Post is poned. See you tomorrow.

I believe that by this time, I have made the case that Larry Gonick is a national treasure. His use of comics to educate (across seemingly all fields of knowledge) is unparalleled, and if you are not familiar with the three volumes of The Cartoon History Of The Universe¹, you need to remedy that.

You may recall the word last month that Gonick was selling originals; you may also recall that he and I corresponded, seeing as how some of the few thousand pages he’s drawn in his career dealt with Claude Shannon, who I may have mentioned once or twice.

It’s done. The Shannon pages from The Cartoon Guide To Computer Science (sadly out of print) are now mine. They are installed on the wall over my desk, where I can feel the spirit of a playful polymath encourage me to look at problems that are interesting and solve them to the extent that the effort is both meaningful and fun.

Should you have some topic that Gonick has expounded upon that is near and dear to your heart, I encourage you to contact the man, as he is making his work available for exceedingly reasonable prices. If I were to win one of the fuck-you huge lottery jackpots this week, I’d make him an offer just to get his entire archive into Jenny Robb’s hands and loving care.

But not my three Shannon pages. Those will be going to the Electrical Engineering department at my alma mater

Spam of the day:

I have for you a quantity of new customers . you need?

I do not. Thanks for asking.

_______________
¹ The first of which was — no kidding — edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis.

You might not realize that a pair of occasionally-updating webcomics updated today, but some of us still believe in the power of RSS and saw the notifications.

First up, The Perry Bible Fellowship and a very good dog (despite what some in the panel might say).

Next up, a 22 page behemoth from Abby Howard at The Last Halloween; Howard’s spent a lot of time the past couple of year on her excellent Earth Before Us series of educational graphic novels (the third of which should drop in summer — Age Of Horns, people!), but you know that the monster-overrun TLH is where her heart yearns to be. We get a lot of backstory and worldbuilding in this one, and progress towards the next chapter, which may or may not take us back to Mona and whoever else survived Book 1. Go check it out!

And now, the weekend.

Spam of the day:

Take 57 lucky days of the year
Take +1 happiest day of week
The formula, which activates the luck 30 hours

Is this one of those deals where you do the math on your calculator and the answer is 5318008?

Before we get to the Good Thing in the title, I wanted to mention an Auxiliary Good Thing. That is to say, the second issue of The Nib in print is reaching mailboxes — such as mine, today — and it looks great. If you want a copy of this issue, on the theme of Family, you can either go back in time and back the Kickstarter, or you can take out a supporting membership.

Both options give you a choice of digital or print, but let me assure you that like the Death issue from September, Family is beautifully designed, on weighty, satisfying paper and has a considerable odor from the many inks¹ used in its construction.

Okay, the main Good Thing: Word’s been going around for the past few days about how the Eric Carle Museum Of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA, would be running an exhibition on the history of the graphic novel. Out Of The Box: The Graphic Novel Comes Of Age² opens on !0 Febrary and will run until 26 May, and will feature the work of Vera Brosgol, Catia Chien, Geoffrey Hayes, Gene Luen Yang, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Hope Larson, Matt Phelan, David Small, Raina Telgemeier, and Sara Varon.

But wait! There’s more.

The night before (that would be 9 February), there’s an opening reception from 5:00pm-7:00pm, with guest curator Leonard S. Marcus Brosgol, Chien, Krosoczka, Phelan, Telgemeier, and Varon expected to be in attendance. There’s a talk with the same folks the next day (10th again) at 11:00am to officially open the exhibition.

If you want to attend these special events, you need to RSVP, via one of two different methods. For the reception, contact Jenny Darling Stasinos at 413-559-6310 or jennys [at] carlemuseum [dot] org; for the gallery talk, RSVP at 413-559-6336 or info [at] carlemuseum [dot] org. Reservations open today, and run through Monday, 4 February.

Now here’s the kicker — both of those events are for Carle Museum members. If you aren’t one, now’s the time to join. Please note that Amherst is in the middle of one of the greatest concentrations of web/indie comics creators on the continent³, the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, home to Northampton, Easthampton, TopatoCo, Eastworks, the very sexy R Stevens, and at least one creator of Ninja Turtles, so if you’re going you may as well wander around and try to spot background locations from Questionable Content.

It’s not like those folks keep storefronts you can wander into, but if you bump into one on the street, they’d probably appreciate it if you told them I love your work, please accept three dollars cash from me a tip and I promise I will leave you alone and not be a creepy stalker.

Spam of the day:

As Seen On TV + 1 Month FREE!

One of the great improvements in Gmail lately is that images do not automatically load in spam. As there’s no text in this email, only pictures, I literally have no idea what they’re trying to scam me with. It’s awesome.

_______________
¹ I pity the youth of today, who never received a fresh-from-the-ditto machine quiz in junior high, the purplish ink still stinky and damp, making all your penciled answers smudge and tear. Wait, no, the opposite of that, those things were terrible.

² No direct link; at present, that’s on the upcoming exhibitions page, and will presumably shift to the current exhibitions page, and eventually the past exhibitions page.

³ Other loci include Portland, Seattle, the Bay Area, Toronto, Brooklyn, and White River Junction.

That is to say, both deeply weird Flash cartoons of the early Aughts and deeply weird space probe/football fanfic are idiosyncratic, personal creations made for the internet, marked by a sense of collaboration/accessibility with the audience, which makes them essentially webcomics, so say we all.

Webcomics as a concept, stretching past the literal definition of comics on the internet¹, can incorporate anything creative that probably won’t pass the muster of a publisher/editor, but which can find a niche of similar weirdos when thrown into the wilds.

Which is to say, Jonathan Coulton has always been a webcomicker, albeit one that worked primarily in words+sounds instead of words+pictures. No music publisher would have ever done something like Thing A Week, which means no music publisher would ever have made available a song about a very cool NPR morning host, fractal math, Leonard Nimoy’s late-70s paranormal-bait syndicated TV show, or (tangentially) Ferocious J². Heck, the guy partnered with Matt Fraction to do a graphic novel to accompany his last album.

(And, since JoCo has collaborated with MC Frontalot, you have a direct link to songs about Achewood, Wigu, and Indie Rock Pete.)

And what, I ask you, is more webcomics than doing a giant passion project that no sane publisher would get within 3.048 meters of, throwing it up on Kickstarter, and finding that a bunch of weirdos are into it?

My new album is called Some Guys, and it’s a collection of soft rock songs from the 70’s that sound exactly like the originals.

Our approach was more, what if we put these guys in a time machine and brought them into this studio and recorded them here today? What would that sound like? And what if we hired real horns and real strings? How much would that cost? A LOT! But would it sound delicious and make us giddy, like we had discovered an amazing secret or invented a new magic trick? Yes, it would. The end result is that these songs sound exactly like you expect them to, but they’re also different and new in an alternate universe sort of way.

And for a guy on his first Kickstart, JoCo’s apparently learned from his predecessors pretty well:

STRETCH GOALS
No.

Some Guys (seriously, go see the album cover, and read the writeup about the album cover, and especially watch the video — the clips that JoCo included sound exactly friggin’ like the originals, which is somewhat cognitively dissonant³, but in a wonderful way, and the message in the text crawls is inspiring) was announced at 10:00am EST, and as of this writing it’s over US$49,500 (on a US$20K goal).

The record is made, this is effectively a pre-order and a way to pay for physical versions (CD, vinyl) for those that don’t want digital downloads; it’s a zero-risk project if you’re looking for something wonderful, fun, soft, and cheering.

Spam of the day

You still have not taken the prize in the category Like the year 2018
15 0.1 2019 super prize is canceled

Aw, man, I really wanted super prize.

_______________
¹ Since pretty much everything is on the internet even if emotionally it’s designed for another space.

² As seen here, in requisite tin foil hat.

³ I am reminded of the very first live event for This American Life, where the stage band (consisting largely of John & John from TMBG) went out of their way to reproduce song snippets that were heavily used on TAL in those early years. Not putting a TMBG spin on them, mind you, trying to make them sound indistinguishable from the actual songs, rather than just drop the original clip into the staged readings They didn’t attempt Perpetuum Mobile by Penguin Cafe Orchestra, but can’t really blame them — it takes about 15 musicians playing in I think 7 different time signatures.

Following up on the various calls for entries yesterday, there’s at least two more awards programs that incorporate webcomics in a thoughtful manner, and you may want to consider them.

• The Cartoonist Studio Prize from Slate and the Center For Cartoon Studies is back for its seventh iteration, and the call for entries is open until 31 January. The CSP is fairly unique in a couple of regards — it has only two categories (Print Comic Of The Year and Web Comic Of The Year), it produces shortlists of ten works in each category, and in lieu of a statue it presents each winner with one thousand American cash smackeroos — and has remarkably few barriers to consideration.

  The work must have been first published (or translated into English) in calendar year 2018, online for the web entries. That’s it. Form, genre, topic, length, intended audience age, and all other artificial criteria are not considered. The only real restriction is that current faculty and students of CCS are ineligible.

  Got a print comic you want to submit? The form is here [PDF]. Did your work on the web? You’re gonna go here instead. The shortlists will be announced in March, and winners in April.

• Also open for your entries, the Prism Awards are presented by Prism Comics, the Cartoon Art Museum, and the Queer Comics Expo¹ annually, recognizing awesome comics by queer creators/addressing queer characters and topics. There will be awards granted for Best Short Form Comic, Best Webcomic, Best Comic From A Small To Midsize Press, Best Comic From A Mainstream Publisher, and Best Comic Anthology.

  Submissions must cover work made (or first published) in calendar year 2018, and not previously submitted for the award². Nominees will be announced at the Queer Comics Expo (dates TBA, but April) and awarded at SDCC in July.

  While we’re here, the Prism Comics Queer Press Grant (which is for two thousand American cash smackeroos) is also accepting submissions, with comics of all forms and media considered

  [F]irst and foremost by artistic merit, followed by concerns such as financial need, proposal presentation, and the project’s contribution to the LGBT community. The judges also lean towards projects that are more fully realized — we want to see many pages of sequential art, rather than an idea with sketches. The Queer Press Grant is awarded to an amateur artist who hasn’t yet gotten a mainstream publisher. They are reviewed by the Prism Board, past recipients of the Grant and Prism’s Advisory Board

  The Prism Awards submission guidelines may be found here, and entries are due by 15 February. The Prism Comics Queer Press Grant process is described here, and will take submissions until 1 March.

Spam of the day:

Hi – I came across your website fleen.com and I wanted to see if you have 3-5 minutes to see if I can reduce your payment processing fees? Please feel free to call or email me at 866.303.2558 opt.1

Got some time to kill? Call this guy and waste some of his time.

_______________
¹ Their official site is a Tumblr, and what with the stupidity over there, it may be locked as violating guidelines since anything and everything (but especially LGBTQ everythings and anythings) are being tagged as violating the TOS.

² That seems an odd requirement, but policies of this nature are typically reactive, so somebody out there is apparently doing work in one year, publishing in another, and trying to resubmit for the award again? Lame.

Hey there everybody, how’s the first full week of the year treating you? Good, good. Gonna mention some things you might want to get in on in the immediate term.

Entries! Got a couple of things that are looking for entries at the moment!

• The Eisners have just placed their call for entries, and it appears that one of this year’s judges is an adorable corgi, so that’s good. The rules [PDF] for webcomics/digital comics are slightly clarified, with digital defined as published online in 2018 and webcomic as long-form stories published online in 2018. I’m not sure what the line for long-form is, but that’s okay — the Eisners never have been sure either. Entries close 15 March.
• While we’re talking awards, the NCS has also announced its call for entries for the division awards. As in past years, online comics are divided into short form (think gag panels or strips) and long form (ongoing story), and there’s a new online animation category this year. Please note that the online comics require regular updates, whereas online animation may be a one-shot. It’s a tight turnaround for your entries — they’re due by next Tuesday, 15 January.
• Not an award (at least, not yet), but Iron Circus Supreme Leader For Life C Spike Trotman is celebrating the arrival of FTL Y’All in mailboxes around the world with a call for the next anthology:
  

  Iron Circus’ latest anthology project has been REVEALED.
  YOU DIED: An Anthology of the Afterlife! Submissions open FEBRUARY 1ST!
  Get the details HERE. https://ironcircus.com/you-died

  Let me save some of you some trouble and vicious mocking from Spike: read the submission rules. Seriously, she gets enough of these that if you decide to send something without following the guidelines, it goes out and if you bitch about her not accepting your brilliant jewel, she’ll inflict emotional damage on you for being an idiot.

  There’s enough folk out there that can follow directions to get that US$50/page rate (plus Iron Circus’s bonus structure) and the ability to buy copies for resale at a 50% discount that she doesn’t need to deal with somebody that can’t read and will only waste her time.

Comics! So about nine months ago, Nancy went from a moribund comic strip that primarily functioned as a vehicle for its current artist to draw Aunt Fritzi spank-bank style to the most vital comic since Cul De Sac or even Calvin & Hobbes; Olivia Jaimes is a genius¹. And credit where credit’s due, Universal Feature Syndicate/Andrews McMeel is approaching the revivification of moribund strips in a big, exciting way.

Click on the link for yesterday’s update of Alley-Oop and you’ll get a strip that actually ran in 2013, ending on a cliffhanger. Follow the link for today’s update of Alley-Oop and it’s one panel and an entire creative team later — it’s the promised relaunch with writing by Joey Allison Sayers and art by Jonathan Lemon, a pair of webcomickers who show every promise of being able to do for the Oopster what Jaimes did for Nancy. I’m calling it now: Alley-Oop is (or will be) lit.

Too many people slept on the Nancy creator shift; now is your chance to get in on what looks like a back to the very beginnings reboot of Alley-Oop (it’s strongly implied that most of the strip’s 86 year history was — like Bobby Ewing in the shower — just a dream). Plus it looks like Lemon signs his work with a little lemon with a face on it, and I declare this to be ACCEPTABLE.

Spam of the day:

Me now can last at least 2. 5 hrs and leave their partners please Watch this amazing 2 minute trick that ‘Kills’ ED, leavings your girl satisfied

I am not sure which language the person who wrote this original spoke, but I bet they don’t speak it very well.

_______________
¹ Note to self — set odds on Jaimes a) being nominated for the NCS newspaper strip division award, b) winning it, and c) taking the Reuben Award itself, further cementing Stephan Pastis as the Susan Lucci of the cartooning world.

I’ve got just enough time to establish residency and take advantage of some sweet discounts at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Here’s the deal:

The Cartoon Art Museum thanks its fans and supporters throughout Northern California by offering discounted admission to its galleries throughout the year as part of its ongoing mission to ignite imaginations and foster the next generation of visual storytellers by celebrating the history of cartoon art, its role in society, and its universal appeal.

San Francisco residents enjoy the benefits of a reduced General Admission fee to the Cartoon Art Museum all year long, and the Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to announce that it will extend that same discount to other counties throughout Northern California during select months in 2019.

*Residents of the following counties will enjoy reduced admission to the Cartoon Art Museum during the months listed below*:

March

Residents of these counties are asked to provide a valid photo ID to claim this admissions discount.

January	Napa
February	San Mateo
March	Santa Clara
April	Solano
May	Sonoma
September	Alameda
October	Contra Costa
November	Marin

Yeah, okay, maybe I won’t still be at the Marriott in Alameda County in September (at least I hope not; the red-eye flight home tonight is gonna suck, but at least my dog will be thrilled to see me tomorrow morning). And wherever you live, CAM’s got you covered this month for pay-what-you-want on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00am to 5:00pm. For the rest of the year, the first Tuesday of the month will still be PWYW, so bring the family and enjoy exhibits like A Treasury Of Animation (ongoing), and Emerging Artist Showcase: Thi Bui (through 14 January). There’s really no bad time to visit, to be honest.

In decidedly less good news, KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed shared the following earlier today:

I’m sad to say that Zu, our beautiful goofy big-hearted train wreck of a dog, has metastatic bone cancer. You know him by his Twitter callsign, Shitbeast Prime.

Requisite disclaimer: Spangler’s a personal friend of mine, I wrote the foreword for her first book, and I’ve been bowled over by Zu because he masses nearly as much as I do and has a much lower center of gravity. I’ve also lost two dogs to bone cancer. It’s heartbreaking, trying to find a way to keep them from pain but not rob them of any good days.

Spangler’s not asking for anything, but believe me when I tell you she would move heaven and earth for any treatment that seemed viable, damn the cost. If you like her work (in her comic, which is great, or her novels, which are great, or livetweeting White House press conferences so you don’t have to watch them, which is not great per se, but a damn valuable resource), maybe purchase some of her work?

And if you have a Good Boy or Good Girl of your own at home, give them some extra love; I know that Zu would appreciate it.

Spam of the day:

I have written a tonne of articles on sex toys, bondage and other stuff with which I have some personal experience :D I would like to contribute these articles to your blog as I think that your audience would enjoy reading them and find them useful. I will try to write some articles on famous porn stars and their biographies as well.

Frederic (or is it Anastasia, you use both names in your spam), you offer for download from your site what purports to be porn articles, related photos, and pics of you [presumably engaging in the personal experience you mentioned]. Does that actually work? It’s kind of obvious what you’re attempting here.

Know who we haven’t heard from in a while? Eben Burgoon. Longtime readers may recall that through the first half of Fleen’s history, we frequently noted happenings in Burgoon’s spy spoof, Eben07, in an appropriately purple prose. Then Burgoon and his compatriots moved onto B-Squad and he even gave me beer themed to his webcomic.

Burgoon’s been doing workshops and Maker Faires from Northern California (his normal stomping grounds) to as far away as Vilnius, Lithuania (no, really), the breadth of which made me wonder if he’d really gotten all that spycraft and secret mission tendency out of his system. Apparently not; Burgoon’s partnering with Starburns Industries to bring B-Squad back:

Starburns Industries Press sets its eyes on remastering an independent series, B-Squad, from indie darling author Eben Burgoon and a rotating roster illustrators and artists that change issue to issue.

B-Squad shares the ridiculous and dangerous missions of an expendable team of misfit mercenaries ranging from pop-culture riffs to cut from whole cloth oddballs. The bargain-bin commandos tackle leftover assignments of other more respected mercenary groups. SBI Press’s run begins with a remaster of the series debut Conspiracy in Cambodia, originally independently published in 2013, written by Burgoon and illustrated by Lauren Monardo.

In the spirit of a Saturday morning cartoon block, each B-Squad book serves as home for brand new tangential comics like [B-Squad illustrator Michael] Calero’s Monster Safari” and Burgoon’s newest creation about six-inch tall wizards trapped in the fast-food culture of a remote truck stop titled Tiny Wizards.

The remastered books are rounded out with activities, puzzles, and bonus content in homage to dentist office staples like Highlights magazine and ZooBooks.

No word as to whether or not the remastered B-Squad will feature Goofus and/or Gallant. You (where you is taken to mean folks in/around the Sacramento, California area) can ask him at the next workshop he’ll be running, on three Tuesdays in February (12th, 19th, 26th), at the Crocker Art Museum.

Spam of the day:

Account Name : ANDREW FARRINGTON
Account Number : [redacted]
IMPORTANT – YOUR PAYMENT CARD IS NEARING ITS EXPIRY DATE

Weird, why would you send something for Andrew Farrington to me? Then again, this might not be spam, but the latest in a long line of Other Garies Tyrrell sending their emails my way. Usually that’s easy to clear up, but I’ve had to resort to using the British tech press to shame Ryanair over their persistent screwups. Fun!

Did everybody enjoy the end of 2018? And by end of, I mean in the sense of driving a stake through its rotten heart, burning it on a sanctified pyre, burying the ashes at a crossroads under a wreath of garlic, and sowing the ground with salt.

We’ll be back to regular posting shortly as everything starts to ramp up again; tomorrow will be a skip day as I’ll be on a plane for most of it.

In the meantime, let us all resolve to be more like Wonderella.

Spam of the day:

Jimmy Fallon: Judge Judy exits

I see we’re starting the year off with some prime-grade nonsense. Well done, 2019.