Just had lunch with Official Friend o’ Webcomics Rick Marshall (currently doing his best to get webcomics coverage added to MTV’s Splash Page); we’ve made plans concerning the upcoming New York Comic Con (The Big M will have a large presence there, and Marshall will be moderating one panel on Saturday (5:15 to 6:15, 1A07, “Radical Publishing”). If you bump into him during the show, make sure they let him out of the MTV booth long enough to get some food.

• Via Shaenon Garrity, news of the second annual scholarship in honor of the late King Features editor, Jay Kennedy. It’s from the National Cartoonist Society Foundation, which means that it’s got a focus on traditional newspaper-style strips. But check out this part:
  

  Applicants must be college students in the United States, Canada or Mexico that will be in their Junior or Senior year of college during the 2009-2010 academic year. Applicants DO NOT have to be art majors to be eligible for this scholarship.

  Along with a completed entry form, applicants are required to send 5 samples of their own cartooning artwork; noting if and where the work has been published (either print or web). [emphasis mine]

  You’ve got a couple of weeks, college students. Between this and the Penny Arcade Scholarship (2008 winner discussed here), opportunities for young practitioners of the geekly arts are only getting better.

• Yay! Something*Positive 1938 is back! And we’re only about four months of story-time into the sage of the MacIntire ancestors, so there’s plenty of Depression Era (the original Depression era that is, not this weak-sauce knockoff going on now) wackiness to look forward to.
• I am morally obligated: moustache (eventually to be found here).

Okay, mangled quote, but the sentiment is sincere — the creatures cooped up in Andy Bell’s head have now been successfull trepanated for seven years. Celebrations include a new website, a Birthday Creature that has a love for Slim Pickens, and a renewed resolve to ruin any restful sleep you might otherwise have for another seven years. Yay?

• In other news, webcomicky Inaugural Hijinks continue, as Shaenon Garrity gets her drawing on. There might be nothing in this world sadder than a wet transvetite, but he seems pretty happy here.
• Lots of webcomics creators joining Derek Kirk Kim’s call for creators to share their displeasure over the all-white casting of the planned live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I never watched Avatar, so I didn’t know the show was so directly linked to and inspired by various asian cultures; if not for Kim, I would have been primarily concerned that what I always heard was a very good story had been given the kiss of death: M Night Shyamalan will be directing.
• From alert reader Pat Race of Alaska Robotics, an important tip:
  

  I wanted to make sure others using FeedBurner are aware that it’s being folded into Google at the end of February. This may affect your feeds and subscriptions if you’re not on top of the transition.

  More info on the transition at that quote; if you do use FeedBurner, now’s the time to get started on whatever shifts you need to make. You’ve got a month, use it wisely.

• Various good stuff over on Webcomics.com right now: getting merch to a show (specifically, Brad Guigar on navigating the myriad ways of bulk shipping), and rebranding your strip (specifically, Kris Straub on the recent — and very successful — Starslip transition).

We at Fleen have noted in the past that Brian Warmoth, Friend of Webcomics, deserves better than the [web]comics industry has given to him. It’s not as good as a permanent gig, but Comic Book Resources has arranged with the War Moth to do a series of interviews with webcomickers expected to make a splash in 2009 — first one’s up now, and I’m going to just blindly recommend you read all of them as they come out. He’s that good.

• Not quite webcomics, but have you seen the latest Scott Pilgrim movie news? Freakin’ Superman is going to be Evil Ex-Boyfriend #3 (with super vegan powers, and we can only hope a cameo by webcomickers).
• Somebody will have to check me on this, but I think that Tales of Marga, over at Graphic Smash, just set the record for the longest middle-of-the-story hiatus. New story page today, we’re back! splash page this past Sunday, and previous story page … Wednesday, 25 July 2007. Welcome back to the game, Thor Thorvaldson Jr.
• Two words for you: Bobby. Crosby. He can be a bit … forceful in his opinions; polarizing, even. But dang if the guy doesn’t know how to pick exactly the right artist to work on his various projects.

  Owen Gieni, Remy Mokhtar, and Tiger Claw couldn’t have artistic styles more different from one another if they tried (heck, Gieni alone has more divergent styles than you can shake a stick at), but then Last Blood, Marry Me, and +EV are very different stories that require very different art styles. To that list of successful collaborations we may now add (thanks to alert reader Román Sánchez, who pointed me towards it) Dreamless, with art by the incomparable Sarah Ellerton. With fewer than half a dozen pages, I can’t tell you much about Dreamless except that it’s got me kind of hooked. I don’t like to make statements so early in a strip’s lifespan, but I have a good feeling about this one.

  I should also note that Crosby is still looking for artists to collaborate with in 2009 — and he’s paying. The terms aren’t fully disclosed (and as always, consider carefully what you’re signing with the assistance of competent counsel), but if you were ever wanting to do webcomics work with a short-term goal of getting into print, there ’tis.

  Keep in mind, this is work for hire: the stories are part of Crosby’s sandbox, and playing with them is going to mean following his rules. But on the other hand, to do so doesn’t require you to, say, bring original IP to the table and assign many of the rights away. And hey, at Crosby’s promised rate of at least $15/page (plus a cut of future profits, terms not disclosed), one of his 100-or-so-pages stories comes to a payout on the same order of magnitude as what a Zuda winner would get. Intriguing, yes?

Webcomics notes the peaceful transfer of power and welcomes our new benevolent overlords with comics to note the occasion, and art of both the printed and wooden interlocking varieties. As a side note, that puzzle from Chris Yates is (as of this writing) going for less than the fair market price of his other Baffler!s of similar size and complexity, so hey — bargain time.

Speaking of bargains, if you’re in the market for a warehouse manager, the one that used to run the Achewood store is looking for a job. Hey Chris Crane, I don’t know how you feel about cross-continental commutes, but it sounds like Topatoco is growing by leaps and bounds these days and they could maybe use a hand.

Do you like process tutorials as much as I do? Probably more, considering that I can neither draw nor use Photoshop. In any event, there’s a very nice process tutorial today from Nedroid — all about building an image in CS4. If you want some Q&A about said process, it can be found in Mr Oid’s LiveJournal.

Soooooo … we pointed out about two weeks ago that John Campbell, was preparing for his annual descent into madness, aka hourly comics. Although he’s struggling against microbial attempts to kill him, so far he prevails, and has indeed convinced others to join in his unique brand of sleepless creation. Kate Beaton has the most compact roundup of Hourly Comics Doers, and you can get in on it less than two weeks hence when Hourly Comics Day hits. Give in to the madness.

• Fresh off his 2005 talk finally getting posted to the TED video site, Scott McCloud follows up with an interview with Jesse Thorn on The Sound of Young America. I didn’t know this one was coming up, so it was just luck that I was near a radio last night and heard Jesse’s intro at the top of the show. As mentioned a few weeks back when he spoke with Chris Onstad and David Malki !, Thorn is probably the best radio interviewer in the game today, and his talk with McCloud was a terrific listen — you can check out the podcast here.

  And if that weren’t enough, the Sunday evening guy on WNYC followed up TSOYA with the weather, some teasers for the programming to come, and the revelation that he used to be the McCloud family babysitter. As I wrote to Scott last night, it’s a weird world, and he sits in the middle of it all (the world, and the weird).

• Finally, Heidi MacDonald brought us some news over the weekend — following in the footsteps of Phil & Kaja Foglio, Carla Speed McNeil, and Wendy & Richard Pini, Colleen Doran has converted her formerly-print indy comic to a webcomic. One of the things you should know about Ms Doran is that she runs a lot of links and posts at her blog on creator’s resources — agents, copyright and trademark info, things like that.

  Oh, and while I’m here, we’ll note that while she doesn’t have a table, Ms McNeil will be attending NYCC and contribute to two panels — come back later in the week, we’ll give you the details, along with all the other webcomics-relevant panels we can find.

So, Child’s Play — looks like I jumped the gun in reporting their totals for the year. Today brings what will likely be the official cutoff of the 2008 seasonal effort, with a total of 1.43 million frickin’ dollars, which well exceeds last year’s take (when the worldwide economy wasn’t being totally bitchcakes). Yikes.

In case you feel like thanking Messers Krahulick and Holkins, you can find them in three weeks time at New York Comic Con, along with such other luminaries as Scott Kurtz, Brad Guigar (somebody remind me to bug him for details about the rumored Phables print collection), various Dumbrellites, Comics Bakers, Slingshot Girl (who I hear is to illustrate one of the stories in the long-rumored Machine of Death collection), a band of fugitive Canadians with a cool ride, and (major thrill for me here) Karl Kerschl and friends:

If you’re in or around the area, please come by and say hello. I’ll be doing sketches, selling T-Shirts and prints and giving away stickers. And probably wandering around a lot. Hey, it’s New York! Even the frigid winter weather can’t keep me from exploring Manhattan.

I’ll also be sharing table space with Cameron Stewart, compatriot and author of Sin Titulo. And if we’re really lucky, Ramón Pérez and Andy Belanger might loiter around long enough to sketch something. That’s half of txcomics right there!

So, wisdom-of-the-crowds time — who else is going to be there that I’ve missed?

Answer: This unretouched photo shows a standard postal envelope (complete with postmark) dwarfed by his enormous hand. Your only choices are to submit to the Nexus of All Webcomics Realities, or to be crushed. There are no alternatives. Now that we’re done being terrified, let’s move onto some news.

• Missed it: Pilli Adventure now available en Español.
• Seasonal Merch Alert: Valentine’s Day is now officially less than a month away, so if you want to get something to express your feelings to your special dude or lady in a webcomics motif, now’s the time. Roast Beef seems not to have anything smoochin’-related, but you can find find examples of the craft from Wondermark, Eros, Inc, Octopus Pie, and quite probably others, but those are the ones I’ve noticed.
• WOOO HOT NAKED ACTION WOOO: Ask Dr Eldritch decides that after a fairly serious 500 comics, the theme for the next 500 should be ladies gettin’ naked. Seriously, fully two–thirds of the comics since #500 have featured young teens ogling a naked lady. Honestly, Ask Dr Eldritch creator Evan Nichols — isn’t there enough of that on the internet already?

Okay, everybody who’s not read Jim Zubkavich’s Makeshift Miracle, stop right damn now and go start from the beginning. Now do yourself a favor and pick up the print version, because it reads even better in book form. Now ask yourself, Why is Gary pushing a two-three year old book that prints pages that ran on the web like seven-eight years ago, cool as it may be?

The answer, Bunky, is because of what Zubkavich has been up to since then. Bit of design work, some artwork for a mildly obscure RPG there, and oh yeah — artwork for a new browser game … a little thing called ZORK.

Holy.

Crap.

Zubkavich is the lead designer, contributing all the characters and monsters, and was aided by a terrific logo design from the able hands of fellow webcomicker Indigo Kelleigh. Honestly, the only thing that could make this cooler is if the soundtrack busts some phat rhymes.

Not quite getting the idea of “easy”, or just in a cranky mood? Chris Yates eschews RSS feeds for The Update-O-Tron. If anybody manages to navigate it all the way to the end successfully, let me know. Also, I think that by the time you finally do navigate it to the end, it’s statistically likely that the strip will have updated.

• I don’t have the energy for this — would somebody please explain to Zuda that their understanding of women vis-a-vis webcomics (as both audience and creators) might possibly be a bit skewed? ‘Cause this shit ain’t making me think that the people in charge of Zuda (or, to be fair, this particular marketing push) have ever met actual live girls. (link via ¡Journalista!)
• C’mon people, we could have done better than this — Mike Rouse-Deane rends his garments:
  

  After 9 months, 134 different artists contributed to 134 different strips each one adding their own take on a group of police officers and their lives. The goal was to make it an entire year, from April 1st to April 1st and finish it. Each strip was on time, each strip was regular as clockwork until today.

  As of Tuesday 13th January 2009 the Guest Strip Project failed in its mission. It wanted to carry on a regular strip through different artists and raise as much money to the Make-A-Wish International Foundation as possible. This has always been its goal and unfortunately we have failed.

  Via email, Rouse-Deane informs us that GSP raised $84 (sadly, I don’t think that’s a typo) for the Make-A-Wish International Foundation through ad revenue and book sales, and that the direct link to the Make-A-Wish Foundation on the site was visited 106 times. Still, every little bit helps. It was a hell of a thing for Rouse-Deane to try, and it’s too bad that the full year didn’t get filled. Go give the archive a read, and if you like even the occasional strip here and there, toss a couple of bob to MAWIF.

• Finally, The Flowfield Unity takes a shot at rhyming slang. Very clever stuff, and I’ll tell you this much — I’m going to use the word berk much more than I have in the past, now that I know its origin.

Major redesign today at what is now merely “Starslip” without the “Crisis” — complete with new, sleeker character designs (they already appear to be more facially expressive), which only makes sense since they’re in a completely different universe and all. Now we just have to wonder what the big, three-glowy-bits thing at the bottom of Friday’s strip was. It kind of looks like a cross between a Starslip arch, the 2001 space fetus, and one of the Bone cousins.

So despite the fact that I told you all to go to Danielle Corsetto’s New Jersey signing this past Saturday, I’d completely spaced on it myself because I’m an idiot. Until, that is, lazing around my home on Saturday early afternoon, reading Jennie Breeden‘s The Devil’s Panties volume 2 and hitting page 183 where Jennie recounts meeting Danielle at a convention and getting her picture taken with the giant McPedro.

Crap! I exclaimed, and quickly finished a number of household chores I’d been putting off. Then I raced up to Kenilworth, and had a grand time with Danielle until the snow forced the signing to conclude early; if you tried to come by after about 4:30, Danielle feels really bad about it.

Because I forgot my camera (cf: idiot, above), I didn’t get any pictures with Ms Corsetto, and because I already had her two books signed & sketched, nothing new there either. But because Ms Breeden fortuitously left room at the bottom of page 183, Ms Corsetto was kind enough to do a sketch in that space. You’ll have to pick up a copy of DPvol2 to figure out why cartoon Danielle is shocked at her own previous behavior.

Confidential to RS3 in MA: Happy Birthday, and also apparently to PM in Sweden. In fact, Happy Birthday to each and every webcomicker — much like race horses are all assumed to have a birthday of 1 January, I’m declaring 12 January the Official Birthday of webcomickers who are not Jon Rosenberg. Hooray!