Life (that would be work) is kicking my ass today, so I only have time for a quick notice and a doubleshot of spam (I left it out yesterday because spammers don’t get to share a post with Raina Telgemeier).

Probably too late for almost everybody, but today is the first Wednesday of the month, and that means TopatoCo Drink ‘n’ Draw at Eastworks. I’m writing myself a note to email Holly and Jeffrey about next month, because I didn’t even see this one until yesterday.

Anyways, tonight’s event runs the traditional 7:00pm until whenever, and stars the Darlings of Brooklyn, Christopher Hastings and Evan Dahm. Those guys need to do a project together; they’ve both contributed to the Tales From The Drive series (courtesy of Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett), but I can’t recall them ever working directly with each other. Tell them I said hi and also we need to hit my bar again.

Spams of the day:

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Well, as long as it doesn’t require registraion, sure I’ll use your entirely legit dating site to meet women an ocean away.

Here are some Options for Breast Augmentation

I am happy with my body as it is, thanks.

I envy you; I really do. You get to do something that I never will be able to do again.

You get to read Raina Telgemeier’s Ghosts for the first time; it releases in one week, and I have been reading and re-reading it (in an uncorrected proof, so there may be differences with the final edition) since SDCC. It’s a book that draws a clear contrast with Raina’s earlier work, and fundamentally differs from the usual stories we tell children (particularly the girls). Let’s talk (oh and needless to say, spoilers ahoy).

Ghosts is written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier, with colors by Braden Lamb that range from spookily subtle to eye-poppingly festive. It releases Tuesday, 13 September 2016 from Scholastic’s Graphix imprint. Fleen thanks Ms Telgemeier for the advanced review copy.

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¹ Edit to add: I was reading Ghosts again and the perfect descriptor for Cat in that scene popped into my brain. Her expression reads My life is a sitcom, and they’re just about to juice the laugh track with that womp-womp sound.

² And, in the finest Miyazaki tradition, the heroine of the story gets to fly.

³ It’s a Raina Telgemeier story, of course there’s middle school angst.

Having apparently enjoyed his time at SXSW, President Obama has decided to throw his own festival on Monday, 3 October; I’m guessing that webcomics could fit neatly into the Interactive track, but you’ve only got until 10 September (that’s a week from tomorrow) at 5:00pm EDT to get your application in. I know there’s people in our community that have been to Austin, so who’s going to DC?

• My suggestion: get somebody out there to talk about Kickstarter/crowdfunding (George, Spike), and be sure to bring up KC Green’s This Is Fine plush which finished up today just under US$455K, or 13 times funded. Nicely done, KC, and good luck Make That Thing getting some 14,000 plushes to more than 12,700 backers.
• Second suggestion: just put Onstad on stage talking about how to write a bunch of blogs in different voices, three of which updated today, just in time for the long weekend, hooray!

And that’s it — long weekend comin, which I will happen to spend on EMT duty, with tropical storm/hurricane Hermine heading this way. Stay dry, I’ll see you next week.

Spam of the day:

Congrats! Your FREE Starbucks Samples are Ready

I don’t drink coffee. I think you meant to send this to Rich Stevens. Try again.

Dr Nootropic — “Smart Drug” discovered: proven to double IQ and memory-retention

What did I just say? Rich is over thataway, dammit.

Okay, nothing from Marian Call, Hope Larson, or Kate Beaton, and I did meet Marguerite Sauvage, but still. Let’s go with the theme when it suggests itself.

• Where are you going to be between week after next and early November? Because you will want to coordinate your place-being with that of Raina Telgemeier as she does her nationwide book tour in support of Ghosts. As it turns out, I’m going to be in Minneapolis the same time Raina is, and I hope to catch up with her there (bearing in mind that the grind of a book tour is, if anything, even greater than the grind of a show, when we already don’t get enough time to talk)¹.

  Please note that these events are ticketed, and each venue has its own rules, which you should review. Also, I’m hearing that some of the venues are already sold out (or nearly so), so if there’s a Telgemeier fan of your acquaintance² you may want to grab tickets now and work out logistics later.

• Brigid Alverson is one of my favorite people; she’s been doing the [web]comics journalism thing longer (and better) than I have, and as her day job is in local government, we always get to talk about the logistics of emergency services when we run into each other. And that’s pretty much the deal — no matter how many times we say We should make definite plans for SDCC, we always seem to bump into each other at random on the show floor, without fail. She’s got a new interview with John Allison on Oni Press’s plans to do a second reprint format of Allison’s Bad Machinery.

  Now I love me my big, floppy, oversize landscape format Bad Machinery collections, so I’m glad to see that Oni will keep producing them. But the newer, smaller trim size (about 15×23 cm) will certainly be easier to drop into a bag or read in transit, and the cover that Allison shared for the new volume one is gorgeous. I’m not going to buy them all again, but for those that didn’t get in on the large format, the new trim size will be available from March 2017, at a lower price point. Everybody wins.

• Cathy Leamy and I met for the first time in the hallway outside Kate Beaton’s spotlight panel; I recognized her name, but didn’t remember at the time that she’d been mentioned her on the blog before, back when Anne Thalheimer was contributing. Circles inside circles, man.

  Anyhoo, Leamy (as you may recall) does comics that do medical education, so I was happy to see the RSS feed go ping! as she dropped a new one on us, explaining perhaps the single most mystifying, aggravating question in all of modern medicine: Why is the doctor always late for my damn appointment? Short answer: people.

  Longer answer: life is full of friction, because people. It’s a nice explainer, with plenty of acknowledgment of frustration on both sides of the issue, which will hopefully will lead its readers to have a bit more patience, do their best to help keep doctors on schedule, and make appointments early in the day before it all goes straight to Hades.

Spam of the day:

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I think you might have mixed up the parameters in your spam-personalization code. One scam at a time, please!

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¹ I probably won’t be able to get from the work gig to the event in time, and if space is tight I don’t want to keep one of Raina’s younger readers; I’ll try to meet up with her for dinner and reviving adult beverages after.

² My wife told me this morning, I read your copy of Ghosts, it was so good; she’s got excellent taste.

It’s unusually busy for a Wednesday. Here are some things you may want to observe in the near term.

Today! Okay, we’ve all pulled the odd all-nighter and felt like crap the next day, but do any of us know what real sleep deprivation is like? Unless you’ve been through elite military training (some kind of special forces, or SERE), the answer’s probably no … and even your SOCOM operators might shudder at the thought of 205 consecutive hours — eight and a half days — without sleep.

The story of four guys (of course it’s guys) that did exactly that in service to a medical experiment in the early ’60s (of course it was the ’60s … it would never pass ethical review today) to determine if enough lost sleep would turn a person permanently psychotic is brought to us by Olivia Walch over at The Nib today.

I want to make sure you didn’t miss the word permanently in that last sentence, and I wonder if the investigators were prepared to deal with a subject that wound up permanently damaged.¹ It’s equally fascinating and terrifying, and it’s made me want to trawl all of Walch’s comics … they aren’t all about deranged science experiments, but some are about math, so I’ll take it.

Today! Mary Cagle brings the sequential part of her diary comic, Let’s Speak English! (an account of the 2.5 years she spent in Japan, as an English language classroom assistant in a series of elementary schools) to an end. There may be other strips, but this is the conclusion of the time to return to the States story arc that began here, and progressed through tearful, sometimes painful goodbyes.

It’s been an enlightening, sometimes myth-deflating time following Mary-sensei as she navigated a very foreign culture and all the memorable bits therein. Let’s all thank Cagle for her efforts and encourage her to do her best forever!²

In One Week! Jim Zub’s latest creator-owned comic, Glitterbomb, releases its first issue to comic shops; I talked about it (mostly his artist, Djibril Morissette-Phan, in my SDCC interview with Zub … he is super good at art, you guys), but didn’t tell you much about the book beyond the descriptor Chtonic horror, so let’s remedy that a bit.

It’s a satire of Hollywood. With elder demons, bloody death, and a mid-30s actress who’s not quite good enough to avoid being discarded because she’s no longer 24. It’s about the need for fame, how our society is evolved to deliver it, and what happens when we don’t achieve our dreams.

The first issue doesn’t have anybody acting in a particularly malevolent manner (at least, nobody human), but does feature some really thought-provoking (and guts-spraying) situations about what happens when the desperation to be loved (personally, by the public with their attention) overcomes our social conditioning. It does all of that by page two.

If you’ve ever wondered what will happen to the entire Kardashian clan when the public collectively decides not to pay attention to them any longer, pray (if you’re the praying type) it’s more like Norma Desmond and less like Glitterbomb.

Some Point In The Not Too Distant Future! The Joe Shuster Award nominations (Les nominés pour le prix Joe Shuster 2016) are out, and webcomicky types are all over the place. Names like Fletchter, Immonen (Kathryn), North, Zdarsky, Lemire, Belanger, Immonen (Stuart), Staples, Stewart, DeForge, Tamaki, Chmakova, and Soo are to be found across all categories.

I’ve said to before and I’ll say it again: Canada has the greatest density of comics talent to population of anyplace in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly the world. The Shuster Awards will be presented at a time and venue to be announced, in Fall 2016.

Spam of the day:

Get a free tactical headlamp with an adjustable focusing beam!

Dudes, headlamps are about the nerdiest thing ever, why do you think it’s the key element of Frontalot’s stage persona? You’re just overcompensating your nerdshame by trying to convince me yours is tactical. Show me it’ll hold up to the rigors of a week of mud, rain, sleep deprivation, and explosions, then you can call it tactical.

(Says the guy who actually went and bought these because oh glob, so cool … but I am actually an EMT who has crawled into half-crushed cars, so it’s only half pathetic.)

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¹ For a payout of US$250-$400; somewhere in the US$1800-$2800 today, adjusting for inflation, according to this calculator.

² Insert image of small Japanese children all shouting Ganbatte! in unison.

Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett put up the Kickstarter for the Drive chapter one collection around midnight Easterly Time, and as of this writing (call it a bit less than fifteen hours in), he’s above US$24K of the US$35K goal. Looking good on the stretch goals (which I’m told will include the Tales of the Drive anthology stories, from the likes of Dylan Meconis, Ryan North & Tony Cliff, Zach Weinersmith, Christopher Hastings & Anthony Clark, and Evan Dahm), looking like I have to clear space on my shelves, etc. Two things I wanted to talk about beyond the fact this is a cool Kickstarter.

• No, three. Three things. Because first, I note that three people have taken advantage of the top reward tier (US$500), which includes the complete eight book Sheldon library, various Drive tchotchkes, and one of the few pages of original art Drive art (the strip has been produced digitally since very nearly the start). It’s a bargain, and quite frankly underprices the Drive art.
• Second, I want to note that LArDK pulled a sneaky launch on the campaign, as there are two reward tiers that he apparently tipped off his Patreon supporters to yesterday, as they were only good on that day. Basically, they got a shot to grab the US$65 tier for US$50 or the $US90 tier for US$75, and a total of 240 people did. Now consider the momentum you get from letting your most ardent fans — the ones giving you money every month — an early shot at a bargain for one day only.

  The FOMO is strong, the campaign goes widely public more than halfway to goal (as of right now, there are 362 backers, meaning two thirds of the backers are from the early access period), and you get to screw with my formulas for predicting final tally all at the same time. Curse you, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett! But seriously — this was a masterful stroke of leveraging an existing support base.

• Third, everybody that actually knows how to run a good Kickstarter (i.e.: not anybody that spams you promising a successful campaign for a usurious service fee) will tell you that a good, to-the-point video is a key part of the campaign. Of course, LArDK has provided one (it’s hilarious, and at 82 seconds in length, gets the point across efficiently), but that’s a given. And it’s super unfair.

  Not everybody trying to Kickstart their thing made a feature film (and a fine looking one at that) and has experienced Hollywood types (director/cinematographer, film editor) at their beck and call. Everybody else that ever makes a Kickstarter video from today forward has to up their game because LArDK just went and blew the curve for you. Email your complaints to screw.you@losangelesresidentdavekellet.com.

Spam of the day:

The DRIVE Kickstarter is finally here! YOU GUYS I’M VERY EXCITED THIS IS VERY EXCITING http://http://DriveKickstarter.com

We get it, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, you’re excited about your book.

Where to start? How about here, because it’s always good to see a fresh Paul Southworth comic, and not because of any name-related preferential treatment. Please enjoy the return (after about two years) of Lake Gary.

• Know what’s got a damn-near universal, gut-level meaning to anybody that grew up in the US and swaths of Canada? Sears. It’s just that place with everything, not too exciting, tools right next to teen clothing because why not? And a place that ubiquitous, that mundane, was inevitably going to attract the attention of the 21 Century’s visual depictor of ubiquity, Brandon Bird.

  He launched his Sears Project three years back, Kickstarting a cross-country trip to visit as many Sears locations as possible, to paint representations of them, to capture the Searsness of modern American life.

  And now comes the next stage of Searsification:

  p.s. do you guys know about my Sears event? http://brandonbird.com/

  On Tuesday, 13 September (already established as the most important release day in webcomics), Bird will be doing the most mundane thing you could do after a trip to chronicle mundanity: he’ll be giving a slide show:

  It’s been three years since I embarked on a dangerous quest to document all the Sears stores in the land and in honor of that anniversary I’m hosting a little event next month. Enjoy a slideshow, Sears-themed refreshments, and Q & A with myself and co-Sears tripper Erin Pearce about just what it was like to live on the road in search of Sears. Get a peek at upcoming Sears art and learn what’s next for the Sears project. (Seating is limited, so if you know for sure you can make it and want to reserve a seat, rsvp to brandonbird [at sign] gmail.com.)

  That’ll be the 13th, 8:00pm, at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles (on Alvarado, right near Sunset Boulevard).

• I don’t know if you noticed the Kickstarter for an indie videogame about the feral dogs of Moscow’s subways, but it’s now got two links to webcomics. As a result of unlocking achievements, they’ve unlocked a particular real-life dog as a playable character: Reginald Barkley, loyal pooch of Kean Soo. And last night it was announced that you can also play as KC Green’s Question Hound, which seems appropriate given it’s a game that involves both dogs and fire.

  At least, you may be able to, as Russian Subway Dogs is only about 40% of the way to goal with 23 days to go. There’s other dogs to unlock, though, and for a Canadian outfit, developer Spooky Squid Games would be foolish to not try to entice us with Ryan North’s dog, Chompsky AKA The Dog Who Was Stuck In A Hole With Ryan That Time.

  Let me be clear that I don’t know that they want to include Chompsky, or that either North or Chompsky would be willing to be included, but come on — what is a subway but a very fancy hole?

• Speaking of Green and Question Hound, looks like the long tail is ticking up slightly. In any other campaign, pulling in US$3-6K per day in the final week would be really damn impressive; when you’ve got a first day’s take of US$165K, it kind of gets lost in the vertical scale. Just under four days left to go, maybe ending in the vicinity of US$450K? Neat.

Spam of the day:

My So-Called Life won acclaim for its honest treatment of the issues facing adolescents in the mid-1990’s.

Don’t start. Angela should have gone with Brian Krakow because Jordan Catalano was a dick, and was played by the single most full-of-himself actor in history this side of Shia Labeouf.

Because when you get a callback across more than a decade, you pay attention¹.

The thing about Achewood being Onstad can take almost any potentially nonsensical throwaway line and go back to it whenever he likes. When, last Friday, we saw the spectacle of Todd preparing to yell BALLS louder than anybody in history, it could have been a simple bit of weirdness, and the admonition in the last panel to tune in next week (that would be today) for the conclusion didn’t necessarily mean anything.

But then there was the alt-text last week: Todd first set this challenge to himself when my 11-year old daughter was zero. And there it was: a strip from August of 2005 when Todd declared his intentions. Was there any intention at the time on Onstad’s part to ever revist? Likely not — Todd’s been pestering Ray in this manner about forever, and things either go spinning in a completely unforeseen direction (compare the very nearly identical posing and annoyance on the part of Ray six months later, at the start of what history would record as the start of The Great Outdoor Fight) or just drop.

This time, though — Onstad couldn’t have put together the spectacle of Todd’s attempt eleven years ago; even in the aftermath of The Great Outdoor Fight it wouldn’t have felt right. It wasn’t until 2009 and the The New Kings of Sapphic Erotica (starting here, before merging into The Lash of Thanatos) that the sense of complete over-the-top showbiz² is there.

It’s not just the commonality of the J Vincent J Lemoni Arena, it’s not just the surreal randomness (then: identical elephant costumes; now: color commentary from Paul Stanley of KISS) it’s the sense of unquestioned hype. Of course this is the sort of thing that would require a round-the-clock media blitz. Of course it ends the only way it possibly could for Todd (failure, followed by light corpse disrespect, and another punch in his Frequent Diers Card). Of course there’s a callback to the soft-tissue injury motif of eleven years ago.

And of course — because it’s Todd — we don’t know if the final panel declaration of THE END, INC. NO MORAL means this is actually the end any more than last week’s foresaw a second installment. We may follow Todd to his latest afterlife, we may spin in some unseen direction. Point is, it’s been a while since there was a real story arc — the last one being Téodor’s interrupted interlude with Penny — and with a pretty solid calendar year-to-date of weekly updates under his belt, Onstad just might be feeling it enough to share with us³.

In any event, we got to see Todd’s inspirational shirt again, and that makes it all pretty much the opposite of a Fuck You Friday.

Spam of the day:

Find free coupons for toilet paper discounts click here.

How much toilet paper do you think I use that the offer of discount coupons is enough to get me to click?

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¹ Just pretend when you were young, a teacher told you to pay attention and you took it to heart.

² Not to be confused with Showbiz.

³ Of course, the possibility exists that what he wants to share with us invovled a Bead Shop.

It’s always Thursdays when there’s nothing going on — absolutely nothing is happening today.

• I mean, this announcement from Los Angeles Resident Dave Kellett about a hardcover collection of Act One of Drive? Not today — that won’t happen until Tuesday.
• Or this announcement from Rich Stevens about enamel pins? Actually a month old, as they were up for sale at San Diego Comic Con¹.
• And how about KC Green, The Man That Memes Without Even Trying? There’s a new flareup of Dickbuttery at the moment (because there is nothing that can’t be mashed up with Dickbutt), but as we all know, Dickbutt is more than a decade old and has actually been receding from attention somewhat for the past couple of years (scroll down to the update from ten days back).

  The This Is Fine strip is far more recent (being some three point five years old), and is even Kickstarting a plush at the moment, but the final story on that isn’t due for another week², so that’s not about today either.

So yeah, I think we’ve scientifically established that absolutely nothing is going on today. Try back tomorrow, maybe there will be something more.

Spam of the day:

If you have a dog, you must see this!

I have a dog that’s a total goofball, why would I want to see anything else?

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¹ Where the Rainbow Alliance pins were a particular hit, with people buying them ten at a time. It’s the only non-book thing I’ve gone out of my way to obtain from a con in about forever, and it’s really quite handsome. Get ’em now before the C&D!

² If there’s going to be a big push in funding it’s going to kick off between now and Monday … although the huge interest in this one at the beginning means this might be the first webcomics megasuccess that just tapered off funding at the end instead of jumping upwards. This is honestly the flattest, most asymptotic long tail I’ve ever seen.

Okay, one of them’s really a pre-announcement of when a hiatus will wrap, but let’s go with it.

• Ryan Estrada has, for the past forever, been hard at work on Big Data. He announced the project on this page back in April, he started a Kickstarter a few days later to determine how much to release, and he’s been heads-down ever since putting the polish on.

  And now we have a premiere date. The internet radio play about the Caper of the Century and the Keys to the Internet will start releasing on Tuesday, 13 September (the same days as a few other things; it’s going to be a great day for those of us of certain sensibilities); Kickstarter backers will get all nine episodes at once, the rest of us will have to persevere through cliffhangers and plot twists.

• Meanwhile, David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) reached today the end of his webcomic recaps of Old School Trek episodes, Planet of Hats. Or, more properly, reached it again; he finished up the recaps of Star Trek’s run with Turnabout Intruder (ick) back in January. Then he did the end-of-season recap¹ a week later, and gave us a final splash page at the end of the month.

  Then two months later he started all over again with the mid-70s animated series, the 22 episodes of which are what actually finished today. In case you aren’t old enough to have watch the animated Star Trek on Saturday mornings when you were a kid, it was pretty dire, but on average no worse than the third season of the live action show¹.

  And much like a Peter Jackson trilogy, Morgan-Mar had at least one more ending in store for us: although it will be the new year before it happens, he will be tackling the six movies that feature the original Star Trek cast, so we can look forward to the highs of Wrath of Khan and the lows of the execrable The Final Frontier, so that’s all right.

  As of this writing, it appears that Generations is being classified as a nu-Trek film, but who knows? Drop enough in his Patreon on the condition that he recap Darmok or Yesterday’s Enterprise or The Inner Light and I’d bet he’d come around. Even better, give him enough that he’s obligated to make it through all of TNG and DS9 — I’d love to read his take on In The Pale Moonlight or Far Beyond The Stars or even just highlights of Bashir’s bromances with O’Brien and Garak³.

  The thing is, point your RSS readers — it’s still a thing! — at the feed address and see you all on 4 January 2017. You can spend the time until then reading his first Irregular Webcomic print collection, which is being received by backers as we speak.

Spam of the day:

WE’LL PACK AND MOVE YOUR STUFF FOR YOU!

The hell you will. I’m never moving again.

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¹ Hey, if you’re going to borrow a strip’s format from Shaenon Garrity, you include the season recap pages, because they are insane and great.

² Or most of the first season and a half of Next Generation (basically, everything pre-Borg) for that matter. It remains an indisputable fact that only DS9 hit the ground running and stayed there.

³ Shippers, start your engines.