Yeah, this could be a catchphrase to rival Stop salting ham!

Conventions:

• Wizard (ack, ptoo) World LA kicks off today, with appearances from Kellett and Malki !. Word is that Pugboy will have a copy of his new collaborative book for you to paw through.
• The UK Web & Mini Comix Thing is next weekend in swingin’ London, with the likes of John Allison, Rene Engstrom, Meredith Gran, Liz Greenfield, Chris Hastings, Roger Langridge, Lem, Carly Monardo, James Turner, Weebl, and many more cool webbers in attendance. If you’re on that side of the Atlantic, do drop in.

In other news: Batman, by Jamie Dee Galey; Hereville restarting; a remix contest to celebrate the release of the first book of the chronically-underreviewed Simulated Comic Product; and a new sketch blog some veteran fantasy webcomickers

Spotted at my friendly local comics shop, How To Make Webcomics, which means my pre-ordered copy should be arriving soon. Since the Halfpixelites didn’t have any review copies to toss my way, I had to make do with a quick flip-through yesterday; noted then:

• Immediately interesting thing #1: I noticed that each chapter is written by a different author, but the other three chime in regularly with concurring & contrasting opinions, accompanied by little cartoon heads to let you know who’s kibbitzing. Interesting way to have a primary voice to a topic while still allowing discussion.
• Immediately interesting thing #2: rumors in the latest Webcomics Weekly podcast of a Brad Guigar centerfold (we at Fleen understand that the pre-order artist editions omit the black censor bar). Remember, ladies — he’s taken!

Spotted in my mailbox: Octopus Pie! It would be difficult to offer a comprehensive review of this book without sounding like a total suck-up, so let me point out that it’s full of the same awesome humor and art you see three times a week on the web; that it’s released under a Creative Commons license that allows artistic experimentation; there are more asymmetrical eyes (scientifically proved to be 37% funnier than the regular variety) than you can shake a stick at; and that it’s chock full of moustachy goodness on every page. No? Just my copy? Weird.

Since I can’t really be objective about this book (after all, Mer did our masthead, and has been involved in my pseudo-journalistic efforts since before I started this gig), let me just point out who did provide objective praise. The back cover features blurbs from names like Larson, Kibuishi, Allison, McCloud (“My favorite new webcomic”) and the New York Daily News. I simply can’t wait to see Mer and tell her in person how much this book was worth the wait.

Which, as it turns out, will be Saturday, as the SPLAT! symposium takes place in New York; the organizers have graciously tossed a press pass my way, and I’ll be giving y’all a rundown next week.

Right, everyone who already knew about the awesomeness that is Rachel Nabors, put your hand up. (You folks can skip right to the fundraising link in the following paragraph.) She creates weekly webcomics for gURL.com, where she’s been publishing for years, but has a mighty impressive list of accomplishments on her Portrait of a
Comicker bio page (and particularly for someone who’s still fairly young). Her work’s influences are evident, but they really work; it’s sort of charming and autobiographic and very accessible. (It reminds me a little of Karen Ellis’ work as well.)

I first saw her site because of a link to her fundraising drive on Barry Deutsch’s Hereville (which I will write about at some later point). I was struck by her smart webdesign, even though the home page can be a little tricky to navigate. In addition to an impressive gallery of work, her webcomic work is funky, and quirky, and totally something I would have loved to have found as a teenager (I mean, as an adult I still love it).

(A note on that fundraising thing: go look. Holy crap.)

What I think I enjoy most is that the whole site, from the comics to the bio and back again, seems to be really infused with this creator’s personality. It’s vibrant and dynamic, and really caught my eye in a way a lot of webcomic sites don’t. (In part it might be because her site includes more than webcomics; there’s a lot of other material there, but overall it creates this fascinating portrait of a webcomicker. It’s worth your time to go through the site.)

Good thing that Tim Demeter had something to share with you:

Frances & Friends by Bryan Prindiville of Bassetville fame) is an animated feature which allows you control the speed of the animation (or “clickbook”). You can download the panels from Clickwheel.net and sync to your iPod and then navigate through them using your iPod’s clickwheel, (or flip through them on your iPhone).

See, I’ve always dug basset hounds (they “got long ears”), Prindiville’s work is all-ages friendly, and the control-the-speed-of-animation thing I think is a new thing. Maybe. It’s neat, though.

Okay, back to work.

You may have seen the announcement already, but it’s time to take a whirl in the Wayback Machine to the far-off past of … 2000. A young buck named Richard “Rich” Stevens III had just uploaded his very first comical strip, featuring a porn star and the robot she loves (kinda) (sometimes) (not really, because she’s too drunk and too self-absorbed).

Stevens, having now finished 1967 strips, is looking to celebrate his 2000th strip in style. So he’s giving you his archive. For free.

The link won’t go live until tomorrow, but Stevens is giving out the first 200 strips in a PDF, to be followed on subsequent Wednesdays with 200 more until he’s caught up. Given that many of his strips are impossible to print (due to wildly varying sizes and shapes, not to mention the costs of color), but that he wants you to have them in a convenient format, this is an unspeakably generous act. Seriously, I paid $10, or about 10 cents/strip for Pocket Sweeties Volume 1, which means that Mister 3 is potentially giving up $200 worth of book sales from me alone by tossing his children out on the internetty wastes.

Not only that, but the first page of the PDF contains an explicit Creative Commons license, inviting all and sundry to start remixing and up-mashing. If you think this sounds like a good deal, Stevens could use your help seeding some torrents so that all can have a clean & easy download experience; email the dude known as Clango at his site (that would be dieselsweeties, which is a dot-com) if you feel like aiding the cause.

PS: Have you donated to Cloudy’s brush with adventurous death yet?

Wait, what? Webcomicker Steven Cloud driving from the UK to Mongolia for charity? And I can make a donation to help? Crap in a hat, count me in!

The WCCAs were announced on Saturday at MegaCon; the winners (in a new, more compact form) can be found here and here. Big winner this time: Girl Genius.

In other news, this page has written many times of Michael Rouse-Deane and his various projects for good causes. So when Rouse-Deane wrote to me and said, “I’m thinking of doing a webcomic that’s all guest strips,” that caught my attention. Given the caliber of talent that Rouse-Deane has been able to attract to his various pursuits, I think we’re going to see some really quality work out of what will presumably be called The Guest Strip Project, or, Ryan Estrada Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Look for the new strip to launch on April 1st, and in the meantime, play along with the internet’s new fun-time game: Guess That Guest Artist!

Edited to fix missing link the second item.

Heya. Some good comments coming out of yesterday’s musings on angels; I was particularly glad of Chris Baldwin‘s story of his experience with capital-raising. I hope that with the current credit crunch, such bank loans are still available for deserving creators. Several more items related to webcomics bid’ness today:

• Von Allan wrote an extensive analysis of his readership growth over the first three months of the road to god knows. New strip creators, pay attention.
• Dawn Douglass writes with an appeal; her comic-aggregation venture is looking for VC backing, and she’s looking for input. For the record (and I told her this), I think she’s got a logical flaw in her argument that free “alienates creators from their art” (for views that nicely parallel my own, see Kevin Kelly again: free is a means to an end). But the point is, she’s looking for cartoonists — specifically editorial cartoonists — to take a look at her ideas.

  And now that I’ve typed out the words “editorial cartoonists”, I think that I see the source of the disconnect between her ideas and mine; most cartoonists (and with the arguable exception of maybe Penny Arcade pretty much all webcartoonists) are not editorial cartoonists. They’ve got their own concerns that can contrast deeply with the average (aspiring?) webcomicker.

Announcements!

• Darren J. Gendron writes to let you know that The Expert’s Guide on How to Kill Things That Go Bump in the Night recently wrapped its first major story arc. It started with an army of vampire cheerleaders, took on The Shat, and wrapped with the help of the Dozen Dead Elvises and Dead Monkey Elvis. It that doesn’t get you to read the damn thing, I don’t know what will.
• Quick two-fer from Wes Molebash:

  Boxcar Comics is redesigning its site, launching creator-hosted podcasts, building up the jam comics, and going to be hitting the conventions with vigor previously unknown to western science. And Molebash’s The Litterbox Chronicles has scratched out (see, it’s about cats, so that joke is funny) a number one position on the Zuda hit parade, but needs your love to stay there. Like Tinkerbelle.

• And finally, Rick Marshall informs me that a new interview with Fleen Fave Rene Engstrom is due to go live at ComicMix in about … now-ish. Get clicking.

Since I keep seeing referenced everywhere in the blogodrome, I guess yesterday’s link to the 1000 True Fans piece was worthwhile. It’s gotten me thinking a lot about the economics of independent artistic types. See, I’ve had a particular conversation with multiple webcomickers that roughly runs, “I want to do x, but I have to raise the money for it first.”

Fill in x with whatever — merch, books, animation, print. They’ve got a fanbase, they’ve got an idea that will definitely sell, but to get to that point they need seed money to actually produce x. On the one hand, that’s the beauty of pre-orders — you can gauge demand and raise that money and have an idea of how much you might make on the back-end.

But the downside is that pre-orders take time and effort — both of which prevent the creator from making other stuff, and delay the earliest pre-orderers from getting their stuff while waiting for the Okay, fire up the presses threshold to be passed.

So I’m wondering if what The Webcomics Biz needs isn’t some sort of cross between angel financing and Grameen Bank. Somebody with some bucks to burn fronts the money, takes a cut off sales until repaid with some profit and (this is the important part), runs the proceeds back into a cash pool for the next use. Couple-few iterations of that, the original seed capital’s been repaid, and the pool could be self-sustaining. In a perfect world (Ha! I crack me up sometimes), this could allow creators to work on riskier projects, with longer times to the break-even point.

While theoretically this is the sort of thing that the members of a collective could do, most of them don’t have a formal legal structure set up, being arranged instead around circles of friends. And we all know the old cliche about loaning money to friends. Really, it needs an outside to offer the service to the community at large. Hell, I’m tempted to make a run at it myself, but whatever shaky journalistic ethics we at Fleen have would be sorely strained by having a financial stake in particular webcomics.

Still — is this a totally stupid idea? Or might there be some part of it that could actually work? Let’s get brainstorming, peoples. I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but we very possibly might be able to look in our work and say I dunno, Larry. It’s a wacky idea, but it just might work!

I thought I’d offer something bite-sized this week, in the form of Rick Smith’s Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery. It’s a very new webcomic, started on 22 January of this year, but it’s updating daily, apparently. It follows the main character, Yehuda Moon, who owns a bike shop, called (yes, you guessed it) the Kickstand Cyclery.

I’m waiting to see how it develops. In part, I’m pre-disposed to like it, I think, because I get some of the references (like what a ghost bike is), and because I’m one of those folks who’s a fair-weather rider. I don’t ride in the winter, and I’ve been missing it like mad lately. It keeps snowing. There aren’t bike lanes near my house. You get the idea. Some of it’s poking fun at bike commuters, and others very much making fun of, well, …just look here.

Since the webcomic itself is so new, the storylines are all fairly nascent. We don’t know, for example, how these characters will continue to interact, how Yehuda’s commute will change (if at all), what happens come spring and everyone wants a bike…but the comic’s done by someone who enjoys biking, at the least, and is kind of right on with bike shop culture (from what I’ve seen of it).

It won’t take you long to get through the archives, but it’s worth a look. The color is snappy, the dialogue is funny, and I think it’ll go in some interesting directions.