It’s a real day for revelations in Webcomickia.

• Firstly, why is there a countdown on the Machine of Death webpage? Answer, from the Machine of Death webpage’s latest update — because that’s when the first ever Machine of Death talent show will take place. It’s in LA, it’s free, it’ll be streamed live for those of you that can’t make it to LA, and it could feature you:
  

  Just submit an audition of whatever you want to perform. Anything is allowable — a song, a performance, a reading, a dance, a video, you name it. The guidelines are:

  • The act can be a maximum of five minutes in length (shorter, punchier = better)
  • Related somehow to MOD or to the concept of a death prediction
  • Performable in front of mixed company (no nudity, Nazi uniforms, or both)
  • If you want to perform live, you must be willing to come to Los Angeles. Otherwise, we can show a video.

  Send your audition (which, if you can’t attend in L.A., will be the video we show) to: submit at machineofdeath dot net. A link to YouTube or Vimeo or something is fine. The deadline for submitting an audition is April 18. That’s not very long! Get going! [emphasis original]

  David Malki !, when cornered by me weekend before last, was very coy about what the countdown timer meant (although he gave some fascinating hints about what it wasn’t, given some of the other things that the MoD Squad seem to be working on but can’t talk about yet), and this announcement exceeds my expectations.

  Also, I think now I know why Malki !’s been taking that machining class he’s been Twittering about for the past couple of weeks — you guys I think he is going to make an actual MACHINE OF DEATH. Just remember that the card that it spits out for you says SMOTHERED BY BUNNIES, I was totally the one to think that up.

  Entirely apart from the talent show, there’s now a Machine of Death limited hardcover + goodies set, and any order from TopatoCo will get you a free death prediction card while supplies last. Here’s hoping they last until MoCCA Fest.

• Speaking of MoCCA Fest, the next answered question is, what will their programming be like? Answer: pretty cool. I won’t be able to make MoCCA on Saturday (my nephew will be recognized as an Eagle Scout that day), but the best panel looks to be on Sunday anyway:
  

  2:30pm Pizza Island: The Panel
  Moderated by Brian Heater
  Panelists: Julia Wertz, Sarah Glidden, Kate Beaton), Meredith Gran, Lisa Hanawalt
  Some of today’s brightest young cartoonists share a workspace in Brooklyn. Here is their story.

  Pound for pound, I think that’s the greatest concentration of cartooning talent in the world. Can’t wait to hear them talking about their experiences (although is Domitille Collardey not on the panel? must investigate).

• Speaking of Pizza Island, if you wondered who these amazingly talented cartoonists are, they’ve been kind enough to answer you in the form of self-portraits, which are pretty much the best things ever. Even better, they’ll be used in an upcoming piece in New York magazine, which will hopefully be less infuriatingly superficial than the last local press they received.
• Finally, speaking of Pizza Island again, lots of questions for Meredith Gran were answered in her brand new interview with Zack Smith at Newsarama. I particularly liked the discussion about the types of stories that Gran found herself moved to write while living in Portland, versus those inspired by Brooklyn. Good stuff.

My laptop’s VPN (via physical network cable) sudden died and my cell phone spontaneously rebooted at the same time. I’d call it a coincidence, except the same thing happened a few months ago with a different computer. And, um, a different phone. Still spooky. Also, my throat is killing me and I’ve got that general blah sense that makes me think I got all the way through winter without a flulike disease, only to be laid low now that spring is here. Let’s do this.

• Webcomicky signing for those of you in Portland: Mike Russell and David Walker will be hitting Bridge City Comics on Wednesday, 13 April. Also, Portland, you have too many nicknames. You can pick one of “Bridge City”, “Stumptown”, or “PDX”, and let some poor, undernicknamed midwestern burg have the excess.
• Speaking of events, the first book collection of SMBC, Save Yourself, Mammal!, hits Brooklyn on Sunday, the 8th of May. It’s a ticketed affair, and in keeping with the cheerful principles of capitalism (much the the cheerfulness with which he does everything), SMBC supremo Zach Weiner is offering you the chance to buy yourself advantages (better seats, priority position in line, physical contact with Weiner himself) at the launch.

  But in keeping with the cheerful principles of philanthropy (ibid.), all proceeds go to a pair of classroom charities via Donors Choose. In fact, Weiner’s flirting with filthy (albeit cheerful — passim) socialism, in that all proceeds from the sales of SY,M will be going to Donors Choose. Isn’t that worth your $10 to $40 (USD) (plus convenience fee)? (Yes.)

• One day, two webcomics, two hideous monstrosities from the deep. Such a coincidence hasn’t been seen since the crocodilian-themed coincidence on the day Steve Irwin died. Add that to the electronic coincidence up above, and I’m almost to the point of buying a lottery ticket. Almost.

I won’t say it out loud, I won’t say it out loud, I won’t say it out loud. Just leave my classroom already.

I listened to a good portion of Webcomics Weekly #78 on my ride to work this morning (but not the whole thing, as it clocks in at more than an hour and a half), much of which concerned itself with Chris Onstad’s recent announcement. Brad, Dave, Kris, and Scott had a rather different take on Onstad’s announcement than I did, which I guess comes more from the perspective of a creator than a consumer of these web-comical entertainments.

They were pretty unanimous that Onstad’s hiatus announcement was ungracious and unfair to his readers (which, as one of them, I didn’t pick up on) and I was puzzled by their reaction until a bit by Scott Kurtz nearly an hour in … I have to quote this part in full:

Now if a person who lives in a world where you’re lucky to have a job cannot find joy in occasionally repeating yourself when you get to do this for a living, then you need to take some of the money you made from your latest Dark Horse book and get some fucking therapy.

Now I get their point of view. Strong words, but illuminating. To fill in some info for other speculations that they had re: Onstad and willingness or reluctance to engage in commercial endeavors with his art (they were drawing from his refusal to run ads on his site), I can add the following:

• Onstad self-published regular collections of Achewood strips prior to the (three and counting) Dark Horse collections
• Judging from margin notes in the third Dark Horse volume, he miscalculated the costs of his first collection and sold at least some portion of the print run at a loss honoring pre-orders
• At least since the second Dark Horse collection (which contained the earliest strips, the first collection having been The Great Outdoor Fight) came out, I have not been able to find the self-published Achewood collections in print
• There appears to be no store associated with the Achewood site, and it has been some time since he ran a top banner advertising one of his shirts or other items of merchandise

Those last two are most disturbing to me — the last may or may not be a direct result of the Dark Horse deal (at three books and holding), but the next-to-last is almost certainly a result of his publishing agreement.

Speaking of books, we know that Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie and Jon Rosenberg’s Goats weren’t picked up for further books by their publishers, and that Archaia’s Gunnerkrigg Court publishing was so badly bungled that it took approximately two years for Tom Siddell to be able to sell copies himself (via TopatoCo, where it promptly sold out due to unmet demand). I haven’t heard anything about a fourth Wondermark collection from Dark Horse, and their Sinfest collections have been coming out on an irregular and elongated schedule.

I really hope that Christopher Hasting’s Dark Horse Dr McNinja collections sell like hotcakes, smashing all known sales records, and that it doesn’t turn out that going to a big publisher means having less stuff to sell for the rest of his career. Hastings is a smart guy, and I’m certain he took all the best information and advice he could gather into this decision, but having another party in the mix means another set of priorities that may not mesh with his own.

I’m not trying to single out Dark Horse for criticism here, they just happen to deal with more webcomics properties than anybody else — but a publisher that deals with hundreds or thousands of titles will look at a book (or series) that doesn’t perform in a spectacular, record-breaking fashion year after year, and at some point will have to (by all the laws of economic reality) say, Well, time to let that one go. That point where it’s decided to cut losses (or more likely, cut something that generates too little profit to sustain the additional middlemen of publisher and distributor) probably does not come with the same criteria that a self-publishing creator would apply. It’s not evil, it’s not misguided, it’s not shortsighted … it just is.

• Hey, let’s look at some book news that’s less melancholy, yeah? Steve LeCouilliard, creator of the Xeric-winninng Much The Miller’s Son, wrote to let us know that the third print volume of his series is on the way. LeCouilliarad didn’t mention the title of this book (I’m hoping for Electric Muchaloo or Much 3: The Muchening), but he did mention:
  

  The new book will be in a large 8 5/8in x 12 3/8in hardcover format with full color art similar in presentation to a typical bande dessinée album. Coming in June 2011!

• Got an invitation to check out a webcomic called Tales Of The Brothers Three, which has been running for a couple of years and is nicely summarized here. I’ve liked what I’ve read, but I can’t stop thinking of the old Bag Brothers Three strip from the (presently, and perhaps permanently inaccessible Mac Hall). In case you don’t happen to recall with Rain Man-like precision a throwaway gag about cheap-ass Halloween costumes from seven or eight years ago, there’s photographic proof of cosplay. Of course there is.
• Know who will never take the whole comics creator thing for granted? Ryan North. Documentary proof courtesy of John Campbell.

A bit more than five years ago (goodness, how time flies), as Paul Taylor was really ramping up the mythological doom storyline in Wapsi Square, I had the occasion to write the following:

Paul Taylor does something similar in today’s Wapsi Square. There’s been literally weeks worth of his dark storyline, with dead gods and the end of the world and portents of danger. He’s been doling out the hints of what’s going on at a furious and satisfying rate. But sometimes, you have to put all that aside for a day, and draw a big ol’ wide panel of hot girls dancing.[links altered to fit current archive structure]

Taylor’s been back to that same part of the story — what happened to three girls to turn them into a force of metaphysical rage — several times since he introduced it, each time looping a little closer to the details and getting a bit darker; if you aren’t familiar, start reading the archives around November of 2005 and work you way forward, or, go read books 2 and 3 thoroughly.

But unlike that first pass where he took time out from the doom and horror for a little (metaphorical and literal) colorful fun, or subsequent loops where he told more than he showed, this time he’s diving full into the heart of darkness. Persons unknown tried to control their world by means of sacrificing others; one decided to stop it by means brutal and probably deserved; she fell just shy of success and fell further into a horrifying fate.

This strikes me as the last iteration, the last retelling of these events from a fresh POV, and Taylor’s not sparing any feelings. It’s a gut-punch that finally brings home (unsparingly, and without mercy) what happens to sacrifices and those that cross the venal and powerful when they try to resist. The time for half-revealed truths and sparing the worst details is done, and whether we were ready to handle it or not, we’re getting the full blast of repressed, ugly suffering.

In lesser hands, it would be no better than the unimaginative “torture porn” that passes for most horror cinema these days, but I think that Taylor’s earned this look into the abyss … just don’t look too long. As you read these latest installments, hold onto the knowledge that we’re only a week or so from geeking audiophiles¹. I’m not sure if Taylor spent last week softening us up for this week’s stories, or just wanted to give us a mental lifeline to happier strips, but the happy does take the edge off.

In an entirely less profoundly disturbing corner of the world (unless you look too closely beneath the happy colors), Box Brown has established an offshoot of his delightfully eschatological Everything Dies. Having put up a couple of pixel-style comics that put the fun in fundamentalism, Brown has gathered them at their own site, Super Gods. They’re delightful, but here’s hoping that Brown hasn’t offended anybody too badly; I’m not overly worried that the subjects of his comics might take offense, but I also know that Rich Stevens is powered by coffee, breakfast, and revenge.

_______________
¹ I know some serious capital-A Audiophiles — the sort that spend and extra $25 000 when building a house to make their listening room acoustically perfect enough for their $50 000 speakers — and that last link could absolutely be a documentary of the the sheer joy these people feel over vacuum tubes. It’s a little scary.

Fortunately, it’s during those quiet days that something that might otherwise be overlooked is more easily noticed. Case in point: Dean Trippe; his work on Butterfly has been quiet of late, but it’s been more than offset by this efforts at Project Rooftop and various contributions to print comickry. But now he’s absolutely burning up the internet with details of his (sadly rejected) proposal for a book series at DC: Lois Lane, Girl Reporter:

Lois Lane, Girl Reporter follows the adventures of young Lois Lane. At eleven years old, Lois has discovered her calling: investigative journalism. She sets out to right wrongs and help out her friends. This series explores Lois’s character, reveals her surprising early influence on the future Man of Steel, and introduces fun new elements into this enduring character’s back story.

In each book, Lois will tackle a problem or mystery affecting the members of the community she finds herself in as she travels around the country. The investigations in this series will not be mystical or supernatural (though some characters may suspect such sources), but real world problems that Lois works to set right.

So far, so good, but what makes it absolutely genius is this little bit from the end of the proposed first book:

The story ends by another appearance by twelve year old Clark Kent, who helps the people of Smallville in secret, but never openly, due to his parents’ fears of his being discovered. But Clark reads Lois’s article reprinted in the Smallville Star, laying on his stomach on the living room rug. He looks over his shoulder, smiling at Martha and says, “Golly, that’s some girl, huh, Ma?” Here’s this girl fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way with no superpowers and no secret identity. Clark enrolls in his school’s journalism class the next day. That’s why Clark Kent is a reporter. Lois Lane is his hero. [emphasis added]

From my (admittedly sparse) reading of the history of Superman, for the first 30 years or so, Superman was a complete dick to Lois, and Lois was a scheming, jealous shrew trying to trick Superman into marriage. At some point they tried to make her hip, and it was only relatively recently that Lois was actually shown as any good at her job. But making her the inspiration for the future Superman? That’s a really nice twist there.

LL,GR is (or “was”, I suppose) pitched at the a female, tween audience, but it appears to have struck a nerve, in that everybody that’s read the pitch seems to be saying, Heck, I want to read that. I am a 43 year old dude, and I want to read it, because it sounds totally cool. Add to the fact that Trippe was collaborating with John Campbell (who knows a thing or two about getting to the emotional heart of things), and that there would be illustrations by P:R vet Daniel Krall (who has a style that reads like a cross between Carly Monardo, Chynna Clugston, and Jess Fink), and you have one of the great books that nobody is ever going to see (cf: Tintin Pantoja’s proposed take on Wonder Woman). But at least it got Kate Beaton sketching some 1950s-era Lois Lanes, so it’s not a complete wash.

So what happens when your comic is really, really long-running? There are archives that require more time and commitment than any rational person would want to spend in front of a computer, even with the help of Archive Binge. But even if taking print as a given, it seems to me that there are two strategies that can be utilized: the Completist approach and the Best Of approach; which will work I think will largely depend on the nature of the strip and the audience.

Case in point: Josh Lesnick’s Girly, which ran from April 2003 to September 2010. It quickly became a plot-heavy, continuity-driven strip, which is the sort of story that rewards very loyal readers, but is a challenge to newcomers (cf: John Allison’s perception of bleeding audience at Scary Go Round, and his decision to reboot into Bad Machinëry).

This is the audience that can (and will) go for a comprehensive reprint set, much like Lesnick now has up for preorder at Kickstarter — and a handsome set it is. Four books, slipcased, with tons of extras, and limited to a print run of 500 copies. As a wrapped-up story that grew ever more complex (the page counts for each of the four books is about the same, but each covers progressively fewer chapters than the one before it), Lesnick’s goal isn’t realistically going to be to bring as many people to this work as possible — this is a reward for the fans.

By contrast, PvP (May 1998 — ongoing) is a continuing strip with an intermix of noncontinuity gags and short storylines that weave together into a connected whole. Sometimes these longer story arcs play out over a considerable period of time (cf: the Brent and Jade Break Up metanarrative that wove throughout all of 2002), but a precise knowledge of all that went before is considerably less necessary than it would be for Girly readers.

In fact, PvP’s Scott Kurtz has in many ways the opposite problem of Girly’s Lesnick — by having many books in print, the logistics of keeping inventory, not letting older material cannibalize sales of new, and giving new readers a jumping-on point for the current strip made for a considerable challenge. Kurtz has mentioned the challenges of longevity on Webcomics Weekly, and hit on the solution to avoid the comprehensive back-catalog. Old strips will remain online, but that’s it for the older books — a new Best Of collection hits the highlights, sets the stage for the current stories, and clears the deck for the next ten years (or so) of periodic collections.

Also worth noting: no more books 1 through 5 in the store, no more having too much merchandise on the table (which can scare off potential customers), although you can still get the comprehensive edition while supplies last. Two situations, two solutions, and hopefully two happy audiences and two happy creators.

In other news, T-Rex posed a question today that, coincidentally, may have been answered in today’s Bucko. Fun threesomes for everybody! Bucko, by the by, has shifted from a Tuesday/Friday schedule to Tuesday/Thursday, and thus slots neatly into the space occupied by Digger until last week. Though you’d be hard pressed to find two webcomics less alike, my complete sense of bereavement has been temporarily assuaged by having a terrific new strip replace a beloved old strip in my daily trawl. Cancel the national emergency.

Been listening to the radio (WNYC, New York’s major public radio station), and it occurred to me that a couple of the pieces I’ve heard might be of interest to the Fleen audience.

On the one hand, a discussion about the works of Tove Jansson, with her niece and primary English translator. On the other, still going on (as this is being drafted) on the crowd-funding model for artistic endeavours, including the thoughts of an IP lawyer; this one is skewed more to the musical end of things, but a primary focus is Kickstarter, so still of interest to at least some of you. The art of informative conversation is not dead.

• Also of great interest is a one-sided conversation (and that’s not meant pejoratively — it’s a single voice, going in one direction, but meant to be a collaborative statement, at least in my reading) from Chris Onstad, on the topic of the sporadic nature of Achewood of late. It starts on the need to not repeat and the need to recharge, but I found the most telling part in the middle:
  

  One thing that’s always made me a bit sad is how Internet presentation seems to devalue content. So much art, writing, and news is suddenly available to us that each piece seems nearly a throwaway, lost in the gullet of our now-insatiable appetite for information. Here in the future, everyone is famous for 15kb. Fifteen reTweets. Fifteen LOLs. Should I work fifteen hours on something that will take fifteen seconds to read? The answer is yes, of course, because I love what I do, but after nearly a decade one wonders if one couldn’t do more for people with that time. Create greater and lengthier entertainment. I’d like to focus more on prose; despite the heavy foot I seem to have planted in the comics world, perhaps I can balance both by shifting the weight a bit. Some might count themselves kings of infinite space when bounded in the nutshell of six panels, but personally I’m finding it a bit cramped.

  So there’s our answer — Onstad, like anybody who creates, is entitled to work at his own pace, to his own standards, and following his own muse. We who consume his work so readily — for free! — can bitch all we like, but it won’t make the RSS feed go ping! any quicker. And let’s be honest, we will bitch, but I hope that the vast majority of us do so because we wish more, in whatever form we can get.

  The act of creation is fraught with infinitely more toil and exposure than the curation that we who comment will ever expend, and when we are freely given those creations, our primary reaction should be a sense of gratitude first and foremost. We can surely debate the quality and form of the work, but we should not take it for granted.

  I will always keep a feed open for Achewood, and hope that Onstad finds the form he wants to work in with ease. And also that he gets his store back up, as I wish to provide him money in exchange for goods (cough Achewood Cookbook II, cough)¹.

• Finally, I want to acknowledge all of the terrific conversation that was had yesterday, as side-effect of the most light-hearted and fun wedding I’ve ever attended (and I include my own in that assessment). When I grow up, I want to be Chris Hastings and/or Carly Monardo — either one, they’re both stellar people who deserve all the happiness that they bring each other, and I was honored to witness their day of joy.

  For those wishing to get a peek at what it was like, it was all over yesterday’s twitterfeeds for a significant slice of webcomickers. And future brides, take a tip from Carly — nothing keeps you on your feet for a long day of processing, dancing, visiting, receiving, and fun like a pair of Chucks.

_______________
¹ When you’ve got the time, it’s cool; Chris Onstad is not my bitch.

I’ll go further — it is the first really nice day since the near-fimbulvetr arrived with a vengeance back in December. The seasons have continued their turning, the warmth has returned, and things are growing. Let’s make this quick so I can get out there and enjoy it.

Readers may recall the package o’ minicomics that Eros, Inc. [safe for work, really!] creator Michael Jonathan sent me back in October. Some pretty good stuff in there, including one, Quail: The Song of the Blackbird EP, that I thought was perhaps a bit under-realized:

The broader framing story of [Eros, Inc.] served [two related minis] well, and Quail: The Song of the Blackbird EP seems slightly lost without that framework. That being said, nice job by Jonathan on making music an integral part of the story. I’m not certain that the tunes that popped into my head fit any of the songs that the characters sang on the pages, but the fact that they spontaneously generated in my frontal lobes says he’s doing something right.

That framework exists now, and in a form that may put your expectations and Jonathan’s on a mild collision course, maybe:

My indie-folk, kung-fu musical comic “Quail: The Song of Blackbird EP” is now available to read online in its entirety! You can find it here.

I’m meeting with a friend of mine who is going to write the music this month, so a CD should be ready in time for TCAF. [emphasis added]

So now we see if the songs in your head and the songs in the comic match up at all.

• Speaking of shows (TCAF is a show!), word came late yesterday afternoon that MoCCA Fest tables are sold out. Is it just me, or do these smaller shows (cf: Stumptown, SPX) fill up quicker every year? Everybody’s pretty much used to the megashows being locked up years in advance, but it used to be that you didn’t have legions of previous exhibitors talking about getting shut out from tabling.

  Either the small shows need to get larger, or … not sure what, actually. There’s more people than ever making really high-quality comics, and that’s good. Looks like the even newer/smaller shows (cf: MIX) are succumbing to the limits of time/space/reasonable organizational effort. Suggestions for solutions cheerfully accepted.

• Following up on the previous mention of charitable efforts to help Japan, the ToonSeum is hosting a series of film screenings, with proceeds going to the Artists Help Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Emergency Fund (founded by Dice Tsutsumi, an art director at Pixar).

  Next Saturday, 26 March, those of you in the Pittsburgh area can see Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service at 2:00pm, Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters Per Second at 4:00pm, and Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress at 6:00pm. Museum admission is a lousy four bucks, so how about you donate what it would cost you to see three movies in a theater?

So there it is. 759 pages over eight or so years, and now there’s a great big hole in my Tuesday/Thursday reading because Ursula Vernon is a big meanie who insists that “stories have endings” and “dragging things on forever is weak-ass”. Whatever.

In the end, Digger was almost singularly good storytelling — at times full of derring-do, adventure, excitement, pathos, and magic (all things that any self-respecting wombat would steer clear of) — wrapped in incredibly expressive art (especially given characters that lacked, variously, eyebrows, human anatomy, visible faces, or bodies capable of motility) suffused with heavy blacks and shadows and silhouettes (indeed, two of the characters were nothing but silhouette). And each of those visually-striking (and distinct) characters had their own unique voice, word choices that bespoke of entire cultures that we only saw the edges of, and wordplay evocative enough to have wormed its way past my ears and into my voice¹. It’s over, it’s got as close as one could hope to a happy ending, and whatever Vernon chooses to do as serialized webcomickry from here out, I’ll be reading.

• Addendum to yesterday’s story of the semi-annual Jess Fink Design Rip Off: Fink’s reaction. Gotta say, she’s a lot calmer than I would be in these circumstances. Then again, I haven’t ever created anything anybody wanted to steal.
• Also, there are a number of charity efforts going around our community for the benefit of disaster relief in Japan; as you might imagine, I’ve had several people contact me with requests to promote one or the other. Without knowing the organizers of any of these efforts personally, I can’t really make a recommendation that you should pay attention to any one in particular.

  The good news is, these things (art auctions, things that require submissions to be sent) will be unfolding for the next several weeks, and as I have a chance to do more due diligence, I’ll be letting you know which I’m following myself. The need will still be there weeks and months from now, so sit tight and we’ll see what’s good together.

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¹ It is an absolutely true thing that I have caught myself saying, Oh, blood and shale and Don’t ask, don’t ask, no possible good will come of asking as spontaneous expressions of, respectively, exasperation and disbelief. But for the record, I have never escalated to Remember Tunnel 17!

It was a bit more than 24 hours ago when Jess Fink let us know what was going on:

Oh it’s cool you guys it’s Just that FUCKING FUCKWAD TODD GOLDMAN RIPPING ME OFF AGAIN http://tinyurl.com/5v5h7du

For those not familiar with Fink’s reaction, she has a history of getting her designs (particularly those she did for Threadless, which incidentally requires artists to own the designs they submit) getting ripped off, with one particular appropriator seemingly recurring at regular intervals:

David+Goliath Threadless rips http://tinyurl.com/5vev53j @ToddGoldman legacy of rips http://tinyurl.com/4586lfh new rip http://is.gd/7CUa7U

One may note that the middle link of the three in that last batch is a mirror of a site that reported on a prior iteration of art thievery (some four years back) and received a lawyerly communication as a result. Curiously, in conjunction with yet another accusation of Todd Goldman lifting Jess Fink’s work (in May of 2010), I attempted to communicate with those same lawyers for comment, but didn’t get a reply; it’s possible that they no longer represent Goldman. In any event, the C&Ds are flying in the other direction today:

Thanks for all the help and kind words yesterday everyone! I have contacted Lawyers and sent cease and desists and boy are my arms tired.

Which makes me wonder — how many times do we go through this? We have a serial offender who — depending on how charitable you’re feeling — either:

• Knowingly and purposely steals designs from a variety of creators and one in particular:
  

  @Taiomatic he [Goldman] asked me to work for him then ripped my designs instead, plus others. I think my complaints are legitimate. Blockin you! :D

, or:

• Hires designers who do the stealing and passing along, sometimes the same design more than once, and does not vet their work sufficiently.

I have my opinion on the matter, and invite you to draw your own. On top of that, persons discussing said incidents have been subjected to lawyering (passim) that could be as either a SLAPP or plain ol’ bullying (if you’re not). Again, depends on how forgiving a person you are.

Since it seems pointless to go through this again and again, it serves only to aggravate legitimate creators and enrich the appropriators (keep in mind that commercial operations that have bought stolen designs have already paid for them, and probably won’t get their money back if they have to stop selling), there has to be another way. Here is where I must draw upon the Hive Mind: If you know of a company that sells this kind of stuff (your Hot Topics, your Forever 21s, that sort of place), perhaps one of you knows (or knows somebody that knows) one of their buyers?

I want to talk to that person. I want to ask what these retail operations do to limit their own liability (in both the legal and dammit we can’t sell this stock we paid for senses) in dealing with their vendors. Do they require good behavior from their suppliers? Are they to the point where they’re sick of having to deal with these situations? At what point does it prove a good business decision to cease doing business with a vendor who has a history of bad behavior?

I just want to ask one of them these questions, because I’m betting that the buyers for these sorts of retailers are actually like, say, independent comics creators — a relatively small community that knows each other and talks. It may well be that they’ve never considered the moral, legal, and financial implications of their vendor choice, and just need to work out some best practices on their own.

And if that meant that mall operations across the country decided they weren’t going to do business with a repeat ripoff artiste, that would be just awful.