Are we, collectively, godsdamned capable of that? In the past 48 hours, I’ve watched two creators whose work I enjoy to bits take public steps back to deal with reactions to their work, and the necessity of those actions doesn’t speak well of us as a species.

Minna Sundberg released a 72 page comic about cute bunnies living in a dystopian social credit system; she’d been working on it for months, reducing the updates of Stand Still, Stay Silent in the meantime. In addition to social commentary, Lovely Peopleserved as a vehicle for Sundberg to declare her recently-accepted Christian faith (one that appears to be on the literalist/traditionalist end of the spectrum), which she mentioned in text matter accompanying the comic. The comic itself is gorgeous, the idea of government and commerce collaborating to coerce the population is appropriately chilling, but I found both the story and the accompanying text to present a perspective that Christians are uniquely oppressed that is unconvincing.

Disclaimer #1: I am about as nontheist as you can get, having been brought up a Methodist and been a believer until my late teens/early twenties, when I started sliding from a personal faith to a belief that Christianity can be a metaphorical model without being literally true, to being implausible, to being no more convincing than any other faith or spiritual system, to being entirely without a belief in more than can be measured and observed. My declaration of belief starts with the speed of light in a vacuum, and the closest thing I have to a spiritual belief is I’m convinced that Shannon’s Figure 1 can be used to make my interactions with others better.

Disclaimer #2: Despite the fact that Sundberg has a belief system that is completely alien to my understanding of the universe, this doesn’t make us enemies. I use the term nontheist instead of atheist is because there are so many self-declared atheists that use that label as an excuse to be godsdamned¹ assholes to people that have faith. Any faith, but a lot of them seem to hold particular disdain for Islam². Thomas Jefferson is coming into a much-overdue reappraisal, but I will always respect his greatest work, the Virginia Statute For Religious Freedom, in defense of which he said It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg. So long as my nontheism doesn’t seek to punish Sundberg’s belief, nor her beliefs seek to punish my lack of belief, we’re good.

But she still felt compelled to write this yesterday:

Today’s comment section is closed since I know many people will be upset about the comic. I left it open yesterday because I wanted to let you vent negative feelings for a bit, but in order to let those who just want to read SSSS in peace do so, I’d direct the venting to the fan forum (or wherever else). I heard there’s a place set up to argue there. I’m in no way affiliated with the forum, it’s all fan-operated, and I don’t visit there, so whatever the mods decide to allow is up to them, I don’t mind.

And, from skimming through the comments (that would be on Monday’s update, here), I can’t say that her reaction was wrong. My usual policy of never reading comments appears well borne-out because I find self-pitying bullshit over there about (paraphrasing lightly here) She’s been brainwashed by evil zealots and In a year there won’t be any of the old fandom left because fundamentalists will flock to keep her from hearing reason and Only if we let them. What the crap, people. No. Stop it.

And today, in place of one of my favorite comics since forever, from one of my favorite creator duos, this:

Shaenon: Hey there. Since all the comments on today’s strip were people complaining about how boring and badly-drawn Skin Horse is, I’ve decided to stop drawing it. There’s no point in continuing a project nobody likes. Sorry for wasting your time.

Sorry, [Skin Horse co-writer] Jeff[rey C Wells].

I don’t know Shaenon Garrity well; I’ve been a vocal booster of her work for about as long as this page has been up, but if I recall correctly, we’ve met in person once³ plus occasional contact on Twitter. If her read on the situation is that this was necessary for her well-being, I am not about to gainsay it. But Jesus tapdancing Christ, can we please, as a society, agree that if something isn’t perfectly to our liking, it is okay to not expose ourselves to it and let other people enjoy it? Are we capable of that? Life is hard enough under normal circumstances, much less during the Plague Year, that it makes less than zero sense to spend time sniping (and worse) at people who aren’t hurting anybody, who are just trying to share a little levity and joy for those that happen to like whatever thing they’re making.

I’m heartened that Garrity updated her stance some hours later:

Update: Thanks to everyone for the kind words. I’m talking to Jeff about what to do next.

To be clear, no one was super mean in the comments; there’s just a long history of complaints and nitpicking and “funny” little jabs, and the first few comments on today’s strip were all in that mode. It just feels like people aren’t enjoying the strip, and I don’t want to make something people don’t enjoy.

I’ve long had a hands-off policy about comments on this page (not that there have been many comments for a looong time), but this is fair warning: if anybody shows up here to complain about Garrity’s present or future decision(s), I will fucking nuke you from orbit. You’re in my house, and we are going to treat people who aren’t doing any harm with a baseline of respect and empathy. You want to be the kind of person that would make Mr Rogers or Dolly Parton ashamed to know you, do it on your own time in your own space where I can pretend you don’t exist, or that you’re a better person that you are.

In the meantime, both Sundberg and Garrity have stores and Garrity has a Patreon. Like their work? They could use some support, and given the parasocial world we’re in, the best most of us can do is to buy their stuff.

Spam of the day:

Firefighter Mike Banner recently stumbled on a Japanese ‘red soda’ that actually heats up and melts large amounts of clogged fat…releasing it as energy…

You’re talking about the country that has a specific style of cooking that’s designed to give sumo rikishi more mass. But they needed to invent a soda to counteract that? Sure.

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¹ If you’ll pardon the contradiction.

² Looking at you, Dawkins.

³ On BART, of all places; my wife and I were on vacation, pretty sure it was Free Comic Book Day, and I was only certain it was her because she was with her husband Andrew Farago, who’d sold us the admission tickets at the Cartoon Art Museum the day before. I did some mid-grade fanboying, and she was kind enough to direct us to some good comics shops in Berkeley.

I say that because I thought we were back yesterday and then ha ha nope, we were down again for 10-12 hours, until the small hours of the morning. I’m going to give it another day or so before I believe that we are actually stable. You saw my Twitter, and Jon’s, and you can probably guess what I think of our current hosting provider¹.

But assuming that we’re up long enough for you to read this, there’s a case of somebody absolutely screwing … not even a customer, in this case more of a partner absolutely sideways in the most hypocritical and impunity-rich manner possible.

See, I was going to talk about the latest update at Oh Joy, Sex Toy, where Erika and Matt share their long-awaited take on the Hismith Quadruple Penetration Fucking Machine. One may recall that the last time this particular pan-sexual roto-plooker was mentioned, I thought Matt ‘n’ Erika had actually made it up and went looking. Note where I found it, that’s going to be important in a second.

The reason I wanted to talk about today’s OJST was because right in the middle of the epic of the HQPFM, there are three panels (which I’ve arbitrarily numbered 10, 11, and 12), which culminate in a shocked-looking Erika stating matter-of-factly (in what I imagine was a very small voice) I saw God. I was eating lunch at the time and nearly choked on laughter and also sandwich. As it is, I think there’s still some mustard-covered sprouted-multigrain sandwich bread in my nasopharyngeal space². I went to the sosh-meeds to share my appreciation and sorrow, only to find that Erika and Matt had bigger things on their mind:

WELL.

Amazon just booted us from their affiliate program, which we use to sell *their* sex toys and copies of our books on sexual health, because Oh Joy Sex Toy features explicit images.

They informed us they do not have to pay us any of the money we earned before this.

So all the pre-orders we did for LET’S TALK ABOUT IT (and all of THEIR sex toys that we sold for them) that were placed through our Amazon affiliate link… nothing. The income we generated from those sales, they do not have to pay us. [emphasis mine]

There’s more, but that’s the heart of it. Amazon did not come to dominate nearly every aspect of commerce and technology by playing fair and out-hustling lazy competitors. They did it by viciously undercutting businesses to where they could not possibly make a profit, squeezing contractors, killing their pick-and-pack workers, demanding delivery speed that results vehicular death on the regular, and inviting companies to sell on their platform until they can pirate designs and kick them off. Oh yes, and withholding money that rightfully belongs to other people because the only way to get it back is to have a deeper legal budget than Amazon and literally nobody has a deeper legal budget than Amazon except maybe Disney.

People ask me why I don’t use Amazon, ever, and everything in that last paragraph is why. Amazon doesn’t give a shit about anybody they have contracted business with, they are merely a source of money to be extracted at their leisure. I have an account with them that’s more than 20 years old, and which has purchased exactly nothing since 2019. There are books that I’ve been waiting for Diamond to get to my local comic shop³ for more than a year that could be here tomorrow via Amazon, and I won’t do it. There’s entire series that exist only on comiXology that I desperately want to read, and likewise no. It’s not worth the human damage.

I don’t think it’s been a big thing here, and certainly something I’ve tried to minimize, but there will never be another link to Amazon or an Amazon-owned enterprise here. If there’s a pre-order that a creator wants people to use, or something that’s exclusive to comiXology I will mention it, but you’re going to have to find it yourself. Fuck Amazon in the physical manifestation of its collective corporate ear-hole, and fuck Jeff Bezos in particular. They suck.

PS: Buy Erika and Matt’s books and merch from almost anyplace else but especially your local bookstore. Support their Patreon. And Let’s Talk About It is not only a marvelous book that you should absolutely read because it will make you a better person, it inadvertently led to the creation of a new heirloom in my family.

And seriously — fuck Amazon.

Spam of the day:

The sexual part of a woman’s brain is much more responsive to the signals your body is giving off than it is to anything you say. That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you know how to turn a woman on regardless of what you say.

Save your money, I’ll tell you the secret: have a luxurious, Commander Hadfieldesque moustache.

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¹ Who bought out the previous hosting provider, who were everything you want in a hosting provider: boring. Excitement is definitely not something you want with respect to your web hosting.

² Ow.

³ Huh. Monopolies suck and screw over everybody they interact with, who’d have guessed.

Re: this and this and this. We have access to Fleen back (obvs), but still working out network at home.

Tomorrow, people.

Hopefully.

After all, there are only so many Shut up and take my money and Just hook it to my veins GIFs that can be posted per second before the lasers that make modern communications infrastructure work start to malfunction and murder random passersby.

And if the source of such money/veins declarations were, say, luxuriously packaged, associated with a wildly popular webcomic, and in a limited edition? Well, that’s just a dangerous situation all around. I speak, naturally, of this:

Friends, what better way could there be to drink illicit hooch from that Lackadaisy Speakeasy (or, if you prefer, straight maple syrup) than from custom-made Lackadaisy shot glasses?

After months of careful product design and sourcing, they’re finally on their way!

Iron Circus Comics is producing an animated short for Tracy Butler’s manic masterpiece, Lackadaisy! And as part of one of that project’s stretch goals, we’ve commissioned a limited, one-time run of Lackadaisy-Speakeasy-themed shot glasses! Each one is emblazoned with the Lackadaisy club logo in gold foil, and they come four-to-a-set in a gorgeous, partitioned wooden crate, oh-so-sneakily labeled as Algid brand “embalming fluid” in case the local coppers get nosy.

Only 1,000 of these sets will be made, and they’re designed and manufactured in accordance with American and international food safety standards. Scheduled to hit American shores in late spring or early summer, but available for pre-order now!

That from the email sent to we at Fleen by C Spike Trotman of Iron Circus and I gotta say, that’s a lot of character for a sales pitch email. For those that didn’t get into the minutiae of the Lackadaisy animated short Kickstart last year, getting the shot glasses made was a US$135K stretch goal¹, and they’ve been through design and sourcing for much of the past year.

Personally, the squared-off design makes them look a bit like a whisky glass², and given the fact that a souvenir-type shot glass will typically run you about ten bucks, a set of four with that gorgeous box is more than fair at US$45. Backers got first crack at the glasses on Tuesday, the general announcement went out today, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the pre-orders are largely spoken for by tomorrow³. I’d say that if you have any interest, you want to get in on the offer now.

Spam of the day:

We greet you !!! If you are interested in a full-time job or a part-time job on the Internet, then we can offer you our way of earning money. Now we provide access to our service, which makes it possible to earn from 20 to 30 thousand rubles a month.

I don’t know if I’m more impressed that you’re trying to entice me with the equivalent of US$268 to US$408 for a month’s full-time work, or the fact that you sent your Russian-language spam in actual Comic Sans. Who knew that the evil transcended the Latin alphabet?

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¹ The project had a base goal of US$85K, and ultimately raised US$330K.

² And in the hands of a cat-sized person, it’s a super-generous pour, and solid enough to do damage in a bar brawl.

³ Although given the fact that this is going to go like hotcakes, a smart person — and Spike is very smart — would be wise to lay in 500 or so extra glasses, to be sold individually for the next forever without the limited edition trappings.

I’ve spent too much of today arguing with my cable company (punctuated by a network glitch about ten minutes ago that has my computer convinced that there is no internet connectivity despite the fact I am typing these words to you), which is actually atypical for me. They’ve been very good as a cable company, but for the past coupla days they’ve been absolute shit as an internet company.

One good dude in the right department (which took me far too long to get to, after multiple false starts), though, so I’m presently awaiting a call back from retention about fixing my problem rather than telling them to get their crap unattached from my house and never darken my doorstep again. Hear that, Cable Company? You get my money because Feraz treated me like a human.

But there are many things on Long Island apart from the historical origin point of my cable/internet provider, some of them good. There’s … oh, the Unprintable Satanist Ritual Killing², that’s good. Jon Rosenberg is from there originally, too. And for our purposes today, the hamlet¹ of Syosset and the library therein.

They’re going to be having an online confab of cartoonists tomorrow evening, 7:30pm EDT, via Zoom. The event goes by the name of Celebrity Drawful, and features Danielle Corsetto, Michelle Ngyuen, Jey Odin, and Shivana Sookdeo. Audience members get to judge which artist does the best job of interpreting ridiculous prompts, and it should be fun for all.

Spam of the day:

We are a marketing provider of the American Bar Association Blueprint. We are offering Law Firms a free no obligation website evaluation.

My dudes, what made you possibly think this is a law firm? I am but one useless man and therefore a disgrace.

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¹ This is an actual municipality type in New York state.

² Unprintable because when the news folks went out to the alleged Satanic ritual killing ground, they found a large rock spraypainted with the words SATIN LIVES. Even the depths of Satanic panic, people couldn’t wrap their brains around kids being so misinformed about their alleged Prince Of All Flesh. Hail Satin.

Actually, a couple of things that look good. Let’s dive in.

Oooo, This Looks Good, Guest Comics Division: Beth Reidmiller has been the colorist/logistics whip-cracker/booth wrangler/book designer/etc for Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett’s Sheldon for about forever now¹, and while her coloring is terrific, we haven’t seen her line art … until now. Reidmiller is the latest contributor to LArDK’s other strip, Drive, where the best comics folks are invited to write & draw stories set in the Drive universe. Reidmiller’s contribution started today, will run on Tuesdays for the next 15 weeks², and explore the backstory of a central character — Captain Taneel³.

The good captain has been in need of some character exploration for some time now, and Reidmiller has chosen to start at a pivotal moment where some of that history was tantalizingly hinted at: a fight with her ex-husband, who just happens to be highly placed in the ranks of the murderous extra-secret secret police (they’re fun at parties).

Seeing Reidmiller’s framing of that scene vs the original is super interesting, particularly in how she accomplished the near-impossible — turning Cuddow (a member of a milquetoast species best known for their obsequiousness and poetry slams) into a dynamic badass in panel four. If you don’t read Drive, it’s worth diving into the archives, and come back for the next four months on Tuesdays to see what’s up with the captain, her brother, her ex, and all of it.

Oooo, This Looks Good, Literary Awards Division: Fleen fave Ursula Vernon (obligatory reminder: I loves me some Digger) got news yesterday that she’s been nominated for the Andre Norton Award at the Nebulas; the Norton award is for middle grade/YA fiction, which is where an awful lot of tremendously creative genre fiction has been happening for some time now. Vernon’s nomination is for the novella A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking and released under her T Kingfisher nom de plume. The description is a hoot and very, very Vernonesque:

Fourteen-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.

Having failed to keep a sourdough starter alive for more than 4 months at a go, let me reassure you that Mona is in possession of some mighty skills. Good luck to Vernon, who will hopefully add another Nebula to the award’s shelf. And congrats to Vernon’s husband, Kevin Sonney (technological badass and actual wildlife-whispering Disney Princess), who yesterday received the greatest gift of all: a Lar deSouza original commemorating Sonney’s status as chickenkeeper non-pareil.

Oooo, This Looks Good, Punching Nazis Division: My copy of Matt Lubchansky’s The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook arrived today. Can’t wait to tear into it.

Spam of the day:

Ho’oponopono Certification Special Offer…

As near as I can tell, this is a coupla white dudes deciding they’ve discovered traditional indigenous Hawaiian secrets to something or other and ugh. Gross.

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¹ The earliest credit I find for her is April of 2015, but she could show up earlier. I’m not back-scrolling the entire archive on account of things to do.

² Which I’m pretty sure makes it the longest of the Tales From The Drive stories.

³ Damn you, LArDK. Damn you.

No unfying thought or theme, just stuff I saw lately.

• Ngozi Ukazu did us all a favor and posted an old short comic story to The Twitters. Titled Wingman, it could have been inspired by the fact that firefighter gear lockers resemble hockey locker room stalls, or maybe just wondering what an alternate universe Ransom and Holster would be like. Either way, it’s a delight.
• Just about a month back, I noted that Randall Munroe had come up with an awesome explainer of how mRNA vaccines work, on account of he’s a great science communicator. However, I just saw a shared TikTok video that gives Munroe a run for his money with a sixty second documentary on the magic of mRNA vaccines … lagies and jenglefenz, please enjoy the majesty of Fork Hands.
• Hey, I just realized — that same day we talked about the xkcd mRNA vaccine explainer? We also pointed out another bit of quality comics-based sci-comm, from the JKX Comics collective; they had just launched a Kickstarter campaign for their full-color comics compendium on scientific research, Gaining STEAM.

  Well, the end of the campaign is in sight, with just under two days to go as I write this, and I’m pleased to say that Gaining STEAM is sitting about 3.5x goal. A’course, our prediction under the FFF mk2 was for 6x to 9x times goal, which means we maybe have to look back at the assumptions of the FFF mk2 to see why it was so far off. The M in STEAM, after all, stands for mathematics, and clearly our model is off and needs to be iterated to discover what’s lacking¹.

  And I found it — some time back, we at Fleen noted the general inability of the FFF mk2 to predict final outcomes if there’s fewer than ~ 200 pledges in the intial 24-30 hours (which is where the base prediction comes from). In this case, Day 1 had 115 backers, Day 2 another 39, and as of this writing, there’s still only 228 total. A highly motivated but small group of backers all jumped onboard on Day 1 (it funded, after all in 5 hours), making the long tail look like it would be more substantial that it was. My mistake.

  I see that the McDonald Ratio is also off, with a prediction of about $24,000, so we’ll have to make note of the exceptions for future reference: low initial backer count and stealth launches (especially with reserved tiers) will be exempted from predictions.

  But what the heck, it’s still a 200 page comic about basic research, with hundreds of folks ponying up the dough. That’s still worth celebrating, and with most of two days still to go, no telling how strong it might actually finish.

Spam of the day:

Jesiica Phillips wrote: It looks like you’ve misspelled the word “spinny” on your website. I thought you would like to know :). Silly mistakes can ruin your site’s credibility.

Yeah, the word spinny appears three times in the blog’s history, and no conceivable misspellings appear, unless you’re upset about spiny, which was in reference to a hedgehog. Then again, you appear to have misspelled your own name, so pardon me if I don’t take your concerns seriously.

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¹ This is probably more an application of the E in STEAM, engineering, which is all about iteration. The M crowd would more likely come up with a model, spend three days getting it typeset just right in LaTeX, and then promptly resolve to ignore the actual outcome. It’s trivial is the closest thing that mathematicians have to a liturgical prayer.

Only tangentially related to webcomics but I regret nothing, except that I wish I could have found a trophy that was even more sarcastically small. Onwards.

• She said it wasn’t going to be a regular comic, just a one-off gag sketch, but Abby Howard just could help returning to the idea of giving your pets People Juice and sending them to school. School 4 Petz is small, pure gag cartooning, often without text, each a perfect distillation of funny. Lately, dreaded continuity has snuck in with Lil’ Paulie, and the desire to worldbuild has manifested.

  Since I think that Howard will keep to her promise to not make School 4 Petz into a thing, I’d say bookmark that Twitter thread, as I also think that now and again Howard will have a fleeting idea and half an hour later there will be another wonderful three or four panels. Plus, you know, if she ever did make School 4 Petz into a thing, there are artists out there who make bank with the Anthrocon crowd and catering to furries in exchange for cash is way more productive and ethical than, say, involving oneself in cryptoart Ponzi schemes.

• With vaccine distribution ramping up (something like a quarter of adults in the US have had at least one shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, and the J&J single-administration vaccine is just starting to roll out), people are naturally looking forward to what the social aspects of life will look like when it’s safe to gather in groups again.

  If you forced me to make my best prediction, I’d say today — knowing that everything could change tomorrow — that the end of summer would probably support the holding of reduced-capacity cons. 100,000+ people together for four-five days? No. But a space that held that many people allowing for 50K or so, I think that might work.

  The megacons of the Spring and Summer will probably not happen in their traditional form this year either, but the smaller festival-type gatherings? Not MoCCA in April, but I’d say better than even odds on SPX in September. The SDCC-alike in November seems like a safe bet, too. However, I will absolutely never criticize organizers for playing it safe because a) we just don’t know, and b) they have to make their best decisions based on the best information available months in advance.

  Thus, the announcement that CXC will go virtual again this year, with exhibitor applications available starting tomorrow. From Boneville, which has the news in advance of the CXC page:

  Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s expo will be an online showcase with programming track that will air primarily on a CXC Discord channel and potentially other CXC streaming platforms. CXC will not charge a tabling fee for the expo.

  Those accepted as CXC exhibitors will work with CXC to provide programming that will air on Discord and other channels during the weekend of the show. CXC will provide training and support on using Discord and will also provide online support available throughout the weekend of the show. Additionally, CXC may also request that exhibitors participate in additional panels or programs during the show weekend. These programs may be scheduled in advance, and participation is optional. Honoraria will be paid to all exhibitors participating in programming, whether it is a panel, presentation, or Discord event.

  As with prior years, CXC’s exhibitors will be chosen via a juried selection process. We will notify those selected via email, and have a waiting list for those not selected.[emphasis original]

  That’s how you do it, and can I say it’s beyond past time for comics conventions to compensate those on panels and programming. If there’s not the cost of badges/travel to provide, then payment is the right thing to do, even if it’s a modest amount.

  Once things get back to in-person, this idea should be retained and spread — sure, the established shows will provide travel, lodging, and appearance fees for the biggest guests, but if you’re providing programming you should get something as well. Props to the showrunners in Columbus (Tom Spurgeon would be proud), and hopefully everybody else will get with the idea.

  The exhibitor application for CXC 2021 will be linked at the show’s blog starting tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Impossibile trovare l’indirizzo di posta elettronica immesso. Verificare l’indirizzo di posta elettronica del destinatario e provare a inviare di nuovo il messaggio. Se il problema persiste, contattare il supporto tecnico.

Darn. Looks like I won’t get to carefully consider your offer (in Italian) about getting Bitcoin worth 100,000 Euro. Darn.

The most magical day of the year, or maybe two or three days of the year? And I’m being serious — for something that has the potential to bring down the entire site, to be able to log in with the otherwise-unused admin account, press a button, and have things patch to the next release without a hitch? That’s pretty damn impressive, even if it’s not really anything to do with webcomics.

Also only webcomic-adjacent is our main topic today. Longtime readers of this page will recall that one of the many friendships I’ve been privileged to make in my 15+ years of semi-abusive opinion-mongering is that of KB “Otter” Spangler¹, creator (and still writer) of A Girl And Her Fed², person that I can call on if I ever need to make a problem “go away”, and wrangler of the most wonderful words. Let’s be clear about this — I love her for her magnificent mastery of profanity and euphemisms, for her endlessly amusing goofball dogs, for the stash of Thin Mints with which I have been plied, but most of all for her words. She not only writes up a storm, she edits other people³ whose words I love and makes their words (and maybe yours?) better.

But we are here today to discuss Spangler’s words; I think I’ve had an alpha-read of each of her novels and while I have made the odd observation or suggestion here or there, I am usually too engrossed to to nitpick. Her latest series is cosmic sci-fi and features a galactic-level intelligence that is also a child and has discovered humanity. For thousands of years, its favorites (who’ve come to be known as Witches) have been given the ability to ask for galactic-level intelligence skills to be brought to bear, which may as well be magic. Thing is, said child godling is easily distractable, sometimes alarmingly literal, and can’t do everything — think about the most wonderful, eager-to-please Golden Retriever puppy you’ve ever known.

Now imagine it with near omnipotence. Mind that tail underfoot.

By luck and circumstance, the Witches have learned to direct that raw power and potential to shepherd the expansion of hairless plains apes to countless worlds, and mostly oversee shipping and logistics.

What? What else are you going to use near-instantaneous travel across galactic arms for? Stuff’s got to get from world to world, and supply chains are tricky even with a child godling making things just happen. Then there’s the simple fact that people faced with various inhospitable worlds can either try to change the world to fit the people, or they can change the people to fit the world. Because it’s cheaper, a thousand gene-tweaked versions of humanity exist, and where there are obvious differences, somebody is going to decide they’re superior to somebody else. Same shit, different millennium.

In Stoneskin, the newest Witch tries to wrap her mind around the sudden shift in her life — from a backwater, hardscrabble world to one of the galaxy’s political elite in an instant, with very little time to get up to speed. And out today, the followup: The Blackwing War, where it becomes quickly apparent that for every reason the Witches have to prevent a war of extermination on the part of genetic supremacists there may be an equally good one to keep out of it, province-sized extermination camps or no.

Spangler’s writing of the human condition is sharp, her hopes and her cynicism for the potential of humanity brought to bear with words that range from scalpel-sharp to blunt instrument as the situation requires. You’ll hold your breath along with Tembi Stoneskin as she tries to find a way forward that will save everybody, knowing all the while that it simply isn’t possible. There are unknowable minds in the galaxy that cannot be understood, and the worst of them are about 2 meters tall, more or less, bipedal, and like to dress up in black leather uniforms.

Start with Stoneskin, then grab The Blackwing War, and dive into Spangler’s back catalog while waiting for the next one to come out. Whichever book it may be, in whichever series, it’s going to have some fantastic words.

Spam of the day:

Hello, my name is Tyrell , I wanted to personally reach out to you today hoping we could potentially partner together.

I only partner with other Garies Tyrrell, and that’s two Rs, dammit.

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¹ She doesn’t really go by Otter any more, but she did when her number first went into my phone so she’s now Otter forever.

² I love all the variations on your art in the strip over the years, Otter, but the smartest thing you ever did was partner up with Ale Presser to do the pictures of Act III.

³ I would pay good money to read a full-length Vernon original draft with Spangler’s edits in situ.

There’s some creators that I just smile when they have something new going on, or something new to share. Got some smiles going today that I thought I’d share.

• Doing an enormous, complex, emotionally-deep (not to mention sometimes fraught) story that doesn’t pay the bills around your other paying gigs¹ takes a lot of planning and patience. Barbarous (by the absolutely stellar team of Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota) wrapped up it’s first “season” of five story arcs six months back, followed by a series of guest–illustrated side stories until end of last year, and resuming today.

  But more importantly, we’ve had a couple of teaser images for the forthcoming Season Two, which makes me believe that Ota and Hirsh are getting ready to drop some new plot goodness on us. How excited am I for the return of Barbarous in any form, but especially Season Two? I momentarily mistook guest illustrator Niki Foley’s page today as the start of the new season, as her style is reasonably close to Ota’s. In any event, today a side story, and soon the triumphant return and hopefully some comeuppance for a twerp who pissed off the wrong people. I can’t wait.

• I will never not wake up and want a new comic from Jeffrey Rowland. Never So much so that I’ve apparently been invading his dreams, and while I understand on an intellectual level that running the company that makes it possible for dozens of webcomickers to make a living, when he can find a moment to chronicle whatever a couple of weirdos (chosen from at least seven different cohorts of weirdos) are up to, it’s always worth it.

  And in the past couple of days, those weirdos have been Dug (the groundhog), Sheila The Horse (the horse), and Observation Duck. Everybody feel good for these weird animals that live in the center of the Earth as they try to live their dreams and live with the consequences of same.

• You know who is the most relentlessly positive person on the planet, just so invested in the idea of you being as happy as she is and determined to make the whole world more joyous? Colleen AF Venable. Doesn’t matter if the you in question is a reader, a fellow creator, or a bunch of bats that she traveled halfway ’round the world to help care for. Come Monday, Venable will be in a YA-GN Zoom meetup with fellow creator Mark Crilley to launch his latest, mention her most recent, and generally show the process behind making awesome graphic novels.

  The session will be hosted by Book Beat of Oak Park, Michigan, who will have signed copies available for in-person pickup or mailing. Fun time kicks off at 5:00pm EDT on 15 March, 2021, with free tickets available now (or just watch the stream at Book Beat’s Facebook page). Venable’s always a delight in conversation (something I discovered exactly 13 years ago as of Monday and her Crilley convo), and I suspect this discussion will be no different.

Spam of the day:

Basically we provide full turnkey solutions to launch your very own online betting website with real money odds and casino where you controll winnings, players and everything else?

So instead of running this solution yourself, where you are the house and the house always wins, you are going to sell it to me, so I can be the one with the guaranteed winning? This tells me you are not able to make money even with a casino, which puts you in some pretty rarefied company, and bodes ill for your venture.

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¹ Not least being their co-writing duties on Pixels Of You, due in November, with art from JR Doyle.