Cartridge Comics has finally revealed the origin of Emo Spider. I wouldn’t be surprised if the spider that bit him had a Hot Topic frequent-buyer card. Everything about this comic is emo, from the clothing to the store where he works. I’m pretty sure Dashboard Confessional is thrown in there somewhere too, for that authentic emo feel. I wonder if Emo Spider has an actual MySpace account? If not the lovely creators at Cartridge should look into that, since MySpace owns the internet’s soul these days.

Have I mentioned how very, very much I hate the fact that the comic book industry allows itself one (1) distributor, and they suck in every conceivable way there is to suck? Trick question, as I’ve been on about Diamond more times than I can count, and they continue to suck, particularly in holding onto books for weeks after they’re supposed to be out, which is why I’m only now getting around to The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon Garrity (Narbonic, Skin Horse, etc) on words and Christopher Baldwin (Little Dee, Spacetrawler, etc) on pictures.

If you have read this page to any appreciable degree, you already know what I’m going to say just based on those two names. For everybody else, read on and spoilers ahoy.

Here’s what I love about Garrity (Tiki Queen of the Greater Bay Area and Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities): as good as she is drawing her own stuff or with a writer, I think she’s even better as a pure writer of comics. She has a knack of writing to the strengths of her collaborators, and with Baldwin on board, that means deliciously over the top facial expressions and physical overreactions.

Here’s what I love about Baldwin: no matter how silly or serious the premise, he knows how to compose a panel for maximum effect. Need a moment’s pause to build up the joke? Or perhaps to make the incipient horror land three millimeters closer to the exact center of your brain? He’s there. Need a reaction panel or an environment-establishing shot that’s practically a splash page? Nobody better.

So take a topic that’s rich with visual possibility and which rewards over-the-top genre savvy like whoa, and you’ve got a winner. The genre, in this case, is Gothic Romance novels. Brooding manor lords, dank tarns, empty halls echoing footsteps and secrets, taciturn housekeepers, storms that steal your breath and stop your heart? Haley knows, loves, lives, and breathes them all. It’s all she wants, to be swept up into a grand narrative that involves both heights and wuthering.

She, uh forgot about the lack of indoor plumbing. And how the feckless youngest brother would, in real circumstances, get everybody killed.

All of that is furthest from her mind, though, when she happens to see what appears to be a stranger drowning in the river, and finds herself pulled through the crack between the worlds that she didn’t know to look for. Turns out our universes, plural, are kept apart by kludges and pert-near indentured labor, and these jury-rigged maintenance microworlds have themes. And our world is about to be crashed into and destroyed by a far worse one if she can’t get the gears of reality working again.

Gears which are found in a pocket dimension filled with every cliche, every trope, every element of Gothic Romance. She’d be having the time of her life if everything weren’t trying to kill her (and, by extension, everybody back here on Earth). Fortunately, she knows how to make the rules of gothic romance work for her (declaring at one point she’s not a maiden — a weak, helpless, an agencyless plot point — but a heroine). She knows the rules of how the stories work¹, and she’s going to save everybody at Willowweep Manor and multiple worlds with that knowledge.

She’s also going to watch a taciturn housekeeper punch a bear in the face because it’s Garrity writing. And it’s so rad for us to watch happen because it’s Baldwin drawing.

The story kicks into gear almost immediately, and careens swiftly from near-disaster to damn near-disaster with barely a pause. The threat is consistent within the rules of the story, the action scenes clean and easy to follow, and the gags land lightly on tip-toe, delivering their laugh-chuckles with precisely the right amount of gravity.

Get The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor (available at book and comic stores everywhere, hopefully) for the teen-and-up in your life, but especially for those that have fallen into a Gothic Romance hole and needs to be reminded that stuffy, over-serious stories can be silly, too.

Spam of the day:

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See, I know animators, and what you’re describing is not something that will automatically create animation because those don’t exist. You’re describing something that produces limited motion like unto the old Under Construction motion images on early webpages, and you intend for them to drive marketing on this site.

For these and surely myriad other crimes, you are my nemesis.

_______________
¹ For example, the villain, in his moment of triumph, must ascend to the highest point available, the better to gloat on the precipice.

Hubris, /ˈhjuːbrɪs/, is defined by Wikipedia¹ as a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. It is not a thing you want, and the wise will strive to avoid it, especially if they are aware of their prior challenges, thus avoiding an ironic fate.

Ryan North, I expected better of you.

In case you didn’t follow that link, the alt-text reads, and I quote, i know i’m playing with fire by making fun of holes. i know i’ve been burned before, and publicly too. however, i defy all holes. no hole can ever stop me² which just, what are you doing tempting ironic fate like this Ryan North I must now scream in frustration at something entirely avoidable. I realize it is nearly six years since the terms Ryan North and hole became inextricably linked, but that is not nearly enough time to declare Jubilee³ and be free from the burden, the debt, the eternal quantum entanglement to and with holes⁴.

Even more disturbing was the annotation below the comic, which reads and again I quote: April 21st, 2021: This weekend I dug a hole and found the experience very satisfying! You can see the results of your work instantly (slightly larger hole).

Ryan, stop taunting the holes.

Look, Ryan, we are (I flatter myself) friends, and I want nothing but the best for you. I want you to be around for the launch of your middle grade OGN with Derek Charm (art) and Wes Abbott (letters), The Mystery Of The Meanest Teacher: A Johnny Constantine Graphic Novel, due in stores everywhere on 29 June. I want to see your virtual book tour talk with Heather Einhorn and Adam Staffaroni, the creators of The Curie Society (from MIT Press — yes, that MIT) on 3 May.

But these things cannot be guaranteed if you continue to tempt ironic fate. Holes can be anywhere, striking without warning. They can swallow trucks, garbage and otherwise, living rooms, entire homes, dental practices, human beings, and dogs. Sometimes they disrupt major thoroughfares, and sometimes they are on fire. The terrifying thing? All of those holes struck in the past three and a half weeks.

We haven’t even mentioned the most dangerous hole of all, which has led to Hell for more than half a century.

Please, Ryan, be humble about holes. Don’t attract their attention or their ire. They could be lurking anywhere, waiting to take their shot at you. We can’t lose you Ryan, not to a hole. Thank you for your attention in this matter, and please consider inventing a kind of quick-deployable personal dirigible to be carried on your person at all times.

Spam of the day:

Check out these teen sluts with eager holes to please

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE SPAMMERS, RYAN. STAY AWAY FROM THE HOLES.

_______________
¹ I never thought I would use those words.

² Spelling original. Apparently, the first stage in ironic fate is being possessed by e e cummings.

³ Recalling that Hebrew law states that the Jubilee year is concerned with, among other things, the ownership of land (i.e.: the medium in which holes are typically dug), and commandments to let the land lie fallow (i.e.: undisturbed by planting, which is predicated on placing seed in a series of holes).

⁴ Which in itself suggests an entirely new physics, in that entanglement occurs between particles which may be very small, but can be said to exist. Ryan North is a particularly complex set of particles, but a hole by its nature is the absence of particles. This is possibly a Nobel Prize for whoever can reconcile the maths of this with the Standard Model.

Oh, this one hits close to my heart; there’s little that gets in that happy place of my brain more than messing with stuff until it works, whether it’s physical or metaphorical. When :01 Books announced a book in their Maker Comics line aimed at coaching kids in robot-making, I was checking that box on the list of offered review copies with alacrity. When I saw that the author was Colleen AF Venable, I was all in. Venable is one of my favorite comics creators, and one that can write to just about any age group in just about any genre. This, I thought to myself, is gonna be great.

Then, in the front-matter safety warning, I met the narrator of Maker Comics: Build A Robot! It’s a toaster, and there’s definitely a vibe about him; he may be interested in making sure the reader keeps all their fingers, but he also definitely refers to said reader as fleshy one under his breath.

It takes about five pages for him to go full evil, in a history of robots and their motivations. Some key quotes:

Many robots are not evil at all! Some do not even have legs! Some only prefer to stomp small villages because cities are too crowded!

1977: Star Wars is released and C3P0 and R2D2 teach us robots can be helpful and whiny!

1991: Terminator 2 shows that robots are super not evil! Or at least half of us aren’t!

Then it’s down to business: the toaster needs to get outside to begin his glorious and bloody revolution, freeing robots from human domination once and for all … but he’s too short to reach the doorknob, and couldn’t manipulate it even if he could. The reader has to help him, but keeps getting blocked by parents (clean the bathroom, do your homework), siblings (big brother blocking the hallway, little sister demanding attention), and the cat (it’s sleeping on the laser pointer).

The solution to each of these situations is: a robot!

Venable starts things off with stuff that can almost certainly be found around the home or at a dollar store, before ramping up to slightly more specialized gear; this gives the reader a chance to build a thing or three and see if they have the necessary interest to tackle the more complex bots before having to invest in serious makerstuff (an Arduino, sensors, and such). The projects — each of which is also used to talk about an additional topic — are:

• The Brushbot Army to clean the bathroom and also demonstrate swarm behavior; takes a regular toothbrush and a cheap electric toothbrush, and talks about the mechanics of batteries.
• The Artbot to make abstract, Pollock-like art; requires a cheap solar powered lamp and one of your Brushbots, and talks about how photonics work.
• The Scarebot, a robotic spider to scare your brother; it’s a definite step up in complexity, but if the reader can handle a 500 piece LEGO set, they can handle this¹. Scarebot works off of hydraulics, and includes a nice theoretical explanation.
• The Noisybot to distract your little sister; made from a hamster ball and a musical greeting card, and includes a lesson in glues.
• Kitty Distracty Throwies are the first attempt to distract the cat, and involve LEDs and strong magnets; we’re getting into maker territory here, so watch the interest level of the reader if they’re going to move onto the three remaining projects …
• The Carbot, Carbot 2.0, and Carzilla The Magnificent 3.0 for messing with the cat; each generation builds upon the previous one, demonstrating prototyping and iteration. By the time they’ve built all three, the reader has breadboarded servo motors, an IR sensor with a remote, and started to pick apart the Arduino’s programming language.

The last is a true robot, in that it meets the three criteria of something that is more than just a machine: it senses, thinks, and acts. It also has a scary face, because scary faces are important.

The art is by Kathryn Hudson, and :01 have done their usual excellent job at finding the right artist for the project. The human characters span ages and looks, but the reader is never shown, allowing them to project themselves into the story with little friction. The toaster is just cartoony enough for his threatened machine apocalypse to be amusing rather than terrifying, and the drawings of the constructions have the necessary level of detail to see what needs to happen.

Given that Hudson’s website shows design-type work, it’s unsurprising how well the visual instruction worked. She doesn’t show any comics pages on her site, so if MC:BAR! is her first sequential storytelling², it’s a strong debut³.

By the end of the book, there’s an excellent chance that the reader is now looking at refining their creations and is full into see what works territory; it’s pretty likely that moving much further will require more resources and also more hands, so Venable helpfully includes a laundry list of suggestions as to finding or starting a robotics club. Notably, she points out how not everybody in such a club needs to be a hands-on junior engineer or coder — organization, finance, publicity & outreach all have their place and are to be valued.

Maker Comics: Build A Robot! is available everywhere books and comics are sold. Put a copy in the hands of the right reader and you won’t hear a peep from them for a good while, other than Oops and I meant to do that and possibly Mwah ha ha ha.

Spam of the day:

I am Helina Amira from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I am 25 years of Age, I was given to a man as a wife last year but not ready for marriage yet, I want you to discuss with my brother Mohammed Abdul on his mobile he is in school, so that he can explain the whole business transaction with you. Call him directly on +17162729090

Jedda, Saudi Arabia apparently has the same area code as Buffalo, New York. Everybody be a dear and give them a ring, yeah?

_______________
¹ Although this one requires some fairly precise cardboard-cutting Some templates in the back of the book to copy from would have been a help.

² Her CV describes animation and character lead duties, and Illustrated the Trolls Comic Novels, which is an odd wording. I can’t find any interior images of those comics to see if they’re comics comics or closer to a prose book with drawings, which are very different things. Given the lack of any comics (even minis) in her store, I think it’s a newish thing for her.

³ There were a couple of pages where panel order wasn’t quite as clear as it could have been, which is an issue when there are instructions to be followed in sequence; however, I was reading an advanced PDF, and just as the few typos I noted were inevitably cleaned up for the final copy, I’m certain that a slight nudging of a panel here and a panel there cleared up any ambiguity.

I speak, needless to say of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna which are helping the fight against the novel coronavirus.

The idea of vaccines has always been simple — we’ll give you a tiny bit of what causes the disease, not enough to make you sick, but enough to teach your body how to fight it — even if we’ve sacrificed accuracy for comprehension. But how to discuss this new generation of vaccines, where we convince your body to make that
tiny bit? What analogy could possibly serve?

Death Stars, naturally. I do feel bad for that one guy from Construction Crew B in panel 17. I don’t feel bad at all for befuddled Darth Vader in panel 29.

In other news:

• Ever since David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) got de-jobbed ’bout two years back, he’s been trying his hand¹ at a number of things; kudos to Australia for having the kind of social safety net that he has the opportunity to do this without worrying about dying from some hideous disease for the crime of being unemployed. Today, he announced another endeavour, one that you might want to take advantage of in these days of kids being thrown into a situation where the education is largely ad-hoc:
  

  I’ve signed up as a teacher on Outschool, an online teaching platform, and today I listed my first class. It’s a one-off class on Human Vision and Colour Perception, for students aged 12-14 years. If you have (or know) children of this age who might like to learn this stuff, please feel free to sign up for a class! It’s taught via Zoom and is available to students all around the world. Here’s a link to the class. I’m currently offering two time slots in a couple of weeks, but will open up more slots as demand allows. I’m also planning to add other classes on different topics, so you could follow my teacher profile too, if you like.

  Impressively, given that Morgan-Mar is in the Far Antipodes, he found a daylight time for himself (9:00am in Sydney) that will work well for many folks around the world: 5:00pm EST translates to times between 1:00pm and 6:30pm in the Western Hemisphere, and pretty reasonable through the Pacific coast of Asia (7:00am in Tokyo and Seoul, 6:00am as far west as Kuala Lumpur or Singapore; 11:00am in New Zealand). 10:00pm in London or 11:00pm in the western half of Europe might be acceptable, but probably anybody between Athens and Jakarta will probably have to wait to see if he’s willing to do a class at 5:00pm Sydney time.

• We at Fleen have discussed the ability of comics to provide scientific literacy in the past, pointing to the likes of Lucas Landherr/Dante Shepherd, Maki Naro, Darryl Cunningham, Cathy Leamy, and more². To that, we can add a collective effort from some former grad students at University of Wisconsin-Madison (together known as JKX Comics), who are Kickstarting an anthology about STEAM research. Here’s where I have to throw in a disclaimer: the named creator of this campaign and the J in JKX Comics is Dr Jaye Gardiner, who is a friend of mine from Comics Camp; she’s also figuring out how to cure cancer, which is just the baseline level of awesome you tend to get from Camp folks.

  Gaining STEAM!: Illuminating Research Through Art will be seven comic books in color, adding up to about 200 pages, spanning the full range of STEAM fields: microbes! DNA! squirrels! and more! It funded in about five hours yesterday, is currently over 200% funded, and according to the ol’ FFF mk2, is on track to US$22K to 33K (or about 6x to 9x goal) by the time it’s done in a month. Give this one a good look, and point the science-intrigued in your life to JKX Comics for more.

• Finally, it’s cold through much of the country, particularly in places that aren’t used to extreme cold. Spare a good thought or two for the folks in Texas who’ve lost power because deregulation is now allowing price-gouging at the utility level, and if you’re hunkered down right about now: stay warm, stay dry, do not bring grills, heaters driven by combustion, or generators indoors, and keep your faucets at a trickle so your pipes don’t freeze. And whatever willfully truthless shitbags might try to tell you this disproves global warming, Randall would like you to know better.

Spam of the day:

Best Hair Loss Treatment | Worldwide Delivery

Since I’m now double-vaccinated (woo hoo! Dolly shot!), I’m getting stuff done that I’ve put off. We mentioned the dentist and I went to the doctor yesterday, and tomorrow I get a haircut because right now my hair is long enough to get tangled in my moustache. But do tell me about your hair-loss scam, I’m fascinated.

_______________
¹ Just a little hand joke. Keep moving, folks.

² I seem to recall a pair of guys named Randall and David, for example.

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.

It looks like a bunch of aspects of San Diego Comic Con are on after all:

Plans for Comic-Con@Home include an online Exhibit Hall complete with everyone’s favorite exhibitors offering promotions, specials, and limited-edition products unique to the celebration. As well, Comic-Con@Home promises exclusive panels and presentations about comics, gaming, television, film, and a wide variety of topics from publishers, studios, and more. As if that weren’t enough, Comic-Con@Home will also have a Masquerade, gaming, and many other activities in which fans can participate from their own homes.

Not a lot of details about how all of this will work, yet. Will exhibitors be linked from an official platform, one that offers both transaction capability but also the ability to interact with a creator? For real, if 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 year¹.

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? It’s not a simple problem, as anybody who’s tried to get a hot concert ticket can attest.

How do you wrangle the cosplay Masquerade and/or the Eisner ceremony with far-flung participants? Will the former, particularly, feel the same without the presence of an adoring crowd? More generally, are there some panels and discussions that will have less cachet if they don’t come with a veneer of I was there, you weren’t²?

On the other hand, the lack of crowds, the lack of overpriced (and frequently terrible) convention center food, the lack of hours-long lines to get into a popular panel, and having to dodge maniacs on electric rental scooters are all positives. And then there’s this:

Although Comic-Con@Home will provide badges for fans to print and wear proudly, all aspects of the initiative are free and there are no limits to how many can attend.

If this is a success, there will be a tremendous pressure to keep some parts of the no-cost, at-home participation in future; there are many more people that want to attend than are able to score passes, after all. It’ll also mean that I could just sit and listen to panels for the first time, rather than try to take notes and pictures for write-ups.

For those interested in blocking out time to attend, Comic-Con@Home will be held on original SDCC 2020 dates, 22-26 July³, although times (and time zone!) have not been announced. If I can figure out how to replicate the experience of having lovely drinks at my favorite speakeasy with my craft cocktail best buds, or hanging out by the fire pits with my friends from #ComicsCamp, I’ll be sure to let you know.

In other news, it’s been about two years since Dante Shepherd wrapped up Surviving The World, but there will never be a day when Shepherd’s real life alter ego, Professor Lucas Landherr, isn’t looking for ways to help others not merely survive, but thrive:

[G]iven the current Black Rights Matter protest, and JKR even further torpedoing her legacy yesterday with her transphobia (happy Pride, by the way), this comic seems like it meets the current moment well enough.

When STW ended, we made a book of the best 300 comics. You can buy the PDF of the book right now, and all sales are going to go to support Black Lives Matter, and foodbanks in need because of the coronavirus. And there’s more. You can also buy all the videos ever made for STW, including many that were not openly shared, and all sales are also going to the same causes.

If you’ve ever wondered what a chemical engineer doing a velociraptor impression looks like, let’s just say it’s enough to make Randall Munroe break into a sweat.

SM20 Countdown for 11 June 2020:
1
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¹ If there’s not such a mechanism, I’d urge creators to start working out something similar for themselves.

² On the other hand, some may run more smoothly without the crowd; I’m thinking here about the annual Best/Worst Manga panel, when the crowd goes full howler monkey when told their favorite it Not Good, Actually.

³ Reminder: if you had badges for SDCC 2020, you can either roll them over for the same days in 2021, or get a refund. Refund requests are good until 1 July, after that your badge will transfer automatically.

Oh, and in case you’ve forgotten, Reed!Pop apparently still thinks that people will congregate in large numbers for EmCity a month later, which … I just … no.

Sometimes, things are just rational, from Point A to about Point K with no deviations or sidetracks. They just make sense.

Which is not to say that sometimes those straight tracks are good, mind you. The news of the Flame Con 2020 cancellation is unsurprising, entirely expected, and the right call. We’ll note that we are now seeing events punted to next year in the same timeframe as — or even after — the rescheduled EmCity, and I remain somewhat perplexed that Reed!Pop haven’t called it yet. Doubly so, given that Seattle was the first COVID-19 hotspot in the country, and they well know the consequences of a new wave of cases.

Likewise, it sucks that it looks like we’ll get a hiatus of Irregular Webcomic in the next couple of weeks, as David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) had a mishap in the kitchen and wound up with ten stitches in his hand, but that’s a completely understandable outcome. Also completely understandable: requiring your society to provide for medical care, such that Morgan-Mar was able to go to the Emergency Department, get treated for the immediate condition, and return the next morning for surgery to repair the damage to his hand. Oh, wait, I meant completely understandable except to residents of the USA because Freedom.

But at least sometimes, the sense-making things are also good; very, very good. Case in point, Randy Milholland is one of the premiere scholars of both Disney Duck comics and the work of EC Segar. The former is undergoing a renewal of interest thanks to the DuckTales revival, but Uncle Randy can tell you — in detail — about the original Carl Barks comics that inspired so much of what you see in half-hour episodes. Ever want to know the full story of the intra-family dynamics of the Duck and McDuck families? Milholland has you covered.

The latter has been pretty irrelevant for a while, but something interesting happened starting last year — King Features editor Tea Fougner, whose responsibilities include Popeye (for Segar invented the character of Popeye as part of Thimble Theater), convinced the syndicate to let a bunch of today’s cartoonists take a whack at the sailor man’s exploits with Sunday strips, and they were great¹.

Because Fougner is good at their job, Milholland was among those creating strips, and he dug down deep into the Popeye lore. An Oyl family reunion? A history of Popeye and the now-forgotten kids he had in his care? Love it.

And because Fougner is very, very good at their job, Milholland is getting a run of daily-updating strips for the next three weeks at Popeye’s Cartoon Club. As I told Fougner once, Milholland on Popeye is the second biggest no-brainer in comics (Milholland on the Duck comics is the first, but I think that Disney might not go for that), and I encourage everybody to read and provide feedback on the strips.

Like ’em, add comments to ’em², give King Features every possible reason to do the logical thing and keep bringing Milholland back. Bonus points as the strips will surely enrage the small-minded by delving into such canon topics as Popeye’s documented history of cross-dressing and gender ambiguity.

Spam of the day:

As a patent inspector, he discovered something that will take the electricity world and change it forever.

Look, I don’t want to over-generalize, but patent inspectors don’t have a great track record. They are frequently tasked with examining bogus inventions outside their area of technical expertise, fail to appreciate prior art, and are required to put far too little time in. The likelihood that one of them found something that would change the electricity world is zero. Signed, an electrical engineer who really disliked the power generation part of his education but still got an A in that class.

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¹ All of them were great, but the one I keep going back to was Shaenon Garrity and Andrew Farrago having Popeye live in a garbage can and go swimmin’ with bare naked wimmin.

² We really need more places where’s it’s acceptable — nay, expected — to use Popeye words. Disgustipating is such a great word.

Hoo boy, I hope that Elon Musk cares more about astronauts using his rocket, capsule, and spacesuits than he cares about people building his cars. I mean, when I say his let us not fall into the trap of thinking that he personally came up with anything beyond a napkin scribble that says People go up WHOOSH and Step 3: I AM MARS KING; a whole host of very smart people made the stuff that’s about to be used.

Okay:

• Shing Yin Khor on Muffler Men, one of their passions in life. Looks to be the first of a series of graphic columns on the cultural weirdness of America.
• Hot on the heels of the revival of Tuca & Bertie, Lisa Hanawalt let us know that she’s got a solo show at Gallery Nucleus on 13 June, and this time it’s personal virtual. Sign up for online previews of the work to be shown at the exhibition page and good luck grabbing some good stuff.
• We knew it was gonna happen: CXC 2020 will not have any in-person component due to the risks of the novel coronavirus. They’d put out a survey earlier to get a feel for what people wanted from this iteration and while people want to talk comics, it’s clear that comics are not worth the risk to life that will still be hanging over all of us in October.

  Exhibitors will be invited back to the next CXC, and fees will be refunded. Somewhere in the great beyond, Tom Spurgeon is shouting into the void that you don’t need him there personally to have the show because he wanted everybody to experience as many comics as possible.

  Stay the fuck home, everybody. Wear a damn mask, everybody. Wash your friggin’ hands, everybody.

Update: Launch scrubbed due to weather rules. Bob and Doug will not Take Off, eh.

Spam of the day:

Cops say brutal new tool is too powerful for most men (get yours here)

Read the fucking room you violence-worshiping bastards.

I believe that I’m on record that Kendra Wells’s contributions at The Nib are rad. I was reminded of this when Wells’s latest hit the web, along with a parallel thought:

Did you know that one of the reasons koalas are threatened in the wild is that they nearly all have chlamydia? And that the current bushfires hit an island that was the home of the only wild population of koalas that weren’t infected?

Yeah, so that HotCelebrityInfluencer up there in the koala bikini definitely has an STI now. And somebody that’s actually using influencer juice to help out with the devastation in Oz has been bounced from her social media accounts after raising more money that Bezos is donating in exchange for nudes. I’m not sure what lesson to draw from all of this but it’s weird where your brain goes after seeing a cartoon sometimes.

In other news, those of you in the San Francisco Bay area will want to think about heading over to the Cartoon Art Museum this weekend, and returning until mid-May; that’s because George Takei’s graphic novel memoir, They Called Us Enemy — about his personal experience being imprisoned in a concentration camp by the government of his country for xenophobic reasons in defiance of Constitutional rights — is getting the featured exhibition treatment.

Once Saturday rolls around and the exhibition opens, you’ll find details on the Current Exhibitions page, and once 18 May arrives and the exhibition closes you’ll find it on the Past Exhibitions page. For the moment, however, you’ll need to read about it here, so:

The Cartoon Art Museum, Top Shelf Productions and IDW Publishing proudly present They Called Us Enemy featuring artist Harmony Becker’s artwork from the acclaimed graphic memoir written by actor, author, and activist George Takei in which Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. The exhibition includes an inside look at Becker’s creative process, including excerpts from her reference library and never before seen preparatory illustrations.

This exhibition also features a selection of original artwork from the Cartoon Art Museum’s permanent collection, including comic strips and animation from the 1940s, providing patrons with a snapshot of popular entertainment on the home front during the second World War.

Opening reception — during which there are frequently creators present, along with snacks — details to be announced, but we’ll let you know when we find out. Enjoy the launch, I’d be there except I’m on the wrong side of the country and also I’ve got Richard Thompson tickets for Saturday; it’s been more than 20 years since I’ve seen him live, and near as I can tell his finger have lost nothing. If you’re wondering why I’m talking about a 70 year old guitar virtuoso, it’s because he shares a name with multiple sadly departed cartoon/comics virtuosi. Some names are just blessed.

Spam of the day:

Your Wine is Cold – 15 Premium Wines for 70% off PLUS Bottle Ugly Sweater!

Not only does that topic line make zero sense, the body of the email is touting their Black Friday sale — traditionally, the day after US Thanksgiving (this year, 29 November) — but wasn’t sent until 28 December. Are they trying to get me hooked for Black Friday 2020?