Long before I ever met Randy Milholland or his rampant, luxurious beard, I was talking about him and his work to others. In particular, I spent part of the reception at the Harvey Awards in 2004 (attached as it was in those days to the MoCCA Fest at the Puck Building) talking about Randy Milholland with Neil Gaiman, who had noted in his keynote address the import of his (that is, Beardy’s) jump to full-time comickin’¹. There is some secret thrill to be gained by talking with somebody you admire greatly, and finding out that you’re both fans of the same work.

In the years since, I’ve come to know Milholland reasonably well and to admire his work even more. All of which is to say, the going-pro event took place eight years ago yesterday, and I thought it worthy of note. So, noted.

There’s a lengthy piece on paying for music by David Lowery that’s been making the rounds for the past day or so. It’s very long, it’s very good, and I will not be excerpting it here because it deserves to be read in its entirety. Go do that now.

I’m pointing the three of you that hadn’t been linked to Lowery’s piece previously to it because I think it has something to say to the ongoing conversation about webcomics. On the one hand, piracy/ripping aren’t the issues for webcomics that they are for music, in that the model is predicated on giving things away and making money on the back end, the economics of which work better for webcomics (as an industry) than for music (again, as an industry). Naturally, there are contrary cases that one can find almost immediately, artists who have embraced the new economy with both hands and wrestled it into submission; we’re talking about the non-exceptional cases here, and Lowery makes a cogent argument about why those ways don’t necessarily work for the vast majority of musicians.

What I took away from Lowery’s piece wasn’t so much a parallel of the dangers (share sites for scanned comics, stripping away of attribution, even cases of outright thievery), or trying to work out an equivalence between “not paying for music” and “not buying from webcomickers”; it was more generational.

This page has made much of the generational shift in comics, between The Old Way and The New Way, but I think that struggle is pretty much done. Some people don’t (won’t/can’t) acknowledge that The Old Way ain’t coming back; the era of disintermediation is here, and attrition will take the hindmost. Lowery’s piece (and the posting that inspired it) really have me thinking about a reluctance to buy anything on the part of cohort that’s a half-generation behind many of the young creators I follow (and thus nearly a full generation behind me).

The direct creator:audience relationship has allowed a thousand artistic visions to bloom that otherwise would have been held back by gatekeepers, but now I wonder if we’ve at a pinnacle for that flowering, rather than the early days of a growth period. The kids that are just now getting onto the internet under their own identities (and Facebook’s trying to get them ever younger, with its efforts to sign up pre-teens) may represent a period of unparalleled demand coupled with an unparalleled willingness to pay for anything, endlessly mashing up and remixing what their forebears created and sharing it among themselves for reputation. New requires time (effort/compensation); reposting requires nothing.

It’s a more pessimistic way of thinking than I’ve had before, and I haven’t convinced myself as to how likely it is, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a bubble deflated before getting all that large. Any creators making it on their own now (or planning to) need to be putting serious planning into what their business will look like next year and the year after that — and only slightly less predicting what 2025, 2030, and beyond can (should/must) look like. The market for your creations in the coming decade won’t be so much what you can improvise (design/exploit), it’ll be what you force it to be.

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¹ I got Gaiman to autograph a program from his speech to Milholland, and he drew a quite nice sketch of a Middle Ages plague-doctor; Milholland has since returned the favor.

I’ve been wondering why it is that I hadn’t met Matthew Inman before Memorial Day weekend at the NCS shindig, then I started wondering why I was wondering. We hadn’t crossed paths because I don’t do that many conventions these days, and he does even less; most of the people I’ve met in this deeply weird community have been via personal introductions. The Oatmeal is on my casual follow list rather than priority follow list¹. That being said, he’s exactly the guy that you want to be talking with when you’re in a room full of people you don’t know and have not so much in common with, and he’s somebody that I’m going to genuinely look forward to seeing when our paths have cause to cross.

All of which is to say, I am resolved that should I ever feel the need to be a tremendous douchebag towards Matthew Inman², I am going to remember a few things:

• Follower counts count
• When faced with an unflattering portrayal of my mother, the last thing I should do is double down
• Streisand effect, Streisand effect, Streisand effect

Not that I am likely to feel the need to treat Inman with extremely rude, explain-to-me-how-this-is-not-extortion-please behavior, as I have managed a run of 1882 consecutive days of governing myself accordingly³ and don’t see that streak ending anytime soon. Still, it looks likely that at this rate, the bears and the cancers are going to be splitting northwards of US$250,000 (US$152,000 with thirteen days to go as of this writing) so I guess we should all thank the FunnyJunk [no link because seriously, screw those guys] people for deciding that Matthew Inman gave them a sad and that escalating their hurt feelings into legal threats was a good idea.

Speaking of legal threats, The Great Todd Goldman Contretemps of Aught-Seven⁴ stirred up not just a lot of commentary at this page, but also a lot of communications direct to me; nothing has matched it since, but the amount of requests and enquiries I’ve gotten from the latest Kickstarter pieces are getting close. Since it looks like I’m not going to be allowed to let Kickstarter fade into the background just yet, let’s mention some of the more notable ones:

• From commenter “Myth”, an argument that the US$10 and under tier represents “impulse buy” tendencies and attracts people who want to feel randomly good about backing things. In my experience, most people won’t kick a quarter into the tip jar of a talented busker on the street, so I’m not so sure about them donating ten bucks for random good feelings. I’ll concede the possibility, but there’s no way for either of us to assert definitively without a survey of users as to their motivations, and I have neither the data nor the time to manage that. As for the specific dollar figure cited, I’m going to fall back on a half-decade of working con booths and stand by US$20 being the quantum unit of money.
• From commenter Mark V, a wondering as to whether low-tier backers drive participation at higher tiers by means of momentum. I was mentally thinking Hey that sounds interesting, go do that to Mr V’s suggestion to do a daily sampling of a bunch of projects and look at the cross-correlation of the time series for the different tiers (time, people, I am not made of it!), but before such a churlish suggestion could escape my lips, he produced a quick analysis of success vs backer count, incorporating my 39 projects and another 20 that failed.

  Two things to note here: I really wanted to find some “near miss” projects, ones that came just shy of succeeding, but couldn’t come up with a set that wasn’t all outliers the last time I went looking (similarity was a big part of why I set an arbitrary floor of US$10,000 for my analysis), so good work by Mark finding a set that he considered valid. Even more interesting was a datum that jumped out at him:

  Surprisingly (?), there is a clean break between the funded and unfunded projects at 100 backers. Does anyone know of any unsuccessful comics Kickstarters with more than 100 backers?

  Damn good question, Mark. Anybody know of any? And please, before somebody that’s looking at Kickstarter as a kind of magic ATM skims this bit and takes away the wrong lesson, 100 backers is not a magic guarantor of success. The dependency goes the other way — if you’ve got the kind of project that would be a success, you’ve already amassed a pool of supporters that would hit triple digits. As always, there are contrary cases.

  Thanks to Mark V for seeing an investigatory direction that I hadn’t considered, and to everybody else with specific questions — the data are there waiting for you same as for me. The more people that dig around and look for answers, the greater chance of something meaningful getting unearthed.

• Alternately, you could wait a couple days and hear me and Richard Bliss compare notes; Howard “My Evil Twin” Tayler introduced me to Mr Bliss via email yesterday:
  

  Richard “The Game Whisperer” Bliss has been doing research on, and a podcast about Kickstarter since November of 2011, mostly focused on what it means in the board game space.

  So scheduling on that is getting worked out today, and I’ll let you know when you can listen. Honestly, when I stared my lines of enquiry, it was because I’m a numbers nerd and when I see patterns in them I have to dig around and see what I can find. I didn’t expect all of this interest from so many quarters. Oh, and as long as I’m on the topic of Howard Tayler, congrats on completing twelve years of updating Schlock Mercenary every damn day.

Hey, did you notice that Cameron Stewart brought back Sin Titulo? Because he did, and with no other projects competing for his time, it’s going up every day until it’s done. Read it again for the first time.

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¹ Inman’s in good company there — there’s some incredibly popular and successful comics that serve their audiences well, but they aren’t for me.

² Say, bears are facing an extinction-level threat and need a few bucks.

³ Seriously, Charles Carreon, Attorney-at-Law, when somebody calls your bluff on legal threats that we all know you were never going to act on, you cut your losses and quit with making the noise.

⁴ If I may be indulged for a moment, it’s probably my greatest point of pride with respect to this blog that we at Fleen did not remove any of our Todd Goldman coverage when “invited” to do so. Major publishing houses did, we did not.

Arrived in the mail today (I will spare you the story of how it was addressed¹), one copy of Dave Kellett’s newest collection, on the topic of that black water that some people like to drink. I can’t in good conscience offer a review of this book since I contributed to it; much like the Unshelved collection, Frequently Asked Questions, Coffee! It’s What’s For Dinner reprints my referee’s commentary from the Coffee Cup Lid Challenge of Holy Crap Four Years Ago?? Aught Seven.

Of course, my commentary doesn’t appear anywhere online, so if you want to see me use the phrase Proustian Madeleine² in print, you’ll have to buy one or the other (or both!) of the aforementioned books. And when you order those books, please be sure to point out to Messers Ambaum, Barnes, and Kellett that I don’t drink coffee, which means that I got a copy of each book in exchange for blathering about something I don’t know anything about³. Suckers!

• Noted in the LiveJournal of Ursula Vernon, a story of her art getting ripped off by the nephew of Joseph Lieberman.

  Really.

  Apparently, the now-stealthed site art4love.com [no link would be provided even if it hadn’t been taken down] scraped a bunch of images, ran ’em through a giclee printer, and sold them for upwards of $1000. I have attempted to get a comment from Mr Chad Love-Lieberman (yes, really), owner of the suddenly off-line site and supposed perpetrator behind this wholesale theft of art from multiple creators, via the toll-free number that ran on his site; the outgoing message identifies the line as belonging to love4art.com, and no response has been received to messages left.

  And because I on occasion resemble an actual journalist, I also called Senator Lieberman’s office⁴, asking if they had any comment on the situation; the press officer was out, a message was left, and any response from the Senator’s office will be run when received. Oh, and a note for any of you wishing to also contact the Senator’s office for comment: Senator Lieberman’s website locked my browser up good, and that was with Javascript turned off; I’d advise you call the Senate switchboard directly at +1 202 224 3121 and ask to be connected.

  Also, without any sarcasm at all, the personnel at the Senator’s office were polite, helpful, and professional; anybody that might interact with them, please do them the courtesy of behaving in a like manner. You should also do the same if calling Chad Love Lieberman’s toll-free number, which is +1 877 226 LUV4 (yes, really), because whoever answers the phone doesn’t deserve your scorn⁵.

• How about something more uplifting? :01 Books continues its march into curated webcomics hosting, with Faith Erin Hicks launching Friends With Boys with more than 30 pages back-dated to the start of July. It’s going to be a new update every weekday as Hicks tells the story of a girl entering high school after having been homeschooled her entire life; the collected story will be published by :01 next year. If FWB is anything like The War At Ellsmere, it’s gonna be terrific.

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¹ Except to say that it was not sent to the proper place, namely: Penthouse Suite, The Fleenplex.

² Somewhere, Eric Burns-White’s ears just pricked up and he doesn’t know why.

³ The astute among you will note that I usually offer up such ill-informed blathering for free.

⁴ This brings the list of interesting places I have contacted on behalf of this blog to one (1) sheriff’s department, one (1) elected official, and one (1) legal counsel for Todd Goldman.

⁵ Presuming that Love-Lieberman doesn’t answer his own phones, which seems a pretty safe bet.

Yesterday saw the announcement of not one, but two webcomics book collections that will debut at TCAF; the creators will be there, smiling for two days while undoubtedly selling out of their stash of readables, so I’d advise against waiting until end of day Sunday to make your purchases.

• First up: Chester 5000 XYV, the super-sexy, nearly wordless Victorian smutparty (and I mean that in the bestest way possible) from Jess Fink. A year and a half ago, it was announced that Top Shelf were picking up Chaz and friends, then a looong time went by before the release date got locked down. What wasn’t known before: it’s a hardcover! A shiny, shiny hardcover. Obligatory disclaimer: Chester contains numerous, clear, totally hot depictions of wang and lady-bits, frequently meeting each other to great, sweaty effect. It’s getting warm in here.
• Also coming out yesterday: the new Dr McNinja collection (originally slated for June release, then 18 May) is now set to drop in Toronto, and go on general sale on 11 May. Christopher Hastings is having a few site problems right now, so I can’t show you a picture from the bonus story (by Benito Cereno and Les McClaine) that Hastings has been waiting to show the world for an entire year. Let’s just say it features the entire McNinja clan driving heavily armed snowmobiles, with the exception of Doc’s sidekick, Gordito. Gordito, as always is riding his faithful ‘raptor, Yoshi — and Yoshi is driving a heavily armed snowmobile. The next twelve days cannot pass quickly enough.

Fleen congratulates Hastings and Fink¹, and encourages all attendees of TCAF to buy so many of their books. Buy them so that Fink and Hastings have to worry if they need to explain to US Customs why they’re carrying so much cash money into the country.

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¹ It is a rare treat to be able to write about Fink and not have to mention whichever lowlife is stealing one of her designs this week. The countdown to the Todd Goldman “accidental” release a Chesteresque design starts now.

It was a bit more than 24 hours ago when Jess Fink let us know what was going on:

Oh it’s cool you guys it’s Just that FUCKING FUCKWAD TODD GOLDMAN RIPPING ME OFF AGAIN http://tinyurl.com/5v5h7du

For those not familiar with Fink’s reaction, she has a history of getting her designs (particularly those she did for Threadless, which incidentally requires artists to own the designs they submit) getting ripped off, with one particular appropriator seemingly recurring at regular intervals:

David+Goliath Threadless rips http://tinyurl.com/5vev53j @ToddGoldman legacy of rips http://tinyurl.com/4586lfh new rip http://is.gd/7CUa7U

One may note that the middle link of the three in that last batch is a mirror of a site that reported on a prior iteration of art thievery (some four years back) and received a lawyerly communication as a result. Curiously, in conjunction with yet another accusation of Todd Goldman lifting Jess Fink’s work (in May of 2010), I attempted to communicate with those same lawyers for comment, but didn’t get a reply; it’s possible that they no longer represent Goldman. In any event, the C&Ds are flying in the other direction today:

Thanks for all the help and kind words yesterday everyone! I have contacted Lawyers and sent cease and desists and boy are my arms tired.

Which makes me wonder — how many times do we go through this? We have a serial offender who — depending on how charitable you’re feeling — either:

• Knowingly and purposely steals designs from a variety of creators and one in particular:
  

  @Taiomatic he [Goldman] asked me to work for him then ripped my designs instead, plus others. I think my complaints are legitimate. Blockin you! :D

, or:

• Hires designers who do the stealing and passing along, sometimes the same design more than once, and does not vet their work sufficiently.

I have my opinion on the matter, and invite you to draw your own. On top of that, persons discussing said incidents have been subjected to lawyering (passim) that could be as either a SLAPP or plain ol’ bullying (if you’re not). Again, depends on how forgiving a person you are.

Since it seems pointless to go through this again and again, it serves only to aggravate legitimate creators and enrich the appropriators (keep in mind that commercial operations that have bought stolen designs have already paid for them, and probably won’t get their money back if they have to stop selling), there has to be another way. Here is where I must draw upon the Hive Mind: If you know of a company that sells this kind of stuff (your Hot Topics, your Forever 21s, that sort of place), perhaps one of you knows (or knows somebody that knows) one of their buyers?

I want to talk to that person. I want to ask what these retail operations do to limit their own liability (in both the legal and dammit we can’t sell this stock we paid for senses) in dealing with their vendors. Do they require good behavior from their suppliers? Are they to the point where they’re sick of having to deal with these situations? At what point does it prove a good business decision to cease doing business with a vendor who has a history of bad behavior?

I just want to ask one of them these questions, because I’m betting that the buyers for these sorts of retailers are actually like, say, independent comics creators — a relatively small community that knows each other and talks. It may well be that they’ve never considered the moral, legal, and financial implications of their vendor choice, and just need to work out some best practices on their own.

And if that meant that mall operations across the country decided they weren’t going to do business with a repeat ripoff artiste, that would be just awful.

That would be trying to catch up everything at work the day after a snow day. Which is why I’m terribly behind on my reading (again), and will be dipping into the mailbag so as not to post nothing. If the Fimbulvetr continues, those of you with press releases will have a much better chance than usual to get them run.

• Item! Friend to words-with-pictures everywhere and curator of the Cartoon Art Museum Andrew Farago (aka Prince Consort to the Radness Queen of the Greater Bay Area) would like very much for you to come to an event next month:
  

  San Francisco, CA: The Cartoon Art Museum welcomes celebrated cartoonists Aaron Renier and Jason Shiga on Thursday, February 17, 2011 as Renier celebrates the release of his new book, The Unsinkable Walker Bean, published by First Second Books and Shiga presents his innovative graphic novel Meanwhile, published by Abrams ComicArts. Please join Renier and Shiga at 7:00pm for a discussion of their latest books, followed by a signing in the museum’s bookstore. Copies of The Unsinkable Walker Bean and Meanwhile will be available for purchase onsite. Please call 415.227.8666, ext. 310 to reserve a copy. The suggested donation for this event is $5.

  If you didn’t read Meanwhile, go find a copy and leaf through it — it’s a pick-your-path comic so complex that new computer software had to be constructed from base theory in order to track all of the story paths. And Walker Bean was one of the standout books that First Second sent me last year, one that I’d recommend to reader that’s … let’s say eight and up. Fabulous stuff.

• Item! Back in the Spring, when snow seemed far away, we spoke a bit about Flash interface comics (also about David Malki !‘s Big Paper conspiracy theory), and as such brought up Red Light Properties. Creator Dan Goldman has been hard at work, seeing as how he’s about to crank out his 250th update in just over a year; given that he has to construct interactive features into each update, that’s quite a accomplishment. If you haven’t read the story of a Miami real estate office run by a hallcinogen-boosted shaman, his broker ex-wife, and the“previously-haunted” homes that they flip, maybe you should.
• Item! Speaking of Mr Malki !, everybody should read this. Doesn’t matter if you’re working on a webcomic, or any kind of creative endeavour. Just read it.
• Item! Spy talk, cryptic remark, offhand reference to Eben07 by Eben Burgoon. Clancyesque, overblown description of clandestine meeting. Fake intelligence report on the wrap-up of the second chapter of the on-going series Operation: 3-Ring Bound. Mission instructions that Burgoon is expected to lie low for a two month hiatus to build up a buffer of comics and to obtain all possible information on his work in the meantime, perhaps by listening to the Full Disclosure podcast.

  Tip that known associate Lauren Monardo of Brainfood Comics (which succeeded with its Kickstart, woo!) is providing the variant cover to the new Eben07 book, now available for pre-order. Cut-off sentence evoking danger and disaster. Honestly, it all reads a bit like a semi-drunken pastiche of the far superior work of Department Head Rawlings¹.

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¹ REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS, EYES ONLY
Have planted rumor that previous leaked intelligence reports regarding subject: Burgoon were only meant as attempts at humor. Believe that this version of events will take root and become dominant. Continue operations as normal and initiate protocol omega.

First, go read this. Then come back and enjoy the candor of Jess Fink regarding art, jerks, and her fists.

Fleen thanks Ms Fink for her time and openness, and reiterates that Mr Goldman has been invited to respond via his representatives, but has not done so yet. Spread the word and do what you can, my minions.

“Not This Shit Again”

Per Jess Fink‘s Twitter last night:

Well Todd Goldman is ripping me off again

Which references this image [edit to add: the infringing image has been removed, presumably by the original poster], which may be compared against Ms Fink’s original (from a posting 18 months ago when this same image was ripped off by a designer that sold a shirt to Forever21; note to anybody that might want to steal from Jess in the future: pick another damn picture!).

Okay, time to govern myself accordingly, since the last time Mr Goldman was reported on in these pages, it took a month to clear up his dispute with Dave “Shmorky” Kelly, and resulted in both rude communications purportedly from Mr Goldman, and what I believe was a threatened SLAPP directed towards this site.

In the previous situation, Mr Goldman attributed the appropriation to “an artist working for his company” (compare and contrast to a 2004 interview where he gushed “I just keep coming up with ideas and ideas”). No public statement has been forthcoming (as of posting time) regarding whether or not Mr Goldman acknowledges the similarities or if it’s those darn employees that are responsible. I will note that’s an awfully big TODD signature on the print (only $600, marked down from $1200!).

We have questions in to Ms Fink, who will answer to whatever degree she believes does not compromise her own interests. We have also a request to Mr Goldman’s representatives for his comment/response. More on this as it develops.

• On a happier note, please take a look at Max Huffman’s Mocktopus Kickstarter O’ Doom. Woo, fun!

For those of you that don’t wake up to Morning Edition, there was a story this morning on the Center for Plain Language, their awards for good & bad writing, and one of their judges. In other words, suck it, Big Paper! David Malki ! has your number:

[G]ood, clear business communications to be rewarded with shiny trophies at a fancy ceremony; and horrible, confusing, misleading and/or opaque business communications to be savagely mocked by yours truly in as ruthless a manner as possible.

PS: Malki !’s one-time weekly publisher likes his latest book.

• In other news, all sites utilizing ComicPress as their CMS should see what Phil “Frumph” Hofer has to say about the current state of the theme. Short version: the current implementation of ComicPress has one more release in it (2.9.2), then its underlying architecture is going to change a bit. Versions 1.0 through 2.92 will now be known as ComicPress Legacy, and versions 3.0+ as ComicPress Premium. Legacy will remain free, but new features will not be developed by the ComicPress team (although others out there are welcome to do so).

  Other shoe (and you knew it would fall one day): Premium will not be free, and the ComicPress developer that you purchase it from will be responsible for supporting it. Frumph himself (who has been a tireless resource to the ComicPress user base, volunteering much time and effort) is stepping down as lead developer, just as ComicPress starts to roll in the bucks. He’ll continue to provide custom site designs and contract support, but the demands of his life require that he spend less unpaid time on ComicPress. But for all that he’s contributed so far, send him your thanks; he deserves it

I have some webcomics to point y’all towards today; I’ve been following each for a while, but wanted to let ’em build up a bit more (archive size, or chunks of plot, or something) before I talked about ’em. Consider each worth your time.

• Rich Barrett’s Nathan Sorry is (or perhaps was) an investment analyst who should have died in the World Trade Center; instead, he’s got a new identity and $20 million dollars that isn’t his which he didn’t mean to steal, not really (not that that will save him from the wrath of those it belongs to, I’d wager). He might think two months a small southern town are enough distance to complete his escape, but we know better, don’t we? Eventually, this one will be a graphic novel, about 250 pages or so.
• Paul Dwyer goes absurdist and amps up the mental conflict between art and story in I Shot Roy!, which is built on images from comic books of the 1940s (don’t worry, it’s all in the public domain). In terms of surreality, I’m gonna put this one up next to God™¹.
• Katarina Emgård adds to the profile of Swedish webcomickry with a sci-fi, hero-ish story called Kisenja. It’s got a Flash interface, so it may be a bit slow to read depending on your network and computer; it’s pretty, though, especially the design of the homepage. Six episodes so far, each with six to eight pages and new updates monthly (although Episode 1 is a comparative monster, with 26 pages).
• Also Flash-interfaced (more on that in a minute) is Red Light Properties from Dan Goldman (you may remember him from ACT-I-VATE); SF publisher TOR is actually providing hosting until the story is complete. Every Tuesday brings you eight more pages on a Miami realty firm that specializes in haunted homes.

  Now, about that Flash interface: this one is a bit heavyweight on the loading, but you have some options.You can either load the comic by adding one panel (or sometime, one word balloon) at a time, or a whole page; while the incremental approach is quick, I found it somewhat distracting — or maybe it reduced me as a reader to too passive of a role. Instead of finding my way around the page, I was being led. Loading one page at a time, on the other hand, was distractingly slow on my computer, and (I can’t help but think) isn’t quite how Goldman wants it to read. Either choice detracts only slightly from a weird, wonderful work.

• The precise opposite of Red Light Properties would have to be Don MacDonald’s Machiavelli; ol’ Niccolò’s name has become so famous that we mostly think we know his deal, but there’s a lot to that particular history that most people don’t know. Kate Beaton might try to get to the core of Machiavelli in six to ten panels, but MacDonald is in for the long haul, ustilizing a pen and ink to a beautiful, washed effect.
• Finally, I thought I’d already written about Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell, but it turns out I hadn’t. D’oh. Through a convoluted set of circumstances that were utterly not his fault, the title character has a karmic debt that has doomed him to eternal torment, unless he can be the nicest, best, most giving guy in the history of, uh, history. Given that he lives in a hipster-rich section of Brooklyn, works in financial aid counseling, and has some stoner angels crashing on his couch, the odds aren’t looking too good. Very funny.

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¹ Full title: Or, more fully, God™ © 2XX8 *** ***** ****** ******* Incorporated. All rights reserved. God and all related characters, titles, names and documents are trademarks of *** ***** ****** ******* Incorporated. No similarity between any of the names, characters, persons and/or institutions in this deity with those of any living or dead person or institutions is intended and any such similarity which may exist is purely coincidental.

On any other day, the newly-revealed poster for Scott Pilgrim vs The World (“An epic of epic epicness”) would get pride of place up top, but this isn’t any other day. This is the day (well, okay, last night) that John Keogh, after many teasers, has dropped the last Lucid TV on us, and it’s a masterpiece. Last one to leave Jim Belushi Memorial Hospitul, turn out the lights. And may I note that the flashing logo on the side of JBMH will always remind me of one of Chuck Jones’s better sight gags.

• In other news, I’ve been meaning to mention this for a couple days now — Jim Zubkavich has been responsible for a lot of projects with his UDON Entertainment studiomates, and as of a week ago, that includes a new mini-series that is a) licensed from b) a fighting video game series that c) I’ve never played. I still enjoyed the hell out of it, because as Chris Sims rightly notes, You can never have too many ninjas.
• Last up, a philosophical diversion. Anonymous (as you will see in a moment) writes:
  

  Hello Gary,

  So recently I’ve been trying to get under control the large (for me) amount of hits one would get when they google my name, for a couple of reasons, mostly being the fact that they were created during an adolescent time of my life (my adolescence) and would like them to be kind of, well, removed. With the internet being like an infinite attic that everyone can shuffle through I would like my presence to be something more conscious, if you know what I mean. Could you please take a few seconds out of your day and just delete my last name ([redacted] from [redacted]) from the post copied below? I would be most grateful!

  [link redacted]

  Thank you!
  -[redacted]

  This is actually a bit of a dilemma for me — while it would be trivially easy to remove one word from one post, we at Fleen have had a long history of not retroactively de-publishing content. No matter how stupid, abusive, or misinformed the content (and that’s from us; the comment threads can get downright evil), it stays up because it’s a record of what actually took place. Corrections have been logged, of course (very minor things like typos and bad punctuation without notice; more weighty things like rewordings or retractions via strikethrough), but no comment or posting has ever been taken down.

  There is one caveat to that last statement, actually. At the height of the Todd Goldman Shitstorm of Aught-Seven, with lawsuit threats a-flying, one poster contacted me with a request that a comment be deleted because he’d submitted it from work, and was afraid if the lawyerin’ got out of hand, his employer might terminate him. I did so, and he resubmitted the same comment from his home computer, so the net effect was zero (aside from the chill in the air that expressing an opinion can be dealt with so harshly).

  Anonymous’s request reminds me a lolt of the story of “Peter”, who legally changed his identity to get away from Google searches; I take it as a given that the words and works that we craft should be things we are willing to stand behind, but must we be tagged with associations forever? I also take it as a given that everybody — every. body. — was an idiot as a teenage for instance (you really can’t help it, what with the hormones and the brain not being all the way cooked). Anybody with a smidge of self-awareness looks back on those years and slowly shakes their head with a muttered comment thanking [insert thankable entity] that they aren’t like that anymore. Heck, I find the process of growing, changing, and maturing (kicking and screaming all the way) means that any random interval of the past, from last week to third grade, is likely to leave me wondering how I could be such a dick back then and I hope I’m not like that now. So the line about an adolescent time of my life rings true for me.

  Ultimately, the full identity of Anonymous isn’t part of the story — not like a more prominent figure would be. And while the no-depublishing rule was something I set in stone for myself when Fleen started in 2005, if we are to grow, change, and mature, then we must be willing to revisit our ironclad beliefs as situations and circumstances warrant. Request granted, and we’ll take such considerations under advisement in the future.