So I trust that you’ve seen that Heidi Mac over The Beat way has combined the responses from her people-in-comics survey (cf: yesterday) to determine the most important industry people of the year (Dav Pilkey and Tom Spurgeon), and also the most significant person of the past decade.

If you read through the survey, there’s no doubt as to the consensus: it’s Raina¹, and who among us can disagree?

Well, technically I did. I’ve marked down Raina as the most important person in comics in pretty much every one of The Beat’s surveys since I’ve been invited to participate, and anybody that’s been reading this page for a hot minute knows that I don’t ever shut up about her central importance to the industry. So what was I thinking? Allow me to quote myself:

Uncharacteristically, I’m not going to say Raina/SMILE, because the past decade in comics nearly completely coincides with the work done by Mark Siegel and the people he’s nurtured at First Second.

It’s because I took a view of the entire system of comics. Raina is key, she kicked off an explosion of new readers, and there will be untold new creators of comics — new Rainas if you will — from her fanbase. But because of Mark Siegel, those new Rainas will have publishers, plural, to partner with. Siegel not only oversaw the creation of :01 Books into a powerhouse publisher, he has seen members of his team go on to found other imprints at other publishers. There’s a view of comics that he has (quoting again):

[H]ow broad comics can be — everything from board books to treatises on immigration policy — is now de facto editorial policy across the publishing industry.

Raina is the superstar that was necessary to jumpstart an industry out of doldrums. Siegel built the infrastructure that ensures Raina isn’t a one-off. If you’ll allow me to indulge in a sports metaphor — something I probably wouldn’t have ever done had I not gotten to talk to Gene Yang² about his process of discovering a love of basketball — no superstar can play the game solo. There’s an ongoing infrastructure of coaching, finding talent and developing them, building a team that ebbs and flows and spreads its influence and enables that superstar to be the best ever.

So: Raina is Megan Rapinoe, Siegel is the entire structure of women’s soccer, from college up to the pros, only without being institutionally exploitative and sexist. Shit, this probably would have worked better as LeBron/the NBA, but I really like Rapinoe.

One last quote, promise:

Literary awards, widespread adoption by libraries, growing acceptance in classrooms, the explosion of nonfiction and educational comics, creators headlining book festivals, new title announcement exclusives in major newspapers and magazines, the odd genius grant or ambassadorship — all of these would have happened without First Second, but they happened a hell of a lot sooner with First Second.

And that’s why I broke with my own precedent, despite the fact that Raina is a dear friend of mine and an absolute marvel of a human being, and coincidentally why I don’t mind in the least that I was far, far outvoted. We need the superstars and the league both, but one is too large and diffuse for us to properly appreciate all it does.

And on that note, let me point out that we are two weeks away from the release of the first title from Gina Gagliano’s Random House Graphic, The Runaway Princess, which is going to be the start of a damn interesting 2020. Forward to the new decade.

Spam of the day:

I made a screenshot of adult sites on which you’re having fun (you know what this is, right?). After that I made screenshots as you quite unusual satisfy themselves (using your device’s camera) and glue them.

Would that be the camera that I don’t have (desktop), or the camera that has a physical shutter across it (laptop)? Also, since you only gave me 48 hours from the reading of your email threat to send you five hundo in bitcoins and that was back on 19 Dec, can I assume all my friends and family have now been sent completely black pictures that I’m supposed to be embarrassed about?

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¹ The Fleen Style Guide states that a full name should be used on first reference, followed by family name only on subsequent references, unless the presence of duplicated family names would cause confusion. Exceptions exist for longtime established nicknames, and for the two persons who are known on this page solely by mononyms: Raina and George.

² Do I need to say that Yang’s past decade is inextricably linked with Siegel’s?

Hey. How you doing? Have a good set of holidays? Good, good. I spent what was supposed to be rejuvenative downtime fighting a cold which is still hanging on by its bacterial fingertips, so I hope yours was better. 2020 has started out more terrifyingly chaotic — and more quickly — than I’d expected, even at my most cynical. I’ve been pretty buried in the step back from the fight and catch your breath mode that we all have to engage in from time to time, but I’m back to exercising my opinion at lawmakers with specificity and persistence¹. But today, let’s talk comics.

• I cribbed that last bit from the introductory tagline that Brad “Sexy, sexy man” Guigar and “Los Angeles resident” Dave Kellett use at the start of each episode of ComicLab (at least, once they’ve finished up with whatever weirdass random absurdity they have on deck for the cold open), and if you’re not a regular listener, let me direct you to their year-end, best-of-2019 clip show.

  There is absolutely zero useful advice in here — unless you want to get a commercial film crew to stop shooting in front of your house, or possibly to stay married — but there are plentiful hilarious stories and rants, plus Drunk Orson Welles. I advise you not drink anything while listening, because you will end up spit-taking on multiple occasions.

  Oh, and Happy Birthday to LArDK. You had a hell of a 2019 and I suspect 2020 is going to be even better.

• As long as we’re talking about 2019, Heidi Mac over at The Beat has compiled her annual survey of folks in the comics biz looking back over the year and forwards towards the next. As of this writing, the first three parts are up, but you’ll eventually find all of them (there’s usually a half-dozen or more) here. You’ll find the excessively wordy input of a hack webcomics pseudojournalist in Part 1.
• When Tom Spurgeon’s memorial service was announced, word was that in addition to Columbus in mid-December, there were tentative plans to also remember The Spurge in New York in the new year. Those plans are concrete now, with the Society of Illustrators building on 63rd the venue. New York isn’t quite the center of the comics universe it used to be, but there’s plenty of people within daytrip distance of Manhattan, and on the 24th (that’s a Friday), they’re invited to the 3rd floor reception at 6:30pm, and the 1st floor memorial at 7:30pm.

  If you’ve been feeling the absence of Tom Spurgeon for the past two months, I’m going to encourage you to attend if it’s in your means to do so. Don’t feel that you didn’t know him well enough, or that you aren’t important enough — I can tell you with absolute confidence that if Tom knew your work he wanted you to succeed at comics, and if he had no idea who you are, he still wanted you to succeed. I am undecided if I’m going to go again, but I’ll tell you without hyperbole — in these unsettled, fraught times, saying goodbye to Tom among a tiny fraction of the community he loved was a balm.

• When people say that comics is a medium of almost infinite potential, I like to think that some of them are thinking about things like graphic medicine — the idea that comics can help educate people about health and medicine, whether as providers, patients, or policymakers. Cathy Leamy has been ahead of the curve in providing comics in this niche, which has grown to the point that panels and even entire conferences are being organized around the idea; fittingly, it’s via Leamy’s Twitterfeed that I’ve learned of some upcoming events.

  Following last year’s first event in the Boston area, there will be a three-day schedule for the New England Graphic Medicine Conference hosted by Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston; the call for papers ends on 10 January, but given that the topic list contains such areas as artist health, climate change, comics journalism, and The Nib cited as an area of discussion, there’s probably some folks reading this that are what NEGMC are looking for.

  Then, in July, Toronto will host the Graphic Medicine Conference the weekend before SDCC, covering similar territory, with a deadline for submissions on 31 January. Note that GMC presenters are responsible for their own expenses (including conference registration), although they note that [d]iscounted rates and some limited scholarships will be available for students, artists, and others in need; registration info isn’t up yet, so no idea what that might cost you (it appears that in past years, presentation by videoconference was an option).

Spam of the day:

Get better photos with the optical zoom lens with manual focus telescope

No lie, my current phone (a midrange 2019 model) has a better camera on it than any actual physical camera I ever owned, going back to my 35mm film days. I don’t need a doodad to make that differential even greater.

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¹ Truly, I never thought that I would need to have both local and DC offices for my representative and senators on speed dial.

In case you don’t feel like clicking through, it reads:

Please RT. Per his last wishes, donations of funds in Tom Spurgeon’s name can now be made to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum — specifically in support of Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) programming. Here is the link: http://go.osu.edu/cxcsupport

The new year will be upon us soon, and with it I imagine we’ll be talking about other things. To help ease into that new world, please take a moment to think about Congressman John Lewis, who shared some grave news¹ with us over the weekend. Lewis, aside from the acclaim rightly earned with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell for the March trilogy, is a bona fide hero, a man who was nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus bridge by men who hated him for the dangerous ideal he championed — that all persons deserve equal protection of the law.

For me, I’m going to be taking to heart Charlie Pierce’s words:

John Lewis is still alive. That must be understood before the announcement of his illness causes the news cycle to inter him prematurely, and to cover the causes for which he still fights to be buried under flowers, and encomia, and empty pious bullshit of a very high grade. John Lewis is still alive. His causes are still this nation’s causes. His life’s work is unfinished, and it will remain unfinished, and the forces seeking to diminish it may pause if and when he finally passes, pauses for all the flowers, encomia, and empty pious bullshit, but those forces will be back at work very quickly after the funeral music fades. Votes still will be suppressed. Poverty still will be blamed on the poor. The question of race still will be put off for another day. But, for the moment, John Lewis is still alive.

and resolving to take up, even moreso than in past years, the fights that John Lewis fought, to get in that good trouble that he encouraged. This page has, over the past while, become more political out of necessity; I suspect it will only continue in the coming year. I do hope you’ll continue to join with me.

Spam of the day:

Selling Aged Twitter Accounts for Cheap 2008-2015 Hello! I will sell Aged Twitter Accounts for Cheap 2008-2015

You’re an asshole who is actively catering to those that are ruining the world. Fuck all the way off and when you get there, continue to fuck off.

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¹ Pancreatic cancer, for those lucky enough not to know, is perhaps the most vicious bastard in the cancer family. It it usually not symptomatic until after it has spread to other organs and although it is a somewhat rare cancer, it is among the most lethal, both in terms of mortality rates and absolute numbers of deaths.

For your consideration: the Tom Spurgeon memorial pin from Ad House Books, available for a limited time for the astonishingly low price of three American dollars each, plus shipping. I got mine today.

The art was taken from Sam Henderson’s masthead representation of The Spurge at The Comics Reporter. Right now the page is down, but that link will hopefully work again in the future; until such time as the site is working again, you always use the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, which has The Comics Reporter archived.

While there you may note that the Internet Archive is in the midst of a funding drive, and that donations today are 2-for-1 matched, so if you’re inclined to give, today would be an excellent time to do so. I just gave ’em US$25 and I encourage you to do likewise in whatever amount you’re able.

Regardless, I hope you’re having a nice Boxing Day¹, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Feast of Stephen, or however you name this day.

Spam of the day:

High Demand for propertieS juSt like yourS review inquirieS

Odd capitalization aside, you’re overlooking one thing: if I sold you my property, that is to say the house I live in, I would have to move, and I would rather do almost anything than that. There are boxes still to be unpacked from when we moved in, May of 2004. No thank you, I will die in this house.

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¹ I have EMT duty tonight, and I sincerely hope it goes better than the last time I had EMT duty on Boxing Day. It was 2010, and my crew lucked out in that our holiday duty for the year — Christmas Day — fell on the Saturday of our regularly-scheduled weekend duty. We didn’t have to ride a holiday plus our weekend, bonus!

Saturday (we didn’t go on until 7:00pm, so the crew had a nice time with their families, although my wife was visiting relatives out of state) went fine, but around noon on Sunday it started snowing at a pretty good clip. By 4:00pm we were called out for a motor vehicle collision and it was getting distinctly hazardous. I was supposed to go off duty at 7:00pm, but as it looked like a blizzard was setting up shop, I declared an emergency² and put out an alert for all available personnel to report to our building for the duration.

I got four experienced EMTs and three not-EMTs. We figured out bedding, got dinner squared away, and I took the ambulance to my house to get my dog, who was patiently waiting for a walk and supper. By this time there was 30cm of snow on the ground and I damn near got the ambulance stuck twice³. If you’re ever called upon to carry a slightly panicky, 30kg greyhound (plus blanket and food) through 30cm of snow, I recommend against it.

We bunked down, seven folks on improvised bedding in one lounge (one young lady reported my dog slept on her most of the night, resulting in a toasty-warm experience in a chilly building), waking to:

• A deep sense of relief that no calls had come in overnight
• A total of 66cm of snow on the ground
• Our driveway and approach road clear (the town’s public works department had plowed us every three hours overnight)
• Roads passable enough to procure foodstuffs to cook for the crew

By 10:00am, with everybody fed (and the dog in heaven from all the petting and attention), we settled back, hoping that things would remain quiet.

At 10:06am, the first call came in.

Normally, our small town averages 2 or 3 calls in any 24 hour period. We took 19 calls before the crew went off duty at 7:00am Tuesday, frequently to houses that had not shoveled out their driveway or walkway. We took everything from cardiac events to a dude that had a basil leaf stuck in his throat and, quote, It’s kind of scratchy. One crew would come back from a run and collapse, tones would drop, and the other crew would go out. We hopscotched the calls in this manner until daylight faded and returned again.

Tuesday morning I stumbled home, craving my first change of clothes and shower since Saturday morning, cleaned up, went to bed, and woke up in time to go back on duty for my regular Tuesday shift at 7:00pm. Wednesday morning I went home again and slept for 18 hours. Thursday, the state of New Jersey put out a call for spare ambulances and personnel to head up to Brooklyn to help work down their backlog and on behalf of the crew still in town I said Ha, ha, ha, NO.

So yeah, hoping it goes easier than that.

² I was, at the time, Captain, the third-ranking officer. Numbers 1, 2, and 4 were all out of town for the holidays, the bastards.

³ This was the weather event you may have heard of where New York City had a backlog 3000 pending medical calls as late as Thursday, with more than 100 ambulances stuck in the snow, dozens of which had patients onboard. My little town of 13 000 folks, with seven people running two ambulances, didn’t fail to respond to a single call. I am inordinately proud of what we accomplished.

Gil Roth, who spoke at Tom Spurgeon’s memorial service, captured an audio recording, which he has shared. It’s absolutely worth your time to listen to it.

Someday, childroons, you will be able to tell your great-grandkids¹ that you were there for the approximately 20 hours that a bunch of people hated Jake Parker for ruining Inktober. It was never a thing, but everybody’s nerves are on edge from the everything, so I’ve got a bit of sympathy for the flash-fire that spread throughout comics soshmeed when some folks got trademark nastygrams from an overzealous lawyer.

But man, I am a bit surprised at how the whole thing went from zero to pitchforks and torches, without a pause for Hey, Jake, I got this stupid thing from somebody says they’re your lawyer, is this for real? Parker has clarified what’s going on and it’s about what I expected, but the standard Rule Zero Of The Internet applies: don’t read the comments.

I get that people who got C&D’d by lawyers are mad, and Parker appears to be making an effort to make things right with them. But the number of people in the comments (godsdammit why did I read the comments?) willfully misreading what Parker is saying, ascribing motives based on theoretical evil future behavior, and disregarding what people who actually know how trademarks work so they they can be VERY!!! MAD!!!!! is … sadly, it’s about what you’d expect it to be.

Deep breaths, everybody. Jake Parker isn’t the antichrist. You can still do all the stuff you were doing so long as you don’t try to make it look like you’re doing something “Official”. Lawyers gonna lawyer, shit’s getting resolved, and unless you were on the receiving end of a lawyer letter, your energy is better spent on developing your craft than online ire².

And if it so happens that Parker is lulling us into a false sense of calm before a tremendous heel turn, you’ll have my apologies and my best efforts to smuggle in all the flaming barbed wire-wrapped folding chairs necessary to take him down. Deal? Deal.

Spam of the day:

Hey, I know this up coming time is going to be slammed with the holidays, but are you missing potential customers?

My business selling flaming barbed wire-wrapped folding chairs is distinctly short on customers. Send all you got my way, please.

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¹ Just kidding! The Earth will be a husk inimical to human habitation before then.

² Seriously, about two hours into the event, I saw somebody on Twitter advocating for a class action lawsuit to overturn Parker’s trademark and that’s … that’s not how any of this works.

I was intensely reminded of the people that would contact Webcomics Weekly or Comic Lab wanting to know how to negotiate Hollywood licensing rights for the comic they hadn’t created yet, or the people that would show up for a con panel on Kickstarter wanting to know how to turn on the Magic Money Machine but who didn’t have a project or audience.

Things are wrapping up, folks are stepping back from their comics to spend time with families, the solstice approaches and with it the period of time between the longest night¹ and the start of society’s new year. Posting may be light and sporadic between now and everybody getting back into it around the 5th or 6th of December.

But in the meantime, please enjoy the latest update — and oh my, twenty pages worth! — of KC Green’s adaptation of Pinocchio. We’re getting near to the end, I can feel Real Boyness about to burst forth, but something finally struck me in this chapter.

For all his misbehavior, all his snotty aggression, all his self pity, Pinocchio has been nearly always honest in this story. His nose grows in this chapter, but I was astonished to realized I couldn’t remember the last time that happened. Disney and other popular adapters have conditioned me to expect the nose bit to be nearly constant instead of a rare, notable event. Carlo Collodi’s story is far more balanced than the Pinocchio most of us know (and his grillo parlante, talking cricket, an exceedingly minor character), and I really should have expected that².

Oh, and there are best-of lists being promulgated in various corners; presumably having learned their lessons since they reinstated graphic works to the best seller lists, New York Times has a nicely considered and curated list (paywalled) with Guts not only included, but in the splash image at the top.

A whole lot of lists are including The American Dream? and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, with Forbes providing a decent representation of the consensus (and yes, Forbes will let anybody publish anything, and have essentially zero credibility on any one-off articles you find online; this is a recurring series and has actual editorial involvement).

I used to run year-end list of Top , but I’ve pretty much moved away from that — there’s so many good books being released, there’s such a chance that I missed something good, and I don’t have time to do things like decade-long retrospectives. You found something that really spoke to you? It’s the year’s best and I may or may not agree with you, but neither of us is wrong.

Me, I found myself loving stories by or about queer women/trans allegories³, which the traditional approaches to comics not only would decide shouldn’t be published at all, but even if they were, aren’t supposed to appeal to me. They’re just really good stories is all.

Spam of the day:

There’s no turning back. Burn the boats.

This came with little burning fire emojis on either side of the text, so I guess somebody really hates boats. Don’t tell Lucy Bellwood, she’ll correct this bozo with vigor.

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¹ In the northern part of the planet, that is; for those in the southern reaches it is high summer, and for some it is a particularly hard one. It’s sobering to see how much territory is involved, overlaid on the largest population centers of the US and the UK (one of which I live in; the far corner of the box is more than twice as far from New York City than my home), but the thing is — those fires aren’t that far from Sydney. If NYC in that map were Sydney, there are fire fronts far closer to the city proper than the far box boundary. Stay safe, Oz friends.

² I could rattle off the differences between characters in the Disney versions of their stories vs the Hans Christian Andersen, Brothers Grimm, or Rudyard Kipling originals, so why should Pinocchio be any different? I’m starting to suspect that I should read the original Bambi, 101 Dalmatians, or Mary Poppins for good measure.

Fortunately, I don’t have to read Swiss Family Robinson because Ursula Vernon did that for us and boy, is it a bonkers story. Speaking of Vernon and bonkers stories, she smacked down an ignorant dude with Uncle Sven yesterday, and it was glorious.

³ But for the record, my pick for book of the year is Laura Dean, tied with Are You Listening?. I adored these stories.

Runners-up are The Midwinter Witch and Kiss Number 8, either of which could have been my personal favorite in a year that didn’t include so very much competition.

Sometimes, life hands you a gift; sometimes, that gift involves watching a friend go through something disappointing, perhaps even painful, that was entirely self-inflicted. And sometimes, because we are very good and he loves us, we get to watch Ryan North open a Mystery Bucket.

For those not in the know, there are a few things you’ll want to check out:

• Today’s Dinosaur Comics, wherein T-Rex gets all excited about a Mystery Bucket
• A Twitterthread, wherein Ryan North also gets all excited about a Mystery Bucket
• A Periscope video session, wherein Ryan North opens the Mystery Bucket, discovers that some mysteries are perhaps left alone, and also he gets two wooden letters Q.

Personally, I’m going to interpret the whole thing — the bucket, the mystery, the realization that the mysteries and buckets were inside us all along — as Ryan’s Christmas present to all of us. Thanks for that, Ryan! You spread cheer far and wide, and you got a bucket out of it. It’s a Bucketmas¹ miracle!

I presume everybody’s seen this by now? I’ll confess that I’m not enough of a The Far Side scholar to be able to tell which strips are old and which are the promised interspersed new ones². I mean, I recognize Cow Tools and Ace Moving Company, and I for sure would recognize most strips with cavemen (Thagomizer for instance, or Primitive Chemists Describe The First Dirt Molecule), but there could be new strips and I doubt I’d recognize them as new unless they dropped particularly modern references. Without those, The Far Side is timeless and could have been written yesterday.

Welcome back to the game, Gary Larson. The internet is a weirder place than when you stepped back from it some years ago, but that’s okay — there are cartoon dinosaurs that have grown in your absence and also tall men that get stuck in holes³. We’re glad to have you back.

Spam of the day:

Garytyrrell, Delayed e-mails from Twitter

Oh no, what will I do? I guess I’ll just have to go over to Twitter myself to be yelled at by nazis, bots, and nazi bots.

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¹ I decree that 9 December will henceforth be Bucketmas, commemorating the day Ryan North opened the bucket and plumbed the mysteries inside. Bucketmas Season will start on 7 December, when we go and identify our own Mystery Buckets, to be opened on Bucketmas like comically large Advent calendars.

On Bucketmas Eve, 8 December, we obtain the Mystery Buckets and also prepare ahead of time whatever treats are necessary to deal with the disappointment contained within. The remainder of Bucketmas Season will be determined by the number of wooden letters Q found in your bucket — each Q representing one day that you must bring your bucket with you wherever you go.

I am serious about this and have already written a post to be published on 9 December of next year. Just you wait and see.

² It appears that so far, we’re only getting a curated selection of old strips. They’re still hilarious.

³ Philosophical observation: a bucket is nothing more than an extremely bounded hole. You thought you had the upper hand, but who’s in charge now, hole? It’s Ryan North, that’s who!

Longtime readers of this page will recall that I never managed to record the actual day of launch; it was December 2005, there were test pieces in the pipe that got released after the fact which muddied the waters, and it was sometime before the 24th because that’s when the Wayback Machine¹ started tracking it.

So some time back I decided that the 15th of December would serve as the official birthday of Fleen, much like how all thoroughbred horses are considered to be born on 1 January regardless of their actual foaling date. The 15th was Sunday, and yesterday I was talking about Tom Spurgeon², so I’m a bit late, or maybe not. We’ll all find ways to cope, I’m certain.

It’s been a ride; at the time I started, Spurgeon had been running The Comics Reporter for a bit more than a year (11 October 2004 is the oldest date I can find via the Wayback Machine), and The Beat a little older (Heidi Mac launched in June of that year, although she didn’t host it herself until 2010, so who knows how much of the early years at comicon.com and Publishers Weekly still exist). CR stayed much the same, The Beat expanded into new areas of interest, with a rotating stable of writers and is maybe no properly described as bloggy any longer. Fleen started with me and Jeff Lowrey (who dropped out about 14 months later), and today it’s pretty much me and Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin when the BD scene needs discussing.

Through that time we’ve sometimes stretched the meaning of webcomics, at the same time lamenting the imprecision and general suckiness of the term. I’ve done some pieces that I’m really proud of, some that I banged out without much planning, a few I’d probably want to take down if I thought about it for a minute; to be honest, I’ve probably completely forgotten the vast majority of what I’ve written here.

When I hit publish, this will be the 3712th post to go out under my name in about 5110 days, which is close enough to 5 posts in 7 days as makes no difference. I’ve been threatened with a lawsuit by an alleged millionaire/artist³, been memorialized in comics, met heroes who’ve become friends, seen friends become household names, determined I have an Evil Twin, raised thousands of dollars for the disadvantaged and deserving, been informed that all of this will be included in the Library of Congress, and found my people.

So we’ll call today 14 years of what Rosenberg assured me would be 300 words a day, that’s nothing, that’s lunch blogging, a false promise for which I will surely extract my vengeance some day. I can’t say how much longer all of this will go on because who the hell knows how much longer anything goes on these days, but the Post-It with my to-do list for tomorrow includes Fleen as an action item. In the meantime, I’m glad to have you along for the ride.

Spam of the day:

Geschäftsnummer- EE 70/218. (Geschäftsnummer- EE 70/218.)

Nee, mach diesen Scheiß nicht.

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¹ Or, more precisely, the current iteration of Fleen. The name was chosen because Jon Rosenberg already owned the domain for the Fairly Large Electronic Entertainment Network, an early webcomic portal.

² Speaking of which, earlier today I learned that the image on yesterday’s post, the artwork produced for Spurgeon’s memorial, was by Julian Dassai (portrait), Laurenn McCubbin (color) and Emi Gennis (letters). The post has been updated to reflect this.

³ I leave it to you to decide if the individual actually deserves to be designated either a millionaire or an artist; I have my doubts about the former and absolutely none about the latter.

Artwork by Julian Dassai, Laurenn McCubbin, and Emi Gennis.

I hadn’t intended to write about Tom Spurgeon’s memorial service when I set out for Columbus on Saturday morning. A memorial service is practically a funeral, and you don’t treat funerals like con panel recaps to share. I would go, I would browse the items in the Tom Spurgeon collection at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (among other things, he donated thousands of minicomics, providing crucial documentation of the most ephemeral side of comics), maybe go through the public gallery.

It was Jeff Smith that started me reconsidering my intent. I think it’s gonna be a celebration he said to me, a short while before the service started. It was, with far more laughter — raucous, spontaneous, joyous laughter; so, so much laughter — than tears, because everybody that spoke had a Spurge story to share, and Spurge just naturally lent himself to funny situations. And celebrations are things that you do share.

So there were the tumblers full of Microns, with attendees invited to write or draw a memory to be included in a tribute mini to come.

There was the rotating series of photos projected behind the speakers, including three-or-so-year-old Tom on a tricycle with a brown paper bag on his head. His mother asked him that day Why the bag? and he replied More fun.

And there was his brother Whit, leading off the speaking order, and introducing each new person, sharing a note from seven year old Tom’s report card: It would be to Tom’s advantage to learn to be more tactful. If he never learned that lesson, or the one about deadlines, nobody on the day much cared. There was much talk about the time Tom was a dick to somebody, mixed with the realization that his criticisms were nearly always correct and something to learn from … and in any event, he was far more free with his encouragement. Regarding deadlines, Whit noted it was entirely appropriate that the first hour of the program has now taken two hours and ten minutes.

We came to say goodbye, and we learned that Tom Spurgeon contained such multitudes that I believe nobody in the room didn’t learn something about him. For me, the most surprising thing was to learn that Tom attended seminary after college; Laurenn McCubbin brought home the inherent contradiction in that bit of history when she said I never saw him as a preacher.

Then, she continued, Tom was a pastor … and we were his weird, heathen flock and it all made sense to me. More than the words, more than the towering intellect, more than the absurdly funny situations that adhered to him, even more than comics, Tom was defined by his love for the people that made comics, that read comics, that loved comics, and he never stopped trying to make their lives better and more fruitful. Who will fill that role, to care for every single person in comics? Evan Dorkin knows the answer — it will have to be us, every single one of us, that takes up the charge, and all of us together will still not do as much as Tom did.

But Tom thought we could. At the end of his mother’s remarks, she shared the concluding sentences from something he’d written a few years ago, to be read in the event of his death. He asked us all to care for one another. Every single person in that room may have wondered who could fill Tom’s shoes, but he knew it couldn’t be just one person.

At his direction, Tom Spurgeon was cremated; his ashes now reside in the Billy Ireland’s permanent collection. When you go to visit the library and museum, you’ll be visiting him. And that, Carol Tyler observed, makes The Billy sacred ground.

Goodbye, Tom. I wish my words were up to this task, but then, I don’t think anybody’s would be. Except yours, of course. You were always good with words.

Spammers don’t get to share Tom Spurgeon’s day.