May all the angels and ministers of grace forgive me, I have backed a Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff book. Welp, I guess I have between now and April 2018 to do as much good as possible before that thing shows up and I lose all sanity. Again.

Doing Good 1: Hey, remember that talk that Kelly and Zach Weinersmith gave at the Strand Bookstore, which was recorded by C-SPAN? It was broadcast this past Sunday, and that means it’s now available for streaming at the C-SPAN site. Round about the 42:30 mark, I achieve a lifelong dream and get identified in a transcript as Unidentified Speaker.

Doing Good 2: I’m going to reiterate my call for all of you to purchase Shing Yin Khor’s Small Stories. It’s a slim, small volume — almost Moleskine cahier size — with Khor’s delicate watercolors perfectly reproduced, though ten stories of anger, redemption, hope, silliness, and magic. Some of them are heartbreaking¹, some are uplifting, some are both at the same time. She’s collected some of her best work from the past few years, and you will not find a better use of twelve bucks than this

Doing good 3: Looking to get some sweet, sweet webcomics merch for the upcoming Solstice-adjacent holiday(s)? Keep in mind that you can’t wait until the night before and expect to get stuff the next morning … Amazon may be working on direct teleportation via quantum entanglement, but your favorite webcomicker needs lead time. Also, sleep.

As a most optimistic guess, the TopatoCo shipping times calendar for Aught-Seventeen is probably representative of what the most on-the-ball creators can do. Probably want to order at least 4-5 days earlier for a lot of single-person operations, though.

Spam of the day:

Young cute blonde looking to cheat on my BF this weekend

Oh no, what if I am her BF? This is just like the pina coloda song.

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¹ On par with Trigger Warning: Breakfast, which was originally published anonymously, but which Khor has recently claimed.

[Header image below the cut to contain the horror]

Hussie, Green, and (motherfucking) Dril collaborating on a Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff project? I just got over the flashbacks from the last one.

(more…)

Want to see smart people talking about stuff? Time to follow some links, folks.

• First up, Brad Guigar¹ took the time to talk to Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett as part of his Webcomics Confidential webcast series [Webcomics Dot Com subscription required]; for longtime readers of this page, it was a hearkening back to the glory days of what he learned at the recently-held PatreCon 2017. The conference was invite-only, and while there are some talks from last year’s iteration publicly available (and the same will probably happen eventually for PC17), there’s not really an effective way to learn everything that happened without talking to somebody that attended.

  Guigar and Kellett’s discussion is a dense hour of key points about how to use Patreon to its best effect, and if you’re on Patreon there’s undoubtedly good info for you here. It’s well worth tossing Guigar five bucks for a 30 day trial to have a listen and take notes. I will give you one nugget though — there’s a killer discussion of whether it’s better to set up your Patreon to run per month or per update.

• Hey, remember when Kelly and Zach Weinersmith talked at Strand Bookstore and C-SPAN recorded it? That was great. It wasn’t known at the time when C-SPAN would be running the talk, but now it is:
  

  This Sunday at 7pm ET scientist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith report on future technologies

  That would be Sunday, 12 November. C-SPAN is on your cable lineup in that block of channels you don’t usually visit. or will likely be here sometime after the broadcast premiere. You’ll learn about how supermarket snickerdoodles will enable the hilarious robot apocalypse, space elevators, why quantum computing will never get a popular explainer, and Crypt-Keeper wasps all of which will be worth your time.

Spam of the day:
We are offering this to you because you are a registered member of the comic community.
Okay, I mock down here, but I want to be serious for a minute.

This disclaimer was at the bottom of an email imploring me to support a Kickstarter that recently concluded (it was sent approximately halfway through the successful campaign).

I’m not mentioning its name and I’m never going to mention it, because this? This was done wrong. You got my email from a list I’m on because I hold press credentials for SDCC; it’s meant for sending news and announcements.

While it’s acceptable to indicate that you’re running a Kickstarter, a press release is not the same as the give-us-money appeal that you send to your audience. People wanting to let me know about your thing, don’t do this.

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¹ A sexy, sexy man.

But Gary, I hear you cry, if you’re talking about Homestar*Runner, why do you have a picture of Grover at the top of the post? Bear with me. It will all relate by the end.

• Readers of this page will recall that I have, at various times, declared Homestar*Runner to be a webcomic, originally in the context of a discussion I was privileged to lead at Comics Camp this past April. Said discussion and declaration were sketchnoted by Jason Alderman.

  Alderman’s on my brain because of a tweet I saw earlier today; if you are lucky enough to be in Pittsburgh now-ish, and lucky enough to work (as does Alderman) in the support and design of museums, then you (like he) might just be attending the Museum Computer Network 2017 conference. And just maybe you were lucky enough to attend Alderman’s presentation (recently wrapped up as I write this) on how to make sketchnotes.

  It’s something that I want him to teach me someday, something that I think would make a really cool 27-part series here at Fleen, just as soon as I can convince him to create something so extensive for free. Or maybe one of the times he does one of these talks, I’ll get him to record it and post a link.

• But getting back to H*R, my point was that webcomics need not be ink on paper (or pixels on tablet), it can be anything that tells a story with a point of view, a direct relationship between creator(s) and audience, and the likelihood of collaboration. It can have sound and motion¹, but it has to have them for a reason; the creepy-ass blinky eyes of late-era FOOB² aren’t a reason. But used correctly, they can set a mood and serve a story, and that’s the other part of what I wanted to point you at today.

  I met Mike Grover at Comics Camp, and today he’s released the first chapter of a new limited-animation, looping soundtrack comic called Deeply Dave, and damn if it doesn’t do all the things you can do with webcomics that you can’t do with just comics. Grover provides the option to read it without the AV enhancements, and it’ll be a book eventually.

  For now, the repetitive motion brings more than a bit of depth³ and atmosphere to the story (especially considering the use of red and blue accents, reminiscent of the colors decoded by old style 3D glasses), making each panel appear to have far more going on that it would otherwise.

  The jittery images (think Squigglevision™) add a sense of menace to the presumptive Big Bad (the white circle eyes and heavy silhouette body remind me of the God Warriors from Nausicaä). The music is echoing, and distant — exactly the mood you want to convey the enormity of an ocean that does not care about you and could kill you at any time. Turn it down to just above the level of audibility for maximum effect.

  Grover may only be using the animation and music as a means of promotion, but I hope that he has the time to keep at it through each of the subsequent chapters. They’re super effective.

There you go: Camp, sketchnotes, Homestar*Runner, Gover, it all ties together. Now go forth and find your own weird coincidences in the world.

Spam of the day:

Today only: something SCARY GOOD

For the record, this spam did not get sent on Halloween Day, but rather five days after. Considering it purported to be a Pandora ad (although not from anything resembling Pandora.com) for spooky Halloween music, they really pooched this attempt to get me to click on totally innocuous links.

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¹ As opposed to Sound And Motion

² Which may not show up in the linked strip, but trust me — they were a horrorshow.

³ That is such a great joke and you don’t even get it unless you read the comic, so go read it already.

It’s been a long, long time since Providence blessed us with a running gag of this nature. Many, many years ago, a young lad (goodness, still in high school) named Ian Jones-Quartey did a damn fun webcomic called RPG World. Then one day, he stopped. People asked him about it a great deal at conventions and on panels after he transitioned to his animation career, where he’s worked on series like The Venture Brothers, Steven Universe, and OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes. He joked that every time somebody asked him about when RPG World was coming back, he would delay its return by a month.

I abused that promise, eventually offering a bounty of a dollar for anybody that would ask him, watching the expected return get pushed later and later. Alas, all good things, etc:

here’s the final RPG World comic from OK KO! more info: https://tmblr.co/Zgt2lx2QfJJZR

Here’s the most important bits of the very interesting, very satisfying story behind the comic:

A recent episode of my show OK KO!, A Hero’s Fate is a fully-absorbed finale of my old comic RPG World. RPG World was a comic that I made when I was a teenager(Starting in August 2000). A lot of people ended up liking the comic and I was a little too young to take that fact seriously. I never finished the comic’s story because… I was a flighty teenager and I ended up going to animation school.

Originally the story wasn’t going to have any specific call-outs to the comic but the storyboard team for the episode, Ryann Shannon and Parker Simmons crafted a narrative around Hero and KO learning to value the people in their lives AND their heroic ambitions.

Ryann created an epilogue to the episode which showed Hero returning to comic form to finish his story. I felt very embarrassed by this but it made so much sense in the storyss context. I leaned into it and using her rough version as a guide, drew the full ending page myself. I rummaged thru my supplies and broke out the same set of pens I used to ink the comic with, and scanned it on my same old scanner.

The whole thing has ended up being very cathartic. Knowing that Hero and Cherry will live on in endless worldwide repeats of this episode is mindblowing.

The story of RPG World proper ended in the middle of the story in July of 2005, or just about six months before I started blogging. A series of short interludes followed. The last real update was in June of 2007. And the RPG World page at Keenspot now lists the page above as the final, canon update.

It’s done. The running gag that’s been a running gag since before I started blogging is done. OK KO! got a great episode, RPG World got a finish, and Jones-Quartey got to revisit the story that lil’ baby Ian cut his teeth on. All in all, not back for a Thursday, and more than twenty years earlier than expected.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m behind on my watching of OK KO! and I need to remedy that.

Spam of the day:

Fergies new trick to weight-loss!

I’m really not the person to be advertised to by invoking Fergie. I firmly agreed with Nathan Rabin when he described the Black Eyed Peas as essentially a four-person advertising agency flimsily masquerading as a pop group. Think of them as the distinguished firm of Hologram Man, Meth Lady, The Other Guy, and The Other Other Guy, Inc.

Webcomics are, naturellement, a world-wide phenomenon; we at Fleen are pleased to bring you the latest news on the French webcomics scene, courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin.

• Montpellier¹ might not seem like a big city, but it does house a vibrant comics community, of which at least Paka (corny, untranslatable puns, with some exceptions) and Fabrice Erre (the life of a history and geography teacher in high school) maintain webcomics. These are very much anchored in local life … which also means they are unlikely to ever be translated (corny puns don’t help, either).

  But earlier this year they have been (re-)joined by Yllya (a previous veteran of comic blogs), another Montpellier dweller, who tells us about her Happy Family and in particular their daughter .. Their troll, pizza-hating, job-threatening, just plain evil daughter. Not only are those are available in English for your reading pleasure, but you can see the author improving her English strip after strip, up to a point it will soon be flawless. Highly recommended.

• Not only do Agat Films et Ex Nihilo produce the animated version of Tu Mourras Moins Bête (of which the second season has just started airing), they also unveiled a few images of their adaptation of Les Culottées on the occasion of the Cartoon Forum in Toulouse, and they seem to be doing a great work of adapting Pénélope Bagieu’s style. They are also there in order to look for foreign broadcasters; no word as yet on that front, but we at Fleen will be sure to keep you posted.

Many thanks to FSFCPL, and come back tomorrow for an analysis of the Girls With Slingshots omnibus Kickstart; we’re a little short of 24 hours (and thus outside the window to calculate the FFFmk2), but considering that (as of this writing) it’s sitting at US$97,824, I’m going to guess that the final total is: large.

Spam of the day:

Your 2017 Transunion, Equifax and Experian Credit-Scores as of Sep 16

Weird. In the aftermath of the Eqiufax breach, there’s plenty of disclaimers on the sites of Transunion, Equifax, and Experian about how they maintain credit histories, but do not themselves calculate credit scores, which are determined by outside algorithms. It’s almost like you don’t actually represent these bureaus and don’t know how they work. I’ll certainly give you all my personally identifying and financial information!

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¹ Full disclosure: you correspondent studied there for two years and has a number of relatives living in the area.

Wow, I missed a lot in a week; let’s jump in and see what’s up.

• SPX Occurred to the usual great acclaim and positive feelings. Fleen congratulates the attendees and exhibitors on a great weekend, and the Ignatz Award winners in particular. Representatives of webcomics in the winners circle include Der-shing Helmer’s The Meek as Outstanding Online Comic, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh’s Johnny Wander: Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us as Outstanding Collection, Taneka Stotts (editor) and the contributors to Elements: Fire — An Anthology by Creators of Color as Outstanding Anthology, Jess Fink’s Chester 5000 XYV as Outstanding Series, and Bianca Xunise for Promising New Talent.
• Still at SPX, various attendees at the show have stuff to share, now and in the immediate future. Lucy Bellwood¹ released a detailed public accounting on the Kickstarter campaign for her 100 Demon Dialogues book/plush. Sharing numbers like this makes it more likely that newer creators dipping their toes into the Kickstart waters will succeed not only in funding, but in not bankrupting themselves on the expenses post-fundraising.

  As of today, Bellwood is up about US$3500 on US$50,000 raised, an amount which could be shaved down further by unexpected circumstances. But even if everything finishes exactly as measured today, be sure to pay attention to that US$3.5K number, not the US$50K. It’ll be half a year’s work or more by the time Bellwood’s done, and while 50 grand for half a year’s work is a comfortable living, 3.5 grand is not even subsistence living. Anybody inclined to sneer about the huge amounts of dough Bellwood’s rolling in, do have the courtesy to know what the hell you’re talking about.

• Speaking of both SPX and Kickstarter, C Spike Trotman and Danielle Corsetto took time from the show to announce they’re partnering up to bring a comprehensive omnibus printing of Girls With Slingshots to Kickstarter. Corsetto’s got the 2000+ strips, Spike’s got the Kickstarter process down to a science, and later today when the campaign goes live we can all get in on what’s sure to be a handsome volume featuring color strips. Those of us that have all ten GWS books, the first five of which are in B&W, will get to decide how much we need everything to match. Damn you, Corsetto! And damn you too, Spike, for enabling her!
• Missed like a week ago: The 20th anniversary of David Willis’s comics, which started on 10 September 1997 in the Indiana Daily Student, starting a run that would continue through four strips until the end of Shortpacked! in January of 2015. The rebooted version of the Willisverse, Dumbing of Age, launched on 10 September 2010, and continues to this day². If you feel this accomplishment merits some in-person congratulations³, you can see him at Bloomington, Indiana’s Vintage Phoenix Comics this coming Friday, 22 September, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Give him a Damn you, Willis! for me.
• Missed last week: The Homestuck videogame came out and people really love it! It was near five years back that almost 25,000 backers raised almost US$2.5 million to make the game, which has surely been through many design changes and mutations in the time since. But with Homestuck creator Andrew Hussie aided by past and present webcomic creators like Ryan North, Christopher Hastings, Tauhid Bondia, and Kris Straub, it’s not really a mystery that people are very happy with the outcome.

  Even better for those put off by the infamously dense and deep Homestuck, consensus is that you needn’t be familiar with the epic to play the game. Hiveswap is available via Steam or the Humble store with blessedly modest system requirements.

• And finally, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith announced their Soonish book tour; at present, dates in Seattle, Denver, New York, San Jose, Dallas, and Austin have been announced. Check the map and get your tickets now — it’s the first time Weinersmith’s been seen in public outside of BAH!Fest in years, and no guarantee after the book tour he won’t scurry back into his dank cartoonist’s lair, never to emerge into sunlight again.

I think that’s everything caught up. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll have news from across the Atlantic/Atlantique courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin.

Spam of the day:

Bad news is, I must have underestimated the amount of people who wanted to get in … because Ted’s server actually fell over.

This is the most astounding spam of apology, as somebody from “Ted’s Sheds” is making amends for traffic problems by extending for one day only their amazing offer of 16,000 woodworking plans (presumably including plans for the eponymous sheds) for the low, low price of … they don’t actually say. Too bad I don’t need a shed.

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¹ Adventure Cartoonist!

² Seven years in, I don’t think we’ve made it as far as midterms in the first semester of freshman year; by the time they graduate, these characters will have changed even more than Willis himself.

³ And heck if there are many webcomickers that have been as consistent as Willis for two damn decades, which include such life upheavals as throwing off a fundamentalist upbringing, a marriage, and the birth of twin sons.

But I will point out that there’s still a few hours to contribute to the F-Six Hurricane Harvey fund-match giveapalooza. Contributions currently sit at US$175, which is less than I’d hoped, to be honest. I realize this is the third time I’ve come to you for the year, but the year continues to be garbage in ways that money will help with, so….

In the meantime, anybody want to watch Ryan North get totally smashed and recount the plot of his favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation? And then for a bunch of loonballs wrangled by Jon “Ferocious J” Sung re-enact said drunken recount? North’s contribution was recorded at San Diego Comic Con 2016¹, so I’ve been waiting quietly for this for more than a year, and it was worth it.

Good thing, too, as J is (as listeners to his regular podcast, Idea Factory Giveaway well know), he and his wife are expecting their first child around Halloween, meaning the time he has to don the ol’ Picard bald cap and engage in his other frivolities for our entertainment will soon be greatly curtailed. Dive in now while you can.

Spam of the day:

This article is great. It is very nice to read it. I want more. I cordially greet you.

If you can tell me one thing that post said, I will give you a dollar.

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¹ Fun fact: J had to obtain a better microphone for the interview portion, and one was lent to him by Isaiah Mustafa, aka The Old Spice Guy. That’s right, this whole ridiculous situation just got even sexier.

Readers of this page will likely know a few things about me: I stand second to no man in my admiration for the work of Katie Lane¹, I started in webcomics with You Damn Kid and will wait however long between hiatuses², and I had no real opinion on Pepe the Frog prior to his appropriation by the worst people in America. By extreme coincidence, these three things are all in the news today.

• Katie Lane said it best in a tweet:
  

  I’m tired of creators feeling confused and intimidated when they’re given a contract. So I made a thing. http://bit.ly/2xpFNth

  The thing in question is a free e-course for artists and freelancers on how to read contracts; don’t let the vaguely clickbait wording on the landing page deter you — this is solid information, it’s free, and Lane is undercutting her own professional practice by teaching potential clients to do something that they might have hired her to do for them. She just cares that much.

  So click the link, add your email, confirm your request, and about a minute later the first message will hit your inbox. You’ll get daily emails for the next four days, with advice on how to read a contract³, written for normal people. Why aren’t you doing this? I’m doing this because reading a contract is something I taught myself to do when signing a mortgage and I figure I can always use better info that what I figured out by my lonesome.

• Owne Dunne has been telling the stories of You Damn Kid and associated strips for as long as I’ve been reading webcomics; probably longer. The first webcomics stuff I ever obtained for money were a book, print, and t-shirt featuring the iconic Frog Rocket Wiener, and I’ve been sharing that factoid since at least 2008. He’s done many, many strips since I started reading back in Aught-Aught, or even Ninety-Nine. And while the original launch date of 12 June may have been a bit ambitious, but it’s here at last.

  While I was expecting either Classic style or New style YDK, and would have been thrilled for something related to Nippleshine Manor (RIP), the first animated short comes courtesy of Norman P Function, and concerns Stink Lines, dog adoption, and teaching canines methods of birth control that do not involve chop[ping your] nads off. It’s as exactly as uncontrolled as you suspect.

• There’s very little Matt Furie can do to reclaim Pepe the Frog; he killed Pepe off and Kickstarted to try to revive the positive aspects of the character. Terrible, terrible people, on the other hand, outnumber Furie by about a squazillion to one. One of those terrible, terrible people recently self-published (and later signed a contract with conservative-leaning Post Hill Press) a children’s book starring a frog called Pepe defending his farm from menacing Muslims.

  That shit would not stand.

  The terrible, terrible person behind this book (a vice principal in a Dallas suburb, until all of this hit) admitted to the blatant copyright violation and worked out an agreement with Furie’s lawyers in a very few days. The book has been pulled from Amazon and no longer appears in Post Hill’s Coming Soon section.

  Best of all, the terrible, terrible person behind this book has had to surrender all the money he made from it (a little over US$1500) and, at Furie’s insistence, is giving it to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Furie is a badass, and terrible, terrible people ought not to forget that.

Current fundraising for Houston total: US$100

Spam of the day:

True Wireless Earbuds With Amazing Sound

Man, I’d lose the buds I have now if they didn’t end up dangling from my iPod. Pass.

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¹ Light-ning Law-yer!!

² Hiati?

³ But not advice on what the terms mean; for starters, those vary state to state. You still need a lawyer and oh damn now you know one that’s giving you valuable info for free who would be happy to have you as a client (as long as you’re not a jerk; jerks need not apply).

Hey, the weather is distinctly non-Augustlike and I want to get out there, so how about a couple of quick pointers and we all enjoy the weekend? Got two things to share.

• Great news from Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, who’ve been away from one of their signature creations for too damn long. Capture Creatures has been incomplete and hiatused for too damn long … two years or so by my count. I have theories¹ as to why this is, but Gibson and Dreistadt are too polite to confirm these suppositions.

  But good news:

  Capture Creatures returns in 2018!

  I’ll try to get a confirmation if this is a relaunch, a continuation of the interrupted original run, or something else. Since I’m on the far end of the continent from Gibson & Dreistadt, I won’t be able to use my traditional technique of buying them drinks and hoping they volunteer something². In the meantime, dust off the old issues and refamiliarize yourself with Jory and Tamzen in anticipation. 2018 cannot come too soon.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a little breaking news about the insanest fight manga to not come from Japan, Last Man:

  Last Man [the animated series, last mentioned here] will air in English on [streaming app] VRV starting August 25th [i.e.: today] at 6:00pm ET, and director Jérémie Périn will be a special guest at Crunchyroll Expo [running today through Sunday at the Santa Clara Expo Center).

  As previously mentioned, Last Man (the book series) is batshit insane and good, and the fact that the tie-in series will be available to those of us on this side of the Atlantic is welcome news. Now to wait for the final volumes to get finished, translated, and released because boy howdy! Book 6 ended on one hell of a cliffhanger and I needs me some closure.

Spam of the day:

Free Trial Radar

Whoa, you’re giving away radar? Is that like a cut-down home version to keep track of your drones?

Free Makeup Brush – Claim Yours Now

Oh. It’s like a radar for finding free offers on completely ordinary stuff. Talk about burying the lede.

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¹ Namely, that the chronic disorganization and crappy (not to mention slow-walked) payment model at BOOM! ran into somebody that said no. I surmise that BOOM! is trying to treat the pair as they treat their work-for-hire newbies and don’t know institutionally how to interact with somebody that has the experience and knowledge to enforce their contractual rights.

To be 100% fair, for every BOOM! creator I’ve spoken to that has experience terrible treatment (on the business side, not the editorial side), I’ve spoken to another that has zero complaints and has been perfectly happy. How much of this is luck, or how much it’s BOOM! picking strategically who gets their limited attention³.

² I plied both Dreistadt and Gibson with excellent drinks in San Diego (adjacent to a wall decorated in 3D-printed human skulls, apparently left over from a Rob Zombie video shoot.), and could not get them to tell me anything on the record. As I recall, the conversation went something like this:

All: These are great drinks!
Me: Care to confirm my theories about how you’re getting screwed on Capture Creatures?
B&F: Nope!
Me: Fair enough. Let’s have more great drinks!

That’s some hard-hitting investigative pseudojournalism there, let me tell you.

³ Apparently, there was a time where BOOM! editor Shannon Watters was responsible for literally dozens of titles at the same time. I’ve gone back to pull their publication history and check mastheads, but I have been told by numerous sources that the number was upwards of fifty. That’s five-zero. If true, no matter how short a period, BOOM! was putting the crunch culture of Silicon Valley to shame as fucking amateurs in the field of running their people into the ground.