In the most reckless stretch goal of all time, North has promised that his final stretch goals for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST will be:

$425,000 = another 25 books sent to libraries and schools!
$450,000 = another 25 books sent to libraries and schools! Also I will … create a pizza that looks like Hamlet and… eat it?
$475,000 = another 50 books sent to libraries and schools!
$500,000 = I will literally explode [emphasis original]

Judging from the uptick in support in the past couple of days, it appears that he just might do it. Please, people, think of Chompsky! Do not cause Ryan North to explode, if only because he is a giant of a man and the pieces would require immense cleanup .

• You know who’s a stellar (pun intended) guy, just an amazingly wonderful representative of all the best that [web]comics offers? Dave Roman. Sometimes he gets lost in the shuffle when his wife, the fabulously talented Raina Telgemeier goes and dominates the New York Times YA bestseller lists for two or three years at a time, but just look at the stuff that Roman’s done (oftentimes with partner John Green): Jax Epoch. Teen Boat¹. Agnes Quill. Fantasy, goofball teen angst, mystery — all genres and audiences find something by Roman to call their own.

  And, as he has for some time now, Roman also brings in the youngest readers with the Sci-Fi school days adventure of Astronaut Academy, the second collection of which is rapidly approaching. This is the book I give to kids just starting to read longer books for pleasure; when they’ve outgrown it, there’s plenty more Roman to keep ’em busy. So thank you, Dave, for all your varied work, and keep doing what you’re doing.

• Today’s reason to keep on going in an uncertain future: Tracy White’s return to webcomics:
  

  About to start drawing my first new comic (online only) in three years. #goodtobeback

  I’ll got out on a limb and guess you’ll be able to find the new work (as yet unnamed) at White’s main site, Traced. Given the two and a half years since How I Made It To Eighteen was released, I’ll go out on another limb and say that White’s got some stories building up just waiting to be shared with the world. Keep your eyes peeled and your hands inside the car at all times.

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¹ Obligatory warning: do not ever Google the words “teen boat” without appending the word “comic(s)”, and especially not image searches. Just … just trust me on this one.

Friend o’ Fleen Rick Marshall did a set of live, on-camera interviews at Long Beach Comic and Horror Con earlier this month the first of which is now available for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to turn your speakers UP, as the little percussion sting at start takes on a Lalo Schifrinesque character when given sufficient volume. Don’t wuss out with little speakers on your laptop, either — give that sucker some bass.

• We’re a little more than two weeks into this year’s Child’s Play holiday campaign which makes it a good time to note that the current take is north of half a million dollars, which if the current giving rate can be maintained will produce a total normally only seen attached to things like Homestuck Kickstarters.

  Though unlike Kickstarters, which see a huge front-loaded effort that then drops off (maybe regaining momentum at the end of the campaign), Child’s Play tends to see week-on-week increases through at least the first half of the campaign, typically peaking around the phenomenally well-funded charity dinner/auction (which this year will be on Thursday, 6 December in Bellevue, WA). Recall that Child’s Play has an unbroken streak (even through the economic meltdown) of increasing totals year-to-year, which means another US$3million need to be raised to keep the tradition alive.

• Speaking of Child’s Play, there’s an entire calendar of events covering the next few weeks, meaning that nearly everybody has a chance to do something that’s simultaneously fund and beneficial and maybe even local. Case in point: my favorite recurring event is Ümloud!, because you really can’t have too many umlauts in your life.

  Having long since grown beyond its conception as some people playing Rock Band in a bar, this year’s Ümloud! will stream the Rock Band fun over the internet, so everybody can enjoy it. Everybody that’s not at the charity auction in Bellevue, that is, as it’s also on 6 December. If you’re catching the fun from home, maybe check out the participating hospital map¹ and find a local beneficiary that you could toss a few bucks? Just sayin’.

• Interesting: a Top 100 Most Important People List (such as you would find this time of year), this time referring to movers and/or shakers in the comics industry. Unsurprisingly, it’s reportedly overwhelmingly male² with the first woman not showing up until slot #29 (Diane Nelson, head of DC Entertainment).

  In fact, all but one of the women are outside the creative end of comics, the one outlier, the single woman deemed important from a creative standpoint being Kate Beaton. While I have to object that no other female creators are worthy of recognition, it’s hard to argue with the influence Beaton’s had, particularly given the very wide swath of attention that she’s earned both inside and outside comics for the past year and a half or so.

  But seriously, no Amanda Conner? Fiona Staples is redefining how beautiful comic art can be with her work on Saga, Carla Speed McNeil is breaking the boundaries of SF work with Finder, Colleen Doran’s Gone to Amerikay has been received with universal acclaim, and Spike Trotman released Poorcraft to fill a niche that nobody else even recognized. Raina Telgemeier continues a multi-year domination of the YA market, and Hope Larson and Meredith Gran are hauling new/young/female readers into comics hand over fist.

  Granted, the list is reportedly focused on who has power within the industry, but if you don’t have comics that people want to read, you don’t have an industry. If you can’t see how these women (and I could name plenty more) are influential on comics today, and especially to keeping comics alive as a vital industry for the coming decades, you’ve got some research to do.

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¹ Which initially centers on North America, yes, but which is scrollable for reasons. Drag ‘er around to other hemispheres, see what you can find!

² On account of the whole thing won’t be revealed until tomorrow, in the inaugural issue of a print companion to the Bleeding Cool website.

Let’s see now — network is slowed to a crawl, electrical is intermittently going out (including lights, including in the bathrooms), PAs sniffily holding up fingers to indicate that you simply can’t go that way now, equipment accumulated in the hallways to the point that access to the fire exits is entirely theoretical at this point, and attitude thrown at my students. If it weren’t for the plentiful snack tables set up, I’d be approaching An Incident at this point. And okay, fine, I hate things like the murder of all my loved ones more, but those situations typically don’t occur at work.

So I’m behind on the details of what came out of SPX, aside from the fact that everybody seemed to be selling a mountain of stuff. I can’t give you a numbers breakdown on the latest Homestuck Kickstarter unlocked tier¹ except to note that it’s caused a pretty significant upwards tick in backing. I can tell you that Order of the Stick, Penny Arcade, and TwoKinds remain the all-time top three Kickstarter comics projects, but that’s because Homestuck is classified as a videogame. With US$1.4million and counting, Homestuck has eclipsed all other comics-related endeavours.

So come back tomorrow, hopefully the film crews will be out of here, and I’ll be able to share more, like how Raina Telgemeier has managed to snag the #1 and #2 slots on the New York Times bestseller list for graphic novels, which is normally the sort of thing that requires you to be named Rowling or King or Gaiman. Everybody celebrate by getting a copy of DRAMA to go with their copy of SMILE — it’s seriously that good, and well deserving of the acclaim and sales.

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¹ Although I will say: Homestuck-themed tarot deck? Genius.

As a professional communicator, a colleague once opined to me, the most important tool you have at your disposal is silence. He turned out to be kind of a weird guy, but he had been an announcer for the CBC in his youth, so I imagine he had that part right. It fit with my own experiences in radio oh so long ago, and was almost word-for-word something that Ira Glass said about a year later:

I like Harry Shearer, who does a show on KCRW in Santa Monica that’s syndicated to some stations around the country. Listening to his show taught me that it’s okay to pause however fucking long you want to in the middle of a sentence on the air.

So — silences are good; keep that in mind as I talk about three books today, which have in common a couple of things:

1. Copies were gifted to me by the respective authors on the floor of SDCC
2. Each of them approaches its story with a unique appreciation for silence

We’ll start with DRAMA by Raina Telgemeier, read in an uncorrected proof edition, and available 1 September. Like her earlier, autobiographical Smile, DRAMA takes place in middle school, and Telgemeier’s ear for the early teenage years — the rhythms of speech patterns, the small dramas that loom so large within the framing story of a drama club’s spring production — is as sharp as ever. Callie, Jesse, Justin, Liz, and all the others aren’t facsimiles of 7th- and 8th-graders, they’re living, breathing, scheming, hurting, striving, entirely alive people that just so happen to have originated somewhere in Telgemeier’s imagination.

She uses silences in all the expected ways — montage, reaction, actions that don’t feature anybody talking — but also as gutters. The gutters, Scott McCloud taught us, are where the reader has control of the story and determines what happens that isn’t being explicitly shown. The difference here is the actions are being shown (without words) at big emotional beats; where one panel would have more than adequately gotten across the mood of the story, flipping the page and finding two, three, four more panels, spread across as many as two pages, serves as an extended moment of audience interaction.

Callie is {humiliated | lost | abandoned | embarrassed | other} — choose from your own experience, the mood that resonates with the reader has no choice but to build over the time it takes to traverse all of those “extra” panels. Those silences are uncomfortable, not because we’re told they are, but because Telgemeier makes us remember every time we’ve ever been in those situations. Bravo.

By contrast, Makeshift Miracle Book 1: The Girl From Nowhere (available now, although the comics in this volume only finished online three days ago) by Jim Zub (Mr Zubkavich, if you’re nasty) uses silence as a counterpoint to internal monologue. Some of you may have read about Colby Reynolds and the mystery girl, Iris, in Zub’s original treatment, The Makeshift Miracle, collected in book form in 2006; back then, Zub handled both writing and art chores, and while Zub would be the first to say that the new, full-color art by Shun Hong Chan is an improvement, I always thought that the original made for an intimate, singular POV in the story.

But this is a different story, not just different art. Story beats have been rearranged, the narrations (from the explicit perspective of a diary written after the fact) have largely been replaced with an in-the-moment reactive monologue. Most importantly, the story has been given much more room, by a factor of 50-100%, with single pages being replaced by two, three, or more where necessary. Colby doesn’t have that much more to say, thus — silences, and plenty of them. The additional room gives the ability to show more and tell less, making the story less Let me tell you what happened to me and more Come along and see what’s going on in my life.

The otherworldly, mysterious interactions of Colby and Iris give the story the space to breathe. It’s not just an exercise in decompressed storytelling, it’s taking the opportunity to stop and smell the weirdness that the characters otherwise would have been too nonchalant about. If you have a copy of the earlier The Makeshift Miracle, don’t look at the new edition (which isn’t complete, in any event) as a replacement; these are the same story, but different treatments that deserve to be evaluated on their own merits.

Finally, Sailor Twain, or, The Mermaid in the Hudson (collecting the now-completed webcomic, and generally available 2 October) by Mark Siegel, also known as the editorial director of :01 Books (which, as previously noted, is pound-for-pound the most celebrated graphic novel publisher in the world). Here, along the Hudson River from Manhattan to Albany, amid Gilded Age wealth and decadence, silence is almost a force of nature.

Things that should be noisy — violent storms, enormous side-wheeler steamships, Civil War battlefields — are rendered with barely a sound effect or indication of shouting. The effect is striking, particularly in a story that emphasizes the dangers of sound, and which for the longest time dances around what the most hazardous of them all — the mermaid’s song — might sound like.

Sounds of the industrial age, sounds of ancient enchantment, sounds which deafen, and sounds which drive men to die or to kill are implied in the moody, delicate pencil and charcoal drawings, but are for the most part left to the imagination of the reader. Like the other books above, this makes Sailor Twain an intensely reader-driven experience. Peruse it slowly, carefully, and maybe stay away from sad songs while you do.

Okay, look. It’s been a long day, a long week, and you got a mountain of text off of me yesterday morning, and you’ll get more on Tuesday. Monday evening, if Monday’s flight is particularly boring. Let’s do both of us a favor and keep this brief.

• Saturday we heard that Dave Kellett and Dylan Meconis both lost out in their respective Eisner categories, booo.
• Saturday I spent a fair bit of time talking with the always-smart Vijaya Iyer about the business of media in general and Kickstarter in particular. More on that later.
• Saturday I happened to run into Raina Telgemeier at random on the floor, and she was kind enough to give me an advanced review copy of her latest graphic novel, the hotly-anticipated DRAMA. Understand, I’m primed and ready to read DRAMA, given how much I’ve loved Raina’s previous work, but each time I’ve talked with Scott McCloud, he’s let me know how this book is, quote, A game-changer. I suspect that as soon as I read it, I am going to be getting downright evangelical about DRAMA.
• Saturday Scott & Kris announced their new Blamimation-style treatment of Mappy¹ for ShiftyLook. Rich Stevens announced that he’ll be running print versions of Diesel Sweeties material via Oni Press, as well as other projects as a writer.

Saturday purchases: RASL volume 4, given an ARC of DRAMA.

In the panel rooms today: Keenspot at 2:00, Axe Cop at 3:00.

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¹ The mouse police.

The things is, working on The Next Way Of Doing Things isn’t enough. As Dave Kellett clearly stated as the final thought of his talk, his analysis and recommendations are only good for 12 – 18 months tops; after that point, the complexities become too pronounced, the future path too hard to predict from here and now. In a lot of ways, for a lot of people, The Next Way Of Doing Things is arriving just in time to become irrelevant, since everybody already engaged in The Next Way is currently developing The Way After That.

This situation leads to Rashomonesque situations for observers, and where participants who just now are coming to realize that they’re a generation behind on business practice are unable to even perceive that they’re actually on the verge of being two generations behind¹. I have to imagine that such a realization would lead to — at the least — disorientation, and likely anger.

Before Jim Davis’s talk, word was already making the rounds about something that happened at the closed-door NCS member’s meeting that morning. Jon Rosenberg was busy being taught the secret handshake as a new member, business items were taken care of, and the floor opened to anybody that wanted to make comments.

Cue the ominous music.

The NCS has a hefty contingent of members that are extremely elderly²; some of these guys remember what it was like 50, 60 years ago, when there weren’t no dames, everybody looked alike, and the engineers that would someday invent the tools these digital whippersnappers would eventually use were still in diapers. Change is the last thing you want at that stage in your life, but most people are too polite to shit over somebody in public. One guy, though….

Okay, I want to go out of my way to be fair, here. I don’t know the gentleman in question, haven’t ever met him, and for all I know he loves his dog and his great-grandchildren and is motivated more by fear than by malice. In my head (for I was not there), I imagine that one slightly crazy great-uncle that every family seems to dread inviting to Thanksgiving, because while he might profess to be joking when he complains about all of the <insert minority here> you can’t shake the feeling that he’s “kidding on the square”. Good ol’ crazy Great-Uncle Slappy. Yeah. Pass the yams.

So Great-Uncle Slappy engaged in what others have described (accurately, I believe) as a “screed” against them young’uns, and how there need to be different tiers of membership because real cartoonists use paper, and anybody using digital means should have to pay more to belong³. Welcome to the NCS, Jon.

I might not have brought Great-Uncle Slappy up, except that for the rest of the weekend, I heard one thought repeatedly expressed: people were angry about the rant. Maybe he was kidding, maybe he wasn’t, but to act in such a manner towards fellow members was not acceptable. I heard people that wished they could have told G-US to sit down and shut up, but felt constrained by politeness and the fact that he apparently always gets the last speaking slot to complain. I heard one board member apologize to Jon personally, saying that he’d wished he’d been able to cut the mic. I wonder if Cathy Guisewite, Lynn Johnston, Hillary Price were wondering if the bile would turn in their direction.

So there’s the crux of the problem — a generation that remembers How Things Used To Be, a generation that sees How Things Must Change (which, to be clear, seems to incorporate the entire leadership of the NCS), and a teeny-tiny generation that have been working on their own and decided to find out what the NCS might have to offer. For actuarial reasons, it is imperative that the second generation increase the numbers of the third generation and rapidly, because without new blood, the organization will age itself out of existence. While we’re at it, the NCS probably needs to be a whole lot less male, a whole lot less white, or what appeal will it have to the extraordinary talents that surely have better things to do than be berated — he’s kidding! really! — by Great-Uncle Slappy?

And there’s the rub. To a person, every member I met and spoke with (especially the board members) recognizes this reality and the importance of making changes. I think that the new division award for On-Line Comic Strips (one last time, imperfect; one last time, potential to be what people want and need it to be) is just the first step. Making the organization institutionally friendly to younger creators isn’t just a good idea — it’s a survival strategy.

People like Mike Krahulik and Dave Kellett may have first picked up a pen because of Garfield or Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes, but what of the half-generation that came behind them and may not have had the habit of reading newspapers? Is being in the room with history — but not personal inspirations — enough to entice them 10 or 20 years from now?

But what if the current generation of creators⁴ were there to greet them? Do they have an incentive to join for the sheer love of the medium and wait out the generational shift? Heck, will they see value in going to another city for the weekend and not sell stuff?

If I seem to be more identifying questions than proposing answers, it’s because I don’t really have a say in the matter. I’m not eligible for membership, I don’t draw, I am very much the consumer instead of the creator. To the extent that I’m able to work a small part of the transformation⁵, I am happy to do so. But right now, the future of the organization depends on how much potential members value being part of a continuity to the history of comics. There’s a big dialogue to be had among the interested parties and I think it’s going to be fascinating.

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¹ Or perhaps merely haven’t processed it into higher realms of acceptance yet.

² I heard the number 91, being the count of members over the age of 80.

³ I imagine that Gregg Evans, who has produced Luann on a Cintiq for years, was thrilled at this notion.

⁴ Off the top of my head: Gran, Beaton, Brosgol, Telgemeier, Larson, Vernon, Moen, Meconis, Corsetto, Allegri, Sugar, Ward, Jones-Quartey, Dreistadt, Ota, Carroll, Miller and Mercer (yes, I’m still on about them, they’re terrific), and shall I go on?

The careful reader may notice something most of these creators have in common.

⁵ I’m actually torn about this — I have great affection for webcomics and some people think the depth and breadth of my knowledge are enough to make me useful in the ongoing process of coming up with an award everybody can be proud of. On the other hand, from a philosophical standpoint, I feel it would be better for the NCS if it had a wide enough swath of members with enough exposure to webcomics that my services weren’t needed. That’s probably pretty synonymous with “there’s a lot of younger members what joined up”.

They’re back, and with more broken spines strong characterization per panel than any other comic strip or book, Susan B Assthony, Georgia O’Queefe, and Queen Elizatits are kicking every head, fighting every evildoer, and wearing all the sunglasses. I honestly spent 20 minutes trying to decide which excerpt from The Strong Female Characters: Action Punch Role Model Strength Bomb to post, because the entire thing is inspiring. Ultimately the decision was made because Poop Yogurt is inherently funny. For those few of you that aren’t familiar with the SFCs, you can begin your education in the eradication of sexism here.

Events! Things are happening in and around the New York branch of webcomickry in the immediate future!

• As previously noted, the Teen Boat!¹ book launch takes place on an actual boat tomorrow night, 11 May 2012, at 7:00pm. The venue is the Waterfront Barge Museum at Pier 25 in Manhattan (on the scenic Hudson River, a couple of blocks below Canal). On the off chance that you’re in the neighborhood and don’t like teens, boats, or books, it looks like the pier has mini-golf, so that’s all right. Look for creators John Green & Dave Roman to be signing, sketching, and singing sea chanties all night long. Rumor has it that Raina Telgemeier will be there, and while she would never want to take anything away from Dave & John’s night, if you happened to tell her how awesome you thought SMILE was or how much you’re looking forward to DRAMA, I bet she’d say thank you.
• Same webcomics-time, same webcomics-city, but a different borough: Scott C opens his solo show, Tender Times, at Cotton Candy Machine in Brooklyn. For those of you that can’t make it to 235 1st Street (roughly at the meeting point of Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Boerum Hill, and mere steps from the Union Street subway stop on the D/N/R lines), Cotton Candy Machine will be having a pre-sale of Mr C’s art in their store from 3:00 to 5:00pm. For those of you than can make it, these gallery openings traditionally feature fun times and booze.

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¹ Once again, our safety warning: Teen Boat!, the lighthearted, all-ages comic/graphic novel does not, repeat, NOT have anything to do with the most obvious web address that one might assume referred to said boat. If you try to browse to teenboat.com [no link], you will come across something particularly NSFW, and on the off chance it’s safe for your work, please shower thoroughly and get on a regimen of industrial antibiotics before coming within ten meters of me. Thank you. Especially don’t do an image search on “teen boat”. You’re welcome.

Since we’re all going to die in an East Coast Apocalyptoquake, I’m about to head down to the End Times Bunker and make sure that looters haven’t gotten into the beans. In the meantime, earthquake vet Raina Telgemeier would like us to know what a real damn earthquake is like. Hopefully, her comics will serve to buoy our spirits while we rebuild from the devastation.

Speaking of devastation, I’m on my second re-read of Zahra’s Paradise, a review copy of which was thoughtfully sent to me by the good folk of :01 Books, and devastating is the only word I have to describe it at the moment. I’m going to need some more time to absorb before I do a formal review but for now, suffice it to say that this is a book that leaves you feeling raw. For those of you following along online, there are only a few pages left, and then the book drops on 13 September, just as the last page goes online.

Do you like things? Do you plan to be around in the future? If so, you may enjoy these things which are Coming Soon!

• Coming so Soon that’s it’s actually already out, the Cloudscape Comics Society has been doing a series of really good anthologies and the latest one, 21 Journeys is now available at ecRATER. Vanessa Kelly at Cloudscape was kind enough to send me a PDF for review, and there’s some damn good work inside — what struck me most is that more than any anthology I’ve seen recently (with the possible exception of the final Flight volume), each story in 21 Journeys feels entirely in sync with the theme, but also distinct and reflective of the creator’s own unique voice. Outstanding work, well worth your time.
• Coming Soon to an RSS feed near you, Kris Straub will be following up the late, lamented Tweet Me Harder with a new podcast on the theory and practice of humor: The Humor Authority doesn’t have a launch date yet, but Mr Straub has never been one for delay when he sets his sights on a goal, so listen to the teaser¹ and be prepared for the forthcoming discussion.
• Coming as Soon as you like: your contribution to Buckonet, the crowdsourced site² helping the search for one Richard “Bucko” Richardson. You do know about Bucko, the dick-n-fart-joke murder mystery by Jeff Parker and Erika Moen? He’s run off in terror and the wiki is coordinating the search. If you see Mr Richardson, he is freaked out on absinthe and in fear of life, so report those sightings.
• Coming so Soon it’ll be here before you know it: not one, but two new Box Brown comics. On the one hand, you gots the new issue of Everything Dies, with an innovative “pay what you can afford” mechanism. On the other, Blank Slate Books will be releasing Brown’s newest original project, The Survivalist, in October. One of Brown’s strengths is to find people that he utterly disagrees with (cf: any of the modern stories from Everything Dies), research the hell out of their beliefs, and present them as fairly as he possibly can. Where he criticizes, it’s based on their words, logical, and not personal. I have to believe that this approach will carry through to his story of a paranoid conspiracy buff (who just happens to be right), and I’m looking forward to reading it.
• Coming … well, not that Soon, really, but worth putting on your calendar: the next graphic novel by Raina Telgemeier will be titled Drama, regarding middle school theater geeks, and be out in a bit more than a year. Countdown starts now.

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¹ Warning for those with delicate sensibilities: there is mild smack talk directed at EB White towards the end of this audio clip.

² I love these reader-driven projects, from the history of The Great Outdoor Fight (seemingly throwing some code errors right now) to the history of The Elemenstor Saga.

Okay, so apparently there’s a better answer to the big question of How do I get noticed? from yesterday’s posting than the one I came up with. Consider: Raina Telgemeier, her husband Dave Roman, Becky Dreistadt and James Kochalka (and who knows how many more) are all webcomickers, and were all born today.

Add in TopatoCo impressario Jeffrey Rowland (born four days ago), Dead Winter’s Dave Shabet (born three days ago), and TopatoCo Vice President of Kicking Your Ass Holly Post (born two days ago) and you’ve got a sure-fire method for gettin’ noticed — simply go back in time and convince your parents to give birth to you sometime between 22 and 26 May. You’re welcome.

• Love [web]comics? Live in or near San Francisco? Want to talk comics with a couple of high school teachers? For those of you that are scratching your heads at that third item, would it help if I mentioned the teachers in question are Thien Pham and Gene Luen Yang, creators of Level Up, a YA graphic novel that got the Fleen Seal of Approval? Yang and Pham will be appearing at Cartoon Art Museum on 25 June (that’s a Saturday) from 1:00 to 3:00pm for a cartooning workshop; they’ll be talking about their collaborative process, signing books, and drawing with attendees. Free with paid admission to CAM, which is like seven bucks (three, if you’re under 13 years of age), so go grab some lunch and make a day of it.
• Latest autobio comics to catch my eye — Breena Wiederhoeft’s Easel Ain’t Easy² — which has the loose, scribbly style that makes everybody in it look like somebody you know. As Wiederhoeft is yet another Portland-based cartoonist, it’s amusing to cross-reference the sense of place you get from EAE against that of, say, DAR! (hint: there’s a lot more dicks and farts in DAR!).

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¹ Third week of August.

² Know what else ain’t easy? Pimpin’.