First of all, congratulations to Tyler Page, a regular exhibitor at MoCCA, who skipped for a very good reason — his wife Cori gave birth the day before the show. We at Fleen wish the family all the best and hope to see the little one at all future MoCCAs.

From the Books Department:

• Ryan North reports he’s working on the next Dinosaur Comics book; instead of the ‘best of’ approach he took in YWFIMOOM, this one will be the full run of strips from 2006. There will be a secret naming convention to Dinosaur Comics books from here on out, which you may try to unravel by purchasing all future volumes. Look for it to be released sometime next year.
• Cat Garza looked very happy behind a dwindling pile of the Secrets and Lies anthology he edited. He had every right to be considering the large number of contributors and tight production schedule (he only solicited for contributions a week after last Fall’s SPX). Cat’s a sterling gentleman, and I was pleased to make his acquaintance.
• David Malki ! saw great success from the debut of Beards of Our Forefathers, and is presently working on volume 2 of Dispatches From Wondermark Manor for release next month in San Diego. Look for Malki ! to shift his merchandise operations to Topatoco in the near term, leading to exciting stuff-bundle opportunities.
• Also debuting at MoCCA was Chris Yates‘s Set it to Awesome, which is an astoundingly heavy book, what with the glossy full-color photos on every page. To this reporter’s eye, it outsold everything on the show floor except for POOP signs.
• Meredith Gran sold out of pretty much everything she brought, and is preparing for San Diego by sending the second Octopus Pie book to press in the next week. After that, we at Fleen hear plans of animations from Ms Gran.
• Also sold out: Spike went home without a single copy of Templar, AZ Book 1 left, and took plenty of pre-orders for the forthcoming Book 2. I pre-ordered mine back when there was snow on the ground — it’s got Reagan on the cover!
• Hope Larson does the coolest book customization ever — buy a copy of her thoroughly charming Chiggers, and she’ll take off the dust cover and paint directly onto the pigment-thirsty hard cover.
• Kean Soo‘s Jellaby sketchbook is incredibly cute, yet Soo himself is a right-hand-rule-throwin’ badass. After the Jellaby story finishes in next year’s graphic novel, look for a third volume of short stories.

Not books:

• Andy Bell‘s latest toy, The Giver, should be on a boat from far shores about now, making availability at San Diego a possibility (I suppose it depends on if Customs wants to be cooperative or not).
• Rosemary Mosco is thoroughly delightful, selling me her very last paleontology-themed alphabet print; we spoke widely over sophisticated adult-type beverages about things that are extinct and the people that study them.

Webcomickers seen at the show, in addition to the above, included Jon Rosenberg, Rich Stevens, Jeff Rowland, Sam Brown, Jeph Jacques, Chris Hastings, Alexander Danner, Dave Roman, Raina Telgemeier (who reports the with her last Babysitters Club book about to be released, she is looking forward to receiving hate mail from people upset about her treatment of the X-Men instead of her treatment of Kristy, Stacie, et. al.), Randall Munroe, Ryan Sias, Dirk Tiede, Shaenon Garrity, Danielle Corsetto, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and MoCCA curator-extraordinaire Jen Babcock.

Overheard in casual conversation:

Kean Soo, on Ryan North — I have dirt on the Man-Mountain.
Ryan North, in sad confirmation — I have made some bad decisions.

Photos tomorrow.

At 3:05pm on June 8, the fire alarms sounded in the Puck Building; like all New York City fire alarms, they’re designed to be annoying as hell. Like all New Yorkers, the crowd was nonplussed and went about their interactions with the exhibitors … in New York, the alarm doesn’t mean anything unless somebody makes an announcement. At 3:10 it’s quiet again; three cycles of the alarm and some shouted announcements that there was no need for worry did the trick.

At 3:15, Matt Murray (President and Executive Director of MoCCA) asks everybody to leave; he has a loud voice that both carries and conveys that he will brook no foolishness. A few vendors look hopeful that a fire means they won’t have to carry unsold merchandise home with them.

A few minutes later on the street, the first due fire companies have already set up on the “A” side of the building: Engine 33 and Ladder 20 have emptied their crew compartments and the firefighters are pulling out Scott packs. Then more apparatus shows up: Engine 24, Engine 9, Hook & Ladder 5, Battalion 2, but the crowd hasn’t been moved away from the sidewalk in front of the Puck yet. That’s well within the collapse zone, and it’s where no fire commander will allow a crowd to interfere with operations.

Normally, the incident commander will send some guys in shirt sleeves to verify it’s a false alarm, and everybody can go home, but there’s the crew of Ladder 20 in full turnout gear. They think something’s really happening, and one of them says, “We’ve got a report of fire in the basement.” The sweeps will be done according to the book; what with all the paints, wall fixtures, fabrics, solvents, and thousands of other petro-based products that make up modern decor, they won’t put anybody across the threshold without an air bottle. Beautiful decorative elements, really: lightweight, cheap, and when you heat ’em to the burning point, they start throwing off cyanide analogs that melt your lungs after the second breath. The crowd is still coming down from the seventh floor.

The Ladder 20 guys are looking serious; the Puck is an old building — from before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, even — and firefighters hate old buildings. They especially hate old basements because there’s not so many ways out of them. They’re mentally running down what they know of the building, figuring their sweeps, knowing exactly how many steps they have to cover to pull themselves and their partner out of a situation that suddenly goes bad and into sweet, clear air. “Stay safe,” I say. He nods.

The thing you have to understand is, firefighters are crazy. When EMTs have to strip a patient, we reach for the trauma shears that will cut through a leather jacket or the ballistic nylon straps of an aramid-fiber armorvest like a hot truck through butter. A fire-rated turnout coat and bunker pants laughs at trauma shears; to cut one sleeve is three solid minutes of careful cutting and ripping and cursing. The coat weighs as much as your year old nephew, the chubby one.

Then when they’ve emptied their second 30-minute air bottle and get sent to the rehab area, firefighters don’t take off that coat — they sit in the cooling chairs slamming Gatorade and cursing the EMTs who’re trying to coax blood pressures and core temps down and pulse-oxes up, consciously willing their pulse rates back below 150 so they can get up and go back in.

It’s 101 degrees according to the thermometer under the vodka billboard on the corner of Houston, and every one of these guys is losing 2 kilos of water weight just standing around in that gear. And that’s just the 30 kilos of equipment that gives you a rational chance of not dying once you cross the threshold — add in the weapons that will actually let you knock down the fire and you’re carrying an extra 40, 45 kilos into an environment that’s 3000 degrees Fahrenheit and you love it. Do not ask firefighters to put on all this crap and then deny them the chance to do something worthwhile. They are ready to go in, now.

And just like that, it’s done; an officer in shorts goes jogging up the steps, running accountability on his guys coming out. Scott packs come off, tools go away, and they clear the scene — first the engines, then the big unwieldy trucks. It’s 3:35 and they’re getting ready to wrangle the crowd back in. In 20 minutes, the line outside will be gone, Matt Murray will be drenched with sweat, and the show back in full swing. Just another day in New York City.

Con recap and photos tomorrow.

Answer: Scary Go Round Feats of Strength entry that crosses over with the late, lamented Return to Sender (currently offline; Vera I’ll pay to renew the site if you want me to).

Go read it NOW NOW NOW.

Photos to come later, but the highlight of MoCCA this year had to be the mid-afternoon Sunday fire alarms that caused the building to be evacuated in the midst of a 101°F heat wave (38 Celsius for those of you in sensible parts of the world). We got photos of the chaos and firefighter quotes and a full recap starting a little later but for now, we can sum up the show with one word: books.

Lotta books debuted from a lotta creators, books announced for iminent (and not-so-iminent) publication. And the alarms hit 30 seconds after Meredith Gran sold out of Octopus Pie volume 1. COINCIDENCE?

The thing about the Puck Building is, the air-con is from another era. When it works, it drips water to the point that one may be forgiven for thinking that a tropical waterfall is in the area (usually, it seems, directly onto the accumulated Dumbrellites).

When it doesn’t, the lack of openable windows and odd airflow patterns lend a distinctly whiffy character to all ‘n’ sundry. New York City is projected to hit 35 Celsius (95 Farenheit, for you ‘Mericans) this weekend, leading me to regard my hack pseudo-journalist efforts at the MoCCA show as hardship time.

Look for news, photos, and interviews to be more incoherent than normal as I drag my subjects to nieghboorhood watering holes for drinks and on-the-record conviviality. If you’re coming to the fest and want to know what’s on other than “sweating”, The Comics Journal has a handy round-up here.

New Sylvan Migdal strip!

Two years of comics at Planet Saturday!

Technosaurs included in new e-zine featuring comics, short ficion, art, and reviews!

Not [web]comics, but horrifying nonetheless!

I feel like I’m channeling Kaylee from Firefly here, but you do not know how excited I was when Mike Luce emailed in to let us folks know that he’s about four months into a gorgeous updated-twice-weekly new series called “The City Dreams of Tamino the Cat”. It’s got many of the elements I enjoyed about his earlier series Fite! (which I found only as it was coming to a close), including extraordinary color work (just check out the rich blues here and here), lovely artwork, and maybe a cameo from Fite!?

Luce describes this new work as “about 1/3 Japanese Woodblock Print design, 1/3 50s animation and 1/3 cubism” and when you look at the work you can see some of these elements influencing the design. There’s neat panel design, and I’m totally enjoying it. Unlike in Fite! the primary language here is in English, and so the experience of reading it is different, but no less powerful. I’m excited to see how the series develops, and I’d encourage you to go have a look.

Unrelated, I’m off to MoCCA this Saturday to table with the Trees & Hills folks, where we’ll have new issues and anthologies aplenty. We’re somewhere on the first floor, in the A ballroom, near a doorway…think of it like a scavenger hunt? Yeah. More on that next week.

Have you seen these? Comics stories from the China earthquake by Coco Wang; plans are to eventually have 100 or more such stories. Powerful stuff — having trained for (but thankfully never participated in) mass-casualty events, this is the sort of thing that reads like an EMT’s nightmares. Big thanks to Ananth Panagariya at Applegeeks for the link.

In lighter news, Rick Marshall Willenholly has restarted his webcomics interview series (up first: Chris Hastings)over at ComicMix; I’m reliably informed that there’s now a buffer of completed interviews, so we ought to see this as a regular feature from here on out.

New webcomicker podcast! Krishna Sadasivam got in touch with some buddies, then got in touch with a few more creators (click that last one if you haven’t already — damn good stuff), and declared their confab to be the first meetup at The Sequential Artists’ Pub. First episode at Talkshoe, next live broadcast on 13 June.

Rënë Ëngström has a charity appeal for those of you who care about the less fortunate who need your help — and if you don’t care, you’re a horrible person. PS Carly let’s talk at MoCCA.

Onwards: So, who’s been reading between the lines over at DJ Coffman’s blog? Catch where the lines pulled apart about yay-wide?

It makes me very sad and depressed to report this news, but I want to be as transparent with the fans and supporters of Hero By Night as possible here. The ongoing print series has been suspended BY ME due to financial issues at our publisher. I couldn’t keep this on my schedule, because frankly it’s gotten to the point where I need to make hard decisions to be sure my time is spent on projects that pay me on time and have some security to them. Up until this point, Platinum has been rock solid and something I could bank on contractually and I enjoyed that security. While the plan had always been to stay on schedule through Issue 7 (a Christmas issue), and the book hadn’t been officially canceled by Platinum Studios, I couldn’t in good faith keep going when behind the scenes I knew that there would be books solicited that would not be coming out on time — our issue 4 wouldn’t be coming out because Jason had to make the hard decision to stop coloring Hero By Night for the same reasons, so my book was sitting uncolored and I knew we’d be missing the print deadline dates.

[Platinum and Coffman are] discussing getting the rights back to the whole thing that I sold to them — this would allow me to take HBN on my own, self publish on the web or in print among other things.

The most important point in all of this is nicely summarized by Scott Kurtz:

I’m not sure if we touched on this in the book, but I know we’ve discussed it on the podcast. It’s so important that it bears repeating: once you sign away your rights to a second party, that party is really under no obligation to ever return those rights back to you. Even when the situation is out of the control of both parties and everyone has the best of intentions.

Contracts are not enchanted documents that enforce some kind of morality upon all parties involved. They are not magically consumed in brilliant clouds of sparks and dust if either party breaches the terms. A company could go bankrupt and you might still never regain your rights.

Or, as I was once challenged for saying, [A]ll contracts are inherently about ensuring that — if needed — you can cut the other guy’s heart out and he’s legally obligated to provide the blade. Without language that specifies under exactly what circumstances rights revert to the creator, they won’t. Ever.

Fleen wishes DJ Coffman the best of luck, both because we want to know what happens in Hero By Night, dammit, and also because he deserves better than this. He was a very public supporter of Platinum when there was a lot of grief thrown their way about having never actually published a comic book; even in his posting announcing the hiatus, he was unfailingly gracious and thankful towards them. If karma and/or justice have any place in this world, Platinum will swiftly return the rights to his creation, and a means to resume publishing will follow. And DJ? I got four bucks American cash money set aside for issue #4 right here; drop that puppy into my LCS and it’s all yours.

See that picture up there? My wife watched me put all of this in one place and let loose a spontaneous Holy crap. Fortunately, I now have a solution, as well. And with all that protective space, I am now compelled by by sickness to collect more webcomics stuff. You people are stealing the food from my non-existant childrens’ mouths!

Moving on:

• You may have noticed a posting by Ursula Vernon over LiveJournal regarding a piece of her art. The original is here, a common memetic remixing is here, and the gist of the post is that t-shirts were getting offered of the remix without attribution to (or approval of) Vernon. She reports a reasonably amicable resolution, but a larger issue remains.

  This page has in the past come out in favor of artists rights to remix and reinterpret existing work, providing it substantially transforms the original or uses it to comment on aspects of culture. Unfortunately, that’s a grey area of copyright law, as there’s nothing in the US Code (people in the rest of the world, you’re on your own) that either explicitly forbids or allows such use, nor (to the best of my knowledge) has any court case ruled on this gap in the law. Thus, the question of Can Penny Arcade use Strawberry Shortcake, owned by American Greetings, to comment on American McGee? (decent summary here) remains unsettled.

  But the situation can be made more clear where creators explicitly make their intentions known up front. Vernon’s gone back and applied some Creative Commons stickers to her work (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, in this case), and despite the weaknesses in the Creative Commons model, it’s probably the best available solution at this time. Those of you who create, take note and give this some thought.

• Finally, in case you hadn’t noticed yet, a server farm in Texas suffered an explosion which has taken out some 9000 websites associated with some 6000 clients of the hosting service; as of this writing, most of Blank Label Comics remains down, as do portions of the American Elf archives and Adult Webcomics. If you know of emergency backup pages or alternate addresses for webcomics affected by this ongoing outage, please add ’em to the comments below.

Known backup locations in The Great Webcomics Outage of Aught-Eight:
Schlock Mercenary: stripped-down page at www.schlockmercenary.com
Shortpacked!: www.shortpacked.com working
Real Life: www.reallifecomics.com/ is working, but Greg Dean is apparently taking the day off
Wapsi Square: down www.wapsisquare.com working, but showing last Friday’s strip
Ugly Hill: down www.uglyhill.com working (thanks for the info, Marlowe!)
Melonpool: down