Just a heads up that tomorrow’s post may be somewhat incoherent as I intend to be day drinking in celebration and I don’t think I’ve ever written one of these things when under the influence of sophisticated adult beverages.

• For starters, I see (by way of Boneville) that Comic-Con International — the folks behind SDCC, Wondercon, and APE — are putting on educational panels on the third Thursdays of each month, starting the day after tomorrow. The first will be titled Comics For The Littlest Readers, featuring Jeff Smith, Andy Runton, Jenni Holm, Debbie Huey, and Dan Santat, with more information forthcoming.
• And it wouldn’t be January without the Young Adult Library Services Association releasing the annual listing of Great Graphic Novels For Teens; I’m a little late on that one, but it’s been a year already in just 19 days.

  Readers of this page should recognize Fleen Faves like Almost American Girl, Go With The Flow, Snapdragon, and Superman Smashes The Klan¹, in the Top Ten but there’s plenty of great work on the full list.

  That list includes — but is by no means limited to — such stellar work as Astronauts, Banned Book Club², Dragon Hoops, The Daughters Of Ys, Giant Days, The Last Halloween, Witch Hat Atelier (which was denied a debut and featured creator slot at TCAF last year, boo COVID), and many, many more. Gonna guess you can pick up any three books off the list at random and find at least one all-time fave in that sample.

• Now, I’m not saying that younger readers should be kept from stories of fighting fascists — see Superman and his Klan-smashing above — but maybe the new original story from Matt Lubchansky isn’t the place to start them out. Lubchansky has announced pre-orders for their new, highly cathartic, 64 pages of guilt-free satire of what the hard right think of antifascists, The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook.

  And if full-color Nazi-pummeling isn’t enticing enough — and as you know here at Fleen we always say If you see a Nazi, punch a Nazi — orders from Silver Sprocket have the option of including an embroidered patch (limited to 300) or Antifa challenge coin (limited to 100).

  I don’t have mine in hand (yet), but ever since my evil twin launched the webcomics/challenge coin thing³ some years back, I’ve gotten a number of these wonderful little tchotchkes, and one thing they have in common? They are solid lumps of brass and thus perfect for hucking at the skulls of fucking Nazis, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Neoconfederates, those assholes that ruined the OK sign and the word boogaloo, and all other associated CHUDs, the better to make them cry. Still time to get in on that.

  Do it for the children.

Spam of the day:

1 Weird Diet Trick Heals Vitiligo Fast

Oh, so a visible condition that has been known since antiquity had a simple solution that all of humanity has somehow missed out on, except for this one rando who discovered it? Right.

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¹ I have the strongest urge to re-read that right now and I don’t know why. What about Superman punching stupid white supremacists right in their stupid white supremacist faces could possibly have such a hold on me right now?

Yep, that’s a stumper.

² I also want to pull out this story of running an authoritarian (and his wannabe authoritarian daughter) the fuck out of power. Weird!

³ At least, I didn’t see anybody making challenge coin-alikes prior to Schlock Mercenary in 2013. If I’m wrong, let me know!

With the uncertainty of everything swirling around, we’re all just trying to figure out what happens next. Some thing will happen mostly the way they always have, some things are great big question marks, and and it’ll be who knows how long before we know which are which. For creators, there are two things to keep an eye on about now.

• The first is SPX, which has taken the step of communicating with the creative community to admit We don’t know what life’s gonna be like come September. Ordinarily, exhibitor application info would be getting posted about now, and the lottery dates would be announced, but since things are exploding on the COVID front (seriously, people, stay home) and the vaccine rollout has been marked by an almost total absence of unified planning or oversight, nobody knows where we’ll be in six or seven months.

  Personally, I think that Autumn has a 50/50 chance of returning to public events if people get their shit together now (which … yeah, ain’t happening) and people aren’t so fearful of public events that they don’t stay home. Anyway, good on the SPX organizers for trying to be as responsible as they can at this time.

• The second would be the announcement that National Cartoonists Society has opened submissions for their annual awards, of which two categories cover webcomics. What’s in question is whether the awards are presented in person or not¹, but the process of submitting, nominating, voting, and awarding will be the same as in prior years.

  If you want to be considered, you have until Friday 22 January to get the online form filled out. Remember to only submit a given award to one category, provide documentation that the work was released in calendar year 2020, and look carefully at whether your webcomics work is Short Form (gag-a-day or strip work) or Long Form (ongoing story arc). And, as a disclaimer, I have been a part of the jury process for the two Online Comics categories since 2012² and will be serving in that capacity again this year.

Spam of the day:

Deliver the highest-quality face mask from certified manufacturers directly to you at wholesale prices.

Fuckers like you are why I was working with insufficient PPE back in March, April, and May. We spent the summer stocking up before you could raise your bloodsucking head. Die forgotten.

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¹ Even if incoming President Biden can vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days, that’s less than half of the number we need to get us to herd immunity, and then you have to wait another 3-4 weeks for the second shot and then another two weeks for the full measure of protection, which puts us in mid-June before we’re maybe halfway to our goal. Like I said, September is maybe plausible but the spring and summer are likely to be a second consecutive set of write-offs. I’m sure the recipients of the NCS Awards will get a very nice shout out on Zoom and a lovely package in the mail.

² Except last year; lots of things got disrupted in 2020.

Let’s face it, nobody right now is exhaling or relaxing, no matter how many walking exemplars of impunity are finding themselves being taken into Federal custody in a manner that is simultaneously tragic, enraging, and hilarious. So let us be grateful that the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is doing their damndest to bring a little light to us all.

• On Sunday afternoon next weekend (that would be 24 January), there will be an interactive game of Paper Charades (like they did at CxC this year), which is a non-copyright-infringing game that looks a little bit like Pictionary but which is legally distinct. Raina Telgemeier, Dana Simpson, and Shannon Wright will be there to play along, with folks chiming in from chat to guess what’s getting drawn.

  The fun starts at 4:00pm EST (that’s 1:00pm for those of you on the west coast; everybody else figure it out on your own), it’s free, and open to all, but you do have to register in advance.

• The following weekend (that would be 30 January), the Billy opens a new exhibit of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, specifically focusing on the political commentary that the eponymous possum and his cohorts gleefully engaged in. Into The Swamp: The Social And Political Satire of Walt Kelly’s Pogo will be on view until 31 October, with a hiatus from 19 April through 11 June.

  Now you may be saying to yourself, Self, hasn’t Gary been pretty adamant that this is not the time to engage in public events, place-going, and suchlike? and in this you would be right. Hopefully we’ll be back to some semblance of public engagement well before the exhibit closes — wearing your masks keeping your distance now, and getting your shot as soon as you’re eligible radically increases the odds of getting there, especially in the back half of the run — and in the meantime, the Billy has restricted hours and capacity.

  Reservations are required (see here), with information on Ohio State’s safety guidelines here. Don’t go travelling just for this until we’ve got the pandemic under control, but once that happens? You’ll want to see this.

Spam of the day:

(Did you order an intimacy?)

No, but I am still waiting on a Negroni, a plate of jamon iberico, and an order of duck-fat fries. Could you check on when those will come out?

June? You expect them in June? Yeah, okay. Thanks.

Sometimes, though you’d be forgiven for thinking me loathe to admit it, there are things bigger than webcomics. I just listened to hours of mendacious bullshit coming out of the noise-holes of dozens of people who think anybody not exactly like them should not have a say in our society, and in the end their object of worship was held to account anyway.

Ten Republican members of the House voted to forward the article of impeachment to the Senate, which officially makes this the most bipartisan impeachment ever. Who knows what happens now, or how we begin to extricate this malignant growth from the nation — which is only personified in its ultimate end state in Donald Trump, not solely composed of him — and begin to undo the damage of the last four years and the last 400.

But on this momentous, knife-edge day that has been sadly foreseeable since forever, I suppose we should all do our best to preserve our thoughts on what’s happened so that future generations may know what it was like. To that end, allow me to say:

Donald Trump, it’s my fondest wish that you and your entire wannabe-mobster family¹ and all your fascist collaborators and enablers die in prison where you just might have enough self-awareness to understand how loathed you are, but I kinda doubt it. Eat me.

And although I believe I’ve done a good job of communicating what the political position of this page has been, and my readers have been remarkably non-assholish over the years, if you find yourself shocked!, offended! and, shocked some more!!!, door’s over there. Ain’t nobody forcing you to stay.

Spam of the day:

mRNA vaccine by Moderna contains *Luciferin* dissolved with *66.6* ml of distilled *phosphate* buffer solution. You can fact check this by going directedly to the link down below that goes to google patents. You will see the patent has been filed by moderna on the right hand column. When you download the pdf, press ctrl + f on your keyword and look up the word “luciferin” which pops up 5 times in the document. Also search up the word “luciferase” in which that word pops up 59 times

Luciferin and luciferase are the chemicals that make firefly butts light up, you credulous fuckwit. You can eat me, too.

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¹ I sincerely hope that Barron grows up to be like his cousin Mary, and escapes the enormous toxicity he’s been bathed in since birth. None of this was your fault, kid, and biology is not destiny.

Before we get started, I believe that birthday Version 1.0 release anniversary wishes are in order to everybody’s favorite robot pal, R Stevens. Selfless and giving entity that he is, he’s celebrated with a great new pin design in limited quantities that ships for free starting tomorrow. Fuzzy nightmare pals forever!

• I got my copy of The Nib’s latest print collection, Greetings From The Wasteland in the mail today, and it’s great. For starters, the collection of political cartoons is in large part arranged by creator, so all of your Pia Guerra cartoons are together, all the Gemma Corrells, all the Kendra Wellses, etc.

  Sadly, there wasn’t enough space to dedicate to the entire story of the future wasteland cartoons of editor Matt Bors — there would have been no room for anybody else — which, if arranged in the correct order, form a single, coherent story¹. But that’s hardly a surprise, given that they had four years of daily cartoons from dozens of cartoonists (15 of which get featured sections) to curate and only 200 pages to play with. Get yours now.

• We are facing down the second year of disrupted in-person events, but if there’s one thing comics-as-a-community has gotten good at, it’s finding ways to shift to virtual gatherings. Thus, the Cartoon Art Museum would like you to know that uncontrolled pandemic² or no, there will be some form of Queer Comics Expo and some way to announce the annual Prism Awards:
  

  Awards will be presented to comic works by queer authors and works that promote the growing body of diverse, powerful, innovative, positive or challenging representations of LGBTQAI+ characters in fiction or nonfiction comics. The goal of the Awards is to recognize, promote and celebrate diversity and excellence in the field of queer comics.

  The Queer Comics Expo launched as an annual event in 2014 as a celebration of queer culture and to promote diverse queer representation in comics, animation, and other great ways to tell our stories. QCE also serves as a fundraiser for San Francisco’’s Cartoon Art Museum. This year the event will take place May 15-16, 2021. Applications to participate as a creator or presenter for 2021 are OPEN until Monday, March 15, 2021 and will be NOTIFIED by Thursday, April 15, 2021.

  You can submit for both the QCE and the Prisms by browsing to cartoonart.org/qcexpo. Submissions for the Prisms are open until 28 February, with finalists announced at QCE (15-16 May) and winners announced over the summer. Categories include Best Short Form Comic, Best Webcomic, Best Comic From A Small To Midsize Press, Best Comic From A Mainstream Publisher, Best Comic Anthology, and Best Comic For Young Readers (new category).

  Category-specific requirements vary, but in general all submissions must have been first published in calendar year 2020, be in English, and have prominent LGBTQAI+ themes or be a strong allegory to the queer experience. See the entry form for more details.

Spam of the day:

This professor plugged his house to Earth’s core… that can harvest the power of Earth’s core making him 100% energy independent.

Yeah, I don’t have the patience to explain the concept of “electrical ground” to this spamming asshole, but I attended nerd schools — as an undergrad and grad — for six years specifically to learn that the Earth is where electricity goes to die.

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¹ Really, Bors said it himself. Two comics more recent than the book provide the bookends. By the way, their names are Gorm and Tinsel.

² Seriously, people, stay the fuck home, wear a mask, and make people that you know who won’t do those things feel your wrath until they decide to stop killing the rest of us.

It’s been an exhausting … forever, really.There are various lights at the ends of various tunnels, not the least being that the local Girl Scouts will start cookie sales in my area on Saturday. Science has long wondered how many boxes of Thin Mints can fit into a standard-sized freezer, and come the weekend I intend to find out.

In webcomics news …

• Today marks the start of year 20 of Something*Positive, which just boggles my mind. I started reading a little after Choo-Choo Bear¹ was introduced back in January 2002, and I’ve been a fan of Randy Milholland’s work ever since. I’d say you should read it from the very beginning, but that would require a significant expenditure of time and all you get for it is a tremendously well-written story that will occasionally break your heart. So yeah, you should do that.
• Speaking of 20-odd years on, we’re a week into the latest story from John Allison’s Tackleverse, a direct carryover from the excellent Wicked Things print series last year. While it’s no secret that Lottie is my favorite, I’d be telling you to read it regardless because Allison is another one of those folks who just gets better with each new story. Bonus: today’s strip definitely confirms that Steeple is part of the Tackleverse which we suspected, but it’s nice to have confirmation. Nice to see you, Billie!
• Readers may recall that I’ve spoken highly of Power Nap by Martiza Campos and Bachan, which wrapped last year. Both creators had other projects going and for stretches the story was pretty sporadic, but once they moved into the final scenes last year, they brought things to a satisfying and regularly-paced conclusion.

  Then something happened — the RSS feed I had for Power Nap to let me know when new pages released started telling me there were new pages, even though things had wrapped. It took a couple of pages to see what was going on — biker-looking dudes engaged in siege warfare in what appears to be a fantasy world, dudes who have a clear idea about what their jobs are (discussion about various warrior unions and demarcation show up), and one very pissed off dude is finally revealed to have the same name as this new story: GUTHRUM.

  Which is maybe the best, most metal name for a pissed off biker dude/on-the-clock siege warfare warrior I’ve ever heard. Pages are going up at a steady, weekly pace, and so far it’s a lot of fun. I can’t wait to see what Guthrum and his buddies get up to from here, but I bet it involves a lot of complaining.

Okay, let’s see if we can get through a full week of posts without life getting in the way. If T-rex is successful, I feel our chances will improve immensely.

Spam of the day:

Stuckpoop <stuckpoop@[redacted]> wrote: Drink this to eliminate constipation

How confident in yourself do you have to be to voluntarily take the email address stuckpoop? Pretty damn, I think.

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¹ Reminder: everybody’s favorite pudding cat was 25 years old at his introduction, putting him well into his forties now. All the chemo that made his bones liquid must have really done the job.

I’d intended to talk about how I was doing post-COVID vaccine, but then Warnock & Ossoff did their old parishoner/boss John Lewis proud and Donald Trump instigated the Stupid Putsch and here we are.

So I was more than a bit mad yesterday when I heard that Fox News was trying to act like it was BLM and antifa that were invading the Capitol and doing violence¹ and wondered what I can do. There’s regular, organized campaigns against their advertisers, but the real money they make is in the fees they charge cable providers for the privilege of carrying their programming, whether anybody watches it or not. And you can’t unbundle and get rid of single channels, everybody knows that.

But I tried anyway, and what the hell? It worked. And I told the world to do the same and hopefully a few zillion people are calling up their cable companies and asking for Fox/Fox Business/OANN/Newsmax/The Blaze/etc to not get any more of their money. And even if the cable companies won’t do that (cf: Comcast continues to be the worst), they’re hearing from a bunch of people who are upset as hell about the propaganda networks (key phrase I used: I will not have any of my money used for the material support of terrorism) and will hopefully use that as justification to negotiate those carriage fees down.

I mean, the cable companies don’t want to pay that money to Fox/etc, they want to keep it. And yes, the cable industry as a whole is terrible, but if they can take a dime or two from Fox (et al) for every one of their subscribers for every month going forward? That’s a hell of a lot more money than any ad campaign you could get yanked off the air. Murdoch is supposed to have cut ties with Trump as it is, time for him to feel some financial sting rather than just walk away.

So I started typing while I was cradling the phone to my ear² and talking with “James” (surely not his real name, which I do not begrudge him) and he listened very politely and I said that if he couldn’t that I’d like him to pass the word to his superiors and he found a way to do it. No bundle changes, just Fox and its ilk will not arrive in my house any longer, and my share of the fees is withheld. I thanked him, and said I hoped he got a lot of similar calls. Weirdly, although the cable industry is verifiably the worst, I’ve always had good dealings with Cablevision/Optimum.

I have no idea if it’ll work at scale, but it was tremendously satisfying — and likely more productive than the time I spent yelling at Rudy Giuliani³ on Twitter.

I also spent time today calling my Senators and Congressman (had to go with their local district offices — when you call, convey to the staffer taking the message your profound relief that they/their colleagues weren’t hurt after yesterday’s disgrace) to warn them not to trust anything electrical or electronic that was left behind in their offices and oh yeah to impeach that motherfucker again, to send the architects of insurrection the fuck out of Congress (lookin’ at you, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz; and what’s your deal anyway, Ted? Afraid you would lose the Most Hated By Your Cowokers trophy to Josh?), to bring down some scrupulously fair but motherfucking consequences on Y’all Qaeda and Vanilla Isis, and to fix the injustices of the last 4 years, not to mention the last 400.

So that’s why comments are off for the next while here at Fleen. I thought it prudent, even though the MAGA chuds seem to leave me alone. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get back to comics at some point, but we’ll take it day by day. Take care of yourselves, friendos, there’s more than just COVID out there that wants to wreck everything, and it’s going to be a long-haul project to repair all the damage.

And get the shot when it’s offered. My arm still hurts, but it’s a damn sight better than COVID.

Spam of the day:

which the conventional graphic symbols are executed. drafts of literary works

Something in the Master Spam Wordsalad Generator Algorithm is really hung up on the idea of manuscripts right now. 90% of what I’m getting reads like this.

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¹ It was a pretty damn lily-white crowd and they were plainly the fa that antifa does us the favor of fighting. Plus they all keep doing incredibly stupid shit like posting video of themselves or giving on the record interviews bragging about doing crimes. Bunch a’ real brain geniuses there.

² Awkwardness, anger, and multitasking are to blame for the typos in my tweets. Swear.

³ I dream of the day I can call him a craven shitstain to his face, but for now it’ll have to be via the internet. All the same, if he spends even a fraction of a second with his eyeballs having to process my visceral hatred of him, if I take even a little bit of his hauteur away, it’ll have been 47 seconds well spent.

Stay safe, hold your elected representatives to be the Department Of Motherfucking Consequences, and tell your cable company that you want Fox channels to no longer receive your money.

Hello to all Fleensters figuring I’d be back yesterday. I intended to (just as I intended to write more today), but something came up that’s been taking up my time. Without going into too much detail, I’ve been spending a lot of hours on making arrangements for the members of my EMS agency to receive the COVID vaccine (we’re CDC tier 1A, it’s 3 weeks into distribution, and our first shot happened yesterday¹).

So I should be a bit more free² starting tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.

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¹ The planing at the federal level — where resources actually exist — was essentially zero. They threw a bunch of vials at the states at random times and in unknown amounts and said Figure it out!

Also, why the fuck are we paying CVS and Walgreens to distribute vaccines into congregate living spaces when we have the national Public Health Service who are designed to do exactly this in coordination with FEMA and military resources? Fifteen days until people that value competency return to control of the national government.

² Not to mention nursing a sore arm from receiving my first dose of the Moderna vaccine in a couple of hours. It’s the Dolly shot!

We at Fleen are, like many, celebrating this shortest day of the year (Northern Hemisphere) by looking forward to seasonal celebrations and taking our mind off both this dumpster fire of a year and also everyday ordinary routine. Posting may be brief, sporadic, or absent between now and the New Year.

Thanks for spending 2020 with us — I think we helped each other.