Middle age, is a weighty phrase — it can mean that extended time of your life when you see perhaps fewer days ahead than behind, and definitely feel the bleh aspects of keeping a human body working. Side effects may include increased torpor and or stamina-lack, baldness, and desperate displays of how youthful and cool you are¹. Or it could refer to that broad swath of time between the general decline of accomplished empire, and the resurgent renaissance as society gets its learning on again.

Or it can refer to the intersection of the two, vis-a-vis the webcomic of the same name by Steve Conley². Conley was kind enough to send me a copy of the first print collection of The Middle Age (30 or so strips plus bonuses) — a slim, squarebound volume, it occupies the middle ground between mini-comic and a printed-overseas-year’s-worth collection. If you’re looking for an introduction to a comic that you don’t now, it’s the perfect balance of economy (of cash and time) and ephemerality, the sort of thing that’s perfectly supported by Patreons.

And it was a necessary introduction, on account of The Middle Age escaped my notice until Conley emailed to ask if I’d be at SPX; there’s a lot of webcomics out there, and even a longtime creator starting one can escape my notice more easily than I’d like to admit. And I admit it, because doing so lets me make up for my oversight; this is a fun comic.

The nominal hero (Sir Quimp of Grawlix) and the nominal MacGuffin (Maledicta! The Blade of Woe!) are pretty quickly reversed in roles — Maledicta runs circles around Quimp, berating the largely well-meaning but hapless knight at every turn, and taking control of his body when unconscious to deal out truly horrifying amounts of death. It’s gotta sting for Quimp to be reduced to bit player in his own life by an inanimate (but evil and intelligent) chunk of metal, but it’s also perfectly in character.

But for me, the inversion (clever), the pacing (brisk), the gags (full of earned funny) aren’t what grabbed me about The Middle Age; it’s the language. Grawlix isn’t a nonsense word (well, it is, but it has a meaning); it’s the spiral symbol in word balloons that represents naughty words … and Quimp’s speech is full of grawlix after he meets Maledicta.

Then there’s that name: maledicta, I am assured by Google, translates from Latin as malicious. But break it down a little — male means poorly, badly; dicta means called but is not far removed from dictum (saying, speech, something said). It’s just this side of bad + words, which of course are disguised by grawlix. Ironically, Maledicta doesn’t utter so much as one naughty word in Book One, while Quimp is reduced to it on multiple occasions as they meet, establish their respective stories, and head off (at the end of the book) to the town of Gaffe.

I am beginning to sense a theme³.

Those wishing to explore said theme further, the second book is currently in pre-orders, shipping in the next two weeks or so. For those even more impatient to revel in the word games, Conley updates The Middle Age on Mondays.

Spam of the day:

CELEBRATE THE HOLIDAYS WITH YOUR FAVORITE TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX INSPIRED GIFTS

What.

________________
¹ I, by contrast, have a full and lush head of hair, am vigorous, and have always been this cool and relevant. Why, yes, I am about to turn 50, thank you.

² Whose Astounding Space Thrills I was enjoying back in the Dawn Age of webcomics, some 20 years back. Which might make both Conley and me middle aged if not rapidly approaching decrepit.

³ Previous wielders of Maledicta include Gwaethbfnl the Unpronounceable and Lord Snitbag the Poorly Named. And just to pile on, a Google search tells me that quimp(s) are graphical elements in a maledicta balloon to represent obscenities, resembling the planet Saturn (which kettle-shaped Quimp kind of does).

The same reference calls out jarns and nittles, but definitions are sadly lacking, but Quimp’s surcoat contains an embroidered design with all the curseword symbols represented.

A few obligatories as we get started. One, I spent some time during NYCC having a really nice dinner and conversation with Nidhi Chanani; the book didn’t come up apart from Hooray! It’s out! I need to pick up a copy! Two, there will be spoilers ahead.

I’ve been waiting for Nidhi Chanani’s debut graphic novel, Pashmina, since it was first mentioned on the upcoming season lists from :01 Books about a year ago. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to become friends with Chanani, and I’ve been even more interested in seeing what she’d come up with when given the opportunity to tell a story.

She’s better known as a illustrator, but it’s clear she’s got stories in her — case in point, check out these two. There’s a moment presented, but you know that Chanani knows what brought those two to this point in time, and where they’re going from here. I suspect that frozen moments from stories similar to Pashmina have been snapshotted in her illustrations, and now we get to see the instants that lead up to them and the ones that come after.

Priyanka (or Pri, when she’s trying to downplay her sense of being different) is a typical SoCal teen, or at least she wants to be; she has to navigate the usual terrible high school experiences¹ and lack of confidence (Pri draws comics enough to have a favorite pen, whose absence will provoke minor panic — one of many touches I suspect are autobiographical²) that come with the age. Most keenly, she feels only half served by her Indian heritage (specifically that of Kolkata, which is in Bengal, in the northeastern corner of India), what with her single mother being unwilling to talk about India, her father, or what brought her to America in the first place.

She knows Indian food is great, and having aunties and uncles that love her is a perk, but believing in intercessionary gods is a bit much to ask when she doesn’t have a sense of India. Mom tells her India is poor and dirty and unimportant and she’s never going back, and that’s all there is to it; this provokes all the hellbent curiosity of any teen that’s told It’s not important for you to know that.

That’s when she finds the magic pashmina in her mother’s luggage, the one that transports her to India, of a sort. It’s all fabulous architecture, warm waters, amazing food, beautiful vistas, and she has animal sidekicks that are very certain that everything is brightly perfect. It’s the Disney version (although closer to Epcot than It’s A Small World) where any unpleasantness is carefully excised and tucked away out of sight … except for that one shadow that seems to follow her around. Pay no attention to, it’s not important, everything is great here her animal sidekicks insist in a perfect inversion of her mother’s dismissal of anything positive about India.

When the time comes to visit the aunt and uncle she’s never met, Pri finds in short order that her sidekicks are right, and her mother is right, and there’s a patriarchal overcast on the entire society that’s leaving her confused. Worse, the pashmina doesn’t work for her anymore. She wanted to be in India and she’s there and so the candy-colored version isn’t necessary, but the mystery of where the pashmina came from and how it got its power becomes a priority.

It’s at this point, three quarters of the way through, that the story really starts to come together. Pri’s journey isn’t just about learning her personal history, it’s about learning the sweep of the history and society she comes from — why her mother fled India, how girls are undervalued and exploited, the possibility of making things better.

She gets the information she sought, but she finds that wisdom and happy endings don’t necessarily go hand in hand. The veil that falls from her eyes looses her voice, though — the pashmina shows possibilities, and Pri (or Priyanka, as she’s starting to prefer) can tell stories that tell of choices. Even the intercessionary gods that you don’t really believe in need storytellers.

If there’s a place for improvement in Pashmina, it’s that the last quarter of the book runs at a much faster pace than all that came before it. The earlier portions of the story felt organic and lived-in, and the tail end seemed abrupt by comparison. It would have benefited from Pri being able to slow down and take in all the strangeness at the same pace she took in smaller challenges in familiar surroundings.

Then again, when the worst I can say of a book is that I wish it had another three dozen pages to spend on its protagonist, you’re doing pretty damn well, and debut stories aren’t given the resources of proven creators. I expect that Chanani’s next book will reflect an increase in confidence from the market and the pages that will come with it. After all, her art features a lot of characters waiting to share their stories, and her readers have a world of choices to be shown.

Spam of the day:

Regal Comfort 6 Piece Sheet Set

Wow, a choice of colors and sizes? Where else could I possible get that? Oh yeah, everywhere.

_______________
¹ The mean, pretty, blonde girl at least only craps on Pri because she considers her poor, not for being brown.

² Pri was born just after her mom came to America, Chanani just before her family emigrated; they’re similar enough in their experiences except Chanani’s old enough not to have had an iPod as a teen.

Let’s finish up the week with a word from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. He starts with a bit of news, digresses into the fine points of French IP law, and bring it back around to the potential for better access in the future. Take it away, FSFCPL!

Last week, Maliki became an internationally published comic series. Indeed, on October 5th Ediciones Babylon¹ released Maliki: Blog in Spain in Spanish …

… I sense you are disappointed.

It is clear that we at Fleen would be most thrilled to cover the news of Maliki being published stateside, but sometimes events don’t happen in any expected or logical order: contacted about the genesis of this project, Team Maliki stated that [t]he publisher stumbled upon Maliki, then the Maliki BLOG, and simply contacted [them] to know if [they] would be OK for a Spanish version. In other words, an opportunity they were happy with presented itself, and they took it.

It is, nevertheless, an important development, and a first: the first time a French webcomic is published outside a French-speaking country without having first gone through a traditional publisher for the French edition. This means Team Maliki directly manages their international rights, no middleman.

Financially, it matters, but less than you’d think: even when a publisher manages the international rights and sublicenses them to foreign publishers, royalties have to be paid to the author whichever the edition, by French law. For instance, the rightsholders for Astérix once successfully sued their French publisher who played fast and loose with this rule for foreign editions, and given the international reach of Astérix, I can not even begin to imagine what the damages must have been like.

However, when it comes to control, especially creative and quality control, it changes everything: French creators often have very limited control over foreign editions, with sometimes disappointing results. But if there is one thing we know about webcartoonists, it is that they insist on being in control, and Team Maliki were in a position to make sure it was a product they could be proud of. Moreover, they were able to seed a Spanish version of their site with translations provided by the publisher, and while only a sampling is present at the moment, all the infrastructure is in place to produce them all: note the third flag that appeared for e.g. The Creepy Old Guy.

But the most important lesson is this: it can be made to work out. There is no reason for foreign publishers not to treat directly with creators who still have all their rights, and the latter will usually be more than happy to have someone else handle promotion in a market unknown to them as well as translation (not everyone can summon a translation dream team out of their communities, at least not for every language): the proof is in the pudding.

As always, we are grateful to FSFCPL for keeping us up on the development in bandes dessinées web, and hope that this prompts some of our stateside publishers to look to creators on the continent when next trawling for good reprint projects.

Pourriel du jour:

Irina Shayk is without question heating up the summer season on the quilt pertaining to saying!

Translation: they can manage it for a webcomic or graphic novel, at least try with the spams, yes?

________________
¹ Who, incidentally, also publish Lucky Penny in Spain, including a nice interview with Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (English version at the bottom of the page).

Okay, I didn’t really miss it, but with the travel and all, this is the first chance I’ve had to write about the fact that Homestuck is getting an annotated print treatment from Viz:

Viz had some interesting announcements at their NYCC panel. And this is the biggest: a new print edition of Homestuck, Andrew Hussie’s cult webcomic/interactive experience. The strip has already had print collections from Hussie, but the new editions will be very extensive, with animated content rendered as frames on the printed page. And commentary on EVERY page by Hussie.

Which raises some questions:

• How will these be different from the previously-published TopatoCo¹ collections?
• What kind of production challenges will have to be met, particularly in the later acts of the story, where animations/music sometimes went on for 12 – 15 minutes?
• Is this happening too late? Homestuck was the fandom that grew crazy big, but which has definitely faded from view.
• Will this include Sweet Bro And Hella Jeff? I’m not sure the existing edition can be improved upon in any fashion.

It’s that third question that keeps coming back to me. The time for this was a year and a half ago, when Homestuck was concluding (or, even better, for the printing to have begun in earnest during one of the long hiatuses, and for it to have been well underway at the time of the big finish). A comprehensive program like this needed to be in place in the era when Jeffrey Rowland could lead a parade of literally hundreds of Homestucks across the floor of San Diego Comic Con; they would have dropped the cash to pre-order the entire run without thinking about it.

But, publishing being publishing, the announcement is that in April, a full two years after the strip wrapped, the first two chapters of Homestuck will hit print in a combined volume. Which, by my count of pages in the archive, amounts to a bit less than 10% of the full run — so how long before the War And Peace of the 21st century is concluded in print?

Like I said, a lot of questions, but it appears that Viz believes they’re in it for the long haul — http://homestuck.com now exists as a clearinghouse of all things Homestuck, and if you look at the very bottom of the page, it reads

Joint ventures, man. Takes forever to wind those things down, especially when they’re building new stuff:

WPG [What Pumpkin Games, publisher of Hiveswap] and Homestuck, Inc. (Homestuck) also announced a strategic partnership with VIZ Media to develop a comprehensive array of additional entertainment content and licensed merchandise based on the HOMESTUCK universe, including both the original web comic and the HIVESWAP game series.

Viz is banking Homestuck never going away, and becoming a perpetual IP. And hell, if any webcomic can do it, the weird little story that could will be the one that does.

Spam of the day:
This is too long, I have to show you a screenshot:

And that, kids, is why you set your email client to disallow HTML emails.

_______________
¹ Which have author’s notes on each page, but the first two of the three volumes are sold out.

Today’s a travel day, the next two days are a tight-turnaround client gig, so posting may be brief or absent. Do try to muddle on.

I missed most of a story as it was blowing up, but I’m pretty well caught up today; here are some base facts to get started from:

First, Zainab Akhtar is one of the best writers in comics, period. She runs a site that’s like this on in that it’s an individual effort, and unlike it in that she gets well-deserved Eisner nominations. Also, I’ve never had to step back from public commentary because the combination of being a woman, brown, and Muslim made comics writing an invitation to abuse. Also, I do not have a Patreon that you should definitely support. She is smart, incisive, and sees things from perspectives that would never occur to me. She’s on my list of people I need to meet to thank in person for her work.

Second, the Lakes International Comics Art Festival is about to happen in the Lakes District of the UK. We at Fleen mentioned it in reference to a partnership with TCAF, but that was the extent of my real awareness of the show, until late last week.

Akhtar made an observation on Twitter about the guest lineup at Lakes — it’s overwhelmingly white (about 85%, by my count). Not news, she noted that fact years ago. The Lakes Twitter account responded by blocking, then unblocking Akhtar, and somewhere in there somebody with access to the account unleashed a pretty vile attack on her which appears to have been deleted, but screenshots are forever¹.

What the person(s) in charge of the Lakes Twitter account don’t seem to understand is that when you represent an organization, criticisms are not personal; responding as an organization requires finesse and care and actually listening to criticisms and answering them calmly. Responding with attacks doesn’t win you points, and will almost certainly damage your brand. And if you continue to treat an institutional critique like a personal attack (it wasn’t) and act like you’re still fourteen years old, you create a reputational damage that can kill your event.

This morning, John Allison announced that he is withdrawing from participating in LICAF (as of this writing, he is still listed on the guest page); I don’t imagine they’ll be able to get him back in the future. It’s a principled stand, and one that will likely cost Allison economically (and possibly the esteem of terrible people, but I don’t think he cares about that part too much; this is just one reason why he’s a great person). I’m expecting to see more guests pull out between now and Friday, which is going to keep the story going and may kill the Festival as long as it remains under its current leadership.

Please note that a fair number of the confirmed guests are international, and regardless of how they feel about management’s behavior they may be contractually obliged to attend. Likewise, I don’t have any criticism for people who choose to attend LICAF this year (having made plans and arranged their lives and purchased passes), but I will be very interested to see how many of both groups are willing to return next year.

And the pushback isn’t limited to guests; at least one exhibitor has emailed the show to say that she’s withdrawing, and this is just as impportant. Lydia Wysocki paid for the privilege of tabling, and may or may not get her fee back. She’s offering to help the LICAF showrunners improve their ways, and I sincerely they (or, more likely, whoever comes in to try to salvage things next year) takes her up on it². We are way past the time when somebody says Hey, here is something that’s happened that you aren’t noticing and reacting dismissively can be accepted. Time for LICAF to grow up.

Spam of the day:

Book Your River Cruise Vacation

Well, they aren’t sending me a pitch that’s specifically calling me a senior citizen, so that’s something.

________________
¹ I was particularly puzzled by the claims that Akhtar has some kind of grudge against the show from 2014. Her 2014 writeup was largely positive, but she noted the overwhelmingly pale nature of the show and concluded it wasn’t for her. If that’s what the LICAF tweeter regards as a grudge, they are in desperate need of a fainting couch.

² In the meantime, follow her links and get familiar with her work.

So it’s nearly the weekend and who the hell knows what’s happening in the world at large (much less the world of [web]comics). Let’s focus on some happy thoughts.

• Tillie Walden has been having a heck of time the past twelve months. At SPX last year she took two Ignatzen, then she launched her first webcomic, then the buzz started building for her debut graphic novel (which turned out to be brilliant), and she’s been guesting and paneling at seemingly every prestigious comics show in CY 2017. Not bad for having just turned 21.

  For those that thought said webcomic was great and also thought that there should be a way to reward Walden for it, your moment has come:

  We’re SO EXCITED to be publishing the amazing @TillieWalden’s graphic novel ON A SUNBEAM next year!

  Makes perfect sense; :01 Books are already Walden’s publisher on Spinning, and :01 head Mark Siegel is very open about wanting his imprint to be the sort of place that keeps the well-fitting creators around forever. And given the lead times on book production¹, this is an incredibly tight turnaround — no more than 15 months from now. I know of books at :01 that were announced last year for Fall of 2019.

  (And side note from the announcement embedded in the tweet: Seth Fishman — no relation to Desmond — is rapidly becoming one of the two or three most important people in the comics publishing world, representing some of the best in indie/webcomics³ in between writing his own books. Heck of a nice guy, too.)

  So congrats to Walden, congrats to :01, and congrats to everybody that will get to read On A Sunbeam on paper. The next 3 to 15 months can’t come quickly enough.

• And for those looking forward seven months or so, applications for the 2018 iteration of VanCAF are now available. Saturday and Sunday, 19 and 20 May at the Roundhouse with guests TBA, but VanCAF has had one of the best exhibitor curations of recent years, so I’m entirely confident the lineup will be great.

  Applications are open until 31 October, and note that they give priority to comics artists (as opposed to illustrators/animators/other artists) with new works debuting at or around the show, who represent all the communities of Vancouver and around. PNW, this is one of your moments to shine.

Okay, I’m out for the weekend, and quick note that I’ll be traveling for work on Monday, so maybe no post. If you’re in Canada, Happy Thanksgiving.

Spam of the day:

Up to $100 Off and Free Shipping

This spam was for glasses and I’ll give ’em this — the image that they used is pretty much exactly the frame of my glasses, just in black instead of silver. Still think I’ll stick with my Warbys, though.

_______________
¹ I’m pretty sure every time I’ve check the publication info on a book from :01, it’s indicated that it’s printed in Dongguan City, Guangdong province in China. Printing in China means there’s necessarily a boatload² of time taken up in shipping and customs before stateside distribution can begin.

² I’m so sorry.

³ Kate Beaton, Randall Munroe, the Weinersmiths, Abby Howard, Ryan North, and more.

It’s been a long, long time since Providence blessed us with a running gag of this nature. Many, many years ago, a young lad (goodness, still in high school) named Ian Jones-Quartey did a damn fun webcomic called RPG World. Then one day, he stopped. People asked him about it a great deal at conventions and on panels after he transitioned to his animation career, where he’s worked on series like The Venture Brothers, Steven Universe, and OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes. He joked that every time somebody asked him about when RPG World was coming back, he would delay its return by a month.

I abused that promise, eventually offering a bounty of a dollar for anybody that would ask him, watching the expected return get pushed later and later. Alas, all good things, etc:

here’s the final RPG World comic from OK KO! more info: https://tmblr.co/Zgt2lx2QfJJZR

Here’s the most important bits of the very interesting, very satisfying story behind the comic:

A recent episode of my show OK KO!, A Hero’s Fate is a fully-absorbed finale of my old comic RPG World. RPG World was a comic that I made when I was a teenager(Starting in August 2000). A lot of people ended up liking the comic and I was a little too young to take that fact seriously. I never finished the comic’s story because… I was a flighty teenager and I ended up going to animation school.

Originally the story wasn’t going to have any specific call-outs to the comic but the storyboard team for the episode, Ryann Shannon and Parker Simmons crafted a narrative around Hero and KO learning to value the people in their lives AND their heroic ambitions.

Ryann created an epilogue to the episode which showed Hero returning to comic form to finish his story. I felt very embarrassed by this but it made so much sense in the storyss context. I leaned into it and using her rough version as a guide, drew the full ending page myself. I rummaged thru my supplies and broke out the same set of pens I used to ink the comic with, and scanned it on my same old scanner.

The whole thing has ended up being very cathartic. Knowing that Hero and Cherry will live on in endless worldwide repeats of this episode is mindblowing.

The story of RPG World proper ended in the middle of the story in July of 2005, or just about six months before I started blogging. A series of short interludes followed. The last real update was in June of 2007. And the RPG World page at Keenspot now lists the page above as the final, canon update.

It’s done. The running gag that’s been a running gag since before I started blogging is done. OK KO! got a great episode, RPG World got a finish, and Jones-Quartey got to revisit the story that lil’ baby Ian cut his teeth on. All in all, not back for a Thursday, and more than twenty years earlier than expected.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m behind on my watching of OK KO! and I need to remedy that.

Spam of the day:

Fergies new trick to weight-loss!

I’m really not the person to be advertised to by invoking Fergie. I firmly agreed with Nathan Rabin when he described the Black Eyed Peas as essentially a four-person advertising agency flimsily masquerading as a pop group. Think of them as the distinguished firm of Hologram Man, Meth Lady, The Other Guy, and The Other Other Guy, Inc.

Hey. As predicted, today is sucking. Post tomorrow, when synapses that have the bandwidth to do more than just keep me upright.

PS: Know who’s great? Dylan Meconis, for many reasons other than her reply this morning. If you’re in San Antonio, Texas, she’s giving a talk called Blink and You’ll See It: Form and Story in Today’s Graphic Novels at Chapman Center’s Great Hall, on the campus of Trinity University. Go listen and get smarter at 7:00pm tonight, and give her a high five for me.

NYCC is upon us, and although this is the second year they’ve decided I shouldn’t be granted press access (although they’ve been awful free about spreading my email address around as if I were accredited press, not that I am bitter), it appears to be a better year for webcomics types at the show than in recent years. It used to be full of of the New York/east coast webcomics crowd, then almost all of them were driven out in favor of such comics-associated brands as Chevrolet, but this year’s not bad.

The Guests of the show include a bunch of familiar names, but don’t actually list their Artist Alley addresses; for that, you have to go to the show floor guide and scroll through until you find ’em, which is annoying. Others aren’t in AA but are on panels, yet their panel schedules are listed as Coming Soon. Given that the show starts in two days, that’s cutting things a bit close. Anyway, Guests include Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota¹ (fresh off their Ignatz win, N2), Carey Pietsch (Friday panels only), Emi Lenox (Thursday to Saturday only, K24), Erica Henderson, K15), Kate Leth (K16), Molly Ostertag (couldn’t find a booth assignment, try :01 Books), Ngozi Ukazu (N1), Pénélope Bagieu² (Thur/Fri only, no booth assignment, try :01 Books), and Tessa Stone (N1).

In addition, you’ve got the Blind Ferret folks (taking bets on which Broadway shows Sohmer goes to see when he’s not at 1728), the Cyanide & Happiness folks (2247), Evan Dahm (I6), First Law Of Mad Science (1050), Kel McDonald (I5), and Scott C (G28). Publishers that will likely have webcomics types in attendance at various times include BOOM! (1828), :01 Books (2239), and Oni Press (2028).

I know that Jim Zub will be wandering the show like a vagabond samurai, without a booth. Finally, lawyer to the independent creative community Katie Lane³ will be part of the NYCC Continuing Legal Education series, as part of the panel for Beyond the Printed Page: An Overview of Licensing Comic Book Properties to the Film, Television, and Merchandising Industries⁴, on Sunday morning. Not gonna bother with the details, since it’s an extra hundred bucks and only of interest if you’re a lawyer. And it’s pretty likely that I missed people that should be listed, so be sure to drop me a line to fix that, or if you want to hang out away from the Javits Center (aka The Worst Convention Center In The World).

Spam of the day:

Microsoft flight simulator x gold edition

Man, even back in the day of the first IBM PC, I couldn’t ever keep those planes in the air. Thank you for reminding me of my manifest failures.

_______________
¹ I always list them as Yuko and Ananth, but today I’m switchin’ it up. Also, if you go looking for them in the exhibitor list, you’ll find Johnny Wander and Ananth Hirsch [sic], no mention of Yuko.

² Thanks to the sharp eyes of FSFCPL, we also know that Bagieu, Zep, and Julia Wertz will be at Columbia University’s Butler Library tomorrow, Wednesday 4 October, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm talking about DIY careers in comics.

³ Light-ning Law-yer!!

⁴ I guess lawyers get paid by the word as well as the hour.

Okay, this is my fault: I dropped the ball on pushing the Hispanic Federation’s UNIDOS campaign for hurricane relief after I launched my matching campaign last week. Jon Rosenberg’s medical fundraiser¹ hit just after and distracted me, as did the general state of the world being awful. Regardless, we didn’t get as much as we might have otherwise (then again, having four matching fundraisers this year, plus helping Alec Rosenberg to walk without pain, means that we may all be feeling collectively tapped out).

Nevertheless, you came through. Backers (all of whom elected to remain anonymous) donated and I rounded up my match to US$500. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. For reference, this brings the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund to a total of US$9275 of matches, plus another US$375 from my employer. Between you and me, that’s nearly twenty thousand damn dollars from fans of webcomics to help and defend those that need it. Thank you all.

In other, less immediately financial news:

• We wrote last week of the return of Christopher “Doctor” Hastings to webcomickin’, and he had one more surprise for us. Turns out the five comics we saw last week are not related to each other at all, but were each the launching point for a separate story:
  

  Here are my FIVE new weekly comics!

  Mon: Magical Merlin
  Tue: Queen of Clubs
  Wed: Asimov’s Laws
  Thu: Karate Sewer Gator
  Fri: Woodsman!

  Magical Merlin is naturally a wizard; Queen of Clubs looks to be a domestic sitcom; Asimov’s Laws features Inventor Dad and wacky maker mishaps; Karate Sewer Gator is intrigue involving punks, dope, and the eponymous gator; and Woodsman! so far is heavy on camping mishaps at the hands of bears. Friggin’ bears. One or more of them is sure to tickle your fancy.

• Did I mention that my wife quit her job last year to go back to school for a good old-fashioned re-careering? Because she totally did. Which is why last night, I was helping her study the geological time scale, from the Hadean eon (formation of the Earth to ~ 3.6 billion years ago) through to the modern day (we’re in the tail end of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era, of the Phanerozoic eon, starting a paltry 2 million years ago). At the conclusion of the study session², I passed her my copy of Abby Howard’s Dinosaur Empire and told her just to read that. All the life before dinosaurs back to the pre-Cambrian, and all the life since the K-T extinction event have all sucked rocks compared to dinosaurs³.

  As noted when I reviewed Dinosaur Empire, that book is listed as the first volume in a series called Earth Before Us, but it wasn’t clear who might be making subsequent books.

  Wonder no more.

  Hey, folks! Just to let you know where I’ve been all month, I’ve been hard at work on the pencils for book 2 in the Earth Before Us series~

  So this is why I haven’t been updating. Sorry for all the waiting you’ve had to do, and thank you for your patience!

  Speaking for myself, this is great news. Sure, I like getting free comics from Abby Howard, but getting more ancient critter books? Maybe the Oligocene, aka The Age Of Horns? Or the Devonian, aka The Age Of Fish? Heck, let her take a shot at the Cambrian explosion and all the protofish and sea scorpions and weird-ass spiral shell squid. I’m so in, and ready to give her money in exchange for books 2 through infinity.

Spam of the day:

Jane Seymour explains how Crepe Erase can help you look as young as you feel.

I feel about sixteen most days, and if you ditch the random grey in my hair and the moustache, I still look it. Do I win?

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¹ Which, as I write this five days later, is sitting just north of 93% of goal. You are all amazing.

² And that’s why the writers of Doctor Who screwed up in the Third Doctor era, because they were described as having dinosaurs, but the Silurian Period was over a good 160, 170 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared in the Triassic period. I’m not sure her professor will appreciate my nerdrage.

³ Not sure what the academic appreciation of that opinion would be, either. Don’t care. Dinosaurs are the best.