The PR is coming in hot and heavy, people are heads-down making last-minute arrangements for meet-ups (or getting work done before grabbing a flight to San Diego) … among other things, let this be your notice that Monday and Tuesday’s posts may be sparse or absent, and Wednesday through next week will be plentiful from the San Diego Convention Center.

• Speaking of San Diego, Andrew Farago at the Cartoon Art Museum (give them a couple of bucks, won’t you? they need a home) shared the programming that CAM will be associated with at SDCC. Farago will be moderating a panel on Indie Comics on Thursday at 1:00 (that one made our programming guide), and there will be a CAM-sponsored Family Drawing session at 5:30 (that one didn’t).

  The highlight, as in years past, will be the near-constant parade of comics superstars at the CAM booth, Thursday through Sunday, sketching to benefit the museum. A schedule will be posted in the booth of who’s covering what hour, but we’re told that the dozens of sketchers will include Charlie Adlard, Lalo Alcaraz, Phil Foglio, Scott Koblish, Bill Morrison, and somebody named Raina Telgemeier (never heard of her).

• Know who I have heard of? Melanie Gillman. Know what I’d like to know about them? Their artistic influences, their creative process, when their next comic is coming out. Know what I don’t give a rat’s ass about? Everything that a bunch of Reddit lowlifes apparently spend their fevered nights and days obsessing over with respect to what they looks like unclothed, a circumstance that is common enough for cartoonists (heck, anybody, but our focus here at Fleen is on cartoonists) from traditionally nonpowerful groups (i.e.: anybody not cishet white male) who dare to exist on the internet that Gillman has to think of how to prepare their students for the inevitable day that the soul-crushing objectification/hate machine turns their way.

  So consider this one of way too many reminders and rejoinders that I have to leave on this page more and more often these days — don’t do this. And if for some reason you think it’s a good thing to do shit like this, kindly do me the favor of fucking off and never reading my stuff again. You suck and don’t want even that tenuous, one-way connection between us.

Spam of the day:

Limited Time: Get $30 OFF our Best Security software

So you, a spammer/identity thief, want to sell me security software, and you choose something from Symantec, who have been screwing the pooch on their offerings all summer long? Bad choice, bandit.

Saturday, oh Saturday, the day where hopes go to die in San Diego. Sunday, the day where the light at the end of the tunnel is visible, except for those that have to wait to bring their cars around to the docks for load-out. Before we get to those, let’s make a quick visit to a pair of Fridays.

First, last Friday, C Spike Trotman¹ announced her latest forthcoming publication, this Sarah W Searle is bringing her Sparks from serialization at Filthy Figments {NSFW, depending on your W]. Second, this coming Friday, when Kel McDonald finds out if the second and final Sorcery 101 omnibus funds or not. I’m kind of astonished how many established creators are having trouble making funding on their Kickstarts, and McDonald’s sitting on a projected 97% final funding, so this is literally make or break time.

Okay, onward and conward, and as always, let us know what we overlooked.

Saturday Programming
Once Upon A Time: Teaching Fables, Fairy Tales, And Myths With Comics And Graphic Novels
10:00am — 11:00am, Shiley Special Events, San Diego Central Library
The aforementioned Ms McDonald will be talking about fantastical tales for a library-centric crowd, along with Chris Duffy, Alexis Fajardo, Ben Hatke, and Trina Robbins, with moderator Tracy Edmunds, MA Ed.

Spotlight On Kate Beaton
10:30am — 12:00pm, Room 5AB
This will be my first chance to tell Kate Beaton in person how much my niece loves The Princess And The Pony. Hint: a lot.

Comic Book Law School 303: New Revelations
10:30pm — 12:00pm, 30CDE
Part three, which bee-tee-dubs is qualified for continuing education credits for lawyers. This one’s on complex issues of copyright and trademark.

Spotlight On William Gibson
11:30pm — 12:30pm, Room 24ABC
Appropriate, since we seem to be living in one of his cyberpunk dystopias at the moment.

Spotlight On Jeff Smith
12:30pm — 1:30pm, Room 8
Jeff Smith is the opposite of a dystopia. Let’s all go and have some fun and ignore stupid, stupid [fill in horrible person type here]s.

The Kids Comics Revolution
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Room 29AB
Best panel ever? Emily Carroll, John Patrick Green, Noelle Stevenson, G. Willow Wilson, and Gene Luen Yang.

Spotlight On Noelle Stevenson
4:00pm — 5:00pm, Room 23ABC
Because she’s a shark, AAAAHHH.

Buckaroo Banzai: Getting The Band Back Together
5:30pm — 6:30pm, Room 8
Holy crap: Perfect Tommy, Pinky Caruthers, Scooter Lindley, and Rugsucker will be on stage together.

Sunday Programming
Historical Comics
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Room 28DE
Kate Beaton, Chester Brown, and Derf Backderf in conversation with Calvin Reid. Hopefully to contain Nemeses.

YA? Why Not? The Importance Of Teen And Young Adult Comics
1:00pm — 2:0pam, Room 24ABC
Going to be tough to decide where to be this hour — Kate down the hall, Hope Larson, Raina Telgemeier, Cecil Castellucci, and Brenden Fletcher over here at the same time.

Spotlight On Emily Carroll
2:00pm — 3:00pm, Room 4
It’ll be the spooktaculariest room all weekend for an hour.

Kickstarter Secrets Revealed
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Room 4
At last, they finally admitted that if you’re gonna do a how-to on Kickstarter, you got to get goddammned George Rohac there. Also the afivementioned Kel McDonald, Hope Nicholson, and Kickstarter’s comics outreach lead, Jamie Turner.

Markiplier Comics & More: Keenspot/Red Giant 2016
4:00pm — 5:00pm, Room 7AB
The annual Keenspot panel, pretty much closing out the programming for the year.

Spam of the day:

Make $7,682/month from home

a. That’s a supiciously specific number. b. Who’s to say that I don’t already?

_______________
¹ C Spike Trotman. Trotman, Spike, Trotman!

No? Fine.

Oh Achewood, how you play with language delights me as few other things can. Let us just hope that Téodor has learned his lesson, and while we’re at it, let’s see what happens in the panel rooms for the first half of this year’s San Diego Comic Con. As always, let us know if we’ve overlooked anything.

Special Program For Those Who Maybe Don’t Even Go To SDCC
Space Time With Marian Call and Friends
FRIDAY 7:30pm — ??, 98 Bottles in Little Italy
An evening of music and nerdery; tickets $12 + $10 food/drink minimum, 21 and up.

Thursday Programming
The Graphic Novel Medium
10:00am — 11:00am, 29AB
Derf Backderf, Peter Kuper, Hope Larson, Sydney Padua, and Maximilian Uriarte kick off the show with a discussion of the graphic novel, moderated by Evan Narcisse who is seriously smart and a hell of an interviewer/moderator. I still remember the great job he did at SPLAT! back in 2008. I also enjoyed hearing him recently on This American Life.

Comic Book Law School 101: Genesis
10:30am — 12:00pm, Room 30CDE
The basics of intellectual property law, from actual lawyers and not people on the internet that got opinions.

Getting Into Comics And Staying There
12:00pm — 1:00pm, 28CDE
This year’s iteration of Jim Zub and others willing to share their advice for getting into comics creation, thus creating more competition for themselves.

The Business Of Creativity: Can Comics Find The Balance?
12:30pm — 1:30pm, Room 4
Paul Levitz had a long and storied career with DC and is now a board member for BOOM! Studios. So maybe ask him why BOOM! financially screws their creators so badly, because it sure as hell doesn’t seem like they’re in anything resembling balance.

Something For Everyone: Indie Comics
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Room 29AB
Moderator Andrew Farago (from the Cartoon Art Museum) talking to Emily Carroll, Lisa Hanawalt, Jennifer Hayden, Keith Knight, and Ed Luce about how comics need not equal capes.

First Second Tenth Anniversary Celebration
1:30pm — 2:30pm, Room 4
Because they’re the premiere art-house publisher of graphic novels, that’s why.

Fantasy Mixology: The Perfect Literary Cocktail
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Horton Grand Theater
Don’t be fooled, it’s not about booze. Dammit!

We Need Diverse Comics
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Room 9
Nidhi Chanani, Ben Hatke, Nilah Magruder, Raina Telgemeier, and Ron Wimberly talking about how comics have changed and still need to change. Anybody arguing that white guys can write characters unlike themselves will be beaten by me. Moderated by Petra Mayer of NPR.

The Mark, Sergio, Stan, and Tom Show
3:30pm — 4:30pm, Room 8
You never listened when I told you to go listen to Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier, so now they’ve added Stan Sakai and Tom Luth. These guys have known each other forever and have about a century and a half of stories between them. Go.

The Nappy Hour
5:00pm — 6:00pm, Room 32AB
The latest iteration of Keith Knight’s lightning-round discussion of comics/nerdstuff by, for, and involving people of color; joined this year by Lalo Alcaraz, Roland Poindexter, and Ashley A Woods. Anybody arguing that there should be panels about white guys and comics/nerdstuff will be beaten by me.

The New Comics Journalism: Representation For All
7:00pm — 8:00pm, Room 23ABC
The latest iteration of the state of comics journalism panel, with comics journalists Heidi MacDonald, Megan Purdy, Emma Houxbois, Brett Schenker, and others talking about journalizing.

Webcomics Advocates: The Webcomics Gathering
8:30 — 9:30, Room 4
As was done last year, webcomics creators will have 30 seconds to promote their work to the crowd. Seems like most creators will be getting dinner but you never know.

Friday Programming
Keeping It Short: Short Form Comics
10:00am — 11:00am, Room 28DE
Kate Beaton, Emily Carroll, Lisa Hanawalt, together, holy crap.

The Black Panel
10:00am — 11:00am, Room 5AB
Not the one with Keith Knight, but it does have Wayne Brady (who is more than that one Chappelle sketch).

Cartoon Network: Steven Universe
10:15am — 11:45am, Indigo Ballroom
Crap, crap, crap, do I try to get into the Steven Universe panel (that defeated me two years ago) or go see Beaton, Carroll, and Hanawalt? This one has Rebecca Sugar, Jeff Liu, Ben Levin, Zach Callison (Steven), Estelle (Garnet), Michaela Dietz (Amethyst), Deedee Magno Hall (Pearl), and Charlyne Yi (Ruby), with composers Aivi Tran and Steven Velema, moderated by Ian Jones-Quartey¹.

Comic Book Law School 202: Numbers
10:30am – 12:00pm, 30CDE
Part two of your legal education, talking about licensing, rights transfers, contracts, and the like.

Exploding Kittens And The Oatmeal
6:00pm — 7:00pm, Room 25ABC
Huh, I thought for sure that Matt Inman wasn’t going to be around, seeing as how he doesn’t seem to have a table. He’s welcome to come say hi over at Dumbrella Central.

How Old Is YA In Europe And The USA?
6:30pm — 7:30pm, Room 8
Alas, I have tickets for the Space Time show or I’d be checking out this transatlantic discussion moderated by the invaluable Brigid Alverson.

The Girl Genius Radio Plays
8:30pm — 10:00pm, Room 24ABC
Because you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Phil Foglio do a dramatic monologue as Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer.

Spam of the day:

Biblical Miracle Confirmed(pg. 1117 King James Bible)

That’s a new one — biblical reference by page number. Every bible I’ve ever seen numbers the testaments (sometimes the individual books) separately, which means there isn’t a page 1117. And even if there were, I doubt that whatever’s on that page actually contains the secret to curing your diabetes in three days.

_______________
¹ Ask him about RPG World, I dare you.

Holy crap, somebody went and made Ana-Tomix. Chris Onstad is, once again, ahead of his time. Let me know when you’ve got the three-ball option, or the counterintuitive uniball model.

Okay, so the Harvey Awards. The ballot got announced yesterday and again there’s the inexplicably high number of nominations for one publisher (Valiant this time) due to block voting (it’s part of the game)¹, and again there’s an inexplicable set of nominees for the webcomics category. Let’s take a look:

Best Online Comics Work

• Albert the Alien, Trevor Mueller and Gabriel Bautista
• Battlepug, Mike Norton
• Bloom County 2015, Berkeley Breathed
• Oh Joy, Sex Toy, Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan
• Zombie Boy, Mark Stokes

Where to start, where to start? Once again, nominees are distinguished solely by their medium for distribution, with no regard to length, format, genre, or purpose. The longform Battlepug and Albert the Alien are up against the strip-based Bloom County and Zombie Boy, and the educational, page-oriented Oh Joy, Sex Toy. Could there someday be a recognition that OJST should be in the educational category (okay, the Harveys don’t have one, but the Eisners do, if memory serves), or at least matched up against educational comics like Your Wild City and Battlepug against Dr McNinja? Also, how is Bloom County nominated for both Best Online Comics Work and Best Syndicated Strip or Panel? The one really should preclude the other.

Then again, complaining here has no value, since this is based off of how many people nominated their own work and got their friends to do likewise. Get organized and see what you can do for next year. And while you’re plotting out the takeover of the webcomics category next year, check out the webcomickers that are competing in the print arena:

• Giant Days (written by John Allison, art by Lissa Tremain and Max Sarin on art) and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (written by Ryan North, art by Erica Henderson) are competing for Best Continuing or Limited Series against the likes of Bitch Planet and Saga
• The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal (written and drawn by EK Weaver) is contending for Best Graphic Album Previously Published against five Valiant books²
• Giant Days again, up for Best Original Graphic Publication For Younger Readers versus Lumberjanes and Over the Garden Wall (although, mysteriously, nothing by Raina Telgemeier or Kazu Kibuishi)
• Lissa Tremain is up for Most Promising New Talent, to complement Giant Days (again!), up for Best New Series

It’s John Allison’s year, people. We’re just living in it.

Balloting for the Harveys is open until 8 August, with comics professionals eligible to vote. The awards will be presented at Baltimore Comic-Con on 5 September.

Spam of the day:

truTV PR: Media Alert: truTV’s Impractical Jokers Invade San Diego with Fan Events

Heh — Gmail has categorized an actual PR email blast as Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Unless you trust the sender, don’t click links or reply with personal information. Awesome.

_______________
¹ Then again, I see that both Terry Moore (for Rachel Rising)and Stan Sakai (for Usagi Yojimbo) are nominated as Best Cartoonist, without publisher-wide blocks behind them. That’s gotta be purely the respect of their peers, and well deserved, too.

² Take that, voting block!

You gotta hand it to Ryan North, the guy know how to play the long game. Today’s Dinosaur Comics installment (which would be number 3000) continues a gag from DC #2000, which in turn continues a gag from DC #1000. Look for the next mention of Kangaroo Kicking Kraziness™ in let’s see, 1000 strips divided by three strips a week is 333 weeks or six years and 146 days or let’s call it … Wednesday, June 29th, 2022 (or Year 6, SixthMonth, NinthDay of the GTC¹).

• Speaking of long games, will this page ever tire of talking about Raina Telegemeier and the revolution in comics that she sparked starting with Smile and continuing to the present day?

  Nope! Telgemeier is responsible for shaking up the industry, shaking up the demographics of who reads comics, who will be making them in the future, and given that she started pulling in fans with her Baby Sitters Club adaptations ten years back, shaking up who (in the near future) will be raising their kids as the next generation of comics readers.

  Although the big capes comics companies tend to ignore the lessons that Telgemeier and her contemporaries offer at their peril, in each passing year there’s a greater appreciation for the changes they (and particularly, she) have brought about. The discussion to that end at The AV Club today is especially on point because a full half of the participants aren’t tremendous fans of Smile, but all recognize it for the watershed moment that it is.

  As usual, the invaluable Oliver Sava makes the best points, but the entire group knows the score: comics is an industry that needs new readers to live, and right now it’s imprints like Graphix and :01 that are leading the way. Anybody that doesn’t get on board is dooming themselves to obscurity. Read the whole thing, set it to the side, and read it again.

• Speaking of book publishers and comics, I’m adding Knopf Doubleday to the SDCC exhibitor map from yesterday; I missed them initially as they’re away from the publishers row in the 1100-1200 aisles, but with offerings like The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew and The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage by Sydney Padua, it would be criminal not to point you towards Booth 1520.
• Finally, speaking of nothing in particular other than a damn good story, Christopher Baldwin announced today that come September and the conclusion of his current sci-fi story, Anna Galactic, he’ll be returning to the first of his sci-fi stories for more Spacetrawler:
  

  Yup! That’s right. All new adventures of the comic, Spacetrawler will begin in September.

  Anna Galactic ends sometime in August/September, and then I’ll switch over to Spacetrawler. There will likely be some overlap, and my best guess is that Spacetrawler will begin the first week of September.

  And helping bring about this is the generous support of many of you through Patreon! Please, follow that link and help out in bringing back all the awesomeness. Also, my weekly Patreon blog will include Spacetrawler development drawings and blather! You can unlock it to read it by helping out too, by contributing over on my Patreon page.

  Speaking for myself, Spacetrawler’s Dmitri may be my favorite of all of Baldwin’s characters, ever; he maintains a carefully-cultivated air of hedonistic amorality, but he’s the most altruistic schemer that Earth’s ever produced. I hope the revival is all about Dmitri as a truly benevolent philosopher king who pretends to be a dictator while actually spreading freedom, because I think he could actually pull off all the contradictions inherent in that job description. Of course, the booze helps!²

Spam of the day:

worked out well for me

Good to hear! Feel free to tell me all about it from way over there.

_______________
¹ Glorious Trumpalo Calendar.

² From approximately his fifth speaking appearance in strip #21, Dmitry was never without a drink in hand unless in a sealed space suit in hard vacuum. For reference, that’s 120+ appearances over nearly 400 strips, which I guess counts for one hell of a running gag. Theme complete!

Okay, that’s got nothing to do with anything today, other than I’ve always liked that page and hey — reee-markable.

• First thing: EK Weaver has gotten a lot of notice over the years for The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal, especially over the last year or so since it was published in omnibus form via Iron Circus and Kickstarter. I mean, hey, Eisner nom and all that. But today she’s back with something that’s much briefer, much rougher, and maybe much more important than TJ and Amal, being the first exploration I’ve seen in comics about the toll that finishing a creative project can take:
  

  A personal, messy comic about depression + the fallout from finishing a major creative project: http://tjandamal.com/other/depressioncomic.png …

  It’s not pretty, it’s not polished, and it’s terribly, terribly valuable every time a creator that fights against the brain-lies depression shines a light on that struggle. And even when there isn’t the additional burden of mental illness, it’s worth remembering that creation is an act of great effort under any circumstances. To pass something out of your imagination into the wider world (particularly something with an extended, serialized existence) and then to see it end? Put another way, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Gary Larson or Bill Watterson — to name just two — have withdrawn from public life (even if their works wrapped on their own terms), or that Charles Schulz couldn’t live without creating Peanuts.

  I think I’m probably in danger of conflating my two points here — that creation is effortful and ending it stressful, and that stress can exacerbate existing mental conditions. Schulz would absolutely be diagnosed as depressive today, but I am making no implications of such a condition in Watterson or Larson. To bring it back to my original point, Weaver’s letting us in on an important set of ideas, and there’s a third one there as well: that creation is itself sustaining as well as straining. Give it a read and have a bit more empathy the next time your favorite creator’s a bit late with updates, yeah?

• Second thing: fifty-two weeks makes a year, so it appears from the latest New York Times Best Seller List that Raina Telgemeier’s Smile has now spent the equivalent of four full years on the list¹, along with a total of 149 weeks for Drama, 90 weeks for Sisters (out of 94 weeks since release!), 54 weeks for Kristy’s Great Idea (I missed it’s one-year anniversary, sorry), and 14 for Claudia and Mean Janine. Yep, only five spots out of ten so the cumulative total of 515 weeks is artificially low, but don’t worry — Ghosts is already racking up the advance praise and we’ll see the others back soon enough.
• Third thing: book day! Two review copies from the wonderful Gina Gagliano at :01 Books² — the fifth in the Last Man series and the second in Gene Yang & Mike Holmes’s Secret Coders series — and the second volume of Vattu from Evan Dahm (soon to be added to Dahm’s TopatoCo store).

Spam of the day:

Free Gold IRA offer

I’m sure Ira’s a nice guy and all, but I don’t want him gold-plated, thanks.

______________
¹ 208 weeks out of the 332 since publication on 1 February 2010.

² Who, I see, added a new editorial assistant yesterday, increasing the staff by 25% because a remarkably small staff produces all those great books. By the way, want to feel old? Kiara Valdez, the new addition, was asked the first comic she can remember reading and replied I vaguely remember reading the 1st volume of Scott Pilgrim at the library when I was in 5th grade. I was in my mid thirties.

For those wondering, the Octopus Pie Volume 4 launch party last night was a lot of fun; I’m not going to do a write-up here, as much of what I was told by Meredith Gran, Mike Holmes, and fellow attendee Evan Dahm hasn’t been announced yet. Rather than run the risk of mentioning things they want to announce on their own terms, I’ll just say that they’re all working on Cool Things that you will love. Look for them on the con circuit this year and ask ’em yourself what they’re up to.

Instead, let’s talk about other things that have come up.

• At the launch party, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of a young lady that came because (as she put it) she’s grown up reading the likes of Gran, Beaton, Munroe, and other lights of webcomickry. She had stickers of her original character (Bus Man … possibly Busman, or Bus-Man¹) and sent me a PDF of a short story she recently completed on her Tumblr. Her name is Sam[antha] Schroeder, you can see her portfolio here and her comics here.

  There’s so many people making comics — at every stage of their individual artistic journeys — that finding one whose work you want to share is always a Good Thing; I’m sharing Schroeder’s doodles and comics (there’s not much there yet) because I think it’s great to follow somebody from the beginning. A few years one and she’ll probably be embarrassed by this work, but that’ll only be because of how much she’s progressed.

  The story I mentioned is a sweet-natured look at what it’s like to be a not particularly grim reaper² who’s wondering about whether all those reapings are fair. It’s charming, and you can find it at these links.

• It’s been not quite five years that Tyler Page (creator of Nothing Better) has been working on his medical memoir, Raised on Ritalin (of a piece with other personal stories about health, like Tracy White’s How I Made It To Eighteen or even Raina Telgemeier’s Smile), which recently hit its final chapter. It’s a book that’s undoubtedly changed in the time it took to produce, and it’s now possible to read the entire thing at once.

  And for those of you that hate hitting the Next button a few hundred times in a row, you can get a hardcopy:

  HERE IT IS: @Kickstarter for Raised on Ritalin – A Graphic Novel/Memoir about #ADHD by tyler page http://kck.st/1WfH1k4 #kickstarter

  It’s probably partly a shift in the openness with which people are now willing to discuss mental illness, partly changes in psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, and partly who I hang out with these days, but things like ADHD and depression weren’t things I knew that people had — actual people, that is, people I knew personally — before about a dozen years ago. A lot of your favorite creators have been open about the challenges they face with psychiatric conditions, and that’s a tremendous help for people that don’t know why their brains work the way they do. Lots more people need to get that help, and Raised on Ritalin has to potential to provide that help.

  It’s not just the story of Page’s diagnosis and what ADHD means to him personally; it’s a biography of the disease and the drugs that are used to treat it, as well. It’s an important story, and it’s only going to get to the places it needs to be³ if it’s in a printed and bound form. And that will only happen if a measly US$6000 gets raised in the next month or so.

  Page is already about 40% of the way to goal, but he really needs to go way over goal — that’s what will allow not only physical improvements to the book (he cited better paper, for one), but to print enough copies that the people who don’t yet know that they need it will be able to find it in places that can help them³ in the future. If you know somebody that lives with ADHD or any other mental condition, if you want to learn more (because you’re a good person and have a sense of empathy), you could hardly find a better starting place that Page’s book. Pledge, spread the word, and share your copy when you get it.

• Happies Birthsdays. The aforementioned Raina Telgemeier (I did mention her … just scroll back up and you’ll see) and Becky Dreistadt are having birthdays today. Actually, it’s a good deal more extensive that just two people; 26 May is apparently the most popular birthday in indy/webcomics:
  

  @beckyandfrank @CoryCasoni @TomTomShimShim @JNoze + @the_kochalka @NickBertozzi @bannister01! #birthdaysquad

  To be clear, in that tweet Telgemeier is replying to Cory Casoni, who is not one of the co-birthdayists; that still makes for at least seven people celebrating today, which makes today The Best. And you can get in on the celebrations, either by tweeting and maybe getting an advanced copy of Telgemeier’s next book, or by sending Dreistadt a picture of a cat to make her happy.

Spam of the day:

New York Comic Con

Nope, we’re done. Don’t find my presence to be helpful to your strategy of selling people to advertisers? I don’t have to read your emails any more. Bye, now.

______________
¹ However you spell it, Bus Man has the best superpower for an urban environment ever; whenever he needs to get somewhere, regardless of schedule or time of day, a bus will pull up and it will be an express to his current destination.

² She’s still a reaper, mind you, but not the doom-and-gloom kind.

³ Libraries, therapist’s practices, school counseling offices, etc.

Generally behind on everything and about to post a quick note to that effect when I got an email from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin reminding me about a story tip he’d sent earlier which I’d teased, and intended to run by now. Never doubt the motivating power of FSFCPL, people! Also, he finds things to talk about that not only would I never see, but it’s hugely unlikely that anybody in the US comics press would. So let’s dig in together, shall we?

Thanks to the work of Becky, self-proclaimed Maliki’s human Swiss Army knife, Maliki has made a big push recently to post English language strips. They are not translated in chronological order however, so your best bet is to follow @Maliki_officiel for newly posted translations.

Moreover, Mali herself has made an effort to post on a regular weekly schedule since January (the schedule was rather … sporadic before), and those get translated as well, so you can expect new content to read every week, too. Happy reading.

See, this is why it’s always worth reading his emails. The Becky mentioned (who may or may not have good hair) is a [possibly real person inspiring a] character in Maliki, described here:

Maliki is a young woman with pink hair and pointed ears. This comic follows Maliki’s daily life full of spontaneity and originality, while also taking her back to her childhood memories.

A quick once-over through the English language strips reveals a story that appears to be largely autobio-inspired, but with some fantastical elements (like the occasional fairy or catgirl). So basically like Bouletcorp, only set in Bretange, and featuring a cast of recurring characters.

It’s pretty, it’s fun to read, and if the English strips seem a bit scattered — jumping between art styles and story points — that’s due to the fact it’s not being translated in order. And that’s okay! The somewhat random nature and irregular patterns makes it more addicting, like how the very occasional win on a slot machine makes you want to plow more quarters in.

The English archive goes clear back to 2004, and features everything from three- or four-panel strips to splash illustrations, to as much vertical scrolling as it takes to tell a story.

And as always, we at Fleen thank M. Lebeaupin for his sharp eyes and willingness to share the good stuff with us.

Spam of the day:

Raina Telgemeier: hello Gary

Call me crazy, but I don’t think the real Raina is emailing me from Poland to share links to malware sites promising me slutty g-string girles [sic]. Just a hunch.

I was going to spend today’s post catching up on all the things that happened during my recent and unfortunate hiatus, but you people keep doing things. So I’m not able to spend a proper amount of time on KC Green’s moment of historiography, Abby Howard’s The Last Halloween Kickstart (back it, dammit, I want my book), Magnolia Porter, Aatmaja Pandya, and Victoria Elliott’s visual novel, the now-open submissions at Creators for Creators, or news from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin¹. What could be so important as to displace all that awesomeness?

• Oh, I don’t know, how about Oni Press announcing a whole new imprint to be dedicated to erotic and sex education comics?
  

  Oni Press, Portland’s premier independent comic book publisher, is proud to announce Limerence Press, a new erotic and sex education comics imprint focused on positive, diverse, and approachable stories that reflect a wide variety of emotional and intimate experiences.

  Okay, one: great name. And two: sex education comics? Where on earth will they find creators to do serious but sexy education for … oh, right:

  Limerence Press is launching with printed editions of volumes 1–3 of Oh Joy Sex Toy, a popular sex education and sex toy review webcomic by creators by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan.

  To say that this is a perfect match would be an understatement; to say that Moen is excited about it would be be entirely truthful, but lacking in sufficient emphasis. Best of all, this is going to open up avenues that Nolan & Moen have not had for distribution previously:

  Limerence Press is printing Moen and Nolan’s Oh Joy Sex Toy Volume 3 Kickstarter books, helping the creative team reduce costs. The unique and limited-Kickstarter edition cover will be exclusive to Kickstarter backers, and serve as the books that Moen and Nolan sell directly online, at conventions, and at book signings. A separate Limerence Press cover will be distributed to comic shop retailers, bookstores, and specialty shops—avenues previously inaccessible to the creators.

  The Kickstart + regular edition is something Oni have experience with, having previously used the model on Yuko Ota & Ananth Hirsh’s Lucky Penny (which they’ve been taking awards nominations for since I’ve been gone). And sharp-eyed readers will note that Limerence is launching with three volumes of OJST, and yet there have only been two print collections to date — which brings us to the third part of the news:

  Which leads me to my NEXT announcement (oh yes, there’s more!)… The Volume 3 Kickstarter will be launching at 11am PST today!!!!

  Or about 20 minutes from now as I type this line. Congratulations to Moen, Nolan, Oni, and everybody involved with Limerence — but most of all congrats to all the people who haven’t seen OJST before and will now have the opportunity to get factual, healthful, utterly necessary information. There’s way too many people — kids, really — who don’t get anything resembling true information about sexuality, and for whom sex education equates to Don’t do it before you get married or God will blow your legs off, a situation that leads to increased rates of unintended pregnancy and STI transmission. Moen, Nolan, et. al. are serving the public good, and more power to ’em.

• Also coincidentally launching today: Matt Lubchansky (whose Dad Magazine, with wife Jaya Saxena, has launched to great acclaim and is outselling Hamilton for goodness sake) has Kickstarted the first collection of his Please Listen To Me comics and is more than 50% of the way to goal a little less than 14 hours in. Lubchansky’s one of the best gag cartoonists (that is, not using set cast members; he doesn’t limit himself to the single panel gag format) working today, and this book is going to both have excellent cartoons and make the right people cry. Go get it.

Spam of the day:

Secret so powerful it was kept out of The Bible! Click here to read Jesus’ lost words and how they could improve your life!

Let me guess: Drink more Ovaltine?

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¹ Actually, FSFCPL’s news is not time-sensitive, so we’ll get to that one in a day or so.

Good news for indy and webcomics creators, as TopatoCon 2016 will be free to attend and the NCS Division Awards released their nominations. Two of the three nominations for Comic Books are Giant Days (Max Sarin, although the image that they’re using is a Lissa Tremain cover) and Squirrel Girl (Erica Henderson), and the two online categories are full of excellent choices. Namely, Drive (Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett), The Creepy Casefiles of Margo Maloo (Drew Weing), and Octopus Pie (Meredith Gran, her second nod) for Long Form, and Bouletcorp (Boulet), Kevin and Kell (Bill Holbrook), and Sheldon (LArDK, again) for Short Form. Gonna be some tough choices to make as the NCS membership looks over their ballots.

The rest of this post is about one person I met at MoCCA Fest, and how you’ll want to keep your eye on her work.

At the start, it was the earrings¹. Large, white, vaguely dangerous-looking at first glance. Definitely lethal at second glance, and nervous-making despite the endlessly cheerful demeanor of the wearer. I asked what they were, and she told me — perhaps a little too cheerfully — Bobcat jaws! Like, actual fang-sporting jaws of actual bobcats, the better to destroy her enemies if she has any, which I seriously doubt.

Since I was there I glanced over her table, and as I mentioned before, I stopped when I looked at an open minicomic, the pages of which I immediately recognized. It was If Only Once, If Only For A Little While, open to the second and third pages. I remembered it because at the time I thought the character designs were reminiscent of Adachi Mitsuru’s Cross Game or (dating myself here) Matsumoto Izumi’s Kimagure Orange Road (which, coincidentally, is now finally being translated into English).

I always found their faces to be expressive with an absolute minimum of detail, and the same strengths showed here; it’s like the artist found that diagram in Understanding Comics that shows the continuum of faces, from photorealistic to circle/dots/line and picked out a spot just over the line into the cartoony end and said Here. These are the faces that suit this story.

There’s also the staging of those two pages (seriously, go look at them), particularly with the coiled dragon mural and that one, mostly black panel on page three. They draw your eye in and make you visually circle around that central bit of text: An awful truth is still the truth.

Combined with the bit dialogue at the end of page two (Nothing that exciting would ever happen here), the reader is entirely engaged in the story and primed for — perhaps dreading — the revelations to come. And that’s before you notice the POV shifts and camera angles and distances in the individual panels, each serving exactly the purpose needed in establishing mood and story. Did I mention the skill at which she draws the drape and folds of clothing? Because she gets how cloth works on human bodies. I’ve seen this before, but I know I haven’t given you money for it I said; We need to fix that.

And that was when I met Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.

Details came up quickly — she’s a student at MCAD, getting ready to graduate in the coming weeks; she’s been doing comics for about three years, and oh yeah — she’s also working on her comic book debut, which just so happens to be the much-anticipated Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy crossover. I asked how on earth she’d scored that gig as her first comic book work and with all the sincerity in the world she said I got really lucky.

And that was when I decided I needed to know Rosemary Valero-O’Connell much better.

As I mentioned, I saw a lot of student work at MoCCA, and talked to a fair number of students; some were reticent, some outgoing, all were starry-eyed and optimistic about their forthcoming fabulous careers in comics, except one. Valero-O’Connell was cautious and hopeful and well aware that the comics business is not a meritocracy or even particularly fair. She knows that the deadlines and page rates may border on science fiction², she knows that the business end is capricious and even cruel. She’s ridiculously grounded and ready to do a huge amount of grinding work to establish herself.

And that was when I resolved to follow Rosemary Valero-O’Connell very closely.

It shouldn’t be too hard; in addition to LJ/GA³, I noticed that she did the cover to the new Steven Universe original graphic novel that releases today (co-written by show producer Ian Jones-Quartey, no less). She mentioned that she has projects in the pipeline that she can’t talk about just yet. She is, I hope, working on stories of her own, because I want to read them and see them where they belong — on the shelves of stores, gathering the sorts of notice and acclaim that Raina Telgemeier and Hope Larson and Noelle Stevenson are getting.

And that is why you want to pay attention to Rosemary Valero-O’Connell; she’s seriously skilled today, and she’s only going to get better.

Spam of the day:

The Gene Simmons Company

Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Gene Simmons achieved permanent Garbage Person status on 4 February 2002.

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¹ I should note that the earrings had competition for coolest jewelry of the show; not long after entering the hall I noticed a black, metallic, sculptural necklace on a woman and complimented her on it. The more I looked at it (with her permission, don’t want to be creepy) the more it looked familiar. That looks like a benzene ring I said, indicating the central element, but I don’t know what the things hanging off it are. It’s dopamine she told me, so at least I can still identify benzene. Pretty sure this was it if you want one of your own.

² At one point I begged her to spend some time this week reading everything Katie Lane has written on work made for hire, and to please never undervalue her skills. She knows, and thankfully she’s got an agent looking out for her. And hell if she didn’t luck into the Impossible Thing with this LJ/GA gig — an underpaid (it’s mostly Boom! wrangling the story, so it’s definitely underpaid) WMFH gig where the exposure (reminder, kids: people die of exposure) is actually significantly valuable. This story is going to put her on a lot of people’s radar.

³ To be honest, I’d planned on dropping both Lumberjanes and Gotham Academy because I found the original creative teams to be more to my tastes than the current creative teams; I’ll be holding out at least through the six issues now.