Three of them, in fact.

• Miracle the First: Paul Taylor is the first person in comics history to correctly depict a nasal cannula. That’s the oxygen tube that goes in the nose, as opposed to more high-delivery methods like masks¹. Every. Friggin’. Time. I’ve ever read a comic (book, strip, web, whatever) that featured somebody getting oxygen, they’ve gotten the nasal wrong:
  • it doesn’t shove one tube up one nostril leaving the other empty
  • it doesn’t end in two prongs shoved in the two nostrils, hanging down like some long, hollow booger
  • it doesn’t clip to the nose

  It does exactly what Taylor has drawn: form a closed loop with two prongs in the middle that go in the nostrils, and the tubing itself is draped over the ears and snugged up under the chin to keep everything in place. From today forward, proclaim that there is never reason to get this one wrong again.

• Miracle the Second: Six of the extremely talented and personable folks at Periscope Studio have banded together, like Voltron, to bring justice to the galaxy print up a series of art books, and you can support ’em over at Kickstarter. A pledge of as little as US$5 will get you PDFs of all six books (from Ron Randall, Paul Guinan, David Hahn, Natalie Nourigat, Benjamin Dewey, and Erika Moen — who yesterday survived largely unscathed² a rather scary auto-vs-bike collision that scared the crap out of me from 5000 km away and which we will dub Miracle the Second and a Half). Naturally, higher pledge levels get you physical comics of breathtaking beauty and vision, so make with the pledging.
• Miracle the Third: So yesterday when I went down the list of Thought Bubble attendees, I noted the attendance of Nicholas Gurewitch of the long-hiatused, much-beloved Perry Bible Fellowship and thought to myself, Man, I hope he’s working on something new.

  Ask and ye shall receive: Gurewitch tweet-announced a new animated short that he wrote and directed, featuring death, destruction, and a cameo by one Zachary T Paleozogt. It’s hilarious, but you knew that would be the case.

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¹ Of which there are several types, which we need not go into here.

² I’m giving at least partial credit to the incredible shape that Moen is in due to her pole-based acrobatic skills, and partial credit to the fact that she’s a force of nature and cannot be defeated by mortal instruments.

A couple of quick thoughts for you today, as we careen through space on an improbably-small hunk of rock with an impossibly-narrow band of gases that somehow sustain all the life and — by extension — webcomics that we know to exist in the infinite universe. You know … Tuesday.

• One of the smaller-scale, highly regarded comics shows takes place this weekend in Leeds, UK, as Thought Bubble Comic Con participates in the week-long Thought Bubble Festival. There are symposia and screenings in the festival all this week, and the convention itself at Clarence Dock on Saturday and Sunday. Indy- and web-comicky types in attendance will include John Allison, Kate Beaton, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Jeffrey Brown, Darryl Cunningham, Meredith Gran, Nicholas Gurewitch (!), Olly Moss, Ethan Nicolle, Ramón Pérez, Tom Siddell, Cameron Stewart, and Maris Wicks, in addition to the British Comics Awards. Tell everybody I said hi.
• For those not able to make it to Leeds this weekend, one might make plans to check out Evan Dahm’s new e-book, Lacunæ. The word lacuna (lacunæ is the plural) refers to a gap, missing section (as in text) or silence (as in music); Dahm’s book refers to the latter definition as it’s a collection of 18 “quiet places”, taken from a series of drawings of remote dwellings on remoter islands.

  He shared some of the drawings on Twitter as he worked on them, and they put me in mind of the further corners of Le Guin’s Earthsea, and that’s some damn good company to be in. It’s two bucks for nearly twenty pages of intricate, mood-setting places, and if I don’t see at least one of them stolen for either an album cover or a mural on the side of a van by this time next year, it’s only because we’re too far from the 1970s¹.

• For the past few years, webcomickers have been molding the next generation(s) of comics artists, as diverse creators have presented workshops and lectures at various colleges or taught full-semester programs. To that number we’re about to add one Bradley² J³ Guigar will be teaching at the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia. Lots of predecessors for teaching a class, but this is the bit that I think is unique — Guigar won’t be teaching drawing, or story, or joke writing, he’ll be teaching how to make a living in the arts:
  

  In January, I will be teaching a senior-level course on Arts Entrepreneurship … For a long time now, I’ve argued (sometimes loudly on Webcomics Weekly) that art schools need to do a better job of preparing their students for the Real World they’re being thrust into. And that means an overwhelming probability of freelance work and running a small business centered around one’s craft — not the studio jobs and staff positions that were prevalent decades ago.

  Hint for those Hussian students that end up sitting class with Professor Guigar next semester: he’s got a lot of Dad Jokes, he’s not embarrassed to drop them on you, and if you can make him laugh, you’ll get 30 to 90 seconds to check your email or texts before he’ll be able to continue. I encourage you to learn all you can from him (he really is frighteningly smart), and also to keep track of how many laugh breaks you get out of him before graduation; I’m going to place the over/under at 75, but would be thrilled to hear that I underestimated.

  Oh, and if you’re going to try to bribe him, learn how to make a proper whisky sour. Just sayin’.

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¹ Not necessarily the worst place to be too far from.

² Bradford? Bradmark? Bradbourne? Bradburn? Braddock? Bradon? Bradshaw? Bradwell? Brady?

³ It is my firm belief that the “J” doesn’t stand for anything, but is in reference to Bullwinkle J Moose and Rocket J Squirrel. Whatever the truth of the name, he’s dreamy.

A friend of mine recently told me about how when he was younger, Ender’s Game¹ was his favorite book, and now many years later, his mother had read it and while it wasn’t necessarily her cup of tea, she understood exactly why it was his favorite: Because the hero is a pre-teen that saves the world in space by playing videogames. Oooh, burn, Mom.

Likewise, Richard Feynman will always be my favorite scientist; as a little baby engineer, his famed audiotaped² lectures on physics were considered a marvel of clarity, and then early in my undergraduate career the first of his autobiographical volumes came out³ and we learned something else about Feynman — he screwed around (literally and figuratively) and had fun and lived his life in a way that exemplified the notion that if you weren’t overly concerned with what other people thought about you, it was probably for the best.

He was a complex, brilliant, difficult, charming, obnoxious genius that wanted to know the why and how of everything, a man who at certain points of his life knew things that literally no other human knew, a man who could reduce the most complex concepts in physics to squiggles on a chalkboard, a man who joked and told stories and played in samba bands, a man who got laid a lot. Around 20 years old he was everything I might aspire to be, and it’s one of the great losses of my life that I’ll never get to meet him⁴. He was nowhere near as awesome as his stories made him out to be, probably, but that’s part of the point of telling stories, getting to make yourself look better.

Two years ago he got a really good biographical treatment — certainly not his first — in graphical form, from Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick, published by the good folks at :01 Books. Given the importance of Feynman Diagrams (the aforementioned squiggles) in modern physics, having his story told in slightly squiggly pictures is a natural. It’s hard to think how they might top themselves.

Until now.

Ottaviani and Myrick are taking on the one physicist who may be as influential, as complex, as colorful a character, with as involved and messy a life as Feynman (although he was probably never investigated by the FBI as a possible subversive): Stephen Hawking. And given that Hawking has been locked into his own body for decades, unable to speak for himself, the silent medium of graphic fiction may be the most expressive means of describing the inner thoughts of the man. Oh, and the fact that he’s still alive to talk to doesn’t hurt; that’s not just an abstract possibility, by the way:

Hawking author Jim Ottaviani says, “July 4, 2012 was a good day in physics and for Gordy Kane, Leland and me. Not only was the Higgs boson revealed to the world, but Gordy — a prominent physicist and author of The Particle Garden — won a long-standing $100 bet with his friend Stephen Hawking on whether there even was a Higgs. And in an email letting us know about these things, Gordy and his wife Lois also added an ‘Oh, by the way….’ They told us that Stephen had read and enjoyed our Feynman book (!) and invited us to come to Cambridge and talk about doing a book about him. We didn’t get on a plane that same afternoon, but we did start planning our trip, and this book. Like I said, a good day.”

Hawking is due for release in 2016, and a preview is presently available on Boing Boing. It’s not much compared to the full book, and it’ll likely be different by the release date, but it’s enough for now.

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¹ No link because seriously, screw Orson Scott Card.

² “Tapes” were these things that stored information on long strips of magnetic ribbon. Ask your parents.

³ The sequel was posthumous, and in large part dealt with his role in the Challenger disaster investigation, which also resonated for us. It was January of my freshman year when the associate dean of students Tom Miller (aka your official buddy at Rose-Hulman; by the way, he’s still there and still your buddy despite the fancy VP title and tie) found me and some friends on a couch in the Union building and told us, The Space Shuttle just exploded.

That day, more than any other in our technical education, reinforced the idea that our actions as engineers would have consequences. We wouldn’t know for a long time what had gone wrong, but something had — something was missed, or not anticipated, or done wrong.

⁴ Others on that list: Claude Shannon, Chuck Jones, Jim Henson, Stephen Jay Gould.

I have to wrap up things with the client and then head to the airport, which means I am missing pretty much all the ComfyCon events (which are kicking off about now) for the day. Don’t be like me.

The easiest way to derive some webcomic-related joy out of a ComfyCon-less existence is to obsessively re-read the long-awaited Monster of the Week update dealing with the greatest hour of ’90s television, Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”. I managed to mis-calculate when this would appear by two months and one week on past occasions, but it’s here now motherscratchers, and it’s glorious. Realizing that no one person could do justice to JCFOS, MoW creator Shaenon Garrity has turned curator, inviting thirteen comickers to each take a panel and get to the emotional heart of the episode. Lord Kinbote, Alex Trebek, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Scully’s many great lines, Mulder’s pie rampage, and the bleepin’ sheriff with the bleepin’ vocabulary all get their due. It was worth the wait.

So many Things!

• New Thing! ComfyCon is go!
• New Thing! Kel McDonald’s previously-mentioned African folktales anthology is now on Kickstarter! Kel! Cube! Becky! Faith! A dozen stories that you haven’t seen a thousand times before!
• New Thing! Frank “The Voice Of Wallace The Fish” Gibson will be one of the writers of the new Bee & PuppyCat comics alongside B&P creator Natasha Allegri and the always-awesome Madeleine Flores!
• Thing Wrapping Up! The Bee & PuppyCat series Kickstarter has just wrapped with more than US$870K, meaning nine episodes of cosmic ennui!
• New Thing! Ryan Estrada’s latest comics collection, Broken Telephone, is now live! That is to say, you can now subscribe to all-new digital comics, from nearly 20 artists, arriving every other week for up to a year. To be precise, Estrada’s using the Kickstarter campaign as a funding backbone for his usual Pay What You Want model, with certain funding tiers getting you more and more and more comics, from so many creators, all of whom were paid for their efforts. Rockin’. Go get it.

It’s Events Day at the Fleen Ranch, so break out the dayplanner and gas up the car, you got some places to be. While you’re waiting for the tank to fill and the GPS to get your directions together, Rich Stevens dropped some wisdom last night, followed by the mic. Check it:

Do you want to make webcomics?

OK, great. You need two traits. One or the other, you will fail at my definition of webcomics in the professional sense.

1.) You need to find joy in variations on a theme, even if the theme is “your imagination.” You will hopefully be doing this task thousands and thousands of times. Enjoy it, love it, do it for the right reasons.

2.) You will need a gleeful, hateful, beautiful endurance. Avoid drama and destroy all your enemies by being solidly there for your fans. Save your heckling for the graves of misogynists.

The end. [boldface original]

Something to ponder while you make your way around the country.

• The every-three-years Festival of Cartoon Art kicks off tomorrow in Columbus, Ohio on the campus of Ohio State; the formal festival is full up, but some associated events have individual admission tickets still available, at the FCA page linked just above. One thing that’s sold out entirely will be the STRIPPED screening; just think: three years ago STRIPPED co-creator Dave Kellett did a keynote presentation, which opened doors for a lot of the interviews in the movie he’s now sharing … what new project will the screening enable? For those of you (including me) not able to attend the FCA this year (which is pretty much the entire world, minus the 275 registrations that the FCA allows), time to start making plans for Fall, 2016.
• While you’re making those plans for 2016 (or maybe 2019), maybe head east on I-70 for a few hours to Pittsburgh, where our old friend The Toonseum will be holding its third Bad Movie Night tomorrow at 7:00pm; as is tradition, the name of the movie will not be announced until the audience is seated and unable to escape. Admission is US$10 (five bucks for members) and the event is 18 and up.
• Rumblings have been made on the nets that serial troublemakers Danielle Corsetto and Randy Milholland may be about to spring a new iteration of ComfyCon on an unsuspecting world. The original ComfyCon, as you may recall, took place last year during San Diego Comic Con, for those creators and fans that could not (or perhaps would not) attend the much more hectic show by the Pacific Ocean; taking place online, it was well received by all concerned.

  ComfyCon II: The Comfying is still on for this weekend, and the quiet launch will make it all the more exciting when we see all involved, both event- and people-wise. Notifications may come with short lead times, so follow the twitters of your favorite webcomickers to be sure not to miss anything.

• Finally, what’s likely the last webcomics-related event of the calendar yet, Webcomics Rampage 2013 rolls into Austin Texas early next month, with an all-new, all-larger, all-louder THREE! THREE! THREE! days of webcomics maaaaayheeemmmmm.

Catching up from the weekend yesterday means I left out a few items for space; let’s get them the attention they deserve, along with a few new things for today.

• The buzz around Buzz! is beginning to build, as the previously-mentioned original graphic novel from Ananth Panagariya (pretty words) and Tessa Stone (pretty pictures) approaches release. The spelling-bee-as-combat-sport story drops in a few weeks time, and the creators took the time to talk to Caleb Goellner at Comics Alliance about the power of words, words-as-pictures, and pictures-as-words. Good stuff.
• John Allison’s Bad Machinery has had a slow build for the past few years; a lot of fans of his previous Tackleford-set series never made the leap to the new protagonists and their mystery-solving ways, but those that have joined up in the meantime have become well attached to the wonder-teens¹. Now Publishers Weekly is getting in the love, naming the first Bad Machinery print collection to Best Books of 2013 (Children’s Fiction) list; I’d argue for an “all ages” designation rather than “children’s”², but there’s no arguing with the inclusion of The Case of the Team Spirit.
• Dean Trippe and Jim Zub get a little love from The AV Club, in the form of the latest comics review round-up, which appreciates both Something Terrible and Samurai Jack, respectively. Well done, Messers Z and T.
• Animators at Dreamworks will have another reason to appreciate their career path³, as the Stripped team head studioward for a Very Special Reason:
  

  Today, Dreamworks is having us over to screen @strippedfilm for their animators & staff, as an inspiration film. How cool is that!

  Pretty damn cool, Stripped co-director, co-producer, co-almost-everything Dave Kellett, pretty damn cool. I want to see this movie like you can hardly believe.

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¹ I, for one, appreciate how Lottie, Shauna, and Mildred are the centerpiece of the story; teen boys get all the attention in much of mass media that has teens as characters.

² Especially considering the fact that Delilah Dirk and Boxers & Saints also appear on the list, which is clearly not for children qua children. It’s really a YA list at the very least.

³ Apart from I’m a professional animator which, I know every job has its challenges and sucky days, but from here that’s pretty damn magical.

A number of things happened Thursday, but I felt like Friday belonged to Joey. I don’t imagine a slight delay in discussion has changed any of these things too much.

• If you aren’t familiar with Horace Greenstein, Scary Owl Lawyer, you damn well should be. Now available in scarier, sound-and-vision form courtesy of Nothing But Flowers.
• New A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible!
• It’s been ten years since the first Child’s Play was announced¹, and in that time its focus has been singular: make life a little easier for sick kids (and their families) via a network of affiliated (now world-wide) hospitals. Announced late last week is the first expansion of the Child’s Play mission, extending the same promise of relief to kids outside of the hospital environment, but in no less miserable straits:
  

  With the holiday season upon us, we wanted to share some exciting news from Child’s Play. Due to the incredible amount of support from gamers around the world, we’ve been working on a new initiative to benefit children and their families in domestic violence facilities.

  Unlike the network of hospitals we serve, domestic violence shelters operate on a much smaller scale and can have specific needs and challenges: Anonymous locations, apartment-style housing, multilingual families, and more.

  Within our pilot program, we have domestic violence facilities that provide emergency housing, long term housing, counseling, legal advocacy, and a variety of youth and family care programs, but there was one unifying factor to each and every one: They’re in need of ways to support, entertain, distract and interact with traumatised youth.

  I’m proud to announce we have selected ten facilities to participate in the pilot program for our domestic violence assistance initiative. Over the past year, we’ve been working to build a custom designed game kiosk, complete with console, TV, and appropriate games.

  As we get feedback and fine-tune the manufacturing and distribution process, we will expand the network to include facilities nationwide.

  PA co-creator Mike Krahulik isn’t the most popular guy in some communities these days; if you can separate the creator from the creation, there’s some good work being done here by a lot of people (not the least Child’s Play coordinator Jamie Dillion) and the good that can be produced here is tangible and much-needed. Just sayin’.

• I’ve been thinking about the Kickstarter scam-backer incident since it broke last week, and while I’m gratified that things came to a quick resolution (tl;dr: Kickstarter revoked the account of the scammer in question), I’ve been wondering what kind of protections could be baked into the Kickstarter ecosystem to discourage such scam attempts in the future. I’m not sure that anything foolproof could be devised² without impairing the the utility of the site, given that disputes of this nature are between a customer (in this case, a scammer), a credit card company, and a merchant (which Kickstarter is not; Kickstarter is a permanent marketplace with a floating roster of merchants).

  Amazon’s not very involved either, given that it’s little more than a credit processing service rather than a merchant. The bank issuing the card is obligated to investigate on behalf of the allegedly aggrieved party³, but it doesn’t want to be stuck with a deadbeat customer and is somewhat incentivized to find in favor of their cardmember because that makes it Somebody Else’s Problem. The Somebody in that SEP is the merchant, who get hit with a chargeback.

  So what to do? For starters, I don’t know what Kickstarter may be planning to deter scammers in the future — although I am confident that they are planning, since this particular cat it out of the bag, and dong nothing means having to spend the time and effort to react to them one at a time — but if I were over there I’d consider at least some of the following:

  • At a campaigner organizer’s request (or maybe automatically), make chargeback investigators aware of past disputes against other campaigns
  • Allow campaigns to approve backers above some threshold dollar value
  • Require backers above some threshold dollar value to provide some amount of their pledge in escrow/bond

  Those last two might work to deter the next guy that’s determined to steal top-value backer rewards; the hassle of dealing with credit card complaints (and the risk of triggering fraud alerts at the credit card companies) might not be worth it if you could “only” steal, say, US$100 worth of stuff as opposed to US$1000. Much to think about, and much to keep an eye on in future.

• Speaking of Kickstarter, and not on the topic of scams — one of the most delightfully thoughtful (or thoughtfully delightful) webcomics is finally getting a proper print collection, and they’re fundraising as we speak. Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell creators Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan would like very much for you to join their eponymous hero on the karmic rollercoaster ride that is his life, and to enjoy the paper-based versions of the laugh-chuckles which can be yours for as little as US$30 (it was US$25, but the early birds beat you to the savings).

  DCIGTH is terrific, funny, heartfelt stuff, and you should get in on this while the getting’s good. Oh, and collectors of comics art: please note that originals from the DCIGTH run are included in reward packages starting at the US$60 level, which is criminally cheap. Also, handmade plushies of Skittles the Manticore, hooray!

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¹ Perhaps appropriately, it started in reaction to what the PA guys perceived as persecuting, dickish behavior on the part of another. You may argue if you wish about the presence or absence of irony in that state of affairs, but it is inarguable that Child’s Play has done a great deal of good for sick kids and their families in the decade since.

² cf: the prevalence of scammers on eBay, who always find exploits within policies that are meant for honest participants. But, like they say, locks are for honest people.

³ Remind me to tell you sometime about the dark days before card swipers and how customers could get screwed by stolen credit cards for weeks until the numbers got into the hands of merchants.

We lost Joey Manley last night.

If you weren’t familiar with Manley, reading any social media feed populated by webcomickers will give you an idea of how important he was in the nascent days of this weird little medium. He promoted webcomics, built infrastructure for webcomics, would have been perfectly happy to become rich by building up webcomics — but never at the expense of those that created them.

His profile had been much lower in recent years, since he partnered up with money and — in my reading, he would never be so ungracious as to say such a thing — shuffled off to the side by his new partners, the sites that he founded gradually winding down original content and eventually shuttering the doors.

But! Joey Manley won’t be remembered for how his projects ended; he’ll be remembered for how his projects launched dozens, hundreds of careers. He’ll be remembered for being too damn young when he died. He’ll be remembered with a sense of heartbreak for his partner, family, and loved ones.

Rest in peace, Colonel Joey; we were better for having known you.

Let me just point you at some things worth seeing.

• I can’t tell if this is a brilliant piece of performance art, or just somebody that needs a good punch — an Indiegogo campaign to fund a Kickstarter campaign. It claims to be in the Comic category, which could be comic as in funny ha ha or as in comics Hard to tell, since at present, they ain’t saying what the Kickstarter campaign would actually be for.
• At least three of the nominees for the Goodreads Best Books of 2013 (Humo[u]r) are webcomics-adjacent. That’s a full 20%, which far outstrips the percentage of webcomics-adjacent books in the wider marketplace. Guess webcomics types are just inherently statistically funnier than everybody else.
• Regarding yesterday’s account of media companies screwing indy creators: I was contacted today by a webcomicker (no names) who related the tale of a friend who was asked to design and produce — that is, pay for — jackets for a major sutdio’s next release in a big-name franchise. Not just work for free, but lay out cash in exchange for a credit as costume designer.

  Last I heard, costumer designer was a job, aka something that people get paid to do, not pay for the privilege of doing. Hey, production goon that thinks this is an acceptable way of dealing with creative people so you might save budget for that hookers-and-coke line item: fuck you. I hate you and everything you stand for¹.

• Let’s end on an up note. My copy of The Bear Volume 2 arrived, and it’s as wonderful as you might expect. Ryan Sohmer again skillfully negotiates between snarktacularity and sincerity, and Becky Dreistadt delivers up the most gorgeous paintings of parent-and-child critters. My favorite is right at the beginning of the book because ahem, greyhound. As Sohmer notes, he’s now got twins at home in addition to the eldest son that inspired the first two Bear books, so hopefully he’s inspired to keep cranking out the parental experiences and gettin’ Becky to keep painting the critters.

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¹ And by that, I mean that you should ideally find yourself in the bleakest of all possible circumstances: pinned underneath a broken snowmobile on the endless, frozen wastes of the Arctic tundra. At night, the ice weasels come.²

² Bleakest possible circumstances devised by Matt Groening a couple of decades ago in the run of Life is Hell, which I miss dearly.