From the top:

• Round numbers: Diesel Sweeties #2000and five years of Wondermark.
• Speaking of those guys: Rich Stevens (and a mess of other cool people, including webcomickers) is at ROFLCon, at the once-prestigious Harvard University. David Malki ! (and a mess of other cool people, incuding webcomickers) is at the Stumptown Comics Festival, in the once-ignored Portland, Oregon. Both events kick off today and continue tomorrow.
• Again with the Malki !: He’s on the podcast of The Ethicist, via the once-respected New York Times.
• More broadcasting: Webcomickers will be invading the once-sedate world of public radio, as members of the North Carolina Web Comics Coffee Clatch descend on the studios of WUNC for an appearance on The State of Things. Tune in or listen to the stream on May 8th at about 12:40pm eastern time, and be sure to call 1.877.962.9862 with your questions. The show will be rebroadcast later that night, then released as a podcast on the site; members of the NCWCCCCCCCCC are also negotiating to have excerpts animated on their website.
• In the hot seat: By the time you read this, Rick Marshall will have his latest webcomic interview up at ComicMix. Paul Southworth of Ugly Hill answers your questions, and I have to note that Ol’ Rick still needs a name for this series; may I suggest Webcomics With Willenholly?
• Life imitates Dinosaur Comics: Ryan North should totally get a commission from that logo design shop.
• And last but certainly not least: Chris Yates of Reprographics has his first book up for pre-order. Titled SET IT TO AWESOME, it features a foreword by Colleen AF Venable and an afterword by David Malki !, which brings us full circle. Looks like I can tell what my first purchase at MoCCA‘s gonna be.

Weekend now. Enjoy it.

Announcement first — things are going to be a bit busy in the next two weeks; I’ll be running some pre-done book reviews, maybe some “Best of Fleen”, but there won’t be much that’s topical. We at Fleen thank you for your patience, and if the scheduled posting goes a little wonky and you don’t see everything on a regular schedule, please bear with us. I promise to make it up to you when thing calm down again. Honest.

Okay, things that slipped by in the aftermath of NYCC:

• A two-fer from Ursula Vernon, who has advice for the budding artist on her LiveJournal, and reports a glowing Kirkus review of her forthcoming young-readers book.
• Speaking of forthcoming books, the second Shortpacked! book is on pre-order now, as is the sixth Unshelved tome. The former includes drama and the power of corsets, the latter includes Book Club contributions from various [web]comickers, the famed cross-strip Coffee Lid Challenge, and bonus commentary on that last item by some hack pseudo-journalist.
• Hey kids — do you like to enjoy things your own way? Brad Guigar’s been running his flagship strip in color for about a month now, but it was always designed for black & white. I’m digging my chance to taste the rainbow, but some people prefer it as it was. Good news — Evil, Inc. now lets you decide to veiw the color or B&W version of the strip, and remembers your preference, all thanks to a nifty bit of coding from our publisher.
• And finally, here’s Chris Hastings doing the American Beauty thing. You just know he’s naked under there.

Big pictures ahead — only click if you want to see webcomickers up close.

• The Comics Bakery Crew: an apparently baco-vegetarian Kean Soo (L) and Dave Roman (R).
• The Ladies of the Bakery: a between-sessions Raina Telgemeier (L) and Johanne Matte (R).
• Next year, there’ll be a giant inflatable rat outside his table: Brad Guigar (L) defied the forces of stupidity, and Ryan Sohmer (R) defied a union guy that wanted 85 bucks to plug in a lamp.
• My camera was accidentally set on ‘sepia’: An old-timey Scott McCloud. Ask him about the Mayor of Rhode Island sometime.
• Man, that banner behind her is like a perfect (if square) halo: Jennifer Babcock, enjoying the show before teaching kids about webcomics.
• He’s really less mean than he looks: Andy Bell, in a moment of glaring. But he set me up with some sweet vinyl toys without me having to go through blind-box hell, so he can glower all he wants.
• On the other hand, this guy is exactly as serious as he looks: Jon Rosenberg, calculating how much cuter his daughter is getting while he’s away.
• Giant foam horror, or mockery of life?: At least it wasn’t Fat Skeletor. You people seriously owe me one.
• Don’t tell anybody, but I think it may be a trap: Admiral Ackbar chillin’ at the Dumbrella booth.
• Some day, he’ll beg me to use the Sleestak pictures again: A show-weary Rick Marshall, sporting the required facial adornment of journalists on the webcomics beat.

Final tidbit from the weekend: Of the many flyers and givewaways I was handed over the course of the weekend, one particularly caught my eye: Pigtails & Potbellies. It’s a little Calvin & Hobbes, a little Little Dee, and a little bit limited since it’s written as “little girl spends the summer at grandma’s farm” which only allows for so many lazy afternoons with your talking pig. Did I forget to mention there’s a talking pig? Also a pig of an uncle.

There’s fewer than 20 installments so far, and the only complaint I’ve got is that the presentation is a bit weird — click on an update title and it will take you there, but the current strip always dominates the screen space above the fold. The trick is to click on the image itself to isolate it. In any event, this one’s got potential.

Editor’s note: Joey Manley was kind enough to sit down with me during the opening hours of the just-concluded New York Comic Con to tell me what the ComicSpace/Webcomics Nation merger looks like six months in. John Boeck, one of the ComicSpace investors (more on his background below) was kind enough to join in. What follows is an edited presentation from my hand-written notes, with exact quotations indicated in italics.

(more…)

But check out Rick Marshall’s writeup of Webcomics: Threat or Menace? from NYCC. I didn’t remember half that stuff.

Stuart Immonnen on the most blatant thievery of internet artistry imaginable. Read it, pass it on.

Lots of stuff happened over the weekend, which is largely still a blur to me. As mentioned last week, I moderated Webcomics: Threat or Menace? on Saturday, during which I was so intent on not sucking that I didn’t really store any of it in long-term memory. Rick Marshall from ComicMix was in the audience and has promised a write-up, but if anybody happened to record it, let us know. For the record, The Frontingest Man Alive said that I didn’t suck, so yay.

The panel consisted of Rich Stevens, Robert Khoo, Richard Brunning (Senior VP — Creative Director for DC) and Jeremy Ross (Director, New Product Development for Tokyopop); Brunning and Ross were very nice guys, not taking the “webcomics are evil” tack that the session description promised (found here), and Rich and Robert were very good about not claiming that webcomics would eat the firstborn children of the dead-tree publishers. We never did get a consensus on threat or menace, but seemed to agree that media are all shifting towards a long-tail, some-degree-of-free, and the old and new schools are going to have to meet in the middle. For more on this topic, come back tomorrow for an interview I did with Joey Manley and John Boeck on where ComicSpace is headed, six months after the big merge.

And on the off change that Jeremy Ross is reading this: you guys really need to get the rights to Kimagure Orange Road.

Others seen around the con: Brian Warmoth, Scott McCloud, Jennifer Babcock (who did a terrific job with the How to Make Webcomics panel on Kids Day), DJ Coffman, Brad Guigar, Ryan Sohmer (who risked a savage beating by defying the convention center union guys who wanted like 85 friggin’ dollars to plug in a light fixture), Chris Hastings, Raina Telgemeier, a healthy-looking Dave Roman, (Dave and Raina did about 83 sessions between the two of them, including a very noisy Avatar:The Last Airbender session that sounded really good through the walls and totally didn’t drown out my session, not that I am bitter), and the Jellabalicious Keen Soo. I was pleased beyond measure to finally make the acquaintance of Amy Kim Ganter and Kazu Kibuishi, and I understand that the inimitable Jonathan Coulton was at the show, but I missed him. If anybody knows JoCo, kindly ask him this for me — What’s Soterios Johnson really like? Besides dreamy, of course.

Finally, Fleen announces the Webcomics Partner of the Year Award to Caroline Guigar, who figured out that Brad was running out of books, and wrangled two toddlers and several boxes, sending replenisment stock on a Greyhound so that Brad would have something to sell on Sunday. If you want to succeed in webcomics, I strongly advise you to find somebody that supportive to help you.

Moustaches are never truly created or destroyed, they merely shift from one strip to another.

Yeah, not much of a post, but I’m busy working up questions so I don’t suck moderating Webcomics: Threat or Menace? at New York Comic Con tomorrow at noon. Come see Rich Stevens, Robert Khoo, and as-yet-unnamed reps of DC and Tokyopop on stage. Rumor has it that Brad Guigar will be sitting in the audience with some busted beer bottled and a length of chain, settling into the “menace” side of things.

Speaking of the panel, I’m gonna be too busy running it to cover it properly, so if anybody wants to do up a narrative with good quotes, see me.

And in completely better news: The lost Winterview comes to light!

Ladies and Gentlemen, ________ _____ Kellett, daughter of Dave Kellett and Gloria Calderón Kellett. About that name:

I can already imagine a few of you will be e-mailing me to ask what her name is, so allow me to give you my take on that. Both my wife and I have chosen pretty public lives, and in general we’re happy to share a great deal with the world. But I want to give my children the chance to choose the path best suited to them … whether it be a public life or a private life or somewhere in the middle. So, while I have no qualms about posting a few cute, early baby pics — as she’ll look markedly different in a few months, anyway — I want to give her the gift of anonymity to become her own person in life. I know you’ll understand the value of that.

We at Fleen respect the decision of ________’s parents, but using our awesome investigatory skillz we can exclusively reveal that the little tyke has eight syllables in her full name — on those rare occasions when her parents are mad at her and have to escalate to the full name, eight syllables will be awesome. As an “eighter” myself, I can tell you that by the time your parents have spit the whole thing out, they’ve forgotten why they were mad at you!

This means that we’re looking at the first-ever Guest Week at Sheldon next week; Dave’s a pro and managed to put together a great, 13 day story to run around ________’ birth, but let’s give the guy some time to get caught up and recharge.

Well wishes, monetary gifts, and posters of Shakira for the happy family may be sent via Fleen.

New podcast debuts tonight!

As part of the revitialization of Boxcar Comics and the group’s continuing effort to promote themselves publicly in a cross-functional manner, we have created a brand new podcast at TalkShoe called the Boxcar Comics Hobo Jamboree!

What is our podcast about? Good question — one that we will be answering tonight during our first broadcast recording TONIGHT at 8:00 PM CST! The goal moving forward is to talk about the world of webcomics from the creator’s perspective. We’ll cover everything about the creative process — including how we come up with ideas for jokes and storylines, artistic technique, promotion, planning, audience reaction and criticism.

If you are a fan of HalfPixel‘s Webcomics Weekly, you’ll find a lot to enjoy here, but Boxcar Comics Hobo Jamboree won’t be weekly right out of the gate. We plan on hosting our show once a month. If there is greater demand or we have more topics we want to discuss, we might bump that up to two a month.

Tom Brazelton will be the moderator for each show and various members of the collective will rotate in and out as their schedules permit. If you can’t join us live, remember that you can download the show from TalkShoe. We’ll be adding it to iTunes in the near future.

Kris Straub conquers the world!

In a week or two, my contract at my day job is drawing to a close, and I’m going to be looking for part-time or other contract work so I can pay rent. But … I think Starslip Crisis is already enough to bring in a full-time wage — at least if it’s cultivated. Right now we really don’t spend much time together, and eight hours of my day are occupied elsewhere, so I’m either at work, or we’re shipping, and not growing Starslip into the bastion of sci-fi humor it should be.

I’m looking forward to having a couple weeks to regroup and refocus, and I’ve been planning out the year.

If I can come back to webcomics full-time — if you help me come back to webcomics full-time (!) — then I will not do Starslip Crisis, or Chainsawsuit, or a twice-weekly pop culture strip, or a thrice-weekly brand-new strip.

No, friends — I will do all of the above. I have concrete plans for four concurrent strips. I just need the time to give to them.

Not content to conquer the Gervaisian webcomic mindspace, Owen Dunne’s running a banner ad promising the return of You Damn Kid … sort of.

And for those of you that need to point friends or family to a compact What are these webcomics, anyway? primer, Lea Hernandez has you covered.