We told you about the secret strip at Randy Milholland’s S*P store, Positive Thinkers, a couple weeks ago. A second, brief Choo-Choo Bear interlude soon followed, and then the site settled down to product announcements. It is a store, after all. Until Monday. Full page strip, which is unbelievably a) rude (NSFW, actually) and b) funny. It’s the perfect distillation of Milholland’s talent, in 11 panels that neatly dissect the entire superhero trope. If you aren’t signed on to Milholland’s RSS feed, you’re going to miss these gems. I haven’t found permalinks for them, so enjoy them as fleeting moments of joy until they’re gone.

Because I’m lazy, I neglected to properly keep you up with progess on the Child’s Play front since the annual launch back at the start of the month. Please to be noting that your peers have donated more than US$300,000 as of the end of last week, which means it’s probably over a US$500,000 by now. Ray may believe that six hundo is class money, but this year, I’m hoping to see something more like 1.5 million.

Addendum to yesterday’s update only of interest to people who care about me as a person: It appears that my creators friends did not spontaneously decide to honor me in their own special ways to mark the anniversary of my birth. There is mounting evidence that my wife had, sneakily and over a great period of time, covertly arranged the tributes that I received yesterday; our marriage is built upon a foundation of slippery lies, and I can never trust her again. She’s the awesomest.

I wonder if my enemies can top this parade of moustachey tributes/abuse. I doubt it. Thanks for the giggles, compadres.

In actual news today:

• The very popular (with me, anyway) Baby/Toddler/Kid Status box at Achewood appears to have reached its final update today:
  

  Today, she departs bittersweet. She waves to you, in her trendy clog shoes with the aftermarket Tinkerbell pin. She wears her Alice in Wonderland costume, but then chooses to be naked while scrubbing the popsicle mold in the kitchen sink. She asks for a piece of chocolate as big as herself, pretends her bed is a big red airplane, and wisely says that if we fill the bathtub up more deeply tomorrow, we might get a whirlpool when it drains.

  I’m going to miss those sometimes bizarre, haiku-like missives from Rancho Onstado. Perhaps sensing our need, you may now purchase the collected archive of Current Baby Status from Achewood Industries.

• You’ll Have That‘s Wes Molebash sends along his photos from last weekend’s Mid-Ohio Con; sadly, it appears the bounty will go unclaimed.
• Creators and creatrixes! Want to make WordPress your bitch? Tyler Martin is too polite a guy to put it like that, but that’s what you’ll be doing if you grab the newest version of his ComicPress theme:
  

  ComicPress continues to help Webcomic creators create their websites and publish their comics with WordPress. Versions of ComicPress 2.1 are now seen at such Webcomic sites as the recently-redesigned PvP, the recently-Fleened We The Robots, the recently-determined to kick your ass until you explode Freak Angels, and the recently-getting a lot of attention Octopus Pie.

  So if you’re running a webcomic via WordPress, you basically need this tool in your toolbox, unless you think you’re cooler than Warren Ellis or Meredith Gran. And nobody’s cooler than Meredith Gran.

• Finally, rumo[u]r has it that Michael Lalonde is considering making Orneryboy his full-time job; although such a jump requires a great deal of planning and thought, we at Fleen would like to give Lalonde our strongest encouragement in whatever path he may take.

The votes are in, and in a finish that shocked and surpised absolutely no one, Spike’s Templar, AZ is declared this year’s Webcomic Idol by the readers of Bomb Shelter Comics. The panel of distinguished judges (plus one hack journo) appears to concur that Templar was the logical choice, having beaten out Lucid TV in the final round.

The voting results have disappeared from the BSC forum page, but last time I looked it was running about 65/35 in favor of Templar, which means that popular opinion and judging opinion were in pretty close accord at the time. I was surprised to see some contestants (like Shi Long Pang and Fear, My Dear) get dropped as early as they did, but that just goes to show the strength of the field of competitors.

Now, what do we have for the winner, Johnny?

The winner gets automatic membership into the collective, and all the promotion we can provide. In addition, we’ll host the winner’s comic on Bomb Shelter for free (if they want it) and even design a new site for the comic (once again, if they want it). That was the prize last year, and since Digital Strips is going to be a co-sponsor this time around, (more details on that as it progresses) there might be more for the winner.

No word yet on whether Spike’s taking up the redesign and hosting offers, but for now, let’s just let her bask in the win. Tomorrow she can do the traditional romp-through-the-surf photo op (Lake Michigan isn’t that cold this time of year, is it?), and then it’s back to the grind of creating a damn good comic. Buy her book, dammit.

Hey, stuff:

• Traced, home of autobiographical comics by Tracy White has been redesigned. The site integrates reader commentaries with the comics and features the resumption of the Evolution storyline. White’s done some interesting docu-comics in the past, is working on a graphic novel, and was Ignatz nominated a few years back, so give it a look.
• And since you’re not busy, keep an eye on your calendar for 3 December, when Von Allan‘s the road to god knows… starts serializing on GirlAMatic. It’s about a teen girl coping with her mom’s schizophrenia, but manages to sprinkle some funny in there; updates Monday to Thursday, and 142 pages in full, more info on Allan’s blog.
• Come to think of it, there’ll be about three or four other series launching on GaM that same day, and what the heck — Shaenon Garrity‘s Lil’ Mell is back after its hiatus, so spend some time going through the archive, won’t you? Even if you’re at work, you’re not really working today.

Today’s the first post-Thanksgiving-Friday I’ve had off from work in a very long time. Even while in grad school, Thanksgiving wasn’t so much a break as it was a chance to catch up on grading before the flurry of finals and the semester ending. It’s nice to not be surrounded by research papers; it’s nicer still to have today free with no research papers and nothing which must be finished. I had a recent toe-dip back into academia on Monday, where I guest-lectured a course on comics at UMass; as sometimes happens, we ended up talking a little about webcomics, which was interesting.

Don’t get me wrong; I actually really enjoy my job. I’m finally working in a field where my Ph.D. is an asset, and I’m able to speak with a range of different people about a number of different things; it’s never the same day twice. But it is corporate. It’s my first real foray into the corporate world (which feels really different from the academic/corporate world); I have a cubicle, I work in a department, I wear a badge…so, yeah, it’s a little different from what I’m used to doing for work.

But I’m getting the joke, as it were, about office life. A friend recently sent me a link to We The Robots, Chris Harding’s new ‘thrice-weekly’ webcomic. Now, before you start thinking, “Robots? Another webcomic about robots? Aren’t robots and ninjas and pirates, like over?” let me plug. It’s kind of about corporate life, and it’s kind of about family, and the artwork is done in this vibrant, colorful way which belies the sterility the title might imply. It reminds me a little, weirdly, of Eric Carle and Ed Embley, and I really love the lettering (I’m still kind of a typography nut). Color is used very effectively, and the overall look of We The Robots is fairly different from other webcomics I’ve seen before.

It’s also wickedly funny. On one level, it works as kind of this satire on corporate life and corporate culture, kind of in the vein of (of course) Dilbert and Office Space in that ‘it’s funny because it’s kinda true’ sense. But it also manages to skewer
mass entertainment and compulsory education in some very deft ways. It’s worth just sitting down and reading through the archives, since the archives are very short, as the webcomic just launched in October of this year, with three very entertaining sections by way of introduction.

Please enjoy the other side of the fourth Thursday in November, courtesy of Jeff Rowland. Also: Black Friday.

And if that’s not enough to knock you out of Thanksgiving mode, you may at your own risk view a hell of a disturbing photo that was sent to me, so I’m inflicting it on you. Seriously, it’s like some kind of reverse Poke-birth trauma going on there.

Okay, Mid-Ohio-Con is this weekend; it’ll be a perfect chance for some of you to walk around, work off some of that pie you’re gonna be gorging on. Oh, don’t look at me that way, you are so. Wes Molebash of You’ll Have That fame will be there:

I’ll be selling copies of Volumes 1 and 2 of the strip, as well as the the one-shot comic book (including a small amount of the limited edition covers!). If you’d like to get your hands on some original artwork, I’ll have a few pieces of work that I’ll be selling for dirt cheap. And of course I’ll be signing, sketching, and high-fiving, so make sure to stop by my table located in the artist’s alley section of the convention.

High-fiving: official sport of webcomics. Also on tap for Mid-Ohio, David Willis, who may be surprised to find that one of the guests of the show will be a one Mister Tom Batiuk. Funky Winkerbean, meet Funky Cancercancer. Fleen will pay a bounty of five dollars American cash money to anybody that gets a photo of Willis and Batiuk together.

I missed out on the limited-edition (1 of 1) Hob prints, I ain’t missing out on the We Rogues of Wool poster. Speaking of Little Dee, do I detect an interesting pronoun choice in today’s strip?

Those of you down North Carolina way that enjoy things that are great, please check out the Charlotte Observer‘s free weekly supplement, Eye. It’s now running Boy on a Stick and Slither (in color), along with other webcomics-and-print dual-use weapons as Diesel Sweeties and Secret Asian Man.

Weirdly, BoaSaS used to run in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which would indicate that it’s slowly making its way north from Florida (creator Steven Cloud’s point of origin), past Georgia, and now the Carolinas. Presumably, like other southern invaders, BoaSaS will continue to spread and dominate its environment due to a lack of natural predators. Best to just accept it, and welcome your new webcomics master now.

Editor’s note: I’ll be away on Thursday and Friday for the American version of Thanksgiving, with no internet access. So as to have enough content pre-written to cover those two days, I’m gonna be stingy on news items now. Also, don’t count on Thursday & Friday being topical.

I’ve been emailing back and forth with Rick Marshall since April or so; right after I met him, I wrote:

Hey, ever wonder why Wizard’s online site is so much better (and webcomics-acknowledging) than the print magazine?

in tribute to Marshall’s (and cohort Brian Warmoth‘s) efforts to make the website more than just Maxim with slightly more comic book content. Well, he’s not at Wizard anymore, and we at Fleen are still trying to wrap our minds around that one.

He’s spoken to The Spurge about his recent experiences, and you ought to go check out what’s on the mind of this friend of webcomics.

And if you happen to run any kind of publishing enterprise, Rick is an extremely capable editor, fast, dedicated, able to produce as much work as any three people you have now, and a fun guy to have beers with. Hell, in less than two years he took Wizard‘s monthly pageviews up by two and half orders of magnitude, and that was with a site saddled with clueless management and crap content. With luck, we’ll be running some of his stellar prose here in the coming weeks.

Hey, check this: Meredith Gran, creator of Octopus Pie (and our masthead) gets interviewed by The Sound of Young America, which concentrates on “things that are awesome”. Okay, it’s for the SOYA blog and not the radio show, but I bet that can be remedied. Hey Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart! Do an audio version of the long interview with Mer. You can produce it by speaking into microphones.

In other news:

• New Dresden Codak, combining references to The Simpsons, the Wonder Twins, Richard Feynman’s bongo dumming, and physical constants that can be used to derive the existence of black holes. Best part? After all that build-up, Kimiko has a solution to her problem that’s simple, elegant, and too marvelous to spoil here. Go read it and bask. Then read the archives and bask again.
• This week, Girl Genius has gone to a rotating splash page — very nice, but something else caught my eye in the redesign. I suspect it’s been there for a couple of days now, but I just this morning noticed a very matter-of-fact, no-attention-drawn-to-it link:
  

  Buy Girl Genius Collections as PDF files

  Hmmm. Very hmmm. It’s only the older volumes (so presumably pirating isn’t as much of a concern), and the Foglios are too canny with their business to be caught out in such an easily-avoidable mistake. Somebody might want to tell DC and Marvel that this is a much more painless way to read comics electronically than the Flash-based monstrosities at their online ventures.

• And the week-long xkcd arc that wrapped today seemingly existed for the purpose of imparting both a message and a horrible, awful, no-good pun that can only be excused by its relation to The Princess Bride. Damn you, Randall Munroe! Daaaaaaamn yooooouuuuu!