The webcomics blog about webcomics

San Diego Looms

So, yeah, probably a regular post tomorrow (I’ve got a late flight) but for a solid week after that? Irregular as heck. Let’s clear a few backlog items before the madness descends.

  • I’m three days late on this, but I wasn’t going to let it go: buried in at the end of a discussion of Canadian literature being developed for broadcast is a line that could almost be overlooked:

    FGF is also mid-production on a number of other screen adaptations of Canadian books, most notably Kate Beaton’s picture book The Princess And The Pony and Jeff Lemire’s graphica trilogy, Essex County.

    I’m not sure what’s more charming — the thought of Kate Beaton’s wonderful story about believing in yourself (and also farts) arriving on the small screen (I’m figuring 30 minute animated special), or that identification of The Princess And The Pony as a Canadian book. Mark my words, Beaton will be regarded in the Great Northern Pantheon alongside Atwood, Davies, and Mowat. Everybody feel good for Kate!

  • Second, after too long a time¹ away from their many fans, Becky [Dreistadt] and Frank [Gibson] have returned to the webcomics game with Bustletown. Let’s run down the criteria for Becky&Frankness:

    The first sixteen pages of Bustletown are up now, with the next chunk of story dropping after SDCC; no word yet on how often it’ll be released, or if there will be an RSS feed, but if you find you want to keep up with Bustletown, it’s now listed over to the right in the link library. Everybody feel good for Becky and Frank!

  • It’s been more than two years since Girls With Slingshots wrapped, since it started over again as [re-]colored strips with commentary. Creator Danielle Corsetto spent some time getting the final two print volumes produced & distributed, and she’s been teasing us with the eventual color omnibus edition².

    And, quietly (or at least as quiet as you can be when you’re trying to keep things on the downlow amongst 1300+ Patreon supporters), she’s been doing some marvelously revelatory autobio comics under the title 32³. There’s everything there, from the ordinary to the deeply personal (although if you follow Corsetto’s twitterfeed, you know that she’s genetically designed for #TMITuesday, so personal is not really a problem).

    Anyway, Corsetto has just opened up the formerly Patreon-only strips to public view, and they are excellent. The dozen in the archive so far (with updates approximately weekly) range from multi-page college flashbacks to four panels on the logistics of groinal grooming; they’re all pretty damn hilarious, and any day with Danielle Corsetto telling a story from her life is automatically a better day than it would have been otherwise. Bookmark and read, and everybody feel good for Danielle!


Spam of the day:

Do you need to find a DNA lab for immigration?

No … and if I did, I don’t think I’d use a lab that looks (from its advert) like it should be called Akbar & Jeff’s DNA Hut.

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¹ Including a suspiciously incomplete Capture Creatures print comic series; hey, BOOM!, since you’re obviously uninterested in completing the series, hows about releasing rights that you’re apparently squatting on and letting Becky and Frank complete it elsewhere? Or is the money that it would take to negotiate a fair rights reversion earmarked instead for giving away 1000 drinks at SDCC?

² Which, for once, I probably won’t get. I’ve got the 10 original collections, most signed-and-sketched, and I’d hate to give them up. No room for both on the shelf, so I’m keeping the softcovers.

³ No, she’s not 32, she’s 36 as of this writing. Explanation for the title here and here

One Day To Go And Finding The Good Where We Can

We live, damn it all, at a time of great transition; things are ending and other … things … are starting. As it turns out, such is occurring in Webomicstan as well.

  • It’s been a long time coming, more than eleven and a half years since we first met Dr McNinja, as written & pencilled by Christopher Hastings and inked by Kent Archer. In the decade-plus since, color duties have been assumed by (briefly) Carly Monardo and Anthony Clark, and Doc has been written/drawn by everybody from Benito Cereno & Les McClane to Kate Beaton to Becky & Frank.

    A good 18 months back, Hastings warned us that Dr McNinja would be ending sooner rather than later; he warned us as well that there were no guarantees which characters would survive (spoiler warning, it’s all bad guys that died; it looked like Gordito might but he got better and thankfully Gary The Barber appeared to never be in danger).

    Since the announcement, Hastings has only increased his comic book writing, having graduated from miniseries (various humor-tinged 3- or 4-issue runs at Marvel) to ongoing (Adventure Time, and being the originating writer/person most responsible for shaping Gwenpool). He’s got lots of irons in lots of fires, and when things finish up — as is imminent — it will be with the knowledge that damn, this was completely a thing¹.

    You done good, Doc (both docs, Hastings and McNinja). The world will be a bit less radical and insanely fun next week, but you’ve taken us on a hell of a ride in the meantime. Thank you.

  • Announced today: the imminent start of an administration that has no truck with capital-s Science will not stop Zach Weinersmith from promoting a love of knowledge and critical thought. Namely, the latest iteration of BAH!Fest will take place at the hallowed Kresge Auditorium on the campus of MIT. The call for submissions is now open, and this show will have an open theme — any bad ad-hoc hypothesis, on any topic, is fair game.

    The most exciting part? The keynote will be delivered by Marc Abrahams, co-founder and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel Prize. It’s probably fair to say that there’s no inspiration for BAH!Fest that Abrahams hasn’t had a hand in², so this is very exciting … there’s pretty much a straight line from the seminal A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown (Seim, 1956) to BAH!Fest, so if you’re anywhere near MIT on 23 April 2017, 7:00pm-ish³, tell Zach & the rest they’re doing great things.

  • Speaking of great things, we’re down to the waning hours of the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund, which will cease its activities at noon EST tomorrow as Barrack Obama leaves the office of President of the United States and glob help us all. The next while is going to be a struggle (genteel for some of us, existential for far too many), so the Six-F will be matching any donations you make from Election Day to Inauguration Day to:

    American Civil Liberties Union
    Brennan Center for Justice
    Campaign Zero
    Electronic Frontier Foundation
    International Rescue Committee
    NAACP Legal Defense Fund
    National Resources Defense Council
    Planned Parenthood
    Pro Publica
    Sacred Stone Camp’s GoFundMe
    Syrian Civil Defense aka The White Helmets
    The Trevor Project

    As of this writing, you have approximately 19 hours to send me (that would be gary) a receipt at the address of this website right here (which is a dot-com). I’ll match it. And as needs require (and I am able) between now and the end of the retrograde nightmare about to break upon us, I’ll repeat this exercise.


Spam of the day:

McDonalds Breakfast wants you to try all day breakfast – Free on us!

Not even if it was McBonalds.

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¹ Reminder: I met Hastings for the first time at an Andy Bell art show, where he was wearing a Great Outdoor Fight t-shirt. I would, by coincidence, be standing next to him at the Great Outdoor Fight signing in Brooklyn, when he and Onstad met. It was an entirely appropriate bookending.

² The other likely inspiration: the Journal of Irreproducible Results (which I was very fond of reading back in college), which Abrahams edited for a time before leaving and founding AIR. Alas, the JIR is not what it once was.

³ It’s doubtful I’ll be able to be there, as I’m applying for the Alaska Robotics Minicon Camp in Juneau that same weekend.

Okay, Weird

Something’s going on with WordPress where I lose connection to the back end and editing functions, but the front end continues to show the site. And then it comes back without doing anything! So let’s be quick about this, and I hope you will appreciate how much work went into this one.

See, I owe Amazon an apology, as I was complaining t’other day about my copy of Romeo And/Or Juliet not being here on day of release, and now I’ve got it. Thanks, Amazon! It’s wacky and wonderful, and features many, many terrific artists and story ending illustrations. Author Ryan North’s sense of both complete absurdism and Shakespearean drama are intact, as he takes us through multiple plots, multiple story styles (I’m presently following along a noir pastische), and pulls in multiple plays for inspiration (said pastiche stars Rosalind from As You Like It, and there are short versions of Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and even Midsummer’s play-in-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe). There’s time travel, giant robots, sex-having, sweet fights, record-setting one-rep weightlifting, a cookie recipe, and even a nod to Back To The Future¹.

Sadly, the best thing we saw in To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure — where those illustrations were full page with the minor text associated with the story ending (usually grisly death) — is modified somewhat; the illos are mostly 1/3 page in size, with a continuous stream of text-illustration-next story point. As a result, RAOJ doesn’t have page numbers, it has passage numbers — a passage being a node in the story, ranging from a line or two to more than a page. Additionally, instead of the full-color glossy illustrations from TBONTBTITA, the papr stock is matte and the pictures are all combinations of black, white, and red. The changes do make the book less of a bicep-building than TBONTBTITA, though … that was one seriously heavy book.

But despite all of the good points, Romeo And/Or Juliet has one stunning flaw, one shared with To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure, namely: the index of artists in the back of the book contains only an alphabetical listing, not a listing by passage (or page, in the earlier book) number. So when I came across a stunningly beautiful (or funny, or disturbing … ) illustration in my read-through, I’d sometimes recognize the artist by style, but more often not. Then I had to scan the index, looking for the passage (or page) number, to find it who it was.

Well, no more! Ryan North, I am calling you out for having a defective book, and furthermore I am doing something about it. Specifically, I have painstakingly transcribed the passage numbers and artist names and compiled them into a table (below the cut) that you may print and stick in your copy of RAOJ. I trust Mr North will prevail on his publishers to include information in future printings; with a clear typeface, you might be able to fit it on a promotional bookmark, but at the least you could “tip in” some pages in this and future North/Shakespeare collaborations.

It’s a minor thing, though — don’t let the lack of reverse-lookup prevent you from picking up Romeo And Or Juliet; it’s a brilliant job from a brilliant writer and nearly 100 brilliant artists. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to decide what to do in this game of rock-paper-scissors I seem to have found myself in.


Spam of the day:

Identity Issue PP-658-119-347

I believe that you are the PayPal Review Department exactly as much as I believe the South Asian-accented man who called himself Steve Martin on the phone yesterday really was calling from the Treasury Department².

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¹ Or at least North’s obsession with the novelization of the movie.

² I called him to point out he is very bad at being a thief and he hung up on me. So I called back and got him again and continued my spiel. After five further discussions (sample statement from me: I can do this all day), he apparently decided he had to take a break and a woman picked up in his place. She said I was very rude and not to call their scam operation again or I would be in trouble. That was fun.

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News: Good, Better, Best

For those wondering, the Octopus Pie Volume 4 launch party last night was a lot of fun; I’m not going to do a write-up here, as much of what I was told by Meredith Gran, Mike Holmes, and fellow attendee Evan Dahm hasn’t been announced yet. Rather than run the risk of mentioning things they want to announce on their own terms, I’ll just say that they’re all working on Cool Things that you will love. Look for them on the con circuit this year and ask ’em yourself what they’re up to.

Instead, let’s talk about other things that have come up.

  • At the launch party, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of a young lady that came because (as she put it) she’s grown up reading the likes of Gran, Beaton, Munroe, and other lights of webcomickry. She had stickers of her original character (Bus Man … possibly Busman, or Bus-Man¹) and sent me a PDF of a short story she recently completed on her Tumblr. Her name is Sam[antha] Schroeder, you can see her portfolio here and her comics here.

    There’s so many people making comics — at every stage of their individual artistic journeys — that finding one whose work you want to share is always a Good Thing; I’m sharing Schroeder’s doodles and comics (there’s not much there yet) because I think it’s great to follow somebody from the beginning. A few years one and she’ll probably be embarrassed by this work, but that’ll only be because of how much she’s progressed.

    The story I mentioned is a sweet-natured look at what it’s like to be a not particularly grim reaper² who’s wondering about whether all those reapings are fair. It’s charming, and you can find it at these links.

  • It’s been not quite five years that Tyler Page (creator of Nothing Better) has been working on his medical memoir, Raised on Ritalin (of a piece with other personal stories about health, like Tracy White’s How I Made It To Eighteen or even Raina Telgemeier’s Smile), which recently hit its final chapter. It’s a book that’s undoubtedly changed in the time it took to produce, and it’s now possible to read the entire thing at once.

    And for those of you that hate hitting the Next button a few hundred times in a row, you can get a hardcopy:

    HERE IT IS: @Kickstarter for Raised on Ritalin – A Graphic Novel/Memoir about #ADHD by tyler page http://kck.st/1WfH1k4 #kickstarter

    It’s probably partly a shift in the openness with which people are now willing to discuss mental illness, partly changes in psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, and partly who I hang out with these days, but things like ADHD and depression weren’t things I knew that people had — actual people, that is, people I knew personally — before about a dozen years ago. A lot of your favorite creators have been open about the challenges they face with psychiatric conditions, and that’s a tremendous help for people that don’t know why their brains work the way they do. Lots more people need to get that help, and Raised on Ritalin has to potential to provide that help.

    It’s not just the story of Page’s diagnosis and what ADHD means to him personally; it’s a biography of the disease and the drugs that are used to treat it, as well. It’s an important story, and it’s only going to get to the places it needs to be³ if it’s in a printed and bound form. And that will only happen if a measly US$6000 gets raised in the next month or so.

    Page is already about 40% of the way to goal, but he really needs to go way over goal — that’s what will allow not only physical improvements to the book (he cited better paper, for one), but to print enough copies that the people who don’t yet know that they need it will be able to find it in places that can help them³ in the future. If you know somebody that lives with ADHD or any other mental condition, if you want to learn more (because you’re a good person and have a sense of empathy), you could hardly find a better starting place that Page’s book. Pledge, spread the word, and share your copy when you get it.

  • Happies Birthsdays. The aforementioned Raina Telgemeier (I did mention her … just scroll back up and you’ll see) and Becky Dreistadt are having birthdays today. Actually, it’s a good deal more extensive that just two people; 26 May is apparently the most popular birthday in indy/webcomics:

    @beckyandfrank @CoryCasoni @TomTomShimShim @JNoze + @the_kochalka @NickBertozzi @bannister01! #birthdaysquad

    To be clear, in that tweet Telgemeier is replying to Cory Casoni, who is not one of the co-birthdayists; that still makes for at least seven people celebrating today, which makes today The Best. And you can get in on the celebrations, either by tweeting and maybe getting an advanced copy of Telgemeier’s next book, or by sending Dreistadt a picture of a cat to make her happy.


Spam of the day:

New York Comic Con

Nope, we’re done. Don’t find my presence to be helpful to your strategy of selling people to advertisers? I don’t have to read your emails any more. Bye, now.

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¹ However you spell it, Bus Man has the best superpower for an urban environment ever; whenever he needs to get somewhere, regardless of schedule or time of day, a bus will pull up and it will be an express to his current destination.

² She’s still a reaper, mind you, but not the doom-and-gloom kind.

³ Libraries, therapist’s practices, school counseling offices, etc.

In Which I Must Disagree With Ryan North

In all other respects I generally agree with him, but I am firm in this: feta is gross and its presence on an otherwise-delicious pizza is just wrong. I’m getting ahead of myself, we’ll come to that bit later.

  • It’s been maybe six weeks since David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) announced that he was taking legal advice to determine if it would be possible to produce a printed version of Irregular Webcomic without running afoul of the LEGO corporate behemoth. It appears that the answer was affirmative, given the announcement today:

    I have started work to have collections of Irregular Webcomic! strips printed in book format, for purchase.

    Boom. That’s the sound of perhaps the longest-running webcomic without a print collection (going on thirteen years old) giving its readers what they want. Given a deep archive filled with interleaved storylines, Morgan-Mar opted out of the sequential approach, and will be going with a themed collection:

    The first book will collect all of the Fantasy theme strips up to the hiatus period which began with strip #3198. By my count, that’s 504 strips. With some bonus material, we’re estimating about 140 pages.

    Smart move, by the way — grabbing the first 500 or so strips in IW history would require readers to hop between fourteen different storylines, and not get much resolution on any of them. Also, I’ll note that the Fantasy theme probably makes the least use of actual LEGO assets¹ (other than the Me theme), as the main characters are painted RPG miniatures and not LEGO minifigs; the branded building bricks are used more for backgrounds, props, sets, and side characters. Having less prominent LEGO stuff in the LEGO-themed comic is probably a safe move from a legal standpoint, at least to start.

    Morgan-Mar is presently working with the wonderful folks at Make That Thing, with plans to launch the requisite Kickstarter around the first of the year so as to avoid the holiday confusion (not to mention the tax implications of making a bunch of money in 2015 but not spending it until 2016). I’ll keep you appraised of any future developments, but I will say that this exciting news. Very exciting.

  • Speaking of unreasonably large Kickstarted books from longtime webcomickers, Ryan North officially finished the last stretch goal of the To Be Or Not To Be campaign: he made a pizza that looked like Kate Beaton’s Hamlet portrait and ate it. And then, because he is a Ryan-sized man and has prodigious hunger, he also made one that looked like Beaton’s Ophelia and then ate it, too.

    There was a third pizza².

    This third pie resembled Beaton’s take on Juliet, and with that, North announced the sequel to TBONTB, the long-rumo[u]red Romeo and/or Juliet. Key points: the book will not be crowdfunded, but rather published by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin. As a result, a hard release date can be promised (7 June 2016), the book is in a final form (no stretch goals), and will feature 400 pages and (by my count) ninety friggin’ artists providing illustrations. I ain’t typing out the list but you can find a copy/paste of it below the cut.

    Oh, and let me point out this one line near the bottom of the announcement:

    I can’t say more about the book JUST YET, but I will say this: as someone who has backed the original Kickstarter and is also awesome, be sure to hold on to your preorder email receipt. For SURPRISES :0 [emphasis original]

    Done, and done!

  • Still on Kickstarted books, the TJ & Amal omnibus got a nice writeup today at The AV Club, and not to do with Kickstarted books at all, yesterday’s Nick Trujillo news has revealed itself: Glitched is running as a Twitter account, and appears to make use of the new polling feature. IN-teresting.

Spam of the day:

You have missed messages vindication Cordially Skype+ service

Weird, it’s almost like I’m being invited to click on links of unknown provenance by services that I don’t use.

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¹ Or maybe the Space theme, for similar reasons.

² cf: Ryan-sized man.

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Multiple Media

There are a couple of offshoots of webcomickry in other realms of expression that caught my eye today, plus the list of SPX exhibitors is live. Let’s go down the list, shall we?


Spam of the day:

In days gone by, should you stood a bankruptcy or even a foreclosure, getting approved with an car finance was like pulling teeth

Days gone by? Are we talking like the pre-lidocaine era?

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¹ Oh please, oh please, let ASW recurring character Ryan North be part of this play!

Kickstarts And Cuttings And Comics Arts Festivals

Relatively quiet weekend, relatively busy Monday. Let’s do this.

  • Oh my, that blew up further than I thought it would; the last four days of Smut Peddler 2014 were in the top six days of the full campaign, and the final total just cleared US$185K, for creator bonuses of a staggering $US1700. Well done Spike, and everybody that loves the porns. Which, based upon the previous SP collection and the Sleep of Reason collection, leads us to the conclusion that porn is 2.8599 times as popular as horror.
  • Speaking of Kickstarts, the latest book from Johnny Wander creators Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya¹ has just gone up, meaning you’ve got a chance to get a copy of Cuttings in a handsome hardcover, or an even-handsomer limited-edition hardcover. It would appear that this collection also includes perhaps my favorite Ota/Panagariya collaboration: PONY COP. Everybody jump on this so I can get PONY COP in a handsome hardcover book, please. As of this writing, Cuttings is just shy of 40% of the way to goal, which is just shy of 60% too little. Step it up, people. Do it for the children.
  • TCAF, one of the best shows on the comics show calendar, runs this weekend in a now certified crack-smokin’-mayor-free Toronto. Today, the full programming slate was released, with multiple tracks of goodness packing the two days. There’s a full track for children (Kean Soo! Jeff Smith! Dave Roman! Ben Hatke! Raina Telgemeier!² Kazu Kibuishi! And many more!), a Canadian reading series (Tony Cliff! Karl Kerschl!Jillian & Mariko Tamaki! And more!), round tables and interviews and profiles (Lynn Johnston! Chip Zdarsky! Jeet Heer! Box Brown! Spike! Katie Shanahan! Rachel Duke! Mike Maihack! Noelle Stevenson! Kate Leth! Tom Spurgeon! Heidi Macdonald! Kate Beaton! Meredith Gran! KC Green! Tom McHenry! Jess Fink! Faith Erin Hicks! Becky Cloonan! Cameron Stewart! Becky Dreistadt! Ryan North!), and, of course, George.

    If you think I’m linking to anybody other than the mononymic George, you’re crazy.

  • Not to do with Kickstarts, Cuttings, cats, or comics arts festivals, and possibly my even mentioning it could spiral out of control and cause the creator in question to ‘splode, but what the heck: Randy Milholland has heard the plaintive cries of his many fans and lo he has smiled upon us. There are finally — even now, unto the seventh generation we have waited — concrete plans for the first Something*Positive collection.

    It is a long way off, and will involve a lot of work on Milholland’s part, which means that everybody that’s ever wanted a copy had better be prepared to step the crap up and make a purchase³ when the time comes.

    And there was much rejoicing.

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¹ Who were apparently cats all this time. Who knew?

² Speaking of Telgemeier, she’s just reached an astonishing 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for Smile. Wowzers.

³ I am speaking here directly to the many, many people that have bitched to Randy over the years that because he did a donation drive to quit his day job and draw the strip a decade ago that they are entitled to as much free entertainment as they see fit to demand from him. Without fail, these people are never in Milholland’s records as actually having donated, but they have a massive sense of entitlement anyway. Time to quit the passive-aggressive games and prepare to finally drop some cash, fakers.

Immediate Future

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.

Get ‘Em While They’re Fresh

Yesterday, Chris Yates put up images of the last Baffler!s in Webcomics Fortnight Deux, meaning since we last mentioned them there have been contributions from Evan Dahm, David Willis, Rebecca Clements (that one astonishes me; I simply can’t believe that Yates and Assistant Emily the Lion were able to translate such a complex image into wood and paint), Andy Bell, and Danielle Corsetto. Mr Yates has been busy posting the Baffler!s to eBay, where as of this writing 13 of the 16 puzzles are available for bidding.

Guys, they start at fifty bucks, which is criminally cheap¹. As much as I’d love to grab up the Fat Pony, Tigerbuttah, Beartato and Friends Pizza Party, and Year in Japan [no link yet] for a grand total of US$200, we all know that ain’t gonna happen, and nor should it.

Yates and Assistant Emily deserve as much money as possible for the hard work they’ve put in, and the individual creators who contributed designs likewise should be fairly compensated for coming up with such wonderful designs. The auctions run for five days each; go crazy, outbid me, and have fun reassembling them.

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¹ As of this writing, none of the bids have cracked US$65, plus shipping. And don’t go complaining about the shipping charges, Yates packs his stuff to the point that tactical nuclear weapons couldn’t damage it in transit, which is exactly what you want if you care about your puzzle arriving with all of its pieces present.

Möbius Strip

The last Wigu update went up over the weekend¹. In case you’re wondering, the story does lead to a natural scene, which may be found here. Click 1179 times and end up where you started, which is the best possible metaphor for Wigu Tinkle’s life I can think of — live, experience, grow, repeat, secure in the knowledge that being eight lasts forever.

  • In case you missed it, professional comics funnyman and Twitter personality Anthony Clark has a new pay-what-you-want sketchbook available for your purchase and download. Few things in this world are as purely fun as Clark’s cartoons and even the briefest of his sketches is made from uncut joy. With a one dollar minimum, the 100+ pages you receive are the bargain of the year.
  • Chris Yates continues Webcomics Baffler! Fortnight II with contributions from Scott C, Kate Beaton, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, and Chris Hastings, each better looking than the one before it. Furthermore, I have information that the most intricate of these Baffler!s is yet to come, so be prepared for some good old-fashioned bidding wars when they hit auction a week from today.

    And heck, as long as we’re talking about Yates and Baffler!s, even a blizzard couldn’t prevent the debut of the brand new dual-level production Baffler!s (from Ceaco) at Toy Fair 2013 in New York.

  • There’s some hospital stories to share with you, not all good I’m afraid. Longtime webcomicker Michael Poe was hospitalized with acute renal failure on Friday, with his wife sharing the details on Saturday. Like so many self-employed creators, Poe lacks health insurance and delayed seeking medical help despite obvious illness since the beginning of the year. Those wishing to help Poe with what will surely be considerable costs are requested to make their way to his Etsy shop or online store.

    Meantimes, webcomicker JeffZugsZugale and longstanding Friend of Webcomics Rick Marshall² found themselves in hospitals on opposite coasts over the weekend, helping to usher new people into the world.

    Young Miss Marshall, Young Master Zugale, welcome to the world. It’s noisy and bright and too warm or too cold and sometimes people are jerks, but more often they’re pretty nice if they have a chance to be. Enjoy the crap out of it, and when your parents get that glazed-over look in their eyes that says they’re asleep standing up? That’s the time to double down on the screaming adorably curl into a sleeping ball and let them have six hours of uninterrupted quiet.

  • Finally, the results of last week’s impromptu contest to see who gets a copy of Johnny Wander volume 3. You may recall that the terms for entry were to leave the most convincing argument as to why a friend needs to read Johnny Wander, and after careful deliberation the book will be sent to “Root” to pass onto friend “M”, largely on the basis that “M” is a student librarian active in Young Adult programs, and thus has a great potential to spread the wealth around. “Root”, drop an email to gary in care of this here website with a shipping address and I’ll get the book in the mail.

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¹ Although we’ve seen the end of Wigu before, what with things like the WIGU TV network channel comics, and the somewhat-related and entirely coincidentally predecessor strip, When I Grow Up. Also, has Romy ever loved Quincy as much as when she was watching him drive a tricked out van/mecha in a battle to the death with Space Mummy for the fate of the Earth? I think not.

² Willenholly.