Some things that have gone on for a while are coming to an end. I thought I’d share.

• Once upon a time — musta been ’round October few years back — Nick Wright¹ launched a webcomic called Treading Ground. It bounced around for 2003 and 2004, took 2005 off, returned for part of 2006, and then came back all regular-like in 2010. I came across a link to it early last year and went through the archives, but confess I’d forgotten about it until two things happened:
  1. The resurgent Eric Snark-White wrote about Treading Ground last week, detecting a hint of “wrapping up” in the storyline
  2. Nick Wright announced, two days ago, that Treading Ground is wrapping up this week

  From which we may conclude two things:

  1. It’s possible to wrap up a comic in a pretty graceful, organic way; Wright didn’t make a big announcement that things would be concluding and let that dominate the story for weeks/months/however long. He built in some story beats where people found themselves questioning decisions, settling on new directions in life, and which legitimately conclude the central story-driving conflict of the past 250 strips. I’ll be interested to see his promised next project (to be announced on Friday), and this time I’ll be sure to check it out from the beginning.
  2. Though I may have made of fun of the tendency of Websnarkings to depend on readings so deep as to be in danger of striking oil, it is clear that Eric is an astute and skilled analyst of stories and we all should be paying attention to him. That, or he is my natural rival and I must destroy him — I can never decide which².
• Long time readers of this page may have noticed that I have a tendency to build nicknames around certain creators and figures in the webcomics scene³ — thus, the Toronto Man-Mountain, The Radness Queen of [vaguely NoCal geographical location], the Latin Art-Throb⁴, my evil twin, and so on. Today we must retire one such nickname, as Gordon McAlpin can no longer be called my sporting bet nemesis. From an email I received from Mr McAlpin:
  

  I concede on our bet

  http://www.girlcomicstrip.com/ Dana Simpson is kind of working something but hell if I know what. It doesn’t seem like Universal is involved. I’m sure she’s still getting her development stipend for Girl, even if it will never appear. BTW, Multiplex turns 6 on July 10th and recently passed #600. :)

  Given that by the terms of our bet, there were as many as three more years to go before final status determination, I’m surprised that McAlpin was so eager to give up his dollar. Then again, sometimes prolonging that final act does nobody any good⁵. Then again again, Gordon sent me the agreed-upon stakes in the form of a PayPal transfer, so I had to substitute a dollar already in my possession in order to make good on condition #4 of the original bet.

  Then again^cubed, I don’t have a PayPal account and it’s not worth it to give a company I regard as intensely creepy any information about myself for one stinkin’ buck, so I’m released McAlpin from the monetary forfeit. Hugs all around, we’re all friends here, and time to think up a new nickname … since Gordon is the original stereotypical Canadian name, we may have to go in that direction.

• Metaphorical attic-cleaning time: in addition to dropping a complete graphic novel on us, Ryan Estrada apparently figured his hosting bills weren’t quite high enough, because today he’s announced the completely free, no strings attached single data bolus of (damn near) everything he’s ever done:
  

  This collection contains over 1000 pages of comics including Aki Alliance, Ped X-ing, Awesome O’Clock, Chillin’ Like Villains, Cartoon Coup, The Unbelievable! The Amazing! Computer-Savvy Ungulate, Frank: The Storybook, The Kind You Don’t Take Home to Mother, Sci-fi Drive-by, and Mystical Monkey. It also includes 25 minutes of adventure videos, with Expeditions: Africa. There’s no forms, no signup, no ads, just a single 826 mb download.

  I think it’s time to clear one of those promotional-item 1GB USB keys I’ve got hanging around here.

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¹ Who is not, sadly, an amalgam of Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, but we can dream, can’t we?

² Oh, wait, he’s offered to buy me scotch, which disqualifies him from the destruction list. My bad.

³ Although Eric Burns-White is one of the very few to have merited two such nicknames, also being known on this page as E. B.-White.

⁴ He’s dreamy.

⁵ Much like ripping off a Band-Aid™ instead of trying to gingerly remove it one yanked hair at a time.

Getting back into the swing of work, a bit behind, so perhaps you’ll forgive me if I point you towards some things that I’ve noticed over the last little bit and forgo the more thinky things like the Harvey nominations?

• For starters, we’re coming up on the opening of We Love Webcomics at Doublepunch Gallery in San Francisco. It’ll feature the works of incredibly, almost stupidly talented people. Quite frankly, it would be worthwhile to attend if it featured no more than three random Showdowns, any two Rebecca Clement whimsies, and Natasha Allegri’s tribute to Snooki. As it turns out, I have no special knowledge that any of those things will be present, but then again, you could substitute just about anything by Campbell, Clement and Allegri and have it rock, not to mention the work of Furuichi, Green, Jonathan, and more. Those in the westerly climes, do check it out for us, yes?
• Late-breaking realization #37: by not attending SDCC this year, I am missing out on obvious purchasing opportunities. Under normal circumstances I’d be picking up copies of the new Chainsawsuit, Starslip, Scenes From A Multiverse, Penny Arcade, Super Stupor, Drive, and Flight collections. Just the shipping on all of these books is almost enough to justify the flight and hotel costs for the week¹. That’s not even considering that I wouldn’t be able to pick up the newest Schlock Mercenary and Digger books, since Tayler and Vernon won’t be there either. Gonna be an expensive July….
• Doing me the favor of not having a new book that needs purchasing, the ever-mysterious E Burgoon passed some information to us² regarding some of his(?) recent semi-covert activities. Of greatest interest is the fact that Burgoon has worked a deal with the seemingly-legitimate front organization friendly local comic shop, Empire’s Comics Vault in Sacramento, to offer seminars designed to bring more artists and writers to webcomickry. It’s possible that there may even be video of the first of these for your edification and/or viewing pleasure in the near future.

Okay. Going slightly off script here for a moment; I think that I’ve calmed down enough to approach this rationally and not go on the written equivalent of a tower-based shooting spree. A few hours ago I read this:

[Blog] : One chapter ends, another begins… http://www.mindpollution.org/2011/07/05/one-chapter-ends-another-begins/

… which lead to the unwelcome news that Rick Marshall, consummate comics reportage pro and relentless booster of webcomics, has been let go from this position at MTV Splash Page (no link, because screw them). Rick’s way too much of a gentleman to see this as anything but an opportunity to explore new projects, but I’m not. I’m going to say that MTV are foolish for not realizing what a resource they had (Rick’s Rolodex is deep and broad, and his interviews revealed a knowledge of comics to match); keeping him on a blog with the too-narrow focus of comics-meets-movies-and-TV was understandable when that was all that MTV had in the way of comics coverage, but not asking him to helm their dedicated comics blog (MTV Geek; again, no link because still screw them) was shortsighted in the extreme³.

So, if you’re looking for somebody that exemplifies journalistic best practices and has a deep and abiding love of comics and all they do, drop Rick a line — he makes the rest of us that dabble in banging out copy look bad, while making the medium, its creators, and fans look very, very good. Anybody that’s lucky enough to snatch him up will be lucky to have his talents working on their behalf.

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¹ It is very, very expensive to ship to the Fleenplex.

² Via the traditional dead-drop, as befits his(?) strict adherence to the best practices of tradecraft.

³ Which should not be construed as a criticism of anybody that MTV did invite in to work on MTV Geek. There’s some good work being done over there, but I think you’ll forgive me if I decline to read it in future.

In honor of Canada Day today and Independence Day Monday, Fleen is taking a long weekend. So as to not leave you completely bereft of content, please enjoy this picture and link of Jon Rosenberg’s newest magnum opus, which is now orderable. It’s pretty much every foray into the wild ‘n’ wooly multiverse pre-Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer¹.

Okay, one more thing: Ryan Estrada, not known for doing things in a small way, dropped a 200 page update today. The entirety of Aki Alliance, a complete graphic novel, is awaiting your eyeballs.

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¹ Say it like Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute for maximum giggles.

So … ‘tother day Ryan Sohmer posted an update of The Gutters (just about every update is by an different artist, this time by Ryan Lee) that kind of hit me in the gut. Not that I think that any idea or issue is so sacrosanct that you can’t argue about it, or that any creation of human ingenuity is so perfect that you can’t have different opinions on it. And not because I came into comics as an adult from volunteering with the CBLDF.

However, I think that the premise of his critique of the CBLDF is flawed.

We’ll just dismiss the last two lines where he claims that the CBLDF will provide you with kiddie porn images for a monthly fee — hyperbole, humorous exaggeration, no blood, no foul. I think the real problem comes the middle of the text block:

We fight for your right to view graphic depictions of naked children.

The very straightforward, declarative nature of that sentence gives the impression that that is all that the CBLDF does, which isn’t true¹.

In part, it’s not true because there are threats to comics that don’t deal with the obscenity angle at all; for instance, in 2004 the US Customs Service in Charleston, SC seized a shipment of comics that included a parody of the Bush administration using the iconography of Richie Rich. Their argument was that the images violated copyright, and that the laws of parody don’t apply to comics because comics aren’t covered by the First Amendment. There are similar cases from across the country and across the Fund’s history, but they aren’t the ones that stick in the mind because they tend to settle very quickly.

The obscenity/pornography cases are the ones that linger — in part because we’re in the midst of a multi-decade moral panic over the threats to children everywhere, and in part because in most parts of the country, prosecutors are elected and can pretty much guarantee re-election by going after perceived perverts. The problem is, in a lot of cases, “perversion” is defined as “what I don’t like, personally”. That leads to circumstances like the Mike Diana case, or the fact that Canadian Customs regularly seizes any material coming into the country that contains lesbian/gay content.

Then we come to the elephant in the room — depictions of children in sexual situations. As a society, as a species, we’ve pretty much agreed that this sets off the ick reaction in our brains. It just ain’t right, and protecting those who cannot form consent in a meaningful way from predation is a laudable thing. But somewhere along the way, the idea has been formed that in addition to protecting real children, we must prevent the existence of sexual representations of fictional children, since such material will inevitably damage hypothetical real children.

Honest. That’s the logic.

I’m mindful of the damage that sexual exploitation can do to children — I don’t have any of my own to be fearful of, but as an EMT, I’ve been trained to spot abuse and I’m a mandatory reporter². But again (and I swear I’m not splitting hairs), what constitutes a child? The law, which is a blunt instrument (thanks to Neil Gaiman for that metaphor) doesn’t distinguish and frequently leads to insane circumstances like teens being charged as sex offenders for sending nude pictures of themselves to other teens.

But that’s The Law — and that’s the dilemma. The line needs to be drawn somewhere, and I’m not comfortable thinking that there’s always a single place to draw it. By its nature, this is going to require case-by-case evaluation, with an eye towards precedent; to say that all cases where somebody cries But the [hypothetical] children! How can you defend somebody that does this to [hypothetical] children! are automatically wrong is no more useful than to say they’re automatically right.

Let me draw an analogy (and I’m going to apologize in advance because I’m taking you to a completely unrelated topic in comics, but the parallels are just too useful). In talking about the NCS and webcomics and the establishment of standards, Scott Kurtz wrote:

[T]ry this mental exercise. Come up with a series of criteria by which the NCS can determine professionalism among webcomics that lets in Penny Arcade but keeps out CTRL-ALT-DEL without defaulting to “Well not him because he sucks.” In the end, it’s always going to come down to a bunch of men and women (young or old) making a personal judgment call.

As he usually does, Kurtz identified the key issue there. Now I want you to make some minor substitutions:

Come up with a series of criteria by which the Law can determine what comics are permissible in their depiction of underage sexuality that lets in Anders Loves Maria³ but keeps out creepy manga without defaulting to “Well not that because the characters are [insert arbitrary distinction].”

Why does it seem that the CBLDF spend an inordinate amount of time on child porn-ish cases? Because that’s where the judgments have to be made. That’s where the grey areas exist, where the one-size-fits-all proscriptions are least likely to get it right. I have utterly no problem with Ryan Sohmer for having opinions that either match or don’t with my own, nor for starting the public discussion that he did. But I don’t think the place he started it from was a fair premise to build that discussion on.

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¹ Although it’s sometimes a useful fiction — the CBLDF executive director once shared with me that when trapped on an airplane next to a boring person that he doesn’t want to deal with for five hours, “I defend child pornographers” is a great answer to the “So what do you do?” question.

² Actually, every adult in the state of New Jersey is, but since I’ve been trained it would be harder for me to turn my head the other way and claim that I didn’t know or suspect anything was wrong.

³ I’ll leave it to you to browse the archives, considering that Sweden’s morality police could very well decide that Rene Engström is a vile threat to society based upon elements of her work that are an honest depiction of how life is.

It might be that Carly is doing essentially fan comics of her own shared creation (using a Beatonesque strip format), it might be because everybody and their dog are taking turns drawing the Strong Female Characters™, usually tagged on Twitter as #strongfemales, or because there’s now a suggested tagline for the SFCs that sums up everything about mainstream superhero comics, or maybe just because there’s now a Tumblr dedicated to Susan, Georgia, and Queen. Mostly it’s because every new person that sees the phenomenon gets caught up in it and grabs others to say Check this out, you’ll love it. Also, because Chris Sims has the right idea.

• In other things I noticed on Twitter that don’t have to do with Strong Female Characters™, I noticed a brief-yet-telling exchange between Christopher Butcher and Jim Zubkavich:
  

  It’s kind of amazing how little interaction the webcomics half of my twitter feed has with the “mainstream comics” half, and vice versa.

  Webcomic folk aren’t even curious about the strange comiXology troops scouting the blasted barren lands of Pay-For-Contentia. :)

  I do find that odd, yeah.

  After the rapprochement between the web and mainstream wings of comicdom at this year’s Reuben Awards, it is a little unusual to not have seen that conversation continuing in the weeks since. Then again, I meet somebody new, it takes a while for the conversation (without booze) to get to be spontaneous. I’m guessing this is a bit of inertia until everybody figures out who everybody else is online and continues that conversation. Hoping so, anyway.

• Let’s end on one of my favorite sources of laugh-chuckles: SMBC Theater and the casual collection of reprobates found there; it takes a certain kind of comedic fearlessness to have no hesitation whatsoever in regularly presenting yourself as a completely horrible person, and yet everybody I’ve met in conjunction with the SMBC shorts is a really nice person¹. The bad news is that there will be fewer SMBC Theater shorts for the time being — one a month instead of the customary one a week.

  The good news is that it’s because the SMBC Theatricians will be spending their time working up an ongoing webseries with higher production values; Zach and James explain it all here². Naturally, this is the sort of undertaking that requires a more substantial budget that the SMBC troupe have had to work with in the past, leading to the traditional Kickstarter campaign.

  Short form: your contribution over the next six weeks means the possibility that next year you get to see James Ashby blown up in outer space. Please give generously, as it is entirely possible that this is the only way to destroy him³.

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¹ Except James; I’ve re-evaluated my earlier position and decided that he would totally kill me at the first opportunity.

² Warning: contains James. Do not believe anything this man tells you, he is pure evil.

³ Either that, or nuke his site from orbit, but that’s got some messy collateral effects I’d prefer to avoid.

The aristotelian ideal form of all t-shirts has been designed by Meredith Gran; look upon it and tremble. I said tremble, damn you! And while you’re trembling, please enjoy more Strong Female Characters with dialogue (via Kate Beaton) and motion (via Carly Monardo) and color (fanart by Pascalle Lepas).

You know, that comic book nod to female spinal structure, where both breasts and buttocks are simultaneously presented to the viewer? Over the weekend, Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Carly Monardo via their respective twitters, took that pose and used it to create the greatest female-empowering female heroes ever: Georgia O’Queefe, Queen Elizatits, and Susan B Assthony. Fan art quickly followed. What with 52 new comics launching from DC in the fall, there’s going to be a need for new characters and I cannot think of any that typifies cape comics better than these three.

• Hey, remember Recipe Comix at Saveur magazine? Much like Chris Hastings two weeks ago, Emily Horne has opted to make her contribution an adult beverage¹. By the way, this means that fully 50% of the first four installments of Recipe Comix are booze-related, a situation that I wholly approve of.
• Showing that his mission in life is to be far more patient than I ever could be with those that don’t² understand basic science, Darryl Cunningham is back with a comic that lays out the basic evidence for evolution. Young Earth Creationist and Intelligent Design aficionados, this is your wake-up call. Thanks to Scott McCloud for passing on the link.

  I’ll also note that Cunningham’s collection of comics on psychiatry (that would be the appropriately-named Psychiatric Tales) is available at many fine comic shops now; I was going to pick it up at Midtown last week, but they were sold out before I could get one. On balance, I’m going to call that a good thing.

• Let’s end on some good, old-fashioned commerce, shall we? My Evil Twin has opened pre-orders on his latest release, covering strips first published between 24 July 2005 and 16 August 2006. When he started his reprint publishing program, back in 2006, Tayler was reprinting strips from 2003. Now it’s five years later and he’s publishing strips from 2005. Granted, he went back as far as 2000 and has done more than one book a year since, but at this rate, it appears that he’ll never run out of material to print. That there is some kind of self-sustaining business genius, I tells ya.

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¹ Specifically, an adult beverage in the class known as the reviver, a class specifically designed for use the morning after a night of too many other adult beverages. I like to think that if you get in trouble with two many Hastings-style ginger-based cocktails, Horne is there to help you have Ideas.

² Or possible choose to refuse to understand basic science.

Part the First Readers of this page may recall a mention of Mia Wiesner and the survey she was conducting on the expectations readers have of digital comics. Ms Wiesner emailed me a few days ago with the preliminary results, which I will now summarize for you (please note, I am rounding most of the original numbers to the nearest percent):

• There were 441 completely-answered surveys
• 91% of respondents do (or would) read digital comics
• 45% have already purchased digital comics, 27% may do so, 19% never will
• The genres most likely to be read digitally are
  1. Science Fiction
  2. Humor/Comedy
  3. Fantasy
  4. Superhero
  5. Crime/Mystery
• The least-appealing aspects of digital comics are
  1. Not actually owning the comic
  2. DRM
  3. Lack of physicality
  4. File format incompatibility
  5. Need to repurchase if file gets damaged

Further results are pending release by the university, and we will bring them to you when available.

Part the Second It’s been many years now that this page has considered questions of What’s fair game for creators to reference?, with the earliest example I can find being this one. I actually was thinking back to that situation (Rich Stevens received a C&D for selling highly-abstracted pixel images inspired by Star Wars that LucasFilm objected to), because of something I read yesterday.

Back then I was asking myself, How few pixels does Rich have to use to represent a TIE Fighter or Stormtrooper helmet before it’s too abstract for Lucas to object?¹

The thing that I read yesterday that asks (essentially) the same question was a well-written bit on Fair Use by Andy Baio, regarding a pixel version of the cover of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. The image in question was commissioned by Baio to accompany a chiptune tribute to Kind of Blue; he’d cleared the musical rights, but hadn’t thought it necessary to do so for the cover. That decision cost him some US$32,500 when he found himself on the receiving end of a demand from lawyers representing the photographer of the original image.

Much like I interpreted Fair Use doctrine in the Steven/Lucas case, Baio felt he was probably in the right, but couldn’t afford the process of fighting it out in court. He’s not angry or bitter in his posting, but does end on a really good question that echoes mine from 2006: how few pixels, how low-res do you have to go before it’s Fair Use? Scroll down to the bottom of Baio’s posting and have a guess. One warning, though — there is no right answer².

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¹ Or, since Lucas would always object, the more accurate question would be How few pixels for the abstraction to have separated the reference from the original, for the transformation to be so complete that Fair Use is undisputed even by a Hollywood lawyer?

² Yet. There will be someday, when somebody with enough money takes something to the Supreme Court and we get some precedent. By the way, we’re currently at nine days and counting.

Karl Mutha-h’in¹ Kerschl, people. Not only does he draw Miller better than Miller does, not only does he include the most appropriate quote possible as the title of the strip, he sticks the landing perfectly. I was giggling for half an hour after I read this.

Quickly now, since the trains got screwed up again today and I’m behind again today and I just need a drink again today.

• TopatoCo picks up maybe the biggest unaffiliated creator out there, as John Allison moves his non-artwork merch to the biggest little webcomics distributor:
  

  Visitors to the shop will find most items marked as “sold out” or “coming soon”, with only ebooks, handmade items, teatowels, and my more expensive giclee prints still available to buy. From next week, things that aren’t a. digital or b. dependent on me to push a pen/button will be available at Topatoco.

  This move is designed to free me up for more freelance commissions, as I’d been shipping a lot of items myself and overseeing all the orders, not the most economical use of my time.

  More time for John Allison originals and commissions? Sounds good to me.

• As everybody and their dog are talking about JK Rowling’s big announcement, I ‘spose I should weigh in, too. I enjoyed the books, I’m not sure I’m invested enough to get involved in “Pottermore”, and boy, a creator going alone without a formal publisher (and engaging audience on as nearly a one-to-one basis as possible) sure sounds like webcomics, doesn’t it? Bonus points to Heidi Mac for the Akallabêth reference in her writeup. I’m sure that I’m not the only one that went squee over the reference to Tolkien’s voluminous apocrypha (I’m fairly certain I heard both Evan Dahm and Aaron Diaz making swoony noises).
• Okay, fine, Akallabêth, “the tale of the downfall of Númenor as written by Elendil the Tall, King of the North Kingdom”. Big disaster, brought about by poor decisions and evil intent, sweeping up the wicked and the virtuous in its murderous wake. Not quite the same as the Joplin tornado last month, but then again the Akallabêth didn’t have the likes of Dave Roman and Chris Duffy (formerly editors of Nickelodeon magazine) arranging for a comic anthology to be distributed to the children of Armenelos.

  They are, however, working up such an anthology for the benefit of the children of Joplin, with information (and ways to help the endeavor) over at IndieGogo. As of this writing, they’re 90% of the way to goal, but going way the hell over goal isn’t really a problem — it just means that more kids will be helped with an escape from the fact that they’ve lost everything. Go. Give.

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¹ “Honoring, respecting, calling on Mothers Day and taking out for a nice lunch on her birthday”, naturally.

[Edit to add: There’s supposed to be an excerpt of the OctoPie strip mentioned right below at the top of the page, but the image uploader fought with me, and once I finally got it to accept an image, it’s pulling this chop-off-in-the-middle crap. Problem occurring on multiple computers, so it’s on WordPress’s end. We’ll get that fixed as soon as we can.] Fixed. Thanks, Phillip.

When Meredith Gran posted the most recent Octopus Pie on Sunday, I’m guessing that she didn’t know she was neatly predicting how my work week would go. Interruptions, whether in the classroom or when you’re trying to get your swerve on, can either lead to an excess of politeness and dangerously narrow eyes or horrific violence¹. I’m trying to not be fired and Will’s trying to be a better person, so we breathe deep and solider on.

• Frequent readers of this page will know that I stand second to no man in my appreciation of :01 Books, who in addition to producing some of the finest graphic novels known to man also are in the webcomics biz as a sort-of publisher. It’s that latter role that I’d like to mention today, as :01 have announced the re-launch of TUNE by Derek Kirk Kim and Les McClaine (seen recently on art chores of the bonus story by Benito Cereno in the latest Dr McNinja collection). It’s an interdimensional romp full of accidental imprisonment and the eternal desire we all have to get back to our homes, plus a bit of trying to get laid. Added bonus: if you don’t like starting a new webcomic because there’s only a few updates? TUNE’s got 148 pages ready for you to read. Go get ’em.
• If you don’t like starting a webcomic that’s been around because there’s too much in the archive, Rebecca Clements (of Kinokofry, Secret Mystery Diary, BEC, and more) just launched Ruffle Hall ‘tother day, and while she’s dropping new pages like mad, it’s still in the wholly manageable dozen-or-so range. Nobody does whimsical quite like Clements; I’d go so far as to say that much like Kazu Kibuishi is channeling the spirit of Miyazaki², Clements is on occasion possessed by Dr Suess (with the disclaimer that I don’t think the good doctor was quite so much into the ladyparts, but you never know). So what happens to a pair of slightly odd characters who live in the boringest place in the entire world when they go off for adventures? Wonderful things, my friends, wonderful things.
• Continuing the Isn’t anybody dead? theme that was previously established, Pierre and Krep didn’t actually get roasted alive, and have been having a nice chat with the Mihrrgoot king and finding out that maybe the Oh, shit shoe that had to drop isn’t just that the Eebs aren’t as helpless as we thought. It may be that Our Heroes may not be as on the right side of their struggle as we thought. Facing unfathomable horrific potentialities, indeed.
• My Blam: Come up with a Googlewhack³, hours later there are at least 9 hits that result purely from the cartoon I casually mentioned it in. I call it, “Being Randall Munroe”.

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¹ For added verisimilitude, just add Wilhelm.

² Doubly impressive because Miyazaki isn’t dead and is still using his spirit.

³ “Canadian surrealist porn”