I know, I know, in these uncertain times I should be grateful that I have insurance but holy crap I’m ready to go on a spree about now.

• A friend of mine observed that if you do something wacky once, it’s wacky. If you do it twice, it’s weird, but three times makes it a tradition. The Unshelved Pimp My Bookcart contest is now only one iteration from “tradition” status, as this year’s winners have just been announced.
• For future reference, the Fleenplex received some information in the mail from Comic-Con International, who would like you to know that pre-registration for San Diego 2008 is now open online, and that they do expect to sell out again. Also, for those hoping to get to Vegas or some other venue with more hotel rooms available, you’re out of luck until at least 2013; just thought you’d like to know.
• Shhh … secret S*P strip.

This week’s been busy, and so I’m trying brevity this week. It’s fitting, actually, since I’m all kinds of into The Superest lately. You’ll get through the archives quickly, but hopefully the site will continue and generate a larger body of work (because what they’ve got so far is fabulous). According to their website, The Superest “is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.”

The primary players involved are Philadelphia-based illustrator and designer Kevin Cornell and, also hailing from Philly, Matthew Sutter, an animator and designer. Though there are, from time to time, invited guest artists, these two are pretty much the driving force behind the site. You might, however, be asking something more along the lines of What the heck is My Team, Your Team?!

The Superest sprang up as a result of a comment made on Cornell’s site by Andy Havens at TinkerX (listen up, you Pioneer Valley Comics Schmooze folks; I think we need to do some of these the next time we do jam strips!). Apparently Havens invented the game as a way to help keep his young son occupied while waiting in a restaurant queue, and it kind of spun off from there. He’s scanned the images that he and his son drew at the game’s genesis, and they’re totally charming. In fact, the whole passing along of this idea is kind of awesome, no? There’s even another site, Bayou Battle, inspired by TinkerX; it’s more of a Photoshop sort of thing in the vein of OMG! I can haz webcomic? than scanned drawn images, but it’s also entertaining.

Anyway, to get the full cumulative effect, you’ll so want to start reading at the beginning. It’s really entertaining.

For those of you that learned geography in American public schools, “Nebraska” is a very large chunk of real estate. I have spent every waking moment today dealing with the malevolent incompetance of insurance company “customer service” phone reps, and I’m not done yet, so you get two quick items that I cut and pasted while on hold. You’re welcome.

• On this side of the Atlantic, Bryan Lee O’Malley gets an interview at The AV Club. It’s a good read. Coincidentally, the new volume of Scott Pilgrim hits today and if I ever get this phone-tree nightmare worked out, I’m grabbin’ me a copy and holing up under the blankets with a tub of ice cream until I’ve read it at least three times — I AM PREEMPTIVELY DECLARING IT THAT GOOD.
• On the other side of the Atlantic, the Mancunian Dreamboat experiments with alternate business models for webcomics. Spoiler alert: he may not be entirely serious in all these suggestions.

Michael Rouse-Deane has been keeping us all appraised of the progress of his charitable projects this year: the naked webcomickers calendar, and The Kid’s Book Project. The former has been available for purchase for some time, and the latter has just completed. Rouse-Deane sent us:

First of all the introduction page, something which only the artists have seen. Secondly one page that has been coloured (of course the book is in black and white). Unfortunately I can’t tell you which page this is nor what’s happening but … at least it’s a sneaky peak. And finally, below is the list of the pages of each artist.

We at Fleen how our suspicions who did that colo[u]r page (click for a slightly larger version); answers on a postcard if you want to get your guesses in. And given that the artists don’t know which page their contribution goes to, we’re not going to disclose that here; you’ll just have to buy a copy and see for yourself. But we can tell you who contributed to the book:

Ryan Armand, Phillip Blackman, Eddie Bowley, Box Brown, Jeff Burkholder, Brandon J Carr, Bryan Chojnowski, Zach Clairville & Sam Batzdorff, Mitch Clem, Danielle Corsetto, Brittney Crump, Joe Dunn, J. Edward Edens, Ryan Estrada, Donny Fox, Josh P.M. Frees, Dorothy Gambrell, Frank Gibson & Ned Hugar, Ali Graham, Liz Greenfield
Edward J Grug III, James Hutchinson, Andrew James, Julie Keene, Richard Lillie, Gareth Lind, BT Livermore, Jeffery Manley, Molly McCausland, Les Mellor, Shawn Miller, Steve Napierski, Ryan North, Edmund Osterman, Frank Page, Ivan Pope, Josh Rosen, Ed Ryzowski, Matt Sandbrook, Dan Scannell, Jon Scrivens, Dave Sherrill, Jason Sigler, Philip Spence, Phillippe St. Gerard, Jimmy Tierney, Dean Trippe, Tom Truszkowski, Steve Wallace, Stephen Waller, Liz Walsh, Damian Willcox, Charles Woolbright Jnr., and Nate Wootters.

Okay! That’s today’s contribution towards carpal tunnel syndrome done, and we at Fleen hope to hell we didn’t leave anybody out. Now go order the book, dammit.

Which leaves us with a short list of timely topics:

• Fred Gallagher takes a fair amount of grief for an update schedule that can charitably be called irregular, I think he’s earned a bit of slack this week. Congratulations on the birth of Sarah and Fred Gallagher’s first child, Jack; mom & baby doing well.
• Review of the first Perry Bible Fellowship collection at The AV Club. The thing I found most interesting about The Trial of Colonel Sweeto is that it’s not in the same chronological order that the individual strips originally ran. I’m not sure if they’re in a random order or if Nick Gurewitch sat hunched over a lightbox in his artist’s garret for weeks on end with a cup of ramen and bottle of Jack his only companions, desperately trying to find the funniest possible sequence, but whichever it was, it worked.
• Randall Munroe falls prey to filthy continuity: five updates of XKCD due this week, and a storyline to go with ’em.
• On on a tangetially relevant note, I was sick all weekend and missed seeing the official rapper of webcomics in concert. Anybody that caught MC Frontalot at the Knitting Factory last night, let us know how it was. My guess: awesome.

Too bad, it’s what you’re getting. Attend:

• Described by creator Chris Peloso as an incredibly unpopular comic that almost no one has heard of, Tiny Ghosts has recently published an anthology, making it in Peloso’s words probably the least popular webcomic ever to get into print.
• Onezumi.com: webcomic. Nightwish, Finnish metal band currently on tour. Connection? The latter is wearing shirts from the former (screen caps here).
• Latest 24-hour [web]comic to hit: Ataraxia Theatre — it’s got monkeys!
• Reproduced as received:
  

  on a particularly rainy afternoon, your weary body slumped in a chair, you stare blankly at the computer screen. it gives you no information, no comfort. you click randomly, right, left, crawling through portals appearing to have no end. suddenly you find yourself at a website, a site that invites you to become involved, by choosing where you go next, how you get there and even creating directions of your own. you, the intrepid adventurer, navigate from comic to comic through links embedded within, hidden in shared objects or frames. you are at the tangent pageant.

  Um. ‘kay? Digging past that paragraph, we find a new webcomics site where a bit of poking around reveals a number of comics offerings, some of which have embedded links leading to other offerings. Not too much there at the moment, and lots of dead ends so far, but could be interesting in time.

  One piece of advice to the site owners, though: I’m a patient guy, so I messed around until I figured out what you’re trying to do. Most people will not, so I’d cut down on the mood-setting a little, and just spit out a description of what you’re attempting.

Ever since the So, what are webcomics anyway? question popped back up a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about what I like about webcomics. I’m midway through a conversation which I’ll eventually write up and post; both of the folks have interesting, smart, and somewhat critical things to say about webcomics, much to do with definitions. I’m still making up my mind about much of it, though I have to say that I have shifted a little in my thinking. Initially I took this kind of inclusive position, thinking about accessibility.

I realized tonight, midway through my banjo lesson (yes, really), that I’d made kind of a weird glide in my thinking. If something’s online, ostensibly anyone could access it. That’s great. But how do you get people there? And how do you get them to click back on the second day? I’ll never be able to read all the webcomics out there; as it is, I can’t keep up lately with the ones that I like! I have a fabulously geeky friend who just twigged to Questionable Content; he’s trying to read all the archives. I’ve been trying to read through the archives for months.

Peter, my banjo teacher, has a MySpace page (about which I give him much grief). He’s got another website as well, but, primarily, he uses this social networking stuff as a way to keep people updated about shows and releases and such. Now, I use him as an example because I did the artwork for his most recent CD. While that artwork’s available online, I don’t at all think of it as online art. You can’t see the quirks in the design, the individual aspects of the print (we hand-printed ’em), or any of that stuff. Still, if not for the link, you might never have seen it at all. Or you might have run across it through some wayward Google search, or someone might email you a link, or whatever. Who knows?
(more…)

See, the American dollar has been slip-sliding to historic lows against other major currencies. While this does not affect my life directly in any major way, it is starting to affect some of my webcomics merch-puchasing. Drat it all, some of what I like is imported.

Case in point: I loves me some Liz Greenfield autobio comics, and news that she’s got a print mini of them up for preorder made me happy. But given the current exchange rates, the €8.95 (with shipping) that she needs to charge to keep the spectre of starvation from the door comes to more than US$13; toss in the very cool calendar also up for pre-order, and you’re looking at a cool US$40. Yeah, imported items always cost more and the shipping rates are very fair compared to actual trans-Atlantic costs, but at some point it’s going to cut seriously into Greenfield’s business. And unlike the assumptions made in macroeconomic theory, I can’t just find an equivalent domestic supplier of the goods, since there’s only one Liz Greenberg Greenfield [dammit, I apparently had a bowl of Stupid Flakes for breakfast this morning; we at Fleen apologize to Ms Cusack].

Taking a slightly different tack is John Allison, who’s placed his merch business Stateside, leading to the ironic situation that I can buy one of his shirts postpaid for £11 (US$23; pretty fair for an American Apparel shirt with a quality print job) while a fellow Brit would pay £14 (US$29.50). Good for me, and Allison gets more sales out of it than if he shipped from Blighty, but it may not actually help in all cases:

There’s also a strong possibility that in the future I may have to switch to doing the comic in black and white — purely in service of the print editions. Colour printing is getting more and more expensive and the weak dollar means that while some of the sting is taken out of it for me, I’m selling fewer books (and all other items) to the USA, where the greatest percentage of my readers are. I don’t like the idea of this move very much and if I can avoid it, I will. I certainly don’t want to punish my many loyal readers, who like me, enjoy all colours.

Disaster! Particularly when Allison’s decision to draw at a larger size means we’re now getting lips in full detail on our sassy heroines. So this one goes out to any creator with a merch line and an international readership — what kind of shift in purchasing patterns have you seen, and any ideas how to combat it? Barring the ability to do merch-on-demand locally in all major locales of the world, I’m stumped.

Kris Straub is bustin’ out the nerdcore wit’ a quickness. Did I say that right? All I know about you kids and your “hip lingo” I learned from Herbert Kornfeld. In any event, it appears that Straub can freak and flow at the same time.

And what goes better with the rap than the sea shanty? Chris Baldwin makes good on his promises to record We Rogues of Wool, with both audio and video versions. I heard a rough cut of this one over the weekend (minus some filling vocals and sound effects), and thoroughly enjoyed it. If audio alone is good enough for you, download the MP3 here so as not to kill Baldwin’s bandwidth but trust me: the video is sublime. Bonus points for the Gonzo-like and Cookie Monster-like voices, and a definitive pronunciation of “Vachel”.

A bit late with this, but Child’s Play has launched this year’s holiday drive, with an entirely modest goal of US$750,000. Given that last year cleared a cool million, it would really be letting down the team to not at least equal the previous effort, yeah?

And this morning’s browse brings word of an option:

6. a privilege acquired, as by the payment of a premium or consideration, of demanding, within a specified time, the carrying out of a transaction upon stipulated terms; the right, as granted in a contract or by an initial payment, of acquiring something in the future

In this case, it’s Tim Broderick‘s Odd Jobs with a new deal:

Tim Broderick’s ODD JOBS has been optioned to Warner Brothers Television. The series includes Something To Build Upon, published by Twilight Tales, and Cash & Carry, due out in January from Echelon Press.

Two things must be noted here, even as we congratulate Broderick:

1. This doesn’t mean that Warner’s is actually making a TV show out of Odd Jobs; it means that in return for consideration to Broderick, nobody else can do so. If the option period expires without a filmed version being made, Broderick walks away with a check; if they choose to make a show, there will be further deals covering that.

   Even if they do make a show out of Odd Jobs, it could be a hell of a long time before we see anything on screen — it’s been more than two years since Fox optioned You Damn Kid, after all. For a nice discussion of the topic, see the very funny docu-comic Fortune and Glory by Brian Michael Bendis.

2. Warner Brothers Television is a division of Warner Brothers Entertainment (itself a part of the Time Warner megacorporation), as is DC Comics, which is the parent of Zudacomics. Looks like the pathway to big-media partnerships doesn’t necessarily run through Zuda after all. But then, we knew that.