I have a feeling it’s going to be a quiet week in webcomics, what with a fair number of the New York/New Jersey contingent either still affected, or out helping others. Case in point: Meredith Gran, in a bit less than a day, managed to raise more than US$550 for the rehabilitation of Prospect Park, and the twitterfeeds of lots of creator types reveal they’ve pretty much immediately moved from the Hooray, power’s back! stage to the Let’s help those still without stage. Lots of people helping to clean out inundated houses, deliver food and supplies, and generally try to make life easier for those that got hit hardest. Bravo.

• The stories of what happened during Superstorm Sandy will not be compiled in full for some time, but for me the main reference point for personal experiences (maybe even more than my own, as I came through pretty easily) will likely be the diary-type sketches that Kate Beaton did. If you want to know what the aftermath was like, in all its dramas (small and great), frustrations, moments of clarity and charity, click on the very tall strip and take a journey to the Village, early last week.
• In less storm-related matters, Christopher Baldwin hit a round number over at Spacetrawler today — 300, to be precise — with a little good old fashioned mayhem, Aussie-style. Spacetrawler’s various players and plot threads are careening ahead with no break in pace, and I’ve a feeling the big blowup and tragedy we know is coming (remember, the story started with Nogg informing Martina’s dad of her death). It’s a neat trick, letting everybody know how the story ends before you even start, but still making the ride all exciting-like.

Power’s back, town’s not too badly off¹. Going to catch up on everything that happened this week and see you all on Monday.

In the meantime, if you know of creators in the swath of the superstorm, this might be a good time to throw some commerce their way; if you’ve already done so, please be patient regarding any delivery delays. Me, I’m gonna spend some time tomorrow dropping some money at Wild Pig Comics — who were to be hosting a webcomics multicreator signing this weekend — since everybody needs commerce to kick back in and I needs me some funnybooks after the past four days.

Speaking of kicking, if any of you know Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, feel free to give him a right good kicking on my behalf for his incredibly stupid comments of the past few days. Yes, “Brownie”, the people of New York are dependent on electricity-based “modern conveniences” like ventilators and oxygen concentrators; part of what I’ve been doing in my town for the past few days is sharing our supply of O₂ cylinders with people who would die without them. Ass.

PS: Anybody that knows me in the Central NJ area that needs someplace to plug in a device or a hot shower, call.

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¹ Although there’s probably 40 families here in my town of 13,000 with various degrees of trees into their homes; some will require repair, some will have to be demolished. As bad as it is, we got off lucky.

No posts until those situations resolve, dammit.

Strong Female Characters.

Power and internet still holding, yay. Hopefully you (yes, you personally, not the vast, impersonal, generic “you”) are safe and dry and well. What happened over the weekend before Sandy decided to draw a bead on the Mid-Atlantic coast?

• Several neat bits from Meredith Gran, as she took a look back on her process of writing and how she relates to her characters that should be mandatory reading for anybody that does a story-type strip. She’s also started sharing the webcomics made by her students at SVA, with the first two showing loads of potential. Look for more from her along those lines in the near future. In the meantime, give a good look to Post Hoc by Wyeth Yates and The Bell Blues by Aatmaja Pandya.
• Speaking of “Yates”, Chris Yates (no relation) has just released the first-ever transparent Baffler!s for sale and oh man they are tasty. Only 50 total will be for sale right now (the remaining 50 next year), 25 each of the completely transparent and “First Frost” (with random transparent and opaque paint splatters). Actually, 25 of the completely clear and 24 of the First Frost on account of I just bought one¹. Clear Baffler!s are so awesome, they get their own store page.
• Know who this page hasn’t mentioned in far too long? Rebecca Clements; she’s been on an extended sabbatical from comics, but now she’s back and cranking up the pretty pictures to near-dangerous levels. First up: an enormous summation of what she’s been up for for the past year (living and working in Japan), offering up prints of her best comics, as well as a few originals. If you appreciate the most whimsical art this side of the late Theodore Geisel would do well to welcome Clements back and hope that they can keep up with her renewed burst of creativity.

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¹ Booyah.

Seriously, Hurricane/Tropical Storm Sandy is looking to be pretty damn unpleasant come Monday. Stay safe, all in the way of the storm track.

• Speaking of disasters of one form or another, everybody’s red-haired pal (no, not Jimmy Olsen) Zach Weinersmith dropped some good news on us last night via Twitter:
  

  Presenting, a “Starpocalypse” Teaser, from SMBC Theater, written by James Ashby http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=…

  Warning: shirtless James, who, as previously established, is History’s Greatest Villain, primarily for the whole shirtless thing.

  Anyhoo, a trailer to finally showcase last year’s Kickstarted project that exists in large part to write circumstances where James is blown up in space. But more than just destroying James, Starpocalypse will feature a very balls-intensive FSM, orgasm hats, pointless despair, hot lady aliens or androids or something with purple hair and weird eyes whatever, and big-ass space battles. And hopefully a lot of destroying James.

• Via Chris Hastings:
  

  NEW BOOK NEW BOOK NEW BOOK

  I might be reading too much into this, but it appears that Hastings may have a new book. Release is set just prior to whichever winter solstice-adjacent holiday you prefer, so best pre-order it if you want to make somebody’s Decemberween joyous.

One last thing, if I may be serious for a moment — wherever the storm hits (and despite the fact that I have people that I like a great deal or even love throughout that probability cone, I am wishing as hard as I can that Sandy veers towards any of them instead of me because I am almost as great a villain as James), take care and be aware that you may have to care for yourselves for a while.

In particular, ambulances cannot go out when winds are high, because they are all great big top-heavy boxes on wheels that will roll over until they smash into something if the gusts hit just right. If you’re in the path of high winds, count on EMS response being delayed/suspended during the worst of the storm, and even after there may be significant obstructions. Stay indoors, don’t get hurt, and with any luck we’ll all see each other on Monday.²

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¹ For the record, I chose this title early yesterday after getting my third advance prep briefing for emergency ops in re: Hurricane Sandy. Then Rick Marshall up and uses the same name in tweets and links it to Doctor Who before I can. Damn you, Willenholly, for stepping on my gag! Daaaaaamn yooooooou!

² Except James, unless he puts on a damn shirt.

1500 strips at Girls With Slingshots. Woo!

• Dave Kellett dropped a comment on yesterday’s post disclaiming the words about having to be fired by thousands of readers, thinking perhaps that it was Rich Stevens. I decided to go through my listings for particular words o’ wisdom and match them up with known sources:
  “People die of exposure” — Stevens
  Anything to do with a “liminal state” — Kellett
  On how to make a good webcomic, “Don’t suck; if you do suck, stop sucking as quickly as possible” — either Matt Boyd or Greg Dean, I forget which (but I totally used the quote when moderating a panel at the first NEWW, so if you think that was me, it wasn’t)

  Any others that you would add to the list of Webcomics Wisdom?

• Per the twitterfeed of the fighteningly-talented Kazu Kibuishi, a recommendation for a Kickstarter campaign for you:
  

  @gagnemichel is one of my favorite people on the planet. And this project will be amazing like everything he does. http://kck.st/RiLUEN

  For those of you unused to following the advice of talented people like Kibuishi¹, that project is for a short film based on Michel Gagné’s Rex, which was pretty much guaranteed to be the most charming and adorable part of any of the Flight anthologies. The goal is extremely modest (only US$15,000), and Gagné has been a professional animator for longer than many of you have been alive, so if there’s anybody that knows what a film meeting his vision should cost in terms of time/effort/money, it’s him.

• Holy crap, somebody let Chris Yates have access to an acrylic-cutting laser and he’s produced a transparent Baffler!. Most encouraging thing? That little inscription that notes the photo is “00/100”, presumably a prototype of something I’m going to have to get this holiday season.

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¹ Speaking of Kibuishi, I realize that I have yet to review Amulet 5 and it’s no longer really a timely thing — suffice it to say it is as impressive and engaging as the first four, delving into some serious darkness, and making me wonder if the Big Bad’s Assistant has fallen so far (despite the best intentions at the start) that he cannot be redeemed. We’re only at the halfway point, folks.

Even I, non-MMPORG player that I am, know about the oddly alliterative affirmative, although to me those letters will always make me think instead of Jeff Zugale, illustrator¹, webcomicker, and finest of fine arteests. I had the rare opportunity (seein’ as how he lives in LA and me on the east coast) to catch up with the wonderfully talented Mr Zugs² and see how he’s doing.

See, Zugale had the chance to grow up in northern New Jersey, right around the corner from a comic shop that opened up some twenty years ago and is still owned by a guy who will take any opportunity to throw a party. Twenty years is a long time in the funnybooks business, a long time for a friendship, and a sufficient excuse to bring Zugale back home from the Left Coast for the weekend to hang out with some special guests, run a sound board for contests and interviews and games and such. If you ever watched The Uncle Floyd Show in your formative years, that’s pretty much the feel of what Zugale found himself in this past weekend, and to which he graciously invited me to come and hang out.

Then the sweetener: one of the guests (and, coincidentally enough, the ex-wife of the owner of the comic shop in question) was Amanda Conner, aka My Favorite and the only reason I’ve bought cape comics in the past half-decade or so, if only because (quoting Shaenon Garrity here) she draws everybody like they’re just a little bit drunk and it lends a great deal of humanity to a genre that often lacks it³. So that was awesome.

Along the way, I got to talk to Zugale about some of the work he’s doing on Not Invented Here (loving it), whether or not there’ll be another ClownSweaterUniPegaKitty-like commission anytime soon (Scalzi’s busy finishing his next book, so maybe after that), and about his family (best ever, yours probably sucks by comparison). Through it all, I was struck by how wide-ranging Zugale’s talents, skills, and clients are, which is probably the very best thing you can do in a world where you work for yourself — you might have a client decide not to work with you, but unless they all do, you aren’t officially Out Of Work.

In that way, freelancing is pretty much like the webcomics model; as Dave Kellett (who, living in LA, probably gets to see Zugale a lot more than I do) once pointed out, a syndicated cartooner can be fired by one person (a syndicate rep) or dropped by a, editor (preventing an entire paper’s readership from seeing the strip), but putting his work on the ‘net means tens of thousands of people would all have to independently decide to fire him for the strip to collapse. Not a bad lesson to learn from an odd assemblage of comic-book fans in an American Legion hall who were watching a highly-competitive Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament bracket. Weird times, fun times, best times.

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¹ I don’t think I ever followed up on that earlier posting; I read Scalzi’s reboot of Little Fuzzy and although it was a very different book than Piper’s, it was pretty damn satisfying. Congratulations critically- and popularly-acclaimed author John Scalzi! You have earned the approval of a hack webcomics pseudojournalist!

² Not to be confused with Mr Zub; I’d ask what the likelihood of two “JZ”-initialled creators in webcomics might be, but then I remembered the two Chrises Eliopoulos (Chris Eliopouli? Does that work for Greek roots, or only Latin?) and wondered why we don’t have a third JZ creator in the webcomics world.

³ If you haven’t read her Power Girl series, seek it out; twelve of the most fun issues of comics since Jeff Smith took on Captain Marvel.

There are a few people that I pay close attention to in webcomics for their continued performance over the long haul. For example, Krishna Sadasivam hit fifteen years of making comics for the onlines at the start of the week, with no sign of stopping.

Also down as a long-haul vet, particularly when you recall the years running webcomics in parallel with print, and before that comics in print solely? Phil and Kaja Foglio, especially considering that I was reading Phil’s stuff in nineteen-friggin’-eighty-two, making the more than a dozen years of Girl Genius not even half of a long and storied career. Considering the time that the Foglios also ran the Buck Godot series online (from print, then back again), you’ve got a few thousand pages that have gone online (plus some really sex-positive porn over at Slipshine [NSFW], I’m told), and even more comics that haven’t made it online … you don’t have a career like that without making some good decisions, or at least learning how to not repeat the bad ones too many times.

And the thing about good decisions? Over time, they can change to become “indifferent” or “suboptimal” or “why did I choose to do this, again?”. Case in point, the Foglios have decided that running a store is no longer in their interests, and hooked up with the merch-slingin’ wizards of Starhampton, TopatoCo, just in time to not worry about the holiday rush. The news page and the press release essentially say the same thing; from Professoressa Foglio:

We are very excited to be handing the direct sales of our Airship Entertainment products over to the wonderful people at TopatoCo.com They are all set up to sell you fun things from lots of great webcomics, and we absolutely LOVE the idea of not having to pack orders in our basement any more. Our sales have simply gotten too big for us to handle ourselves, and we really need to concentrate on making more things over shipping more things. So please have a look, and check out all the other great webcomic-related stuff they sell.

And and from her male half:

The creative staff at Studio Foglio have been running a successful business since 1993, but lately the increased volume of sales has become difficult for their small organization to handle. Also, Phil Foglio grouses: “We aren’t getting any younger. The last thing I want is to be shlepping forty-five pound boxes when I’m sixty.” The Foglios believe that TopatoCo will be an excellent solution for dispensing books, especially since it puts them in the company of so many top-notch webcomic creators.

Taking on Studio Foglio’s stock had some unique challenges for TopatoCo. Diamond Comics has been the distributor for Studio Foglio’s brick-and-mortar sales since dinosaurs walked the Earth, and that will not change. Studio Foglio also has rather large initial print runs, which translates to massive stacks of books that need storage when they arrive from the printer. All of this had to be dealt with by TopatoCo’s shipping and warehousing staff, and has been handled with remarkably little bloodshed.

Note to self: still need to pick up Girl Genius volume 11, and can now bundle that with QC book 3 and perhaps Tom Tomorrow’s latest, since he’s part of the TopatoCo Cult Family You Can Never Leave Burgeoning Empire of Minimal Bloodshed now, too.

• Today’s remarkable thing: Jillian Tamaki did a short story called Half Life that has been preying on my mind all day. It’s quiet, contemplative, occasionally creepifying, and ultimately … I’m not sure if “peaceful” or “resigned” is the better word? It’s a damn good comic is what I’m telling you and you need to go read it now.
• Dave Kellett’s talked to me a few times about the difficulty in getting clips for STRIPPED at a reasonable price; the estate of Johnny Carson saw that a few seconds here or there were worth a modest fee, but other, bigger players have been tightening the thumbscrews because they can. Even in what must be a frustrating situation, Kellett is determined to stay on the ethical side of things, which I get the feeling is even more important that the legal side of things.

  I can understand his reluctance to pull the trigger on what would be a logical solution, and at this point I’m hoping somebody gives him a winning lottery ticket for a nice investment opportunity. Fleen wishes Kellett all the best and notes that he and Schroeder are doing so well on generating their own footage that we’d be willing to kick in a few extra bucks. Just sayin’.¹

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¹ What I am saying is I would pay money that Kellett could to a major motion picture studio in payment for its “Bein’ a Dick” tax.

Know what? You don’t care about my situation, so let’s point you toward things you might want to buy.

• First up, in line with last week’s predictions, Sin Titulo has wrapped and will be available in a handsome hardcover collected edition from Dark Horse next year.
• Nextly, three short adventures from John Allison, including the recently-concluded THAT, are now available for your obtaining. Plenty of Shelly Winters for those fans of the ginger ninja, and even the story of Dark Esther¹ at university.
• For those of you that want to exhibit at TCAF in the springtime, uh, the deadline for applications passed over the weekend. But don’t get too discouraged, as the new MoCCA, merged into the Society of Illustrators earlier this year, returns with the MoCCA Festival in April, with the application here [PDF].
• If there’s one thing that We at Fleen can be counted on appreciating, it’s comics-related furniture; if you want a sturdy piece of wood to help with the creating of comics rather than the storage of them, Dave Kellett has something fancy to show you.
• Want to make Jon Rosenberg’s daughter hate you? She’s got about a thousand of the cutest bunnies ever hanging around for hug times, and now you can get your own if you want to take a bunny away from an adorable child. You monster.

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¹ My favorite.

Must pack, check out of hotel, present a session, do a conference call, get fondled for freedom, and fly cross-country for six hours. Oh, tell you that Octopus Pie returns soon (presumably as Meredith Gran’s work on Marceline wraps up), which I choose to interpret as a present just in time for my birthday.