I recently attended a comics-folks meet-up sort of thing (it’s more organized than I’m making it sound) in which two things fell into place. First, one attendee gave a tiebreaker vote to Planet Karen by Karen Ellis for this week’s column (thank you, by the way). Second, someone else asked if I had a theme for this column, and I do even though I haven’t quite articulated it. My academic work is largely to do with gender, comics, and popular culture, so I’m interested in webcomics that do interesting, smart things with gender. The original plan was for the column (updating Thursdays) to alternate between longer, critical pieces one week and shorter reviews the next, and they’re going to be in the first person. As I’ve continued, however, those boundaries have become less easy to delineate (today’s was supposed to have been a shorter piece, for example).

Planet Karen is an ideal example, actually, in this case. It’s a diary webcomic in which the gothy title character details her day-to-day life in England with a ten-day lag with subjects as varied as publishing her webcomic diary, making merch, discovering she has diabetes (during the holidays, even), fearing she crashed a website, paying the rent in cash because she’s lost her checkbook, and so forth. It’s upfront and earnest and self-reflexive, even for autobio work. It’s pretty captivating and led to a number of interesting questions (most of which I’m still thinking about).

Part of my desire in reading it was also to consider autobio work’s appeal a little more critically. I have a decided preference for autobio work (and admittedly, I’m not objective as I do a print-only autobio comic), and part of what’s so interesting to me about autobio work is that it seems to break down some of the distance between creator and reader. Now, with webcomics, this distance already seems a little blurry because of both the immediacy and the anonymity of the internet.

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More commentary on the latest webcomics/Wikipedia interaction, from Rich Stevens this time:

Tonight’s comic is a shout out to all the people in webcomics who have been targeted for deletion on Wikipedia recently. There seems to be a pretty big bias over there against the legitimacy and relevance of web-based strips, which strikes me as pretty goony for a non-official encyclopedia with enough room to include every obscure topic in the universe.

If I had it my way, I’d yank my own article and be blissfully nonexistent along with a ton of cartoonists I respect.

(Seriously, who makes a to-do list out of deciding if someone else is worthwhile or not? Just glancing at this list, I see five quality strips with strong fanbases.)

Although, from my reading, Rich may have misidentified a Wikieditor for scorn; it appears that the user in question is only cleaning up the formatting of the Webcomics section and not participating in the actual deletes:

You deleted White Ninja?? What the hell is wrong with you? *Also OverCompensating?? What is your problem, and where do you get the right?*

Honestly, why this obsession with deleting perfectly viable webcomic entries? Are you looking for an endlösung to the comic question?

If so, thank you User:BradBeattie! But learn from the mistakes of others (including myself) and try not to get too mad. It hasn’t done any good, and it can drive you to make poor choices.

So let us turn instead to things that are awesome, like today’s Scary Go Round. Whatever you think of his writing, his varying art styles, or the very singular voice of his strip, John Allison never phones it in. He creates details unnecessary for the gag or the plot, but which add richness to this story’s world.

Case in point: Moon’s sweater, which is well-worn, has lost the elastic at cuffs and neck, and is torn at the lower hem. It’s the sort of detail that your eye just takes in and rolls around it for a while, and later your eye has a satisfied look and smokes a cigarette.

Who would have thought it would finally come at the hands of a mild-mannered strip about mild-mannered librarians, created in part by a real-life mild-mannered librarian? Gonna be somebody’s ass gets whooped on this one. And as we all know, when webcomics creators fight, it gets ugly.

In other news:

Several mentions in the webcomicsosphere for the past twelve hours or so about Michael Bay. Yes, that Michael Bay. Specifically, news about the newest project that he’s signed onto:

The film will reportedly center on an academic researcher who discovers that multiple versions of Earth co-exist in different dimensions, but all are threatened by an apocalypse to occur in 2012 prophesied by the ancient Mayans. By opening a portal into a parallel universe, he makes contact with his double to stop the prophecy from being fulfilled.

The film is currently looking for a screenwriter.

Here’s a suggestion: how about Jon Rosenberg? Sounds an awful lot like the storyline that’s been running in Goats for most of the past two years.

Apparently, a forthcoming novel by Whitley Strieber, 2012: The War For Souls, is the basis for the Bay production; given that Strieber’s book isn’t due to be published until September, it’s impossible to say whether or not ideas got (let us euphemize) farmed from Rosenberg. After all, Mayans are hot right now, right? On the other hand, this isn’t a new experience for Rosenberg, whose long-running strip has featured a genius goldfish and sexually-deviant gray aliens living among ordinary Americans (which, let’s face it, is a pretty particular combination of themes right there).

Attempts to reach Rosenberg for comment were unsuccessful. We at Fleen can only speculate whether he is:

• flattered that his ideas are good enough for people to make money off of them
• pissed off that it’s not him making the money
• horrified that it’s Michael Bay who’s making the money, or
• ready to sue for 1.6 billion dollars

Personally, we at Fleen are hoping for that last one, because it would be awesome, like a flaming train running into a bus full of nuns, kittens, puppies, and orphan children, and then they all blow up in slow motion. Hey — somebody get me Michael Bay on the phone, I got an idea for him.

Editor’s note: Easter Eggy goodness over at Girl Genius today, and since it tosses a little love to The Devil’s Panties, I figured we at Fleen should do the same. Panties wrangler Jennie Breeden was kind enough to do an interview with us in the wake of the New York Comic Con last month, and it’s well past time that it ran.

For those of you who may not recall, at San Diego last year Breeden announced that she’d given notice at her day job and was making [web]comics full time. Six months in, how’s she doing?

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So posting will probably be late today. Apologies in advance.

PS: Don’t forget The Thing in sunny springtime London where they don’t have major snowstorms.

Boy on a Stick and Slither creator Steven Cloud is getting some page space over at Comics.com, the web arm of United Features Syndicate. It looks like BOASAS will be joining the syndicate in some capacity, on account of it says, “coming soon!” and everything.

Except, Cloud informs Fleen, he hasn’t signed anything yet.

To clarify things, Cloud and UFS have been in discussion for a web-only syndication deal (the sort of thing we’ve seen before), but no final agreement has yet been reached.

It’s a shame that Cloud wasn’t able to announce any (potential) agreement in his own way, and Fleen hopes that he is able to come to terms that are amenable to his interests without undue pressure. Fleen also hope that Cloud gets to dope slap a syndicate suit for jumping the gun on the announcement. More on the deal (and slapping) as it develops.

I thought I’d start this week with a quick note of thanks. The list of suggestions on last week’s column was both interesting and lengthy, so much so that I’m still reading through those suggestions rather than moving forward too much further with the article I want to write about women in webcomics. Some of them—like Jennie Breeden’s The Devil’s Panties and Leanne Franson’s Liliane, Bi-Dyke weren’t unfamiliar to me, though I think The Devil’s Panties is probably one of the better-known webcomics out there, and though I’m much less familiar with Franson’s work online, I know her print collections well. Others, like Normal Life, and Planet Karen, I’d just never heard of. As a group of recommendations, they’re a wide range of different styles and subject matter, and not all are American, which is good. It’s always interesting to me to see what people recommend and why, and I’m glad for a diverse set of new things to read.

The comments, of course, raised the issue for me of wondering about how do people initially find the webcomics that they read and follow (and maybe this overlaps a little with earlier pieces about readership and introducing folks to webcomics)? Certainly, recommendations go a long way, be that a suggestion from a review site (there are lots of ’em out there), a link on a friend’s blog, or someone you know emailing you a link directly from a webcomic’s site. Sometimes this transmission becomes almost viral; someone emails you something you think is so cool that you blog about it and then email a couple of other folks about it, who in turn email a bunch of other people, and so on. Word of mouth (so to speak) is a powerful force.

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Presently, Dr Leon Sumbitches redirects to the main article on Achewood. But for how long?

Actual content later today.

So it’s not going to be Dick & Fart, LLC after all. Dang. But the offices of the new Scott & Kris show promise to have the highest Aviator density this side NASA in the Apollo days.

Fashion eyewear aside,this venture brings to mind some curious possibilities about how webcomickry collectives (and business relationships) overlap and intersect in various ways: Starslip Crisis is part of Halfpixel, and also part of Blank Label Comics, but the rest of Halfpixel is not part of Blank Label; neither is PvP, but PvP: The Series is (in conjunction with Blind Ferret Entertainment) and also, presumably, part of Toon Hound Studios (but not Toonhound Studios); Toon Hound (but not Toonhound) has a relationship with Image; plus it (that would be Halfpixel again) has a store, which may or may not sell the products of any/all of the above.

From a corporate standpoint there’s a chance that if Kurtz and/or Straub gets hit by a bus, the lawyers are going to be teasing apart the interests for the next decade. So let’s just call it a way for a couple of friends to be able to work together; given all that the two accomplish already, picking themselves up and going to a separate place to work (rather than working from their respective homes) has the potential to explode their productivity. Either way, Fleen offers a hearty welcome to the new Halfpixel.

Speaking of The Onion, “Ordway” writes wanting to know what’s up with the editorial cartoon that’s been running in that hallowed paper for the past six months or so. It’s garnered much consternation, although I would have thought that it was obviously a parody of a bad editorial cartoon. All the cliches are there, from clumsy “jokes” to marginal art to the fetish for labelling everything. I mean seriously — labelling a pair of underwear as “underwear”? It’s a spoof, people. Although I must confess, if I open the paper and don’t see a crying Statue of Liberty, my day is a little sadder.

And you know whose work appears in The Onion? David Malki !. It’s old news by now but if you hadn’t heard, Lynn Johnston isn’t retiring after all. Instead, she’ll turn FBOFW into a permanent clip show, which is a terminally depressing thought. Johnston’s real reason for bowing out:

I could not sustain a gag a day strip (daily). Because if you’re doing the kind of work that is gag-a-day, eventually you’re going to have to work with writers. One brain cannot come up with a gag a day.

As Malki ! wrote in response to Johnston’s difficulty thinking up one joke per day: I’m sure she didn’t MEAN to insult hundreds of comics writers she’s never heard of (not to mention plenty of her syndicated colleagues), but I think she kinda did. More than that, she’s keeping new creators from having a shot at the 2000+ papers she runs in now, which is an additional kick in the teeth to hundreds more writers she’s never heard of.

Finally, I can’t tell you how many times I wish I had balls this big.