Daisy Owl, friend to moustachery everywhere.

• Okay, this sucks: Kean Soo‘s most famous work, the award-winning Jellaby, is losing half its presence in print. For reasons beyond our Earth Logic, Disney-Hyperion are yanking Jellaby volume 1 from print:
  

  It was, I presume, a financial decision on the part of my publisher, Disney-Hyperion, even though the book has been a modest success by comic standards (more than 18,000 copies sold over the span of 21 months), and had been slowly picking up readers as time went on. Having Jellaby off the shelves does create an unfortunate situation, however — the second book, Jellaby: Monster in the City, is the conclusion of the story that runs through both books, and by removing the availability of the first book, Monster in the City is in danger of leading a shortened life as well, being a now- incomplete second half to a two-part story.

  Now, I’m no publishing mogul, but it seems to me that if you have something that sells, then making more means you can sell more. So yeah, terrific logic there, Disney-Hyperion. Heckuva job. Bottom line, if you want a copy of this utterly charming book, better grab it now. Those of you that plan on having children some day, get a copy or two now and lay them down like fine wine for your progeny to enjoy in the future.

• How about some good news that relates to our Northerly Friends? The Toronto Comics Art Festival has had a reputation for being one of the best shows on the circuit, and 2010 marks the move from biannual to annual occurrences. Furthermore, the exhibitors list has been released, with the guests forming a veritable who’s who of our chosen artform. In addition to Mr Soo, in no particular order, you got yer Spike, yer Doc Hastings, yer John Campbell, and yer KC Green.

  Want more? You also have Graham Annable, Kate Beaton, Box Brown, Danielle Corsetto, Joey Comeau & Emily Horne, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Rene Engström, Meredith Gran, Chris Hallbeck, Andrew Hussie, Jeph Jacques, Lucy Knisley, Sam Logan, Davids Malki ! and Maguire, Dylan Meconis, Hurricane Erika, The Toronto Man-Mountain, Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, Dave Roman & Raina Telgemeier, Jon Rosenberg, Jeff Rowland & the TopatoCo crüe, Rich Stevens, and Jim Zubkavich, plus about a million others that I’ve no doubt missed on the list.

  Whew. My travel plans for the spring aren’t entirely set yet (there’s this pretty awesome out-of-state post-wedding party-up later in May), but I hope to attend TCAF if only to say howdy to all the incredible talent that will be attending. But whether I make it there or not, if you’re not doing anything much, much cooler on May 8th & 9th, the Toronto Reference Library will be the place to be.

Also, Wonderella. The rest of us have to work today. Yay?

• Looks like ten years of near-daily updates has provided a chance to start afresh over at Sinfest. Slick is slicker, the Devil is more devilish, and I hope that tomorrow things will be back to normal, because if this is a reboot and I have to wait nine years to see more progress on the Fuschia/Criminy romance (which started just over a year ago), I’ma get pissed.
• [Editor’s note: this item edited to correct dates; thanks to Jeff Carter for correcting us!]

  Comics start and comics finish — Boxcar Astronaut will hit 150 weekly installments and the end of its storyline yesterday on Sunday. Backyard adventures only last as long as the summer, and next spring the games will be different. Very Calvin & Hobbes feeling to the wrap-up, and at 150 strips, it’s the perfect size for an archive trawl over pizza tonight.

Newish strips that I’ve been looking over, and perhaps you should too:

• The Optimist, which has a pretty strong sense of design and virtually zero archives at the moment. However, creator Tom Pappalardo has about two decades of cartoonin’ in him, so it’s not your usual two-update-nonwonder; Pappalardo also worked on Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot! for a couple years. Big possible downside right now — no sequential archive; you can look up strips by tag, but not browse by date. Weirdly enough, this is a design decision on the part of the creator:
  

  Many (but not all) of the WTF strips can be viewed on this site in a deliberately hard-to-navigate manner, so as to encourage you to purchase the book collection instead. Ha! Suck it!

  So … yeah. We’ll let you know how that last part works out.

• If it went on hiatus and got retooled, it’s new, right? Scooter and Ferret by Georgia Ball launched in 2004, ran until 2008, when it was retooled for a chance at newspaper syndication, and now is back:
  

  [F]ollowing the antics of a bad-tempered Ferret, his dim-witted buddy Scooter and his superficial best friend Maridee. Scooter and Ferret is available 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

  Which sounds okay enough, but what interests me is what an established strip, after a year off and retooling, would look like. A lot of self-editing can take place in a hiatus, and a much stronger strip could emerge. Unfortuantely, the website is having technical difficulties at the moment, so as soon as it’s back we’ll look at it a bit more closely. But seriously — taking time off and coming back? Intriguing.

Whoof — the dry air here in the northeast is playing merry hell with my sinuses, and I can only hope to get to the end of this post without another sudden onset of epistaxis.

• I’m gonna start with a quick mini-review, as I got my copy of Tyler Page’s Nothing Better volume 2: Into the Wild. I know that I said months ago that this was going to be my next purchase, but I’m apparently a challenge to buy gifts for; it was requested that I ramp back my purchases and make desired volumes known such that some might appear in festive wrappings one December morn. Afterwards, I resumed my buying and now I have copies of most of the things I would have otherwise bought earlier for myself, including this one.

  It’s good, you guys. Really good. On the heels of volume one, Kat and Jane are moving from at-odds unwilling roomies to friends, as the freshman year slips from Halloweento Christmas). I’m particularly impressed by how Page treats the storyline of Jane’s new college boyfriend, Ryan — at times, both she and he are too quick to jump to jealous conclusions over innocent interactions, which was handled with far more subtlety that one usually finds in fiction. These three pages could easily have turned (in less skilled hands) into a Very Special Episode on the dangers of controlling boyfriends, low self-esteem, abusive relationships, or whatever. In fact, Page made sure to present the vulnerability one feels in a new relationship as equally likely on the part of both people.

  As the book wraps up, none of the principal characters are who they were at the beginning (except for Trish and Victoria, the total bitches that live on Kat & Jane’s floor), but it never feels contrived or artificial how they’ve changed. They’re growing, more rapidly and awkwardly than they will at any other time in their lives, and we get to watch it happen. With any luck, Volume 3 (currently serializing) will show us more of Darby (with his puppylike crush on Jane) and Gene (with his creepily menacing Jesus-freak vibe).

• Also new this week — my copy of Skin Horse volume 1, with free art! Now when I talked about the free art aspect to the book (until the end of the month, so hurry), I mentioned in an offhand manner one or two strips that I thought were extra-neato. What with Shaenon Garrity being in the middle of moving house and explicitly stating that the art would be random, I gave it no further thought. Then I opened the package, which despite the prominent DO NOT BEND warning, somebody had valiantly tried to mutilate. Miracle of miracles, the art and book were perfectly intact, and it just so happened that my strip was one of my aforementioned favorites. This is why Shaenon Garrity is the Radness Queen of the Universe (or at least the East Bay).
• As long as we’re mentioning Her Radness, she emailed to let you know about something interesting at a site she edits:
  

  This is seriously cool. John Barber’s new webcomic, Outside Infinity, has just joined the Modern Tales lineup. As you may or may not recall, John’s previous webcomic, “Vicious Souvenirs,” one of the first interactive Flash-based comics, was part of the Modern Tales launch lineup way back in the day. Then John went off to work for this place called Marvel Comics. But now he’s back with a new, non-Flash-based series, and I’ve got him on Modern Tales.

  John describes Outside Infinity as “the sort-of true story of a guy who discovers the mathematical proof of the existence of black holes … while dying on of an incurable disease on the losing side of Russian front in World War I.”

  There is pretty much nothing in that description that isn’t really awesome.

• Last bit, then the weekend: Phil Foglio writes the best press releases:
  

  The comic book site Comic Book Resources just put up a list of The 30 Most Important Comics Of The Decade. Some reasonable picks. However I’m writing to say that one of their choices was Girl Genius, so you can see that they are indeed serious & responsible journalists. It also behooves me to mention that 3 other webcomics made their list, a respectable percentage over all. The others are: Penny Arcade, Achewood, and MegaTokyo. We salute our fellow webcomic creators.

  “But Gary,” I hear you cry, “that looks nothing like what I’ve been told by reliable sources (including yourself) what a proper press release should look like! How do I get to write something like that and have you run it?”

  Simple. Go back in time thirty years and be as consistently funny as Phil up to the present day, and I’ll run any dang thing you write.

Let’s rewind about 24 hours, shall we? A good chunk of yesterday’s post wasn’t up to standard; in part, it was me explaining my thoughts poorly, in part it was a poor choice of words. Let’s take them one at a time.

In response to my discussion of Webcomics Dot Com subscribers getting a discount on tables at C2E2, where I went on a digression of how another con had some pretty hefty charges above and beyond table space, Scott Kurtz wrote the following:

Gary,

I’m sorry things cost money.

-Scott

Which only makes sense if I failed to make my thoughts as clear as I should. I tied unforseen expenses at one Reed show to the story of discounts at another Reed show; I swear it made sense in my head as a general lesson on “reading the fine print”, because four years into the history of NYCC, I am still seeing exhibitors surprised that they had to pay extra for things like tables and chairs.

I want to stress that I don’t know if this is Reed’s charge or union charges at the venue, but it really doesn’t matter, since I wasn’t effective at drawing a distinction between the specifics ($60 discount!) vs the general (as always, make sure you know what you’re getting for your money, at any show, anywhere, put on by anybody, ever). In any event, Brad Guigar clarified in a comment that my concerns were unfounded. For everybody that was confused by the almost completely random train of thought, mea culpa.

Secondly, I realized that a reference I made to Guigar’s efforts with the new WDC was likely to be misinterpreted, in large part because Larry Cruz did a much better job coming to the same conclusion. I wrote:

I’ll be very intrigued if Guigar manages to line up similar sponsorship/discount packages for his subscribers. If he does, he’s just one eco-friendly tote bag away from duplicating the model of public broadcasting across the country.

Where Cruz far more clearly wrote:

I come to the sudden realization that Guigar and company are trying to transform webcomics.com from a casual blog to a professional trade organization like the Society of Automotive Engineers … except for online comics. You’ve got your seminars (online), inside information, and contacts with vendors for a yearly fee. All that’s missing is your own laminated ID card identifying you as a member.

It’s that “tote bag” line that got me into trouble. As a long-time member (not “donor”) of public radio, I know that while the tote bag is the most visible symbol of support, the greater side benefits of giving money to my local NPR station is a wide variety of discounts and benefits negotiated for me — memberships and admissions to all sorts of cultural groups and events are mine for the asking.

But from my position as insider, I forgot that most people don’t give to their local NPR or PBS station, and likely would see the “tote bag” as the only benefit … and as we all know, tote bags are pretty cheap to make, and you gotta give far more than their fair market value to get one shipped to you.

This could (and likely did) leave the distinct impression that the discount that Guigar & Co. lined up to C2E2 was being described as low-value, when what I meant to express was WDC lacks only that visible symbol, with the high-value members-only benefits already in place. Again, my bad.

Looking back on how badly I pooched that story, I’m reflecting on what it is I’m trying to accomplish with this blog. I’ve long described myself as a “hack webcomics pseudo-journalist”, precisely because I’m not a journalist at all. Yet, that tagline up there on the title bar makes reference to the “Webcomics Action News Team”, and clearly that’s not the case. A previous tagline invited you to “Enjoy Our Semi-Abusive Opinion-Mongering”, which isn’t quite my goal either (but certainly it’s catchy). For the record, my wife liked the recently-retired “Try Our Thick, Creamy Shakes”, which might actually be the most accurate description of what to expect here.

In any event, with the possible exception of the day in 2006 that I hit “Publish” instead of “Save Draft” and put a half-finished set of notes up for a couple hours, yesterday’s posting was probably the least successful I’ve ever put into the aether. Like everything else, it stays up, but I’ll be adding a link from that posting to this one shortly, so that anybody that wanders through the archives can get a fuller sense of what should have been said.

In closing, I’d just like to add one thing: In case you were wondering, the onomatopoeiae FAP FAP FAP and FAAP FAAP FAAP do not mean the same thing. Please kids, search the internet for definitions carefully.

Edit to add: Dave Kellett has changed the “FAAP” sound effect in that strip to “PAAP”. Doesn’t really sound like a duck’s wing, but honestly it’s probably for the best.

Editor’s Note: The post below is preserved in its original, clumsy, only marginally useful form. A pretty extensive clarification may be found here.

From Ladies Love Cool Brad, news about why Webcomics Dot Com might be worth the thirty bucks:

Subscribers to Webcomics.com are eligible to get tables in the Webcomics Pavilion area of the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) for a special creators’ discount of 15%, or $60 off the list price of $400.

Guigar later clarified on his twitterfeed that the tables in question are 2′ x 8′ and are not in the Artists Alley — they are in the webcomics area¹. This … this is interesting. I’ll be very intrigued if Guigar manages to line up similar sponsorship/discount packages for his subscribers. If he does, he’s just one eco-friendly tote bag away from duplicating the model of public broadcasting across the country.

In other news, we mentioned the success of Girl Genius in the online poll at The Washington Post‘s comics blog search for Best Comic of the Decade. Having see the Foglios run away with the victory, there’s now an open call for nominations for Best Webcomic of the Past Decade. Curiously, nobody has mentioned Hark A Vagrant or MS Paint Adventures yet. Perhaps one of you should remedy that.

_______________
¹ Keep in mind that C2E2 is run by Reed Exhibitions, the people behind the New York Comic Con, and the forthcoming Pax East; it’s the NYCC show that prompts me to mention this. I don’t know if it’s Reed, or just union rules at the Javits Center, but the table space there notoriously included only the space.

If you want, say, an actual table, a chair, or something plugged into an electric jack, you need to contract separately for such at rates that sit somewhere between extortion and science fiction. More than one exhibitor at NYCC was seen to buy cheap tables and chairs at local big-box stores and abandon them after the show, and still pay less money than rental would have been.

Mr Madsen and R Stevens both celebrate their respective births today, woo. In gratitude to all of you, Stevens has unleashed a veritable cornucopia of pixellated delights: 33% off socks today, a dinoriffic t-shirt, and custom pixel portraits commissions until the end of the month. In honor of his generosity, I direct you all to what may well be Stevens’s holy book.

• As long as we’re celebrating birthdays, one might note that Sam Brown’s Exploding Dog is now ten years old, and Registered Weapon by Gardner Linn, Chris Thorn, Dave Lentz, and Rob Simmons, is a year old. When the inevitable world-wide holiday to celebrate webcomics is someday declared, I guess that 12 January will be the natural choice.
• Missed this last week, but it’s not yet hit the ‘sell by’ date, so I think we’re good: Ryan North got interviewed at Question Riot on the topic of his webcomics infrastructure efforts. If you were curious about Oh No Robot, RSSPECT or Project Wonderful, get yourself over there immediately.
• Question: who, in all of [web]comickry, is nicer than Raina Telgemeier? Since the Dalai Lama doesn’t do comics, I’d gonna go with “nobody”, and you can share in the niceness in person. To celebrate the imminent release of her graphic novel (from the webcomic of the same name), SMILE, Telgemeier will be having a launch party on Saturday, 13 February at Rocketship in Brooklyn. There will be a live reading, braces-friendly food, and possibly a Valentine’s Day theme (NB: I haven’t confirmed this, but I’m pretty sure that Raina’s valentine is her husband, Dave, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up if I were you). If all that isn’t enough to entice you, the bar next door to Rocketship does outrageously good cocktails. With any luck, I’ll see you there.

• It seems that Our Kate (Beaton, that is) will be doing a residency at Mount Allison University, which is apparently her alma mater. Speaking personally, the day that I went back to my college to do recruiting at the career fair? It rocked, so we at Fleen wish Beaton all the best as she returns to her old stomping ground as an Official Guest of the University.
• From Randy Milholland and Danielle Corsetto, news of a wallpaper at the Comic Creator’s Alliance to benefit Love 146 and Gracehaven, in support of the victims of human sexual trafficking. There’s a couple-zillion webcomics characters in the art, all of which was coordinated by Lora Innes. If you’ve got a few bucks you can spare for a good cause, here’s a good cause that could use a few bucks.
• Robert Khoo tweeted about the latest Penny Arcade job listing; I’m in favor of more candor in job listings like:
  

  At a base-level, this is what we are looking for in a human:

  • You need to have a crazy-person level of attention to detail.
  • You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment.
  • You have to be able to work under pressure, especially in game 5 with the score at 10-10.

  And here are some other things we’re using to weed people out. It’s not fair. I know. Life’s not fair.

  • A Bachelor’s degree is preferred. I don’t care what it’s in.
  • 2-3 years experience in a professional workplace as a designer
  • You should probably be a fan of Penny Arcade. Probably. Yeah.

  There were also a bunch of technical requirements in there which you should probably look over because I can pretty much promise you — apply without those skills, and a dozen creative and potentially offensive will laugh at you, possibly in public.

• Finally, I think this makes the first webcomics project to actually make it to the filming stage … there have been numerous projects optioned here and there, but The Kind You Don’t Take Home To Mother (from Ryan Estrada’s webcomic of the same name) is now in production as a 90 minute animated feature. Have I missed anything prior to this point? I’m not counting things like PvP: The Series (web release) or David Malki !‘s various films (not webcomics driven), since they don’t feel like the same scope project, but I’m probably being entirely arbitrary.

Remember ’bout a month back, Mike Ciccotello was supposed to get some airtime on Fox Business Network for his artwork? They finally got around to it. Check it out: the fictional Wesley Mouch and Dagny Taggart; the some-wish-he-could-be-fictional Timothy Geithner. Lots more at Ciccotello’s site, including congressional leaders and presidents; you’ve never seen Christopher Dodd scowlier or Barney Frank jowlier.

Here’s what I’ve noticed of late.

• Joey Manley — he of ComicSpace and WebcomicsNation and the Modern Tales family and such, is getting even more in the game. Not launched yet, but Manley will be writing a new webcomic about competitive cookery, with art by Tony Furtado. No name or URL to share with you yet, but as an avid fan of Iron Chef — now cruelly denied to me by the machinations of corporate fat-cats — I am officially intrigued. Seriously, all this tableau needs is Chairman Kaga and I’ll be happy.
• Speaking of Modern Tales, Alexander Danner has some news to share on that topic:
  

  Gingerbread Houses begins its fourth chapter at its brand new home on the web, PictureStoryTheater.com. Gingerbread Houses is a self-contained graphic novel, and is now halfway through its two-year run in online serialization.

  PictureStoryTheater.com will serve as the primary home for Danner’s comics inspired by fairy tales, fables, and children’s literature. In addition to Gingerbread Houses, it will serve as the archive for the original Picture Story Theater comics, which were illustrated by Bill Duncan and originally published on ModernTales.com. Danner’s more experimental, mainstream literary, and workplace-themed works will continue to reside at TwentySevenLetters.com.

  Gingerbread Houses updates Thursdays as MT and PST.

• New webcomics contest: Alex Heberling, celebrating five years of drawing words & pictures for the web on 18 January, is offering fabulous prizes for fanart.
• Gonna end on a teaser — heard some news last night about a pretty big project that (by my reading) is going to sit about midway between a trade show and ROFLcon. I should be able to bring you something more concrete in a week or two, and you might want to check your calendars for the fall, see if anything’s going on ’round Halloween. That’s all I can say now.

Got some bad news, not in a very good mood. This is briefer than it should be, but I imagine you’ll deal.

• Wes Molebash is giving away art from the last four years of comic-drawing; details here
• Spike has opened pre-orders for book four of Templar, AZ; various packages (including a pre-order only t-shirt design) at the store
• Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius was named the best webcomic of 2009 by the readers of Broken Frontier, which site seems to focuse on Marvel & DC normally

That’s all I’ve got right now; hopefully tomorrow will be better.