Even though I won’t be there for Preview Night, which kicks off in a few hours; even though time zones mean you’ll hear probably everything I do sooner than I can write it up, there’s still lots to talk about.

• For starters, Frank ‘n’ Becky are doing a for-real Little Golden Book! It won’t be out until next year, but this is the perfect followup to their LGB homage last year. Not only that, but if you go by their booth, you can see the sculpt for their first (forthcoming) vinyl figure, and maybe tell me what it is! And you can pick up the art book collected volume of Becky’s video game mural.
• Jim Zub would like you to know that the twelfth issue of his very funny sword-and-asskickery comic book, Skullkickers, will feature stories written by some of webcomics finest. Or at least Zach Weiner and My Evil Twin. In all seriousness (which really isn’t appropriate for Skullkickers, but whatever), the book is very funny, the five issue story arcs are just long enough to develop a plot without bogging down or losing the possibility of new readers, and taking a one-issue break after the arc to let creative friends play in your sandbox is a terrific idea. Make sure to pick it up (issue #9 is due in a few weeks, so look for this one in November or so.
• From funny comic to PZ Meyer-linked meme to handsome print in four days. Tony Piro hit one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments since last Friday.
• Re: Today’s Sinfest; no reason, I just thought it was adorable.

Where to start, where to start? With the announcement of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s new book, Seconds? Or with pictures of Kate Beaton’s D&Q offering, which is either enjoyed by very small people or is a giant book? Or perhaps about the hot, new game that’s sweeping SDCC, courtesy of Marshall Willenholly? Or heck, why not the book trailer for Amulet 4, due this fall from Kazu Kibuishi?

• Okay, how about here — a couple of weeks ago, Chris Sims (professional Batmanologist and surprisingly astute analyst of pressing issues in comics) wrote a piece about how DC and Marvel should adopt aspects of webcomics. In reaction, a bunch of creators talked about what they’d pitch to the Big Two for ongoing, daily, fun-chuckles. Webcomickers invited to the party included Brad “The PUNisher” Guigar, Curt Franklin, Justin Pierce¹, Lucy Knisley, Shaenon Garrity, and the if-he-stops-comicking-he-dies Ryan Estrada². Each of these pitches that doesn’t happen is a wasted opportunity on par with Lois Lane, Girl Reporter.
• A couple of days ago, David Malki ! was “kind” enough to share an earworm with the world on Twitter (DO NOT CLICK HERE if you don’t want it to be stuck in your brain all day), so now I’m going to return the favor. David, check out what Kris Straub is doing in the current Starslip storyline. Now you have the Dick Wolf cash register sound³ in your head and can’t get rid of it! Ha ha, my evil plan worked!
• Last notes. Readers of this page may recall the name Øyvind Thorsby, who does webcomics that are funny, make creative use of space (click through the next dozen or so strips), and are (to be kind) populated with enormous heads. Thorsby dropped me a note that I wanted to share:
  

  Remember me? My latest comic is The Accidental Space Spy. It’s reached 100 strips. First strip here.

  Not remember somebody with maybe the metal-est name this side of Toki Wartooth? Heaven forfend! Anyhoo, the “space” in The Accidental Space Spy refers to the “outer variety with galaxies and aliens and things”, not the “let’s get creative with all the dimensions and mess with the readers heads” type (again, funny, make follow the link and click through to the end of the chapter). Thorsby’s line is thicker, smoother, and more assured, and the heads have settled on a size that’s less “disturbing” and more “quirky”. I’m going to enjoy catching up with this one.

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¹ Just give him Wonder Woman and let him write it like Wonderella; can’t be worse than most of what WW’s been subjected to for most of 70 years.

² Much like sharks must keep swimming in order to breathe.

³ Credit for that term must go to Richard Belzer. Also, be glad I gave you a link that doesn’t repeat the sound a bunch of times — after a half-dozen or so, a certain hypnotic insanity is known to occur in up to 19% of the population.

You get more weird PR in the run-up to a major show — just now I received some promising something called ShatnerPalooza¹ to be taking place at San Diego Comic Con, which has me still shaking my head in mute amazement. Meanwhile, nearly everybody I know in webcomics is in a flying metal tube heading to SoCal (or at least trying to). We’ll just watch the Twitterstorm and Google-plusery happen at a remove, you and I, and pretend that we were there with the cool people.

In the meantime, please enjoy the following seminews:

• What with travelling most of Friday and all, I’m assuming that everybody’s seen the notification that the Xeric Foundation is essentially wrapping up its program of grants to get indy comics printed? Because webcomics, that’s why:
  

  The advent of essentially free web publishing has forever altered the way aspiring comic book creators can get their work out into the public eye. With this in mind, I have decided that it makes sense that the Xeric Foundation will no longer provide grants to self-publishing comic book creators, and instead devote all of its available grants funds to charitable organizations.

  There will still be one last grant-making cycle, though — to let everybody put together their best work, the usual November review will be skipped, making May 2012 the last-ever chance to apply for a Xeric grant. If you wanted bragging rights, now’s the time to get the proposal whipped into shape.

• Dated last week, but announced today: Joey Comeau and Jess Fink, neither of whom should be left unsupervised for obvious reasons, have joined forces. Be afraid, but also be prepared to enjoy the crap out of We Are Become Pals!, words by Joey and pictures by Jess.
• Rhetorical question for the philosophically-minded amongst you — is it blasphemy to merely repeat what a holy book actually says? How about if it’s illustrated … with Lego? The Brick Testament has been getting its first full book together, and pre-orders are open now (from regular vendors, not so much from BT’s own shop). My first piece of advice: get ready to purchase this book. My second piece of advice: given the bankruptcy court review going as I am writing this, you probably don’t want to order from Borders.

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¹ And I quote:

The centerpiece of “SHATNERPALOOZA” will be the World Premiere of The Captains – an Epix Original Documentary produced and directed by William Shatner. In The Captains, he travels the world to connect with each of the actors who have played Captains over the long life of the Star Trek franchise. Shatner recalls his own experiences in the role that made him a star by interviewing Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, Avery Brooks and Chris Pine while interweaving clips from their respective shows and movies.

Shatner. Interviewing. My head just exploded.

Trying to fly out of O’Hare is always a challenge. But for now, let’s see what we’ve got.

• From yesterday’s twitterfeed of one Mr Ryan Q North¹ comes news of a certain milestone:
  

  Today is the 2000th comic at www.qwantz.com! That is a lot of comics with the same pictures !! #iknowright

  As North himself acknowledged in the past, a significant number of those strips are guest outings, but still … 2000 strips that (nearly) all use the same six panels (or variations thereunto) and (pretty much) portray the same scene — house, tiny woman, stomping. Impressive indeed, and the famously modest North² didn’t even make mention of it on his site. Here’s to another 2000.

• Speaking of round numbers, Danielle Corsetto hit 1200 Girls With Slingshots strips today, with an update that’s equal parts D’awwww and Woo-hoo, 200 strips means a new book I can add to my collection (plus the fact that Corsetto turns around books quickly — no waiting years for the trade here, Sparky). And given that the last 200 strips (starting here) have been in color, that means a color book, much to my delight³.
• Speaking of tigers (we were so, pay attention to the footnotes, they’re not just there for my health), Andy Bell should watch out for them on his trip to Southeast Asia; word broke today that Bell will be a featured guest at the Singapore Toy, Games and Comic Con in August. Curiously enough, STGCC appears to be an offshoot of New York Comic Con, which brings a whole new scope and scale to the idea of a satellite show.
• Last thoughts for today, and no names on this one, let’s just call it a cautionary tale. If you’re going to send me a press release, having the only link in the email lead to an online PR site and essentially reiterates and builds on the release, and having neither the email nor the full release contain a link to your webcomic? You’re doing it wrong.

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¹ Nexus of All Webcomics Realities, Northern Division.

² I have a sketchbook contribution that consists of a tiny T-Rex uttering the words I try hard, which I imagine is North’s personal motto.

³ I’m tempted to quote an old Bugs Bunny cartoon: Three cheers and a tiger for me!

There’s a discussion that’s been taking place in various corners of webcomicdom about forever in re: Whose IP Is It, Anyway? This particular iteration of the question started when Joel Watson noticed a startling similarity between one of his t-shirts and one offered by TeeFury (Watson’s tweets on this matter appear to have been deleted, but at one time the initial tweet resided here) (and Kris Straub has a good recap of the issue here).

T-shirt thievery happens regularly enough that you can almost set your watch to it, but the wrinkle this time is that both Watson’s shirt and TeeFury’s bore as their central content a Doctor Who/Peanuts mashup based around Lucy’s ubiquitous psychiatric help booth and the “The Doctor is IN” sign thereunto. Watson wanted TeeFury to not be stealing his design, but others opined that since Watson created neither Doctor Who nor Lucy’s booth, how much of the design could be called “his” was unsettled.

Enter Scott Kurtz, who while not denying the prevalence of remix culture or his own part in appropriating cultural touchstones for personal enrichment, also held that the remixer should acknowledge that it wasn’t really an original idea in the first place and that at best you could:

[H]ope we flew under the radar. Sometimes people got C&D letters. Sometimes they didn’t.

I was one of the first people to try to make a buck off of the “Han Shot First” shirt. I understand the practice all too well. But it’s one thing to try to make a buck off a larger cultural meme, and another to claim that you’re the only person who’s allowed to do it.

Straub had essentially the same idea, but perhaps a little more diplomatically:

I don’t know what constitutes an original idea anymore — or rather, I feel if you have to peel back layer upon layer of existing intellectual property to get to the part you’re actually responsible for, it’s not nearly as much yours as you’d like it to be.

The most useful information in the entire contretemps is probably that pointed out by Chris Hallbeck in a reference to the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center’s list of precedential cases; it would appear that the only case law on combining IPs (without the intent of parodying either) holds that it’s infringing:

An author mimicked the style of a Dr. Seuss book while retelling the facts of the O.J. Simpson murder trial in The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the book was a satire, not a parody, because the book did not poke fun at or ridicule Dr. Seuss. Instead, it merely used the Dr. Seuss characters and style to tell the story of the murder. Important factors: The author’s work was nontransformative and commercial. (Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P. v. Penguin Books USA, Inc., 109 F.3d 1394 (9th Cir. 1997).)

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but it would appear to me that the famed Penny Arcade Strawberry Shortcake case would not necessarily fall into this precedent (since it was intended to parody American McGee). But who the hell knows? I’d submit that at this point it’s all unsettled law until some sufficiently broad ruling from the Supremes gets rendered, which doesn’t happen all that often. In any event, it’s not that long before we have to worry about infringement on far more than t-shirts¹.

• Want to enjoy some things where copyright isn’t in doubt? Allow me to re-engage in my biweekly pointing-to of Saveur’s recipe comics, with the most recent installments including Anthony Clark’s oven-roasted potato wedges and Ali Kenefick’s attempt at a hypercomplex recipe in diary form.
• Alternately, you can put some Strong Female Characters on your wall; Carly, Mer, Kate — never change. Also, for each of your birthdays forever, I am getting you so many sunglasses.

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¹ A discussion that is written by an Actual Lawyer (albeit a Canadian²), and which gets bonus points for the use of the tragically underused word foofaraw³.

² No disrespect to our future conquerors neighbors to the north; I merely indicate that jurisprudence is different on the two sides of our mutual border.

³ Scrabble players, if you can pull this one off, even the great Hodgman will tip his hat to you.

I’ve been going through the programming listings for the upcoming San Diego Comic Book Death March Convention, and ahve come across some panels that readers of this page may find to be of interest. Funny thing — back in ’06 when I first attended SDCC to report for Fleen, there were three panels that could be described as Webcomics School; this year, that let’s show you how to do it! impetus appears to have been taken over by the movie industry, with numerous Comic Con Film School 10x panels scheduled across four days. Interesting.

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Achewood’s home page is delivering up random comics every time I load it. So far today, I’ve seen obnoxious rich entrepreneur Philippe, Roast Beef’s first depression, the beginnings of Mister Band, Ray’s toast at Beef and Molly’s rehearsal dinner, and robot ass in a TV (BOO TO THAT). I’ve set my browser to reload the page every five minutes, meaning every time I click on the tab, there’s a new delight awaiting me.

• Rich Burlew’s overcome the latest unexpected hiatus (which, given Burlew’s ongoing health concerns, is entirely acceptable — if you don’t like it, point your RSS client at the feed and work on having some empathy) to Order of the Stick and is back with a new strip and the stated desire to put out a lengthy string of comics before the next unplanned hiatus. While he hadn’t been able to produce comics, Burlew was able to work up proofs for the next OoTS book, which should be in physical form forthwith. Everybody welcome back Mr Burlew and toss him some continued wishes for continued health, yes?
• Speaking of books, I believe that I mentioned that I picked up Jess Fink‘s Chester 5000 XYV when it hit my local comic shop a few weeks back, right? Now? Well, I did, and it’s adorable. Also, calling back to Fink’s mention that Chester pages were being included in a MoSex show, a reminder:
  

  Hey if you are in NYC this week you can still see art from Chester 5000 at the Museum of Sex dirty comics show!

  I just may have to do that. Not enough museums have exhibits built around awesome sexy fun (just don’t try to travel to Canada with a copy of Chester in your bag).

• Speaking of Chester, this may not be the first Chester fan-art, but I think that so far it’s probably the funniest. I know that I mentioned Chris Hallbeck’s Maximumble when it debuted back at the start of the year, but haven’t really since then. It’s pretty much always a hoot and a half, and the flexibility that it affords Hallbeck to do silly one-off gags (without the strictures — such as they are — of Biff) must be considerable, given that Hallbeck’s now doing twice as many comics without skipping a beat.

Ryan Armand’s GREAT finished yesterday with little warning, but it couldn’t be argued that the story was left hanging. The indomitable Mr Phipps/Flipps had conquered nearly every opponent (even the derision of his son) and decided that being truly GREAT didn’t necessarily mean conquering the world. Indeed, just having the best ramen cart in the park is its own GREATness.

So we’ve come full circle, from the day that young Lyle Phipps lost everything to this, the day that another young man believes he has, too. But just as Mr Phipps encouraged so many others, the newcomer finds resolve and sets off to fix his circumstances. What else is there to say?

Only that there are books, with the new, second volume clocking in at more than 400 pages, for a total of 600-odd pages of comics, including more than 30 pages of new scenes. It’s more than good — it’s GREAT.

Site note: Updates may be sporadic next week, as I deal with limited connectivity during the day. Rest assured, you’ll get as much of my blather as you can handle.

As you may have heard, the San Diego Comic Convention (which looks like this, for those of you unfamiliar) has released the floor map for this year [PDF], and has done me the service of helpfully marking off the webcomics area in easy-to-find burnt orange. If you’re interested in the sorts of people that this page talks about, chances are that they’ll either be within a 25 meter radius of booth 1332, or in the small press area (helpfully marked off in tasteful lavender). Oh, sure there are a few outliers immediately outside this zone, and a few more further afield, but that’s basically where you want to go.

It looks like there have been some minor changes from last year’s map — TopatoCo (booth 1229) has seemingly switched places with Keenspot (booth 1231), which seems slightly counterintuitive, as it means switching up a double booth for a triple and TopatoCo’s creators were pretty pressed for space last year. Then again, it puts them on the end of a wide transit aisle, meaning that their crowds won’t be creating an IDLH by intermingling with the Cyanide & Happiness (booth 1234) crowds just across the way (seriously, in past years it was possible to stand in the middle of the 1230s aisle, lift up both feet, and remain suspended in air via the sheer crush of bodies).

In any event, by staying in the ORANGE ZONE, you can meet up with the likes of oxymoronic descriptions, unsighted mustelids, gleeful poisoners, funployed funployees straight from the Party Mansion, Scott ‘n’ Kris ‘n’ Brad ‘n’ Dave, The Crosbyrama, the hardest working man in webcomics (plus the guys he works for), unlikely monsters, Uncle Randy’s travelling nightmare show, steampunk that doesn’t make you nervous, and the original murder of douchebags¹.

In the immediate area, you might find northerly robuts (booth 1033), the coolest graphic novel publisher in the country (booth 1323), and a spot to pick up the latest volume of Digger (booth 1236). Slightly further afield, you might come across the possibly last iteration of comics best anthology series (booth 2235), a museum dedicated to the sorts of things you like (booth 1930), the people you can thank for publishing both adorable wordless owls and adorable wordless Victorian porn (booth 1721), the rockstars of library science (booth 2300), and the best two-syllable named webcomics (booth 1714).

With all that wandering around, if you want a concentration of webcomics types again, head back to the LAVENDER ZONE and be prepared for angry flowers (K-16), iron crotches (P-12), handlebar moustachery (M-12), Satanic porn (N-12), Keef (K-15), sleepy puppies (O-14), earth-shattering sibling rivalry (P-02), werewolf cops, and CGI nerdery (Q-13).

It’s extraordinarily likely that I’ve missed somebody, so let me know in the comments and I’ll add in anybody overlooked. In the meantime, programming info has started to go up, and once all four days are posted we’ll bring you the highlights.

Finally, let me implore all the creators out there to take some time during the show to make it down to the high-numbered end of the hall to that you may pay tribute to the people that made you what you are today (booth 5102). Respect.

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¹ Yes, at last it can be told, the collective noun for “webcomickers” is “murder of douchebags”. I’m not certain if it was Jon Rosenberg or Rich Stevens that came up with the term, but it fits and I’m using it.

Some things that have gone on for a while are coming to an end. I thought I’d share.

• Once upon a time — musta been ’round October few years back — Nick Wright¹ launched a webcomic called Treading Ground. It bounced around for 2003 and 2004, took 2005 off, returned for part of 2006, and then came back all regular-like in 2010. I came across a link to it early last year and went through the archives, but confess I’d forgotten about it until two things happened:
  1. The resurgent Eric Snark-White wrote about Treading Ground last week, detecting a hint of “wrapping up” in the storyline
  2. Nick Wright announced, two days ago, that Treading Ground is wrapping up this week

  From which we may conclude two things:

  1. It’s possible to wrap up a comic in a pretty graceful, organic way; Wright didn’t make a big announcement that things would be concluding and let that dominate the story for weeks/months/however long. He built in some story beats where people found themselves questioning decisions, settling on new directions in life, and which legitimately conclude the central story-driving conflict of the past 250 strips. I’ll be interested to see his promised next project (to be announced on Friday), and this time I’ll be sure to check it out from the beginning.
  2. Though I may have made of fun of the tendency of Websnarkings to depend on readings so deep as to be in danger of striking oil, it is clear that Eric is an astute and skilled analyst of stories and we all should be paying attention to him. That, or he is my natural rival and I must destroy him — I can never decide which².
• Long time readers of this page may have noticed that I have a tendency to build nicknames around certain creators and figures in the webcomics scene³ — thus, the Toronto Man-Mountain, The Radness Queen of [vaguely NoCal geographical location], the Latin Art-Throb⁴, my evil twin, and so on. Today we must retire one such nickname, as Gordon McAlpin can no longer be called my sporting bet nemesis. From an email I received from Mr McAlpin:
  

  I concede on our bet

  http://www.girlcomicstrip.com/ Dana Simpson is kind of working something but hell if I know what. It doesn’t seem like Universal is involved. I’m sure she’s still getting her development stipend for Girl, even if it will never appear. BTW, Multiplex turns 6 on July 10th and recently passed #600. :)

  Given that by the terms of our bet, there were as many as three more years to go before final status determination, I’m surprised that McAlpin was so eager to give up his dollar. Then again, sometimes prolonging that final act does nobody any good⁵. Then again again, Gordon sent me the agreed-upon stakes in the form of a PayPal transfer, so I had to substitute a dollar already in my possession in order to make good on condition #4 of the original bet.

  Then again^cubed, I don’t have a PayPal account and it’s not worth it to give a company I regard as intensely creepy any information about myself for one stinkin’ buck, so I’m released McAlpin from the monetary forfeit. Hugs all around, we’re all friends here, and time to think up a new nickname … since Gordon is the original stereotypical Canadian name, we may have to go in that direction.

• Metaphorical attic-cleaning time: in addition to dropping a complete graphic novel on us, Ryan Estrada apparently figured his hosting bills weren’t quite high enough, because today he’s announced the completely free, no strings attached single data bolus of (damn near) everything he’s ever done:
  

  This collection contains over 1000 pages of comics including Aki Alliance, Ped X-ing, Awesome O’Clock, Chillin’ Like Villains, Cartoon Coup, The Unbelievable! The Amazing! Computer-Savvy Ungulate, Frank: The Storybook, The Kind You Don’t Take Home to Mother, Sci-fi Drive-by, and Mystical Monkey. It also includes 25 minutes of adventure videos, with Expeditions: Africa. There’s no forms, no signup, no ads, just a single 826 mb download.

  I think it’s time to clear one of those promotional-item 1GB USB keys I’ve got hanging around here.

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¹ Who is not, sadly, an amalgam of Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, but we can dream, can’t we?

² Oh, wait, he’s offered to buy me scotch, which disqualifies him from the destruction list. My bad.

³ Although Eric Burns-White is one of the very few to have merited two such nicknames, also being known on this page as E. B.-White.

⁴ He’s dreamy.

⁵ Much like ripping off a Band-Aid™ instead of trying to gingerly remove it one yanked hair at a time.