It’s time I introduced you to someone; his name is X’unei and he introduced himself on Saturday night to the assembled #ComicsCamp cohort in Tlingit.

He told us about himself, at some length, before generously repeating himself in English. He is a university professor, and has his hands in novels, poems, screenplays, filmmaking, music, visual arts, and oh yes — he is one of perhaps 80 people in the world that can speak Lingít Yoo X’Atángi. I am fond of quoting a cartoon cat that describes his expertise as being held by one dude or even none in a million, but in a world with 7 billion humans, X’unei is literally one in 87.5 million.

He has an English name, but he prefers X’unei, a name which is rooted in this language, this people, this place. Because of how time works in Tlingit (both language and worldview), he is not only X’unei, but he is every X’unei that has lived before and every X’unei that will live in the future¹.

So X’unei has seen 400 or so indigenous languages at the time of European contact dwindle to maybe 300, and will see perhaps another 100 lost in the next 50 years. There’s two dozen languages native to Alaska, and most of them are dying; he’s looking to the speakers that remain — many of whom are in their 80s — and wondering if the 130 or so people who are studying this one language — which may be 15,000 years old, born in the southwest near the Navajo, spread north into Canada, and then along the rivers and glaciers until it made its way back to the coast — can keep it alive.

He has so much to tell us about this place that we’ve found ourselves, about those who came to claim the land and called the Tlingit inferior because they don’t write things down; about the elder who countered that she can tell a story that takes ten days and it will always be the exact way that she wants to tell it.

So as not to make a terrible botch of things — I took a lot of notes, but I’m certain I missed more than I caught and I may very well have gotten details wrong here — I am going to spare you a lot of what X’unei taught us, and point you to Lingít Yoo X’Atángi, his online language resource.

You can hear the sounds of the language, there and on his YouTube channel, and you can learn about the 61 sounds you need to make in order to speak (26 of which are not in English), and the four vowels that each come with four variations (long vs short, high vs low). You can try to break yourself of the habit of up-talking to indicate uncertainty or a question, and try to get used to the fact that virtually all of the sounds are made behind the teeth² and a bunch of them require you to take your lungs out of the equation.

All of that? That’s the easy bit. Thinking in Tlingit is very different from thinking in English.

There’s a lot of metaphor³, and verbs classify based around whether or not they have happened yet. There’s a suffix that indicates a thing that performs an action (a ladder, a saw), a way to turn a verb into a noun. There are siblings that may be your kin, or any Tlingit of the same generation. The metaphors are more than a linguistic construct, they’re a way of thinking of the world, a way of looking at how things are and then describing your place within it⁴.

And the stories, always the stories. The story of how the Tlingit people came to their lands by passing under a glacier, about not speaking the word for the brown bear because they’ll come, about announcing your intentions at the edge of the forest before you enter to hunt or forage in the house of your grandparents. About the place names that are lost, about the true owners of this land who will take you away if you whistle at night unless you carry tobacco and copper with you, about the Salmon People who will teach you the value of the food you might disrespect. About how they know all these things happened, really happened. About how they tell the stories so they don’t forget.

And if you start to wonder if maybe there’s a few too many stories, then X’unei will tell you about the time he saw a youngster ask an elder How come every time I ask you a question you tell me a story? and was answered with Let me tell you a story about that….

We dipped out toes into a vast ocean, one that serves as a means to connect a people across past and future (and if X’unei is every X’unei ever or to be, then we who come to Tlingit lands are the same people who stole them, and hopefully the same people who will act to decolonize them). It was a gift freely given, and one that I will do my best to treat with the respect it deserves.

Pictures:
No other pictures today; if you can make out my scribbles in the photo up top, good on you.

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¹ He told of meeting an elder who expressed that his own uncle had been named X’unei; afterwards, the elder referred to him as Uncle.

² What’s the hardest job in the world? Tlingit lip reader.

³ For example, there aren’t colors, per se, but there are comparisons to common things. One particular blue is the blue of a Stellar’s jay.

⁴ I think this relates to how X’unei said you might not name your kids for a week or so, because you have to see who they are. I’m guessing the ubiquitous Have you decided on names yet? ritual that parents-to-be go through around the seventh month are utterly alien to the Tlingit mindset.

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.

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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.

Travel to #ComicsCamp is a relatively straightfoward thing; there’s a bus, there’s a bunch of Campfolk on it, there’s the sun in the sky and fabulous vistas to pass through, and then you’re there. First up — announcements (watch out for bears¹, keep the cabin doors closed or ravens will get in), and intros (including a live demo of the Pacheco:North ratio; cf: yesterday), which take a while when there’s nearly 80 people to get through. In short order a set of identifying photos were taken and posted, book- and game-libraries established, lost-and-found, borrow-what-you-need, and snack tables set out.

Jeste Burton, kitchen wrangler of beloved memory, introduced herself and got to work; by the time pack-in was done, a dinner of roast potatoes and sprouts, spinach salad with mixed vegetables, pickles, and flaked chicken was approaching readiness. She really is a marvel, and the job she does delivering meals with a few dozen dietary restrictions to be mindful of is nothing less than extraordinary.

But no group meeting of this size, with a mix of familiar faces and new, ever took place without a social activity, and this year’s was even more bonkers than last year’s bizarro science fair posters.

Teams were formed. Craft supplies were made available. A two-word prompt was provided, with the instruction given to make a shoebox diorama embodying that prompt. I’m going to guess that this was dreamed up by Sophie Lager, one of the local Juneau folk who work very hard for months to make Camp happen (and a dear friend of mine), who apparently revels in the insanity that this set of instructions would foreseeably cause given the very creative people in the room and the extensive booze table in easy reach.

• Ever wonder what an airplane whale looks like? I heard the first balloon pop during construction and a cry of dismay exclaim Oh, no! My baby!, but the second one held². Those pipecleaners at the bottom allowed the waves to move back and forth, too.
• I personally felt that fire meeting made the most creative use of materials, what with the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos™ being used for the combustion effect. Creative and arguably delicious!
• Most elaborate honors probably go to gryphon harpoon, what with that delicate, curling scissor work. Given the short time allowed for construction, it’s super clean and impressive.
• I only got one in-focus photo of ham geode, so you will just have to imagine how the lid folds up to show that the box represents a pig, which you can then look inside. It’s like an fMRI, only infinitely more disturbing.
• I didn’t find a caption for this one and never found one of the team to explain the prompt. Ocean cave, or cavern ship, perhaps? The stalactites and stalagmites with googly eyes were a nice touch.
• It was all the file folders full of documents that made office boat so delightful. I have to believe Lucy Bellwood was involved, since the flag up top is pointed in the correct direction.
• The pine laboratory took into account both the the noun and verb meanings of pine to talk about how desire is made, which combined with the star-headed monster on the right gave a decidedly creepy vibe.
• I think the prompt was ferry mongoose which okay, little weird. But labelling every element like it’s a bad editorial cartoon? That’s some genius right there.
• And then there’s this atrocity, for which I can only apologize for my part in bringing it into the world. Given the words family heart, my group decided that naturally that meant there was a family (Grandpa, Mommy, Sis, baby, dog, and cat) all linked by branching blood vessels via their necks to one monstrous, floating, common heart. As perversions of nature go, it’s pretty darn adorable, thanks to the enthusiastic ability of Andy Runton to put a cheerful smiley face on anything. I’m so, so sorry.

But the thing is? It worked. People got to know each other, fires (both of friendship and literal variety) were stoked, hangouts initiated, and scrounging for one the advanced copy of Guts that Raina Telgemeier was able to bring with her³ begun. Some tapped out early, some were at it until the early light of dawn started hinting over the mountains to the east.

Pictures:
A little while before departing Juneau, I noticed a pair of skydivers — they’re small and hard to see because phone cameras don’t do a great job of picking out small, light-colored things against vast swathes of uniform color, but there you are. If you draw a line from the tramline anchor station on the ridge along the 2 o’clock angle, you’ll see one of them close in, and one about a third of the way to the picture’s border.

You can see the first one better in this photo, and I’ll note about five minutes later I lost sight of them, and I’m not sure if they came down on this side of the ridge or not. The other seemed to be well over the Gastineau Channel, but I lost them also; they could have landed anywhere from the cruise ship docks to the old mining site on Douglas Island.

Now here’s the thing — when I saw the skydivers, I made an involuntary half-whistle, half whoooo sound. This prompted one of the local ravens to mimic me, repeating my vocalization for as long as he could see me. They’re not only smart and capable of holding grudges, they’ll make fun of you, too.

I’ve blurred these two photos a little for privacy. Thanks to a small Polaroid camera, everybody got their picture taken and placed on the big Who’s In Camp board. Not only could this help you identify fellow Campers, but if you were to leave (for a hike, or to head to the local beach for aurora hunting, say), you could shift your picture to the OUT column so we’d have an idea where everybody was. There was a sign-out sheet nearby with times. Nobody’s seen you for a bunch of hours? We’d see if the dogs (one lab, a pair of huskies, and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in an inflatable cone of shame) could sniff you out.

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¹ Aaron Suring recommends making yourself look large by putting your arms up and being loud; Hey, bear! being a potentially useful turn of phrase. Within 24 hours, this led to Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett adapting his long-running Stan Lee impersonation by deciding that Stan was a) at Camp, and b) extremely afraid of bears. If you ever wanted to know what ursaphobic Stan Lee shouting Hey, bear! sounds like, feel free to ask LArDK for demo.

But be warned that about six dozen people will never, ever get that particular set of phonemes out of their brains.

² Two and a half days later during pack-out, I had to dismantle that particular diorama and the balloon simply would not pop. I stabbed it with a pen and it slowly farted out air at me.

³ It was never not being read, and at the end of Camp, one Camper⁴ was chosen randomly to present that well-thumbed copy to a kid in their life, because Raina is awesome.

⁴ It wasn’t me, so you’ll have to wait until 17 September along with the rest of the world, kids in my life. Rest assured, it’s Raina’s most personal, relatable, and ultimately reassuring work yet. It’s almost like she’s friggin’ great at making comics or something.

Saturday is a big day for #ComicsCamp; there’s the one-day convention at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center for the people of Juneau¹ that needs to be set up, conducted, and torn down. There’s hotels and accommodations to be checked out of and luggage packed. There’s the travel to the campsite itself, up by Eagle Beach, and getting settled into what for many will be their third bed in 48 hours. Hopefully, there’s time to eat² somewhere in the middle.

This year the Mini-Con featured signings from nine creators from the 10:00am opening until the 5:00pm closing, a board game room, children’s book readings at the Juneau Public Library, and sessions at three nearby venues. In no particular order:

• The Zach Gordon Youth Center saw drawing hangouts (with Kazu Kibuishi, Tony Cliff, Raina Telgemeier, and Andy Runton), a writing hangout (with Ryan North and Karla Pacheco³), and a making monsters out of Sculpey hangout (with Shing Yin Khor).
• The Alaska State Museum ran a series of workshops on making picture books, with Alaskan creators discussing self-publishing (Inari Kylanen [store manager for Alaska Robotics] and Lee Post), writing (Hannah Lindoff) and illustrating (Michaela Goade and Lucas Elliott).
• Further workshops in the Community Room of KTOO featured Scott C on character design, and Dik Pose and Nobu Koch on stop motion animation.
• Presentations in the auditorium at KTOO featured Lucy Bellwood on the full history of Jeanne Baret (which had been teasered the night before in the library variety show), a Baby-Sitters Club Super Secret Club Meeting with Raina Telgemeier and Gale Galligan (the two women chosen by BSC creator Ann M Martin to adapt her work into graphic form), and discussions of work and process by Tillie Walden, Jen Wang, and Kazu Kibuishi.

I want to talk about two of those at some length, partially because they were the only two I got to see in their entirety around my show volunteer gigs, and partially because they provide a study in contrasts. As such, they neatly illustrated a recurring theme explored at Camp (of which more later) that success looks different depending on who you are, where you are in your career path, and what your expectations are. No one interpretation is correct, and though there are similarities (particularly in the financial realm), every successful creative career is its own thing.

That being said, it would be difficult to find two [web]comics creators that work more differently than Kibuishi and Walden. Kibuishi is a planner — head down, work in service to a larger goal (often related to caring for others). He spent his college years as an award-winning editorial cartoonist⁴ and was on track to animation prize winning fame when a robbery cost him his computer and more than a year’s work. He began a stint as an architectural graphic designer and helped sell billion dollar projects around the world — interesting work, to be sure, but it wasn’t telling the stories that he had in him.

September 11th prompted him to quit and shift back to stories, which led to Copper, then a stint as a Creative Director at an animation studio and commercials, and then the big leagues: Disney hired him to direct the feature film Let’s Get Francis.

Which you’ve never seen. Nobody has, because a fair amount of studio productions are made just to keep somebody else from making them, with no intention of ever being released. It’s possibly in the Disney vaults somewhere, waiting to be released the week before a big-screen adaptation of Amulet, or maybe it was wiped to recycle drives like the early days of cel animation. Kibuishi didn’t want to get lost in the process — after all, the first work on what became Frozen started while Walt was still alive — and so he left Disney, made a pitch around Amulet, and then it’s a straight shot to today.

Well, except for that bout of meningitis that put him in a coma and gave him amnesia. The lasting effects of that were he got to read his own books and enjoy them as new things, not realizing he’d made them, and a need to be even more meticulous in his work processes than before. Oh, and the time it took him to get back to Amulet was spent painting the covers for the American editions of the Harry Potter books for their 15th anniversary.

How meticulous is his work process? He’ll draw out scenes for his stories and then rearrange them until they make sense as a book. Each scene, each page will be run through an average of 5 to 7 versions before he decides he’s got something he can commit to; tricky pages may take as many as 20 revisions. It’s a lot of planning, years to get the book finagled the way he wants it, but it has its rewards — there’s a subway station in New York City where the mosaic tile features a kid reading a copy of Amulet, which prompted a sincere Whoa when he saw it⁵.

Now let’s talk Walden. She’s 22 years old. She spent a dozen years as a competition-level figure skater, as chronicled in Spinning. Not chronicled in Spinning is the fact that art and comics were her twin brother’s thing growing up, and after the usual period of time drawing comics as a young kid, she left that area of expression⁶ to him — she still had skating, after all, and several instruments that she plays. Comics came when she was 16 when her father signed her up for a two-day comic making workshop that possibly he wanted to attend himself.

A two-day workshop with Scott McCloud, who saw something in the non-comics-making teen and told her he was looking forward to seeing what she did (knowing McCloud, he was both a) entirely sincere, and b) actually did see something of her future success by the end of those two days). So you’ve got that kind of encouragement and no real skill at comics and the rational thing is to bring it out as a funny story but never do comics — but you don’t have the work ethic imposed by skating coaches (one of them Russian) who would tell you things like Run and don’t stop until you throw up.

So you spend your days at 16, 17, 18 doing nothing but comics. You eke your way out of high school, you talk your way into the Center For Cartoon Studies MFA program despite not having a bachelor’s degree⁷. You put your work online and get contacted by a British publisher who prints your first three books. Then you do Spinning and On A Sunbeam and the forthcoming Are You Listening? (a comparatively brief 320 pages, compared to 400 for Spinning and 544 for Sunbeam).

So how do you create so many comics, which are so very good, so quickly, even with the single-minded devotion to work of a border collie on pure, uncut espresso? How do you deliver more than 1200 pages of comics by the age of 22, period, much less in the time since your graduation from comics school?

You do so by treating comics like jazz.

Walden works straight to ink, no designs or character studies, no extensive planning. The page gets drawn and the characters — What’s her haircut? Long, because my hand’s still moving! — and story reveal themselves. It’s not sloppiness or haste or inattention to detail. It takes a great deal of proficiency, a great deal of discipline, a complete mastery of the fundamentals to sit at the drawing board cold and just let it all wash over you and out, the way that Coltrane or Parker or Monk could on horn or piano.

And like Coltrane or Parker or Monk, you have to be ready to deal with the consequences and imperfections: Maybe the drawing looks a little funky. I have this attitude that nothing bad will happen if I screw up. That courage leads to a deliberateness to make the story work, and also to a reality where many Tillie Walden originals simply don’t exist — they’re discarded when their purpose has been served. The point of Tillie Walden’s comics is the process and the act of creation; the books are a product (or possibly even a byproduct) and exist for you guys.

I suspect that for both Kibuishi and Walden, Hell looks something very much like being forced into the other’s creative work habits. And yet, they both fall in love with their characters, who they are, how they change, and the things that happen to them that make them different people.

And deep down, there’s a reflection between them.

Walden talks and answers questions with long, arcing responses that are perfectly structured to anticipate followups and address points you didn’t even realize that you were asking about, all while drawing and filling her space with whatever whim takes her⁸. Her lines are crisp and perfect, each one adding the precise detail needed, iterating the page through the versions of what it has been and will be⁹.

Kibuishi paints while he talks, off the cuff, returning to previous ideas, conversing casually, but he builds his paintings up out of abstract swathes of color, stopping before he gets too detailed. Your brain, he explains, makes this look more detailed and real when it fills in what’s missing. If I kept painting this, it would look less real to you. He’ll never make another painting quite like it, given how unplanned, improvised, and jazzlike it is.

Neither is correct. Neither is wrong. Neither should be emulated. Both have found ways that work for them multiple times in multiple creative arenas. Their paths to comics success have been about as different as they could be and yet I find myself willing to drop cash on an unknown book by either solely because I know that they’ve found the tops of their respective games in service of their stories. The differences don’t matter, only the fact that they’ve found ways to perfect their skills.

And we get to read the comics.

Pictures:
Mostly, they’re in the text above. For reference, this is what the floor looked like at opening, just a few of the 972 people that made their way over. And here’s what the greater Juneau region looks like.

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¹ And beyond; everybody in Alaska has a frequent flyer number, and they are used to hauling halfway across the state for something interesting. Over the years, people at the Mini-Con have identified themselves as being from Fairbanks, Homer, Anchorage, Ketchikan, and Sitka. Don’t think I’ve spoken to anybody from the Aleutians or Nome, but it also wouldn’t surprise me.

² Did I mention that there’s great food in Juneau? Pretty sure I did. That includes a couple a tasty food trucks right outside the JACC, one of which does awesome steamed pork buns.

³ The two of whom were last seen together explaining the Pacheco:North Ratio of standard cow:big cow, which they demonstrated live at Camp.

The wisdom of letting Pacheco (who had for sale at her table custom hotel door hangers that on one side read Gettin’ My Bone On and on the other side read Fuck Off; I meant to buy ten for random distribution on my next hotel trip but failed to do so) near youth is best debated another time.

⁴ Well, he kept coming in second to this one other guy, but then again that other guy just won a Pulitzer, so no shame there.

⁵ It’s also technically a copyright violation, but Kibuishi and Scholastic decided that it can slide.

⁶ Which idea calls back to a question Kibuishi fielded — when asked When did you start drawing comics? he replied When did you stop?

⁷ Walden: Suckers!

⁸ Walden: I’m going to draw a house. No, a boat.
Audience member: A houseboat!
Walden: Yes! I don’t know what houseboats look like, but I’m going to draw one anyway.

⁹ And, at the end, I’m gonna put Bart Simpson up here.

For those who are new around here, there’s this thing called #ComicsCamp, run by the fine folks at Alaska Robotics (which is a comics shop¹, game shop, art supply shop, and gallery) in Juneau, and it involves bringing creative folks into schools, public events, and a one-day convention before giving them a weekend of recharging and also s’mores. I’ve been privileged to attend three times now, and you can read about my previous experiences at Camp here, here, here, here, and here. Those two series will read differently from each other, and from the one that’s starting now — Camp’s a living, breathing thing, and it changes.

It started for me a couple of days before my travel with a bit of a panic — the SSD in my laptop decided it had reached end of life and bricked itself good; there’s a hard drive in there, too, but it was a tense couple of hours getting Linux reinstalled and data salvaged. Fortunately, I keep a bootable USB drive attached to the power converter cable, so I didn’t have to go searching too far. The whole thing’s a lot slower than it used to be (or should be), but that’s an issue for later this week; it got me through what it needed to, which was ensuring that the creator presentations for one of the public events — about which more momentarily — were tested and projectable.

In addition to seeing a swathe of Campers arrive, Thursday 25 April also saw public events: storytime and a ‘zine making workshop at one of the Juneau public libraries², the Juneau Makerspace got some hands-on puzzle-cutting knowledge from the master, and a lecture by Ryan North on How To Invent Everything which he should know, on account of he wrote a book that tells you how to do exactly that. In case you’re looking for the high points, they include:

• Young Ryan first became aware of the notion of time travel when he was six and saw Back To The Future for the first time; it made an impression³ and he was particularly struck by the Chuck Berry scene and thus had an appreciation of the Bootstrap Paradox at a far younger age than most of us.
• Having decided to write what is surely The Most Dangerous Book In History, North found himself staring down literally years, plural, of research⁴ to determine not only what the key technologies of human history are, but also how to create them from first principles while simultaneously not imparting knowledge that might hurt or kill his readers. This led to what may have been the most existentially self-evident question of all when North asked himself (and I quote):
  

  Have I accidentally decided to do something impossible?

  Again??

• But he persevered, and found within all that research to find a key thought re: human inventiveness and creativity; namely We are not as smart as we think we are. He rattled off a series of key inventions in history — human flight, or the stethoscope⁵ — and found that they came about centuries or millennia after we had the basic parts and just failed to put them together⁶. In the case of arguably the greatest invention in human history⁷ — written language, which allows us to preserve knowledge across time, space, and culture — we were about 200,000 years late.
• The more basic the technology, the later we were, and the further back in time you go, the worse things get. Now-ubiquitous crops were terrible, people died because they didn’t know to wash their damn selves, and the only positive of the past is that if you do end up there, you can name things after yourself.

One thing you should know about Juneau is that it’s basically the same as Portland or Seattle, just smaller; you’ve got great food (shouts-out to The Rookery Cafe and In Bocca Al Lupo, who both fed more than their share of Campers before and after our time off-grid, and the astonishingly good Coppa Ice Cream), great cultural institutions, and great people. Give them something fun to do, and they’ll arrive in droves, as they did for the Kickoff Event at the Valley branch of the JPL. In addition to music from the Marian, Seth & Maria Rockin’ Teenage Combo, you had:

• Cat Farris reading from her graphic novel, My Boyfriend Is A Bear. Fun fact! Farris and I spent several days bonding over our greyhounds, because greyhound people are the best people.
• Molly Muldoon talking about how to solve a murder all Agatha Christie style. Fun fact! Muldoon’s rules for dealing with murderers left an impression on everybody who went to Camp, and who spent a great deal of time making sure there were extra exits from everyplace. Can’t be too careful!
• Alex Graudins explaining how improv can help you make friends and be more creative in all aspects of life. Fun fact! Graudins illustrated Science Comics: The Brain, and included dearly beloved and sadly departed pooch Reginald Barkley in three cameos, not two as I’d previously counted.
• Alison Wilgus explained Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation, and why it’s such a jerk. Fun fact! I have one about Wilgus’s trademark red glasses, but it’s not my story to tell. Sorry!
• Gale Galligan shared her knowledge of bunnies, who are adorable but also super gross. Fun fact! I am not kidding, what rabbits do with poop is gross.
• Dik Pose spoke about baseball. Fun fact! You don’t need a presentation to talk baseball; just like on the radio, a voice and some imagination is pretty much the purest expression of following the game.
• Michael Grover shared comics about starting a band when you’re a ghost and have no hands. Fun fact! Don’t feel bad, Jake Spooky, many bass players have never played bass, or even seen a bass.
• David Malki ! talked about the social history of beards. There was other stuff in there, but it was really about beards. Fun fact! The band’s musical outro was an improvised, lyrics-ignored version of Wonderwall, chosen solely so that Wondermark could be sung in the chorus.
• Tony Cliff read his forthcoming children’s book, Let’s Get Sleepy. Fun fact! There are enough Tonys Cliff in the world that trying to search for this Tony Cliff and Let’s Get Sleepy produces a lot of results on Marxist class struggle.
• Jen Wang talked about chickens, which come in a bewildering variety of sizes, colors, and shapes. Fun fact! There are hen-to-rooster trans chickens.
• Tillie Walden read Shel Silverstein poems. Fun fact! Silverstein wrote more great poems that conventional mathematics can count; for every one of his poems you love, there are dozens that other people love just as much.
• Lucy Bellwood talked about Jeanne Baret, who defied expectations and traveled the world cataloging and categorizing botanical specimens for pre-Revolution France. Fun fact! Baret collected and described more than 6000 species, but the gentleman of society who sponsored her took all the credit and named a couple dozen species after himself. She got one plant named for her like five years ago.
• Shing Yin Khor talked about the numerous dinosaur statues — some of which bear only passing resemblance to what we know about actual dinosaurs — of Holbrook, Arizona. Fun fact: the dinostatue:human resident ratio of Holbrook (approximately 1:149) is much greater than either the whalestatue:human resident or dogstatue:human resident ratios of Juneau (both approximately 1:32,000).

Afterwards, local Camp helper-organizers Rob & Pagan volunteered their lovely home for dinner and dessert supplied by Coppa. At Pat Race’s request, they came up with a Squirrel Girl-themed ice cream called Eat Nuts And Kick Butts (peanut butter with salted caramel ribbons and a chocolate layer on top). Ryan North, naturally, was given the honor of the first scoop which turned out to be necessary, as the solid-frozen carton required a Ryan-sized man’s strength to break through. It took some doing, but he ultimately succeeded; it was a good omen for the days to come.

Pictures:
Juneau is a fabulously beautiful place, and given the landscape found all around, there is little surprise that it’s a vertical city. I once made the mistake of trying to go to a restaurant by the most direct route and wound up taking four separate sets of outdoor staircases.

Remember what I said about arriving in droves? This crowd came out at 6:00pm on a Friday night.

Remember what I said about Coppa’s ice cream? Here’s the Peeps flavor, with real decapitated Peeps throughout. And here’s the ENAKB variety being duly selfied by North, who then did his best ceremonial ribbon cutting pose for the crowd. It proved to be a hard-frozen challenge requiring mighty struggle, but in the end it was worth it.

_______________
¹ And a damn fine one, too. So fine, in fact, that they’ve been nominated for the Eisner Spirit of Comics retailer award this year. If you’re an Eisner voter, Pat Race, Aaron Suring, and everybody at AK Robotics are stellar human beings with a real sense of service for their community.

² The one on Douglas Island, one of three in the Juneau Public Libraries system, all of which saw events.

³ To the degree that he wrote an e-book that is a page-by-page deep reading of the novelization of Back To The Future, which among other things has Opinions on the subject of Mr Strickland. What I am saying is that Ryan North has probably thought a lot more about time travel — real and fictional — than you or me.

⁴ He was maybe halfway into the process when we spoke about it at Camp 2017.

⁵ The only time something was invented, North reminds us, because somebody was too horny to otherwise do their job.

⁶ Or, in the case of the compass, neglected to put it to its practical use. Rather than navigation, the Chinese originally used compasses for fortune telling.

⁷ No, not dogs. Humanity has domesticated about 16 different species, and only dogs are workmates, guardians, helpers, and friends that know our minds and read our expressions. Given how thoroughly and completely they have tied their lives to ours, it’s reasonable to say they domesticated themselves, or at least deserve credit for the assist.

For those of you that were wondering, it’s been 15 hours and 4 time zones since I got up.

Also in case you were wondering, because I probably will not have another chance to write this before it becomes old news, the Cartoon Art Museum has stuff going on for Free Comic Book Day, Saturday of next week:

• CAM’s “first Saturday” workshops summer season kicks off with a special set of themed lessons on Saturday, May 4th. In celebration of Free Comic Book Day, participants will learn how to make their own mini-comic. Kids 7 to 13 years old can catch the 1:00pm to 2:30pm session, and those 14 and up can come by at 3:00pm to 4:30pm; cost is US$20, with a 15% discount for CAM members. Similar sessions will also run the first Saturday of June, July, and August.
• Anticipating the release of the Detective Pikachu movie release on Friday the 10th, there will be a Sketch-a-thon on the 4th Local artists will be drawing pictures related to Detective Pikachu in the museum lobby, and free Pokegoodies given away. This event is free and open to the public, 11:00am to 5:00pm.
• And, of course, Saturday the fourth is also Star Wars Day, and you can also craft your own paper lightsaber, with materials provided, from 11:00am to 5:00pm.

Okay, still got things to do before this very long day is done. See you when I see you.

[Editor’s note: Postings this week are going to be brief (as I prepare for) or absent entirely (as I travel to and attend) on account of Alaska Robotics Mini-Con on Saturday and the adjacent events. For that matter, you probably won’t get anything out of me next week as I’ll be away from network and/or traveling and/or recuperating. We thank you in advance for your patience.]

• Evan Dahm’s latest Overside tale, Vattu, is reaching a point in the story that feels like the end game is approaching. The overall plot is at an inflection point — the emperor is dead, plots swirl around the succession, at least two communities of ex-pats are in various stages of revolt, and another of individual exiles is in upheaval — and there are arcs around the main characters to wrap up. What better time to release the 1000th page of the saga, as Dahm did yesterday?

  If you think that reading the whole damn thing to date (which is a very good use of your time, let me assure you) is too taxing via the website (I sympathize, I can’t read big story chunks online), I refer you to the two books that tell the first roughtly-half of the story (nearly six hundred pages worth!), and a third one is about to ship to Kickstarter backers. In the meantime, everybody congratulate Dahm, and I’ll see you in the depths of the Blue Age.

• Less than three weeks out seems to be not the time to announce new special guests, but you are not TCAF, who add on until the very last moment before opening their doors. The newest tranche of guests from around the world includes Seth, Bessora, Margreet de Heer, Erica Henderson, Kid Koala, Rachel Lindsay, Jonathan Ng, Richard Marazano, Alex Norris, Émilie Plateau, Jérémie Royer, David Rubin, Hiromi Takashima, Typex, Jhonen Vasquez, and Chip Zdarsky¹.

  TCAF will happen in and around the Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge Street) on Saturday 11 May (9:00am to 5:00pm) and Sunday 12 May (10:00am to 5:00pm). Attendance is free, but some events will require tickets to control crowding.

Spam of the day:

Stop What You Are Doing And Look At This Very Good Offer !!

This Very Good Offer includes a coupon so I can advertise on Bing. I do not think you know what constitutes goodness with respect to offers.

_______________
¹ Who for once is at the end of the alphabet instead of that bastard Jim Zub².

² Jim Zub was kind enough to send a preview copy of issue #2 of his current comiXology series, Stone Star. As you may recall from launch day last month, issue #1 impressed me, and I can safely say that issue #2 builds on that framework and ramps up the narrative.

And, uh, looks like Zub’s now the last person to be mentioned in this post. Sorry, Chipster.

Like, a bunch more Homestuck dropped about five minutes ago.

Can’t imagine why I’m so distracted today.

One thing that helped my focus, though? Called the office of my Congressional representative to make clear that it is utterly necessary to begin the process of impeachment. It will not be quick — the process for the previous title-holder of Most Corrupt And Venal Piece Of Garbage To Occupy The White House took somewhere between six and fourteen months, depending on when you want to say it started. It won’t be easy, it will be divisive (but no more so than allowing the present state of affairs to continue), but it is gods-damned necessary.

So. Call your representatives, since that’s where things start. Chairman Nadler’s subpoena for the full, unredacted Mueller Report is a good start, but it must be made clear — the power being exercised in the executive is illegitimate, the daily violations of the emoluments clause unconstitutional, and the damage to the country by all associated with this administration are not tolerable until a new election. The time to compel testimony, build a case, and refer for trial in the Senate is past. We are either a self-governing people, or we are not.

I want to introduce you to Dr Leah Misemer, who is a postdoc at Georgia Tech¹ and assistant director of GT’s Communication Center. She researches comics, how they can be used by marginalized audiences to find community, and the use of comics in the fields of medicine and allied health. She teaches students about using comics as a mechanism for civic engagement, and to think about all the ways that comics reach audiences.

She’s had students in her Webcomics And Digital Culture course doing research on the structural nature of webocmics, and the niche they occupy in the online landscape. The resulting exhibition (which is, appropriately enough, online) is now up and running, and you may wish to check out Webcomics, Print, And Digital Culture: Speaking W/O Limit.

The exhibition is built around a series of collections, each examining a central theme:

• Building Community looks at everything from how audiences congregate in forums to how the societally disadvantaged can find places to congregate without fear or judgment.
• Online Identity looks at how authors can express themselves through their creations, particularly via autobio comics.
• Digital Affordances looks at the unique capabilities of online vs print; alt-text, animation, the sheer scope of Homestuck are all present, but so is the bit where you can change Dinosaur Comics to alternate forms by messing with the URL.
• Digital Vs Print is exactly what it says on the tin; it might be a superset of the other themes, in fact.
• Global Reach is probably the collection you should read first, in that we here at Fleen have (by necessity of language if nothing else) a clear tendency towards English-language webcomics in general, and North American webcomics in particular (the efforts of FSFCPL notwithstanding). Even accounting for that, there’s a whole dang world out there making webcomics, and we don’t really talk about them except for when The Nib introduces us again to somebody doing great work in yet another corner of the world.
• Diversity Of Purpose looks at how webcomics can always find a niche. A webcomic can be about depression or transition or cancer, or it can be about wacky things that happen in a library, or even (in a few cases, at least I’ve heard of such) about a coupla’ guys on a couch playing videogames. It’s all fair game.
• Case Study: xkcd, which was chosen because it exemplifies all of the other themes in one handy combo platter of stick figures. So, so many stick figures.

There will be interpretations you don’t agree with², there will be stuff that leaves you scratching your head³, but I can pretty much promise it’ll make you consider aspects of this weird, wonderful world o’ webcomics that had never occurred to you before. And ten internet points to anybody that can produce arguments for which of the theme criteria Fleen meets.

Spam of the day:

I’ d tried everything to beat my E.D… But when I injected Thai street drugs directly into my penis… Let’ s just say, things went too far. They nearly amputated my ” Johnson” with a scalpel…

This email, in case you were wondering, features the subject line Secrets to perfect female satisfaction, but appears to have completely forgotten the clitoris. So, yeah.

_______________
¹ It is not known if she is a ramblin’ wreck.

² I found the Digital Vs Print and Digital Affordances sections to be overlapping substantially, and would have personally combined them into one collection, adding in a collection examining how webcomics typically are creator-owned and do away with editorial/corporate control over material. A webcomic’s audience is the reader, where a corporate comic’s audience is the editor or publisher. This idea is, to be fair, addressed to a degree in the Diversity Of Purpose collection.

³ For example, whoever described Girls With Slingshots as The webcomic follows a group of friends who are all members of the LGBTQ community and their day-to-day experiences seems to have overlooked a raft of characters (Maureen, Clarice, Candy, Hazel’s mom, Jameson, Melody, Chris, Zach) and especially how Hazel — who is arguably the closest stand-in for the creator — is sometimes uncomfortable with her best friend’s queerness.

There’s also a description of Scenes From A Multiverse using few digital affordances, which overlooks the polling feature that SFAM was originally designed around. I get it, students at GT are in demanding majors and this is a humanities elective; they don’t necessarily have time to go back through a decade or more of archive. But I will never understand how anybody described Homestuck as convenient while keeping a straight face.