The Ignatz Awards are maybe the most democratic of all the major comics awards — if you attend SPX, you get a ballot. At least, if you attend on Saturday, because they tally the votes through the day and the bricks are given out Saturday night, but you get the idea. They also, traditionally, have a very good jury, who provide a very good slate of nominees. This year’s nominees have just been announced, and it’s a cornucopia of quality.

As readers of this page know, I am a major fan and promoter of the work of Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and her work on Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me could have come from a 20 year veteran of comics, rather than somebody working on their first book who’s still in the first half of their 20s. It’s no surprise that Valero-O’Connell was nominated for Outstanding Artist, Oustanding Graphic Novel, and Oustanding Story, the later two categories being co-nominations with writer Mariko Tamaki. I’m thrilled everytime I am reminded that so many people loved this book as much as I did.

The other multiple nominee that caught my eye, and of which I am a tremendous fan, is The Nib; Matt Bors’s marvelously eclectic endeavour has a history with SPX, debuting their hardcover collection there a few years back. The Nib was nominated as Oustanding Series (for the print magazine), and two issues (Family, and Death) were separately nominated for Oustanding Anthology. Well done Bors, and the entire group of editors and contributors.

But those are not the only deserving nominees; let’s take a look at who we at Fleen will be rooting for.

• Outstanding Artist: In addition to Valero-O’Connell, you’ve got Lucy Knisely for Kid Gloves, which I also loved. I’m not familiar with Koren Shadmi on Highwayman, Sloane Leong’s Prism Stalker, or Ezra Clayton Daniels on Upgrade Soul.
• Outstanding Collection: Love Letters To Jane’s World by Paige Braddock, Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak, Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet, Leaving Richard’s Valley by Michael DeForge, and This Woman’s Work by Julie Delporte. I have no clear preference, but all these creators are skilled and worthy of the win.
• Outstanding Anthology: In addition to the two issues of The Nib, you have Electrum (edited by Der-shing Helmer), Wayward Sisters (edited by Alison O’Toole), and We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology (edited by Tara Avery and Jeanne Thornton). My preference is for The Nib, only because they do so many different kinds of comics in each issue. I suspect they’ll split the vote, though.
• Outstanding Graphic Novel: In addition to Laura Dean, you’ve got Upgrade Soul by Ezra Clayton Daniels, Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal, Highwayman by Koren Shadmi, and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. I believe I made my preference clear, but Kobabe’s been doing some damn good comics, including Gender Queer.
• Outstanding Minicomic: Trans Girls Hit The Town by Emma Jayne, Gonzalo by Jed McGowan, Silver Wire by Kriota Willberg, Cherry by Inés Estrada, and YLLW YLLW YLLW by Mar Julia. Not familiar with any of the books or creators. If I get the chance to vote, I might throw it to a dude because so maybe at least one dude wins. ‘Cause damn, women having been outshining the dudes at the Ignatzen for a couple years now.
• Outstanding Comic: Lorna by Benji Nate, Infinite Wheat Paste #7 by Pidge, The Saga Of Metalbeard by Joshua Paddon and Matthew Hoddy, Egg Cream by Liz Suburbia, and Check, Please!: #Hockey by Ngozi Ukazu. I do love me some comics about gay collegiate hockey bros, but I’m surprised to see the nomination in print but not for …
• Outstanding Online Comic: Isle Of Elsi by Alec Longstreth, That’s Not My Name! by Hannako Lambert, What Doctors Know About CPR by Nathan Gray, About Face by Nate Powell, and Full Court Crush by Hannah Blumenreich.

  I find it interesting that despite the rules specifying an online comic can be an individual comic, continuing storyline comic or strips, and the only real restriction being that it appears on the web before print, that there’s a real tendency towards shorter works. Three of the nominees (Name, CPR, and Face) are arguably essays in comic form (any one of them could have appeared at The Nib), and Full Court is a 16 page short story. Only Longstreth’s Elsi is a traditional (whatever that means) plot-based, ongoing webcomic.

  The extremely wide-open criteria means that this category, more than any other, varies widely from year to year, based on the jury’s personal views of what a good online comic looks like. I am precisely 50% in favor of having a narrower definition so there can be some consistency, and 50% in favor of the variety that is rewarded by the present system.

  Because of my avocational interests, I am pulling for What Doctors Know About CPR (which really, really could have appeared in The Nib’s Death issue).

• Promising New Talent: Haleigh Buck, Ebony Flowers, Emma Jayne, Mar Julia, and Kelsey Wroten. I’ll have to dig into their work, but I’m really liking the looks of what Jayne and Julia are doing.
• Outstanding Story: In addition to Laura Dean, you’ve got Sacred Heart Vol 2 Part 1: Livin’ In The Future by Liz Suburbia, Sincerely, Harriet by Sarah Winifred Searle, Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal, and The Dead Eye And The Deep Blue Sea by Vannak Anan Prum. Although I’m a tremendous fan of Searle’s work, Laura Dean remains my favorite book of the year until The Midwinter Witch arrives to make its case.

  Speaking of which, I’m very surprised to not see Molly Ostertag and/or The Hidden Witch in any category, nor Tillie Walden and/or On A Sunbeam anywhere in the nominations. Ah well, if I want the nominations to be perfect, all I have to do is become a comics writer and/or artist, and have a distinguished enough career that people in the industry think enough of me that I’m asked to be part of the jury. Simple.

The Ignatz bricks will be distributed starting at 9:30pm on Saturday, 14 September, at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland.

And hey, if the competition for the Ignatzen is a little to wholesome, there will be some virtual blood in a head-to-head original character deathmatch tournament sponsored by Abbadon over at Kill Six Billion Demons’s Discord. Registration’s open until they get 64 entrants.

Spam of the day:

Kontrollnummer- FX 75/463. (Kontrollnummer- FX 75/463.)
Garbage bags and much more.

I am less concerned by the German language pitch for what appears to be general shipping supplies than I am for the inclusion on the list of Solvent. All kinds. I get the feeling that you are selling to the serial killer market.

I don’t think this has ever happened before — a comics awards nomination list came out and I can’t find a single fault with it. There’s an embarrassment of riches in the Harvey Awards for 2019, and in multiple categories there are so many good works nominated that I’d be hard pressed to select any one (were I a voter, which I’m not). Let’s begin:

• Book Of The Year includes Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J Krosoczka, Kid Gloves, by Lucy Knisley, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, BTTM FDRS by Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore, On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden, When I Arrived At The Castle by Emily Carroll (Koyama Press) — any of which I would be thrilled if they won — along with Belonging: A German Reckons With History And Home by Nora Krug, Berlin by Jason Lutes, My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and Upgrade Soul by Ezra Claytan Daniels.
• Digital Book Of The Year includes Check, Please by Ngozi Ukazu, Space Boy by Stephen McCranie, The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow, The Nib edited by Matt Bors¹, and Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal. I’m not familiar with Space Boy or Woman World, but the other three are top notch.
• Best Children’s Or Young Adult Book² includes Hey, Kiddo, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Mr Wolf’s Class #2: Mystery Club by Aron Nels Steinke, New Kid by Jerry Craft, and On A Sunbeam. Three of those are also up for Book Of The Year, which should tell you something about how critical the MG/YA space has become to comics.
• Best Manga includes Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection, Mob Psycho 100 by ONE, My Hero Academia by Kohei Horikoshi, Our Dreams At Dusk by Yuhki Kamatani, Smashed by Junji Ito, and Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama. I’m only really familiar with Witch Hat Atelier — which is excellent — but I recognize the others from the Best/Worst Manga session at SDCC this year, all in various Best categories; when Chris Butcher tells you a manga is good, take that to the bank, friends.
• Best European Book includes Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt, O Josephine by Jason, Radiant by Tony Valente, Red Ultramarine by Manuele Fior, translated by Jamie Richards, and Waves by Ingrid Chabbert and Carole Maurel. I’ll be honest, I’m not familiar enough to comment intelligently here, but I’d be very surprised if the nominating committee suddenly sucked for one category.
• Best Comics Adaptation Award — that’s movies and TV — includes Alita: Battle Angel, Avengers: Endgame, The Boys, Captain Marvel by Marvel Studios, Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, Doom Patrol, Marvel’s Spider-Man (videogame), The Snagglepuss Chronicles (a theatrical adaptation), Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, and The Umbrella Academy. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have a dog in this fight, but come on … Spider-Verse, right?

The Harveys had, in the past, a reputation for ballot-stuffing and really mediocre work being mass-nominated by publishers. This is … not that. Somebody really sat down and looked for outstanding work, and if there’s one thing that stands out it’s the utter lack of capes outside of the adapted work.

If you’d told me a year ago that this award would feature exactly zero bats or mutants, but instead feature multiple nominations for a memoir about growing up in a household dominated by addiction, a very queer high school drama, and and sci-fi story set in a universe of no men and spaceships that are giant fish, I never would have believed you. I honestly would have to vote by random chance among three to five nominees in no less than three of those categories. Here’s hoping this is just the first year of a new era for comics awards.

The Harvey Awards will be presented on 4 October in conjunction with NYCC; voting by comics professionals is open until 10 September.

Spam of the day:

NostalgiaCon 80’s Pop Culture Convention Launches Media Village for Media and Social Media Influencers

Okay, 1, quoting John Hodgman: Nostalgia is a toxic impulse and 2, quoting me, Influencer culture is a cancer. Also, 3, your press release says this con will be in Anaheim, but your offices are in Miami, what the fuck? and 4, you credit the con as the brainchild of two people including — and I’m not making this up — the Chairman and CEO of Walmart’s exclusive car-buying platform, what the actual fuck?

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¹ That’s the way the nomination reads; as Bors noted on Twitter, if The Nib wins, it’s a recognition of all of his editors: Eleri Harris, Matt Lubchansky, Andy Warner, and Sarah Mirk.

² Note that those are very different demographics!

If there’s one thing you’ll never run out of at SDCC, it’s the range of human experiences that go from extreme to extreme. I listened to the replay of Armstrong stepping off the lander pad last night while preparing for drinks with friends. The moon hung bright and inviting as it must have 50 years ago and I swear I could taste the Tang that I drank back then¹, a sense memory that couldn’t be further from the rather sublime single cocktail I enjoyed in a dark room with a taxidermied ostrich over the door and a wall made out of 3D-printed skulls salvaged from an old Rob Zombie video.

Tang vs fine Italian bitters. Buttoned-down serious men with pocket protectors in their own dark room half a century ago, fussing over a computer being overwhelmed by a handful of extra bytes every few seconds vs some goofball in a t-shirt and jeans holding a supercomputer in his right hand, scrolling through pictures of his even goofierball greyhound.

Or, to provide an even greater contrast:

On Friday while waiting to interview Jim Ottaviani, I had the great pleasure to make the acquaintance of Phil Plait², who couldn’t have been nicer. It was only for a few minutes, but it was a genuine honor to talk to a person that spends all their time trying to spread knowledge about how the world works.

On Saturday while walking my way through the Gaslamp towards the convention center (also while on a lunch run, several hours later), I had the great misfortune to encounter a slient parade of utter wankers in Guy Fawkes mask/hat/cape combos, some lining a section of street, some silently processing between, some silently handing out literature, all holding giant placards decrying (in the most vilely truthless manner possible) the dangers of vaccines.

One tried to hand me a flyer and I said out loud Do not touch me, you pathogen-ridden vector. You’re a very, very lazy child killer. It was suggested to me later that they may have been doing some kind of bit — although I do think it was sincere — but I don’t care. On the literal anniversary of the day we, as a species, first landed on the gosh-darned moon, which I count as the second greatest thing we, as a species, have ever accomplished, these assholes are out critiquing an achievement that contains within it the only greater achievement humanity has managed³.

So, yeah. Within a period of 24 hours I experienced the sheer joy of scientific literacy and willful ignorance with almost unlimited potential for harm. Don’t be anti-vaxxers, kids; vaccines cause adults.

I only got to one panel yesterday, but it was a humdinger — a collection of publishers, creators, and teachers had an Ask Me Anything session about using comics in the classroom. I love hearing teachers and librarians on this topic, I just can’t get enough of it. I talk about it more once the notes are pounded into shape, but one thing that stuck with me is for all the discussion about how comics are helping students develop visual literacy, there’s no real agreement on what visual literacy is or how to define its boundaries.

Fortuitous, then, that shortly before closing Scott McCloud came by to talk⁴ and I asked him how his next book — on visual literacy! — was coming along. It’s going to be a while yet, but I mentioned the discussion from the panel and told him, Hey, no pressure, but the world is kind of waiting on you to give us a point of reference to discuss this stuff so we can figure out what it all means. Good thing you’ve done that before. He laughed, but also may have muttered Oh God in there. But I made up for it by sharing the story Tillie Walden told in Alaska about how she’s making comics because he encouraged her, so he’s got that going for him.

There was also a quick talk with Gene Yang at a signing, where I was one person too late to get a galley copy of Dragon Hoops. One of the things that I really appreciate about Yang is his prodigious memory for people; he has no reason to remember me, we’ve done one interview three years ago and maybe three times since then a quick handshake and two minutes chat, but he always does. This time, we spoke about how much I’m looking forward to his Raina Telgemeier turn (This book is about me he said, sounding a little surprised himself) and he asked if I’m a basketball fan. I told him I’m not, and then the fervor he brought to challenging kids to read outside their comfort zone came into his voice: Neither was I, but it’s great!

Like pretty much everybody associated with :01 Books, he’s a treasure. Mark Siegel and the people he’s worked with have done tremendous things for comics, and with their alumni moving into other publishers, they’re an incubator for the industry (I suggested metastasizing, which did make Siegel laugh, but we decided it was maybe not quite the word you want associated with your brand).

Pictures:
I lost a couple of photos in getting them synced from phone to laptop — thanks, technology! — but that’s the way things crumble. It’s not quite cosplay, but Peter Porker made some notable appearances. I think this may be the same group as earlier in the week, but with Porker instead of a bagel. This puppet was magnificent — she made it! — and I particularly like the posing she did in the photo up top, rearranging the fingers into the proper thwip! position.

You can’t see it because one of the photos I lost was the front of this pair, but Russell is holding a stuffed Dug in the Cone Of Shame.

But the best of the day had to be a three-way tie between Gizmoduck (the wheel was cleverly done), Gwenpool (when I told her I was going to send a copy of this photo to Christopher Hastings, she squeed a little), and The Landlady from Kung Fu Hustle, who had the most genuine and pleasant smile when not in character. Kudos, all around!

Panels to watch for:
I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to the panel on introducing younger readers to comics (noon, Room 28DE), the roundtable on combining tech and magic in your stories (1:00pm, Room 25ABC), or the short form comics discussion (also 1:00pm, Room 28DE). But I will be scouring the NPR website, because my wife texted me to say that Dylan Meconis was on Weekend Edition Sunday and she sounded great. Audio will be up here later today.

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¹ There are only two things from my childhood that I’ve lost and truly regret — one being the Linotype slug that I’ve mentioned. The other is tied to what I believe is my earliest concrete memory; Tang for a period of time sold their powder in a plastic jar that, when placed on a cookie sheet in the oven at a particular temperature, would deform and reform itself into a fair simulacrum of the Apollo Lunar Module.

I remember seeing the commercial and dutifully drinking the goo every morning until the jar was empty, I remember thinking it couldn’t possibly work, I remember watching it twist itself like magic, I remember being told No, I couldn’t play with it because it was still blisteringly hot plastic, you silly child.

² Thanks to Zach Weinersmith for the assist; after telling Plait that I enjoy his work, I mentioned that we had you as a friend in common, which prompted a handshake and a pleasant conversation.

³ I speak of the eradication of smallpox. It is an unalloyed good, and something that every person alive can be glad and proud of. Third greatest achievement of humans is dogs, and I think we have to share that one with the dogs, who were and are our willing partners in a monumental act not of domestication, but cross-species friendship and mutualism.

⁴ Speaking of contrasts, I was probably standing about 3 meters from where I first met McCloud, when his very kind words about this page sent me over the moon (callback!). If you’d told me that day that not only would I meet McCloud, but achieve the kind of familiarity where I would see him and say Oh, hey Scott instead of OMG OMG OMG that’s Scott McCloud!!!, I never would have believed you.

Like a lot of you, I first became aware of Tillie Walden when she started winning Ignatzen a few years back. The webcomic release of On A Sunbeam occurred in short order — nearly a year before Spinning — and I loved both (particularly the big, chapter-long chunks of story released of OAS, making the wait for updates rewarding and full of meaty story progression). But since :01 Books was kind enough to send me a copy of the print release of On A Sunbeam, and since I heard Walden talk about her relationship with her work at the Alaska Robotics Mini-Con¹, I’ve decided to revisit and share my thoughts. It’s going to be light on the spoilers, but I won’t say there are none.

On A Sunbeam is huge. It’s 500 pages (down from 700, Walden said in Juneau; she may not do much in the way of preparatory design or layout in her straight-to-ink process, but she’ll do a hell of a lot of editing later on²) worth of heavy, with a tactile paper and deeply-infused inks that retain hints of their original aroma long after being produced. To read this story in print is an undertaking, a confrontation of physical heft that lends weight to the story. She may regard the book as an afterthought to the act of creation, but when the book is this substantial before you even open it, you feel the work the story required. It demands your attention.

Walden’s not a fan of science fiction and doesn’t claim it as a source of inspiration, so naturally the book is up for a Hugo. Maybe the most radical departure from all but the most recent Hugo winners, the most speculative part of the speculative fiction is that Walden’s imagined a universe not just of life in space and far-flung communities in the firmament, but one where every character but one is female. It’s utterly unremarked-upon, there’s no backstory to say and that’s why there are no more men, it just is, a quiet fact lurking in the background until you realize there’s no dudes.

That one character that’s not female? They’re nonbinary.

Sure, much of the story takes place at a boarding school “For Girls”, or aboard a small ship where there don’t happen to be any men, but then the accumulated weight of the story kicks in. So many references to sisters and daughters, and casual reference to your or my moms. Is it a thesis statement or an aspiration? I think it’s more that there’s nothing in the story — school, bullies, love, family, loss — that requires the presence of men, so there aren’t any. It’s not a society that’s set in opposition to men, or defined by its separation from or absence of men, it just doesn’t have any and possibly never did. It sneaks up on you.

And it’s that casual display of the details of this universe that makes the story and the setting so beautiful. Little grace notes like shoes by the entrance of the spaceship and clutter everywhere tell us this isn’t sweeping space opera, it’s just life that happens to take place in space. Sure, the ships look like carp — complete with eyes and mouths and swimmy fins to keep them aloft — and homes, offices, and school campuses are their own, free-traveling craft, but it’s still just life. Live in a community in a weird part of space that may kill you getting in or out? Cool, you still need horses to get between towns. Want to set up a sports tournament between schools? They’ll need to rendezvous and dock with each other first.

The story is told initially in two threads, today and five years ago, paralleling the experience of the protagonist as she finds love and creates family. Bits of lore drop in conversation and become important, or are utterly forgotten (there’s an offhand reference to Earth, but it seems to be just another place you can live and not the cradle of humanity or anything). The plot in each time progresses on in the way that life does — often mundane, or frustrating, but rarely full of high adventure — until every hundred pages or so, Walden hits us with a showstopper. These moments come out of nowhere, and pack the emotional wallop that an entire series of comics might be built around³. There’s a character break that’s shocking and utterly earned. An act of bravery. A moment of fear and loss.

And in just about the exact middle of the book, the actual thesis statement for On A Sunbeam, and for Walden’s work as a whole:

Have you ever even considered that something that’s trivial to you could mean … so much more to someone else? You don’t get to take the easy road out and just respect the parts of people that you recognize.

That’s goddamn beautiful. More beautiful than the worldbuilding and imagination and the gorgeous illustrations. The most important thing is being willing to extend respect to somebody who’s different, whether you’re in a universe of fish-ships and schools wafting among the stars or not. You don’t get to decide what’s important for anybody other than yourself.

Take your time with On A Sunbeam; read it, exist in the story, listen to what it has to say. Set it aside for a day, or a month, and come back to it again; new little details will jump out at you, obvious now in ways they weren’t before. Read it again in a year, two, ten, and let it lead you back into that place where respect can be required, and love and family can be the foundation you build upon.

Spam of the day:

But if you’re still stuck on squats and lunges to grow your butt, you need to stop NOW.

Maybe you need to stop now, but my butt is friggin’ glorious.

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¹ And, at various points, we discussed other things, including what winning fuck-you lottery money would mean, desert island books, and Game Of Thrones. She’s really smart and utterly sincere and has become one of my favorite people.

² Which, if you recall our prior discussions of how Mark Siegel prefers to approach editing in :01 releases, is a unique way of working. Add to the fact that the story was done in about a year, including living overseas, and it’s pretty much inconceivable that the book actually exists. Only the most monstrous of work ethics could actually result in this story seeing completion.

³ Think Superman and Regan on the ledge, or Old Doreen and Old Nancy deciding to go back in time knowing it’ll reset their decades-long love, but they’ll find a way to recreate it.

A number of things happened while we’ve been going through the 2019 #ComicsCamp recap; for example, TCAF and a book that I loved, loved, loved released (review coming). A catch-up, then, for you.

There’s not one, not two, but three comics events take place in different corners of the continent starting tomorrow.

• Out in California, you’ve got NCSFest on the pier and surrounding public areas of Huntington Beach; it’ll be a Euro-style public festival, and feature the naming of this year’s Reuben Awards on Saturday. Follow the likes of Brad Guigar and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett for news on the ground.
• In Vancouver, you’ve got VanCAF kicking off on Saturday, with appearances expected from Abby Howard, Alina Pete, Ben Passmore, Boya Sun, Catie Donnelly, Cloudscape Comics, Emily Carroll, Evan Dahm, Faith Erin Hicks, Gigi DG, Haley Boros, Heather Gilbraith, Kazu Kibuishi, Kel McDonald, Kory Bing, Lars Brown, Mariko Tamaki, Matthew Bogart, Molly Muldoon, Msassyk, Pia Guerra, Ryan North, Sam Logan, Sarah Becan, Sloane Leong, Steve LeCouilliard, Steve Rolston, Tony Cliff, and Zac Thompson. That’s just the name I recognized on a fast pass over the guest list, and that means there’s even more creators that I (and maybe you) don’t know yet and get to discover.
• And in New York tomorrow and Saturday, the biennial Queers & Comics Conference takes place at the School of Visual Arts. If you want to go to an event that’s all sessions, it’s US$20 to register for the whole shebang. Panelists on various topics include Mariko Tamaki (who may be jetlagged, so be kind to her in Vancouver), Magdalene Visaggio, Alison Wilgus, Beth Barnett, Phil Jimenez, Rachel Pollack, Karen Green, Josh Trujillo, Paige Braddock, Kori Michele Handwerker, Blue Delliquanti, Jay Edidin, Sophie Labelle, Sam Orchard, Gina Gagliano, Tony Breed, Bill Roundy, and a whole bunch of folks whose names I don’t recognize. I’m going at least on Friday. I may or may not be writing up my experience; I suspect that I’ll be shutting up, listening and pointing you to a bunch of people’s work.

Speaking of pointing to people’s work, there were creators I met at Camp¹ whose work is new to me, and you should check it out. In no particular order, then: Anastasia Longoria, AnneMarie Rogers, Michael DiPetrillo, Leila del Duca, Jessi Jordan, Colin Andersen, Beth Barnett, Megan Baehr, Ally Colthoff, Tori Rielly, Bekka Lyn, Payton F, The Giant Rat, and Lily Williams.

And if you read this page you damn well better know who Tillie Walden is, but her UK publisher has put together a starter kit of her tricky-to-find first three books (she was only able to sell me two of them in Alaska). Okay, might not want to spring for the shipping if you’re not already in the UK/Europe (on this side of the pond, there’s a limited supply at Retrofit), but I thought I should point out that she had books before Spinning and that you should get them.

That should do for now. I’ll try to get something together for tomorrow, but the Q&C Conference is going to take up pretty much the whole day.

Spam of the day:

Introducing the brand new Ho’oponopono Certification…Secrets that bring you to “zero.”

Oh yes, pair of white guys, please tell me more about how you have decided that you are the official deciders of how to properly enact a traditional Hawai’ian practice. That’s totally cool of you.

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¹ You didn’t think I was really done just because I’d talked about everything that happened, did you?

And then #ComicsCamp was all done until next year; breakfast on Tuesday followed by an all-hands closeout session, followed by packing up and clearing out. Most everybody that attends is on a midday flight from Juneau to Seattle, and then onwards. Some few people will be on flights around 6:30 or 8:00pm, and a handfull of unfortunates¹ won’t fly out until 5:40am on Wednesday, generally because we’re making our way east across three or four time zones.

Those that need to be on the bus get their stuff together and say goodbye and help clean and pack up common resources until they have to leave. The dozen or so leftovers and locals stay until noon or so, sweeping and cleaning the main lodge and bathrooms, mopping the kitchen and packing out leftover food. By 1:00pm we’re checking into our hotel for the last night, and making plans for lunch and hang-outs in town.

The thing about 78 awesome people in close proximity is it can sometimes be hard to interact without a constantly-shifting population of participants, and a desire to pull ever more people in — it’s the usual convention Who’s going to dinner? problem writ somewhat smaller. But with a half-dozen people at The Rookery for lunch, or maybe ten at In Bocca Al Lupo for dinner (divided into tables of four), it’s easier to have a small conversation².

Thus, questions that have nothing to do with comics or creative careers come to the fore: If you won the fuck-off huge Powerball jackpot, where are you going first? If you were stuck on a desert island, what three books would you take? What one movie prop would you like more than any other?³.

Also, beers, and an invitation back to Rob & Pagan’s place to catch that week’s Game Of Thrones — the battle at Winterfell, y’all — with a big screen and an Aperol Spritz close to hand. If you ever have the opportunity to watch like your fifth GOT episode ever in a room full of enthusiasts and then have to go back to your hotel and immediately pack up your stuff to squeeze in 4.5 hours of sleep for a 4:00am taxi, I encourage it.

Multimedia:
Coincidentally, as I was wrapping up this year’s Camp recap, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett shared his recollections of Camp, in the form of the latest Comic Lab podcast. I think that the infectious joy in his voice (which is hard to convey with words on the screen) is matched only by the infectious nature of his Ursaphobic Stan Lee impression (ditto). If I have to hear it in my brain until I die, so do you.

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¹ Hi, how ya doin’?

² Or to share tater tots with those whose lunch order tragically does not include them.

³ My answers:

• Portland, to make legal arrangements with Katie Lane so I don’t fuck up my life.
• The Great Outdoor Fight, the collected Digger, and the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf.
• The dress jacket worn by Kenneth Branagh in his version of Much Ado About Nothing, which set off a lengthy discussion of the various versions of that play between me and Molly Muldoon, leaving Tillie Walden thoroughly bemused that we each knew so much of the text by heart.

  That Molly, though — she’s got opinions on Claudio (which I thoroughly agree with).

So there’s still some of #ComicsCamp Monday to discuss, and it all fits a theme, even if it didn’t all happen at the same time.

Kazu Kibuishi spoke about making a living at comics, and while he spoke about work process in terms similar to his public session on Saturday, it was more a conversation about finding what works for you. Remember the contrast between Kibuishi and Tillie Walden’s work styles? Let’s add a contradiction — in all that formal process, Kibuishi finds it helpful to draw at the speed that somebody would read the page.

Pages that are meant to make you linger and consider carefully? More time on that puppy. Middle of a fast action scene, flipping breathlessly? Speed it up. I’m tempted to call this a variation of Scott McCloud’s observation that manga panels have varying levels of detail to draw your eye to what’s important now (Understanding Comics, page 44 in my 25 year old copy).

Apart from that, Kibuishi shared that he’s putting more thought into character designs for future series, with an eye to make cosplay cooler and easier to build¹. Oh, and there was a great digression about the benefits of drawing to Dick Dale instrumentals, both because they’re super awesome, but also because of the wealth and breadth of inspirations behind them — Dale made surf guitar standards out of the Lebanese folksongs that his family taught him.

But if there was one thing that lay under Kibuishi’s talk (and multiple others) it’s that while he can discuss what works for him (process, satisfaction, definition of success), it’s different for everybody. Remember the session back on Sunday about financial stability? After that one, posterboard-sized sheets started appearing in the main lodge, each bearing an anonymous pie chart indicating sources of income. Some of them look vaguely similar, some have scant resemblance to most others, a few are gonzo-unique outliers. But no two are the same, and arguably no one is better than any other, even if each creator who shared their experience probably wants to change some things about their balance.

Let’s get back to that commonality thought for a moment — everybody’s experience is in some ways similar, and in other ways utterly unique. The act of working, for most cartoonists, in isolation can make it seem even more unique, especially when the doubts kick in. But when you look at the experiences of peers, and near-peers, and will-be-peers, the journeys to finding that unique set of success conditions start to look familiar. And during the secret session, that point was made again.

I’m being coy, so forgive me. You may recall that Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett made a film about comic strips, and the transition from the newspaper page to webcomics. It’s pretty neat. That movie is about 90 minutes long, and it’s built from about 300 hours of interviews, including with some of the biggest names of comic strips that you love with all your heart. There’s exabytes of stuff that didn’t make it into the film, and LArDK shared some of it. I’m not mentioning names because while it was judged that this likely wouldn’t cause the creator in question any distress, it’s also not meant for mass consumption. But I will share this:

Every creator, no matter how famous, also needs to hear from time to time that their work had an impact on readers. Every creator, no matter how successful, needs that reassurance that they’re doing good work.

Speaking of universality, after dinner on Monday night the question came up — in the same vein as the pie charts indicating proportions of income sources, could there be a report on the ranges of income? A bit of brainstorming among LArDK, David Malki !, and Ryan North determined there could be an income band axis, a years as a cartoonist axis, and some color coding to determine satisfaction². Brio supervised from the couch.

The survey sheet remained up until after breakfast on Tuesday morning, and people added their input. In some respects, no surprises — people at comics as career for a short period of time reported income clustered at the bottom of the range, and the top end was reserved for long-time vets. After about five years, the entire range of income was represented, and after ten years the satisfaction score was mostly positive — either because regardless of income, people found ways of working they enjoyed³, or those who weren’t satisfied with comics as a career mostly self-selected out before spending a decade of their life at it.

I suspect that if you put the easel up with the same income survey today and magically gathered all the same Campers to add their responses, there would be differences up and down the sheet, of only because much of the response came as the booze table was being steadily worked down so there would be less to pack up on the morrow. For my part, I did my traditional Create A Camp-Commemorating Cocktail duty, and came up with a tasty concoction that was eventually named for Brio:

2 oz Laird’s applejack
0.5 oz Aperol
0.25 oz simple syrup
0.25 oz St Germaine
dash aromatic bitters
dash citrus bitters
dash ginger bitters

Muddle one wedge of lemon and one wedge of lime to liquid ingredients. Shake over ice, strain, and drink carefully, musing on how we’re all figuring out our way in the world.

Pictures:
Even if you can’t see all the writing, you can probably see no two pie charts are quite like each other. Bonus views of the dioramas from Saturday night.

Income vs time vs satisfaction, with about 55% of Campers responding. Still not enough for real statistical significance, but enough to get the idea — you’re not the only one trying to figure this shit out.

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¹ The result, he said, of seeing an Amulet cosplayer with an intricate, complicated, difficult build of a costume and realizing that if he’d made the character a bit more work on his end, it would have made things much easier for the fan.

² I helped with the layout a little, and because I’m a stickler for such things, I asked if the income numbers were constant dollars and if they should account for US/Canadian exchange rates. However, I did not contribute data to either the income survey or the pie chart collection. For starters, my pie chart would look like a circle with one color for DAY JOB.

³ Plus, not everybody is trying to make comics their sole gig.

Saturday is a big day for #ComicsCamp; there’s the one-day convention at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center for the people of Juneau¹ that needs to be set up, conducted, and torn down. There’s hotels and accommodations to be checked out of and luggage packed. There’s the travel to the campsite itself, up by Eagle Beach, and getting settled into what for many will be their third bed in 48 hours. Hopefully, there’s time to eat² somewhere in the middle.

This year the Mini-Con featured signings from nine creators from the 10:00am opening until the 5:00pm closing, a board game room, children’s book readings at the Juneau Public Library, and sessions at three nearby venues. In no particular order:

• The Zach Gordon Youth Center saw drawing hangouts (with Kazu Kibuishi, Tony Cliff, Raina Telgemeier, and Andy Runton), a writing hangout (with Ryan North and Karla Pacheco³), and a making monsters out of Sculpey hangout (with Shing Yin Khor).
• The Alaska State Museum ran a series of workshops on making picture books, with Alaskan creators discussing self-publishing (Inari Kylanen [store manager for Alaska Robotics] and Lee Post), writing (Hannah Lindoff) and illustrating (Michaela Goade and Lucas Elliott).
• Further workshops in the Community Room of KTOO featured Scott C on character design, and Dik Pose and Nobu Koch on stop motion animation.
• Presentations in the auditorium at KTOO featured Lucy Bellwood on the full history of Jeanne Baret (which had been teasered the night before in the library variety show), a Baby-Sitters Club Super Secret Club Meeting with Raina Telgemeier and Gale Galligan (the two women chosen by BSC creator Ann M Martin to adapt her work into graphic form), and discussions of work and process by Tillie Walden, Jen Wang, and Kazu Kibuishi.

I want to talk about two of those at some length, partially because they were the only two I got to see in their entirety around my show volunteer gigs, and partially because they provide a study in contrasts. As such, they neatly illustrated a recurring theme explored at Camp (of which more later) that success looks different depending on who you are, where you are in your career path, and what your expectations are. No one interpretation is correct, and though there are similarities (particularly in the financial realm), every successful creative career is its own thing.

That being said, it would be difficult to find two [web]comics creators that work more differently than Kibuishi and Walden. Kibuishi is a planner — head down, work in service to a larger goal (often related to caring for others). He spent his college years as an award-winning editorial cartoonist⁴ and was on track to animation prize winning fame when a robbery cost him his computer and more than a year’s work. He began a stint as an architectural graphic designer and helped sell billion dollar projects around the world — interesting work, to be sure, but it wasn’t telling the stories that he had in him.

September 11th prompted him to quit and shift back to stories, which led to Copper, then a stint as a Creative Director at an animation studio and commercials, and then the big leagues: Disney hired him to direct the feature film Let’s Get Francis.

Which you’ve never seen. Nobody has, because a fair amount of studio productions are made just to keep somebody else from making them, with no intention of ever being released. It’s possibly in the Disney vaults somewhere, waiting to be released the week before a big-screen adaptation of Amulet, or maybe it was wiped to recycle drives like the early days of cel animation. Kibuishi didn’t want to get lost in the process — after all, the first work on what became Frozen started while Walt was still alive — and so he left Disney, made a pitch around Amulet, and then it’s a straight shot to today.

Well, except for that bout of meningitis that put him in a coma and gave him amnesia. The lasting effects of that were he got to read his own books and enjoy them as new things, not realizing he’d made them, and a need to be even more meticulous in his work processes than before. Oh, and the time it took him to get back to Amulet was spent painting the covers for the American editions of the Harry Potter books for their 15th anniversary.

How meticulous is his work process? He’ll draw out scenes for his stories and then rearrange them until they make sense as a book. Each scene, each page will be run through an average of 5 to 7 versions before he decides he’s got something he can commit to; tricky pages may take as many as 20 revisions. It’s a lot of planning, years to get the book finagled the way he wants it, but it has its rewards — there’s a subway station in New York City where the mosaic tile features a kid reading a copy of Amulet, which prompted a sincere Whoa when he saw it⁵.

Now let’s talk Walden. She’s 22 years old. She spent a dozen years as a competition-level figure skater, as chronicled in Spinning. Not chronicled in Spinning is the fact that art and comics were her twin brother’s thing growing up, and after the usual period of time drawing comics as a young kid, she left that area of expression⁶ to him — she still had skating, after all, and several instruments that she plays. Comics came when she was 16 when her father signed her up for a two-day comic making workshop that possibly he wanted to attend himself.

A two-day workshop with Scott McCloud, who saw something in the non-comics-making teen and told her he was looking forward to seeing what she did (knowing McCloud, he was both a) entirely sincere, and b) actually did see something of her future success by the end of those two days). So you’ve got that kind of encouragement and no real skill at comics and the rational thing is to bring it out as a funny story but never do comics — but you don’t have the work ethic imposed by skating coaches (one of them Russian) who would tell you things like Run and don’t stop until you throw up.

So you spend your days at 16, 17, 18 doing nothing but comics. You eke your way out of high school, you talk your way into the Center For Cartoon Studies MFA program despite not having a bachelor’s degree⁷. You put your work online and get contacted by a British publisher who prints your first three books. Then you do Spinning and On A Sunbeam and the forthcoming Are You Listening? (a comparatively brief 320 pages, compared to 400 for Spinning and 544 for Sunbeam).

So how do you create so many comics, which are so very good, so quickly, even with the single-minded devotion to work of a border collie on pure, uncut espresso? How do you deliver more than 1200 pages of comics by the age of 22, period, much less in the time since your graduation from comics school?

You do so by treating comics like jazz.

Walden works straight to ink, no designs or character studies, no extensive planning. The page gets drawn and the characters — What’s her haircut? Long, because my hand’s still moving! — and story reveal themselves. It’s not sloppiness or haste or inattention to detail. It takes a great deal of proficiency, a great deal of discipline, a complete mastery of the fundamentals to sit at the drawing board cold and just let it all wash over you and out, the way that Coltrane or Parker or Monk could on horn or piano.

And like Coltrane or Parker or Monk, you have to be ready to deal with the consequences and imperfections: Maybe the drawing looks a little funky. I have this attitude that nothing bad will happen if I screw up. That courage leads to a deliberateness to make the story work, and also to a reality where many Tillie Walden originals simply don’t exist — they’re discarded when their purpose has been served. The point of Tillie Walden’s comics is the process and the act of creation; the books are a product (or possibly even a byproduct) and exist for you guys.

I suspect that for both Kibuishi and Walden, Hell looks something very much like being forced into the other’s creative work habits. And yet, they both fall in love with their characters, who they are, how they change, and the things that happen to them that make them different people.

And deep down, there’s a reflection between them.

Walden talks and answers questions with long, arcing responses that are perfectly structured to anticipate followups and address points you didn’t even realize that you were asking about, all while drawing and filling her space with whatever whim takes her⁸. Her lines are crisp and perfect, each one adding the precise detail needed, iterating the page through the versions of what it has been and will be⁹.

Kibuishi paints while he talks, off the cuff, returning to previous ideas, conversing casually, but he builds his paintings up out of abstract swathes of color, stopping before he gets too detailed. Your brain, he explains, makes this look more detailed and real when it fills in what’s missing. If I kept painting this, it would look less real to you. He’ll never make another painting quite like it, given how unplanned, improvised, and jazzlike it is.

Neither is correct. Neither is wrong. Neither should be emulated. Both have found ways that work for them multiple times in multiple creative arenas. Their paths to comics success have been about as different as they could be and yet I find myself willing to drop cash on an unknown book by either solely because I know that they’ve found the tops of their respective games in service of their stories. The differences don’t matter, only the fact that they’ve found ways to perfect their skills.

And we get to read the comics.

Pictures:
Mostly, they’re in the text above. For reference, this is what the floor looked like at opening, just a few of the 972 people that made their way over. And here’s what the greater Juneau region looks like.

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¹ And beyond; everybody in Alaska has a frequent flyer number, and they are used to hauling halfway across the state for something interesting. Over the years, people at the Mini-Con have identified themselves as being from Fairbanks, Homer, Anchorage, Ketchikan, and Sitka. Don’t think I’ve spoken to anybody from the Aleutians or Nome, but it also wouldn’t surprise me.

² Did I mention that there’s great food in Juneau? Pretty sure I did. That includes a couple a tasty food trucks right outside the JACC, one of which does awesome steamed pork buns.

³ The two of whom were last seen together explaining the Pacheco:North Ratio of standard cow:big cow, which they demonstrated live at Camp.

The wisdom of letting Pacheco (who had for sale at her table custom hotel door hangers that on one side read Gettin’ My Bone On and on the other side read Fuck Off; I meant to buy ten for random distribution on my next hotel trip but failed to do so) near youth is best debated another time.

⁴ Well, he kept coming in second to this one other guy, but then again that other guy just won a Pulitzer, so no shame there.

⁵ It’s also technically a copyright violation, but Kibuishi and Scholastic decided that it can slide.

⁶ Which idea calls back to a question Kibuishi fielded — when asked When did you start drawing comics? he replied When did you stop?

⁷ Walden: Suckers!

⁸ Walden: I’m going to draw a house. No, a boat.
Audience member: A houseboat!
Walden: Yes! I don’t know what houseboats look like, but I’m going to draw one anyway.

⁹ And, at the end, I’m gonna put Bart Simpson up here.

For those who are new around here, there’s this thing called #ComicsCamp, run by the fine folks at Alaska Robotics (which is a comics shop¹, game shop, art supply shop, and gallery) in Juneau, and it involves bringing creative folks into schools, public events, and a one-day convention before giving them a weekend of recharging and also s’mores. I’ve been privileged to attend three times now, and you can read about my previous experiences at Camp here, here, here, here, and here. Those two series will read differently from each other, and from the one that’s starting now — Camp’s a living, breathing thing, and it changes.

It started for me a couple of days before my travel with a bit of a panic — the SSD in my laptop decided it had reached end of life and bricked itself good; there’s a hard drive in there, too, but it was a tense couple of hours getting Linux reinstalled and data salvaged. Fortunately, I keep a bootable USB drive attached to the power converter cable, so I didn’t have to go searching too far. The whole thing’s a lot slower than it used to be (or should be), but that’s an issue for later this week; it got me through what it needed to, which was ensuring that the creator presentations for one of the public events — about which more momentarily — were tested and projectable.

In addition to seeing a swathe of Campers arrive, Thursday 25 April also saw public events: storytime and a ‘zine making workshop at one of the Juneau public libraries², the Juneau Makerspace got some hands-on puzzle-cutting knowledge from the master, and a lecture by Ryan North on How To Invent Everything which he should know, on account of he wrote a book that tells you how to do exactly that. In case you’re looking for the high points, they include:

• Young Ryan first became aware of the notion of time travel when he was six and saw Back To The Future for the first time; it made an impression³ and he was particularly struck by the Chuck Berry scene and thus had an appreciation of the Bootstrap Paradox at a far younger age than most of us.
• Having decided to write what is surely The Most Dangerous Book In History, North found himself staring down literally years, plural, of research⁴ to determine not only what the key technologies of human history are, but also how to create them from first principles while simultaneously not imparting knowledge that might hurt or kill his readers. This led to what may have been the most existentially self-evident question of all when North asked himself (and I quote):
  

  Have I accidentally decided to do something impossible?

  Again??

• But he persevered, and found within all that research to find a key thought re: human inventiveness and creativity; namely We are not as smart as we think we are. He rattled off a series of key inventions in history — human flight, or the stethoscope⁵ — and found that they came about centuries or millennia after we had the basic parts and just failed to put them together⁶. In the case of arguably the greatest invention in human history⁷ — written language, which allows us to preserve knowledge across time, space, and culture — we were about 200,000 years late.
• The more basic the technology, the later we were, and the further back in time you go, the worse things get. Now-ubiquitous crops were terrible, people died because they didn’t know to wash their damn selves, and the only positive of the past is that if you do end up there, you can name things after yourself.

One thing you should know about Juneau is that it’s basically the same as Portland or Seattle, just smaller; you’ve got great food (shouts-out to The Rookery Cafe and In Bocca Al Lupo, who both fed more than their share of Campers before and after our time off-grid, and the astonishingly good Coppa Ice Cream), great cultural institutions, and great people. Give them something fun to do, and they’ll arrive in droves, as they did for the Kickoff Event at the Valley branch of the JPL. In addition to music from the Marian, Seth & Maria Rockin’ Teenage Combo, you had:

• Cat Farris reading from her graphic novel, My Boyfriend Is A Bear. Fun fact! Farris and I spent several days bonding over our greyhounds, because greyhound people are the best people.
• Molly Muldoon talking about how to solve a murder all Agatha Christie style. Fun fact! Muldoon’s rules for dealing with murderers left an impression on everybody who went to Camp, and who spent a great deal of time making sure there were extra exits from everyplace. Can’t be too careful!
• Alex Graudins explaining how improv can help you make friends and be more creative in all aspects of life. Fun fact! Graudins illustrated Science Comics: The Brain, and included dearly beloved and sadly departed pooch Reginald Barkley in three cameos, not two as I’d previously counted.
• Alison Wilgus explained Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation, and why it’s such a jerk. Fun fact! I have one about Wilgus’s trademark red glasses, but it’s not my story to tell. Sorry!
• Gale Galligan shared her knowledge of bunnies, who are adorable but also super gross. Fun fact! I am not kidding, what rabbits do with poop is gross.
• Dik Pose spoke about baseball. Fun fact! You don’t need a presentation to talk baseball; just like on the radio, a voice and some imagination is pretty much the purest expression of following the game.
• Michael Grover shared comics about starting a band when you’re a ghost and have no hands. Fun fact! Don’t feel bad, Jake Spooky, many bass players have never played bass, or even seen a bass.
• David Malki ! talked about the social history of beards. There was other stuff in there, but it was really about beards. Fun fact! The band’s musical outro was an improvised, lyrics-ignored version of Wonderwall, chosen solely so that Wondermark could be sung in the chorus.
• Tony Cliff read his forthcoming children’s book, Let’s Get Sleepy. Fun fact! There are enough Tonys Cliff in the world that trying to search for this Tony Cliff and Let’s Get Sleepy produces a lot of results on Marxist class struggle.
• Jen Wang talked about chickens, which come in a bewildering variety of sizes, colors, and shapes. Fun fact! There are hen-to-rooster trans chickens.
• Tillie Walden read Shel Silverstein poems. Fun fact! Silverstein wrote more great poems that conventional mathematics can count; for every one of his poems you love, there are dozens that other people love just as much.
• Lucy Bellwood talked about Jeanne Baret, who defied expectations and traveled the world cataloging and categorizing botanical specimens for pre-Revolution France. Fun fact! Baret collected and described more than 6000 species, but the gentleman of society who sponsored her took all the credit and named a couple dozen species after himself. She got one plant named for her like five years ago.
• Shing Yin Khor talked about the numerous dinosaur statues — some of which bear only passing resemblance to what we know about actual dinosaurs — of Holbrook, Arizona. Fun fact: the dinostatue:human resident ratio of Holbrook (approximately 1:149) is much greater than either the whalestatue:human resident or dogstatue:human resident ratios of Juneau (both approximately 1:32,000).

Afterwards, local Camp helper-organizers Rob & Pagan volunteered their lovely home for dinner and dessert supplied by Coppa. At Pat Race’s request, they came up with a Squirrel Girl-themed ice cream called Eat Nuts And Kick Butts (peanut butter with salted caramel ribbons and a chocolate layer on top). Ryan North, naturally, was given the honor of the first scoop which turned out to be necessary, as the solid-frozen carton required a Ryan-sized man’s strength to break through. It took some doing, but he ultimately succeeded; it was a good omen for the days to come.

Pictures:
Juneau is a fabulously beautiful place, and given the landscape found all around, there is little surprise that it’s a vertical city. I once made the mistake of trying to go to a restaurant by the most direct route and wound up taking four separate sets of outdoor staircases.

Remember what I said about arriving in droves? This crowd came out at 6:00pm on a Friday night.

Remember what I said about Coppa’s ice cream? Here’s the Peeps flavor, with real decapitated Peeps throughout. And here’s the ENAKB variety being duly selfied by North, who then did his best ceremonial ribbon cutting pose for the crowd. It proved to be a hard-frozen challenge requiring mighty struggle, but in the end it was worth it.

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¹ And a damn fine one, too. So fine, in fact, that they’ve been nominated for the Eisner Spirit of Comics retailer award this year. If you’re an Eisner voter, Pat Race, Aaron Suring, and everybody at AK Robotics are stellar human beings with a real sense of service for their community.

² The one on Douglas Island, one of three in the Juneau Public Libraries system, all of which saw events.

³ To the degree that he wrote an e-book that is a page-by-page deep reading of the novelization of Back To The Future, which among other things has Opinions on the subject of Mr Strickland. What I am saying is that Ryan North has probably thought a lot more about time travel — real and fictional — than you or me.

⁴ He was maybe halfway into the process when we spoke about it at Camp 2017.

⁵ The only time something was invented, North reminds us, because somebody was too horny to otherwise do their job.

⁶ Or, in the case of the compass, neglected to put it to its practical use. Rather than navigation, the Chinese originally used compasses for fortune telling.

⁷ No, not dogs. Humanity has domesticated about 16 different species, and only dogs are workmates, guardians, helpers, and friends that know our minds and read our expressions. Given how thoroughly and completely they have tied their lives to ours, it’s reasonable to say they domesticated themselves, or at least deserve credit for the assist.

That would be the show poster for Alaska Robotics Mini-Con, which has announced more of the goings-on in and around the show on Saturday the 27th. To wit:

• For those in town as early as Thursday the 25h, Chris Yates will be running a puzzle making workshop at the Juneau Makerspace, and Ryan North will be teaching you how to invent everything at the Juneau Downtown Library. Times for both TBA.
• Friday features the traditional kickoff event at the Mendenhall Valley Public Library, with snacks at 5:00pm and the variety show (music, short presentations of Mini-Con exhibitors) at 6:00pm. This will follow a full day of school visits by creators, leaving no school unvisited.
• Saturday will be the show itself, as well as a workshop on making picture books at the Alaska State Museum from 12:00pm to 3:00pm, and talks at KTOO and the Zach Gordon Youth Center; these will include drawing hangouts, a stop-motion animation rig, Sculpey monster-making with Shing Yin Khor, and talks by Kazu Kibuishi, Raina Telgemeier, Jen Wang, Gale Galligan, and Tillie Walden.

Speaking of Tillie Walden, I should note that the LA Times Festival Of Books named Walden’s On A Sunbeam the 2018 Festival Book Prize winner in the Graphic Novel category. If you haven’t read it you really should.

Speaking of awards, the Slate/Center For Cartoon Studies Cartoonist Studio Prize winners for 2019 were announced today, with the honors (and a thousand dollars cash money) going to Chlorine Gardens by Keiler Roberts (Best Print Comic) and Being An Artist And A Mother by Lauren Weinstein (Best Web Comic).

As previously noted, Nancy was nominated in the Best Web Comic category which remains a head-scratcher. It’s still the best thing on the newspaper page in the past decade or more and if you aren’t reading it you need to start reading it. That being said, congratulations to Roberts and Weinstein, and to all the nominees.

Spam of the day:

Open An Augusta© Gold IRA

No. Just … no.