It seems we’ve hit the season of accomplishments.

• About six weeks back I was doing a mini-crawl through the Gunnerkrigg Court archives and noticed that the current strip appeared to be the 983rd one in Tom Siddell’s exploration of consciousness, myth, technology, friendship, plus bozos, jerks, numbnuts, doofs and jabronis¹.

  Making a mental note to scan the archive picker a bit more closely over the ensuing month, it appears that the pages are, in fact, numbered sequentially. That means that today marks the 1000th update of Gunnerkrigg Court, which as we all know is the hallmark of quality in the struggle against a sea of schmendricks and crumbums. One should also note that this most recent ninnyhammer-heavy story is going to look great when volume 4 hits the shelves; so that you’re all caught up by then, mayhap you ought to pick up the earlier books?

• Likewise, if my math (and a helpful note from Bill Barnes) may be trusted, tomorrow would appear to be the tenth anniversary of Unshelved, which began its long march to dominance of the library science departments of the world on 16 February, 2002. They were younger then, Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum, a little freer, a little more lighthearted perhaps.

  But in the passing of their youth they have gained wisdom, the sort that only comes from hitting the ALA convention floor and having a crowd of librarians threaten to tear their clothes from their bodies so as to absorb some of their mighty essence. If this makes Ambaum and Barnes sound like a sort of thinner and less musical Tenacious D, well, there are merits to the analogy. Unlikely superstars within a specific milieu, varying degrees of bald and middle-aged, but still able to pull down the groupies like nobody’s business?

  Yeah, okay, I ain’t buying the groupie thing either², but the Unshelved Crüe remain the epitome of niche appeal, which makes for a pretty comfortable environment when an underserved cohort decides you’re their #1 favorite entertainment provider. Congrats to Ambaum and Barnes for not only having one of the long-term successful webcomics, but also one of the long-term successful webcomics partnerships. If the library thing ever grows old, they could take what they learned from dealing with each other for a decade and hit the marriage counseling circuit.

• Okay, it’s not a power of ten, but how about 200 comics over at All New Issues, with an extra-special Jamie Noguchi guest strip? You don’t need to know anything about the fictional comic book character of Lobster Boy, or the various relationships and infatuations (requited and not) in the strip to get the message of today’s strip. It’s all there in the last panel.

Some other quick numbers, with thanks to the Harpers Index:

• Likelihood that Rich Burlew will clear $US800,000 and 10,000 backers in the five days left to his Kickstarter project: 100%.
• Likelihood that the George Rohac conspiracy (okay, okay, “Benign Kingdom”) will hit US$50,000 and 1000 backers in the nine remaining days of their Kickstarter project: 100%
• Likelihood that Rich Stevens will have to take a road trip to deliver a Pac-Man arcade machine to Wil Wheaton in the twenty two days remaining in his Kickstarter project: 100%
• Further likelihood that somebody will make Rich eat at least one more pound of bacon (that would be the second) and/or force him to do a month of strips on a Windows machine instead of his beloved Mac and/or give up coffee for a month: 2/3^{3, 4}

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¹ Especially jabronis.

² It’s not like they got Brad Guigar in the band.

³ Unlike the other Kickstarter items noted, which are based on uplifting possibilities of joy and happiness, this one has only the potential for schadenfreude. Shame on you person(s) that make it happen, and bless you at the same time.

⁴ That “3” is a footnote, not a mathematical exponent. Likewise, so that I can avoid an infinite series of footnotes explaining that yes, the previous footnote was also a footnote, the “4” is a footnote and not an exponent.

Basically, everybody¹ has something that they celebrate at this time of year, and it’s likely that I’m the only one reading this because everybody else² is on their way to some gathering or other, possibly one that involves pie.

And booze. Sweet, sweet, drama-erasing and -inducing booze.

So as you make your way to your celebration, let the spirit of webcomics (as manifested in the Holy Trinity of North The Strong, Garrity The Tikiac, and Rohac The Destroyer) accompany you. Stay safe, and see you³ next week.

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¹ And Guigar.

² And Guigar.

³ And that’s about beaten that joke into the ground. What can I say? If there’s one person who appreciates a running gag, it’s Brad⁴.

⁴ Guigar.

There are days I see something out on the web and the only rational response is, “Yep, that’s my lead story.” In this case, it’s information that actually makes good on something I halfway-attempted pert-near four years back.

A little history: In response to an article at Comixpedia, I suggested we try to figure out if there was a magic “break even” number on unique readers that would render a webcomic economically sustaining for the creator. Because I’m a bit of a math nerd, I put out an open call for confidential data, with the caveat that I would only do the numbers if there were at least 100 respondents (and even that wouldn’t get us very close to statistical significance). At the time, 48 creators were willing to share data (including, it must be said in retrospect, a pretty goodly proportion of those that do make their living from webcomics), but as that fell way short of my threshold, no math.

Enter George Rohac, general fixer for Oni Press, publisher of anthologies, possessor of the worlds most nervousness–inducing grin, perpetual con-scene fixture, and Master’s degree holder. It’s that last one that’s important today, as Rohac has released both his thesis, Copyright and the Economy of Webcomics [PDF], and more importantly — his data set [Microsoft Excel].

There’s nearly 300 survey responses covering unique visitors, comic creation time, business management time, comic longevity, prior projects, copyright/copyright equivalent asserted, merch offered, income derived, and self-assessment of whether or not that income provides a living wage, and it’s all Creative Commonsed, so you can squash numbers to your heart’s content.

Most interesting numbers to me: more than 80% of Rohac’s respondents reported making less than US$8000 per year on the comic, but approximately 7% reported more than US$45,000, and more than half of that number reported more than US$65,000. On the “do you earn a living wage” question (and this one is highly subjective), a few respondents down as far as the US$8000 – 14,999 range answered “yes” (on the other hand, a few respondents in the US$65,000+ range answered “no”, so take that as an example of differing costs of living).

Also, the clearest correlation that I noted on casual inspection? Higher incomes pretty much go hand-in-hand with higher numbers of weekly unique readers. Yeah, I know — no surprise there, but even the most obvious intuitive assumptions work better with numbers backing ’em up.

Now that we have a first reasonably complete sample of hard numbers (although there are a number of missing responses across the surveys, by accident or deliberate omission, and of course more responses would make any conclusions drawn more valid), it’s time to move onto the “lies” and “damned lies” part of the game. Feel free to draw your own conclusions and remember — statistics has its own set of rules, and if you’re going to argue that “the numbers say x”, you have to follow them.

Okay, it’s been a long day of going through notes recollections of the immediate past weekend, whilst simultaneously trying to get back to regular life (boo). One of the things about NEWW that stuck with me was an offhand comment (and I’m sorry, I didn’t note who observed this bit of truth) that this wasn’t the show where you’d see a lot of big announcements. I think that’s partly because it’s at the very end of the con season, partly because any such announcements will be possibly more effective next week as the end-of-year merch sales pick up, and partly because it’s not a commerce-centric show.

Make no mistake, there was plenty of merchandise, with creator after creator selling and taking commissions at their tables (along with two merchandise rooms for collective business groups), but it was a lot more about recognizing the creators, the fans, and the peculiar bond between them. So much of what’s below weren’t announcements, but just things that came up because that’s where the conversation (and the booze) took us.

• During setup (some Friday evening, some Saturday morning), Erika Moen was omnipresent. And that pile of Squishable T-Rexes and Yelling Birds? I flung myself on it like it was a leaf pile and bounced. Less than 15 minutes after show opening on Saturday, it was all but invisible.
• The Eastworks building is dog-friendly. In addition to two of the three most famous webcomicker dogs (alas, Commissioner James Gordon couldn’t make it this year), there were numerous people from the area that walked their dogs through the building. The whippets I met on Saturday morning were especially adorable.
• Ongoing debate for the weekend — is Aaron “Latin Artthrob” Diaz dapper, or tweedy? I’m tending towards the former. Regardless, his new print is gorgeous in person; monitor resolution, no matter how high, does not do it justice.
• Evan Dahm (foreground, with the disembodied headwear of Ananth Panagariya and Yuko Ota behind him) tells us that Order of Tales book 3 will be released soon, and even more excitingly, there will be a one-volume edition next year, with a foreword by Jeff Smith. Speaking of Yuko and Ananth, everybody agreed that Yuko’s artwork for the VIP show sketchbooks (with wonderfully thick paper that didn’t let Sharpies bleed through) was a marvel. Also, George Rohac agreed with me that Yuko and Ananth should make up giant “George’s smile” masks, if only so that he can wear one at shows.
• Frank Gibson and Becky Dreistadt (Gibson’s hands visible behind Karl Kerschl, followed by Dreistadt, then Scott Yoshinaga and Audra Furuichi) are working on a graphic novel for ______ and getting ready to put together a ______ for ______! Wow! Okay, yeah, they can’t talk about all of their stuff now, but trust me — it was amazing. Speaking of Kerschl, he wins Best Business Card In The History Of Business Cards, thanks to a printer’s overrun: the two-sided, four-page gatefold from the back of the Charles Christopher book, with it’s full cast illustration? That was his business card.
• David Malki ! (no photo, he was a blur of motion all weekend) has weeks and months related to Machine of Death in the immediate future, but did manage to slow down long enough to give us a hard number: 5000 copies sold on Day One; even more impressive: you will eventually hear about the numbers after Day One.
• Magnolia Porter (seen waaaay back in both this photo — behind Chris Hallbeck, Randy Milholland, and Spike — and this one — behind Angela Melick, Tyson Hesse, David McGuire, and Kel McDonald) is working on a graphic novel that may become a Xeric contender. She will also be collaborating with McDonald on “Cocksuckers”, a period vampire story. Also, her Ben Bailey print is going to be a gift to my wife, who loves Cash Cab; shhh, nobody tell her.
• Here’s a better photo of Angela Melick’s “Red” — the highly personalized jacket of an engineering student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Ms Melick, by the by, is even as we speak winging her way with her husband on a delayed honeymoon to Thailand, and was relieved to see that her copy of Machine of Death did not come with a slip that said PLANE CRASH, THAI POLITICAL UNREST RIOT or HIDEOUS TROPICAL DISEASE. Come back safe, Jam.
• Team Topatoco honcho Kaliis Smith (seen here giving the volunteers their pre-show briefing, including a bit on the importance of high reflectivity) gave us the low-down on what “sold out” meant for NEWW on Saturday: 1000 tickets sold (plus weekend and VIP passes). On that note, the volunteers were awesome (one of the most common sights during the weekend was watching one of them wheel a cart of snacks and water to the exhibitors) and thanks to the greater exhibit space and compelling programming, meant that the floor felt less crowded than last year, despite at least 25% more attendees.
• Speaking of the programming, this is the Best. Panel room. EVER. Everything from in-depth discussions of world-building to all-out Jean-Luc Picard lovefests took place on these couches, under the gaze of Socrates.
• Also on those couches (and elsewhere in Eastworks), Dave Kellett (with David and Maggie Willis in the background) used the set as interview space for a documentary film he is currently working on — more about which tomorrow.
• Jorge Cham has the most amazing hair in webcomics. Howard Tayler (my nemesis and evil twin) does not. Emily Vasseur was the second-most impressive cosplayer at the show, outshone only by the duo of Reginald and Beartato (I later saw the gentleman in the Reginald costume remove his headpiece and while I felt it would have been disrespectful to snap a photo of him half-clad, I will note that he had a prodigious moustache — respect, my brother). I also hear that Reginald and Beartato may be making an appearance in Reprographics soon.
• Danielle Corsetto (with Jenn Jordan and Sophie Goldstein in the background) had so many people lining up at her table, she was declared a fire hazard and moved closer the the exits on Sunday. She also let us know that GWS book five will drop in time for Christmas, and that there are other big announcements between now and the end of the month.
• Best merch of the show? Either the new Baffler! by Chris Yates line of puzzles, or the do it yourself Dinosaur Comics whiteboard.

So the fine men and women of the United States Postal Service finally got me my copy of Howard Tayler’s first Schlock Mercenary book today (postmarked the 15th, I swear they were faster when they sponsored Lance), so look for a review in the coming days. Also, if rumors are to be believed, the long-awaited and completely non-controversial The History of Webcomics may be dropping in the next day or so; that one will probably take a bit longer. And today, it’s City Limits, the latest webcomics-artists-anthology, this one edited by George Rohac and Katy Ullman.

Like its predecessors, Flight and Disposable Parts, there’s a theme to this collection, although perhaps a bit less abstract than stuff flies or robots. CL focuses on a fictional city made up in a room full of creators at last year’s Otakon (many of whom may be seen here), which leaves a bit of room for crossovers — a bit of background gag in one story becomes a foreground plot point in another. This is a nice touch, and it would be nice to see if these little nods become a regular feature of creator anthologies.

Like all anthologies, it’s going to be somewhat uneven in tone and style, and no two people are going to agree on what the best parts are. You got horror (funny from Mookie Terraciano, creepy from Dan Kim), dumb action movie fun (in three parts from Brian Caroll and two from Ryan Estrada), science fiction (from Bob Gandy and Haque/Panagariya), and so forth. There’s probably something here to your taste and something that makes you go meh.

One thing though, and all future anthology editors should take note: not all the work reproduces equally well in the B&W printed medium. Justin Eger’s moody, somber story is well served by Rickey Winrick’s art in Reunion which probably looks great on a screen or color repro, but here the shading is muddled a bit around the edges. Similar issues and a distracting pixelation affect the splash pages of Bob Gandy’s contribution, No Moving Parts. By contrast, Mohammed Haque does his usual magic in Disconnect — the man knows how to get the thinnest lines and subtlest shading differences to display clear and sharp.

And if you clicked on those links above, you probably can’t see the flaws that I mentioned — maybe it’s an artifact of paper, maybe it’s to do with the source materials not having a high enough resolution, maybe it’s just that somebody produced a pre-press master on a day with an “R” in it — but it seems a shame that the image quality isn’t uniform throughout. No idea how to fix that, but there’s lots of people that read this that have prepared work for press; perhaps they could enlighten us.

Hey, remember this? Yeah, it was a bit more than I’d anticipated. The fix wound up over-aggressively discarding emails and some stuff that should have come to me was swept up with the flood of spam and destroyed. Good news is the spam flood is now under control, and testing shows that the email address works again.

The bad news is I’m not sure how much I missed in there. I figured out today from clues elsewhere that Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh have launched a new Kickstart for a new “Leeds-sized” (that would be 9″ x 11.5″, which is a good deal larger than the trim size of almost anything else you’re getting) edition of the most recently completed Barbarous chapter.

Readers of this page will recall that Barbarous is great, that Chapter 5 is where the story really kicked in with a bunch of threads¹ coming together to create a very compelling whole. And now that Barbarous is back with the start of Season 2/Chapter 6, this is the perfect time to get the last one into print.

As of this writing, Ananth & Yuko are sitting a few bucks under US$25K (of a US$18K goal), about a day into the four week campaign; they’re actually higher on backers and total amount today over yesterday. The FFF mk2 says they’re on track for US$64K to US$96K which is entirely typical for their projects.

Even better, with Chapter 5 marking the end of the first story arc of Barbarous, Yuko & Ananth are offering the previous four print collections and a slipcover to put ’em in which would be really, really pretty on your shelf. They’re also offering a limited number of original pages (half of them are gone, get on that if you want ’em) at the ridiculously low price of US$250 for Chapter 5 + extras, or US$310 for the entire Season 1 (uh, those are gone). These are valuing a Yuko Ota original page at less than US$200, which is frankly ludicrous. Got them money? Jump on that.

One quick note — the delivery time on this campaign is approximately a year from now, what with printing schedules being thrown into chaos by the once and future pandemic, and with Ananth & Yuko having their business affairs run by George, I would imagine this date was chosen to be very, very conservative; recall that George has a track record of delivering backer rewards sometimes months early.

Even so, that’s far enough in the future that it’s impossible to predict what shipping costs will be like, so the campaign is not charging shipping at this time. You’ll pay that when it’s time to ship, so keep in mind that sometime in 2022 you’ll have to cough up for that.

Okay, that’s it. Webcomics pretty much don’t get better than whatever Yuko & Ananth are teamed up on. Get in on this now, or wait until conventions come back and maybe get a copy then. You’re better off getting now.

Spam of the day:

This year turned out to be very difficult. But we have optimized and reduced the cost of our products! It is almost impossible to find prices lower than ours, the sale is at the cost price level. Watch and be surprised by our super low prices

Your obvious scam might actually be slightly more plausible if you actually mentioned what your alleged products are.

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¹ If you’re a Barbarous reader, I’m so sorry. If not, trust me, that was hilarious/groanworthy.

Late night with a dude in crisis in EMT-land. Couple quick items before I try to make up for being six hours short on sleep.

• Tillie Walden is a particular favorite here at Fleen. We’ve talked about her modern books (Spinning, On A Sunbeam, Are You Listening?) at some length, and have made oblique references to her earlier work, published by Avery Hill as the result of a cold-call email and a decision on Walden’s part that it probably wasn’t a scam. She some Ignatzen for them, but they’ve been difficult to track down since the print runs were small and overseas¹.

  So let’s all be glad that Avery Hill have compiled those earlier, hard-to-find works into a single omnibus edition called Alone In Space. The bookplate editions are sold out, but the hardcover is still available and will cost you less than individually tracking down The End Of Summer, I Love This Part, and A City Inside, as well as adding various short pieces from print and the web. Tillie Walden is a staggeringly skilled cartoonist and this should be on your shelf.

• Lots of other stuff should be on your shelf, and now it a terrific time to make that happen. Via the twitterfeed of George:
  

  Graphic Novels went from 9.3% of adult fiction to 20%. Making it the 2nd largest category. Like dang.

  He goes on to note that it’s all lumped together, regardless of genre and a lot of it is manga, but it’s still comics, it’s still fiction, and it’s only going to grow. We live in good times for comics.

Spam of the day:

silent-plug.com

Nope. Deleting that one unread. Don’t wanna know.

Pervs.

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¹ I’d never seen a copy of any of the three until I met Walden at Comics Camp 2019 and she had two of them at her Mini-Con table.

Tie-ins, at the very least. Let’s see what’s up.

• There have been numerous adaptations of Girl Genius (by Professor and Professoressa Foglio) into other media over the years — novelizations, radio dramas, card games — and they’ve expanded to a new frontier now with vidyagames. Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne takes its inspiration from the Castle Heterodyne mega-arc (running roughly from here to here, or about six years of comics), which gives a whole lotta room to play.

  The game itself is made by Rain Games of Norway, who appear to have a track record making games of this sort, but not crowdfunding — this is their first Kickstarter campaign. Goal is set at a reasonable US$200K, but they’ve got stretch goals reaching improbably as high as one million dollars which … I don’t think I’ve ever seen stretch goals go as high as five times base funding and actually be met.

  There’s a huge ask, so the FFF mk2 may not work so well — the trend held really steady for the first couple of days then dropped hard, giving a prediction of about US$135K-200K, which puts goal at the upper end of the range. The McDonald Ratio is predicting about US$150K total, which is worrisomely low.

  Again, this isn’t the sort of project that the predictions were trained on, so we’ll have to see, but with 6 days down and 24 to go, the project sits at 31% of goal at present, and video games are both notoriously expensive, and have a tendency to run over both time and budget. We’ll have to see.

• By contrast, paper-based games are quicker and cheaper to develop, and oftentimes the creator of a comic is deep into a particular game, which helps. Enter: Jim Zub, who’s already got a dedicated Skullkickers“>Skullkickers tabletop game in development, but who also decided to mark the 10th anniversary of the comic by releasing the first new Skullkickers story in five years inside a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure book.

  Skullkickers: Caster Bastards And The Great Grotesque¹ will feature a 30 page story and 60 page adventure campaign, featuring new spells, game mechanics, magic items, and monsters, adaptable to whatever game you’re currently playing.

  As I may have mentioned previously, I haven’t played D&D since it was called Advanced D&D waaaay back in my college days — before 2nd edition was a thing — and I’m heartily tempted to get this because a) Skullkickers is hilarious, and b) the love that’s pouring out of the game portion of this book is apparent even through the distance of the internet.

  Zub’s been writing official D&D comics for a couple a’ years now, and went so far as to shave his head to better get into character for a live game last year. He’s mentioned multiple times that his course in life was irretrievably set from discovering D&D at the age of 8, so when he tells me that he’s picked out some top-notch game designers to make the playable part of this as good as it can be? It’s gonna be good.

  And, as an added incentive, the crowdfunding/fulfillment parts are being run by George, who mentioned casually he is approaching his 100th crowdfunding project managed, so I think he just might have a handle on how to keep everybody on track. Just a hunch. It’s a little early to apply the FFF mk2 math, but somewhere around a day in, they’re at 64% of the CA$22.3K (or US$16,843) goal with 23 days to go, so I think this one’s gonna fund. In case you were wondering, only one of the top tier reward (where, among other things, you appear as a wizard character in Caster Bastards) remains as of this writing.

Spam of the day:

Hello! I saw you the other day and I really liked you. I live in a neighboring yard, alone) let’s meet at my place?

This town’s ordinances don’t even allow dogs to live in yards, they have to have access to the house. Besides, I know my neighbors and none of them speak Russian like you do.

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¹ I’m sure the similarity of that title to Hamster Huey And The Gooey Kablooie is mere coincidence.

Web Comics: Saving the Entertainment Industy [sic], Four Panels at a TIme[sic]
So when I did the programming guide t’other day I typed in the session titles manually; I didn’t notice until just now when I got lazy and copy/pasted that the title of this session features two separate typos. Let’s just hope that this isn’t a metaphor for the panel itself.

[fires up the session]

Welp, that was … a thing. It’s a mere 26 minutes and 38 seconds long, starting out with the moderator reading the panel description verbatim before mentioning four-panel webcomics, not acknowledging anything else about the medium, presenting a thesis of OMG did you know there are comic strips on teh intarnetz??!! I made it to the 3:16 mark when the moderator told one webcomickers People weren’t coming within six feet of you even before [COVID] hit.

Sorry, but Ha ha, laugh chuckles, you’re a reclusive loser and people hate you is pure douchebaggery and not something I’m spending any brain on. I’d say that it’s a shame this panel wasn’t in person because the message of closing my notebook, putting away my pen, and standing up in the front row (where I typically do my panel reporting from) and leaving less than three and a half minutes into a session would have sent a message, but honestly? I only checked this one out because I didn’t have to walk across the convention center. The description was not promising and it was sadly accurate.

Shaenon Garrity In Conversation With Andrew Farago
Now that’s more like it. Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum, went above and beyond in preparing for conducting a Special Guest Spotlight interview with Shaenon Garrity — he’s spent every day of quarantine living with his subject, which makes sense given that they’ve been a couple forever. It provided an advantage that most every other session won’t have, in that it’s not a thing for Garrity and Farago to sit next to each other on the couch and have a face-to-face conversation¹.

And despite the fact that there’s literally nothing Farago wouldn’t know about Garrity’s work and career², he’s a skilled enough interviewer to ask the questions that prompt answers that will both satisfy Garrity’s longtime fans and also people not really familiar with her work. The conversation ranged from the challenges of monetization — what happens when your bandwidth costs exceed what you make from ad revenues? — to the shift from webcomics portals and collectives to scrapping for eyeballs on social media giants of today.

Garrity’s known and worked with so many people over her career, people that have gone on to be key contributors everywhere from King Features to :01 Books that Farago remarked that comics only exists today because of her and Joey Manley; while Garrity put most of the credit towards Manley, I would note that this page has for years noted that Garrity is a Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities³ (and Tiki Queen of the Greater Bay Area). She sits at the center of so many people, who connect other people, who connect other people. If you have anything to do with comics, you’ve probably got as many different connecting paths to Garrity as Kevin Bacon has to … let’s say Kermit The Frog^{4, 5}.

All in all, Garrity and Farago offer the superior choice if you’re looking for a webcomics-focused discussion, as I don’t see any others on the schedule until you get to the Keenspot panel on Sunday, and even that appears to be more about how one of Bobby Crosby’s stories got picked up and adapted to a movie that may or may not ever happen what with everything going on.

Back with more tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Are you tired of struggling to get Instagram followers and engagement?

As I do not, have never, and never will have a Facebook/Instagram account, I’ma say the answer to that one is no.

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¹ Or, more properly, both half-facing each other but mostly facing the camera.

² Literally within two minutes of talking about her post-college cartooning start, Garrity talked about how webcomics circa 2000 were unique in that they might be inspired by comic strips, but would feature long plotlines and story arcs that would never fly in newspapers, which put her several million up on the guy in the earlier, allegedly webcomics-centric session.

³ The others being Ryan North and George.

⁴ Although the Bacon Oracle should list Mr The Frog’s Bacon number as 2 — there are a whole bunch of people in The Muppet Movie with Bacon numbers of 1, such as Charles Durning, Steve Martin, Elliott Gould, Austin Pendleton, and Bruce Kirby.

⁵ Which puts me in mind of the Erdős-Bacon number, whereby a small number of scientists and actors have connections to both Kevin Bacon and prolific mathematician Paul Erdős. I’m guessing there’s some number of cartoonists that can site their connections to both Bacon and Garrity, but if there’s a chain from Garrity to Harvey Pekar you won’t need two separate connections, as Pekar had a Bacon number of 2.

Bet you didn’t know I had one of those, did you? Granted, it’s mostly in my head, but it determines things like when to go to an aside in em-dashes — like this one — and when it’s time for a parenthetical (I’m big on those), not to mention the absolute necessity of Oxford commas. Footnotes speak for themselves¹. Semicolons are our friend; we have a habit of using italics for both emphasis and direct quotes³, with only the direst of emphases elevated to bold face, bold italics, or larger text sizes. Oh, and print comic names are also italicized; webcomic names are not. Title text always capitalizes articles and other “minor” words, unless there’s a specific artistic reason not to.

Creators are referred to by full name on first usage, and by family name thereafter, unless it’s getting tedious and switching it up will make the flow better. There are exceptions to this policy, persons that are referred to primarily by first name because they earned it — George and Raina come to mind — but even this has limits. Ryan North is The Toronto Man-Mountain. Shaenon Garrity is Tiki Queen Of The Greater Bay Area. Jon Rosenberg is my co-birthdayist, and Howard Tayler my evil twin. Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett knows what he did.

It is actually naming that brings us here today, and a situation that has actually occurred before, but which has now become prominent enough to warrant formalization. Namely, what to do with persons who change their pronouns, gender, or name?

I mean, obviously we at Fleen honor that because we’re not monsters. I’m talking about past references to before the announced change (or the time when we at Fleen became aware of the change, as oft-times people don’t tell everybody in the world simultaneously). I thought about instituting a policy of going back through the archives to make the change everywhere I could find it, and ultimately decided against it. Not because — as has been noted on numerous occasions over the past forever — I am a lazy, lazy man. I actually have a good reason to do thing that requires less effort this time.

It’s because this page forms a part of the historical record, and knowing that people can — and have — changed their pronouns, gender, or name is important to remember. If somebody were to bring to my attention that they had recently decided to share one of those changes with the world, and would I mind editing a post that went up today, I’m not adverse to that. But I won’t go back five or ten years to a post that far predates and change it, mostly because it would inevitably lead to a scrambled record, some under one identity and others under a different one, interleaved in time. I will of course not deadname anybody, and endeavour to note when linking back into the archives that at the time, the person referenced was known differently.

All of which is to say, by 2014–2015, Real Life had gotten increasingly sporadic, and then it went away for a couple of years. 2018–2019 kept a fairly regular schedule until partway through the year. Things resumed this month and continued from where it left off, wrapping up a storyline last Friday.

And today, everything changed. Or, more precisely, today everything in the strip Real Life is starting to catch up with actual Real Life:

Well, it’s live. So, it’s official: I’m out.

Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Mae, the creator and cartoonist for Real Life Comics, which I started back in 1999 when I was just 18.

Over the next 3 weeks, I’ve got a storyline running about my journey.

reallifecomics.com

Eep!

Welcome to the world of webcomics creators, Maelyn Dean; we’re glad to meet you. I have a feeling that somewhere in this storyline, Cartoon Greg (as he still is) will be leaning out of the last panel to edit that copyright credit and embark on a very different, and hopefully far more joyous life.

Spam of the day:

Hidden technology leaks from NASA

One of the most significant things about NASA is that they literally document and release everything. Once data comes into their possession, they have a ridiculously short number of hours before they have to release it, or their Public Information Officers get fired and/or pulled up in front of Congressional committees. There was a whole sub-plot in The Martian about it. So fuck on outta here with this bullshit.

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¹ Namely, whenever there’s a long enough explainer that it would break the flow of the paragraph(s) in the body text, were it to be included there. Or just for a joke, particularly one involving Brad Guigar². And footnotes themselves go inside the punctuation at the end of a clause or sentence.

² He’s dreamy.

³ The distinction between which should be self-evident in the text.