It’s damn near the longest nights of the year, for those of us in the northern hemisphere — a time when the whole world seems dark and cold and determined to see the end of us. And yet, in damn near every culture, you’ll find this is the time that people look to feast and celebrate together, to jump into the long cold season ahead with hope and optimism that they’ll see the coming of Spring again.

That idea’s been around for as long as there have been people, and I think it’s worth remembering. If you celebrate, Merry Christmas. If you don’t, I’m wishing you food and fellowship, celebration with your loved ones, that feeling that we’re all in this together, and the hope that as the days slowly claw back at the dark, that we’ll all be better off before much longer. As long as you hold that notion of commonwealth for all, you’re welcome at my hearth¹.

Posting this week as circumstances warrant, otherwise I’ll see you in the new year.

Spam of the day:

do you sell your website domain?
Best,
Flo

Twelve million dollars and it’s yours.

_______________
¹ Or, in this case, a GE model JGBP33 gas range/oven. I’m making pizza!

As promised yesterday, we have a second dispatch from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, still in the Greater Toulouse region of France. Take it away, FSFCPL!

A mere two weeks after the Colomiers comics festival, Toulouse was hosting the Toulouse Game Show or TGS, and since this is a show that Maliki’s Souillon regularly attends (though he and Becky skipped it this year), I thought it would be worth checking out. Yup, time for another four-hour train ride to Toulouse …

While the TGS has video games content, it is more general than that and is best thought of as a marketplace for pop culture paraphernalia (taking the whole of the Parc des Expositions de Toulouse), much like any other anime con. In it you could find apparel merchants, steampunk accessories dealers, retrogaming preservation associations, a lot of cosplay of course¹, diorama creation clubs, a food court, booths for many webseries, etc.

And the TGS did feature comics content, and not just Ankama (found in pretty much every anime con in France, Belgium, and possibly Switzerland). I did not spot any creator I previously knew about, so it seems webcomics have not significantly invaded the TGS so far, but this also means everything was new to me. In particular, the fanzine scene was well-represented.

Still, the comics presence was not sufficient to have a dedicated section or artist’s alley, with most comics booths being next to one of the steampunk accessories dealers. Not that there is anything wrong with mixing comics with steampunk), but the TGS and other such conventions could make themselves more attractive to both comics creators and comics fans by dedicating an area to comics, in my opinion.

I am still catching up on my haul of comics bought there (work has been hectic lately), but I was already able to note the variety of approaches the creators I met there have with the web. In some cases, the pages were initially posted online, such as for Blue Bird’s Oath. Other creators put books as a whole on Mangadraft after the fact, keeping the latest print-exclusive until its successor comes out. And some creators barely have a web presence at all.

So while I am not done with my assessment, this trip to the TGS is already a net win to me², and I will keep an eye on it, especially as it provides a view of indie comics outside that of Paris or Brussels, and which is itself nevertheless different from that of Colomiers: I found no overlap at all.

Thanks as always to M Lebeaupin; when we at the US branch of Fleen eventually make it to France, we’ll have a much better idea of where to go for comics³.

Notspam of the day:

I keep getting email for other Gary Tyrrells (Garys Tyrrell? Garies Tyrrell?). If it’s important, I try to sort things out, but it doesn’t usually work. This morning, I got an invoice for lintels from Perth, Australia. As a special holiday treat, I’m sharing a typical reply:

Hi Wanita,

Wrong person. Bunch of Gary Tyrrells around the world (at least two in England, maybe three in Ireland, two or more in Oz, and one electrical contractor in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, US) think my email is their email. There’s also a sort-of famous Gary Tyrrell in California, but he’s cool. We had lunch together once.

I have not ordered any lintels from you. Truth be told, I’m not 100% sure what lintels are. I mean, I visited Australia once but what with the bridge-climbing, wine-touring, wombat-petting, and Great Barrier Reef snorkling, lintels didn’t come up at all. I’m sure your lintels are very nice, though.

For the record, I also do not have a Peugot that needs service in the Lakes District, have an order for a Brexit-supporting cloisonne badge to be delivered to the Scottish Borderlands, owe registrations fees on a vehicle in Dublin, have a Jurassic Park Smash ‘n’ Throw T-Rex on order at a toy shop in Kildare, have plans to fly between Ireland and Eindhoven, hold a Lawson’s card in Melbourne, or hold any interest in various contracts and requests-for-bid for electrical jobs. Oh and I don’t have a warranty on tires in California, but that wasn’t the Gary Tyrrell that I know, so at least one more?

Please contact your guy and update your records. Tell him Gary said hi.

Gary
The one in New Jersey

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¹ Among the characters spotted: Arthur, king of the Britons with his personal coconut knocker, a T-Rex, two ghostbusters of opposite genders, and a wheelchair-riding Aquawoman.

² Not to mention everything else you can do there, such as eating takoyaki, buying retro games (be sure to have your console so you can check they work: you’ll have a hard time returning them otherwise), or attending a panel by the competitive Puyo Puyo playing community.

³ Other than Belgium, that is. Several of the best English language collections in comics shops I’ve ever seen were in Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp …

* Where You is defined as Dispatches from France courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. Let us jump into the first of them now.

I didn’t know what to expect in Colomiers, but I wasn’t disappointed in the end.

The town of Colomiers (located next to Toulouse, home of the French aeronautics industry) has been hosting a comics festival for the past 32 years, and it is remarkable for its focus. Indeed, while it is directly set up by the cultural services of the town, it is not mainstream-oriented, as those tend to be (which makes sense: these towns typically intend to provide quality entertainment for their inhabitants, without any grander ambition).

Rather, with this festival the municipal authorities clearly mean to try and make the town, which might otherwise seem like an ordinary suburban town, a cultural attraction with their editorial choices, the first of which being a clear focus on indie comics.

First came the professional day, which was very student-oriented: at the start of the day I was given a proof of attendance, for instance. And the matters covered were undoubtedly advanced, such as the state of comics creation in Argentina, or the carrier of a master of comics in Argentina, Alberto Breccia¹.

Then I was able to go to the exhibition of his work the following day, and he indeed had a varied career, working with a variety of styles and means, though the published pages (often shown next to the originals) were often unfortunately not up to preserving his midtones. I was able to visit the other exhibitions the festival set up, all involving people I had never heard about before.

But besides the exhibitions, where the focus is most clear is in the main expo space that I trawled on the third day, which was almost entirely dedicated to independent creators and publishers, without even sellers of historical editions of comics as you can find even in SoBD for instance (there was a small space for a general comics library and a few invited creators). As a result, Colomiers provides the indie French-Belgian comics scene with the most space of any festival or convention in France.

I went back home with a few realizations.

First, it is interesting to note that, except in a few cases (Lapin, in particular), this scene is still largely independent from webcomics, by contrast with the small press scene in the U.S. which has by now entirely merged with the webcomics culture. So most of the works and creators were new to me, and it is clear it is going to take me some time to properly penetrate this scene.

In particular, the works shown made me realize I did not previously give much though about the legibility/reader effort dimension of comics: while webcomics, in French or in English, have made many experiments mainstream comics haven’t, on the other hand they would rather err on the side of being legible without much effort as a survival strategy on the web, where attention is very limited. Not so in this indie comics scene, and this brought me back to Scott McCloud’s theories on the subject (fortunately the local library, very much involved with the festival activities, did have Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics for me to refresh my memory).

The festival also veered towards the edge of what constitutes comics, showcasing for instance the publishing part of an artist collective as one of the four featured publisher, where the shown works were hard to distinguish from merely separately framed pictures in succession (they were wordless). Was it comics? Was it not? Heck if I know.

I did find familiar ground that nevertheless I think is representative of the festival, which is the works of Joan Cornella, published in France by Ici Même, one of the four featured publishers. You have probably seen one of his absurd, wordless, slightly disturbing four-panels cartoons floating on the web, but those are only the tip of the iceberg, and only with the book can you see how absurd he can go; I would recommend at least taking a look.

Yet all this focus on indie comics does not mean the expo space was empty: it did have significant attendance without it being free to attend (while SoBD, also focused on indie comics, is free to attend), with many families coming. So it is clear the organizers have managed to create an interest for indie comics in a wide demographic; this was best represented by the presence of Biscoto, an indie youth comics magazine. And the organizers do not always have it easy: it is quite a balancing act for instance to have under the same roof the creator of Avni as a featured creator, and the creators of its not-as-sensible parody Proutchi, themselves present as part of the Lapin booth.

I will be sure to come back next year, but meanwhile it has provided me with much food for thought.

Thanks as always to FSFCPL, and come back tomorrow for his take on the comics scene at the Toulouse Game Show

Spam of the day:

It’s no secret the liberal news HATES the Bible and anything to do with it.

Nobody ever whines as much about being oppressed as a scammer trying to appear to be evangelical. Nobody.

_______________
¹ The day ended with a drawn concert, which itself was much more experimental in nature than any I previously saw. No way to recount it; I will just note that, on the drawing side, actual plant leaves, and on the musical side, the support springs of a desk lamp were at one point involved.

Why? Why would you break things in a class the days running up to Christmas vacation? Why would you do this to yourself?

More importantly, how did you manage to make two separate tools fail in ways that were never before seen and are theoretically impossible?

Happy Strippiversary to Something*Positive, 17 years, woo, lots more to say but no time to say it. I’m starting to understand how Randy Milholland can be a magnet for the biggest screwups and morons on the planet.

In past years, I’ve listed out what I considered the best work of the year, and you know what? I’m not doing it this year, for a couple of reasons. One is that we’re living in a Golden Frickin’ Age of good comics, and there’s too much stuff out there to say that any list is comprehensive. The other is that so many people are already producing lists of recommended material, in as many niches as you like. Best monthlies, best capes, best original graphic novels? All out there, go look.

But I will point you to one list in particular because it’s a slice of comics near and dear to my heart — best comics for the younger readers (although everybody has their own boundaries for that — this one goes from barely independent readers to the upper teens), courtesy of Paste magazine. Don’t agree with it¹? Find another! Raina Telgemeier came up with her own list a week back, and it’s terrific.

Anyway Paste calls out a bunch of webcomic or webcomic-adjacent stories, including Fleen faves The Hidden Witch, Be Prepared, The Divided Earth, Delilah Dirk And The Pillars Of Hercules, and Margo Malloo: The Monster Mall.

It’s also got stuff I enjoyed the crap out of but haven’t written up here, like Animus (creepy as heck), the 2nd-4th Cucumber Quest books (loved ’em didn’t have time to review them when they came out), as well as Hey, Kiddo (waiting until I’m in a sufficiently bleak mood to tackle that one), and The Prince And The Dressmaker (about which I got opinions²).

And this just scratches the surface. It could have included Last Pick, or Check, Please!; Amulet: Supernova or Spill Zone: The Broken Vow; The Adventure Zone or Hermes; any/all of the Science Comics titles or Ocean Renegades. I could go on. Like I said, Golden Age.

The point being, you’re almost spoiled for choice when it comes to giving the kids in your life excellent reading material, and there’s so much more on the horizon. Find a kid you like and get ’em something good; you’ll start them on a lifelong love of comics and if you’re very lucky?

They’ll share.

Spam of the day:

Our writing services include everything that you require to transform ideas into a finalized and seamless book. and recommended by various renowned online publishers, including Google Books, Amazon, Ingram and Barnes Trusted and Noble – we take pride in our services and strive to deliver only the best.

This came in an email with the subject line , 1 Hr Left to Become a New York Times Best Selling Author, and it offends me. The quality of writing in this sample is representative of the whole, and the misrepresentation of the publishers list (there’s merchants there, and distributors, and retailers — no publishers) gets my onetime bookseller hackles up. You are very stupid, mike.jordan@professionalwriterhub.com and you think that I am somehow stupider than you are.

_______________
¹ And I do have my issues with Paste‘s list, starting with the idea of ranking. What makes one book better than another? Particularly when you run the gamut from visceral horror for teens and very dark autobio through all-ages Latin American folk tales from a Hernandez Brother?

² I get it, I really do, but the more I think on it, the more I think that everybody that praises TPATD while overlooking The Witch Boy/The Hidden Witch doesn’t trust kids to get the subtleties of the story and implications in the latter, and prefers the Disney version of the former. Kids are smart, they can handle subtle. Don’t write down to them.

Hey, would you like to get a pair of webcomics in print form, similar in that they are both beautiful to look at, dissimilar in that their topics and art could not be more different? Sparky, it’s your lucky day!

• On the one hand, you’ve got a Kickstart for a 10 year compendium¹ of Sandra and Woo by Oliver Knözer (words) and Powree (pictures), which is about as cute and wholesome a comic as you’re ever going to see. Sandra’s 12, Woo’s a raccoon, the humor is comforting. I actually think it’s got a pretty good Calvin and Hobbes vibe to it.

  The campaign is to print the first 1031 SaW strips (out of 1042 as of today’s writing) and produce an art book to accompany it (with 92 pages in color, including 50 guest artists). PDFs of the books start at just €10, with various editions and combo platters of the books (standard edition, deluxe signed/sketched edition, etc), prints, and extras running up to babout €110.

  Amazingly, Knözer set the goal at a mere €3000 (or thereabouts, what with exchange rate fluctuations), so they’re well over ten times goal on funding. The only question is if you’re getting in on this during the 16 days remaining, or you miss your chance. And if you’re worried about transoceanic shipping costs, international shipping is in play, with a remarkable €10 for shipping outside Germany but inside the EU, and €15 (about US$17) everywhere else. Ask the folks at Topatoco who they’d kill to get a seventeen buck international shipping rate on 500+ page books&sup2.

• On the other, Kill Six Billion Demons by Abbadon is probably the polar opposite of Sandra and Woo in every way. A depraved universe of Old Gods, demons, angels, and worse is in turmoil as the Key To Damn Near Everything ends up in the possession of a barista/sorority girl from our reality and she is freaking the eff OUT. It’s a hoot. Image have printed the first two (very handsome, hugely detailed and very, very deranged) story arcs, and they want you to now that volume three (an enormous story, 147 pages deep) is on deck for March:
  

  Tom Parkinson-Morgan, known to his impressive online following as Abbadon, will release a trade paperback collection of the third chapter of his popular ongoing webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons this March from Image Comics.

  “In this one there’s love, revenge, obsession, a mad god, and a dragon,” said Parkinson-Morgan. “There’s also a four-page spread of an army of psychopathic accountant priests fighting colonial soldiers mounted on dinosaurs.”

  What Abbadon didn’t mention? Most of those psychopathic accountant priests are fighting with spears modified so that their stabby ends are sporting chainsaws, and they are not even the most bizarre combatants in the scene, which takes place in a fractal bank vault the size of a world at the center of the universe, which is built on the site of the progenitor god’s holy suicide. The entire damn comic is the fever dream of a mystic that spent the last 96 hours in a tequila/Red Bull-fueled haze while nonstop binging Metalocalypse. It’s glorious.

  Kill Six Billion Demons Book 3 will release to comic shops on 6 March 2019, bookstores 12 March, and looks to be priced at US$17. If you’re not into wholesome enough to spend US$17 on international shipping for Sandra and Woo in the February/March timeframe, spend it on the most thoroughly world-built exploration of eschatological theology that you’ve ever seen.

  With chainsaws.

Spam of the day:

Meet Singles Who Share Your Same Values

Crap, is this that dating site that launched to deal with the fact that Trumpaloompas can’t find anybody in DC to date them, and them promptly leaked all the personally-identifying information? Ick. No.

_______________
¹ The Kickstart description actually says anthology, but that’s not the right word in English. Translations, man.

² I remember hearing once that Berlin offers extreme subsidies for mailing books; if you need to ship internationally, it may pay to send a pallet-load or two over to there for what’s damn-near flat-rate to the rest of the world.

It’s been an up and down couple of years for Kate Beaton and family — for every book or wedding, there were setbacks in Becky’s fight against cancer. But even amid grief there’s new hope, and sometimes very, very good news:

My dad just had open heart surgery, and he is through and doing good! Phew. Truly, no one else could keep me in my place.

Beaton’s burying the lede in that tweet just a little, as the accompanying cartoon made clear. She and husband Morgan Murray are expecting a child, her mom is over the moon (as we knew she would be), Da always has a unique perspective on things, and pregnancy is serious overrated.

Anybody that loves Kate’s cartoons (that would be everybody, near as I can tell) is filled with happiness — not only because she and her family are overdue for some joy, but also because this is going to result in many, many moments of hilarity large and small, some of which will be shared with us and the majority of which will be held close to the hearts of those that were there at the time. Some will likely involve turnips.

Congratulations and love, Kate and Morgan and little one to be named later. We’re all thrilled for you.

Spam of the day:

NOTE: In return for the FREE CONTENT/ARTICLE that I will be providing you, I would expect just a favor of a backlink from within the main body of the article.

Oh please, tell me what topics you have on hand that are appropriate for a blog that deals 99.47% with webcomics, a topic that pretty much nobody else cares to write about.

It’s been established in the past that the exact date is lost to us, but I’m gonna say that today is as good as day as any to say that Fleen went live. It was as early as the 5th of December 2005 that we were banking posts, and it was the 22nd when Jon posted the public announcement and rules, which have mostly been adhered to (although that whole firing thing would be a neat trick, as I’d have to form a majority to fire myself).

But it was around now, somewhere between the 12th and 15th when posts started going public and getting written daily in reaction to things happening on the day. The 13th of December 2005 featured some recurring themes — drama, shitstorms, personalities clashing — to a degree that we may as well declare it the official start.

So, that’s 13 years down; this page is now a Teen, with all that implies. Here’s hoping it doesn’t turn so snotty that we have to murder it before it becomes legal to drink.

Spam of the day
We didn’t feature spams when we launched, so we’re giving them a rest for the anniversary.

We see the return of a coupla’ things today, one recent and one it’s been a while.

• Readers may recall Project: Rooftop, the superhero fashion website launched in 2006 by Dean Trippe and Chris Arrant to highlight the best in superhero costume/character design and redesign. The site’s featured various art over the years, but it’s been since Summer 2013 since there was a redesign contest — the once-regular highlight of P:R

  Or rather, it was since Summer 2013, because the contests are back:

  CONTEST ANNOUNCEMENT – X-Men: Days of Future Pants!
  THE RULES:

  Pick 2-5 of your favorite X-Men. They can be the team you’ve always wanted to see, your favorite line-up of the past, or just your favorite X-Folks to draw.

  Design a core uniform. For this challenge, we’re inviting you to redesign the base team look, the cohesive uniform that says they’re a team, but as is often the case with a team of varied powers, abilities, and personal motifs, feel free to show individual members in personalized versions of that core uniform.

  The teaser for the contest has to be seen to be believed — a Kirby-style Cyclops having that dream when Professor X summons you to battle for a world that hates and fears you and you’re in your underwear¹. Or, uh, just look up top, it’s right there.

  If you think you can help Cyke (or other, better X-Men) never have to worry about a lack of functional, attractive uniform again, send your design to projectrooftop at gmail, which is a dot-com by 14 January. Judges (which appear to be Trippe, Arrant, and Jay Rachel Edidin & Miles Stokes (hosts of Jay And Miles X-Plain The X-Men) will be back with winners and commentary in February. Bragging rights await!

• More recently, David Malki ! caught a case of Munchausen’s elphatiasis² by proxy. Approximately 8 episodes into the 23 strip epic, I tweeted the following:
  

  Oh glob, I just had a terrible premonition. Next year’s @wondermark calendar by @malki is going to be 12 months of check out my sick elephant. And so help me, I’m going to buy it.

  To which David Malki ! replied with denial:

  Gary, Gary, Gary. You really think there will be meat left on this bone by the time the calendar rolls around??

  Which, in fact I did, despite the Malki !dian scoffing. And I was right to believe:

  Here are some pictures of the (presently in-production) 2019 Wondermark Calendar, Examining Ill Pachyderms: A Veteronorfian Field Guide.

  For those not familiar, Malki ! produces a calendar each year, with beautifully printed cards for two-week periods, arranged in two rows so you can always see at least two weeks into the future³. And while this year’s calendar will feature none of the strips from the recent epic, it will be an entire year of sick elephants.

  For the recent epic, you’ll have to purchase the book (at the same link, but be careful — some browsers don’t offer the choice to get the calendar with the book, or the book on its own; Chrome- and Mozilla-based browsers seem to work okay, though) wherein the entire saga of The Elephant Of Surprise. I ordered my calendar before the book was announced, so I’ll have to pick up a copy later — preferably when I can get Malki ! to sign it, at which time I fully intend to challenge him to come up with a new sick elephant pun. I am fearfully confident he will do it, too.

Spam of the day:

Latest hair growth released from the sharks

Sharks don’t have hair. That’s kind of the whole deal for mammals — hair. Sharks aren’t mammals, so no hair. Duh. Get your fake hair growth psuedoscience right, email spammers!

_______________
¹ And visor, since it’s Cyclops. Because of the visor, the dude is even more of a never-nude than Tobias Fünke.

² Look it up.

³ As opposed to a traditional calendar where an entire month is shown, and on the last day of the month you see exactly zero days of the next month until you flip the page. It’s ingenious.

So since I wrote about Larry Gonick selling originals last week, I maaaay have been in contact with the gentleman. It maaaay be the case that he was able to locate some pieces featuring a certain unicycling genius-slash-personal-Yoda. It definitely is the case that Gonick is underpricing his originals and that if you collect comic art you should get in touch with him and give him money

As a result, it may be that I’ve got computers on the brain moreso than usual, which means I’m grateful that Fleen Alert Reader Mark V pointed me a while back at a series of comics designed to teach computing topics.

Julia Evans is a programmer from Montreal, working on infrastructure at Stripe. She also makes comics (most of which run 20-24 pages, so she calls them zines) about computing. Although they’re described them as for working programmers, don’t let that dissuade you — my reading is that if you mess around with coding and you’ve got an interest that intersects with one or more of these, you’ll be able to make sense of what Evans is talking about. They’re there to make a topic accessible, so if you’ve got trubs with a particular tool, she’ll cut through the cruft and get you to a productive state.

About half her zines are free, and the others go for ten bucks on Gumroad¹. She’s also got some really great thoughts about charging for stuff and the perception of value and the need for having a company … these reminded me of nothing so much as a recent Twitterthread by Infosec Taylor Swift on how you can convert free work into corporations paying you, which requires at least pretending you’re a real gosh-darn company.

Anyway, good stuff. Now I have to go back to designing a look and feel for the frames for my Shannon art.

Want to Flatter your Figure? Take a Look at Fashionable Plus Size Bras

I do not think you are sending this to the person you think you are sending it to.

_______________
¹ For personal use; if you want to do volume purchases, she’s got attractive rates. I’d particularly recommend the zine on dealing with managers for any and all entry-evel programmers as part of their onboarding².

² A 20 page zine isn’t going to be as comprehensive as, say, reading the entire management theory section of Rands In Repose³, but it’s also going to take you months less time to absorb some practical lessons if you go with the zine.

³ Aside from being the pre-eminent philosopher on the topic of software engineering and managing those who do it, Rands is of course one of the perpetrators of Jerkcity, which has been running for more than 7200 updates since August of 1998 and I totally missed that anniversary.

And speaking of Rands and his many thoughts on creating software, Evans has many thoughts on using comics to convey technical topics. I suspect that if she and Dante-Lucas Landshepherdherr put their heads together, something magic would result.