The Ignatz nominees were announced earlier today, and I found the honorees for Outstanding Online Comic to be … odd. Maybe more than other comics awards, the Ignatzes vary widely in character from year to year, but like other named-year awards, they’ve pretty much always looked at work for the year before the award: the 2009 award honored work primarily done in 2008, the ’08 award for work in ’07, and so forth.

This year, however, they seem pretty determined that the 2010 award will honor work done in 2010 (which isn’t quite 2/3 done yet). Consider the nominees:

• John Callahan’s Callahan Online is a now-frozen two-week archive of Callahan’s panel gag toons. Frozen, because he died at the end of last month, so anybody looking to examine his work will have those ten panel gags to judge and not much else. Hate to say it, but this feels like an Oh crap, did we honor him while he was alive? afterthought.
• Sarah Becan’s I Think You’re Saucesome is a diary comic that focuses on weight loss. It’s got a taste of Bellen!, here, a bit of Kinokofry there, and reminds me a lot of Stop Paying Attention, so that’s okay. Lots of updates (between 3 and 6 new strips a week), but it only began on March 1st of this year.
• Stephen Gilpin’s The Lesttrygonians features an archive going back to 1998 (!), but only 21 of those strips (weekly, from April of this year) are more recent than October 2000. It’s nice stuff, between a half- and full-page each week, but it’s a small amount of work in a short amount of time; the decade-long hiatus means the older stuff could barely be considered the same strip.
• David King’s Reliable Comics is a bit tougher to parse, temporally speaking — he posted a series of strips done in 2007-2008 between Dec 2009 and Feb 2010. February to April he posted strips from 2009, and since April work done this year, for a total of 26 “recent” strips.
• Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 began at the end of November 2009, and is currently in progress. Of the nominees, it appears to be the only one that features a traditional story, with a beginning, middle, and end; tonally, it feels a lot like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison.

None of this is meant to say That strip shouldn’t win/even be nominated because it’s ____ !; if the jury decided that the best comics work of the past year is heavily skewed towards the past five months, then that’s their call. I just can’t recall any award iteration that took the year quite so literally. I won’t be at SPX so I don’t get to vote, but I like (and this may be a side effect of having the fullest bodies of work to judge) Dawson and Becan quite a lot.

• Speaking of time, Amulet Book 3: The Cloud Searchers is out in two weeks!
• You may have heard that Our Kate (Beaton, that is … look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, son) is about to decamp from Canada for a period of time and hunker down in Brooklyn for a spell. Not content to see what a change of venue will do to her creative side (whenever she travels, she gets a bunch of really good comics from it), Beaton’s decided that she’s going to celebrate her new home by working for the good of others.

  Specifically, she’s joined up with a team of comics types to participate in the 2010 Run for Congo Women (New York, 5K, 25 September), with monies raised going to Women for Women International. Team Comics has their fundraising page here, and they could use your help. Hop to it, people, and Kate, next time I see you I owe you a tasty beverage for being a Damn Good Person.

If there were such a thing as “Followup Friday” around here, that is.

• It’s been a long slog to get all the dies just right, but everybody that can’t afford a Chris Yates original Baffler! puzzle/object d’art just got a budget alternative. Fully a year after the deal was made and nine months after it went public, Ceaco’s first three licensed Baffler! designs have been announced for release this October. Everybody that has a grandma that loves doing puzzles? Your holiday shopping just got a little easier.
• Busy guy these days, Jim Zubkavich is; finished up that ninjariffic series o’ comics from the spring, and now has a new series from Image due next month. Given Zubkavich’s history of quality work, that alone would be worth a mention, but the fact that said new series is titled SKULLKICKERS and described as sword and sassery? Icing on the proverbial cake, my friends. Grab yourself a copy and revel in the kicking.
• Following up on the American Apparel story from the start of the month, there are two words you never want to hear about one of your vendors: going concern. This is because it’s pretty much a given that those two words only ever get used following the words it is not certain that [name of business] can continue as a. It’s rare that a company that uses the Two Words O’ Death avoids either ceasing business operations and/or bankruptcy, and thanks to a financial filing yesterday, those are pretty much the only choices AA has left. As is usual in these cases, Kai Ryssdal’s got the lowdown.
• Finally, a reminder that the Dallas Webcomics Expo number 2 (Electric Boogaloo) will be this weekend, and remember that there’s that art auction to benefit sick kids, so bring cash and lots of it.

Quick things!

• John Campbell had an art show. Here are pictures of the art show. Saddening!
• Dave Kellett, Keith Knight, and David Malki ! tried to spell words for charity. Here is the story of how famous and/or beautiful people are favored in our society. Shocking!
• TCAF 2011 applications now being accepted. Right-thinking people regard this as a good thing. Woo!
• The original may have been a hoax, but it’s still comics. Whiteboardery!
• Jeff Zugale did an analysis of “print” vs “web” business models for comics, and found that the “web” model has always been in use. It’s behind the subscription wall at Webcomics Dot Com which is a shame because this needs to be part of the broader conversation. Mayhap the newly vacationed Brad Guigar could be convinced to make this one a freebie?

Longer thing!

At the time I was writing yesterday’s update, I did not yet know what was waiting in my mailbox: a gifted copy of We Are The Engineers by Angela Melick. Considering that the book was announced as pre-order on the 11th and arrived from across an international border (and a weekend!) on the 16th, how could I not read it immediately?

A confession — since I met Ms Melick at NEWW last year, I’ve been a faithful reader of Wasted Talent, but I never read back far enough into the archives to cover her college years, when the inspired-by-life strip began (an aside: were this a movie, it would be touted as based on the incredible true story; since Melick is an engineer, it’s probably best described as slapped a linear approximation transform on what actually happened because crap on a stick, have you seen how messy the real data were?).

Turns out that I needn’t have felt guilty about it, as Melick has gone back to redraw the “best of” several hundred strips and distill down the period when she was still cartooning with improvised materials in margins (again, engineer) into her much cleaner and accomplished current style.

I have often remarked on how Melick (and Kean Soo, for that matter) and I share a bond of common experience. It doesn’t matter that it was different times, different countries, or different disciplines — engineers are an odd folk, and we get each other. Being part of an overworked, high-achieving minority within a much larger university was Melick’s experience, whereas I was part of a high-achieving, overworked, all-nerd school across town from a much larger (but entirely unrelated) university. She studied physical stuff, and I the more intangible (ECE511, I still remember you). UBC engineers built an artificial pond to throw people into, we had the natural variety. A decade and a half of technological and cultural change (not to mention a Y chromosome) separate her experiences from mine, and still — every page of WATE resonates like I was there alongside her.

But here’s the thing — much as engineers like to hold ourselves apart (it’s a comfort to us, having long ago realized we could have had a lot more fun and sex in college if we had picked easier majors), we really aren’t that much different from anybody else¹.

The experience of being a student engineer puts a certain sharp relief on certain aspects of college (our experiences were probably more math-intensive than most), but everybody remembers studying too long, working projects too hard, praying for a curve to kick in and rescue everything. Everybody remembers looking down on another major and wondering how they had it so easy, or a first job and wondering if you’d ever get the hang of things. Everybody had idiot traditions and the revered history of those that came before you.

Whatever your experience of working too hard with others sharing the same goal, you’ll find your memories coming back after reading WATE. It took Proust seven books and a cookie to provoke this kind of involuntary recall, and he didn’t even have one psychotic squirrel in there, so screw him; you won’t be able to write a senior thesis around WATE, but you’ll have a hell of a lot of fun reading it.
_______________
¹ Nah, we totally are.

That would be 500 strips worth of Mulitplex from Gordon McAlpin (my gentlemen’s bet nemesis, coming up on one year into the 3 to 5 year lifespan of said wager) and 3000 strips worth of Unshelved by Gene Ambaum (friend to one and all) and Bill Barnes (my nemesis on everything except the friendly wager with Gordon).

And if my sums are correct (which they may not be), Thursday will mark 1000 strips worth of Girls With Slingshots [link not valid yet] by Danielle Corsetto (even friendlier to one and all than Gene Ambaum). So that’s all right.

• On the other end of the spectrum, we have a brand new webcomic for your consideration — Mimi and Eunice. Ordinarily, a comic that started sometime last month wouldn’t be mentioned here, but two things distinguish M&E:
  1. It’s by Nina Paley, who applied the free content (or “webcomic”) model to an entire feature film that kicked ass
  2. The archive already has 16 entries for August 2010 and an astonishing 115 for July 2010

  At the moment, it’s easy to search out M&E strips by topic, but there’s effectively no dating or archive system. This is a bit weird, but given that the strips aren’t topical or plot-driven, my initial suspicion of this situation may not be entirely warranted. In the meantime, M&E rewards random topic-diving.

• Following up on a post from last November, wherein we noted that the mysterious Eben07 would be “doing print” with Brain Food Comics, an outgrowth of The Slightly Askew Adventures of Inspector Ham & Eggs: BFC has since also picked up the print bid’ness of Dinoman, and is now in the “cash intensive” phase of expansion. Kickstart[er]ing is not unusual in these cases, but the donation patterns on this fundraiser caught my eye: all pledges are currently at the $50, $75, and $100 levels, with none at the more economical $5, $10, $20, or $30 levels.

  This would seem to indicate a fairly high level of buy-in from fans of the associated comics, as nobody’s opted for the cheap donation levels. Conventional wisdom has been that you can’t succeed in business catering to a narrow (but free-spending) audience without a broader base, but with better than 10% of goal in the first two days of the pledge period? Maybe the “long tail” can be stubbier than we all thought.

With all the [web]comickers out there being different (sometimes very different) and distinct people, they naturally have different priorities and hold different concepts dear. Nevertheless, one thing unites them all, holding them as one people, and even ties them to the mass of non-[web]comickers (a world that might even hate and fear them). I speak, naturally, of caffeine.

No real reason to bring this up, except that while I was writing this post, a nicely informative half-hour segment on the local NPR station dealt with the magic molecule. Pretty good chance that by the time you read this, there will be streaming audio of the story available here.

• Speaking of science (chemistry is science), Katie Sekelsky wants you to know:
  

  [V]oting is now up for the Union of Concerned Scientists 2010 Science Idol cartooning competition. 12 cartoonists were commissioned to create cartoons on the topic of scientific integrity, and the winner, determined by the vote, will get the cover of the calendar + some extra bucks.

  I’m not sure if there’s any other web cartoonists in the mix, but mine is #5!

  Might have expected Randall Munroe or Zach Weiner to be in the mix, but still some worthy competitors.

• Weirdly enough, Randall and Zach both were on my mind this morning; Randall for drawing a situation that I’d actually considered making happen, and Zach for his contribution to Ryan North’s honeymoon week, which honors the essential nature of Ryan North: an enormous shirtless man.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wrap up today’s work so I can go see Scott Pilgrim.

Following up on yesterday’s latest webcomics iApp issue, it appears that Mr or Ms Reilly Watson’s webcomics reader is still up, and still using the service- and trademarks of other people to advertise itself. To answer Greg Carter’s comment, I didn’t make the copyright argument because I don’t know for certain that the app is in fact a scraper; if it’s an RSS aggregator, it’s not violating copyright as long as it’s just pointing users towards the sites of webcomickers.

But whether or not it’s scraper, copyright is an area where holders have discretion to enforce or not; no such leeway exists with trademarks, which must be enforced (I believe that the legal term is vigorously defended) or they can be lost. Anybody who feels that they need to enforce either copyright or trademark can make their case to the developer (who doesn’t provide a contact address that I could find, other than Google), or directly to Apple (thanks to Rich McDonald for that email address).

• Oh man — Karl Kerschl was serious in his warning:
  

  The new episode of The Abominable Charles Christopher is online. Avoid if you’re fond of bear cubs.

  Karl, why you even got to do a thing? If you’ve ever felt the slightest twinge while reading about Vivol and Moon Bear, then set firmly your resolve and have the tissues ready — it’s a heartbreaker.

• New discovery: All New Issues, by Bill Ellis and Dani O’Brien. I was introduced to them some time back (over some excellent drinks) as friends of Danielle Corsetto, but they hadn’t started the comic then. Fewer than 30 strips, very clean style, very enjoyable.
• Seems like I have to mention this once every six months or so. If you want me to read your press release, your chances go way down if you send through a three-sentence email that just says Check out this 7200KB PDF attachment. Ain’t happening.

New Jess Fink site! She said “poop”!

• Okay, this is the sort of story that changes quickly, so by the time you read this it may no longer be an issue. There’s a new webcomic-reading application over in the iPhone/iPad apps store, by one Mr or Ms Reilly Watson. Unlike the last one of these that made a splash in the community, this app does not appear to be a simple RSS feed aggregator — it appears to pull comics from the creator’s site, present it outside of their preferred context, costing the creators bandwidth and advertising revenue (I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, so my apologies if I’m wrong on this one). One more time for those in the back: RSS readers = cool, scrapers = not cool.

  Mr or Ms Watson might particularly want to pay attention to a bit from Robert Khoo at the SDCC Webcomics Lightning Round, as it bears repeating:

  Question: Going back to people taking your content, were you aware of how you have to protect your work always, and is that likely to change?
  Khoo: It’s very complicated, and would take a lot more than twenty seconds to answer properly; we aggressively protect ourselves from people trying to make money off our marks, otherwise we see it as a form of community enabling.[emphasis original]

  And lookee there — Mr or Ms Watson mentions Penny Arcade as one of the ‘popular comics’ included (although I must point out in the service of snark that Mr or Ms Watson seems to have farmed support for the app out to Canadian Google), which means that Mr or Ms Watson is indeed making money off that mark.

  Quick hint to Mr or Ms Watson and all who might follow in his or her footsteps: the Patent and Trademark Office maintains a simple trademark search which shows exactly who owns what. I’ll also point out that trademark owners have an obligation to defend their marks, and that registration means that violators are subject to treble damages. That would be the case here even if the app is just an RSS aggregator, since it’s advertising on a name and identity owned by somebody else. If the app in question is a scraper, Mr or Ms Watson should prepare to share out revenue to the creators who are going to be demanding compensation.

• Oh hecka yeah — Angela Melick, aka Jam, aka Spike Without Dreads, aka my right hand rule homie, has done the crazy and redrawn a bunch of her Wasted Talent college-era strips in order to put her first book together. We Are The Engineers debuts at Anime Evolution this weekend, and goes up for pre-order on the 13th for artists editions, with actual online sales on 18 September.

  For everybody that ever wondered what the crap was going on in the head of the engineers that they know and (let’s be honest — only sometimes) love, Melick is your translator. We’re definitely a breed apart, and she’s our ambassador to the world of people that don’t subscribe to the notion If it ain’t broke, break it and see if you can make it better! We are an oft-misunderstood people, and may consider WATE as a field guide to our mysterious ways.

• Finally, because a few people have been asking — I’m not going to be able to make it to SPX and/or Intervention next month; unfortunately, I’ve got a little too much going on this autumn, and will save my away from home time for NEWW. On the upside, most everybody I would see in Bethesda will be in Easthampton in November, so that’s all right.

  For those of you that are heading to Maryland, Casey Roberson wants you to know that there are hotel bargains o’plenty in the immediate area of the two shows, including a place called Legacy Hotel in Rockville (less than 2 miles from SPX) with single-bed rooms for $68/night. Please note that we at Fleen are not travel service and make no claims about the quality of accommodations. Then again, you could probably get cut by a murderous drifter just as easily at an expensive hotel as a cheap one, so may as well save a few bucks.

By the time you read this, Steven Cloud and Matt Bors will have left Moscow (the first leg on their journey to/through Afghanistan) for Dubai, then on to Central Asia and into bandit country with Ted Rall. It’s possible that Cloudy’s progress may be visible here, but as we all know 4G coverage is atrocious in the 3rd world , so maybe not.[Edit to add: At Steven Cloud’s request, link removed.] Cartoon updates (hopefully including contributions by Cloudy & Bors) available at Rall’s blog. Stay safe, guys.

• Having had the pleasure of hanging with Scott McCloud and listening to him find comics in everything (I’m thinking particularly about a series of decorative tiles that told a story in an ice cream join in Princeton), my own definition of what constitutes comics is much broader than it was in my younger days.

  Pictures + words (and sometimes not so many words) in sequence is a sufficient meeting of the criteria, which means this resignation “letter” that’s making the rounds is comics. It’s even got a thought balloon! And since it was entirely designed for electronic delivery, it’s webcomics. Also, pretty damn funny.

• Blast from the past: Robert Anke, whom you may remember from the miserable annals of this page (where he is duly enshrined), would like you to know that he has collected all his various creative endeavours into one overall archive. Juggernaut, indeed. I mention this only because I did quite enjoy Anke’s Running in the Halls, and now the entire run is in one convenient location.

For those of you wondering, MoCCA Art Fest 2011 (9 and 10 April, at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan) tables are almost available [PDF]. There were a couple years there where applications were only accepted by mail and by hand, and local cartoonists pretty much shut out everybody else, but the note here says:

Registrations will be accepted on a first come, first served basis beginning August 10th by fax (212-254-3590), mail (594 Broadway, ste. 401, New York, NY 10012), email (exhibitors@moccany.org), and in person.

… which ought to equalize things nicely. It was pretty well-run this year compared to last (with a rookie crew of show-runners and unseasonable heat turning 2009 into a sweaty mess), but since I don’t exhibit you’ll have to decide for yourselves if the table costs (below the cut) are worth it.

• Speaking of time-sensitive opportunities, we’re just four days away from Jenny Everywhere Day 2010. In case you’ve forgotten (it has been nearly a year since we mentioned her), Ms Everywhere is:
  

  [A]n open source character created in 2001 by Steven Wintle and the members of the Barbalith forums. She’s free to use by anyone in any capacity they see fit.

  Jenny exists in all realities at the same time and her powers stem from an ability to “Shift” herself and others from one reality to another. Her exact powers/limitations within any given story are up to the people working on it.

  The two things that make her “Jenny Everywhere” are her goggles and her scarf. Every other aspect to her design (including race, body type, hair color, eye color, number of limbs, etc.) are completely up for grabs and fall under the discretion of the creator.

  Create your own interpretation of Jenny Everywhere, and submit on or before the 13th to be part of the fun.

• News in the webcomics-publishing sphere: Chris and Kyle Bolton of SMASH have signed a deal to have Season One of their webcomic published by Candlewick Press (who appear to be new to the comics game, but have quite a catalog of kids and YA books).

  SMASH has a loose-limbed, gleefully frenetic style to the art (not unlike Skottie Young’s work on the OZ adaptations at Marvel) and a breakneck pace to the story, as befits a 10 year old that suddenly finds himself all supered-up. Best of all, with publication (date TBA) all arranged, the Boltons have time to get SMASH season two underway, with serialization starting next month.

• Finally, is there no limit to the depths to which he will sink? Two geekly pursuits stretched and squashed into a four-word pun that strains language to the breaking point? Brad Guigar is a bad man. A very bad man.

(more…)

Long week, cocktails still hours away. Let’s do this.

• Gather ’round children, and let me tell you a story. First, there was the idea, then the dream. Dinosaur Comics posited the idea of a machine that could tell you how you would die, and David Malki !, Ryan North, and Matthew Bennardo had the dream of collecting stories inspired by that machine.

  The dream had a name: Machine of Death, an anthology of stories about the machine and how it affected people, illustrated by webcomicdom’s finest, released as print book, audiobook, and Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 licensed PDF.

  The stories were selected (so few stories, crushing the dreams of more than 600 aspirants [and now you know why David Malki ! is known to this day as The Dreamcrusher, children]), the illustrators obtained, and then … nothing.

  Until now.

  After a long year of excitement, disappointment, renewed excitement, continued disappointment, thickheadedness, obstinacy and relief, we are pleased to announce that Machine of Death will be officially released this October by Bearstache Books, the boutique printing arm of Wondermark Enterprises.

  So that’s all right, then.

• Lotta guest strips flying through the aether to give the aforementioned Ryan North a break for his upcoming troth-plighting (Happy third night of RyanAndJennyMas, everybody), including today’s by the aforementioned Dreamcrusher. But these are not your only shots at guest strips, whoa no. For instance, Wes Molebash is the sort to plan ahead for disaster, and has issued an open call for Max vs Max guest strippage:
  

  Send your guest strips to me at wes (at) maxvsmax (dot) com and use Guest Strip Submission as the subject. If you do not use Guest Strip Submission as the subject, then it is likely your submission will get buried in my inbox never to be seen again.

  Save your comics as .PNG or .GIF files and make sure they are 980 pixels wide. I don’t care how tall they are. They can be black-and-white, color, grayscale . . . whatever. Draw my comic the way YOU would draw my comic.

  I don’t really care what you write about or what characters you feature. I do ask that you keep it fairly clean (PG or PG-13).

  I’m not sure when these strips will run. They may get published at the end of the month during my wedding week, or I may save them for a later date. You may want to keep that in mind during your writing process.

  Please include any links and pertinent information about your blog/comic strip/website in the body of your email. I want to send you some link love for helping me out, and I won’t be able to do that if you don’t give me a URL.

  Man, everybody’s getting married. Maybe I should do that sometime.

• Is there anything that can’t catch fire with a Kickstarter crowd? Described by its own creator as a “combination of really cute and slightly oogy”, the PuppyCow plush has hit about 1/3 of goal in four days. If you always wanted an abomination of nature craftded “seven inches tall and featur[ing] udders made out of a fake leather material”, now’s your chance.
• Time’s running out to send some last minute good wishes to Steven Cloud before he drops himself into a war zone for the sheer beardiness of it. Rall will be sending out updates via Stephanie McMillan, so follow her on Twitter or watch this page for important news. Honestly, I hope there isn’t any — no news means that Cloudy, Bors, and Rall are alive, fed, and not too uncomfortable, and I wish nothing less than the most boring trip ever for them.