I speak today of international tax regimes, and a Brexit-addled government in London that is determined to immiserate the residents of the UK. One may recall changes to value-added taxes in the UK in the past, the VATMOSS which eventually exempted small purchases and which was mostly addressed by services like Gumroad and everybody else? Well, they just hoped to fly under the radar of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs.

Yeah, got some bad news for you, person who sells anything to anybody in the UK:

This HMRC change to VAT on small imports is potentially hugely damaging to free trade and customer choice – article here https://t.co/zzybRFHScC summary below

That from Paul Lewis, a financial journalist in Blighty. The summary from his tweet was the image included above, but for screenreaders, here’s the important parts:

Anyone abroad who wants to sell a product in Britain will have to register with HM Revenue & Customs and pay VAT directly to the government. At present the seller merely has to fill in a customs declaration that the purchser pays the tax. Three other changes will come into effect. First, the VAT exemption for products worth less than £15 will come to an end.

I left out the second and third because they deal with EU-resident sellers with British customers and vice versa; I’m addressing the folks that are not part of the EU or UK, but regardless of where in the world you are, I’ll repeat that first line with some bolding this time: Anyone abroad who wants to sell a product in Britain will have to register with HM Revenue & Customs and pay VAT directly to the government.

So if you’re an indie creator with customers in the UK, I’d encourage you to encourage them to get any purchases sorted out now, with delivery dates well in advance of 1 January (who knows if the Customs officers will treat a package showing up on 2 January but in fulfillment of an order placed on 15 December as old rules or new rules). Either that, or get in business with Her Majesty’s Government, and be prepared to pay with time, money, and effort to get in (and stay in) compliance with the new regs¹.

I mean, you could try to ignore it, but something tells me that small merchants that don’t pay VAT are going to see their shipments refused for delivery² rather than a discreet eye turned to the side. At the very least, if you try to smuggle your stuff to customers via the post, you’ll possibly find yourself the subject of inquiries if you ever change planes at Heathrow.

Spam of the day:

Contact Benjamin Today and Discover the Difference a Professional Blog Writer Makes!

I sincerely doubt you can master the intricacies of Fleen House Style but sure — submit 3000 words on why working on spec is a bad idea and if I like it, maybe I’ll have some work for you in the future.

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¹ Hopefully we’ll get more information before or near to the first of the year if t-shirts and books from overseas becoming prohibitively complicated for sellers to process. Because that revocation of the £15 exemption is either a major-league a dick move, or Her Majesty’s Government needs every tuppence it can wrangle from the rest of the world as their economy gets Wrecksited. I’m seeing reports of EU vendors being told they have to pay HMR&C £1000 for the privilege of collecting and forwarding VAT and ha ha no, fuck that.

² Or worse, the purchaser never gets them, and the shipper never gets them back. Whether they end up in a landfill, on Ebay, or in some Customs officer’s home is open to speculation.

I have to be honest, I didn’t expect the Jeffrey Toobin story to prompt a Hold my beer moment from Rudy Fucking Giuliani within 48 hours. I really dread what the Friday after-hours newsdump may bring. Fortunately, there are good things happening even amidst the ruins of Culture.

• I’ll admit, this one caught me by surprise until I saw the review at The AV Club yesterday: Allie Brosh of Hyperbole And A Half has a new book out! Since the site hadn’t had updates since about 2013, I hadn’t been keeping up. I mean, I’d go back every once in a while to make sure it was still there (I refer EMT students to the Improved Pain Scale every class I teach), but I’d figured that Brosh had moved on to other things.

  Nope! Last month there was a typically Broshian book announcement, wherein you got to choose how much irritation and/or weirdness you wanted in your experience of learning about Solutions And Other Problems, the first chapter of which Brosh has thoughtfully shared with you. I don’t have a copy in hand, but looks like she’s missed no steps in her nuanced view of life, and I’m looking forward to it greatly; I’ll wager you are, too. Order here

• Speaking of books, you know what’s better than a book from somebody whose work you enjoy? How about three books from the most relentlessly joyful somebody whose work you absolutely enjoy-verging-on-adore? I speak, naturally, of Lucy Bellwood:
  

  Susan Van Metre at Walker Books US has acquired, at auction, in a three-book deal, world rights to author Kate Milford and cartoonist Lucy Bellwood’s, Seacritters, pitched as Pirates Of The Caribbean meets Redwall, about a young badger who joins the crew of a notorious pirate ship as they set out on a new semi-legal career path as privateers.

  Lucy Bellwood gets to draw ships from the Age Of Sail and crew them with adorable animals. Folks, I am over the moon, nothing can flout me out of my good humo[u]r.

  Publication for the first book is set for 2023.

  Godsdammit. Okay, it’s okay, that’s only a little more than two to more than three years away, I can wait. For something that will undoubtedly be suffused with Bellwoodian goodness, I will wade through the Maelstrom barefoot. Insert any Wrath Of Khan-sounding speech of determination and defiance here that you like, it’s all appropriate.

  I trust that the very second the books go up for preorder you will be aiding me in sending them to instant profitability, because Lucy Bellwood spends so much of her life trying to provide joy and respite on a daily friggin’ basis to everybody, the very least we can do is make sure she gets paid.

Spam of the day:

Want to CLONE an affiliate site that is making commissions RIGHT NOW? Well you need this “website cloning” app – which creates an instant “mirror image” of one of the top money-making sites out there:

Prettty sure you just offered to commit a crime, for money. This isn’t the only spam I’ve received offering a way to make money from (quoting here) other peoples websites, so fuck all of you scammers that want to convince yourselves that I’m as much of a thief as you are.

Me? Okay, I guess. I mean, I found out that work has apparently decided that we’re all using Microsoft Teams now, which is an abomination against all that is good and holy, and which decided to mark me as “Available for your DMs and chat, send ’em over any time you like!!!” despite the fact that I’m always teaching and not available, and which won’t let me log out or quit.

Seriously. I log out or quit, and it friggin’ re-launches and re-logs in, which brings my computer down to a crawl. Let’s try to find something that does not suck from every pore of its being; I’m thinking … webcomics.

It’s more than a little shame that work decided that today was the day to inflict pain, as today is one of the great holidays of Webcomickia, being as it marks — jointly and severally — the births of both John Allison and Ryan North. I thought I might put some birthday-apprope photos up top, but wouldn’t you know it? The internet is replete with photos of Ryan North — some even fully clothed! — but relatively few of John Allison. Doing a search produced the preview shown above, where I think we can quote Sesame Street and hum One of these things is not like the others, as one of the photos is John Allison, debonair chronicler of weird goings-on, and the other three are a different, lesser John Allison, onetime head of the Cato Institute.

There are no photos of lesser Ryans North; all other Ryans North have hidden themselves away from the extreme handsomeness and also Chompsky. Happys Birthday to Messers Allison and North; both of you produce better comics every time one comes out, and that is a rare skill.

In other news:

• David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) has been throwing himself into Irregular Webcomic and his myriad other creative endeavours since his (mostly controlled, but still a big shift after a lengthy period of association) dejobbing¹, and has taken the next step — he had a store where you could get his (honestly, excellent) photographs, but sometimes you just gotta go where everybody else is:
  

  As part of my ongoing attempt to start a photography business so that I can avoid going back to working for The Man, I have opened an Etsy shop, selling greeting cards featuring prints of my wildlife and landscape photography. I ship worldwide. If you’d like to support me, and get some cool greeting cards, please check it out, and maybe mention to your friends and family.

  Speaking of cool greeting cards, my friend with whom I toyed with an art scammer, Hollis Kitchin? Awesome greeting cards and prints at her art shop, including some gorgeous new floral designs. If you need cards, please consider these two fine folks from opposite corners of the Pacific Ocean.

• Speaking of Comics Camp, which is where I know Hollis from, another Camper has a new book announcement. Readers may recall that my primary complaint about Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina was the :01 Books should have given her about three dozen more pages to let the story and characters breathe a little more. I don’t want to say they definitely listened to me, but I will note that her next book has had its official cover reveal and pre-order announcement over at The Beat, and if you follow the link to the Macmillan page, it appears this time they gave her four dozen more pages to play with.

  Jukebox features more Indian young women as protagonists, more time travel, more family history searching … everything in Chanani’s wheelhouse, and anchored by her adorably inviting style. Get ready for discussions of music history (Sister Rosetta Tharpe!) and poetic waxing on the merits of vinyl², both of which are making my old college DJ habits start to rouse and demand to be fed. Jukebox releases from :01 on 22 June, 2021.

Spam of the day:

It looks like an ordinary survival tool you’d see at Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shop – but it’s not.It’s been updated with a tiny military technology that makes a 300-pound meth-fueled man lose control of all bodily functions in seconds.

So what, you finally found the Brown Note?

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¹ The fact that that story is nearly two years old shows you what a country with a functioning safety net — notably, a national healthcare system — means for somebody taking a flyer at a creative career. It means the luxury of time, the luxury to try, the luxury to fail and not worry that it will cost you your life just because you’re no longer making corporate research PhD Aussie Fun Bucks.

² I’m not apologizing for that.

As Trek movies go, it was only mediocre, but Malcolm McDowell is always worth watching, particularly as he reminds us that time changes all things.

• Case in point: Ryan North¹ reminds us, via the ever-accommodating vehicle of T-Rex, that things have changed quite a damn lot and we can but remember the Before Times. I don’t know if you habitually read the alt-text at Dinosaur Comics, but if you read today’s, it’s contains a promise that you can redeem for physical contact with Ryan North² and I can scarcely think of another promise of future times that is more likely to get me through until then. I will take you up on that hello and goodbye, you giant man of comfort.
• Second case in point: publishing is a weird biz, where delays are common even when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic on. It was once planned that nowish there would be a YA graphic novel from Christopher Baldwin and Shaenon Garrity³ called Willowweep Manor. At least, that was what we were told in May of last year, which I took to mean that the book was largely done, given the enormous lead times for printing and publicity planning.

  But sometimes even done projects get rearranged; I’m gonna say that it’s not COVID that pushed the book until Summer of 2021 (it would have had to have been done with the overseas printing before everything went on lockdown to meet a Fall 2020 release), but the why doesn’t really matter. It’s out there, and in the time that things have changed it’s picked up not only a new release date, but also a cover and a new title:

  The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon K Garrity, illustrated by Christopher Baldwin
  One dark and stormy night, Haley sees a stranger drowning in the river. Since her greatest passion is Gothic romance novels, she knows her moment has come. But when Haley leaps into the water to rescue the stranger, she awakens in Willowweep. It certainly looks like the setting of one of her favorite books: A stately manor. A sinister housekeeper. Three brooding brothers. There’s even a ghost.

  Except Willowweep is not what it seems. Its romantic exterior hides the workings of a pocket universe—the only protection our world has against a great force of penultimate evil, and its defenses are crumbling. Could cruel fate make Haley the heroine that Willowweep needs?

  If you didn’t click on the link to the cover, do so; I love the energy that Baldwin’s brought to the cover, with (presumably) Haley about to lay some smack down with that umbrella, and Chinstrap Dude (presumably much older) looking kind of overwhelmed and useless with what appears to be butter knife. The overall tone reminds me of a massive Hieronymus Bosch painting I saw in Ghent once, one of his fantastical Hellscapes⁴, which due to the presence of lovingly-rendered rabbits I have always referred to as Screw Not With The Bunnies Of The Apocalypse. This cover is what happens when you screw with the Bunnies Of The Apocalypse.

In a more just world, I’d have something to say about George (the third Nexus Of All Webomics Realities, Wherever He Happens To Be Division), but as time has taught us, it’s far from a just world. We’ll make do.

Spam of the day:

Over the last ten years, he’ s developed a program where ANYONE can start relieving their own back pain in the next 30 minutes. Just 15 minutes into the program and you’ re feeling eons better. Out of pain. Or at minimum greatly reduced. My chiropractor highly endorses Ian Hart and his methods.

See, I know you’re lying. If there’s one thing that will get a chiropractor kicked out of chiropracting, it’s admitting that there are treatments for anything that don’t involve chiropractice.

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¹ Toronto Man-Mountain, Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities, Frostbite Division.

² Don’t be creepy about it.

³ Tiki Queen, Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities, Greater Bay Area Division.

⁴ It wasn’t The Garden Of Earthly Delights since that’s at The Prado and I’ve never been; it was probably one of the studies for Garden, but who can say? No photos allowed, I didn’t keep a diary of the day, and dude drew a lot of hell-bunnies.

I wanted to share with you something I received yesterday, something that if you were to act on it, say, today or later, that will absolutely not be a problem. It’s about the cost of comics.

Producing comics costs money, and it should be in all circumstances that the dominant cost is paying the creators. By a fluke of timing, yesterday also brought forth a damning bit of reporting into throwback practices of the bad old days from a huckster who should be avoided at all costs. If you’re thinking of getting into comics remember that the first rule is money flows to the creator(s).

For a hell of a contrast to Andrew Rev¹, consider that for years now, The Nib has been putting out comics five days a week, and paying the best rates seen since the heyday when every general-audience magazine ran cartoons and there were people making mortgage payments on homes with pools in Connecticut from making those cartoons. These days, it’s pretty much The New Yorker and The Nib. But unlike the heyday of general-audience magazines, anybody can read their stuff for free, no subscription required, and so there’s an appeal that was sent to everybody that’s signed up for their newsletter (which is free and separate from their Inkwell subscriber program). They’re asking people for a few bucks:

This week’s Nib comics cost $2,500. Will you help us cover it?
Each week at The Nib we publish thousands of dollars in comics — most of them original works we’ve commissioned from our artists. A short comic you read on the site costs $300, while our long form often goes over $1,000.

Producing comics isn’t cheap and we have no financial backing other than our monthly members. This is an entirely reader-funded publication.

So we’re setting modest goal of raising $2,500 in donations [14 October 2020] to cover our costs of publishing.

That’s it. If all our readers gave us $10, we’d fund our publishing efforts well into next year!

Ten bucks. If you read The Nib online, can you make a one-time donation of ten bucks? I’m a monthly subscriber and also buy all of the The Nib’s print collections, which comes to maybe six hundo over the lifetime of the site; Matt Bors isn’t asking for class money, he’s asking for ten bucks, once.

If you’ve thought about being a subscriber and this is a good time for US$4/month (or more — more is good) instead of ten bucks once, that’s also a great idea. If you don’t like the thought of an ongoing subscription and another account that needs to be updated the next time TJMaxx or whoever has a data breach and you get a new credit card, I get it … maybe take that US$48 that represents a one-year subscription and send it over all at once.

You can donate here. A few minutes, a few bucks. I’ve always figured my fair contribution to creators at about US$0.10/page (which is about the cost of a print collection), and The Nib does at least three short comics/day (with much longer ones interspersed), so that’s at least a buck and a half a week, or six bucks a month — that lowest level of subscription is a bargain, and a tenner will cover your moral obligation for most of two months.

Comics cost, and money flows to the creators. You’re here because you love comics. Take a few minutes, take the credit card equivalent of the change jar you have on the table by where you keep your keys, and join with others to keep the comics coming and the money flowing in the right direction.

And for the love of all that’s holy, if you’re a creator read that longer piece linked above and never work for Terrific Production.

Spam of the day:

Smart way that can do your ear clean within seconds

This is just that mind-control bug thing from Wrath Of Khan, isn’t it?

_______________
¹ The most vile part of the contracts in that story, for me, wasn’t the We don’t have to pay you until COVID has been defeated to a mathematically impossible degree clause. It was the part that says you’re exclusively tied to Terrific as long as they aren’t more than 45 days late in paying you. Who the hell expects that a contract that says I can violate my obligations to you for a month and a half and it’s all good won’t immediately turn into permission to do exactly that, forever?

Working on about three hours sleep thanks to a protracted late-night EMS call that involved police action. I know those two words make people nervous, so let me assure you that the police action was determining whether or not the patient fabricated an emergency that could get entirely innocent folks charged with felonies.

I may have mentioned in the past that if I miss out on sleep because somebody needs help, that’s okay; even relatively low-grade help that you could have worked out yourself but you think you’ll get seen sooner because we wheel you in¹, I can live with that.

But for glob’s sake, if you just want a ride home two towns over, don’t make up a medical emergency and ask to be taken to the hospital that’s in the direction you want to go. And really don’t make up imaginary Black dudes assaulting you. That’s a dick move.

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¹ That doesn’t work. Charge nurses will sniff out escalation attempts and send you to chairs without raising an eyebrow.

Sometimes you throw the spam in the shredder, and sometimes you decide to dangle the bait in front of them and resolve to mess with them a bit. If nothing else, it has the potential to be amusing.

This one started when Hollis Kitchin¹, a friend of mine from Comics Camp, mentioned that she’d gotten a probable scam email (visible above, click to embiggen). Dude cold-contacted her, dangled a possible seven grand purchase, looking for large artwork on a rush basis. You can put the text of this email into the search engine of your choice, and come up with a zillion examples that are practically identical, and all fraudulent. Artists that engage in good faith end up out pieces they could have sold, on the hook for shipping, possibly taken for additional cash, and sitting on a large, bounced check. These scammers suck.

So I asked if I could play with him. I emailed our fraudster as if he’d emailed me first, and copied as much of his language back at him as I could manage:

Thank you for storming on some of my works and finding them impressive and intriguing. I sometimes doubt that I am good at what I do, but since you say it is undoubtable that I am good, I must thank you for the compliment.

I would be very pleased for you to purchase some of my works as a surprise gift to your wife in honor of your upcoming anniversary. An image of my only available work is attached, which I will hold for you, but there is another buyer interested so if you wish to purchase it, you must be willing to act quickly.

It is quite a large piece (approximately 2 meters by 3.5 meters), and so would require specialized shipping and handling. I will have to enquire as to the costs but please look at the picture now to know more about my piece of inventory. The title is “The Tenderness of Memory Is a Balm Always”.

I would prefer that you make payment by check only.

Fast sale time required? Check! Specialized shipping required, so a confederate who needs to be paid in cash will collect the art from me, which the buyer will helpfully bump up his purchase price to cover? Check! Pay by check which will bounce? Check! He must have been salivating over his imminent success, so much so that I’m not sure he ever looked at the image of The Tenderness of Memory Is a Balm Always. When you click on the link, be sure to scroll allllll the way down and two the right, and zoom in. Here’s the detail if you need it.

He asked for more samples! Now I had to come up with stuff that was vaguely plausible, while still being totally ridiculous, and also kinda crappy because I felt like providing him kinda crappy images; I also didn’t want to give him anything resembling high-res that he might not have found on his own. Also, I wanted at least one of the images to be ferociously inappropriate for his claimed purpose of an anniversary gift to his wife. My response required the utmost care:

I am happy to put together a listing of pieces. It turns out that I have more than just “The Tenderness of Memory Is a Balm Always” (I guess you were not in favor of its dense layers of meaning) that I can sell to you. I went digging through my studio and found some forgotten art that was never picked up by a buyer who died and whose husband absolutely hated the idea of paintings (he called them “The Devil’s Images”) and thus they are still here. They’ve not been stored in ideal conditions, but if you put a frame and mat on them, I don’t think you’ll be able to see where the weevils gnawed on the edge.

I have attached images of three completed pieces within your budget of $1500.00 – $7000.00 ready for immediate sale:

“My Wife” is large and figurative²
“The Great Wave At Islip (Garbage Barge Island)” is large and seascape
“Study #37” is abstract and large

The first two are on stretched canvas and sealed. The third is on board, produced as a single line from a ball-point pen that I attached to a Spirograph I made out of old Legos and produced in a 38 hour fugue state while I was on a Jolt Cola bender. At the end, I had damaged all of the joints in my right hand and elbow and required three surgeries and seven months to recover, so I’m happy to let it go. To be honest, I think it might be cursed because while I was making it, it would whisper terrible things to me about ponies.

Each of the three is $2000.00, but I’ll let Study #37 go for $1000.00 because of the curse. As long as you don’t listen to it, you’ll be fine. For your budget, you could get all three. Actually, it would be a big help if you could because I’m still paying off the doctor’s bills from making that last one.

I tell you, when I got that second reply, I was over the moon; Hollis wrote up a press release to send him, one that purported to tell of my upcoming one-man show at a prestigious museum. Another Camper came up with a 3GB+ TIFF image that, once zipped, was less than 3MB, just to see if we could overload his computer.

Sadly, he decided that this scam wasn’t working and discontinued our correspondence. However, if any of you would like to play with him, “Ashley Jackson” is ashleyjac436@gmail.com. I hear he’s looking for large format art, and is willing to spend US$1500 to US$7000. Just remember to string him along and waste as much of his time as you can (or at least make it so he can’t bother to use his email any longer for all the crap he’s getting there) because he’s a lowlife that preys on artists.

Spam of the day:
Yeah, I think we’re covered today.

_______________
¹ Aside from fabulous watercolors of weather, critters, and whales, she also co-owns the best lingerie shop in the southeastern portion of Alaska, and possibly the entire state. It’s built into a former bank site, with the enormous vault still present. I would advise that if you annoy her, you not accept any invitations to sample Amontillado with her.

² In retrospect, I should have named it Ashley’s Wife.

Okay, let me be clear for a moment– change purely for the sake of change isn’t a good thing. Change purely for the sake of change is why I work for a corporation that, approximately every 18 months, reorganizes itself from top to bottom, leaving tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries unsure sure of exactly who they work for or what the purpose of their organization is, for no good reason whatsoever¹. The work is something I’m very skilled at and enjoy, the salary and benefits are good, and the checks don’t bounce is literally the extent of why I work there, because there is no broader sense of mission or purpose that will be retained 18 months from now and I’ve opted out of even trying to pretend to care².

But change that improves upon the stale or inappropriate, that updates the old in favor of something better? That’s necessary; it’s why every five years, there are new protocols for CPR, as we figure out with empirical evidence what works and what doesn’t, stop doing things that are harmful, and iterate our way to practices that are better.

All of which is to say, it’s been two weeks since we learned that Mark Trail has a new dad, and today’s the day that the strip switches to new creator Jules Rivera (the latest in editor Tea Fougner’s webcomics-originating strip-assumers). The regular readers of Mark Trail were largely caught unawares, judging by the comments section under today’s strip, and it is hilarious.

All of these hidebound folks lamenting that the strip won’t look anachronistic any longer, decrying that it’ll now be written and drawn by a woman (gasp!) of color (double gasp!!), and therefore suck and they’re quitting right now.

They don’t know what they’re going to be missing:

The opening story arc has no less than five boat explosions.

If that’s their idea of ruination, I’m sorry they hate fun.

Which is all the more hilarious because so many of them specifically cited boat explosions as one of the things that make Old School Mark Trail awesome that will obviously never happen again³. But I guess when you demand comic strips never change⁴, you miss out on a lot of stuff.

Speaking of never changing, I have a feeling that the diehard Trail-heads would be be upset about anything that allows things they like to be enjoyed by somebody new because scarcity means value? I’m thinking now about a very neat idea that a friend pointed me towards the same day I learned about the imminent Apocalypse Mark Trail transition, one aims to make comics more accessible.

ComicA11y comes from Aussie designer/illustrator/developer Paul Spencer, and is designed to make comic strips open to people with various challenges. Actually, let me rephrase that; as Scott McCloud once put it, all of us have cognitive limits when reading, whether we fit into a traditional model of disability or not, and ComicA11y is designed to reduce the burden of reading comics, because while they may be simple enough for you or me to read, that doesn’t mean they’re equally easy for somebody else.

So let’s enhance comics. Spencer’s starting list includes:

• Resizable text; of all the adaptations found on comic websites, this is the most likely to have some kind of inclusion (probably within the browser), along with responsive design for the viewing device.
• The native font can be substituted with a simpler one that features more easily-discerned letter shapes (notably, mixed case instead of all uppercase; take that Brad Guigar!⁵).
• A closed caption mode prints the text for the strip below the panels, one balloon at a time. With each new caption, a headshot of the speaker is shown, and the speaker themself is highlighted in the strip to stand out from the background. Having text outside the image means that screen readers can see it.
• High contrast mode strips out the color, leaving sharp black and white, with extraneous background details suppressed.
• The strip can switch between horizontal and vertical layouts.
• A large number of languages are provided for translation, with or without the captioning; support for both left-to-right and right-to-left languages is included.
• Crucially, behind the scenes there’s support for HTML5 markups that tie into various assistive technologies.

Spencer is still looking at further improvements, including the ability to work with unalike panel sizes, connected speech bubbles, and ways to incorporate all of these features without impeding the creators. That last is probably the most important, in that all of these enhancements will rely on the willingness of creators to do extra work. Christopher Baldwin, for example, includes an audio narration of each Spacetrawler strip, and kudos to him for doing so.

But even when an accessibility feature is easy to use, how many people will use it? Do you include alt-text captions on images in your Tweets for screen readers for the visually impaired? I do so about two time out of three, if I’m being honest.

In addition to ease of use, ComicA11y (and whatever similar solutions may be developed) need ubiquity and an expectation on the part of the audience needs to get back to the creators that this is expected. They need to hear that if a comic is made for you, it needs to be made for as many other people as possible. Any ideas on that, or features, or improvements, Spencer’s email is at the bottom of the ComicA11y page, and he’s inviting feedback. Here’s hoping he gets some that’s really good, and he gets further in his goals of making comics available to everybody.

Even sticks in the mud that ragequit Mark Trail before the boatsplosions.

Spam of the day:

Dial Vision Glasses are unique glasses with adjustable lenses designed to correct vision issues on an as needed basis.
It is easy to adjust the individual lenses using the control knob.

Or — and try to follow me because this is a little complicated — I could go to the drugstore where they have a waide variety of eyeglasses with various levels of magnification for about seven bucks a pair, which is what people do if they don’t have more complex problems (like my astigmatism) that require specific lens shapes. You’ve invented a pair of head-mounted, open-frame, low-power binoculars.

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¹ Aside from the obvious, which is to settle feuds at the senior executive level and make it impossible for anybody to take responsibility for anything that happened in a line of reporting that no longer exists, duh.

² Fortunately, approximately 94% of all the very important mandatory all-hands teleconferences that are meant to obfuscate what’s going on happen during times when I’m teaching and thus can’t attend, oh darn.

³ While not a daily reader, I think I’ve paid close enough attention to Mark Trail over the past 20 years to notice two, maybe three boat explosions in that time. When something exciting happens that infrequently, I guess you cling to it. Curiously, none of the commenters is worried about a lack of Mark Trail punching a bad guy so hard he loses his facial hair.

⁴ Another commenter mourns that Heart Of The City sucks now, which it curiously started to do when taken over by a Black woman.

⁵ You know I love you, Brad.

Here’s the thing about Child Star; I have no idea how much of a spoiler warning I should put on this thing. On the one hand, it’s a work of fiction and there’s plot points that you might not see coming that could be discussed here. On the other hand, I suspect that spoiler susceptibility is largely a function of age.

Those of us in the 40-50 range and up might well on casual reading think that this is another of Box Brown’s nonfiction works¹, because it recalls so many things that actually happened, the memory of them can blur to the point that you’d convince yourself it’s real. Younger readers that didn’t live through the back 20 years of the Cold War would just think he’s come up with one hell of a twisty story.

All of which is to say, I found myself awash in a sea of note-perfect recreations of TV Guide listings and ads, of Nancy Reagan-inspired Very Special Episodes, of a story that paralleled the life of numerous real-life child stars (one in particular) so cleanly that recalling what happened 40 or more years caused me to stop multiple times to say, Wait, that’s not what happened, was it?

For those younger than me who don’t remember back to, let’s say the Montreal Olympics, this is what it was like, all of it, particularly the Reagan years. Hollywood was churning out TV, movies, and TV movies exactly as bad and uninspired as Brown’s fictional examples. The thorough exploitation of the entertainment/industrial complex by the Republican political machine was just as pervasive as shown here. The universality of a cute, sassy kid on a sitcom, one that reached all corners of society, actually was possible in a world of three broadcast networks plus a handful of rerun channels plus maybe PBS. It really did happen that a full third of the country would watch the same thing on a Tuesday night.

And for those that only know Gary Coleman from the soundtrack of Avenue Q, this book is practically a biography, with overtones of every other kid that hit big and wound up getting chewed up and spit out — which would be pretty much all of them in the past 50 years except Kurt Russell, Jodie Foster, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Peter Ostrum.

It’s an uncomfortable read, which leads to a lot of questions as to who is responsible for the machine that entices and destroys young lives; is it the agencies, the production companies, the moguls of Hollywood that are responsible for every Mary-Kate and Ashley or Britney whose childhood is twisted into something unrecognizable and what that inevitably does to them? Is is the public that demands the new, the fresh, and increasingly the scandalous to sate their appetites for the next heavily-scripted unreality family once Hiltons, Kardashians, and Gosselins no longer amuse?

Yes, and yes. Central character Owen Eugene’s parents may have failed to protect him and actively exploited him — all while declaring how much they sacrificed and thus deserved — but it was a hundred million ordinary folks that demanded they do so, and would do it to their own kids in a heartbeat³ if they could.

Because on TV and in movies, everything is perfect, the people are better, the money never stops, and the closest to human empathy you get is the mild obsessive that collects all the tchotchkes and ephemera related to their favorite. Child Star is a cautionary tale more than anything, distilled down to a form that makes it truer than any memoir; it’s more melancholy of what This Is Spinal Tap would have been if it wasn’t played for laughs. You weren’t blameless, Owen, but you deserved better.

Child Star by Box Brown is published by :01 Books, and is available wherever books are sold. The pandemic has disrupted the whole review copies pipeline, so this one was my purchase and it was worth every penny. Put it in front of any kid aspiring to stardom, and especially their parents.

Spam of the day:

Nice day! You applied and you were accepted as a remote employee. CLICK HERE, FILL IN THE FORM, I’LL GIVE YOU A JOB. They took you.

Thanks for the offer, but remote or not, I really don’t feel like working Moscow hours.

Extra Special Time-Sensitive Bonus Spam of the day:

New York Comic Con Starts Tomorrow!

Yeah, if you’re going to declare that I don’t deserve press credentials for your show, I’m going to have to ask that you take me off your friggin’ press list. It was always the biggest pile of useless of all the shows I was credentialed for, and now it’s extra pointless.

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¹ His previous books being biographies of André the Giant and Andy Kaufman², an almost-oral history of Tetris, and a straight history of drug policy around cannabis.

² With an extra half-biography of Jerry Lawler thrown in for good measure.

³ We’re not even considering the pressure on each high school kid that’s decent at a sport to shoot for the pros, or the number of hangers-on, posse-mates, and less-than-immediate relatives that immediately show up for a share of the payout.

Emails and sometimes even this entire site have been acting up for a while, thanks to a DNS issue that I believe is now resolved. If you didn’t have a satisfactory experience previously, give it another 24-48 hours for propagation and it should be better. I’m already seeing email tests run quicker and more reliably than when I started chasing down the problem, so hopefully we’re good.

The internet, man. It’s held together with duct tape, chewing gum, and the least threatening lasers ever.