Honestly, some of my favorite times in comics involve seeing what creators I follow already come up with as their next project. No matter how much I like the current work, seeing what they come up with to distinguish the new from the old usually involves a real stretch of the creative muscles — your Chex vs Starslip, Sheldon vs Drive, Ugly Hill vs Not Invented Here, Goats vs Scenes From A Multiverse, Bobwhite vs Monster Pulse, Captain Stupendous vs Snowflakes, Little Dee vs Spacetrawler, Kilroy and Tina vs Wonderella.

To that list, we can now add You’ll Have That/Max vs Max creator Wes Molebash, who launches Insert Image today. It looks to be more story/plot oriented rather than based around what could broadly be called “relationships” (which formed the core of his earlier work), but it’s still recognizably Molebash — the character designs are unmistakably his¹, church (as both an institution and a setting) appears to be a prominent element, there’s (even with just one strip) a sense of fundamental decency about the characters. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one; I think that Molebash may have found a vehicle that matches his voice even better than his earlier comics.

Know where there’s a sense of fundamental decency that’s a full 180° from Molebash’s midwest? Brooklyn. Not that Meredith Gran’s cast of characters aren’t decent enough people, they’re just the living embodiments of “It’s complicated”.

Which, the more I think about it, is probably why she was the perfect choice to write/draw Marceline and the Scream Queens, because the residents of the Land of Ooo aren’t as simple as their very handy labels would make them seem at first blush. The Candy Kingdom isn’t all sweetness and light; Marceline’s not letting her Nightosphere origins decide what kind of person she should be, and Princess Bubblegum sometimes has to do some not-very-nice things. Gran knows how to write characters with obvious surfaces and deeper contradictions.

So it’s pretty cool that just in time for MatSQ#2 to hit the stands this week, there’s a very nice review of MatSQ#1 at The AV Club today:

Gran has a firm handle on both characters’ voices, and in signature Adventure Time fashion, crafts a story that is rooted in a realistic situation and then amplified by the fantastic setting. Marceline’s popularity intimidates Bubblegum, prompting the cruel words that cause Marceline to doubt her creativity.

The two are ultimately united through art, as the Scream Queens put on an epic show that completely changes Bubblegum’s point of view. Over four silent pages, Gran dramatically captures all the energy and theatricality of Marceline’s show, aided by Lisa Moore’s vibrant color palette of complimentary reds and purples.

Damn straight.

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¹ I always thought Molebash’s designs sat about midway between Ryan Estrada and Mike Krahulik, and [img] carries on that aesthetic pretty strongly.

Not saying they’re completely out of the blue, but still.

• Very much a Huh moment: I’m not entirely sure what the read-between-the-lines part of the announcement means, but I’m pretty sure the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art just said it’s ceasing to exist:
  

  The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) and the Society of Illustrators have announced plans for MoCCA to transfer its assets to the Society, creating a single cultural institution supporting and celebrating illustration, comics, and animation.

  The Society will continue and expand MoCCA’s mission in a number of ways: staging MoCCA Fest in its current location, dedicating a gallery in the Society building to MoCCA’s Permanent Collection, continuing MoCCA programming, and curating a special exhibition of works from MoCCA’s Permanent Collection in their Hall of Fame Gallery […]. There will be extensive arts programming around both of these exhibits, including lectures, workshops, film and music series. Current MoCCA memberships will be honored at the Society of Illustrators.

  So, that’s something more than a de-accession of artifacts, or construction of an institution-within-an-institution. Does somebody with access to legal filings know where to look for a corporate dissolution? Because that’s what this sounds like:

  Commenting on the transfer of MoCCA’s assets, including its permanent art collection and the MoCCA Fest name, Society Executive Director Anelle Miller observed, “The Society of Illustrators has a long, proud history of promoting the art and appreciation of all genres of illustration. We are honored to be able to spearhead the expansion and growth of the incredible foundation that MoCCA has created over the past ten years.”

  More on this as it develops.

• Maybe not so much Huh as Hmmm: As of this moment, an artboook anthology is on the verge of becoming the third most-funded comics project in Kickstarter history, which position it will hold for approximately a week until Penny Arcade takes the number two slot, and then another week or so before CreatureBox takes number four.

  Still, Top Five status is nothing to sneeze at, and taking two separate projects into the Top Twenty in the space of six months (with a combined take somewhere northward of US$165,000) makes George Rohac the Kickstarter Guru of 2012, I’m thinking.

• Less Huh and more Hooray: Congratulations to Emily Nagoksi and Rich Stevens, who totally changed their respective Facebook relationship statuses, with cake. I can’t express how happy I am for them. And dang is that an impressive cake.

Those that don’t care about the mechanics of press access to conventions (which can range from simple and painless to frustratingly opaque, show to show, year to year) can read the first two bits and skip the long piece at the end.

• Know who’s a smart guy? Jim Zub; it wouldn’t surprise me that X number of years from now when a definitive history of North American comics in the 21st century is written, he’s recognized as much for his savvy in navigating UDON through the various realms of webcomics, licensed IP, and creator-owned print as he is for his own comics projects.

  I enjoy every chance I get to talk to him, and carefully follow what he says online; recently, he did a series of Twitterposts that became longer blogposts on comics writing, and with them all done, he’s helpfully linked to all of them. If you enjoy the craft of comics, take a careful read at what he has to say on brainstorming, pacing, page planning, scripting, and dialogue. Good stuff.

• Because there’s nothing like an unexploited niche: Andy Bell appears to be the most celebrated toy designer in all of Gibraltar (scroll forward to pages 28 & 29 for the August 2012 issue; no direct link I could find). Given Gibraltar’s estimated population of around 29,000 (or, to put it another way, a little more than twice that of my town), if his prominence there was representative of the entire world, there would be about one and a third Andys Bell in his usual stomping grounds of Greenpoint, which is roughly the same as the one they currently have.

  Of course, that undersupplies New York City as a whole (there should be 284 and a fraction Andys Bell, but actually have only one), and don’t get me started on the Expected Andy Bell Population of the United States (let’s just say there should be nearly 10,300 more of him running around, or nearly four per county. Clearly, we suffer a shortage, and somebody should get on that.

(more…)

I believe that it is a matter of record that one of this page’s favoritest creators is “Hurricane” Erika Moen, who is funny, brave, honest, and knows her way around risqué material¹ like a champ. It is a matter of record that this page cannot wait for the print release of her latest comic, Bucko (with Jeff Parker), despite the cognitive dissonance this page gets when realizing that Bucko presented juggalos as fully-realized characters worthy of our attention. Honestly, Erika and Jeff — this page may never forgive you for that.³

So it’s understandable that it’s considered newsworthy in these parts to point out that Ms Moen will be part of a three-woman art show in Portland, Oregon this Thursday, 2 August. And because it’s Erika Moen, it’s understandable that the theme of the show is erotic art by comics artists, and perhaps inevitable that the venue will be Gallery Sesso, contained within the walls of Club Sesso, which is owned by Ron “Yes, that Ron Jeremy” Jeremy.

Perhaps you shouldn’t click on those last two links if you’re at work? All the details are available at Moen’s website.

Oh, and about that nickname that I bestowed on Ms Moen? Come 2015, it could be literally true.

Side note for any that missed it: Kwanza Johnson (onetime Zuda editor; while I think that the design and interface of Zuda left much to be desired, there were some damn good comics there while it lasted) has neatly summarized the priorities of [digital] comics creators in one picture. Ignore the numbers at your peril.

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¹ Including when to be classy, instructive, just revel in the smut (or a combo platter of any of the preceding) as the situation dictates.²

² Heh, heh, he said, “dick”.

³ Oh, who is this page kidding — c’mere, you.

Audience disintermediation, relying on the quality of work instead of being handed a break, controlling and owning your creations: Patton Oswalt was talking about comedy at the Montreal Just For Laughs Festival, but it’s equally applicable to individual creative endeavours like, oh, say [web]comics.

And because Oswalt is very, very smart and very, very thorough, he says it twice, for two different audiences: the creators and the publishers. This one is brief and non-optional, go read it now and start thinking how you can make good on his calls to action. As a bonus exercise, keep your eyes open for whichever publishers are the first to move in the direction that he calls for; they are going to succeed out of proportion to the stragglers, and will likely be the ones philosophically inclined to see creators as partners, not indentured employees.

Speaking of doing good work all over the place: Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson do a narrative comic, gallery art, books of all sort, and ________, not to mention working on a _______ for ________ that will make them goddamn superstars once it gets announced. And just for fun, they’re resuming the Capture Creatures series today, which I guess means that Becky decided that only painting 350 different things this year was an insufficient challenge, and let’s crank that sumbitch up to 500 or so.

Cool by me — I love these critters and the stories that accompany them. I’ve been really bad at predicting evolutions until now (having no personal experience of Pokemon), but if Vinopossum doesn’t evolve into something wine-related, I will be shocked.

For those of you outside the eastern seaboard of the United States, I-95 is a roadway with one purpose: to break people and their will to live. Some 450km of it lie between me and home.¹ Fun! Let’s keep this brief.

• On t-shirtery and the design thereof, received wisdom shared with you by the very generous John Allison.
• On achieving 867% of funding the goal for Trial of the Clone, and soliciting input for the next Zach Weinersmith-penned interactive story, which comes down to the eternal question: Good or Evil?
• On the possibility that Aaron Diaz² just volunteered Danielle Corsetto, Anthony Clark, and Emmy Cicierega to publicly engage in The Hammer Dance, less than US$11000 need be raised over the course of ten more days. If they do this, you can be sure that Diaz’s parachute pants will be tweed and tailored to perfection by Duchess of Portland.
• On those last two Kickstarters, note the relative generosity of updates: 20 days, 8 updates for a project that’s still fundraising, and 17 updates over one month (with progress-o-meter graphs!) for one that’s wrapped up, but not yet delivered the goods. These are good practices — frequently let everybody know what is happening with their money. It is incumbent on fundraisers to keep that line of communication open once things close, and there are those that do exactly that and they are to be commended.

  Others … not so much. Eighteen updates from launch to goal? Good. Ten weeks after goal before breaking radio silence? Not so good, Fat Cat Gameworks; nobody expected that you’d have product to ship the next day, but they need to hear that you aren’t just sitting around trying to figure out what to do next. If nothing else, figure out loud.

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¹ That sound you just heard was Ms K. Brooke “Otter” Spangler, warming up to sing my funeral dirge, because she knows what kind of Destroyer Bitch-Goddess I-95 is … she knows and would rather see me dead than suffer its embrace.

² The Latin Art-Throb.

Who says that service outages are always a bad thing?

So I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for the Penny Arcade Strip Search Reality TV Series Thing since before I knew it was A Thing. Robert and Brian teased the crap out of it to me, never quite getting around to exactly what you might call details (and now that I reflect, it was probably one of the shoes waiting to drop that were left hanging back in Las Vegas). Since discovering it was A Thing (and Robert getting to see the look on my face, as he said he wanted to), I’ve been wondering where it could go.

Certainly, this is the sort of winnowing process that Robert Khoo lives for; many have commented that the hiring process for Penny Arcade is convoluted and demanding, bordering on insane¹, but I think most people who criticize have likely not been involved in personnel matters before. I’ve just wrapped up a four year stint as the Membership Trustee for my volunteer EMS agency, and I can tell you that Khoo is precisely correct that what makes for a bad hire is not a lack of skills, it’s a lack of fit (personally, culturally) in both directions. It’s the sort of thing that can kill a small business (or volunteer organization) if it’s not handled with extreme care, and more so when those environments are characterized as high-energy, high-pressure, or high-performance. If unpaid volunteers would have willingly subjected themselves to the multi-stage process that Khoo designed, I would have adopted it in a heartbeat.²

Since it’s a competition that needs to be visually interesting, I trust that Khoo will also be up to his usual standard in devising challenges (I’m pretty sure that Robert likes planning things like bachelor parties and reality competitions so that he — like a photographer that hates to be photographed — doesn’t end up participating in them). The demand will certainly be there, and the rewards certainly won’t be just for the eventually winner; the audience that could be built up by being followed for a season of PATV (some 30 episodes, I’d presume) and making it to the final three or four could be enough to launch a career, even without the year-long in-house association with PA’s experts.

I think that the ultimate success or failure of this project will hinge on two items: the breadth of work that gets in and stays in for the duration, and how well the contestants are nurtured.

In the case of the first, Mike and Jerry are terrific about pointing their readers to creators whose work is marvelously divergent from their own; can you think of any webcomicker less like Penny Arcade than, say, Erika Moen? Having an Erika-type, or analogues to the breadth of topic & style found in your Beckys, Kates, Merediths, Toms, Evans, or Jams in the contest, people whose work is nothing like Penny Arcade will, I think, be a prime determinator of the quality of competition.

This isn’t entirely up to the producer end of the equation — I do think that Mike, Jerry, Robert, and the others are fair-minded enough to want to showcase the best work with the most potential (after all, they’re on the hook to give a sort of imprimatur and don’t want to sully their own brand), but if the contestants self-select and you don’t get applications from as wide a pool of creators with as wide a range of artistic styles (and personal experiences), the show won’t live up to its potential with respect to (as Anton Ego put it) the discovery and defense of the new.

The second item is more within the control of the showrunner. TV does reality/competition shows on a range from generally classy (cf: The Amazing Race or Iron Chef America) to trainwreck (cf: Housewives, Shores, anything centered around a job that isn’t Ace of Cakes ’cause dammit, those people like each other and have fun at work), and even the shows on the ability counts more than narcissistic personality disorder end of the spectrum can drop the ball badly (cf: Mondo was robbed, and where is the goddamn owl).³ Put bluntly, will Strip Search have a Tim Gunn to encourage, critique, mentor (and, when needed, lay the smack down)? Note that unless the Tim Gunn role is fulfilled by Khoo, the local substitute will not be as good a dresser as Tim Gunn. Heck, just see if Tim wants to come out to Seattle for a couple of months.

So that’s where my head’s at. The rest we’ll see when the final numbers on the Kickstarter are in (as of this writing, we’re about US$1500 away from Jerry having to cosplay something suitably humiliating at PAXes Prime and East), but the projection makes Strip Search a virtual certainty at this point. Contestant screening, format, challenges, guest judges⁴ are all to be seen. There remains an incredible amount of work to execute on all the potential, but if there’s one thing the Penny Arcade crew (all of them, even the ones whose names you don’t see in the credits) know how to do, it’s execute on potential.

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¹ Let’s make this clear: you or I could not get hired by Robert Khoo. We wouldn’t make it past the laundry question, much less to the phone interviews.

² Not that we ever had 5000 applicants for a single open EMT slot.

³ Confidential to Scott Kurtz: Project Runway has started again, so you might want to not pay attention to my tweets on Thursday nights for the next coupla’ months.

⁴ I could be available for a weekend, just sayin’.

I’m in the midst of an archive binge of Homestuck and it’s taking up a lot of time and mental cycles. I’m not even a year into this story¹ and my mind is reeling from the sheer volume of how much work Andrew Hussie has done so very, very quickly. By the time I’m done, I’ll most likely have to go back and start the damn thing over again, as I’ll be trying to keep track of 5000+ pages of art and 300,000+ words, which would be the equivalent of 1.5 Crimes and Punishment or Mobys Dick.

• Know what else is an overwhelming amount of comics? Ryan Estrada’s The Whole Story project, where four days remain to name your own price to obtain all those tasty, weird comics.²
• Know what else is an overwhelming amount of extremely important and well-written words? Colleen Doran’s Very Bad Publishers essays. Every once in a while she takes the time to point people that may not have seen the full saga, and is doing so now, which is the perfect time for me to mention it again. If you haven’t ever read about Very Bad Publishers, then take a couple hours and do so.
• Unexpected surprise of the day: This page has made much of Randy Milholland’s ability to write believable characters that behave in realistic ways, and to change their personal habits oh-so-slowly and organically. Nobody in the Something*Positive cast started out as damaged as Mike Dowden, but he’s come a long way. Today, he’s still not finding life entirely going his way, but at least he has a new haircut, one that doesn’t make him look like a sociopath that lives in his mom’s basement. As longtime readers may recall, he stopped being a sociopath sometime around Halloween 2004, and moved out of his mom’s basement prior to becoming a father in 2006. And, uh, damn I’ve been reading this comic a long time.

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¹ Homestuck began on 13 April, 2009 and I’ve made it as far as Rose: Knit the scarf. Ride the ogre., which ran on 11 March, 2010. It’s partway into Act 4, and I’m guessing about a quarter of the way through the story as written so far.

² As reported earlier, Estrada started with price tiers in his pay-what-you-want scheme, but later opened it up entirely to reader’s choice. Literally any amount will get you all those comics.

Not sure if these are thorough enough to qualify as “followups”, but what’s terminology between friends?

• Yesterday we mentioned that Meredith Gran and Ryan North will be doing a joint Adventure Time/Marceline signing at Little Island Comics in Toronto tomorrow. But we did not mention that the fun doesn’t stop there! Per Mr North:
  

  TOMORROW, WEDNESDAY JULY 25th, 1-3 pm: Mer and I sign at Little Island Comics in Toronto and there’s an Adventure Time costume contest. And activities!! This one is for kids!

  TOMORROW, WEDNESDAY JULY 25th, 6-6:45 pm: Mer and I do an Adventure Time presentation at The Central and do a Q+A!

  TOMORROW, WEDNESDAY JULY 25th, 7 pm: There is a costume contest for adults that Mer and I judge!

  TOMORROW, WEDNESDAY JULY 25th, 7:15-9 pm: The signing for adults happens at The Beguiling with Meredith and myself!

  The Central, for those wondering, is an emporium of adult happy-time beveragosity, and it is located approximately next door to The Beguiling. Little Island is behind The Beguiling; that is, the backs of the respective stores open on to Honest Ed’s Alley. Honest Ed is of course Ed Mirvish, legendary proprietor of Honest Ed’s Bargain Store, which should be familiar to anybody that’s read Scott Pilgrim. Should anybody find Gran or North in the vicinity crying like a newborn baby at the sheer horror of being alive, please contact the appropriate authorities.

  Also you guys — kids costume contest! That sounds more adorable than should be allowed under Canadian law.¹

• It occurred to me recently that not everybody has obtained the fifth (and final) Starslip collection. If you are of the mind to scoff and note that all of the comics in the book can be obtained online, allow me to disabuse you of that notion, Mr or Ms Scoffs-a-Lot. For you see, the last Starslip comic isn’t. The last, that is. I mean, it’s still a Starslip comic, but it’s not really the last one, because the soon-to-be-generally-available Starslip: The Future Dies Tonight has an epilogue. I do not exaggerate when I say that those few extra panels were worth the price of purchase by themselves, which I will not spoil. I do, however, urge anybody with a fond spot for Starslip in their hearts to obtain the final volume as quickly as it goes on offer, because it really ties the whole strip together.

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¹ Being on the metric system, things in Canada are already up to 2.54 times more adorable than in the United States. They’ve got all those fluffy white seal cubs, after all.

That’s what the cool kids call “Toronto”. It’s true, I have cool kids right here and they all say that.¹ Anyway, for those of you in the Greater Toronto Exurb, Meredith Gran would like you to know something:

I’m going to be in Toronto THIS WEEK doing a signing, and you ought to come by! I will be signing for my Adventure Time: Marceline & the Scream Queens series, though I will have a few Octopus Pie books to sign as well. And my awesome partner in guestitude is Dinosaur Comics/Adventure Time writer Ryan North²! Oh my glob!

So if you’re in Toronto on Wednesday the 25th (that would be the day after tomorrow), you want to be at Little Island Comics (the kids-comics spinoff of world-class comics shop The Beguiling), from 1:00 to 3:00pm. That’s not much time to see two people, so if I were you, I’d ris-vip at the Facebook event page. Tell Ryan and Mer I said, “Hi.” If I were going, I’d give Ryan the penny of T-Rex I got out of a penny squisher at the American Museum of Natural History (dinosaurs are on the fourth floor).

It seems that pert-near every time a major comics- or genre-type award decides to add a category for internet offerings, Girl Genius is going to get recognized³. This time it’s the Comics Buyers Guide, who have had a fan-driven award for three decades, and have just instituted a category for Favorite Webcomic. Per Girl Genius co-creator Phil Foglio:

All of the awards were nominated and voted upon by the readers of the Comics Buyers’ Guide, a venerable resource for the comics buying public that has been around since Christ was a carpenter. This year, the CBG grudgingly acknowledged that the internet, “while obviously a fad, is an extremely tenacious one, like that Poké–manga stuff.” and added the Webcomic category for the first time.

Despite the life–changing effects of winning this award, the Foglios have vowed to remain as humble and impoverished as they were yesterday, and would like to thank everyone who voted for them, and fully expect their assorted publishers to immediately take out lavish ads trumpeting this, their latest accomplishment. Yeah, that would be nice.

So that’s all right in the world of webcomics then. Enjoy your Monday.
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¹ Also they tell me that they are swingin’ on the flippity-flop.

² Paragon of Giantly Virtue, Nexus of All … aw, heck, you know by now.

³ Exception: Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse taking the first-ever NCS division award for online comics.