I was going to be enjoying a lazy, no-pants day but some people had to go and do significant things so fine, I’m writing. Still no pants, though.

• Ursula Vernon became the first person not named Foglio to take a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, for Digger (presumably for volume six, which released last year following the wrapping-up of the story). At press time, Ms Vernon was reportedly in an alleyway delivering a vicious beating to Neil Gaiman. So much for her plan to lose with dignity.

  Lord knows that I’ve written a lot about how much I dig¹ Vernon’s work, so I’m utterly thrilled for her and feel it’s recognition well deserved. At the same time, let us take a moment to acknowledge Howard Tayler, who is one of only two creators² to be nominated in the Best Graphic Story category a mind-bending four times. There is the matter of going 0-for-4 but hey, could be worse³, right?, Along those lines, I have already decided what to get Tayler for his birthday the next time it comes around in 2016.

• Meanwhile, about 2050 miles west of Chicago and the Hugos, news was coming out of PAX Prime during the Q&A with Mike and Jerry (helpfully streamed live to the world) that PAX is going abroad as PAX Prime, PAX Dev, and PAX East are joined by PAX Very South. For those of you that can’t travel to the Far Antipodes, 2013 will also see the launch of a new Scott Kurtz comic, of which details are presently thin on the ground.
• Okay, time to get serious, as one more thing smacked webcomics well in the face over the weekend — the sites hosted by Blind Ferret Entertainment, which include Looking for Group, Least I Could Do, Girls With Slingshots, Something*Positive, Reptilis Rex, Goblins, and PvP [no links, about which more momentarily] were hit by somebody with nothing better to do than to distribute malware. It’s been a long weekend of repairing both damage and reputations (malware warnings are likely to persist from Google and Firefox for some time), and as of this writing, the various sites remain down.

  Combine that with a story that’s been percolating around the tech sphere for the past week that the Java language has a critical flaw that’s been zero-day exploited, and the ultra-rare out-of-sequence patch issued by Oracle has not fixed the problem.

  I’ve written before about my general level of paranoia in browsing — how I do not enable JavaScript on a global basis, and only individually-trusted sites get it enabled; I’ve now turned off all Java plug-in functionality in every browser within my control, and I’m seriously considering removing Java entirely from my computers. I will lose some functionality (fancier presentations, comment ability, etc) in my day-to-day computer use, but maybe it’s not on me to be paranoid.

  Hate to say it, guys, but maybe we don’t need as elaborate, feature-rich layouts for our comics. Trimmed down, more simply-presented sites could be easier to build, faster to load, and generally more secure. It’s going to make some things more complex (including, most likely, the easy slotting-in of ads), but it’s time to start thinking in that direction. I know that nobody’s going to rebuild their websites overnight (and most of you aren’t going to change your browser settings either), but if you should happen to do a redesign, maybe security/reader safety needs to become more of a criterion that it has been in the past.

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¹ I’m so very, very sorry. I blame it on my ever-worsening Guigar Syndrome.

² Technically, a creator team: the writer/artist combo of Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham have been nominated for the current Fables collection four times; various other artists have been on the nominations, but only the *inghams have been on all four ballots.

³ Much worse.

After all, we’ll all be spending the day reflecting on the experiences and history of the labor movement, right? Right!

But that doesn’t mean I can’t take the time to point you all at a funding campaign for the weirdest, most Freudian of all webcomics, Power Nap. What happens when you’re the one guy allergic to stay-awake pills in a world that runs 24/7? You get shunned as a freak, and your dreams start coming to life, smashin’ stuff like there’s no tomorrow. Then you get sucked into those dreams and you have no idea what the hell’s going on and nobody’s telling you anything and maybe you’re about to die because the cruel authors of your fate ¹ find all of this amusing — but this bizarre, disturbing existence you lead looks great in eye-popping color.

Thus, funding campaign. Power Nap Vol 1 will be a Euro-sized digest, 70+ pages, full color (and yowza, do they use a lot of colors), and contain the first three chapters of the ongoing story (including the one that’s presently unspooling before us). Feast your eyes on the comic if you haven’t previously, and if it’s the sort of thing you think deserves support², see if you can’t find some room on your shelf for a physical copy.

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¹ That would be Maritza Campos and Bachan.

² Hint: it is.

Events that you may find of interest:

• Note to self: wear the T-Rex Stompin’ shirt tomorrow.
• Note to self: if you improbably find yourself in Seattle this weekend, drop by PAX, where one may find Kris Straub doing things, or Wil Wheaton doing things. I’m pretty sure that Mike, Jerry, and Scott doing things, but I haven’t found specific, concise posts by them yet.
• Note to self: if you future-technologically find yourself in Chicago this weekend, drop by Chicon 7/Worldcon, where one may find Howard Tayler doing things or David Malki ! doing things. Again, I’m certain that Los Foglios and Ursula Vernon will be doing things, but not much specificity given by them either.
• Note to self: if you magically find yourself in Atlanta this weekend, drop by Dragon*Con and you know exactly what Jennie Breeden will be doing — blowin’ Old Spice dudes¹ in front of a crowd of screamin’ ladies. Last time, she got a marriage proposal.
• Okay, promised you booze, let’s talk booze. Kristen Siebecker may not be a name that you recognize, but you should; aside from being married to indy comics creator Alex Robinson, she was the one responsible for organizing the first iteration of MoCCA Fest, which was a massive success and became a showcase for webcomickers for years afterwards.

  She’s also a fully-qualified sommelier and is starting a new series of wine-appreciation classes, so if you’ve ever wanted to learn exactly what it was you were drinking and why you liked (or didn’t like) it, you could do a hell of a lot worse than checking out her class.

  Popping Your Cork: Tips For New Wine Drinkers starts at 6:15pm and runs for an hour and a half or so on Wednesday, 12 September at Simple Studios, 134 West 29th Street (2nd floor) in Manhattan. It’ll set you back twenty bucks, for which you’ll get tasted on three wines, learn some useful stuff, and maybe if this becomes a regular event, it’ll take on a comics-maker overtone.

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¹ … who are wearing kilts, with a leafblower.

Okay, seriously webcomics — time to get back to doing stuff; summer’s nearly over, kids are going back to school. Chop, chop.

• Great idea or the greatest idea? PAX is just around the corner, and a beer blogger has put together a guide to where to find the greatest of civilization’s accomplishments¹ in and around the show. The bit that caught my eye was for a bar that’s got a reputation for both beer and mixed drinks where, if I were attending PAX, I would take the following recipe (developed by my bartender² last weekend) and see if they could mix it up because it’s delicious. I share it now with you:
  

  The Violet Knight³
  1/2 oz Laird’s bonded applejack
  1/2 oz Suze
  1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
  1/2 oz cinnamon syrup
  1 1/2 oz ginger beer

  Combine in a fizz glass, carefully top with G’Knight Imperial Red, grate nutmeg on top.

Quick notes:

• TopatoCo continues to bring the awesome.
• Ryan North does not like FedEx very much.
• People really like Dig Dug, holy crap. Thirty-four updates (some multi-paged) and counting.

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¹ Hyperbole? No. The oldest recipe known to exist is for beer, current thinking holds that agriculture was invented to ensure a steady supply of grain for brewing, beer sustained untold generations of people when the local water would have killed them, and provided a compact way to store calories for the winter that otherwise would have rotted away.

² Chris Stanley, holding down the bar at Catherine Lombardi; his blog may be a bit out of date, but there’s a zillion recipes for drinks and ingredients there, which you should check out. Seriously, the dude is an improvisational genius — I’ve watched him whip up custom drinks on the fly for parties of up to six, for five rounds without repeating himself. Tell him Gary sent you and he’ll treat you right; tell him Gary sent you and that you want “a Bishop Brûlée” and he’ll make you a drink that uses fire as a main ingredient.

³ This drink was tentatively named Work’s Not For Another Eleven Hours (a bit unwieldy), and there have been objections raised to the current moniker because it’s not violet colored (gentian, the main ingredient of Suze and a prominent flavor in this drink, inspired the name of gentian violet dye). Any suggestions for a better name will be much appreciated.

The rumo[u]rs are making the rounds regarding Jim Zub’s Skullkickers #17, available tomorrow in fine comic shops everywhere; actually, I’m not sure you can call it a “rumo[u]r”, when you come right out and say it in the solicitation:

Somebody DIES! Or, everyone DIES! There’s lots of DYING! Oh man, it’s some kind of DEATH-fest goin’ around. It’s all epic and brutal and a major character DIES so you better order a ho-jillion copies. No, seriously, someone DIES. Big DEADING in the house. Also: The end of our incredible third story arc. Sweet.

I would have put some emphasis in there, but I think it’s pretty apparent that the takeaway is “major character dies”. Now this being comics, death is a temporary condition, the result of an imaginary story or retconned immediately so that you can have drama but still put things back the way they were. But not if you name is Zub, Sparky. There’s a for-real shocking conclusion, a cliffhanger, and a stack of questions that amount to How the hell is he going to keep the story going for another three arcs after that? Do not doubt the Zub, he will find a way.

(more…)

Scope and scale seem to be slightly askew today.

• This page has, for the better part of a year, been bringing you news on The Bear, the Ryan Sohmer-penned, Becky Dreistadt-illustrated children’s book-in-progress; today, The Bear launched its Kickstarter campaign which still isn’t accumulating backers and dollars to the degree I’d anticipated.

  By which I mean, it’s “only” at 10% of goal in the first five hours or so, meaning the 30 day campaign is pretty much a guaranteed success, but previous Becky-heavy projects have been hitting the US$10,000 mark in about this time. I’m particularly surprised because the backer rewards feature not one, not two, but four Dreistadt original paintings up for grabs, which are normally the sort of thing that go in about ten minutes each, and they’re all (as of this writing) still available.

  I can only attribute this to a lack of the word getting out on this, the last big travel/vacation week prior to work/school life resuming next week¹. Me, I’m stocking up on a couple of these bad boys, give ’em to friends with new sons like I give copies of Blueberry Girl by Gaiman & Vess to friends with new daughters.

• If The Bear’s response is smaller than I’d figured on, it’s nice to know that there’s a balance, and the latest webcomic-related server-wanging came not at the hands of one of the behemoths that manage such things without intention², but at the paws of the modest-sized A Girl And Her Fed. Specifically, a stray mention of The Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie, NSW was enough to make their server fall down and go boom.

  Although I know for a fact that AGAHF creator Ms K Brooke “Otter” Spangler is the sort to feel absolutely horrible about taking down a non-profit, I hope that she finds in herself a little bit of pride that she could muster enough readers that want to contribute to the furry little VD-infected³ buggers as to constitute a “horde”. Assuming you think that koala care is a good thing, give it until tomorrow maybe, and pace yourselves? As of this writing, The Koala Hospital site is up, but throwing some warnings.

• Speaking of unexpected sizing, John Allison returns to the latest case at Bad Machinëry today, and I just want to publicly recognize him for his newest character design revisions. Flip back to the beginning of BM some three years back and compare Lottie and Shauna to what they look like now. This isn’t just artistic drift over time, it’s a deliberate act on Allison’s part to reflect the passage of time as his characters age and mature.

  We haven’t seen Sonny, Linton, or Jack yet, but I’d wager that they’ve upped their gangliness factor by about 40% since the end of The Case of the Fire Inside; by contrast, the first thought I had on reading this morning’s installment was, Dang, Charlotte and Shauna are almost young women. When did they get so old? Then again, I wonder the same thing about my nieces and nephews, my next door neighbor’s kid, and nearly everybody I see, so maybe it’s just me.

  Nah, it’s totally Allison. Nice work, The Englishman.

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¹ Or maybe because this one is in the “Publishing” category instead of the “Comics” category, meaning people aren’t seeing it in their searches?

² Jerry Holkins one wrote that he sometimes fears linking to things he likes might be interpreted as an act of aggression.

³ It’s hard to beat captions like One Direction member Liam Payne said he fears catching koala chlamydia after cuddling a koala that peed on him.

(more…)

Ready for the weekend? I sure am hell of ready.

• Thing Number One: heard while still in a waking state on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, courtesy of science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce, the story of an attempt to build a museum devoted to Nikola Tesla, and how by the time the story aired, the Matthew Inman-led campaign had cleared a cool million dollars. In the eight hours since crossing the megamark (as of this writing) an additional US$50,244 has been raised. Assuming a constant rate (which won’t happen, but what the hell) we’re looking at the next 37 days raising an additional five and half million dollars. With that kind of money, I’m calling for do-it-yourself deathray kits in the gift shop.
• Thing Number Two: seen and heard this morning while somewhat more awake, David Malki ! goes sound-and-video for today’s Wondermark. It’s a little less … uplifting than the Tesla museum story, but it does follow the Malki! mystique pretty closely. That is, it makes me wonder exactly how much of it was repurposed from original material¹ as Malki ! is wont to do, and how much he created himself (he being a rather talented filmmaker). Applying methods which one has mastered in one medium to a completely different medium? That’s one of the hallmarks of genius, my friends.

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¹ I’m guessing 1950s era industrial hygiene films.

With the rough cut done and the fine cut approaching, Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are, in mere hours, conducting what I believe is the first test screening of Stripped in LA, at something called “The Marina”, which I presume means something to Angelenos. Guys, I can’t tell you how much work has gone into this film (the last post about the making-of aspects to run on this page was just about one year ago exactly, at which time they had put in more than two years of work), and how much of a splash it’s going to make in the world of [web]comics. Let’s all think good thoughts in the direction of SoCal, oh, let’s say an hour from now. If nothing else, the Dave half of Freddave has a new little one at home and I’m sure he hasn’t slept more than an hour a night since San Diego Comic Con six weeks ago.

• Thing to look forward to #1: We at Fleen have spoken with Magnolia Porter at numerous points since Bobwhite wrapped, and it appears that a collection is finally on its way. Don’t get us wrong — Monster Pulse Porter’s best work yet, and The Good Crook was full of charms¹, but Bobwhite was the first time she really made us sit up and take notice. For you lucky attendees of SPX in three weeks, Porter will have a limited run of Bobwhite: Year One while she completes work on the comprehensive single-volume collection.
• Thing to look forward to #2: In actual fact, I don’t usually discover stuff that I’m super-interested in Kickstarter’s emails with their featured projects², but every once in a while, there’s a damn good one. And as luck would have it, this one is five times over goal after four days (in a thirty day campaign), so it also comes under the heading of “sure thing” for those of you that don’t appreciate the “will they make goal or not?” aspect of KS. Specifically, there’s a customized notebook for comic-making, which combines a class moleskine-style sketchbook with a series of comic references and how-tos.

  I DRAW COMICS is proudly stamped on the cover, and boy, will you ever with one of these in hand. My only disclaimer is that from the (admittedly few) sample pages shown on the KS page, it appears to draw a focus on superhero-type comics, which is understandable given that one of the project coordinators is an artist at Marvel. To the extent that body proportions are solely skewed towards the capes crowd³, it may not help every aspiring comics creator, as so many interesting comics don’t follow the stylistic conventions of the DC/Marvel Wednesday pull-list.

  But I have a hard time believing that even a sketchbook entirely serving the aesthetics of superhero comics would be entirely worthless to non-superhero creators; heck, I may even grab one myself, and I can’t draw much more than stick figures — and not even good enough stick figures that Randall Munroe needs to worry about competition.

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¹ Not to mention the fact that you could see Porter develop as an artist and storyteller as it developed, and my goodness has it been nearly five years since it launched? Yes, it has.

² Which is not to say that projects I’m interested in don’t get featured — it’s just I know about them before the email shows up.

³ And I trust that they have the good sense to not include Strong Female Characters-type bodily examples.

Almost the very first thing I wrote for this page was a comparison of a one Mister Jeffrey “JRo” Rowland and Tex Avery. Somewhat later, I found similarities in the work of John Allison and Frank Tashlin, and Jon Rosenberg and Chuck Jones.¹

This (old) (incomplete) idea came back to me today, wherein I tagged Meredith Gran as Friz Freleng-like, although she sees herself as a Bob Clampett. I based my call on her willingness to go as far as necessary for a perfect scene, no matter how many pages or panels it might take, much as Freleng was willing to put in extended sight gags that had little to do with the main action, taking up precious time² in an animated short to do so. These were frequently silent, which is another kind of storytelling that Gran excels at. So, open question to creators — do you find yourself identifying with an animator’s aesthetic, and if so, who and why?

New idea: tuxedos make you look great, but if you don’t wear one regularly, man can you look like David Byrne in his large suit, not that I would know. I think it’s because most tuxedos, being worn infrequently, never loosen and soften with wear and thus always look a bit stiff and large on the wearer.

But sometimes you are just a dapper enough muthascratcher to pull off that look, and every once in a while, they give you a fancy-shiny award too. In the hierarchy of awards for creative types, I doubt the Philadelphia Geek Awards will ever challenge any of the EGOT (well, maybe the Grammy), but to have a perfect evening with your best friend in the world and get a light-up plaque conveying the respect of other creators? Well done, Brad Guigar; no matter what awards you may or may not win, you’ll always be the best geek in our hearts.

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¹ Briefly: Rowland’s Wigu is suffused with an anything-goes attitude, but living by a single cardinal truth: if it works in the mind of an eight year old boy, it’s plausible. Allison is about social situations, the proper way to act, and subversions of that order spiraling out of control. Rosenberg’s work relies on structural rules and quickly establishing how far each premise can stretch those rules without … quite … breaking them.

² In the sense of taking a break from the main action and then returning to it, Paul Taylor’s has definite tendencies in that direction.

Wanna see something pretty? Becky Dreistadt, of the eponymous Becky and Frank, has put together a new portfolio site of her best work. And the best part about it? Concept art for unannounced projects; if I told you some of the projects that these things have been designed for (and which may — Lor’ willin’ and the creek don’ rise — see the light of day in full productions after the usual development time), you’d never believe me.¹ So browse your butts over to BeckyDreistadt.com and get to appreciating.

Wanna see something that’s simultaneously funny (ha ha) and funny (true)? We’ve mentioned French comicker Boulet previously, with respect to a 24 hour comic that has to be seen to be believed. What we didn’t mention at the time is that he also has been doing webcomics for about forever, and has more recently begun the long process of translating them into English. With a years-long archive, as you can imagine, there’s a bit of a backlog. For example, this bit of realizing that your awkward past was in your own head was originally run in March of 2008, which means that if he stopped making new work tomorrow, it would be years before we Anglophones caught up. He should have been in the blogroll before now, and today we rectify that error. Go trawl through and enjoy a comicker with a keen eye for observing life.

Wanna see something quantitatively jaw-dropping? It has been five days since we reported on Matthew Inman’s Operation: Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, by which time the campaign itself was approximately 20 hours old. At less than a week in and 40 days still to go, O:LBaGTM is still bringing in US$1000 every fifteen minutes or so² and is closing hard on US$820,000, which means sometime before the day is out, the necessary funds to build a goddamn Tesla museum will have been raised. The only question in my mind is, how nice will the goddamn Tesla museum be? Overages have been earmarked for making things better (the US$850K goal is just to purchse the land), so with five million dollars easily within the realm of possibility, the answer is likely to be “pretty goddamn nice”. I’m holding out for decorative Tesla coils in the bathrooms, at least until somebody discovers that fluids are a good conductor and they have to turn them off. Wusses.

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¹ I was originally going to word that more rudely, but I’ll never be able to have the facility with casual blasphemy that Lore has, so why bother?

² Based on a thoroughly unscientific process of me refreshing the page every few minutes.