The latest iterations of two cool things are now available:

• Winterview #7: Kazu Kibuishi and Amy Kim Ganter (on their wedding day, no less).
• A non-ugly floor map for webcomics at SDCC. I give you: WebComiCon! While you’ll find representatives of literally dozens of webcomics in a tight grouping between aisles 1200 and 1400 (there may be hijinks), don’t overlook the others in the Small Press and Indy Press areas.

  This map is an evolving thing, and late-breaking additions will be noted here at Fleen. Case in point: Topher Davila of TomatoTV.net will be in Small Press booth P9, which would be about mid-way between The Devil’s Panties (with special guest Striptease) and Young American.

So my brain’s a little slow on account of my normally very somnolent greyhound waking us at 4:00 this morning, barking her head off. For the record? Greyhounds got big lungs and when they bark — which is generally and thankfully rare — they’re loud, like the Last Chorus of angels is on its way to Armageddon loud. She was refusing to move, on high alert, staring out the window very intently at a friggin’ fox that must have been scratching around the front porch and woken her.

This one was pretty nonchalant, sauntering down the steps and out our yard, sniffing intently at the curb and wondering why anybody would bark and such clearly innocent scrounging behavior. Then somebody out for a very early drive came down the block and the little ruffian turned tail and hauled off at great speed, looking far less nonchalant and more put-upon, as foxes are sometimes known to be. Anyway, I’m a bit tired today, so don’t expect a lot of insightful commentary.

• Which is pretty lucky as I’m all out of insightful commentary about a godsdamned national disgrace:
  

  Yesterday I saw four different GoFundMe’s pop up in my feed for creatives with medical bills they can’t handle. Each one a heartbreaking situation.

  Surprising no one – they were all in the U.S.

  That being the start of a thread from Jim Zub, wherein he very kindly does not ask why Americans hate themselves and their neighbors so much that we allow ourselves to be bankrupted by bad health, or perhaps just allow ourselves to die if we aren’t rich enough to be bankrupted. I don’t get it, I’ll never get it.

  One of the four¹ is probably David Gallaher — whose work I’ve been following since the launch of Zuda all those years ago — and whose life has been upended because of his poor choice to be born with a seizure disorder:

  Friends, I am trying to raise money for my seizure recovery and medical bills. It’s been a long difficult year, so any support is welcome.

  https://www.gofundme.com/f/q3wxp-seizur …

  If you click through to the GoFundMe page, you’ll find:

  [L]ast year, at 43 years old, a sudden resurgence of chronic seizures beginning in 2018 caused out-of-pocket and out-of-network medical expenses to grow to over $63,000. I have tried to appeal the expenses and have tried to work with the hospital to lower bills to $25,000. Even then, this is money that I just don’t have — money it will take years to pay off.

  Let’s be clear — Gallaher paid for insurance, at a cost of more than US$1100 per month, for more than a decade. Call it in the vicinity of US$150K for the privilege of subsequently being billed US$63K. Without insurance, who knows how deep in the hole he’d be. As established, I hate the necessity of asking you yet again to contribute in this time of need, and I hate the reality that the possibility of healthcare in this country depends on how big your social network is. The only thing I hate more is the certainty that Gallaher can be spared much turmoil if we deal with this deeply imperfect system now, and resolve to act in a way to change it in the near future.

• But you know what? Zub’s a great guy, and I don’t want his only mention on the page today to be such a bummer. What else you got goin’ on, Zub?
  

  The gang at Marvel asked me if I’d be interested in bringing several Robert E. Howard characters together with a bit of Marvel magic (by way of Moon Knight) in a sweeping sword & sorcery story. Of course I said yes, but as soon as I did I felt an intense pressure to create something that felt appropriately pulpy, mysterious, and intense in the way the best Robert E. Howard stories do.

  That’s Zub telling us that he gets a new 4-issue miniseries to play out all his fantasy storytelling chops on Conan: Serpent War, the first issue of which dropped today, and the remainder of which will be released by the end of January, to be followed by his run on the regular Conan series starting in February.

  And if that’s not enough Zubby goodness (Zubness?) for you, consider:

  I’ve been writing the official D&D comic series since the launch of 5th edition, but I’ve been playing D&D since first edition when I was 8-years old. Each year IDW releases a new mini-series that builds on a theme or setting being promoted in a recent D&D product.

  The Baldur’s Gate heroes (including Minsc and Boo, cult favorite characters from the famous Baldur’s Gate video games) have adventured through four previous comic mini-series — and now they’re heading into their most ambitious adventure yet: INFERNAL TIDES, built on elements from the recent Descent Into Avernus adventure source book (which I also did story consulting on for Wizards of the Coast).

  That’s Zub telling us that his inner eight year old is vibrating with excitement that transcends time and space. Infernal Tides drops next Wednesday, and as a reminder his other current official D&D tie-in wraps up the Wednesday after that. Even in a world of magnificent, malicious stupidity, I’m glad we’ve got Zub doing stories that will bring joy to the next generations of kids with stars in their eyes and dice in their hands.

Spam of the day:

Play piano in a flash learn to play keyboards now

You have obviously mistaken me for somebody that can keep pitch and rhythm straight in his head.

_______________
¹ I didn’t even see the other three that Zub mentioned. And I’ve seen so damn many of these at regular intervals, only the names that I recognize sink in anymore. This has to stop.

Something’s going on with WordPress where I lose connection to the back end and editing functions, but the front end continues to show the site. And then it comes back without doing anything! So let’s be quick about this, and I hope you will appreciate how much work went into this one.

See, I owe Amazon an apology, as I was complaining t’other day about my copy of Romeo And/Or Juliet not being here on day of release, and now I’ve got it. Thanks, Amazon! It’s wacky and wonderful, and features many, many terrific artists and story ending illustrations. Author Ryan North’s sense of both complete absurdism and Shakespearean drama are intact, as he takes us through multiple plots, multiple story styles (I’m presently following along a noir pastische), and pulls in multiple plays for inspiration (said pastiche stars Rosalind from As You Like It, and there are short versions of Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and even Midsummer’s play-in-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe). There’s time travel, giant robots, sex-having, sweet fights, record-setting one-rep weightlifting, a cookie recipe, and even a nod to Back To The Future¹.

Sadly, the best thing we saw in To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure — where those illustrations were full page with the minor text associated with the story ending (usually grisly death) — is modified somewhat; the illos are mostly 1/3 page in size, with a continuous stream of text-illustration-next story point. As a result, RAOJ doesn’t have page numbers, it has passage numbers — a passage being a node in the story, ranging from a line or two to more than a page. Additionally, instead of the full-color glossy illustrations from TBONTBTITA, the papr stock is matte and the pictures are all combinations of black, white, and red. The changes do make the book less of a bicep-building than TBONTBTITA, though … that was one seriously heavy book.

But despite all of the good points, Romeo And/Or Juliet has one stunning flaw, one shared with To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure, namely: the index of artists in the back of the book contains only an alphabetical listing, not a listing by passage (or page, in the earlier book) number. So when I came across a stunningly beautiful (or funny, or disturbing … ) illustration in my read-through, I’d sometimes recognize the artist by style, but more often not. Then I had to scan the index, looking for the passage (or page) number, to find it who it was.

Well, no more! Ryan North, I am calling you out for having a defective book, and furthermore I am doing something about it. Specifically, I have painstakingly transcribed the passage numbers and artist names and compiled them into a table (below the cut) that you may print and stick in your copy of RAOJ. I trust Mr North will prevail on his publishers to include information in future printings; with a clear typeface, you might be able to fit it on a promotional bookmark, but at the least you could “tip in” some pages in this and future North/Shakespeare collaborations.

It’s a minor thing, though — don’t let the lack of reverse-lookup prevent you from picking up Romeo And Or Juliet; it’s a brilliant job from a brilliant writer and nearly 100 brilliant artists. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to decide what to do in this game of rock-paper-scissors I seem to have found myself in.

Spam of the day:

Identity Issue PP-658-119-347

I believe that you are the PayPal Review Department exactly as much as I believe the South Asian-accented man who called himself Steve Martin on the phone yesterday really was calling from the Treasury Department².

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¹ Or at least North’s obsession with the novelization of the movie.

² I called him to point out he is very bad at being a thief and he hung up on me. So I called back and got him again and continued my spiel. After five further discussions (sample statement from me: I can do this all day), he apparently decided he had to take a break and a woman picked up in his place. She said I was very rude and not to call their scam operation again or I would be in trouble. That was fun.

(more…)

Webcomics is a relatively small group of people trying their best to live a creative life, most of whom will spend a significant time flirting with poverty (or at least under-earning compared to their age cohort); this is a situation that is tailor-made for adopting a zero sum game mentality that says If I can undermine that guy over there, keep him from making a couple sales, maybe I can get his booth space at SuperMegaConOrama. Maybe that will make him give up and go back to the day job. Maybe I can sweep him his audience then and by this time next year I won’t have as much trouble making rent.

And yet that doesn’t happen. Every day, I see acts small (What was the name of that Photoshop brush you used? Did you know you can do this, it saves me a mountain of time. Hey everybody, I just discovered this great new comic, go check it out!) to huge (I will pay my artists bonuses above what I’ve already paid them. Here is what I’ve learned about making it as a creator, so you don’t have to learn the lessons over a decade like I did.) to potentially life-changing (I will fund scholarships for my future competition.) fly around the webcomicsosphere like it ain’t no thang. As a rule, creators keep an eye out for each other and want everybody to succeed.

And sometimes, that out-kept eye requires a bit of digging so as to prevent colleagues from falling into a hole. Enter David Malki !, webcomicker, filmmaker, pilot, firearms technician, woodworker, game creator, author, editor, darling of the Maker community, podcaster, and (in context of today’s discussion) financial canary in the coalmine:

This has bugged me for a long time. I’ve received Bank of America merchant-service promotions in the mail; I’ve gotten phone calls about it; and I’ve even had firsthand experience dealing with it, on behalf of other businesses.

So, this is a small-business public service announcement! Don’t believe that guarantee. Or anything, really. Don’t believe anything, ever. [emphasis original]

You really want to follow that link, if you’ve ever thought I need to get an account to take credit cards for my creative business; Malki ! has systematically taken apart the offer made by (in this case) Bank of America (I’m sure other large banks offer similarly bad arrangements) for a merchant charge account and a lease on a credit card swiper. Short version: Sign up with them and you will pay far more than you would with, say, Square, and will be locked into an equipment lease for years, racking up thousands of dollars of excess fees and costs, with little to no recourse to get out. This is honestly the sort of warning that could keep somebody from failing in an on-the-edge business (or make failure less painful and protracted). It’s not something that he ever had to share once he’d satisfied himself as to the relative merits of BoA’s offer¹; that he did share it was an act of generosity and community that should be acknowledged.

And seriously — go read it and then understand that behind every offer that a powerful oliogarchic company makes to you, there lives the potential for this kind of screw-job. Read the contract, understand the terms, get the assurances from the smiling, slick sales-type in writing and notarized. As was observed on this page seven years and a day ago:

I was once challenged for saying, [A]ll contracts are inherently about ensuring that — if needed — you can cut the other guy’s heart out and he’s legally obligated to provide the blade.

Don’t be on the receiving end of that blade.

Spam of the day:

brandsecretーブランドシークレット

In case you were wondering, the string of katakana just says “brandsecret” again. But bonus points for sending me spam with a link to, and I quote, idrinkleadpaint.com. Which is apparently a legit site that ran a Kickstarter a couple years back. Ain’t no way I’m clicking through to see what the deal there is.

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¹ Which is to say, you suffer from having too much money and want to give some to a very rich corporation.

No theme today, just not finding enough things that resemble each other.

• Via the twitter machine of A Girl and Her Fed creator K Brooke “Otter” Spangler comes news of a really well-written discussion of publishing contracts by Hugo winner Kameron Hurly, via the blog of Chuck Wendig. That’s a roundabout way of getting to the item at hand, but it’s through a series of really smart people, so that’s all right.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about contracts since the news of Ron Perazza’s job shift yesterday, since he was fairly synonymous with Zuda and I spent a lot of time picking apart their contracts back in the day, and I’ve always had a particular interpretation of contracts¹.

  Or as Hurley puts it, the people offering that contract are not your friends and boilerplate is inherently a screwjob:

  I hear this a lot in publishing “Oh, but they are such nice people!” The people at my current publisher, Angry Robot, are super nice people. I love them to pieces. But I’ve seen their boilerplate contracts. Many of the editors at Tor – also nice people! But… I’ve seen their boilerplate, too. Name a publisher and I can name you nice people there who nevertheless will hand over boilerplate contracts to new writers because that’s simply corporate policy (“Boilerplate” refers to a standard, unnegotiated contract that the publishing house’s lawyers have approved and hope authors will blindly sign, thinking it can’t be negotiated or that it must be totally on the up and up because shouldn’t a major publishing house be trustworthy? No more than any other corporation, my friends). Publishers and online platforms like Amazon and Kobo are not here because they necessarily love authors and the written word (some do) but because there is money to be made. They offer their services because they are businesses.

  There have been a long string of really nice people running publishing houses who still stole their authors’ royalties, went bankrupt, or worse. Someone being “really nice” says nothing about what kind of deal they’ll offer you. At the end of the day, you can be sure that even if you’re thinking that writing is a happy, pleasant friendly circle jerk among friends, your publishers are thinking they’re engaged in a money-making business, and they’re treating it as such. Even if you’re signing with some mom-and-pop shop publisher that’s your best friend and her husband stapling pamphlets themselves, if you sign over all your rights to them, your rights become something they own, so if they go bankrupt or want to sell off rights to license your work to someone else, you’ll have zero say in the matter.

  All that protects you in this business is the language in your contract. And that’s language that you sit down and study before anything goes wrong, when everything looks great, when you’re heady with the idea of publishing your first book, or your first book with a major press, or your first series, or whatever. It can be difficult to imagine, in that heady, carefree moment, all the things that could go wrong. But having been through many things that went wrong in my career, let me say this: there’s a lot that could go wrong, and you need to keep your head out of the clouds when you’re sitting down with a contract. [emphasis original]

  It’s a good, important read for anybody that’s self-publishing, non-self-publishing, or in any way engaged in the business end of creation.

• Raina Telgemeier continues her domination of the new-to-comics set; if she weren’t such a darn nice person, I’d start worrying that her real goal wasn’t just to make excellent YA comics, but to develop an entire generation of fans who will eventually grow up, and regard her as their living Goddess-Queen. Should it turn out that the teeming crowds that gather around her at every appearance and book tour stop in fact are laying the groundwork for an eventual worldwide coup d’etat, let me remind them all that I’ve been a Telgemeier fan and booster since before some of them were born and welcome their future regime. All hail.
• Oh jeeze, oh jeeze, David Malki ! has gone and launched a Kickstarter. So far this one hasn’t seen the enormous takeoff of the fabled Machine of Death game, with the day one funds equalling only about 10% of the funds raised in the equivalent time of the earlier campaign. Which means that at this time, it’s “only” on trend to succeed, but at the moment it doesn’t seem to have enough backers (yet) for the Fleen {Funding | Fudge} {Formula | Factor} to be utilized yet.

  Malki ! always brings something new to projects and this time it appears to be in the Add-Ons:

  Feel free to choose any tier, then add the amount below to your pledge total to add any of these items à la carte to your pledge. Feel free to add as many instances as you like – we will ask you later which designs or titles specifically to send you.

  The weird penny amounts are so we can easily track which add-ons you’ve ordered! Please add the exact amount listed, otherwise it will confuse us and make everything take longer.

  • ADD ON 1 OF ANY PUZZLE = ADD $25.03
  • ADD ON 1 OF ANY POSTER = ADD $15.05
  • ADD ON 1 OF ANY BOOK = ADD $10.07

  Those odd numbers of cents will add up to totals that uniquely describe which add-ons somebody opted for; I’m going to bet that makes Malki !’s life significantly easier come fulfillment time, and makes me wonder why nobody has used parity-code pricing before. Clever!

• Speaking of crowdfundings, there will be one soon enough for my favorite new webcomic of 2014, Stand Still, Stay Silent:
  

  There we go, now chapter 3 is officially over and the dreaded chapter break begins! Two weeks this time, because I’m going to be preparing the oh-so-imminent print drive for SSSS book 1 so that I can launch it around the same time as chapter 4. So nothing next week while I try to get everything up, and then the adventure continues either on Tuesday or Wednesday the following week. I haven’t quite decided yet, just got to see how efficiently I manage to get everything done. :3

  In case you haven’t been following Minna Sundberg’s postapocalyptic dram-com, she’s put together 178 updates of full (sometimes multiple) pages, in color, between 3 and 4 a week on average, since 1 November of last year. Holy crap, that’s a lot of comics, and the story hasn’t even introduced all of its main cast yet, but it doesn’t feel slow or dragged-out in the least.

  My guess is it’ll end up being as long as your BONEs or Vattus², and it will be worth every damn page. It’s smart, it’s gorgeous, it’s engrossing, and it’s going to stand as one of the great longform stories in comics. Get caught up now so you are ready to order up Book 1 in a couple weeks when the fundraiser goes up.

Spam of the day:

The lack of transparency and credibility in banks’ balance sheets fuels a vicious cycle. When investors can’t trust the books, lenders can’t raise capital and may have to fall back on their home countries’ governments for help.

I believe that you are concerned with banking transparency about as much as I believe that “Greg” who called me this morning really was “from Computer Support Windows Microsoft”.

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¹ The specific quote doesn’t actually appear on that page; it was alt text for an image, which was lost in a past server migration. It’s been quoted a couple of places in the Fleen archives, though, and I stand by the sentiment, so I’ve reintroduced it in the alt text of today’s image.

² Which, by the bye, is back from interchapter hiatus on Monday, hooray! And his OZ illustrated edition is on the verge of completion, double hooray!

Almost everybody’s busy with the Apple product announcements going on today, so it’s a boring day for me; I mean, the only Apple product I own is a second-generation Nano that’s still got the Stuff Sucks Gelaskin wrap on it. Let’s see what’s happening within webcomicdom.

• In case you hadn’t heard, David Malki ! has a sofa that needs a good home. Okay, fine, he’s calling it a couch, but if we call it a sofa, we can make the obligatory Zappa reference.
• There are few people who have done as many different types of comics as Dylan Meconis, and there are even fewer people that I could stand to be stranded on a desert island with. She’s got an amazing line, a keen sense of story (whether serious or comedic, short form or long), and is just a little bit evil¹; she also knows more about Star Trek than you do, just deal with it. Today’s her birthday, which means I get to appreciate her even more than normal. Happy Birthday, Dylan!
• Going to SPX this weekend? One of the issues that has dogged the show since its move from downtown Bethesda to the northern, highway-ish reaches of town has been the relative lack of food options within easy distance of the convention hotel². It’s not really that there’s no food to be had, but it is spread across a divided road and a bunch of strip-malls; as a result, it was a delight to see the official SPX tweet-feed contribute to the likelihood that attendees and exhibitors might end up well fed:
  

  The amazingly talented @yaoxiaoart did us a huge solid this year. She created a beautiful food map for SPX! pic.twitter.com/4nGX5RESMW

  It’s less “map” (in that it’s not a representation of places and their locations relative to landmarks) and more “illustrated guide”, but it’s still wonderful. Click through to help make your plans.

• Ron Perazza has been involved in comics, particularly the digital/webcomics-adjacent end of them, for a long time. He was the driving force behind DC’s Zuda, and if that was an imperfect experiment, it was a case of a large publisher trying something at least. He also involved himself in the production end of things at Marvel in the wake of the Zudaplosion and shakeups at DC, and has continuously — I believe, at least — been trying to find ways to bring major publishers into closer accord with independent creators, without screwing them.

  Today, he takes that (largely self-defined) mission to a place where it might actually take root:

  So this is new. I left Marvel. Today was my first day as Creative Director for Amazon Publishing. I’m pretty excited about the whole thing.

  Watch this closely; particularly, keep an eye on to whatever degree Perazza can influence how Amazon runs comiXology. Good luck with the new gig, Ron — do good work, and we in New Jersey are sorry to see you decamp to sunnier climes³.

• Seriously, it’s a nice sofa, and there’s totally a map under the right-hand cushion that leads to pirate treasure.

Spam of the day:

In just a week you will reduce 4″ guaranteed.

I’d think less of this if it weren’t from the same people trying to sell me other stuff to add 4″ guaranteed.

_______________
¹ She may have encouraged me to take a picture in front of a Portland food truck pod to send to Rich Stevens knowing that it would evoke massive feelings of envy in him. She’s the devil in my ear, whispering to me that I should live my life in the most amusing fashion possible.

² This is almost an unfair complaint, as downtown Bethesda is practically wall-to-wall restaurants, with representatives of just about every world cuisine imaginable. I surmise this has to do with the proximity to Washington, DC, and the many embassies therein; if you’re tired of cooking for the ambassador and want to take a whack at running your own place, the town is full of diners that readily accept new national dishes.

³ That is purely a metaphorical statement; today it appears to be sunny in Seattle and it is cloudy in New Jersey; I gather that much of the year it is suicidally drizzly in the Pacific Northwest.

Before I have to clear out of here to make a Friday-afternoon flight.

• Jim Zub’s Makeshift Miracle resumes from hiatus today, until October at least. If you haven’t been reading, get started on that.
• Matthew Inman gets some props from Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of RadioLab in an interview over at The AV Club. Said props are specifically on the topic of murdershrimps, but the interview itself is a nice meditation on the nature of creativity and creative partnerships.
• Hiveworks continues its rapid expansion with the addition of Hurricane Erika’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy. A long time ago I wrote about a theoretical webcomics support-services provider that I termed Aduz; today in addition to Hiveworks and its hosting/advertising gigs, you have TopatoCo’s curated merch-handling, Make That Thing’s Kickstarter-wrangling, Blind Ferret staking out a spot between HW and The Big T, Breadpig expanding from mostly publishing-related ventures into Kickstarter sherpa services, and the ever-present George. Aduz is here, service providers keep growing to fill the need, and here’s hoping they manage their growth smartly so as not to overextend beyond capacity¹. Exciting times.

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¹ TopatoCo are the masters at this; I’d estimate they could be at least 30% larger than they are right now, but only by doing a crappier, less-fun-for-them job, which is something they are not willing to do. If every company took that as a model, the economy would be a lot stronger and going to a job that required pants wouldn’t suck so much.

Yesterday’s post was bigger than one would normally expect, particularly for a Wednesday when it is scientifically proven that nothing of interest ever happens, and yet there we were. Lost in the shuffle were some things which were (and are) worth mentioning.

• The Joey Comeau-penned, Mike Holmes-drawed Bravest Warriors comic has been upgraded from miniseries to ongoing, and that Fionna and Cake will get their own miniseries come January. Per Comeau’s twitterfeed, BW#1 will be available at NYCC (which kicked off for VIP/pro/press day a couple hours ago), and per everybody and their dog, F&C#1 will feature an alternate cover by Becky Dreistadt. Good times, my friends.
• If you look up the words “noble failure” in the dictionary, you’ll be flipping back and forth a lot because there’s probably like 700 pages between the N pages and the F pages, but let’s pretend for a moment they’d be together.

  Anyway, look ’em up, and down around reference number five or six (out of thirty-seven) there could be a mention of Zuda [no link exists¹], which did some things right (looking for new talent not already working with major comics publishers, an uncharacteristic amount of transparency for a major comics publisher), some things wrong (contests and contracts), and some things inconceivably (formatting requirements and oh lump, that interface).

  While I had some definite opinions on the entire Zudaenterprise, I remain steadfast in my stance that they popularized some damn good comics, and the people that worked there were true in their aims. This is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me: I will die in it at the stake.²

  We recently noted some of what onetime Zudaeditor Kwanza Johnson has been up to, and this week brings news of onetime head of DC Creative Services Ron Perazza (if memory serves, he stayed on after the shutdown of Zuda, but left DC a while later in the wake of a corporate restructuring about two years back) and what he’s been up to. Namely, a new site in partnership with Daniel Govar (a one-time Zuda contributor), Comic Book Think Tank. The statement of purpose is pretty promising:

  This site is the creative playground of Ron Perazza and Daniel Govar – comic book professionals with years of experience in a wide variety of creative and techincal areas. It’s a place where we can explore what comics are (or can be) and where we can share the results of those experiments with any and all who are interested.

  I’m particularly interested to see what kinds of results Perazza and Govar might produce and encourage everybody with an interest in comics to keep an eye on their experiments. For now, the centerpiece of the site is a self-contained story, Relaunch, with others yet to come. Seems like a half-dozen or so of these stories (30 clicks to finish, but some of that results in overlays on the current page, so web page count <> printed page count) might make an nice anthology? We shall see.

_______________
¹ Zudarest in Zudapeace.

² Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1. By the way, do you like SHAKESPEARE? And perhaps do you like things that are FUNNY and/or AWESOME, and relate to webcomics? Watch this page in the next few weeks, because my friend, will we ever have a treat in store for you.

I believe that it is a matter of record that one of this page’s favoritest creators is “Hurricane” Erika Moen, who is funny, brave, honest, and knows her way around risqué material¹ like a champ. It is a matter of record that this page cannot wait for the print release of her latest comic, Bucko (with Jeff Parker), despite the cognitive dissonance this page gets when realizing that Bucko presented juggalos as fully-realized characters worthy of our attention. Honestly, Erika and Jeff — this page may never forgive you for that.³

So it’s understandable that it’s considered newsworthy in these parts to point out that Ms Moen will be part of a three-woman art show in Portland, Oregon this Thursday, 2 August. And because it’s Erika Moen, it’s understandable that the theme of the show is erotic art by comics artists, and perhaps inevitable that the venue will be Gallery Sesso, contained within the walls of Club Sesso, which is owned by Ron “Yes, that Ron Jeremy” Jeremy.

Perhaps you shouldn’t click on those last two links if you’re at work? All the details are available at Moen’s website.

Oh, and about that nickname that I bestowed on Ms Moen? Come 2015, it could be literally true.

Side note for any that missed it: Kwanza Johnson (onetime Zuda editor; while I think that the design and interface of Zuda left much to be desired, there were some damn good comics there while it lasted) has neatly summarized the priorities of [digital] comics creators in one picture. Ignore the numbers at your peril.

______________
¹ Including when to be classy, instructive, just revel in the smut (or a combo platter of any of the preceding) as the situation dictates.²

² Heh, heh, he said, “dick”.

³ Oh, who is this page kidding — c’mere, you.

How do you feel about words? Particularly words put together to entertain, inform and/or delight? I have some to share with you today.

• First up, Chris Sims (of Comics Alliance, the Invincible Super-Blog, Awesome Hospital, and Batmanology fame) has dropped one of his excellent thinky pieces — not that I don’t love the funny stuff, like his justly-famous evisceration of Tarot #53 [as NSFW as you possibly can be], but when he’s serious, he’s as good a writer on comics as we have.

  He’s looking at the question of why comic book publishers aren’t doing webcomics to drive interest in their characters (really focusing on Marvel and DC, since one could argue that Dark Horse has had a setup similar to what he’s described via their Myspace Dark Horse Presents, despite the clunky interface), and while the issue has been discussed many places in the past (including this page), Sims has a knack for cutting through the crap.

  What he’s saying makes sense … it makes all the sense in the world, and there are executive types in executive-type offices that need to be giving his arguments serious consideration. Had Zuda [RIP] follow Sims’s model, it would still be with us and DC wouldn’t be trying the Hail Mary pass of rebooting-but-not-really their entire line.

• In other corners of the internet, Ryan North is talking with Smithsonian magazine’s online arm about … dinosaurs! Yeah, okay, not much of a surprise, topic-wise, but given that Smithsonian is probably the best general-interest magazine being produced in the US today, and given that I’m likely on the low end of the age cohort for their subscriber base, it’s a big deal. Ryan says some words about his creative process, about how his readers teach him about dinosaurs, and some very nice things about Anthony Clark’s Nedroid.
• Speaking of Nedroid, did you see the very calm (far calmer than I would have been) tweet that Clark dropped earlier today regarding a blatant act of theivery?
  

  Reminder: There is no official “Nedroid App,” and if you buy one you are getting ripped off.

  Near as I can tell (Clark, rightly, isn’t giving the perp any links and neither will I), this is in reference to an app at an unofficial iOS market that promises Nedroid Comics for the low-low price of only US$1.99, which would be awesome if it were the developer’s legal right to sell them. While we’ve has the discussion on this page in the past about what constitutes fair vs unfair development of webcomics apps, this one is way over the line.

  It’s not an RSS aggregator. It’s not a fancy skin on the browser that directs you to Clark’s site. Near as I can tell (I don’t have an iDevice, nor would I give the developer any money to test my theory), it’s an entire damn archive of Nedroid comics delivered in one big bolus to your phone. I come to this conclusion because the size of the app is helpfully listed as 136.4 MB, and there’s no damn way a non-thieving app could ever require that much space.

  A DMCA takedown request has been sent, which is good. Better would be finding out it had been honored promptly, the developer suitably chastised, and monies recovered on Clark’s behalf. But if I find that app still exists in public form in, say, 48 hours, I will gladly offer to bankroll whatever further legal measures that need to be taken to put a stop to this nonsense.

• Let’s finish with some happy news. There are words from mad genius toymaker¹ Andy Bell regarding his newest, somewhat fishy, creation. And there’s a sample panel from Chris Eliopolous of his contribution (with Mike Maihack) to a comics adaptation of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.

  The Storyteller is a particular favorite of his very large body of work (as with a lot of Henson’s late period, it’s animatronic heavy and appealed to a young engineering geek), and the dark nature of original fairy tales (before the Brothers Grimm cleaned them up, way the hell before Disney made them safe) has always appealed to me², so I’m waiting for this one with bated breath. Urge to kill … fading³.

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¹ Or “nightmare maker”, I can never remember which.

² More thoughts on fairy tales vis-à-vis webcomics may be found here; had I been thinking when writing that piece, I would have linked the performance fleece line to this comic.

³ Except for the urge to kill some tasty fish. Mmmmm … sashimi.