The header image is apropos of nothing, except that Kendra Wells has been killing it at The Nib lately, and that there’s something refreshingly hilarious about a pop song called Obstruct My Justice.

It’s spring time (the snow from the Nor’easter two days back is melting and everything!) and that means comics festival time. In case you hadn’t seen, both MoCCA Fest and TCAF have new information up for your perusal.

• First up: MoCCA (7 and 8 April, at the Metropolitan West event space, next to the Intrepid Museum) has schedules of events (which will take place a skant two blocks away, at the Ink 48 hotel), with six panels on Saturday and six more on Sunday.

  The big draws look to be the retrospective on creating March with co-author Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell (Saturday at 3:30pm in the Garamond Room), the Jaime Hernandez spotlight (Sunday at 12:30pm, Garamond Room), and the Mike Mignola Q&A (3:30pm, Garamond again). It’s not like what’s happening in the Helvetica Room is bad, it’s just these three caught my eye.

  Oh, and I’m not sure if I mentioned that featured guests for MoCCA, but they include webcomicker Rebecca Mock (who also designed the badges this year) and The Nib cartoonist Ann Telnaes (who also draws for other places, like The Washington Post). Exhibitors that caught my eye include Alisa Harris (A119 A), Carey Pietsch (H255), Christian Blaza (H264), Corey Chrapuch (H230), Josh Neufeld (I270 A), Julia Gfrörer (E183 A), Ken Wong (G242), Laura Ķeniņš (E179), Madeline Zuluaga (F231), Pénélope Bagieu (no table listed, but I’ll bet she’s hanging out with the cool folks at :01 Books, E162), Priya Huq (H263 B), Robyn Chapman (E170), Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (J286), and Sara Varon (D155 B). Did I miss anybody? Let me know!

• For those not all festival’ed out, TCAF will run 12 and 13 May, centered on the Toronto Reference Library, but spilling out into the surrounding neighborhood for a event that’s become more and more citywide. They’ve also done us the favor of putting all their exhibitors on one fast-loading page. However, the fast-loading page doesn’t allow you to click links into new tabs or copy link addresses, so there’s no quick way of including websites for folks. I know, but you think I have these all memorized?

  Anyways, you’ll see Lucy Bellwood, Boum, Tony Breed, Vera Brosgol, Emily Carroll, Cecil Castellucci, Danielle Corsetto, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Melanie Gillman, Sophie Goldstein, KC Green, Nicholas Gurewitch, Kori Michele Handwerker, Dustin Harbin, Myisha Haynes, Ananth Hirsh & Yuko Ota, Abby Howard, C Spike Trotman, Jeph Jacques, Shing Yin Khor, Hope Larson, Kel McDonald, Sara & Tom McHenry, Rebecca Mock, Sfé Monster, Molly Ostertag, Ben Passmore, Katie Shanahan, Whit Taylor, Jen Wang, Ron Wimberly, and the zubiquitous Jim Zub. You should be able to find their sites pretty easily.

Spam of the day:

Congratulations, You’ve Been Considered for Inclusion…

They still do Who’s Who type scams? Man, that takes me back. I remember getting actual postcards back in like high school talking about the importance of being listed in such a prestigious personal branding vehicle. Got some sour news for you, Jack — you weren’t getting my US$39.95¹ back then, you ain’t getting squat from me now.

_______________
¹ US$95.74 in constant dollars.

Frank Zappa, in his autobiography, recounted the story of playing his then-favorite R&B tune for his high school music teacher and asking why he liked it so much; the reply was Parallel fourths. That was his introduction to twelve-tone theory and understanding why music works the way it does.

Similarly, when I read a comic and can’t figure out why I like it, there are a few people that I trust to make it clear — Zainab Akhtar, David Brothers, and Oliver Sava are at the top of the list. Sava heads up comics writing at The AV Club, and has gathered other writers that also get comics.

Today, they (that would be Sava, joined by Caitlin Rosenberg and Shea Hennum) talk about the best of the year, and there’s a significant representation of webcomics, and comics from people that cut their teeth in webcomics. Sava holds forth on Julia Wertz’s Tenements, Towers & Trash, Giant Days by John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, Whitney Cogar, and Jim Campbell (respectively: words, pencils, inks, colors, letters), and Squirrel Girl by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, and Rico Renzi (words, art, colors).

Rosenberg adds Tess Stone’s Not Drunk Enough, Wilde Life by Pascalle Lepas, Noora Heikkilä’s Letters For Lucardo (via Spike’s Iron Circus Comics¹), and Abby Howard’s Dinosaur Empire! Hennum’s additions are slightly further removed, but include offerings from Retrofit Comics (founded by Box Brown), Koyama Press (friend to indies everywhere), and 2d Press — Hennum’s definitely further into art comics than I usually read, but the writeups are making me revisit that decision.

The point here being, much like Mark Siegel promised his Macmillan overlords that :01 Books would contend for literary prizes within ten years of launch³, this recognition’s not just for bragging rights. It offers credibility, visibility, and the opportunity for further work, not just to the creators that have been called out by one of the premiere popular culture sites, but to their contemporaries and colleagues as well.

On a day that I noticed some chud on Twitter (no link for him … of course it’s a him) declaring that Andrew Farago was irrelevant and that real geeks don’t care about some museum in San Francisco, and it’s not like he’s Scott McCloud or anything⁴, it’s just further proof that comics is becoming more and more about new creators, new voices, new kinds of stories, and (crucially) new points of view, and the old stereotypes of what comics are/who reads them are slipping further into irrelevance. It’s a good day to read about some great comics, and an even better day to read some great comics. The list by Sava et alia is a damn good place to start.

Spam of the day:

Girls battle for your heart: choose Veronika or Kristina

Mail order bride spam, or anime series episode title? I can’t decide!

_______________
¹ Separate from the best of the year list, Rosenberg also reviews Crossplay, presently funding on Kickstarter, also from Iron Circus².

² Speaking of Iron Circus, Spike spent some time today pre-announcing ICC’s 2018 offerings, and it comes to at least six books (two of which are anthologies); Banned Book Club, previously announced, is due in 2019. Let that sink in — a one-plus person shop is making plans more than a year out, wrangling at least seven books in that timeframe. Try to deny her achievements, I dare you.

³ It actually took less than a year to break out the tuxes at the National Book Awards for Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese.

⁴ McCloud on Twitter in response: Andrew Farago is a prominent authority on comics and a good guy. Anyone saying otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Take that, chud!

I swear that title actually means something in context.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith were at Strand Boooks in Manhattan last night, kicking off their monthlong book tour in support of Soonish. For those of you that don’t want to read, the talk was recorded for C-SPAN and will appear as part of their books series in a couple weeks, and Zach did a solo interview with ABC today that that went over many of the same points. Everybody else, onwards.

Here’s the thing about Soonish that you should know — it was a joint effort that played to both authors strengths (Kelly: scientific interviewing and bibliographies; Zach: wide and deep self-taught curiosity about nerd stuff and also dick jokes), that would have absolutely destroyed a lesser marriage.

Each of the topics that they examined took a solid month of research and writing and interviewing and doublechecking — and keep in mind that they did the full workup on more than the ten technologies that made it into the final book¹. Much of it took place while Kelly was particularly busy². There were Nobel laureates to talk to, agents and editors to keep happy, and a looming deadline.

For those that are interested in the mechanics of making the book and their working process, they’ll be recording a podcast on that topics in New York City tonight, but the short version is (per Zach) For any task, somebody has to be in charge. It doesn’t matter who, and it switched back and forth for each chapter, but somebody has to be the one that make the decision to alter direction, kill the project, take responsibility. That, and recognizing it’s not personal, is how they got through the process.

But when you get to write a book about all the ways that things that look great (spaceflight for US$500/kg instead of US$20,000!) will actually kill us in foreseen (whoever gets it first can just hang out in orbit with a bunch of tungsten rods that they drop onto Earth with the force of nuclear bombs!) or unforeseen ways (and in order to do it, you have to have perfect understanding of the weather patterns of the globe, predict them with 100% accuracy into the future, and build a 100,000 km long chain of carbon atoms with exactly zero of them out of place or it all fails spectacularly!), that process has its perks.

That’s before they get to how humanity will voluntarily let itself be slaughtered by robots in exchange for cheap cookies, or just the reassurance that the robot is trying hard to help while the smoke and toxic gases are getting closer. As a species, we are often not very smart, which means maybe we shouldn’t be allowing people to create their own viruses for fun and profit?

And what do you do when people will inevitably engage in acts like hate crimes in augmented reality, while doing nothing in actual real reality? Then Pokémon Go came along and planted Pokestops at the Holocaust Museum and the sites of concentration camps, and we saw how maybe we haven’t anticipated all the outcomes just yet. I’m not saying that we’re good at planning for unexpected contingencies, but we’re at least starting to get used to the idea that we haven’t thought of all the side effects in our whiz-bang future tech utopias. Like Kelly said, Nintendo did the right thing because … well, you know.

Highlights:

• The very nice woman that owns the Strand introduced Kelly and Zach, but pretty obviously was not familiar with the work of the Whiner-Schmidts.
• There were multiple questions about SMBC comics and how Kelly looks grumpy in them, which I should really dispel. Kelly is one of the bubbliest, most excited to share knowledge, funniest people you’ll ever meet. Okay, so she doesn’t get the whole single-use unlubricated monocle thing³, but she is no more the scowling cartoon than Zach is the feral, unclothed crazy person he draws himself as (although, on second thought …).
• Since Zach got a couple of solo questions about his work, I asked one to Kelly: Favorite parasite and why? After taking a moment to reassure the audience that studying parasites is her actual job and she’s not just a weirdo, she proudly recounted the story of the parasitoid — it must kill its host to complete the reproductive cycle — that her team discovered. Eudurus set, the Crypt-Keeper Wasp, is a remarkably nasty piece of work and Kelly positively shines when describing it.
• Asked about what they’re working on next, Kelly mentioned getting back to her day job research, and Zach mentioned that he’s teamed up with economist Brian Caplan to illustrate a graphic novel that argues the economic benefits of immigration.

Soonish is available in bookstores everywhere. The book tour continues apace.

Spam of the day:

SqrtnAmy16 wants to know if you’re free this week

No lie, I am running around like an alligator on fire this week. Thanks, though!

_______________
¹ They started with 50, but at book length, that didn’t allow any more depth than a mildly amusing Wikipedia article. They chopped down to 25, then 11, eliminating topics that rely too much on magic, or unrealistic economics, or are so far advanced that minor incremental changes will get us there.

The eleventh was quantum computing, which they abandoned late in the game for not being able to do a sufficiently good job explaining it. The longest surviving chapter in Soonish is ~10,000 words, and QC had more than 30,000 that didn’t do justice and would have only grown further in time and word count. Ten’s a good round number anyway.

² Asked in the Q&A how they dealt with news breaking that disrupted what they’d already written — which happened with both Cheap Spaceflight (thanks, Elon Musk!) and Augmented Reality (thanks, Pokémon Go!) — Kelly responded, I’d say drinking, but I was pregnant while we were writing it.

³ You’re buying them in 25 packs! Why? How? I didn’t mention it to her afterwards, but I did in fact make use of such a monocle to look dapper as fuck at my niece’s wedding.

By which I mean, the map of San Diego Comic Con’s exhibitors, in handy PDF form, which I painstakingly re-capture and format every year. Well, not this time! I’m keeping the maps from last year to the extent that they match the layout this year

The North Half Layout Is The Same
It’s on the right side of the overall floor map, and apart from a logo change or two, the booth numbers and major players correspond to the same layout as last year:

The Webcomics, Small Press, and Independent Press Pavilions remain reasonably accessible from the “B” lobby. Let’s break ’em down.

The Last Stand Of Webcomics?
It’s been a long run, but more and more creators are opting to skip SDCC; of course, once you give up a booth you won’t get it back in the current decade, so expect to see a bit more holding on. Centered roughly on booth #1332, you’ll find a majority of the webcomickers who will be at the show within about a 1.5 aisle radius; some are slightly outside the orange area, but not too far. Those that return are for the most part at the same booth number as previous years, but there’s been some upheaval, as we shall see.

Notes:

• :01 Books appear to have been relocated to booth 2800, and taken Macmillan Children’s Publishing with it (2802).
• Rhode Montijo (of Happy Tree Friends fame) in 1329.
• No news yet on which TopatoCo creators will be along; we’ll update once we know.
• Hachette (1116), Harper Collins (1029), (1117), and Simon & Schuster (1128) remain in Publisher’s Row; Knopf Doubleday appears to be skipping.
• As of this writing, Booth 1332, the heart of Webcomics Central, is listed for Flex Comics which sells (quoting here) Bro Tank shirts and does occasional mash-up strips with a fitness theme. Far be it from me to criticize a webcomic for selling t-shirts, but given that the shirts are on the front page and the comic found off at a link, I’d say it inverts the normal order of things.
• But that’s still not as bad as booth 1235 going to Pulsar Entertainment LLC, which appears to have its origin in a talent contest (ugh) and is celebrating its own launch by running its own contest (double ugh) with all entries granting a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to Pulsar Entertainment (triple ugh). They’re over next to Blind Ferret; I’m sure Sohmer will have lots to say to them.
• Dumbrella this year will only be Rich Stevens and Andy Bell; they’ve invited Cards Against Humanity to share space.
• Meredith Gran will be at the show with husband Mike Holmes, but I don’t have a definitive location yet. Possible locations include Image (Gran), :01 (Holmes), and Dumbrella (both). More when I have it.

Small Press Abides
Right by the Webcomics section is Small Press. Here you should find:

From the Small Press section, you’re close by:

Notes:

• Gallery Nucleus will feature arty types when they aren’t hanging out at Mondo down in booth 835. Keep an eye out for your Scotts C, your Beckys and/or Franks, and alumni of the various Flight anthologies.
• No confirmation yet on which webcomickers will be at the BOOM! booth when, but I’d expect a pretty strong rotation.

Now head back toward the “B” Lobby into the Independent Press area and you’ll find Terry Moore at Booth 2109, which is split (in accordance with tradition)with Jeff Smith (who remains the best). You’re also not too far from the Jack Kirby Museum at Booth 5520 which, yes, is a very large number but is actually just inside the B1 entrance. Weird, right?

Going back to that larger map of the northern half of the exhibit hall. Wedged in between the Marvel and Image megabooths you’ll find Keenspot in Booth 2635.

The Far End Is Exactly The Same
There’s still some neat stuff if you keep wandering past the video games, Star Wars, Legos, and suchlike.

Give yourself half an hour or so, try not to spend all your money on Copic markers (Booth 5338), and you’ll find both Udon Entertainment (home of such worthies as Christopher Butcher and Jim Zub — although rumor is Zub is sitting this year out — at Booth 4529); and The Hero Initiative (at Booth 5003). Zub’s onetime Skullkickers artist, Edwin Huang will be in the Artists Alley at table EE-19, and Katie Cook will be at table HH-17.

Offsite
Every year for the past half-decade the amount of stuff you can see outside of the exhibit hall has grown; I’m guessing we’re only a year or so away from complete parity. If you know of anything especially good, let us know and we’ll add it here. Otherwise, just wander the city and see what you got.

Spam of the day:

Getting Christie Brinkley’??Perfect Skin Just Got a Lot Easier

This sounds suspiciously like it’s intended for serial killers.

Yeah, yeah, I know everybody’s living it up in Seattle, what with the many, many webcomickers and Ass Swordsman Tetsuo sketches and all, but have you considered the fact that we’re just a month away from MoCCA Festival 2017 in New York City?

The weekend of 1-2 April, from 11:00am to 6:00pm is when, the Metropolitan West event venue (mere steps from an actual damn aircraft carrier with an actual damn space shuttle) is where¹ — a venue with some pretty decent food options, bee-tee-dubs — at a cost of five friggin’ dollars a day. For that you’ll get the best comics artists on the coast (always a well-curated mix of familiar standbys and new talent²), and Guests of Honor including Cliff Chiang, Becky Cloonan, David Lloyd, Blutch, Drew Freidman, and some guy named Gene Yang who’s supposed to be a genius or something.

Programming’s not been announced yet, but traditionally MoCCA have GoH spotlights, some smart people doing profile-type interviews, and no conflicts — every panel runs in a unique timeslot to avoid having to choose who to see talk at a given time. It’s usually six or so panels on each of the two days, meaning the only thing keeping you from seeing every panel is how much time you want to spend on the show floor.

Webcomicky types due to table at MoCCA include Bill Roundy, Carey Pietsch, Evan Dahm, Josh Neufeld, Julia Gfrorër, and slates of creators from :01 Books, the Center for Cartoon Studies, and Top Shelf/IDW.

As a bonus, the Festival will almost certainly not catch fire. I’ll see you there — I’ll be the guy with the notebook and the moustache.

Spam of the day:

XXX__PPOORRNN WATCH HER GET F**CKED IN THE A$$

I’m not sure I understand the gist of your offering. It’s mysterious and too subtle to be understood.

_______________
¹ Sessions will be held in the nearby — and gorgeous — Ink48 hotel, 11th & 48th.

² I met nascent superstar Rosemary Valero-O’Connell there last year, let’s not forget.

[Edited for clarity: Originally, the Takei/Noguchi story appeared immediately below the Diesel Sweeties story. It was pointed out that having a comic dealing with celebrity death before images of a beloved (but elderly) celebrity could cause a mistaken (and panicky) impression.]

The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles is hosting an exhibit on the life of George Takei, and Yellow Peril creator Jamie Noguchi is doing both the show poster, and a bio comic book that will be given away to museum visitors. Neat!

I think we can all agree that Rich Stevens (as is so often the case) has the right of it.

Vermont’s first cartoon laureate, James Kochalka, gets the spotlight treatment, courtesy of Vermont’s public television network.

Mary Cagle’s Kickstart to print Let’s Speak English continues to tromp all over the place, and having met the basic stretch goals, Cagle announced a goal without limits. For reachig US$25,000, five copies of the book would be donated to libraries; since that goal’s been left in the dust, Cagle announced another copy will go to another library for each additional thousand bucks raised.

At present, that puts her at 17 copies. According to the FFF mk2, she’s on track for a finish of US$104-156K, and the McDonald Ratio puts her in the realm of US$103K; in either case, it looks like 80 to 100 libraries are getting free books, y’all.

And that’s it; normally we make fun of a spammer down here, but I’m giving them the day off.

We’ll be back in the new year, talking about webcomics, the people who make them, the people who read them, and whatever the hell else we feel like talking about. One last reminder: I’m matching donations to a series of good causes, so if you’ve donated (or dedicated sales of your stuff) to any of those organizations listed below the cut, drop me a line.

The Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund will close for the year on the 20th of January, so let me know about your giving before the vulgar talking yam¹ takes the oath of office. 2017 probably has no inclination of being any better than 2016, so we’ll just have to kick its butt until it settles down and friggin’ behaves.

_______________
¹ Hat tip to Charlie Pierce, shit-kicker and hell-raiser extraordinaire.
(more…)

Hey, look at that! A map of San Diego Comic Con 2016’s exhibit hall, which you can pull down to your device of choice here [PDF].

There will never be an extension to the San Diego Convention Center, so once again the bend in the hall divides things roughly in half, with our attention mostly on the north — or away from Tijuana¹ — side of the hall.

The Great Geek North
Let’s start over to the right side of the map, which is the side of the building closer to most hotels, the harbor, and the road from the airport. Conversely, it’s further away from the stadium and the surrounding lots where much of the offsite eventing will take place. It looks like this:

The Webcomics, Small Press, and Independent Press Pavilions are all reasonably accessible from the “B” lobby. Let’s break ’em down.

Upon The Webcomics Sea
Centered roughly on booth #1332, you’ll find a majority of the webcomickers who will be at the show within about a 1.5 aisle radius; some are slightly outside the orange area, but not too far. Those that return are for the most part at the same booth number as previous years, but there’s been some upheaval, as we shall see.

Notes:

• Blank Label appears to have given up its space, with David Willis deciding that twin boys are preferable to SDCC crowds. Booth 1330 will be the home of newcomers Cool Cat Blue.
• Similarly, it appears that Matt Inman will not be at the show, perhaps the better to defend against pornbots (or, more likely, spend his time and effort on his ever-expanding series of Blerch Runs; coincidentally, yesterday marked seven years of The Oatmeal, so happy strippiversary to Inman).
• Other listed newcomers to Webcomics Central include Jefbot in 1232, Mystic Revolution (boothing away from the rest of Keenspot, see below) in 1235, Digital Pimp in 1237 (which is odd, considering their latest newspost is about SDCC 2014), and Rhode Montijo (of Happy Tree Friends fame) in 1329. Lotta turnover.
• No news yet on which TopatoCo creators will be along; we’ll update once we know.
• Given all the book deals flying about, I would be remiss not to mention the presence of Hachette (1116), Harper Collins (1029), Macmillan Children’s Publishing (1117), and Simon & Schuster (1128) in Publisher’s Row; Knopf Doubleday is staking out their turf on the other side of Webcomics Central (1520).
• As of this writing, Booth 1332, the heart of Webcomics Central, is not listed as having an exhibitor. If this situation persists on arrival, I will claim that space in the name of Garylandia. So much for territorial ambitions. Looks like Phicno.com (an indie community for comic book, graphic novel, children’s books, cartoon and original content authors and fans) grabbed up the space.

Small Press And Such
Right by the Webcomics section is Small Press. Here you should find:

From the Small Press section, you’re close by:

Notes:

• Gallery Nucleus will feature arty types when they aren’t hanging out at Mondo down in booth 835. Keep an eye out for your Scotts C, your Beckys and/or Franks, and alumni of the various Flight anthologies.
• No confirmation yet on which webcomickers will be at the BOOM! booth when, but I’d expect a pretty strong rotation.
• Gene Yang and Hope Larson will be spending at least some time at DC’s enormobooth (1915).

Now head back toward the “B” Lobby into the Independent Press area and you’ll find Jeff Smith (no longer webcomicking but so what, he’s the best) again splitting booth space with Terry Moore (who’s announced no new series work — miniseries only from here out) at Booth 2109. You’re also not too far from the Jack Kirby Museum at Booth 5520 which, yes, is a very large number but is actually just inside the B1 entrance. Weird, right?

Going back to that larger map of the northern half of the exhibit hall. Wedged in between the Marvel and Image megabooths you’ll find Keenspot in Booth 2635.

The South Shall Rise Again
There’s still some neat stuff if you keep wandering past the video games, Star Wars, Legos, and suchlike.

Give yourself half an hour or so, try not to spend all your money on Copic markers (Booth 5338), and you’ll find both Udon Entertainment (home of such worthies as Christopher Butcher and Jim Zub at Booth 4529); and The Hero Initiative (at Booth 5003). Zub’s onetime Skullkickers artist, Edwin Huang will be in the Artists Alley at table EE-19, and Katie Cook will be at table HH-17.

Offsite
Every year for the past half-decade the amount of stuff you can see outside of the exhibit hall has grown; I’m guessing we’re only a year or so away from complete parity. If you know of anything especially good, let us know and we’ll add it here. Otherwise, just wander the city and see what you got.

Spam of the day:

Lonely Asian Girls Looking for Boyfriends

Nothing special about that, but the fake disclaimer at the bottom that tells me how to get off their list (liars) is hilarious: Click here if you no longer want to receive offers of Safeway coupons.

_______________
¹ The happiest place on Earth.

²Don’t forget that Ms Call has a concert on Friday night over in Little Italy with a passel of internet musicians, NASA scientists, and David Malki !.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; we may imagine Beef and Ray tearing down the road, not yet able to form words.

MoCCA Fest is next weekend, and I’ll be seeing you there, yes? For those who’ve missed the new, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival (presented by the Society of Illustrators) is off tow its third venue in as many years (and its fourth overall), but the SoI folks know how to put on a show and I suspect this one will be as good as the last few, which keep getting subtly better. We’ve seen news about the venue, the show poster, the Guests of Honor, and the programming, so let’s talk about exhibitors that will be there. As usual, I’ve probably missed a few, so let me know of any necessary corrections.

• Time was, MoCCA attracted an exhibitor pool that was heavily concentrated on New York (particularly Brookyln), with a lot of indie and webcartoonists in the mix; longtimers include the likes of Evan Dahm (table I276), Dean Haspiel (A112), Josh Neufeld (same), and Sylvan Migdal (H261, who I must have met at maybe the second MoCCA Fest ever).
• A lot of the original cohort has come and gone, but there are newer indie and webcartoonists (many of them from Brooklyn) who’ll be there, including Rachel Dukes (I268), Jenn Jordan (H261), Aatmaja Pandya (F214), Carey Pietsch (F207), and Alison Wilgus (G231). Heck, some of their generation have become bona fide superstars like the omnipresent Noelle Stevenson (C135).
• Also present since small times have been a strong mix of publishers — Abrams Books (G235/236), Fantagraphics (C136-139), :01 Books (D144), Pantheon (E158/159) — and institutions — Center for Cartoon Studies (E174/175), Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (E160-163), Parsons (J283/284), SVA (A118/119), Syracuse University (E166/167) — dedicated to the craft and perpetuation of comics.
• And one of my favorite parts of MoCCA Fest has been its turnover; there’s always somebody new showing up, with stuff that looks interesting that I haven’t seen before. This year I’ll particularly be on the lookout for Olga Andreyeva (J291), Azure (D146), Alisa Harris (G231), and Ken Wong (I266). I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this list (and the one up above of the newer generation of Brooklynites and allies) is overwhelmingly made up of women; I suspect it will not be too many years before a show like this one has to have a panel that asks what it’s like to be a dude making comics.

Lastly, for any that have energy left over after a first day that’s likely to be packed full, SoI are sponsoring an afterparty/awards ceremony from 7:00pm to 11:00pm on Saturday night, although you need to be an exhibitor, volunteer, Guest of Honor, or otherwise VIP to get in. Fun starts with free beer from Flying Dog Brewery until it runs out (cash bar afterwards) and a small plates buffet; the MoCCA Fest Awards of Excellence ceremony starts at 8:00pm.

Keep in mind that the SoI dates from a time when a skilled trade like illustrators could purchase a fancy-ass building for their headquarters, and they’ve got a century’s worth of neat stuff on display. If you can go, I’d encourage you to do so; if you can’t, I’ll see you on the floor.

Spam of the day:

topkitchenremodeling Gorgeous Kitchens – Check it out.

No comment.

It’s a good time to be Matt Bors. His plans for The Nib keep expanding, and he’s got a talk coming up at the Cartoon Arts Museum that those of you in the Bay Area may be interested in. Let’s get specific.

On the Nib front, I’ve been very impressed with the breadth of talent, frequency of updates, and reach that Bors has achieved in the not quite eighteen months since he took the reins in September of 2013. Best of all, he’s got a budget and he’s not afraid to use it; paying gigs for cartoonists are pretty sparse on the ground outside of The New Yorker, so having another place for both recurring and occasional contributors is heartening.

Speaking of which, Bors mentioned some shifts to the lineup the other day; nothing earth-shattering, we get R Stevens on Thursdays and Gemma Correll (whose work I didn’t know before she started placing cartoons at The Nib, and who is simply terrific) on Mondays now. Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Jen Sorensen and Erika Moen shift around as well (to Tuesdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays, and Wednesdays, respectively). Kate Leth will now be chiming in monthly, and he’s ramped up the cartoon journalism, with a half-dozen longer pieces in the pipeline this month alone.

And speaking of “monthly” and “months”, the Nib-produced Calendar of Obscure Holidays may have sold exclusively via pre-order but Bors has you covered. Go here for the first two months of the year (January and National Fetish Day is by Erika Moen; February and National Shut-In Visitation Day is by Matt Lubchansky), with the promise of more as the year progresses.

Finally, Bors will be part of a panel discussion (with the aforementioned Bolling, Tomorrow, and Mark Fiore) at CAM one week from today, 19 February 2015, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. It’s in conjunction with CAM’s current showcase on political cartooning, Slinging Satire, and will cost you five measly bucks¹ (free for members), so get on that if you’re in San Francisco next Thursday.

Spam of the day:

Olha, eu não vou discutir com você.

I am sorry, I do not speak Portuguese, so perhaps your attempts at selling things I don’t want would be better made elsewhere.

_______________
¹ It’s a figure of speech. Please, no actual measles-infected fivers and vaccinate your damn kids you anti-science freaks.

Oh hell yes, full-size Jethro coming Wednesday to You Damn Kid. The strips don’t get permalinks until they hit the archives, so you’ll just have to click over promptly for that one to work.

• Got twelve minutes, a hankerin’ to laugh along with Matt Inman, and an appreciation for the job that ASL translators have to do? Check out Inman’s keynote speech from BAH! Fest West 2014, a marvelous piece of proselytizing for Jibbers Crabst and an opportunity to see what the ASL for this is an eight-legged vagina that gives you boners until you are dead looks like.
• From the storming the gates of academia division, news comes of Rosemary Mosco’s Bird and Moon getting the museum treatment:
  

  I’m so excited: the Museum of the Earth just opened a Bird and Moon exhibit! http://www.priweb.org/
  exhibitions.php?page=currentexhibitions/quirksofnature …

  Come see my comics alongside expert commentary, fossils, live critters, sweet-smelling dirt, and more at PRI’s MOE http://tmblr.co/Z8KOWv1XKSEoL

  A few photos from the exhibit. Yes- they’ve got fashion items inspired by nature. Museum of the Earth, you rule. https://www.
  facebook.com/museumoftheear…

  To decode those abbreviations a bit, that would be the Museum of the Earth at the Paleontological Research Institution which is affiliated with — but not part of — Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The show, Quirks of Nature, will feature Mosco’s cartoons paired with specimens, fossils, live animals, and other museum-type stuff. Descriptions and captions written by major science types from major science places will provide the context, while Mosco provides the pretty pictures and funny laugh-chuckles. The next time you’re in the Finger Lakes region, drop by and check it out — Quirks of Nature runs through 8 June 2015, unless they decide to extend it and honestly, why wouldn’t they?

• The Child’s Play page hasn’t updated with a story specific to last week’s annual charity auction, but I believe we can utilize some basic math to see what the impact of the night (and the weeks running up to it) were. The lifetime total raised as of 2 January 2014 (taken as our starting point for this year’s Child’s Play) was US$25,196,670. The current lifetime total raised as of this time I am writing this is US$28,417,292¹. The difference between a) and b) is US$3,220,622, a significant portion of which would have been raised last Thursday night.

  If I were a thinkin’ man I could have taken a total on Thursday afternoon and compared on Friday morning, but ehhh. Close enough. Since the start of active fundraising (taking the traditional start date of 1 November), Child’s Play has pulled in US$3.2 million, or roughly what they took in cumulatively in the first five years, and a little less than half (so far) of last year’s total. Lots of time between now and end of the year, just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

The test can also determine if you have a vitamin K deficiency. Where does my last name come from

Well, since vitamin K deficiency can cause osteoporosis and coronary disease, I’d speculate that would be the origin of “McHearthouch-Breakbones”.

_______________
¹ With the caveat that the counter is moving every time I go back to the page.