Let’s reward the situation with slight webcomics news.

• Steve Jackson Games, which has been in the business of making nerd entertainments roughly forever (hands up everybody that played Car Wars instead of dating at any point in your personal history), also has a history of intersection with webcomics. For instance, numerous webcomickers have contributed cards to the Munchkin series of games, and Dork Tower creator John Kovalic is practically the SJG house illustrator. Now anybody can join that rarefied group of talents:
  

  Do you publish a webcomic? Are you a Munchkin? Do you like . . . GOLD PIECES?

  We will be running a month-long contest for webcomics that refer to the Munchkin game. At the end of the contest, the SJ Games Men in Black (our demo team, hundreds strong) will vote on the winners.

  Short version: prizes up to $1000 for the judged portion; a parallel contest will be open to public voting, but given that such a scheme gives an advantage to already-popular webcomics, this contest will be for donations (again, up to $1000) to the creator’s favorite charity. The mechanics and rules are here, but several items should be called out for your attention:

  2. You may use images or representations of the Munchkin game, characters, logos, or monsters as long as you acknowledge that Steve Jackson Games retains ownership of the characters and monsters depicted [SJG provides boilerplate text for this, and will allow reprints of these comics in collections with the same acknowledgement].

  5. If your comic burns out the eyes of our staff members, it’s out of the running. We have no doubt that some of you have the power to squick some of us. Please don’t.

  8. You must be cool with worldofmunchkin.com linking back to all entries, and permanently hosting copies of the winners with links back to their regular sites.

  9. The contest begins on May 1, 2011 and ends on June 1, 2011.

  10. The e-mail entry must be sent to SJ Games by noon (Austin time) on June 1, 2011. Please include your name, address, and e-mail address.

  11. Employees, immediate family members of employees, MIBs, contractors, or freelancers of SJ Games may enter the contest but are not eligible to win at higher than Honorable Mention level. If ineligible people do something cool, we’ll celebrate it — we just won’t write you a big check for it. We might hire you afterward if you’re not careful.

  Item #11 is what will keep Kovalic from winning automatically, so that’s good. Personally, I think you should get bonus points if you can work in Wil Wheaton somehow, but it’s not up to me. Check out the full set of rules and create something amusing.

• I apparently spoke too soon yesterday about Wondermark‘s birthday passing unremarked-upon; starting today, and continuing for a massive eight pages, David Malki ! presents the Nominally-Essential Tinkerer’s Handbook, which appears to be what you get when David Malki ! attends a machining class and then freebases a two-year backlog of MAKE.

  This massive creation is, naturally, in addition to tonight’s live stageshow which — we have just learned — will feature cake. Birthday cake, as today marks six months since the release of Machine of Death (which is like 17 years in human time). Fun! Excitement! DJ Malki !-Malk ! droppin’ fat rhymes! And if you can’t make it in person to Holllllywood’s Fake Gallery, you can take advantage of the livestream here, starting at 8:00pm Pacific (UTC -7). The only thing you’ll miss out on not being there in person is the magnificent, personal magnetism of Malki ! (I think it’s some kind of pheromone) and the other performers.¹

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¹ And the cake. Delicious, delicious cake.

Many things today:

• The Hugo Award nominations are out and as expected, Schlock Mercenary (by Howard Tayler, aka my evil twin) and Girl Genius (by Phil and Kaja Foglio aka the most charming people in the world) both have print collections up for Best Graphic Story. It’s worth noting that Tayler is also nominated in the Best Related Work catgory for Writing Excuses, a podcast that he produces with Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells.

  Rounding out the webcomics-related activity, Randall Munroe has been nominated as Best Fan Artist, which seems an odd fit, but it’s apparently been a category with a history of odd fits so that’s all right. Those with memberships (excepting the “Child” category) to the World Science Fiction Convention (this year in the form of Renovation in Reno Nevada) are entitled to vote on the winners, to be presented in August. Fleen congratulates the webcomicky nominees.

• Blank Label gets a little larger today as Gordon McAlpin (aka my sporting bet nemesis) brings Multiplex into the fold. In terms of visual style, storytelling style, and update schedule, this seems like a nice, complementary fit for BLC’s current members, Kel McDonald, Spike, and David Willis. Welcome aboard, Gordon.
• I see on my regularly-consulted 2011 edition of the Wondermark calendar that today marks the 8th birthday of Wondermark. One wonders if such an odd confluence of inputs — Victorian era woodcut art, David Malki !’s persistently clever wordplay (with the occasional foray into sac ants for variety), and a sense of go-for-broke creativity — could have been predicted to persist for so long and to have birthed opportunities for so many side projects. Curiously, no mention of this milestone appears on the Wondermark site, presumably because Malki ! is too busy putting together the last elements of tomorrow’s Machine of Death Live Stage Spectacular.
• We’re down to less than three hours until the second set of Chris Yates original webcomics-series Baffler! puzzles go on sale. This week’s haul includes an adorable kitty by Becky Dreistadt, ninjas by Sam Logan, and entirely SFW Chester by Jess Fink, a leapin’ McPedro by Danielle Corsetto, a typically bulgy-eyed pug by Dave Kellett, a pixel T-Rex by Ryan North, and an all-business Sheriff Pony by Jeff Rowland, all of which may be seen here. My favorite part? The cactus-shaped piece (a Yates trademark) in the McPedro puzzle. They go on sale today at 4:00pm Mountain Time (UTC-6) at the Baffler! store.
• Pre-orders are up for Zach Weiner’s first SMBC collection, Save Yourself, Mammal!. Given more than 2000 strips in the SMBC archive and this being the first collection of said strips, it’s of necessity taking a best-of approach. Which means that you’ll find no eh, it was okay strips included just because they fell in the same week as a couple of real rib-ticklers (the non-continuity aspects of SMBC make this fairly easy to do).

  As previously noted, 100% of the profits from SY,M will go to Donors Choose to fund classrooms across the US and help support the development of the next generation of tech nerds; what I didn’t see mention of before is that the book is being released under a Creative Commons license (specifically, Noncommercial 3.0 Unported), and that given the books have to be ready for the launch party in just under two weeks, your pre-ordered copy should ship starting a mere two weeks from today. All hail Weiner and the mad geniuses behind breadpig, because they know how to get things done.

Logistical note: work will, for the next couple of days, take me to the premises of a large financial institution that shall remain nameless¹ and which will provide me no net access aside from what I eke out on my phone. Minimal, severely delayed, or entirely absent updates are anticipated, and we at Fleen thank you in advance for your patience.

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¹ But the name rhymes with scold man; snacks, which sounds like notes that could be expanded into a pretty interesting update in a story-oriented comic, possibly Skin Horse.

Holiday weekend for some. Short day at work for others. Last day before weekend EMT duty for me. Let’s do this.

• Advance notice: John Allison has a holiday week coming up, and might like to feature the work of talented, less-known webcomickers at Bad Machinëry. Send him an offer (but please, no finished artwork) via the electronical mail addressing system designated john at the domain scary go round, which is a dot-com, with the subject line “strong>Better Than The Breeze Through The Twigs.
• Short notice: Super Art Fight, like the doom-proclaiming supervillain in a capes-and-punching comic, returns once more to wreak havoc. Those of you in Charm City can drop by The Ottobar (aka the villain’s secret volcano lair) tonight to get in on all the shenanigans. Doors at 9:00pm, show at 9:30, twelve bucks to get in and enjoy the mayhem.
• I spent some time yesterday telling you at length why Anya’s Ghost is the best comic of 2011. What I didn’t tell you is that the good folks at :01 were also kind enough to drop me an advanced copy of Level Up by Gene Luen Yang (words) and Thien Pham (pictures). Spoilers ahead, y’all.

  Appropriately enough for a book that concerns the education of its protagonist at length, both Pham and Yang teach high school when not making comics. Also in the amazing coincidences department, Yang and Pham dedicated Level Up to their brothers, both of whom work in medicine and thus fulfill the role of “good Asian sons”.

  And that’s what the book is really about — expectations placed on Dennis Ouyang from a young age to be a good son, to “eat bitterness” and become the doctor he is expected to be. Expectations that stand in stark contrast to his entirely ordinary kid desires to play Nintendo, desires he puts to the sides as he is expected to, until his father dies of the same disease that felled his own father. Dennis discards the expectations and falls into the videogames he denied himself and doesn’t surface for another three years.

  That’s when things get weird. Having discarded one life for another, Dennis careens back and forth between the extremes of games and medicine, each time he rejects one for the other he loses one of his lives in the metaphorical videogame that is his life. It’s only when he runs out of lives and opts to Play Again? that he realizes you can’t live your life solely for yourself, nor solely to the expectations of others. The realization comes after a reveal as to the true nature of the (rather bossy and obnoxious) angels that have been herding him towards his destiny, angels that might be a psychological manifestation of guilt, but might be real.

  Much like Yang’s American Born Chinese, Level Up is all about the experience of growing up Asian in America, but this time it’s less about the expectations of society and the struggle to fit in around the casual (and not-so-casual racism) found there, and almost entirely about family and the expectations that originate within the walls of home. It’s thoughtful, it’s revealing, and it’s got a lesson that every YA reader should take to heart. Also, it’s got the rarest of all things — an extended, non-gratuitous poop gag. Kids are gonna love it, and adults will see things that escape the younger readers. Level Up releases on 7 June, is a quick-reading 160 pages, and comes highly recommended.

For those of you that are in a hurry, I’m going to lead with a tweet I wrote immediately after finishing Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol:

Just finished “Anya’s Ghost” by @verabee & about to read it again. Going to preemptively declare it the best comic of 2011 now.

Not that I was surprised by how much I loved the book; everybody that’s received an advance copy and written or blogged or spoken about it has raved, and when I saw display copies on the :01 Books table at MoCCA Festival, I had to force myself not to pick one up because I knew that I would turn into a booth barnacle, unable to put it down until I’d read it cover to cover. Gina Gagliano at :01 was kind enough to set me up with my own advance copy, which proved my suspicions about the depths of my monofocus were correct. I’ve read this book cover to cover four times in the last 18 hours; it’s just that good.

For those of you that want more than that, read on but be aware: these be spoilery waters. Actually, I’m going to try to keep the plot details to a minimum, because this book deserves to be read with all of its twists and turns intact, but there is an obvious place to start, right on the cover: there is Anya, and there is a ghost — not the ghost of Anya (who is very much alive), but a ghost that decides to hang around Anya. The relationship between the two is one of the core elements of the story, and it shifts in fits and starts (just as relationships do, particularly when you are a teenager and That Way About Things).

But Gary, I hear you cry, I thought you said you would try to minimize spoilers, and now you’re telling us what Anya’s like! No spoilers there — just go back and look at the cover again, and tell me that Brosgol hasn’t distilled the very essence of the disaffected teen into so very few, very simple lines. The slightly slumped posture, the grumptacular shape of the mouth, the affectedly world-weary eyes all convey everything you need to know about Anya (namely, that you already feel sympathy for her mom, and that if Anya ever grows out of this stage she will look back at this part of her youth and cringe).

Now take a look at Anya’s Ghost (she gets a name later, don’t worry) and the contrast in character that’s evident — smiling, one finger up to the mouth conveying some sense of minor mischief or coquettishness, but fundamentally light-hearted and free as much as Anya is heavy and burdened by life.

Except you know from looking at Anya that her burdens aren’t as severe as she thinks they are, and if her outward appearance is quite reflective of reality, what differences might there be between how Anya’s Ghost appears and what she actually is? Mischief comes in many degrees, after all, and ghosts tend to hang around because there’s something they can’t let go of. They want something badly enough to transgress the usual way of things, and having those wants frustrated for how many years before you die, and then how many more afterwards? That requires a determination that few can stand against. The cover image speaks of the battle of wills (and will-nots) that’s brewing in a New England suburb.

(It should be noted here that apart from the incredibly evocative art that Brosgol supplied for the cover, the physical book cover — by the incomparably talented Colleen AF Venable, of whom this page has spoken numerous times — is a thing of beauty. The lines depicting Anya’s Ghost are embossed on the cover, giving a physical reality to her insubstantial existence, and interestingly a physical reality defined by absence. The letterforms that spell out the words Anya’s Ghost are debossed, rising up above the surface of the rest of cover, leaving Anya herself behind and intruding into the reader’s space. The use of layers here echoes the layers of the stories that Anya finds herself navigating and it’s a brilliant design.)

Let’s share one more bit of artwork from the book — this is from the inside front cover, and it’s a damn good example of how well Brosgol can reveal a character’s mood and inner thoughts without using a word. I was particularly drawn to the eyes, and how much can be conveyed by those circles and a few incidental lines. Heck, for most of the book, Anya’s Ghost doesn’t even have pupils, but she’s convincingly portrayed across a range of moods from “innocently needy” to “murderous rage”.

That spectrum of different personalities applies to pretty much all of the characters, whether its “self-absorbed” to “maturing as the result of bad decisions”, “nerdy and annoying” to “I was like you”, “object of aspirational crush” to “what a jerk”, and “why are we friends” to “why are we friends after not being friends for a bit”. The progressions feel natural, unforced, and less the result of changes in the characters than the result of peeling away layers and looking a little deeper.

The only thing about looking a little deeper? Sometimes what we find isn’t pleasant, and sometimes the difference between a ghost (that wants what it wants and will do whatever is necessary to achieve its wants) and the person that ghost used to be is little more than a pulse and a bit of solidity. Surfaces don’t always reflect depths, and learning that lesson turns out to be more important to Anya than all the biology exams and physical-fitness evaluations in gym class. Luckily, most of us learn those lessons with fewer supernatural threats than Anya has to deal with.

So here we are, nearly 1000 words into this thing, and I still haven’t said anything yet about the wicked sense of humor that Brosgol brings to the story¹, about the chill you’ll get down your spine when you see the Crazy Eyes, the little details in Anya’s Russian immigrant home life that make her feel so fleshed-out, or the painfully real path that Anya navigates as a modern teenage girl dealing with social pressures and body issues. I could go on for another 1000 words and still not address these adequately, so let’s just finish up with the facts: Anya’s Ghost goes on sale on 7 June. It is 224 pages long, was written and drawn by Vera Brosgol, and is the best comics work of 2011.

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¹ Those unfamiliar with how sharp Brosgol’s humor can be are encouraged to watch her animated short, Snow-bo.

There are some webcomics books that I should like to commend to your attention. I also have a couple of non-webcomics books (at least, not directly webcomics books, but by creators with webcomics in their histories) that I will be commending to your attention at some length in the coming days. Oh yes, I shall.

• If you are like me, then you enjoy little in this life as much as the work of John Allison. Bad Machinëry (I do like the look of the children’s adventure story books denoting the chapters) is a delight, and the earlier Scary Go Round was an integral part of my daily entertainments. It’s over, it’s done, but even Allison can’t resist revisiting logical story hooks, thus last year he took a peek back in time as “Dark” Esther de Groot went to university and encountered an entrenched power structure that can only be dealt with by punchings. It is mathematically equivalent to awesome, and it is now available in non-electric form for a piddling £4 plus shipping. Actually, I’m not sure that four bob is piddling, what with the US dollar tanking and all. Ah, hell, in for a pound, in for more pounds, because you can personalize for another eight quid.
• As long as you’re breaking out the plastic, may I recommend you save some for the forthcoming new edition of Rice Boy? It’s been sold out for some little time now, but Evan Dahm’s Kickstarter to fund the new printing has achieved approximately 250% of goal (with three days left to go); per Dahm’s twitterfeed, the excess funds raised means that the new printing will number 3000 books, instead of the 1000 in the first printing. For those that enjoy the finer things (or those that already own Rice Boy and are obsessive completists), there will be a first-ever hardcover edition, in a limited run of 200 books.
• Know what else today needs? An anthology. The Couscous Collective put out the FOREST themed volume (their first) at APE), and they’re following it up with the SPACE themed volume, which launched last weekend at Stumptown. For those of you that might fondly recall Narbonic, Shaenon Garrity (Radness Queen of the East Bay) has included the first original Narbonic in five years. For those that like to plan ahead, the next Couscous collection will be on the theme of OCEAN, and will continue the twice-a-year, APE-and-SPX schedule.
• Not book, but worth mentioning: anybody that had doubted that Robert Khoo had managed to whip Penny Arcade into a real business, consider the most recently-announced Child’s Play fundraiser: a golf tournament. There will be beverages and snacks and powered carts, but please remember to adhere to the expected behavioral norms of the golf course. Nobody wants to be that guy that embarrasses everybody else.

Contrary to the occasional snarky aside on this page (always meant in good fun), the newspaper comic is not entirely dead or devoid of creativity. Strip cartooners still exist that push the limits of craft, given the limitations of editorial dictates, space, declining revenues and deadlines, cartooners who know that having restrictions can result in more funny, cartooners who aren’t just phoning it in so they can make their 11:00am tee time.

Among modern cartoonists (web, newspaper, and other), it’s pretty much agreed that Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson¹ is the epitome of the strip craft. And Richard Thompson is the subject/honoree of a project that could use your assistance, if you’d be so kind.

If you’ve seen Thompson at a convention (I saw him on a particular interesting SDCC panel in July 2009), you may notice that he has a sometimes better, sometimes worse tremor in his hands (aside: I can’t think of a more terrifying thing for a cartoonist to face, yet his lines are confident and controlled). What I didn’t know when I saw Thompson speak (although he had announced it about a week earlier) is that he has Parkinson’s Disease.

It’s chronic. It’s degenerative. It can lead to cognitive problems in the late stages. It has treatments that are of varying efficacy, but no cure.

Thompson’s friends would like your help teaching this “pain in the fundament” who’s the boss. As part of the TeamFox initiative to support Parkinson’s research, there is now a Cul de Sac fundraising team, but the organizers aren’t asking for your cash (at least, not just yet). They’re asking for cartoonists to donate original art (on the theme of Fun) to support a book that will be used to fundraise:

We are inviting cartoonists like you to donate original art made especially for a book about Parkinson’s awareness in Richard’s honor. Part of the profits from the sale of the book would benefit the Michael J Fox Foundation (MJFF), and the original art will be auctioned as part of the fundraiser with all of auction money going to MJFF. Additionally, there will be a limited number of deluxe edition books signed and numbered by Richard Thompson.

The theme is going to be fun. It is your take on the Cul de Sac characters. Please run with them; deconstruct them, parody them, confuse them, cubisize them, psychoanalyze them, draw them in your own strip, whatever tickles your fancy. Enjoy. Open up your heart and just create something out of the ordinary, maybe not with your own characters, but this is an opportunity for you to let your talent to shine in a wide range of ways.

Please write a little text as well, if you would. Not necessarily about Richard or PD, but inspiration, technique, influences, determination, strength, spirituality, etc.

By all accounts I’ve ever heard, Richard Thompson may be the nicest guy in cartooning; to hear that he’s inspired others to take such a creative, positive approach to giving that sonofabitch disease the finger seems entirely in character for him. Contact information is on the TeamFox page, and I’m suggesting to webcomicdom that we ought to absolutely bury the organizers under more artwork than can possibly be included in the book, artwork that will still be auctioned to support research. Give it your best shot, and do something in honor of a master craftsman whose work you should be studying closely if you aren’t already.

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¹ Not the Richard Thompson who has the nimblest guitar-picking fingers on the planet, but wouldn’t it be awesome if it was?

Quick logistical note before we get started — Fleen’s had a WordPress upgrade, so there’s a slight chance of weirdness in the immediate term; if you notice anything wonky, please use the contact box over there to the right.

• By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the picture up above; if not, you have a bit more than three hours to find some money and try to get in on some sweet webcomics Baffler! action. Seems that webcomics very own hyperactive Tintin with a scrollsaw, Chris Yates, has teamed up with a bunch of his buddies to create original Baffler!s based on their iconic characters and designs.

  Thus you got yer pirhanamoose, yer Beartato, pre-screaming horror bunnies, Biff‘s spaceship, Mania (as played by Commissioner James Gordon), a momentarily non-evil Pintsize, a surprised Meatloaf, and a self-portait by Rebecca Clements. They go up for sale at 4:00pm MDT (UTC-6) today. and Mr Yates has priced them exceedingly fairly, especially considering:

  1. There’s only one of each
  2. He’s splitting the proceeds with the respective creators
  3. At least three of them would spark highly-lucrative bidding wars if they were placed up for auction

  More Bafflers! with more characters coming next week, and if the voices of disappointment are especially legion perhaps Yates and the respective comickers would consent to more runs of similar designs in future? We can hope.

• In other news, I wound up following a trail of Project Wonderful ads and wound up on a webcomic I’d never heard of before that I found interesting enough to archive trawl. Taking a fresh spin on the (frankly tired) zombie genre, The Other Grey Meat posits a society where all humans have been “enlightened” and everybody you know is a zombie. Only the least-evolved are the shambling wrecks that you know, with individuals benefiting from a brain-eating pyramid scheme and getting smarter based on how many brains their ‘children’ have eaten.

  This society is ruled by the guy at the top of the pyramid, the one who makes the brain-substitute that all zombies subsist on (think Soylent Grey). There are cracks in the society, and a single human who doesn’t know how he survived the zombocalypse, and an art style that somewhat resembles mid-period Questionable Content (that last point is slightly disorienting, to tell you the truth). All in all, worth a couple hours to get caught up with the story.

• Speaking of death, I found an odd confluence between Friday’s Chainsawsuit and today’s posting at Webcomics Dot Com [subscription required to read more than the abstract]. To wit: what happens to your creations when you die? Neil Gaiman discussed this same topic and did the creative world the favor of presenting a sample will naming an executor specifically for intellectual properties. It’s worth a read if you have creations that you wouldn’t want to see misused after you no longer have a say.

There’s a new interview with Robert Khoo over at Bitmob. It’s pretty brief and it doesn’t really cover new ground, but it’s got the basic information about Khoo, his role at Penny Arcade, and how things got started & grew from there. It’s the sort of thing that needs to run somewhere about once a year, because there’s always going to be new readers that don’t know the story yet. Sort of like how every update to your comic will be somebody’s first time, so you’d better have something that appeals to the new reader.

We haven’t seen an outside really do the in-depth interview that crawls inside Khoo’s skull yet (although I suspect that if such a thing exists, it would look a lot like a transcript of 100 or so appearances by Khoo in PATV, reconstituted into a single narrative whole), which is likely a function of time. Khoo is constantly in motion, and there are Bond supervillians that work fewer hours in a week¹.

Someday, when he retires from the PA job (in the month or so I give him before he gets bored and dives into the next 100 hour/week long-term project), maybe I’ll get Robert to sit down with me and a bottle of very good liquor and pick his brain on everything from business strategies to hiring practices to the finer points of wrangling creative types. In the meantime, we can put together our mental models; just remember, Robert is always one step ahead of you. Always.

Short Takes:

• Rigby the Barbarian creator Lee Leslie (who I know I’ve written about, but for the life of me can’t find in our archives at the moment) writes to let us know that he’ll be one of the creative team on the new Image comic, SCREAMLAND, with the first issue dropping in June. Interesting hook on this one: what happens to all of the monsters that used to star in the classic monster movies, now that their careers are over?
• Last summer, we told you about an upcoming Ryan Sohmer comic book project called Messiah, about the latest in a series of would-be saviors called by The Big G to do some holy work. I was afraid I’d missed it, but Sohmer tells me that he’s working on the end of the series now, which means when it launches, all six issues will be done, meaning it’s a new comic book title that won’t have late issues. I know! Weird!
• Stumptown happens this weekend, with a panel on Sunday I’d like to commend to your attention:
  

  12:00-12:45pm
  National Cartoonist’s Society — Join syndicated cartoonist Matt Bors for an peek inside the most prestigious organization for cartoonists: the National Cartoonist’s Society. Joining the discussion are syndicated cartoonist Jack Ohman, Jen Sorenson, and Scott Kurtz. [emphasis added]

  For the love of Darwin, somebody videotape this.

• Let’s end with a bit of housekeeping, if you’ll indulge me: I’ve had a number of requests that I check out comics recently, both new and celebrating milestones, that aren’t going to be written up here. While these included extremely basic (bordering on crude) work that’s not yet worth mentioning (and it’s gratifying that I’ve never really had the problem that other commentators and reviewers have had with creators who think that reviews are legally required to be gushingly positive — I write about what grabs me and people don’t seem to take it personally when their work doesn’t grab me), there’s a second major reason some of these comics aren’t ever going to get a writeup:

  I can’t see them.

  If your hosting is so intermittent, or so slow that your site doesn’t render in a reasonable amount of time, or if it’s so browser-specific in its coding, or so dependent on Javascript (or Flash or similar technologies) that it won’t display anything in bog-standard HTML (and here’s a hint: I don’t turn on script execution for sites I don’t already know and trust), I am not going to see your comic. But it works fine for me is not a valid protest — you are not your target audience. But nobody else has a problem with Javascript or Flash or whatever is not my problem. This is how I browse to minimize the possibility of drive-by nasties infecting my computer, and it’s not negotiable.

  From time to time I’ve seen creators post to their blogs or newsboxes or twitterfeeds that they’ve done some changes to their sites, and Could everybody please take a look and see if there are any issues and tell me what browser and O/S you’re using? That’s a site I’m going to read. So yeah — don’t make it difficult/impossible for me to read, and I’ll give your comic a look. Still no promise I’m going to write it up, but you’ve got to get over that first hurdle first.

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¹ Then again, it’s relatively easy as a Bond supervillian to knock off early, you have all those minions to do the detail work. If Khoo ever got an army of minions, I’d expect the UN to be receiving unauthorized transmissions from a hidden volcano lair at regular intervals.

Lots of webcomics crossing significant boundaries this week.

• For starters, The Book of Biff (which just about exactly one year ago crossed the 1000 strip mark) is spending this week celebrating its fifth birthday, with plenty of guest strips to celebrate. Doug Savage, Zach Weiner, and the Gene/Bill tag-team strips have all been great successes, as their respective art styles are pretty compatible with Biff creator Chris Hallbeck’s.

  Today, though, Lar de Souza & Ryan Sohmer take center stage with a horrifying vision of what Biff + verisimilitude looks like. Plus I just read the new Guinea PI book the other day, so that look of hamster panic is just … wrong. At this rate, we’ll see Alex Ross or Greg Horn contributing tomorrow’s strip, so clear out those Uncanny Valley storage tanks, ’cause there’s a heapin’ helpin’ of nightmare fuel a-comin’.

• Today also marks the 3000th update of the increasingly inaccurately-named Irregular Webcomic; check me on this, David Morgan-Mar’s missed about what? Two updates in the past eight-plus years? Something like that. As noted 1000 days ago, Dr Morgan Mar was in a fairly exclusive siblinghood of about two dozen creators, and is now in a fraternity of perhaps eight or nine.

  So how long is 1000 more strips? Long enough that since #2000 arrived (where I spoke in terms of lunar exploration), Morgan-Mar could have begun a trip to Mars, puttered around on the surface for three months, come back, and still have been home for a year. Give him a hand and realize one thing: given the time zone differences, Morgan-Mar is by now flying to Ecuador on holiday, which means he has already queued up the next 20 or 30 comics to be delivered while he’s enjoying himself someplace awesome.

• Since we’re dealing with Big Round Numbers, we’ll note that barring a grave accident that destroys the plant, Schlock Mercenary will hit 4000 strips in about six weeks (which means that Howard Tayler is probably finishing the inks on the update in question sometime this afternoon), above which threshold there’s thin air and far, far above the twinkling lights reflected from MS Paint Adventures. Heck, give him two weeks and a case of energy drinks, and Andrew Hussie could have more Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff updates than most other webcomics will ever achieve. I am absolutely certain that he will eclipse Tezuka’s lifetime achievement of 150,000 pages of comics; dude’s a machine.

Anyway, congratulations to Hallbeck and Morgan-Mar, and to Tayler and Hussie in advance.

• Those of you on the Left Coast, bottom corner, there’s a gallery show coming up that you should be checking out. In what is doubtless only the first of the multiple projects that were hinted at by Frank Gibson over the weekend, Becky Dreistadt will be teaming up with Lorelay Bové for two-person show at Gallery Nucleus in LA. Can’t wait to see the show catalog; the sheer amount of whimsy on the display will be out of all reasonable expectations.

So the next tweet generator is making the rounds, and I think it cries out for mash-up with this week’s other source of existential horror, Chicks With Steve Buscemeyes. Webcomickers being the perverse lot that they are, I expect to see fumetti mixing the two by the end of the week. As the AV Club would have it, Check your boners at the door.

• In far less disturbing news, may I point you towards Sin Titulo? I try not to be anxious between updates (that is, after all, what RSS is for, and the irregular updates mean that I get to go back and re-read vast swaths to catch up with the story again and gosh what a burden to dive deep into such good comics), and that patience has been rewarded. Regard: not one, but two updates on consecutive days. Lo, Cameron Stewart did smile upon us, and it was good.
• Looking down the guest/exhibitor list, it almost seems like last weekend’s MoCCA Festival was just a webcomics warm-up for this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Fest. It’s certainly the case that no city goes as all-out for their local comics show as Portland, evidenced by the involvement of the mild-mannered mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, who is secretly SAMDROID, compellingly handsome local superhero. Somehow, I don’t see Bloomberg doing that when NYCC comes around¹.
• Know who’s gonna be at Stumptown? Well, yeah, lots of people, but for the moment I’m thinking about Sarah Glidden, who will be doing the special guest thing. She’s also got the start of a followup to her acclaimed How To Understand Israel In 60 Days Or Less, in the form of a 21 page preview of her next work of investigative/documentary comics. Namely, The Waiting Room, about the experiences of Iraqi refugees in Syria, which is presently hosted by Cartoon Movement (editorially curated by Matt Bors), himself no stranger to the less hospitable places in the world. Compelling stuff.

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¹ Although if there were a big Washington, DC comics show, I’m pretty sure that Biden would be there. Just ask R Stevens if you doubt that he’s some kind of train-themed superhero.