Yeah, the home computer pretty much needs a rebuild. There goes my evenings and upcoming weekend. How are you?

• If there is any justice in this world I will win this — a Wondermarkish physical artifact, which has been given the Malki ! treatment (malkied? malkified?) not via Photoshop, but rather by careful use of an Xacto knife and wood joinery. It’s being given away by the good folks behind Hendrick’s Gin, which is beautifully, wonderfully tasty stuff, although it doesn’t look quite large enough to hold my bottle of Hendrick’s, I’m sure it has many uses.

  Please, whatever you do, do not go to the contest giveaway page and enter the drawing (US residents only), because doing so will only dilute my chances of winning, as is my due.

• Programming for NYCC is now posted, but it’s somewhat difficult to read — you can see lists of sessions by date (example: Thursday via text, Thursday via grid) or by track (example: comics, only available in grid form), but only the session titles and times show. In order to see descriptions or participants, you have to “drill down” (as the business meeting types say) by clicking on the title, which makes it difficult to scan for keywords of interest (like “webcomics”). As such, I was only able to find one session that is relevant to our weird little tribe:
  How the Webcomic Publishing Sausage Gets Made
  8:45 pm – 9:45 pm, Room 1A23
  Follow along on a webcomic’s long odyssey as it goes from its home on the internet to a publisher, a warehouse, and finally into the hands of its loving fans with expert tour guides Zach Weiner and representatives from Breadpig Publishing and Amplifier Fulfillment.

  There may well be others, but hell if I could find ’em.

• Received recently in the mail:
  

  Hopefully this isn’t too forward of me, but I’m sort of starting out as a web cartoonist (only about 60 pages into a story) and was wondering, since you guys know a fair bit about webcomics, if you’d mind taking a look and letting me know what you think. My goal is to put out a great comic, so any tips would be really appreciated! that is, if you want. Either way, thanks a lot for keeping up this blog, it’s a great resource for me.

  That’s from Lorena TL of LS-Zián Comics. Taking a quick glance, it’s got a loopy visual style that’s arranged into (so far) four story arcs, the most recent starting here. So far, so good. Here’s what I can give to Lorena (or anybody else asking similar questions)¹:

  1. The archive calendar shows an update history of 1 – 3 comics per week, randomly spaced. Yeah, yeah, RSS readers, everybody’s got ’em, don’t care. Pick a schedule, commit to it, readers will appreciate the regularity.
  2. If you’re going to be doing story arcs, every page has to both move the arc forward and stand on its own. Every page is likely to be somebody’s first (as this one was for me), and if I can’t get some sense of what’s going on in the overall story, I’m far less likely to dig back to a starting point and invest my time.

     If you’re a complete master, you can get away with single pages that don’t have a clear conclusion to them (cf: anything by Evan Dahm; the Overside stories simply must be read long-form, but he’s so visually interesting you’re willing to make that leap). And even complete masters will go out of their way to deliver a punchline, or story beat, or a big interesting speech.

  3. To paraphrase Brad Guigar, it should be impossible to get worse at something you’ve practiced thousands of times. But don’t just fail to get worse: get better, and better, and better.

  Here endeth the lesson.

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¹ Bearing in mind that I’m not a creator — I’m a typical (if likely more widely-read than usual) representation of your audience.

I’m headed to one of my not-favorite places on earth, Las Vagrus, Nevadruh¹, a place I can generally tolerate for about 72 hours. I’ll be there from tomorrow through next Friday. Anyway, between an extensive work schedule and time zones, expect postings to go up late. I know, you’re strong and will muddle through somehow. With any luck, I can use the plane ride to get enough re-reads of Amulet 4 in that I’ll be able to do a proper review. Short version: Wow.

• Submitted without comment, via Bernie Hou‘s twitterfeed:
  

  Of all the–…? My If You See Something, Say Something print on @topatoco got cease & desisted by the MTA

  Sorry for all the millions I was costing you, MTA! Now that I’ve taken it down, you can lower your fares right

  Okay, one comment: the now-evaporated print was done from this comic, re-done with the assistance of the lovely Carly Monardo as the foreground model, and fortunately can never be seen by anybody ever again.

• Anniversary Desk: The Exclamationverse! (which presently consists of four separate, linked strips, plus one reimagining) hit 14 years old yesterday, based on a premiere date of 8 September 1997 for Roomies! And based on a 9 September 2001 launch, Wapsi Square turns ten years old today. Put Paul Taylor and David Willis together and you have webcomics experience that’s been old enough to drink for three years already. Well done, guys.
• This looks intriguing. Shaenon Garrity² is going to do a presentation on Kickstarter at the Alternative Press Expo the first weekend of October in San Francisco. I’ll be at my niece’s wedding in New York, so I’m going to have to miss out on what promises to be a wealth of good information, particularly considering that Garrity may still hold the record for pledge amount/contributor ratio (at the time of that posting, about US$92 per pledger; final ratio just over US$76 each). If you’ve used Kickstarter to good effect, she’d like to hear from you — drop her a message via the tweets machine.

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¹ Partially due to my severe allergies to excessive neon and arbitrary noise, partially because it was never better described than when Frank called it de hypocritical Jeezis-jerknuh parodise.

² Radness Queen of the East Bay and Nexus of All Webcomics Realities, North American Cordillera division.

Does mail still come in bags? I keep hearing that the Postal Service here in the US is on the verge of nonexistence, so maybe soon there won’t be any mailbags except in the metaphorical sense.

• Following up on yesterday’s mention of convention codes of conduct, Fleen Publisher and Impressario-General Phillip Karlsson¹ emailed me to point out that this discussion is taking place in other communities. For those that want to see how the Perl coder community is discussing standards of conduct, make with the clicky.
• Also following up on yesterday’s mention of indy/webcomic-themed conventions in general, Rebecca Viola emailed me a bit ago to mention a newcomer to the con circuit:
  

  We thought you would be interested in hearing about our second annual comics show. Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) is back and has a fabulous new website with tons of information about panels and new comic debuts! The show will be held Saturday, Sept 24 and is open to all ages with free admission.

  You thought right, Rebecca, and given the short duration, all-ages orientation, and free admission, I’d say that MICE is helping fill a niche that’s really only served by TCAF at present. I’ve spoken with some people that were at the inaugural MICE last year and they all had good things to say about it; if you’re in the New England area and are looking for creators the likes of Christopher Baldwin, Alexander Danner, or various TopatoCosters (not to mention what looks like a bunch of up and comers — people that we’re all going to be talking about in a few years time), make your way to Cambridge on 24 September.

• Speaking of things timed around cons, Kel McDonald wrote to tell me about an undertaking launching just after SPX:
  

  Right after SPX, Spike, Diana, myself, Lin Visel, and a few others are running this Tumblr contest. It’s kinda like the Ironman Challenge but with a time limit.

  Kel was hoping that I’d get my ass in gear soon enough to help promote the SketchBet so that there’d be plenty of participants, but her email came in during my Irene-prompted downtime. No matter, as the contest is full up with participants, so we can sit back and watch the fun roll in starting 17 September. See you there.

• Not email, but too cool to keep to myself: readers of this page may recall that I loves me some A Girl And Her Fed³, and I particularly love the character of Mr Speedy, a genetically-modified, ultra-rightwing, chlamydia-infested, viciously sarcastic koala. In case I didn’t have enough dick jokes in my life, I will soon be able to have a plush Speedy to prompt my recollection of his choicest word-bombs. Warning: they’re salty.

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¹ For newcomers, Fleen is service² of Phillip’s company, Dumbrella Hosting (which also hosts a series of high-quality webcomics as well as Oh No Robot and Project Wonderful. He makes sure that everything on the site works, leaving me to be the vaguely entertaining blog-monkey, and the deal is that in return for churning out the word count, he buys my drinks anytime we’re in the same place. Given that he lives in Rhode Island and I live in New Jersey, and that my liver is not nearly as debased as his, this does not put an excessive crimp in his booze budget.

² Possibly even a public service ernouncemint.

³ Rumor has it that I may have written the foreword to the first AGAHF print collection, coming soon.

That’s not fair — like the man sang, Bozo was a freakin’ genius [NSFW lyrics, depdending on where you W]. These people causing me headaches, they’re no Bozos. Let’s focus on some people that could very well fall into the freakin’ genius category and call it a day.

• Awards updates — Kate Beaton was at a wedding, but that didn’t stop her from winning the Harvey Award for Best Online Comics Work (page to be updated Real Soon Now, no doubt) at Baltimore Comic Con. And Kaja & Phil Foglio (with colors by Cheyenne Wright); made it three for three and remain the only people to ever win a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Congrats to Beaton, the Foglios, and Wright.
• The Modern Humor Authority (by Kris Straub) is gone and its domain squatted for good (no link, but I understand it offers a plethora of information about training to be a phlebotomist¹), but nothing that analytically brilliant ever completely goes away. Humor Authority is Straub’s new podcast on the theory and application of what’s funny with Straub and people who commit acts of humor in public on a regular basis — the first episode is now live, with Axe Cop/Bearmaggedon (co-)/creator Ethan Nicolle; it’s a wide-ranging and smart conversation (I keep thinking of Inside the Actors Studio), and I can’t wait to see who else goes into the chair. The best thing I can say about this still-nascent conversation series is that it entirely avoids the famous EB White² aphorism about the analysis of humor³.
• Not that long ago, the notion of “game related to webcomic” was a rarity. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen an Axe Cop expansion to Munchkin and a campaign to make a piratey boardgame, and now a new Kickstarter for a new card game. Difference — instead of being inspired by webcomics work, or the work of a webcomics creator, Borogrove is a card game that first appeared as a game within Kory Bing’s Skin Deep, and now might make the leap to actually being A Thing.

  Actually, that “might” is a bit more tentative that it should be, considering we’re three (3) days into the 30 day campaign and Bing has already raised (as of this writing) US$4459 of the $5500 required (or 81% of goal in 10% of time). I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the 500 decks are going to be made, and maybe a few extra. Those interested can check out the rules for Borogrove here.

• Side note: I picked up Gunnerkrigg Court Volume 3: Reason at my local comic shop last week, which led to an obsessive re-reading of all three books (and shortly, the couple of chapters since the third volume). Damn, Tom Siddell knows how to plant story hooks. I thought I was a pretty keen observer of life at the Court, but it’s only in reading the whole thing in a narrow timeframe that you really see how much he’s planned, and how many questions are yet to be answered. Wonderful stuff.

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¹ Really.

² The other one, not the webcomics-snarky one.

³ Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

For starters, let me point out the Birthday Boys of Webcomics, Rick Marshall¹ (today) and Aaron Diaz² (tomorrow). You would be hard pressed to find two guys more in love with comics, more devoted to finding good examples of same, or more dedicated to improving their own skills within their respective roles (reviewer/promoter, writer/illustrator/teacher). Happy birthday, guys, I owe each of you a beer.

Pretty things for you to see, some of which I’m recommending purely on the basis of their creators’ past work:

• Rebecca Clements did a 24 hour comic, and it’s available for your purchase. Come Inside My Body is a choose-your-own adventure tour to the insides of Clements³. Her whimsical, Seussian style is ideal for what might otherwise be an unending parade of horrors, since let’s face it — our insides are pretty awful, disgusting bags of glop. Bonus points if you can tell which pages were done during the onset of no-sleep madness.
• Also on the recommended sight-unseen list, Tyson Hesse has a Kickerstarter campaign up, to support print versions of his Boxer Hockey and Diesel projects. There’s lots of price points with small incremental dollar amounts, with tangible dead-tree product available down to the $15 level.

  Guys, if you’re not familiar with Hesse, what you need to know is that he has a command of color that’s mindblowing. Check out his posters if you don’t believe me. That one guy working alone can produce work this pretty (and that printing technology is advanced enough that it can be produced without the need for a monastery full of illuminators) is surely proof that we live in the future.

• Recommended sight-seen: I’ve long been a fan of Tyler Page’s Nothing Better — it just reads so honestly that you could almost think that you were reminiscing about your own experiences, not reading about people that are totally made up and not real. Page is now turning that eye for verisimilitude to somebody that is real and not made up — himself, in the just-released first chapter of a full graphic novel titled Raised on Ritalin.

  Part memoir, part exploration of ADD/ADHD and the medicines prescribed to treat it, it’s eventually going to be a full book, but for now you can get a taste of what’s to come. So far it’s unsparing, uncompromising, and promises to read like a combo platter of Tracy White’s How I Made It To Eighteen and the psychiatric/science comics of Daryl Cunningham.

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¹ Will, and Holly.

² Who may need a new nickname, seeing as how the only reason he doesn’t have a promised update today is that he had to run off a pack of four would-be muggers yesterday. The Latin Art-Throb sounds great, but what do you all think about The Punkbuster?

³ She already did the ladyparts previously, so don’t expect a guided tour this time around. KLARBLARG, indeed.

Although it’s only August (and therefore only half over), the one thing that I think it’s safe to say I regret this summer is that I didn’t get a chance to attend a certain class at CCNY and get to see Aaron Diaz¹ teach a class full of college students about webcomics. I’ve long admired Diaz’s art process blog, and I was eager (as a practitioner of the instructive arts myself) to see how he would do in front of an audience (if nothing else, he was sure to have the regulation sport coat with leather elbow patches).

While our schedules never meshed, the results of Diaz’s efforts are available to me (and to you) in the form of the webcomics created by his students:

At the end of the course, everyone was given the option to actually publish a webcomic of their as their final, and I’m going to share them here (because, after all, they won’t get the full experience unless someone’s reading their work online)! I highly encourage you guys to contact these artists and provide constructive feedback. Note: these are beginners, most of which have never drawn any comics before this course.

Keeping that in mind, I want to call out the work of Sharon Stokes, who produced a gag-panel comic called ‘Tis Race, for not only having an easy-on-the-eyes style (that is, she didn’t try for art beyond her abilities, and instead polished what she was capable of — I’d expect to see much more elaborate work from her in a year or so), but also for having multiple updates. Most of her fellow students managed a page or two (sometimes much more elaborate), but in only providing the beginnings of a story, it’s tough to see how they might follow through. Stokes put up five different gags with five different directions, which shows a certain flexibility. Plus, this is a legitimately funny joke, one that I’m surprised I’ve never seen before.

As for the rest — since a lot of creators send me links, I see a lot of beginner-level work, and none of what got posted by the class is on the low end of the beginner talent spectrum. As far as being interesting enough to make me check back without a reminder, Leon McKoy’s Desert Raine caught my eye; if none of the others did, well, I can count on one hand the number of single-update beginner-level webcomics that have over the past ten years, so no real failing there. Art will be refined, story beats will get more subtle, lettering, coloring, and spelling will all improve. With any luck, there will be more classes like this at CCNY, and we’ll be able to see the progression of these students and those in the future.

Also on the theme of lessons: Daniel Davis, maker of comics, prints, postcards, and the like, has shared some lessons learned over a half-decade of exhibiting at San Diego Comic Con, and he’s willing to share them with you. Key points you might want to pay attention to:

• Davis has run a profit each year at SDCC
• He’s also improved gross sales each year at SDCC
• He has a keen eye for things that could be done better (booth layout, payment solutions, visual appeal)
• He’s got the number of everybody that’s ever wondered, Should this be a shirt?:
  

  If you want to make a whole lot of money at the con, make prints/t-shirts based on a famous property that you don’t own, or mashup two hot properties. You’ll get some quick sales for sure.

  But I wouldn’t recommend it; it’s a short-term gain with no brand-building. You’re competing with tons of other folks doing exactly the same thing, it’s not memorable, I predict that eventually the big studios will shut down this sort of activity, and then you’ll have to start from zero all over again.

  It lacks story. “Why did you make X?” Oh, well I’m a fan of X.” That’s a boring story compared to being inspired, excited about your creation.

Read the whole thing, even if showing at a convention isn’t on your immediate list of things to do. There’s a lot of very astute self-analysis there.

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¹ The Latin Art-Throb, naturally.

Is The Untouchables the right visual reference, do you think? Might it be better to go with The Right Stuff? In any event, Messers Green, Hussie, Rowland, Jacques, and Stevens look like a band, and the article that the photo is attached to is better than average¹ for a newspaper story on webcomics. Nice job on the title of the piece — The New Webcomic Entrepreneurs — as that’s really the important thing about our community.

It’s not the fact that comics end up on the web, it’s that the people that put them up are in charge of the business aspects of what they do (or, as Randy Milholland mentioned in an unrelated tweet yesterday, I am a small business). The only thing I noticed that was kinda weird — the author of the article talked to five creators and mentioned two others by name, but none of them were ladies? Like I said — weird.²

• Speaking of entrepreneurship, got an email from Darren “Dern” Gendron, regarding a Kickstarting of a product niche I can’t say I’ve noticed before in webcomickry: board games. Sure, there’s some card games out there (most recently with respect to the Axe Cop³ supplement to Munchkin), but I don’t recall any board games. Scury Dogs: Pirates and Privateers looks to fill that gap, assuming that the rather more complex production issues of a board game (compared to a card game) can be overcome with the rather larger necessary budget.

  As of this writing, about $3600 of the necessary 20 grand have been raised, with just over a month to go. If you like boardgames but find that you’re getting bored with Catan⁴, take a look at the gameplay description that Gendron has at the Kickstarter page and maybe kick in some booty fer the cause.

• Newly noticed: The Chairs’ Hiatus by Matthew Bogart; it’s the story of a band, or what used to be a band. It kind of fell apart, and the members drifted away and have been living in various states of quietude and isolation. Now they’re meeting again face to face and remembering what they had, what they missed, why they got so angry, and what could possibly be forgiven. It updates somewhat irregularly, a half-dozen or so screensworth at a time, in tall, continuous-reading chapters (30 or more screens to the chapter, we’re a good way through the third chapter now).

  There’s not the “punch” you get on every page, but since multiple pages go up in each update, and the story is explicitly designed to be read in longform, that’s not really a shortcoming. The art is nicely composed, and the faces are simple enough to make reader identification with the characters extremely simple. I like this one, and I’ll be checking it irregularly, because I want to read big chunks of story, just like it was meant to be read.

• Did I mention that Digger volume 6 was available for purchase? Because it totally is, and given that the strip wrapped back in March, this is the last time I’ll get to tell you “New Digger volume available in exchange for money, you guys!” More to the point, two waves of signed copies will be put up for sale on 6 August, half of them at 6:00am and half at 6:00pm (GMT-5). Since none of my Digger copies is signed I’m not going to fight you for one; someday though, I will be in the same place as Ursula Vernon, and all six of my books will be there, and I will get signatures and or sketches, yes! Yes, I will!⁵

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¹ Although the dismissive parenthetical that “the name says it all” in reference to MS Paint Adventures? Very, very lazy.

² One possible explanation — all of the creators in the article live in Massachusetts except Randy Milholland, and he has a history of having lived there, so maybe that’s it?

³ Speaking of Axe Cop, let this serve as a reminder that tomorrow Axe Cop co-creator (elder half) Ethan Nicolle launches his second webcomic, BEARMAGEDDON. Not sure entirely what it’s about (bears, I’m guessing), but I have a feeling that somebody should alert Stephen Colbert.

⁴ Oh god that pun was completely unintentional, I’m so sorry. It’s all Brad Guigar’s fault.

⁵ For added effect, read that last bit in the voice of the deranged and highly-amusing Marlon Fraggle.

Even though I won’t be there for Preview Night, which kicks off in a few hours; even though time zones mean you’ll hear probably everything I do sooner than I can write it up, there’s still lots to talk about.

• For starters, Frank ‘n’ Becky are doing a for-real Little Golden Book! It won’t be out until next year, but this is the perfect followup to their LGB homage last year. Not only that, but if you go by their booth, you can see the sculpt for their first (forthcoming) vinyl figure, and maybe tell me what it is! And you can pick up the art book collected volume of Becky’s video game mural.
• Jim Zub would like you to know that the twelfth issue of his very funny sword-and-asskickery comic book, Skullkickers, will feature stories written by some of webcomics finest. Or at least Zach Weiner and My Evil Twin. In all seriousness (which really isn’t appropriate for Skullkickers, but whatever), the book is very funny, the five issue story arcs are just long enough to develop a plot without bogging down or losing the possibility of new readers, and taking a one-issue break after the arc to let creative friends play in your sandbox is a terrific idea. Make sure to pick it up (issue #9 is due in a few weeks, so look for this one in November or so.
• From funny comic to PZ Meyer-linked meme to handsome print in four days. Tony Piro hit one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments since last Friday.
• Re: Today’s Sinfest; no reason, I just thought it was adorable.

There’s a discussion that’s been taking place in various corners of webcomicdom about forever in re: Whose IP Is It, Anyway? This particular iteration of the question started when Joel Watson noticed a startling similarity between one of his t-shirts and one offered by TeeFury (Watson’s tweets on this matter appear to have been deleted, but at one time the initial tweet resided here) (and Kris Straub has a good recap of the issue here).

T-shirt thievery happens regularly enough that you can almost set your watch to it, but the wrinkle this time is that both Watson’s shirt and TeeFury’s bore as their central content a Doctor Who/Peanuts mashup based around Lucy’s ubiquitous psychiatric help booth and the “The Doctor is IN” sign thereunto. Watson wanted TeeFury to not be stealing his design, but others opined that since Watson created neither Doctor Who nor Lucy’s booth, how much of the design could be called “his” was unsettled.

Enter Scott Kurtz, who while not denying the prevalence of remix culture or his own part in appropriating cultural touchstones for personal enrichment, also held that the remixer should acknowledge that it wasn’t really an original idea in the first place and that at best you could:

[H]ope we flew under the radar. Sometimes people got C&D letters. Sometimes they didn’t.

I was one of the first people to try to make a buck off of the “Han Shot First” shirt. I understand the practice all too well. But it’s one thing to try to make a buck off a larger cultural meme, and another to claim that you’re the only person who’s allowed to do it.

Straub had essentially the same idea, but perhaps a little more diplomatically:

I don’t know what constitutes an original idea anymore — or rather, I feel if you have to peel back layer upon layer of existing intellectual property to get to the part you’re actually responsible for, it’s not nearly as much yours as you’d like it to be.

The most useful information in the entire contretemps is probably that pointed out by Chris Hallbeck in a reference to the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center’s list of precedential cases; it would appear that the only case law on combining IPs (without the intent of parodying either) holds that it’s infringing:

An author mimicked the style of a Dr. Seuss book while retelling the facts of the O.J. Simpson murder trial in The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the book was a satire, not a parody, because the book did not poke fun at or ridicule Dr. Seuss. Instead, it merely used the Dr. Seuss characters and style to tell the story of the murder. Important factors: The author’s work was nontransformative and commercial. (Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P. v. Penguin Books USA, Inc., 109 F.3d 1394 (9th Cir. 1997).)

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but it would appear to me that the famed Penny Arcade Strawberry Shortcake case would not necessarily fall into this precedent (since it was intended to parody American McGee). But who the hell knows? I’d submit that at this point it’s all unsettled law until some sufficiently broad ruling from the Supremes gets rendered, which doesn’t happen all that often. In any event, it’s not that long before we have to worry about infringement on far more than t-shirts¹.

• Want to enjoy some things where copyright isn’t in doubt? Allow me to re-engage in my biweekly pointing-to of Saveur’s recipe comics, with the most recent installments including Anthony Clark’s oven-roasted potato wedges and Ali Kenefick’s attempt at a hypercomplex recipe in diary form.
• Alternately, you can put some Strong Female Characters on your wall; Carly, Mer, Kate — never change. Also, for each of your birthdays forever, I am getting you so many sunglasses.

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¹ A discussion that is written by an Actual Lawyer (albeit a Canadian²), and which gets bonus points for the use of the tragically underused word foofaraw³.

² No disrespect to our future conquerors neighbors to the north; I merely indicate that jurisprudence is different on the two sides of our mutual border.

³ Scrabble players, if you can pull this one off, even the great Hodgman will tip his hat to you.

Karl Mutha-h’in¹ Kerschl, people. Not only does he draw Miller better than Miller does, not only does he include the most appropriate quote possible as the title of the strip, he sticks the landing perfectly. I was giggling for half an hour after I read this.

Quickly now, since the trains got screwed up again today and I’m behind again today and I just need a drink again today.

• TopatoCo picks up maybe the biggest unaffiliated creator out there, as John Allison moves his non-artwork merch to the biggest little webcomics distributor:
  

  Visitors to the shop will find most items marked as “sold out” or “coming soon”, with only ebooks, handmade items, teatowels, and my more expensive giclee prints still available to buy. From next week, things that aren’t a. digital or b. dependent on me to push a pen/button will be available at Topatoco.

  This move is designed to free me up for more freelance commissions, as I’d been shipping a lot of items myself and overseeing all the orders, not the most economical use of my time.

  More time for John Allison originals and commissions? Sounds good to me.

• As everybody and their dog are talking about JK Rowling’s big announcement, I ‘spose I should weigh in, too. I enjoyed the books, I’m not sure I’m invested enough to get involved in “Pottermore”, and boy, a creator going alone without a formal publisher (and engaging audience on as nearly a one-to-one basis as possible) sure sounds like webcomics, doesn’t it? Bonus points to Heidi Mac for the Akallabêth reference in her writeup. I’m sure that I’m not the only one that went squee over the reference to Tolkien’s voluminous apocrypha (I’m fairly certain I heard both Evan Dahm and Aaron Diaz making swoony noises).
• Okay, fine, Akallabêth, “the tale of the downfall of Númenor as written by Elendil the Tall, King of the North Kingdom”. Big disaster, brought about by poor decisions and evil intent, sweeping up the wicked and the virtuous in its murderous wake. Not quite the same as the Joplin tornado last month, but then again the Akallabêth didn’t have the likes of Dave Roman and Chris Duffy (formerly editors of Nickelodeon magazine) arranging for a comic anthology to be distributed to the children of Armenelos.

  They are, however, working up such an anthology for the benefit of the children of Joplin, with information (and ways to help the endeavor) over at IndieGogo. As of this writing, they’re 90% of the way to goal, but going way the hell over goal isn’t really a problem — it just means that more kids will be helped with an escape from the fact that they’ve lost everything. Go. Give.

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¹ “Honoring, respecting, calling on Mothers Day and taking out for a nice lunch on her birthday”, naturally.