Let’s see, you had the usual reprobates hanging around a hotel ballroom in the Jersey burbs this weekend, news of a new signing, books and reviews, and some news you can use. Let’s take ’em one at a time.

• The inaugural Wild Pig Con took place Saturday and Sunday in Springfield, NJ, in a hotel featuring an in-lobby Mexican place with $4.00 margaritas (yay) that didn’t open until 5:00pm (boo). At any random time you might have heard Randy Milholland being told that he was responsible for con-goers getting married, seen David Willis molesting Danielle Corsetto‘s booth decoration, observed Ross Nover hosting Super Art Fight! (to an audience chock–full of webcomickers), or watched old Spider-Man reruns. Not a bad use of five bucks, honestly.
• Emergency last-minute signing! Seattle fans of Kellett, Kurtz, and Straub (which, weirdly, is not the name of a white-shoe law firm) should make their way over to The Comic Stop in Lynnwood round about dinnertime. Tell ’em I said Hey.
• News broke over the weekend of a review in the New York Times of Raina Telgemeier‘s SMILE, and just as importantly, the USPS finally delivered my copy of Erika Moen‘s DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary Volume Two. In case I hadn’t talked enough about either book/webcomic previously, they’re both as good as I can possibly express.

  For two works so very different in tone (for the life of me, I cannot imagine Raina ever producing work that isn’t all-ages friendly, whereas Moen had jerky employees at a printing plant refuse to work on her book because of its adult content), they have something in common — an honest, clear-eyed look at the lives of the authors as they try to figure out who they are. Plus, one of them has enormous sex toys and mystery poop.

• I’m assuming that by this time next week you’ll be able to go into any random Pearl art supply store, wave your hand and casually remark I’m a Webcomics Dot Com subscriber, and they’ll load you up with everything you need for a $5 co-pay. Okay, maybe not quite that far, but a nearly 40% discount on retracto-standing banners? If you were going to buy one of these guys anyway, taking out a membership at WDC means you’ll end up $50 ahead by the time it’s all said and done.

  Enjoy your purchase and savings in good conscience, as I’m sure Brad Guigar totally isn’t neglecting his family with all the time he must spend arranging these deals — if you hear his kids humming Harry Chapin songs, I’m sure that’s completely a coincidence.

Since I’ve pretty much got no voice right now, this blogpost will be conveyed via the medium of interpretive dance.

No, let’s not. How about a visit to the Fleen Mailbag?

• Over the past couple of months, a number of readers have written talking about how they just discovered Lackadaisy. Is this the start of a groundswell? A well-orchestrated astroturf campaign? Or mere coincidence? Whichever, it’s a good read, with cute animals acting out a Jazz Era story of speakeasies and bootlegging, rendered in delicate sepia.
• Even if the comic in question weren’t worth reading (and it is), Tom Pappalardo’s Broken Lines is worth your examination because man! Look at the design of that page and those books. I couldn’t possibly tell you why, but the design visuals just hooked themselves into my brain and are making me say Preeeetty.

  Possibility: the typography is similar to a lot that I saw at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, which is like the Louvre for type geeks. I spent a happy afternoon there drooling over Claude Garamond’s original punches and matricies, whose proportions and aesthetics I find reflected in the pages of Broken Lines. Plus, the comic itself has a cowboy and an astronaut on a roadtrip to adventure!

• Alert reader Andrew de Weerd wrote to point us towards an interesting project; a friend of his, a middle school teacher, has begun a diary webcomic of sort as a class project. I’ve held this story for a while, knowing that middle schoolers don’t always have the greatest tenacity with respect to ongoing projects, but Tales From Waltersland has done a decent job of updating two-three times a week for a month now.

  It’s not the most polished work you’re going to find, but it’s interesting if only for the fact that such a project exists in the first place. This first iteration will probably be wrapping for summer break soon, but I’m interested to see how TFW might develop and improve across the course of an entire academic year. Tune in again at the end of summer, and we’ll find out together.

• From the pages of ACT-I-VATE, Rami Efal has published Never Forget, Never Forgive, a story of warfare, vengeance, and redemption in medieval Japan. What caught me wasn’t the description of the book, but the story of its inspiration:
  

  NEVER FORGET, NEVER FORGIVE were the common calls Rami Efal, the author and illustrator who is also a descendent of Holocaust survivors, heard while growing up in Israel. The infant author was puzzled: “Whom will one forgive if not one’s enemies?”

  Ink-heavy, occasionally scratchy, shadow-laden style to the art; anybody that likes the work of Goseki Kojima is encouraged to look closely at this one.

Okay, so there’s something about launching a new webcomic with only one update — there’s little to hook me in, and make me want to come back for more. But on occasion, an established creator will “launch thin” and I know I’m signing up for the ride.

Rene Engström has been mentioned often on these pages for her work on (the now-completed) Anders Loves Maria, which all right-thinking people adore. Of less frequent mention were her diary comics, always funny, revealing, and enticing. A frequent subject of these comics has been her relationship with Rasmus Gran, fellow cartoonist, diarist, and single parent.

And now the two have decided to collaborate: So Far Apart isn’t one webcomic, in the sense that Engström and Gran aren’t one person; they have their separate lives and homes (a cursedly long distance from each other), and on Tuesdays they draw dairy comics about what happened to them. These are then presented as two halves of one whole, much in the sense that as much as the creators are separate, living, breathing beings, spending any time with them quickly reveals how incomplete they feel without the other.

The first comic went live last night — on 16 March, 2010 it was Gran’s turn to make the journey so they could spend time together, and given the vagaries of modern transit systems, it was a whole lot of boredeom wrapped up in hassle and a bit of panic. Engström had perhaps the easier day (despite having to work on taxes — and we know how she feels about taxes), but the waiting … the waiting.

So Far Apart earns an instant place on the blogroll; check it out and keep checking it out and learn what these two crazy kids are all about.

Had to take an extra day to get the photos juuuust right on this one. Chris Yates has made his 1000th Baffler, entitled The Test, and it is maybe the most impressive jigsaw puzzle of the (admittedly young) century. Look at the color-themed trays that surround the central ground. Check out the different schemes used as the five (five!) layers get built up. At this point, I think the only way that Yates can top himself is if he made a jigsaw puzzle that — when assembled, possibly in multiple layers, formed a comic strip … think Choose Your Own Carl in three dimensions that you had to assemble.

No, wait, don’t. We might kill him.

PS: This post is not tagged “merch”, even though said Baffler is up for sale (and, if anything, priced too low). It just seems … tawdry.

• Everybody’s been following Scott C’s Great Showdowns, right? Classic confrontations from movies interpreted in that special way by the master of the lopsided grin (and eyes). I love the one of Robocop and the happiest ED-209 ever.
• There was a fast-tracking story that developed yesterday, as a guy named Dale Zak released, then stopped charging for, then pulled, a webcomics-reading iPhone app. See the twitterfeed of just about any prominent webcomicker from about 24 hours ago for their take, or for another view of the situation, take a look at Lauren Davis‘s analysis of the legal/ethical issues involved (note: Ms Davis is not a lawyer, but a lot closer than most anybody else that’s commented, so that’s good).

  Here’s my thoughts — and let me preface that my intial reaction yesterday was, as Davis described the reaction of the creator community:

  … largely a misunderstanding bred from a bad history with mobile applications and the reaction was — by and large — knee-jerk.

  Mea culpa.

  The thing is, these situations flare up every so often, and just about every time, the deemed-offending app goes away and the developer expresses surprise that the creators weren’t happy to see the app released. In the days of “scrapers” — where the apps pulled images directly from websites, forcing the creators to pay bandwidth — objections were pretty valid and clear-cut.

  If, as Davis reported, Zak’s application was an RSS aggregator, it becomes murkier — creators certainly throw their RSS feeds to the world, but want their comics to be read with the full content of the feed, or drive users back to their websites, where ads may be seen and revenue generated.

  Many creators particularly don’t want their comics seen absent the context and framing of their sites; others object to the fact that their comics are often used to promote the sale of these apps, making their hard-earned mindshare into marketing for somebody else to make money. By contrast, many developers have seen their efforts as selflessly promoting the work of the creators. What we have here is failure to communicate the desires of one community to the other.

  I’ve seen it said that these problems will persist until either the creators all band together and release a reader of their own — but who does the work? who’s in the club and who’s not? — or until the developers make the entire process opt-in — but who goes to the effort of contacting & dealing with potentially hundreds of creators?

  So, as a modest proposal, let me suggest a clearinghouse of expressed intents. Creators can — in one place — go on the record to say that these are the conditions that must be met if you want my work to be part of your app without me getting upset. Developers agree to honor the guidelines of the creators, and those that don’t probably find themselves on the receiving end of Twitterstorms like Mr Zak got hit with yesterday. Nobody’s necessarily happy that they have to take the extra step — of providing a profile or checking profiles provided — but that small bit of effort could save much stress down the line. I’m volunteering to put up a page of such information.

  Here’s a few introductory ideas that I think might be useful (and let me stress that I’m spit-balling here … if the consensus is that I have my head up my well-meaning ass, then let’s bash this thing into a collectively helpful shape together). With a little work, I think that some broad categories could be defined that describe how webcomics might be delivered by third-party-developer apps (and I’m envisioning only an app that pulls from RSS feeds, not one that scrapes images); we’d probably want to include:

  1. Feel free to incorporate my RSS feed into a feed aggregator, but you must include the entirety of the feed
  2. Feel free to grab links from my RSS feed, but I want readers to come to my site via a browser
  3. Please don’t pre-load my feed into your application
  4. Feel free to pre-load my feed into your application
  5. You may include my comic’s name and/or logo in your promotional material
  6. Please don’t use my comic’s name and/or logo in your promotional material
  7. Please show me how my content will appear in your app before you include it
  8. My comic must display at a resolution of at least ____
  9. If you meet my other conditions, no need to notify me that I’ve been included in your app
  10. Even if you meet my other conditions, please notify me that you’ve included me in your app

  (Re: numbers 7 and 8; one of the complaints I hear from creators is that many of these apps don’t show their work as it’s meant to be seen, leading to perhaps mistaken impressions about the artistic quality.)

  The biggest challenge I’d forsee in this “pre-consent” model is what to do if a creator’s requirements change after an app is released; make the changes in the next naturally-occuring version, or require a new version be released, or new apps can’t include it, but anything out there already is fair game? I’ve been thinking over this because one of the creators involved in yesterday’s unpleasantness, Jon Rosenberg, has certain rights to his work presently shared with a large corporation. What if a creator were to sign a book deal, but a publisher decided that an independent app were making money off of what it considers private turf? That’s the sort of picky detail that could screw things up.

  So, thoughts? Is this a situation that actually needs a solution? Would attempting such an undertaking be more trouble (probably for me, since I’m volunteering) than it’s worth? Because from where I sit, the current situation is at best a recurring distraction, and at worst a significant source of friction for people who would certainly rather have their time be more productive.

Another day, another announcement of a comic strip talent search/contest with dubious benefit to creators. Between the time I was requested to take a look at the terms & conditions, and this morning, Webcomics Dot Com had beat me to the punch — you need to subscribe, but the Bradster has the rules readthrough all done. Conclusion: not a good deal, since if you win you get to do a free comic strip for a month and sign over all the rights. Yay?

Basically, it’s the Amazon superstar contest all over again, and the only thing that’s come out of that particular project is I have a fun bet with Gordon McAlpin (the Gordonest of all possible Gordons). Oh, and Buni, one of the Amazon finalists, launched as a webcomic (although it’s dropped in frequency from daily to twice weekly to weekly, it’s still better than most of what’s on the comics page — ironically, creator Ryan Pagelow is running a second webcomic about a newspaper desperately trying not to die). So, I’m guessing at the conclusion of the WaPo contest, I will again be the individual that benefits most from the contest, in that I won’t be busting my ass for the privilege of “exposure”. To quote the very sexy R Stevens, People die of exposure.

• By contrast, there’s a contest going on that you can enter, knowing that you won’t be giving up any rights or producing any free IP for a large corporation, and you might win a one-of-a-kind t-shirt: Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell Fan Contest, details at the link. Woo.
• New (to me, and maybe to you) webcomic time, with a hell of a great hook: Space-Time Condominium is the story of a guy (sorta — hold that thought) named Griffin that gets picked to live in a rent-free house with four other versions of himself from alternate universes. Now, if that weren’t enough to inspire some big-time laugh-chuckles (Griffin the Cow gets made into burgers by his housemates! Zombie Griffin tries to kill the others! Griffine, the female Griffin, is the object of lust for all the non-gay Griffins in the house), there’s a kicker that makes it extra-awesome:

  It’s not really a webcomic. It’s a long-forgotten Canadian sitcom, and each update is an episode complete with audience reaction. Check out the Reruns link; one update per week for about 18 months means you can knock down the whole season in a casual binge.

• Finally, your moment of culture. Mike Russell went to the Portland Opera to see The Barber of Seville, and he’s posted the results of his live-sketched comic interpretation. All together now: Ohhhh, wait’ll I get my hands on that waaaaa-bit! Whaaaaat would you want with a raaaaa-bit?

I can’t believe that Brad Guigar, of all people, didn’t get Uncle Ben’s famous dictum right. It has to be a transcription error or something. Oh, right, you’re wondering what I’m talking about. As part of the general trend in comics reporting in mainstream places slowly drifting away from BIFF! POW!, there’s also a trend of articles along the lines of Look! People making comics on the web! Thus, AOL’s small business/entrepreneurs portal talking about webcomics as sustainable income source, with quotes from Matthew Inman, Chris Onstad and the aforementioned Guigar:

Guigar also suggests taking a course in small business operations. “It’s a double-edged sword: Webcomics comes with incredible freedom, but with that freedom comes incredible responsibility. To enjoy the freedom of being a self-published creator, you have to take the responsibility of being a good businessperson.”

• TCAF was, by all accounts, amazingly fun, and the Doug Wright Awards were given out Saturday night — Our Kate didn’t win the Pigskin Peters Award for which she was nominated, but you know who else didn’t win? Doug Wright. I always figured if the awards were named after you, you’d automatically win, but apparently not. This should give you some idea of the level of competition, and Fleen congratulates Marc Bell for the win.

  This weekend, some of the Toronto survivors will be making their way to deepest, remotest New Jersey for Wild Pig Con; it’s like five bucks to get in and check out the attendance list. Me, I’m going to see how insane Randy Milhollland is from all of his cross-country driving.

• Finally, not exactly webcomics, but … well, you’ll see:
  

  The ToonSeum, Pittsburgh’s own museum dedicated to the cartoon arts, is proud to announce the June release of Illustration Ale, its collaboration with East End Brewing Company (“Pittsburgh’s micro-est microbrewery”).

  Illustration Ale is a limited edition, 700-bottle run of a one-time East End brew. The ale is a bottle-conditioned, with a rich dark malt character, spicy and nuanced, without any actual spices added. The complex flavors result from the brewer’s careful handling of a special Farmhouse Ale yeast.

  Each one-liter swing-top bottle bears a label created by one of six Pittsburgh cartoonists, making for a unique six-pack collection. The custom labels were designed by David Coulson, Dave Klug, Pat Lewis, Jim Rugg, George Schill, and Mark Zingarelli, and showcase some of the amazing cartoon talent based in the city. Two dollars from the sale of each bottle will directly benefit the ToonSeum.

  This is a worthy trend and I would like to encourage it. Those of you in western Pennsylvania, go forth and drink beer to support comics.

So it’s been just about fourth months since Webcomics Dot Com did the big switch to paysite, and that means it’s time to say something.

I was wrong.

In reaction to the announcement, I wrote:

Honestly, I’m not sure that this is going to succeed; WDC has been a pretty active and useful resource for webcomickers, but that accumulated wisdom is now locked off behind a subscription wall — the archives of the free days are not freely available. The change was dropped into the laps of readers pretty abruptly.

I can see the argument that WDC takes Guigar as long to produce on a daily basis as any of his strips, but with no recompense other than perhaps driving a few people to his strips (although I doubt many who frequented WDC didn’t already read his comics). That effort deserves remuneration, and Guigar has set what he thinks is a fair price.

I just don’t think that many people are going to pay it.

Guigar’s betting that the distinction between entertainment and information is sufficient that people will pony up a couple bucks a month for access (side note to those attempting such things in the future: “ten cents a day” sounds much less than “thirty bucks a year”).

Unfortunately, with the exception of very few prominent brands, with high-quality content, pitching to niche audiences (we’re talking Wall Street Journal grade, here), this hasn’t proved to be the case on the internet so far — people pretty much equate “content” and “free”.

That fourth graf is where I got it especially wrong — I was reading WDC as an informational resource and nothing more; what’s become clear is that Brad’s managed to turn it into something else entirely. If it isn’t already, it’s well on its way to becoming a professional society, with the fringe benefits that go along with it. Members exhibiting at the inaugural C2E2 got a break on table costs greater than their annual subscription (with the possibility that a similar deal may extend to other Reed Exhibitions shows in future), and the 10% discount at Transcon could be worth hundred of dollars.

And while I don’t have definite information on this, I think it’s likely that Guigar would not have been able to negotiate such deals for the readers of an open website — that $30/year subscription acts as a gatekeeper, and convinces suppliers that this is an audience that they want to reach out to. That bit of exclusion acts to make the demographic cohort economically desireable.

As … let’s say awkwardly as the transition was handled, the outcome has been significant. I’ve seen no indication that the quality of postings has dropped off, that the discussions have fallen away, or that the passion of the membership has diminished. Guigar is coy on the exact number of members, but he has been willing to describe it as Close to twice what I expected, and more signing up every week. That fact alone ought to give him the leverage to make deals to benefit his members in future. Website hosting, accounting and business services, private-label Bristol, and custom-edition Cintiqs could be a reality someday. Or, if we’re really shooting for the moon, how about WDC becoming the equivalent of the Freelancers Union? They get access to an insurance benefit.

Naturally, we’re talking long term on any of these developments, but we’re only a third of a year from inception. The shift from free info site to professional society is still in its infancy, but there’s great promise for what’s coming up. I read the intent wrong, and Brad just sat back and smiled that secret smile he gets when he knows he’s gonna show me what the deal really is. Nicely done.

I’ve got a stack of new collections that are on order, a bunch of new webcomics to look over and see what can be recommended, and one academic paper on ancient Egyptian art and how it relates to comics to peruse. I just am not going to get to any of those in a reasonable amount of time, so I’m declaring this Gary Doesn’t Blog Day.

Yes, I realize that I’m undermining the spirit of the holiday by writing this. I never said I was orthodox.

If I stay awake until the end of this post it’ll be a miracle.

Although Jon Rosenberg and Rene Engström have been forced to forgo TCAF this weekend (by respectively, career re-evaluation and passport woes), there are still plenty of people to populate the webcomics pavilion! See the full map of the show here; warning: it’s a biggun.

• Excuse me, Axe Cop, could I please ask that you not give away our secrets? Now everybody will want a moustache, and then where will I find replacement parts for my sticky dynamite gun?
• The Design A Shirt For JoCo contest has concluded, and the results are in. The winner is one Ryan Estrada, who by an amazing coincidence shares a name with a webcomicker of some reknown. Mr Estrada won for a design that pays tribute to Mr Coulton’s song First of May, which is a bouncy tune about the wonders of springtime. Enjoy it with the whole family!
• Paul Southworth has been involved in the creation of a small person. Isaac Thomas Southworth, mother, older brother, and dad are all reportedly doing fine. At press time, it is not clear whether or not the new guy prefers to be called Isaac or Ike, but given that he’s already reduced his father to a state of fear, I’m guessing he’s a badass — Ike it is.
• Lots of good discussion in the comments thread of yesterday’s post, re: Goatspocalypse. What I find most encouraging is that whatever Rosenberg’s new endeavours may include, there’s a a real enthusiasm to see what he’ll come up with. Actually, that’s probably the second most encouraging thing — I think the most encouraging thing is the acknowledgement that change in a career field is inevitable, and managing it on your terms (as much as possible) rather than letting it just happen to you, is an idea that you have to get used to. It may be that this public conversation about the nature of his career will be one of Rosenberg’s lasting contributions to future generations of independent creators.

Editor’s note: This post is largely going to concern the economic well-being of Jon Rosenberg; long-time readers may recall that Jon was the first publisher of Fleen, and largely the driving force in me writing this damn thing for the going-on-five-years since. You can insert any necessary disclaimers about conflict of interest into this piece that you feel necessary.

It sounded serious on Twitter the other day:

I have just completely wasted thirteen years of my life.

… but then again, we’re talking about Jon; he’s been known to exaggerate his woes on occasion. But as the followup has shown, this isn’t a moment of artistic doubt — this is a wholesale re-evaluation of … life, I guess. After being part of the defining generation of webcomics, after just about creating the two guys sitting on a couch genre, after providing countless hours of free entertainment and thousands of updates (which, contrary to his own self-interest, have become increasingly artistically, narratively, and philosophically complex), Jon’s toying with the conclusion that the creation that expresses him best isn’t sustainable:

Goats is thirteen years old. Since 2003, I’ve been working on a single epic storyline meant to culminate at the end of 2012, at which point Goats would toddle off into the sunset and I would start my next comic. Easy, right?

It is becoming apparent that this approach isn’t viable. While I’m happy with what I’ve done creatively, the webcomics medium rewards quick, easy updates with traffic. Long, continuity-filled stories like Goats that take a long time between updates tend to stagnate, although there are certainly folks more talented than I who can pull off this difficult feat.

None of this is news to me. It’s hard to come to a teenaged webcomic and not get put off by the large archive. And the books do not seem to be mitigating the problem as much as I had hoped, since most folks are trying to buy food and pay rent these days and graphic novels understandably do not provide shelter or many other things at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. As many other problems as Goats has, as many mistakes as I have made, this is the only one that matters right now. Without growth, I’m dead in the water. There’s only so many times I can beg you guys to buy stuff.

If I were single, or younger, or less encrusted in the leakings of children, I would hunker down, buy some ramen and just tough it out. But it’s not fair to my family to ask them to suffer like that, they deserve better. A lot better. So I have to make some changes.

The bright spot in Jon’s missive is what he didn’t say — he’s not giving up comics or creative work, he’s not going to get a job selling insurance for this wife’s uncle’s cousin or anything like that. He is going to be looking at what things he can make that will appeal in a more immediate, less attention-requiring, and financially remunerative form. As much as I would love to think that there’s a place for long, complex stories that demand attention from the reader, Jon doesn’t owe me that in my free entertainment; nevertheless, he’s said that he’s not dropping Goats where it stands.

There will be a wrap-up to the (as of today) six years, five months, and three days long storyline that those of us in his (too small to satisfy his publisher, alas) cult have invested in. It won’t feature the original depth and breadth that he conceived, but maybe after he’s become the next JJ Abrams and conquered all forms of media, he’ll have time to go back and release the director’s cut of his first magnum opus and we’ll get to read it then. I hope so — he deserves that closure.

And as much as a final groundswell of sales might not change any decisions based on balance sheets and long-term exploitation possibilities, if you’ve ever chuckled at Jon’s work, I think getting a book or two would be a nice thank you for a story that he’s fought to give to us in exchange for meager and shrinking rewards.

Thanks for the stories, Jon. I can’t wait to see what the next one is like.