So a couple of apropos of nothing observations:

• It’s an oldy, but a goodie: psycho wang shakin’ primate is a combination of words that is never not hilarious. This comic actually went up about six weeks before this blog debuted, and it still makes me laugh out loud every time.
• Burning up the twitters today (I saw the link when Raina Telgemeier retweeted Bill Amend) is a beautiful comic on artistic potential and telling those voices that say you can’t, everything’s too limiting to drop dead. As near I can tell (seeing as how I don’t read Norwegian), Jellyvampire is a new webcomic (only a month and a half-dozen updates old), some of which appears to be plot–oriented in Norwegian, and some of which is non-plot-oriented and in English, by a cartoonist named Ida Eva. Messing around the site (did I mention it’s in a language I don’t speak or read?), I found a bunch of work by other cartoonists, at least some of which make decent sense regardless of language barriers. Explore, enjoy.
• I don’t think I have ever hated a fictional character as much as I hate Clarice (formerly known as Agent 146 ) over at A Girl And Her Fed. I am including Sauron and Cruella de Ville in that statement (but not their hypothetical offspring). What do you do with somebody so irredeemable, when you live in a world where ghosts are an objective reality and killing them only makes them stronger? I want to see Clarice broken down to her constituent pieces and her mind taken apart to the point that she’s nothing but autonomic reflexes. I hate her that much, which I guess means that AGAHF creator Otter is doing her job.

  NB: Clarice the murderous cyborg bitch-goddess is not to be mistaken with Clarice the librarian and part-time dominatrix; Clarice the librarian is cool.

• From the mailbag, Kevin writes:
  

  I am trying to nail down stats on (A) how many newspaper cartoonists remain in the U.S.; (B) how many syndicated comic strips remain, and (C) how many strips are now available online. I also am trying to get a sense how many online cartoonists are making a living at this. If you can help, I can cite you as my source.

  (B) would probably be the easiest to determine, in that there are only a few syndicates left, and looking down their list of offerings should give a pretty good number. (A) will probably be about the same as (B), in that some cartoonists do more than one strip, some partner up on the same strip, and there are some in-house cartoonists here and there. (C) entirely depends on what you count as a “strip online” (Solely online? Primarily online but collected to print? Originally print but tangentially online? English language only — see the second item, above?), and when it’s worth taking note of.

  I’m guessing that the Powers of Ten approach is the best that you can do: at any given time, there’s on the order of¹ 100,000 webcomics, 10,000 of which see more than a week’s worth of updates, 1,000 of which have an audience beyond immediate friends and family, and 100 of which allow their creators to make “a living” (the definition of which is its own can of worms). Anybody got a better set of numbers, the comment link is down there.

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¹ Naturally, “on the order of” means that you could easily go up or down by a factor of ten. In other words, it’s the opposite of anything resembling an accurate measure.

As some of you may know, I teach for a technology company. Today is the first delivery of a new course, and there are a million little things going wrong that, if not cleaned up, will kind of make the rest of the week not … happen. As such. You may well imagine that paying customers want the entire week to happen, seeing as how they paid for it and all. So, short on time.

• Luckily, I can just point you to any random tweet that mentions hashtag #tcaf from the past 48 hours or so (or check out the pictures), and you can get an idea of what Christopher Butcher and his crack staff put together. No lie, I gotta get up to Toronto next year, since I’ve never heard anybody (exhibitor or attendee) with any serious complaints about the completely free show. Well done, everybody from TCAF.
• On the but what’s happening now front, may I present the return of F Chords? It’s been a little less than two and a half years since Kris Straub wrapped up the first side of the story of Ash and Wade, two aspiring and/or itinerant musicians from Austin. As anybody who remembers records (they were these big things made out of vinyl that existed before CDs, kids) will recall, there’s always at least two sides to an album (and sometimes more, if it was a multi-disk set), which means we’ve finally flipped the vinyl over for the rest of the music. Story. Look, forget the tortured analogies; it’s back and it’s funny, okay?
• Speaking of tortured, did you catch the big damn story twist at Spacetrawler today? I don’t think that Pierrot and Krep are dead, since it’s unlikely Nogg would know about their “final” conversation unless they related it at a later point, and he hasn’t actually told Mr Zorilla that they died, and refers to them in the present tense. No, the big damn twist deals with one of the fundamental secrets of the Eebs, which leaves (I’m guessing) at least two more (spoilers ahoy, BTW):
  1. Why do they brain-clamp themselves, knowing it renders them a slave species?
  2. What is the secret of the spacetrawlers? Remember, Yuri apparently knows, which maybe means she is more Eeb than human now, if they were able to tell her.

  Put it all together, and I’d guess we’re about at the 1/3 mark of the overall story, just about the point where what we thought was the major obstacle/goal of the story gets revealed as a trivially small bump in the road and all the characters go Oh, shit when they realize what’s actually in front of them. Sounds good to me.

Everybody’s on their way to TCAF, it’s quiet, and it’s Friday afternoon. Briefly, then:

• John Allison and about a zillion other British [web]comics artists are collaborating on an anthology that looks pretty damn good. Instead of focusing on a broad theme, each of the creators will tell the story of one day in the life of Nelson “Nel” Baker, with the days contributing to the overall story of one woman’s life. Look for Nelson in November (in the UK, at least), with all profits from the first edition going to the housing charity Shelter.
• After a period of hiatus, Registered Weapon is shortly to return with President’s Day, the first of two new stories. To my mind, Registered Weapon goes hand-in-hand with Dr McNinja or Axe Cop in the combination of traditional comic book styles & conventions with just enough crazy to make it really absurdly fun. Seeing as how the good doctor has his new book debuting this weekend, and hour the good officer just finished up his three-issue Dark Horse series, it makes sense that the good, uh, cash register would be back for more adventure.
• Celebrating eight years today: Station V3. That’s a lot of damn comics (as of this writing, 2902), and with the exception of the second and third months (June/July of 2003), pretty much seven updates per week without fail. Well done, V3 creator Tom Truszkowski.
• In case you were wondering why that Wondermark strip from today is up there, it’s because it pretty much sums up how I live my life, especially items 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10, and double-especially item 6. Let’s quote it here and bask in its glory:
  

  PROBLEMS ARE DESIGNED TO BE SOLVED. Spring into action. Make it happen. Hannibal was right: I love it when a plan comes together.

  David Malki ! comes as close as any has ever come to the soul of an engineer with that one thought.

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No footnote today? That’s unpossible!

Hey, you know whose work I really dig? Shaenon Garrity¹. I have, at various times, pointed people to her own webcomics (access to which is summarized here) and her columns (similarly, here), one of which (at Comixology) has become far more regular of late and another of which (at The Comics Journal) was absent for a while in the wake of TCJ’s revamp². It’s the latter that I wanted to point you towards today.

In returning to her TCJ writing, Garrity is taking “webcomics” as her topic (a term and form looked down upon mightily in the past of TCJ, although given much more respect in the days of Dirk Deppey’s ¡Journalista!), and turns her initial commentary to something I’ve thought about in the past: preservation.

Namely, where do all those old webcomics go? I’ve mentioned previously how I will always keep certain webcomics in my personal bookmarks, hiatused or discontinued or abandoned as they may be, because just maybe they’ll be back someday, and I intend to be waiting for them. Yet how many early works just don’t exist any longer? For instance, I greatly admired Meredith Gran’s pre-Octopus Pie webcomic, Skirting Danger; don’t bother with that link, it’s parked. I’m pretty sure that Gran doesn’t think on her early works very often; this line of thought is endemic among every webcomicker — hell, every creative person of every stripe — that I know, that every piece of creative output older than [pick an interval] from today is complete shit and nobody should ever have to suffer through it.

Imagine if Picasso had felt that way as he transitioned from one style to another. Hell, van Gogh’s CSI (complete shit interval) could sometimes be measured in hours, but dang those canvases were expensive, and those paints, and Theo could always be counted on to store a few paintings at his place so it wasn’t necessarily his first impulse to burn them. But when purging the work requires no real effort (drive crashes and/or expired domains just take enough doing nothing to occur), we are in danger of losing things that we may value more in future than at present.

I think part of the reason that I own so much original art (for instance, I own pretty much all of this storyline, plus a binder full of S*P and Super Stupor panels, more Goats originals than I can count, plus OC, Dr McNinja, Skin Horse, and a dozen more) is that it spurs in me a protective instinct. Just spread it out around the world whispers the SysAdmin voice in the back of my head, so that a disaster can’t claim all of it. When I first started collecting animation art, my gallery dealer told me she’d only sell the really good stuff to people that understood they had to preserve it for the future, 1/24th of a second at a time.

Creators, you might not think all of your work is worth preserving. You might not have thought of preservation at all (in which case, you probably ought to, if only from a keeping backups perspective until you get that next book made), or you might work purely digitally, such that there is no physical artifact to preserve. Just … think about it, okay? Anybody wants to talk to me at a show about keeping an extra thumb drive of art in a safe deposit box for them, I’m happy to have that conversation. Let’s just not let work be lost because we never considered the possibility.

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¹ Radness Queen of all Environs West of the Rocky Mountains. Also, happy birthday yesterday, Shaenon!

² A revamp which, I’m sad to say, appears to have left her cartoon dissections of the ongoing Cave of False Consciousness rants from last year entirely evaporated into the aether. Nada, zilch, and they were really funny, too.

Where to start, where to start?

• Today, PvP is a man¹. I find it oddly compelling that on the 13th anniversary of the launch of the most internetty of strips (not just about videogames, but about a videogame magazine, originally published on a videogame website), Scott Kurtz is getting in touch with historical comics styles that haven’t been in vogue for at least 20 years, and are only now seeing serious study. Here’s to another 13.
• Just in time for TCAF, Bernie Hou drops a new Alien Loves Predator poster design on us, albeit one without Abe the Alien or Preston the Predator. It’s been a long time since Hou updated, but marrying his love of movies (cf: the one-time guess-the-movie site, The Burgg, presently down due to hackage) with his love of New York. Welcome back, Bernie.
• Some brand new things that I am happy to recommend to you — one of which I get on a visceral level, and one of which is a mystery. The mystery would be this paean to coffee, as I’ve never understood the appeal of the Magic Black Water, but it certainly seems to fuel enough creativity so what the hell. The new is a Kickstarter to fund the creation of a … I’m going to go with hand-crafted … print version of the short, complete, and somewhat disturbing Think of the Children, which would be the story of William Gaines, the 1954 Wertham-fueled moral panic that destroyed horror comics, and the creation of both the Comics Code Authority (now seemingly defunct) and MAD magazine. Oh, yes, and Lovecraftian horrors from beyond imagining. Them, too.

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¹ I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry … I mean, it seems like the bris was just yesterday!

Busy evening. A t-shirt infringement was discovered, PvP went all ’50s on us, an entire Canadian election took place, and I opened my mail. Let’s take them one at a time, shall we?

• David Malki ! discovered a new low in design rip-offery, as an online storefront by the name of Tanga.com [no link for them!] not only appropriated two of his designs, they actually duplicated the descriptive ad copy word for word.

  Words fail me. You could almost argue independently coming up with the same gag concept, but that? That’s just lazy. Mr Malki ! recounted the sad affair via Tumblr, and went further to talk about what makes for a good implementation of ideas on shirts vs a bad implementation. I think it’s essential reading, as it gets pretty much to the core of what makes references to popular culture more or less worthy; key points:

  Why is this a big deal? Artists, myself included, make pop-culture references in our work all the time, and borrow ideas from other artists shamefully. Sometimes I do both at once — using artwork I didn’t draw to make jokes about a movie I didn’t create.

  Largely, it’s the difference between imitation and commentary.

  [one vendor’s] tees provoke a feeling of identification in the viewer, while [another’s] tees provoke a feeling of discovery.

  As a culture, we typically place a premium on creativity and integrity. That’s why it delights us when a creator makes something clever and new, but offends us when someone copies the work of another and profits unfairly from it.

  We may not really care that the shirt saying “I like turtles” isn’t fundamentally saying anything except “I’ve seen an internet video.” And the designer of the shirt isn’t making any creative statement beyond “Have you seen an internet video? Buy this shirt, then.”

  Do I think it’s fair to take Futurama clips and recut them into a shot-by-shot remake of The Godfather? Yes, I do. I think it’s interesting and it’s creative and it advances the culture. Do I think you should be able to sell a DVD of that? I think that decision should be left to the Futurama rights holder, who may feel that it damages the commercial prospects for their own original work — but if they don’t feel that way, or (in a perfect world) if it wouldn’t at all affect the commercial prospects for the original work, I say go for it.

  What I do find distasteful is a disregard of the rights of others for a purely profit motive. That, I think, should be stamped out when it occurs for the benefit of a creative culture generally. Artists need to feel that they can be free to create and put their work out there without fear of being ripped off. If ripoff artists are rewarded, or even just ignored, then artists suffer.

  I’m glad that our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a ripoff is to call it out and shame it. I think we’re right to feel proud of someone coming up with a new idea, or creating a new combination of old ideas, but bored or sickened by the same old lazy references being regurgitated for profit. Don’t tolerate it! Having high standards pushes the culture forward faster.

  As I am writing this, Malki ! is reporting that Tanga removed his ad copy (how nice of them) and have purged critical comments on the matter from their site. At this time, he is actively receiving communications from them, and if any new information comes to light prior to publication, we’ll go back to it.

• Scott Kurtz continues with his exploration of the golden age of strip cartooning by doing this week’s LOLBAT strips in 1950s Raymond/Toth/Drake style, which makes me glad that I plunk down a couple of bucks every other month to buy Dave Sim’s Glamourpuss. In between the plentiful shots of crazypants rambling, Sim explores the technical aspects of art from that era of cartooning, and it’s been an education to learn both how those master artists worked, and how hard it is to draw in that idiom successfully. Kurtz is never better than when he’s stretching himself, and this is a heck of a stretch. I’m loving it.
• So yeah — most every Canadian I know is via the world of [web]comicking, and they seem to be pretty unanimously gutted about Harper getting his majority back. It’s completely lamesauce, and I hope that those of you going to TCAF from these southerly climes will buy one of your hosts (in the sense that all of Canada is your host) a stiff drink so that they can medicate away the pain. You know that some of the TCAF programming is actually in a bar, right? Your gesture of solidarity could hardly be more easily accomplished.
• About three weeks back, I had the occasion to remark via twitter on one of Paul Taylor’s original art auctions — specifically, the auction of the art for a strip a month earlier that had featured in a recent write-up of how he handled some particularly dark material in Wapsi Square. I didn’t get it, but hey — that’s life.

  Except that I did. Right after the auction closed, a reader (coincidentally also named Paul) emailed to say that he had both won the auction and noted my interest in the piece, and wanted to send it to me. Five-plus years into this opinion-mongering experiment, I’m still taken aback when people I haven’t met tell me that they find my blogging to be informative and/or entertaining.

  To actually receive a gift from a reader in this fashion (as I did yesterday) leaves me utterly gobsmacked — especially since the gift-giver isn’t promoting anything or seeking attention for his own creative efforts. It’s enough to make my low and suspicious heart grow three sizes today. So thanks to Paul, and to everybody that’s ever told me they like what I do here; it’s appreciated more than I could ever adequately express.

Yeah, it’s a bit overcast, but it’s also appropriate given that Scott McCloud and Steven “Cloudy” Cloud¹ are making waves today.

• On the one hand, you’ve got process video (which I always find fascinating, despite the fact that I don’t draw, much less with technical tools) from McCloud. Not only process video from a guy who went purely digital a long damn time ago (eight or nine years by my estimate/recollection), but weirdly enough, his first process video ever. Specifically, it’s all about the McCloudian method of lettering (including balloons, tails, and suchlike) using Illustrator, in two parts (part one; part two), each a shade over ten minutes in length. Anybody that does digital production undoubtedly has worked out personal methods for this sort of thing, but seeing another’s technique can’t be a bad thing, especially if that technique’s been practiced and refined over the better part of a decade.
• On the other hand, you’ve got Cloudy’s return to Boy on a Stick and Slither; there were nearly 1200 little digressions into the deeply philosophical end of the webcomics topics pool, followed by adventure travel and other priorities for a good long while now. But the BoaS and S are back at their very own Tumblr and traversing a bunch of mental reality shifts for your workaday amusement. Any day with these two arguing the minutiae (and occasionally the maxutiae) of life is a good one, and apparently that makes for two good days, as the infinitely malleable arguers made a stealth appearance back in October that we all missed.

That’s it for today — it’s my anniversary and I’m gettin’ out of here early for some special celebratin’, if you know what I mean²
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¹ Smock, Smock, Smock, Smock, Smock, Smock.

² Pizza and TV. What?

Yesterday saw the announcement of not one, but two webcomics book collections that will debut at TCAF; the creators will be there, smiling for two days while undoubtedly selling out of their stash of readables, so I’d advise against waiting until end of day Sunday to make your purchases.

• First up: Chester 5000 XYV, the super-sexy, nearly wordless Victorian smutparty (and I mean that in the bestest way possible) from Jess Fink. A year and a half ago, it was announced that Top Shelf were picking up Chaz and friends, then a looong time went by before the release date got locked down. What wasn’t known before: it’s a hardcover! A shiny, shiny hardcover. Obligatory disclaimer: Chester contains numerous, clear, totally hot depictions of wang and lady-bits, frequently meeting each other to great, sweaty effect. It’s getting warm in here.
• Also coming out yesterday: the new Dr McNinja collection (originally slated for June release, then 18 May) is now set to drop in Toronto, and go on general sale on 11 May. Christopher Hastings is having a few site problems right now, so I can’t show you a picture from the bonus story (by Benito Cereno and Les McClaine) that Hastings has been waiting to show the world for an entire year. Let’s just say it features the entire McNinja clan driving heavily armed snowmobiles, with the exception of Doc’s sidekick, Gordito. Gordito, as always is riding his faithful ‘raptor, Yoshi — and Yoshi is driving a heavily armed snowmobile. The next twelve days cannot pass quickly enough.

Fleen congratulates Hastings and Fink¹, and encourages all attendees of TCAF to buy so many of their books. Buy them so that Fink and Hastings have to worry if they need to explain to US Customs why they’re carrying so much cash money into the country.

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¹ It is a rare treat to be able to write about Fink and not have to mention whichever lowlife is stealing one of her designs this week. The countdown to the Todd Goldman “accidental” release a Chesteresque design starts now.

Also: severe weather outlook day in the greater New York City demographical region. Yeesh.

• Okay, I don’t draw at all, and even I found the promo video for TCAF to be cool beyond all measure. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a beautiful discussion of drawing tools from a double handful of Canadian cartoonists, with a simultaneously jaunty and haunting score behind it. Everybody involved with this (and other aspects of arranging/presenting TCAF): you are wonderful. Everybody going to TCAF next weekend: I hate you, because I have to go to the dentist instead. That “everybody going” bit, by the bye, includes a significant slice of webcomicsdom, making my hatred not a real thing. You should totally go, and I’ll wish you well as my jaw cramps up.
• Speaking of video, (Dr) Jorge Cham hit us up with another of his occasional forays into academic filmmaking, but instead of a trip report (as with his New Mexico State University videos), today’s features audio from a pair of theoretical physicists talking about dark matter, their impromptu lecture given translation and interpretation by Cham’s drawings being interactively animated on-screen¹.

  It’s remarkably informative; I had a pretty good grounding in physics from my nerd school days and still had trouble wrapping my head around the (admittedly new, evolving, and still somewhat self-contradictory) ideas of dark matter, but I have a much clearer understanding now. I’ll go so far as to say that this is the greatest bit of webcomics physics education since (Dr) David Morgan-Mar derived Maxwell’s equations in a non-scary fashion; that bit had formulas and symbols and so might appeal to a bit more than today’s more intuitive piece, but they’re both wonderful. Hats off to Cham, guest lecturers Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng, and to Morgan-Mar on general principles.

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¹ If you found any of the animated info went by too quickly to read or absorb, Cham has thoughtfully provided all twelve of the pages from the short here.

What with the big stage show last night off his plate, David Malki ! ran the risk of having free time, so it only makes sense to announce that Machine of Death 2 is in the works.

What with the guy in charge making Sailor Twain and hosting Zahra’s Paradise, :01 are now even more fully in the webcomics biz.

The sparse net access that I had yesterday would go away, leaving my tapping at my phone to post.