Okay seriously whoever has been wishing for a snow-filled winter like we used to have kindly knock that shit off. The demands of keeping up with weather kept me from noticing details in things I referenced yesterday, so let’s play catch-up.

• Regarding: Ryan North and David Malki ! fighting via the specialized medium of unflattering book covers, I neglected to note that both of these fine gentlemen have webcomics-related anniversaries going on. North observed yesterday:
  

  Hey you know what happened on Saturday? Saturday was February 1st 2014 ALSO KNOWN AS the eleven-year anniversary of Dinosaur Comics! Is that not nuts? It is ENTIRELY NUTS. When I started Dinosaur Comics on February 1st, 2003 I thought the comic would last a month, and at the end of that month I’d change the template to something involving astronauts. But then I ended up liking T-Rex and Dromiciomimus and Utahraptor and thought, “okay, maybe I’ll change templates every two months instead of every month”. And now here we are 11 years later! The moral is: changing templates is a lot of work that can be easily postponed, THE END.

  So congratulations to Ryan North on reaching the eleventh stripiversary (traditional gift: verified Twitter status). Meanwhile, Malki ! (perhaps due to a lack of self-confidence due to the fight with North) neglected the opportunity today to put up the 1000th Wondermark strip. See? Last Friday: number 999. Today: previously-seen artwork¹ that graced the front matter of Emperor of the Food Chain, the most recent Wondermark collection. Come on, David Malki !, give us strip number 1000! Do it for the children.

• Regarding: the 90 year time jump in Stand Still, Stay Silent, I was entirely too focused on the time jump in question and did not look more carefully at Minna Sundberg’s demographic profile of Reykjavík after decades of pandemic:
  

  Population: 41 750
  Immunity rate: 11%

  Now granted, Iceland is not a large country, containing perhaps a third of a million people all told², the capital city containing on the order of 120,000 of those people. According to Sundberg, that population is a third of what it was at the start of the “rash illness”, even though they closed their borders almost immediately and likely came out better than any other nation on the planet. One little caption, so many deaths, and still the risk exists for 89% of those few. Good thing they’ve got geothermal power, so that the capital of the known world will have some semblance of technology remaining.

• Regarding: I completely missed it yesterday, Drew Weing has a new webcomic! The Creepy Casefiles of Margo Maloo will update Mondays, and the first four pages are already live, tossing us headfirst into a young boy — perhaps ten or eleven years old³ — into a new city, a new home that is definitely haunted, and no small amount of complaining about those facts. Keep your eyes on this one, it’s likely to be a masterclass in comics creation.

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¹ Make no mistake, it’s gorgeous and disturbing at the same time.

² By contrast, the county I live in has nearly three times the population, less than 1% of the geographical area, and 100% fewer volcanos, geothermal pools, and construction projects detoured by the presence of elves.

³ That’s the third eleven of this post. Weird.

Of course once the working day is done, there’s a good six inches of heavy snow at home that needs clearing. Yikes.

• Back: Makeshift Miracle. Yay.
• Coming soon: Wasted Talent book 3. Do not step to Jam, she will slash you.
• Won’t somebody please think of the children: Ryan North and David Malki! are at loggerheads. Heavens preserve us.
• Time jump resolved: 90 years.
• Anybody that’s been in comics — creating or reading — learns pretty quickly that there’s possibly no creator more respected and beloved than Stan Sakai, creator of Usagi Yojimbo. Sakai has meticulously researched and presented Japan during the Shogun’s peace, with dress, social standings, customs, culture, and conflict all presented with the highest standards of accuracy¹ — and if the characters who inhabit this feudal Japan are all anthropomorphic animals, well, that’s okay.

  Nobody draws panels and action sequences that are as easy to follow as Sakai, nobody has as fluid and organic a line as Sakai, nobody has kept an independent creation going for per-near thirty years with the consistency and quality that Sakai has. It should go without saying that in person, he is the most gracious and kindly of people; he is like a beloved uncle to entire convention halls.

  Unfortunately, Sakai has had some horrible months of late; his wife, Sharon, has been struggling with a severe illness that has depleted their insurance, and just before the new year his infant grandson died in his sleep. A benefit to defray the medical costs has been set up through the Cartoonist Art Professional Society, and last week Dark Horse announced a 30th anniversary tribute book to Usagi Yojimbo, all proceeds to benefit the Sakais.

  If you’re a creator and can contribute art to the CAPS project (which will be auctioned), please do so. If you want to contribute to the Dark Horse book, please do so.

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¹ Did use knowledge of Tokugawa-era Japan gleaned from Usagi Yojimbo when touring Osaka to make a tour guide wonder how the hell I knew about the hollyhock crest and the relative power centers of Edo, Kyoto, and clan centers? Maaaaybe.

Yeah, yesterday sucked, but at least somebody will get something useful out of it. Better today, thanks for asking, but still a little behind so this will be brief.

Strip Search alum Amy T Falcone, formerly of Citation Needed and Cardigan Weather, has launched her latest comics, Clique Refresh:

You might hear a faint buzzing in your ears right now. No, that’s not your tinnitus acting up, that’s just me screaming at the top of my lungs. Thank you to everyone who backed the Kickstarter, helped me in the creation process, or kept me motivated to push through with this project. I couldn’t be more excited to tell a story about Internet friendship, growing up, establishing oneself in a new city…

Hmmm, that last bit sounds a little autobiographical; granted, Cardigan Weather was a journal comic, but sometimes the works of fiction are more true than those of nonfiction. Sometimes. In any event, Ms T Falcone has a lot of comics chops, and she has the redoubtable Mary Cagle on colors.

But what really caught my eye is the fact that on the very day of launch, Clique Refresh is already a member of Hiveworks, which until now has been partnering with established comics. Granted, a Stripmonaut matched up with one of the hottest colorists-for-hire¹ in webcomics is a pretty sure bet. With updates coming Tuesdays and Fridays, it shouldn’t take too long to see how Clique Refresh develops as both a story and an eyeball-attracting machine.

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¹ Cagle is in the same league as the very prolific Anthony Clark and Ed Ryzowski.

So today I’ve been dealing with IT Support at my company. An issue with my laptop¹ that I reported on Monday went back and forth for days, as the solution marked it would be best if you did this in the offices became oh you tried that and it blew things up, so you have to go to the office became oh you’re in the office and the original problem is triggering network security to quarantine your laptop became the laptop is no longer quarantined but you can’t recognize a working network became okay you can see the network again now try the fix we originally recommended.

The fix describes clicking on things that do not exist. The latest call resulted in Oh no you can’t do that yourself we have to do it by remote access to your laptop and wait where you are until you get an email from us.

I have burned literally all day on this, and though I now have network connection again, it is for the first time all day.

If you don’t hear from me tomorrow, it’s because I chucked this laptop out the window and then got myself arrested.

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¹ Which took eight separate attempts to report, between phone lines that were never answered until they disconnected, an online system that timed out before I could type my description, and finally a live chat system that miraculously worked.

Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight: ShiftyLook is a subsidiary of Bandai Namco, which through predecessor companies and associated firms, has a deep catalog of videogames going back a few decades. The purpose of ShiftyLook has been to find new ways to use the IP associated with those old games, which they’ve done by starting up webcomics, webtoons, and a multiplayer large visual novel-type game. That’s pretty much everything they could be doing, right?

Wrong.

Jim Zub (well known to readers of this page) has been pretty involved in the development of the ShiftyLook comics (writing, scouting talent, etc), and one of his comics projects, Wonder Momo, is about to square the circle that is Momo’s Wonder-Hoop.

Having originated as an arcade side-scroller, Zub, co-author Erik Ko, and artist Omar Dogan (all of whom are part of UDON Entertainment) turned it into the story of a wannabe idol singer with lots of over-the-top Power Ranger-type action¹. Now Bandai Namco are turning the new story based on the old game into an anime miniseries, with a videogame to follow. So that’s a game based on an anime based on a webcomic based on an arcade game. Opined Mr Zub on Twitter:

Bandai-Namco made a Wonder Momo anime based on the comic strip story I wrote! Unveiled in Japan just now! @ShiftyLook

And there’s a new Wonder Momo video game also in development based on our comic story. Absolutely surreal.

For a little more context as to what this means to Zub, check out his history with anime, and what this would have meant to his 15 year old self.

Wonder Momo (the anime series) will stream as five, 5-minute episodes on Crunchyroll on Thursdays at 7:30pm (presumably EST), starting in February. Wonder Momo (the game) is under development for PC and Android. Jim Zub (the architect of Momo’s revival) probably took about half an hour to feel justifiably proud, then got back to work because that’s the kind of guy he is.

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¹ And, given that the protagonist, the frenemy and the protagonist’s mom are all magical girls with transformation sequences and battle suits that don’t feature pants, surprisingly tame and tasteful fan service. Heck, the original arcade game featured a perv with a camera distracting Momo with upskirt attempts; Zub’s repurposed him into a legit photojournalist.

Anybody reading this on the other side of the Atlantic from me? Or just immensely wealthy? Some things to keep an eye out for.

• Firstly, the annual Festival de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême is getting ready to kick off again, and while my high school French is a little rusty, I’m pretty sure that it starts on Thursday (30 January) and runs until Sunday (Saint Groundhog’s Day). There’s literally no way for me to look for all the names that might be there — Angoulême is enormous, with more than 200,000 attendees each year, and 6000 to 7000 pros there to meet them.

  It adds up to more than five times the population of the host city, and takes over much of the public space. To put this in scale, for San Diego Comic Con to be as large in absolute terms, it would have to roughly double attendance; for it to be as large in relative terms, some five million people would have to descend on the city.

  Doing a quick scan of the creator present (okay, I cheated and used the English site; creators listed along with publisher/booth-owner name, which will give you locations here), one finds indy-, euro-, and web-comickers like Derf Backderf, Frank Santoro, and Dash Shaw (with Ca Et La), Scott Campbell (with Cambourakis), Boulet and Lewis Trondheim (with Delacourt Delcourt [per Pierre’s correction in the comments; merci, M Lebeaupin]), Alison Bechdel and Joost Swarte (with Denoel Graphic), Alec Longstreth(with L’Employe du Moi — Belgique Wallonie Bruxelle), Bannister (with Glenat), Ben Hatke and Mo Willems (with Rue de Sèvres), and literally thousands more whose names I missed or whose work I’m not familiar with.

  Scott Campbell, by the way, will be there to promote and sign Les Grands Duels du Cinéma, which activity he will continue in Paris from Tuesday the 4th to Sunday the 9th at various venues.

• As long as we’re in France, let’s move up the Channel a bit until we come to Belgium, and Ghent (I loved visiting Ghent, particularly the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb at St Bavo’s Cathedral¹ and the fortress known as The Gravensteen²), where local animation studio GridFX is making a number of interesting projects. But lots of medium-sized cities have local animation studios, and lots of them are making interesting projects (even if few of those interesting projects have the cachet of, say, The Triplets of Belleville).

  GridFX caught my eye because partway down the story — almost in passing — was a bit that mentioned they were the studio that snagged Michel Gagné’s The Saga of Rex, as presented in a half-dozen installments over the run of Flight. Gagné will be directing himself, which will probably turn out pretty damn well considering he’s directed four shorts, and has an extensive resume including some of the best animated films of the past two decades³. Here’s hoping that when Rex is done, it will be seen in more than the occasional arthouse.

• Finally, let’s finish across the icy North Sea, where it appears that the Machine of Death co-editors have been sidelining as Norwegian contract killers. Because that’s normal.

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¹ I am possibly the least religious person you will ever meet, and this painting damn near made me believe in the whole High Church, early Renaissance conception of God and Christ and all their saints. It’s that transcendent, and all I could think looking upon it was Human hands made this, somehow.

² Designed by a Spanish king to establish his claim to Ghent specifically by looking as menacing as possible. From the row of guildhalls on the opposite side of the canal, it looks like the backdrop for a death metal music video, even in bright sunlight.

But then you look behind you at those guildhalls, and the cafes and bars and people enjoying a damn good beer and you think Okay, you can be badass all you want on that side of the water; we’re good over here. What I am saying is along with Bruges and Antwerp, I love the crap out of Ghent and find it a wonderful place to be.

³ Visual effects animation: The Iron Giant; animation on the tasting sequence: Ratatouille; special effects consultant: The Incredibles; development artist: Brave. For those that look back on them fondly, there’s also credits on Space Jam and Star Wars: Clone Wars, but I never saw them.

I was already going to be writing about Kickstarter campaigns when Scott Kurtz made a damn good observation on Twitter:

It’s interesting to follow “pay me to make a webcomic” Kickstarter campaigns, and 6 months to a year later, see who actually DID anything.

The first thought I had was Man, Scott’s very possibly talking about personal friends and acquaintances in that statement; I hope they don’t get mad at him. My second thought was, No, actually, I hope they’re smart enough to take his observation to heart. I suppose that’s why when I have (rarely) backed a Kickstarter that’s designed to launch a comic; I’m always looking for something concrete up front (which, if I get it, tends to bode well for an actually-regular webcomic).

The Last Halloween? I got some pins and a recipe for Sadness Brownies¹. Sufficiently Remarkable? Digital goods, including an audio recording of creator Maki Naro telling a terrible joke. Those were all I convinced myself I was ever going to get, and not only did I get them, but both comics are updating according to schedule, pretty much².

Others … haven’t done so well, either at launching at the promised time³, or at keeping updates coming; I really don’t want to get into names, mostly because for any that I might mention, there were probably three others that weren’t even on my radar. Not that I have much reason to complain about campaigns that I didn’t back (I’ve cut waaaay back on my Kickstarter habit in the past few months), but it’s something to always keep in the back of your mind — Does this project owner convince me that he or she will be able to get/keep their act together?

Let’s talk about some Kickstarts that I have confidence will be made good on in a timely fashion, then:

• Update! Dean Trippe’s magnificent, haunting, win-all-the-awards Something Terrible has six days to go; it’s a little under US$35,000 (of a US$6400 goal) at this writing, and closing in on the US$36K stretch goal of an added epilogue and fancier book design. He’s dead in the middle of the Fleen Predicted Total, but I would be happy to have underestimated this one.
• Update! My buddy Otter’s wonderful, funny, tense novels-to-audiobooks project is over goal, approaching the stretch goal where we can get the audiobooks on a cool USB drive, and pushing towards the stretch goal where Braille conversions (and donations to libraries serving the visually-impaired) happen. It’d be cool to get bonus stories and challenge coins but let’s get that Braille conversion done, yeah? Little more than three weeks for that to happen.
• New Kickstarter! Jesse Thorn, impressario of the Maximum Fun empire, wants to have a conference of independent creators in LA later this year, and that’s going to cost some US$120,000. Aside from the fact that Thorn’s various podcasts have given props to webcomics on numerous occasions (and that MaxFun’s merch is handled by TopatoCo), one of the keynote speakers at the Make Your Thing conference (for that is its name) will be webcomics own Kate Beaton. She may be branching out into other areas of creativity, but comics about history and literature and her younger self will always be where she started.

  And crap, look at the other people gonna be there: Jay Allison, Jane Espenson, Chris Gethard, Merlin Mann, Vernon Reid (!), and John Vanderslice were just the names that jumped out at me the most. Word is trickling out, which is why MYT is currently sitting at 2% of goal, with a predicted finish around 65%, but we’re only three hours in and I hope to see that much higher by this time tomorrow.

  This one deserves some traction, but I fear that the relatively high price points for the campaign — US$25: stickers, thank you email, update announcements; US$100: add video access to the conference and a t-shirt; US$400: add a ticket to the conference and gift bag — are going to be a sticking point. For a three-day professional-type conference US$400 is actually pretty realistic, but how many small-scale creators are going to be able to drop four hundo (plus travel expenses)? I hope this one makes goal, but ask me again in a couple days if it will.

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¹ Which might be the bestest brownies I’ve ever had. Well done, TLH creator Abby Howard!

² Within experimental error, given year-end family obligations, technical issues, etc.

³ Granted, Kickstarter has a long and hallowed history of things not happening when they were supposed to, but there’s a lot less lead time involved in getting a website up and running, even a rudimentary one and getting stuff made by vendors on the other side of the world then shipped to me so I can ship it to you (even before you encounter completely unpredictable events like ships turning back when partway across the Pacific).

Sometimes,you just need something that was amazing and hasn’t been seen for a while to be public and prominent again.

• I don’t believe that I have written on this page before about a trip I took to Belgium and Holland maybe … fifteen years ago? Sounds about right. While in Brussels, my wife and I visited the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée, and in and around all the Hergé exhibits (the whole town is a celebration of Tintin), and the other great Eurocomics (around the corner from my hotel was a mural of Blake et Mortimer that took up the entire side of a building¹), was one small piece of art that was clearly the centerpiece of the entire museum.

  Gertie.

  One precious, thin to the point of near-transparency original image (not even a “cel”, as this predated the use of celluloid for animation) from Gertie the Dinosaur, drawn by Winsor McCay nearly a century earlier. Much of what we recognize as comics, and maybe the entire idea of animation, derives from McCay and Gertie the Dinosaur. Heck, it’s a marvel that any of the film still exists, given how little of the silent film era was preserved. But Gertie has never been entirely forgotten, and she’s getting her due courtesy of The Toonseum for her one hundredth birthday:

  Gertie toured the vaudeville circuit in 1914 along with creator Winsor McCay in a unique show combining a live on stage performance and animation. The show wowed audiences, and left them bewildered at what was dubbed one of the great wonders! That vaudeville circuit would have brought both McCay and Gertie to one of Pittsburgh’s many theaters. Now almost 100 years later Gertie returns to Pittsburgh.

  On February 8th, kids can come watch Gertie in action on the screen again and learn about the world’s first of film’s dazzling dinosaurs. Gertie will also be showing off some of her classic cartoon friends on screen as the ToonSeum kicks off our year-long Century of Animation.

  Gertie screens at 1:15pm, followed by quick classes in cartooning and flip-book making, and the dinosaur part also gets its due attention:

  In addition you can explore Gertie’s dinosaur friends including T-rex, Apatosaurus, Velociraptor, and many more from Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Enjoy activities such as measuring teeth and claws, dino foot print stamping, and much more.

  The Carnegie Natural History Center’s Dippy the Dinosaur will be celebrating his 150th Birthday later this year, so look for other events with Gertie and Dippy coming up soon. (It has long been rumored that Dippy and Gertie are an item!) The event runs from 1pm-3:30pm on February 8th at 1pm at the ToonSeum. The cost is $8.00 per child (general admission) and $3.00 per child (members). Adults are free.

  Personally, I think that Gertie might be related to Professor Science, and the velociraptor mentioned may actually be Utahraptor going incognito; naturally, there is only one T-Rex.

• You know what kinda looks like a dinosaur, but not really, but kind of? Jellaby. Okay, J’s a monster, what with the tiny little horns and wings and all, but work with me here. Because this lets me keep to the theme of welcome returns and the subtheme of dinosaurs and announce that after too long a time out of print, Jellaby volume 1 is coming back:
  

  OMG you guys! JELLABY v.1 is coming back into print! This is awesome news! Yay @CapstoneConnect & @keansoo!!! -kjc

  At least in Canada? Amazon’s US site doesn’t recognize the book, but their Canadian site claims it released last week, even though it appears to not be releasing until March? Look, it’s got a new subtitle, a new cover, and a new foreword by Kazu Kibuishi, so find every kid that you know and get them a copy (even if you have to import it from Our Friends To The North) because Jellaby is great.

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¹ I gather that there is more than one in Brussels.

Well! That was a fun couple of days, including two separate airports that just did not want me to leave their premises and threw every possible obstacle in my way. Now let’s never speak of the last 48 hours again.

• Catching up! My buddy Otter — or more properly, KB “Otter” Spangler — of A Girl And Her Fed has launched her first Kickstarter campaign, to take her first novel (released last year) and her next novel (to be released in about six weeks) recorded as audiobooks. On casual inspection this would seem an odd project, since wouldn’t you just make that a stretch goal of the Kickstarter for the books themselves?

  In this case, no, because a) the books weren’t Kickstarted, they were just released on her own; and b) the protagonist of Digital Divide and Maker Space is blind, and releasing them as audiobooks is outreach to an audience that wouldn’t otherwise be able to connect to a relatable character. In fact, one of the stretch goals will be to convert the books to Braille and donate copies to libraries that serve the visually impaired, so this is maybe less about help me make a cool thing and more about help me extend this cool thing to people who tend not to get as many cool things in a form they can access.

  We’re not quite 48 hours in (like, 12 minutes shy of 48 hours as I write this) and we’re sitting around 95% of goal; per the venerable F^3 calculation, this project should finish up somewhere between 200% and 400% of its modest US$7000 goal. Go support it, and enjoy the project video, which is a puppet show¹.

• Catching up! Some new comics launching over at ShiftyLook, with some veteran creators taking a whack at videogame characters that have … shall we say thin? … plots. Shannon Campbell and Sam Logan are breathing life into Tower of Babel, which is essentially a Jenga-in-reverse puzzler/platformer. Meanwhile Team Nice Wizard (aka Ryan North, Christopher Hastings, and Anthony Clark) are fleshing out the story of Dig Dug.
• Catching up! Box Brown’s Retrofit Comics started as a limited-duration project to publish comics for a year. Then it became an ongoing imprint. Brown himself spent a lot of time working up André the Giant² for much of the past two years, but as that project’s all done but the shipping at this point, he’s back to his publisher role with a vengeance:
  

  After only publishing 7 books in 2013, we ARE BACK to a 12-comics-a-year schedule! In 2014 we’ll be releasing comics from these HOT comics artists!

  Which you can click through to see; I just wanted to stress that this is not a funding announcement, this is an availability-of-subscriptions announcement. These comics are getting published, the only questions are how many, and will you get them or not.

Whew, I think that’s everything I needed to get caught up on. Fortunately, nothing going on in comics today except for the surprise announcement that Scott McCloud is an android. Reached for comment, McCloud responded Of course not, I am a completely alive human, beep, null set. You heard it here first.

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¹ No sign of Spinal Tap, who presumably made off with the audio equipment for the puppet show as the sound levels are bit low. You’ll want to bring the volume up on your computer for all the puppety goodness.

² No lie, this looks to be premier work of André the Giant scholarship; I’m not into professional wrestling³, but like everybody, I know (and have a fond spot for) André the Giant.

³ By which I mean I had a brief period of watching in late junior high school. If I understand my wrestling history right, this was when what is now the WWE was moving from a mostly Northeast base into a wider national profile, pre-Hulkamania. Anyway, my knowledge of pro wrestling is from 30+ years ago, aside from some bored Saturdays watching GLOW⁴ in college.

⁴ That would be the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, because come on, watching Amy the Farmer’s Daughter getting beat down by Matilda the Hun until her [Amy’s] little brother Timmy pulls himself from his hospital bed and makes his way ringside on crutches to inspire her [again, Amy] to defeat her evil rival? That’s gold, from the time of two-reel 1930s melodramas⁵ to the first epic battle between Morimoto and Flay on Iron Chef. Heck, I’m pretty sure that the kid cheering on Morimoto actually was named Timmy!

⁵ By the way, I experimented with the construction 1930s two-reel melodramas before rewriting. I heard on the radio last week (or maybe it was an episode of Judge John Hodgman that there are certain rules of grammar that aren’t taught, but which we instinctively absorb; for instance, you wouldn’t say the red big car instead of the big red car. If anybody knows the name for this phenomenon, I’d love to hear it. Ryan North, I’m looking at you.

Footnotes, everybody!

In lieu of … well, everything, really … please enjoy a new episode of Overcompensating because damn. More Jeffrey Rowland comics (even just one) is exactly what I needed today.