Joanna, you may be dead, and you may have a bit of a drinking problem, but if only for your brave battles against the Catcoon, I must have a representation of you!

Also, whoever bought this before I was even aware that it existed: I hate you and everything you stand for.

First dates for Scott McCloud’s Making Comics Tour announced; we at Fleen will do our best to cover various stops by McCloud and family.

Interesting bit o’ writing (on the main page now, it’ll be here in a week or so) from Scott Kurtz over at PvP; he’s talking about his treatment of his character, Jade (and by extension, his wife, Angela). I find it interesting that as Kurtz tells us he’s looking to write Jade differently, he’s also drawing her differently.

Her facial expressions are more subtle and varied than we’ve seen in the past, and seem to give her a wider range of emotional depth. Compare the last time Jade had a major role in a storyline to recent strips. Heck, compare the fourth panel of that last strip to the others on the same day to get a good idea of ‘old Jade eyes’ vs. ‘new Jade eyes’. Opening up those pupils just a little bit really has a lot of impact.

From the depths of Bulgaria (where one is reminded that vampires are biting danger!) to musings over the Forces Sweetheart, things are never quite right for the residents of Tackleford Metropolitan Borough. That, naturally, is why right-thinking folk love Scary Go Round so damn much, and why they should all be perusing John Allison’s fourth collection of SGR strips, The Retribution Index.

Some things you should note as you peruse:

• This book features Allison switching back and forth from his Illustrator mode to his hand-drawn mode; both are beautiful to behold.
• Reading SGR in large doses reminds one that Allison never forgets anything; note the nunnery that is suggested to Amy, which rather than merely being a throwaway gag, becomes a plot point more than a year later.
• This book does not include the story “Oldbourne”, which starts in the archives here; this is a great shame because “Oldbourne” featured my favoritest SGR moment of all time: I trod on Lego! The expressions on Shelley in this strip are a marvel and make me smile every time I think of them; I only hope there are enough smiles left for me in the rest of the book.
• Don’t worry, there are actually plenty of smiles! Especially considering this book covers a period of time when Esther was becoming a more prominent character. Esther’s growth from walk-on extra to mysterious background player to full cast member has been wonderful to behold.
• This book also does not include Allison’s year-end music reviews, or a two-week guest stint that featured some beauteous work; however, this allows plotlines to resolve more quickly, so that’s all right.
• There are some odd printing artifacts on certain pages, where blacks are not entirely opaque. This is actually pretty interesting, as it allows the reader a peek behind the scenes to see what the character models look like in all their layers.
• Finally, as an extra-special bonus, each chapter is introduced and commented upon by Shelley Winters, who is a small friend to all of us. There are trials and tribulations for Shelley in the book, but all is well in the end.

To summarize, this is a pretty wonderful book, and I think that you would enjoy it very much! So please be certain to purchase and read TRI at the first opportunity, and watch out for devil bears.

Getting back to the Wapsi Square book review (down there somewheres), there’s some new reveals on Tina over at Wapsi Square this week. Note the different text color? Hmmmm. Very hmmmm.

Also, today’s Achewood features a description of a coffee machine that would make people who like that sort of thing go into anacoffylactic shock. Seriously, a fully-articulated syrup nozzle? I don’t even drink coffee, and that’s sounding cool.

Phil & Kaja Foglio are back with the fifth Girl Genius collection, Agatha Heterodyne and the Clockwork Princess; for regular readers of Girl Genius, it’s more of the same: high drama mixed with hard slapstick mixed with steampunk romance in a world “where the Industrial Revolution became an all-out war”. Our Heroine continues her journeys with Master Payne’s Circus of Adventure, trying to keep a step ahead of the dangers loosed upon the world by madboys (or “Sparks”, to be polite). There’s monsters and mutants, random mechanical beasties (or “clanks”, to be polite), and the danger that the world might find out who she really is.

The Folgios move the story along at a rapid clip, revealing more of the political situation of Europe under the Pax Wulfenbach, more of the history of the Jägermonsters, and more of Agatha’s mother (and her parents). There’s going be to hard times ahead for the Girl Genius, trials and tribulations and not much fun for quite a while. But it seems that it will all work out in the end (or was that the beginning?), and in the mean time, it’s a beautifully-drawn, fun read.

We told you about it here, and the lads from Terror Island have delivered! Thanks to Kris Straub for hosting: Ham!

You’ve got just about all of webcomics represented on The Ham Project, even if some of them didn’t quite get the idea, which was to draw Tim Buckley with hands of ham. There’s some obvious glee in these drawings, but I’m certain that it’s all meant in good fun, and that Buckley will be taking it as such. With any luck, this could turn into the new, hot meme and displace Batgirl from her throne.

PS: See? I was telling the truth about Dave Kellett!

I like Wapsi Square a lot. I like how it transformed itself from a slice-of-life strip to something with mysterious, supernatural overtones so smoothly, you almost didn’t notice it happening. And with Paul Taylor’s new omnibus collection, Wapsi Square 2001 — 2004, we can watch that transformation all over again.

Into the life of ordinary 20-something Monica is thrown a single magical (if goofball) element, almost a throwaway, early in the life of the strip. Things settled back down to lighthearted fun, and even the return of the supernatural was played more for laughs than anything else. Ah, but since then — our goofball seems to have quite a history, and Our Heroine’s personal experience is tied up in prophecy and dangerous responsibility.

A key thing, easily noticed in the collected strips, is the emphasis that Taylor puts on what’s often an invisible art: lettering. When the script face changes, big, important things are happening. Whether it’s the fractured components of an ancient chimera reincarnated as drunken college girls named Brandi, Bud, and Jin (heh, I just got that), or a neighborhood barrista who appears to be a font of insight and wisdom (with a focus on what’s important), you know that Taylor has plans and ideas for all of these characters.

The planning brought to the characters is notable even in one-shots. For instance, this lady, seen in exactly one strip so far. The story tells us she’s an industrial designer of custom brassieres, but her word balloons are all scratchy, meaning that she may be supernatural. Looking at that scarf around her neck, I can almost imagine Taylor deciding, One day she stretched a polymer cable too far; it snapped and cut her throat, leaving her voicebox damaged and her neck scarred.

Beats me if that’s her actual backstory, but rest assured, Taylor has one for her, and everybody else in the strip. He’s just doling out the details one at a time. And that’s the essence of good storytelling — show, don’t tell. Taylor mentioned in San Diego having ideas for the next five years running around his head, and looking at the stories told in just the first three, I believe him. If you haven’t read Wapsi Square before, WS2-2 is the perfect introduction.

My respect for Kristofer Straub’s Starslip Crisis jumped a couple of notches while I was reading his second collected volume, Sparkling Diplomacy. The book covers the daily strip from October 19, 2005 to May 22, 2006, and lays the foundation for the titular crisis that forms the spine of the overall story.

The actual cause and nature of the crisis aren’t revealed in the strips contained in this book (I guess you’ll just have to buy book 3 when it comes out), but the seeds of it are there. What looks like a slight, throwaway gag about men and women remembering conversations differently takes on a whole new significance in the light of later events. What appears to be a bit of background detail will play a crucial and dramatic role months later. All these hints were always there — they’re just easier to see when reading the story in big chunks (literally so — as in the first collection, the strips in SD are printed larger than their own-screen equivalents, making those small details easier to notice).

Once again, Straub has added commentary and biographical info on the dramatis personae throughout the book; especially in the case of Lord Murdertron, these are helpful in understanding the characters better. Add in the usual top-notch job from Straub in keeping the story (and the funny) rolling along day after day in the context of a larger dramatic story arc, and you’re left with a must-read. Sadly, there is one down note in an otherwise wholly-enjoyable collection: Straub has opted to keep his barely-concealed, vicious character assassination of T Campbell in the collection, slightly marring an otherwise sterling effort. He makes up for it by including his contribution to the Blank Label Comics Hurricane Telethon, so we’ll let it slide this time.

Lulu did their usual bang-up job on the printing, although it appears that they’ve moved to a less-white paper stock; other Blank Label books have a brighter white on the page, where SD is a somewhat muted cream color. Restful, but brighter might have been better.

What can I say? It’s Flight 3, it’s awesome, it’s got megatalents like Kazu Kibiushi and Kean Soo and Phil Craven editing. Every piece in the book is breathtakingly beautiful to behold.

But it’s taken a bit of bit of a turn this time around. It seems that creators that did light-hearted whimsy in Flight 2 go for something grimmer this time around, and vice versa. Michael Gagné’s Inner Sanctum in F2 featured a little alien-planet fox in a rollicking adventure that was a little dangerous, but all turned out well. In F3‘s Underworld, the fox struggles heroically only to die at the end, and be reborn as something harder. In F2, Bannister presented Dust On The Shelves, a meet-cute story with the love of your life in a comic store; F3‘s So Far, So Close is an almost meet-cute, with the participants parting ways forever.

Kean Soo’s Last Things Last (F2) is a heartbreaking autobiographical story about letting go a loved one; Jellaby: The Tea Party (F3) is lighthearted and fun. Most startling, however, is probably newcomer Azad Injejikian’s Polaris, which starts as a quiet story about a little girl who’s different and just wants to be accepted … and ends with the destruction of all humanity. Great story, though.

So call the theme of F3 “Let’s mix things up” and accept that you’re going to love it. Also, kudos to the entire crew for getting a major publisher, Ballantine, behind F3; it was a coup two years ago to get Flight published by Image, as it put the book into every comic book shop in the country. Ballantine, though — they can put F3 into every bookstore, period. The wider distribution is only going to bring more people to this work, and that’s a great thing.

Finally, thanks to Injejikian, Kibiushi, Johane Matte, and Rodolphe Guenoden, who were kind enough to sketch in my copy at San Diego — inks over pencils, y’all. These people are artists.