As we saw yesterday, other things are occurring in webcomics — Tavis Maiden is Kickstarting print volume 1 of Tenko King and more than halfway there; Wes Molebash has launched his latest strip about family, Molebashed¹ — but you’ll have to follow up on those by yourself. Because today is dedicated to continuing our dive into the cornucopia of graphic novel goodness that Gina Gagliano at :01 Books was kind enough on me. I speak, naturally, of review copies, and we look today at the book that has the greatest potential to change lives.

I know that we all talk about how a particular book (or record, or movie, or whatever) changed our lives, but Secret Coders (words by Gene Luen Yang and pictures by Mike Holmes) may make the cliche literally true. In order to explain why, I have to tell you about three times that my life was nudged into the direction that ultimately stuck.

Firstly, I am of an age such that I experienced the educational experiment known as The New Math; along with the approach to teaching arithmetic described by Professor Lehrer, I was taught set theory at the age of six: sets, intersections, unions, differences, subsets, supersets, and Venn diagrams². Nobody gave much thought to what a six year old would actually do with set theory, so it lay dormant in the back of my brain.

In early high school, my father and I soldered together our first computer, a Sinclair ZX-81, and in my spare time I picked up a copy of Larry Gonick’s sadly out of print 1982 edition of The Cartoon Guide to Computer Science. I learned about names like Babbage and Lovelace, Hollerith and Turing, Von Neumann and Zuse, and Mauchley and Boole and Hopper and especially Claude Shannon. The others were obsessed with making machines to compute, Shannon was obsessed with the communication and density of information³, and that seed nudged me in the direction of communications and information theory during my college career.

About the same time, I was watching my four year old niece play on the computer — she showed me how drawing the lines and using the symbols would make a little raccoon dance — and it dawned on me that she didn’t know how she was being trained to think logically. The symbols she was drawing were logic gates and the lines she was drawing were were signal pathways; she was getting her own version of the Venn diagrams that I’d had nearly two decades earlier, until she got bored with the exciting low-res RGB display and it would enter its own dormancy period in her brain. Some time later, I stared my present career teaching databases, and those Venn diagrams became even more important so that I could describe relational theory and the whole thing came full circle.

The lessons, taken together, are these: you can teach very sophisticated ideas to very young kids; words + pictures have a uniquely strong impact when it comes to teaching; making it into a game (instead of math class) makes it more likely to make the jump from dormant to obsession.

Which is why Secret Coders might read as a somewhat simplistic story of a school with mysterious secrets, outcast students determined to figure them out, and reasonably obvious puzzles woven into the text with a Can you figure it out? presentation style.

Except the first of those secrets? It’s how to do math in binary. And those puzzles? The solutions are computer programs, in Logo to be specific. The characters might be middle schoolers, but the book is aimed at kids eight and up, just about the exact age cohort that got Venn diagrams 40 years ago and dancing raccoons 30 years ago. The lessons are hidden in the games, but the outcome is children will think logically, solve problems by breaking them down, and incorporate concepts like sequencing and recursion.

Yang (a computer geek since the summer after fifth grade, according to the afterword) clearly had his own version of those three moments, because the three lessons that I learned over the course of 25 years are fairly jumping off the pages. And if Yang’s figured out how to set out the puzzles in a way that grade schoolers can follow, Holmes has created vibrant, engaging, easy-to-follow illustrations for those abstract ideas so that the kidlings won’t get lost.

The ability to not just use technology, but to be in control of it, will be of greater importance to the kids that read Secret Coders than it would have been to me at that age; I am part of the last generation where the path of being completely non-technological would not be an impediment, but today it’s a necessity. The world needs engineers and engineers need to learn how to approach problems with the tools available and bash their way to solutions. Learn a little Logo without realizing it? It’s a quick jump from there to other languages, and from there to a controller that moves a robot, or gathers up data, or keeps a rocket on path. In twenty, thirty years somebody that’s changing the world is going to remember Secret Coders (and its sequels, this is a series) and realize it was the moment that everything got nudged into a particular direction.

Secret Coders releases 29 September; that’s enough time to find a ROM of Rocky’s Boots for the budding programmer in your life.

Spam of the day:

You must be aware that you will find ways to Prevent Identity Theft when you are working wirelessly.

Like not working on the access point named OMG SUPER FREE WIFI HERE?

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¹ We at Fleen do not condone the bashing of moles, and are surprised that Molebash — a pastor! — would engage in such a barbaric practice. For shame, sir. For shame.

² Venn diagrams were the best thing of all because it let you do math by drawing with crayons. That habit never really left me, as I fell back in later years to graphical approximations in lieu of formulae to the consternation of every math teacher I ever had in school, but to the utter delight of my Electromagnetic Fields professor, Dr Frank Acker, who regarded approximation as the engineer’s birthright.

³ Also juggling, unicycling, and the construction of robots to juggle and/or unicycle. Also rocket frisbees. He’s basically my hero and the person that the 21st century most depends on that you’ve never heard of. That book fell apart from overuse fifteen years ago and I can still see every scribbly drawing of Shannon on his unicycle explain the concepts of signal, noise, and information.

Every time I read about something that Max Temkin does, I’m impressed; yesterday he may have set the bar impossibly high for future impressions, though.

Let me back up a little.

Temkin is one of the creators of Cards Against Humanity, the party game for horrible people. In his spare time, Temkin has been involved in things like the Twelve Days of Holiday Bullshit sampler pack of joy, one day of which involved Temkin and R Stevens wrangling two dozen webcomickers to produce a Funnies Section for the modern age¹. More recently, he teamed up with Kris Straub to bring PWNMEAL (the extreeeeme gaming oatmeal) to PAX East. What I’m saying is, Temkin is all about surprising people with unexpected things that will bring them joy.

Now you may recall that about three months ago, John Campbell hit a very bad place in life and engaged in behavior that caused a lot of concern for Campbell’s immediate safety². Specifically, Campbell announced publicly that unfulfilled Kickstarter pledges for Sad Picture For Children would never be fulfilled, and that inquiries would result in books being destroyed.

That’s not the sort of place that you bounce back from in twelve weeks or so, but Campbell has been showing signs of improvement, with a backers-only announcement at the end of April titled If you’d like a book you can have one. Most recently, Temkin³ appears to have successfully reached out to Campbell and … well, read it yourself:

An update from Max Temkin

Hello! My name is Max Temkin. I’m a designer from Chicago.

I am a great fan of John Campbell’s work and a backer of Sad Pictures for Children, and it’s been really hard for me to see this amazing book create so much trouble for both John and its backers.

Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to John about helping to close out this project, and I’ve agreed to take over the project and fulfill the remaining books to backers. On Monday, I picked up the remaining 100 books from John’s apartment, and I’m going to work with you to distribute them fairly to people who haven’t gotten their project rewards yet.

In just a moment, you’ll receive a backer-only update with a link to a form to fill out if you didn’t get your copy of Sad Pictures for Children. We’ll do this on the honor system; there are only 100 books left, so please only fill out the survey if you didn’t get yours.

To close out this project quickly, I’m going to pay out of pocket to deliver the remaining books. All I would ask of you in return is to continue to support John’s art in the future, and continue to take risks on Kickstarter to help make new art.

Thanks for your patience, and I look forward to getting the rest of these books out to you,

– Max

P.S. I will do my best to keep up with Kickstarter backer comments, but if you need to reach me quickly with any questions or comments, I am @MaxTemkin on Twitter, my email is max.temkin@gmail.com, you can text me at (312) 857-[removed to prevent spam harvesting]. [emphasis, links original]

I don’t know that you could ever say it often enough: Max Temkin is one of the good ones. Here’s hoping that recognizing the value in distributing the remaining books is the corner that Campbell needed to turn to get back to a good place, and that a trend of improving safety and stability (mental and physical) is the result.

In lighter news, Drive is back and Dave Kellett is taunting his readers for not picking up the “hiding in plain sight” secret in today’s update. Dammit, Dave — you have a critically-lauded movie and you get all sassy.

I have some ideas about this strip, but I don’t want to spoiler anything, so I’ve placed it below the cut, below the footnotes. Drivenauts, have at it.

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¹ Another involved giving $US100,000 to various small projects that affected the lives of more than 38,000 students across the country.

² And, this being the internet, more than a little shit-flinging and casual cruelty. You know who you were.

³ Who worked with Campbell on a comic for the aforementioned Twelve Days.

(more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, TCAF Turns Ten, as the press release I’ve just received informs me. Reliably one of the best showrunners each year, Chris Butcher has put together a stellar lineup for this year’s iteration (to be held 11 and 12 May), including headliners Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, Taiyo Matsumoto, Raina Telgemeier, Blutch, Gengoroh Tagame, Dash Shaw, Maurice Vellekoop¹, plus the crème de la crème of webcomics (pick ’em out from the list here, there’s too many for me to hunt ’em all down).

Quick shots:

• Kazu Kibuishi (Daisy Kutter, Copper, the Flight anthology, and a little thing called Amulet) announced yesterday that he’ll be one of the judges (along with some guy named “Pendleton”, which is surely not an actual name people give their kids) for this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition for schoolkids. The idea of art contests often brings up hard feelings in the independent arts, but the terms for the D4G contest seem pretty reasonable:
  

  11. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS: As between Google and the Entrant, the Entrant retains ownership of all intellectual and industrial property rights (including moral rights) in and to the Doodle (excluding Google’s rights in the Google logo/trademark). As a condition of entry, Entrant grants Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, transferable, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, publish, distribute, publicly perform, create a derivative work from, and publicly display the Doodle for any purpose, including display on the Google website, without any attribution or compensation to Entrant. Entries will not be returned. [boldface original]

  Google can use your Doodle, but it’s still yours, and I’ll note that the prizes are far more fabulous than for any art contest when I was in school. The top 50 winners get a trip to New York City and a Wacom digital tablet; places 2 through 5 get US$5000 scholarships, and the overall winner gets a Chromebook, a US$30,000 scholarship, plus a US$50,000 technology grant for their school².

• Courtesy of John Campbell, michaelkeaton.net for all your Michael Keaton needs, with special guest appearance by Mister Rogers.
• As promised, you can now make your own Ryan North.

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¹ Of whom, Matsumoto, Blutch, and Tagame are making North American debuts.

² If homeschooled, they get a US$5000 grant for home, and get to designate a local library or public school to receive the remaining US$45,000.

Faster your seatbelt, got some weird stuff for you today.

• Following up on yesterday #1: I was trying to avoid giving unnecessary weight to the issue, but my obliqueness confused some people, so for anybody wondering what the hell I was on about, read this, imagine the reaction from people who live to be angrily offended¹, and take it in the context of this. Thankfully this little blowup has had a relatively brief half-life.
• Following up on yesterday #2: Rich Stevens, as of this writing, is alive and triumphant over bacon in the battle of man vs delicious, cured meats. KC Green got a good portion of the ordeal on video for those that want to see the 32-slice battle in motion.
• Following up on yesterday #3: Not found in the NYCC session schedule (because it’s not a session), news that Anthony Clark, Chris Hastings, and a cardboard cutout of Ryan North, will have a major announcement at the ShiftyLook booth regarding a secret project. Before you ask, I already tried to obtain the cardboard cutout of Ryan for myself, and according to Hastings there are “plans” for it². Booth 3374, Thursday at 5:00pm, y’all.

New stuff:

• I’ve got my copy of the Bucko collection, do you? Maybe I can convince you with a peek at the extra-special bonus material! Namely, the full story of Queen Teri Hurricane Bluray-Devastatah d’Gresham, a thing of power and beauty, but tragically omitted from the online serial. Okay, yeah, you also get the promised three, er four-way, which (spoilers!) turns into a six-way. Dudes, it is so hot.
• Since we’ve previously established that Questionable Content is the locus of all webcomics crossovers and thus exists in all their realities, today’s revelation has … disturbing implications. Namely, that Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham is just another way of spelling Tommy Westphall and webcomics don’t exist. Sorry.
• Speaking of sorry, I’m not sure how many of you might have seen the latest update to the Order of the Stick Kickstarter, where we find out that Rich Burlew had a bad encounter between the tendons of his drawing hand and some broken glass. His wife reports that the surgeries went well and he’s expected to recover all function, but for the moment is pretty hepped up on goofballs, delaying both his strip and the Kickstarter rewards that he’s been producing. We at Fleen wish Burlew a speedy recovery and all the goofballs he needs to hepped up on in the meantime.
• Ordinarily, I’d be wishing a happy birthday to several people active in the [web]comics orbit today, including David Malki ! and K. Sekelsky, but I’m afraid that I can’t today. That’s because today marks the 100th anniversary of Chuck Jones, one of the most formative influences on who I am, and today he’s the only one I can wish a happy birthday despite the fact that he’s not around to hear them. Sorry, everybody else, today is Chuck’s day; feel free to insert a paraphrase of the Saint Crispin’s Day speech here if you like.

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¹ AKA, “Tumblr”.

² Dang.

At least half. Look, it’s got books in it, okay?

For instance, there’s a comic book that’s been making the twitterrounds with its Kickstarter the thing is, Tomorrow Jones looks like it’s got an interesting story hook, as Joey Softerworld pointed out:

The “updates” section on this comic kick-starter have some thoughtful posts about the depiction of women in the comic.

The section in question:

I was faced with the decision of how her universe was going to work. Would everyone, or at least most characters, also be less sexualized? I ultimately decided it would serve the story better if Tomorrow were unique amongst the heroes and heroines in her world. Her mother wears a revealing costume, most female heroes will. But Tomorrow doesn’t. Tomorrow is bucking tradition and trying to do things her own way. She will face pressure to conform and act like everyone else. That is going to be an active conflict in the series, but more so, it makes Tomorrow unique in her own story as well.

So, a strong (literally) female character that’s not a Strong Female Character — very laudable. But Tomorrow Jones is less than a week from closing, and (as of this writing) only at 31% of its (very modest) goal. It’s doing better than in March, when an extremely similar pitch closed unsuccessfully, and with less funding than the current attempt.

I can’t repeat this enough times — no matter how enticing the project sounds, unless it fulfills a need that nobody knew they needed before (there are numerous examples in the Design section of Kickstarter), the most clear indication of a successful fund-raise is going to be the built-in audience and credibility of the creator based on past work.

Brian Daniel seems like a perfectly capable creator, but for somebody to plunk down money on a perfectly capable creator that they don’t know, there needs to be more than a few art samples, a decent story description, and ten bucks burning a hole in their pocket. I’ll go so far as to say that the convenience that Kickstarter offers probably works against Mr Daniel here, as many, many people would fork over that ten bucks for a mini comic or sketch book of developmental work at a show, following a quick flip through something physical.

The end effect of operating at a distance from the creator, one that doesn’t have an existing audience, a pent-up demand, or a positive word of mouth from people who’ve actually seen the book (or all three), is that many perfectly worthy projects are going to be non-starters¹.

The only thing that might help an unknown in this situation is the recommendation of a trusted authority; for instance, I’ll wager a lot of people that haven’t heard of Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase would be willing to splash out for his new book because it carries the TopatoCo Seal of Approval². And that’s where we have the classic Catch-22: Daniel needs the money to finish the book so the has something to show you that will convince you (or convince me to convince you) to fund the book, which doesn’t exist yet. I hope he raises the money because I suspect Tomorrow Jones would be a decent comic book. If my suspicion is enough to convince you, the Kickstarter page is thataway.

Other things:

• Oh sweet merciful dog, yes: the beginning of a crowdsourced topic index of Webcomics Weekly episodes. Can’t wait to rediscover exactly where Brad Guigar’s rant on “champing at the bit” was. For reference, the good part of Laugh Track starts at about five minutes and goes until Scott promises to burn down our technology-based society.
• Danielle Corsetto gave you a gift today — feeling under the weather and not wanting to half-ass a pivotal point in her current storyline, she elected to use a guest strip that was previously submitted during an open call; it’s quite good, but that’s not the gift I was referring to. The gift is Corsetto dropped all her other banked guest strips on you at once. One hundred and ten of them to be precise, in an act of generosity and optimism on account of she hasn’t left herself any to offset future sick-times. That sound you hear is productivity plummeting across the world.
• There’s a new Recipe Comix update over at Saveur; this time, Jennifer Weber drops some potato dumplings on you. This looks to be the simplest way to fancy up potatoes since Anthony Clark’s potato wedges which for the record are crazy delicious.
• Advanced notice: Great Showdowns, book, October, forward by Neil Patrick Harris. Hell, yes.

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¹ Not to mention the fact that the reward structure for Tomorrow Jones goes up to US$150 without actually including a copy of the comic. Ten bucks gets you a signed physical copy of Poorcraft, fifteen for a copy of Daisy Kutter, and US$20 for Sad Pictures for Children, each of which are actual book books in the hundreds of pages. The Kickstarter free money machine never existed except in myth, and you aren’t getting that free money now.

² Oddly enough for a company that regularly deals with the Better Business Burro, there are no comics documenting the existence of a Seal of Approval up in TopatoCo World Domination Headquarters, and I for one think that’s a damn shame.

Today, many are creating a comic (simple is fine) to describe what you’ve been doing each hour of the day. Haven’t been reading them? Pick a webcomicker, check their twitterstream, there’s a good chance they’ve got the comics there. My favorites today have been from Anthony “Nedroid” Clark, even though (as of this writing) he’s only up to 1:00pm. Special notice should, as always, should be given to John Campbell, probably the most prolific practitioner of Hourly Comics, as he’s spent the majority of days in the months of January 2006-2012 drawing them.

• For your consideration: Rich Stevens is making plans:
  

  I guess it’s time to see if I can Kickstarter a humongous comprehensive ebook edition when I hit comic #3,000.

  That strip he mentioned, number 3000? Number 2992 went up today and he updates like friggin’ clockwork, so you can expect it on Monday, 13 February 2012. Mark your calendars, bet the farm, bet the kid’s insulin money — it’ll be there, and then we’ll see what a 3000-comic collection looks like. My guess: pixelicious¹!

• Speaking of countdowns to things happening on Monday the 13th: Reptilis Rex launches then. The mysterious protection-program participant known as “William Tallman” will be teaching us all about secrets of the lizard-men from the hollow earth. Looks educational.
• Finally, in today’s BurleWatch™, sometime in the past 10-12 hours, the Order of The Stick reprint drive crossed the US$343,416 mark, making it one of the Top Ten of All Time Kickstarter projects. As of this writing, it’s nearly ten thousand dollars further on (US$355,223 to be specific), and probably in the 8^th or better slot.

  Near as I can tell, the top fundraiser of all time is this (admittedly cool) design project from December of 2010, with a total of US$942,578 from more than 13,000 supporters. I’m not quite sure that Burlew can hit those kinds of numbers, but he is more than a third of the way on both money and supporter count in about a third of his allotted time, so I’m not counting anything out at this point.

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¹ Shut up, it is too a word.

Fortunately, it’s during those quiet days that something that might otherwise be overlooked is more easily noticed. Case in point: Dean Trippe; his work on Butterfly has been quiet of late, but it’s been more than offset by this efforts at Project Rooftop and various contributions to print comickry. But now he’s absolutely burning up the internet with details of his (sadly rejected) proposal for a book series at DC: Lois Lane, Girl Reporter:

Lois Lane, Girl Reporter follows the adventures of young Lois Lane. At eleven years old, Lois has discovered her calling: investigative journalism. She sets out to right wrongs and help out her friends. This series explores Lois’s character, reveals her surprising early influence on the future Man of Steel, and introduces fun new elements into this enduring character’s back story.

In each book, Lois will tackle a problem or mystery affecting the members of the community she finds herself in as she travels around the country. The investigations in this series will not be mystical or supernatural (though some characters may suspect such sources), but real world problems that Lois works to set right.

So far, so good, but what makes it absolutely genius is this little bit from the end of the proposed first book:

The story ends by another appearance by twelve year old Clark Kent, who helps the people of Smallville in secret, but never openly, due to his parents’ fears of his being discovered. But Clark reads Lois’s article reprinted in the Smallville Star, laying on his stomach on the living room rug. He looks over his shoulder, smiling at Martha and says, “Golly, that’s some girl, huh, Ma?” Here’s this girl fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way with no superpowers and no secret identity. Clark enrolls in his school’s journalism class the next day. That’s why Clark Kent is a reporter. Lois Lane is his hero. [emphasis added]

From my (admittedly sparse) reading of the history of Superman, for the first 30 years or so, Superman was a complete dick to Lois, and Lois was a scheming, jealous shrew trying to trick Superman into marriage. At some point they tried to make her hip, and it was only relatively recently that Lois was actually shown as any good at her job. But making her the inspiration for the future Superman? That’s a really nice twist there.

LL,GR is (or “was”, I suppose) pitched at the a female, tween audience, but it appears to have struck a nerve, in that everybody that’s read the pitch seems to be saying, Heck, I want to read that. I am a 43 year old dude, and I want to read it, because it sounds totally cool. Add to the fact that Trippe was collaborating with John Campbell (who knows a thing or two about getting to the emotional heart of things), and that there would be illustrations by P:R vet Daniel Krall (who has a style that reads like a cross between Carly Monardo, Chynna Clugston, and Jess Fink), and you have one of the great books that nobody is ever going to see (cf: Tintin Pantoja’s proposed take on Wonder Woman). But at least it got Kate Beaton sketching some 1950s-era Lois Lanes, so it’s not a complete wash.

Multiple disciplines suggest themselves in today’s stories; it’s like an Ig Nobel in miniature around here.

• Chemistry
  Back in my college days (ah, nerd school) we had a simple test to determine what items went in which department — things that fell down were Civil Engineering, things that moved around and made noise were Mechanical Engineering, things that made your hair stand on end were Electrical Engineering, and things that smelled funky were Chemistry¹.

  Years later, I found myself doing a week’s work at a manufacturing facility of a flavoring and fragrances company and I was struck by the near total absence of any scents whatsoever — like the magic of chemistry had sucked out all of the olfactory noise that would prevent testers from judging tastes and scents on an isolated, objective basis. I wonder if Kaja Foglio knows what I’m talking about.

  This isn’t some idle speculation — Professora Foglio likely has experienced the odor equivalent of a sensory-deprivation chamber because she’s recently wrapped up the development of ZOMG Smells (noted geeks perfumers) development of a line of Girl Genius perfumes. Whether you want to smell like a Jägermonster, a madboy Spark! I meant Spark!, or the aftermath of the Nuremberg Pudding Incident (not to be confused with the Noodle Incident), ZOMG Smells (and shortly, the Studio Foglio online store and con booth) have you covered.

  If anybody knows of another webcomic that’s inspired a line of perfume, let me know. Since we’ve had songs recorded by/about webcomic characters (cf: Deathmøle, Dinosaur Comics: The Opera), interactive animations (cf: MS Paint Adventures, Dinosaur Comics again), recipes inspired by webcomics (cf: Webcomics: What’s Cooking?) and now perfume, I guess the only sense left to tie in would be touch. How long before we see a line of Girls With Slingshots sex toys?

• Economics (it’s sort of a science)
  Speaking of Girls With Slingshots, one may note that Danielle Corsetto has a brand-new design to her website, complete with spankin’ new RSS feed, blog capability, twitterfeed, con schedule, alt text, and the works. If you didn’t read Corsetto’s intro to the new design (and kudos to Tyler Martin for his work — it looks great) you might be confused by the list of conventions for 2011 where she notes she’ll be at the Blind Ferrett booth. If you did read the posting, you may have noticed that GWS has joined up with Blind Ferret — hosting, storefront, merchandise fulfillment, book publishing, handy excuse to head to Montréal every few weeks for “business meetings” (and absolutely not to enjoy a fabulous city full of comickin’ people).

  This is a big deal for Corsetto, and possibly a bigger one for Blind Ferret, who are now branching out into the sort of webcomics services-for-hire that this page has called for (and international/binlingual in scope, too); between the seeing-impaired mustelids and the toxic sentient solanid, those top-tier webcomickers that need business services appear to be better supplied than ever. Exciting times.

• Temporal Mechanics (okay, it might be Star Trek science, but it’s at least sciencey, right?)
  Michael Payne wrote to point out something important is happening next Friday, besides the expected post-American Thanksgiving tryptophan coma: the Daily Grind Ironman Challenge will cross 1500 updates. There are still six of the original 56 contestants duking it out for the status of Last Webcomicker Standing and the fabulous prize of $1120. How long is that, really?

  Long enough that most of the Final Six are actually approaching 2000 to 3000 updates in their comics, since they were merely hopping into the contest with whatever comic was actually running at the time. Long enough for contestants like Dean Trippe, John Campbell, Brian Fukushima, and Natasha Allegri (to name but a few) to build careers since they got knocked out, careers so notable that it’s a surprise to look down the list and say, “Crap, they were in that contest five years ago?” Long enough that the contest had already seen its field winnowed by half before I started my hack webcomics pseduo-journalism.

  Heck, it’s even been long enough for Brad Guigar to grow a sweet moustache/chinbeard combo and get a pair of contacts (compare/contrast). So to all of the remaining Iron Men, we at Fleen say well done and geez, are you gonna make us wait another 1500 days to see who wins this thing. Just bow out together and split the money.

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¹ In large quantities, things that smelled funky qualified as Chemical Engineering.

Quick things!

• John Campbell had an art show. Here are pictures of the art show. Saddening!
• Dave Kellett, Keith Knight, and David Malki ! tried to spell words for charity. Here is the story of how famous and/or beautiful people are favored in our society. Shocking!
• TCAF 2011 applications now being accepted. Right-thinking people regard this as a good thing. Woo!
• The original may have been a hoax, but it’s still comics. Whiteboardery!
• Jeff Zugale did an analysis of “print” vs “web” business models for comics, and found that the “web” model has always been in use. It’s behind the subscription wall at Webcomics Dot Com which is a shame because this needs to be part of the broader conversation. Mayhap the newly vacationed Brad Guigar could be convinced to make this one a freebie?

Longer thing!

At the time I was writing yesterday’s update, I did not yet know what was waiting in my mailbox: a gifted copy of We Are The Engineers by Angela Melick. Considering that the book was announced as pre-order on the 11th and arrived from across an international border (and a weekend!) on the 16th, how could I not read it immediately?

A confession — since I met Ms Melick at NEWW last year, I’ve been a faithful reader of Wasted Talent, but I never read back far enough into the archives to cover her college years, when the inspired-by-life strip began (an aside: were this a movie, it would be touted as based on the incredible true story; since Melick is an engineer, it’s probably best described as slapped a linear approximation transform on what actually happened because crap on a stick, have you seen how messy the real data were?).

Turns out that I needn’t have felt guilty about it, as Melick has gone back to redraw the “best of” several hundred strips and distill down the period when she was still cartooning with improvised materials in margins (again, engineer) into her much cleaner and accomplished current style.

I have often remarked on how Melick (and Kean Soo, for that matter) and I share a bond of common experience. It doesn’t matter that it was different times, different countries, or different disciplines — engineers are an odd folk, and we get each other. Being part of an overworked, high-achieving minority within a much larger university was Melick’s experience, whereas I was part of a high-achieving, overworked, all-nerd school across town from a much larger (but entirely unrelated) university. She studied physical stuff, and I the more intangible (ECE511, I still remember you). UBC engineers built an artificial pond to throw people into, we had the natural variety. A decade and a half of technological and cultural change (not to mention a Y chromosome) separate her experiences from mine, and still — every page of WATE resonates like I was there alongside her.

But here’s the thing — much as engineers like to hold ourselves apart (it’s a comfort to us, having long ago realized we could have had a lot more fun and sex in college if we had picked easier majors), we really aren’t that much different from anybody else¹.

The experience of being a student engineer puts a certain sharp relief on certain aspects of college (our experiences were probably more math-intensive than most), but everybody remembers studying too long, working projects too hard, praying for a curve to kick in and rescue everything. Everybody remembers looking down on another major and wondering how they had it so easy, or a first job and wondering if you’d ever get the hang of things. Everybody had idiot traditions and the revered history of those that came before you.

Whatever your experience of working too hard with others sharing the same goal, you’ll find your memories coming back after reading WATE. It took Proust seven books and a cookie to provoke this kind of involuntary recall, and he didn’t even have one psychotic squirrel in there, so screw him; you won’t be able to write a senior thesis around WATE, but you’ll have a hell of a lot of fun reading it.
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¹ Nah, we totally are.