Vattu #800.

That is all.

It’s Christamas Eve–Eve–Eve, and even closer to Hanukkah, and everybody’s wrapping up work for the week in anticipation. But on Monday, stuff happens again:

It’s official! The Kickstarter for the Let’s Speak English book collection will go live on December 26th! A Boxing Day Bonanza!

That would be the print collection of Let’s Speak English, the comic autobio of Mary Cagle’s time as an elementary school English-language teacher in Japan. Brief moments from her various days, occasional repeating characters, and a slowly diminishing sense of being a fish out of water are found through the 134 strip (or about two year) run. The only thing I don’t absolutely love about LSE is that Cagle, a world-class colorist, chose to do it in black and white.

Sure, you could say that she’s just following the form of yonkoma, Japanese four-panel vertical comics, and you’d be right; I just think that her adventures in Japan would have been even better with color is all. I’m greedy that way. Since she’s promising us extras in the book, maybe she’ll do as many weekly comics in Japan do, and toss a few full-color pages at the front. That’d be neat.

Regardless, it’s going to be a fun and charming book, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the campaign come the 26th. If we don’t see each other again before then, have a great weekend, have a terrific holiday of your choice, and let’s all get out of this absolute stinker of a year and try to make 2017 less of a trash fire¹.

Spam of the day:

I Like To Play With Toys Productions

Weirdly, this was not porn spam. Crazy, right?

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¹ There is value and nobility in the attempt. And hey, have I mentioned the Six-F lately? Still gathering funds for matching!

As I note every year about this time, people get busy with family, holidays, and taking the heck off from the usual grind — I’m speaking primarily of creators here, but heck, I do it too — and thus the amount of news coming out may not justify a post every day. When I have news, I’ll share; when it’s less than usual, I may condense into fewer days. Expect much of the next two weeks to be slight.

• But before we go, there’s a bit that I really ought to mention. We at Fleen have long observed Let’s go to David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc from afar, and one memorable occasion in the past year, up close across a cafe table in midtown Manhattan. We’ve mentioned that after more than a decade and thousands of updates he produced his first print collection on the backs of a https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dmmaus/irregular-webcomic-burning-down-the-alehouse
  and the able help of Make That Thing.

  What I failed to mention is that said print collection, Irregular Webcomic: Burning Down The Alehouse (a copy of which he gifted to me some months back; it’s an odd experience, reading page after page of just one storyline of Morgan-Mar’s, even though his site is set up to do exactly that if you want) is available for general purchase over TopatoCo way, now that the backers have been fulfilled.

  The fault is mine because if you wanted it for the holidays, that’s basically impossible even if you live across the street from TopatoCo’s work camp state of the art shipping facility for toiling happy labor drones packing elves of pure happiness and light. But you know what endears you to giftees? Saying I am thinking about you at all times of the year, not just the Yule-adjacent holidays and I got you this I’m totally not late for Christmas, honest. It’s worth a shot.

• That thing I was excited about last week? The first part of it happened; the second part requires a confluence of events that are not in my control (including a general state of the world not being crazyballs bonkers) and so I’m not getting into specifics yet. Let’s just say that Scott McCloud’s habit of passing journalists towards me may have resulted in an interview¹ that will possibly provide some quotes and context for a story to run on a major, non-fake media outlet sometime next week. Maybe².

Spam of the day:

Last Chance! Make Christmas Magical for a Special Child

Sure, I’ll totally do that by signing a kid up for your “official letter from Santa” and giving you all their contact information so you can get them into your databases while they’re still young and vulnerable. I am completely that much of a monster.

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¹ With a journalist whose name anagrams to the seasonally-appropriate A Yule Band.

² cf: the world not being crazyballs bonkers, meaning they might get to it the third week of August.

Fifteen years yesterday, and it’s the start of Year Sixteen today; around for five years, more or less before this here page even got started. I speak, naturally, of Randy Milholland’s Something*Positive, a behemoth of a strip in terms of archive depth, dramatis personae, and a complete adherence to the progress of time.

Characters have grown — it’s all but impossible to see Davan as the asshole he was in strip one, for example¹ — and characters have died² and characters are becoming their own people in unexpected ways. It’s all natural and slow and organic, and it remains one of the most emotionally honest works of webcomics, every damn day.

Happy anniversary, Davan, Aubrey, PeeJee, Jason, Fred, and Choochoobear, who’ve been there from the beginning. Happy anniversary, Vanessa, Nancy, PamJee, Donna, Rory, and those that have come later. Happy anniversary, Kharisma, Mike, Monette, Ollie, Kyle, Berenger, and all those who’ve managed to stop being terrible human beings because at the bottom of his grumpy exterior, Milholland has the heart of a true optimist. Happy anniversary, Avagadro, Pepito, Twitchy-Hug, Fluffmodeus, and all the other horrors that whisper terrible things at us (including the Last Trick or Treaters, my favorite of which are the kids that show the horrors what for).

Happy anniversary, Randy; something about you invites the casually entitled to throw more grief your way than any three random webcomickers, and still you send these bizarre, frustrating, lovable characters out to us every week. We’re the better for it.

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¹ Although some might argue he’s merely a different kind of asshole these days.

² We are coming up on eleven years since the most heartbreaking moment of the strip and Fred is still kept from Faye. Worse, he’s getting lost in the past, but

There’s something about the depths of winter, the short days, that makes us seek out family; for some it’s a matter of travel, for some the journey is longer. For nearly all of us, it’s where our strength and hope reside.

• Longtime readers of this page may recall that Brian Warmoth¹ and Rick Marshall² were a couple of guys that Megan Fox Tits Wolverine magazine put on the webomics beat back when they still had a magazine and weren’t busy screwing up their business of comics conventions with penny-ante grifting. Instead, MFTW just criminally underpaid a bunch of writers (of whom Warmoth and Marshall were the most prolific) to build up the magazine’s web presence and then fired them unceremoniously, taking down their stories in the process.

  Both Marshall and Warmoth landed on their feet, though, and have done well for themselves in the intervening years. In Warmoth’s case, very well as of this weekend, as he and his wife, Julia, welcomed their first child into the world — an act of profound optimism in the best of times — at their home in the Bay Area.

  Brian’s one of the sweetest, most genuine guys you’ll ever meet, and the rarest of things in the digital media age: a damned skilled editor who can bring out the best words from his writers, while building up audiences in niche media. I’ve seen the photos and while they aren’t mine to share (nor are the specific details), take it from me that Young Master Warmoth is adorable, and will undoubtedly grow to make his parents proud. Fleen congratulates the newly-expanded family, and wishes them all the best (along with a few uninterrupted nights of sleep).

• But when anybody in webcomics mentions the word family, it’s pretty likely that one idea springs to mind: Kate Beaton is visiting her parents, and at least some of her sisters will be there with their families, and the Best Comics Ever will come about as a result. And that’s pretty much what happened from yesterday, as Beaton made her way to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia from her writerly stomping grounds in Newfoundland. There’s Mom, and Da, and Agnes, of course. Everybody loves Agnes.

  And then Kate shared something more; it was low key and undramatic, as befits the folk of Cape Breton who (one would believe from Beaton’s comics) hate more than anything else the possibility of Making A Fuss. Kate’s sister Becky warned her to be ready, and she reached up and removed her hair. It’s not hair, you realize, it’s a wig and she’s bald underneath. She’s chemo bald and that means … oh, no.

  Here’s the thing — we don’t know Becky; Kate has been extraordinarily generous in sharing her life, and all the Beatons have been willing to be part of that sharing. I can’t imagine that Kate would have done that without Becky’s express permission and it feels real even though we don’t know them because Kate’s always made them feel like they’re right there, we can touch them they’re so close.

  And I don’t know you, Becky Beaton, or Kate’s other sisters, or her parents, or Agnes, or any of the extended clan in Cape Breton³, but I wish I did. I want you to know that everybody that reads Kate’s comics (especially the silly, ordinary family comics) considers every Beaton to be The Best. Love and strength to you, and your family, and laughter too, because that’s pretty much what all the comics since have been about. When there’s laughter in the Beaton household, there’s no room for Fuss.

Spam of the day:

Why Your Soreness is Caused by “Dry Joints”

Are you talking about the solder thing, because that would be the best spam logic leap ever.

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¹ Shown here, right.

² Will, and Holly, shown here, center right in khaki.

³ Well, except for her relative Jeff Smith.

But my Twitterfeed appears to reveal that President Obama didn’t save us, so it up to us to save ourselves. Let this serve as a reminder, then, of two things:

1. The Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund¹ project continues to gather your donations to causes that will help us unravel the causus trumpii; please send me (that would be gary, who can be reached at this here website.com) receipt images of donations to these organizations and I’ll match ’em, up to a total of US$10,000. Creators that have run your own fundraisers, you count; send me your totals.
2. Rich Stevens inadvertently designed the symbol of the resistance over the summer. I’m wearing mine until we have the country we deserve again; anybody feeling the heat can come sit by me.

Weekend. Fresh new hells can wait until Monday, and I’ll do what I can to fight ’em in the meantime.

Spam of the day:

Meet Local Singles Over 50 — See Photos!

Dudes, I’m an upper-income straight white cisdude in what’s about to be a very different America. You’re supposed to be sending me spam about Central European teenagers. If I indulge in a midlife crisis in any other way, I’ll be breaking Trumplaw.

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¹ Six-F from now on.

I don’t want to count any chickens before they hatch — actually, I can’t say that I want to count chickens ever, they’re monumentally stupid birds and counting them sounds really tedious — but I may be involved in something really cool in the next two weeks or so. Fingers crossed, and as so much that involves me and webcomics, if this happens it’ll be because Scot McCloud is in the habit of passing my name on when somebody’s looking for a comment on webcomickry and he’s busy. Your confidence in me is pretty much the greatest reward¹ I have for my sometimes tortured history of embloggenation.

Speaking of tortured history, I believe that I may have mentioned in the past that I’m not entire certain what day you could say Fleen went live. It was definitely December of 2005, and I’d been banking pieces to run on launch day, and I just neglected to pay any attention whatsoever; I’ve since decided to just split the difference and all it the middle of the month, which appears to be today-ish.

Some of what we did at launch (like the contributions of Jeff Lowrey and Nic Carey) have fallen by the wayside. Although it’s mostly been a one-man show, other contributors have popped up from time to time, like the inestimable Anne Thalheimer and the invaluable Pierre Lebeaupin. Some things I thought I would have an abiding interest have faded, while others (like my unholy love of parenthetical thoughts) have persisted².

This is, as near as I can tell, the 3340th post at Fleen in the eleven years since launch, with one more lost to the ages; somewhere close to 3000 of those were written by me. Individual posts range from about 200 words to near 4000; I’ll figure 500 on average and claim northwards of a million words, which is not bad for (mostly) frantic typing at lunchtime³.

Along the way, I’ve discovered on evil twin, found at least three retroactive weirdo best friends from high school, made no great enemies (except for James Ashby, but as history’s greatest villain, I like to think he’s everybody’s great enemy) and read more wonderful comics than I can recall. Most importantly, I’ve been able to tell you (all two thousand or so; honestly, I’m sometimes surprised at the influence people ascribe to me when Fleen’s readership is exceedingly modest) about work that I love and that I think you’d love, too (I think frequently on the speech about the discovery and defense of The New from the end of Ratatouille⁴).

Eleven years, more or less; new experiences still to come. It’s been a blast, and despite every day I despair of finding three sentences to string together, I find myself eager for the next story, the next deadline, the next couple hundred words. See you tomorrow for the start of Year Twelve.

Spam of the day:

My brother recommended I would possibly like this website. He was once entirely right. This publish truly made my day.

You and me both, spammer. You and me both.

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¹ Close second — being told by creators that a review found something in their work that others hadn’t.

² The footnotes came later. My love of Brad Guigar, the blog’s official Sexiest Man Alive, was always there (sorry, Ryan North).

³ Not to mention finding and formatting the screenshots and links, an unknown (but huge) number of which are now lost to rot.

⁴ If you haven’t burned it into your memory and need a refresher, click here .

Possibly also bad, and maybe stupid¹. There’s loads of things going on. To wit:

• The second half of the Calista Brill interview is up at The Beat, and it’s just as enlightening as the first part.
• The first new installment of Kazu Kibuishi’s webcomic, Copper, in forever (the previous installment was April of 2009, before Amulet Book 2 was out) has been released to the wide world, and Kibuishi’s dog-and-his-boy team haven’t missed a step. It’s entirely in character with all the previous episodes, but you know what caught my eye? That hanging lamp, which puts a Schulzian overtone on the vignette. Fred, Copper, don’t be strangers.
• Le Millionnaire est mort, vive le millionnaire: Tony Millionaire announced the end of Maakies today and pointed us all towards his new comic venture, Rickets & Scurvy at about the same time. While not necessarily a webcomic, Maakies has had more than its share of influence on the webcomickin’ world; particularly given the demise of alternative newspapers, the comics that would have wound up there are online these days, in large part to Millionaire and his contemporaries.
• You know how I can tell Brad Guigar is doing good with his ongoing exploration of smut? He’s shutting down a project that probably didn’t take much of his time and from which he clearly derived a lot of dad-joke amusement², presumably due to being busy with the aforementioned smut. Tales From The Con has been running at the Emerald City Comicon site for more than four year, featuring a rotating cast of artists depicting Guigar’s takes on what the con circuit is like from both sides of the exhibitor table. But comes now the news that TFTC is wrapping its run and going out with a new softcover collection of all 250+ strips, available for preorder now
• But the biggest news in webcomics today is also the biggest webcomic I can ever recall seeing from Zach Weinersmith — 62 panels³ of deep-dive on quantum computing (with a writing assist from Scott Aaronson), which is a pretty damn good primer on an entire field of theoretical work, in the form of a parent and teen sex talk. Enjoy a week’s worth of funny and nerdery all in a single sitting, thanks to a burning desire to (as per the secret punchline behind the big red button) make Randall Munroe look like a slacker. Bravo.

Spam of the day:

1 Weird Trick to Regrow Your Hair in 60 Days (it works!)

and

??ir falling out? Want thicker, healthier hair?

Whatever else may be true about me, whatever my sins and shortcomings, I legit have a head full of thick, magnificent hair. I have for reals gotten compliments on it from strangers. If I use either your weird trick or your Keranique™ treatment, I fear it may turn into a replay of The Beard.

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¹ I’m tempted to distill it down to the Zappaesque Dumb all over, an’ maybe even a little ugly on the side, but then I decided not to. PS: Hi Brett and Rich.

² Case in point: most recent strip, which I suppose may be the last.

³ Sure, Weinersmith regularly goes from single panel to a dozen or more, but this is waaaay outside his usual length. Previous similar atypically long single comics: 50 states, 50 slogans, any particular installment of Ducks.

And the dearth of news is hitting hard. Plans are being made for festive fun times — whether that’s Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Day, or the premiere of Star Wars 3.5, everybody’s got somewhere to be in the next fortnight. Deadlines are coming on fast for ordering stuff if you want it in time to wrap and give as a gift (for example, TopatoCo’s judgment of shipping realities is here, and they’ve been at this a long time and have things down to a science; other shops may not be able to get stuff to you as well). The Best of lists haven’t come out yet, the world is still a mess¹, and it’s a slow news day. There’s gonna be more of these until after the first week of the new year, I suspect.

But there’s a nice chunky read for you over at The Beat, where Alexander Lu talks with :01 Books Executive Editor Calista Brill (Part 1 is up now, Part 2 is due sometime today). I’d describe Brill as the secret weapon of :01, except:

• She’s not a secret
• Pretty much everybody over there qualifies as a secret weapon, in the sense that they’re all indispensable, do their jobs quietly, and are super-effective

It says something about :01 Books and the culture that Mark Siegel has put together that the core staff of eight or nine years ago is still there (except for book designer extraordinaire Collen AF Venable, who only left because another publisher offered her an art director job … and she’s still at :01 as an author), and I suspect will be there unless they get head-hunted to head up imprints elsewhere.

They’re staffing up and expanding their publishing pace (roughly doubling both) without sacrificing their famed quality, and Brill’s discerning eye (with respect to both acquisitions and improving books) is a big part of why they’re succeeding. Go read about somebody that works hard while enjoying the crap out of her job, to the benefit of all of us.

Spam of the day:

shoes are a breeding ground for fungus

I guess that’s why you’re trying to sell me knockoff designer handbags instead of knockoff designer shoes?

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¹ Which is why I should issue a periodic reminder about the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund² and how we’re still matching donations. I know a lot of you creators are doing similar things, and I will absolutely match your own efforts.

² Thanks to faithful reader Roo for the suggestion that prompted me to decide on a name.

Okay, y’all know “C” Spike “Trotman”, right? Scrappy lady webcomicker that put out a bunch of anthologies, has leveraged Kickstarter like few before or since, and has built up her own publishing company because was told by a bunch of people she’d never succeed and has succeeded the shit out of her career in an act of exquisite vengeance? Never overlook the value of spite in making your life plans, bee-tee-dubs. Responsible for publishing both established creators and previous unknowns, ambitious plans for a dozen and a half books in the near- to medium-term¹, and fond of tweeting out her plans for world domination? Yeah, her.

Some people still don’t pay attention to Spike on the electronic Twitter machine because they only want to think about comics, and her other topics frequently include lengthy tweetstorms on the topics of her dog, her cooking adventures, her favorite videogames, her favorite trainwreck YouTube hosts, her favorite documentaries, art history, and the ways to understand, undermine, and dismantle the (choose all that apply) {racist | sexist | ableist | heteronormative | ciscentric | white supremacist | pretty much all other awful philosphies, honestly} power structure because she is going to outlast your ass and then dance on your grave, The Man. She’d basically be an Elmore Leonard heroine come to life if you didn’t scoff and mutter Nobody can do all that, what a Mary Sue.

Here’s the thing — every time I tune into one of those tweetstorms, I learn something. Sometimes it’s something huge, like how power structures get built to make socioeconomic advantages as permanent as possible; sometimes it’s something esoteric, like the use of light and body positioning in the pre-Raphaelite school. And yeah, sometimes it’s which YouTuber is having a shitstorm meltdown about mom not buying the right Cheetos, but they can’t all be winners. Point is, sometimes I’m on deadline and just need to find out what the latest news for Iron Circus Comics and its associated creators might be.

You already know where this is going. The new twitterfeed for Iron Circus Comics is now live, and sharing news of Spike’s endeavours, as well of those of other creators and publishers. It’s going to be a valuable resource and I commend it to all of you.

Spam of the day:

??me to get out of debt with the IRS

The IRS sends emails from irs.gov, not from sales-neo.stream. I am more insulted by how bad you are at trying to steal my money than the fact that you’re trying to steal it.

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¹ For contrast, consider that :01 Books, which I would call the premiere graphic novel-only imprint, spent its first ten years putting out 20 +/-2 books a year. That’s approximately what Spike is doing, only without the backing and logistical support of one of the biggest publishing conglomerates on the planet. This is not to run down :01, who have been tremendously understaffed and doing crazy person amounts of work for most of that decade; it’s to point out that Spike is doing CPAOW times about four or five.