I imagine that many of you are taking the news that Ray Bradbury died about the same that I am — sad that we’ve lost such a creative voice, tinged with satisfaction that he lived long enough to see how beloved he was [AV, and probably NSFW]. Looking around the webs, lots of creators that were influenced by Bradbury are remembering him and their interactions with him. Thanks for everything, Ray.

• In less depressing news, you learn something new every day; cross reference here, then tell me that Kris Straub hasn’t been planning this for, oh, seven years. I love it when the pieces of a long game come together.
• Speaking of the seven-eight years ago time frame, these sketches from David Hellman’s sketchbook are gorgeous, and reminiscent of that time he started working on A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, which just happens to be coming back. All in favor of taking up a collection to send Hellman to Italy every couple years, raise your hands. Thank you.
• Working on that new Kickstarter rewards analysis that I mentioned yesterday — a major player in the form of TwoKinds (currently tracking to be the #2 best-funded comics project of all time) isn’t quite complete yet (it has another three days to go), but I think those last few days won’t significantly affect its contribution to the way I’m looking at things. Maybe I’ll just type in their numbers last.

For those of you that weren’t up around 3:00am EDT (GMT-4), it appears that webcomics has a couple of anniversaries to mention today. Let’s give some props for longevity, shall we?

• First up, the only man that my moustache fears, Darren J “Dern” Gendron:
  

  Huh. Today is my sixth anniversary of making webcomics.

  To be slightly more specific, this is Gendron’s anniversary, not the anniversary of any single particular webcomic:

  My first comic was Dear Pirate, which was like Dear Abby, but instead people got advice from a pirate.

  Current Dernprojects may be found at the Dernwerks, plus the Monster Alphabet project (previously noted here for the achievement of hitting 5000% of goal on Kickstarter). Dear Pirate appears to exist solely in one plasticine-rich update and nowhere else.

• And a bit more approximately on the anniversary date, Aaron Diaz¹:
  

  I started Dresden Codak 7 years ago and all I got was this t-shirt (and a career and prestige and personal fufillment).

  Although, technically, we’re a few months overdue on the congratulations:

  I actually technically started in March, but my first comic in the current Archives is June.

  Even if the date is somewhat approximate, Diaz still gets included purely for the joy and optimism by which he regards his webcomickry, even when in the depths of Sleep-Deprivation Work Madness, which I believe he refers to as “The Gauntlet”.

• As long as we’re handing out the congrats, we ought to note that David “Damn You,” Willis concluded his latest Kickstarter (for the first Dumbing of Age reprint) last night at just shy of 300% of goal, or some US$30,000 (just under US$45/backer on average, exploiting the previously-identified sweet spot). It’s become routine for creators with established audiences to routinely pick up tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of supporters. I think it’s time to go back and run those numbers again, see what the normalized distributions look like.

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¹ The Latin Art-Throb.

Man, not much going on these days — lull between conventions, SDCC doesn’t have programming info up yet¹, couple of things I can’t talk about yet, and a pervasive sense that everybody else is in a holding pattern. So let’s go with the no-fail way to find something cool on a Monday², and set the WAYBAC machine³ for PIZZA ISLAND.

• Over at Saveur Magazine, the latest Recipe Comix contribution comes from onetime Pizza Islandian Lisa Hanawalt, as she takes us through not just a Hearty Sausage & Sweet Potato Soup, but through the basis of all cooking itself:
  1. Make garlic and onion hot.
  2. Put other foods on top and make them hot too.
  3. Don’t put fruit in there unless you’re an expert!

  Honestly, it’s not too far off something Saint Alton would say, and I’m sure he’d approve of the prominence in Hanawalt’s artwork of the single most useful cooking implement ever invented: the cast-iron skillet. It lasts forever, makes food taste good, can block bullets, and is easy to draw. Everybody feel good for an implement from antiquity!

• As long as we’ve taken a trip to Pizza Island, let’s drop in on Julia Wertz, who’s put together one of her best comics ever today. I’m not sure she saw this one as being particularly significant, or thought that people being clueless/dicks/clueless dicks towards her at conventions would resonate as it has today. Really, it’s mostly people not taking three seconds to ask, Is my behavior even remotely appropriate rather than actual malice. And while most of us don’t sit on the other side of the convention table and have to put up with this kind of nonsense, I like to think that most of us can shake our heads in wonder and have a bit of empathy for those creators that end up on the receiving end. Tl;dr: awkward interactions — compelling in a cringey way.
• New format for the next while over at Octopus Pie: tall stories, told three or so pages at a time. Nobody does uncomfortable dreams like Meredith Gran (cf: here), so here’s hoping that fictional Brooklyn keeps up the heatwave that makes for fitful sleep for a while. For those of you that dislike scrolling, the individual pages are also available.
• No pizza here, but Dave Kellett dropped some interesting hints via Twitter all weekend as his docufilm recorded a musical number with his buddy Kate “Oates” Micucci. Photo to whet your appetite from the artiste herself. Innnnteresting. Can’t wait to see what this looks like when the film releases.

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¹ We’re less than 40 days out from Preview Night — has the programming always been released this close to the con? I could be wrong here, but it seems like we’re cutting it close this year.

² I mean, apart from all of the webcomics that are utterly free and entertaining, but that’s not news.

³ If you don’t remember Mister Peabody and Sherman, I suggest you go back in time and convince your ancestors to get you born sooner so you can watch Rocky & Bullwinkle. You can thank me later.

Paragon of agility Rich Stevens is going to be a business school teaching case someday, what with his ability to turn on a dime¹ and execute his mad plans quickly; Small, fast, ruthless … all Edge as Mr Gibson put it. Yesterday, about this time, he put up a microsale [link probably dead by the time you read this] in honor of his tenth anniversary of Quitting The Day Job:

The one thing I don’t know about Diesel Sweeties is the day I posted the first comic. It was some time in early 2000, twelve years ago.

The one thing I’ll never forget about Diesel Sweeties is the first week it was my full-time job. That was ten years ago this week.

This is the longest, most stable-yet-rollercoastery job I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve screwed up plenty, but never enough to have to give it up. It’s all thanks to you folks out there reading and buying stuff. I’ve been sorting comics by year for my 3,000+ strip ebook project and it made me wonder … do I have a shirt in the store from every year this had been my job? Actually, kind of yes.

******

Because this is how my brain processes things, I’m doing a DecaSale. Ten shirts are on sale for $12.10 each for 24 hours. They represent a little tangible reminder of every year from 2002-2011. A few will be weeded out during this sale to make room for 2012.

This sale starts NOW, 3pm Eastern AKA Easthampton, MA time and runs for 24 hours. [emphasis original]

I think if you were to do a comprehensive trawl of my archives (and I would never recommend that to anybody), you’d find certain names cropping up with regularity: Gran, Kellett, Khoo, Vernon, Beaton, because they’re consistently out there doing new stuff, consistently interesting to me. But probably the person that gets the most mention would be Rich², because nobody in webcomics is out there trying as many things, experimenting, pushing himself, looking for The Next Way Of Doing Things, and The Way After That, and The Way After The Way After That. He is in constant, almost Brownian motion, trying, succeeding, failing, learning, and having the goddamn time of his life as he does so. He just might be who I want to be when I don’t grow up.

So good on yer, Richard Stevens the Third — it’s been a great decade for you, and I can’t imagine the next ten years will be less {fun | frustrating | exciting | meaningful | other value-laden words here} [choose all that apply]. As for everybody that missed the DecaSale, there won’t be another of those for ten years, or until Stevens has some other excuse to do something similar that pops into his head like unto a bolt from the blue. Week from Tuesday, I’m guessing.

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¹ Before any of you make with the sexual innuendo, just … don’t.

² Actually, it’s probably Scott Kurtz³, now that I think of it, and for mostly the same reasons as Rich.

³ And Guigar.

Know something? You’ve gotten like 3500 words out of me since Sunday and I’m tired. Let’s keep this one brief for all of our sakes.

• Seen online:
  

  last starslip drawn on may 30, 2012, 5:53pm, at abbot’s habit, venice, ca

  We won’t see if for some weeks, of course, but I can’t help feeling both a little happy and sad for Kris Straub. It’s been seven years, three titles (if memory serves) and one big ol’ reboot since Starslip (as she is now) started; saying goodbye to your creation can’t be easy, but wrapping up the story on your terms, tying up all the loose ends … that’s got to feel great. Thanks very much to Mr Straub for letting us take the ride along with him.

• Seen in person: the Square reader has been a badge of office for people that are making your purchase options broader and easier at conventions. Waiting to get approved and receive that dongle in the mail has been a ritual for more than one webcomicker. So what does it say about ubiquity that I saw one hanging on the pegs at Staples for ten bucks yesterday?

The things is, working on The Next Way Of Doing Things isn’t enough. As Dave Kellett clearly stated as the final thought of his talk, his analysis and recommendations are only good for 12 – 18 months tops; after that point, the complexities become too pronounced, the future path too hard to predict from here and now. In a lot of ways, for a lot of people, The Next Way Of Doing Things is arriving just in time to become irrelevant, since everybody already engaged in The Next Way is currently developing The Way After That.

This situation leads to Rashomonesque situations for observers, and where participants who just now are coming to realize that they’re a generation behind on business practice are unable to even perceive that they’re actually on the verge of being two generations behind¹. I have to imagine that such a realization would lead to — at the least — disorientation, and likely anger.

Before Jim Davis’s talk, word was already making the rounds about something that happened at the closed-door NCS member’s meeting that morning. Jon Rosenberg was busy being taught the secret handshake as a new member, business items were taken care of, and the floor opened to anybody that wanted to make comments.

Cue the ominous music.

The NCS has a hefty contingent of members that are extremely elderly²; some of these guys remember what it was like 50, 60 years ago, when there weren’t no dames, everybody looked alike, and the engineers that would someday invent the tools these digital whippersnappers would eventually use were still in diapers. Change is the last thing you want at that stage in your life, but most people are too polite to shit over somebody in public. One guy, though….

Okay, I want to go out of my way to be fair, here. I don’t know the gentleman in question, haven’t ever met him, and for all I know he loves his dog and his great-grandchildren and is motivated more by fear than by malice. In my head (for I was not there), I imagine that one slightly crazy great-uncle that every family seems to dread inviting to Thanksgiving, because while he might profess to be joking when he complains about all of the <insert minority here> you can’t shake the feeling that he’s “kidding on the square”. Good ol’ crazy Great-Uncle Slappy. Yeah. Pass the yams.

So Great-Uncle Slappy engaged in what others have described (accurately, I believe) as a “screed” against them young’uns, and how there need to be different tiers of membership because real cartoonists use paper, and anybody using digital means should have to pay more to belong³. Welcome to the NCS, Jon.

I might not have brought Great-Uncle Slappy up, except that for the rest of the weekend, I heard one thought repeatedly expressed: people were angry about the rant. Maybe he was kidding, maybe he wasn’t, but to act in such a manner towards fellow members was not acceptable. I heard people that wished they could have told G-US to sit down and shut up, but felt constrained by politeness and the fact that he apparently always gets the last speaking slot to complain. I heard one board member apologize to Jon personally, saying that he’d wished he’d been able to cut the mic. I wonder if Cathy Guisewite, Lynn Johnston, Hillary Price were wondering if the bile would turn in their direction.

So there’s the crux of the problem — a generation that remembers How Things Used To Be, a generation that sees How Things Must Change (which, to be clear, seems to incorporate the entire leadership of the NCS), and a teeny-tiny generation that have been working on their own and decided to find out what the NCS might have to offer. For actuarial reasons, it is imperative that the second generation increase the numbers of the third generation and rapidly, because without new blood, the organization will age itself out of existence. While we’re at it, the NCS probably needs to be a whole lot less male, a whole lot less white, or what appeal will it have to the extraordinary talents that surely have better things to do than be berated — he’s kidding! really! — by Great-Uncle Slappy?

And there’s the rub. To a person, every member I met and spoke with (especially the board members) recognizes this reality and the importance of making changes. I think that the new division award for On-Line Comic Strips (one last time, imperfect; one last time, potential to be what people want and need it to be) is just the first step. Making the organization institutionally friendly to younger creators isn’t just a good idea — it’s a survival strategy.

People like Mike Krahulik and Dave Kellett may have first picked up a pen because of Garfield or Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes, but what of the half-generation that came behind them and may not have had the habit of reading newspapers? Is being in the room with history — but not personal inspirations — enough to entice them 10 or 20 years from now?

But what if the current generation of creators⁴ were there to greet them? Do they have an incentive to join for the sheer love of the medium and wait out the generational shift? Heck, will they see value in going to another city for the weekend and not sell stuff?

If I seem to be more identifying questions than proposing answers, it’s because I don’t really have a say in the matter. I’m not eligible for membership, I don’t draw, I am very much the consumer instead of the creator. To the extent that I’m able to work a small part of the transformation⁵, I am happy to do so. But right now, the future of the organization depends on how much potential members value being part of a continuity to the history of comics. There’s a big dialogue to be had among the interested parties and I think it’s going to be fascinating.

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¹ Or perhaps merely haven’t processed it into higher realms of acceptance yet.

² I heard the number 91, being the count of members over the age of 80.

³ I imagine that Gregg Evans, who has produced Luann on a Cintiq for years, was thrilled at this notion.

⁴ Off the top of my head: Gran, Beaton, Brosgol, Telgemeier, Larson, Vernon, Moen, Meconis, Corsetto, Allegri, Sugar, Ward, Jones-Quartey, Dreistadt, Ota, Carroll, Miller and Mercer (yes, I’m still on about them, they’re terrific), and shall I go on?

The careful reader may notice something most of these creators have in common.

⁵ I’m actually torn about this — I have great affection for webcomics and some people think the depth and breadth of my knowledge are enough to make me useful in the ongoing process of coming up with an award everybody can be proud of. On the other hand, from a philosophical standpoint, I feel it would be better for the NCS if it had a wide enough swath of members with enough exposure to webcomics that my services weren’t needed. That’s probably pretty synonymous with “there’s a lot of younger members what joined up”.

The title of the session was Making A Living As A Cartoonist In The 21st Century, presented by Michael Jantze, Dave Kellett, and John Lotshaw. Although I met Jantze for the first time over the weekend, we had served together on the nominating committee for the NCS’s first division award for webcomickry; Kellett has been mentioned many times on this page and (disclaimer!) is a personal friend; Lotshaw I didn’t know or meet until after the talk was done. As I had some idea where the session was going thematically, I spent a lot of time watching the audience rather than the podium.

Jantze was up first, with a detailed, fairly lengthy presentation on the history of cartooning, which initially struck me as incongruous for a session detailing current and future business models. However, watching the audience (largely creators in long-term relationships with syndicates or publishers), it began to make more sense — by tying the current state of cartooning with the changes it has gone through¹, Jantze primed the audience to accept a need for change.

Kellett talked about the value of disintermediation, of maintaining a direct connection to the audience, of the 1000 True Fans premise. Heads nodded sporadically, but the real turn-around moment was when Kellett effectively demonstrated that every syndicated cartoonist is already in the Give It Away For Free game. Citing numbers from Jeff Zugale regarding the total size of one day’s edition of Los Angeles Times in square inches vs cost (US$0.75), the amount paid by a reader for an average comic strip is literally measured in hundredths of a cent. Assuming that the ultimate customer of a comic strip is the reader², that’s about as close to the “Webcomics Model” as you can get.

The audience was still adjusting to that fact when Kellett hit them with some numbers: Here’s how I make my money, in percentages and broke it down by books, merch, advertising, and such. To demonstrate his point that there isn’t A Way To Do Things, he contrasted the very percentages supplied by Jeph Jacques, Danielle Corsetto, Howard Tayler, and other prominent webcomickers. This was when the flurry of note-taking began in earnest, with numbers and names being scribbled on any available blank surface³.

Having been primed to recognize Where They Are and How Things Can Work, Lotshaw hit the audience with Things You Can Do: differences between sites and apps; how to obtain ISBNs of your own; differences between Print on Demand, local print shops, and offset; how many copies of a book makes for economy of scale with each of those sources; good ways and crappy ways to produce PDFs for print; the fact that no middlemen taking a cut⁴ means you have to do all the things they would do. Scribble, scribble, scribble, Qs followed by As⁵, very enthusiastic applause.

More importantly, for the remainder of the weekend I watched Kellett get cornered by creators (fairly reconizable names, too), following up with more enquiries. How can I put things online? My archives are locked at [syndicate site]. Would I have to start over with a new project that I own? I don’t really see traffic at my website, much less sales. How long to build up that audience rapport?

I’ll acknowledge some confusion about the reluctance to start new comics that I heard expressed more than once — I’m in daily communication with creators that have two, three, or more things going on all the time. Then I realized that there’s a crucial time-sink in working for somebody other than yourself, one that takes up time that webcomickers don’t have to spend time on: webcomickers only have to put up work they’re happy with. Working for somebody else means lead times, approvals, rewrites, rewrites, rewrites. I wouldn’t be surprised if for many syndicated creators, those efforts take up time equivalent to developing merch, doing shipping, or traveling the con circuit.

I also suspect that a lot of minds shifted from the position of That Webcomics Model is stupid and can’t possibly work and over to Jeeze, I wonder if I have the time to shift to that Webcomics Model before I get to the point I want to retire. Will I bleed newspapers to the point of non-viability before I can make a shift? Can I ride it out? I’ll stress that nobody expressed words to that effect to me … but as far as gut feelings go, it’s a fairly strong one.

If there were stragglers still resistant to the notion of the need for change, they were pretty much obliterated when Jim Davis endorsed everything from the Jantze/Kellett/Lotshaw presentation towards the tail end of his own talk the next day. Garfield gets delivered to 5 000 000 Facebook accounts; small apps and comics are distributed with the hope that they’ll be passed around; he wished he’d known the things that J/K/L talked about three years earlier, as it would have saved him a lot of mistakes; giving away the comic for free and getting rid of the middlemen is the way to go. I get the feeling that if tomorrow, every newspaper on the planet ceased to carry comics⁶, Jim Davis wouldn’t see a measurable dip in income, and none of the five dozen people that work directly for him would lose their jobs. Again … gut.

So where to next?

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¹ And particularly to the fact that the current day has a lot of similarities with the 1890s.

² It’s actually the editor of the newspaper, for whom the cost of a strip is measurable by whole coins or bills.

³ In a number of cases it was the session handouts from Infomercial Guy, who had supplied note-taking space thereon. Each page in that handout was branded with his name and web address so I guess that counts as free publicity. Well played, Infomercial Guy.

⁴ Or, as Kellett put it, living on large margins instead of large volumes.

⁵ Big response of the Q&A: when the datum that when Bill Amend released his recent Fox Trot app for iOS devices, he made 25% of his usual two-year book sales in two weeks. Cue audible gasps and Ooooohs. The only ones in the audience that didn’t seem to be surprised at that point were the duo of Mercer & Miller, who were sitting directly in front of me.

⁶ Fun fact: 60% of Garfield’s audience is international, and a lot of dialogue/situations are designed to make the effort of translation simpler.

Jon, remember one thing, I said. The Reuben Awards dinner was done, the last bits of dessert being passed around the table, the ceremony getting ready to begin. If you win, you give me the manly hug and you kiss Amy, not the other way around. Jon Rosenberg’s wife has heard me, and behind Jon’s back she begins to choke on the bit of chocolate she’d been nibbling at.

Oh, I don’t know, says Jon, stroking his chin and staring at me. You’ve got the moustache, I’ve got the goatee, I wonder what that feels like on bare skin. Behind him, Amy begins choking all over again and I’m pretty sure something dessertish is about to come out her nose. Jon’s nervous, convinced he’s going to lose, happy to see that the On-Line Comic Strips division award is the first on the list, so that at least it’ll be over soon. He steps outside for his 87th smoke break and I apologize to Amy for timing my remarks while she was trying to eat. She’s shaking her head, prouder of Jon than I’ve ever seen, so happy that she could be here to share this with him.

Mike Krahulik is one table away with his wife, Kara, along with Robert Khoo and onetime PAX-wrangler Amber Fechko. She’s getting close to finishing medical school and her PhD, hoping to stay in Seattle for her neurosurgery residency. In about ten or twelve years, if you need somebody to cut into your brain to fix something that’s gone horribly wrong, hers is the face that you will want to see before the surgical mask goes on. In fifteen or twenty years, hers might be the first face you see, period, as she perfects her research into neuro implants to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and spider-sense to the wannabe angsty superheroes.

The last time I saw Kara she was pregnant with a boy who is now nearly two years old. She’s done the dress-up thing with Mike many times for Child’s Play, for the TIME 100, but it’s clear that each time she’s thrilled for him. The geeky guy with scribbly cartoons she’d met all those years ago is a key part of a small media empire, endlessly creative, able to spend loads of time with their sons, and dang does he clean up well.

Robert is Robert.¹

Mike hasn’t noticed yet that his award nomination is up first; he’d been hoping to hear an acceptance or two, have some idea what to say if he should find himself at the front of the room. It’s quickly decided: thank the NCS, say something on behalf of Jerry², thank Robert, extra-thank Kara. He’s pretty damn happy to be in the room, and later he’ll tell me Stephen Silver said I’m an inspiration to a generation and Jim Davis knew who I was and said he liked my work. That’s a pretty good night. Mike and Jon wish each other good luck.

I’ve lost track of Matthew Inman since the end of the pre-dinner cocktail reception³; he’d only arrived in Las Vegas a few hours earlier, and his first introduction to the NCS is a room full of people he doesn’t know. We shake hands and I’m glad that he’s so young, since it means that I’m no longer one of the ten youngest people in the room. Okay, there are kids of members here, and a delightful pair of students from SCAD⁴ that I’d met on Friday, but I’m definitely on the young end of the age spectrum. We talk about SQL coding for a bit with his girlfriend, Kyoko.

Matthew asks if I know anybody, and I nod towards where Jon, Mike, et. al. are having a drink with Bill Amend. I mention some of the people I’ve met during the weekend, but it’s a dozen or so out of the couple hundred in the room and we share that sense of disorientation that comes from standing on the periphery. Matthew surveys the room, taking in the membership and says to me, This is only my opinion, but I’m wondering why Zach Weiner isn’t here. They need to invite him! I mean, I do like one comic a week, and he’s putting great stuff up every day! We spend the rest of our talk discussing how awesome Zach and his creative collaborators⁵ are.

The time is getting close — there were various program bits, honors, and an intermission before the division awards, and people are coming back to the ballroom with fresh drinks. Amy tells me that Jon’s parents, who are watching their three kids back in New York, have forwarded a question from their daughter: Did Daddy get his reward yet?

The lights go down, and Dave Kellett and I wonder who will present this first recognition of webcomics. Bill Amend (a Cartoonist of the Year laureate) is announced and he’s brimming with energy as he leans towards the microphone to read the names of The nominees for On-Line Comic Strips, and it’s about fucking time. Sample strips are projected onto huge screens in the ballroom as each name is read to applause.

Amy gets her kiss. I get my manly embrace. While Jon is waylaid by photos and well-wishes on his way back from the stage I hug Amy and feel stray tears on her cheek. Jon makes it back to the table, not quite convinced any of this is actually happening. He ducks out once more, this time to call his parents. In the back of my mind, I imagine that somewhere in the extended clan, there’s an elderly relative or two that will finally stop wondering when that boy will get a real job.

If I have the timing correct, as I write this Jon and Amy are a thousand kilometers behind me and 10 kilometers straight down, waiting to fly home to their kids. They have with them a carryon bag with a heavy, impressive plaque next to two neatly folded notecards. One has four names on it, and the smaller one simply says

_______________
¹ It might be appropriate to abbreviate that further: Robert is.

² Sadly, Mike’s Penny Arcade co-creator Jerry Holkins and his wife Brenna were unable to attend and were missed.

³ Catching up later, he told me he was seated at the Table of Late Registrants, halfway across the room from Webcomics Corner.

⁴ Specifically, Sarah Miller, who is finishing her junior year, and Ashley Mercer, who is preparing to graduate and start an internship as a Disney Imagineer. When I met them on Friday Ms Miller neglected to mention that she was this year’s Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship winner. She has a style that tends toward Cthonic horror, and Ms Mercer has an interest in children’s books. I suggested they collaborate, and when I ran into them in the ballroom, they told me that they had been excitedly kicking ideas back and forth the night before. Watch these two names — they’re going to be huge.

⁵ With the exception of James Ashby, who has been previously established as history’s greatest villain.

NCS division award for On-Line Comic Strips presented by Bill Amend to my friend, Jon Rosenberg. Fuck, yes.

One of the rules I adhere to in life is, when Robert Khoo scribbles a note that says Hey Gary, we’re going to go gamble, want to come?, the only appropriate answer is Yes. Particularly when the note comes during a session that is….

Okay, I want to be extra-fair here, because everybody at the NCS I’ve met has been been terrific. Tom Richmond, the president, has put on a great show, and Jerry Van Amerongen¹ has put together a great slate of presenters and presentations. That being said, when soliciting presentations and/or presenters, it’s possible to have content described in a way that makes it sound better than it actually will be; usually it’s a matter of content and tone clashing with the audience.

Had it been a matter of me being the wrong audience because I’m not a cartoonist, I would have stayed out of respect for the speaker, but when it’s a case of somebody so very off the rails that you hope everybody else in the room is as uncomfortable as you are, because it means they aren’t being suckered in²? When Robert nodded in the direction of the door, getting away from the room just made sense.

Which was great, because after finding a table with open chairs together, and Robert declared open interview time. I double-checked with them some of the details on the new Paint The Line game (availability at San Diego: check), and admired the new First Party polo that Mike Krahulik was wearing (it’s moved onto the “definite purchase” list for San Diego, and may I say again that the First Party upgrade program was a customer-care stroke of genius?). Then we got down to the really good stuff: Lookouts.

You may have noted the news last year that Lookouts is being made into a tabletop RPG/board game. You may have seen art teasers from Mike earlier in the week. What you probably didn’t know is that Cryptozoic Entertainment, developers of the game, will also be publishing an ongoing Lookouts comic book, the first two issues of which are already completed. Mike’s very happy with the work done on the interiors, and the cover image he showed me (the teaser is just a small portion of it) looks gorgeous.

The plan is for electronic distribution, but I really hope that a print edition can be made at some point — although Penny Arcade and its projects have always been designed for adults, they’ve had plenty of creations that reach down the age spectrum: Cardboard Tube Samurai³ could easily overlap with the younger readers of, oh I don’t know, Usagi Yojimbo. Lookouts and The New Kid can be enjoyed by an even younger audience — if you’re comfortable with your kid reading BONE, these two stories are no problem (which pulls us down to seven or eight years old). Kids don’t have enough comics that they can call their own, and Lookouts would slot in nicely next to Adventure Time in the local comic stores. Just sayin’.

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¹ Who did a cartoon back when I was in high school that has stuck with me — it involved a doberman throwing himself out a second-story window after realizing the family had named him “Binky”. I told him how funny that strip was to me and I think it pleased him that somebody remembered it for goin’ on 30 years.

² I’m being oblique here in details because the topic of the talk was getting free publicity for yourself, and the tone was just so … infomercial that I decided I didn’t want to reward the speaker with the name-check he repeatedly made clear he desperately craves. Also, upon leaving the room, I made sure that I had not accidentally signed up for a time-share in a condo. Seriously, bragging about getting on the local news by exploiting a tenuous connection to Elizabeth Taylor on the day of her death in order to promote your animation business? That is not something that non-horrible people do.

³ And my goodness, has it really been three years since a CTS adventure?