I’d be willing to be that if I went back through the three years of Fleen postings and looked at all the days that absolutely nuthin was happening in webcomics, the majority of them would be Thursdays.

But here’s an item of some interest: while the MoCCA website lists the 2009 Art Fest dates (6 and 7 June), it says that registration and venue are “coming soon”. But Raina Telgemeier (whom all and sundry should both love and trust) is reporting today that the 2009 MoCCA show will be shifting from the Puck Building to the 69th Regiment Armory, which is no stranger to art shows.

No idea what the space inside is like, although I believe it’s probably got more room than the Puck Building. If you’ve not exhibited at MoCCA before (or have been unable to get space), keep your eye on the MoCCA website … I’d guess they’ll be able to accomodate more people this year. And while the Armory isn’t in SoHo, 26th & Lex isn’t a bad neighborhood for cool stuff at all. See you there in six months or so.

By the way, you know that every MoCCA inevitably leads to webcomickers in search of karaoke, right? And in case you hadn’t seen it, Dr McNinja creative team members Chris Hastings and Carly Monardo apparently get to sing karaoke with their buddy Bill Murray. Lucky little so-and-sos.

Although to be fair, I love Dylan Meconis and Erika Moen more. I mean, they do awesome comics like Family Man, Bite Me, and DAR, while you’re the sort that hangs around reading my stuff which quite frankly brings your taste into question.

Anyways. Dylan and Erika are doing a live broadcast later today, and will be answering questions from readers. I’m on EMT duty tonight and can’t participate, so y’all need to step up and make sure it’s the best livecast ever (what I said about your taste above? That was totally about the guy three IPs down from you).

The fun kicks off at 7:30pm Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8), at The Erika Moen Show (brought to you by Ustream), and will run for an hour or so.

Making the rounds — a question from Rick Marshall (tireless promoter of cool things and friend to children everywhere) to various webcomic creators: Who would your characters vote for? Answers so far from Rene Engström and R Stevens in their LiveJournals, and by the time you read this, Marshall should have a collection of responses at his blog. Oh, and Rick? Keep coming up with cool ideas like this one before I have a chance to, and I’m bringing back the Sleestak references. Just sayin’.

• The official rapper of webcomics sees his new CD shipping today; those of you that pre-ordered have probably been enjoying the downloaded tracks, but I’m a physical artifact kind of guy. That’s why I’m extremely pleased that The Front slid me a disk a few weeks back and I’m loving it. Bear in mind — I’m a suburb-livin’ white guy who can no longer deny that he’s in his forties, and thus not the prime audience for hip-hop of any sort. But Final Boss (like its predecessors) has earned its spot in heavy rotation for my commute — the only thing that makes me feel better about facing the working day than Front is Radio Lab, and Jad & Robert don’t rap.
• Hey, webcomicker! Ever wish you could bend the ear of an entertainment lawyer? Joey Manley wants to hear from you. Expressed by the Colonel:
  

  Over the next few months, I will be doing a series of podcast/interviews with Phyllis Kaufman, a leading media/entertainment/intellectual property rights attorney here in NYC. The goal of these interviews will be to help give webcartoonists a sense of how to successfully negotiate a publishing/movie/videogame/etc. licensing deal.

  We’re still trying to figure out a structure for the set of interviews (whether we’ll take it medium by medium — a book deal podcast, a movie deal podcast — or issue by issue — or what). But I hope and expect that these interviews will be useful and meaningful.

  If you had Phyllis in the room with you, what would you ask her about this stuff? And if you have a contract that you’ve signed or are about to sign, would you be willing to share it with us (we promise never to tell anybody), so that Phyllis can speak with an understanding of the actual kinds of deals that people are having shoved at them? I’ve already shared with her the Zuda and the TokyoPop contracts, both of which are public info, but any further information we can obtain would be useful.

  Responses can go directly to Joey, whose surname is Manley, and has been known to keep an email address at the Google-based email service, which I understand is a dot-com.

What’s that? Another webcomicker with a Hollywood option? News came yesterday that Agnes Quill by the prolific Dave Roman (with the help of various other creators) has been picked up for development. For those of you new to the game, Dave and his wife Raina Telgemeier are, in addition to scary-talented, two of the nicest people in indy/webcomics you’re ever likely to meet. Between this and the publication pickup of Raina’s SMILE: A Dental Drama, it’s turning out to be a very good year for the kids from Brooklyn Queens dammit I knew that, thanks for the correction, Dave.

But just so we’re all clear, this does not necessarily mean that we’re gonna get an Agnes Quill movie; it means that the producers have negotiated for the right to make such a movie. A’course, Dave gets the financial benefits of that transaction whether or not the movie is ever made (and as has been pointed out before, more than one Hollywood idea-fountain has made a tidy living by not having movies made — options that expire can be resold again and again), so everybody be happy for Dave!

While we’re on the subject, anybody notice this peculiar corinsidence? Word of the Amulet deal came around St Patrick’s Day, Last Blood got announced on April Fool’s Day, and Agnes Quill in the immediate vicinity of Halloween. Look for the next big webcomic/movie deal around Groundhog Day.

• Speaking of Comics Bakery, their frequent convention boothmate (and my EE-knowin’, right-hand-rule-throwin’ brother) Kean Soo sends word that the second Jellaby book (Jellaby: Monster In The City) is now available for pre-order, with a release date and every damn thing. Unfortunately, it’s not until April, but maybe it drops a little bit early? Maybe? In the meantime, enjoy this Jellaby short.
• Finally, in the not quite ten days since the return of webcomics.com under the aegis of the Halpixel lads, there’s been some really good stuff going up. If you haven’t been over there yet, let me recommend particularly Krishna Sadasivam‘s practical tips on using ComicPress, Dave Kellett‘s interview with Karl Kerschl, and Chris Eliopoulos‘s on how you either make comics because you want to, or because you can’t not make them. If the entire community continues to contribute quality material like this, they’re gonna put me out of business and I get to sleep more — sweet.

Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz dropped some hints about this to me when we had dinner back in September — it’s The Dresden Codak Show (in color)! According to Diaz, it’s not Dresden Codak the webcomic brought to live action — the title is the same, and many of the big themes will be present, but it’s a different story for a different medium. But don’t take my word for it — drop by APE this weekend and ask him yourself.

• Jeff Rowland‘s got yo’ notability hangin’ (‘long wif a two-week supply of IGNINT MCNUGGET): his leg has been immortalized on Wikipedia, under the topic of warning seriously awesome icky photos “necrosis”.
• Free lesson of the day: Howard Tayler shares some hard-earned wisdom on shipping, while freely acknowledging that most of the hard earning was done by his wife, Sandra. To wit — how to ship a thousand packages in six hours, from a series of blog posts by Sandra during the process.

  Short version: you don’t just ship packages at a rate of 167/hr by showing up on the big day. Things start weeks earlier with order collection, getting said orders into a useful order, getting the inventory whupped into shape, getting all the postage arranged, before finally stuffing stuff into stuff-holders.

  To be clear — following exactly these instructions will not work for you the way it worked for Sandra and Howard. You’ll have to work out your own methodology to keep massive shipping events under control, but stealing ideas from Sandra is probably a very good starting point.

I think it’s officially on the way to being a movement now: last week, R Stevens and Sam Brown held an experiment. Noting that there are no longer many shared cultural experiences in a world of thousands of channels and easily-accessed internet porn, they declared that at 8pm EDT on 23 October, everybody should listen to Michael Jackson’s Thriller all the way through.

Time for the second instance of shared culture: tomorrow night, 10pm EDT, it’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars by David Bowie, and you can tweet along with Sam ‘n’ Rich. Give this a few more weeks, and we’ll be talking “watching Apollo 11 land” levels of worldwide shared experience.

In other news:

• Following up on our thoughts about the blurring line between webcomics and episodic games, part two of On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness drops today.
• Just over a year ago, Ryan Estrada and John Campbell launched the Cartoon Commune from Mexico. They’ve moved on from the country in question, but the urge to communally cartoon rises strong, and Estrada has announced Cartoon Commune 2.0 for all your quick illustration needs, with a stellar array of talents just waiting to draw for you.
• Finally, as we hurtle headlong towards the spookiest day of the year — filled with ghosts, goblins, witches, sexy soldiers, sexy devils, sexy catgirls, sexy cops, sexy Ghostbusters, sexy barristas, sexy devils, sexy pirates, and God help us, sexy Alan Greenspan — okay, maybe it’s not so spooky. Unless you’re in Detroit, where Eric Millikin, wrangler of monstrous images extraordinaire, is going to be part of a show of macabre art. The disturbing images of the damned that will haunt your dreams and waking hours until the sweet release of death fun kicks in tomorrow night, at Tangent Gallery/Hasting St. Ballroom. Head over after you finish listening to Ziggy.

I’m gettin’ old … the fall clean-up chores didn’t used to leave me this sore. Perhaps some news from the world of webcomics will cheer me. Let’s start with a new twist on the Original Strip Merchandise Model from Chris Baldwin:

Over the past couple of years I have received many emails from people who wished to purchase a strip, but found it was sold before they got to it. I am now offering to re-draw ANY strip for $80. And worth every penny.

There’s an interesting tension here between desirability and scarcity — common wisdom is that part of the appeal of original strips is that there’s only one of them out there. On the other hand, I’m really kicking myself for not acting quickly enough to buy the April 14, 2007 and October 13, 2008 strips. On the other other hand, I’ve been saying for years that Baldwin criminally underprices his originals, and will be intrigued to see if the hand-drawn do-overs — which are twice the price of the $40 originals — do well for him. Plus there’s this:

Not only will I make sure that any strip ordered before November 1st will be drawn and mailed by December 1st, but also the funds raised will be going directly into the Little Dee book#3 fund, which should be to the printer around year-end, and hopefully to you by February or March. [emphasis mine]

So that’s all good. I will also vouch personally for the worth every penny comment above; Baldwin’s one of the few creators that does full inking and lettering on Bristol, so the originals look absolutely stunning. And if any other creators take up this approach, I can think of at least one other strip I desperately need.

In other news:

• Ian Jones-Quartey’s fondly regarded in webcomics circles for the now-abandoned RPG World, and in I like awesome things circles and his work on Los Bros. Venturos — remember the hilarious bit with “the nozzle”? He directed that. But what I want to point out today is that the latest installment of his ongoing music/animation/improv experiment nockFORCE is a 32 track mixtape that you can listen to and enjoy — so make with the downloading of Siege at Death Mountain.
• Happy Birthday to John Allison; in lieu of cards, he has a special birthday-boy request:
  

  The best birthday present you could give me is putting about the rumour on the internet that Scary Go Round is not hard to get into and a new reader’s worst nightmare. Let’s get that idea out there. I think you could read any of the stories in the last year in isolation without needing footnotes.

  Rumor started, and as an added birthday bonus, rumor sincerely believed in my heart.

• Dirk Deppey at ¡Journalista! linked to a post at the MAD blog about a freelance artist urban myth by Tom Richmond. ‘Tis very amusing and all, but I’m going to refer you especially to the final paragraph, whereby even a likely-specious story has an important lesson for us all:
  

  For me, I never sign my work when I am being provided a by-line, but I am thinking of insisiting I place my full name in each image thanks to the possible passing of the Orphan Works Act. I think that having a signature in a hard-to-miss place in each image might go a long way to preventing it being considered “orphaned”.

  I’ll admit that the OPA is looking more likely than I gave it credit for earlier this year; if it survives challenges and the back-burnering of everything not directly related to the global financialypse, this could be an important safety tip for all you campers out there.

Oh, yeah — I update the blog every weekday. Right.

• Missed it, but Dirk Deppey caught it: DJ Coffman‘s got the latest on Platinum/WOWIO non-payments. Key bit that jumped out at me:
  

  [Platinum head] Scott Rosenberg use to say to me a lot “Perception is reality.” He showed a lot of passion for promoting Drunk Duck and letting the creators do their own thing there and not interfere with the site. But now the PERCEPTION is that he did, or somebody there did, see this place as a mine for young creators. Many roped into contracts with that mobile side, not paid … lied to, as the above email suggests. The truth though is that Platinum Studios is poorly, poorly managed. And right now, there’s just no money to be had. They’re holding on for that big deal to come through, and it just might. And that’s ALL they care about. But at what cost?

  So we at Fleen are forced to ask again: have any creators been paid by WOWIO for Q2 yet? Answers on a postcard.

• Okay, whose heart skipped a beat at the sight of photo-rendered “Dark” Esther De Groot? Look for Esther & Sarah’s ‘zine to be all fumetti-stylin’ SGR for the rest of the week.
• A philosophical musing now, prompted by an email from a reader who identifies himself only as “Andrew”, regarding a videogame that I had not heard of (I have no game appliance in my home, and confess my interest in the medium is mostly sparked by new Civ iterations):
  

  I know this is old news, but I’ve barely seen any notice in webcomicsland — Penny Arcade plugged Braid, but no one’s pointed out that the art bears the unmistakable stamp of David Hellman from A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible.

  Unmistakeable stamp indeed, Andrew — the screens I’ve now gone and looked up for Braid are a welcome breath of ALILBTDII-style goodness from Hellman.

  The question occurs to me, can videogames of an episodic nature (like On The Rain-Slick etc., or BONE) be considered a branching or outgrowth or form of webcomickry? Considering that a webcomicish (and yet … more) enterprise like SBEmail is also almost a game-lite (what with all the hidden things to find), we’ve got a really blurry line.

  Looking back to last year’s Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic, the backlash against Steve Purcell was, as far as I can see, motivated more by the extraordinarily sporadic and slight updates, and not by the fact it was essentially an on-rails version of the Sam & Max game. We’ve already established a consensus that webcomics and indy (print) comics have largely merged into one entity — how much broader can the category become? Your thoughts, please.

So let’s try to find some fun where we can.

I should have written about this one yesterday, but I didn’t want it to get lost in all the other stuff. The opera made about this Dinosaur Comic is going to be performed in public. A guerilla group of musicians named Liederwölfe will perform the song of the sinister raccoons at 10pm this Friday, October 3rd, as part of the Pop Montreal independent music festival. So if you should find yourself in the vicinity of 30 Ste-Catherine Ouest, Montreal, and can afford a ticket price of Pay What You Can, you should be there.

Interviews!

• Rick Marshall talks with Sam Brown, who explodes dogs for your amusement.
• Von Allen of The Road To God Knows … talks to Jennifer Contino at The Pulse (Ms Contino is talking to lots of webcomickers these days, and we at Fleen wish to encourage her in this direction).
• Tracy White of Traced (and Ignatz nominee) talks to The XX-Man at ComixTalk. For good measure, White has turned the first Traced comic ever posted into an animation … time to remember your first time GETTING DRUNK.

If you didn’t happen to hear it, a 7:19 long broadcast interview with Achewood’s Chris Onstad is up at the NPR website. Highlights:

• About a minute in, 13.2 million people heard Steve “Ratboy” Inskeep make an oblique reference to cell phone nuts
• Starting around the 2:30 mark, Onstad reads four panels from page 29 (also here) in the voices of Ray and Roast Beef (!)
• An 11 page excerpt is to be found on the website of the highly-respected news organization with the disclaimer:
  

  (Please note that some users might find the language of this excerpt inappropriate.)

Lots of other things today, too.

• Ace Fleen contributor Jeff Lowrey sends us photos of Baltimore Comic-Con with this missive attached:
  

  Don’t really have a bad cosplayer photo, sorry. Best I could have done was a Harley Quinn with a bad camel toe … or a male Green Lantern also with a bad camel toe.

  I think we’re all glad that Jeff spared us. Anyway, check out the Halfpixel dudes (with Jinxlets and without), Danielle Corsetto & friend, and a crowd that seemed curious, but orderly.

• Scoop: Our sources indicate that Brad Guigar (shown in the photos above in a shirt that reveals his firm alignment with “villains”) is going to be getting a bunch more exposure. Starting on Wednesday, Evil, Inc will begin appearing in The Trend, a weekly publication that is direct-mailed throughout the greater Philadelphia metroplex. That’s right — you no longer have to take on the onerous burden of going to the website or buying a copy of the (Philadelphia) Daily News to get your dose o’ Guigar — he’s coming straight to over 800,000 mailboxes.

  The Trend is a weekly publication, and will run six strips in every issue. As he does in his annual collections, Evil-boy will convert the strips to read as continuous narrative. It’ll start with “best of” strips to catch new readers up, then dovetail with the current storyline about the time that other editions of The Trend get the strip in January, meaning 1.2 million people will get exposed to Evil whether they like it or not! Bwahahahaha!

• Finally, on Saturday evening, in the midst of a field and under a dark and forboding sky, Andrew Bell — creator of creepy, disturbing material from the darkest recesses of the imagination if not the bowels of hell itself — plighted his troth. The celebration reportedly included free-flowing alcoholic beverages (aka “demon rum”), dancing (aka “the Devil’s revels”) and a “photo booth” that collected the souls of all who sat within it (Ha! You didn’t get my soul, because I already sold it to Rosenberg for a dollar!).

  The bride, obviously aware of the horrors that await her and fully complicit in Bell’s wicked ways, was radiant, even as the depravity swirled around the tastefully-appointed tables. Two young women, in defiance of God’s will, swore to remove themselves to Massachusetts with all dispatch and “totally get married” to each other. Some of the various webcomickers in attendance mysteriously disappeared, returning later with blank visages, perhaps subjected to sights that Man Was Not Meant To See. There were cupcakes, which were delicious, but which possibly also damned the eater to an eternity of torment from which even death offers no respite. At press time, all guests were believed to be accounted for, and claimed nervously that they had a lovely time.

  In all seriousness, it was the second best wedding that I’ve ever attended (I do have to place my own first), and the most fun I’ve had in ages. I cannot possibly wish Andy and Jackie anything less than the greatest happiness, and urge you all to go check out the really cool guest strips running while they relax in a tropical paradise, lost in sun, sea, fruity drinks … and each other.