Namely, wash your hands a lot (hot water, plenty of soap and water), don’t touch your face, cover your coughs and sneezes. You know, all the stuff you’re supposed to do in cold season, flu season, and every other season because we are trying to have a godsdamned society you filthy animals.

Yes, I was talking to you. As long as I ride on an ambulance for free, I get to remind y’all to please do your part to not spread the contagion that may kill me. Also, I write about webcomics and have some things to point you towards:

• The Herblock Foundation, which celebrates and promotes the work of the legendary political cartoonist, has announced the winner and finalist of their annual prize for excellence in editorial cartooning. The winner was Michael de Adder of New Brunswick, Canada, who you may recall was entirely coincidentally laid off about two days after running this cartoon.

  The finalist was webcomics’ own Matt Lubchansky, whose work is frequently seen at The Nib, where they are the associate editor and an integral part of the process of producing the finest in nonfiction cartooning today. As a side note, Chef José Andrés was chosen to present a lecture on behalf of the Foundation. Curiously, all three of the honorees are famously willing to get up the nose of Screamy Orange Grandpa, and good on them for it.

• As long as we’re speaking of presidential politics, there’s an opportunity to mix some primo art acquisition with political action. Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, who we at Fleen may have mentioned on some few occasions, is offering up original pencil pages from Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (we at Fleen love that book), with all proceeds going to the Bernie Sanders campaign.

  Full disclosure: unless she drops out, I’m supporting Elizabeth Warren; as far as platforms go, hers and Bernie’s are distinguishable only in degree, and more similar than any other that have been proposed. In terms of what they can actually get accomplished, I think the ultimate legislation that either can expect to enact (with Bernie starting further along and inevitably having to negotiate towards the middle, and Warren starting closer to where either would end up anyway) would be pretty much indistinguishable.

  I’m supporting Warren because I think she has a better chance of executing on her plans¹, but if she decides to drop out I’ll vote for Sanders gladly². I’ve given money to Warren and likely will again, I don’t feel that also giving to Bernie is a contradiction. It’s not like I’ll have any chance to really affect the nomination, seeing as how New Jersey is in the last tranche of states to vote, on 2 June.

  Now grab your copy of Laura Dean, pick out your favorite page(s), and don’t you dare pick any that I did.

Spam of the day:

Solar fountain pump with 4 Nozzle Spray settings to create a relaxing environment.

Is this a bidet thing? If so, I’m curious about the solar aspect.

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¹ Not to be confused with executing Mike Bloomberg’s aspirations which was totally sweet to watch.

² If neither Sanders nor Warren gets the nomination, I’ll do what I’ve done in very nearly every presidential election of my life and vote against instead of voting for.

That post title sounds like a particularly unfortunate Doctor Who porn parody. Sorry. Let me make it up to you with a pair of brief items.

• I’m sure you’ve seen it, but Gunnerkrigg Court got optioned as a series. Reminder — we’ve been here before and it’s a long, long way from option to something we can watch. That being said, there’s a mountain of story that Tom Siddell has graced us with since my goodness, April of 2005 — the strip predates this page — and given the smart animated series that have been made since then (looking at you, Aang and Korra), it’s one that I think could find an audience. Fingers crossed that it progresses in exactly the way that Siddell wants.
• Haley Boros is an illustrator, designer, and comics artist from Vancouver, and she draws dogs really, really well. I mean, super good; she drew my good boy Flynn before he died, but it’s not her best dog drawing. Those are reserved for her good boy, Rusty, who among other things was the star of a fantasy epic using the prompt words for Inktober 2019.

  Now she’s Kickstarting a print version of his good boy adventures as a MAKE 100 project. 75 folks can get the print book (CA$20, approx US$16), 25 more can get the book plus a marker portrait of their own good doggo or other, lesser pet¹ (CA$50, approx US$38). And 31 people can get one of the original illustrations from Rusty’s Inktober 2019 adventure, on a first come, first dibs basis (CA$75, approx US$57). No FFF Mk2 on MAKE 100 projects, the potential backer counts are too small to make predictions, but it’s just under 50% funded with another 27 days to go. Boros is great, Rusty’s great, and the combo of his inspiration for her art is super-great. Check ‘er out.

Spam of the day:

Attention: Accounts Payable Or Domain Owner – Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence > The Thing About Holidays And IT Failure to complete your fleen.com search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this proposal making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web.

All I know about Accounts Payable is that it’s a bunch of no-account losers, and all the real accounting gets done in Accounts Receivable. RIP, Herbert Kornfeld.

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¹ I know people that keep various fish, cats, lizards, hamsters, gerbils, chinchillas, turtles, tortoises, pigs, snakes, birds, chickens, geckos, and/or axolotls as pets. They are all loved and wonderful, but deep down we all know dogs are the best and make the best portraits. Don’t believe me? Look up the warrior dogs that Ron Dan Chan illustrated on Twitter. I think the greyhound is the best, but the Pomeranian phalanx always makes me smile

For your consideration: the Tom Spurgeon memorial pin from Ad House Books, available for a limited time for the astonishingly low price of three American dollars each, plus shipping. I got mine today.

The art was taken from Sam Henderson’s masthead representation of The Spurge at The Comics Reporter. Right now the page is down, but that link will hopefully work again in the future; until such time as the site is working again, you always use the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, which has The Comics Reporter archived.

While there you may note that the Internet Archive is in the midst of a funding drive, and that donations today are 2-for-1 matched, so if you’re inclined to give, today would be an excellent time to do so. I just gave ’em US$25 and I encourage you to do likewise in whatever amount you’re able.

Regardless, I hope you’re having a nice Boxing Day¹, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Feast of Stephen, or however you name this day.

Spam of the day:

High Demand for propertieS juSt like yourS review inquirieS

Odd capitalization aside, you’re overlooking one thing: if I sold you my property, that is to say the house I live in, I would have to move, and I would rather do almost anything than that. There are boxes still to be unpacked from when we moved in, May of 2004. No thank you, I will die in this house.

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¹ I have EMT duty tonight, and I sincerely hope it goes better than the last time I had EMT duty on Boxing Day. It was 2010, and my crew lucked out in that our holiday duty for the year — Christmas Day — fell on the Saturday of our regularly-scheduled weekend duty. We didn’t have to ride a holiday plus our weekend, bonus!

Saturday (we didn’t go on until 7:00pm, so the crew had a nice time with their families, although my wife was visiting relatives out of state) went fine, but around noon on Sunday it started snowing at a pretty good clip. By 4:00pm we were called out for a motor vehicle collision and it was getting distinctly hazardous. I was supposed to go off duty at 7:00pm, but as it looked like a blizzard was setting up shop, I declared an emergency² and put out an alert for all available personnel to report to our building for the duration.

I got four experienced EMTs and three not-EMTs. We figured out bedding, got dinner squared away, and I took the ambulance to my house to get my dog, who was patiently waiting for a walk and supper. By this time there was 30cm of snow on the ground and I damn near got the ambulance stuck twice³. If you’re ever called upon to carry a slightly panicky, 30kg greyhound (plus blanket and food) through 30cm of snow, I recommend against it.

We bunked down, seven folks on improvised bedding in one lounge (one young lady reported my dog slept on her most of the night, resulting in a toasty-warm experience in a chilly building), waking to:

• A deep sense of relief that no calls had come in overnight
• A total of 66cm of snow on the ground
• Our driveway and approach road clear (the town’s public works department had plowed us every three hours overnight)
• Roads passable enough to procure foodstuffs to cook for the crew

By 10:00am, with everybody fed (and the dog in heaven from all the petting and attention), we settled back, hoping that things would remain quiet.

At 10:06am, the first call came in.

Normally, our small town averages 2 or 3 calls in any 24 hour period. We took 19 calls before the crew went off duty at 7:00am Tuesday, frequently to houses that had not shoveled out their driveway or walkway. We took everything from cardiac events to a dude that had a basil leaf stuck in his throat and, quote, It’s kind of scratchy. One crew would come back from a run and collapse, tones would drop, and the other crew would go out. We hopscotched the calls in this manner until daylight faded and returned again.

Tuesday morning I stumbled home, craving my first change of clothes and shower since Saturday morning, cleaned up, went to bed, and woke up in time to go back on duty for my regular Tuesday shift at 7:00pm. Wednesday morning I went home again and slept for 18 hours. Thursday, the state of New Jersey put out a call for spare ambulances and personnel to head up to Brooklyn to help work down their backlog and on behalf of the crew still in town I said Ha, ha, ha, NO.

So yeah, hoping it goes easier than that.

² I was, at the time, Captain, the third-ranking officer. Numbers 1, 2, and 4 were all out of town for the holidays, the bastards.

³ This was the weather event you may have heard of where New York City had a backlog 3000 pending medical calls as late as Thursday, with more than 100 ambulances stuck in the snow, dozens of which had patients onboard. My little town of 13 000 folks, with seven people running two ambulances, didn’t fail to respond to a single call. I am inordinately proud of what we accomplished.

Someday, childroons, you will be able to tell your great-grandkids¹ that you were there for the approximately 20 hours that a bunch of people hated Jake Parker for ruining Inktober. It was never a thing, but everybody’s nerves are on edge from the everything, so I’ve got a bit of sympathy for the flash-fire that spread throughout comics soshmeed when some folks got trademark nastygrams from an overzealous lawyer.

But man, I am a bit surprised at how the whole thing went from zero to pitchforks and torches, without a pause for Hey, Jake, I got this stupid thing from somebody says they’re your lawyer, is this for real? Parker has clarified what’s going on and it’s about what I expected, but the standard Rule Zero Of The Internet applies: don’t read the comments.

I get that people who got C&D’d by lawyers are mad, and Parker appears to be making an effort to make things right with them. But the number of people in the comments (godsdammit why did I read the comments?) willfully misreading what Parker is saying, ascribing motives based on theoretical evil future behavior, and disregarding what people who actually know how trademarks work so they they can be VERY!!! MAD!!!!! is … sadly, it’s about what you’d expect it to be.

Deep breaths, everybody. Jake Parker isn’t the antichrist. You can still do all the stuff you were doing so long as you don’t try to make it look like you’re doing something “Official”. Lawyers gonna lawyer, shit’s getting resolved, and unless you were on the receiving end of a lawyer letter, your energy is better spent on developing your craft than online ire².

And if it so happens that Parker is lulling us into a false sense of calm before a tremendous heel turn, you’ll have my apologies and my best efforts to smuggle in all the flaming barbed wire-wrapped folding chairs necessary to take him down. Deal? Deal.

Spam of the day:

Hey, I know this up coming time is going to be slammed with the holidays, but are you missing potential customers?

My business selling flaming barbed wire-wrapped folding chairs is distinctly short on customers. Send all you got my way, please.

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¹ Just kidding! The Earth will be a husk inimical to human habitation before then.

² Seriously, about two hours into the event, I saw somebody on Twitter advocating for a class action lawsuit to overturn Parker’s trademark and that’s … that’s not how any of this works.

I was intensely reminded of the people that would contact Webcomics Weekly or Comic Lab wanting to know how to negotiate Hollywood licensing rights for the comic they hadn’t created yet, or the people that would show up for a con panel on Kickstarter wanting to know how to turn on the Magic Money Machine but who didn’t have a project or audience.

Well, crapola.

I had a full 600 words here about how it looks like we aren’t getting a Wondermark calendar from David Malki ! this year — understandable given he’s putting together a book twice as large as it was planned to be — with lots more about the nature of time, and Leap Years starting on a Wednesday, and the whole damn thing evaporated as I was saving.

It appears the WordPress update that pushed through the other day wiped out periodic timed saves, godsdammit.

I am not even trying to recreate all of that. Here’s what you do:

1. Grab your 2014 Wondermark calendar cards (theme: Roll-a-sketch). It features a year starting on Wednesday, which is what we need for January/February. Use the first four cards, and half of #5.
2. Grab your either your 2009 Wondermark calendar cards (theme: Victorian tableaux) or your 2015 Wondermark calendar cards (theme: Concert of Conscience). When you get to the end of February in the 2014 cards, plop in the whole-month cards from 2009 starting with March, or start paying attention halfway down card #5 from 2015.

   I’ll be using the 2015 set, as it’s one of two years that I managed to snag calendar #001 in the limited edition; if it matters, the 2009 monthly cards start with Monday on the left, running to Sunday at the far right.

3. Do whatever the hell you want on 29 February, it’s The Purge, laws don’t exist, and it’s also Howard Tayler’s birthday (but I repeat myself).
4. If you don’t have calendar inserts from 2014 and 2009 or 2015, I don’t know what to tell you. Just don’t get a bootleg This Is Fine calendar from meme thieves¹.

Much like TV only works because somewhere in the world, at all times, at least one rerun of I Love Lucy is being broadcast, it is highly probably that time itself will only continue to work if as many people as possible continue to stock insert cards in their Wondermark calendars; no pressure. Examine your conscience and do what needs to be done.

Spam of the day:

FungusRemoving Spice

Unless this gives me blue-in-blue eyes and makes my name a killing word, not interested.

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¹ I have no idea if such a thing exists, except for the part where I’m completely sure because meme thieves are the worst.

If you didn’t say Me! Me!, you’re very possibly a liar, or perhaps didn’t hear me correctly. Pizza, people!

If you got a hankering for art to meet politics to meet good deeds, then Shing Yin Khor is somebody you want to pay attention to. I mean, also because they produce heartbreakingly beautiful comics that are painful in their truths, wield tools with aplomb, are actively working to bring capitalism to heel, and are small enough to fit in your pocket.

But set all that aside for the moment; when Khor sees people with less, people in need of protection, plans get made and people wrangled in order to make uplifting art for the purpose of helping because godsdammit, somebody’s got to. On a couple of occasions now, pizza-themed art — some of which is patently and wonderfully ridiculous — has been made and auctioned off to support Food Forward LA, which strives to both reduce food waste and reduce hunger. The third iteration of Project Pizza will run on Saturday:

From 10AM to 10PM join artists Shing Yin Khor and Eron Rauch as they host a draw-a-thon featuring a dozen of their talented friends making art and jamming their faces full of pizza.

Grab a slice (one random drawing), a whole pie (10), or even a party pack (30) to share with friends and co-workers. Preorders open December 12th, and we sell out every year, so stop back by to secure your slices!

You can check out a list of artists expected to participate in the live event, and also some of the art that’s been constructed by remote friends and sent in. A full list of participants is at the Project Pizza page, below the pre-order links. It’s not possible to request particular artists, but at the US$100 support level, they’ll try to direct at least one piece by a favorite artist to you. Also, the first 20 folks to send in a hundo or more get a tiny sculpted pizza. And on the off chance you don’t need one or more tiny pizza arts in your home, they’re taking tips as well — that money goes direct to FFLA without the work of shipping you anything.

Look, I know it’s an expensive time of year, that people got crap jobs and little extra money but consider: ten bucks means 45+ kilos of being saved and distributed. The last event raised more than US$4600, and the goal this year is an even five grand, or fifty tons of food. Just think about it, okay? Oh, and if the you-gotta-have-a-PayPal-account thing is a problem for you, here’s FFLA’s direct donations page; you might not get a tiny pizza, but you’ll help a bunch of people not be hungry, and that tastes great.

Spam of the day:

Now ANYONE Can Learn Piano or Keyboard

I dunno. If my mother (lifelong pianist and church organist) couldn’t manage to teach me, I don’t think your revolutionary, spam-based method will succeed.

Sure, sure, getting a European convention report from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin is enough for even the most rabid news-seeker, but there were some things that I’ve come across that are at least a little timely, and FSFCPL has much more to say on the topic of Quai des Bulles, so I’m giving you bonus content today. For free!

• Those who follow the work of Christopher Baldwin know that within his nomadic travels, he has for a considerable time been working on an original graphic novel about the town of Glens Falls, New York. Today, he let us know that it’s available in his TopatoCo store. Glens Falls is fictional series of tours around town given by actual people, each highlighting significant and interesting aspects of the town in upstate New York. We at Fleen have not yet read it, but given Baldwin’s long and high-quality career making unique and wonderful stories, I’ma say this one merits an on-faith purchase.
• About a month ago, I mentioned a Kickstart to produce a line of anatomically-accurate, to-scale models of more ceratopsian dinosaurs than you’ve ever heard of. Oh, don’t give me that look. Unless you’re Abby Howard, you had no idea that Monoclonius, Nasutoceratops, Einiosaurus, Spiclypeus, or Wendiceratops were even a thing.

  You may also recall that I said that a large part of the line of figures was based on meeting some truly impressive funding targets, with my beloved Triceratops (adult) being the next-to-last figure to be unlocked at the unholy level of US$450,000 and I needed a lot of you — a lot a lot of you — to pledge or I’d never get my trike. The campaign ended at US$272,647, or more than US$180,000 short of the necessary level, damn you all.

  But project creator David Silva has done something I’ve never seen before, and I think it’s worth mentioning because a clever creator might want to emulate his tactic. Given that nearly half of the stretch goals were not reached, Silva is using BackerKit to continue the funding drive. As usual, BackerKit is being used to allow people to purchase additional stuff, using their original pledge as a credit to be expended, with the ability to pay up for more/new things. But he’s also allowing you to pre-order models that aren’t unlocked, which will not charge your card unless the required funding level is reached by a cutoff as late as February¹.

  It’s a second-chance stretch goal mechanism, one that is tailor-made to take advantage of everybody that says the day after the campaign closes I never knew! I would have pledged! As of this writing, three more figures have been unlocked via Backerkit (a fourth is only a few thousand away), and he’s increased his take to US$357,013. That additional 85 grand is in the two days since the BackerKit surveys went out. Put another way, if everything were to freeze right where it is, Silva’s increased his funding by a whopping 31 percent in 48 hours.

  Now for those with an interest in nonavian dinosaurs, there are plenty of lower-priced items available now that are certain to be produced (a 24 month calendar, gorgeous prints, even some of the smaller figures), and every one of you that finds something you like gets me closer to my enormous Triceratops. Here’s the link; go be a hero for the dino-loving kid (of whatever age) in your life.

Spam of the day:

Herb Under Tongue Destroys Fungus.

Herb has a weird name and an even weirder hobby.

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¹ Due to the high number of models envisioned, they were always going to be released in waves, with delivery between September 2020 and September 2021. As the locked critters are the largest/most complicated/most expensive models, he can continue to fundraise on them while starting production on the earlier waves, spreading out his own effort against the surety of future funds.

Yeah, some people will disappear by the time cards are charged, but I’ve got a much better chance of getting my trike now, if another US$93,000 can be raised by January.

So Chris Onstad has been doing a series of drawing of a pair of cats on a motorcycle since last Tuesday. I just happened to refresh my Twitter tab at the right time and see the first one go up for sale. It’s going to look great next to my previous Onstad original, an oil pastel portrait of Ramses Luther Smuckles. When I kick it, my heirs and assigns are going to get some awesome art.

• The news coming out of Chile hasn’t gotten the same attention as that from Hong Kong, but it’s just as important; if you need a primer, The Nib has you covered. One side story that I came across today is that these latest protests against unfettered capitalism¹ are not a brand new phenomenon, but one of a recurring series. And at each of them from 2010 to 2017, there was a hero, who got his own biographical webcomic by Portland-based cartoonist Liz Yerby, which has lately made its way to the protestors in Chile.

  Good Dog. And thank you to every comics artist that is using the medium to do this kind of nonfiction reporting, no matter how narrow the subject.

• On a lighter note, Ngozi Ukazu is spending a bit of time before the last Check, Please! collection releases in April reminding us about the depth of worldbuilding she put into her gay college hockey bros story. For years, Ukazu tweeted in-character observations, in something approaching real story time — events that happened at the start of the academic year would go up in September, and so forth.

  She’d lock the account to avoid spoilers as she dove into each year’s story arc, leaving them inaccessible to fans for large chunks of time. A good hunk of the first Check, Please! collection from :01 Books was made up of tweets and other ephemera from the two years of story time covered.

  And now she’s out with a collection of tweets and other ephemera:

  Now, for the first time, I’m collecting Bitty’s best TWEETS. (!!!) And I’m doing this in a book I call THE CHIRPBOOK.

  And on top of collecting Bitty’s Tweets, The Chirpbook will contain new selfies, never-before-seen pictures from Jack Zimmermann’s camera roll, brand new comics, and secret tweets from Bitty’s senior year. (So, SPOILERS!) All of these features and more will be in The Chirpbook, the perfect catalog to round out your Check, Please! Collection.

  It’s a simple campaign: book (hardcover and soft), stickers, miniprints. It’s full of spoilers and so it won’t release until April, concurrent with the aforementioned second :01 collection and the end of the comic itself. The crowdfund is creeping up on the 50% mark of the US$26,000 goal, and while I don’t think this will hit the crazy heights of Ukazu’s previous book collections (after all, it’s not the main story and there aren’t any crazy-high dollar pledge tiers), her legion of fans will most definitely be all over this.

  Oh, and I’ll be making note of this WRT Kickstarts for the next while at least: The Chirpbook carries the logo of the Kickstarter Union. I hope to see this become the rule rather than noteworthy.

Spam of the day:

Hello, I’m 6 years old, I’m shooting and editing a video myself, please rate my new video, thanks !!!

Got to say, the English language proficiency of the alleged six year old is much better than that of the presumed adults that send most of the spam I get. Also, you’re lying.

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¹ There’s basically no regulatory constraints on what corporations can do, and the government is almost wholly beholden to business. The Heritage Foundation regards it as the freest economy in South America and number seven in the world. This is on the basis of business freedom and property rights (ie: no regulatory regime), noting that there is room for improvement in labor freedom (ie: labor has too much). This is all the legacy of the murderous (but economically free!) Pinochet regime, put into place by a CIA-backed coup in 1973.

This was decided a few hours prior to the news breaking about Kickstarter firing three people in the space of eight days, who all were involved in the unionization effort there. But since that happened, my trip will now be a dual-purpose wallow in some comics and awesome people trip mixed with commit some godsdammned journalism overtones.

For those that haven’t seen all of the brewing shitstorm: Clarissa Redwine asserts that she exceeded all her employment performance metrics for Q2, but Kickstarter told her she was fired for performance deficiencies. Taylor Moore says he was offered no explanations as to his termination. I’ve not seen a public identification of the third employee yet. Both Redwine and Moore have said their severance was contingent on signing an NDA/non-disparagement agreement which is both common and totally weaksauce¹.

Kickstarter, for its part, put out a statement that no employee has or will be fired for union organizing. It’s … not being received well, possibly because it reads like it was crafted in a sterile legal environment to stay on the right side of perjury laws rather than the right side of the community they’ve built.

Some webcomics (and webcomics-adjacent) folk have chimed in already, the two most significant of which are probably Andy Baio (one half of The Andys behind XOXO and the attempt to re-engineer Drip, not to mention pre-launch board member and onetime CTO of Kickstarter; Andy McMillan is the other) and George (who is probably more closely associated with Kickstarts than anybody else in the web/indie comics world).

I have some emails out to people closely associated with Kickstarter asking if they are willing to go on the record with their thoughts; one response indicates they will specifically not say anything until certain direct discussions take place, which is entirely fair. A bunch of people that have tied their business models to Kickstarter will be at SPX this weekend (including some Thought Leaders), and I’m going to ask as many of them as I can what they think, then I’m going to tell you what they said.

In advance, please do not impute motives to anybody that isn’t named in the quotes, or that you are certain you have figured out from an off-the-record comment. Just don’t. You may be very pissed at Kickstarter right now² and ready to burn them to the ground, but there is a mountain of difference between choosing to not contribute to Kickstarter campaigns, and having to suddenly figure out how — or if it’s even possible — to no longer use them as a creator platform while meeting rent. It will be difficult for more than a few of them to navigate a course between what they want to do ethically and what they are required to do practically.

Spam of the day:

Do you know that you are able to earn more than 1200 euros per day? Hurry up to be one of the first to use this method before it becomes widespread.

Take your fucking pyramid scheme somewhere else, please.

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¹ How fucking insecure do you have to be as a corporation that you can’t tolerate people you fired complaining about it? Bitching about current/past employers is an inalienable fucking right.

² I certainly am, and this is what I’ve decided: I am prepared to suspend my support of future campaigns if the Kickstarter Union calls for that, which they are not presently doing. If that changes, I’ll make my intentions public.

Regardless of the requests of Kickstarter United, I will not be canceling any present pledges, because taking back money that creators expect, money that I pledged prior to this douchebaggery, isn’t fair to those creators.

All of this is subject to revision pending what I learn this weekend, and from further verified information (including statements from Kickstarter or KRSU) in the future.

This being the occasion of Matt Bors noting that The Nib has, despite some prominent hiccups, been part of our media landscape for six years, publishing more than 4000 comics, and paying cartoonists more than US$1.5 million¹.

I’m going to quote from an email that Bors sent to me — I’ve been on the mailing list since backing the Kickstarter for the print version — because too many of you may not have seen it. Bors says the recent funding drive raised US$15,000 — presumably, only counting the initial charge against those credit cards, and a similar amount will continue each month — that means maybe a few thousand people got it, plus however many were previously signed up.

Not good enough. If you read comics anywhere you need to know what Bors and his co-conspirators are up to. You also need to give them money, but let’s start with a little basic info:

I’m re-establishing the regular lineup as much as possible. That means Tom Tomorrow, Jen Sorensen, and Matt Lubchansky in there as often as possible, along with Joey Alison Sayers, Gemma Correll, Kasia Babis and all the others who contributed short satire on a regular basis².

I’ve always wanted The Nib to build up younger political cartoonists as well as publish the top ones so the regular lineup will include work from recent Locher Award winner Chelsea Saunders, last year’s Locher award winner Charis JB, and Niccolo Pizarro.

For longer non-fiction work, I am currently publishing comics that were finished before leaving First Look and will begin commissioning more of that type of work soon. These kind of comics are more time-intensive and expensive, so there will be less of them than when we had an editing staff of four, but it’s still a crucial element of the publication to me.

The Animals issue of the magazine is in the works — Drugs is after that and I’ve even got cover art for the issue after that — but I’ve started thinking about other print projects The Nib could take on. So there’s a big book collection on the horizon: an anthology of our best queer comics. We have such a breadth of queer history, non-fiction, and satire comics that it seemed an obvious fit for a nice themed collection of some of the work we put out over the last few years. Expect to hear more about that next month.

Oh, and we’ll be launching an online bookstore soon! And doing more merch. And surely other things.

With Bors being the sole editorial and publishing decision-maker, I imagine that a number of projects that were pending or actively back-burnered by competing interests will now make progress based solely on budget. He’s not promising anything, but I’d imagine that getting Lubchansky, Eleri Harris, Andy Warner, and Sarah Mirk back on editorial staff would be a priority (if memory serves, it was about a year before Harris was added as Deputy Editor and at least another year before Lubchansky became Associate Editor, so it could be a while).

What Bors isn’t doing is standing still. In the face of losing nearly all of his funding, he is moving forward and making plans to start new projects under The Nib’s banner. He is exhibiting the tenacity of the cockroach, a phrase which was once used to describe the interview style of contributors to The AV Club, and a description which they took as a mission statement (even using it as the title of their first print collection), and which brings us back to the top. All that remains is to remind you to support The Nib and to have a good weekend.

Spam of the day:

Hello!! Surprise Your Husband With This Beautiful Wood Guitar Pick !!

I would be more surprised to have a husband, to be honest.

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¹ Some of which must have involved some serious logistics. I could name at least two dozen countries of origin for contributors to The Nib, including possibly countries with economic systems not easily accessible to a USAian like Bors. For example, would a Danish citizen who leads tours in Iran be subject to sanctions on economic relationships? I don’t know, but I’ll bet Bors has had to find out.

² Me, I’m hoping for a lot more Pia Guerra because damn she takes no prisoners.