Two days ago it was not-yet-spring weather, now all of a sudden it’s late-June weather, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it slice of spring in between. What the hecking heck? And with the imminent doldrums of summer comes the quiet season with not much going on as creators everywhere are seemingly enjoying the warm, nap-prompting weather.

In fact, I’ve got nothing for you other than a response from Robert Khoo regarding my questions regarding the Magic: The Gathering challenge yesterday, which is: Sorry, not at liberty to say! Fair enough.

Since the news is taking a nap today, I suggest we all take the opportunity to do likewise. See you tomorrow.

Spoilers if you haven’t seen the latest episode of Strip Search: the challenge involved doing a Magic: The Gathering-themed deck for a skateboard, and in a scant 90 minutes (scarcely enough time to come up with a preliminary design and ask for client feedback) some remarkably polished work got done. However, there could be only one winner and that for the challenge and that was “Hurricane” Erika Moen¹ and well deserved it was, too.

The only thing in this particular challenge that caught me off guard was the fact that although the challenge was described as work-for-hire and that Wizards of the Coast would be producing the skate deck for giveaway during Vans Warped Tour, Strip Search host Graham Stark did not, as has been traditional, explicitly say that Moen won x-number-of-dollars for her design.

Also, as this is a work based around another company’s IP, the usual rule that “the Artists own everything they produce” may not apply; there’s been a lot of online clamoring for one design or another to be produced as a print (notably Maki’s), and I’ve yet to notice any movement in that direction as of the time of this writing. I’ve reached out to Strip Search executive producer Robert Khoo for comment, and I’ll be sure to let you know what I find out².

In other news, one of the nicest, most modest guys in webcomics, Ryan Pequin, had some big news last night:

Anyway by the way I’m a real-ass storyboard guy on Regular Show now.

I’m actually almost finished my first board but frankly I expect the ground to swallow me whole somehow before I feel like this is official.

You’ll get to see the first episode I worked on in ten months so keep your eyes peeled until then!

Taken as a piece with the other webcomics types working on Cartoon Network–affiliated shows and comics, it certainly seems like webcomics is not just a goal in and of itself, but also a damn fine mechanism for making talent known in other fields.

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¹ Personal pick of this page to win the entire competition since the day that the reality show was announced as a stretch goal to the Penny Arcade Kickstarter.

² Keeping in mind that it may be the only answer he can give is Our arrangements with sponsors don’t allow me to comment on that, which is entirely fair.

Before we get to stories of people that have their act together and those that don’t, I have this one blind item appeared in my mailbox from what appears to be a burner email account and makes the (unsubstantiated, but dang it would be awesome) claim that the Ryan Sohmer/Becky Dreistadt childrens book collaboration,
The Bear, will be launching as a webcomic in the immediate future. I believe that’s what’s called an exclusive, so yay you for hearing about it first.

Onwards. MoCCA Fest 2013 took place over the weekend and I have to say that I noticed a lot of changes this year. The show’s first run (a decade ago) was a smash success as a one-day affair at the Puck Building and immediately shifted to a two-day model in its second year. Alas, 2008 was the last year in that facility, and also the year that a talented group of people left MoCCA’s board to pursue other opportunities¹. Unfortunately, when that group left they took a great deal of institutional experience with them.

Had they all stuck around, moving from the Puck² to the 69th Regiment Armory³ would have been a challenge; with seemingly no experienced showrunners on hand, it was … not good. Panels were planned to start the moment the show started; the doors didn’t open for a full hour and a half after scheduled opening; the city was under significantly cooler temperatures than the prior year, but it was still sweat-drenchingly hot inside the Armory, with almost no air circulation and no air conditioning⁴.

Incremental improvements occurred in 2010-2012 (they could hardly have slipped further), and then MoCCA essentially dissolved and transferred its assets to the Society of Illustrators last year, leaving the question in the air: How would the Society manage MoCCA Fest?

Well, we have the answer now: really damn well. Some of the changes made were seen as both positive and negative (the new drapes behind the tables focused attention and cut down on the echoey acoustics, but also cut down sightlines and may have crowded the exhibitors to an uncomfortable degree), some were masterstrokes (the Society did something that MoCCA never managed — the back end of the hall was draped off into a museum-like exhibition space, with some absolutely marvelous pieces from their collection up for display).

From a logistical standpoint, the new MoCCA featured night-before load-in hours instead of a scramble the morning-of, improved line-handling at the entrance (I’ve never gotten in so quickly), overhead banners to get your bearings, volunteers everywhere I looked, and a return of on-scene food (last seen at the Puck). The only thing that I found would have helped would have been some simple printed placards hanging from the red-draped backdrops to indicated booth name/number.

Johanna Draper Carlson (whom I sadly missed seeing on the floor) declared it the best MoCCA ever, which may or may not be the case (second MoCCA, I met Jeff Smith for the first time; third one, I wound up drinking with Vijaya Iyer, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti and we decided that Alfonso Cuarón should direct all the Harry Potter movies, and also I got the best convention sketch ever), but it’s certainly the best of the Armory Era.

I realize that I haven’t talked a lot about projects from the people I would normally be covering, but mostly they’re between announcements — things will be happening by the end of the year, or next year, or when something presently underway is finished, but not much in the immediate term, which meant that I could talk to them about other things — I got to talk to Lucy Knisley about how great I found Relish, but also how much I was looking forward to her Tanzania Travelogue (spoiler: so much, and the zebra she drew me is adorable). I got to thank George O’Connor for a book he did two years ago because he found something new and balanced and sympathetic to say about the very archetype of a wicked stepmother. I got to talk about Doctor Who companions⁵ with Boulet, touring North America with his entirely brilliant Darkness Noirness

The bit that’s most stuck in my head, though, was talking about the show itself with Darryl Ayo Brathwaite about the show itself, where I think he summed up the new era of MoCCA as well as anybody could: the turnaround will stick in the collective memory of comics longer than the hard years and we’ll likely see an even better show next year, which is a damn good thing because there’s a need for a show like this in the dominant population center of the country. The Society of Illustrators has salvaged the idea of MoCCA Fest, made it into something better, and that’s a pretty damn good thing.

On the far side of the good-bad spectrum, the end of the week brought news of the forthcoming demise of Night Shade Books and with it, a great deal of uncertainty regarding the Girl Genius novels. Not being a lawyer, much less a specialist in IP law, I’m not sure how companies can say We’re going to sell your contract to another company and they’re going to rewrite your contract unilaterally into a form that guarantees you’ll never get another royalty check ever and you’re going to like it, but there you are.

The alternative is for Phil and Kaja Foglio to (with some appropriate degree of politeness, and undoubtedly through their lawyer) to tell Night Shade Books to take a hike⁶, which unfortunately brings up the possibility of the rights to the Girl Genius novels ending up in limbo as bankruptcy⁷ works itself out, a process that literally may never resolve itself.

Barring a change in legal thinking that regards time-limited intellectual property rights (like that to publish books) as automatically reverting to the creator in cases like this, there’s not a hell of a lot that the Foglios can do except to see if the aspiring purchaser of Night Shade’s assets, Skyhorse, is wiling to offer a contract that doesn’t promise a royalty of 10% on net (“on net” means “we can always find a way to accrue costs and make it so the net is zero”). Fortunately, the contracts in question only cover the prose novels, but taking away the ability of a creator to make money from something they thought up and in a way that the contracts didn’t allow for? That right there is some straight-up bitchassedness.

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¹ I have since had conversations with source(s) that I deem reliable that MoCCA was engaged in activities that skirted the edge of “acceptable practice” with respect to deaccessioning, and that the exodus represented a protest against these policies.

² Which retains some exhibition space but judging by a walk-past I coincidentally had a few weekends ago, the ground floor of the Puck is now an REI store.

³ Most recently notable for being the place that the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show rendered logistical aid to the New York National Guard in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

⁴ For the third year in a row, I found myself having to render aid in conjunction with a MoCCA show as heat exhaustion affected an exhibitor; in the last two years of the Puck years, I dealt with an impaired individual on the sidewalk who had toppled over his wheelchair and an exhibitor who suffered a seizure at load-in and bashed his head against the wall. Since then I’m happily 0-for-4 on medical interventions.

⁵ Scroll alllll the way down any of his pages and check out the little Karen Gillan sketch if you want to know why that was a natural topic of conversation.

⁶ Hopefully the Folgios’ lawyer is creative in his wording, like Ken White or Marc Randazzo.

⁷ My entire experience of bankruptcy was once on the receiving end; I bought furniture from a company that had already started filing under Chapter 7 but not yet announced that fact, continuing to do business that they knew they couldn’t possible make good on. Once they filed, they told me I wouldn’t get my furniture and the money I’d paid them would be considered an asset and as an “unsecured creditor” I’d have to petition the court to get a fraction of it returned. I said fuck that and disputed the charge with my credit card company and had my balance credited in 24 hours. That’s why you don’t make advance purchases with checks, kids.

Seriously, I have multiple labcoat-related items today.

• Project Runway meets webcomics for the second time. Last time it was a puking clown; this time it’s fashionable labcoats put together by a contestant from Season 10 and one of Jorge Cham’s collaborators from The PhD Movie. We will get Tim Gunn to take notice of us yet.
• Unless and until the Project X² ¹ takes off, the most famous lab coat in webcomics will remain that worn by Dante Shepherd, who brought himself to the fore twice today: once because he’s the latest creator to guest star in Jon Rosenberg’s anything-goes sandbox (and does so on a topic near to Rosenberg’s heart, booze), but he’s also making progress on a second strip first mentioned back in January (the title of that post also concerns booze …. COINCIDENCE??).

  It appears that the working title of that project will in fact be the final, so look for PhD Unknown to launch sometime this month and the reference to PhDs takes us back to the first item in an ever-deepening spiral of recursion from which there is no escape.

• Except there’s always an escape when there’s something shiny² ³ to look at, such as the latest infodump from the redoubtable Jim Zub on making a career of independent comics. Forget the fact that Zub opted not to include numbers, just look at the graphs showing losses and gains, slowly clawing their way in the direction of profitability.

  Actually, ignore everything except for that last graph on the page (helpfully reproduced above, where you see the red area of loss growing inexorably over time until a sharp about-face kicks in at the start of 2012 and a rapid climb towards the magic “break even” point.

  That inflection point is from when Zub put Skullkickers online and started driving browsers towards his print collections. Ignore that particular unslippery slope at your peril.

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¹ For once, that’s not a footnote, that’s an exponent. Unless I come up with a second footnote in this piece, in which case we’re in trouble.

² Such as my just-received copy of Benign Kingdom: Spring 2013 which — no kidding — has a gold foil embossment on the cover that’s so shiny that it reflected the afternoon sun into my eyes and made me turn my head, blinking away an afterimage. That’s pretty damn shiny.

³ This time it’s actually a footnote. I trust that you’ve navigated any potential confusion without too much trouble.

Books! I like books. Here are some books that you may like also.

• Most exciting (as far as I’m concerned) is some long-awaited news from Cameron Stewart:
  

  BREAKING: Sin Titulo released in beautiful hardcover on Sept 24 from @DarkHorseComics – put $19.99 (US) aside now

  Sin Titulo, the most atmospheric, dreamlike (in the creepy and with its own odd logic sense, not the gauzy view of frolicking attractive people sense) webcomic in about forever, finally has a publication date. It was a certain purchase for those of discriminating taste, and now we know exactly when that purchase will take place, and exactly how handsome the book in question will be (very).

• Longtime readers of this page may recall that I have a predilection for A Girl And Her Fed by K Brooke “Otter” Spangler, and may have noticed my references to her first wholly original novel, Digital Divide, which she has been selling in chunks for the past little while now. It’s great¹, it’s out in its entirety today, and it just so happens to be the seventh anniversary of AGAHF as well.

  Guys, this is a book that takes place five years in the past from the current comic storyline, you know that the protagonist is still around (’cause look, there she is in Monday’s strip) and you still end up wondering Oh crap how can she possibly survive this? It is the sort of book where a character makes a moral compromise and you send up shouting (maybe out loud, I ain’t sayin’) NOOOOO DON’T DO IT! at the page (or “screen” to be perfectly accurate, but let’s not quibble). It’s five bucks, it’s nearly 300 pages, and it’s chock-full of really clever ideas; it even features a scene that takes place inside of an ambulance which is always my chief criterion for quality literature.

• Speaking of books presented as electrons, there is a preview of Ryan North’s Poor Yorick (the bonus prequel to Choose Your Own Hamlet that was unlocked during the Kickstarter) over on the YouTubes. North’s been dealing with a construction challenge putting together the e-book version of CYOH and PY, as e-book construction kits are used to the kind of book that only goes in one path in one direction (lame!) instead of all over the damn place (neat!), leading North to create the programming to generate these books himself. What this means is that CYOH and all the ancillary items are that much closer to ending up in your (my) hands, which is several kinds of all right.
• Finally, a very thin “book”, which is this case is actually a list of the unique names of the 9069 people that gave money to the Penny Arcade Kickstarter last year and thus get to see and hear Mike Krahulik shout their name while chasing a duck. Well, not so much shout as read off a really long list. Also, not so much chase as following around a flock of a dozen or so.

  If you’re waiting to see if the ducks get annoyed or organized, they mostly seem curious that the weird guy isn’t feeding them, keeps following them around, and talking to them — not the usual experience of farm ducks, I’d imagine. It’s all quite surreal, but honestly I prefer this to whatever proofs might be offered that Krahulik satisfied the reward for the 6258 people that pledged US$15 or more.

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¹ Disclaimer #1: Otter has been passing me PDFs as each part of Digital Divide was finished. Disclaimer #2: I was a beta reader for Part IV of the novel (roughly the last 20,000 words). Disclaimer #3: I provided a foreword for the first print collection of AGAHF. Add whatever level of skepticism to my opinions to account for these interactions that you feel would be necessary.

Okay, it’s been a while since my daily drive-by of Graphic Smash showed any new updates to anything I had a habit of reading there, but habits, y’know? Today’s page is a bit unexpected, particularly considering the date shown. Odd. Reached for comment, Joey Manley said:

I’m sad to see it go, but it was time. It hadn’t been an active publication in years. Note that Modern Tales and serializer also went down at the same time, and Girlamatic will be doing so. Webcomics continues to thrive as a medium, but the age of the collective (especially the subscription-based collective) is behind us. For my part, E-Line is moving on to a new, very ambitious comics projects. It’s the end of an era but not the end of the world.

Longtime readers may recall previous reports of Manley’s ideas for projects with E-Line stretching back a number of years, but not much in the past — yeesh — four years or so. At this point it may be that anybody making plans for ambitious comics-related projects whose company name doesn’t rhyme with -opatoco is going to have to run hell of fast to catch up to the current leaders. However, in line with blog policy, we at Fleen remain cautiously optimistic that we’ll see some of Manley’s ideas produce something interesting in the near- to medium-term.

Where you get those ideas, of course, is a matter of some divergent theories. One school of thought holds that ideas are retrieved from perverse depths with arcane, disturbing tools¹. Others believe ideas are plentiful on the ground and ripe for the taking. Ryan Estrada has long been part of the latter camp, but he’s got a new twist.

In brief, he’s taken a script that he’s decided that he won’t ever have time to properly develop and shared it with the world, just to see what others might do with it. Ahuizotl, as it’s called, is released under a Creative Commons license that requires nothing but attribution; if you turn it into a million dollars, you just won the metaphorical lottery. Even more exciting:

If this works out, and someone makes something cool with it, maybe I’ll release more!

Let’s clarify that: making use of free ideas is what’s going to prompt Estrada to release more free ideas. I can think of nothing more exciting than others jumping in on this concept and turning Estrada’s initial offering into the ideas equivalent of a take-a-penny-leave-a-penny dish at the cash register of the webcomics Kwik-E-Mart.

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¹ In case you can’t see what Maura’s saying that so disturbs Library Anne, it is:

Let’s just say Vaseline, a frozen kielbasa and some cold medication are involved.

It’s one of those words with entirely too many definitions.

• Hey, have I mentioned that MoCCA Fest is this weekend? Because it totally is, and I will be roaming the crap out of the show floor¹ on Saturday². Look for a healthy contingent of webcomickers and their natural allies, including the various B9 creators, Magnolia Porter, Lauren Zukauskas, Mike Isenberg & Oliver Mertz, David McGuire, Sophie Goldstein, Sylvan Migdal, Oni Press, Top Shelf, and :01 Books — who will be debuting Lucy Knisley’s Relish, which it seems everybody loves.
• Let’s take a trip to the picture show, as The Economist examined closely the efforts of Freddave Kellett-Schroeder to navigate the waters of Fair Use in the production of Stripped. It says something that the vagaries of US copyright law would get such a close reading in a London-based magazine, but I’m not sure if I can articulate exactly what it says.

  It’s probably very insightful and about midway between the ubiquity of US-made media and the inability of the newsy segment of that same media to do in-depth reporting on issues raised in odd corners of the culture. Anyhoo, as of this writing there’s just under two days left to help get more sound and video clips into Stripped, if you should be so inclined.

• From the movie show to the reality show, Stripped to Strip Search:
  

  [Regarding surprises during the production period] Khoo echoed this, noting especially how Krahulik hit a particular point where his respect for The Artists became a major influence on his participation.

  Well! We know what Robert was talking about now, don’t we? My regard for Mike Krahulik [SPOILERS in that link] has jumped several notches with his insistence that he would not [redacted] the losing Artist’s contribution in Strip Search elimination #3.

  Very tense episode, and had Khoo not said in previous interviews that every day resulted in an elimination, I would have bet good money that this would be a candidate for playing a “nobody goes home” card. We at Fleen want to congratulate Lexxy Douglass and Tavis Maiden for sharing their best work with us; you both rock.

• Dang if it doesn’t make my heart sing as Chris Onstad decides to show us he’s getting the (metaphorical) band back together:
  

  Achewood’s hiatus has been the stuff of much speculation, and the lack of information from me has contributed to this. In some cases, silence on my part was construed as disregard; this truly was never the reason for it. Some of my personal struggles became all-consuming and needed addressing. We can go over the unsavory details later. I’m grateful—and lucky—to be able to tell you that these are, after a long, dark tea-time, behind me. But during this period, many of my relationships suffered. Some were with my readers and supporters. For you affected by my difficulties, I sincerely apologize. Please know I’m working to restore that relationship —- first and foremost by addressing the second cookbook —- and will have good news on that to share with you soon. [emphasis mine]

  Chris, all is forgiven if even one of those recipes in the second cookbook is even half as good as Perfect Oven Fries Every Time.

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¹ Which is small enough that I’m not bothering with table numbers here.

² Sunday I’m helping to skills-test a class of EMT students, finding out who’s learned how to not kill their patients.

The first one is: No April Fool’s Day gags at Fleen. No, wait, the pants thing, that would be Rule To Live By #0, then the April Fool’s thing can still be RTLB #1.

RTLB #φ: It’s always appropriate to say Happy Birthday, so let’s note that Christopher Wright has, as of yesterday, been doing Help Desk for seventeen (occasionally irregular) years, making it one of the Grand Old Webcomics.

RTLB #e: You can never have enough Jeff Smith, ever. Much as I loved his turn towards sci-fi/horror and his turn on Captain Marvel, when I think “Jeff Smith”, my eye inevitably turns towards my gilt-edged first printing of the hardcover BONE one-volume collection because BONE is the best and I’ll fight any man-jack among you says different. And now we get word that Smith is returning to humor/fantasy, and he’ll be doing it as a webcomic called Tüki Save The Humans:

It will be about the first human to leave Africa. It takes place about 2 million years ago during the Ice Age and Africa has been turned into a desert. Everyone is trying to stop Tüki –- the Animal spirits, other humans, and more.

Looking to do this in color from the beginning. Plans to release it weekly online as free webcomic, and eventually releasing the chapters or arcs for sale. Jeff said he would need to have at least 6 months of the book in the can before he started to make sure he stays on schedule.

Big props to Smith for thinking in terms of maybe the most impressive webcomic buffer ever, and finally I get what Smith’s wife and publisher, the very smart Vijaya Iyer, was hinting at last year at SDCC when we talked Kickstarter and webcomics and I had the distinct pleasure of introducing her to a mess of people who have figured out the webcomics model.

RTLB #π: Optimism wins out, maybe? I first noticed the Jeff Smith announcement because of a tweet from Faith Erin Hicks, which reminded me that it’s time to again talk about Hicks’s collaboration with Prudence Shen, Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong. NCPGW has been running since the fall via :01 Books online-to-print curatorial site, and it rapidly approaching its conclusion (eight pages of battlin’ robots mark today’s update, starting here).

Now here’s the thing: I know how NCPGW ends, because :01 Books were kind enough to send me a review copy a couple weeks back in advance of the 7 May release date. No spoilers, but I can say that although Shen and Hicks have been thoroughly debunking the titular assertion for more than 250 pages¹, I will say that the conclusion is satisfying, reasonably non-painful for the protagonists, and arrived at entirely fairly.

It would have been easy for Shen to make things too easy for her band of barely-speaking-to-each-other rivals, and she avoids it deftly. Along the way, we get a terrific exploration of friends that aren’t really, enemies that are really, the absolute terror that’s engendered by cheerleaders, and the universal utility of Richard Ayodade.

If this sounds kind of awesome (and it is), and if you plan on being at the MoCCA Festival this weekend, be sure to drop by the :01 table and tell ’em how much you appreciate their providing a platform for such terrific work from such talented creators. I sure will be.

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¹ Anybody that has seen or read any story, or lived in any way whatsoever, will be able to tell you that phrases like Trust me and This will absolutely work and Nothing can stop us are full of deception. Especially when used in proximity to references to industrial-strength weed killer.

Nobody likes a good internet riot more than me¹, and there’s a call going around in webcomics circles using exactly that terminology today:

Hey Internet, it’s Time to Riot For Howie Noel

Executive Summary: webcomicker Howie Noel has had for a number of years a comic called Tara Normal, which attracted some attention and perhaps even offers from the entertainment conglomerates. Simon & Schuster has, over the past year or so, released a series of books aimed at readers eight and up under the series name SaraNormal. Both deal with an alive female person who has mysterious ghost-seeing powers. I think that’s about the limit of what all people would regard as “undisputed facts”.

Ryan Fisher (he of the riot-rousing post linked above) reports that Tara Normal creator Noel went on the TGT podcast last month talking about Tara Normal and SaraNormal, and feeling poorly treated by the latter; I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast, so much of what follows is based on Fisher’s interpretation of what was said there:

Not only is the name a blatent [sic] rip-off of Howie’s Tara Normal, the comparisons don’t stop there. SaraNormal features a young woman with the same abilities as Tara, hits some of the EXACT SAME plot points and even includes some of the same cast members! If that isn’t bad enough, the fictional author Simon & Schuster created to huck this brand of copyright infringement has the SAME DAMN BIO THAT HOWIE USED. The bastards couldn’t even come up with an original background for their made up AUTHOR! SaraNormal is now a book series that has 9 different books, meanwhile Howie is left with the pieces of the baby he created.

Let’s take those one at a time:

• Titles aren’t sacrosanct; the same riffing that led from “paranormal” to “Tara Normal” could lead to “SaraNormal”, or for that matter, ParaNorman. I’m not saying that it was an independent derivation, just that this is probably the weakest claim.
• Regarding the powers, abilities, and plot points, I’ve not read either TN or SN, so I can’t comment; Fisher said he hasn’t either, and it’s understandable if Noel reports seeing massive similarities — in any person’s mind, coincidence only explains so much.

  However, ideas like “young woman talks to the dead and investigates paranormal activities” aren’t protected by copyright, only their execution. From my reading of synopses, it appears that Tara is a licensed paranormal investigator that beats up zombies; Sara is 12 and apart from the talking to ghosts thing, has life problems closer to what you’d find in a Judy Blume novel.

• Fisher’s last point is probably the strongest — if S&S have appropriated Noel’s bio for the author of the SaraNormal books, that’s pretty blatant. However, I couldn’t find a side-by-side comparison of the two bios. When I asked Fisher about it, he referenced the bio provided for the author of SaraNormal as seen on Amazon:
  

  Phoebe Rivers had a brush with the paranormal when she was thirteen years old², and ever since then, she has been fascinated by people who see spirits and can communicate with them. In addition to her intrigue with all things paranormal, Phoebe also loves cats, French cuisine, and wiling her afternoons away in coffee shops writing stories. Phoebe has written dozens of middle-grade fiction books and is thrilled to now be exploring Sara’s paranormal world.

  … but did not have a copy of Noel’s books to compare to, so that’s inconclusive.

The best thing about this (and what makes the riot calls premature) is that Fisher says Noel’s been advised by a lawyer to not disclose other details. If you think you’ve been ripped off, lawyering up is the smart thing to do, as is keeping quiet on things the lawyer says not to yap about, as is not starting any riots or letting others start them on your behalf.

Guys. We’ve got speculation here, not self-reported, and the creator has a lawyer whose job will be much more difficult if any unsanctioned riots get underway. Know how you know that last bit is true? If a riot would have helped, the lawyer would be leading it.

Whether Sara is a thinly-disguised version of how Tara was described at 13, I can’t say (and from a third-hand perspective, neither can you). I can easily believe that given the YA (read: mid-teens and up) explosion in paranormal fiction, S&S would be looking to expand the concept down to the pre-teen readers. I can, barring other information, can find the explanation of “same idea, different people” to be reasonable.

I am not saying that these explainings-away are true, just that we don’t have enough information to break out the pitchforks, as one might if you saw a drawing suddenly lifted from a cartoon to a suspiciously-identical unauthorized shirt or art gallery print.

Should Noel’s lawyer decide that a het-up internet is the appropriate response, or evidence come to light that somebody at S&S planned an appropriation, then swing by my place: I’ve got a whetstone that’ll put a nice edge on your rhetorical pitchfork. Until then, please recognize that there is no clear set of rules to govern situations like this and sometimes the best thing you can do is keep your powder dry.

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¹ Okay, that’s probably not true, but let’s face it — the internet creates a tendency towards mobs greater than anywhere this side of Springfield.

² That bio does seem a bit contrived to me, but contrived to make the author resemble the protagonist.

Anytime you have to ask yourself Should I be establishing a document trail? is not the easiest of days, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s (briefly) talk webcomics (of course) and Kickstarter (big surprise there).

• Aaron Diaz¹ wrapped up his Kickstarter for The Tomorrow Girl last night with a few surprises:
  • He took the number two slot from Penny Arcade in the Comics section
  • He did not pass the Machine of Death game, which Diaz and David Malki ! both seemed to think would happen
  • He wound up very close to a nice round multiple of US$5000, but came up six dollars short which is the most baffling thing of all — you watch pledge totals go up and down all the time as individuals try to be the one to make a project exactly make goal² or exactly hit a round number
  • Being a generous soul, Diaz has declared that although he finished with US$534,994 he will make good on the stretch goal for US$550K (drawing all the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park according to modern scientific thought) but let’s not kid ourselves, he likes drawing dinosaurs more than he likes breathing

  Well done, Mr Diaz, and thereisnogodspeed on all those stretch goals (and dinosaurs); between this and the MoD game, Make That Thing is going to have one hell of a beta test.

• It’s been a while since we mentioned Super Art Fight, the DC-area premiere competitive improvisatory movable art feast because honestly, we all know the drill by now. SAF shows up in a town (much like a rampaging cycle gang), takes over a bar or show venue or convention session room (again, much like a rampaging cycle gang), and proceeds to art the crap out of a bunch of large drawing boards while music blares and a play-by-play (draw-by-draw?) commentary takes place at a level of enthusiasm slightly greater than than of a match where a pair of luchadors have their masks on the line. Then they blow out of town, property damage and broken hearts in their wake. You kinda have to be there to understand it.

  Until now. [cue appropriate music]

  The best of Super Art Fight’s art (show posters, art from the Wheel of Death, original contributions from competitors) is now being collected into a … I’m sure that book is not a word sufficient to contain what’s inside the covers. Let’s go with “being collected into a” tome over on the ol’ Kickstarter. The producers of Super Art Fight would like it to be known that they are not responsible for pledgers suffering nosebleeds, temporary deafness, hysterical blindness, or mysterious pregnancies, and that if you have an art-boner that lasts more than four hours, consult a physician.

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¹ Tolkien scholar par excellence and paleontology buff with the passion of every single six year old in the world taken together.

² Heck, I gave two bucks to the second Stripped Kickstarter to make it hit exactly goal. I’m not proud of that.