Vattu: The Name And The Mark is book one of Evan Dahm’s Vattu, the latest story from Overside, which feels like it’s presently approaching the end of book two.

You guys, in case I haven’t said before — and I know I have — Vattu is so good, and having the book in hand is making me read it all again in one go. The last of this book — the story of how Vattu came to the city and made her way to the streets to live on her own, with the companionship of the War-Man — was some 250 page updates ago, or nearly two years. We hadn’t seen any of the politics of Sahta, or the Surin, or wonderful, wonderful Juni. The mysteries of unweight haven’t been explored yet, nor what feels like the seeds of two revolutions: Vattu’s being violent and freedom-seeking, Juni’s being scientific.

Instead we get the story of Fluters, Those-Marked-in-White, and Vattu’s birth. The petty anger and hatreds of Vanni who became the Priest and sold out Vattu. The dangers of living a nomadic life that is short and a challenge to survive each day. It’s lush and beautiful and Dahm’s ecosystems (rivers and oceans, plants and animals, predators and prey, yes — but just as much empires and colonies and tributaries) retain their organic, evolved, lived-in appeal.

Vattu: The Name And The Mark was produced via a Kickstarter campaign, and as fulfillment of those orders finalizes, I would expect to see two things happening:

1. The book should appear in Dahm’s store and if you don’t have a copy you should buy the hell out of it; you may also perhaps have the opportunity to do so this weekend at Emerald City Comic Con.
2. Before too long, we’ll reach the end of book two, and there will be a new Kickstart to get that collection in our hands.

Personally, I’m ready to give Dahm the money for it right the hell now because damn, this is a marvel and the story only gets better from here.

Despite what it may look like, today is not merely an excuse for me to tell an amusing college anecdote. That’s just the bonus.

• On a long-ago episode of Webcomics Weekly (I don’t recall which one, so have fun searching), the strapping four lads agreed (that was what stuck in my mind — all four of them agreeing on something) that you can’t really put out a professional quality webcomic without engaging in some degree of commercialization and money making. If you were that degree of professional in the making and content of your comic, the argument went, it was inevitable that you would be making some amount of money from it.

  I always thought that was too reductive a world view, considering that people like David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) exist who have produce pro-level webcomics with no desire to make a living (or even pocket money) from them. The comic is its own reward, regardless of desire to follow a comics career¹.

  I bring this up because I’ve been thinking a lot about a piece written earlier this week by Liz Greenfield (creator of the much-missed Stuff Sucks, now lost to time) on the value of non-profit comics:

  Over the past seven weeks I’ve been in Bristol, working closely with a dozen amazing individuals to write a graphic novel. We did it in record time and the resulting manuscript is impressive. It’s full of true stories and fantastic lies and imagination. It’s the most exciting and bravest work I have been involved in yet and I can’t wait to share it with you, but I will have to draw it first.

  It’s safe to say the past eight weeks of workshops and the process of writing using physical theatre exercises, improvisation techniques, group workshopping etc. has altered my practice forever. One thing that emerged was the advantages of non-commercial work – this project is being supported by the Arts Council of England and the Arnolfini in Bristol – over work whose end goal is to satisfy sales targets and generate profit for the writer, artist, publisher.

  I’m aware that most of my colleagues in comic books aren’t familiar with this model of creating, as these opportunities are still fairly new and far between (outside of France and Belgium, who subsidise comics as any other art form with generous grants, residencies, prizes, awards).

  If you’re in the same boat as me, maybe the reason you haven’t made a change is you’re waiting for someone to swoop in and bind it and put in on the shelves of a library/bookshop. My advice is: don’t. Don’t give way to a fantasy and let it stunt you growth. Don’t labour robotically under the illusion that someone will recognise your determination and see through all the levels of artifice you guard it with. This work should be made of doubts and hope and insecurities and love, or not at all. If you’re going to hate your job, at least find one that pays properly.

  It’s worth a read, and Greenfield invites her fellow art bastards to add their opinions on personal and not-for-profit projects.

• Speaking of (very) personal and (potentially) not-for-profit projects, one of those comes to a fairly big denouement in a few hours, as Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder have a public unveiling:
  

  Try to spot the guy who’s a nervous little nellie for his premiere tonight.

  STRIPPED has its public gala premiere in about six and a half hours (as I write this), and if you cock your ears in about eight hours towards LA, I’m pretty sure you’ll hear sustained applause, as well as four years of tension and stress suddenly releasing in Messrs Schroeder and Kellett. If your ears are especially good, you might make out some of the questions and answers that follow, but as I’ll be on EMS duty I won’t be able to relay them to you. Anybody attending the premiere want to share the experience? Drop me a line.

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¹ Perhaps analogous to the experience of a visiting professor of history when I was in college. Being an engineering school, we only had one professor of history and when he went to Japan for a year on a fellowship a replacement was found from a large state university a few hours away. Halfway through fall term he stopped suddenly in the middle of class (War, Revolution & Society 1789 — Present; being the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, he was playing it for all it was worth) and said I just realized something. You guys are all engineers and scientists, but you’re doing the same work that I would give to history majors and you’re all doing well. You’re doing as much reading in a ten-week quarter as they would in a 15-week semester. He paused, then continued, What the hell?

We explained that although none of us would be historians or use what we learned in our careers, we just enjoyed it; taking a 400-level history class (or literature, or psychology, or whatever) was like a hobby for us, since it would be the one class that term without math.

Also, it gave us an opportunity to write papers, which allowed for some serious pranking possibilities. Having nothing better to do one night, my buddy Thrice² and I wrote up a fake first page for a paper on All Quiet On The Western Front that used outrageously out-of-context and artificially conflated quotes to prove that Remarque was a bloodthirsty, warmongering proto-Fascist who regarded life in the trenches as one long, drug- and booze-fueled, dude-on-dude sex party. The real paper started on page two.

² AKA John Costain Knight III. Not very much later, he was serving on board an aircraft carrier ensuring that the nuclear reactor didn’t unexpectedly go boom!, which is exactly the sort of responsibility you want to give to a guy that you’ve seen drunkenly throw up after midnight in a booth at Hardee’s. On the other hand, the John C Stennis never went boom!, so I guess it all worked out okay.

It’s nearly time for Emerald City Comic Con in the city with the needle that reaches to space. Half of webcomics will be there, what with TopatoCo throwing down a challenge to all and sundry:

We are outgunned and outnumbered but we believe we might win. Maybe. We have street smarts and gumption and all that. We will have STUFF. We will have THINGS. We will have surprises. We will have the WILL TO SURVIVE. But most importantly, we will have friendship. And street smarts.

Also the power of Emily Horne & Joey Comeau (badass tattoos), Aaron Diaz (once beat up a gang), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, Tyson Hesse, Jeph Jacques, Kate Leth, Sam Logan (demolitions expert). David Malki !, Ryan North, Dante Shepherd, and Chris Yates (uses power tools like, all the time).

Opposing them will be the combined forces of David Willis, Joel Watson, the C&H crew, with various assists from Jennie Breeden and her stompy boots, Angela Melick and her 3D printer, Periscope Studios and special asskickers Amy T Falcone & Abby Howard, and the Guigar/Kurtz Axis of Awesome.

Trying to stay above the fray and avoid casualties, one may find vision-impaired mustelids, representatives of the local mad genius, Blerch control, and library communities, a strange attractor of fantrolls, and makers of potentially-killer robots from an isolated lair.

Wondering why they’re surrounded by weirdos, Evan Dahm, Kory Bing, and Magnolia Porter will seek to keep a sense of normality in a 10 meter radius of their booth, which will surely fail due to the proximity of Human Beard Randy Milholland and his handler/convention wife, Danielle Corsetto. Plus whoever I missed.

Don’t even get me started on the programming, where you’ll find Dean Trippe talking about Something Terrible, as well as many of the aforementioned exhibitors. Oh, and that Dave Kellett will be at the Unshelved booth, with STRIPPED DVDs for sale.

Me, I’ll be home in New Jersey, wishing such a great show with so many great people weren’t a continent away. Dang.

Four.

That’s it, no punchline or rhetorical devices. Four. We’ll be back tomorrow assuming I ever dig out from under this backlog.

I was going to put up a picture of Omar Little and Robb Stark in sort of a tribute to Things That Are Coming, but there’s only so far I’m willing to stretch for a joke. We’ll just have to content ourselves with a chunk of space-time instead and look at some new things this week as it wraps up.

• Thing! Experimental evidence of the The Big Bang has been reported here and there all week long, but Jorge Cham¹ is the first person to put it in terms that I could really grasp. Yes, yes, life spent in the study of science and all that, sometimes you only really grasp things with the addition of a good picture².
• Thing! The very sexy R Stevens always has a half-dozen things on his plate at any given time, the result of a genetic makeup that incapable of either boredom or standing still for more than 37 seconds at a time. He took on another one starting today, and it seems such a perfect match I’m surprised it took thing long. Starting today, Stevens launches Multitouch Theater at Macworld; each week will see Stevens opining on “Macs, iOS, and everything in between”, which is sort of like getting paid to just be him.
• Thing! Today, The AV Club launched what they’re calling an “illustrated column”, but which is clearly a webcomic³. Arriving monthly, Iconography will look at artifacts from pop culture, starting off with the golden idol from Raiders.
• No Thing! Despite being de-bejabbered at the prospect of owing her supporters and not being able to make good, Ursula Vernon (obligatory note that I loves me some Digger) has decided to dip her toes into the Patreon pool. I tagged this item as No Thing because that’s what Vernon is promising her supporters, and as such in limiting them to only two tiers of support:
  

  Pledge $1.00 or more per month
  Nothing much!

  Pledge $2.00 or more per month
  Still nothing, but twice as much of it!

  The Patreon campaign is best described as a Keep Ursula Weird slush fund, noting that one and two dollars are enough to purchase (respectively) a cup of coffee and a roll of antacids⁴. Honestly, it’s no different than John Allison’s subscription drive experiment, or any other tip jar or donation link on any number of webcomics homepages and Vernon should feel no guilt or obligation.

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¹ With a technical assist from Jon Kaufman, a member of the BICEP2 team that found the confirming evidence. Sometimes you have to go straight to the source.

² Case in point: I mastered semiconductor physics back in college largely because Dr Art Western (who, among other things, amused himself by sitting on a bed of nails outside his office on Parents Weekend and briefly held the world record for a high-temparature superconductor, back when double digits in Kelvin was a big deal) managed to explain charge migration via a diagram involving crazed squirrels avoiding traps.

Also, shamed by his grade-school daughter for not being a good enough teacher, if you got an A on one of Dr Western’s exams, you got a gold star (two gold stars for a perfect 100!), and collecting three or more by the end of term meant you could trade them in for a Batman sticker. Two exams in the 90s and one in the high 80s meant I came just short of the sticker, but I got an A for the class.

³ Structurally, it’s a series of frameless images with captions, which makes it feel like the work of Erika Moen, or Wendy McNaughton, or Molly Crabapple.

⁴ Necessitated by her I’ma eat weird prepackaged foods with my husband so you don’t have to podcast, Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap. It’s a riot.

There’s a couple of instances of people making fanart, and then the fanart being co-opted by others, and there’s a lot of discussion — light, heat, some signal, lots of noise — about both.

• Case one: the now apparently-resolved case of Anita Sarkeesian and Tamara Gray’s rendering of Princess Daphne, discussed at length on the second episode of Surviving Creativity. The best thing about that episode of SC¹ is the acknowledgment that some actual legal expertise is required (something missing in most internet discussions of trademark, copyright, and fair use), and the promise that Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire will be joining them to add that expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Katie Lane is smart, and that next episode will be mandatory listening for all independent creators.

  Case two: before Gigi DG launched Cucumber Quest, she had a webcomic called Hiimdaisy, which combined fan art and parody of video games (as near as I can tell, I never read it and Ms DG took ’em down some years ago). There’s presently a Kickstarter campaign to continue the work with an explicit acknowledgment that it’s inspired by Ms DG, although it’s a new artist. Ms DG is aware, but is distancing herself from, the project².

  My take on the whole thing is if you wanna do fanart, then do fanart, nobody can prevent you from drawing whatever you want. But it seems a bit classless to make your fanart an extension of somebody else’s visual style (and to trade on their name), and it seems to skirt all the legalities to raise money in order to make your fan-thing.

  Sure, sure, you say it’s non-profit (not that those are two magic Get Out Of Copyright Jail words), but you say that the bulk of the funds your raising are for the purchase of a Cintiq and somebody’s keeping that toy when this is all said and done. Better apply any and all overages in the funding to a legal fund, ’cause that right there is the sort of thing that gets people sued. Each day that goes by increases the odds that the project gets canceled, either by a come-to-his-senses Renard, or (more likely) by Kickstarter.

• Weird that two different second-order It’s somebody else’s intellectual property incidents would pop up in so short a time frame; despite my opinioneering in the last item (it need not be said that I am not a lawyer, but that opinion would inform my thought process if I were a member of a jury, which is possibly just as important) my real thought on the matter is this: it’s better to have your own ideas.

  Case in point: Karl Kerschl, who could spend all day drawing Other People’s Stuff if he wanted to, but who clearly allows the OPS to take up hours that aren’t taken up with his own work. The Abominable Charles Christopher is some of the best work of anybody’s career, and nobody can tell Kerschl what he can or cannot do with it.

  And what he’s doing with it today is announcing preorders for the softcover edition of Book 2 of Charles Christopher. Let me be blunt: the only reason for this to not be on your shelf is if you already own the hardcover. You’ve got perfectly good blood plasma you aren’t using, sell some of that and put in your order.

• And in further praise of coming up with Your Own Stuff, the aforementioned Steve Hamaker shared something on the twitter machine today:
  

  My wife, Jenny Robb interviewed Bill Watterson for the upcoming Calvin & Hobbes exhibition at the @CartoonLibrary. http://library.osu.edu/blogs/cartoons/2014/03/20/new-interview-calvin-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-and-cul-de-sac-creator-richard-thompson-talk-libraries-comics-and-the-creative-process-with-ohio-state/ …

  Jenny Robb is the curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State, and as such has probably been around more magnificent comics art than anybody else currently drawing breath. She’s frighteningly smart, and she’s scored the Watterson half of what’s actually a double interview, the other half being done with Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, conducted by exhibit curator Caitlin McGurk. Read them both here, and if you’re anywhere near Columbus, Ohio and don’t go see the retrospective while it’s running, we’re through. On the off chance that you’re not anywhere near Columbus, Ohio, kindly remember that you have two kidneys for a reason.

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¹ The disappointing part of the podcast was that colorist supreme Steve Hamaker was part of the discussion and was sorely underutilized. If you’re going to have him on, let’s hear about his creative process! Guests can add a hell of a lot to a discussion when the topic is something they’re involved in, otherwise it’s just kind of unfair to them.

² Although project creator Jack Renard takes a different tack on this, presenting the project has having DG’s tacit approval.

Got a calendar handy? You’re going to need it.

• Today If you missed out on any of the Benign Kingdom merch from the various B9 Kickstarts, and you like saving shipping when ordering other webcomics merch, good news! As of now-ish, all the Benign Kingdom books are available via TopatoCo.
• Monday, 24 March Specifically, 9:00am PDT, when registration for what is likely the first webcomics-related athletic event opens up. That would be the Beat The Blerch runs — 10K, half marathon, full marathon — springing from the imagination of Matthew Inman and his paean to running, The Blerch. The runs themselves will feature:
  • “I Beat The Blerch in 2014” tech shirt¹ and medal
  • Large quantities of birthday cake at every aid station along with Nutella and magical grape beverages
  • There may or may not be actual Blerchs in fat-suits chasing you throughout the race

  While it’s true that Inman will have a Blerch-themed book coming out about ten days after the run, I don’t believe that promotional concerns are uppermost in his mind. There are certainly ways to promote a book that will require less time and effort over the next six months (not to mention the fact that Inman will be running himself), and the fact that he’s still looking for sponsors tells me this is more of an Inman thing than a thing with an Andrews McMeel budget behind it.

  Besides, Inman’s got a history of taking on big, weird, wonderful projects, and organizing a mass of webcomics readers to wheeze their way around forested trails seems a perfect fit with his sensibilities.

  Also, this:

  We won’t charge you to download your race photos after the event.

  I gather that’s a huge annoyance with lots of “serious” race events, and tells me this is more about the fun and hell of it than anything else. Blerches (blerchen? blerchi?) will be beaten in Carnation, Washington on Sunday, 21 September, times TBA. From the information shared so far, I feel confident in declaring that this event promises to be the highlight of the September 2014 timeframe in the Pacific Northwest.

• Saturday & Sunday, 5 & 6 April Specifically, 11:00am to 6:00pm, the annual MoCCA Fest will kick off at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, for the low, low price of five bucks a day at the door. The show has been through a lot of changes — the overwhelming majority of them positive — in the years since the Society of Illustrators took over MoCCA’s assets and mission, and I expect this year to continue the upward trend.

  The exhibitor list is up now and includes the likes of Darryl Ayo, Elena Barbarich, Nick Bertozzi, Box Brown, Scott C, Ben Costa, Evan Dahm, Chris Giarusso, Sophie Goldstein, Dean Haspiel, Matt Lubchansky, Phil McAndrew, Sylvan Migdal, Maki Naro, Magnolia Porter, MK Reed, Jaya Saxena, Tom Siddell, Noelle Stevenson, and many more.

  Also many fine publishers of words and pictures, and the goddamn Jack Kirby Museum. Oh, and the usual contingent of creators from various Scandinavian countries will be present, along with educational institutes and a few zillion other awesome people I haven’t mentioned. See you there.

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¹ I don’t believe that is a typo of tee shirt; apparently, active people have things called tech[nical] shirts” which are like tee shirts, but better.

But sometimes, only a good, old-fashioned Sharpie will do.

• A Tumblr post from Mary Cagle caught my eye this morning; it dealt with delays in Cagle’s comic and the busyness of life in general. Let’s read it together:
  

  Basically, my big plan right now is to bring KB back first thing in April for the 5-year anniversary. As much as it frustrates me, thank you to everyone who’s poked me about when the comic will return. It’s a great reminder that people care about it almost as much as I do!

  For those curious, here’s what’s been keeping me away from KB lately, just to prove I’m not exclusively sitting around on my butt:

  What follows is a lengthy list of things keeping Cagle busy, starting with teaching English and dealing with life in a foreign country¹ and continuing on through a list of five creative projects that she’s working on, including coloring weekly webcomics for Amy T Falcone, coloring past webcomics for a book for Kel McDonald, coloring Johanne Matte’s contribution to the next Flight Explorer, and flatting and painting pages for Kazu Kibuishi next Amulet volume².

  What struck me was not how busy Cagle is (which doesn’t surprise me at all, given her deft hand at colors), but the fact that she can collaborate on all these projects with a literal ocean between her and the other creators. Maybe this struck me because I was watching the full Scott McCloud interview from STRIPPED³ last night and he talked about his first job in comics: doing production work for DC.

  It involved knives and cutting and working on physical art and the sort of partnership between professionals like Kibuishi and Cagle would have been nearly impossible, due to the amount of material that would have to be shipped around the world. The possibility of contributing two colored pages a week to Ms T Falcone would have been literally impossible, as no amount of express shipping could make the art be where it needed to be. There is also the little matter of having a limited palette of colors to work with, rather than the millions of subtle hues that Cagle has at her fingertips, let’s not forget that.

  This is all a very roundabout way of saying that, who have spent the last 30+ years around computers on a daily basis, got future-shocked by the realization how far technology has come. Thanks for making me feel old, Mary! It’s okay though, ’cause I like your comics.

• Since we mentioned that comics movie in passing, let’s discuss it just a little more. Along with your obligatory reminder that STRIPPED will release on iTunes/other channels on (respectively) the 1st and 2nd of April, there is the new tidbit that Kickstarter backers due a physical DVD don’t have much longer to wait:
  

  Individual DVDs will mail from manufacturer the day they’re complete: 3/21. Signed or INTL DVDs have to route to LA then mailed

  That’s good news for approximately 2950 backers due non-signed DVDs (minus an unknown number of international orders), whose discs will be shipping in three days. It’s not out of the realm of the possible that they’ll have their copies of the movie in a week or so. It’s less good news for those of us awaiting signed DVDs, as Fred ‘n’ Dave will be scribbling their signatures for some 791 backers.

  I wonder if Dave will do that K-in-a-box that he uses to sign his comics? It’s gotta be faster than signing Fred Schroeder. Anyway, look for both Kellett and Schroeder to attend the Hollywood premiere on 26 March in high spirits, then spend the next month in wrist braces.

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¹ That’s gotta be like 19 hours a day right there.

² Also one 40 page project without a name attached.

³ Gotta be a back to see that one, son, although fillmmakers Fred Schroeder and Dave Kellett have hinted in the past making all the raw interview footage available in some form in the future. Considering the number of artists they met with in their studios, the process and drawing footage alone will be invaluable to future generations of students.

There two brief items up here before we get to the major point of discussion today: STRIPPED.

• Via R Stevens at The Nib, itself at Medium: pixel Neil deGrasse Tyson. You know who else R Stevens has pixelized? Me. Is this proof that Dr Tyson and I are destined to be best friends? Probably.
• For your consideration, Tom Siddell has added his previously print-only Annie in the Forest Part 2¹ to his website, free for you to read. Once again, Siddell’s done us a service, making an item freely available that could otherwise be making him money. Read it, enjoy it, drop a few bob via his donation link, or possibly by buying something from him next month at the MoCCA Fest in three weeks.

I watched STRIPPED over the weekend; anybody that caught my twitterfeed between Friday night and Saturday morning saw what I thought of it — it was masterful. But what I’ve been thinking about since was the choice of interview subjects that filmmakers Fred Schroeder and Dave Kellett chose to return to time and again. These folks were the centerpieces of the story of comics.

• There was less of Bill Watterson’s (rightly) lauded contribution than I might have suspected, and the film was not the less for it; in a handful of voiced cutaways, he made incisive points, but he wasn’t used in the film merely for the sake of Being Bill Watterson. I never thought I’d say this, but I admire the restraint that must have been required to not include every syllable of Watterson’s voice that found its way to tape.
• Darrin Bell is not a household name; Candorville and Rudy Park are both pretty damn good strips, but you likely wouldn’t place him or his work without prompting because we’re past the era of superstar comics-page creators. He’s disarmingly young, frighteningly smart, and wonderfully sincere in his many interview snippets. There have to have been many, many creators that spoke about their journey of becoming a creator, but there was a spark to Bell’s interview segments that made him a natural. I can’t wait to see the entirety of his interview.
• Greg Evans is a man I met, briefly, at the NCS Ruebens Weekend; he very kindly took the time to make me feel welcome in a place where I felt out of place. His strip isn’t for me, and I found myself surprised and a little thrilled at how much he was in the film. He almost perfectly straddles the line of long-term creator recognizing the changes in the industry², looking at them realistically, and really wondering how he can ride that wave rather than rail against it. He might have been the decades-long syndicated creator that jumped feetfirst into indy creator endeavours if Bill Amend hadn’t beat him to it.
• Patrick McDonnell is unapologetically Old School³. His tools are old school, the art style is old school — midway between Segar and Herriman, with a verbal sensibility perched directly between Schulz and Kelly — and his air of not concerning himself with the challenges facing the syndication model is older than old school. Syndicated cartoonists didn’t worry about their business model ceasing to exist in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s; it simply was and would continue to be. Around McDonnell, you get the impression — at least for him — that reality has not changed and will not. His approach to cartooning and the business of cartooning is as Zen as the spare, airy, light-filled studio where he was interviewed.
• Jim Davis, who came up through the cartooning trenches as an assistant before catching lightning in a bottle with Garfield, is far more philosophical about cartooning than one would think he would need to be. He famously created Garfield with a businessman’s eye — there were lots of dogs on the comics page but not many cats, and he saw a market niche⁴ — and has overseen a juggernaut of success based on the broadest possible appeal.

  He is, as a result, richer than God — maybe richer than any cartoonist has ever been, barring only Sparky himself — and is reported to be sitting on a buffer longer than a year. He has a small corporation’s worth of people working with and for him to get All Things Garf delivered to the world on a daily basis. He needn’t involve himself in any aspects of Garfield at this point, he could walk away and live in luxury for the rest of his days.

  But he does. He does because (and this is from the Kickstarter backers-only full interview with Davis; the rest of you, I hope you get to see it) he thinks that one day, he could write the strip that makes the whole world laugh. Because that possibility matters more than every TV series, movie, and tchotchke put together.

• Mort Walker has been in cartooning for more than six decades. He oversees strips that have been on the page long enough that your parents (or grandparents) read them. He could be everything that’s wrong with comics but it’s clear that he stays in the game not out of stubbornness or to show Those Darn Kids how it’s done, but because he remembers reading Moon Mullins on Sunday mornings with his father, back in the 1920s. He’s see the rise and maybe-fall of comics first hand and never lost his full investment in the medium.
• Stephan Pastis is perhaps the one voice not completely in harmony with the others; he’s perhaps the most recent syndicated cartoonist to find widespread success (or at least, as widespread as it’s possible for any strip launched in the last 20 years to have achieved), and for all the success he’s had with Pearls Before Swine, there’s an edge in his interviews.

  In his segments, he seems like he’s pushing back against the changes in the model, like he wants to actively drag the entire industry back four or five decades. In his most telling exchange, his frustration becomes overt — and completely understandable — when he notes the odds of ever making it as a syndicated cartoonist, and then doing so just as the business implodes. I made it to the NBA, and the stadium is collapsing. His energy would make him a stellar independent creator/owner in the webcomics mode, if only he hadn’t spent so much time in the past openly contemptuous of it.

  His counterpoint, however, is absolutely crucial to the film, if only because he’s willing to express the frustrations that probably everybody in syndicated cartooning (or maybe those not named Davis or McDonnell) must be feeling. Pastis is not the enemy of progress, but he’s no friend of the particular path it’s taking.

Oh, yeah, some webcomics types said smart things too, and Chris Hastings gave as concise an explanation of How Webcomics Work as ever could have been.

Also Cathy Guisewite. And Scott McCloud⁵. And Lynn Johnston. And Jenny Robb. And RC Harvey. And Kazu Kibuishi. And Shaenon Garrity. And David Malki !. And more that I’m certainly forgetting now.

STRIPPED is sprawling, comprehensive, hilarious, heartfelt, honest, and wonderful. It went by in an eyeblink, with no wasted moments or times that don’t serve the narrative. It’s as good a history of comics — where they came from, where they are, where they’re going — as ever there has been, and it’s only the merest fraction⁶ of the material that was collected during production. It feels like the work of a lifetime, and I mean it as the highest compliment that it’s astonishing to think that it only took four years to produce.

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s probably somebody in your circle of friends that has, given that you’re on this page to begin with. Ask around; I think you’re going to find that everybody’s that seen the movie is of one mind. Something uniquely American that’s touched three or four generations is changing, but will never go away; you should know its history, and barring a time machine that lets you experience the last century of comics first-hand, STRIPPED is the best way to do so.

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¹ More specifically, only available at the 2013 Thought Bubble Festival, now obtainable through the internet boutiquery services of TopatoCo.

² For example, Evans has produced Luann digitally for more than a decade.

³ Disclaimer: he’s also approximately a neighbor; we very occasionally run into each other on the street or in a restaurant and do that 20 second Hey! How are you? thing. It happened at the Reuben Weekend, which caused us both a moment of cognitive dissonance, as we were 3500km away from our usual random meeting stomping grounds. Finally, we chose the vet that took care of our greyhound for most of her life (and our new greyhound, who just had his first visit) based on his recommendation.

⁴ Which, if you think about it, is a very webcomics thing to do — find a niche that isn’t served and become their favorite. Only Davis did it in nineteen-freaking-seventy-eight, before a lot of webcomickers were born. Hell, if you go to his website, he’s got the entire 35+ year archive freely available — you can’t get more webcomics than that.

⁵ The full interview with McCloud — a couple of hours worth! — was released to KS backers last year. I really hope you get to see it someday because dang is that guy smart.

⁶ At just about ninety minutes, carved out of more than 300 hours of interviews, it would be possible to produce another 199 movies of equivalent length from material already on hand. Although I’m pretty sure that the 10 or 15 minutes that they spent talking to me needn’t be seen by anybody.

Well! Some interesting things have happened since we spoke yesterday, and as might be expected I have some opinions on them.

• Firstly, I have finished my read-through of of Box Brown’s André the Giant: The Life and Legend (a review copy of which was kindly provided by :01 Books), and all I can say is Wow. As I believe I mentioned when I received the book, I don’t have any great personal history with professional wrestling and was grateful for the frontmatter and backmatter in the book that explained the concepts of over, shoot, kayfabe, and other esoterica that the WW{F|E} congoscenti take for granted.

  I knew Mr The Giant almost entirely from his appearance in The Princess Bride, a relatively small part of a long life in show business that consequently gets relatively few pages here. And yet within those few pages, we get moments of quiet as André finds respite from the chaos and expectations of the ring via friendship with Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal¹, Mandy Patinkin, and Robin Wright. Also Rob Reiner finds that André’s bar tab was US$40,000.

  That’s a funny bit, but it masks a sad truth — André never stopped growing throughout his life, his joints couldn’t support his enormous size, and he spent much of his life in pain. He drank mightily, to take away that pain, but also because his sheer size made his tolerance to alcohol almost unearthly.²

  Two little stories out of a few dozen vignettes — André loved telling stories, and they grew in the telling as much as he did. He appreciated show business, making sure the fans were entertained, and would go to any lengths to serve the narrative. Brown has gone to similar lengths to tell the story of André the Giant, and he’s done an admirable job.

• Download codes for Kickstarter backers of STRIPPED went out (thousands of them), and I got mine last night after dinner.

  I had work today and couldn’t stay up to watch it.

  But there’s plenty of love for it on the Twitters, and some of it is even from people who aren’t in the movie!

  Kidding aside, I am anxiously awaiting the moment I can fire up the movie when I get home. It’s going to be marvelous. Review as soon as possible.

• Lastly, I’d like to join the chorus welcoming Ada Marie Weinersmith to the world on this, Pi Day. In my opinion, she’s a marvelous baby, and I would welcome her to the world again! Well wishes may be sent to proud mother and father, and if their various online endeavours are late or missing for a few days, I’m sure we can give them some slack.

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¹ Who, it appears, picked up almost immediately on André’s habit of calling everybody Boss, and everybody referring to André by the same nickname.

² When doctors were trying to figure out how much surgical anesthesia to use on a nearly 300kg human, they asked him how much it took to get drunk. A bottle of vodka would make him feel the beginnings of a buzz.