Hey, thanks for that time off. As readers of this page probably know, I traditionally spend the end of April at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp, which means I’m largely off the grid for a week or so. And as anybody probably knew, the entire world is full of canceled or postponed events, and Camp was one of them. Big sads all around.

But Pat Race and Aaron Suring, the stellar fellows behind AK Robotics, Camp, and numerous other projects, got a brainstorm that at least some part of the Camp experience could be improvised online. It was a last-minute thing because of other stuff they had front-burnered, but it came together. Over the space of five days nearly three dozen sessions occurred, mostly on Zoom, with Camp alumni and would-have-been first-timers coming together to form the intentional and intensely weird community that coalesces around Camp each year.

I already had vacation time blocked out for Camp that left me with no work obligations, so I decided to replicate the Camp experience as much as possible — between the round trip to Alaska and the fact that there’s no internet at Camp itself, I opted to step back from social media and the news¹ for the same period of time that I would have been gone anyway. The only question is if it would succeed the way that people really needed it to.

Yes, Zoom sucks² and we’ve all got Zoom fatigue, but it worked; it worked to the degree that during the opening session, which was mostly just people introducing themselves, saw attendance go up during the nearly 90 minutes it took for everybody to say hi. It worked to the degree that people who were supposed to attend Camp for the first time raved about the virtual experience and have had to recalibrate their expectations for the real thing being even better. There may not have been campfires, drizzle, ravens, and s’mores, but it worked.

There were skills demos, hangout time, socially distant boardgames, and one memorable presentation on the evolution of orcs in fiction, games, and fanart (from the original evil and pretty racist sword-fodder to he big to the modern pinnacle of he big and horny³). There are plans for a zine of favorite recipes (a quaran-zine full of cui-zine, if you will). People that might not have been able to make it regardless of pandemic got to attend. Relationships were established and re-established. Cats and dogs showed up on camera. By my estimation, at least a half-dozen people were logged in every hour the Camp events were running.

I’m not sure there’s a lesson here other than one that we all already know — human connection is important — but it’s worth reiterating. Every year at Camp I give a variation of Lesson One that we teach to Lil’ Baby EMTs — You are the most important person in the world, your safety and well-being are paramount, you cannot help anybody unless you first take care of yourself — and I’ll admit that this year I was saying it as much for myself as for anybody else that needed to hear it. The theme kept coming up, at discussions of [waves hand] all of this, of economic realities, of cooking, pretty much nonstop: I don’t want to ask for help. Other people have it worse. I’m doing okay.

Everybody that said it was sincere, and everybody that heard it was also sincere in stomping on that shit and saying Stop. It’s okay to ask for help. Any kind of help. And the thing is, I’m pretty sure that everybody was, at some point or another, on either side of that exchange. There’s a lot of self-denial going around, mixed with a lot of (in many cases, frustrated) desire to help others.

There’s room for a lot of intentional and intensely weird communities out there, and I encourage you to find and/or found them as you need to. For some of you that will mean applying to #ComicsCamp next time it comes around. For others, it will be grabbing friends and friends-of-friends and getting online and just hanging out being awesome/stupid together. For all of us, it will be a step towards a better frame of mind while we’re still taking rainchecks on the in-person connections we’re all so desperately craving.

Oh, and if you did want to take a whack at forming your own community — online for now, maybe IRL later — Pat and Aaron are full of excellent ideas and have worked out a lot of wrinkles. Maybe they could add a We advise you on community building and support tier to the Alaska Robotics Patreon⁴? Regardless — take a deep breath, make some contacts, and go lift each other up. The world and all of its bullshit will still be here when you get back, but the burden will be a little bit lighter.

Spam of the day:
I was going to include the email I got offering me quick turnaround on mortuary body racks, but that one got me so mad that I called the company to yell at them for spamming something so inappropriate, and it turned out that one of the other Garies Tyrrell (who thinks my email is his email) was supposed to be the recipient. So not evil spam after all!

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¹ As much as I’ve written here in years past that Camp is a place that gets my head on straight, I have to acknowledge the act of stepping away from the shouty echo chamber is a big contributor to that rejuvenation.

² It’s also a tool I’ve used all day, nearly every day, for more than two years at the day job. I like to think that my Zoom wrangling skills helped make it suck a little less for the virtual Campers.

³ It was the mostly hilariously WHAT-filled ten minutes of the past decade.

⁴ Which could use your support, or maybe take a look at the prints, shirts, comics, calendars, postcards, and other stuff at their shop, which they won’t be able to take to/sell at conventions, or out of their store in Juneau, which is likely seeing its entire tourist season drop to zero.

See you in a couple of days.

Before we get started — this is nothing to do with webcomics, but check out what actor/director Mary Neely’s been up to on Twitter. Guaranteed to improve your mood. Now, as a reminder that we in the United States do not have the only severely challenging times (merely those most exacerbated by the greatest idiot possible), Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin joins us today to talk about how things are progressing in the land of bandes dessinées.

After a period of uncertainty regarding what could be planned beyond April, recently France was given more visibility (through the voice of president Emmanuel Macron): the lockdown is now targeted to end May the 11th. This means bookshops, among other retail points, will be allowed to reopen at that date, Glob willing, and that is obviously a relief for comics publishers, and consequently, for the creators they publish.

But the same announcement made it clear this would not be going to be a return to business as usual (and not just in the way retail points will have to adopt social distancing measures): no festival is to take place until mid-July, at the earliest¹. At that point, it was inevitable for both Lyon BD (set to take place in early June) and Japan Expo Paris (set to take place in early July) to announce their respective cancellations this year. This will of course impact our coverage here at the Fleen French headquarters, but will much more dramatically impact the livelihood of the many stakeholders of these opposite kinds of festivals.

As I see it, while many businesses will be able to wake after a period of hibernation and resume more or less as usual (there certainly won’t be as many parties centered around cake and other pastries at my workplace), it is clear many activities that relied on social events will have to reinvent themselves in order to survive the longer period where we will have to live with Covid-19.

First, we have the festival structures themselves: they no longer need to spend the money necessary to rent the congress center or to defray the various contributors or to spend for other various logistics, but (non-profit or not) they do still have to pay the salaries of the few permanent employees they have, as well as various fees, like the rent for organization headquarters, now without the money intake from exhibitors and attendees. Now, they happen to be in the same boat as the many, many live arts festivals (think Avignon for theater and the myriad of music festivals), and it is unlikely that authorities will allow this boat to sink, but that does not mean they will make it unscathed.

Then we have exhibitions and other various unmanned expositions, which are an essential part of comics outreach. Those will not benefit from a centered festival weekend and the publicity that comes with it, but will otherwise be able to take place more or less as usual, since most of those are set up to last a few weeks anyway, allowing visitors to space themselves out. In fact, Lyon BD organization has planned to set up such cultural activities starting in the fall.

Also essential for outreach are panels, but I am afraid those will have to take place online for the foreseeable future. This raises the question on how to make sure contributors would be paid for the trouble, as compensation for panels is an essential complement for some of them, allowing them to dedicate time to properly prepare them and provide quality information. Traditional pay-per-view video on demand seems ill-suited for such endeavors, however; relying on ongoing crowdfunding platforms such as Patreon may be a better starting point.

As for signings, those could take place in bookshops in the same way that many bookshops have always set up such signings year long, but with some additional care: line management is going to become a much pressing concern than it already was, and will probably preclude the most popular creators from even considering this solution. An alternative could be signing in local libraries, though this is more viable for self-published creators: the others apparently cannot normally retail their own books, as evidenced by the fact that a local bookshop would set up a small retail point in the library for the books of these creators when I attended such a library-hosted event.

Finally, as a replacement for anime cons which are often a significant source of encounters and income, I imagine some creators could experiment with local markets. Indeed, France has a healthy network of local markets, and even if they are dominated by foodstuffs, they have always hosted local businesses such as basket weavers, and creators, especially if they’re local, would not be out of place in such a setting. It’s worth remembering it is unlikely to sustain them as well as a market centered on cultural goods would, but it could be worth the attempt.

Besides, I’d bet a pretty penny that local markets are where the decorative face masks (that can no longer be retailed in the now cancelled anime cons) will end up being sold …

So, about like here, then, with the added complication that the rescheduled date for EmCity is 21-23 August, only a month after the now-shuttered SDCC. I wouldn’t hold my breath regarding SPX or Baltimore, either. Looks like there’s going to have to be a bunch more remote programs and (once restrictions start to lift) distributed pop-ups; regardless of official decisions, I don’t see anybody anxious to jump into a tens-of-thousands-and-up situation until testing, vaccination, and treatment are well perfected.

As always, we at Fleen are grateful to FSFCPL for his valued perspective.

Spam of the day:

Votre Site

Although it claimed to be sent by “Pierre”, I don’t believe that it was from our much loved and right trusted Pierre Lebeaupin. So into the bitshredder it goes! Helpfully, Google Translate offers up a suggestion for Other Pierre that I feel almost captures the necessary idiom: vous pliez tu sac à vent crétineux.

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¹ Belgium is unlikely to be a recourse, seeing as it has been hit even harder by the disease, relatively to its population.

Welp, I said a couple of days ago that I just might be getting royally drunk today so I could properly mourn the fact that I am not at this moment flying to #ComicsCamp as I should. Haven’t started, probably won’t on account of treating your life stressors with alcohol is not the best of coping strategies, but damn do I miss me some friends and also large impressive beards. There’s just so many of the in Alaska.

The weather forecast says it’s drizzling there pretty much nonstop through when I would leave next week, and it’s in the temperature range that makes drizzle most oppressively gross, so … yeah, still not calling it a dodged bullet. I’d put up with all of the weather in a heartbeat. But there are small things that are cheering me today and I figured I would share them with you.

• Speaking of #ComicsCamp, Gale Galligan has been a treasured Camp Buddy™ for the past couple of years, particularly when she is teaching us about the ways in which bunnies are adorable and also very, very gross. And she’s the latest creator to sit down with the Brad “Sexy, Sexy Man” Guigar and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett at Comic Lab.

  Dave ‘n’ Brad do a great job of brining as much lightness as possible to these very challenging days, but when they bring in another creator to bounce off of, it gets really fun. Galligan, as you may recall, has been responsible for the Baby Sitters Club graphic novel adaptations since Raina Telgemeier got too busy with her own work after the fourth book, and she knows the YA market like nobody’s business. Galligan joins the boys around the 25:40 mark in this week’s episode, and if you want to enjoy more recent convos, check out Karl Kerschl¹ (26:45 or so), or Lar de Souza (around 20:00). They’ll absolutely lift your spirits.

• Well, that’s one way to convince obsessive completists² to read three months worth of archive. Randy Milholland included a throwaway caption that today’s Something*Positive exists because of a flash-forward panel from a 2013 strip … and then didn’t say which strip it was. And that’s what caused me to start at 1 January of that year and read forward until I found the damn thing. Thanks, Randy. Seriously, though — do you keep a spreadsheet of all the future reference dates in S*P? You must.
• And Nicholas Gurewitch has come up with a seriously disturbing appeal to support his Patreon. I loved it and simultaneously feel like something wrong has colonized a corner of my psyche.

Spam of the way:

COVID-19 – Corona Virus Update from Survival Magazine

Oh, please. Your readers spent decades constructing their infinite tactical survival bunkers and immediately turned into the dipshits out screaming they need everything opened back up so they can get a haircut and free refills on their iced tea.

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¹ Who, weirdly, Google search results believes is 70 years old.

² [waves] Hey.

You see, Thursday was the day I was scheduled to fly to Juneau for Alaska Robotics-sponsored MiniCon and #ComicsCamp. Friday would be spent hanging with the best people in the world, enjoying the ambiance of a world-class coffee shop, ice cream shop, knitting supply shop, state museum, distillery, lingerie emporium built into an old bank building complete with heist target-style vault and/or Italian restaurant. Saturday would be the con, and then the bus ride out to Camp. Ravens would taunt me, and hopefully bears would keep their distance. I’d be home again a week later.

And then the world got its reminder that sickness is never all that far away. Tickets and hotel reservations got refunded, backpack and sleeping bag got put away again. Camp friends got commiserated with. We’ll be back, but it’ll be a while and we’re all very bummed, particularly (I’d imagine) the people chosen to attend for the first time, who have to put off their integration into our weird, welcoming, intentional community until whenever the world gets its collective shit together.

It was the right call; no matter how supportive of the creators it is, no matter how much it helps newbie artists develop their careers, no matter how many people in Alaska would benefit from the public events¹, none of that is worth the risk of immiseration and sickness that just one asymptomatic individual could bring to Juneau² (and visitors could bring back to the corners of the state).

So yeah, little bummed today. Fair warning, I may spend Thursday getting very drunk in order to feel properly sorry for myself about the whole thing. Or maybe I’ll just go back through the 30,000 or so words I’ve already written about Camp, and spend the day texting and calling the people I’m missing.

But even on these blah days — and let’s be realistic, none of us is running more than about 70% of how we should on our best days — there’s encouraging bits to help us navigate. Today, it’s Amulet creator Kazu Kibuishi³, who’s put a long out of print book up for free downloading. The idea was to get Daisy Kutter to a publisher and back into print, but right now he figures it’s more important to get it to people that need to read it than it is to shop it around for eventual re-release. I’m going to keep that lesson about what’s more important in mind for the next while.

Spam of the day:

Using the Covid-19 epidemic to share Jesus

Hail, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, Satan.

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¹ Not the least being, each year every school in Juneau gets visits from creators. There’s not a lot of author and artist visits that make it up to southeast Alaska (much less the rest of the state), and folks come from all over to participate.

² People with complex health challenges are routinely advised to fly to Seattle for care. It’s not the place you want to stress critical care capabilities.

³ A regular Camp denizen and my cabinmate my first year there; I learned more than a year later that once while sleeping he and Rebecca Mock intercepted and squished a spider that was descending towards my face and so I owe them each a life debt.

:01 Books held a day-long series of online chats on Saturday, and a couple hundred people came. Titled Comics Relief, it was bookended by casual talks between :01 creators and imprint director Mark Siegel, with a series of how-to sessions in the middle. Given the limitations of the format, Siegel’s casual talks, which went wherever the conversation preferred, were the most successful parts of the day, with the exception of some technical glitches¹ of the sort that we’re all becoming accustomed to these days.

Speaking for myself, I found a particular comfort in several things that Gene Luen Yang said in the conversations; in the first, he spoke how he was doing mini comics, sleeping twelve to a room at cons and losing money on everything he published at the time he met Siegel, and eighteen months later I had to rent a tux for the National Book Awards ceremony, where American Born Chinese was the first graphic work to be nominated.

And in the last session, as Yang, Siegel, and Ukazu were talking about how much of an influence Avatar: The Last Airbender has become, Yang talked about being a high school computer science teacher, listening to students talk about A:TLA instead of working and thinking it sounded cool, but not getting in on the conversation. After Derek Kirk Kim loaned him the DVDs of the first two seasons (and watching the third as it aired); a few years later, the creators came to him to write the comics that would bridge Aang’s story and Korra’s.

He didn’t come out and say it, but the lesson is inescapable: there’s a lot that’s getting ready to happen, no matter how behind the curve we are at the moment, and some of it will be doing something you love a lot. We can’t all be Ambassadors or MacArthur Fellowship geniuses, but there’s still stuff out there to take joy from coming down the pike.

In other news:

• Brad Guigar, sexy man about town, is jumping into the web-presence game, and he’s doing it in the form of a professional development seminar for the Graphic Artists Guild. His teaching gig may be on hold what with all the colleges being closed, but you can hear what twenty-plus years of cartooning online has taught him.

  If you’re a GAG member it’s free, and non-members can connect for US$45; if you’re a subscriber to Guigar’s Webcomics Dot Com, he’s got a coupon in the members area good for US$15 off. The session kicks off at 2:00pm EDT (GMT-4) on Wedensday, 22 April. The seminar will last an hour, with Q&A to follow.

• Speaking of Guigar, the latest episode of Comic Lab has a pretty extensive discussion about keeping a cartooning business going in times of quarantine. For a different view, check out Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s announcement about their delayed Oh Joy, Sex Toy Kickstarter; they run one about this time every year, and they’ve looked at the uncertain climate (particularly the unsettled state of the US Postal Service) and decided putting it off for a month is the most responsible thing they can do.

  So this is your reminder that if you like comics, it’s probably time to not just toss what you can afford to your favorite creators², but also to call your elected officials and insist on measures to ensure the ongoing stability of the USPS. Repealing the nakedly antagonistic requirement that they pre-fund pensions and insurance 75 years in advance — they have to pay today for the retirement of employees who won’t even be born for a decade! — would be an excellent place to start.

Spam of the day:

Urgent news about metformin

Yes, spammers, I am quite certain that my old friend Jim (who was best man in my wedding, 27 years ago next week), is urgently emailing me with your bullshit. Thing is, you misspelled his name, in a way that particularly annoys him. So yeah, you kind of pooched that one.

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¹ Ngozi Ukazu’s audio was unreliable and delayed, and Lucy Knisley never got her connection quite working (although we all got to see her rather disinterested cat snoozin’ in the background. Hi, Rhino!).

² I haven’t received it yet, but I’ve decided that when I get the stimulus check, it will all be going to comics creators.

Now that it has, we can spend some time rearranging that week in July, be mad for the opportunities lost, and start to move on. And bonus? No hotel rodeo to negotiate this year.

In the meantime, let’s consider some good news:

• The Excellence In Graphic Literature Awards have spent the past couple of days releasing the names of winners, and they’re nearly ready to announce the Book Of The Year. But so far they’ve shared the following:
  • Children’s: Akissi: More Tales Of Mischief by Marguerite Abouet and Mathieu Sapin.
  • Middle Grade (Fiction): White Bird: A Wonder Story by RJ Palacio.
  • Middle Grade (Nonfiction): Guts by Raina Telgemeier.
  • Young Adult (Fiction): Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T Crenshaw.
  • Young Adult (Nonfiction): King Of King Court by Travis Dandro.
  • Adult (Fiction): The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis.
  • Adult (Nonfiction): A Fire Story by Brian Fies.
  • Mosaic Award: recognizing a work that serves diverse, underserved audiences, Kiss Number 8 by Venable and Crenshaw.
  • Book Of The Year: Not yet announced as of publication time. I’ve been stalling, hopingn they’d announced before I hit Publish but nothing yet. We’ll update when we know; wouldn’t bet against KN8, though.

    Update to add: White Bird by Palacio.

  Congratulations to all the honorees; it’s all terrific work.

• Hey, need something to do this weekend (and yes, it is about to be the weekend)? Matt Bors has you covered. He’s made two print issues of The Nib free to download for the month of April. Specifically, you can get the Family and Empire issues (the second and third of five so far), with comicky goodness from the likes of Alison Bechdel, Emily Flake, Joe Decie, Andy Warner, Keith Knight, Sarah Glidden, Eleri Harris, Kendra Wells, Nomi Kane, Matt Lubchansky, Jon Rosenberg, Gemma Correll

  Paragraph break! That was getting long!

  … Joey Allison Sayers, Ben Passmore, Niccolo Pizarro, Masha Gessen, Whit Taylor, Ellen T Crenshaw, Kasia Babis, Brian McFadden, and more. If you like them and would like to encourage Bors to make more (not to mention getting in on that awesome Nib magazine ink smell), drop by the store and pick up the physical thing.

Okay, see you on Monday with highlights from the :01 Books virtual con that runs tomorrow. Still time to register if you haven’t! But I did just get an email saying that there’s been a huge response and the conferencing solution might actually max out. In which case, wait for somebody else to leave, check out the livestream on the :01 Facebook page, or wait for the recordings to be released. It’s just like an SDCC panel room that gets too full!

Spam of the day:

Why is your website – fleen.com not featured on Google’s first page for most of your keywords?

It is. Get lost.

See you tomorrow.

Thanks as always to Jon Rosenberg for hosting Fleen, and for doing what’s necessary to get it back up and running when it stops.

Also, thanks are due to a bunch of creators up and down comicdom, who’ve decided that they aren’t going to let something like a pandemic that forces us all inside take down the friendly local comic shop that depends on us all going out. Creators 4 Comics¹ have come together to offer a series of auctions, the proceeds of which will be pooled to support the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC, although I’m not sure how that works out unless it’s in French or something), which is taking applications for direct aid to stores, to disburse starting at the end of the month.

Various creators are running their own auctions of stuff that is, at times, very them. Chip Zdarsky, for instance, is auctioning off an original erotic story starring the auction winner, a situation for which the phrase self insert is both tailor-made and somehow insufficient. Ryan North, by contrast, is offering an original erotic story about Chip Zdarsky writing erotica about the auction winner and if these two keep this up it’ll turn Tinglesque in no time (North is also offering a never-before-seen comic book script). You can find commissions, signed books, TV show set visits, care packages, promo swag collections, logo designs, and more.

If you want to find a constantly-changing possibly current list of everything, that’s here. Then take a run over to Twitter and look for the #creators4comics hashtag and tweet a bid at the person making the offering you like (increments of a dollar, please). At noon EDT on Monday 20 April, bidding closes² — if you’re the high bidder, make your donation to BINC, send the creator your receipt, and get your stuff. Also keep in mind that new auctions will be going up for the next while, so keep checking in case you don’t find anything grabbing you.

Spam of the day:

Made with nanotechnology to filter the air you breathe

Oh for fuck’s … ahem. Making a mask with a very fine mesh to filter out things as small as viruses is not nanotechnology, you enormous, blithering bullshit artiste.

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¹ Not to be confused with Creators For Creators, who are awesome in a different manner.

² Well, officially at least. Creators may run things with different end times, so check with them.

Today’s example: the Cartoonist Studio Prize, presented as a joint endeavour of Slate magazine’s book review and the Center For Cartoon Studies, currently in its eighth iteration. Year after year, they put together a really strong slate¹ of ten nominees in the category of print, and ten more in web; the shortlists serve as an effective You Should Read This To Keep Up list, and each winner gets one thousand American dollars cash². Folks that you see written about on this page are frequently seen on either list.

This year’s nominees for Best Print Comic are:

• Bttm Fdrs by Ben Passmore and Ezra Claytan Daniels (Fantagraphics)
• Flying Kites by the Stanford Graphic Novel Project (self published)
• Glenn Ganges In The River At Night by Kevin Huizenga (D&Q)
• Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim (D&Q)
• The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis (D&Q)
• Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers (D&Q)
• Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (:01 Books)
• Pittsburgh by Frank Santoro(New York Review Comics)
• Sobek by James Stokoe (ShortBox)
• The Tenderness Of Stones by Marion Fayolle (New York Review Comics)

Part of what I love about the CSP is its utter disregard for length, subject, or genre; if it’s in print and it’s good, it’s on the list.

This year’s nominees for Best Web Comic are:

• About Face by Nate Powell
• Cabramatta by Matt Huynh
• Eat Street Diners Club by Will Dinski
• I Am More Than My Chromosomes by Elísabet Rún.
• Koreangry by Eunsoo Jeong
• Loving My Inner Black Weirdo by Bianca Xunise
• Paranatural by Zack Morrison
• Sleepless Domain by Mary Cagle
• Tiger, Tiger by Petra Erika Nordlund
• Unhealthy by Abby Howard

Again — there’s ongoing series, there’s one-shot autobio/nonfiction, and there’s everything in between. I was a little surprised to see the web version of Unhealthy on the list; not because it’s unworthy — it’s an excellent read — but because it’s only Abby Howard’s half of the longer print version that was a joint project with Sarah Winifred Searle.

If I were part of the jury (and let me stress that I am not), I’d be pulling for Unhealthy, and Laura Dean, which were two of the best things I read last year. But there’s great creators up and down both lists, and as is typical for the CSP, there’s not a name in sight that would annoy me for winning. Congratulations to all the shortlistketeers; the winners will be announced a few weeks.

Spam of the day:

Buy N95 Face Mask and Medical Face Mask to protect your loved ones from the deadly CoronaVirus. The price begins at $1.49 each. If interested, please visit our site:

I didn’t think it was possible to be more pissed off at these bottom-feeding fuckers, but then I noticed the return address on this piece of shit. It was spoofed to appear to come from info (an address that doesn’t exist) at fleen.com.

Like I was going to suddenly give credence to an email claiming to come from a domain I control. That’s just weaksauce.

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¹ I’m so sorry.

² Or about 1.66667 times class money.