Friday! SPX is kicking off in mere hours in Bethesda. TopatoCon has its pre-opening concert in a week. More importantly, it’s almost the weekend. Let’s party.

• Speaking of TopatoCon, comics and science fan Propriety had a great idea, shared on Twitter, that I think should become standard for humane-scale cons: a modification of the showfloor map with creator avatars. Brilliant idea, let’s see if it can become a standard.
• Speaking of both TopatoCon and SPX, know who’s gonna be there? Well, lots of people, but I’m talking about KC Green at the moment. Green’s been alluding on the social media about a mysterious creative task that was taking a lot of his time, and he told us today what it is:
  

  i think i can finally say something a out this: I’m doing a one shot Invader Zim comic issue http://www.previewsworld.com/Home/1/1/71/920?stockItemID=OCT151570 …

  Thinking on the words Invader Zim and comic book and writer-artist, there is no place that you can go for a satisfying outcome except for KC Green. Oni made the 10000% correct choice; this is gonna be great.

• Speaking of SPX, be sure to see the many awesome creators that work with :01 Books who’ll be there. And when you get back, check out the latest :01 Books blogtour, celebrating the launch of Fable Comics from Monday. I’d point out that come the 30th, the blogtour will land here at Fleen where we’ll be talking about the absolutely stellar Jaime Hernandez and his take on The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but modesty forbids.

Weekend. Enjoy the crap out of it, see you next week at TopatoCon!

Spam of the day:

HEY! Noticed you on FB and was hoping maybe we could hook up.

I think you mistake me for somebody who has a Facebook account. I mean, I’m sure a complete stranger who makes that basic a mistake is exactly who I want to hook up with.

In rough chronological order.

• It has been nearly six months since we noted that it had been a year since Achewood last updated. As I feel I must always point out when mentioning Achewood’s update schedule, this should not be taken as a critique of Chris Onstad. Frankly, if the page never again updates and we are left forever with a vignette of Ramses Luther Smuckles forever contemplating his Journey, eviscerations, and the milk-eyed son of a slack-tittied dog, then that will be just marvelous; like a Zen garden, there are contemplative depths in those fourteen panels, and I can look at them forever.

  No, I mention the hiatus because Onstad is not idle; I noticed over the span of summer that Onstad had done a series of paintings for sale, but somehow missed the earlier announcement that there were also commissions being taken and originals in a new gallery site. So I’m grateful that Chris Sims at Comics Alliance noticed and shared that knowledge.

  Commissions, you guys, and original art. And, most excitingly, hand-painted enlargements of your favorite panels. I did not realize until today what it was that I most wanted in life and now I know.

  I have written of missing the opportunity to get my copy of The Great Outdoor Fight inscribed with Ramses Luther Smuckles¹, and am now trying to decide what panel would best remedy that situation. Silent and foreboding, as here? With Sondra, in a moment of tenderness here²? Contemplating the staff of life and the relative merits of KitchenAid stand mixers in panel four? Time to start looking at the budget and making a decision.

• Three and a half weeks ago I shared with you the closest thing I have to religion and the opportunity to get it on a notebook. At the time I exhorted all of you to pledge, on account of I want my notebook. It appears that you did not listen to me. As of this writing, the Book Block project is sitting at a mere 45% of goal with 16 days to go, and the per-day data are looking downright anemic.

  So let me reiterate: I want my notebook, and if this project fails I am going to hunt down every single one of you bozos that thinks to yourself Hey that’s pretty neat I ought to pledge oh darn it closed two days ago. Although, to be fair, the project runners have been damn quiet of late — one update four days after launch, a second four days later, and nothing for the past three weeks. I’ve exchanged emails with the creators, so understand I am prodding them as well as you. To all concerned, I re-reiterate: I want my notebook and none of us wants to see the other outcome. Pledge!

• A week back I shared with you the happy news of a new Perry Bible Fellowship strip, and seven days later another new strip popped up in my RSS feed. Dare we hope … weekly?

Spam of the day:

Hello admin, i see your website needs fresh content. If you are too lazy to write unique posts everyday you should search in google for

Attention Workers it has been 127 days since our last dumbest spam sentence

_______________
¹ Make no mistake, I am thrilled with Cornelius Bear, but who could resist the allure of The Man With The Blood On His Hands?

² Or, if I’m feeling like dropping class money several times over, that second row as Ramses Luther removes the cap from Lyle’s beer.

Also squirrels. Friggin’ squirrels, man. Let’s talk about things that don’t suck.

• Readers of this page will know that I greatly enjoy the work of David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and amateur Mr Bean impersonator), a man who has gifted the world with literally an infinite amount of webcomics, and a man to whom I cannot give money in exchange for goods because he has not attempted to monetize his best-known effort, Irregular Webcomic¹. For some short while now, he’s been running a Patreon to offset costs, and hopefully reduce his day job by one day per fortnight.

  And, of late, for another reason. Morgan-Mar has been publicly musing about the possibility of finally doing a print collection of Irregular Webcomic, but as the strip is largely composed of tableaus (tableaux?) of LEGO-brand figures, he needed to navigate their intellectual property boundaries carefully. Not wanting to unleash a torrent of IANAL on Dr Morgan-Mar², I kept quiet as he mentioned that Patreon funds would be going to find competent legal advice on issues of international intellectual property³.

  But that all changed today:

  There’s plenty of net.advice saying that parody is Fair Use of copyright material, but this doesn’t apply for two reasons: (1) I’m concerned about misusing LEGO’s trademarks, not copyright. Also those of Star Wars and Harry Potter, for those comic themes. And (2) I live in Australia, where there is no such thing as Fair Use. (We have Fair Dealing, which is a less permissive law than US Fair Use.) Basically, I have no real idea if I could publish IWC for profit without violating LEGO’s intellectual property.

  …

  I have just signed an agreement to have the lawyers investigate the relevant trademark laws and provide me with professional legal advice. [emphasis mine]

  So, with an actual lawyer consulting actual laws, hopefully Morgan-Mar will not be best by armchair attorneys all day and night, and even more hopefully I’ll be able to exchange money for a copy of an IWC book sooner rather than later. Oh, and if the attorney’s advice comes back as It’s a shame you aren’t in the US, their laws would let you do this but Australia’s won’t, I’m sure that Katie Lane and Make That Thing would just love to find an excuse to head to Sydney for business meetings with Morgan-Mar If you want to see all this come to pass (and honestly, who wouldn’t?), keep that support going to Morgan-Mar at his Patreon.

• Sneaky webcomic of the day goes to Jeffrey Rowland, whose 16 page return to the adventures of Topato and Sheriff Pony (who have gotten kind of … doughy since we saw them last) led through a philosophy of capitalism, a quick peek at an older Wigu Tinkle & family, and ended in naked shilling for TopatoCon.

  I am in awe of the sheer coincidence that a con being put on by Rowland’s company wound up being referenced in Rowland’s comic. And I am delighted to think that by going to TopatoCon in, oh, ten days, I may be contributing directly to the ongoing existence of the Butter Dimensions. I would only add, on behalf of Topato and Sheriff Pony, that in addition to intangible currency, you spend lots and lots of tangible currency with all the exhibitors in Eastworks. Do it to keep existence existing.

• From the comments yesterday:
  

  Kate Beaton did a Q&A on Tumblr the other day. In general, the way she talks to her fans online makes me think that she is basically the best person ever.

  Jacob, in that assessment you would be entirely correct. For those interested in some of those Qs and As (on the day of Step Aside, Pops! launching) and how awesome Beaton is with her fans, check out this, this, this, this, especially this, this, and this.

Spam of the day:

Hi Dear,

Let me stop you right there. Sending a spam in the name of noted philanthropist Charles Feeney, claiming to want to give me a large amount of money, in case I did a 10 second Google search and decided things are more plausible because that’s an actual person? That’s pretty evil. More importantly, I’ve never met Mr Feeney, but I don’t think he’s the sort to open a business email with “Dear”. Maybe if I was his kid? Then again, I am adopted … so he might … I MUST RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL AND GET MY MILLIONS. SO LONG, SUCKERS, I’MA BUY ME SOME BETTER FRIENDS.

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¹ Although I would be remiss if I didn’t point out his Star Trek recap comic, Planet of Hats, does sell originals.

² Which he received anyway.

³ Morgan-Mar lives in Australia,the LEGO empire is Danish, likely the majority of his customer base is in North America.

Books, books, bookity-books!

• Oh yes, it’s here at long last! It of course, is the long-awaited Step Aside, Pops! from the stellar Kate Beaton, and by here I mean in general release since I haven’t snagged a copy at Fleen Central yet. Nevertheless, I’m willing to give this one a big ol’ recommendation on blind faith on account of Our Kate is the most reliably funny person working in comics today. Go get it.
• Oddly, one place that you can’t get Step Aside, Pops! is on comiXology, who announced earlier today that Drawn + Quarterly (Beaton’s publisher) is now distributing nineteen books through the e-comics platform, but I guess not on day-of-release. I went to see if D+Q had any remarks about this (aside from the canned quotes from publisher Peggy Burns in the press release), and it appears not¹.

  Anyway, the D+Q books available via comiXology at launch include work by Peter Bagge, Lynda Barry, Chester Brown, Guy Delisle, Tom Gauld, Gilbert Hernandez, Miriam Katin, Rutu Modan, Anders Nilsen, and Brian Ralph.

• Setting what may be the world land speed record for getting a Kickstarted book designed, printed, and to backers, Matt Bors announced that Eat More Comics will definitely be at SPX (so drop him an email if you’re a backer and want to pick it up in person), that Make That Thing will be shipping immediately on receipt of their inventory, and that if you weren’t a backer, you can put in a pre-order now at TopatoCo to be shipped after the KS backers are shipped, estimated to be 5 October.

  As a reminder, the campaign closed on 12 August, 34 days ago. Books will be place in hand on Saturday, four days from now. Five and a half weeks is unheard of in Kickstartistan, a country where late deliveries in the months-to-years timeframe are not particularly rare. Kudos to Bors, The Nib associate editor Matt Lubchansky (who related stories to me of book layout and custom comic drawing), and everybody else that’s had a hand in showing what a little organization (or, more likely, frantic all-nighters) can accomplish.

• Finally, I’ve seen it mentioned several places, but Colleen AF Venable was the first I saw to mention it, so credit to her. Noelle Stevenson’s print collection of Nimona made the longlist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

  Previous graphic works recognized by the NBA include American Born Chinese (finalist, YPL, 2006), and Boxers & Saints (finalist, YPL, 2003), both by Gene Luen Yang; Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (finalist, Nonfiction 2014), although none has yet snagged the highly-respected honor. Here’s hoping Stevenson is the first, if only because the NBA could use a winner that espouse the most useful philosophy I’ve ever seen:

  I’M A SHARK AAAHH

  Frankly, I can’t think of a better message for Literature to convey to Young People.

Spam of the day:

DID YOU GET MY EMAIL?

Oh, my. “Mrs Grace Fernandez”, who really wants to give me US$20 million, is getting impatient and following up to make sure that I got the earlier spams that went straight into the trash. Gotta almost admire the thoroughness of a thief that sends follow-up messages.

I declare BOGO on Spam of the day!

Dear Valued Customer, You have a new security of Wells Fargo. please Follow the link below now to confirm your details

Wow. Wow. You know what? If I’m stupid enough to click on that hot mess, I deserve to have all my money stolen. Just … wow.

_______________
¹ Also, their website doesn’t load at all in my preferred browser — complaints about not being able to open secure transactions — and other browsers don’t let me so much as click on links without activating Flash and that ain’t happening. Great publisher, wonderful books, disappointing website.

As mentioned previously, Fleen is happy to contribute today to the ongoing celebration of Ben Hatke’s Little Robot, a wholly delightful book you may recall from our review.

Gina Gagliano at :01 Books was kind enough to arrange for Mr Hatke to answer some questions, which we present below; as the questions touch on specifics of things that happen in the books, be away that here be spoilers.

Fleen thanks Ben Hate, Gina Gagliano, and everybody at :01 Books for helping put this conversation together. If you haven’t gotten a copy of Little Robot for the kid(s) in your life (or yourself, that’s allowed), please do so. It’s a delight. The Little Robot blogtour concludes tomorrow at Cuddlebuggery.

Spam of the day:
We’re giving spam the day off, seeing as how Hatke’s book has put us in too good a mood to deal with spammers.

Man, I dig exhibitor maps for conventions. I love being able to figure out my approach to talk to all the people I want to talk to in the least amount of time. Sometimes the maps are huge and sprawling, and sometimes there’s no point in trying to point out where the cool web/indie-comics types are because you’d just end up putting a circle on the entire damn map that says HERE on it.

• It’s the latter case that we concern ourselves with today, as both the SPX and TopatoCon exhibitor maps have gone up, and they’re chock full of creators you’re going to want to see. They’re also on a humane scale, so I don’t have to do one of those maps-hacks where I show you where to go on the showfloor, as I’ll have to do sometime next week for NYCC¹.
• Since we’re already talking about TopatoCon (because let’s face it, we’re always talking about TopatoCon), one might point out a couple of new programs on the schedule. At noon on Sunday, please note the killer description for Pleasure Is The Measure:
  

  Join us for a sciencey, sexy, feminist conversation about women, their bodies, and comics — featuring Kate Leth (Kate Or Die), Jess Fink (Chester 5000), Danielle Corsetto (Girls With Slingshots), and Spike (Smut Peddler) and moderated by NYT bestselling author Dr. Emily Nagoski (Come As You Are).

  Smart ladies who know their way around what makes things sexy as all hell? Yes, please.

• Also, one modestly points you to the new official description of the 5:00pm Saturday event in the podcast space²:
  

  Join host Gary Tyrrell (fleen.com) as our three contestants Frank Gibson (Bee & Puppycat, Capture Creatures), Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Darkest Part Of The Forest) and Holly Rowland (TopatoCo VP) square off in a tournament-style cocktail challenge. Each contestant will be given a box of mystery ingredients and will make up a theme cocktail on the fly. One contestant will be eliminated in each round by a panel of judges chosen from the audience. Who will emerge victorious and who will get 86’d?

  86’d/eighty-sixed is bartender slang for cut off and ejected from the establishment; think Chopped but for booze. This is gonna be fun, and I want to make ti clear that I am not the one putting together the challenges and will be just as surprised with what the contestants have to work with as you will. It’s not Cutthroat Bar and I am not channeling my inner Evil Alton Brown³.

  Oh, and because it’s a damn shame that cocktail enthusiast Christopher Hasting will have to miss Boozetopia (due to his comedy-writing workshop happening at the same time), I will need a volunteer to take the best drink of each round across the hall to him.

  Also, if you are going to be at TopatoCon, are at least 21 years old, and interested in being a judge for 86’d, I’m looking for people who will be able to articulate what they like (or don’t) about a drink, not just chug the damn thing with an eye towards getting wasted. Please email me (gary) with the subject line TASTING AND JUDGMENT, at this-here website (fleen.com).

• Speaking of Hastings, news comes today that once again Marvel is coming to him to add to their cape-comedy offerings:
  

  The Gwen Stacy/Deadpool mash-up begins in a three-part back-up story by writer Christopher Hastings and artist Danilo Beyruth beginning in Howard the Duck #1 and going through the two subsequent issues.

  In December’s Gwenpool Special #1, She-Hulk throws a holiday party and invites many Marvel luminaries, with Gwenpool showing up. Writers Gerry Duggan, Charles Soule and Christopher Hastings, along with artists Danilo Beyruth, Langdon Foss, Gurihiru are listed for the book.

  Marvel, just do what we all know you need to do and give Hastings and ongoing title where he can blend the action with the goofy. Because is there anybody else that would throw in a scene with Tony Stark telling Reed Richards about how many weddings he’d been to that summer where Get Lucky got played⁴? No, there is not, and that little bit of human interaction is what’s missing from so many cape books (the magnificent Squirrel Girl excepted, obviously). Give him a book, Marvel. Doooo iiiiiit.

Spam of the day:

Hi, I do think this is a great website. I stumbledupon it ;)

I never use StumbleUpon; it renders like shit in my browser.

_______________
¹ Also, I’m never thrilled with the interactive maps that take you someplace else every time you click on the damn thing and which require JavaScript/Flash to run and are completely useless on mobile.

² AKA the bar.

³ Maybe next year.

⁴ Four.

New PBF, y’all, and thanks to the magic of RSS, it was waiting there for me at the end of work yesterday.

There’s something about early post-summer that seems to invite the launching of webcomics. Yesterday we noted fourteen years of Wapsi Square¹, and today marks five years of Dumbing of Age, itself a reboot of the Walkyverse, which launched on the same day in nineteen holy cripes ninety-seven and relaunched in reruns on the same day again in the rather recent 2012.

So I guess the early post-summer days are really a David Willis thing, and everybody else is along for the ride. I don’t know what he was thinking when he launched Shortpacked in January, but his obsessive need of symmetry was at least observed in ending that strip on the same January day ten years later. Honestly, between this tendency and his obsession with Batman, he’s very nearly a calendar-themed minor villain. He doesn’t really do anything wrong, but that’s no guarantee he won’t get beaten by a billionaire ninja if there aren’t any murder clowns around.

Oh, wait, one thing that might be wrong from the perspective of his fellow webcomickers: today’s Dumbing of Age shows that Willis now has a comic buffer through 1 January 2016 (112 days from now), so he’s probably in for some stink-eye next time he’s hanging around somebody that’s running late. David Willis, happy double strippaversary, and I declare your Bat-villian name to be: FUTURETOON.

Spam of the day:

Kära företagskund, Du har fått ett nytt internt meddelande. Klicka för att se.
I’m told this means: Dear business customer, You have a new internal message. Click to see. Funny, I don’t remember opening any business accounts in Sweden.

_______________
¹ It might stretch the definition of early post-summer, but I may as well note that 1 October will also mark 14 years of Achewood, hiatusy though it be.

Let’s do ’em in reverse order.

• Paul Taylor has been cranking out Wapsi Square for fourteen — count ’em, fourteen! — years now. The initial slice-of-life story pretty quickly turned to the mildly supernatural, then evolved a full-blown mythology and world-threatening danger tied to the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse that got resolved a good two years before deadline.

  The strip went back to life-slicing but Taylor couldn’t stay away from the weird and he’s introduced a new generation of characters — not humans interacting with a supernatural world, but teen paranormal creatures. That’s about five shifts in focus in fourteen years, and no sign of where it leads next. Happy strippaversary, Wapsi Square.

• Lucy Knisley does autobio unlike anybody else — she finds a way to chop her life and experiences into discrete stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Sometimes it’s around a time in life that has a fixed duration (like her travelogues), sometimes it’s around a theme (like her food-centered stories), and now she’ll be telling us about what it was like to get married — the time when distance caused a split from her boyfriend, the realization that they couldn’t be apart, the run-up to the wedding, and what’s happened in the year since. Her work is always a treat, and the cover for Something New has debuted over at Bustle. Check ‘er out, and put in your pre-order now, because this book is mathematically certain to be great.
• Here we are, some two and a half weeks out from TopatoCon, and the announcements just keep coming.
  • There’s the entirely sweet show poster by Catie Donnelly, for starters; I can’t wait to see it printed up nice and large so I can read the entire story that’s being told in emoji¹.
  • Consensus on the Tweets-Machine is that the dapper bearded dude dancing at the front of the stage is Tony Breed, who would like you to know that he’s started a info-clearinghouse type blog creators and creations at TopatoCon, where you can get the skinny on LGTBQ creators and works to be featured at the show. Check out (and submit to!) TopatoQueers over on Tumblr.
  • Other constituencies are emerging inside the ad hoc culture that is forming around TopatoCon²; TopatoJam will be hosting game developers in parallel with TopatoCon, courtesy of Pioneer Valley Game Developers.
  • Want to help spread the word about TopatoCon? Join the street team, get a ticket.

  TopatoCon will run Saturday and Sunday, 26 and 27 September at Eastworks in Easthampton, Massachusetts. See you there.

Spam of the day:

I am really enjoying the theme/design of your website. Do you ever run into any web browser compatibility problems?

You don’t really care about the answer to that question, given the context of the rest of your comment, but I’ll answer anyway: No, I don’t. Because websites don’t need to be complicated things. They can be just some graphics and text, which has the added benefit of not taking friggin’ forever to load.

_______________
¹ Suck it, Moby-Dick.

² And we all now how ad hoc cultures are. The armies that coalesce might build themselves some cardboard fortresses. And if that’s not enough, I hear that the mastermind behind Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle will be at Eastworks during TopatoCon weekend.

Hey, welcome back from the long weekend (those of you the States), or just to a random Tuesday (everybody else). Got some things to recommend to you, in the positive and negative senses.

• Maritza Campos and Bachan’s Power Nap is a weird, wildly creative, half-hallucinatory romp o’ fun, and they’re presently crowdfunding their second print collection. A bit atypically for webcomics, they’re doing the Power Nap collctions in a thinner, Euro-style presentation rather than the thick, halfway-to-omnibus style you get in American comics (print and web).

  Naturally, it’ll be full color, the better to make all those gorgeous dreamscapes pop. And I would be remiss to not point out that five readers have a chance to make a cameo in the strip, presumably to be killed in some horrible, hilarious fashion. I positively recommend you get in on this while the gettin’s good (the campaign will run for another 36 days, after that no promises you’ll be able to snag a copy).

• Following up on our earlier story, it appears that the Cartoon Art Museum has nailed down the talent list for this week’s Night of 1000 Sketches, likely the last fundraiser to take place at CAM’s current location in the Mission District of San Francisco.

  Remember, that’s this Thursday, 10 September, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, with tickets ranging from US$10 to US$100 (the more you pay, the more drinks, sketches, and goodies you get). Tickets are available here, along with a list of the 36 artists who will be sketchin’ their hearts out¹ to benefit CAM’s venue shift. Anybody in the greater Bay Area on Thursday, I recommend this one most positively.

• I also want to positively recommend that you check out the ongoing blog tour for Ben Hatke’s Little Robot, which will be landing here at Fleen on Monday. In the meantime, check out the other places that are talking about Hatke’s latest (and possibly most personal) children’s book at the blog tour HQ.
• Know what’s positively hilarious? Watching people at the website of a comics syndicate trying to wrap their brains around the comics of Jon Rosenberg², selections of whose Scenes From A Multiverse started running at GoComics yesterday.

  My favorite was from the individual who described SFAM as, quote, Mediocre newcomer to gocomics [sic], unquote. Moments later the same person flagged as a favorite this Heathcliff comic, and today was puzzled by a Peanuts strip due to not knowing what the word pompous means. Recommend Rosenberg’s comics for the giggles, double-recommend the confused reactions for double-giggles.

• I promised some negativity, so here we go. I got an email that insisted I had signed up for news from a self-described film production company (I didn’t) that thinks it’s very important for me to tell you about a contest they’re running to design a spaceship for a movie that they say is going to have a Kickstarter, but doesn’t yet. So let me tell you about it.

  The rules tell what they want (broad outlines for the spaceship, deadline, etc), but don’t say boo about rights or what they do with the entries that don’t win. The awards section specifies that the winner will get to do a bunch of stuff:

  – You get an opportunity to have your design included in the TRIBORN universe.
  – You will have an opportunity to work with the production design team as they model and build from your design
  – You will get to design the interior of the cockpit that will be built into a set.
  – You get a special credit in the movie as a concept designer.
  – You will get a one day pass to set in the Los Angeles area during the making of this movie with the opportunity to meet Ricco Ross, plus other cast and crew members. You will see your design in action, get photos of yourself on the set you designed, hang out with cast & crew, and get some other free swag (travel and lodging not provided).

  Anybody want to tell me what’s not included in that list of fabulous prizes? Like maybe compensation (above and beyond the promised free swag) for getting to work with the actual paid people, and getting to do additional design work? They aren’t even promising the bullshit reward of exposure³ because the only exposure they’re offering is a special credit in the end credits of a movie that nobody is ever going to see and which means exactly jack.

  Oh, but they get to share your design on their websites and social media, so the more they get people to draw for free, the more content they have to draw eyeballs to their site (their rules don’t specify you get so much as a link back). So I recommend most heartily that you submit entries to them that consist of a spaceship that resembles the words FUCK YOU, PAY ME.

  I doubt they’re the sort to learn their lesson and resolve to do better, but pointing out how much they suck could at least be amusing.

Spam of the day:

Update Account (Final Notice)
You received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes in services.
Your account gary[at]fleen.com will be terminated if you don’t respond immediately.

You mean the account that I control will somehow be cut off if I don’t click on your link? Wow, how does that work?

_______________
¹ In order to make the name of the event not be a tremendous lie, they will each have to draw approximately 28 sketches, or a bit more than 9 per hour (or one every 6.5 minutes) during the evening. Give an artist a drink ticket and they’ll probably make the sketch 37% awesomer.

² The soulkeeper.

³ Quoting again, as we must, Rich Stevens: People die of exposure.

Hey. So I have to travel I-95 — aka Satan’s Own Highway — alter this afternoon, the Friday before a long weekend. This is gonna be brief.

SPX has revealed its programming slate, and it appears to be the usual (i.e.: high on quality, low on quantity). Each day will feature two rooms of programming, one with events on the hour, the other with events on the half hour, from midday on. Highlights include:

• Saturday at noon the slate kicks off on a high note, a combined spotlight panel on Kate Beaton and Noelle Stevenson.
• Food, man, food. Tasty Comics will be about the intersection of food and comics, with Robin Ha, Jade Lee, Eric Colossal, and Jessi Zabarsky, moderated by Lauren Jordan. Get hungry at 1:30pm.
• Comics are for everybody, and the straight white dude hegemony is starting (oh so slowly) to fade. Black Art Matters (with Darryl Ayo, Ron Wimberly, Whit Taylor, and Spike Trotman) drop some truth at 2:00pm, and Queer and Here to Make Comics! (Anna Archie Bongiovanni, Yao Xiao, Hazel Newlevant, and Kevin Jay Stanton, with Dylan Edwards moderating) reveal the secrets of the dreaded Queer Comics Agenda¹ at 6:00pm.
• Sunday starts off as well as Saturday, with the first panel on sexy, sexy times and the message that Erotic Comics are for Everybody! (Sarah Winifred Searle, Anna Bongiovanni, Paul Reinwand, and Spike Trotman, under the loving guidance of Jess Fink) at 12:30pm.
• Scott McCloud. 1:00pm. Come for the second half if you can’t drag yourself away from the sexy times.
• Comics and the internet will be the focus of Dear Internet: Today I Made a Comic. Now What? at 3:30pm; join Molly Ostertag, Aatmaja Pandya, Matt Bors, and Comixology’s John Roberts, with Jen Vaughn moderating.

Have a heck of a weekend, Statesians. Maybe I’ll see you on Monday, maybe not.

Spam of the day:

Download Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star Movie.

I wouldn’t watch that shit with your eyes, my friend; I ain’t gonna watch it with mine.

______________
¹ Make comics while queer.