Got a couple of things to mention today, starting with a prime example of how science fiction and fantasy are ultimately always about the society you live in now. Let’s just say you don’t need to know 1200+ strips of complex (somtimes very complex) plot to get how the latest update of Order Of The Stick could apply to all kinds of situations today. Well done, Rich Burlew.

Readers may recall that :01 Books have had a couple of con-like virtual events under the title of Comics Relief, the first in April and the second in June be sure to check out the replays of the sessions — the various process events are interesting from a craft perspective, and the three that involve :01 creative director Mark Siegel are a masterclass in how to conduct an interview that flows like a conversation.

Readers may also recall how this page has discussed the impact that :01 Books has had on comics beyond its own backlist of authors, on account of :01 alumni have gone on to other publishers and imprints and how Siegel’s vision of what comics could be is now essentially the mission statement for the entire industry.

Finally, readers had damn well better recall that one of those alumni is Gina Gagliano, a woman not only tasked with launching a new graphic novel imprint in a too-brief timeframe, but also with a debut season beset by a worldwide pandemic. Okay, that last bit wasn’t planned, but she’s got to deal with it all the same. Gagliano knows you have to roll with the punches, and if there’s not been a third Comics Relief in a while now, she’s just gonna have to pitch in with something similar:

Random House Graphic is announcing an exciting kickoff to the fall season with “Falling for Graphic Novels,” a series of virtual events in September hosted by five indie bookstores across the United States.

The panels will feature Random House Graphic’s creators and allow attendees to discover and virtually visit new stores around the country. Each panel will focus on a theme in kids and YA comics, allowing readers to immerse themselves in stories of magic and heroes, queer and diverse representation, and even an interactive art class.

The celebration will give attendees an in-depth look at this exciting medium that continues to grow in popularity and show the power and breadth of visual storytelling. The series begins Wednesday, September 2, with a new event each week.

The five events will be:

• Heart Happy! Tales of Friendship, Family, and Fun! (there’s something very Japanese about that title)
  Wednesday, 2 September, 6:00pm PDT
  Featuring Laura Knetzger, Jose Pimienta, and Jeffrey Brown
  Hosted by Vroman’s Bookstore (Pasadena, CA)
  Moderated by Oliver Sava
  Hosted on Crowdcast
• Random House Graphic Doodle Draw!
  Thursday, 10 September, 4:00pm CDT
  Featuring Mika Song, Kaeti Vandorn, Stephen Shaskan, and Brian Yanish
  Hosted by BookPeople (Austin, TX)
  Moderated by Alex Lu
  Hosted on Zoom
• Magic and Mayhem: Adventures in Graphic Novels!
  Wednesday, 16 September, 7:00pm CDT
  Featuring Sophie Escabasse, Reimena Yee, and Nathan Page and Drew Shannon
  Hosted by The Book Stall (Winnetka, IL)
  Moderated by Nicole Herviou
  Hosted on Crowdcast
• Celebrating LGBTQ+ Representation in Comics!
  Tuesday, 22 September, 6:00pm MDT
  Featuring Trung Le Nguyen, Jessi Zabarsky, and Chad Sell
  Hosted by BookBar (Denver, CO)
  Moderated by Samantha Puc
  Hosted on Crowdcast
• RH Graphic: Pick Your Hero!
  Sunday, 27 September, 2:00pm EDT
  Featuring Judd Winick, Mark Siegel, JC Phillipps, and John Gallagher
  Hosted by Books of Wonder (New York, NY)
  Moderated by Mika Avila
  Hosted on Crowdcast

Click on any of the five titles to go to the reservations page.

There are some great names in there, but I’m particularly interested in the first one because Oliver Sava is one of the very best writers about comics working today. The LGBTQ+ session also looks great, but I’ll have to catch whatever replay is available, as Tuesday is EMT duty night. And did you notice Gagliano’s old boss is a panelist on the last session? Siegel doesn’t just publish graphic novels, he makes them, and the Five Worlds series has been at Penguin Random House since before RHG was formed as a single gathering point.

I was going to talk about one thing more today, but I think I’ll let it sit until tomorrow; it’s getting late to hit Publish and also I want another day to absorb before I’m ready to talk about Shing Yin Khor’s latest meditation in comics form.

Spam of the day:

I have been waiting for you since to contact me regarding your winning amount of US$2, 100, 000.00 (Two Million One Hundred Thousand United State Dollars) loaded on your ATM Visa Card which we discussed. We are duly interred switched, therefore you can make withdrawal in any location of ATM Machine Center Cash point of your choice in any part of the world and the maximum you can withdraw a day is $5,000 US Dollar.

A good, old fashioned 419 scam? That takes me back.

One of the casualties of the pandemic, event-wise, was the annual Queer Comics Expo, which is sponsored by the good folks at the Cartoon Art Museum. It should have taken place back in May but you know, everything. One of the features of the QCE is the annual Prism Awards, which are now being presented virtually and open to all and sundry:

Prism Comics, Queer Comics Expo and the Cartoon Art Museum are excited to announce that the 2020 Prism Awards will be held virtually as a two-day livestream celebration event free and open to everyone online. Held Saturday and Sunday, September 19th and 20th from 2:00pm — 5:00pm Pacific time, the event will feature panels with the finalists and judges leading up to the awards ceremony!

Details on how to tune in will be released soon. For updates on the September 19 & 20 celebration RSVP through cartoonart.org/calendar/2020prismawards to receive reminders and the information to join. You do not need to RSVP to attend. How to watch will be shared by all three entities, Prism Comics, Queer Comics Expo and the Cartoon Art Museum, through social media and press.

That from the email that CAM sent me, which also included a list of the Prism Awards finalists. Some names that you will surely recognize are to be found there:

• The Webcomic nominees are The Girl that Can’t Get a Girlfriend by Mieri Hiranishi, Cafe Suada by Jade Sarson, and Magical Boy by The Kao; the fact that two of the three nominees are on aggregator sites (Webtoons and Tapas) says something about the shifting nature of webcomics as a whole, I think.
• The Short Form nominees are In Search of Absent Pigments by Alex Assan and Lin Darrow [Editor’s note: the nomination only lists Assan, but Assan’s own site credits Darrow, so I’ve included them here], Pseudo Slut Transmission by Emma Jayne, and One Day Out by Ina Bestari.
• Longer form individual stories are broken up by the size of the publisher’s reach, so there are two groupings. Small/Midsize Press nominees are Trans Girls Hit The Town by Emma Jayne (a 2019 Ignatz winner), Lemonade Summer by Gabi Mendez, and Stage Dreams by Melanie Gillman. The categories are a little fuzzy, as Pseudo Slut Transmission is only about six pages shorter than Trans Girls Hit The Town, which was counted as a minicomic for the purposes of Ignatz categories.
• The Mainstream Press nominees were certainly spoiled for choice this year, but ultimately settled on Bloom by Kevin Panetta & Savanna Ganucheau, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable & Ellen T Crenshaw.
• Finally, the Anthology category consists of Come Together edited by Tab Kimpton and Alex Assan, Heartwood edited by Joamette Gil, and Shout Out edited by Steven Andrews.

Five categories and fifteen nominated works means that a two-day virtual event can give great, huge gobs of time to each of the nominees. If you weren’t familiar with a particular work, by the end of the weekend you surely will be. Oh, and take a gander at the announcement and scroll down to the bottom, where you’ll find a list of all 27 judges plus the organizing committee; there’s lots of great people involved.

Spam of the day:

The anti-crisis program, as if you spend $ 10 you will earn $ 500 in one day!

A fifty times rate of return? Why, I could spend just a hundo a day for a month and be set for the next couple of years! What could possibly go wrong?

As I trust you all remember, yesterday was Holemas, the day that we commemorate Ryan North getting stuck in a hole. In fact, yesterday was the 5th Holemas, the original adventure having taken place in 2015. And if yesterday was Holemas, that makes today Holeboxing Day, when the mighty give gifts to the meek.

And who — who, I ask you — is mightier than Strong Bad? Nobody, that’s who. And since it is long-standing doctrine in these parts the Homestar*Runner is a webcomic, I wanted to tell you about something the estimable Mr Bad has coming up, along with some friends of his.

One of the side effects of the Oh Glob, We’re Going To Be Like This Forever Thanks To Incompetent Federal Behavior pandemic is that live shows pretty much don’t exist, unless you’re Smash Mouth and you feel like doing your damndest to turn Sturgis, South Dakota into the latest contact-tracing nexus. It’s a tough thing, relying on people that will pay you to be in the same space at the same time as you, but some internet-centric musicians have been doing remote concertlike events for some time, and I’m not saying that COVIDtimes are good times for them, but they’re at least a bit ahead of the curve in figuring out how to ply their trade.

Enter: The Doubleclicks, nerdy musicians par excellence. They’ve been running shows everywhere from straight YouTube to inside Animal Crossing for a bit now, and they’re ready to bring a bunch of their nerdiest friends together for a big ol’ show of music and comedy on Saturday, 22 August at 6:00pm PDT/9:00pm EDT:

Join Internet musicians Jonathan Coulton, the Doubleclicks, Nur-D and Molly Lewis for an evening of music, comedy and love, with lots of special guests including: Hal Lublin (Thrilling Adventure Hour, Nightvale), Danielle Radford (SyFy’s Great Debate), Strongbad (Homestarrunner), Zach Reino (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Kim Evey (The Guild), and SO MANY MORE, with sketches written by Kayla Cagan (Piper Perish) and produced by Ben Blacker (Thrilling Adventure Hour)!

It’s like one of those big variety shows at conventions with lots of cameos and funny bits, except it’s in your house, and it’s very very very well-organized, because we’re running it.

That from the email that Los Dobles Clics sent me because I give them money in exchange for their albums, but also on their website. Due to the number of folks performing, it won’t be a tip jar kind of situation, it’ll be a ticketed event, moreso because the show is a benefit for MacArthur Project and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief — proceeds will be used to obtain food, medicine, shelter, hygiene supplies, and other needs of LA denizens without homes.

Getting your ticket now means you’ll get an email with the link for the livestream (which will be replayble until Sunday, 6 September at midnight EDT) instead of waiting for a possibly over-busy website at showtime. Tickets are US$6.50, with an option to make an additional donation of any amount on top.

And because you’d like to know who all is on the bill, in addition to amazing superstar headliner Strong Bad and special guests The Doubleclicks, you’ll also have Jonathan Coulton, Nur-D, Molly Lewis, Amy Dallen, Aydrea Walden, Hal Lublin, Lexie Grace, Danielle Radford, Kim Evey, The Library Bards, Mary Robinette Kowal, Paul and Storm, and Zach Reino, in an extravaganza written by Laser Malena-Weber and Kayla Cagan.

Honestly, it’s a little too much entertainment for the cost of a fancy coffee and two-thirds of a pastry to go with it. It’s not like it’ll sell out, but get your tickets ahead of time anyway; when they see how much they’ve raised for the cause, the performers will put that much more love into the show.

Spam of the day:

We’ve developed the bots to act as salespeople in order to generate a consistent source of quality leads. They’re not only outperforming a typical sales persons workload by the equivalent of ten times, but they also drive down lead costs by a phenomenal amount.

This was sent to me because I’m the listed tech contact for my EMS agency’s website. I’m half-tempted to see if their bots can actually generate more sick and injured people and if they can, to get them shut down because it’ll be the friggin’ robot apocalypse.

Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin is back with a fresh translation of an oldish webcomic, and what it means for Comics Today on both sides of the Atlantic.

Maliki has (finally) translated into English their announcement for going independent¹ (previous coverage), and after rereading it, it deserves additional commentary.

It is interesting to contrast it with Scott McCloud’s own assessment of the state of the US comic book industry in Reinventing Comics. When it comes to business, the dominant thinking in the US is that there is room to grow, and there is space for everyone, you just have to look and work for it. Whereas in France, the dominant vision is rather that of of the body of available work as a fixed cake, that must be shared by everyone; it’s almost Malthusian (I tend to think the dominant French vision is wrong, but that the US vision can be taken too far).

What’s interesting is that, for their respective comics industries, the common wisdom has been the reverse. At the time of Reinventing Comics at least, the US comics industry had lived so much on extracting more and more value out of the most faithful in their existing customer base, without really working on expanding the readership to new audiences to compensate for attrition, that it was in danger of losing its cultural relevance. Fortunately, in recent years there has been a shift away from that, with a focus on diversity both for characters and readers.

By contrast, comics of the French-Belgian tradition have for some time worked on expanding their audience, whether it is through covering more themes (such as journalism comics), through additional formats, in a demographic sense, etc. And that is very commendable, don’t get me wrong, not to mention there are dimensions such as variety of demographics where we are still far from Japan, where there are manga for grandparents, manga for young women, manga for office workers, etc. But …

But it appears that after outcompeting each other in that regard, publishers have gotten carried away and now only know how to compete through expansion; and at some point, there are diminishing returns.

And what happens then?

Well, while they drown booksellers in new releases, they simultaneously squeeze creators (who are not exactly in a position of power): reducing their royalties, increasing their output demands, shifting responsibilities to them, etc.

There are many elements in Maliki’s comic that I agree with, but where I’m most aligned is that it’s pointless to find a culprit who started it: you could be looking for a long time. And so the problem is rather with the process the industry is engaged in, and sometimes the best way to fix such a system … is to leave it.

We again thank Maliki for their expose, and for the courage it must have taken them to go this route.

Editor’s note: I entirely agree with FSFCPL’s interpretation that the difference between French and US attitudes at the moment is a function of saturation. In the US, comics are still niche, and there’s plenty of cultural mindspace for them to grow before they’re societally ubiquitous like in France.

The thing is, different artforms can find themselves at different places on the spectrum of Zero-Sum Game to Expansionary Space; the average TV showrunner in the age of peak TV is pretty likely to regard their audience as whoever they can peel off from another show instead of entire swathes of society who’ve been entirely ignored by the makers of TV for decades, and are now watching their first show ever.

And, as always, we at the Fleen Home Office thank FSFCPL for his insights and analysis.

Spam of the day:

I like MojoHeadz.

Is that some kind of manly macho version of Bratz, but for dudes? Because if it’s not, it sure sounds like it is and you might be leaving money on the table.

_______________
¹ Gary here. Reading through Maliki’s (now dated) announcement, I can’t help but think how much it echoes Howard Tayler’s comments on who gets what in publishing from the Webcomics 103 session back in Aught-Six. To quote:

Imagine you’ve got a book on sale at Borders [Editor’s note: Yeah, yeah.] for $10 — pretty sweet, right? Hang on a minute, because you aren’t going to get $10 a copy. Here’s how it breaks down:

The store sells it for $10, keeps $4, and pays $6 to the distributor

The distributor keeps $3, and pays $3 to the publisher

The publisher keeps $1, pays $1 to the printer, and $1 to the author

You’re the author

There’s a lot of hands in the pie, and you want as many of them as possible to be yours. If you can contract with printers directly, you can get the $1 that the publisher would keep. If you can bypass distributors like Diamond and shop the books around yourself, you can keep $3 more (although this is likely to severely cut into the number of retail locations you can place the book in, which will depress sales). If you have the garage space, a postal meter, and help from friends and family, you could do mail-order fulfillment yourself and keep the store’s cut ($4) along with the distributor’s.

Or, as the point has been made by Messers Guigar, Kellett, Kurtz, and Straub ever since How To Make Webcomics came out a dozen years back: you can be in a high volume business, or you can be in a high margin business; the trick is to make the larger share of a smaller pot of money exceed what you’d get from a smaller share of a larger pot of money.

Also, do you suppose there’s any significance that FSFCPL and Maliki talk about a share of cake, but Americans generally talk about a share of pie?

If you don’t follow my Twitter, you maybe don’t know that we had a rough couple of days here at Fleen Central, after our dog (a smallish and very sweet-tempered greyhound) got attacked by an off-leash dog during her Thursday evening walk. She’s had surgery to repair her ankle (the same one that she broke to end her racing career) and she’s very much back to her regular behavior, except that she’s on two weeks strict rest.

That means no jumping, running, zoomies, bouncy play, getting and down from furniture (the couch is her favorite place in the world). While greyhounds are notorious for sleeping 20 hours a day and being very, very lazy, there’s generally ten minutes of intense activity in there. She’s being very good, but we have to keep an eye on her every hour we’re awake to make sure she isn’t doing something she shouldn’t. It’s taking up some time.

So I have three brief items today, and a submission from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin for you tomorrow. After that, we’ll hopefully have her in a calm enough routine to get back to reading webcomics widely.

• Firstly, the third print collection of Stand Still, Stay Silent is now Kickstarting. Minna Sundberg continues to put out one of the most lushly beautiful webcomics in existence, and the previous volumes of SSSS have been impressive in their quality and entirely worthy of the material inside the covers. On day 3 with 27 to go, it’s sitting a bit over 500% of goal, so at this point, it’s a pre-order. Oh, and if you speak French, maybe give this one a miss — as Sundberg noted the other day:
  

  [V]olume 3 will be published by Akileos publishing in French this autumn, so unless you specifically want the english version you’ll be able to get that one cheaper and faster.

• Secondly, KC Green posted the 32nd chapter of his adaptation of Pinocchio, and it’s getting back to parts of the story that we in modern culture are familiar with. That is to say, body horror with a dash of moralizing about Always Being A Good Boy Or Shit Will Happen To You And You’ll Deserve It. Four more chapters to go.
• Thirdly, holy crap, Megatokyo turned 20 years old on Friday. I’ll confess that I lost the plot years ago (and in my less charitable moments wonder if Fred Gallagher has as well), but one must acknowledge the perseverance that allows a creator to put together 1584 strips over two decades. Now that he’s passed the big Two-Oh, maybe he’ll invest in some ink.

Spam of the day:

Environmentally-conscious pest control solutions that protect your home, family and pets.

I host a number of house centipedes and jumping spiders (along with the occasional mantis) in the walls and baseboards of my house. They do a remarkable job of keeping everything else under control.

We mentioned Elinor Wonders Why, the new PBS animated show for kids — I’ma say 4-5 years old, based on the preview episode I watched; the press release said 3-5, but the 3 year olds I know have the attention spans of drosophila¹ — the other day, and wanted to mention just a couple of items in followup.

• Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson are not only credited as Created by in the opening credits, but are also listed as Executive Producers and writers of the theme song. This is probably the greatest amount of showrunning ever performed by a pair of STEM PhDs in entertainment history.
• Judging from the cast page at IMDB, the kid characters are voiced by actual kid actors.
• An episode about butterflies was written by Rosemary Mosco, who is also pleased about the number of bugs and lizards in the show that she worked into the show. Mosco is exactly the person you want to share a love of nature and how it works with anybody of any age.

Get your favorite preschooler, check your local listings, and tune in for some all-ages science and nature learnin’ starting Monday, 7 September.

Spam of the day:

80 keto dessert recipes (free today)

I suppose this could be more nonsensical. It could be a promise of 80 paleo dessert recipes.

_______________
¹ If the show manages to work drosophila into the show, I will be mightily impressed.

I speak, of course, of New York Comic Con, who some years back said that I didn’t qualify for press credentials because I insist on covering comics. Despite the fact that they don’t want to let me in, they also don’t want to remove me from their brand-heavy press list, which is why I got this in my email yesterday:

NEW YORK COMIC CON PHYSICAL EVENT CANCELED
REEDPOP & YOUTUBE PARTNER FOR DIGITAL NEW YORK COMIC CON

With a bunch of the boilerplate that you’d expect, talking about how disappointed they are, but also how excited they are about the new opportunities this affords, etc. This was a weird bit, though:

ReedPop will also give fans the opportunity for experiences that will get them up-close and personal with meet & greets, live Q&As, personalized autographs, videos, and professional workshops.

I’m very curious about what all that means. SDCC really kind of dropped the ball on anything other than pre-recorded video for their programming, so maybe RP and NYCC, with an extra two and a half months to plan, have found a way to actually introduce interaction? If so, I’m wondering if they’re still paying all the subjects of those meets, greets, Qs, As, and autograph sessions. If so, I’m wondering if they’re going to have some kind of fee structure, on account of I’ve read this entire press release twice¹ and I don’t see the word free anywhere. SDCC really led with that in their announcement.

And while fans won’t be able to stroll the Show Floor and Artist Alley aisles at Javits this year, ReedPop is creating a virtual marketplace for fans to explore where exhibitors and creators will share their newest items. There will be more information on these exciting fan developments unveiled in the coming weeks.

Not having to do anything in the Javits is the best possible outcome of this whole pandemic thing. That entire space sucks. Again, SDCC didn’t really have any kind of mechanism for exhibitors to interact or vend wares, with creators left to work it out for themselves. Could they have built a turnkey system similar to what Jeff Smith and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett worked out for themselves?

If so, one has to wonder if there’s money exchanging hands. For all their faults, Comic Con International are a nonprofit, and Reed Exhibitions (a division of that which was once called Reed Elsevier) decidedly is not; they’ve got a long corporate history of extracting as much money has possible from specialty markets, in many cases becoming so dominant that entire industries become inextricably dependent on them (cf: they pretty much own the entire academic journal publishing industry) and then requiring large amounts of money for everything while acting like they’re entirely devoted to the betterment of their customers².

Given that this is the company that charged higher-than-average table fees on the show floor and supplied only a table — there’s an upcharge for chairs — I don’t see them giving up the opportunity to pull money from either attendees or exhibitors. I’d love to be proved wrong, but this is a show that’s systematically eliminated small creators and players over the past half-decade, and given over significant amounts of floorspace to friggin’ Chevrolet³, so I think my skepticism is warranted. And since they don’t want me as press, I’ll just leave my thoughts here and forgo followup; if they want to reach out and correct any mistakes on my part, I’m here.

Spam of the day:

I am highly reputed seller in Fiverr, from Bangladesh.

Nope, stopping you right there. If you’re working for Fiverr, you’re being exploited from Hell to Breakfast and no way I’m buying anything you’re offering, knowing a good chunk of that cheap rate goes to those bloodsuckers. If I need [reads email] WordPress work done on this site, I’ll pay somebody a proper amount to do it, not the five bucks you’re offering.

Also, your name is Wolfgang Janssens? Of the Dhaka Janssens, I’m meant to presume?

_______________
¹ I’m a glutton for punishment.

² The About ReedPop section of the press release is a deep, 15-line, 176-word paragraph; the About YouTube section is 4 lines and 65 words. That’s a bit egotastic.

³ In a city with a notoriously low rate of car ownership, or even driver license-having.

It’s a sad day when stereotypes raise their ugly heads in the world of webcomics. The saddest part being, they hurt those that hold those prejudices the most.

• I speak, naturally, of Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett and his campaign to print not one, but two new Sheldon collections simultaneously. That’s a message that’s worth discussing, but unfortunately LArDK gets side-tracked into a shame spiral over his choice of facial hair. Moustaches are not just for quarrantine, LArDK, they’re for life. Let go of your hate, find enlightenment, and realize that in this (as in so very, very much) your wife is correct.

  As for the rest of you, I’m certain that if the campaign goes well, it’ll help LArDK to a better place, and let him come to embrace what is objectively one fine lookin’ ‘stache that he’s rocking¹. Fortunately, success looks pretty certain; as of this writing, the funding is north of 83% and pretty likely to pile up some stretch goal improvements².

  If you’re interested in some thick books (each is more than 200 pages, which a quick glance at my bookshelf means they’re 50% larger than the previously biggest Sheldon collections) to be delivered around December (just saying, you could knock down some holiday shopping now) at an eminently reasonable price³, you’ve got until 10 September to pony up.

  Do it for the moustaches.

• In non-moustache news (we do that sometimes), have you seen that Jorge Cham has been working on a TV show? I hadn’t? I think the first he mentioned it was about a month ago, which I missed. Then about two weeks back, he mentioned that he’d talked to the Television Critics Association in advance of the premiere, which I also missed. Look, a lot happens on Twitter these days and I’m trying to moderate my doomscrolling, okay? The TCA tweet showed up in my feed today and now I’m caught up.

  A quick flip between Twitter accounts revealed the original May 2019 press release, from which we will now quote:

  Today, PBS KIDS announced the animated series ELINOR WONDERS WHY, set to premiere Labor Day 2020. ELINOR WONDERS WHY aims to encourage children to follow their curiosity, ask questions when they don’t understand and find answers using science inquiry skills. The main character Elinor, the most observant and curious bunny rabbit in Animal Town, will introduce kids ages 3-5 to science, nature and community through adventures with her friends. This new multiplatform series, created by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson and produced in partnership with Pipeline Studios, will debut nationwide on PBS stations, the PBS KIDS 24/7 channel and PBS KIDS digital platforms.

  So this is what Cham and his We Have No Idea co-author Daniel Whiteson have been up to — they’ve been players in the hurly-burly world of Hollywood, power players in the production of televised entertainment, a seamy industry that has line items for cocaine and hookers in its budgets. Oh, wait, it’s PBS Kids? Never mind, that’s an entirely different seamy industry that has line items for tote bags and googly eyes in its budgets.

  In all seriousness, Cham and Whiteson have spent the past forever spreading knowledge about the universe we live in, how it works, and why we know what we know (and, crucially, what we don’t know … yet). The character designs for Elinor Wonders Why are cute, the lessons are imparted in a gentle fashion (check out a preview episode here), and if they aren’t exactly dealing with the hard science facts of their book, they are teaching basics like how senses work and how animals and plants behave, as well as mentioning prominent scientists.

  More importantly, they’re teaching logical thinking and the idea that problems have solutions that can be solved; that last idea frequently escapes people far older than Elinor‘s target audience, so the sooner we get the idea into kids, the better.
  Elinor Wonders Why debuts on PBS Kids (and maybe your local PBS station, but they don’t all run the same programming) and online on 7 September.

Spam of the day:

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Those are … disturbingly specific.

_______________
¹ No longer subject to tricks of the light that make him look like J Jonah Jameson, the moustache in question is well on its way to Hadfieldian proportions.

² Not going to do a FFF mk2 calculation, as LArDK does early notices to his Patreon backers, with special discount tiers available to them for the first 24 hours of funding, before opening things up to everybody else. Perfectly legit technique, but it throws off the math.

³ 400+ pages of print edition for US$45 (plus S+H) means less than 12 cents per page, and with an average of two strips per page, less than six cents per laugh-chuckle. Giving up just one a’ your five buck fancy coffee drinks means you get more than 83 punchlines.

Yeah, looks like I did math after all.

There are, if my math is correct, three things to look forward to next month. The first and most important, of course, is seeing what Demi Adejuyigbe comes up with on the 21st. If you’re not familiar, check it out here, here, here, and here, and watch the Twitter thread on the day (It’s a Monday this year).

• But nearly as important is SPX, which will be going virtual this year. Along with the distancing required, there a delay in getting information on the page, with the exhibitor, guest, and programing pages still to appear. But one aspect of SPX that is inextricably linked with the festival is up to date, and it’s a doozy.

  The Ignatz Awards are, famously, voted on by the attendees of SPX. Attend on Saturday, walk the floor, talk to creators, drop your ballot in a box before you leave. Between the close of the hall and the awards ceremony, volunteers work through the dinner hour to count the votes and prepare the presenters for what’s easily the most democratic comics award out there.

  There may not be any ballot boxes, or a floor to walk on Saturday, but the Ignatzen will go on, and the most democratic comics award is opening itself up to an even wider electorate:

  Sign up to vote for the 2020 Ignatz Awards!

  In exchange for your Name and Email Address, we will send you a 2020 Ignatz Awards Ballot. We will never sell, loan or give this list to a 3rd Party. SPX keeps its emails to a minimum, so we will not Spam you either.

  [Editor’s note: the folks in charge of this year’s deeply flawed Eisner voting might want to get in contact with the Ignatz folks, see what a vote-by-mail looks like. It would be vastly preferable to what they’ve been doing.]

  I’ve requested my ballot, and hope that you will as well. There’s a plethora of great comics released all the damn time and this is your chance to recognize the best of the best.

• And have we all remembered that this September is when Ryan North’s adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five — with line artist Albert Monteys and colorist Ricard Zaplana — comes out in September? Specifically, the 9th. There’s a first look out today and while I’m not familiar with Monteys’s work, the designs in that preview look well matched to North’s sensibilities (which, it goes without saying, mesh perfectly with Vonnegut’s very serious absurdism). Order yours now, avoid the rush.

Spam of the day:

Get Paid $25 per hour to watch YouTube videos

I should note that Gmail marked this message as dangerous before they delivered it to me, meaning that they well know what an open sewer YouTube can be, and if somebody wants to pay you to watch videos, they’re probably a godsdamned Nazi. Pass.

Thursdays, fam. Thursdays. No day of the week is a draggy and uninspiring as Thursdays, not even late Sunday afternoon. Not much happening within my noticing today¹, so let’s just take a peek at a couple of items and see if we can make it to Friday, Gateway To The Weekend.

Howard Tayler² has been busy with a whole lot of nothing of late, and good on him for that. Okay, in my quick glances at sosh-meeds, I did learn more than I wanted or needed to know about him getting a colonoscopy³, but mostly he’s having some time to himself and all right thinking folks should approve of that. He’s also working on finishing up a Kickstart that was sidelined by the dual whammy of health and lockdown.

He’s also too creative a guy, with too many projects and stories inside, to stay away for overly long. If you’re like me, you’ve still got Schlock Mercenary in your daily bookmarks because a habit of 20 years doesn’t go away after a couple of weeks. Actually, if you’re like me, you’ve got the site in your RSS reader, because Google’s machinations or no, RSS is the greatest technology since polymerase chain reaction, or maybe the smallpox vaccine. But some of you have given up the paths of righteousness, yet still want to know when Tayler gets back to doing stuff of interest. He’s got you covered:

If fear of missing out[*] has you religously clicking in here every day despite the absence of daily updates, if you want to be kept in the loop on all things Schlock Mercenary, or if you want the very basic line art of the above image as a printable coloring page, you should sign up for the Schlock Mercenary Newsletter.

[Editor’s note 1: Since he’s no longer daily updating, there’s not an item-specific link to this announcement, nor can you browse to it with the Next and Previous controls.]

[Editor’s note 2: At [*], Tayler had his own footnote, which I am omitting here because it would conflict with my own footnotes. Head over to the site to read his if you’re afraid of missing out.]

Meanhile, John Allison may have finished Bobbins, Scary Go Round, and Bad Machinery, but he’s still got shorter projects that he’s running, one after another. We’re coming up on the last week of the latest Destroy History story, after which he informs us we’ll get back to Steeple.

It may not take place in Tackleford, but it deals explicitly with ideas of faith and belief, and the next story will be called Secret Sentai which is a concept so perfect that I didn’t even know I needed it in my life. And given that the current DH is ending on something almost cliffhangerish, we’ll surely get more of that down the line. I love it when creators can hop between projects as inspiration takes them, full of enthusiasm for whatever’s next. And Allison, as previously established, keeps getting better, so there’s that too.

Spam of the day:

Write only if you are grave! My name is Jess. I am 25. My new photos and raunchy videos here

Is this a stealth Shakespearean pun about how tomorrow you’ll find me a grave man?

_______________
¹ With the disclaimer that I’ve largely moderated my social media doomscrolling. I simply can’t keep up with all of it, so if there’s something I should know, my Twitter habit these days is to maybe look at what’s happened in the last 15 minutes, and then maybe refresh once when I’m caught up with that. It’s done wonders for my mental health, but I know I’m missing a lot.

² Evil twin, etc.

³ Note to self: you’re overdue. To be fair, you had an appointment lined up and then COVID hit. Got to get it lined up, and a dentist appointment to replace the one you should have had. Oh yeah, and you were in the middle of a TB booster series that you’ll have to start over. Dang it, pandemic, you are making it hard to manage the slow degradation of my bodily processes.