According to that unimpeachable source, Brad Guigar is 43 years old today. In honor of the Bradmastide season, we will feature an interview with Brad tomorrow, provided I can figure out how to work the digression about the Great Unmedicated Bipolar Pumpkin into thing without it looking like we’re both a pair of loonballs and/or drunk. No promises. In the meantime, how about some other happenings from around our corner of comics?

• The Hugo Award nominations hit over the weekend, with an odd shift in the universe of sci-fi awardsdom; that faint silence you hear is the lack of a nomination for the fine folks at Studio Foglio, whose work on Girl Genius has literally owned the Best Graphic Story category in all the prior years of its existence. The Foglios graciously decline nominations this year, leading to the following slate:
  • Digger, by Ursula Vernon
  • Fables Vol 15: Rose Red by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham
  • Locke & Key Volume 4, Keys to the Kingdom written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez
  • Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication written and illustrated by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton
  • The Unwritten (Volume 4): Leviathan written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross

  Two webcomics, three comic book collections; let’s address Schlock Mercenary first. There was an … unfortunate comment left at The Beat¹ that decried Howard Tayler’s inclusion on the list and stated he was only nominated because he was “whoring” (that’s a quote) his audience to get nominations. Leaving aside the rather obvious flaw in the logic², one should note that Tayler did ask his audience to support a number of eligible works by other creators. Of the works Tayler was advocating for, he was involved in two and not involved in five, and one of the two he worked on got nominated³. If he’s whoring, he’s the least effective whore ever.

  Not content to impugn the quality of Mr Tayler’s work, the commenter went on to idly speculate that Ursula Vernon engaged in similar, whorey practices. Leaving aside the well-documented fact that I loves me some Digger, ten seconds with Google would show that while Ms Vernon has spent the (roughly) one year since Digger wrapped writing frequently about her garden, interesting birds, amphibians gettin’ on in her garden, oversized turkeys (both free-ranging out by the back fence and in the roaster for Thanksgiving), mulch, mulch, and more mulch, and spoofs of Regency romance novels complete with ninjas, not once did she ask for consideration in any awards.

  Look. We all have our favorites. We all think our taste is impeccable. We all love what we love⁴. But before you accuse a creator (of whom you are barely aware) in a manner that is unseemly at best and incredibly dickish at worst, perhaps just a smidgen of due diligence? Awesome.

• Rounding out the nominations in Best Fan Artist, we find that Randall Munroe is again recognized. It’s a weird category, but as long as Randall keeps cranking out things that make me think like today’s update, I don’t have any problems with him being nominated for everything up to and including Science Cartoon Pope⁵.
• Not related to the Hugo Awards, but within the realms of engineering: Angela Melick is having a launch party for her second book in Downtown Vancouver on Saturday, 14 April. It’s in a bar, which can only mean fun times. And the very next day, Jorge Cham’s The PhD Movie goes on sale, with a newly announced five percent of profits going to support Endeavor College Prep in East Los Angeles. Proof positive that engineers are the best people? Possibly.

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¹ I’m not calling out the commenter by name; while his words were rash and unwarranted, I’m more interested in taking the behavior to task than the person.

² Namely, that if Tayler were capable of whoring himself so effectively, I’m sure his wife would prefer he use his whorish powers to bring in some money for things like groceries and mortgage payments, rather than a small statue of a rocket. It’s a very nice small statue of a rocket, but I’m pretty sure the local Food o Rama would prefer cash.

³ He also shares a nomination (along with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Jordan Sanderson) for the Writing Excuses podcast in the Best Related Work category, but did not advocate for it as far as I can find in a cursory search.

⁴ C.f.: previous graf, where I loves me some Digger.

⁵ Rest of the nominees in no particular order: Aaron Diaz, Zach Weiner, Dante Shepherd, Tony Piro, David Morgan-Mar, and Darryl Cunningham. Honorable mention to Jon Rosenberg for Cartoon Neil DeGrasse Tyson With A Jetpack.

How many? How about the announcement that Jim Zub will be translating old videogame IP into new webcomics will have to be disposed of here in the intro, because there’s just that much stuff to talk about. Or that fact that Tom Siddell just dropped the mother of all surprise twists¹ on us after 1002 updates? Naturally, this means the rest of the week will likely be dead. Ah well, thems the breaks in the exciting world of hack webcomics pseudojournalism.

Let’s start with new follow-ups of recent stories:

• John Allison’s soft-launched subscription drive (referenced here) has, in its first week, attracted some US$6000 in support, with a majority of the activity in the middle ranges. Looks like my suggestion that the Silver tier of support was appropriate was more accurate than I thought.
• As we saw yesterday, Rich Burlew is up over US$1,000,000 on Kickstarter², but today Dave Kellett reminded us that my flip characterization of temporary millionaire should more correctly have been theoretical millionaire:
  

  So, to review: Burlew will pay ~10% in Kickstarter/CC fees, and >40% in Federal/State tax. Same thing happened to Stripped. A huge downer.

  Burlew did write an update noting that he’d not calculated all of the costs for the drive correctly and noting the adjustment of certain calculations eleven days ago, and also noted an estimated cost of US$200,000 just on postage to mail out all of the merch (at a time, it should be noted, when he was sitting at about half the monetary total he’s at now, so drag that number upward).

  Moral of the story: anybody expecting that Burlew has joined the financial elites as a result of this campaign, he hasn’t. The general operating fund he’s establishing out of any residual overage doesn’t alter the fact that Kickstarter is, essentially, a per-project funding mechanism that works on a pre-orders model³.

• Announced just about a month ago, Penny Arcade’s foray into daily editorial reportage on the videogame industry launched in the wee small hours of the morning as The Penny Arcade Report. And talk about launching with a bang, as PAR editor Ben Kuchera both interviews Valve honcho Gabe Newell and tours the Valve offices.

  To be perfectly honest, this probably won’t be part of my daily content trawl, but I imagine I’ll be poking my head in from time to time because it isn’t really possible to keep up on the breadth of popular culture without some passing knowledge of videogaming (and much as the AV Club keeps me up to date on nearly all aspects of popular culture, their VG coverage is mostly limited to reviews rather than trends and analysis).

On to new items:

• Darryl Cunningham, comics creator/champion of the reality-based approach to life, has an advanced copy in hand of something I think you’re going to want to see: the print version of his non-psychiatric comics⁴, Science Tales. With any luck, that means the rest of us will have an opportunity to get our own (non-advanced) copies in the near future.
• You know who in the world of webcomics I like and — more to the point — feel I understand on a near-genetic level, because our shared weltanschauung⁵ is based on not just one, but two voluntary tribal affiliations⁶? Angela “Jam” Melick. Despite the name of her autobio comic, she wastes no talent, as no fewer than three major things are coming together right now for her:
  1. Her recent talk at the Vancouver Public Library on comics writing is now up on YouTube
  2. Her second book, Welcome to the Real World⁷ is perhaps three weeks away from dropping
  3. She’s jumping from a large company to a small one (employee #3), which is a scary and exhilarating time in the life of any young geek⁸
• She kicked the ass of first of these three things, and the two that are yet to/about to occur are going to get theirs kicked as well. And joining her in some of that ass-kickery will be fellow British Columbian and webcomicker Sam Logan, who has his own career shift to consider:
  

  For those who don’t know, aside from drawing Sam and Fuzzy comics for a living, I have also spent the last 8 years designing and illustrating a pair of children’s science magazines called KNOW and YES Mag. Well, I’m sad to say that a few days back, we received word from the company that owns the magazines that they were shutting them both down and letting us all go. Like, immediately.

  So, what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to what I’ve always said I’d do if this happened… go full-time cartoonist and focus entirely on my own stuff. [emphasis original]

  Anybody that reads Sam and Fuzzy regularly will probably suspect, as do I, that in a few years Logan will regard this involuntary⁹ change as one of the best things that ever happened to him, possibly even matching the day he first tasted Rice Krispies¹⁰.

• Finally (!), may I recommend to your attention this digression on creativity by David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) on the nature of creativity? I believe I may, with a special emphasis on these bits:
  

  Recently I made something. I thought some people might enjoy it. I posted it on the web. One of the comments I received was, “You have way too much spare time.”

  This is one of the worst things you can say to someone who shares their creativity. For starters, it’s wrong. It’s not merely wrong, it’s incredibly, blatantly wrong. It’s so wrong that it breaks the wrongness barrier, emerges into another universe, and is wrong there also. I wish I had too much spare time! Then I might actually achieve half the stuff I have ideas for and want to do. Creative people never have enough spare time.

  Thankfully, criticism does little to deter people who really want to make stuff for their own sake. Again, I have no solid statistics, but my experience makes me suspect that most creative people fall into this category. They make stuff not for the recognition, but because it’s in their nature to make stuff. They can’t not make stuff. They go around with their heads full of ideas, lamenting the fact that they don’t have nearly enough spare time to make all the cool things they can imagine. [emphasis original]

  I usually call out Morgan-Mar’s longer thoughts because they explore a piece of science or physics in a way I find particularly compelling, but I (to my detriment) forget sometimes that he also has a strong philosophical streak. Despite destroying the universes that one time, his drive to create takes my breath away. Bravo, sir.

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¹ I refer, naturally, to the fact that in a place so full of technology as The Court, Jones continues to use a Motorola RAZR. So very 2002, Jones.

² As of this writing, US$1.094 million, with 20 hours to go; he’s also posted a target for how much has to be raised to actually receive a million dollars (however temporarily) after the Kickstarter/Amazon cuts and assuming a 5% rejected credit cards rate: US$1.14million. At present growth rates, he’ll hit that in about six hours.

³ And rather handily, too, seeing as how PayPal rules basically prohibit that model.

⁴ Which already had their own print collection, Psychiatric Tales.

⁵ Look it up.

⁶ Webcomics and engineering, a select confraternity also inhabited by Kean Soo; if we ever touch the rings worn on the small fingers of our working hands, we gain absolutely nothing because engineers don’t friggin’ need superpowers to get shit done, we do it because it needs doing and that need is like crack to us.

⁷ My thoughts on her first book, We Are The Engineers, may be found here.

⁸ I did a couple years as employee #8 at a small tech firm, which is slightly less jarring as there’s more people to learn from before you have to fly on your own.

⁹ In the sense that its timing was imposed rather than chosen.

¹⁰ No kidding, dude eats Rice Krispies every day of his life. Also, I believe this is the first time that I’ve broken into double-digit footnotes.

You know, that comic book nod to female spinal structure, where both breasts and buttocks are simultaneously presented to the viewer? Over the weekend, Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Carly Monardo via their respective twitters, took that pose and used it to create the greatest female-empowering female heroes ever: Georgia O’Queefe, Queen Elizatits, and Susan B Assthony. Fan art quickly followed. What with 52 new comics launching from DC in the fall, there’s going to be a need for new characters and I cannot think of any that typifies cape comics better than these three.

• Hey, remember Recipe Comix at Saveur magazine? Much like Chris Hastings two weeks ago, Emily Horne has opted to make her contribution an adult beverage¹. By the way, this means that fully 50% of the first four installments of Recipe Comix are booze-related, a situation that I wholly approve of.
• Showing that his mission in life is to be far more patient than I ever could be with those that don’t² understand basic science, Darryl Cunningham is back with a comic that lays out the basic evidence for evolution. Young Earth Creationist and Intelligent Design aficionados, this is your wake-up call. Thanks to Scott McCloud for passing on the link.

  I’ll also note that Cunningham’s collection of comics on psychiatry (that would be the appropriately-named Psychiatric Tales) is available at many fine comic shops now; I was going to pick it up at Midtown last week, but they were sold out before I could get one. On balance, I’m going to call that a good thing.

• Let’s end on some good, old-fashioned commerce, shall we? My Evil Twin has opened pre-orders on his latest release, covering strips first published between 24 July 2005 and 16 August 2006. When he started his reprint publishing program, back in 2006, Tayler was reprinting strips from 2003. Now it’s five years later and he’s publishing strips from 2005. Granted, he went back as far as 2000 and has done more than one book a year since, but at this rate, it appears that he’ll never run out of material to print. That there is some kind of self-sustaining business genius, I tells ya.

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¹ Specifically, an adult beverage in the class known as the reviver, a class specifically designed for use the morning after a night of too many other adult beverages. I like to think that if you get in trouble with two many Hastings-style ginger-based cocktails, Horne is there to help you have Ideas.

² Or possible choose to refuse to understand basic science.

Meredith Gran, at the Pizza Island panel, in response to the question, “How will the studio defend itself in the zombie apocalypse?” — I’m gonna die.

I trust that puts all of the zombie nonsense to bed once and for all. What else can we learn from this year’s MoCCA Festival?

• It’s easy to spend a lot of money on good stuff. In the photo up there, one may find mini-comics by Box Brown (Everything Dies 4, 5, and 6), Sophie Goldstein (her work apart from Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell is simultaneously more moody and more lighthearted, with one mini dealing with the pitiful few survivors of a global holocaust, the other with a mildly disgruntled cat), Kel McDonald (partnering with Marie de France to do a take on a fairy tale of the sort that used to exist prior to Grimm and Disney prettying them up — secrets, betrayals most foul, and righteous vengeance involving a de-nosing) and the NERD Comics collective (on the theme of Darwin).

  One may also find books by Sylvan Migdal (Curvy 1 and 2), Collen AF Venable & Stephanie Yue (Guinea PI: Pet Shop Detective 3), and Evan Dahm (Order of Tales 3). One may additionally find prints from Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, along with a small piece of evidence that I am fated to die by TRUCK. That’s right, David Malki ! had an actual MACHINE OF DEATH into which I willingly placed my hand and received my fate.

• Nearly all of the above (as well as those without wares that I had not yet purchased) spoke of what’s coming up — Migdal’s new comic will feature a Victorian lady dealing with planet-destorying space opera; Malki ! spoke about the expected rush of audition tapes for the rapidly-approaching MoD live stage show; Dahm spoke about the scope and scale of his current storyline (Vattu will be larger than any Overside story yet seen), as did Latin Art-Throb Aaron Diaz (Dark Science will be longer than Hob, but not ridiculously so).

  Ota & Panagariya may be announcing a very interesting print in the future, so keep your eyes peeled for that. The newly-free Frank Gibson promised numerous amazing projects with Tiny Kitten Teeth (and life) partner Becky Dreistadt. Scott C is busily brainstorming new Showdowns every day, and Tracy White and I had nice talk about How I Made It To Eighteen.

• You meet the nicest people at these things; waiting in line for the Pizza Island panel, I met a charming young man named Zach who will shortly be launching a new webcomic that sounds intriguing, and may have a niche to itself. Think Bryant Paul Johnson’s now-wrapped Teaching Baby Paranoia, only actually true. Alternately, think documentary, but shorter and less investigatory than Darryl Cunningham‘s muckraking (and I use that word in the most complimentary sense).

All in all, quite a lot for one day. What else is going on in webcomics today?

• Long run: Achieved! Chris Daily’s Striptease (which bears the distinction of being the first webcomic whose creator I ever met, waaaay back at the first MoCCA Festival, speaking of closed circles) hit 1000 strips today. Ten and a half years (more or less), radically changed art styles, a cross-country move, a collaboration on a second strip (itself more than four years old at this point) and a marriage can’t keep the true-hearted webcomicker down. Well done, Chris.
• Return: Achieved! Karen Ellis’s long-hiatused Planet Karen (fewer than a half-dozen updates since November of 2009) popped back today, with the promise of maybe more strips in the future? PK had been one of my favorite autobio webcomics, and I do hope Ellis is able to find the time to keep up with it.
• Free Stuff: Achieved! Dave Kellett’s self-published Sheldon collection, Literature: Unsuccessfully Competing Against TV Since 1953 (which you may have heard got an Eisner nod last week), probably isn’t in as many hands as some of its competition for Best Humor Publication, so Kellett’s making it easy for Eisner voters to read. Got a data connection? Got 12 MB of free drive space? Voting in the Eisners? Then download a PDF of Literature here so that you can give it due consideration.

  I’m guessing that there’s no way for the download server to know who’s actually an Eisner voter and who isn’t, so Kellett’s essentially giving his book away for the next couple of weeks (there’s precedent, as when Ursula Vernon was nominated for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition back in 2006, Digger was subscription-unlocked to allow voters to examine her work). If you’re taking advantage of the freebie and like what you see, won’t you consider buying a copy? I’m sure Dave (and his young daughter, who likes things like food and shelter) would thank you.

It’s true. But much as I respect Mr Spiner’s work I am talking here about facts and figures and (especially) numbers. Specifically, the very intriguing set of data released by David Malki ! over at the Machine of Death blog (hands up those of you that think it should be called “Blog of Death”) regarding MoD and e-book channels.

As you may recall, the editors of MoD (Modditors?) had always planned to release the collection under a Creative Commons license, including as a free PDF, and they did so remarkably soon after the print edition was released. Such free distribution has not hurt the book’s sales (which are in a fourth printing, bringing the total number of physical copies by my estimate to somewhere north of 25,000); indeed, people were asking as the PDF released (for free) if they could voluntarily pay money for it. In addition to the basic single- and double-page spread PDFs, MoD has been available in a variety of e-book formats from a variety of vendors, including (as of yesterday) Apple’s iBooks.

But which is the best channel? I don’t have a book to release electronically, and I probably won’t have one in the forseeable future, so the question is entirely academic, but dang if it isn’t an interesting one. Malki ! et. al. had been told by e-book publishers and distributors (seriously, why do you need a distributor, which is a business model designed to move physical items from place to place, for e-books?) that these be treacherous waters:

“We reach thousands of ebook sales partners,” they said. “Even if you do a Kindle version yourself, that’s only one of thousands of sales channels.”

“Are there really thousands of ebook sales channels?” we responded. “Why have we never heard of any but about five?”

Ultimately, we decided that while there might be thousands of ebook sales channels, we only cared about a couple of them, and we could manage a couple of them on our own. We ended negotiations with ebook companies, released our PDF, and looked into selling ebooks of our own in the few sales channels that make up the majority of the market. [emphasis original]

But that still left the question of which channel is the best, and with numbers widely varying from different sources (and different points in time — Apple is a relatively recent addition to the game), any numbers are useful. And those numbers (for the month of January) show a clear winner:

• Kindle sales accounted for 84.5% of all ebook sales in January
• Nook sales accounted for 10.4% of all ebook sales in January
• The remaining 5% were mainly ePub sales through our site, although a few iBooks sales are recorded there too (the iBooks version only went live at the very end of January). [emphasis original]

The practical upshot being, if you’re going to release an e-book, the Kindle would seem to be your first priority. Hopefully, more numbers will be forthcoming in future months.

In other news, it appears that webcartoonist For Science! Darryl Cunningham (cf: here, here, here, and here) tweets that his work has garnered the attentions of NPR, which will be interviewing him. As he is British, Mr Cunningham may not have recognized the name of Linda Wertheimer, but as she does mostly fill-in hosting duties on NPR’s major general news programs, it’s likely to be on a fairly high-profile program. I’m betting Weekend All Things Considered. Countdown to Mr Cunningham being vilified by Fox News starts … now.

Almost more than one can keep up with today. Let’s dive in, shall we?

• From Tony Piro‘s twitterfeed, news that Calamities of Nature is one of the twelve finalists in the Washington Post’s “Riffy” Awards, webcomics division. One might note that two of the nominees, xkcd and Jesus & Mo are in the running for the overall Best Comic (Any Medium) award.
• Speaking of the Riffies, one might also note that one of the nominees is The Oatmeal, the status of which as “comic” or not formed a great deal of the discussion on the latest Webcomics Weekly. Yet another of the nominees (Scott Kurtz for PvP) has Opinions on this, and outs himself as a curmudgeon in both the podcast and yet another comment thread at The Daily Cartoonist. Even more remarkably, Kurtz and his nemesis, Ted Rall, find themselves in agreement towards the end of said comment thread! In other news, the end of the world has been moved forward from 2012 to next Thursday.
• Book alert — the first Girl Genius novelization (first reported about six months back), Agatha H[eterodyne]. and the Airship City has been in release since the first, but 12 January (which by amazing coincidence is Professora Kaja Foglio‘s birthday) is Girl Genius Day. If you intend to buy the book but haven’t yet, make your purchase that day and make a bit of a splash, hey? After all, there is precedent.
• How does Warren Ellis do it? Today marks the 120th 6-page update of FreakAngels, which makes it the last update to be a part of the fifth reprint collection (each of which consists of 24 updates of 6 pages), which is due for release on 8 February — a mere 32 days from today. That’s called not letting your audiences have to wait to give you money. Granted, Internet Jesus has the advantages of an established name and no backlog of stories to work down, but damn. That’s some organization right there.
• Darryl Cunningham, who did such a wonderful comic about Andrew Wakefield (whose falsified vaccine “research” almost certainly caused children to die of preventable diseases) back in May was well ahead of the curve — the British Medical Journal are reporting on Wakefield’s actions (they mince no words, calling it fraudulent) this week, and Wakefield is finally getting the attention he deserves. Too late for some of those kids, of course, and no matter how thoroughly he’s discredited he will still have those that believe him uncritically (no links, not giving them any traffic), but it’s good to know that investigative cartooning has a valued place. How valued? Cunningham tweeted that the BMJ wants to reprint his cartoon in the student version of their journal. Well done, Mr Cunningham.
• Family News — via webcomics überfan Michael Kinyon (seriously, I read five or six dozen webcomics regularly; he reads several times that), the news that the irregular postings and hiatuses over at Digital Pimp Online are done. Creator Kevin Gleason’s son, Alexander, has had multiple health issues and surgeries in his short life, and now he’s healthy. Congratulations to the entire Gleason family. Oh, and congrats as well to Greg and Liz Dean, who are expecting their first child. If Real Life is a bit sporadic over the next decade and a half, I hope you’ll understand.
• Finally, late-breaking news that Kate Beaton has been invited to Yale University for the purpose of a Master’s Tea Q&A with the The Yale Record. The fun kicks off at 4pm on Monday the 24th, at the Pierson Master’s House, 231 Park St on the campus of Yale.

Several interesting things in the past day or so.

• Firstly, happy stripperversary (that’s an anniversary for a strip, not an anniversary with strippers) to Jeph Jacques, seeing as how Questionable Content hit seven years yesterday. I’m sure that there’s nothing Jacques would rather have you do than look back to strip one and then comment on the art.¹
• Okay, so Jezebel has a bit of a viewpoint in its reporting of American Apparel‘s uh, colorful CEO, Dov Charney (cf: such Jezebel search tags as americanappalling). They still did some pretty solid-looking business-type reportage in their story on how AA may be facing bankruptcy, which leaves a number of t-shirt mongers with business decisions to make:

  Stock up on AA shirts against a possible interruption or discontinuation? Look for alternate vendors? Discontinue AA orders immediately and/or renegotiate billing terms, on account of bankruptcy means you might not get shirts you paid for? I won’t pretend to know what course of action might be best for anybody, but it’s absolutely time to decide what questions need asking.

• Contest! Beard and moustache cartooning contest! Hosted by Phil McAndrew of Feral Pizza!
• Darryl Cunningham has been mentioned on this page previously, in conjunction with his webcomics in support of rationality (specifically, as regards the false beliefs vaccines cause autism and homeopathy works better than placebos); we’re glad to again mention his comics work (courtesy of a link by Scott McCloud, who found it courtesy of link from The Spurge; we’re all a bit late to the comic itself, which dropped on the eve of SDCC), this time on the topic of yes, we did land on the moon, dammit.

  Just please, don’t make the mistake I did and read the comments; they start off nice and normal, then go off the rails into CrazyTowne — and not the good CrazyTowne, full of fun times and wooo, the bad CrazyTowne where you back away from everybody you meet slowly, without making eye contact.

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¹ Actually, there’s probably about 6000 things he’d rather have you do, including four or five that involve urethra weasels.

My wife’s back from a trip, so mine started looking up considerably when I picked her up at EWR.

• If you haven’t donated art to Carly Monardo’s Webcomics Auction for the Gulf Coast, I’d say you’re probably out of luck unless you get it to FedEx today. Deadline for submissions to be in Carly’s hands is day after tomorrow, but if you can manage it, you’ll be in some pretty impressive company — twenty-six creators by my count, including names like Beaton, Dreistadt, and Foglio. The bidding kicks off next Monday, 5 July.
• The more I read by Darryl Cunningham, the more I’m convinced I need to buy him a beer; he did the stellar bit of investigative cartooning (that is, representing the work of investigative journalists in cartoon form) on the history of the vicious lie linking autism and childhood vaccination.

  Cunningham is back with another blow for rationality, in the form of a 19 page strip on homeopathy, and how buying into its promise requires a complete rejection of evidence-based … I was going to say “medicine”, and then “science”, but really, the only appropriate word is “reality”. It’s a good ‘un.

• A couple of days ago, I read a plaintive tweet that worried that Nice Pete was “going to do the murders to Téodor” (can’t find it right now; add a comment if you know who wrote it), and given recent events, it was hard to dispute that such might be Nice Pete’s dark intent. Then again, an earlier creepy ride in Nice Pete’s murder van actually arrived at a super-secret ice cream shop, so maybe things aren’t so bad?

  But just how bad things could get wasn’t revealed until today — I can’t tell if Nice Pete is hallucinating the whole thing, or if he really is a thrall of his own shadow. Does this make him more or less of a sociopath? Regardless how much he and I may agree on the subject of Rachel Ray, I must say that he is lately proving himself not very Nice at all.

• Notability, ho. Friend o’ Fleen (and good-natured recipient of my Land of the Lost jokes) Rick Marshall took some time out from wrangling comics news at MTV’s Splash Page to guest-write the pop culture blog over at USA Today; lots of love for the webcomics packed into his column, including an inexplicable mention of your humble hack webcomics pseudo-journalist in the company of some giants of the medium (and he spelled my name correctly, which nobody ever does. He hearts me!).

For starters, let me point out the Birthday Boys of Webcomics, Rick Marshall¹ (today) and Aaron Diaz² (tomorrow). You would be hard pressed to find two guys more in love with comics, more devoted to finding good examples of same, or more dedicated to improving their own skills within their respective roles (reviewer/promoter, writer/illustrator/teacher). Happy birthday, guys, I owe each of you a beer.

Pretty things for you to see, some of which I’m recommending purely on the basis of their creators’ past work:

• Rebecca Clements did a 24 hour comic, and it’s available for your purchase. Come Inside My Body is a choose-your-own adventure tour to the insides of Clements³. Her whimsical, Seussian style is ideal for what might otherwise be an unending parade of horrors, since let’s face it — our insides are pretty awful, disgusting bags of glop. Bonus points if you can tell which pages were done during the onset of no-sleep madness.
• Also on the recommended sight-unseen list, Tyson Hesse has a Kickerstarter campaign up, to support print versions of his Boxer Hockey and Diesel projects. There’s lots of price points with small incremental dollar amounts, with tangible dead-tree product available down to the $15 level.

  Guys, if you’re not familiar with Hesse, what you need to know is that he has a command of color that’s mindblowing. Check out his posters if you don’t believe me. That one guy working alone can produce work this pretty (and that printing technology is advanced enough that it can be produced without the need for a monastery full of illuminators) is surely proof that we live in the future.

• Recommended sight-seen: I’ve long been a fan of Tyler Page’s Nothing Better — it just reads so honestly that you could almost think that you were reminiscing about your own experiences, not reading about people that are totally made up and not real. Page is now turning that eye for verisimilitude to somebody that is real and not made up — himself, in the just-released first chapter of a full graphic novel titled Raised on Ritalin.

  Part memoir, part exploration of ADD/ADHD and the medicines prescribed to treat it, it’s eventually going to be a full book, but for now you can get a taste of what’s to come. So far it’s unsparing, uncompromising, and promises to read like a combo platter of Tracy White’s How I Made It To Eighteen and the psychiatric/science comics of Daryl Cunningham.

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¹ Will, and Holly.

² Who may need a new nickname, seeing as how the only reason he doesn’t have a promised update today is that he had to run off a pack of four would-be muggers yesterday. The Latin Art-Throb sounds great, but what do you all think about The Punkbuster?

³ She already did the ladyparts previously, so don’t expect a guided tour this time around. KLARBLARG, indeed.

For those of you that don’t follow my Twitterfeed, the last 24 hours may be summed up thusly:

1. Modern travel schedules are a myth
2. I do not possess sufficient bodily insulation to survive the Minnesota winter
3. The cold has interrupted the food supply chain

It appears that if I do not wish to starve, I must hunt and kill one of the numerous ice weasels that are even now surrounding my current locale, probing for signs of weakness. Assuming I don’t survive this bout of nature, red in tooth and claw, please consider the following:

• Dorothy Gambrell has presented another in her occasional series of financial disclosures in graphical form. One may try to divine truths there, but fact is the sample size (one) means that any conclusions you draw are only partway supported by statistical relevance to the members of the sample population (Gambrell herself), and essentially without application to anybody else. For myself, I think that it approaches a geometric beauty all of its own even when divorced from the monetary meaning.
• Daryl Cunningham, having previously taken apart vaccine opponents, homeopathy proponents, and moon-landing deniers, decided that his inbox and comment threads weren’t filled with enough specious logic and invective (much of it featuring multiple correctly-spelled words) from those that feel differently than he does. Thus, he now tackles the intersection of the scientific, economic, and political, taking a gander at climate change. As always, it’s good comics.

  And as always, the early comments are brief, in aagreement with Cunningham and reasonable; the somewhat later comments are longer, and may contain respectful disagreements on certain points. This means we’re about to hit the point where the entirely unhinged and insane comments make an appearance, so be prepared.

• Eisner nominations are open. As in prior years, the categories are largely restricted to material that ships to bookstores, and Best Webcomic must take the form of:
  

  [L]ong-form stories published online in 2010; webcomics must have a unique domain name or be part
  of a larger comics community

  I’m of the opinion that webcomics shouldn’t have their own catch-all category like this. If (for instance) Karl Kerschl’s art on The Abominable Charles Christopher is as good as his art on Assassin’s Creed (and it is), it should be eligible in the same categories (no disrespect to Kerschl’s co-artist on AC, Cameron Stewart, but Stewart got the Eisner for Sin Titulo last year, so let’s use Kerschl for this example). Ain’t gonna happen this year, but I wonder — if one of the big publishers released a title only in digital form in 2011, what would the awards look like in 2012? Not shipping a comiXology purchase to the stores.