Yeah, yeah, I usually mix “good news” themed posts with some visual reference to Professor Farnsworth; I just felt like it was more important to use tentacles today.

• Sad news from Portland, Oregon to share with you: one of the most brave, brutally honest journal comics is wrapping up:
  

  Hey dudes, good news!

  Or maybe good news?

  I’ve decided to end DAR!

  Okay, bad for me, good for Erika Moen … let’s get some more of the announcement taken care of:

  [H]ere is my Official, F’reals Announcement. The final strip will air on December 28th, 2009.

  I’ve been working on this project for about six years old now. It started my sophomore year of college as a 20 year old student and has seen me through my first love, finding my queer identity, my first heartbreak, my first rebounds, traveling to another country, depression and medication, having stupid adventures, meeting the man I’d eventually marry, re-structuring “my identity”, graduation, working in the real world while struggling to keep making art which brings us to today where I’m a 26 year old self-employed happily married woman.

  Oh, and I guess there were some dick ‘n’ fart jokes in there too.

  I’m extremely grateful for the wonderful opportunities and experiences and connections that have come into my life because of this ridiculous comic. After six years, I feel emotionally and mentally ready to move on.

  But don’t worry! DAR! was not my first comic and it is so far away from being my last. Making comics has been my passion for over a decade now (Hell, I even graduated from college with a self-made degree in comics) and I can’t see a time when I’ll ever stop.

  So that’s all right, then; Moen is still putting out a second volume of DAR! comics, and at the link above, you can sign up for an email notification when each of her new projects gets off the ground. I’m going to miss the crap out of DAR!, but I’m really interested to see where she’s going, and will enjoy the ride. The link to DAR! will remain in the sidebar for as long as the comics exist, or until a new project is even awesomer. Thanks for sharing so much of yourself with all of us, Erika — it was extraordinarily generous of you.

• As long as we’re talking about good things (and if Hurricane Erika decides that wrapping her comic is a good thing, I am officially On Board With That Shit), how’s about the cover of Hope Larson’s next graphic novel, Mercury? Two immediate thoughts:
  1. That’s freakin’ beautiful
  2. I am reminded of when Larson and husband Bryan Lee O’Malley both started getting notice for their early comics work, and my assessment was that it was Larson that was headed for superstardom; I Heart Scott Pilgrim’s Head as much as anybody, but seeing this cover makes me stand by my original judgement more than ever
• Know who’s got the weirdest career arc out of webcomics of anybody? Steve Troop. Just as Tiger Woods is getting all radioactive and dropped by sponsors, Nike busts out a new set of commercials that don’t feature humans (with their tendencies to attract the wrong sort of attention), but rather puppets. Puppets designed by Steve Troop, that is. The video of the first commercial can be seen hereabouts, with another six (and another 20 or so puppets) on deck for release as basketball season progresses. None of Troop’s signature aliens sighted yet, but one may hope … one may hope.
• Finally, it’s my understanding that a new Dresden Codak has been sighted in the wild; I can’t verify from the handheld but interested parties are urged to check for themselves.

Internet at home, the single busiest weekend of the year — teaching, next step to getting an emergency medical qualification, and a fundraising breakfast that involved a seven hour kitchen shift. Yeesh. So if there’s anything really new going on in webcomickry I’m a little behind; here’s some stuff you may or may not have heard before.

• Congrats to Gordon McAlpin on the Multiplex kick-starting; I didn’t read the email annoucing the imminent deadline on the project in time to give everybody one last shot at getting in on the action (which was Friday), but I can now confidently state that McAlpin (my $1 bet adversary) has achieved 176% of his $7500 goal, so that’s all right.

  Because Gord’s a stand-up guy, he also pointed out that those wanting to fund Spike‘s Poorcraft project still have a week to do so (at this point, the book is so well funded that more money means more copies that Spike will be giving away to various economic-helping-type organizations; at present, 100 copies are so earmarked for donation.

  Also, there’s still a month to go to get in on cheap copies of the Tigerbuttah we-can’t-call-it-a-Little-Golden-Book-but-that’s-what-it-is. XX-man has a list of other projects from the community; bet you can find something you’d like over there.

• Not to make this an all-Xerexes, all-the-time edition, but the ComixTalk Year End Roundtable, Woo is up. Garrity! Santo! Alverson! Carlson! Badman! Fesworks! Woodruff! Some random hack!
• Finally got around to watching the video interview of Julia Wertz talking about not having insurance that’s been making the rounds for the past couple weeks. Compelling stuff, but then I broke the cardinal rule of the internet and read comments and now I have a headache. Watch the video if you haven’t, don’t scroll down the page to where the stupid begins.

Here’s a couple of things to tide you over:

• I think this is going to be a standard thing in the future: the exhibitor’s list for TCAF ’10 as Twitter list. Easy to update to reflect changes, and more than just a static blurb, there’s interaction with the exhibitors for the fans.
• A pair of new webcomics inspired by videogames noted today: via occasional Fleen contributor Jeff Lowrey points us towards a new casual-gaming strip from James Francis of Babylon Sticks. And via the XX-Man’s Twitterfeed a Team Fortress webcomic; this one’s got a story and every damn thing! It appears to be a one-off, providing a bit of color to a game event, but what the heck — the idea of a thoroughly evil woman egging these murderous teams on at each other for her own nefarious purposes certainly puts a new spin on the game.
• Mike Ciccotello is a guy I met at my local bookstore, at one of Patrick McDonnell approximately-annual does a talk/readings. Mike has done a bunch of [web]comics (initially as a strip, more recently of the editorial variety), and spends the occasional day as Brad Guigar’s convention henchman. Just you’re average, everyday Renaissance Man with a day job and a wife who thinks he’s pretty nifty and an unusual venue for his latest art.

  So there’s this guy named John Stossel, right? Once upon a time he was a “expose the scammer” type of television journalist type, and lately he’s just kind of a libertarian who doesn’t believe in regulation; whatever you think of his politics or his reporting, he sports a formidable moustache. He’s got a new show on Fox Business, and for an upcoming piece he’ll be running portraits by Ciccotello of characters from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

  Ayn Rand is one of those writers whose appeal escapes me utterly (and also must bear responsibility for the existence of the “Objectivist Club” at RPI, whose members during my graduate education pissed me off more than any other human beings that I’ve met in person, with the exception of Jack Thompson), but Ciccotello’s artwork is really nice. The plan was for them to run last night, but I gather that Stossel decided to celebrate the opening of the Copehagen conference by talking about how global warming is a good thing. As soon as the story airs, we’ll share the art with you.

Because a bunch of things just sort of happened all at once, many of them of the milestone variety. Viz:

• Little Gamers turns nine years old today.
• Today is the arithmetic mean of the day that Irregular Webcomic hit 2500 strips and the day that Misery Loves Sherman hits 500 strips (no link until tomorrow). Also, I’m about five days late on this one (but I like to do these round-numbers deals in big chunks when I can), but Tweep pretty much put itself outside of casual Archive Bingery last week when it crossed the 1000 mark.
• Today marks two years of Bill Barnes making Unshelved his entire job, and one day since Jeph Jacques sold enough t-shirts to buy a house.
• And if all these variations on damn that is a lot of webcomickry going on isn’t enough for you, you can slurp up two and a half hours more in this vidcast, starring Dylan Meconis, Bill Mudron, Katie Lane, and Erika Moen (who is totally awesome at both thinking up titles and spelling); it’s all about making comics and navigating the world of freelancing (that last part is especially important if you ever consider doing such work yourself).
• Finally, there’s a thinky piece by Eric Burns-White yesterday on why paywalls on the internet (whether it’s newspapers or comics or encyclopaediae) are doomed to failure. I will register my usual and token objection to one thought that crops up in the comments (and often does in these contexts): that very few internet ventures make money purely by providing content (with the unspoken assumption being that this is why old-time comics guys look down on webcomickers as t-shirt merchants).

  My objection being, I don’t care how many newspapers paid to carry Peanuts, that’s not what got Sparky his own private hockey rink; he got richer than God by licensing his characters to appear on everything from snack cakes to insurance companies. The ratio of direct revenue from the comic to revenue from merchandise (including the dreaded t-shirts) is probably not significantly different from that seen by the average self-sufficient webcomicker when comparing direct website revenue (say, advertising) to that brought in by the sales of tangible stuff.

  It’s not a critical point, but I have a great affection for it, so let me have this one thing, okay? It doesn’t detract from the logical basis of Mr Snark-White’s argument, and doesn’t lessen the strength of his conclusions.

Sometimes, there’s just a window where it’s all Big Players that announce/do things.

• In terms of audience, influence, and longevity, Penny Arcade is the biggest deal in our corner of the web, no? I figure over the next 1 – 3 years that statement will become less definitive, but for now, they’ve been doing it bigger and longer than anybody else (and get your mind out of the gutter). Having produced the comic, custom content for game publishers, a game series, a scholarship, a convention series, and a multi-million dollar charity, there really wasn’t anyplace else to go besides reality TV.

  So they did that.

  The pilot episode is up now (with what looks like six more episodes in the works), including the year’s biggest Awwwww moment as Jerry Holkins introduces his new daughter to the world. If you enjoy the kind of TV that doesn’t involve pretty people eating gross things and scheming in “alliances” (but I guess Alliances are okay), take a gander.

• In the world of print comickry, DC are one of the proverbial Big Guns, and their move into webcomics has proven to be both more long-lasting and influential than I figured it would be (but, for the record, the interface is still pretty hateful on my browser). There’s a pretty good interview/article (it’s sort of midway between the two) at the blogsite of a Louisiana TV channel with Zudaboss Ron Perazza. Perazza’s a really nice guy, genuine in his goals and intentions (and if he and I don’t have entirely parallel viewpoints on webcomicking, that doesn’t mean that either of us is deluded or wrong). I particularly want to recommend the interview to you because it’s got an unusually good bit of reportage behind it — there’s none of the (hopefully, formerly) obligatory “Biff! Pow!” nonsense, nor the mistaken assertion that comics-on-the-web are a brand-new phenomenon spearheaded by forward-thinking publishers. In fact, I quite liked the second ‘graf:
  

  Today, companies are still trying to find the most user-friendly mode of consumption and more importantly, the right business model. Digital comics, or Web comics as they have become known, have been highly successful for many independent creators with comic strips, but have not been much more than a glorified marketing gimmick to the major players in the industry.

  Don’t worry, Zudafans, the remainder of the piece focuses on how the majors reacted to that state of affairs; in fact, the majority of what’s in the piece won’t be a surprise to anybody that regularly reads this page, but it’s the first I’ve seen out in the wider world that acknowledges that there are different approaches to comics+internet that will work differently for different constituencies of business, creators, and readers. Hell, that’s something that we at Fleen could stand to be reminded of from time to time.

• One of the larger hosting companies out there, at least in that it hosts an unusually large number of webcomics, is Dreamhost. Unfortunately, that can create what paranoid types like me call a Single Point of Failure, and problems there can have outsized consequences. Late last night (or early this morning, or perhaps a bit past tea-time, depending where you are), Dreamhost did a wobbly and while the core failure seems to have been contained in about three hours, lingering aftereffects were reported a good twelve hours after initial report. If you couldn’t get to your preferred free entertainment last night (or this morning, or tea-time), give it a while. And as this isn’t a new occurence, there may be some shifts of provider in the near-to-medium term.
• Finally, it’s well understood that the world’s greatest (indeed, the Cartoonist Extraordinaire) is Bill Connolly. His videos on how to draw have inspired more people than Bob Ross and Commander Mark put together. Now, a bunch of artists have created a new website in tribute to Connolly’s most well-loved lesson of all. Thus, the Beautiful Asian Lady Collection is ready for your adoration and participation (thanks to Yuko Ota for letting the world know about this marvel).

Quick item #1, because I’m required to: today’s moustache vs moustache webcomics battle! If Angela Melick actually did what she portrays in that second link, I just fell in love a little.

Quick item #2, because sometimes we like to watch stuff happening: video of Ryan North being smart at last month’s ACM conference vs video of the Tweet Me Harder dudes live on stage in Hollywood.

• Okay, so the deal is this — on the internet, you’re constantly bombarded with calls of “watch this” and “this is great”, particularly when you (as we at Fleen do) ask for people to send you notifications of stuff. Unfortunately, whatever the field of endeavour, most of it isn’t very good (c.f.: Sturgeon’s Revelation). What to do?

  Find voices that you consistently trust and mentally assign them a heavier weighting when trying to decide if what they recommend is worth following up on; note that this model neatly demonstrates a paradox in Information Theory that posits that a frequently wrong source actually conveys more information than one that’s sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

  For example, a movie reviewer in a newspaper that I used to subscribe to I trusted to consistently have her head up her ass; thus I could take her pans as hearty recommendations for my time and movie dollar, and her raves as a signal to avoid at all costs.

  All this is a fancy way of saying, sometimes a voice cuts through the noise and the recommendation is sufficient on its face. Case in point, Evan Dahm wrote to me recently, and I’m taking the following recommendation pretty seriously because his work is impeccably good:

  Liz Baillie, who has been publishing minicomics for years, has just recently started publishing her comic Freewheel as a webcomic.

  There isn’t much online yet, but I’ve read the first few chapters as they were originally published as minicomics and it is a very interesting, surreal comic.

  That’s all I needed; I was unfamiliar with Ms Baille’s minicomic work, but three pages in, I am intrigued and ready for more.

• John Baird’s been busy with the Create A Comic Project; let’s let him tell you the news:
  

  On November 6, 9, and 11th, the Create a Comic Project gave its first series of academic presentations! The first was at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society of Public Health Education (SOPHE) on Friday and the others were at the 137th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), both held in Philadelphia, PA.

  The presentations — two 15-minute talks and a 40-minute round table discussion — covered background information about the Create a Comic Project and two of its educational outreach efforts in the past year, which were conducted in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh. The roundtable had health professionals join in with a participatory demonstration of the comic project in action!

  As part of the presentations, Baird acknowledged a number of webcomics for their support of the project, along with the Guest Strip Project as an example of large-scale (and international) collaboration. Take a minute to scan one or two of those links, and 10 or 15 to look at something that you’re not familiar with; there almost certainly something you’ll like in there.

• Sometimes, email has just a hint of Yay, me!; sometimes it’s because you’ve perfected your life’s work, sometimes just because you went further with something than maybe you guessed when you started, and are still going strong. From Chris Flick:
  

  Friday Nov. 13, 2009 marks my Two Year Anniversary of doing Capes & Babes. Technically, my two year anniversary is REALLY November 12th, but that falls on a Thursday so I have to wait one extra day for my 2 year anniversary (damn those Monday, Wednesday & Friday schedules!).

  Also, I have collected the first 200 strips (see a pattern here?) of Capes & Babes in a 165 page TPB called You Can’t Print Flick.

  Warning to anybody that buys Flick’s book — it is my understanding that Brad Guigar, well-known paronomasiac, wrote the introduction. Tread carefully.

First off, did everybody see this? Thanks to the generosity of various sponsors (large and small), Child’s Play 2009 started out of the gate with $260,000. Please note that this is not an excuse to not give, figuring that Google‘s got your contribution all taken care of.

Speaking of charitable efforts, there’s something that you really need to see: Starthrower in Haiti is a new, twice-a-week webcomic that exists solely to raise money for the Starthrower Foundation, which sponsors young Haitian adults who wish to complete their education and/or apprenticeship.

It’s created by Daniel Lafrance, a Canadian storyboard artist, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. There’s a soft, pencil-ish quality to the colors, mixed in with a masterful sense of character design that’s neither too fussy nor too simple; think Herge’s ligne claire¹ and you’ve got a pretty good idea what it looks like. Check out what’s likely the only charity-dedicated webcomic since the now-folded Guest Strip Project.

• It’s November, and that means it’s National Novel Writing Month; you probably know somebody that’s giving it a go, and in case you don’t, head over to Help Desk and check out the widgets showing word count progress. Alternately, check out Later by Darcie Frederick; the webcomic’s been doing weekly updates for about a year now, but now it kicks into high gear as Frederick’s decided to tackle NaNoWriMo by doing 30 comics in 30 days. She’s, uh, actually a couple days behind right now, but I’m pretty confident she’ll catch up.

  Oh, did I mention that Later is the most trope-busting post-apocalypse webcomic you’re ever likely to see? No gangs fighting over the remains of civilization, no zombies, no widespread destruction. Just very few people, a lot of melancholy, and a cat named Simon. I like Simon.

• Did somebody say webcomics iPhone app? I know, I know, you can’t spit these days without coming across some RSS scraper or other, but there are two you might be interested in. Howard Tayler (my evil twin — or am I his?) has a call out for those interested in beta testing the Schlock Mercenary iPhone app.

  And Onezmui & Harknell, the creator/techie couple behind Stupid & Insane Defenders Against Chaos and My Annoying Life have released an iPhone app to aggregate all their various content (multiple strips, blogs, and podcasts) with a twist:

  We’re also making a (Stupid and Insane) offer to other webcomics–get your own version of our app for your comic for free! We’ve always tried to give back to the community and this is our biggest offer so far. More info on the service is here.

  Short version: it’s a service to allow creators build their own iPhone apps and get ’em in the iTunes store. Right now it’s based off the “Central” app (cf: “Chaos Central”, about 5cm up the screen), which is a consolidator of whatever kinds of content you put out that can be accessed via RSS or XML. I got to play around with Chaos Central a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty slick.

  Of course, as the owner of a G1 and not an iPhone, I can only hope that the collective nerdgasms last week over the new Motorola Droid means that there will be more interest in developing such apps in the future for the Android O/S. Until then, I guess all us Android users will have to eat lunch over here and someday ours will be the cool table. So there.

_______________
¹ If anybody out there has the family name “Ligne”, I will pay you ten dollars American cash money to name any daughter you might have “Claire”.

A damn good interview with Erika Moen went up the other day, and you should watch it (part 1, part 2) because she (that would be Moen) tells a story that needed to be told. It’s a story about a printing company (which she graciously does not name, but is not Transcontinental, about which Moen has nothing to say but good things) that screwed her (again, Moen) sideways on the first printing of her book.

This leads to certain questions that you should ask your printer, including, After accepting my book, will individual employees that decide they don’t like my content be able to veto actually printing the damn thing? and If you have to shift this to a Canadian plant so that I can make deadline, and it costs more because of your actions, will you be holding my books hostage until I pay more than we originally contracted for? The whole thing is good, but that section (near the end of part one) is crucial.

• What’s that you say? Tiny Kitten Teeth wants to do a book about Tigerbuttah in the style of a Golden Book? And they need your help over at Kickstarter to make it happen? Get goin’ people. Disclaimer 1: I have a personal relationship with Becky and Frank, as they went to college with my niece (and are rockin’ awesome people). Disclaimer 2: I have pledged to this project and have a vested interest in other people supporting it so I can get some damn cool stuff out of it. Antidisclaimer: It’s a freakin’ GOLDEN BOOK. What in hell are you waiting for?
• Tweet Me Harder goes live on stage, for free, on November 14th in Holllllywood (like Bullwinkle always said, you have to pronounce that word like it’s got four or five “L”s). Kris Straub! David Malki !! Special guests! I live on the wrong coast! Crap!
• Aw, poo. Looks like I missed something for a few weeks now. See, the “fold” of the Planet Karen website falls right below the comic (on my monitor, at least), so I hadn’t seen the newspost that falls below the fold. Seems like the long-awaited first PK book is now available, and I hadn’t known, so I am very late in sharing this news with you. Sorry. You can go here to buy it (warning: the store uses scary monetary units called “pounds sterling”, which are totally not dollars at all; don’t be nervous, you can still buy the book).

No reason, just felt like getting that out there.

• For those of you that keep track of such things, Child’s Play gears up for another year (that woud be the seventh) of giving and good deeds. Last year’s giving (coming on the heels of the global economic meltdown’s start) was $1,434,377 (US). Let’s see if this year (coming at the end of a full year-plus of global economic crapitude) we can do as well. There’s already more than half a dozen IRL and virtual events for the cause, and more on the way.
• The last one was a success, so the fine (for certain values of “fine) people (for certain values of “people”) at TopatoCo are bringing out Open House/Sales Event Mark II.0 a week from Saturday (that would be November 14th), from noon to 6:00pm local time (that would be Eastern Standard). This time they’ve added that Awkward Stare-Fest aspect to the event, and I will pay one dollar American Cash Money to the first person that stares at any TopatoCoian enough that it becomes awkward for all involved. But for your own safety, I advise you keep such tactics to the cartoonists and not to TopatoCo VP Holly Post — rumor has it she bites when provoked.
• It’s a good day in webcomicdom when something completely unexpected hits my frontal lobes. When it happens twice (at opposite ends of the day’s trawl list), it’s extra good with creamy nougat in the center. In case you hadn’t seen it, Achewood gets the Tony Millionaire treatment (lacking only the magic words, Dook Dook Dook) and XKCD borrows a page from Edward Tufte (lacking only sufficient resolution on most monitors; click here to embiggen). Oh, and before any of you start the righteous nerdfury about Elrond meeting the Fellowship after the departure from Rivendell, please note that the comic clearly states it’s for the movie version. Thank you.
• Continuing a tradition that goes back to Garry Trudeau‘s pioneering work (started in the late 70s), Chris Yates engages in a little investigative cartooning today. Lest you think that the scandal he’s unearthed is invented for the sake of a gag, allow me to point you empirical proof: The Survey Is A Lie. He will get to the truth!

I might be the only one, but I miss the discontinued theme song to The Sound of Young America, a radio show about things that are awesome, hosted by America’s Radio Sweetheart, Jesse Thorn.

Readers with a good memory will recall that we have spoken about Mr Thorn previously on this page, and that he’s generally the best interviewer in the radio business right now. I can think of no demographic crying out for lengthy interviews with hip-hop artists less than that of public radio listeners, yet that’s exactly who Jesse provides them for — and interviews with comedians, writers, and the odd (sometimes very odd) webcomicker or two. He keeps a statistically older/whiter-than-the-median audience listening to people they don’t have a pre-existing interest in because he’s that damn good.

And now, Thorn and his general awesomporium have a new storefront provided by TopatoCo. When we spoke with Holly Post, VP of TopatoCo a while back, there was an unused bit from that interview where she mentioned (all offhand-like) that there were people that create stuff on the internet that’s not webcomickers that they might find to be a good fit. At the time, I figured she was talking about, say, Brandon Bird, but now I see that they were thinking bigger. Congratulations to all involved.

• Chris Yates has schemes, which apparently he might share some hint of tomorrow. We at Fleen have heard some reports of what could be Very Big News, and are just waiting for confirmation; will Yates, in fact, tell us about how he’s getting ready to make ***-*** ****** ******* for a major, international ****** *******? Watch his strip and this space for updates.
• Gunerkrigg Court‘s first book got really delayed as its publisher had cash-flow problems; now that those are sorted, we can look for volume 2 next month. To celebrate, creator Tom Siddell is talking with CBR about the forthcoming volume.
• For the past week or so, Joey Manley has been holding forth on how to make it in the world of webcomics, but today’s musing on the topic is the one you need to read — it’s why it’s flat-out impossible for you to achieve success in webcomickry:
  

  Have you given up yet? Good. Because if I was able to talk you out of it so easily, with one stupid blog post, then you didn’t have what it takes. Not everybody gets to make a living at webcomics, because not everybody is talented enough and determined enough to do so. And guess what? That’s just fine. You’re better off where you are. Making a living at webcomics is hard, it’s unlikely, it’s the most impossible thing you could ever decide to do for a living, and in order to stand a chance you have to want it so badly that you’re willing to push through anything, anybody, any time, push beyond human reason and common sense, and then push a little harder, even, than that, if you’re going to really commit yourself to the grueling effort that is required to succeed at webcomics (or at any art, but maybe especially webcomics).

  Hint: Don’t stop reading until you reach the end.