It’s axiomatic with me that for very nearly every creator whose work I enjoy, I have a single answer to the question Which of their projects is your favorite? Because creators grow in skill and the breadth of their worldview, because practice doesn’t ever drag somebody backwards, the answer is generally¹ The next one. And in the last 24 hours, we’ve gotten a couple of The next one announcements that look very good indeed.

Let’s start with the news from Shaenon Garrity (creator of too many good things to list, but presently working on Skin Horse with Jeffrey C Wells), via Twitter:

Guess @chris_j_baldwin and I can officially announce this…

That would be Christopher Baldwin, who also has done too many good works to list them all, but who is presently working on the second series of Spacetrawler. And the this in the tweet is a screencap of a publishing announcement which reads:

Karen Wojtyla at McElderry Books has acquired world rights to the YA graphic novel Willowweep Manor by Shaenon K Garrity, illustrated by Christopher J Baldwin. Teenage Haley is obsessed with all things Gothic, but never imagined she’d experience them in real life, until the day she rescues a drowning young man and wakes up in a 19th-century estate complete with brooding gentlemen, sinister servants, and an actual ghost. But all is not as it appears, as Haley learns she has not been swept into the past, but instead into a strange universe all its own. Publication is slated for fall 2020; Barry Goldblatt at Barry Goldblatt Literary handled the deal.

In no particular order:

• As much as I love Garrity’s solo comics work, her collaborations are where she really shines. Baldwin is going to design the hell out of the vaguely unsettling characters and scenery.
• To hit a release date in the fall of next year, that book is already done. It’s on final edit if not already queued for printing in China and the long journey here to hit the late Spring/early Summer festivals and cons for promotion.
• That description has me hooked. I hope it’s actually book one of a series.
• Barry Goldblatt (along with Seth Fishman and a few others) are really stepping into the space pioneered by the legendary Judy Hansen. The fact that I can name multiple graphic novel literary agents off the top of my head should tell you that comics are in a damn golden age of quality and variety.

And then earlier today, the entirely essential Oliver Sava at The AV Club brought the news that John Allison has his next series lined up, what with Giant Days wrapping in a few months, and By Night about to publish issue 12 of 12. We knew that Allison was working on something new, given the hiatus announcement in October that put on Scary Go Round/Bad Machinery on an indefinite pause, and the latter-day Bobbins strips bringing the entire Tackleverse to a quiesced state in February.

As recently as this week, Allison promised us new projects post-Giant Days, with fabulous new characters, and mayhap even the return of an old favorite. But it appears that the next Allisonian project will be Steeple, a five-issue supernatural horror series, with Allison on both writing and art duties², with colors by Sarah Stern, letters by Jim Campbell, and at least one cover by current Giant Days artist Max Sarin.

It’s a story about good and evil (and the greys between) and a trainee priest in Cornwall and just maybe a certain inescapable Tackleford regular³. Steeple #1 releases on 18 September from Dark Horse, who’ve been in rather a bit of need for new properties (having lost the Buffy and Star Wars licenses, and seen longtime mainstay Usagi Yojimbo head to IDW and the promise of monthly color), so hopefully they’re giving Allison the royal treatment.

Because after all, what he does next is going to be his best yet.

Spam of the day:

In 3 weeks he lost 27 lbs? In 3 months he lost 84 lbs?

He’s either got a tapeworm or he’s doing irreparable harm to himself. Please stop holding either up as behavior to be emulated.

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¹ With the caveat that this depends on the creator in question having control over their work. I stand second to nobody in my admiration of Gene Luen Yang’s work, but when DC put him on Superman, it was apparent from my POV as a reader that editorial was jerking him every which way from month to month. He had different artists, radical shifts in story, plots suddenly dropped, and it can only be because he was doing work that was changed at the last minute to accommodate something going on in another comic.

Compare to what he was able to do with superhero story forms on The Shadow Hero, or beloved (but corporate-owned) IP on Avatar: The Last Airbender and the conclusion is either his work was severely constrained/interfered with, or he suddenly forgot how to do comics for ten issues of Superman, then went back to being a master of the form again.

² We haven’t had a comic-sized story with Allison on art since the Giant Days Christmas story, and I’ve missed his style on the page.

³ Sadly, not Desmond Fishman. Probably.

Huh. Boo, It’s Sex! by Danielle Corsetto, Monica Gallagher, and Mae Keller wrapped up today. The recent plot exploration (how did Tara become a ghost?) didn’t strike me as a lead-in to a finale (there had been other, light forays into plot, although more related to sexytimes and relationships), but there it is.

The hook is present for another season if Corsetto, Gallagher, and Keller want to take it — the only folks that need more factual information on sex than four ladies that came through underserved public high schools would be the passel of dudes replacing them — but I still wish there was going to be another episode come¹ Thursday. They aren’t leaving us hangin’², though — the last strip ends with a coda of where to get quality information about how sex works, including Scarleteen, Planned Parenthood, Sexplanations, and Oh Joy, Sex Toy, which ain’t going anywhere so long as there are sexy times to be had and information about how sexytimes work to be shared.

In the meantime, show your appreciation to Corsetto, Gallagher, and Keller by a) checking out their other work, and b) refreshing yourself about sexytimes (however you define it) and how to enjoy it properly (with however many other people you wish, including zero, in whatever way you mutually agree upon) by starting again at episode #1. Being smart about sexytimes is always sexy.

Speaking of sexy, let’s check in with the Cartoon Art Museum:

• On Sunday (that would be 2 June), in the Museum Drawing Room, there will be a talk by Steven Greenberg, editorial cartoonist of the Ventura County Reporter, and previously of the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Marin Independent Journal, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sacramento Bee, and more. The talk is free to the public, starts at 2:00pm, and Greenberg will sign and answer questions at 3:00pm.
• On Saturday 15 June, Jon B Cooke, Ron Turner (founder of Last Gasp), and Malcolm Whyte (CAM founder) will be talking about The Book Of Weirdo (edited by Cooke), a comprehensive retrospective of Weirdo magazine, which served in large part as a vehicle for R Crumb.

  I realize that may make it an unnecessary event for some of you, as there is an opinion that no figure in cartooning has been studied out of proportion with their actual influence and terribleness as a human so much as R Crumb. But there’s no denying that Crumb’s managed to be proximal to a bunch of cartoonists who are worthy of discussion and study³, and hopefully those better folks will be centered in the discussion. If you go and it’s mostly Crumb worship, feel free to tell the gentlemen on the riser that they’re jerking off in public.

  Toon Talk: The Book of Weirdo, and Other Weirdos starts at 6:30pm, with a suggested donation of US$10 (members free with RSVP). Copies of Cooke’s book will be available for US$35, and Cooke’s newest book (Art Out Of Chaos: The Illustrated Biography Of Maxon Crumb) for US$25.

Spam of the day:

=> 1 Weird Stretch HEALS Back Pain and Sciatica

Yeah? Cool. How come you need all this personal information to share this free miracle of No Back Pain?

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¹ So to speak.

² So to speak.

³ I was never into Crumb so much as a cartoonist and feel his primary accomplishment was lending art and credence to Harvey Pekar’s work. The fact that this is the first talk at CAM I can recall that’s listed as neither free to the public, nor with a fixed ticket price, may reflect some ambivalence about Crumb on the part of the organizers.

Possibly unnecessary navel-gazing ahead.

You might notice, if you have especially sharp eyes, a difference in the list of webcomics over there to the right. Truth is, I forget about it most of the time, maybe once a year I make sure that things still exist and then forget about it again. But neglectful or not, it’s a list that I put together and carries my imprimatur.

Also something to know for the purposes of this discussion: I don’t read forums anywhere, and particularly not webcomics discussion forums. Partly this is because I don’t have the time, partly its because I don’t want to inadvertently lift somebody else’s opinion or idea and present it as my own.

Third, I am not exactly a subtlety-seeing guy. It takes me a lot of readings and re-readings of comics to see what’s really going on, which is a bit of a drawback in a medium where much of the work is designed to be read quickly, in small chunks, at intervals.

Put all of that together and I can miss stuff that should be concerning to me; a trend may emerge in a comic that’s for the worse, and it may take a long while for it to sink into my brain, and for longer still I may not change my habits.

For example, I still bring up the links for You Damn Kid, Help Desk, and Horror Every Day pretty much daily even though I know there’s not going to be an update. The first two are notorious for years-long hiatuses, Help Desk’s creator is working mostly in prose these days, and Shaenon Garrity¹ told us that HED would run for exactly one year and then finish, which happened five damn months ago.

The update to the list I’m talking about is not adding the notation [finished] to Horror Every Day, although I did finally do that just now. It’s the removal of Sinfest, which has been delving deeper into TERF/SWERF territory for some time. I got an email from reader Matt, expressing their own thoughts about the strip not being what it was and asking how I felt about its inclusion in my A Good Start list.

Let’s be super clear — this was not an accusation that I am a terrible person, or a demand that I change anything or align myself with any particular viewpoint. It was about Matt’s own changes of opinion about Tatsuya Ishida’s work, and wondering about my thoughts on separating the art from the artist². It made me realize that while I’d been having these discussions internally, I’d not considered that I was still publicly recommending a work that I no longer felt should be recommended.

It was enough to snap me out of my inertia and decide that leaving it on the list would be incompatible with my ideals about how people should be treated. I also decided that since my inertia had potentially caused harm — that people may have gone to the strip who wouldn’t have otherwise, and been on the receiving end of messages that deny their validity and existence — I also shouldn’t remove it quietly like nothing had happened. Not taking into account the weight my words carry was a mistake; I’m sorry, and I’ll hold myself to a higher standard in the future. It’s no longer on the list and now you know why.

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¹ Funk Queen Of The Greater Bay Area, ArchMistress Of Tiki, and one of the three Living Nexii Of Webcomics. She’s rad.

² Which, hoo boy, is a long-ass discussion all by its lonesome. I still have a set of Cerebus phonebooks on my shelves not out of affection for the story (even the part before Dave Sim went full trashfire), but mostly because I’d rather not have them be anyplace where somebody could casually read them without an extensive discussion of Sim’s crappy worldview beforehand to put it all in context³.

Some day, people will possibly remember Sim as a passable draftsman, a groundbreaking letterer, and a shit storyteller and we’ll have the distance to evaluate the work in that context dispassionately. I figure it’ll take about another half-century.

³ That, and I can’t bring myself to destroy a book that’s not in irreparable condition.

I’m ready to get started on the weekend (and also my favorite nieces are coming to visit), so let this serve as notice for two things:

• Monday’s a holiday here in the States, and I will (among other things) be parading with my EMS peeps. If you ever get a chance to be in a parade and the folks in your community clap and cheer because they appreciate you? Do that.
• It’s time for the annual comics creator page rates survey. Particularly given the upheaval being thrown by the Oni/Lion Forge deal it’s worth providing data so that, hopefully, all creators can find a way to better-paying work. Respond if you are able.

Spam of the day:

Lose Weight With An Underactive Thyroid

If I’m reading this correctly, they want to actually impair my thyroid function so I can lose weight? Bozos, I’m barely able to survive winter with the slight insulation I’ve got now. Fuck outta here with this nonsense.

Like a lot of you, I first became aware of Tillie Walden when she started winning Ignatzen a few years back. The webcomic release of On A Sunbeam occurred in short order — nearly a year before Spinning — and I loved both (particularly the big, chapter-long chunks of story released of OAS, making the wait for updates rewarding and full of meaty story progression). But since :01 Books was kind enough to send me a copy of the print release of On A Sunbeam, and since I heard Walden talk about her relationship with her work at the Alaska Robotics Mini-Con¹, I’ve decided to revisit and share my thoughts. It’s going to be light on the spoilers, but I won’t say there are none.

On A Sunbeam is huge. It’s 500 pages (down from 700, Walden said in Juneau; she may not do much in the way of preparatory design or layout in her straight-to-ink process, but she’ll do a hell of a lot of editing later on²) worth of heavy, with a tactile paper and deeply-infused inks that retain hints of their original aroma long after being produced. To read this story in print is an undertaking, a confrontation of physical heft that lends weight to the story. She may regard the book as an afterthought to the act of creation, but when the book is this substantial before you even open it, you feel the work the story required. It demands your attention.

Walden’s not a fan of science fiction and doesn’t claim it as a source of inspiration, so naturally the book is up for a Hugo. Maybe the most radical departure from all but the most recent Hugo winners, the most speculative part of the speculative fiction is that Walden’s imagined a universe not just of life in space and far-flung communities in the firmament, but one where every character but one is female. It’s utterly unremarked-upon, there’s no backstory to say and that’s why there are no more men, it just is, a quiet fact lurking in the background until you realize there’s no dudes.

That one character that’s not female? They’re nonbinary.

Sure, much of the story takes place at a boarding school “For Girls”, or aboard a small ship where there don’t happen to be any men, but then the accumulated weight of the story kicks in. So many references to sisters and daughters, and casual reference to your or my moms. Is it a thesis statement or an aspiration? I think it’s more that there’s nothing in the story — school, bullies, love, family, loss — that requires the presence of men, so there aren’t any. It’s not a society that’s set in opposition to men, or defined by its separation from or absence of men, it just doesn’t have any and possibly never did. It sneaks up on you.

And it’s that casual display of the details of this universe that makes the story and the setting so beautiful. Little grace notes like shoes by the entrance of the spaceship and clutter everywhere tell us this isn’t sweeping space opera, it’s just life that happens to take place in space. Sure, the ships look like carp — complete with eyes and mouths and swimmy fins to keep them aloft — and homes, offices, and school campuses are their own, free-traveling craft, but it’s still just life. Live in a community in a weird part of space that may kill you getting in or out? Cool, you still need horses to get between towns. Want to set up a sports tournament between schools? They’ll need to rendezvous and dock with each other first.

The story is told initially in two threads, today and five years ago, paralleling the experience of the protagonist as she finds love and creates family. Bits of lore drop in conversation and become important, or are utterly forgotten (there’s an offhand reference to Earth, but it seems to be just another place you can live and not the cradle of humanity or anything). The plot in each time progresses on in the way that life does — often mundane, or frustrating, but rarely full of high adventure — until every hundred pages or so, Walden hits us with a showstopper. These moments come out of nowhere, and pack the emotional wallop that an entire series of comics might be built around³. There’s a character break that’s shocking and utterly earned. An act of bravery. A moment of fear and loss.

And in just about the exact middle of the book, the actual thesis statement for On A Sunbeam, and for Walden’s work as a whole:

Have you ever even considered that something that’s trivial to you could mean … so much more to someone else? You don’t get to take the easy road out and just respect the parts of people that you recognize.

That’s goddamn beautiful. More beautiful than the worldbuilding and imagination and the gorgeous illustrations. The most important thing is being willing to extend respect to somebody who’s different, whether you’re in a universe of fish-ships and schools wafting among the stars or not. You don’t get to decide what’s important for anybody other than yourself.

Take your time with On A Sunbeam; read it, exist in the story, listen to what it has to say. Set it aside for a day, or a month, and come back to it again; new little details will jump out at you, obvious now in ways they weren’t before. Read it again in a year, two, ten, and let it lead you back into that place where respect can be required, and love and family can be the foundation you build upon.

Spam of the day:

But if you’re still stuck on squats and lunges to grow your butt, you need to stop NOW.

Maybe you need to stop now, but my butt is friggin’ glorious.

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¹ And, at various points, we discussed other things, including what winning fuck-you lottery money would mean, desert island books, and Game Of Thrones. She’s really smart and utterly sincere and has become one of my favorite people.

² Which, if you recall our prior discussions of how Mark Siegel prefers to approach editing in :01 releases, is a unique way of working. Add to the fact that the story was done in about a year, including living overseas, and it’s pretty much inconceivable that the book actually exists. Only the most monstrous of work ethics could actually result in this story seeing completion.

³ Think Superman and Regan on the ledge, or Old Doreen and Old Nancy deciding to go back in time knowing it’ll reset their decades-long love, but they’ll find a way to recreate it.

More book reviews in the immediate future, friends, but I wanted to take a moment to catch up on some things that have happened in the recent weeks that I had previously missed. In no particular order, then:

• Know who’s cool? Lucy Bellwood. Like, adventuring around the world cool, has a better haircut than you cool, and teaming up with Scott McCloud to explain some tech stuff¹ cool. In this case, the tech stuff is federated learning, and the comic (story by Bellwood & McCloud, art by Bellwood) will bring you up to speed.

  In case you’re wondering about working for a giant behemoth that’s completely abandoned all pretense of having Don’t be evil as a guiding principle, may I remind you that Google has an enormous budget for things of this nature, and I sincerely hope that Bellwood and McCloud were given the equivalent of a dump truck full o’ money for their work on the comic.

• I mentioned the winners of the NCS division awards for webcomics² on Sunday but did I mention the latest Johnny Wander Kickstart? On Twitter, yeah, but not here so let’s talk about it now. Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh are Kickstarting a book of previously-uncollected (and new!) comics on the theme of travel in this, the tenth year of Johnny’s wandering. It’ll be great.

  In case you’re wondering how much you want to deal with Kickstarter given the news about the company not accepting a proposed union, may I remind you this is what’s happened when unions were proposed in all cases in the history of unionization except maybe three? Yeah, I had expectations of Kickstarter-the-public-benefit-corporation being better than this, but all this means is that the next stage of labor law gets followed: there’s a vote, and if the employees vote for a union they have to recognize it.

  Honestly, I think it’s just the reflexive distrust of anything other than rugged self-made mandom³ that is the hallmark of anybody that’s temperamentally suited to be a tech executive. The vote’ll happen, my money’s on it passes, and then the entire damn industry has a reckoning to face. And even at their worst, KS not embracing a union wholeheartedly will still damage comics creators a couple order of magnitude less than the shitshow aftermath of the Oni/Lion Forge let’s be movie producers together wankfest merger.

• Now that the Canadian {T | Van}CAFs are behind us, I’m thinking of things happening in about eight weeks in San Diego. Way too many people and way too much stuff, but I should point out that webcomicky types like Randall Munroe, Katie O’Neill, Carey Pietsch, and Ursula Vernon will be present as guests of the con.

  In case you’re wondering how I’m going to find an area of concern that balances out the news just to keep up the pattern, I’m not. These folks are great and you should read their stuff and let them know they rock.

Spam of the day:

{Well | Prince | Genoa | Lucca | arenow |justfamily | estates | Buonapartes | ButIarn | youifyou | tellme | thatthis | meanswar | ifyoustill | trytodefend | theinfamies | andhorrors | perpetrated | bythat | Antichrist | really | believe | heisAntichrist | willhave | nothing | moreto | dowith | youandyou | arenolonger | myfriend | nolongermy | faithful | slaveas | youcall | yourself | Buthow | doyoudo |

And that’s in the From: field of the email header. I leave it to your imagination how the body of the message progressed.

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¹ One may recall a day ten and a half years ago when the world was introduced to the Chrome browser by McCloud.

² Requisite disclaimer: I am part of the nominating/judging process for these awards.

³ Baaaarrrrrfff.

A few weeks before MoCCA Fest, the fine folks at :01 Books sent me uncorrected proof of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (words by Mariko Tamaki, pictures by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell) and I dove in. I held my review until closer to release date (which was, uh, two weeks ago) and then got caught up reporting on this year’s #ComicsCamp, so I’m late. But you know what? I got to read it a couple more times, so that’s okay. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers — not much here you wouldn’t find on the back cover — but take care in any event.

My first readthrough caused me to think a lot about Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T Crenshaw, because they’re both about finding yourself, dealing with a shitty friend (and confronting the realization you might be the shitty friend), with LGBTQ identity to the fore. But LDKBUWM is less a parallel to KN8 and more a perpendicular. This is different time, a different place, a different reality in terms of LGBTQ freedoms. It’s not about finding yourself in the realization of sexuality or exiting a closet — most characters in LDKBUWM are either LGBTQ in some sense, or at least appears heteroflexible¹ — so if you take the coming out part of the teen story away, what do you get?

You get what was requested the Queers & Comics Conference: a queer comics character who’s bad. You get a character who can be a complete antagonist who happens to be queer, rather than a villain because they’re queer, or somebody that has to be presented as an exemplar of humanity to be a worthy enough queer to be included in the story.

Or if not a villain/bad in the traditional sense, at least a total dick.

Laura Dean is popular, hot, entitled, a mistreater of whoever isn’t in her favor at this instant (particularly her nominal girlfriend Freddie, who she keeps breaking up with) and a serial gaslighter; her go-to whenever called on her shitty behavior is Don’t be mad, making the subject of her mistreatment feel like they’re the one that’s at fault for overreacting. If only they’d been a better person, Laura Dean wouldn’t have had to act that way. Look what you made her do.

If Laura Dean were Loren Dean and presented as male, the story could be one step away from a cautionary after-school special about bad boyfriends that turn into abusers. As it is, she’s a user of people rather than an abuser, but if we check in on her in ten years I bet she’s got a TRO or two.

And as crappy a person as Laura Dean is, she makes those in her orbit worse, too. Freddie is neglectful of her friends, wrapped up in trying to get back into Laura Dean’s graces, knowing that she needs to make one of these breakups stick but half convincing herself that she can change enough that everything will be good in the future with Laura Dean. This is the finding yourself part of the story — deciding not how to present yourself as an identity, but deciding on how you choose to act.

Structurally, LDKBUWM is a little bit different; it doesn’t so much start as the reader begins paying attention to these characters at a certain point in time that’s really no more or less significant than any other. It’s arguably got a conclusion that it works towards, but really it just sort of fades out. The characters existed before page 1, they continue to exist after page 289, their stories continue and ebb and flow and branch and rejoin, like a river that we put our boat in at one particular place and pulled ashore again a few weeks later; we can see the extensions of the water upstream and downstream of the section we traversed and know that there’s more there.

Characters are revealed by small choices in their dialogue, but also in posture and visual habits. Freddie and her best friend Doodle both present as needing affection and attention, but they go about it in different ways. Freddie’s all public gestures and reactions, where Doodle is made of quiet implication. I spent my first read thinking that Doodle’s somewhere on the autism spectrum but have ultimately decided that she isn’t — but she was raised by a single parent who is. Her affect is of somebody that is learning to be demonstrative, having lacked the example of it at home. None of this is stated, and all of it may be completely off base, but it’s how the characters read to me … and it’s been a long while since characters on a page have left me with such distinct impressions of who they are by subtle implication.

That’s equally down to Tamaki’s plotting and dialogue and to the visuals, which let’s discuss. I’ve been talking up Rosemary Valero-O’Connell for about three years since I first met her. I said at the time that her minis reflected an unusually strong sense of page composition and design, and that her characters reminded me of two veteran manga creators whose work I love. Both have improved in the intervening time, especially her faces. Freddie has bits of Terry Moore’s Francine Peters in her big, expressive face, and Doodle says more with a raised eyebrow than a page of dialogue could contain². Crucially, and it’s the first time I’ve ever noticed this, Valero-O’Connell’s faces retain their expressiveness in 360 degree rotation; with remarkably few lines, there’s a shifting in the shape and weight of mouth, cheeks, eyebrows, and the entire skull shifts to convey mood.

She’s not afraid to have people speaking over their shoulder, and let the listener who’s facing us have the reaction; it’s astonishingly strong work. Plus, she does this one bit where a jerk jock is all homophobic at supporting character Buddy: we never see his face but can tell from the tilt of his head, the slump of his shoulders, the refusal to look at the gym coach who’s dressing him down, exactly what expression he’s wearing. Yeah, it’s our brains filling in what we can’t see, but it’s also the case that Jerkboy has the same blonde undercut as Laura Dean, and we’ve seen enough of her shitty girlfriend entitled smarm to fill in that detail. The reader, on an instinctual level (it took me four or five readthroughs to realize it), has been promoted to full partner in the visuals of the story.

And those visuals are lush. The characters — not just the named ones that we get to know, but all the backgrounders going through their own stories that we don’t get to eavesdrop on — are all unique. Skin color, modes of dress, hairstyle, size and shape — all of them are varied, giving the sense of a public school in a place that’s truly diverse (Berkeley, California), as opposed to TV or movies³ where a “diverse, random” crowd is 70% male and 70% white and all “Hollywood average” in appearance.

It’s not just people who’ve been on the receiving end of a bad partner in a relationship that will feel seen reading LDKBUWM, it’s just about everybody — there in the background, each character drawn with the same care and respect as the starring and supporting players. Someday, Tamaki will write or Valero-O’Connell will illustrate some of those stories, and we’ll see Freddie or Doodle or Laura Dean pass by in the background.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a stellar achievement in comics, and is the one to beat in my private list of best books of 2019. You can find it wherever books are sold, and carries my highest recommendation for the teen-and-up in your life.

Spam of the day:

You will be glad to know [spammer] which belongs to Bing and Yahoo, as one of the largest pools of advertisers in the world, they pay more to buy your traffic.

Ooooh! You belong to Bing and Yahoo! Know who else belongs to — that is to say, is findable via — Bing and Yahoo? Everybody.

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¹ Crowd scenes feature lots of seeming same-sex or gender ambiguous couples, which may be part of the script or may be a choice on Valero-O’Connell’s part.

² I’m reminded of longtime NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards, who could vocally lift an eyebrow over the radio with a single, arch syllable — Oh? — when interviewing some political powerbroker who was clearly lying.

³ Or too many comics, sad to say.

T’other day, I wrote the following regarding the 2019 Queers & Comics Conference on Twitter:

Fellow straight folks? Next time the #QueersAndComics conference comes to a city near you, attend. Listen. Ask questions. Learn.

And so in that spirit, some thoughts of what I learned, mostly in the form of things said by presenters in their own words¹:

• Asked about the motivation for their project: Spite.
• One of the best ways to change the world is to pretend it’s already changed.
• Asked about the tenor of their comic: Do you want to be depressed … but with jokes?
• Commenting on a recurring artistic theme: I wanted some Magical Boys [in the comic], there aren’t enough of them!
• Speaking about the creation of comics as a form of self-discovery: You’ve basically spoken to yourself … via other people.
• On the value of how readers react to your work: [A reader said] “Your comic made me realize that I’m trans” and I’m like “Huh.” … “HUH.”
• Our duty as queer artists is to resist. But also to create … new ways of looking at the world.
• Because we are smarter and more talented and hotter than [those oppressing us] we will win.
• Here at Queers & Comics, we have represented five decades of queer cartooning.
• I’m looking forward to when we can create queer comics characters who are bad.
• If you think trans kids are too young to know their gender, put all kids on hormone blockers.
• On challenging themes in kidlit: Kids are pretty self-censoring. They’ll just put the book down if there’s something traumatizing there.
• The reason I liked Bilbo Baggins is he didn’t know his own worth and discovered who he is.
• I’m not cisphobic. Both of my parents are cis. They’re very active in the cis community.
• I have a lot of kids in my life. I want them to read everything, read the old stories and break them down. To see why Cinderella is treated that way.
• On the box-checking of LGBTQ+ themes in kidlit: What I see is a focus on tolerance rather than a celebration of diversity.

I wan to go back to one of those: Our duty as queer artists is to resist. But also to create … new ways of looking at the world. It wasn’t addressed to me; in fact, pretty much none of what was covered in the day I attended (and I presume in the day I didn’t) wasn’t addressed to me, and that’s a big part of why I felt I needed to show up. As long as the world is made by and for the comfort cis/straight folks², it’s incumbent on those of us who are playing life on the lower difficulty settings to listen to those who are structurally disadvantaged.

If you think of yourself as a good person — and I’m going to wager most of us do — the absolute least thing you can do to make the world fairer and more equitable is to show up and listen when people say We’re being hurt. We’re being ignored. To take just a couple of hours and immerse yourself in a space where everything isn’t about you. To ensure that those who are trying to figure out their place in the world aren’t just speaking among themselves³.

And because this page is about webcomics, a note from the discussion on libraries.

Karen Green is a superstar in the comics/libraries world, having established the collection at Columbia University. I will listen to her talk on any panel, anywhere. And because she noted the unique challenges in properly archiving some of the more ephemeral forms of comics (‘zines, webcomics), she decided to do something about it. In conjunction with colleagues at the University of Chicago, and using technology from the Internet Archive, Green helped to establish the Global Webcomics Web Archive.

Got a webcomic that would otherwise be lost? Contact Green, and they can crawl it/preserve it. Not saying that maybe every webcomic that is ultimately dependent on Tumblr for its presence should do this but maybe I am. Also at risk for loss: e-file rewards. That PDF that’s unique to your Patreon or Kickstarter? Some day it won’t exist anymore. Green doesn’t have a good solution — if you wanted to send it to her, she’s got no place to keep it, and no right to circulate it. You could give her permission for circulation — say, after a certain date — but she’s still got no place to store it. Your physical copies, though, she’s happy to accept. Maybe you could print off and do a simple binding on a copy of that e-reward and let Green know you’d like to donate it?

Finally, because Green is one of the best people, she has a budget for acquisitions. I’d say make donations if you can (grab out a copy from a print run and send her an email to ask where to mail it), but point her at your store if that’s not possible for you. She also now has a line item in her budget for acquiring original comics art from the New York City community, so if you’re making stuff and you have an original that especially significant that you’d prefer to see preserved for the future? Contact her.

Karen Green’s email is klg19, which may be directed at Columbia, an educational institution of high repute. She’d love to hear from you.

Spam of the day:

You were recently chosen as a potential candidate to represent your professional community in the The 2019 Worldwide Association of Female Professionals We are please to inform you that your candidacy was formally approved Congratulations!

You have fundamentally misunderstood something about me, would-be identity thieves, but it’s an interesting coincidence that you came up today.

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¹ Or as near as I could capture in the moment. All quotes are believed to be accurate.

² And let’s not fail to extend that to include white, male, wealthy.

³ The introductory/welcome session on day 1 was held in an auditorium with a posted capacity of 180, and I’d say it was about 70% full. The program for the conference listed 144 presenters. Granted, not everybody that was going to be at the conference was in the room for that session, but I’d say that not only do more straight folk need to show up to listen, more people who aren’t on the presenter list need to.

It’s still early days for the Q&CC (this was the third iteration), but you need to have a lot more people in the audience cohort than the presenter cohort to get the ideas really into circulation so the one community (queer) can effectively disperse ideas to the other (comics). Which again: straight people, but also all comics people regardless of orientation need to show up. It’s twenty bucks and some time.

Word is getting around on Twitter that at the Reuben Awards last night, the prizes for Online Comics — Short Form and Online Comics — Long Form were given to Cat And Girl by Dorothy Gambrell and Barbarous by Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh, respectively.

All three have been making comics on the web about forever, all three are at the top of their games, and all three are well deserved. Everybody feel good for Hirsh, Ota, and Gambrell!

A number of things happened while we’ve been going through the 2019 #ComicsCamp recap; for example, TCAF and a book that I loved, loved, loved released (review coming). A catch-up, then, for you.

There’s not one, not two, but three comics events take place in different corners of the continent starting tomorrow.

• Out in California, you’ve got NCSFest on the pier and surrounding public areas of Huntington Beach; it’ll be a Euro-style public festival, and feature the naming of this year’s Reuben Awards on Saturday. Follow the likes of Brad Guigar and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett for news on the ground.
• In Vancouver, you’ve got VanCAF kicking off on Saturday, with appearances expected from Abby Howard, Alina Pete, Ben Passmore, Boya Sun, Catie Donnelly, Cloudscape Comics, Emily Carroll, Evan Dahm, Faith Erin Hicks, Gigi DG, Haley Boros, Heather Gilbraith, Kazu Kibuishi, Kel McDonald, Kory Bing, Lars Brown, Mariko Tamaki, Matthew Bogart, Molly Muldoon, Msassyk, Pia Guerra, Ryan North, Sam Logan, Sarah Becan, Sloane Leong, Steve LeCouilliard, Steve Rolston, Tony Cliff, and Zac Thompson. That’s just the name I recognized on a fast pass over the guest list, and that means there’s even more creators that I (and maybe you) don’t know yet and get to discover.
• And in New York tomorrow and Saturday, the biennial Queers & Comics Conference takes place at the School of Visual Arts. If you want to go to an event that’s all sessions, it’s US$20 to register for the whole shebang. Panelists on various topics include Mariko Tamaki (who may be jetlagged, so be kind to her in Vancouver), Magdalene Visaggio, Alison Wilgus, Beth Barnett, Phil Jimenez, Rachel Pollack, Karen Green, Josh Trujillo, Paige Braddock, Kori Michele Handwerker, Blue Delliquanti, Jay Edidin, Sophie Labelle, Sam Orchard, Gina Gagliano, Tony Breed, Bill Roundy, and a whole bunch of folks whose names I don’t recognize. I’m going at least on Friday. I may or may not be writing up my experience; I suspect that I’ll be shutting up, listening and pointing you to a bunch of people’s work.

Speaking of pointing to people’s work, there were creators I met at Camp¹ whose work is new to me, and you should check it out. In no particular order, then: Anastasia Longoria, AnneMarie Rogers, Michael DiPetrillo, Leila del Duca, Jessi Jordan, Colin Andersen, Beth Barnett, Megan Baehr, Ally Colthoff, Tori Rielly, Bekka Lyn, Payton F, The Giant Rat, and Lily Williams.

And if you read this page you damn well better know who Tillie Walden is, but her UK publisher has put together a starter kit of her tricky-to-find first three books (she was only able to sell me two of them in Alaska). Okay, might not want to spring for the shipping if you’re not already in the UK/Europe (on this side of the pond, there’s a limited supply at Retrofit), but I thought I should point out that she had books before Spinning and that you should get them.

That should do for now. I’ll try to get something together for tomorrow, but the Q&C Conference is going to take up pretty much the whole day.

Spam of the day:

Introducing the brand new Ho’oponopono Certification…Secrets that bring you to “zero.”

Oh yes, pair of white guys, please tell me more about how you have decided that you are the official deciders of how to properly enact a traditional Hawai’ian practice. That’s totally cool of you.

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¹ You didn’t think I was really done just because I’d talked about everything that happened, did you?