Matt Buchwald started drawing Fodi in the middle of 2003. The story of Fodi is a classic story of triumph over adversity, time travel, beer, and Matt’s strange obsesssion with winged women.

Before we dig in, Matt wanted to make sure that he would get to say at least one funny thing. So here’s Matt for a brief intro:

A chicken walks into a library and goes up to the front desk. She asks the librarian, “Book book book book?” The librarian leaves and comes back with four books. The chicken takes the books and sits down at a table, where she hands the books to her friend the frog. The frog looks at the books in turn and saids, “Read it, read it, read it, read it.”

Mission Accomplished, Matt! And now, our interview about Matt, Fodi, and the Beer That Saved Pittsburgh.
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“At the crossroads of the academic and the asinine” is how Bryant Paul Johnson describes his webcomic, Teaching Baby Paranoia (Modern Tales subscription required for most of the archives, but a few free examples are to be found). Once a week, he takes us on a trip into the hinterlands of bizarre phenomena, secret history, and all-around weirdness. It’s copiously documented with footnotes, historical references, and citations to original sources.

Don’t believe a word of them.

Oh, sure, the stories he tells (like today’s intersection of antiauthoritarian philosophizing and supple human leather) sound just weird enough to be true. But mark my words, Johnson is making it all up. Also, you cannot, in fact, spell asshole with A, C, G, and T. He’s lying to you.

Except when he’s not. And that’s what’s so cool about Teaching Baby Paranoia: the storytelling skill that convinces your brain 100% that some improbable oddity just might be true, and mixed with the knowledge that the items so implausible, so easily disproved, dammit, end up being on the true side of things.

Maybe. Damn.

Some quick news from the Dayfree Press front.

Butter Nut Squash started updating last week after a several month long hiatus.

They are also selling a 30 page book containing reprints, new material, rants, and pinups. It was supposed to be released on the 15th.. but they don’t tell you where or how to buy it. I imagine they don’t actually want to sell any copies, just have them printed up so they can roll around in them ala Scrooge McDuck. Now, some basic deduction would lead one to suspect that it’s being printed by Speak Easy Comics, and is available at comic stores you can find using Comic Shop Locator. But SpeakEasy’s website claims that BNS stuff will be “coming soon”, and Comic Shop Locator doesn’t have a way to find out which stores have BNS stuff.

So, PC Weenies has been around forever; the archives start in late October 1998, which puts it roughly in the same vintage as Penny Arcade or PvP. In internet terms, that is geological-scale deep time. It’s a single-panel gag strip (without navigation buttons on the main page, but you’ll find them in the archives), with a focus on general computer/technical nerdery. We’re not here to talk about that.

See the panel on the main page over to the right? The one from the top of this post? Clicking on the blonde takes you here, which is our topic right now. PC Weenies, like many strips, offers its loyal readers the opportunity to throw the cartoonist a couple bucks. Unlike many strips, part of what your couple bucks can buy is an appearance in the strip. You get to consult with creator Krishna Sadasivam on your appearance and theme; when the strip runs, you get a hardcopy of the character design.

This opens up all kinds of interesting questions, though: How much to draw you as being much more attractive than you actually are? Or for fawning text that describes your vast intelligence, incredible athletic ability, and/or monumental sexual prowess? Can you contract for an unflattering protrayal of somebody you don’t like? If your character becomes popular enough for repeat appearances or sells merch, can Sadasivam keep all the dough?

Please note that I don’t have a problem with any of these things … I just wish that PC Weenies listed a proper schedule of charges. I don’t need the fame and fortune promised, but I do want to humiliate my enemies. I just need to budget my vengeance, that’s all.

Most of the artists who use our contact form to entice us to read or review their comic also include something else. They apologize for marketing their strip – and usually in the contradictory form of “sorry for the shameless self-promotion”. If you’re apologizing, you’re not shameless, sorry!

TK Longmire sent us just such a missive yesterday – and guess what? It worked. This is the lesson for the day. If you want to make money off your comic, then you need regular readers. In order to get any readers at all, you must market your strip!

TK’s comic, Tasty Human Meat starts out being about a guy and his robot roommate. Despite this fairly pedestrian setup, it gets quirky fairly quick.

And then he switches to a series called Alternate Universe Comix, which takes place after a nuclear holocaust turned everyone into sealife.

TK has given us an entire world, with melancholy, schadenfreude, office life, teen bravado, communists, and everything else.

Under the sea? Yeah. That’s where I’d like to be. Thanks for a good comic, TK.

One of the questions that comes up around here is, “How do you decide what webcomics to talk about?” Jeff’s mentioned the idea of following links until you hit something interesting, and there’s also the contact form that creators use to let us know what they’re up to. And sometimes, people make an open call for comment. And by god, that’s when Fleen responds.

Up next: The Mulberry Gallows Project. On first glance, it’s pretty primitive, but there might actually be something worth discussing below the surface. The creator, Adam Marien, identifies TMGP as his first attempt at a comic, and it shows. Where it shows isn’t so much the art (there are plenty of established comics out there with visuals that are no better), but the unevenness. Case in point: the seventh strip has a bleak humor that wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in Dinosaur Comics or A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. A better execution and it could even be brilliant. But just two strips later, you get something that’s totally pedestrian.

For every bit of self-referential surrealism, you have an example of pure, distilled ordinaryness. Or, more optimistically, every bit of ordinary is balanced by well, I’m not sure, but there’s potential there. Marien needs lots of practice. He needs to find some consistency. But with enough of both, someday TMGP could erupt as the mutant love-child of Twisp and Catsby, megaGAMERZ 3133T, Ed The Sock, and ergot.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Jin Wicked does a pretty good job of making pieces of her life amusing and interesting. Some of her jokes material is a bit overused, but all in all, she stays entertaining.

Be warned, though, she expresses her political views!

As you may know, one of the strips that we here at Fleen like a lot is Alien Loves Predator. There’s a full explanation of its awesomeness elsewhere on the site, which you may wish to peruse.

Back? Good. Bernie Hou is running a guest week over at ALP, and it’s developing nicely. Yesterday’s strip (by David Malki) was visually similar enough to Hou’s fumetti that you might not realize it’s somebody else’s work. Today’s strip (from Zach Weiner) is drawn rather than photographed, and does a particularly good job of reproducing Abe’s speech patterns. Who knows who will provide tomorrow’s strip? It’s a mystery known only to the artist, Hou, and you, if you check back tomorrow.

David Malki ! apparently employs a cast of thousands in the production of Wondermark.

At least, if you believe a single word of his three page missive on the Making Of Wondermark. According to this missive, no I say it’s a manifesto, David employs the following persons or groups of people:

• creative staff
• research department
• writing staff
• Creative Director
• Executive V.P.
• compositing team
• Line Cook
• auditing agency
• liners
• ballooner/balloonist
• penciller (six)
• layout artists
• Korean roughing studio
• research team
• letterer
• inkers (three)
• Distribution Chief
• freelance antiquers

Counting the timeframes given and doing some estimating of my own for the rest… it takes somewhere between three and six months to produce each Wondermark strip.

The piling on of lies in this “making of” document compound to the point of indecency and beyond to a level that is clearly illegal.
It makes my head ache so bad I wish it would explode!

Review time, kids! The webcomics library is growing by leaps and bounds, and over the next week or two, more items should be in our hot little hands. Up today: the reprint of Looks, Brains, and Everything, Scary Go Round book 1.

LBE (as the cool kids call it) contains what has become known as the Zombie Shelley storyline (which actually starts here, but damn I love that photo); since for many people, Shelley is the favorite character (and probably the soul of the strip, but I’m starting to take a real shine to Dark Esther), doing a story like this so early in the strip’s run (it comprises online chapters 2, 3, and 4) was an ambitious move on Allison’s part.

The art is even more gorgeous on the printed page than on the screen, and remarkably consistent with Allison’s current output (amazing considering that the youngest of these pages are three years old, and this is from the very beginning of Allison’s use of Illustrator); you would expect to see a ramping-up of quality or shift in style, but it’s always been as good as it is now. Allison has done a bit of tweaking in the story (he expresses particular discomfort with this page in the end-of-book material; the replacement page is much more melancholy); other additional pages also flow so smoothly that you’ll be hard pressed to find them without doing a page-by-page comparison against the online archives. On the necessity of these half-dozen additions, Allison sums up his feelings nicely in the Introduction:

Most artists I know view their old work with a mixture of horror, embarrassment and remove.

Like a teenaged diary rediscovered, it reveals the flaws and quirks you’ve spent the intervening years trying with all your might to hammer out. Those flaws are so gross and caricatured to our own eyes that we can’t see what people enjoyed about the stuff in the first place.

So I was pleasantly surprised upon revisiting this work to be reminded of a few of it’s charms…. While I can’t say thta I didn’t secretly want to re-draw every panel, the pages that follow seem good enough to let stand. These were the stories that helped me make comics my job.

Allison is being far too modest. The story and art are as full of charm as anything ever done in webcomics, dancing along your brain’s pleasure center like a zesty ranch dressing dances on your tongue.

Special note must also be made of the amazing job that Allison does in dealing with the business end of comics as a job: from the day that he asked if there was support for this book to the day he announced its availability was less than a month. One order via PayPal was processed the same day, and arrived across an ocean (and through the Great Northeastern Blizzard of Aught-Six) in one week. That’s a lot of logistics and follow-up to expect from one person working solo, and producing a comic five times a week. Given the disastrous implosion of Vault Distribution not so long ago, it’s good to remind ourselves what top-notch service in webcomics merch looks like.

In conclusion: LBE deserves an OBE. Yes, it’s generally understood that honors recipients are people and not objects, but Her Majesty will cope. She always does.