We’ve written about John Baird and his Create A Comic Project at the New Haven Free Public Library previously, so it was a pleasure to hear from Baird that he’s got new stuff on tap, and you (yes, you) can help out:

On June 2 the Create a Comic Project (CCP) will have a Comic Making Tournament (CMT). The CMT will be at the New Haven Public Library in New Haven, CT, on June 2 from 11 AM – 2 PM. A brief summary of the tournament is here.

There are several sponsors for the event (including Yale University), but volunteers to help with judging are greatly needed. Anyone in the New England area is welcome, especially webcomic artists. Any comic creator who shows up will be dubbed a celebrity judge. The chief reward for doing this will be a massive ego boost from being treated as awesome by several dozen kids.

One idea for a concluding tournament event: all the children will issue a mock challenge to the artists for a comic making showdown, á la Iron Chef. This should prove to be a very fun time!

If you’re interested in helping, please send me an email to createacomic at NOSPAM gmail dot com. Thank you!

Man, I wish I could attend that. Given the number of New England-located webcomickers, there better be at least one that shows up in a Chairman Kaga costume. I’m looking at you, Southworth.

Scott McCloud has some last-minute changes to his speaking tour; if you live anywhere near Cheyenne, Wyoming (and I realize that out thataway, the concept of “near” is somewhat fluid), you can join in on the fun on Wednesday at the Laramie County Public Library, 7pm. Also please consider that the McCloud family minivan will be ass-haulin’ from South Dakota to Wyoming to Montana, so if you see them in your rear-view, pull over to let ’em pass.

In other news, Dinosaur Comics is about to turn 1000 strips old! But this week is Guest Week, so does that count? Maybe! Today’s strip is numbered #993, which means that sometime next week the strip odometer rolls over. In any event, today’s strip (by the dudes from Dr McNinja) is pure, distilled awesome and features bacon and a secret Achewood (which is today the source of my new favorite saying) shout-out. What more could you want?

And lastly: new SGR book. Ryan dies and Tim gets run out as mayor and Esther and The Boy get it on in a caravan in Wales and there’s Devil Bears and Rachel and Tessa and crime doin’ and justice is served via giant bazongas!

Word from Christopher B. Wright that — because moving across the country isn’t stressful enough — he’s leaving the Green Keen Empire to take Help Desk solo:

The other news is that I’m going to be leaving Keenspot. Over the past year I’ve been trying to move Ubersoft.net to a database-driven site, and each attempt manages to screw up the Keenspot servers something fierce, causing crashes and slowdowns and other me-related havoc. If I want to keep going in this direction — which I do — it’s pretty clear that in order to do so I’m going to have to set out into uncharted waters and get my own website hosting. So come July I will be switching over to a non-Keenspot hosting provider.

It’s a pretty scary prospect. I’ve been with Keenspot for 7 years and haven’t regretted it. I get a lot of site traffic from Keenspot and expect that a lot of that traffic will go away when I move on. That said, the prospect of crashing a brand new server is somewhat exciting.

Best of luck to Wright, and be sure to cut him some slack if there are server hiccups, yes?

Speaking of server hiccups, you may recall that Scott Kurtz posted recently that his provider was doing some preventative maintenance and bringing additional server resources online; as I recall, it went unusually smoothly. Naturally, a clean server transition really means unexpected outages will crop up later, just when you’re breathing easy. Kurtz would like you to know:

[T]he PvP server had some hardware issues that my host Speakeasy is working on. We’ve been down for about a day. We had planned to run maintenance over the slow part of the weekend but apparantly the server had other plans and crapped out early yesterday.

It’s all a part of running your own website.

I’ll be posting strips over at halfpixel.com until my site is back up again. But it might be a long weekend.

Now that you can all get your PvP fix, how about a dip into the mailbag?

• From Tommie Kelly: The End is into its fourth chapter; I held off on linking until there was a bit of content there.
• Straining the bounds of the concept of “anniversary”, Dean Tan let us know the other day that his comic, Life In Existence, hit its ninth consecutive strip. By the time you read this, it may be at twelve or thirteen!
• Taking a more straightforward approach to the “new webcomic” announcement (yeah, talkin’ to you, Tan!), Michael Hoskins announces Nightworld. Number of installments necessary to reach the first decapitation and head-eating: three.
• Speaking of college themed strips, John Kroes writes to invite you to Last Ditch Effort, which runs both online and in several dozen college papers across the country.

And as we all know, strips that start in college papers can lead to bigger things, like books that end pre-orders on Monday. Just sayin’.

Lastly, condolences to Mr T for laughing too hard and giving himself Winkernoma. Hope you’re feeling better, T.

Where to start, where-oh-where? How about: Wizard (online), running an interview with Shortpacked creator David Willis.

Next up: Wapsi Square, where we get a bit more insight into Tina the Mysterious Barrista(s) (she did refer to herself as we, which I find interesting). Gotta say, Tina being the equivalent of Monica’s personal demons is one thing that I never would have predicted. And as long as we’re stopping off in the Twin Cities, I’ll note that Paul Taylor is listing Wapsi Book 2 for this summer. That’s item #37 on my San Diego purchase list.

How about a good old-fashioned Two Minutes Hate? Nobody likes Comic Sans. Nobody. Seriously, nobody. I think a lot of people don’t get the idea of having a favorite font. Me? I travelled to Antwerp in large part just to visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum so I could see Claude Garamond’s originals (and the fact that Kulminator is practically around the corner was entirely coincidental)

But in addition to a seriously hearty laugh-chuckle, this morning’s Sheldon made me remember my grandfather. He ran a Linotype shop near Manhattan’s old Radio Row (which got torn down to build the World Trade Center); it made me remember the day that he took me to work to show how the keyboard worked, how you could type things here, and slug of metal with backwards letters came out there, and it made me remember how he made one with my name on it in Palatino. Powerful stuff, webcomics.

Yesterday morning I carpooled into town with my housemate on the way to work (it’s a longish story involving a haircut appointment, a crap bus schedule, and the Dalai Lama). I was in the middle of a transaction at the teller window when I heard, “Anne! Look!”
I turned around and saw a scruffy looking kid sauntering across the bank lobby with the Red Robot on the back of his black hoodie, and then my housemate said something that sounded like mumble mumble Exploding Dog? mumble and I realized, interestingly, that even though she reads both Exploding Dog and Diesel Sweeties, she knew the character but didn’t associate it with the comic of its origin.

It got me thinking about how webcomics references pop up in the most random places. Not long ago, I was at a drugstore on the main street of the town where I live, and I was being rung out by a teenaged cashier who’d stuck a hand-written sticker on her uniform which read, “I’m a rocker. I rock out.” It was weird enough that I couldn’t help but comment, “Hey, I know a guy who makes t-shirts with that slogan on ’em.” She looked at me with the disdain reserved for old, un-hip folks and said, petulantly, “Well, it is a really popular webcomic, you know.” Yeah, I thought, that was kind of my point.

I had begun to wonder if it was just going to be all Diesel Sweeties references (surely other webcomics show up in weird random places!) but last night I returned to my alma mater to lecture, and the first thing out of someone’s mouth in the audience participation part was “goats!” Which of course led to a digression about Goats.

When I got home yesterday evening, I found a charming wee email from Kyle Sanders, prompted by my column last week. He’s the creator of Standard Deviation, which he describes as “a webcomic based on the college experience.” I figured I’d have a look, for a few reasons (including the timing, which was just too perfect with me all nostalgic and such). First, I know that there’s a whole lot of webcomics on the college experience. Second, I usually enjoy reading them since my college experience deviated pretty radically from the traditional experience (did you check out that alma mater link?) It updates Tuesdays and Thursdays, and has been online for just over a year (though, of course, he’s been drawing for a while longer than that…), so it’s still fairly new and the archives aren’t too difficult to read through.

But while I was reading through his archives, I also clicked on a link for Blue House Comics by Stirling Morris and Shawn Miller. It’s also about the college experience and seems relatively new as well (it updates Mondays and Fridays).

I’m still, of course, reading through them both, but my initial responses are fairly positive. I’m enjoying reading through the archives, despite a few small navigation issues, and I was wondering if there were other “college experience” webcomics out there that folks read and enjoy?

Noticed some good news at !Journalista! this morning: this year’s Xeric Grants have been announced, and we’ve got some webcomics winnners. Given that the Xerics are for self-published dead-tree comics, the focus isn’t on comics that were designed for (and released on) the web, but here we have Tyler Page‘s Nothing Better Vol. 1, taken from the webcomic of the same name.

And even more interestingly, (via Heidi MacDonald), we have Kevin Colden’s Fishtown:

The press release notes that Colden “serialized his comic book online just before receiving the acceptance letter from Xeric. The feedback has been great! So, he’s decided to continue posting and decline the grant money — not an easy decision — but he’s still a Xeric winner!â€?

I’m not aware of any previous grantees turning down money, so do Colden a favor and go check out his work. And while you’re at it, check out Nothing Better and buy Page’s book, ’cause it’s good stuff.

And as long as we’re talking about good news and good stuff, we at Fleen would be remiss if we didn’t mention Paul Southworth’s good news:

My wife is 20 weeks pregnant as of today (halfway there, about 5 months), and everything is going well. So every purchase you make from me will go to a good cause; the feeding and clothing of a new little person this coming September. I’ll keep you posted!

Check out the sonogram of the little critter; I like this child, my sibling in moustachery, already. As Southworth noted, having replicants ’round the house is expensive, so please note that you still have until Friday to purchase his Medieval Friday, at which point it will be gone forever.

Fear not, there is a secret new design that will go on sale to replace it, and Fleen contracted stalker paparazzi to obtain an exclusive photo. The new shirt design was allegedly seen partying in an LA club with an unnamed starlet, and rumor has it that not all parties were wearing under-wears. Click here for the exclusive first look. Or, if you don’t like shirts, just buy some of his originals, unless you’re an evil bastard who hates babies that have enough food and clothing and shelter. Jerk.

The St Petersberg Times reports today that Todd Goldman and Dave Kelly have reached an agreement (at least, that Goldman’s press agent stated such on the 3rd). Also, that Todd Goldman called the situation “false accusations”, and Goldman’s art dealer describes the situation as “… with the Web, anybody can go out and ruin someone.” Now we could go back and forth on this forever, but it looks like it’s time to stick a fork in this one.

How about some press releases? Speaking of May 3rd:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MILES GROVER OF THINKIN’ LINCOLN ISSUES A PRETTY OBVIOUSLY FAKE PRESS RELEASE TO FLEEN.COM IN THE HOPES THAT THEY WILL MENTION HIS COMIC ON THEIR BLOGSPACE THINGY – MAY 3 2007

Thinkin’ Lincoln, everybody’s favorite webcomic about floating president heads (also: floating queen heads and uh… vice president heads), has passed an amazing milestone this week. Yes, that’s right, we’ve finally hit comic number 433!

“When this comic started,” quipped Miles Grover, author and artist of Thinkin’ Lincoln, “I never thought I’d be able to do 433 comics. Think about it! 433 is a lot of comics. If you read them back-to-back and it took an average of 15 seconds per comic to read, that would be a little bit under 2 hours to read! OK I guess that’s not that long, but still.”

Yes, it’s been a year and 10 months since the comic started and what a wild ride it’s been! Like the time when Lincoln thought about things and then said stuff or that one time when George Washington was a jerk. And who can forget the time when Darwin was involved in a joke about evolution?

We appreciate all our loyal readers and look forward to the next 433 comics to come!

Before you get to thinkin’ that contrived press releases will work for you, bear in mind that I feel a minor obligation towards anybody/ anything involving Lincoln at the moment, seeing as how I neglected to properly credit Zombie Lincoln as the creator of the antisolipsism picture used here.

Oh, okay, one more:

Austin, Texas resident and internet cartoonist DON JOLLY has a whole lot of BRAVERY to be proud of!

Jolly, who is twenty years old, has been diagnosed with serious head cancer. But even so, he keeps on bravely doing the same kind of things healthy people do: like writing a comic on the internet called Flapjack Canyon.

“It sucks that Don has cancer,” said his Dad. “He’s always whining. And I have to give him rides all the time.”

Flapjack Canyon is a product of Jolly’s dim of view of human experience. In the series of stand-alone, six panel stories he has painted such depressing subjects as a wounded young woman being a total slut to spite her idiot parents, a man nervously awaiting the death-prophecy of a matte black watch and a chubby moron who trades spiritual fulfillment for a jet ski. The black & white art is produced digitally, with the intention of evoking the grimy look of early Apple II graphics. (Readers take note: not a sprite comic.)

“I have cancer,” said Jolly. “I have cancer.”

Seeking comment, Fleen contacted Jolly for the following short interview:

Fleen also attempted to contact Cancer for a statement, but was unsuccessful at press time.

Matt Boyd is putting the whole ugly affair behind him. It’s probably the best thing he could do, under the circumstances.

Speaking of journal comics, Planet Karen is something you ought to be reading if you’re not already; the past couple of days have been a real study in contrasts. On the one hand: darkness (and not the faux darkness that’s a common affectation among the prone-to-wear-black). On the other: funny (very funny, and I could spend all day making a list of reasons why Candy Mandelbrot is the best airhead local news bunny name ever).

In other news, Josh Carrollhach wrote:

Hey there. Love your site. This has popped up over at Drunk Duck in the forums.

The “sign your rights away in the guise of a contest” continues, this time in webcomics. Platinum Studios, though Drunk Duck, is holding a comic contest where the winner signs away everything. My thoughts here.

I didn’t read through all the T&Cs, but it looks like the same contest as last year, and that means the same arguments are coming back up. Seems to me that the only person really qualified to comment on this is DJ Coffman, and near as I can tell, he’s satisfied. That may change, but the situation really boils down to:

• If you feel that this contest would negatively impact your moral rights as a creator, don’t enter.
• If you feel that you can win, make sure you have a lawyer explain in plain English what the terms of the deal are before you sign.

Crisis resolved.

There were a couple of good press releases in the ol’ mailbag, too, but I figure we can run ’em tomorrow. Weather’s too damn nice here for me to be inside bloggin’.

A call requesting comment with respect to the Boyd non-incident was unsuccessful. The woman I spoke to on the phone told me that she would be unable to speak on the matter “unless there’s been a charge made.”

Should the State’s Attorney for St. Mary’s County decide to make a statement, we’ll run it here.

Editor’s note: Matt Boyd was kind enough to talk to Fleen about his recent experiences; what follows is a lightly-edited transcript of a Gmail Chat session.

(more…)

Okay, we linked to the funnybook version on Monday, but what’s happened to Matt Boyd is more tragic than humorous.

From what I’ve gathered things were, if not exactly good, then at least no-hard-feelings for Boyd on the part of those that used to be his bosses; they understood it was a stupid overreaction on the part of people that he worked with, they didn’t personally hold it against him, and they were willing to give him good references. Couple weeks of unemployment benefits, grab a new job, all good.

Then the cops showed up on his doorstep.

Details are sketchy at this time, but it appears that making a comic about his experience counts as making terroristic threats. I realize that by this logic, me reporting on the making of a comic that’s seen as a terroristic threat may count as lending support to terrorists. If I wake up in Gitmo, tell my wife that I love her, and I’m sorry I’m not there to help walk the dog.

In the meantime, the best information appears to be from Rich Stevens (story on the front page now, here eventually); more on this as it develops.

Edit to add: interview just conducted with Boyd, to run tomorrow.