The thing about the Puck Building is, the air-con is from another era. When it works, it drips water to the point that one may be forgiven for thinking that a tropical waterfall is in the area (usually, it seems, directly onto the accumulated Dumbrellites).

When it doesn’t, the lack of openable windows and odd airflow patterns lend a distinctly whiffy character to all ‘n’ sundry. New York City is projected to hit 35 Celsius (95 Farenheit, for you ‘Mericans) this weekend, leading me to regard my hack pseudo-journalist efforts at the MoCCA show as hardship time.

Look for news, photos, and interviews to be more incoherent than normal as I drag my subjects to nieghboorhood watering holes for drinks and on-the-record conviviality. If you’re coming to the fest and want to know what’s on other than “sweating”, The Comics Journal has a handy round-up here.

New Sylvan Migdal strip!

Two years of comics at Planet Saturday!

Technosaurs included in new e-zine featuring comics, short ficion, art, and reviews!

Not [web]comics, but horrifying nonetheless!

Have you seen these? Comics stories from the China earthquake by Coco Wang; plans are to eventually have 100 or more such stories. Powerful stuff — having trained for (but thankfully never participated in) mass-casualty events, this is the sort of thing that reads like an EMT’s nightmares. Big thanks to Ananth Panagariya at Applegeeks for the link.

In lighter news, Rick Marshall Willenholly has restarted his webcomics interview series (up first: Chris Hastings)over at ComicMix; I’m reliably informed that there’s now a buffer of completed interviews, so we ought to see this as a regular feature from here on out.

New webcomicker podcast! Krishna Sadasivam got in touch with some buddies, then got in touch with a few more creators (click that last one if you haven’t already — damn good stuff), and declared their confab to be the first meetup at The Sequential Artists’ Pub. First episode at Talkshoe, next live broadcast on 13 June.

Rënë Ëngström has a charity appeal for those of you who care about the less fortunate who need your help — and if you don’t care, you’re a horrible person. PS Carly let’s talk at MoCCA.

Onwards: So, who’s been reading between the lines over at DJ Coffman’s blog? Catch where the lines pulled apart about yay-wide?

It makes me very sad and depressed to report this news, but I want to be as transparent with the fans and supporters of Hero By Night as possible here. The ongoing print series has been suspended BY ME due to financial issues at our publisher. I couldn’t keep this on my schedule, because frankly it’s gotten to the point where I need to make hard decisions to be sure my time is spent on projects that pay me on time and have some security to them. Up until this point, Platinum has been rock solid and something I could bank on contractually and I enjoyed that security. While the plan had always been to stay on schedule through Issue 7 (a Christmas issue), and the book hadn’t been officially canceled by Platinum Studios, I couldn’t in good faith keep going when behind the scenes I knew that there would be books solicited that would not be coming out on time — our issue 4 wouldn’t be coming out because Jason had to make the hard decision to stop coloring Hero By Night for the same reasons, so my book was sitting uncolored and I knew we’d be missing the print deadline dates.

[Platinum and Coffman are] discussing getting the rights back to the whole thing that I sold to them — this would allow me to take HBN on my own, self publish on the web or in print among other things.

The most important point in all of this is nicely summarized by Scott Kurtz:

I’m not sure if we touched on this in the book, but I know we’ve discussed it on the podcast. It’s so important that it bears repeating: once you sign away your rights to a second party, that party is really under no obligation to ever return those rights back to you. Even when the situation is out of the control of both parties and everyone has the best of intentions.

Contracts are not enchanted documents that enforce some kind of morality upon all parties involved. They are not magically consumed in brilliant clouds of sparks and dust if either party breaches the terms. A company could go bankrupt and you might still never regain your rights.

Or, as I was once challenged for saying, [A]ll contracts are inherently about ensuring that — if needed — you can cut the other guy’s heart out and he’s legally obligated to provide the blade. Without language that specifies under exactly what circumstances rights revert to the creator, they won’t. Ever.

Fleen wishes DJ Coffman the best of luck, both because we want to know what happens in Hero By Night, dammit, and also because he deserves better than this. He was a very public supporter of Platinum when there was a lot of grief thrown their way about having never actually published a comic book; even in his posting announcing the hiatus, he was unfailingly gracious and thankful towards them. If karma and/or justice have any place in this world, Platinum will swiftly return the rights to his creation, and a means to resume publishing will follow. And DJ? I got four bucks American cash money set aside for issue #4 right here; drop that puppy into my LCS and it’s all yours.

See that picture up there? My wife watched me put all of this in one place and let loose a spontaneous Holy crap. Fortunately, I now have a solution, as well. And with all that protective space, I am now compelled by by sickness to collect more webcomics stuff. You people are stealing the food from my non-existant childrens’ mouths!

Moving on:

• You may have noticed a posting by Ursula Vernon over LiveJournal regarding a piece of her art. The original is here, a common memetic remixing is here, and the gist of the post is that t-shirts were getting offered of the remix without attribution to (or approval of) Vernon. She reports a reasonably amicable resolution, but a larger issue remains.

  This page has in the past come out in favor of artists rights to remix and reinterpret existing work, providing it substantially transforms the original or uses it to comment on aspects of culture. Unfortunately, that’s a grey area of copyright law, as there’s nothing in the US Code (people in the rest of the world, you’re on your own) that either explicitly forbids or allows such use, nor (to the best of my knowledge) has any court case ruled on this gap in the law. Thus, the question of Can Penny Arcade use Strawberry Shortcake, owned by American Greetings, to comment on American McGee? (decent summary here) remains unsettled.

  But the situation can be made more clear where creators explicitly make their intentions known up front. Vernon’s gone back and applied some Creative Commons stickers to her work (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, in this case), and despite the weaknesses in the Creative Commons model, it’s probably the best available solution at this time. Those of you who create, take note and give this some thought.

• Finally, in case you hadn’t noticed yet, a server farm in Texas suffered an explosion which has taken out some 9000 websites associated with some 6000 clients of the hosting service; as of this writing, most of Blank Label Comics remains down, as do portions of the American Elf archives and Adult Webcomics. If you know of emergency backup pages or alternate addresses for webcomics affected by this ongoing outage, please add ’em to the comments below.

Known backup locations in The Great Webcomics Outage of Aught-Eight:
Schlock Mercenary: stripped-down page at www.schlockmercenary.com
Shortpacked!: www.shortpacked.com working
Real Life: www.reallifecomics.com/ is working, but Greg Dean is apparently taking the day off
Wapsi Square: down www.wapsisquare.com working, but showing last Friday’s strip
Ugly Hill: down www.uglyhill.com working (thanks for the info, Marlowe!)
Melonpool: down

Gotta keep this one relatively brief, as there’s things to get done before the road trip tomorrow to pick up my new coffee table/art cabinet; this is what webcomics creators have driven me to: I no longer have enough wall space to display my originals and must invest in furniture to store them. Anyway, two webcomics to compare/contrast — one’s brand new, one’s been around a while, both new to me.

Richard Kirk wrote:

For your consideration… Semi-autobiographical cartoon. Nice, clean website. I have no connection except for being a fan.

and David Reddick wrote:

I’m proud to unveil my new twice-weekly fantasy webcomic and labor of love, Legend of Bill, presented by the fine folks at SoulGeek.

Em Cartoons is a nice autobio strip, and I dig creator Maria Smedstad’s art style a great deal — something about the face being so minimally rendered makes it easy to project emotions to the reader. But I have to disagree about the website. While clean, the archive links require an excessive amount of searching to make progress through the story of Em, and that’s death if you’re trying to get people to a) read your archive (especially one going back to November of 2006) and; b) fall in love with the strip and become a fan/evangelist. It would be a bit of work, but translating Em Cartoons to a design that features the standard <<, <, >, and >> buttons would be well worth the effort. I want those who might casually come across Em Cartoons to find it easy to be engrossed, because I think it’s good work.

Bill is just starting (only two updates so far), but features an intriguing premise: standard fantasy-type barbarian gets started not because he’s born on a battlefield and fated to adventure … he just got really bored with his intern gig. Although it’s not quite as obvious in the strips that are up, scroll down to check out Reddick’s sketches and wallpapers … his art is very Sergio Aragonés-esque, and that can only be a good thing. Nobody does loose, scribbly, and fun like Sergio, and the man may yet overtake Tezuka for most pages of comics drawn in a lifetime. If that’s where Reddick’s drawing (ha, ha) inspiration from, he’s in damn good company

Okay, on the one had Brooke “Otter” Spangler does a pretty damn cool webcomic, and on the other she has repeatedly threatened me with hideous fates worse than death. What’s needed here is a tie-breaker to kick her into either the cool people I should buy a beer or the mortal enemies who must be destroyed list.

And voilà: she’s sharing some of her well-learned lessons in an essay entitled The Eight Things I’ve Found Helpful in Creating a Webcomic. There’s some damn good thinking going on here that webcomickers of all stripes (but particularly the newbie variety) ought to read and digest carefully.

For brevity’s sake, I’m going to copy the Eight Things here, but go read the supporting thoughts in full.

1. Traffic doesn’t really matter
2. Your audience will create an image of you, so control it
3. Don’t whine, ever (or as close to ever as humanly possible)
4. You’re broke; get over it
5. Nine-tenths of everything you try will fail, so plan, plan, plan
6. You can’t please everybody
7. Good manners are essential
8. Don’t expect people to do things for you

To quote Miyamoto Musashi, You must practice this well.

I was going to add something like Pay special attention to these particular items, but they’re all pretty damn good; maybe not live in a cave like a hermit for years before writing it good, more like … no, wait. Scrabbling together a webcomic is kinda like living in a cave like a hermit. Now all Otter has to do is win 60 duels and she can be the reigning warrior/philosopher of webcomics for all time.

First, this. I would have mentioned it earlier, but modesty prevailed. However, we’re now on a trendline, people. Check it out: Fox in New York grilling one of Jon’s disciples, because he’s a threat. Or something.

Not really webcomics per se, but sorta: I was just going to quietly revel in the awfulness of the now-infamous new Tokyopop contracts, but I don’t need to because Bryan Lee O’Malley’s already done so. More on the general topic of giving away your IP from the Halfpixellians in Webcomics Weekly #34.

And if you are going to work for essentially free, wouldn’t you rather it be for a good cause? Michael Rouse-Deane is looking for artists (who aren’t already working with him) to contribute to the Guest Strip Project‘s big charity push:

Basically, I’m after 31 artists that ain’t on my list so far to do stand-alone strips for August as the GSP is having a huge month donation drive trying to gain money.

So I’m asking the artists to do strips during July for me that are stand-alone and don’t relate to any of the storylines we’ve had, and that the whole month is gonna be filled with artists and people visiting the site every day and hopefully donating to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Books!

• Andrew Bell‘s Do Not Eat! is now available to those that haven’t fortunate (?) enough to be in near proximity to Andrew Bell. Please, share the tender back meat.
• I’m not sure how Paul Taylor manages to draw in a style that comes across as so light-hearted and fun, yet also satisfies every cheesecake fan that wants to be serviced. Whoof — that sounded sketchier than I intended, which I guess is okay, because Taylor’s just released a sketchbook of Wapsi Square mystery girl Monica. Non-repro blue never looked so good.

Were I the sort that believes in things like karmic debt, I’d start to suspect that James Kochalka feels really guilty over something he did in a past life, ’cause he’s sure doing awesome things for us to make up for whatever it might have been. As you all no doubt recall, Kochalka opened up the archives of American Elf not two months ago, and now he’s given us another gift.

In celebration of his birthday (yesterday), Kochalka added SuperF*ckers to the AE site; the latest one is always free and the archives are available to Elf subscribers (elfscribers?). In his own words:

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until the end of June, there will be a new page of SuperF*ckers comics. Four issues of the series have been published by Top Shelf, and it is among my most popular work. It’s not a superhero parody, not quite a satire, not completely ironic. It’s a story of a bunch of superpowered teenagers living in a clubhouse together. It all takes place down the bank behind my house, in a field.

(In my mind, I actually consider this new comic to be sort of a spin off of SuperF*ckers, with that series’ most prominent character getting his own book. Consider this Jack Krak #1.)

There was also a cryptic comment about wanting to make “another exciting announcement like this soon”, but honestly — he’s given me enough for now. Any more excitement, I might burst.

• Other webcomickers with a 26 May birthday: Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman (that is so damn cute, but exactly what I’d expect from the perfect couple)
• The world of webcomics will have to do with one less Ryan for the next month or so, as Ryan Estrada heads off to scale Kilimanjaro and have adventures. First up: getting on your scheduled flight is for wusses.