Let’s get you updated, Lightning Round style!

• Item! Brigid Alverson turns her attention towards webcomics news & info blogging, and I can tell you right now that she’s going to do this much, much better than we at Fleen do. She’s a terrific, well-informed writer, and I urge you all to check her out daily. Just remember to come back when you’re done, ‘kay?
• Item! MoCCA Fest 2010 dates and table availability announced. Back to the Armory, but earlier in the year, so hopefully people won’t be dropping in the aisles from fever & ague. Exhibitor tables are $410 for a full table and $260 for a half until 31 December, with discounts for MoCCA members (hint: membership’s about $35). Prices go up on New Year’s Day, and registrations will be accepted on a first come, first served basis beginning 21 October by fax, mail and in-person (applications on the website). The fax option may help alleviate the problem last year when people from around the country got shut out by locals walking in their applications.

  But here’s my question, because I’m not a creator and have never taken a table anywhere — is that a really high table cost for the size and duration of the show? It seems like it to me. Given all the problems that last year’s show had, I’m guessing that MoCCA has one, maybe two years at most to turn things around and get a really good show together before they start seeing exhibitors abandoning in droves. MoCCA has always been one of my favorite shows of the year, so here’s hoping that they get it really right next April.

• Item! By all accounts, Scott Kurtz killed as the MC of the Harveys. Along the same lines, a very nice, heartfelt, gracious post by Kurtz up today about his re-evaluation of Zuda and his feelings about it. Well done, sir (now I retire to my blogger’s desk and gather up the gold-plated instruments with which to twirl my moustache in a self-satisfied manner).
• Item! Randall Munroe, via sales of xkcd: volume 0, and tickets to his brief book tour, has raised enough money to build a school in Laos. Holy crap.

Let’s all enjoy the remaining time we have before the pissed-off planetoid decides to wreak horrific vengeance on us all.

• If you’re going to die in an apocalyptic satellite brouhaha (I guess Galactus gets the snack-size leftovers), may as well go out laughing, drunk and or fighting. And lucky for you, all three can be accomplished simultaneously at Super Art Fight 5 tonight in Baltimore:
  

  Using one of the most star-studded lineups ever, Super Art Fight 5 will have some of the biggest names in webcomics taking to the stage for battle.

  The first bout on the card is the Tag Team Challenge, which pits Jamie Baldwin and Danielle Corsetto against Kelsey Wailes and Bryan Prindiville. Baldwin and Wailes are both past winners of past battles, with both ranking in the top 3 of potential challengers for the title. Prindiville is fighting for a chance to become part of the official roster, while Corsetto is taking part in her first-ever fight.

  The second match of the night is The War To Settle The Score, pitting Nick “Ghostfreehood” Borkowicz against Lar deSouza. The two started their grudge in Connecticut, with deSouza winning a tag-team challenge with a healthy dose of trash talking. Borkowicz, one of the founders of Super Art Fight, wasn’t pleased with the loss, and is out to settle the feud in Baltimore.

  The main event is the Super Art Fight Championship, where defending champion Michael Bracco puts his belt on the line against Chris Impink (yes, we have a belt). Bracco is looking to be the first belt-holder to ever defend his title in Super Art Fight history. Impink is the career underdog of Super Art Fight, and could pull the upset.

  During the matches, commentary will be provided by the Super Art Fight hosts, Marty Day and Ross Nover, with musical accompaniment by the official DJ of Super Art Fight, DJ Sheephead.

  So that’s at Metro Gallery in Baltimore (1700 North Charles Street), $10 a head, doors open at 8pm, mayhem starts at 9:00. Survivors of the bloobath (and lunar revenge) may be found the next day at Baltimore Comic-Con.

• You know what? Seeing as how the moon will kill us all in the immediate future, I’m going to share something with you. Received recently was the first piece of Fleen fanart, from Krishna Sadasivam. When death rains from the skies and the living envy the dead, this image will make me smile as I face the end of all things — my humble website inspired an artist to take the time to create an image in which I slightly resemble Sergio Aragonés. Also, I once had a t-shirt made about my moustache. That’ll do, hack webcomics pseduo-journalist. That’ll do.

So let’s get this particular iteration of the Interpocalypse kickin’.

• Seems like a lot of comics are finding their way to mobile devices these days — Howard Tayler, in his recent Fleen interview, talked about an iPhone app for his stuff; I’m getting hit with regular press releases about somebody named “Tyrese” who’s created a comic about an asskicking vigilante who takes no guff (man, where do these original concepts come from) that resembles his creator to a startling degree and is now releasing it via iTunes as a — gahhh — motion comic (insert Clutch Cargo joke here). You got your LOLBOTS, you got your Clickwheel, and now it appears you will have your Erf:

  Erfworld: The Battle for Gobwin Knob is soon coming to mobiles in a partnership with Robot Comics.

  Originally published online under the Creative Commons license, Erfworld is today one of the most popular and heavily trafficked webcomic sites, supported by its own wiki consisting of 5000+ fan-created articles about the Erfworld universe, including a complete single panel annotated archive of the comic that would make a Grant Morrison fan proud.

  Awesome — now I know why the text-only “summer updates” are still going.

  I kid, I kid … the storytelling and world-building that goes on in the “novelization” of Erworld is really quite good. But I want to see the pictures again, dammit.

  Things that made me ask questions — is this the first let’s-get-comics-on-handhelds development group that’s developing for less-widespread devices like Android phones, Nintendo DSi, and Kindle? And is the first development of a complete story (140+ pages) originally formatted for full-screen viewing, to get redone for widely-varying but mostly small screens? At least, that’s what I’m taking from the Robot Comics self-description, ’cause if all they do is shrink down the pages, that’s gotta be one unsatisfying reading experience. As they say, we shall be watching their career with great interest.

• Know what rocks? Anders Loves Maria is back from hiatus (which included a pretty nasty flulike bug colonizing creator Rene Engström). Know what sucks? It’s almost over:
  

  I’m back at work now and ready to give you my full attention, hopefully uninterrupted until the story’s conclusion, some 30 pages or so into the future.

  Okay, let me rephrase that — I am thrilled that Engström is telling the story she wanted to tell, with a definite beginning, middle, and end (and enough flashbacks to spin the heads of the LOST writing staff). I’m not happy that this means that sometime, probably by the end of the year, that I will not have more ALM to look forward to. To have them go on forever, like a soap opera that long outlives its original characters, would be terrible. But to not have Engström’s comics is possibly worse. Here’s hoping that she already knows what the next project will be once ALM wraps (diary comics! diary comics!) and will be ready to launch quickly because Daddy needs his medicine.

• Know what the awesomest part of the recent Dinosaur Comics site redesign is? Blogposts are now tied to comic updates, so I can permalink things like the title of Ryan North’s upcoming ACM address to the folks that made HAL:
  

  So hey what are you doing October 16th-18th 2009? If you’re like me you’re coming to the (free!) ACM Reflections | Projections conference in Urbana, IL! I’m giving a talk! In fact, I’ve got the last talk of the day, entitled “GUYS, LOOKS LIKE IT’S WACKY TIME”, in all caps, just like that. Will it truly be wacky time? Yes, absolutely. You should come!

  Please somebody video this so we can all see what WACKY TIME WITH RYAN looks like. I bet it looks like a kiddie TV show on twenty-eight hours of no sleep!

I’ll repeat myself for those in the back: LEGO David Bowie. Okay, it’s nothing to do with webcomics, but it’s awesome (much like this video clip of students from my alma mater lighting the traditional Homecoming bonfire with a trebuchet). I suppose webcomics are awesome too; let’s see if anything happening matches up (gonna be tough, considering that LEGO Rock Band will also feature a LEGO Iggy Pop).

• Baltimore Comic-Con is coming up this weekend, complete with the Harvey Awards, hosted by webcomicstan’s own Scott Kurtz. Anybody that hasn’t seen Kurtz when he’s got a microphone in his hand and just riffing along — it’s worth the ride.
• Long-time readers of this page may remember the New York Center for Independent Publishing, as they are the very cool people that put on the SPLAT! symposium about 18 months back. Not content to let one discussion of such matters take place, the NYCIP are doing a series of presentations on the theme of Comics History/New York History:
  

  New York Comics as New York History: Tuesday, October 20
  Comics historian Kent Worcester will explore the connection between the city’s familiar streetscapes and the development of the comic book from the 1930s and 1940s to the post 9/11 era – looking at the ways comics history has mirrored the ups and downs of the quintessential American metropolis.

  Cartooning and New York City Politics: Tuesday, November 3rd
  Boss Tweed may have been the most powerful man in the City, but he was still tormented by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons. Parsons faculty member Bill Kartalopoulos will host a panel exploring the interaction between political cartoons, New York City politicians, and the public.

  New York, the Super-City: Tuesday, March 9th
  New York served as the model for Gotham City, inspired Will Eisner as he created the noirish adventures of The Spirit, and became a recurring character during the 1960s resurgence of Marvel in comics such as Spider-Man and Iron Man. ForeWord Magazine contributing editor Peter Gutiérrez will moderate a talk on the relationship between superheroes and their favorite hometown… and on how comics culture has promoted potent and memorable images of New York to readers worldwide.

  “Carousel” in New York: Tuesday, April 20th
  The series closes with a multimedia presentation hosted by R. Sikoryak, Parsons faculty member and author of Masterpiece Comics. This event will feature work and performances from some the of the top comics artists working in New York.

  The series will take place the NYCIP, 20 West 44th in Manhattan (pretty much directly across the street from the famed Algonquin Hotel), starts at 6:30pm, and is yours for the low-low price of $15 at the door ($10 for members, $5 for students). Anybody that’s around NYC on those dates that’s reading this? No better way to spend a couple hours.

Corrections and Clarifications: Yesterday, Fleen quoted Brad Guigar, in reference to Ryan Estrada’s new supervillainesque webcomic, as saying Fools! I will vanquish every one of you puny mortals and lay all your works to waste! Moohahahahahaha! Due to deadline pressures, Mr Guigar’s quote was extrapolated from a pool of likely responses as calculated by the Quote-O-Matic 2000™ we got secondhand from Fox News. When reached for comment at his remote secret lair, Guigar actually said, I really don’t feel as if I own the rights to a villain-themed comic. He then added Mwa-ha-ha and ceased transmission. Fleen regrets the error.

I’m fine, but let’s say that a near miss happened today to someone I know and it’s got me in a mood; if the news about the x0,000 phished Hotmail, etc. accounts weren’t enough to make you reevaluate your approaches to password discipline (mine verges on clinical paranoia), then hey — awesome. You’re the soft target, not me. With that bit of entirely callous disregard for the well-being of my fellow netdwellers out of the way, let’s get some quick news items in.

• Speaking of bad people, Ryan Estrada has launched a new daily webcomic about them; okay, his are more the “costumed bad guys” and less “disaffected programmers working for various ethnic mafias”, but you get the idea. Chillin’ Like Villains launched with a full 24-page story in the archives, and after a one-day chapter splash, kicks in with fresh adventures today. Reached for comment about the new competition in the supervillain-themed webcomics sphere, Brad Guigar bellowed, Fools! I will vanquish every one of you puny mortals and lay all your works to waste! After pausing for breath, Guigar continued, Moohahahahahaha! and fiddled with what appeared to be some kind of nullifier, or possibly a mind-control beam.
• Speaking of insane rantings, Jeff Rowland would have you believe that he is prone to such outbursts; in fact, he is a pretty savvy businessman who’s managed to negotiate his way to a modest (if possibly accidental) empire of internet merchandisery, which he talks about at Comic Alliance:
  

  It’s still the friggin’ wild west out here; if you can get 20,000 people to read your comic about a dog that huffs paint, there is a way to make a living from that.

  Much like our own interview with TopatoCo VP Holly Post, Rowland talks about webcomics giving you slack for being weird, TopatoCo’s growth curve, and their unique corporate culture:

  I got David Malki [!] running promotions and propaganda and that dude is an idea dude to the marrow. Most days I just spin him around on this big board and decide what to do from what thing his feet point at.

  People, I have stood in TopatoCo HQ, and I am fully prepared to believe that Rowland is telling the truth. If you want to make good business decisions, your course is clear — obtain your own David Malki ! and revolve him until gravity tells you what to do.

• Speaking of interviews, Zudaboss Ron Perazza had one with David Gallaher a couple days back at CBR; full disclosure: Gallaher is the creator of High Moon, which was one of the first Zudawinners. The interview is full of interesting stuff, and whatever your views on Zuda, the Zudacontests (I’m decidedly meh on them), the Zudainterface (hell meh), these are some talented guys and it’s worth your time to listen to them. Besides, I can’t be the only person who swooned upon learning that Gallaher has written a graphic novel of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar!.

  What do you mean, you never heard of YT,JD!? It was an awesome radio drama about a fabulous freelance insurance investigator … a freelance insurance investigator with an action-packed expense account! Look, if you live in or around Washington DC, WAMU does this multi-hour block of old radio programs on Sunday nights, and YT, JD! is often in the rotation. It’s cracktastic.

Editor’s note: When last we left our intrepid heroes, Howard Tayler was recounting the things he learned at the Success in Comics seminar the weekend before. Tayler had just spoken about opportunity cost and his experiment in alternate revenue streams for 2009: XDM, an RPG manual and the first non-Schlock material to be published by Tayler. We now rejoin our adventurers as Tayler wonders if he will be asked how the book is doing, when suddenly …

(more…)

Editor’s note: So a week ago, Howard Tayler — webtooner, husband, father, onetime software industry small-m mogul, and generally godly fellow — made his way to that modern-day debauchorama known as Las Vegas. What could make an upstanding gentleman brave such a den of iniquity? The opportunity to learn ways to better his craft and business at a weekend seminar that brought together people from the worlds of syndication, gag cartooning, strip cartooning editorial cartooning, and webcomics.

Sanity intact, no quickie annulments on file with Clark County registrars, hopefully zero warrants, and an unknown number of trips to New Rock later (word to the wise: don’t count on your bad deeds “staying in Vegas”), Tayler was kind enough to sit down in our virtual studios for a chat about the experience. That is to say, we’ve been bouncing emails back and forth, and today Fleen is happy to present the first portion of that interview.

(more…)

Hey, lookit that: Todd the Squirrel is being … well, Todd … and pissing off a classy lady-squirrel. We’re a long way from the first Achewood strip, nearly as long a way from when Todd was first introduced, and the denizens of Achewood have had many ups and downs in the meantime. It’s been a stellar eight years, where one can say without hyperbole that the worst, most perfunctory Achewood is better than most anything else being created today, and that the best achieve a kind of weird poetry. Fleen thanks Chris Onstad for taking us along on the journey.

• If I worked out the math correctly, today is both the five year anniversary of Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots, and tomorrow will be strip #800. To celebrate, today’s installment features nightmare horrors from the deepest recesses of Hell (aka clowns). Yay? But then there’s this: half off original strip art through Sunday Friday, sorry!. Some of my favorites are already gone, dangit.
• Speaking of “dang”, news comes to us this day that come Spring (northern hemisphere) next year, Little Dee will be wrapping up after nearly five years (no blog permalink, but it’ll be there for a while):
  

  I am sad to tell you all, but I will be ending Little Dee in early spring of 2010 (exact date not yet set). I have loved drawing and writing Little Dee, and love the characters. But I feel it is time for me to try new things.

  I first started thinking about it summer of 2008. I realized that I was feeling I had told most of the tale of Little Dee and her friends, and that I have other stories outside of them to tell, more characters and worlds to create. And that I loved Dee, but if I didn’t make sure I had new paths to walk, that I would one day wake up and feel stuck and feel it a burden. I never wanted that.

  We at Fleen love Little Dee (the strip and the character), and will be sad to see both go; but if there’s a clean conclusion to her story of life in the woods with the critters, then it’s all good. Her story had a beginning, a reeeaaallll long middle, and now it will have its end. To lighten the mood, what say we start a pool about how the strip will end. Be the first to comment with a short description of how you think the strip will wrap up, like Dee talks or Dee finds her parents again and if you’re right, you win the admiration of your peers and the thanks of a grateful nation. I’m gonna take Vachel finally snaps (art direction by Quentin Tarrantino). Don’t believe me? Check out the first strip here, or the fifth one here; that boy’s a cauldron of seething rage.

  But in Dee’s place, something new will rise. We’d heard the rumor of an adorable sci-fi comedy strip with lasers, but now Baldwin has a site and progress reports up for Spacetrawler, and it looks like he’s getting script feedback/edits from a bevy of talented people, including webcomics mainstays Dylan Meconis and Mike Russell. Sign up now, avoid the rush.

• If you don’t follow them regularly, you might not know that there are a couple of media analysis places that generally get things right. Yesterday, one of them — MediaShift from PBS, focusing on digital media — turned its eyes on webcomics and the mechanics of indy-art businessin’, and spoke to some familiar names. Worth checking out.

For those looking for the Howard Tayler interview that was promised yesterday, it’s coming. In the meantime, consider the following, please.

• Speaking of Tayler, changes o’ plenty over at Blank Label’s homepage in the past few weeks. Over roughly the past ten-twelve days, we saw several comics failing to update daily; Paul Southworth’s Ugly Hill leaving the strip lineup and list of comics at the top of the page but not the “Brady Bunch” thumbnail set; the same for Paul Taylor’s Waspi Square; the addition of a link for new member Dave Reddick’s Legend of Bill but pointing to a not-yet active placeholder on the page; and today, the return of Steve Troop (who, by the way, is one of the creators interviewed in that new Calvin and Hobbes sorta-bio)’s Melonpool.

  We at Fleen are have not yet determined if these are programming issues or membership shakeups, but one might reasonably assume the latter: Southworth, at least, has launched his new strip wil Bill Barnes, which would complicate the act of keeping the strip at BLC because BLC is a different kind of collective; to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only one out there that merges the revenues of its members.

  Other high-profile collectives like Halfpixel or Dumbrella are really just a common brand name (aka A bunch of lowlife emo-candyraver drug-addled web-cartoonists I’m loosely associated with. We have a sort of mutual non-aggression pact.) without intermixed finances from things like ads. We may be seeing BLC transforming itself from a corporatized collective (CoCo?) to just the regular kind. Or it could be bugs in the code — I have not received definitive information from anybody in a position to know, and I imagine we’ll all find out what the deal is soon enough anyway. Lesson to take away: webcomics journalism is hard.

  Also, if you’re going to have a collective, think about your lineup changes carefully and always compare them against the most important yardstick of all — Will this make Gary change his morning browsing habits? If so, it’s a bad change because Gary is a creature of habit and his brain takes a while to wake up.

• 24 Hour Comic Day is coming up this weekend! So far, Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub seem to be setting up a Dallas branch of the effort, with KC Green coming into town to join in on the fun. My guess is that all three of their twitterfeeds are going to hilarious once the sleep deprivation sets in. Who else is planning on tempting the gods of caffeine and madness?
• New Yorkers and those who love them: the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, as part of their regular Thursday-night event series, will have a panel discussion tomorrow evening on The Comics Press, including friend o’ webcomics Heidi MacDonald, along with Aaron McQuade & Evie Nagy and Douglas Wolk. 7:00pm at the museum, $5 general admission, free for members.
• Also starting tomorrow (and running through the weekend), the Marbella International Film Festival (that would be Spain) will include in its screening schedule a short based on Doug Wilson’s webcomic, K-9 Lives. In honor of the screening, I’ve been trawling Wilson’s archive (only about 100 updates) of wordless comics. The navigation’s a bit of a pain (driven by drop-down list, be forewarned), but the wordless story of a dog with a cat attached to its buttocks is more entertaining than anything describable by that story hook has a right to be.

So we’re coming to the end of Randy Milholland’s month-long everything happens on one day experiment, which not being enough of an artistic challenge by itself, has had the difficulty factor amped up by juggling at least four separate storylines, one of which is a canon crossover with Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots (which, by the way, is celebrating a five year anniversary this week) wedding event. Whew.

Weddings, of course, have a long history in webcomics crossover land, and it’s always fun to see Milholland’s take on another creator’s characters — especially Candy. She’s pure evil. But Milholland (whose work is essentially an optimistic view of humanity, albeit one that hates to admit it) has had plenty of nasty characters of his own — basically, his entire cast are horrible people — and he’s had a tendency to find ways to redeem them, deepen them, or at least give them a chance to prove they aren’t entirely stupid. Of all his vile creations, only Twitchy-Hug and Avogadro (coincidentally, both dead) never earned a sympathetic portrayal, so I’m pretty confident that the hard Candy shell may hide something like a soft, squishy center. Or maybe not. But damn if I don’t want to find out.

• Speaking of vile characters, a real-life example of one kicked in the front door of Ellie Connelly creator Indigo Kelleigh last night, leaving him with an insecure home and not-easily-covered repair work. Want to toss a hearty, karmic, “Screw you” to the would-be burglar? Kelleigh’s got a fundraiser going on, and I think maybe we need to start a petition to the government of the state of Oregon that permits Kelleigh to install a full moat complete with vicious animals.

  Either that, or should the burglar ever be caught, that every reader of his comic be permitted to give him a good, full-swing smack across the face (offer only good to those familiar with the plot and characters, so if you want to be able to punch a complete stranger that desparately needs it, start reading Ellie Connelly today).

• It’s apparently Hans Gruber Day in webcomics today. Was there a memo I missed? I’ll just have to content myself with — RYAN! Yay, he’s back, he’s back, and looking so dapper and … grown up? My mind, she is blown.
• In case you missed the comments thread from yesterday, Howard Tayler came back from the Success in Cartooning seminar (conference? meeting?) with a head full of amazement and ideas; as he’s too smart to put more than a summary of his experiences online when he can get me to type it for him (cue the dancing — it’s not quite the “I got paid three times” dance, but shares many of the same moves), we’ll be doing an interview on What He Learned And Why You Should, Too. Look for that later this week.