It’s a day to be blessed with gifts, if you’re a webcomicker, or a webcomics fan, or just if you’re me. Let’s run ’em down.

• Over the weekend, news broke that Ben Costa’s Shi Long Pang is one of the latest recipients of the Xeric Foundation‘s grants; look for the wandering Shaolin monk to have his way into print significantly eased by the award. Hooray!
• Also over the weekend, Phil & Kaja Foglio must surely have been gratified (perhaps even a little mystified) to see that Girl Genius is up for consideration at The Washington Post‘s comics blog as Best Comic of the Decade. Considering that every other nominee appears to be a strip that runs on WaPo‘s comics pages, somebody must have gone further afield that is the usual case in these sort of polls.

  Oh, yes, it’s a poll, and it’s awaiting your vote — you know what to do. Make this not only a victory for a long-form, independently-produced, full-color, full-page comic, make it such an overwhelming victory that none may dare challenge the Foglios again. Oh, and start saving your pennies because Girl Genius volume 9 just wrapped, which means that a book collection is on the horizon (and volume 1 is getting set for reprint in March– in color this time!).

• You thought the Twelve Days of Hipsters was awesome? Check this out: Octopus Pie Christmas Special! Singing! Dancing! Cat barf! Yaaaaay!
• Received in the mail today: an invitation from :01 Books to join their review copy list, which means I’ll be able to bring you timely writeups of new work by webcomickers the likes of Gene Luen Yang and Tracy White. Big thanks to Gina, Colleen, and all the folks at :01!
• Also in the mail today, a gift from Rich Stevens, who found exactly what I didn’t even know what I needed and sent it along as a gift for the holiday of my preference. This one keeps on giving because I now have the URL for the artists that created this glass, meaning that I can purchase more of these to form a matched set. And guys — they have moustache pint glasses and champagne flutes. I now understand what leads people to “register a china pattern” to ensure they have matching designs on their formal dining table. I have found my signature design and will follow this imperative to the ends of the earth (or at least the glass cabinet of my bar).
• And finally, if you’ll forgive me for being slightly maudlin, thanks to all of the creators that entertain me so tirelessly, the readers who write in and tell me I’m doing something useful, and the friendships that webcomics have brought me — these are the real gifts that I’ve recieved and I treasure them above all. Except the moustache glass, that’s better than anything ever.

I trust that everyone here has heard the old saying about the fox and hedgehog — how the fox knows many things (i.e.: every sneaky trick in the book, and some that aren’t), but the hedgehog knows one big thing (i.e.: how to curl up into a spiny ball with no weak points), and that’s why no fox has ever eaten a hedgehog.

Yates was kind enough to answer some of our questions on this exciting new development.

Fleen thanks Chris Yates for his time, and encourages everybody who knows a puzzle fan to keep their eyes open for the new mass-market offerings. And if those fans like the chipboard jigsaw puzzles, be sure to point them to the originals.

There will be another post up later today (or possibly tomorrow), an interview with Chris Yates on the very exciting news that he’s sharing today. For now, there’s a couple of stories that deserve some examination and not to be put off any longer.

• First of all, man nerds work fast when they put their minds to it. The XKCD Laotian school fundraising project resulted in success and a pretty damn inspiring dedication plaque from Randall Munroe:
  

  “Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” – Plato.

  This school is a gift from the readers of XKCD, an internet comic strip. The world is full of exciting things to discover. We hope you find some of them.

  That news is about a month old, and it should have been brought up before now; I couldn’t let it go any further in good conscience. Judging from the progress photos at the link, the school is likely done by now. Finished. Built. Ready to educate. Well done, all involved.

• Second thing, and this deserves to be a much bigger story, in that it could literally save a life. Back in the Spring, Snowflakes launched, and it’s been a delight. Back on Monday, a flashback storyline began and it filled in a lot of color on one of the characters who’d been a little in the background since launch. But more important was the newsbox item on that day:
  

  For the next few months, we’re running a separate storyline for the American Heart Association, based on their “Be The Beat” program to promote heart health.

  You’ll still get Snowflakes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but two of those updates per week will be AHA strips.

  Let’s be perfectly clear, here: we are getting a tutorial on CPR in a webcomic and it’s fitting into the storyline.

  Allow me to share some things about CPR from the perspective of a guy who’s had occasion to use it. Disclaimer: This blog post is not an accredited AHA instruction and you need to go to class, okay? Okay. First off: When the heart goes kablooey, there’s no guarantee that it’s ever going to start up again. CPR by itself almost never results in a revival, and what’s important is getting a defibrillator to shock the heart back into proper working order. But even then, only about 70% of kablooies are shockable, and not all those that are will convert back to a non-kablooey rhythm, and every minute that goes by from onset to shock decreases the chances of success by about 10%.

  What CPR does is buy you time to get a defibrillator hooked up. And it’s easy. Easy enough that in a bad situation, a 911 dispatcher can coach you through it. But that takes time, and your form won’t be good, and you’ll tire too easily and then that time you’re buying starts to slip away again, so let’s take the time to learn it now. You’re all going to sign up for a class, but on the off chance you see somebody clutch their chest and slump to the ground on your way to the classroom, here’s what you do:

  Call 911. Make sure there’s no pulse — two fingers lightly against the outside of the Adam’s apple, and wait for a good 8 – 10 seconds. Got nothing? Open the patient’s shirt and make a fist. Place the heel of the fist on the breastbone, between the nipples, then wrap your other hand over the fist. Lock your elbows, and start pushing hard and fast.

  “Hard” means you’re pushing down about 1/3 of the body’s thickness. “Fast” means 100 compressions a minute; hum Stayin’ Alive or Another One Bites The Dust to get the rhythm right. If you haven’t had a class and don’t know how or when to breathe for your patient, don’t bother — just keep compressing (it’s likely in next year’s revisions of the CPR protocols, the whole rescue breathing thing will be dropped in favor of pure compressions anyway). Count out loud on each compression, so the rescuers who you called know how long you’ve been working.

  That’s it. Hard and fast. The class that you’re all signed up for now teaches you confidence (so you don’t hesitate), and how to use an automated external defibrillator, and different protocols for adults, children, infants, and newborns. It’ll teach you correct form so that your compressions are more effective (hell, I’ve held CPR certs since I was 20, and I didn’t know that my form was good until one day in the ER when a critical care tech told me that I was providing a strong femoral pulse from my compressions, while simultaneously not breaking any of the guy’s ribs) (don’t you worry about breaking ribs; if you hear popping sounds, keep compressing hard and fast).

  Neither this discussion, the calm voice on the other end of a panicked call to 911, nor Snowflakes is going to substitute for what you’ll get from class, but in a pinch any one of the three will be a damn sight better than nothing. Say it with me: Hard and fast. Hard and fast. Hard and fast.

  Now go sign up for that class (especially you parents out there — kids don’t have heart attacks, but there’s a bundle of nerves in the chest that if it gets smacked, there’s a one-in-a-zillion that it basically acts like the POWER OFF switch for the heart … it’s why you see Little League batters with big chest pads these days), and everybody thank the AHA and Snowflakes creators James Ashby, Chris Jones, and Zach Weiner for the Be The Beat miniseries.

Occurrences came and went while I was limited in my ability to browse:

• There was that Zingerding thing (and can I ask as we move out of the 2000-single digits and approach the 2000-teens, can we stop naming our internet startups with completely stupid names?) that popped up. Brad Guigar did a pretty good job of expressing the requisite skepticism after the initial announcement, and an even better one dissecting the (very preliminary) contract terms. My guess is that by this time last year, we’ll have forgotten about this particular Hey Kids! Webcomics! attempt.
• A Girl And Her Fed wrapped up a couple months of fighty scenes (starting here-ish) with a lesson or two:
  1. If your protagonist finds a new toy, and the villain breaks it, don’t be surprised to see said villain suffer a righteous ass-handing.
  2. Wrapping up months of fighty scenes and watching the Big Bad get her comeuppance on strip #666? Awesome.
• New Platinum Grit! Seems to me like the very irregular update schedule is getting a bit quicker these days; it’s only been since May that the last issue dropped, and previously there were droughts of entire, multiple years. If you can’t get enough of Trudy Cooper’s art between updates, may I suggest Oglaf (NSFW; Very NSFW; really, about as supremely NSFW as you could get and not feel like you had to shower or go to church and atone afterwards, but very, very funny) which is approximately weekly?
• Oh wow. Wow. Everybody check out The Nerds of Paradise right now.

Yeah, yeah, I usually mix “good news” themed posts with some visual reference to Professor Farnsworth; I just felt like it was more important to use tentacles today.

• Sad news from Portland, Oregon to share with you: one of the most brave, brutally honest journal comics is wrapping up:
  

  Hey dudes, good news!

  Or maybe good news?

  I’ve decided to end DAR!

  Okay, bad for me, good for Erika Moen … let’s get some more of the announcement taken care of:

  [H]ere is my Official, F’reals Announcement. The final strip will air on December 28th, 2009.

  I’ve been working on this project for about six years old now. It started my sophomore year of college as a 20 year old student and has seen me through my first love, finding my queer identity, my first heartbreak, my first rebounds, traveling to another country, depression and medication, having stupid adventures, meeting the man I’d eventually marry, re-structuring “my identity”, graduation, working in the real world while struggling to keep making art which brings us to today where I’m a 26 year old self-employed happily married woman.

  Oh, and I guess there were some dick ‘n’ fart jokes in there too.

  I’m extremely grateful for the wonderful opportunities and experiences and connections that have come into my life because of this ridiculous comic. After six years, I feel emotionally and mentally ready to move on.

  But don’t worry! DAR! was not my first comic and it is so far away from being my last. Making comics has been my passion for over a decade now (Hell, I even graduated from college with a self-made degree in comics) and I can’t see a time when I’ll ever stop.

  So that’s all right, then; Moen is still putting out a second volume of DAR! comics, and at the link above, you can sign up for an email notification when each of her new projects gets off the ground. I’m going to miss the crap out of DAR!, but I’m really interested to see where she’s going, and will enjoy the ride. The link to DAR! will remain in the sidebar for as long as the comics exist, or until a new project is even awesomer. Thanks for sharing so much of yourself with all of us, Erika — it was extraordinarily generous of you.

• As long as we’re talking about good things (and if Hurricane Erika decides that wrapping her comic is a good thing, I am officially On Board With That Shit), how’s about the cover of Hope Larson’s next graphic novel, Mercury? Two immediate thoughts:
  1. That’s freakin’ beautiful
  2. I am reminded of when Larson and husband Bryan Lee O’Malley both started getting notice for their early comics work, and my assessment was that it was Larson that was headed for superstardom; I Heart Scott Pilgrim’s Head as much as anybody, but seeing this cover makes me stand by my original judgement more than ever
• Know who’s got the weirdest career arc out of webcomics of anybody? Steve Troop. Just as Tiger Woods is getting all radioactive and dropped by sponsors, Nike busts out a new set of commercials that don’t feature humans (with their tendencies to attract the wrong sort of attention), but rather puppets. Puppets designed by Steve Troop, that is. The video of the first commercial can be seen hereabouts, with another six (and another 20 or so puppets) on deck for release as basketball season progresses. None of Troop’s signature aliens sighted yet, but one may hope … one may hope.
• Finally, it’s my understanding that a new Dresden Codak has been sighted in the wild; I can’t verify from the handheld but interested parties are urged to check for themselves.

‘Cause this is the time of year that my friends are provided with astonishingly good (if I do say so myself) full-fat baked goods. Nummers!

• Speaking of being friends, Paul Abbamondi does a little thing called My Life Comics; over the weekend, he proposed to his girlfriend in that space. The bad news is that she is now his ex-girlfriend; the good news is that she’s now his <Holly Hunter voice>fi-anse</Holly Hunter voice>. Webcomics: a force for both good and attaching yourself in a life-long manner to totally awesome ladies.
• Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Cartoon Art Musuem, whose association with webcomickry is extensively chronicled on this page. We at Fleen salute the fine work done by CAM, which includes:
  

  [T]he collection, preservation and display of original cartoon art in all its forms. Today, the Cartoon Art Museum is still serving the San Francisco Bay Area and the artistic community through exhibitions, community outreach and public programming. A full and exciting roster of exhibitions and programs are being prepared for the coming year, and we are very thankful for all of the support and encouragement that we have received over the past 25 years, and look forward to continuing to fulfill our mission statement as it was conceived back in 1984.

  In a stunning coincidence, the anniversary happens to coincide with the start of their annual fund drive; if you’re looking to snag a last-minute deduction on your taxes, there’s far worse places to donate a couple bucks. C’mon, you got the money to drop on a fancy-ass Starbucks drink, you can spare a tenner for the cause.

• Finally, I was going to comment on how Brad Guigar was noting the crossing of the 3000 strip mark in the Greystone Inn/Evil, Inc. continuum, and I was gonna get all smartass about how if you count his emergency auxilliary classy strip and his world’s only sex strip that doesn’t show sex, ol’ Brad had hit the Big Round Number of 3357. Then he went and did the math himself, leaving me without a lede. Thanks, Brad, and “congratulations”¹.

_______________
¹ See if you get any cheesecake, mister. Rassa-frassin’ stealing my bit.

Internet at home, the single busiest weekend of the year — teaching, next step to getting an emergency medical qualification, and a fundraising breakfast that involved a seven hour kitchen shift. Yeesh. So if there’s anything really new going on in webcomickry I’m a little behind; here’s some stuff you may or may not have heard before.

• Congrats to Gordon McAlpin on the Multiplex kick-starting; I didn’t read the email annoucing the imminent deadline on the project in time to give everybody one last shot at getting in on the action (which was Friday), but I can now confidently state that McAlpin (my $1 bet adversary) has achieved 176% of his $7500 goal, so that’s all right.

  Because Gord’s a stand-up guy, he also pointed out that those wanting to fund Spike‘s Poorcraft project still have a week to do so (at this point, the book is so well funded that more money means more copies that Spike will be giving away to various economic-helping-type organizations; at present, 100 copies are so earmarked for donation.

  Also, there’s still a month to go to get in on cheap copies of the Tigerbuttah we-can’t-call-it-a-Little-Golden-Book-but-that’s-what-it-is. XX-man has a list of other projects from the community; bet you can find something you’d like over there.

• Not to make this an all-Xerexes, all-the-time edition, but the ComixTalk Year End Roundtable, Woo is up. Garrity! Santo! Alverson! Carlson! Badman! Fesworks! Woodruff! Some random hack!
• Finally got around to watching the video interview of Julia Wertz talking about not having insurance that’s been making the rounds for the past couple weeks. Compelling stuff, but then I broke the cardinal rule of the internet and read comments and now I have a headache. Watch the video if you haven’t, don’t scroll down the page to where the stupid begins.

Here’s a couple of things to tide you over:

• I think this is going to be a standard thing in the future: the exhibitor’s list for TCAF ’10 as Twitter list. Easy to update to reflect changes, and more than just a static blurb, there’s interaction with the exhibitors for the fans.
• A pair of new webcomics inspired by videogames noted today: via occasional Fleen contributor Jeff Lowrey points us towards a new casual-gaming strip from James Francis of Babylon Sticks. And via the XX-Man’s Twitterfeed a Team Fortress webcomic; this one’s got a story and every damn thing! It appears to be a one-off, providing a bit of color to a game event, but what the heck — the idea of a thoroughly evil woman egging these murderous teams on at each other for her own nefarious purposes certainly puts a new spin on the game.
• Mike Ciccotello is a guy I met at my local bookstore, at one of Patrick McDonnell approximately-annual does a talk/readings. Mike has done a bunch of [web]comics (initially as a strip, more recently of the editorial variety), and spends the occasional day as Brad Guigar’s convention henchman. Just you’re average, everyday Renaissance Man with a day job and a wife who thinks he’s pretty nifty and an unusual venue for his latest art.

  So there’s this guy named John Stossel, right? Once upon a time he was a “expose the scammer” type of television journalist type, and lately he’s just kind of a libertarian who doesn’t believe in regulation; whatever you think of his politics or his reporting, he sports a formidable moustache. He’s got a new show on Fox Business, and for an upcoming piece he’ll be running portraits by Ciccotello of characters from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

  Ayn Rand is one of those writers whose appeal escapes me utterly (and also must bear responsibility for the existence of the “Objectivist Club” at RPI, whose members during my graduate education pissed me off more than any other human beings that I’ve met in person, with the exception of Jack Thompson), but Ciccotello’s artwork is really nice. The plan was for them to run last night, but I gather that Stossel decided to celebrate the opening of the Copehagen conference by talking about how global warming is a good thing. As soon as the story airs, we’ll share the art with you.

Let’s keep this brief.

• Neal Adams is widely regarded as one of the most significant comics artists of the Silver Age, and if you started reading comic books when artists still bothered to draw feet, chances are that Adams was responsible for your mental image of Batman and Superman. And who is Adams collaborating with? Scott Kurtz, on the PvP Christmas storyline. I’ma go out on a limb here and guess that for Kurtz to be more excited, it would take Jack Kirby coming back from the dead and adding some krackle to a Skull fart gag.

  Actually, that would rule.

• T-Rex auction to benefit Child’s Play (which, as of earlier today, is up over US$1.2 million this season; what economic meltdown?). Fine hug-receptable manufacturer Squishables is putting up for auction a fine representation of the late Cretaceous haps-asker, complete with accessories:
  

  [N]ot only do you get a Squishable T-rex, but you get all of the things from the comic that Squishable T-Rex wants to squish:

  • A big blue car!
  • A moderate sized log cabin!
  • A tiny tiny woman!

  How about a print-out of the original design document for this awesome squishable? How about if Ryan [North, creator of Dinosaur Comics] and Zoe [designer from Squishables] both sign the print out? Would that be cool enough for you? Yeah, we thought so.

  As of this writing, the auction is up to a paltry US$81, but there’s about six days to go. Get cracking.

• New book from A Softer World! Launch party for the new book from A Softer World! The fun (and, if ASW scribe Joey Comeau’s past behavio[u]r is any indication, ball-punching) next Monday, December 14th, at 7:00pm in Montréal’s Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore/Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.
• Finally, most significantly, Anders Loves Maria is hurtling towards conclusion, and Rene Engström has gifted us with a six-page update. There is annoyance at juvenile antics. There is the sudden realization that it’s happening, now. There is the need to know what’s happening. There is the fearful realization that in this life nothing is guaranteed, a new life, and the terrifying realization that you can be powerless in the face of something so small and helpless.

  These characters that feel so real, that have loved and fought and fucked and fucked up and reconciled and broken themselves and each other, their journey with us is coming to an end. Not all of those ends are going to end well. It’s still not certain that our principals will decide they want each other more than they don’t. Whatever happens to Anders, Maria, and their child, I suspect that I will end up some degree of heartbroken, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you’re of the inclination to Give Stuff at this time of year, please note that many of the fine vendors of webcomickry are approaching sales deadlines, depending on where in the world you might be.

• In other news, an end-of-year tradition returns — Xaviar Xerexes having taken 2008 off from compiling a roundtable discussion of webcomics issues (and predictions) is back in the saddle again. Look for that in the immediate future as the participants (including, rumor has it, a hack webcomics pseudojournalist) get their punditry into the XX-man for aggregation.
• I can’t wait to see what the official response of Dragon*Con (if any) to this is. Either Ryan Sohmer is lying through his teeth and D*C have bounced him for entirely justifiable reasons (which I find unlikely given his careful, businesslike nature and innate Canadian politeness), or he’s correct and D*C have to save serious face by spinning furiously. The truth could be somewhere in the middle, but somehow I don’t think things could have spun so spectacularly out of control that way; in any event, just being quiet and hoping it all goes away isn’t a viable strategy.
• The ivory halls of Artsy Folk (are they ivory? I know that academia is … maybe they’re just “shining towers” or “exemplars of culture” or something like that) are taking note of our niche of late. Case in point: Dallas Art News sent invitations to participants of last month’s Dallas Webcomics Expo to contribute to an exhibit of sorts, entitled Webcomics Imitating Art.

  While at first blush that title seems slightly … snippy? … it actually refers to the theme at play: creators would use their own characters & aesthetic to recreate or reference famous works of art. The creators that answered the call produced homages to works by the likes of Grant Wood (American Gothic), Andy Warhol (Marilyn), Edvard Munch (The Scream), Jan van Eyck (Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife), Leonardo da Vinci (Vitruvian Man), Michelangelo Buonarroti (Two Muscular Guys Touching Fingers), and more.

  The original plan was that the webcomickry would coincide with an already-planned tour, but it got postponed; nevertheless, the art kept coming in (and non-DWEX exhibitors jumped on the bandwagon), resulting in a total of 19 pieces. Participants and art are shown at the link; most of those involved appear to have relatively modestly-trafficked sites, meaning that many more people now have the opportunity to get exposed to their work. Click, dig in, and find something new to enjoy.