This bit about pushing all non-:01 Books content to the side becomes a bit hard when there’s something as significant as the announcement that SPX and Nickelodeon are partnering up for animation pitches¹. We’ll leave my thoughts for the footnotes.

In the meantime, we have two (two!) books to discuss today, in the form of Ben Hatke’s Little Robot, and the anthology Fable Comics. Unsurprisingly, they are both highly suitable for the younger reader (perhaps listener) in your life.

Little Robot is a bit of a departure for Hatke; it’s not the rolicking adventure story of Zita the Spacegirl, nor the almost entirely sweet Julia’s House For Lost Creatures. Little Robot occupies a middle position between the two — incorporating the lush illustrations and storybook nature of Julia’s, but getting into the more melancholy themes of the Zita books. This is particularly impressive because Little Robot features a pair of protagonists who don’t get names.

There’s a girl, and she lives a life without luxury (not deprivation, but pretty low on the socioeconomic scale); she doesn’t have friends her age around, but she has the wild woods (based on Hatke’s own Shenandoah Valley home) to explore and a junkyard of stuff to mess with and a bag of tools for repairs. She’s young, she’s solitary, she’s barefoot and poor, but she ain’t stupid.

There’s a robot, lost from where he was supposed to be; we don’t know entirely what his designation or purpose are, but when he goes missing his masters are pretty quick to send out some big hardware to find him, trampling over anything in the way.

The girl and the robot become friends, but a bit haltingly — neither has much experience with it — and it’s a friendship that’s punctuated by jealousy and possessiveness and jerkish behavior. In other words, a perfect representation of how a young child would act in uncertain circumstances; our characters are no angels, and no matter how much they want to be good friends, they aren’t entirely certain what that means.

Angry fight followed by rejection or not, when your friend gets snatched up by a giant robot and whisked away to who-knows-what, you grab your favorite wrench and head out to mess stuff up. It’s a neat journey about finding friends, making (literally) friends, and being overwhelmed by friends. There’s a bit of betrayal and darkness in the middle, and it ends up in a good place because girl and robot work for it to. Kudos to Hatke for not hiding the tougher aspects of friendship, and for giving us a (female, poor, rural, brown) POV character that’s demographically unlike the audience that many books get pitched to.

Fable Comics is the third Chris Duffy-edited collection of the world’s best cartoonists tacking some of the world’s best-loved stories; like Nursery Rhyme Comics and Fairy Tale Comics before it, Fable Comics splits its contents between stories likely familiar to its audience (lot of Aesop here) and stories that are likely new (there are Chinese and Angolan and Native American fables, and stories taken from the Panchatantra and the satires of Ivan Krylov and Ambrose Bierce).

Standouts include a very James Kochalka take on the story of the Fox and the Gapes, Sophie Goldstein’s take on a hungry leopard and clever deer, R Sikoryak telling the story of the lion and the mouse by way of Krazy Kat, and a series of short pieces by George O’Connor tied together by the presence of Hermes (who he hasn’t gotten around to yet in his excellent Olympians series).

Honestly, though, every piece has art that suits the story, an intact lesson, and the clever (and stupid, and generous, and wise, and venal, and hubristic, and greedy, and, and, and …) animals that have captured our imaginations for millenia. Perfect for reading a story or two at bedtime for a week or two.

Little Robot releases 1 September; Fable Comics three weeks later on 22 September — plenty of time to brush up on your animal and robot voices for when you read them to the kid(s) in your life. As always, we at Fleen thank Gina Gagliano and everybody at :01 for the review copies.

Spam of the day:

A good trained locksmith could easily put in a CCTV plus suggest you the most effective options available inside market

I put a Post-It note scrap over the webcam on my laptops; you think I’m putting CCTV cameras in my house? Not a chance.

_______________
¹ In which I find it odd that no mention of the pairing appears on the SPX website yet. There was a good back-and-forth on the pros and cons between the Twitter accounts of Meredith Gran and Christopher Butcher that you should go look at.

Please note the past tense of the conversation; both Gran and Butcher said what they felt was important, and I doubt neither is interested in reopening things, so please do not read two tweets, decide that somebody is wrong on the internet and get all foamy at the mouth.

But Gary, doesn’t this imply that you think that Butcher and Gran are smarter than we are and we should just shut up and let the grown-ups talk?

No Comment.

And my goodness, there are things happening that didn’t originate with :01 Books (if you can imagine such a thing): Emily Carroll did the illustrations on a new book that released yesterday; the Jim Zub-penned Skullkickers (with the vast majority of art duties over the past five years and three dozen issues handled by Edwin Huang and Misty Coats) comes to an end as a comic book today, although it lives on in webcomic reruns (where it’s probably got about half a year to go).

But there are two pieces of :01 discussion I wanted to have today.

First, the book that I will be discussing in detail below is the first mentioned here at Fleen to be designed by Danielle Ceccolini, whose hiring I mentioned in conjunction with last year’s New York Comic Con. Some of the review copies I’ve received have Ceccolini designing covers for books that have predecessors in a series, or which are designed with one or more other people; solo standalone books are also in the stack. There’s a long lead time on publishing, and I’m certain that Ceccolini is thrilled to see the first tranche of her designs finally getting out into the world.

Second, that book is The Chase, the third volume of the Last Man series. This is the book where the pattern established in the previous two gets upended, and which sets a new pattern that wasn’t previously apparent.

The upended pattern is that it’s a Eurocomic-style fight-tournament manga; it’s got ritualized fighting elements, but it’s more of a mystery story. The oddly medieval/magical land of the first two books is left behind for a more decaying society teetering on the edge of chaos. It’s not quite a Mad Maxian postapocalypse, more like a failed state that is in a pre-post-apocalypse rut; we see hints that there are more civilized corners of the world where technology is made instead of scavenged.

Other parts of the decaying wasteland motif are turned upside down as well — there are the uncontrolled, semi-mutant “police” and “justice system” that are a thin veneer of pretense over barbarism, which we’ve seen a million times before. But in that decaying world where the cops are literal bandits, did you ever wonder what the firefighters are like?

They’re pretty bestial, but they are determined to help and are willing to enthusiastically run over anything in their way to be of service, even get into a brawl with the cops if that’s what it takes. They’re in the book for three pages, max, and if they’re just as quasi-semi-mutant-pre-post-apocalyptic as the rest of a every-man-for-himself society, they are at least selflessly so. It’s a fresh and hilarious take on the trope, and they are just one of the twists to be seen here in the borderlands.

The new pattern is right there on the spine of the book — at the very bottom of spine, below the :01 log is a thumbnail of the character that dominates the book. It wasn’t obvious before, but book one was really all about young Adrian Velba, book two about mysterious stranger Richard Aldana, and book three is about Adrian’s mother, Marianne.

She was a typical mother looking out for a young kid before; now she’s revealed to be knowledgeable about the wide world, an extraordinarily resourceful traveler, a crazy-skilled (to the point of nigh-suicidal) motorcyclist, and the most dangerous fighter we’ve seen yet. She consistently underplays her hand until things get seriously dangerous, then she hands this lawless pseudo-quasi-semi-mutant-pre-post-apoacalyptic town’s brutal enforcement regime its ass without breaking a sweat. Marianne Velba is not a slightly overprotective mom but rather a rampaging valkyrie who will lay waste to anything that threatens her son or obstructs her path of discovery.

But more importantly, this is her book, no question, making it clear that Last Man is going to have shifting protagonists; maybe book four will give us a new POV character, maybe we’ll rotate back through the three we’ve seen already. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time the series is done it turns out it was mostly Marianne’s story and should have been called Last Woman.

Last Man: The Chase is by Bastien Vivès, Michaël Sanlaville, and Balak, with translation from the French by Alexis Siegel. It releases on 6 October, which should give you enough time to find and absorb Last Man: The Stranger and Last Man: The Royal Cup, and try to figure out where the story is going. As always, Fleen thanks Gina Gagliano at :01 for providing the review copies.

Spam of the day:

Famous Theological Uncovers Church Conspiracy No.6283187

They’re numbering Church conspiracies now? That’s pretty organized.

As we saw yesterday, other things are occurring in webcomics — Tavis Maiden is Kickstarting print volume 1 of Tenko King and more than halfway there; Wes Molebash has launched his latest strip about family, Molebashed¹ — but you’ll have to follow up on those by yourself. Because today is dedicated to continuing our dive into the cornucopia of graphic novel goodness that Gina Gagliano at :01 Books was kind enough on me. I speak, naturally, of review copies, and we look today at the book that has the greatest potential to change lives.

I know that we all talk about how a particular book (or record, or movie, or whatever) changed our lives, but Secret Coders (words by Gene Luen Yang and pictures by Mike Holmes) may make the cliche literally true. In order to explain why, I have to tell you about three times that my life was nudged into the direction that ultimately stuck.

Firstly, I am of an age such that I experienced the educational experiment known as The New Math; along with the approach to teaching arithmetic described by Professor Lehrer, I was taught set theory at the age of six: sets, intersections, unions, differences, subsets, supersets, and Venn diagrams². Nobody gave much thought to what a six year old would actually do with set theory, so it lay dormant in the back of my brain.

In early high school, my father and I soldered together our first computer, a Sinclair ZX-81, and in my spare time I picked up a copy of Larry Gonick’s sadly out of print 1982 edition of The Cartoon Guide to Computer Science. I learned about names like Babbage and Lovelace, Hollerith and Turing, Von Neumann and Zuse, and Mauchley and Boole and Hopper and especially Claude Shannon. The others were obsessed with making machines to compute, Shannon was obsessed with the communication and density of information³, and that seed nudged me in the direction of communications and information theory during my college career.

About the same time, I was watching my four year old niece play on the computer — she showed me how drawing the lines and using the symbols would make a little raccoon dance — and it dawned on me that she didn’t know how she was being trained to think logically. The symbols she was drawing were logic gates and the lines she was drawing were were signal pathways; she was getting her own version of the Venn diagrams that I’d had nearly two decades earlier, until she got bored with the exciting low-res RGB display and it would enter its own dormancy period in her brain. Some time later, I stared my present career teaching databases, and those Venn diagrams became even more important so that I could describe relational theory and the whole thing came full circle.

The lessons, taken together, are these: you can teach very sophisticated ideas to very young kids; words + pictures have a uniquely strong impact when it comes to teaching; making it into a game (instead of math class) makes it more likely to make the jump from dormant to obsession.

Which is why Secret Coders might read as a somewhat simplistic story of a school with mysterious secrets, outcast students determined to figure them out, and reasonably obvious puzzles woven into the text with a Can you figure it out? presentation style.

Except the first of those secrets? It’s how to do math in binary. And those puzzles? The solutions are computer programs, in Logo to be specific. The characters might be middle schoolers, but the book is aimed at kids eight and up, just about the exact age cohort that got Venn diagrams 40 years ago and dancing raccoons 30 years ago. The lessons are hidden in the games, but the outcome is children will think logically, solve problems by breaking them down, and incorporate concepts like sequencing and recursion.

Yang (a computer geek since the summer after fifth grade, according to the afterword) clearly had his own version of those three moments, because the three lessons that I learned over the course of 25 years are fairly jumping off the pages. And if Yang’s figured out how to set out the puzzles in a way that grade schoolers can follow, Holmes has created vibrant, engaging, easy-to-follow illustrations for those abstract ideas so that the kidlings won’t get lost.

The ability to not just use technology, but to be in control of it, will be of greater importance to the kids that read Secret Coders than it would have been to me at that age; I am part of the last generation where the path of being completely non-technological would not be an impediment, but today it’s a necessity. The world needs engineers and engineers need to learn how to approach problems with the tools available and bash their way to solutions. Learn a little Logo without realizing it? It’s a quick jump from there to other languages, and from there to a controller that moves a robot, or gathers up data, or keeps a rocket on path. In twenty, thirty years somebody that’s changing the world is going to remember Secret Coders (and its sequels, this is a series) and realize it was the moment that everything got nudged into a particular direction.

Secret Coders releases 29 September; that’s enough time to find a ROM of Rocky’s Boots for the budding programmer in your life.

Spam of the day:

You must be aware that you will find ways to Prevent Identity Theft when you are working wirelessly.

Like not working on the access point named OMG SUPER FREE WIFI HERE?

_______________
¹ We at Fleen do not condone the bashing of moles, and are surprised that Molebash — a pastor! — would engage in such a barbaric practice. For shame, sir. For shame.

² Venn diagrams were the best thing of all because it let you do math by drawing with crayons. That habit never really left me, as I fell back in later years to graphical approximations in lieu of formulae to the consternation of every math teacher I ever had in school, but to the utter delight of my Electromagnetic Fields professor, Dr Frank Acker, who regarded approximation as the engineer’s birthright.

³ Also juggling, unicycling, and the construction of robots to juggle and/or unicycle. Also rocket frisbees. He’s basically my hero and the person that the 21st century most depends on that you’ve never heard of. That book fell apart from overuse fifteen years ago and I can still see every scribbly drawing of Shannon on his unicycle explain the concepts of signal, noise, and information.

Yeah, there’s lots of stuff to talk about, like how many people are reporting their receipt of Exploding Kittens, even unto the far corners of the earth¹, Kate Beaton getting a cartoon in the New Yorker² (her first solo placement), and Christopher Hastings announcing the wind-down of Dr McNinja. Go browse those in your free time, because we’ll be talking about something else today.

And tomorrow.

And likely several days after that, as Gina Gagliano at :01 Books has been busy with the review copies, as I have a literal stack of them that have arrived here at the ol’ Fleenplex in the past couple of days. They’re for books that will be releasing in the Fall season, and I get to read ’em and tell you what I thought. Given that this is :01 we’re talking about, I don’t think that you’ll be surprised to learn that the three I’ve pulled so far are really good, which lead to the minor dilemma of which one to write about first.

Ultimately, I chose Battling Boy: The Fall Of The House Of West for a couple of reasons: I really liked its predecessor, Battling Boy: The Rise Of Aurora West; I really like how this book continues its subversion of the Hero’s Journey trope; and I really, really like how Ms Gagliano summarized the book in the cover letter she sent:

With Battling Boy, [Paul Pope] rewrote the hero trope with a kid main character; with Aurora West, he’s telling the story of a teen girl. Expanding the terrain of who can be a hero — and a superhero — is one of the things that he’s best at, and this story is full of action and adventure and also punching.

I love that and also punching line, not least because it shows that Gagliano is the best at getting people to want to read books. But I love the first sentence even more, because it gets to the heart of what Pope’s doing with the the BB series³: finding new ways to tell the story of heroism and what it takes — what it costs — to be one. And quite frankly, Aurora West is the better story to explore that theme.

I described Battling Boy as Paul Pope at his Paul Popiest and his Jack Kirbiest but it didn’t get into my brain the way that the Aurora West books have; it’s good (damn good), but it’s several stories we’ve seen put together: godling (however old he is as his people measure such things, he’s 12 or 13 emotionally) must undergo his rites of adulthood and go out into the wide cosmos to defeat evil.

Doesn’t matter much what evil or which, just do that and his society will accept him as a man. He settles on a city in a world beset by monsters and at whatever point in time his Labors are done (there’s a clear parallel to Herakles in that there are 12 magic garments — specifically, t-shirts, on account of he’s not earned his Kirby outfit yet — to let BB channel great power) he’ll leave. We’re just at the beginning of his story and it’s being told in a fresh way, but it’s a template we’re all familiar with.

The Aurora West books, on the other hand, are different. Aurora isn’t destined to greatness because she comes from godly power, but because she’s pissed at the monsters that killed her mother. So is every other teen that made it past puberty and is relatively safe from the nightly thread of kidnap, but they’re mostly resigned to the monsters that prey on the city’s children. Her only advantage is that she hasn’t been taught to deal with monsters (who are presented as half supernatural ghouls, half mobsters) by locking herself in when the sun goes down.

Her father, Haggard, is the (soon to perish) protector of the world (that BB has yet to visit) partly because he worked hard his entire life to become such, and partly because somebody has to do the job and ain’t nobody else stepping up. Daughter and father are bound by a sense of familial duty and different reactions to the absence of their mother/wife. He puts as much of the grief away as possible to concentrate on the crusade; she is driven by a need to know which particular monster killed her mom and to take individual vengeance. They aren’t talking to each other about the things they most need to, which makes both of them less effective than they should be, and more paralyzed by the fear of further loss than they will admit.

Along the way, Aurora is training to help her father as protector; she thinks he’s cramping her progress, he thinks she’s too reckless, but the key thing is that he’s training her. BB’s parents essentially threw him over the corner of reality and said Don’t screw up or you’ll die, we’ll see you when you get back. BB is leaning to stand on his own out of complete necessity; Aurora is learning about herself, her father, and the importance of sharing your burdens.

Along the way, she learns that even earthbound, mortal heroes must be more than mortal, bigger than life, with a manufactured myth about them that is as important — maybe moreso — than the reality of the great struggle. She learns that heroes are built on a kind of benign deceit, one that lets them do the job without breaking; sometimes it’s fostered on the lies they tell themselves, sometimes on the lies that they are told because the truth will render them unable to fight on. She learns how fear-borne nightmares can destroy, how love is a strength and a weakness, and how benevolence and protection must be undergirded by ruthlessness.

BB see his quest as an especially challenging game. The Wests are fighting a protracted war of attrition and barely holding onto a stalemate. It’s a narrative that’s thematically richer and deeper; call Aurora West the Lord of the Rings to Battling Boy’s The Hobbit, or maybe Harry Potter books 4-7 vs books 1-3.

BB:TFOTHOW (story by Paul Pope and JT Petty, with gorgeous, scratchy, menacing B&W art by David Rubín) will release on 13 October; that’s enough time for you to track down BB:TROAW and read it through a couple of times. You should also go find a copy of BB and see where Aurora is headed once she’s on her own. I have a feeling that the godling will become a lot more interesting once he and Aurora determine that their goals are complementary: she needs raw power, he needs guidance and wisdom, they both have plenty to learn from the other, and a dual Hero’s Journey would be a neat way to really turn all the usual tropes on their heads.

As always, many thanks to :01 Books for the review copy.

Spam of the day:

You can get the buns from the store(commissary is what the inmates call store ), or you can trade or gamble.

_______________
¹ The game itself is fun, leading to much in-your-face triumphalism and a three-Nope chain when were were playing it yesterday between EMS calls.

² Scroll forward from the landing page; it was the sixth cartoon when I looked, but there’s at least one sponsored cartoon advertising Bojack Horseman in there.

³ Considering it’s now one book for the titular Boy and two for Aurora West, I’m wondering if Pope doesn’t feel as I do and find that West is the more interesting and compelling character.

Got my shipping notification, and now it’s a race to DFW to see if I can make it home to blessed New Jersey in time. Say what you want about my home state, at least our airports have actual exit roads.

With that in mind (and time short) please enjoy a quick view into what my email and website spam filters are like these days.

Spam of the day: Lightning Round!

Bathe Safely with a Whirlpool Walk-In tub

How old do you people think I am? I don’t need a walk-in tub.

I am a, staff of Private Banking Services at the Bank of China (BOC).

How much? US$8.35 million? Snore. I don’t answer 419 scams for less than 50.

Rachael Ray Bikini Body Diet

Seriously, what is it about Rachael Ray in particular that she keeps getting mentioned in this context? She’s got a good cosmetic dentist, some irritating catchphrases, and pretends to cook.

Your PayPal account has been suspended Case ID 364-186

That would be the PayPal account I don’t have? I will absolutely provide you all my information now.

• Holy cats! Raina Telgemeier has somehow slipped, as the latest iteration of the New York Times Best Seller List includes only three of her books, in the relatively modest #4, 5, and 6 slots (although we’re also a mere four weeks away from Sisters being on the list for 52 consecutive weeks, so there’s that). Not to worry; although the first Baby-Sitters Club color reissue has slipped off the list (after dropping to #10 last week, its 11th on the list), the second BSC color reissue released the day before yesterday.

  You can see where I’m going with this.

  There’s a lag time on the NYTBSL, but I’ma guess we’re shortly going to see The Truth About Stacey join Smile, Drama, and Sisters, and very possibly see the return of Kristy’s Great Idea. Can we do five Telgemeier books simultaneously? With the remaining two BSC color reissues due in October and January, could we see an actual majority of the ten slots owned by books about tween girls? No bets, my friends.

• Holey Cats! Now this is how you meet promised Kickstarter fulfillment goals:
  

  When we launched our Kickstarter back in January, we hoped to sell 500 copies of our game. With that in mind, we wrote the following on our Kickstarter page: “Estimated delivery: July 2015”

  We wound up selling more than 500 copies. We sold 460,000 copies.

  …

  I know we promised we’d deliver in July. But that’s a lot of things we had to do. So, the new expected delivery date is …

  Still July!

  Yep, kittens that ‘splode start their rolling shipping today; it would be impossible to ship to ship every one of the 220,000-odd (some very odd) backers in 122 different countries on the same day, despite the fact that the EK crüe have sent massive quantities of games to various countries around the world to ship domestically, rather than from the US (which would involve customs, and international shipping, and headaches and delays and missing packages galore). Heck, they had to partner with six companies for production and fulfillment, including seeing the Cards Against Humanity folks set up an entire company — Blackbox — just to handle the shipping and notifications.

  Those specific details — 122 countries, six companies, Blackbox — all come from the shipping-commencement announcement along with other facts about the game; my favorite fact-cluster is that printing the 26.8 million cards required 2356 gallons¹ of paint, producing a gross tonnage of 104,000 pounds² requiring 17 rail-car sized shipping containers to hold them all. You can find at least one member ExKit team at GenCon, with copies of the game, just in case you didn’t back the campaign and/or can’t wait until sometime next week. And if you need a primer on how to play, they released a video starring the voice of Dr Krieger, because listening to Lucky Yates talk about stuff exploding won’t cause nightmares at all.

• Depending on what topics he decides to cover, there may or may not be cats (holy or otherwise) involved! Ryan Estrada is feelin’ creative again, and we all know what that means: a burst of comics to bury ourselves in. This time, he’s decided to do fake pitches for licensed comics based on existing concepts, and Dylan Meconis has already tossed the first suggestion out: an animated version of Murder She Wrote. But Estrada being Estrada, he’s already got a half-dozen in the pipeline, and posted his unlicensed adaptation of Bringing Out The Dead. Keep your eye on Unlicensed By Ryan Estrada for more insanity in the coming … forever, possibly.

Spam of the day:

All are hands-free, water-proof, rechargeable, and 100% medical grade silicone. There are specific nipple toys which are created to improve nipple stimulation.

Hey, Erika and Matt? I think this one is for you.

______________
¹ Just shy of 9000 liters, or 0.007230289 acre-feet.

² About 47,200 kilos, or 1 adult humpback whale.

So, massive tech failure at work affecting me and many colleagues, fun!

While I wait for my critical-priority IT ticket to get picked up (which I am sure will not be delayed in any way, shape or form¹), please enjoy today’s spam message because as soon as I finish typing this, my expected response time will be up and I will have to get on the phone to scream at people who are bad at their jobs.

Spam of the day:

A Libyan oil business man made a fixed deposit of $24,500.000.00 in my bank branch where I am a director, and he died with his entire family in the war leaving behind no next of kin. I Propose to present you as next of kin to claim the funds

Yes, and I am certain that “Gary al-Tyrrell” will be a perfectly plausible name for the next of kin of a Libyan oil baron.

_______________
¹ I crack myself up sometimes.

If you’ll indulge me a little, I want to rearrange the order of things on today’s post.

Spam of the day:

um, he book WAS DONE WHEN HE STARTED THE KICKSTARTER, WAS Intended to help _print the damn book_ hello??!???!!!!!!!!!! IT WAS DONE WHEN IT STARTED!!!!! But you’ll believe his bullshit about being stressed causing him to be a YEAR AND A HALF LATE???

YOU. ARE. AN. IDIOT.

I suppose I should start with the acknowledgement that I’m breaking one of the fundamental rules of the internet by reading the comments, but there’s a general exception for reading comments on your own site; indeed, this comment was submitted here to Fleen in re: our most recent post on Something Terrible and held for moderation¹. Its author is using what I believe to be a pseudonym and fake email address, which is always the sign of quality opinions! Let’s address the author’s points one at a time, shall we?

• That sure is a lot of correctly-spelled words, Bill (Can I call you Bill? That’s the name you gave although I doubt it’s yours). Not so much with the spacing, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and syntax, though.
• Regarding the book being done when [the Kickstarter campaign] started, surely somebody as erudite as yourself will acknowledge that pre-press design is a skillset in and of itself, and having images for web done is not the same as just sending things off to press.
• Regarding [Trippe’s] bullshit about being stressed, two things: First, please educate yourself on the concepts of depression and PTSD, which are not the same thing as being stressed. Second, Trippe’s been remarkably honest in social media and in person about the toll that telling his story has had on him. You may, from your comfortable distance, have decided that it’s bullshit, but I’d defy you to talk with the guy in person and come to the same conclusion. Dean’s one of the most open and honest people I’ve ever met.
• Regarding a YEAR AND A HALF LATE???, PDFs meeting the lower tiers of Kickstarter pledges were promised in April of 2014, physical hardcopies in June of 2014². Certainly they’re late, but your all-caps exaggeration does not do your argument any favors.
• Regarding YOU. ARE. AN. IDIOT., it’s entirely possible (have you been talking to my family?), but what about this particular project has you so het up (as my grandmother used to say)? Dissatisfied backer? Trippe’s already made the offer to refund you, which granted means that you lost out on the massive interest you would have earned on your pledge amount over the course of a year. Tell ya what, Bill, I’ll make good on that twelve cents you lost out on. Worried for my financial well-being because I got scammed? That’s adorable, thanks for your concern.
• Not specific to anything you wrote, but are you familiar with Kickstarter? Almost nothing fulfills on time. That’s practically built into the site’s DNA.

It’s interesting, though, that you’re so concerned about getting THE TRUTH!!!!!!one!!!! about evil, evil Dean Trippe and stupid, stupid Gary Tyrrell out there, speaking boldly against our obvious corruption and collusion. You’ve had many opportunities to do so since January of 2014³ when I started writing about the campaign.

But you dropped in a drive-by comment from with a fake name and fake email, leading me to believe you aren’t a regular reader as they tend to be reasonable people who aren’t afraid to sign their own names to their opinions. I’m talking about something that I like and you have come into my metaphorical home to tell me Trippe’s full of shit and I’m an idiot — thanks so much for your obvious righteousness, but it was an unnecessary effort.

Much like the last 600 or so words I’ve spent on this response; I trust that we’ve both gotten this out of our systems and can go find other people who are wrong on the internet to confront?

• Speaking of book Kickstarts, Steve Hamaker has just launched one to print volume one of Plox, and it would be really cool if he could spend GenCon weekend (where he’ll be tabling with Scott Kurtz & co at the Toonhound Studios table) not worrying about if it was gonna fund or not.

  Hamaker’s one of the low-key maestros of modern [web]comics, a colorist that makes even the best work better, and he doesn’t get enough attention for his own creations. Back it now, and if you see him in Indianapolis be sure to let him know that if he doesn’t have the book to you by the last day of March 2016, Bill up above is gonna have a fit at him how much you enjoy his work.

• In other news, Los Angeles Resident Dave Kellett has announced the latest contributor to his Tales of the Drive project:
  

  So! That makes 4 super fun DRIVE short stories written/drawn by @ZachWeiner @drhastings @dmeconis and @jonrosenberg!

  That would be Zach Weinersmith, Christopher Hastings, Dylan Meconis, and Jon Rosenberg (okay, that last one was a little obvious). Judging from Twitter traffic ‘tother night, Rosenberg’s still in the writing stage, and LARDK hasn’t said when he’s going to start posting story pages yet. Maybe a nice little back-to-school celebration? A whole story up as a Thanksgiving present? Come on, LARDK, give us something to mark on our calendars and pine away in anticipation for!

_______________
¹ Typically, this happens for tripping keyword lists, having excessive links in the body of the message, or being from unfamiliar IP addresses.

² Which, between you and me, was optimistic in the extreme; closing the campaign in February, if everything went perfectly, means that hardcover books before September of 2104 would be just barely possible.

³ Is that where you got the year and a half from?

The TopatoCon exhibitor list grows by leaps and bounds! When last we spoke of such things, it looked like this:

KC Green
Jeph Jacques
Jess Fink
Tom Siddell
Rosemary Mosco
Kate Leth
Anthony Clark
Christopher Hastings
Danielle Corsetto
David Malki !
Dante Shepherd
Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson
Michael Rapa
Mildred Louis
Sara Goetter
Jon Rosenberg
Karla Pacheco
RJ Lake
Spike
Allison Shabet
Lauren Jordan
Joshua AC Newman
Magnolia Porter
Alison Wilgus
Shoona Browning
Randy Millholland
Brian Lee
Skullmandible
David Willis
Kori Michele
Hannah McGill
Blue Delliquanti
Evan Dahm
Molly Ostertag

And thanks to the list that’s been posted at TopatoCon’s Internet Information Center, we may add to the list:

Amazing Super Powers, Kory Bing, Boston Comics Roundtable, Tony Breed, Cardboard Fortress Games, Eric Colossal, Matt Cummings, Megan Nicole Dong, Catie Donnelly, The Doubleclicks, G Town Games LLC, Games By Play Date, Erin Gladstone, John Green, Tyson Hesse, How To Win At Everything (Daniel Kibblesmith & Sam Weiner), Kitfox Games, Amanda Lafrenais, Braden Lamb, Matt Lubchansky, Ira Marcks, Kel McDonald, David McGuire, Tom McHenry, Maki Naro, Nerdcore Medical, Cole Ott, Aatmaja Pandya, Amanda Scurti, Sarah Winifred Searle, Small Beer Press, Sarah Sobole, Space Whale , Spriteborne, Olivia Stephens, Jordan Witt, and Jessi Zabarsky (whew!).

Sadly, we appear to have lost some exhibitors from the list. Rosemary Mosco reports that she’ll be attending, but not tabling. Jeph Jacques isn’t on the new list, and TopatoCon falls right in the midst of the time that he reports he’ll be moving to Canada, and so it may be too uncertain to promise an appearance. I’m sure that there are other missing names, but as my previous list was sequential-by-announcement and the new one is alphabetical, maybe it’s best that you double-check yourself.

In other TopatoCon news, the venue has changed to allow more attendees, and the show will now be taking place at the venerable Eastworks, site of the much-loved NEWW and NEWW2 shows in 2009 and 2010. Hotel/ticket information will be coming soon, and the showrunners have released a code of conduct that lays out a zero-tolerance policy for:

… offensive comments (related to a person’s race, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, disability, or religion), stalking, unwanted photography or recording, unwelcome physical contact or sexual attention, and disruption of events. In general, the polite and courteous method is to err on the side of caution. If you feel you may be making someone uncomfortable, end your interaction with them. No one owes you their time or attention (and you don’t owe anyone yours), so be cool. [emphasis added]

I bolded that part because it seems necessary to remind the Sea Lions out there that the world does not, in fact, revolve around their obsessive needs to talk you to death. Hooray!

Spam of the day:

????????????????SEO,???????

You know, just waving about your hands and saying SEO is not how that actually works. Maybe in the LARP of website management, but not in the real world.

This page has long been a fan of Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible, which has been a webcomic and Kickstarted as a book-book. The elephant in the room is that the book is late — delivery was estimated in June of last year — which I’m willing to give Trippe all kinds of slack for. He told a story about himself, and as a result found himself the impromptu leader of a tribe whose price of membership is way too high but whose fellowship is literally lifesaving.

This is especially apparent with the next PDF version of Something Terrible that Trippe sent to his backers this week, which features a new essay about what the experience of sharing his secret origin is like — having stepped into the spotlight, he’s experienced stressors that weren’t there before:

I’m humbled to know how many people desperately needed my story, and most of the time, I don’t regret it. But if I’m being honest, it’s hard. Even revisiting all of this in order to complete this print edition has been tough. I thought doing the digital edition was all the therapy I needed, but I’ve learned that it’s an everyday thing. Always healing. Always training. Just like Batman.

So, yeah. Next time you find yourself with hundred of abuse victims reaching out to you to make it better, I’ll give you slack on your missed deadlines, too.

But Trippe’s done more than work through the mechanical and logistical aspects of putting Something Terrible into print; he’s added a new four-page epilogue to the PDF that he sent to backers this week. It hits a payoff that is even more emotionally overwhelming than the justly-lauded You’ll Be Safe Here.

Think of it as the post-credits scene in the superhero movie that is Trippe’s story, one that required the very tight cropping shown above to not spoil. It’s a perfect coda, I can’t wait for you all to see it, and never forget: not all heroes wear capes.

Updating yesterday’s list of GenCon exhibitors from the wide, wide world of webcomics, Steve Hamaker reports he’ll be there with Scott Kurtz (but not sure where, exactly), and David Malki ! reports that he’ll be at the Blind Ferret table.