Getting caught up, what with yesterday being a holiday and all. The Thursday programming list went up a little while ago, and here’s what’s happening at Comic-Con two weeks from today.

Friday
The Factual And The Actual
10:00 — 11:00, Room 32AB
Starting things off early on Friday, with Randall Munroe, John Hendrix (The Faithful Spy), Don Brown (Rocket to the Moon! Big Ideas That Changed The World #1), Dylan Meconis (Queen of the Sea, review coming soon), Jim Ottaviani (Hawking), and Rachel Ignotofsky (Women In Art) talking nonfiction and nonfictionish comics, moderated by Judy Prince-Neeb (Chula Vista Public Library).

Comic Book Law School© 202: Let’s Make A Deal (or Three)
10:30 — 12:00, Room 11
The legal education continues, with this session on income-related topics: licensing, and agreements covering merch, manufacturing, and distribution, and how contracts govern it all.

Bedside Press: What’s Next?
12:00 –1:00, Room 25ABC
Remember yesterday when I thought we’d never see Scott Kurtz inside the San Diego Convention Center again? Well, today it’s Kris Straub that’s returned, talking about projects coming from the Canadian small press, along with fellow creators Amanda Deibert, SM Beiko, Steenz Stewart (editor extraordinaire, hire her after the Lion Forge implosion fiasco), Lilah Sturges, Ashley Robinson, and pubisher Hope Nicholson.

Feminist Comics That Rock
12:00 — 1:00, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
Meanwhile, we’ve got a just as compelling session in the same timeslot as the Bedside talk, over at the library so it’s pretty much impossible to hop between the rooms and catch half of each. Raina Telgemeier, Peggy Burns, Claudia Aguirre, and Jennifer Holm, moderated by Candice Mack (LA Public Library). Not that I’lll get to either, as I’ve got an interview lined up at 12:15. Grrrrr.

LGBTQ+ YA Graphic Novels
1:00 — 2:00, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
If you were at the library for the noon slot, stick around for Rosemary Valero-Connell (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me), Sarah Graley (Kim Reaper), Claudia Aguirre (Morning In America), and Lilah Sturges (Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass) in discussion with Amanda Melilli (ALA Graphic Novels And Comics Round Table).

Steven Universe
1:00 — 2:00, Ballroom 20
But if you’re a Steven Universe fan, you weren’t in any of those sessions listed above, because you’ve been in line for Ballroom 20. Shelby Rabara (Peridot) moderates, with Estelle (Garnet), Michaela Dietz (Amethyst), Deedee Magno Hall (Pearl), and Rebecca Sugar. Songs! Laughs! Trailer for the movie!

America’s Best Comics Editors And What They Do!
1:30 — 2:30, Room 8
I love the nuts-and-bolts discussions of how thing get made. I can’t think of anything that would keep me from listening to Jann Jones (Legendary), Henry Barajas (Top Cow), David Mariotte (IDW Publishing), Chynna Clugston Flores (Image Comics), Shannon Eric Denton (WildStorm/DC Comics), Sarah Gaydos (Oni), and Elizabeth Brei (IDW) talk about the editorial process!

Spotlight on Ursula Vernon
1:30 — 2:30, Room 24ABC
Godsdammit! Except this. Because as I believe I have established, I loves me some Digger, and everything else that Ursula Vernon creates.

A Conversation With Sonia Manzano (AKA “Maria” from Sesame Street)
2:00 — 3:00, The Theater, Comic-Con Museum
No lie Maria was one of the moral lodestones in my early education. Unfortunately, the Comic-Con Museum is like 5 miles away at Balboa Park, so this ain’t happening. Just as well, I need to get lunch sometime today.

Graphic Novel Or Illustrated Book: You Make the Call
2:00 — 3:00, Grand 12 & 13, Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina
It is one of the rules of this page that you should see Karen Green, Columbia University librarian, speak whenever you get the chance. She’ll be talking with creators William Stout, Armand Baltazar, and Mark Wheatley, along with JC Vaughn (VP Publishing, Gemstone). Unfortunately, I’ll still be at the Vernon retrospective.

Kids And YA Graphic Novel Publishing: Behind The Scenes
2:00 — 3:00, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
I am becoming convinced that somebody said, Hey, let’s put every single panel Gary would want to see overlapping in one big block on Friday, at the far corners of the city! Why else would I miss out on hearing :01 Books publisher Mark Siegel, with Tracy Hurren (Drawn & Quarterly), Maya Bradford (Abrams ComicArts), Andrew Arnold (HarperCollins) and moderator Carla Riemer (librarian, Claremont Middle School).

Science And History in Comics
3:00 — 4:00, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
This is getting ridiculous. Maybe if I find food I can eat on my walk from the Vernon retrospective on my way to the library, I could hear Jim Ottaviani, MK Reed, Ben Fisher, Emily S Whitten, and moderator Tracy Edmunds.

Spotlight On Kurt Busiek
3:00 — 4:00pm, Room 28DE
Mentioning because the spotlight will be controlled by Scott McCloud, who besides being a genius has been buddies with Busiek since middle school. Nothing better than watching two old friends catch up and shoot the shit.

Graphix Fix: Great Graphic Novels For All Ages
4:00 — 5:00, Room 32AB
Scholastic Graphix superstars including Jim Benton, Sarah Graley, Jennifer Holm, Varian Johnson, Shannon Wright, Jon J Muth, and Raina Telgemeier. I suspect the room may be too small.

Comics Law: Disney, Malibu, And The Uncensored Mouse
4:30 — 5:30, Room 24ABC
This sounds legit fascinating: a discussion of a court case where Disney stomped on a publisher for printing public domain Mickey Mouse newspaper strips. Tom Mason (editor of the reprints), Dave Olbrich (publisher of the reprints), Nat Gertler (About Comics publisher), and Michael Lovitz (IP attorney).

Best And Worst Manga Of 2019
6:00 — 7:00, Room 4
I’m not making it to the show floor at all on Friday, am I? This one’s always fun, and features Brigid Alverson (my good friend and fellow pixel-stained wretch), Christopher Butcher (who has a birthday today, go wish him a happy one!), Megan Peters, Rob McMonigal, and Deb Aoki. Lots of experience and impeccable taste on this panel, find out what they loved and what they hated.

Creator Origins: A Candid Conversation On LBGTQ Comics Creation
6:00 — 7:00, Room 9
I’ve lost track of how many panels have caught my eye today … twelve? Fifteen? [Editor’s note: this is number seventeen, and we’ve got a still to go.] Megan Townsend (GLAAD) taking to Joe Glass (The Pride), Clive Hawken (Delver), Spike Trotman (Iron Circus Comics), and Ivan Salazar (comiXology).

Comics Of The Internet: The Memes, the Myths, The Legends
7:00 — 8:00, Room 9
It’s about comics that go memetically viral. Sounds a lot like one that happened last year on Sunday, and even also features Hope Nicholson, this time with Jose Sagastume, Ivan Salazar, and Kris Straub.

MAD vs New Yorker Cartoons: Which Are Funnier?
7:30 — 8:30, Room 24ABC
Oof. Too soon?

TGIF Keenspot Panel Party Hosted By Rob Potchak
8:00 — 9:00pm, Room 28DE
I’m not entirely certain that Keenspot shifting from their traditional very last timeslot of the con is actually doing them any favors, considering they’re now up against Friday night food, parties, and the friggin’ Eisner Awards.

The Girl Genius Radio Play
8:30 — 10:00, Room 8
Yepper, somebody is bound and determined to ensure that Phil and Kaya Foglio don’t get to bed at a reasonable hour at all this year.

The World Of Drive
9:00 — 10:00, Room 9
Oh, come on! Look, I stand second to no man in my love of Drive, and the work that Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett and his colorist Beth Reidmiller have put in to make it such a great strip. And I really, really love what happens when LArDK talks with his directing partner, Fred “Not The Beethoven One” Schroeder. But if I’m awake after this day at 9:00pm, I’ma be wherever the impromptu Comics Camp reunion is happening, with booze close to hand.

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Hey. Question for you. Why are women so damn good at comics? I mean, why are there literally so many more women whose work I am excited to follow than dudes? Is it because dudes held the entire industry to themselves for so long, only letting in other dudes that looked and thought and wrote like them, resulting in staleness and homogeneity? And women, long excluded, had to up their game and be so much better than dudes who could get published just for showing up?

• Case in point #1: Dylan Meconis. She has a wicked edge to her stories, one that treads the line of humor and messing with you for being a chump, whether she’s exploring the French Revolution (via vampires), the Age Of Reason (via werewolves), or comic/SF convention culture/cliche (via the apocalypse).

  And today, her latest graphic novel hits the stores:

  This book is full of:

  • cool nuns
  • 16th century infographics
  • recycled folklore
  • embroidery trash talk
  • questionable chess strategy
  • shameless pandering to the lutist community
  • identity crises
  • dubiously symbolic flora
  • mysterious pinnipeds
  • loud young redheaded women

  There is also:

  • one (1) nun who’s kind of a jerk
  • one (1) hot lad who probably knows how to do Sword Stuff
  • one (1) fake saint and her relic, which is in point of fact a dried fish head

  Not to mention your standard royal exiles the inconvenient alternate claimant to the throne that would be the lead talking point in most elevator pitches. We’ve seen that before, but embroidery trash talk? Yes, please. There is more raw creativity in that description than in most ten-year runs of dude-centric comics.

  Additionally, I can state unreservedly that it’s gorgeous, having been present to see some of the pages painted in late April 2018. Queen Of The Sea is part of Candlewick’s expansion beyond children’s books and YA prose into the graphic novel space, and they are not screwing around. Grab a copy as soon as you can and join me in reading it.

• Case in point #2: Shing Yin Khor, who wrangles watercolors, powertools, and emotions with equal facility. Their memoir of traveling the historic Route 66 releases on 6 August, retelling a road trip with their dog Bug in search of their passions in life (including, but not limited to, giant muffler man statues, roadside dinosaur statues, and what it means to be American). They’re working on her next book, a graphic novel about the Chinese contributions to the American west, particularly in and around lumberjackery. And they just got announced as one of the featured guests for SPX this year:
  

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: Ignatz winner Shing Yin Khor @sawdustbear, a Malaysian-American cartoonist and installation artist exploring the intersections of race, gender and immigration. Their forthcoming graphic novel, “The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66” is out in August.

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: Cartoonist Rosemary Valero-O’Connell @hirosemaryhello who’s opening eyes with her latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me w/ writer, @marikotamaki. Past works includes Lumberjanes. Her illustrations work has been shown in galleries internationally.

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: @marinaomi is the award-winning cartoonist of 4 graphic memoirs and the Life on Earth YA graphic novel trilogy as well as founder and admin of the Cartoonists of Color, Queer Cartoonists, and (soon) Disabled Cartoonists databases. http://MariNaomi.com

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: Ignatz Award winner for Promising New Talent, @biancaxunise! Her body of work focuses primarily on the daily struggles of identifying as a young black feminist weirdo in modern society and has been featured in The Washington Post, The Nib, BBC and more.

  Checking out the Special Guests page at SPX, there’s a dozen names so far, more than half of whom are women — Emily Carroll is there, Eleanor Davis, and Raina Telgemeier. The dudes there are interesting, too — Eddie Campbell and Jaime Hernandez are essential in any conversation about comics, Box Brown does astonishingly detailed documentary comics, Ed Piskor and Kevin Huizenga are amazingly accomplished — but the women are the ones whose next work I’m dying to see.

• Case in point #3: Abby Howard does comics that hit that Kate Beatonesque sweet spot. Just detailed enough to get across the story point or emotion she’s shooting for, just esoteric enough in topic that nobody else is doing the same thing, and absolutely hilarious when funny is what she’s shooting for. Her long-running autobioish Junior Scientist Power Hour may not always be true to life — I’m not convinced her cat Spoons really went on a hero’s journey that took place in a magical realm entirely contained in Howard’s ass — and it may have been fallow while Howard was working on her utterly charming Earth Before Us trilogy, but it’s always been great reading.

  And now, it is coming to an end. She’ll keep up the journal comics on her Patreon, and the previously-uncollected JSPH strips are getting the print treatment, courtesy her new Kickstarter campaign. If you didn’t pick up her first JSPH collection, you can get it along with the new one at an advantageous price!

  It’s been a while since we busted out the Fleen Funding Factor, Mark II, but the math projects that JSPH2 will finish in the range of US$39K-58.5K (on a goal of US$30,000), with stretch goals ranging up to US$65K. She’s at 41% of goal since launching yesterday and 28 days left to go, but I need anybody with an interest to pledge so that this one completes, because if it doesn’t I might not get the original art I pledged for, and that would be a tragedy.

Spam of the day:

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I was going to do a Seuss-rhyme her to express my ire, but man that’s one hard style to emulate. Guess I’ll have to content myself with Fuck you, scamming scum.

Hey, are you gonna be in the city of Chicago this weekend? I mean, everybody in the midwest is dodging persistent rain, tornadoes, floods, and general End Times events, but if you’re in Chicago you can at least enjoy the last days of Earth with comics at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, Saturday and Sunday, 1 & 2 June, from 11:00am to 6:00pm at the Billie Jean King Recreation Center (the third floor of Center on Halsted¹), 3656 N Halsted Street. It’s free to the public, got a humane scale of exhibitors (one big room plus a hallway entrance, an even 100 tables if my count is right), and an emphasis on the comics part of comics.

Special Guests will include Nicholas Gurewitch, Ben Passmore, Whit Taylor, and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell. Exhibitors draw heavily from the middle of the country, and will include Ben Sears, Biance Xunise, Blue Delliquanti, Cathy G Johnson, Iron Circus², John Porcellino, Katie Schenkel, Chris Grady, Patrick Lay, Sage Coffey, Sarah Becan, Tess Eneli Reid, Tom McHenry, and Tony Breed

I didn’t include table numbers because come on — just walk around the room.

Programming is heavily tilted towards the Special Guests — I don’t think there’s a panel until Sunday that features a panelist that’s not a Special Guest. Ones that caught my eye include:

• The Occult In Comics; Saturday, 11:30am-12:30pm; with Corinne Halbert, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, Anders Nilsen, and Isabella Rotman, moderated by Anya Davidson.
• Looks Good Enough To Eat: Drawing Food and Recipe Comics (workshop); Saturday, 11:30am-12:30pm; with Sarah Becan.
• The Idea Kitchen (workshop); Saturday, 1:00-2:00pm; with Nicholas Gurewitch and Jackie Davis.
• Graphic Medicine: Comics as Treatment; Sunday, 1:00pm-2:00pm; with Whit Taylor, Sage Coffey, Bianca Xunise, and Vreni, moderated by Kevin Budnik.
• Storytelling Flow (workshop); Sunday, 3:00pm-4:00pm; with Tom Hart.

The panel room is apparently the theater off the entrance, but no indication where the workshops are.

CAKE is accessible by the El (Red line to Addison), the #8 Halsted bus, the #22 Clark bus, #36 Broadway bus, or #152 Addison bus. Head for the corner of Halsted and Waveland, and look for the Whole Foods; Center On Halsted shares the block and is just to the north.

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_______________
¹ Oddly, Center On Halsted’s events calendar doesn’t make mention of CAKE, but it’s there.

² It doesn’t specifically say that C Spike Trotman will be there but come on … it’s right down the street for her.

A few weeks before MoCCA Fest, the fine folks at :01 Books sent me uncorrected proof of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (words by Mariko Tamaki, pictures by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell) and I dove in. I held my review until closer to release date (which was, uh, two weeks ago) and then got caught up reporting on this year’s #ComicsCamp, so I’m late. But you know what? I got to read it a couple more times, so that’s okay. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers — not much here you wouldn’t find on the back cover — but take care in any event.

My first readthrough caused me to think a lot about Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T Crenshaw, because they’re both about finding yourself, dealing with a shitty friend (and confronting the realization you might be the shitty friend), with LGBTQ identity to the fore. But LDKBUWM is less a parallel to KN8 and more a perpendicular. This is different time, a different place, a different reality in terms of LGBTQ freedoms. It’s not about finding yourself in the realization of sexuality or exiting a closet — most characters in LDKBUWM are either LGBTQ in some sense, or at least appears heteroflexible¹ — so if you take the coming out part of the teen story away, what do you get?

You get what was requested the Queers & Comics Conference: a queer comics character who’s bad. You get a character who can be a complete antagonist who happens to be queer, rather than a villain because they’re queer, or somebody that has to be presented as an exemplar of humanity to be a worthy enough queer to be included in the story.

Or if not a villain/bad in the traditional sense, at least a total dick.

Laura Dean is popular, hot, entitled, a mistreater of whoever isn’t in her favor at this instant (particularly her nominal girlfriend Freddie, who she keeps breaking up with) and a serial gaslighter; her go-to whenever called on her shitty behavior is Don’t be mad, making the subject of her mistreatment feel like they’re the one that’s at fault for overreacting. If only they’d been a better person, Laura Dean wouldn’t have had to act that way. Look what you made her do.

If Laura Dean were Loren Dean and presented as male, the story could be one step away from a cautionary after-school special about bad boyfriends that turn into abusers. As it is, she’s a user of people rather than an abuser, but if we check in on her in ten years I bet she’s got a TRO or two.

And as crappy a person as Laura Dean is, she makes those in her orbit worse, too. Freddie is neglectful of her friends, wrapped up in trying to get back into Laura Dean’s graces, knowing that she needs to make one of these breakups stick but half convincing herself that she can change enough that everything will be good in the future with Laura Dean. This is the finding yourself part of the story — deciding not how to present yourself as an identity, but deciding on how you choose to act.

Structurally, LDKBUWM is a little bit different; it doesn’t so much start as the reader begins paying attention to these characters at a certain point in time that’s really no more or less significant than any other. It’s arguably got a conclusion that it works towards, but really it just sort of fades out. The characters existed before page 1, they continue to exist after page 289, their stories continue and ebb and flow and branch and rejoin, like a river that we put our boat in at one particular place and pulled ashore again a few weeks later; we can see the extensions of the water upstream and downstream of the section we traversed and know that there’s more there.

Characters are revealed by small choices in their dialogue, but also in posture and visual habits. Freddie and her best friend Doodle both present as needing affection and attention, but they go about it in different ways. Freddie’s all public gestures and reactions, where Doodle is made of quiet implication. I spent my first read thinking that Doodle’s somewhere on the autism spectrum but have ultimately decided that she isn’t — but she was raised by a single parent who is. Her affect is of somebody that is learning to be demonstrative, having lacked the example of it at home. None of this is stated, and all of it may be completely off base, but it’s how the characters read to me … and it’s been a long while since characters on a page have left me with such distinct impressions of who they are by subtle implication.

That’s equally down to Tamaki’s plotting and dialogue and to the visuals, which let’s discuss. I’ve been talking up Rosemary Valero-O’Connell for about three years since I first met her. I said at the time that her minis reflected an unusually strong sense of page composition and design, and that her characters reminded me of two veteran manga creators whose work I love. Both have improved in the intervening time, especially her faces. Freddie has bits of Terry Moore’s Francine Peters in her big, expressive face, and Doodle says more with a raised eyebrow than a page of dialogue could contain². Crucially, and it’s the first time I’ve ever noticed this, Valero-O’Connell’s faces retain their expressiveness in 360 degree rotation; with remarkably few lines, there’s a shifting in the shape and weight of mouth, cheeks, eyebrows, and the entire skull shifts to convey mood.

She’s not afraid to have people speaking over their shoulder, and let the listener who’s facing us have the reaction; it’s astonishingly strong work. Plus, she does this one bit where a jerk jock is all homophobic at supporting character Buddy: we never see his face but can tell from the tilt of his head, the slump of his shoulders, the refusal to look at the gym coach who’s dressing him down, exactly what expression he’s wearing. Yeah, it’s our brains filling in what we can’t see, but it’s also the case that Jerkboy has the same blonde undercut as Laura Dean, and we’ve seen enough of her shitty girlfriend entitled smarm to fill in that detail. The reader, on an instinctual level (it took me four or five readthroughs to realize it), has been promoted to full partner in the visuals of the story.

And those visuals are lush. The characters — not just the named ones that we get to know, but all the backgrounders going through their own stories that we don’t get to eavesdrop on — are all unique. Skin color, modes of dress, hairstyle, size and shape — all of them are varied, giving the sense of a public school in a place that’s truly diverse (Berkeley, California), as opposed to TV or movies³ where a “diverse, random” crowd is 70% male and 70% white and all “Hollywood average” in appearance.

It’s not just people who’ve been on the receiving end of a bad partner in a relationship that will feel seen reading LDKBUWM, it’s just about everybody — there in the background, each character drawn with the same care and respect as the starring and supporting players. Someday, Tamaki will write or Valero-O’Connell will illustrate some of those stories, and we’ll see Freddie or Doodle or Laura Dean pass by in the background.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a stellar achievement in comics, and is the one to beat in my private list of best books of 2019. You can find it wherever books are sold, and carries my highest recommendation for the teen-and-up in your life.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ Crowd scenes feature lots of seeming same-sex or gender ambiguous couples, which may be part of the script or may be a choice on Valero-O’Connell’s part.

² I’m reminded of longtime NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards, who could vocally lift an eyebrow over the radio with a single, arch syllable — Oh? — when interviewing some political powerbroker who was clearly lying.

³ Or too many comics, sad to say.

[Editor’s note: This has only the slightest bit to do with MoCCA, but it’s time-sensitive. Zach Weinersmith & Bryan Caplan’s graphic novel on immigration releases in October, but it’s available for pre-order starting today. As in the past, Weinersmith is angling to prevail on the Amazon algorithm and offering up rewards for those that do preorder.]

Today’s theme on the happenings at MoCCA Festival 2019 is what people are working on, on account of I ran into a lot of people working on a lot of things. This isn’t necessarily chronological, so don’t look for a consistent passage of time.

• Before I even made it inside on Saturday morning, I ran into Magnolia Porter and Tom Siddell (both of whom are killing it on their respective comics right now), and they’re working on their new, shared life as married folks. It’s a long way from the UK to Brooklyn, but they’ve got tablet, network, and each other. You will seriously not ever see anything more adorable — I am including sleepy puppies trying to keep their heads from drooping in this statement — than newlywed Porter gleefully introducing Siddell to somebody as my husband. I love those crazy kids.
• In the opening minutes, I also ran into Calista Brill, editorial supremo at :01 Books, who is working on everything — walking the aisles trying to determine who should be on her radar, keeping to the ambitious release schedule (they’ve gone from about two dozen books a year to more than twice that in less than two years), launching at least two, maybe three new lines in the space of a year¹ … they’re on the verge of world domination but too busy to slow down for the customary Mwah-ha-ha-ha!
• Just as well they haven’t declared victory, really, since Gina Gagliano is less than nine months from Random House Graphic‘s debut year, with twelve books on the slate and announcements reaching out to 2023, if I’ve paid attention. Less than a year ago, she was thrown into a new job without a staff, an office, or time to catch her breath before having to develop things like a marketing budget (for books that didn’t exist and had no deliverable date because she didn’t yet have any creators under contract yet), and now she can see things starting to happen. Preview material for sales folks, printing press time and shipping containers coming together, all the logistics that assure yes, this is real.
• Evan Dahm is going to be able to show off three, four new books over the coming year; Island Book is just over a month from release, Vattu’s third collection is approaching delivery, and he’s in the final stages of a project for Iron Circus called The Harrowing Of Hell, about what happened to Jesus for those days between crucifixion and resurrection; there’s going to be a collection of shorter works as well. Somewhat appropriately, Dahm will be finishing Harrowing just as Easter approaches; with printing lead times, I’d expect it to release (also appropriately) sometime in the Lenten season next year.

  Asked about what public domain book he’d like to adapt next, he allowed that he’d like to take a shot at The Worm Ouroboros by ER Eddison, but he may be a while before he gets to it; you can’t help but notice that nice, big 1 at the top of the spine of Island Book, so I’m guessing he might be a bit spoken for for the next while.

• Rosemary Valero-O’Connell is working on saying No for a while. Her debut longform work, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (words by Mariko Tamaki; I’ve been reading it obsessively since I got a review copy on Friday), hits in four weeks, and making a 250-plus page book in just about a year, while working on other items at the same time, would tax anybody. After some downtime, she gets to start work on her second longform work, one that she’ll be writing as well as drawing. I’ve said ever since I met her that she would produce astonishing work and just keep getting better; so far, it looks like I’ve been right.
• Colleen AF Venable² has plenty to keep her busy, too. Kiss Number 8 is so, so good³, and her gig directing art for Odd Dot is starting to pay off. I told her that the ringbound easelback presentation for Code This Game! made me angry, because I wanted that innovation to have existed for my college years; she heaped praise on her staff member (she called him one of my inventors) that came up with that design in 30 seconds with an X-Acto) and I begged her to license it. Apparently, every imprint up and down the Flatiron Building is asking if they can use that innovation (I really hope that includes all their cookbooks) and she’s more than happy to share. She’s just happy, period. Collen AF Venable has the proportional happiness of a spider that’s really, really happy.

  And all of that is before she gets to her own books — she’ll be doing a Maker Comic and she’s got a superhero story that sounds brilliant and hilarious and brilliant again, one that will hit right in the spot that the Minx line failed to capitalize on a dozen years back.

• I’d never met Tea Fougner in person before; we wound up geeking out over how wonderful Olivia Jaimes has been on Nancy for the past year. She hopes that seeing the tremendous interest shown in a nearly century-old property will make it easier when she argues to her bosses that she needs to be able to revitalize some of King Feature’s legacy strips with bold returns to what made them great.

  The tributes to Popeye are a start, but we agreed that she needs to just hand that strip over to Randy Milholland and then let him go to town. Either that, or she needs to hop to Disney, work her way up to the appropriate place, and then hand Duckville to Milholland and likewise let him go to Duckburg.

You know what? At least four more people to talk about in this context, plus all the new creators I met for the first time, and we’re over 1000 words. More tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ 2019 saw the start of the Maker Comics line, early next year will see the civic engagement line, World Citizen Comics (of which Weinersmith & Caplan’s book is less a member, more a precursor), and I heard rumors of a history line in the works.

² She gave me her current business card which notes, Yup, That’s My Real Middle Name.

³ Despite some folk asking if it matters that they didn’t read the first 7.

Let it never be said that the folks at :01 Books (and their fellow imprints at Macmillan) don’t make their catalogs available for review. Their Spring/Summer offerings are getting ready to drop, and I find myself today in possession of advanced copies of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Hawking, The Time Museum vol 2, I Will Be Fierce, and This Was Our Pact (I, uh, may have given one or two of them a first read already).

Also in the Big Box O’ Quality Reading: previews and exceprts of Island Book, Pumpkinheads, Old Souls, and The Adventure Zone: Murder On The Rockport Limited. and Code This Game!¹. Creators associated with these books who’ll be at MoCCA Fest include Evan Dahm, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, Carey Pietsch, and Colleen AF Venable².

Look for reviews of these books closer to their respective release dates, and if you’re anywhere near NYC this weekend, to drop in to see these and many more creators.

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¹ The last from Macmillan’s new imprint, Odd Dot. It’s too narrow to describe them as an education imprint, but they are definitely geared towards ensmartening their readers.

² Venable is the Creative Director at Odd Dot, and you can bet she’s responsible for the design of the book, which will feature spiral binding and an easel back so you can prop it up next to you while you type code samples from it, and the pages aren’t constantly flying around.

As this goes live, we’re in the vicinity of 90 hours until MoCCA Fest 2019. We’ve got the programming, there are some late exhibitor addenda (see below), and some news on peripheral events that you may want to keep an eye on. There’s some other things going on, too.

• MoCCA, then: Word comes to us via the Tweets Machine that Evan Dahm will be at table G238. I mean, this was a no-brainer, guy’s got Island Book coming out six weeks from today from :01 Books, which is going to put him square in the sights of those that pay attention to kids books. And kidlit librarians/advocates are relentless in their pursuit of good books, so congrats to Dahm on his forthcoming recreation of the opening of A Hard Day’s Night.

  Also at MoCCA (although not tabling) will be Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, also no surprise, given that Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (pictures by Ms Valero-O’Connell, words by the incomparable Mariko Tamaki) is coming out five weeks from today¹, also from :01. She’ll be signing at their table (E162) at 2:00pm on Saturday, and will likely be wandering the floor other times. Her other appearances in conjunction with Laura Dean will come between now and November, and will encompass the cities of Minneapolis/St Paul, Toronto, Chicago, and Leeds.

• Speaking of MoCCA, one of the long-running traditions is that the night before, Drink And Draw Like A Lady; since 2008, it’s gotten women together to make comics in public, have some delicious beverages, and never once have to hear the question, So what’s it like being a woman in comics?

  But the thing about traditions is, somebody has to arrange the damn things, and oftentimes it falls onto just a few. The first DADLAL was put together by a couple of ladies named Hope Larson and Raina Telgemeier², and since then a fluctuating group of volunteers have taken on tasks for events in various cities, from arranging the posters³ to lining up sponsorships (for a number of years, that would have been Katie Lane’s Work Made For Hire) to making sure the venue was ready.

  Most recently, it’s been Alisa Harris, Alison Wilgus, and Tea Fougner that have done most of the work for the NYC events; they have lives and obligations the other 364 days of the year, and also life sometimes gets in the way:

  We know it’s been a while and we’d like to apologize for the late notice that we will be taking a break from our annual pre-MoCCA Fest party this year. A number of factors have come up. Most notably, The Productive, our awesome venue for the past several years has closed its physical location.

  Alison, Tea and I have been busy with life and work and decided that it might be best to take a year to recuperate so we don’t spread ourselves too thin. We are so grateful to everyone who has attended and helped out in past years! This party is awesome because of you.

  DADLAL isn’t gone, it’s just taking a break. Here’s hoping Fougner, Harris, and Wilgus get to spend Friday night with their feet up, a preferred beverage close to hand, and whatever amiable companionship they prefer purring, wagging, or even speaking in human words that they’ve earned this break.

• And not MoCCA, but still on the festival circuit: Shelli Paroline is many things — artist, writer, half of a very successful creative duo with Braden Lamb, and co-director of MICE, the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo. It’s in that latter capacity that she would like you to know that this year’s MICE will be happening on 19 – 20 October, on the campus of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that exhibitor applications are now open:
  

  You can now apply to exhibit at MICE happening October 19 – 20, 2019 in Cambridge, MA! Application period open through April 23. We got guidelines here: http://www.micexpo.org/application/

  I really have to get up to that show one of these years, as it is by all accounts a great one. And, for those who are just starting out exhibiting, MICE has one of the most reasonable table pricings in all of comics: full tables for US$180, halfsies for US$90, and thirds for US$65. They like to put an emphasis on the comics part of comics expo, and also to see new faces, so give it some thought between now and the 23rd, yeah?

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¹ I am going to get home from Comics Camp and immediately have a bunch of great books to read. This truly is a new golden age of comics.

² Before they were HOPE LARSON and RAINA.

³ They been drawn by Larson, Raina, Lucy Knisley, Erika Moen, Harris, Emi Lenox, Cary Pietsch, Savannah Zambrano, Janet Sung, Kat Fajardo, Olivia Li, Megan Brennan, and more. You recognize some of those names, and you’re going to recognize the others in future.

Heya. Let’s bring you up to speed on some things mentioned recently.

• TCAF! We mentioned the first tranche of Very Special Guests two weeks ago, and we mentioned the International Guests a bit more than one week ago, which means it’s time to talk about the latest additions to the guest roster, the Young Adult Guests¹.

  Joining others (maybe you?) at the Toronto Reference Library on Saturday and Sunday, 11 and 12 May, will be Flavia Biondi (best known for Generations, Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau (Bloom), Renee Nault (the new graphic adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale), Ryan North (you know who he is), Sarah Winifred Searle (the forthcoming graphic novel, The Greatest Thing, due out next year), Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, my review copy of which will hopefully be here soon), Colleen AF Venable² and Ellen T Crenshaw (Kiss Number 8, which is wonderful, review to appear here soon), and Tillie Walden (On A Sunbeam).

  Oh, yes, and how about a few superstars over the Kids Guests? You got yer Raina (her guide to making comics, Share Your Smile, will be out in April), Kazu Kibuishi and Jason Caffoe (I think this is their first joint appearance since Amulet Book 8: Supernova came out). Additions to the Exhibitor ranks since last we spoke include the 5 Worlds team and Shan Murphy; there’s probably others, and I will notice them on the next read-through, or the one after that.

• CAM! A few days back, we mentioned a bunch of stuff happening at the Cartoon Art Musuem over the next month or so; among those items was an exhibition dedicate to the art of A Fire Story by Brian Fies. Fies will be on book tour when the exhibition opens, so it makes sense that he won’t be ther for the usual launch-of-exhibit reception. Or rather, it would make sense, but why give up a good reception? Fies will be there a bit later in the month:

  The Cartoon Art Museum is proud to present an evening with cartoonist Brian Fies on Saturday, March 30, 2019 from 7:00-8:30pm as he discusses his new graphic novel A Fire Story: A Graphic Memoir, depicting the artist’s firsthand account of the 2017 Northern California wildfires. A book signing will follow Fies’s discussion. Advance tickets for the Saturday, March 30 event are available through Guestlist: Fire Story Tickets

  That’s from the email that CAM sent me; the event doesn’t appear to be on their webpage yet. US$10 for the public, free for CAM members.

• Zub! Okay, not an update, but you should know. Jim Zub, his wife Stacy King, and Andrew Wheeler (all of whom will absolutely shark you in a game of We Didn’t Playtest This At All, especially in the presence of presents³) announced that they were given the opportunity of a geek’s lifetime — to create a series of books for younger players of tabletop RPGs to introduce them to the ideas of roleplaying and constructing a seat-of-your-pants story together. Specifically, books for the most hallowed of tabletop RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons. Spill it, Zub:
  

  As experienced DMs/players, it’s easy to forget how intimidating tabletop RPGs can be for people who haven’t played before. These guides lay out the major concepts (class, race, equipment, creatures) in a way anyone can understand and encourage them to create their own stories. Readers can use the material in these books to brainstorm a character and imagine their role in an adventuring party. Get them excited about the possibilities, and then bring them to the gaming table to show them how those initial ideas can really flourish with a roll of the dice.

  The two guides in the D&D Young Adventurer’s Guides, Monsters & Creatures and Warriors & Weapons, release on 16 July, which I believe is the day before Preview Night at SDCC, and just long enough before Gen Con to get out into the public and thoroughly read before heading to Indy. Congrats to King, Wheeler, and Zub for the nerd experience of a lifetime.

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¹ That would be guests of interest to YA and younger readers, not guest who are themselves young adults. I mean, some of them are pretty young for adult humans, but that’s not why they’re in the category.

² I just now realized that her two middle initials, instead of being pronounced aff as I have always done in my internal monologue, could instead be pronounced A-F, because she is in fact Colleen As Fuck.

³ On opposite coasts of North America, DanteLuke Landherr-Shepherd and Ferocious Jon Sung just shuddered and don’t know why.

So Saturday had some stuff going on, huh? The Steven Universe movie announcement (cough, cough, scoop here) caught everybody by surprise; I think there’s been more leaks from the Mueller investigation than there were around the movie news. The day started with the Eisner news from the the night before and ended with the news from the Prism Awards¹. The folks at Prism are presumably enjoyed a well-deserved sleep-in today as their website isn’t yet updated with the winners, but Andrew Farago of the Cartoon Art Museum tweeted a list of winners, which included Molly Ostertag’s The Witch Boy for Mainstream Comics and Graphic Novels, and Blue Delliquanti’s O Human Star³ for Webcomic.

In between, you had things like Scott McCloud talking about the twenty-fifth anniversary of Understanding Comics, which means there’s a significant number of significant talents in comics (say, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, who I got to catch up with, and who remains a delight) who not only don’t remember a world without Understanding Comics, they’ve never lived in a world where it didn’t exist. As you might expect, that discussion involved a lot of pictures and words and will take a while to write up². It’ll be worth it, I promise. I’m also working on a recap of the presentation given by Mark Siegel of :01 Books on how comics and graphic novels came to be what he terms The New Mainstream. Good stuff.

Oh, yes, and Shing Yin Khor now has the best challenge in comics and/or power tools history in front of her: how to disassemble an Eisner award trophy³. It was pretty easy to take apart the brick that represented the Ignatz Award for the Elements anthology and distribute the pieces to the many contributors; scroll through Khor’s Twitter and I believe you’ll find pictures of her with the sledgehammer used. But the Eisner will take some planning and possibly a Dremel. I think the coolest approach would be to take slices from the globe, leaving a Death Star II effect, but I’m certain we’ll get to see the end result soon enough.

Speaking of Khor, on the occasion of a Comics Camp mini-reunion last night, I fulfilled one of my impromptu goals for the week and captured a photo of that included both the Sawdust Bear and the Toronto Man-Mountain. The original photo is up top, but using extremely high-tech, computer, zoom in on sector 7 and enhancement, we at Fleen have extrapolated what the remainder of the scene may have looked like, which you may find here.

Cosplay included some deep cuts; the most mainstream was San from Princess Mononoke, and I also caught Assassin Bug (look him up, kids; all the *pool characters owe a narrative debt to AB), and this one pleasant fellow with a moustache (yes!) who talked to us a bit about the importance of sunscreen and left his card when he moved on. Nice guy.

Panels to keep an eye on today include:
1, 2, 3, . . . 20?! How To Create (And Survive) A Successful Graphic Novel Series with Jennifer and Matthew Holm, Raina Telgemeier, Molly Ostertag, and Dr Rose Brock of Sam Houston State University. Room 11 at 1:00.

Comics Of The Internet: The Memes, The Myths, The Legends with Matt Kolowski and Kiersten Wing from comiXology, Hope Nicholson, Megan Kearney, Nick Franco, and David Malki !. I suspect this will heavily reference the one comiXology title that got announced t’other day about webcomics gone viral. Room 29AB at 2:00pm — 3:00pm.

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¹ Which shares its name with way too many awards — in photonics, PR strategy and campaigns, Greater Boston-area building trades, medical-surgical nursing, Colorado social impact, and paranormal romance writing are just on the first page of the Google search.

² Much like McCloud describes his next book, as having to research a very long book so I can write a short book, I suspect that I will have to come up with a lot of words to condense down to a readable length. Might not happen until the flight home, but then again I’ll probably spend it catching up on sleep and my knitting.

³ Which, bee-tee-dubs, McCloud confirmed a suspicion of mine: the globe of the trophy is based on page 3 of Understanding Comics.

Okay so our Friends To The North celebrated their big holiday already, and we here in ‘Merika won’t until tomorrow, but the holiday doldrums are well upon us. Not much going on, but there is one thing to keep an eye out for in the coming weeks:

On July 17 we’re Kickstarting The Nib Magazine, a 100 page print quarterly. The first four issues — Death, Family, Empire and Scams — have been in the works all year and we will hit send to the printer the second it’s funded.

All new comics every issue — journalism, strips, Nib crew, Intercept journalists, names from mainstream comics. I can’t wait to drop who is on board.

That from The Nib editor and driving force Matt Bors, who’s shepherded the editorial/reportage comics site from (intermittently neglected) Medium section to big-ass book to recurring calendar to animated series, the contributors to which keep showing up in consideration of various awards.

You’ve got two weeks notice. Be prepared.

And I just realized that I haven’t discussed this year’s Eisner nominations, on account of they came out while I was at Camp. As we’ve seen in the past forever or so, the distinctions between Best Digital Comic and Best Webcomic are confusing and/or confused, and which are described as:

For the Best Digital Comic category, works must be longform — that is, comparable to comic books or graphic novels in storytelling or length. Webcomics similar to daily newspaper strips, for example, would not be eligible. Digital comics should have a unique URL, be part of a webcomics site, or otherwise stand alone (not be part of a blog, for instance).

So webcomics are defined by what they aren’t rather than by what they are, but for the most part they’ve come to largely be creator-owned work without publisher gatekeeping (although there are a couple of fascinating exceptions in the Best Webcomic Category. This year’s nominees are:

Best Digital Comic

• Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (Monkeybrain/comiXology)
• Barrier, by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin (Panel Syndicate)
• The Carpet Merchant of Konstaniniyya, by Reimena Yee (reimenayee.com/the-carpet-merchant)
• Contact High, by James F. Wright and Josh Eckert (gumroad.com/l/YnxSm)
• Harvey Kurtzman’s Marley’s Ghost, by Harvey Kurtzman, Josh O’Neill, Shannon Wheeler, and Gideon Kendall (comiXology Originals/Kitchen, Lind & Associates)
• Quince, by Sebastian Kadlecik, Kit Steinkellner, and Emma Steinkellner, translated by Valeria Tranier (Fanbase Press/comiXology)

Best Webcomic

• Awaiting a Wave, by Dale Carpenter and Nate Powell, features.weather.com/us-climate-change/arkansas (The Weather Channel Digital)
• Brothers Bond, by Kevin Grevioux and Ryan Benjamin, www.webtoons.com/en/action/brothers-bond/list?title_no=1191 (LINE Webtoon)
• Dispatch from a Sanctuary City, by Mike Dawson, https://thenib.com/dispatch-from-a-sanctuary-city (The Nib)
• The Tea Dragon Society, by Katie O’Neill, teadragonsociety.com (Oni Press)
• Welcome to the New World, by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/26/opinion/sunday/welcome-to-the-new-world.html (New York Times Sunday Review)

I’ll go out on a limb and say that Carpenter & Powell, and Halpern & Sloan were doing Work For Hire; I’ll also note that O’Neill’s The Tea Dragon Society is functionally indistinct from what the Eisners call a Digital Comic — to the extent that she and it are also nominated in the category of Best Publication for Kids (ages 9–12).

Outside the immediately applicable categories, you’ll find Giant Days (John Allison, Max Sarin, and Liz Fleming) nominated as Best Continuing Series, Spinning (Tillie Walden) in both Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17) and Best Reality-Based Work, What Is Left (Rosemary Valero-O’Connell) in both Best Single Issue/One-Shot and Best Coloring, and Elements: Fire (edited by Taneka Stotts) in Best Anthology¹.

The Eisner Awards will be presented on Friday, 20 July, as part of San Diego Comic Con. Best of luck to all the nominees.

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¹ Presumably, if it wins, Stotts will have Shing Yin Khor devise some means of breaking up the statue into components that can be distributed to the contributors.