I am only today back to a normal, non-hurty, awake state. Embloggenation will resume next week as normal, or as close to normal as we get around these parts.

In the meantime, please refer yourselves to The AV Club‘s review of Machine of Death, and know that this is the one place on the internet where it’s safe to read the comments, which already contain references to tripped balls, prescriptive language, and Chuggy G. Both the review and the comments are the chuggiest.

… and I could really use a shower and more than three hours uninterrupted sleep.

Now I want you to understand that Dave Kellett is my very dear friend, so I’m saying this with love in my heart. But after all the road surveys I’ve done in my Outback Sport over the course of this storm, determining where I could get an ambulance safely, and where my crews needed additional plowing? This Sheldon strip can officially eat it. Subarus rule.

What with this, and other, holidays coming fast and furious over the next week or so, don’t expect updates every day. I’ll probably miss one or two in there, particularly considering the fact that I’ve got about 72 hours of EMS duty between now and next Wednesday, and we might get hit with a major snowstorm smack-dab in the middle of it. Did I mention the part where everybody senior to me is going to be out of town? My first tour as senior officer and we could have an actual Weather Event. By this time next week, I may have significant grievances, so I guess I’ll take a raincheck today.

Anyways, webcomics.

• When I saw that the lads at Penny Arcade had released their children’s story, The Last Christmas, as an iPad animated storybook benefiting Child’s Play, I got a hankering to re-read that delicious mash-up of Lovecraft and Christmas. Imagine my surprise to discover that the story in question (which I was sure was just a year or two old) was actually released in 2004. But yep, there it is in the archives, and in my copy of The Case of the Mummy’s Gold. Time flies, etc., but if you want to grab a copy of The Last Christmas, it’s free in the iTunes store, and you can drop a few bucks to Child’s Play (which I note is over US$1.8 million for the year, with an excellent chance of cracking The Big Two).
• Late breaking news: Box Brown’s Everything Dies (about which I really can’t say enough good things) got a last-minute-before-Christmas delivery, meaning that issue #5 is now available for your purchase. To be clear, there is no way you will get this delivered in time for Christmas, but the sooner you order, the sooner you get to read it, and that’s not a bad deal.
• Speaking of Everything Dies, it made a pretty distinguished list today: Lore Sjöberg’s Best New Webcomics of 2010 That Are Mentioned In This Column over at Wired. Good choices, and I learned about a couple I wasn’t familiar with before. And on the off chance that isn’t enough Lore for you (and honestly, can there ever be enough Lore), check out the Hall of Lores. In the Lore Project Giggle-Inducement Hierarchy I keep in the back of my head, it’s just under Speak With Monsters and slightly above Sean & Wormwood, the Friendly Satanists. For the record, though, the greatest things that Lore’s ever done are the (seasonally-appropriate) Nine Inch Noës and Kitchen Floor, because there is no way that anything is better than a depleted-uranium beholder. No. Way.

And what’s cheerier than cheesecakes? See, years ago when this site was merely a gleam in the admittedly evil eye of Mister Jon Rosenberg, much planning and plotting took place over beers at a holy place known as the Peculier Pub. The chief barkeep, Stephanie, was a semi-regular in Rosenberg’s comic, and she both terrorized us and gifted us with plentiful beverages. She’s not at the Peculier anymore, and what with distance and kids, Jon and Phillip and I haven’t been there in ages. But habits die hard, and at these merry times, I still feel the compulsion to buy off Stephanie for another year with custardlike desserts on graham cracker crusts. I may have made enough of a habit of it for it to be immortalized in comics.

• On the way, I intend to hit up my friendly local comic shop and pick up the first Axe Cop trade, which (by one of those peculiar corinsidences normally seen only in scripted entertainment) comes one day before Axe Cop’s birthday (not to be confused with his first episode appearing online, which happened in January — this is when Malachai and Ethan Nicolle first drew Axe Cop, 23 December 2009). Lot of stuff can happen in a year, but I think it’s safe to say that Malachai Nicolle will someday go to a pretty good college.
• On the off chance that you aren’t one of those people that like Axe Cop (i.e.: somebody who hates awesome things), I can perhaps interest you in something else. Namely, grumblers that wonder when Aaron “Latin Art-Throb” Diaz will get around to posting a new Dresden Codak update now have an answer. “It’s just art!” they protest, “How long can it take?” Well, given the thought he puts into his design process, as long as it damn well takes.

  Part of why DC feels so immersive is because Diaz has thought about nearly every aspect of what shows up on the page (and even more that doesn’t, I suspect), if only judging from the thought he puts into character clothing. Every tutorial that Diaz has posted on his Tumblr artblog has been illuminating (and keep in mind that I don’t have the skills of an artist — those that do are even more appreciative that I).

  Speaking solely for myself, the title of this latest missive was the most revelatory part of the posting: Costumes, the Wearable Dialog. I’d never thought about it in those terms before, and it’s opened my eyes to a previously-hidden aspect in lot of very good comics (and made me realize why I found a lot of not-so-good comics unsatisfying). If you haven’t been reading Indistinguishable From Magic, you’ll never find a better jumping-on point — we might not all spend our days thinking about silhouette, expression, or perspective in everyday life, but you see clothing all the time. Read, enjoy.

Is this a first? I think it’s a first. Jennie Breeden‘s fourth collection of The Devil’s Panties (which are always massive volumes, capable of inducing blunt force trauma, jam-packed with comics) hits the shops this week, and it’s also available via alternative channels:

Devil’s Panties (Volume 4) on Iphone, Kindle, Ipad, Android and Blackberry

Some years ago I noted that Ms Breeden managed to release her (at the time monthly comic) regularly & on schedule, where the large comics companies were incapable of getting their top-name marquee books out on time. Is it any wonder that she’s managed to trump them on day & date releases?

• Speaking of happy tweets, the very sexy Rich Stevens has been dropping some uh-MAY-zing photos via his twitterfeed over the past:
  

  We’ve been adopting electronic orphans this Christmas. http://twitpic.com/3h5obq http://twitpic.com/3h5oat

  few:

  I swear, it followed us home. http://twitpic.com/3hn35f

  days:

  just working on my high scores you know how it is http://twitpic.com/3h9u3r

  What he’s doing is becoming a hero to fourteen year old me, as well as ensuring that I move in with him over the summer, not to mention eventually transfer my entire life savings to him, one quarter at a time. As evil plans for world domination go, it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever heard. And that’s before he revealed that my all-time favorite arcade game is on his buy list. It’s a Christmas miracle!

• It’s been six months since the last one, so why am I not surprised that there’s another comic scraper site that’s popped up — credit Frank Gibson for finding this one. In case you’re wondering why such a thing would prompt, say, Jeph Jacques to exclaim:
  

  whaaaat no way, i hate those fuckin’ aggregator sites >:(

  … it has to do with a couple of things. For starters, the comic is presented entirely by itself — today’s comic appears without Jeph’s comment below (which is often a place to promote new wares), without site advertising, and without links to Jeph’s store. Thus, Jeph receives nothing from the eyeballs that view his strip at the scraper site (indeed, since a quick peek at the page code shows that the image is being served from Jeph’s site, he’s actually out money every time somebody reads his work from said scraper).

  Ironically enough, it’s got Jeph’s copyright intact at the bottom of the comic. Now I’d hate to be the one to suggest mass action, but if one were to note the owner of the site in question and send a polite note (for reals now — be polite) explaining exactly why he’s on the wrong side of the issue, I’m sure that would be helpful.

  And if it’s not, hey — DCMA takedowns work for anybody, not just big corporations.

• Saddest tweet of the day — ¡Journalista! honcho and TCJ online editor Dirk Deppey has been dejobbed:
  

  I’ve been laid off from Fantagraphics. Wednesday will be my last day as The Comics Journal’s newsblogger.

  Deppey is a man that’s got Opinions. I didn’t always agree with him, nor he with me, but he was there in the midst of comics blogdom, gave a lot of attention to the webcomics side of the fence, and clearly put a lot of thought and damn hard work into his writing. I’m going to miss his contributions to the dialogue for as long as it takes him to land his next gig, which will hopefully very soon. Vaya con comics, Dirk.

Nine years.

Something*Positive, despite its creator’s attempts to occasionally convince us that he is a walking miasma of doom and bad luck, has continued on for nine years, spawning no less than five spin-offs (although only Super Stupor and Rhymes With Witch see updates these days, leaving we fans of Midnight Macabre, New Gold Dreams and S*P 1938 crying into our booze). It started with a clearly drawn line indicating the limits of questionable taste and immediately (like, in panel #4 of the first strip, out of what by now is probably more than 10,000 panels) pole-vaulted over that sumbitch.

Davan was unlikeable and sarcastic, PeeJee and Aubrey dangerously psychotic, Jason an unrepentant man-whore, and these were the sympathetic characters. But then a funny thing happened slowly, and over time — it’s probably not so much a case of the characters growing on us as much as they just grew up. Not all at once, and not easily, but for all his misanthropic bluster Randy Milholland retains an almost unique ability to find possibilities for redemption in the most assholish of characters.

With the likely exception of Avogadro Pompey, nobody is entirely without some small spark of worth. That he manages this trick with such damaged people (I’m lookin’ at you, Mike) is a sign of his skill; that he doesn’t let such re-makings come cheap, or easily, or to ever quite finish is a sign of his honesty. And I love what he’s done with the character of Davan’s parents, particularly his father.

And having watched the guy interact with fans and maybe-sorta-possibly-future fans at shows, I can tell you that mean ol’ Randy is a teddy bear at heart. The greatest joke is, for all the surface cynicism and darkness that his creations put up to protect themselves, the title of Something*Positive is far more true than any of them are willing to admit. It’s fundamentally an optimistic work, and I’ll wager nobody that reads it regularly — excepting maybe TV’s Wil Wheaton — doesn’t come away from each strip feeling a little smile with each update. Might be from humor, might be from sympathy, for me it’s most often a smile of recognition.

In conclusion, screw you Randy, I got sucked into a six hour archive trawl yesterday and re-read a good chunk of ’02 – ’05 when I should have been doing more productive things. Then again, I got to spend six hours re-reading a good chunk of ’02 – ’05 yesterday, and I can’t thank you enough for that. If holding those two seemingly contradictory thoughts about Milholland in my brain simultaneously confuses you, you just haven’t read enough S*P. Start at strip one. It gets more horrible, and more cheerful, and more painful, and more uplifting, with every strip that goes by. Plus, please be aware that Mr Milholland sells his original artwork at criminally low prices, and the more of you that buy from him, the less he’ll have to tempt me with¹ every time he gets that Daddy needs his drinkin’ money look on his face.

In other news today, two meditations on disease and dying and finding meaning when you don’t think that there’s something bigger than us humans to explain it all for you. Box Brown continues his superlative work on Everything Dies with a look at his friend Ben, how he died, and what it all means. There was a person in Brown’s life, and now there isn’t, and sometimes the only thing we can do is to keep moving and remember. And from Randall Munroe, whether or not the prospect of serious illness (which carries behind it the reminders of mortality) demands comfort beyond the rational, and how (and more importantly, why) science is its own comfort.

_______________
¹ Pride of my collection: either the definitive response to women in refrigerators, or “Came a Brain”.

Still under the weather but awake for some of today. So here’s some brief items, and I’ll see you for regular updates on Monday.

• Lot of press this year about comiXology, especially since the iPad made reading comics on-the-go (and on a screen larger than that of an iPhone) so very easy. They’ve spread into direct support for the other major mobile O/S, with a new comiXology app for Android. While I love my Android phone, it’s a very early model, and apparently the app requires a later version of Android than I’ve got, so no luck to me. And in any event, this probably won’t live up to its potential until the inevitable breakout Android-based tablet (to present, none of the models has made a big hit in the marketplace) sometime in the future. In the meantime, if you’ve got Android 2.1 or higher, let us know what you think.
• Friends of comics The ToonSeum invites friend of comics, webcomic creator, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum, consort of the Radness Queen of the 510 Area Code, and (most relevant at the moment) author of The Looney Tunes Treasury Andrew Farago for an appearance and signing on Boxing Day (that would be 26 December) from noon to 2:00pm. Anybody in Pittsburgh, drop by and say “hi” for me; I’d join you, but I pulled Christmas weekend EMS duty and western Pennsylvania is just a little bit outside of response range for any 911 calls we might get. I’ll have to make do with a lot of pie.
• Just bout five years ago, an evil genius named Jon Rosenberg enticed me (and a pair of co-conspirators, but I’m the only one without a life, it seems) to make with the opinion-mongering found here so frequently. Although Fleen officially launched on 22 December 2005, a handful of posts had been written over the prior couple of weeks, so today serves as well as any as an “official” anniversary for this bastard child of hype, opinionmongering, and occasionally non-mangled syntax.

  I’ve never adequately “thanked” Jon for getting me started down the path to hell known as blogging, but it appears that the past few years of attempting to kill him with my mind may have finally had an effect — Rosenberg and his lovely wife Amy are expecting twins come June. This may not prove to be his death, but surely the lack of sleep that it causes will push him ever closer to the edge of madness. This is probably a good place to insert maniacal laughter, but I’ve got a sore throat, so click here for a reasonable facsimile.

  In all seriousness, congratulations to Jon and Amy — twins rule (I should know, I married one) and they can only benefit from having one of the most weirdly creative of all the possible dads in the world. Here’s hoping that they get good and stockpiled on sleep and diapers, and maybe this would be a good time for you to purchase some fine merchandise from him, so that his sproglings need not be clothed in discontinued t-shirts and sleep in a bassinet made of unsold books? Do it for the children.

You didn’t get me yet, Machine of Death! I’m still alive, albeit just barely. Declaring a sick day and going back to bed. In the meantime, feel free to check out the ComixTALK year-end roundtable, featuring people much cleverer than me.

Minnesota really doesn’t like me, having now infected me with some dread sickness. Already fell asleep once in the classroom, here’s hoping I don’t infect everybody at the airport.

• Matt Bors, one of the Happy Trio of Death-Defying Adventurers, has a new gig as, in essence, comics editor of a new international site of comics and journalism. Cartoon Movement goes live today (look for cartoons from Bors from the Afghanistan trip), and from this early vantage point, it appears to have a focus on what Garry Trudeau called “investigative cartooning”. This is worth watching closely.
• How do you get Latin Artthrob Aaron Diaz to post frequent updates? Make him move across the continent and declare Guest Week. Three updates in three days at Dresden Codak so far, with the promise of more tomorrow and Friday.
• It’s official: Christopher Baldwin has created the best onomatopoeia of 2010. SPLUBT! indeed.
• Ignatz laureate Troop 142 by Mike Dawson is now complete; look for a print edition in the near future.
• Keep an eye on ComixTALK, there will shortly be a roundtable discussion on webcomics by such notables as Larry Cruz, Heidi MacDonald, Rick Marshall, Brigid Alverson, Lauren Davis and Brian Heater… plus some hack webcomics pseudojournalist.

Painstakingly, I might add. As per my Twitterfeed, locked out of the client-provided computer I’m using for this class (it would be entirely too convenient to let me use my laptop, after all), so this will be short and heavy on cut/paste.

Edit to add: Have computer access back now, not retyping this whole damn thing, but will fix typos and add links.

• Not webcomics, but too bad: Pittsburgh’s ToonSeum is running some classic animated Christmas fare a week from tomorrow. Enjoy A Charlie Brown Christmas (everybody do the repetitive dance!), A Wish For Wings That Work (the definitive performance by Mister The Cat), and The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick is a genius). Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack (with accompanying cartoon) starts at 6:30, with Bill and Opus at 7:00pm and Jack Skellington at 7:45pm. Suggested donation: five bucks. The ToonSeum is at 945 Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District.
• I met Cari Corene at San Diego Comic-Con ’09 when she was Dave Kellett‘s assistant (you could totally tell, because she kept calling him “Mister Kellett”, which is a dangerously large amount of respect to show a cartoonist, lest they get ideas about their station in life). Anywho, Ms Corene did a bang-up job in that year’s sketchbook (theme: beards and moustaches) and she since launched her own webcomics endeavours, DOOR, which is the story of a pug dog and a genie that’s not trapped in the usual bottle or lamp, but ann overhead-tank-pull-chain-type toilet. It’s better than it sounds, with a lot of really neat visuals.

  Chapter 1 made it to a modest print run, and Chapter 2 is up for the same, pending funding. The Kickstarter’s here, and though some people I deeply respect wonder if Kickstarter has outlived its usefulness, for situations like this, I just see it as a pre-order with a bit of structure. Not enough funds raised? You never get charged and don’t have to wait for a refund to get processed. Works for me.

• I didn’t mention yesterday’s A Girl And Her Fed when it ran, but better late than never. Blazing Saddles reference that manages to avoid the obvious fart joke? Classy. Also building up to something just in time for creator “Otter” to take an end-of-year break. If you aren’t reading AGAHF, get going so you can share in my misery.