Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin has been busy, and we’re the better for it. It’s been about a year and a half since he introduced Fleen readers to Maliki, which is typical of French autobioish webcomics — not necessarily true to life, possibly exaggerated to the point of riduculousness in search of the funny. Really, nearly the entire French webcomics community would feel right at home in Jeffrey Rowland’s reality.

And if there’s one thing that FSFCP loves as much as introducing we New World types to French webcomics, it’s digging down into how things are made. With that in mind, he sought Chloé and Sergane, who are contributing the English translations of Maliki. Take ‘er away, FSFCPL!

Fleen thanks FSFCPL, Chloé, and Sergane. If you haven’t been reading Maliki, check it out.

Spam of the day:

20% Off Skid Steer Asphalt and Concrete Tools

I keep getting special offers for heavy roadwork machinery and honestly? I kind of love it.

I first met Shing Yin Khor over the summer at San Diego Comic Con; I was most familiar with her work at The Nib, and I really, really love what she does with watercolor. She’s super cool in person, too.

Earlier today, she tweeted out a short story, 20 pages across five tweets and I can’t stop reading it.

Desert Walk is about finding peace and solace in empty places; away from noise and other people and the ghosts you carry with you, and especially away from the one that hurt you. The hurt isn’t emotional or metaphorical in this story (or, I should probably say isn’t just emotional or metaphorical), it’s the hurt of trauma and assault.

There’s solitude and desert sounds, bugs and bunnies, a digression on how strength and hardness are different things, in minerals and porcelain and people. How things can be broken and repaired and how sometimes the repair is beautiful and sometimes it’s worse than the damage. There’s memory and the contemplation of forgiveness, and the cleansing power of hate applied in due measure.

It’s beautiful. It’s haunting. It’s little bits of life shared from the edges, and we read and know that the horrors that we imagine from the oblique references are not as terrible as the reality. It’ll just take a few minutes to read Desert Walk, then a few more to read it again, then more as you fall into individual pages, the details singing across your eyes, and then read it again from the middle, jumping back and forth.

It’s a poem in pictures, a step inside somebody else’s skin for as long as you can’t stop reading it.

Spam of the day:

You’ve Received a Bass Pro Shops Reward – Details Inside

Now I know for certain that you don’t have any idea who I am.

Those that read this page know that I’m basically in the embloggenation game solely because of Jon Rosenberg; he persuaded me to start (for his own nefarious purposes), he hosts this page and provides assistance when things break, and he once bought my soul for a dollar. We’ve got a history, is what I’m saying.

We haven’t had regular Thursday night beer since about the time his daughter was born; she’s a full person, nearly double-digits in years if not already. It’s been thanks to electronic means of contact that I’ve kept in contact since, and particularly watched Jon and his wife Amy deal with a series of terrifying medical challenges — their twin boys were the result of a especially high-risk pregnancy, that beat some very long odds to produce two alive children. The cost was a literal multi-million dollar medical bill, and a case of cerebral palsy for one of them.

As CP cases go, it’s far from the worst you could have, and Alec has already defied expectations by learning to walk when that was doubtful. But the misfiring nerves that make that such a challenge for him will not behave on their own, which will lead to a lifetime of struggle to maintain that ability. That struggle will impair him in many other ways; bluntly, if you have to spend half your conscious brain cycles on putting your feet where they belong, there’s not so many left over for everything else. His physical condition will deteriorate, and it’ll be much tougher for him to achieve educationally.

So imagine for a moment — three kids, including twins with a medical bill that you’ll never pay off, one of whom has needed special therapy for the entire six years of his life. It would break the highest dual-income couples I know, and we all know that while Jon’s cartooning is great, it’s not a seven-figure income gig. Any reasonable person would crumble in the face of the challenge, or optionally fake their death and light out for the territories.

Jon has thrived at being a father, and especially at being a special needs father. I don’t think he would have told you he ever thought he could do it, but that’s what capital-L Life handed him, so he dug down and did what needed to be done. The scotch helps. Anybody that’s ever bitched in his direction about the frequency of his updates, eat a sack of something deeply unpleasant; he’s taking care of his family first.

For the past year, Jon and Amy have been exploring an option that will give Alec a shot at avoiding the worst that CP has in store for him; it’s a surgery (best applied before kids turn seven) that will shave out the spinal nerves that send garbage signals to his legs. It’ll require a year of intensive therapy to learn to walk all over again, but when he does, Alec won’t face the continued degeneration that would be a certainty otherwise. They’ve got insurance, but it won’t pay for the follow-on care that’s necessary.

So Jon’s launched a campaign to raise the money — US$65,000 — that’s needed to give Alec a shot at a more normal life. In the (as of this writing) 14 hours since it went live, people have very generously donated more than US$14,000. That’s amazing, and I love you for it.

I hate that it has to happen.

I hate that with insurance, a family that’s employed has to make decisions like Does our son get to live a normal life, or do none of the kids go to college? I hate that an insurance plan would cover a surgery of this nature, but not the follow-on care that prevents it from being a waste; the money spent now will not only spare Alec disability and pain for a lifetime, it will prevent later costs associated with his condition. Did I mention that Amy’s job, the source of the insurance in question, is with a medical insurance corporation? Even their own aren’t cared for. It’s unworthy of a wealthy society, and the sooner we get back to the idea of medical care being a nonprofit endeavour, the better.

Jon’s going to be away for a while; Alec gets his nerves trimmed at the start of November, and it’ll be Jon’s new job to get him to and from rehab, to work with him through the toughest year of his young life¹. Comics can wait until that’s done. He’ll let us know how things are going, and with any luck in less than a year he’ll have a video on Twitter of Alec racing his brother and sister across the lawn and we can all have a good cry and know it was worth it.

Then we roll up our sleeves and make it so that the most fundamental needs — food, water, shelter, healthcare — are not subject to a godsdamned libertarian myth of self-sufficiency and are instead recognized as the human rights that they are.

If you can be generous now, please do so. If you can be loud and insistent later, please do so. But let’s stop this crap where people get healthcare based on how wide their social circle is, or how sympathetic their stories are². For the moment though, it’s all we’ve got. We’re all we’ve got.

Spam of the day:

Find the best treatment options for specific cancers

Why do I have a feeling that this will lead me back to GoFundMe?

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¹ Arguably, he’s already past the toughest year — odds were not good that Alec would be born alive, and he managed that.

² Not to mention moralistic gatekeeping. I loathe GoFundMe, for doing things like preventing seriously ill sex workers from raising money to save their lives, because platform rules don’t allow GFM to be used to support pornography. And if they cure their illness/injury, then they could be alive enough to make porn. Fuck GoFundMe in the ear-hole, but only after my donation is processed.

It’s been a bleak year, not helped by the fact that just prior to the initiation of the worst timeline, Christopher Hastings wrapped up The Adventures Of Dr McNinja, depriving us of an increasingly deep (not to mention deeply weird, in the best sense of the word) webcomic after eleven and a half years.

Those of us that buy Gwenpool have kept up with his current comics work (and you guys, it is so good, playing with the nature of comic book reality in very smart, very innovative ways), but that’s once a month. We’ve needed a regular fix from ol’ Doc Hastings. Wait, what’s this?

Oh gosh, what is this: @hastingsfunnies

Hello, I am drawing webcomics again. More info to come. @hastingsfunnies

It seems that Ol’ Doc Hastings has heard our pleas and decided to get back into webcomicking. It further seems that he’s chosen Twitter as a distribution venue, rather that having a website or even a Tumblr. Innnteresting as Bugs Bunny might say. I’m particularly wondering how the idea of an archive will be implemented.

Since that first tweet yesterday, it’s two updates for two days, leading one to hope that there will be many comics from Hastings, and they will (I suspect) start to tie together. A wizard¹ puzzles over a spell; an old couple halfway flirts; it screams scene set-up without giving anything away. Of course, Hastings is very, very good at making seemingly offhand remarks pay off much later (sometimes a decade or more), so I just know that these characters are Up To Something, we just don’t know what yet.

Based on his long career of great comics, @hastingsfunnies gets added to the blogroll without the customary proving period; I have complete faith that Ol’ Doc Hastings will keep us coming back for the next installment for the next forever.

Spam of the day:

Get Your Mobility Back

Godsdammit, spammers, I am not in the market for a knock-off Rascal™ brand mobility scooter. I get around on my own two feet just fine. It’s Tuesday, which means tonight is EMS duty night, which means I’ll probably be carrying a large person down the stairs, even!

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¹ Aside: Does anybody draw crazy eyebrows as good as Christopher Hastings?

No. No, they do not.

I really didn’t think, when I started writing this blog¹ nearly twelve years ago, that I’d spend one particularly year wrangling no fewer than three philanthropical fundraisers for political disasters².

Looks like it’s time for round number four for the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund. The utter dearth of official federal response to Hurricane Maria, particularly in Puerto Rico, means that it’s time to step up again. There’s essentially no power systems, no water, no agriculture, no functioning economy on the island right now. So if you have it in your means (and I know, this is the fourth time I’ve come to you in less than a year), please donate.

Because of the uncertainty about which organizations are going to raise money and not spend it on the disaster they’ve promised/implied (lookin’ at you, American Red Cross), I’m deferring to America’s cultural conscience (and grandson of Puerto Rico), Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’s been doing a lot of work rounding up info on reputable organizations to donate to. He’s put his trust in the Hispanic Federation and that’s good enough for me.

The need is acute right now, but this one is going to last a long time, so we’ll set a deadline of end of the month; send me a receipt of your donation before the calendar flips over to October, and I’ll match it. If you can provide me with suggestions as to organizations that are getting money/supplies directly to PR (and the US Virgin Islands, and everyplace else in the Carribean), I’ll add them here.

Spam of the day:
I’ve got to say, I’m pleased that I’ve not received any scammer spam purporting to collect money/goods for the Harvey-Maria confluence of weather crises. Maybe they have a conscience?

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¹ Or got roped into it by Jon Rosenberg; tomayto, tomahto.

² Hurricanes and other large-scale weather events result in slow disasters that reveal the resiliency (or lack) of our systems and infrastructure. Collapsing dams, neighborhoods under water in floodplains, and petrochemical plants dumping their poisons into groundwater are absolutely situations driven by human decision (or at best, failures of imagination). Listen here for more.

I intend to get out and enjoy it.

• Last night I noticed a tweet from everybody’s favorite, Kate Beaton that lead to a story that is both fabulous news and deeply disappointing at the same time. Barnes & Noble, at their SF/Fantasy blog, honored the 80th anniversary of The Hobbit‘s publication by recounting the story of hour Maurice Sendak almost got the gig to illustrate an edition 50 years ago. Great story, terrible that we never got that and they used that as a jumping off point to imagine how seven legendary artists¹ would also make great partners with Tolkien’s work.

  The seven chosen are Paul Pope, Mary Blair, Dr Suess, Al Hirschfeld, Edward Gorey, Mo Willems … and Kate Beaton.

  This is amazing company to be in, and I can’t say that it isn’t entirely earned. Each of the seven is immediately, uniquely identifiable, each suits their chosen material perfectly, and each would bring a wonderful spin to Bilbo’s adventures. That’s the good part.

  The bad part? Four of the seven — Blair, Suess, Hirschfeld, and Gorey — are dead, and so it’s entirely appropriate for B&N to contract with an artist to do work in their style. But Pope, Willems, and Beaton are all very much alive, and to have somebody else ape their style when they’re around is weak tea.

  Grant Lindahl’s got a pretty good handle on Beaton’s style (I particularly like the spider, which looks like the offspring of Shelob and Fat Pony), but you know who’s got an even better handle on Beaton’s style? Same applies to Willems and Pope.

  Maybe she was busy. Maybe the amount they had in the budget was too little to interrupt her current work. But her tweet reads to me like she wasn’t asked, which is weak tea. To paraphrase a character that every reader of the SF/Fantasy blog should be familiar with, OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?

• Updated Kickstarter numbers for the Girls With Slingshots omnibus, Yuko Ota’s off-hand comics, and Howard Tayler²’s thirteenth (!) Schlock Mercenary collection, according to the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II, and the McDonald Ratio:
  • GWS Omni: US$276K to US$410K (FFFmk2, unchanged since Wednesday); US$357K (McDR, up from US$347K)
  • Offhand: US$36K to US$54K (FFFmk2, up from US$25K to US$37K); US$51K (McDR, up from US$30K)
  • Schlock 13: US$90K to US$136K (FFFmk2, up from US$84K to US$126K); US$120K (McDR, up from US$99K)

  This time next month, we’ll know how they all worked out.

Spam of the day:
_______________
¹ Legendary is their word choice; in fact, the title of the post. Also, by Tolkien’s numerology, this would make the artists equivalent to the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone. Granted, most artists do end up hunched over their drawing boards and don’t always get out into the sun.

² Evil Twin, etc.

Things don’t always work out for the best, but that doesn’t mean that they’re completely unworkable.

• For instance, Thought Bubble — a weeklong celebration of comics in Leeds, UK, that culminates in a weekend comics convention — lost its traditional November dates and had to relocate. Unfortunately, that puts it in close proximity to SPX, which led more than one creator to tell me that they had to choose between doing one show and the other. Thought Bubble’s made the best of the situation, though, and will run their comics show with an impressive list of guests and exhibitors, from both sides of the Atlantic.

  On the Guests list (which is helpfully divided into Writers, Artists, and All on the website), you have webcomics luminaries such as Jon Allison, Darryl Cunningham, Marc Ellerby, Cameron Stewart, and Spike Trotman. The page is laid out with nice big images and names, and each links to a page about the guest — easy to navigate and intuitive to use!

  On the Exhibitor front, Thought Bubble did something I’ve not seen before that I really liked; the show is spread out across different venues, and thus there are multiple exhibitor pages, one per venue.

  Unfortunately, the layout of the pages requires a good deal of effort to decipher — exhibitors are shown by an image, which may be a character, a scene, or a photo. Names are sometimes present, sometimes not, and they’re seemingly arranged alphabetically by URL of all things. As a result, it’s tough to pick out who’s attending without clicking through to every website, which I’m not gonna do. I can tell you that Tom Siddell will be at the Cookridge Street Marquee, and that by chance the comiXology Marquee has a significant number of avatars with names on them.

• In a completely different kind of unfortune, A Girl And Her Fed creator KB “Otter” Spangler has a dying tablet, which makes it hard to draw stuff. By good fortune, however, she was putting the finishing touches on a new novel last week¹, so she’s got a new thing to sell and hopefully get back to the art game. Stoneskin is Hogwarts in space (cosmic beings beyond our ken performing the stand-in for magic) meets trade empires, and it’s a hell of a good read.

  It’s completely different from her other books (set in the world of a single near-future technology, and the societal and political upheavals it causes), but it’s unmistakably Spangler’s writing. Even better, it’s a preface to a planned trilogy, which means I (and you, I suppose) get to read another 750 to 1000 pages of her writing, so yay. It’s entirely worth your five bucks, is what I’m saying.

Spam of the day:

Stop taking the wrong blood pressure drugs and try this out

124 +/- 4 systolic, 80 +/- 4 diastolic, bitches. I once had a cardiologist tell me that I will obviously die of something, but it won’t be heart disease.

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¹ At least, it was a little less than two weeks back when she asked if I wanted to be an beta reader for it. As has been well-established on the page previously, Spangler is a very close personal friend, I love her work, and I wrote the foreword for her first book. I believe that’s us sufficiently disclaimed.

Okay, there’s gonna be a lot of Kickstarter numbers thrown around, but before we get to that, I don’t want to miss out on talking about Ben Hatke’s Book Tour Extravaganza in support of Mighty Jack And The Goblin King. He’ll be hitting eight cities in nine days starting next Monday (25 September) in Portland and finishing up the Tuesday following (3 October) in Winnipeg.

Along the way he’ll be talking with the likes of Lucy Bellwood, Kazu Kibuishi, and Ryan North, so if you’re going to be in Stumptown, Seattle, Monterose (California), Salt Lake City, Saint Paul (Minnesota), Amherst (Massachusetts), Toronto, or The Slurpee Capital of the World, do check out the cities/dates/accompanying cool people.

• I was going to be spending some time today talking about how the Girls With Slingshots omnibus Kickstarter was going and how it was likely to do, but it’s probably not practical to do so. Recall the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II: take the predicted amount of funding for a project from the Kicktraq “Trend” tab at the 24-30 hour mark and divide by four — that’s the base prediction. Then take that amount and divide it further by five — that’s the uncertainty. Thus, a project predicted by the Trend formula to raise US$100K would likely finish in the US$25K +/-5K range.

  But, it’s not good for certain projects — if the number of backers in that first time period isn’t at least 200 or so, it’s not accurate. It’s also not good where there are huge, pent up cascades of money that then drop off because everybody who’s gonna back the project jumped in during the first few hours; the FFFmk2 depends on an organic long tail. In both of these cases, the McDonald Ratio is more accurate: take the total raised in the first three days and that’s about 1/3 of the final total¹.

  The total amount asked for, and the relative pricing of the reward tiers have not, to this point seemed to affect the accuracy of either of these tools. With those caveats out of the way, the McDonald Ratio is premature for the GWS campaign (it’s still less than 48 hours in), but it’ll be above US$347K, because that’s what you’d get by tripling the total as of this writing, and I don’t see many people canceling pledges.

  The FFFmk2 (again, I think this is gonna be skewed) is running US$343K +/- 67K, or somewhere between US$276K and US$410K. There’s just no precedent in the formula for a project that brings in US$116K in less than 48 hours, but it seems a safe bet that the US$50K goal will be met five to eight times over.

• So then I was going to talk about Howard Tayler²’s campaign (launched yesterday) for the thirteenth Schlock Mercenary collection; the high backer count (over 650 as of this writing) and history of successful projects (the formula tends to work better when backers see the creator has a track record) are both good, but the short funding period (only 24 days) makes the McDonald Ratio a bit suspect. Regardless, I’m going to run the numbers and call it US$84K to US$126K (FFFmk2) and north of US$99K (we haven’t had three days yet); call it three to five times goal.
• Finally, well under 24 hours ago (so all calculations are going to be low) the newest Johnny Wander collection went up for funding; fresh off their Ignatz win, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh are printing a collection of Ota’s art from the past five years from those periods when repetitive stress injuries forced her to use the wrong hand. Spoiler: Ota quickly draws better with her non-dominant hand than most everybody draws with their dominant hand.

  This is such a cool idea, made even cooler by the fact that the special edition of the collection will feature a lenticular image of an MRI of Ota’s right wrist, in all of its damaged glory. So, with knowledge that these numbers will only go up, US$25K to US$37K and US$30K are the prediction or comfortably over the very modest US$19K goal (those lenticular effects ain’t cheap, y’all).

By end of the week, all of these estimates will be more accurate, but honestly? The numbers games — which make no mistake, I adore — are less important than the fact that so many great comics are available almost on a whim these days. Take advantage of it as much as you can.

Spam of the day:

porn star $20 and a sandwich and she’d fake an orgasm over Weetabix

There is so much wrong with that sentence I don’t know where to start.

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¹ Named for Kel McDonald, who has run a stack of Kickstarts, and found the rule very useful in her campaigns. However, McDonald tends to run longer campaigns than most — six to eight weeks, typically — and that may skew the prediction high on campaigns shorter than the traditional 28 to 31 days.

² Evil twin, etc.

Webcomics are, naturellement, a world-wide phenomenon; we at Fleen are pleased to bring you the latest news on the French webcomics scene, courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin.

• Montpellier¹ might not seem like a big city, but it does house a vibrant comics community, of which at least Paka (corny, untranslatable puns, with some exceptions) and Fabrice Erre (the life of a history and geography teacher in high school) maintain webcomics. These are very much anchored in local life … which also means they are unlikely to ever be translated (corny puns don’t help, either).

  But earlier this year they have been (re-)joined by Yllya (a previous veteran of comic blogs), another Montpellier dweller, who tells us about her Happy Family and in particular their daughter .. Their troll, pizza-hating, job-threatening, just plain evil daughter. Not only are those are available in English for your reading pleasure, but you can see the author improving her English strip after strip, up to a point it will soon be flawless. Highly recommended.

• Not only do Agat Films et Ex Nihilo produce the animated version of Tu Mourras Moins Bête (of which the second season has just started airing), they also unveiled a few images of their adaptation of Les Culottées on the occasion of the Cartoon Forum in Toulouse, and they seem to be doing a great work of adapting Pénélope Bagieu’s style. They are also there in order to look for foreign broadcasters; no word as yet on that front, but we at Fleen will be sure to keep you posted.

Many thanks to FSFCPL, and come back tomorrow for an analysis of the Girls With Slingshots omnibus Kickstart; we’re a little short of 24 hours (and thus outside the window to calculate the FFFmk2), but considering that (as of this writing) it’s sitting at US$97,824, I’m going to guess that the final total is: large.

Spam of the day:

Your 2017 Transunion, Equifax and Experian Credit-Scores as of Sep 16

Weird. In the aftermath of the Eqiufax breach, there’s plenty of disclaimers on the sites of Transunion, Equifax, and Experian about how they maintain credit histories, but do not themselves calculate credit scores, which are determined by outside algorithms. It’s almost like you don’t actually represent these bureaus and don’t know how they work. I’ll certainly give you all my personally identifying and financial information!

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¹ Full disclosure: you correspondent studied there for two years and has a number of relatives living in the area.

Wow, I missed a lot in a week; let’s jump in and see what’s up.

• SPX Occurred to the usual great acclaim and positive feelings. Fleen congratulates the attendees and exhibitors on a great weekend, and the Ignatz Award winners in particular. Representatives of webcomics in the winners circle include Der-shing Helmer’s The Meek as Outstanding Online Comic, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh’s Johnny Wander: Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us as Outstanding Collection, Taneka Stotts (editor) and the contributors to Elements: Fire — An Anthology by Creators of Color as Outstanding Anthology, Jess Fink’s Chester 5000 XYV as Outstanding Series, and Bianca Xunise for Promising New Talent.
• Still at SPX, various attendees at the show have stuff to share, now and in the immediate future. Lucy Bellwood¹ released a detailed public accounting on the Kickstarter campaign for her 100 Demon Dialogues book/plush. Sharing numbers like this makes it more likely that newer creators dipping their toes into the Kickstart waters will succeed not only in funding, but in not bankrupting themselves on the expenses post-fundraising.

  As of today, Bellwood is up about US$3500 on US$50,000 raised, an amount which could be shaved down further by unexpected circumstances. But even if everything finishes exactly as measured today, be sure to pay attention to that US$3.5K number, not the US$50K. It’ll be half a year’s work or more by the time Bellwood’s done, and while 50 grand for half a year’s work is a comfortable living, 3.5 grand is not even subsistence living. Anybody inclined to sneer about the huge amounts of dough Bellwood’s rolling in, do have the courtesy to know what the hell you’re talking about.

• Speaking of both SPX and Kickstarter, C Spike Trotman and Danielle Corsetto took time from the show to announce they’re partnering up to bring a comprehensive omnibus printing of Girls With Slingshots to Kickstarter. Corsetto’s got the 2000+ strips, Spike’s got the Kickstarter process down to a science, and later today when the campaign goes live we can all get in on what’s sure to be a handsome volume featuring color strips. Those of us that have all ten GWS books, the first five of which are in B&W, will get to decide how much we need everything to match. Damn you, Corsetto! And damn you too, Spike, for enabling her!
• Missed like a week ago: The 20th anniversary of David Willis’s comics, which started on 10 September 1997 in the Indiana Daily Student, starting a run that would continue through four strips until the end of Shortpacked! in January of 2015. The rebooted version of the Willisverse, Dumbing of Age, launched on 10 September 2010, and continues to this day². If you feel this accomplishment merits some in-person congratulations³, you can see him at Bloomington, Indiana’s Vintage Phoenix Comics this coming Friday, 22 September, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Give him a Damn you, Willis! for me.
• Missed last week: The Homestuck videogame came out and people really love it! It was near five years back that almost 25,000 backers raised almost US$2.5 million to make the game, which has surely been through many design changes and mutations in the time since. But with Homestuck creator Andrew Hussie aided by past and present webcomic creators like Ryan North, Christopher Hastings, Tauhid Bondia, and Kris Straub, it’s not really a mystery that people are very happy with the outcome.

  Even better for those put off by the infamously dense and deep Homestuck, consensus is that you needn’t be familiar with the epic to play the game. Hiveswap is available via Steam or the Humble store with blessedly modest system requirements.

• And finally, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith announced their Soonish book tour; at present, dates in Seattle, Denver, New York, San Jose, Dallas, and Austin have been announced. Check the map and get your tickets now — it’s the first time Weinersmith’s been seen in public outside of BAH!Fest in years, and no guarantee after the book tour he won’t scurry back into his dank cartoonist’s lair, never to emerge into sunlight again.

I think that’s everything caught up. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll have news from across the Atlantic/Atlantique courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin.

Spam of the day:

Bad news is, I must have underestimated the amount of people who wanted to get in … because Ted’s server actually fell over.

This is the most astounding spam of apology, as somebody from “Ted’s Sheds” is making amends for traffic problems by extending for one day only their amazing offer of 16,000 woodworking plans (presumably including plans for the eponymous sheds) for the low, low price of … they don’t actually say. Too bad I don’t need a shed.

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¹ Adventure Cartoonist!

² Seven years in, I don’t think we’ve made it as far as midterms in the first semester of freshman year; by the time they graduate, these characters will have changed even more than Willis himself.

³ And heck if there are many webcomickers that have been as consistent as Willis for two damn decades, which include such life upheavals as throwing off a fundamentalist upbringing, a marriage, and the birth of twin sons.