Ooof, late start today. How’s about some merch news?

• Not satisfied with merely one Book 4, Kris Straub releases two Books 4 (not to be confused with Book 8): Starslip Book 4 and Chainsawsuit Book 4 are available for your reading pleasure.
• Previously available: Gordon McAlpin (my sporting bet nemesis) has had Multiplex‘s first book, Enjoy Your Show out since September, but now it gets a bump in terms of availability. Diamond Comics (who are pretty much the sole distributor to comic shops) is listing the book in their June PREVIEWS catalog (with a “Movie Comics” theme), where it’s Staff Pick. If you’ve been meaning to grab it, mention it to your friendly local comic shop.
• From the Evil Twin, news that the $50 membership fee for WorldCon, which gets you the right to vote in the Hugo Awards, will also get you an e-copy of all the nominated works, which has a street value of $46. If you didn’t want to wait for a physical copy of the latest Schlock or Girl Genius storylines, and wanted to read about a million other words, this is the Bargain of the Century.
• Following up on yesterday’s Ryan Sohmer twitterfest: the Least I Could Do pilot project is live on Kickstarter, with a goal of US$75,000 in 60 days. Scott & Kris managed to get US$50,000 in about four days, so something tells me this is doable.
• Speaking of Canadian Ryans, Ryan North just broke the news that the Giant Squishable T-Rex is to be sold … let’s let him tell it:
  

  The NYC National History Museum will soon have these T-Rexes – http://tinyurl.com/yds6ne7 – in their store.

  I think he means the natural history museum, which would be the American Museum of Natural History, a place that I regularly frequent. Cool news. Even cooler if they can modify their penny squisher to make the T-Rex design say some thing from panel two¹.

• Finally: Steve Wolfhard. Cat Rackham book. Buy it.

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¹ Ryan, send me your address, I have something for you.

Seems like our earlier discussions re: Shelly from Wapsi Square and Ivan from Oglaf were premature. Shelly: not dead, 80,000 year old sphinx. Ivan: not dead, some kind of magical sleep. As usual, leave it to Wonderella and/or Jeffrey Rowland to cut through the crap and figure out — no Rapture, nobody dead.

• Not that there won’t be anybody dead. Judging from the Twitterings of a one Mister Ryan Sohmer, starting here-ish and moving forward, it certainly seems like he’s mad enough to cut some sumbitches. TL;DR version: Sohmer’s relating the story of a meeting with Canada’s Teletoon network, wherein Sohmer was privy to the pitch for something called The Dating Guy that became, after the meeting, a wholesale appropriation of Sohmer’s character designs (on casual inspection, it is rather similar to Sohmer’s own Least I Could Do).

  I am inferring (and have no specific knowledge one way or the other) that said meeting considered the possibility of a LICD tv show to be developed in conjunction with Teletoon. If Sohmer’s contentions are correct, I’d be mad, too.

  The thing is, I don’t know that TDG’s original pitch looked like, I wasn’t in on any of the meetings, and I haven’t compared the TDG online content with LICD (nor am I familiar enough with LICD to draw conclusions without a deep re-reading … it’s just not my thing, you know?).

  But I do know Ryan Sohmer somewhat, and he’s a canny businessman (cheerfully mercenary is how I once described him), smart enough not to make baseless accusations against (what I presume is) a fair-sized Canadian media corporation, on account of whatever country you’re in, fair-sized media corporations really hate getting called on bad behavior and tend to retaliate.

  He’s also ambitious enough not to let a screwing distract him from his larger goals, and if LICD on the air is one of those, a few hours of public scheming (with the equally not-going-to-let-a-screwjob-go-by-quietly Randy Milholland) has resulted in the possibility of a Kickstarter campaign to accomplish (nearly on his own) what previously might have required a fair-sized Canadian media corporation¹. We shall see soon enough.

• Also not dead: the independent creator model of business, Snuggie-comparisons notwithstanding. Jonathan Coulton has his say on the Planet Money podcast that concluded he was a fluke:
  

  The thing that I think most got in the way of what could have been a much more interesting discussion was some confusion about what a business model is. “Writing a song that gets discovered on Slashdot” is not a business model, any more than “putting sleeves on a blanket” is a business model. It is a thing that happened to me, that part is true, but it’s not really much of a strategy. I make songs that are good and then I sell them (and concert tickets, and Tshirts) to the people who want them – that’s my business model, and it’s patently obvious that it’s replicable because I stole it from every other recording artist in the world.

  Here are some things I do differently from some other artists: I own all my music 100%, which means I have complete control over how I sell it (or not). I can give it away, I can bundle it on a USB key or in a zip file, I can allow people to make and post music videos, and I don’t have to deal with lawyers or labels to do any of that. I also get all the profits.

  I am extremely public about my creative process, hopes and fears, victories and failures. I communicate directly with fans as often as I can without letting it become my full-time job.

  I have never spent any money on marketing and rely completely on blogs, podcasts and social networks to spread the word.

  My business model is designed especially for me, by me, and it constantly changes and evolves. Nobody, not even me, should try to do exactly what I’ve done, because there are parts of it that won’t make sense for who you are or what you’re interested in.

  Creators of any stripe may want to keep this line in their heads, substituting their own means of expression in for “music” as appropriate:

  Know only this: to do this you need to work extremely hard, make music that is great, and find people to buy it from you. The end.

  And having listed off other creators that work off a direct-interactions-with-fans model:

  I obviously don’t know the details of everyone’s business, but I’m guessing that we have this one thing in common: we’ve all decided that it’s fine with us if we reach fewer people as long as we reach them more directly.

  I truly believe that the sooner we all acknowledge the internet is not actually killing art, the sooner we can get back to making things that are awesome.

  Good thoughts all the way through, and well worth your attention. Go. Read. Absorb. Adopt. Evolve. Prevail.

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¹ Either that or Milholland porn. The mind reels.

A couple of the things I wanted to point you to today may make little or no sense to those of you reading from outside the United States. As some of you may know, I spend a lot of my free time as an Emergency Medical Technician-Basic, riding with my town’s volunteer Emergency Medical Services. We’re entirely supported by community donations and grants and don’t charge for our services (but economic realities and falling levels of support will likely cause us to change that policy, and soon).

On numerous occasions, I’ve dealt with patients that found themselves behind the curve on their ability to afford care. In some cases, they were prescribed medication for conditions but weren’t taking them; in other cases, they were skipping appointments with doctors; once or twice they didn’t even want to call us because they didn’t know we wouldn’t send them a bill. In each of these cases, the anxiety was caused by the prospect of paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to deal with an immediate situation. In each of these cases, after dropping the patient at the local Emergency Department, I spent an hour muttering under my breath about how a decent level of healthcare is a goddamn human right.

But it can get so much worse.

Today I have to share not one, but two stories of [web-]comics related efforts to help people with the bills they’ve incurred because of this bitched-up system of healthcare delivery that we live with because taking care of people is apparently an unforgivable sin against capitalism. Two people made the mistake of getting cancer and not immediately rolling over to die, and as a result are tens of thousands of dollars in debt (side note for those of you following the global economic situation: in the US, people that lose their houses due to default — two-thirds of them trace the cause to medical expenditures). So give ’em a good read and do what you can, okay?

• From the Cancer Sucks department, Howard Tayler (my evil twin) is putting the printer proof for his latest book on the auction block, with the proceeds going to the medical bills of his friend Jake Black, who is US$25,000 in the hole from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There’s five days to go in the auction as of this writing, and it’s clear that there’s still plenty of room for the bids to go higher. Tayler’s also got three pieces of original art up for auction in the same timeframe, which you should also check out.
• And in the Cancer Sucks Redux department, there’s the story of comics colorist Moose Baumann; I’ll be honest, I’m not familiar with his work at all, but that doesn’t matter when you learn of the particular circumstances in this case:
  

  A few years back my wife had breast cancer. She had chemo and a partial mastectomy, and we thought things were good. A year later we found out that it had spread, and she went in for more chemo and surgery. Several months prior she had lost her job and her insurance, and because of her “prior condition” she no one else would insure her. So we’ve been working on paying off the full cost of her medical bills for the past two years, just north of $90 grand.

  Right now work is scarce and money is super tight, and on June 1st it looks like we may lose our home because of all of this. I’m trying to sell some prints of my work online to make some quick cash, and hopefully keep my home. I’m reluctant to ask for help, it’s embarrassing, but I’m at the end of my rope. [empahsis added]

  The prints in question are $20 a pop; if you read comics, there’s probably something over there you’ll like. On a typical day, a few thousand people read this site as I blather on about things that — whatever objective importance they may possess — catch my fancy. I’m asking you, please, look over Baumann’s offerings and if something catches your eye, help his family out. Thanks.

• Let’s end on a up note if we can, hey? I got an email yesterday that I wanted to mention. We at Fleen have, from time to time, had the occasion to share with you stories of webcomic scrapers, and our opinion that a lot of grief could be avoided if only the developers of webcomics collector apps/pages would let the creators know of their intent and ask permission to include them. Here’s the important part of the missive in question:
  

  I’d like to include a link to Fleen in an iPad app I’m working on. It’s a webcomic reading tool, and to give the users a complete experience we’re including a list of good blogs that they can read to find new & quality webcomics.

  It is just a link, so asking about it might come off as not being worth the bother. But I’m trying to make an app that really respects the comic artists as well: all the comics are shown as on the webpage, it uses the same browsing software on the iPad as anything else, so it doesn’t strip ads or insert ads or generally mess around with the comics. Only comic artists that agree to be featured will be in our featured comics listing. We’re also working on some ways to encourage support, like a link in the menu that goes right to the store or donation pages for the comics.

  This is how you do it, people. Kudos to developer Steven Masuch for taking the high road, and when his app is generally available, would somebody with an Apple fondleslab¹ like to review it for us? We at Fleen don’t have one.

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¹ The term fondleslab was coined by the brilliantly snarky hacks at El Reg. Much respect.

We’re a couple of weeks into submissions for Machine of Death 2 (Electric Deathaloo), and the news of just how many stories have been submitted is pretty amazing. From David Malki !’s twitterfeed:

So far we have received 103 submissions, for a total word count of approx. 317,000. (That is about the length of The Fountainhead)

We are at 1.5 Crime and Punishments, 2 Grapes of Wraths, and 0.6 Wars and Peace.

About 1.3 Ulysseux and 1.5 Mobies Dick

So, quite a lot for Messers Malki !, Bennardo, and North to sort through. Since my submission for the original MoD was rejected (along with about 96% of all submissions, if my back of the envelope figures are good, so no hard feelings to Mr North, Mr Bennardo and Mr Dreamcrusher), I hadn’t really thought of any MoD stories I’d like to tell, but to be honest — the new submissions announcement caused one to pop into my head.

Here’s the thing, though — I’ve got a germ of an idea, maybe even a unique idea in the MoDiverse, but I don’t think that I can develop it to the point where it would be very good. As we at Fleen have discussed in the past, the notion that ideas are scarce is at best a distraction — execution is all that matters.

Thus, I’m giving this one away — I have no idea if it’s as unique as it could be, I have no idea if anybody out there can develop it to the point that it’s good enough for inclusion, and I sincerely apologize to Messers Bennardo, North, and Malki ! if they get flooded with poorly-executed submissions taken from this seed. Details below the cut, and no complaining if it turns out nobody but me wants to read a story built around this idea.

• Seen ‘tother day on American Elf: James Kochalka expands his (literal) multimedia conquest to filmdom, and will possibly be viewable on your TV:
  

  I performed in a really cool animated (rotoscoped and other techniques) indy sci-fi romance, called MARS. The movie has never seen wide release, but they’re currently in negotiations with Netflix to make the movie available on their service. So, please add MARS to your netflix queue! This will help make our dream of getting the movie on Netflix come true.

  I’d be curious to see MARS, if only to find out if rotoKochalka gets elf ears at some point.

• Big round numbers alert: Michael Terracciano hits 2500 updates of Dominic Deegan: O_____ for Hire¹. One may also note that by an accident of timing, the day after tomorrow will also be the ninth anniversary of Dominic Deegan; long time, lotta strips.

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¹ I work for a company that makes various solutions for data — storage, analysis, and general info-bothering — and make it a personal policy to never spell out or pronounce The O Word because I dislike their products. No reflection on Terracciano’s work is meant or implied.

(more…)

It’s been making the twitterrounds and honestly, I can’t remember who to credit for first pointing it out, so we’ll just say it’s via Kate Beaton because Kate rules. From Phil McAndrew (who has the best blog name in history — Marvelous Mustache¹ Factory), a treatise on Super Obvious Secrets That I Wish They’d Teach In Art School. How super obvious? Enough so that Mr Non-Artist here understands them all.

More importantly, while McAndrew writes in lieu of responding yet again to students wondering how break in to a career in comics or illustration (that is, not specific to webcomickers), every single thing he says applies to webcomics. As we at Fleen have come to accept, the distinction between webcomics and not-web comics is entirely academic at this point, and we’re only using the word because it’s got inertia and is relatively succinct.

Do you own the words+pictures that you create, and at some point the internet is a/the dominant vector for distribution? Webcomics. It’s not an either/or proposition any longer, it’s a spectrum, and anything that looks like a comic falls somewhere on that spectrum (granted, some of it falls waaaaay over to the low end of the spectrum, where the internet part is an afterthought and the ownership stake is minimal and the creator is in some way or another getting screwed — we won’t be paying to much attention to that end of the spectrum).

I am purposely limiting the highlights that we quote here — the impact of McAndrew’s simple advice is best appreciated in great big chunks, and you really should check out the drawings he chose to accompany his thoughts. Some of these are about how you improve your art, some are about how you conduct yourself, all are important.

I’ll add one last thought: If these simple rules are helpful, if they contribute to your artistic growth and cartooning success (however you define it), if you find value in them even if you aren’t a comics creator (at least six of the ten secrets presented apply to any endeavour, not just cartooning), then make it a goal to tell Phil McAndrew so. Find him at a convention, a signing, or randomly on the street (NB: do not stalk Mr McAndrew on the street) and thank him for sharing his thoughts. I’m guessing at least one of you just saved a couple years tuition in art school if you apply these rules stringently enough.

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¹ While we at Fleen prefer moustache, as used by the World Beard and Moustache Championships™we will not gainsay those that wish to use the alternate mustache. For once, the American spelling keeps the “u”! Then again, leaving out the “u” would result in the entirely-perverse “mostache”, a word which is used only by t-shirt thieves that don’t appreciate the subtleties of original design.

² This is currently in the running for Best Sentence of 2011.

³ That little parenthetical is the key part of this key point. Want to be a success? Remember that there’s a big difference between working for free and working for yourself. The work is immediately unpaid but provides you with some means of income in the future? Good. The work is immediately unpaid but somebody else promises to maybe pay you something in the future, no really? Bad. Very, very bad.

There’s a lot of hoo-ha about how the world is Definitely Going To End On Saturday, No Really, We Mean It This Time. Since I predominantly work in New York City, I’ve been a target of people who firmly believe this and want to desperately save my soul before the big unraveling hits this weekend. But, as webcomics has shown us, every day can be considered the end of the world, with or without any degree of religious involvement.

Either those comics will smugly amuse you come Sunday (when the world doesn’t end), or they’ll be among your last happy thoughts in a short and hellish existence before the end of all things (when the world does). Either way, you win by reading them now. Oh, and if you do end up being bodily assumed into heaven? Don’t worry, you still have time to pre-book your pet care.

• Assuming that it’s not wasted effort to make future plans, may we point out the launch part for Dave Roman‘s Astronaut Academy ([A] delight to read from start to finish — Fleen Book Corner) will be on 11 June at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn? Given the kids-friendly (but by no means kids-exclusive) nature of AA, the fun starts early at 3:00pm, and goes until 10:00pm. There will be comics-making workshops for the kids, snacks, and general party times with one of the nicest guys to ever make comics.
• As long as you’re making plans that will take past the weekend to come to fruition, can I mention one that will probably mark you as a better person, and therefore less likely to end up in an eternity of torment? ‘Bout a year ago, I pointed you to a webcomics charity run by Elena “Yamino” Barbarich of Sister Claire fame (and, like seemingly half of the young guns of webcomickry, she was a fellow student with my niece Colleen at SCAD).

  Oftentimes, these efforts are one-offs, meant to help alleviate the pain of a specific event, but Ms Y has kept it as an ongoing effort, with more creators joining in and a permanent focus on Kiva as the beneficiary. And speaking of Kiva, as of this writing Team Webcomics has made an even 4000 loans totally more than US$162,000 since its inception in Feburary of 2009, putting the group in 57th place out of more than 18,000 groups in terms of total money lent. Well done, people.

• Finally, if you’re looking for something that will probably have no effect whatsoever on your being a good person or not, but which will likely amuse the heck out of you, may I suggest the TCAF 2011 Machine of Death Draw & Guess spectacular, now in amazingly life-like video? Why, yes, I believe that I may.

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¹ “A branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind.”
² “Theology dealing with salvation especially as effected by Jesus Christ.”

Not really webcomics, but since I’m on the PR list of a widely-connected guy named Chase Wang¹, I get lots of info on PC technology, games, and pop culture events. One of Chase’s recurring clients has been the upcoming AM2 (animation, manga, music) convention the first week of July. The latest announcement from which reads:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AM2 ANNOUNCES THE TOKYOPOP LIQUIDATION SALE

Yeah. With so many creators of Tokyopop’s OEL line left — abandoned is the only word I can come up with — I’m sure it’s a great comfort to them to know that somebody’s makin’ money off of an everything-must-go fire sale, but it surely ain’t those that wrote and drew the comics.

• Following up from Friday — yep, looks like Shelley’s really dead. Crap. And will the others even know of her passing? Speaking of deaths, requiscat in pace, Ivan [that particular link mostly SFW]. He’s been the centerpiece of Oglaf [which is usually the polar opposite of SFW] since the first page, even if he didn’t get a name for a good long time. And he’s really been the buttmonkey of the strip, frustrated and abused at nearly every turn, and now he’s gone.

Man, this has been a grim day, hasn’t it? Hows about some hopeful notes, each of which will require the collective efforts of numerous people working towards a common goal?

• On the one hand, you’ve got an idea for a massively-parallel comic via Twitter from Stewart Moore (link via Scott McCloud), an idea that will likely produce many marginal branchings, but also a handful that are really brilliant.
• On the other hand, there’s a Kickstart going to bring more Scott [Kurtz] & Kris [Straub] to your computers with plenty of laugh-chuckles along the way; it’s a big-budget item but with nearly 1/3 of the fundraising goal achieved since the project launched earlier today, it’s pretty good odds that you may see more of these guys in the future. Seriously — get Straub and Kurtz good and on (which may or may not be synonymous with three beers in ’em), and there’s probably not two funnier people on the planet. Can’t wait to see how this turns out.

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¹ Really.

Yeah, yeah, “webcomics” is a terrible word, always has been, and the reasons why are pretty well explored at this point, that’s not what’s relevant here. What is relevant is that so many strips seem to be between arcs, getting caught up after big pushes (lookin’ at you, TCAF 2011), or just plain quiet. My mailbag is empty (once I share the springtime miracle-of-life link below), and I’ve always got a backlog of potential stories there.

You know what? Screw it. I’m spending this weekend enjoying myself (hell, I even took off work the start of next week), so let everything go quiet for a week. It’ll come back. In the meantime:

• Corners seem to be turning. The Mystery War is over (with a final tally of Girls 7, Boys 8, given the ending of The Case of the Damned United, and how The Case of the Good Boy seemed to be one for the girls to my eye) leading one to wonder what interactions the six Tackleford Youngsters will do with their time. Probably kissing. Two weeks of guest strips and mysteries in the meantime.
• More corners: is Paul Taylor really killing off a main character? Yeah, plutonium is pretty serious stuff, but did Shelley really go someplace else physically and for real, or was it all just a metaphorical journey? It was certain that Monica would have to die to stop the calendar machine and she came through that with just a … detachable blade in her skull. Wait, detachable blade? And power source for what?
• Speaking of unspeakable horrors, those of you that get the jibblies from bugs might not want to click on this next link — it’s a six page comic detailing some of the more ick-inducing means that insects have of reproducing. If you’re curious but fearful, the text introduction gives a non-visual summary of the comic’s goings-on, along with a description of how it came to be. Ladies and gentlemen — Mother’s Day.

Yesterday was Draw Cat Rackham Day, and now that it’s over the accounting can finally begin. As of press time, Steve “Monstro” Wolfhard has collected more than 100 Cat Rackhams into a Flickr set, and a Twitter search on draw cat rackham shows dozens if not hundreds of references and contributions since Anthony Clark kicked it off yesterday morning. Naturally, messing with the search terms a bit (say, searching on just “cat rackham”) significantly expands the results set, to the point that we may never see all the Cat Rackhams.

In the meantime, please enjoy my favorites (so far), starting with the aformentioned Clark’s drawing, and wonderful drawings by people whose first names link to their own sites and whose family names link to their Cat Rackhams: Graham Annable, Vera Brosgol, Emmy Cicierega, JP Coovert (is that a Rich Stevens cameo? Dude loves cats like nobody’s business …), Joe Decie, Aaron Diaz¹, Dustin Harbin, Stephen Heintz, Mark Luetke, and Kean Soo.

Completely unrelated to anything else, I received an email through that contact link over there to the right that left me scratching my head:

Hi Gary,

I’m writing to let you know that we posted an article, “50 Healthy, Low-Cal Cocktail Recipes for the Aspiring Skinny Girl”(http://redacted). I just thought I’d share it with you in case you thought it would appeal to your readers.

Thanks for time!
Ken Martin

First of all, you’re welcome for time, Ken Martin! Thing is, I’m having trouble figuring out why you thought my audience were particularly interested cocktail recipes that feature abominations like diet soda and Splenda (may as well throw in some Pucker and make it the trifecta of things no right-thinking person wants anywhere near their booze). Also, I’m doubly curious why you’re building a link farm on a site that purports to be a supplier of information on nursing schools.

If only you had given me some plausible reason to pass your internet ad dollar chasing attempts on to my trusting readers. Next time, provide an opportunity to help the recently-deposed president of Ivory Coast move $90 million to the US with a generous share for an honest person willing to provide a Social Security Number and bank account number, and we at Fleen might be able to help.

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¹ The Latin Art-Throb.

That photo is one dromaeosaurid away from being Randall Munroe‘s worst nightmare. Then again, how can you hate the clade that gave us Bambiraptor?

• For those of you that didn’t make it to the Save Yourself, Mammal! launch party this past Sunday, there is photographic evidence of the fun that you missed out on. The book is still listed at the same link as the just-concluded pre-order it’s been shipping for a couple of days now over at Breadpig; presumably the coming weeks will bring sales points at Zach Weiner’s Internet Weinerporium, aka his TopatoCo storefront.
• Via the mailbag, from Noel:
  

  Friday May 13th is going be the second Dialogue Free Comics Day. It’s when we encourage webcomics to concentrate on the visual side of things and post a comic with no dialogue in it. We had a great response last year and are hoping for even more this year.

  I’ll be honest, I missed this being A Thing last year, but the idea intrigues me. The date of Friday was set on 20 April, but I have only recently heard that this was going around, so I’m unsure how big a response there will be from creators, but it’s a really interesting idea. One of those stretch your cartooning muscles type exercises, even.