For those of you that don’t follow my Twitterfeed, the last 24 hours may be summed up thusly:

1. Modern travel schedules are a myth
2. I do not possess sufficient bodily insulation to survive the Minnesota winter
3. The cold has interrupted the food supply chain

It appears that if I do not wish to starve, I must hunt and kill one of the numerous ice weasels that are even now surrounding my current locale, probing for signs of weakness. Assuming I don’t survive this bout of nature, red in tooth and claw, please consider the following:

• Dorothy Gambrell has presented another in her occasional series of financial disclosures in graphical form. One may try to divine truths there, but fact is the sample size (one) means that any conclusions you draw are only partway supported by statistical relevance to the members of the sample population (Gambrell herself), and essentially without application to anybody else. For myself, I think that it approaches a geometric beauty all of its own even when divorced from the monetary meaning.
• Daryl Cunningham, having previously taken apart vaccine opponents, homeopathy proponents, and moon-landing deniers, decided that his inbox and comment threads weren’t filled with enough specious logic and invective (much of it featuring multiple correctly-spelled words) from those that feel differently than he does. Thus, he now tackles the intersection of the scientific, economic, and political, taking a gander at climate change. As always, it’s good comics.

  And as always, the early comments are brief, in aagreement with Cunningham and reasonable; the somewhat later comments are longer, and may contain respectful disagreements on certain points. This means we’re about to hit the point where the entirely unhinged and insane comments make an appearance, so be prepared.

• Eisner nominations are open. As in prior years, the categories are largely restricted to material that ships to bookstores, and Best Webcomic must take the form of:
  

  [L]ong-form stories published online in 2010; webcomics must have a unique domain name or be part
  of a larger comics community

  I’m of the opinion that webcomics shouldn’t have their own catch-all category like this. If (for instance) Karl Kerschl’s art on The Abominable Charles Christopher is as good as his art on Assassin’s Creed (and it is), it should be eligible in the same categories (no disrespect to Kerschl’s co-artist on AC, Cameron Stewart, but Stewart got the Eisner for Sin Titulo last year, so let’s use Kerschl for this example). Ain’t gonna happen this year, but I wonder — if one of the big publishers released a title only in digital form in 2011, what would the awards look like in 2012? Not shipping a comiXology purchase to the stores.

Must dash very soon, so let me point you towards the pre-order announcement for Order of Tales book 3, The Tower of Smoke. Evan Dahm puts together books that are heavy, substantially so, that provide intense tactile pleasure even as the gorgeous, color-saturated (Rice Boy)/lusciously-detailed B&W (Order of Tales) pages tickle your eyes and brain. They feel good in your hand, they capture the imagination, and if you’re a completist, next year is your lucky year — The Tower of Smoke ships in January, with a one-volume edition of Order of Tales due later in 2011 (with a foreword by Jeff Smith).

By my estimate, that’s going to be about twice the size of the Rice Boy collection, although only about 60% the size of the BONE one-volume edition (now in the … I think it’s the 14th or 15th printing?), which remains the greatest bargain in the history of comics. Now, if Dahm can just get the info from Smith’s publisher/wife, Vijaya Iyer, about the bindery she used for the hardcover/leatherbound/gold-edged BONE OVE (she told me that the place she used normally does gift-edition Bibles), that would be one hell of a present-to-myself for Christmas ’11 (or ’12, or ’13…).

Also, since we’re talking about books, big thanks to Dave Kellett, who very kindly sent me a copy of his eighth collection, Delightful Jokes for High Class Folks. True to its title, it started with three strips of Arthur horkin’ his guts up in the throes of food poisoning. Weirdly, these strips are from June of 2010, where the rest of the book appears to start around September of 2009. I can only assume that this was intentional, with Kellett searching out the most classy strips in his not-yet-published archive and leading with them. I thought it was hilarious.

That would be the names of the various work clients that are reminding me why I hate Wall Street (the metaphorical concept, and the actual street just around the corner) with the intensity of a thousand exploding suns. Plus, if you say their names three times, they appear to kill you. Or I get fired. Whichever, not on my to-do list for today. Instead, how about some holiday cheer?

• A followup on last month’s mention of Patrick Rothfuss and the Worldbuilders charity — in his blog, Rothfuss takes a look at the webcomics items that have been donated to help entice you (yes, you!) to support Heifer, International. Lotsa books, and even a couple of in-strip guest appearances up for grabs.
• Know what I could do with right about now? A damn good party, filled with laughter and joy and comics for me to take home and a tall, ruggedly handsome Canadian dude. As long as I’m on the record, I also always wanted a pony, but that hasn’t shown up yet. But the first one remains a possibility, at least for those of you in the Greater Toronto Metrosphere, as one of the great North American comics shops (that would be The Beguiling), run by one of the great North American comics proprietors (that would be TCAF organizer Christopher Butcher) is hosting a book launch for one of the great North American webcomics creators (that would be Ryan North).

  Dinosaur Comics: Dudes Already Know About Chickens will get the fun-times treatment on Tuesday, 21 Dec at 7:30pm (doors 7:00) at Pauper’s Pub, 539 Bloor St West in Toronto. You can even participate in a Secret Santa gift exchange if you like! It’s a Tuesday so I can’t make it (EMS duty, dang), but otherwise nothing would keep from the transnational fun in RYANTOWNE.

• Recently released news from the Stumptown organizers (specifically, showrunner Indigo Kelleigh) that dropped today — table confirmations are going out soon, and there’s a new process you need to know about:
  

  As the Stumptown Comics Fest has grown over the past seven years, demand for space on our exhibitor floor has skyrocketed well beyond our capacity. For the 2010 Fest we managed to fill our 130 exhibitor tables in a three week period, and were left with a sizable waiting list. Moving to a larger venue for 2011 was intended to alleviate some of that problem, but the community’s demand to be a part of the Fest exceeded our expectations, and we are again looking at having a waiting list of over 100 applicants. There is simply no fair way to decide who will get space and who won’t, and so in an effort to maintain the high caliber of exhibitors that people have come to expect from Stumptown, I have decided to curate the exhibition space.

  That’s maybe not the understanding people had when they applied for space, but perfectly reasonable from my point of view. The small-to-midsize shows that prove most successful for creators are all seeing a demand that requires they be selective about who gets in, and finding a good match between exhibitors is arguably preferable to making it a random collection of whoever got the earliest postmarks or timestamps.

  Having corresponded with Kelleigh a bit in the past, I’m confident that in trying to make the show better for exhibitors and attendees, he’s likely made his own job much more difficult, as he’s the sort of guy to agonize over what now needs to be a judgment of relative worth. He’s going to look at work in depth, trying to find the very best representatives he can in the applicants, and not making the cut isn’t him telling you that you suck. He just found somebody else that fit in place better. With the increase in floor space for 2012, hopefully the decisions will be less wrenching for Kelleigh and his staff.

Springtime is usually Neil Cohn time — you remember him, with the surveys of how people read comics — but this time he’s getting a jump on his latest solicitation of experimental test subjects. Despite the scary way I just worded it, if you participate in Cohn’s latest experiment of visual linguistics, you almost certainly won’t end up a gibbering mockery of nature … after all, there aren’t many mad social scientists. Plus, you might win a Best Buy gift card.

• Child’s Play update: given the November 30 total of US$752,000, and the amount raised just last night (from the charity dinner, and a check delivered by the Desert Bus people), but not counting any direct donations over the previous week, 2010’s efforts stand north of US$1.14 million. Wowsers.
• Anniversary times! In the past twenty four hours, we’ve seen both four years of Erfworld (seriously, four years? seems like two, tops) and the 100th page of Spacetrawler. Then again, the first couple of updates were double-sized, so it’s probably more than 100 pages by now, but what the heck — I’m declaring it an official Significant Round Number anyway.

  For those interested in extras and the collegial side of webcomics, the Erfworld page has a nice discussion on lettering and the efforts in redoing work for print, so that you can learn from their experience. And the Spacetrawler page (as well as the previous update) has a list of webcomickers with quality merch available for the holidays, who each have their own lists as well.

  It’s not really in anybody’s direct self-interest to make it easier for potential competitors to produce their wares more easily, or to promote those wares at potentially the expense of your own, which just goes to show you what fundamentally decent people one finds among independent comics creators. Also, were I to point out just one piece of exciting merchandise this season, it would surely be the Sailor Twain prints. Goodness, those are gorgeous.

• Lots of people putting together year-end lists and summaries; I think that I can safely say that 2010 was the year that substantially all the balls were tripped. Top that, 2011!

But first, a quick note. In my discussion Al’Rashad yesterday, I mentioned author Chris Bird a good deal, and did not give enough credit to the artist, Davinder Brar; Bird has pointed out my omission. In my defense, it’s much easier to find information on Davinder Brar, pharmaceutical executive, than it is to find Davinder Brar, comics artist. It appears that Brar’s work is mostly available at his deviantART account, and that Al’Rashad may be his first publicly-discoverable comics work. In which case — holy crap, this is pretty accomplished stuff for what constitutes a rookie outing. Fleen regrets the oversight.

Various places you might want to go, starring various people you may be interested int:

• J Baird, having just passed the fourth anniversary of the Create A Comic Project, is busy putting polish on a presentation — South By Southwest Interactive 2011 have invited him for a solo talk in March on interactive comics and math education:
  

  As a teaching tool, comics are inherently well suited for patterns, geometric shapes, and visual representations of data. They can be a form of stealth teaching — engaging students to think creatively about mathematics, helping instill intrinsic motivation and improving long-term retention…. Navigating the symbolic language of math is a known barrier for many students. Current research into how the brain translates concepts and similarities suggests that comics provide a pathway for alleviating this barrier through the very nature of being “sequential art.” By traversing through each of these stages, a holistic picture of comics’ place in the development of advanced math pedagogical techniques becomes clear.

  Fascinating stuff. And before anybody in the back row starts snickering “pedgogical” refers to the study of teaching and the process of teaching. Perverts. But back to Austin; using the “webcomics” tag in the handy-dandy panel search tool doesn’t turn up any other presentations at SxSWI, but that hasn’t stopped Rosscott of The System from participating in a panel on image manipulation without Photoshop. Anybody else from the community going to be there that I missed?

• It’s sold out, but tonight is the Child’s Play Charity Dinner/Auction, when the cream of gamerdom gets all fancy-dressed and drops major bucks towards charity. Given that this year’s Child’s Play was up over US$750,000 a week ago, the total will in all likelihood eclipse a cool million by this time tomorrow, and almost certainly surpass last year’s US$1.2 million.
• Speaking of Austin, local comic shop Dragon’s Lair will be hosting Webcomics Rampage this weekend. Last year’s event got good reviews from the creators and fans who attended, and no reason to think that this year will be any different. The fun runs 10am to 7pm Saturday and Sunday, with a veritable plethora of webcomickers in attendance. If nothing else, you’ll have Randy Milholland and Danielle Corsetto in the same place, and that’s always good, wholesome fun.
• Advance planning: inspired by today’s opening of San Diego’s Exhibitor Room Requestarama, it looks like the next con after the Rampage is likely Arisia, in a month or so in Boston; Shaenon Garrity will be Webcomic Guest of Honor. Then I don’t think there’s much on deck until Em-City, with its numerous webcomicky guests and exhibitors. Enjoy the break, everybody; it might be cold, but at least it’s relaxing.

While we at this page have recently bemoaned the lack of regular/frequent Achewood updates, it appears that it was all for good cause. Having recently obtained and read Dark Horse’s third Achewood collection, A Home For Scared People, one easily understands that Chris Onstad has been putting much of him time into the supplementary material in this book.

As if the strips from early May to late October 2002 (including the entirety of Roast Beef on the moon, plus Ray’s first two startup businesses) were not enough, there are multiple character portraits of Ray and Roast Beef (including Ray on Beef, Beef on Ray, and digressions on the both of them by Téodor and Mr Bear), as well as an interview of the pair of knuckleheads since small times, by Téodor. The latter contains pure, unbridled comedic gold at every turn. For example, when Téodor makes the mistake of bringing up avocado in the conversation:

Téodor: What?
Ray: [scratches cheek]
Beef: [looks at floor]
Téodor: Seriously, what?
Ray: You uh … I mean, Beef and I really ain’t down with avocado.
Téodor: Avocado is delicious. What do you think guacamole is?
Beef: Guacamole is a lot of tasty stuff held together with a necessary green slime. Served on a tasty, salty, fried corn chip.
Ray: Did you know that they did some tests, and an avocado is the exact bell-like shape of a filled-up colon? That’s why the Incas called it the ptoxábl, or “hind fruit”.

That’s what I’ve been missing for the past months; I thought it might have gone away for good, but it was getting collected in prose form. Here’s hoping that Onstad, having produced such for one book (and presumably more), will now have the time to get his store updated. I’m being completely serious here — I want to reward him with cash money for giving me these thoughts out of his brain, and the Achewood shop is entirely too heavily dominated by “out of stock” messages.

• In other news, almost exactly six months ago, a Canadian gentleman given to blogging on comics-related items named Chris Bird (the eponymous Mighty God King of this bloggishness) released the first page of his own webcomic. Al’Rashad: City of Myths has now hit 24 pages, wrapping up Part One (or issue #1, if you prefer), and collecting the weekly pages in one spot for easy reading.

  In correspondence with Mr Bird, I commented on his ability to spin a world that obviously has much richness beyond the pages and characters that he has revealed so far. His disturbing tendency to show, not tell, and to create something new instead of rehashing a plot that had been done at regular five-to-seven year intervals since the Silver Age is rare and infuriating — how am I to enjoy this story if I don’t already know the entire thing?

  He did not, he assured me, miss that memo, but rather he set it on fire, and then jump[ed] up and down on the burny bits. Check out Al’Rashad, and if you like comics from the Big Two, read his pitches for Legion of Superheroes and Doctor Strange, and somebody give him a writing gig.

• Y’all have been reading Box Brown’s Everything Dies, right? His exploration of religion, faith, and What Comes Next goes self-reflective in the latest update, But I Don’t Want To Die … A Personal Religious History. Much like Tolstoy remarked that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, I suspect that every formerly-religious, currently-not person has their own story as to how they wound up that way. Kudos to Brown for sharing his.

I do this a couple times a year — open up the mailbag, look over new (or new-ish) comics that people have sent me links to, and read the most recent five to ten installments. It’s gut-level, it’s not deep, and very occasionally I find something that I like. This time I’m sharing it with you.

• Sketchfervor! by Amelia Altavena
  Art’s a bit like Raina Telgemeier, ranging from cartoony to watercolorish. Topics range from daily life to deeper thoughts. Not much in the way of storyline, but probably worth an archive trawl sometime.
• The Deadlys by Chris Cantrell
  Chas Addams meets Seth McFarlane, with a family & friends circle of monsters (some under-the-bed mythological types, some, evil-that-men-do types) in a world skewed towards creepiness. Not as over the top committed to a monster reality as Monsters, Inc or Ugly Hill, it’s essentially a sitcom with the suburb having Halloweentowne set dressing — job worries, wacky hijinks, and mix-ups included. Currently running a holiday-themed story arc that will likely be more plot-cohesive than prior installments.
• Rhetoric by Darrell Stark
  Laugh-chuckles in a retail setting, this time a bookstore. Not much I can tell in the quick trawl about who the characters are — they don’t show clearly developed personalities across this sample, and even the physical design and color palettes assigned to them are kind of same-y. The boss is apparently sympathetic and a driven jerk? There may well be plenty of development and differentiation if you read from the beginning but I’m having trouble getting myself past the faces — they’re all sad, disturbingly so, almost Winkerbeanian in the depths of their unhappiness.
• Wunderman Comics by Nate Wunderman
  Comic book type stories, from alien invasions of Earth to time travel capers. Art looks and feels like 1980s 2000 AD one-off stories (Alan Moore wrote a lot of great stuff, and a bunch of up and coming artists illustrated it), with colors straight from old school Métal Hurlant. I couldn’t get the promised navigation (keyboard or mouse) to work, so a lot of clicking on one page in the archive gallery, reading it, going back, and then clicking on the next. On the up side, a lot of comics show up here weekly.

If you thought that Ryan Estrada was going to go heads-down and radio silent during the One Month Animated Feature challenge and we’d see what he had been up to on New Year’s Day, we got a treat for you. No, not you, Christopher Wright who has placed my moustache on notice, this information isn’t for you¹. For everybody else, Estrada has released teaser designs of his major characters and linked them to their voice actors, including some webcomics luminaries. You got yer Kurtz ‘n’ Straub, naturally, but also Steve Wolfhard, animator Barney Wornoff, and nemesis to podcasters/John Allison lackey/semi-pro Stan Lee Channeller Kevin McShane.

And for your listening pleasure, a voice track of Straub and Kurtz that hints at the plot of what may be called The Alias Men. It appears that the aliens want to rob Earth of its most precious resource, scarce throughout the known universe: free WiFi. More, including Estrada’s MacGyvering-up of a lightbox out of string and chewing gum, at the project’s Tumblr or Estrada’s Ell-Jay.

• Meanwhile, there’s a pretty nifty, not-quite-noirish murder mystery webcomic that wrapped up today — She Died In Terrebonne ran for just about a year, and it featured a beginning, middle, end, and coda in just over fifty pages. If you’ve got a spare hour, read the whole thing through from the beginning, and maybe check out the other webcomics work from writer Kevin Church, of which there are multiple worthy examples, with a variety of talented artists.
• I have mentioned Skin Horse by Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey Wells on this page plenty of times, mostly because it’s awesome. On my more restrained days (such as back in July of 2009) I may describe it as:
  

  [O]ne of the highlights of my day, because what can possibly be wrong about a webcomic that deals primarily with paranormal-managing government bureaucrats who subtly recall the less-well-known Oz books and gets regularly cranked up to about 14 on the Insane-o-Meter? Unstoppable zombies, talking dogs, killer robots, crystalline entities, baby cobras that only want hugs, opera-loving silverfish, a likely-undiagnosed-Asperger’s brain transplanted into a military airframe, and a transvestite psychologist who bags all the babes?

  And it’s drawn by Shaenon Garrity, the one person able to compete with Ryan North for the title of Nexus of All Webcomics Realities?

  But not enough of you are reading it. I say this not because I have any inside information on what Skin Horse’s readership numbers are like, but merely because not every person on the planet is revelling in the fun. For a limited time, you may now get in on said fun for a super-bargain discount — for December only, get both Skin Horse books (two full years of strips) for twenty dollars American cash money (plus shipping and handling), representing a nearly 30% discount. If nothing else entices you, it is the one webcomic I know of that has ever paid proper respect to New Jersey’s contribution to traffic engineering: the dedicated left-turn lane/jughandle. Thank you Mr Wells and Ms Garrity, and you’re welcome, rest of the world.

_______________
¹ Oh boy, is this my new Internet Feud? My previous nemesis, The Midnight Cartooner over at Digital Strips, has been really quiet about our internet grudgery for a while now.

I have a dilemma — perhaps even it could be called a Circumstance — involving too many books. Dave Kellett has just announced his eighth sequential collection of Sheldon; I recently obtained the sixth Schlock Mercenary book. Like Kellett Howard Tayler adds to his Well of Strips for Publication at a rate of hundreds per year; Danielle Corsetto, whose fifth Girls With Slingshots collection is now on order. Questionable Content only has one book, but Jeph Jacques will be releasing more than one a year until he’s caught up, which will be in a half-dozen books or so (god help me if Randy Milholland ever starts releasing his Something*Positive backlog in book form).

It used to be that a dedicated reader of comic strips might collect books from one or two creators that were especially liked; at different times I collected volumes of Doonesbury, Foxtrot, Bloom County, and Calvin and Hobbes, and that was it — over the first 35 years of my life, only four strips merited book purchase. But now I have literally dozens, from creators who are far closer to the start of their careers than the end (the list above merely recounts the most recent must-adds), and that’s not counting even more creators whose work I enjoy, but I made the strategic decision to not purchase their collections.

Yeah, I know, first world problem, but I wonder if it’s a concern that any of these creators had considered. Fifteen or twenty years into their careers, are they going to run into fans that have actually run out of room for physical artifacts? I may be the canary in the coal mine with this one.

• In other news, Otter always sends me the best stuff (cf: the Rifftrax/Axe Cop sighting two days back), best of all she doesn’t have a book out yet. Oh she will, and sooner than my bookshelves would appreciate (at this point, each new purchase pretty much necessitates the removal of an earlier purchase), but for today she is not contributing to the load-bearing test of my office/library’s floor.

  In any event, she pointed me towards an interesting piece on Why Conventions May Not Be A Good Idea For Creators by Tony DiGerolamo. It dovetails nicely with a discussion in a recent edition of the newly-resurgent Webcomics Weekly; as I recall, Kurtz, Guigar, and Straub took some heat for telling creators that jumping straight into conventions may not have the appeal that it once did. DiGerolamo’s logic approaches from a different direction that Kurtz et. al., but comes to a startlingly similar conclusion. Read and consider well.

• Did everybody see the guest strip Rebecca Clements did for Octopus Pie today? Clements nailed Gran’s style from the first frame while still conceptually (and typographically) referencing Little Nemo in Slumberland and at the same time (perhaps unintentionally) invoking one of the finest pieces of Appalachian literature ever produced. If you should ever come across a short story called The Beard by Fred Chappell, remember that this is what is meant by an elegant sufficiency.
• I’ll admit — I hadn’t heard of Namir Deiter by Isabel Marks before today, but her husband Terrence thought it worth mentioning that today marks Namir Deiter’s 2896th update, or 11th anniversary. And you know what? It is worth mentioning. I dedicate an unholy number of hours each week to this medium, and the fact that a nearly 3000-strip-deep webcomic has been going for more than a decade that I’d never come across exists has ceased to surprise me. I read a about 65 strips regularly, another 50 or 60 irregularly, and am probably familiar with a few hundred beyond that. Statisticians have yet to come up with a term to describe what a drop in the bucket those numbers represent.

It’s not much better out now. Maybe the next day or so will be better?

• You know what’s for wimps, apparently? NaNoWriMo. You know what the true creative make-or-break project is? OnMoAnFe. That would be Ryan Estrada‘s effort in the rain forest of Central America for the month of December — the One Month Animated Feature:
  

  It’s always been my dream to make an animated feature, but I’ve never been able to get the time and resources I need. Well, I’m sick of waiting. This December, I’m sitting down at my desk in the Costa Rican jungle to work. And on January 1st, I’m releasing the finished movie online, free to all.

  For anybody else, I’d say it was probably suicidal; for Estrada (veteran of the 168 hour comic), I’d call it merely semi-insane, but unlikely to produce permanent mental harm. Everybody send Estrada some good vibes tomorrow as he begins his descent into Ultimate Crunch Time.

• Speaking of tomorrow, congrats to Christian Fundin and Pontus Madsen, who will celebrate ten years of deceptively-cute-yet-foul-intentioned (in the best way possible) updates over at Little Gamers.
• Still speaking of tomorrow, I get to flip over the card in my 2010 Wondermark calendar from November to December; I wonder what ribaldry and/or misery will await me in all of its artisanal screen-printed glory? Also, to ensure that another 12 months of inappropriate thoughts continue, I ordered my calendar cards for 2011 today, and urge you to do likewise, as they exist in an extremely limited edition of under 200.

  Watching screenprinting, letterpressing, typebothering and old-style ink-manipulations of every kind is utterly fascinating to me (and also to a statistically unusually large number of the readers of this page — as compared to the general population), so while the rest of you go enjoy a refreshing beverage or snack, we will be enjoying a short video documentary on the creation of the 2008 edition.

• Hey, you’re reading Zahra’s Paradise, right? The first webcomic launched under the imprimatur of the creative wünderkinden over at :01 Books about life in modern Iran, and the search for a disappeared protestor is just now starting a storyline on Iran’s secret prisons:
  

  Kahrizak is the incarceration center where so many protestors disappeared to. It was eventually closed when it became public
  knowledge, and an embarrassment for the regime.

  In this chapter, the blogger [and narrator of the story] receives news: one of his friends who was missing, Ali, has been released and has returned home. Everyone rejoices, and they gather to celebrate. But Ali does not want to celebrate; his experiences in prison have been
  traumatic. He does have a message for the blogger, though: his brother, Mehdi, was held with him in Kahrizak, where the government moved
  troublesome people it wanted out of the normal system, inaccessible to any pleas for help.

  The creators of Zahra’s Paradise, Amir and Khalil (anonymous for obvious reasons) have done their homework throughout the story, but given that Kahrizak is based on the accounts of people who have seen the inside of the secret prisons, it’s likely that this chapter will be especially harrowing, and important. If you haven’t been reading, this is the time to jump in.