Tie-ins, at the very least. Let’s see what’s up.

• There have been numerous adaptations of Girl Genius (by Professor and Professoressa Foglio) into other media over the years — novelizations, radio dramas, card games — and they’ve expanded to a new frontier now with vidyagames. Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne takes its inspiration from the Castle Heterodyne mega-arc (running roughly from here to here, or about six years of comics), which gives a whole lotta room to play.

  The game itself is made by Rain Games of Norway, who appear to have a track record making games of this sort, but not crowdfunding — this is their first Kickstarter campaign. Goal is set at a reasonable US$200K, but they’ve got stretch goals reaching improbably as high as one million dollars which … I don’t think I’ve ever seen stretch goals go as high as five times base funding and actually be met.

  There’s a huge ask, so the FFF mk2 may not work so well — the trend held really steady for the first couple of days then dropped hard, giving a prediction of about US$135K-200K, which puts goal at the upper end of the range. The McDonald Ratio is predicting about US$150K total, which is worrisomely low.

  Again, this isn’t the sort of project that the predictions were trained on, so we’ll have to see, but with 6 days down and 24 to go, the project sits at 31% of goal at present, and video games are both notoriously expensive, and have a tendency to run over both time and budget. We’ll have to see.

• By contrast, paper-based games are quicker and cheaper to develop, and oftentimes the creator of a comic is deep into a particular game, which helps. Enter: Jim Zub, who’s already got a dedicated Skullkickers“>Skullkickers tabletop game in development, but who also decided to mark the 10th anniversary of the comic by releasing the first new Skullkickers story in five years inside a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure book.

  Skullkickers: Caster Bastards And The Great Grotesque¹ will feature a 30 page story and 60 page adventure campaign, featuring new spells, game mechanics, magic items, and monsters, adaptable to whatever game you’re currently playing.

  As I may have mentioned previously, I haven’t played D&D since it was called Advanced D&D waaaay back in my college days — before 2nd edition was a thing — and I’m heartily tempted to get this because a) Skullkickers is hilarious, and b) the love that’s pouring out of the game portion of this book is apparent even through the distance of the internet.

  Zub’s been writing official D&D comics for a couple a’ years now, and went so far as to shave his head to better get into character for a live game last year. He’s mentioned multiple times that his course in life was irretrievably set from discovering D&D at the age of 8, so when he tells me that he’s picked out some top-notch game designers to make the playable part of this as good as it can be? It’s gonna be good.

  And, as an added incentive, the crowdfunding/fulfillment parts are being run by George, who mentioned casually he is approaching his 100th crowdfunding project managed, so I think he just might have a handle on how to keep everybody on track. Just a hunch. It’s a little early to apply the FFF mk2 math, but somewhere around a day in, they’re at 64% of the CA$22.3K (or US$16,843) goal with 23 days to go, so I think this one’s gonna fund. In case you were wondering, only one of the top tier reward (where, among other things, you appear as a wizard character in Caster Bastards) remains as of this writing.

Spam of the day:

Hello! I saw you the other day and I really liked you. I live in a neighboring yard, alone) let’s meet at my place?

This town’s ordinances don’t even allow dogs to live in yards, they have to have access to the house. Besides, I know my neighbors and none of them speak Russian like you do.

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¹ I’m sure the similarity of that title to Hamster Huey And The Gooey Kablooie is mere coincidence.

Just under ten years ago, David “Damn You” Willis launched his rebooted Walkyverse¹ comic, Dumbing Of Age. In the 9 years, 11 months, 3 weeks, and 5 days since then, the story has progressed from college move-in day through about … eight weeks of story. Up to midterms or so, a rate of about 5 days of story time per real-world year.

Since Sunday, the story has wordlessly jumped forward three whole months, saving us about 15 years of daily reading. Given that Thursday is the actual tenth anniversary, I expect we’ll get one more timeskip update tomorrow, and we’ll finally reach second semester on Thursday. Which means that in four strips, Willis has shifted the rate of story time:real time up to ten years per sememster, meaning we’ll see graduation sometime in 2090 instead of 2170 at the old rate.

Given that comic strips have a long history of being passed down to third and even fourth generation creative teams, I have no doubt that Dumbing Of Age will still be running when graduation comes in, whenever that may be. In any event, congratulations to Willis on ten years of DOA and 23 years of continuous webcomicking. That’s a damn big round number.

In other news:

• We’re down to the wire on the Ignatz voting, with votes due before 9 September, which means you have until 11:59pm EDT to get yours in. The bricks will be awarded on Saturday the 12th, which is actually a very leisurely turnaround time for the Ignatzen, with the tallies normally taking between close of the exhibit hall and 9:30pm the same day.

  For reference, given the poor situation that the Ignatzes have found themselves in, I voted Michael DeForge for Outstanding Artist rather than personal fave Rosemary Valero-O’Connell. In the Outstanding Onnline Comic category, I had a dilemma because the work is all very good. But what do you do when end up with a short editorial comic like I Exist (by Breena Nuñez) up against a words+pictures poem like Like The Tide (by Isabella Rotman), an Insta account of single-panel gags (by Gabby Schulz), and a long-stretches-silent, page-a-week updater like Superpose (by Seosamh & Anka). I tossed my vote to Witchy (by Ariel Ries) because I dig the story. Good luck to all of the nominees.

• Know what else is happening this weekend, virtually? NCSFest. I lost track of it in the lockdown, but I got an email today that it’s going on this weekend, including the Reuben Awards, which will be broken up into six separate programs (the programming page doesn’t have hard start times, but the day’s programming starts at 10:00am EDT).

  I wasn’t involved in the process this year, so I couldn’t tell you anything about the webcomic awards beyond what’s been publicly shared. The Online Comics — Long Form nominees are Steven Conley for The Middle Age, Maaria Laurinen for Phantomland, and Alec Longstreth for Isle Of Elsi. The most interesting thing there is that Phantomland is on Tapas, which is about three revolutions in comicking beyond what a large part of the NCS membership is aware of.

  The nominees for Online Comics — Short Form are Jim Benton, Christopher Grady, and Emma Hunsinger. The short forms don’t have specific titles to go with the creators, but I’ll wager that Hunsinger is on the list because of How To Draw A Horse as much as anything else. That’s magnificent work, but so is Grady’s Lunarbaboon. Benton’s a one-man IP factory, but I think he’s outclassed by the other two.

  But the Reubens news that has me most curious isn’t in the Online categories, it’s the Big Award Of The Night, the Cartoonist Of The Year, the one that’s gone to folks like Schulz, Johnston, Watterson, Larson, Trudeau, Amend, Thompson, Guisewite, and other legends of cartooning. The nominees are:

  • Hilary Price
  • Lynda Barry
  • Terri Libenson
  • Mark Tatulli

  That’s three solid practitioners of the comic strip and one living legend in Lynda Barry. Also, four nominees where normally there are only three². Also, three women. And … wait, I’m being told that there’s a fifth nominee:

  • Raina Telgemier

  Okay, the NCS almost never nominates somebody whose work is outside the newsprint mode — comic strips, editorial comics, magazine work, all periodicals is my point — and the last one to win Cartoonist Of The Year from outside that world was Matt Groening back in 2002³. I don’t think they’ve ever recognized a graphic novelist, and certainly not anybody whose medium is middle grade autobio aimed at girls.

  That sound you hear is the industry coming to grips with the fact that the literal Old Boys Club is fading from existence and getting replaced by those damn Millennials. Gonna have to figure out when that broadcast is and pay some damn attention to it.

Edit to add: The NCSFest schedule page now has start times for sessions, instead of just durations.

Spam of the day:

Currency printed is NOT wealth, real wealth is what we produce (in terms and goods and services) and exchanged for currency (a measure of your productivity).

Oh crap, this is a pitch for some new blockchain fantasy, which is even more of a fiction that actual money. Go peddle your shit to somebody that’s bad at math.

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¹ So named because a series of related comics — Roomies!, It’s Walky!, Joyce And Walky!, and Shortpacked! — had one David “Walky” Walkerton as a central character, to whom all of the others could trace relationships. The Walkyverse itself debuted 13 years to the day before DOA.

² I mean, since Pastis broke his Susan Lucci streak last year, may as well open it up. [shrugmoji]

³ Okay, Glen Keane, animator, won a couple of years ago, but being the son of Bil Keane of The Family Circus means he’s part of that world. The only others I can think of are Sergio Aragonés and Will Eisner, the latter of whom won in 1998 — well past his creative peak, and clearly as a lifetime achievement.

What’s that? You didn’t know how this isn’t the real day to celebrate working folks, the one that’s celebrated around the world? Fortunately, The Nib has you covered, with a timely rerun from two years ago by Sam Wallman.

So in honor of the holiday (not that we can really tell the difference, as today is functionally March 192nd), this is going to be short post, letting you know about the winner of the Fleen Free Graphic Novel Giveaway. We took at look at the responses¹ and from them randomly picked Erik, who wrote:

I’ve been meaning to subscribe to The Nib for quite a while, and this is exactly the push over the line I’ve been needing. Regardless of whether I win a book, I’m subscribing now, for the foreseeable future given the level of content. And if by some chance my name gets pulled, I’d love the George Takei memoir – he’s been a superb role model for how to turn celebrity into positive social energy.

Everybody feel good for Erik! Once They Called Us Enemy gets delivered, there will be a selfie that we’ll run here.

Oh, and as a quick reminder, today is the premiere of Elinor Wonders Why; you can look up broadcast times for your local PBS station at PBS.org and clicking on the link for TV Schedules, which should take you to your local PBS station; for those of you in the NYC metro area, Channel 13 has it at 10:30am and 1:30pm.

That’s it, everybody; enjoy the day, read about the history of the labor movement or other attempts at progress and justice, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Hey, great site. Are you guys still open? I’m reaching out businesses who need more customers right away. Here’s how we can increase the visitors to your business immediately

Reply to spam of the day:

If I were any more open, I’d be the Goatse guy!

I swear I actually replied to the email with this. I am both proud and not proud of this.

_______________
¹ Since we posted the contest, we at Fleen have become aware of an irregular email issue where some senders (but not all, and even those that are affected aren’t affected all the time) are getting errors that the domain fleen.com doesn’t exist. I spent some time with tech support today and it’s a nameserver issue, the resolution to which will take another day or two to spread. If you got bounced on your entry, I’m very sorry and better luck next time we give something away.

Just kidding! If you were to feed the corpus of Fleen’s output (even just the stuff that appears under my name) into an AI and ask it to come up with a post, it would be nothing but lengthy sentences — excessively complex, even — with an abundance of parenthetical thoughts, and plentiful footnotes¹; they’d also have probably too many semicolons, as I do tend to go on at length. Approximately 5% of the content would read just a bit more formally, and be sprinkled with references to the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées scene.

On the whole, it might not read significantly more nonsensical than some of my weirder stuff, though. But comics need to follow language rules that are different from prose — the introduction of pictures, word balloons, panels, and other visual elements can significantly change the plain meanings of words.

That hasn’t stopped some folks from seeing what they could with an AI and comics, though. Ryan North used a GPT-3 AI model to generate descriptions of Star Trek episodes and tweets out the best ones. Then he asked it to create the back half of a Dinosaur Comics strip, after coming up with the first half himself. The result was recognizably Northian, but not so much as an alternate strip that really nailed T-Rex and Utahraptor, but was too verbose to be used.

So it’s probably no surprise that an AI has been used to construct something comic-adjacent, as pointed to me by the Twitterfeed of Dylan Meconis:

I’ve been sending this list to friends and enemies alike all day long and it has universally reduced them to rubble. My October is now spoken for.

The list is question is for Botober, the AI bot-generated set of drawing prompts for the month of October, courtesy of Janelle Shane and GPT-3; it wasn’t trained specifically on drawing prompts, and thus a fair amount of curation was necessary to come up with 31 suggestions that wouldn’t melt brains. Earlier runs produced items like 5. An object that is not a doughnut but is also not a flower and 11. Ice cream flavor tuxedo and 23. Not an imitation of a pile of logs. Shane talked about how to get an AI to generate a list of prompts, and a couple of goes later came up with 31 items that range from Yeah, okay to What on the weirdness scale.

In case you don’t want to click through on the list above, I’ve transcribed the 31 official prompts for Botober for your drawing pleasure below the cut; spelling and punctuation match Shane’s original (with comments following a long dash). I expect to see your interpretations of and widely distributed on their respective days.

Oh, and don’t forget — free graphic novel for you, maybe.

Spam of the day:

I really need a man for infrequent intimate dates without obligations. On my territory. I live nearby.

I chose the spam that sounds the most botlike, although that could just be because it was originally in Russian and machine translated.

_______________
¹ Probably mentioning how Brad Guigar is a sexy, sexy man.

(more…)

Sometimes, things can happen for entirely innocent reasons and still make you say, in the immortal words of Richard Strong, This is not good.

A little history, which is at this point so historical I barely remembered it. A buncha years ago, before this blog got off the ground, the Ignatz Awards came in for some controversy because one of the panel of judges nominated himself for awards and wound up on the ballot. It was Frank Cho, and if my memory serves, he was kind of a dick about it when it was pointed out that such behavior doesn’t pass the smell test. Paraphrasing, his argument was Well, I think my work was the best of the year, so why shouldn’t I be a part of putting myself on the ballot? which just … yeesh. To his credit, he’s reportedly seen his conduct then as a mistake.

The bigger mistake? Not writing rules into the Ignatz process to prevent that from ever happening again. As readers of this page know, I am very much in favor of Rosemary Vallero-O’Connell’s work, and given the enormous number of awards she’s taken over the past year, it seems I’m not alone. Furthermore, I think she’s just a neat person, and I don’t believe that she’s got a malicious or selfish bone in her body. The fact that she’s nominated in the Ignatzen this year for Outstanding Artist is entirely merited.

Except this year, she’s on the nominating jury. I’m going to say that there’s, mathematically speaking, a zero percent chance that she nominated herself, but I can’t believe that there’s no rule about recusal/ineligibility¹/whatever you want to call it. It just doesn’t look good, and it’s caught up somebody that doesn’t deserve to be mired in controversy. For everybody’s sake, Ignatz coordinators, make sure this doesn’t happen again, please.

Ultimately, who gets the bricks is in the hands of the voters now, and as mentioned recently, that could include you. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but please — don’t vote for Valero-O’Connell, because I’m pretty sure this is a circumstance where winning would be worse than losing. We’ve had enough comics awards fuckery this year, we don’t need any more.

Thoughts on this year’s nominees to come, particularly after I receive my ballot (they should have been distributed starting yesterday, but I won’t get nervous for another couple of days).

Oh, and reminder — the free graphic novel giveaway is still going on. Tell your friends.

Spam of the day:

gary.tyrrell Welcome to CarInsurance

Not content with emailing me, these folks actually called to try to scam me. I told them My car insurance company has rates lower than anybody else by at least 15%, and they’ve sent me three rebates on this year’s bills because COVID means people are driving less and therefore their expenses are less than anticipated. They hung up on me, either because of that or because I told them my name was Harry Mourningwood.

_______________
¹ Want to know the gold standard for this? Dog shows. You can have problems with the idea of breeding dogs for physical conformation instead of health or temperament, but there’s something they do very right — judges are almost always themselves competitive breeders, but when they’re picked to judge at a big show?

They stop competing for a year or more in advance so that there’s zero chance that one of their dogs might conceivably win or lose against a dog they’d have to judge later, just so there is no circumstance where bias could be credible.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this before, but some years ago at a work conference, a colleague mentioned comics in an offhand way. Everybody else in the group sort of tuned out, but he and I started talking about words+pictures, and when I mentioned that I wrote about webcomics, he became animated. He wanted, very badly, to make sure that I knew about Power Nap. I assured him that I had it on RSS, and read pages as they came out, and when it was a while since the last page, I’d go back and read a chapter at a time to catch up.

And now I’m not doing that any more, because Power Nap has fluffed up its pillow, snuggled deep under the blankets, and settled in for its last snooze. That is to say, the story wrapped up.

For those not familiar, Power Nap (by Maritza Campos and Bachan) posited a world where everybody could achieve Rich Stevens’s fondest dream and never have to sleep. A cheap, over the counter drug allowed everybody to essentially stay awake all the time, upending society in numerous ways. Does it matter if your commute is four hours if you can just watch TV and aren’t tired when you get home? Not needing a bed means that your apartment now has an extra room for the same rent. You have more hours in the day to do everything, consume everything, try everything.

Unless, like Drew, you’re allergic to the drug. Those unfortunates that are always run ragged, always sleeping, become outcasts and pariahs (perpetually broke, too, on account of everybody else is working at least twice as many hours as you and the economy has adjusted to match). Which is unfortunate, because the sleepers (and thus, dreamers) are possibly the only ones that can help save the world when the collective effects of nobody sleeping or dreaming start to spill over into the world.

There’s your standard-issue conspiracy of the powerful trying to keep it all under wraps, of course, and your regulation rag-tag group of warriors trying to fight back against the monsters and doom and stuff, with the help of your basic unhelpful (downright jerkish, to be honest) spiritual guides who know more than they’re letting on. But really? It’s about Drew, and the wringers he’s put through, and the fact that he just wants one. damn. night. of restful sleep.

Did I mention the monsters and doom and stuff? Because when weird-ass dreams spill over into your weird-ass work life, the visuals get wonderfully wild and bizarre. I’m a sucker for a reluctant hero story, particularly one that typifies the tagline of the comic:

In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.

Then again, when the betting’s a sure thing and the odds are high enough, somebody is going to make a killing betting on the underdog. And so it comes to a end of the story, with two pages left (Campos described them as a post-credits scene), about 220 pages from beginning to end, or the size of a proper graphic novel, told a page at a time over the course of nine years (about a page every other week). Hopefully, it’ll get collected so that it’s easier to read all at once, but whether that happens or not, you can check it out starting from the beginning and be done by bedtime.

I mean, depending on your time zone. If you’re already past dinner, don’t stay up all night. That’s what started all the trouble for Drew, and no promises you’ll turn out better than he did.

Spam of the day:

Your website is the reflection of your business. Without optimizing your website for search engines, you will not get any traction from any digital marketing channels such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. We can fix all these issues and run successful backlink building campaign for a monthly fee of $500.

This guy (who goes in the space of one email variously as Adam P, Adam Stover, and Sam D) told me this page got 0.45 clicks per month. I wrote back to Mr D declaring that I’d told my staff we needed to be in business with him right away. There’s only one solution for this — I need the services of Mr D. Only D can fix it, gotta have the D, bring me all the D! More D! Curiously, he hasn’t replied, and I’m still over here waiting for somebody to give me the D.

If there’s one thing true about the opinions of all of us at Fleen, it’s the unnecessarily-pluralized identity that we at Fleen have adopted. But if there’s a second true thing, it’s that we at Fleen are big fans of The Nib. Editor Matt Bors and his staff have put together something special, and if you aren’t supporting them in their mission to bring the best comics possible to the world — while fairly paying the people who make them — then you should be.

But sometimes we need a little push.

I support The Nib with a monthly subscription at a level that qualified me to receive a free book; to be honest, I’d forgotten about it, so when I got the email on Friday with the discount code, it was a surprise. Some of what’s on offer I’ve read already, some of what’s on offer is on my Gotta Get That list, some of what’s on offer I’d never heard of before, but Bors & Co have excellent curation skills and I have no doubt the stuff that new to me belongs on the GGTL.

I’ve also got completely packed booskhelves with a one-in/one-out policy in effect, and a desire to not only talk about The Nib, but to get people to give them money. So here’s the deal: I’m giving away my free book to one of you, gratis. More specifically:

• This offer is good for people that are not presently subscribers to The Nib; we’re looking to expand the subscriber base.
• You’ll get to pick from any of the books on this page (which includes the individual past issues of The Nib magazine, but not the bundle of the first four issues combined).
• We’ll choose randomly from everybody that emails me (that would be gary) at a domain which is also the name of this website, which is a dot-com by end of Friday, 4 September. Heck, if your email is in my inbox by the time I wake up Saturday morning (EDT), I’ll count it.
• You’ll agree to a) subscribe to The Nib at any level you choose for at least six months. Want to cancel after that? Fine; if they can’t hook you in half a year of excellent editorial and nonfiction comics, it’s not for you. You’ll also send in a photo of you holding your choice to run here, so we can all see what good taste in reading material you have.
• You don’t need to send proof of subscription or subscribe in advance to enter our little giveaway; we at Fleen like to think that we’ve promoted a readership that wouldn’t take advantage or go back on their word. And heck, if in a couple of months you’re in such financial straits that keeping a US$4+ subscription is a hardship, it’s not like we’re gonna yell at you. Your good faith attempt is all we’re asking.
• You agree that if you don’t love the book you chose, or if at any time in the future you find yourself ready to get rid of it, you’ll donate it to your local public library.
• Residents of the United States only, please. I don’t regret the ultimately futile attempt at sending a book to Mario from Portugal, but I’m ready for a success this time.

But, Gary!, I hear you cry, I’m already a subscriber to The Nib! What kind of cool stuff can I get in on? Glad you asked, Sparky. How about the new Skin Horse Kickstarter? Harking back to the top of the page, if there’s a third thing that we at Fleen are known for, it’s thinking that Skin Horse, by Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey C Wells (with colors by Pancha Diaz), is hell of rad, and not just because there’s historically a 50/50 chance that something I’ve written ends up on the back cover as a blurb¹.

Actually, it’s two books, containing strips from 2 October 2017 to 7 March 2020, which if my date math is correct corresponds to 762 full color strips, plus bonus stories, which you can get in print starting at US$40 (you can also get the full ten book run in PDF for US$40, so read the descriptions carefully). 30 days to go on the campaign, which is just over 180% of goal so far. It’s a terrifically fun story with lots of ups and downs, and there’s no time like the present to jump in and enjoy the mad science, non-human intelligence, and omnipresent civil service bureaucracy. Plus goinking.

Spam of the day:

Get an accurate body temperature reading at a distance with this medical-grade infrared thermometer.

Or, y’know, just get one from Home Depot like I did. Okay, it’s industrial and I use it on my oven, but there’s medical use infrareds online for as little as twelve bucks. Don’t let these opportunists talk you into something that can be had in exchange for three easy payments.

_______________
¹ For the record, existing volumes 4, 5, 6, and 8 contain quotes from me, alongside such luminaries as Mark Waid, Dylan Meconis, Lauren Davis, Seanan Maguire, Brigid Alverson, and Christopher Baldwin. I’m also quoted on the cmpaign page for these two books, with one of my more tortured constructions, but one which I think sums up Skin Horse nicely.

Revisiting yesterday’s post, we can add a bit more on the two things that got way the hell under my skin, the lack of a nominees listing for the Ringo Awards and the reality-blind full speed ahead intention of the Baltimore Comic Con to take place in person. Let’s take ’em in reverse order.

• The BCC (that would be the Con) seems intent on the fiction that in two months, they’ll be seeing all of you in 3D at the BCC (that would be the Baltimore Convention Center). One more reason that the Con Committee needs to change their messaging to Sorry, we’ll see you in 2021, everybody be safe was added in a comment by reader Rob Nobody:
  

  I feel compelled to point out that the Baltimore Convention Center is ALSO the primary public COVID-19 testing center in Baltimore. (I just got tested today for the second time; very quick and smooth operation and have been getting our results in ~36 hours, highly recommend as much as one CAN recommend getting that thing jabbed up your nose into your sinuses.) So yeah, if the Comic Con people think they have a chance in hell of actually doing this in person, they are in for a RUDE awakening.

  Just pointing that out because the ConCom apparently doesn’t know.

• Right, the Ringos. They are, hands down, the weirdest awards in comics, with a complex structure designed (at least it’s my reading) to deal with the critiques that jury-nominated awards don’t match up with fan interests, and fan-nominated awards can be gamed by block voting. Thus, there are four entirely different kinds of awards at the Ringos:
  • OPEN+JURY NOMINATED AWARDS: Two nominees will be selected by an open, online nomination process. The remaining three nominees will be selected by a jury of comics industry professionals. A tie among the jury’s choices may result in more than five nominees in a category.
  • OPEN NOMINATED AND VOTED AWARDS: All the nominees and the winner of these five categories will be selected by open voting. The five top Fan-Only Favorites will be announced at the Award Ceremony in September at the Baltimore Comic-Con. A winner in a given year’s Fan Favorite category is not eligible to be nominated in that category the following year.
  • THE MIKE WIERINGO SPIRIT AWARD: The nominated works will be voted on by the professional jury as well as three additional, perennial jurors: Matt Wieringo, Todd Dezago, and Mark Waid.
  • THE HERO INITIATIVE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AND DICK GIORDANO HUMANITARIAN AWARDS: These award are selected by Hero Initiative and will be announced at the Ringo Awards Ceremony.

  It’s only the first cohort that has a proper ballot, as the second is all write-in and the third and fourth are closed processes. Since we spoke yesterday, the Ringos have made public the nominees for the 17 Open+Jury categories, 8 which have five nominees and 9 of which have between 6 and 9 nominees. Folks, this is getting overly complicated already.

  Look, I’m not going to fault the jury for having ties, but when you’re supposed to come up with 3 nominees and you end up with as many as 7, you need to pare that down a little. I’ve been part of a jury process eight times (holy crap), and we’ve had protracted voting rounds to get down to three nominees every single time.

  You’ve got to work it down because if you’ve got eight or nine nominees, you’re going to have a winner with somewhere in the 20% range of votes. It’s a situation tailor-made to get the most excitable, antisocial, attack-oriented chuds (and no, I’m not naming their little hate movement here because fuck those guys) screaming about how the real fans were excluded by secret SJW cabals trying to destroy comics and also tits.

  Anyways, you can find web- and indie comickers up and down the ballot, including in Best Cartoonist (Writer/Artist) (which features alternative/political comics makers alongside arthouse comics makers alongside strip cartoonists alongside monthly floppy folks alongside Raina, just in case you were wondering), Best Writer (where you’ll find Mariko Tamaki), Best Artist Or Penciller (including Fleen fave Rosemary Vallero-O’Connell), Best Single Issue Or Story (which includes Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers), Best Original Graphic Novel (Hot Comb again but weirdly this category has essentially zero overlap with the Cartoonist, Writer, and Artist categories in terms of people and their work both being nominated), Best Comic Strip Or Panel (including Nancy by Olivia Jaimes, Sarah’s Scribbles by Sarah Andersen, The Middle Age by Steve Conley, and specifically Pia Guerra’s comics at The Nib but looks like not anybody else), and Best Kids Comic Or Graphic Novel (Guts).

  The Best Webomic category has seven nominees:

  • The Croaking by echorise
  • Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe
  • Fried Rice by Erica Eng
  • Penny Arcade by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins
  • Rocío Diestra by Rocío Diestra
  • Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg
  • SubZero by Junepurr

  The category is dominated that what you’d call graphic novels updated in chunks, with only Penny Arcade following the strip format.

  But the one that’s most unlike the others is Rocío Diestra, which is a) on Instagram (which means I can’t really read it because fuck Zuckerberg), b) single comics panels interspersed with photos and other content, and c) in Spanish. From what I can see, the art style is reminiscent of Gemma Correll, so that’s all right. I’m intrigued and honestly surprised that Americans would nominate something not in English.

If you want to vote on stuff, you can do so here. The winners will be announced on 24 October, but despite what both websites say there is zero chance that this will be a presentation at Baltimore Comic Con.

Spam of the day:

In general, I recently broke up with our mutual friend (if interested, I’ll tell you later when we meet)
Well, now I need a man for hot, but very pleasant meetings.

The only mutual friend we might have that speaks Russian is John, who I knew in college, and who learned to drink from Russians one summer on a work exchange in Orel back before the Berlin Wall came down (and thus was responsible a year later for the single most epic drunk incident at my college in the entirety of the 80s). He’s why I have a genuine Red Army furry hat, which he got in trade for an old, worn-out pair of New Balances I was going to discard. Fun fact: John’s wife doesn’t speak Russian so I think you might be fibbing.

We’ll get to the title reference in a moment, but I want to call out something first. Yesterday I spent quite a bit of space talking about Shing Yin Khor’s meditation/poem in comics form, Stone Fruit Season why, my goodness, you really should go read right now if you haven’t yet. If you have, read it again.

Anyways, when you’re done reading Stone Fruit Season, you might want to check out the comment below yesterday’s post from reader David Cortesi, who notes that Stone Fruit Season contains a number of references to TS Eliot’s The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock. Having spent most of my nerd school humanities electives on history and political science, I wasn’t familiar with Prufrock (or really, much of Eliot’s work except to be aware that his poems are the root cause of why people got purposefully very drunk/high to watch a movie and have been clamoring for The Butthole Cut.

But now I’ve read Prufrock and yeah, I think Cortesi is onto something. So thanks for that, I learned something today. Namely, that while I can’t say that I’m suddenly an Eliot fanboy, I can see how he set the stage for modern poets whose poems I do enjoy, including one in particular that I once traded a hand-transcribed copy of to The Space Gnome in exchange for admission to an interstellar trade guild. I love it when circles close so neatly.

Okay, time to get a bit more serious about thing, as I have to look at two comics institutions that are (at least as of the time of this writing) taking two entirely different approaches to the dominant issue of our time, the novel coronavirus pandemic.

• On the one hand, you have the Cartoon Art Museum (who I was always going to write about today), who are running an auction to benefit the museum and its programs. Specifically, they are holding the Shelter-In-Place Fundraising Auction:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum’s galleries were locked down following a statewide mandate issued on March 15, and our staff took immediate steps to adapt, developing online exhibitions, workshops, and conferences, sharing resources with other institutions, and seeking alternative sources to offset the revenue lost from our temporary closure.

  Members of the creative community have stepped up to help the Cartoon Art Museum and offer assistance during these uncertain times, and many cartoonists offered original art for the museum’s forthcoming Shelter-In-Place Fundraising Auction. Comic book artists, graphic novelists, comic strip artists, and animators have contributed artwork from their own archives for this ongoing online auction, which will help us continue our mission to ignite imaginations and foster the next generation of visual storytellers by celebrating the history of cartoon art, its role in society, and its universal appeal.

  That link will take you to a preview of items to be auctioned, the first of which will go up tomorrow, Thursday, 27 August, at CAM’s Ebay page with new items listed weekly. Props to everybody at CAM for finding a way to continue on in the face of closure.

• On the other hand, you have something I had no idea I was going to write about today, except I happened to see a related story that caught my eye and subsequently raised my ire. The Ringo Awards announced today that their final ballots are decided, and voting is now open. So far, so good. But nowhere on their site (so near as I can tell) do they actually list the names on the ballot categories unless you provide an email address to register to vote.

  No. I’m not providing an email address for the privilege of researching information that should be public. I spent a significant amount of time poking around the Ringo Awards site looking for anyplace that has the categories and final nominees, and nothing. As of this writing, the sole communication from TRA on their Twitter account since late June is to say Hey, Kids! Comics award ballots! Vote and we’ll tell you who’s on them!¹.

  It was in my poking around in vain that I came across the following, which is on the home page, just above the list of this year’s judges:

  The fourth annual awards will return as part of the fan- and pro-favorite convention, The Baltimore Comic-Con. Top honors will be announced Saturday, October 24, 2020.

  That can’t be right, I thought, nobody could expect less than two months out from an event that regularly tops 15,000 people is going to be held indoors. That would be unbelievably irresponsible. So I went over to the BCC page, where (as near as I can tell) neither the words coronavirus nor COVID appear. The About/General Info page mentions exclusives, hotels, and sponsorships, but nothing about public health. The News page features a tickets on sale story from last November and literally nothing more recent.

  They are planning to hold this thing in person. There’s no other interpretation. They’re pushing tickets, advertising guests, and not acknowledging the elephant — the entire friggin’ population of African elephants gathered together into one improbable herd — in the room.

  Okay, they’re not good at communicating, I thought, but the absence of newer news doesn’t excuse this. The past ten days have been nothing but stories from around the country of schools — ranging from local public up through large universities — resuming classes and immediately having to shut down because of massive COVID outbreaks. The Frequently Asked Questions is about ticketing, how kids have to stay with parents, rules on celebrity group photos, how VIPs can enter the hall 30 minutes early, and their privacy policy. They are not acknowledging reality here, and it is dangerous.

  Well, maybe they’re just waiting for somebody else to pull the plug? I thought. In that case, there should at least be a statement about how they are carefully assessing the situation with respect to everybody’s safety, and oh, I dunno, recognizing that every other con canceled more than two months out? The Baltimore Convention Center has, right there its front page, a link to a Re-Opening FAQ that says, and I quote:

  The Baltimore Convention Center is currently unable to host events during the current State of Emergency enacted by Governor Hogan in March of this year. Events will take place again when the state of emergency has been lifted.

  They aren’t allowing more than 10 people at a time to make site visits (and are strongly encouraging virtual visits) to decide if they want to take a gamble on booking the convention center sometime 12 – 14 months from now. The city of Baltimore — home of Johns Hopkins and the best epidemiologists in the world, they are not fucking around with this thing — is currently at Phase 2 of reopening² and as of yesterday is meeting criteria to revert to Phase 1³. You’ve got all the justification needed to make a decision, stop jerking off in public, Baltimore Comic Con Committee.

  Call off the godsdamned con. And if they don’t and you decide to attend, stay the fuck away from me.

Spam of the day:
Know what? No spam today. I’ve had enough stupidity for one day.

_______________
¹ If you want to participate in the public voting portion of the multipartite Ringos, you have until 23 September. If you do and feel like sharing the nominees, I’ll run the list here at some point.

² No direct link to that screen; follow the link provided and click the button for Reopening Phases. Screenshot taken 26 August 2020, approximately 4:00pm EDT.

³ Again, no direct link; go to the button for Reopening Indicators. Screenshot taken 26 August 2020, approximately 4:00pm.

There is almost nobody in comics that can get to essential truths of life, the deepest parts of our souls, as well or as naturally as Shing Yin Khor. We at Fleen said as much when Khor started their current contributing gig at Catapult back in May, and their latest piece there only reinforces the notion.

Stone Fruit Season is about a number of things. It’s about peaches and sense memory. It’s about identity and depression. It’s about finding strength to go on in times of crisis and white supremacy. It’s an awful lot to ask for a nine-page comic, but then again almost nobody in comics can take watercolor and pain and weave them into a meditation on what is, what never was, and what should be.

Khor talks about the time they ate a peach in in the shower:

But in the midst of my ennui, wet and haggard and broken, I ate a cold sweet peach —
— and then I wanted to eat another one.

Yes, I dared to eat a peach.
And I had to live, so I could eat another.

Those words, without the accompanying art (spare, beautiful, haunting), would be the basis of a poem, an ode of reflection. With the art (grasping, desperate, radiance coming up from the fruit) it becomes something more.

I never really thought of peaches as a Chinese fruit, until I did.
I never really thought of myself as a Chinese person, until I did.

It becomes a means to attach to one’s heritage, a lifelong quest for Khor, where food has previously been a point of focus.

The Chinese origins of the peach made it exotic, more alluring. Once easily available on low hanging trees and given freely to enslaved people, the marketing and commercialization of peaches made them valuable; a white person’s fruit.

The phrase “Georgia Peach” is not used to describe the beauty of Chinese women or Black women.

Peaches, Khor teaches us, are bound up in the (perhaps uniquely American history) of hype and transformation of the commonplace into the valuable, something reserved for the landed and wealthy. And maybe most of all, Khor shares with us that an awareness of the questionable and immoral is not all we are capable of, that there is joy and power to be found in the mundane and the stolen:

I understand that this is not a magic fruit; it is a fruit that mythologized itself on the back of Black suffering, still picked by brown laborers.

But to me, there’ll still always be something about the first sweet peach of the year.

Sweet nectar and soft pulp dripping down my arms —
— eaten greedily, ravenously —
like a terrified animal who has survived to see one more stone fruit season.

She ends on a defiant howl, a declaration for all of us in these times, no matter what our own version of peach or madeleine or ratatouille may be:

Screaming —
I lived, I lived, I lived.

Ah, but I said there’s almost nobody in comics that can capture emotion and critical moments in life with perfect crystalline clarity, which means that there are some. And at least one of those is, today, defiantly howling for her own reasons.

Kate Beaton’s family comics, I’m on the record as saying, are something I would trade the entire rest of the comics medium for; absolutely nobody can get to emotional truths — the universal that grabs onto the primitive parts of our brain and says you know this is true — with so few lines (either text or inks). She has one today on the Twitters that ranks with the best she’s ever done. And just in case it ever goes away, here’s a copy¹.

If Stone Fruit Season doesn’t make you stand a little straighter, if Mary’s choice of affection recipients doesn’t make you double over again in laughter, Maybe take a nap? Definitely switch things up and get yourself to a place where you can accept rage and joy and helpless laughter. Let us know if you need help getting there; we all deserve that much.

Spam of the day:

Stem cell therapy has proven itself to be one of the most effective treatments for Parkinson’s Disease.IMC is the leader in stem cell therapies in Mexico.

Weirdly, this message was written in (and mechanically translated from) Japanese.

_______________
¹ To quote Beaton, apropos of the cat’s expression, she grabbed him by the haunches, and pulled him in for a sweet kiss on the butthole.