Yeah, hi, typing this around trying to get to my appointment for a COVID vaccine. Sorry it if goes up late (not sorry)

• Fans of BACK have been watching KC Green and Anthony Clark’s weird, oddly heartfelt drama about an undead cowgirl, an innocent druid, and the end of the world, barreling towards a conclusion, and then at the end of December a hiatus was announced — Give us a couple of weeks to get the end of the story all lined up, they said, we really want to stick the landing. Given that a weekly update is typically two or more pages full of creative mayhem, Clark and Green are entitled to as much time as they need to get it all set. But how long before BACK was back?

  As of yesterday’s update, we have an answer:

  BACK
  THE EPILOGUE
  will begin Feb 17th 2021
  regular updates will
  occur until it’s over.
  Every Wednesday

  Hooray!

• In case you were wondering, TCAF has announced that 2021 will be virtual, but being freed of a physical time/place, they’ve expanded out to a full week of programming. Want in? The time to apply is until 3 March, and you can do so here, but note:
  

  TCAF’s new exhibition website is being made in partnership with Canzine (the festival of zines) and the Toronto Hand Eye Society. Zinesters and indie video game creators will be among the 600 virtual exhibitors in May!

  Applicants will have the choice to apply for TCAF, Canzine OR Comics x Games. Accepted exhibitors will have a customizable online shop page where they can upload up to 5 items for sale. After TCAF, exhibitors will send all sold items to a warehouse, where orders will be bundled and shipped off to shoppers. This process is to help save exhibitors and visitors excess transaction and shipping fees. Options will be available to see additional products.

  That sounds an awful lot like what I was wondering if SDCC would do for its exhibitors last year. Interesting that the free festival managed to pull it off and not the massive nonprofit corporation.

• Hey, remember when it looked like the UK VAT was going to screw over absolutely everybody selling low value items into Great Britain and Northern Ireland? As a guy who has customers in the UK, Brad Guigar¹ looked into the situation and found out that Her Majesty’s tax folks have set a fairly high bar for the outside-the-UK vendors to clear before they become responsible for collecting.

  Unless you’re selling more than £85,000 per year to UK customers, you don’t have to make the arrangements (the privilege for registering to collect and remit VAT was reported to be £1000+ per year, so whew, lucky break). Your customers will have to pay VAT at a 20% rate for goods up to £135, but it’s not on you to manage what they do. Full details behind the paywall at Webcomics Dot Com.

Spam of the day:
Yeah, nah, my arm’s starting to hurt already. Time to hydrate and take it easy, tomorrow’s maybe gonna be rough.

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¹ He is a sexy, sexy man. Total DILF material.

Feels good to get back to book reviews; the number that I was able to bash together over the past 11 months or so of quarantine is far fewer than I would have liked — both due to a disrupted flow of review copies¹, and everything being the way it’s been — but I hope that this is the start of a renewed string of book reviews. And if it is, we’ve got a good title to start us out.

Colleen AF Venable (author of National Book Award nominee Kiss Number 8, among many other works) and Stephanie Yue (colorist on Smile, among many other works) have worked together previously, on the superlative Guinea PIg: Pet Shop Private Eye series (six books in all, get them all for the new reader(s) in your life and prepare yourself for a breathless recounting of the adventures of Hamisher and Sasspants), but they have joined forces for a full-length graphic novel for the first time on Katie The Catsitter, one of the newest from Random House Graphic. It’s a welcome return to the Venable-Yue partnership. We’ll try to keep things general, but spoilers ahead, yeah?

Katie lives in a walk-up in New York, and although the story doesn’t come out and say it, she and her mom are poor folks in a richer neighborhood; her friends don’t have moms that have to work all night; they live in buildings with doormen, don’t get their food from the bodega, and get to go to camp. Camp! An oasis of green that city girl Katie has never experienced. One particular friend’s mom offers to pay Katie’s way to camp, but Katie’s determined to earn the money herself, no matter how unsuited she may be to grocery-carrying (mashing eggs), plant-sitting (they all died), and other miscellaneous kid-type chores.

Until she gets asked up to the top floor of her building by the mysterious Ms Lang, who needs a cat-sitter. Cat’s aren’t allowed in the building, but that hasn’t kept her from keeping cats.

217 of them. In an apartment, but sadly, Ms Lang informs us, New York City apartments just don’t fit 218 cats well. Suspiciously well-trained in everything from using the bathroom like people to computer hacking the Pentagon to making Katie a new fingerprint-sensor key, because it’s easy to teach a cat to fetch, or hit a few keys, or create a 3-D model, render and print a mold, then cast and cure a silicone fingerprint. “Easy”. And if the cats create havoc, they repair everything (including sourcing replacements for any shredded furniture) before Ms Lang is home at midnight, and Katie’s making 30 bucks an hour.

Weirdly, on the nights that Katie cat-sits, the Mousestress — New York’s most mysterious costumed villain — is revealing mistreatment of animals or rescuing those in need in ever flashier ways. She isn’t really committing crimes of the usual villain sort — the breaking and entering is in service of bringing unpleasant facts to light, not to steal stuff or hold the city hostage — but The Eastern Screech (Yes. It is I. New York’s highest Yelp-rated superhero.) is determined to take the Mousestress down because … well, because he’s a bit of a jerk. I’d say he’s stiff-necked, but he does that rotate-the-head-all-the-way-round thing that owls do, so he’s not, but you get me.

Meanwhile, Katie’s best friend since forever is writing from camp less and less, having found new friends and boys and who knows what else. Katie’s got nobody to talk about all this to, except for 217 cats, each with a particular skill² far beyond what you’d expect cats to have. Along the way, Katie learns that villains aren’t always evil, friends aren’t necessarily forever, and if you’re gonna fight the law for all the right reasons, you need a crew of deeply skilled experts that have your back, no matter what.

The story’s charming, the art is inviting and full of character, and it’s clear that Yue and Venable have a blast working with each other. Look for Katie The Catsitter to top best-of lists and awards categories for middle grade readers for the next couple of years, as we’re promised Katie The Catsitter — Best Friends For Never in 2022, and hopefully there will be more after that.

Katie The Catsitter by Colleen AF Venable and Stephanie Yue is available at bookstores everywhere; a copy was purchased prior to review. It’s a perfect read for any kid that has the patience to make it through 200 pages on their own, although older readers will get more of the gags and maybe be more receptive to the message that heroes and villains aren’t always who Yelp tells us they are.

Spam of the day:

DOMAIN SERVICES EXPIRATION NOTICE FOR fleen.com Domain Notice Expiry ON: Jan 17, 2021

Oddly, we are two and a half weeks past your deadline and we’re still running. Strange.

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¹ Including, among other things, Random House Graphic seemingly having to drop plans to get physical review copies out into the world, and :01 stopping all physical copies. Both are being generous with electronic review copies, but I am old and grumpy enough to massively prefer the act of reading on paper. You can’t get a PDF autographed, people!

² In addition to those specifically called out in the text, there’s a personnel file of pretty near to 200 different cats, each with a name and a skill. Admiral Dewey: tea expert; Chomsky: cognitive science; DJ Bootie Butler: mad beats; Hashbrown: composting expert; Knope: community action; Marley: murder podcast expert; Nick Furry: comic book expert; Puss N Cahoots: lawyer; Shamrock: green initiatives; Smushy: mixed martial arts; Willow Harkill: photonics engineer.

Not content to come up with 200 areas of expertise, Venable has dreamed up some amazing cat names: Baby Teefling; Captain von Smooch; Cat Benatar; Cathulhu; Catman Crothers; Em-Dash; Meatloaf; Meowth von Landingham the Fourth; Mr Aaron Purr Sir; Sassafras Assassin; Shrimpy Longstockings; Spooky Pumpkin Patch, and dozens more. Yue has given each of them a unique design and a personality, no two cats in the crowd scenes look the same, and the ones that are most relevant to the plot all have distinct coats, silhouettes, and ways of moving (or not, in the case of Oslo, the movie expert).

So, snow to an average depth of pert-near a half-meter [update to add: The National Weather Service declared it officialy 19.7 inches, or 50.038cm, which is almost exactly a half-meter.] up and down a driveway that’s a good 40 meters long. I’m a little tired and need to take a nappy-nap before I go on EMS duty tonight¹. Maybe go look at some Hourly Comics from yesterday? Abby Howard’s were good.

Spam of the day:

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I’ve had value merge failures on the bodies of spam before, but this is the first one on the subject line. Pick one fake social media followers scam and stick with it, please.

_______________
¹ Fun fact: people don’t call 911 during the weather event. They wait six or seven hours after it’s done and then pile up all the 911 calls that they didn’t make. This event was 30 hours long. Gonna be a fun night.

There were originally going to be more words in today’s post, but I’ve had to clear snow twice so far — 40 cm and counting of snowfall will do that — and will likely have to do so twice more again before it’s done. So you get some pointers and the assurance that I had many clever words on deck in my brain that just won’t come out now.

As you may have gathered from the title, our common thread today is new work from Matt Lubchansky — cartoonist, associate editor at The Nib, and international bon vivant — who was most recently mentioned on this page in association with their new original graphic novel¹ ’bout two weeks back. As well as being a prolific cartoonist in their own right, Lubchansky is also works with other comickers (web and otherwise) on group efforts and anthologies. Let’s see what’s on deck:

• Firstly, Lubchansky is one of a dozen artists that are pairing up with journalist and podcast host Rose Eveleth (Flash Forward) on a new graphic novel about ways to imagine our future(s). Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide To Possible (And Not So Possible) Tomorrows will contain a myriad of subjects, each expanded from interviews with experts, about what’s possible and what probably won’t be (which makes it sound similar to Soonish but with more illustrations from more people).

  Along with Eveleth’s words, pictures will be supplied by Lubchansky, Blue Delliquanti², Box Brown, Ben Passmore, Sophie Goldstein, Julia Gfröer, John Jennings, and more. Five more, by my count. Flash Forward releases on 30 March, is nearly 300 pages long, and is available for pre-orders now.

• Just in case you haven’t gotten enough Lubchansky — and honestly, how could you? — they’re going to be doing a panel discussion with the other editors at The Nib this Thursday, 4 February:
  

  Extremely exciting news: I/@kellywritershse get to host some awesome @thenib editors in conversation on Feb. 4 at 6pm ET

  The panel features ~ @MattBors @Lubchansky@WhitTaylorComix and @elerimai ~!

  You can watch live on Youtube.

  That from writer/cartoonist Alli Katz, with additional event details at Facebook. In case you didn’t recognize the other names in the announcement, that was Editor/Publisher Matt Bors, Features Editor Eleri Harris, and Contributing Editor Whit Taylor.

Spam of the day:

TruGreen lawn services We know you take pride in your lawn.

My lawn is a morass of divots thrown up by greyhound zoomies, and is currently buried under knee-deep snow. You’re high if you think pride comes within a half kilometer of this benighted patch of grass.

_______________
¹ Pre-orders still open!

² Who would like you to know that the events in their signature work, O Human Star, start in-story on 2 Feb 2021. Starting tomorrow, Delliquanti will be re-running OHS on their social media pages, one page per day, with commentary. Dive in if you haven’t previously.

We have to start with Molly Ostertag’s news. Readers will recall that her Witch Boy series is a modern marvel that everybody should read and pass on to other to read. And today we found out that Netflix is making it not just into a movie, but a musical:

Netflix To Release Animated Musical From Oscar-Nominated Director Minkyu Lee

The Witch Boy will also feature original music by the Grammy-nominated sister trio Haim. Maria Melnik writes the script with Roy Lee, Miri Yoon and Ryan Harris producing. Vertigo Entertainment produces the feature and Netflix releases.

Ostertag’s … honestly, happy doesn’t seem like a big enough word for what Ostertag is with respect to the production. Elated? Ecstatic? Joyous? What caught my eye the most, though, is the combo of the teaser image in the Deadline story and this bit from her tweet thread:

Seeing the way [Lee] connects to THE WITCH BOY and is transforming it for film, with thoughtfulness and care and artistry, has legitimately been the honor of my creative career. When I saw his first drawings of Aster I cried. I think you all will love this movie [purple heart emoji] [emphasis mine]

This will not be The Witch Boy exactly as shown in the book, a straight implementation designed only to appeal to existing fans¹. It’s an adaptation to another medium, one that has its own strengths and weaknesses apart from comics — comics are not just storyboards, people! — and will look and play out differently than the original.

That image seems to feature an older, more citified Aster than we’ve seen before, and the story may aim for a different age range than the original books. This is all good, and if you have any doubts, read what Ostertag said again. If you love the original (and glob knows I do), the originals are still there on your shelf and won’t change even if this turned out to be a fiasco — which, to be absolutely clear, I don’t think it will be.

It’s something new, with a different set of creative hands and different points of view on it, and it is absolutely going to piss the right people off. Can’t ask for anything more than that. Oh, and note to self — figure out when you need to subscribe to Netflix. Given the lead time on animation, it’ll likely be a while.

Other good stuff today:

• Did everybody see Nancy today? That last panel is a legit brilliant idea.
• I’ve made more of a thing about it over on social media than here, but I’ve really been digging the art on A Girl And Her Fed since creator KB Spangler² did the third act time jump and handed the drawing off to Brazilian artist Ale Presser. I mentioned at the time that Presser had both recently given birth and defended her doctoral thesis, and I may have mentioned at one point that she was soliciting survey input for that same thesis.

  Not long ago³, she contacted me with the actual output of her thesis, including the video of her defense [in Brazilian Portuguese] and the full text [PDF, also Brazilian Portuguese], but with something that you, dear reader, may find useful. The dissertation is full of data and analysis, but its conclusions are a guide to making comics for small-screen devices, and it’s both chock-full of good advice and also available in English [PDF]. Also, Messers Guigar, Kellett, Kurtz, and Straub: is this the first appearance of How To Make Webcomics in a bibliography? Maybe!

Spam of the day:

Exposed NASA-Funded Report Sends Shockwaves Through The US Population

They release those like twice a month, only they’re about anthropogenic climate change so people like you that start emails Dear Patriot ignore and downplay them.

_______________
¹ Lookin’ at you, first couple of Harry Potter films.

² Disclaimer: I am personal friends with Spangler, of the post-bail-and-help-you-hide-bodies variety, I did the foreword for her first AGAHF collection, and have served as an early reader for ten or so of her novels. She’s rad.

³ Pandemics and new small humans means things take a while.

Something you may not know about me is that I don’t do anything that’s not on my schedule. It’s not necessarily written down anywhere, but there’s a definite to do list that runs my life, and if I put something on that list it will happen. For decades now, I’ve put certain pieces of media on my mental list with the intention of experiencing it.

This has the side effect of making me, essentially deathless until I reach that landmark. Death (the capital-D death that Gaiman told us is actually a Goth cutie and Pratchett told us SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS) will show up for me and I’ll be able to say¹ Sorry, not on my list of stuff to do today, and I have things I’ve committed to do still. Get back to me later².

In the past, I’ve used future events like the end of BONE, the end of Strangers In Paradise, and the completion of Digger when they were a suitably distant number of years away — can’t get a hideous disease, can’t walk in front of a bus, gotta see how it turns out. Today, I have a new one.

Readers of this page may have noted that I love the work and the person of Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, who is skilled out of all proportion with her youth and just a wonderful human being in real life. For years she’s hinted at where her creative drive was pushing her, not telling me too much (understanding that there are always detours in the creative career’s route) but definitely letting me know that her current projects were leading towards something. Something like this:

Aaaand it’s been announced!! The 12th House is the book that I got into comics to make and I couldn’t be more excited to finally get to talk about it publicly! It’s my first solo book of this length & every page I’ve pencilled so far is the best I’ve ever drawn. Coming in 2023!

I firmly believe that all the stellar work that Valero-O’Connell has produced since we met not quite five years ago has been for its own sake, but also to sharpen her skills for The 12th House. She’s always had an unusually clear perception of what her career would look like, and knowing when to tackle That Story That’s Been Waiting To Be Told is something that too many creators don’t have a good handle on; we all know new storytellers determined to launch their career with a 500 page epic before they’ve developed the chops to handle something like that.

But after seeing Valero-O’Connell’s artistic development and consistency on book-length stories, and the storytelling skills she’s developed on mid-length work, I have every confidence that this book will be landmark of the form. It doesn’t hurt that she’s got :01 Books’s Calista Brill on editing; she’s one of the best in the business, and this is entirely of a piece of :01’s entire philosophy: develop relationships with creators, not with specific IP or series. This won’t be the last of their partnership, I’ll warrant.

So thanks very much, Rosemary, my friend — you’ve single-handedly ensured that I will make it past the midpoint of my 50s, and as long as you keep announcing new books, I will be for all intents and purposes be immortal.

Spam of the day:

We have a surprise for UPS Customer.. ..

Strangely, I’m not most offended by the nakedly fraudulence that’s fairly dripping from this subject line. I’m most offended by that crime against ellipses.

_______________
¹ Maybe think? Or some form of telepathy?

² Which is actually a role that she was halfway to fulfilling from damn near our first meeting.

Find little bits to center yourself when things feel overwhelming. Got some of them for you today, one of which will explicitly provide coaching to shed those stressors because I’m a giver.

• I’m not even sure when I first read The Perry Bible Fellowship, to be honest. I think it was probably sometime around Skub, with Nicholas Gurewitch’s severely random absurdities mostly lurking in the back of my mind until Weeaboo embedded itself in the lingo — something that not many of us can claim to have done — which was before this blog had even launched. But here we are, 20 years on, and Gurewitch is still cranking out new comics.

  What’s that? You didn’t realize that there were new PBF comics, tied to the 20th anniversary and not linked to/from the archives? Well, well, well, looks like somebody’s adherence to unfairly-disregarded technologies like RSS finally paid off! Because if you were subscribed to the PBF’s RSS feed, then you would have received links to two new comics on Sunday and Monday, both collaborations (with Twistwood and Extra Fabulous, respectively).

  Will there be more? Will the Part 1 bit in the title of that first comic portend more to the story? Maybe! Gurewitch works in mysterious ways, and we would do well to pay attention.

• Hey, are you looking for good comics, and have a few bucks to put towards the purchase of said good comics? And are you the sort of person who is generally patient (say, in waiting for a Kickstarter campaign to complete), but also decisive (on account of a limited number of rewards going quickly will require you to make a commitment quickly)? And, maybe most importantly, do you love doggos?

  Then allow me to point out that Haley Boros is back for the second January in a row with a Kickstarted comic about her three-legged dog Rusty’s fantasy adventures, only this time Rusty is joined by her new good dog, Ginger. Three Legged Tales: The Good Knight is a Make 100 project, with strict limits on the physical rewards, of which a fair number have already been claimed. The campaign launched earlier today and is just over 50% of the way to goal, so there’s still time, but don’t sleep on it. The doggos will never forgive you if you sleep on it.

  Just kidding, of course they’ll forgive you. The doggos love you.

• One of these days when I have an operating time machine, I will of course go back in time to see what the dinosaurs looked like¹, and definitely to check out how awesome the pterosaurs were — I want to see these flying giraffes in action. But after I got back from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, I would definitely stop by springtime, 2013 and let Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan know that their new sex toy review comic would end up, in between reviews of fuck couches and butt toys, as a vehicle for solid mental health information.

  I am specifically noting today’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy which — superficially, at least — appears to have nothing to do with sex. The Stress-Response cycle isn’t about gettin’ it on, it isn’t about making hot dudes kiss, but it is about the health of your most important sex organ — your brain.

  Moen has been really open about her mental health challenges in the past, but this is more than her typical here is what I’ve gone through maybe you can recognize yourself in it, too; instead, it’s a discussion of here is something that we all go through (because we’re hardwired to do so and that hardwiring isn’t doing us any favors) so here’s how to improve your coping skills, and I urge you to stop whatever you’re doing right now² and go read it.

  Then go pick up a copy of the book it’s synopsized from, Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle by Emily (PhD) and Amelia (DMA) Nagoski, available wherever you find books. Disclaimer: I am personally acquainted with Emily Nagoski³ and have always found her to be super smart; unsurprisingly, when teamed up with her twin sister, the pairing is even super smarter. Anyway, to bring it back to comics, drop some thanks to Nolan and Moen for being such generous advocates for mental health, even when it doesn’t seem to have a sexy angle — if you want to get it on, you have to get your head on right first, yeah? Yeah.

Spam of the day:

Message for: fleen.com, Owner/CEO or Marketing Department

Got some bad news for you, buddy. We’re an autonomous collective, or possibly an anarcho-syndicalist commune, consisting of me. I spend a lot of time in meetings arguing with myself over points of procedure.

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¹ I believe that if R Stevens had written that strip today, it would have referenced not just the color of the dinosaurs, but also the feathers, and possibly the chonkiness.

² Uh, readin’ your blog, Gary. Duh.

³ Who just so happens to be romantically euphemistic with R Stevens from two footnotes up. There are no coincidences in life.

For anybody that pays attention to Young Adult and Middle Grade books (and gosh, can you pay attention to [web]comics and not pay attention to YA and MG?), there was a lot of chatter in your social media feeds, as the American Library Association Midwinter meeting is where the awards for the best of media for youth are presented. The most prestigious awards are the Newbery Medal (for most outstanding contribution to children’s literature) and the Caldecott Medal (for the most distinguished American picture book for children), but there are a whole swathe of what are properly termed the Youth Media Awards, including the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, Sydney Taylor Book Award (for books and teens that authentically portray the Jewish experience) and the American Indian Youth Literature Award (awarded in even-numbered years).

And anybody that reads this page knows that comics have been making deep inroads into the realm of literary awards, and the YMAs are no exception. We’ll start with Michaela Goade’s Caldecott for her work illustrating We Are Water Protectors (words by Carole Lindstrom) — a book that’s already been recognized with the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, is a Kirkus Prize finalist, and was listed as a best book of the year for the New York Public Library, School Library Journal, NPR, and Publishers Weekly¹. It’s been my pleasure to know Goade (how many times do I have to tell you how much Comics Camp enriches lives?) and to become familiar with her work, and I cannot think of a more deserved recognition.

But let us note that other [web]comics folk are all over the YMA categories, and I recognize that I’ve probably missed some here and there — Gene Yang’s absolutely stellar Dragon Hoops is Printz Honor Book², Displacement by Kiku Hughes was an APALA Honor Book³. I also noticed Kent State: Four Dead In Ohio by Derf Backderf as one the recipients of the Alex Awards, which are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults.

I would be remiss not to note that multiple wins by All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team, which is one of five Newbery Honor books, one of three Sibert⁴ Honor books, and a finalist for the YALSA Award For Excellence In Nonfiction. The full list of winners and honorees can be found here [PDF], and you can find the full presentation for replay here [A/V]. Fleen congratulates all the winners, but reserves the right to give Goade the biggest high-five the next time we see her.

In other news of good work:

• Julia Kaye would like you know that her second book, My Life In Transition, a collection of her autobio comics (a sampling of which can be found here) is about to release. It’ll be nearly 200 pages of comics goodness, go for US$14.99, and will be out on 16 February, so get your pre-orders in now, if you please.
• If you read Skin Horse — and if you don’t, why the hell don’t you? — you could tell that the story is building up to a finish. It’s been thirteen years since I recommended you read it from the very first strip, and rarely have I been so correct; but all good things come to an end, and yesterday Shaenon Garrity⁵ and Jeffrey C Wells⁶ made it official that the wrap-up is coming this year.

  Ish.

  Maybe.

  It’s flexible.

  Look, the story is gonna go where it’s gonna go, plus Wells has to figure out where to shoehorn my ass into the narrative on account of I splurged for one of the We Write You Into The Comic tiers on their latest book-kicker because I think I knew this might be my last chance. The story has taken wide digressions and loops from its original plans — go back through the archives, hit all the Sunday process strips, and see how many times Garrity and Wells say This started off as something completely different or We just couldn’t work this in so we dropped it over the past baker’s dozen of years — while still remaining true to the vision that was there from the beginning⁷.

  And having tortured the English language to the breaking point in that last sentence, I’ll just remind you — it’s never to late to do an archive trawl and get in on a great story. Join us now, so we can all be weepy together later when it’s done.

Spam of the day:

Hey, I just opened a hydroponic hemp farm here in Miami, Florida. It’s the first of it’s kind of this size. I was wondering if you would be interested in writing an article about our farm to help us or if you offer paid advertisement articles on your website?

Hey, Box? I think this is yours and came to me by accident.

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¹ It’s not hard to imagine that if it were an even-numbered year, We Are Water Keepers may have taken the American Indian Youth Literature Award for the very best writing and illustrations by and about Native Americans and Indigenous peoples of North America. Lindstrom (a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe) and Goade (a member of the Tlingit and Haida peoples of Alaska) drew on their own traditions, and those of the original peoples from across the continent.

² The Michael L Printz Award recognizes the best book written for teens strictly on literary merit; the award went to Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story), and Dragon Hoops was one of four additional honorees.

³ The sole honoree alongside winner This Light Between Us in the Youth Literature category. I never did get a review of Displacement written as it fell during a personally bad time last year, but it’s a hell of a good account of generational trauma and memory set against the crime perpetrated against Japanese-Americans in World War II.

⁴ Given to the authors(s) and illustrator(s) of the most distinguished informational book published in the United States in English.

⁵ Mistress of Funk and Tiki, and Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities, Greater San Andreas Fault Regional Division.

⁶ A sharp writer in a flat cap who keeps a pretty low profile, actually.

⁷ Makeouts and animals in hats. It’s the highest of high concepts.

This post keeps asking you to submit.

• T’other day, we pointed you at the NCS awards submission process, and we have another one today, but I’m actually of two minds about this one. As we all agree, the Eisner Awards are the most prestigious comics awards in North America, and you should definitely submit your work for consideration, the guidelines to which are found here¹ [PDF].

  On the other hand, the administration of the Eisners was revealed to be deeply, deeply broken, from start to finish, and nobody associated with the Eisners or Comic-Con International (a California nonprofit public benefit corporation) would answer a single damn question about what went wrong, why it went wrong, how long it had been going wrong, or which steps they’re taking to keep it from going wrong in the future. There has been, as near as I can tell, no substantive communication on this matter, and therefore I must conclude no recognition of the legal obligations they have with respect to this data breach.

  With my day job hat on, I cannot in good conscience recommend anybody agree to participate in the Eisner voting process until there’s a metric fuckton more disclosure provided. But hey, voting isn’t for months now, so submit and hopefully they’ll unfuck themselves? I mean, that’s all we can do for now. I’ll keep on the story as I’m able to.

• Let’s bring up the mood a little; something that I can wholeheartedly recommend that you submit work to — although it’s somewhat niche — is the Graphic Medicine Review, which will be making a call for submissions shortly. In this ongoing Plague Year-Plus, damn near everybody has a story about their personal intersection with the medical system and health outcomes, so I expect to see you considering this, people. For more info, contact Matthew Noe or A David Lewis².
• But Gary, I hear you cry, what if I have a great piece of comic work that doesn’t involve COVID and I don’t trust the Eisner process? Good question, and by way of answer may I suggest you look at the Cartoonist Studio Prize, now in its ninth iteration, and renowned for both its blessed simplicity (two categories: print and web, that’s it) as well as its choice to recognize comics greatness with cold, hard cash? This year, in addition to the traditional one thousand US dollars, the winners will also receive a Wacom One tablet.

  As in past years, the CSP is presented by The Center For Cartoon Studies, but it appears that the media partner is shifting from Slate magazine to The Beat.

  Creators may submit no more than one work per category, which must have been released in calendar year 2020, and your deadline for submissions is 15 February. Please read through the full set of guidelines and the submissions forms for print [PDF] and webcomics [Google form] for more information.

  The nominations list will be released in April, and the two winners announced shortly after.

Spam of the day:

Bitcoin price will be $ 38500 in 5 days

As I write this, one Bitcoin goes for USD30,201.20, and is down approximately 26% from its high 13 days ago. Might want to turn in your prognosticator’s card there, Sparky.

_______________
¹ Interestingly, they are talking about tentative categories, which is not something I can recall seeing previously. I guess if they decide to not have a category you submit in, try not to take it personally?

² Some day, he hopes to be The David Lewis.

What, I’m the only one that remembers mid-’80s Saturday Night Live?

The most venal, gleefully ignorant, hateful, petty, murderously incompetent grifter in history is out of power and on his way to encounter some motherfucking consequences. There’s a hell of a long road ahead of us, but today just go listen to Amanda Gorman’s poem if you haven’t already. And if you have, listen to it again. For all the uplift, she’s reminding us there’s a promissory note that’s way the hell overdue and it’s time to make good.

Webcomics again tomorrow.

Spam of the day:
Nope! With that industry-captured toady Ajit Pai out at the FCC, maybe we’ll finally get some movement on stomping spammers like the parasites they are. Today they can fuck off.