I had this beautifully-written post about everybody that’s going to be at Emerald City Comicon (plus much more), and poof! WordPress ate it, and I really don’t have time today to rewrite it now. Thus, I’m taking a mulligan and will have it for you tomorrow.

Dammit.

But first, how about that <oscar thing that happened>, huh? Boy that was <adjective>!

It’s just one of those days when similar things occur all at once; this time, it’s the announcement of books, books, books, and more books.

• Up first, the (why does she have to be so) young and talented Mary Cagle’s Kiwi Blitz, which have arrived just in time for this weekend’s fun-times in Seattle. The Kiwi Blitz store doesn’t have a listing for books (pre-orders having wrapped an’ all), but I’m guessing that whatever doesn’t go to pre-orders or get sold at ECCC will be showing up on that page in the next couple of weeks.
• Also imminently available (well, “imminently” given the timeframe of various delays by factors outside of the control of the creators), Erfworld Book 1 — which is weird, because the first part of the second book is actually in Rob Balder’s hands as we speak. After promises, and extra payments to entice his printers to actually, you know, ship the damn things already, Balder has now been told:
  

  I have just now (Feb 28th, 1:30 am) been told by our overseas printer that Book 1 is slated to arrive at my door March 11, 2011. This despite our agreement that 1200 of the books from the print run would be sent by air freight by February 25.

  Balder’s being a really stand-up guy about the deliveries; having previously promised shipping before the end of February, he’s showing his printers what a promise actually looks like by standing by his word:

  Anyone who wants their money refunded and their order canceled, please submit your order number through our Customer Support Form and we’ll take care of that. Otherwise, expect all outstanding orders to ship by the middle of March. This, of course means that the $20 pre-order price will still be honored until I get books in hand on the 11th. i.e. the Pre-Order Price Now Goes to 11

  Given how extensive Erfworld Book 1 actually is — more than 150 color pages at A4 size (actually, the American equivalent of 8.5 x 11 inches) — the $20 pre-order price is actually a steal, and Balder is undoubtedly being cost money by these interminable delays. Here’s hoping that once he actually gets his goods, he’ll be kind enough to share the name of the printer that jerked him around as a warning to others to tread carefully.

• Speaking of pre-orders, A Girl And Her Fed is coming along nicely with the pre-orders for Volume 1: Rise Up Swearing, with some 64% of necessary orders having been filed. With AGAHF creator Otter eager to see her own copy, she’s willing to make it worth your while to get in on the pre-orders:
  

  Two weeks in and more than halfway to the goal is amazing; at this rate, I’m hoping to place the order-orders in the last week of March. I’ll make it worth your while … I’m all about tossing in some bonus content for people who preorder. Maybe a nice print?

  Disclaimer — Otter beats me up a bit in the introduction that I wrote for Rise Up Swearing and since I fear her googly-eyed vengeance, I beg you to not make her any more anxious that she might already be. For the love of all that you hold holy, order soon and order often.

• Finally, in the realm of pre-pre-orders, news dropped this morning about the first book from the Not Invented Here Kreative Krüe, Paul Southworth and Bill Barnes. While not expected to reach the reading public until June (once again, damn those printers that are affordable for being across wide oceans and requiring huge amounts of lead time), orders that get placed in March will be signed by Barnes and Southworth, and there are even hardcover (limited to 100 copies) & sketch editions (limited to 60 copies) available for in exchange for your purchasing dollars. Oh, and you get more than 20% off of the cover price if you order before the end of March, so even if you didn’t want signatures spoiling your pristine merch, you can always cover ’em up with the White-Out you buy with your savings.
• Finally, allow me to wish a Happy Fake Birthday to my Evil Twin. Howard Tayler claims to have been born on February 29th, a day which we all know doesn’t really exist, which makes me doubt his alleged status as a native of our planet. But what the heck, he’s got cool boots. Also, about the time the rest of us are all dying of old age, Tayler will just be getting into his lower 20s and living it up — well played, Mr Tayler, well played.

So it’s a wedding-attending day for me, with much news likely to slide past as I’m getting all fancied-up (Three-piece suit? Check. Red Robot tie? Check. One-off moustache socks? Check.) for the fun times. We all have our crosses to bear.

• Sharp-eyed readers of Friend of Fleen Lore Sjöberg may have noticed a few things of late: his website of varied delights (Bad Gods) is unfortunately 502ing, and his columns at Wired (Alt Text) have been featuring a variety of webcomics illustrators instead of art by Sjöberg himself.

  The Bad Gods outage appears to be a side-effect of a sad story best told by Bob The Angry Flower scribe Stephen Notley [no permalink, so copy-pasting more here than I usually would]:

  Intent readers of angryflower.com might have noticed that the site was completely down and boned for a few days last week. As I understand it, this was because some bot-spamming jackhole decided to seize the lungfish.com servers [editor’s note: Slumbering Lungfish is another of Sjöberg’s sites] and commandeer them into asking millions of uninterested people if they needed their penises enlarged.

  This led to a full-on cruchplosion of said servers, and when stalwart lungfish host Lore Sjöberg changed the passwords to close off the flood, said jackhole retaliated by going back in and wiping the hard drives. Thanks, you irredeemable fucker! Dante’s whipping up whole new levels of hell for your punishment, you shitsack!

  Anyway, the end result was that lungfish got pwned, along with it angryflower.com, and Lore reasonably concluded he shouldn’t be in the hosting-other-folks-websites biz any more, as he had not the time nor inclination to spend on defending generosity against dinks.

  So! Angryflower.com has moved to a different web host, dreamhost.com, which I hope works out. I bid the fondest adieu to Lore and lungfish. Lore, author of The Book of Ratings, current writer for Wired, has been the generous patron of angryflower.com for close-on a decade and a half, patronage without which this humble site would’ve crumbled years ago. I urge all who have ever read this site to click the above links, follow Lore’s writings and buy Lore’s output. It’s great and worth it.

  I cannot but help agree with Notley’s advice that you all become immediate patrons of Sjöberg, but may I add an additional piece of advice? If any of you out there in the Hive Mind has any inkling of the miscreant that’s responsible for this turn of events, it would be awesome if you’d beat him/her until he/she can no longer crawl, see, or cry.

  With respect to the guest illustrations at Alt-Text, they actually started prior to this most recent unpleasantness, but it’s never a bad time to point one towards the work of Chris Hallbeck, David McGuire, or Box Brown (found respectively at The Book of Biff/Maximumble, Gastrophobia, and Everything Dies. Revel in the cross-pollination. Revel, damn you!

Lightning Round!

• Mike Russell‘s impromptu (and very amusing) miniseries, The Sabretooth Vampire, has concluded in an explosion of excitement.
• Kel McDonald, not busy enough with Sorcery 101 and Cocksuckers, is organizing an anthology of fairy tales on Tumblr with an eye towards print next year. Check ’em out.

That picture doesn’t relate to webcomics in any way, but it nicely illustrates a really interesting idea that Kris Straub had on the nature of time and the many-worlds hypothesis, and I think it looks neat.

• Via the tweetfeed of Matt Boyd comes news of a new project:
  

  TRAILS OF TARNATION is a twelve-part serial western following the exploits of Derek and Jeff, two cowboys on the run from the corrupt Sheriff Maynard Lumbar. The series is produced and filmed in Rochester, NY by Nicholas Gurewitch, Derek Walborn, and Jeff Stanin.

  You may recognize the name of Nicholas Gurewitch, creator of The Perry Bible Fellowship; together with Walborn and Stanin, Gurewitch forms Voltron works under the aegis of New Picture Agencies (who are also responsible for earlier projects, like the BBC-commissioned short films that Gurewitch talked about at SDCC ’10).

  You can see Trails of Tarnation episode 1 at its own site (maybe — it was having problems rendering the embedded player in my browser) or at Vimeo, where you can see other NPA productions (check out some of the Elite Fleet or Sometimes This Happens shorts, which are animated by Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey!) (by mentioning Ian, I have now pushed back the return of RPG World by another month; current estimates place resumption in October of 2037).

• We’re getting on towards con season, and I wanted to put out a piece of advice for anybody that will by travelling — don’t pack your laptop (or your phone, your meds, your camera, your passport, anything you can’t stand to lose) in your checked bags. Recent weeks have seen two different webcomickers report the loss of laptops from their luggage (coincidentally or not, they both flew USAir) — as we all know, you’re not allowed to lock the bags, which makes anything portable and valuable easy pickins for those of bad intent.

  The airlines have basically no obligation towards you in these circumstances (being of a low and suspicious nature, I made it my habit to read all the legal disclaimers on ticket jackets, back when there were ticket jackets) — anything you can’t prove was in the luggage at the time you hand it to them they don’t have to compensate you for. Quick quiz time — guess how much any airline is going to go out of its way to believe that you had something other than completely ordinary-grade clothing and toiletries in your suitcase. Valuables go in the carry-on, and if somebody requires you to check a bag of valuables, insist on taking a photo inventory that they acknowledge in writing before giving it to the baggage handlers.

This is a week later than I expected the story to break, but that’s life. Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge grim survivor contestant Michael Payne happens to be a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, which give out this little thing called the Nebula Award that you may have heard of. Payne is, in particular, a member of the jury for the Andre Norton for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, given out annually by the SFWA for the best YA SF/fantasy novel of the year. In addition to the open nominations voting process, the collective members of the jury can add up to three titles to the nominations list, and:

[T]his year I asked Amulet Books to send around copies of Barry Deutsch‘s Hereville ’cause it’s been one of my favorite comics since he started posting it at Girlamatic all those years ago. After reading all the books submitted to us, the jury agreed on two titles to add to the Norton ballot, and one of them was indeed Hereville.

Hereville‘s not on Girlamatic anymore, but you can still find the original 57 page story online. Consensus is that this is the first time a graphic story has been nominated for a Norton (and perhaps the second time for any of the Nebula categories), but I’m more interested in the fact that this appears to be the first Nebula (which is a rather respected literary award) nomination for what’s ultimately a webcomic.

This page has opined in the past about the declining difference in meaning between “webcomics” and “just comics”, and Deutsch’s work underscores this, I think. The Nebulas don’t have a separate category for comics, much less webcomics — Hereville is being judged the peer of works in different presentations and forms, and we’ll see more of this in the future. Not because [web]comics are getting better (although certainly some of them are, and some of them are crap, and some in past were masterworks that were overlooked), but just because more people (like Payne) in the future will have had experience of them, and not think it odd to say, Hey, we should consider this, it’s really good.

It’s not about agendas or secret campaigns or undue influence, it’s about familiarity. We may have turned a corner, this funny little subniche of a popular-yet-marginalized artform, and it’s possibly one of those corners you don’t turn back from. Like it or not, the best of [web]comics is going to have a seat at more tables in the future.

I blame Carla Speed McNeil¹; having compulsively read and re-read Finder: Voice since I picked it up Thursday afternoon, I’ve been drawn into a re-reading of the previous eight Finder trades. The first half of Sin-Eater volume 1 is a little rough on the artwork, but it settles down rapidly and damn! There’s so many story-hooks that reference later elements and this is just going to demand late-night re-reads until I’ve re-absorbed it all. I’d be really mad if these weren’t such good comics. If you’re not reading Finder (in print, online, wherever), it better be because you’re waiting for the omnibus editions.

• I have discovered a flaw in the voting mechanism of Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse: with five fan-favorites in a showdown, how can anybody in good conscience choose between Sciencemaster Adler and Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer? Well, I guess about a thousand of you did, since Adler beat Snarlington pretty handily in the champions poll, but I have equal regard for both of them. No matter who won, disappointment was sure to follow. Minions, I command you to make Cornelius Snarlington cosplay accoutrements for the coming con season so that I may not miss that be-antlered sociopath overmuch. Also, buy Rosenberg a drink when you see him ’cause damn, he’s doing funny work.
• From the Twitters came some unanticipated news from Sylvan Migdal:
  

  Book proof back from the printer!

  That would be the proof copy of the second Curvy collected edition, which somehow slipped past my radars and surprised me with its imminent existence. For those not familiar, Migdal’s earlier works are all utterly charming, possessing of a loose, cartoony style capable of great expressiveness, and frequently making use of artificial restraints (like the limitations of color palette on Ascent, for example) to great effect.

  Curvy is just like those earlier comics, with the added bonus of gettin’ it on in every possible combination. Whoo yeah, reverse mermaid! Uh, that would be a mermaid with the fish-parts up top and the lady-parts down below, duh. Also potentially of interest — I’ve never met Migdal, but I met and had a terrific conversation with his mom once at MoCCA Fest. Anyway, get reading on Volume 1 (it’s only ten bucks), so you’re all caught up for Volume 2 at this year’s iteration of MoCCA.

• I swear this list wasn’t posted when I wrote about Martz, Mutch and LeCouilliard winning Xeric Grants. But there it is — the November list, for your consideration; Fleen congratulates all the laureates, and reminds everybody else that the next application deadline is 31 March.

_______________
¹ I also blame Ms McNeil for the disturbing dream I had last night; for those of you familiar with Finder, I have three words for you:

IZZAT FOR MEEEEE?

Those of you not familiar, too bad.

It seems a couple of you are taking an offhand, tongue-in-cheek bit o’ snark with more seriousness than it deserved; either that, or somebody’s off their meds. On this page I claimed that, much like the Fox Network had become a hardcore sex channel, Achewood had transformed itself into a subscription-only site, and Howard Tayler was being paid by Jerry Holkins to artistically satisfy the latter’s giraffe-neck fetish. Let me assure that that here at Fleen, our goal is only the truth, but there will be obvious exaggerations from time to time. Don’t make me hafta break out the SarcMark, people.

• In the far Antipodes, a project that has been mentioned in bits and pieces over the past few weeks is finally complete; I speak, naturally of the grand mural that Becky Dreistadt has been making for the fine folks at Gameplanet in Auckland, NZ. Consisting of 46 individual canvasses, arranged in the form of the classic Space Invader, the mural as a whole recounts the history of videogames and the most iconic characters to spring from the world of pixels. As is to be expected from Dreistadt’s work, there is more concentrated awesome than one may shake a stick at.
• Jamie Smart, the mad genius behind all of the comics at Fumboo, has launched another one on the grown-ups side of the site. Smart does this all the time, of course, but Corporate Skull is a bit different:
  

  I haven’t done this kind of thing before, planned a comic so big it contains actual story-arcs and plots. Normally what i do is whimsical and immediate, mainly because my own concentration is so poor I can’t drag a story past a handful of pages. But in the last few years I’ve become a lot more fascinated with actual storytelling, and have been quietly working on a few different projects to construct some tall tales. Corporate Skull is the first to see light.

  See this was intended to be a big comic. 600 pages. And it’s all been worked out – i know what i want to happen, how it all turns out, what appears where (y’know, almost as if i knew what i was doing). I’ve never spent so long working on something BEFORE actually drawing it, in this case it’s been two years of filling up notebooks with the plans.

  That’s a lot of prep, and you can see the first ten pages of Corporate Skull at its own site; it’s off to a really good start, but the site’s a bit slow right now so maybe space yourselves out over the next couple of days?

• From Michael Kinyon, webcomics überfan, news that Karen “Kez” Howard, masters student at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, is taking part in the Goin’ Bald for Bucks fundraiser this year. Her pledge page can be found here, and it lies within your power to absolutely destroy her fundraising goal. Go. Pledge.

Edit to add: Link to Kez’s pledge page corrected.

You really couldn’t come up with two more different stories, but I think there’s actually a thread pulling these two together. In any event, I’ve been spending way too much time reading and re-reading both of them — Astronaut Academy: Zero Gravity by Dave Roman since the :01 Books folks were kind enough to send me an advanced review copy (which may see changes prior to release in June), and Finder: Voice by Carla Speed McNeil since I picked it up yesterday. Let’s take AA: ZG first, shall we?

• Hakata Soy is the new kid at school — which just happens to be a Space School on a Space Station, where you learn all kinds of Space Things. He also used to the be the leader of a Voltron-like robotics hero team and is joining a term already in progress. There are predecessors for this story — substitute magic or mythosteampunk in various proportions and you’d in Harry Potter or Gunnerkrigg Court territory — but Roman hits on a story technique that sets this story apart.

  Yes, this is Hakata’s story, but each chapter (some as short as a page, some ten or more pages) is told from the point of view of a different character. There’s an overall story arc, but it’s told in bits from many angles; it’s not quite Rashomon (there’s not just one incident in play here), it’s more like an oral history where the interview subjects sometimes have only the slightest desire to be associated with each other. There’s nominal villains, but there’s nobody that can’t be understood or redeemed, even the vain and spoiled Maribelle Mellonbelly (who rules the school as the richest and prettiest girl) learns that friendship and selflessness are admirable.

  But the best character literally wafts his way through the narrative, trying to avoid all entanglements and spend his time floating in the emptiness of space under the distant stars. All of the students are refreshingly direct about what they’re thinking and why (young kids can, after all, be one step away from sociopaths in their concern about nothing other than themselves), about abilities and possessions that they just remembered they have (ditto on kids being generally scatterbrained), but Doug absolutely wins for honesty. During an emergency anti-gravity drill, Maliik Mehendale floats close to Doug for mutual support:

  M: Hey, Doug. Looks like we’re partners.
  D: If you turn out to be dead weight, I’ll cut you loose without hesitation.

  What keeps Doug (and Maribelle, and Scab Wellington, and Cybert the killer robot) from coming off as evil is that they’re just so darned cute. Roman’s art is equal parts cartoony-style Tezuka (think more Mighty Atom and less Black Jack) and Dig-Dug, with thick, chunky lines and art that plays well in silhouette — reduce any character to a filled-in black shape and you’ll still be able to tell who it is and what they’re feeling from body language. It’s a delight to read from start to finish.

• Finder, by contrast, is a deep, deep study of a culture-clashing powderkeg of a domed city, with art that has found the ideal balance point between “utterly realistic people” and “but some things need to be exaggerated for the story”, with nary a hint of the Uncanny Valley. It’s a long, long story of goin’-on 2000 pages, with Voice being the ninth collection released, and the first since McNeil shifted from a print-pamphlets-then-collect-the-trade model to a release-pages-as-a-webcomic-then-release-the-trade model. It is also an absolute refutation of the notion that webcomics can’t do longform stories, considering it’s not just a 200 page story, but a portion of the larger, interlocking tale.

  The focus of Voice is on 18 year old Rachel Grosvenor and her immediate challenge to gain a full membership her clan — it’s one of the oldest and most prestigious in her society, full membership will allow her to care for her siblings and see them educated, and failure to achieve means her best alternative is to become somebody’s mistress. Oh, and you get one shot at winning membership, there are only a limited number of slots open, and the legal right to attempt is tied to an heirloom ring that was just taken off her in a mugging.

  Rachel needs something found, and nominal main character of the overall story arc is Jaeger, the titular Finder (who can not only find things that you ask him to, but by virtue of the title is obligated to do so, and without payment), and he doesn’t appear in this story at all. With the sort-of hero (Jaeger is half Campbellian Hero, half capricious wanderer, and half trickster figure) appearing only in bits of memory, this isn’t going to be a conventional story. In order to find her ring (which may allow her to find a place in her clan), Rachel must find the Finder — or learn to make do herself without the need for the hero to save her.

  This is where Finder and Astronaut Academy converge. Take the many viewpoints of AA and expand them from short chapters to entire books — each volume of Finder has a different POV character, the stories overlap and happen around the fringes of each other, and contribute to a single (albeit loosely connected) narrative.

  It’s not so much dealing with how the characters interact as how entire cultures do, with Jaeger’s status as outsider (literally — his legal right to be in the domed city is at times tenuous) allowing him to cross the metaphorical and physical boundaries and see how their mores interact. For sheer depth of backstory and implication and untold stories around every streetcorner (much of which is hinted at in her page-by-page endnotes, as detailed as you’d find in Family Man or Templar, AZ) McNeil has no peer.

  This is as good as [web]comics gets, and Voice works well enough as a standalone story that you won’t lose out having not read the previous eight collections — but when you’re done reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) Voice, make sure you’ve got some budget to get those earlier collections, because you’re going to be drawn back to Jaeger’s meandering path again and gain. Fortunately, Dark Horse (who are now McNeil’s publishers) will be releasing the first four volumes in a highly-affordable (more than 600 pages for $24.95!) collected edition in less than a month. Start saving, you’re going to want it.

Hey, they can’t all have 350 words on the horrors of dental work.

• We have, in the past, discussed the work of Michael Jonathan on this page, with respect to his identity/brand design, to his mini comics, and his main work. It’s the latter that’s of interest today, as you should know that Eros, Inc. (which, despite this being the internet and that implies, is entirely SFW) is back from hiatus. It’s been a half-year or so, but this actually makes for a pretty good jumping-on point for new readers — ’tis the start of a new season, and Jonathan is ladling on the content to bring readers up to speed. Want to convince me that there’s enough comics to be worth my while? Doing updates that are the equivalent of 2½ – 3 pages is a pretty good place to start.

  I’m also gonna say that the art is a little more … assured is the right word, I think. Confident. Visually clean, no wobble or hesitation evident, like somebody’s been spending those six months away from regular updates drawing, drawing, drawing. Welcome back, Mr Jonathan, can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store for us.

• Show announcement for those of you that will be in New York City at some point during the spring, and what with MoCCA Fest happening in the spring, I imagine a fair portion of you will be. And it’s MoCCA that we’re referencing, as they bring a new show dedicated to Will Eisner and the inspiration he drew from his hometown of New York. Will Eisner’s New York: From the Spirit to the Modern Graphic Novel runs 1 March to 30 June, and it’s curated by possibly the two most knowledgeable people possible: Denis Kitchen and Danny Fingeroth. MoCCA is open Tuesday through Sunday (although closed right now for installation of this show), noon to 5:00pm, with a suggested donation of five bucks.

I refer, of course, to the mouseover text at today’s xkcd:

I heard the general anesthesia drugs can cause amnesia, so when I woke up mid-extraction I started taking notes on my hand so I’d remember things later. I managed ‘AWAKE BUT EVERYTHING OK’ before the dental assistant managed to find and confiscate all my pens.

See, when I woke up mid-extraction, I spent my time desperately trying to get the oral surgeon to make me not be awake anymore¹. Further details of dental trauma are behind the cut so that the squeamish may avoid them, and I guess we can chalk one up in the Comics make shared experiences come alive! column.

• Another painful shared experience? Junior high school. Allow me to paraphrase Matt Groening’s description of junior high, as the brilliant cartoon wherein he expounded his theory (School Is Hell, Lesson 10: Junior High School, The Deepest Pit In Hell) doesn’t appear in the Big Book of Hell omnibus, which is close to hand):
  

  Junior high is designed to help children through the formative “snotty” years. By isolating them from younger kids, they will be less likely to torture them, and keeping them from high school kids, means they will be less likely to receive the beatings they so richly deserve.

  That’s as good as I can recall it. But the feelings of horror, not fitting in, inadequacy? For the past year and a half, Jason Dobbins has been voluntarily going to that well with Tales of the 8th Grade Nothing, dredging up his experiences for the laugh-chuckles of others; in sports, I believe this is what’s know as taking one for the team.

  To spend even more time reliving those times, Dobbins has begun a print version of Tot8GN, with issue one (featuring Days One and Two of the first week of school) in pre-orders until 1 March. Dobbins was kind enough to send along a copy issue one (hey, any time I get an unexpected package on the porch and it’s not a flaming bag of poo, that’s a good day), along with a sketch edition.

  Taking a page from the major comics publishers and their “con editions”, this is a comic with a big ol’ blank frame on the front cover, to be filled in with art; mine features his main two characters, Eve from Octopus Pie (because Dobbins figures — correctly — that I dig Octopus Pie) and moustachery. Lesson to be gained: if you’re going to send review copies, maxing out on the recipient’s interests makes it much more likely to get read and/or plugged.

• Speaking of guys that know effective techniques for getting their work plugged — Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes have one of the most unique vectors for pulling in new readers I’ve ever seen in the Unshelved Book Club. So many creators dropping in to review books in their own style, then those creators mention it on their own sites. New readers come to see what the deal is, some fraction of them stay. Simple, elegant, and works to hook in the readers and Barnes and Ambaum want the most (book people). I’m wondering what part of their sustained run as webcomickers is due to the mechanism of the guest Book Club review, but whatever it might be, it’s working.

  Did I mention that Unshelved hit nine years old today? I’m sure that neither Gene nor Bill thinks it feels like almost a decade since they started (possibly it feels much, much longer). That begs an interesting question: are there any other creative teams on comics that have lasted as long? Pretty much only Holkins & Krahulik and Foglio & Foglio come to mind. There aren’t many webcomics that have existed that long, and there aren’t many creative types that can work together for the long run, so I think it’s a pretty exclusive club at the moment — and they’re all from the Seattle area. Coincidence?

(more…)