Editor’s note: It’s all Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeapuin today, chiming in from the Lyon BD festival. Well, except for the Spam of the day, that’s me.

Guess what happens at the beginning of June? That’s right, Lyon BD Festival, and just like in 2017 and 2018 your correspondent was there to cover it.

One characteristic aspect of Lyon BD is that it lacks a congress-center-like space as a central hub: Quai des Bulles in Saint Malo has the Palais du Grand Large, Colomiers has the Hall Comminges, and that is without mentioning the convention centers housing the various anime cons. As a result, when the Place des Terreaux had to go into renovations this year, meaning they couldn’t erect tents to host booths like the previous years, Lyon BD had to split itself between the Town Hall where it usually resides and the Palais de la Bourse) a few blocks away.

But regardless, Lyon BD always sets up or encourages more exhibitions that they have space in the main locations for, spilling them in many public places. The lobby of a small theater/comedy scene? Yup. The town halls for three boroughs? You bet’cha. A local bookshop? Of course. A hospital lobby? Been there, done that. An underground parking space? That, too. Contrary to Angoulême it does not feel quite like comics taking over the town, because Lyon is just too big, but they’re getting close.

So while sub-par planning on my part prevented me from attending professional day on Friday or entering the main locations, I nevertheless had a full day going to and fro between the different exhibitions¹. My favorite piece was in the Héro-ïne-s exhibition, one of the new pieces recently introduced from international creators, called Umah-Mah, by Thomas von Kummant (the names at the top may be familiar: Umpah-Pah was an early work of theirs, from just before they started Astérix). What if Sacagawea was a badass warrior, not merely saving hapless European explorers ready to walk into every trap, but able of single-handedly hunting buffalo armed with but a tomahawk, and striking fear in the hearts of her enemies, becoming single-handedly responsible for the success of the expedition? That’s Umah-Mah in a nutshell, since that is pretty much the plot of Umpah-Pah that von Kummant references².

The day was capped by an opening party, the first of its kind, with a dozen artists including Boulet and Luke McGarry drawing live on a small scene over music they chose (one or two at a time!), with in the middle a zombie-themed drawn concert on the main scene, featuring Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead) and
Julien Limonne.

P.S. I should mention Boulet and Cy directly switched to covering the Annecy animation festival as in past years. Since the two festivals arrange themselves to be set up on successive weeks, couldn’t they coordinate to give poor creators a day of rest?

Spam of the day:

If you’d not prefer not to recive future emails Unsubcribe here
480 Walnut Drive Penn, ND 58362

Hey, I don’t want to alarm you, but apparently Penn, North Dakota is literally about six small blocks, a car repair shop, and a bar, situated on maybe eight streets total, none of which is called Walnut Drive. Weird! You’re referring me to a place that doesn’t exist, no doubt by accident.

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¹ Note to the lowlife who stole my bike: I hope it gets stolen back from you at the most inconvenient time possible. And that you get caught, of course.

² Umpah-Pah actually takes place in the somewhat extrapolated context of a French expeditionary force reaching New World shores in the 18th century (e.g. they end up encountering a Prussian expeditionary force; Goscinny’s penchant for playing with history did not start with Astérix), but the parallels are otherwise striking.

And by That Guy, I mean Alex Jones, who has a history of losing (or at least settling and admitting he was wrong) when his bluster and terrible behavior actually arrives in court. Matt Furie, on the other hand, is now two-for-two in his efforts to take various MAGA types and CHUDs to task for turning his cartoon frog into a symbol of white supremacy and Nazism.

You may recall that Furie sued a guy that appropriated Pepe to use in an anti-Muslim children’s book¹ and forced him to give up all his ill-gotten gains — and then contributed it all to CAIR, which was a rather nice fuck you to the haters. In March of last year, he filed suit against Jones for selling a poster that featured Pepe. Given that Jones sits atop a questionable-supplement-fueled media empire and no doubt has lawyers on speed-dial to deal with all the shady shit he gets up to, I had some fleeting concerns about Furie’s chances of success.

Then I remembered it’s Alex Jones, nightmare client who never shuts up or stops his clownery, and waited for the inevitable:

Fringe conspiracy-theory outlet InfoWars settled a lawsuit Monday over their use of cartoon character “Pepe the Frog,” paying $15,000 to Pepe’s creator and promising never to use the cartoon again.

To be precise, Jones and InfoWars had to fork over the US$14 grand they’d made on the poster, and another US$1000 just because. Jones and his lawyer, who apparently want to project an image where writing a check with three zeroes is insignificant, are calling it [Wayback Machine, not Jones’s site] a tiny amount and speculating that Furie spent over a million in legal fees, ignoring the whole bit where Furie was represented pro bono.

They’re … not very smart. And considering that Jones is about to be deposed in the suit that Sandy Hook parents have filed because he’s made their lives a living hell just because, here’s hoping that he keeps up the bluster, the bravado, the general dissociation from reality, and brings all of that with him into his sworn testimony, because being him is going to damage the hell out of his case.

Furie is donating the extra US$1000 of Alex Jones’s money to amphibian conservation group Save The Frogs.

In other news, Boulet is at the Annency Festival of animation and is sharing his experiences via Twitter. Day one in French and English, with more presumably forthcoming. Speaking of French festivals, Lyon BD Festival was this past weekend, and our own Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin was there. We’ll share his reports starting tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

There Is A Hidden Secret Inside You… Waiting!
=> It blows away the “complexity” of breakthrough
=> It heals the deepest of wounds and blocks… even the “impossible” ones.

Anybody ever tell you that you sound like a cut-rate Jack Kirby? Let me know when I get the “Tiger-Force” at the End Of All Things.

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¹ ‘Cause your kids won’t hate who you hate without proper indoctrination, I guess.

Hey, remember when the news broke, ’bout four months back, that Randall Munroe would be doing a book about how to do stuff?

For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s the world’s least useful self-help book.

So Zach Weinersmith’s BAH!Fest if it were run by experimenters instead of theorists¹, then. Very, very insane experimenters. How To releases on 3 September, and the same day, Munroe starts his book tour at the Harvard Science Center. The following two weeks will find him in Washington, DC, New York City, Ann Arbor, Portland (OR)², Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Louisville (KY), and Raleigh (NC). Venues and associates include the likes of Sidwell Friends School, Politic ‘n’ Prose, Cooper Union, The Strand, Powell’s, University of Utah, NC State University, a couple of churches, a library, and a fraternity³.

There will be one more stop on the book tour, and to get Munroe to your town (United States only), you’re going to have to gather some friends, some books, and some creativity:

Arrange the titles of your favorite books into sentences that tell a story, assemble a single continuous line of people holding up the covers, and take a photo or video documenting your feat. You can make the story as long as you want, but each book needs to be held by a different human.

Creative grammar is fine, and you’ll get extra credit for including as many books and people as possible.

Now, write the best story you can within those limits, and either post it to the sosh-meeds under the hashtag #howtoxkcd or email it to howtoxkcd — which can be found at Google’s e-mail, dot-com (say that last bit in a Homestar Runner voice for bonus points from me … I’m not sure Munroe will hear you) — between 10 June and 31 July. The additional tour stop will be announced in August.

As we all know, give Munroe’s readers a challenge, and they exceed all expectations. Best be creative as all get-out, and get to work.

Spam of the day:

One thing I am tired of is high power bills. I want to share with you a way to never for power again.

I used to dream about the day I would never for power again. Alas, big power again will require me to always for, never to never.

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¹ I am reminded of that time when Richard Feynman was given a tour of CERN and shown to a massive block of science (you now the ones, they’re all over CERN) that his tour guide was busy explaining when he realized Oh! This will test your hypothesis about charge change in particles, Professor Feynman.

Feynman looked up and down over the looming, cavernous pile of technology and asked how much it cost. The guide said 37 million dollars or whatever the figure was, and Feynman asked You don’t trust me? You can find it in here.

² Event info coming soon; click here to pre-order the book for the event.

³ That is, a nerd frat; my father was a member alongside Robert Lucky, a situation that I believe I have mentioned with some slight bitterness. Also, if you follow that link, bear in mind it was from before we knew Doug TenNapel was a jerk about and to transfolk.

I’m presuming you saw this from Matt Inman yesterday:

I am happy to announce that I am in development on my own animated feature for Illumination.
In short: I got a movie deal.

The good news: I’m making a movie and it’s going to be very funny.

The bad news: these things take years to make and it is an all-consuming task. This means I will no longer be working on The Oatmeal full time.

With that, Inman joins a pretty sizable list of web- and indie comics to get a Hollywood deal: You Damn Kid, Odd Jobs, Last Blood, Agnes Quill, The New Kid, Delilah Dirk, Castle Hangnail, and big kahuha build-a-franchise titles like Bone and Amulet.

Thing to keep in mind? Some of those deals go back a dozen years or more and by my count, the number of webcomic-originating properties that have made it to screen (large or small) so far¹ is one: Axe Cop, with Nimona having a release date in 2021. But this is a little bit different.

Because the movie isn’t The Oatmeal; the deal isn’t for the IP, it’s for Inman. He gets to make a movie with a studio that’s … well, they aren’t the top of the animation hierarchy, but they aren’t nobodies, either². Think about how Noelle Stevenson got the opportunity to make She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power, and has managed to get two full seasons released since Nimona was optioned, and has time for two or three more before it will release.

But also think about how nothing exists until it actually exists and all sorts of things may happen between now and a hypothetical release date that cause production to be abandoned, or the end product to be shelved. A’course, Illumination doesn’t have the resources to make movies that won’t be released. If they don’t release Untitled Matt Inman Project it’s because something went badly wrong rather than they just decided not to put it out in the world. You’d pretty much have to be the dominant, near-monopoly power-player of the entertainment industry to have the resources to do that.

Speaking of which, Kazu Kibuishi may or may not ever see an Amulet adaptation (or franchise) hit the big screen, but he’s made a movie. You’ve never seen Let’s Get Francis and you never will, because while Disney paid him to conceive and direct it, they also chose to scrap it. We at Fleen are cautiously optimistic that Inman will enjoy the next several years, but the best laid plans, etc.

In the meantime, there won’t be many comics from him as he shifts to a very different kind of creative endeavour. My money’s on him succeeding (at least on the things he’s got under his control), as it was revealed that he’s been doing creative consulting for Illumination for the past year and a half, including punch-up on the just released The Secret Life Of Pets 2. He’s not going in cold, and I think in three to five years he’ll have made something he’s proud of.

Spam of the day:

Live Chat with Asian Women

I think you got your generation scripts scrambled, Spammy. You shift from promising me access to beautiful Asian women to instead pointing me to Hot Russian Ladies (who may or may not be Desperate Girls) in the space of two lines. Pick an unfortunate mail-order bride ethnic sterotype and stick to it!

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¹ I’m not counting things made directly for the web, meaning that various projects related to PvP, Cyanide & Happiness, SMBC, and Automata. The standard here is that a big company pays you for the rights to make something from your story, and they bear the costs of making it and distributing it.

² I’m speaking here about longevity and creative reputation; Illumination have, thanks to owning the Minions, made on-the-order-of billion dollar grosses on four of their ten releases so far. They don’t have the legacy of Disney, the technical and gonzo creative skill of Pixar, or the legendary mystique of Ghibli. They also don’t have the cookie-cutter sameness of Dreamworks, or the mercenary laziness of Blue Sky and Sony Animation³.

³ Which both show signs of improving as they break their past patterns. Sony’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, was friggin’ brilliant and Blue Sky are making Nimona.

So everybody knows Dustin Harbin, right? Active up and down indie comics, one of the folks who’ve helped put on HeroesCon (the newest iteration of which is Friday-Sunday next week), gentleman beloved by all that have met him? And, as of a little bit ago, the latest recipient of access to medical care¹:

Hey guys: a couple weeks ago I faceplanted on my bicycle and — short version — they had to reattach the bones of my upper jaw to my skull and I lost 3+ teeth, Guess who doesn’t have insurance? I’ve set up a GoFundMe for what will be some large large bills: http://bit.ly/nosmash

Let’s get what passes for good news out of the way: as of this writing — approximately six hours after Harbin posted his tweet and eighteen since the fundraiser went up — he’s over US$23.5K; he originally was looking to raise US$25K, but surgery being what it is, he’s raised his estimated need to US$75K. I donated, and if it’s in your means to do so, I’d request you join the 400+ people that have done so already.

I hate that this is necessary. I hate that quality of healthcare you’re entitled to in this country depends on your ability to leverage social networks. I work a corporate, technical job with what’s likely a 90^th percentile health insurance plan and I know that one bad diagnosis would still result in bills that would bankrupt me. It shouldn’t be like this, every other country in the world manages to not be like this, and it needs to change.

If I had smashed up my face like Harbin did² my insurance would probably find a way to soak me for a few thousand dollars — which I have a far greater ability to absorb, not being self-employed in the arts — and I’d complain about it, and the hassle of getting fixed up, but I’d eventually get fixed up to a reasonably high quality end state.

I do not deserve this more than Dustin Harbin.

I do not deserve to pay US$20 for a three month supply of meds that I require on a daily basis instead of wondering how I’m going to get by because a drug company decides to discontinue low-margin drugs or jack prices up by 100,000% because they can³. I am not more worthy of good health because I have a good job because I had a good education because my family was able to pay for it because they didn’t have to worry about medical needs sucking us dry because my father had a good job because he had a good education because Jesus tapdancing Christ I’m at least four generations from anything resembling bootstraps.

Nobody wants this. Go Fund Me doesn’t want this, despite the fact a full third of their income has been from campaigns for medical expenses. Our economy and everybody that lives here would be infinitely better off if medical bankruptcy weren’t a thing. But a cabal of super-rich are existentially offended by the idea of paying a proportional amount of their wealth in taxes for the common good and then give relative pittances in charity⁴.

None of this needs to be the case. None of this should be the case. If you don’t want any of this to be the case, give what you can to Harbin, and then give to/support candidates for political office who are willing to say that healthcare is a godsdamned human right so we don’t have to do all this again in a week.

Spam of the day:

It is a new “super” antenna that is able to capture TV signals through the air like no other antenna ever could.

It is a piece of wire that is between 01.x and 10x the wavelength of the signal it’s trying to capture. In the US, that’s between 54 and 806MHz, or from 0.37-5.5m, so a hunk of wire 50-100cm long would do it. It was not developed by a NASA engineer using military technology, except that I suppose somebody in the military uses technology like tape measures, wire clippers, and plug crimpers. Fuck outta here with this bullshit.

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¹ No word yet if he was seen at St Biden’s Memorial.

² And I damn near did when I was 16. I was also thrown headfirst from my bike, but I landed right side supraorbital instead of facefirst. I managed not to crack my skull, managed not to break my neck, but also managed to pierce my right ear in seven places. The fact that I landed on gravel — which skidded beneath me — instead of on hardscape probably saved my life.

³ Fun fact! My wife worked for a company that got bought by Mallinckrodt years ago. They treated their employees like shit.

⁴ Which is then leveraged into a tax break. For the record, I’ve ranged between 8-12% charitable giving for the past ten years, less for the past couple since my wife’s been back in school and not working.

The signs were there, of course. A sale because a webcomic storefront would be moving. Tweets about a trip and veiled references to Montana, and moving a few tons of merch. When the announcement came a few hours ago, all the pieces fell into place:

Had a few ppl ask why I was in Montana a few weeks ago and… Hey now… What’s this… https://store.dftba.com/pages/creators

That from George, Slayer Of Problems, First And Only Of His Name For No Other Person Will Ever Have The Essential Georgeness Of He Who Was Once Surnamed Rohac, announcing a new marketplace titled Don’t Forget To Be Awesome. It’s got some folks you may have heard of selling stuff there, including webcomics Johnny Wander, Atomic Robo, and Check, Please!, but also McElroys, Greens, Brad Meltzer, Anita Sarkesian¹, How It Should Have Ended, Rainbow Rowell, and Star Talk.

Some of them are Rohac’s management-services clients over at Organized Havoc, some are certainly there because DFTBA is a Hank Green deal. In any event, you’ve got some webcomic names sitting in business relationships with — I hate this term — influencer-type folks, and in a number of cases, I’d argue the webocmics folks are bigger deals. Maybe it’s just because George brought his clients over, but did you notice who’s at the top of the client list? And if you’re as widely known as Hank and John Green, how much sway does George’s management/consultancy deal have to have before you’re noticeable?

Rhetorical questions. This is a continuation of a trend that’s been going on for a decade or more where a guy that blows stuff up on TV, nerd musicians, and a pixel-stained wretch can overlap their creative forces, like some kind of latter-day Algonquin Round Table, only if the ART included some experimental chemists, an aviatrix, and some vaudevillians. In this case, it’s an astrophysicist, a gender politics theorist, and some science communicators along with fandom cheerleaders and webcomickers in addition to your writers. Even if you don’t care about all those other folks, webcomics has a seat at the creative community table.

As long as you’re checking out the table, George would also like you to know that Tess Stone is Kickstarting volume 2 of Not Drunk Enough, and all the fancier stuff associated with the Samwell Men’s Hockey Team that was previously only available in Kickstarts is now has ongoing availability².

Spam of the day:

BECAUSE Hillary JUST let Something HUGE SLIP… NOW it’s back DESTROYING her election campaign. THREATENING her with impeachment. HUMILIATING her speechless supporters.

You … you think that Hillary Clinton is in an elected office subject to impeachment? That’s … THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS, YOU FIVELIGHTING ASSHOLES.

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¹ Who, it must be said attracts griefers and CHUDs like nobody’s business. Which means that the store infrastructure is pretty well tested and CHUD-proof, which should be a point of reassurance to any webcomicker that wants to be sure their merch sales aren’t disrupted by whiny manchildren.

² Bitty’s great, but I wonder if the economies of scale work to offer jerseys for other players. I know some Shitty fans³ who’d wear #42.

³ That’s fans of the character named Shitty, not fans who are themselves shitty.

Tuesdays often seem to be the busy day in Webcomicslandia; maybe it’s a knock-on effect of how books and magazines release on Tuesdays, or maybe it’s anticipation of comic books releasing on Wednesday. Maybe it’s a figment of my imagination. Whatever the case, it’s definitely busier than Thursdays … Thursdays are dead.

• Danielle Corsetto might have been somebody you didn’t expect to hear from, what with Boo! It’s Sex wrapping up last week and all. But she’s back with a public Patreon post about BIS finishing, about other projects on deck, and about how she’s about to hit the road and you just might be on her path:
  

  I’m leaving this Thursday [editor’s note: day after tomorrow, 6 June] (SHIT THAT IS REALLY SOON) to work on “the book” — it still doesn’t have a name — on the west coast, among other talented cartoonists, writers, and illustrators.

  I could’ve flown, but of course I decided to make it A Whole Thing and do signings and camp out along the way. So if you’re on my route between here and Portland and back, I may be stopping at a comic shop near you!

  So that’s a roadtrip from Shepherdstown, West Virginia to Portland, where she’ll be in residence at the famed Helioscope for a month working on a new book that takes place in Shepherdstown. Sometimes, you need distance and place filled with creative friends to really make progress on a project. Along the way, she’ll be making stops for comic shop signings in Madison, Wisconsin (Friday, 7 June), Portland (Saturday, 15 June, along with Lucy Bellwood and Erika Moen), and Omaha (TBD, but probably Tuesday, 9 July).

  If you want one of the big-ass Girls With Slingshots omnibuses, best to drop Corsetto a line so she takes up precious space in her car for it. Every one of those things she packs is going to decrease her car’s fuel economy by about 3.7 MPG, so if you reserve one you better show up to buy it.

  And the best part of this entire trip? She’ll get to spend a month hanging out with Sally the greyhound. I’m so envious.

• Hey, you know who publishes that big-ass Girls With Slingshots omnibus? Iron Circus. Know what’s going on with Iron Circus these days? C Spike Trotman is more than happy to share. If you missed IC at CAKE last weekend, you should still be on the lookout for:

  Delver is now up to issue #4, with the conclusion due on 26 July. I enjoyed the preview of issue #1 and if there’s any way for me to consume this story on paper¹ I will drop some cash on it. Seeing as how the final issue is due just after SDCC, I suspect we may seen an announcement during the show.

  And taking a cue from the long line of vendors of semi-disreputable merch (we’re talking porn here, people), Spike is celebrating the release of the third volume of Iris And Angel by declaring that the first one’s free. If you like the story about doing’ taxes² and dudes in lingerie, the parts 2 and 3 are five bucks a pop.

  And if you require comics on paper (see footnote 1, below), there’s new print comics including the previously-mentioned How Do You Smoke A Weed? (now shipping after its concluded Kickstart), and Minus, a YA thriller. For lo, Spike has seen the pile o’ money that is YA fiction and has decided to jump in and good for her.

Spam of the day:

The “Go Ahead” Signal That Makes Him Obsessed With Winning Your Love

I can’t tell if this is meant for a woman, or for a gay dude, but I have no need for your love secrets that will make any man desperate for me. Thanks, I guess?

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¹ I resolutely avoid purchasing media that I do not get to own in a physical form. If I needed any further convincing of this, the problems that a student of mine had yesterday trying to attend class with a DRM-protected e-book that would not open would have sealed the deal.

² Not a euphemism, they’re actually doing taxes.

I’ve got about nothing left in the proverbial tank, so here’s some quick things you might want to check out:

• Abby Howard’s third Earth Before Us book, Mammal Takeover!, inches closer to release. Age Of Horns, folks — deer and rats and bunnies all with horns, and dog-sized rhinos and house-sized sloths and VW Bug-sized armadillos all over the damn place. Each of the EBU books has been released a bit later than the one before it (start of August 2017, mid-August 2018, next one in mid-September) because it takes time to fit all that awesomeness in. Hopefully Ronnie will get back from the past without bringing every cute fluffy thing home with her in Ms Lernin’s Science Magic recycle bin.
• Jim Zub has thought more about the logistics of making a career in comics than you; he just has. His primers and data-shares and constant responses to open questions on Tumblr¹ could constitute an outline of how to take a shot at a vocation in a notorious luck-driven and inconstant profession. His latest tutorial tackles that space where you’ve gotten all your shit together and made a comic … and then find yourself asking What now? as the heady rush of accomplishment starts to fade and you realize you’re still at the very beginning of the process. But if you absolutely had to condense it down to a single thought, it would be:
  

  The first few paying gigs you get will probably be extremely difficult to track down, but with each one you’ll build up your skills and contacts. It really is a creative journey. As stressful as it can be, enjoy the process and celebrate your accomplishments.

  Smart guy, that Zub.

Okay, hopefully tomorrow allows for a more leisurely approach to writing. Have fun until then.

Spam of the day:

Redeem Your Sam’s Club Reward before it expires

Sam’s Club is named for Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, and thus a place I would never do business with on account of my personal interactions with Walmart corporate has led me to believe that they are possibly the most exploitative corporation on the face of the planet. Sure, Amazon screws over a lot of people, but they do it with algorithms; Walmart engages in that in-person, face-to-face artisanally-crafted over-screwing which lacks even the veneer of distant, disconnected people not realizing the import of their actions. Screw your fake offer of accepting something from the worst people in an attempt to steal my info, scammers.

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¹ Including many asked in bad faith by frothing assholes, who always receive a far more polite and meaningful answer than they deserve.

Good Omens releases today and I need to finish up work and get to the more humorous End Times than the parade of shitbaggery that is foisted upon us daily.

Before I head out to do that, I’ll mention that Christopher “Doc” Hastings has finished is most recent Twitter-hosted webcomic, Harry Potter And The Guy Who Hijacked The Wrong Fucking Plane (starting here), and started a new Twitter-hosted webcomic: Never Enough.

It’s only just started, but promises to be noirish and full of ridiculously over-the-top melodrama and terrible, terrible jokes. Warning for the four people that don’t like [Super] Mario [Noun] lore: you’re gonna want to skip this one.

Spam of the day:

If your 2019 resolutions include saving money or getting healthier, or improving your productivity you’re in luck.

My 2019 resolutions include kicking the ass of anybody that abuses commas like you just did, Spanky.

Hey, are you gonna be in the city of Chicago this weekend? I mean, everybody in the midwest is dodging persistent rain, tornadoes, floods, and general End Times events, but if you’re in Chicago you can at least enjoy the last days of Earth with comics at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, Saturday and Sunday, 1 & 2 June, from 11:00am to 6:00pm at the Billie Jean King Recreation Center (the third floor of Center on Halsted¹), 3656 N Halsted Street. It’s free to the public, got a humane scale of exhibitors (one big room plus a hallway entrance, an even 100 tables if my count is right), and an emphasis on the comics part of comics.

Special Guests will include Nicholas Gurewitch, Ben Passmore, Whit Taylor, and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell. Exhibitors draw heavily from the middle of the country, and will include Ben Sears, Biance Xunise, Blue Delliquanti, Cathy G Johnson, Iron Circus², John Porcellino, Katie Schenkel, Chris Grady, Patrick Lay, Sage Coffey, Sarah Becan, Tess Eneli Reid, Tom McHenry, and Tony Breed

I didn’t include table numbers because come on — just walk around the room.

Programming is heavily tilted towards the Special Guests — I don’t think there’s a panel until Sunday that features a panelist that’s not a Special Guest. Ones that caught my eye include:

• The Occult In Comics; Saturday, 11:30am-12:30pm; with Corinne Halbert, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, Anders Nilsen, and Isabella Rotman, moderated by Anya Davidson.
• Looks Good Enough To Eat: Drawing Food and Recipe Comics (workshop); Saturday, 11:30am-12:30pm; with Sarah Becan.
• The Idea Kitchen (workshop); Saturday, 1:00-2:00pm; with Nicholas Gurewitch and Jackie Davis.
• Graphic Medicine: Comics as Treatment; Sunday, 1:00pm-2:00pm; with Whit Taylor, Sage Coffey, Bianca Xunise, and Vreni, moderated by Kevin Budnik.
• Storytelling Flow (workshop); Sunday, 3:00pm-4:00pm; with Tom Hart.

The panel room is apparently the theater off the entrance, but no indication where the workshops are.

CAKE is accessible by the El (Red line to Addison), the #8 Halsted bus, the #22 Clark bus, #36 Broadway bus, or #152 Addison bus. Head for the corner of Halsted and Waveland, and look for the Whole Foods; Center On Halsted shares the block and is just to the north.

Spam of the day:

Live Chat with Asian Women VIEW HER SEXY PHOTOS

Dude, don’t yell. Sheesh.

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¹ Oddly, Center On Halsted’s events calendar doesn’t make mention of CAKE, but it’s there.

² It doesn’t specifically say that C Spike Trotman will be there but come on … it’s right down the street for her.