Readers of this page will likely know a few things about me: I stand second to no man in my admiration for the work of Katie Lane¹, I started in webcomics with You Damn Kid and will wait however long between hiatuses², and I had no real opinion on Pepe the Frog prior to his appropriation by the worst people in America. By extreme coincidence, these three things are all in the news today.

• Katie Lane said it best in a tweet:
  

  I’m tired of creators feeling confused and intimidated when they’re given a contract. So I made a thing. http://bit.ly/2xpFNth

  The thing in question is a free e-course for artists and freelancers on how to read contracts; don’t let the vaguely clickbait wording on the landing page deter you — this is solid information, it’s free, and Lane is undercutting her own professional practice by teaching potential clients to do something that they might have hired her to do for them. She just cares that much.

  So click the link, add your email, confirm your request, and about a minute later the first message will hit your inbox. You’ll get daily emails for the next four days, with advice on how to read a contract³, written for normal people. Why aren’t you doing this? I’m doing this because reading a contract is something I taught myself to do when signing a mortgage and I figure I can always use better info that what I figured out by my lonesome.

• Owne Dunne has been telling the stories of You Damn Kid and associated strips for as long as I’ve been reading webcomics; probably longer. The first webcomics stuff I ever obtained for money were a book, print, and t-shirt featuring the iconic Frog Rocket Wiener, and I’ve been sharing that factoid since at least 2008. He’s done many, many strips since I started reading back in Aught-Aught, or even Ninety-Nine. And while the original launch date of 12 June may have been a bit ambitious, but it’s here at last.

  While I was expecting either Classic style or New style YDK, and would have been thrilled for something related to Nippleshine Manor (RIP), the first animated short comes courtesy of Norman P Function, and concerns Stink Lines, dog adoption, and teaching canines methods of birth control that do not involve chop[ping your] nads off. It’s as exactly as uncontrolled as you suspect.

• There’s very little Matt Furie can do to reclaim Pepe the Frog; he killed Pepe off and Kickstarted to try to revive the positive aspects of the character. Terrible, terrible people, on the other hand, outnumber Furie by about a squazillion to one. One of those terrible, terrible people recently self-published (and later signed a contract with conservative-leaning Post Hill Press) a children’s book starring a frog called Pepe defending his farm from menacing Muslims.

  That shit would not stand.

  The terrible, terrible person behind this book (a vice principal in a Dallas suburb, until all of this hit) admitted to the blatant copyright violation and worked out an agreement with Furie’s lawyers in a very few days. The book has been pulled from Amazon and no longer appears in Post Hill’s Coming Soon section.

  Best of all, the terrible, terrible person behind this book has had to surrender all the money he made from it (a little over US$1500) and, at Furie’s insistence, is giving it to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Furie is a badass, and terrible, terrible people ought not to forget that.

Current fundraising for Houston total: US$100

Spam of the day:

True Wireless Earbuds With Amazing Sound

Man, I’d lose the buds I have now if they didn’t end up dangling from my iPod. Pass.

_______________
¹ Light-ning Law-yer!!

² Hiati?

³ But not advice on what the terms mean; for starters, those vary state to state. You still need a lawyer and oh damn now you know one that’s giving you valuable info for free who would be happy to have you as a client (as long as you’re not a jerk; jerks need not apply).

Update to add: My employer will be matching donations to the Houston Food Bank; if you want your effort to be tripled (you give $1, I match $1, my employer matches my $1, total of $3 donated), there’s the place to give.

It was twelve years back that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and that being some months before this here page launched, we didn’t talk about the impact it had on webcomics — a number of hosting and colo facilities were in the Crescent City, and they failed as the floodwaters rose.

Actually, we wouldn’t have spoken about that regardless, as Hurricane Katrina was a bad time for me personally; I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned it here, but my wife’s parents lived in New Orleans at the time, and we lost contact with them about 9:00pm Monday night¹. We didn’t hear back from them until the wee morning hours of Saturday. It’s a terrible thing, not knowing.

Anyway, they called us around 3:00am from a Red Cross intake center at an Army base in Texas (they got to ride in a helicopter!), and then their time at the phone was up. In the meantime, I found a hotel in the same city with vacancies, and when they got their next shot at the phone eight hours later and were still waiting their turn at processing (there were a lot of displaced people there), I told ’em to sign the We’re Leaving release, hop in a cab, and head to the Marriott. An hour later they’d had their first showers and hot food in days, and the luxury of talking to us without anybody waiting their turn.

We told ’em to stay there at least the weekend and were never so glad to get a higher than expected Visa bill that month. They did return to New Orleans, but only briefly to gather their things; they wound up in West Virginia, close to one of my wife’s sisters (the surgical nurse, which was helpful when their health later took downward turns).

Houston, and its metropolitan area, is much larger than New Orleans. It is not conceivable how many people will have to be rescued as the waters are — as of this writing — still rising nearly three days after landfall; it is not conceivable how many will have to be evacuated from homes and neighborhoods that are no longer structurally safe or provided with the necessities of life; it is not conceivable how many may never be able to return. Some of them were probably chased out of NoLa in 2005 and wondering which deity they pissed off to go through all of this again.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that there’s going to be a continuing need for help down in Texas; the immediate rescue-and-recovery will last for the next couple of days, but the rebuilding will take much, much longer.

Fleen readers have proven themselves to be generous in the defense of others, and I’m asking you to help once again. Material goods are not as helpful as cash, so any contributions to any of the local charities called out by Charity Navigator as being well-regarded, we’re going to match them until the end of Labor Day.

Those organizations are:

• Houston Food Bank
• Food Bank of Corpus Christi
• Houston Human Society
• San Antonio Humane Society

Remember: a lot of people that don’t evacuate make that choice because they can’t take their animals with them; add in the animals that have been separated from their people, and you see the need.

If there are webcomics down that you learn about alternate posting locations for, we’ll run a list; otherwise, let’s be patient, and let’s do our best to help².

Spam of the day:
Not today.

______________
¹ Exactly twelve years ago tomorrow.

² On that note, there is a nonzero chance that FEMA may ask my town’s EMS to send ambulance and crew to Texas; it happened after Katrina. If that happens, I’ll be away. I trust you’ll deal.

Hey, the weather is distinctly non-Augustlike and I want to get out there, so how about a couple of quick pointers and we all enjoy the weekend? Got two things to share.

• Great news from Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, who’ve been away from one of their signature creations for too damn long. Capture Creatures has been incomplete and hiatused for too damn long … two years or so by my count. I have theories¹ as to why this is, but Gibson and Dreistadt are too polite to confirm these suppositions.

  But good news:

  Capture Creatures returns in 2018!

  I’ll try to get a confirmation if this is a relaunch, a continuation of the interrupted original run, or something else. Since I’m on the far end of the continent from Gibson & Dreistadt, I won’t be able to use my traditional technique of buying them drinks and hoping they volunteer something². In the meantime, dust off the old issues and refamiliarize yourself with Jory and Tamzen in anticipation. 2018 cannot come too soon.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a little breaking news about the insanest fight manga to not come from Japan, Last Man:

  Last Man [the animated series, last mentioned here] will air in English on [streaming app] VRV starting August 25th [i.e.: today] at 6:00pm ET, and director Jérémie Périn will be a special guest at Crunchyroll Expo [running today through Sunday at the Santa Clara Expo Center).

  As previously mentioned, Last Man (the book series) is batshit insane and good, and the fact that the tie-in series will be available to those of us on this side of the Atlantic is welcome news. Now to wait for the final volumes to get finished, translated, and released because boy howdy! Book 6 ended on one hell of a cliffhanger and I needs me some closure.

Spam of the day:

Free Trial Radar

Whoa, you’re giving away radar? Is that like a cut-down home version to keep track of your drones?

Free Makeup Brush – Claim Yours Now

Oh. It’s like a radar for finding free offers on completely ordinary stuff. Talk about burying the lede.

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¹ Namely, that the chronic disorganization and crappy (not to mention slow-walked) payment model at BOOM! ran into somebody that said no. I surmise that BOOM! is trying to treat the pair as they treat their work-for-hire newbies and don’t know institutionally how to interact with somebody that has the experience and knowledge to enforce their contractual rights.

To be 100% fair, for every BOOM! creator I’ve spoken to that has experience terrible treatment (on the business side, not the editorial side), I’ve spoken to another that has zero complaints and has been perfectly happy. How much of this is luck, or how much it’s BOOM! picking strategically who gets their limited attention³.

² I plied both Dreistadt and Gibson with excellent drinks in San Diego (adjacent to a wall decorated in 3D-printed human skulls, apparently left over from a Rob Zombie video shoot.), and could not get them to tell me anything on the record. As I recall, the conversation went something like this:

All: These are great drinks!
Me: Care to confirm my theories about how you’re getting screwed on Capture Creatures?
B&F: Nope!
Me: Fair enough. Let’s have more great drinks!

That’s some hard-hitting investigative pseudojournalism there, let me tell you.

³ Apparently, there was a time where BOOM! editor Shannon Watters was responsible for literally dozens of titles at the same time. I’ve gone back to pull their publication history and check mastheads, but I have been told by numerous sources that the number was upwards of fifty. That’s five-zero. If true, no matter how short a period, BOOM! was putting the crunch culture of Silicon Valley to shame as fucking amateurs in the field of running their people into the ground.

Especially Thursdays in late summer.

I do, however, want to point you to something that happened today, something which puts the capper on a great deal of work by a number of ferociously skilled people. I speak of the final episode of the first series of The Nib animated, as seen at Topic.

Matt Lubchansky (associate editor at The Nib, as well as creator of a zillion brilliant cartoons, editorial and otherwise) has put in a lot of the producer work to make static comics come alive, and the project has delivered what was promised: sharp humor, and the more horrifying Trump visages imaginable¹. All told, the ten episodes come to some 45 minutes of piss-taking, and if you’ve not been watching them for the summer, you could to worse than to binge.

Congrats to Lubchansky, Nib editor Matt Bors, and contributors including Jen Sorenson, Emily Flake, Andy Warner, John Martz, Kendra Wells, Joey Alison Sayers, Keith Knight, Maki Naro, Sarah Mirk, Pia Guerra, Brian McFadden, Nomi Kane, Sas Goldberg, Ellen Crenshaw, as well as voice actors James Adomian and Rachel Butera, and the animators at Augenblick Studios. Be sure to keep an eye out for the next series.

Spam of the day:

30% Off Sakai Trench Rollers!

I never really thought of getting earthmoving equipment to roll trenches before, but now I kind of want to.

_______________
¹ Since Trump shows up in multiple segments of each episode, based on the work of different cartoonists, it’s a kick to see multiple interpretations of him.

The thing about webcomics and webcomicky people? Always doing new stuff. Let’s see what some longtime creators are up to.

• Item! Jamie Noguchi has been away from Yellow Peril for a while, thanks to the demands of a young human in his household and the freelancer’s life. We got some really cool George Takei biocomics out of the hiatus, so that’s okay. And it appears that behind the scenes, Noguchi has been working on something related to his one true love.

  I speak, naturally, of tokusatsu, the Japanese entertainment genre featuring rubbersuit monsters and overly dramatic young people saving the world with giant robots, karate, motorbikes, and possibly Spider-man. Noguchi knows his way around tokusatsu, with a series of videos explaining what’s up with the various Rider- and Ranger-type series.

  And the new project? Well, we have to wait another week or so:

  Alright! There we go! And starting September 1, you’ll see what this dumb thing is all about! #tokutember

  I suspect this will be better than the time a pair of puppets slap-fought each other in a train-themed Ranger series.

• Item! Meredith Gran may have wrapped Octopus Pie but that doesn’t mean she’s idle. What would you most like to see from her? If you said a point and click adventure game, it’s your lucky day:
  

  a few weeks ago I started working on a point + click adventure game, my first attempt at such a thing. it’s going to be my next project!

  it’s so nebulous right now that I’m having trouble formally announcing things. I’m not fundraising at this time – just developing

  but I will be updating patreon soon with info about it. at this time I’m really just looking for a sustained income so I can focus on it

• Item! Not only is Vera Brosgol’s new book about to drop, it appears her last graphic novel — the stellar Anya’s Ghost — is going to get the screen treatment:
  

  Soooo here’s a thing!

  The quoted treat leads to a Deadline Hollywood story about the production of the feature film, with shooting set to begin later this year. Everybody feel good for Vera, and wave to her as she sets off for a life of Hollywood glamour.

• Item! Any day that Anthony Clark posts pretty much anything — a comic, a sketch, a picture of a cool dog he met that day — is, by definition, better than a day without Anthony Clark posting anything. What with his wizard-a-day series for 2017 (posted today: #235, Badminton Wizard), there’s been plenty of days better than there otherwise would have been in an otherwise terrible year. And if any of those wizards particularly catches your fancy, but you don’t want to scroll back through a lengthy Twitter thread, there’s now a Wizard Gallery! And you can buy prints of your favorite wizards through TopatoCo!

Spam of the day:

Isabella (91) Don’t Miss To Checkout My~Private~Profile, Hot Photos Inside

It’s possible that the (91) is just indicating that this is the 91st Isabella to send me an allegedly sexy spam, but it’s also possible that (91) is meant to be an age, which makes the similar spam from Leanna (3) especially icky.

Still ramping back up into what’s happening in webcomics these days. I expect it’ll be a while before I’m fully caught up.

Erika Moen & Matt Nolan’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy is very nearly always educational for me. I learn about things that people do in ways that I do not that sound awesome. I learn about things that people do or like that have no interest for me, but which makes me more empathetic — just ’cause I’m not into it, don’t mean it’s a bad thing is a lesson we can all stand to learn. But best of all (for me) are the sexual health lessons, because I almost always learn something useful.

Today, I learned something that in retrospective is blindingly obvious, but which had never been taught to me or occurred to me before. I happened to have a reasonably complete and comprehensive sex education experience when I was in high school — it was the mid 80s, AIDS was poorly understood, and at least my school district decided to respond with the best, most up to date information possible. None of this abstinence-only nonsense — here’s methods of birth control and STI prevention, here’s the odds they work as intended, here’s the ways you can mess up using them and cause bad outcomes. In retrospective, it was great.

There was also a really good anatomical component each year (starting back in fifth grade, as I recall), and one of my teachers being a breast cancer survivor, there was a no-bullshit discussion of self-exams with absolutely no snickering tolerated from the male portion of the class. This is how you catch things as early as possible; this is how you keep from dying was her message. But we never got the message that came near the end of today’s update, where Moen’s character delivers this exhortation:

So get familiar with your funbags (or where they used to be) and keep an eye out for anything that looks or feels unusual for them! [emphasis mine]

or where they used to be encompasses both survivors who’ve had mastectomies and those undergoing gender transition. Trans* issues wouldn’t have been taught to me back in the mid 80s because it just wasn’t a topic of discussion; the gradual increase in trans* visibility means that where they used to be is perfectly logical¹. It’s actually the concept of survivors and recurrence that caught me flat-footed. We were taught you lost your breasts to cancer and that was it; you might get other cancers in the future, but not breast cancer again.

It’s a sobering thought, delivered in an almost offhand manner. It’s made me think a lot. It’s a hell of an accomplishment for six words. And that’s why I love what Moen and Nolan are doing, week after week.

Spam of the day:

HURRY_UP! Online dating that is worth your time.

The partially-clothed young woman pictured in this spam has been Photoshopped to render her incapable of fitting her breasts into a mammogram scanner without the aid of industrial sedatives and a forklift. Reminding myself about the bit above re: just ’cause I’m not into it but jeeze. I’m surprised anybody thinks she can stand upright.

_______________
¹ In the notes below the strip, there’s also links and resources not only for assigned-male-at-birth transwomen, but also cisgender males. Fun fact, a small (but measurable) fraction of breast cancer cases are in cis-men, which often are not caught until disastrously late because they don’t do self-exams or get mammograms. Heck, most penis-havers can’t be bothered to do self-checks for testicular cancer, so they really aren’t checking their manly pecs for breast cancer. Once again, knowledge to the rescue.

On account of I do the majority of my blog writing in midafternoon, and against all past historical precedent, it’s clear skies for today’s solar eclipse. I needed to ease back in anyway, so let’s do this briefly, yeah? Since I’ve been gone, there have been two things I noticed in my greatly-reduced webcomics-attention-paying:

• Ugly Hill! Oh good glob, Ugly Hill! There’s nothing at that link, and even the Wayback Machine has most all of the art missing, but Paul Southworth has brought it back via his Patreon:
  

  ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m re-releasing “Ugly Hill” from the beginning for $5 Patreon subscribers starting Monday, 8/7/17! https://www.patreon.com/southworth

  Add this to the recent revival of Lake Gary and we’re getting what all that is good and right in the world tells us we deserve: hideous Southworthian creatures behaving terribly. And it will go on forever; at five updates a week, it may take four or five years to get through the entirety of Ugly Hill.

• The latest Iron Circus anthology sent out its call for submissions. FTL, Y’all takes as its theme the prompt of a cheap faster-than-light drive — like two hundred dollars cheap — and asks for stories of the situations that result. As readers of this page will recall Iron Circus Benevolent Dictator For Life Spike Trotman runs successful projects that pay (including, historically, bonuses based on how the Kickstarts go), but that she does not suffer fools gladly.

  Got a great idea for the anthology you want considered? Great! Read the damn FAQ first so you don’t waste your time. Then read the damn submission guidelines so you don’t waste Spike’s time, or that of project editor Amanda Lefrenais. I can pretty much promise you that the best looking and most original story in the known universe will be kicked to the reject pile if you don’t follow the guidelines. Submissions close 15 September, and contributors will be announced 15 October.

Okay, time to observe the majesty of the universe.

Spam of the day:

Partner_of_Credit_One_Bank
Find Your Perfect Credit Card!

Wow. They claim to be Credit One Bank in the images included in the email, but can’t bring themselves to maintain that fiction in the return address. They’re really just a partner of Credit One Bank! (they’re not)

William “Bill” Pierce died in his sleep over the weekend; he was as welcoming of the moustached goofball that married his baby girl as ever I could have hoped during the 25-plus years I knew him.

I don’t believe we get an existence after this one, but I’m pretty sure he did, and I’m certain the thought of resuming a certain acquaintance brought him great comfort over the past sixteen months.

I’ll be gone the next little while. Take care of each other while I’m away, yeah?

[Editor’s note: The inestimable Gina Gagliano at :01 Books sent a review copy of Tillie Walden’s Spinning that I received just after San Deigo Comic Con, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s due for release in about a month’s time (12 September, to be precise), and I normally wait until the ten-days-to-two-weeks prior to run a review of a forthcoming book.

But heck, Kirkus and Junior Library Guild and Publishers Weekly have had theirs out for weeks now¹, about the same time Walden was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly. So early or not, I’m diving in. Needless to say, you may find spoilers ahead.]

I find myself with thoughts that so completely mirror an earlier book that I feel compelled to quote some of what I wrote three years back:

[I]t’s a story that hurts in a real, tangible, maybe-necessary-maybe-not way. I suspect that if I’d been an almost-teen girl at any point in my life, it would ache and resonate even more. Getting to the truths below the surface of the One Summer in question is like having to peel away a bandage and finally let the healing of the wound below finish up.

That was in reference to This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki; I’m years further from being anything resembling an almost-teen girl, but Spinning is helping me understand what that point in life (and the half-dozen years since) are like. Which is not to say that it’s the same story, not at all.

Spinning is autobiographical, it’s telling a story that bumps up to just a few years ago in Walden’s life (the book functionally ends when she’s 16 or so; she’s just recently turned 21), and it works in a hazy, dreamlike, spare fashion (some pages entirely lack panel borders, with huge swaths of white space and widely-separated blocks of text and images making the moment hang

in

the

air

forever) to act less as memoir², and more to serve as an emtion-delivery mechanism. 400 pages of Walden’s personal history digested, I can’t tell you more than the broadest outline of when things happened to her.

Although presented linearly, I’m left with an impression of Walden’s life that’s more akin to the skating diagrams shown during the first instance of her testing to determine her competition level — swoops and swirls, crossing her own path, which suddenly disappears and reappears further along after a jump.

The curlicue patterns in the ice may as well be her life’s path: intense shyness and dissatisfaction followed by a cross-country move; solitary nature exacerbated by having to adjust to a new home, new school, new teammates and rivals, and even a new vocabulary of skating³. All of which were eclipsed by the effort of dealing with the fact that she’s gay and wondering if she’ll ever be allowed to love somebody openly.

That lack of straight-line storytelling leads to a potentially unreliable narration — there’s just enough sketches of a schoolgirl bully to wonder what really happened (and when), for instance — which is not a drawback. Walden indicates in her afterword that she intentionally did not seek out any reference material, photos, or recollections of others in making the book, preferring to get to an essential truth over a literal one. This is maybe the greatest storytelling strength in Spinning.

I may not have a clear understanding of what point in Walden’s life the Skate Moms at the rink — Walden’s own mother is shown as variously distant, disinterested in her skating career, and complaining of its costs — decided to be total bitches to her about paying for rink time, but I am acutely aware of the depth and breadth of how that incident — and the others in her life — made her feel.

Some of those feelings were imposed on her, some of those feelings propelled her or paralyzed her, some of those feelings that she may never have shared before this book. The emotional charge is such that, more than once, I was left gasping after a too-long period of not breathing, not daring to disturb a years-and-miles distant Walden in a moment of crisis.

I used the word dreamlike earlier, and the more I think on it, the more I think it’s the most precise word to use. Spinning⁴ leaves you in that same state as you’re in when waking from a dream and everything is bright and perfectly detailed in that moment before it fades, leaving impressions. It’s a story where you don’t start at the beginning and move to the end; you start at an arbitrary point and then you get dragged in and filled in on the bits you need when necessary. I won’t tell you everything, the story whispers, just true things.

Spinning is transformative. It the story of one person, with just enough true things to make its points, some of them related to skating but most of them not. It requires you to open yourself up to the truth of being Tillie Walden, at the expense of not being solely you, just a little. Take the leap, find yourself in other shoes (err, skates), and you’ll be different for having invited in somebody else’s truth for a short while.

Spam of the day:

Need Medigap?

What sets this scam for fake Medicare coverage for senior citizens apart from others of its ilk is the photo embedded. A guy that’s meant to look like a go-getter of a senior, with a don’t screw with me, medical-industrial complex look on his face instead looks like a bald, poorly dressed, constipated Larry Bud Melman.

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¹ As of this writing, there are 33 reviews on Goodreads.

² That is, a recounting of these are the things that happened at these points in my life.

³ New Jersey, where Walden lived until the end of fifth grade, and Texas, where she moved, belonged to different competitive organizations with different standards and criteria.

⁴ As well as her critically-lauded webcomic, On A Sunbeam.

In the week since I declared a return of the Six-F, I’ve had a gratifying response from readers (and friends of readers, and friends of friends of readers …) who have sent me their receipts from donating to The Trevor Project to support LGBTQ youth in crisis.

Thankfully, the week has seen a broad swath of society push back against the sloppy, steamy tweets of the man inexplicably elected to the presidency, and his pathetic little tantrum against some of the most vulnerable Americans seems to have stalled. I believe with all my heart that’s because people are willing to say No and back it up with the money to fight this unrelenting assholery.

Last time around, The Trevor Project saw US$305 in reader donations over two months, rounded up to US$500 for the match, because Round Numbers are good. This time, in only a week’s time, you donated US$420 — exactly one weedsworth, no way that’s a coincidence — which I will be rounding up to the classiest of all class money amounts: We lookin’ at a six hundo.

One other thing: I neglected this time to contact donors and get explicit directions on how to identify them in this post so I will only be using two names (one included explicit directions on how to be identified, the other self-identified on social media); the others are going to be listed by initials, but anybody that donated can contact me and I’ll update the list.

Thank you then, to (in no particular order) LP, DH, LB, MV, MC, Marian Call and her LA concertgoers, and Pierre Lebeaupin. The donation is being made in the name of Donald Trump, so that he can be sent a nice thank you card for sparking some good to offset the monumental damage that he’s done.

Spam of the day:

Visit the 20th Largest Island on Earth!

I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but that’s probably not how I would describe Ireland when spamming people with fake travel resources. Just sayin’.