I keep hearing radio stories and reading articles about how there’s this great new book about Tetris, of all things, celebrating the 30 years that the game has been rewiring the brains of Westerners.

And you know what? They’re all talking about the wrong book. Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure that Dan Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect (named for the phenomenon where people hallucinated or dreamed falling Tetris pieces) is a fine book, but when it comes to complex ideas about a fundamentally visual medium, you need a different kind of guidebook.

Enter Tetris: The Games People Play by Box Brown¹, which shows us the (long, twisted, filled with machinations and actual Murdochesque media-tycoon villains) history of Tetris, its creators, and the effect it had not only on the videogame industry (it could arguably be said to have made Nintendo into a household name and killed at least two other companies), but on our actual brains.

Like Brown’s last nonfiction graphic novel, he’s taken a topic that most people would regard as Cool, but how much is there really to say about it? and found depths. He knows when to go broad, when to go deep, and how to let the outsized personalities in the story create their own character development. He finds the story behind the surface that nearly everybody knows, and his simple, chunky art is ideal for expressing something complex and making it relatable².

Which, if you think about it, is kind of perfect for the complex-yet-minimal-on-the-surface Tetris itself. I don’t know if there will be a Tetris effect, but Brown’s book is nearly as compelling and addictive as its namesake.

??????r?nt?t????n???m?s, bad credit OK
translation: cheap rent to own homes

Look-alike letters interspersed with actual roman characters to get around pattern-matching blacklists? You suck for that, but you suck even more for being the most exploitative industry on the damn planet.

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¹ Out today from :01 Books, who were kind enough to supply me with a review copy some months back.

² cf: Chapter Two of Understanding Comics.

Well, that turned out to be less disastrous that it could have (in that the bill was about 10% of the bad outcome, but still greater than most people could throw together on short notice — I’m lucky to have the ability to keep an emergency repairs slush fund without too much sacrifice), but required a bunch of time and it’s still not quite done. Missed a bunch of stuff while I was gone, too:

• Announcement of the monthly TopatoCo Drink ‘n’ Draw, the last for 2016 if my memory serves
• The return of The Abominable Charles Christopher (these pups are going to learn not to screw with Vivol, and if Luga was around he’d knock sense into them)
• The release of Tyler Page’s Raised On Ritalin print collection to the general public (last month when I was in Minneapolis, Page and his wife Cori Doerrfeld graciously had me over for dinner and a lively discussion with our mutual friend Raina Telgemeier)
• An update from France from esteemed Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin (that one’s not time-sensitive and appears below)
• An entire convention

On the other hand, I am around to catch some timely things, like:

• The incomparable Hope Larson (comics maestra, ice cream maker extraordinaire, and caterpillar wrangler to the stars) has found enough time in her schedule (between Batgirl and her next book, out sometime in 2018) to resume Solo¹, or the news that after fifteen years, 4500 strips, and one-and-a-half creative teams, Unshelved is coming to an end next month.
• There’s also word of a benefit for the Cartoon Art Museum (reminder: they’ve been sleeping on the couches of other museums for a while now, and could really use some help getting back to a place of their own) next month, featuring cast members of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra:
  

  Go behind the scenes of The Legend of Korra and Avatar: The Last Airbender with special guests voice actors Janet Varney, John Michael Higgins, Mindy Sterling, Dante Basco and Avatar: Legacy illustrator Dan Parsons. Cosplay highly encouraged! All ages welcome.

  The event will be 19 November, starting at 7:00pm, at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco. General admission tickets at US$28, with premium tickets (which get you an autograph from each special guest) for US$38, with CAM members receiving a 10% discount. Tickets can be purchased via the Friends For Benefits website and are likely going to go fast.

And, as promised:

Team Maliki has just unveiled the first self-published Maliki collection, and to the surprise of absolutely no one they have launched a preorder [French version] for it on a crowdfunding platform called Ulule [English version]. One aspect which stands out is the use of “books” rather than “sum collected” to define stretch goals.

Gary here. That’s a new one on me — I’m going to have to think about how it differs from regular currency-based stretch goals, but it could allow a project with multiple forms of a book (PDF, softcover, hardcover, limited edition, retailer discount multi-packs) to count equally towards stretch goals. Interesting.

[T]here is some precedent for a French comics campaign of this scale, which in fact may be a daunting yardstick to be compared to; I couldn’t cover it at the time, as it was before I took up the mantle of Fleen Senior French Correspondent in January of this year, so this is the ideal opportunity to introduce it as background …

Laurel [Duermael, athough she’s mononymic in her work], while French, lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband, and works there as an illustrator, mostly for Docker. She maintains a comics blog about her life there. Don’t be misled by her seemingly happy style, as she can deal serious blows, whether it is to cover her experience (French-only) dealing with the French consulate in San Francisco, or to excoriate (French-only) French magazine Biba and Little Market for a “competition” that amounted to providing illustration work for little more than exposure (and you know what they say about exposure).

Her blog is currently taken up by a story (only in French so far) titled Comme Convenu [As Agreed] which is inspired by her experience starting out in the Bay Area in a video game startup. Around this time last year, she launched a crowdfunding campaign on Ulule as a preorder for printing the first volume, with a goal of €9167.

It ended up funding in about one hour. After about one day, it was already 800% funded. It ended up funding at 2,860%² (no, this is not a typo). And remember, the story and book are only available in French, so this couldn’t have been tapping in the established English-speaking comics crowdfunding audience.

Of course, Maliki: Blog does not need to reach the same kind of total amount to be considered a success, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up overfunding in a similar fashion.

At present, Maliki: Blog has pledges for 3414 books (on a goal of 1000); as those are spread out across three different quality levels (Classic, Collector, Super Collector), it’s hard to say how much money it represents, but if everybody only opted for the lowest tier, that would be nearly €70,000³. With just over two weeks left to go, Maliki seems like as not to hit €100K.

Spam of the day:

Mighty Dolly

Okay, so they’re pretending to sell me industrial warehouse equipment for moving heavy loads but you know what? If they told me that their dolly product was named Parton, I’d click on the link because Dolly Parton rules.

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¹ I really dig Solo; it’s her most adult (in the sense of acknowledging that being an adult can suck sometimes) and melancholy work to date, I think. In case you were wondering, no Karl Lagerfeld here.

² That would be in excess of a quarter-million Euro. If I have my exchange rates correct, that would have been just shy of US$300,000.

³ Conversely, if they all opted for Super Collector, it would be over €170K; just a €100K margin of uncertainty, no big. Oh, and as of this writing, €1 is a buck-eleven (US$1.1139 to be exact, which there’s no point in being since it’s gonna float).

So, how’s your day going? Mine started with my wife noting a small leak along the wall in the basement and escalated to the (cast iron) (original to the house) (almost 90 years old) pipe that brings all drain water from the second floor to the wastewater line showing a pretty significant crack, that goes up an as-yet undetermined distance into a wall.

If we’re lucky, a mostly unseen wall in a utility space will give access to the entire section of pipe that needs replacing. If we’re less lucky, a pretty significant chunk of wall (exterior and/or interior) and pretty much all of a bathroom will need to be opened up. My house repairs guy used words like extensive and that will need permits and have to remove the toilet, the tub, the floor …, none of which are good things to hear (especially six weeks after we just redid the roof, oy).

But, as a gentleman of my acquaintance¹ once observed after having taken 4m of water into his basement in Hurricane Sandy² and facing an extensive renovation, There’s problems and there’s problems you can fix with money. I’d rather not have to spend the money and it’s going to be a hassle, but it can be fixed.

So that’s where I’m at — free moments around the working day that would ordinarily allow me to catch up on webcomics or bang out a proper piece of roundup, review, or hack pseudojournalism are being spent on other things. It’s a hassle and I’d rather have time free to write, but it won’t last forever.

Which is my way of saying please bear with me if I’m not able to post as much this week as I’d normally do. I’ll be back as soon as I can be.

Spam of the day:

Dolor Tempus Company — Good day, I have sent your order. Please open the statement given here to see more details.

Want me to open your virus-ridden document? Maybe don’t give away the game by naming your fake company Dolor (Latin: pain, sorrow, regret) Tempus (Latin: pain, season, moment). At least you didn’t name it Tempus Dolor, which Google Translate assures me is Latin for period pain.

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¹ The most relentlessly cheerful guy I’ve ever known; ask him how he’s doing and the response is invariably Super! or Great! or Excellent! If he ever answers with a low-key I’m good it probably means that he’s coming down with a week-long hideous disease.

² Fun fact: his basement ceiling is 2.5m above floor level, leaving another 1.5m of water to come up into the main residence.

Ready for the weekend? Me too. Let’s look ahead just a bit, though.

• The 5th of October is gonna be a fun one in comics shops, as it will see the debut of both the original graphic novel Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe (Ryan North and Erica Henderson), but also the reissues with comic shop safe covers of Oh Joy, Sex Toy (Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan) volumes 1 and 2. For added bonus fun, Oh Joy, Sex Toy volume 3 will hit a mere month later, on 9 November.

  The latter is brand new to everybody, what with Moen & Nolan’s deal with Oni Press imprint Limerence moderating the need for a Kickstarter campaign this time². It’s a great time to see webcomics folks in the traditional store channel, particularly since it’s because of such fun topics as a) Squirrel Girl, and b) sexytimes.

• As long as we’re talking about the next couple of weeks, the Cartoon Art Museum continues its outreach and education programs whilst simultaneously looking for new digs. Next up: weekly adult classes on character creation (October 13, 20, & 27) and visual story design (November 3, 10, & 17) at CAM’s temporary educational space, 275 5th Street in San Francisco.

  Classes run for two hours each (6:30pm to 8:30pm), at a cost of US$135 for the public and US$100 for CAM members. Considering individual membership only runs US$45 (US$35 for students), that’s practically the cost of a year’s support there in the discount.

  Oh, and in-session materials will be provided, but you may want to pick up some basic tools (pencils, choice of inking tool, paper, sketchbooks) for homework/practice. The session sign-ups are found at the links above.

So it’s a bit rainy and a bit melancholy and a whole lot Fall-y¹, which is very possibly the best season. Get out there and enjoy it. See you back on Monday.

Spam of the day:

[block of kanji I’m not going to look up Unicode for and paste in individually]/VIRUS DETECTION(SMTP,Trojan:W97M/MaliciousMacro.GEN)

Oh my goodness, a throwaway address in Japan is warning me about viruses on my computer! Whatever shall I do? [hits the delete button, goes to get more tea]

_______________
¹ Note to readers in the Southern Hemisphere: it is so Fall. If you claim it’s Spring, fine, but here it’s Fall.

² This point was previously worded differently, and poorly. The intent is: a Kickstart is well and good, and will meet immediate needs as well as supply a modest inventory for store sales. A publisher means reprints as necessary and enough stock to supply as many comic shops as come calling without the danger of going out of print. Fleen regrets the clumsy construction caused by poor wording.

Last week we all learned that Tillie Walden would be launching her first webcomic, titled On A Sunbeam. Last night, the first weekly entry went up, and there’s little to say other than Wow.

Okay, that’s not true, or I wouldn’t have bothered firing up WordPress. There’s lots to say. Like how Walden is a mere 20 years old, and is producing work that is going to suck you right in, demanding to know what happens next, what’s happened before, who these characters are, and where they’re going. Like how the art is remarkably polished, and how well it serves an intriguing-as-all-hell premise.

Last week, we at Fleen had the impression it would feature (and I quote) rebellious prep school students in space, but that’s only part of it. It’s the flashback part, and the current story is about young folk (indeterminate age, but probably secondary school age) and an older woman (of clearly rough reputation) on an itinerant gig of restoring old buildings … in space. POV character Mia is thrust into the latter, having previously experienced the former, and how/why she wound up here is still to be seen.

The world has an industrial aesthetic that I’d describe as steampunk without the steam-gear fetish — spaceships look like fish, buildings are old and cathedral-like, like a culture transitioning from high Renaissance to Industrial Revolution suddenly figured out spaceflight and architecture stopped there (although clothing did not — it’s got a late 20th Century feel: practical, functional, nondescript even). I suppose an alternate take would be Moebius without the fetishy fashion aspects.

Which is to say, there were a lot of deliberate choices that led to On A Sunbeam’s look and feel; they’re not just thrown together at random, and they feel organically linked even without knowing the backstory and worldbuilding. Remember everything I said about Walden’s characters dragging you into the narrative? The art is just as compelling.

None of which is really surprising; Walden may be on her first webcomic, but she’s got multiple books under her belt, and two Ignatzen bricks from earlier this month. If she can post story even fractions of the size of the first update (a full chapter, three dozen pages worth!) each Wednesday, On A Sunbeam is going to be one of the densest, richest, fastest-growing webcomics experiences in years¹.

The only thing missing is an RSS feed, so write yourself a note to check back Wednesdays. Jump on now while it’s still new; don’t delay event one update.

Spam of the day:

Keep?the?good?teeth?and only replace the bad ones.

Isn’t that the entire point of dentistry? And what’s with the choice of non-Latin (but Latin-looking) characters in the text? ?????t??????d?t??t???nd??nl? — none of those words is composed only of standard keyboard characters.

_______________
¹ Although it’s completely different in tone, story, aesthetic, pacing, subject, and just about everything else, it sort of reminds me of Minna Sundberg’s Stand Still, Stay Silent in terms of overall accomplishment. This speaks well of both young ladies in question.

The Drive hardcover Kickstart has wrapped, and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has come up about eight bucks shy of 300% funding¹, which means we all get fancy endpapers, ribbon bookmarks, spot gloss, dust covers, a stack of e-books, and a download of STRIPPED along with our comics. Yikes, givin’ away the store, LArDK!

When the campaign launched, I noted that Kellett’s trick of giving the heads-up to his Patreon supporters (giving them first crack at limited rewards — very smart) skewed the first-day numbers, preventing my usual analysis with the Fleen Funding Formula (Mark II). Now that it’s all said and done, I’m going to see what the FFF mk2 would have predicted and compare against the actual finish.

To reiterate: the FFF mk2 looks at the Kicktraq projection at the 24-30 hour mark and divides that value by 4 for the midpoint of the projection. That midpoint is further divided by 5 to get the margin of error². That gives Drive a predicted finish of US$110K +/- 22K, or a range of US$88K to US$132K. Actual finish: US$104.7K, or pretty damn close to the midpoint. For contrast, the McDonald Ratio³ predicts US$97K, also well within the margin of error (and likely more accurate for lower-backer-count campaigns). This is the first head-to-head comparison I’ve had for the two tools, and I’m tentatively convinced (ask me again after another dozen trials) that they’re equally useful.

Now starts the long wait for printing and shipping and setting up Gumroad with all the digital downloads; the books should go out around February, by which time we’ll have built up another two or three Tales From The Drive guest stories, and who knows how much more details of the Pilot’s War and the Second Spanish Empire. Can’t wait to see where it all leads.

Spam of the day:

Strathmore Professional — Congratulations! You’ve been selected to Join Strathmore’s Who’s Who Network

Damn, I thought somebody was going to offer me Strathmore paper that I could give to an artist friend. Stupid spammers.

______________
¹ It’s actually closer to three hundo, but eight bucks sounds funnier.

² Futher, the FFF mk2 is only used for campaigns that have at least 200 backers in that initial period.

³ From Kel McDonald’s observation that the first three days equals one third of the final total

Some of these will concern you, some will grab at your sense of empathy, some will intrigue; basically we’re all over the place today.

• I’m very interested to see what the unintended consequences of a new law in California concerning the sales of autographs/autographed memorabilia will do to the major comics shows. Via the twitterfeed of author Amy Stewart, a new law (presumably intended to keep people from buying fake autographs/tchotchkes for big bucks) will require any signed item (think books and art) costing more than five damn dollars (think: everything) to come with a certificate of authenticity with a seven year retention requirement.

  It might be that people at SDCC next year are forced into the charade of selling books/prints/whatever and making the person who bought it then come back for a separate signature. It may be that the “signed & sketched” price variant is actually illegal. It may mean that California-residing creators can no longer supply pre-signed merch to stores (think Raina Telgemeier and the signed copies that bookstores have of Ghosts … they’ll have to dump stock yesterday or risk sanctions that I don’t know how to determine under California’s Civil Code).

  Okay, the summary of the bill indicates that the person signing things is exempt, but resellers appear not to be. Raina can sign a book without recordkeeping, but any comic shop or bookstore with a signed by the author! sticker on books is potentially screwed. California creators/vendors, your thoughts please.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a dispatch regarding a Kickstarter that’s burning up the webcomics category in two languages:
  

  Commit Strip, the strip about the daily life of coders, has launched a Kickstarter for their new book collection, and their first in English, at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/commitstrip/commitstrip-rise-of-the-coders-a-book-about-the-fu. And about 24 hours in they [had] already blown past twice their (admittedly modest) goal. Note that, much like the Last Man campaign, they have rewards in multiple languages but had to set up a separate page for the French description of the campaign as Kickstarter does not support campaigns in multiple languages.

  That last bit surprises me. I wonder if KS would object if you just had a bunch of text in more than one language, or set up support alternating languages but with identical price points and rewards. Certainly that would be a pain; I wonder what our friends to the bilingual north think about this particular feature lack.

• We’ve spoken here at Fleen about Something Terrible, and the burden that Dean Trippe has taken upon himself, because the key thing about being Batman is, you don’t want any other people to have to be Batman. Your trauma defined your adulthood, but you can use that to help others not become as I Am The Night as you wound up; for Trippe, it means making himself available¹ to other survivors of childhood sexual abuse and creating his own impromptu Bat-Family, meeting and offering solace to one person at a time.

  But there’s more people out there than you can meet one at a time that need him, so Trippe’s gone the media route. Last Friday saw the launch of the Something Terrible podcast, hosted by Trippe and no doubt finding its own direction for future episodes. Trippe calls it a mission², I call it a most unfortunately necessary public service that I absolutely will not be listening to; I’m not burying my head in the sand, but in order to keep myself where I need to be to help when necessary³, I need to deal with trauma-bearing people individually, in person, as the need arises. I can’t go seeking them out.

  But those on the other side of the equation, who don’t have my luxury of distancing themselves? Who need Batman to avoid becoming Batman? The Something Terrible podcast is going to be a godsend. Here’s hoping you never have to subscribe.

Spam of the day:

Search For Baby Shower Gifts Options

The one part of the patriarchy and general male privilege that I will gleefully engage in is the general pass I get for baby showers. I know that makes me a terrible feminist, but this is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me. I will die in it at the stake. PS: Benedick rules.

______________
¹ I suspect, on occasion, to his own detriment. Dean, there’s a reason that they tell you to secure your own mask before helping others — if you aren’t well and whole, you can’t be of assistance to them, no matter how much they need it. Don’t overdo it, please.

² A very Batman-like approach to it, I must say.

³ Occasional reminder: I am an active Emergency Medical Technician.

So this is probably a first — a podcast review at a webcomics site; but given that the podcast in question is by the webcomickiest of all webcomickers (the inimitable Ryan Estrada), I figure it probably works. Also, I should note that Estrada sent me downloads for all nine episodes (not to mention minisodes, and the reading of the related Machine of Death story, Shiv Sena Riot) so I’ve heard ahead of the three episodes now available for free listening.

Radio drama is something we in the US don’t have a lot of experience with¹, and the first thing you have to worry about is whether or not the voices and characters are different enough to follow easily. Estrada’s come up with a story conceit that lets him take a sprawling cast (more than 70 voice actors) across nine episodes and break them into manageable, discrete units that are pretty easy to follow. Apart from an overly-long, overly-narrated chase scene (which is not the easiest thing to depict in audio only) in episode one², the story zips along nicely.

The conceit is that a virus used by MRAs to spy on women has infected the phones of both teams of thieves and their targets. This works better than you might suspect, since everybody’s got a phone on them all the time, after all. The thieves are after the fabled Seven Keys To The Internet³, but that’s just another conceit for Estrada to tell a series of other stories about things he wants to talk about — criminal gangs in the digital age, Korean gaming police, secret hard drives in photocopiers, the history of magic, the history of abusive patents, venture capital and the tech bubble, put-upon phone center workers (a recurring theme, as this would be Manisha, star of Shiv Sena Riot and Estrada’s earlier Broken Telephone), relay phones for the deaf, and the prominence of Eastern Texas in patent trolling all come under his scrutiny … and as the end credits note each time, these are all real things.

The result is a series of I told you that story so I could tell you this story connections, with each story different in place, tone, subject matter, and (in large part) cast. So far, the best balance of all the competing areas of focus has been episode three, Motivation, featuring a lovely series of musical interludes derived from the verse of 19th Century spiritualist scammers and a lead performance (by Chris Tharp) that equally channeled Jeff Garlin and Penn Jillette.

The only thing that I’d ask for is that the show page link to cast credits on a per-episode basis instead of one big list. It’s a bit confusing trying to tie roles to particular interludes this way. Oh, and Jemaine Clement insists, in the opening titles, on pronouncing Data as dah-tuh instead of the proper day-tah. As another Data once pointed out, One is my name. The other is not. Get it together, Clement! Or, since Estrada’s the director and should know better, get it together, Estrada!

But these are minor quibbles. Big Data is a bunch of different stories on a bunch of weird-but-true side effects of modern life, and a fun journey through What Matters To Ryan. Give ‘er a listen, if only for the creative insults lobbed at Kickstarter supporters at the end of each episode.

Spam of the day:

MOVING SUCKS! LET US HELP YOU.

Got that right, which is why I’m never moving again. Pretty good pitch, though.

______________
¹ Not for lack of enthusiastic trying, sometimes. Waaaay back in college, I was part of a radio show that tried to put together a single, two hour SF radio drama in conjunction with the return of Comet Halley. It’s a creative endeavour that is very hard not to suck at.

² By episode four, a similar fight scene (also tough to do in audio only) was much briefer, reflecting either tighter scripting, tighter editing, or both. Much appreciated, either way.

³ It’s actually twelve, and full disclosure: one of my friends is actually a keyholder and she would find it hilarious to think that somebody might try to steal her key. She’d also kick their ass.

YOU get an event, and YOU get an event, EVERYBODY gets an event to go to!

• In conjunction with NYCC (which, ahem, has decided not to credential me), there will be an off-site, open to everybody pair of events at a branch of the NY Public Library during NYCC weekend. First up: Friday, 7 October in Greenwich Village at the Jefferson Market Library from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Guests include Ryan North and Box Brown. Then on Saturday the 8th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm at the 53rd Street Library, the all-ages panel will include Rebecca Mock and Carey Pietsch. The events are free, but do require registration, so hit the links to reserve your spot.
• No time to bask in the glory of Geniusdom, Gene Luen Yang is on tour for the latest Secret Coders collection — featuring Mike Holmes on art — from :01 Books, starting tomorrow at the National Book Festival in DC. He’ll be bouncing around — New York, Naperville, IL, Cincinnati, Dallas, Albuquerque, and Denver — for the next ten days or so. Locations, dates, and times here.
• Big news for Ben Hatke — Zita The Spacegirl has been picked up for animation by Fox; as she so often does, Heidi Mac’s The Beat has the story by Alexander Lu, who seems to be getting all the good stories lately. There’s hardly a better story for middle grade readers than Zita, so I’m looking forward to the final product. In the meantime, Hatke’s on tour to promote Mighty Jack, starting Monday in Louisville, Kentucky and bouncing mostly around the midwest until 4 October (special congrats to Naperville, which also shows up on Hatke’s schedule). Details and dates here.
• The Check, Please! Kickstarter has passed the three-day mark, meaning we can now compare the FFF mk2 with the McDoanld Ratio — named for Kel McDonald, who predicts that the first three days of funding will equal one third the total — and see how they stack up. Recall that the very steep dropoff after day one (representing fanatical, pent-up, no-delay-brooked demand instead of a more gradual decision to yeah, I’ll back that) throws off the Fleen Funding Formula (Mark II). The day three total is US$206,586, giving an MR value of US$619,758, against an FFF mk2 value of US$750K +/- 150K — approximately in line with each other (at least, in the same order of magnitude); we’ll be able to see which came closer in another 28 days.

Spam of the day:

REPLACE MISSING TEETH IN A DAY!

Dude, if you were able to repair what was shown in that photo (it was gross) in a day, the arc of Raina Telgemeier’s career would have been very different. You lyin’.

On the other hand, this meant that the first thing I saw when I got up this morning was — glorioski! — good news, in the form of the annual reveal of MacArthur Fellows. And if you scroll down the list to the Ys, you will find — double glorioski! — Gene Luen Yang. Yang is (as I have mentioned here) a consummate professional, a quiet, deliberate gentleman (in every sense of the word) and the last person I can imagine being thoughtlessly vulgar. I can only hope that he forgives me then, when I sum up my feelings on this as:

Fuck, yes.

Okay, he’s not (as I tweeted too early this morning before my brain had fully engaged) the first comicker to be named a MacArthur Fellow (or “genius”, as they are popularly known); that would be Alison Bechdel, two years back. He’s the 975th in a line of highly accomplished people who have made the world better, he’s one of us, and we are celebrating today, dammit.

I won’t be able to say anything new at this point about Yang — many people are talking about him today — so I instead have copied the review I wrote just about exactly ten years ago for American Born Chinese, the book that launched him on his current trajectory (and, not coincidentally, paralleled the rise of :01 Books). My feelings about ABC have only strengthened in the meantime. If you haven’t read it (or haven’t read it in a while), today would be an excellent day to remedy that.

Originally posted 12 September 2006, complete with long-dead links.
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