You know it’s gonna be a good day when you get this in your mailbox from Tyler Martin:

We’re announcing the launch of Lunchbox Funnies, a new comics collective featuring some of the finest all-ages comics on the internet!

The term “all-ages� has become something of a mantra for our creators. We’ve each been working towards creating highly entertaining comics that can be enjoyed by beginning readers, teenagers, and adults alike. We’re convinced that “all-ages� doesn’t mean “just for kids,� but rather it’s a label that should apply to entertainment that allows for shared experiences across generational lines. Our creators benefited greatly from quality all-ages entertainment growing up, but these days stories that can be enjoyed by children and adults seems incredibly rare. Lunchbox Funnies wants to change that.

The lineup features:

• Aki Alliance by Ryan Estrada
• Astronaut Elementary by Dave Roman
• Butterfly by Dean Trippe
• Cow & Buffalo by Mike Maihack
• Lunchbox by Ovi Nedelcu
• Silent Kimbly by Ryan Sias
• Wally & Osborne by Tyler Martin
• Zip and Li’l Bit by Trade Loeffler

At the Lunchbox Funnies website, you’ll find links, news, and information for each of our comics and creators.

Plus, and this is just a personal observation, Lunchbox Funnies has two Ryans, which may be 50% more than any other webcomic collective! Except, um, The Ryans, which Ryan Sias and Ryan Estrada are already in, so it shouldn’t count.

So what could be better than Lunchbox Funnies launching? How about Abby L. taking some time out from deciding who’s webcomics-sexy to resume The Green Avenger after a brief hiatus. Plus, and this is just a person observational, I’m digging the textures that got used in today’s strip … kinda hazy on a cold day, kinda fuzzy like memories from too long ago. So what could be better than a strip coming back from hiatus?

How about a pair of one-year anniversaries? One year pretty much seems to be the make-or-break point for a webcomic … if you don’t find a voice and a style and an audience in that first year, you probably won’t ever. So congrats to Charles Smith of Justice City Recovery Center and Brian Oaster of Misunderstandings Between Friends. Plus, and this is just a personal observational, you’d be hard pressed to find two webcomics as opposite in intent and execution as JCRC and MBF, yet I believe there’s an excellent chance you’ll enjoy a readthrough of both of them. What could be better than that?

How about another new collective (dark themes here, kiddies … I especially like the warning about potential cannibalism), a brightly-colored new webcomic complete with advice column, and a new comixcast (it has cool beats, and it’s easy to dance to!) from exciting, exotic Ottawa? Plus, and this is just a person observation, there’s also a new interview regarding Diesel Powered Sweeties in Publishers Weekly. Pretty good deal for a Wednesday.

Corey Marie Parkhill of Scene Language sent a big box o’ comicky goodness to Fleen recently — well, okay, it was about two weeks ago, but it’s taken a while to plow through everything. Given how much was in the box, this was an extraordinarily cool thing to do.

What? You want contents? Check it: you got the Greatest Hits of collection Life’s So Rad, the Big Ol’ Book of BIZMAR anthology (that’s bunnies, insects, zombies, monkeys, aliens, and robots, with contributions from webcomics/indy comics creators), a stack of mini-comics, and more, all from Young American Comics.

The LSRGH collection is strips interspersed with commentary from Parkhill about what was going on in her life at the time, and how it affected the direction of the strip; interesting reading, but it sort of precludes a traditional review — it doesn’t really work to critique a life as it was lived. Likewise, anthologies are tough to put a single handle on when they contain so many contributors (dozens, in the case of BIZMAR), so suffice it to say that some contributions are better than others, and I found Stephen Notley‘s to be particularly funny.

Also, by a peculiar corinsidence, this year’s anthology from Young American, small town/BIG CITY, has open submissions until the 7th of March. Want to get in on the fun? Check out the guidelines. And even if you don’t want to get in on that fun, you can get in on other fun — this being the best bit of shameless self-promotion that we’ve received yet, we at Fleen have decided to share, and hereby announce our first ever contest with an actual prize.

You can win the Big Box o’ Comicky Goodness (books! minicomics! pins! stickers! a t-shirt, adult medium!) by sending the best response, in 25 words or less, to the question:

Send your entries to me (that would be gary), who can be reached at this here website (that would be Fleen), which is of the dot–com variety. Entries must be received by, let’s say, midnight EST (GMT – 5), Tuesday, the 23rd of January. Judges decisions are final, Fleen contributors and Ms Parkhill are not eligible, residents of Canada may be required to answer a skill-testing question, and we’ll contact you if you’re the winner. Good luck, everybody.

Science at its best, courtesy of Dinosaur Comics readers Alex Rea and Chris Berry.

For all those not present for The Proposal, the webcomics place to be this past weekend was at the SURPRISE! 30th birthday party in the studio/apartment space of one Mr Richard Stevens III. Apparently, there was other stuff for Stevens to celebrate this week as well.

There was fun and merriment; there was a coconut, drained of its life-giving milk by means of a power drill; there was a good-tempered small dog on floor cleanup duty; and there were hotdogs. Sadly, no HoDoLo (2-point-oh), but there was hotdog stew, a hotdog roller, and a birthday cake shaped like a hotdog.

There was a Wii, which meant there were Miis, and sketch battle, and dessert. Some ate enthusiastically (some suspiciously so), some with trepidation, and one was overheard to express some reluctance with regard to the spitty cake.

In the end, Stevens was rendered utterly speechless and befuddled that a bunch of jerks/friends could lie to him so convincingly. Thanks go to Crif Dogs (for the provender), Mer Gran (for organizing the damn thing), and to the plotters and conspirators: Jon Rosenberg, Phillip Karlsson, Jeff Rowland, Andy Bell, John Allison, Steven Cloud, Chris Hastings, and Tallahassee Econolodge (who made the cake). Also in attendance: Jeph Jacques, MC Frontalot, and a random hack journo.

Best of all: Rich Stevens will never, ever, believe anything that any of us has to say to him, ever again. Sweet.

Submitted with one comment: congrats, Eric & Weds.

Lotta confusion about what Scott Kurtz really means in his open letter; on first readthrough, I wasn’t entirely clear on what he was proposing and why, so I called him to ask. And just to save time, we’ll posit that Kurtz is one of the polarizing figures in webcomics, has pissed off people by word and deed (although in person, I’ve always found him to be amiable, and he’s always offered me every courtesy), and there’s baggage associated with almost everything he says. So underneath the strata of history and emotional color that will inevitably cloud the issue, what was he trying to say?

What he’s really interested in is preserving the experience of spreading out the Sunday comics on the floor. And he’s not sure how to do that, so he wants brainstorm around a table with people who might have ideas. Hey, that was easy.

This isn’t about getting webcomics into the newspaper (although that may be a side effect), and it isn’t about promoting webcomics to a wider audience (ditto), and it isn’t about artistic merit (where the opinions fly fast and thick, and Kurtz may have fatally insulted many who could have helped him). It’s about acknowledging that the comic strip is probably where everybody who’s reading this right now learned to read, and we may have seen the last generation to have that experience.

Partly that’s because the newspapers (as Dave Kellett reminds us — it’s about two dozen comments down the list) are on a downwards spiral, and partly because the creative community of comickers (both here, and in print) haven’t come up with the next the delivery mechanism, one that will have the same ubiquity that newspapers are losing. That’s the bottom line — Kurtz is writing open letters (instead of doing things behind the scenes) and trying to stir up some shit up out of a sense that we should preserve that experience for future generations.

And before you dismiss the need, that delivery mechanism ain’t webcomics — at least, not yet. Ask 1000 random people on the street if they read the comics in the paper today, and even if they didn’t, they at least know what you’re talking about. Everybody knows that The Newspapers carry The Comics. Ask those same 1000 people what webcomics they read today, maybe 40 will know that such a thing exists, and 20 will have an answer for you.

Right now, everything that we in the webcomics community have done to make “our” (speaking in the broadest possible sense) comics more widely known and acknowledged, for the past 10+ years, has resulted in that miniscule slice of the popular consciousness. What was long the most popular and widely-seen form of artistic expression in this country is experiencing rebirth and invigoration on the web, but only for the nichest of audiences.

What Kurtz is proposing isn’t an invasion/takeover that will save the newspaper comic, make the medium vital again, and reverse a decades-long decline in that particular sector of journalism. He’s proposing that we ask the question, What comes next? It’s going to require people on all sides of comics, people who love creating comics, and those who love reading them, and those who just want to make a buck helping the first group stay in contact with the second.

Maybe that means that webcomics do invade the papers on their swan dive towards oblivion, just long enough that a friggin’ lot of people pay attention to the comics page again, so they’ll follow to that next delivery mechanism; maybe not. He doesn’t know, I don’t know, and no one person knows enough about paper stock, advertising, finance, postal rates, hosting, intellectual property, marketing, and each of a dozen other areas of enquiry that all bear on this issue. But a group of people comparing notes on what’s worked for them and (just as importantly) what’s failed for them, might point everybody in new directions.

Collectives are one way to exchange that knowledge, but collectives (as we see them now) consist of like-minded people mostly moving in parallel paths; maybe what’s needed for a good cross-pollination of ideas is a full-bore collision of minds from lots of different disciplines. We’re making progress, no doubt, but evolution is a slow, incremental process, and maybe what we need is that metaphorical meteor crash to jump-start things.

And the result of such a collision (if it ever occurs) may well be We can’t come to consensus, or Y’know, I think what we’re doing now is the best we can do and we all give up and go home — hey, dinosaurs were even cooler than comic strips, and today they only exist as a narrow slice of their once-thunderous diversity, so why should comic strips be any different?

Or such a collision might spawn a whole bunch of other questions that have to be answered before we see where this medium is going. Or it could be that the necessary personalities can’t really exist in the same room in significant numbers, and we get a lot of light and heat and drama and not much substance.

One way to find out.

Love him or hate him, noble effort in service to art or clusmy ego-stroking self-promotion exercise, turning point in the history of webcomics or just shouting on the internet, it doesn’t really matter. Kurtz has started a discussion that I think is worth having. As much as I can, I’ll contribute. Anybody else wants to join in? I got your first beer.

A quick investigation has shown that I let my IEEE membership lapse some years ago, so perhaps I will not be murdered by Peter Cropes.

In other news, the number of webcartoonists willing to participate in the Survey of Doom has taken an unexpected jump over the last 36 hours or so, with seven more people opting in. I haven’t had time to reply to you all individually, but thank you all very much for your willingness to participate.

We’re still only about halfway to the arbitrary minimum of 100 creators to achieve something like statistical significance, with the 31 Jan deadline approaching.

And in other-other news, I had a long conversation with Scott Kurtz yesterday regarding his Open Letter. I think there’s been some misunderstanding about his intent likely stemming from (this is Kurtz, after all) some of his word choices. It’ll take me a little while to work out all my impressions and get ’em written up, but the Reader’s Digest version is:

• He’s not proposing what you think he’s proposing
• What he is proposing is worth doing
• He’s doing it for the right reasons
• I’m in

More tomorrow.

I’m in the IEEE member directory!

So PvP was down for a while yesterday, but the wait was worth it. Because when it came back, there was Scott Kurtz’s open letter to Bill Amend, et. al., and I’ve been giving it a good, hard think. Short form — newspaper syndication of comics is a troubled business model, webcomics are (let’s be honest) off in our own little corner of the world, and:

Some of you might think that new guard, the webcomics can bring these changes. But I think that’s an incorrect notion. We have no credibility outside of our own community and circles. We have little knowledge of how newspapers work and we have no connections or trusted working relationships with the people in power. We’re limited to the web and when we try to cross over we have less than stellar results.

The syndicates are failing online. Comics.com, Comics Sherpa, Ucomics. Nobody cares. They’re hiring hipsters to bring new talent into their existing system but they meet resistance with such piecemeal actions I think.

More and more I’ve been wondering if there’s a halfway point where we can all meet. What we need is a bridge. Someone who understands both sides and can work with both sides. Someone who has the time, which means someone who’s probably retired from comics or is superhuman in is ability to meet his daily syndicate schedule. Someone who is willing and able to work alongside or outside is syndicate contractual obligations.

What would happen if I got myself, Bill Amend, Bill Hollbrook, Joey Manley, Robert Khoo and a handful of forward thinking features editors all into a room together?

Who’s interested and what’s our first step?

Answers to those three questions:

1. I don’t know, but I would pay American cash money to see that meeting happen.
2. I am.
3. Not sure yet, but check back tomorrow; I’ll be talking with Kurtz later today, and we’ll have to see what sort of ideas might develop.

Oh, Achewood, why must you be so brilliant? Although the crossroads of hip-hop and obsessive, geeky pursuits has been well-travelled for some time now, I don’t think anybody but Chris Onstad could have come up with the term hip-hobbit.

And yet, Nice Pete (who, it must be said, has some anger issues) has heard Téodor and Ray mocking the song stylings of Mister Band. Can this possibly bode well? Is this the stealthy start of another run of sheer briliance? Onstad himself has indicated that he doesn’t plan story arcs, they just happen, so we’ll just have to see.