Re: Cards Against Humanity’s 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit and hints of the involvement of webcomickers. There are more than twenty creators whose work has been wrangled into shape (by R Stevens) together in a Sunday Funnies-style comics section.

You can enjoy the entire thing online, if you happen to dig on people like (in no particular order) Allie Brosh, Nick Gurewitch, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Maki Naro, Abby Howard, Anthony Clark, Sam Brown, Jon Rosenberg, Ryan North, Natasha Allegri, John Campbell, Zach Weinermsith, Shawn Smith, Elaine Short, Kris Straub, Megan Murphy, Jana Kinsman, Jess Fink, or John Allison¹.

For my money, though, the best one was from Katie Rice, a wordless, delightfully evil little parable about Santa rewarding good children and punishing bad children. For your money, you’ll just have to browse through, and if you find work that you particularly like, maybe visit the creator and check out their fine wares?

In other news, as I write this, there have been Something*Positive comics for twelve years and eight minutes. Sadly, I can’t claim to have been there from the very beginning, having been tipped off to the brilliance of the pudding cat known as Choo-Choo Bear some time after his first appearance, probably around the time two dangerously violent psychopaths got luchador masks. I guess that means for me there’s only been eleven years, eight months, eleven days, and eight minutes of S*P, and I’ve loved every minute of it.

I have written extensively on this page about how Randy Milholland may be my favorite writer of characters, because they quickly grew out of the caricature stage and into messy, complex, changing (ever so slowly) people, none of whom can be entirely dismissed or despised. All of them, even Ollie, have reasons to empathize with them².

Maybe it’s appropriate that today’s strip features Kharisma, as she’s grown the most of any of the cast³. It’s a messy kind of extended family that Milholland’s built centered on Davan, who I’m just now realizing I haven’t felt the need to describe as hapless for a couple of years now. That’s the way that Uncle Randy works — slowly, incrementally, and before you realize it, those little incidents of not being an utter asshole have assembled themselves into something resembling redemption and self-improvement.

The really amazing thing, though, is that Milholland used S*P as the springboard for multiple other strips, each of which are just as good. Seriously, get the Super Stupor issues and ask yourself (like I do) why Randy doesn’t have major publishers offering him miniseries.

Finally, let me wrap up this by reminding you all that it is your moral duty, on whatever occasion you may actually meet Mr Milholland, to badger him mercilessly until he does the Fluffmodeus voice. You may need to offer booze. It’s a fair trade.

So sorry about that, Randy, and thanks very much for the comics; you — and they — are damn good.

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¹ All of whom, it should be noted, were paid for their contributions, ’cause CAH don’t screw around.

² Okay, not Avogadro, but he’s dead. Also, I’m not sure that Fluffmodeus is actually a sentient being as opposed to free-roaming hallucination.

³ Except maybe Mike, but I’d argue that he’s much further along the way towards being an actual, whole person and Kharisma is very much still a work in progress. Additionally, Kharisma’s growth has largely been by dint of her own personal effort, seeing as how she’s on the wrong and the only good examples she’s got are the ones she can make for herself.

Robert Khoo on what PA want to accomplish with the Diversity Hub & Lounge.

tl;dr: It’s being headed up by one of the founders of GaymerX.

Oh my stars and garters, The Boy! Neil threw me a bit there, what with identifying Eustace Boyce as 25, but then Bad Machinery has been running more than four years now, and that was three years after the end of Scary Go Round¹, and I guess you leave school around age 18 in Britain, so yeah, 25. Looks like since breaking up with Esther, he’s moved well onto the Susan end of life. Still, good to see him again.

• It’s been a while since we at Fleen have mention Matt Lubchansky, which is Our Bad, because he keeps doing good comics. For just about exactly one year (the first strip dates from a year ago yesterday), The New Amsterdam Mystery Company by Lubchansky and Jaya Saxena has been bringing the mystery, and yesterday the first NAMC collection, The Curse of the Dying Dutchman (which coincides with the first NAMC story arc) went up for pre-order. You’ve got two slim weeks to get in on a story that’s part supernatural mystery, part love letter to New York.
• Hat tip to Ryan Estrada (or at least, the twitterfeed of The Whole Story): Jerzy Drozd² of Comics Are Great!³ is now offering a course in comic-making; okay, lots of people do that, even people that make (and promote the art of) comics as much as Drozd. What distinguishes this one (and makes sense, being linked by The Whole Story, the name your price publisher) is that Drozd’s course is being offered on Gumroad, pay what you want:
  

  In this four-part series we’ll explore how to build a comics story from the ground up! There’s a lot to consider when making a comic: developing a dynamic cast of characters, defining your world, devising visually exciting pages, and more. And what about figuring out your options for getting your work to your audience? This series of interactive presentations will provide you with some context and options in navigating those waters.

  Name your price for seven hours of comics instruction! You’ll be able to download the DRM-Free videos or stream them from Gumroad.

  So that’s seven videos, seven hours, for free? Well, yes, but only if you’re a chump. There’s a lot of knowledge and work there, so if you decide to download, don’t leave the price set to zero, ‘kay?

• I expected to wake up this morning to a bigger than usual backlog on Twitter, what with the last episode of The Best Show, but I didn’t expect to see a new Penny Arcade/PAX controversy. Here’s the short version: Indie Statik broke (and Kotaku confirmed) the story of a new offering at future PAXes: a diversity lounge. There’s been a lot of back and forth about segregation and I’ve seen the word ghetto used more than once; I think that a lot of the reactions have come from people that read the Indie Statik and Kotaku stories, and more of the reactions have come from people that read the first reactions.

  I also think that a lot of people aren’t discussing things so much as they’re projecting assumptions on on each other. We’ve got one set of primary source material here, the document describing the lunge in question, the originals of which may be seen at Indie Statik (image 1, image 2). I think that everybody that’s got an opinion on the matter might want to follow those links, because they might not say what you think they say.

  Most importantly, a lot of people I’ve seen have been describing the lounge as a designated safe space and getting angry that all of PAX isn’t likewise. Thing is, my reading of the document doesn’t indicate that’s what’s planned at all. I do see indications that it’s a place that people can come and learn, and that part of what can be taught is how to establish safe spaces.

  My reading of the description is Hey, want to learn about people who aren’t like you but play games anyway? Willing to pry yourself away from demos for half an hour, maybe? Go here. Implicit in that is a subtext: Everybody that’s always complained that you get jumped on for being oppressive and wondering what you’re doing wrong and why won’t anybody teach you? This is what you’ve been asking for, so avail yourself or shut up.

  What I didn’t see anywhere in the description is All minorities go here so the rest of us don’t have to think about you, which is a pretty close paraphrase of one of the criticisms I read earlier today. But you know what? It hasn’t happened yet, and whether or not it’s well-executed will be determined months from now; whatever aspects of it aren’t done well at PAX East, will they be done better at Prime and Aus? Will the PA principals be involved in curating the content, or will they be delegating that to somebody else? How credible will the content slate be? Crucially, will Mike and Jerry be spending some learning time in there?

  What we’ve got at the moment is a two-page outline, vague enough that it could have come out of a corporate mission-statement generating workshop. It’s not a blueprint, it’s the brainstorm that will build the structure that will eventually be used to define the blueprint. Maybe nobody avails themselves of it and it fails spectacularly. Maybe it succeeds to the extent that the hub and lounge grow and assume more floor space at each subsequent show. Maybe it’s an expression of Mike & Jerry’s parental concern that their kids come up in the hobby they love, but without absorbing the worst parts of the culture that surrounds it⁴.

  Penny Arcade is too big to do anything quietly — or subtly, for that matter; they’ve got a load of momentum to shed before they can chart a new course. It will take years to work past some of their mistakes (if in fact they ever completely do) and to be known for more than their worst behavior. Maybe — just maybe — this is where it changes.

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¹ We’ve actually seen The Boy within the pages of Giant Days, if memory serves, but that’s from the early days of university and thus seven years ago in story time.

² Improbably enough, there are two Jerzy Drozds out there, the other being a bass luthier of some repute. Odd, but no odder than there being two Gary Tyrrells, I suppose.

³ Word.

⁴ Mike and Jerry have not always been wise in picking which fights to have or how to have them. I suspect that like all conscientious parents, they want their kids to be wiser, smarter, kinder, better people than they themselves have been. Or maybe I’m projecting because my parents and grandparents taught me to be better than the prejudices that they learned and didn’t always grow out of.

Guhhh, this bout of the Martian Death Flu apparently wanted to cram four or five days worth of feeling crappy into about twelve hours. I’m over the worst of it, and don’t actually feel bad, but I could use about ten hours of sleep. Thankfully, the snow appears to have stopped with less accumulation than would have required shoveling, so yay. Oh, yes, also webcomics.

I don’t think that there’s a world-builder of alien¹ environments and characters² that’s more accomplished, more thorough, more in tune with the totality of what’s being dreamed up and then deposited on the page³ for you to read than Evan Dahm. We’re conditioned by years — decades — of entertainment to think of not human as human, but slightly taller/shorter with different ears/nose/forehead, possibly a vocal tic, and entirely analogous to one particular culture, but Dahm’s creatures and characters and architecture and scripts and, and, and spring from a place that isn’t merely the familiar with a smear of paint and some prosthetics.

Case in point: Overside.

I’ve lost count of how many cultures and species and languages and geographies and histories Dahm has created to populate this place that feels organically⁴ real, and for each of those that he shares with us, there are hints about many more just around the corner. Junti becomes the most curious and inventive Surin in history and takes to the skies and it is exhilarating … but around each of those corners and alleys surrounding the Chapterhouse enclave there’s a debate, a haggle, an argument, a conspiracy taking place, because the city of Sahta is more than just the scene that’s being depicted now — it’s someplace that Dahm has made breathe since the first time we glimpsed it.

By the way, we spent 200 pages building up the story of Vattu, whose world can’t conceive of such a city. And as of yesterday, he’s spent another 300 pages building up the experience of Vattu (and Junti, and other captives, exiles, citizens, and rulers, highborn and low) in that city, and bringing us along for the ride. We’ve learned bits of culture, society, religious thought, calendrical structure, climate, politics, economy, and natural philosophy⁵, never laid out explicitly, always sneaking in at the periphery of whatever’s happening on the main stage.

So there we are, 500 pages of the current Overside story, rendered in glorious color, and we might be approaching the 40% mark of the story. There’s much more ahead of us than we have behind, and there are many more eras and lands in Overside still to share their secrets⁶. Given that Dahm’s about to be able to ship the first volume of Vattu, this would be a good time to catch up on at least one of those stories (there are others), and luxuriate in all the world-building. You’ll be glad you did.

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¹ In the sense of not like that which is familiar rather than the sense of outer space monsters.

² I should probably say people instead.

³ Or screen; work with me here.

⁴ Free-range, even. Locally-sourced.

⁵ I almost said science, but I think that Junti is the first Surin to approach unweight — and life, possibly — with the critical, systemic approach that demarcates the line between natural philosophers and scientists. She’s going to spark the Sahtan equivalent of the Enlightenment, that girl is.

⁶ Not to mention what he’s doing with L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dear glob, that’s going to be beautiful.

Okay, I can feel a fever starting, so I’ma get some sleep before I do anything else. Play nice until I’m back, kids.

In case anybody had any doubts that Chris Onstad is a languagesmith of the highest order, may I refer you to today’s Achewood. Even if this storyline ends here, it was worth it.

• In other news, a tweet dropped that makes perfect, perfect sense, so much so that in retrospect, we at Fleen are surprised that it doesn’t drop earlier:
  

  We can now announce that Becky is the character designer on Bee and PuppyCat!

  That would be Becky Dreistadt, and naturally everybody here knows Bee and PuppyCat and on the off chance you don’t know Bee and PuppyCat, please acquaint yourself with Bee and PuppyCat immediately. Heck, go watch it now anyway, I’ll wait.

  Back? Awesome. In case there were any doubts that Dreistadt were the right person for this design job¹, check out any part of her portfolio, including her work on Tiny Kitten Teeth, Capture Creatures, The Bear, or Benign Kingdom. You would have to spend a decade of concentrated mad-scientist bioengineering to create somebody better suited to this role on this webseries. Also, I would pay money to see Beer and PuppyFrat expanded into an episode, much like Natasha Allegri’s gender-reversed joke illustrations became Adventure Time’s Fionna and Cake².

• The recognition of webcomics-type ladies and dudes continues at The AV Club, this time with the staffers indicating what one piece of pop culture from 2013 they would share with the entire world if possible. Among the responses: Nimona by Noelle Stephenson and To Be or Not To Be by the ubiquitous Ryan North.
• The Patreon train continues its travel through Webcomicsville; since Jon Rosenberg³ launched his page on Monday, he’s nearly reached his first extra-reward tier. On Wednesday, Zach Weinersmith jumped on board and is already on the verge of altering the ad mix on his page. Today Ryan Sohmer got his ticket punched, with the potential of launching another comic.

  I’d worry about the additional writing duties causing his brain to collapse from over-mining, but honestly — the difference between the workload of writing two regular webcomics, one ongoing children’s book⁴, two webseries, and two editorial comics and writing three regular webcomics, one ongoing children’s book, two webseries, and two editorial comics isn’t that much, incrementally. Back the Patreon campaign, and you can help drive him to the brink of neural overload!

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¹ And that’s before one considers the neat symmetry that the “Frank” of BeckyandFrank would be Frank Gibson, who provided the voice of Wallace in Bee and PuppyCat

² And who created Bee and PuppyCat? Natasha Allegri. Wheels within wheels, plans within plans. It all fits together!

³ Obligatory disclaimer, etc.

⁴ Illustrated by Becky Dreistadt! It all comes back around!

Well, that’s my holidays all cheered up — the inimitable Tom Spurgeon¹ decided that his year-end interview schedule needed a hack webcomics pseudojournalist for balance, and we just had a delightful talk. Assuming you don’t get enough of my semi-abusive opinionmongering here, I’ll be sure to let you know when that goes live. And may I say, this was the first time Spurgeon and I have interacted person-to-person, and he’s simply a terrific conversationalist. In case you still need a little something to cheer up your holidays, there’s places out there that would provide you with gifts for the comics center of your brain; let’s go check ’em out.

• Via the tweet-feed of Mr Scott C, I see that Gallery 1988 will be holding the latest iteration of its Crazy 4 Cult show in New York this year, meaning that I get a shot at Scott C art without having to fly to LA. Opening is tomorrow night, at G1988’s Manhattan space, 355A Bowery (at 3rd), from 7:00pm to 10:00pm. Past experience of gallery openings suggests that there may well be snacks and booze available. There will be an associated signing event on Sunday, from noon to 4:00pm, and the show will run each day from noon to 7:00pm, until Saturday, 21 December.
• Word is appearing online that the 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit packages o’ fun are arriving in mailboxes. I, alas, missed my chance to get in on the gifting extravaganza, despite the exhortations of people like Rich Stevens and Dylan Meconis dropping broad hints on Twitter that I really should be signing up.

  There are still nine days to go according to the official page, and given that they’ve commissioned a Molly Lewis song about Hawai’ian detachable-vagina gods, I’m guessing that when the Stevens/Meconis thing drops, we’ll all recognize it immediately. If one of you who are in the lucky 100,000 subscribers would let us know when that happens, that would be awesome.

• This page is well known to be in the tank for K Brooke “Otter” Spangler, creator extraordinaire of A Girl And Her Fed, and aside from the fact that she regularly gifts us with one of my favorite webcomics for free, she’s decided to up the ante somewhat. Take ‘er away, Otter [no direct link]:
  

  How would you like the first nine chapters of MAKER SPACE?

  Maker Space would be the second of Spangler’s AGAHFiverse novels; the first, Digital Divide, was terrific, and the second looks to be even better. Disclaimer: Otter asked me to do a reality-check on a plot point involving a branch of engineering I’m not trained in, so I’ve seen a snippet of the book and loved it, even though I was spectacularly useless with respect to the technical check she was seeking².

  How would you like them for free?

  Now we’re talkin’. Spangler is offering approximately the first third of her next novel for the princely sum of zero dollars because she’s awesome. Also because when the book actually comes out in March, some of you will want to see how it turns out and might pony up more than zero dollars for the ending. In the meantime, if you haven’t taken my advice on how good a story-wrangler Otter is, this is your no-risk chance to check out her stuff, in PDF format here or Kindle-style MOBI here.

  Those links will take you to Gumroad, where you’ll be asked for a credit card number — don’t provide one. As soon as you enter 0 in the price box, the request for your plastic will go away; give ’em an email address to send the link to, and get to downloadin’ and readin’ and enjoyin’. Oh, and be sure to leave out a plated of cookies and glass of milk for Otter Claus³.

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¹ So don’t even try to imit him!

² Not that that kept me from commenting on almost every other aspect of what she sent me. Pedantry, thy name is, uh, me.

³ If anybody wanted to draw a sketch of Otter Claus, well, I wouldn’t say no.

Several repeat visits today; sometimes that’s just how things reveal themselves.

• Speaking of Penny Arcade, Child’s Play, etc: The progress graph on the main page is a little out of date, as the recent formal dinner/auction raised more than US$250,000 and have brought the year’s total to the neighborhood of US$3.4 million. This brings the ten-year total to some US$21 million, and there’s still US$1.6 million to go to pass last year’s total (CP have always grown in absolute terms, year-on-year).
• Speaking of The AV Club and their year-end best-of lists, today they tackled Graphic Novels and Art Comics¹ wherein they recognized Emily Carroll’s Out of Skin and Gene Yang’s Boxers & Saints, all of which also count as “speaking of …”. One should note as well that another of their recognized graphic novels, while not strictly webcomic-related, does come from :01 Books (speaking of, once more) — namely, Paul Pope’s Battling Boy.
• Okay, this might stretch the limits of “speaking of”, since we have to go back exactly one year when A Lesson Is Learned By The Damage Is Irreversible returned for what was claimed to be a one-off. They have since released a second new comic within the past five weeks, meaning they’re only now restarting the hiatus clock and will have to go more than six and a half years to equal their previous absence.

  It actually makes sense that they’ve produced but one comic since their return for hiatus, as it would seem that significant amount of time would be needed for them to put a collection of their past strips as prints up at TopatoCo, seeing as how they’re all different sizes and degrees of complexity. Those factors mean that not all ALILBTDII strips are available, and that those that are will have prices varying from US$14 to US$60 (for a single-piece humongous print of I Name Thee Annihilator, which is 190 cm tall, or nearly one Ryan North in height).

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¹ To distinguish from yesterday’s list of mainstream comic books, the boundaries being somewhat arbitrary.

To quote The Spurge, who tweeted last evening:

emily carroll emily carroll emily carroll

Spurge’s tweet led to a Tumblr that led to Zainab Akhtar’s blog that’s got images and info — a full preview, honestly — of Emily Carroll’s first print collection.

Due in July 2014 in a 200+ page hardcover, Through The Woods looks to be exactly what anybody that’s read Carroll’s comics will want — fairy- and folk-tale influenced, deeply unsettling stories, including a reconfigured-for-print version of her breakout story, His Face All Red. Akhtar asserts that this is one of the books that most comics fans are looking forward to and I’m gonna go out on a limb and agree; at least for me, this may be my most-anticipated book since, jeeze, I dunno? Anya’s Ghost? Boxers & Saints? Darkness? Just head over to Akhtar’s site and drink in the beauty.

Okay, one other story that matters: you’re coming up on your last chances to get in on a pair of webcomics Kickstarts.

• You’ve got 10 hours to get in on Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan’s Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell campaign (which, sitting at about 180% of goal, is definitely going to be made, but you won’t get your copy any quicker than on the KS). DCIGTH is charming, comforting, and a complete story, so this is it — your chance to support Jordan and Goldstein for the free comics they supplied you.
• And since I last wrote about it a week ago, the Broken Telephone campaign has seen a resurgence, sitting at about 91% with three days to do. Kicktraq has the latest iteration of Ryan Estrada’s The Whole Story series finishing at 104% of goal (which is loads better than the heartbreaking 96% it was predicting last week), but nothing counts until it crosses that 100% threshold. There’s an armful of creators who stand to get paid with actual, real money, but only if a little less that US$2200 of more pledges show up. Time’s running out, don’t let this one stumble.

Changes coming down the pike, Clem, and hard to say where they’re gonna lead.

• Let’s not bury the lede — Jerry Holkins posted a rather startling news update on Friday afternoon, of which the key point was:
  

  But I don’t think I want to “grow my business” anymore; I sort of want to do the opposite. And I’m tired, sick to death, of saying “Maybe Someday” when it comes to the things we really want to make. So, we’re not going to do that anymore. The next year is going to be a pretty big one, one of the biggest yet; it’s the year the previous fifteen have been leading up to in the literal sense but also in other ways. I think they’re going to be “big years” from now on, frankly. And it hurts pretty bad, but I don’t know where PATV as a “channel” for third party shows and The Penny Arcade Report fit into that. We’ll be shutting those things down at the end of this year.

  It may just be a sign that webcomics qua webcomics has finally gotten to an age where something like a fundamental shift of direction can take place and be noticed; plenty of creators make strategic shifts every other month¹, but they affect far fewer people or have fewer visible effects. For an enterprise like Penny Arcade to make such a shift² for essentially philosophical reasons — I suspect it’s not the last we’ll see, but probably also it’ll be a while before another such appears.

  In the meantime, this opens up questions about the future of Blamimations and other Scott & Kris-type productions, not to mention current and future productions from LRR, Mega64, and some pretty damn skilled game journalists. I’d guess that the PATV banner will now be focused solely on what happens inside the walls (so to speak) of Penny Arcade Industries, and that future iterations of Strip Search are no less likely than they were before, but at this point we’ll have to see.

  I would quibble with Holkins on one point though, and that’s that he still will be building his business, but less by incorporating the creations of others, and more by expanding the offerings of his own.

  But it’s time to start making good on some of the promises we’ve made in our work. Recognizing that things like the Pins or The New Kid or Daughters of the Eyrewood or Thornwatch or The Lookouts or Automata deserve every ounce of our resources. Novels and albums, too – all these things that got put off in the interests of Empire. Essentially, we’ve decided to be Penny Arcade.

  This refocusing of effort casts certain decisions in a new light — the expansion of PAX to a third event (and what I’ve interpreted as hints that there may be more in the future), the handing-off of art and writing duties on The Trenches … Holkins gives every impression of having built up his sandbox and now wanting to get to play in it again. I wonder how long he’ll get to before the Empire starts to raise its head again.

• The scope and scale are entirely different, but I can’t help but see parallels in the appeal made by Jon Rosenberg today — he wants to be able to direct more of his energies to the creation of comics, but instead of having too much business to attend to, it’s the unique challenges of children³ and family. The world is in some degree cyclical in its nature, and webcomics is not different in that respect — the Patreon system that Rosenberg is now banking his creative career on is reminiscent of the public broadcasting-model approaches that webcomics returns to on occasion.

  Someday, the pendulum will swing the other way again, and maybe it won’t be necessary. For now, though — if you like his work (and I’m too lazy to type out the obligatory disclaimer re: me and Jon again, but you can read it here), a very small amount of money will make it possible for that work to continue.

• The AV Club, who I think of as being rather trustworthy when it comes to cultural recommendations, is writing about its favorite books of the year today, and in among your Thomases Pynchon and Davids Foster Wallace, one may find a couple of entries from our weird little corner of the cultural conversation. Allie Brosh’s collection of Hyperbole and a Half and the second volume of Machine of Death are both called out as among the year’s best. Well done Ms Brosh, and everybody at MoD.

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¹ Indeed, that agility is one of the great advantages of being an independent creator, where the distance from see an opportunity to decide on a plan of attack to make it happen to all done can be measured in hours. that

² And not in response to a crisis or failure, which is how things of this sort normally go in the business world.

³ And Jon didn’t bring it up, but I will: his situation isn’t helped by the fact that his twin sons (happy and healthy today, thank whatever you thank in these situations) entered the world sooner than would be optimal, after an extraordinarily risky pregnancy. No father on the planet could have been prouder than Jon when the son he was told might never walk on his own did exactly that.

However, these triumphs came at a time when the system for the delivery of healthcare in this country — both to get those boys born, and the extensive needs for physical therapy since — is structured in such a way as to make a situation like this financially ruinous. I don’t know the particulars, but I suspect that if you looked around everything you could see within a 50 meter radius taken together probably doesn’t have as high a dollar value as the medical bills Jon’s family have racked up.

So understand, Jon’s not trying to make comics under the usual constraints of family; he’s trying to make comics under the usual constraints of family and medical debt that likely reaches seven figures, and after more than two years of that unique financial burden, is finally asking for help.