If I can post today, I will. If not, we’ll try again tomorrow. ¯\_(?)_/¯

EMS stuff came up. Nothing earth-shattering, but time-dependent. See you tomorrow.

I speak, needless to say of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna which are helping the fight against the novel coronavirus.

The idea of vaccines has always been simple — we’ll give you a tiny bit of what causes the disease, not enough to make you sick, but enough to teach your body how to fight it — even if we’ve sacrificed accuracy for comprehension. But how to discuss this new generation of vaccines, where we convince your body to make that
tiny bit? What analogy could possibly serve?

Death Stars, naturally. I do feel bad for that one guy from Construction Crew B in panel 17. I don’t feel bad at all for befuddled Darth Vader in panel 29.

In other news:

• Ever since David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) got de-jobbed ’bout two years back, he’s been trying his hand¹ at a number of things; kudos to Australia for having the kind of social safety net that he has the opportunity to do this without worrying about dying from some hideous disease for the crime of being unemployed. Today, he announced another endeavour, one that you might want to take advantage of in these days of kids being thrown into a situation where the education is largely ad-hoc:
  

  I’ve signed up as a teacher on Outschool, an online teaching platform, and today I listed my first class. It’s a one-off class on Human Vision and Colour Perception, for students aged 12-14 years. If you have (or know) children of this age who might like to learn this stuff, please feel free to sign up for a class! It’s taught via Zoom and is available to students all around the world. Here’s a link to the class. I’m currently offering two time slots in a couple of weeks, but will open up more slots as demand allows. I’m also planning to add other classes on different topics, so you could follow my teacher profile too, if you like.

  Impressively, given that Morgan-Mar is in the Far Antipodes, he found a daylight time for himself (9:00am in Sydney) that will work well for many folks around the world: 5:00pm EST translates to times between 1:00pm and 6:30pm in the Western Hemisphere, and pretty reasonable through the Pacific coast of Asia (7:00am in Tokyo and Seoul, 6:00am as far west as Kuala Lumpur or Singapore; 11:00am in New Zealand). 10:00pm in London or 11:00pm in the western half of Europe might be acceptable, but probably anybody between Athens and Jakarta will probably have to wait to see if he’s willing to do a class at 5:00pm Sydney time.

• We at Fleen have discussed the ability of comics to provide scientific literacy in the past, pointing to the likes of Lucas Landherr/Dante Shepherd, Maki Naro, Darryl Cunningham, Cathy Leamy, and more². To that, we can add a collective effort from some former grad students at University of Wisconsin-Madison (together known as JKX Comics), who are Kickstarting an anthology about STEAM research. Here’s where I have to throw in a disclaimer: the named creator of this campaign and the J in JKX Comics is Dr Jaye Gardiner, who is a friend of mine from Comics Camp; she’s also figuring out how to cure cancer, which is just the baseline level of awesome you tend to get from Camp folks.

  Gaining STEAM!: Illuminating Research Through Art will be seven comic books in color, adding up to about 200 pages, spanning the full range of STEAM fields: microbes! DNA! squirrels! and more! It funded in about five hours yesterday, is currently over 200% funded, and according to the ol’ FFF mk2, is on track to US$22K to 33K (or about 6x to 9x goal) by the time it’s done in a month. Give this one a good look, and point the science-intrigued in your life to JKX Comics for more.

• Finally, it’s cold through much of the country, particularly in places that aren’t used to extreme cold. Spare a good thought or two for the folks in Texas who’ve lost power because deregulation is now allowing price-gouging at the utility level, and if you’re hunkered down right about now: stay warm, stay dry, do not bring grills, heaters driven by combustion, or generators indoors, and keep your faucets at a trickle so your pipes don’t freeze. And whatever willfully truthless shitbags might try to tell you this disproves global warming, Randall would like you to know better.

Spam of the day:

Best Hair Loss Treatment | Worldwide Delivery

Since I’m now double-vaccinated (woo hoo! Dolly shot!), I’m getting stuff done that I’ve put off. We mentioned the dentist and I went to the doctor yesterday, and tomorrow I get a haircut because right now my hair is long enough to get tangled in my moustache. But do tell me about your hair-loss scam, I’m fascinated.

_______________
¹ Just a little hand joke. Keep moving, folks.

² I seem to recall a pair of guys named Randall and David, for example.

The thing about trilogies is, you know they’re going to fall into one of two patterns. They may be loosely connected, but largely independent stories, and if you jump in on book two or three, you might miss some nuance, but there’s also obviously other things happening to the characters between the volumes on the shelf. Or it’s one continuous story, broken down into more digestible chunks, and where one leaves off the next one begins.

In the case of the latter, as in Last Pick: Rise Up by Jason Walz (:01 Books), you have to read all of it or you have an incomplete single story instead of missing out on one or more related stories. So if you haven’t read Last Pick and Last Pick: Born To Run, go do that before reading any further here, and be aware that here be spoilers. In fact, to discuss this one we’re going to be going pretty heavy on the spoilers; if you don’t want those, skip down to the last couple of paragraphs for context on appropriate ages for readers, as this one is a bit trickier than it appears on the surface.

The other thing about trilogies of the second sort is you know how the story is going to play out. The main characters have their big challenge to overcome/world to rescue, and they’re going to accomplish that goal. Thanks to Tolkien’s model, we know that the protagonist(s) might not get to enjoy the saved world because of their personal trauma, but others will get to go back to normal life and even the hero gets their well-earned reward. That’s just how these stories work.

We know that Sam (maybe 17 years old, employed as a conscript mutant-culler by the locust-like aliens that swept everybody from Earth to be similarly utilized) and Wyatt (her twin brother, autistic, left behind on Earth like all the other elderly, broken, and useless members of humanity) are going to find their parents (conscript mutant-cullers for the past four years, along with most of the adult population of Earth, however many of them are left alive), chase the aliens off their planet, and get back to a semblance of normal life. That’s just how these stories work.

Sam might have figured out why the aliens are scooping up whole planets worth of people to do their dirty work¹, found her parents, prompted a series of prison breaks freeing oh so many captive humans and figured out how to stop the aliens once and for all². Wyatt may have been laying the groundwork for an uprising in the past six weeks, with the Last Picks from around the world building their own jerry-rigged versions of alien craft to fight back, and lured the entire alien armada to Earth for a decisive battle.

The thing about these stories? We see the hobbits go home to the Shire. We don’t know the names of all the farmers in the Westfold or Ithilien or in the lands around Erebor that were slaughtered trying to hold back the might of Mordor’s armies. Sam and Wyatt inspire untold numbers of people to follow them. Those jury-rigged ships? They aren’t built to spec. And the humans who’ve had barely enough time to paint a flag or slogan on the outside haven’t had time to develop real piloting or combat skills. Those prison escapees are still on hostile alien worlds, with no weapons, no food, and their captors sending overwhelming force.

They’re almost all going to die.

For maybe the first time in this kind of youths must fight to save their entire planet story that’s so very common, we find out just how few people there are left to try to rebuild when it’s all over and how much it’s going to hurt to be one of those that survive³. Sam and Wyatt don’t want to send those people to their deaths, they’re very nearly broken by the knowledge that that’s what they did, but things are moving too quickly and honestly, there isn’t a better alternative.

This was a bloody, painful end to a war that never needed to start, and in its finish it reminds me of nothing so much as Deep Space Nine‘s Dominion War. An entire shelf of YA dystopian uprising stories play out like General Martok, reveling in the fight and the victory; Walz reminds us that drinking in the ashes of a devastated civilization, with billions dead on each side, is never a cause for celebration.

It wasn’t obvious when the Last Pick trilogy started that this was going to be a subversion; even to the end of the second installment, it looked like another rousing story of … and then those crazy kids pulled it off and saved everybody!, but Walz built towards it slowly, inevitably, almost imperceptibly until you’re well past the point it should have been obvious from the beginning.

It’s a hell of a lesson to those that read it, but means that you should probably look to give this one to readers at least on the older half of the recommended 12-18 year old reader range. Or, to put it another way, if you had a 12 year old read the first book, and then the subsequent two as they came out in annual installments, they’re probably old enough to deal with ending. If you’ve got a reader that can handle the heaviness of the message, there’s not a lot better out there to offer them.

Last Pick: Rise Up was written and illustrated by Jazon Walz, with interior colors by Jon Proctor and Joe Flood; cover colors by Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb. It’s been out since last October, but Diamond just now got a copy to my local comic shop. Thanks, Diamond!

Spam of the day:

Hi Gary, Thanks for renewing your Compulsory Third Party Insurance policy with us on 21-01-2021. We want to check in on how the process worked for you. Are there any improvements we can make on our end?

I dunno, maybe send this to the Gary Tyrrell that’s your actual customer in Australia and not me?

_______________
¹ We already knew the aliens are many planets in a federation, all susceptible to mutation, and their treaties prevent any member of any planet from killing another, even a mutant. They kidnap entire populations of whole planets to kill their own mutated citizens because their laws won’t let them do it themselves.

² She’s learned that the mutation illness is preventable and the political leadership isn’t bothering to prevent it. Once that knowledge gets out, it’s going to shatter the alien civilization.

³ Exception to the rule, because there’s always an exception: most installments in the many Gundam series spend a good amount of time on the burdens of war and trauma of those that survive.

By which I mean, my computer blue-screened for the second time in two days earlier this afternoon; the first time was about 20 hours after I applied Patch Tuesday patches, and the second time was about 20 hours after the first time. Each time it came back from the restart, but the second time, I went into all the programs that auto-restarted themselves in their prior states, closed out all their work, exited them, and cleanly shut the box down before restarting.

And after 10 seconds of the Windows 10 logo and the spinning progress circle, my computer stopped pumping out a video signal to my monitor. Oops.

It was running, but I couldn’t see anything. After figuring out a keyboard sequence to request a shutdown with no visual feedback, I rebooted — Windows logo, spinny circle, then no video. I did it again, and this time I interrupted during the logo three times, which is how you get to Safe Mode these days. Fortunately, telling Windows to roll back the latest stability release seems to have done the trick, but it was — as the late Graham Chapman once said — a bit of a brown trouser moment¹.

So why am I going on about computer woes that are obviously resolved, other than perhaps to pad out today’s word count? Because things fail.

Case in point: in my EMT sideline, I am required to keep patient records in electronic form so that the patient can be tracked easily through the medical system (possibly facility to facility) and population-level studies can be done on anonymized data. On duty night, I went to sign my crew into our chart service and was presented with an error indicating unscheduled downtime. Probably about 30% of the EMS systems in the country were cut off from their charting capability². The next day, I got the following [mildly redacted] email:

On Tuesday, February 9, 2021, [ ] experienced a severe outage for approximately two hours, beginning at approximately 4:15 p.m. MST (UTC – 07). Services were not restored until 6:27 p.m. MST. All charting capabilities were halted during this outage.

What You Need to Know
All [ ] customers were affected.
No action is required, but some PCRs that were in progress at the time of the outage may not have been saved and should be reviewed for completeness. There was no loss to saved data. [ ] is 100% available and fully returned to service.

What We Are Doing
On behalf of the entire staff of [ ], please accept our sincerest apologies. [ ] has a long record of minimal disruptions and we are dedicated to maintaining the highest possible level of reliability. We have assembled a clean-room of subject matter experts who are forensically investigating to determine the root cause. We expect to have the results within the next few days. At that time, we will undertake a plan of action to prevent that issue from repeating in the future. Please be assured that we will not rest until we are sure of a permanent solution.

[ ] commits to provide industry-leading, world-class solutions that are trusted to deliver the reliability you need for critical operations. We have not met our commitments with this outage and truly apologize for the disruption to your service.

Of course, if you experience any lingering issues or find further anomalies, our Support team is available 24/7 to help. Please do not hesitate to reach out for additional assistance by phone at [ ] or through our Customer Community.

Sincerely,
[ ]
Vice President, Customer Success & Operations

That is how you do it. A clear indication of what they know, what they’re doing, and a commitment to not let it happen again. Clear lines of communication for any concerns, with the name of the party taking responsibility.

Compare, if you will, the utter noncommunication around last year’s Eisner’s fiasco; yes, I’m still mad about that. Or to cite a more recent example, Box Brown discovered that a cannabis company stole one of his Andre The Giant character designs and has built their entire corporate identity around it.

Now you may recall that Brown is generally in favor of cannabis, but he’s said that even if they had contacted him ahead of their use he wouldn’t have agreed to this use of his art because he believes (rightly, to my reading) that Mr The Giant’s estate is the one that should be able to say how his likeness is used. The weedcorp has been stonewalling Brown, so I used their contact form (no email or phone I could find) to pose some questions:

[clipped from the top — introduction of me as writing on comics; this is a formal request for comment for publication, with a deadline for response of 5:00pm EST Wednesday, 10 February 2021]
You are using, and appear to have built your entire brand identity, around Box Brown’s depiction of Andre The Giant, as seen in his bestselling and award-winning biography, “ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND” from :01 Books.

Mr Brown has stated publicly that he did not authorize this use of his artwork, and has not been paid for it. What response would you like to provide about what appears to be fairly blatant copyright theft?

No response has been received, so we’ll call that No comment. To add a little more context, Brown tells us:

So what happened is:
A company wanted to call themselves “Giant Cannabis” so they went to a company called @99designs and got a cheapo logo designed. The “artist” searched “giant cannabis” and lo and behold MY WORK came up. The artist traced it and sent it in.

They printed it on tons of packaging. Then I called them out and they tried to pay me off. Then when I said no (bc its an illegal use of Andre the Giant’s image) they said they won’t use the packaging anymore. Here we are a year later and it’s still on shelves [spellings to get around Twitter’s limits corrected]

One of my goals of the last few years is to design a cannabis package but… not like this

spent a long time on the phone with them about a year ago and they told me they would pull it but obviously have not. I alerted the Andre the giant people who have a bigger claim than I do.

So yeah — don’t try to stonewall, kids. It doesn’t work. If you screw up, it is always better to own it.

Followup from yesterday: It appears that Meredith Gran has control of twitter.com/granulac again. Take that, account-jacking dick!

Spam of the day:

I have performed a website optimisation and performance audit on your website fleen.com, if you would like the results please head over to [nope!].com & select 25 point complimentary website security and performance audit and I will send it over to you.

Yeah, I’m good, thanks.

_______________
¹ He did a lecture tour of colleges when I was a student; he was talking about his involvement with a group of utter whackjobs called the Dangerous Sports Club, who decided that skiing was an insufficient challenge unless there was stuff between you and your skis.

Stuff like a full grand piano that you sat at and played whilst schussing your way downslope.

They also invented bungee jumping, and immediately decided that wasn’t good unless you were strapped to, say, a comfortable overstuffed leather chair. The BTM was the assessment of a DSC member to Chapman, regarding a fellow member who suddenly appeared to not have his femur where it belonged, but instead in its place was a rather nasty (irony alert) poin-ted stick.

He also taught us medical student drinking games. What I am saying is I paid closer attention to that lecture than probably any other during all my college years.

² This is why we still carry a clipboard and paper forms.

It’s still a load of crap. I speak, naturally, of the fact that Disney has killed off the Fox-affiliated Blue Sky animation studio, which had previously had all of its approaching-release movies delayed, of which one remained and will now be shelved rather than seen:

Blue Sky’s final movie, a fantasy story about a young shapeshifter called Nimona, will be left unfinished and will not be released.

Originally announced as an animated film in 2015, pushed back from a 2020 release date to 2021 six months before the pandemic, narrowly escaping the axe that fell in the Fox purchase, but getting pushed back to 2022, Nimona is now scrapped because we live in a monoculture and Disney will not have anything exist that does not bow to its view of the world.

They could have let Blue Sky finish its last production. They could have allowed a very different kind of young heroine. They could have just dumped it to streaming and made money — which, considering they’d already bought the entire damn studio and the production, would essentially have been free money — which you would think is the actual purpose of a corporation. But, I suppose, they don’t have the ancillary rights to merch and staright-to-video sequels and a Nimona character in the parks, so fuck sharing and getting 94% of the benefit.

Disney has their Way, their Method , their Version of how things are meant to be, and everything they build must conform to them or be ground down and erased. It is all or nothing for them.

I mourn for those who would have found a vision of themselves in an animated version, for all the nascent culture that is snuffed out so that the very rich can become very, very rich as we pay them for the privilege of becoming so.

But Nimona is still on my bookshelf, and hopefully Noelle Stevenson had a good agent and lawyer that included a rights reversion, and we may yet see Nimona on the big screen.

And like I mentioned a while back around the Disney screwing Alan Dean Foster story, if you sign a contract of any sort, it seems you need to include a Disney buys out whoever I am contracting with clause that reverts control of your brainchild to you. They want all or nothing? Let them have nothing.

And, because we can’t have nice things, Meredith Gran has had her Twitter account jacked by by a complete dickhole, who keeps changing the account name to avoid reporting. He (of course it’s a dude) is, as of this writing, going by the name @dazeywtf, which you should report as a hacked account and also ping @twittersafety on the matter, please and thank you.

Spam of the day
No spam, but I will say that I was writing that last paragraph when my computer blue-screened with no warning, and I gotta hand it to WordPress for preserving all but about a half-sentence of what I wrote despite me not having explicitly saved anything yet. Well done, WordPress.

So the thing is, when you (and by you I really mean me) were due to go to the dentist in March of 2020 for your half-yearly cleaning and didn’t because pandemic, and then you decide to not go until it’s safe, and furthermore you don’t get a second vaccination until February 2021, nearly a full year after you were supposed to go in and about 18 months since you were last in the dentist chair?

Yeah, that routine cleaning hurts, no matter how good your dentist is (and I quite like my dentist¹).

So tooth-hurty turned out to be more prescient than I’d figured, and I’m going to lie down for a bit and throb. I swear, if I could have found a way to make this webcomics-related, I would have. See y’all tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

This is not SPAM!

Never in the history of email has that sentence ever been typed and turned out to be accurate. It’s spam. It’s always spam.

_______________
¹ Which, given my personal dental history is pretty positive statement.

We are deep in the winter doldrums. Wait, can you get doldrums in winter? Not talking about the mood, there’s an actual historical term that I think is season-specific? Lemme check …

Huh, what do you know? It’s geographic, not temporal, and derived from nautical lore. I bet if I’d paid better attention to some past conversation with Lucy Bellwood, I would have known that. Anyhoo, let’s pull you out of the doldrums with some upcoming [web]comics stuff and events.

• Hey, do you like saving money? Sure, we all do! And do you like porn? Like I need to ask. Now you can save money while grabbing yourself some promo erotica from the fine smut merchants at Iron Circus:
  

  Holy heck, Valentine’s Day is on its way! Let’s celebrate!
  All erotica, in all formats (hardcover, softcover, and ebook), is now 25% off in the Iron Circus shop! C’mon and grab yourself something nice! [emphasis original]

  That’s until February 14, naturally. Have some fun by yourself, with your favorite other person, or maybe the group of folks that you find enticing and exciting. It’s all good.

• The uncertainties of COVID will still be here when you’ve had, uh, sufficient time with all that smut, and we’re still a long ways from having in-person comics events. Not to worry, though, as the Cartoon Art Museum will be bringing you a free streaming event on 18 February (that would be Thursday of next week):
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum and Netflix present animation legend Glen Keane (Oscar-winning director of Dear Basketball) in conversation with director Robert Kondo (The Dam Keeper, Tonko House) as they discuss Keane’s storied animation career and his latest feature film, the Netflix/Pearl Studio production Over The Moon. This discussion will be followed by a brief Q&A session with our live audience.

  You can catch the convo starting at 4:00pm PST, free thanks to Netflix’s sponsorship, but you will have to register in advance — see the Zoom event page to do that.

• And a week later, (that would be Thursday, 25 February), CXC and The Billy are bringing you another free streaming event, this one at 6:00pm EST. MS Harkness (Desperate Pleasures, Tinderella) will be talking about creating autobio comics:
  

  This presentation will focus on how MS Harkness adapts and structures real life moments and memories, including difficult histories, into her work. This presentation may contain discussion of sensitive topics that are not appropriate for all ages.

  This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Ladies First: A Century Of Women’s Innovations in Comics and Cartoon Art, currently on display at The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

  This is a free live webinar that will also be simulcast on CXC’s YouTube ) and Twitch channels. You can register via the CXC Zoom site.

Spam of the day:

I’m inviting you to take up my free sales letter template. As a thank you for taking up my invitation I will give you a completely free no strings attached fill in the blanks professional sales letter template. Just go to [nope].com now.

I think I got your fill in the blanks sales letter template already, Jay. You sent it to me with the blanks filled in.

Yeah, hi, typing this around trying to get to my appointment for a COVID vaccine. Sorry it if goes up late (not sorry)

• Fans of BACK have been watching KC Green and Anthony Clark’s weird, oddly heartfelt drama about an undead cowgirl, an innocent druid, and the end of the world, barreling towards a conclusion, and then at the end of December a hiatus was announced — Give us a couple of weeks to get the end of the story all lined up, they said, we really want to stick the landing. Given that a weekly update is typically two or more pages full of creative mayhem, Clark and Green are entitled to as much time as they need to get it all set. But how long before BACK was back?

  As of yesterday’s update, we have an answer:

  BACK
  THE EPILOGUE
  will begin Feb 17th 2021
  regular updates will
  occur until it’s over.
  Every Wednesday

  Hooray!

• In case you were wondering, TCAF has announced that 2021 will be virtual, but being freed of a physical time/place, they’ve expanded out to a full week of programming. Want in? The time to apply is until 3 March, and you can do so here, but note:
  

  TCAF’s new exhibition website is being made in partnership with Canzine (the festival of zines) and the Toronto Hand Eye Society. Zinesters and indie video game creators will be among the 600 virtual exhibitors in May!

  Applicants will have the choice to apply for TCAF, Canzine OR Comics x Games. Accepted exhibitors will have a customizable online shop page where they can upload up to 5 items for sale. After TCAF, exhibitors will send all sold items to a warehouse, where orders will be bundled and shipped off to shoppers. This process is to help save exhibitors and visitors excess transaction and shipping fees. Options will be available to see additional products.

  That sounds an awful lot like what I was wondering if SDCC would do for its exhibitors last year. Interesting that the free festival managed to pull it off and not the massive nonprofit corporation.

• Hey, remember when it looked like the UK VAT was going to screw over absolutely everybody selling low value items into Great Britain and Northern Ireland? As a guy who has customers in the UK, Brad Guigar¹ looked into the situation and found out that Her Majesty’s tax folks have set a fairly high bar for the outside-the-UK vendors to clear before they become responsible for collecting.

  Unless you’re selling more than £85,000 per year to UK customers, you don’t have to make the arrangements (the privilege for registering to collect and remit VAT was reported to be £1000+ per year, so whew, lucky break). Your customers will have to pay VAT at a 20% rate for goods up to £135, but it’s not on you to manage what they do. Full details behind the paywall at Webcomics Dot Com.

Spam of the day:
Yeah, nah, my arm’s starting to hurt already. Time to hydrate and take it easy, tomorrow’s maybe gonna be rough.

_______________
¹ He is a sexy, sexy man. Total DILF material.

Feels good to get back to book reviews; the number that I was able to bash together over the past 11 months or so of quarantine is far fewer than I would have liked — both due to a disrupted flow of review copies¹, and everything being the way it’s been — but I hope that this is the start of a renewed string of book reviews. And if it is, we’ve got a good title to start us out.

Colleen AF Venable (author of National Book Award nominee Kiss Number 8, among many other works) and Stephanie Yue (colorist on Smile, among many other works) have worked together previously, on the superlative Guinea PIg: Pet Shop Private Eye series (six books in all, get them all for the new reader(s) in your life and prepare yourself for a breathless recounting of the adventures of Hamisher and Sasspants), but they have joined forces for a full-length graphic novel for the first time on Katie The Catsitter, one of the newest from Random House Graphic. It’s a welcome return to the Venable-Yue partnership. We’ll try to keep things general, but spoilers ahead, yeah?

Katie lives in a walk-up in New York, and although the story doesn’t come out and say it, she and her mom are poor folks in a richer neighborhood; her friends don’t have moms that have to work all night; they live in buildings with doormen, don’t get their food from the bodega, and get to go to camp. Camp! An oasis of green that city girl Katie has never experienced. One particular friend’s mom offers to pay Katie’s way to camp, but Katie’s determined to earn the money herself, no matter how unsuited she may be to grocery-carrying (mashing eggs), plant-sitting (they all died), and other miscellaneous kid-type chores.

Until she gets asked up to the top floor of her building by the mysterious Ms Lang, who needs a cat-sitter. Cat’s aren’t allowed in the building, but that hasn’t kept her from keeping cats.

217 of them. In an apartment, but sadly, Ms Lang informs us, New York City apartments just don’t fit 218 cats well. Suspiciously well-trained in everything from using the bathroom like people to computer hacking the Pentagon to making Katie a new fingerprint-sensor key, because it’s easy to teach a cat to fetch, or hit a few keys, or create a 3-D model, render and print a mold, then cast and cure a silicone fingerprint. “Easy”. And if the cats create havoc, they repair everything (including sourcing replacements for any shredded furniture) before Ms Lang is home at midnight, and Katie’s making 30 bucks an hour.

Weirdly, on the nights that Katie cat-sits, the Mousestress — New York’s most mysterious costumed villain — is revealing mistreatment of animals or rescuing those in need in ever flashier ways. She isn’t really committing crimes of the usual villain sort — the breaking and entering is in service of bringing unpleasant facts to light, not to steal stuff or hold the city hostage — but The Eastern Screech (Yes. It is I. New York’s highest Yelp-rated superhero.) is determined to take the Mousestress down because … well, because he’s a bit of a jerk. I’d say he’s stiff-necked, but he does that rotate-the-head-all-the-way-round thing that owls do, so he’s not, but you get me.

Meanwhile, Katie’s best friend since forever is writing from camp less and less, having found new friends and boys and who knows what else. Katie’s got nobody to talk about all this to, except for 217 cats, each with a particular skill² far beyond what you’d expect cats to have. Along the way, Katie learns that villains aren’t always evil, friends aren’t necessarily forever, and if you’re gonna fight the law for all the right reasons, you need a crew of deeply skilled experts that have your back, no matter what.

The story’s charming, the art is inviting and full of character, and it’s clear that Yue and Venable have a blast working with each other. Look for Katie The Catsitter to top best-of lists and awards categories for middle grade readers for the next couple of years, as we’re promised Katie The Catsitter — Best Friends For Never in 2022, and hopefully there will be more after that.

Katie The Catsitter by Colleen AF Venable and Stephanie Yue is available at bookstores everywhere; a copy was purchased prior to review. It’s a perfect read for any kid that has the patience to make it through 200 pages on their own, although older readers will get more of the gags and maybe be more receptive to the message that heroes and villains aren’t always who Yelp tells us they are.

Spam of the day:

DOMAIN SERVICES EXPIRATION NOTICE FOR fleen.com Domain Notice Expiry ON: Jan 17, 2021

Oddly, we are two and a half weeks past your deadline and we’re still running. Strange.

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¹ Including, among other things, Random House Graphic seemingly having to drop plans to get physical review copies out into the world, and :01 stopping all physical copies. Both are being generous with electronic review copies, but I am old and grumpy enough to massively prefer the act of reading on paper. You can’t get a PDF autographed, people!

² In addition to those specifically called out in the text, there’s a personnel file of pretty near to 200 different cats, each with a name and a skill. Admiral Dewey: tea expert; Chomsky: cognitive science; DJ Bootie Butler: mad beats; Hashbrown: composting expert; Knope: community action; Marley: murder podcast expert; Nick Furry: comic book expert; Puss N Cahoots: lawyer; Shamrock: green initiatives; Smushy: mixed martial arts; Willow Harkill: photonics engineer.

Not content to come up with 200 areas of expertise, Venable has dreamed up some amazing cat names: Baby Teefling; Captain von Smooch; Cat Benatar; Cathulhu; Catman Crothers; Em-Dash; Meatloaf; Meowth von Landingham the Fourth; Mr Aaron Purr Sir; Sassafras Assassin; Shrimpy Longstockings; Spooky Pumpkin Patch, and dozens more. Yue has given each of them a unique design and a personality, no two cats in the crowd scenes look the same, and the ones that are most relevant to the plot all have distinct coats, silhouettes, and ways of moving (or not, in the case of Oslo, the movie expert).