Well, what can I say about my little sabbatical? It seemed like an increase in work (uh, and rollerderby) coupled with a drop in the number of webcomics I’m reading. Every once in a while I hit a slump and this one was amplified by two autobio comics of which I’m fond both ending. You’ve read about Chris Baldwin’s, a recent favorite with the home-field advantage, and Matt Reidsma’s High Maintenance Machine, a long-standing favorite (and not only because it’s full of cats).

I can’t give them too much grief; each has other equally interesting projects on which he plans to work. I can empathize, though, with that feeling of waking up and thinking, Okay, how is this work helping me? Is it challenging me? What am I getting out of it? There’s something to be said for ending the run, the experiment, whatever, before it feels like it’s getting to be a chore. I was thinking about these ideas in the context of friends of mine who have a very cyclical webcomics reading pattern; they’ll follow daily for a while, get bored and/or get absorbed in other things, and then read a whole stack of archives when they have some spare time. I fell into this over the last few weeks, where I’d wake up in the morning, check my email, check CNN, and go to work. When time became precious, webcomics got squeezed out.

And then somebody dropped this into my inbox. It’s a donations webpage for a guy named Sean Tevis who’s running for State Representative in Kansas, who created a xkcd homage to raise money and win the election. Seems to be working so far; he’s raised a pile of cash and gotten some notable press.

The site’s been up for just about a month (yes, I’m late to this party too) and it seems like an interesting, different way to campaign, particularly because he hit his fundraising goal in about a day. Mostly it’s a good idea; novel approach, interesting webcomic, and brings attention to the medium and traffic to xkcd. Not bad things.

At the same time, I wonder, is it about the novelty, something about webcomics and politics? Something like 90% of Tevis’ donors are not his constituents, according to the NPR piece, and it’s kind of fascinating to think about the shape such things may have on future elections. It’s nothing new for non-constituent donors to back a candidate; people donate from out of state all the time. Of course, the piece is an homage done in a certain style; it’s not swiping or appropriating though I wonder if there was communication between Tevis and Munroe prior to publication, and what could possibly happen if, someday, let’s say, a candidate’s political views were in sharp opposition to the webcomics creator he or she was referencing though an homage such as this.

I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here; I’m not sure of anyone’s political leanings (well, aside from Tevis’s after looking at his homepage) nor is that really where I want to focus. Mostly I’m landing at being impressed by a guy who did something different and made a point while making money for the campaign. It’s interesting.

Imagine if all campaigns ran this way…

Now let us never speak of this again.

• More process “fillum” (as they say in Ireland): Jeph Jacques The Unanagrammable weighs in at his LiveJournal.
• Book of Biff creator Chris Hallbeck is laid up either by oral rot, or possibly brain worms. In any event, there’s guest strips up, including some weapons-grade punnery.
• Hourly comics a-comin’ from Kate Beaton (to be dumped on us a full day’s worth at a time). I am hard pressed to think of anything I’d rather see at this exact moment in time.
• At least it wasn’t Octopus Pie: now you know the rest of the story. And you thought only Trekkies enjoyed gagh.

Webcartoonist signings continue apace: David Willis will be at The Laughing Ogre in Columbus, Ohio on Wednesday, 27 August pretty much all day. For anybody planning on attending, may I draw your attention to the fact that Mr Willis apparently spends a lot of time thinking about licking his fans. I trust you know what to do with this information.

Also continuing apace: webcartoonists reproducing; this time it’s Joseph Hewitt, whose son was born three weeks early; all is well with young “JP”, but if you’d care to help Hewitt keep his strip running, he’s soliciting for guest artists to draw pages of his current storyline. If you help him out:

When the comic is finished, I’ll collect it in a print volume and send a copy to each of them along with a handwritten note expressing my undying gratitude. It’ll be just like an anthology except without the ology!

Can I just say I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a fight scene more (and bear in mind I’ve been reading batshit insane manga for going on 20 years now) than the rampage currently going on between a sentient, transgenic panda and a maybe-sentient, partially-disarmed zombie in the pages of Skin Horse? Why yes, I think I can.

Finally, Damian Duffy, one of the curators of the Out of Sequence musuem show (mentioned here) wants us to know that there will be a full website about the show with links in early October (the show doesn’t launch 24 October, after all), and that a partial listing is available here. Thanks for the info, Damian.

‘Cause I just got this:

Nickelodeon Magazine has announced its first-ever “Best Kids’ Graphic Novel” Awards, taking place in spring 2009. The Awards will honor the best comic books and animated novels for kids published across the U.S. The submission process is open through Sept. 30, 2008, and voting will take place in December.

All graphic novel submissions must be submitted before Sept. 30, 2008. A list of books for kids to vote on, pre-selected by the Nickelodeon Magazine editorial staff, will be available in the December issue and online. The results will be announced in print and online in spring 2009 in conjunction with the release of Nickelodeon Magazine’s popular annual cartoon-themed issue.

Publishers interested in submitting graphic novels should send two copies of each title no later than Sept. 30, 2008. Submissions should be mailed to:

Chris Duffy or Dave Roman
Graphic Novel Award
Nickelodeon Magazine
1515 Broadway 37th Floor
New York, NY 10036.

Hear that, creators? Got something that’s appropriate for the 7 to 13 crowd? Send it in and get yerself a little publicity. You probably won’t win unless you kill Kean Soo. Please note that this is not a suggestion that you kill Kean to improve your chances, ’cause he’ll just get the sympathy vote.

In other, briefer news:

• Another process video, this one by Josh Lesnick.
• Chris Baldwin‘s it was supposed to last for one month diary strip (which featured both me and my dog) wrapped today — view the whole thing under the title May 2008 at his special projects site, Water Street.
• We haven’t gotten one of those hope-it-saves-the-chain concept stores out of Borders in New Jersey yet, but they’ve got one in Allen, Texas. They’ll be having Scott Kurtz out on Saturday at noon for a signing to help with the grand opening.

Let’s just dive in:

• Outsiders as comics creators themed show going up at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in October; apparently, “webcomics creator” makes you an outsider, and by my count there are two dozen or so creators to be found in the show catalog whose work was created primarily for online consumption. Links to source material (for material that’s freely accessible) would have been nice, but you can’t have everything. Thanks to show contributor/new nexus of all webcomics realities Shaenon Garrity for the link.
• In other news, DIY magazine show creator Oliver Brackenbury did his most recent show on webcomics in general, and has a nice conversation with former nexus of all webcomics realities Ryan North.
• Jessi Bavolack wrote in response to our discussion of Otakon to point out that there was a Challenge associated with Webcomics in the year of the common reckoning 2008. As in the past, the goal was to promote Otakon via your webcomic, and all entrants may be seen at the link; in a stunning coincidence, one of the co-winners was created by Jessi Bavolack. The odds of such a random happening are so astronomical as to foster a belief in a Divine Creator, upend everything we know, and demand that we start society over again from this point in time. Thus, this is now declared Year One of the New Times. Get on the bandwagon before our first religious war.
• Speaking of Girl Wonder, there’s a relatively new comic over thereabouts that looks interesting. In a nutshell: Jane Austen writes Die Hard (Ha! take that and stick it in your counterprogramming!). Edit to actually link the damn thing, honestly I don’t know where my head was yesterday: link Now if somebody at Girl Wonder could confirm that Karen Ellis is still alive and well, it would be a weight off my mind.
• Speaking of new comics, there’s an exercise in telling a locked-room (or perhaps a very small universe) story called Blank It; it’s pretty odd so far, with two nameless guys trapped in an infinite, empty space, but since one of the two creators is veteran creator Lemuel Pew (remember when he was still named after a food product like a million years ago?) edit to undrop sentence: it’s worth checking out.
• Finally, this has been linked a mess o’ places (but I first noticed over at ¡Journalista!: Colleen Doran on how to get health insurance if you’re a self-employed artist. Read that one twice.

Tom Brazelton‘s donation drive kicks off today, with a variety of worthwhile stuff up for grabs (although his current ads seem to believe I’m looking for a wife from India; weirdly, this is not the first time in my life somebody has made this assumption about me).

• Oh Holy Assmaster, this is awesome — Ursula Vernon‘s kids book, Nurk, has made the reading list of The Most Perfect Human In Existence.
• New how-to videos: Kellet, Malki !, Jacques (last one requires an account).
• Otakon photos courtesy of erstwhile contributor Jeff Lowery REY: the Applegeeks guys, the hardest working woman in webcomics, and something seriously freaky.
• Check it: Dr McNinja becomes Dr McColor courtesy of Carly Monardo (she really needs to stop doing so much cool stuff in such a short period of time before people start to think I have a crush on her) (I totally do). On a related note, Ms Monardo is the better half of McNinja creator Chris Hastings, which leads to something I have to get off my chest now: Much like when my sister started dating a mechanic after high school that my whole family came to rely on, Chris is not ever allowed to break up with Carly, because she is too valuable to the rest of us. Seriously, even if supermodels start hitting on you, you have to say ‘no’, dude, or the internet will kick your ass. On a second related note, I’m not sure I needed see said ass, but there you go.
• Oh, yeah, and it appears there’s a new slot on your newspaper’s comics page. Hooray! More room for Mary Worth!

Finally! A morning with a bit of free time before the conference wraps up, and at last I’m able to leisurely browse my webcomics, lay down some prime punditry on you via a suddenly no-longer-overloaded WiFi. Then I noticed the sign in the hotel lobby this morning that indicated that DEFCON registration was thataway. So basically, my immediate surroundings are crawling with Black Hats, and I’m risking my financial well-being for the forseeable future just by typing these totally nondescript, perfectly ignorable packets that absolutely nobody should find interesting enough to bother with as they zip through the aether. If they find me in a Vegas back alley with my credit rating shredded, know that I fell in the service of webcomics. Onward:

• Tom Brazelton is learning a hard lesson right about now, one which I struggle to teach to IT professionals responsible for massive data systems. Namely, the short, to-the-point English word backup has a precise and fairly lengthy meaning — keep multiple copies in multiple locations on multiple media types or you’re fooling yourself.

  To be sure, many people have learned this lesson in the past (even some in our community), but it always make the data-slinger in me wince to see such occurrences. I’ve spoken to lots of webcomickers in the past who’re taking the right steps (external hard drives for secondary and sometimes tertiary copies of their Photoshop files), but still have chinks in their proverbial backup armor (those external drives right next to your computer don’t do you much good in the event of fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or giant monster attack).

  If you make a webcomic, your homework for this weekend is to re-evaluate your disaster recovery plans (and in the past 15 years, I’ve only seen one data shop that really had a bulletproof system … the cockroaches will take over, and The New England Journal of Medicine will still have intact data). Write out a plan for making backups and rotating your archives off-site. You might start by signing up for a half-dozen Gmail accounts and storing your files as attachments, but don’t rely on Google to make tape backups of what you store with them. Your mantra is, If I didn’t do it, it didn’t happen.

  If you need more drives or archive-management software, start looking for the sales now. And when the clerk hands you the change, keep in mind that Brazelton’s misfortune is your wake-up call, and toss a tenner towards his donation drive (launching Monday) or buy some of his merch to help offset the very expensive data recovery service he’s going to have to engage to recover every single one of his strips.

• In happier news, one of my favorite webcomickers doesn’t have a webcomic of her own — Carly Monardo is known to some of you for her work on The Venture Brothers, or perhaps for her recent design challenge sketchblog (not to mention an awesome sense of how Wonder Woman should look), and hopefully you’re aware of her numerous excellent guest comic contributions and her stellar work on the Dr McNinja book covers and posters. Recently, she collaborated with David Malki ! on a poster depicting a Gernsbackian world better than our own. The hopes and wonders of the Space Age are just dripping off of this beauty, and it’s not just me saying so — it’s Boing Boing.
• Want to see what Sweeney Todd would have looked like if it starred Jeff Rowland, Tallahassee Econolodge, Mr Jon Rosenberg, and The Englishman? Damn right you do, Sparky, and here it is. Obligatory spoiler warning: this comic adaptation of a movie will tell you how the movie goes.
• Do you see something? If you do, check out the new project from Alien Loves Predator creator Bernie Hou, as he dips his toes into the water of editorial cartooning and earns Ted Rall’s eternal wrath for giving away his product for free on the internet.

A generalized commercial industry (like comics) that is a) facing inherent, structural challenges that b) cause it to look extinction in the face and c) can’t manage to get its collective head out of its ass long enough to keep a talented, capable, professional like Rick Marshall d) working on its (still comics, stay with me) own behalf bloody well deserves its long slide into irrelevance. Go look at the stellar writing in his clip file, especially the webcomicker interviews that put our own efforts here at Fleen to shame.

While it’s a comfort that ComicMix doesn’t seem to have a Let’s actively screw our people attitude that some of Marshall’s former employers seemd to evince, I’m sure that’s not helping Rick much in the rent and groceries category. Mark my words: one day, Rick Marshall is gonna run this town, and I for one welcome our new overlord.

• It is to our shame at Fleen that we haven’t been paying enough attention to The Cartoon Lounge over at The New Yorker, which has been giving some love to webcomickers of late. Up most recently: John Campbell (thanks to Campbell’s former roommate Ryan Estrada for the tip-off).
• Hey, just a quick question — do you like comics that are awesome? You’ve got some catching up to do, as Joe Chiappetta has built up a full year of color Silly Daddy comics up. Xeric Award winner, yo.
• And finally it appears my hobby has borne fruit. All hail the Forced Entry Tool of the Gods. Allow me to point out that while I did not write the comment about the inevitable zombie uprising, I have in the past pointed out that the Halligan bar is likely to be a greater survival aid for emergency medical workers (who, after all, will comprise nearly 90% of the early casualties) than anything else in such an undead holocaust.

Let’s hope that settles that. In other delayed-by-slow-ass-network happenings:

• Looking for a completely unique gift for a loved one? Want to star in a comic strip of your own? Chris Baldwin has you covered: the solicitation has gone out for stories of how your day went, to be made into a comic. You supply $100 and a script with four scenes from the day; Baldwin changes the names (to protect the innocent) and sends you the original artwork. Your day may show up in print in future, which has the potential to be a really damn interesting collection.
• If you aren’t reading Anders Loves Maria, why the hell aren’t you? This strip has been hitting on all cylinders pretty much since day one, and lately, Rene Engström’s work has been so good that it hurts to realize that I will never create anything this compulsively readable.
• Con Watch! Greg Carter wants you to know the deal with Otakon and webcomickers:
  

  Otakon next weekend has filled up the first two Artists Alley table sections with webcomickers. It’s not officially “Webcomic Island”, but it has all the appearances of one. Here’s the interactive AA map if mouse over a table, you can see who it belongs to. Check out pods A & B when you first enter the AA.

  Kudos to Otakon for the clustering of webcomics, and that interactive map is pretty cool.

• Finally, check out PC Magazine’s online edition, which has a new feature on the 10 Best Unsung Webcomics. Although I’m not sure why they call these unsung, since we’ve sung about most of ’em pretty repeatedly.

Sitting on a signal from two hotels over, so this is gonna be fast.

• Strip within a strip alert: Over at Ugly Hill, semi-frustrated artist Peter’s webcomic “SasqWatch 2813” (about chupacabras and sasquatches in a post-apocalyptic world) is running. This comic-within-a-comic model spawned an actual webcomic once, when MegaGAMERZ sprung fully-formed from the pages of Goats like unto Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Squid Bats ahoy!
• Emergency McCloud sighting: you’ve already missed yesterday’s talk at The Learning Annex, but you can catch the talk & signing at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble, and tomorrow’s talk at the Brooklyn Central Library. Both events are at 7pm.
• Launching today: F Chords by webcomickin’ machine Kris Straub (seriously, if James Brown weren’t dead, he’d be seriously challenged by Straub for Hardest Working Man Alive). Anyway, because Straub is a class operation, there’s already a small archive built up to the story of session musicians doing commercial jingles. I can think of no situation that affords more opportunities to mine humor from existential despair.
• Finally, mark your calendars for the latest Dave Kellett book launch party: you can get sketches, free booze, and bask in the glow of superhappyfuntime on Sunday at 7pm in Beverly Hills. Enjoy a book totally about the most malfunction-prone dog in America. If anybody wants to split gas with me, we can go see if Dave brings his own little weirdo to the event.