It seems that you enjoyed Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebaupin’s writeup of Day 1 at Lyon BD las week, at least as much as he enjoyed writing it; FSFCPL has further contributions of Days 2 and 3 at Lyon BD, but I’m going to make you wait a little for them. Last Friday’s congressional bid news¹ bumped some other stories that I think are still relevant and which I don’t want to get stale. So let’s see what we would have talked about on Friday had Pete Sessions not picked up a challenger.

• We’ve mentioned Pénélope Bagieu more than once here at Fleen, including news of her biocomic series of remarkable women (Les Culott&ecaute;es) being acquired by :01 Books, to be published as Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World. It’s under that name that we’ll find some spectacular news from Variety:
  

  Penelope [sic] Bagieu’s Feminist Graphic Novel ‘Brazen’ Set For Animated TV Series

  Penelope [sic] Bagieu’s daringly feminist graphic novel “Brazen” (“Culottées”) which portrays bold and rebellious women around the world, is being turned into an animated TV series by a pair of French production banners, Agat films & Cie and Silex Films.

  Developed into 30 episodes of three minutes each, “Brazen” will explore the lives of 30 women such as Nellie Bly, Mae Jemison, Josephine Baker and Naziq al-Abid.

  Sarah Saidan, an Iranian filmmaker who studied at France’s prestigious animation school La Poudriere, is on board to direct the series that will air on Gaul’s public broadcaster France Televisions.

  Here’s hoping that some channel will follow :01’s lead and bring the animated shorts to English-speaking shores.

• Hard to believe, but yesterday was but one month to the day since the Taptastic TOS shitshow got noticed and rapidly walked back; one of the bright spots to come out of said shitshow was the commentary of IP lawyer Akiva Cohen, who contributed some much needed expertise and a healthy dose of reality to the discussion. Cohen took some time out end of last week to drop some new wisdom under the hashtag #WebcomicsLawSchool, with the day’s lesson being on that perpetual source of misunderstanding, copyright registration:
  

  OK. Time for #WebcomicsLawSchool. This week’s topic, Copyright Registration: When, why, & how?

  [Side note: the best thing about that thread is the phrase This week’s topic, as Cohen is dropping knowledge on the regular. Did you know this? I didn’t know this. That’s why I’m talking about it, so you’ll know this and keep your eyes out for more. As always, keep in mind that Cohen’s advice is general and while he is a lawyer, he’s not your lawyer unless you pay him to be, in which case he’s not talking about your business in public. Okay, back to the smart guy stuff.]

  First thing to know: You don’t need to *register* your copyright to *have* a copyright #WebcomicsLawSchool

  As soon as you “fix” your creative work in a tangible form – get it out of your head and on paper, performed, etc.

  You have a copyright in that work. Nobody can take it without permission; if they do, you can sue them.

  Well, sort of. Because “you can sue them” is one of the primary reasons to actually *register* your copyright

  Until your copyright is registered with the US Copyright Office, you cannot file a copyright lawsuit in Federal Court.

  And that’s the key idea, the one that in my experience tends to be misunderstood more than anything else in copyright law — copyright is automatic, but there are hoops to jump through to preserve your legal options².

  Those hoops are well-established, and your job is to go through the #WebcomicsLawSchool history to see what more Coehn has to say, because that’s where the thread ends — his kid was doing something adorable, and that outweighs giving free legal advice to the internet.

  Hint: it starts here. Bookmark the hashtag, keep an eye on the posts, they’re really helpful.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Which, due to a fortuitous bit of timing, I believe we were the first to report on; I happened to see Rob DenBleyker’s tweetnouncement about two minutes after it went live, and we had our story up about ten minutes later. Fastest typing of my blogging career.

² And no, the “poor man’s copyright” of mailing yourself a copy to prove creation date doesn’t count.

Thanks to a frustrating, blinkered, blind adherence to arbitrary rules on the part of various IT types¹ that make it impossible for me to do my job² , possibly of possibly my entire career, has struck me today. How bad? I actually spent a good ten minutes this morning calculating whether or not I’d be beaten by Security if I pitched my laptop out a third floor window and screamed YOU CAN BILL ME (laced with appropriate profanity, naturally) in front of horrified customers.

So, Monday.

But I’ll not leave you wanting. By coincidence, today’s classic episode of You Damn Kid (which will eventually permalink here, unless I miss my guess) neatly parallels my feelings today, substituting for the titular Kid’s Dad. I don’t want to be an old man, much less the Old Man, but there you go. I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out that Owen Dunne has a placeholder on the front page of YDK that promises

YDK TV
Starts Monday, June 12!

… which would be today. Nothing yet, but still quite a few hours left in the day.

And while we’re waiting to see what Dunne has cooked up, let’s also whet your appetite for a fresh field report from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who spent the weekend at Lyon BD:

I did get to meet authors and glean interesting info from them, to visit expos, to attend panels, etc. Oh, and I managed to ask Scott McCloud a few questions, too.

Oh, good — glad those two go to meet. Better mood, more news tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Je demande pardon qu’est intervenu … Chez moi la situation semblable. On peut examiner.

Good to know that French spam has as little regard for sensical reading as English spam.

_______________
¹ And I work in IT! Hey, IT guys making my life miserable — there’s a reason why we’re hated, and it has to do with you not even helping your colleagues. Jerks.

² While simultaneously putting me in violation of other rules for not doing my job.

Thursdays, man. Thursdays.

But I would feel absolutely terrible if I didn’t at least point you to some very good news for Molly Ostertag; we’ve mentioned the recent Kickstart for the second volume of Strong Female Protagonist and also the release of Shattered Warrior, two projects on which she ably handles art duties.

But Ostertag doesn’t get to tell a story visually as well as she does — even when written by another — unless she’s a hell of a strong story composer herself. Getting to write as well as illustrate a full graphic novel was just a matter of time, with Scholastic doing the honors in publishing the upcoming The Witch Boy (on, appropriately enough, Halloween Day). I haven’t seen an advanced copy or anything, but I’m pretty damn confident that it’s going to be great.

I’m not alone. Seems the development team at Fox Animation has similar opinions:

Fox Animation has preemptively picked up the feature film rights to The Witch Boy, an upcoming graphic novel by Molly Knox Ostertag.

[The] Witch Boy centers on 13-year-old Aster, whose family raises all their girls to be witches and boys to be shapeshifters. Anyone who dares cross those lines is exiled. The boy hasn’t shifted, and he’s fascinated by witchery. When a mysterious danger threatens the other boys, Aster knows he can help … but as a witch. With the help of a non-conforming friend, Aster will have to find the courage to save his family while also be true to himself.

I’m not sure what I’m more delighted by — that the gender metaphor will resonate in a bunch of 8 to 12 year olds, that the rights were obtained this early, or that it’s Ostertag’s solo debut. I’ve said it about other creators and it applies here as well: as good as Ostertag is in her mid-20s, I can’t wait to see how damn good she’ll be in her mid-30s. There are going to be some gods-damned amazing comics dropping every friggin’ week by the time Scott McCloud’s target year for a female majority in comics — creators and readers — arrives¹.

We’ll include the obligatory disclaimer that rights/options/etc don’t mean that anything will happen quickly (or at all)², but you know what? Fox had to write Ostertag a check. Her name recognition just went up, meaning that her next publishing contract negotiation just tilted a bit more in her favor. She wins, we get to read The Witch Boy no matter what, and it’s a sunny day out. I’m declaring victory and going out to walk my dog.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ 2024, according to McCloud. I’m on record that he was wildly pessimistic in thinking it would take that long, and pessimism is not a characteristic I normally ascribe to him.

² Given the current state of book challenges and censorship attempts, I can see a story about witchcraft and a boy wanting to engage in Girl Things will rile up the fundamentalist outrage machine. Bring it.

We’ll get the sixth one out of the way first.

• I woke up today with one of my all time favorite Something*Positive strips at the forefront of my brain, and wanted to go read it again. Here it is — Lizard-Happy. Man, what a great little moment Randy Milholland wrote there. I’ve loved this strip since I first read it what, two or three years ago?

  Nope. More than seven. How the crap did this strip run more than seven years ago and it feels so much more recent? Pretty sure this is proof that time is accelerating, a situation for which the laws of physics make no allowance¹.

  The conclusion is clear: physics — mayhap the universe itself — is broken, and all is about to come crashing down. Time, space, mass, energy all coalescing into a monobloc and everything we’ve ever known or love erased not just from existence, but probably from ever having existed in the first place.

  Not sure how that happened, but it’s probably something one of Milholland’s very performative I used to be your fan until I found out [something completely irrelevant] type followers did, just to spite him². Either that, or I’m just older than I thought.³

• Five things, then. Katie Lane⁴ dropped one hell of a resource on the creative community via twitterage earlier today:
  

  New Post!! 5 Things to Know Before You Sign Your Publishing Contract

  Which turns out to be the first of five topic-specific emails from an online training course that Lane is offering on understanding publishing contracts. The First Thing is this:

  In any publishing deal, you’re in charge. That’s because a publishing contract is you giving the publisher permission to use your work. They need permission and you’re the only one they can get it from.

  Man, I love that; no matter how a publisher may try to spin things to where you act out of fear, the lesson is that it’s not a failure to say no; it’s an inalienable right, and your ultimate protection. Key thoughts from Lane:

  Every term in the contract is a request:

  • May we have the right to make merchandise?
  • May we publish your book for a royalty that’s 10% of the cover price?
  • May we have the right to publish the next book you write?

  Just because they ask doesn’t automatically mean you have to say yes. With every request for permission in the contract, ask yourself:

  • Do I want to give them this permission?
  • Do I trust the publisher to use these rights effectively?
  • If I give the publisher my permission, and I don’t like the results, what options does the contract give me?

  [emphasis original]

  Much more, as the kids say, at the link. The Next Thing will be Only give them the permission they need, and can use, but if you want to see that, Lane requires you to do something. I’m not saying that she’s following the smack dealer model of first taste’s free, but to get Things Two through Five, you’ve got to sign up for the course. And if she is, she’s a pretty bad smack dealer, because the entire course is free. If you’ve ever signed a contract, may sign a contract in the future, or are possibly signing a contract right this very minute⁵, jump on that link and get smart.

Spam of the day:

Check out hotkate97
Kate posted naked pictures and selfies of herself so you can decide if she has the type of body that you would be willing to make love to. Her selfies and pics will be available for you to view until tomorrow morning around 10:15. Kate is allowing you to see her naked pics until tomorrow: Again, Kate is not wearing clothes in any of these pictures that she wants you to view.

Whoever is sending out emails for hotkate97 is more than a little desperate.

_______________
¹ Trust me on this, I just read all about what time is.

² They flock to him, like nobody’s business. I think he needs to hand out more beatings, as a warning to others.

³ Nah, definitely the broken universe.

⁴ Light-ning LAW-yer!

⁵ To whatever degree the concepts of past, future, and present mean anything now that Milholland pissed off that used-to-be-reader and got spacetime all broken, that is.

There’s days when I have a lot to say, and there’s days when stories speak for themselves; today we’re in the latter category.

• First up, Erika Moen — cartoonist, force of nature, hell of awesome — dropped some news on us yesterday [the story is SFW, but the side panel ads are probably not] … she’s headed to Sweden:
  

  Oh my gosh, I’m making my first trip out to Sweden!!! If you’re in the neighborhood, please come say hi to me at the Stockholm International Comics Festival this May 20 – 21!!!!

  Or the Stockholms Internationella Seriefestival; if you speak Swedish, hit up the link. If not, here’s the translation, which links to bits about the festival’s Small Press Expo (described as the “official sibling” of the annual event in Maryland), and details on the international guests.

  If I’m reading everything correctly, the SIS will take place at Stockholm’s Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, in Sweden’s only specialist library for comics, Serieteket (here, for those of you that like maps). Free admission, and I think the times are 11:00am to 5:00pm (CET, or GMT+2), on Saturday and Sunday (20 & 21 May).

• On my way back from Comics Camp (start here, if you’ve forgotten, and work forward) I had a layover in Minneapolis, and thus was able to visit with Rosemary Vallero-O’Connell, about whom I’ve written lots over the past year or so. She mentioned that in addition to all the work she’s been doing since graduating last May, she’d been in talks with VICE News to do an interview about work/life balance and the financial end of a creative career. Turns out that it happened, and now you can see it.

  It’s a huge topic (things dealing with money — peripherally or directly — took up many hours at Camp), and not one where all the subtleties can be done in a few minutes. Heck if they didn’t do a damn good job laying out the boundaries of the issues, though.

  I found the most compelling part to be Vallero-O’Connell’s frank recognition that there’s a very fine line to tread, with both too many and too few jobs offering risks. Don’t have enough gigs, you don’t make money and you can’t pay your bills. Accept too many¹ and you risk spreading yourself too thin² or injury — meaning you can’t sustain the money and can’t pay your bills³.

  There’s no grand solution offered — not that there could be — but just acknowledging the challenges is tremendously valuable. Vallero-O’Connell is starting to get a handle on what the career looks like (not just for now, but as a sustainable effort over many years), and seeing her present the quandries and puzzle them out is going to help others find their balance quicker than they would otherwise. Give it a look.

Spam of the day:

KOHL’s: Antiquated Dept. Store…

Are … are you trying to get me to click on your fake KOHL’s gift card by negging them?

_______________
¹ A constant temptation for freelancers, particularly those new to the game.

² Leading to substandard work or burnout.

³ Unspoken in the four minute run time: even if you accept the exact right amount of work, you can’t guarantee you actually get paid what you’re due on a prompt basis, meaning you can’t pay your bills. I’m sensing a theme to the freelancer’s life.

Scott McCloud sends the most interesting people to me. In this case, NPR’s National Arts Report, Neda Ulaby. Waaay back at the end of December, she wanted to talk to me about webcomics, particularly the successful Kickstarter of Ngozi Ukazu to print book two of Check, Please!.

So it was that I found myself downloading an app onto my phone that would record my half of an interview, and finding a quiet room without echoes to talk webcomics, self-publishing, creator ownership, and all the other hallmarks of our weird little community. Ms Ulaby and I spoke for about 15 minutes, she figured she might get four for the entire story, and would be talking to other people; I guessed I might get two good quotes in.

Then the current administration happened, and finding four minutes on a national radio network for a story about fictional gay hockey players took up the back burner position. I guessed the story was dead.

Until I got an email this afternoon. I am told that the story will run as part of All Things Considered today, but since local NPR stations run the program at different times and may chop out segments to do local inserts, I can’t tell you when it might run. Check that link tomorrow, you should be able to play it back. I’ve got ATC on in the background here at work, and am listening with bated breath.

So, yeah — that happened.

Update: Looks to be about the 48:00 or 50:00 mark in Hour One. Here’s the story link, on account of my local station cut away to a local story, dammit.

Update 2: The story hook that makes it relevant now? Ukazu’s debuting the book at TCAF this weekend. Go pick it up and congratulate her.

One of those endings/beginnings days, you know?

• Gordon McAlpin¹ has been in the webcomic game as long as anybody, putting together a just about exactly 1200 strip archvie over (by a peculiar corinsidence) just about exactly 12 years over Multiplex way. It’s been, to no small degree (and I mean this sincerely and without any malice whatsoever) the webcomics equivalent of For Better Or For Worse

  That is, it’s let characters age and grow and drift apart and come back together and sometimes leave never to return, with both the good and the venal prevailing at times, but always centered on the (in McAlpin’s case, improvised) family at the center². And, like FBOFW, there is an end to such stories, even though we know the characters will go on. Through nine books, McAlpin has let his love of movies and his characters show in equal measure … and when you’ve got that much love to give, why not have a tenth book?

  Multiplex (the webcomic) may have scrolled all the way to the end of the credits today, but there’s a teaser that comes after; Multiplex 10 (the animated short, and perhaps trailer for more animation) will be part prequel, part reboot, and, I’m guessing, all awesome. But while webcomics are easy to put together and toss out on the web to find an audience, animation of any quality is hell of work, and not the sort of thing you can dash off in the spare hours of the day. Enter Kickstarter, and the crowdfunding campaign for MUX10, which went live a bit more than 12 hours ago and is presently a bit more than a third of the way to its US$15,000 goal.

  There’s rewards and an impressive list of collaborators at the campaign, but what I’m most impressed by is the fact that overfunding will go not to stretch goals, but into making a better film … and possibly even more episodes. Give ‘er a look, and if you’ve ever enjoyed Multiplex during its original theatrical run, consider tossing McAlpin a buck or two, yeah?

• Speaking of things finishing and restarting in other forms, this is your periodic reminder that our friends at the Cartoon Art Musuem are nearing their end of their time in the wilderness, and preparing to open in their new (hopefully permanent, but who can say with San Francisco real estate?) location. If you live in the Bay Area and wanted to tell CAM what a good job they’re doing you have a chance next weekend at the Silicon Valley Comic Con at the San Jose Convention Center, 21 – 23 April. As far as I can determine, it’s the only comic convention presented by The Woz, the ur-geek to whom all owe allegiance.

Spam of the day:

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Google?

_______________
¹ AKA The Nicknameless, having once been my sporting bet nemesis, but that was resolved long ago.

² Also in McAlpin’s case, there’s no requirement that you only ever marry the creepy dude you met in high school, the one with absolutely nothing to recommend him, and who brought moustachery into disrepute. Screw you forever, Anthony.

• As hinted at yesterday, word came down that the Faith Erin Hicks-penned Nameless City trilogy of graphic novels (the second of which, The Stone Heart, released yesterday) from :01 Books, is going to be an animated miniseries. From io9:
  

  [E]ach book in the fantastical trilogy — which focuses on the adventures of Rat and Kai in the titular city, nameless for the fact it keeps getting invaded and renamed by different warring nations all the time —- split into four-episode adaptations. While there are no other details about the series just yet (like, where it’ll eventually air), Frederator Studios plans to release the first four episodes in the fall of 2018.

  For reference, Frederator are the folks behind Adventure Time, Bee and Puppycat, Bravest Warriors, and other cool things. While it’s true that their existing shows have had a somewhat simplistic design aesthetic, and The Nameless City is visually rich and complex (think Legend of Korra complex), they’ve built up enough animation talent and goodwill that I think they’ll do right by it.

  The animation part is great news, as it will allow for complexity to be rendered economially;it would probably be near-impossible to create a multiple-Asian-inspired-cultures visual palette (the background architecture, clothing styles, and visual details in TNC are full of competing artistic traditions stretching back generations) in the real world.

  It also gets away from what would be an enormous potential for whitewashing in casting. Congratulations to Hicks, colorist Jordie Bellaire, and everybody at :01 Books. I’ll be waiting the next 18 months with bated breath.

• Not that live-action is always the wrong choice. Care to comment on the uses of live action to convey kick-butt young heroic women, noted comic writer Ryan North?
  

  SQUIRREL GIRL TV SHOWWWWWWWWWW

  Okay, to be clear, we aren’t going to open TV Guide and find a listing for Squirrel Girl; the show will actually concern itself with Marvel second-stringers New Warriors, who are younger heroes that mostly you haven’t heard of. Needing some star power to anchor the show, Marvel’s naturally turned to Doreen Green and Tippy-Toe (and please include Nancy, Mew, Chipmunk Hunk, and Koi Boi), despite her not being a member of the New Warriors in comics.

  Doesn’t matter! We’re gonna get Squirrel Girl defeating bad guys with empathy, cleverness, and awesome punching when empathy and plans fail to work. It looks like the show will feature a comedic take (and please include Squirrel Girl’s theme song), will debut sometime in 2018 (and please include little asides to represent North’s alt-text from the comics pages), will run on Freeform (the basic cable channel formerly known as ABC Family, and please find a way to include the Kra-Van, and the Deadpool cards, and Squirrel Girl’s Twitter habit, and Gigantos, and beating up Galactus on the friggin’ moon), so now’s the time to call your cable company and make sure you get it.

• But Gary, I hear you cry, what if I don’t want to wait until 2018 for cool comics stuff in media? Well then, Bunky, you’re gonna want to fire up your podcatcher of choice and check out the latest from NPR’s Code Switch, titled Changing Colors in Comics [no direct link to the show; it’s dated 5 April 2017].

  The culture podcast takes the societal conversation about race as its ongoing topic, and this week they’re talking to Ron Wimberly (I’ll remember his visual essay on skin tones in Marvel characters forever), the Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse in Philadelphia (the first comic shop on the east coast owned by a black woman, it mixes comics and cultural conversation), and some crazy dreamer turned ass-kicker/name-taker out of Chicago named Spike who’s building a comics-publishing empire.

  It’s a hell of a good show and while I know not enough about Wimberly’s work, and have never been to Amalgam, I am pretty familiar with Spike’s career path over the last decade or so.

  She’s broken down the resistance and denigration she got for her attempts at making a business more than once in various public fora, and make no mistake: some of the contempt was because she’s young, some because she’s working in webcomics instead of real comics, and a great big ol’ heaping helping because she’s a woman, black, and a black woman who just doesn’t know her place.

  Listen. Learn. If you ever said to yourself she’d never succeed, and especially if you ever thought she didn’t deserve to succeed, it’s still not to late to smarten up and approach the future with less fear.

  Welllll, not too late for some of her critics. Bunch of ’em were old white dudes back when, are even older now, and are going to die knowing the world left ’em behind. The rest of us can decide that the world changing for the better doesn’t mean we’re suddenly put upon.

Spam of the day:

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• Know what I love? Kickstarter post-mortems. I can’t get enough of people sharing how a campaign went, and especially talking about how finances measured up (or out, or whatever ever direction finances are measured in). The latest one comes courtesy of David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc, arbiter of image quality standards and part-time Mr Bean impersonator), who spent a longer than average (and more expensive than usual) time last year putting together the first print collection of his comics.

  Since Morgan-Mar works in LEGO-brand construction sets and minifigs, he had to consult with lawyers to figure out if printing a book made up of photos of LEGO things he built would possibly raise the ire of the Danish brickmongers before he even got to the usual book parts of making a book. Conclusion: maybe, but if they did sue him, he’d be able to mount a credible defense (whatever that might cost).

  Not quite as reassuring as Heck no, they’d never be able to touch you!, but good enough to get started! And, in fact, if not for the more than three thousand Aussie fun bucks, he would have lost only AU$260.21 on the endeavour. With the legal fees — well, ouch. But one thing not included in the breakdown is how many books over the Kickstarter rewards were printed, and thus may make a dent in the debits column as they sell in future.

  But the good news is, he notes in the post-mortem that he intends to print more books, and considerable costs are one-offs, making what would otherwise be a pricey hobby a less pricey — or even slightly remunerative — hobby instead. And in case you missed out on the Kickstart and wanted to help Morgan-Mar reduce the loss he took to provide you, his loyal readers, with what you always said you wanted, the book’s available at TopatoCo¹.

• I’ve mentioned Douglas Wilson on this page previously; he’s a cartoonist and animator from Manchester, England, UK, and work’s pretty damn good. He’s looking to shift a character — Jack Astro — that’s he’s been working into animated shorts for about five years into a longform story, and the first part of that went live yesterday. Take ‘er away, Doug:
  

  Jack Astro is a test pilot for the experimental Singularity Drive program. After sending a duplicate version of Jack and his ship to multiple galaxies in the universe – the drive scattered across space. He must reassemble the lost pieces before the drive re-activates to send him home. Doug is currently writing and drawing a 130 page comic which will update twice a month in 5 page vertical scrolling chunks of story on his website BandOfOne.co.uk.

  Patreon backers will receive PDF downloads of each issue of the comic as he completes them so they can read the story in larger chunks (first issue is 33 pages) instead of waiting for the story to unfold on the website.

  More precisely, Patreons at the $1 level get access to that first block of story, and if you aren’t on Patreon you can also obtain it via Gumroad for £1.50 (along with the Jack Astro shorts & earlier works as pay-what-you-want). Wilson kindly sent along a copy of issue 1 for me to peruse, and I enjoyed it — it’s well worth an entry-level Patreon pledge or cost of a cup of coffee (not even the fancy coffee, just the regular kind).

Spam of the day:

Magnificent things from you, guy

Spelled my name wrong.

_______________
¹ Just sayin’. Also, if Morgan-Mar received 100% of the cost of the books (which won’t be the case — TopatoCo’s providing warehousing and handling services, and gets paid for them), a mere eight books would erase the non-legal loss (which is reasonable, as the legal costs will apply to future books). If you wanted to bring him all the way up to zero loss (which also means making nothing on considerable personal effort), it’ll take just about exactly 100 books (AU$3560.21 lost, US$27 or AU$35.57 per book at today’s exchange rate).

I don’t know about you, but I’m just about ready for the weekend. Let’s boogie.

• For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Reed!Pop could buy Emerald City Comicon (and, not coincidentally, the services of showrunner team Jim & Andrea Demonakos) and still have their two opposite-coast major comics shows (that would be EmCity and New York Comic Con) be polar opposites when it comes to indie- and webcomics. EmCity, in case you didn’t know, has essentially eclipsed San Diego as the big attendance show that webcomics flocks to, and NYCC is inhospitable to the very same crowd. Most perplexing.

  But, since EmCity is next week and all, how about a rundown of who you’ll find there? I love the maps that people create to show where they’ll be (although they’re a bit rarer this year than past), but even without the maps we can give you a list of who’s gonna be there (in no particular order, and we quote):

  Pat Race and the Alaska Robotics crew (booth 204, including Marian Call, whose new album dropped today and is awesome and she’ll have shows concurrent with EmCity); Sohmer, Unca Lar, and the Blind Ferret folks (booth 110); (Brad Guigar (booth R5); Danielle Corsetto and Randy Milholland (booth 1413); Jennie Breeden (booth 1322); all of the miscellaneous Explosm weirdos (booth 828); and Kaja & Phil Foglio (booth 118).

  There’s a hefty delegation from Helioscope (formerly Periscope) (booths H1 through 16 inclusive, to be occupied by Aaron McConnell, Aud Koch, Ben Dewey, Brian Wolf, Bridget Underwood, Cat Farris, Dan Schkade, Lucy Bellwood, Lukas Ketner, Ron Chan, Ron Randall, Roxy Polk, Steve Lieber, Tadd Galusha, Terry Blas, and Zach Fischer).

  Want more? How about Spike Trotman, Blue Delliquanti, Takneka Stotts, and Amanda Lafrenais (together at booth 212); Jake Richmond (booth X4); Molly “Jakface” Nemecek (booth Q3); the ubiquitous Jim Zub (booth V3); Kate Leth (booth J6); Kazu Kibuishi (booth K1); Lars Brown and David McGuire (booth Z1); Ngozi Ukazu and Tessa Stone (booth M9); and Pascalle Lepas (booth P16).

  We’re still not done (even allowing for the fact that I probably missed a bunch of people), consider that you’ll also find Dave Kellett (booth 1116); Der-shing Helmer (booth K6); Matt Inman (booth 410); Tony Breed and Lonnie Mann (booth M10); and Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (booth M10).

  Finally, you gots the creatorpaloozas that will be the :01 Books (booth 1602) and TopatoCo (booth 1102) contingents. The former will include Box Brown, Gene Luen Yang, Matthew Loux, MK Reed, Pénélope Bagieu; the latter is bringing Jeph Jacques, Sam Logan, David Malki !, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Alina Pete, Tyson Hesse, Becky Dreistadt, Matt Lubchansky, Abby Howard, Catie Donnelly, and Brandon Bird.

  Emerald City Comicon runs from Thursday 2 March to Sunday 5 March 2017 in Seattle.

• For those that can’t make it to the upper-left corner of the country, may I suggest curling up with a good podcast? Owne Dunne may be back to hiatusland with You Damn Kid, but that doesn’t mean that he’s idle. Dunne’s always done a stack of projects simultaneously, one of which was the webcomic parody of old-fashioned, hard-boiled cops, Banion.

  Of late, Banion has been audio-enhanced for your listening pleasure, and is now downloadable from Google Play and iTunes. Dunne’s at his best when he takes a classic form (the childhood memoir, the Dragnet style cop, the British prestige drama) and knocks it 47.3° to the side, which pretty much describes Banion, The Podcast

Spam of the day:

A Better Way to Inflate Everything

Nnnnooope. Not going near that one.