Happy Halloween, kids! Try not to rot your teeth out by the weekend.

• November is shaping up to be a momentous month, as it’s finally been announced when Jeff Smith’s new webcomic will be launching. As previously noted, Tüki Save The Humans [that link may just be a placeholder; we’ll all find out together in a couple of weeks] will be about the first human to leave Africa for the wider world, and it’s been in the planning stages for a very long time (Smith’s wife and publisher, Vijaya Iyer, was dropping hints as long ago as SDCC 2012). Working in a share-first, print-later model will be a big change for Smith, and his shift to the webcomic model will represent perhaps the biggest name in dead-tree comics to take a flyer on our weird little community.

  In any event, Tüki will be unveiled in a 10 November brunch at the Society of Illustrators in New York, as a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (Smith has been a long-time supporter of the Fund), which you can attend in exchange for a donation to the CBLDF. You’ve got US$100 general admission tickets (US$40 of which is tax deductible), and for those that want to get up close and in-person with Smith, there’s the US$250 VIP ticket (US$190 deductible). Drat and darn, about the time the program starts at noon I’ll be at the airport getting ready to depart for Wildest Iowa for work, or I would most likely be there, because Jeff’s great, the Society is great, the CBLDF is great, and I have a feeling that Tüki is going to be great as well.

• For those that can’t be in New York on the tenth, how about Pittsburgh on the ninth? The Toonseum will be holding a memorial service for Lou Scheimer, the recently-departed animation impresario and co-founder of Filmation. For those that were too young to catch Filmation in its heyday on Saturday mornings, or perhaps after school, the animation was basic, limited, featured a lot of re-used stock footage, and was pretty often in the service of not particularly great shows.

  He also made sure that Filmation’s work was never sent overseas and was a major contributor to keeping animation jobs and skills in America. There’s a lot of animators today that grew up watching Filmation’s various shows, and they’ve been the teachers and inspirations of at least one more generation. Scheimer was a Pittsburgh native, as well as a supporter and booster of The Toonseum, where a gallery is named in his honor. The memorial is open to the public, and will run from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.

• On the off chance that you’re having trouble keeping track of all these dates, can I suggest you invest in a webcomic-themed calendar? Okay, the offerings from Jorge Cham and Brad Guigar might only start in January, 2014 … but if you’d bought one last year, you’d have someplace to note your Pittsburgh or New York comics-themed events right now, wouldn’t you? Don’t let that happen to you next year.

All Hallows’ Eve approaches, and comics are well into the spirit. You can choose from disturbing with a funny undercurrent or just damn disturbing; make your heart stout and fear the darkness as little as you can manage.

• First up, Strip Search runner-up Abby Howard will be giving us Halloween all year long with the ongoing, longform The Last Halloween, but today’s fourth installment is where things get seriously spooky. The world is coming apart, respected author/punter/pundit Chris Kluwe meets his end, and Mona must deal with crappy candy and no TV. It’s a perfect treading of the line between seriously scary and hilarious, and it’s only going to get scarier and hilariouser¹ from here.
• Nextly, Emily Carroll may have actually met the Devil at a crossroads and asked for the ability to see into souls to discover what is more than terrifying, but disturbing on an existential level, and then to portray those disturbances in moody, atmospheric, fuzzy visuals. Not fuzzy in sense of low resolution², but fuzzy in the sense of a dream half-remembered, or a dream so real that as it fades it feels like something you know is true is fading away and taking a part of you with it. She taps deep into the primitive part of the brain, the part that knows that there are men of bad intent and worse in the dark, the part that knows that in the places away from the purifying sun, other laws hold, will you or no.

  Carroll’s latest is possibly her most disturbing yet, a slow descent into possibly madness (or possibly perfect clarity) tinged with body horror. Somewhere, around the corner from a crossroads, the Devil is carefully reading his copy of a contract looking for an exit clause and hoping against hope that Carroll never decides to portray what would scare the ruler of Hell.

• Lastly, Randy Milholland’s series The Last Trick-or-Treaters (found in the Rhymes With Witch archives) has seen nearly 30 watercolor paintings presented at Halloweentime each year since 2011. Some are … I don’t know if I want to say lighthearted, but at least the menace was inverted or muted, or carried a sense of deserved comeuppance. Some have highlighted bravery and loyalty in the face of the unspeakable. But the latest set have ramped up the sense of innocents seduced into malevolence, and they are his best so far. Milholland’s made some mention of plans to collect TLT-o-T in print so keep your eyes open for that.

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¹ Shut up, it is too a word.

² And certainly not in the sense of the adorable little kitties and puppies with their fuzzy ears and OMG SO ADORBS. Those kitties and puppies still rule, though.

Sometimes that’s good, sometimes less so. Let’s take ’em as I found ’em, shall we?

• First up, The Verge describes itself as covering
  

  the intersection of technology, science, art, and culture. Its mission is to offer in-depth reporting and long-form feature stories, breaking news coverage, product information, and community content in a unified and cohesive manner.

  So there’s a bit of pop culture there at the edges, but it’s not the focus. Which is why I was happily surprised to see a fairly comprehensive summary of Achewood, with a particular focus on the recently shopped-around TV series, along with an update of what creator Chris Onstad is up to these days (short version: refining the pitch for round two of trying to get somebody interested). I’m with author of the piece, Adrianne Jeffries, in my puzzlement at the lack of grabbed-up status for an Achewood show. I’m not sure which metric is used to quantify the “top five cable networks” that all took a pass, but I’d have to believe that somebody at [Adult Swim] would be smart enough to snag at least a pilot commitment. Like Ms Jeffries, I await Achewood’s eventual triumph.

• The National Wildlife Federation is the largest private nonprofit organization to focus on conservation education and advocacy, unless I miss my guess; generations of American kids grew up reading NWF’s Ranger Rick magazine, and they’ve got more magazines pitched at older and younger age ranges, along with a mountain of multimedia and broadcast programming. They’re a big deal, and their blog collection is pretty comprehensive in its scope and coverage.

  Yesterday, this Official Big Deal in the world of Nature took some time to talk to webcomics own naturalist, Rosemary Mosco, about her nature-oriented comics, her favorite wildlife environs (bogs and fens), and included some of her best work in the piece. I expect to see a lot more Parts of the Bird and Animals with Misleading Names prints out “in the wild”; now if only we could get some prints of If You Find A Baby Songbird Out Of The Nest into our nation’s schools, kids would be able to help said birds and also be safer from raptor attack. I call that a win-win.

• It’s irregular as all hell (which, let’s be honest, is part of its charm), but Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half is also one of the most straight-to-the-truth-of-the-matter acts of comics ever. Brosh spoke to Mother Jones magazine (the current newstand issue, no less) about her upbringing her, now widely-publicized struggle with depression, and — oh yeah — her new book which releases today. I have feeds for HaaH, I follow Brosh on Twitter, and I entirely missed any hint that Brosh was was compiling and expanding her comics into print form:
  

  This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two”.

  Fifty. Percent. New. Allie Brosh. All at once. Oh, hell yes. I’m gonna just go right ahead and tell you to buy this one sight-unseen.

• Not that outside attention is always good; IP churn-factory/possible fraudulent enterprise Platinum (no link because screw those guys; go read what Heidi Mac has to say about the state of their corporate governance back at the start of the year) got a bad reputation in webcomics circles back in the old days of Aught-Six and Aught-Seven, but their influence persists to the present day, as Megan Rosalarian Gedris can sadly attest:
  

  Right now, Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space is one of the comics Platinum is most proud of. They can show it off to investors as a success that they created, despite not doing a thing with the property except for one small print run 6 years ago. I have not seen a dime from them since 2007. Once the initial 6 issues they commissioned were over in 07, I was “allowed” to keep working on the series, which I did because I enjoyed the characters, but I received no payment. I received no support in any other capacity. I built the comic up by myself and with some gracious help from Hiveworks. Platinum Studios did nothing but hold it back. I had plans for a 4th and 5th arc of the comic, but ended the series this past January when I realized things with Platinum would never get better and as much as I loved these characters, I was being taken advantage of by continuing the series.

  So I have to take it off the internet. I won’t let my work be used to boost the reputation of this slimy company even a little bit. I’d rather see it disappear.

  There’s no good outcome here for Gedris; she’ll see the work of years disappear down the memory hole and likely won’t even have the satisfaction of inconveniencing Platinum (they’ve tied up the rights to so many different IPs, they likely won’t notice one that goes away). The only good comes from the possibility of an object lesson for younger creators, and not one that relates solely to Platinum … there are a lot of people out there that would love to take advantage of you. So let’s go over the key points again:

  1. Contracts offered are starting points, not ending points.
  2. It’s okay to grant a limited license to develop a specific project with clear terms describing rights reversion; it’s not okay for somebody else to say And that’s why we own your entire idea now.
  3. It is not a once-in-a-lifetime chance you have to snag right this very minute; if your work is good, there will be other offers.
  4. Never forget the immortal words of Scott Kurtz: Hire a lawyer. Hire a lawyer. Hire a lawyer.¹ Repeat as many times as it takes to get the idea thoroughly ingrained in your skull.

  Got it? Good. Now pay it forward and make sure everybody else knows these lessons as well.

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¹ Said lawyer’s hotness or Jewishness is up to you.

The spam filter is getting far less of a workout ever since I set topics more than 30 days old to be locked; if perchance you come across an old post that you really want to comment on, drop me a line¹ and I’ll see what I can do.

In one of those perfect storm confluences of independent forces², a bunch of projects launched today:

• If you’re a Maki Naro Kickstarter backer, you now have access to Sufficiently Remarkable; everybody else will get to see the deal in four weeks.
• If you’re a Brad Guigar Kickstarter backer, you now have access to the first of his Webcomics Movers And Shakers interview podcasts, this one with Webcomics Impressario At Large George Rohac; everybody else will get access to the recording at some point in the future.
• No backer requirements this time; sometime today the long-awaited, Strip Search-wining Camp Weedonwantcha by the irrepressible Katie Rice will go live. Hooray!
• Adding yet another a tip to the proverbial iceberg, Ryan Estrada announced that in addition to all the comics he does, all the comics done by others that he publishes, all the work in exposing the lie that is the promise of exposure in lieu of payment, the adventure videos, live stagings of Choose Your Own Hamlet, and just generally living in a foreign land (whose non-Roman script he’s taught a squajillion people how to read), he is now the non-union Korean equivalent of Ira Glass:
  

  Super exciting news! I’m now the host of People & Places, a short weekly radio show on Busan eFM!

  I knew all that podcasting experience would amount to something! I pitched and developed it myself, and the goal is to make it the Busan, South Korea equivalent of This American Life, filled with stories that make the audience laugh, cry, think or swear. My first episode airs wednesday morning, during drive time!

  You know, in his copious free time.

• If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Estrada had a time machine and had gone back in time after having thoroughly internalized John Allison’s just-released contribution at 10 Rules for Drawing Comics, especially #5:
  

  Allow yourself to be bored. There are a million ways to distract yourself today. Turn your phone off when you go out, give yourself time to let your mind wander. That’s when a lot of the best work gets done. Computer games aren’t productive. Checking Twitter/email/Tumblr every three minutes to see if anything has happened isn’t productive. It’s counter-productive. You’re wasting your limited lifespan.

  Not the “being bored” part (I don’t think Estrada is biologically capable of it), but the sense of doing lots of different things, so that creativity doesn’t get clogged up. While we’re on the topic, you should take a few minutes and read all the other entries at 10 Rules, especially considering there’s only ten entries so far.

• Finally, not sure how I missed it last week, but the episode of Bullseye that features the very funny and fascinating Nick Offerman also has a really nice discussion with Brandon Bird about The Day He Became An Artist (Bird starts at about the 42 minute mark ).

  Bird’s out visiting Sears stores at the moment or I’m sure he’d have more to say about it; probably the least surprising aspect of this whole bit is that Bird and Bullseye host Jesse Thorn know each other from college. Creative, interesting people just seem to eventually overlap, circles of friends merging with ever-broader circles of friends, to the point that it would be weird if two people from completely different communities didn’t know each other.

  Anyway, it’s a really good listen, and you will likely enjoy it.

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¹ That would be at gary who maintains a point of contact at this here website, which exists in the dot-com TLD.

² And you do not need to remind me that a year ago, we were staring down the barrel of Superstorm Sandy, which took some time to return from. I got off far luckier than many (and everybody’s circumstances were unique), but I’m still taking a moment on the eve to send good thoughts to those that are still rebuilding their homes, businesses, and lives.

It’s just like squirrels; if you see one, there’s probably others lurking around.

• Congratulations to Darren J Gendron, creator of many webcomics and webcomics-adjacent projects, who reports this morning:
  

  As of 6:32 a.m., we have the arrival of one Montgomery Ironwill Gendron, weighing 6 pounds, 15 ounces. Mommy and Monty are doing fine.

  Those clicking on the link will find that this time that photo is of a cleaned-up and suitable for the Amiden Great-Aunt baby, so that’s good. Also, if Young Master Gendron’s middle name actually is Ironwill, that is totally badass¹; considering that Monty’s big brother is named Franklin Powers Gendron, there’s an excellent chance of badassery.

  Also, Jesse Thorn² tweeted a little while ago:

  Oscar Thorn was born this morning at 3:45. He and @TheresaThorn are healthy and beautiful and amazing.

  Considering that the Thorns are west coasters, that would be about fifteen minutes after Ironwill entered the world. One is forced to conclude two things:

  1. Man, Jesse really didn’t want to get a dog.
  2. These babies are coming closer and closer together; the (last we saw) tremendously preggers Rene Engström has probably had five babies as a result of all this prompting.
• Know who’s had a lot of overlap with Jesse and Theresa Thorn, particularly vis-à-vis multiple iterations of MaxFunCon? David Malki !. Despite being busier than twelve ordinary humans trying to determine the optimal delivery method of the Machine of Death game, he also ends up with ideas that must be dealt with immediately.

  Let’s be clear, that beard-related idea occurred yesterday; the shirt is available for order today. And for the process nerds among you, Malki ! has shared a very nice writeup of how the design was constructed, possibly as an excuse to talk about a favorite (free) design tool.

• How do you know you’ve arrived? Make a ridiculously implausible comic, then hours later have the premise confirmed by the frighteningly smart and capable people you’re spoofing. Mr Weinersmith, I believe that Stockholm is on the line with news of your Nobel.

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¹ Not to mention unlikely to be duplicated once he ends up in class with all the Jadens and Jaydens and Jaedons.

² He doesn’t do a webcomic, but the Maximum Fun empire is a client of Mr I Am Made of Poison, and he has followed the independent creator give it away/monetize the back end model for years, so he counts.

Pretty much good news across the board today, in fact.

• Word comes from New England today, that Paul Southworth (late of Ugly Hill, currently of Not Invented Here) is part of a special event that one might choose to remember every 24th of October for the forseeable future:
  

  ITS A GIRL! Eloise Karin Southworth is 8lbs 5oz and everyone is doing great! http://instagram.com/p/f2l3CNp3tM/

  Those clicking on the link should be aware that it features an alive human child moments after its emergence into the world, and not looking like the angelic baby with the beatifically-reposed mother that might feature in the birth announcement you send to your maiden great-aunt. There’s vernix¹, and a full-throated protest at being dragged into a noisy, bright, cold world, and it looks like a lot of wriggling and pinking-up and you know what? She’s gorgeous. Congrats to Eloise, her two big brothers, mom and dad, and sincere hopes that every day just gets better for them all.²

• One of the things that Chris Hastings mentioned as an upcoming project during his NYCC panel was a Dr McNinja-themed card game. It was all designed, he had a prototype at home, and everybody that came to visit got to play it and nobody said it was less than lots of fun. The Kickstarter would be starting in the near future.

  In this case, “near future” meant yesterday, and it (that is to say, Dr McNinja’s Legendary Showdown) is already funded. What I found most interesting about DMLS (I’m afraid that it simply demands boldfacing) is the first stretch goal of the campaign, which is not based on a dollar figure, but on backer involvement.

  In case you can’t read that image up top, it says:

  2,500 Facebook shares or #LegendaryShowdown tweets
  NEW CHARACTER CARD

  I don’t recall at the moment another campaign tying content to the breadth of discussion of the project in question; it’s a damn clever idea, since that many tweets and shares puts the game in front of more potential backers. I’ll be watching this one very carefully. If I could make one suggestion to the project runners at Killer Robot Games³, maybe they want to also count Kicktraq shares? Just spitballing here.

• Not new, per se, but still good news — per the comments on yesterday’s post, Sinfest is having website issues, but Tatsuya Ishida is posting updates on the forums (yesterday, today). Hopefully the main page will sort itself out soon, but in the meantime, there’s still comics and that’s all right.

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¹ Look it up.

² Although if Southworth is good at his job as father, today will mark the last time his daughter is naked on the internet.

³ Couldn’t find a website for them, on account of the words “killer robot” spawn a lot of matches in Google.

Some things go exactly as you expect; anybody could have told you when PAXEast registrations went live today, the tickets site (and the hotels site, for that matter) were gonna get hammered like the Obamacare site on launch day. Seems to have sorted itself out, in the sense that much of the registration and hotel inventory are now spoken for. Have fun in Boston, y’all.

• One thing that’s been pretty much constant for a really long damn time is that every morning, there will be a new update at Sinfest. Love it or hate it (or, given that it’s about five different strips in one, love parts and hate other parts), Tatsuya Ishida’s strip is something you can practically set your watch by — checking the archive, the last break in the daily schedule I can find was the several weeks long gap between 14 June and 10 July of 2006. More than 2600 days in an unbroken streak followed until today.

  Not that Ishida (who is quiet and not well-known in webcomics circles) owes us an update or anything — it’s just that when a long-established pattern suddenly changes, it sure as hell catches your eye. Fleen hopes that all is well with Ishida and thanks him for all of the free comics to date, and appreciates him in advance for any that he creates in the future.

• More than seven years of an update streak is a pretty big number, and here’s another: 1,254,120, which readers may recall as the number of United Sates Dollars raised by Rich Burlew in his record-shattering Kickstarter campaign last year¹. I’m bringing Burlew and his campaign up because he emailed me regarding The Lando Effect (as described by Rich Stevens yesterday) and declaring it the reason that said Kickstart became such a huge success:
  

  I just wanted to point out that the Lando Effect that you mentioned in yesterday’s column is exactly what powered my Kickstarter project. The initial pitch included a bonus digital story about the history of a secondary character, and also allowed three backers to buy additional stories about any character they chose that would then be distributed to all backers. As the drive went on, I added more side stories with each goal hit … So, yeah, it absolutely does work, as long as your audience is invested in the series as a whole and the chosen character is compelling enough in their main story appearances to pique interest.

  In case you didn’t have a reason to believe Stevens, Burlew has given you one-point-two million more reasons, and also ascribes to the “side story” model the success of his print collections that pre-date the Kickstart. Just don’t ignore his last line, which we’ll repeat here with a little emphasis added:

  So, yeah, it absolutely does work, as long as your audience is invested in the series as a whole and the chosen character is compelling enough in their main story appearances to pique interest.

  Also, try not to have near-career-ending injuries at any time; if you find yourself on the cusp of having a near-career-ending injury, just imagine Burlew standing a meter or so in front of you, sadly but firmly shaking his head and silently mouthing the word No.

• Finally, it’s Wednesday, and that means it’s Charles Christopher day², and for those of you that have always wondered Hey, Karl Kerschl lives in Montréal, when will we be able to read Charles Christopher in French?, the answer is Real damn soon now, Sparky:
  

  The first volume of The Abominable Charles Christopher has been translated for the French market by my pals at Studio Lounak! It’s their first publication and it’s a beautiful hardcover volume with a spot-gloss on the lettering.

  It’s available through a number of retailers and you can buy it now from werehouse.ca, which also stocks my other books, as well as books by Becky Cloonan, Andy Belanger and Cameron Stewart.

  This is the first of many such volumes, and hopefully more translations!

  Given how non-culturally-specific TACC is, I’m not surprised at all to see that Kerschl’s pushing for translations — there’s a world of people who would read these gorgeous, heartfelt comics in other languages, and I hope that they spread the word far and wide in their respective linguistic communities. My French is extremely spotty³ so I think I’ll give this one a miss, even though it comes with an exclusive bookplate that looks pretty gorgeous.

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¹ Which resulted in a creative-production and fulfillment job that would send most rational people into a fetal ball o’ panic, and give rise to serious thoughts of taking the money and fleeing to a country without an extradition treaty. Burlew continues to make progress (hampered as he was not only by the scope and scale, but also by a near-career-ending injury 13 months ago) and has set the standard for communicating progress made on the many aspects of fulfillment via his brilliantly-designed Workometer.

² Also weekly computer maintenance day, but maybe that’s just me?

³ When traveling, I count myself lucky if I can use the local language to get a train ticket, a hotel room, and a beer. I’ve managed that so far in Czech, French, Dutch, and Japanese, but I only “studied” one of those for four years in high school. Oh, and when I speak French, I have a tendency to drift into other languages, including on one particularly embarrassing occasion outside of Antwerp, tlhIngan Hol.

If you find any broken links or missing photos in posts, do let me know; I think that I’ve got everything fixed for the current calendar year, and will be working my way back through older posts as I encounter them. Yay, hosting! Also, while I’m thinking about it, something about shifting hosting just brings the spammers out in full force — in the past 48 hours I’ve had to clear more spam out of the filters than the previous two weeks; for some reason, they’re really attached to this old post regarding the SPLAT! Symposium back in March 2008. No idea why it’s so attractive to people that really want me to buy fancy shoes.

Okay, it’s late, let’s do this:

• Congrats to Krishna Sadasivam on 15 years of PCs, Weenies, and PC Weenies.
• Big thanks to the USPS for bringing me a copy of Skin Horse book 4 (which continues the tradition of the previous volumes of somehow ramping up the crazy and loopy and the ha-ha to ever-new heights).
• For those of you with RSS feeds, there’s one that you really should be on, courtesy of the very sexy R Stevens; Perpetual Edge Case is not where you go for pixel comics, it’s where you go for philosophical musings when they occur, and when they do they’re full of mad wisdom. I’m going to quote liberally (that is to say, in its entirety, because you need to read it) from the one that dropped yesterday, entitled The Lando Effect:
  

  Free games with in-app purchases are apparently the One True Way to make money off indie games. I can’t find the articles I read that I got that from, so I hope you’ll indulge me for the length of this email.

  The point is that people more easily spend money on stuff inside a game than they do paying a small amount up-front for the game. You’re more likely to buy zombie-fighting upgrades to your Plants or Mighty Eagles for when you get frustrated by Angry Birds than you are to spend $10 for the game itself. (I am the opposite, but what else is new?)

  As someone who’s kinda been doing that with free comics that eventually translate into merchandise sold to 1-2% of readers, that makes a lot of sense to me.

  But what about in-app purchases *inside comics*?

  Let’s take Scott Pilgrim for example. It’s a dumb-kid-hero-quest-romance narrative with a clear line between lost boy and the boss characters he needs to defeat to find love and be a “man”. (I’m being extremely reductionist here.) But what makes the series special are all the side characters. What if such a book came out today for free as a digital series? How would you make a living off it?

  If you were selling it to me, you’d offer the story in a free serialized form with the ability to buy “side quests” to see more of characters like Wallace and Knives and Kim Pine who otherwise just come in and out of Scott’s story. Give me Scott’s story for free but sell me the Mighty Eagle of Kim Pine getting in a bar fight or Wallace going out on dates.

  The Empire Strikes Back is free, but for .99 you get an 8-minute Lando featurette showing a failed romance that ended just before the events of the movie which set him up to make a deal with Darth Vader. Twin Peaks is free, but you can give David Lynch a buck for a monthly webisode about the front desk of the Great Northern hotel or of Audrey Horne ordering pie. Spider-Man comics are free, but for 75 cents, you can follow the villains or Aunt May around for an extra 8 pages of hijinks.

  I wonder if that would work. You put some ads on the free stuff, which folks who buy the extras don’t have to see. You get readers who would never plunk down for the book itself. You get to spend more time with the fan favorites who don’t really advance the main plot. [emphasis original]

  If you don’t already subscribe to what is for all intents and purposes the Rich Stevens Conspiracy-of-One Newsletter, get on that.

That’s it for today and remember, if you need Christian Louboutins, I apparently know about twenty three guys that can set you up.

Update to add: Steven has posted the essay at The Medium.

I might get used to this.

No, that’s a lie, ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. As usual, many thanks to Jon Rosenberg¹ and Phil “Frumph” Hofer². I cannot say enough good things about either of them, so buy Jon’s books and tchotchkes and hire Frumph for all your WordPress/website needs.

Oh, and needless to say — let us know if anything’s broken. Contact form is over there to the right.

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¹ Disclaimer: he owns my soul.

² Who is so good that you can go to sleep thinking Jon might need to shift hosting and wake up to an email that says Heya, Phil here, moved your site and here’s your new credentials, you’re all set.

Oh Zach Weinersmith, you scamp, you’re always making me look at things differently.

• Speaking of changes in perspective, there’s a crackerjack recap by Hurricane Erika of the talk she gave at this year’s XOXO Fest. Part bio, part perspective on life as an independent artist, part look to the future. The thing about Erika is, every time I read one of her comics, I learn something about somebody else — how they view the world, what their experiences are, how they’re different from me. I am utterly convinced that her work has made me more empathetic than I would have been otherwise. Hell, she (with co-conspirator Jeff Parker) turned a member of a feared and despised subculture into a sympathetic character without even divulging her name. She’s smart, she’s humane, and you should give it a listen.
• For reasons unknown even to myself, today’s Achewood made me think on my favorite character, Mr Cornelius Bear¹, and I got to wondering how long it had been since we’d seen him with his young paramour, Polly. Answer: It has been five years (almost exactly) since today’s sentence, the whirlwind of attraction and the dinner party at Ray’s. It has been more than four years since last we saw mention of Polly, a strip that led directly to the most Mexican Magical Realism adventure of all time, Todd’s foray into North Korea. Lots of things have changed in the four years since, but Chris Onstad’s ability to delight is not one of them.

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¹ Naturally, except for Ramses Luther Smuckles, who kicks men’s asses and votes