I mean, Jim Zub is one of the more omnipresent writers of comics in the biz these days, with some Wednesdays seeing as many as four Zub titles dropping simultaneously. Even better, the guy who’s made a career out of being able to write in any genre, for any publisher, on time, slotting into whatever line-wide crossover or editorial mandate is going on, and setting up the big name who’s eventually going to be brought onboard to replace him with a solid story foundation and plot hooks is working his way up to major titles. You know, things like Avengers.

But his heart will always be in his own stories. Okay, his own stories and Conan, because Zub knows what is best in life, but for the purposes of our discussion right now, his own stories. One of those own stories dropped via comiXology about 18 months back, and it was pretty damn good.

Thing about comiXology is that you don’t really own comics, you rent them for as long as Amazon figures you should be able to, and to keep reading them in that timeframe you have to keep giving Amazon money. I prefer physical media that can’t be memory-holed unless Bezos comes over to my house¹.

And whaddaya know, that pretty damn good story will be getting a physical release after all:

Stone Star volume 1, the Space Fantasy book I did with @JimZub, Espen Grundetjern, & @MarshallDillon for @comiXology, is getting published for print by @DarkHorseComics in 2021!

That from Max Dunbar, who had lineart chores on Stone Star to Zub’s words, Espen Grundetjern’s colors, and Marshall Dillion’s letters. It’s a story I wholeheartedly recommended before, and do so again now that you can actually pay for a permanent copy.

And because Zub’s never got just one bit of news to share, allow me to point out that he’s got some pure prose available for you, too:

I’m thrilled to announce that From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back is now available from your favorite bookshop or online outlet. I’m one of 40 authors who contributed a short story showcasing how characters beyond the main cast see and feel about events that take place in that wonderful Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Every author involved in this special project has waved initial payment and royalties so that all proceeds can go to First Book — a leading nonprofit providing new books, learning materials, and other essentials to educators and organizations serving children in need. To further celebrate the launch, Penguin Random House is donating $100,000 to First Book, and Disney/Lucasfilm will donate 100,000 children’s books — valued at $1,000,000 — to support First Book and their mission of providing equal access to quality education.

That from an email that Zub sent me yesterday, but if you want deets you can check out the tweet as well. Zub’s story is about Yoda’s reaction to a certain farmboy showing up in his swamp. Ever wonder if Yoda’s people have inverted syntax in their internal dialogue? Or if a 3rd-person narration can be written in Yodaspeak while still getting the point across clearly? Or if reading Yoda’s words will cause Frank Oz’s dulcet tones to resonate in your brainmeats? One way to find out, nerf herder.

Spam of the day:

Herb Hegmann, a 47-year-old father of 4, was close to giving up? He had struggled with tooth and gum decay for more than 7 years? He’d tried everything, but nothing worked?

It’s called flossing, Herb. It’s simple, it’s cheap, and it works.

_______________
¹ And if he does come over to my house to memory-hole my comics, I have a greyhound that can sprint up to 70km/hour and who will aggressively get in his face to demand attention and petting.

As I believe has been made clear on this page since the very beginning, Randy Milholland is a treasure and Something*Positive one of the best webcomics being made in this or any year. I know that we’ve all been wrapped up in the high emotional stakes of the last¹ few strips, but I’m here to remind you of something else:

Dude is a scholar of Popeye and his run on Popeye’s Cartoon Club was the most life that storied old sailor’s seen in decades. It would be the height of sense for King Features syndicate to bring him back on the strip full time, or at least have him do Sunday strips for the next forever. Lots of us said this during his run on Popeye’s Cartoon Club, and it seems we have the opportunity to say it again:

Hey, if you liked my Popeye strips, Comics Kingdom is doing a survey about which older comics to restart and Popeye is one of ’em. Consider for voting (and maybe mention my name and my Popeye strips. No, I have no shame)

That from Milholland at the top of S*P today, and it takes just about a minute to fill out the survey:

1. If you could get more of one of your favorite classic King Features comics with new art and stories, would you choose:
   [Popeye is one of the choices, which also includes an “Other” choice you can type in]
2. If there were one classic King Features comic you absolutely WOULD NOT want to see new comics for, it would be:
   [Same list as #1]
3. What would be your feelings about seeing new comics for the following classic King Features characters?
   [Same list as #1, but rating each on a five point scale from Very Unhappy to Very Happy]
4. Do you have any other thoughts about seeing a revival of any classic King Features comics?
   [Open response]

I answered, respectively, Other: Popeye, specifically with Randy Milholland; Other: I would want you to bring none of them back until after you’ve brought back Popeye with Randy Millholand; rated all neutral or better, but top marks for Popeye; and a long comment about how not only should they give Randy Popeye, they should also convince Disney to give them the license for a daily Duck comic and let Randy have that, too. The only thing Randy’s a deeper scholar of than Popeye is the history of Duckburg and the citizens thereof.

Fly, my pretties, and let King Features know your mind: you love great comics and want to see them spread. Also, because Randy promised that if he got to do more Popeye strips he’d let us know the name and deal of the Sea Hag’s intern, and she’s the best new comics character since Zonker Harris.

Spam of the day:

Good afternoon.. Here is a backing soundtrack we did for a client, just listen, maybe some track will suit your company as corporate music

I think you’re trying to pass off the work of an actual house music composer as a job you did for a client, Mr Obviously Fake Name. That’s … weird. Just to counter this, I’ll encourage folks who are into that sort of thing to look up VS Vladimiros on YouTube and maybe they’ll decide to give them the attention instead of you.

_______________
¹ In that one, we got an answer to my question — Fred did get to hand out candy on Halloween night, and for that I will always be grateful.

When the histories of this time and place are written, I’m not sure that anything will embody the utterly fruitless flailing of the Trump Administration as calling a Very Important Press Conference starring Insider Goon #1 (Rudy Giuliani) in the parking lot of a lawn service next to a dildo store and across the street from a crematorium, during the middle of which the press all left because the race was called for Biden.

And all of us, I think, want to know what the story is behind Four Seasons Total Landscaping, accidental venue for maybe the saddest, most pathetic outburst in four years of increasingly sad and pathetic behavior. Did Rudy know a guy who knew a guy? Did — and I believe this with all my heart — the campaign think they were contacting the Four Seasons hotel and end up booking the wrong Four Seasons by accident? Did they think we wouldn’t notice that the entire thing took place between a fire extinguisher and a hose?

I want the oral history of this fiasco, the podcast series, the dissertation of what the hell actually led to this parking lot on the edge of Philadelphia, but in the meantime I have a new favorite shirt. Friend of Fleen Shing Yin Khor spent some time Saturday night gettin’ tipsy and designing a tribute shirt for Four Seasons Total Landscaping with everybody’s favorite orange nightmare, Gritty, prominently featured.

For about 24 hours, the shirt was up for sale at Threadless, with the intent of maybe sending five hundo to the campaigns of Democrats Ossoff and Warnock in the Georgia Senate runoffs, as well as to the Stacey Abrams-led Fair Fight, which has done so much to counter voter suppression and gerrymandering in Georgia.

That was the plan, but like everything else about 2020, reality had its own ideas:

tl,dr;

1. We raised $28k+!!
2. This is now a tax problem for me!
3. Please be patient as I sort accounting, and wait 2 weeks for Threadless to actually send/transfer money.
4. Here are my max contribution receipts for the Senate runoff campaigns.
5. Shirt comes down at 2pm PST.

Khor maxed out the allowable contributions under election law to a campaign per election cycle for both Ossoff and Warnock, and will be sending the remainder presently. For a few hours, there was only a tote bag at the Threadless link (benefiting National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network), because you gotta have a product there to leave a message saying the shirt are down, because wrangling finances is not Khor’s job and they have better things to do.

And then, a few hours later after convos with Threadless, the shirt was back:

SHIRTS ARE BACK! I will be working directly with Threadless to get money directly to voting charities(the ones mentioned earlier)!! However, I am still refusing to offer shirts on black, out of respect for the beautiful oranges of Gritty’s fur. Thank you.

Get yours here, and remember: any designs on Etsy or elsewhere (all of the ones I’ve seen being considerably more expensive than Khor’s versions) are knockoffs by lowlifes that need to be reported.

And let it never be said that we at Fleen don’t step up, so the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund is back in business. I will match all donations to Fair Fight up to US$1000 between now and when I get my shirt in the mail (damn right I ordered one). This is the one time you should accept the USPS being a little slow.

Spread the word, email or post your receipts, cost me some money, and let’s put McConnell out of his godsdamned office.

Spam of the day:

Bear Grillz shared a new online system for earning!

I think they’re trying to make me think of Bear Grylls, but instead they’re making me think of a bear that grills, or possibly a bear with grillz. That last one is frankly terrifying, but a bear that grills is awful close to something that Ryan North and Erica Henderson shared with us and is thoroughly awesome.

Everybody get caught up on sleep last night? Feeling a little more calm? Actually bemused by how fruitless the attempted ratfucking of the election is? Cheeto Mussolini never did hire very good lawyers, since good lawyers want to get paid. Anyway, quick bit of webcomics for you.

• A week ago, I wrote about Magnolia Porter Siddell’s contribution to the Barbarous side-stories drawing a pair of lifelong (and deathlong) lovers putting their ghost heads close enough together to provide the impression that they were practically merging into one monstrous face.

  Today, she upped the merge factor into something considerably less menacing and also infinitely more creepy. Well done, Mags!

• In other news, we await word from Eudora, Texas to see how the MacIntires are doing in the aftermath of their loss. Our thoughts remain with them in these trying times.

Spam of the day:

The Biggest Indicator Of Illness: How to Monitor Blood Oxygen.

Okay, a) pulse oximeters are like twenty bucks; I have one in my trauma bag. b) They don’t work reliably on COVID patients, reading SpO2 levels that are incompatible with life, much less a patient having a conversation with you. Something in the novel coronavirus changes blood chemistry, and the calibration logic of oximeters gets thrown off. So peddle your bullshit elsewhere.

There’s been a shoe waiting to drop for nearly as long as I’ve been writing this page; two months into my internet opinion-mongering, Randy Milholland took a hard turn on his most sympathetic character and set up making his most cantankerous character into the new most sympathetic character.

For nearly fifteen years, Fred MacIntire has been living life as best he could, having had more than his share of tragedy. Wait for me. Won’t be long now, he promised, and in the moment he meant it. He’s had his ups and downs since then, and he was asymptomatic for so long that I forgot he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s before Faye died. The symptoms hit hard, cruelly hard, and if lately he’d seemed more physically frail, he also seemed more present.

And here’s the thing: that magnificent, cranky, generous, sarcastic, big-hearted guy loved Halloween his whole life, even when others were determined to ruin it for him. He forgot about how much he loved it last year, maybe, but this year he was back in fine spirits.

Davan’s once again proving to be exactly his father’s son¹ with his reaction, and the days ahead promise to be full of grief (Davan’s depression has been hitting hard lately) and the secret relief that caregivers have when their charges are finally freed of their pains. Secret relief, and unwarranted shame for feeling relieved.

Gods damn you, Randy Milholland, for making us all cry; I know that this was the plan, it was always the plan, you don’t do things by impulse in Something*Positive². This one hurts, but it’s an honest hurt because you made Fred real as anybody we know in our own lives³. I don’t know if he got to hand out any candy, but you let Fred see one more Halloween, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

Spam of the day:
Spammers don’t get to share space with Fred MacIntire. Requiescat in pace.

_______________
¹ No matter how much they both would have argued the point, and both been secretly grateful for their similarities.

² Except for spite, when supposed readers make demands of you and you swear to do the opposite forever — which promises I wholeheartedly believe.

³ Plus, you’ve written before about your mom being irked at you killing her off in the strip; may as well get some equal time in with your dad.

I mean, I should have realized, the map of the world that showed up waaaay back¹ when, where we realized that it was the body of God and the towns Abigail and Daniel visited, they were running up the spine. It’s not just that Abigail is BACK from the dead, she’s literally been crawling up somebody’s BACK.

I’d link pages but …

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>BACK</title>

At the moment, that snippet of code you see above is the whole of BACK, so if you’re looking for the latest of KC Green and Anthony Clark’s story, Green’s got you set over at Tumblr.

Yes, this is a short post, but I wanted to mention the Tumblr, and also to have a spot to put spam, because the other post today doesn’t get spam.

Spam of the day:

Enter for your chance to have your Mortgage Paid

<voice = "Adrian Veidt">
Pay off my mortgage? I paid it off thirty-five days ago.
</voice>

Thirty-seven, actually. Mortgage got sold to a sucky company and I decided with the interest rates on savings being so much lower than rates on my mortgage, it was time to dip into reserves and just put that sumbitch to bed. It took sixteen years and five months, but I’m out of debt.

_______________
¹ So to speak.

Make sure that you (and people you know) have voted. We have to bury that fucker.

Then start making a list of what we’re going to demand of the next administration. Doesn’t matter who wins, there’s things that need to stop, things that need to be reversed, things that need to be made that never were before. Today’s the end of voting, but it’s just the start of what needs to happen.

Spam of the day:

A group of scientists have put their heads together and figured out a quick way to REGROW GUMS OVERNIGHT… They created a mineral dust which you just have to sprinkle over your toothpaste before brushing your teeth… This video clearly shows how you can restore your gums literally overnight.

Oh, this isn’t gonna turn into The Blob at all. [eyeroll emoji]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [Sparkles] ANNOUNCEMENT! [Sparkles]²

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

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

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

Spam of the day:

Hi, I was just taking a look at your site and filled out your feedback form. The feedback page on your site sends you these messages via email which is why you’re reading my message right now right? That’s half the battle with any type of online ad, making people actually READ your message and I did that just now with you! If you have something you would like to promote to millions of websites via their contact forms in the US or to any country worldwide send me a quick note now, I can even focus on particular niches and my pricing is super low.

So you want me to pay you to annoy other people the same way you’re annoying me right now by abusing the site that I provide? No. Fuck off.

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

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

I trust that you all know by now how very good Barbarous by Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh is; I mean, I’ve written about it enough in the past.

With the recent conclusion of Chapter Five/Season One, Hirsh and Ota have turned art duties over to friends for a series of four- or five-page short stories, which have multiple reasons to recommend them:

• Ota and Hirsh have focused on long form stories for so long, it’s easy to forget how well they can haul you in with a handful of pages. Don’t believe me? I have two words for you, friend: PONY. COP.
• So far, two of the three have focused on Cecilia, the eponymous Girl With The Skeleton Hand, who’s been a background character in Barbarous, but hasn’t had a starring turn for nearly a decade. There’s stuff going on with Cecilia (capital-S Stuff, even), she’s got more history and authority than she’s letting on. As much as they want to tell us about Cee, I want to read.
• The art! Befitting folks who’ve been doing [web]comics forever, Hirsh and Ota have some very skilled friends. Case in point: today’s installment from Magnolia Porter Siddell has all the round, cartoony characters she does so well, but that fourth panel where the kindly old ghosts sudden go dark, practically merging into one monstrous face? That sudden shift in tone (where the art finally catches up with the text) and then back to sunshine and rainbows? That’s some godsdamned poetry right there.

Spam of the day:

Our lingerie and sex toy affiliate program will enable you to display our banners on your website and when someone clicks on these banners or affiliate links and purchases sex toys or lingerie products from our store, you will earn a handsome commission.

and

What is your favourite product from Peaches and Screams UK valentines day playwear collection?

You want Erika & Matt, but they have standards and I think you’ll have to do better than you are now to earn a spot with them.

It’s just too perfect — you’ll see the relevance by the time you get to the bottom of the post, promise — and it’s a tenet of this page that cartoonists get paid, particularly when the cartoonist has a link right next to the cartoon that tells you exactly how to pay them. In case you were wondering, if I were using the cartoon to talk about the cartoonist’s work, that would be Fair Use, but I’m not, so it’s only right to pony up the £5.

I read two comic updates today that couldn’t be more different, but somehow … somehow they touch on the same theme. Small creatures confronting very large creatures — large enough and advanced enough to be gods in comparison to the small. Two comics that are approaching the end of their respective runs, both of which are exploring the nature of the reality of creation (Creation?), and one’s place within the company of great powers.

On the one hand, today’s page of Kill Six Billion Demons starts what will possibly be the Last War There Ever Is, as the Gods of the Seven-Part World vie and Alison, a human thrown into their midst, begins to question (not for the first time, but maybe the last) what she thought she knew of her universe¹. She’s been thrown into a world in turmoil, manipulated at every turn by innumerable factions, with the end of everything crashing towards her and a pivotal role to play that nobody’s quite explained to her.

On the other hand (and don’t laugh), today’s pages of BACK starts what will possibly be the last struggle there ever will be between an unnamed (and until now, unseen) human and a bug. Judging from the last few pages, it’s looking like this bug is actually Agnes, a cowgirl that has been in a communion with the God of this very singular world (a world that exists entirely on the God’s body), and she’s questioning (not for the first time, but maybe the last) what she thought she knew of her universe². She’s been thrown into a world in turmoil, manipulated at every turn by innumerable factions, with the end of everything crashing towards her and pivotal role to play that nobody’s quite explained to her.

You could hardly have two more different comics (BACK being played mostly for laughs, KSBD being played for awesome in the original sense of inspiring awe, the slack-jawed disbelief that what you’re seeing is actually happening), two more disparate vehicles for exploring the metaphysical and eschatological, but that’s comics for you. And the thing is, they’re both succeeding at that exploration wildly, as a pair of nobody-asked-them-if-they-wanted-to-be heroines learn about the prisons the world creates, the ones we create for ourselves, and the costs of tearing them down.

Anyway, I read the latest pages of each today, and the parallels just wouldn’t stop asserting themselves. If you’re not familiar with one or the other, now would be a decent time to check them out and let me know if what I’m seeing is actually a thing, or if I’m just chasing non-existent connections.

Spam of the day:

Help me please. The coronavirus left without money. Send some bitcoin money.

I am all broken up to hear that the coronavirus left without money, but I am not sending you bitcoin so the coronavirus can have money. That’s just stupid.

_______________
¹ There’s more than one, after all. 777,777 to be exact.

² Which, in this case, appears to be the body of a singular enormous humanoid; Agnes and all the other characters have been more or less human, but with very spindly limbs and sometimes too many of them, so it appears they were bugs all along. I’m not sure if KC Green (who write BACK and drew today’s update) had let Anthony Clark (who’s drawn the previous 299 updates and whose aesthetic is all over the character designs) in on this twist, but the buggish nature of pretty much all the characters seems to suggest he did.