It’s a bit of a roundup today, folks.

• See! For those of you in Pittsburgh-adjacent areas, the ToonSeum is running a Little Nemo exhibit through 28 June; specifically, an exhibit of tribute and inspired-by works by some of the great contemporary comics artists, taken from the award-winning anthology Nemo, from Locust Moon Press. If I were on the correct side of Pennsylvania, I’d drop in just to see what Carla Speed McNeil was doing with Slumberland as inspiration.
• Do! Update your links and feeds for regular Nib contributors who are now scattered to the nine vectors. Thanks to alert reader Craig L, we now have GoComics (ugh, but you gotta take what you can get) links for Brian McFadden, Shannon Wheeler, Jen Sorenson, Matt Bors, and Gemma Correll’s Four Eyes strips. Also, a link to Correll’s Tumblr, which supports RSS. Many thanks, Craig!
• See! A list of exhibitors at this weekend’s Special Edition NYC, the comics-centric comics show that’s in its second year as an adjunct to the much larger (and not all that comics-focused) New York Comic Con. I’ve actually heard good things about SENYC, about it being on a more humane scale than the megashows, and how the roster of guest and programming are blessedly free of wrestlers, videogame marketers, and TV shills. In any event, circumstances outside my control have conspired to keep me from being able to attend last year or this year, but you should go if you’re in town, because there’s going to be a healthy webcomics (and webcomics-adjacent) presence, including TopatoCo and Periscope creators.

  On the floor, you’ll find the likes of Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Brad Guigar, Brandon Bird, Chris Giarrusso, Dean Haspiel, Dylan Meconis¹, some combination of Mike Isenberg, Oliver Mertz, Daniel Lapham, and Jeff McComsey, Jeph Jacques, Jim Zub², Karl Kerschl, Kate Leth, Lucy Bellwood, Meredith Gran (Sunday only), Molly Ostertag, Phil Foglio, Ramón Pérez, and more! Heck, there’s even a Webcomics Fans meetup on the schedule.

  Speaking of schedules, webcomickers are going to be all over the Freelance Like A Rock Star panel (Saturday, 3:45pm, Theater 2, featuring Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire³), and Creating Comics: The Real Stories (Sunday, 2:30pm, Theater 1). Zub will be on three panels in case you can’t get enough of him — and honestly, how could you?

• Do! Make a note for about February, to send me an email yelling at me to clear my weekend for Special Edition next year, on account of I’m clearly missing out. Thanks for that.

Spam of the day:
Okay not quoting from this one. Unlike the PR email I got yesterday that was wildly inappropriate for this blog, I got an email that was relevant, but put me off for a different reason. Namely, the subject line was A desperate attempt to get your eyeballs on my shameless self-promotion.

Don’t do that. Not the self-promotion part, not the shameless part, but the desperate part. You shouldn’t be desperate to get my attention — you have something that you want me to cover? Let me know. I’ll cover it, or I won’t, but anybody that you want to pay attention to your work can smell desperation (even when you don’t state it outright) from 1.61km away, and it’s not an attractive smell. Being desperate to get my attention is like telling somebody This is my work but it sucks, I’m terrible. STOP DOING THAT.

I am not naming the person(s) that sent my that email. I’ll cover them in the coming days/weeks, or I won’t, and if I do I won’t ever say that they’re the offender(s) in this situation. I’m not going to hold this subject line against them, I’ll cover them (or not) based on the quality and newsworthiness of what I find … but seriously, don’t do that.

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¹ Dylan Meconis is going to be on my coast and I’m going to miss seeing her! This is killing me.

² Who is in the middle of this list instead of the end, thanks to SENYC listing creators by first name.

³ Dylan Meconis and Katie Lane are going to be on my coast and I’m going to miss seeing them! I’m already dead.

It’s been odd, the past half-week or so: The Nib has been quiet, with no comics more recent than three or four days, a sad echo of what was the best congregator of editorial comics, story comics, confessional comics, comics journalism, and just plain comics¹ that we’ve seen come down the pike for a good long time. And they paid. We knew the end was coming, but it’s still disturbing to see the final week’s entries getting older. There was a new comic from (once and possibly still) site editor Matt Bors today, but it wasn’t his usual editorial work, more a randomized snark.

In a way, it’s a perfect companion to the new focus that Nib overlords at Medium want — more social, less contextual, more likely to be shared and digested in a quick bite than require some time and thought. Said overlords changed their minds about what they wanted from The Nib once, maybe they’ll change them again — or at least decide to take a hands-off approach to Bors’s editorial vision. Maybe he can get the band back together. Maybe it wasn’t just a fleeting moment that we’ll never have again. At least they went out with sharp elbows and some of their best work even as the lights were being turned off.

Happier notes:

• If ever somebody doesn’t get why Oh Joy, Sex Toy [Not Safe If Your Work Is Insufficiently Awesome] is wonderful, show them today’s strip. I don’t know if I’m more in love with Erika’s description of the doodad² or the illustration of the pokébattle³ at the end, which she has seen to provide a mostly SFW version of at her twitterfeed. I don’t need a device that tracks how I’m doing my Kegel exercises, but thanks to this comic, I kind of want one.
• Speaking of things I didn’t realize I wanted: of all the webcomickers that have drifted away from my daily attention, probably none has been so neglected as Marc Ellerby, creator of the long-wrapped Ellerbisms. I don’t know what it is — I like Ellerby’s work a whole lot, but if I don’t actively pay attention to him, he just slips off my radar for embarrassingly long intervals. The upside to this is I sometimes find in my absence, he’s completed entire works of comics that I get to enjoy all at once.

  Or maybe I’m lucky enough to catch a retweet of an announcement, such as this morning when Ellerby let us know that Gumroad has pay what you want pricing for Ellerbisms and Chloe Noonan. Ellerby’s Gumroad store is here and there I learn — holy crap! — that Ellerby is also illustrating for the Ricky & Morty comic book (makes sense — his style is right up the R&M alley). So go give him some attention and — more importantly — money.

• I am behind on the news that Lumberjanes is being made into a movie; I could claim that I wanted to wait a couple of days to see if there would be any women assigned to the early creative effort, like pairing up with (or replacing) the screenwriter, but nothing since the news broke last week. That’s not really it, though — I saw the news last week and inexplicably didn’t write about it. Anyway. Lumberjanes is great, and if somebody on the inside can confirm something that I’ve been wondering about since the news hit — do Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, and Shannon Watters get paid as a result of the rights sale, or just BOOM!? — then all will be well (assuming I get the answer I want, namely, yes, the ladies are cashing big checks of screw this! money).

Spam of the day:
No quote, but a story. I got an email from a PR firm (bad start) that obviously just sent out a blast to every blog it could find regardless of relevance (gettin’ worse), asking me to consider covering the story of a 72 year old opera singer who is recording her first album and has only eight days left on her Kickstarter to reach funding. But the thing that tells me that this PR flack that I’m not going to name is very bad at her job is the fact that she didn’t include a goddamn link to the goddamn Kickstarter.

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¹ Man, I’m gonna miss having Gemma Correll delivered straight to my brain.

² A FitBit for your ClitBits.

³ Of course it’s Squirtle. I see what you did there, Erika.

Because it’s not a person, there’s no body to bury … and if it were, it’d be the type of person to claw its way out of the grave and snack on the mourners at the funeral for maximum surprise. Joey and Emily are just spontaneous like that.

So here we stand: after one thousand two hundred and forty-three perfect little pillows of hope/despair, melancholy/sanguinity, sexiness/moresexiness, Emily Horne and Joey Comeau leave behind the project that has brought them some measure of internet fame, some measure of internet wealth¹, and critical adoration. Tomorrow’s going to be a less weird place, knowing that they aren’t conspiring together to put exactly the right words and photos together for maximum discomfort, disturbance, and serenity².

Instead, tomorrow they’ll be conspiring together to come up with exactly the right mix of comics for their retrospective collection, Anatomy of Melancholy, the Kickstarter for which will be open for another three hours or so (as I write this). At present, the campaign sits at a hair over US$230,000 which is a good 25 grand higher than the FFFmk2 predicted; it appears that they never added a stretch goal that amounted to We get to choose the good ramen for once, which personally I would have loved to have seen. It’s never good when a Kickstart fails to meet its obligations to backers, but if ever two people were perfectly suited to take a quarter-mil (minus fees) on the lam and never be heard from again, I’d say it’s Joey and Emily. It would be perfect.

But alas, everybody is gonna get exactly what they paid for, and Horne & Comeau will hopefully make a modest profit, but never enough to make up for the dozen years of toil and privation. Thanks for sharing what was inside you, I’m sincerely sorry it didn’t make you rich and famous, and remember — when faking your own death to make off with the money, the secret is to cut all ties with friends and family³. Just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

Bosley Special Anniversary Offer

Seriously, hair replacement? I need hair replacement less than I need to drop 26 pounds for bikini season. The only spam I’ve gotten that’s more wrong-headed was the one with the return address Racy Ukrainian Girls and the subject line Russian Girls are Pursuing Western Bachelors, Communicate Free Today Only. Russians and Urkainians are not the same, idiots!

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¹ That is, minimal, but neither of them starved to death or died of exposure.

² Except for the fact that they hit a stretch goal and will do five comics randomly over the next year.

³ I know Ryan says he can keep your secret, but he’ll slip up. Safer to just disappear.

• Alison Wilgus, one of the new invitees to TopatoCon, was kind enough to drop a comment on yesterday’s post to let us know that there are still more new invitees to TopatoCon that we at Fleen missed.

  Aatmaja Pandya, Maki Naro, Matt Lubchansky, and Olivia Stephens are added to the list, the full version of which sits below the cut. Thanks for the info, Alison!

• Also yesterday, TopatoCon invitee Dante Shepherd¹ let us know that his second great creative work, one that’s been under development for most of the past year, has launched:
  

  Holy hark. I’m a Dad. Again.

  Hey, world! Meet Torpedo! She’s 6lb 7oz and she’s utterly awesome.

  My ChemE dept just sent out an announcement that the baby arrived. They announced that her name truly is “Torpedo”. So that’s delightful.

  Torpedo, welcome to the world. It’s kind of loud and noisy and bright right now, but that’ll settle down soon enough. It’s also kind of stupid and cruel at times, but I think that if you follow your dad’s lead, it’ll become less so; if everybody followed your dad’s lead, it’d be cleared up before you’re old enough to read this. In any event, it’s the best world we have right now, and the only one we can offer you, so we’ll try not to mess it up too bad before we turn it over to you.

  Best of luck to you and your big sister Cannonball (senior henchman); she’ll help you learn your way around the important things in life, like your dad’s lab coat, his Red Sox cap, the junior faculty, and the chalkboard in the spooky basement. Remember not to eat the chalk, no matter how delicious it looks. Try to give your parents the occasional full night’s sleep and they’ll love you more than you ever thought possible.

  Oh, and maybe give your dad a break at feeding time? He’s not as tasty and nutritious as you might have hoped.

  Torpedo and mother The Swede are reportedly doing well; best wishes to everybody at STW Headquarters.

Spam of the day:

It is no secret that a boost in confidence and having a positive self-image can contribute to a woman’s over all well being but the majority of women do not have cosmetic surgery for anyone other than themselves.

Are … are you negging me?

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¹ A pseudonym for mild-mannered professor of chemical engineering Bruce Wayne.

(more…)

We’ll do good news first, okay?

• It’s been a while since the last update to the TopatoCon exhibitor list, but what with applications being closed, we can add a series of new creators to the expected roster. You may recall that five weeks back the list sat at:

  KC Green
  Jeph Jacques
  Jess Fink
  Tom Siddell
  Rosemary Mosco
  Kate Leth
  Anthony Clark
  Christopher Hastings
  Danielle Corsetto
  David Malki !
  Dante Shepherd

  Judging from the various tweets that went out yesterday (predominantly from the creators themselves; TopatoCon has retweeted them, but hasn’t provided a definitive list so far — probably because communications are still ongoing, and this is only for tabling creators, not presenters or podcasters or gamerunners), we may confidently add (in no particular order):

  Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson
  Michael Rapa
  Mildred Louis
  Sara Goetter
  Jon Rosenberg
  Karla Pacheco¹
  RJ Lake
  Spike
  Allison Shabet
  Lauren Jordan
  Joshua AC Newman
  Magnolia Porter
  Alison Wilgus
  Shoona Browning
  Randy Millholland
  Brian Lee
  Skullmandible
  David Willis
  Kori Michele
  Hannah McGill
  Blue Delliquanti
  Evan Dahm
  Molly Ostertag

  Thirty-four tables, thirty-five people if I’ve counted correctly. That’s a bit more than half of the 70 exhibitor limit that Holly Rowland told us about two months back, and I’ve seen indications of four creators on the waitlist, with others undoubtedly out there. How many more webcomic-type creators we get, how many podcasters, game builders, and other creative types is presently unknown, but will hopefully be revealed in the near future. For now, it looks like the last weekend in September is gonna rule.

• In other news, the first indication I had that things might be awry was a fairly direct tweet from the very sexy R Stevens:
  

  Today only! My last regular comic on @medium : BATTLE OF THE OLDEST https://thenib.com/battle-of-the-oldest-21843559d267 …

  I’d seen chatter in the infosphere about a change of focus at Medium, without specific indications how it would affect The Nib, and it appears that the effects are going to be significant:

  Assistant editor Eleri Mai Harris was let go a few weeks ago, the first warning sign, and now the cartoonists who were syndicated on the site, such as Tom Tomorrow and Ruben Bolling, as indicating they they will not appear there any more.

  It’s been only three months since Nib editor Matt Bors was ramping up the talent pool, and honestly not that long since the whole thing started. Everybody that wondered how long the money would keep going out when Medium didn’t seem to be making any, we may have our answer. We’ll have to see what the next week or so brings, but it won’t be the same excellent resource is was, dammit.

Spam of the day:

If you are to lazy to write unique articles everyday you should search in google for:

Yes, that’s it — tell the guy that’s written maybe 2500 articles over nine and a half years that’s he’s lazy. I’m sure to buy your product and/or service!

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¹ And may Glob have mercy on that place where a soul would be in a regular person.

This is something that I’ve resisted writing for a while; I wanted to hold off and look at the work in question as a whole, but it’s become increasingly difficult as the story progresses and gets stronger and more revealing as it does. I’m probably jumping the gun a little, but today is when I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer. And with that out of the way, I suppose I should tell you what the heck I’m on about.

I’ve written several times before that Meredith Gran was doing the best work of her career on Octopus Pie, and I meant it every time; I’ll go so far as to say that she’s the one of the few creators with a long-running comic that hasn’t hit a rut or plateau — she’s been on a long, improving arc, punctuated by bursts where she ups her game to an astonishing degree. Remarkably, each of those bursts takes a different approach.

She’s previously dropped in story arcs that played with the overall plot and progression of Octopie; she’s done arcs that played with the form of the comic. What she’s doing in the latest storyline (which starts here and which rewards a familiarity with the characters but which will still entice the first-time reader) trumps everything she’s done before.

Without ever once tipping her hand, she’s showing us how breakups work from multiple perspectives; she’s letting us hear the words (and not many of them, more on that in a bit) that come out of their mouths, but their body language¹ tells us when those words are false. We see the lies that these characters tell themselves and each other, we see them stripped down to their innermost cores, and there’s not a wrong beat or misstep along the way as the focus of the story shifts from Eve to Hanna to Will to Aimee. Everything that happens is smooth and organic and (in retrospect) inevitable.

And quiet. The words are perfect, the words are true, but the real revelations come in the silent panels, or the ones where the words are tiny and unimportant. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that partway through this storyline Gran made the decision to use social media in a different way — her day is quieter, and her comic is quieter, and every word has weight. I can’t find a single one that isn’t entirely necessary.

As Eve and Hanna and the presently absent (maybe permanently) Marek and Will and Marigold and all the other characters age out of their twenties, the exaggerated nature of their reality (overturned cars and evil skaters and escapes out windows and exploding lairs of evil geniuses and rock lobsters and renfaire misadventures and, and, and) is getting sanded down in the face of … reality? adulthood? There’s a palpable sense of change and maturation, that things can’t stay the way they have been. There’s a feeling that you can’t stay the way you were in your twenties, not unless you want to wake up one day and suddenly you’re fifty and have turned into Olly.

There’s a feeling of a stage of life — the one that comic keys on — coming to an end, and with it our time with the characters. I’ll miss them terribly, but in a period of time where Gran said she’s been working on layout and drawing, and when her writing has broken through to the next level, I can only imagine what her next project will look like when she can unleash those skills on something open and new and unrestrained. It’s a sad time in the Brooklyn of Octopus Pie, but it’s a great time to be reading Meredith Gran.

And tomorrow? Next month? Next year, and the years after that? They’re going to be even greater.

By happy coincidence, somebody else was in a pensive mood today; if you haven’t read Ryan North’s incredibly moving essay on A Softer World and his friendship with Emily Horne & Joey Comeau, now would be the time to do that.

Spam of the day:

Don’t continue putting off your lifestyle change.

Unlike Dentarthurdent, I am not having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. It’s pretty good in fact, but thanks I guess?

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¹ Weirdly, it reminds me of Fury Road; I read a description online (and I’m sorry, I neglected to note who said it; if you know, please share!) that given the dearth of dialogue, Fury Road amounted to the loudest silent movie ever made. The emphasis on showing, the use of language to the degree required and not one syllable more, resulting in clarity of motivation … that’s what I’m getting at.

• Every year, I resolve to remember the cluster of webcomicker birthdays that occurs at the end of May; since I’m already well into the missed the start and try to remember next year, bozo phase, I’ll point out that today is the co-birthday of Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman, as if they could be any more adorable together. Additionally, it is Becky Dreistadt’s birthday, yesterday was Holly Rowland’s, and about three-four days back was Jeffrey Rowland’s¹.

  So happy [recent, in some cases] births-day, Jeffrey, Holly, Raina, Dave, and Becky! You are all awesome people.

• Speaking of birthdays, I think I’ve got the upcoming birthdays of my youngest niece and nephew covered; I received over the weekend my copies (one to keep, one to give away) of Evan Dahm’s² Wonderful Wizard of Oz adaptation, and with any luck the next couple of weeks will bring my copies (one to keep, one to give away) of Zach Weinersmith and Boulet’s³ Augie and the Green Knight.

  Here is my question: given those two books, which would you give to the younger sister, and which to the older brother? I’m leaning towards Oz for the older brother (as he’s just about old enough to read it for himself) and Augie for the younger sister (as she’d need either one read to her, and Augie’s such a kick-ass hero and it’s never too early to start that habit in nieces).

  I imagine that they’ll both end up reading (or having read to them) both books, I’m just wondering if anybody out there who’s maybe read the PDF backer copy of Augie or Oz has a definite idea of age ranges. Help me out, peoples, and make a couple of little kid birthdays happier.

Spam of the day:

Shed 25lbs of bellyfat for bikini season,

You really sent this to the wrong person; to get rid of 25 pounds from my abdomen, you’d have to remove at least four major organs.

_______________
¹ Not so weird that such a cluster occurred; at one point in the past, there were three separate people (me being one of them) on my EMS agency with the same birthday; it’s just a matter of time until you get these coincidences and duplications.

Heck, some day I’m going to start a business with another Gary Tyrrell just so we can confuse people that call up the main phone line. Can I speak to Gary Tyrrell? Which one? The one that went to nerd school. Which one? The one that likes beer. Which one? The one that pronounces his last name like “Ferrell”. Which one? The trombone guy? Please hold for Mr Tyrrell.

² Who, by the by, yesterday started rerunning his seminal series Rice Boy with commentary over at Tumblr. Read it again for the first time!

³ Who, by the by, will be having his French-language books released in English, starting next April and continuing for the next half-dozen years or so. Goo news for those of us who can’t get enough Boulet.

Since we spoke last, good news has come in from opposite sides of the country, and on this holiday (for those of you in the US, at least), I figured some good news would be just the thing.

• Firstly, late Friday afternoon brought word that the Cartoon Art Museum has received a reprieve on their loss of location due to the kindness of their landlord (who have been working with CAM to resolve their rent issues longer than was generally known):
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum is delighted to announce that their month-to-month tenancy at 655 Mission Street has been extended through September 2015. Their current landlord, Brad Bernheim of Coast Counties Property Management, and Matthew Cuevas of Cappa & Graham, Inc., a San Francisco event management company, made this extension possible.

  … CAM’s lease was up a few years ago, and it has been functioning on a month-to-month since then. “We knew that we could not sustain our location as the economy skyrocketed and have been looking for a more long term space for a while,” says Executive Director, Summerlea Kashar.

  “I was really touched when Cappa and Graham came to me with the offer to help extend our current term in our location, even just for a few months. For all of the businesses that feel like the economy and the landlords have been pricing us out, it was heartwarming to hear that Matt and Brad were willing to support us,” remarked Kashar.

  Good news indeed, and from the sounds of it the landlords have gone out of their way to support CAM; the press release noted that their lease actually elapsed several years ago, and they had been accommodated¹ on month-to-month basis since. Congratulations to CAM for getting three months more for keep their collections and programs in the public eye before being forced into what will hopefully be a brief hiatus.

• Meanwhile, on Saturday night in Washington, DC, the National Cartoonists Society’s 69th Annual Reuben Awards were given out, and while I wasn’t able to be there, Brigid Alverson was on hand to let us know about the awards as they were given out. Most relevant to this page, I for once saw the two nominees I was rooting for take the division awards for Online Comics — Short Form and Online Comics — Long Form.

  In the Short Form category, Danielle Corsetto won for Girls With Slingshots, and was on hand to receive the plaque. In the Long Form category, Minna Sundberg won for Stand Still, Stay Silent, and was in Finland instead of DC but that’s okay.

  I’ve mentioned my involvement in the NCS online comics division awards in the past; I’m not going to go into either the comics that were presented by the advisory committee to the jury for selection of the final three nominees, or which comics I specifically nominated, but I will say this: Sundberg and Corsetto didn’t just win, they were selected to move onto the voting round against the best webcomics we could find, and then they captivated the electorate².

  To put it another way: an organization with a significant percentage of its membership in the 80+ age range chose the short form webcomic based on a lesbian wedding storyline and a long form webcomic where a major plot point is the divergence of Scandinavian languages. I don’t know about you, but to me that says that generational distance aside, cartoonists recognize great cartoonists.

  Congratulations, Danielle Corsetto and Minna Sundberg — I can’t wait to see what you each come up with tomorrow.

hi!,I love your writing so a lot! proportion we keep up a correspondence more about ykur post on AOL? I

This is probably going to sound terribly elitist of me, but I try not to have any correspondence on AOL.

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¹ So to speak.

² Each nominee’s work was represented by a selection of twelve strips — either sent along with their nomination paperwork, or compiled by a committee member that nominated them. I’ll share that of the comics I placed in nomination, I did my best to end on a cliffhanger, and I’m confident that I caused some archive binges.

I’ve been waiting for my copy of Skin Horse volume 5 for ages now¹, which I should note is not the same thing as being late. Ms Garrity and Mr Wells wisely put plenty of time for fulfillment into their crowdfunding plan, and the book which was due in May 2015² arrived yesterday, on time and as promised. I love that phrase, about as much as I love checking the box on my Kickstarter Backed Projects page that says Got it! By the way, of the 40 projects I’ve backed with delivery dates not in the future, this makes six that are late³, which is a pretty damn good record as far as Kickstarts go.

I’m particularly happy to receive this book because while Skin Horse is one of those comics that I read daily (indeed, I’m grumpy if I don’t get to read it daily for some reason), I get much more out of it in big chunks; receiving the new book means I get to read two full story arcs in one sitting, and given the way the story is resolving at present, volume 5 ends on the record scratch that marks the big reveal at the end of the second act of the overall story. That means that I probably won’t get more than seven or eight books in the full story and that makes me sad — but then again, I was sad when Narbonic ended and now I have faith that whatever Garrity and/or Wells do next (jointly and severally, as the lawyers say), it’ll be well worth my time.

Okay, Monday’s a holiday in the States; I expect I’ll have something to say about the NCS division awards (I don’t get a vote, but I’m very happy to see Danielle Corsetto and Minna Sundberg in their respective categories and am rooting for them), but otherwise you likely won’t miss much if you don’t come back until Tuesday. Have a good weekend, everybody!

Spam of the day:

Hi my name is Olivie and I just wanted to drop you a quick note here instead of calling you.

Feel free to try to call me, but understand two things:

1. I answer the house phone, which lacks caller ID, with a cheery Ahoy-hoy! which weirds most people out.
2. I will string out cold-calling telemarketers like yourself as long as possible, figuring that while none of you scamming bastards will ever stop calling (given that you’re already ignoring the Do Not Call list), I can at least cost you money by wasting your time at least as much as you’re wasting mine.

________________
¹ The first rule of Webcomickers Having Kids is it puts a crimp the schedules of my entertainment (both free and paid), and thus is to be discouraged. The world, alas, must be peopled, so they get a pass for now.

² Also due this month: Evan Dahm’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz adaptation, for which I have tracking info that indicates it is presently on a truck in my geographical vicinity. I’ma call that one fulfilled on time as well.

³ One of which is moderately late, and I believe affected by West Coast dockworkers strikes; three are about a year overdue, two for reasons out of control of the creators; the last two are more than two years late, one of which I expect to see in the next couple of months and one of which I’ve mentally written off. Oh, and there were some on other platforms, but mostly it’s Kickstarter for me.

If you’ll indulge me, today isn’t going to be about webcomics, per se. It’s going to be about David Letterman, who retired from broadcasting last night (or early this morning, if you prefer), and who is a seminal influence for so many people — in the world of late night shows and comedy, obviously, but for so many of us that hit the teens-to-twenties phase at some point in the past 35 years (including pretty much all of the first couple of generations of webcomics creators). Everybody that has an appreciation for absurdist humor, for knowing irony in the face (and service) of stupidity owes Letterman a debt. And so, on this day after I watched Letterman wrap up his career, I am full of memories.

I remember watching his daytime show, ahead of its time, weirding out the typical early-80s daytime audience. The least weird thing he did in that period was abandon the studio with ten minutes to go in the last show before the long Labor Day weekend, leaving a somewhat confused woman from Iowa he plucked out of the audience in his place. He pointed her at the cue cards, showed her which camera to look at, and left. It was the most audacious thing I’d seen in my life and I loved it.

I have a fondness for Larry “Bud” Melman (portrayed by the peerless Calvert DeForest, who never entirely let on as to the degree that he was in on joke with us), particularly considering that in the first six months of Late Night, he did a remote from my town. As the proprietor of Melman Bus Lines, he toured my small suburban New Jersey borough, making an inspection of our bus stops and shelters, deciding if we were worthy of addition to his network of day tours. A year or so later he nearly caused Dave to choke during his infamous remote segment, greeting arrivals at the Port Authority bus terminal. I remember the last night we saw Larry “Bud” Melman’s son, Troy “Skipper” Melman.

I remember being lucky enough to get bonus Dave, as Late Night taped down the hall from, and at the same time as, NBC’s local late-afternoon new magazine show, Live At Five. Any time they got a good guest he couldn’t book (Wayne Gretzky, former president Jimmy Carter), he’d take a camera crew down and bust into their set and interject himself, amusing Sue Simmons and pissing off Jack Cafferty mightily

I treasured the guerrilla comedy of those early years: throwin’ stuff off a five-story tower, crushing stuff in a 80,000 lb drop press, or drivin’ around LA in a convertible gettin’ drive-through fast food with Zsa Zsa. Dave never left the studio enough, preferring in later years to hide behind a Taco Bell mic or a walkie-talkie connected to Rupert Jee to mess with people.

Those were the days of rampant anarchy on Late Night, as we got to know stage manager Biff Henderson, director Hal Gertner¹, Chris Elliot as Marlon Brando, the Stupidest of Pet and Human Tricks, Bob the dog, and the sky-, monkey-, thrill-, Anton-, and tiger- cams.

Maybe it’s because there is no better time to watch Dave than in college, but this period stands out as his creative peak for me — when there was no better block of TV than The Tonight Show-Dave-Later, when Dave took the opportunity to mess with his audience during Monday reruns (dubbing an entire episode into Spanish; rotating the camera continuously over the course of the hour), or his colleagues any old time (I remember him taking the last two minutes of his show to play the Star Spangled Banner and run a we now conclude our broadcast day announcement before walking into frame and admitting it was just a prank on Bob Costas).

It was the era of why the hell not?, when Jack Hanna² got his start as a recurring guest, when Marv Albert or Tony Randall would appear in the most random of cameos and Connie Chung would crush walnuts in her bare hands because why the hell not? Harvey Pekar, the person least likely to ever appear on TV, guested multiple times because why the hell not? More seriously, it was also a time of glasnost and perestroika and it made perfect sense for 22 members of the Red Army Chorus — on a goodwill tour of the US to promote friendship with the Soviet Union — to drop by repeatedly to sing the Henry Mancini-penned Viewer Mail theme song because why the hell not?

I remember watching Crispin Glover freak Dave out and the next night when he was reported that Glover had been murdered by Paul and Biff; I remember watching Madonna derail the show and Dave’s reaction the next night. I remember the great Top Ten lists — Amish pickup lines, Effects of Y2K with James Earl Jones, one where Isabella Rossellini was played by Dave Foley³. And always, always, always: Dave’s mom.

We all remember the night he returned from his bypass surgery and his medical team welcomed him back to the world of the living; the night in September 2001 when he welcomed us all back from despair and to the start of finding our way back to normal following a goddamn disgrace; the nights he said goodbye to Johnny and to Warren.

People with more cause than me to have been inspired by Dave have already paid tribute to him, including Conan’s incredibly gracious insistence people should watch Dave instead of him, and James Corden entrance to Letterman’s theme music before offering up his own thanks to Dave. It’s been a long, weird, funny journey, and we’ll never be the same as we were before we started.

Thanks, Dave.

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¹ Uh, that’s Gurnee, with two Es.

² The only person who could reliably mess with Dave, apart from Penn & Teller what with the rat traps and cockroaches, and the Tokyo Shock Boys.

³ I can’t find this anywhere and am toying with the idea that I invented it in my head, but it sure sounds like something Dave (and Dave) would do.