Crappy con experiences, courtesy of Brooke Spangler, covering a panel-presenting Jennie Breeden‘s table and dealing with a Lady Weirdo:

LW: What are these?
ME: Uh … playing cards.
LW: I know that.
ME: Okay.
LW: Do you have any other cards?
Now, here’s where I made a mistake. Jennie did have another, different deck of cards; she had done two printings and the cards on the table were from the second printing. So when Lady Weirdo asked about another set of cards, I made the assumption that she was a fan of the Devil’s Panties and was looking for the original, hard-to-find set.
ME: I’m not sure where she’s keeping the other deck of cards. I don’t know if she brought any with her today.
LW (holds up two sets of cards): You have two sets here.
ME: Actually, ma’am, those are the same set.
LW: The pictures are different.
ME: No, you’re just looking at the front and the back of the same deck. See?
I take the two sets from her and show her that the pictures are the same when they are turned the right way.
ME: It’s the same set of cards, just that the two sides are different. Like the cover of a book.
LW: I read books!
ME: Okay.

Read the full encounter over at the link; it will provide a definitive refutation of both The Customer Is Always Right and There’s No Reason Gary Needs To Slap People In Public.

• In happier news, but one that proves no less brain-boggling than the story above, [web]comics power couple Bryan Lee O’Malley & Hope Larson have put up a short story that kicks twelve kinds of ass. Please to be enjoying Bear Creek Apartments; you think you know where it’s going, but you don’t know squat. In retrospect, it was all foreshadowed, and the revelation is delicious.
• I keep forgetting to link to David McGuire’s new strip, GastroPhobia, so I’m grateful that Meredith Gran linked it today and got my brain in gear. It’s even funner than the late, lamented Webcomics Are Awesome (also awesome: that 404 page), giving us a terrifically twisted look at Ancient Greece and all that inhabited her (my most anticipated character-yet-to-be-seen: Bambikles).
• Finally, EB-White (I imagine that somewhere in New England, a bearded man just smiled and cackled happily to himself) has returned to webcomics blogging with furious vengeance. Welcome home, Mr Snark.

Now why did the lads at Unshelved never think of a “Libr[Anarchy symbol]rian” hoodie? Or this little paean to Mr Dewey? Looks like other webcartoonists are movin’ on your turf, Gene and Bill, and that can only mean one thing: DANCE FIGHT!

• New interview with Silly Daddy creator Joe Chiappetta. All the indy-comic creators seem to migrating to original-webcomics, don’t they?
• New graphic novel from The Road to God Knows … creator Von Allen: Lil’ Kids features the main characters from TRTGK… as (wait for it) young ‘uns, and is also available as a free PDF for those of you that are a) cheap, or b) impatient.
• From Phillip Chan of Matriculated:
  

  Joe Dunn and I entered Platinum Studios’ Comic Book Challenge and now we’re in the top 10. We need votes to move on to the next round.

  We’d be greatful if you could help us spread the word and get some votes!

  Word spread, but given the way that Platinum‘s had money … let’s call them issues … I can’t help but think that you’re probably better off not winning. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, etc., etc., but it’s often a pretty good trendline. Do your due diligence, guys.

• Finally, I just read the end of Freakangels Book 1 (I like to let three-four weeks build up and read ’em all at once) and had a holy crap moment — because this decidedly non-London boy actually recognizes the geography on this page. Sure, I knew that the story was taking place in the vicinity of the Whitechapel Market (some good pubs ’round there), but this was a bit more specific. Thanks to the remains of The Gherkin (center stage) and The Tower, I’ve got my angles are worked out, and I’m pretty sure that the building that Alice is standing on is one that my employer has offices in. Webcomics: is there anything they (or Internet Jesus) can’t do?

Reports now indicate that Steven Cloud is not dead, repeat, not dead, although circumstances dictated that Team Best Intentions Tea & Travel abandon their beloved Nissa Micra 150 miles into Mongolia, so close to Ulan Bator they could practically smell it. Okay, so close in this case means covering the remaining distance took two days in a bus with progressively more people crammed in it (possibly the proverbial Mike-Charlie-Foxtrot). Nevertheless, they made it bodily intact to the finish line to whoop it up with other teams, despite both skilled and unskilled police/border guards trying to take them for all they were worth, and some being compelled to grow some truly terrifying beards.

Our latest communiqués place Cloudy well on his way home …

I’m chilling in Seoul at the airport. Free internet stations. That’s class.

… thus making it unlikely that we at Fleen will need to run the epitaph that was pre-arranged in the unfortunate circumstances of Mr Cloud’s passing:

Steven Cloud, killed by Gypsies, in accordance with prophecy.

Onward:

• Oh my Dawkins, it looks like they’re actually doing it.
• Work conspired against Kate Beaton running more of her hourly comics, but she more than made up for it by embedding an infectious little piece of music in her LJ post. I must seek out these “Golden Dogs” for further study, seeing as how I can’t stop playing their song. Please stop hogging all the cool bands, Canada.
• Tom Brazelton continues to make progress toward the cost of restoring his trashed hard drive (amazingly, he appears to have irretrievably lost only one MP3 and one Photoshop temp file). How are you coming along with your backup/archive plans?
• Finally, from John Baird, more writeups of webcomickry at the recently-concluded Otakon, from himself, and from Erin Ptah.

Now let us never speak of this again.

• More process “fillum” (as they say in Ireland): Jeph Jacques The Unanagrammable weighs in at his LiveJournal.
• Book of Biff creator Chris Hallbeck is laid up either by oral rot, or possibly brain worms. In any event, there’s guest strips up, including some weapons-grade punnery.
• Hourly comics a-comin’ from Kate Beaton (to be dumped on us a full day’s worth at a time). I am hard pressed to think of anything I’d rather see at this exact moment in time.
• At least it wasn’t Octopus Pie: now you know the rest of the story. And you thought only Trekkies enjoyed gagh.

Webcartoonist signings continue apace: David Willis will be at The Laughing Ogre in Columbus, Ohio on Wednesday, 27 August pretty much all day. For anybody planning on attending, may I draw your attention to the fact that Mr Willis apparently spends a lot of time thinking about licking his fans. I trust you know what to do with this information.

Also continuing apace: webcartoonists reproducing; this time it’s Joseph Hewitt, whose son was born three weeks early; all is well with young “JP”, but if you’d care to help Hewitt keep his strip running, he’s soliciting for guest artists to draw pages of his current storyline. If you help him out:

When the comic is finished, I’ll collect it in a print volume and send a copy to each of them along with a handwritten note expressing my undying gratitude. It’ll be just like an anthology except without the ology!

Can I just say I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a fight scene more (and bear in mind I’ve been reading batshit insane manga for going on 20 years now) than the rampage currently going on between a sentient, transgenic panda and a maybe-sentient, partially-disarmed zombie in the pages of Skin Horse? Why yes, I think I can.

Finally, Damian Duffy, one of the curators of the Out of Sequence musuem show (mentioned here) wants us to know that there will be a full website about the show with links in early October (the show doesn’t launch 24 October, after all), and that a partial listing is available here. Thanks for the info, Damian.

‘Cause I just got this:

Nickelodeon Magazine has announced its first-ever “Best Kids’ Graphic Novel” Awards, taking place in spring 2009. The Awards will honor the best comic books and animated novels for kids published across the U.S. The submission process is open through Sept. 30, 2008, and voting will take place in December.

All graphic novel submissions must be submitted before Sept. 30, 2008. A list of books for kids to vote on, pre-selected by the Nickelodeon Magazine editorial staff, will be available in the December issue and online. The results will be announced in print and online in spring 2009 in conjunction with the release of Nickelodeon Magazine’s popular annual cartoon-themed issue.

Publishers interested in submitting graphic novels should send two copies of each title no later than Sept. 30, 2008. Submissions should be mailed to:

Chris Duffy or Dave Roman
Graphic Novel Award
Nickelodeon Magazine
1515 Broadway 37th Floor
New York, NY 10036.

Hear that, creators? Got something that’s appropriate for the 7 to 13 crowd? Send it in and get yerself a little publicity. You probably won’t win unless you kill Kean Soo. Please note that this is not a suggestion that you kill Kean to improve your chances, ’cause he’ll just get the sympathy vote.

In other, briefer news:

• Another process video, this one by Josh Lesnick.
• Chris Baldwin‘s it was supposed to last for one month diary strip (which featured both me and my dog) wrapped today — view the whole thing under the title May 2008 at his special projects site, Water Street.
• We haven’t gotten one of those hope-it-saves-the-chain concept stores out of Borders in New Jersey yet, but they’ve got one in Allen, Texas. They’ll be having Scott Kurtz out on Saturday at noon for a signing to help with the grand opening.

Let’s just dive in:

• Outsiders as comics creators themed show going up at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in October; apparently, “webcomics creator” makes you an outsider, and by my count there are two dozen or so creators to be found in the show catalog whose work was created primarily for online consumption. Links to source material (for material that’s freely accessible) would have been nice, but you can’t have everything. Thanks to show contributor/new nexus of all webcomics realities Shaenon Garrity for the link.
• In other news, DIY magazine show creator Oliver Brackenbury did his most recent show on webcomics in general, and has a nice conversation with former nexus of all webcomics realities Ryan North.
• Jessi Bavolack wrote in response to our discussion of Otakon to point out that there was a Challenge associated with Webcomics in the year of the common reckoning 2008. As in the past, the goal was to promote Otakon via your webcomic, and all entrants may be seen at the link; in a stunning coincidence, one of the co-winners was created by Jessi Bavolack. The odds of such a random happening are so astronomical as to foster a belief in a Divine Creator, upend everything we know, and demand that we start society over again from this point in time. Thus, this is now declared Year One of the New Times. Get on the bandwagon before our first religious war.
• Speaking of Girl Wonder, there’s a relatively new comic over thereabouts that looks interesting. In a nutshell: Jane Austen writes Die Hard (Ha! take that and stick it in your counterprogramming!). Edit to actually link the damn thing, honestly I don’t know where my head was yesterday: link Now if somebody at Girl Wonder could confirm that Karen Ellis is still alive and well, it would be a weight off my mind.
• Speaking of new comics, there’s an exercise in telling a locked-room (or perhaps a very small universe) story called Blank It; it’s pretty odd so far, with two nameless guys trapped in an infinite, empty space, but since one of the two creators is veteran creator Lemuel Pew (remember when he was still named after a food product like a million years ago?) edit to undrop sentence: it’s worth checking out.
• Finally, this has been linked a mess o’ places (but I first noticed over at ¡Journalista!: Colleen Doran on how to get health insurance if you’re a self-employed artist. Read that one twice.

Tom Brazelton‘s donation drive kicks off today, with a variety of worthwhile stuff up for grabs (although his current ads seem to believe I’m looking for a wife from India; weirdly, this is not the first time in my life somebody has made this assumption about me).

• Oh Holy Assmaster, this is awesome — Ursula Vernon‘s kids book, Nurk, has made the reading list of The Most Perfect Human In Existence.
• New how-to videos: Kellet, Malki !, Jacques (last one requires an account).
• Otakon photos courtesy of erstwhile contributor Jeff Lowery REY: the Applegeeks guys, the hardest working woman in webcomics, and something seriously freaky.
• Check it: Dr McNinja becomes Dr McColor courtesy of Carly Monardo (she really needs to stop doing so much cool stuff in such a short period of time before people start to think I have a crush on her) (I totally do). On a related note, Ms Monardo is the better half of McNinja creator Chris Hastings, which leads to something I have to get off my chest now: Much like when my sister started dating a mechanic after high school that my whole family came to rely on, Chris is not ever allowed to break up with Carly, because she is too valuable to the rest of us. Seriously, even if supermodels start hitting on you, you have to say ‘no’, dude, or the internet will kick your ass. On a second related note, I’m not sure I needed see said ass, but there you go.
• Oh, yeah, and it appears there’s a new slot on your newspaper’s comics page. Hooray! More room for Mary Worth!

Finally! A morning with a bit of free time before the conference wraps up, and at last I’m able to leisurely browse my webcomics, lay down some prime punditry on you via a suddenly no-longer-overloaded WiFi. Then I noticed the sign in the hotel lobby this morning that indicated that DEFCON registration was thataway. So basically, my immediate surroundings are crawling with Black Hats, and I’m risking my financial well-being for the forseeable future just by typing these totally nondescript, perfectly ignorable packets that absolutely nobody should find interesting enough to bother with as they zip through the aether. If they find me in a Vegas back alley with my credit rating shredded, know that I fell in the service of webcomics. Onward:

• Tom Brazelton is learning a hard lesson right about now, one which I struggle to teach to IT professionals responsible for massive data systems. Namely, the short, to-the-point English word backup has a precise and fairly lengthy meaning — keep multiple copies in multiple locations on multiple media types or you’re fooling yourself.

  To be sure, many people have learned this lesson in the past (even some in our community), but it always make the data-slinger in me wince to see such occurrences. I’ve spoken to lots of webcomickers in the past who’re taking the right steps (external hard drives for secondary and sometimes tertiary copies of their Photoshop files), but still have chinks in their proverbial backup armor (those external drives right next to your computer don’t do you much good in the event of fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or giant monster attack).

  If you make a webcomic, your homework for this weekend is to re-evaluate your disaster recovery plans (and in the past 15 years, I’ve only seen one data shop that really had a bulletproof system … the cockroaches will take over, and The New England Journal of Medicine will still have intact data). Write out a plan for making backups and rotating your archives off-site. You might start by signing up for a half-dozen Gmail accounts and storing your files as attachments, but don’t rely on Google to make tape backups of what you store with them. Your mantra is, If I didn’t do it, it didn’t happen.

  If you need more drives or archive-management software, start looking for the sales now. And when the clerk hands you the change, keep in mind that Brazelton’s misfortune is your wake-up call, and toss a tenner towards his donation drive (launching Monday) or buy some of his merch to help offset the very expensive data recovery service he’s going to have to engage to recover every single one of his strips.

• In happier news, one of my favorite webcomickers doesn’t have a webcomic of her own — Carly Monardo is known to some of you for her work on The Venture Brothers, or perhaps for her recent design challenge sketchblog (not to mention an awesome sense of how Wonder Woman should look), and hopefully you’re aware of her numerous excellent guest comic contributions and her stellar work on the Dr McNinja book covers and posters. Recently, she collaborated with David Malki ! on a poster depicting a Gernsbackian world better than our own. The hopes and wonders of the Space Age are just dripping off of this beauty, and it’s not just me saying so — it’s Boing Boing.
• Want to see what Sweeney Todd would have looked like if it starred Jeff Rowland, Tallahassee Econolodge, Mr Jon Rosenberg, and The Englishman? Damn right you do, Sparky, and here it is. Obligatory spoiler warning: this comic adaptation of a movie will tell you how the movie goes.
• Do you see something? If you do, check out the new project from Alien Loves Predator creator Bernie Hou, as he dips his toes into the water of editorial cartooning and earns Ted Rall’s eternal wrath for giving away his product for free on the internet.

A generalized commercial industry (like comics) that is a) facing inherent, structural challenges that b) cause it to look extinction in the face and c) can’t manage to get its collective head out of its ass long enough to keep a talented, capable, professional like Rick Marshall d) working on its (still comics, stay with me) own behalf bloody well deserves its long slide into irrelevance. Go look at the stellar writing in his clip file, especially the webcomicker interviews that put our own efforts here at Fleen to shame.

While it’s a comfort that ComicMix doesn’t seem to have a Let’s actively screw our people attitude that some of Marshall’s former employers seemd to evince, I’m sure that’s not helping Rick much in the rent and groceries category. Mark my words: one day, Rick Marshall is gonna run this town, and I for one welcome our new overlord.

• It is to our shame at Fleen that we haven’t been paying enough attention to The Cartoon Lounge over at The New Yorker, which has been giving some love to webcomickers of late. Up most recently: John Campbell (thanks to Campbell’s former roommate Ryan Estrada for the tip-off).
• Hey, just a quick question — do you like comics that are awesome? You’ve got some catching up to do, as Joe Chiappetta has built up a full year of color Silly Daddy comics up. Xeric Award winner, yo.
• And finally it appears my hobby has borne fruit. All hail the Forced Entry Tool of the Gods. Allow me to point out that while I did not write the comment about the inevitable zombie uprising, I have in the past pointed out that the Halligan bar is likely to be a greater survival aid for emergency medical workers (who, after all, will comprise nearly 90% of the early casualties) than anything else in such an undead holocaust.