For those who were intrigued by the early descriptions of SPX panels, I should note that the programming schedule is now posted, with speakers including Jillian Tamaki, Eleanor Davis, Tillie Walden, Gene Yang, Keith Knight, and Shannon Wheeler.

Of those, Tamaki and Walden will have book debuts; it’s not listed on the site as a debut, but the English-language edition of Alex Alice’s Castle In The Stars: The Space Race of 1869¹ is on Tuesday and I say that’s close enough.

And then, of course, there are the many, many exhibitors who’ll be in the Marriott Bethesda North ballroom; in roughly geographic order, you should keep an eye out for:

Green Zone
Top Shelf (wall 64 to 67), Iron Circus Comics (wall 72 and 73), Kel McDonald (wall 74), Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota with George Rohac (wall 81), Ngozi Ukazu and Mad Rupert (wall 82), Ru Xu (wall 91A).

Blue Zone
Drawn & Quarterly (wall 1 to 4), Miss Lasko-Gross (table H10A), Whit Taylor (table H14B), Tony Breed (table I3B), Ross Nover (table I10), Natasha Petrovic (table J6), Adam Aylard, David Yoder, Joey Weiser, and Drew Weing, Eleanor Davis (tables K12 to 14), Cartozia Tales (table K8), Lucy Bellwood (table K9), Retrofit Comics (tables L2 and 3), Nilah Magruder (table L6), Shan Murphy (table L10B), Koyama Press (tables M1 and 2), Dustin Harbin (table M4), Carla Speed McNeil (table M7A), Sophie Yanow (table M12A), Toronto Comics Art Festival (table M14), MK Reed (table N1), Gemma Correll (table N2), Sophie Goldstein (N13B), Ed Luce (N14), Fantagraphics (wall 56 to 61).

Red Zone
School of Visual Arts (wall 7 to 8), Colleen Frakes (table B5), former Fleen scribe Anne Thalheimer (table B6A), Liz Pulido (table B8), Zach Morrison (table B11), Jamie Noguchi (table B9), Barry Deutsch (table C13), 2dcloud (tables D1 and 2), Evan Dahm (table D8), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson (table D9), Penina Gal (table D13), Carolyn Belefski (table E4A), Carolyn Nowak (table E6), Carey Pietsch (table E7A), Natalie Riess (table E7B), The New York Review Of Books (table E13B), Liz Prince (table E14A), Falynn Koch and Tucker Waugh (table E14B), Rebecca Mock (table F3A), The Center For Cartoon Studies (table F4), NBM Comics (tables G1 and 2), Tillie Walden (table G3), Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera (table G4), Kori Michele Handwerker and Melanie Gillman (table G5), Adhouse Books (wall 53 to 55).

Yellow Zone
Sara & Tom McHenry (wall 25), Jess Fink and Eric Colossal (wall 28), Danielle Corsetto (wall 29), TopatoCo² (wall 31 to 33), The Nib (wall 34), Meredith Gran and Mike Holmes (wall 35A), Out Of Step Arts³ (wall 44 to 46).

The Small Press Expo runs on Saturday 16 September (11:00am to 7:00pm) and Sunday 17 September (noon to 6:00pm). Admission at the door is US$10 on Sunday, US$15 on Saturday, and US$20 for the weekend.

Spam of the day:

Search for the best gas cards Compare for the best features

What features? You put money on the card, you give it to somebody, they get that much gas. Done.

_______________
¹ Imagine a Miyazaki story with a male protagonist, set in Jules Verne’s Europe, against a backdrop of Prussia’s quest to unify all the German states under their banners (and the threat of an unstoppable fleet of near-space ships as the Romantic period wound down and the Belle Epoque got underway; also, Mad King Ludwig is in it).

It’s a lushly-painted story with a tight story that will be concluded in a second volume; the hdardcover itself is in the dimensions of a children’s book, but clocks in at 60 pages of gorgeous bandes dessinées. Get it for the airship fan you know.

² Including Kate Leth and Abby Howard

³ Including Andrew MacLean, Paul Maybury, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Neil Bramlette.

Here we are a little more than two weeks out from SPX — to be held 16 and 17 September in Bethesda, Maryland¹, and I’m eager to talk to you about the programming slate, which is always well-curated and humanely paced. Unfortunately, it’s not posted yet.

More precisely, the schedule of events is not posted, but SPX did give us a fairly extensive list of highlights. Traditionally, SPX runs two programming rooms, one panel in each, on offset schedules. Maybe six events per room on each of two days, for a total of a two dozen or so panels (plus the Ignatz Awards and dance party on Saturday night). And at least eight of those two dozen or so panels have had descriptions released. Highlights include:

• Last year’s multiple honoree and current hot creator du jour Tillie Walden talking about her new book, Spinning, with SPX executive director Warren Bernard.
• Perennial favorites Jillian Tamaki and Eleanor Davis in conversation with Jim Rugg.
• MacArthur Fellow and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang discussing his Reading Without Walls initiative with Johanna Draper Carlson.
• Political cartoonists Ann Telnaes (current NCS honoree for political cartoons, plus a Pulitzer), Matt Wuerker (also a Pulitzer alum), Keith Knight (Glyph and Harvey awards), and Ben Passmore talking with The Spurge the reality of political cartooning in the current climate.

Plus Sikoryak! Heidi Mac! Shannon Wheeler! 2dcloud! Jeremy Sorese! And many more! I’ma guess sometime between now and this time next week, we’ll have the proper schedule, until then, prepare for your time in Bethesda, and don’t forget to stock up on Faygo.

Know who else you’ll find in Maryland, on account of he lives there? Jamie Noguchi. When you see him at SPX, he’ll be halfway done with his Tokutember project, about which we now have some details. Check it:

Starting September 1, I’m going to kick off a little art project called Tokutember. It’s like daily drawing or Inktober or any other drawing challenge, except it’s tokusatsu themed! I’ll be posting my daily creations here as well as twitter and instagram with the hashtag #tokutember. Please feel free to join in on the fun!

That link takes you to the main Tokutember site with the details: from now on, September is Tokutember, and every year will have an appropriate theme. For 2017, the theme is insects, so draw something (in the theme or not, he’s not your boss), post it, and repeat at whatever interval you desire.

Noguchi will post his contributions at the site, and he’s included handy sosh–meeds links to tags so you can find all the best kaiju, rangers, and other effects-heavy Japanese entertainment tributes.

Current fundraising for Houston total: US$150

Spam of the day:

Get up to 1200 as soon as tomorrow

Up to 1200 what? Is this one of those over 9000 deals?

_______________
¹ Coincidentally, the same weekend as the Juggalo March on nearby Washington, DC.

[Editor’s note: The inestimable Gina Gagliano at :01 Books sent a review copy of Tillie Walden’s Spinning that I received just after San Deigo Comic Con, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s due for release in about a month’s time (12 September, to be precise), and I normally wait until the ten-days-to-two-weeks prior to run a review of a forthcoming book.

But heck, Kirkus and Junior Library Guild and Publishers Weekly have had theirs out for weeks now¹, about the same time Walden was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly. So early or not, I’m diving in. Needless to say, you may find spoilers ahead.]

I find myself with thoughts that so completely mirror an earlier book that I feel compelled to quote some of what I wrote three years back:

[I]t’s a story that hurts in a real, tangible, maybe-necessary-maybe-not way. I suspect that if I’d been an almost-teen girl at any point in my life, it would ache and resonate even more. Getting to the truths below the surface of the One Summer in question is like having to peel away a bandage and finally let the healing of the wound below finish up.

That was in reference to This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki; I’m years further from being anything resembling an almost-teen girl, but Spinning is helping me understand what that point in life (and the half-dozen years since) are like. Which is not to say that it’s the same story, not at all.

Spinning is autobiographical, it’s telling a story that bumps up to just a few years ago in Walden’s life (the book functionally ends when she’s 16 or so; she’s just recently turned 21), and it works in a hazy, dreamlike, spare fashion (some pages entirely lack panel borders, with huge swaths of white space and widely-separated blocks of text and images making the moment hang

in

the

air

forever) to act less as memoir², and more to serve as an emtion-delivery mechanism. 400 pages of Walden’s personal history digested, I can’t tell you more than the broadest outline of when things happened to her.

Although presented linearly, I’m left with an impression of Walden’s life that’s more akin to the skating diagrams shown during the first instance of her testing to determine her competition level — swoops and swirls, crossing her own path, which suddenly disappears and reappears further along after a jump.

The curlicue patterns in the ice may as well be her life’s path: intense shyness and dissatisfaction followed by a cross-country move; solitary nature exacerbated by having to adjust to a new home, new school, new teammates and rivals, and even a new vocabulary of skating³. All of which were eclipsed by the effort of dealing with the fact that she’s gay and wondering if she’ll ever be allowed to love somebody openly.

That lack of straight-line storytelling leads to a potentially unreliable narration — there’s just enough sketches of a schoolgirl bully to wonder what really happened (and when), for instance — which is not a drawback. Walden indicates in her afterword that she intentionally did not seek out any reference material, photos, or recollections of others in making the book, preferring to get to an essential truth over a literal one. This is maybe the greatest storytelling strength in Spinning.

I may not have a clear understanding of what point in Walden’s life the Skate Moms at the rink — Walden’s own mother is shown as variously distant, disinterested in her skating career, and complaining of its costs — decided to be total bitches to her about paying for rink time, but I am acutely aware of the depth and breadth of how that incident — and the others in her life — made her feel.

Some of those feelings were imposed on her, some of those feelings propelled her or paralyzed her, some of those feelings that she may never have shared before this book. The emotional charge is such that, more than once, I was left gasping after a too-long period of not breathing, not daring to disturb a years-and-miles distant Walden in a moment of crisis.

I used the word dreamlike earlier, and the more I think on it, the more I think it’s the most precise word to use. Spinning⁴ leaves you in that same state as you’re in when waking from a dream and everything is bright and perfectly detailed in that moment before it fades, leaving impressions. It’s a story where you don’t start at the beginning and move to the end; you start at an arbitrary point and then you get dragged in and filled in on the bits you need when necessary. I won’t tell you everything, the story whispers, just true things.

Spinning is transformative. It the story of one person, with just enough true things to make its points, some of them related to skating but most of them not. It requires you to open yourself up to the truth of being Tillie Walden, at the expense of not being solely you, just a little. Take the leap, find yourself in other shoes (err, skates), and you’ll be different for having invited in somebody else’s truth for a short while.

Spam of the day:

Need Medigap?

What sets this scam for fake Medicare coverage for senior citizens apart from others of its ilk is the photo embedded. A guy that’s meant to look like a go-getter of a senior, with a don’t screw with me, medical-industrial complex look on his face instead looks like a bald, poorly dressed, constipated Larry Bud Melman.

_______________
¹ As of this writing, there are 33 reviews on Goodreads.

² That is, a recounting of these are the things that happened at these points in my life.

³ New Jersey, where Walden lived until the end of fifth grade, and Texas, where she moved, belonged to different competitive organizations with different standards and criteria.

⁴ As well as her critically-lauded webcomic, On A Sunbeam.

Looks like the weekend at San Diego Comics Con is gonna be quiet compared to Thursday/Friday; not that there’s any less programming per se, just that the descriptions provided didn’t reach out and grab me or seem particularly relevant to the purpose of this page¹.

Saturday Programming
Comic Book Law School 303: A Helping Hand
10:30am — 12:00pm, Room 11
And the legal lessons conclude with fan-centered issues: Fair Use, fanfiction, fanart, fanfilms, and fansuchlike.

Real Life On The Page
12:00pm — 1:00pm, Room29AB
With (all together now) Box Brown, who really can talk about other things, a discussion of history and education topics. Moderated by NPR’s Petra Mayer, the panel includes MK Reed, Alison Wilgus, Tillie Walden, and Landis Blair.

BOOM! Studios: Discover Yours
12:30pm — 1:30pm, Room 24ABC
I mentioned a stealth BOOM! panel on Thursday, and here’s an overt one (also featuring John Allison), and the offer still stands: one dollar American cash money to anybody that asks why BOOM! pays so poorly and (perhaps more importantly) so late. Filip Sablik, president of BOOM! publishing and marketing will be present, so this is probably your best chance to speak truth to power.

Superheroes and Comics Can Transform Learning
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
Lots of variations on this theme from year to year, but how many feature Jorge Cham? Sadly, his We Have No Idea co-author, Daniel Whiteson, doesn’t appear to be part of the panel.

Unconventional Comics
1:30pm — 2:30pm, Room 8
Did you know that there are comics without superheroes? (I am paraphrasing the original description only slightly) Gemma Correll, Melanie Gillman, Simon Hanselman, and R Sikoryak in conversation with Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago.

Spotlight On Box Brown
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Room 4
Like this, for example: Box Brown’s a huge wrestling fan, and the interview for this session will be conducted by Uproxx’s pro wrestling editor, Brandon Stroud. Let Box Brown stretch his conversational legs!

Sunday Programming
Steven Universe: Art & Origins
10:00am — 11:00am, Room 29AB
What’s this? A small scale Steven Universe discussion? Rebecca Sugar, Ian J-Q, and zero voice talent? I think I just found my new must-see panel.

The Not-Keenspot Panel
I always mention the Keenspot panel, but when the title talks about how your Bobby Crosby-helmed YouTube show is taking over the Keenspot panel slot? Yeah, no, calling shenanigans on that. You can find it easily enough, though — it’s the actual, literal last panel in the programming list.
[Editor’s note: Keenspot impressario Chris Cosby disagrees with my characterization; you may find his rebuttal below in the comments.]

Spam of the day:

We miss you! Check out our 90% off Clearance
Oakley – Simple design of fashion and sports, can get model very good got-up face.

You miss me, alleged legitimate vendor of Oakley sunglasses? I think we both know my got-up face is fair/middling at best.

_______________
¹ For example, an hour with Duff Goldman? I’d be all over that, but it doesn’t have much to do with webcomics, y’see.

Continuing our look at programming for this year’s San Diego Comics Con.

Friday Programming
Biographical And Autobiographical Comics
10:00am — 11:00am, Room28DE
Sonny Liew, Box Brown, Sarah Glidden, and more, on nonfiction comics.

Cartoon Network: OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes
10:00am — 11:00am, Indigo Ballroom, Hilton San Diego Bayfront
Ian Jones-Quartey may have moved on from Steven Universe, but his new show is getting loads of attention right now. I’d say this was my chance to see him in a session panel without having to line up, oh, now, except for the fact of what’s in the Indigo Ballroom immediately after, and how many people are going to attend this one (not all of whom will have an interest) to have a better shot at the next one.

Comic Book Law School 202: Help Is On The Way
10:30am — 12:00pm, Room 11
Continuing the series from yesterday with a focus on where the money gets involved: licenses and transfers of rights, publishing, manufacturing, merchandising, and distribution agreements, including contracts and incorporation.

Cartoon Network: Steven Universe
11:00am — 12:00pm, Indigo Ballroom, Hilton San Diego Bayfront
Yeah, here’s the next thing in Indigo. Rebecca Sugar, Deedee Magno-Hall, Michaela Dietz, Estelle, AJ Michalka, and Zach Callison (respectively: creator, Pearl, Amethyst, Garnet, Stevonnie, and Steven). Gonna be a madhouse.

Taking Comics From Web To Print
11:30am — 12:00pm, Room 24ABC
Simon Hanselmann and Liz Suburbia talkinga bout how to get from web to print. Seems an odd topic for Hanselman since his pre-publisher career was dominated by self-published minicomics, and a weekly comic run by VICE, which is pretty much a publishing deal that’s merely not on paper.

Handling Challenges: Bans And Challenges To Comics
12:00pm — 1:00pm, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
Raina Telgemeier, Candice Mack, Gina Gagliano, and David Saylor talking with Betsy Gomez about people that have nothing better to do than to police what other people are reading.

Condemned To Repeat?
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Room25ABC
This is like the third time that Box Brown is on a nonfiction-focused panel, right? I think it’s third. Andrew Farago moderates, Nathan Hale, Sarah Glidden, John Holmstrom, Lewis Trondheim, and Brigitte Findakly talk.

Read Like a Girl: Middle-Grade Fiction for Girls (and Boys)
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
The SDCL is where you want to be if you want to see Raina this show apparently; this time she’s talking with Nidhi Chanani, Shannon Hale, Jenni Holm, Molly Ostertag, and moderator Brigid Alverson. Lotta smart on this panel.

Spotlight on Marguerite Bennett
1:00 — 2:00pm, Room 28DE
I have to quote the official description for a bit: Do you like sassy broads in good dresses mouthing off about storytelling? If your answer is, “What a weird panel description,” then come see Ryan North interview Marguerite Bennett on comics, craft, work ethic, process, representation, feminist wrath, queer culture, comedy, kissing, storytelling, and more! I can’t decide if that was Bennett, North, or the two togther that wrote that description; either way, awesome.

Nonfiction and Memoir in Graphic Novels
2:00 — 3:00pm, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
Box Brown nonfiction comics panel count: four. Panelists include Thi Bui, Nathan Hale, Tillie Walden, and Alison Wilgus.

Spotlight on Gemma Correll
2:00pm — 3:00pm, Room 4
Oooh! Gemma Correll!

What’s New With Terry Moore
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Room 28DE
Because Terry Moore is freakin’ awesome, and because Strangers In Paradise is back in 2018.

Monetize Your Comics On LINE Webtoon Discover
7:00pm — 8:00pm, Room 4
Quoting here: LINE Webtoon’s Tom Akel will walk you through how to publish and promote your own IP on the Discover platform, and Patreon’s Heather Wilder will provide details on the partnership between Patreon and LINE Webtoon and how creators can take advantage of the Webtoon creator investment program. Hear from creators who have published their work through Discover while building huge audiences, including Kaitlyn Narvaza, Stephen McCranie, Tiffany Woodall, and Sarah Andersen. This is really how SDCC sees webcomics: a means of getting to a point where you can involve an IP company; outside of that, nothing. Interested to see what Patreon has to say, though.

The World Of Drive
9:00pm — 10:00pm, Room 9
Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett will be talking Drive which is a damn shame because I’m obligated elsewhere on Friday night and who thinks you’re going to get a panel crowd at 9:00pm? The Eisners are happening, there are screenings, but a panel? Dumb. Which is a shame, because I really want to hear what LArDK has to say about one of my favorites, in a rare panel actually dealing with a webcomic.

Webcomics Advocates: The Webcomics Gathering
9:00 — 10:00pm, Room 32AB
And just in case webcomics weren’t being disregarded enough, let’s bury two separate panels in the death timeslot against each other, on the far sides of the San Diego Convention Center to make it practically impossible to hop between if you found both interesting. Anyway. As in previous years, you get 30 seconds to deliver a pitch about your webcomic.

Spam of the day:

Hello every one i want to share my testimony
on
how i belong to Illuminati member,

Bonus points for the irregular spacing and tortured English — makes me think you just might be an isolated secret master of … well, something.

They’ve started putting up the programming schedules for San Diego Comic Con 2017, starting with Wednesday night and Thursday, the traditional two weeks in advance. We’ll be digging into things that are of possible interest¹ to those who read this page (which really means whatever caught my eye). Let’s dig in.

Special Program For Those Who Maybe Don’t Even Go To SDCC
Marian Call solo show
FRIDAY 7:00pm — ??, Summit Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Santee
An evening of music; tickets $10 to $20, or pay-as-you-wish at the door. It’s a ways out, you’ll probably want to split a cab. It’s not going to be a wide-ranging show like previous years, probably because she’s going to be part of W00tstock the night before; hey, Marian, tell John Hodgman I like his work and respect his moustache.

Thursday Programming
Real World Retellings
10:00am — 11:00am, Room 29AB
Nonfiction, from a panel including new father Box Brown, presumably talking about André, Tetris, and (not out until February) Andy Kaufman.

Creators, Libraries, And Literacy
10:00am — 11:00sm, Shiley Special Events Suite, San Diego Central Library
You won’t be on the floor for the start of the show, but you’ll be listening to Raina Telgemeier, Molly Ostertag, and others talk about about the importance of libraries. Cool.

Comic Book Law School 101: Help Me Understand
10:30am — 12:00pm, Room 11
The long-running legal education series returns; this session is on the basics of IP law. Attorneys attending get 1.5 credits of California continuing education.

Spotlight on Jeff Smith
11:00am — 12:00pm, Room 32AB
Because if you don’t love Jeff Smith, you don’t love comics.

Discover The Impact Of The Web On Mainstream Comics
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Room 28DE
Making the jump from webcomics to print, with Molly Ostertag, John Allison, and multiple namechecks of BOOM! in the description. No mention of who is moderating, but if it’s somebody from BOOM!, I will give a dollar to whoever asks them why, if they love comics and web creators so much and have the cash to spread around booze, they pay them so poorly and only after considerable effort.

Editing Comics
1:30pm — 2:30pm, Room 4
Editors are great, the panel includes people like Cassandra Pelham (she edits the like of Raina, and Mike Maihack) and Mark Siegel (runs a little shop called :01 Books is all), and it’s moderated by the invaluable Christopher Butcher.

Writing From Life: Turning Personal Experience Into Relatable Stories
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Room 29AB
Ooh! Gemma Correll and Tillie Walden!

The Mark, Sergio, Stan, And Tom Show
3:30pm — 4:30pm, Room 8
Same time, same room, same day as last year and every year prior. Because Sergio, Mark, Stan, and Tom friggin’ rule, that’s why.

Spotlight On Erica Henderson
5:00pm — 6:00pm, Room 32AB
John Allison talking to Erica Henderson? No brainer.

25 Years Of Bob The Angry Flower
5:30pm — 6:30pm, Room 4
Stephen Notley on a quarter-century of what was always a webcomic, even when there wasn’t a web.

Superhero Family Feud
6:00 — 7:00, Horton Grand Theater
Gameshow, with writers of various superhero fare eager to prove who knows the most about comics, characters, and capes. I can tell you from personal experience that Ryan North digs down deep to come up with the characters — some only seen for a page or less! — that he has encounter Squirrel Girl. Do not bet against him.

Spam of the day:

GPS devices: Monitor performance as well as location

My location is here in my office chair, and my performance is outstanding.

_______________
¹ Handy hint: the Web tag is useless and has approximately zero to do with webcomics.

Oh my, so much has happened since I went to Comics Camp. The obvious is that TCAF happens this weekend and everybody will be there ‘cept me, but let’s not ignore other things going on:

• Erika Moen & Matt Nolan are Kickstarting the latest OJST collection (number four!), hit goal about 12 hours in, and are well on their way to rewarding their guest artists beyond their original contracts. At US$50K, each guest artist will receive a shipping box’s worth of free OJSTv4 copies (to sell or otherwise dispose of); at US$65K, their page rates get retroactively bumped by $20/page. Since, as in prior volumes, about a third of the book is guest artists, that’s a pretty significant chunk of wealth-sharing for Moen & Nolan.
• Hope Larson moved cross country (from LA to North Carolina), turned in a book (she’s got one a year on deck for the next few years), and restarted Solo. Busy lady. BTW, I didn’t get Larson’s Compass South / Knife’s Edge collaborator Rebecca Mock to give me any juicy details on the latter book, due out in about six weeks time, despite us being cabinmates at Camp. Journalistic laziness or respect for spoilers? You decide.
• The Eisner nominations are out, Sonny Liew appears to be nominated in every possible category for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and there are now two categories for the comics that appear courtesy of the nets and lasers and electrons: Best Webcomic and Best Digital Comic. The confusion of the Eisner organization with respect to webcomics appears to be as deep as ever, as I couldn’t tell you what qualifies a work in one category or the other¹, and there’s a distinct lack of recognition of ongoing strip-type work that forms the bulk of webcomics. Nevertheless, there’s some good candidates there:
  Best Webcomic
  • Bird Boy, by Anne Szabla
  • Deja Brew, by Taneka Stotts and Sara DuVall
  • Jaeger, by Ibrahim Moustafa
  • The Middle Age, by Steve Conley
  • On Beauty, by Christina Tran
  Best Digital Comic
  • Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
  • Edison Rex, by Chris Roberson and Dennis Culver
  • Helm, by Jehanzeb Hasan and Mauricio Caballero
  • On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
  • Universe!, by Albert Monteys

  And there’s lots of your traditional webcomickers in other categories: Raina Telgemeier for Ghosts in Best Publication for Kids (ages 9-12); John Allison, for Bad Machinery Volume 5, Chip Zdarsky/Ryan North/Erica Henderson/Derek Charm for Jughead, and Ryan North/Erica Henderson for The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl in Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17); Zdarsky/North/Henderson/Charm for Jughead and Lisa Hanawalt for Hot Dog Taste Test in Best Humor Publication; Box Brown for Tetris in Best Reality-Based Work, Jason Shiga for Demon in Best Graphic Album — Reprint; and Brown and Tetris for Best Writer/Artist. Best of luck to all the nominees.

• Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has added DRIVE: Act One to his store, now available in handsome hardcover and slightly less handsome softcover. Honestly, if you’re gonna get this book, spring for the hardcover (because it’s friggin’ gorgeous) unless your name is Mario from Lisboa, Portugal, on account of Mario won hisself the extra copy I had in the Drive Giveaway Spectacular.

  International shipping on this beast (more than 1.25 kg!) is somewhat less than purchase price, and while I may restrict future giveaways to the US only, I’m glad Mario is going to get to enjoy this tome. Unless Customs steals it, because did I mention it’s friggin’ gorgeous? Pretty sure I did. Send us a photo when you get your book sometime between next week and never, Mario!

Return Of The Son Of Spam of the day:

File Your Tax Return for Free

I’ll note that this particular spam (and likely scam) was received the day after taxes were due. Way to be proactive, spammers!

_______________
¹ The latter appears to allow for longer form stories, where the former appears to be for single-shot (but sometimes lengthy) presentations. For example, Bandette and On A Sunbeam (fiction stories) are digital, but On Beauty (which is more reportage/editorial in nature) is webcomic.

Hey, who wants to learn about the state of webcomics-related crowdfunding in Europe? Well, you’d better have said I do!, Sparky, ’cause it’s what you’re about to get … tomorrow, courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. Start feeling the anticipation, because it’s coming right at you. In the meantime, let’s catch up with a couple of notable news items.

• First up, and I’m a little late on this one, the annual Slate/Center For Cartoon Studies Cartoonist Studio Prize shortlists have been released. This is the fifth year for the CSPs, which have a breathtaking simplicity for comics awards: ten print comics and ten webcomics (equal billing!) are nominated by the faculty and students at CCS, Slate’s technology & culture writer Jacob Brogan, and a guest judge (this year, it’s Karen Green of Columbia University, where she’s the curator for comics and cartoons Rare Books and Manuscripts Library¹).

  Announcement gets made, a month later the two winners are announced, and the creator or creator team gets a check for US$1000. No muss, no fuss. This year’s nominees include John Martz, Eleanor Davis, the March team, Sarah Glidden, Sonny Liew, and Leela Corma (print), and Tillie Walden, Jess Ruliffson, Christina Tran, Meghan Lands, Luke Healy, and Diana Nock (webcomics).

  The print nominees are dominated by publisher by Retrofit/Big Planet Comics (three nominations), with the usual suspects (Koyama, D&Q, Top Shelf, Fantagraphics) also represented. The webcomics are dominated by single stories with beginnings, middles, and ends (including a biographical profile from The Nib, which is also my pick on the webcomics side, with Walden’s On A Sunbeam as a close second), with few ongoings. None of this is good or bad, just how the nominating panel found things to be this year.

  Best of luck to all the nominees; the winners will be announced on April 10th.

• Speaking of the Center For Cartoon Studies, one of its alumni, Sophie Goldstein, has something to share with you. Goldstein’s been on my radar ever since she was one half of the team behind Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell, and she’s not wasted the time since. She’s been nominated for the Cartoonist Studio Prize, won a pair of Ignatzen, and produced a stack of damn good comics as long as your arm. And yet, as successful as her career has been, it’s been part time work; time for that to change:
  

  With the help of Patreon, I hope to make writing and drawing graphic novels my full-time job. Like many creators I’ve had trouble stitching together a steady income from my work. Currently, I work part-time at a rock climbing facility and take on occasional freelance to make ends meet. However, long-form storytelling is what I love to do, and with the help of my patrons I can focus on the big projects closest to my heart and and get them out in the world as soon as humanly possible.

  Note to self: organize a webcomics rock-climbing outing sometime. Goldstein, Jamie Noguchi, Matt Boyd, and Yuko ‘n’ Ananth are probably not all of the webcomicker climbers out there, and I’d trust any of them to catch me on a whipper. But I digress. Goldstein’s base goals are very modest:

  • US$60 — the amount she was recently paid to participate in a medical experiment
  • US$200 — her monthly food budget
  • US$650 — her monthly rent and utilities

  She’s reached the point where she no longer has to be subject to the whims of mad doctors and can eat; it’s time to make sure she has a place to live while making comics. Go check out her comics (so much is available for free on her site) and if you like what you see, give just a bit so that she can make more.

Spam of the day:

Re. For Whom It May Concern.

Oh, this is one just bad — two different names from the introduction to the signature, a third name as the point of contact, tortured English, a vague promise of a grant to me just for being awesome (with no amount specified) from Google and/or the UN and/or the EU and/or an Act of Parliament, but only if I’m American. Hello, hi spammers, you are very bad at your job kthxbye.

_______________
¹ Green is really smart; I saw her talk about how graphic novels have changed in the ten years since :01 Books hit the scene at last year’s SDCC.

Last week we all learned that Tillie Walden would be launching her first webcomic, titled On A Sunbeam. Last night, the first weekly entry went up, and there’s little to say other than Wow.

Okay, that’s not true, or I wouldn’t have bothered firing up WordPress. There’s lots to say. Like how Walden is a mere 20 years old, and is producing work that is going to suck you right in, demanding to know what happens next, what’s happened before, who these characters are, and where they’re going. Like how the art is remarkably polished, and how well it serves an intriguing-as-all-hell premise.

Last week, we at Fleen had the impression it would feature (and I quote) rebellious prep school students in space, but that’s only part of it. It’s the flashback part, and the current story is about young folk (indeterminate age, but probably secondary school age) and an older woman (of clearly rough reputation) on an itinerant gig of restoring old buildings … in space. POV character Mia is thrust into the latter, having previously experienced the former, and how/why she wound up here is still to be seen.

The world has an industrial aesthetic that I’d describe as steampunk without the steam-gear fetish — spaceships look like fish, buildings are old and cathedral-like, like a culture transitioning from high Renaissance to Industrial Revolution suddenly figured out spaceflight and architecture stopped there (although clothing did not — it’s got a late 20th Century feel: practical, functional, nondescript even). I suppose an alternate take would be Moebius without the fetishy fashion aspects.

Which is to say, there were a lot of deliberate choices that led to On A Sunbeam’s look and feel; they’re not just thrown together at random, and they feel organically linked even without knowing the backstory and worldbuilding. Remember everything I said about Walden’s characters dragging you into the narrative? The art is just as compelling.

None of which is really surprising; Walden may be on her first webcomic, but she’s got multiple books under her belt, and two Ignatzen bricks from earlier this month. If she can post story even fractions of the size of the first update (a full chapter, three dozen pages worth!) each Wednesday, On A Sunbeam is going to be one of the densest, richest, fastest-growing webcomics experiences in years¹.

The only thing missing is an RSS feed, so write yourself a note to check back Wednesdays. Jump on now while it’s still new; don’t delay event one update.

Spam of the day:

Keep?the?good?teeth?and only replace the bad ones.

Isn’t that the entire point of dentistry? And what’s with the choice of non-Latin (but Latin-looking) characters in the text? ?????t??????d?t??t???nd??nl? — none of those words is composed only of standard keyboard characters.

_______________
¹ Although it’s completely different in tone, story, aesthetic, pacing, subject, and just about everything else, it sort of reminds me of Minna Sundberg’s Stand Still, Stay Silent in terms of overall accomplishment. This speaks well of both young ladies in question.

Okay, so I make it a policy to not read certain comics during the work hours — NSFW means something different to everybody, after all. But a misclick today brought up a blocker when the browser requested Oh Joy, Sex Toy, which is fair enough. Everybody has a right to decide what is displayed in their own environs. But the reason cited — that’s pissing me the hell off and fairly emblematic of so many damn problems we have because America, as a country, is way too hung¹ up about sex. Not blocked for sexual content or situations, not blocked on the basis of explicitness, blocked because sex education is forbidden. This one time, I’ma say Screw you, nanny filter; you suck.

Let’s talk about happier things, any of which should have contributed the header image for today’s post instead of that dumbassery. In fact, let’s have multiple header images because these other items deserve it.

The Ghosts tour rolled into Minneapolis last night and I’ve never seen a crowd of 10 to 14 year olds so physically unable to sit still, they were vibrating at the excitement of being in the same room as Raina Telgemeier. The presentation is a tight half-hour of Ghosts read-along (with audience sound effects), inspirations, past books, and how comics are made. The crowd was larger than what’s shown in the photo by at least a third in that room, plus an overflow room down the hall. The folks at UMinn had the signing down to a science, with numbered tickets being called in groups of twenty, and comics-drawing activities for those waiting. A++++, would attend again.

Boulet’s avatar generator is now an app, with an even wider range of features and expressions. Download the Bouletmaton for Android, and I dunno about Apple but if this means for once we get the app first and the iPhone users gotta wait, I’m fine with that.

Ngozi Ukazu does a hella cute, irregularly scheduled webcomic about college hockey that I can only read about twice a year because I have to read the story in chunks. She had a hella blowout Kickstarter for a Year One print edition last spring, and she’s just blown the damn doors off of the Year Two campaign, launching (as of this writing) in the past three hours and already past 1300 backers and 117 damn thousand American dollars cash money, holy crap.

Speaking of Kickstarter, Brandon Bird just put one up for his latest creative project — I have internally referred to each of these as an Art Thing — and it’s a doozy. Bird wants to make a lowrider dedicated to the late Jerry Orbach: half art car, half statement of purpose for a life lived following your muse, wherever that leads. In this case, hopefully, to an impromptu back-alley competition to see whose Jerry Orbach tribute car can bounce the highest.

Who wants serialied fiction? T Kingfisher, the authorial pseudonym of Digger² creator Ursula Vernon had one of those stories that just wouldn’t go away, and so wrote out 90,000 words and has decided that her Patreon support is such that she can release it for free, Tuesdays and Thursdays (with bonus material on Sundays) until it’s complete. It’s a through-the-portal story, but not the kind you read as kids, which starts with a young girl named Summer — not allowed to do anything thanks to her overprotective mother — being surprised by the sight of a house on chicken legs over the back fence.

Baba Yaga is nobody’s kindly fairy godmother, and when she offers Summer her heart’s desire (or to suck the marrow from her bones … could go either way, really) it’s pretty certain that wherever Summer ends up, she’s going to come back different — sadder, wiser perhaps, very possibly scarred inside or out. Summer In Orcus starts today; read the introduction to get where Vernon’s coming from, then dive into Chapter 1 and join me in counting down to Thursday.

Finally, Tillie Walden picked up a couple of Ignatzen over the weekend (Promising New Talent for I Love This Part and Outstanding Artist for The End Of Summer), and the :01 Books twitterfeed (with whom she has a book coming; :01, not the twitterfeed) tells us that she’s about to start a weekly webcomic on top of everything else. Per Broken Frontier, it’s titled On A Sunbeam, it debuts next Wednesday, the 28th, and will run weekly. It’s early to tell where the story is going to go, but I’m getting a rebellious prep school students in space vibe, which is a combination of words that pleases me.

Spam of the day:

From: Andrea Chamberlin
To: Me, that is to say, Gary
Message: Hi George, Just checking the emails is this a good one for you?

Tom

Every single name wrong. Good job, team. Good job. Lotta hustle.

_______________
¹ Heh … he said hung.

² Obligatory reminder: I loves me some Digger.