From Ursula Vernon:

ART RECEPTION CHANGE!
Okay, gang, the art reception will NOT be Monday the 4th after all — apparently there was a miscommunication between when the show opens, and when the reception actually is. Free cheese day will be Friday, August 22nd, from 6-8.

This is a lot later in the month than I was expecting, but apparently the city has the show first, and then the reception, which is sort of backwards from what I’m used to, but they’re buying the cheese so I can’t complain.

Anyway! Friday the 22nd! 6-8! Clear your schedule then, not the 4th!

Thanks for the info, Ursula. Apart from that, there’s absolutely nothing happening in webcomics today. The quiet — it’s eerie.

If you see that guy up there in the vicinity of webcomics, he’s doing floor reporting for us, so give him the dirt you got. For those sticking closer to home, things of note:

• Ursula Vernon, one of our absolutely favorite creators, has an art show opening on Monday, 4 August in Cary, NC. I guess this explains her otherwise baffling absence from the upcoming ConnectiCon, not that it does any good to those of us at Fleen that will be in Vegas (ick) for work (double ick) that week, dammit.
• Interviews with Davids Willis (by Rick Marshall) and Malki ! (by Geoff Hoppe and The Spurge), and Ryan North by Joey Comeau of A Softer World.
• Speaking of Rick Marshall, he claims to not be a serial killer. You be the judge.
• Friend of Fleen (and comics, both web- and especially -strip) Josh Frulhinger (better known as the Comics Curmudgeon) will be on Jeopardy! tonight. For the next few days at least, you can check out his howdy-do here, and look up time & station for your local market here. And remember, Josh — when in doubt, always go with Who was Eisenhower?
• Finally, I’m guessing that by now everybody has seen the Kansas state legislature election campaign site of Sean Tevis? He’s very kindly agreed to answer some questions about his unique use of webcomics, so check back in the next couple days for that.

Here’s a game you can play at San Diego Comic Con: count the Dr Horrible/Captain Hammer/Penny cosplayers. There’s been a run on the “Hammer’s hammer” shirts which are presently sold out. How many you wanna bet end up on guys with chemical-safety gauntlets and cargo pants?

• On a related note, Harper Collins is running a sweepstakes to give away an “Official Comic Geek Survival Kit“, which would turn out to be useful at SDCC, but unfortunately the deadline to enter is actually 15 August. Oh, well — if you win, you’ll get your prize about the time you’ve recovered from the excesses of the week.
• Still basically on the topic of Comic-Con, this is a popular time for announcements, and we’ve got a doozy for you: Steve Troop has returned to comickin’, this time in print and with all-new content:
  

  Troop had intended to return to webcomics earlier this year with an entirely different comic strip about a kid who believes his father is a super hero–simply because his father keeps telling him that he is one. That project was scrapped, however, when Troop’s sketchbooks filled up with drawings of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and other creatures, in lieu of a father masquerading as a caped vigilante.

  The death of zoologist Steve Irwin in 2006 contributed to the change. Irwin died after a stingray attack in 2006, leaving his daughter Bindi to take over his hosting responsibilities.

  “I wondered what would have happened if Steve Irwin had been a cryptozoologist instead of a zoologist,” explains Troop. “Maybe Bindi would have hosted a show about hunting monsters instead of animals.”

  Thus, CryptoZooey, Troop’s new all-ages comic book. I’ve read some preview material that reminded me of, variously, Leave It To Chance, Amelia Rules!, and Susie Derkins all rolled together. In other words, pretty damn awesome. Head to cryptozooey.com for more info and purchasing opportunities.

• Finally, in completely unrelated — or possibly totally related, we’re not sure — news: mezzacotta. Known information at this time: the launch date (a little after 0930 3 October 2008 GMT), the pronounciation (mεtsə′kɒtə), the asking price (€1 million prior to launch, €5 million afterwards) and that at least one of the (evil?) geniuses behind it appears to be David Morgan-Mar. Oh, and dictionary.com defines “cotta” as “a kind of coarse woolen blanket”, and “mezzo” as “half or moderate” (but “mezza” has no definition, so make of it what you will).

We at Fleen have just learned that Dave Kellett is addressing the Society of Illustrators on webcomics and what they mean, and the meeting is open to the public. It starts in … 15 minutes? Sorry. Anyway, here’s the deal:

2:00 – 4:00 PM Pacific Time
Brand Library Studios/Art Gallery
1601 West Mountain Street
Glendale, California 91201-1200

Go, go, go! Hurry!

Like all right-thinking people, I find David Morgan-Mar’s Irregular Webcomic to be an indispensible part of my day. The fact that he has to construct and photograph LEGO®™©^etc brand building-block play-sets to build his comic is astonishing to me. The lengths he will go to in order to indulge a pun are legendary. His resemblance to Mr Bean is striking. And his comments on everything under the sun (but most satisfyingly for me, physics) are worth the price of admission themselves.

Today, Morgan-Mar hit 2000 updates. Not content to note the significance of the achievement (which requires nearly five and half years of daily updating, considerably longer if you’re going with the more common three or five updates per week), he did some poking around and tried to determine how many webcomics have actually hit the 2K mark. His answer: 17 (to my eye, a fairly complete list, although he missed Sheldon, which passed the mark last October). Round it up for experimental error and oversights, and you’ve still got fewer than two dozen.

To put that into perspective, I can only think of one undertaking with a membership as exclusive as that (and accomplished in such a short time frame, seeing as how the internet as we now experience it is less than twenty years old): two dozen people have broken Earth orbit and been to the vicinity of the Moon (yes, yes, I know — only twelve of them landed and walked around, but if you achieve lunar orbit you’ve been to the Moon, goddammit).

Do I exaggerate? Indulge me, because exaggeration doesn’t change the fact that unlike the others on the list, Morgan-Mar doesn’t make comics his primary gig. Doctor Morgan-Mar works full time on image processing research (having done a bit in my own undergrad days, I can tell you it’s a facinating and challenging field that sucks in smart people and breaks all but the smartest), making Irregular Webcomic (and Darths & Droids, and Infinity on 30 Credits a Day) hobbies.

If you heard the latest Webcomics Weekly podcast (#41, for those playing at home), there was a question in the second half of the show to the effect of, If you could do your webcomic with no commercial pressures, no worries about it being your source of income, how would it be different? The guys looked at it as an unexpected question, seeing things like marketing and merchandising not as chores, but as lenses to focus their art and ability to touch readers. I read the question a bit differently — With respect to your webcomic, if you had a million dollars, what would you do?

The answer isn’t Two chicks at the same time, it’s what Morgan-Mar has done: create simply for the joy of creating (and educating, and inflicting really bad puns). The LEGO®™©^etc brand building blocks? They’re just a bonus.

Quick now:

• I normally don’t talk about new strips ’til there’s a couple dozen strips in the hopper, but there are exceptions. I recently got a sneak peek at a work that’s achingly well done and should be read by everybody who loves good things. Starting Monday, please enjoy the Victorian/spiritualist adventures of Miss Ellie Connelly, by Indigo Kelleigh of Circle Weave and other works.
• Hey, want to do some guest art that’s seen by all and sundry? Comixtalk is looking for a cover artist for August. The theme is “how to”, and you can toss your replies to the X-Man, via xerexes over at gmail, which I believe is dot-com.
• And finally, I figure I ought to toss some love to both Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible (go watch it, it’s terrific) and The Onion‘s AV Club, because their commenters have thrown some love our way. Achewood, Dinosaur Comics, Wonderella, and Wigu, enjoy your name-checks as “things to do on the internet when you’re sore from all the porn”.

About now, a one Mister Steven “Cloudie” Cloud is winging his way to England, there to begin the Drive of Death. If you want to follow the minute-by-minute progress of his heedless dash into disaster (at least as long as the technology exists along the way), Twitter is your friend. I’m not a prayin’ man, but if I were I’d be askin’ for Cloud and his comrades to arrive mostly safe and mostly well in Ulan Bator in about three weeks time. Don’t want it to be boring, then there’s no good stories come out of it.

So you got your Corn Chex, your Rice Chex, and your Retro Chex with video commentary (see what I did there — that’s comedy, son). We’ve seen wrapped-up webcomics rerunning with creator’s notes before, but Kris Straub is taking the “DVD Extras” model to its logical extreme. Scientists estimate that by the end of the re-run, the total time of after commentary will equal nearly 4 months of continuous viewing.

The record for most awkward-pause panels in one comic strip has been reclaimed by Achewood (previous record holder, xkcd). We at Fleen congratulate Roast Beef and Miss Lady on their wedding.

Did I mention that I picked up the Fart Party book at my friendly local comic shop last week? Because I totally did, and since it seems I did so on the same day that creator Julia Wertz got de-jobbed, I’m sure those extra couple bucks helped. If you haven’t ordered it, you totally should, even though according to the intro and foreword, it appears that under the wrong circumstances Ms Wertz would have you eat a bag of wet dicks and she would personally shit in your cereal. My only question is, do they have to be wet?

And finally, winners announced in Wondermark‘s once-every-five years creativity contest. The winners are no Witchblade-themed opera, but heck — what is?

Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 (hereafter, Z!C) is an odd thing to be reading at this stage in my life. As a freshman in college, I was handed a copy of the LOUDEST comic book in the universe, giggled, and promptly forgot about the creators. More than twenty years ago, I started reading Scott McCloud’s first creator-owned series about a do-goodin’ title character with a perpetually sunny disposition; I kept with it after the initial ten, color issues (not in this collection) transitioned to the stories of this collection. A move after college and a lack of good comic shops meant that I missed out on the “Earth Stories” that formed the final arc of the comic series.

More than fifteen years ago, I rediscovered McCloud through Understanding Comics; shortly thereafter, the Kitchen Sink Press reprints found their way into my collection, but KSP went under before the fourth volume, which would have comprised the Earth Stories. Ten years ago, I was the guy that liked The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln. In the past two years ago, I met McCloud, devoured Making Comics, and bugged him more than once But when will you reprint the Earth Stories?

In retrospect, McCloud has taken up as much of my reading time, over so many projects, as any author I can think of. He created the one villain (in all of the fiction of my lifetime) so chilling, evil, and plausible in his malevolence that he’s given me bad dreams¹. I’ve come to admire, respect, and treasure just hanging with the guy as much as I have valued his work — but here is this creation, from the beginning of his career, that I’d never seen in full. I paused before reading those final 200-odd pages, wondering if the past two decades would affect me and my reading, at long last, of the Earth Stories.

I shouldn’t have worried.
(more…)

Brad Guigar’s got a graphic of the multiple places that he and his compadres will be at SDCC. Solid, effective graphic design. Bold, even. But it kinda reminds me of … something … not comicky at all. Eh, it’ll come to me.

The Halfpixelarians have a booth in the Indy Press area, #2107; this may be in addition to their presence at the Image booth (#2729), or in place of it.

The Comics Bakery funsters will be in the Small Press section, P2.

More updates as we learn of them.