I don’t know about you, but I’m just about ready for the weekend. Let’s boogie.

• For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Reed!Pop could buy Emerald City Comicon (and, not coincidentally, the services of showrunner team Jim & Andrea Demonakos) and still have their two opposite-coast major comics shows (that would be EmCity and New York Comic Con) be polar opposites when it comes to indie- and webcomics. EmCity, in case you didn’t know, has essentially eclipsed San Diego as the big attendance show that webcomics flocks to, and NYCC is inhospitable to the very same crowd. Most perplexing.

  But, since EmCity is next week and all, how about a rundown of who you’ll find there? I love the maps that people create to show where they’ll be (although they’re a bit rarer this year than past), but even without the maps we can give you a list of who’s gonna be there (in no particular order, and we quote):

  Pat Race and the Alaska Robotics crew (booth 204, including Marian Call, whose new album dropped today and is awesome and she’ll have shows concurrent with EmCity); Sohmer, Unca Lar, and the Blind Ferret folks (booth 110); (Brad Guigar (booth R5); Danielle Corsetto and Randy Milholland (booth 1413); Jennie Breeden (booth 1322); all of the miscellaneous Explosm weirdos (booth 828); and Kaja & Phil Foglio (booth 118).

  There’s a hefty delegation from Helioscope (formerly Periscope) (booths H1 through 16 inclusive, to be occupied by Aaron McConnell, Aud Koch, Ben Dewey, Brian Wolf, Bridget Underwood, Cat Farris, Dan Schkade, Lucy Bellwood, Lukas Ketner, Ron Chan, Ron Randall, Roxy Polk, Steve Lieber, Tadd Galusha, Terry Blas, and Zach Fischer).

  Want more? How about Spike Trotman, Blue Delliquanti, Takneka Stotts, and Amanda Lafrenais (together at booth 212); Jake Richmond (booth X4); Molly “Jakface” Nemecek (booth Q3); the ubiquitous Jim Zub (booth V3); Kate Leth (booth J6); Kazu Kibuishi (booth K1); Lars Brown and David McGuire (booth Z1); Ngozi Ukazu and Tessa Stone (booth M9); and Pascalle Lepas (booth P16).

  We’re still not done (even allowing for the fact that I probably missed a bunch of people), consider that you’ll also find Dave Kellett (booth 1116); Der-shing Helmer (booth K6); Matt Inman (booth 410); Tony Breed and Lonnie Mann (booth M10); and Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (booth M10).

  Finally, you gots the creatorpaloozas that will be the :01 Books (booth 1602) and TopatoCo (booth 1102) contingents. The former will include Box Brown, Gene Luen Yang, Matthew Loux, MK Reed, Pénélope Bagieu; the latter is bringing Jeph Jacques, Sam Logan, David Malki !, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Alina Pete, Tyson Hesse, Becky Dreistadt, Matt Lubchansky, Abby Howard, Catie Donnelly, and Brandon Bird.

  Emerald City Comicon runs from Thursday 2 March to Sunday 5 March 2017 in Seattle.

• For those that can’t make it to the upper-left corner of the country, may I suggest curling up with a good podcast? Owne Dunne may be back to hiatusland with You Damn Kid, but that doesn’t mean that he’s idle. Dunne’s always done a stack of projects simultaneously, one of which was the webcomic parody of old-fashioned, hard-boiled cops, Banion.

  Of late, Banion has been audio-enhanced for your listening pleasure, and is now downloadable from Google Play and iTunes. Dunne’s at his best when he takes a classic form (the childhood memoir, the Dragnet style cop, the British prestige drama) and knocks it 47.3° to the side, which pretty much describes Banion, The Podcast

Spam of the day:

A Better Way to Inflate Everything

Nnnnooope. Not going near that one.

One of the great advantages we at Fleen have is the continued willingness of Pierre Lebeaupin — our esteemed Senior French Correspondent — to keep an eye on the French indie/web comics scene (and, more broadly, that of Europe in general) and share his insights with us. And while we at Fleen welcome contributions from anybody who can provide passably-constructed thoughts that don’t take a mountain of editing, the rest of you have a lot of catching up to do before you get to be as good as Lebeaupin is.

We’ll take a gander at his latest look at the relationship between French webcomickers and French Youtubers, but there’s another item to mention first.

• As noted in the past, dashing chalkboard provacateur Dante Shepherd has unmasked himself as mild-mannered professor of Chemical Engineering Lucas Landherr, although he has kept his nom du webcomics for the STEM-themed Science The World series.

  The latest in the series (the tenth, in fact) covers the topic of gene therapy, and is unique in that it’s the first where he’s taken a back seat in creative terms. Previously he’s written scripts and gotten various artists to illustrate; this time, he’s editing the script of one of his students (Zoe Simonson), which was illustrated by another (Monica Keszler).

  The reason I wanted to mention this strip (aside from the fact it released on Chemical Engineering Day … nice try Shepherd, tell me what part of a two-story fractional distillation column gene therapy relates to) is that Keszler (who illustrated a previous comic on refrigeration cycles), is well fascinating. She’s doing a co-op in Germany right now (there’s your European connection), and in addition to studying Chemical Engineering¹, she’s an accomplished digital artist taking a minor in animation. That’s impressive as hell, and I thought you should know.

Okay, take it away, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin:

• After covering the happenings of French webcartooning for a while, I began to notice a pattern: Youtubers were often involved together with webcartoonists, and in a way that I don’t see with English [language] creators, at least not as much.

  You may have seen it a bit through some of my previous contributions, first when Maliki started her ongoing crowdfunding site and in the process of doing so, explicitly credited Youtubers for trailblazing in the popular consciousness the notion that you can make a living from your passion projects; and second when an equal number of Youtubers and webcartoonists were involved in Editions Delcourt’s new collection, Octopus.

  But this is only the tip of the iceberg: for instance, following a number of them on Twitter I often see them in conversation with one another; and thinking about it, I can recall a number of other interactions that really tell a connection between webcartoonists and a subset of Youtubers.

  The most significant one is between Cyprien Iov (usually just Cyprien) and Paka. With 10 million people subscribing to his humor videos, Cyprien is one of the most popular independent video creators in the French web; and Paka has been writing and drawing his webcomic for more than 11 years and 2000 strips², so he has been around. So it was no small event when they released a comic book together a few years back, Roger Et Ses Humains, with Cyprien writing and Paka drawing.

  But this phenomenon is not limited to humor. For instance, Patrick Baud’s channel presents weird, unlikely, but true stories of scientific research, encounters, exploration, etc. And when he published a book of such anecdotes, who did he call to illustrate them? That’s right, webcartoonists such as Marion “Professeur Moustache” Montaigne, Boulet, and a few others. Octopus, as we’ve seen, is another instance of these interactions in the same area of scientific vulgarization.

  Some events also involve the two together: for instance, Boulet is a recurring participant to the Nuit Originale shows of Thomas Hercouët; and to a lesser extent, we have Yves Bigerel’s intervention in La Veillée.

  And that is without mentioning creators who do both, such as Les Kassos (which I’m told are blocked in the US, unfortunately³) where Bigerel is a writer, or Lays Farra, who creates both L’Eclaireuse and C’est Pas Sourcé.

  More generally, it appears that a number of webcartoonists and Youtubers are figuring out at the same time how to thrive as independents, whether it be through publishing books or crowdfunding or other means, and are in this together, one way or another. So I expect such collaborations and links to only increase in the future.

Gary again. The trend that FSFCPL has identified specifically in French webcomickers/Youtubers is analogous to a tendency I see generally in modern creative life — namely, that the limits to how one makes a creative life are falling at the same time that the boundaries between creative avenues blur.

The perfect example being the day I left work in Midtown Manhattan and happened to see an enormous billboard in Times Square drawn by a webcomicker, advertising a stage show featuring an internet nerd-music band, a writer/former teen actor, and a goofball that builds things (and frequently blows them up) to celebrate the scientific method.

The only thing they have in common is that they really liked each other’s work, so why not collaborate across every artistic boundary possible? Why not have a circle of people that do Cool Things that incorporates a radio host, a NASA flight director, a webcomicker who happened to write a book that became a blockbuster movie, and an astronaut (who, if not the poet they keep telling us we should send up, is pretty damn close⁴)? Why, in my youth, did writers only ever seem to socialize with writers, musicians with musicians⁵, actors with actors? Why shouldn’t Chemical Engineers and comics artists be working together?

No good reason that I can see. Thanks for reminding us, FSFCPL.

Spam of the day:

Bizarre Cure Destroys Toe & Nail Fungus

Well, now that I know it’s bizarre, I guess I’ll keep the fungus!

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¹ Which I will grudgingly allow might be as difficult a discipline as my own, beloved Electrical Engineering.

² The only reason I haven’t introduced it by now is that it is 99% corny, untranslatable puns; don’t expect an English version any time soon …

³ Editor’s note: I was able to click through a sampling of the videos in this channel; I can’t say that they’re all available, or will remain so, but they don’t appear to be uniformly blocked at this moment.

⁴ Also: possessor of the most magnificent moustache of modern times. Respect.

⁵ To be fair, musicians also associated a lot with supermodels, although the latter now seem to be more likely to be found around athletes.

I’m taking the day off to give this cold the chance to get gone. See you tomorrow. Sleepytimes now.

In this case, their announcement of Kids and YA Guests for 2017 (held, as always, in/around the Toronto Reference Library, this year on 13 & 14 May), which includes some huge names: Isabelle Arsenault and Fanny Britt! Svetlana Chmakova! Elise Gravel! Matt Forsythe! Jarrett Williams! And also a huge crew of creators coming with :01 Books, including Scott Westerfeld, Shannon Hale, LeUyen Pham, Faith Erin Hicks, Molly Ostertag, Matthew Loux, Mike Cavallaro, Mike Holmes, George O’Connor, Farel Dalrymple, Box Brown, Penelope Bagieu, and Alison Wilgus, half of whom will have debuts. It’s gonna be a great time in the Big Smoke¹.

Spam of the day:

Monthly curated natural treats and toys for your pup

My dog is presently barking his head off at a pile of squirrel poop. Got that in your curation?

_______________
¹ They call Toronto that, right? I mean, I knew about Cabbagetown being a nickname, but I’m pretty sure I saw Big Smoke somewhere.

A bit after I wrote about my vocal woes on Friday, I lost my ability to speak entirely; for the record, that’s not previously happened in more than 25 years of teaching, and with some of the week’s class yet to be covered, created a dilemma.

The weekend involved a lot of warm salt-water gargling, hot toddies, tea with diabetes-inducing amounts of honey, and thanks to the world’s best PA (other people may like their doctor, I love the PA at my doctor’s practice), a course of steroids¹ that have brought me back to a croaking level.

However, finding ways to make up the interrupted class on Friday have taken all my spare time today in/around my current class, and so I once again must prevail on your kindness to allow for a brief post. But thanks to Brian The War Moth (most recently seen here), I do have something cool to point you at: 3-D extrapolations of comic strips, one fairly simple art-wise, but showing a nice responsiveness to dragging around, and one expanded from a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

Just drag them slowly if you don’t want to get a sense of vertigo.

Spam of the day:

We have received a notice that you are about to miss a student loan payment.

Mother-bitches, I paid off my student loans in 1996, seventeen friggin’ years early. You ain’t received shit.

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¹ Running down the list of possible side-effects, she didn’t say that I’d get even one of uncontrolled muscular development, rage fits, or shrunken gonads. Popular media has lied to me yet again.

My voice, that is. It’s running about 7% of normal capacity, which sucks considering that I teach for a living. Everything is taking twelve times longer than normal¹ and so this is going to be super quick. The inestimable Chris Butcher and the TCAF folks have announced a fresh slate of international featured guests, adding to those previously announced. The full list is hell of impressive.

Okay, back to the interpretive dance to convey SQL permissions exist in a stack of depth one.

Spam of the day:

I must say you have very interesting posts here. Your blog can go viral. You need initial boost only.

I don’t need the blog to go viral; I need my upper respiratory tract to stop be viral. Got anything for that?

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¹ Worse, I have one guy in class that is putting lotion on his hands like every 15 minutes, and it’s got a fragrance that is catching on all the coughed-raw sections of my throat in an extraordinarily painful manner and he won’t stop. It’s like he’s afraid he’ll get the hose again.

No big, I just make my living by speaking all day, argh. Let’s do a roundup.

• I had a chance to talk to him about it a month back at the Dr McNinja Wrap Party, but as the announcement hadn’t been made, I told Christopher Hastings that I’d hold onto the news. But now the announcement is live and we can all enjoy the fact that Hastings is writing a Baby Groot series for Marvel, starting in May. It’s planned for a story arc that can extend depending on how well the early issues sell, and I both like to read Hastings’s stuff and want him to make a living¹, so make a note to order I Am Groot from your local comic shop.
• A two-fer from the Theorist Emeritus Of Comics, Scott McCloud: Firstly, a general announcement of his next book, which we won’t see for a couple of years. He told me about this one in the wake of The Sculptor, and it’s been on my mind ever since. Short form, he’s doing a book about how visual communication works, which means that he’s combining the philosophical thrusts of three of my favorite works: The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information by Tufte; The Elements Of Typographic Style by Bringhurst, and his own Understanding/Reinventing/Making Comics trilogy.

  Speaking of the trilogy, McCloud also gave us a sneak peek at the new cover for Understanding Comics, with a promise of Reinventing and Making getting a similar redesign. I have great affection for the original covers and I’m not running out to replace them with the new, but I do like the strong design and statement the new cover(s) make(s). There’s a shift in emphasis from the comics to McCloud himself, with his cartoon avatar’s face too prominent to even entirely fit in the image.

  The message is unmistakably clear — these glasses have seen some things, and behind those lenses there is wisdom waiting to be dropped. The medium isn’t the message any longer, the messenger is now the focus; in a few decades, cartoon!McCloud will be as iconic and indicative of the idea of comics as cityscape spelling out The Spirit or a superhero surrounded by Kirby crackle.

• Speaking of prophets, Jon Rosenberg² has been killing it on the editorial cartooning lately, with his Michael Flynn cartoon sneaking in mere hours before Flynn’s resignation. In today’s contribution at The Nib, he seeks to harness this power for good. Meanwhile, Tatsuya Ishida just cuts to the chase to say what we’re all feeling.

Spam of the day:

Hey man… hows it going I noticed the debt you are in and I’m here to help

Nice try. My debt-to-income ratio is negative. Those predatory banks owe me money, that’s how good I am at savings.

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¹ Also on the want list — in some future Marvel movie, I want to see his name listed in the credits for his work defining Gwenpool; for that matter, lets see Ryan North and Erica Henderson listed for their definitive work on Squirrel Girl in the same credits.

² Disclaimer: the guy that first prompted me to start this page, and my source for hosting.

Or at least, I feel much better than yesterday. What say we dip into the mailbag?

• It’s been a while since we heard from our friends at the Cartoon Art Museum, so let us all celebrate Will Eisner Week by finding the only way to make comics bigger than looking at Eisner’s influence — namely, by adding in Jack Kirby as both legends will be celebrating their centennials this year:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum celebrates Will Eisner Week with Will Eisner and Jack Kirby: A Centennial Celebration on Saturday, March 11, 2017 from 3:00-5:00pm
  at Mission: Comics and Art, located at 2250 Mission Street, San Francisco. Join us as we discuss the life and artwork of the legendary comic creators Will Eisner (born March 6, 1917) and Jack Kirby (born August 28, 1917). Bay Area comic creators Mark Badger (Batman, Julius Caesar), Al Gordon (Legion of Super-Heroes, Justice League), Justin Hall (No Straight Lines), Mario Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Steve Leialoha (X-Men, Fables), Trina Robbins (Wimmen’s Comix) and Judd Winick (Hilo) will discuss Eisner’s career and the impact that his work had on their own artistic endeavors. A booksigning will immediately follow the panel discussion.

  The thing that I find most inconceivable about this event is that so many creators can talk about the influence that friggin’ Eisner and Kirby had on their work in only two hours¹. You could fill a week, easy.

• I got an email yesterday from Kristina Stipetic, and several things about it caught my eye:
  

  My new webcomic debuted today! It’s called Alethia.

  What it is: a webcomic about robots abandoned by their creators. Scattered groups of robots search for purpose in the factory-cities of their desolate world. It updates with completed chapters instead of page-by-page.

  Why is this interesting? As far as I know, this is the only webcomic to have an animated opening sequence. It’s also simultaneously released in both English and Chinese.

  The bit about the animated opening sequence? Interesting, but I’d be hard pressed to tell if it’s really unique or not, and I’m very much of two minds about blending comics and animation; they have different jobs to do. But the release in Chinese is very intriguing, as is the fact that Stipetic, judging from her About page, not only works in the Chinese language, but lives there as well. More than that, the Chinese version of the comic is presented in a different format than English — the former appears a page at a time, the latter as one tall series of pages comprising a chapter; I wonder to what degree this represents local expectations.

  Additionally, the chapter-at-a-time release is staggered with release on other channels — online will see Chapter Two on 11 March, but Comixology already has up to Chapter Three and Stipetic’s store is up to Chapter Four. This gives me a great deal of confidence that the story will take a direct route from beginning to middle to end, without the digressions that can come from publishing as it’s produced.

  We at Fleen don’t usually promote brand-new comics, but every once in a while something shows a great deal of promise; within the 29 pages of Chapter One, Alethia grows more intriguing and confident, and by the chapter break it’s laid down a number of possible directions and questions to be answered, making it worth your read now, and worth remembering on the 11th for the next chapter.

Spam of the day:

Karla Wants to Share Her Profile with You

I am simultaneously relieved and disappointed that this was not webcomic’s own Professional Horrible Person Karla Pacheco.

________________
¹ Well, that and the fact that they don’t even mention Winnick’s The Adventures Of Barry Ween, Boy Genius. Man, that was some funny stuff.

So this is gonna be quick so I can get some tea and sleep.

Coincidentally after yesterday’s noting of Iron Circus’s distribution deal putting new books into stores, C Spike Trotman is making it worth your while to get any of the Smut Peddler series of books — in print or PDF — at a discount, for today only:

With the Smut Peddler Double Header Kickstarter rewards shipping out to backers, we’re finally able to offer the print editions of My Monster Boyfriend and Yes, Roya in the store! Additionally, the 2012 edition of Smut Peddler is back in print at last! Finally, it is Valentine’s Day, so we thought we’d give you a little love.

Today only, you can use the voucher code VolcanicDeclaration at check out to get 15% off on these three dirty books. This applies to both the print and PDF editions, too.

So get your Valentine something romantical or treat yourself! Today is all about lovin!

Thanks for all the love facilitation, Spike. Rest of you, get on that¹. Oh, and while I’m absolutely, mathematically certain that Spike decided to do this weeks ago — she is not a woman that leaves things to chance — if by any happenstance my post yesterday prompted her, you’re all welcome, and please enjoy the high-class erotica.

Spam of the day:

Go here to help out someone’s super hot mom

You know what they say: every horny MILF slut is someone’s super hot mom, so treat her right [SFW, promise!].

_______________
¹ And get your mind out of the gutter.

Oh, that’s not what you call it? Internet Jesus was the first person I ever saw to point out that Saint Valentine’s Day was originally a Roman celebration of blood, werewolves, and sex called Lupercalia; they’ve got cards and everything. ANYway, if you’re into the modern interpretation of sexytimes without the blood and werewolves, read on.

Because webcomics (and even webcomics collections) often don’t make it into traditional distribution channels, it is sometimes months or even years before a long-since-available webcomic collection makes it to comics shops, or regular bookstores¹. Case in point: I’ve had my copy of Chester 5000: Isabelle And George by Jess Fink for months now (and it’s been in her TopatoCo store for nearly as long), but even with Top Shelf Comix behind the book, it’s lagged getting into the stores.

Until now:

Chester 5000: Isabelle & George comes out in stores & on Amazon tomorrow, VALENTINES DAY!! ? ? ? http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog/chester-5000-book-2-isabelle-george/954 …

Not sure if those heart emoji are going to come through or not. They’re cute, so I hope they do. [Editor’s note: they didn’t.]

Anyway, if you haven’t read Isabelle And George, it’s mostly a prequel to Chester 5000. That is, it tells the story before Chester 5000, then there’s a tiny bit in the middle that recaps the events of the earlier book, then adds a coda to the now-expanded cast and all their various combinations of friendship, love, and hot, hot Victorian boning down (with or without robots).

But seriously, though — even though both Chester books are definitely (defiantly, even!) adults-only, there’s a sweetness to them, a sense of empathy towards the characters that is utterly charming as well as pulse-quickening; Fink is unparalleled in her ability to make us care about her characters as people, and to be happy for their joys and orgasms.

Get a copy for the love of your life and let it inspire you towards feats of horny werewolfdom. Don’t give it to your kids (even though, being largely wordless², it’s an easy story to follow), and probably don’t give it to your mom. Your cool aunt, though, the one that your parents vaguely warn you about, but who takes you ballooning over river gorges? She’ll love it.

Spam of the day:

:):)LetsPlayCALLOOFBOOTY:):)

Gosh, @SeXXXyChikk69, thanks for the offer, but did you really mean Call Oof Booty? The Oof makes it sound less fun and more like moving furniture, you know, like Oof, this damn sofa is heavy, gonna be sore tomorrow.

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¹ And mad props to C Spike Trotman, as Iron Circus’s distro deal means a whole lot more webcomics gonna make it to a whole lot more store a whole lot quicker. My Monster Boyfriend made to the trade last week, concurrent with its initial release; Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here never would have made it into shops widely without the deal, and is now playing distro catch-up.

² Seriously, the only wordless story that’s easier to follow would be one of Andy Runton’s Owly books. C5K: I&G would make Owly and Wormy hell of blush but they’d seriously be happy for all involved.

Don’t look at me like that. Find any cluster of comickers in the bar on a convention night, and they’re drawing their characters getting up to shenanigans. I seen some things that Owly and Jellaby have done that’ll turn your hair white.