I’ll leave it to the boss herself:

It turns out that sometimes if you and @ppcrotty, @WhitLeopard, @RoxieReads, and @jhautsethi work very hard, people bring you cake. Who knew?!

That from Gina Gagliano, head of Random House Graphic, at the party thrown to celebrate the first releases from the imprint, and a debut year that will see twelve graphic novels for kids released¹. She and her stalwart staff² — senior editor Whitney Leopard, designer Patrick Crotty, and publicist/marketer Nicole Valdez — talked about the books out now (and coming soon) that they really want you to know about. And since I accepted a piece of their cake, I feel like I should hold up my end of the bargain.

• Gagliano’s choice for favorite upcoming book is Witchlight by Jessi Zbarsky, which she described as a girl with swords meets a girl that does magic, they have adventures and fall in love and in the middle there’s food which is just … I’m in. Look for it on 14 April.
• Leopard wants you to read The Runaway Princess (out for the past three week) by Johan Troïowski, because it’s got an interactive element in each chapter, as the reader is asked to do or achieve something, and also Stepping Stones (due 5 May), the first kids book by Lucy Knisley, who is the best.
• Crotty, coming from a background of indie comics, particularly wants you to read Bug Boys (released three days ago) by Laura Knetzger, noting how many of the great comics we’re getting these days wouldn’t exist without the indie creators doing 8 to 12 page minis, never anticipating they’ll be collected in a print volume. The Bug Boys are for kids but have a Charlie Brownesque philosophical side, and Knetzger keeps cranking out the minis, so it won’t be long before the second collection arrives.
• Valdez allowed that there was some disagreement over who would get to talk about Bug Boys, but was enthused to talk instead about Aster And The Accidental Magic (coming in two and a half weeks) by Thom Pico and Karensac. This girl is me is the message she wanted to convey, an idea that underlies RHG’s mission — to put a graphic novel in the hands of every kid in America³.

They’re on their way. Gagliano talked about how she started in the industry fifteen years ago, how comics were regarded with suspicion but now schools and libraries are their biggest champions. There’s a lot of hands out there that still haven’t gotten comics, and lot of minds that still have to develop that higher level of reading, and she and her team are going to do their level best to fix that.

And yes, publishing is a very Manhattan-centric business, but the crowd was overflowing the aisles at Books Of Wonder, and not just because of the cake. There were younger folk there, mid-20s a lot of them, ready to answer that call and pitch their ideas and end up on some of those shelves. Here’s to finding out what makes it there in the coming years.

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¹ Out of a total twenty four for Random House Children’s Books. No pressure, just got to make up half the output for one of the most storied publishing imprints in history in your first year, that’s all.

² Random House associate publisher Judith Haut, while not part of Gagliano’s staff, is the one that decided that there needed to be a RHG and found the right person for the job.

³ Quoting Gagliano, and echoing their tagline, A graphic novel on every bookshelf. Whoever that kid is, wherever that shelf is, Leopard told us back in July, they will have at least one title that makes that kid say This is the book I was waiting for.

What? No, not EmCity, although we will be talking about that presently.

Today I’ve got my eye on the SF Comics Fest, via the good folks at the Cartoon Art Museum. For those of you that haven’t seen it in past years, SF Comics Fest is an association of comics-related events (like Will Eisner Week) taking place in and around the Bay Area, in a sort of mutual non-aggression pact. This year’s events will run from 29 February¹ through 8 March and will include:

• 29 Feb: San Francisco Youth Justice Comic Con A free event for youth blending activism with comics, anime and pop culture. The event will feature zine-making, a drawing jam, a cosplay parade, exhibitor booths, and workshops facilitated by local artists and activists.
• 1-7 Mar: Will Eisner Week Read a graphic novel, encourage others to do so. Yeah, I know, for most of us this is better known as “every week”, but now’s your chance to get evangelical about it.
• 7 Feb: Eisner Edition Saturday Cartooning for Kids There’s monthly Saturday afternoon cartooning workshops (underwritten by the NCS Foundation) that run from 1:00pm to 2:30pm at the Cartoon Art Museum, and March’s will focus on the legacy of Eisner. You can get more information on the full Spring 2020 series here.
• 8 Mar: 35th Anniversary Spirit of Mini Comics Challenge It’s the 35th anniversary of CAM, and they’re marking the occasion by seeking to make 35 minicomics in one day. Demonstrations, creative coaching and materials provided at the event, which is free and open to the public.
• 8 Mar: 25th Anniversary of MUTTS Patrick McDonnell will be talking about his work and signing afterwards; in keeping with the theme of MUTTS, representatives of Muttville senior dog rescue will be there to talk about adopting older dogs. Muttville outreach from 5:30pm to 6:30pm, and McDonnell from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. CAM members free with RSVP, others US$10 and up, with book purchase and membership options, head over to Guestlist for all means of attendance.

There’s plenty of other events happening around the Bay Area, which you can catch up with here; if you want to host your own event, you can sign up here, which means the list of SFCF events will only grow from here on out. Anybody on the left coast in two-three weeks should keep an eye out for what’s going on while you’re there.

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¹ Also the 13th birthday of my evil twin, Howard Tayler. At last, he is a man!

Hey, y’all. Got some time-sensitive info for you, and some advance-planning info for you. Let’s do this.

• Time Sensitive! Iron Circus Comics has a sale going on. In honor of Horny Werewolf Day tomorrow, there’s discounts to be had on all of their funtime sexytime offerings.

  Until the famous gettin’ it on holiday is done, you get 30% on books, softcover and hard¹ PDFs, special editions, and even the already-discounted scratch-and-dent copies of The Art of Kaneoya Sachiko, The Complete Curvy, Crossplay, Iris and Angel, TJ and Amal (including the prequel and side story), Letters for Lucardo, all the various Smut Peddlers, and Yes, Roya. Get ’em while the gettin’s good.

• Advance Planning! Ngozi Ukazu just a few updates away from the big finish of Check, Please!, and getting ready to release the second half of the story in print form through :01 Books. Check Please: Sticks And Scones drops on 7 April, and to mark the occasion, Ukazu’s going on book tour.

  Her travel kicks off on the 4th, with launch day in her hometown of Austin, before heading on to DC, Brooklyn, Long Island, suburban Boston, and Chicago over the next ten days. Now’s the time to prepare yourself to attend an event if you can, but also to say goodbye to the best bros² you could ever wish for.

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¹ Hurr, hurr.

² I have so much headcanon about what Ransom and Holster will get up to. They are basically going to have to live next door to each other for the rest of their lives or they’ll be too sad. Also, Shitty will be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court some day.

This is going to be somewhat brief, as we at Fleen (and by that I mean Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin) are working up another posting in response to the breaking news.

Until then, I hope that you saw what would have been yesterday’s most important story but for other (and much happier) breaking news — the Creators For Creators Grant applications are open:

HEYYY! The Creators for Creators grant is open for 2020! We give $30k to an unpublished creator or duo to support the creation of their debut work. It’s funded entirely by comics creators. Check out our submissions page creatorsforcreators.org/submissions-2/ and follow @Creators4C for updates!

That from Kelly Sue DeConnick, all around amazing comics writer and one of the original — let’s say signatories — that established the C4C grant back in Aught-Sixteen. Since then there have been three recipients¹; the fourth will receive:

[US]$30,000 to a single cartoonist or writer/artist duo in order to support the creation of a new and original work of a length between sixty-four and one hundred pages over the course of a single year.

In addition to the monetary support, the recipient of the grant will have access to mentorship from the experienced creators involved with Creators for Creators. Mentorship will cover almost every aspect of the comic-creating experience. The goal is to give the recipient a firm foundation in the creative, business, legal, and financial areas of the comics business.

The recipient has total control over how and where they choose to publish their work once it is completed, whether they choose to submit it to a creator-owned publisher or release it themselves in any format. Iron Circus Comics and Image Comics have both pledged to support the recipient by publishing their work, if the recipient so chooses. No matter their choice, the recipient retains all rights to their work.

Applicants (18 years and older) must not have had solo work published by a third party (anthologies and self-publishing are okay), and the work submitted for the grant (which must be 64-100 pages when complete) must not have been submitted for publication in the past year and must be original. The full guidelines, application [PDF], and release agreement [PDF] are at the C4C site; send them with your supporting materials to submissions2020 over at the creatorsforcreators site, which a dot-org. Applications must be received by 11 May 2020, and the recipient(s) will be announced in June.

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¹ Who mostly are not originally American/Canadian; there’s huge world of comics built out of experiences from outside North America, and we’re all luckier for getting to see them.

So I was going to be writing today about the official announcement, last week, that Queen Of The Sea (one of my very favorite books of last year) would be getting a sequel. Dylan Meconis had said as much, back in July when I last saw her, but the announcement made it officially official:

So some exciting news! There will be a sequel to Queen of the Sea!! There is exclusive sneak peek art and a lovely interview by @FuseEight right here.

Prince Of The City will pick up where Queen Of The Sea left off, but not for two and a half years, boo. Pages composed of watercolors take a hell of a long time to make, and Meconis has other projects in the meantime, like the History Smashers series (words by Kate Messner), which releases starting this July.

Like I said, I was going to be talking about all that today, but Meconis got upstaged a bit more than an hour ago, by an announcement of a new, ongoing project that she’ll be involved in:

I don’t want to brag or anything, but I turned my latest project in three days early.

My wife joked that I wouldn’t post about having a kid until we brought the baby home and I laughed because I’m not THAT paranoid but then it just kind of snuck up on me, and by that I mean “went into labor pre-dawn the day after turning in two huge sets of files” which is VERY me

Bringing a child into the world under the best of circumstances is an act of supreme optimism. Given the challenges we face now (and the women involved), I choose to see this birth as a declaration: the world had damn well better get its shit together and be a place worthy of this little one growing up, or it will be subjected kicking and screaming to ruthlessly logical — Vulcanesque, one might say — behavioral modification, until it does. Either way, we get a better world out of the deal.

Congratulations to Meconis, wife Katie Lane¹ (of Work Made For Hire), and to this perfect child, blessed with the two most amazing moms anybody could ever ask for. Associate Child Oversight Specialist President Teddy Roosevelt is reportedly preparing to help shepherd the new member of the family until they’re ready to apply to Starfleet Academy, or take up a career in nonsparkly vampiric piracy, whichever they choose.

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¹ Light-ning Law-yer!!

We at Fleen have been very excited for goin’ on two years now about the launch of Random House Graphic, and about Gina Gagliano being named to head up the imprint. We’ve followed the announcements, watched the first book hit release, looked out the next couple of years at what’s coming down the line.

Now it’s time to celebrate, y’all:

Come meet the Random House Graphic publishing team: GINA GAGLIANO, WHITNEY LEOPARD, PATRICK CROTTY, and NICOLE VALDEZ, as they discuss the launch of this new imprint, featuring The Runaway Princess by JOHAN TRIANOWSKI and Bug Boys by LAURA KNETZGER. [emphasis original]

That from the events page of Books Of Wonder, the venerable New York children’s bookstore. They’ll be hosting the imprint launch party on Thursday, 13 February, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at their 18th Street location, in the vicinity of Union Square Park. Both Bug Boys and The Runaway Princess will be available for purchase, and each copy sold will be matched with a donated copy to a children’s charity. Light snacks provided, but I’d grab an insurance slice beforehand if I were you.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how publishing remains overwhelmingly white, but if you kept an eye on the acquisition announcements, RHG is buying books from a lot of POC, and mostly from women. True, graphic novels take a long time and we won’t see a lot of them until next year or later, but it’s clear that Gagliano, Leopard, et al, have decided that they’re going to be part of a solution to books only reflecting a small percentage of the population, and I intend to thank them in person for it. If I see you there, say hi.

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• It was a tough 2019 for Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan; they worked up two books for print, and Moen had a well-documented (and damn brave of her to do so) intensive treatment for her mental illness. So starting in late December, they turned Oh Joy, Sex Toy over to guest strips for six weeks, to give themselves a break.

  Yesterday, they returned, and with the absolute happiest strip I’ve ever seen them collaborate on, and they do a comic all about ways to bring people to orgasm. Take a look at the panel I tweeted yesterday and tell me it’s coming from a place other than pure, contented happiness¹. Welcome back, Matt and Erika, and glad to see the break² did you some good.

• Also taking a break for about the same block of time, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh, who put Barbarous on pause to get caught up on other projects. The first three or so chapters of Barbarous were a measured introduction to the characters, always showing rather than telling³.

  Chapter four started to really build in the possible conflicts that the outside world might bring to Percy and Leeds, and chapter five got us back into the swing of things after a lengthy hiatus, dropping us into the middle of a magical attack from an thus-far unknown adversary. Things are speeding up and now is the ideal time to get caught up if you weren’t.

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¹ In this case, from having a squeaky-clean butthole.

² Or at least a bidet attachment.

³ Not only are the pair masterful storytellers, Ota’s one of the best character and costume designers in comics; nobody pays as much attention to how clothes accent a character except Kosuke Fujishima.

Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks may be the most potent combination in nonfiction comics. How else to explain how they can spin such engagement and — dare I say it? — suspense from events past and in the public eye? They took the recent history of the three women who lived among Primates, and now they’re looking at the history of women in space in Astronauts, a copy of which was provided by :01 Books; pretty much everything in the book is available to anybody with access to interlibrary loan, but let’s tag this with spoilers, ahoy anyway.

Compared to Primates, Ottaviani and Wicks take a different approach this time around; last time they partnered, the book was told by an omniscient narrator, observing what Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas did in their research on chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (respectively). In Astronauts, the bulk of the story is told as remeniscences of its central subject, Mary Cleave, with forays into the experiences of other women who came before her.

In case you don’t recognize her name, Dr Cleave (biologist, ecologist, environmental engineer, and pilot from the age of 14) was a member of the 9th NASA astronaut group — the second recruited following efforts by Nichelle Nichols to broaden the pool of applicants beyond white guy test pilots — and really only applied because being an astronaut meant you had to qualify as a jet pilot and she always wanted to fly a plane with an afterburner. She twice flew into space on Atlantis, specialized in the operation of the shuttle’s robotic arm, and was instrumental in working out the design and operation of the NASA space toilet. After retiring from flight status, she served as head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

And in telling her story, she tells the story of Valentina Tereshkova, of the thirteen women who passed every test that Mercury Seven did but weren’t allowed to join the astronaut corps, of the designers that made the Shuttle, of the astronaut one class in front of her that had the weight and eyes of the world on her as NASA’s first woman in space.

Oh, and she tells about how it took NASA 23 missions before they figured out that zero-G crumbs from sandwiches could be avoided by using tortillas, thanks to fellow STS-61-B rookie Rodolfo Neri Vela’s meal preferences. Sometimes the obvious answers aren’t obvious until you let somebody with a different background into your club, y’know?

Mary Cleave may not be the most famous astronaut you’ve ever heard of, but Ottaviani and Wicks found maybe the most typical member of the NASA astronaut program — whip smart, widely experienced, endlessly curious, problem solvers, people who maybe didn’t set out to be astronauts but wound up there because they had the skills to get there¹.

Being born in 1947, Cleave’s lifetime parallels that of crewed spaceflight; she was solo piloting about the time that Yuri Gagarin took the first human spaceflight. She was just about the same age at the time of her astronaut selection that Neil Armstrong was at his. She helped make the Shuttle workable for extended missions, and her first flight helped work out the construction techniques that would be used to build the International Space Station. She was instrumental in diverting Eileen Collins away from a career as a Mission Specialist and towards that of Pilot and Commander. Like I said, typical.

Astronauts is bookended with the idea of what an astronaut looks like, starting with a floating figure doffing the pressurized launch suit and only revealing Cleave on page two, and ending with pages of photos: Tereshkova, Ride, and Cleave, their cartoon representations next to their pictures.

This is followed by a two page spread of people whose faces we should know — Guion Bluford, Ellison Onizuka, Mae Jemison, Sunita Williams, Leland Melvin, Chris Hadfield, and more². It’s perfectly synced with the message of the book, and if, like me, you’ve spent your life looking up at those explorers that have left the bounds of Earth, it’s likely to inspire a tear or two.

We, as a species, made it to space, to the moon, to semi-permanent residence in orbit, because of women. We’re going back to the moon, and we’re not forgetting half of humanity this time. We’ll be going further in the future and that will require astronauts, who can no longer be picked from less than 6% of the planet’s population. Ottaviani and Wicks want you to remember that, and wants everybody reading Astronauts to ask themselves one question: What do you want to be?

Astronauts, by Jim Ottaviani (words) and Maris Wicks (pictures) is available at your local bookstore or comic shop starting today. It doesn’t shy away from the fact that we’ve lost astronauts, and you may need to explain about Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia; assuming that’s not a problem, it’s an ideal read for any wannabe astronauts or space enthusiasts with the patience to get through 160 pages.

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¹ Or, as Cleave put it, I got my first job at NASA because I could fix the toilet.

² There are three photos that I didn’t recognize, and while I get the point Wicks and Ottaviani are making — astronauts can look like anybody — my only wish for the book is that might have included a key to the astronauts on those nearly-final pages.

Well, last week certainly sucked, but I’m back in the swing of things, and eager to talk about some books with you. First up: Go With The Flow by Lily Williams (words and pictures) and Karen Schneemann (also words). A review copy — that is, an advanced, not-final-version-of-the-book review copy, so your reading experience may be slightly different than mine — was sent by the fine folks at :01 Books a few weeks back, just as release day was happening. I took the unusual step of waiting to write this review until I could discuss the book with somebody else (more on that in a moment), so for once what you’ll read here is not based solely on my reading and interpretation. Oh, and spoilers ahead.

This is a book about periods; having never had one, I talked with my wife at some length about her experience with the topic, through the lens of several dozen years of having periods, to be sure that I wasn’t missing anything important. She assures me that GWTF gets it right, particularly its emphasis on the fact that no two period-havers¹ experience menstruation the same way. The framing story — high school, friends, mean girls, jerk bros, institutional sexism, screwing up and apologizing, crushes, and the rest of what it means to be a teen — provides a structure to hang the information on, without anything seeming preachy or lecturey.

Except for when it’s meant to. To the extent that there’s a single POV character in the circle of four besties, it’s Abby, the artsy, headstrong who sees something wrong and wants to do something about it. She’s joined by Brit (literary, reserved), Christine (blunt and sometimes inappropriate to hide her capital-F Feelings), and Sasha (new in school, picked on by the Mean Girls)². They’re all mad that period supplies are rarely stocked in the bathrooms (and when they are, they cost money³), but it’s Abby that cajoles (and sometimes browbeats) the others into her protests and letter-writing.

Abby’s assumptions that her friends feel about things as strongly as she does precipitates the big conflict moment in the story, and puts those friendships at risk. This part read particularly true, because we all ow that as teens, we don’t think through the consequences of our actions on those we care most about — oh, and she gets in trouble with Principal Condescending, too.

The crux of the story isn’t defeating institutional sexism — or even the localized, petty kind — but rather finding a way past that screw up. The fact that Abby’s Big Moment Of Protest resulted in positive notoriety and funding for period supplies throughout the district is less important than the fact that she grew as a person (not the mention the fact that she shouldn’t have had to go crowdfunding in the the first place).

And although Abby’s campaign for period justice forms the central plotline of the book, all four characters get their own time in the spotlight. Sasha adjusts to the new school with the help of her friends, and has the most typical social experience of sophomore year — first relationship, first experience with dating, etc. Brit deals with endometriosis and the time it keeps her from school, but is lucky enough to have supportive parents (at least one of whom is a doctor) and treatment by a specialist that hopefully knows what they’re doing⁴. Christine deals with an older dude negging the shit out of her in trying to scam his way to a physical relationship (and being too smart for his crap) while also dealing with her confusion over her own sexuality and her feelings for Abby⁵.

All of which is a lot to deal with in 330 pages or so, but Go With The Flow is more than up to the challenge of telling the story of friendships and periods, while simultaneously providing quality, truthful information about menstruation and more⁶. Oh and the art is inviting, with clear lines and distinct character silhouettes; there’s a variety of human shapes, sizes and ethnicities and nobody reading the book need feel it’s not for them.

I recommend it for anybody that’s having periods, had them in the past, can be expected to have them in the next couple years, or who knows anybody in any of the other categories; let’s say ages 10 and up. It’s available now via your local bookstore or comic shop.

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¹ The book both acknowledges and honors the experience of gender non-conforming and trans folk with respect to periods, and notes that some trans women can develop hormonal cycles that mimic period symptoms

² You can meet adult versions of them in The Mean Magenta, the webcomic that Schneemann and Williams started to discuss periods, and which became the basis for the book.

³ The rather condescending principal who explains to Abby that no there’s no money to stock the supplies in the bathroom and it’s not like the boys get free jock itch cream refuses to acknowledge that this is a hygiene issue, and he’d never not think about stocking toilet paper. He dodges the question of why the football team got new uniforms and equipment after only two years if there’s no money in the budget.

⁴ If you follow Williams on her twitterfeed, she’s open about her own experience with endometriosis, and the shamefully poor understanding of it that doctors — even OB/GYNs! — have of the condition and its treatments. It took Williams fourteen years to get a diagnosis and it looks like Brit will be far luckier in that regard, but the story ends without a definitive solution for her. The webcomics of adult Brit indicate that she’s mitigated the worst of her symptoms, but still way the heck over at one end of the menstrual experience spectrum.

⁵ Like Brit’s endometriosis and Abby’s quest for gender equality, Christine’s story isn’t resolved by the end of the book. She pines, Abby doesn’t notice, Brit does, but they don’t come out and talk about it. Again, Williams and Schneemann really get what Teens and Feelings are like, and capture the awkwardness of trying to figure out who you are with laser clarity.

Judging by the adult versions of the characters from The Mean Magenta, Christine found a way to accept her feelings and keep her friendship with Abby. Oh, and Sasha appears to have a type — the dude she’s with in The Mean Magenta has a pretty strong resemblance to the first high school boyfriend from GWTF. I’m pretty sure it’s not the same dude, but maybe?

⁶ I came to the book prepared to learn a lot and found as I went along that my sex education back in school was pretty good. Granted, transgender and gender non-conforming people didn’t really come up but I would have been getting that information from about 1978-1985. I will say that there was some remarkably non-judgmental content back then about gay and lesbian people, and at least an acknowledgment of prominent individuals that had undergone what was termed sex reassignment (rather than gender confirmation) surgery.

I was lucky to grow up in a window of time post-sexual revolution, pre-Moral Majority culture wars, when truthful information was seen as the best way to deal with the still-new AIDS epidemic. Also, thank glob, I grew up in New Jersey. I had to explain the mechanics of human reproduction to more than one of my classmates when I got to college in Indiana, after there was a spate of sudden, unplanned marriages amongst dudes on my freshman dorm floor and their first girlfriends away from home.

After all the lost time, we’re just gonna start fresh next week. I’ll be spending the weekend celebrating St Groundhog’s Day which, while not as important to me as some folks, marks the weekend in 1991 when my wife and I first met. Y’all be safe, we’ll see each other on Monday.