Tom Siddell, you perfect bastard, how could you do this to us?

Let me back up. Siddell has done three print side-stories to Gunnerkrigg Court’s main story — Annie In The Forest: Part One, Annie In The Forest: Part Two, and Traveller: A Story From Beyond The Walls — the first two of which have for some time also been available for free viewing online.

Today, Traveller joined the Annies, in both English and Galician¹, at the Extras page.

Okay, no spoilers, but it’s a heartbreaker and Tom Siddell is bad and mean and bad some more … you made Paz cry, you son of a bitch.

(Siddell is actually a very nice guy without a mean bone in his body and the story both works on multiple levels and is structured well; I bear him no ill will, but damn it’s dusty in here.)

With that preparation, please read and enjoy Traveller² and if you like it, please remember that he’s given you something for free that other people paid for, and maybe drop him a few bob? And if you need something cheerier after having your guts ripped out and stomped on the pavement (>ahem<), maybe enjoy this fine Nedroid Comic shared earlier today by Anthony Clark; it ends on a positive note!³ Now get outside and enjoy the weekend.

UPDATE TO ADD: OH HELL OF YES, JESS FINK HAS KICKSTARTED THE SECOND CHESTER 5000 STORY YES I AM YELLING GO BACK THIS NOW.

Spam of the day:

And they passed the night in a crockery-jar who had a little curl this ball was her favorite plaything

I received this from Glenda. I ain’t want to go out and be Glenda’s acid guide! On the plus side, Achewood is back with the first Fuck You Friday of 2016.

_______________
¹ The story concerns Paz and her visit home from the Court, and Galician is her native tongue; I’m told it’s linguistically sort of midway between Castilian (that is to say, formal) Spanish and Portuguese.

² Enjoy may not be the most accurate word, but you get the idea.

³ Or at least as positive as Reginald is going to manage.

So I went to bed early and wasn’t awake to watch Iron Circus Comics — aka Spike, aka The Woman Who Is Going To Own Comics Publishing, aka Maybe If You Apologize For All Those Years You Told Her She Was Never Going To Succeed She’ll Have You Killed Mercifully — launch its latest Kickstarter. Kickstarters, actually, as two pieces of pure, uncut smut went up together, and you can back one, the other, or (and stay with me here because this is a a little out there) both of them at the same time.

So, uh, maybe assume all the links in this post are probably not things you want to click on if your boss can see.

First up, Yes, Roya, a book-length graphic novel of quality erotica, written by Spike herself and illustrated by Ghost Green, with Kinomatika on the cover. It’s the early 1960s, there’s cartoonists involved, and sexy times as a young upstart finds that life behind closed doors in the Camelot era was decidedly kinkier than your parents and grandparents let on.

Secondly, My Monster Boyfriend, continuing the Iron Circus tradition of ladycentric erotica anthologies, this one is exactly what it says on the cover: there are monsters, and they are various people’s boyfriends, and there may just be hot, hot monster action going on. Lots of creators on this one, and Spike hasn’t released the full contributor list yet, but you’ll find names like EK Weaver, Jess Fink, Gail freakin’ Simone, and Trudy Cooper.

And since this is a Spike Kickstarter, a couple things we knew were going to happen did in fact happen:

1. The goal was reached ridiculously quickly after launch. Keep in mind it was 9:00pm on the east coast when the campaign went up and promptly started raising US$1000/min before tapering off to US$10K in 15 minutes, US$20K in the first hour, and the entire US$40K goal in less than eight hours. Remember, this was overnight, and word doesn’t spread so quickly when your audience are away from keyboards.
2. There’s gonna be bonuses. As a result of we at Fleen bungling a description of Iron Circus’s bonus structure a little while back , Spike reached out to us and let us know that these projects would use a different pay structure than previous project¹, one that will scale with the number of pages as well as the overfunding. For My Monster Boyfriend and Yes, Roya, pay starts at US$75/page, with an additional US$5/page for US$10,000 over goal.

   One may note that (as of this writing), pay rates are already up to US$80/page. Assuming this one goes follows the same funding patterns as prior ICC smut offerings, I’d expect funding above US$150K (NB: not a formal prediction; we’re still 8 – 12 hours away from being able to use the FFFmk2), meaning page rates of US$130 or more.

Oh, yeah, and the first stretch goal — a reprint of Smut Peddler 2012 — was met by the time Spike woke up this morning. There will be more. Oh, and did I mention that there are previews, more than 20 pages worth, over on the Kickstarter page? Because there are; no links, I’m gonna make you go read the damn thing and find ’em yourself … and before you complain, I just told you about free porn so hush.

The Smut Peddler Double Header runs until Wednesday, 24 February.

Spam of the day:

why havn’t you claimed this Walmart gift yet?

Because Walmart is a rapacious, evil corporation run by the vampiric scions of the Walton family with a bloodthirstiness that would make Vlad Tepes say Hey, maybe just chill a little, and I would rather deal with the bastard child of Verizon and Comcast for the rest of my natural life than set foot in a Walmart. The only worthwhile thing Walmart has even done is be so awful that walmart.horse provoked not a single twinge of sympathy in anybody anywhere.

______________
¹ Briefly, contributors got US$50/page, and a US$50 bonus for every US$5000 over goal.

There were a few other things (some of which got displaced by yesterday’s dumbassery) so let’s talk about them, yes?

• Jess Fink has finished — for the second time, no less — the ongoing story of Chester 5000 and the people who built him, love him, and love each other. It started off as straight Victorian robo-erotica (that old saw) way the heck back in 2008 but quickly became something more. It wasn’t just about heaving bosoms sprung free of corsets and a startling array of gadgets put to increasingly hot use; it was about neglect and jealousy and absorption and fury and reconciliation and forgiveness — it was about love.

  And then in 2011, Fink went back and told both what came before and what’s happened since the original run of Chester; subtitled Isabelle and George, it dealt with the characters in even greater depth, added a dash of adventure and vengeance, and gave us a better idea of who these people (Chester himself appears less and less as the story goes along) really are. It’s full of heart, completely lacking in dialogue, and immediately engrossing. Not to mention hotter than hell. Thanks for letting us ride along for the last 300 or so pages, Jess. Here’s hoping that we get a print collection of Isabelle and George to go alongside the first Chester collection.

• We mentioned not too long ago the Voltron-like collaboration of KC Green and Shmorky to make some animated bumpers for [adult swim]. Via Shmorky, we now have a collection of GIF clips from the other bumpers (ten in all), which are conveniently collected for your viewing pleasure at NerdSpan
• From the Big Damn Numbers department, today is as good as day as any to declare an end to Child’s Play 2015; per the CP site (which hasn’t changed for the past couple of days), the lifetime fundraising total for the campaign sits at a little north of forty million damn dollars. Taking into account data from previous years, the history of Child’s Play looks like:
  

  2003: $250,000
  2004: $310,000
  2005: $605,000
  2006: $1,024,000
  2007: $1,300,000
  2008: $1,434,377
  2009: $1,780,870
  2010: $2,294,317
  2011: $3,512,345
  2012: $5,085,761
  2013: $7,600,000
  2014: $8,430,000
  2015: $6,438,053
  Total as of 7 January 2016, the arbitrary end of CPXIII: $40,064,723

  So, in case you were wondering what it looks like when Child’s Play doesn’t raise more than the prior year, it looks like they still raised almost six and a half million. If that counts as failure, we could all use some more failure in our lives and endeavours.

• New show alert: Pat Race, the never-still creative force behind Alaska Robotics, has with some partners brought a bunch of indy/web comics types up to Juneau, Alaska for talks, cultural events, and meet & greets; word on the street is that the creators have had a fabulous time, and the denizens of America’s least-accessible capital city have enjoyed ’em even more. So how to top a record like that? With a mini-con, naturally:
  

  I’m very happy to announce Alaska Robotics Mini-Con, a festival and artist camp taking place right here in Juneau from April 22-26th.

  Aaron, Lou and I have been hosting guest artists for several years through our work at the Alaska Robotics Gallery and JUMP Society as well as through partnerships with other non-profit organizations like the Friends of the Juneau Public Libraries. We’ve also spent many years attending and exhibiting at comic conventions and arts festivals. Encouraged by those wonderful experiences, we decided it was time for us to host our own tiny comic convention and artist getaway.

  I hesitate to even use the phrase “comic convention” when describing the event but those who have attended such things know that the term has grown to include a much more broad collection of pop and contemporary arts, games, music and more. We’re planning to embrace the spirit of those outside conventions but provide a far more down-to-earth, Southeast Alaska experience.

  The draft schedule calls for a one-day public event on Saturday, 23 April, followed by a two day artists camping retreat with a limited number of attendee slots — applications will open on 18 January. Look for a roster of guests in the near term but for now, if this sounds like fun, I’d say start looking into transport to Juneau before knowing the lineup; the on-faith, camping-centric thing works for MaxFunCon, and it ought to work as well for ARMCon. Given the talent that Race has attracted to Juneau in the past — Kate Beaton, Vera Brosgol, Dylan Meconis & Katie Lane — I’d bet on there being some killer guests hanging ’round the campfire under the northern lights.

Spam of the day:

Reverse your Blood Pressure in only 7 Days

If I reverse my blood pressure, doesn’t that make my entire cardiovascular system collapse? That doesn’t sound good. Then again, this particular bit of sparkling medical science (featuring the obligatory one weird food) came from an actual email address that I swear I am not making up: Dr. Dave <cretin @[redacted].date>. That’s just beautiful.

In all other respects I generally agree with him, but I am firm in this: feta is gross and its presence on an otherwise-delicious pizza is just wrong. I’m getting ahead of myself, we’ll come to that bit later.

• It’s been maybe six weeks since David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) announced that he was taking legal advice to determine if it would be possible to produce a printed version of Irregular Webcomic without running afoul of the LEGO corporate behemoth. It appears that the answer was affirmative, given the announcement today:
  

  I have started work to have collections of Irregular Webcomic! strips printed in book format, for purchase.

  Boom. That’s the sound of perhaps the longest-running webcomic without a print collection (going on thirteen years old) giving its readers what they want. Given a deep archive filled with interleaved storylines, Morgan-Mar opted out of the sequential approach, and will be going with a themed collection:

  The first book will collect all of the Fantasy theme strips up to the hiatus period which began with strip #3198. By my count, that’s 504 strips. With some bonus material, we’re estimating about 140 pages.

  Smart move, by the way — grabbing the first 500 or so strips in IW history would require readers to hop between fourteen different storylines, and not get much resolution on any of them. Also, I’ll note that the Fantasy theme probably makes the least use of actual LEGO assets¹ (other than the Me theme), as the main characters are painted RPG miniatures and not LEGO minifigs; the branded building bricks are used more for backgrounds, props, sets, and side characters. Having less prominent LEGO stuff in the LEGO-themed comic is probably a safe move from a legal standpoint, at least to start.

  Morgan-Mar is presently working with the wonderful folks at Make That Thing, with plans to launch the requisite Kickstarter around the first of the year so as to avoid the holiday confusion (not to mention the tax implications of making a bunch of money in 2015 but not spending it until 2016). I’ll keep you appraised of any future developments, but I will say that this exciting news. Very exciting.

• Speaking of unreasonably large Kickstarted books from longtime webcomickers, Ryan North officially finished the last stretch goal of the To Be Or Not To Be campaign: he made a pizza that looked like Kate Beaton’s Hamlet portrait and ate it. And then, because he is a Ryan-sized man and has prodigious hunger, he also made one that looked like Beaton’s Ophelia and then ate it, too.

  There was a third pizza².

  This third pie resembled Beaton’s take on Juliet, and with that, North announced the sequel to TBONTB, the long-rumo[u]red Romeo and/or Juliet. Key points: the book will not be crowdfunded, but rather published by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin. As a result, a hard release date can be promised (7 June 2016), the book is in a final form (no stretch goals), and will feature 400 pages and (by my count) ninety friggin’ artists providing illustrations. I ain’t typing out the list but you can find a copy/paste of it below the cut.

  Oh, and let me point out this one line near the bottom of the announcement:

  I can’t say more about the book JUST YET, but I will say this: as someone who has backed the original Kickstarter and is also awesome, be sure to hold on to your preorder email receipt. For SURPRISES :0 [emphasis original]

  Done, and done!

• Still on Kickstarted books, the TJ & Amal omnibus got a nice writeup today at The AV Club, and not to do with Kickstarted books at all, yesterday’s Nick Trujillo news has revealed itself: Glitched is running as a Twitter account, and appears to make use of the new polling feature. IN-teresting.

Spam of the day:

You have missed messages vindication Cordially Skype+ service

Weird, it’s almost like I’m being invited to click on links of unknown provenance by services that I don’t use.

_______________
¹ Or maybe the Space theme, for similar reasons.

² cf: Ryan-sized man.

(more…)

Man, I dig exhibitor maps for conventions. I love being able to figure out my approach to talk to all the people I want to talk to in the least amount of time. Sometimes the maps are huge and sprawling, and sometimes there’s no point in trying to point out where the cool web/indie-comics types are because you’d just end up putting a circle on the entire damn map that says HERE on it.

• It’s the latter case that we concern ourselves with today, as both the SPX and TopatoCon exhibitor maps have gone up, and they’re chock full of creators you’re going to want to see. They’re also on a humane scale, so I don’t have to do one of those maps-hacks where I show you where to go on the showfloor, as I’ll have to do sometime next week for NYCC¹.
• Since we’re already talking about TopatoCon (because let’s face it, we’re always talking about TopatoCon), one might point out a couple of new programs on the schedule. At noon on Sunday, please note the killer description for Pleasure Is The Measure:
  

  Join us for a sciencey, sexy, feminist conversation about women, their bodies, and comics — featuring Kate Leth (Kate Or Die), Jess Fink (Chester 5000), Danielle Corsetto (Girls With Slingshots), and Spike (Smut Peddler) and moderated by NYT bestselling author Dr. Emily Nagoski (Come As You Are).

  Smart ladies who know their way around what makes things sexy as all hell? Yes, please.

• Also, one modestly points you to the new official description of the 5:00pm Saturday event in the podcast space²:
  

  Join host Gary Tyrrell (fleen.com) as our three contestants Frank Gibson (Bee & Puppycat, Capture Creatures), Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Darkest Part Of The Forest) and Holly Rowland (TopatoCo VP) square off in a tournament-style cocktail challenge. Each contestant will be given a box of mystery ingredients and will make up a theme cocktail on the fly. One contestant will be eliminated in each round by a panel of judges chosen from the audience. Who will emerge victorious and who will get 86’d?

  86’d/eighty-sixed is bartender slang for cut off and ejected from the establishment; think Chopped but for booze. This is gonna be fun, and I want to make ti clear that I am not the one putting together the challenges and will be just as surprised with what the contestants have to work with as you will. It’s not Cutthroat Bar and I am not channeling my inner Evil Alton Brown³.

  Oh, and because it’s a damn shame that cocktail enthusiast Christopher Hasting will have to miss Boozetopia (due to his comedy-writing workshop happening at the same time), I will need a volunteer to take the best drink of each round across the hall to him.

  Also, if you are going to be at TopatoCon, are at least 21 years old, and interested in being a judge for 86’d, I’m looking for people who will be able to articulate what they like (or don’t) about a drink, not just chug the damn thing with an eye towards getting wasted. Please email me (gary) with the subject line TASTING AND JUDGMENT, at this-here website (fleen.com).

• Speaking of Hastings, news comes today that once again Marvel is coming to him to add to their cape-comedy offerings:
  

  The Gwen Stacy/Deadpool mash-up begins in a three-part back-up story by writer Christopher Hastings and artist Danilo Beyruth beginning in Howard the Duck #1 and going through the two subsequent issues.

  In December’s Gwenpool Special #1, She-Hulk throws a holiday party and invites many Marvel luminaries, with Gwenpool showing up. Writers Gerry Duggan, Charles Soule and Christopher Hastings, along with artists Danilo Beyruth, Langdon Foss, Gurihiru are listed for the book.

  Marvel, just do what we all know you need to do and give Hastings and ongoing title where he can blend the action with the goofy. Because is there anybody else that would throw in a scene with Tony Stark telling Reed Richards about how many weddings he’d been to that summer where Get Lucky got played⁴? No, there is not, and that little bit of human interaction is what’s missing from so many cape books (the magnificent Squirrel Girl excepted, obviously). Give him a book, Marvel. Doooo iiiiiit.

Spam of the day:

Hi, I do think this is a great website. I stumbledupon it ;)

I never use StumbleUpon; it renders like shit in my browser.

_______________
¹ Also, I’m never thrilled with the interactive maps that take you someplace else every time you click on the damn thing and which require JavaScript/Flash to run and are completely useless on mobile.

² AKA the bar.

³ Maybe next year.

⁴ Four.

Hey. So I have to travel I-95 — aka Satan’s Own Highway — alter this afternoon, the Friday before a long weekend. This is gonna be brief.

SPX has revealed its programming slate, and it appears to be the usual (i.e.: high on quality, low on quantity). Each day will feature two rooms of programming, one with events on the hour, the other with events on the half hour, from midday on. Highlights include:

• Saturday at noon the slate kicks off on a high note, a combined spotlight panel on Kate Beaton and Noelle Stevenson.
• Food, man, food. Tasty Comics will be about the intersection of food and comics, with Robin Ha, Jade Lee, Eric Colossal, and Jessi Zabarsky, moderated by Lauren Jordan. Get hungry at 1:30pm.
• Comics are for everybody, and the straight white dude hegemony is starting (oh so slowly) to fade. Black Art Matters (with Darryl Ayo, Ron Wimberly, Whit Taylor, and Spike Trotman) drop some truth at 2:00pm, and Queer and Here to Make Comics! (Anna Archie Bongiovanni, Yao Xiao, Hazel Newlevant, and Kevin Jay Stanton, with Dylan Edwards moderating) reveal the secrets of the dreaded Queer Comics Agenda¹ at 6:00pm.
• Sunday starts off as well as Saturday, with the first panel on sexy, sexy times and the message that Erotic Comics are for Everybody! (Sarah Winifred Searle, Anna Bongiovanni, Paul Reinwand, and Spike Trotman, under the loving guidance of Jess Fink) at 12:30pm.
• Scott McCloud. 1:00pm. Come for the second half if you can’t drag yourself away from the sexy times.
• Comics and the internet will be the focus of Dear Internet: Today I Made a Comic. Now What? at 3:30pm; join Molly Ostertag, Aatmaja Pandya, Matt Bors, and Comixology’s John Roberts, with Jen Vaughn moderating.

Have a heck of a weekend, Statesians. Maybe I’ll see you on Monday, maybe not.

Spam of the day:

Download Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star Movie.

I wouldn’t watch that shit with your eyes, my friend; I ain’t gonna watch it with mine.

______________
¹ Make comics while queer.

TopatoCon, that is. For starters, there’s more names on the exhibitor’s page — I noticed Kevin Budnick, Gillian Goerz, Jonathan Griffiths, Phil Kahn, and Stacey King in addition to the previoiusly-announced guest below the cut — and there’s news of a pre-con concert!

TopatoCon proudly presents:
THE DOUBLECLICKS
FEATURING MOLLY LEWIS

To kick off our convention weekend, we’ve invited some of our favorite musicians to play a concert that’s open to the public!
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

8 p.m., Doors open at 7:30
Academy of Music Theatre
274 Main St
Northampton, MA 01060
TICKETS

$15 General
$12 Students

Purchase at the box office, by telephone at (413) 584-9032, ext. 105, or click here to order online.

Reminder: this is before the con even starts, and you’re entertained; further, those that have never seen The Doubleclicks or Molly Lewis before can sample their (considerable) talents and have the opportunity to meet them the next day (although Lewis isn’t listed on the exhibitor site yet, I doubt she’s getting out of town immediately after the show) and buy all their stuff. That’s at least a win-win, possiby a win-win-win-win.

In other news there’s a pair of comics that tell stories about being in comics. The first is from Maki Naro, and tells of his righteous irritation at yet another “contest” for illustration/comics pros that amounted to spec work; he actually submitted it to the contest-holders in question, which I think is brilliant and laudable. The other is from Faith Erin Hicks (h/t: Heidi Mac at The Beat), and tells of how you can only break into comics by knowing the secret handshake and living in a big city oh wait no, that’s not how it works. Both of them are worth your time.

Spam of the day:

You are requested to claim your pending commission
payout in the amount of $7,302.29 earned since
you registered for our programme.

Best regards,

“Ashley”

Bite me, “Gary”

(more…)

There are a couple of offshoots of webcomickry in other realms of expression that caught my eye today, plus the list of SPX exhibitors is live. Let’s go down the list, shall we?

• I had never heard of the Rorschach Theatre before today; it’s in Washington DC, and since 1999 have been less of a place and more of an event. See, Rorschach turned its lack of its own space into a sort of mission statement and found ways to tailor productions to the various spaces that hosted them. They’ve got performance space these days, but still treat the innovative use of space as a sort of calling card.

  And if you’re innovative about space, you get to stage things that wouldn’t necessarily fit on a traditional stage, like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, or their next production: TRUTH & BEAUTY BOMBS: A Softer World. The recently-wrapped bit of surreality has been adapted to live performance (with previews starting 4 September and running until 4 October, reservations now open), and given that this is about as experimental as theatre can get, the costs of mounting the production need covering. Think about it: usually plays start from things like a script and characters¹, but they’ve got twelve years of webcomics to adapt.

  Which is where you come in; starting, oh, now-ish, you can help defray the costs of playwrights, actors, designers, directors, stage crew, technicians, fight choreographers (!), costumes, props, construction, insurance, etcetera, etcetera, via that most webcomickish of all mechanism: the Kickstarter. The play is going on regardless; the funding from the campaign will help to backfill the company coffers so that they can do innovative work like this in the future. Want tickets? You can get a pair at the US$50 tier (actually cheaper than directly buying the tickets). There’s t-shirts, meet-and-greets, and friggin’ walk-on roles up for grabs.

  If you ever wondered how Emily Horne & Joey Comeau’s work could somehow be made weirder, this is the answer, and now we all have the opportunity to show the creators that they aren’t making a huge mistake. I’m not going to be in DC anytime soon, but heck if this isn’t the sort of thing that makes me smile — I’m kicking in ten bucks, will you?

• Marian Call has been mentioned on this page previously, because when you put her musicality together with partner Pat Race, you get all kinds of cool nerdery. I’m still not over how awesome Space Weird Thing was, and now Call & Race are back with a new video that features Marian Call (in the role of Marzipan) and Marian Call (as Strong Bad) in a note-perfect cover version of Sensitive to Bees from Strong Bad Sings and other type hits, which I have an actual copy of. Whatever you are doing right now, stop doing it and go watch the magic. It’s magical.
• As mentioned above, the SPX exhibitor list is now up, and there are both a number of web-/indy-comics types, as well as people that will be bouncing from Bethesda up to Easthampton for TopatoCon the following week. In addition to special guests like Kate Beaton, Noelle Stevenson, Gemma Correll, Matt Bors, Scott McCloud, and Spike, SPX will include people such as Aatmaja Pandya, Amanda Scurti, onetime Fleen contributor Anne Thalheimer, Anthony Clark, Audrey (and presumably also Jamie), Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson,

  [inhale]

  Blue Delliquanti, Box Brown, Carey Pietsch, Carla Speed McNeil, Catie Donnelly, Chris Yates, Clay Yount, Colleen Venable, Danielle Corsetto, David McGuire, Dustin Harbin, Eric Colossal & Jess Fink, Evan Dahm, Isabelle Melançon & Megan Lavey-Heaton, Jeffrey Rowland, Jon Rosenberg, KC Green, Matt Boyd, Meredith Gran & Mike Holmes, Molly Ostertag, Penina Gal, Rachel Dukes, Dave Roman, Ross Nover, Sam Bosma, Sara McHenry & Tom McHenry, Tony Breed, and Yuko Ota & Ananth Hirsch. Check ’em out, tell ’em I said hi, and let me know who I left off the list.

Spam of the day:

In days gone by, should you stood a bankruptcy or even a foreclosure, getting approved with an car finance was like pulling teeth

Days gone by? Are we talking like the pre-lidocaine era?

________________
¹ Oh please, oh please, let ASW recurring character Ryan North be part of this play!

The fine folks behind the next great webcomics-centric convention (that would be Holly and Sara) released a bit more information, including an updated exhibitor list, information on where to stay, and transportation options. Let’s dive in.

On the Exhibitor page I spy a few new names, including Z Akhmetova, Lex Cornell, Shelby Cragg, M Dean, Sarah Tacey, and Jim Zub. There are some corrections as well, with the former Skullmandible now listed as Cohen Edenfield (Skullmandible), and Kori Michele as Kori Michele Handwerker. Also, Jeph Jacques has confirmed that he will be there after all. Compare to the previous exhibitor list, which is below the cut.

Also, the hotel listings and directions are now up, the latter of which includes something that I’ve never seen before: a con-provided rideshare forum, so that if you happen to be passing by one of the airports or rail stations, you can maybe pick somebody up for a cut of gas money and tolls.

Naturally, one should take all possible precautions in utilizing this method of transit, as this discussion between showrunner Sara McHenry and exhibitor Dante Shepherd shows:

So far two TopatoCon exhibitors have signed up on the attendee rideshare spreadsheet. Working with cartoonists is fun and cool always

Will I have to mention that my truck does not have AC and I like to stop to give drifters rides too if I sign the list

I think that’s an assumed level of risk.

(Dunno if I’d trust that Shepherd guy if I were you — he claims to have a pseudonym to separate his comics from his academic career, but how much do we really know about him?)

Still to come: programming, events, and fun things to do in town. Stay tuned to this page for information as it become available.

Spam of the day:

Protect Your Deck from Winter,

As soon as I get a deck, I promise to get back to you so we can protect it from winter in the middle of August.

(more…)

The TopatoCon exhibitor list grows by leaps and bounds! When last we spoke of such things, it looked like this:

KC Green
Jeph Jacques
Jess Fink
Tom Siddell
Rosemary Mosco
Kate Leth
Anthony Clark
Christopher Hastings
Danielle Corsetto
David Malki !
Dante Shepherd
Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson
Michael Rapa
Mildred Louis
Sara Goetter
Jon Rosenberg
Karla Pacheco
RJ Lake
Spike
Allison Shabet
Lauren Jordan
Joshua AC Newman
Magnolia Porter
Alison Wilgus
Shoona Browning
Randy Millholland
Brian Lee
Skullmandible
David Willis
Kori Michele
Hannah McGill
Blue Delliquanti
Evan Dahm
Molly Ostertag

And thanks to the list that’s been posted at TopatoCon’s Internet Information Center, we may add to the list:

Amazing Super Powers, Kory Bing, Boston Comics Roundtable, Tony Breed, Cardboard Fortress Games, Eric Colossal, Matt Cummings, Megan Nicole Dong, Catie Donnelly, The Doubleclicks, G Town Games LLC, Games By Play Date, Erin Gladstone, John Green, Tyson Hesse, How To Win At Everything (Daniel Kibblesmith & Sam Weiner), Kitfox Games, Amanda Lafrenais, Braden Lamb, Matt Lubchansky, Ira Marcks, Kel McDonald, David McGuire, Tom McHenry, Maki Naro, Nerdcore Medical, Cole Ott, Aatmaja Pandya, Amanda Scurti, Sarah Winifred Searle, Small Beer Press, Sarah Sobole, Space Whale , Spriteborne, Olivia Stephens, Jordan Witt, and Jessi Zabarsky (whew!).

Sadly, we appear to have lost some exhibitors from the list. Rosemary Mosco reports that she’ll be attending, but not tabling. Jeph Jacques isn’t on the new list, and TopatoCon falls right in the midst of the time that he reports he’ll be moving to Canada, and so it may be too uncertain to promise an appearance. I’m sure that there are other missing names, but as my previous list was sequential-by-announcement and the new one is alphabetical, maybe it’s best that you double-check yourself.

In other TopatoCon news, the venue has changed to allow more attendees, and the show will now be taking place at the venerable Eastworks, site of the much-loved NEWW and NEWW2 shows in 2009 and 2010. Hotel/ticket information will be coming soon, and the showrunners have released a code of conduct that lays out a zero-tolerance policy for:

… offensive comments (related to a person’s race, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, disability, or religion), stalking, unwanted photography or recording, unwelcome physical contact or sexual attention, and disruption of events. In general, the polite and courteous method is to err on the side of caution. If you feel you may be making someone uncomfortable, end your interaction with them. No one owes you their time or attention (and you don’t owe anyone yours), so be cool. [emphasis added]

I bolded that part because it seems necessary to remind the Sea Lions out there that the world does not, in fact, revolve around their obsessive needs to talk you to death. Hooray!

Spam of the day:

????????????????SEO,???????

You know, just waving about your hands and saying SEO is not how that actually works. Maybe in the LARP of website management, but not in the real world.