We’ll get to the title reference in a moment, but I want to call out something first. Yesterday I spent quite a bit of space talking about Shing Yin Khor’s meditation/poem in comics form, Stone Fruit Season why, my goodness, you really should go read right now if you haven’t yet. If you have, read it again.

Anyways, when you’re done reading Stone Fruit Season, you might want to check out the comment below yesterday’s post from reader David Cortesi, who notes that Stone Fruit Season contains a number of references to TS Eliot’s The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock. Having spent most of my nerd school humanities electives on history and political science, I wasn’t familiar with Prufrock (or really, much of Eliot’s work except to be aware that his poems are the root cause of why people got purposefully very drunk/high to watch a movie and have been clamoring for The Butthole Cut.

But now I’ve read Prufrock and yeah, I think Cortesi is onto something. So thanks for that, I learned something today. Namely, that while I can’t say that I’m suddenly an Eliot fanboy, I can see how he set the stage for modern poets whose poems I do enjoy, including one in particular that I once traded a hand-transcribed copy of to The Space Gnome in exchange for admission to an interstellar trade guild. I love it when circles close so neatly.

Okay, time to get a bit more serious about thing, as I have to look at two comics institutions that are (at least as of the time of this writing) taking two entirely different approaches to the dominant issue of our time, the novel coronavirus pandemic.

• On the one hand, you have the Cartoon Art Museum (who I was always going to write about today), who are running an auction to benefit the museum and its programs. Specifically, they are holding the Shelter-In-Place Fundraising Auction:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum’s galleries were locked down following a statewide mandate issued on March 15, and our staff took immediate steps to adapt, developing online exhibitions, workshops, and conferences, sharing resources with other institutions, and seeking alternative sources to offset the revenue lost from our temporary closure.

  Members of the creative community have stepped up to help the Cartoon Art Museum and offer assistance during these uncertain times, and many cartoonists offered original art for the museum’s forthcoming Shelter-In-Place Fundraising Auction. Comic book artists, graphic novelists, comic strip artists, and animators have contributed artwork from their own archives for this ongoing online auction, which will help us continue our mission to ignite imaginations and foster the next generation of visual storytellers by celebrating the history of cartoon art, its role in society, and its universal appeal.

  That link will take you to a preview of items to be auctioned, the first of which will go up tomorrow, Thursday, 27 August, at CAM’s Ebay page with new items listed weekly. Props to everybody at CAM for finding a way to continue on in the face of closure.

• On the other hand, you have something I had no idea I was going to write about today, except I happened to see a related story that caught my eye and subsequently raised my ire. The Ringo Awards announced today that their final ballots are decided, and voting is now open. So far, so good. But nowhere on their site (so near as I can tell) do they actually list the names on the ballot categories unless you provide an email address to register to vote.

  No. I’m not providing an email address for the privilege of researching information that should be public. I spent a significant amount of time poking around the Ringo Awards site looking for anyplace that has the categories and final nominees, and nothing. As of this writing, the sole communication from TRA on their Twitter account since late June is to say Hey, Kids! Comics award ballots! Vote and we’ll tell you who’s on them!¹.

  It was in my poking around in vain that I came across the following, which is on the home page, just above the list of this year’s judges:

  The fourth annual awards will return as part of the fan- and pro-favorite convention, The Baltimore Comic-Con. Top honors will be announced Saturday, October 24, 2020.

  That can’t be right, I thought, nobody could expect less than two months out from an event that regularly tops 15,000 people is going to be held indoors. That would be unbelievably irresponsible. So I went over to the BCC page, where (as near as I can tell) neither the words coronavirus nor COVID appear. The About/General Info page mentions exclusives, hotels, and sponsorships, but nothing about public health. The News page features a tickets on sale story from last November and literally nothing more recent.

  They are planning to hold this thing in person. There’s no other interpretation. They’re pushing tickets, advertising guests, and not acknowledging the elephant — the entire friggin’ population of African elephants gathered together into one improbable herd — in the room.

  Okay, they’re not good at communicating, I thought, but the absence of newer news doesn’t excuse this. The past ten days have been nothing but stories from around the country of schools — ranging from local public up through large universities — resuming classes and immediately having to shut down because of massive COVID outbreaks. The Frequently Asked Questions is about ticketing, how kids have to stay with parents, rules on celebrity group photos, how VIPs can enter the hall 30 minutes early, and their privacy policy. They are not acknowledging reality here, and it is dangerous.

  Well, maybe they’re just waiting for somebody else to pull the plug? I thought. In that case, there should at least be a statement about how they are carefully assessing the situation with respect to everybody’s safety, and oh, I dunno, recognizing that every other con canceled more than two months out? The Baltimore Convention Center has, right there its front page, a link to a Re-Opening FAQ that says, and I quote:

  The Baltimore Convention Center is currently unable to host events during the current State of Emergency enacted by Governor Hogan in March of this year. Events will take place again when the state of emergency has been lifted.

  They aren’t allowing more than 10 people at a time to make site visits (and are strongly encouraging virtual visits) to decide if they want to take a gamble on booking the convention center sometime 12 – 14 months from now. The city of Baltimore — home of Johns Hopkins and the best epidemiologists in the world, they are not fucking around with this thing — is currently at Phase 2 of reopening² and as of yesterday is meeting criteria to revert to Phase 1³. You’ve got all the justification needed to make a decision, stop jerking off in public, Baltimore Comic Con Committee.

  Call off the godsdamned con. And if they don’t and you decide to attend, stay the fuck away from me.

Spam of the day:
Know what? No spam today. I’ve had enough stupidity for one day.

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¹ If you want to participate in the public voting portion of the multipartite Ringos, you have until 23 September. If you do and feel like sharing the nominees, I’ll run the list here at some point.

² No direct link to that screen; follow the link provided and click the button for Reopening Phases. Screenshot taken 26 August 2020, approximately 4:00pm EDT.

³ Again, no direct link; go to the button for Reopening Indicators. Screenshot taken 26 August 2020, approximately 4:00pm.

Since last night I’ve had news of friends swept up into bullshit charges and a justice system designed to impoverish and immiserate even those for whom no charges can remotely be made, and another whose company is deciding to lay off half his work group and send the other half to work for a contract supplier at a 30% salary cut, who will be expected to do all the same work that was previously done. Because insurance in this country is tied to employment, that’s being held over his head to keep him on the job until August, during which time he is expected to train his replacement¹.

So having done what I can do to help in both situations, I am spending the rest of the day finding joy where I can. Shing Yin Khor, who has been the subject of admiration of this page on more than one occasion, sent me a package full of amazing stuff and I thought if you saw it, you might find some joy as well.

Firstly, Khor has been doing some remarkably powerful divination of late; the card marked Outer Colony Divination contains a fortune and an embroidered patch of the three-eyed rat. The sticker is an absolutely beautiful death’s-head moth. The Field Guide To The Space Worm is full of Khor’s delicate, fantastical watercolor work (see the Center For Otherworld Science to get a feel for how good that can be); some day, I want to see their take on one of those weird, possibly fraudulent codicies. Finally, the metal coin you see is engraved with the words YES and NO on opposite sides; it is heavy, and will guide you to correct decisions in your life.

Some of these things are available at Khor’s store; some can only be obtained by trade or gift or attendance at the correct ritual. All of them are marvelous and bring joy; should you dive into whatever can bring you joy today? Coin says YES.

SM20 Countdown for 3 June 2020:
9

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¹ His words to his boss on the topic: I dare you to place somebody with me to train.

That title will make sense eventually, I promise.

If there’s one person (and he would be the first to say there’s never just one person, it’s always groups) that has done more to popularize and legitmize webcomics and indie comics, and to make niche foreign comics available to North American audiences than Chevalier Christopher Butcher, then I don’t know who that would be. Y’know, little things like co-founding and largely running TCAF, being instrumental in running The Beguiling for much of its history, scouting manga for importation to the US/Canada market and editing stone fuck classics are why. This is aside from the fact that he is the sweetest dude in the world and is compelled to take care of people down to his core¹.

So when something he’s built is under challenge, when he feels the need to ask for help, people step up. You may recall that TCAF launched a pop-up store in the Toronto Reference Library for the 2014 holiday season; it being what the kids call a roaring success, the shop stuck around as an ongoing concern under the name of Page & Panel². Like everything else, it’s feeling the pinch of public places closing, and with TCAF cancelled, they’re also missing out on an expected bump in sales. So Butcher and the TCAF folks are asking for some help:

Happy Giving Tuesday! The pandemic has hit our festival shop Page & Panel hard and we need your help. Please consider supporting our vibrant community space! https://gofundme.com/f/page-and-panel #GivingTuesdayNow, #GivingTuesdayCa #TCAF2020

Look, I get it, we’re all tired and cranky and many of us are about a week from being From Circumstances. But some of us are still okay, and maybe even don’t need all the stimulus money that we maybe have received from the gubmint, and could kick a few bucks to P&P (along with creators that could use a hand, many of whom have direct cash links on their sites)?

The first day of fundraising went well, and they’re about a third of the way to meeting the goal that will stabilize finances and hopefully allow for staff to be re-hired. If you can’t give away cash, maybe that comic you were going to buy anyway could be bought from them? Or possibly you have your eye on something from The Beguiling’s online art store? Plenty of chances to lend a hand, or (as Topato would say), a finger or two.

Spam of the day:

We are also ready to offer professional EN-RU and RU-EN translations. All our developers are from Ukraine and Russia!

You can’t see it here, but the body of this spam was ridden with not-quite-standard Roman letters, designed to be readable but also defeat text-matching based filters; the f in from was actually italic, with swooping descender, likely the forte indicator (𝆑, which may or may not render in your browser) from a musical score. So color me slightly distrustful that you are actually looking for a business partner to market your computing services in the West, unless those services are widespread cybercrime.

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¹ Although he is an inveterate trash-talker when playing drunk Pac Man Vs and not above attempting to body-check opponents away from the control stick. You might be twice my size, but you ain’t chasing ghosts onto me, Butcher.

² That link took me forever to find, as the name consists of two words that appear all the hell over this blog.

Thanks as always to Jon Rosenberg for hosting Fleen, and for doing what’s necessary to get it back up and running when it stops.

Also, thanks are due to a bunch of creators up and down comicdom, who’ve decided that they aren’t going to let something like a pandemic that forces us all inside take down the friendly local comic shop that depends on us all going out. Creators 4 Comics¹ have come together to offer a series of auctions, the proceeds of which will be pooled to support the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC, although I’m not sure how that works out unless it’s in French or something), which is taking applications for direct aid to stores, to disburse starting at the end of the month.

Various creators are running their own auctions of stuff that is, at times, very them. Chip Zdarsky, for instance, is auctioning off an original erotic story starring the auction winner, a situation for which the phrase self insert is both tailor-made and somehow insufficient. Ryan North, by contrast, is offering an original erotic story about Chip Zdarsky writing erotica about the auction winner and if these two keep this up it’ll turn Tinglesque in no time (North is also offering a never-before-seen comic book script). You can find commissions, signed books, TV show set visits, care packages, promo swag collections, logo designs, and more.

If you want to find a constantly-changing possibly current list of everything, that’s here. Then take a run over to Twitter and look for the #creators4comics hashtag and tweet a bid at the person making the offering you like (increments of a dollar, please). At noon EDT on Monday 20 April, bidding closes² — if you’re the high bidder, make your donation to BINC, send the creator your receipt, and get your stuff. Also keep in mind that new auctions will be going up for the next while, so keep checking in case you don’t find anything grabbing you.

Spam of the day:

Made with nanotechnology to filter the air you breathe

Oh for fuck’s … ahem. Making a mask with a very fine mesh to filter out things as small as viruses is not nanotechnology, you enormous, blithering bullshit artiste.

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¹ Not to be confused with Creators For Creators, who are awesome in a different manner.

² Well, officially at least. Creators may run things with different end times, so check with them.

Hey, have the days started to run together for you, rendering all sense of what’s a work day and what’s the weekend meaningless? Cool, cool … but I’ve got a work from home job and the weekend actually still has meaning for me and I am looking forward to this one like you wouldn’t believe. If the same is true for you, or if weekends are whenever you want them to be for the time being, doesn’t matter. I decree that tomorrow is the day for you to kick back and relax a bit. Here’s some info to help you plan what you might do.

• The :01 Books virtual convention, Comics Relief, which is set for Saturday next week¹, has released some more details in the form of a schedule. The event is shaping up to be something like an All :01 All The Time day of panel content, with the schedule and participants now up for your perusal. Fun starts at 11:00am EDT on the 18th (platform TBA), and if you have any questions for the panelists, you can submit them now².
• The Ringo Awards nominations are up, because pandemic or no, there were some great comics last year and it would be a shame not to recognize them. You (yes, you!) can nominate here until 5 June. The winners are presently scheduled to be presented at Baltimore Comic Con on 24 October, but I don’t think they can make any promises in that regard right now. Whether there’s a physical event or not, I’m sure the honorees will be sufficiently thrilled.
• As you may recall, I have noted that Homestar*Runner is a webcomic, and thanks to the machinations of one Mr S Bad, Homestar*Runner is now a webcomic with a free to listen soundtrack of 180 songs, jingles, background music, and other audio miscellania. It doesn’t contain the classic Strong Bad Sings And Other Type Hits (featuring Limozeen), but you can purchase that for a measly ten bucks (American). While you’re waiting for it to be delivered, revel (revel, damn you!) in 20 years worth of random aural delight.

Spam of the day:

Gwenith Paltrow and Kate Hudson have both taken selfies wearing the mask N95

Dude, don’t even. The only thing “Gwenith” ever takes selfies with is a fake-ass pseudoscience doodad — hello, jade vag egg! — that you can conveniently buy from the Goop store for the equivalent of two days labor at minimum wage. N95s ain’t got nearly enough woo to interest her.

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¹ Reminder: today is Friday. Unless you’re reading this on a different day, in which case maybe it’s not. Look at your phone, it’ll tell you what day it is.

² Oh, and everybody that submits questions will be entered into a drawing for a free STACK O’ BOOKS, winner to be announced during the Q&A session (session #6, 4:00pm EDT). 13 years or older, resident of the US to win, good luck everybody.

Busy EMT shift on Tuesday night, including my first definite (as in, previous positive test) COVID-19 patient; with the decontamination and sanitization required, everything takes about twice as long as it does normally. I am short on sleep and despairing for the safety of everybody working the healthcare end of this crisis¹, but at least there’s some good stuff happening in Webcomickia:

• Rich Stevens often reacts to uncertainty by throwing himself into merch design and/or giving away stuff. He can’t really get out and work, but he’s got a bunch of envelopes, a bunch of stamps, and a bunch of stickers ’round the house, and figures giving them away will while away some hours. Details here, first come first served.
• Ryan Estrada has had the great good luck to live for a number of years in Busan, South Korea, a country that knows how to treat pandemics — particularly the respiratory kind — seriously. COVID-19 may have delayed his next book (see Monday’s post re: Iron Circus), but it’s about to come out and his co-author/wife, Kim Hyun Sook, have made a comic about their experience making the graphic novel.

  In case you didn’t know, Kim has had experience living through an authoritarian regime, having grown up in South Korea in its military dictatorship period; that time in her life is the basis of Banned Book Club, as she and her friends defied a repressive government to read forbidden books. If the thought of Estrada living in a society that’s functional in the face of pandemic threats isn’t interesting, maybe learning from Kim how to undermine the grip of a jumped-up authoritarian with a cabal of noncompetent sycophant enablers will be useful to you at this time.

• We’re light on specifics at the moment, but :01 Books (a place where everybody there is just the best person) have announced a virtual book festival for a week from Saturday. On 18 April from 11:00am to 5:00pm EDT (8:00am to 2:00pm PDT), creators will come together to show how the comics you (and they) love are made. Info here, register here (they’ll get back to you with further info), and we’ll share details in the coming days as they’re released.

Spam of the day:

Introducing the multi-state concealed carry certification. One ONLINE ONLY Certification is changing the way Americans get multi-state concealed carry permits.

Oh yes, please, all you gunhumpers please give this scammer your money for a piece of paper and try to conceal-carry in the state of New Jersey. No, don’t look up our laws, or how multi-state concealed carry isn’t a thing, just do it and see what happens.

And be sure to do it where there’s lots of cameras, because I can’t wait to watch that video on YouTube.

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¹ And let me be clear, I am doing this once a week, with sufficient PPE; if that ceases to be the case, I will not put my crew in harm’s way because nothing about being an EMT requires you to commit suicide, especially when you’re doing it for free. So for the sake of whatever you hold dear, keep your ass at home, no exceptions, until we’ve got a handle on this shit.

I myself am too spiteful to die in a pandemic that Donald Trump is mismanaging out of a combination of ignorance, stupidity, and malice (no matter what, I will live long enough to shit on his grave and to see his spawn and also Jared sent to prison for the rest of their lives) but others won’t be so indestructible. Stay home and leave the good masks for those doing the work.

For certain values of life, that is; in this case, the value would be The minions of a belligerent, poisonous space potato. The way found is how to ship the finest in webcomics merch to you in times of isolation:

Hello! Here’s some good news. Starting today we’re shipping orders again! We’ve figured out a one-person-in-the-warehouse-at-a-time policy that includes rigorous sanitizing before and after shifts.

The precautions we’re taking exceed those advised by the CDC and WHO, both of whom have indicated there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 is being spread through the mail.

Due to these precautions, shipping will be slower than normal. Please allow 4-8 business days for your order to ship (this is subject to change depending on the Situation¹).

However, due to widespread service disruptions that change on an almost daily basis, we will be holding on to non-US orders for a while longer until things clear up. As always, if you have any questions please contact us here or at topatoco.com/help

And huge thanks to our team: Agent Paperklip, @tomselleck69, @CptOblivion, @MrReciprocity, and The Marlboro Kid!

Hey, you know how you can add little notes to your TopatoCo order that get read by whoever is doing the packing of your merch? This would be the place to include a thank you, or some little token of appreciation². Maybe if we ask nicely, Topato can add a button to the ordering process that lets you add a tip for whoever is sending out your t-shirt, poster, or book order.

• In other news, Iron Circus Comics may have to change its name to Iron Circus Comics And Media or some such. The Lackadaisy Cats animation is gonna happen, and a short while ago they passed the (quite frankly ridiculous) US$225K final stretch goal. This is C Spike Trotman’s 24th Kickstarter, and I think she just passed about 20% of her cumulative funding in this one campaign alone.
• Speaking of, Spike’s not resting on her laurels. The whole COVID-19 starting in China thing threw her printing schedule out of whack (what with the real impact occurring just about exactly the same time as the Lunar New Year shutdowns), but that’s just given customers and distributors time to run up the orders on a bunch of her coming titles. So much so that there might have been shortages had she not increased print runs, which requires a bigger outlay of cash and possibly bigger delays which gives more time for more orders and I’m not sure if this circle is vicious or virtuous.

  Want to be sure to get your most-anticipate upcoming IC title? Public pre-orders are up, although some titles will not be shipping until October³, so check out the dates on the pre-order pages for Banned Book Club, The Complete Penultimate Quest, The Harrowing Of Hell, It’s Your Funeral!, The Nixie Of The Mill-Pond And Other European Stories, Smut Peddler Presents: Silver, Student Ambassador: The Missing Dragon, and the presciently-titled Softies: Stuff That Happens After The World Blows Up.

Spam of the day:

Shocking Proof God’s Plan Is Coming True…

Humanity has worshipped a few zillion gods and I’m curious which one, but I have a feeling you’re talking about the god referred to by the tetragrammaton, YHWH (which Larry Gonick reliably informs me is pronounced Yahoo-Wahoo). So tell me — if this proof is so awesome, why are you trying to get me to pay you to see it instead of spreading it far and wide? I really hope that you’re right and it is proof that your god is real, because as I recall he had some nice bits of vengeance planned for the profiteers and falsely pious like you.

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¹ Editor’s note: this is the general situation we live in right now, not the person who calls himself The Situation who last I heard was in federal prison for tax evasion.

² I will usually include a recipe for a cocktail that I’ve worked up, or a playlist suggestion for the next impromptu warehouse dance party.

³ Depending on how bad the world breaks further.

I’m wondering if we’re starting to hit the end of Phase One of the coronavirus response. We still don’t have full distancing in all places (thanks, Republican governors!), and those of us that have been under restrictions for a couple weeks are hitting the it’s going to be how much longer? stage. Various notable people are being reported in critical condition or deceased because of COVID-19, new evidence how just how bad it’s going to get for the areas still in denial drop daily, and a concentrated, national response still hasn’t even started because of the insecure egotist in charge.

Things are about to get explosively bad in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia — and then everywhere else, hopefully not until we pass the peaks in the early-hit places. We’ll get there. We’ll find that what seems hard and isolating becomes doable (and those of us who’ve been doing it for a while will have it incumbent on us to help those that come behind). Practice helps (says the guy that had his first positive-screened patient over the weekend, and expects to get them regularly from here on out), but not as much as patience.

So. Deep breath. There’s some stuff here to take your mind off things for a bit, and an opportunity to help make something amazing, if it’s within your ability at the present time (which is absolutely not the ideal time). And, because we live in a crapsack reality, something that’s usually pretty bad has become downright terrible. Let’s start with that one and work our way up:

• Diamond is a monopoly, and those are never a good idea. Having already decided it won’t receive/ship comics for the foreseeable future, it decided today that because it’s not got money coming in from comic stores — that would be the comic stores that Diamond’s already said won’t be getting the product they ordered — it’s not going to pay its suppliers for product they’ve already received and sold.

  It’s a neat tornado of shitty behavior: announce you’re not going to be sending stuff to your customers, which causes customers to not pay you to do nothing, which causes you to not have money coming in, so you decide to keep what money you’ve already got and not pay the vendors that supplied you in good faith. Whatever form the direct market takes when all of this is done, I sincerely hope this course of action is the death knell for the crappiest link in the comics chain and that multiple new companies arise and put Diamond in the dirt.

  Oh, yeah, they did the same to the games distribution vendors as well.

• Couple weeks back we brought you news of Fredddave Kellett-Schroeder’s new interview series Kickstart, a project which got off to a comfortable start and then just sort of stalled. Don’t get me wrong — this funding curve would be great if it were depicting, say, a count of coronavirus infections¹, but it’s not where you want to be for a project funding. The FFF mk2 isn’t looking promising: US$64K-96K, with a goal of just under US$90K would be promising, except for one thing.

  The project was promoted to past backers of Stripped and other Kellett projects for 18 hours or so before the public reveal, and a good chunk of that day one total comes from the pre-announcement period. It’s a useful technique, but it throws off the funding formula, which relies on an organic launch. A better metric in this case would be the McDonald Ratio, which states that the first three days of funding equals one third of the total raised, or in this case about US$65K, well under goal. The dramatic dropoff from day two to day three, and the almost zero funding since² make this one a longshot.

  Which is a damn shame, because this series looks super interesting. There’s still time to turn things around, weirder things have happened, but it’s going to take a lot of people deciding they want this in the next nine days (days of uncertainty and economic stress nobody was considering back in early March). More likely, this is going to have to be shelved until a later time when people have spare money again. Just … if you have discretionary funds right now, give it some thought, okay?

• Let’s end on some unalloyed good news. Aud Koch has shared her first week’s quarantine art, and it’s stunning. Go take a good long look and forget all of … this … for a while.

Spam of the day:
Got a call from “Mike” who claimed to be calling to reduce my electric bill, from a clearly audible boiler room. I told him You’re lying, you’re trying to steal from me while a plague is underway, and I hate you. Felt great.

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¹ It bears a striking resemblance to the curve for South Korea, who have done everything in just about the complete opposite way that the US has. Never forget: both countries saw their first confirmed case on the same day. That being said, some of the worst-hit areas here in the US are starting to just maybe see a flattening in the curve and that’s good news. Don’t slack off now; hold the line and drive it down into the dirt.

² Including three days of negative funding. Ouch.

In that the world is still in the parallel grips of coronavirus and stupidity, the greatest concentration of the latter coming from the Oval Office and also certain Senate offices. Last week setting Twitter (and every other form of social media) to the side was a sanity saver, but I’m back and suffering to bring you the webcomics deets, so I hope you appreciate it, you magnificent bastards.

• Item! Longtime Fleen fave A Girl And Her Fed wrapped up Act 2 of the decade-plus story on Friday, and today marks the start of Act 3, featuring a time jump (12 years) and a new artist. Ale Presser takes over from creator KB Spangler, who will stay on writing duties. Presser’s also recently defended her dissertation (on webcomics!) and given birth, so this is an exciting time for all involved. Still to be determined is if our current pandemic times end up in the backstory of Spangler’s near-future exploration of civil rights, information, and power.
• Item! SPX opened the table lottery today, under the theory that we’ll be able to move around again by September. This reminds me — the Hotel Rodeo for SDCC (typically late April) is going to be an act of supreme optimism. If you feel like rolling the SPX dice, lottery closes on 3 April.
• Item! Gene Yang took his virtual book tour for Dragon Hoops to the radio. Okay, he would have done that anyway, but check out the interview with NPR’s Petra Mayer (a friend of comics if ever there was one).
• Item! The list of new entertainment to consume via computer while staying the hell home continues to grow. Today, please enjoy Emily Carroll’s short comic, Beneath The Dead Oak Tree, free for download thanks to ShortBox (and certainly with Ms Carroll’s blessing) at Gumroad. If that’s not enough, Strong Bad has some earworms for you about staying safe and distant and uninfected.
• Item! Mandatory shutdowns have hit the heart of Webcomickia, with Topato Potato’s personal armor of poison judged insufficient by the government of Massachusetts to keep the package wranglers safe. Your orders will be sent once it’s safe to do so, and any new orders you want to send in will keep both TopatoCo and the many individual creators they enable solvent in these trying times. Naturally, if you want to change or cancel anything, they will do their best to accommodate. In the meantime, please consider the digital offerings that Topato, Sheriff Pony, Jeffrey, Talahassee, Paperklip, Lucid John, Weedmaster P, and the rest of the crowd would be happy to see sold to you.
• Item! Finally, Abby Howard is a creator that we at Fleen really, really like. And she’s launching a Kickstarter to make a plush version of her real-life kitty, Spoons. Spoons (The Cat) The Plush will capture that wide-eyed — possibly high as balls — feline’s countenance, including the possibility of getting a 100% certified haunted version of the plush.

  There’s also catsonas for you, humansonas for your cat (she will draw your cat like the cats from Cats; no word how she feels about the #buttholecut), and Polaroid photos of the real Spoons. Campaign runs through 22 April and with any luck production will fall in behind the worst of the pandemic shutdowns, slowdowns, and cooldowns. It’s a perfectly-timed opportunity for you to support a creator now, as so many other opportunities are impacted by the novel coronavirus. Do it for Spoons.

Spam of the day:

Scientists: Tinnitus Has Nothing To Do With Your Ears

Oh, really? So that’s why pressure changes when my ears are clogged have always caused ringing, with clear complaints on my part going back to the age of seven? And that’s why flying pretty much guarantees at least 24 hours of ringing that reaches distraction levels? Nothing to do with my ears at all. Right.

Updates to two things that happened yesterday:

• Matt Lubchansky, new Herblock Foundation Prize Finalist, appeared in the pinnacle of sort-of pop culture fame — as the clue in a crossword puzzle. It looks like USA Today releases its puzzles outside of the paper on at least a one day delay, and I gotta warn you that it’s a crappy piece of webpage programming¹, but still: from 1 March 2020 onwards, Lubchansky will be known as Matt “17 Across” Lubchansky, and I can hardly think of a better nickname. Whatever the timing, clearly The Powers That Be are aware of Lubchansky’s relevance and are adjusting the culture in response.
• Warren’s out. I really thought she’d stay in until the next debate and unleash her wrath on Biden; she’s still gotta be nursing a grudge for when he gutted the bankruptcy reform process she’d spearheaded. I also really hope that the final debate rules will allow for candidates to tag in a partner, on account of Screamy Orange Grandpa would be absolutely dismantled in record time by a Warren with no restrictions and out of fucks to give.

  Regardless of what else happens, Sanders has a platform that is substantially the same as Warren², and he’s got my support, and there’s still time to email Rosemary to donate to Sanders and get amazing art simultaneously.

Spam of the day:

Prime Web Traffic 2764 Pleasant Road Bld APMB # 934 Fort Mill SC 29708

That address is literally a mail drop. Not giving me a lot of confidence here, spammer.

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¹ At least in my Chromium-based brower; I’m still waiting for it to load the puzzle from Sunday so I can type in M A T T. Might be better in Firefox?

² I find myself largely in agreement with the logic of one Mr David Malki ! as to the abilities/outcomes of Warren v Bernie, but coming to a different conclusion. Namely, that she is more likely to get stuff done than Bernie, but that he is more ambitious in his goals; he concluded that you have to shoot for the less likely, but more transformative outcome and I think you need to grab improvements wherever possible. Or, to put it another way, I hope like hell that Bernie actually can enact his priorities by means of mobilizing mass support, but institutional power has done a damn effective job of ignoring the shit out of mobilized mass support as long as I’ve been alive.

I also think that Wall Street and your average billionaire regard Warren as more of an existential threat than Bernie, in that they’ve largely ignored him for his career, and they fought her tooth and nail at least twice before she was even elected.

With any luck, she’ll lead a party coup to replace the utterly worthless Chuck Schumer as Senate {at least Minority, please please please Majority} Leader.