Okay, not really. I just wanted to see if I could say that with a straight face. It’s the Friday before a short week (for those of us that go about the uncredibly serious bidniss o’ growin’ up in Ermerica), and I’ve still got a mess o’ work to do before I can call the day done. Let’s make this short.

• Free book: blog about Wondermark, fill out a form, maybe get one of ten copies of Clever Tricks To Stave Off Death (I already bought a copy, so I’m not filling out the form — integrity!). Alternately, use the form to enter your local library into contention for one of another ten free copies.
• Not-free book: Marooned‘s first book is now up for pre-order; if you’re not familiar with it (I wasn’t until very recently), it’s that most classic of stories: man gets stuck on Mars with robot; man and robot don’t really like each other, but learn to work together; killer robots show up to spoil everything. The art’s got a bit of Matt Groening, a bit of Scott C., and (call me crazy, but I swear it’s got) a bit of Curious George in the mix. The book is jam-packed with extras and goodies, and if that’s not enough for you, the first taste is free.
• Art! Amsterdam will be the home of a show by six American artists called Mish Mash KaBash! from 9 – 18 December; one of the six will be the mysterious fellow known as Sam Brown (credited in show materials as “Exploding Dog”). Unfortunately, all the show materials I can find are only available from the gallery as PDFs, but you can see them here. Any European readers who’d care to report on the show, please contact us.

In conjunction with the currently-running Monsters of Webcomics show at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, there will be a special event on Saturday (-day, -day, -day), 12 December, from 11:00am to 5:00pm. Think “One day webcomics convention and nerd-out” as guests of the museum meet local webcartoonists, pick up swag & sketches, and attend writing & drawing workshops throughout the day.

Featured guests include Brian Andersen, Leigh Dragoon, Karen Luk, Betsy Streeter, Jason Thompson, Chuck Whelon, and Nexus of All Webcomics Realities (US Division, Women’s) Shaenon Garrity.

If you’re interested in participating (and can get to SF on your own), contact CAM supremo Andrew Farago, who runs the gallery at the museum which holds the cartoonart domain, which is a non-profit organization.

• Pre-orders for the lastest book from Evan Dahm (of Rice Boy and Order of Tales fame) are now up; Order of Tales, Book 2: The Hand of Stone will be shipping in 4 to 6 weeks, will run you US$25 ($35 in Canada) for 280 freakin’ pages, and look absolutely gorgeous. Hop to it, peoples.
• If I’ve got my sums correct (and the graphic on this page suggests that I do), Registered Weapon (once a cash register, now a robot, all cop) just hit 100 updates. Ordinarily, 100 updates is something I’d save for a slower news day, since it’s becoming somewhat ordinary to reach that milestone, but honestly I just needed an excuse to quote today’s RW Police Blotter:
  

  An employee of Buffalo Wild Wings called in a report that “two bears or something are straight-up [expletive] in the parking deck like it’s the [expletive] Bang Bus.”

  Two thoughts:

  1. That opening leads to a viciously funny dissection of the phenomenon of “Twilight Moms”
  2. If you know what Bang Bus is without looking it up, shame on you

  PS: Don’t Google it if you’re under 18 21 37 you know what? just don’t or at work.

Actually, compared to me, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins are pretty young guys … but Penny Arcade turns eleven years old today, which is practically stretching back to the Cretaceous in terms of webcomics. They’ve had some pretty serious ups and downs in that time, although for a while now it’s been definitely on the sky-pointing trajectory. Congratulations to them for being the sorts that would push themselves further with each update, to give back to their community as much as they do, and for (dare I say it) respectable family men with wives and kids and every damn thing.

• After all that heart-warmness, let’s turn to the other coast and another old-timer; Jon Rosenberg¹ not only has his second big-publisher book up for pre-order, he’s got an update today that neatly encapsulates Objectivism in words and pictures. Plus, I have always wanted to type the words, Somehwere in the distant infinite depths of space and time, Ayn Rand is sporting a massive chubby.
• Events! For those of you down with tha’ GMT, may I commend you towards the Thought Bubble Festival, tomorrow through Sunday in Leeds? Looks like the comic-bookiest part will be on Saturday. And may I ask why it is that here in the states we don’t get comics events funded via lottery? If I gotta wait to buy my lunch at the deli because the registers are taken up with people dumping money into Powerball, I oughta at least see some cosplay as a result.

  Back on the left coast, mark your calendars for Legends of Webcomics, an open-studio party in Portland hosted by Meredith Gran and Latin Heartthrod Aaron Diaz with special guests Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, and Luke Mahan; there is gonna be so much sexy times going on in that studio even if Moen doesn’t bring Cockosaurus with her. Fun starts Saturday 5 Dec, 3 to 7 pm, in PDX.

• Here is where I’d normally throw in a spy-motif extended joke because I have new relating to Eben07, but I think I’ve used all the good ones up. So straight story it is as we note that Brain Food Comics (formed by the principals of, and to publish the collected comics pertaining to, The Slightly Askew Adventures of Inspector Ham & Eggs) have taken an interest in the espionage-themed webcomic. So that’s an in-house publisher grown out of the indy/webcomics scene, picking up another title; from such small beginnings develop massive successes, sometimes. Best of luck to Brain Food, and with any luck they’ll be crowding out staid titles from the comics shops, and achieve total market dominance in a decade or two.
• Von Allan’s The Road To God Knows … is getting a wider distribution. The exploration of mental illness (and the effects on not only those ill, but those around them) is being made available as a free PDF, a torrent, or at Scribd.com; the electronic versions are being distributed under Creative Commons Canada licence that grants readers the ability to distribute the online versions of the book for free. It’s also available in physical form via the usual online venues or in the better comics shops and bookstores. More info at Allan’s site.

_______________
¹ Obligatory disclosure: Jon started me out on this-here blog, and in fact owns my soul. I sold it to him for a dollar one night while drinking, and he carries it in his wallet to this day. Next to his butt, where it’s nice and cozy.

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Quick item #1, because I’m required to: today’s moustache vs moustache webcomics battle! If Angela Melick actually did what she portrays in that second link, I just fell in love a little.

Quick item #2, because sometimes we like to watch stuff happening: video of Ryan North being smart at last month’s ACM conference vs video of the Tweet Me Harder dudes live on stage in Hollywood.

• Okay, so the deal is this — on the internet, you’re constantly bombarded with calls of “watch this” and “this is great”, particularly when you (as we at Fleen do) ask for people to send you notifications of stuff. Unfortunately, whatever the field of endeavour, most of it isn’t very good (c.f.: Sturgeon’s Revelation). What to do?

  Find voices that you consistently trust and mentally assign them a heavier weighting when trying to decide if what they recommend is worth following up on; note that this model neatly demonstrates a paradox in Information Theory that posits that a frequently wrong source actually conveys more information than one that’s sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

  For example, a movie reviewer in a newspaper that I used to subscribe to I trusted to consistently have her head up her ass; thus I could take her pans as hearty recommendations for my time and movie dollar, and her raves as a signal to avoid at all costs.

  All this is a fancy way of saying, sometimes a voice cuts through the noise and the recommendation is sufficient on its face. Case in point, Evan Dahm wrote to me recently, and I’m taking the following recommendation pretty seriously because his work is impeccably good:

  Liz Baillie, who has been publishing minicomics for years, has just recently started publishing her comic Freewheel as a webcomic.

  There isn’t much online yet, but I’ve read the first few chapters as they were originally published as minicomics and it is a very interesting, surreal comic.

  That’s all I needed; I was unfamiliar with Ms Baille’s minicomic work, but three pages in, I am intrigued and ready for more.

• John Baird’s been busy with the Create A Comic Project; let’s let him tell you the news:
  

  On November 6, 9, and 11th, the Create a Comic Project gave its first series of academic presentations! The first was at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society of Public Health Education (SOPHE) on Friday and the others were at the 137th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), both held in Philadelphia, PA.

  The presentations — two 15-minute talks and a 40-minute round table discussion — covered background information about the Create a Comic Project and two of its educational outreach efforts in the past year, which were conducted in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh. The roundtable had health professionals join in with a participatory demonstration of the comic project in action!

  As part of the presentations, Baird acknowledged a number of webcomics for their support of the project, along with the Guest Strip Project as an example of large-scale (and international) collaboration. Take a minute to scan one or two of those links, and 10 or 15 to look at something that you’re not familiar with; there almost certainly something you’ll like in there.

• Sometimes, email has just a hint of Yay, me!; sometimes it’s because you’ve perfected your life’s work, sometimes just because you went further with something than maybe you guessed when you started, and are still going strong. From Chris Flick:
  

  Friday Nov. 13, 2009 marks my Two Year Anniversary of doing Capes & Babes. Technically, my two year anniversary is REALLY November 12th, but that falls on a Thursday so I have to wait one extra day for my 2 year anniversary (damn those Monday, Wednesday & Friday schedules!).

  Also, I have collected the first 200 strips (see a pattern here?) of Capes & Babes in a 165 page TPB called You Can’t Print Flick.

  Warning to anybody that buys Flick’s book — it is my understanding that Brad Guigar, well-known paronomasiac, wrote the introduction. Tread carefully.

How big?

• How about 10? Real Life hit the ten year mark yesterday, and celebrated with a rare Sunday posting. Creator Greg Dean promises that the week will be following the Inside the Comic Studio with James Lipton theme in celebration.
• Okay, okay, how does 500 sound? A Softer World rolled over its 500th update over the weekend, with a particularly wacked-out triptych of existential horror (starring Meredith Gran).
• Okay, if those don’t do it for you, let’s try … 5. Blind Ferret Supremo (or humble shopkeep? only his mother knows for sure) Ryan Sohmer had a damn interesting announcement on Friday afternoon:
  

  I have always been vocal about my beliefs regarding a career in webcomics. It takes a great deal of work and dedication, a greater deal of luck and a myriad of other ingredients to make it work, but it CAN work. A career in this field is a viable option. Like anything else however, an education would provide a huge leg up.

  Because of that, and our desire to help others break through, we have decided to create The Rayne Summers Webcomic Scholarship, at The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.

  Beginning in the fall of ’10, we will be covering the full tuition for the selected applicant. The applicant who, I might add, is working towards a career in webcomics. Over the course of the next 5 years, we plan on adding 1 student per year, thus by 2015, the Scholarship will be putting 5 students through the program per year.

  Let’s put that in concrete terms: for the current academic year (2009 – ’10), tuition at CCS is $16,000; given the economics of higher education, the absolute best case is that next year (when the scholarship starts) it will be only slightly more. In five years, with five students? Very little chance that will come to less than $100,000 per annum that BFE are ponying up to help create the next generation of webcomickers.

  And here’s the thing: every time I talk to Sohmer — every. damn. time. — I come away with two impressions:

  1. He’s funny, personable, and I like him
  2. He is completely, but cheerfully, mercenary in his outlook to a degree that would make any self-respecting Ferengi blush

  By that second point, I mean that all all times he has a monomaniacal focus on what will continue to maintain and grow his business; he approaches that end of the creative game like nobody else this side of Robert Khoo. He has his eyes on his audience, their disposable incomes, and potential competitors for that pool of money, and doesn’t waver in giving them his full attention because he knows that Daddy’s supply of Red Bull isn’t going to pay for itself (actually, given the amount that fans bring him at conventions, it just might … but work with me here).

  And by this scholarship, what Sohmer’s doing is creating potential competitors for himself, “because he can”. Ladies and gentlemen, that is either the act of a clueless, hubristic fool, or a careful, calculating (potentially evil?) genius. My money’s on the latter.

• One last BRN for the day: 1. Doesn’t sound very big, or very round. It’s the number of strips so far in a brand-new webcomic called Max vs. Max, and normally a new-out-of-the-gate effort wouldn’t get press here. But this one is from Wes Molebash, of the now-folded You’ll Have That, so I’m pretty confident that this one will do okay. Get in on the ground floor.

I don’t want these to get lost in the shuffle so — lucky you! — it’s a weekend update at Fleen, as we review Scott Campbell and Leontine Greenberg‘s show Adrift, which runs at My Plastic Heart in New York for the next four weeks.

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So, the Friends of Lulu annual Lulu Awards got announced, and three webcomickers are among the honorees: Kate Beaton took the Kim Yale Award For Best New Talent, Danielle Corsetto is the Lulu of the Year, and Paul Taylor is now a Lu-Dude, as his Monica Villarreal was named Best Female Character. Congrautlations all ’round!

In other news (and I got a mountain of it backlogged right now):

• Although best known for Bellen!, Box Brown also does print comics work, and has a new blog about same. Very production-oriented, for those of you that like such things (I like such things).
• Last year it was Sean Tevis in Kansas, this year it’s Nicholas Ivan Ladendorf in Missouri that’s using webcomics to support a run for political office; key difference: Ladendorf was a webcartoonist prior to the run. Maybe. Let’s give him the floor for a moment:
  

  In the introduction of his campaign site, the candidate is wearing a mousekateer hat and his icon for discussing gun control is an AK47 on a leash with spiked collar. Even with this ‘edu-taining’ approach the candidate takes on some serious topics such as abortion and abolishing the federal reserve. Ladendorf is quick to point out “The site will continue to grow with the campaign. I have more to say and I’ll draw on this reservoir of additional issues as soon as the artist in me deems them presentable.”

  I’d love to tell you more about Ladendorf as a webcartoonist, but all I can say for certain right now is:

  • The “AK47” appears to actually be an M-16
  • The site is pretty sparse

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — if you’re going to put a category header on your site, having one line of text that says “thus and such will go here someday when I get around to it” doesn’t cut it, especially if that section is labelled “Bio” and you’re running for political office. So if/when that section ever gets filled in, we’ll point you to Ladendorf-the-webcartoonist. Until then, this might be his artsite, but all the links appear to be dead so your guess is as good as mine.

• As Al Schroeder of Mindmistress surmises, I don’t really read superhero webcomics (the last one I read was the late, lamented Skirting Danger), so I was unaware that a half-dozen or so of them are engaged in a crossover that will change everything, redefine superheroics, etc. … everything the big Event Crossovers from Marvel and DC do, except this one will end without leading directly into the next, perpetually-recurring, everything-will-change-again crossover. Thus: CROSSOVERLORD, which has included some over-crossing to non-superhero webcomics here and there. Check it out at your leisure.
• Joshua Smeaton got a Xeric grant for Haunted, the spooktacular webcomic where it’s Halloween and you’re 12 again and the scares are a bit too real. The printed version (which is, of course the purpose of the Xerics) is now available for order through your friendly local comic shop or bookstore. $12.95, ISBN 978-0-615-31563-8, or order code NOV090896 in the November Previews catalog.

So much good to get to; let’s jump straight in, shall we?

• As we mentioned yesterday, the new Tastefully Done calendar is now on sale, and it’s chock full of webcomicky nudery. Quick clarification, though — yesterday we mentioned some of Mike Rouse-Deane’s previous projects in support of Make-A-Wish International, but the TD series of calendars supports Cancer Research UK.
• New resource for librarians, from the library-themed webcomic: Unshelved Answers. Pretty full-featured forum that’s been put together, too, complete with badges indicating the accomplishments of the poster, and a reputation score. Interestingly, as of this writing, Unshelved writer Gene Ambaum has a reputation of 238, and Unshelved artist Bill Barnes has a reputation of 98. In cold, hard, objective, numerical terms, this means that Ambaum is 2.429 times as worthy a person as Barnes; sources familiar with both persons agree that’s about right.
• Hooray, gonna get married — Fleen sends congratulations to Striptease creator and Punch an’ Pie artist Chris Daily.
• Hooray, a new kid — Fleen sends congratulations to DC VP of Creative Services (and ultimately, Boss-King of Zuda) Ron Perazza and his now larger family.
• Hooray, the get-out-the-vote campaign worked — Commissioner James Gordon Hastings is now in the finals of the Cutest Dog Competition. Three of the four finalist dogs will be awarded $5000, and one — the Official Cutest Dog — will take home one million dollars (over three decades or so, don’t expect him to get a pimped-out water dish or anything). At this point, it’s all down to the judges, who will announce the winner in two weeks; in the meantime, I think we can all agree on one thing: Gordon good boy!

The brilliant thing about Gank A Big Hooler is, it can mean anything. And that means the second Wednesday of November is officially Gank A Big Hooler Day here at Fleen.

• Gank a big hooler, let’s talk more about bars: Aussie (Melburnian, to be precise) Ben Hutchings does a bar-story themed webcomic called Tales From The Pub — it’s all about stories that take place (or are told to Hutchings) in pubs, clubs, and drinking circumstances, and are described by Hutchings as:
  

  [S]hamelessly peurile, often stomach churning, obscene and true

  Think about the old Pathetic Geek Stories strip that used to run in The Onion‘s print edition. Updates twice a week, with plenty of schadenfreude to go around.

• Gank a big hooler, we brought up Mike Rouse-Deane‘s Guest Strip Project the other day, which is just one of his multitude of projects to benefit the Make-a-Wish International Foundation. It being near the end of the calendrical year, Rouse-Deane is back with a new iteration of the naked webcomics calendar, Tastefully Done. Look for a launch later this week, complete with promo pics. Having seen a sneak peek of said pics, I can state authoritatively there’s some prime cheesecake, beefcake, and, um, crittercake on deck.
• Gank a big hooler, webcomickers do find interesting ways to support themselves. Case in point, Rachel Keslensky of Last Res0rt (vampires/furries/reality TV shows … in space), has launched a campaign whereby donations (towards printing the first trade volume) result in cameo appearances. There’ve been similar implementations of this idea (notably, Krishna Sadasivam’s cheerfully capitalist approach to product placement — where the product is you), but I can’t recall such being done to fund self-publishing.
• Gank a big hooler, that’s some long-haul dedication on the part of Paul Gadzikowski, as Arthur, King of Time and Space, hit its 2000th consecutive daily update yesterday:
  

  Today AKOTAS has 2000 updates. They haven’t always been my work (five out of two thousand have been guest art), and they haven’t always had punchlines. But, since AKOTAS started two thousand days ago, there’s been something new here for every day.

  So yeah — somebody tell TV Tropes that they need to update the AKOTAS entry under Webcomics Long Runners.

• Finally, it’s Veteran’s Day, or Remembrance Day, or some variation, commemorating the end of The Great War, and how we all thought it would be the last one. However you may choose to remember or honor those who have fallen, there’s a bit of audio I went back to listen to today, one bit of private loss and remembrance that was shared with the world. From The Moth Radio Hour, episode 1, the third story (no direct link, so start about the 29:00 mark and be ready to have the breath sucked out of you).

So there’s going to be webcomics-centric event at a comics store in Austin, Texas next month — they’re even flying in out-of-state guest, which is pretty dang cool. One caveat: although it’s called “Dragon’s Lair Webcomic Weekend”, it’s not associated with the New England Webcomics Weekend (™, dontcha know) that took place last March in Easthampton, Massachusetts (and will again in Fall ’10).

It will probably be no easier to keep exclusive use of the term “Webcomic[s] Weekend” than it is to hold onto “Comic[-]Con” — not that this is a bad thing, webcomics getting more popular and having events occur around them. Just understand, the original (and still the best) put on by Meredith Gran and Rich Stevens (with so much help from so many others) and held at Eastworks, will be the show arranged by the creators for the fans.

• Speaking of weeekends, this past one I was lucky enough to spend some time at a cocktail brunch presided over by my favorite barmen, with drinks shaken by the incomparable Dale DeGroff, in honor of the release of Lush Life, a new book of art and stories from the best bars and bartenders of the world, written and illustrated by Jill DeGroff. I’m bringing this up because as my wife and I were getting our copy signed, we were told that there were more than enough stories to fill a second book … and a third, and maybe a fourth. They’ll come later (instead of Lush Life being thicker) because of the need to keep production costs down.

  Bam. Self-publishing. In our very brief interaction before, I’d liked Jill DeGroff, but now I really liked her — getting the material, doing the layout, raising the capital, and printing that sucker up for herself is something I’ve seen many webcomickers do, and it always impresses the hell out of me. DeGroff isn’t a webcomics artist, but as we’ve previously established, the difference between a webcomics artist and any independent comics artist (or, for that matter, any independent artist, period) is essentially nil.

  We got to talking art and comics and she asked me who I liked. The first three names that came to my mind were Gran, Engström, and Beaton, which prompted The King Of All Cosmos Cocktails to remark, “I’ve heard of Kate Beaton” and start scribbling her URL for future reference. (Hey, Kate — the greatest drinks mixer in the world is in all likelihood chuckling mightily as he peruses your archives right now.)

  Anyway, if you find yourself in a bar, and a well-dressed lady appears to be intently sketching you (as I saw she was doing to me), tarry a while and have a good story at the ready — you may find yourself in a future edition. And even if you don’t, pick up a copy of Lush Life, as there’s some damn gorgeous work in there.

• Speaking of Kate Beaton (as if I don’t enough already — but I’ll stop speaking of her when she stops doing such incredibly good work), Dirk Deppey managed to combine her with a reference to one of my other favorite topics on this page, Frank Zappa. I don’t think that I’ve ever quite managed to work those two into one item, but the piece at ¡Journalista! is even better than anything I could have come up with, for two reasons:
  1. It combines one of my favorite Beaton things (doing squats on the North Pole) and one of my favorite Zappa things (the concept of eyebrows); the only way this could have been better is if it involved dudes and swords
  2. Deppey included a succinct and insightful analysis as to why this particular strip is so well put together; seriously, read the strip and read what he has to say — it’s like he put into words all the things that were running around in my subconscious

  Read, enjoy, and when in doubt, do some squats.