Longtime readers of this page will recall the fondness that we at Fleen have for Brad Guigar’s Phables. Nice little comic vignettes about life in the big city, as contributed by the people that live there — it’s practically a modern-day Studs Terkel (requiscat in pace) book in pictures. But it’s been largely absent from updates since September, and was on a biweekly schedule for months beforehand.

I asked Guigar what the deal was with that (for although I have always lived within the gravitational sphere of New York City, I do live close enough to Philly to have some interest in the natives and their charming — if rustic and simple — culture and ways), and he replied cryptically. There were plans, and schemes, and nefarious doers of ill to contend with he told me. I chalked the conversation up to one more piece of evidence that living outside the genteel confines of the Midwest has driven poor Brad ’round the bend … if he starts in about how “lizard men secretly run webcomics”, just nod reassuringly and keep a clear path betwen you and the exits.

But it appears that I was wrong (at least about his mutterings about Phables and they’ll get theirs), for today brings long-anticipated news:

I’m finally ready to launch pre-orders for the Phables book. You can order the book now for $15 or you can get a limited-edition artist edition book (I do an original sketch inside the book) for only $15 more. Pre-order now!

Hooray! But wait — there’s more in the email?

Unfortunately, there have been too many things going on behind the scenes that have made it impossible for me to discuss this with you. But, the time is finally right for me to speak openly: I’ve ended Phables.

Crappo! I’m telling you as a friend, Brad — the lizardmen are not using Phables to send instructions to the British Royal Family! It’s okay, you can keep doing the strip, honest. And just because your wife reads xkcd and not your strip, that doesn’t mean she’s in on the conspiracy, really.

I’ll see you at New York Comic Con next week and we can talk someplace safe, okay? I’ll order my book from you then, and we can talk about this new idea I have for a webcomic that I think you’d like — it’s called Filly Follies, and it’s all about anthropomorphic My Little Ponies and their city of Fillydelphia, and they’d send you stories to illustrate. You’d like that, right Brad?

So a couple of days ago, I noticed entirely by chance a Project Wonderful ad for a webcomic I’d not heard of before — Circle vs Square. It’s a bit spartan visually, with little beyond a plain circle and a plain square seeking to dominate each other (think Death to the Extremist). Okay, eyeballs delivered, nothing immediately grabbed me, moved on.

Yesterday, alert reader Eben Burgoon wrote to coincidentally point me towards CvsS, because that very visually primitive strip seems to have broken new ground in the creativity of selling out — it has incorporated Project Wonderful ads directly into the comic itself. Since I first hopped over there last night, it appears that the PW ads in the strip haven’t changed (LadyStar x2, Chainbear, Burgoon’s own Eben07, and Calamities of Nature), but it certainly appears that they could.

So I call upon webcomickers with something to advertise to see this as a challenge. What kind of button content can be snuck into the middle of CvsS strip #170? How can its content be subverted? It’s mass collaboration time, gang. Get creative.

In other news:

• Chris Flick over at Capes & Babes is too proud to sell out … but not too proud to entice people to be friends with free art:
  

  I am currently offering a free, hi-rez, full-color marker illustration of Kang the Time Lord. All you have to do is follow me on Twitter or add a link to Capes & babes on your blog side bar. If you add a Capes link to your site, you need to send me an e-mail but if you follow me on Twitter, I will send you a DM with a link to the PDF.

• In case your RSS feed hasn’t caught up, new Dresden Codak; creator Aaron Diaz got this update to us much faster than the previous one, which will hopefully be a trend.
• Finally, not webcomics, but friend-of-webcomics (and all good things, really) Neil Gaiman has been awarded the highly prestigious Newbery Medal for his contributions to children’s literature (in this case, in the form of The Graveyard Book). As noted in this morning’s NPR interviewette, Gaiman’s work is now part of an organized canon of children’s lit, and will likely be there “on the Newbery shelf” forever. Richly deserved, and a bright spot of news in these dreary times.

Via Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and other channels, the story of how the surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus decided how to fight the tide of low-quality clips of their work showing up on YouTube.

Rather than the usual take-down notices and lawsuit threats, they made a huge selection of high quality clips freely available in their own channel, pointing out that the proper thing for those who enjoy the laugh-chuckles to do would be to buy the DVDs. They increased sales by 23,000%, or a 230 times growth factor.

Now I haven’t seen any absolute numbers, so it could be that they went from 10 units a week to 2300 units a week, and that’s less impressive than if they went from 1000 to 230,000 … no, you know what? It’s freakin’ impressive no matter what the baseline number was.

No doubt there will eventually be a plateau effect, when everybody who was ever willing to buy the collected Monty Python DVDs has done so, and the addition of new consumers occurs at a much lesser rate than the giant rush of pent-up demand that we’ve just seen rushing out into the channels of commerce like a huge, metaphor-laden thing.

But from my perspective, it’s just another example of the rewards possible when you provide compelling & quality content, develop a relationship with your audience, give them a means to support you, and invite them to do so.

• Speaking of the free model, it allows cool toys and remixes of content that I like. Say, panels eight and nine of this Octopus Pie, which now invites your own contributions of words to horrify Eve Ning.
• Also vaguely on the idea of free — El Santo at Webcomic Overlook interviewed comics creator (and Zuda contestant) Neil Kleid, and started out with what seems to be the new baseline when discussing independence vs. publishers in webcomics: Spike’s Greater 1% Theory. Interesting read.
• Nothing to do with free at all, but probably the last bit of inaugurania, from xkcd.

Just had lunch with Official Friend o’ Webcomics Rick Marshall (currently doing his best to get webcomics coverage added to MTV’s Splash Page); we’ve made plans concerning the upcoming New York Comic Con (The Big M will have a large presence there, and Marshall will be moderating one panel on Saturday (5:15 to 6:15, 1A07, “Radical Publishing”). If you bump into him during the show, make sure they let him out of the MTV booth long enough to get some food.

• Via Shaenon Garrity, news of the second annual scholarship in honor of the late King Features editor, Jay Kennedy. It’s from the National Cartoonist Society Foundation, which means that it’s got a focus on traditional newspaper-style strips. But check out this part:
  

  Applicants must be college students in the United States, Canada or Mexico that will be in their Junior or Senior year of college during the 2009-2010 academic year. Applicants DO NOT have to be art majors to be eligible for this scholarship.

  Along with a completed entry form, applicants are required to send 5 samples of their own cartooning artwork; noting if and where the work has been published (either print or web). [emphasis mine]

  You’ve got a couple of weeks, college students. Between this and the Penny Arcade Scholarship (2008 winner discussed here), opportunities for young practitioners of the geekly arts are only getting better.

• Yay! Something*Positive 1938 is back! And we’re only about four months of story-time into the sage of the MacIntire ancestors, so there’s plenty of Depression Era (the original Depression era that is, not this weak-sauce knockoff going on now) wackiness to look forward to.
• I am morally obligated: moustache (eventually to be found here).

Okay, mangled quote, but the sentiment is sincere — the creatures cooped up in Andy Bell’s head have now been successfull trepanated for seven years. Celebrations include a new website, a Birthday Creature that has a love for Slim Pickens, and a renewed resolve to ruin any restful sleep you might otherwise have for another seven years. Yay?

• In other news, webcomicky Inaugural Hijinks continue, as Shaenon Garrity gets her drawing on. There might be nothing in this world sadder than a wet transvetite, but he seems pretty happy here.
• Lots of webcomics creators joining Derek Kirk Kim’s call for creators to share their displeasure over the all-white casting of the planned live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I never watched Avatar, so I didn’t know the show was so directly linked to and inspired by various asian cultures; if not for Kim, I would have been primarily concerned that what I always heard was a very good story had been given the kiss of death: M Night Shyamalan will be directing.
• From alert reader Pat Race of Alaska Robotics, an important tip:
  

  I wanted to make sure others using FeedBurner are aware that it’s being folded into Google at the end of February. This may affect your feeds and subscriptions if you’re not on top of the transition.

  More info on the transition at that quote; if you do use FeedBurner, now’s the time to get started on whatever shifts you need to make. You’ve got a month, use it wisely.

• Various good stuff over on Webcomics.com right now: getting merch to a show (specifically, Brad Guigar on navigating the myriad ways of bulk shipping), and rebranding your strip (specifically, Kris Straub on the recent — and very successful — Starslip transition).

We at Fleen have noted in the past that Brian Warmoth, Friend of Webcomics, deserves better than the [web]comics industry has given to him. It’s not as good as a permanent gig, but Comic Book Resources has arranged with the War Moth to do a series of interviews with webcomickers expected to make a splash in 2009 — first one’s up now, and I’m going to just blindly recommend you read all of them as they come out. He’s that good.

• Not quite webcomics, but have you seen the latest Scott Pilgrim movie news? Freakin’ Superman is going to be Evil Ex-Boyfriend #3 (with super vegan powers, and we can only hope a cameo by webcomickers).
• Somebody will have to check me on this, but I think that Tales of Marga, over at Graphic Smash, just set the record for the longest middle-of-the-story hiatus. New story page today, we’re back! splash page this past Sunday, and previous story page … Wednesday, 25 July 2007. Welcome back to the game, Thor Thorvaldson Jr.
• Two words for you: Bobby. Crosby. He can be a bit … forceful in his opinions; polarizing, even. But dang if the guy doesn’t know how to pick exactly the right artist to work on his various projects.

  Owen Gieni, Remy Mokhtar, and Tiger Claw couldn’t have artistic styles more different from one another if they tried (heck, Gieni alone has more divergent styles than you can shake a stick at), but then Last Blood, Marry Me, and +EV are very different stories that require very different art styles. To that list of successful collaborations we may now add (thanks to alert reader Román Sánchez, who pointed me towards it) Dreamless, with art by the incomparable Sarah Ellerton. With fewer than half a dozen pages, I can’t tell you much about Dreamless except that it’s got me kind of hooked. I don’t like to make statements so early in a strip’s lifespan, but I have a good feeling about this one.

  I should also note that Crosby is still looking for artists to collaborate with in 2009 — and he’s paying. The terms aren’t fully disclosed (and as always, consider carefully what you’re signing with the assistance of competent counsel), but if you were ever wanting to do webcomics work with a short-term goal of getting into print, there ’tis.

  Keep in mind, this is work for hire: the stories are part of Crosby’s sandbox, and playing with them is going to mean following his rules. But on the other hand, to do so doesn’t require you to, say, bring original IP to the table and assign many of the rights away. And hey, at Crosby’s promised rate of at least $15/page (plus a cut of future profits, terms not disclosed), one of his 100-or-so-pages stories comes to a payout on the same order of magnitude as what a Zuda winner would get. Intriguing, yes?

Webcomics notes the peaceful transfer of power and welcomes our new benevolent overlords with comics to note the occasion, and art of both the printed and wooden interlocking varieties. As a side note, that puzzle from Chris Yates is (as of this writing) going for less than the fair market price of his other Baffler!s of similar size and complexity, so hey — bargain time.

Speaking of bargains, if you’re in the market for a warehouse manager, the one that used to run the Achewood store is looking for a job. Hey Chris Crane, I don’t know how you feel about cross-continental commutes, but it sounds like Topatoco is growing by leaps and bounds these days and they could maybe use a hand.

Do you like process tutorials as much as I do? Probably more, considering that I can neither draw nor use Photoshop. In any event, there’s a very nice process tutorial today from Nedroid — all about building an image in CS4. If you want some Q&A about said process, it can be found in Mr Oid’s LiveJournal.

Soooooo … we pointed out about two weeks ago that John Campbell, was preparing for his annual descent into madness, aka hourly comics. Although he’s struggling against microbial attempts to kill him, so far he prevails, and has indeed convinced others to join in his unique brand of sleepless creation. Kate Beaton has the most compact roundup of Hourly Comics Doers, and you can get in on it less than two weeks hence when Hourly Comics Day hits. Give in to the madness.

• Fresh off his 2005 talk finally getting posted to the TED video site, Scott McCloud follows up with an interview with Jesse Thorn on The Sound of Young America. I didn’t know this one was coming up, so it was just luck that I was near a radio last night and heard Jesse’s intro at the top of the show. As mentioned a few weeks back when he spoke with Chris Onstad and David Malki !, Thorn is probably the best radio interviewer in the game today, and his talk with McCloud was a terrific listen — you can check out the podcast here.

  And if that weren’t enough, the Sunday evening guy on WNYC followed up TSOYA with the weather, some teasers for the programming to come, and the revelation that he used to be the McCloud family babysitter. As I wrote to Scott last night, it’s a weird world, and he sits in the middle of it all (the world, and the weird).

• Finally, Heidi MacDonald brought us some news over the weekend — following in the footsteps of Phil & Kaja Foglio, Carla Speed McNeil, and Wendy & Richard Pini, Colleen Doran has converted her formerly-print indy comic to a webcomic. One of the things you should know about Ms Doran is that she runs a lot of links and posts at her blog on creator’s resources — agents, copyright and trademark info, things like that.

  Oh, and while I’m here, we’ll note that while she doesn’t have a table, Ms McNeil will be attending NYCC and contribute to two panels — come back later in the week, we’ll give you the details, along with all the other webcomics-relevant panels we can find.

So, Child’s Play — looks like I jumped the gun in reporting their totals for the year. Today brings what will likely be the official cutoff of the 2008 seasonal effort, with a total of 1.43 million frickin’ dollars, which well exceeds last year’s take (when the worldwide economy wasn’t being totally bitchcakes). Yikes.

In case you feel like thanking Messers Krahulick and Holkins, you can find them in three weeks time at New York Comic Con, along with such other luminaries as Scott Kurtz, Brad Guigar (somebody remind me to bug him for details about the rumored Phables print collection), various Dumbrellites, Comics Bakers, Slingshot Girl (who I hear is to illustrate one of the stories in the long-rumored Machine of Death collection), a band of fugitive Canadians with a cool ride, and (major thrill for me here) Karl Kerschl and friends:

If you’re in or around the area, please come by and say hello. I’ll be doing sketches, selling T-Shirts and prints and giving away stickers. And probably wandering around a lot. Hey, it’s New York! Even the frigid winter weather can’t keep me from exploring Manhattan.

I’ll also be sharing table space with Cameron Stewart, compatriot and author of Sin Titulo. And if we’re really lucky, Ramón Pérez and Andy Belanger might loiter around long enough to sketch something. That’s half of txcomics right there!

So, wisdom-of-the-crowds time — who else is going to be there that I’ve missed?

Answer: This unretouched photo shows a standard postal envelope (complete with postmark) dwarfed by his enormous hand. Your only choices are to submit to the Nexus of All Webcomics Realities, or to be crushed. There are no alternatives. Now that we’re done being terrified, let’s move onto some news.

• Missed it: Pilli Adventure now available en Español.
• Seasonal Merch Alert: Valentine’s Day is now officially less than a month away, so if you want to get something to express your feelings to your special dude or lady in a webcomics motif, now’s the time. Roast Beef seems not to have anything smoochin’-related, but you can find find examples of the craft from Wondermark, Eros, Inc, Octopus Pie, and quite probably others, but those are the ones I’ve noticed.
• WOOO HOT NAKED ACTION WOOO: Ask Dr Eldritch decides that after a fairly serious 500 comics, the theme for the next 500 should be ladies gettin’ naked. Seriously, fully two–thirds of the comics since #500 have featured young teens ogling a naked lady. Honestly, Ask Dr Eldritch creator Evan Nichols — isn’t there enough of that on the internet already?