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.

Well, crapola.

I had a full 600 words here about how it looks like we aren’t getting a Wondermark calendar from David Malki ! this year — understandable given he’s putting together a book twice as large as it was planned to be — with lots more about the nature of time, and Leap Years starting on a Wednesday, and the whole damn thing evaporated as I was saving.

It appears the WordPress update that pushed through the other day wiped out periodic timed saves, godsdammit.

I am not even trying to recreate all of that. Here’s what you do:

1. Grab your 2014 Wondermark calendar cards (theme: Roll-a-sketch). It features a year starting on Wednesday, which is what we need for January/February. Use the first four cards, and half of #5.
2. Grab your either your 2009 Wondermark calendar cards (theme: Victorian tableaux) or your 2015 Wondermark calendar cards (theme: Concert of Conscience). When you get to the end of February in the 2014 cards, plop in the whole-month cards from 2009 starting with March, or start paying attention halfway down card #5 from 2015.

   I’ll be using the 2015 set, as it’s one of two years that I managed to snag calendar #001 in the limited edition; if it matters, the 2009 monthly cards start with Monday on the left, running to Sunday at the far right.

3. Do whatever the hell you want on 29 February, it’s The Purge, laws don’t exist, and it’s also Howard Tayler’s birthday (but I repeat myself).
4. If you don’t have calendar inserts from 2014 and 2009 or 2015, I don’t know what to tell you. Just don’t get a bootleg This Is Fine calendar from meme thieves¹.

Much like TV only works because somewhere in the world, at all times, at least one rerun of I Love Lucy is being broadcast, it is highly probably that time itself will only continue to work if as many people as possible continue to stock insert cards in their Wondermark calendars; no pressure. Examine your conscience and do what needs to be done.

Spam of the day:

FungusRemoving Spice

Unless this gives me blue-in-blue eyes and makes my name a killing word, not interested.

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¹ I have no idea if such a thing exists, except for the part where I’m completely sure because meme thieves are the worst.

If you didn’t say Me! Me!, you’re very possibly a liar, or perhaps didn’t hear me correctly. Pizza, people!

If you got a hankering for art to meet politics to meet good deeds, then Shing Yin Khor is somebody you want to pay attention to. I mean, also because they produce heartbreakingly beautiful comics that are painful in their truths, wield tools with aplomb, are actively working to bring capitalism to heel, and are small enough to fit in your pocket.

But set all that aside for the moment; when Khor sees people with less, people in need of protection, plans get made and people wrangled in order to make uplifting art for the purpose of helping because godsdammit, somebody’s got to. On a couple of occasions now, pizza-themed art — some of which is patently and wonderfully ridiculous — has been made and auctioned off to support Food Forward LA, which strives to both reduce food waste and reduce hunger. The third iteration of Project Pizza will run on Saturday:

From 10AM to 10PM join artists Shing Yin Khor and Eron Rauch as they host a draw-a-thon featuring a dozen of their talented friends making art and jamming their faces full of pizza.

Grab a slice (one random drawing), a whole pie (10), or even a party pack (30) to share with friends and co-workers. Preorders open December 12th, and we sell out every year, so stop back by to secure your slices!

You can check out a list of artists expected to participate in the live event, and also some of the art that’s been constructed by remote friends and sent in. A full list of participants is at the Project Pizza page, below the pre-order links. It’s not possible to request particular artists, but at the US$100 support level, they’ll try to direct at least one piece by a favorite artist to you. Also, the first 20 folks to send in a hundo or more get a tiny sculpted pizza. And on the off chance you don’t need one or more tiny pizza arts in your home, they’re taking tips as well — that money goes direct to FFLA without the work of shipping you anything.

Look, I know it’s an expensive time of year, that people got crap jobs and little extra money but consider: ten bucks means 45+ kilos of being saved and distributed. The last event raised more than US$4600, and the goal this year is an even five grand, or fifty tons of food. Just think about it, okay? Oh, and if the you-gotta-have-a-PayPal-account thing is a problem for you, here’s FFLA’s direct donations page; you might not get a tiny pizza, but you’ll help a bunch of people not be hungry, and that tastes great.

Spam of the day:

Now ANYONE Can Learn Piano or Keyboard

I dunno. If my mother (lifelong pianist and church organist) couldn’t manage to teach me, I don’t think your revolutionary, spam-based method will succeed.

So there’s this thing that the Cartoon Art Museum does in alternate years, where they decide on a cartoonist, get a bunch of other cartoonists to do tribute art, then auction it all off as a fundraiser. It’s cool for fans of the tribute-makers, fans of the tributee, fans of comics in general.

This year’s auction is a tribute to Bill Watterson.

Here’s the deal:

• Participants announced so far include Harry Bliss¹ and Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin), Jeffrey Brown, Brian Fies, Lynn Johnston, Patrick McDonnell, Steve Purcell², Riley Rossimo, Jon Way$hak, Mo Willems, Michael Jantze, John Reiner and Bunny Hoest, Roger Langridge, Gemma Correll, Charles Brubaker, Aaron Conley, Andy Ristaino, Nate Powell, Kim Dwinell, Le Tang, Tony Guaraldi-Brown, Betsy Peterschmidt, and more to come.

  Get the feeling that Watterson was kind of a seminal influence of almost everybody in comics? I sure do.

• Images for the auction can be seen at CAM’s page on Comic Art Fans, with some of the contributions having been on display since the end of September.
• One of the items up for auction is a print of the final Calvin and Hobbes strip³, signed by Watterson and given to his editor, John Glynn. Glynn has passed this treasure on.
• The auction will be conducted on CAM’s eBay page, starting soonish? in the beginning of December is what the press release says. New pieces will be added biweekly, there will be a pause for the holidays, resuming in the new year.
• In March 2020 there will be an exhibition of all the pieces at CAM in San Francisco, so if you win an auction you won’t get your prize right away. There will also be an accompanying full color catalog of all the pieces at the same time.

Without a more specific date (I’d argue we’re well into the middle of December), your best bet is to follow CAM on social media, or park yourself on the eBay page if you want a shot at things. Or, given that a lot of this work is going to go for serious coin, maybe set an alarm for March and check out the exhibition catalog when it drops.

Spam of the day:

Weird Fruit Burns fat 1,828% faster!

1. That is a suspiciously precise number.
2. The weight loss industrial complex, like being in trouble, is a fake idea.

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¹ That site requires Flash, in this the gods-damned year 2019.

² No web presence that I can find.

³ One may recall that it was a Sunday, printed half-page size thanks to Watterson’s contract demanding space (in return for which he offered the very best monsters, dinosaurs, and mayhem), on the last day of 1995. I remember it like it was yesterday.

Know what we need more of? Science.

• Readers of this page know that, whatever else may be true, Rosemary Mosco of Bird And Moon is one hell of a naturalist, a terrific explainer of all things biological (particularly snakes, birds, and butterflies), a walking compendium of knowledge ranging from identifying what’s in owl barf to climate change.

  And for those of you that can’t get enough of her¹, you’ll have a shot at an in-person event in just about five weeks:

  This is going to be amazing. I’m taking part in a @scifri event on Jan 16 in Boston! Come see a video about my comics (and my interrupting pet birds), chat with folks including the amazing @mariswicks, and check out a ton of art and science collaborations.

  Just for the uninitiated, @scifri would be Science Friday, the long-running NPR show which — among other public services — broadcasts the annual IgNobel Prize ceremony. Ira Flatow has hosted the show since its inception, and he’s been an entertaining, effective communicator of Science Stuff ever since the early Newton’s Apple days. Yes, I watched it from the premiere episode. Yes, I am old.

  I expect that readers of this page are already familiar with Maris Wicks.

  Anyways, the event that Mosco’s so rightly excited about would be the Science Friday Create Curiosity Fair, to be held in the pubic space of NPR member station WBUR, on 16 January 2020 from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. The event is all ages, general admission US$10, kids under 12 free with registration. In addition to Mosco and Wicks, you’ll have folks from the Harvard Museum of Natural History², the New England Aquarium³, and other sciencey types from the region.

• Speaking of the IgNobel Prizes (and we were, just about two paragraphs due up), did you know that one IgNobel laureate has also won a Nobel Prize? It’s true! There was a levitating frog involved!

  Unsurprisingly, it’s a white dude, which fact would also not surprise you if you’ve read the latest from Maki Naro (cartoonist, science communicator, and Best At Drawing Totoro) and Matthew Francis (physicist, science writer, bowler hat enthusiast, and author — with illustrations by Naro — of Who Owns An Asteroid?) on why women are systematically excluded from the science Nobels.

  It’s a good read, one that’ll make you mad. And if anybody says Well, chicks just ain’t good at science, ask them whose notes Watson and Crick cribbed from and who discovered pulsars. I could go on, but honestly, this hypothetical I’m just a believer in merit and ability bozo hasn’t heard of Watson, Crick, or pulsars, so screw that dude (of course it’s a dude).

Spam of the day:

Keep yourself AND your wine warm this winter 15 bottels of our AMAZING Holiday wines

So this appeal from “Thanksgiving Wines” (which arrived four days ago) is apparently that rare wine merchant that believes in keeping their bottels [sic] warm, which will only accelerate the march to vinegar. Try again.

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¹ And how could you, really?

² They got dinosaurs.

³ They got squid.

What can you say at this point about an Abby Howard book on extinct critters, evolution, ecological niches, and Science Magic? Much like the earlier entries in the Earth Before Us series, Dinosaur Empire! and Ocean Renegades!, Mammal Takeover! dives into an era of geological history, looks at what the world was like and what animals filled which roles, courtesy of Ronnie and Ms Lernin.

It’s basically a 120 page expansion of the ten pages that Larry Gonick devoted to the Age of Mammals in his classic Cartoon History Of The Universe, vol 1 (starting at the Big Bang, ending with the emergence of humans), only with the benefit of 40 more years of accumulated knowledge. Gonick didn’t know we were in the Sixth Great Extinction, or the threats of anthropogenic climate change; Howard has the responsibility to confront those issues and make them compelling (but not terrifying) for her audience of 5th +/- 2 graders, which she manages with aplomb.

Plus, folks that know more about extinct critters and how to artistically convey them¹ think she’s doing a good job, so who am I to contradict them? My only complaint is that we didn’t see all of the truly bizarre creatures during the so-called Age Of Horns (horned mice! horned jackrabbits! deer with weird-ass horns sprouting vertically from their snouts!), and aquatic mammals got a brief presentation (there’s a bit on where whales and other cetaceans came from, but nothing on the pinnipeds (I am all about the sea lions).

So that’s pretty much it for the Earth Before Us series — one book on the timeframe of dinosaurs, one on multicellular life before dinosaurs, and one on everything since the K-T extinction event. Whatever she works on next will be excellent, but for now, get the set of three EBU books for the dino-loving kids (of whatever age) in your life. The ones that don’t now about pre-dino life or post-dino life will probably end up with a obsession. Here’s hoping that Ronnie and Ms Lernin can find other topics to explore, but we’ll also have these trash receptacle-centered Science Magic journeys to enjoy time and again.

[Editor’s note: Thank you.]

Spam of the day:

South Beach Skin

You mean sun- and cocaine-damaged? Sign me up!

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¹ Dr Mark Witton is not only an expert the large pterosaurs known as azhdarchids, he is also one of the world’s premiere paleoartists. He is why we think of large pterosaurs as flying giraffes that could spear you with their beaks. I love his work.

Stepping back from webcomics for a moment; got family coming in for the weekend, because of the very personal nature of the relationship we have with arthritis¹. When I first met my wife, she was newly diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis; her mother had dealt with it for more than 40 years at that point, and noticed the symptoms quickly. Thanks to having been treated from an early stage, she’s largely in good shape, but that can vary from day to day.

My mother in law, though — it was not physically possible for me to make my hands assume the shape that hers were stuck in. Think claws and you aren’t too far off. She dealt with it for most of her life, and the constellation of similar autoimmune diseases that accompany it. She ultimately wound up with one a/i condition that slowly degraded her lung function and eventually killed her.

But in her last ten years? Until the last one, when moving without portable oxygen got to be too much? She spent a bunch of Decembers here in New Jersey for the local iteration of the Arthritis Foundation’s annual 5K run/walk fundraiser. At more than 80 she did that course, accompanied at one time or another by most of her eight kids. My wife’s been adult honoree twice, and despite the December cold not being the best thing for her joints, has been out there each year, for her mom and herself.

If you’re anywhere near Central New Jersey, you can participate in this year’s event; it’s on Sunday. If you’re nowhere near, there are literally dozens of AF runs this weekend, probably some of which are near you.

Or you can give to my wife’s team², as she (and her oldest brother and her younger twin sister) make their way in public to remember their mom and try to make sure that nobody else in the future has to deal with the same struggles. I’ll be part of the EMS standby, as usual. If you come by, say hi! Anybody that helps us to remember Welma Pierce gets a free high five.

Non-spam of the day:

The Arthritis Foundation’s Jingle Bell Run is the original festive race for charity. 100% of your registration fee and fundraising go to a great cause!

Damn straight.

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¹ There are several kinds, broadly classifiable as You used your body too hard when you were young and now you’re paying for it (osteoarthritis) vs Autoimmune disease of the joints (rheumatoid arthritis). We are discussing the latter.

² And some of you have, in response to tweets I’ve sent out. I see you, and I appreciate it more than you can ever know.

From Ian Jones-Quartey, About eight minutes ago as I write this:

Hey so @rebeccasugar and I have been a couple for 12 years … and yesterday we got married! To each other!

Oh, hooray! I only met Rebecca Sugar once (at another wedding, as it turns out), but I’ve followed Ian’s work since he was in high school, and known him since his SVA days. He’s a sweet guy, and Sugar is widely and justly known for creating one of the most humane stories of modern times, making countless kids feel like the world is for them, too. Be happy for them, and remember that Steven Universe Future debuts on Cartoon Network in two days.

And because I need to have more than just breaking news in this post, let me note that Gemma Correll is getting an Emerging Artist Showcase at the Cartoon Art Musuem, from 20 December until 29 March. It’ll feature a collection of Correll’s favorite cartoons, including material from The Nib. I first saw her work when The Nib launched, and I’ve been a fan ever since. It says something about how much her sensibilities match mine that, without knowing of my preference for her work, my wife gave me a birthday day last year that was illustrated by Correll. If you don’t know her work, check it out.

Okay, back to being deliriously happy for the bestest young animators in the world. Y’all have a magnificent day.

Spam of the day:
Spammers don’t get to share the day with Rebecca and Ian.