Family party yesterday to celebrate the latest high school graduatin’ niece; the weird part is that her sister was talking about her upcoming tour of grad schools. How’s about a bit of juvenalia to make us all feel younger?

• Bill Amend always has been one of the nerdier guys on the newspaper page; yesterday’s Fox Trot just proves that he gets webcomics, in all its … varied? … glory. Click on the pic up top for a larger version, since it’ll be gone from the gocomics site in a few weeks.
• Seems like this time last year, we at Fleen were running the third or fourth iteration of the Webcomics Floor map for SDCC; maybe not attending this year has dulled my sense of urgency, because we haven’t had one and it’s T-10 days and counting. Fortunately, Alice Bentley has justified my innate laziness and compiled a fairly comprehensive list o’ webcomickers/booths in her LiveJournal. To it, add the Dumbrellites (R Stevens, Jon Rosenberg, Andy Bell, Sam Brown), with special guests Chris Yates, Scott McCloud, Wil Wheaton, MC Frontalot, and Meredith Gran: booth 1335. A quick glance over the exhibitors list didn’t reveal any other names, but please let me know if we’ve omitted anybody. Pick me up one of everything, and ask Wil what Kiki Stockhammer is really like.
• Speaking of Wil Wheaton, part one of a three-part interview with him went up a little bit ago at ComicMix. Short version: Wil digs webcomics.
• Finally, for the SF Zine Festival this week, Shi Long Pang creator Ben Costa shows us how Juno should have gone. Ladles and Jenglemints: Cloaca Maxima.

Time to talk! Check this:

Villard Books will publish the recently completed Goats story arc, The Infinite Pendergast Cycle, as a trilogy — in the style of the great sci-fi sagas Goats so affectionately parodies.

Oh, my. Villard, for those of you keeping score at home, is an imprint of Random House, and is known in our community as the current home of the Flight series. And check me on this, but I believe this would be the first color reprinting of a story-based webcomic by a major publisher (possibly excepting Jellaby, which featured/will feature strips that didn’t appear online prior to publication). Actual suit-and-tie publishing moguls have reached a deal to reprint a work that they don’t own. They’ve put this into their schedule, sunk the money into the plans and the printing and the promotion, they’ve committed to Goats for the next two years.

Aside from an unprecedented development for capital-w Webcomics, this seems like a fairly big deal for Mr Jon Rosenberg, so we at Fleen did a quick talk in the popular “Q&A” format.

Fleen will be following this development closely. Congratulations to Rosenberg, and to Villard for investing in the future of webcomics. Press release should be up various places by now, but I recommend you click below the cut.

Edit to add: Rosenberg’s apparently been spreading his interviews around; check out the discussion with Rick Marshall over at ComicMix.

(more…)

A few days ago, Fleen noted that Wizard magazine had apparently re-discovered webcomics. For an insider’s view of what Wizard‘s first discovery of webcomics was like, please see Rick insert Land of the Lost joke here Marshall’s blog post on same. Interesting stuff.

Should be able to finalize the story by noon today. But I gotta say, I get the highest comment count in months on a non-post? I should not-post more often.

We at Fleen are working on a fairly major story-thing at the moment, and waiting with bated breath for confirmations. If our sources are correct this is a pretty big deal, so bear with us in the meantime.

webcomics.com, new tires, clean upholstery, 2 owners, minor dings, serious offers only.

In other news:

• Darren J. Gendron writes to tell us that Dernwerks comics has posted its report of Anime Expo ’08.
• Ben Paddon would like you to know that Jump Leads has just past the crucial one-year mark and will soon be putting out its first proper book. It’s all very exciting!
• I really picked the wrong year to skip San Diego: the Dumbrella booth will be featuring special guests Meredith Gran (who hopes to have Octopus Pie2: The Octopussening available, God and printers willing), Scott McCloud, MC Frontalot and Wil “Zombie Pimp” Wheaton. Keep an eye here for location, schedules, signings, etc. Somebody take pictures for me, and let me know how magical it all was, dammit.

  Edit to add: Chris Yates will also be at the booth! My missed opportunity is now 14% more magical.

You may recall that two of the best friends that captial-w Webcomics ever picked up are Brian Warmoth (please, somebody draw me a picture of a moth geared out for WAR) and Rick Marshall “Will and Holly” — a year ago, they were well into their mission to de-suckify the Wizard website, in part with a series of terrific interviews with various webcomickers known as Cursory Conversations.

You may note that there is no link attached to “Cursory Conversations”; this is because the entire archive mysteriously disappeared from Wizard‘s website not long after Wizard decided Warmoth and Marshall did their jobs really well and therefore their services were no longer required.

So imagine my amusement when I was informed that Wizard has a) discovered webcomics; b) yesterday inaugurated a new series of micro-interviews with creators; and c) decided to start with the same creators that Warmoth started with a year ago.

No link, just enjoy the unintentional hilarity of Maxim-lite reinventing a wheel it already created. Meanwhile, be aware that Marshall not only interviews webcomickers at ComicMix, he also does a weekly webcomics news roundup. Now if there could be direct links to those two categories, I’d be really happy; I might even cut back on the Sleestak gags (do yourself a favor and don’t follow the Urban Dictionary link).

Big thing, via community servant extraordinaire John Baird:

On June 24, 2008, the Create a Comic Project was awarded a Small Neighborhood Grant from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (CFGNH). The award will go toward sponsoring the Comic Making Tournament III, the CCP’s major annual event where children wield their imaginations to create their sequential art masterpieces.
The Comic Making Tournament III is planned to take place in either March or May 2009. Like the previous tournaments, it is aimed at the population of disadvantaged children in New Haven. The tournament hands out prizes that these children would not normally be able to afford, such as art books and supplies, as well as graphic novels and webcomic apparel.

The tournament will feature a number of events for the kids to compete in, such as creating single page comics, multi-page comics, and arranging panels in nonlinear fashion. The tournament, like the comic project, will use two types of templates for its events: blank comics for children to draw their own and those with art but without words for children to provide the dialogue.

Small things:

• Been following and Chris Baldwin‘s diary comic since well before my dog showed up as a bit player. Not visible in this drawing: the blissed-out look on her face from Baldwin’s attentive ear-scritching.
• For some reason, I don’t feel like shouting AAAAAAH EYES because the color is so pretty; as A Girl and Her Fed careens towards strip number 500, the plot just keeps drawing me further in.
• First “bork”, now “snailing”. Sweden is full of linguistically-creative perverts.
• So my wife calls down the stairs to me on Saturday evening, “Turn on the radio! Lore‘s on All Things Considered!” This was supposed to happen about six weeks ago, but better late than never.
• Finally, Only 939 views (as of this writing)? C’mon, people, it’s the Clango & Granulac show! RS3 asking the collected brainpower of Google how to make webcomics more easily content-searchable? That’s him doing all of you a solid.

But still — holiday. Some small items for you.

Minus came to an end yesterday, but Ryan Armand would like it if you continued to drop by the site for the next few weeks; there will alternate strips, some that were set aside and never run, etc. Also, if you wanted to get a print of a particular strip, now’s the time to jump in and order, since Armand’s only taking orders until the end of the month.

Via David Malki !, audio of the Webcomics panel at Heroes Con ’08, with Mr Exclamation, Nick Gurewitch, Chris Harding, Danielle Corsetto, and Julia Wertz, as moderated by The Spurge.

Spoiler alert: As early as next week, announcements will be made that change our understanding of webcomics and irretrievably alter their future course; in other words, just another run-up to the Nerd Prom. Also round about next week, the most unintentionally hilarious webcomics-related thing ever is going to drop onto the web, and I’ma make fun of it. You have been warned.

Finally, I want to toss some major props to Jeremy C, a Senior Marketing Associate at Harper Collins. He emailed me Tuesday afternoon to ask if I’d like a complimentary copy of Scott McCloud‘s magnum opus reprinting of Zot!, which I have been jonesin’ for ever since the old Kitchen Sink Press reprint series died around 1998 (for the record, I would also like a pony, a working time machine, and to decide who lives and who dies). Less than 40 hours later, that sucker was waiting on my front porch, well in advance of today’s suspension of mail service. Look for a review soon, and everybody going to San Diego, this is number one on your to-buy list.

But I’d still like to welcome Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw as he steps up from a one-off print-review of webcomics to his more usual video-review style. Usually, it’s videogames that bestir his wrath at Zero Punctuation, but this time it’s videogame-themed webcomics.

As fun as it was reading his earlier dissection, this is better because you can hear the contempt in his voice. Sadly, Croshaw has pretty much said everything that needs to be said about videogaming webcomics, so we probably won’t see any more of these directed towards our community’s … lesser efforts. Nevertheless, plenty to keep us busy, as we try to puzzle out what this “Bontrol-Bolt-Belete” of which he speaks is.

In other webcomicky news, check out Rick Marshall’s totally awesome interview with (the usually reliably-cranky) Warren Ellis on Freak Angels and more.

That’s it for today — tomorrow’s meat and beer won’t grill and drink (repsectively) themselves, you know … so much to prep. Haven’t decided if I’m actually going to take tomorrow’s holiday (for those of you in ‘Merica), but check back anyway … it may rain.