Ready for some cool stuff? Let’s do this.

• I’ll confess, when TopatoCon announced that it was shifting venues from the hotel/conference center to Eastworks, I had some trepidation regarding one of the cooler things that was on tap. To quote TopatoCo/Make That Thing/TopatoCon honcho Holly Rowland:
  

  [T]here will be table service that will bring you beer and chicken fingers.

  But that was in the context of a hotel! Would there be such amenities at Eastworks? Then again, the event schedule involves at least two separate sessions on Saturday that involve booze (one of which, I will be speaking), and now today comes further news:

  Hey! You! Do you like beer? We’re going to be hosting local beer tastings all weekend at the TopatoCon bar! […] Free with admission!

  I don’t have the capability for emoji here on Fleen, but there were no fewer than six emoji of frosty beer mugs in that tweet. And maybe we’ll get table service after all.

• I’m not sure what’s going on in the November/December timeframe in Austin, Texas, but it appears that the traditional season of Webcomics Rampage is shifting to earlier in the year this year. Dragon’s Lair — comic shop extraordinaire and WR sponsor — has announced that this year’s Webcomics Rampage (the seventh such) will be 16 – 18 October, with 14 confirmed guests so far. I hear that Austin’s really nice in October, and hope that running just a week after New York Comic Con doesn’t keep them from adding another webcomics luminary or two.
• This page has mentioned in the past the efforts of Katie Lane to help get creative types paid, including classes she’s run on that very topic, on multiple occasions. Today, I’m pleased to see that Lane is expanding her efforts and making it even easier for you to learn the skills you need to not get screwed on your work:
  

  The Ace Freelancer’s Guide to Getting Paid goes on sale next week! http://www.acefreelancer.com

  Before you follow that link, check out the tweet and the gif embedded therein; Katie Lane wants you to get paid.

  Okay, now click through and sign up for the next class session on how to get paid. If you have a history (and be honest with yourself) of falling into the trap of thinking that you’re overcharging, and how it’s not good to be pushy, and if you’re just patient they’ll surely get around to cutting your check sometime this century — you know, the lies the people who employ freelancers are trying like hell to transform into conventional wisdom — you can sign up for the super-duper version of the class that includes a one-on-one consult.

  Your work has value. Even if you aren’t charging much, you damn well have the right to be paid the amount agreed upon, in the timeframe agreed upon. The sob story being pushed by the people who agreed how much/when to pay you does not change your basic needs (i.e.: food and shelter) and you can cut through the bullshit and get what you are due.

  Like everything else in your career, getting paid is a skill, and investing in developing that skill will reward you for the duration of your working life. Look over the syllabus. Look over your billing history. Look inside yourself. And then do what you gotta do to get paid.

Spam of the day:

Though this is not recommended, you could wish to look around to be able to lenders until you are capable of amass just how much you will need from multiple small loans

Somewhere, Spike is preparing to nail a copy of Poorcraft’s chapter on debt and borrowing to the forehead of the sumbitch that wrote this spam.

We’re all over the place today, from the neatest, most encouraging news to the most horrifying visions of what eternal damnation must surely look like. I suspect that no two of you will precisely agree where on that scale each of these items will fall.

• Well, okay, I suspect that everybody will place the already-fully-funded Kickstart for Lucy Bellwood’s nautical comics collection, Baggywrinkles, on the positive side of that scale. It’s part autobio, part educational, a downright bargain with physical copies of the book going for as little as US$16, and featuring an all-new story about scurvy! And a very modest US$20K stretch goal will take the collection from B&W to color!
• Sticking with Kickstarter for the moment, we’ll note that Matt Bors was lying to us when he said that the Eat More Comics Kickstarter campaign would not have stretch goals, on account of they just announced some stretch goals. Every coupla’ thousand bucks from the US$45K goal means exclusive comics from the likes of Zach Weinersmith, Rich Stevens, Gemma Correll, and Bors himself.

  Even better, hitting US$60K means that all the artists — who are getting paid for their comics to run in the collection, on top of the pay they received to run at The Nib, on top of whatever they made from drawing them in the first place — will get a page rate boost. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the best part about Bors & Co is that they pay, and even if some of what The Nib ran made you grind your teeth and regret that money went/will go to cartoonists you despise, I can pretty much guarantee that even more money went/will go to cartoonists you love. Let’s help ’em make rent.

• Love ’em, hate ’em, wonder how they became so dominant in at least one field (webcomics) and superdominant in another (videogames), there’s no denying that the lads at Penny Arcade cast a long shadow and that they attract attention from outside both those areas of endeavour.

  This time it’s the advertising world, where Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik were named to a list of 10 visual artists who are remaking advertising, part of an overall list of the 100 most creative people in/adjacent to advertising. Also on that list with Krahulik & Holkins: Annie Leibovitz (the most important portrait photographer of the past four decades) and Brett Doar (who creates all those Rube Goldbergian installations for OK Go music videos).

  And as long as we’re on the topic, Randall Munroe was recognized not specifically for comics or art, but for his ability to create viral content that blows the hell up. Also on that list with Munroe: Serial’s Sarah Koenig. Looking at the other 80 names on the list, you’ll find the likes of John Carmack (for Oculus VR), Amy Schumer, Janelle Monáe, Mindy Kaling, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and a whole bunch of ad pros and commercial directors you’ll never have heard of. This time next year I’d expect to see Raina Telgemeier or somebody at Ad Week is missing the boat.

• Finally, I think that we all also will agree on which item definitely falls on the negative side of the scale: for all those who have ever seen Lar DeSouza’s Sailor Bacon cosplay has never been able to un-see that spectacle, that extravaganza, those bloomers. We can console ourselves that the display was always for a good cause (namely, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada), even if there was no way to convey the full horror to those that weren’t there to share in the mental scarring.

  Until now:

  In a grand effort to support me and my wife in our annual fundraising efforts for Multiple Sclerosis research, [Ryan] Sohmer and Blind Ferret have made available these adorable and somewhat disturbing Sailor Bacon plushies!! Designed by me and manufactured by the fine folks at Soft Stuff (who also donated a portion of their manufacturing costs to the MS Society of Canada!), these tiny ambassadors of hugs are now shipping from the BFE headquarters.

  You can order up one of these abominations and send it to somebody that needs a good disturbing! Why should you be the only one unable to ever sleep again without seeing … that … lurking behind your eyeballs? Drop your twenty five bucks, spread the madness, take some minor solace that this great sin against Nature benefits a worthy cause, or maybe just buy them all up and see if you can destroy them before they worm their way into your brain.

  It’s too late. They’ve got you. Pray for the mercy that you’ll succumb to sweet, forgetful madness quickly and Glob have mercy on your soul.

Spam of the day:

Your LED Flashlight Coupon, 75% off expires 07/21/2015

I’ll admit — this one almost got me. I’m a sucker for a good LED flashlight.

So I have a flight to catch, meaning this is going to have to be short; rest assured, each of these stories is worth many more column-inches¹ than I have time to give it right now.

• It’s a great time to be Noelle Stevenson! Hot on the heels of the Lumberjanes movie news comes word that Stevenson’s webcomic, Nimona, is to be an animated feature. You can take your pick of stories — I like the one from io9, personally — it appears that toute les bandes dessineés-web is thrilled for Stevenson, and even more thrilled that more people will get to be exposed to Nimona.
• It’s anniversary time in webcomicsland — Chris Hallbeck realized t’other day that it’s been five years since quitting the day job in favor of comicking, and put together a recapof his best office-themed comics. This one’s my favorite. And Howard Tayler² can probably tell you down to the minute exactly when he quit the corporate world to concentrate on Schlock Mercenary, which strip started on this day in 2000, resulting in 5479 consecutive days and 5479 consecutive strips. You make the rest of us look considerably less industrious than we would appear to be otherwise, Howard — congratulations, you unstoppable machine, you.
• This last piece is less about congrats and more about stop doing whatever you are doing right now and take five minutes to learn something. It’s been fallow times these past two weeks over at The Nib since parent company Medium messed with editorial focus and funding; editor Matt Bors has kept the lights on and run some longer pieces of what I’d call comic strip journalism, and today’s entry by Dale Beran is as good as such comics get.

  It’s a follow-on to his piece on the riots in Baltimore (where he’s a public school teacher) about six weeks ago, on the general topic of how “normal” times in the schools are both a perfect consequence of the situation that prompted the unrest, and a perfect predictor of the next situation. Go and read Warnings and Instructions right now, and the next time somebody tells you how “they” don’t care enough to do well in school, or don’t value education, or need to be willing to work harder to rise above their circumstances, share the link.

Spam of the day:

Hi,i believe t?at ? saww you visited my blg th?s i got here too return the favor?

World of Questionmarks is my new favorite site.

______________
¹ Or, if you don’t live in America, 2.54 many more column-centimeters.

² The best evil twin I could ever ask for.

Today’s post is not about spam in that it’s about something that actually is relevant to this page, but which was crafted so poorly as to make calling it out necessary.

Let me back up a moment and take a trip into history. There is an expression in the newspaper biz called burying the lede, where the lede is the leading idea of your story¹, the part you want the reader to take away. When you bury the lede, you hide that key idea in irrelevant information or fail to mention relevant information up front. The greatest possible example of such, the ur-buried lede, was promulgated by the Associated Press a little more than 150 years ago:

WASHINGTON, APRIL 14 [1865] — President Lincoln and wife visited Ford’s Theatre this evening for the purpose of witnessing the performance of ‘The American Cousin.'[sic, ²] It was announced in the papers that Gen. Grant would also be present, but that gentleman took the late train of cars for New Jersey.

The theatre was densely crowded, and everybody seemed delighted with the scene before them. During the third act and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard, which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious until a man rushed to the front of the President’s box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, exclaiming, ‘Sic semper tyrannis,’ and immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across to the opposite side, made his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience from the rear of the theatre, and mounted a horse and fled.

The groans of Mrs. Lincoln first disclosed the fact that the President had been shot, when all present rose to their feet rushing towards the stage, many exclaiming, ‘Hang him, hang him!’ The excitement was of the wildest possible description.

It takes until the third paragraph to get to the fact that Lincoln was shot. Now, while what I’m about to share with you is not that bad, it’s a pretty poor way to write a press release. I received overnight an email with the following subject line:

Press Release: Los Angeles Resident’s Comic Strip Now Available on GoComics

Los Angeles resident sounds an awful lot like The Onion’s Area Man. The fun continues into the body of the release which begins:

GoComics, a part of the Universal Uclick syndicate family, is excited to announce the addition of “Drive” to its lineup of new and classic comic strips, including Big Nate, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Garfield and Peanuts.

Created by Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, the comic strip “Drive” is now available on GoComics. Kellett is an award-winning cartoonist and the co-director of the hit documentary “Stripped”, which includes interviews with more than 70 cartoonists.

The fact that Dave Kellett live in LA is not the relevant thing that we should be discussing, people. The fact that he’s a longstanding creator of multiple strips, has published a dozen collections, been nominated for the highest awards in comicking, and is an award-winning filmmaker who go the first audio interview with Bill Freakin’ Watterson in decades are not less important that the fact he lives in LA.

Note that all those things I brought up are in the release, three paragraphs later, in an attached PDF.

I hate attachments. Best case: I have to download and open and go rooting through to get the information I need to write my story (or, quite possibly, cut-and-paste). Median case: the attachment is a goddamn image (let me be clear, that did not happen here, but it has happened in the past) meaning I have to re-transcribe the information that you want to share with me so I will share it with my readers — making it more difficult for me to tease out this information makes me want to toss your press release (or mock it).

Worst case: you have some hideous virus on your computer and your attachment infects my computer, which is why every other press release I’ve ever received with the relevant information in an attachment has gone straight into the trash and the topic that was meant to be shared died unloved and unmourned. I took the risk in this one case so I could find out if the useful information actually appeared. This will never, ever happen again.

I don’t mean to shit specifically on GoComics (and I’m not naming the person responsible for this steaming pile of failure); I’ve gotten plenty of bad press releases from individuals, and from PR shops both large and small. I just didn’t expect this stunning level of profound skill-lack from a very large syndicate with decades of experience dealing with newspapers (who, after all, are the traditional targets of press releases).

Take a lesson, kids. Nobody cares that General Grant took the late train of cars for New Jersey. Although one good thing came out of this: from now on, I will always refer to the creator in question as Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett.

Spam of the day: See above.

_______________
¹ Not lead; newspapers developed the alternate spelling of lede because at the time presses used type that was cast from molten lead (the metallic chemical element, Pb) and they wanted to avoid confusion. Not that anybody would be burying hot type in the ground or anything. Look, it’s a charming artifact of another age, okay?

² The play is actually called Our American Cousin, but we’ll give the reporter and fact-checker a break after a century and a half.

It’s a little somber up ahead; you might want to have a picture of adorable animal babies ready in case it gets too heavy.

• I had all sorts of stuff cued up to talk about today, but that’s before the news broke (scarcely fifteen minutes ago as I write this sentence) and all previous plans got scratched. A Softer World — bastion of weirdness and melancholy, in the best possible sense of all of those words — will be coming to an end:
  

  It’s the end of the world. A Softer World is ending, and we want to do something fun to celebrate! Are you with us?! tinyurl.com/RIP-ASW

  I feel like I just pushed a big red button.

  There have been other melancholy comics, other places where weirdness reigned supreme, but none so perfectly encapsulate the beautiful and banal horror of everyday life like the joint effort of Emily Horne and Joey Comeau; their comics pulled no punches and after more than 1200 they aren’t about to start now. This will not be an extended goodbye, old favorite characters trotted out to give their storylines a wrap-up¹; the trigger gets pulled today, the bullet lands in 27 days.

  Which date will coincide with the ending of the Kickstarter campaign to print a hardcover collection of the very best 200 strips from A Softer World’s dozen-year history. Emily Horne and Joey Comeau, claims in their Kickstarter video notwithstanding, are not going to fake their deaths and disappear in a month; they both will continue to share their creativity for as long as there are such things as photos and words.

  Well, Horne certainly will; Comeau’s always been the sort that you suspect will end up in circumstances that cause bystanders to be completely baffled until they’re running in terror. But until then, he’ll totally be sharing his words! Until then, you can ask them what their future plans (creative and/or destructive) this weekend at TCAF, where they’ll be exhibiting and delighting their fans.

• One other thing that was on my to discuss list for today fits the mood that’s come over Fleen Central today, so I think I’ll keep it. In my time writing this here page, I’ve been privileged to meet many, many creators; some were friends and acquaintances before I joined the ranks of pixel-stained wretches and have been kind enough to continue to be seen with me, others I have come to know specifically because I’ve pounded out maybe a million words on the topic of webcomics.

  It’s pretty unusual for well-known creator to be completely unknown to me, as I’ve been able to wrangle at least a passing Hey with so many. But for all that, I’ve never been lucky enough to meet the creators of the internet’s most sporadic piece of great art and know little about them. David Hellman has had acclaimed pursuits outside of ALILBTDII, but I knew nearly nothing about Dale Beran until this morning.

  Dale Beran, I learned, is a weekly contributor of comics to Baltimore’s City Paper, which has done so much valuable reporting of the terrible events of the past week, and which is not a newcomer to the story of inequality, economic challenge, and systematic oppression in the Charm City. I learned this because today The Nib ran a lengthy piece of cartoon reportage by Beran about navigating the recent events in Baltimore, where he is a public school teacher.

  It’s a powerful read — enlightening as to the sociopolitical state of Baltimore, depressing in the sense that everything we see happening now has happened in nearly identical form before² — and one that you should take ten minutes now to absorb. It’s not a new situation, but only first-hand accounts by observers that middle America will give credence to³ will get the rest of us to own up to the reality of what’s always been happening.

  I still don’t know who Dale Beran is from personal experience, but his words and pictures are doing a pretty damn good job of convincing me he’s somebody we should all know and listen to.

Spam of the day:

The many shades in brown, from dark to mild, will help you pick a unique one.

I don’t even want to know.

_______________
¹ It doesn’t hurt that they don’t have characters or storylines, apart from the ever-popular spot the Ryan North cameo.

² And unless we as a society are much smarter than we have been to date, will inevitably happen again.

³ That is to say, not the people who have to live on the receiving end of a system built on centuries of dehumanization and marginalization, who were not miraculously elevated to political and economic parity in 1965.

That is to say, a white guy.

You’re not helping! And I don’t want to be in the giraffe zone!

So, since the storm bearing down on me (and everybody else in the Greater New York City mediasphere, and all points twixt there and Boston) looks to be a doozy, I may or may not be able to post tomorrow. Wednesday may be out as well, as I have to spend most of the day on planes, assuming planes are still a thing after this winter joy goes through. Thursday and Friday, all day work meetings, meaning that posting may or may not happen. How’s your day going?

• Actually, mine isn’t that bad, considering I’m looking at between 45 and 60 cm of snow landing on me over the next 30 hours or so, not the least because I saw something on Twitter earlier today that made my heart go thumpa¹ — a new Perry Bible Fellowship strip! More than that, it’s the first of six new strips this week, proving that Nicholas Gurewitch loves us more than the fickle weather gods. I should note that Christopher Butcher also loves us, as he was the one that pointed me towards the Gurewitch tweet. Excellent dudes, both of them.
• You know where they definitely won’t be getting 45 – 60 cm of snow in the next 30 hours or so? Sydney. In fact, judging from the internet communiques of David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc), his corner of New South Wales², ‘Straya is suffering from record-breaking heat and never really sees snow anyway. Nevertheless, he has reached out from his (definitely not going to die-in-a-snowdrift) home to gift us with a new webcomic, ’cause why not, it’s been since April since he launched one anyway:
  

  And here it is, a brand new non-Alaskan non-furry non-paintball daily dinosaur webcomic, officially approved by Ryan North himself!
  The Dinosaur Whiteboard.

  With the assistance of a Dinosaur Comics ALERT DANTE SHEPHERD SKIP TO THE NEXT LINE TO AVOID COGNITIVE OFFENSE dry-erase whiteboard IT’S OKAY TO READ AGAIN DANTE, Morgan-Mar has added yet another comic to the mezzacotta family of laugh-chuckles, a site that has an archive of approximately 9526 + ∞ updates³. Morgan-Mar and his creative cohorts have been busy and have thoughtfully supplied you with enough free comics to wait out even the longest blizzard.

Spam of the day:

Hello, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam responses?

Why would you think I get a lot of spam?

_______________
¹ I can’t be the only person that misremembers the lyrics to One Night In Bangkok like this.

² Not to be confused with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, either real or fictional. One is a lovely spot that I greatly enjoyed visiting with my wife a dozen years back, and the other is a dude on the internet.

³ Irregular Webcomic: 3368 updates; Darths & Droids: 1149; Planet of Hats: 35; Square Root of Minus Garfield: 2078; Lightning Made Of Owls: 668; Comments on a Postcard: 2212; Awkward Fumbles: 15; The Dinosaur Whiteboard: 1; mezzacotta: infinity.

Readers of this page will have long since recognized the esteem in which we at Fleen hold David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Webcomic and many, many, many other endeavours (especially, for the purposes of this discussion, mezzacotta, about which more momemtarily).

Those in the know will remember that Morgan-Mar (perhaps I should say Doctor Morgan-Mar, as he is part of a proud tradition of STEM PhD-holding webcomickers) does not make comics as anything other than a hobby; he works in optics research for a division of Canon (all the more surprising given that he may be responsible for more pages of webcomics of anybody this side of Andrew Hussie, especially considering mezzacotta, which I promise we’re about to get to). We typically don’t see Morgan-Mar on this side of the Pacific Ocean (or the equator, for that matter), except for his occasional attendance at a scientific conference, which he was coincidentally doing in the immediate past.

When he returned from the annual SIGGRAPH, Morgan-Mar responded to an email that I’d sent him on an unrelated topic (wine, to be specific), and he had some interesting observations about the overlap of the conference and webcomics. I found his experiences to be fascinating and I’m sharing them with you; lagies and jenglefenz¹, please welcome David-Morgan Mar. Yaaaay!

There was a talk by Ozge Samanci (who you’ve mentioned on Fleen: http://fleen.com/archives/2007/10/17/online-comic-webcomic-survey-says/²) titled “Impact of Digital Media on Comics”, which of course I attended. It wasn’t really about webcomics per se, but rather a Scott McCloud-esque survey of what new things the digital presentation format can bring to comics. Looking at my scribbled notes:

Digital media can give 4 things to comics:

• Procedural — you can generate content computationally.
• Participatory — you can interact with the viewer.
• Encyclopaedic — you can segment and categorise ad infinitum.
• Spatial — you can play tricks with the spatial layout.

She showed examples of some comics with looping animations in each frame — each individual animation does not progress the story, it only provides atmosphere for the short segment of time captured in the panel, so it remains a comic rather than becoming a work of animation.

She said in 2014 there are still no true examples of McCloud’s infinite canvas, only approximations which fall short of the true potential. (xkcd came up as an example.) A true infinite canvas comic, she said, would need to be procedurally generated, so you could really scroll *anywhere*. I actually talked to her afterwards about mezzacotta, which is procedurally generated and offers an almost-infinite scope temporally with its archives. She wasn’t aware of it and said she’d include it in future revisions of this talk!

She talked about geocomics — making a comic readable via GPS coordinates, where you physically have to travel to certain locations to see given panels. She mentioned using the digital presentation to provide film-like effects such as panning and zooming for the viewer within a comic panel. She talked about engaging the reader as a character within the comic, letting them interact with the other characters. Or control the presentation of the panels, by allowing the reader to stretch the frame borders, for example.

She concluded by saying that webcomics pretty much haven’t really explored all of the possibilities of the medium yet, and there’s a very long way to go. The problem as she sees it is not the conceptualising, but the executation — you need an artist and a good programmer to collaborate (or be the same person).

After the talk I also mentioned to her my attempt to make a collaborative multi-stream branching comic with Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, and she said the problem with collaborative comics is always lack of participation. (Too true!)³

Anyway, it was plenty of food for thought.

On another minor note, in the interactive exhibitions there was a gadget someone had designed to provide haptic user feedback through an airbrush — to allow the roughest amateurs to paint desired works of art. They let you try the airbrush, and pulled up a stencil on a computer which guided the feedback system. They had a collection of several stencil shapes for people to use, most of them rather anonymous animals shapes, but one of them was a very familiar looking T. rex.

Many thanks to David Morgan-Mar for the info, and for the use of the photos.

Spam of the day:

Is your website about generating traffic from top of the page postings no matter quality with the content when you are ad supported. Things can be extremely starting to heat up since pre-season games are simply weeks away. … Think about the non native one who learns English language but can not utilize it properly and does some hilarious errors which will change the meanings of entire statement.

Believe me, it’s tough to not think about the non native one who learns English language but can not utilize it properly and does some hilarious errors which will change the meanings of entire statement.

_______________
¹ For some reason, I only ever think of that gag when I’m writing about David Morgan-Mar. I don’t know if he’s an especially big fan of The Muppet Show, Harry Belafonte, or Mister The Frog in general, but given that all right-thinking people are, it’s probably pretty likely.

² Editor’s note: want to swell my head way the heck up? Report on something fascinating and relate it to something I wrote. I have such a grin on my face right now.

³ Or perhaps too much; Hussie famously relied upon reader input to determine the action in the next update of Homestuck for a good long while, but ultimately turned away from it due to it being too difficult to tell the story he had in mind. I almost said a logical story, but just as there are different algebras, there are different logics, and Andrew Hussie’s logic does not always resemble our Earth-logic.

For those wondering what may have happened in the Randy Queen/Escher Girls dustup from yesterday, there have been a few occurrences that are noteworthy:

• Ami Angelwings, proprietor of the Escher Girls blog, put up a timeline of events¹ last night.
• Some time after that, Tumblr restored the text of the posts that Queen had DMCAed, but not the images.
• Some time after that, Randy Queen apologized, sort of. Turthfully, it was not really an apology in the sense of saying I wronged you and I’m sorry and I won’t do it again, it was more in the vein of a statement that yeah, something happened but we cool now, but that walkback was probably the best that could be expected. In case the text isn’t visible to you (I don’t know how Facebook works, sometimes I can see links there and sometimes I can’t), here it is as an image.

Much as I would have been thrilled to cover a prolonged story, the stress and headache for Angelwings would not be a fair tradeoff for easy posts on my part, so let’s just be glad that this one wrapped up without too much unpleasantness. If Queen revokes his DMCA takedown on the original images, then we can call it a 100% satisfactory outcome and respect him as a stand-up guy. I’d add Tumblr restoring the rebloggings that they removed to that list, but I don’t think any of us think that’s going to happen.

Want to read something that’s unambiguously happier? How about the first portion(s) of a lengthy discussion between Becky Dreistadt and Phil McAndrew, both contributors to the Benign Kingdom series of art books. The conversation presently has two parts up, here and here (I missed the first part when it came out, just before SDCC, but when the second part came out yesterday I went back to read it), and future installments will be found here.

Dreistadt and McAndrew have both spent considerable time in the art mines, leading them to have a great deal to say about topics ranging from digital vs traditional media to the value of art school. In fact, let me pull out a choice quote on that latter topic: Asked about her time at SCAD, Dreistadt said:

I enjoyed my time there and met a lot of incredibly talented artists that helped me to push my work. I think for me I needed to go to art school, it helped to discipline myself and to find my style. Before I had attended art school I was into gothy anime and thought that the only way to tell if someone was a good artist was if they drew really detailed. So I’d do these terribly cross hatched to hell dark moody pictures. And school helped to teach me how to tell stories that had a point and that you didn’t have to make serious work to be taken seriously.

Now recommending art school or SCAD is tricky to me. Some people need it, I know many people who never went and have careers as cartoonists. But I also know people who have gone to art school and never made a living doing art and are in debt. Art schools are not good at teaching you how to get a job or how to get your art seen. I really wish that my school had said that you need to go to conventions and you need to post your work online. That is how I have gotten all of my jobs and how I’ve made a living. And the artists that aren’t making a living seem to not do either of those things. [emphasis added]

Here’s why I bolded that chunk: it occurred to me while I was in San Diego that the faculty in the sequential art and/or animation departments of fancy art schools ought to find the time to buy one Mr Bradley J Guigar a whiskey sour or two and pick his brains about how he’s teaching his arts entrepreneurship class. I’ve had that conversation with him (over the phone, so I don’t know if he had a whiskey sour close to hand or not, but I’d wager he probably did), and what he’s teaching is revolutionary — how to make a living as a working artist.

A lot of faculty probably don’t want to have that conversation, as the romantic image of making art in poverty until your genius is recognized is still rather prevalent, webcomickers are probably not opposed to the idea of burying that poisonous ideal once and for all². Some of them have in the past, presently are, or at some point in the future will be teaching in some of those art schools, and would be benefiting their {past | present | theoretical future} students an immense amount. Plus, you’d see Brad on whiskey sours, which is always fun times.

Spam of the day:

I Finlandesi dunque vogliono riformarla in questo senso; in caso contrario – è la conclusione – ?uscire dalla Ue è un’opzione, se la Finlandia si convincerà che comporta più svantaggi che benefici?

I’m pretty sure that with very low trade barriers and possibly the most efficient agriculture in Europe, Finland is better off in the EU than they could ever be out of it.

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¹ Wisely, she put it up on Blogspot, seeing as how Tumblr have proven remarkably amenable to pulling down posts in response to DMCA requests that range from iffy to utterly baseless.

² Paging C Spike Trotman, message for Spike Trotman on the topic of paying artists.

I am mathematically certain that I will get more angry comments for the mouseover text in that image up there than anything else I write today.

• While we’re all anxiously awaiting the launch of the Wonderella Kickstarter that’s due today, two separate webcomickers (that deal significantly in the various sciences) lighted upon the same topic for the day. On the one hand, engaging in descriptive precision not often seen outside the brain of T-Rex, you have Zach Weinersmith describing the production of cheese in needlessly clinical terminology while simultaneously calling out young children for hypocrisy. Stupid young children!

  On the other hand, you have Maki Naro looking at the history of cheesemaking, wherein we learn that it’s one long string of Hey, dare you to eat this. I would note that the dare-to-eats that were filled with deadly pathogens are not shown, which leads to a couple of possible conclusions:

  • If we take them to have happened but are no remembered, then cheese evolved, with deadly (or more likely, non-palatable) variants being selected against.
  • If instead we take them to have never existed in transitional forms and all cheese to be intelligently designed by a Prime Cheesemover, then God is real and those that eat secularist cheeses are going to hell.

  Arguments for or against may be directed to Mr Naro, but given the nature of this new interview which discusses in part his skeptic tendencies, we can safely conclude he believes in Godless evolutionary/Big Bang-derived Devil’s cheese¹, the atheist pervert.

• Dealing with neither cheese or the question of divine existence, those in and around Dallas are advised to seek out Zeus Comics tomorrow, as Danielle Corsetto catches up with her convention husband Randy Milholland for a joint signing from 4:00pm to 8:00pm. Danielle’s already under instructions to give Randy a hug for me, but if you wanted to do so as well, that’s cool.

Spam of the day:

It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d most certainly donate to this outstanding blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to fresh updates and will share this website with my Facebook group. Talk soon!

Reader, you do not ever have to feel shame over wanting to give me money; simply find me in person, and hand me cash. Sweet, sweet, untraceable cash.

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¹ Which begs the question, would the Devil’s cheese be the most sumptuous, delicious, decadent cheeses, designed to lure the unwary into lives of pleasure? Or would they be pressurized goo in a spray can (which — much like the unholy “wyngz” — may not be referred to legally with a proper spelling) and rubbery, flavorless, individually wrapped slices of “cheese food”, a term which contains two words that are both lies?

I’ve been on quite a tear about Jim Zub lately, because he’s an example of what this page concerns itself with — a creator that is focused on good work, and owning as much of it as possible. He’s also incredibly generous with the hard-won knowledge that he’s accumulated from a decade or more of struggling upwards to the point where he can seem like an overnight success. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a damn fine writer (and underutilized artist), and so when he’s got a project coming out, I am more than happy to pimp the crap out of it.

I’ve mentioned his upcoming creator-owned series, Wayward, and how it’s very, very good, and how it will arrive in about a month’s time. The last part is most important because — due to a detail in how comics are distributed — a key milestone will occur on Monday. Pretty much every comic is distributed through one company, Diamond¹, and they have something called final order cutoff whereby retails can adjust their orders 20 days before shipping; for Wayward, FOC is on Monday.

What this means is, if you are interested in Zub’s work, if you want to give Wayward a shot, you should tell your local comic shop this weekend, so they can adjust their order by Monday’s deadline. Publishers that subscribe to FOC will adjust their print runs based on these numbers, meaning an under-anticipated title may be difficult to find, and may even not make sufficient sales to be continued despite demand.

Off the top of my head, Lumberjanes, Midas Flesh, and Figment — all from the past year, and all with webcomicker-heavy creative teams– were under-ordered and people had difficulty finding them when they launched; fortunately, they seem to have rallied and went back to press as necessary². For Wayward, first issue sales (and the drop — or hopefully rise — between first and second issue sales) will be critical in determining if it continues or maybe just gets one story arc before wrapping up.

So it’s be-counted time; if you like creators being able to make their own stuff — and ten minutes discussion with any creator will reveal that it’s the stories and characters they create for (and own!) themselves that they value over any work-for-hire gigs, no matter how high-profile and prestigious — you can help perpetuate that by not just resolving to buy a comic, but by letting a retailer know that you want to buy a comic.

That one action will help to keep Zub’s creator-owned work viable, which in turn will make creator-owned work from other creators look like a good risk to the publishers, retailers, and market in general. It’s a small thing, but it’s got a multiplicative effect.

Spam of the day:

“The best method all of us towards just where we want to be go winning tournament for instance and any other signs is with them,’ LaForge announced, who will be preparing a placed statement

Man, don’t even. Geordi never said any damn thing about it. Quit putting words in his mouth.

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¹ The wisdom of having an entire industry of independent shops dependent on just one company is a topic best left for another time but damn, there needs to be competition in this business again. Case in point: there’s an alternate distributor out there that pretty much handles self-published books only, which means my local shop is now offering a number of books by Brad Guigar, and is starting to pick up the Evil, Inc collections. However, it’s a small minority of shops that work with these alternate channels.

² As it turns out, they are all also limited series, so it wasn’t as likely they would be canceled due to low initial sales; however, an underprinted issue is the same as leaving money on the table, for both publisher and creative team.

Spam of the day: