Did you see the Friday and Saturday SDCC programming notes I posted yesterday? Because you totally got a weekend posting out of me. We’ll get to the Sunday programming down below, but first let’s get some other things squared away.

• Book Thing The First: Howard Tayler¹ has opened pre-orders for his ninth collection, Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic. Tayler’s comics always deliver highly on both the print quality per dollar and laugh-chuckles per dollar scales, so give ‘er a look.
• Book Thing The Second: David Malki !, Ryan North, and Matt Bennardo are aiming to make a whole passel o’ people official New York Times #1 best seller authors. Much like how the first collection of the Machine of Death became the #1 seller on Amazon and gave Glenn Beck a sad, This Is How You Die is aiming to front-load sales across all distribution points to debut in the Times in the top slot. Let’s let North give you the details:
  

  This will be especially awesome since, like the first volume, this will be the first publishing credit for most of the authors in the book. We honestly don’t know if this idea is possible. But we know it’s possible to try.

  Every sale from today onwards counts towards our NYT status. If this book at all interesting, and you think you might like reading inventive and memorable stories curated by a dude whose comics you like, then why not head over to Amazon.com (or .ca or .co.uk) and get the book? They’ve got it on sale for 30% off retail. [emphasis original]

  On top of that, publishers Grand Central Books have released a sweet, hilarious, mayhem-filled book trailer video that nicely explores the premise of the titular Machine and especially the fact that it has a cruel sense of humor. I liked the fourth segment (TIME TRAVEL) best because of an especially good twist, but you can decide for yourself after viewing².

• Book Thing The Third: Sam Logan launched a Kickstart about four hours ago to fund the printing of what may be the largest webcomic collection to hit paper so far — a 1500+ page omnibus edition of the first seven years of Sam and Fuzzy. Naturally, in that time he’s hit 58% of a relatively hefty US$27,000 goal (those 1500+ page omnibii don’t come cheap), which should surprise exactly nobody.

  What is a bit surprising is the rather high per-backer pledge, which as of this writing sits at US$115.14; granted, some of that is because the basic version of the omnibus is gonna set you back US$49, with increasingly fancy versions at US$69 and US$95, but all of those fall below the average.

  Nope, the average can only be explained by the highly-personalized rewards (custom avatars and portraits) available at the US$160+, and the already-claimed tiers that promise original production artwork (US$750 and US$850). Lessons to draw from Logan’s campaign include:

  • Big, exciting projects capture the imagination
  • Having a backlog of demand for never-before printed material is good
  • One-of-a-kind rewards will elicit a siren song whose chorus is Give me money
  • If you’re going to have to send a bunch of books that weigh 3 or more kilos, it’s a good idea to have Make That Thing in your corner

  In fact, I’ll make one last observation here about Make That Thing (a division of TopatoCo) from their announcement³:

  After Kickstarter backers receive their rewards, the softcover books will be sold online through TopatoCo, who are fortifying their warehouse’s foundations this very moment.

  TopatoCo is the United States’ third-largest publisher of independent comics products. Based in Easthampton, Mass., TopatoCo creates books, apparel, gift items, and novelties for over fifty of the world’s most popular web-based creators.

  Did you catch that? TopatoCo is the United States’ third-largest publisher of independent comics products. I’m guessing that the first two have names like Top Shelf or Fantagraphics, and what’s more TopatoCo does far more than just printing comics. The scale of it all is a little boggling.

Sunday Programming

Funky Winkerbean’s 40th+ Anniversary
10:30am – 11:30am Room 8
I was going to list this solely to ensure that Chris Sims wouldn’t miss it, but sadly he tweeted this morning that he has a conflict. Even when he’s not reading the strip, Sims is crushed by the despair of life conspiring against him.

How and Why to Write a Great All-Ages Comic Book
11:00am – 12:00pm Room 28DE
By the time Sunday rolls around, you start to see some repetition in panel topics especially considering that this day’s programming skews towards kids. But you’d be a fool to pass up the chance to listen to Andy Runton, Jimmy Gownley, Katie Cook, and more.

Faith Erin Hicks in Conversation with Jeff Smith
11:30am – 12:30pm Room 8
The appeal should be self-evident.

Shattering Convention in Comic Book Storytelling
1:30pm – 2:30pm Room 23ABC
The title disguises the intent a bit — it’s about how there can actually be comics characters that aren’t white guys. Features Brandon Thomas, Gene Luen Yang, and Gail Freakin’ Simone.

Keenspot 2013: Red Giant Expands to Consume the Earth
2:00pm – 3:00pm Room 4
Wouldn’t be Sunday at SDCC without the Keenspot panel.

First Second: Gene Yang and Paul Pope In Conversation
3:30pm – 4:30pm Room 26AB
The title says it all; it’s a shame it’s been shuffled off to nearly the very end of the con when people are honestly thinking about getting home (if they haven’t thrown in the towel already).

Get Comics Anywhere
4:00pm – 5:00pm Room 28DE
Tablets and phones — are you making your comics look good on them? Why the hell not?

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¹ As far as evil doppelganger’s from a parallel universe go, he’s the best I could have hoped for.

² Other deaths: OLD AGE, PARACHUTE FAILURE, HOT GIRL, BEAR.

³ I would have written up this Kickstart regardless, but the announcement from MTT Public Affairs Supremo Sara McHenry is a work of beauty and it seems a shame not to share it.

A pretty deep swath of webcomics had their traffic interrupted yesterday because of malware warnings; the thing of it is, there was never any malware to begin with. Somebody, bored presumably, decided to toss some code into an ad frame whose sole purpose was to trigger Google’s malware detectors, leading to automated warnings and who knows how many reluctant readers. Known to be affected were comics associated with Hiveworks, Questionable Content, and The Devil’s Panties — none of which, it should be stressed again, are believed to have been an actual risk.

I’d almost be able to understand this behavior better if there had been some kind of reward in it; if there were some kind of equities market for webcomics and driving down readership for some high-traffic sites meant that somebody could make some money by shorting those comics, that I could understand (it would still be reprehensible and sociopathic, but at least there would be a motivation). This, though? Pointless.¹

• In entirely better news, the Digger Omnibus Kickstart is well over goal with three weeks still to go, and The AV Club has thrown a little love towards creator Ursula Vernon. Not that Vernon has necessarily noticed, what with being on her honeymoon in Alaska and contemplating interesting purchases which with the success of the Omnibus is probably surprisingly affordable.
• Today’s mandatory² viewing: Ryan North on what to do to optimize human history should you ever come into possession of a time machine: bone down on hotties invent the most crucial and challenging technology of all.

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¹ Congratulations, Expert Hacker, you annoyed a bunch of people that you will never meet, caused work for people that had other things to do, and it didn’t benefit you at all beyond the fact that you proved to yourself that you could. We all agree now: you exist, you matter, you’re just as important as you always suspected you were and you are so cool. No, really.

² You have to watch something while waiting for the Strip Search finale to air in … just under eight hours.

Nine years is a long time in webcomics, and it would not be a slight accomplishment to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props. But to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props and 2222 wooden jigsaw puzzles? That’s the work of a creative madman, possibly with a frantic body posture and overly-excited facial expression.

So happy Baffler!versary to Chris Yates, Assistant Dragon Emily, Previous Assistant Dan, Captain Felix, Mensa the Menacer, Box-Head, the POOP sign, and all the other denizens of the Greater Boulder Puzzle Metropolis, and may your sanding fingers never shrivel up and fall off. PS: special 30% off Baffler! sale this week in celebration

• Apparently, MoCCA Fest 2013 isn’t over until the Society of Illustrators says it’s over, and sister, they ain’t said so yet. How else to explain the fact that talks and events associated with this year’s MoCCA are still going on? Case in point: 25 April (that would be ten days from now) at 6:30pm, Boulet (Fr ici, Eng here, and I don’t know how to say “here” in Korean) will teaming up with Gabrielle Bell to talk with the comics-loving public for a few hours, thanks in part to a cultural program organized by the French Embassy.

  An Evening with Bell and Boulet will be held at the Society of Illustrators, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and will run you between US$7 and US$15 depending on whether or not you’re a student, a member of the SoI, or a non-member; tickets and more information here.

• Science cartooning, heck yeah! Rosemary Mosco is one of those people that I can talk to forever about pterosaurs (and oh my goodness, it appears that Witton has a book coming in June, hooray) and bunches of other things as well, but man do I love talkin’ pterosaurs with her. She’s one of them actual scientist-type scientists (such as make we poor engineers look like unrigorous experimentalists), and as part of the Cambridge Science Festival in Cambridge, MA, she’ll be talking on the topic of science cartooning along with Jay Hosler and EJ Barnes.

  Science & Comics will take place at Cambridge’s Main library, from 2:00pm – 4:00pm on Saturday, 20 April, in the lecture hall. Like the vast majority of the CSF events (going on now until Sunday), it’s totally free.

• Two of my favorite creators have been stepped back for a while (and will be for the forseeable future) from their main creator-owned project due to external commitments. One of those (a graphic novel from Oni) has been running in place of their main work and the other was revealed late last week: the reason that I’m not seeing “>Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya’s twice-weekly autobio adventures is, in part, due to them producing an Adventure Time miniseries about PepBut and Cinnamon Bun as noir detectives. Let’s see, midsummer last year was when Meredith Gran’s Marceline and the Scream Queens mini launched to great acclaim, so I have high hopes for this year’s midsummer launch of Adventure Time Candy Capers. Mostly because PepBut rules.

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No footnotes? I … I can’t explain this.

Before we get to stories of people that have their act together and those that don’t, I have this one blind item appeared in my mailbox from what appears to be a burner email account and makes the (unsubstantiated, but dang it would be awesome) claim that the Ryan Sohmer/Becky Dreistadt childrens book collaboration,
The Bear, will be launching as a webcomic in the immediate future. I believe that’s what’s called an exclusive, so yay you for hearing about it first.

Onwards. MoCCA Fest 2013 took place over the weekend and I have to say that I noticed a lot of changes this year. The show’s first run (a decade ago) was a smash success as a one-day affair at the Puck Building and immediately shifted to a two-day model in its second year. Alas, 2008 was the last year in that facility, and also the year that a talented group of people left MoCCA’s board to pursue other opportunities¹. Unfortunately, when that group left they took a great deal of institutional experience with them.

Had they all stuck around, moving from the Puck² to the 69th Regiment Armory³ would have been a challenge; with seemingly no experienced showrunners on hand, it was … not good. Panels were planned to start the moment the show started; the doors didn’t open for a full hour and a half after scheduled opening; the city was under significantly cooler temperatures than the prior year, but it was still sweat-drenchingly hot inside the Armory, with almost no air circulation and no air conditioning⁴.

Incremental improvements occurred in 2010-2012 (they could hardly have slipped further), and then MoCCA essentially dissolved and transferred its assets to the Society of Illustrators last year, leaving the question in the air: How would the Society manage MoCCA Fest?

Well, we have the answer now: really damn well. Some of the changes made were seen as both positive and negative (the new drapes behind the tables focused attention and cut down on the echoey acoustics, but also cut down sightlines and may have crowded the exhibitors to an uncomfortable degree), some were masterstrokes (the Society did something that MoCCA never managed — the back end of the hall was draped off into a museum-like exhibition space, with some absolutely marvelous pieces from their collection up for display).

From a logistical standpoint, the new MoCCA featured night-before load-in hours instead of a scramble the morning-of, improved line-handling at the entrance (I’ve never gotten in so quickly), overhead banners to get your bearings, volunteers everywhere I looked, and a return of on-scene food (last seen at the Puck). The only thing that I found would have helped would have been some simple printed placards hanging from the red-draped backdrops to indicated booth name/number.

Johanna Draper Carlson (whom I sadly missed seeing on the floor) declared it the best MoCCA ever, which may or may not be the case (second MoCCA, I met Jeff Smith for the first time; third one, I wound up drinking with Vijaya Iyer, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti and we decided that Alfonso Cuarón should direct all the Harry Potter movies, and also I got the best convention sketch ever), but it’s certainly the best of the Armory Era.

I realize that I haven’t talked a lot about projects from the people I would normally be covering, but mostly they’re between announcements — things will be happening by the end of the year, or next year, or when something presently underway is finished, but not much in the immediate term, which meant that I could talk to them about other things — I got to talk to Lucy Knisley about how great I found Relish, but also how much I was looking forward to her Tanzania Travelogue (spoiler: so much, and the zebra she drew me is adorable). I got to thank George O’Connor for a book he did two years ago because he found something new and balanced and sympathetic to say about the very archetype of a wicked stepmother. I got to talk about Doctor Who companions⁵ with Boulet, touring North America with his entirely brilliant Darkness Noirness

The bit that’s most stuck in my head, though, was talking about the show itself with Darryl Ayo Brathwaite about the show itself, where I think he summed up the new era of MoCCA as well as anybody could: the turnaround will stick in the collective memory of comics longer than the hard years and we’ll likely see an even better show next year, which is a damn good thing because there’s a need for a show like this in the dominant population center of the country. The Society of Illustrators has salvaged the idea of MoCCA Fest, made it into something better, and that’s a pretty damn good thing.

On the far side of the good-bad spectrum, the end of the week brought news of the forthcoming demise of Night Shade Books and with it, a great deal of uncertainty regarding the Girl Genius novels. Not being a lawyer, much less a specialist in IP law, I’m not sure how companies can say We’re going to sell your contract to another company and they’re going to rewrite your contract unilaterally into a form that guarantees you’ll never get another royalty check ever and you’re going to like it, but there you are.

The alternative is for Phil and Kaja Foglio to (with some appropriate degree of politeness, and undoubtedly through their lawyer) to tell Night Shade Books to take a hike⁶, which unfortunately brings up the possibility of the rights to the Girl Genius novels ending up in limbo as bankruptcy⁷ works itself out, a process that literally may never resolve itself.

Barring a change in legal thinking that regards time-limited intellectual property rights (like that to publish books) as automatically reverting to the creator in cases like this, there’s not a hell of a lot that the Foglios can do except to see if the aspiring purchaser of Night Shade’s assets, Skyhorse, is wiling to offer a contract that doesn’t promise a royalty of 10% on net (“on net” means “we can always find a way to accrue costs and make it so the net is zero”). Fortunately, the contracts in question only cover the prose novels, but taking away the ability of a creator to make money from something they thought up and in a way that the contracts didn’t allow for? That right there is some straight-up bitchassedness.

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¹ I have since had conversations with source(s) that I deem reliable that MoCCA was engaged in activities that skirted the edge of “acceptable practice” with respect to deaccessioning, and that the exodus represented a protest against these policies.

² Which retains some exhibition space but judging by a walk-past I coincidentally had a few weekends ago, the ground floor of the Puck is now an REI store.

³ Most recently notable for being the place that the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show rendered logistical aid to the New York National Guard in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

⁴ For the third year in a row, I found myself having to render aid in conjunction with a MoCCA show as heat exhaustion affected an exhibitor; in the last two years of the Puck years, I dealt with an impaired individual on the sidewalk who had toppled over his wheelchair and an exhibitor who suffered a seizure at load-in and bashed his head against the wall. Since then I’m happily 0-for-4 on medical interventions.

⁵ Scroll alllll the way down any of his pages and check out the little Karen Gillan sketch if you want to know why that was a natural topic of conversation.

⁶ Hopefully the Folgios’ lawyer is creative in his wording, like Ken White or Marc Randazzo.

⁷ My entire experience of bankruptcy was once on the receiving end; I bought furniture from a company that had already started filing under Chapter 7 but not yet announced that fact, continuing to do business that they knew they couldn’t possible make good on. Once they filed, they told me I wouldn’t get my furniture and the money I’d paid them would be considered an asset and as an “unsecured creditor” I’d have to petition the court to get a fraction of it returned. I said fuck that and disputed the charge with my credit card company and had my balance credited in 24 hours. That’s why you don’t make advance purchases with checks, kids.

Oh my goodness, so many things today.

• The final word on the place of webcomics in the larger comics world was offered by TopatoCo VP of Asskicking Holly Rowland:
  

  TopatoCo is between Oni and Dark Horse at ECCC. If there’s anyone still talking about the legitimacy of webcomics, I will pants them.

  Please, somebody, call her bluff. I’m begging you. Everybody else, have video cameras ready.

• Today marks ten years of Emily Horne and Joey Comeau making A Softer World; ten years and 931 instances of breathtakingly beautiful photos and profoundly arresting captions. In all of webcomickry, I can’t think of another example that simultaneously pulls in two so very different directions and expresses two so very different voices so very, very well.
• Once upon a time there was a simple acknowledgment of fact: any collection of webcomickers, impromptu or organized, was incomplete without at least one Ryan in the immediate vicinity. While Ryans Estrada and North have been publicly very busy of late¹, Ryan Sias of Silent Kimbly fame pulled back a bit, did some children’s books and storyboarding, and wasn’t so much with the webcomicking.

  Until today, that is, when Sias announced the return of the no longer silent Kimbly with new weekly adventures. One quick note: you get to The Kimbly Chronicles by using the address http://www.kimblychronicales.com/, with an extra “a” in the middle there. Just bookmark it and you’ll be fine.

• The countdown to Strip Search kicked into a quicker tempo yesterday with the launch of StripSearch.tv. Obviously no episodes yet, but you can meet the Artists, learn about the show, and puzzle your way through some rather odd numbers associated with the production. I don’t know what the whole pineapples thing is about², but I’m intensely curious. Hit the RSS feed and you won’t miss any Tuesday/Friday episodes when they start later this month.

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¹ Respectively involved in global trekking, single-person animation, and Korean comic translating (Estrada), and totally math comic book writing, Kickstarter record breaking choose your own Shakespeare adventure creating, and beloved movie novelization close reading (North).

² My own fault, I suppose. When Robert Khoo asked if I had any more questions, I specifically did not ask if any edible bromeliads featured prominently in the show. Mea culpa.

Strip Search appears to be on the verge of going live, having graduated from a parking page to a test pattern. I’m not a betting man¹, but I’d wager that we’ll see the site live in the next day or two. Then it’s just a matter of how long Robert Khoo feels like teasing us before the first episodes start streaming.

• Webcomic? Check. Crossovers? Check. Print collection? Check. Original print series? Check. Card game? Check. TV show? Check. What’s left of Malachai and Ethan Nicolle to conquer? Judging from the photos tweeted by MTV² Geek, the answer would be toys. Weirdly, searching for “Axe Cop” at the website of Mezco Toys brings up a couple of Thundercats figures, so I guess they’re really early in the preview cycle for now. There’s a reference to Axe Cop in Mezco’s exhibitor profile for next week’s New York Toy Fair so I’d say wait for the summer’s big shows to see these generally available.
• To paraphrase James³ and Marque, Being broke sucks, and now Jerzy Drozd is the latest creative type to try to make it suck less. Tomorrow will see the Comics Are Great! show will do an on-air Google+ hangout, with special guests Laurianne Uy and Poorcraft scribe C Spike Trotman on the topic of smart frugality. If you can’t make the Hangout, tomorrow at 12:30pm EST (GMT-5), it’ll be up at the Comics Are Great! YouTube channel sooner rather than later. It’s a live event, so warm up your questions on how to make do with less for fun and profit.
• Surprisingly, nobody is in the running for a free copy of Johnny Wander volume 3, as per the contest announced last Friday. It’s not even in the store yet, people! You can only get this is you were in the Kickstarter! Free book, people!

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¹ It’s that whole “pretty good at math” thing.

² Who’re still on my list for the shameful way they treated Rick Marshall Willenholly, so you best watch yourself, Viacom!

³ History’s greatest villain.

That title was “Linkapalooza”, and it featured a photo of Frank Zappa in an Uncle Sam-patterned oversized novelty tophat because at that time that title produced that result in a Google image search. Anyhoo, things to point you towards today.

• James Kochalka may have retired American Elf, but he’s keeping plenty busy what with voicing Grotus in the SuperF*ckers shorts [NSFW, obviously] and starting a new strip for his local newspaper¹, and collaborating with Shmorky on a comic that fits hopes and dreams and malice and loss into one page. What I am basically saying is that you can keep up with all your Kochalka needs by keeping an eye on his Tumblr.
• Jim Zub, one-man living embodiment of the creation/destruction duality that undergirds comics, is back with more of his ongoing series of analyses of how the heck you make it in such a crazy industry. His latest looks back at a year of Skullkickers² running on Keenspot (starts here), which has brought the online reader to the end of the second story arc and just into the first story of the second Tavern Tales collection. It’s a topic that we at Fleen have discussed with Zub more than once over the past year, but seeing numbers puts everything in perspective:
  

  Skullkickers online has garnered just over 5.8 million pageviews and been visited by 272,000+ people over the past 12 months. More than 90 times the number of people who buy our monthly issues have checked out Skullickers online so far. Each month an average of 22,600+ new people come on board the story and the site generates almost 486,000 pageviews. I don’t know how it compares to other webcomics (though I’m sure it’s far lower than a lot of the long running and financially self sufficient sites) but it’s reaching 7-8 times our floppy comic print run worth of new readers every month, building up awareness of the title day by day using content we already had archived and ready to go. [emphasis original]

  That bit about “content we already had archived and ready to go”? That’s Zubese for “free money”.

• Over the years, we at Fleen have been eagerly waiting for Jess Fink’s We Can Fix It, her very sexy time-travel self-makeout story of sexy sexiness. Unfortunately, over the years, We Can Fix It (which has been complete forever, come on guys) has been repeatedly delayed by the publisher, which to be fair, they may have had extremely good reasons for doing. It may be working out for the best, as Top Shelf³ have had Fink go back and make everything even prettier than it was before Also, because she loves you, Fink has posted a seven page preview where Future Jess resolves that make the past as sexy as possible by making out with it. Oh, like you wouldn’t.
• A bare 24 hours since our posting yesterday, and Zach Weinersmith’s newest book collection has gone from about US$40K on Kickstarter to damn near US$110K (as of this writing). He’s burned through twelve more stretch goals, extended the Map Of Mystery twice, and had to space out new goals to increments of US$10K instead of US$5K, because they were being achieved too quickly.

  One may note that Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543 is in the Kickstarter Comics category, and the not-quite-resurrected Ryan North’s To Be Or Not To Be: A Choice-Filled Adventure By Ryan North And Also William Shakespeare Too is in the Publishing category, meaning that Weinersmith cannot break North’s record ’cause different categories. However, looking at their respective backers-and-dollars reports at Kicktraq, one can see that Zach may well hit Ryanesque numbers by the time this is done in — my glob — a month.

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¹ Note for our younger readers: a “newspaper” is a means of distributing information by printing it on multiple sheets of thin paper, folding to a convenient size, and making it available for sale to interested parties. Formerly, they roamed the American landscape in vast herds, but the population has lately dwindled to near-extinction levels.

² Which tends pretty much all the way towards the “destruction” end of the spectrum.

³ Who are all the very best people, and I always make sure to drop by their booth at any show I attend to buy anything I don’t have already, but also just to say hi. Seriously, they’re wonderful.

I can always tell it’s going to be a good day when Gina Gagliano sends me a review copy of whatever :01 Books has in the release pipeline; honestly, that imprint’s name is the closest thing that exists to a sure bet in the world of publishing. Not everything by :01 is going to appeal equally to every segment of their audience, but it’s surely going to be a well-executed, handsomely-produced piece of graphic storytelling.

In other words, feel free to judge a certain subset of books by their cover, or at least that little bit on the base of the spine that Colleen AF Venable¹ put there.

Lucy Knisley has been featured on this page in the past, often in relation to her food-based comickin’, and sometimes just as a countervailing opinion in my ranting on the topic of molecular gastronomy. If I have perhaps given Knisley’s other, non-food-centric work short shrift, maybe it’s because she does the food part so very, very well. Case in point: Relish⁰, which neatly straddles the line between memoir and foodie travel journal. There are recipes, reminiscences, and a bit of retrospection. It’s masterful.

Not a lot of people Knisley’s age can produce a work that seeks to sum up their lives (and although Relish doesn’t have a plot, per se, I will be mentioning specific things that happen, so Beware Ye Who Fear Spoilers)without coming off as self-important; Knisley, on the other hand, is saying less Look at me, I’m interesting and more Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I was twelve and my buddy got fearful of Mexican Customs and ditched two hundred dollars worth of grade-A porn in an airport bathroom? The former can rarely be accomplished without interminable smugness; the latter is a tease that draws you in, and probably starts a conversation about the stupid things you witnessed (or did) in your own tween years.

The artwork has just enough detail to imbue the characters and places with weight and existence, without so much as to make them distancing. Who remembers everything from when we were six or seven in perfect clarity? There’s a bit of fuzziness to those memories, with the shapes a bit simpler, the colors a bit flatter than how it must have been, and that’s where emotional truth comes from. The clean, simple designs that Knisley uses feel more real than the family photos she used for reference that get a few pages in the back².

And what a realness she shares — sights, sounds, and above all smells from her own life, and passed down in family stories. Food (the preparation of it, the preferences for some things and not others, the experience of eating it) form the lens through which Knisley shares the stories of her life and how it helped her grow into the person she is today. She even manages a spirited defense of occasional indulgence in junk food³ that halfway convinced me that maybe my diet should contain a few more nitrate-laden, won’t-rot-no-matter-how-long-they-sit McFries.

Every food has its own value⁴, she could be saying, which corresponds pretty closely to And so does every person and experience⁵. From farms to gourmet markets, street-food stalls to the finest restaurants in the world, Knisley has embraced food in all of its various forms and made it part of who she is. Like good hosts everywhere, she’s inviting you (in April, when Relish releases) to sit down and share in this bounty. Breathe in deeply, take your time, come back for seconds, and bon appétit.

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⁰ Or, more fully, Relish My Life In The Kitchen (as it appears on the cover and title page) or perhaps Relish: My Life In The Kitchen (as it appears in the supporting information from :01). I love the fact that the title can be read two very different ways depending on whether or not you include the colon.

¹ I consider it symptomatic that I’ve gone completely bonkers given the fact that I have a favorite book designer.

² Actual thought I had when I saw Knisley’s author photo in the back: Wow, good picture. Looks almost like her. My brain had accepted the cartoon Lucy as the reality to which the photo must have referred.

³ Sugar, salt, fat, and artificial flavors are bad enough; young Knisley goes so far as to make a request for ketchup that earns her mother’s ire, and to purchase McDonalds in the heart of Rome, sending her father into a tizzy.

⁴ Well, everything except for one spectacularly foul recipe that a friend of Knisley’s made; it involved basting chicken in frozen concentrated lemonade.

⁵ And even that lemonade chicken fiasco has the benefit of being a touchstone between friends that will never be forgotten.

Some of you may have noticed a brouhaha in the web-o-spheres over the past day or two regarding another webcomic scraper by another person that couldn’t be bothered to ask permission from creators before lecturing them how copyright works (his version: I can do what I want because I want to). I didn’t mention it earlier on account of the takedown requests were flying fast and furious and he was at least removing strips from his site (albeit with a lot of whining, as I understand it). Less attention given, the better.

Which is why I do want to mention a webcomic reader (an app this time, for iDevices) that’s Doing It Right. Comic Chameleon is the brainchild of Bernie Hou, creator of Alien Loves Predator, so he knows what a creator wants from an app. He’s contacted other creators and asked permission up front to include their work. Instead of being a glorified browser or RSS reader, the app permits panel-by-panel reading, so there’s actually a functionality value-add there.

Best of all, he’s worked out a revenue-distribution plan so that ads within CC itself end up paying the creators (granted, probably not a lot of money, and divided a bunch of ways, but still — it’s a choice that indicates the app is for their benefit, not his). Look for Comic Chameleon in early 2013, and check out the demo on YouTube.

• There was a very nice comment in yesterday’s posting by a fellow named David Welsh; as is my practice when I see a poster I’m not familiar with, I followed the link to Welsh’s site and found … okay, let me back up for a moment. Something you should know about me is that I cannot even think of certain scenes in stories without getting choked up; any time, any place, they will get to me without fail. Mayday, mayday, India-Golf-Niner-Niner is buddy spiked; It shames the armored cavalry to abandon a courageous warrior. Our squad wishes to ride in support of Princess Nausicaä; Let’s make sure history never forgets the name ‘Enterprise’; Su per man.

  At the top of that list, the top of the top, will always be stories (sometimes just scenes, but more often the entirety of the story) of extreme loyal dogs. I will seriously use this single issue to judge your entire worth as a person; there is something wrong with you, like sociopath wrong, if you can think about Seymour or Hachiko¹ without being moved to your very core.

  Which is a roundabout way of saying, when I followed Welsh’s link, it went to a new (fewer than ten updates) webcomic that he writes, the topic of which is the original loyal-beyond-death dog, Greyfriars Bobby. And just for topping on the heart-tugging, this version of Greyfriars Bobby returns to his master’s grave every night not just to guard it, but to fight supernatural beasties that would threaten all of Edinburgh. Extraordinarily loyal and brave? I’m not made of stone, people — I am in, all the way in.

  I should also mention that art, by Junelle Faye, treads the line between cute and threatening nicely, and hopefully both Welsh and Faye will be able to crank out more strips on a regular basis. Check out Greyfriars, and let the sniffles begin.

• Received at the comic store yesterday: the 300+ page Dr McNinja: Timefist and the concluding issue of Marceline. Two thumbs up for each of them, which requires me to borrow a couple of thumbs.
• Received in the mail when I got home yesterday: Benign Kingdom, Fall 2012, hardcover edition, plus additional goodies. I cannot begin to tell you how gorgeous this book is, and as soon as Danielle, Emmy, Anthony, or Aaron² can point you in the direction of sales, buy it. I suppose you could get the individual art books, but you don’t look like a chump, so get the very handsome hardcover to go with the Spring 2012 edition.
• Expected in the mail any day now, like tomorrow, because I got an email from TopatoCo: Tiny Kitten Teeth. Hell, yes.
• Not expected in the mail anytime soon because of time-sink potential: Either of the Homestuck collections, although I do not know what my deal is on delaying. I should just take the week between Christmas and New Years and binge my way through all 6000+ pages just like the mother of two who is powering her way through and has made it as far as the Midnight Crew intermission.

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¹ Don’t even get me started on service dogs like Endal or Comet.

² The Latin Hobbit-Throb.

Speaking of SPX, the theme of the weekend appeared to be YOLO, as chronicled by webcomics own photojournalist, Chris Yates. I … I think it’s a gang thing, you guys. Meanwhile, Kate Beaton rounded out the last of the major comics awards with another win for the Hark! A Vagrant print collection in the category of Outstanding Anthology or Collection, making more plaques, statues, and bricks than I can recall off the top of my head.¹ The award for Outstanding Online Comic went to Jillian Tamaki’s SuperMutant Magic Academy, which I’ll confess I am not familiar with. A perusal of the category nominees revealed a nice mix of ongoing and wrapped-up work, strip-type serials, panel-type loosely-linked semi-oneshots, autobio, and more — a nice balance of form, story topic, and art styles.

• Speaking of SPX, the national passenger rail system was not very nice towards Chris “Doc” Hastings, involving both a broken train on the way there and a cancelled ticket on the way back. He’s safely ensconced back in Brooklyn at last report, and
  able to share some of the other projects that he’s been working on, including the comic book-y treatment for a pitch packet of a proposed TV series, presently raising production costs over on IndieGoGo.

  You really can’t go wrong with a name like Freelance Beatdown, the brainchild of comedic personage Jordan Morris; given the glowing terms that Hastings uses to describe Morris, It’s unlikely that he’ll ever feel weirded out by Morris or his usual partner (and damn good interviewer), Jesse Thorn. Look, I like Morris and Thorn’s work a hell of a lot, I’m just saying that not everybody agrees with me.

• Okay, this is clever: all of Machine of Death (at least, the MoD that’s associated with the first volume), including the full book in three different electronic formats, stage show clips, the entire podcast series, and more, in a customized USB thumb drive for fifteen bucks. I think it’s just a matter of time before all collections of a certain size/complexity (lookin’ at you, omnibus edition of Skin Horse, whenever that happens) will have thumb drives as a delivery option.

  Look, I love me some big-honkin’ collections, I think they’re beautiful to look at, satisfying to read, and indicative of the value that I place on the work contained within; I’ve got collection series on my shelf that number as high as volume eleven. But not everybody has the wherewithal to drop US$50 (to US$100 and up) on the really big collections, so having a cheaper, more physically compact option² is going to be a value channel that can’t be ignored.

  Anyway, to celebrate the thumb-book and other items just now releasing, MoD honcho and Wondermark impressario David Malki ! is having a contest with fabulous cash and merchandise prizes. Dudes, you could end up a trillionaire.³

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¹ Seriously though — what was with blocking my girl Kate, 2012 Eisner Awards?

² Possibly after a delay to not conflict with physical book sales. Even more so, we’re now getting to webcomics that have run long enough, and have enough books in their catalog, that deciding when to let things go out of print becomes an actual concern. Get a bunch of custom-screened (or engraved, or shaped) USB drives, orders come in for various items out of print, copy master files over and drop it in the mail. Once you’ve got the thumbs in house, the rest of production doesn’t have to be an expense of anything other than the time it takes for file-dragging.

³ In Zimbabwe. Actual value as of this writing: US$27,631,942,525.560 in theory, except for the part where Zimbabwe’s currency has been indefinitely suspended from international trade because it’s worth less than the paper it’s printed on; 6.5 sextillion percent inflation will do that.