Hey. Question for you. Why are women so damn good at comics? I mean, why are there literally so many more women whose work I am excited to follow than dudes? Is it because dudes held the entire industry to themselves for so long, only letting in other dudes that looked and thought and wrote like them, resulting in staleness and homogeneity? And women, long excluded, had to up their game and be so much better than dudes who could get published just for showing up?

• Case in point #1: Dylan Meconis. She has a wicked edge to her stories, one that treads the line of humor and messing with you for being a chump, whether she’s exploring the French Revolution (via vampires), the Age Of Reason (via werewolves), or comic/SF convention culture/cliche (via the apocalypse).

  And today, her latest graphic novel hits the stores:

  This book is full of:

  • cool nuns
  • 16th century infographics
  • recycled folklore
  • embroidery trash talk
  • questionable chess strategy
  • shameless pandering to the lutist community
  • identity crises
  • dubiously symbolic flora
  • mysterious pinnipeds
  • loud young redheaded women

  There is also:

  • one (1) nun who’s kind of a jerk
  • one (1) hot lad who probably knows how to do Sword Stuff
  • one (1) fake saint and her relic, which is in point of fact a dried fish head

  Not to mention your standard royal exiles the inconvenient alternate claimant to the throne that would be the lead talking point in most elevator pitches. We’ve seen that before, but embroidery trash talk? Yes, please. There is more raw creativity in that description than in most ten-year runs of dude-centric comics.

  Additionally, I can state unreservedly that it’s gorgeous, having been present to see some of the pages painted in late April 2018. Queen Of The Sea is part of Candlewick’s expansion beyond children’s books and YA prose into the graphic novel space, and they are not screwing around. Grab a copy as soon as you can and join me in reading it.

• Case in point #2: Shing Yin Khor, who wrangles watercolors, powertools, and emotions with equal facility. Their memoir of traveling the historic Route 66 releases on 6 August, retelling a road trip with their dog Bug in search of their passions in life (including, but not limited to, giant muffler man statues, roadside dinosaur statues, and what it means to be American). They’re working on her next book, a graphic novel about the Chinese contributions to the American west, particularly in and around lumberjackery. And they just got announced as one of the featured guests for SPX this year:
  

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: Ignatz winner Shing Yin Khor @sawdustbear, a Malaysian-American cartoonist and installation artist exploring the intersections of race, gender and immigration. Their forthcoming graphic novel, “The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66” is out in August.

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: Cartoonist Rosemary Valero-O’Connell @hirosemaryhello who’s opening eyes with her latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me w/ writer, @marikotamaki. Past works includes Lumberjanes. Her illustrations work has been shown in galleries internationally.

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: @marinaomi is the award-winning cartoonist of 4 graphic memoirs and the Life on Earth YA graphic novel trilogy as well as founder and admin of the Cartoonists of Color, Queer Cartoonists, and (soon) Disabled Cartoonists databases. http://MariNaomi.com

  #SPX2019 SPECIAL GUEST: Ignatz Award winner for Promising New Talent, @biancaxunise! Her body of work focuses primarily on the daily struggles of identifying as a young black feminist weirdo in modern society and has been featured in The Washington Post, The Nib, BBC and more.

  Checking out the Special Guests page at SPX, there’s a dozen names so far, more than half of whom are women — Emily Carroll is there, Eleanor Davis, and Raina Telgemeier. The dudes there are interesting, too — Eddie Campbell and Jaime Hernandez are essential in any conversation about comics, Box Brown does astonishingly detailed documentary comics, Ed Piskor and Kevin Huizenga are amazingly accomplished — but the women are the ones whose next work I’m dying to see.

• Case in point #3: Abby Howard does comics that hit that Kate Beatonesque sweet spot. Just detailed enough to get across the story point or emotion she’s shooting for, just esoteric enough in topic that nobody else is doing the same thing, and absolutely hilarious when funny is what she’s shooting for. Her long-running autobioish Junior Scientist Power Hour may not always be true to life — I’m not convinced her cat Spoons really went on a hero’s journey that took place in a magical realm entirely contained in Howard’s ass — and it may have been fallow while Howard was working on her utterly charming Earth Before Us trilogy, but it’s always been great reading.

  And now, it is coming to an end. She’ll keep up the journal comics on her Patreon, and the previously-uncollected JSPH strips are getting the print treatment, courtesy her new Kickstarter campaign. If you didn’t pick up her first JSPH collection, you can get it along with the new one at an advantageous price!

  It’s been a while since we busted out the Fleen Funding Factor, Mark II, but the math projects that JSPH2 will finish in the range of US$39K-58.5K (on a goal of US$30,000), with stretch goals ranging up to US$65K. She’s at 41% of goal since launching yesterday and 28 days left to go, but I need anybody with an interest to pledge so that this one completes, because if it doesn’t I might not get the original art I pledged for, and that would be a tragedy.

Spam of the day:

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! Get a FREE Backpack While Supplies Last
This message seems dangerous

Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Avoid clicking links, downloading attachments, or replying with personal information.

I was going to do a Seuss-rhyme her to express my ire, but man that’s one hard style to emulate. Guess I’ll have to content myself with Fuck you, scamming scum.

So what, I hear you cry, actually happens at #ComicsCamp, Gary? And that’s an excellent question, since to the outside world it looks like a bunch of creators go off-grid for about three days, and everybody knows as soon as you get more than two creators together, 90% of their time is spent figuring out where to go for dinner and exactly how many people are in the group and can you get them all to show up at the same time¹. But with actual ample time, and the dinner plans questions off the table, other things must be found to fill the hours.

Thus, a slate of activities designed to share skills/provide guidance and context to careers, as well as time to play (or invent) games, skip rocks on the water, sketch, hike, paint, play outside like you haven’t since you were a kid, or just kick back and do blessed nothing for the first time in forever. Just show up on time for your shift prepping or cleaning up a meal, and all is cool.

Since most of us can imagine what it’s like to do most of those things (although, and I can’t stress this enough, you are probably not accounting for the deeply majestic beauty of the Alaskan semiwilderness), I’m going to share mostly about the programming.

Last year, almost by accident, most of the first day’s programming involved craft-type sessions (Ravenstail weaving, painted pillow-making, wool felting, bookbinding, and more), and this year continued the tradition by design. There was going to be heavier stuff a bit later, and a bit of physicality would cleanse the mental and emotional palate so that heavy lifting could be approached fresh.

Thus, the Sunday schedule looked like:

The only thing to note about scheduling is that it quickly becomes impossible to not put cool things up against each other, so decisions had to be made.

• 10:00am Amber Rankin is an animator with a background in artifact documentation for an archeology company; she brought some artifacts and talked about how drawing them isn’t quite like other still life subjects. Not being much of a draw-er, I left that to folks who would benefit from learning another way to interpret the stuff in front of them.

  Tess Olympia (as she prefers) is a program manager with Sealaska in early education. While I’m a sucker for notebooks and would love to learn how to construct my own, I didn’t want to take up limited materials and keep somebody who would actually use a sketchbook for sketching from being able to participate. So a handful of us broke out needles and hooks and messed with fibers — some for the first time, some at a high level.

  Me, I learned one knit stitch — the titular knit stitch, as in knit one, purl two — at Camp last year, and since then I’ve been playing with the math of knitting, seeing what happens if I do this, or try that. I have a ball of garbage yarn that I use to experiment and when I get an effect I like, I move it to a nicer project. The very nice, been-knitting-longer-than-I’ve-been-alive ladies at the local knit shop tell me I do everything wrong, but I do it consistently and get interesting results, so they have no complaints. I used the time to finish off a project² that’s taken my time on airplanes since last June or so. Catch me in person and I’ll tell you about it.

• 11:30am Jim Heumann is a printmaker from Juneau, and he brought the supplies for cutting linoleum sheets for relief printing. Shing Yin Khor brought a stack of tins like you’d get Altoids in, a big bag of little square trays, about 1cm on side, and a couple dozen tubes of concentrated watercolor paints. Paint in little trays, trays in tin, and with a water supply and brush, you’ve got a travel painting kit. Again, I left those to the actual artists, to consume neither limited materials, nor time on equipment.

  But you know what was never a thing at any of the camps I attended as a kid? Friendship bracelets. Maybe the Boy Scouts though they weren’t masculine enough. But once you learn a pattern for knotting and have embroidery floss in front of you, all it takes is patience, leaving time to talk and get to know people Cat Farris and I had spent some time already bonding over our respective greyhounds, and this one was a no-brainer. I actually gave the bracelet I made to a friend at Camp, because hey, it’s there in the name!

• 2:00pm Man, I haven’t seen Shrinky Dinks since I was a kid, and I saw that Lee Post got some really nice ones produced. I would have absolutely done the session on finances with Rebecca Martinez — having worked corporate for a couple of decades and thus been exposed to the idea of financial planning, I felt that I could probably contribute — but it was up against the session on Tlingit Language and History.

  After last year’s sessions by Lily and Ishmael Hope on Tlingit traditions, I wanted to know more. I wasn’t alone, either; offhand, I’d say it was the best-attended session of Camp, apart from the all-hands opening and closings. It was also very information-dense and I’m still going through the four pages of notes that I took³, so that will get its own writeup later.

• 3:30pm Chris Yates and Alison Wilgus know puzzlemaking and podcasting, respectively, like few others. But being the rare white guy that doesn’t think he should have a podcast, and not having a wood shop at home, I opted to hear what Ryan North had to say about comedy (or, if you prefer, humour) writing.

  It was substantially similar to a session he did two years ago with Kate Beaton (who couldn’t attend this year for the best of reasons), a session that challenged me on one of my core beliefs in life: that Ryan North (and Kate Beaton as well) is effortlessly funny, when the core message of the workshop was no, this is a learned skill like any other.

  Which, okay, yes, to write something and put it into the world and have it be funny, that’s a skill to learn and practice and perfect. But it’s also true that Beaton (and North), in casual conversation and completely off-the-cuff, will leave me laughing because of all the funny that is spontaneously produced. Learning to write funny things is not the same skill as having perfect timing or an ideal, dry intonation that makes everything you say funnier. So I’m half conceding on my core belief, but an acknowledgment that their creative work is funny because they’ve spent years practicing their craft, which is learnable.

  Case in point: North provided us with two pages from The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (art by Erica Henderson with inking assists from Tom Fowler) with the dialogue stripped out, and had us fill in our own. It was a tough exercise, trying to come up with words that fit an already-set situation, and in only about ten minutes. I felt my contribution was about three hours from being serviceable, but when read out anonymously by Ryan it got spontaneous laughs, which was maybe the best feeling in the world. I still think it could be much tighter (or maybe work better with a different page of art), but it’s still a sense of accomplishment.

  Even more importantly? Of the twenty or so pages that Ryan read out (again, all anonymous), none of them wasn’t funny, and all of them were substantially different gags. One starting situation, twenty different directions, one common result. Your approach for success, North observed, doesn’t have to be the same as anybody else’s to be real and valid. As I mentioned previously and will again, that was a recurring theme to Camp, and one that all creators should take to heart.

  Oh, and Brio the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel spent most of Ryan’s session gently snoring on a giant beanbag chair. That dog got some serious love over the weekend.

One of my favorite parts of Camp each year is when people present for five minutes on a topic that they’re passionate about. Ever wonder about why the Middle East is so screwed up? Let Beth Barnett tell you all about the Sykes-Picot Agreement! Were you curious about how new commercial flowers are produced? Jessi Jordan has hand-fertilized hibiscus until it produced colorful new mutations! Tiny things on YouTube! #twentyninezine! Carnivorous plants! Thermochromic pigments! Retired racing greyhound adoption! Everybody has passions beside comics (at least, I hope they do), and it’s great to share.

Pictures:
Geez, there are just no pictures pertaining to this day that are landscape and would make a good header, you know that? Way to plan things out, Past Gary.

Brio snoozin’ on the bean. That bean bag chair, btw, was large enough to accommodate 3-4 Campers or one very small dog. There was also a giant stuffed bone-in ham pillow.

The comic page blank up top (click to embiggen, naturally) featured one of my favorite submissions, where Tony Stark only said I’m Tony Stark, over and over again. It was tough to get a clear enough photo of my effort to read the dialogue because my phone camera’s face recognition kept picking out Tony Stark heads as areas of interest and letting the other bits go slightly out of focus. My absolute favorite submission used this template, involved Tony Stark talking about how often he eats candy off the ground/out of the garbage, and the computer voice sadly intoning Oh, Tony. No. North’s version of those pages can be found in The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe which is great and you should read.

Five Minute Talks by Beth, Alison, Jessi, Cat and me, Kerstin, Molly, Tony, Inari, Maarta, Leila, Ana, Cleo, Allison, and Haley.

_______________
¹ Answers: The eighteenth place suggested, four more than the final count everybody agreed upon, and no.

² A lot of which was me adding a few zillions lengths of fringe to edges. Rather than take the time to bury stray bits of yarn from the start and end, I spent literally hundreds of times more effort to hide them in a forest of similar yarn. Genius!

³ Including some very sincere discussion about how much the Tlingit language is intrinsically tied to the Tlingit people, leaving me with some thinking to do on how much I should share rather than just pointing you to resources presented by Tlingit speakers.

It’s like when Lily Hope told us last year about art collectors that try to commission her to weave traditional robes and she tells them she can only accept the commissions if the finished pieces stay with the clan. If you want something to hang on your wall and congratulate yourself on your refined taste, she can make you stuff that is of her own design and meaningful to her, but decidedly not traditional.

I’m thinking of it as being the difference between something made or shared by a Tlingit person, and something that is of the Tlingit people. In New Jersey, we learn about the people that originally resided here in fourth grade (or at least, I did way back when), but it’s abstract — there haven’t been any Lenape people here in generations and collectively we who live here now aren’t required to confront what happened. Some of the indigenous Alaskan peoples, though, they experienced first contact with settlers in living memory. The absolute least that I can do is to really think about how to approach this topic with the respect it deserves.

Still talking about people doing interesting work, but no Editor’s note today. Sorry?

• There’s nobody I look forward to seeing once a year like George O’Connor — his Olympians series from :01 Books is a delight of ever-expanding complexity, and we always have a good talk about the more obscure corners of Greek myth. So one more book, with Hestia stepping out of the limelight³ to narrate the story of Dionysus.

  After that, he’ll be busy on his contribution to the World Citizen Comics line, but then he’s allowed for the possibility of looking at the Norse deities, and that should be fun — Loki’s an even bigger jerk than Hermes, and his book was a riot, dick jokes and all. We also discussed the possibility of taking a run at the Egyptian pantheon, but they lack definitive (or at least surviving) accounts, and those that we do have would be tough to adapt to a middle grade book¹.

  His love of the material (and talking with anybody of any age) is infectious. He knows his stuff better than anybody I’ve ever met (like how when Hephaistos caught his wife Aprhodite and brother Ares in flagrante, the original texts state that Apollo and Hermes decided to bust his chops, offering up that they’d gladly be caught in such a compromising position) and always offers up a story I’d never heard before (like how the founder of Athens sprung from the leg of Athena … after Hephaistos, in a creeper moment, got shall we say too excited in her direction²).

  There may be more stories that are thematically linked instead of focused on a single character, as well. And I was pleased to point him in the direction of Meg Hunt at table B124, who was selling bandannas that were screenprinted with mythical beasties; the one with the minotaur practically tells the whole story, which McCloud would tell us makes it a comic.

• Speaking of the B aisle, I saw some of the most beautiful paper art I’ve ever seen at the table of Mäelle Doliveaux of Beehive Books — shadowboxed works of cut paper, one-offs made as special tier rewards for a Kickstarter. Follow this link and scroll down, and see what can be accomplished with patience and a sharp enough blade⁴ to cut paper very cleanly.
• Falynn Koch’s done a couple of Science Comics (on the topics of plagues and bats) and will be one of the early contributors to the new History Comics line, but I was glad to talk to her about her Maker Comic (on the topic of baking). Mostly we talking about how all of the recipes mentioned in the story are given in the back, except for the chocolate chip cookies. Just use the one on the bag is the advice given in character, and there’s a reason.

  That recipe on the bag — any bag, from any maker of chocolate chips — has been refined in the crucible of a million home cooks, perfected until they show off those chips as much as is humanly possible. More than anybody else, Koch opined, the chocolate chip people want you to succeed with that recipe, so that you’ll love the cookies and want to make more and buy more chips. I’m not saying that she got into my head with that bit of wisdom, but I will say that less than 10 hours after we talked, I had a fresh chocolate chip cookie in my hand, and that required navigating the rest of MoCCA, getting home, and doing a grocery run.

• Every year at MoCCA, I see people I’ve never seen before. Some are showing their influences plainly, a table of stickers of popular characters, no indication yet of what stories they have to tell, what characters they would breathe life into. Some are starting to see how to construct those stories, how to make characters that aren’t Naruto with the serial numbers filed off. Each year I see some that are very good, and each year I see about 0.75 of a creator that’s scary good, one that you’ll want to keep your eye on for the future, because they are going somewhere.

  This year, I met her within 10 minutes of the floor opening on Saturday. I made my way to the far back wall to escape the crush of people entering, and at the shared booth for students of Moore College Of Art & Design in Philadelphia, I met Dylan B Caleho. Her senior thesis comic, Don’t Linger In Dark Corners, caught my eye from ten feet away. It’s a damn strong cover, designed to stand out against background noise, and a story that perfectly paces to a cliffhanger, one that demands a full story treatment.

  Fortunately, she’ll get the chance; after graduation, Caleho will be taking a job with a comics press, working the production end of things. It’ll only help her understand how to build comics better, and hopefully she’ll get the chance to show what she can do on a longform treatment of Don’t Linger before long. I mean, she’s going to be showing up on radars sooner or later; my bet is on sooner.

  Just one thing: follow her at the Twitter link above, or her Instagram. There’s a Tumblr that comes up if you search for her that appears to have been taken over by Vietnamese spammers, so don’t go to dylanbeedoodles.tumblr.com unless it’s via the Wayback Machine up to or including 2 Feb 2019, unless you’re in the market for Hanoi-made polo shirts.

Spam of the day:

I had visited your store last week, and I saw a very nice pants i wanne buy. But I have a question, today I wanted to order it, but can not find the pants anymore in your store. it looks like the first picture on this site http://bit.ly/[redacted]

Oh, yes, I’m entirely going to click a link to see what pants you want to buy when I don’t sell pants, or even voluntarily wear them. That’s a great idea.

_______________
¹ There’s a lotta semen in those Egyptian myths.

² Yeah, okay, lotta semen in the Greek myths, too. But relatively large numbers of non-semen-based stories to tell, compared to the folk of the Nile.

³ All the records of her that survive speak of modest Hestia, and there’s little about her that does survive. O’Connor considers that intentional — the goddess of the hearth, the one that keeps you warm and safe and isn’t interested in knocking shit down or raping your daughters or killing everything that moves? No need to tell stories about her to paper over the flaws and motivate you to worship, everybody knows them all and loves her.

⁴ In this case, a blade made of photons; she used a laser cutter for this.

Okay, I know it’s not because of the folks at the Society of Illustrators behind MoCCA Fest; it’s because of the history of that corner of New York that the Ink48 hotel has meeting rooms named Garamond and Helvetica. Y’see, the hotel is in a corner of the city where newspapers and other print operations were once plentiful; the building itself was once as print house. So what better place to hold the MoCCA program tracks, a block and a half from the Metropolitan West event space where the show floor will be hopping.

As in past years, the programming at MoCCA is simple: two rooms, programs run with adequate intervals to get back and forth, seven events per day. This year, my eye lingered on:

Saturday
Cartooning For Peace, 12:00pm, Helvetica
About 15 blocks from UN headquarters, with Liza Donnelly, Ann Telnaes and other editorial cartoonists, and a paired exhibit on the show floor.

Keith Knight: Red, White, Black And Blue, 1:30pm, Garamond
Keith Knight has been one of the most direct and unmistakable voices in cartooning forever now; he’ll be presenting his slideshow/lecture, Red, White, Black And Blue: Why America Keeps Punching Itself In The Face When It Comes To Race.

The Personal And The Political, 3:00pm, Helvetica
Mike Dawson, Sarah Glidden, and James Sturm join Jonathan Gray of the John Jay College-City University Of New York to talk about how much “political” has seeped into everyday life, at least for those that had the gift of ignoring politics on a daily basis in the Before Times.

Professional Development 101: Art Directors’ Roundtable, 4:30pm, Garamond
Look, there’s a bunch of great artists with strong, singular visions out there. Why do some keep getting hired and others languish? I’m not an art director, but I’ll be being professional and easy to work with¹ are right at the top of the list. Find out if I’m right with ADs Emma Allen (The New Yorker), Matt Lubchansky (The Nib), Will Varner (formerly Buzzfeed), and Alexandra Zsigmond (formerly The New York Times). This one is co-presented with the continuing education folks at SVA.

Sunday
Narratives Of Motherhood, 1:30pm, Helvetica
Oh man, how great would Lucy Knisley be on this panel? Okay, the topic is motherhood, not pregnancy — give her a couple of years, I bet the next book could support a great discussion. But I’ll bet you that it’ll also be a great discussion from Emily Flake, Sacha Mardou, and Lauren Weinstein, with MUTHA Magazine editor and Publishers Weekly graphic novels review editor Meg Lemke.

Comics And The Teaching Artist, 3:00pm, Helvetica
It takes a lot to master a craft; it takes even more to figure out how to master a craft and convey that knowledge to others. Just remembering what you didn’t know once upon a time, to put yourself in the shoes of students that similarly don’t know (and don’t know what they don’t know) is a challenge. How the learnin’ sausage gets made will be discussed by comics scholar Tahneer Oksman (Marymount Manhattan College), Ivan Brunetti (Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and Comics: Easy as ABC!), Sequential Arts Workshop founder Tom Hart, and Center For Cartoon Studies founder James Sturm.

Professional Development 102: Artists’ Roundtable, 4:30pm, Garamond
The second half o SVA’s continuing ed offerings looks at things from the perspective of artists, and what it takes to maintain a career. Josh Bayer, Fran Meneses, Julia Rothman, and Andrea Tsurumi in conversation with artist and art director Kristen Radtke.

Spam of the day:

I thought that our service may be of interest to you. More people means more national exposure for your business.

You thought wrong.

_______________
¹ Alternately, being a hack contrarian shitlord seems to work for Michael Ramirez and Ben Garrison.

One of which I’ll be giving closer scrutiny, one of which I will view at a distance.

• Distance first: C Spike Trotman’s latest comic features MK Reed partnering up on words,pictures from Clive Hawken, colors from Maarta Laiho, and letters from Ed Dukeshire. It’s called Delver, it’s a five-issue limited series, and it’s a dungeon crawl story filled with the sorts of societal implications thinking that Spike’s known for, and the YA perspective that Reed’s known for:
  

  Delver is my answer to ‘Where are all these abandoned, treasure-laden dungeons coming from, anyway? And what happens when you unload all that loot in the tiny hamlet down the road?’

  Not a lot of dungeon crawls start out with the major threat being gentrification and that is a perspective that I just realized I have been sorely lacking in my genre fiction.

  It’s also on comiXology, which means I find myself of multiple minds about it. It’s all over their service, and various Amazon channels like Kindle. I don’t get comics that way, because I refuse to “buy” media that I do not in turn own.

  When it’s all done, it’ll be available on Amazon print-on-demand, which is fine in that I can get a physical thing that can’t be yanked back, but I’d have to see what the price point for the trade is versus per issue costs. Even then, I’m a big fan of my local comic shop, and getting stories from a de facto monopoly¹ that is bypassing them entirely? I’m deeply ambivalent.

  But dang if that description isn’t right up my alley:

  Temerity, our main character, is a teen girl stuck in the middle of sudden economic upheaval in her very small town, except that her town’s gold rush also involves giant monsters springing out of the ground. She has no idea how to help her family and neighbors with the man-made crisis above ground, and the adults around her aren’t any better at solving problems.

  Delver issue #1 releases today on comiXology, US$2.99, or free if you comiXology Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited, or Prime Reading.

• Closer scrutiny: one of the great things about webcomics is there’s always somebody doing work that is going to interest you that you just learned about. Today, for me, that would be IO Black, and I have absolutely no idea what their webcomic is about or if it’s any good. The work that I’m digging into is a survey on how you get readers, and it’s at the juicy intersection of there was a lot of thought put into this and enough responses to achieve statistical significance:
  

  (Thread) I recently ran a Twitter poll to see how people were finding new webcomics. Thanks to signal boosts, we got nearly 3,000 votes – and the results couldn’t be clearer:

  WORD OF MOUTH – 2118 (70.7%)
  COMICS PORTALS – 523 (17.5%)
  ONLINE ADS – 216 (7.2%)
  OTHER – 139 (4.6%)

  (If you’re wondering, these numbers include “Other” votes that were reassigned to their “proper” category based on the exact voter response. In the interests of transparency, you can find all of that raw data here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OG…)

  OH YEAH, THAT’S THE STUFF. I know that sounds sarcastic as hell, but I genuinely love this kind of data.

  Black goes on in that thread to talk about general lessons to take away, with a deeper dig into the specific topic of discoverability via #hastags. There’s a second thread about what makes for a good #hashtag, and the beginnings of trying to devise one that makes sense for the kind of community interactions that will give visibility and prompt others to pay attention to your work and talk about it.

  My advice? Do what I’m going to be doing in free time for the next couple of days: dig into the poll data, and keep an eye on what Black’s saying. Right now, their twitterfeed is going to be the centerpoint of this discussion.

Spam of the day:

[lips] [lipstick] SEX DATING [lipstick] [lips]! [envelope with heart] ACTION REQUIRED [envelope with heart]
If You Didn’t Singed up on SexAdultDating Please Click On the Link Below

I’m not sure if you’re asking if I was singing, or if I got singed by something hot, but I don’t believe I’ll click on your link, which appears to send a further spam mail to about 11 different addresses in the UK.

_______________
¹ One that I try to have as little to do with as possible, given that every thing they sell at cheaper prices is based on the immiseration of their workers and predicated on the harvesting of data from me for sale elsewhere. Oh, and with the added benefit of undercutting and destroying a wide range of merchants who can’t compete if only because they are hobbled by old-fashioned things like a workforce that gets bathroom breaks and minimum wage. It has been, relatively speaking, easy for me to avoid doing business with Wal-Mart over how they treat their employees; it’s damn near impossible to keep track of what’s Amazon and what isn’t.

We’ll be taking a look at the first release¹ in the Maker Comics line from :01 Books in just a moment, but first …

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Please Listen To Me, the whatever-they-want-to-talk-about-but-mostly-political offering from Matt Lubchanksy (commonly found these days at The Nib, where they are associate editor) has been on hiatus since April of 2018, for reasons. But it’s back! Maybe not regularly, but back! We’re happy to have you back, Matt.

Madison Furr and her excellent colleagues at :01 dropped a stack of review copies on me recently, and I was super excited to find Maker Comics: Bake Like A Pro! by Falynn Koch near the top of the stack. It may be because I am a home baker of some practice (mostly breads these days², but I flatter myself to say that I can do a decent pie crust, and I pride myself that the cheesecakes I make in the December holiday season for my bartenders get me free drinks all the year long), it may be because the other candidate for first Maker Comics release, Fix A Car! is one that I have less comfort with³.

Let’s just say it’s because I know enough about the topic that I can tell if the book’s getting things right and have enough to learn that a new explanation will help my own understanding. And here’s the deal: Koch scores on both criteria. I haven’t tested all of the recipes myself, but I recognize enough to see that the methods and instructions are solid. It teaches from a perspective that I wish I’d had in my home ec classes back in my teenage years:

• Baked things don’t have arbitrary recipes, they have ingredients that behave in certain ways, and you can make changes and substitutions if you understand how they behave.
• Each ingredient serves a purpose (providing structure, leavening, moisture, color, flavor) and how you bring those ingredients together matters.
• Cooking may be an improvisational art, but baking is rule-based math and science.

Or, as Koch has it, magic; the framing story features an apprentice wizard who is learning baking as an introduction to alchemy.

The references in the back indicate that Koch’s learned from the best — I’m not familiar with some of them, but I can see the influence of Alton Brown, particularly in the exploration of one master recipe (the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe, which is as close to a perfected recipe as we’ll ever see) to get variations by playing with proportions. Please understand, I’m not accusing Koch of ripping off Brown, any more that Brown was ripping off Shirley Corriher when he used Good Eats to do the same. Besides, Brown’s puppets that explain yeast action belch out carbon dioxide, and Koch’s little cartoon yeast fart out carbon dioxide. Totally different!

But bakers always have things they consider most important — more than one family has had long-running disputes over whether to use shortening or lard in biscuits⁴ — and thus there are things I wish Koch had covered. While she correctly points out the importance of having a clean oven interior in temperature regulation, she didn’t talk about how oven interior temperatures can vary widely, and therefore you need a good thermometer (in-oven, probe, instant read, IR or all of the above).

And I will die on this hill — we should not be measuring flour by sifted/scooped/leveled volumes, we should be weighing it. Yes, baker’s scales are somewhat pricey (as are some of those thermometers), but they are no less useful than the stand mixer that makes its way into the book which is listed as (if available) in multiple recipes. There is no quicker way to getting consistent results — which are necessary to seeing where your baking needs improvement — than having accurate temperature awareness and portioning ingredients by mass⁵.

And EMT hat on: there was one very odd recommendation on taking a hot pizza stone out of the oven to move the uncooked pizza to it. Okay, I get it, not everybody has a pizza peel, but this struck me as super hazardous for anybody, much less kids. If you cook on a baking stone and don’t have a peel, get a sheet of parchment paper under your crust, put it on a cookie sheet (on the underside if it has a lip) and slide the whole thing onto the very hot rock. You can grab the parchment and pull back onto the cookie sheet when it’s time to come out. Please don’t try to take a hot stone out of the oven (which could shatter when you place it on the stove top if you’re even a little rough in your handling) and return it.

But those editorial choices aside, kids will not develop their own deeply held baking beliefs if they never start baking. And if you want them to get a head start on baking, Bake Like A Pro! will get them on that path so that we can have the very important fights later.

Spam of the day:

Shock your family, make your garden more contemporary. You will love it’s new look!

Or I could ignore your spamming ass, and wait for the future release, Maker Comics: Grow A Garden!. Release date not announced yet, but it’s on the back cover of Bake Like A Pro! and :01 haven’t lied to me yet.

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¹ Okay, the first two titles in the Maker Comics line released simultaneously last Tuesday; I’m looking at the one that both comes first alphabetically by title and by author’s last name.

² In fact I have a pizza dough resting in the fridge as I type this. If it turns out particularly pretty, I’ll tweet a picture later tonight.

³ One might argue that my lesser expertise is a reason that I should have gone for the car fix book. But I don’t have the tools to practice what I might learn, and I can change a flat and check my oil and am perfectly willing to pay people to handle more in-depth automotive interactions.

⁴ Lard. Duh.

⁵ For those that pick up the book and play with the pizza recipe, make the following substitution: 300 grams of flour instead of 3 cups, 180 grams of water instead of 1 cup; the golden ratio for basic breads is 5:3 flour:water by mass (plus yeast as necessary, plus oil as required by the type of bread — the amounts given will work nicely).

As an aside Brown’s baking book is from 2004 and he lists virtually every ingredient by volume (because his editors and his mom made him) and mass (which is what he wanted); in the 15 years since, I think we deserve a general-audience intro to baking book with the courage to make the leap to ingredients by mass only.

In the time since I decided on the topic for today’s post, the latest (and last for the year) Iron Circus Kickstart has launched, run out its early bird rewards, and cleared 45% funded.

It’s been 45 minutes since launch. I’ll have to update the numbers when I’m ready to put this post to bed.

I’ve really only got one thing to add, which I’ll get to in a moment. The campaign for the second Letters For Lucardo volume by Otava Heikkilä, the first having been a hit. It’s got vampires and hot, hot dude/dude action. The portrait of Lucardo on the cover bears more than a little resemblance to Prince. The prefunding will run for a total of 19 days, wrapping up on the 28th.

And there’s the one thing I wanted to mention — you need to be careful having Kickstarts at the end of the year, because if you get the money from the campaign but don’t spend it on project expenses before 31 December, that’s a tax hit. Given that the 28th is a Friday and it generally takes Kickstarter some time to come up with the dough, I expect that Iron Circus Supreme Leader For Life C Spike Trotman will actually get the money right at the start of 2019 and have the entire damn year to spend it before taxes raise their ugly head. Nice planning, Spike!

And even if hot, hot dude/dude vampire stories aren’t your thing, I can pretty much promise something in the Iron Circus catalog is. Spike sent me an email (and said it’s okay to share) about the storewide sale that’s going on now … there are six new books in the shop (and plenty more coming in the New Year), but if you want to save 20% on your purchase, place your order by the end of the month and use the discount code WarOnChristmas.

Update: 62 minutes, 52%.

Spam of the day:

Dear VAM POSTUPIL PLATEZH 3045 RUB

Yeahno. Not even trying to make sense of that.

The time when hopefully-smart people tell us what the best things of the year were; a couple of well-curated lists have hit in the last day or so, and I thought I should point out some of the recognition that webcomics (and the webcomics-adjacent) have earned.

• There are very few writers on comics (of all types) working in English that are as good as Oliver Sava at The AV Club; even better, Sava has an eye for talent and has sought out others that have interesting, smart perspectives on comics and gives them plenty of space to write. He’s joined on the 2018 list of best comics by Caitlin Rosenberg, who nearly always has something to point out that I’d missed in whatever we both read.

  Giant Days (by John Allison, Max Sarin, and Whitney Cogar) continued its run of excellence, so no surprise to see a little love for the Tackleverse. Print (or reprint) runs of On A Sunbeam (by Tillie Walden) and Rice Boy (by Evan Dahm) also get nods — they’re both still available in their entirety online, but this is the year that :01 Books and Iron Circus, respectively, pushed the stories wide. Finally, they note that the single best strip — heck, the single best panel — of 2018 can be summed up in three words: Sluggo is lit, from the revamped Nancy by pseudonymous webcomicker Olivia Jaimes, who’s made the comics page safe for weirdness again.

• NPR, meanwhile, has produced a deeply curated list of the best books of 2018, and as usual they include a healthy selection of words+pictures; close to 10% of this year’s recommendations could be called comics. Like On A Sunbeam and Rice Boy, you can find much of the comics that went into Check Please!: Book One (by Ngozi Ukazu) and Your Black Friend (by Ben Passmore) online; the print editions of both are surely spreading their reach, though.

  I’m on record as being deeply conflicted about Jen Wang’s The Prince And The Dressmaker, but I’m not going to say that the NPR reviewer’s delight is misplaced or wrong — we all get from books what we get¹. Other books from onetime or sometime webcomickers include Vera Brosgol’s delightful and cringey Be Prepared, Lisa Hanawalt’s Coyote Doggirl, and Luisa — Now And Then, adapted by the invaluable Mariko Tamaki.

  Finally, in the realm of pure literature, you get some love for the only book that will let you jumpstart an entire civilization if stranded in the past, How To Invent Everything, by Ryan North (illustrations by Lucy Bellwood). Fun fact! According to North, one of the key technologies for your civilization is non-sucky numbers², which seems a random thing for me to mention here for no reason at all, but I sure did that.

• Hey, you know what you can do with non-sucky numbers? Measure stuff and calculate ratios! And you know what the greatest ratio in the world is? North, building on the work of Karla Pacheco, gifted us with such a ratio just today:
  

  Big Cow was photographed next to Small Cows. So how does Knickers compare to REGULAR cows?? Well @THEKarlaPacheco is slightly taller than a standard Holstein, and since I am slightly taller than Big Cow, the ratio between Big Cow and a regular cow is about… THIS

  Pacheco, I should note, has made a habit of being photographed with taller people — because pretty much everybody is — including, sometimes, much taller people like the Northesque Jeph Jacques. And North, I should note, has made a habit of being photographed with shorter people — because pretty much everybody is — including, sometimes, much shorter people like the Pachecoesque Shin Ying Khor. It is now my goal to measure as many comics folk as possible against one of these Big Cow/Small Cow metersticks, for science. Moo.

Spam of the day:

Target customers directly with email marketing tactics

a) No. b) Your email domain is duderenata.com, which sounds … wrong. Like cinemarama or perhaps Estradarama, but with duders?

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¹ However, I stand by my contention that Molly Ostertag’s The Witch Boy covered much of the same topical ground with more subtlety and honesty. It was released in 2017, so it’s not on the list. The sequel is, if anything, even better, but both books suffered from releasing at the end of October, too late for inclusion in lists that must have already been under construction.

² The others being verbal language, written language, the scientific method, and a calorie surplus.

If there are people that have thought more about how to interact with their respective audiences than Zach Weinersmith, Ryan North, and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, I’m not sure of who they are. And when they start kibbitzing in public about how you done screwed up and made them want to not work with you any more, then Sparky, you screwed up.

And by Sparky, I of course mean Facebook.

LArDK’s feelings have been well-established for some time now, and Weinersmith cited Kellett’s thesis in his public musings on Friday:

For the record, though: We used to do lots of “free” stuff on facebook, back before they turned into an extortion racket for artists.

Btw, @davekellett pointed this out in 2015 (http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/150128.html …) and I poo-pooed it. But, facebook’s basically just gotten worse since. I personally have doubled my facebook “audience” since then, but my reach among them has dropped.

… which prompted concurrence from North, LArDK, MC Frontalot, and others:

yep! same here. I actually did an interview for an article explaining this and giving numbers for why it was so bad, but then the next week it was revealed how bad Facebook was for DEMOCRACY ITSELF, so I think the article got canned :0

I’m actually really close to closing down DC on Facebook – I don’t want to lose the readers, but at a certain point supporting FB becomes a tacit endorsement of what they do… and besides, if they’re not actually showing my stuff to the readers there anyway… SHRUG EMOJI

I would love love love to see Facebook become a vast content graveyard, just page after page perpetually autoposting “we’ve moved on…”

I ended up taking down my personal FB page. For me, their role with Cambridge Analytica and the other groups tacitly working for the FSB/GRU was the final straw.

The last being a reference to the fact that Facebook, presented with evidence that it was being used to spread propaganda, responded by hiring a political hit-firm to spread stories that their critics were paid by George Soros, playing into the most vilely antisemitic tropes that — gosh! — they’ve been so instrumental in spreading. Not that Zuckerberg knows anything about it. Nope, not it.

Which is leading to a fairly fundamental question: why should (in this case) Weinersmith post content for free to Facebook, who then sells ads and makes money that they don’t share with him, and which further charges him money to actually deliver his posts that might make him money so he can afford to keep making the content they’re monetizing? Why should anybody?

And, as I’ve been writing this post, I’m seeing word that Tumblr is apparently taking down NSFW accounts, despite the fact that NSFW content isn’t prohibited by the terms of service. If you don’t trust Tumblr randos, trust George, who’s reporting the same, and back up your content.

There’s been a major shift away from webcomics folk maintaining their own sites in the past few years, with Tumblr and various portal-type sites (Taptastic, Webtoon) offering free hosting and eyeballs that might not have landed on an individual site in this mostly post-RSS (and bookmarkless) world.

But any time you rely on somebody else’s infrastructure to run your business/art/lifestyle/whatever, you run the possibility of it being taken away by somebody whose priorities are not yours. Let us not even talk about Flickr’s forthcoming changes or the fact we’re coming up on the anniversary of the Great Patreon Balls-Up Of Aught–Seventeen.

So today’s sentence¹ is as follows: use other (free) services all you like, but keep your content someplace besides the free service. You don’t have to put up your own site! You don’t have to do anything you don’t want! But please, for the sake of your work and my peace of mind, keep a copy someplace so you can rebuild when the free service du jour decides you don’t get to use them for free (or at all) after today.

Spam of the day:

Furnish Your Outdoor Area in Style

Let’s leave my area out of this.

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¹ And how is it more than ten years since today’s sentence?

First up, the nominations hit in the last hour or so, and Fleen congratulates not only the nominees for Outstanding Online Comic, but also the web-type folks who are peppered throughout the other categories. OOC first, then:

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal (originally on Instagram, now most easily read on Webtoon), The Wolves Outside by Jesse England, A Fire Story by Brian Fies, Lara Croft Was My Family by Carta Monir, and A Part of Me is Still Unknown by Meg O’Shea. I’m not familiar with England’s work, and I know I’ve read Dhaliwal’s but don’t recall all the details; I remember reading Fies’s, Monir’s, and O’Shea’s and am pleased to see them here.

Other nominations of note include Say It With Noodles: On Learning To Speak The Language Of Food by the Sawdust Bear/Space Gnome/Paul Bunyan fetishist, Shing Yin Khor (for Outstanding Minicomic and How The Best Hunter In The Village Met Her Death by Molly Ostertag (who is having such a good year) for Outstanding Story, both of which appeared online originally, but which will be available from their respective creators at SPX on 15-16 September at the Bethesda North Marriott.

Right, books:

• If you’ve got a kid in the house, they undoubtedly know Gene Yang already; if they’re even a little geeky, they’ve probably been reading the Secret Coders series by Yang (words) and Mike Holmes (pictures), which wraps up with its sixth installment in a few weeks.

  Along the way they’ve followed the story of Hopper, Eni (whose name turns out to be … no, no, you’ll just have to wait) and Josh as they’ve learned some fairly sophisticated programming in LOGO¹, solved a mystery, and dealt with … let us say a romance of many dimensions. Highly recommended for the budding problems solver in your orbit, and since book 6 (Monsters & Modules) doesn’t drop until 2 October, you’ve got time for them to make their way through the first five books².

• And another book, one that you can read, I’ma say in the next week, week and a half. Longtime readers of this page know that I am fully, 100% in the tank for KB “Otter” Spangler’s A Girl And Her Fed, and particularly the associated novels. I mentioned AGAHF last week, in conjunction with a turning point in the story, and Spangler’s got more to say on the topic today (I’m linking to the crosspost at her writing blog, because the comic’s newsposts don’t have permalinks), and especially about the book in question:
  

  In fact, the next Hope Blackwell book comes out this week! It’s the story of what happened after Thomas Paine showed up in Mare’s kitchen and told her about the Afterlife. There are chupacabras.

  I’m not naming the novel in question because Spangler hasn’t released the title publicly, but she did let me read an advance copy and if you are a fan of words, you’ll find something here to love. Yes, monsters, and yes what happens when a nun with very proper sensibilities butts head with an ADHD-afflicted narrator with a potty mouth. There’s odd bits of history that really happened, and the most intelligent person in the world is an asshole for shits and giggles, and trustfund ghost-hunter wannabes.

  But mostly it’s a story about trauma. About the hurts — some physical, some not — that we shove down and try to forget, and how they come screaming back to the surface when our defenses are down. You can laugh and deflect and delay, but trauma finds a way. You have to grow through it, and Spangler’s subjected her characters to more growth — kicking and screaming, in most cases — than anybody this side of Randy Milholland or Meredith Gran.

  Spangler doesn’t always have a lot of sympathy for her characters, but there’s empathy in spades. She specializes in damaged, quasi-terrible people doing the right thing despite the costs, people who have no fucks left to give but plenty of damns³. Plus, we send each other Sharktopuses. Anybody that you can send a Sharktopus to is by definition a quality person.

  Title To Be Revealed: A Hope Blackwell Novel releases sometime this week, maybe next — there’s cover artwork to be finished, final passes on the various e-book encodings to do, all the last minute stuff. When it’s out, you can find it on Spangler’s book page for a ridiculously reasonable sum, and I’m sure she’ll make mention in her tweets.

Spam of the day:

Dear Gary, You are invited to attend Passionflix’s World Premiere of New York Times bestselling author K. Bromberg’s Driven series [date redacted]. [In attendance will be] Tosca Musk ?(Passionflix co-founder, director), Maye Musk (COVERGIRL® supermodel)

Not really my beat, but FYI, that director and supermodel in attendance? They are, respectively, Elon Musk’s sister and mom. I just found that interesting.

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¹ And really, it’s less about the coding language and more about learning to think in a problem-solving manner. The language could have been entirely made up and it would have had just as much impact.

² As always, thanks to the fine folks at :01 Books for the review copy.

³ Hat tip for that turn of phrase to Helen Rosner, whose brilliance at Twitter is surpassed only by her brilliance at The New Yorker.