I have performed another pass through my near-illegible notes of NYCC happenings, so please forgive me for any omissions yesterday, and for things that happened when I was largely out of the loop. For instance, I met a capital fellow named Colin who was attending his very first con, and he totally didn’t go insane. Also, in the photos below, you will see on Vincent LaBate, writer of Kitty Hawk, and my fellow Studio Foglio booth monkey; one really couldn’t ask for better company.

In missed news, we didn’t even have time to report on the DrMcColorist search before it was done. Everybody feel good for Anthony “Nedroid” Clark. Nor did we have time to mention that it’s now The End Times over at Ugly Hill, as creator Paul Southworth wraps up the story and prepares for his next project. I’m gonna miss the sexist, classist, ocularist, speciesist, and everything-else-ist Hastings Kilgore, but I can’t wait to see what Southworth drops on us next.

Okay: pictures!

Over at the Studio Foglio booth, you had Vincent (L) and Phil (R) in a moment of repose before the storm. I think that Phil’s mom (L) had little idea what she was in for. But the weekend saw plenty of Girl Genius cosplayers, including three different Agathas, one of whom brought her own Gil, and another who showed up with an unrelated Zeetha.

Non-GG-themed costumes that stopped to say hi included various iterations of punky and steamy, with odd doo-dads and thingies aplenty.

Wandering by the booth you had fake webcomickers, various villainesses, a herculean Hulk towering over the crowd, and above it all, the privileged few in their luxury suites.

Back in the trenches, Mike and Jerry enjoyed their last moment of quiet for two days (aside from a panel or two), men in snappy hats did snappy things, and filthy hobos huddled for warmth around an open fire. Meanwhile, Ryan Sohmer came out totally blurry (it’s rumored that he can’t be photographed unless he wishes it), and the hardest working man in webcomics was … somewhere else? Huh. Better work on that, Brad.

Andy Bell, on discovering I was working a different booth — You’re dead to us, Gary.

Me, to Jon Rosenberg, in reponse to the Dumbrella goods sign — Can I have a hug?
Rosenberg — No.

Back to regular stuff tomorrow.

Well, Scott Kurtz may have feared the pimps and chuds that reside in New York, but apparently the only thing to fear was not bringing enough stuff to sell. In the time that I made it away from helping at the Studio Foglio booth (read Girl Genius, dammit — it’s brilliant), it appeared the theme of NYCC09 (apart from Scott Pilgrim rules) was What recession?

Talking things over with Heidi MacDonald on Saturday night, we marvelled at where all the money we saw getting dropped was coming from. Then we talked at length about Cyanide and Happiness, and I was able to point her in the direction of Kris, Dave, and Rob so that she could get educated on the gentlemen in question. Meeting Rob, Kris, and Dave was one of the highlights of the show for me (C&Her Matt was unable to attend, unfortunately), and I quickly discovered several things about them:

• They dress sharply, with jackets, bowties, and snappy hats (bowler, fedora, top)
• The single most common word out of their mouths is thanks, or some variation thereon; I’m struck by how genuinely grateful they are for the well-wishes and interactions from readers
• They’re almost digustingly young, and I had to fight the urge to tell them to stay the hell off my lawn
• Kris flew to New York from his home in Wyoming; per the latest US Census data, the population of Wyoming should have no more than 0.73 of one cartoonist, making him a rounding error or a statistic anomaly — a charming one, in a hat

Mike “Mister” Krahulik and Jerry “Mister” Holkins can, in fact, have a conversation without using the word wang; they brought their teach schoolkids to make comics program to NYCC, and despite the fact that there were about 90% adults in the audience, they conducted the program for the inner 3rd grader in all of us. Takeaways:

• My art skills have improved from subliterate stick figures to barely recognizable cartoon men, ladies, cats, elephants, octopi, dogs, and monkeys … the secret is ovals, the letters C and T, and not worrying that I don’t draw as well as Mr Krahulik
• Those barely recognizable cartoons will accompany me to my grave

Speaking of Penny Arcade, a talk with P-A business supremo Robert Khoo led to some secret plans about where the website is heading, which I can now reveal exclusively: Penny Arcade will be making comics about videogames, then releasing those comics in book form.

Other people I was thrilled to run into (in many cases, meeting for the first time), in no particular order:

• Karl Kerschl, who when asked for a Charles Christopher sketch, interrupted his commission sketch list to do an absolutely beautiful rendering of his title character, utilizing no fewer than four separate pens
• Rosscott, of The System, whose business card is as beautifully stark as his comic
• Milton Griepp of ICv2, with whom Phil Foglio and I had an interesting talk about webcomics, making money by giving things away, and what support services may be needed there
• Joey Manley, host extraordinaire; should he ever invite you to a party, jump on the opportunity because the food and booze and company and environs will all be wonderful
• Every one of the Foglio superfans who presented in nervous, thrilled states to meet Our Hero — you remind us why we love this medium so much (and to the five Girl Genius cosplayers — excellent jobs, all of you)
• No fewer than three people (Susan, John, and I’m sorry, didn’t get the third one’s name) who came up to say hi and recognized me solely by the moustache
• No fewer than three others who were convinced that I was Phil Foglio — given the general level of worship Phil’s fans demonstrate, I was tempted to agree with them and ride out the love
• Ottilie Millson, better known as Phil’s mom, who was with us in the booth for the weekend, and who assures us she still has the baby photos
• Carla Speed McNeil, whose Finder you really should be reading; grab the trades, then get to work on the latest story which is at her website
• Onezumi and Harknell, lovely people and soon to be forces of nature at next weekend’s Katsucon
• Darren Gendron of Dear Pirate, if only for the the business card that identifies him as a “known scallywag” (some evidence indicates that he may not be a scallywag after all)
• Magnolia Porter, who just happened to be at the ROFLThing party on Saturday night and whose Bobwhite is good readin’

But unfortunately, there are downsides to any convention:

• The creative team behind Remedy offered me a naked bribe in the form of a print to drum up some attention for their webcomic from Fleen. For shame! Naked bribery at NYCC is my schtick (traditionally on Saturday morning, I make the rounds with coffee and donuts for those who need them).
• The local restaurants that dropped menus off at every booth were apparently unprepared to handle the volume of orders from the Javits Center, resulting in late and often severely compromised food
• But they were still better than the convention center sandwiches, which lacked any kind of moistening agents (mayo, mustard, anything) for the low-low price of only nine bucks apiece
• Missing all but the last five minutes of the Making Comic Strips panel (with Danielle Corsetto and Brad Guigar) due to unannounced and undocumented room changes

Overheard during the show:
Mr Krahulik, on piggybacking your new comic to an existing audience — If you want to do a comic about a horse, maybe there’s a website that would like to run it. So have your mom and dad check out horselovers.com and ask.
Mr Holkins, on that suggestion — That might not be the best website to contact, kids.

Mr Holkins, on being offered a Saturday morning pick-me-up — Wait, there’s coffe in there? That’s a box.
Me, in reply — Yep. Want a donut?
Holkins — Don’t you worry about eroding the wall of your journalistic integrity?
Me — In fact, this is naked bribery.

A young woman who was literally dragged through the crowd by her friends to meet her idol, Phil Foglio, and was reduced to a state of bashful vibrations and giggling — Hi.

Danielle Corsetto, to Tom Wilson II at the conclusion of their panel, bouncing with excitement — I have to get a picture with you!

An ancient and white-haired bartender at the ComicSpace party, having been asked by Corsetto if he knew “how to make a Sex on the Beach” — I always get sand in it.
Corsetto, in response — He’s my New York boyfriend.

Pics tomorrow.

By the time you read this, I’ll already be at the Javits Center, trying to make myself useful. Should my fan wish to find me, I’m most likely helping out at the Dumbrella booth, or the Studio Foglio booth (who were suddenly short-handed, and desperate enough to take up my offer of free labor).

• You know who else will be at NYCC, but not in a fixed location? Rosscott, of The System, who coincidentally is the subject of Brian Warmoth’s latest CBR interview.
• Hey kids, have you heard about Kiva? Long story short, it’s a microlending site that allows you to help entrepreneurs in some of the world’s less well-off corners. It’s best to go in thinking, Hmm, I can spare ten bucks towards what sounds like a worthy project, and I’ll probably never see that money again. Then you’ll be surprised, because there’s about a 97.5% chance you’ll get your money back with interest.

  So why bring this up? Like many collective endeavors on the internet (lookin’ at you, distributed computing to cure disease!), Kiva allows you to form teams, such as the webcomics team just formed by Zach Weiner and Ryan North. Zach and Ryan assure me all are welcome.

• Tangentially webcomics: From Heidi over at The Beat comes word that Bloom County is getting a comprehensive reprinting. Were I to take my old Billy & The Boingers square flexi-record of U Stink But I ♥ U and fling it frisbee-like into any random gathering of webcomickers, 83.5% of the corneas I scratched would belong to somebody who was inspired to be a cartoonist by reading Berke Breathed’s work in bygone days of youth. Not that I would do so ’cause damn, it’s the only record I still own and I ain’t wanna get it all scratched up.

Quickly now (and since I’m going to be busy all day tomorrow, let this serve as fair warning that you’ll be getting a canned update and if anything newsworthy breaks I’m sorry for not covering it).

• Readers of Fleen will recognize the name John Baird as being the gentleman (in every sense of the word) behind The Create a Comic Project. He’d like you to know:
  

  [J]udges are needed! The Create a Comic Project is having it’s third annual Comic Making Tournament on Saturday, March 14, 2009. If you’re a comic artist who lives near New Haven, CT, please consider stopping by.

  Local media has been asked to cover the tournament, so you may get some free press out of it. At the very least, you’ll get the “Ooos” and “Aaahs” of several dozen enthusiastic kids.

  If you’re interested, send an email to createacomic at gmail dot com.

• Anybody given this a test drive yet? Tyler Martin’s ComicPress plug-in for WordPress is practically the standard for webcomic sites, but there’s a new offering. Zachary Lewis went looking for a content management system that fit his needs, and wound up writing his own. SomeryC suports comments, news articles, an RSS feed, timed publishing (queueing) and in-browser uploading; it’s available for download here, is discussed here, and Lewis is looking for feedback/feature requests here.
• Nudged to action by alert reader “L”:
  

  Hey, you haven’t posted about mezzacotta.net/postcard yet, in which David Morgan-Mar and co. have hit on the laziest webcomic concept ever. What? How can it be lazier than an algorithm that makes the comics for you? You’ll see.

  Indeed you will. From the Comments on a Postcard about page:

  The Guernsey Comics Collective became a cult hit in the late 1990s with their witty series Mango Chutney! In 1998, chief writer Billy Striker began to collect together various other ideas in order to start another strand of work. Painstakingly, the other members of the team began to assemble art, lettering, and design for the series, until they were ready to storm the world once more.

  Unfortunately, a fire broke out in the headquarters of the collective in mid 2001, and only one man escaped…. The only surviving legacy of this great creative work of the GCC is the “director’s commentary”, the notes and minutes carried by the publisher that would have marked a spectacular comeback.

  So, director’s commentary on a series of strips, but the actual strips themselves have been destroyed. And the commentary has actually been reconstructed not by the mezzacotta crew, but by a series of dedicated volunteers. Still, one can only wonder at the marvels the strips might once have shown.

So my buddy Lore, fresh off his “update every weekday in January” kick at Bad Gods, has decided that February is just January with an “f” out front. And as long as he brings us brilliance like Jug Sauce Elite (submit your suggestions for anagrammed superheros here), I will be a happy guy.

• Speaking of potential new webcomics memes, Kate Beaton contributes to the cat comics fad, David Malki ! repurposes some advertising, and Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz got in on the hourly comics thing.
• Speaking of hourly comics, John Campbell is selling his hourly comics originals on eBay. Mind you, this is not a sale of individual comics, but the whole set for 2009 in three Moleskines. Let the frenzy begin!
• Dang, forgot to mention this like a week ago. Brian the War-Moth continues his webcomics interview series at CBR with Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade.
• Finally, I am apparently an arbiter of taste. This is the second journalist in the past ten days that’s sent me a stack o’ questions for a feature story on webcomics (Woo! Go, The Independent, woo!); it may be time to ask Ryan North and Shaenon Garrity to resign their current jointly-held office of Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities. Speaking of Shaenon Garrity: oh hell yes, I want this.

You’d think three-plus years into this “blogging” thing I’d be able to control my own posts better. Ah, well.

Observant readers of comics.com may have noticed a strip running yesterday with little fanfare — Steven Cloud has wrapped up his thrice-weekly association with United Feature Syndicate’s website, and Boy on a Stick and Slither will no longer be updated there. Naturally, BOASAS (as the cool kids call it) will continue as it always has at its own site, but I wanted to talk to Cloud a little about this shift, aobut what it means for webcomics vis-a-vis the syndication model, and (of course) his terrifyingly impressive beard.

Fleen thanks Steven Cloud for his time; you can meet him and his beard at the Dumbrella booth during New York Comic Con this weekend.

No sooner had I mentioned the PvP and Starslip adoption of AssetBar last week than:

1. The guys behind the technology emailed me with some information about their product
2. Scott Kurtz contacted me to talk about his adoption of the premium-content management software
3. Meredith Gran started her own premium niche for Octopus Pie

Since I’ll see both Scott and Mer at New York Comic Con starting Friday, I’m going to do an update on fanflows next week — but expect to see more webcomics flirting with premium content this year. Ironically, the economy being so bad is going to lead to a lot of experimentations out of webcomics, perhaps leading us to a consensus as to workable approaches faster than we would have in a more stable environment. We’ve got an evolutionary testbed here with the fast-forward control stuck in the on position (pretty sure I cribbed that line from William Gibson, but hell if I can find a reference right now).

• Roomies! book! goes! up! for! preorder!; David! Willis! preoccupied! with! exclamations! (and! penis!).
• Speaking of new books, Ian McConville‘s first art book is now available at Topatoco. It contains work ranging back to the early days of Mac Hall, all the way up to late 2008.
• Our long national nightmare is over: Achewood returns, complete with extravagantly-named dudes.
• Hourly comics! The official 2009 site is here, but other (and completely true) contributions may also be found here and here.
• What happens when you realize that your webcomic will not be made into a TV series? In the case of Owen Dunne, you take the option money and make your own.

Chris Hastings of Dr McNinja pointed me to a post by Neil Swaab of Rehabilitating Mr Wiggles about the alt-weekly cartoon market drying up. Decent points to be made, but in the middle, this tired old thing again:

I know there are plenty of web comic artists who are able to subsist on the income they make from their website, but they aren’t making money from their comics; they’re making money from merchandise. Not to belittle web-only comic artists, but when their income is derived from t-shirts, it makes them salesmen first, artists second. (emphasis mine)

I am officially sick of this argument. Everybody that looks down on webcomics creators as “artists second”, get off your goddamned high horse.

If you’d care to explain to me how Sparky became richer than God off of Peanuts, have the intellectual honesty to admit that it wasn’t because he was a brilliant artist with a unique vision that resonated with so many people. It was because Snoopy was licensed to appear on everything from MetLife billboards to (gasp! horror! shame!) t-shirts.

The only thing that those t-shirt shilling webcomickers Swaab looks down on are doing different than “the artists” is cutting out the goddamned middleman and keeping the goddamned money for themselves instead of allowing somebody else to take a huge cut of it in return for convincing them that “artists” don’t sully their hands with such base concerns as filthy lucre.

This argument is bullshit. It’s dead. Get over it and while you’re at it, get over yourselves.

First of all, look up there at what I got in the mail today, still in its protective plastic shield to guard against troublesome postal carriers and customs guys! There’s so much cool emananting from those ladies, it threatens to make me sit at the dork table in the lunchroom.

Okay, for those of you going to NY Comic Con next week, here’s some panels you may want to keep an eye out for. Some of them are directly related to webcomics, some have webcomics luminaries associated with them, and some are nothing to do with webcomics per se, but will be useful or awesome nonetheless.

Not listed in the program guide, but Carla Speed McNeil will be on two panels, where she is consistently an awesome speaker:

Lots to talk about today

• Once upon a time, it was pretty common for well-known webcomics to have a premium content tier — exclusive comics, higher resolutions, downloadables and suchlike were available for a subscription fee. Over the past several years, such schemes have fallen by the wayside with (just going off the top of my head here) Keenspot & Goats folded up their premium-content tents, User Friendly membership essentially giving an ad-free experience (and who doesn’t have an ad-blocker?), and only Sluggy Freelance‘s program promising additional content (which seems to mostly be a private blog and offers for members-exclusive merchandise). Apologies to various creators if I didn’t get all the details of your program right, but I ain’t registering accounts for the sake of a half-paragraph.

  Only Achewood has had a robust program that I’ve noticed of late, featuring strip previews, blog & ‘zine content, and famously, a live-updating account of Beef & Molly’s wedding. The toolset that Onstad uses (AssetBar by name) is pretty interesting — while it would take a membership to comment on strips or rate them for quality, anybody can read the comments, search by ratings or popularity, and in essence benefit from the community-generated content. You just can’t contribute unless you pony up your three bucks a month.

  I bring all this up because yesterday, a pair of heavy-hitters (namely, Starslip and PvP) added that selfsame AssetBar tech to their sites. In Starslip’s case, it’s background information, early looks at strips, alternate story plots; for PvP, it means a return of comments (we’ll see if those who have a reflexive dislike of Scott Kurtz and always used to verbally crap on him in previous iterations of comment trees are willing to pay for the privilege), wallpapers, exclusive podcasts and suchlike. Neither seems to be using AssetBar exactly as Achewood does, or entirely like the other. We’ll have to see where this trend goes; in the future, AssetBar may be another of those vendors supplying a much-needed service to webcomics at large. (Thanks to Tony Piro, who noticed the launches before I did and emailed me.)

• The print comics apocalypse continues with Tom Tomorrow pointing you all to Max Cannon’s summary of the situation. Editorial cartoonists (and those strip cartoonists of the alt-weekly bent) are probably those most vulnerable to print’s continued contraction. While there have been some successful transitions from print to web (looking at you, Phil & Kaja), they produce a very different sort of material.

  The bit from Cannon’s writeup that most grabbed me is in the middle of the big paragraph and features the all-caps text WE DON’T MAKE A LIVING FROM OUR WEB SITES. I’d love to quote it for you here, but it’s not selectable text — it’s a GIF image of text, which makes it real difficult for somebody potentially sympathetic to his position (me) to drop a relevent blockquote here. With absolutely no malice whatsoever, this may be part of the problem with Cannon not making a living from his website — an appeal so important is not easily referenceable, and isn’t even entirely visible because it’s in a window that only shows 20% of the text at a time. To make a living from your website, you need a website that serves the needs of people who will give you money.

  Web design, effective communication with audiences, community building … these are all skills that must be practiced and learned. From where I sit, it looks like niche print strips creators (that is, the Walkers and Brownes and Guisewites of the world are safe) now have a choice — learn those very skills and radically rengineer their web strategies, try desperately to reverse their loss of papers (which appears to be Cannon’s approach), or give up on cartooning as a primary source of income. I honestly can’t see any other outcomes for them.

• Speaking of disappearing comics, for those of you wondering how much it takes to get rid of a webcomic from Wikipedia, the answer is two votes out of three. To quote the eminently quotable Kris Straub, That’s pretty goddamn weak.

  I bring this up not to reignite the Great Wikipedia/Webcomics Wars (which is always great fun), but merely as a point of data that supports an assertion that we in the webcomics community should just absent ourselves from a site that clearly doesn’t care about us. Hey Wikipedia? Truce. How about you just put up one article that says, “If you want to know about webcomics, just go to the Comixpedia wiki and look it up there because we can’t be arsed.” Awesome, thanks.

• Thanks to Howard Tayler, by the way, for the wikistory, and if you’re in Utah tomorrow and feeling depressed about that fact, he’s going to be lecturing on certain aspects of this wacky world we call webcomics, in a session called Talent? Who Needs Talent? That’s noon local time, Utah Valley University, at the library.
• Finally, it’s been there to see for weeks, but I wanted to make it a little more timely: the latest phase of Owen Dunne no-comics comes to an end this SUNDAY. Clippy!