Following up on Ryan Estrada‘s spot-on comment yesterday (short version: the people answering the Hot Topic 800 number have nothing to do with the situation, and have probably never been in Hot Topic themselves, so be polite!), I received and email last night from Dave Kellett. He must have gotten the right person at the call center (or I got the wrong one), because he got us a better number:

I was told to call their “Buyer’s Team” at 626.839.4681.

Called that number, and got a hold of “Allison”, the buyer for women’s tops. Or rather, got her VM. Left her a detailed message with my phone number.

Doubt she’ll call back, but she might.

In any case, I thought I’d forward on the info about contacting the Buyer’s Team … might save folks time rather than calling their (clearly) Bangalore call center.

Remember the rules: be polite; state the situation clearly; ask them to follow up with you about how Hot Topic will be compensating Jess Fink and Threadless for the theft of the shirt design, and how they will prevent similar situations in the future.

The question naturally arises, what would be an acceptable resolution to the Jess Fink/Hot Topic situation? As I see it, some of the remedies proposed last year in the Shmorky/Goldman don’t quite apply (given that Hot Topic aren’t selling $5000 versions of lifted artwork, but rather a whole mess o’ t-shirts). Here’s what I came up with as model solutions — feel free to comment.

1. Hot Topic enter into good-faith negotiations with Jess Fink and Threadless to determine an equitable compensation for the theft of the design; this should not be based on the number of shirts they sell, but the number that HT has stocked into their inventory.
2. Hot Topic should feel free to seek compensation from the vendor whose designer felt the need to lift so blatantly.
3. Hot Topic should let us know what they’re going to do to help prevent situations like this recurring regularly, as they have been.

Now, Hot Topic are of course a very large corporation that need not necessarily pay attention to what some artist somewhere is saying; then again, Todd Goldman was widely reputed to be a $90 million/year shirtmonger, and yet attention and behavior changes were forced in that case.

If you wanted to let Hot Topic know your feelings on this matter (and missed the alt text in yesterday’s post), note that Hot Topic has a contact page, complete with email, 800 number, and live chat with customer service reps. A polite inquiry along the lines of, Can you tell me how Hot Topic will be dealing fairly with artist Jess Fink, whose stolen work you are presently selling? that shows up in the call logs a hundred times or so could have a damn near immediate effect. Go make me proud.

In finishing out the Transmission-X trifecta I mentioned two weeks back (but go look! There’s eight other webcomics I haven’t mentioned), and in anticipation of more lovely New England weather, this week I point you to Karl Kerschl’s charming The Abominable Charles Christopher.

It has its sassy moments, and, overall, the composition is very strong. Space is used very well, as in this particularly poignant strip, in a way I haven’t seen used as skillfully in many other webcomics. The wordless strips are often very beautifully done, and that’s particularly difficult to do. While it doesn’t have the splashy, bright colorwork of something like Mike Luce’s Fite! does (though his animals and these strike me as wonderfully similar), the colors Kerschl uses absolutely evoke a wintery feel and are better suited to creating a mood. They’re very effective, and the overall feel is very elegant.

What I especially enjoy are the moments where this elegance kind of contrasts with the characters, when they’re being emphatic with one another or at certain moments in their conversations. The webcomic is still new enough that you can move through the archives quickly, but the work has a depth of detail to it which may make you want to linger over each, to savor them rather than speed through. It reminds me a little of some of the Japanese animation I’ve seen, and I’m not quite certain of where the story’s going (plus, given the range of charaters–from the henpecked bird husband to the ongoing story of Vivol & Moon Bear–there’s a number of different things happening), but I really like this one. It is absolutely worth your time.

Multiple people wrote to me about this, but credit Carly Monardo with getting there first.

Okay, for historical context, read here and work your way forward.

For “Shmorky”, substitute “Jess Fink“. For “Todd Goldman”, substitute “Hot Topic“. For my take on the whole situation, allow me to quote Kris Straub on one of the past iterations of Wikimesses: That’s pretty goddamn weak.

For lawsuit threats, wait a week until after the story has died down, then mail them to the contacts page.

For your edification:

1. From Josh Lesnick, Girly is back to updating three times a week, in a storyline that involves a ray that makes people grow sexy moustaches. As an added bonus, Josh points us to the de-hiatusing of UFO and Our Home Planet, which he notes are two of his favorites.
2. You’ve probably seen it, but Nick Gurewitch is stepping back from regular PBF updates to pursue other endeavors. This is why God invented RSS feeds, people.
3. This just in: Gabe, Tycho really hideous monsters, Jack Thompson proved right.
4. Little Gamers videogame now on XBox Live; free trial until Sunday, 24 February 2008.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I work in IT, and as such have come down with a mild case of what The Front calls the wrist-hurt disease. It has fortunately not progressed as far as a formal RSI, but while I’m waiting for the NSAIDs to kick in and my new habits to become effective, I’m drastically cutting back on my computer time. This should be temporary, but I’m only going to be writing at length about stuff that’s literally important enough to me to be worth the pain; expect brevity and link roundups. You’ll know I’m feeling better when the word count goes back up.

So, from alert reader Brett g [sic] Porter, check out this story from the New York Times over the weekend. It’s a profile about longtime greeting-card ‘tooner Sandra Boynton, but there are some useful lessons for any independent artistic type. I particularly liked this quote on page one of the story:

As an entrepreneur, Ms. Boynton maintains a firm grasp on market realities and her finances, but she says she has succeeded by refusing to make money her main objective. Instead, she says, she has focused on the creative process, her artistic autonomy, her relationships and how she uses her time.

“I don’t do things differently to be different; I do what works for me,� she says. “To me, the commodity that we consistently overvalue is money, and what we undervalue is our precious and irreplaceable time. Though, of course, to the extent that money can save you time or make it easier to accomplish things, it’s a wonderful thing.�

Read. Enjoy.

Travelling for much of today, so this is being done in advance. It’s been a bit of a busy 30 hours or so from one miss Liz Greenfield, revealing her cover design for the 2008 UK Webcomix Thing anthology.

Then before we’d had a chance to catch our breath, she’s part of a team that goes and wins a business school challenge. There’s a rah-rah this is such a wonderful thing, this challenge quote from her on the winners page, but I prefer this one:

FUN FACT: In high school I did a Economics & Sociology major, unaware I was going to become a cartoonist and rarely in contact with money or other people. I entered the interfaculty round of FLUX in the spirit of not wasting skills and a day of knocking about and free coffee, but I lucked out, and now there is more at stake. Our team gets to represent this part of England next month.

Speaking from the point of view of someone who hasn’t won much since a kangaroo-themed mathletes competition at age 12, this is kind of a big deal. And as a poor student, I could definitely get used to earning a fan of £20 notes every day for drawing cartoon headers on flipcharts!

I mean, there’s no mail, the banks and stock market are closed, but only some of the schools and workplaces (including mine!) are … so quick update then back to bed.

Hey, remember the bit I did last week about James Brown Guigar? Turns out he’s even harder-working than we suspected. Startin’ today, Guigar’s main strip has gone all colorificated. “But Gary”, I hear you cry. “How can you say that Guigar has become harder-working when he clearly states that the color is by Ed Ryzowski of Geek Tragedy”?

Hey, just because Guigar’s hired somebody to do the actual Turnerizing, that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park for him. The strip was designed for black and white, he has to work with Ryzowski to get the look ‘n’ feel correct, and he has to work futher ahead than he used to. No more finishing up tomorrow’s strip at 11:28 tonight if he wants color (not that we are implying in any way that Guigar, who after all has a job and a family, has ever felt the crunch of time and gotten a strip done mere minutes before deadline, oh no, no, no, no, never).

In other news, Choose Your Own Achewood™.

Work has me crawling under tables doing physical inventory of computer assets; my back and my skull are tired.

• If you haven’t seen the new Topatoco store, the bells and whistles are pretty much in place now. Of note: discounts apply to purchases (for example, three t-shirts), even from different creators that hail from different studios. While you’ve been able to get, say, a Dumbrella Val-u-Pak o’ Shirts at a convention, now you could do so with wearables from, say, Dinosaur Comics (Dayfree Press), Dresden Codak (of Koala Wallop), and Three Panel Soul (of nobody in particular). Remember all my blatherings about Aduz? With this common storefront service, Jeff Rowland has taken the first step towards that bright and shiny future. Now, who’s gonna step up and do the same on the manufacturing end?
• Okay, so everybody knows that Alexa rankings lie somewhere between “fanciful” and “science fiction”, right? Which is why I didn’t spend too many mental cycles on Mr T‘s surveys of webcomics traffic rankings based on Alexa and similar services. Unreliable data in = unreliable conclusions out. But he’s done something that may actually wrest some value from that morass of non-metrics.

  Namely, he’s pulled data from Alexa and Compete for his latest crack at analysis, but he’s also going to be retaining numbers from survey to survey instead of treating them as discrete events. The numbers in a particular survey may be utter crap, but the trendlines from month to month may actually be useful. If each survey has approximately the same bias in the data, the differentials may be somewhat reliable.

  A’course, that’s a hell of an if, but time will tell. In six months, if we see the lines yo-yoing back and forth like a drunken clown, we’ll be able to abandon the entire exercise until the technology improves. If not, getting some of the sites in question to agree to disclose their traffic may help to refine the model to the point that it can actually tell us something. For the moment though, please look upon the numbers as requiring significant amounts of salt.

Last week I mentioned, briefly, Cameron Stewart’s webcomic Sin Titulo. It’s an eerie little webcomic kind of to do both with family and with memory, and I’m quite taken with it. For me it immediately evoked some other favorites in its very savvy use of pacing; one in particular is Max’s book The Extended Dream of Mr. D..

Beginning midway through June of last year and updating once per week, Sin Titulo is just now getting to the heart of answering some of its questions. Alex, the main character, begins the story by finding out that the grandfather he’s come to visit is, in fact, dead and has been so for more than a month. While looking through his grandfather’s things, Alex discovers a photograph of his grandfather with a woman he does not recognize. In trying to find this woman, he stumbles through a series of events he doesn’t understand that link his grandfather, a horrific orderly named Walter, and the woman in the photograph.

The art is crisp and well-suited to the story, and the pacing is that of someone who has worked in comics for many years; Stewart’s history shows in this particular story. I don’t want to stay too much, since it really is a work that achieves what it does through a cumulative effect (and it certainly makes the reader curious). You should start at the beginning and work your way through. At most, it will take an hour or so, but you’ll likely want to linger longer over the images.