Have I mentioned this yet this year? I feel like I should have. The National Cartoonists Society has its call for submissions for consideration of their annual awards open now — as in past years, webcomics (or On-Line Comics, as they are styled) are eligible for consideration in both the Long Form (think ongoing story) and Short Form (think daily gags) categories.

Also, I should note that, as in past years, I am involved in the process of selecting nominees that will lead to the awards ballot. Applications may be submitted until 7 February, and if you’re in the webcomics world, no physical items need be provided, hooray.

Some things to consider:

• An awful lot of webcomickers do work of significant quality that’s not webcomics. Is there any reason why we should not see nominations for Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Adventure Time, Gwenpool, Hellcat, Giant Days, Glitterbomb, and Goldie Vance (comic books); every single damn Iron Circus anthology, Baggywrinkles, Tetris, King Baby, Secret Coders, Demon, and Ghosts (graphic novels); the entire breadth of The Nib and Jon Rosenberg’s SFAM Trump cartoons (editorial cartoons¹)? Nominate work outside of webcomics if you’re working outside of webcomics, people!
• The NCS awards are presented at a black-tie dinner (it’s really fancy) in a different city each year (I went in 20012, to Las Vegas, and fulfilled a lifelong dream of gambling in a muthascratching tuxedo, drink in hand, after midnight; I’ve never felt more like James Bond, if James Bond ever played a $5 Pai Gow Poker table). This year it’s in Portland, Oregon, where more than a few of you live or have friends. Gonna be fun times in Stumptown, and you could meet some really interesting people.²

Okay, there’s your homework for the weekend — take a good look at the submissions process and criteria, consider well where you may qualify, and take a flyer if it seem plausible. Awards aren’t why you should be doing this, but remember — an awful lot of people first heard Gene Yang’s name not because American Born Chinese is a brilliant book, but because he was nominated for the National Book Award back in 2006. Want to be a MacArthur Fellow or National Ambassador For Young People’s Literature? Get your name out there.

Spam of the day:

JR Crooks’ mission is to help you earn more money trading gold this year than ever before in your life.

I’m pretty sure JR Crooks spends far more time trying to sell me on paying him money to teach me about trading gold than he spends on trading gold. Pass.

_______________
¹ Actually, just let anybody other than Michael friggin’ Ramirez win, that guy is awful. Of note, both Jen Sorenson and Ann Telnaes have won in the past few years, both of whom regularly contribute to The Nib; it’d be sweet to see Matt {Bors | Lubchansky} take it.

² For example, I got to thank Jerry van Amerogen for a punchline I’d read early in high school and had been occupying my brain for more than 30 years, and Bill Amend for a punchline nearly 25 years old. It’s odd what grabs you by the brain and stays.

Guess who left the power brick for his laptop back the hotel? This is going to be brief because Compy is bleeding watts like nobody’s business.

• Firstly, happy birthday to the Webcomics magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for the eighth year running, Richard Stevens III. You are a hell-raiser, a nimble agitator, an innovator, a top-notch pixelist, and beloved of all the people.
• Secondly, continuing their run-up to a re-opening in the Spring, the Cartoon Art Museum is going to be involved with this year’s San Francisco Sketchfest. Next Friday, 20 January will be the Dragon Ball Z Live VR panel (10:00pm to 11:30pm; Brava Theater Center), and Saturday 28 January will feature An Afternoon with The Venture Bros. (2:00pm to 3:30pm; Cobb’s Comedy Club) and Skull Juice Podcast: Trent Live (10:00pm to 11:30pm; Brava Theater Center). Details and tickets at the links.

Okay, that’s it. Let’s hope there’s enough juice here to

Spam of the day:
Taking a day off because I’m an idiot.

We at Fleen have never been shy about our admiration of Meredith Gran and what she’s doing on Octopus Pie; in fact, we at Fleen own a number of OP originals, and love them dearly. We’ve also made no secret of the fact that Gran’s work has been improving, has taken a tremendous jump particularly in the past two years, and especially since she announced that she was winding up the strip. It’s like she’s got decades of further improvement in front of her, and is determined to not let any of it go unseen by readers that might not follow her to the next project¹, so she’s throwing it all in now.

But sometimes she finds a way to make it screamingly apparent that maybe nobody understands how comics work, how they can tell stories uniquely, like she does. Case in point: the top tier of panels in today’s update. Marigold is knitting, time pauses at sunrise and she is for a moment lost in a reverie of yarn and needles and contemplation of possible futures — disaster or new day. I suspect she has been at it all night.

It’s gorgeous. It’s immediately intuitive what’s going on. It’s emotionally affecting, even before you realize the whole time, Jane was asleep next to her, and that the sweater is a gift. It would lose a fair amount of its impact if not for the stellar coloring job by Valerie Halla, but that image lived in Gran’s brain first, and she had to direct Halla to get it just right. I honestly can’t think of as simple and quiet a collection of panels, such a small moment that revealed itself so beautifully.

While the remainder of Octopus Pie is now in that borderland where the most appropriate unit of time is shifting from months to weeks, Gran is in no way easing off. There’s no senioritis here; she’s spent the past decade achieving ever-higher plateaus of skill and will make us miss these characters like crazy.

But for now, someplace in Brooklyn it is that dawning time when we’re not sure what the future brings, and a young woman is knitting a sweater forever.

Spam of the day:

Obama–is- leaving, this- is- your – last chance

Not for another nine days, he’s not, but you’re right, it’s nearly my last change. The Six-F is still taking donations, folks. Ten causes, I match your contributions up to a total of ten thousand damn US dollars cash money.

Oh, and thank you, President Obama. You’ve been better than we deserved and we shall miss you mightily.

_______________
¹ Memo to readers that don’t follow Gran to her next project: What the hell, people?

Since I spoke to you yesterday, two very cool books have been announced for the near term. Let’s do this.

• There’s a huge trend these days for adult coloring books — no Disney Princesses or sparkleponies here, but abstract designs, tattoo art, great Impressionist paintings and suchlike. Also, it was inevitable for there to be adult coloring books, if you take my meaning and I think you do:
  

  Oh shit, I guess we’re officially announcing it today! :D

  Ready for the sexiest adult coloring book? Pre-order OH JOY SEX TOY: THE COLORING BOOK @ErikaMoen @Plustenstrength! http://bit.ly/2iwR8Ab

  Straight from the pages of Oh Joy, Sex Toy by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan, a color-it-yourself collection of very sexy renditions of the Masturbateers doing all the sexy things they do, will be in comics shops on 8 February (just in time for Valentine’s Day!) from Limerence Press (the sexy division of Oni Press). The great thing about the Masturbateers is that they encompass all shapes, sizes, points along the gender spectrum, body types, adult ages, and degrees of physical ability — everybody is sexy in their own way, and I’ll bet that Moen’s artistic choices have meant a lot of people have seen someone that looks like them portrayed as a sexual person for the first time. Inclusion, y’all: it matters.

• As mentioned last week, Tyler Page’s Nothing Better has been overdue for its third print collection for a while, and at long last it’s here. Lagies and jenglefenz, please allow me to present the Kickstarter for Nothing Better: Great Expectations (Part 1)
  

  It’s been 7 years since the last collection came out though I’ve been sitting on this material for almost two years. I’ve been busy with raising a family, freelance work, and publishing another book [Editor: Raised on Ritalin. So it’s time to give fans what they want in print.

  My goal here is modest – Nothing Better has a small but dedicated group of fans who continue to bug me for more of the comic in print and I’d love to give it to them. So I’m only looking to print 300-400 copies of the book to sell online and at conventions. The book is already done – laid out, designed, and everything. I’ll be working with a great local printer here in Minneapolis so the turnaround shouldn’t be too long.

  The combination of the finished book and the modest goal (only US$1000! Remember what Spike said?) means that Page is only running the campaign for 20 days total, with delivery expected in March, mere weeks after the campaign closes. As of press time, he’s at 41.5% of goal, and a lucky couple-hundred people are going to be able to get a hell of a good book before everybody else. Nothing Better really is that good, so get pledging.

  [Obligatory disclaimer: A review of mine is quoted on the Kickstarter page as a blurb; I have not received any offers or rewards for the use of my words. Also, people that are much more famous than me are also much more succinct than me.]

Spam of the day:

Woman sheds 42 lbs. in 30 days with this simple night-time drink

I’m guessing some kind of horrific toxin.

So while I was in transit on Friday afternoon, the news came: the Alaska Robotics Mini-Con is back on for 2017! School programs! Camping! Probably not getting mauled to death by enormous land predators!

Everybody that went to last year’s confab in/just outside lovely Juneau, Alaska, has relayed a tale of renewal of purpose and energized creative batteries. Alaska Robotics honcho Pat Race has invited a slew of guests for public programs and opened up applications for the really appealing part for the creator community: the camp.

A few dozen creators/aspiring creators/interesting people will get to attend an informal confab in the temperate rainforest, sleeping in cabins, eating s’mores, hanging out with other cool people away from deadlines and internet; the invited guests will be there, and you might as well. I’m filling out an application and hope that I make the cut (given the limited capacity of the camp, I might not; if Race has to choose between accepting me and allowing, say, a Boulet or a Jeff Smith¹, I hope he goes with them and not me).

Now here’s the rub: this isn’t a show weekend to vend and make money (there is a one-day public con component, but the real attraction is the camp); it’ll cost US$600 to attend (including lodging and food), and getting to Juneau will certainly cost more. Look at it as a professional-development opportunity of the first rank, a weekend-long equivalent of Comics Grad School. And if you’re still not convinced, consider that ARM-C has the absolute best code of conduct/harassment policy ever:

Many conventions have harassment policies and we feel like it’s important to approach this event in the spirit of inclusion. We love the many varied groups and fandoms that congregate at comic conventions we’ve attended and we want everyone to feel safe and welcome at our convention. If anyone makes you feel unsafe or goes out of their way to make you feel uncomfortable, let us know. We’ll feed them to the bears. [emphasis mine]

More information at the site, at the intro video, and at the camp exploration video; the application is also available for your perusal.

Oh, and if I do get in, I’m planning on bringing my trauma bag, so if they do feed you to the bears, I can probably patch you back up again.

Spam of the day:

Luukkaan evankeliumi, luku 12. “kukaan ei tiedä, milloin tuomiopäivä koittaa, ei edes Jeesus itse, vaan yksin Isu;o&qu.t¤mÃtta Jehovat tuntuvat tietävän, tai aikankin ajankohta on ainakin tarkentunut:).

Google Translate assures me this is a somewhat-garbled extract of the Gospel of Luke, in Finnish. Just in case you were wondering.

_______________
¹ I have no idea if they’re applying, I just went with people that it would be insanely cool to learn from.

And on that note, another thing that we’ve seen before: a warning of likely missed updates. I’ll be doing a quick trip that will keep me in motion for much of the next 48 hours, so there may not be a post on Thursday or Friday. I imagine we’ll all manage somehow.

• It’s been a considerable time since we’ve had regular updates at The Last Halloween, and with new characters and storylines introduced in the brief preview back in the Fall, my jonesin’ for TLH is at a high point. There’s been good reasons for the delay, as creator Abby Howard has been working on other projects — projects that pay a damn sight sooner than webcomics do — so this is not a complaint! And, as we learned earlier today, one very large reason for delay is approaching its own end:
  

  AAAAAHH

  Speaking as a backer of the Kickstart to print volume one of TLH, one for whom the book will be the reward for my support, I wish to echo that AAAAAHH because godsdamn is that pretty. Ya done good, Abby, and the decision not to mess around with softcover for this book was briliant That thing looks like a tome of secret and forbidden knowledge.

• Speaking of things coming back into the spotlight, David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc¹ wrapped up his very fun experiment in learning to draw cartoons, Planet Of Hats, back in August. It had taken him about two years (once you account for a two month break) to recap all of the episodes of old-school Trek, including the animated series of my childhood, using twelve panels per hour of story.

  It was particularly fun to see how, when forced to condense descriptions to a few panels and not many words, how silly (or outright bad) some of the old Trek stories were, but also how so many of them can be rightly regarded as classics. And then he was done, no more Original Series stories to tell; he’d decided not to carry the recaps into the subsequent series, and so there was a Trek-shaped void in Wednesdays.

  Until — and I can’t believe I forgot about this until I saw him link it — today.

  Planet Of Hats is back for a final, 12 week run of movie recaps; given the longer nature of the films, each one will get two weeks of recapping, starting today with part one of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This means that in two weeks, we’ll get to see Wrath Of Khan; on the other hand, it means that we’ll have to see Trek V as well (but it’s not worse than some of the third season stinkers … probably).

  There will be plenty of artistic choices for Morgan-Mar to make; for example, ST:TMP is kind of notorious for a couple of things: a scattered crew, a recycled plot, a screaming Chekhov, a transporter accident that was hinted at but not precisely shown⊃2, and a seemingly-interminable fly-around of the Enterprise that took approximately half of the movie’s runtime to conclude. Morgan-Mar is able to dispose of the latter in a single panel that nevertheless hints at the very slow pace of the original³. All in all, a nice way to spend the rest of winter (in the Nothern Hemisphere) or summer (if you’re Morgan-Mar).

Spam of the day:

Read your message before it gets deleted

You’re a psychic — couldn’t you tell on your own I would delete your email without clicking your link?

_______________
¹ I should really program a macro or something for that string; every time I need to type it, I have to go searching through my own archives to make sure I get it right.

² At least not until it was referenced in Galaxy Quest, which is still one of the best three Trek movies ever.

³ And the transporter deal? Pretty tame in the film, low-grade icky here in panel eight, and downright horrifying in the novelization. I know that Reg Barclay took a lot of grief for his transporter phobia in TNG, but keep in mind that this is a guy for whom getting mashed up with another person and turned inside-out while still alive is historical fact.

If you have room on your clothing for pins and don’t feel up to defeating the Empire today¹, you could do far worse than to fill them with a selection from Scott C’s latest offerings. You can choose any four you want from the seven on offer (I’d choose the two dogs, unicorn, and triceratops, myself) for just US$35.

Spam of the day:

My previous post about the financials of creator-owned comics in mainstream retail paints a pretty bleak picture. The risk is high for retailers, creators and publishers, profit margins are thin and making your new comic stand out in a crowded marketplace full of worldwide pop culture icons is an uphill battle at best.

This is … this is the very best machine-generated text meant to slip through spam filters by appearing to be on-topic that I’ve ever encountered. I’m actually impressed, and more than a little concerned that a few more years and I won’t be needed around these parts anymore. We can just get whatever Markhov engine spit this out to post in my stead.

______________
¹ No pressure! We can’t each fight every fight every day! We have to pace ourselves or the other side will turn our exhaustion to their advantage.

I was going to say that a whole day down and 2017 isn’t too bad, but then I remembered that there have been mass shootings and car bombings and realized my sensitivity level with respect to atrocities may need recalibration. Let’s just focus on a couple of small, good things while we’re all waiting for a shipping container’s worth of shoes to drop.

• Last night, Spike over at Iron Circus determined what may have been the absolute lower time limit for a successful Kickstarter: 53 minutes.

  Let me explain.

  Spike had been teasing through the weekend that a Kickstarter would be going up sometime on the 1st; subscribers to the Iron Circus newsletter would know the time of launch, the rest of us would have to keep our eyes peeled. Timing would be critical, as there was just one reward available, and it was limited to 100 backers. Whatever the reward was, it would only be available now, with no future sales.

  At 9:00pm EST, the campaign (for a US$15 enamel pin, from Carla Speed McNeil’s design) went live, with a seven day run time. At 9:53pm EST, the last pin was claimed. There was still 6 days, 23 hours, and 7 minutes to go; there’s no mechanism on Kickstarter to end the campaign, aside from cancellation.

  Spike’s subsequent tweets revealed that as much as a fun, tiny project, this pin was an object lesson: trying for mega-success on your project can not only lead to a nigh-unfulfillable nightmare, but is wildly improbable to succeed in the first place. A small success is still success.

  But thinking on it today, I can see another way to look at it. Lots of people follow Spike on the Sosh-Meeds, more than 20,000 on Twitter along; but I’ll wager far fewer of them were part of Iron Circus’s email list. From personal experience, signing up for an email newsletter has a lot of inertia around it — I’m slow to sign up, and even when I never pay attention to the emails that pop up in my inbox, even slower to unsubscribe.

  In her tiny, little project, Spike picked up some number of new advertising targets, and it cost her nothing. The cost to acquire an email address is remarkably hard to nail down, but this was a no-lose situation: if the Kickstarter failed, she got her email signups at zero cost; if it succeeded, she got her email signups and so far has made a US$1342 profit on the deal¹.

  And so there’s one hell of a business lesson to be learned², and I sincerely hope that all looking to increase their customer contact lists will learn it. Find a small thing that you want for yourself, that your audience will want, and drum up the interest. Be small, fast, ruthless … all Edge, a behavior seen in the likes of Mr Stevens and Ms Spike, and you’ll be in damn good company.

• Those of you in the Bay Area have a webcomics event to add to your respective social calendars: Jeffrey C Wells and Shaenon Garrity have a new Skin Horse book out, and with the Kickstarter backers all fulfilled (I got my copy a few weeks back), it’s time for public sales. And that means launch party:
  

  Hey, a party! I’m throwing a book release party for Skin Horse Volume 6 at the wonderful Borderlands Books in San Francisco on Saturday, January 14. Expect books, cupcakes, and wine.

  Borderlands (located at 866 Valencia Street, in the city of Saint Francis) is a legendary shop; by longstanding precedent, expect the cupcakes to be delicious and the wine to come in boxes. Fun starts at 3:00pm PST and goes until all the fun has been had or Garrity decides she needs tiki drinks.

Spam of the day:

Press ahead and empower images to scan all pictures.

You’re offering Asian mail-order brides; please don’t use the word empower.

_______________
¹ Per this tweet, the US$770 goal was the cost of the run of pins; she’s raised US$2112 (there may have been as many as two backers sneaking in over the 100 limit due to timing, and one person has pledged an unknown amount at the “no reward/tip cup” tier). Spike’s done waaaay too many Kickstarts to not have priced in an appropriate amount for shipping, and at this point “only” 100 envelopes is a trivial amount of labor.

² There’s a second lesson to be learned, if a few more campaigns like this happen to provide a few more data points. This is the sort of situation that would let a clever person reverse-engineer the Kicktraq trend algorithm. That curve is going to decay in a very interesting fashion.

[Edited for clarity: Originally, the Takei/Noguchi story appeared immediately below the Diesel Sweeties story. It was pointed out that having a comic dealing with celebrity death before images of a beloved (but elderly) celebrity could cause a mistaken (and panicky) impression.]

The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles is hosting an exhibit on the life of George Takei, and Yellow Peril creator Jamie Noguchi is doing both the show poster, and a bio comic book that will be given away to museum visitors. Neat!

I think we can all agree that Rich Stevens (as is so often the case) has the right of it.

Vermont’s first cartoon laureate, James Kochalka, gets the spotlight treatment, courtesy of Vermont’s public television network.

Mary Cagle’s Kickstart to print Let’s Speak English continues to tromp all over the place, and having met the basic stretch goals, Cagle announced a goal without limits. For reachig US$25,000, five copies of the book would be donated to libraries; since that goal’s been left in the dust, Cagle announced another copy will go to another library for each additional thousand bucks raised.

At present, that puts her at 17 copies. According to the FFF mk2, she’s on track for a finish of US$104-156K, and the McDonald Ratio puts her in the realm of US$103K; in either case, it looks like 80 to 100 libraries are getting free books, y’all.

And that’s it; normally we make fun of a spammer down here, but I’m giving them the day off.

We’ll be back in the new year, talking about webcomics, the people who make them, the people who read them, and whatever the hell else we feel like talking about. One last reminder: I’m matching donations to a series of good causes, so if you’ve donated (or dedicated sales of your stuff) to any of those organizations listed below the cut, drop me a line.

The Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund will close for the year on the 20th of January, so let me know about your giving before the vulgar talking yam¹ takes the oath of office. 2017 probably has no inclination of being any better than 2016, so we’ll just have to kick its butt until it settles down and friggin’ behaves.

_______________
¹ Hat tip to Charlie Pierce, shit-kicker and hell-raiser extraordinaire.
(more…)

Yesterday (Why, it’s Christmas Day, sir!) a friend was surprised by my lack of distress on the Twitters in re: the announcement from Chris Onstad of Achewood’s newest hiatus. Rather than see this as the latest piece of suck in a year just rife with it, I think that it’s an idea that Onstad has eased us into — there have been hiatii before, and a mostly-weekly schedule for the past year has felt like an extended present more than a full-bore return to form. Reading of the toll that Achewood takes on Onstad:

Achewood takes a huge give from its producer. It’s so slippery, so complex, so vast, so old, and I hold it to such a high standard, it becomes all-encompassing. When I do Achewood, I can’t focus on or give enough time to the securities I need to build for later in life, or to my human relationships. [emphasis original]

left me with a feeling approaching a regretful realization of something that had been in front of me all along, but hadn’t realized it. The highs and lows of the characters — all of them in their own rhythms — obviously take a great deal of effort to bring to fruition. I have always known intuitively that to inhabit the brainspace of Cassandra “Roast Beef” Kazenzakis is to flirt with melancholy the likes of which only our most advanced and depressed poets are equipped to confront, but that is not to say that I ever appreciated consciously the sacrifices that Onstad made in sharing that creation with us. And Beef is but one Dude from a single set of Cirucmstances¹.

And after all, Achewood has gone nowhere — an archive of some of the most brilliant characterization of the past two decades still exists; printed copies of the formative years of the strip and its most famous storyline will live on my bookshelf for as long as I draw breath. Need I add that my purchase from the gallery glares down at me as I write this, and that I regularly make Perfect Oven Fries Every Time?

Thank you for the ride so far Mr Onstad; those who read and understand Achewood and those who would begrudge this stepping-awy … well, let’s say that the Venn diagram of those two groups hell of looks like an eight. When the novel is written, when the syrup line extends, when you have no choice but to return to Achewood Court and The Underground, we’ll be here to welcome you with much crispy Stellas.

Oh, and some other things happened, too.

• As was noted last week, Mary Cagle started her Kickstarter campaign for a print edition of Let’s Speak English and promptly blew through her goal about two hours in and (as of this writing, about three hours after the launch announcement) is currently sitting at a tidy 150% of full funding.
• While the traditional etiquette books would have you believe that eight years of marriage is marked by gifts of bronze or pottery, it appears that (as with the prior seven) doodles are an acceptable substitute. Happy eighth anniversary to Ian & Jess McConville.
• Re: today’s Dinosaur Comics rerun is actually true; we also teach baby EMTs to use Stayin’ Alive by The Bee Gees, as it is slightly more positive in outlook.

Okay, that’s it for today; catch you next time something happens, or possibly in the new year.

Spam of the day:

Marissa Cooper (Gmail Team) sent you a message

Because when Gmail’s message team sends me an email on Gmail about my Gmail account they always mark it this message may attempt to steal your identity.

________________
¹ Although I suspect that inhabiting other characters was likely a tonic — Cornelius, say, or Ramses Luther Smuckles.