It started innocently enough, with Paul Southworth musing on Twitter about a movie trailer, like you do:

Why does the old man say “I can make you mortal” in the Wolverine trailer? Wolverine isn’t immortal. He can/will die eventually, right?

If you detonated a warhead in his colon or waited 5,000 years, I feel like Wolverine would probably be dead.

Wolverine healing himself together after being torn in half? Awesome. Reassembling himself from scattered atoms? We have crossed a line.

‘Nother day, ‘nother set of opinions on comics, but then somebody¹ had to go and blow it all straight to Hades. See, the only two things I really remember from high school biology class (which I never did very well with) are genetics (it’s got math! and something resembling certainty!) and the paramecium (the “white mice” of single-cell life). Certain species of paramecia would, if cut in two, completely regenerate into two whole little critters; the parallels were obvious:

If you tear him in half, do you end up with two Wolverines?

As was the cost of such speculation:

@fleenguy You, my friend, have just written the next 7 months of Wolverine. Congratulations!

So, yeah, sorry about that. Marvel’s gonna have to come up with some new adjective to pre-pend to the many, many Wolverine comics and it’s all my fault. On the bright side, maybe Jim Zub can borrow whatever that new adjective might be, seeing as how Zub loves him some adjectives.

Yeah, okay, you got me — while the above exchange did take place spontaneously, I’m really just bringing it up because it’s a good reason to talk about the enlightening Mr Zub again, especially as he’s recently written the first installment of a multi-part series on effective communication as part of his ongoing habit of sharing the hard-learned lessons in a decade of making indy comics. The paragraph I keep coming back to is:

This may seem like an odd topic for a tutorial but, believe me, it’s just as important as anything else I’ve covered so far. The quality of your communication and how you’re perceived as a communicator has a direct correlation to how you’re treated as a professional.

Boy-howdy, I’m glad that Zub said it², because there are people in the [web]comics world that desperately need this lesson.³ Guys, if you are your brand, how you communicate “you” is important; your personality, your POV, your humor can all help to build that brand. But if you’re building something with its own identity, something professional, you have to switch those parts of “you” off that don’t convey professional in your public pronouncements.

You may get great mileage out of lolspeak or edgy humor, but as soon as the conversation shifts from you-personally to you-the-person-that-is-negotiating-contracts-proposals-and-money, you need to be somebody else. Somebody entirely professional, probably a bit boring, and relentlessly correct in your spelling and syntax.

Even if you can pull off the trick of shifting voice, anybody that looks you up and finds the other voice on the same venue (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, whatever) is going to suffer from some degree of cognitive whiplash, with the likeliest outcome being that the people that want to see “regular you” don’t notice the difference but the people that need to see “professional you” don’t get the impression you’re trying to make. Consider it the work equivalent of accidentally sending naughty pics to your Mom.

If you’ve ever found it useful to have different email addresses for personal use versus business use, it’s probably time to make the same decision for your social media interactions. Just remember which account you’re logged into, okay? I know what a pain it is to find one social media client that you can be comfortable with, but if you need that division of message, you’d be better off finding different clients for different accounts to lessen the chances of spillover.

________________
¹ Hi.

² And said it better than I ever could have.

³ No names, so you can assume I’m talking about the person sitting next to you.

What to do when your e-book publisher decides to drop comics of an adult nature, including your very popular anthology that is surely bringing in a considerable amount of money? Sale on the physical copy, naturally. Let’s let Smut Peddler editor Spike tell the story:

Hey folks FYI: Gumroad has temporarily dropped adult content. But Smut Peddler will be available on Comixology, starting in May!

I’ve been working with Comixology for a while to get my stuff on there, and it’s scheduled to go live in a couple of weeks. EXCITED.

SALE: Smut Peddler is ALL GUMMED UP! Until April 30th, physical copies of this fabulous anthology are 33% OFF!

That was where it stood 30 minutes ago (as of the time of writing this paragraph): unfortunate occurrence, making the best of it, resilience of the artist, etc. Then I noticed that Bleeding Cool was reporting on this situation, and their report (more precisely, a link from their report) made this situation seem a bit more … tawdry.

Not because of the porn (especially tastefully done porn, predominantly from the ladies), and not because Gumroad pulled Smut Peddler (taking credit cards means that they have to adhere to policies put forth by the card companies and payment processors, a situation that has tripped up more than one previous purveyor of porntastic provisions). See, the Bleeding Cool piece talked with a guy who had his gay-themed e-book pulled by Gumroad, and he asked why, if he’s being pulled, is Smut Peddler allowed to be on the service?

More precisely, he asked three times, by name, in all caps, via an open posting on Facebook.

All of which leads me to a dilemma. We at Fleen are not in favor of rewarding people who behave poorly with links or attention. Yet we also realize that you shouldn’t necessarily take my interpretation of this situation at face value, and you should have the opportunity to judge for yourself, which is less likely to happen if you have to go searching all over the hell’s half-acre that is the internet to find what I’m talking about.

So here’s what I’ve done: Ive screenshotted the posting that the person in question made to Facebook (seen above), and removed his name. This is for two reasons:

1. If I’m being unduly harsh, the creator in question doesn’t deserve to have his name unduly linked with critical rhetoric.
2. If, on the other hand, my gut feeling on this is correct and the creator in question is engaging in behavior somewhere between a hissy fit and sour grapes¹, he doesn’t deserve the publicity that even a critical assessment would bring him.

In any event: Smut Peddler’s on sale for 33% off until the end of the month.

Let’s talk about things that are more unambiguously positive, ‘kay?

• The Jeff Rowland’s Flickr account has a new video up showing some of the activity around the in-renovations future home of TopatoCo. At one point in the video (18 seconds, to be precise), Rowland approaches a road roller, leading to the possibility that joyrides may take place at some point in the future. There is no part of this that could possibly end unawesomely.
• There are several webcomics “review” sites that are little more than exercises in drive-by vandalism, delighting in the negative for the sheer nihilistic joy of it². So I am overjoyed to see a new webcomics review site pop up that is dedicated to the prospect of sharing what the author finds to be good rather than tearing down what’s subjectively bad.³ Ladies and gentlemen, may I commend to you Robynne Blume’s Webcomics Worth Wreading, which opens with a discussion of Reptilis Rex by William Tallman.
• Strip Search Elimination #5 spoilers ahoy. Hold up here if you haven’t seen it yet.

  All good? ‘Kay, let’s start off by saying that was the best visit to Artdome we’ve had yet, and I was sorry to think that either Amy or Maki would be going home because we really are past the point of obviously weak competitors; anybody in the house could win it at this point. Also they both interacted with each other and the Creators in a way that was more lively and unguarded than we’ve seen before. Also-also, Jerry drank a comic⁴, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type.

  Now what I find to be the curious thing at this point is where the show goes from here. When I spoke to Robert Khoo and Erika Sadsad about the show before it debuted, Khoo said that while there will be no way to tell the entire story of what happened in the mansion, there was a natural narrative that emerged during filming.

  Up until now, I’d been expecting that narrative to be Amy’s, from her initial presentation as the one person playing the game part of the competition, to her meeting and befriending of Erika Moen, aka my fucking hero. Sadly, that story’s come to an end⁵, which got me to wondering what else might be the new narrative if it’s not Amy’s Journey. Possibilities include:

  • Dr Strangeabby or: How Mike Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Tangent
  • Monica’s Story, brought to you by Depends
  • Katie Will Kill All Who Challenge Her And Eat Whatever She Kills
  • Lexxy: Third Time’s The Charm!
  • Maki, Tavis, Beardlove by Elizabeth Gilbert
  • Erika Just Wins Everything Because We At Fleen Have Been Team Hurricane Since Day Minus 218

  Your best guesses as to where the heck the story goes from here in the comments, please.

________________
¹ If anybody knows a short, pithy expression that means If I can’t have something I’ll make sure others can’t either, I’ll be happy to use it. For now we’ll make do with “sour grapes”.

² No links, but if you want to know why such things still exist, my best guess is found in the extended digression on the nature of criticism by Anton Ego at the end of Ratatouille:

We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.

³ Honestly, if it’s that bad, let it alone and it’ll go away on its own. Or just repeat to yourself Okay, I don’t like it but that doesn’t mean other people aren’t allowed to.

⁴ And he just … kept … drinking.

⁵ At least within the context of the show, but Ms T Falcone has skillfully parlayed her time on the show into more attention and eyeballs on her comic than she could reasonably expected to have had otherwise. A lot of people are going to be following her career closely from here on out.

Warning: we’re starting today with a link to 2000-odd words that you should read in its entirety, so make sure you set a little time aside. To help make up for it, I’ll try to be brief.

• Shaenon Garrity, Funk and Tiki Queen of All She Surveys, looks back a dozen years to the early days of Colonel Joey’s involvement in webcomics, marking the recent passing-on of the Modern Tales family. It’s really nice remembrance from one who was there¹, and startling in the realization how many of the people that Manley gathered around himself a dozen years ago have gone on to be influential and successful. Give it a read and maybe nod in the general direction of Kentucky, as we may never know how much that nudge given by Manley contributed to those creators staying in the game.
• It’s been going on three years since Brad Guigar³ ran a workshop on webcomickin’ at New York Comic Con 2010 (partnered up with the redoubtable Scott Kurtz), to overwhelmingly positive reviews. I’d been wondering why Guigar hadn’t offered such a bootcamp (as he termed it, and can I say that the mental image of Guigar in a Smokey The Bear hat screaming at rookie webcomickers to drop and give him a punchline is awesome) again, when lo and behold he announced another one, coinciding with the first full day of Philadelphia Comic Con:
  

  Brad will present a lecture on the art and commerce of webcomics and then take their class through a collegiate-level critique of their work.

  Cost of attendance is $29.99 for Webcomics.com members who would like their work critiqued.(Members of Webcomics.com are eligible for a special discount.)

  Be prepared to take and offer frank, constructive criticism. Each participant will receive a printed packet with tips, advice and comments directed specifically on how they can improve their work. Everyone is welcomed to attend the panel and join the discussion, but only Bootcamp participants will have their work discussed specifically.

  Philadelphia Comic Con (formerly known as Megan Fox Tits Wolverine World Philly) will take place Thursday 30 May – Sunday 2 June at the Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA; the Webcomics Bootcamp will take place from 5:00-6:30pm on Friday, 31 May, room TBA.

• Next weekend is going to be a busy one for [web]comickers, at least for those between the 45° and 59° northerly latitudes. From the southwest to the northeast, there will be events going down in Portland, Calgary, and Stockholm, any one of which may fill you with delight and wonder at the comics arts, but only one of which will feature Rene Engström, who tweets:
  

  I’ll be speaking at a panel on webcomics at Stockholm’s International Comic Festival on Saturday the 27th of April between 4 and 5 pm at Bibliotek Plattan!

  The Bibliotek Plattan, or Plattan Library, is part of the Kulturhuset complex at the Sergels Torg, which is the most central public square in the city. Judging from the site plan [PDF], you’ll want to head to the basement once you get there. Tell Rene I said hi, and see if you can get her to show you a sneak peek of The Venerable Leaf.

________________
¹ I’ve long since grown accustomed to consuming Garrity’s writing in four-panel chunks, and it always surprises me how wonderfully she writes when she’s not constrained by the limit of a few dozen words. It shouldn’t not with all the forgotten manga she’s so lovingly described², or her contribution to the Machine of Death [MP3] anthology.

² She is entirely responsible for me devouring (ha, ha) the 26-volume run of Yakitate!! Japan, the insane fight manga to end all insane fight manga, where by “fight” one should read “competitive bread baking”.

³ He’s dreamy.

But even here there must be some encouraging news, yes? Yes.

• Encouraging News The First: Lucy Knisley’s latest book, the absolutely stellar Relish, has made the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list, debuting at #8. For reference, that puts Knisley above Batman¹.
• Encouraging News The Second: Sometimes I’m shocked about what I look back and find that I haven’t written about on this page — particularly when I’m convinced that I did at some point. For example, PostScript, by brothers Graham and Neal Moogk-Soulis, which deals with what happens to fairy tales after the happily ever after part². Five years they’ve been at this, and I haven’t mentioned them until now? Bad hack webcomics pseudojournalist!

  Anyways, Los Bros Moogk-Soulis are celebrating with a site redesign and a fifth print collection, and debuting it next weekend at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. Oh, and comics; many, many fine comics. Should you see Neal and Graham on the wide prairie next weekend, give ’em a big high-five and strongly consider picking up their books; there’s some good stuff in there.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling better now. Let’s hope that all the crap that’s been foisted on us this week sees fit to stay there as we move forward together.

_______________
¹ Also the still-there-after-56-weeks Smile by Raina Telgemeier, hanging in at #10. I’m not sure that book will ever fall off the list.

² Not that happily ever after is how fairy tales always end; my favorite is the Polish ending that I recently learned about, where the storyteller states … and I was there too, and we drank mead and wine.

We at Fleen have long been impressed by the Doug Wright Awards for excellence in English-language Canadian cartooning — the list of categories is mercifully short¹, the nominees are traditionally very strong, and the ceremony is held in conjunction with one of the best shows of the year, TCAF.

To that list, one may now add the fact that this year’s awards program will be hosted by Scott Thompson, best known from roles such as Best Friend of the Time Gate Operator, Tomin the drunk alien ambassador, Pleakley’s Mother, Dusty Gozongas, and various roles on some obscure sketch comedy show in the ’80s.

Thompson actually does have a comics connection, having co-written a graphic novel relating the alternate-world-barbarian-fantasy adventures of the most staid businessman in history, Danny Husk. I foresee an amusing evening full of uplifting frolic and cavortment.

Sticking with Canada in general, and Toronto in particular, word dropped from Ryan North yesterday that the webcomics domination of Cartoon Network-related programming continues apace:

Breehn is doing a Bravest Warriors AMA! He lets drop that @achewood and I are each writing an episode :o

The “Breehn” referenced would be Breehn Burns, the writer/director to whom Bravest Warriors (and Adventure Time) creator Pen Ward entrusted the adventures of the emotion-laden space teens. The remainder of North’s tweet referenced a question posed to Burns if he needed help on writing duties, prompting the reply:

This year we’ve brought several writers to the show, so I’m writing about half the scripts with my co-writer Jason Johnson, and for the rest I’m supervising new writers. Among them are Ryan North who does the [Adventure Time] comics, and Chris Onstad who writes the best web comic in existence, Achewood.

So far as I know, animated shorts is a new area of creative endeavour for both North and Onstad². North, naturally, has a feel for Wardian absurdism, what with the Adventure Time comics being one of the breakout successes of the past year, and he and Onstad have deep reserves of skill in making language dance in their comics³. Usually this is the sort of thing that I would view with cautious optimism, but screw that — this is gonna be great.

_______________
¹ To be precise: three. Namely, Best Book, Best Emerging Talent, and the Pigskin Peters Award (for experimental or transgressive work).

² Although the proposed Achewood cartoon show has certainly given Onstad experience in adapting to animation, not to mention voice acting.

³ As well as the fact that Ryan North used to live with Joey Comeau, who writes the Bravest Warriors comics! Oh man, how deep does this rabbit hole go?

Silly me, I didn’t get a screen shot of the parking page that greeted readers of Fleen earlier today as the renewal was making its ways around the world. While the fleen.com email service saw no interruptions, for a few hours I was assured that this page would make a perfect address for auto dealers, auto loans, and all your auto needs. Sadly, people that may have wanted to snag the domain weren’t greeted with the sensitive yet handsome dude, the beautiful yet computer-savvy lady, or the couple that for some reason you just want to slap. Sorry ’bout all that.

• Having dipped her foot¹ into the world of e-self-publishing, A Girl And Her Fed creator K Brooke “Otter” Spangler has been noting some distinct similarities between that world and the earlier, what the heck are we trying to accomplish? days of professional webcomicking, and she’s been kind enough to share her observations with you.

  Having also spanned the world of webcomics self-publishing, and actual-publisher publishing, Otter’s buddy (and Fleen Fave) Ursula Vernon² has her own take of the astonishing Webcomics/SelfPub parallels, and likewise holds forth with useful opinion. They are are pair of sharp ladies and to paraphrase Otter, BUY THEIR BOOKS.

• Oh my, yes, please: Jess Fink’s so very delayed, I thought I might never see it released, can it really be true? time-travel self-makeout epic, We Can Fix It, finally has a release date! Of course, we’ve heard this before (more than three years of hearing it before) but this time it’s certain because Fink has the actual books in her hot little hands, meaning she’ll have them for TCAF in a few weeks. For those of you not going to TCAF, you can exchange money for this book in a variety of places, including by pre-ordering from Top Shelf directly. Go do that now.
• Did somebody say most prestigious awards in comics? The Eisners nominations are out, the superheroes are relatively absent, and webcomickers and their natural allies are well represented. How well represented? Enough so that there’s simply too many names to track down all the web addresses and put the links in the text³. Let’s just take them from the top down, shall we?
  Best Single Issue or One-Shot
  The Mire, by Becky Cloonan (self-published)

  Best New Series
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
  Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (Monkeybrain)

  Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12)
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
  Amulet Book 5: Prince of the Elves, by Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
  Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse, by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos (Archaia)

  Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17)
  Adventure Time: Marceline and the Scream Queens, by Meredith Gran (kaboom!)
  A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, adapted by Hope Larson (FSG)

  Best Humor Publication
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)

  Best Digital Comic
  Ant Comic, by Michael DeForge
  Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
  It Will All Hurt, by Farel Dalrymple
  Our Bloodstained Roof, by Ryan Andrews
  Oyster War, by Ben Towle

  Best Adaptation from Another Medium
  A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, adapted by Hope Larson (FSG)

  Best Graphic Album —- Reprint
  Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson by Mark Siegel (First Second)

  Best Penciller/Inker
  Becky Cloonan, Conan the Barbarian (Dark Horse); The Mire (self-published)
  Colleen Coover, Bandette (Monkeybrain)

  Best Coloring
  Colleen Coover, Bandette (Monkeybrain)

  I’m particularly excited to note the presence of Bandette in the Digital Comic category, but also represented in other categories against print comics. And I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Comics Alliance, Robot Six, and The Comics Reporter have all been nominated as Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism, and they are the homes of such webcomics-friendly folks as Chris Sims, Brigid Alverson, and The Spurge. Best of luck to a very strong and deserving field, and let’s hope that we see such good nominations in future years.

________________
¹ Up to about the knees, actually.

² We at Fleen loves us some Digger.

³ On account of the fact I am a lazy, lazy man.

No pictures; I’m sure we’ll all muddle through somehow.

If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to answer some questions I got on Twitter last night:

My roommates @beckyandfrank said I should ask you about First Aid classes, in the wake of what is currently happening in boston…

I find myself wanting to be able to help in some manner should I find myself in an emergency situation… I was looking at…

Red Cross classes, but I’m not really certain what the difference is between the certifications and ‘Lay Rescuers’ vs “Pro’…

Is there anything specific you’d recommend?

Gladly, Zach. For those that may have missed my copious references in the past, I hold an EMT certification and am a member of an EMT training faculty in my home state of New Jersey; these are related to the fact that I serve on my town’s volunteer Emergency Medical Service, which is why you’ll find me carrying an 911 pager and ambulance keys on Tuesday nights, every sixth weekend, and rotating holidays.

Before I get to Zach’s answer, I want to note that the emergency services in Boston did a superb job in the face of an act of disgraceful cowardice and evil. They were helped by a bunch of factors — being present on the scene already, having medical tents on-site and staffed, a plethora of bystanders eager to help. All that being said, I was astonished reading the Guardian’s minute-by-minute account of the attack, when they noted at 3:30pm (a mere 40 minutes after the bombs went off) that all victims had been cleared from the scene. That is a goddamn world record for a mass casualty incident¹ and I have never been so proud to wear the Star of Life as I was reading that.

So if, like Zach, you’ve decided to take something terrible as the prompt to try to do some good, what should you do?

First of all, none of what I do in my EMS career is rocket science — anybody can be taught, anybody can do it. The two things that everybody should know are some CPR and some First Aid. Both have a variety of classes associated with them, with reputable standard curricula by bodies such as the Red Cross and the American Heart Association. But which ones to take?

The heart (so to speak) of CPR is simple: air goes in and out, blood goes round and round. Keep that up, and you keep somebody alive. CPR courses are usual described as “civilian” or “lay rescuer” versus “healthcare provider” or “professional”; the difference is the former are intended for bystanders who observe a crisis by chance, and the latter for people in the formal healthcare chain who arrive with equipment.

As far as I’m concerned, you shouldn’t be able to graduate junior high school, get a driver’s license, or have a kid without taking a lay rescuer CPR class (including infant/child CPR) at some time in your life — it’s that simple (two, three hours), and it should be that universal. Don’t worry about a pro-level class unless you’re going to be working in a healthcare setting or on an ambulance. Any level of training these days will teach you to work Automated External Defibrillators, which are pretty simple once you’ve practiced a few times.

The core of first aid is: um, the blood’s coming out, so it’s not going round and round anymore, and this guy seems to be in a lot of pain and getting worse — can we at least stop him getting worse until we can get him to somebody that know how to fix him? It’s where you learn to stop the bleeding and get people to lie still until we can immobilize ’em and transport ’em safely to a place of care.

There’s lots of courses ranging from super-basics (generally 5 – 10 hours for the Red Cross First Aid I and II) to First Responder (you can generally ride on an ambulance, under the supervision of EMTs) courses that take about 40 hours, to programs that will lead to a professional track (EMTs, depending on the state, will be in class 200 hours or more and can provide varying degrees of medications and trauma care; paramedics will be in school for two years and can do considerably more).

Having taken some classes (and they’re offered everywhere, check your local community center or Y), what else should you do?

First, regardless of your level of training, your primary obligation is to stay safe. No heroics, if it’s not safe for you to help, get to where you’re safe. As the helmet decorations tell us, you only have one ass to risk and your first duty is to get it home whole and safe.

So it’s safe to do so, what have you got to work with? Whenever I’m in a public place my eyes are scanning for emergency exits, aid stations, AEDs, call boxes and so forth. Lady clutches her chest in front of me and collapses, You go back by the bathrooms, find the box that says AED, bring back the contents, move. You call 911, tell them we’ve got an adult woman down, EMT on scene, now, and then I’ve got my gloves on² and I’m treating. Except for the “EMT” part, anybody can learn to do that.

Because I happen to know that Zach lives in Southern California, I hope he’s taken the time to put together a first aid kit as part of his earthquake preparedness; for that matter, I hope that everybody reading this that isn’t in an earthquake zone has done the same. My jump bag is full of various bandages, tape, a small flashlight, gloves, gloves, more gloves, a pair of cheap safety glasses, ice packs, sterile water, and suchlike³. You can put one together for US$30 or so and keep it stashed in your house or car against need.

If you have the time and inclination, there are Community Emergency Response Teams in nearly every locality of the country; they’ll train you to a First Responder standard, and you’ll be called upon to help in cases of disaster in the jobs that are low risk (rescue is dangerous business, you won’t get that in 40 hours of class) but vital: urban searches, transport of the lightly-injured, keeping people from unsafe zones.

If you want to help out on a more regular basis, volunteer EMS exists in most places, and even if you don’t think you want to ride on an ambulance, they still need help raising money, paying bills, keeping the station clean and operational — auxiliary members are the lifeblood of volunteer agencies.

Back to webcomics tomorrow. And the next time you bump into an EMT, paramedic, firefighter, or cop — the ones running towards the disaster, hoping like hell there isn’t another device waiting to take out the responders — do me a favor and thank them.

_______________
¹ Standard practice is triage alone will take 30 seconds per victim, times more than 140 victims, and must be completed before treatment and transport to definitive care.

² When I’m out, I’ve always got nitrile gloves stashed in a pocket or two. Without gloves, the situation isn’t safe and I will not proceed; remember — if it’s damp or gooey and didn’t come out of you, it’s potentially a disease-ridden death-vector and touching it with your bare skin is suicidal.

³ It’s also got more specialized equipment like a high-vis vest, extrication helmet & gloves, a bag-valve mask, artificial airways, BP cuff, stethoscope, and immobilization collars — things that you need special training to use, so let’s not worry about them for now.

Nine years is a long time in webcomics, and it would not be a slight accomplishment to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props. But to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props and 2222 wooden jigsaw puzzles? That’s the work of a creative madman, possibly with a frantic body posture and overly-excited facial expression.

So happy Baffler!versary to Chris Yates, Assistant Dragon Emily, Previous Assistant Dan, Captain Felix, Mensa the Menacer, Box-Head, the POOP sign, and all the other denizens of the Greater Boulder Puzzle Metropolis, and may your sanding fingers never shrivel up and fall off. PS: special 30% off Baffler! sale this week in celebration

• Apparently, MoCCA Fest 2013 isn’t over until the Society of Illustrators says it’s over, and sister, they ain’t said so yet. How else to explain the fact that talks and events associated with this year’s MoCCA are still going on? Case in point: 25 April (that would be ten days from now) at 6:30pm, Boulet (Fr ici, Eng here, and I don’t know how to say “here” in Korean) will teaming up with Gabrielle Bell to talk with the comics-loving public for a few hours, thanks in part to a cultural program organized by the French Embassy.

  An Evening with Bell and Boulet will be held at the Society of Illustrators, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and will run you between US$7 and US$15 depending on whether or not you’re a student, a member of the SoI, or a non-member; tickets and more information here.

• Science cartooning, heck yeah! Rosemary Mosco is one of those people that I can talk to forever about pterosaurs (and oh my goodness, it appears that Witton has a book coming in June, hooray) and bunches of other things as well, but man do I love talkin’ pterosaurs with her. She’s one of them actual scientist-type scientists (such as make we poor engineers look like unrigorous experimentalists), and as part of the Cambridge Science Festival in Cambridge, MA, she’ll be talking on the topic of science cartooning along with Jay Hosler and EJ Barnes.

  Science & Comics will take place at Cambridge’s Main library, from 2:00pm – 4:00pm on Saturday, 20 April, in the lecture hall. Like the vast majority of the CSF events (going on now until Sunday), it’s totally free.

• Two of my favorite creators have been stepped back for a while (and will be for the forseeable future) from their main creator-owned project due to external commitments. One of those (a graphic novel from Oni) has been running in place of their main work and the other was revealed late last week: the reason that I’m not seeing “>Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya’s twice-weekly autobio adventures is, in part, due to them producing an Adventure Time miniseries about PepBut and Cinnamon Bun as noir detectives. Let’s see, midsummer last year was when Meredith Gran’s Marceline and the Scream Queens mini launched to great acclaim, so I have high hopes for this year’s midsummer launch of Adventure Time Candy Capers. Mostly because PepBut rules.

_______________
No footnotes? I … I can’t explain this.

I’ve been wondering when the first really big Strip Search-related splash would be made and last night Lexxy Douglas launched a Kickstarter to get her webcomic started. In the order that they occur to me:

• Less than 90 minutes after launch (and about an hour after the first public tweet), Douglas had cleared her US$7500 goal.
• Reading the campaign pitch the money raised is to let Douglas turn down otherwise-paying work so she has the time to launch the comic; this stands in contrast to most [web]comics-related Kickstarters that are going to succeed, in that a request to make something that nobody’s seen yet generally doesn’t do as well as a request to merchandise something that already has an audience.
• Douglas, of course, has an audience (via social media) and is well integrated with webcomics creators, not to mention the fans she’s garnered in her time on Strip Search. Last night I thought she’d timed the launch of this KS campaign well, given that she was still seeing an uptick in attention from people that felt her elimination from the show was a travesty. #TeamLexxy will be all over this.
• This morning, I think that her timing is absolute fucking genius [A/V mixed with a liberal dose of holy crap!]; seriously Lexxy, that is some Khoo-level strategy you pulled right there. Bravo.
• As of this writing, Ms Douglas is on the cusp of just north of US$21,000 and the Gary’s First Law of Kicktraq Projections has her finishing in the US$50K – 100K range.
• Stretch goals are presently defined up to 50K; better think up a couple more and ones that don’t require physical production/shipping, on account of you’ve already got a couple hundred packages to mail.
• It appears that George helped Of course he did.

Speaking of Kickstarts, what may be the most logistically-challenging [web]comics Kickstart in history¹ is making progress, and dropped some references to a pledge-management system² called BackerKit, which you may as well get used to seeing, as I suspect it will be a standard part of Make That Thing campaigns.

I can’t give you a comparison with the previously-mentioned After The Crowd as I don’t have access yet, but the screencaps and video make it seem roughly equivalent. The one key differentiator that I noticed is that BackerKit appears to give you continuous access to manage your pledge/information, where After The Crowd gave you a time-limited, one-shot access (with the ability to request re-access later if needed).

________________
¹ Fulfillment will involve the wrangling of literal dozens of webcomickers, wood craftsmen, printers, translators, musicians, delicious adorable kittens, and more.

² It’s only a matter of time before the enterprise software industry reduces that to “PMS”.

Douglas Adams was right¹ — there’s something about Thursdays that’s just off, and Dentarthurdent is not unique in that assessment. Today is probably the Thursdayiest Thursday in some time, too. Let’s see if there might be some news out there that will break through the doldrums.

• I had the good fortune to catch up with both Kate Beaton and Scott C last weekend at MoCCA Fest, and I take it as a sign that both have lots of things going on that neither specifically mentioned that they have a series of events coming up next week in Juneau, Alaska that you can totally attend if you have access to either a boat or a plane. Juneau, y’see, isn’t exactly what you’d call accessible by road unless you’re already there.

  It is, however, breathtakingly beautiful, almost entirely deceptive in its sense of scale², and a surprisingly comics-friendly town. At least, that’s what Scott McCloud and family discovered during the Alaska loop of their year-long book tour which was — goodness! — just about six years ago.

  Anyways, Ms Beaton and Mr C will be guests of Alaska Robotics, with lectures, signings, and workshops from Thursday to Saturday next week. Juneau’s not that large³, so if you can find your way out there, I imagine somebody can point you in the right direction.

• Looking a few weeks into the future, those of you (us) that backed the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter who might have been hoping to get your goods shipped in late April per the original estimates? You’ll be waiting a few weeks longer than originally planned as y’all swamped the foundry:
  

  Sadly, there will be a delay — we did, in fact, swamp the manufacturer. The full coin order will not arrive at Chez Tayler for another 40 days. From there it will take us at least a week to assemble bundles for shipping, and then, sometime in early June, we’ll have a shipping party in which 3,000 packages go out the door, and Sandra and I rack up $30,000 in expenses for postage.

  The delay means that your coins will ship in early June, not late April as previously promised.

  I’m thinking that on the grand spectrum reasons for Kickstarter delays, exhausting the manufacturing capacity of a specialized industry is waaaay over towards the Acceptable end, and I do hope that nobody will be bitching at Howard Tayler⁴ for blowing that particular deadline. We’re into you would only get it faster by violating the laws of physics territory here.

• Looking a little further out, we have a release date for the print collection of Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, namely 27 August. The news prompted a remembrance of something long forgot and a happy discovery: there’s a Delilah Dirk short story in the fifth Flight collection which is substantially the same as Chapter 3 of Turkish Lieutenant. Those of you with both in your collection (or will have, come the end of summer) can do a side-by-side comparison for changes, not that I am for a moment suggesting that you (I) might be a detail-obsessed completionist. Not at all.
• Speaking of detail-obsessed completionists, I’ve been digging deeper into the reconstructed archives of Lore Sjöberg’s Bad Gods, and found another long-forgotten favorite — within the collection of POKE/PEEK mini-animations are five perfectly formed arguments proving the most important collorary to Tyrrell’s First Law Of The Internet⁵: Also, don’t engage with anybody who would read the comments. It’s odd how little some things change in — goodness! — seven years.

_______________
¹ About far more than just Thursdays, in fact.

² Starting out from a park building on what we’d assumed would be a 15 minute or so hike to the Mendenhall Glacier which was right there, we found ourselves turning back after two hours on account of the damn thing was no closer than when we’d started. There was simply no visual cue as to the actual distance, which was weird.

³ Actually, that depends on how you define “large”. The actual urban portion of Juneau is pretty small (about 12 square miles and 17,000 people, and chunks of that are university/state capital land), but if you include all of the “city and borough” land, you’re looking at more than 3200 square miles/32,000 residents (or a bit smaller than Rhode Island and Delaware put together). By contrast, my town runs a relatively compact 2.8 sqare miles, but manages to fit 13,500 people into that space.

⁴ My evil twin.

⁵ Namely, Never read the comments.