Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Dylan Meconis who was much loved by all, for she could draw pictures and tell stories that made people forget their cares. She spun a story called Bite Me as a dwarf spins gold from wool, and all who read this story were enchanted. But one day, the story ended and the people were sore disheartened. But goodly-hearted Dylan heard their cries, and began a new story called Family Man. All who read the story were glad once again, and waited eagerly for midweek to come so that Dylan might tell them more. And they lived happily ever after.

Ah, fairy tales; you may not realize what those words actually mean. It’s been a couple of centuries since we really had fairy tales, you see; Jacob and Wilhelm were documenting language and culture when they compiled their famous collection of folk-tales, and they cleaned them up considerably to make them worthy of the right sort of people. More than 40 tales were omitted from their compilations for being unsuitable for respectable society. By the time Hans Christian Andersen came along, the Victorians had thoroughly sanitized the very idea of the fairy tale (Andersen’s originals are only now starting to be restored to their original grandeur). Then came Disney, and fairy tales became more than harmless — they became cute.

So here we are in a new century, with a thoroughly safe set of stories for children where the good guys always win and the bad guys always get punished safely off-screen, and some brave storytellers are writing fairy tales as they used to be. That’s what Meconis has crafted here: a story full of mood, from a time when the dark outside the house contained who knows what, and there are worse things in the woods than a wolf that needs to be put down on a frosty night.

Take a look at that page again — it’s the first one of Family Man, and it sets a high bar of expectation. Everything about the landscape screams “deep of winter”, in a time before climate control, insulation, or performance fleece, when the short days of the year didn’t mean winter wonderland, they meant maybe we won’t die of starvation and cold before spring comes. Look at the wolf’s face, with the narrow, malevolent eyes and a cruel sneer over vicious teeth; it was an undeserved reputation, but for millenia this was the most feared and loathed of the forest’s creatures, surely the very spawn of the Devil. That is how you start a fairy tale, with an attention to detail and mood that drags you along, will-you or no.

Very slowly, Meconis is doling out bits of the story. We have met Luther Levy, ink-stained scholar in the Saxon lands near Göttingen, and his merchant brother Johann, home for a visit. Their younger sister Liesl (sniffed out by Johann with his “Levy nose” … hmmm), their stern, religious mother, and their clockmaker father have been given to us in the smallest of doses, forcing us to learn about them in an organic, deliberate fashion. Right now, all is well and ordinary, but we know how fairy tales start — it’s just matter of time before the menace that lurks outside the hearth decides to step from the shadows.

From a starting point of modernity (for what could be more modern than the clock, bending the natural rhythms of time to the mechanical rule of man?), we’re about to fall back into a sense of magic and wonder. And when the ancient and modern bump up against each other, can danger and divine punishment be far behind? This story is to Cinderella as an angel (a real angel, a messenger of fearsome visage and great import) is to those treacly little cupids running around the greeting-card store at the mall. It’s worth your time; you deserve a little bit of real fairy tale in your life.

And since I’m thinking of it: I want a cherub to top my Christmas tree this year. A real cherub, straight from the King James Version or the Book of Ratings; there’s creative people that read this, so if any of you are good at soft sculpture or dollmaking, drop me a line. In a world where I can buy a plush Shoggoth or Summer Fun Chtulhu, there must be somebody willing to make me a four-faced, four-winged tree topper.

So there was beer at the Peculier last night with the usual crowd, plus Chris Hastings (newly of DFP) and by one of those odd coincidences that proves just how incestuous webcomics really are, the best friend of Liz Greenfield (also newly of DFP). “Oh,” she said, “you’re the Fleen guy.” That makes her at least the fourth person that’s referred to me that way … I’m thinking I need some business cards printed up. Anyway, Norna (sorry for not catching your last name) wanted to know why we haven’t written up Stuff Sucks yet; I told her I had intended to hold off a bit yet, wait for the story to hit a break point, but screw that. It’s damn good work and it’s time we acknowledged it. So here’s everything you need to know about Stuff Sucks:

Liz Greenfield is actually John Cusack.

Stay with me here. Check out the parallels in the cast: Daniel is a man-child, not always successful in being what his girlfriend wants him to be. Tony has a record store just to have a place to keep his collection. Aaron & Mike have the same conversation/argument over and over and over again; oh, sure, it’s different words, but it’s really the same conversation. Nicole is (was?) Daniel’s wealthy girlfriend who’s never been satisfied with the way he is. And there’s schemers in the form of Leo and Zemi, with grand plans (some of which target Daniel directly for special mind-games and life-ruining). I’m still trying to figure out where the fish fits in this model, but he does. Oh yes, he does.

And how do explain this? Faced with Nicole dumping Daniel (side effect of a cruel prank by Zemi), Tony heads to Nicole’s house for a little musical warfare á la Lloyd Dobler to try to get her to take Daniel back. But Greenfield knows that in the real world, there’s no boombox-induced awww, that’s sooooo romantic reaction. In the real world after a stunt like this there’s retaliation, escalation, and incarceration.

The loopy and appealling characters are wrapped in an open, clean-line art style that puts me in mind of a combination of Vera Brosgol, Raina Telgemeier, and Tyler Page. The writing is a prime example of show, don’t tell; even with first two dozen strips being reworked and currently unavailable, the reader has no problems dropping into the story at strip #25. Like walking into a well-written movie after the first reel, it only takes a moment to get the gist of the story because the characters are so well-developed. We might chafe at being forced to wait a week to see what happens next, but for the characters it’s all happening too fast as they try to adjust to this sometimes-sucky thing called life.

Editor’s note: Been waiting a while to write this one and no, not all webcomics creators are analogous to Warner’s animators. I got a guy in mind that reminds me of Lasseter, but that’s for another day.

There’s a fundamental rule to comedy, Chuck Jones told us: funny comes from restrictions, having a concrete set of rules and forcing characters to act logically within them. This leads to the fundamental difference between a Jones short and, say, a Disney short: the Disney gang goes off and does something wacky because it’s in the script. Chuck’s characters find themselves in a situation, and who they are dictates how they react (the clever student can also pick out these two approaches in individual episodes of Seinfeld).

Thus, nobody makes an unnamed bull knock Bugs Bunny out of a bullring — they just both happen to be there, and it leads to an escalation of conflict up to the greatest sight gag of all time (involving wooden ramps, grease, glue, sandpaper, matches, a fuse, and many, many explosives — you know the one). Thus, nothing will make that son-of-a-bitch frog sing if there are witnesses. Thus, it’s perfectly clear that the Coyote will stop getting injured if only he’d stop trying to eat the Roadrunner … but he can’t (if my memory serves me well, that’s rule #4; the other rules include the ideal number of gags in a Roadrunner cartoon is 11; the Coyote’s greatest enemy is gravity; and all materiel must come from the Acme corporation). Thus, in the ultimate expression of rule-based comedy, Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf are at each other’s throats merely because it’s their job. When the whistle blows, they stop trying to defeat each other, dust off, clock out, and the night shift picks up where they left off.

The reason that rule-based comedy is so brilliant is that it forces the creator to think through characters and motivations. You can’t just throw in a bundle of wacky for random use … it’s got to be logical. It makes you a sharper writer; it forces you not to create Funny, but to find it within your creation. Jon Rosenberg not only gets it, he’s even trying to subject a journal comic to a rules-based approach. But to really see an appreciation of rules, check out the recent years of Goats (say, since the earth was destroyed). Characters fill specific roles (chaos-initiator, hapless bystander, methodical planner, disinterested observer, henchman) according to who they are on the inside. Want to make characters truly hilarious? Force them to act outside their comfort zone.

Just as importantly as the character rules are the world rules that Rosenberg has implemented; the rules were always there but they weren’t always obvious. Now we know why they’re there — Goats exists in a deterministic universe running off of a laptop. Its behavior is predictable: reality-crafting monkeys can’t create anything larger than a potato (which Oliver isn’t); Phillip will die from choking on trail mix at some time in the future (and I have to believe that Rosenberg will approach that day’s strip with particularly sadistic glee); people (human, animal, and other) in Goats bear a distinct resemblance to those in various far-flung futures … which at least seems to give us some hope that the universe won’t be ending in seven years after all. In every way, it’s far funnier and more intriguing to see what Rosenberg comes up with when he’s bound by the rules of his creation than in the anything goes days.

The flip side of this, naturally, is that it’s hard; you have to invest a lot in your characters and your world so that the readers know where the boundaries are. Your readers have to be patient, since the buildup is likely to take some time. But the payoff? Totally sweet.

Note: This post was edited to add the promised images pertaining to “various far-flung futures”

Myspace has updated its Terms of Service to no longer assert ownership or license over contents in backups. Implication: delete your account, they can’t use your stuff. Is it too early to declare that Jeff Rowland has brought Rupert Murdoch low?

For all those of you wanting to know how to make a webcomic, there’s a discussion on this very topic going on now; two of them, in fact. Sparked by the very sexy R Stevens at Diesel Sweeties yesterday, the dialogue has now been crossposted to his LiveJournal and discussion board. From Stevens, the rules are (quoting here):

1. Set a schedule. Give yourself a month to figure out your characters in your head, then start to PRODUCE on a set schedule. It will build your muscles. If you don’t like the first comics you make, throw them away and keep going.
2. Know your characters. There’s nothing worse than a strip that starts out as “Hey! We are characters! Are we in a comic strip? Where is my script? Wow it is the last panel. LOL! GOTTA GO!”

I like these two rules because they make no judgements on content, art style or quality.

Good points all around, especially since they echo something Frank said once about the nature of artistic creation; going from memory here:

You want to be an artist? Okay, first announce your intention to create something. It doesn’t matter what. It helps if you put a frame around it, so people know where the art ends and the real world begins, and then fill that frame with your art. It helps if you finish it at some point (or just declare it a work in progress). Congratulations, you are now a bona-fide artist.

I’m pretty sure I mangled that quote pretty badly, but you get the idea. Other cartoonists (by my calculation, the discussion group creates thousands of webcomics panels per month) have added such helpful hints as Mind the fourth wall, Don’t introduce yourself (the creator) as a godlike figure in the comic, and No sprite comics. Naturally, people have come up with counter-examples for just about every rule, but it’s been a pair of remarkably informative discussions, and given the sometimes prickly nature of creative types, entirely collegial and respectful times two. There have even been respectful digressions on do we need another webcomics that isn’t very good?, with the consensus being love of creation is reason enough (but don’t expect the world to read it).

In other news, the NewsCorp/Rowland Death Watch continues apace, with others chiming in on the Myspace TOS. Could Jeff Rowland have sparked another revolution on the internet? He does seem to average one about every six or seven months. There ought to be a Nobel Prize for things like that.

In no particular order (and with fewer links than yesterday, I promise):

You may have seen that Jon Rosenberg and Phillip Karlsson have divided the Goats business between them. This means that Phillip now buys my beer, not Jon; it also means that there will be less reluctance to discuss Goats on these pages, as Jon is no longer the publisher. What drove these manly paragons of webcomickry to shameful divorce is yet to be fully disclosed, but our own Tuesday Crimson is on the story and we will hopefully soon learn if there’s a boning angle.

It’s been a bit more than 24 hours since Jeff Rowland moved his public challenge to Myspace from his LiveJournal to the front page of Overcompensating. As of this writing, no comment from Rupert Murdoch has been made about this attack on his empire. We urge all lovers of things that are fun to keep an eye on Mr Rowland, and to do all you can to ensure his personal safety.

As was noted in yesterday’s comments section, Dayfree Press has some new members in Dr McNinja and Stuff Sucks. I think that Lore said it best when he commented that he wasn’t familiar with Stuff Sucks but would check it out, since that’s the purpose of collectives.

There’s more webcomicker thesis animated short film on the horizon! In fact, I’ve seen a finished product that I’ve promised not to name yet, since there’s an effort to line up some festival entries. Be assured that once the story can be broken, we at Fleen will be the ones with the hammer and tongs. And shortly, the “we” part of that sentence will be literally true again — new writers have been chosen, and will start showing up on these pages shortly.

Finally, Andrew Bell has a new shirt that I particularly wanted to bring to your attention — it’s based on the very lovely Vindictive Viruses painting from his recent show, which carries a special resonance for me. Last Thursday, the show having concluded and Mr Bell being all caught up on life, that painting was handed to me in fulfillment of its purchase. It’s beautiful thing, and I’m having a tough time figuring out where to hang it. My wife, who is usually mildly disinterested in my webcomics mania, loves it (but then, she’s always been partial to chromosome #12).

Which brings me to my point: why should we keep such wonderful things to ourselves in this exceedingly tiny webcomics community? When an opportunity arises to reach out to a specific constituency, we should take it. If you know a microbiological researcher, virologist, epidemiologist, or professor of the life sciences, point them towards the shirt and the show. Let’s get the word out that there’s cool stuff here, and all are welcome to partake. Also, somebody should send a Bears Will Eat You shirt to Stephen Colbert. Just sayin’.

People on the internet: What business brought you here? I stayed up all night working on a draft of a new book based on the Structured Query Language for databases! That’s because, some days, I take an envelope out of the box and I PUSH IT. I notice you are leaving! Could my conversational stylings be partially to blame?? Hah hah, I guess I was being kind of silly! any event in which I was embarrassed is now non-canon. I’ve also retroconned my name to be “Mister Awesome”, by the way!

It occurs to me… Today is a good day I think to talk about DINOSAUR COMICS Your whole family is made out of meat, an allegorical comic and comic allegory Dude! It’s SO GOOD. Holy crap yes! I was like, “Aaaaaahhhh!” “HELLO T-REX” What is the attraction to this structure of humour? I think this is very symbolic for… something! Is it a metaphor? My friend, I am simply asking the questions that need to be asked!

Here is a hypothetical situation: T-REX AS CULTURAL CRITIC: maybe he’s got this weird fetishistic cultural interest in inefficient, repressive institutions. You were raised on fairy tales, where there were no moral grey areas, where good and bad were clear, where there was never any real doubt over which side would win in the end! That’s a pretty crazy theory! Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof! Imagine my dismay at coming to such a realization!

What are you saying that’s original? The thought DID cross my mind! I have surprised even myself! Argh! So frustrated! Well, this has been quite the anagnorisis (a moment of recognition or discovery)! To summarize: Fuuuuck I’m screwed! I’m pooched, man! I’m pooched! Being pooched is akin to being screwed! C’est vraiment incroyable, ça! I must guard against such self-absorption in the future! I GUESS THERE IS A LESSON HERE FOR US ALL!

Why are you so interested in this, anyway? Seriously everyone! How come? However, that will be more than enough excitement for me! Any final comments, T-Rex? T-REX AND HIS WACKY DINOSAUR FRIENDS Five stars! Are you jealous of my mutant dinosaur powers? T-REX WINS! Wooo! I declare: high fives all around! FINALLY: HUGS AND KISSES! Aww! Come’ere you!

Fleen masthead designer/once-upon-a-time webcomicker/real-life GynoStryker Meredith Gran has just posted her thesis animation in support of graduation from the School of Visual Arts. Like, just now, in the past 45 minutes or so.

Go and feast in the brilliance that is … Polar-oid.

Okay, so that’s the submissions. The Fleen Editorial Board will be meeting in high-level secret meetings throughout the weekend and issuing invites to new writers ’roundabouts Monday.

To the eventual winners, congratulations.

To those who have given their all and don’t get chosen, thanks very much for playing, and don’t forget your lovely parting gifts (provided by the fine folks at Sue-Bee Honey™, Rice-a-Roni™, and RC Cola™; also please enjoy a complementary copy of our home game).

And to all our audience, thank you and drive safely.

Seriously, though, nice job from all of the applicants, and watch for daily posts from our new writers in the coming weeks.

Lord, I loves me some Little Dee. Chris Baldwin does a sweet (but not treacly), sharply funny (but not mean-spirited) (except for Vachel) strip that my youngest nieces and nephews can enjoy right along with evil-hearted ol’ me. And now his first collection of Little Dee comics is out (temporarily sold out, in fact). It covers the full run of the strip from inception to the 3 month hiatus that Baldwin took at the end of last year. It’s just as good in dead-tree form as day-by-day (maybe better, because your mouse finger won’t cramp up clicking “next” all the time). The printing is crisp and beautiful (really deep ink saturation on the beautifully-colored front and back covers, too). So if we all just accept that the book is wonderful, isn’t this review superfluous? No, because two things about LDv1 raise interesting questions:

1. Baldwin has included the guest strips that ran in May last year; kudos for taking the time to make the necessary arrangements with his fellow creators. One of the unique things about webcomics — maybe the most unique thing — is the tradition of Guest Week. With the exception of Rhymes With Orange and Funky Winkerbean , I’m not aware that any newspaper comic has ever tried this (and RWO doesn’t really have characters or storylines). Webcomic guest strips lead to hilarious and memorable takes on familiar characters as highly creative people get to play in each others sandboxes. So why aren’t more of them included in reprint collections? Oftentimes, you don’t even get both halves of a crossover printed when a collection goes to press. Am I the only one that wishes this was different?
2. Like most authors, Baldwin has asked what he hopes is an impressive person to provide a blurb for the back cover. This one gets quoted verbatim:
   

   Christopher is dedicated, knowledgeable and talented in both the business and art of the daily comic strip, and Little Dee is a solid example of his expertise.

   That was written by one John Glynn, who is listed as Acquisitions Editor for Universal Press Syndicate. Pardon my bluntness, but this is a prime example of corporatespeak; it’s superficially laudatory, but ultimately noncommital. It places the business of comics before the art, and the best compliment it can render is that Little Dee is a solid example. Where I come from, that’s called “faint praise”.

   Regular readers of this space will know that we at Fleen (okay, “I at Fleen”, happy?) have a bug up our (my) butts (butt) about the state of syndicated comics. The fact that the guy who’s presumably in charge of deciding what gets syndicated by UPS (such as Ann Coulter, Dear Abby’s idiot daughter, and James Dobson) is using such mild language instead of I want to see Little Dee in every paper in the country and any of my competitors that thinks different is a moron is pretty indicative of the state of smarts at the syndicates. But I promised you questions, so here you go:

   Why a quote from a syndicate suit? You got an annoucement for us, Chris? Do I have to start writing to the features editor of my paper? Is there actually a syndicate with an eye for talent out there, and Johnny’s just playing his cards close to his vest? Enquiring minds want to know.