expect this stunning level of profound skill-lack from a very large syndicate with decades of experience dealing with newspapers (who, after all, are the traditional targets of press releases).

Take a lesson, kids. Nobody cares that General Grant took the late train of cars for New Jersey. Although one good thing came out of this: from now on, I will always refer to the creator in question as Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett.

Spam of the day: See above.

_______________
¹ Not lead; newspapers developed the alternate spelling of lede because at the time presses used type that was cast from molten lead (the metallic chemical element, Pb) and they wanted to avoid confusion. Not that anybody would be burying hot type in the ground or anything. Look, it’s a charming artifact of another age, okay?

² The play is actually called Our American Cousin, but we’ll give the reporter and fact-checker a break after a century and a half.

I’m in a good mood today, how about you? It’s actually suspicious how well today’s been going.

• Oh, it’s a good day in webcomics, for we are at the start of the most festive time of year. I speak, naturally, of the start of Kate Beaton’s latest visit home to Nova Scotia, and the Kate’s Family Comics (aka Kate’s Mom Comics, aka Momics) that result.

  I’ve noticed eight of them arrive so far; if past visits are any indication, we’ll get 12 – 15 a day for a week or so, and Beaton will gather them all together in tall recaps when they’re done. In the meantime, keep an eye on her twitterfeed for little snippets of perfect humo[u]r, where we all get reminded that Kate’s Mom is the best, Kate’s Dad is the best, and Kate’s comics are the best.

  Oh, and the countdown to the release of The Princess and the Pony is on: 30 June, y’all.

• Alert readers may have noticed that Dante Shepherd managed to put together some appropriate comics in the wake of his second daughter’s birth; he took four days off when said child was imminent, then produced most of a week before wisely declaring a paternity leave. The first of the guest entries is up today, with Rosemary Mosco contributing thoughts (as she is wont to do) on nature, and taking the time to pay homage to Shepherd’s ever-present Red Sox attire. I loved it, and can’t wait to see what other clever people take a whirl at the chalkboard.
• Explain to me how the hell it’s been a year since BACK debuted. Time is running too damn fast these days.
• Word came this afternoon that Chris Eliopolous (of Misery Loves Sherman and the lettering of seemingly every Marvel comic of the last two decades) has had a pleasant Monday:
  

  Cosby and Eliopoulos’ Cow Boy Headed to TV With DreamWorks Animation http://comicbook.com/2015/06/08/cosby-and-eliopoulos-cow-boy-headed-to-tv-with-dreamworks-animat/ … via @comicbookdotcom

  Cow Boy (written by Nate Cosby, illustrated by Eliopoulos) released a couple years back and it’s a delight; the deal with DreamWorks makes two big option announcements for BOOM! Studios in as many weeks¹ and once again, I’m hoping that this means a decent paycheck for the creators more than the publisher. In any event, congrats to Eliopoulos and Cosby!

Spam of the day:

Buy Flagyl Online

Why the hell would I do that? Flagyl makes everything taste like pennies forever and if you aren’t careful taking it, it messes up your gut bacteria and you end up with C. diff which means months of crapping uncontrollably. A’course, this is black market flagyl, which means it’ll probably not be real and have other charming (side-)effects. Have fun with that.

_______________
¹ Cow Boy publisher Archaia was bought by BOOM! a while back.

Because you can never have too much John Allison, whether it involves the extended/extensive Tackleford continuity, or his other projects, two bits of recent news caught my eye and make me happy.

First, from BOOM! Studios associate editor Jasmine Amiri, word that Giant Days, Allison’s side-story of Dark Esther at university, has been extended from six issues to twelve, with a new combo edition of the first two issues to catch up late arrivals. This is particularly good news because Giant Days issue #3 is recently out, and the third issue is often the make-or-break point.

Issue #1, people buy that¹; issue #2, they’re still deciding if they’re going to keep buying it or not; issue #3 is where the drop-off is going to occur, if it occurs, and maybe there’s no issue #4 and up. It’s a scary place to be, even when you’re doing a miniseries rather than an ongoing².

On the other hand, it’s also where limited or miniseries get extended, or converted to ongoing — if memory serves, Lumberjanes and Samurai Jack both got their runs bumped up off the back of issue #3. If another couple issues of Giant Days show solid numbers and growth and BOOM! wants to pay Allison (and artist Lissa Treiman) a fair price to keep it going, I’ll be the happiest geek with a Wednesday pull-list.

Then Allison had to go and make me even happier:

I’m reprinting Murder She Writes, just re-read it while proofing. Not to sound conceited, but that was a nice piece of work.

Murder She Writes was one of the “in-between” stories that Allison used to break up the long story arcs of Bad Machinery; they tended to be very silly, very Shelley-centric, very good, and very absent from the archives once they went to print. The fact that it’s getting a reprint gives me hope of someday seeing a comprehensive omnibus collection of the in-betweens and latter-day Bobbins strips, basically because I am a huge completist and will make room on my shelves for the totality of Allison’s oeuvre³.

Okay, Friday afternoon — enjoy the crap out of your weekends, people, or I’ll be forced to shove Giant Days into your brain until you do.

Spam of the day:

The company founded in 1985, has total assets of RMB1.52 billion, occupies a total area of 800,000 square meters, and employs 3,000 staff members, including 98 senior engineers and technicians and 319 mid-level engineers and technicians.

That is oddly specific information about your company; too bad you never told me what they do with all that money, space, and expertise.

_______________
¹ If only because speculator types are hedging their bets that in 20 years, they might be sitting on the equivalent of Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27, or Amazing Fantasy #15 and cash that sucker in for a million dollars.

² If you aren’t reading Carla Speed McNeil & Alex de Campi’s No Mercy, what the hell is wrong with you? If this gets cancelled from low sales and I don’t see the end of the story, I’m taking vengeance on all of you bozos.

³ Also, somebody at Marvel should pay Allison to do a She-Hulk/old-school rollerskates-armor Iron Man team-up to get racked next to The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl; you know it would be the best comic book ever.

Webcomics is a relatively small group of people trying their best to live a creative life, most of whom will spend a significant time flirting with poverty (or at least under-earning compared to their age cohort); this is a situation that is tailor-made for adopting a zero sum game mentality that says If I can undermine that guy over there, keep him from making a couple sales, maybe I can get his booth space at SuperMegaConOrama. Maybe that will make him give up and go back to the day job. Maybe I can sweep him his audience then and by this time next year I won’t have as much trouble making rent.

And yet that doesn’t happen. Every day, I see acts small (What was the name of that Photoshop brush you used? Did you know you can do this, it saves me a mountain of time. Hey everybody, I just discovered this great new comic, go check it out!) to huge (I will pay my artists bonuses above what I’ve already paid them. Here is what I’ve learned about making it as a creator, so you don’t have to learn the lessons over a decade like I did.) to potentially life-changing (I will fund scholarships for my future competition.) fly around the webcomicsosphere like it ain’t no thang. As a rule, creators keep an eye out for each other and want everybody to succeed.

And sometimes, that out-kept eye requires a bit of digging so as to prevent colleagues from falling into a hole. Enter David Malki !, webcomicker, filmmaker, pilot, firearms technician, woodworker, game creator, author, editor, darling of the Maker community, podcaster, and (in context of today’s discussion) financial canary in the coalmine:

This has bugged me for a long time. I’ve received Bank of America merchant-service promotions in the mail; I’ve gotten phone calls about it; and I’ve even had firsthand experience dealing with it, on behalf of other businesses.

So, this is a small-business public service announcement! Don’t believe that guarantee. Or anything, really. Don’t believe anything, ever. [emphasis original]

You really want to follow that link, if you’ve ever thought I need to get an account to take credit cards for my creative business; Malki ! has systematically taken apart the offer made by (in this case) Bank of America (I’m sure other large banks offer similarly bad arrangements) for a merchant charge account and a lease on a credit card swiper. Short version: Sign up with them and you will pay far more than you would with, say, Square, and will be locked into an equipment lease for years, racking up thousands of dollars of excess fees and costs, with little to no recourse to get out. This is honestly the sort of warning that could keep somebody from failing in an on-the-edge business (or make failure less painful and protracted). It’s not something that he ever had to share once he’d satisfied himself as to the relative merits of BoA’s offer¹; that he did share it was an act of generosity and community that should be acknowledged.

And seriously — go read it and then understand that behind every offer that a powerful oliogarchic company makes to you, there lives the potential for this kind of screw-job. Read the contract, understand the terms, get the assurances from the smiling, slick sales-type in writing and notarized. As was observed on this page seven years and a day ago:

I was once challenged for saying, [A]ll contracts are inherently about ensuring that — if needed — you can cut the other guy’s heart out and he’s legally obligated to provide the blade.

Don’t be on the receiving end of that blade.

Spam of the day:

brandsecretーブランドシークレット

In case you were wondering, the string of katakana just says “brandsecret” again. But bonus points for sending me spam with a link to, and I quote, idrinkleadpaint.com. Which is apparently a legit site that ran a Kickstarter a couple years back. Ain’t no way I’m clicking through to see what the deal there is.

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¹ Which is to say, you suffer from having too much money and want to give some to a very rich corporation.