So many things have happened since I spoke with you last. Let’s hit the highlights, shall we?

The Hugo Awards got awarded last night in Montreal, and two of webcomicdom’s finest were up for (I believe the first ever) award for Best Graphic Story: Phil and Kaja Foglio for Girl Genius (specifically book 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, starting online here), and Howard Tayler for Schlock Mercenary (specifically, The Body Politic story arc, starting online here). The Foglios won, and Fleen congratulates them; unfortunately that means Tayler lost, and we at Fleen extend our sympathies along with the comfort that at least he lost to some wonderful people with terrific work.

• New England Webcomics Weekend (definitely returning to *hampton, MA in 2010) appears to have spawned a movement: the Dallas area will be home to a webcomickers gathering on Saturday, 14 November. The Dallas Webcomics Expo has a site up, but I’m not sure who’s organizing; a request for information has been sent, and all will be shared at the soonest of times.
• Have you seen this? Wonderella bobblehead on pre-order! The only thing this needs is a voice chip that says Rim me, Sasquatch and you have the perfect desktop accessory or stocking stuffer for children of all ages!¹
• Finally, Commissioner James Gordon needs your help. See, if he’s found to be the cutest dog (and look how cute he is!) in I dunno, America or the internet or whatever, his parents (Chris Hastings and Carly Monardo) will be able to defray the costs of their wedding by a considerable amount … and, I’m told, throw a hell of a party for all of you. So vote already, so he can get back to the important work of fighting crimes.

  PS: for those wondering my own dog is not in the contest, it’s because large dogs never win these things, even though Grace is the cutest dog in the world. Yes she is! Yes she is!.

_______________
¹ Do not actually give this to a child; you will scar them for life.

I think that Chris Onstad may be on his way to topping The Great Outdoor Fight. From the improbable beginning of Todd asking for $6 million from Ray, progressing through the introduction of Ray’s sainted mother to the merest hints of what the GOF might be, there was no reason to suspect how off-the-rails brilliant the story was going to get.

Even once we arrived at The Acres and had seen some of the greatest single lines in the history of Achewood (including “Attention Workers …”, “Thomas Edison … ” and “no one said …” in the same strip, followed quickly by “Frederick H. Coca-Cola … ” a scant two strips later), I don’t think any of us anticipated how momentous and game-changing this story arc would become.

Then Ray tore a guy’s face off.

Next thing we know, it’s despair, exhiliration, friendship, found fathers, and the very Acres in flames. Our expectations of Achewood would never be the same, and even stories that would have been rightly deemed classics prior seemed slightly wan by comparison.

But now — a seemingly typical exchange for Achewood Court (Ray and Mr Bear team up to produce Williams-Sonoma catalogoue porn) has already been forgotten as the prime instigator after only a few strips (Ray’s an inveterate over-editor), leading to a contest whose ridiculousness is only hinted at (really, who would have been surprised if the storyline just petered out after that text message?), while for-the-ages lines get tossed around with ease (there are at least three on this page and as God is my witness I will find a way to work Contestants will compete as identical elephants into casual conversation some day).

But even as the story careens wildly, straining at the limits of Achewoodian logic (is this the real Chuck Williams? The silhouettes say “human”, but he doesn’t seem to have any problem fitting into an elephant suit sized for a cat or bear, or appearing in front of an audience of cat lesbians), it still remains just on this side of the boundary line between What We Have Come To Expect and Something Entirely New.

Then Roast Beef went and got his palm read, received a death sentence and next thing we know frickin’ Cartilage Head — Cartilage Head!! — is all up in the story.

We know Ray has proved himself a coward who would desert a dying man. We thought that he had been redeemed not six months later on Crandall’s Acres. Now his accuser is back and oh, look — Beef appears to be a dying man, what with the Lash of Thanatos and all. A’course, dyin’ ain’t nothing new for Beef (or Ray, for that matter), but still — when you got it on good authority that death has just grabbed its car keys off the table by the door, you pay attention.

• In other news, there is nothing. Nothing matches this. Deal.

It is for entirely unrelated reasons that I’m criminally late in posting today, but as it turns out it’s a good thing — the additional time has allowed for more richness to develop around something I wanted to point out to you. Namely, a thinky piece at Webcomics.com by Scott Kurtz on the topic of webcomics and controlling your business.

That groaning that you hear in the distance that sounds like What, again? is not warranted. Yes, Kurtz has been involved in some of the more spectacular shouting matches that have blown up around this topic, but the essay he’s written is well-considered, well-written, and certainly helpful to the discussion. Key takeaway:

If the gap between business and creative responsibilities continues to widen — after having been so nearly bridged — if independent artists decide to find more ways to remove themselves from the responsibilities of running their own businesses, how can we make sure we don’t return to a time where we lose all our power and ownership in the process?

Can we find a safe harbor in the middle?

This in response to what Kurtz sees as a pendulum swinging away from the aesthetic/philosophical choice of retaining ownership of your comics work, and towards (over- ?) reliance on (what for the sake of brevity we’ll call) a “publisher” in exchange for significant ownership interests in the work in question. As of this time, there’s a good (and calm) back-and-forth in the comments, with the most salient point coming from Jeffrey H Wasserman:

This is the “curse” of a successful small business. Single proprietor businesses, be he or she a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, upon achieving a certain size must grow both horizontally and vertically. He needs people to handle or direct the traffic, systems, premises, bookkeeping, financing, legalities, public relations, advertising, etc.

A good business man realizes that in order to grow the business he needs to hire people or secure the services of outside contractors better than him in other fields. The trick is in managing these people properly and demanding results. [emphasis mine]

Which I think ties into Scott’s thesis, which is okay — very few creators will be fully competent business types as well, but that for their own good they need to at least be aware of how their business is run and not turn it entirely over to others. Kindly refer to the cautionary tale of Lynn Johnston, who upon her divorce discovered her ex-husband (to whom she’d entrusted her business) had strip-mined her accounts (original interview no longer available, but salient bit quoted here); if one can’t trust a spouse without doing some due diligence, one damn well better keep tabs on a corporation. You needn’t be expert in all aspects of business to do so, but you can’t just wash your hands of it and claim any degree of responsibility for your own life. Heck, this statement may satisfy even perennial nay-sayer Wiley Miller (although I’m not holding my breath).

Anyhoo, worthwhile read and recommended to anybody that wishes to create or own anything, not just a [web]comic.

I hope that Dave Kellett‘s got a good bouncer on for the latest Sheldon launch this weekend, or the celebutantes and MTV refugees will be swarming out of the woodwork for anything that resembles a free drink and attention. If you go and you see Paris, tell her to freakin’ eat something, already.

• Speaking of celebrations, couple of round numbers to note: 1000, 2000, and 2500 strips were each recently passed by (respectively) Theater Hopper, Least I Could Do, and Goats (no celebratory strip, so I chose a recent one at random).
• New schedules abound! Well, one new schedule at least:
  

  Hello With Cheese just got 500% Cheesier!

  After starting as a Monday-only strip in January, Hello With Cheese is changing to a 5-days-a-week comic, starting this week. Enjoy the cheesiness!

  My inner math geek compels me to point out that for HWC to get 500% cheesier, it would have to go from one update a week (100% cheesy) to a schedule with 500% more cheese, or six updates a week, so really it’s only a 400% cheesiness increase. My inner everything-except-math-geek compels me to apologize for the math pedantry. In any event, please enjoy a webcomic with hitherto-unknown levels of cheesiness, such that the Kraft people are expressing interest and alarm.

• Let’s wrap on something uplifting, shall we? J. Baird of the Create a Comic Project (oft-featured in these pages) sends word of an article about CCP’s panel at the recently-concluded Otakon, as well as an eyewitness blogpost from said ‘kon (warning: cosplay).

Ryan Pequin does some awesome comics on the web, including hourlies at his own site, and at Top Shelf 2.0 (and I forget what the accepted convention is for ending a sentence immediately after a decimal number, so I’m going to pad out here … pay no mind). To those outlets he’s now added a short-sketch site, to be found at Three Word Phrase. Starts here, and 30 updates in the archive already. Occasionally disturbing, as in the final panel of the latest update.

So everybody remembers Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz‘s magnum opus, Hob, right? Massive, 27-part story that unfolded over 20 months at Dresden Codak, with massively detailed art, essentially forming a manifesto on transhumanism and the technological singularity, and still managing to include references to Richard Feynman and a girl in a miniskirt kicking high in the air (I like to think he’d approve)? Got my copy in the mail yesterday, and boy howdy is it pretty.

I’d just like to point out that for a work that posits (even celebrates) a time when technology and life merge into indistinguishability, it’s oddly comforting that it’s been encapsulated in a form of storage that might be called archaic: the hand-bound book. Hell, my copy had pages that were stuck together as an artifact of the production process, just like hand-printed and -bound books always had for the first 450 years or so of their existence.

Diaz produced 50 of these babies, and later took orders for a run of softcovers (which should be going out shortly by my calculations), but as far as I know, that’s it. If you want to see what the fuss is about (and with the large-trim pages, the images are bigger than on my monitor, and dang do they look nice), come over to my place, ask politely, and please make sure your hands are clean. But you can’t have it, it’s mine.

For those keeping track of such things, there’s still a stack of books from the recent comics gathering that I got and haven’t read yet. Capsule reviews: Dr McNinja 3 and Girl Genius 8 are both shining exemplars of how to bring a payoff to every thrice-weekly page, while still having an overall story develop. Since I’m mentioning Girl Genius, word from Phil Foglio is that the recently-finished-catching-up-online Buck Godot epic, Gallimaufry, will see print in January. Hooray!

• If you’ve ever looked at the list of websites over there to the right, you may have noticed waaaay down at the bottom is one that hasn’t seen updates in a long time; Owen Dunne’s You Damn Kid updated for a long time, released a book (via Keenspot’s imprint), got optioned by Fox TV, went on hiatus, came back, went on hiatus, launched a bunch of other comics, went on hiatus for a long damn time, came back with a live-action video series this past February, and managed a pair of updates before reverting to hiatus.

  Please don’t misunderstand me — I labor under no illusion that Owen Dunne is my bitch, and I don’t mean to bring up the irregularity of his comickry as a means of criticism. Life gets in the way, and through all the interruptions, YDK has retained its place on the links because I really like Dunne’s work and consider myself essentially infinitely patient waiting for the next iteration which begins today:

  [Y]ou get paid and hate your job, I make squat but I like to do this. And that place where we meet in the middle is The Happy Monday Place. Or something like that. So welcome, and I hope you make it a regular stop each week.

  So here’s how it will work. A new page every Monday, with new comics, a short installment of the Barnyard Pete Show, and a monthly edition of Banion — The Podcast. The individual pages will be archived, not the individual comics. (However, the old YDK comics are archived, just click on the text at the top right of the comic.)

  Catch that? The Barnyard Pete live-action shorts will now be in Flash (much faster to produce), and Banion (clueless but serious detective in the Joe Friday tradition with his own webcomic) will now be podcast as an old-style radio drama. Looks like my theory about webcomics being a breeding ground for other forms of creativity wasn’t too far off. Speaking solely for myself, Dunne had me at an all new Nippleshine Manor! Welcome back to the game, Mr Dunne — should a hiatus come up again, I’ll be waiting for your return.

• Know who else we haven’t heard from in a while? Nicholas Gurewitch. Know who’s trying to remedy that? Andrew Farago:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum’s Monsters of Webcomics exhibition is so big that it needs TWO opening receptions with special guest Nick Gurewitch, creator of the popular webcomic The Perry Bible Fellowship.

  On Thursday, August 27, Gurewitch will meet fans and sign copies of the two bestselling Perry Bible Fellowship collections, The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack. The booksigning is free and open to the public.

  On Friday, August 28, Gurewitch guides Perry Bible Fellowship fans through an artistic thesis about visual storytelling, and will go behind the scenes of comic-production with co-writer/spiritual advisor Evan Keogh. Special guest Michael Capozzola (stand-up comedian and creator of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Surveillance Caricatures) will lead a Q&A with Gurewitch immediately following the presentation. This is a ticketed event. General admission for this presentation is $10, or $5 for members of the Cartoon Art Museum.

  Those of you in the San Francisco area at the end of the month, take notes and report back to us.

Did you catch this? David Morgan-Mar ((PhD, LEGO®©™^etc), educator of scientific notions and webcomicker of note, got stopped and mildly searched on his holidays in London on suspicions of terrorism for photographing one of the most-photographed landmarks in England. What’s that? You wanted proof? Here y’go, Sparky. Of course, it’s possible that officer in question wasn’t really so officious as to detain Morgan-Mar on such idiotic grounds — it’s possible that he was a time-traveller, and well aware of the hideous pun that was about to be foisted on the world, and rightly decided it was weapons-grade. For shame, fear-based society, and for shame, Dr Morgan-Mar.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s look at another kind of interesting times: I recently had the opportunity to talk with Holly Post, VP of Special Projects at TopatoCo (“the world’s largest webcomics merchandise company, and probably at least in the top 20 of the hemisphere’s best internet e-stores in general”) about the company’s recent growth, plans for the future, and whether or not they can stay weird and still deal with more serious businesses.

(more…)

In today’s breaking news, Legend of Bill creator Dave Reddick has joined (n the past hour or so) Blank Label Comics. For those not familiar with Reddick’s work, he assists Jim Davis on his strip about a large cat (dunno, don’t think that’s going anywhere), as well as working on various Star Trek-themed strips for Gene Roddenberry’s production company, a single-panel webcomic, and the aformentioned Aragonesque barbarian epic. Look for Legend of Bill to show up on the BLC front page shortly (and maybe at the same time, the code’ll get fixed so that Shortpacked! shows up again (unless … there’s something they’re not telling David Willis? Could this be a Dave-for-Dave swapout?).

Our main story today is what’s likely the last reminiscence of San Diego Aught-Nine: the AfterCon party on Saturday night, hosted by the Cyanide & Happiness gents, Zach Weiner‘s new sketch-comdey undertaking, and the superstars of nerdcore.

I’ll confess something here — I never really got it when a stand-up comedian included lengthy stints opening for music acts. Okay, maybe Sinatra I can see, but the number of people that’ve opened for high-energy, heavily-amplified, passionate-fanbase artists? I just always figured they enjoyed being told “You suck!” and “Gedoff the stage, we want ____ !” Turns out? Not so much.

The audience at The Casbah last Saturday was The Nerdcore Tribe — having missed much of the hip-hop revolution on generational grounds and having an untrained ear that’s not good at catching the verbal dance that characterizes your quality rappers (not that this is unique circumstance with me; I once had a really enlightening half-hour chat with Harvey Pekar about how to train my ear to really get jazz … he called me “man” and “cat”, of which I am very proud), I didn’t catch much of the lingual dexterity exhibited by YTCracker and MC Lars — but there ain’t nothing wrong with my eyes. The crowd was into it, completely absorbed, singing along and on ready to devolve into the joyous riot (no harm, no foul, lots of bumps and bruises) you get on the dance floor when the beat takes you over. If anybody would resent an interruption of their vibe for electronic funnybook cartoons and movies, it was them.

But funny is funny. Catching a short of the oh my God that’s horrible and funny I’m going to hell but I’ll be laughing all the way variety (such as The Sign or I Love Noodles), it doesn’t matter if it’s what you came to see or not. You’re into it. And longer pieces, with Weiner’s troupe of pranksters (including James Ashby, one of his collaborators on Snowflakes) work just as well when they’re as funny as Gateway Drug, LOL CAT, or the as-yet-not-online Ultimate Staring Contest. Even a projector failure (which must have made already-nervous hosts even nervouser … don’t worry guys, you broke every leg out there) couldn’t put a damper on the enthusiasm.

Lessons learned — I’m not too old to stand in a one-room small venue, beer in hand, listening to rappers. I do in fact know all the words to MC Frontalot‘s Livin’ At The Corner of Dude & Catastrophe and Diseases of Yore. The sense of humor that lets a creator sustain a webcomic is (for the right people) transferrable to other media and forms of expression. Beer bought for you by Zach Weiner is always extra-tasty. Many thanks to all the people who put together the show, so graciously invited me, and to the parents who worked so hard making the costumes.

Today, I’m going to talk about some of the books I got in San Diego — two of which were provided by the authors for free, so feel free to take that into account as you read my impressions.

• First up, Wapsi Square book 3, The Timekeeper’s Daughter, has convinced me I may have to stop reading Wapsi Square on a daily basis. Because holy crap you guys, it’s so much better in collected form. This is where the mythology and universe-building of the strip really takes off, and Paul Taylor’s story (of which I suspect we’re getting to see maybe 20% of what’s in his head) just doesn’t have the same impact on a day-to-day basis as it does reading a couple years worth at once. We’re at that midpoint to the story, where the heroes (who are all heroines) finally realize what they’re up against, but do not yet have any idea how to achieve their goals.

  Understand, I’ve been reading Wapsi for more than half a decade now, and it was only on finishing TTD that it really hit me: for the world to be saved, there are going to be casualties. Sacrifices. Bubbly Monica and flaky Shelly will bear the costs of the universe getting to continue, and that’s a pretty big tab to settle. Taylor only has about three years to wrap things up before the Mayan calendar resets in 2012 and everything we know … just … stops … and starts over again a few dozen millenia ago. I liked Wapsi Square in small doses, but I really like it in big chunks.

• Next, the first collection of Punch an’ Pie, and understand: here be spoilers. What we have heah, is failure to communicate. Angela loves Heather. Heather loves Angela. They bite the bullet, move in together, adjust to each other, meet families and co-workers and never quite get into the habit of talking to each other instead of past each other. The tension of unresolved (even unacknowledged) issues ramps up so slowly at first, and then just becomes part of the background noise of who these characters are, that when the in-retrospect-inevitable breaking point is reached, it hits like a punch in the gut with the added insult of a pie to the face.

  And that’s how far creators Aerie (words) and Chris Daily (pictures) planned things with Pa’P — nearly eight months of strips to get Angela past the first grownup relationship to the first grownup crisis so that the strip could really start documenting the process of actually becoming a grownup. It’s slightly cruel to end the book there, where the crisis that breaks down Angela will hang with the reader until the second (and later) volume(s) can tell how she gets put back together again.

  It’s a hell of a cliffhanger, and anybody that reads through to the end will doubtlessly want to know what happens next. It’s online, Bunky, but if you read the book then rush to that link, you owe it to the creators to set aside some money for the purchase of the next book, when it becomes available. Many thanks to Aerie and Chris for providing the review copy.

• Lastly (but not leastly), I’d like to talk about Randy Milholland’s second comic book presentation of Super Stupor (so far available to those that pre-ordered it, hopefully available to all and sundry soon, ’cause it’s really good). The first SS strips made me laugh, as Milholland (who’s simultaneously one of the sweetest, funniest guys I’ve ever met, and the possessor of maybe the evilest sense of humor ever) brought his skewed worldview to bear on the cliches of superheroics.

  Then came the fourth strip, and with it the definitive rebuke to one of the laziest, most disturbing cliches in modern capes comics (and more broadly, much of the popular arts) — that’s when I knew that something special was bubbling up, and it prompted me to hound Milholland until he agreed to sell me the original art.

  But while the dissection of supers worked well in short, mostly-disconnected one-shots, the comics really pull them together. And surprisingly to me, the most prominent theme in SS #2 isn’t about turning the cliches on their heads; it’s one of the most honored (and poorly used by lesser writers) traditions in the world of capes: redemption. A villianess wants to change for the hero she accidentally loves. A hero wants to make up for his derelictions while in the arms of a villianess. A third- (if he’s lucky) or fourth- (if he’s being honest with himself) string hero wants to do what’s right, no matter how much of a fuckup he thinks he is (which is nearly as much as some of his colleagues believe).

  It’s remarkably well done, with a depth of character that caught me by surprise but shouldn’t have. After all, Milholland is the master of presenting us with characters that should be rightly loathed, then organically dragging them kicking and screaming (and us along with them) into people that we can’t help but like. They’re trying, in both senses of the word: trying to be better than they are, and often trying our patience at the same time. SS#2 is a nice, fat comic book, and the best use of five bucks I could have had at the convention had Randy not gifted me with a copy.

  Beg, borrow, or steal it, and if you like capes comics and want to see them do well, send copies to every editor you can find at the big publishers — this is how superheroes should be done (and they’ll really like the back-up story, a nastily hilarious bit about a sentient, evil tumor that provides weak-egoed types with sentient, evil cleavage or a sentient, evil package; very, very funny, and very, very wrong, especially Arch-Angela’s last line).

Well, there’s another San Diego Comic-Con come and gone … some planned things didn’t happen as I wished, some unplanned things popped themselves up, and a whole lotta people came and went. Let’s do our last wrap up (and there may not be a posting as such tomorrow, seeing as how I haven’t really read any webcomics since last Tuesday, but you’re still up a couple posts so that’s all right).

• Continuing on from yesterday’s rushed-for-press-time missive, I got a chance to head over to the IDW booth and ask about the Bat Boy thing. I spoke with Chris Ryall, publisher and editor-in-chief, who described himself as a big fan of the Peter Bagge/Danielle Corsetto Bat Boy strip that ran in the late, lamented Weekly World News (a fan to the extent that Ryall had purchased two of Bagge’s originals the week before). Ryall said that he wanted to shift the pretty whimsical strip (where, among other things, Bat Boy was President of the United States) into a more traditional comic book type universe.

  But, and this is the important part, Ryall wants more people to see the original strips, and wants to run them as a backup feature — he’d been talking with Bagge about this but hadn’t obtained Corsetto’s contact information, which I was happy to supply. Danielle, if you don’t hear from him after the Con rush settles, drop me an email and I’ll make sure you crazy kids get your heads together.

• Changes at Keenspot are in the air. Rumors were travelling the show floor that John Troutman had either precipitously left, or been asked to leave, Keenspot; the circumstances described in the stories varied, but agreed that it came down to an It’s personal situation. We at Fleen haven’t had a chance to speak with Troutman directly for his side of the story (and will endeavour to do so), but when contacted for comment Keenspot CEO Chris Crosby provided the following:
  

  John Troutman’s Keenspot membership has been terminated, but we have no comment on the matter otherwise and wish John the best of luck.

  Take that as you will; as of this writing, Troutman’s Flat Feet and High Heels is still linked on the main Keen page, and in fact was highlighted in the spotlight position at the top of the page when I browsed there a moment ago. I was unable to make it to the Keenspot panel yesterday, so I don’t know if the Troutman issue was brought up; when asked prior to the panel if there were any big announcements planned, Keenspot’s Bobby Crosby hinted at the possibility of more Hollywood deals but wouldn’t make any definitive declarations. Anybody with first-hand reports of the panel is invited to chime in below; please don’t bring any Well, I heard from my friend that he heard from a guy at a booth that he heard from a passing cosplayer … “facts”.

• Paul Taylor’s sculptors brought some stock of the one-run-only Monica statue over to the Blank Label booth. It’s a lovely piece of work, Taylor was clearly thrilled with the outcome (and I’m sure he’d love to have a Shelly sculpture to go with it, so make with the pre-orders). The other person impressed: David Willis, who’s decided to do his own Shortpacked figure(s) with Patch Together. First up: Amber. Question I forgot to ask: corset version or non-corset version?
• The Zudapanel kicked off yesterday with a bang — it was standing-room only (with a posted capacity of 403), and the panelists were taking questions both from the floor and via Twitter (cool idea, but a little wonky in practice — Ron Perazza (director VP of Creative Services at DC … unless his title’s changed in which case let me know, Ron thanks, Laura!) told me afterwards that trying to keep up with the conversation/questions on the handheld while also speaking/paying attention to the conversation was more awkward than anticipated. I missed the first half and the explanations of how the panel would run, which means there was only about 15 minutes left before I was really up to speed as to the mechanics of the session, and I’m not able to fairly comment on the whole thing.

  I’ll say this — that portion of the panel that I did see didn’t really change my mind about Zuda and its operations; I think that the service is a corporate version of an independent production model, and philosophically I prefer the indy approach. It’s not that Perazza, or Kwanza Johnson, or David Gallaher, or any of the other people I’ve met from the Zudaworld are bad or wrong people — as I’ve written before, they’ve been unfailingly polite to me in all our dealings, especially given the skeptical approach I’ve taken to their production model. It comes down to the fact that we have different mental definitions of the word webcomics.

  This is not a problem unique to this discussion — any time I’m contacted by somebody wanting a quote, a primer, or an interview about webcomics, the first thing I have to do is try to come up with a working definition of “webcomics”, and I’ve had a hell of a time developing one that’s both consistent and practical. Hell, last night David Malki ! told me that he hates the word (and even the word comics) so much that we should stop using it. His suggestion: Electric Joy. I think that if we were to come up with a new word, we need to find one that doesn’t invoke mental images of AC-to-DC power supplies and safe words, but hey — that’s just me.

  But getting back to the point, I think we need to have a broader discussion one of these years on the relative merits of the independent model (the creator must really do all the ancillary jobs) vs the syndicate model (all that grunt work done for you, but at a significant cost in rights, and the web is viewed fundamentally as a place to content locked away) vs the Zudamodel (embracing the web, but still functioning as a publisher). For now, you can decide for yourself — the entire discussion was recorded for podcast (which should be over here sometime today), and the Twitter conversation is right there at hashtag #makecomics (Perazza and the other panelists were going to continue to answer questions via Twitter after the session ended, so there’s quite a lot there).

Up today: the long haul that starts at the airport. On the other hand, I managed to get everything packed up, so no box o’ books to ship home, hooray.

Photos: Some catching up to do, so these go back a couple of days. On the floor one might have seen the coolest mobility scooter ever, the saddest clown in the world, and the awesomest fan gift in history (I’m told the guy who made that little clank is approaching retirement and will thus have lots more time to play in his metal shop … I shudder to think what he’ll come up with next; I mean, I like Phil a lot, he’s a terrific guy, but I don’t want him to have a death ray or anything).

Lots of Venture Bros cosplay, with Dr Mrs The Monarch being popular this year (saw another with an absolutely perfect costume, but as casually walking by the booth she was in prompted her to try very hard to sell me a calendar of cosplay fetish photos, I opted against snapping a pic and for moving along as politely as possible; for reference, showing me a photo of a zombified naughty schoolgirl in a total of 18 square inches of fabric and exclaiming, And this is my little sister! is a tad bit creepy). Also slightly disturbing, the pair of cosplayers who appeared to be a couple that were dressed (just about perfectly, I might add) as Dr Orpheus and his daughter Triana (pictured here with the life model for Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose … somebody ask Chris Sims to analyze that one, ’cause I ain’t going near it).

For reference, the Dumbrella Hobo Party booth accepted foodstuffs in exchange for goods (the guy that brought these obtained stickers). Also: orphans, but making change was really messy. We weren’t able to get Iron Chef Sakai to do anything with the beans, but we tried. And there was some adorable animation at Top Chef, as Owly and Wormy went looking for lunch.

That’s it. See you next year.