I don’t regret this request in the slightest and if you read this, you’re obligated to help make the wishes of future dead me come true.

To be clear, I don’t have the novel coronavirus (at least, not to my knowledge) and haven’t had any symptomatic patients (although it’s a virtual certainty I’ve had asymptomatic patients that had no idea they had the NoCo). And since the orange self-trepanator seems to actually be getting stupider and worse at managing any aspect of the pandemic and therefore trying to kill me, I feel justified in pre-planning my moist, sticky revenge.

Other people, naturally, are nicer and better than me; one of my go-to examples of a fundamentally good person would be Colleen AF Venable, who I note today is full of good cheer and congratulations for the finalists in the 2020 Exellence In Graphic Literature Awards, including her Kiss Number 8 co-creator Ellen T Crenshaw. Let’s check out who in webcomic-adjacency is getting recognized:

• In the Middle Grade category, you’ve got Sarah Winifred Searle on the fiction side for Sincerely, Harriet; on the nonfiction side you’ve got Raina Telgemeier for Guts.
• Young Adult includes Mel Gillman (Stage Dreams) and Venable/Crenshaw (KN8) for fiction, and Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?) for nonfiction. Also for nonfiction, the prescient Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918 by Don Brown.
• Looking at graphic novels for the Adult reader, you have Brian Fies (A Fire Story) and Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick (Hawking) repping the nonfiction.
• The Mosaic Award (recognizing graphic literature that serve diverse communities) is also looking at Venable & Crenshaw, and they are also up for Book Of The Year.

The books that don’t have a relationship to webcomics look pretty awesome, too. Winners will be announced in early April, and in theory be presented at the Denver Pop Culture Con on Saturday, 4 July. We’ll have to see about that last part.

Spam of the day:

Big money – [link in PDF file] # Sk3.Mg.1n0T

You must think that I just fell off of a turnip truck if you expect me to fall for that.

Speaking of which, why is it particularly turnip trucks that mark you as especially stupid if you fall off of them? Why not beet trucks (I hate beets, so falling off to get away seems like a good thing to me) or a green bean truck?

My friend Randy from college worked one summer at a green bean cannery, where dump trucks full of green beans would pull up to a particular spot and Randy would maneuver a giant, vacuum-powered suction apparatus over the top and hoover up all the green beans for sorting (got to get rid of the jimson weed that gets mixed up with the beans), cleaning, steaming, and canning.

Eight to ten hours a day through the harvest season, position the bean-sucker, hit the button, send ’em to the line. Except for the excitement when a critter that decided to nap in a truck full of green beans was accidentally introduced into the process — Sanitation crew to tower three, we got a skunk in the sucker — it was a boring, if lucrative job. He summed it up when we returned to classes as Green beans suck, and I suck green beans. He works for an aerospace company as an engineer, which I think makes him an actual rocket scientist.

Anyway, turnip trucks. Didn’t fall off one o’ them, or any other kind of truck.

We’re going to be kicking off a series of book reviews today, since so many of us are cooped up, we may as well talk about new graphic novels and collections. I’m also going to sprinkle in other, most likely COVID-related news before we get down the review. Today, that’s going to be the news that Zach Weinersmith is making a series of his books free to download to help you through whatever isolation you may be in. He’s a good dude, Zach is.

Today’s review is Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang, an advanced review copy of which was provided by the excellent folks at :01 Books in January, and which I have been thinking about very deeply ever since. Go back and read about my initial impression on first read, and the most powerful recurring visual motif Yang uses; it’ll save us some time here.

When I talked with Yang briefly at SDCC last summer, I remarked that Dragon Hoops was going to be his version of a Raina Telgemeier story — unlike all of his previous graphic novels, this one is memoir¹. It also means that the usual warning about spoilers ahead is perhaps less earned this time; after all, DH is about the high school Yang taught at making a run for the California boys basketball championship in the 2014-15 academic year. Anybody can determine with a moment’s search how the book is going to turn out. We also know what’s in Yang’s personal future at this time of his life: appointment as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (January 2016) and MacArthur Fellow (September 2016). Heck, he and I were talking about this season of the Bishop O’Dowd Dragons when I interviewed him in July of 2016. So how do you build suspense when everything is already known?

And this is where Yang’s genius² for making comics comes in. It’s not just a memoir of his coming to terms with sports (his lack of interest for the first four decades or so of life, his discovery of how much they can catch you up), or a narrative of following the team on their quest (which is meticulously end noted — he wants you to know exactly when a conversation or event was abridged or time-shifted to serve the story, and when it was exactly as shown), it’s also a meta-narrative about making the book.

Let’s back up a moment.

The 2014-15 school years was a crossroads for Yang; he’d been dividing his time between teaching and comics and family his entire adult life. All of his successes, multiple critically-acclaimed graphic novels, all done during nights and weekends. Coming off of Boxers & Saints (a work that consumed six years), he was looking for the next story and found it in front of him at work. He would subsequently resign his teaching position to concentrate on comics (and, coincidentally, the ambassadorship that he didn’t yet know was coming his way), eventually making his way back to part-time teaching because he’s the sort of guy that believes you needn’t have just one calling.

And since the idea of the story of the Bishop O’Dowd Dragons was so much on his mind, it’s part of Dragon Hoops; Yang continuously portrays himself wondering how to tell the story of what’s happening around him while he’s experiencing it. He wonders what to bring into the book, what to leave out, and has an amazing conversation with one of the O’Dowd players (Jeevin Sandhu, #24) about his character design. Yang had drawn Sandhu with a zigzag hairline to make sure he read as Punjabi, not African-American, but gets that it looks silly. As they discuss options, the hairline changes from panel to panel, settling into a new design that’s used for the rest of the book.

That conversation gets played out in larger form throughout the book, as Yang incorporates the ups and downs of the season, the backgrounds of individual players and coaches, the history of basketball, and the changes in himself over the course of the year.

And maybe there’s no change as big as the dilemma over how to continue to balance teaching, family, and comics becoming complicated when his agent calls with an offer from DC: they want him to write Superman³. Even before that offer, Yang feels the balance slipping as the book becomes more complicated. But one of the greatest moments of uncertainty about the book shows Yang wearing a Zot! t-shirt, adopting the dress of a teen who decides to be a hero because that’s what you do if you have the ability, and who comes to learn the world is more subtle and complicated than simple good/evil bust ’em ups. Yang’s coming to acknowledge the complications inherent in his life choices, the team is acknowledging their storied past and nationwide ranking don’t ensure an easy path, and everything is feeding back on itself.

And it never gets lost in the weeds. This is the densest, richest, and yet simultaneously most logically-structured story I can recall. Every complication feeds back to the central stories of the Dragon’s season and Yang’s own version of a championship run (because what could make you more the champion of comics than writing Superman?). And I realize this is an abrupt shift and doesn’t really fit in this paragraph but I don’t have any better place for it — Yang also has a killer running gag about an assistant coach with a newborn. Every time he is shown, the kid is in a Baby Bjorn, and every time this particularly foul-mouthed coach is cursing, he’s conscientiously covering the kid’s ears with his hands. It never gets old.

Yang’s super-clean visual style is a perfect vehicle for the twists and turns of the story, and I must take time to mention that his usual colorist, Lark Pien, has done career-best work here. The sepia tones that slip into the scenes depicting the invention and development of basketball, the use of period-matching palettes with a slight faded effect for the personal histories of Yang and the coaches, every one of them acts as a visual cue that seamlessly places flashbacks and decades-ago in a continuous timeline leading up to the bright lights and excitement of now on the court.

Dragon Hoops is going to go down as a worthy companion to Yang’s best work (and you know, he’s only been nominated for the National Book Award twice). It releases today from :01 Books, and would be widely available at a bookstore near you if we weren’t all hanging at home. More than one independent bookstore is taking phone orders and either meeting you at the door for pickup and handoff or mailing to you, so look up one of them and pick up a copy today. It’s really good.

Spam of the day:

This Bracelet is to keep people safe from insects and mosquitoes

Got bigger problems right now, thanks.

_______________
¹ Although certainly he’s drawn from his own experiences growing up Chinese-American in everything from American Born Chinese to the recently-concluded Superman Smashes The Klan.

² Lower-case genius, not the uppercase version frequently used to refer to the MacArthur grant. I will never forget the time I asked him what it’s like to be an official Genius and he laughed I still have to do the dishes. Perhaps not coincidentally, he is shown more than once in this book at moments of change doing the dishes.

³ Superman being a recurring motif in the book. Yang’s got a lifelong love for the character, he comes to see the reluctant-to-share star players as superheroes on the court deciding to be Clark Kentish away from the boards, and of course Superman is well known as a champion of the disadvantaged (most of the players are African-American, many being raised by single mothers) and immigrants (Jeevin’s got to explain, as a Sikh, why not everybody loves Gandhi; exchange student Quianjun “Alex” Zhao is chasing a dream of playing pro ball in China, trying to earn playing time on one of the best teams in America).

By the way, the conversations shown between Yang and the editors at DC in the lead-up to his tenure on Superman pretty much confirmed my suspicions that they fundamentally don’t get who Superman is, and leave me more convinced than ever that they were messing with his stories, leading to whip-saw reverses in direction that made the book pretty messy.

They got out of his way for New Super-Man, with a Chinese teen learning to be worthy of being the Superman of China, which was a much more cohesive story. And with Superman Smashes The Klan, it’s obvious that Yang understands heroes in general — and Superman in particular — as much as anybody of the past eighty years.

Yesterday, we mentioned that fans of STRIPPED check their emails, on account of the hivemind known as Freddave Kellett–Schroeder had sent emails to Kickstarter backers of that fine movie (and it’s second Kickstart to finish production) to let them in on a secret: they apparently didn’t have enough travails in the four years or so it took to make the movie, so now they’re making a series:

Story/Line will be a love-letter to the art of cartooning, featuring in-depth, thoughtful interviews about the craft. These will be deep conversations, in the style of a PBS or BBC interview. Each will be beautifully shot in 4K, with one of the best crews in Los Angeles. Among our four Kickstarted interviews, we’ve already scheduled with Academy Award-winning Directors Chris Miller & Phil Lord (Spider-Verse, The Lego Movie, and every other great movie from the last decade), and Eisner-Award-Winning cartoonist Scott McCloud (The Sculptor, Understanding Comics, 24-Hour Comics Day).

So they’ll be channeling their inner Bill Moyers, or hopefully Graham Norton; Norton gets the absolute best out of his subjects via the simple expedient of boozing them up for the talk. Look into this, Freddave! They’ve got one interview in the can (and on their own dime) so far — Jake Parker of Inktober fame — and the campaign is to get another four interviews for general distribution to backers, with a secret additional interview mentioned.

Here’s where I think their rewards tiers are a little hecked up — to get that last, secret, interview, you have to be a backer at a high level; at present, it requires US$30 or more to get the Parker + four interview series, but US$85 to get the secret interview (or US$300 if you want a bunch of Sheldon e-books and an original comic to go along with ’em). That’s a pretty big jump from five interviews to five interviews, uncut footage, a poster, and the secret interview unless that secret interview is amazing.

Then again, they got Watterson on audio for STRIPPED and the Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett half of Freddave Schroeder-Kellett attends fancy industry parties with the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Taika Waititi, so who knows? I want to make it clear that I have no idea who the secret interview is and I think I just convinced myself to up my pledge after typing that last sentence. Well played, Freddave Kellett-Schroeder! Well played.

Update to add: Third interview announced. Raina.

Spam of the day:

justin l____ district manager at Primerica Financial Services would like to connect on LinkedIn.

This is actually from LinkedIn, which means it is definitely spam. I have no damn idea who Justin L____ is, and have had no relationship with Primerica except once more than 20 years ago when the local office called me in for an interview “for an executive position” that turned out to be a room full of people being encouraged to join and push penny stocks on cold-called dupes. Ever see The Wolf Of Wall Street? That.

I gave them about 20 minutes to get to the point then got up, said I was asked to come in for a job interview and instead you’re trying to get us to join some kind of Amway cult (which tremendously offended the woman at the front of the room) and walked out.

So yeah — get lost, Justin.

I got the email yesterday from Alert Reader Rob:

Hey, have you noticed that Kukuburi is back? This is why I will never give up RSS.
http://www.kukuburi.com/v2/2020/01/14/one-eighty/

I keep an antiquated browser around solely because it’s got an integrated RSS feature, but as I confessed to Rob, I sometimes prune my feeds when I feel that things will not update again. The last time we at Fleen mentioned a story element from the ever-delightful Kukuburi (by the ever-delightful Ramón Pérez) was probably this piece from May of 2009.

It got sporadic, finally going on hiatus in 2012. Repeatedly since then I hoped for its return (while never criticizing Pérez for concentrating on work that pays), and as recently as two and a half years ago declared my belief it would return some day. And now I can proudly state that the link over there in the blogroll has been updated to say no longer on hiatus, hooray! Let’s love it for as long as it lasts; I’ll be binging the entire archive in the immediate future.

• Speaking of immediate future, Evan Dahm would like to remind you that the most wonderful week of the year starts on Sunday:
  

  Goblin Week 2020 starts SUNDAY #goblinweek #goblinweek2020 https://goblinweek.tumblr.com/post/190290598 …

  Yes, Goblin Week! Wait, you’ve never heard of Goblin Week? I’ll let Dahm explain:

  IT IS A PERIOD OF 7 DAYS WHEREIN YOU MAKE GOBLINS EVERY DAY OR AS MUCH AS YOU WANT WAHTEVER A GOBLIN IS. DONT WORRY ABOUT IT GOD IS DEAD

  You can trust Dahm, he draws the best goblins ever, although I’ll give Ben Hatke the edge in doing goblin voices at story time. If you need to get in the mood, here’s last year’s goblins for your enjoyment.

• Speaking of enjoyment (and here I am talking to comics creators), would you like to enjoy your chosen career while also having the ability to purchase food, clothing, and shelter? Of course you would! But as has been made abundantly clear, page rates for comics have stagnated badly, and taking inflation into account, are significantly lower than they were at pretty much any point since the ’60s.

  Partly this happens because publishers discourage any kind of open discussion of rates and what’s reasonable, leading to the perception that, say, a 200 page graphic novel is worth a US$20,000 advance. That’s a hundo per page, which may take ten or more hours to complete, leaving a skilled professional with a pay rate of US$8-10 an hour.

  Enter Gale Galligan (perhaps best known for taking over the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel adaptations from Raina, whose assistant she used to be) and Ngozi Ukazu (who, given the ubiquity of her gay college hockey bros saga, should need no introduction). Prompted by the current Portfolio Day posts, Ukazu wanted to know:

  When is fair page rates day again? Some comic folks are organizing a hashtag re: avoiding unfair pay and how to know when you’re dealing with ethical compensation.

  Prompting Galligan to suggest:

  Hmmm how about a nice memorable date with plenty of lead-in time to get the word out? How’s your calendar looking on June first?

  Which looked good to Ukazu:

  Is that it? OKAY: June 1st is #FairPageRates day.

  Sorted, and if she’s good with it you should be, too. What will be discussed on Fair Page Rates Day? Galligan has some suggestions:

  SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN. See you June 1st, on #FairPageRates day, where we will be talking about fair compensation for people working in comics and everything that entails

  “Are royalties real, and should I be negotiating them? What’s a reasonable rate for x comic job?” These are all things we can talk about any time of year, but ESPECIALLY June 1, which is now officially #FairPageRates Day.

  Spread the word — 1 June, we talk money, and what just compensation looks like, because some creators that have made it (for varying definitions of making it) are decent people who don’t want to pull up the ladder behind them, they want up-and-coming creators to have an easier, more rewarding path to a career than they had.

Spam of the day:
Massive Holiday Wine Sale get 15 bottels of Holiday Wines
Received on 3 January, so not sure what holiday they’re talking about. The email claims to come from a company in Eagle, Idaho, which naturally reminded me of this.

That’s a big book haul. The photo was going to include a lounging greyhound for scale, some somedog decided she had better things to do than get her picture took, hmph! Starting from the top:

• Don’t Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, in fulfillment of the recent Kickstart from ShortBox.
• Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang; I’ve spoken with him briefly about this one, where Yang’s chronicling of Chinese culture and the immigrant experience meets Raina-style memoir. Likely to be a monster hit this year.
• Go With The Flow by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann; want to be this Kids In The Hall character? You need this book which is designed to give young uterus-havers the lowdown on what’s happening with their bodies, and everybody else an appreciation for what they go through. I actually had fairly good public-school sex education starting in 5th grade, and I still expect to learn a ton. Also, a measure of how good :01 Books is — this isn’t an advanced review copy, it’s the regular release of a book that went on sale yesterday.
• Kairos by Ulysse Malassagne; one of the great services that :01 has done for comics in the US is find great work in French and bring it over. There is such a huge pool of comics and creators that are just starting to become known over here.
• Maker Comics: Grow A Garden! by Alexis Frederick-Frost; my beans have been okay for the past coupla’ years, and I hope this helps be improve them somewhat.
• Science Comics: Crows by Kyla Vanderklugt; corvids are scary smart and you should always seek to make friends with them. Never annoy a crow, raven, jay, jackdaw, or rook.
• The Phantom Twin by Lisa Brown; girl haunted by the ghost of her conjoined twin? Sounds like the best ghost story since Anya had ghost trubs.
• Astronauts by Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks; the story of women that have been to space, by a team that’s done some of my favorite science–oriented comics for years now. Also, Ottaviani is a fabulous person to talk to, and this remains one of my favorite interviews ever.
• Snapdragon by Kat Leyh; ever wonder what would happen if there were a witch in town, like a real witch, and you decided to make friends? Leyh has, and we get to follow along.

To be clear, it’s a coincidence that Don’t Go Without Me arrived on the same day as the trove of books from :01, but now I get to take it with me to the reading next week. I’ll be working my way through the pile as quickly as I can while still absorbing enough to give proper reviews; it’ll probably be Astronauts and Dragon Hoops first, so watch for reviews in the coming weeks

Oh, and I saw this on the tweetmachine today; it’s from October, but it’s very possibly new to you as it was for me. Eight tight pages, an unreliable narrator who is not having any more of this street harassment shit that we get to see past, and a satisfying gut punch of a finish. Words by Julio Anta, pictures by Katherine Lobo, letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and if these folks aren’t planning a collection of similar stories, that would be very unfortunate.

Spam of the day:

How a Clorox Wipe Made my Herpes Disappear

Jesus tapdancing … do not rub Clorox wipes on your junk, godsdammit.

Look, there are these sanitary wipes that we used on the ambulance for decontamination. You know what’s on the top of the can? The international do not use on babies or other sensitive things symbol, that’s what. Know what’s not even in most of these babykiller wipes? Bleach. Use bleach wipes on hard, non-porous surfaces only and keep them the hell off of your joybits, genius.

______________
¹ No promises for the future; prostate cancer is basically the escape clause that says individuals like me will not live forever. If nothing else gets you, that walnut-sized gland will.

So I trust that you’ve seen that Heidi Mac over The Beat way has combined the responses from her people-in-comics survey (cf: yesterday) to determine the most important industry people of the year (Dav Pilkey and Tom Spurgeon), and also the most significant person of the past decade.

If you read through the survey, there’s no doubt as to the consensus: it’s Raina¹, and who among us can disagree?

Well, technically I did. I’ve marked down Raina as the most important person in comics in pretty much every one of The Beat’s surveys since I’ve been invited to participate, and anybody that’s been reading this page for a hot minute knows that I don’t ever shut up about her central importance to the industry. So what was I thinking? Allow me to quote myself:

Uncharacteristically, I’m not going to say Raina/SMILE, because the past decade in comics nearly completely coincides with the work done by Mark Siegel and the people he’s nurtured at First Second.

It’s because I took a view of the entire system of comics. Raina is key, she kicked off an explosion of new readers, and there will be untold new creators of comics — new Rainas if you will — from her fanbase. But because of Mark Siegel, those new Rainas will have publishers, plural, to partner with. Siegel not only oversaw the creation of :01 Books into a powerhouse publisher, he has seen members of his team go on to found other imprints at other publishers. There’s a view of comics that he has (quoting again):

[H]ow broad comics can be — everything from board books to treatises on immigration policy — is now de facto editorial policy across the publishing industry.

Raina is the superstar that was necessary to jumpstart an industry out of doldrums. Siegel built the infrastructure that ensures Raina isn’t a one-off. If you’ll allow me to indulge in a sports metaphor — something I probably wouldn’t have ever done had I not gotten to talk to Gene Yang² about his process of discovering a love of basketball — no superstar can play the game solo. There’s an ongoing infrastructure of coaching, finding talent and developing them, building a team that ebbs and flows and spreads its influence and enables that superstar to be the best ever.

So: Raina is Megan Rapinoe, Siegel is the entire structure of women’s soccer, from college up to the pros, only without being institutionally exploitative and sexist. Shit, this probably would have worked better as LeBron/the NBA, but I really like Rapinoe.

One last quote, promise:

Literary awards, widespread adoption by libraries, growing acceptance in classrooms, the explosion of nonfiction and educational comics, creators headlining book festivals, new title announcement exclusives in major newspapers and magazines, the odd genius grant or ambassadorship — all of these would have happened without First Second, but they happened a hell of a lot sooner with First Second.

And that’s why I broke with my own precedent, despite the fact that Raina is a dear friend of mine and an absolute marvel of a human being, and coincidentally why I don’t mind in the least that I was far, far outvoted. We need the superstars and the league both, but one is too large and diffuse for us to properly appreciate all it does.

And on that note, let me point out that we are two weeks away from the release of the first title from Gina Gagliano’s Random House Graphic, The Runaway Princess, which is going to be the start of a damn interesting 2020. Forward to the new decade.

Spam of the day:

I made a screenshot of adult sites on which you’re having fun (you know what this is, right?). After that I made screenshots as you quite unusual satisfy themselves (using your device’s camera) and glue them.

Would that be the camera that I don’t have (desktop), or the camera that has a physical shutter across it (laptop)? Also, since you only gave me 48 hours from the reading of your email threat to send you five hundo in bitcoins and that was back on 19 Dec, can I assume all my friends and family have now been sent completely black pictures that I’m supposed to be embarrassed about?

_______________
¹ The Fleen Style Guide states that a full name should be used on first reference, followed by family name only on subsequent references, unless the presence of duplicated family names would cause confusion. Exceptions exist for longtime established nicknames, and for the two persons who are known on this page solely by mononyms: Raina and George.

² Do I need to say that Yang’s past decade is inextricably linked with Siegel’s?

On a Monday, no less! Maybe it has to do with the mood elevation that comes from watching Screamy Orange Grandpa realize that he’s being booed by an entire sports stadium, over and over. There will be an explosion of tweetarrhea to punish us all later, I’m certain, but for now all is just a little bit better. Let’s keep that positive feeling going.

There’s just something about webcomics that causes some folks to end up with closely-matching birthdays: Ryan North and John Allison, Dylan Meconis and Katie Lane¹, Jeffrey and Holly Rowland, Jon Rosenberg and some hack webcomics pseudojournalist. And yes, I know the math about cohort sizes and likelihood that two people in the same group will have the same birthday², but let us just admit that it’s neat.

Today, we get to wish Happy Birthdays³ to two more stellar creators, who have produced some of my favorite books in the past couple of years.

On the one hand: Molly Knox Ostertag, creator of the Witch Boy series (the concluding entry in which is due next week) and How The Best Hunter In The Village Met Her Death, artist on Strong Female Protagonist and Shattered Warrior, and soon to be traumatizer of children.

On the other hand: Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, creator of stellar shorter works (a collection of which was just Kickstarted and will be shipping soon), artist on Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, multiple brick-haver, and owner of dangerous earrings.

They are both celebrating their respective births today, and I am so, so glad that we all get to live in a time when their work is widely available and justly lauded. Their comics are so different from what so many people would have you believe are real comics, and the current Golden Age we are seeing in comics at present is in no small part due to the efforts of them and their contemporaries. They are rad ladies and I can’t wait to see what they have produced in their 20s, but into their 30s and 40s and beyond. They’re both only going to get better. Happy Birthday, Rosemary and Molly!

One more thing, since we’re in a good mood: Alison Wilgus announced the official book launch event for her most recent graphic novel (Chronin volume 2: The Sword In Your Hand, a review of which I need to compose after giving it another read or three; it’s heady stuff, and stays with you) today, and maybe you get to attend:

NEXT THURSDAY is the official book debut event for Chronin Volume 2, hosted by the amazing @KinokuniyaUSA store here in NYC! I’ll do a quick presentation about my process, sign books, and generally be VERY happy to have all of Chronin out in the world!
https://usa.kinokuniya.com/event-calendar …

I’m going to do my best to attend, both because I love the book and wish to help Wilgus celebrate, and because it’s been too long since I’ve been to Kinokuniya in Midtown (I used to work about two blocks from there, and haven’t been in since I developed my fountain pen habit). So with any luck I’ll see you at 6th Ave between 40th and 41st — across from Bryant Park — at 6:00pm on 7 November, with my copy of Chronin in hand. In the meantime, everybody feel good for Alison, not only for this book release, but for the great editing job she’s been doing on the Adventure Zone graphic novels.

Spam of the day:

This is an impeccably, motley invitation to join me in Seventh-Heaven; to RITE zzzillions! of overdude books for the lengthNbreadth of eternity, emphasize’n in whatever God has ‘aujourd d’hui’: the Psycadelic VitSee, the Protagonist of the Exponential Universe, exploring the concept of the endless, bombastic now in His validation of
the G O O G L e P L E X I A N T H…

…

…

What.

_______________
¹ Light-ning Law-yer!!

² By the time you’ve got 23 people in a group, the chances of two of them having the same birthday is already greater than 50%. Besides Jon, I knew one guy in high school with my birthday and since I started in EMS two other people that joined my agency had my same birthday, and one more not only lived in the house I lived in when I was 5, but sleeps in my old bedroom. COINCIDENCE??

Yes. Coincidence.

³ Happys Birthday? Happy Birthsday?

Hey, some stuff happened since I saw you last, we should talk about that.

• The Ringo Awards took place at Baltimore Comic Con over the weekend, and there were some winners with relations to webcomics. We don’t talk about the Ringos a lot here at Fleen, they’ve got an odd jury+fan voting component that can lead to some … let us say mass responses to the ballot box.

  Am I going to say that comics on Webtoons or Tapas are unworthy of inclusion when considering for awards nominations? Heck, no. But do I believe that a single creator that posts only on those platforms and has work that is … let us say Tumblresque in nature should be considered as the best of the best in comics? Let us say, one last time, that such folks were perhaps over-represented in the ballot.

  All those sayings being said, the Best Comic Strip Or Panel went, as is right and proper, to onetime webcomicker Olivia Jaimes for Nancy, and Best Webcomic went to The Nib, who apart from the whole losing their financial backing thing are having a very good year. A full list of nominees and winners has yet to be posted at the Ringo site¹, but The Spurge has you covered.

• I may have noted, on some several occasions how the New York Times appeared to be bending over backwards to not acknowledge the crucial place that Raina Telgemeier occupies in modern literature, and the culture at large. Today, they seem to be extending an olive branch, devoting a significant chunk of interactive space in their books reportage to Raina, and Guts, and her creative process.

  How Raina Telgemeier Faces Her Fear by Alexandra Alter, with production by Aliza Aufrichtig and Erica Ackerberg, is part interview, part behind-the-scenes look, and all stuffed with goodness for anybody that wants to see what the steps involved in creating a page of comics looks like. Just be sure to take your time scrolling; on my copy of Firefox, once a page went from thumbnails to pencils to inks to color, it didn’t go back. You can re-experience the transforms by refreshing the page.

• And looking forward, Maris Wicks would like you to know that the New England Free Lecture Series continues this Thursday, 24 October, at 7:00pm, with a discussion of using comics for sci-comm presented by … Maris Wicks! From the NEA website:
  

  Registration is requested for all programs, which start at 7 p.m. in the Aquarium’s Simons IMAX® Theatre unless otherwise noted. Programs last approximately one hour. Most lectures are recorded and available for viewing on the lecture series archive page.

  Also on that page, the fact that there’s a cash bar from the time the doors open at 6:00pm until the start of the talk. You can register here, then make your way to 1 Central Wharf in Boston on Thursday. If you get there early, NEA’s a great aquarium that you should absolutely spend some time perusing. They got squid!

Spam of the day:

Hello! If you’re reading this then you’re living proof that advertising through contact forms works! We can send your ad message to people via their feedback form on their website.

You are sending me your crap through my contact form, and you expect me to immediately turn around and give you money so you can pester other people? No. Die alone and unmourned, you parasite.

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¹ This is a proud tradition; I can’t think of a single comics award program that updates their own damn website in less than a week after handing out the awards. Get with it, peoples!

Well, goodness, a whole bunch of stuff has occurred since last we spoke. Let’s look at just a few things, ‘kay?

• This past Saturday saw the Harvey Awards handed out at New York Comic Con; you may recall that this year’s nomination slate was really very strong. While the official page hasn’t updated with the winners list yet, you can find the laureates around the web, say at Newsarama.

  The three categories that I was most invested in — the three categories where there really couldn’t be a bad choice to receive the statue — were Book Of The Year (Hey Kiddo by Jarrett J Krosoczka), Digital Book Of The Year (Check, Please by Ngozi Ukazu), and Best Children’s Or Young Adult Book¹ (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell). The last of them, particularly, is going to run out of room on the cover for stickers proclaiming the Harvey and Ignatz wins, especially if it’s keeping some space for next year’s Eisners.

• Saturday was also 24 Hour Comic Day, and while there are literally too many excellent works to point out, I would be remiss if I didn’t share a modern fairy tale by Melanie Gillman. A young woman feleing unloved in an arranged betrothal finds herself beseeching the Goddess Of Mishaps for help, and it’s damn near perfect.
• Heidi Mac spent the morning at the ICv2 2019 Conference, held adjacent to NYCCC. You can find her livetweets via this search, but the one you want to pay attention to is this:
  

  The slide that shocked ComicsPRO showing size of manga and kids genres.
  #nycc2019 #icv22019 #nycc

  

  In case you don’t feel like zooming in, more than two-thirds of all comics sold fell into one of two categories: Juvenile Fiction (41%, think Raina and similar) and Manga (28%). Superheros were the third-largest market category, but they account for one comic sold out of every ten. This is why C Spike Trotman has been most vocal about the YA offerings from Iron Circus.

• Finally, especially for those that perhaps over-indulged in 24HrCD or maybe are pushing it too hard for Inktober? Stretch.

Spam of the day:

15 Military Discounts Only Available To Those That Served Our Country

While it is true that I have, probably in the depths of the US Army Cadet Command at Fort Knox, a form 139-R from 1985 (enrolling me in ROTC so I could take two mandatory, 1-credit classes, which my college required instead of physical education), complete with an X in the box labeled I decline to state that I am not an conscientious objector and a strikethrough in the loyalty oath section, I cannot say that I served in any meaningful fashion as that concept is generally understood. But given that your email came from Hesse, Germany (from a domain registration that has existed for a whole 12 days), I’m going to doubly say that no, I haven’t served “our” country.

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¹ Okay, one complaint — there’s a world of distance between children’s books and young adult books, leading to YA books that are distinctly at the upper end of the age range like Laura Dean, Hey, Kiddo, and On A Sunbeam contending with books intended for a much younger audience like Mr Wolf’s Class #2: Mystery Club (7-10) and New Kid (8-12). Yes, the over-proliferation of categories is, but maybe split this one into pre-teen and teens-plus?

Recall, if you would, my observation of how the New York Times was dragged kicking and screaming into recognizing Raina Telgemeier‘s Guts in what’s turned out to be the most half-assed way possible. They pushed graphic books off to a monthly bestseller list (among other things, this makes me wonder if they will bother with a ___ weeks on the list notation), and they expanded the list to fifteen titles from ten (to be fair, all their lists appear to do this now), so that nobody can dominate it too much.

Didn’t change a damn thing. In the inaugural Graphic Books And Manga list, Guts is in the top slot, Drama (2012), Smile (2010), and Sisters (2014) in positions 5, 7, and 12, respectively. One may recall from the previous NYT Bestsellers list that included comics that Drama had an accumulated 179 weeks on the list, Smile 240 weeks, and Sisters 117 weeks (also, Ghosts was #1)¹.

And now that I’ve finished my mockery of the Times for all this weaksaucery, I’m happy to tell you that Raina hasn’t lost a step with her latest. I was lucky to read an advance copy at Comics Camp, but it was only yesterday that I got my own² and was able to refresh my memory.

Guts, for a long time, wasn’t the book that we were supposed to be reading. On her Ghosts book tour three years back, when she asked Do you guys want to see some pages from my next book?³, what she shared was an expanded version of her story about Barefoot Gen, the comic that changed her life. It focused on her relationship with her father. It was supposed to be out a year ago. It just wasn’t coming together like it needed to. And during that stalled creative process, she four herself moving across the country, back to her hometown of San Francisco and away from an ending marriage.

I can’t imagine the stress and anxiety it must have caused to have to travel the country and be on for her fans, be all-caps RAINA at each tour stop. Eventually, the solution was a complete shift of the book that would be delivered, a prolonged period of stress and frustration leading to a story about another prolonged period of stress and frustration.

As Guts tells us, stress and anxiety have been there in Raina’s life for a very long time. Some of those stressors we all live through — mean kids in grade school, say — and are grown out of. Some of them take root and cause a self-perpetuating cycle of I’m anxious, I’m going to barf, I don’t want to barf, now thinking about barfing is making me more anxious than I was and … oh no.

The real trauma of growing up Raina? It started before the teeth.

Her prior two memoirs have had a hell of an important message for her readers: You aren’t alone. Everything that’s wearing on you, it happened to me, too. I got to grow up and draw comics for a living! You can grow up and do what you want to do.

But she’s added several things that are more raw, more true than she’d previously shared: When you grow up, even if you get to draw comics for a living, things won’t be perfect. My phobias and fears are still with me, but they’re part of who I am. I learned to accept them, but not by myself. I got to talk about my fears, therapy has helped, and just like I didn’t have to deal with my challenges alone, you don’t have to deal with yours alone, either.

The reason that Raina’s on a first name basis with kids (or nearly so … I usually hear them, very shyly, call her Miss Raina; it’s adorable) is that they know that she respects them enough to tell them the truth. That she will tell them that she remembers the parts of that age that sucked, that she won’t discount their hurts and stressors and anxieties. She also remembers the value of a well-timed fart joke which, come on, that’s kid comedy gold there.

But it’s about 96% the truth telling, the creation of a space in her stories where kids can feel safe to admit their fears and vulnerabilities, to feel seen and validated, to try and fall short, but be able to try again.

Guts carries the dedication For anyone who feels afraid, and that’s essentially all of us. We won’t all get to grow up to draw comics for a living, but we can learn to deal with those fears and feel confident that at least one person is going to encourage us to be our best, bravest selves.

Guts by Raina Telgemeier — with colors by the indispensable Braden Lamb — may be found wherever books are sold. If you aren’t sure where that is, find a kid about 8 – 13 years and ask where they got their copy.

Spam of the day:

What bananas do to your body

I’m going to guess your contention is not provide nutrition, as part of a varied and healthy diet.

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¹ I’ll go a little farther; in that final accounting of Paperback Graphic Books, the 18 weeks for Ghosts all occurred in the 20 weeks since its release in September 2016; 117 weeks for Sisters happened in a span of 127 weeks since release; 179 weeks for Drama out of 230 weeks in print; Smile‘s 240 weeks were out of 365 weeks since release. Or, considering that Smile didn’t make the list until September of 2011, 240 of 279 weeks since it debuted in the #9 spot.

A Raina book will sit on that list, week after week, between 65% and 92% of the weeks since it’s first printed, forever. And keep in mind, there are far more books vying for a spot on the list these days than in 2010. The only conclusion is that Raina Telgemeier is the most significant voice in comics today. No pressure.

² I’d ordered it at that start of summer from my local comics shop, and Diamond finally saw fit to send it along this week. Monopolies, folks!

³ For the record, asking that in an auditorium full of tweens will cause them to loudly and completely lose their shit.