Time for part two of the followup questions to the Dave Kellett Interview Extravaganza. When last we left our intrepid heroes, they were asking Dave Kellett about what the syndicated comic strip could accomplish.

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The cruel clutches of culinary catechism (and server problems) have abated enough for Greg Dean to send us a Real Life update. Fleen will be keeping its collective ears open to see how long it is before life imitates art and people report Snakes On A Plane incidents like this at airports.

Not one, but two webcomickers are celebrating a significant anniversary, oh, now-ish.

Today marks 10 years of Help Desk (although not all online; it started in a now-defunct magazine); Christopher Wright sent a nice summary of what 10 years with Ubersoft have been like:

Over the years it has parodied Microsoft‘s incomprehensible release schedule, the Microsoft antitrust trial, the Y2K bug, unreasonably restrictive software licenses, online privacy and user tracking, identity theft, ridiculous software patents, software patent lawsuits, copyright infringement lawsuits, and the insidious communist plot to destabilize the free market with the PNG graphics format. It has taken broadsides at Microsoft, IBM, Apple, SCO, Iomega, Sun, Oracle, Diebold, the Federal Government, the RIAA, the MPAA, and even — on occasion — Richard Stallman.

The cartoonist would like to take this moment to thank the computer industry for its tireless efforts to keep him inundated with new material.

On behalf of the computer industry, you’re welcome.

And tomorrow marks 9 years of Goats; Jon Rosenberg didn’t send along a quote, but did note the event on his front page. In the meantime, let’s reflect on exactly how long 10 (or 9) years is … it’s a hell of a long time to continue any creative endeavor. And consider how long 9 (or 10) years is in internet time … that’s practically geological-scale time. Time enough to see an entire medium create itself, grow, develop, and devolve into family spats (no links; today’s a happy day). Goats may have been the first “two guys sitting around” webcomic, which makes it the Platonic Ideal of an entire genre. If you see Rosenberg on the street, thank him and buy him a beer. But don’t touch him; he’s not big on touching.

Since Goats has become increasingly story-driven, you’ll find a cheat sheet I wrote a while back behind the cut; it’ll get you caught up on nine years of fabulously twisted backstory. Someday, there may even be more links in there, but in the meantime, Goats features an easily-searched archive and character guide.

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Circumstances have prevented Tuesday Crimson from posting This Week! In Webcomics Boning; she will return as time permits. But because we at Fleen know you gotta have your boning on Thursday, consider following.

You may have seen that Clay has wrapped up Sexy Losers (gateway page that’s probably SFW, but click further at your own risk), which is a shame as now we won’t see the end of the Shiunji and the Suicide Girl story arc. They’ll be forever trapped between life and death, Yuuko unable to find vengeance and rest, and Shiunji never finding out if being dead yourself is all it’s cracked up to be.

Moving on from storyline particulars before they cost me a job someday. Instead, props to Clay — like all solid comedians, he understood the value of a good running gag, and it’s to his credit that he always considered The Funny in equal proportion to The Sexy. Given that he chose to work in a motif of explicit sexuality, one might expect adult aspects to dominate the work, but a surprising number of his strips provided only innuendo. Nudity, sexual situations, adult language, and everything else that moralizers go on about only showed in Sexy Losers to the extent that they made the gag better; if it didn’t need full-frontal, the strip didn’t have it.

Regardless of what you think of adult humor and situations, Clay provided a consistently funny strip over a period of years, his art constantly improved, and he honed his gags into what perfectly fit his (and his audience’s) expectations. Here’s hoping that he finds the impetus to pick up drawing tools again in the future.

Honestly, it’s not that we don’t like your stuff (although it may not be for us), it’s just time. Your story idea was good, but sometimes something that only makes sense to cover on a particular day comes up (case in point), and pushes your idea to the backburner until it’s lost its timeliness. And with one or two exceptions, it’s not because you were a jerk when you wrote us; it’s just that there are (as of right now) 34 decent suggestions in the “to be written” queue, and new stuff goes to the bottom of the pile.

But sometimes you just have to go with a suggestion right away; got this one earlier today:

How’s THIS for shameless?

I write a new webcomic. Very new. Tomorrow, we will have a grand total of 20 strips. Stay with me, I’ve thought of some positive things about this:

1) It is extremely easy to read the entire archives, and it can be done in a single sitting. In fact, even if you find out that you have only a half hour to live, you can still read the comic in it’s entirety.
2) It’s so early in the run that constructive criticism could make a much larger difference than it would to a more established comic.
3) Mentioning us would totally make at least two people’s day (myself and the artist), whereas it might only make 30-40% of a more established cartoonists day.
4) If anything ever becomes of it, you’ll be able to say you read it before it was cool. Because if our visitor logs are any indication, it’s definately in it’s “before cool” stage.

Anyway, I just wanted to scream about how we exist. Now you know, so I can stop screaming.

I like this letter a lot — shameless, funny, polite, to the point, but what made me want to run it today is not the endearing sense of neediness; it was item #2. It’s so early in the run that constructive criticism could make a much larger difference than it would to a more established comic. That caught my eye, because it relates directly to an upcoming bit in the Dave Kellett followup questions, and I thought it made for a good contrast. Here’s the Kellett Q & A:

The voice of experience is pretty telling here: your first efforts aren’t likely to be good, and even if they are, pretty much every cartoonist I know actively loathes their early efforts. But the eagerness of the newbie is also compelling: I know that! Give me feedback so I can get good enough to loathe my own early work some day.

Despite some opinions to the contrary, we at Fleen don’t enjoy stomping dreams into juice, which is part of why we generally wait to see more stuff in the archive before holding a candle up to it. We aren’t going to wang your server, but a link here could conceivably send a thousand people your way. Make sure you’re really ready for the kind of scrutiny that anonymous internet people will bring. And if there’s stuff in your archive that you’re already dissatisfied with … a quick redo before you put up the Welcome sign might help you sleep easier in the future.

If you read our interveiw with Dave Kellett on the nature of syndication (part 1 and part 2), you’ll recall that we solicited followup questions. Mr Kellett has graciously answered, and we’ll start with his replies today.

Some of the questions were lengthy, and we got some very thorough answers, so we’re breaking this one up a bit. Answers will be posted in several installments, and not all back-to-back. After all, I think that we might all be just a little creeped out if Fleen turned into “All Dave Kellett, All The Time”. (Hey Mer, can we get a redesign on the masthead with the new motto? Thanks.)

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Sylvan Migdal wrapped up Ascent at Graphic Smash today; the story had been steadily building to a climax over the past several months, and today it all came to an end. Up above you’ll see the first of many panels from the strip (you can tell how excited Migdal is about a given installment by how tall it is; today required 13 visits to the scrollwheel), and it’s immediately obvious that today was gonna be special.

Color. Lots and lots of color.

Since the first installment some two years ago, Migdal had restricted himself to four colors: black, white, and two blues. It worked well within his story, but now the main characters find themselves escaped from a magical (if nearly monochromatic) world and back to the planet that birthed them: Earth. Now we see full color, except for a purely black & white flashback detailing the very end of their escape. It’s like The Wizard of Oz in reverse.

On a side note, we heard pretty clearly at the end of last year that new stuff was coming to the Modern Tales family of websites, as free and subscription content would be offered side-by-side under the editorships of Messers Campbell and Burns. Hopefully, some of that content will be coming online soon, as GS is now down another reliably-updating strip, and many days Modern Tales can only muster two or three new offerings (and God forbid Shaenon Garrity gets hit on the head by a rock from outer space, there goes a big chunk o’ pixels).

So do yourself a favor and support more Federal funding for research into webcartoonist-extinction astronomical events, and drop by Migdal’s site on Friday to see what he cooks up next.

This touches tangentially on the current Joey Manley-centered shitstorm regarding dick and fart jokes. I’ll save you some time: every prominent name in the first hundred posts or so says precisely what you’d expect; late in the game, Maritza Campos, Jin Wicked, and Jeph Jacques make some calm, rational points. If you’ve had your fill of webcomics drama for the week, feel free to skip the ManleyMillikinKurtzG fest-o-fun. Now let’s wander a little further afield, ‘kay? Over at A murder of crows (side note: I love the entire notion of “term for a plural group of animals”; if you see R Stevens or Jon Rosenberg at I-CON this weekend, ask ’em what the plural term for “webcartoonists” is), there’s a new piece about Hurricane Joey. And it links a second piece about us.

From some digging, it appears that the author of these essays is named Jeff Knooren; I say “appears” because his name doesn’t appear on the blog page or as a signature to any of his posts, so I’m not entirely sure. Assuming I haven’t completely misinterpreted things, Knooren is the individual that I referred to as “this guy” in a previous post, which he’s apparently taken as a vile insult. Sorry ’bout that, but without a name to put to the links, didn’t have a lot of choice there. He’s pretty much got it in for webcomics critics (not my term for what we do here) and commentators (that’s closer) in general, and while he’s pretty angry about how we parasites have conspired against him (honestly, the first time we’d heard of him was when he pinged us to call us “industry heavyweights”, which is a gross mischaracterization), he does make an interesting point in his open letter:

So, I ask you, where will I be the following week after [Fleen’s] trashing review of my comic? You and I both know, a full comic review from you, will not convert into readership for me, come next week. (emphasis original)

I cite the Porkwrench [sic] review by Jeff Lowery. Porkwrench [sic] got a HUGE boost of many thousands of visitors from you, for a week. Your full review did not translate into readership for porkwrench [sic] that I could tell.

(Aside: I have no idea what kind of bump Pork Wrench got from us; I’d be tickled to think that it was “many thousands”, but our traffic logs don’t indicate we have quite that level of influence. Fleen invites Petie Shumate to share what readership changes did or did not come about after the review.) The comic that Knooren’s referring to (actually, it appears to be two comics) may be found here; the “trashing review” is one we haven’t written yet, but which he apparently feels will be both unfair and unhelpful to him. Can’t comment much on the fairness of something I haven’t written, but he’s absolutely right on the second point. A review from Fleen will not convert into readership for his comic.

Because no matter how much we might link to it, or how much we might say it’s good, it’s up to the comic to keep whatever eyeballs might appear. To wish otherwise is to remove the power of deciding “this is good” from the reader and to give it to the critic. Some feel that this is an essential element of critical discourse and the rightful role of the critic. I disagree, and I have a feeling that Knooren does, too. But opinions do not equal facts, and it’s entirely possible that the success or failure of a comic depends on having somebody else invite you to eat lunch with the cool kids.

So now’s when we get to find out. Here is a link to comics by Jeff Knooren. There is nothing here that can be construed in any way as either positive or negative regarding its worth. If anybody should happen to wander over there and take a look, they’re pretty close to tabula rasa. There’s your potential bump in readership, Jeff Knooren. It’s yours to win or lose.

What does it mean, to “do what you love”? Today, I found out.

It happens that, as part of my undercover assignment, I’m in San Francisco. I’ve been here for a few weeks now in stealth mode. I haven’t talked, thought, smelled, or practically even read webcomics in at least three weeks.

Why? I’m that committed to the job.

Plus, Ferocious J hates me, so all my potential local contacts are in hiding (that man rules this town).

Today, I’m staggering out of some bar and all of a sudden I understand completely what it is to live or die for your work. As I step out the door, I glance up hill and I see a tiny woman pushing a cart that is at least twice her size.

Up Hill.

Up Hill In San Francisco.

And it’s not just any cart. It’s an ART cart. She’s a sidewalk caricaturist going home after what must be a looooonnnnnng day at Fisherman’s Wharf pimping her soul for the tourists.

Why? Because she thinks it’s fun? You’ve got to be kidding me. Because she’s that committed to her job? HELL No.

She is pushing this huge, heavy piece of wooden furniture up some of the steepest and longest hills in the entire Nation so she can PAY THE RENT by making art.

And what are you doing? Sitting around at home after a long “hard” day on the job as a “Systems Administrator” in some fashionably hick town like Nashua New Hampshire, and bitching that you aren’t “using your degree”? Spewing forth idiotic whinging (and I mean that in the Australian sense) on your blog about how some asshole on the Internet doesn’t like your work?

Or are you pushing a cart TWICE your size up the worst hill of your life?

Here’s an interesting statistic for you readers. According to an international survey conducted by HawtPowls.com, the current webcomics boning frequency is as high as 2 on any given day. That’s right: as many times as you bathe in a week, there are at least that many webcartoonists and/or webcomics personalities getting it on every single day. Wrap your inter-noggin around that little equation.

If you’re feeling left out, it’s probably because you’re not in the loop. An important part of any would-be-boner’s success is keeping up with the latest “haps” in the online community. Do you know who’s “2 single 2 mingle”? Tuesday does.

Well, sort of. The fact is, for some reason, the majority of women in this field don’t make information about their personal lives public. Like, at all! I know!

What would drive an individual, let alone an entire gender, to shy away from an opportunity to be a public spectacle? What parallels could possibly be drawn between the availability of public information and the creepy, stalker-like nature of introverted males? If you somehow see a relationship here – well, there’s a whole world of consensual sex you are missing out on.

So I’d like to put out an open call to the women of webcomics. Tell the internet your problems. Flaunt your insecurities. Make yourself remarkably desirable! There is a clustering wealth of male specimens growing from the finest pores of the internet’s back, yet you are literally scrubbing them away with a loofah of willful ignorance. Get inside the loop, sisters. And make with the stats. See if we can’t get this bad boy up to 3 by the end of the month.