And, as much as it pains me to say it, it looks like Jerry was right. Not that Ryan Estrada can’t win an Eisner, mind you, just that he didn’t this time around and when your competition in the category is Adrian Tomine, that’s not such a hard loss¹.

If you want to watch the ceremony, it’s here, and if you want to just read down the list of winners, you can find that here.

Surprisingly absolutely zero people, Gene Luen Yang was the big winner, taking two Eisners for the collected edition of Superman Smashes The Klan (Best Publication For Kids (Ages 9-12), Best Adaptation From Another Medium), and one for Dragon Hoops (Best Publication For Teens (Ages 13-17)). Dragon Hoops was also nominated for Best Writer/Artist and Best Reality Based Work but you know what? Dude’s mantelpiece was crowded before last Friday night, no need to bounce the rubble.

Other web/indy comics folk that came away with spinny globes include Ben Passmore for Sports Is Hell (Best Single Issue), Jillian Tamaki for Our Little Kitchen (Best Publication for Early Readers (Up To Age 8)), Derf Backderf for Kent State: Four Dead In Ohio (Best Reality Based Work), Simon Hanselmann for Seeds And Stems (Best Graphic Album — Reprint) and also Crisis Zone (Best Webcomic).

Congratulations to all the winners, and if Fleen faves like Ryan North, Ngozi Ukazu, and Lily Williams didn’t come up winners, you just have to look at who they were competing against (Yang, Yang, and Yang, respectively).

Spam of the day:

I came across your site fleen.com and was wondering if you’d be interested in us promoting your blog posts / articles, over Twitter? If you aren’t interested, don’t reply, just throw this in the bin :-)

Done. That was easy.

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¹ And what the heck — they made up and are buds now.

Hey folks, a quick note before we get started. Something’s come up in my life that is going to be taking a lot of mental cycles for a while. I’m going to likely be a bit less verbose than normal until it gets worked out. Nothing bad, just … big. Thanks for your understanding.

• Comic-Con@Home, as Comic-Con@Home is kicking off, and also the annual Cartoon Art Museum fundraiser sketchathon. Hit the link to check out participating artists and decide who you want to get a sketch from. Funds benefit CAM.
• Via Ryan Estrada’s twitterfeed, news that Cartoon Crossroads Columbus is searching for a new executive director, a job admirably filled on an interim basis by Jerzy Drozd, who had to deal with the twin challenges of picking up from Tom Spurgeon’s untimely death, and a worldwide pandemic. Drozd did all that could be expected in those circumstances and more, and now a new, permanent ED will take over. Could be you; if it is, do The Spurge proud.

Spam of the day:

Dive into the ocean and your swimshorts suddenly change color! These swimshorts ara AMAZING!

The ocean? You mean where fish poop? No thank you.

I refer, of course, to this, this, this, and this. My only regret in life is that the reading referenced in the last link wasn’t recorded because I desperately want to see that in action.

But Ryan Estrada is nothing if not a magnificently generous human being, and he asked himself, perhaps I don’t need to have this conflict with Jerry. And thus:

Hey @fleenguy I taught Jerry how to make comics and we told one another that we both think the other is capable of winning an Eisner. We believe in each other now. It was a very touching moment. Jerry’s cool.

Doreen Green couldn’t have done it better, and we at Fleen welcome Jerry’s transformation from villain (or at least antihero) to friend (with the acknowledgment that future writers might retcon this). Glad I no longer need to have a nemesis. Go forth, Jerry, and make comics. Make so many, and so good, that you do win an Eisner some day, and hopefully you’ll remember Ryan Estrada’s name when you give your speech.

In other news, Diamond finally got some weeks-overdue books to my shop¹, so look for some reviews in the coming week. In fact, I’m going to get a head start on reading, so we’ll pick this up again on Monday. Have a good weekend, everybody!

Spam of the day:

Himalayan “Poop Protocol” Stretch that’s erasing years of back pain.

…

…

…

What in the actual fuck is wrong with you people?

_______________
¹ While not managing to get this week’s releases to me. I need to get Bubble so I can break out the LASER DONG pin!

There was a lot of it built up in the filters. Two brief items for you today:

• Readers of this page know that we at Fleen are big fans of Oh Joy, Sex Toy by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan; it’s by varying degrees educational, hot, informative, hot, funny, hot, an invaluable resource for people learning to be better partners and better human, and also super hot. My favorite part of OJST is all of it, but my favorite favorite part is the small gags that Moen and Nolan toss in almost at random.

  Case in point: throughout the going-on-a-decade history of OJST, Cartoon Erika and/or Cartoon Matt will show up to the side of a scene featuring Masturbateers to transition from the narrative part of a strip to the informative part. Nobody ever questions it (or the fact that CM and CE may not be regular human size, or in the weirdest possible locales) until today. That bit from today’s strip¹ quoted up above? How long has she been there?! left me giggling out loud. Well done, Matt and Erika. Well done.

• Readers of this page also know that Ryan Estrada is possibly the most multi-hyphenated creator in all of webcomics, and one of the things that we at Fleen admire most about him is his inescapable drive to make the world better. When he sees something wrong or stupid going on, he is not one to let that shit slide:
  

  Terrible new laws are banning too many teachers from teaching about race, sexuality, or queerness. Teachers have long had to teach the past to say things they cannot say about the future. Sadly, that has not changed.

  In the 80s, Hyun Sook and friends were banned from reading Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? because the Chun regime confused kids book author Bill Martin Jr. with socialist author Bill Martin.

  The Texas Board of Education did the exact same thing in 2010.

  History repeats.

  If any teachers want to say something to their class that they are not allowed to say, feel free to invite us to do a free virtual author visit and we’ll say it and then you can be like “MY WORD! Those uncouth authors! I had no idea they would say that!” We’ll cover for you.

  Estrada’s been willing to take on terrible people doing terrible things (including telling the story of one person targeted by terrible people at Oh Joy, Sex Toy) even in the face of a legal system that sides with terrible people, so he’s serious now:

  This was a joke until halfway through the tweet when I decided I would legit do it for any teachers who asked. These laws keeping teachers from teaching make me livid.

  Teachers looking to get around gag laws can contact Estrada via the email link at his website.

Spam of the day:

If you ever need Negative SEO to de-rank any site, you can hire us here

If I didn’t think you were full of shit, I certainly know of some MRA and white supremacy sites that could use some trashing.

_______________
¹ Which is on dirty talk, but like 90% of OJST is really about communicating with your partner. Erika and Matt are so good about wanting your communication skills to level up, I almost can’t stand it. They seriously deserve one of those MacArthur Fellowships for what they’re doing.

But on the other hand, I’m not saying I don’t have nemesis, either.

See, it all comes back to Ryan Estrada, comicker, language demystifier, raconteur, [radio] drama impressario, shamer of cheapskates, and oh yes, Eisner nominee in the inaugural year of the Best Graphic Memoir category (alongside wife Kim Hyun Sook and artist Ko Hyung-Ju) for Banned Book Club. It’s the last item we’re concerned with today.

Estrada is doing something you don’t always see — openly posting on the sosh meeds about who can vote in the Eisners and imploring folks who can to vote for Banned Book Club, and he’s doing it for the best reason of all:

Spite.

Or at least comeuppance:

Time’s running out to register to vote!
You may wonder why I’m so insistent.

Well, a middle schooler named Jerry told me I couldn’t win an Eisner.

It was on the zoom in front of everybody.

Now my whole 6th grade ESL class is following the Eisners to see if Jerry was right.[Fearful face emoji] [Face with open mouth and cold sweat emoji] [emphasis mine]

Oh you did not, JERRY. You did not tell a man who has been thrown from a train, wandered through a drug war, dragged his ass up Kilimanjaro, lit himself on fire twice¹, and slept on a public bench in a gosh-darned typhoon that he is incapable of anything.

Especially not when such a man is unfailingly generous to you, JERRY:

Jerry is actually the cool, smart kind kid in class so he’s not trying to be a jerk he just DOESN’T BELIEVE IN ME.

I stand by my assessment of Jerry and encourage everybody that is eligible to vote in the Eisners to vote for Banned Book Club, so that Jerry can get his head right. Do it for Ryan, Hyun Sook, and Hung-Ju. Do it because Banned Book Club truly deserves both the nomination and the award. Do it to prove a middle school kid wrong and in so doing, strike back at every Jerry that’s not believed in you when he should, as well as everybody in middle school who was so damn certain about something while being so damn wrong.

Do it for spite. Do it so that I, a grown man, do not need to have a nemesis that is in middle school².

If you make, publish, edit, or sell comics, or if you are an academic or librarian that works with comics, you are eligible to cast a ballot for the Eisners until 30 June.

Spam of the day:

Give with Crypto Currency? Why Yes! We are adding it!

This from what purports to be a Christian crowdfunding site, making the claim that they’re emailing me because of my past contributions to somebody raising money to assuage their hurt feelings that they can’t be utter shits towards everybody that isn’t their exact flavor of white supremacist evangelical without getting some mild rebuke for their actions. Or, as they have it, being persecuted. I am very tempted to respond with a hearty Hail, Satan! instead of sending them to the spamhole and reporting them for phishing.

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¹ So far.

² Correctly identified in an old Life In Hell strip as existing only to separate out kids in their maximally snotty years, both to protect the younger kids they would torment ceaselessly, and to spare them from the high schoolers doling out beatings they would so richly deserve. Matt Groening had your number in like 1987 when YOUR PARENTS were in middle school, JERRY.

It’s a good news, bad news — or more precisely, bad but narrowly escaped much worse news — kind of day. Let’s start with the good news first.

• The Abominable Charles Christopher Book 3 Kickstart is up, funded in less than an hour, and at the six hour mark is running more than 250%. It’s beautiful, it’s happening, and if there’s not a hardcover at the moment, if things go very well on the campaign¹, Karl Kerschl just might be able to swing it.

  Speaking for myself, I’d upgrade my sketch edition support tier (featuring three softcovers, original art in the latest) to a hardcover sketch edition to match my vol 1 and vol 2 in a heartbeat². We’ll look at predicted funding finish levels in the next day or so, but in the meantime, congratulations to Kerschl, it’s well-deserved; and congratulations to all of us who get to have such beautiful work on our shelves.

• Okay, bad but coulda been much worse news: mere hours after taking an Eisner nomination for Banned Book Club, Ryan Estrada mentioned he was losing his day job and try to make a go of this cartooning thing as his sole form of income. Today, he gave us the details and it is not pretty.

  I’m going to quote this pretty much in its entirety because there is a lesson for everybody in the story:

  I have to leave my library gig because they asked everyone to sign a new contract that says
  -they can demand we stay after work to make new teaching materials for them
  -we have to use the images they demand (and I know they have little regard for copyright)

  Okay, that first point is bad, because fuck you, pay me, that’s why. The second point is worse, as it opens up Estrada and his colleagues to liability. It gets worse:

  -They’d have eternal, exclusive ownership of anything we make and can use it in any way we want
  -We’d accept unlimited and eternal legal and financial responsibility for damages caused by any copyright infringement in the things they demand we make them to use however they please

  I believe that third item should read any way they want, not we want, but the real horrorshow is the fourth. Under no circumstances should anybody, ever, accept legal responsibility for work that you are directed to produce by your employer. But maybe they just don’t realize what a bad ask this is?

  As it turns out, nope:

  I obviously could not sign that, so my employment will end.

  It was two little lines in an otherwise boring and ordinary contract, and after asking questions I learned it was not hypothetical and they intended to make use of it.

  Read your contracts carefully, kids.

  So like, they could say “stay until 9 and make us a powerpoint about Frozen” and then use it in the curriculum at dozens of for-profit schools across the country for years, then when Disney sues make me pay all the damages and legal fees.

  I had to explain to them today that we can’t even make materials using the images in our textbooks, by reverse image searching and finding out how their subsidiary paid for them on shutterstock.

  Too many fellow teachers signed without realizing how ruinous it could be. [emphasis mine]

  So yeah, being without a job is bad, but not reading the contract, not realizing the importance of those two lines, signing and ending up on the hook down the line? Disaster. And anybody what asks you to sign that contract and doesn’t take out those lines when you point out how you can be held responsible for illegal acts ordered by your superiors?

  Run as far and as fast as you can.

  Normally, this is where I’d put links to the store of the creator in question, but if you look up and down Estrada’s site, almost everything is marked Read It Free!, which is not going to help him come October. So here are books that Estrada has sufficient financial interest in³ that buying a copy of them might actually benefit him directly: Banned Book Club; Student Ambassador; Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here.

  He doesn’t have a way to directly send him money, so maybe just post a lot on social media about how much you like his work (pictures of purchases would be helpful), give his agents something to work with.

  And whatever else you do, read your contracts carefully, kids, and also thank Estrada for sharing this object lesson that you might not end up in the coulda been much worse category yourself.

Spam of the day:

Many have the misconception of Buddhism being a religion. Buddhism is really more of a way of life whch can wired our brains positively and see changes in a different light.

Not according to Zach Weinersmith, it’s not.

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¹ Which they appear to be doing at the moment.

² My hardcovers of book 1 and book 2 featuring drawings of a panicky chipmunk and Moon Bear, respectively. Book 3? LUGA. Book 4? So many choices — deranged great horned owl and grandowlet? Andy the bumblebee? The domestic drama with the songbirds, the roleplaying critters, some of Sissi Skunk’s minions hawking Squirrel Chew? So. many. choices.

³ That is, he’s not one of many contributors in an anthology.

It’s comics awards season again, and as yet unanswered questions regarding their security and disclosure obligations aside, there’s quite a lot to be excited about with respect to the Eisner nominations this year. The list is simply rife with current, former, and adjacent-to webcomics folks. Let’s dig in:

• Best Single Issue is, to my mind, one of the big ones; it reflects a distillation of all the various crafts of comics into a relatively compact, standalone unit, and says that this is one of the best of the year. Ben Passmore, whose work is on the norms-challenging end of the spectrum, is nominated for Sports Is Hell
• Best Continuing Series has two different Chip Zdarsky titles up for consideration: Daredevil, and Stillwater, the latter of which is a co-creation with Ramón Pérez. Yes, I do believe Kukuburi will return one day. I should also note that Stan Sakai is nominated for Usagi Yojimbo, which remains the epitome of a single creator’s vision across the decades and epitomizes the spirit of webcomics if not the distribution medium. It’s also one of those titles — like Octopus Pie, Giant Days, or The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl to name three — that just gets better every single issue (or story arc) and if you don’t read it you damn well should.
• Best Publication For Early Readers (Up To Age 8) I wanted to note that RH Graphic, who launched under the worst possible circumstances last year, have garnered their first nomination for Donut Feed the Squirrels by Mika Song. They’ve got another a bit further down, and to see that level of quality right out of the gate? Honestly, I think it’s entirely in character for the team that Gina Gagliano put together. Welcome to the critical recognition tier, RH Graphic!
• Best Publication For Kids (Ages 9-12) I really enjoyed Go With The Flow (Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann) and Snapdragon (Kat Leyh) — both from :01 Books, who are a perennial powerhouse in this category — but must also note how very, very much I loved Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru’s Superman Smashes The Klan and damn if I wouldn’t be delighted if a book about an immigrant punching literal klansmen and Nazis in their stupid klansmen and Nazi faces didn’t take this one.

  Particularly in this time of Asian Americans being attacked to satisfy the petty hatreds of the small and vindictive. Put this book in the hands of every kid and adult that loves comics because gods damn Yang just gets Superman, and Gurihiru draws Lois Lane better than she’s ever been drawn before.

• Best Publication For Teens (Ages 13-17) I thought that the second Check, Please! collection (the invaluable Ngozi Ukazu) maybe didn’t have to be set in an age-specific category and probably should be in one of the best book categories, but you know what? They’re kind of chaotic in their requirements, and designating this a teens title means more people will put a story of acceptance in the hands of young folk, so that’s all right.

  It’s going to be a tough decision for the voters, though, because Gene Yang is nominated again for Dragon Hoops, and it’s a spectacularly good book. Plus you have Displacement by Kiku Hughes and A Map To The Sun by Sloane Leong … all of which are from :01 Books. When you have four of the six nominees in a category, you’re doing something right.

• Best Reality Based Work features Dragon Hoops again, and as the jury noted that there were a large number of memoirs in publication last year, they added a new category to contain them. Dragon Hoops could have gone there, but it was a genre-stretching work that played with the nature of comics and (auto-)biography, so probably just as well that they didn’t.

  But you know who did get nominated in the inaugural year of Best Graphic Memoir? Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Ko Hyung-Ju for Banned Book Club, which I believe is the first nomination of completely original work for Iron Circus. It’s almost like Spike Trotman’s got a good eye for great stories.

• Best Adaptation From Another Medium Yang takes his second nomination for Superman Smashes The Klan, as the story was originally told as a radio serial back in the 1940s. He’s joined by Ryan North and Albert Monteys for their adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five which I still haven’t read because Diamond is still not filling new orders, even as it gets foreign language releases around the globe. Get it together, Diamond!
• Best Writer includes another nod for Zdarsky for his work on Stillwater, as well as Matt Fraction for both the conclusion of Sex Criminals and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen (which was wonderfully weird and funny).
• Best Writer/Artist Remember that I said RH Graphic had another nomination this year? Trung Le Nguyen is here (for The Magic Fish ) alongside such prominent names as Junji Ito, Pascal Jousselin, Craig Thompson, Adrian Tomine, and Gene Luen Yang for Dragon Hoops. That’s five nominations for two books if I’ve got my sums right, which seems as dominant a performance as I can ever recall for one person at the Eisners in one year.
• Best Cover Artist has a second nod for Ramón Pérez for Stillwater, which is nice.
• Best Academic/Scholarly Work threw me a surprise, as it would be hard to find a book more in tune with the sensibilities of this page than Webcomics by Sean Kleefeld. Sean’s a really smart guy, and if I can ever get my hands on a copy — the academic titles don’t get anywhere near as wide a print run as the entertainment titles — I suspect I’m going to love it. We’ve been way overdue for a good scholarly look at webcomics, particularly since the first one was a) too early, and b) less scholarly and more anecdotal.
• Best Digital Comic and Best Webcomic remain, as always, mysterious to me. It is worth noting that half of the nominations in the former are from Europe Comics and list translators in the credits; looking beyond North America is an encouraging trend and I hope it continues. In the latter, I’ll note that four of the six nominations are at aggregator sites (Webtoon Factory, Tapas, Webtoon) or Instagram.

  So I wanted to call out Alec Longstreth’s Isle Of Elsi and Steve Conley’s The Middle Age for maintaining the webcomics tradition of having your own damn website, if it’s just a domain that redirects elsewhere, because … well, lots of reasons. Mostly so that the work stands on its own rather than because an eyeballs-maximizing site chooses to elevate it, but also so that if things go wrong you can get your work the hell away from a bad partner and keep it running in a way you control. To me, that’s the central ethos of webomics.

Now then, after last year’s (still insufficiently explained) voting fiasco, there’s a new, two-step process: prospective voters¹ apply for ballot access at https://form.jotform.com/211246268258054; those approved will receive an invitation to fill out their ballot by 30 June. Results will be announced online in conjunction with Comic-Con@Home 2021.

I do not have at this time reason to either trust or distrust the process, so my recommendation last year that voting was not secure does not hold for this year, but I suppose we’ll all find out together if they manage to screw the pooch again.

Spam of the day:

In fact, this oil is the reason Croatian women look 20 years younger than they actually are: And today, you can discover how to remove 18 years of wrinkles without spending a fortune.

That is … oddly specific. Are Croatian women generally so reputed?

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¹ Defined as comics professionals: creators, publishers, retailers, and educator/academics or librarians focusing on comics.

Received in the Fleen mailbag from reader Alexander Rogers yesterday:

I had a webcomic question that I figured you would be well placed to answer. I recently read about an upcoming Jennifer Lopez / Owen Wilson movie called Marry Me, which is based on a webcomic by Bobby Crosby. (Apparently this webcomic started in 2005.) Universal Pictures has announced a release date of February 2022, and principal photography was all done in 2019.

Assuming this picture gets released, and assuming the Nimona film is (very sadly) never brought to light, would this mean that Marry Me would be the first film to be based on a webcomic?

Excellent question, Alexander! Couple of things to get out of the way before we tackle the substance of your query. First, we should note that, prolific as he his, Bobby Crosby is not the only person involved in the creation of Marry Me; due credit should be given as well to the the artist, Remy “Eisu” Mokhtar.

Secondly, the film adaptation of Nimona — which was as close to complete as you can get — was killed by those rat bastard cowards at Disney earlier this year and has as much chance of ever seeing daylight as Let’s Get Francis¹.

Thirdly, and for our purposes here today most importantly, we have to broaden our viewpoints beyond equating webcomics with [North] American (or possibly English-language) webcomics, as the two are not equivalent.

In this respect, we at Fleen are lucky to have a pair of resources to bring us wider perspectives²: Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin and the invaluable Ryan Estrada. The former could tell of comics creators who’ve worked in the milieu of BD web alongside print, and have seen work adapted to film: Joséphine, The Rabbi’s Cat, The Big Bad Fox³, and numerous others. But maybe not what you were looking for, since they aren’t directly taken from webcomics.

So let us look to the other side of the globe, and South Korea; webcomics are a much, much bigger deal there than we can comprehend, occupying a niche convergent with manhwa and fully equivalent to the manga industry in Japan. There are so many webcomics that hit widespread popular consciousness off the major aggregators that movies are inevitable; in fact, Estrada gave us a list of 13 of them more than seven years ago; heck, Estrada tells us right at the beginning that Kangfull is a Korean webcomic artist who has had just as many film adaptations of his work as JK Rowling.

Fleen doesn’t have correspondents in Japan or China, and doubtless there are webtoon aggregators in each country sending comics to movies, but I was able to find two after a short search: Nigakute Amai from Japan, and Go Away, Mr Tumor from China (the latter chosen as China’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film consideration at the 2015 Oscars).

But let’s restrict ourselves to what I think the intended scope of your question was, given that you wrote to an English-language site in the US: will Marry Me be the first adaptation of an English-language webcomic making it to theatrical release? There’s Polar, based on the webcomic of the same name, but it was released by Netflix via streaming. So despite starring Mads Mikkelsen, I’m going to disqualify it.

But the answer is still no, because the movie of We Bare Bears was released as a simulcast to North American theaters a couple of months before it released to TV. The movie, naturally, was adapted from the TV show, which was in turn based on creator Daniel Chong’s original webcomic, The Three Bare Bears. Not a direct leap from webcomics to the movie screen, but I think the lineage is undeniable. Crosby & Mokhtar are following on a path blazed by Chong.

Spam of the day:

I handle influencer relations for LeggingsHut. Great to meet you! I stumbled across your account and thought your content would be perfect for us.

and

Our team operates an extremely popular bra and intimate wear blog. We’ve had a few of our avid readers mention your site recently, so I took a look and I’m happy to say that I was really impressed! I’m interested in a possible article exchange between both of our sites as I am sure it will strongly benefit our sites in terms traffic.

I’m not sure which of these two, independently-sent spams is more implausible and/or desperate. My guess is that you don’t even know who Cora Harrington is, you fakers.

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¹ IMDB doesn’t even have a listing for Nimona anymore; it existed as late as two weeks after Blue Sky was axed, but has since been memory-holed.

² And even so, we could use more. Live in a part of the world with webcomics and nobody talking about them? Get in touch!

³ From the work of, respectively, Pénélope Bagieu, Joann Sfar, and Bejamin Renner.

⁴ I was able to find one Japanese webtoon-format manga adapted to live action: , and I’ll wager there are others.

Our deepest sympathies to Ryan Estrada and his family; this isn’t a singular moment of loss, but rather the start of a long term period of coping and compromise and so very much pain, and none of it had to happen. I know that the howler monkeys who think that they are the only people in the world that matter will be screaming about how this isn’t COVID related; if it happens in your vicinity, you have my permission to punch them in the throat until they can’t spew their stupidity any longer.

You know people like that, too. Maybe they aren’t screaming about conspiracies and RFID and 5G, but they think that it’s overblown, it’s not that bad, that they don’t need to wear a mask and it’ll be okay.

As you know, I’m a volunteer EMT. More, I was recently elected Chief of my agency. I’m responsible for the lives and well-being of the approximately 15000 people in my town (and the quarter million in the surrounding area we serve by mutual aid), but especially the two dozen people I have staffing ambulances.

There’s a few old guys like me, one dude that joined us right out of high school and is still riding despite being four months into his internal medicine residency, and a bunch of relative newbies, people on for less than two years, who have STEPPED THE FUCK UP at a time when they could be doing anything else at less risk to themselves.

A couple of moms and dads, mostly college students. A quarter of them are literal kids — we have a half dozen high school students riding as cadets and we try to keep them off COVID calls, but they’re all presumed COVID calls at this point. It’s not enough that every aspect of their lives has been upended, they’re putting on N95s and going into enclosed spaces with sick people. Anybody that complains about COVID fatigue because they haven’t been able to do exactly as they please for up to a month at a time should try doing CPR for 20 minutes with full PPE on a hot summer’s day¹.

So those people that you know, the ones that think it’s not that big a deal? I need you to do something, fam. I need you to contact them — at a distance –and tell them that this is a crisis point in your relationship. Explain that they are actively trying to kill my two dozen crew members and everybody else in the world. People with COVID, and people without COVID who can’t get the care they need because there’s no room for them, and not enough staff to take care of them.

Tell them they need to

Wear

MASK

or they’re dead to you, because they are trying to harm you and everybody you love with their solipsistic bullshit. Want to be a person that can talk to me, ever? You can’t be such a narcissist that you’re willing to kill others without a care in the world when you could avoid it by doing almost nothing. This is murderously malignant behavior, and none of us are getting out of this pandemic untouched by tragedy. There should be no room in your life for people who are choosing to make it worse.

And when this is all done — and it will be, someday — remember who they were. Because if the greatest public health crisis in a century wasn’t enough to make them do the absolute bare minimum, they’ll do the same to you again, again, and again over matters great and small. I don’t get to choose the patients I serve, so if one of them calls me for help, I’ll provide it. But godsdamn if I don’t wish sometimes I could tell them No, you’re not worth the risk to my people and something about petards.

Stay safe, people. And keep everybody else safe, too.

No spammers today.

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¹ That patient was pronounced in the ED, but at least we had a bed to put him on and there was staff sufficient to work the code. That was August. If you have a heart attack this weekend when I’ve got my 24 hour shift, I can’t guarantee you’ll get a bed or a full staff because both of those are in short supply these days.

And, in case you’re new here, that’s an entirely positive development.

• You gotta hand it to Ryan Estrada, things just sort of happen to him. It’s an open question if he naturally intuits situations where things are more likely to happen, or if (as I’ve always maintained) he is some form of natural chaos generator function, causing weird situations to coalesce about him in places where they ordinarily would not occur.

  As far as the Estradian Weirdness scale goes, hiking in the woods in Korea and coming across an art installation/comic book you can wander inside is pretty low scoring, but neat nonetheless:

  In just 9 pages, it tells of the war, the refugees building the city, the locals thriving by embracing nature, and gentrification taking that away.

  But this story takes @scottmccloud‘s lessons about the real story happening in the space between panels to the extreme.

  Because here, the space between panels is an actual hike through the very nature that brings the characters joy, with glimpses through the trees of the very village it takes place in.

  I have never seen anything like it and I am so happy to have stumbled upon it.

  In case you don’t have your copy of Understanding Comics handy, it’s chapter 3 (Blood In The Gutter, p60 in my 1994 Harper reprinting of the Kitchen Sink edition) where McCloud talks about how much story happens in the gutters, and the various kinds of transitions that take you from one panel to the next¹. It’s a terrifyingly creative way to tell the story of a place, and I’m glad that the artist was found by Estrada’s wife, Kim Hyung Sook, and that she could be told of how much enjoyment her work brought to Estrada’s followers.

• While I’m not sure if Estrada is a catalyst for weirdness or merely wanders into it at a greater than normal rate, I have no such illusions regarding Shing Yin Khor; they don’t wait to find or provoke weirdness, they seek it out and when necessary, create it. Consider the multiple road trips in search of muffler men, or the dragging of the Center For Otherworld Science into our reality via a multimedia AR mystery, or perhaps just deciding to give the 12 foot Home Depot skeleton they brought home a proper axe for Halloween. For Khor, that’s just a random Wednesday.

  So I am very excited that Khor has decided to team up with game designer Jeeyon Shim to create … let’s just quote the whole thing:

  [Sparkles] ANNOUNCEMENT! [Sparkles]²

  Shing Yin Khor (@sawdustbear) and I are co-designing The Field Guide To Memory, an interactive journaling game about legacy, wonder, and cryptids. Launching on KS this winter!

  Keep an eye on the hashtag #FieldGuideToMemory and follow our accounts for more!

  The weirdness creator cannot be stopped by pandemic or quarantine, they only become stronger. But is it, as I implied in the title, a thing that stretches the definition of comics, or something merely wildly creative and somewhat comics-adjacent? Given that the story panels will in some cases be 3D objects and the gutters human emotion and experience, I’m gonna call it comics. If it’s not, maybe we need to expand the definition.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Given Estrada’s description, I’d say it was mostly Type 4, scene-to-scene transitions. Which, given McCloud’s analysis, is more likely to occur in Asian comics than Western comics.

² That’s how it showed up in my copy of the tweet’s text. Okay, I added the brackets, but it really did say Sparkles to represent the emoji.