(There may or may not be an update on Monday, depending on how much grilling needs to be done; my guess is: A Lot.)

• Speaking of weekends, start making your plans for the first one of November, because New England Webcomics Weekend just announced its first tranche of guests, including transoceanic visitors Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson and John Allison, as well as transcontinental visitors Aaron Diaz and Erika Moen, ‘long with various out-of-staters MechaYukoAndAnanth, Chris Hallbeck, Danielle Corsetto, David McGuire, Evan Dahm, and Meghan Murphy. Also, some guy who lives upstairs. Many more will be added, and it’s going to be crazy-awesome.
• I’ve been emailing back and forth with Colin Ferguson of Snakehead Games (makers of Star Pirates) for a little while now — as you may recall, Starpirates did a lot of its advertising with various webcomic creators, and Ferguson has had the community on his mind. To that end, Snakehead are offering some recognition to the community, along with fabulous prizes:
  

  We worked with the owners of the coolest online comics to have their communities play in our games. And they did. So we’re throwing a thank you back to the creators of the comics AND their communities. So we already have a first round vote to get 20 webcomics that our community liked. Now we’re going to ask for a round of feedback on their best strip. Best meaning the most “Online Game-y” or “SciFi”. Of course, we’re doing it with a twist.

  What’s up for Grabs?

  1) Cash prize of $1000

  2) $1000 in free advertising on Project Wonderful : www.projectwonderful.com is the way that most comics monetize…and a way we’ve found works for advertising the games!

  Current standings in the polls show a statistically-insignificant difference bewtween Girl Genius, Legostar Galactica, and Schlock Mercenary in the top position, with everybody else a pretty healthy margin behind, so it’s pretty likely one of those three will win a chunk of advertising credit. For the cash prize there’s a pick-a-name-from-the-hat mechanism, so one lucky webcomicker from the list could be having a really good 4th of July cookout beer fund. Good luck to all the contestants.

• It’s been a bit more than three years since I first came across Tracy White’s Traced, and now she’s got a book out; thanks to Gina Gagliano (who sets me up with all the best :01 Books and Roaring Brook Press releases), I have a copy of How I Made It to Eighteen and all I can say is Whew.

  We say things casually — I’m so depressed or I’m going crazy — without any real understanding of what mental illnesses are truly like for those that suffer from them. Whatever the cause (too many drugs, chemical imbalances, bad parenting, childhood trauma, or any one of a million others), the resolutions aren’t easy, and require support from a society that isn’t comfortable acknowledging that such conditions exist. To change the patterns of a lifetime and be taught new ones has to be among the most difficult undertakings a person can be forced into, and White shows just what that process was like for one person.

  Like her webcomic, How I Made It to Eighteen is “guaranteed 95% true”, and it’s a spare, gut-wrenching look at what happens when mental health finally gives way after too long a period of too many stresses, all at the ripe age of seventeen years. Although the names have been changed, White (or “Stacy Black”) doesn’t shy away from the harsh parts of her story — nobody comes through this tale with their hands entirely clean, from the distant and perfectionist mother to the asshole controlling boyfriend to friends that did less than they could, but especially Black herself.

  It’s a remarkable achievement, well served by the very minimalist art and brief text — the largest blocks of words are in the form of responses by Stacy’s friends, answering questions about their friendship, her situation, and how they saw or didn’t see it developing; we learn about Stacy in dribs and drabs from others, while she tells us very little about herself. The reader is forced to fill in a lot of details between the panels and words, trying to make sense of the story with not quite enough input; as Stacy Black progresses towards understanding herself, we progress along with her, and are left relieved that she (and we) made it through the experience. How I Made It to Eighteen demands multiple readings, and will stand as one of the most striking memoirs of mental illness and recovery ever written.

Most days, the stories, news, and emails suggest a sort of commonality, but it’s not working too well at the moment. Let’s see if something pops up as we go along.

• Winning the Best Title of 2010 award in the prestigious “Fleenies”, Vepo Studios presents Whazamo! State of the Art: Webcomics, a profile of webcomickers at this year’s TCAF. Ramón Pérez, Hurricane Erika, and The Toronto Man-Mountain are featured in the five-minute mini-edudrama.
• The Best Creator’s Pitch Fleenie goes to Chris Eliopolous for the best possible reason to read Misery Loves Sherman:
  

  Just go read my damn strip already. It don’t come any cheaper.

Nope, haven’t got any more of those, and we all know you need at least three things to make a theme. But we do have some comings and goings to note:

• Dirk Tiede’s Paradigm Shift is due to return from hiatus on Tuesday, 1 June, as Part 4 kicks off the start of Act II. Considering that Act I took more than ten years (including the self-publishing of three books) to complete, a half-year hiatus ain’t so bad.
• Over at Hello With Cheese, it appears that co-creator and artist-half Bryan Prindiville has moved on; thanks to the extensive buffer, Prindiville actually stopped drawing two weeks ago, but the new artist doesn’t start for a few weeks yet. Prindiville will bow out on Almost A Big Round Number strip #250, on 4 June.
• Having wrapped up Act I of Operation: 3-Ring Bound, the mysterious creators of the spy-themed webcomic Eben07 (of whom no photographs are known to exist, and who are believed to sport modified finger- and iris-prints) will be on break for a month or so.

  Signals intelligence has them taking time to put their report of proceedings through review and classification before distribution to the appropriate departments. It is imperative that copies be obtained and decoded — you are authorized to sacrifice your own life (as well as those of your teammates and any friendly assets) if necessary to meet this objective. Do not fail, or the world may never recover from the consequences.

Here’s the deal: Ted Rall will always be an irritating mystery to me.

On the one hand, he does solid, provacative, cartoon-based reportage from places most people would never think of going. On the other hand, he often seems to be provacative purely for the sake of being provacative, making illogical, self-contradictory agruments in online fora. On the other other hand, in person he’s thoughtful, engaging, funny, and interesting. At the same time seeking to support the cartooning talents of the future as trying to roll the industry back to the past, espousing positions both populist and elitist, seemingly more interested in the argument than the solution, my solution for a good long while now has largely been to ignore him.

And now he’s going back to one of the most dangerous corners of the earth, and taking friends along with him:

I’m leaving for Afghanistan the second week of August. I have three goals:

1. Go to Taloqan in Takhar Province, to revisit the place where I spent much of the fall of 2001 during the battle of Kunduz.
2. Visit the site of the construction of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project between Turkmenistan and Pakistan. This is supposed to be north of Herat.
3. Travel to the remote western deserts near the Iranian border where U.S. forces and reporters rarely venture or report from.

We’ll be “in country” one month—that’s the limit set by most media outlets for reporters covering rural Afghanistan, and with good reason. It’s a hard place to travel, not just from a security standpoint but also because of the harsh climate and poor food and lodging, not to mention lack of basic infrastructure (running water and electricity).

We’ll fly into Dushanbe, Tajikistan, obtain permission from the Tajik Ministry of Foreign Affairs to enter the restricted 100-kilometer zone along the southern border with Afghanistan, then drive overland to Taloqan, and head west and then south before crossing the border into Iran.

Travelling with Rall will be fellow cartoonists Matt Bors and Steven Cloud, who apparently didn’t get enough of Central Asia on the Mongolian Death Fun Drive.

I don’t know Bors and I don’t know Rall well, but Cloudy is a friend of mine; although we joked about pre-arranging an epitaph in case he didn’t return from his previous adventure to lands unknown (Steven Cloud, killed by Gypsies, in accordance with prophecy.), I didn’t actually believe that his trip would result in more than border hassles and some damn fine stories. It was also far less likely on that trip that he would be travelling through places where he might be shot by accident or intent.

Like most people, I like to think of myself as being as good a person as my dog believes me to be. I try honestly not to wish ill fortune on anybody, and as much as Rall has pissed me off in the past, I don’t hate him. I wonder how smart travelling through that part of the world (which has a tradition of summertime = war time stretching back largely interrupted for four or five millenia) will turn out to be. I hope that the reporting and whatever insight it provides is worth the risk. And from the bottom of my athiest heart, I wish Cloud, Bors, and Rall the safest of travels in an unsafe series of places. Come back to us whole and well Ted, so you can get back to pissing me off over things that ultimately don’t matter.

On to lighter things.

• New England Webcomics Weekend 2 is go. Add the bird to your twitter for further updates.
• Meredith Gran interviewed by Gothamist on Brooklyn and her forthcoming Octopus Pie collection.
• Re: bottom two rows of panels from today’s Shortpacked! mega-update — oh, that ain’t right.
• Happy birthday to almost everybody!

It’s just one of those days, you know? Pretty miscellaneous.

• The next Erfworld volume is up for pre-order, and a break of two weeks or so to regroup before diving into the next section of story. I’ll give Rob Balder this — when he says “this story will be about 25 pages” and delivers “more than 30 comic pages and an equal number of text updates”, it’s hard to get annoyed that he might need some downtime.

  Also on the pre-order block: the newest Schlock Mercenary book from Howard Tayler (which I managed to spell correctly this time). As is usual, both books will feature signatures (and Tayler’s will included sketches) in return for the upfronting of cash, saving you potentially thousands of dollars to travel to a show that features the creators to get the same degree of personalization. Now don’t they look like bargains?

• Back in the news as the movie approaches completion: Gene Yang on whitewashing in The Last Airbender, this time in comic form. Confession time: I never watched Avatar when it was on, and I generally dislike Shyamalan movies, so I’ve got no dog in this fight; but it surely does seem like Hollywood went out of their way to honor the Asian aspects of the original stories in every respect except the characters. Feel free to quibble over how this is true or not true in the comments.
• Wait — did they just fly through the drive ring (00:14) when leaving the Denny’s? SCAD student Dave Taubert takes designs from Dave Kellett’s Drive and makes a little rendered fly-by movie out of it. I found the second half (showing some of the construction effort) to be as interesting as the first half; Taubert’s notes may be found here.
• Emergency sale at Box Brown’s place! Okay, not an emergency, but very exciting nonetheless.
• Finally, I’ve seen some papercraft models of various webcomics characters — Wigu Tinkle, Hawk, Truck-Ra (can’t find the model right now — anybody know where it is?), but after seeing these anime papercraft models, I’m starting to wonder what might be possible. Dan McNinja on fire? Cartilage Head? Fuschia and Baby Blue? Model Erika? Squatting Matthew Henson? The mind boggles.

Friend o’ Fleen and all-around good guy Rick Marshall went and got hisself hitched over the weekend, and thanks to the magic of the Twitters, we got to share some of the good times; for my part, I’m not going to make the usual lame joke regarding Rick’s name in honor of this Very Special Occasion (but when he gets back from his honeymoon — Jet Blue willing — we’re back to business as usual). Congratulations, Rick & Jessica, and I sincerely hope you don’t see this until you’re back from whatever tropical paradise hosts the next two weeks of sun, relaxation, and industrial-grade fruity drinks with weapons-grade little umbrellas in ’em.

• Last week, I made mention (via the delightful Colleen AF Venable) that :01 Books was starting its own webcomics group (or, since they are a publishing concern, I supposed “imprint” might be more appropriate). Ms Venable is back with more information on To Be Continued…:
  

  To Be Continued… or TBC… is what we’re calling our new webcomics serials. So far the list includes Sailor Twain by our very own Mark Siegel, Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil, and Derek Kirk Kim’s Tune (which he’s posting once a week on his journal).

  All of these serials are leading up to a finished published :01 books. Mark and I started TBC… as an experiment of sorts, determined to prove that webcomics won’t hurt the sale of final books but rather the opposite: gaining a much wider spread of readers than we ever would with spine-out books buried in the sea of other spine-out books. If this experiment works out you can be sure we’ll be publishing more of our books this way, serializing them online as we go along.

  There’s really no part of that plan that isn’t awesome — but if we (as a reading public) want to see more books treated this way, we need to make sure that Venable & Siegel have the solid sales numbers to show their bosses that they were right in their gamble. Read these comics online, and if you like them, buy them. As a side note, I expect that any success that :01 Books has in this experiment may lead other publishers to follow suit — everybody bemoans the death of publishing, but I think there’s a future in this curatorial role that can’t ever be diminished. If you drown in a sea of potential webcomics reads (as I do, with all the suggestions sent to me), knowing that somebody at :01 Books (or TopatoCo, or similar future endeavours) thought enough of a creator to deal with them? That goes to the top of my “to read” list.

• Regular readers of this page know that I dig just about everything done by Shaenon Garrity, aka Radness Queen West of the Rockies, and I especially dig me some Skin Horse. Said strip is now coming up on Book 2, and rather than taking the pre-order route, Garrity (and co-creator Jeffrey C. Wells) have opted to Kickstart the project, with the end result that it’s (as of this writing) 121% funded after 48 hours.

  Holy.

  Crap.

  Even more impressive than the speed of the response? Not one pledge is for the minimum of $10; the most common pledge amount (44 out of 72) is for $20, and enough people have pledged more that the average amount is over $50. I think we’ve got enough empirical evidence at this point to definitively describe when Kickstarter is going to be successful — namely, when you’ve got a mountain of dedicated fans who would’ve bought the product anyway, and who get a visceral thrill about being part of the process that enables the product’s delivery into their hot little hands. If you’re wondering if Kickstarting is for you, ask yourself if your audience falls into that category.

• Last thoughts for the day — the Eagle Awards are the main British honor for comics work, and they have both a category for Favourite Web-Based Comic (waaaay down there at the bottom) and a popular vote. If you were so inclined, you can chime in for Freak Angels, Order of the Stick, PvP, Sin Titulo, or xkcd.

First, go read this. Then come back and enjoy the candor of Jess Fink regarding art, jerks, and her fists.

Fleen thanks Ms Fink for her time and openness, and reiterates that Mr Goldman has been invited to respond via his representatives, but has not done so yet. Spread the word and do what you can, my minions.

At least, no news regarding Jess Fink’s latest run-in with an appropriator. Meanwhile, it’s really nice out today in New York City, so let’s wrap this sumbitch up quickly and get on to the weekend.

• Ten years of Narbonic (okay, six years of original strips, into the fourth year of director’s cut replay) deserves a bit of celebration. If you order the anniversary print now, you’ll most likely have it back from the framers in time for the actual day (31 July).
• Speaking of anniversaries, Jimbo Hillin would have you remember that Wireheads has crossed the four year mark, which is a not-inconsiderable achievement:
  

  What started out as a shout-out on the ridiculous notion (and people) about doing visual effects for a living, has evolved into (what else?) a comic about people doing the best they can to get by in awful situations, with egos the size of Kansas and terrible deadlines. Doing my best to be working on the fourth book of comics to be ready for Comic-Con.

  I met Jimbo last year at SDCC, and he’s one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I’ve ever encountered. If you aren’t familiar with Wireheads, I’d say it’s time for an archive crawl.

• Nice review of Gunnerkrigg Court‘s second volume over at The AV Club today; they’ve quite rightly acknowledged that creator Tom Siddell is a master of world-building. It may take a dozen or more books to merely clear up all the implied story background that he’s given us so far, and in that time he’ll undoubtedly provide many more for us to wonder about. Even nicer is the recent news that Siddell will be at SDCC this year, which I believe marks his first appearance on North American shores.
• Finally, a bit of rationality across the bows of the non-rational, courtesy of a brilliant bit of investigative cartooning: the story of how the vicious lie that vaccination = autism started. As you’ll learn, it wasn’t a mistake or misinterpretation of science that has led so many people to deny their children the immunizations that could have easily saved their lives. If you ever wondered how easy it was to start a moral panic (and the hideous costs that others will pay as result), here’s your answers.

“Not This Shit Again”

Per Jess Fink‘s Twitter last night:

Well Todd Goldman is ripping me off again

Which references this image [edit to add: the infringing image has been removed, presumably by the original poster], which may be compared against Ms Fink’s original (from a posting 18 months ago when this same image was ripped off by a designer that sold a shirt to Forever21; note to anybody that might want to steal from Jess in the future: pick another damn picture!).

Okay, time to govern myself accordingly, since the last time Mr Goldman was reported on in these pages, it took a month to clear up his dispute with Dave “Shmorky” Kelly, and resulted in both rude communications purportedly from Mr Goldman, and what I believe was a threatened SLAPP directed towards this site.

In the previous situation, Mr Goldman attributed the appropriation to “an artist working for his company” (compare and contrast to a 2004 interview where he gushed “I just keep coming up with ideas and ideas”). No public statement has been forthcoming (as of posting time) regarding whether or not Mr Goldman acknowledges the similarities or if it’s those darn employees that are responsible. I will note that’s an awfully big TODD signature on the print (only $600, marked down from $1200!).

We have questions in to Ms Fink, who will answer to whatever degree she believes does not compromise her own interests. We have also a request to Mr Goldman’s representatives for his comment/response. More on this as it develops.

• On a happier note, please take a look at Max Huffman’s Mocktopus Kickstarter O’ Doom. Woo, fun!

The Twitters have been kinda busy since yesterday, telling us of New Things To Come in webcomics. Let’s take a brief survey, shall we?

• From Colleen AF Venable (of Puff in Brooklyn fame, and noted book designer of reknown):
  

  Ink to Pixels…one of which got all over my hand. Logo for “To Be Continued…”, the :01 Webcomics Group!

  Which only makes sense, given that the good folks of :01 Books are hosting some damn good webcomics. Putting them together with a collective identity is going to be a certain guarantor of quality.

• From Jennie Breeden (hardest working woman in webcomics and nonstop convention-going machine):
  

  gotta get more pages ready for the upcoming new porn comic that I’m working on

  Said site, Filthy Figments (warning: porn, duh), isn’t live yet, but promises a variety of adult entertainments from female creators; the success of Oglaf (warning: more porn, and note to self: add Oglaf to the links) shows that there’s an audience that’s willing to have some naughty content, provided it’s not all up close and in your face (so to speak). I’m guessing there’s going to be equal parts story/plot/chuckles and naked people doing naked things at FF, so mark your calendars.

• From Ryan Sohmer (webcomics impressario and budding multi–industry mogul):
  

  May I present a new project for comic books fans: Gutters.

  Just a single image so far, but it appears to be bringing the patented Sohmer/Lar DeSouza success formula to the world of superheroics. Having tapped into the world of Dudes and Warcraft, Comics Geeks would appear to be a highly complementary demographic cohort for our future northern ruler to add to his growing empire. All Hail, and pass the Red Bull.

• From Jon Rosenberg (webcomics pioneer and currently ginning up a new project):
  

  my new @voxeldotnet server is being provisioned! i hope it doesn’t hurt.

  Rosenberg has stated that Goats should be back from hiatus prior to San Diego Comic Con, but this announcement gives some hope that a new (new!) project may debut even sooner. We, as always, remain cautiously optimistic.

Word came down the pike — Achewood‘s long-awaiting second cookbook, after months of production delays, was finally imminent. I’ve been waiting since the latterly parts of 2009 for it to appear, and the appearance of an excerpted recipe in the Portland Mercury had whetted my appetitie (so to speak). Unfortunately, it’s just like the end of 2009 in that I can’t order the damn thing yet. Call me crazy, but if the item description page reads:

The long awaited follow-up cookbook is now available for pre-order! Order your copy now, and help us figure out how many to print so there are enough for all…

… then adding the book to my cart shouldn’t produce:

• We’re sorry. That item is currently out of stock.

Somebody at Yahoo! stores does not get that “pre-order” means that it’s not in stock yet. If I complain, it’s only because I really, really want to give Chris Onstad my money, and nefarious individuals are apparently not on board with that plan; perhaps they were offended by his testicle cookery?

• By contrast, the pre-orders for the next Schlock Mercenary tome are clearly explained and (I’m guessing) will not give me any grief when I click back there next week. It’s been a good long time since Mr Tayler released his last book, but he’s had a lot of hands on this one — all strips were recolored (Tayler would be the first to tell you that Travis Walton, his colorist, has a better eye for such things that Tayler himself), a bonus story involved the efforts of Dan Willis, Brandon Sanderson, and Dan Wells, and Greg Bear wrote the introduction.
• Speaking of a good long time between books, it’s been (as of this writing) 2 years, 11 months, 358 days since Megatokyo‘s fifth book was released. I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I have to believe that Fred Gallagher’s very complex tale has a high incidence of wait for the book readers, and the long delay can’t be doing them any favors. Unfortunately, they may have a bit longer to wait.

  Book 6 was announced for release on 22 June, but in the past hour, news has broken that DC Comics will be shutting down the CMX Manga imprint as of 1 July. While that nominally gives a week’s breathing space to MT6, it doesn’t appear on a list of CMX titles to be released at the end of June. The DC statement says:

  The shuttering of the CMX line does not affect the best-selling series Megatokyo which will continue publication, now as a DC Comics title …

  … but is not specific if MT6 will release on time with the CMX trade dress, be released later in DC dress, or if the changes only affect reprints of existing volumes and (theoretical, given the update schedule) future volumes in the series. DC aren’t providing any more details at this time, so I guess we’ll all find out together in the next month or so. More on this as it develops.