Announcement first — things are going to be a bit busy in the next two weeks; I’ll be running some pre-done book reviews, maybe some “Best of Fleen”, but there won’t be much that’s topical. We at Fleen thank you for your patience, and if the scheduled posting goes a little wonky and you don’t see everything on a regular schedule, please bear with us. I promise to make it up to you when thing calm down again. Honest.

Okay, things that slipped by in the aftermath of NYCC:

• A two-fer from Ursula Vernon, who has advice for the budding artist on her LiveJournal, and reports a glowing Kirkus review of her forthcoming young-readers book.
• Speaking of forthcoming books, the second Shortpacked! book is on pre-order now, as is the sixth Unshelved tome. The former includes drama and the power of corsets, the latter includes Book Club contributions from various [web]comickers, the famed cross-strip Coffee Lid Challenge, and bonus commentary on that last item by some hack pseudo-journalist.
• Hey kids — do you like to enjoy things your own way? Brad Guigar’s been running his flagship strip in color for about a month now, but it was always designed for black & white. I’m digging my chance to taste the rainbow, but some people prefer it as it was. Good news — Evil, Inc. now lets you decide to veiw the color or B&W version of the strip, and remembers your preference, all thanks to a nifty bit of coding from our publisher.
• And finally, here’s Chris Hastings doing the American Beauty thing. You just know he’s naked under there.

My eyeglass frames recently snapped (in a very unexciting way, having nothing to do with rollerderby) and so I’ve been stuck wearing my contact lenses until the new frames arrive. The contacts are both awesome (Holy crap! I have peripheral vision after all!) and really bad (I mostly feel seasick, unfortunately), never mind the repeated poking-of-eyeball action. I tell you all this because I thought I’d find something short to write about this week, to try to cut down on staring at the computer screen.

My plan completely backfired.

I found Ali Graham’s AfterStrife and fell, hard, for the characters and colorwork. According to his website, “AfterStrife is the story of two completely opposite youths who become spiritually attached to one another in their deaths. Megan, a sharp witted, tormentress and Stitch a dark, brooding goth are forced to work together to unravel the mystery of their being. They are transported into a strange hell dimension by the name of Banteurose, where they must work off their debt to reclaim their eternal souls.” It’s an accurate description, but I’ve really been enjoying reading the archives–despite my aching eyeballs–for the banter between the two and just generally watching the story unfold.

Before this project, Graham published HOUSD; it was a daily comic and is where Stitch (the character you see above) first appeared. What I think’s kind of ingenious about these two webcomics is Graham’s kind of interesting cross-marketing; Stitch has a Livejournal (with a particularly funny post about emo). There’s also a great interview with Graham here, well worth reading.

So, what with the two different webcomics (one of which has a truly enormous archive), some interesting other material including a Scary Go Round guest strip, and some really compelling character write-ups on his cast pages, I think I’ll finish up the reading this weekend when I have a little more time and some new eyeglasses…

Big pictures ahead — only click if you want to see webcomickers up close.

• The Comics Bakery Crew: an apparently baco-vegetarian Kean Soo (L) and Dave Roman (R).
• The Ladies of the Bakery: a between-sessions Raina Telgemeier (L) and Johanne Matte (R).
• Next year, there’ll be a giant inflatable rat outside his table: Brad Guigar (L) defied the forces of stupidity, and Ryan Sohmer (R) defied a union guy that wanted 85 bucks to plug in a lamp.
• My camera was accidentally set on ‘sepia’: An old-timey Scott McCloud. Ask him about the Mayor of Rhode Island sometime.
• Man, that banner behind her is like a perfect (if square) halo: Jennifer Babcock, enjoying the show before teaching kids about webcomics.
• He’s really less mean than he looks: Andy Bell, in a moment of glaring. But he set me up with some sweet vinyl toys without me having to go through blind-box hell, so he can glower all he wants.
• On the other hand, this guy is exactly as serious as he looks: Jon Rosenberg, calculating how much cuter his daughter is getting while he’s away.
• Giant foam horror, or mockery of life?: At least it wasn’t Fat Skeletor. You people seriously owe me one.
• Don’t tell anybody, but I think it may be a trap: Admiral Ackbar chillin’ at the Dumbrella booth.
• Some day, he’ll beg me to use the Sleestak pictures again: A show-weary Rick Marshall, sporting the required facial adornment of journalists on the webcomics beat.

Final tidbit from the weekend: Of the many flyers and givewaways I was handed over the course of the weekend, one particularly caught my eye: Pigtails & Potbellies. It’s a little Calvin & Hobbes, a little Little Dee, and a little bit limited since it’s written as “little girl spends the summer at grandma’s farm” which only allows for so many lazy afternoons with your talking pig. Did I forget to mention there’s a talking pig? Also a pig of an uncle.

There’s fewer than 20 installments so far, and the only complaint I’ve got is that the presentation is a bit weird — click on an update title and it will take you there, but the current strip always dominates the screen space above the fold. The trick is to click on the image itself to isolate it. In any event, this one’s got potential.

Editor’s note: Joey Manley was kind enough to sit down with me during the opening hours of the just-concluded New York Comic Con to tell me what the ComicSpace/Webcomics Nation merger looks like six months in. John Boeck, one of the ComicSpace investors (more on his background below) was kind enough to join in. What follows is an edited presentation from my hand-written notes, with exact quotations indicated in italics.

(more…)

But check out Rick Marshall’s writeup of Webcomics: Threat or Menace? from NYCC. I didn’t remember half that stuff.

Stuart Immonnen on the most blatant thievery of internet artistry imaginable. Read it, pass it on.

Lots of stuff happened over the weekend, which is largely still a blur to me. As mentioned last week, I moderated Webcomics: Threat or Menace? on Saturday, during which I was so intent on not sucking that I didn’t really store any of it in long-term memory. Rick Marshall from ComicMix was in the audience and has promised a write-up, but if anybody happened to record it, let us know. For the record, The Frontingest Man Alive said that I didn’t suck, so yay.

The panel consisted of Rich Stevens, Robert Khoo, Richard Brunning (Senior VP — Creative Director for DC) and Jeremy Ross (Director, New Product Development for Tokyopop); Brunning and Ross were very nice guys, not taking the “webcomics are evil” tack that the session description promised (found here), and Rich and Robert were very good about not claiming that webcomics would eat the firstborn children of the dead-tree publishers. We never did get a consensus on threat or menace, but seemed to agree that media are all shifting towards a long-tail, some-degree-of-free, and the old and new schools are going to have to meet in the middle. For more on this topic, come back tomorrow for an interview I did with Joey Manley and John Boeck on where ComicSpace is headed, six months after the big merge.

And on the off change that Jeremy Ross is reading this: you guys really need to get the rights to Kimagure Orange Road.

Others seen around the con: Brian Warmoth, Scott McCloud, Jennifer Babcock (who did a terrific job with the How to Make Webcomics panel on Kids Day), DJ Coffman, Brad Guigar, Ryan Sohmer (who risked a savage beating by defying the convention center union guys who wanted like 85 friggin’ dollars to plug in a light fixture), Chris Hastings, Raina Telgemeier, a healthy-looking Dave Roman, (Dave and Raina did about 83 sessions between the two of them, including a very noisy Avatar:The Last Airbender session that sounded really good through the walls and totally didn’t drown out my session, not that I am bitter), and the Jellabalicious Keen Soo. I was pleased beyond measure to finally make the acquaintance of Amy Kim Ganter and Kazu Kibuishi, and I understand that the inimitable Jonathan Coulton was at the show, but I missed him. If anybody knows JoCo, kindly ask him this for me — What’s Soterios Johnson really like? Besides dreamy, of course.

Finally, Fleen announces the Webcomics Partner of the Year Award to Caroline Guigar, who figured out that Brad was running out of books, and wrangled two toddlers and several boxes, sending replenisment stock on a Greyhound so that Brad would have something to sell on Sunday. If you want to succeed in webcomics, I strongly advise you to find somebody that supportive to help you.

Moustaches are never truly created or destroyed, they merely shift from one strip to another.

Yeah, not much of a post, but I’m busy working up questions so I don’t suck moderating Webcomics: Threat or Menace? at New York Comic Con tomorrow at noon. Come see Rich Stevens, Robert Khoo, and as-yet-unnamed reps of DC and Tokyopop on stage. Rumor has it that Brad Guigar will be sitting in the audience with some busted beer bottled and a length of chain, settling into the “menace” side of things.

Speaking of the panel, I’m gonna be too busy running it to cover it properly, so if anybody wants to do up a narrative with good quotes, see me.

And in completely better news: The lost Winterview comes to light!

Ladies and Gentlemen, ________ _____ Kellett, daughter of Dave Kellett and Gloria Calderón Kellett. About that name:

I can already imagine a few of you will be e-mailing me to ask what her name is, so allow me to give you my take on that. Both my wife and I have chosen pretty public lives, and in general we’re happy to share a great deal with the world. But I want to give my children the chance to choose the path best suited to them … whether it be a public life or a private life or somewhere in the middle. So, while I have no qualms about posting a few cute, early baby pics — as she’ll look markedly different in a few months, anyway — I want to give her the gift of anonymity to become her own person in life. I know you’ll understand the value of that.

We at Fleen respect the decision of ________’s parents, but using our awesome investigatory skillz we can exclusively reveal that the little tyke has eight syllables in her full name — on those rare occasions when her parents are mad at her and have to escalate to the full name, eight syllables will be awesome. As an “eighter” myself, I can tell you that by the time your parents have spit the whole thing out, they’ve forgotten why they were mad at you!

This means that we’re looking at the first-ever Guest Week at Sheldon next week; Dave’s a pro and managed to put together a great, 13 day story to run around ________’ birth, but let’s give the guy some time to get caught up and recharge.

Well wishes, monetary gifts, and posters of Shakira for the happy family may be sent via Fleen.

In preparation for this week’s post, I actually looked back at Gary’s post about the recent Eisner nominations, specifically the Best Digital Comic category. One, Karl Kerschl’s lovely The Abominable Charles Christopher, I knew right away. But I didn’t recognize any of the others, which made me feel sort of out of it (and even more so when I found out that one of them is one of Joss Whedon’s many projects). I felt a little better about the whole thing once I looked at the rest of the Eisner nominees (jeez, again with the Joss Whedon…), so I thought it might be worth looking at the different nominations. It wouldn’t have been the list I’d have created, but I figured it was worth finding out what did get nominated.

(Side question: are there similar industry awards for webcomics? There’s the Ignatz, for an “Online Comics” category, and the interesting (though a little repetitive) Web Cartoonists Choice Awards…there are others, yes?)

And, holy smokes, Dean Haspiel’s Immortal: it took me a minute to get into it, but once I did I was pretty much hooked despite it being totally weird and also kind of hard to follow in places (and it’s also kind of NFSW in places, so be warned). It was also a little different for me; I think of Dean Haspiel as someone who…well, mostly works in print. Despite these weird narrative moments, Immortal has a quirky, smart use of color–it looks different from much what I’ve seen before–and though the characters initially felt a little Sin City to me, the whole thing takes a big wide jog into weird in its own freaky way.

It also, from the get-go, caught my eye in a way the other works didn’t (excepting Kerschl’s work, about which I’ve already written); I’ll give them another try, of course, but there’s a lot to be said for something that pulls me in as a reader almost right away. That’s very difficult to do, but this one pulls it off magificently.