You may have heard about hosting difficulties that beset webcomics and and around Thanksgiving. Meredith Gran found herself cut off at the knees and having to shift sites on pretty much zero notice (not the first time this has happened to her, if memory serves — curse her ever-increasing readership!).

Then the PvP forums (hosted by Kris Straub under the umbrella of the Halfpixel hosting) found themselves on the chopping block for the crime of consuming too many CPU cycles (and secondarily, containing too exemplars of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory), with some discussions migrating to other fora, and others finding their own home.

It’s never pretty when these kinds of crises require a site owner/creator to scramble to find alternate solutions, so Straub has a handy primer on getting ahead of the CPU curve over at Webcomics.com. Go check out his mailsack for all the dirt. Short form — you may not be consuming excess resources now, but you will someday. Best get yourself optimized while you have the time to do so all leisurely-like.

In other news:

• A little late on my part, but the webcomicker cameo meme continued at Weregeek for the strip’s second anniversary.
• Now here’s how you promote a book: Ray Friesen has a mess o’ cartoons up at Don’t Eat Any Bugs. He also has a book, Cupcakes of DOOM! (which, I’m reliably told, features sword fights aplenty, parrots, penguins, sea serpents, a treasure hunt or two, and all sorts of other piratey shenanigans), coming Real Soon Now:
  

  I’m running a special promotion where the first 50 preorders get a free page of original art from the book, suitable for framing or accidentally dropping behind the couch.

  I’m hoping that Friesen isn’t under-valuing his originals, but if you take a look at his work and decide you like it, it’s hard to beat that opportunity right there. I’m wondering how I can convince some of my favorite creators to replicate this tactic. In any event, check out CoD!‘s first chapter and decide if $12.95 + S&H is too much to ask for original art pages (answer: “No.”).

• Reminder: The Guest Strip Project has simultaneously:
  1. Hit 100 strips
  2. Started the December Donationathon — 31 strips in 31 days
  3. Put the Kid’s Book Project on special for only £4, with all money going straight towards the Make-A-Wish Foundation

  As always, the call for guest strips is open, and coordinator Mike Rouse-Deane would be happy to slot you in for one of the remaining days in the year-long project.

So my niece Colleen attends the Savannah College of Art & Design, where she studies art history and is busy with her thesis (I keep telling her she needs to do a thesis in the form of a daguerreotype fumetti, but she keeps going on about not wanting to die from exposure to dangerous chemicals). We got to talking comics during the run-up to Thanksgiving.

I introduced her to the finest in sci-fi art criticism, and she complained that she burned three hours trawling the Starslip Crisis archives before having to leave to enjoy food with the rest of us whiteys. In return, she pointed me to three friends whose work I now share with you:

The portfolio of Jon Chadurjanijhadistan … to be honest I’ve known the guy for four years and I have no idea how to spell his last name. His longest running project is “Robot Dave”. [Editor’s note: Jon Chad has graduated SCAD and now teaches silk screening and bookmaking at the Center for Cartoon Studies, which he describes as a dream job.]

Becky Driestadt. Everything she does is beautiful, and usually involves forest critters. [Editor’s note: there’s hints of Owly in Driestadt’s work, and I like it!]

Ned Hugar, my roommate and best friend. He’s an acquired taste, but I love him. To be honest I don’t quite get Cats Jetson, but his Urban Buzz project is really cool. [Editor’s note: I’m picking up … not sure I’d use the word ‘influences’, but echoes of Kurtz, Krahulik, and Gran in the art and animation design, and definitely influences of John K because the guy is inescapable.]

Enjoy, and see you all in December.

If I don’t miss my count, this makes a total of two Team Force Alpha strips in two years. Ironically, this is not the worst update schedule in webcomics.

• News from across the Atlantic: pre-orders soon on the new Planet Karen book. Karen Ellis has put herself out there in her autobio journal, and the strip is one of the really good new voices of the past year or so. You’re not working tomorrow, so take a trawl through the archives; if you like what you see, watch this space for news of the orders opening.
• Speaking of books and preorders, Danielle Corsetto‘s Girls With Slingshots vol 2 is now available. Buy with vol 1 and get a discount! Hey, Danielle, next time you’re in New Jersey, I got an awesome bar to share with you — they make drinks interesting and strong.
• Trust Jennie Breeden to quote Georgia state jurisprudence on a … pressing topic. This made me giggle out loud.
• Finally, nothing to do with webcomics, but this is too funny not to share with you. Happy (non-Canadian) Thanksgiving, everybody.

Confidential to Noz-Eezin’ in the Hudson Valley: I’m six years older, how do you think I feel? Happy Birthday.

I’ve mentioned previously how Freakangels, by Internet Jesus (with illustrator Paul Duffield), reads better by running several weekly installments (each six pages long) together. Know how it reads even better? As a book. Picked up the trade paperback recently, and damn, but Warren Ellis can write. He’s a master of the show-don’t-tell skillset, giving us bits and pieces of a ruined world without every coming straight out and giving us the whole exposition (not that he doesn’t know how to do exposition up a treat).

And in print, some pages work better than on the screen; check out this four page sequence from the story; in the book, the first two images face each other, as does the second pair. Now consider a few additional facts:

• Freakangels follows a near-total four-panel layout; sometimes it’s splash pages, sometimes it’s one above and two below (or vice versa), but it’s nearly always four panels on the page
• That almost completely blank page has a four-panel grid on the other side of the sheet of paper
• The paper is slightly thin

As a result, there’s a subtle ghosting of panel borders and word balloons that show up translucent behind that big block of white. It turns an image of being lost in the totality of the universe into something more haunting — panels and balloons mean the passage of time and conversation in comics, and they’re going on somewhere just past where (or when) you can grab onto them. It may be an accidental artifact of printing on too-thin paper stock, but damn it looks pretty.

So there you are. We’re nearly the same age, Warren Ellis and me, speak the same language, and have had many of the same historical touchstones in our lives, and yet he turned out to be the kind of person that could think up and spin stories that I absolutely adore and I did not. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all those voices rattling around in his head waiting to get out and for his compulsion to spit them out to where I can read them. Now, who wants pie?

Now this is how I know the economy isn’t really imploding: independent webcomic creator Meredith Gran’s business is too successful to handle herself:

It’s difficult for me to delegate tasks to others, but I believe the time has come to find an intern.

I am looking for someone who is hard-working, reliable, knowledgeable with computers, and is near/can travel to Easthampton, Massachusetts.

My ideal intern would be either an art student or a budding artist, who’d like a hands-on look at the business of webcomics and self-publishing.

This is not a paid internship, as much as I’d like to be able to afford that right now. I’m happy to do the necessary paperwork to give you college credit, and I will gladly buy my interns lunch and take them out for drinks once in a while. But if you need a salary to live, I’d like to be quite clear that I am not your gal.

Honestly, this is a situation that I’m surprised I don’t see more often in webcomics. Sure, there was The Great Halfpixel Intern Fight of Aught-Eight, but where are the others? Just about every webcomics creator lives within spitting distance of a college … just about every college has some kind of internship program … there’s all kinds of departments that might apply to webcomics interning (art, business, publishing, and creative writing come immediately to mind). Just as long as the intern isn’t going crazy with the Uline catalog, abusing the Endicia account, or calling their boyfriend/girlfriend halfway ’round the world for eight hours at a stretch, there’s not much downside.

Contact info for Ms Gran may be found at the link. If you’re not in the western Massachusetts area, consider that you’ve probably got a webcomicker near by who may be looking for the sort of go-getter that approaches with a stack of college credit paperwork in hand and says, I’m reliable and trustworthy. Sign here, and I can work for you in exchange for coffee and bathroom privileges starting next week. And if you put in the request to the MBA program, I know that there’s still 14 students looking for case studies that will do an analysis of your business needs and opportunities for free.”

Gonna be a sparse week — looks like I’m not the only one with frantic stuff to do this week (what with the impending ‘Merican holiday and all), so let me just point out the Holy Bat-Buckle on Metal Steve, and we can all prepare for the feast (side note: Randy Milholland referenced the Questions of Bartholomew in the run-up to the catgirl holocaust, but I’m digging this Orpheus-like conclusion alongside the apocryphal gospels … for my money, S*P has more depths to it than your average Classics scholar).

• Today marks 3002 updates at Sinfest, and while the actual day of the big round number was pretty nondescript (with nary an acknowledgement of the achievement on the site), the day after featured one of Tatsuya Ishida’s gorgeous Sunday blowouts, so that’s all right.
• I’ve mentioned Moose Mountain once or twice since it launched, but I must confess that the current storyline — about a teenage squirrel that goes on hunger strike until she can move back to New Jersey, complete with her teeth growing out of control — is my favorite so far. Not just for the wacky hijinks, but for the simple fact that New Jersey is a place that many of us choose to dwell despite the opinions of out-of-staters.
• Too slow on the draw, dammit. Meredith Gran’s putting original paintings up for sale at Octopus Pie every weekday between now and Christmas, so I have 22 more chances to snag one of these beauties.

The various half-baked personages behind mezzacotta (including, one should note, Dr David Morgan-Mar, PhD, LEGO^TM) appear to have set themselves a new goal: launch as many new webcomics in as short a period of time as is physically possible. Thus, two new contributions to the genre this week: Square Root of Minus Garfield and Lightning Made of Owls.

SROMG is seeking to use a different mechanism for messing with Garfield strips in each offering. Thus, strip #1 offers Garfield in haiku form and #2 gives us a multiplicity (two, actually) of Garfields. There is no strip #3 yet, but my guess is that the mezzacottans can keep this up for quite a while before they get bored and/or run out of Garfield permutations.

LMOO is a user-driven project. Given the characters supplied (which may be redrawn as desired, so long as certain key identifiers are kept), do yourself up a single-panel strip on anything and submit it. Into the queue it goes, and hey presto! You’re on the internets. Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.

Speaking of Australia (which we were, considering the mezzacotta conspiracy are from Oz), there’s a webcomic I’ve been following for a little while now that has built up enough content that I can share it with you. Home Time Bell is about six kids walking home from school one summer day in Australia.

I particularly like the stylistic conceit that creator Campbell Whyte sometimes employs where he shifts perspective out-of-plane on the 2D world of the comic, giving us a new POV on the world.

On the other hand, Home Time Bell lacks a decent navigation system, so if you’re going to read it, let me save you some time and point you to the first strip. Otherwise, your only alternative is to start from the home page and hit “previous” until you get to the beginning, then work your way forward again.

Item the First
I got an email request for my mailing address about a week and a half ago; throwing caution to the wind (it’s not that I mind the occasional flaming bag of poop in the mailbox, but I hate it when they come postage due), I supplied it. As a result, many thanks to Chris Hallbeck, who gifted me with a copy of The Book of Biff #3: Fresh Toast, which is notable for two things:

1. Eyebrows! I’m in stark disagreement with Brad Guigar here, who finds them distracting; I’m impressed by how expressive those unholy antennae are on Biff. But since you want to see Biff with the eyebrows gone — check it, Brad.
2. Dittos! Okay, a bunch of you are too young to remember the ditto, which was an earlier form of paper reproduction much used by schools in my youth. The pages used a wet transfer system with a fluid that was heavy on alcohols and volatile chemicals with a distinctive smell.

   If you got one of those faintly purple sheets and it was still damp, you’d sniff it for the lamest, most low-rent high in all of history. The inks used in TBOB#3:FT must have been formulated in an old ditto spirit distillery, ’cause they brought back memories of pop quizzes, #2 pencils, and filmstrips.

So it’s fair to say that TBOB#3:FT had a significant, visceral impact on me, right from the opening pages. I can’t guarantee that your copy will flash you back to a bored and misspent youth, but it’s worth a shot.

Item the Second
The lads at Unshelved have revealed the winners of the 2008 Pimp My Bookcart contest, and the top winners (out of … it looks like nearly 100 entries) are really amazing.

That foodcart looks just like the real thing (although hopefully it lacks the taxi exhaust, caked-on grease, and unkillable mutant strains of pathogens resulting from untold generations of evolution). The fire engine looks better equipped to handle structure fires than some real apparatus I’ve been around. And the Dr Suess model down the page is both delightfully loopy, complete with a cute ‘n’ cheerful librarian driving it¹.

Item the Third
Zuda got a great deal of attention from me in the time between announcement and launch; my views on the service are pretty well-known, and I haven’t spent many brain cycles on it since then (mostly because the viewer is a nightmare of bad interface design, memory bloat, and severely lack the ability to play nice with my browser of choice).

However, I’ve heard nothing but good about several of the stories that have come out of Zuda, and now some of them are getting the dead-tree treatment. Look for High Moon and Bayou to hit the stores in 2009, and let’s hope that they’re such big sellers that the 1% royalty the creators get actually adds up to real money.

________________
¹ Purchasers of this model are advised that they must supply their own cute ‘n’ cheerful librarian.

Considering that I’m not really a gamer, it’s a bit peculier how very funny I find Penny Arcade. In fact, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins could each kick me repeatedly in the beanbag, and it still wouldn’t counterbalance the intense pleasure I get from contemplating carrot cake soup.

When you’re in the position of being arguably the most influential webcomic in a rapidly growing medium, when your efforts keep (at last report) a dozen-odd people on payroll, and you reach a milestone like ten years of updates, it’s time to kick back and celebrate bad-ass style:

Also, Penny Arcade turns 10 years old today. We’re going to the Olive Garden!

-Gabe out

I’m reminded of a blog post by Ed Roberston of Barenaked Ladies in a tour blog — a friend from back home was hanging with him in LA for a few days, and had apparently expected a non-stop whirl of parties, playmates, and papparazi. Instead, it was evenings of pizza and Playstation, afternoons on the golf course, and a final summation: You guys are the worst millionaire rock stars ever. Jerry and Mike, thank you for being the worst millionaire rock stars of webcomics, and thanks for the laughs.

In other news:

• Ever notice how you never see Howard Tayler and Jerry Holkins in the same place at the same time? Mighty supsicious if’n you ask me. Anyway, “Howard” gave a keynote address in August to the Utah Open Source Conference on “The Free Content Business Model”, which for “Tayler” means webcomicking as a business with actual numbers. A 33 minute long video of the session is now available, and likely of interest to anybody that’s trying to make internet scribbling their livelihood.
• New interview with Greg Carter at Palace in the Sky Webcomic News, on the whys and wherefores of his vampire epic. Also, Carter, Gina Biggs, and James Burns will be on the webcomics panel at 4pm on Saturday at Altanta Supercon.
• URL alert! A site redesign means that Krishna Sadasivam’s PC Weenies has shifted from a .net to a .com address. Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Did you notice this bit at The AV Club, about web features that made the jump to books? It’s in the writeup of Garfield Minus Garfield:

So many webcomics eventually get collected into book form that we decided to leave webcomics as a whole off this list […]

Now I may be a hack pseduo-journalist, but I remember hearing once that in a newspapery context, you don’t use a term without defining it, unless you’re absolutely certain that every member of your audience knows what you’re talking about. I guess that means that we’re ubiquitous now. Keen.

Also ubiquitous on the internets: Porn. Stick with me, I’m going somewhere with this. There’s a particularly schizophrenic approach to sexuality in this country — culture high and low utilizes sex as its lingua franca, but we’re taught from a young age that sex is bad, dirty, nasty, and if done outside of the sacred bond of marriage, will blow your legs off. And judging by the joyless parade of moisture that characterizes most porn, I’m not surprised.

True story: I once stayed in a hotel with a flaw in its in-room movie system; near as I could tell, anytime anybody on my floor ordered a movie, it showed up on one of five channels on my TV (my fellow travellers have terrible taste, by the way — that many people paying for Pauly Shore movies?). I could generally catch about 45 minutes of a feature before somebody else entered an order and displaced the current offering, but all the porn movies were on the same channel. No displacement there — on average, eight minutes after the feature started, the screen would go gray and stay that way until the next order came in. My interpretation — whoever ordered the porn was done with it and turned the channel off; insert obligatory David Bowie lyrics here.

But the real punchline? That major hotel chain, family-run by nice, God-fearing people, almost certainly makes more money off porn than anybody named Hefner or Flynt. And it’s not even fun to watch, much less amusing or (heaven forfend) funny.

Which, in my typically roundabout way, is why I was so happy to receive the following announcement the other day:

Beginning November 15th 2008, Slipshine.net and Studio Zoe, in conjunction with Studio Foglio, are proud to announce that we will be featuring for all of our customers, the works of Xxxenophile by artist and writer Phil Foglio. Xxxenophile is a six volume masterpiece originally released between 1988 and 2000, and has been acclaimed for it’s skillful storytelling as well as beautiful artwork. Xxxenophile has also been nominated for an Eisner award – a great honor for any book in the industry.

These books, brought to you by the wonderful folks at Studio Foglio, will soon be available for a digital purchase at www.studiofoglio.com.

For those of you not familiar with it, XXXenophile was an occasional comic book series by Phil Foglio, a gentleman of the highest calibre, who knows that legitimately funny porn can only improve one’s life (indeed, reports abound of Foglio wearing a “Gentleman Pornographer” nametag on the convention circuit during XXXenophile’s run).

If you’re of the oh-no-I-couldn’t variety, just consider the covers that Foglio designed for the series — my favorite featured a mostly-naked young woman lounging in bed covered in model skycrapers and pagodas while her eager young paramour zipped himself into a Godzilla suit. The imagination would certain lead you from that image towards the prurient, but only after a hearty laugh-chuckle. Hell, I’ll go so far as to say that no matter how serious Foglio gets, the sweet release of laughter is only a page or too away (and if you think that the faces you make during the other kind of sweet release aren’t worthy of a smirk or two, I’ve got a bridge to sell you). Go check out XXXenophile — it’s good, clean (dirty) fun.

• Speaking of triple-Xs, Xaviar Xerexes would like you to know that he’s got a domain up for grabs:
  

  Fright Night began as a big cross-promotional webcomic effort in 1999 and continued in that vein for a couple of years (I took over the organization of it in 2000). Later on, I used the site for “events” sponsored by ComixTalk. More recently it’s been fairly dormant.

  I am never going to have time to properly use the URL and I’d love to see someone else use it. The only hitch is I want to see the existing archives of past events stay up at the URL but otherwise I’m open to ideas on its future use.

  Follow the link for your chance at stewardship.

• Who doesn’t like gallery shows chock full o’ animatin’ talent? Communists and Nazis, that’s who. And even they would love what class act Carly Monardo‘s up to:
  

  The show, called “Too Art For TV 3“, is curated by Venture Bros. Color Supervisor/BG Painter Liz Artinian, and features non-industry work from people in the animation biz. ([website] still under construction; artist bios are in the process of being edited).

  Fleen will be doing its (our? my? gotta work out these pronouns sometime … ) best to be there and bring you a report. In the meantime, make your plans for Friday, Dec 5 at 6pm.