It’s a little odd to do a panel writeup when anybody can go back to see the panel themselves, but maybe some of you wouldn’t have watched the panel in the first place until somebody gave you a rundown and said Hey, this is neat. So consider this to be that — the conversation between Raina Telgemeier and Robin Ha was a talk that went some expected places, some unexpected places, and nicely overcame the inherent limitations of the video talk.

Excitement and enthusiasm aren’t things you expect to get in a teleconference, but Raina and Robin found a way to bring energy to their audience, despite being separated by time, space, and networking distance. Given that my job is teaching, and even in the Before Times it was often done over Zoom, so trust me when I tell you that to summon energy over the camera and make the viewer feel like they’re there in the room is entirely a thing.

The other thing that really struck me is how well the conversation flowed; there’s a need in such situations for somebody to direct things, and even moreso when network lag might enter into it. The best are able to sense when they need to yield the lead role to the other person for a while, and when to pick it up and run with it; Robin and Raina probably did the best job at knowing when to let the other drive I’ve seen since Scott McCloud and Gene Yang had a spotlight talk back in 2014. Like that earlier example, it was a case of two creators with similar sensibilities finding a resonant frequency that they could hop onto and off from as needed.

I’m almost tempted to make the paraphrases more exact and mine the video for quotes, but if I do that, I’ll never finish. I’m treating the session as if I sat in the room and just had the one shot to experience it; the words attributed to Ha and Telgemeier are paraphrases I’ve tried to make as accurate as possible, but words in italics are direct quotes.

The video was mostly split screen, with Robin on the left and Raina on the right, but occasionally it would switch to just one of them for emphasis. Both are spaces that have been carefully designed to show that they’re creative spaces, but neat and organized; everything is very professional-looking, and it makes an impression. You can tell that Raina’s done a lot of video remote interviews, as she’s got quite the setup — pro-looking mic on a boom with baffle, fill lights to make everything look even, and cameras that point down at her drawing desk that can feed a shadowless image.

Raina started off by asking Robin for details about her work, then Robin asked Raina about her latest book. The common theme between their work might be anxiety (appropriately enough, there was a Lucy Bellwood Inner Demon behind Raina on the shelf). Ha remarked that she had frequent stomachaches as a child which doctors could find no cause for; she noted that at that time, Korean culture’s view on stress and anxiety was … maybe not that they weren’t recognized, but maybe more that they were denied. Raina, by contrast, talked about how helpful it was that her parents were able to get her therapy to help deal with her anxiety as a child.

Ha brought the conversation around to the process of constructing a memoir, with Raina noting that it’s not always easy to tap into memories and history and something that’s a story in them; Guts wasn’t easy to make due to the subject, but also because the memories of the real people involved can vary. Her father was in his 40s when the story started, she was 8, so her memories are more directs to how she felt at the time about what happened. It’s necessary to take creative license, but you also have to want to get to the kernel of truth.

For Robin, growing up reading fantasy, scifi comics, and other work not based in reality makes it strange to be a cartoonist that draws mostly nonfiction, but at least I know what happens and how it’s going to end. She deeply feels the obligation to tell the story as truthfully as possible, given that it’s about real people, real life, wants to do justice to all of them as well. Her mother was completely against being in the book and was upset about being one of the main characters, because most of the things I talk about in the book happen because of her. Robin talked about how she had to earn her mother’s trust, tell her this is going to be a book that’s important to me but I respect you and want you to be okay with it. She gave her the manuscript after the layout stage, and was relieve that after two or three days she only had a couple of edits and loved it.

Raina asked if Robin and her mother talk about [the events of Almost American Girl] now that it’s done, or are you glad it’s done and don’t have to deal with it any longer. Robin talked about how the first couple of times she had a book signing in the DC area, her mother came and during Q&A had some of the questions directed to her. She was embarrassed by the spotlight, but enjoyed people telling her how much her action and bravery meant to them.

Raina brought up the topic of comics influences, and Robin mentioned that all of her most formative favorites were Korean or Japanese; her favorite creator wrote grand epic, LOTR style fantasy, but also loved CLAMP and the other 80s and 90s big names in manga, especially Ikeda Riyoko’s Rose Of Versailles, which was translated into Korean. When Robin first read around 8 years old, she didn’t know it was Japanese. I didn’t have a concept of anybody other than Koreans living on the Earth, I watched American shows dubbed into Korean and just figured the Friends spoke perfect Korean.

Raina, growing up years earlier and an ocean away from Japan, didn’t get much manga, but was much influenced by newspaper comic strips. As recounted numerous times, her first manga was Barefoot Gen, which her father gave her at age 10 because hey, she loves comics, right? Yeah, a tragic story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima opened her mind, but it was also a disconnect from, say, Calvin And Hobbes. Robin remarked on the power of comics to take something huge and hurtful and turn it into something meaningful for readers.

She then suggested that they each do a drawing of something that happened during self-isolation, and turned to an easel to draw herself in her first Zoom session, unnecessarily shouting to be heard. I’m the worst at technology, worse than some of the grandmothers I know, she explained. Raina did a sketch of her compromise with everybody’s new bread-baking habit during quarantine. After all, there’s only so much bread you can each by yourself, so she’s shifted into baking pizza, on account of you can always eat pizza.

The back half of the talk was dedicated to questions solicited from readers on Instagram and Twitter.

Maddy, age 13: What would your non-author job be?
Robin: Probably fine arts, like a painter. When I was little, I went to art school after school, I did fine art in college, I was always a painter first.
Raina: What I enjoy most is planning stuff. I’ve had to change my personality because of pandemic, because I am no longer planning my next trip, my next tour, deciding where I’m going to eat in the next city. So I think I might have been a publicist. I love spreadsheets and plans and calendars!

Brisa, age 9: How did you get over your fear of vomit? I’m afraid of it too.
Robin: Me too!
Raina: The clinical term is emetophobia, and I didn’t learn the term until my early 30s. Once I learned the term, I learned there are ways to make it better. I went to therapist that specialized in treating phobias, did and did cognitive behavior therapy. I learned a lot about breathing, how to ground myself, how to engage my mind in other ways when I felt the panic. One of the techniques is exposure therapy, which means experiencing the thing you’re afraid of in small doses. [Editor’s note: The look on Ha’s face read, Oh, no.]

My therapist did not make me throw up in his office [Editor’s note: And now Ha’s expression shifted to Whew.] It was about saying the word out loud, seeing it written on paper, and eventually I got to see photographs or hear audio recordings. I learned to face my fear and very, very gradually your anxiety decreases. I would not have been able to write Guts without having had the therapy first.

Fox, age 13: You get bullied a lot in your books, do have any advice for readers who are bullied?
Robin: The most important thing is to know it’s the bully who has a problem, not you. Never think of it as like it’s your fault. It’s not something to be ashamed of, or that there are reasons you’re being treated that way. Don’t try to go through it alone, find allies, talk about it.
Raina: I’m going to echo finding somebody you can trust, a place to talk about it, somebody on your side to remind you of everything Robin said. There’s so many kinds of bullying and one of the worst is when the bully is your friend.
Robin: You end up afraid of losing your friends, but there’s millions of people out there and the “friends” you’re afraid of losing and being alone aren’t going to be around forever! They’re going to be replaced by somebody better as you grow older and evolve into a new person, so don’t worry about keeping them.

Mia, age 12: What made you have the passion to start writing?
Robin: I started reading comics before books, thanks to my mom who is also a big comics reader; I wanted to grow up and become a cartoonist, write down my ideas, plan on what I’d create.
Raina: I was a big diary writer in addition to drawing, then figured I could put them together. I made my first journal comics when I was 11 years old about what happened to me each day and never showed them to anybody. People would ask if I wanted to be a writer when I grew up and I said No, because I don’t have any ideas. [Editor’s note: It appears that young Raina was a bit mistaken.]

So you thought you were going to be a fantasy writer and wound up doing personal comics and memoir, I thought that wasn’t even an option. This isn’t a job! I wish I’d had more access to memoir when I was growing up as an example. [Editor’s note: This is a classic case of how if something you need doesn’t exist, the best thing is to invent it.]
Robin: Are you going to show your comics you made when you were 11?
Raina: They’re not very good! I think not being good is kind of important, they don’t have to perfect, they don’t have to be for show, they don’t have to be for anybody but yourself because you enjoy doing it. I did it as a hobby, would have continued if I was a publicist instead.

Josie, age 13: Do you envision drawings first or words first?
Raina: For me they come together; in my head it’s visual and I can hear the words. I draw a quick box, some stick figures, words, balloon, expression on the face. I write entire manuscripts and my editor works from these thumbnails. I have to draw the head, and the mouth before the words come to me. I’m actually not great at keeping a sketchbook, if they’re not acting, not talking, it doesn’t work.
Robin: I’m the same way; the story comes to me like a movie or a dream, a scene with characters acting in my head. I draw index card size at the scene level. Now I’m working on fiction, a fantasy like it was my childhood dream to create. I actually had to transcribe what I envisioned in my head as text, as it’s easier to edit and have other read it because my sketches are super rough, they only make sense to me. I have a synopsis, I can’t wait to draw it.
Raina: Is this an announcement?
Robin: I can show you a few drawings [holds up two pages of character studies; see below for the images] It’s going to be like drama and action, there’s going to be shapeshifters and murder.
Raina: Oooo!

Chandrima, no age: I want to publish my own graphic novel, what suggestions do you have?
Robin: You need to first learn to finish your comics. I had a plan for an epic, 500 page fantasy for my first graphic novel and they’re very fun for the first 20 pages, but you have to be able to finish it! Start small, maybe 20 pages, finish it, have something you can show to people.
Raina: I always say that, start small! Have two characters in a conversation, or a small adventure. Do another, maybe turn it into a collection of short stories in your world, work on your skills, maybe you find that you don’t really like doing comics and want to just write or just draw. Just start on page 1, put in some sketches and word balloons.
Robin: One danger of doing something long as a young creator is your style may change over the course of that 500 page epic, or your taste in stories may change. So if you’re on a project that going to take years to finish and by the middle you’re a different kind of writer or artist, it’s not fun.
Raina: Read lots of comics! Different kinds, styles, genres. There’s so many out there to read and learn from.

They finished up by recommending some book and comic stores that they’re familiar with.
Robin: Here in Washington, DC, Loyalty Bookstores is owned by a queer Black woman; it has a lot of great signings and community events, I highly recommend them. Also, Big Planet Comics, they have an excellent curation of indie and mainstream comics, there’s always something going on there.
Raina: Brain Lair Books¹ in South Bend, Indiana, is Black owned, and has a great graphic novel selection which you can find on their website. Check out their recommendations on YA and MG books, too. And Green Apple Books is my local independent bookstore in San Francisco; I’ve been going there since I was a teen, they have great comics and kids selections. Check them out, and support your local bookstore.

Photos!
Robin Ha shared two images of characters from her forthcoming drama/action/shapeshifters/murder fantasy epic. I love the hair designs in the female-presenting character — they have a lot to say about station and class. The male-presenting character has a little Jaeger by Carla Speed McNeil in his DNA. It might be the attitude, it might be the eyes. I very much want to read this book.

The Eisners are tonight; I’ll post this now so you don’t have to wait until after midnight EDT to read, and do a writeup of notable winners later.

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¹ As per the description on the panel page, The first 100 purchases of Raina books from Brain Lair that use the promo code RAINATA at checkout will receive a signed bookplate.

Web Comics: Saving the Entertainment Industy [sic], Four Panels at a TIme[sic]
So when I did the programming guide t’other day I typed in the session titles manually; I didn’t notice until just now when I got lazy and copy/pasted that the title of this session features two separate typos. Let’s just hope that this isn’t a metaphor for the panel itself.

[fires up the session]

Welp, that was … a thing. It’s a mere 26 minutes and 38 seconds long, starting out with the moderator reading the panel description verbatim before mentioning four-panel webcomics, not acknowledging anything else about the medium, presenting a thesis of OMG did you know there are comic strips on teh intarnetz??!! I made it to the 3:16 mark when the moderator told one webcomickers People weren’t coming within six feet of you even before [COVID] hit.

Sorry, but Ha ha, laugh chuckles, you’re a reclusive loser and people hate you is pure douchebaggery and not something I’m spending any brain on. I’d say that it’s a shame this panel wasn’t in person because the message of closing my notebook, putting away my pen, and standing up in the front row (where I typically do my panel reporting from) and leaving less than three and a half minutes into a session would have sent a message, but honestly? I only checked this one out because I didn’t have to walk across the convention center. The description was not promising and it was sadly accurate.

Shaenon Garrity In Conversation With Andrew Farago
Now that’s more like it. Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum, went above and beyond in preparing for conducting a Special Guest Spotlight interview with Shaenon Garrity — he’s spent every day of quarantine living with his subject, which makes sense given that they’ve been a couple forever. It provided an advantage that most every other session won’t have, in that it’s not a thing for Garrity and Farago to sit next to each other on the couch and have a face-to-face conversation¹.

And despite the fact that there’s literally nothing Farago wouldn’t know about Garrity’s work and career², he’s a skilled enough interviewer to ask the questions that prompt answers that will both satisfy Garrity’s longtime fans and also people not really familiar with her work. The conversation ranged from the challenges of monetization — what happens when your bandwidth costs exceed what you make from ad revenues? — to the shift from webcomics portals and collectives to scrapping for eyeballs on social media giants of today.

Garrity’s known and worked with so many people over her career, people that have gone on to be key contributors everywhere from King Features to :01 Books that Farago remarked that comics only exists today because of her and Joey Manley; while Garrity put most of the credit towards Manley, I would note that this page has for years noted that Garrity is a Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities³ (and Tiki Queen of the Greater Bay Area). She sits at the center of so many people, who connect other people, who connect other people. If you have anything to do with comics, you’ve probably got as many different connecting paths to Garrity as Kevin Bacon has to … let’s say Kermit The Frog^{4, 5}.

All in all, Garrity and Farago offer the superior choice if you’re looking for a webcomics-focused discussion, as I don’t see any others on the schedule until you get to the Keenspot panel on Sunday, and even that appears to be more about how one of Bobby Crosby’s stories got picked up and adapted to a movie that may or may not ever happen what with everything going on.

Back with more tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Are you tired of struggling to get Instagram followers and engagement?

As I do not, have never, and never will have a Facebook/Instagram account, I’ma say the answer to that one is no.

_______________
¹ Or, more properly, both half-facing each other but mostly facing the camera.

² Literally within two minutes of talking about her post-college cartooning start, Garrity talked about how webcomics circa 2000 were unique in that they might be inspired by comic strips, but would feature long plotlines and story arcs that would never fly in newspapers, which put her several million up on the guy in the earlier, allegedly webcomics-centric session.

³ The others being Ryan North and George.

⁴ Although the Bacon Oracle should list Mr The Frog’s Bacon number as 2 — there are a whole bunch of people in The Muppet Movie with Bacon numbers of 1, such as Charles Durning, Steve Martin, Elliott Gould, Austin Pendleton, and Bruce Kirby.

⁵ Which puts me in mind of the Erdős-Bacon number, whereby a small number of scientists and actors have connections to both Kevin Bacon and prolific mathematician Paul Erdős. I’m guessing there’s some number of cartoonists that can site their connections to both Bacon and Garrity, but if there’s a chain from Garrity to Harvey Pekar you won’t need two separate connections, as Pekar had a Bacon number of 2.

No photos, no experiences to relate, just waiting around for Pacific Time to happen and watch the panels go live online. Updates as warranted.

Couple of Howards to talk about today. Weird how that works out.

• I’m either one day late or two days early on this, but there’s something fairly tremendous is going on with my evil twin:
  

  Calling it: 6pm, July 21, 2020, I finished inking the last Schlock Mercenary strip of my 7,345-day run of daily-without-fail updates.

  Except I got the math wrong. 7,348. Because Friday is still three days off.

  I speak, naturally, of the fact that Howard Tayler, the indefatigable machine of webcomics, was working with only a two day buffer.

  Oh, and the 20 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 5 day streak, that’s important too.

  MET will be taking some well-earned time off and some overdue attention to his health, which has been challenging for some time now. And I want to be very clear about something as I add my congratulations to those of pert-near everybody: Howard, buddy, evil twin from a mirror dimension, you waited too long to take these three months. I think that somewhere along the line the idea of having a single, uninterrupted story became more important than it should have, and you neglected yourself to a degree you should not have.

  And while Tayler is being lauded for his achievement — and rightfully so! — we, all of us who are holding up this achievement and maybe shifting our expectations a little bit to the no skip days ever side of the spectrum need to remember that behind that beloved strip we never want to wait for an update from? There’s one or more people whose obligations is first and foremost to their own well being.

  I’m guilty of over-emphasizing the streak aspect of Tayler’s longevity in webcomics as much as anybody, and wish I could go back to every anniversary or Big Round Number when I extolled his achievement and excise however many mentions of and he did it without skipping any days, with its unspoken, not serious (but not entirely unserious) subtext of now get back to the drawing board, Comic Boy, and entertain me.

  You done good, Howard. I expect that you are going to sleep in until next Tuesday or so, and I expect everybody that is making noise about the capital-A Achievement to resolve to purchase stuff from his store, as well as to resolve that we don’t place such expectations on his next project, or any other creator, ever again. Deal? Deal.

• Speaking of misplaced emphasis, I want to point you to the most clueless, self-proclaimed Kickstarter expert of 2020. Dude (of course it’s a dude) emailed C Spike Trotman with a mealy-mouthed, faintly negging description of the latest Iron Circus Kickstart, offering to make it successful.

  Spike. This Spike, who apparently would be incapable of making a success from a horror anthology by Abby freakin’ Howard without taking the extremely important step of … paying some rando thirty five bucks.

  Don’t be this guy. And get a copy of The Crossroads At Midnight which, granted, has a pretty hefty shipping charge associated but it’s also 380 damn pages long full of Howardian goodness unsettling creepiness. Maybe don’t read it alone in the dark.

Today In SDCC@Home:
The virtual show floor is live, which allows you to click on a booth’s exhibitor and see if they have any merch specials. Panels start in a couple of hours (as I write this).

Spam of the day:

Sterilizes and cleans your room within 30-60 minutes

Ooooh, a UV gizmo with a rechargable battery! Know what’ll sterilize and clean (those are actually different things) my room in 30-60 minutes? Me, with a rag and a 10% bleach solution in a bucket.

Scared by fancy percent-type numbers? Get a bucket of water, add bleach until it smells about twice as strong as the chlorine a pool. Wipe surfaces, allow to air-dry at least four minutes. Kills everything you’re promising plus more stuff including the novel coronavirus. Used exactly this method last night to clean up all the blood that a trauma patient with a head injury thoughtfully left on our stretcher cushion.

It’s gonna be a weird year for SDCC programming. There’s no Sergio ‘n’ Mark panel! And in a year that would seemingly require the Tell Us What We Can Do Better session on Sunday afternoon has none. And every session starts at the top of the hour, when they could be staggered easily?

But there’s lots of what appear to be pre-recorded media launches, so there’s that. I’m looking at things that interest me, many of which are at the same time, but which will probably be much easier to bounce between if one turns out to be a dud — no standing at the back of the room after you walk halfway across San Diego, and the library/school/YA panels aren’t a (granted, very pleasant) 20 minute walk away at the library.

Let’s dig in.

Wednesday

Comics In The Classroom Ask Me Anything: Pick The Brains Of Teachers, Administrators, Creators, And Publishers
3:00pm — 4:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
Appears to be pre-recorded rather than live; high school teachers from around the country posed questions to Ronnell Whittaker (teacher), Lucy Knisley, Jason Walz, and Lisa Wu (consultant and former teacher). Doesn’t appear to have a publisher?

Teaching And Learning With Comics
3:00pm — 4:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
Reps of public schools, state universities, and private universities talking with Ebony Flowers, David Walker, and Brian Michael Bendis.

New Kids Comics From Eisner Award Publishers
5:00pm — 6:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
It’s got Jerry Craft and Faith Erin Hicks, that’s reason enough before you add in Robin Ha, Derick Brooks, and Jonathan Hill; moderated by YALSA’s Candice Mack. This one looks like a must-see.

Thursday

Web Comics: Saving The Entertainment Industry, Four Panels At A Time
11:00am — noon, SDCC or YouTube
Maybe you don’t look for solutions to saving an industry, maybe webcomics can be their own thing? And it’s not a good sign that one of the panelists has website listed that doesn’t seem to exist, and when it did exist didn’t seem to have anything to do with comics.

Shaenon Garrity In Conversation With Andrew Farago
2:00pm — 3:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
Now these two folks, they know webcomics. Also manga, museum operations, tiki culture, and all of each other’s secrets, seeing as how they’ve been married for more than a decade. I hope that Shaenon Garrity gets invited back as a featured guest next year seeing as how this one’s a bust, but at least she gets her spotlight panel.

The Adventure Zone: Petals To The Metal Graphic Novel
2:00pm — 3:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
Indispensible for Mcelfans, as Clint, Travis, and Griffin sit down to talk with artist Carey Pietsch about the third (and presumably not last) Adventure Zone adaptation. Moderated by Satine Phoenix.

Friday

Raina And Robin In Conversation
11:00am — noon, SDCC or YouTube
That would be Robin Ha, and Raina is, of course, Raina. Want to learn how to do memoir in comics? Watch this.

History Goes Graphic
noon — 1:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
I expected this one to involve folks from :01 Books, what with the launch of their history and civic engagement lines, but nope. However, let’s be clear: there’s nothing to be disappointed by here, as the panel features Fred Van Lente, Tom Scioli, David Walker, Mikki Kendall, and Malaka Gharib, moderated by Kaitlin Ketchum.

The 32nd Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards
7:00pm — 8:00pm, no links provided
Yeah, I don’t know what it means either, but no functional links associated with the Eisners? Par for the course this year. Interesting that they only blocked out an hour, which I guess means no acceptance speeches and it’s all a pre-recorded list o’ names from host Phil LaMarr
Edit to add: Links are now provided for SDCC and YouTube.

Saturday
Diversity And Comics: Why Inclusion And Visibility Matter
noon — 1:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
For the sake of the panelists, I hope that this one is pre-recorded and that comments are disabled, because the C*micsg*te CHUDs are going to be mortally offended that this exists and nobody needs that shit. But kudos to whoever wrote the description because they included the websites for the panelists — John Jennings, Frederick Aldama, Christina ‘Steenz’ Stewart, Chelsea ‘Ché’ Grayson, David Walker (making his third appearance in this post), and Stanford Carpenter, who between them have three Eisners and two more nominations¹ — and thus saved me the time of hunting them down.
Edit to add: In fact, I was so astonished by those time-saving links that I initially forgot to include them. Fixed!

Best And Worst Manga of 2020
3:00pm — 4:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
Speaking of times to disable comments, as I previously noted, the howler monkeys won’t get to shout abuse at the panel, at least not in a way that they have to hear. This may form a decent precedent for future iterations. With Brigid Alverson, Justin Stroman, Morgana Santilli, Eva Volin, Megan Peters, Rob McMonigal, and Deb Aoki.

Sunday

Inspired By Real Life: The True Stories Behind Graphic Novels
2:00pm — 3:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
Nate Powell is going to be there and if the entire thing turns into a remembrance of John Lewis, well, I’m okay with that and I imagine it wouldn’t annoy Van Jensen, Scott Chantler, or moderator Diana Pho too much either.

LGBTQ Comics And Popular Media For Young People
2:00pm — 3:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
I think I might just set up two monitors on two computers and double up during this timeslot. Moderator Cort Lane talks with Gina Gagliano, Trungles, Alex Sanchez, Noelle Stevenson, Mariko Tamaki, Brittney Williams, and Michael Vogel.

Keenspot 20th Annual Comic-Con Panel: Pandemic Edition
3:00pm — 4:00pm, SDCC or YouTube
You can’t keep a good tradition down, and Keenspot closing things out on Sunday afternoon is certainly a tradition. This year’s giveaway will be digital, naturally.

Spam of the day:

How To Get Paid For What You Already know

I do that every day. It’s called a job.

_______________
¹ Take that, C*micsg*te CHUDs.

Hi. Some stuff has been going on since we at Fleen have been away. Let’s try to ease back into it.

Near as I can tell, San Diego Comic Con has still not, institutionally, recognized what a fiasco the Eisner voting data leak was. My hiatus coincided just about perfectly with the deadline I gave CCI’s Communications & Strategy office to respond on the record, a deadline which was blown, and an office that still has not deigned to reply.

But they are talking plenty about what’s going on for Comic-Con@Home, complete with a schedule of panels. We’ll come up with a (likely very brief) list of what looks most interesting and run that tomorrow, so you can make plans to connect to sessions starting on Wednesday afternoon¹.

There will also be some sort of live virtual exhibit hall running from Wednesday through Sunday, but not many details as to what that means. Here’s the gist:

You’ll find company listings, exclusive products for sale, promotional links, and a whole lot more. The Exhibit Hall will be available for all five days of the convention.

That sounds almost like what I was advocating for back in June:

[I]f you could come up with something that lets an attendee produce a verifiable payment, then talk with a creator for five minutes while watching merch get personalized, you’d have something replicating the experience and providing a value-add for so many people who’ve watched their income tank this year.

Related question: is there a mechanism that provides for con exclusives, something that gives people a chance at their favorite variant stuff but keeping eBay churners from snapping everything up?

That being said, creators I’ve seen who are promising interaction with people during the SDCC dates, including the ability to watch your purchases get personalized, don’t seem to be pointing people towards the SDCC site. Case in point: Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett is doing instant-send Zoom links² if you make purchases during specific hours (1 hour pre-dinner on Wednesday night, 1 hour midday on Thursday and Friday, and four hours in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday; all times PDT).

Jeff Smith is taking pre-orders and scheduling times for visible sketching via Facebook Live, which it looks like anybody can watch. And that’s about it, actually. I haven’t found anybody else replicating the fan interaction experience at a distance, which makes me think that SDCC hasn’t devised and destributed a mechanism, leaving exhibitors to work it out themselves.

In non-quasievent news:

• Achewood has gone full academic: please enjoy a video conference presentation on Achewood and views on masculinity by Ken Alba of Boston University. It’s an intriguing, well-supported thesis, and apart from the abstract’s characterization of xkcd³, there’s pretty much nothing to disagree with here.
• Oglaf, book 3. The strip keeps getting funnier and ruder from week to week, and your order at Tier 4 and up will contain many stickers and multiple KS-exclusive Sithrak tracts because Stretch Goals. I love the (previous editions here) and when I win the lottery I’m going to buy a few zillion of those and leave them in the bathrooms of every highway rest stop I can find.

Spam of the day:

Strangest Japanese “sex” practice

Oh spammers, how I missed you.

No, wait, the complete opposite of that. And may I say, those scare quotes are doing a lot of work.

_______________
¹ Presumably, San Diego time, which is GMT-7.

² Watch the video if you want to see LArDK’s adorable weiner dog, Ollie, doing adorable things.

³ In which Achewood is contrasted with, quote, XKCD, Penny Arcade, and the other ‘manly’ webcomics of the aughts, which just confused the hell out of me. That description is Just Sick as Hell in a way that not even a 3-cell D Maglite can compensate for.

We at Fleen have returned, and we’ll be posting regularly again, barring whatever other horrors this year has to throw at us. Just give us a little time to organize what’s been going on while we were gone.

The most important thing my father ever taught me was the appropriate use of time-saving technology instead of finding nobility in unnecessary effort. When I was in my early teens, he was talking to me about having to perform the calculations in his electrical engineering classes with a slide rule. I asked if this was going to be a talk about how calculators were making Kids These Days lazy and dumb.

No! he exclaimed. Slide rules were a pain and I hated them. As soon as scientific calculators got under $250 I got one and it was the best money I ever spent.

I believe that this was an HP-35 that was remaindered after the HP-45 came out, as list price on the 35 when it was introduced was about double what he claimed to have paid. By the time we had that conversation, he had upgraded to an HP-55, which he kept for the remainder of his career, always preferring to use it plugged in rather than put batteries in. He never said why, but I suspect it was a matter of both thriftiness — those early HPs chewed through batteries like nobody’s business — and a desire to keep the calculator on his desk and not have the ability to dive into work wherever he was.

He was born into the back half of the Great Depression, grew up in a world convulsed by the most destructive war in history, and completed his education during the start of the Space Race. He was a frat brother of the guy who made modems possible. He founded the engineering department of a community college, the first in New Jersey. He spent decades until it was considered high enough quality that after the two year program, students were granted automatic transfers to Rutgers Engineering as juniors. He gave up being Dean to get back to teaching. Somewhere along the line, he testified to the Senate about the value of community colleges. As the longest-serving member of faculty, he led the procession at commencement.

He spent 20 years in retirement, in a world of ubiquitous pocket computers and all the knowledge of the world at his fingertips, which he found less interesting than reruns of NCIS. He’d been in declining health for years, and under home hospice care for the past couple of weeks. Around dawn, he breathed for the last time.

He was variously complicated, smart, confused (often at the same time), a little too willing to pack six children into a station wagon for cross-country drives, lazy, and fond of wine from the marginally drinkable to the top of the line. He was my father and I loved him.

Oh, and he’d want me to thank you for taking the time to read this. He was polite that way.

I’ll be back in a while; comments will be disabled until I return so I don’t have to deal with a mountain of spam when I get back. Behave until then.

On what is shaping up to be a challenging day¹, there’s nothing like the small ray of sunshine that is an unanticipated post from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. Let hear what’s happening on the European side of the Atlantic.

Guess who’s got two thumbs and forgot his keyboard at home last week?

• Quai des Bulles announced they would not hold the festival this year; I can only commend them not only for a decision that was tough to make, but also for giving all stakeholders a full 4 months heads up.

  That leads me to my own announcement: I will not be making any preparations to go to Angoulême in January 2021. Given the characteristics of this epidemic, which has been shown to progress best in closed spaces — you can’t exactly hold a trade show around paper without protecting it against moisture, not in most of France — where people speak or shout a lot, given that summoning thousands of people from the whole French-speaking world (and beyond!) would be an epidemiological management nightmare even if the setting was favorable, and given that I can’t see any validated vaccine production, distribution, and deliverance having been scaled enough to reach herd immunity by that time, might as well declare the whole year starting from March 15th, at least, as a loss for such activities.

  Ouest-France, however, reassures us they will award their prize, to be announced when Quai des Bulles should have taken place.

• Also via Ouest-France (in their print edition), I learned of Nicoby’s latest crowdfunding project, titled C’est la guerre (a reference to how Emmanuel Macron framed the lockdown announcement).

  The contents, his lockdown autobio journal, are interesting, but also interesting is how a publisher is managing the project. We have seen that last year with with tiny and Tall’s campaign, managed by publisher Lapin, and it seems to be gaining traction among indie publishers. We can see for instance the publisher taking advantage of the campaign for some (reasonable) cross-promotion.

  Also interesting is the framing for the campaign: it is presented as an end-run around the glut in bookshop releases that is already occurring as books that should have been released during the lockdown are rescheduled, end-run itself justified by the timeliness of the content. It seems like more and more actors are trying to free themselves from the constraints of fitting in the system of wide bookshop distribution and going direct instead.

• Finally, Maliki’s latest campaign ended with 12,608 copies (10,532 for book 3 proper), or 16647 books_ecc, breaking their own previous crowdfunding record. Never bet against Team Maliki.

As always, Fleen thanks FSFCPL for his reportage from the lands of BD².

Spam of the day:

This new self-defense tool looks innocent… but it will drop a ripped 260-lb. thug in 2 seconds or less and turn him into a whimpering pile.

Big deal. Randy Milholland’s version of Olive Oyl in his Popeye’s Cartoon Club offerings (which, sadly, may be seeing their last update today — write to King Features Syndicate and tell them we want more Uncle Randy strips!) can lay a much bigger brute out by making them feel unloved and alone. Top that, spammers!

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¹ Without going into it too much, a member of my family who’s been declining for years and has been in hospice for the past week is about to die. I will most likely have more to say later.

² That’s bandes dessinées.

Pervs.

As previously noted, SDCC 2020 isn’t happening in person (and I wouldn’t bet on 2021, between you and me), but will be having virtual programs.

Guess who just got credentialed as press for said virtual programs?

Curiously, this happened with ease and efficiency (the entire process took me about ten minutes) at the same time that other persons within Comic Con International can’t seem to respond to me about the Eisners data breach fiasco. Nice to know they don’t institutionally hold grudges¹, but I really want some answers.

Since it’s been a week, and since the Eisner re-vote has finished, I’m going to try one more reminder that I’m still waiting on a response to my questions. Given that it’s about to be a holiday weekend, I’ll give them until end of day on Tuesday (that’s 7 July) before I take their response to be No Comment². I’ll leave it to each of you to decide if no comment on the their responsibilities re: notifications to victims and the state of California³ to be an ass-covering, or a failure to recognize the relevance and importance of the situation.

With any luck, the virtual SDCC will have the traditional Give us feedback about the show session on the last day, and I’ll be able to nail down an answer then.

Spam of the day:

Drug Prices Are Too High

Look, even if that were a site that did more than openly ask you for your email address without identifying who the fuck they are, there’s no way anybody sees that domain name and thinks of anything other than The Rent Is Too Damn High guy. I saw him on the streets of Manhattan once. Dude totally looks like a karate expert.

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¹ Or at least they didn’t connect my name with my submitted questions.

² In the EMS world, we call that one refusal by action.

³ Not to mention jurisdictions around the world. The European Union may have opinions on the matter, but I’m not qualified to comment.