Man, I do not know what got past the shields yesterday, but I was laid low by that 24 hour bug. Feeling much better today, hi, how are you? That one day’s worth of illness has thrown me off, as stuff I wanted to mention yesterday gets pushed to today, and my heads up on who will be where at NYCC gets pushed to tomorrow by which time the show will already be open, and due to a combination of work and my niece’s wedding (love you, Heather!), I’ll only be at the show on Friday. Was that a sentence? It feels kind of disorganized as a sentence, and big disorganized thoughts still make my head somewhat swimmy, so let’s dive in.

• But before we jump into stuff that got pushed, something very timely: there appears to be a concerted attempt to reset passwords on WordPress sites. I first became aware of it when I saw the warning on Twitter from Phil “Frumph” Hofer, Word Press expert-for-hire and ComicPress/Comic Easel developer. Since Hofer has helped a lot of people, he got about 30 password reset-attempt emails and raised the alarm. It turned out not to be limited to Hofer, as many people were experiencing the same thing; I noticed an attempt on we at Fleen occurred about 5:00am.

  As Hofer says, you need to secure administrative access to your WordPress site:

  Important as it is, you NEED to set people back to subscriber after they’re done helping you out, the only person who should ever have consistent administrator access is YOU, no one else. (unless in the case of those people who have a site administrator helping them out, but you get the idea … no 3rd party people)

  Embarrassing as it is to say, I wasn’t fully secure; I had long since killed the privileges on former contributors to this site, but I hadn’t disabled Hofer’s account from when he helped me with a hosting migration a year back. Worse, there’s only one account that ever posts on this site these days — which made it a clear target — and I was using it both to post and for administrative operations.

  Please note that I said was, as I’ve changed that. If you’re using WordPress, take the five minutes to demote your main account to “editor” and shift admin duties to an arbitrary account with a non-obvious name and an obnoxiously long password, then never use it except for admin purposes. You’ll be happy you did.

• Evan Dahm’s illustrated edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has launched its Kickstarter, and is about halfway to goal one day in. This is going to be a gorgeous book, and with the assistance of Make That Thing on fulfillment, it should arrive with no hiccups. I’ve just ordered two copies — one to keep, one to present to my youngest niece-and-nephew pair.
• When you talk about old school webcomics, it’s harder to get older than original Blank Label (the site isn’t even parked anymore) member Steve Troop and the venerable webcomic/puppet show known as Melonpool. It’s been off-and-on for years now (to be perfectly honest, mostly off) while Troop has worked towards a movie version, but Melonpool has returned to webcomics with a reboot. Daily updates so far (and a promise of color Sundays), and we’ll have to see what all the old characters get up to.

We’ll do the full roundup of NYCC exhibitors of interest tomorrow, but how about a list of people that won’t be off at their own tables?

• Cameron Stewart will be riding the excitement of his new Batgirl ongoing (with Babs Tarr on art) via signings and panels on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
• Ananth Panagariya will be signing in support of Buzz! with Tessa Stone at the Oni Booth on Friday and Sunday, and in support of Candy Capers with Yuko Ota and Ian McGinty at the BOOM! booth on Sunday.
• Randall Munroe will be signing in support of What If? on Friday, then have a spotlight panel on Saturday with Bill Freakin’ Nye, dang.
• Kate Leth will be signing in support of Bravest Warriors and Adventure Time OGN Seeing Red, Natasha Allegri in support of Bee and Puppycat, and Noelle Stevenson in support of Lumberjanes, all at the BOOM! booth (check at the booth for times).
• Andrew Bell will have several new toys debuting at the show via the My Plastic Heart booth — there will be a collection of previously-released designs in stylish, slimming black, and his newest take on the Dealmaker.

Spam of the day:

I have found that the key to running a popular website is making sure the visitors you are getting are interested in your subject matter.

Wow, never would have guess that the secret to having a popular website is to have a topic people are interested in. It’s like rocket science!

Sick day, going back to bed. See you tomorrow and if I don’t, avenge my blood.

This is not your typical Monday. Shall we count the ways?

• Perhaps the largest news to hit the geekosphere today (I watched the first season of Twin Peaks before thoroughly losing interest, so today’s news of a return isn’t really grabbing me) would be the word of Ryan North’s next project: he’ll be writing an ongoing Squirrel Girl series for Marvel with an inspired choice for artist in the person of Erica Henderson.

  This ranks high in terms of superhero comics I didn’t know I wanted but I totally do, possibly matched only by the thought of Brad Guigar getting a crack at Plastic Man/Ambush Bug teamup or Chris Hastings getting to write an all-ages, lighthearted Spider Man.¹ I love this, despite the well-documented fact that I despise squirrels. Hate ’em. And yet I am ready to give money to Marvel come January (despite my reluctance to give any more money than is strictly necessary to the Disney corporation) because I know this is going to rule so hard.

• So I noticed ‘tother day that Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey Wells have launched the requisite Kickstarter campaign for their next print collection — their fifth — which is going to make the “S” section of my bookshelf even more crowded than it already is, what with it already hosting Sandman, Starman, Strangers in Paradise, The Spirit, Sheldon, Schlock Mercenary, Starslip, Spacetrawler, and Scary Go Round. Rearrangements will be a necessity, as Skin Horse is one of my genuine daily delights, with the honest laughs cranked up to eleven pert-near every day that I read.

  Unsurprisingly (Garrity and Wells have an extremely loyal following, one that likely exceeds the usual 10% will buy stuff rule of thumb), the campaign has already nearly doubled its (extremely modest) US$6000 goal, and now I need only wait until May or so in order to have said book in my hands. What really caught my attention, though, was something rather clever that was done for this campaign, something that I don’t see done often enough. There was no chance of me missing this Kickstart, because some few hours after it launched, I (along with all backers of Skin Horse volume 4) was sent an email noting that hey, you bought the fourth book in a series, so you’d probably dig the fifth, right? Exactly right.

  Granted, it’s not every project or every creator that can do this kind of carryover marketing, but if you’re producing a sries on a regular schedule, you’d be foolish not to leverage that opted-in mailing list you’ve already got. It doesn’t hurt that Garrity and Wells offer one of the best bargains in webcomics — a sketched & signed physical book, for US$25 (shipping included).

• Speaking of books, my wife had a copy of Randall Munroe’s New York Times bestselling What If? waiting for me after my escape from the city of Chicago (which was more that mildly affected a full week after that disgruntled jerk that tried to burn down the air traffic control center). I am thoroughly enjoying it, and more than a little disturbed how often the people in the addressed situations end up confronted by rapidly-expanding clouds of superheated plasma.
• It is simultaneously the wedding anniversary of two of the most wonderful people ever and the birthday of one of the classiest, most excellent fellows on the planet. I’ll go further: the wedding of Jeffrey and Holly Rowland was the best wedding ever (and I include my own in that statement), and Ananth Panagariya’s continued existence provokes a dilemma in me: I can’t decide if I would rather be Ananth Panagariya, or perhaps one of his roommates, because then I would get to spend every day with Ananth Panagariya. Happy Everything to the excellent lady and dudes.
• Two weeks, two Dresden Codak updates (which I believe all would acknowledge is a land speed record for Aaron Diaz), and the possibility exists of not only sustaining that schedule, but perhaps even increasing it to three pages a month. Diaz is threatening to attempt weekly but acknowledges that such a schedule would possibly break the laws of physics, so on behalf of a frightened world that likes the laws of physics² as they are, please don’t feel the need to fly so close to the sun, Aaron.
• Coincidence? Red Robot shows us how to deal constructively with oppressors and barely four hour later the US Supreme Court declines to hear seven challenges to marriage equality, meaning that five more states have been brought into the fold of modern civilization³. Thirty states down, twenty to go, and as of today more than half the population of the United States can marry whoever the hell they want. So yeah, probably coincidence, but if Stevens wanted to do similarly-themed comics on the eves of other judicial decisions, it couldn’t hurt.

Spam of the day:

You are so cool! I don’t believe I have read a single thing like that before. So good to discover someone with unique thoughts on this subject.

Seriously.. many thanks for starting this up. This site is one thing that is needed on the web, someone with a bit of originality!

Any other day, I would have given this comment no credence viz authenticity, but today I’m in a good mood. Thank you for your good wishes, anonymous commenter who included a link that no way in hell will I ever click on. Much ‘ppreciated.

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¹ Oh please, oh please.

² And thus the universe.

³ No doubt kicking and screaming in some quarters. Darn.

Not to mention the fact that I have a flight to catch out of O’Hare in a couple of hours (FAA willin’ and the creek don’t rise), so this is minimal. I know that you’ll find it in your hearts to forgive me.

• MICE (that is to say, the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo) is both a young show (just five years in) and a relatively small-scale show, but it’s become increasingly significant in the past couple of years; it’s probably comparable to TCAF, SPX, or MoCCA at this point. So if you’re in the greater Boston area, trek over to the Lesley University campus in Cambridge’s Porter Square, where you’ll find free admission, special guests like Raina ‘n’ Dave, James Kochalka, Emily Carroll, and Box Brown.

  Special bonus: exhibitors will be in rooms named for Robert Crumb, Julie Doucet, and Alison Bechdel, and will include the likes of Jason Viola, Alison Wilgus, Jaya Saxena & Matt Lubchansky, Rosemary Mosco, Braden Lamb & Shelli Paroline, Sophie Goldstein, Colin Tedford, Colleen AF Venable, Zack Giallongon, Maki Naro, Molly Ostertag, and Evan Dahm. Tell every single one of them I said hi.

• Still wondering what Patreon does? To help answer the question, they commissioned an explanatory comic from Jon Rosenberg, and you can catch sight of it here. That van Gogh, always with the wanting to eat.

Those of you that follow me on Twitter may know that I am presently in Chicago, and walking around The Loop I’ve encountered people that are near-perfect duplicates of others that I know or at least know of: Hope Larson, Scott C¹, Dustin Harbin, John Allison and more. Lately, it’s been accelerating, and I see people on the street that resemble those I know more rapidly than I can keep up. Either I’m having a very long, very specific, very slow-progressing neurological disorder, or Twitter people are being replaced by invaders from outer space. If any of the people below claims to be in Chicago suddenly instead of where they normally should be, get the shotgun ready.

• Jon Rosenberg and Gemma Correll hit one of those odd bits of internet comic synchrony today, as they each independently released a comic with a rather unusual element in common: the crab with a gun. This is the weirdest coincidence since multiple crocodilian-mentioning comics ran on the day that Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died. I think the aliens screwed up, and decided that Correll and Rosenberg might be the same person.
• One thing that the aliens are probably pretty good at: coming up with an approximation of human language and logic that doesn’t quite sit right on the ear. By that token I’d say that the posts on new social network Ello by “Kris Straub” are almost certainly the work of nonhuman intelligences, because surely no actual person would speak in such a manner as this. He’s been replaced by aliens that learned to speak from crashing Silicon Valley conferences and collecting “thought leader”-speak! Or he’s just really, really tired from having a new kid at home.

Okay, we’ve played out that gag long enough. Quick milestones:

• Yesterday marked ten years and 1905 strips of Girls With Slingshots, which means that everybody should feel good for GWS creator Danielle Corsetto! There’s not any specific to-do at the comic, what with her taking a six week, cross-country celebration lap this past summer, but a quick Attagirl will surely be appreciated.
• Even more impressive: sometime in the past few weeks, TopatoCo passed one hell of a milestone in that it shipped its 500,000th package. I believe that Jeffrey Rowland is now permitted to list Mogul on the “Job title” box of his tax returns. If this year is anything like previous years, TopatoCo will spend upwards of a quarter million dollars just on postage — all to send smiles to people that love cool things and money to creators who would rather kill themselves than ship a half million packages. Everybody feel good for everybody associate with The Topato Corporation!

Spam of the day:

sorry but there is a mistake at Nr. 8 (there are two nuerbms 8) one vertical and another one horizontal. when you press at the crossword on that number it shows you a question vertically while answers horizontally(question about a camel while answer is about a cow ) .

Godsdammit, more aliens. Will we never be rid of them?

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¹ Not the headband-and-shorts version, regular shirt-and-jeans version.

It’s mostly about books today. Books and disappointment.

• I think the historical record is pretty clear: I love Erika Moen’s work. I love DAR!, I love Bucko, I love Oh Joy, Sex Toy, and I love Hurricane Erika herself. I am also on record as digging me some Star Trek — all varieties! — so when I say that today’s OJST update physically pained me, it’s not because of dislike of the artist, the topic matter, or the blatant Trek fangirlism. I am fine with all these things.

  It was the puns. Oh, glob, the puns. Erika, you’re better than this. Because if there’s one thing that I’m also clear on — the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me: I will die in it at the stake — it’s that Brad Guigar is not a role model. Tastemaker and teacher without compare? Sure. A sexy, sexy man? Oh mais, oui. But he has a bad boy side, and he is an unrepentant paronomasiac who should be shunned for his bad example. Erika. This road leads only to one place: Dad Jokes. Just say no before it’s too late.

• Speaking of DAR!, Ms Moen rather prominently held a close-out sale and ditched her remaining stock of books 1 and 2, closing out her sales of those items on 30 September. You can still get them as PDFs, but if you want a dead-tree version, you’re out of luck unless you want to try to convince me to give up my copies¹ or brave the secondary market. Except that maybe you’re not out of luck!

  For those of you that missed it, Minna Sundberg put twelve copies of A Red Tail’s Dream up for sale which immediately sold; the fact that they immediately sold isn’t the interesting part, but rather where they sold. Like an ever-expanding roster of creators, Sundberg’s a member of webcomics advertising/services collective The Hiveworks, which has been hinting at getting into retail merch sales. Well they’ve soft-launched that storefront, and if Hivemill is sold out of ARTD, they’ll likely get some more in future, and oh look — copies of DAR! volumes 1 and 2 also for sale.

  Hivemill’s soft launch has been very soft; this is first I’ve noticed it although it appears to have been in operation since the summer. Look for more stock to show up there as affiliated creators who don’t want to do their own shipping (or who aren’t already associated with TopatoCo) start shifting stocks in advance of the upcoming holiday season. Having more people out there doing order fulfillment on behalf of webcomickers can only be a good thing.

• Speaking of books, I shamefully neglected to mention that I picked up a copy of Strong Female Protagonist book 1 by Brennan Mulligan and Molly Ostertag. I really like SFP but it’s one of those comics that I just can’t read in twice-weekly updates; getting 200 pages of wonderfully chunky story is just what’s needed, and I enjoyed the crap out of it.
• Finally, let’s just admit that nobody knows how to end a book (with attendant hiatus) on a note that makes you want to read more now than Kris Straub. Broodhollow’s second book (subtitled Angleworm, starting here and running for one year) ends with Zane in maybe the worst circumstances since his arrival in the weirdest corner of West Virginia, and there we will have to sit until (likely) January. Take the time to read through the collected story arc and start saving, because when the inevitable print collection becomes available, you are going to want this one.

Spam of the day:

At the beginning of for each and every, the type of publicaddress announcer attempted using mightily toward fuzzy laptop computer Mexico was previously dealt the right fight about communities which have each blended 17 history.

Wha … fuzzy laptop computer Mexico? Is this related to that one very bad Gundam series where various countries fielded giant robots shaped like the laziest ethnic stereotypes and the Mexican Gundam had a giant robot moustache and giant robot poncho and giant robot sombrero? Because that shit was straight-up racist.

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¹ Ain’t happening.s Dream

Editor’s Note: We at Fleen were invited to participate in a virtual book tour for The Rise of Aurora West, which means we’ll be discussing elements of the plot. For those that are concerned with such things, here be spoilers.

Thanks once again to Gina Gagliano for the review copy, and for inviting us to be part of the blogtour; other stops can be found here. And because all the folks associated with Battling Boy and Aurora West love us and want us to be happy, they’ve sent along some lovely art by TROAW artist David Rubín of one of the bigger bads from the book: Medula the Witch. Because there is nothing better (in the sense of totally insane) than a monster-lady with a Tommy Gun and a penchant for chaos. Be sure to check it out full size.

Spam of the day:

You should think about whether you would like a garden that is growing almost wildly or perhaps a garden which is highly structured.
Frictional forces within the accretion disk generate huge numbers of energy, which is radiated as either visible light, radio or X-rays.

I prefer gardens that provide for happy bees and produce edibles, and definitely are not so densely overgrown as to produce their own gravity wells.

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¹ Was because in the early acts of Battling Boy, Haggard West falls to the monsters; this is a prequel, after all, so we see him before his defeat.

• It’s not hard to understand Nimona coming to an end, as it did some few hours ago; creator Noelle Stevenson is busy with lots of comics projects these days (not the least being the excellent Lumberjanes), and the story always had a beginning-middle-end feel to it. Still, I would have been perfectly happy for chapter 11 to wrap up a book of the story, if you will, and then for another book to start with a new chapter 1; then again, it’s about the story that Stevenson wanted to tell, not the preferences that I may have.

  In any event, 250-odd (sometimes very odd) pages is a good run for a story, and we’ll always be able to read about the adventures of Nimona and Lord Blackheart, and the ethics of “villainy” from the beginning … or in handy print form from HarperCollins in May, which you may preorder for convenience. Oh, and Stevenson is promising a book-only epilogue and if that’s not ongoing adventure, it’s the next best thing.

• Kickstarter news I: Unshelved has a problem — namely too damn many comics to put in print form easily. Ten books worth already, an eleventh on the way, and vansihing shelf space the world over. In order to make as many comics available to as many people as cheaply and easily as possible, creators Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes have opted to take the path broken by Diesel Sweeties a few years back and offer the entire damn back catalog on a novelty USB key, presuming all the funding goals get met.

  Stretch goals will mean that the to-be-released book eleven gets included in the ebook bundle, audio commentaries get recorded by Barnes & Ambaum, and — most importantly — free copies of (as of this writing, at least two) books are made available to libraries. It’s an odd thing, making most of the stretch goals into give more stuff to people that aren’t you rather than make the stuff you get more special, but library folk are generous that way.

• Kickstarter news II: David Malki ! has almost finished the production of nonphysical rewards for the Machine of Death card game, and has a project megapost detailing what’s available now (the audiobook version of the game cards; the game to non-backers via various retail outlets; a downloadable version of the game under a Creative Commons license; new rule variants) and what is yet to come (a downloadable artbook; an MC Frontalot song; an original rules song; various personal appearances) in the culmination of a multi-year project.

  Most excitingly for people like me, Malki ! includes an expenses breakdown and a pretty complete financial accounting of what it costs to put together a project like this, which should serve as critical information for anybody that wants to run their own Kickstart. Please note especially where Postage cost just 0.5% less than Game Production, and consider that some of the production involved complex, handmade wooden boxes that must have cost a bundle, without which post fees would probably have been the single largest expense. How big an expense was postage, at 35.9%? Sending two actual humans (Malki ! and Chun Ming Huang) to China and returning them home safely cost less than 1% of the total expenses.

• Not quite Kickstarter: As noted in the beforetimes, Operation Let’s Build A Goddamned Tesla Museum was only the beginning — a physical site was saved, but millions more would be needed to build up the actual museum itself — a monumental undertaking, even with the real-life Tony Stark on your side. To that end, honorary Tesla family member Matthew Inman is running funding drives for the GDTM in the form of commemorative bricks (as seen at many cultural and educational institutions that do not feature the word Goddamned in the name) and t-shirts (which feature the Tesla Motors logo, by personal dispensation of Elon Musk). It is not too early to do holiday shopping for the nerds in your life, and both shirts and bricks cost a hell of a lot less than Tesla motorcars, just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

really not, of course.

Of course!

PS: Mary I am very sorry if linking to your delightful stories of teaching English in Japan means you have been brought to the attention of garbage-person spammers.

We’ve got something for everybody today. Let’s dig in.

• Own a copy of Ryan North’s To Be Or Not To Be? Like me, did you think that you’d exhausted all the possible story paths last year? Au contraire, as North has been sharing some semi-walkthroughs of the story, at least one of which leads to a story point that I never encountered in my dozens of readings:
  

  It reads as a joke, but it isn’t one: if you do actually perform those calculations at the appropriate time in the book – and you’ll know it when you see it – their result will be a new page number to turn too, at which point you’ll continue your adventure as both Present Hamlet and Just Arrived From The Future Hamlet.

  That’s right: time travel. On the other hand, I did come across a story ending that involved the nature of reality itself, and a massive game of chess. Oh, and if you’re of a culinary bent, I also came across a tasty recipe, which North is also sharing with you:

  You will find yourself in a locked-room puzzle with only a few moves to dispose of the body before being discovered. Direct your choices towards making stew, and in one of the endings you will be rewarded with a really excellent recipe for stew.

• Each year, I know that Faith Erin Hicks is going to come up with a new graphic novel that’s going to knock my socks off, ranging from summer camp horror to high school intrigue, to scares mixed with a new high school to wacky hijinks involving high school and robots to the not-at-all-high-school-related Adventures of Superhero Girl, and many, many more. And today is her birthday! Everybody wish her a happy one, and encourage her to take at least one day off her breakneck pace of book-creatin’ to enjoy herself.
• New! Sweet Bro and Hell Of Jeff start a new weeklong story at Paradox Space. Be sure to double up on your sanity meds before you click.
• New! After a long series of delays while she worked on other projects (you know, little things like Sleep of Reason and Smut Peddler and running a publishing company), Spike is itchin’ to get back to the comic that she made her name on. In fact, a few weeks ago at SPX as I was giving her grief for leaving me hanging on Scip and his swirled cone (April, 2013) and the immediate aftermath (last Christmas), with a shift of scene in January and February she promised that Templar, AZ would be returning this month. With the clock counting down, we saw the news earlier today:
  

  Stream over! TAZ page status: 95% finished, from sketch to colors, in about 10 hours. It’ll go up later today. But my wrist hurts, so yeah.

  I’ve been obsessively refreshing my browser and it’s not up yet, but soon! I’d also like to remind Spike that I am in Chicago this week and would be very disappointed in person if the page did not go up as promised¹.

Spam of the day:

But why don’t you consider the narrow people with the loads of diet routine coke, Kraft meals, melted hen, furthermore cookies?

Melted … hen?

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¹ In case you’ve never met me, that’s not a threat of getting physical; I’ve never met you and I’m pretty sure you could kick my ass. Rather, I would pester her relentless. In the immortal words of Kevin McDonald, I’m a whiner without dignity, I’ll make your life hell! [audio, video]

Man, what’s this about Chicago’s airports being shut down? I gotta fly there on Sunday. Grumble, grumble.

• Clever idea of the day: You Damn Kid’s recent return means that we are getting new strips three days a week and vintage strips (with commentary) on Thursdays — in essence, two entirely different strips. But today, Owen Dunne has combined the two into a form — like Voltron — that is greater than the sum of its parts: the strip-in-a-strip [NB: right now it’s the front page of the site, but by Monday it’ll have a different URL, which I’ll update eventually].

  Original Kid/current father to the New Kid is reminiscing about his own childhood, and clicking anywhere on the current strip will bring up the vintage strip from history 2005¹. Or, if you’re very brave, you can check out the uncensored version [NSFBrain]. Long story short, it’s a clever idea.

• When Dylan Meconis — whom I love more than anybody except probably her wife and maybe her mom — and Matt Bors tweeted earlier in the week about deer porn, I was torn between really wanting to see that and never wanting to see that. As it turns out, some comics at The Nib feature entirely innocuous titles that do not indicate what you’ll be seeing. May I suggest that in future, rather than Prequels All The Way Down (clever wordplay, no argument) [NSFW if you’re a deer], this particular comic be instead called Warning! Lark’s Vomit! Deer Porn!
• Let’s go out on something really excellent: Bad Machinery book 3 exists in at least a few corners of the world, and will hopefully be available through the engines of commerce sooner rather than later. Or, you know, December. Fires! Jack and Shauna’s romance reaches its peak! The Mystery War is over. Get caught up on the story, then get your preorders in because this is the start of Bad Machinery really hitting its stride, with each subsequent case somehow getting even better.

Spam of the day:

walmart

Man, fuck Wal*Mart.

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¹ Coincidentally, Ray got kind of stoned in 2005, making those two strips contemporaries.