It was a joke, since the earliest days of Fleen — ask Ian Jones-Quartey when he would finish RPG World and he would delay the return by a month.

Eventually, he gave us the end of RPG World, in an episode of OK, KO!, some 17 years after he’d launched it. No more jokes about October 2038, no more complaining from people that it was their favorite¹, just some well-earned closure.

But the internet hates to let anything go; sometimes that’s bad, but sometimes it’s not.

When Jones-Quartey let RPG World go, he said that anybody that wanted to continue it could, and that’s what a guy named Bryan Howard wrote to me to tell me he was doing, partnered up with the pseudonymous AtariBetch. RPG World Fan Revival kicked off with a catch-up page and a pointer to the original Keenspot archives before jumping in with their best guess as to what the story might have looked like. Taking inspiration from the original, RPGWFR has had its own lengthy hiatuses before adopting a regular schedule in midsummer 2018.

RPGWFR isn’t a continuation Ian Jones-Quartey’s RPG World, but you could call it something between fanon and tribute. A fork, in computer code terms, maybe. There’s an awful lot of story that could happen between the last bit of plot before the Big Hiatus and the canonical end, so maybe it’s like a remix of all the stuff in the middle? It actually reminds me of something Dolly Parton said² in the last episode of the Radiolab offshoot from Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee, Dolly Parton’s America.

Dolly was talking about how her team is planning for the end of her career and a time after Dolly; she’s written some 3000 songs and we haven’t heard all of them by a long shot, and she’s spending a lot of time in the studio. Not producing full songs, mind you, but recording just vocals on a click track³.

When there’s no more Dolly, there will be all these vocal-only recordings that people can create their own arrangements around. Dolly’s music will last as long as people want to tinker with it and the current form of English is comprehensible. Shakespeare’s lasted 400 years and people reinterpret his work, but this will be people partnering with Dolly for the next few millennia.

About five years back, I said that RPG World was sort of immortal, and by letting people take their own whack at his toys, Jones-Quartey has done the same thing that Dolly eventually decided on. Oh, sure, he’s not the one person that’s universally beloved by everyone from conservative church ladies to drag queens, but there will always be somebody out that that finds RPG World to be the greatest thing in their world.

Maybe it’ll be this revival — or the 37th one for that matter — that they love and follow it back to the original recipe. Maybe Jones-Quartey’s next show or movie redefines storytelling so much that completists obsessively dig through his earliest work. Maybe other, uncompleted or orphaned webcomics need to thrown open in this way.

Or maybe we should just be grateful for the sharing that he’s done, and is doing as I write this — check out the unreleased work from OK, KO! that he’s been posting on Twitter for the last day, and enjoy the weekend.

Spam of the day:

The 64 billion dollar optometry industry is desperately trying to hide this from you

Hide what? The fact that eyes change shape and malformed ocular lenses can be compensated for with a piece of glass ground into a specific shape, a technology we’ve had since the 17th century?

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¹ Or maybe their kids, given the amount of time that had passed.

² Stay with me.

³ Not to be confused with a Chick tract; I don’t want to speak for the lady, but I’m pretty sure Dolly would have no time for Jack Chick.

There’s something that I learned years ago, somewhere between my college radio days and my job teaching, and that’s as much as you fill the space around you with words, nothing you say has as much power

as silence.

Which thought came back to me last night in the venerable Bluestockings bookstore/cafe/activist space on the Lower East Side, which was hosting the first of a monthly series of comics readings. Comics don’t get anywhere enough readings, not like books do, and that’s a shame — with the right sense of timing and a clear enough image projected, there’s real power there. The events folks at Bluestockings kicked things off with a trifecta of work by and about queer people, featuring Bee Kahn, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Beatrix Urkowitz; this page is famously in the tank for Ms Valero-O’Connell and I wasn’t familiar with the work of the other two, so let’s start with them.

Bee Kahn brought an introductory section of a story that was self-published and debuted at FlameCon a while back; now it’s getting a slick reissue from a publisher (they can’t say who yet) later this year. Renegade Rule is the story of four women on a pro gamer team, trying to reach the finals for VR shooter league play. It’s hard to tell where the story will go from the excerpt Kahn was able to share (enough to drop the reader into the VR experience and introduce the main characters and their personalities), but it was more than enough to say this:

Kahn’s comic book caption game is strong. You’d have to get Matt Fraction on his best day to come up with captions that land with the same impact and humor. Remember what I said up above about timing? The text in the word balloons and captions in Renegade was mostly too small to read from the audience, but having to click through to add each balloon and box to the image forced Kahn to delay just a bit and it made each bit of dialogue and especially the captions land with impact. I’m going to be keeping my eye out for this one in the fall.

Beatrix Urkowitz brought four short stories, three of which were about the same character, and which displayed a visual sensibility reminiscent of Tom Hart’s Hutch Owen (maybe a splash of Sylvan Migdal thrown in), with a KC Green-like ability to take a premise, run it as far as you possibly can, and then take it even further. The fourth story Urkowitz shared was about the annoying person we all know, and it was good. The first three were about the lover of everyone in the world.

Specifically, and introduction to TLOEITW and how she feels, followed by a story about the lovers of TLOEITW (ie: all seven point whatever billion of us) and how they (we) feel about the situation, and a third story entitled Everyone Breaks Up With The Lover Of Everyone In The World, where all of us form a gestalt entity to deliver a break-up speech to TLOEITW, who concludes that she’ll go get drunk, but literally everywhere she goes is now populated exclusively with her exes. It was a trip.

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell read one of the three stories from her just-arriving-in-the-mail-to-backers-from-Shortbox collection, Don’t Go Without Me (if you weren’t in on the Kickstart, you’ll be able to order a copy next month). The first story in the collection is the title piece, about a date to a parallel universe where telling stories robs you of your memories. It’s haunting and echoes every mythological tale of not understanding the rules of a place, from Persephone’s pomegranate to those who stay overlong in Faerie. You can read an excerpt of it here.

The second story is What Is Left, previously released as a minicomic; I got a copy at MoCCA and loved it, but reading its sci-fi take on a doomed spaceship propelled by a memory-fueled engine changed by reading in alongside Don’t Go. The former is about finding refuge — literally, in this case — in memories, and the latter about diminution from sharing, and while the stories contrast with each other, they also sharpen and strengthen each other. You can read and excerpt of What Is Left here.

The third story, the one Valero-O’Connell read last night, is Con Temor, Con Ternura, or With Fear, With Tenderness; it asks the question What would you do on the last night of the world? Valero-O’Connell, in the making of booklet that’s a Kickstarter accompaniment to the collection, describes her first comics work as dialogueless, narrated visual poetry, and Con Temor is a return to that form. As the questions posed by the story got more pointed, as the reality that a Proverbial It was building, Valero-O’Connell got steadily quieter, and the room more hushed, the audience almost holding its collective breath.

The conclusion, a cliffhanger following a countdown from three¹, slowed its pace and the silence held as everybody sought their own answers to that question, while the screen was a-whirl with swooping curves and scarcely a straight line in sight. There’s an organic life to her work, one that focuses on things that live rather than things that are built, and it lends a vitality to the visuals that’s all but unmatched. Don’t even get me started on what she does with hair; it’s so good, it makes me angry.

Silences break eventually. The applause for each of the readers was well earned.

It’s like I told Roo², we’re in an age of comics like the current age of television, where it is not possible to keep up with all the good work that’s being made³. But for one night a month, Bluestockings is going to do its best to show you some work you might have missed otherwise, and for that we can all be thankful.

Spam of the day:

As an Airbnb host, you can meet interesting new people and learn about diverse cultures without even having to leave the house.

Weird. I thought the purpose of Airbnb was to scam people and deplete stocks of housing in cities around the world, driving up rents and exacerbating the problem of homelessness.

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¹ One that looks to the reader to fill in the ending, more than any story I’ve read except maybe John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider.

² You may recall that MxRoo named the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund, and that we seem to run into each other randomly. Okay, a comics reading might not be the weirdest place to bump into a longtime reader of Fleen, but on the day that Jon Rosenberg’s son got his life back via surgery? I was in Manhattan on a work gig and walking on the street to lunch when I head somebody call my name. It was Roo, with the news that Jon had just posted that the surgery had gone well. We got a history of being together for awesome things is what I’m saying.

³ Which makes it even more baffling that there’s a cohort of miserable assholes out there who have seemingly devoted their lives to shitting on people making comics they don’t like — comics they think shouldn’t be allowed to exist because they’re about things/people other than the precise interests of said miserable assholes — instead of just reading what they like. They are literally denying themselves the time to read all the stuff they do like in order to try to destroy stuff other people like. Petard-hoisters, the lot of ’em.

When we lost Tom Spurgeon, he left many, many holes. Holes in our hearts. Holes on the internet¹ And a great big hole in a comics show in Columbus, where he was the founding executive director. It was announced a while back that CXC would continue in 2020, no promises beyond that, but it wasn’t known who would step into Spurge’s shoes.

Until yesterday:

Cartoonist and educator Jerzy Drozd has been hired as interim executive director of Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC), the international showcase for cartoon art that will hold its 6th annual festival Oct. 1-4.

Drozd is a cartoonist who leads workshops for children and teens in libraries and schools, and for teachers who want to bring comics to the classroom. He is a founding member of Kids Read Comics, a nonprofit that organizes the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival (A2CAF), and has served as its programming coordinator since 2009. He lives in central Ohio with his wife, Anne Drozd, who is the museum coordinator at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

I’m not sure that there could have been a better choice than Drozd; keep in mind that interim appointments of this nature are meant to be stopgaps, warm bodies that keep things vaguely running until a real leader can be found. Drozd is far, far better than that, based on the reports I’ve had from A2CAF (I’ve not made it there myself) and his existing relationship with both CXC and the Billy Ireland.

Drozd is an accomplished cartoonist solo and in collaboration with his wife, Anne. The only not-entirely-positive thing I’ve ever found about Drozd is that he is partially unGoogleable because there is another Jerzy Drozd out there, a luthier of highly-regarded basses, which pushes comics!Drozd down the results. I can sympathize².

I suspect that this is one of those interim appointments that will turn into permanence some time after Drozd has a chance to show us what he can do with CXC ’20. If you’re going to Columbus in October, do him a favor and thank him for jumping into a giant’s role under terrible circumstances; I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

Spam of the day:

Are you ready to do something about your achy legs?

This one’s about special socks meant to help foot and leg pain. As a guy who’s on his feet pretty continuously in the classroom (not to mention EMT duty), I’ve found the simple (and far cheaper) solution is to wear two pair of socks. Works great.

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¹ For some time, his site was down; it mostly back now, thank Glob.

² Actually, I rejoice. I’ve met Other Gary for lunch — nice guy — and I’ve told him that his somewhat higher profile re: that unfortunate trombone-related incident has done a great deal to keep me off of the Big G’s radar. I’ve done careful pruning here and there to make sure I end up further down the search listings than him (and the unfortunate murder victim), and I hope to someday be further down than the kite maker in the British midlands.

This is it. Today is the start of a new world, a better world, one where everything is a bit brighter and more hopeful. What? No, not the impeachment, that’s a shitshow.

No, today is the long-awaited launch of Random House Graphic, and we should give the floor to RHG supremo Gina Gagliano:

We’re doing this thing — starting today! It’s amazing to get to work every day with our fantastic staff and our phenomenal creators on putting more comics for kids into the world. Yay ?@RHKidsGraphic?!

We’ve spoken about the RHG launch titles previously, but to remind you:

• 21 January: The Runaway Princess by Johan Troïowski
• 11 February: Bug Boys by Laura Knetzger
• 3 March: Aster And The Accidental Magic by Thom Pico and Karensac
• 14 April: Witchlight by Jessi Zabarsky

And if that weren’t enough, we are just two weeks away from the long-overdue relaunch of Andy Runton’s Owly:

Are you ready to have a hoot? Pre-order your copy of Owly: The Way Home by @owly today! http://bit.ly/3a7cMWM

As a reminder, the five Owly books are being colored, and also made bilinguial — in addition to speaking in icons, some characters will also be able to speak English. Owly will continue to use symbols only, with others translating for him as necessary. Remastered books will release at six month intervals, with new Owly waiting for us at the end of the reissues. My only complaint? Somebody should have registered ow.ly before Hootsuite got a hold of it. Missed opportunities, people!

Spam of the day:

AutoTrack real-time GPS tracker is an easy-to-use tracking device that, thanks to its compact size and magnetic case, can be easily attached to your vehicle. The live tracking feature through Google Maps works perfectly and is highly accurate.

Your vehicle? Let’s not lie — this is to attach to another person’s vehicle, and you’re catering to the estranged husband/boyfriend with a TRO demographic. You are going to get women killed, you assholes.

So there’s this long tradition in information technology that on a weekday with no mail, you get maintenance tasks done. That’s your window when users won’t be clogging the system or demanding your help. Coincidentally, my class starts on Tuesday this week instead of Monday, so I’ve been doing some put-off-until-a-free-day maintenance on my work hardware (some of which is being retired at the end of the month).

And, being a corporate system, it’s got a zillion little things that don’t work quite like the directions, and which are more specific and narrowly defined than my personal systems. In all truthfulness, I had an easier time upgrading my wife’s laptop to Windows 10 over the weekend¹.

So no post today. You’d think I’d have all the time in the world for webcomics on a non-teaching day, but tomorrow will actually be a less harried, less limited timeframe with hard deadlines. Weird, huh? Oh, and in case you had conflicts seeing Weathering With You last week, they’ve added some new screenings, so I’m heading out in about an hour for that. If you get the chance, it looks really good; if not, see you back here tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Registration Confirmation

This one was completely blank, but Gmail thought it was in French. Asking for a translation revealed images with embedded English text, as well as an unsubscribe address that purports to be from the next town over and which appears to actually belong to the company mentioned in the text. I may take a mosey over there in my next free time, ask them in person why they suck so bad².

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¹ If you’re still on Windows 7, I hope you installed the patches from last Patch Tuesday, ’cause they’re the last ones you’ll ever get. If you’ve got a licensed version of 7, go here, download and run the media creator (you need at least 8GB of free space) and run the upgrade. It’ll migrate you over and give you a new license. Oh, and be sure to run it from an account with admin privilege. Then go see what Tay has to say about securing your new Windows 10 machine. This have been a public service ernouncemint.

² I will absolutely not bestir myself to this effort.

Let’s be clear about something; this is not a review of Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang; a review will require me to read the book several more times, to get at the narrative structure — and the metanarrative structure — that Yang is building as he tells a story about basketball, a half-dozen high school athletes, himself, and Superman.

But this is me telling you about one particular thing that Yang does in Dragon Hoops that I think people should pay attention to, and potentially include in their own work. Yang’s got a recurring visual element, and it’s such a small thing, but also it’s tremendously effective. Each time — I actually have to go back and verify that, but if not each and every time it’s pretty damn close — a character¹ is at a decision point and determines the path they’re going to take, he draws them taking a deliberate step forward across a line.

Sometimes it’s a metaphorical line. Sometimes it’s an actual visible line or boundary. From left to right, the direction the reader’s eye is traveling, carrying the character in the direction of the story. The first time, it’s just a panel with a cute sound effect — STEP. — and doesn’t carry any weight. But as the story goes on, as it becomes something of a motif, it gains power. The STEP.s aren’t big splashy, stompy, heroic comic book hero strides, but they convey a resolution that calls to mind everything from Neil Armstrong to the proverb from the Tao Te Ching about the journey of a thousand miles.

It works because it doesn’t call attention to itself and creeps into the reader’s consciousness gradually, to the point that a casual read (or one focused on other elements of the story) might miss it altogether². And if you can find a visual element, a symbol, that brings that kind of subtle (almost subliminal) meaning to the reader? You’re doing comics right.

Reminder before we head out on the weekend: you have one week to get your emails in if you want a chance at a free copy of Junior Scientist Power Hour vol 1 by Abby Howard. Entries must be received by me by 11:59pm EST (or GMT-5, if you prefer) at the address gary, who writes at fleen, which is a dot com. Remember to include a reference to your favorite ancient critter from Howard’s Earth Before Us trilogy!

Spam of the day:

Welcome to Tiffany

The famous jeweler apparently thinks that I am aching to spend on overpriced gewgaws and tchotchkes just because they come in a robin’s egg blue box.

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¹ Person, really, since these are all real people and the things they did.

² For example, the oranges in The Godfather, which may have started as coincidence but grew into an actual thing. Yang’s too deliberate a storyteller³ for it to be a coincidence, however.

³ Especially here, where copious notes at the back of the book describe his process and decisions in making the book, as well as a half-dozen times that it comes up in the story itself. Hey, I told you there was a metanarrative here.

I got the email yesterday from Alert Reader Rob:

Hey, have you noticed that Kukuburi is back? This is why I will never give up RSS.
http://www.kukuburi.com/v2/2020/01/14/one-eighty/

I keep an antiquated browser around solely because it’s got an integrated RSS feature, but as I confessed to Rob, I sometimes prune my feeds when I feel that things will not update again. The last time we at Fleen mentioned a story element from the ever-delightful Kukuburi (by the ever-delightful Ramón Pérez) was probably this piece from May of 2009.

It got sporadic, finally going on hiatus in 2012. Repeatedly since then I hoped for its return (while never criticizing Pérez for concentrating on work that pays), and as recently as two and a half years ago declared my belief it would return some day. And now I can proudly state that the link over there in the blogroll has been updated to say no longer on hiatus, hooray! Let’s love it for as long as it lasts; I’ll be binging the entire archive in the immediate future.

• Speaking of immediate future, Evan Dahm would like to remind you that the most wonderful week of the year starts on Sunday:
  

  Goblin Week 2020 starts SUNDAY #goblinweek #goblinweek2020 https://goblinweek.tumblr.com/post/190290598 …

  Yes, Goblin Week! Wait, you’ve never heard of Goblin Week? I’ll let Dahm explain:

  IT IS A PERIOD OF 7 DAYS WHEREIN YOU MAKE GOBLINS EVERY DAY OR AS MUCH AS YOU WANT WAHTEVER A GOBLIN IS. DONT WORRY ABOUT IT GOD IS DEAD

  You can trust Dahm, he draws the best goblins ever, although I’ll give Ben Hatke the edge in doing goblin voices at story time. If you need to get in the mood, here’s last year’s goblins for your enjoyment.

• Speaking of enjoyment (and here I am talking to comics creators), would you like to enjoy your chosen career while also having the ability to purchase food, clothing, and shelter? Of course you would! But as has been made abundantly clear, page rates for comics have stagnated badly, and taking inflation into account, are significantly lower than they were at pretty much any point since the ’60s.

  Partly this happens because publishers discourage any kind of open discussion of rates and what’s reasonable, leading to the perception that, say, a 200 page graphic novel is worth a US$20,000 advance. That’s a hundo per page, which may take ten or more hours to complete, leaving a skilled professional with a pay rate of US$8-10 an hour.

  Enter Gale Galligan (perhaps best known for taking over the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel adaptations from Raina, whose assistant she used to be) and Ngozi Ukazu (who, given the ubiquity of her gay college hockey bros saga, should need no introduction). Prompted by the current Portfolio Day posts, Ukazu wanted to know:

  When is fair page rates day again? Some comic folks are organizing a hashtag re: avoiding unfair pay and how to know when you’re dealing with ethical compensation.

  Prompting Galligan to suggest:

  Hmmm how about a nice memorable date with plenty of lead-in time to get the word out? How’s your calendar looking on June first?

  Which looked good to Ukazu:

  Is that it? OKAY: June 1st is #FairPageRates day.

  Sorted, and if she’s good with it you should be, too. What will be discussed on Fair Page Rates Day? Galligan has some suggestions:

  SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN. See you June 1st, on #FairPageRates day, where we will be talking about fair compensation for people working in comics and everything that entails

  “Are royalties real, and should I be negotiating them? What’s a reasonable rate for x comic job?” These are all things we can talk about any time of year, but ESPECIALLY June 1, which is now officially #FairPageRates Day.

  Spread the word — 1 June, we talk money, and what just compensation looks like, because some creators that have made it (for varying definitions of making it) are decent people who don’t want to pull up the ladder behind them, they want up-and-coming creators to have an easier, more rewarding path to a career than they had.

Spam of the day:
Massive Holiday Wine Sale get 15 bottels of Holiday Wines
Received on 3 January, so not sure what holiday they’re talking about. The email claims to come from a company in Eagle, Idaho, which naturally reminded me of this.

That’s a big book haul. The photo was going to include a lounging greyhound for scale, some somedog decided she had better things to do than get her picture took, hmph! Starting from the top:

• Don’t Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, in fulfillment of the recent Kickstart from ShortBox.
• Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang; I’ve spoken with him briefly about this one, where Yang’s chronicling of Chinese culture and the immigrant experience meets Raina-style memoir. Likely to be a monster hit this year.
• Go With The Flow by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann; want to be this Kids In The Hall character? You need this book which is designed to give young uterus-havers the lowdown on what’s happening with their bodies, and everybody else an appreciation for what they go through. I actually had fairly good public-school sex education starting in 5th grade, and I still expect to learn a ton. Also, a measure of how good :01 Books is — this isn’t an advanced review copy, it’s the regular release of a book that went on sale yesterday.
• Kairos by Ulysse Malassagne; one of the great services that :01 has done for comics in the US is find great work in French and bring it over. There is such a huge pool of comics and creators that are just starting to become known over here.
• Maker Comics: Grow A Garden! by Alexis Frederick-Frost; my beans have been okay for the past coupla’ years, and I hope this helps be improve them somewhat.
• Science Comics: Crows by Kyla Vanderklugt; corvids are scary smart and you should always seek to make friends with them. Never annoy a crow, raven, jay, jackdaw, or rook.
• The Phantom Twin by Lisa Brown; girl haunted by the ghost of her conjoined twin? Sounds like the best ghost story since Anya had ghost trubs.
• Astronauts by Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks; the story of women that have been to space, by a team that’s done some of my favorite science–oriented comics for years now. Also, Ottaviani is a fabulous person to talk to, and this remains one of my favorite interviews ever.
• Snapdragon by Kat Leyh; ever wonder what would happen if there were a witch in town, like a real witch, and you decided to make friends? Leyh has, and we get to follow along.

To be clear, it’s a coincidence that Don’t Go Without Me arrived on the same day as the trove of books from :01, but now I get to take it with me to the reading next week. I’ll be working my way through the pile as quickly as I can while still absorbing enough to give proper reviews; it’ll probably be Astronauts and Dragon Hoops first, so watch for reviews in the coming weeks

Oh, and I saw this on the tweetmachine today; it’s from October, but it’s very possibly new to you as it was for me. Eight tight pages, an unreliable narrator who is not having any more of this street harassment shit that we get to see past, and a satisfying gut punch of a finish. Words by Julio Anta, pictures by Katherine Lobo, letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and if these folks aren’t planning a collection of similar stories, that would be very unfortunate.

Spam of the day:

How a Clorox Wipe Made my Herpes Disappear

Jesus tapdancing … do not rub Clorox wipes on your junk, godsdammit.

Look, there are these sanitary wipes that we used on the ambulance for decontamination. You know what’s on the top of the can? The international do not use on babies or other sensitive things symbol, that’s what. Know what’s not even in most of these babykiller wipes? Bleach. Use bleach wipes on hard, non-porous surfaces only and keep them the hell off of your joybits, genius.

______________
¹ No promises for the future; prostate cancer is basically the escape clause that says individuals like me will not live forever. If nothing else gets you, that walnut-sized gland will.

Hey, running late and sorry about that. Let’s jump into the good stuff.

• Item! Alex de Campi is one of the very best comics writers out there, and she has unerring instincts with respect to who to pair up with on art duties. Don’t believe me? Check out her collaboration with Carla Speed McNeil and Jenn Manley Lee on No Mercy, which made me want to punch characters in the face through the page. So when de Campi tells me:
  

  I’m doing a creator-owned horror thing with @EricaFails this year and I just have to say that 1) she’s the best; 2) her colour roughs are better than most people’s finished pages; and 3) this book is going to knock your socks off. The MOOD and sense of place… immaculate

  I say Welp, have to add that to my pull list when it comes out. Erica Henderson has done some great work since stepping back from Squirrel Girl, with Assassin Nation particularly showing a skill for depicting charlie-foxtrot action leading to severely traumatized bodies. I also can’t wait to see her FCBD contribution to Judge Dredd.

• Item! Readers of this page will no doubt recognize the fact that I absolutely adore the work of Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and take no small satisfaction in seeing the entire rest of comics recognize how very good she is since Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me released. Hooray for Rosemary!

  So I’m more than happy to tell you that Valero-O’Connell will be doing a reading of her work next Wednesday night, 22 January, as part of the launch of a new monthly comics series by queer and trans creators to be held at Bluestockings Bookstore in lower Manhattan. Come say hi to all the readers, Valero-O’Connell will have copies of her latest collection for sale², and enjoy some awesome comics.

  Details at the Facebook event page, and I’ll be certain to keep an eye on future events — it’s tough for me to get out to Brooklyn (where things of this nature usually occur) and back on a work night, and the LES is a lot closer.

• Item! As you may have noticed, I now have in my possession two copies of the first print collection of Junior Scientist Power Hour by Abby Howard¹, which is one more than I reasonably need. Time for a giveaway contest. So by 11:59pm EST on Friday, 24 January, email me (that would be gary) at this here website (that would be fleen, which is a dot com) with a reference to your favorite dinosaur or other extinct critter from any of Howard’s three Earth Before Us titles. I want to know which critter and why you love it so much. Random draw will determine the winner, I’ll be in touch about getting it shipped to you.

Spam of the day:

gary.tyrrell Pay off your mortgage faster and save money!…

I am on track to pay off my mortgage ten years early but sure, I’ll click on your link and give you all my financial information for the possibility of paying it off sooner. [sarcastic thumbs-up emoji]

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¹ Also the original pages to The Most Precious Substance In The Cosmos. When I leave all my original comic art to my alma mater, some of it is going to cause more giggles than others.

² With luck, I’ll have my copy in hand from the Kickstart by then.

I believe that I’m on record that Kendra Wells’s contributions at The Nib are rad. I was reminded of this when Wells’s latest hit the web, along with a parallel thought:

Did you know that one of the reasons koalas are threatened in the wild is that they nearly all have chlamydia? And that the current bushfires hit an island that was the home of the only wild population of koalas that weren’t infected?

Yeah, so that HotCelebrityInfluencer up there in the koala bikini definitely has an STI now. And somebody that’s actually using influencer juice to help out with the devastation in Oz has been bounced from her social media accounts after raising more money that Bezos is donating in exchange for nudes. I’m not sure what lesson to draw from all of this but it’s weird where your brain goes after seeing a cartoon sometimes.

In other news, those of you in the San Francisco Bay area will want to think about heading over to the Cartoon Art Museum this weekend, and returning until mid-May; that’s because George Takei’s graphic novel memoir, They Called Us Enemy — about his personal experience being imprisoned in a concentration camp by the government of his country for xenophobic reasons in defiance of Constitutional rights — is getting the featured exhibition treatment.

Once Saturday rolls around and the exhibition opens, you’ll find details on the Current Exhibitions page, and once 18 May arrives and the exhibition closes you’ll find it on the Past Exhibitions page. For the moment, however, you’ll need to read about it here, so:

The Cartoon Art Museum, Top Shelf Productions and IDW Publishing proudly present They Called Us Enemy featuring artist Harmony Becker’s artwork from the acclaimed graphic memoir written by actor, author, and activist George Takei in which Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. The exhibition includes an inside look at Becker’s creative process, including excerpts from her reference library and never before seen preparatory illustrations.

This exhibition also features a selection of original artwork from the Cartoon Art Museum’s permanent collection, including comic strips and animation from the 1940s, providing patrons with a snapshot of popular entertainment on the home front during the second World War.

Opening reception — during which there are frequently creators present, along with snacks — details to be announced, but we’ll let you know when we find out. Enjoy the launch, I’d be there except I’m on the wrong side of the country and also I’ve got Richard Thompson tickets for Saturday; it’s been more than 20 years since I’ve seen him live, and near as I can tell his finger have lost nothing. If you’re wondering why I’m talking about a 70 year old guitar virtuoso, it’s because he shares a name with multiple sadly departed cartoon/comics virtuosi. Some names are just blessed.

Spam of the day:

Your Wine is Cold – 15 Premium Wines for 70% off PLUS Bottle Ugly Sweater!

Not only does that topic line make zero sense, the body of the email is touting their Black Friday sale — traditionally, the day after US Thanksgiving (this year, 29 November) — but wasn’t sent until 28 December. Are they trying to get me hooked for Black Friday 2020?