Oh yeah — #werewolfcomics.

• I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of Johnny Wander Volume 1: Don’t Burn The House Down (available at fine online stores starting next Monday), and I couldn’t put it down. What Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya have created is nothing less than a more modern, authentic-feeling, young-adult (in the sense of being out of college, not in the sense of a “Young Adult” reader) version of Archie.

  Bear with me a moment.

  The thing about Archie comics (and JWV1:DBTHD approximates the size and feel of the Archie digests) is, you don’t need to have been reading for the past 70 years to know that Archie Andrews is Everyteen, Reggie’s a jerk, Veronica’s a snob, Jughead’s most likely asexual, and Betty is freakin’ insane. You can pick up literally any Archie story ever written, and by the end of the story (frequently only six or eight pages) you know who these characters are and what their typical behaviors will be. It’s self-contained, self-explanatory, and above all, as accessible to the first time reader as to the obsessive fan.

  And that’s what maybe sets Johnny Wander, essentially an autobio webcomic, apart from most of its contemporaries. No in-jokes or mythologies, no history that’s needed to read the current update and get a laugh-chuckle in return. Whoever these people are, they’re funny. Reading from the beginning makes them funnier and more “real”, but the barrier to entry is nil, and that is a significant accomplishment. As Yuko and Ananth (one rarely sees them referred to singly, except as a merged hybrid creature) note in the back matter, this c’mon in the webcomic’s fine approach was deliberate:

  Comics like Yotsuba&! have a universal appeal that doesn’t require an ecyclopedic geek knowledge, and that’s what we began striving for.

  Not only did they hit what they were striving for, Yotsuba&! may be the only short vignette model comic that is guaranteed to make me smile more than Johnny Wander. Next time I see Yuko and Ananth (mecha or otherwise), the Beard Papa’s is on me (that sentence actually is grammatically correct, and the shop is right around the corner from my office, yay). Now, exactly do I have to pour ants on to get Volume 2?

• Puppets! Moviemaking! Progress! Steve Troop’s Melonpool photo set (with video coming soon).
• Quite a bit of discussion of some various It Moves! type webcomics; I got tipped off to one that’s particularly implemented in HTML5 (although somewhat hilariously, it doesn’t like my use of HTML5-compliant Opera and recommends I install forbidden-from-my-computer IE9). I’m deeply torn about these (and let me stress I’m not talking about any particular comic right now, just the idea of semi-interaction within the comic offering).

  On the one hand, webcomics, should be open to things you can’t do in print, push the boundaries, I get it. On the other hand, when there’s so much going on, characters moving around, panels shifting and fading, it’s like the comic is driving the reading experience instead of me. It puts me almost irretrievably in mind of an old Life In Hell where young Bongo the one-eared rabbit was asked why TV is the coolest invention ever: When you’re tired, TV does the playing for you. As always, your thoughts are welcome.

The Elder Gods seem to be the theme of the day. Consider:

• Michael Moss wrote:
  

  We just finished a short animation with one of our characters, the great and terrible Cthulhu, from our webcomic Gods Playing Poker! Enjoy.

  Okay, the great and terrible Cthulhu is no Isaiah Mustafa, but the addition of tentacles probably means that Hurricane Erika only likes him that much more.

• Meanwhile, over at Questionable Content/, Friends of Lulu Awards Best Female Character nominee Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham (and a new record for excessive capitalization in one sentence, woo!) is channeling truths man is not meant to know. Or at least, thoughts that man really doesn’t want to hear.
• No elder gods, but in case you hadn’t seen it, the Best Guest Comic of the Month is by Rebecca Clements; she absolutely nailed Kate Beaton’s visual, linguistic, and topical styles at today’s Hark, A Vagrant. Come to think of it, that cat’s tail in the header does look a little tentacle-y. Hmmm.

Absolutely no tentacles even, but the redoubtable (don’t ever try to doubt her, much less redoubt) Jess Fink has some absolutely stunning artwork for a new show for display on her Ell-Jay. Before I give you the link, please note that the title of said show (organized by Jason Fish) is Monsterbation; if everything that just jumped into your head is cool for connecting via whatever computer you’re sitting at, make with the clicky.

[Editor’s note: Okay, crap, this was supposed to post yesterday, and today client interactions are kicking my ass up & down one of the outer boroughs, so … everybody check out today’s Extinct Mammals guest comic by our buddy Lore Sjöberg and we’ll call Thursday a wash. Come back tomorrow for a review of Kazu Kibuishi‘s Amulet Book Three: The Cloud Seekers.]

Zach Weiner (or is it “Weinersmith” yet?) dropped his 2000th update of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal with a discussion of pure Plotonium. But then I saw his SMBC Theater cohort JP Nickel (I think he’s particularly funny matched up against James Ashby in this short) dropping an intriguing piece of news:

@smbctheater will have its own panel at NYC ComicCon in October! @ZachWeiner @jsandlinashby @FuSchmu The Mrs. & I will be speaking!

NYCC’s programming & panel schedule isn’t set to go live until tomorrow (curses!), but when it does, you should find the time & location of the SMBCfest here. Don’t let the fact that nearly every character in the SMBC Theater shorts is a horrible, horrible person — I’ve met a bunch of them and they’re only one level of horrible at most.

• Speaking of NYCC, the exhibitor list is pretty complete, and webcomics are pretty well represented, from ACT-I-VATE to Webcomics Dot Com.
• The Friends of Lulu awards make a return this year (to be given out at the Long Beach Comic Con Halloween weekend), and public voting is now open. I thought I’d mention it because the Lulu awards do something that you don’t usually see: rather than throw webcomics into a single catch-all category (which can find creations wildly different in scope, subject, and tone treated as comparable), they’re distributed throughout the list. Thus, you have webcomics contending for recognitions as wide as Best Female Character, Lulu of the Year, and the Kim Yale Award for Most Talented Newcomer.
• Welcome back to Randy Milholland who had a nasty sore throat that made his drawing elbow lock up. No, really. It’s so improbable and unlikely, it could only happen to a webcomicker; at least we may get some good Life With Rippy strips out of it.
• Finally, we at Fleen have been known to refer to certain members of our community by nicknames; one perennial usage has exploited the fact that Dresden Codak‘s creator shares a name with a Mexican singer/actor, thus making Aaron Diaz webcomics’ own Latin Heartthrob. Today, however, he is re-christened as ALP creator Bernie Hou made the logical leap and observed that Diaz is actually our Latin Art-throb. >slow clap< Well done, sir. Well done.

I don’t know what’s got into me today.

My dog had a pretty serious health scare for the past ten days, but it’s resolved now in the best of all possible outcomes; I know that I’ve been a bit distracted and not doing very well here for the past ten days as a result, but it’ll be better from here on out. Thanks for your patience.

• Every week, there’s a bunch of stories on [web]comics creators — some are very good, some are merely adequate, but they fall into a predictable rhythm and you can pretty much tell where they’re going after the first paragraph or two. So let me point you to one that doesn’t follow the standard script, as the Burlington Free Press talks about James Kochalka‘s latest effort, Dragon Puncher but spends more time on Kochalka’s family and their involvement in the creative process than on the book itself. It’s a pretty nice reminder that art doesn’t come out of nothing — it’s influenced by those around the creators and their lives on a continual basis. Anyway, I liked it.
• Speaking of the creative process, Jess Fink seems to have hers … borrowed without attribution … quite a bit. So it’s with mixed emotion that I point you to her newest shirt design; on the one hand it’s absolutely gorgeous, and on the other the more people see it the greater chance one of them will be the — I dunno, eighty-third person this year? — to steal it and run to Zazzle in an attempt to cash in on Fink’s talent. Then again, this one features glow in the dark inks, and I don’t think that’s in the manufacturing repertoire of print-on-demand places yet. In any event, time to having to beat down on an art thief starts … NOW!
• To be first seen at SPX, those of you that are going: Johnny Wander‘s first book, new Everything Dies and Bringing It All Back Home by Box Brown, minis from KC Green and Meredith Gran and more! All of you guys have fun without me, ‘kay?
• It’s most of an hour long, but this series of videos on Youtube is worth a watch: it’s a thesis defense on the topic of webcomics, continuing the ongoing march of our little microgenre into the realm of academic respectability. Hopefully, this thesis found more respectable sources to cite than the last academic that looked at us and wound up talking about a hack pseudojournalist.
• Finally, I believe that there’s a birthday girl out there in webcomickia today. If you’re going to SPX, I believe that you’re obligated to offer Kate Beaton a celebratory (if belated) birthday drink from the bar. With a little cooperation, you can make this her bestest birthday ever.

New Jess Fink site! She said “poop”!

• Okay, this is the sort of story that changes quickly, so by the time you read this it may no longer be an issue. There’s a new webcomic-reading application over in the iPhone/iPad apps store, by one Mr or Ms Reilly Watson. Unlike the last one of these that made a splash in the community, this app does not appear to be a simple RSS feed aggregator — it appears to pull comics from the creator’s site, present it outside of their preferred context, costing the creators bandwidth and advertising revenue (I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, so my apologies if I’m wrong on this one). One more time for those in the back: RSS readers = cool, scrapers = not cool.

  Mr or Ms Watson might particularly want to pay attention to a bit from Robert Khoo at the SDCC Webcomics Lightning Round, as it bears repeating:

  Question: Going back to people taking your content, were you aware of how you have to protect your work always, and is that likely to change?
  Khoo: It’s very complicated, and would take a lot more than twenty seconds to answer properly; we aggressively protect ourselves from people trying to make money off our marks, otherwise we see it as a form of community enabling.[emphasis original]

  And lookee there — Mr or Ms Watson mentions Penny Arcade as one of the ‘popular comics’ included (although I must point out in the service of snark that Mr or Ms Watson seems to have farmed support for the app out to Canadian Google), which means that Mr or Ms Watson is indeed making money off that mark.

  Quick hint to Mr or Ms Watson and all who might follow in his or her footsteps: the Patent and Trademark Office maintains a simple trademark search which shows exactly who owns what. I’ll also point out that trademark owners have an obligation to defend their marks, and that registration means that violators are subject to treble damages. That would be the case here even if the app is just an RSS aggregator, since it’s advertising on a name and identity owned by somebody else. If the app in question is a scraper, Mr or Ms Watson should prepare to share out revenue to the creators who are going to be demanding compensation.

• Oh hecka yeah — Angela Melick, aka Jam, aka Spike Without Dreads, aka my right hand rule homie, has done the crazy and redrawn a bunch of her Wasted Talent college-era strips in order to put her first book together. We Are The Engineers debuts at Anime Evolution this weekend, and goes up for pre-order on the 13th for artists editions, with actual online sales on 18 September.

  For everybody that ever wondered what the crap was going on in the head of the engineers that they know and (let’s be honest — only sometimes) love, Melick is your translator. We’re definitely a breed apart, and she’s our ambassador to the world of people that don’t subscribe to the notion If it ain’t broke, break it and see if you can make it better! We are an oft-misunderstood people, and may consider WATE as a field guide to our mysterious ways.

• Finally, because a few people have been asking — I’m not going to be able to make it to SPX and/or Intervention next month; unfortunately, I’ve got a little too much going on this autumn, and will save my away from home time for NEWW. On the upside, most everybody I would see in Bethesda will be in Easthampton in November, so that’s all right.

  For those of you that are heading to Maryland, Casey Roberson wants you to know that there are hotel bargains o’plenty in the immediate area of the two shows, including a place called Legacy Hotel in Rockville (less than 2 miles from SPX) with single-bed rooms for $68/night. Please note that we at Fleen are not travel service and make no claims about the quality of accommodations. Then again, you could probably get cut by a murderous drifter just as easily at an expensive hotel as a cheap one, so may as well save a few bucks.

Friday. Last day off work of vacation, weekend a-comin’. Let’s do this.

• Re: Penny Arcade‘s PATV season one finale. Wow. Just watch it.
• Re: Skin Horse book2 pre-order on Kickstarter ends in 23 hours (as of this writing). Hint: the minimum pledge that will get you a physical book (which includes a sketch) actually works out about the same as what you’d pay for a non-sketch edition of the book once you take shipping and handling into account.
• Re: The unique ability of comics to reach audiences (particularly those underserved by traditional media); sometimes this approach provokes a WHAT reaction that may undermine the intended message, but sometimes it works really well. For an example of the latter, may I refer you to Adrean Clark’s Eight Ways To Be Deaf?

  Originally run as a B&W webcomic, 8 Ways is now fully colored and available as an e-book, with print coming next month. This is how you teach somebody about your culture, cause, or goal — organically, with a bit of humor, and remembering that people are people. Over-the-top cliched demonization? That just gets you laughed at. Not “with”. At.

• Re: Missed it entirely. Blank It, the webcomic forced to be creative by trapping its only characters in an infinite, featureless plane, has shaken things up first by constraining the characters, then by transferring the cast to the opposite of the infinite, featureless plane: the interior of a box. Interesting.

For example, there’s this, which is totally not related to San Diego — Marvel (yep, that Marvel) is looking for a web software architect, with the relevant description being:

As a Web Software Architect, you will help define the architecture for Marvel’s interactive digital products, consisting primarily of the Marvel.com collection of Web sites and various mobile offerings. You will be involved in the design and development of cutting-edge Web applications, defining system architecture to achieve scalability and reliability goals, and researching new technologies for our evolving business systems.

Which, once translated from jobpostingese (subdialect: I know a bunch of different business phrases and think I can translate that into IT-speak) sounds somewhere between “you just have to overhaul our main site” and “we’re a year or more behind comiXology and LongBox Digital, and you have to catch us up”. Combined with the recent de-Zudafication over at DC, it looks like the big publishers are trying to figure out what they want webcomics to be (which isn’t necessarily what webcomics are). Many thanks to Friend o’ Fleen Brett “Small g, no period dammit” Porter for the story tip.

• Updates to the SDCC Webcomics Locate-o-Tron continue apace, particularly concerning the news that Doug TenNapel tweeted that his booth will be hosting a certain officer of the law with a stick-mounted cleaver.
• Speaking of tweeting, Christopher Hastings mentioned that Some kid named Malachai sent me a story to draw?, which led to much speculation confirmed by Ethan Nicolle: Axe Cop and Dr McNinja team-up!
• Speaking of San Diego, Scott Kurtz promo’ed his show merch debuts, and much as the vinyl figures look awesome, the line that jumped out at me was:
  

  PvP book 8 will be debuting at the show. This is your first chance to pick up the latest volume of PvP and I’m very proud of this collection. It collects all the strips from 2008 and is the first PvP collection I’ve self published since 2001 (more on that at a later date). [emphasis mine]

  That “later date” turns out to be today, as the press release has been seen all over the comics blogosphere today (for example, with Brigid Alverson). Somewhere in my stacks, I still have Kurtz’s previous self-published work, and I always wondered in the back of my head how long it would be before he returned to the world of DIY.

  With a wealth of experience and advice from his studiomates to call on, I imagine that the mechanical presentation will be better than we’ve seen in the past, and since it’s all on him, I suspect that he’ll push himself to a schedule that’s both regular and on a short delay from on-line presentation. Self-publishing can be a headache, no doubt, but every self-publisher I’ve spoken to is pretty glad to have that control.

• Oh, yeah, and there’s the return of The Webcomics Section, this year coordinated by Jorge Cham, who’s so dedicated to the idea of a webcomics-themed giveaway that he did the wrangling work despite the fact that he won’t even be at San Diego. Four pages of four-color goodness on genuine newsprint, yours for the grabbing pretty much anywhere in webcomicland for the duration of the show, or until we run out.

Sad news broke this morning: Harvey Pekar, jazz scholar, literary analyst of rare insight, and famously cranky bastard — in the best sense of those words — died in the early morning hours at his home in Cleveland. Harvey paved the way for a hell of a lot of people in comics, and was particularly an inspiration for those who wanted to tell their own stories. It seems hard to believe that there could be a Bellen, DAR!, SMILE, Conversations With My Younger Self, or any of a hundred other These Things Happened To Me kind of comics without Harvey’s example.

Although it’s in the Fleen Manual of Style that people are referred to by last name after their initial introduction, I can’t help but use his given name. I was only privileged to meet him once (Harvey himself was gracious, friendly, patient, and erudite, and in that half an hour I learned more about jazz than I had in the prior 35 years), but having shared so much of himself and his life, I think that we all felt like we knew Harvey personally. He was the sometimes grumpy, always fascinating guy that lived a block or two over, even if “a block or two” was on the other side of the world. Now that we have lost Harvey and Studs Terkel, I wonder who will be the next chronicler of ordinary lives.

To his widow, Joyce, and daughter, Danielle, our deepest sympathies; you’ll never read these words and they would likely be only slight comfort, but please know that Harvey made all of our lives richer with his stories, his insight, and his honesty.

For everybody else, there’s a good collection of some of Harvey’s best moments at The AV Club. When you’re done watching those, go out and have an ordinary day that becomes an adventure.

It’s absolutely gorgeous out, why am I at work? Wherever you are, take a peek outside and if it’s nice, close out the browser and go enjoy it for a half hour or so. I’ll still be here.

• Following up on the previously-reported screening of Sita Sings The Blues sponsored by our friends at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francicso, some additional information. As previously announced, the movie screens on Tuesday, 20 July (aka the day before Preview Night in San Diego); now we can share that the screening will be at 7pm (doors open at 6:30) at the Delancey Street Foundation Screening Room, located at 600 The Embarcadero; tickets are $25 in advance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, $30 at the door. Tell Nina I said hi.
• The first ever “Feel Free To Say Hi If I’m Wearing A Dinosaur Comics Shirt Day, Woooooo!” apparently had some success, so Nexus of All Webcomics Realities (Canadian edition) Ryan North is declaring a second such day, this time with a bit more lead time and on the weekend so more people can find romance. Saturday, July 17th will be what is now officially named the annual “July Dinosaur Comics Check Out My Sweet Shirt, And Then Talk To Me Because I’m Awesome Day”.
• Another webcomic has crossed the decade mark; Darrell M. Stark wrote to remind us that today, June 30th, makes ten years of Breakpoint City by Brian Emling. I think you can count the number of webcomics that have managed such on two hands and zero feet, so well done Brian, and thanks for the reminder, Darrell.
• Not quite anniversaries, but two epic stories will be wrapping up next week: on Monday, 5 July Evan Dahm will be finishing Order of Tales with an update of 60-odd pages. Add it to the previously-completed Rice Boy, and Dahm has a couple zillion pages of affecting, weird, compelling story for you to enjoy.

  To make the day extra special, KC Green will on the same day post the final chapter of The Anime Club. For those of you that find Monday to be a holiday, you should find plenty of free time to read both sagas over in their entirety.

• Finally, nothing to do with webcomics, but I wanted to share this: from the TEDx conference held in Princeton earlier this year, the guys who provide me with drinks: Francis Schott and Mark Pascal on the value of old style social networks. Anybody passing through central New Jersey, I am always available to have a drink with you at their bars.