In no particular order.

• Not getting into comic shops even with a Xeric grant. Correction time, kiddies! Box Brown contacted us to let us know that Diamond are hold Xeric winners to sales order minimums, but
  

  If the book doesn’t quite meet the minimum they will take it into consideration because of its status as a Xeric Grant. But, there is no hard and fast number. It’s mostly going to be case by case basis I would imagine.

  Translation: tell your local comic shop you want a copy of Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing.

• Listening to your own voice; Brian Carroll of Instant Classic goes musical, taking the lead as Author Donathan in a singalong installment. Along the same lines, watching yourself on video is also disturbing — I say “uh” way too much in this video from NEWW panel #1 (more panel video without my verbal stumbling at BDC).
• Being afraid for your job because you do a webcomic. Check this out (author’s name and webcomic name redacted):
  

  My webcomic is my 5th-grade-potty-humor-and-dick-jokes outlet, and I love being able to share the things I create or find funny with the world; however, I’m employed by the US Government.

  I’m sure many employers would look down upon a site or comic like mine which proudly displays my name, and the Government thinks it much worse. No one who is offended in power has seen my site yet, but it just takes one higher-up to see what I’m doing and either fire me or force me to make a change.

  I’ve contemplated going back and re-signing my comics with a pen name so I can feign ignorance, and I’ve even thought of taking the site down completely. Neither of those ideas sound fun or fair to me. I was wondering if any persons familiar with law could help me figure out how to distance myself from edgy material for work purposes while still being attached to it creatively. Can they legally force action upon me? Will a click-through EULA (I hate those things, but if it works) protect me? What about a link to an EULA that informs people that by viewing the page, they agree?

  It would be wonderful to find help with my situation, and I think it’s interesting to think about how something like comics can affect people who still work at a desk job for a living.

  We’ll preface this with the obligatory I Am Not A Lawyer, and note that anybody that relies upon me for legal advice/expertise is probably even more boned than they thought. That being said, my understanding is that there’s not a lot you can do. Over the past decade or so, protections for individuals expressing personal opinions or creative works vis-a-vis their bosses punishing them for such opinions/works have been … eroding. The fact that you work for the government may actually work in your favor, though, as the Bill of Rights is specifically written to describe relations between citizens and the government (as opposed to citizens and business). A’course, to get to the point where that distinction actually helps you could require years of lawyers and court dates.

  If you’re really worried, adopting a pen name might not be a bad idea (c.f.: “Clay” vs “Hard” — various identities used by the creator of the now-gone Sexy Losers in response to perceived risk of doing things under his own name), if only for peace of mind. It’s a fine line, though — you’ll probably take another job at some point in your life, and employers know about Google, too (as luck would have it, there’s more than one “Gary Tyrrell” in the world, and one of the other guys is more famous than me).

  That being said, nothing’s ever gone from the internet and there’s no way to retroactively wipe those pages, what with the Wayback Machine and all. The best advice I can think to give you is, if you feel that doing your webcomic leaves you open to sanction, be sure that you never update on contribute to it from work, and can document it (i.e.: keep your server logs). Don’t even visit your own site during work hours. Good luck with the dick jokes, and if anybody reading this actually is a lawyer, feel free to provide advice that’s actually worth something.

• To wrap on a happy note, how about one thing that is the opposite of disturbing? In Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport/Aéroport International Macdonald-Cartier d’Ottawa (at least at the terminal that sends you to Merica after pre-clearing Customs & Immigration) you will find a cardboard stand in the RELAY magazine shop, chock full a’ BONE color volumes. This cheered me immensely and actually makes me feel generally good about the future (or at least the future of those travelling through gates 1-13 of YOW).

I met Box Brown at SPX a couple years ago, just as Bellen was making a splash, but haven’t run into him (in person) since. I’m hoping to remedy that in the near future, but in the meantime, I can listen to him, as he’s been recorded for all & sundy to listen to as Air America’s first Unemployee of the Week at Break Room Live. Whatever your politics, you can’t beat listening to a webcomicker talk about comics, porn, and not going into the office.

In related news, Brown informs us that he’s been told that Diamond will not hold Xeric winners to their new order minimums, so you should be able to actually purchase Love Is A Peculiar Type of Thing in your friendly local comics shop this spring. Hooray!

• It’s gonna be a busy, happy time in the Carly Monardo/Chris Hastings household in a couple weeks. Hastings has that big-ass show with Onstad and North on April 11th, and Monardo is going to be part of a group show at MyPlasticHeart in Manhattan, with the opening reception the night before. Contacted by Fleen to determine if she’s working in the toy medium, Monardo replied:
  

  I will be doing a digital illustration fine art print MASTERPIECE (I hope).

  We at Fleen are leaning towards “masterpiece”. The show is themed around the signs of the Chinese Zodiac, and Ms Monardo will be holding forth on The Rat. Look for awesome photos in the coming weeks.

• Charity updates: Team Webcomics at Kiva has now lent nearly $20,000 damn US dollars, and I just got notice that the first repayment on one of my loans has come in. If you’re not part of the Team, I can now vouch that (at least in my experience) Kiva works as it claims to, which is pretty damn neat. And Kate Beaton reports that while eBay ganked her charity auction, she still managed to sell her piece for $450 for the Maritime Museum of British Columbia. Well done, Ms Beaton!
• Oh, and speaking of well done Ms Beaton, should we mention that she’s a nominee for Best Emerging Talent in the prestigious Doug Wright Award for Canadian cartooning? Why, yes, I believe that we should. Doubly well done, Ms Beaton (and many thanks to Sebastien Brodeur-Girard for the link to the CBC story).

So — yeah. Gonna be huge. Let’s knock down a few things and call it a day.

• On Saturday night in the Greater New York Mediasphere, Channel 13 broadcast Sita Sings the Blues, an ambitious piece of a feature-length animated movie made primarily by one person that’s stuck in it’s own version of copyright limbo. So why am I mentioning this on a webcomics blog? Because of the last bit of the end credits, which look like this, and because of the movie’s homepage, which reads (in its entirety) like this:
  

  Dear Audience,

  I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

  You don’t need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.

  That said, my colleagues and I will enforce the Share Alike License. You are not free to copy-restrict (“copyright”) or attach “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) to Sita Sings the Blues or its derivative works.

  Some of the songs in Sita Sings the Blues are not free, and may never be; copyright law requires you to obey their respective licenses. This is not by my choice; please see our restrictions page for more.

  There is the question of how I’ll get money from all this. My personal experience confirms audiences are generous and want to support artists. Surely there’s a way for this to happen without centrally controlling every transaction. The old business model of coercion and extortion is failing. New models are emerging, and I’m happy to be part of that. But we’re still making this up as we go along. You are free to make money with the free content of Sita Sings the Blues, and you are free to share money with me. People have been making money in Free Software for years; it’s time for Free Culture to follow. I look forward to your innovations.

  If you have questions, please ask each other. If you have ideas, please implement them — you don’t need my permission or anyone else’s (except for the copyright-restricted songs, of course). If you see abuses, please address them, but don’t get bogged down in arcane details of copyright law. The copyright system wants you to think in terms of asking permission; I want you to think in terms of freedom. We’ve set up this Wiki to get things started. Feel free to improve it!

  I’ve got to get back to my life now, and make some new art. Thanks for your support! This film wouldn’t exist without you.

  Love,

  –Nina Paley
  28 February, 2009 [block emphasis mine]

  Sounds … familiar. Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t seen Sita yet, you can catch a variety of download sites, or 13 is streaming it; you’re in for a treat. And after you’ve watched it, go thank creator Nina Paley, ’cause she’s one of us.

• In other news, in case you hadn’t picked up on the drink recipes at Lore Brand Comics, today‘s establishes Lore Sjöberg as a drinker of the highest quality. You just don’t see the Dark ‘n’ Stormy very often, but damn it’s tasty.
• Finally, Chris Crosby has his hands in so many different aspects of webcoimcs, he can’t help but trip over an anniversary just by going to the fridge to get himself a tasty beverage. Today, Sore Thumbs heads off to kindergarten, ’cause it’s five years old. At the risk of sounding redundant, Fleen congratulates Crosby, and illustrator co-creator Owen Gieni.

Quickly, Robin! To the Linkmobile!

• New weekly comic at Modern Tales, and MT editor Shaenon Garrity does her customary interview with the creator, Aaron Neathery over at TalkAboutComics.
• Speaking of TalkAboutComics, Eric Millikin points us all towards Interface: The Journal of Education, Community and Values out of Pacific University Oregon, where Maria Walters overviews our lil’ world to formal academia. Corduroy jackets with patches on the elbows optional.
• ‘Member way back when I thought the TV Tropes list of long-running webcomics was fairly complete? You people keep proving me wrong; this is good, as it will hopefully make for a more comprehensive resource.
• Matt Boyd talks to American Born Chineseauthor Gene Yang. Awesome stuff, particularly the bit in the middle about Cousin Chin-Kee and finding your tribe.
• Speaking of awesome stuff, Paul Taylor‘s getting close to the final sculpt proof of his Monica collector’s statue. Those interested, pre-orders have been met and production moves forward.
• Need to congratulate/console somebody on their beard? David Malki ! will give ’em a phone call for free.
• Planet Karen photoshop files safe! Also, fourth anniversary of the strip! Double hooray!
• Finally, for those who don’t follow Ursula Vernon‘s LiveJournal, the people in today’s episode of The Devil’s Panties are Ms Vernon, her sweetie-pie Kevin, Panties creator Jennie Breeden, and K. Brooke “Otter” Spangler. We’ve heard Vernon’s take on this trip, and her gentleman’s, now it’s time for words + pictures. Pull up a seat and grab some popcorn, kiddies … this is gonna be good.

Per yesterday’s note about Scott McCloud’s return to webcontentery, he’s off to a roaring start with a pointer towards The Grimace Project (note: McCloud’s site doesn’t seem to support direct linking of posts yet, so head to his LiveJournal instead).

Short form: it’s a software toy that lets you mix-n-match the emotional states from McCloud’s Making Comics, then shows you what the resultant face looks like; it looks like an invaluable tool for artists wanting to convey emotional states without confusing the reader.

Shorter form: it’s addictive as all hell. I’ve spent half the day trying to come up with a good mix to express schadenfreude (I think it might take more inputs than the system presently allows). Also, if you leave it alone, it cycles through emotions. Creeee-py.

• Also per yesterday’s posting, an anonymous correspondent has a different take on the UF/MeFi blowup. Snark ahoy.
• When you can’t handle the concession stand at Universal Studios, make webcomics: Tatsuya Ishida recounts his pathways to success and announces that Sinfest will be published by Dark Horse come June. Speaking of Dark Horse, we’re informed by alert reader Jake Stevens that their next Dark Horse Presents on MySpace installment (generally around the first Wednesday of the month) will include the lovely and talented Kate Beaton, David Malki !, and Chris Onstad.
• Speaking of books, you can now complete your Narbonic run with Book 6, courtesy of Shaenon Garrity. Your bookshelf could use some pink — it’s cute. And evil.

Via Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and other channels, the story of how the surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus decided how to fight the tide of low-quality clips of their work showing up on YouTube.

Rather than the usual take-down notices and lawsuit threats, they made a huge selection of high quality clips freely available in their own channel, pointing out that the proper thing for those who enjoy the laugh-chuckles to do would be to buy the DVDs. They increased sales by 23,000%, or a 230 times growth factor.

Now I haven’t seen any absolute numbers, so it could be that they went from 10 units a week to 2300 units a week, and that’s less impressive than if they went from 1000 to 230,000 … no, you know what? It’s freakin’ impressive no matter what the baseline number was.

No doubt there will eventually be a plateau effect, when everybody who was ever willing to buy the collected Monty Python DVDs has done so, and the addition of new consumers occurs at a much lesser rate than the giant rush of pent-up demand that we’ve just seen rushing out into the channels of commerce like a huge, metaphor-laden thing.

But from my perspective, it’s just another example of the rewards possible when you provide compelling & quality content, develop a relationship with your audience, give them a means to support you, and invite them to do so.

• Speaking of the free model, it allows cool toys and remixes of content that I like. Say, panels eight and nine of this Octopus Pie, which now invites your own contributions of words to horrify Eve Ning.
• Also vaguely on the idea of free — El Santo at Webcomic Overlook interviewed comics creator (and Zuda contestant) Neil Kleid, and started out with what seems to be the new baseline when discussing independence vs. publishers in webcomics: Spike’s Greater 1% Theory. Interesting read.
• Nothing to do with free at all, but probably the last bit of inaugurania, from xkcd.

Okay, everybody who’s not read Jim Zubkavich’s Makeshift Miracle, stop right damn now and go start from the beginning. Now do yourself a favor and pick up the print version, because it reads even better in book form. Now ask yourself, Why is Gary pushing a two-three year old book that prints pages that ran on the web like seven-eight years ago, cool as it may be?

The answer, Bunky, is because of what Zubkavich has been up to since then. Bit of design work, some artwork for a mildly obscure RPG there, and oh yeah — artwork for a new browser game … a little thing called ZORK.

Holy.

Crap.

Zubkavich is the lead designer, contributing all the characters and monsters, and was aided by a terrific logo design from the able hands of fellow webcomicker Indigo Kelleigh. Honestly, the only thing that could make this cooler is if the soundtrack busts some phat rhymes.

Okay, that’s really beyond clever, given the past little bit in Starslip Crisis has led us to confront the possibility of a ‘slip going bad. Anybody besides me worried by the broken navigation button that’s visible about halfway down on the right edge? Oh, and while this piece of beauty is presently at the main Starslip page, by next week it may be visible here instead. Now go look at it some more.

• After a seemingly interminable delay, both Gunnerkrigg Court and The Devil’s Panties have their new books in comics shops (and my house). The quality of Tom Siddell’s work in Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation is especially apparent, and it caused a vetern comic-shop clerk to go “Oooh, what’s this?” and “I have to buy this now” while I was being rung up.

  Here’s hoping that both books are a big damn success for Siddell and Jennie Breeden, as I don’t want to wait forever for the inevitable next volumes (not wanting to be at the mercy of a publisher Breeden is already taking orders for a self-published Book 3, which should see release in about a month).

• David Malki !‘s interview is now up at The Sound Of Young America (and will likely be part of this week’s radio broadcast), and it’s good listenin’. And for those of you able to lay your hands on the print edition of The Onion, there’s an extra-special Wondermark bonus in this week’s issue (if you’re gonna get cut with the rest of the comcis page, why not run a coupon for 10% everything in the Wondermark Goodsery?
• So David Morgan-Mar has been doing some pretty simple strips for more than a week now, but has obviously been using the time to work on today’s annotation (make sure you have the annotations turned on, and cookies enabled). It’s an essay and an exercise in something like natural philosophy (which is what they used to call science) starting on the topic of “black” and ending up with how we know all about the stars around us. Between this and the latest podcast of Radiolab, I am feeling pretty damn edjumacated right about now.

  I suspect it may also have some bearing on the color shift we’ve seen since New Year’s Eve — things are getting cooler in the 14 themes, possibly down to about, oh, 2.725K or so. You know, the sort of thing that might happen when, say, a new universal reality is sudden assembled. And since that little thought brings us suspiciously back to what’s happening at Starslip, I’ll wrap it up here. Have a great weekend.

It started in the first half hour of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, when host Liane Hansen spoke with technology commentator David Kushner about Penny Arcade. It’s not a very detailed piece, running a little less than three minutes, and somehow Kushner managed to completely avoid mentioning the Fruit Fucker (despite talking about On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness), and nobody from PA was included, but still. This is probably the first mention of webcomics that many of NPR’s audience will have heard, and the outraged letters that they’ll write because of offended sensibilities will be amusing.

The day continued with a piece in the New York Times that’s really about how the challenges currently facing newspapers are confronting comic strips as well. This piece was notable in my mind for two quotes, which I will reproduce for you here. Quote the first:

Cartoonists are not waiting for the syndicates to develop new business models. They are posting to free sites like Comic Genesis and Webcomics Nation. Some Web comics, like “The Argyle Sweater” by Scott Hilburn, have been picked up for syndication, but that is unusual. Even more rarely, a Web comic might attract a large following at a stand-alone site; such is the case with “Penny Arcade,” a video gaming strip.

I’m not sure that the second statement is factually true. I think that there have been more Web comics [sic] that have made it big on their own than have been picked up for syndication. The problem here likely lies in the idea of what constitutes a reader. “Generic Newspaper Comic Strip” may appear in 1000 newspapers with a combined circulation of tens of millions, but how many of those papers are actually read, how many copies get shared between people, how many readers actually read “GNCS”, and how many do so casually rather than actively?

By contrast, the active nature of having to go get (or at least, subscribe to an RSS feed to) the latest Penny Arcade (or PvP, or xkcd, LICD, QC, C&H, or any of the other high-draw webcomics) means that you have a dedicated reader. I would submit there is a greater potential to make a living with a few tens of thousands of dedicated readers, versus a million people that glance over “Cathy” only because it’s in front of them, requires no effort to do so, and is an ingrained habit of decades.

The more interesting quote was the second one:

But Brian Walker … warns that too much exposure “can take away from the strip itself.” If a comic’s characters are everywhere, he asks, why bother reading the newspaper strip?

And Mr. Walker, who is also a comics historian, believes that comics are best appreciated on paper. He likens reading a comic on a screen to watching a movie on an iPod: the general idea comes through, but some of the essential artistry is lost.

For reference, Walker is part of the creative team of two strips, and one may reasonably assume that some of the essential artistry he’s concerned about is from those two strips. Those two strips are “Beetle Bailey”, and “Hi & Lois”.

I can’t even bring myself to make a snarky comment about the words “essential artistry” being used in reference to those two strips, because even the best strips on the modern comics page are squashed into such a small space as to force the art to be reduced to a minimum of line, design, and dialogue. It’s not the screen that damages artistry (as proved by eye-poppingly gorgeous strips found here, here, here, here, or any other example you care to think of) … it’s the act of printing in newspapers itself.

Heck, take the shrinking space issue away, and you still have inherent limitations of the technology of fast-turnaround printing with ink on newsprint. Cheap paper plus rush jobs do not allow for great art. For a good discussion of the issues surrounding quality art on the comics page, I recommend Dave Sim‘s Glamourpuss; the guy may be really wacky, but his scholarship of the great draughtsmen of the comics page — Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and others — is second to none. Read up on how badly the artistic efforts of strips produced without space limits were butchered to get them to reproduce on newsprint, then consider how those limitations don’t apply to screens.

Fortunately, I have a ready guide to gifts in hard times courtesy of Chris Onstad. Now that the Great Outdoor Fight book tour is wrapped, hopefully he’ll have time to continue making and writing about sandwiches.

Mailbag Quickies:

• Animated holiday card from The Wannabe Pirates.
• Open auditions for new members through the end of December at webcomics collective SpiderForest
• New chapter and some pages to go with it at Kitty Hawk. ‘Bout eight weeks back I wrote that Kitty Hawk’s several-pages-per-weekly-update model would likely let the story evolve in a FreakAngels-like fashion. Since then, I have decided that:
  1. It’s a bit more … not episodic exactly, but composed largely of brief vignettes
  2. Like FreakAngels, I enjoy reading this one occasionally, with multiple updates giving me plenty of pages to pore over

  Pop over and see how you like it.