Multiple things to point you towards today; let’s get right to it.

• So when I met Rosemary Valero-O’Connell last weekend at MoCCA Fest she told me that she was working on captial-S Stuff that wasn’t announced yet so she couldn’t talk about it. Fair enough, I figured it would be a couple months before we heard, at least not until she was closer to done with the Lumberjanes/Gotham Central crossover.

  Nope! Friday, word came down that she’s going to be illustrating a graphic novel written by Mariko Tamaki for :01 Books, so that’s basically the best of everything in one bundle. It won’t be until 2018 that we get to see Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, but Valero-O’Connell was kind enough to share two pages on Twitter today. Note to self: do not die or become blind before this book releases.

• John Allison has hinted that part of the reason for running neoBobbins strips for the next couple of months is time management; what with writing Giant Days and daily cartooning and working up new pages for the Bad Machinery books, he’s got to be pretty busy. He’s just added a fourth channel to get his cartooning goodness, this time for people that weren’t likely to have seen him other places — GoComics:
  

  From today, Bad Machinery is running at @gocomics – I think about 1/4 of the pages running there will be new to you. http://www.gocomics.com/bad-machinery

  Which is to say, he puts a lot of redrawn/bridging art into the books (check out his tweets on the subject of prepping book 6, The Case Of The Fire Inside), so if you’ve not given him money for those, you get to see the new art now. You’re welcome.

• A month ago we saw the nominees for the 2016 Cartoonist Studio Prize (a joint effort of the Center for Cartoon Studies and Slate magazine), and today we see that the winners have been announced. As in prior years, there are two categories: Best Print Comic and Best Web Comic, ten nominees per category, and lots of strong work in both.

  The winners get US$1000 cash money, and presumably a nice card, which will be inscribed with the names of (respectively) Carol Tyler (for Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father; Fantagraphics) and Boulet (for I Want To Believe). Fun fact: Boulet has been nominated all four years of the CSP’s existence, but considering the past winners were Winston Rowntree, Noelle Stevenson, and Emily Carroll, he’s in damn good company.

• From the twitterfeed of Melanie Gillman, word of a new anthology looking for submissions:
  

  Here’s a comics anthology about bad online dating experiences that’s looking for submissions: http://littleredbirdmedia.com/blocked

  The application is here, and I’m extremely grateful that I’ve been married since before online dating was a thing, just saying.

• A little exercise in visualization because math. Personally, I prefer The Dot And The Line if only because it ends on an exquisitely terrible pun.

Spam of the day:

From Dr. David Katz

Sorry, bud. There’s only room for one Dr Katz in my life.

Namely, that the vagaries of San Francisco real estate aside, the Cartoon Art Museum is very much a going concern, and permanent home or no, they are Doing Stuff. Quite a bit of Stuff in the coming weeks, in fact. Let’s take a look.

• A week from Monday (that would be 18 April, in the 2016th year of the Common Era¹), CAM (in conjunction with the California College of the Arts MFA in Comics Program) welcomes cartoonist Leila Abdelrazaq to CCA’s campus. Abdelrazaq will be discussing her new graphic novel, Baddawi, inspired by her father’s life growing up in the refugee camps of Lebanon. The program kicks off at 7:00pm in Timken Hall, 1111 8th Street in San Francisco.
• Three days later on the 21st, CAM continues its Third Thursdays series (this time in conjunction with the Museum of Performance + Design) with a program devoted to figure sketching and performance mapping. This one will tie into MP+D’s current exhibition (through 4 June) Mapping Dance: The Scores of Anna Halprin, a collection of scores and performance videos from the collection of choreographer Halprin (which exhibit itself is a partnership with the California Historical Society).

  That’s an awful lot of institutions working in concert to bring significant and celebrated arts to a wider (and participatory) audience, which in and of itself is an impressive undertaking. If you’ve wanted to improve your ability to represent movement into drawing seeing Halprin’s choreographic scores seems like a good place for inspiration. The event runs 5:30pm – 8:00pm at 893 Folsom Street.

At this pace, there will not be a block or cultural institution in San Francisco that hasn’t done something in conjunction with CAM, and given that comics and cartoons are among the most widely distributed of the arts, that’s appropriate. Drop by either or both events, enjoy yourself, and when you see the donation jar that’s funding a new home for CAM, be generous.

Spam of the day:

Millions Already Awarded – You May Qualify

Oh gosh, is this about something that may have affected me like faulty brakes or a dangerous furnace? Oh. Vaginal mesh implants. Yeah, no, don’t got one o’ them.

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¹ Alternately, the 64th, 6766th, 7524th, 3182nd, 5776th, 28th, or 105th year of (respectively) the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the Assyrian calendar, the Byzantine calendar, the Discordian calendar, the Hebrew calendar, the Heisei era, or the life of the Eternal President of a batshit crazy hermit nation/personality cult. Calendars are weird, man.

Because while I buy a couple of their books, it’s not like I have a vested emotional interest in the publisher. But a whole bunch of webcomics types had things to say at their industry announce-fest yesterday, and that’s hard to ignore.

• First up: the team that revived Batgirl for DC (Brendan Fletcher, Babs Tarr, and Sin Titulo creator Cameron Stewart) wrapped up their contributions to DC with issue #50 yesterday. About the time it was hitting the shelves, they were announcing that the band was not breaking up, but rather jumping to a label that will let them be them. Thus: Motor Crush, a balls-out action SF story with the requisite murky secrets.
• Next: Karl Kerschl recently wrapped up art duties on Gotham Academy, but he’ll be teaming up with lifelong friend Brendan Fletcher to produce Isola, set in a fantasy world with intrigue and revenge and plans within plans¹. Interestingly, Stewart & Kerschl are old studiomates, coming off Bat-books, and both cited DC not letting them engage in all their artistic tendencies as a reason to go to Image, with its creator-driven ethos. Seeing these two incredibly skilled creators (with creative partners that they click with) is going to be a kick.
• Jim Zub is the epitome of a busy guy, and with Skullkickers wrapped up and Wayward between story arcs for the moment, and with his takes on Thunderbolts and Ravenloft not due for a couple weeks, I guess he’s got a spare minute in his day because he also announced a new creator-owned series. Glitterbomb will be an exploration of fame and how it works, through the lens of otherworldly, demonic horrors.

  The entire famous-for-being-famous industry is fundamentally parasitic, so it’s not a huge leap for supernatural beasties to want to get in on the whole scam; this is the first horror project I can recall from Zub, and should do nicely to replace Rachel Rising on my pull list, seeing as how it’s about to wrap up.

• The most significant thing, though, was not about a book being launched; it was about a new initiative to groom talent in the comics industry, with both a monetary grant and mentoring from established, successful comics folk. It’s called Creators For Creators and the founding personnel are named near the bottom of the page; it’s an A-list of Image talent and one creator that (to my knowledge) hasn’t worked with Image²: C Spike Trotman, whose cartooning is less frequent than it was because she’s too busy running her own publishing company and facilitating careers for other creators.

  It makes perfect sense to see Spike on that list; there’s probably nobody in webcomics that’s provided as much direct payment to as many different creators as she has. It’s also no surprise that Iron Circus is presented as the equal of Image Comics in one critical benefit of the CFC grant:

  The recipient has total control over how and where they choose to publish their work once it is completed, whether they choose to submit it to a creator-owned publisher or release it themselves in any format. Iron Circus Comics and Image Comics have both pledged to support the recipient by publishing their work, if the recipient so chooses. No matter their choice, the recipient retains all rights to their work.

  The full criteria for the CFC grant will be released on 1 May, along with applications for the first grant cycle; the page doesn’t indicate how often the application process will open up (given that the US30,000 grant is meant to support a creator to make an original work³ over the course of a year, I’d guess annually) or how the grant will sustain its funding for future years, but then again the entire endeavour is only about 24 hours old at this point. All I know is if they’re taking contributions for the grant, I’d be willing to kick in; I hope to see a CFC corner at the Image booth at shows with a donation jar set up.

• And one last item that has nothing to do with Image: Irregular Webcomic creator David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) will be doing a Reddit AMA in /r/comics “tomorrow”; I put that in quotes because it may not be Friday depending on where you live. It’ll be 11:00pm GMT, 7:00pm EDT, and 9:00am on Saturday for Morgan-Mar himself, home in sunny Sydney, New South Wales, Straya. Be sure to ask him about the Kickstarter campaign for the first IW print collection (just shy of 50% funded, with just shy of three weeks to go).

---

Spam of the day:

4 Ways to Avoid Running Out of Money During Retirement

I’m going to guess — and this is only a guess — that the chief way that the investment advisor who sent this would recommend is to not spend all your money on frivolous things like food and shelter and healthcare. Die when you are no longer contributory to society, elder scum!

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¹ Bonus: one of the characters gets turned into a tiger, meaning Kerschl will be drawing animals in motion, at rest, and in conflict. It’s not Charles Christopher, but it’ll do.

² To be perfectly clear, the name list also included the invaluable David Brothers; he’s written extensively on comics and works for Image as a branding manager, but isn’t a creator himself. I’d guess that he did a significant amount of the logistics and coordination work around setting up CFC.

³ I am already anticipating the whiny ragetears of newbies who are offended that the CFC jury couldn’t perceive the obvious genius of their new concept, The Adventures of EscherGirl in Slutland.

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.

Yes, there are other things to mention, such as the news that TCAF announced another six guests (including Gene Luen Yang), and Christopher Hastings is getting another Marvel miniseries. Those are good bits of news, go revel in their newness.

• Probably nobody on the floor of MoCCA Fest has had as precipitous an upward trajectory as Noelle Stevenson; I first met her two years back when Lumberjanes #1 was fresh on the shelves and Nimona was not yet nominated for the National Book Award or optioned for the big screen. I asked her how she follows all of that up and she mentioned she has a book in development with HarperCollins called Four Wizards¹, as well as a second project she can’t talk about yet. I told her something I told a number of creators — I can’t wait to see what she’s doing in five year, ten years, because she’s just getting better.
• Despite the presence of a booth helper with a name tag reading Gina Gagliano, the beating heart of :01 Books (and the woman who sends me enough review copies to drown an average-size ten year old) was repping the imprint in Houston during MoCCA weekend; no matter, as the booth was in the good hands of Danielle Ceccolini.

  Ms Ceccolini came on board in 2014 to replace departing book designer Colleen AF Venable; print lead times being what they are, it’s only been in the last six months or so that I’ve seen Ceccolini’s name in :01’s offerings, so we’re just starting to get a sense of how strong her designs are (especially given that a number of her designs have been on continuing series — such as The Olympians or Glorkian Warrior — that had an established look and feel).

  Case in point: Faith Erin Hick’s The Nameless City (out today), which sports an absolutely gorgeous design to go with the engaging story. If you ever wanted to read a graphic novel (for, let’s say, tweens and up) that reminds you of all the best parts of Jeff Smith, Hayao Miyazaki, Gene Yang, and Kazu Kibuishi in one book, this is the one for you. Or rather, the first of three for you, since it’s a planned trilogy.

  Between that deal, the numerous Yang offerings each year (including the Secret Coders series with Mike Holmes, second volume due soon), and the Science Comics line, it seems like :01 is on track for a good deal more ambitious a release schedule than their recent history of 18 – 22 books a year. It’s a hell of a lot of work for four people, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that they need more hands to keep their well-deserved reputation for quality.

• Ken Wong was somebody I’d intended to go see on the floor, as the description of his origami comics — comics where the physical, three-dimensional presentation becomes part of the story — intrigued the hell out of me. As it turned out, I walked by his table somehow not noticing the enormous ORIGAMI COMICS banner, but my eye was caught by the cover of what turned out to be the single nerdiest comic I’ve ever read: Bonetti’s Defense — I Know Something You Don’t Know About Swordplay In The Princess Bride. It’s exactly what it says on the cover: a picking-apart of the slight dialogue (and careful choreography) of the epic duel between Inigo Montoya and the Man In Black on top of the Cliffs of Insanity.

  Drawing on what I’d always assumed to be throwaway names (in the screenplay and the original book), Wong finds the historical Bonetti, Capo Ferro, Thibault, and Agrippa and talks about why their teachings are appropriate to the scene in question. And because anything nerdy that you’re nerding out over can never have too much nerding, he finds likely historical referents for fencing masters McBone, Sainct, MacPherson, and Morozzo. Wong even figures out who the most probable inspiration for the Dread Pirate Roberts was.

  It’s not necessary to read Bonetti’s Defense to enjoy everybody’s favorite movie², but it gives a sense of satisfaction to realize how much William Goldman, Rob Reiner, swordmaster Bob Anderson, and everybody else cared to make things right even if only one guy in Brooklyn would ever realize how right they were.

• Not far from Wong’s table, I did the I was going to look for you and didn’t realize you were here and something on the table caught my eye deal a second time, when I came across Azure. In this case, the catch-my-eye factor was provided by a stack of onesies with dinosaurs on them.

  I’m very sorry to say that I can’t find a link on Azure’s site for these because they are adorable and my gosh, did I just have a grand-nephew born like ten days ago? I believe I did, and young Collin is going to be well-equipped with a dinosaur onesie and small prints with dinosaurs on them because you can never start a love affair with dinosaurs too early.

There were students everywhere. I saw tables either officially representing schools, or filled with students who came from particular schools but not in an official capacity, including (but likely not limited to) Parsons, FIT, Pratt, SVA, Syracuse, CCS, Moore, and at least one high school club.

The students themselves ran the gamut from shy and retiring to immensely outgoing; from art student chic to lacking even one piercing or visible tattoo; their work fell into every conceivable genre and style, from I’m mostly inspired by what’s on Crunchyroll this month but haven’t quite figured out anatomy yet to a noir mystery starring snails³.

But there was one (from the far lands of Minneapolis) that stood out from her contemporaries; her work had an assurance, a confidence that I wouldn’t have expected from one so young (and who had only been doing comics for about three years). One whose work I realized I had seen before and (foolishly) had not bookmarked at the time. One who has Big Things happening in the immediate future, and whose future work I am looking forward to as much as Noelle Stevenson’s, one who I think is going to make as big a splash in the industry as Stevenson, Hicks, Telgemeier, or Larson.

But I’m over 1000 words as it is, so come back tomorrow and we’ll talk about Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.

Spam of the day:

Diffuse threats with this recently released technology

You mean I should make them ever less and less concentrated, until they are spread over such a large volume as to be indetectable? Or given the rather rah-rah tactical machismo of your imagery, did you mean defuse? Either way, it’s just a damn flashlight, bunky.

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¹ Or possibly 4 Wizards, or For Wizards; it was noisy and I didn’t ask her to spell it.

² Oh hush, you know it is.

³ The same creator’s other works were all shiny and sparkly, which prompted me to suggest that to my knowledge, nobody has yet combined noir story structures with the Lisa Frank aesthetic and she should get right on that.

Welp, we know why there wasn’t an xkcd on Friday; it’s because Randall Munroe was getting ready to unleash one of his toys on us in the form of xkcd #1663, a slow-moving utterly unique garden simulation where you get to position lights (including color and beam width) and see what grows. It may take hours to see stuff pop up, and no two runs will be the same. For reference, that image up top is from a stock reset of the toy, no messing, after about two hours.

It will take approximately forever to determine all the mechanisms of Garden, but right now it appears that yellow light is required for the short shrub-trees, tall spires, and birdbaths; blue light appears to be necessary for octopuses. Oh, and whatever browser glitch that caused my three-lamp, three-color, balanced layout to reset itself back to stock: you suck.

The rest of this post is the first part of Fleen’s roundup of this weekend’s MoCCA Festival, which I attended on Saturday.

• As I mentioned in my pre-show discussion, a lot of the established webcomics crowd doesn’t do MoCCA anymore; I walked into the Metropolitan West facility¹ — a somewhat modern and spare space compared to last year’s Chelsea location² (then again, the sightlines were pretty good and the climate reasonable; it only really got stuffy for a short while in mid-afternoon, as the rain was ending and lots of damp bodies started to crowd the aisles) — only knowing one person that I expected to see on the floor: Evan Dahm.

  Evan’s deeply artistic, artfully-presented books are a natural for the MoCCA crowd, and he reported the show was going well. He let me know that he’s just approved the proofs for the second Vattu book, and we had a great conversation about the minutiae of that story, its ultimate length (four books), other projects he’s got in the pipeline (nothing I can tell you about at the moment), and our dogs. Mostly our dogs, truth be told.

• Next to Dahm’s table I met Kathleen Kralowec, whose comics are maddeningly bright and intricate, the result of watercolor and marker and absolutely no fear of working in materials that don’t take kindly to mistakes. Check out The Lion And The Roc for a good example of what she’s capable of, and if you see her at a show be sure to pick it up in print, because it’s astoundingly gorgeous.

  It was about this time that I started talking up Pat Race’s Alaska Robotics MiniCon; assuming the first one breaks even and Race is crazy enough to run a show again next year, hopefully a lot of up-and-coming creators are willing to make their way to Juneau.

• A mild correction, lest I leave you with the impression that I made a beeline to Dahm’s table first thing; he was fairly close the rear of the second floor, and while I did start there and work my way down, the first creator I encountered was actually Molly Ostertag of Strong Female Protagonist. We chatted briefly about how hers is the one story-centric webcomic that I cannot read update-to-update, or even chapter-to-chapter; I need to have big chunks of story to dig into, so I was thrilled to hear that the Kickstarter for the second SFP collection will launch this summer. Hooray!
• I met Bill Roundy at MoCCA last year, and we spent a fair amount of time talking craft cocktails. As it turns out, he remembered me and we continued our discussion about the revival of a once-classic cocktail that had largely fallen by the wayside due to the discontinuation of a key ingredient.

  The Brooklyn is a delight (and strong!) mix of rye, maraschino, vermouth, and Amer Picon — a French aperitif that isn’t made any more. My regular bar found you can do a reasonable substitution with Torani Amer³ and flamed orange peel, but people that remember the old Amer Picon say it’s not quite the same.

  But there’s now a distillery that’s sourced the original ingredients and methods, and people who remember the old Amer Picon say that Golden Moon’s Amer Dit Picon is pretty much identical to the original; Roundy (being a man with his head screwed on straight) rightly sees this as a reason to celebrate, and hopefully The Brooklyn will become popular again.

  He may have had a flask for personal consumption with sharing offered to friends and fellow cocktail enthusiasts. I may be in a position to say that Roundy’s mixing skills are excellent. And it’s not up in his store yet, but his print Still Life With Potential Brooklyn (similar to these) is handsome and will soon be a gift to my regular bartender.

More on MoCCA 2106 tomorrow!

Spam of the day:

Commodities’ “Head-Smashed-In”

I hope that this has something to do with putting commodities barons on the receiving end of the famed Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump and reenacting how it got its name.

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¹ After a 20 minute wait in the rain; give a venue security dude a short haircut, suit, and an earpiece and he’s gonna be forcefully shouty when he announces attendess have to leave the vestibule. Which on the one hand, fine, I can absolutely see that having the entrance crowded directly in front of one of the fire exits is an issue.

But on the other hand, it would have been much better to go with Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry, I know it’s raining, but the City won’t allow us to have you stand here in front of the fire exits. If you’re not an exhibitor, please line up along the side of the building and try to stay dry instead of Attention, listen up, you have to leave the building now, unless you’re an exhibitor. Nobody is getting in until you all leave; you must line up in that direction [hand stabby gesture towards the USS Intrepid] now.

That second bit is not an exact quote, but I believe it captures the tenor of the announcement accurately.

² Which featured lots of natural light and roof access; on the other hand, the Chelsea site had a small footprint and required the use of a tight, steep stairway to navigate the upper three floors. MetWest only had two floor, and it was more spacious set of stairs, so that was nice.

³ The owner of the Torani company — they make all those flavored syrups you see in coffee bars — missed Amer Picon, so he came up with his best-effort recreation, which is the only alcoholic offering of the Torani company.

Okay, there’s a lot of nonsense out on the interwubs today, and plus I have been wanting to drink beer a dentist appointment in a little while, so let’s just do this quickly and retreat from the very clever funsters¹.

Okay, you got me, there was a Lirpa Loof gag that amused me, one that got me good², and I’m half-conviced that the lack of a new xkcd today will reveal itself later as some elaborate hoax or another. But one thing isn’t a gag and I think you should check it out.

Bernie Hou is the creator of the long-hiatused Alien Love Predator, a comic about which I wrote a piece that I still really like³. More recently, he’s been the driving force behind Comics Chameleon, and he’s been away from making his own comics for entirely too long.

Until today:

Hey! I’m drawing a brand new comic, it’s all about sports. Just in time for the new sports games. Check it out at berniehou.com

Actually, Sports Happen has single-panel sports-themed strips from April of 2014, plus four (much more polished) new ones to kick-start an archive; no mention yet as to update schedule, but I imagine it will be more frequent in the periods of time when Sport Happen, which we seem to be in right now. I don’t really follow sports (other than to be enraged at the manner in which US Soccer is treating the women’s national team — seriously, the men fly business class and the women fly coach?), but you don’t need to be up on sports to understand that statistics and biometrics are not always good things.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Sports Happen, and those of you that like sport mixed with your comics? This is your new best friend, especially seeing as how your alternative is Gil freakin’ Thorpe. Welcome back to the cartooning game, Bernie; it’s good to have you around again.

Spam of the day:

Bosley — Yes! Financing is Available

I don’t know how to break this to you, spammers purporting to be a hair-restoration clinic/service, but I have a head of rich, luxurious hair with nary a sign of receding or thinning. Seriously, my new barber⁴ complains about how much of it there is. Oh, and I notice that your return address is the same as the sender of other spams regarding liposuction, Russian mail-order brides, the importance of buying gold before the world goes to hell, tactical flashlights, and stool softeners. Heck of a wide range of business interests you got there.

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¹ I hope I don’t need to remind you of the failure mode of clever.

² Turning my entirely justified despising of the entire Internet of Things against me? Darn you, Jam!

³ You know that loathing that artists have looking at their old work? Writers are the same reading their old stuff. I like this ALP review, my review of the first Dinosaur Comics book made up entirely of Dinosaur Comics quotes, the year MoCCA Fest almost burned down and that’s it. I’m a total hack.

⁴ I’ve spent much of the past two years trying to settle on a new barber, on account of the guy I went to for 28 years — a Sicilian gentleman with monstrous hands named Luigi; his shop was strictly first-come, first-served, and was a microcosm of everybody from kids getting their first trim to local politicians to wannabe mobbed-up guys from ten towns north — died at the age of nearly 80. He (without a trace of malice and no little irony) always called me Big Guy and we usually talked about his koi pond when I was in the chair. He had a major grudge against the herons that treated it as a snack bar. Requiscat in pace, Lou.

We’ve got a confluence of comicking anniversaries (and anniversary-like events) going on just now, so let’s run ’em down.

• First up, the person whose work I’ve been reading longest without actually ever meeting in person is possibly Christopher Wright of Help Desk. It’s been around forever, although punctuated with numerous (and sometimes lengthy) periods of hiatus¹, and remains my favorite editorial comment on the world of computer vendors and technical trends. And when I say forever, I mean it:
  

  There were a few comic strips posted in online bulletin boards like CompuServe² (that’s where Kevin & Kell came from). A web magazine ought to have one too! After a few conversations with my father, where we traded horror stories of trying to get tech support to actually address the problems we were having, I made an off-the-cuff comment that it seemed like Help Desks were actually trained to convince the customer that the problem is their own fault instead of a product defect, and suddenly I realized I had a Theme.

  I created a few comics and sent them to Trevor Smith. He generally liked the idea, though he was wary about posting images that were as large as 13k (in 1996, 13k was a huge freaking file). But on March 31, 1996, the very first Help Desk was posted on line, in the archives section of OS/2 eZine. When the April edition came out, it actually appeared as a link on the front page.

  Heady days! They won’t last forever, though:

  That said, Help Desk is definitely winding down. I’m not ending it tomorrow or anything, but there’s not much chance it going 40 years. The computer industry isn’t nearly as much fun to make fun of as it used to be, because most of the relevant jokes involve courtrooms and lawyers and while the jokes aren’t bad the reality is depressing.

  …

  [A]nd anyway I’ve developed other interests: I’m much better writer than I ever was as a cartoonist, and this whole storytelling thing is awfully compelling, so I’m pretty sure as time goes on there will be more and more of that and less and less of clipart comics about Evil Computer Demons.

  All good things come to an end; it was worth it if only for Clippy³ getting cloned and various iterations going on perpetual tequila benders and/or murderous blood harvests.

• And as long as we’re talking about things coming to an end, we’ve mentioned that Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie (which keeps getting better and weirder and more magical-realist I mean have you seen the last half–dozen updates?) is in the end stages. Pretty much every character has gotten their own story arc (some more than others — Marigold and Jane have become far more key to the story than I would have guessed when either was introduced) except for Manuel, and he wouldn’t stand still long enough for you to watch him anyway.

  But over on her Tumblr, Gran took some time to talk about her theory of endings and why they matter:

  My worst case scenario would be that it DOESN’T end. If it was one for the webcomic graveyard.

  You know that end. Frozen in time on its final page, that unremarkable page that neither resolves nor provokes. The page that perfectly encapsulates an artist’s final gasping shred of interest. The drawings on par with everything you’ve ever seen. The layouts woefully consistent. The facial expressions of characters you loved, eyes dead, lightly singed into your mind like a former desktop or lockscreen. Like a poster from your childhood bedroom that you see on Google Images once in a while.
  …
  That’s why when the OP cast is redesigned in hideous 3D and sings “Livin’ La Vida Loca” on the final page, I’ll feel I’ve done things right.

  I love that woman, I love her work, and I’m taking bets right now as to whether or not she actually does what she threatens for the final page. I’m putting the odds at 8:5 in favor.

• We’ve previously mentioned that KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed will be running commentary on old strips three times weekly starting Monday, in recognition that she’s been at this for ten years and all. Today, she let us in on some of her plans [she doesn’t do permalinks on her strip’s newsposts]:
  

  Anyhow. Beginning Monday, there’ll be the usual Big Anniversary Sale in the store, and I’ll be running the comics from the beginning with author commentary at agirlandherfed.tumblr.com. This should be fun! I love yelling at Past Me. She was a dick. [emphasis original]

  I hope that her yelling is restricted to things like Why did I decide to draw this thing that I hated drawing and now I’ve been drawing it for a decade, because honestly? She’s as far from being a dick as I can imagine, and Past Her was no different. She did have a wicked sense of humor, though.

• Lastly, the reason that I’m here talking to some number of people on the internet is that one day Jon Rosenberg suggested it over beers and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Jon’s also been at this webcomics thing for a long time:
  

  Friday is my 19th anniversary in comics. Fuck, I’m getting old.

  Bah. I just turned grunkle for the second time last week, so I don’t want to hear it, youngster. Also, happy strippingversary, you magnificent bastard.

Spam of the day:

Moving? See how Verizon makes it easier.

A) I’m not moving, and 2) The only thing Verizon makes is my inevitable death seem preferable to trying to get them to get this shit together and fix my fucking landline.

_______________
¹ Similar to the other serious contender for the longest/never met title: Owen Dunne of You Damn Kid! and other fine comics.

² Ask your parents, or click here.

³ Don’t ask your parents, the wounds are still too fresh.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: And that was it. Speculations range from the Ruling Body to signature panini presses to Gyne-Lotrimin; Lyle is actually fairly coherent; Philippe introduces himself in case he was forgotten. There will be one day’s breathing space before he launches on his own adventure to the Transfer Station, the brave little guy.

So what I’m learning this morning is the degree to which searching for a hashtag at Twitter is hit-and-miss; the website will give you different results depending on whether you’re logged in or not, and will provide only a fraction of results regardless. I bring this up because the Twittersphere hashtag #webcomics is exploding right now as creators post an eye-catching image and follow its instructions. Normally, I don’t embed images in the middle of the post but I feel I should in this case; here you go:

Using the Twitter client on my phone (that would be TweetCaster) and scrolling back, I seem to have a fairly complete history of the rapid (and accelerating) use of the image + tag combo (#webcomics by itself, naturally, predates today). It appears that the first use of the combo was by Taneka Stotts who posted about Full Circle at 09:56am EDT¹. The next half hour or so saw a few more creators hop on the bandwagon (along with copious retweets), then things started to really pick up.

A bit less than an hour after Stotts kicked the whole thing off, Kate Ashwin of Widdershins noted that it had become a great tool for discovering new comics, elevator-pitch style. It’s not like nobody’s heard of, say, Questionable Content by now, but if you hadn’t, wouldn’t you want to read it based on the five words description?

butts butts butts butts robots http://www.ass.golf #webcomics

I’m a little disappointed that Jacques left out the fairly obvious #buttrocket reference, but those were guest strips.

So there’s your task for today — find a Twitter client that doesn’t abbreviate hashtag searches and go looking. I’m guessing that anybody that can do a good job of condensing the essence of their comic into just five words can write pretty well in other contexts². If you find a new favorite, do be sure to share it with the rest of us.

Spam of the day:

Spring Specials on Roofing Installation

Why, as it turns out I am in the preliminary stages of getting some roof work done. I think that I’ll definitely use the services of an anonymous email from a bogus return address with warnings all over the page in Gmail, instead of talking to the contractor that’s done all the home repair/renovations on my house since I moved it. It just makes sense!

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¹ I presume that the Five Words image is also her work; if anybody can confirm this (or provide an instance of earlier use), please let me know.

² Case in point, my perennial favorite A Girl And Her Fed was condensed down to Haunted X-Files with dick jokes which is just poetry.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; after the booze and pizza and crazy bread, Beef and Ray make the long trip home from Wasco to 62 Achewood Court. After getting zero (Beef) or a minor fraction of 8.504 lbs (Ray) of solids across three days in the Acres, I imagine Our Heroes gorged themselves heartily. I would guess that decision was pretty contributory to Beef’s ultimate reflection on what The Fight meant¹.

Things are happening today, my friends. Things!

• Firstly, and I expect that you all know this by now but I would be remiss, but Homestuck updated for the first time since July last night. Woo!
• Secondly, the much-anticipated Kickstart for Irregular Webcomic’s first print collection hit in the early-morning hours (if you’re in the Western hemisphere, at least). Some twelve hours later it’s just shy of 19% of the way to goal, with 29 and a half days to go. One notable thing to point out is that although IW creator David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) is Australian, the book is being handled by the folks at Make That Thing in *hampton, MA, USA, which leads to the ironically awful situation that Morgan-Mar needs to charge some $31 (Australian) to ship books to his fans across town.

  This is such a terrible thing that he’s actually set the shipping costs for “rest of the world” (basically everyplace that isn’t US/Canada) to AU$28, meaning he’s going to take a loss of AU$3 (about US$2.25) for each order back to his own country. To make up for this, he’s introduced a special backer tier for US/Canada fans only (about 80% of his readership) that adds one slim Aussie Fun Buck to the regular price of the book reward:

  THE BOOK+POSTAGE GOODWILL (US/Canada only): A copy of the print collection book + a PDF digital copy. The extra dollar is your goodwill to help offset postage costs for non-North American buyers.

  I’m pleased to note that as of this writing, 22 US/Canada backers have opted to kick in the extra Australian dollar (about 75 cents, US; 1 buck, Canada) to help subsidize purchasers elsewhere. Nicely done, all.

• Thirdly, today is the launch day for the first two of First Second’s new line of educational graphic novels, namely Science Comics: Dinsoaurs, Fossils and Feathers and Science Comics: Coral Reefs, Cities of the Ocean. When I got my review copies in the mail a while back (the usual voluminous thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 Books), the attached info sheet said they would be releasing in April, but that was subsequently moved up and caught me by surprise.

  Thus I’ve not read Coral Reefs to the degree that would allow a proper review, but I can talk about it generally. It’s by Maris Wicks, and it’s about marine biology (which happens to be her day job and all) and it’s got the same effortlessly informative style as her previous Primates and the recent Human Body Theater. It’s great.

  But of course I’ve read Dinosaurs more thoroughly. It’s about dinosaurs, people, and I firmly adhere to Charlie It’s always a good day for dinosaur news! Pierce’s dictum regarding the terrible lizards: Dinosaurs existed then to make us happy today.

  It’s by MK Reed and Joe Flood, who previously collaborated on :01’s The Cute Girl Network (which was about dating in Brooklyn among the underemployed and undermotivated — it’s a hoot and a half). It’s pitched directly at kids just starting their serious independent learning about dinosaurs (say, 10 years old), and as such there were a few things that may need to be explained to the younger reader to avoid confusion.

  1. Nonlinearity; kids may not be aware of the device that says Oh hey, that thing we told you before? Not so much in telling a story. There are end notes (without indications in the text that notes exist, which actually simplifies things — they can go back and re-read the sections that get elaborated on) and a recurring motif that works well after you notice it: every once in a while there’s a page that talks about what was known at a particular point in time from the POV of that point in time². It’s really neat, but kids may need some coaching to put themselves not just in somebody else’s brain, but at a different point in history to appreciate what’s being presented.
  2. Editing oversights; at one point, the classic explanation of the two divisions of dinosaurs by hip type — the “bird hipped” ornithischians and the “lizard hipped” saurischians — is illustrated in classic fashion by pointing out the pubis bone pointing backwards (ornithischians) or downwards (saurischians). To make it clearer, a sample pelvis is shown, with the pubis in yellow for the saurischia and green for the ornithischia.

     Then, on the next page, the bones are drawn in place on a variety of dinosaurs with the colors reversed. The ornithischians suddenly get a yellow pubis and the saurischians green, which caused me to stop reading to figure out why I was confused. There’s also a bit of text late in the book that’s supposed to say that dinosaurs lived 250 – 65 million years ago, but actually says 25,065 million years ago. Whoops.

  3. Art trumping facts; The very first page of the book contains the caption For 165 million years, dinosaurs walked the Earth, with herds of ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, some non-specific sauropods, and a couple of large carnosaurs out looking for snacks. Overhead, some pterosaurs float lazily. So far, so good.

     The next two pages are the splash pages, with captions that read And flew. And swam., with a very active scene of aerial and aquatic beasties. There’s pterosaurs, archelons, plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs, mosasaurs, none of which are dinosaurs, argh (look ’em up).

     Yes, this is me being pedantic, and yes, they walk back and let the reader known that long dead + reptile-looking does not always equal dinosaur, and yes, the overall theme of the book is about how we have spent a few hundred years learning what dinosaurs were by replacing earlier conceptions with newer ideas.

     But if you’re going to be working in an educational context, you can’t make this big a mischaracterization in the opening pages because the kids will eat you alive for this kind of mistake³.

  All of which just means you’ll have to explain literary devices and editing and artistic choices to the kids that read this book. They’ll get it, kids are smart. Use it as a way to bring up the fact that we’re constantly learning and correcting ourselves, such as when we all had to learn that there were no Brontosaurs, only Apatosaurs. Except for this note on the last story page of the book:

  A lengthy reexamination of the different species of Apatosaurus lead researchers to conclude that there were enough differences to make Brontosaurus its own genus again, weeks before this book was due at the printer.

  Fact: Brontosaurus is now MK and Joe’s least favorite dinosaur.

  None of which is any reason not to run out and get this book immediately. It gives props to a series of early dinoscholars who have traditionally been overlooked (especially women), rightly notes that Richard Own was a complete dick to everybody, and handles the frankly hilarious topic of dinopoops with exactly the dignity and gravity they deserve.

  Plus feathers everywhere. Cool.

Spam of the day:

Science Proves Biblical-Cure – Atheists Stunned

This particular atheist will be stunned when the Bible gets the value of pi more accurate than three. No wonder Solomon had to import architects from Tyre to build his palace.

_______________
¹ I ain’t pooped in five days. Excuse a man.

² I’ll have to quote some to make it clear:

In the year 1800 …
The Earth is 6006 years old.
Dinosaurs are known as monsters.
They lived a few thousand years ago.
They disappeared because of Noah’s flood.
There are no examples of dinosaurs living at this time.
We are certain about all of this.

In the year 1854 …
The Earth is 400,000 years old.
Dinosaurs are known as extinct reptiles.
They lived a hundreds of thousands years ago.
They disappeared for unknown reasons.
There are no examples of dinosaurs living today.
We are certain about all of this.

In the year 1920 …
The Earth is as much as 400 million years old.
Dinosaurs are known as extinct reptiles.
They lived 3 million years ago.
They disappeared because they lost the survival of the fittest.
There are no examples of dinosaurs living today.
We are certain about all this.

³ I still remember standing in the dinosaur halls of the Royal Ontario Museum close to 25 years ago when a small girl came tearing around the corner and stopped dead to look at a model looming over us. She was maybe six years old, absolutely adorable, and her mother asked What’s that one, honey? Is it a plant eater?

She shot back with all the conviction in the world Mom, it’s a Parasaurolophus. She was right, and her pronunciation was dead on. If today she’s reading Dinosuars to her six year old, she’s going to stop on pages 2 and 3 and have the same argh moment I did.