So, the innaugural New York Comic-con has come and gone; logistical problems aside (too many people, too little space, all the high-traffic booths together), it was apparently a success for the webcomickers in attendance. Both Bryant Paul Johnson and Phil Kahn came up to introduce themselves, the Blank Label guys are all super-nice, and our illustrious publisher bought me beer. A success by any measure! A few wee items to tide you over:

First, on behalf of the BLC crew, a piece of advice for Reed Exhibitions: you screwed up bad by rescheduling their panel. Funny, engaging guys were not able to participate, and it was to the detriment of your show. When the next NYCCC comes up, stick by the schedule you promise. Second, a piece of advice for all webcomics fanboys and fangirls out there: the secret to getting creators to like you is to bring them something they want; bribery works! Third, there will be reviews running this week of books I picked up, and some follow-on interviews in the coming weeks.

Other impressions:

• If he ever decides to give up webomics, Steve Troop has a future in both puppeteering and puppetmaking
• Brad Guigar and Paul Southworth? Separated at birth
• Dave Kellett is funny in a way that a safe-for-six-year-olds newspaper-style audience will never appreciate
• Kris Straub has the ability to kill furries with his mind, for which he deserves your undying thanks
• These three ladies had the booth next to the CBLDF; if you’re one of those guys that gave us money or bought a membership just to have clear sightlines, thank you

News: Fleen will shortly have a new contributor! Due to overwhelming response regardaring This Week In Webcomics Boning, we have obtained the services of an insider. Join us on a trip inside the seamy underbelly of webcomics: the booze, the drugs, the parties, the fast cars and faster women … each Thursday, all this and more will fall under the scrutiny of our very own Tuesday Crimson. Naturally, we will be protecting Ms Crimson’s identity closely, but trust us: she’s got the dirt.

Crowfeathers is a pretty good manga style comic. It’s a bit mythic, it’s a bit western, it’s a bit fun.

Crowfeathers also is rather less PG-13 than it claims to be. There’s a fair dose of violence in most episodes as well as rape, murder and racism.

The artwork is fairly well executed in the manga style, and the writing is pretty decent. The characters ring true and are not too exaggerated. The storyline is fairly standard for the genre – a coming of age story where great events are portented and a young pig boy may grow up to be… well, okay not quite that standard. A young crow boy grows up to be an evil bounty hunter and is punished for it, but presumably will be redeemed by the close of the saga. Likely he will also resolve being abandoned by his father and fall in love.

By the time you read this, elements of Dumbrella (including this guy and this guy) and Blank Label Comics (with the scintillating Paul Southworth, sinister Kristofer Straub, kid-friendly Dave Kellet, tenacious Steve Troop, and gregarious Brad Guigar) will be doing final setup at the Jacob Javits Conference Center for the innaugural New York City Comic-Con (not to be confused with the nerd prom of similar name).

Fleen will also be semi-representing, with one of us (me) doing shifts at the CBLDF booth on Saturday. On Sunday, don’t forget to check out the panel titled The Future of Comics: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Where It’s Going…Online, featuring the abovementioned Blank Labellers, Mr Jon Rosenberg of Goats, and Heewoon Chung of Netcomics; room 1E03, 1:00 pm. Drop by and feel free to poke any of them with a wooden spoon.

There will be webcomickers boozing after (and possibly during) the show on several days. Secrets will be pried from the dark recesses of their brains. Interviews, book reviews, and compromising photos will be making their way here over the following weeks.

Plus! For those of you in Western Massachussets, there’s Llamacon at Simon’s Rock College of Bard. Check out the very sexy R Stevens, Randy Milholland, and Jeph Jacques while dodging rampaging herds of catgirls.

Lots of strips have archives that stretch back into infinity — backstory, characters, plots, and plenty more. But like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said once, Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Thus, Quill. Twelve panels, three characters (four if you count the cat), fourteen words, one complete story complete with classic slapstick gag. Even the art has been reduced down to the absolute minimal line necessary to convey shape and emotion.

The creator, Michael Maihack, has other strips on his site and they’re good, too. Seed is a beautifully-illustrated adventure tale; Cow and Buffalo is funny, funny, funny. But Quill? It’s like Picasso’s peace dove: nothing left to take away.

Hate Song. HATE SONG. Sing a SONG about Hate. Celebrate that you HATE!

Life is too short to drink cheap beer.

Move like some sort of jungle cat, silent… fast… strong!

Move yo Honkey Ass.

Get Back to the Yak, Jack.

Hop On!

Don’t be a hate monger, be a hate stylist!

This thread over at Websnark is in danger of turning into This Week in Webcomics Boning. You have been warned.

You don’t know George Dunning’s name, but you know his work; one piece of it, at least.

If you read this page with regularity, you do know John Allison’s name and his work; otherwise, we can’t be friends. Sorry. John’s clearly got a love for the lads from Liverpool, even including in his strip a restrained reference or two to the visuals of Mr Dunning.

But today? Full bore homage, complete with lyrics. Try not to hum along with Shelley if you like, but it’s tough. For all the delicious weirdness that has become the hallmark of SGR, it’s not easy topping your best efforts day after day. Says Mr Allison:

After shipping hundreds of items myself in the last couple of weeks, I was spent last week and didn’t really want to make comics at all. Out of desperation came this week’s story, 5 days that I’m pretty sure are my favourites of the whole run.

All webcomics creators take note: getting desperate leads directly to pure, unadulterated whimsey. Just thing thing for an overcast Wednesday morning.

I first heard about Josh Mirman because of Disposable Parts.

He wrote and drew Stubble for roughly four years, and Punks and Nerds for a little more than a year.

The last few weeks, though, he seems to have started to lose his focus a bit. Okay, more than a bit. In fact, despite some hints, it looks like he’s completely given up.

If we want to dig a little deeper into why, the evidence in his LiveJournal is pretty clear. Josh Mirman no longer wants it as bad as he did. It’s all about the money.

Or maybe he’s just gone completely crazy.

Here‘s the breaking point. Right there is where an artist loses his love. And it’s all your fault, Internet!

Each day, I figure that the whole mess will have finally burned itself out. That everybody who would have been outraged already has been, that everybody who would have fanned the flames has banked the embers. But for every group trying to find middle ground, each day brings news of another corner of the world that’s expressing violence over cartoons. Rioting over art may be nothing new, but this situation seems to have no natural limit. The death toll must be into the hundreds by now.

Some say the eruptions started as a cynical ploy by governments desperate to distract from bad news. Others want to paint it as a clash of civilizations, or a noble struggle in defense of cherished ideals. Meanwhile, nearly everybody is presuming that what sounds reasonable in their own heads must be universally thought of as just peachy. Need an example? I like this cartoon; to me, it speaks well of Islam. Mohammad could be anybody because anybody can be Muslim, and all believers are equal before Allah. To my eye, it doesn’t even necessarily depict the person of the Prophet; the turbans are maybe unnecessary, and I don’t know what’s up with that guy on the right, but it doesn’t seem insulting to me. Maybe that only makes sense inside my mind.

Talking heads, theorists, and Sunday-morning policy showboaters have all had their say, but what about somebody who straddles the line between Muslim and cartoonist? Mohammad “Hawk” Haque knows what it’s like to be faithful to Allah, while living in a culture that doesn’t always understand (or care to understand) his beliefs. Hawk also knows that a good way to diminish tension (and to educate) is to laugh at yourself.

So I had some questions about his take on this whole situation, and he was gracious enough to answer. Before we get started, try to keep in mind that there is no single doctrine of Islam, and Hawk’s not being asked about anybody’s belief but his own. In the interests of full disclosure, there are links to others of the Danish cartoons; they are not here to provide insult or offense, but only so that our readers know what we’re talking about.
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At the back of the first Penny Arcade book (long since passed into the realm of legend) is this bit of dialogue:

Guess we know who won that disagreement. For lo, these many years, I’ve clutched my copy of the Year One book, wondering when, oh when, Gabe and Tycho would be able to once again publish their stuff. And at last my local comic shop got my copy in (they’re pretty much sold out), so Fleen can now bring you a review of Attack of the Bacon Robots!

First impressions: the vertical trim on AOTBR! is much more convenient for reading than the horizontal Year One. It’s got more than twice as many strips, is cheaper by about $20, and presumably Dark Horse are kind enough to actually give Gabe and Tycho money, instead of attempting to screw them sideways in the ass like their insanely Michael Jackson emulating first publisher did. The colors are vibrant and the printing quality is noticeably higher, with 7 year old strips coming in crisp and sharp instead of washed out and fuzzy. Tycho’s intro is a hoot, as is that of comics-page fellow geek traveller Bill Amend. But what struck me most was the afterword.

You don’t read afterwords? Read this one. It’s somewhat ambitiously titled The Webcomic Manifesto, and goddamned if it isn’t the finest piece of writing Tycho’s done since the famous Carrot Cake Soup. It’s wrong to try to excerpt it, because every part of the argument he puts forth in the manifesto is strong and compelling and part of a whole; we’re going to anyway, because it’s hard to find the book right now, and more people should read this:

Typically when people discuss the “ramifications” of Webcomics (capital W, proper noun) … the dialogue tends to focus on how digital distribution of comics alters the power dynamic between creators and publishers.

I guess so.

The most startling change we’ve seen hasn’t been betwen creators and publishers, it’s between creators and readers.
…
Most of the people considered “big movers” in Webcomics are considered so not because they have substantially contributed work to the medium — indeed, they might not even produce a regularly updated comic. No, they are thought of with reverence because in each case they laud some new barrier between people who read comics and people who write them. The barriers they’re so proud of take a number of forms, but Byzantine pay mechanisms and subscription-locked archives are two of the more celebrated anchors.

If you are using systems like these, I need to ask you why you don’t trust your readers.

What are you afraid they’re going to do with your comics? Read them?
…
When you’re ready to stop treating readers like thieves, come check out this Web they’ve got going. I hear it’s going to be big.

There’s a window of safety glass that separates the adherents of different business models in webcomics; roughly speaking, they’re divided into those who think that Understanding Comics was the better book, or Reinventing Comics was (Me? I’m the guy who kinda liked The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln). It gets breached every once in a while, slammed open so that angry exchanges can fly back and forth, then closed again and calm returns once more to the land. That crunching sound you just heard? That was the firebomb that Tycho just chucked through the window. Now go buy a copy of the reprinting and see if you agree with his argument or not. But for the love of all that is good and holy, base your opinion on the full argument, not the excerpt above. And no burning my consulate.