See, I saw a couple of tweets here and there about something that looked interesting and I filed them in the “write about this” pile. Then I got an email from the PR guy at the responsible company, talking about how awesome this is. Got it, I thought, I really do want to write about this Then I got another email from one of the creators in question, also urging me to check things out. It’s a tactical PR exchange of a scale and depth that you’d normally associate with a Disney, or possible a mid-sized authoritarian regime¹.

If it weren’t all involving Jim Zub, I’d start to feel a bit put upon.

But as readers of this page know, I have great respect for Zub and his very generous nature, sharing more about how the comics business works with newbies² than anybody else I can think of. In superhero terms, he has the proportional strength and knowledge-sharing of three men.

And hey, I’d been thinking about mentioning his latest observation re: what sales looks like on creator-owned projects when he dropped a graph about the sales of the trade of his Pat Rothfuss collab on a two-IP crossoverganza, Rick & Morty vs Dungeons & Dragons. Spoiler: sometimes working in somebody else’s IP backyard means you sell a metric squatload of books.

Anyways, today Zub (and comiXology) would much like you to know about a new book, dropping today with no advance leaks or hints:

This morning, comiXology Originals announced and launched STONE STAR, my new creator-owned comic! Yup, we just pulled off a bit of a Beyoncé Drop, cutting through pre-hype and ordering hassles by making the announcement our simultaneous launch.

Anybody else, I’d say maybe they forgot or decided the promo budget was looking thin, but comiXology always has a plan, and being part of Amazon means they’ve got essentially unlimited promo resources. Zub, characteristically, shifted the attention from himself and onto his collaborators immediately. Like, before even describing the book:

Artist Max Dunbar (my phenomenal collaborator on Dungeons & Dragons: Legends Of Baldur’s Gate and the Champions in Weirdworld story), colorist Espen Grundetjern, letterer Marshall Dillon, and I have been working on this series in secret, building the characters and story while juggling our other projects, getting prepared for this surprise announcement and release.

The story? Sounds pretty cool, actually:

Stone Star is a mobile asteroid where entertainment abounds, and competition and celebrity are intertwined. Gladiators fight to find their fortune, but there are other secrets lurking beneath the surface as a new season of competition begins. It’s space-fantasy with modern-day sports entertainment that follows the story of Dail, a teenage thief pulled into the arena who has to decide where his loyalties lie.

The series launches today with a US$2.99 price point for issue #1, or free with Amazon Prime Reading, Kindle Unlimited, or comiXology Unlimited; I’ve made my opinions known about books in the Amazon ecosystem previously, so I figured I’d be waiting to see if there was ever a print run that can’t be depublished for whatever reason, and godsdammit, Zub went and sent me a review PDF of the first issue.

It’s good. It’s real good. Characters³, setting, conflict, stakes all established and waiting to pay off after the requisite last-page cliffhanger. I’m still holding out for that print copy, but I’m going to be paying attention to this one instead just waiting for it to pop back up on my radar.

If you’re inclined to work with e-comics, I’d suggest getting in on Stone Star now. Alternately, Zub and Dunbar have just been announced as surprise guests at Wondercon this weekend, so if you’re in Anaheim, drop by booth 2151 to say hi.

Spam of the day:

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¹ But I repeat myself.

² In essence, creating competitors for himself down the line.

³ There just a bit of the late, lamented Leave It To Chance in the character designs. I’ve been waiting twenty years in case issue #14 of that ever drops, so that just a bit of resemblance is hitting me in the nostalgia gland.

And we all know that when I talk about the Bay Area, there’s just one thing that could mean: party at Shaenon Garrity’s backyard tiki hut! something cool is happening at the Cartoon Art Museum.

As it has in past years, CAM is participating in a museum exchange bonanza, where memberships at one cultural institution are honored at all of them, thus allowing people to see more cool stuff than they’d ordinarily be able to. This year, Member For A Day (taking place on 14 April, that’s a Sunday) will allow CAM members to take in:

• Asian Art Museum
• Berkeley Art Museum And Pacific Film Archive
• Contemporary Jewish Museum
• Fine Arts Museums Of San Francisco (the deYoung is in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion Of Honor is in Lincoln Park)
• Museum Of African Diaspora
• Museum Of Craft And Design
• Oakland Museum Of California
• San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art
• UC Botanical Garden At Berkeley
• The Walt Disney Family Museum

Note that there may be surcharges for special exhibits at FAMSF and the Oakland Museum Of California.

Importantly, the presence of some of the premier museum of not just the area, but of the country (SFMOMA is world class, MOAD is a Smithsonian affiliate) means that CAM is an equal, a legitimate home of scholarship and culture. I find that something that should be repeated every once in a while, as comics still get regarded as unimportant, or lesser — neither art nor literature. I mean, we all saw this on Twitter, right?

My daughter said her LA teacher has officially banned graphic novels from his class. She then asked me to find bags so she could bring hers to school so she can lend them out. A story right from one of @AlanGratz or @allisonvarnes books. #rebellibrarian #banthisbook

Kudos to both mom (for raising a daughter that wants to read and recognizes good reading doesn’t require a particular form) and daughter (who will be running a clandestine library out of her locker — I’m pretty sure this makes her a booklegger in the Leibowitzian sense). Who knows? Maybe the thrill of the illicit will entice a reluctant reader or two even moreso than some graphic novels would have on their own (and GNs are a tremendous tool for getting reluctant readers to engage with books) and it’ll be a net positive.

Mostly, though, that teacher (and some who are cheering him for making kids read “real books”) need to understand — comics are part of the culture and an equal to any other art. Maybe we can encourage that guy to visit San Francisco to see for himself if he needs traditional arbiters of worthiness to give him permission to let kids read what they want.

Spam of the day:
\\ Gay Union News //
Apparently, I’m in the union and didn’t realize it. Are there dues?

With EmCity and C2E2¹ behind us, there’s a stretch of festival-type comics shows in April and May², to be found in Chicago², Toronto, and Vancouver. They’re all respected institutions, and they kick off each year in New York with MoCCA Fest.

And if there’s one thing that tends to happen with festival-type events, it’s that organization and details can happen late in the game. Some are super organized³ and down to a science, some we’ll get programming the week of and updates to the exhibitors list almost up to the day of. What I’m saying here is, please remember as we move into festival season that any information we present now, there will probably be updates and addenda in the weeks to come.

All of which is to say, I saw somebody on the Twitters over the weekend remarking that the MoCCA exhibitor’s list was mostly illustrators and not comics folk, but I think that’s just a function of which names are posted to date. As I write this, there’s about 125 entries on the list, with many longtime MoCCA vets not listed (yet), and a typical MoCCA floorplan offering easily twice that many tables. There’s also the fact that some larger exhibitors (such as :01 Books) will have many creators rotating in and out, not to mention the TBA main signing table

So with the caveat that this list will certainly grow over the next couple o’ weeks, if you head to the Metropolitan West event space (West 46th between 11th and 12th, across the street from the USS Intrepid) on Saturday 6 April (11:00am to 7:00pm) or Sunday 7 April (11:00am to 6:00pm) and pay your ten bucks (eighteen for a weekend pass), you’ll get to see Aatmaja Pandya and Alison Wilgus sharing space at table F217, Sara Varon at table D156a, and an unknown number of folks associated with :01 Books at table E162, and likewise some number of folks associated with Czap Books at table H253b. The food court is damn good, too.

There will be more! [Editor’s note: Case in point, there was just an announcement from Iron Circus that they’ll be there.] And just because I don’t recognize a lot of the names on the current exhibitor’s list, that’s not a bad thing! I’ve learned about more new people I want to follow at MoCCA than at any other show, even in the disastrous post-Puck, whole-exec-board-quit, somebody-forgot-to-get-cash-registers-so-they-could-take-money-for-passes, Society of Illustrators-hadn’t-stepped-in-yet years. I expect this year will be no different. So keep an eye on the show page, keep an eye on this page, and if you have plans for MoCCA that haven’t made it onto the official site yet, drop me a line and I’ll share the news.

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¹ Which, also being a Reed!Pop show, is pretty similar in a lot of respects to ECCC, just a week or two later; for my money, CAKE is the webcomicky show in the Windy City.

² Okay, technically CAKE is in June but it’s the 1st and 2nd. Close enough, dammit.

³ Lookin’ at TCAF here, who have information up earlier than pretty much any other show of the year, festival-type, massive pop culture type, or gym-scale one day longbox vendor events. This is because Chris Butcher is not only an organizational machine, he has spent the past decade-plus training everybody that works on TCAF to be the same. Institutional memory and capability are real things, and to be prized when you have them.

We’ll catch up on Monday, ‘kay?

Man, you can learn a lot from the Twitters. Sometimes, you learn that an idea you had is already in motion. Sometimes you learn that an idea that nobody had makes perfect sense.

• I swear, when I wrote a week ago about the new line of civic engagement graphic novels from :01 Books and how they should pick up Zach Weinersmith, I didn’t know they already had:
  

  Check out the exclusive cover and excerpt reveal of #OpenBorders by @bryan_caplan and @ZachWeiner, on @PasteMagazine! This nonfiction graphic novel on immigration comes this fall, and is available for pre-order now!

  Weinersmith’s been talking to me forever about the graphic novel he’s been working on that argues in favor of open borders; I think the first time we talked about it here was a good eighteen months ago. In all that time, he never let on it was with :01, but honestly I should have guessed. And today, we have a cover reveal and street date, courtesy of Paste¹ magazine: Open Borders: The Science And Ethics Of Immigration, and 29 October.

  There’s a six page preview over there, too, which quickly establishes the central thesis of the book: that wholly unrestricted immigration is not only an economic good, but also morally necessary. I’m calling the over/under on the number of angry, early morning “executive time” tweets about the book on or around the release at … let’s say four.

• There’s a thing I never knew I needed — that anybody needed — and in retrospect it appears bloody obvious. Jeph Jacques has made a habit of purchasing … unique URLs to redirect to his comic², which is no new thing in webcomics. Jeffrey Rowland showed me a list of all the domains he owned once, and it was a thing of demented beauty; Rich Stevens collects domains like an early ’90s kid collected pogs.

  But Jacques makes use of his redirects, linking them when a new comic goes up; I don’t think he’s used questionablecontent.net in more than a year; on the one hand, most of his aliases are much shorter, and on the other, the fact that a massive, worldwide technological infrastructure was constructed just to allow dildo.pizza to exist is funny all by itself.

  But let’s face it — a gag can only take you so far, and some of those exotic TLDs have noncompetitive registrars; at some point, you gotta cut your losses or find a way to pay for your hobby:

  I have the best URLs in the business, and now you can have a sweet fuckin’ print of them thanks to @topatoco https://topatoco.com/collections/jeph-jacques/products/qc-urls-print …

  This is, I believe, the first poster that needs to possibly come with annual updates. Hey, Jeph, have you considered that? This could be an annual subscription item.

Spam of the day:

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¹ And hot dang, can I just express my admiration for a moment of how the folks at :01 have taken the let’s promote our forthcoming graphic novel game from sending the exclusive to The Beat or CBR and raised it to the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Paste? It sends a message not just about their own offerings when you can say a new graphic novel is not just of interest to the comics world, it is and should be part of the general culture.

² And sometimes just to have. Remember walmart.horse?

The National Cartoonists Society is a venerable organization, founded on the principle that cartoonists ought to get together and have a big ol’ drink-up. Oh, and promoting the art and craft of cartooning, and later endowing scholarships, doing USO visits, public outreach, but mostly? Cartoonists like to hang out and party.

In the past, they’ve spread the partying around (case in point: I got to dress up in a damn tuxedo and gamble like I was James Frickin’ Bond one year), but this year and going forward, it’ll be Huntington Beach and a public, Euro-style festival that hosts the (members and guests only) Reuben Awards.

(Requisite disclaimer: I have been a member of the advisory jury for every iteration of webcomics awards the NCS has presented, from 2012 to present; I will not discuss the details of my participation or the process by which the jury made its determinations.)

This year, the nominees for Online Comics — Short Form are Cat And Girl by Dorothy Gambrell, bacön by Lonnie Milsap, and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith. The nominees for Online Comics — Long Form are Untold Tales Of Bigfoot by Vince Dorse, Kill Six Billion Demons by Tom Parkinson-Morgan, and Barbarous by Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh.

Webcomickers and adjacent folks in other categories include Pia Guerra (who tears it up at The Nib) for Gag Cartoons and John Allison (and let’s acknowledge the rest of the Giant Days team: Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, Jim Campbell, Whitney Cogar) for Comic Books.

With respect to my disclaimer above, my thoughts:

• All of the nominees in both categories have that je ne sais webcomiques that says this is something that could only exist on the internet, it would never work in the paper, with the exception of bacön, which could have been slotted into the Gag Cartoons category.
• As previously stated, the categories have undergone a several years refinement process, both in developing an eye as for what makes webcomics webcomics, and in seeking out a wide variety of nominees¹ that wouldn’t ordinarily fall into the orbit of the average NCS member.
• Due to the nature of webcomics and the fact that the term itself is terribly imprecise, there will possibly never be a slate of nominees that entirely satisfies the sort of person that cares about this sort of thing² which makes these categories par for the course in comics awards. That being said, I think this year’s nominees represent well the breadth of webcomics.
• Having previously won, I think Dorse won’t win Long Form this year.
• It’s weird that the revived Nancy did not get nominated for newspaper strip, but since Olivia Jaimes took over in the middle of the nomination period, maybe it’s to avoid confusion. But if Nancy stays as good as it has been (a virtual certainty) and isn’t nominated next year, the pier at Huntington Beach may see riots.
• All three nominees for Feature Animation are recognized for their work on Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, which is only right and proper. Well done, Shiyoon Kim (character animation), Peter Ramsay (director), and Justin K Thompson (production design). It must have been terribly difficult to single out only three names, and I suspect whichever wins will declare that the recognition belongs to everybody that worked on the movie.
• I don’t know who won; until the public announcement, I didn’t know who the final nominees were.
• I have and will continue to have opinions.

The various awards will be presented on 18 May in Huntington Beach, California. Best of luck to all the nominees, but if I had to express one preference? I think it would be awesome if the NCS gave an award to a story about a sorority girl, a genderqueer angel, and a demon fanfic author pulling off a heist from an infinite fractal vault in Hell, if only because a bunch of old dudes that didn’t like dames or beatniks or minorities even appearing in comics (much less making them) would turn in their graves, giving us a perpetual source of clean energy.

Spam of the day:

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What.

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¹ Including Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse (won), Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie, Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots (won), Minna Sundberg’s Stand Still, Stay Silent (won), Ngozi Ukazu’s Check Please (won), Drew Weing’s The Creepy Casefiles Of Margo Maloo (won), Boulet’s Bouletcorp, and Allison’s Bad Machinery (won).

² AKA all of you.

I will, to my dying day, maintain that Shaenon Garrity lacks a sufficient sense of greed, or perhaps ego. I say this because she criminally underprices her originals, which is why I’ve gotten several — from both Narbonic and Skin Horse — simply because she’s Kickstarted a book and was willing to throw original strips in at an uncreedably¹ modest price.

Case in point: Garrity and her Skin Horse writing partner, C Jeffrey Wells, are Kickstarting two — two! — Skin Horse volumes, and they are being typically generous on the rewards.

• US$35 Both print volumes, signed and sketched (early bird, limited to 100, but only five bucks more after)
• US$50 Add an original character sketch
• US$150 Add an original prose story from Wells and the original art of a strip from the books
• US$250 Add print copies of all six previous books
• US$300 The 150 tier, plus you get drawn into the story as a character and you get the original art from your cameo²

Thirty five bucks for two color books, signed and sketched? That’s stupidly cheap, and I encourage you all to get in on it, but not because it’s stupidly cheap; because Skin Horse is one of the smartest, funniest, long-con-est webcomics around, and we need to encourage such.

Plus, if we’re very lucky, a stretch goal will get added that will convince Garrity to resume her recap comics of The X-Files, Monster Of The Week, since the Patreon doesn’t seem to be producing on that front.

Speaking of Patreon — and has there ever been a case in the past 18, 24 months where speaking of Patreon was the precursor to something good? — there’s changes a’coming down the pike, which bear all the hallmarks of keeping VC funders happy at the expense of merely being a stable, profitable company. Let’s let Ryan North³ explain this one:

Patreon, a platform that has become measurably worse with each update, is excited to announce an exciting new update! Now it costs you more money.

I love my patrons and I hate that Patreon as a company is so deep into VC funding that they’ll do anything, like last year when they changed everything overnight and then walked it back a few days later. This isn’t a platform you can trust.

Here’s a great thread from earlier this year about why Patreon is getting worse, and why it’ll continue to do so for a long time. I’m very much looking forward to Drip relaunching as a public benefit corp, which will sidestep these issues entirely: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1092846201374892032

Here’s the deal: Patreon will be charging up to 12% of your pledges plus payment processing fees. The fact that they announced this as we’re making changes soon but if you have an account before cutover you won’t get charged as much instead of we’re making changes soon but if you’re already have an account then you won’t be charged as much is fairly screaming that they’re trying to show some kind of subscriber growth to their investors. It is the same make the numbers look good for quarter end bullshit that leads corporations to fire a bunch of people just before they report earnings to make Wall Street happy.

There’s always been a saying around tech — if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product — which Patreon seems intent on inverting: you’re paying for the product and you are the product. Unfortunately for Patreon, they aren’t irreplaceable. Facebook badly fumbled their Patreon-alike, but New Drip is going to peel people off for the simple reason that a public benefit corporation that isn’t beholden to venture capital won’t — can’t — treat its golden-goose user base as an excuse to sharpen the knife.

Spam of the day:

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I think I’m supposed to infer that whatever your husband did, it left you so breathless from the sex that you can’t complete a sentence even when typing a spamvertisement at a later time?

_______________
¹ Love you, Ike Willis .

² At least one past cameo has become an occasional recurring character — KT the zombie sewer maintenance worker.

³ Who, like Garrity, is a Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities.

We all recognize it — about 1.5 seconds of animation that is one of the most spectacularly recognizable bits of animation of the last 30 years.

One cool slide deserves another. Katsuhiro Ôtomo's #Akira continues to influence artists and filmmakers alike. pic.twitter.com/6LYuOHC6Sr

— One Perfect Shot (@OnePerfectShot) August 2, 2016

We’ll recognize Kaneda’s bike slide from Akira for as long as animation exists, and it’s spawned a host of tributes for no other reason that it looks hell of cool, doing as much to establish the bleeding-edge aesthetic of Neo-Tokyo¹ as any part of the movie.

And yet, it’s maybe not the most arresting image in the Akira canon. There’s one image, from the original manga, of the title character, small atop an oversized, ruined throne, an empty dictator of a ruined empire.

It speaks of a desperate attempt to maintain the façade of order amidst destruction. It’s ice-cold, chilling down to the marrow². Even if you don’t know the context (and it comes more than 1000 pages into story), you can tell everything that image is conveying. It’s powerful. And because it’s not there just to be hell of cool, it hasn’t had a plethora of pastiches and tributes.

Until today.

Over at The Nib, Omar Khouri and Yazan Al-Saadi, who live and work in Lebanon, have produced a primer on the state of Syria after nearly a decade of civil war. And to bookend the piece, there sits Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, small atop an oversized, ruined throne, an empty dictator of a ruined empire.

He’s less figurehead than Akira of the Great Tokyo Empire, but the image is no less arresting or powerful. It’s viscerally disturbing, given that what’s happened to Syria is not the result of insane psychics, but rather the hatreds and love of power of ordinary men, who would rather destroy that which they cannot control.

Eight Years Of Unrest In Syria is a sad, necessary piece of journalism. It’s too small to contain a full accounting of the horrors that the people of Syria have suffered, but it’s a damn good introduction. And it reminds us that just as Akira is the story of how one destruction of [Neo-]Tokyo inevitably scatters the seeds that will lead to the next, if the underlying causes remain unaddressed and truth, accountability, and justice are absent. Without a reconciliation process, there can be no real rebuilding.

Kudos to Al-Saadi and Khouri for their reportage — not least because running stories critical of the Assad regime is not a safe activity — and to The Nib for bringing us voices and stories from around the world³ that would otherwise likely go unseen on these shores.

And if you haven’t yet, go read Akira — it’s a much larger, more nuanced story than the movie (which, let’s be clear, is a masterpiece). There’s a lot there that has particular resonance today, even before you consider that the story features the 2020 Olympics taking place in Tokyo; while there don’t appear to be murderous biker gangs and telekinetic children running around the Olympics site causing catastrophic destruction, these days nothing surprises me.

Spam of the day:

The Free Energy Device That Might Scare Trump To Death

Why? Unless it can be explained in small words by Tucker Carlson or works by stealing his hamburders, he’ll neither understand nor care.

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¹ It occurs almost exactly five minutes into the film.

² More than a little appropriate for Akira.

³ Also running today, a reflection on the New Zealand shooting republished from The Spinoff in Auckland

There’s so many terrible things happening, so much tragedy perpetrated by those unable to conceive of a world where they are not universally acknowledged as masters, and yet …

And yet, there’s always good news to give us a respite from the terrible. Maybe you noticed four words at today’s Gunnerkrigg Court¹. Maybe you saw a tweet that was fairly brimming with joy. Magnolia Porter and Tom Siddell celebrated his relocation from the UK to New York City earlier this week by getting married this morning, and there is a world of good right there. Situations like these, I always fall back on on of my favorite bit from Willy Shakes:

Claudio: Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much. Lady, as you are mine, I am yours

Okay, Claudio’s a drip that needs his ass kicked², but that’s a great line. And like Claudio, I cannot properly say how happy I am for Porter and Siddell; may they find all the joy they can scarce find words to express.

And on the off chance you aren’t the sentimental sort, more good news: KC Green has retrieved his adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio from Tumblr’s foul clutches and set it up on its own site, as well as released Chapter 25. This puts us at about the start of the final act in this three-act story, so get caught up if you want to see how the story looked before the grillo parlante got a name.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Which, let’s be fair, went up approximately 5:45am EDT, speaking in the past tense about something that likely was still a few hours off.

² Benedick calling him on his shit is another of my favorite bits from Dub-S; in fact, pretty much all of Much Ado is a nonstop delight, and I have regular, lengthy internal arguments about my favorite interpretations of those roles. On any given day, Emma Thompson/Kenneth Branagh and Catherine Tate/David Tennant go back and forth as my favorite Beatrice and Benedick.

I prefer Denzel Washington as Don Pedro and Richard Briers as Leonato, but Nathan Fillion and Tom Lenk beat out everybody for Dogberry and Verges. Not sure why Antonio gets short shrift in so many productions, but it doesn’t matter — Brian Blessed is untouchable in that role. And dammit, I think that Keanu does a great one-dimensional villain.

By rights I should have talked about this yesterday, but then when would we have discussed Too Boat, Too Boner? So today it is.

:01 Books is not resting after two years of transition from a 20-titles-per-year publisher to a 50-titles-per-year publisher; particularly in the wake of Gina Gagliano’s shift to Random House — which I’m sure everybody at :01 would agree is actually a win for the industry, although I’m sure they feel the sting of her absence — they have been expanding not only in volume, but also in focus.

Recall that they are not only the only graphic novel publisher that addresses every age range, as well as one of the few that are actively bringing European comics to American readers¹. They have launched thematic lines of graphic novels — Science Comics, Maker Comics — while also staking their reputation on supporting authors of distinctive voice. It’s not obvious what niche they’ve left unserved.

And now we know: civic education and engagement:

That’s the goal of a slate of new graphic novels from World Citizen Comics, which aim to excite and inform readers about how they can fight corruption in elections, blast fake news with truth-telling, and even battle would-be dictators both near and far through a better understanding of constitutions and the rule of law.

It’s significant that the new sub-imprint was announced in Entertainment Weekly, who tell us that there will be seven books initially, starting in Spring of next year (just in time for a major exercise of the political process here in the US). It’s a new enough endeavour that the :01 and Macmillan websites (as well as that of Roaring Brook Press, of which :01 is an imprint … the lines of hierarchy can get kind of scrambled) haven’t caught up to the news yet. But given the enormous impact of the March trilogy (certainly to be matched by the forthcoming sequel, Run), it appears that it’s a niche that can match up ideas and minds with the intention of doing some good.

World Citizen will feature :01 vets like Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb (on Breaking (The) News by Jennifer Pozner, on modern media culture) and George O’Connor² (on Un-Rig: How To Fix Our Broken Democracy by Dan Newman, on the influence of dark money on politics and policy). They’ll also bringing new folks into the fold, like Kasia Babis (on Re-Constitution by Beka Feathers, about resisting authoritarianism and buttressing the rule of law), who’s been killing it at The Nib.

I’m expecting the tone of the imprint will be something similar to Josh Neufeld’s The Influencing Machine, which is one of the best, densest, but easy-to-read primers on How The World Really Works. As for the future, it’s not like the world will be getting any less complex (or the challenges facing us any easier) after the initial tranche of books is done; we seem to be more open-eyed about the resurgence of authoritarianism around the world than we have been in the past³, but the generations that didn’t live through the last antidemocratic period need to learn history — a history that those in charge may not want them to learn. A line of books made for a general audience (as opposed to political junkies), especially one that’s at least partially pitched at younger readers, will be welcome.

And hey, maybe they look at what Zach Weinersmith is doing in the same sphere (his comic series on the American political system with his political scientist brother, his forthcoming book in favor of open immigration with a prominent Libertarian economist) and we get more of his work in book-sized chunks incisively determining what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it, but with dick jokes. If you’re going to tackle something as serious as the defense of democracy itself, you gotta lighten the mood at least a little.

Spam of the day:

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Fact: I have had a lifelong sensitivity to pressure and temperature changes, which manifests (primarily at night) as a mild case of tinnitus.
Fact: Stay the fuck away from me with a gun. Thank you.

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¹ Even though not enough of you bought Last Man and the series stalled on the most devastating cliffhanger imaginable, damn you all.

² Gotta have a project lined up for when Olympians ends, which will simultaneously be a magnificent accomplishment and a very sad day.

³ Which is damn good, because the last time you had so many aspiring strongmen in so many places, it led to 50 million or so dead people and multiple continents in ruins.