Where, @Delta willing, there will be no hassles in getting back home. If there are, however, I’ll most likely be the cause of the disruption at the Atlanta airport that makes the news. Not much going on (Thursdays are always the quiet day in Webcomicstan), so let’s consider a couple of Kickstarters that I think are funding too slowly for comfort. Disclaimer: I am backing both of these and want my books, dammit!

• We’re about a third of the way through the Eat More Comics campaign to print the best of The Nib, and well into the fallow period where little activity takes place, with an uptick in the last week or so. It just barely makes the cutoff for analysis under the FFFmk2 with 201 users on day one, giving us a prediction of US$53.8K +/- US$10.8K, which is a bit worrying — the low end of that range is below the goal of US$45K, and even the midpoint is not enough to get more money for the contributors.
• In happier news, we’re at about the 60% point in terms of duration, but the 75% mark in terms of funding for Monster Pulse volume 2, and what puzzles me the most is the very low backer count for Magnolia Porter’s well-loved story of teens in a weird situation. More than 500 people backed Porter’s first print collection, but we’re only at 210 people on book 2 so far. Where’s all the former backers? I know you didn’t fall out of love with Monster Pulse since that’s not possible, so are you deep in student debt? Lost your jobs? Time to sell some blood plasma, Gary needs his book.
• Okay, okay, let’s make this a little bit not about me. GenCon has become much more webcomicker-populated in the past couple of years, and this year may set the record for participation. Off the top of my head, those in Indianapolis next week can see folks like the Blind Ferret crew, Jennie Breeden, Rob Balder, Randy Milholland, Jeph Jacques, John Kovalic, Howard Tayler, and the ubiquitous Jim Zub. Note that they won’t all be listed under their own names; Zub and Tayler will be with Tracy Hickman at booth 1935, Milholland at BFE, and I’m not sure where Jacques will be. When in doubt, check twitterfeeds.

Spam of the day:

Esta me funcion realmente y la compr en una promocin

“This really function and bought me a promotion”? Okay.

Thanks to the tender mercies of Delta, I spent the majority of my waking hours yesterday at Newark airport trying to get to Atlanta for a work gig, a tale of woe I was only too happy to share on Twitter. Getting in eight hours late has left me a bit punchy today, so let’s keep today’s discussion brief.

• I don’t know how many of you noticed that it’s Comics Week at The AV Club, and while there has been some webcomics in the discussion threads, today saw the first overt recommendations from staffers. Asked What comics are you reading this month?, staffer William Hughes threw props to A Softer World and Achewood before a lengthy analysis of what makes Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie so damn good:
  

  It’s a tricky book to summarize, honestly, because the thing that makes it great is Gran’s unwillingness to let easy labels dictate who her characters are—in the initial comics, Eve is “grumpy,” while Hannah is “the carefree stoner,” but the longer they spend on the page, the less those titles make sense or apply. It’s a book that’s less about big plot arcs or romantic entanglements—although it has its fair share of the latter—than about what those events mean for the characters and their attempts to build a stable sense of who they are and what they want.

  He also notes that Gran shifts between slice-of-life and magical realism (although not the Mexican variety), which by coincidence is well demonstrated by today’s installment; whatever else might be going on in Jane and Marigold’s inner feelings, those little homunculi are absolutely real.

• We may be coming to the end of the Cartoon Art Museum’s cartoonist-in-residence program, what with the loss of the physical space coming at the end of September and all. But it’s not the end of September yet, and curator Andrew Farago shows every sign of wanting to pack as much programming as their remaining lease time will allow.

  Thus, those of you in San Francisco on Saturday, 1 August 2015 can participate in the residency of Hannah McGill from 1:00pm – 3:00pm. For those not familiar, McGill is the creator of RAWR! Dinosaur Friends, as well as being a graphic designer with work visible around the Bay Area. Her talk is free and open to the public.

Spam of the day:

Technological advances in home based surveillance allow one to keep out hackers from your home alarm system.

Oh son, do not even bring your claims about Internet of Things security here. That bullshit will not fly with me.

We’re all over the place today, from the neatest, most encouraging news to the most horrifying visions of what eternal damnation must surely look like. I suspect that no two of you will precisely agree where on that scale each of these items will fall.

• Well, okay, I suspect that everybody will place the already-fully-funded Kickstart for Lucy Bellwood’s nautical comics collection, Baggywrinkles, on the positive side of that scale. It’s part autobio, part educational, a downright bargain with physical copies of the book going for as little as US$16, and featuring an all-new story about scurvy! And a very modest US$20K stretch goal will take the collection from B&W to color!
• Sticking with Kickstarter for the moment, we’ll note that Matt Bors was lying to us when he said that the Eat More Comics Kickstarter campaign would not have stretch goals, on account of they just announced some stretch goals. Every coupla’ thousand bucks from the US$45K goal means exclusive comics from the likes of Zach Weinersmith, Rich Stevens, Gemma Correll, and Bors himself.

  Even better, hitting US$60K means that all the artists — who are getting paid for their comics to run in the collection, on top of the pay they received to run at The Nib, on top of whatever they made from drawing them in the first place — will get a page rate boost. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the best part about Bors & Co is that they pay, and even if some of what The Nib ran made you grind your teeth and regret that money went/will go to cartoonists you despise, I can pretty much guarantee that even more money went/will go to cartoonists you love. Let’s help ’em make rent.

• Love ’em, hate ’em, wonder how they became so dominant in at least one field (webcomics) and superdominant in another (videogames), there’s no denying that the lads at Penny Arcade cast a long shadow and that they attract attention from outside both those areas of endeavour.

  This time it’s the advertising world, where Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik were named to a list of 10 visual artists who are remaking advertising, part of an overall list of the 100 most creative people in/adjacent to advertising. Also on that list with Krahulik & Holkins: Annie Leibovitz (the most important portrait photographer of the past four decades) and Brett Doar (who creates all those Rube Goldbergian installations for OK Go music videos).

  And as long as we’re on the topic, Randall Munroe was recognized not specifically for comics or art, but for his ability to create viral content that blows the hell up. Also on that list with Munroe: Serial’s Sarah Koenig. Looking at the other 80 names on the list, you’ll find the likes of John Carmack (for Oculus VR), Amy Schumer, Janelle Monáe, Mindy Kaling, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and a whole bunch of ad pros and commercial directors you’ll never have heard of. This time next year I’d expect to see Raina Telgemeier or somebody at Ad Week is missing the boat.

• Finally, I think that we all also will agree on which item definitely falls on the negative side of the scale: for all those who have ever seen Lar DeSouza’s Sailor Bacon cosplay has never been able to un-see that spectacle, that extravaganza, those bloomers. We can console ourselves that the display was always for a good cause (namely, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada), even if there was no way to convey the full horror to those that weren’t there to share in the mental scarring.

  Until now:

  In a grand effort to support me and my wife in our annual fundraising efforts for Multiple Sclerosis research, [Ryan] Sohmer and Blind Ferret have made available these adorable and somewhat disturbing Sailor Bacon plushies!! Designed by me and manufactured by the fine folks at Soft Stuff (who also donated a portion of their manufacturing costs to the MS Society of Canada!), these tiny ambassadors of hugs are now shipping from the BFE headquarters.

  You can order up one of these abominations and send it to somebody that needs a good disturbing! Why should you be the only one unable to ever sleep again without seeing … that … lurking behind your eyeballs? Drop your twenty five bucks, spread the madness, take some minor solace that this great sin against Nature benefits a worthy cause, or maybe just buy them all up and see if you can destroy them before they worm their way into your brain.

  It’s too late. They’ve got you. Pray for the mercy that you’ll succumb to sweet, forgetful madness quickly and Glob have mercy on your soul.

Spam of the day:

Your LED Flashlight Coupon, 75% off expires 07/21/2015

I’ll admit — this one almost got me. I’m a sucker for a good LED flashlight.

Couple of things today, mostly hung together on the common thread of people being jerks to webcomics creators.

Here’s the thing: Rosemary Mosco is great at field biology, and even better at explaining nature to the rest of us in ways that make complex ideas easily graspable. Her art and writing styles are unique and unmistakable, and her reputation is of somebody that both knows what she’s talking about and being level-headed and worthy of your trust.

So it sucks that somebody out there is appropriating her good name in a Twitter account. It’s not the case of somebody else coincidentally being named Rosemary Mosco¹; it’s somebody that’s grabbed her avatar and links to her site and uses her name in the account name. Granted, there are only four tweets there and none in the past 18 months, but how many people following the fake account think it’s the real Rosemary Mosco? Scanning the followers of the fake reveals it’s recently been followed by two different environmental organizations, who presumably don’t want to follow an account that’s likely laying fallow until the day that it unleashes a torrent of spam.

Unfortunately, Twitter itself seems monumentally uninterested in dealing with the situation, describing the impostor account as a mere case of similarity. There’s not much to say here other than you have to proactively keep an eye on your name and who may be using it; you have to keep an eye on websites formerly associated with you (a situation which has afflicted Rene Engström, Box Brown, and Vera Brosgol) as well as those that are actively yours (cf: Lore Sjöberg’s domain-jacking, the brute-force attempt to steal Digger yesterday²).

Can you still get screwed even with best practices? Sure — you don’t know who else is taking security seriously, which can lead to things like an unsecured database resulting in 37 million compromised accounts³. But doing nothing because somebody else might not hold up their end of the load isn’t acceptable practice — be a little paranoid, take a few minutes to review your online security (in every sense of the phrase), and make things a little more difficult for the sumbitches that seek to make our lives a little more miserable.

Spam of the day:

Invitation Only event for: gary@fleen.com Ashley Madison is the top rated married-dating company in the U.S., dedicated to privacy.

Boy, did you pick the wrong day to send this crap. Note to readers: I swear that this is a verbatim spam that I received 18 minutes ago as I write this. It’s one thing to be a lowlife spammer, but a stupid lowlife spammer? Just go back to school, get your GED, and maybe you can work your way up to Do Not Call List-evading phone solicitations.

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¹ Much as I am plagued — plagued, I tell you! — by the existence of the other Gary Tyrrell. He got the Twitter name, I got the domain name, and our uneasy détente continues.

² On the topic of brute-forcing, you may be interested in a recent accounting of how many apps allow brute-force password guessing and how long it will take to guess your password (between 30 minutes and half an hour, depending on password strength). If that scares you, please reference past discussions on securing your sites, securing your data, and developing a general approach to security. Short version: take a lot of backups, don’t use an admin account for posting, and secure all accounts with unique, long-ass passwords.

³ Although a website for cheaters would appear to have little to do with the primary mission of this site, I decided the Ashley Madison hack was relevant for three reasons:

1. It’s timely.
2. I teach databases in the day job (much of which revolves around securing the damn things, which ain’t rocket surgery) and this one has me shaking my head at what a boneheaded, easily-prevented situation was the root cause.
3. With 37 million accounts that were compromised, some of them have to be webcomickers. This is not an invitation to start speculating.

It’s short post today, because you’ve got some homework to do.

• On the topic of creators getting paid, thanks to Alert Reader Jacob Haller for linking to a Julia Wertz comic on that very theme.

  Homework: read it, resolve that if you ever see somebody acting like that lady in panel 3, you will punch ’em.

• On the topic of influence on modern-day creators, I can think of somebody that’s even more influential on webcomics (really, all comics cartoons, and every other creative endeavour), and that’s Chuck Jones. Tony Zhou of Every Frame A Painting released a nine-minute video about Chuck Jones’s approach to character, comedy, and story, with a particular emphasis on restraint and limitation — something that we at Fleen have had an interest in since small times¹.

  Homework: Watch it, go watch some classic cartoons by Chuck.

• On the topic of smart people being smart while all around them small minds miss the point, I’ve come to the conclusion that the comics version of Ta-nehisi Coates is David Brothers. They both write about life experiences that I — by luck of birth and genetics — have largely been insulated from, and they both do it better than anybody else. Coates has released his latest book (it’s a masterpiece) and it’s being nitpicked by the living embodiment of upper middle class white prigishness.

  Brothers wrote an absolutely brilliant piece on the latest example of the comics industry shooting itself in the dick re: racial diversity and inclusiveness, and while I haven’t seen any particular Brooksian response to him (and I’ve not gone looking; life’s too short), I notice that today Brothers has taken his Twitter account private, which usually indicates getting beset en masse by idiots and needing a little breathing room².

  Homework: Read the Brothers piece linked above and this excerpt from Coates’s new book; the former is mandatory reading for anybody even tangentially involved in comics culture, the latter needs to be read by everybody in this country over the age of ten.

Spam of the day:

this weblog contains awesome and actually good information designed for visitors.

I am but a humble guide to the actually good information.

________________
¹ Also available in our own post archive, but lots of busted links and lost images can pile up over nine years. Heck, even the Wayback Machine version is going to be missing images in that post.

² Or doing something spectacularly dumb, but Brothers is the opposite of spectacularly dumb.

We at Fleen have talked a lot about The Nib, the Matt Bors-run editorial (mostly) cartooning subsite at Medium, from its inception to its recent folding-up. Things are happening rapidly over there, and if you haven’t been paying attention, it’s time you did.

Firstly, they launched a Kickstarter to publish a 300 page book containing the best of the 2000+ comics that were published there in the 1.5+ years of operation. And quite frankly, I’d be talking about Eat More Comics even if Bors had promised that every single one of those 300 pages would be filled with comics I hated by cartoonists whose work I despised¹ for a very simple reason, which was stated by onetime associate site editor Eleri Harris, starting about 45 seconds in on the Kickstarter video:

The money we’re asking for is for two things: Firstly, we’re going to compensate all our artists fairly for republishing their work again.

The thing about The Nib that I loved most of all — the reason that you should have loved The Nib when it was still a thing — is that they paid. Cartoonists got paid for the right to publish their work (or in many cases, re-publish work that had already appeared elsewhere); Bors had a budget and he wasn’t afraid to use it. And I don’t know what the contracts for running cartoons on The Nib looked like, but Bors, Harris, and onetime assistant site editor Matt Lubchansky are paying the creators again for the right to republish them in the book. Which led to the second money (so to speak) quote of the video, from Lubchansky, starting about the 1:10 mark:

If we blow past [the funding goal], we’re just gonna make more books and give the artists more money.

We all know that not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t try to get artists to work for free, or to under-pay them by offering crappy contracts that many (especially creators at the start of their careers) feel obligated to sign out of fear of missing out. The only response that a creator should ever have to such an overture is No, pay me.

Unless, that is, the creator is approached by whoever the hell this is arguing with Rachel from What Pumpkin² that they should get to use Homestuck without paying because (variously):

• Other people aren’t asking for money!
• We’re building a BRAND!
• We’re all still young and have never done this before!
• We don’t have any money!
• But our Kickstarter!³

In which case, the appropriate response is Fuck you, pay me.

Getting back to the original point, I don’t think that Bors, Harris, and Lubchansky have ever heard Fuck you, pay me directed at them, and that is reason enough to support Eat More Comics.

The other reason will be that a good showing in the Kickstart will provide direct, measurable numbers on what the support for a site like The Nib is, and how much of those supporters are willing to part with actual money. That can only be helpful to Bors as he talks with other publishers with an eye towards reviving The Nib, seeing as how he’s left Medium. Here’s hoping we don’t have long to wait before cartoonists the web over once again have a site whose mission statement is Hey, can we run your cartoon? We pay.

Spam of the day:

Hmm it appears lile your blog aate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just suum it up what I haad written and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.

No, your first comment was about gold farming in MMORPGs.

_______________
¹ Which do exist on The Nib, which is a point in Bors’s favor — if you’re running a cartooning site that’s mostly editorial and I love/agree with everything you publish, you’re doing a crappy job. Bors does not do crappy jobs.

² I have my suspicions, and there aren’t many Kickstarts going on now that would fit the pattern that the whiny person describes, but since Rachel’s anonymized it I’ll keep my speculations to myself.

³ Repeat after me: Kickstarter is not a magic money machine that you go to as rank newcomers to be discovered and made suddenly wealthy. It’s a way to measure the appeal of products to an audience that you already have. No audience going in means you’re going to receive some hard lessons coming out. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to absorb them, but I’m not overly optimistic.

My flight home got cancelled and I’m stuck at the airport with limited signal. Try to muddle through until tomorrow, yeah?

Namely, the return of Berke Breathed to strip cartooning, with the now ubiquitously shared Bloom County 2015.

I’m not concerned that Breathed has returned to stripping and quit multiple times before, or that he’s apparently going to be releasing his comics online rather than to papers (online, after all, means no deadlines other than those he imposes on himself … although the constant deadline battles of Bloom County in its heyday were probably as responsible for its manic energy as anything). I stand by my comments t’other day that I don’t know that Breathed can recapture the feel of a strip that was of its time, of his time, and of its audience’s time.

While Bloom County doesn’t age well — and I say that as a man who still owns a Flexi-disk of Deathtögue backed with Billy and the Boingers¹ — the influence of Breathed on the first two or so generations of webcomickers cannot be overstated. Bloom County spanned the high school and/or college years of a lot of people that made the first webcomics, and the lessons they learned are legion and obvious. The anarchic humor, the willingness to dedicate everything to a stupid joke and then just ride it to see how far it would go, the increasingly deranged cast surrounding one semi-sane audience-identification character, and the semi-serialized tendency of the stories are foundational to webcomics, to a degree that we’re only now getting away from those habits.

Does there have to be a creator of such outsized (if distanced in time) influence? Bloom County wrapped up more than 25 years ago, call it 8 – 10 years before the creators that loved it so began their own works. Will they (and their progeny) recognize the figure of legend as he returns, or has the world changed so much that he can’t make sense of it? This is becoming needlessly Campbellian, isn’t it?

Related: regardless of Breathed coming back, has webcomics synthetically evolved his Mexican non-union equivalent already? Will the future generations of cartoonists look to Achewood or Homestuck as their foundational myth the way that early webcomics looked to Bloom County? Or has the explosion of new voices, built from a broader base of divergent influences and experiences, mean that he was the last one to cast such a shadow?²

So I’ll guess we’ll find out together if Berke Breathed returns as an imitation of his past self, as a 25 years improved secret and ascended master, or as a dilettante. I hope he finds the joy in creation sufficient to propel him to tell the stories he wants to tell; I hope that those stories still compel me to seek them out (but I’m still not getting a Facebook account). But honestly, I’m more interested in seeing what the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Bloom County are up to — the Reagan era is long past, but there’s an awful lot of future yet to be seen through a lot of different eyes.

Spam of the day:

I always spent my half an hour to read this website’s articles daily aloong with a mug of coffee.

Please don’t blame me for your caffeine habit, or the slowness of your reading.

_______________
¹ There is also still a stuffed Opus somewhere in my house, but I’m not sure I could tell you exactly where.

² Probably, yeah — but if the future generations of cartoonists do look to anybody to such a dominant degree, it’s likely going to be Raina Telgemeier (but you can take that as a given in almost any discussion on this site).

Welp, the Eisners were given out over the weekend, and it appears that that webcomic-adjacent had a very good year. I’m a little miffed that Nimona didn’t win for Best Digital/Web Comic, but what are you going to do? Brian K Vaughn (and Marcos Martin, who won for The Private Eye) is pure, distilled name recognition in comics circles. But that’s pretty much the only place I that I was disappointed (aside from my continuing bemiffment that Kazu Kibuishi didn’t get nominated at all), as there were some very encouraging results.

Let’s start with Nimona’s Noelle Stevenson, who as part of the Lumberjanes team (along with Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, and Brooke Allen) took both Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17) and Best New Publication. The former would have been great on its own, but to be recognized as the standout book of the year? That’s a hell of an accomplishment for the hardcore lady types. Likewise, consider that the Best Short Story of the year came from Emily Carroll, whose When the Darkness Presses ran online and defeated the collected efforts of the entire print industry.

You think perhaps there’s a theme developing here, where the most outstanding work of the year is overwhelmingly created by women? Because when it comes to original characters, stories, concepts, and such, that appears to be the case. For instance, Mariko & Jillian Tamaki wrapped up a nonstop year of praise for This One Summer (including being named as both a Caldecott and Michael L. Printz Honor Book) with Best Graphic Album—New, and Cece Bell wrapped up a nonstop nine months of praise for El Deafo (including being named a Newbery Honor Book) with Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12). These are all stories by women, about girls; these are all stories that are different from much of the history of American comics.

Okay, fine, we’ll throw in a token dude: Gene Luen Yang was recognized as Best Writer for Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Shadow Hero; he was competing against the likes of the previously-mentioned Mr K Vaughn, Grant Morrison, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Jason Aaron, and G Willow Wilson (who I thought was going to win). And next year will likely have some representations from the likes of Scott McCloud for The Sculptor and Ryan North/Erica Henderson for Squirrel Girl; get a few more cases like that and we’ll have enough dudes to have a panel on What It’s Like To Be A Male Creator.

But we all know who the night belonged to, and if there is one Eisner that entirely typifies the art of words + pictures, that says you are the whole creative package when it comes to comics, it’s Best Writer/Artist. Charles Burns, Sergio Aragonés, Steven Collins, Richard McGuire, and Stan Sakai were up for the award — there’s got to be close to 150 years experience in those five dudes.

They lost.

To Raina Telgemeier.

Who told an autobiographical story about growing up with her younger sister.

It’s no exaggeration to say — it’s never been an exaggeration each time I’ve said it in the past — that Telgemeier is the future of comics. She writes and draws stories that resonate with her readers in a way that any artist would give up their eyeteeth to replicate; she hooks them and brings them into a medium turning them into not just lovers of comics, but lovers of reading. And she’s just getting started — she’s got dozens of books yet to share with us. She’s still got four books on the NYTBSL (although she’s temporarily ceded the #3 slot to Fun Home, meaning she only has four of the top five books, which list is rounded out by El Deafo and Nimona, by the way), for a total of 317 weeks.

Oh, and she just announced her next book, due Fall 2016. And there will be a couple more Baby Sitters Club books released between then and now. And Smile, Drama, and Sisters aren’t likely to fall off the list anytime soon. You thought I was kidding when I said that the Times might need to qualify the softcover graphic novel list as best sellers not by Raina Telgemeier? McCloud’s famously said that he sees the industry as majority-women (creators and audience) by 2024, and I think that the clock moved up a couple years on Friday night; comics now belongs to Raina and her fabulous friends, and it’s great.

• SDCC rolls along and it appears that webcomickers have deigned to let showgoers live another day. Hooray! In the meantime, it appears that the guys behind Penny Arcade are not content to merely put together a Kickstart to make a live-action webseries out of their noir-robot tale, Automata, wherein they’ve raised more than half of their very specific goal of US$322,637.09 in less than two days. Nope, it appears that they were fooling us when they said they would not be at the show in 2015. They snuck in all sneaky like! Proof!
• Everywhere else, did you feel a bit of a chill down your spine earlier today? It’s possibly because Emily Carroll has released a new comic, a rare (for her) modern-day tale of two girls, a diorama, and unseen (perhaps unsuspected apart from an increasing sense of dread) ghosts of somebody not happy.

  The Groom is Carroll’s most subtle work to date (and that’s saying something), with the horror hinted at around the edges of the experience of the tween protagonists. Read one way, it’s just a case of thing found, got bored, slightly creepy nature gave the excuse to get rid of it. Read another way, there’s evil a’plenty in the suburbs, and the supernatural version could pale in comparison to the everyday, banal version. Like all of Carroll’s comics, this carries the highest possible recommendation.

• Confidential to Jeph in Easthampton: 3000! That’s a hell of an accomplishment, even if only 0.2333% of those strips featured #buttrocket.

Spam of the day:

Forskolean …

Nnnnoooope. Not goin’ there. Whatever you’re selling, it’s got too much possible innuendo wrapped around it.