This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: The Ides of March portend violence upon Caesar, and also we are introduced to the sub-Saharan comb-over. Also, we finally hear from The Latino Health Crisis, and are cruelly kept from returning Ramses Luther Smuckles.

• Do you know what Kickstarter is? Of course we all do!
  And do you know what Retrofit Comics is? The Box Brown-run imprint has been putting out comics by a murderer’s row of independent and alternative creators for several years now, stretching back to their first endeavours in 2011.

  Time for a new campaign. The first was a series of 17 floppy comics; now they’re looking to put out six new comics and graphic novels with stretch goals for another six. The first tranche of creators includes Leela Corman, Alabaster Pizzo, Kaeleigh Forsyth, James Kochalka, Paloma Dawkins, Eleanor Davis, and Luke Howard; stretchers include Mari Naomi, Karine Bernadou, Anya Davidson, Tyler Landry, and Sophie Yanow. The goal is a bit steep — US$35,000 — but look at what you’re getting: a US$36 pledge gets you six comics, ranging from 32 to 100 pages. US$65 will get you all twelve (assuming they fund out) and overfunding will pay the creators more. In fact, that’s why the goal jumped more than three times from the US$9K campaign of 2011: so that the artists could be paid up front.

  Yeah, it’s a fairly high goal, with a fairly ambitious timetable, but this is not a first-timer that’s never built anything before; the creators being published are seasoned pros with many comics behind them, and the the publisher has been around for five years and more than 40 titles produced. It’s as close to a sure thing as you’re going to see. There’s three weeks to go and they’re presently just under 30% of the way to goal. Time to decide which creators you really love and to pick up some of their work.

• And as long as we’re talking about Kickstarter, there’s one that’s about to launch for a project that some people have been waiting for for up to a dozen years. I speak, naturally, of the Irregular Webcomic reprint project coming from David Morgan-Mar and Make That Thing. There’s a video and everything, and once Morgan-Mar has all the last-minute fiddly bits worked out (not to mention once his brain defogs from his recent trip from his native Sydney to the US and Japan), we can expect to see the campaign launch. Sources¹ indicate this will likely be within the next fortnight. Start your drooling anticipation … now.

Spam of the day:

Linked In

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

No.

______________
¹ That would be the email that Morgan-Mar sent me.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We meet The Man With The Blood On His Hands for the first time.

Is this mathematically the best time to write a blogpost? I think it is! And math is intrinsically linked with science, so let’s get all sciency up in here.

• Item! Comicker/science demystifier Maris Wicks is currently (ha, ha) aboard the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s research vessel Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic ocean. She’s there to help facilitate the dissemination of information of a multi-week voyage to study the phenomenon of rocks on the sea floor that make popping sounds all on their own. They’re a mystery and not easily found, but mere days after setting out and making their way to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, success! Popping rocks were found!

  In all seriousness, this is a great use of comics to convey complex ideas (ocean science, geology, climatology, probably a few more -ologies), as has been shown by Wicks’s own previous and current work, but also by Dante Shepherd’s engineering concepts comics. Keep an eye on Wicks, the R/V Atlantis, the Alvin, and all who sail upon/in them; they’re going to be learning some neat stuff and then sharing so we can learn it too.

• Item! Comicker/science demystifier/filmmaker Jorge Cham is out on tour this week, with visits to CMU and Pitt tonight (How To Survive Grad School), FSU tomorrow (talk, signing, and screening of The PhD Movie 2), and William & Mary on Thursday (The Power Of Procrastination). Details at the respective pages, go tell him I said hi.
• Item! Webcomics power couple Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky are going to have a formal launch for the book version of their world-famous Dad Magazine, with back-to-back events in New York City:
  

  DO YOU WANT TO COME TO A DAD MAGAZINE RELEASE PARTY yes you do they’re on April 26 @astoriabookshop and April 27 at @HousingWorksBks

  The Astoria Bookshop event will run 7:00pm to 8:00pm, and the Housingworks Books event the next night starts at 7:00pm but (intriguingly) has no end time indicated. Could be the party goes on forever.

  Where’s the science? I hear you ask. Shut up, that’s where. Just go and enjoy yourself.

Spam of the day:

Talcum Powder Lawsuit ATTENTION: Ovarian Cancer Patients. Did You Use Talcum Powder?

It might just be impossible for me to have ovarian cancer, and it might just be impossible for people with ovarian cancer to not have used talcum powder since basically everybody has at some point. Might as well ask ATTENTION: Ovarian Cancer Patients. Did You Breathe Air?

I mean, unless you’re implying that they put the talcum powder directly on the ovaries which would not be the dumbest illness/injury thing I’ve heard since becoming an EMT.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Two cats have taken their time going to the snack tent to retrieve some brandy of the gets-the-job-done variety. We’ll pick up with them when they get back.

I think that what I like best about the small-to-medium sized comics shows is the fact that they actually feature comics. So it’s with that in mind that I brin gyou news from three such festival-type shows that you’ll be paying attention to in the coming weeks and months, and one prize that draws from the same creator cohort.

• First up, MoCCA Fest has announced its slate of programming for the 2-3 April show in Manhattan; as was the case last year, panels and programs will be offsite, but included in the cost of your US$5 ticket. Highlights include a Sonny Liew Spotlight (12:30pm on Saturday), Cece Bell on El Deafo (2:00pm Saturday), Making Comics for Younger Readers (with Noelle Stevenson and others; 12:30pm on Sunday), and a Rebecca Sugar Q+A (2:00pm on Sunday). Best of all? The meeting rooms are actually named Helvetica and Garamond.
• Nextly, TCAF has announced four more featured guests, who you’ll find the weekend of 14-15 May. If it seems like three is a small number, consider:
  • They were specifically invited to appeal to kids
  • There were already Kids Guests announced like Kate Beaton and Faith Erin Hicks
  • This brings the total of confirmed guests to more than two dozen
  • They are superstars Alex A (Super Agent Jon Le Bon), Kazu Kibuishi (Amulet), Dana Simpson (Phoebe And Her Unicorn), and Raina Telgemeier (the entire damn comics industry; Sunday only)
• The second half of the SPX exhibitor list — the part decided by lottery — is starting to fill in, as news is being shared around the Twittersphere about who got in and who didn’t. The list will be fluid for some time, with table payments not due for another month, and then backfills taking place between now and the weekend of 17–18 September. Please note that the Exhibitors link at the SPX site is still showing the 2015 lineup, but expect that to change in the next couple of weeks.
• The Center for Cartoon Studies and Slate have announced the shortlists for their annual Cartoonist Studio Prizes. As in past years, there are ten nominees from the world of print comics, and ten from webcomics. As in past years, there are single-shot stories and ongoing series — length, genre, topic, style, audience age, and all the other qualifiers that usual divide nominees into many categories have no place here, only the strength of the work. As in past years, one nominee from each list will be recognized (announcement due on 6 April), and get both bragging rights and — uniquely for comics prizes — a thousand damn dollars.

  Pretty much everything that I saw on the lists that I recognized I nodded Yeah, that makes sense, and I don’t see any particularly weak or surprising nominations. It’s worth noting that D&Q and Fantagraphics dominate the print category, and that three of the webcomics nominees were commissioned by Matt Bors for The Nib before it shuttered its doors halfway through the year, or for its short-lived followup, The Response; I’ve no doubt that if Bors had a full 12 months in 2015 to play with, we’d see more on the list.

Spam of the day:

Check out the profiles of over 30,000 Russian babes. Make these Russian girls fall for your charm.

Okay, nothing special there, we’ve seen this particular flavor of spam before. What propels it into the realm of genius is the name of the alleged sender, Olga. Olga Contrabasist. That is sheer goddamn poetry.

Heck, I’m in a good mood, let’s do another one!

Signs of a Fatal Heart-Attack

I’ma go out on a limb here — 10 year veteran EMT and all, you pick these things up — and say the most distinguishing sign of a heart attack that is not merely damaging but fatal, would be the part where you’re dead.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: There were three, then there were two, and Rudy Cava had some dark shit in his past. All hail the pissed man with goals.

Longtime Friend o’ Fleen and shadowy mystery man Eben Burgoon has been on a bit of a tear recently; we mentioned that he put up a Kickstart for the latest volume of his kill-’em-all comic series, The B-Squad, unfortunately the same day as the Cyanide & Happiness folks put up their megasuccessful card game’s campaign¹. But now that the oxygen is coming back into the room, we can see that B-Squad Volume 2 is a bit shy of goal (that is to say, 45% with nine days to go), and direct people to check it out. Burgoon was kind enough to send a copy of Volume 1 over to the Fleenplex and it’s a hoot. A hoot and a half, even, with cruel twists of fate dictated by literal throws of the die².

Burgoon’s been here before — closing days, goal looking iffy — and he’s always regrouped, replanned, and readjusted to reality, and it’s made him a better creator. He’s also too smart to have just one creative venture define him. Which is why he’s now got a signature beer:

The beer itself is a blonde ale brewed with Sacramento wildflower honey. BEE-SQUAD! SEE! It is all connected!

It’s brewed with California grown barley and blend of 2 hops. It’s a slight twist on their previous blonde ale, but to me it sounds ridiculously & dangerously drinkable at 7.0% alcohol and I certainly intend to leave many an expended pint full bee-hind! [emphasis original; puns unfortunate]

Why has no other webcomic had a signature booze before? Those of you in Sacramento on Saturday the 19th of March (coincidentally the end date for the Kickstarter) will have a chance to ask Burgoon, label designer Sean Sutter, and the brewmasters of New Helvetia Brewing Company in person, as they’ll be having a combination end-of-Kickstarter launch-of-beer party from 3:00pm to 8:00pm. Fun goes down at New Helvetia, 1730 Broadway in Sacto, and fun it will be if the book funds out.

If not, it’ll be a hell of a fun wake, and Burgoon will get up Monday to find the next way to bring his creations to life. Adaptability + booze is pretty much what indie and webcomics are all about.

Spam of the day:

LEGAL NOTICE: You may be entitled to settlement from implantable-mesh

Fun fact: my wife has worked in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries for pretty much her entire career, and so I know that implantable meshes are commonly used for breast augmentation. I haven’t ever had either of those, so I suspect that the authors of this spam may not, contrary to their claims, have actually tailored the message to my unique situation.

_______________
¹ Joking Hazard by name, and I use the term megasuccessful in a precise sense, as it closed earlier today having raised 3.246 US megadollars, or roughly double the midpoint of what the FFFmk2 predicted. Well done, lads.

² There’s a double meaning there; the character whose number comes up on the die will die. If one of them perishes in some kind of industrial die-cutting machine, it’ll become a triple meaning.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray is tired from his rampage and shivering from the cold and loneliness. Some nights are longer than others.

Hell, no! So why should the Cartoon Art Museum stop doing cool things just because The Man says they don’t have a gallery space anymore? Become the ruling body, dude!¹ Or at least check out what CAM has coming up in the next few weeks.

• Next weekend, CAM will be heading down to the South Bay and the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con in San Jose. Curator Andrew Farago will be interviewing Norm Felchle (he works on Spider-Man, Mick Gray (Batman and Robin, Alex Sheikman (Moonstruck), and Ryan Sook (Hawkman and a stack of Buffy titles) in a panel discussion, 10:00am on Saturday the 19th.
• A week later, they’ll be at WonderCon at the LA Convention Center; this time it’ll be Program Coordinator Nina Kester doing panel duties with Comedy in Comics, on Sunday the 27th from 11:30am. Guests will include Kyle Baker (Plastic Man, Why I Hate Saturn, The Cowboy Wally Show, and many more), Ming Doyle (DC Bombshells), Francesco Francavilla (Afterlife With Archie), Agnes Garbowska (My Little Pony), Joe Quinones (Howard the Duck, having to put up with Chip Zdarsky), and Raina Telgemeier².
• June 18th and 19th will see the third annual Queer Comics Expo at the SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, which will also serve as a fundraiser for CAM. In fact, they’re looking for people that want to be part of the fun, with applications for QCE programming, volunteers, and exhibitors open through 31 March. Table rates range from US$15 to US$50 (half or whole, one day or both) and exhibitors can get the application details via qcexpo.tumblr.com/exhibitors.

I can think off the top of my head about a couple museums that do less than this in a year, much less in a couple of months while also juggling a major capital fundraising campaign/real estate search. They’re good folks over at CAM, and you ought to take one of these opportunities to go see ’em. Drop a couple bucks in the donation jar while you’re there.

Spam of the day:

Look 20-Years Younger: Celebrity Method Revealed

Man, I already look 10 years younger than I actually am (and the entire insurance industry apparently thinks I qualify for Medicare, which event won’t happen until the 2030s); if your miracle goop makes me look another 20 years younger, I’m never going to get a drink again.

_______________
¹ I appear to have mixed my metaphors somewhat.

² Do I really have to tell you what she does? Read literally any week of postings here and you’ll come across her.

This dayin Great Outdoor Fight history: The presence of tick-pimps, boilbacks, and yard-sleepers quite frankly raises as many questions as they answer. Such as, how many were made into cowboy sauce? I’m going to guess 250-300.

• We’re getting down to the end times here — from issue #1 in September of 2010 to issue #100¹ in August of last year, to the final wind-down of the rerun as a webcomic, Jim Zub’s Skullkickers is reaching a milestone. For the first time, it’s going to be complete for all new readers; a significant portion of his audience never picked up the dead-tree floppies, and only knows Skullkickers as a webcomic; for the first time, it’s going to be there as a complete story, with no new updated on the next Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

  It’s the comic where he really made his bones and his reputation as a journeyman that can write anything for anybody, 1000 pages a year. It’s the comic that launched a series of tutorials on creator-owned comics, whether the economics of such, tricks for promotion, pitching, you name it. In a lot of ways, it’s always going to be the Zubbiest comic of his career¹ other works since have incorporated some of the madcap insanity of Baldy and Shorty (okay, Rex and Rolf), and have tried to do as ambitious things with the nature of stories, but only here did all of it come together.

  I’m just saying, Wayward and Thunderbolts and Samurai Jack and Makeshift Miracle and Baldur’s Gate and Pathfinder and Batman and Figment and all of the others? Excellent writing, in every genre for every possible audience, but they lack something essential. They have far less mayhem, far fewer crotch-kicks, and as a result are thus only partially Zubby. Zubbish? Zublike? Whatever the adjectival form of Zub is, less of that. He set out to tell as big a story as he could², with as much fun as possible along the way, and he succeeded admirably. It’s a Zub world, and we’re lucky to be living in it.

• One really cool thing about Skullkickers was how Zub treated the character of Kusia, the elven assassin. She wasn’t just the major female character, but just generally a more competent and likable character than the putative leads. In a testosterone-fueled genre (six of them, actually), she was the rational touchstone, and she got to argue that just because the eternal archetypes of adventure are male shouldn’t mean that there’s no place for women protagonists. Then she dragged the eternal archetypes into something resembling gender parity and it was cool.

  I’m thinking about this, because it’s rare for male cartoonists to actively seek out reasons to have female protagonists³ but female cartoonists aren’t so blind to the ability of women characters to anchor a story. It’s not even so much that women cartoonists create women characters at the expense of men — it’s that they know that including a mix of both reflect the real world, even when nearly every form of entertainment and social interaction results in dudes thinking women are overrepresented and dominating a story when they hit a ratio of about 1 in 4.

  And seeing as how it’s International Women’s Day, The AV Club has done us the favor (as in past years) of pointing out some great women in the comics and cartoon sphere that you may not be familiar with (not to mention names that you should already know — like Fiona Staples, Emily Carroll, Kate Beaton, Jillian Tamaki, Raina Telgemeier, Eleanor Davis, Meredith Gran, Emma Rios, and Noelle Stevenson — who are recapped in the intro). As is happening in a lot of capital-c Comics, women are making the biggest inroads into indie and webcomics because there’s nobody there to tell them they can’t or that there’s no audience for their stuff.

  Read the article; get to know the names. In a couple of years, these ladies will be as dominant as the now-familiar creators in the intro. Don’t believe me? Take note of the fact that DC Comics lost its position as the biggest vendor of graphic novels last year to Scholastic. And Raina Telgemeier by herself was responsible for about 6.5% of all comics sold through bookstores last year. Sisters and Smile are bigger than Batman, and all the women coming up now are going to get to the top by walking past increasingly less-relevant cape comics. Rock on, ladies; you rule.

Spam of the day:

Gorgeous Kitchens – Check it out.

Attention Brett g Porter; it’s not XTC or Zappa or Pynchon, but I believe this is of interest to you.

_______________
¹ The precise moment when he shifted his professional name from Jim Zubkavich to Jim Zub is less important than the debut of Skullkickers #1; that is the moment when he shed his former identity and became who he is.

² With, it should be noted, the likes of Edwin Huang and Misty Coats, without whom the end result would lack a significant amount of Zubness. He has a knack for picking collaborators that get him and bring out all that he envisions in his brainmeats.

³ cf: Zub’s Wayward, where the current group of nominal heroes is 4 women (or at least female monster-type creatures) and 2 men; the major antagonists are one each male and female with a male junior villain. It feels ordinary in the context of his story, but it’s far from common in comics.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We learn that most esoteric of all knowledge, the maximum recommended period of time that a bird should be in the back of a dude’s car.

A pair of long-time dudes in webcomics have been at their website code lately, and it’s instructive to see what they’ve done.

• On the one hand you’ve got Howard Tayler¹, proprietor of Schlock Mercenary’s spiffy new site, which he set out to make intuitive and easily navigable (just try the arrow keys from any strip). The design is responsive, rearranging elements as I switched from laptop to tablet (both orientations) to phone (ditto).

  Particularly nice was the way that the strip becomes scrollable within a frame on the phone, while the site stays still around it. The design reveals a lot of Tayler’s approach to life; it’s immaculately built², and he credits the engineer that did the coding to his specifications. It makes me think how Tayler started life as a music producer, and parallels the relationship between producer and audio engineer as they come up with the perfect hit.

• Rich Stevens is punk rock, all the way. He’s accomplished much the same thing (the strip is easily readable on every device and orientation), but he’s done all the work himself and while he may not have the most elegant solutions, Diesel Sweeties 3.0³ does everything it needs to do as simply as possible.

  Seriously, take a browse over and open up the HTML source (probably ctrl+u in your browser) and look at the 253 lines of simple HTML that run everything. Count up all the places that the <script> tag doesn’t appear. It took him about three weeks, but as he declared on his podcast, the goal was to be able to update the site anywhere in the world with a text editor and a phone. Im’a say he probably succeeded.

But regardless of which of them is Steely Dan and which is The Clash, they’ve arrived at the same place even if they accomplished their goals by diametrically opposing means. Their websites are adaptable, responsive, reasonably extensible for the foreseeable future, and utterly lacking in comment sections. Getting shit done using the most appropriate tools at their disposal without waiting for an interdepartmental design review working group to focus-test things to within 2.54cm of their lives? That’s the most webcomic thing of all.

Spam of the day:

Great Rates on European Dream Vacations

I thought that said Great Dates on European Dream Vacations and momentarily figured the horny moms in my area were upping their game if they wanted to take me to Europe. This is much less interesting.

_______________
¹ My evil twin.

² I almost said taylered, but I have some pride left.

³ DS 1.0 starts here and runs for 4000 strips; at strip #3000 he shook up the status quo and created a USB drive of all 3000 strips. After #4000 he shook up the status quo (there’s about a six month time jump between the #4000 and today) and relaunched as DS3.0. 2.0 is for suckas.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; Ray is napping off all those sporkfuls (sporksful?) of Christian Brothers.

We had a bit of snow earlier today, but it’s melting off in the sun. Let’s talk about what the deals are, and head into the weekend.

• Kazu Kibuishi is no stranger to the New York Times Best Seller list, and if he spent less time at #1 for Amulet volume 6 18 months back, well, that’s probably because Scholastic made the inexplicable decision to release it on the same day as Raina Telgemeier’s Sisters¹.

  But Kibuishi’s done something that I can’t recall seeing before: he’s debuted Amulet volume 7 at #1 on both the hardcover and softcover lists; given the cliffhanger that this book ends on², expect to see it pop back up when the eighth volume releases sometime next year.

• Hey, you know who else is no stranger to the Times Best Seller list, but who hasn’t done a book for — goodness! — nearly five years? Vera Brosgol. She’s been busy as heck with Laika Studios, contributing to some of the most original and imaginative films in decades. But we’ll be seeing more of her own work soon:
  

  Today is my last day at Laika. I’m leaving to work on my own projects! I will miss these guys so so much. T_T

  Brosgol was one of the first people I met in webcomics, before I started blogging even, back when Return To Sender³ was still updating, and I’ve adored her work from the beginning. Leaving a place of tremendous creativity (the sort that’s got to rub off on you) to work on her own stories again? This is the best possible news.

• Mark your calendars for the tail end of October:
  

  What if I told you to mark October 22-23rd on your calendar, because those are the dates of TopatoCon 2016? WHAT IF

  I would say Yes, please and start scheming as to how we could make last year’s competitive drink-making session even better. I made a drink in a pineapple, people, and kept up the small talk while competitors wrangled ingredients, the kindest of which was pop-boba. What would make for a good successor? An Iron Chef type format⁴? Something more educational? More samples? Answers on a postcard, or at least in the comments below.

• Speaking of conventions, a schedule change to this weekend’s In-Store Convention Kickoff: Jim Zub and Nathan Fillion/Alan Tudyk will be swapping timeslots, with the former now at 4:40pm and the latter at 6:30pm (all times EST). Please adjust your day planners accordingly.

Spam of the day:

Protect Against Identity-Theft

I suppose you mean to educate me by means of direct experience, seeing as how Gmail has helpfully labeled your email with Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information.

______________
¹ Which remains on said list to this day, 78 weeks later, along with Drama (135 weeks), Smile (194 weeks), and the latest Baby Sitters Club reissue (5 weeks). She’s released her 70% stranglehold on the list, but I make it even money she regains it and possible pulls off the eight-peat once Ghosts releases in the fall.

² And it’s evil, I tells ya; the story is also so full of major twists and turns that I don’t know how to review it — even with my usual warnings of spoilers — without recounting the entire damn thing in detail. Suffice it to say that Kibuishi has lost none of his chops, has kicked the story into even higher gear than it was, and guaranteed that the wait for the last two books of the series will be the longest wait in the lives of his many fans.

And when volume 9 finally hits, I’m taking a day to re-read the entire thing at once. It’ll be glorious.

³ Since shuttered, and the domain obtained by persons of low intent. Only browse via Wayback Machine, and go no further than 2006. Some day, Often and Colette will reveal the rest of their story to us; in the meantime, they live in my heart and memory.

⁴ If we can figure out some way for me to shout allez biberonner, I will die a happy man.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I choose the believe that the retired band teacher is a warning of what things may be if Scrooge Ray does not mend his ways. In this case, by beating down on a bunch of long-time dudes and not embarrassing his dad.

So this is late, but I only came across it yesterday when visiting my friendly local comic shop to pick up this week’s books¹; it appears, much like the webcomics stay-at-home “convention” known as ComfyCon, the comics industry has put together a virtual con that will be broadcast to comics shops this Saturday, 5 March. It appears this is even the second time it’s happened, who knew?

The In-Store Convention Kickoff, as it is named, suffers from one stunning disadvantage, which is that the flyer they produced for handout in comics shops doesn’t mention their website. There are references to Facebook and Twitter, which eventually lead to the site, but that was a hell of an overlook.

Fortunately, it appears that the rest of the arrangements are better thought-out. The idea of having to go specifically to a store to participate is pretty clever, driving attention and potentially sales to those stores; there are even exclusive comics that only participating stores can order. There’s also a wide variety of guests that will be part of presentations and panel discussions, from (if I counted correctly) nine different publishers plus a toy company, not to mention the obligatory media guests (Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk).

Best of all, they found people that webcomics fans ought to be interested in: Hope Larson, Christopher Hastings, Ryan North, and Jim Zub will all get time in the program, although whoever thought that 10 – 15 minutes is enough time for Hastings, North, or Zub to be interesting and charming and erudite and entertaining as hell is kind of dumb. Then again, its not like they were singled out — the only sessions longer than 15 minutes are the DC Comics panel (45), the BOOM! Studios panel (30), and the Marvel panel (45). Hope Larson’s part of the BOOM! panel (what with Goldie Vance getting ready to launch), so there may actually be time to say something, given that there are four other people speaking with her.

To be honest, the scheduling and durations [PDF] are a bit concerning. The very short times (along with the disclaimer that times and schedules are subject to change) makes me wonder if some of the less well-known guests might serve the role of cushioning to allow for last-minute shifts in the big names (your Matts Fraction or Kellys Sues DeConnick, for example, who themselves are only allocated 15 minutes total what the hell people). A technical issue here or there, might they decide to cancel somebody with less industry pull than Brian Michael Bendis or Dan Didio to get back on schedule²? That would be unfortunate.

Those caveats aside, it’s an ambitious eight hours planned, and I’ll be curious to see how it turns out. If you have questions for any of the creators, you can tweet them to #ConKickoff2016.

Spam of the day:

These astronomers gathered X-ray data utilizing the orbiting Chandra X-ray
Observatory and brightness information from
one in every of TSU’s automated telescopes in southern Arizona, hoping to measure the age of
the star.

It’s really less spam and more free verse.

_______________
¹ Book of the week: Giant Days #12, where John Allison cliffhangered me and made me sniffly for Esther DeGroot, my favorite of all his creations. Except maybe Shauna and Lottie when they’re fixing time and space.

² Also a concern: there are few breaks allocated between sessions³. Things go over? Maybe there’s a cushion before the next session, maybe not. Somebody’s in the middle of a great story? Next person doesn’t get their ten minutes. I think there may be an overestimation as to the reliability of streaming software on the various computers of 37 different people.

³ Specifically, there are 26 events scheduled, with nine irregularly-spaced breaks:

• Opening keynote speaker Jim Lee ends at 12:15, the Dynamite panel starts at 12:20
• The Dynamite panel ends at 12:35, the Valiant panel starts at 12:40
• The DC panel ends at 1:50, Skottie Young starts at 1:55
• The Top Cow panel ends 3:25, Dan Jurgens starts at 3:30
• The Dark Horse panel ends at 4:20, Ryan North starts at 4:25
• Fillion & Tudyk end at 4:55, the Marvel panel starts at 5:00
• The Marvel panel ends at 5:45, the Zenescope panel starts at 5:50
• Jim Zub ends at 6:45, Mike Deodato starts at 6:50
• The IDW panel ends at 7:45, closing keynote speaker Kevin Eastman starts at 7:55

It appears that if you are a publisher with a panel or if you are a very famous person, you can run long. Everybody else is out of luck. And yes, by this measure Jim Zub is a very famous person; glad I’m not the only one that thinks so.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I remain conflicted to this very day what the most disconsolate part of this tableau is — the smallness of the snack tent? The underwhelming nature of the “feast”? The lone spork? They could have at least made some “Dinosaur” Potato Chuds.

• It was in the early morning hours of yesterday — having twins means he’s on Baby Duty until 5:00am — that David Willis launched the Kickstarter for his fifth Dumbing of Age book, which funded out before he went to sleep. Hardly surprising, as the prior four DoA books have funded like clockwork (at rates of 273% to 370% of goal), although I don’t recall one funding out in less than eight hours before.

  It also doesn’t hurt that Willis puts together his books and sends out his stuff on time; as a result, he generally increases his backer count by about 600 folks from book to book, meaning the just under 700 backers and 177% achievement on a US$22,000 goal (as of this writing) is just an ordinary outcome for him. Checking out the ol’ FFFmk2, we’re looking at US$120K to 180K, which would be in the range of double his previous best funding level.

  Then again, he’s already go more backers than his first collection, and will likely come up with 2 to 3 times as many by the time the campaign ends in 28 days; if the per-backer averages hold, he’d be looking at US$78K to US$117K, and he hasn’t yet unlocked all the stretch goals, the things that convince people to move from intangible rewards to physical rewards. It appears that the twins need not worry about starving before their first birthday.

• Something else that need not be worried about? That Fleen readers will be uninformed about the goings-on in Eurocomics, thanks to Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who has a choice recommendation for us:
  

  Tim from acupoftim.com draws pages about a number of matters, from his admiration of Maddox to what became of Totoro to figuring out what the deal is with these darn squirrels, but he is best known for stories on his various workplaces and coworkers, published in Quotidien Survival.

  He also had a side blog, Glauque-Land, where he publishes photos of his explorations of various urban ruins and other abandoned buildings. Which caught the interest of a Flammarion imprint, and today they are releasing a book of his photos, with accompanying text and illustrations he created for this purpose.

  Maybe more interesting than the publication by itself is the story he published (as comics on his site, of course) of the whole process from his side, especially his attempts to keep a level head and dealing with not being in control of everything. Check them out if you can read French.

  My French is rusty, but you ain’t need to read French in order to see what the squirrels are up to — no good is what. Doesn’t matter if they’re French or otherwise, squirrels are not to be trusted. And curiously, this appears to be one area where animals outside Australia are more dangerous than those inside Australia … this should indicate how incredibly evil and malicious the little brush-tailed bastards really are.

Spam of the day:

Verizon Services FREE 30-day HBO NOW® trial – Let the binging begin

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No. Get bent, Verizon. I’ll let SquirrelCo put their lines into my house before I upgrade my service with you.