First, scroll down and read about Jaime Hernandez, because that guy rules.

Second, here are some things that are time-dependent:

• Tony Breed is one of the nicest guys on the planet; he was sorely missed at TopatoCon, but with a husband dealing with cancer, he had more important things to deal with. And because complicated diseases can wipe people out financially, friends have prevailed on Tony and Eric to accept a crowdfund on their behalf. This is not optional; give.
• Speaking of TopatoCon, Jeph Jacques had copies of QC book 5 with him there, which the rest of the world will be able to buy the day after tomorrow.
• John Allison shares the news that Giant Days is now an ongoing comic! Happy day, I get Esther deGroot every month!

As was mentioned previously, Fleen today participates in the blogtour for Fable Comics from :01 Books; for those of you that have been following the tour¹ for the past ten days, know that we’re only about a third of the way through the book, and there’s plenty more to come. But in today’s installment we look at the well-known (perhaps the best known of all the fables, anywhere, ever) The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and we consider a question that has perhaps never been asked of a fable before.

Namely, Is there anybody that works as much emotional heft into as few lines as Jaime Hernandez?

Check out the first bit of action in the brief story [click to embiggen]: the colors are flat and contrasting, the clothes and sky and grass as simple as could be, but the faces in in panel one! An extra bit of wobble in a line turns a mouth to a panicked rictus, a few droplets of sweat and slight shifts of posture into crouches turns villagers into men prepared to give their lives to preserve their families and flocks from danger.

Panel two’s simple shrug couldn’t be simpler, the face couldn’t contain fewer details and still be a face, and yet they tell us everything about that shepherd boy. Maybe, just maybe, it was sheer boredom and not malice that prompted the first cry of wolf!, and panel three still leaves him the possibility of knocking off the nonsense. Panel four, he’s edging up to the line of no return.

Panel five. Bam. He’s lost whatever moral struggle he had and gone over to the dark side.

We know what happens next — a repeat, false contrition (I think it might have been real a few panels ago, but now it’s not), and then the inevitable occurs. Enter wolf, stage right [click to embiggen] and it’s suddenly chaos, frantic motion, a Chuck Jones cartoon, all flailing limbs and speed lines. The wolf is a black amorph, all curves when sneaking, limbs not even in view when running flat out, the space of a panel too small to contain his swift traverse. It’s only when the wolf plummets over the cliff that it appears as creature and not force of nature.

And then it wraps up [click to embiggen], with the sure knowledge that nobody will ever believe anything he says again, not even hello, all tied up not in the protestations of panels two, three, and four, but in the slump of shoulders in the final panel [click to embiggen]. Six pages, a handful of drawings per page, as little detail as humanly possible. There are very few pixels in these images, very little actual signal, and the message comes through loud and clear. And that, my friends, is why Jaime Hernandez is (and always will be) a national treasure.

Fleen thanks Gina Gagliano at :01 for the review copy of Fable Comics, and for the high resolution artwork included today.

Spam of the day:

LinkedIn
Subject: There’s a new message

Man, even if your “message” didn’t consist solely of a link to an obviously bogus site, you think I would actually respond to LinkedIn? They’re the biggest spammers on the planet.

_______________
¹ Not unlike following The Dead, only with fewer hippies.

Sorry, Maki, but Sara McHenry renamed it and that’s a really kick-ass name.

Multiple people requested the recipe after 86’d! at TopatoCon, so here’s how to make one yourself.

1. Core out a pineapple. Don’t just hack around like some kind of cartoonist on a reality show, use one of these. Leave any residual pineapple juice in the shell. Enjoy the delicious pineapple guts while we move onto the rest of the drink.
2. Mix together:
   3/4 oz lemon juice
   3/4 oz lime juice
   3/4 oz orange juice
   1/2 oz spiced rum
   1/2 oz Laird’s bonded applejack¹
   1 oz falernum²
   1 oz pisco³
3. Shake over ice and strain into pineapple shell.
4. Top with serious ginger ale. None of that mass-market HFCS shit, get some Blenheim’s or Fever Tree or something with some bite.
5. Garnish orange slice, crazy straw, little festive umbrella.

________________
¹ Laird’s has recently abandoned the “bonded” tag to distinguish their 80 proof applejack (perfectly acceptable) and 100 proof straight apple brandy (fucking amazing and about two bucks more than the 80, always use this).

² Falernum is a mix of white rum and simple syrup. Want to make your own? It’ll substitute for simple in any drink you care to make and add a lot of flavor. Take 1 liter of white rum (Bacardi works fine) and add the zest of ten limes, 50 cloves, a 1/2 inch knob of ginger (peeled, sliced fine), 1 tsp vanilla extract, 2 tsp almond extract. Let sit 24 hours and strain. Mix with 1 liter of 1.5:1 simple syrup. It’s a big recipe so make it with friends and divide up the batch.

³ A Chilean grape brandy, very clean and neutral flavor, adds kick and depth to the drink.

[Imagine a picture of the SuperBloodMoon here, as twenty assorted webcomics types recreate Wondermark #302]

It’s kind of freeing, being off Twitter almost entirely for half a week; there was just no time to look at the phone. So, final photos from TopatoCon 2015 (the first of its name), then the drive home, then back to work tomorrow¹.

• The day started early when Webcomics Own Angel of Mercy and Carbs brought donuts. Amazing, amazing donuts, including gluten-free, and the Secret Donut which appeared to have been carved directly from a half-kilo lump of pure chocolate, then rolled in chocolate chips.
• The only session I got to sit in was Go Away, Sea Lions!, as David Malki ! spoke with Spike and Randy Milholland about how not to be a dick on the internet. Good stories, good laughs, good lessons, good questions from a smart audience. Like the other panels in room one (like Stacy King’s discussion of Tokyo fashion, Emily Nagoski’s roundtable on ladies, sexual pleasure, and comics that mix the two, and the cocktail competition I hosted), it should be on YouTube in the near future.
• As was foretold in prophecy, Karla Pacheco and Jeph Jacques are actually MasterBlaster.
• The residents of the haunted AirBnB (Tom & Sara McHenry, Ferocious J[on Sung], Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, David Malki !, Tyler Hutchison, possibly others) hosted a weenie roast under the SuperBloodMoon. A new cult was birthed, and there were also s’mores. Ia! Ia!

Okay, got to check out and eat something before I drop. Come to the next TopatoCon, and if it looked like fun, please drop a note to showrunners Holly Rowland and Sara McHenry (you can reach both through Make That Thing) and tell them what a great job they did because they can’t be told that enough times.

_______________
¹ Note: work tomorrow means flying to Dallas, so there may be an abbreviated post then.

I’m just going to refer you to the #TopatoCon social media tag because holy crap, I’m tired today.

Okay, part of that is probably because Stacy King, Andrew Wheeler, and Jim Zub enticed me, Ferocious J, and Dante Shepherd to stay up past midnight playing tabletop games which tested the limits of friendship. Part of it was probably from helping the aforementioned Dr Shepherd and Maki Naro run science experiments on alive humans, or my extensive time in the TopatoCo Merchateria with the redoubtable Ms Smith and the entirely doubtable Mr J. Part of it was probably just the energy in the exhibit hall, where people just seemed to be enjoying themselves.

And part of it is probably because the cocktail competition 86’d! with Holly Rowland, Holly Black, Frank Gibson, Katie Donnelly (contestants), Kaliis Smith, Eric Churchill, and Karl Pacheco (judges) that I hosted drew an enormous crowd that seemed to enjoy itself (too busy to take pictures, but video coming soon). Hollys Black and Rowland made it to the finish, prompting the crowd to break into a spontaneous cheer of Hol-ly! Hol-ly! Hol-ly! before Ms Black took the crown. We have got to do this again next year.

But mostly it’s probably because the best idea of TopatoCon is also the most dangerous: there’s a bar and I had an excellent bottle of scotch to share.

Please enjoy these photos:

• Volunteers, ready to be dispatched to take care of a problem.
• Holly Rowland was everywhere during the day, makin’ decisions and bein’ a boss.
• Calm before the programming storm. I heard crowds applauding and cheering from across the hall throughout the day.
• The quiet before the show got started. That’s Kate Leth in that last photo; take a look at her Twitterfeed for her photosafari of the show floor.
• I offered Naro a pair of safety glasses, but he’s a cowboy.
• Tabletop gaming took place in this nest of rooms all day; it continued on an impromptu basis everywhere late into the night.
• Kim ran the bar and didn’t blanch at serving up a drink called The Walnutfucker. We had some nice discussions about cocktails.
• I made Sara McHenry a drink in a pineapple; I’d originally designed it for Maki Naro’s Pineapple Maki contest that didn’t happen, but she’s dubbed it the Pineapple Khaleesi and that’s a damn good name so we’re going with that.
• Scenes from Topato’s Bar: post show hours, pre going home; animated fun times; food desperately grubbed while holding exhaustion at bay.

Now I’ve got to scrub the filth from my carcass and return for Day Two. I am as nontheist as they come, but friends … pray for me.

Hey, Gary asked TopatoCo President For Life Jeffrey Rowland, you want a walkie-talkie? It was a bit before 10:00am the day before the inaugural TopatoCon and I was there to help. I wasn’t sure I needed a walkie-talkie, but then he added You get an ear-piece with that. Sold. Three minutes later, I have a small speaker in my ear and a radio nestled in the small of my back, looking like the world’s least likely Secret Service agent on detail, except for the talking into the sleeves thing.

Not gonna lie, once I got the volume worked out to a comfortable level, it proved to be a lifesaver, as setup would take me up and down the length of the Eastworks building multiple times an hour, and finding the organizers to clarify a decision or get an assignment would have been nigh impossible otherwise. I dropped my trauma bag at the just-arranged registration desk — the closest thing to a central location — and hopped on the air: Med/Stache to all stations. Report all injuries to me, no matter how minor; thankfully, none needed to be.

And there was potential — a few dozen eight-foot tables got wheeled around, and a few hundred chairs. There were heavy-ass platform risers, toxic fume-laden spray adhesives, random bits of architecture with random bolts sticking out at odd angles, a ton or so of merch to deliver to tables — but each item was dealt with by a crew of a dozen or so volunteers. The main exhibit hall transformed itself over the course of a couple of hours while the Eastworks staff unpacked a significant shipment of booze for Topato’s Bar. A little after noon, the hall was ready for the first exhibitors to start setting up under the watchful eye of Chief of Security Special Agent Fox Mulder.

Showrunner Holly Rowland was everywhere, passing out assignments and indicating how things should be arranged. Showrunner Sara McHenry was running logistics from a command bunker in the basement, ably assisted by husband and MRA-bane Tom McHenry¹. BabyBird (formerly StinkBot), SparkleDog, and PizzaVessel wrangled the intake and outflow of volunteers.

Radio calls went out from Ferocious J and Agent Paperklip and things happened: goods bedecked tables in the TopatoCo pop-up store, dollies wheeled infrastructure out of the way, signage went up, airport runs occurred. Easthampton held its breath, waiting for a sign, a signal, anything to indicate that the attempts to beat chaos into order were bearing fruit. The portents were uncertain, but all remained cautiously optimistic.

And so stands the long hallway on this crisp autumn night. There will be the last-minute flurry of table setup from the late-arriving exhibitors, but all that needs to happen to make the show itself launch waits in watchful readiness. Eleven hours and forty-six minutes from now, the doors open.

Forty-five.

Forty-four.

Med/Stache to all stations — sleep well and be ready to dig deep tomorrow. It’s gonna be an adventure.

Spam of the day:

I NEED YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION ON MY PROPOSAL

You know, you might get my immediate attention on your proposal if you actually included the damn things in your spam. Oh, well. Sucks to be you, what with not getting my immediate attenntion on your proposal and all.

_______________
¹ My plan is to find every fedora-wearing MRA/PUA/MGTOW type in the Pioneer Valley and show them that photo so their heads will go sploosh.

On my way to TopatoCon. See you there? I’ll be working the TopatoCo pop-up shop (next to the Marketplace entrance on the map, near panel rooms 2 & 3) most of the time, but I’ll be attending some panels (Science the World with Dante Shepherd and Maki Naro, Saturday at 1:30; Go Away, Sea Lions with David Malki !, Kate Leth, Spike, and Randy Milholland; Sunday at 2:00), and I’ll be hosting one (86’d! with Frank Gibson, Holly Black, and Holly Rowland; Saturday at 5:00).

Spam of the day:

Touche. Outstanding arguments. Keep up the good effort.

Will do.

Computering issues (damn you, Windows 8.1, damn you right in the ear-hole) continue from yesterday. The data transfer process has been running for more than 24 hours, with the progress meter around 97% done for at least 20 hours of that time. Since I went to bed, the meter hasn’t budged despite the fact that the the total number of restored files has gone up at least 15%. I literally have no idea how much work is yet to be done¹, and I can’t just let the process run over the weekend because it requires access to a VPN lease that expires every 24 hours.

So I’m not able to do much with the network connection right now, you understand. And that situation may not resolve itself before I have to leave tomorrow for *hampton.

So let me point you towards the preparations that are occurring as I type:

They’re delivering the tables and chairs for TopatoCon! It just got REAL

OK here we go²

The programs for @TopatoCon2015 are HERE and they’re beautiful! Cover art by @catiemonster! #TopatoCon2015

Best start heading towards Massachusetts now, seeing as how the Pope is gonna have the area between DC and New York all tied up.

Spam of the day:

You’re giving your body what it needs to bee hasppy and hesalthy living blogs canada

This sounds like an ad for Brawndo.

_______________
¹ Not exactly true; the original data transfer set identified itself as having 14461 files, 12.73GB. The progress meter tells me it is presently on file number 37798, which makes very little sense to me.

² Glad to see you got home safely, Jeffrey, and I was very sorry to hear about the TopatoCo https://twitter.com/wigu/status/646306201421094912.

Before anybody makes a call to the local acute psych services on account of me actively wishing for death, consider my recent tweets:

1. New work laptop runs Windows 8.1
2. Max 1 week before I put my fist through the screen of this abomination.
3. Back to data xfer. #killme

It boots
[three blank lines]
so
[eight blank lines]
friggin’
[thirty blank lines]
SLOW.

We have reached a state that Roast Beef would recognize as even worse that the Bead Shop, and the shifting of my work is maybe one third done, which must be done tomorrow, before I leave for TopatoCon on Thursday because when I get back I have to immediately get on a plane for a client gig with said abomination. So this is gonna be brief.

• Thing That Makes Me Less Suicidal Today #1: Whiny manchild convinced that evil minorities and women are keeping Marvel and DC from recognizing his genius. Jim Zub patiently and kindly schools him. I will buy Zub a drink at TopatoCon for this.
• Thing That Makes Me Less Suicidal Today #2: Forbes covers SPX, and chooses Spike as the lead subject of a feature titled Black Wonder Woman, Feminist Smut: Welcome To Indie Comic Con. I will buy Spike a drink at TopatoCon for this.
• Thing That Makes Me Less Suicidal Today #3: Randall Munroe is going on book tour in support of Thing Explainer. I don’t think Randall is going to be at TopatoCon, but if he is, I will buy him a drink on general principles.
• Thing That Makes Me Less Suicidal Today #4: Ta-Nehisi Coates is maybe the smartest writer on race, equality, and social issues working in America today. He’s also a Marvel comics supergeek, and Marvel announced that he’s going to be writing Black Panther. This is perhaps the only thing that could get me to regularly buy a cape comic not involving Squirrel Girl. If I ever have the privilege to meet Mr Coates under any circumstances, I will buy him as many drinks as he wants.

No spam today, I’m already dealing with too much stupid.

Where to start, where to start?

• How about with the elephant¹ in the Bethsda Marriott hotel ballroom, where it was noticed that the famed bricks that represent the Ignatz Awards all went to women. Before any arrested man-children start bawling their delicious, delicious tears that this is everything wrong with feminazis ruing comics and making things nobody wants to read, they would do well to remember:
  1. The Ignatzen are voted on by everybody attending SPX, which attracts a sizable and diverse crowd.
  2. The nominees range from low-circulation minicomics to critically- popularly-acclaimed works that have large print runs and are obtainable in any bookstore in the country.
  3. Nothing about this prevents you from continuing to read your masturbatory power fantasies, so quit acting like this is a zero-sum game².

  Looking back at the nominations, for instance, I failed to notice that of the five of the nominees in the Outstanding Online Comic, none identify explicitly as male³. A quick scan of the other categories show that women made up pretty much 50% of all the nominations (40% here, 60% there, some teams and group efforts make attempts at calculation necessarily inexact; I’ll note that Promising New Talent was 80% ladies).

  Still, there’s a long way to go from a hell of a gender-balanced slate of nominees to it’s Ladies Night in Comictown, and the simplest explanation is that this year, the work that spoke most to the audience happened to be made by women in each case. So congratulations to Emily Carroll, Eleanor Davis, Sophie Goldstein (×2), Jillian Tamaki, Sophia Foster-Dimino (×3), and Lilli Carré.

• It’s pretty much inarguable that one of the most important tools in the business plan of a web/indy-comics creator (or creator of any sort) is crowdfunding, and that the dominant platform in that space is Kickstarter. So it’s pretty damn encouraging to see that the people that run Kickstarter are in no hurry to run up the valuation, float an IPO, cash out with a dumptruck full of money, and watch from the sidelines as the need to make tech-bubble levels of profit screws over the user base.

  In fact, they’ve just made that worst-case outcome pretty much impossible, and they’ve got the legal structure to enforce it:

  Kickstarter Inc is no more. We’re now Kickstarter PBC — a Public Benefit Corporation. We’re thrilled to share this news, and we’d love to take a minute to tell you exactly what it means.

  Until recently, the idea of a for-profit company pursuing social good at the expense of shareholder value had no clear protection under U.S. corporate law, and certainly no mandate. Companies that believe there are more important goals than maximizing shareholder value have been at odds with the expectation that for-profit companies must exist ultimately for profit above all.

  Benefit Corporations are different. Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals. [empahsis mine]

  That’s from an email that you probably received if you’ve ever dealt with Kickstarter, or you could read the story at the New York Times if you prefer. If you want to see how Kickstarter is interpreting their positive social impact, you can read their PBC charter here.

  Interestingly, the Kickstarter board is going extra-strong on the public benefit and transparency. The PBC structure requires them to report every other year on how they meet their charter’s goals, but they’ve also defined themselves as a B Corporation; that’s a voluntary designation that requires annual reports on their social goals, as well as some fairly rigorous environmental standards. What it all amounts to is that the people in charge of Kickstarter not only recognize what made it a success, they want to preserve it rather than abandoning it to unchecked capitalist exploitation. Good for them, and good for all of us.

• And for those of you that like geeky things and leave the house occasionally, Jorge Cham has some news for you:
  

  It’s #ThePHDMovie2 premiere week! Pass it on! >20 screenings this week including @CERN @DukeU and more: http://phdcomics.com/movie/#screenings

  Doesn’t look like any of those screenings will be at TopatoCon, but given that it appears that Cham will be conducting a Q&A and signing at CERN in that time frame, I suppose we can forgive him. Just one request for everybody working the LHC, though: if you want to show off for Jorge, please don’t do so by pressing the Big Red Button that says Generate Black Hole, Suck Earth In. Thanks.

Spam of the day:

Hello pecker 8-) i need s3x right now i’m not picky!!

“[N]ot picky”? Are … are you negging me? Am I getting the same approach that MRA dipshits think works on women?

______________
¹ Fun fact: elephant society is matriarchal in nature; the females that have lived the breadth of life’s experiences are what holds the culture together. I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with anything we’re talking about today.

² One might address a parallel thought towards those that are bitching about Viola Davis’s speech at the Emmys last last night.

³ One, Ariel Ries of Witchy, uses the pronoun they; the others describe themselves in bios using explicitly female pronouns or depict themselves in their comics as women.