Oh hell yes, full-size Jethro coming Wednesday to You Damn Kid. The strips don’t get permalinks until they hit the archives, so you’ll just have to click over promptly for that one to work.

• Got twelve minutes, a hankerin’ to laugh along with Matt Inman, and an appreciation for the job that ASL translators have to do? Check out Inman’s keynote speech from BAH! Fest West 2014, a marvelous piece of proselytizing for Jibbers Crabst and an opportunity to see what the ASL for this is an eight-legged vagina that gives you boners until you are dead looks like.
• From the storming the gates of academia division, news comes of Rosemary Mosco’s Bird and Moon getting the museum treatment:
  

  I’m so excited: the Museum of the Earth just opened a Bird and Moon exhibit! http://www.priweb.org/
  exhibitions.php?page=currentexhibitions/quirksofnature …

  Come see my comics alongside expert commentary, fossils, live critters, sweet-smelling dirt, and more at PRI’s MOE http://tmblr.co/Z8KOWv1XKSEoL

  A few photos from the exhibit. Yes- they’ve got fashion items inspired by nature. Museum of the Earth, you rule. https://www.
  facebook.com/museumoftheear…

  To decode those abbreviations a bit, that would be the Museum of the Earth at the Paleontological Research Institution which is affiliated with — but not part of — Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The show, Quirks of Nature, will feature Mosco’s cartoons paired with specimens, fossils, live animals, and other museum-type stuff. Descriptions and captions written by major science types from major science places will provide the context, while Mosco provides the pretty pictures and funny laugh-chuckles. The next time you’re in the Finger Lakes region, drop by and check it out — Quirks of Nature runs through 8 June 2015, unless they decide to extend it and honestly, why wouldn’t they?

• The Child’s Play page hasn’t updated with a story specific to last week’s annual charity auction, but I believe we can utilize some basic math to see what the impact of the night (and the weeks running up to it) were. The lifetime total raised as of 2 January 2014 (taken as our starting point for this year’s Child’s Play) was US$25,196,670. The current lifetime total raised as of this time I am writing this is US$28,417,292¹. The difference between a) and b) is US$3,220,622, a significant portion of which would have been raised last Thursday night.

  If I were a thinkin’ man I could have taken a total on Thursday afternoon and compared on Friday morning, but ehhh. Close enough. Since the start of active fundraising (taking the traditional start date of 1 November), Child’s Play has pulled in US$3.2 million, or roughly what they took in cumulatively in the first five years, and a little less than half (so far) of last year’s total. Lots of time between now and end of the year, just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

The test can also determine if you have a vitamin K deficiency. Where does my last name come from

Well, since vitamin K deficiency can cause osteoporosis and coronary disease, I’d speculate that would be the origin of “McHearthouch-Breakbones”.

_______________
¹ With the caveat that the counter is moving every time I go back to the page.

I was going to talk about other things today, but I came across a wholly-unexpected big of praise for the exceptionally weird town of Tackleford and its chronicler that I simply have to share.

Readers of this page will perhaps recall the generally high regard I have for The AV Club; I don’t always agree with them, but I can accurately map my likes and dislikes to theirs, which makes them an exceptionally useful resource in navigating popular culture of all sorts¹, plus they have repeatedly had GWAR in to do unlikely cover songs². Today, as part of their weekly AVQ&A feature, they asked staffers which one piece of 201-4-era pop culture they would gift to the entire world, and contributor William Hughes decided on:

I want to give people the gift of consistency in 2014, and that means the collected works of John Allison. Allison has spent the last 16 years posting comics about the residents of the quaint English hamlet of Tackleford, as unlikely a hotspot for supernatural shenanigans as you could hope to find.
…
It turns out that doing something for 16 years is an exceptional way to get good at it, and watching Allison’s cartooning and dialogue mature over the years has been an absolute pleasure. (His ability to consistently end strips on punchlines that work perfectly in his characters’ distinctive voices is a special delight). Although the density of continuity and the constantly evolving relationships in Allison’s work can sometimes be overwhelming, The Case Of The Good Boy, from the recently concluded Bad Machinery, is an excellent entry point into his melding of supernatural comedy, teenage angst, and deftly executed wordplay.

Hear, hear.

Also, I note that in the first page of The Case Of The Good Boy, Eustace “The Boy” Boyce is walking in the background, a detail I never noticed before, possibly because he spent the time from heading off to uni until his named reappearance last year growing a beard and adding girth; he got rid of both, though, and is back to being the quiet put-upon young man we recall, aka twisted up with impotent rage.

I appear to have been sidetracked, which I believe was Hughes’s point — Tackleford sucks you in, and it’s powerfully difficult to break free again. Give yourself the gift and start reading.

Spam of the day:

It is learned that the defendant has now appealed.Tang Dynasty woman wearing flat shoes Ma, Po, leather and other textures.

You’re mixing messages, spammer. Use legal stories as your cover, or the history of shoes in the Tang Dynasty; don’t just mash them up willy-nilly, that’s just hell of sloppy.

_______________
¹ They also have an exceptionally non-horrible commentariat, resulting in their being the one site other than my own where I will regularly read the comments.

² Warning: that third clip will make you miss Oderus Urungus something fierce.

BOOM! Studios, particularly via its all-ages imprint, KaBOOM!, and its creator-owned imprint, BOOM! Box, are grabbing up the best of webcomics talent for various projects — the Adventure Time ongoing, related mini-series, and spinoff graphic novels started the trend, but it’s continued with Bravest Warriors, Regular Show, Bee & Puppycat, Capture Creatures, The Amazing World of Gumball, Steven Universe, Midas Flesh, Lumberjanes, and more — I can’t keep track of all of the various webcomickers who’ve drawn checks for work on those books, and that’s before you get into the backup stories and such¹. So it’s scarcely surprising to see the news that the BOOM! group has found room for one more.

And — my heart! — it involves perhaps my favorite character in all of webcomics.

Starting in March, we’ll get a six-issue treatment of Giant Days, being the adventures of Esther de Groot at university², from the fertile mind of John Allison. Even more intriguingly, this will be the first time that Allison specifically writes for another to provide the art, having tapped Lissa Treiman. You may recall Treiman from one of Allison’s occasional fan-art events (aka Feats of Strength) from 2008, when she drew positively the finest Desmond Fish-Man known to history.

More than that, I can’t think of an artist who better captured the feeling of Allison’s characters — he treatment of Moon is a little Vera Brosgol, a little Katie Rice (especially in Skadi-mode), and a whole lot of excellent. Her interpretations of Allison’s characters don’t look like he drew them, and that’s a good thing — she’ll bring them to the page in ways that he wouldn’t; he’s likely (even if only subconsciously) writing to her strengths as an artist. It’s going to look great, read great, and give us more Esther, so who could ask for anything further?

Well, I could. Considering the length of the three Giant Days stories we’ve gotten so far, this miniseries will likely double the size of the canon. Also, if I remember correctly, the existing GD stories scarcely make up the first week of uni; we know that Eshter broke The Boy’s heart, we know that years later they are apart, but what happened in the meantime? Here’s hoping that Allison and Treiman decide after six issues that they have a hankering to tell more Giant Days stories, because I’m ready to read every single one of them.

Spam of the day:

Hi, my name is Sherry and I am the sales manager at StarSEO Marketi

Nope. Stopping you right there, Sherry. Nope, nope, nope.

________________
¹ Or consider that BOOM! owns Archaia, who’ve published Gunnerkrigg Court and The Devil’s Panties.

² Once found online, now only in printed form.

There are people that you know in life, and then there are people that are the best people that you know in life — people who you want to be around because they exude sheer joy in whatever they are undertaking. Undertakings that you want to be a part of, or at the very least consume& with gustosup1;. Several such people are up for discussion today.

• Firstly, today is the anniversary of the birth of two gents I normally only see in San Diego at the Festival du Nerds each July. MC Frontalot makes the songs that make you want to move, is arguably the inventor of an entire category of music, and travels the world like a bespectacled and headlamped Pied Piper. Jon Ferocious J Sung chronicles the lives of dogs, marshals vast armies in battle, boldly goes, and engages in unholy beveragalogical experiments. Both are worth seeking out in whatever form you find easiest, and you should engage wholly in everything they create, with the exception of the candy corn-laced vodka that Ferocious came up with that one time because ick.
• Secondly, this is the time of year that serious organizations make serious lists of the best of various things, books being no exception. Today I note that ur-serious organization NPR have come up with a listing of the best books of the year, a significant fraction of which are of the graphical variety. There one may find appropriate amounts of love heaped upon the likes of Raina Telgemeier², Gene Luen Yang, Emily Carroll, Stan Sakai³, and Chort Zubaz. Hooray for validation!
• Thirdly, the first part of a two-part interview onthe past and future of the Adventure Time comic is now up at Comics Alliance; it’s a conversation between CA’s Chris Sims and real-life pals Ryan North (outgoing AT writer) and Christopher Hastings (incoming AT writer). You can sense the Friendship right there on your screen, it practically oozes out of the internet into your lap.

  That went someplace a little more disturbing than I’d intended. As a palate-cleanse, how about the news that Ryan North will be writing a back-up story in the forthcoming officially-licensed Bill & Ted comic book? Or perhaps the two new pages of Squirrel Girl #1, available for preview sans words? Or the fact that Slate named Midas Flesh (by North, with Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb on art) as one of the unjustly-overlooked books of 2014, which is another example of serious people recognizing webcomics and kind of drags us back to “secondly”.

• You know who I wish did a whole lot more work, like just about every hour of every day? Nicholas Gurewitch, whose The Perry Bible Fellowship exists almost like a perfectly-preserved specimen in amber. It’s unchanging, and wonderful, and everything he’s done since PBF regularly updated is likewise wonderful. And now there’s a new thing, and it’s up to you to make sure it sees the light of day: Notes on a Case of Melancholia is Gurewitch by way of Edward Gorey, and will only make its way to my hands if some number of you help put the Kickstarter over its goal; as of this writing, it’s sitting at about 80% of the requisite US$25,000 which means it’s going to succeed, barring some odd set of circumstances I can scarcely conceive of. Of particular note in the upper tiers of rewards: original Gurewitch sketches, original art from the book, and PBF originals. It’s like a macabre dream come true.

Spam of the day:

Download Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star Movie.

Under no circumstances should you do this. I get that spam only works if you assume the recipient is a little dumb, but this would require absolutely brainlessness to subject yourself to that actual movie product.

_______________
¹ With one tragic exception, to be noted momentarily.

² About whom enough good things simply cannot be said.

³ Who essentially is a webcomicker that happens to distribute via floppy-paper comic books and who — honestly — has remained at the top of the quality game for longer than many of his readers have been alive.

Dreary days outside, but at least there’s things happening this week. Let’s take a look.

• It’s been a long time since Christian Fundin and Pontus Madsen have made daily updates of Little Gamers a priority; design shops and creative consultancies don’t run themselves, nor do jaunts to furthest Mongolia just happen on their own. But even if the archives are no longer as active as they were, they do stretch back to the halcyon days of 2000, a full fourteen years from yesterday, which is a damn long time to keep even occasional updates of a comic going. Happy Strippiversary to Christian, Mr Madsen, the couch ninjas, and all their reprobate friends.
• Looking forward a couple of days, if you were planning on exhibiting at next April’s MoCCA Festival (at its new venue in Chelsea), you’ve got until this Friday, 5 December, to get your table application in. Special guests will include the likes of Raina Telgemeier, and perhaps the only person capable of dislodging her from the top of the New York Times Best Seller List, Scott McCloud. Thing is, they’re both so nice that if McCloud did knock Telgemeier from the #1 slot, she’d just congratulate him; come see the love in person 11 & 12 April, 2015.
• This weekend, 6 & 7 December, Texas welcomes the sixth iteration of Webcomics Rampage to the Dragon’s Lair in Austin. As in past years this is an in-store show, free to attend, but some sessions are likely to be crowded and so you might want to get there early. Open time with creators runs 1:00pm to 7:00pm both days, with livedraws at 2:00pm, 4:00pm, and 6:00pm. Both nights feature the Webomics … After Dark open Q&A from 9:00pm to 11:00pm, which may feature adult themes and language, growwwwllll¹.

  Ever want to see Randy Milholland and Danielle Corsetto spill all their secrets? Or wonder about what Spike and David Willis talk about when you aren’t standing in front of their booth? I … I don’t know what shameful things the other creators would get up to, so assume they’re just as reprehensible as those four, all right?

  Okay, fine, David Malki ! is always secretly measuring you for the shallow grave he dug out behind the show, but that’s all creators, duh. Tell them all I said “hi” and tell Randy he has to do the Fluffmodeus voice at the Q&A. I know that’s not a question, just do it. Trust me.

Spam of the day:

figure of macho modeling, lots of academy academy acceptance accordant to photograph frolicking nude over a beachfront or alone clay shirtless afore to an cruel camera.

Sounds like Fluffmodeus is writing advertising copy again.

________________
¹ I don’t know how you’re supposed to spell that half-meow, half-growl sound that’s all sexy-sounding from the naked lady in the made-for-Cinemax movies. You know the one.

Where to start, where to start? How about with the bad news? If you sell e-books to customers in Europe, 2015 is looking really damn complicated for you; I first saw the rising concern — honestly, panic would be justified — on the twitterfeed of Ursula Vernon, and the entire nasty situation is nicely summed up by KB Spangler on her blog. If you live in Europe, maybe buy your e-books before 1 January, because it looks like it will be prohibitive for all small producers (on either side of the Atlantic) to legally sell them to you after.

If you sell e-books, or e-anything, you will want to do some careful research between now and the end of the year, although my suspicion is that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (or the equivalent agency in other EU countries) can demand all the not-properly-collected value-added tax from a non-EU seller as loudly as they want, and unless you have money stashed in a European bank (or visit there under your own name), they may not be able to collect very effectively. Maybe? Nobody knows, which is the frustrating and scary part.

The rest of the news is better, I promise.

• For the first time, Emily Carroll is selling original comic art pages via auction, running until next Monday. Correction: this Monday, i.e.: today. Act now!
• TCAF is launching a pop-up store at the Toronto Reference Library for the holiday season, with the grand opening the day after tomorrow in conjunction with the debut of Just The Tips — the potentially hazardous sex advice from the back of each issue of Sex Criminals. Chip Zdarsky will be there to, uh, spread the love starting at 6:00pm, and regular store hours will start on Thursday at 9:00am. In the new year, the pop-up will convert to a regular retail space, presumably offering the best of comics from Toronto and elsewhere.
• Speaking of Toronto comics, Jim Zub has dropped more publishing financial data on us, detailing the entire sausage-making process that is the creation and selling of Skullkickers. Once again, ignore Zub’s extreme generosity at your peril — he’s sharing usually-proprietary information so that you need not flounder about and fail.
• Speaking of proprietary information, Chris Yates is giving away all his trade secrets; with a steady hand, some spray paint, and practice, you can make your own Baffler!s. Of course, he’s got ten years experience, so your knockoffs are gonna suck; you should just buy some of his instead.
• Speaking of buying, David Malki ! announced last night his annual perpetually uninterrupted flow of time-style calendar for 2015 is now up for sale, in the usual limited edition. Don’t delay if you want one, because only a lucky few will get the opportunity.
• There’s a really good interview with Randall Munroe in British tech journal The Register from the weekend; I’m a fan of El Reg, but if you’ve not read them before, there’s a fair amount of British nerd vernacular. A glossary of Reg-speak may be found here.

Spam of the day:

I was just looking at your site and see that your site has the potential to become very popular. I just want to tell you, In case you didn’t already know …

Wow. Very popular. Not sure how I’d deal with fame; poorly, I’d expect.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the US and I’ll be traveling for the most part (the rest, I’ll be eating until at risk of bursting). Friday will be spent with family, so maybe don’t expect anything here until next week?

In the meantime, some quick givings of thanks:

• Thanks to Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb, for sharing a sneak peek at their forthcoming adaptation of The Thief and the Watchdog. Can’t wait until we get to read it.
• Thanks to Randy Milholland for not (justifiably) murdering all of the idiots that beset him, and to Jon Rosenberg¹, for largely the same thing. Their birthdays are, respectively, yesterday and tomorrow, which makes me wonder exactly what the heck all the parents of webcomics types were up to back in February — Rosenberg, Milholland, Hallbeck, Spike, Gran, Estrada … all November babies.
• Thanks to all the many creators who entertain me daily, for free, on faith that someday I’ll buy something from them. I try to get as much as I can.
• Thanks most especially to you. You know why.

Spam of the day:

?????????????

Beats the heck outta me, Sparky.

________________
¹ Who pushed me to start this here blog, owns my soul, etc.

No matter how bad a day may be, I am convinced that Miyazaki Hayao can make things better. I had planned to binge-watch Totoro and Kiki as a means of dealing with the ugliness of the world, and then the world brought more and more Miyazaki to me. At The AV Club, a review of the new Miyazaki¹ documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. At The Dissolve² the movie of the week is Spirited Away with an extensive discussion of Miyazaki’s ouvre, including the man’s belief in overcoming any challenge if we just have a bit of empathy.

Finally, my wife brought in the mail and said You have a package from Chris Yates and I knew that today could not converge on Miyazaki any more — I now count myself as the caretaker for Baffler! #3400, depicting Nausicaä; she struggled against those who would corrupt the world for their own sake, armed mostly with a deep and abiding love of all living things. Not a bad lesson for today.

Spam of the day:

I’ve loaded your blog in 3 different internet browsers and I must say this blog loads a lot quicker then most.

This particular spam went on to shill for vaping accessories; all I have to say about that is if you’re gonna vape, at least get some GWAR flavors in there.

________________
¹ Ostensibly, it’s about Studio Ghibli, but in practice it’s all about Miyazaki.

² Founded by and largely written by former AV Club staffers.

The past 24 hours have brought reworkings of three classic stories to me, and darn if they aren’t all wonderful.

• Firstly, Rebecca Clements has, as noted not long ago, been busy with many things besides comics for a while. Fortunately, she’s got quite a backlog of comics that can be read and re-read. One of those older stories has now been released as an e-book, namely, an attempt at retelling Jack and the Beanstalk from memory, for one Australian dollar (or more! you can give more!) over at Gumroad.

  Clements was kind enough to send me a copy for review and it’s the most interesting take on Jack I’ve ever seen — all the elements are there — eventually — but suffused with the loopy, Seussian logic and visual style that Clements is known for. Oh, and a couple of bad words — including the dreaded F-hyphen-hyphen-hypen bad word — so give it a read through before sharing with a youngling, yes?

• Secondly, because I backed the Kickstarter, Evan Dahm sent me the PDF version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to tide me over until the hardcover gets released in the new year. It’s nearly 200 pages long, a completely faithful, word-for-word presentation of L Frank Baum’s original, with Dahm’s utterly charming drawings of Quadlings, and Kalidahs, and field mice, and all the other things that you never knew about if you only watch the movie.

  Once fulfillment on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has wrapped up for the Kickstarter backers, Dahm will surely place the book on sale, so start budgeting now. It’s gorgeous inside and out.

• Thirdly, Zach Weinersmith was exceedingly kind and shared an extra-early sneak preview of Augie and the Green Knight in PDF with me over the weekend. And all I can say is Wow.

  Okay, basically there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are familiar with the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and those who are not. If you know the story already, seeing it told from the side of the Knight (and that of the very brave, very clever, very rambunctious Augie trying desperately to make sure nobody ends up dead) brings new depths to the story. If you don’t know the story already, you’re going to want to hunt it down because the retelling is wonderful in its Weinersmithiness, and now you need to find out if all those long-dead poets are as good at wordslinging.

  Okay, fine, it’s a story that’s been remembered for half a millennium because at least one of those poets was really, really good; but would he have ever written something like this?

  The squire located a few common fauna -— a frog, a newt, and an amphisbaena. One of those animals may sound unfamiliar, so if you’ve never seen a frog, it’s like a goat, but with the head of a lizard and the body of a grasshopper. The newt was a cauldron-ready cooking newt, and the amphisbaena was pretty much your run-of-the-mill amphisbaena.

  The full-page color paintings and B&W spot illustrations by Boulet (including the aforementioned amphisbaena) are, naturally, wonderful. The typography and design are physically pleasing to the eye¹ and make each page enticing and help propel the story along. The book is written in a way that will appeal to both the child that hears it and the adult that reads it aloud; a somewhat older child may be able to read it solo, but may also ask an adult to read it well after she can manage for herself. It’s an experience that’s best shared.

  Augie and the Green Knight will go up for sale after the Kickstarter backers are in receipt of their books, probably by late winter or early spring 2015. Once again, start budgeting now, because these retellings of classics deserve to be on the shelf of the kid (or kid at heart) you love most.

Spam of the day:

Many people think that if they are not spending long periods of time out in the cold, it does not really matter what they are wearing on their feet.

Augie knows this, and wears ½ of a Quadruboots. With stars on them.

_______________
¹ Supplied, Weinersmith informs me, by Michael David Johnson².

² As if the book weren’t appealing to me enough, Weinersmith has included copious footnotes, and even a footnote to a footnote. My heart.

Are you sitting comfortably? Would you like to be more comfortable?

• The schedule for ComfyCon 2014 — the Con that you attend from home! — dropped last night, so now you can see what many of your favorite webcomickers and enablers are going to be doing between a couple of hours from now and Sunday evening. Fire up the compy, make sure the speakers and mic are working properly, and settle in with some snacks.

  Fun starts at 4:00pm today (all times are EST), but the official Opening Ceremonies don’t occur until 6:00pm; this was described at one point as [Something*Positive creator] Randy [Milholland] screams a lot, but now it’s the Randy and Danielle [Corsetto, of Girls With Slingshots] team-up, and those two are always a delight together.

  Tomorrow’s chock-full o’ fun with a pajama party with Jennie Breeden of The Devil’s Panties at 1:00pm (Jennie’s in Portland so it’s still morning for her, shut up), anthology secrets with Spike, Kel, and more at 3:00pm, and sexy, sexy porn with Josh Lesnick and other Slipshiners at 9:00pm. On Sunday there’s panels ranging from dealing with day jobs (2:00pm), a Super Art Fight (7:00pm), and closing ceremonies (more of Randy sobbing uncontrollably; 5:00pm). There’s lots more that I didn’t mention, and it’s likely that panelists and panels will continue to be added. Head over to the main ComfyCon page for the latest info.

• And just in case that you aren’t quite comfy enough, Pusheen has teamed up with plush manufacture giant GUND to do an official Pusheen plush, with a full line of Pusheen products in 2015. In the meantime you’ll just have to content yourself with the plushes, the holiday cards and tree ornaments, t-shirts, jewelry, the most awesome hoodie ever, and much, much more from the fine folks at Hey Chickadee. Some items are already sold out, so get to clickin’ if you want that special someone to be super comfy on [insert holiday of choice here] morn.

Spam of they day:

The following are just three examples of why defamation laws are so important; if these cases were never resolved, we may have read much differently of these historic figures.

Cartoonists, man. Nuthin’ but defamation city around them.