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.

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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.

It was more than three years ago that Octopus Pie ended, a little more than ten years after it started.

For the past three and a half years, Octopie has been rerunning all 1026 strips, close enough to one a day as makes no matter, with Meredith Gran’s commentary about where she was emotionally and professionally as each strip was done. It’s fascinating to see not only how they reflected her own outlook on life, but also her critiques of her own past work, and what she reveals about the craft of putting the strip together.

And now it’s done for a second time; the archives are there, both the original and the commentary track versions, in case you want to read them again, but you’ll be going solo this time.

Here’s part of what I wrote when Gran finished the strip:

Because what Meredith Gran accomplished over ten years and 1026 pages of pure magic was a master class in comics, their ability to tell any damn kind of story you want to, and especially to provide a playground for your characters. Eve Ning isn’t who she was back in strip one; neither is Hanna, or Marek, or Will. Jane and Marigold, Julie and Park, Larry and Puget Sean and America frickin’ Jones, all of them — they didn’t exist in a timeless, changeless story setting. By fits and starts, on camera and off, they lived and breathed, cried and loved and hated and indifferented.

And that is why future comics creators will have to look back on Octopus Pie as a work to be studied, understood, its lessons incorporated. Meredith Gran showed what it’s like to do a better strip every single damn day, to imbue characters with personality and growth (especially off camera), and to show what an ever-changing whirlwind life is as people come and go, grow and wane in their presence.

There have been other projects along the way, of course — for pretty much all of the time since the reruns began, she’s been working on her videogame and also raising her son; for a period of time, she did quick comics to document her gardening (on occasion, the two intersected). Valerie Halla’s colors made significant contributions the the mood of damn near every strip in the last quarter of the comic’s run¹.

Goodbye, Everest Ning. I wonder how much you’ve changed in the three years that we haven’t seen your life chronicled, or how it may change in the remaining forever that we’ll be apart. But we’ll always have that ten years (plus three) that you let us in. And whatever Meredith Gran makes next, and next after that, I’m sure we’ll love just as much.

Spam of the day:

[Gov’t Plans] Why Preppers are Now Enemy #1 Food stockpiles banned! At a time like this!?!

None of what you just said is real. I get that you gotta hustle, and gotta have a scam, but you are indulging paranoid fantasies in fragile people, many of whom are armed and will act on those fantasies in an outward fashion on those that you tell them are the enemy. Kindly fuck off until there is no further off to fuck, then fuck off some more.

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¹ Following on Sloan Leong’s establishment of a color palette some dozens of strips prior. Not to mention the color and animation lent by Lacey Micallef a little more than halfway through the run and Gran’s own early contribution to color: Sparkle Butt².

² Having, as I do, copies of the self-published first three collections of Octopus Pie — slim 70-90 page, Creative Commons-sporting floppy books — I get to look at hand-colored-and-glittered Sparkle Butt whenever I like. You can get the remaining non-Image books here, and the Image editions can be ordered wherever you buy books or comics.

From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, cartoons and the aftermath of the power they hold.

In the French equivalents of Junior High and High School, history, geography, and civics are taught under the same hours in the timetable by the same teachers. For historical reasons, they are known as history and geography teachers.

Samuel Paty was one of them.

So while I don’t know what he was like, I know about his discipline from other teachers I know better. The ones I had in Junior High and High School, of course. Fabrice Erre, too. But the first one in my mind has and always will be my own father (who is retired by now).

For instance, when Emmanuel Macron in his eulogy (Samuel Paty was honored with a national funeral, as well as the Légion d’Honneur in the academics section, and his son was made a ward of the state) told us his home was filled with books, I don’t know if they included comics, but I otherwise couldn’t help but think of my own childhood home, filled with all kinds of books. And among them, comics were not necessarily the least relevant ones for history and geography, even if that was not always to their credit: infamously, the various editions of Tintin au Congo are often used to illustrate the attitude from Europeans of the time towards colonization.

But we did not need that eulogy, or knowledge of the curriculum, to know that Samuel Paty knew the power of a cartoon. We do know that because, while I don’t want to get too much into the ongoing inquiry¹, a few days earlier he was sued by a parent who objected to Samuel Paty using Muhammad caricatures as an illustration of free speech as part of his civics class, and as a a result police had deposed Samuel Paty, who defended his use of the caricatures; not as part of a state mandate (the teachers wouldn’t stand for it, and shouldn’t), but as part of his academic freedom. In fact, while the wording is in dispute, we know he warned of the content and excused students who were unwilling to view it.

In the hours following the murder, it was thought to be a random terror attack. We know now it was anything but random.

As Emmanuel Macron said, we will keep discovering, we will keep inquiring, and we will keep fighting for freedom and reason. #JeSuisSamuel too.

As always, our thanks to FSFCPL for his thoughts. Take care of each other.

Spam of the day:
Spammers don’t get to share this day.

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¹ To give you an idea, the trial for the Charlie Hebdo and related terrorist murders of January 2015 has only recently opened and is still ongoing.

I speak today of international tax regimes, and a Brexit-addled government in London that is determined to immiserate the residents of the UK. One may recall changes to value-added taxes in the UK in the past, the VATMOSS which eventually exempted small purchases and which was mostly addressed by services like Gumroad and everybody else? Well, they just hoped to fly under the radar of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs.

Yeah, got some bad news for you, person who sells anything to anybody in the UK:

This HMRC change to VAT on small imports is potentially hugely damaging to free trade and customer choice – article here https://t.co/zzybRFHScC summary below

That from Paul Lewis, a financial journalist in Blighty. The summary from his tweet was the image included above, but for screenreaders, here’s the important parts:

Anyone abroad who wants to sell a product in Britain will have to register with HM Revenue & Customs and pay VAT directly to the government. At present the seller merely has to fill in a customs declaration that the purchser pays the tax. Three other changes will come into effect. First, the VAT exemption for products worth less than £15 will come to an end.

I left out the second and third because they deal with EU-resident sellers with British customers and vice versa; I’m addressing the folks that are not part of the EU or UK, but regardless of where in the world you are, I’ll repeat that first line with some bolding this time: Anyone abroad who wants to sell a product in Britain will have to register with HM Revenue & Customs and pay VAT directly to the government.

So if you’re an indie creator with customers in the UK, I’d encourage you to encourage them to get any purchases sorted out now, with delivery dates well in advance of 1 January (who knows if the Customs officers will treat a package showing up on 2 January but in fulfillment of an order placed on 15 December as old rules or new rules). Either that, or get in business with Her Majesty’s Government, and be prepared to pay with time, money, and effort to get in (and stay in) compliance with the new regs¹.

I mean, you could try to ignore it, but something tells me that small merchants that don’t pay VAT are going to see their shipments refused for delivery² rather than a discreet eye turned to the side. At the very least, if you try to smuggle your stuff to customers via the post, you’ll possibly find yourself the subject of inquiries if you ever change planes at Heathrow.

Spam of the day:

Contact Benjamin Today and Discover the Difference a Professional Blog Writer Makes!

I sincerely doubt you can master the intricacies of Fleen House Style but sure — submit 3000 words on why working on spec is a bad idea and if I like it, maybe I’ll have some work for you in the future.

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¹ Hopefully we’ll get more information before or near to the first of the year if t-shirts and books from overseas becoming prohibitively complicated for sellers to process. Because that revocation of the £15 exemption is either a major-league a dick move, or Her Majesty’s Government needs every tuppence it can wrangle from the rest of the world as their economy gets Wrecksited. I’m seeing reports of EU vendors being told they have to pay HMR&C £1000 for the privilege of collecting and forwarding VAT and ha ha no, fuck that.

² Or worse, the purchaser never gets them, and the shipper never gets them back. Whether they end up in a landfill, on Ebay, or in some Customs officer’s home is open to speculation.

I have to be honest, I didn’t expect the Jeffrey Toobin story to prompt a Hold my beer moment from Rudy Fucking Giuliani within 48 hours. I really dread what the Friday after-hours newsdump may bring. Fortunately, there are good things happening even amidst the ruins of Culture.

• I’ll admit, this one caught me by surprise until I saw the review at The AV Club yesterday: Allie Brosh of Hyperbole And A Half has a new book out! Since the site hadn’t had updates since about 2013, I hadn’t been keeping up. I mean, I’d go back every once in a while to make sure it was still there (I refer EMT students to the Improved Pain Scale every class I teach), but I’d figured that Brosh had moved on to other things.

  Nope! Last month there was a typically Broshian book announcement, wherein you got to choose how much irritation and/or weirdness you wanted in your experience of learning about Solutions And Other Problems, the first chapter of which Brosh has thoughtfully shared with you. I don’t have a copy in hand, but looks like she’s missed no steps in her nuanced view of life, and I’m looking forward to it greatly; I’ll wager you are, too. Order here

• Speaking of books, you know what’s better than a book from somebody whose work you enjoy? How about three books from the most relentlessly joyful somebody whose work you absolutely enjoy-verging-on-adore? I speak, naturally, of Lucy Bellwood:
  

  Susan Van Metre at Walker Books US has acquired, at auction, in a three-book deal, world rights to author Kate Milford and cartoonist Lucy Bellwood’s, Seacritters, pitched as Pirates Of The Caribbean meets Redwall, about a young badger who joins the crew of a notorious pirate ship as they set out on a new semi-legal career path as privateers.

  Lucy Bellwood gets to draw ships from the Age Of Sail and crew them with adorable animals. Folks, I am over the moon, nothing can flout me out of my good humo[u]r.

  Publication for the first book is set for 2023.

  Godsdammit. Okay, it’s okay, that’s only a little more than two to more than three years away, I can wait. For something that will undoubtedly be suffused with Bellwoodian goodness, I will wade through the Maelstrom barefoot. Insert any Wrath Of Khan-sounding speech of determination and defiance here that you like, it’s all appropriate.

  I trust that the very second the books go up for preorder you will be aiding me in sending them to instant profitability, because Lucy Bellwood spends so much of her life trying to provide joy and respite on a daily friggin’ basis to everybody, the very least we can do is make sure she gets paid.

Spam of the day:

Want to CLONE an affiliate site that is making commissions RIGHT NOW? Well you need this “website cloning” app – which creates an instant “mirror image” of one of the top money-making sites out there:

Prettty sure you just offered to commit a crime, for money. This isn’t the only spam I’ve received offering a way to make money from (quoting here) other peoples websites, so fuck all of you scammers that want to convince yourselves that I’m as much of a thief as you are.

Me? Okay, I guess. I mean, I found out that work has apparently decided that we’re all using Microsoft Teams now, which is an abomination against all that is good and holy, and which decided to mark me as “Available for your DMs and chat, send ’em over any time you like!!!” despite the fact that I’m always teaching and not available, and which won’t let me log out or quit.

Seriously. I log out or quit, and it friggin’ re-launches and re-logs in, which brings my computer down to a crawl. Let’s try to find something that does not suck from every pore of its being; I’m thinking … webcomics.

It’s more than a little shame that work decided that today was the day to inflict pain, as today is one of the great holidays of Webcomickia, being as it marks — jointly and severally — the births of both John Allison and Ryan North. I thought I might put some birthday-apprope photos up top, but wouldn’t you know it? The internet is replete with photos of Ryan North — some even fully clothed! — but relatively few of John Allison. Doing a search produced the preview shown above, where I think we can quote Sesame Street and hum One of these things is not like the others, as one of the photos is John Allison, debonair chronicler of weird goings-on, and the other three are a different, lesser John Allison, onetime head of the Cato Institute.

There are no photos of lesser Ryans North; all other Ryans North have hidden themselves away from the extreme handsomeness and also Chompsky. Happys Birthday to Messers Allison and North; both of you produce better comics every time one comes out, and that is a rare skill.

In other news:

• David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) has been throwing himself into Irregular Webcomic and his myriad other creative endeavours since his (mostly controlled, but still a big shift after a lengthy period of association) dejobbing¹, and has taken the next step — he had a store where you could get his (honestly, excellent) photographs, but sometimes you just gotta go where everybody else is:
  

  As part of my ongoing attempt to start a photography business so that I can avoid going back to working for The Man, I have opened an Etsy shop, selling greeting cards featuring prints of my wildlife and landscape photography. I ship worldwide. If you’d like to support me, and get some cool greeting cards, please check it out, and maybe mention to your friends and family.

  Speaking of cool greeting cards, my friend with whom I toyed with an art scammer, Hollis Kitchin? Awesome greeting cards and prints at her art shop, including some gorgeous new floral designs. If you need cards, please consider these two fine folks from opposite corners of the Pacific Ocean.

• Speaking of Comics Camp, which is where I know Hollis from, another Camper has a new book announcement. Readers may recall that my primary complaint about Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina was the :01 Books should have given her about three dozen more pages to let the story and characters breathe a little more. I don’t want to say they definitely listened to me, but I will note that her next book has had its official cover reveal and pre-order announcement over at The Beat, and if you follow the link to the Macmillan page, it appears this time they gave her four dozen more pages to play with.

  Jukebox features more Indian young women as protagonists, more time travel, more family history searching … everything in Chanani’s wheelhouse, and anchored by her adorably inviting style. Get ready for discussions of music history (Sister Rosetta Tharpe!) and poetic waxing on the merits of vinyl², both of which are making my old college DJ habits start to rouse and demand to be fed. Jukebox releases from :01 on 22 June, 2021.

Spam of the day:

It looks like an ordinary survival tool you’d see at Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shop – but it’s not.It’s been updated with a tiny military technology that makes a 300-pound meth-fueled man lose control of all bodily functions in seconds.

So what, you finally found the Brown Note?

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¹ The fact that that story is nearly two years old shows you what a country with a functioning safety net — notably, a national healthcare system — means for somebody taking a flyer at a creative career. It means the luxury of time, the luxury to try, the luxury to fail and not worry that it will cost you your life just because you’re no longer making corporate research PhD Aussie Fun Bucks.

² I’m not apologizing for that.

As Trek movies go, it was only mediocre, but Malcolm McDowell is always worth watching, particularly as he reminds us that time changes all things.

• Case in point: Ryan North¹ reminds us, via the ever-accommodating vehicle of T-Rex, that things have changed quite a damn lot and we can but remember the Before Times. I don’t know if you habitually read the alt-text at Dinosaur Comics, but if you read today’s, it’s contains a promise that you can redeem for physical contact with Ryan North² and I can scarcely think of another promise of future times that is more likely to get me through until then. I will take you up on that hello and goodbye, you giant man of comfort.
• Second case in point: publishing is a weird biz, where delays are common even when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic on. It was once planned that nowish there would be a YA graphic novel from Christopher Baldwin and Shaenon Garrity³ called Willowweep Manor. At least, that was what we were told in May of last year, which I took to mean that the book was largely done, given the enormous lead times for printing and publicity planning.

  But sometimes even done projects get rearranged; I’m gonna say that it’s not COVID that pushed the book until Summer of 2021 (it would have had to have been done with the overseas printing before everything went on lockdown to meet a Fall 2020 release), but the why doesn’t really matter. It’s out there, and in the time that things have changed it’s picked up not only a new release date, but also a cover and a new title:

  The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon K Garrity, illustrated by Christopher Baldwin
  One dark and stormy night, Haley sees a stranger drowning in the river. Since her greatest passion is Gothic romance novels, she knows her moment has come. But when Haley leaps into the water to rescue the stranger, she awakens in Willowweep. It certainly looks like the setting of one of her favorite books: A stately manor. A sinister housekeeper. Three brooding brothers. There’s even a ghost.

  Except Willowweep is not what it seems. Its romantic exterior hides the workings of a pocket universe—the only protection our world has against a great force of penultimate evil, and its defenses are crumbling. Could cruel fate make Haley the heroine that Willowweep needs?

  If you didn’t click on the link to the cover, do so; I love the energy that Baldwin’s brought to the cover, with (presumably) Haley about to lay some smack down with that umbrella, and Chinstrap Dude (presumably much older) looking kind of overwhelmed and useless with what appears to be butter knife. The overall tone reminds me of a massive Hieronymus Bosch painting I saw in Ghent once, one of his fantastical Hellscapes⁴, which due to the presence of lovingly-rendered rabbits I have always referred to as Screw Not With The Bunnies Of The Apocalypse. This cover is what happens when you screw with the Bunnies Of The Apocalypse.

In a more just world, I’d have something to say about George (the third Nexus Of All Webomics Realities, Wherever He Happens To Be Division), but as time has taught us, it’s far from a just world. We’ll make do.

Spam of the day:

Over the last ten years, he’ s developed a program where ANYONE can start relieving their own back pain in the next 30 minutes. Just 15 minutes into the program and you’ re feeling eons better. Out of pain. Or at minimum greatly reduced. My chiropractor highly endorses Ian Hart and his methods.

See, I know you’re lying. If there’s one thing that will get a chiropractor kicked out of chiropracting, it’s admitting that there are treatments for anything that don’t involve chiropractice.

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¹ Toronto Man-Mountain, Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities, Frostbite Division.

² Don’t be creepy about it.

³ Tiki Queen, Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities, Greater Bay Area Division.

⁴ It wasn’t The Garden Of Earthly Delights since that’s at The Prado and I’ve never been; it was probably one of the studies for Garden, but who can say? No photos allowed, I didn’t keep a diary of the day, and dude drew a lot of hell-bunnies.

I wanted to share with you something I received yesterday, something that if you were to act on it, say, today or later, that will absolutely not be a problem. It’s about the cost of comics.

Producing comics costs money, and it should be in all circumstances that the dominant cost is paying the creators. By a fluke of timing, yesterday also brought forth a damning bit of reporting into throwback practices of the bad old days from a huckster who should be avoided at all costs. If you’re thinking of getting into comics remember that the first rule is money flows to the creator(s).

For a hell of a contrast to Andrew Rev¹, consider that for years now, The Nib has been putting out comics five days a week, and paying the best rates seen since the heyday when every general-audience magazine ran cartoons and there were people making mortgage payments on homes with pools in Connecticut from making those cartoons. These days, it’s pretty much The New Yorker and The Nib. But unlike the heyday of general-audience magazines, anybody can read their stuff for free, no subscription required, and so there’s an appeal that was sent to everybody that’s signed up for their newsletter (which is free and separate from their Inkwell subscriber program). They’re asking people for a few bucks:

This week’s Nib comics cost $2,500. Will you help us cover it?
Each week at The Nib we publish thousands of dollars in comics — most of them original works we’ve commissioned from our artists. A short comic you read on the site costs $300, while our long form often goes over $1,000.

Producing comics isn’t cheap and we have no financial backing other than our monthly members. This is an entirely reader-funded publication.

So we’re setting modest goal of raising $2,500 in donations [14 October 2020] to cover our costs of publishing.

That’s it. If all our readers gave us $10, we’d fund our publishing efforts well into next year!

Ten bucks. If you read The Nib online, can you make a one-time donation of ten bucks? I’m a monthly subscriber and also buy all of the The Nib’s print collections, which comes to maybe six hundo over the lifetime of the site; Matt Bors isn’t asking for class money, he’s asking for ten bucks, once.

If you’ve thought about being a subscriber and this is a good time for US$4/month (or more — more is good) instead of ten bucks once, that’s also a great idea. If you don’t like the thought of an ongoing subscription and another account that needs to be updated the next time TJMaxx or whoever has a data breach and you get a new credit card, I get it … maybe take that US$48 that represents a one-year subscription and send it over all at once.

You can donate here. A few minutes, a few bucks. I’ve always figured my fair contribution to creators at about US$0.10/page (which is about the cost of a print collection), and The Nib does at least three short comics/day (with much longer ones interspersed), so that’s at least a buck and a half a week, or six bucks a month — that lowest level of subscription is a bargain, and a tenner will cover your moral obligation for most of two months.

Comics cost, and money flows to the creators. You’re here because you love comics. Take a few minutes, take the credit card equivalent of the change jar you have on the table by where you keep your keys, and join with others to keep the comics coming and the money flowing in the right direction.

And for the love of all that’s holy, if you’re a creator read that longer piece linked above and never work for Terrific Production.

Spam of the day:

Smart way that can do your ear clean within seconds

This is just that mind-control bug thing from Wrath Of Khan, isn’t it?

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¹ The most vile part of the contracts in that story, for me, wasn’t the We don’t have to pay you until COVID has been defeated to a mathematically impossible degree clause. It was the part that says you’re exclusively tied to Terrific as long as they aren’t more than 45 days late in paying you. Who the hell expects that a contract that says I can violate my obligations to you for a month and a half and it’s all good won’t immediately turn into permission to do exactly that, forever?

Working on about three hours sleep thanks to a protracted late-night EMS call that involved police action. I know those two words make people nervous, so let me assure you that the police action was determining whether or not the patient fabricated an emergency that could get entirely innocent folks charged with felonies.

I may have mentioned in the past that if I miss out on sleep because somebody needs help, that’s okay; even relatively low-grade help that you could have worked out yourself but you think you’ll get seen sooner because we wheel you in¹, I can live with that.

But for glob’s sake, if you just want a ride home two towns over, don’t make up a medical emergency and ask to be taken to the hospital that’s in the direction you want to go. And really don’t make up imaginary Black dudes assaulting you. That’s a dick move.

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¹ That doesn’t work. Charge nurses will sniff out escalation attempts and send you to chairs without raising an eyebrow.

Sometimes you throw the spam in the shredder, and sometimes you decide to dangle the bait in front of them and resolve to mess with them a bit. If nothing else, it has the potential to be amusing.

This one started when Hollis Kitchin¹, a friend of mine from Comics Camp, mentioned that she’d gotten a probable scam email (visible above, click to embiggen). Dude cold-contacted her, dangled a possible seven grand purchase, looking for large artwork on a rush basis. You can put the text of this email into the search engine of your choice, and come up with a zillion examples that are practically identical, and all fraudulent. Artists that engage in good faith end up out pieces they could have sold, on the hook for shipping, possibly taken for additional cash, and sitting on a large, bounced check. These scammers suck.

So I asked if I could play with him. I emailed our fraudster as if he’d emailed me first, and copied as much of his language back at him as I could manage:

Thank you for storming on some of my works and finding them impressive and intriguing. I sometimes doubt that I am good at what I do, but since you say it is undoubtable that I am good, I must thank you for the compliment.

I would be very pleased for you to purchase some of my works as a surprise gift to your wife in honor of your upcoming anniversary. An image of my only available work is attached, which I will hold for you, but there is another buyer interested so if you wish to purchase it, you must be willing to act quickly.

It is quite a large piece (approximately 2 meters by 3.5 meters), and so would require specialized shipping and handling. I will have to enquire as to the costs but please look at the picture now to know more about my piece of inventory. The title is “The Tenderness of Memory Is a Balm Always”.

I would prefer that you make payment by check only.

Fast sale time required? Check! Specialized shipping required, so a confederate who needs to be paid in cash will collect the art from me, which the buyer will helpfully bump up his purchase price to cover? Check! Pay by check which will bounce? Check! He must have been salivating over his imminent success, so much so that I’m not sure he ever looked at the image of The Tenderness of Memory Is a Balm Always. When you click on the link, be sure to scroll allllll the way down and two the right, and zoom in. Here’s the detail if you need it.

He asked for more samples! Now I had to come up with stuff that was vaguely plausible, while still being totally ridiculous, and also kinda crappy because I felt like providing him kinda crappy images; I also didn’t want to give him anything resembling high-res that he might not have found on his own. Also, I wanted at least one of the images to be ferociously inappropriate for his claimed purpose of an anniversary gift to his wife. My response required the utmost care:

I am happy to put together a listing of pieces. It turns out that I have more than just “The Tenderness of Memory Is a Balm Always” (I guess you were not in favor of its dense layers of meaning) that I can sell to you. I went digging through my studio and found some forgotten art that was never picked up by a buyer who died and whose husband absolutely hated the idea of paintings (he called them “The Devil’s Images”) and thus they are still here. They’ve not been stored in ideal conditions, but if you put a frame and mat on them, I don’t think you’ll be able to see where the weevils gnawed on the edge.

I have attached images of three completed pieces within your budget of $1500.00 – $7000.00 ready for immediate sale:

“My Wife” is large and figurative²
“The Great Wave At Islip (Garbage Barge Island)” is large and seascape
“Study #37” is abstract and large

The first two are on stretched canvas and sealed. The third is on board, produced as a single line from a ball-point pen that I attached to a Spirograph I made out of old Legos and produced in a 38 hour fugue state while I was on a Jolt Cola bender. At the end, I had damaged all of the joints in my right hand and elbow and required three surgeries and seven months to recover, so I’m happy to let it go. To be honest, I think it might be cursed because while I was making it, it would whisper terrible things to me about ponies.

Each of the three is $2000.00, but I’ll let Study #37 go for $1000.00 because of the curse. As long as you don’t listen to it, you’ll be fine. For your budget, you could get all three. Actually, it would be a big help if you could because I’m still paying off the doctor’s bills from making that last one.

I tell you, when I got that second reply, I was over the moon; Hollis wrote up a press release to send him, one that purported to tell of my upcoming one-man show at a prestigious museum. Another Camper came up with a 3GB+ TIFF image that, once zipped, was less than 3MB, just to see if we could overload his computer.

Sadly, he decided that this scam wasn’t working and discontinued our correspondence. However, if any of you would like to play with him, “Ashley Jackson” is ashleyjac436@gmail.com. I hear he’s looking for large format art, and is willing to spend US$1500 to US$7000. Just remember to string him along and waste as much of his time as you can (or at least make it so he can’t bother to use his email any longer for all the crap he’s getting there) because he’s a lowlife that preys on artists.

Spam of the day:
Yeah, I think we’re covered today.

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¹ Aside from fabulous watercolors of weather, critters, and whales, she also co-owns the best lingerie shop in the southeastern portion of Alaska, and possibly the entire state. It’s built into a former bank site, with the enormous vault still present. I would advise that if you annoy her, you not accept any invitations to sample Amontillado with her.

² In retrospect, I should have named it Ashley’s Wife.