In a land not quite so far from here sore lacking in etiquette, many did wander from poor behavior to poor behavior, wandering until they had worn out three pairs of iron-bound shoes, wandering until their eyes grew dim with none to instruct them in the ways of interpersonal interactions. In this land was a prophecy, hidden in a gem, the gem hidden in a duck, the duck locked away in a great wooden chest, a prophecy that contained all the secrets of Please and Thanks-You.

A pair of wise queens proposed to find the chest and in the chest the duck and in the duck the gem, and to share the knowledge with all the land, and the wise queens found among the people those willing to aid them in their quest, and they set out to let people know to Stop Doing That Were You Raised In A Barn Or Something¹. They cast their knowings to all who were smart enough to desire them, and that is how Nerddom became just a bit less rude and more considerate.

Okay, that’s harder than it looks. How about something a little less grandiloquent for the rest of today’s news?

• Appearing tomorrow, live and in person, the Ryan ‘n’ Joey Occasional Roadshow² hits Trinity College at UToronto from 7:00 to 10:00pm with fun and excitement and really wild things. Those of you in the GTA, do drop in.
• Jeff Zugale takes a break from both shouting Woo! in inappropriate circumstances and painting Wil Wheaton in awesome circumstances to draw some webcomics for Bill Barnes & Paul Southworth featuring Desmond in pantless circumstances. Smart move making this the first strip of Zugale’s stint on Not Invented Here, as poor Desmond is so freaked out by this memento mori that he doesn’t even notice that he looks different now.
• I recall a conversation with Robert Khoo wherein he denied that Penny Arcade was a webcomic endeavour at all; rather, it was a content-creating company focused on the videogame industry, with the webcomic just one part of it. Granted, the comic is the dominant part, but he didn’t commit to that always being true. Today, PA takes another step towards the comic being just another item in the content portfolio, as Ben Kuchera (formerly of Ars Technica) makes the jump to Penny Arcade with a publicly-described brief of:
  

  [W]riting about the gaming industry for Penny Arcade

  So that’s multiple comics, publishing, tie-in games, a charity, multiple internet TV series, a merch-design house, exposition services, custom branded content service, a scholarship, and now generalized editorial content. While we’ll never see PA challenging, say, Disney for pan-media dominance, I fully believe that’s only because Khoo wouldn’t be able to keep his hands in all aspects of such a broad enterprise. I also fully believe we’re within two years of PA going fully international, most likely with PAXEurope and/or PAXAsia, but I wouldn’t count out satellite offices creating original content in other languages for local consumption.

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¹ This was a somewhat unusual land for such tales, as it turned out that none of the people had, in fact, been raised in a barn and thus had no excuse.

² Occasional in the sense that they occasionally put on a show, not that they are occasionally Ryan and Joey, which they are pretty much all of the time.

In the meantime, please enjoy the numbers that Ryan Estrada shared with the world regarding his income as a full-time cartoonist since 2007. Much like Dorothy Gambrell’s occasional infoshares, it’s a valuable tool for injecting reality into the discussion of what it means to make it in cartooning, and the degree to which you have to learn and adapt in order to succeed.

R Stevens 3, of course. He’s following the tradition of hobbits and giving you presents today, the day of his birth. Also, he has now met the legal requirements to be President of the United States of America.

• Remember how I talked about all the stuff Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson were doing, and how not all of it had been revealed yet? Two more pieces have been, with a gorgeous, limited edition two-piece Adventure Time screen print coming out sometime tomorrow from Mondo Tees (watch their blog and/or twitterfeed for the exact on-sale time, and expect the 185 sets to go quickly). Mere hours later, the Adult Swim themed show at Gallery 1988 opens with a reception¹ from 7:00 to 10:00pm at the Melrose branch; Becky’s contribution pays homage to The Venture Bros².
• Welcome return, or cruel toying with our affections? Tweet Me Harder drops episode #76 nearly ten months after the purported series finale [MP3]. Dare we hope that this marks a return to TMH glory?³
• Eisner nominations are now open, with the criteria for Best Digital Comic not looking significantly different from prior years:
  

  The best digital comic category is open to any new, professionally produced long-form original comics work posted online in 2011. Webcomics must have a unique domain name or be part of a larger comics community to be considered. The work must be online-exclusive for a significant period prior to being collected in print form. The URL and any necessary access information should be emailed to Eisner Awards administrator Jackie Estrada: jackie@comic-con.org.

• Finally, the sad, sorry history of webcomics scrapers has hit a new low, as some bozo on Facebook is scraping content, redelivering without permission, and soliciting donations of cash which will totally be given back to the original creators, no really, promise it’s totally not a scam⁴. Randy Milholland has the details, and after a little preliminary digging at Facebook (I don’t have an account, so I could be wrong on this), it appears the category those getting hosed sideways can file a complaint under would be Intellectual Property Rights Infringement.

  Or it might be on grounds of Impersonation (since the app leaves the impression it’s associated with the comics in question) or Scams & Spam (since funds are being sought). Hopefully, Facebook doesn’t make each creator jump through these hoops and brings down the wrath of Zuckerberg quickly. In the meantime, I’m pretty sure the dipshit pulling this little game is thinking exactly like the person who recently plagued Jamie Smart so.

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¹ Read: booze and snacks.

² Unrelated, but last night in Providence, Rhode Island, while on my way to enjoy a quiet evening¹ with Fleen publisher (and Dumbrella Hosting impressario) Phillip Karlsson, I passed an industrial-looking building for rent with what looked exactly like the Venture Industries logo. I tried to get a picture, but it was too dark.

³ Probably not.

⁴ It’s a scam.

Once again, I’m assuming that most of you have seen this by now, but there’s been an amendment to the requirements of the new NCS award in the Online Comic Strip Division. Namely, the requirement:

5. Creator must earn the greater part of their living directly from the strip/property

has been altered to:

5. Creator must earn the greater part of their living directly from cartooning in order to adhere to the NCS criteria that creators under consideration must be either full members or eligible for full membership

It wasn’t the intent that nominees in this new division be required to meet more stringent requirements than in the others; I don’t think any of us on the committee were reading the old #5 as meaning anything other than the new #5, but in situations like this it’s important to make sure that what you write is as unambiguous as possible. Thanks to Tom Richmond for clarifying, and don’t be surprised if other clarifications become necessary¹.

• As long as we’re on the topic, I feel it useful to point out a couple of thinky pieces written since yesterday’s post on this award and the focus of this blog; thanks to Dave Kellett and Holly Post, respectively, for their wise words. Dave and Holly both opine that the use of “webcomics” as a word that distinguishes from “comics” is silly², as it distinguishes a model of distribution as being distinct from medium itself³. I fully expect that I will continue to use The W Word well past its generally-accepted sell-by date, turning into a latter-day example of your embarrassing great-uncle whose vernacular is stuck 50 years in the past; I apologize for any future offense I may give.
• In fact, let’s broaden out from “webcomics” by pointing out that Pittsburgh’s ToonSeum has an interesting show opening next week, one whose press release scared the crap out of me because the subject line read
  

  Funky Turns 40 at the ToonSeum

  which immediately made me think it was an exhibit of Funky CancerCancer. In fact, it’s about the first wave of positive black animated characters in the 1970s, which means one thing: Fat Albert, possibly including the early episodes which borrowed heavily from Cosby’s standup routines⁴. Funky Turns 40 is co-curated by Pamela Thomas of the Museum of Uncut Funk, which is the greatest name for a museum ever; the show opens 18 January and runs until 10 March.

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¹ But please do spare me any See? They’re just making it up as they go along in order to screw over [insert grievance here]! We’re doing our best to work out kinks (cf: yesterday’s post, the part about perfect and done), and you can bet that every other NCS division award went through these stumbles, but it was so long ago that nobody remembers.

² A opinion I have expressed myself in the past and am entirely sympathetic to, if only I could come up with a short, obvious word that identifies the things that I write about here. I love all kinds of comics, but this page concerns itself almost exclusively with independent, creator-owned, self-distributed examples of such, and a signifier is just useful. I swear, come up with a term (or even an acronym) that’s brief, and I’ll use it.

³ Not that such distinctions are always worthless; I listen to a fair number of radio shows as podcasts.

⁴ Rousing game of Buck Buck, anyone?

So I’m guessing you’ve seen this by now:

[T]he National Cartoonists Society will have a web-comics division for the Reuben Awards this year….

There are many challenges involved, the crux of which is separating those web-comics creators who are doing truly professional work from those who are just enthusiastic hobbyists.

To this end, we are introducing a purposefully narrow-focused new division this year, which will be called “Best Online Comic Strip”, and will be judged by the NCS board in anticipation of being done by an NCS chapter in the future.

Key words there, which I’ll come back to in a moment: purposefully narrow-focused.

The tricky part is the definition of “professional” with regards to web-comics/self-published work. The NCS awards are industry awards, not art awards…. We need an independent “screening committee” to review the creators whose work is being considered to give us their opinion on if they meet the definition of “professional”, and this is what we have put together. Our screening committee will be made up of six experts on webcomics who are deeply involved/knowledgeable in the world of online comics including journalists and professors from major art colleges who are very enthusiastic about participating.

There follows a list of some damn impressive people with some damn impressive credentials and, against all logic, me¹. Onwards:

This is our first stab at this kind of thing. It is bound to have some bugs which we will learn from and hopefully improve the process next year. The important thing is that efforts are being made to include work being done on-line in the NCS’s recognition of excellence in professional cartooning.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about. You can read the list of very impressive people on the screening committee with me, you can read the list of criteria; I want to talk progress.

Because I think there’s going to be some criticism of this new award; I hope it’s reasoned and considered, but on the other hand — internet. It’s limited, yes, and it excludes much of the type of work that one finds in webcomics that simply couldn’t exist elsewhere, and it’s baby steps that don’t get us near where many people would like this sort of thing to be.

And that’s okay.

This is how institutions and groups change — in increments, stepping away from the familiar by only a small amount, then further as the comfort level and resistance to the change meets the reality that the world didn’t actually end. The NCS has more than six decades of Ways of Doing Things, along with members that remember and cherish those Ways and that’s exactly the sort of system that’s tends towards inertia². The recognition that things change comes slow under any circumstances, and just recognizing a possibility of change, much less the need for it, requires a shift in those Ways.

Is this a perfect way for the NCS to integrate webcomics? No. But holding out for perfect, no matter how much the officers of the NCS might push for change, would have meant never seeing progress — holding out for perfect is the enemy of getting something done — and incremental change is still change. I can only speak for myself when I say that I’m going to do my damnedest to see that all the work that can be forwarded under the criteria is; I am also confident that the sole motivation of my fellow committee members (and the judges who will actually make the award decision) is a love of comics and a desire to recognize the best work possible.

It’s a certainty that next year’s awards will be different as a result of the process of this year’s, and in bits and pieces both form and process will improve. That’s why I was so very honored by NCS President Tom Richmond’s request for my participation, and why I hope that nobody will look down on this new thing that we — all of us — are making. It’s limited, it’s unfinished, and before it’s done it’ll probably get messy as all hell, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

• Know what else involves awards, nominations, and comics work? The Hugos, at least with respect to the Best Graphic Story category. Since the Foglios swept the category in its first three years of existence with Girl Genius, they’ve graciously announced that they will not accept a nomination, meaning that it’s open season for [web]comics that are sci-fi-ish and debuted in 2011.

  Off the top of my head, I’m guessing that Schlock Mercenary, Starslip, Spacetrawler, and Drive would fit the criteria, with an outside chance for things like SS Myra (it’s pretty new) or Scenes from a Multiverse (it’s not really a continuing story, but there just might be enough repeat characters — it’s a shame that the bulk of the Sciencemaster Adler, Cornelius Snarlington, and bunnies stories took place before 2011; maybe there’s enough of Duck Thompson, News Duck?).

• Getting into a juried show is kind of like nominating yourself for an award, right? TCAF acceptances started going out last night, and while the TCAF site isn’t updated with the exhibitor list, a search of the twitterverse would seem to indicate that this could be the Best TCAF Ever You Guys.
• Finally, nothing to do with awards or nominations or anything, but I had to point out this comment from Rod Salm where he shares a poster he did on the floor at the 2011 Central Canada Comic Convention in Winnipeg, which depicts every cosplayer to visit his table for the duration of the con. Mr Salm, you crazy.

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¹ Now you know what I was talking about back in November and December about a Potentially Very Cool Thing.

² Think it’s tough to overcome six decades of We’ve Always Done It This Way? The college that I attended didn’t admit women into the undergraduate program until 1995, and the change that finally came was because the number of alumni with the We’ve Always Done It This Way beliefs were finally outnumbered (and out-donated) by alumni with the The World Is Different Now beliefs. It took more than a decade of sustained effort to get there, with a four year lead time once the decision was made before it took effect. All the fuss and effort is now an historical footnote and fewer people remember each year, and it all turned out okay.

I have a feeling that I’m getting in trouble for today’s opinion-mongering.

• So there was a piece written today regarding a fairly famous slinger of words, how those words fit into a webcomic, and the insight one may gain into the workings of that writer’s mind. There was also an interview with Chris Onstad about the Achewood hiatus. As informative as I found the Onstad interview by Laura Hudson¹, it seemed familiar — Onstad wants to work in prose, the short panel comic format doesn’t interest him as it once did, burnout is a terrible thing, merchandise fulfillment brings him no joy.

  By contrast, I found Jerry Holkins conveyed his feelings on having his brain chemistry [un]regulated in a way that I hadn’t seen before; this may be more due to my aggressively searching out news of Onstad when he went on hiatus last year, and not having seen Holkins talk on this topic so much previously (although I do recall a particularly incisive episode of PATV on the topic).

  None of which should be construed as criticism of Onstad, who is not my bitch; I simply cannot conceive of a life where my email resembles Onstad’s:

  Actually, I just recently got my first hate mail since I got back to work. I was like, what took you so long? …
  I don’t know, I almost don’t want to bother dissecting why people do this. This guy writes me and is like, “I don’t see why you bothered coming back. You’re just trying to be as cool as you used to be, and it’s not working. Why do you hate your readers?”

  In general, the back third of the interview was the most interesting, as Hudson and Onstad got specifically into the economics of webcomics, and that’s a good read.

• Hey, Sparky, where will you be on Friday evening? If your answer isn’t On an airplane from Rhode Island to New Jersey², it should be At the Johnny Wander 2 book release party in Brooklyn. Bergen Street Comics has a justly-deserved reputation as one of the best stores in the Northeast, and given the sheer density of webcomickin’ talent in and around Brooklyn, I’d say there’s an excellent chance of meeting some quality creators above and beyond the evening’s headliners. Fun starts at 8:00pm, and includes a live delivery of advice from John. I’d like to tell you that John is much less scary in person than he appears to be in the comic, but I’m afraid it’s only marginally true.

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¹ Who may have been induced to drink Chartreuse, which if you have not had it is sort of the monastic version of Jägermeister, or possibly Malört, in that there’s a million herbals and botanicals in there. Unlike the others, however, Chartreuse can be made to play nice with others in a cocktail. My theory is that mixability is negatively correlated with umlauts.

² As mine is, dammit.

I don’t have any introductory remarks today; sorry.

• I started out by thinking to myself, No way did Randall Munroe draw 1000 little stick figures for today’s strip, but a very basic eyeballing (counting the stick figures in a small section, and assuming a relatively uniform density) indicates that if he didn’t, he’s within the bounds of experimental error. Then I said to myself, Well at least he didn’t draw references to all of his major recurring characters and most well-known strips, on account of Cory Doctorow’s cape would show up in red. Then I looked closer and saw Cory, in black and white, around the 9:30 position on the first “0”. Haven’t spotted any velociraptors yet, though.
• The thing is, when it comes to who I want to get all squishy with, I am of the same mind as Gerda and have interest only in the ladies¹. So why did Jess Fink’s G+ announcement that she was collaborating on a new artblog full of sexy, sexy dudes [NSFYWP]² for lustful gazing catch my attention? Maybe because I dig on Jess’s art, even when it’s Boners Ahoy!? Maybe because the ladies deserve a place for female gazing? In any event, there’s never a bad time to point out tastefully smutrotica and dammit, Jess always makes the sexy equal parts hot and fun. Can’t wait to see what her Smut Peddler (whose contributions just closed, and so we should see it complete soon) story looks like.
• From the helping out colleagues department: Ms K Brooke “Otter” Spangler has finally gotten her plush production completed, after more than two years of effort and many trying setbacks. The big pile of Mr Speedy clones at Otter’s house much surely be the fuzziest, wuzziest, cutest impromptu sleeping spot on the eastern seaboard, but the important part comes from her summary writeup of the process, which is quoted here at length due to no permalinks:
  

  [H]ere’s the super-brief version: the Speedy plush has been in pre-production for almost 28 months. Most of that was raising capital to fund production. Early last year he almost went to production with a different company. I paid a fairly huge chunk of change to get a prototype made, but poor quality, combined with some rather off-putting communications with this company, made me pull out at the last minute.³

  I began working with a new company back in late September, and cannot recommend them strongly enough.* They have fantastic customer service and they busted their rumps getting him to me in under 3 months. He was supposed to be here for the holidays but there was a lengthy snag getting him across the Canadian border.

  *Webcomic people looking to make their own plush, email me and I’ll talk your ears off (eyeballs out?) about them. [asterisk footnote original, numberic one mine]

  That footnote is what I wanted to draw your attention to; I’ve known a buttload of webcomickers (some of them from Canada, making their unit of measure metric buttloads instead of Imperial) that have tried — some successfully, some not — to get various 3D representations of their characters made, and it’s almost always been a huge headache for them. The fact that one has now found a company that can turn around a design from sketch to prototype to delivery in three months (during the run-up to Alliday, no less), and is willing to share that information? You’ve earned yourself a place in Webcomics Heaven⁴, Otter.

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¹ Hey, ladies.

² Not Safe For Your Work, Probably.

³ Insert your own joke here.

⁴ Which is itself found in the First Circle of Hell, wedged into a somewhat unassuming corner, with a nice garden and decent DSL. There no other place to put them and it’s been ages since they got any fresh Roman orators, so there’s plenty of room.

Those with no problems with evolution but who hold out a cheery view of publishing, you might want to avoid the third bullet.

• A pair of webcomickers whose work I enjoy, whose drafting skills are exquisite, and who coincidentally happen to be housemates, are about to embark on a project that promises the awesomest creatures this side of old Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strips. Evan Dahm (sample critter: here) and Yuko Ota (sample critter: here) will be … let’s let Dahm explain the ground rules:
  

  Beginning with this creature drawn by me, we will take turns drawing future creatures, each one representing a visible step in a theoretical evolutionary process. We’ll play with the aesthetic of living things and the process of natural selection, and may or may not end up with a biologically plausible series of beasts.

  Future evolutionary leaps of The Exquisite Beast will take place on Fridays (Ota) and Tuesdays (Dahm), so be sure to check back tomorrow for what ol’ squidface’s genetic descendant looks like — and no cheating by comparing notes around the breakfast nook, Yuko and Evan! I’ve got my eye on you.

• Just to throw out a number: US$3,512,345. That would be the total monies raised by Child’s Play in 2011, having obliterated what I thought was a stretch of a goal by more than half a million friggin’ dollars. For reference, this kicks the lifetime total for Child’s Play to a (frankly, staggering) US$12,510,909; I’m pretty sure that there are sovereign nations with budgets for child health services that don’t reach that number.
• Found via the twitterfeed of Dylan Meconis, a link to an interview with Ellen Archer, CEO of Hyperion Books¹, wherein she discusses changes in the publishing world (some coming, some already here). The bit that caught my eye starts about three questions from the end, where Archer (who has already floated the idea of the end of advances as we presently know them) is asked by Jeremy Greenfield for an example of changes to the business side of things:
  

  EA: I’ve been looking closely at pre-orders and pre-order strategy and how that aligns with authors that we acquire and publish that have active blog sites and followers.

  We’ve got a number of authors who are really good with social media and when we acquire their books, three months ahead of time, they’ll do something really interesting for their audience, like a cover-reveal, and all of the sudden, you’ll see the pre-orders build. Then you take that information to retailers and that can impact their interest in ordering more copies.

  On the publication date, all of those orders release, and then it gets really quiet and euphoria dissipates because you get these mediocre daily sales for three or four weeks.

  Then sales start growing and building. The core fans buy the book, and then they start talking about it and sharing it with all their friends, and then you begin to see the results of it all paying off.[emphasis added]

  From discussions I’ve had with more than one creator who went from self-publishing to working with a traditional publisher, that expectation that The author will help promote the book has pretty much crossed the line into The author will provide a ready-made audience and do all the promotions and we can just cash the checks. Following up on that answer, Greenfield continued:

  JG: That’s interesting, but what if your author isn’t skilled in that approach?

  EA: That’s going to be a problem. That’s always been a problem.

  If they’re not promotable, then it makes selling their book challenging.

  If the work is extraordinary, it will be discovered, but it will be challenging. You have a much more cluttered marketplace than we did beforehand.

  Also, I will look to acquire media-genic authors and properties. [emphasis added]

  Catch that? There’s a couple different ways to interpret that last sentence. The more generous (based on a reading of an earlier part of the interview) interpretation is You have to have a property that will translate to other media and tie into other product types. Think of the book that can be referenced in the TV show (Disney owns networks, after all), which then shows up as a plush (they own retail stores) and decorate a peripherally-related amusement park ride (Disney owns … aw, you know).

  The less generous interpretation of that last sentence (one which a lifetime of observing media companies, along with a low and suspicious nature, tells me that I cannot ignore) is And you, the author, have to be pretty and have a compelling story of your own; survive horrific circumstances or get a disease that doesn’t show in the face and then we can talk Lifetime Original Movie. Think I’m too cynical? Let’s give it a couple of years and see how many more highly-hyped fake memoirs² make it to the shelves.

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¹ AKA the publishing arm of The Mouse.

² I once saw David Sedaris read a short piece of mostly fiction that featured his lament that The fucked-up alcoholic whose memoir is keeping me from the shelves turned out to have made up the whole thing. Can you believe it? Goddamn fucked-up alcoholic.

Later that night, I fixed the printer driver on his Macbook and he paid me twenty dollars.

Long. Very long. Ouch-inducing long. Words not so good. Move on now.

• For the past week, Starslip has been setting up, subtly and first and with increasing speed and strength, the sort of conflict that Kris Straub has built so well before over the past not-quite-seven-years — reality is not what it should be, and that’s the sort of thing that leads to unravellings. These — disruptions is the best word to use, I suppose — felt more permanent than those that had gone before, if only because Straub had previously been careful about talking up the changes to come in Starslip, up-talkings that were absent this time. There were mentions he’d made about knowing how Starslip ends, but nothing definitive.

  Then it became official in his 2011 wrap-up/2012 look-forward:

  Starslip will end by the first week of April. [O]n the artistic side of the coin, once I had plotted out the strip’s last storyline, I had kind of resolved it in my mind. I had all the storytelling tools to end Starslip six months ago, but I didn’t. So I’ve been waiting for the right moment, but in doing so, it feels like I’ve been treading water. It’s not an easy goodbye for me, but I’m excited to move forward on more projects.

  For not-quite-seven-years, Starslip¹ has set the standard in Sci-Fi/comedy/adventure/but there’s something deeper there, and I am sad to see it go. That being said, I am happy that Straub has accomplished the story that he sought to tell and found a way to move beyond whatever limitations it was presenting to him. As Vanderbeam might say, Great Space Heavens! If you meet a Space-Buddha, on the Space-Road, target his go-parts and make explosions.

• Following up on Monday’s survey of Becky and Frankness, Becky Dreistadt has posted a preview of her cover for the forthcoming Adventure Time comic, issue #2, and it’s purty. From Boom! Studios (publishers of said comic), http://boompen.tumblr.com/post/15265770760/do-you-love-adventure-time-do-you-love-emily, including Emily Carroll’s version. You know, I’ve always thought that variant covers for a single comic were basically a scam and I’d never buy into them, but dammit I think I’ll have to. Rounding out the fun, issue #3 will be featuring a cover by Sister Claire² creator Yamino. Adventure Time will in various ways contain the work of so many different creators from the web side of comics, I can only wonder who’ll they’ll get next. Answers, as always on a postcard.
• Final thoughts: This binder contains transcripts of the (literally) hundreds of hours of interviews for Stripped; some tiny portion of it contains about about five quick answers from me at the tail end of a really good interview with the guy who owns my soul³. Looking at the names on the tabs, I am humbled by the thought that I could have had anything worth contributing in such company. I can’t wait to see what they all have to say.

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¹ And/or Starshift, including or not various Crises.

² I don’t think I’ve ever been as succinct as when I described Sister Claire as relentlessly cute and just the right amount of blasphemous.

³ I got a dollar for it!

Before we get started, I have a pair of time-sensitive reminders. Firstly, Sarra Scherb is still collecting your input as to which webcomics should be included in the digital portion of an exhibition at UW come March, at least for the next two days. You can nominate up to three — I threw my love to the Three Ks of Webcomics: Kate, Karl, and Kmeredith.

Secondly, SPX 2012 registration is now open. The show traditionally fills its vendor space quickly, so don’t delay.

• As mentioned previously, I received in the mail a preview of MoD2¹, which contained the first story from MoD², plus two from the upcoming collection, due this summer. They’re a nice contrast, too — I’m not including the titles because at least one of them will give away a central premise — with one asking the lighthearted question How would the Machine of Death change the field of organized villainy? and the other asking the depressingly serious question If they threw an Apocalypse and nobody came, would anybody notice?

  These two stories were really good, you guys. I mean, imagine you’re a James Bond type supervillain, and the governments of the world stopped sending agents whose deaths were LASER or TANK FULL OF SHARKS or BULLETS; instead they only send agents that will die of THYROID CANCER or ALZHEIMER’S, so now what do you do with your elaborate deathtraps? You get creative, that’s what.

  As MoD editor David Malki ! had a not-insignificant career creating trailers for major motion pictures, and as I know that he hated it when the client’s marketing requirements had him give away all the good material in the trailer, leaving the rest of the movie a disappointment, I have confidence that these two stories are not the only good ones from the book and that the full volume will contain many stories as good or better.

• Hey, funny thing, you know where Colleen AF Venable works? :01 Books. And you know what :01 Books sent me just before Christmas? Review copy of Friends With Boys, collecting the still-running webcomic by Faith Erin Hicks. Put those facts together and you know what it means? I know what the next 50-odd pages of FWB are, and arrrgh I can’t tell you because it’s really well done and I don’t want to spoil you.

  So here’s what I can tell anybody who’s been reading FWB in its free webcomic incarnation³: Hicks has a sure eye for the perils of navigating the waters of adolescence, a sure hand at giving her characters distinctive yet recognizable designs⁴, and an ear for natural dialogue⁵ . Ignore the occasional Canadianisms (most noticeable: Grade 9) and the story could take place in any small town on the eastern coast of North America from Connecticut to New Brunswick. Ignore the ghost that’s silently stalking POV character Maggie and it could be the story of anybody making their way to a new high school for the first time. Some day, the setbacks and victories in these characters lives might look small, but right now they’re the sort of things that stay with you for life.

  Oh, and there’s a drama club musical with zombies, which instantly makes it better than any musical ever put on by my high school.

  I’ve come to accept that :01 can be trusted implicitly to publish works that are worth your time and money. Unless you have an unreasoning hatred of a book list that tilts towards YA material (or, as I prefer to think of it, material that appropriate for the YA audience but crosses over to the A audience just fine, thank you very much), there’s no reason not to follow just about everything that they produce. They’ve become the Pixar of graphic novels, where the vetting has been done and the assurance of quality can be assumed; I’ll even go so far as to say that :01 might actually score higher than Pixar on my “implicit trust” scale, since I don’t believe :01 would ever have released Cars 2.

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¹ Electric Somethingaloo.

² “FLAMING MARSHMALLOW”, read by Colleen AF Venable here.

³ Anybody who hasn’t been reading FWB in its webcomic incarnation, I would encourage you to start because it’s really good.

⁴ For example, Zander and Lloyd look like a pair of teens desperately trying to find hair and clothing choices that will distinguish them, given that they’re not entirely thrilled with being (presumably identical) twins at the moment. Likewise, there’s a family resemblance between Zander and Lloyd, older brother Daniel, younger sister Maggie, and their father.

⁵ Even better, an ear for when dialogue is unnecessary; there’s a lot of quiet time in Friends With Boys