How’s your day been? I got into a twitterfight with a brand that has questionable manufacturing quality control and terrible customer service policies, so I got that going for me. Anyway, I thought I could direct you to a pair of webcomics that launched on past Aprils Third, and which could not be more different.

Today, A Girl And Her Fed becomes a teenager, but hopefully holds off on the sullen aspects for another year or two. If AGAHF were a Jewish boy, today it would be a man! It retains the flinty-eyed examination of the implications of technology, surveillance, and the War On Terror that first pulled me lo those many years ago, and keeps me coming back for one of the best villains in fiction. I loathe Clarice so much. So very, very much.

Also today, Cucumber Quest turns eight, and Cucumber has some questions. CQ is all earnestness and sincerity, letting youthful chosen ones and ancient dooms play with their roles in new ways¹, and allowing hostage and captor to find time to bond as genuine friends over baking. And above all the art is adorable, A-DORBS, from top to bottom.

So unless you have some surgery to do on a kitchen appliance of your own, may I suggest blocking out some time to archive dive on one or both of these webcomics? Initialistic creators KB Spangler (AGAHF) and Gigi DG (CQ) will surely thank you for reading (and even more for purchasing) their stories. You’ll thank you, too.

Spam of the day:

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Gmail is telling me This message seems dangerous presumably because all of the links in this spam are chcok-full of malware. I’m figuring it’s dangerous because if it does what it promises, it would take a full 20% of my mass in two weeks, which seems like a bad idea.

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¹ Why exactly have there been so many previous Chosen Ones? And why does the ancient evil not particularly want to be part of a cycle of threat, retreat, and more threat?

As this goes live, we’re in the vicinity of 90 hours until MoCCA Fest 2019. We’ve got the programming, there are some late exhibitor addenda (see below), and some news on peripheral events that you may want to keep an eye on. There’s some other things going on, too.

• MoCCA, then: Word comes to us via the Tweets Machine that Evan Dahm will be at table G238. I mean, this was a no-brainer, guy’s got Island Book coming out six weeks from today from :01 Books, which is going to put him square in the sights of those that pay attention to kids books. And kidlit librarians/advocates are relentless in their pursuit of good books, so congrats to Dahm on his forthcoming recreation of the opening of A Hard Day’s Night.

  Also at MoCCA (although not tabling) will be Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, also no surprise, given that Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (pictures by Ms Valero-O’Connell, words by the incomparable Mariko Tamaki) is coming out five weeks from today¹, also from :01. She’ll be signing at their table (E162) at 2:00pm on Saturday, and will likely be wandering the floor other times. Her other appearances in conjunction with Laura Dean will come between now and November, and will encompass the cities of Minneapolis/St Paul, Toronto, Chicago, and Leeds.

• Speaking of MoCCA, one of the long-running traditions is that the night before, Drink And Draw Like A Lady; since 2008, it’s gotten women together to make comics in public, have some delicious beverages, and never once have to hear the question, So what’s it like being a woman in comics?

  But the thing about traditions is, somebody has to arrange the damn things, and oftentimes it falls onto just a few. The first DADLAL was put together by a couple of ladies named Hope Larson and Raina Telgemeier², and since then a fluctuating group of volunteers have taken on tasks for events in various cities, from arranging the posters³ to lining up sponsorships (for a number of years, that would have been Katie Lane’s Work Made For Hire) to making sure the venue was ready.

  Most recently, it’s been Alisa Harris, Alison Wilgus, and Tea Fougner that have done most of the work for the NYC events; they have lives and obligations the other 364 days of the year, and also life sometimes gets in the way:

  We know it’s been a while and we’d like to apologize for the late notice that we will be taking a break from our annual pre-MoCCA Fest party this year. A number of factors have come up. Most notably, The Productive, our awesome venue for the past several years has closed its physical location.

  Alison, Tea and I have been busy with life and work and decided that it might be best to take a year to recuperate so we don’t spread ourselves too thin. We are so grateful to everyone who has attended and helped out in past years! This party is awesome because of you.

  DADLAL isn’t gone, it’s just taking a break. Here’s hoping Fougner, Harris, and Wilgus get to spend Friday night with their feet up, a preferred beverage close to hand, and whatever amiable companionship they prefer purring, wagging, or even speaking in human words that they’ve earned this break.

• And not MoCCA, but still on the festival circuit: Shelli Paroline is many things — artist, writer, half of a very successful creative duo with Braden Lamb, and co-director of MICE, the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo. It’s in that latter capacity that she would like you to know that this year’s MICE will be happening on 19 – 20 October, on the campus of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that exhibitor applications are now open:
  

  You can now apply to exhibit at MICE happening October 19 – 20, 2019 in Cambridge, MA! Application period open through April 23. We got guidelines here: http://www.micexpo.org/application/

  I really have to get up to that show one of these years, as it is by all accounts a great one. And, for those who are just starting out exhibiting, MICE has one of the most reasonable table pricings in all of comics: full tables for US$180, halfsies for US$90, and thirds for US$65. They like to put an emphasis on the comics part of comics expo, and also to see new faces, so give it some thought between now and the 23rd, yeah?

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ I am going to get home from Comics Camp and immediately have a bunch of great books to read. This truly is a new golden age of comics.

² Before they were HOPE LARSON and RAINA.

³ They been drawn by Larson, Raina, Lucy Knisley, Erika Moen, Harris, Emi Lenox, Cary Pietsch, Savannah Zambrano, Janet Sung, Kat Fajardo, Olivia Li, Megan Brennan, and more. You recognize some of those names, and you’re going to recognize the others in future.

I mean, three stories, each of which demands that it get to set the image at the top of the post. I suppose I could just make three posts, but I am a lazy, lazy man. So it’s three in one.

I Think This Means Five Card Nancy Needs A Rules Addendum

Does anybody at this point doubt that Olivia Jaimes is the best thing to happen to the comics page since at least Richard Thompson’s Cul De Sac, which lasted too short a time.

Jaimes has spent a lot of the last couple of weeks providing a metareferential look at the nature of art and fame, which I thought was capped by yesterday’s title panel. Then today’s strip dropped and one of the key defining characteristics of Ernie Bushmiller’s creation came in for some scrutiny and revision. Namely, the three rocks:

Nancy is Plato’s playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn’t draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car. Much has been made of the “three rocks.” Art Spiegelman (following Bill Griffith—another Bushmiller aficionado) explained to his SVA students how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be “some rocks.” Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate “some rocks” but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of “some rocks.”

Bravo, Ms Jaimes, and may Nancy never want for rocks again.

I Hope He Got Some Tickets For The Gig, Too

Besides being a fabulous comedian, hilarious and heartfelt [voice] actor, and all-around terrific human, Patton Oswalt has done yeoman’s work in promoting artists whose work he loves, and doing so in a direct and effective manner: he pays them to make art for him. Particularly, every couple of shows when he’s on the road will feature a different show poster, and you don’t usually see the same artists repeated.

Just released over the weekend, a three-show stand in November features the work of Mike Holmes. It’s a far cry from Secret Coders (now out in boxed set) or his Mikenesses series, but it’s unmistakably Holmes — loose, energetic, lighthearted, joyous.

If you’re in Northern New Jersey, Baltimore, or Indianpolis in early November, I bet you can grab one when the stagehands are swapping out the displays. And if you aren’t, Oswalt promised a link to get the poster in his store soon, so keep your eyes open for that.

Randall Munroe’s Got A Toy Running Again

You might have seen the picture above when browsing to today’s xkcd, as I keep Javascript off in my daily browser (Opera), only breaking out the supplemental browser with JS enabled (Vivaldi) when the circumstances warrant. It keeps things fast, cuts down on ad tracking, and robs malware of a common infection vector. But when Randall Munroe says you need Javascript, buddy, you need Javascript.

Being foolish and forgetting everything I know about Munroe when he’s feeling creative and/or ornery enough to do a nonstandard comic, I figured that I might be treated with something like a personal tourney of 16 emoji to vote on, with probably some statistical measures about how many people agreed with my final winner, or my final four, or even my entire bracket.

Nope. Munroe appears to have included pert-near every damn Unicode emoji, with what appears to be a ten-level deep competition, a stagering 1024 emoji, which looks like this (compact) and this (enormous). No idea when it’ll be done, but if each of the matchups (512 in the 1st round, 256 in the 2nd, 128 in the 3rd, 64 in the 4th, 32 in the 5th, 16 in the 6th, 8 in the 7th, 4 in the 8th, 2 in the 9th, and finally 1 in the 10th) allows you just five seconds to make your decision, it would require nearly an hour and a half¹ to determine a winner, and that’s if just if each match only appeared to the world once.

Knowing Munroe’s appreciation of statistical significance, I’m guessing he will be waiting until each match has cycled through multiple times before declaring first-round winners. As of this writing, the bracket doesn’t appear to have any emoji moving into the second round, so I’d say come back no sooner than Wednesday’s update for the results. As for how he worked the seeding? That would probably take every remaining post in April if he felt like getting into all of his logic. I’m here for it.

Spam of the day:

Narrator : And so it came to pass on Christmas Day, that the human race did cease to exist. But even then, the Master had no concept of his role in greater events. For this was far more than humanity’s end! This was the day upon which the whole of creation would change forever!

Got to say, if you’re going to try to entice me into a ForEx scam, quoting Rassilon (as played by Timothy Dalton) is at least going to get my attention.

_______________
¹ 1023 matchups * 5 seconds per matchup / 60 seconds per minute = 85.25 minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spam of the day:

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

That’s when a pair of books by a pair of webcomickers drop, and they could not be any more different.

• First up, Vera Brosgol continues her alternating pattern of graphic novel with at least some elements of growing up Russian (Anya’s Ghost, Be Prepared) and childrens picture book, sometimes with a Russian feel to the whole thing (Leave Me Alone!), when she releases The Little Guys via Roaring Brook Press.

  It’s about these guys who are little, maybe half-height to a Smurf. They wear acorn caps for hats, they’ve got prominent noses, and I’m not sure if they have shaggy bodies or that’s just beard covering their bodies, but they’re totally charming. And, crucially, the eponymous Little Guys are the villains of the piece. Slowly the tale turns — they are little, but work together (that’s good!) and together they are mighty (admirable!) They meet any challenge (you go, Little Guys) to get what they want (uhhh, maybe slow down, Little Guys?) with the clear message: None for you! All for us! Hand it over to the Little Guys!

  Look, I’m not saying this book is to teach 3-6 year olds about the perils of in-group conformity and out-group oppression and how easily fascistic systems can evolve from seemingly benign messages … but I’m not not saying it. And I’m definitely not saying that this is a story that said 3-6 year olds should be kept from, since inoculation against virulent pathogens (of both the biological and sociopolitical varieties) is a good thing for herd immunity.

  I reserve the right to revise my impressions of Guys, Little and otherwise, once I get my hands on a copy, but in the meantime you can get a look at how such a book gets put together, and to check out Brosgol’s upcoming book tour dates, starting Sunday the 31st.

• Second, Box Brown continues his alternating pattern of graphic novel that’s a biography of somebody related to wrestling (Andre The Giant, Is This Guy For Real?) and sociological examinations, sometimes with a Russian connection (Tetris), when he releases Cannabis via :01 Books.

  Moreso than some of his earlier works, Cannabis depends on its subtitle to give an idea what the book’s really about: The Illegalization Of Weed In America. There’s a brief history of cannabis use going back a few millenia in India, its spread to the Old and New Worlds, and then it hits the meat of the story: how the prohibition of cannabis was an explicit grab for power and social control, largely by the singular efforts of Harry Anslinger, the first drug policy commissioner.

  (If you don’t know Anslinger’s story, On The Media included a detailed profile of the man in their history of the American drug war, which left me with the inescapable conclusion that Anslinger was motivated, more than anything else, by the fact that he was a racist shitbag. Dude basically murdered Billie Holiday, because she was performing her blackity-black music around decent white folk.)

  All of which makes Cannabis a unique book — not a social history of weed, or arguments for its beneficial nature or why it should be legal, but rather an examination of why it was outlawed, and how very much overemphasis on its dangers has come not from medical proof, but from political expediency to oppress the poor and non-white. My review copy was an early, uncorrected proof, so I’m interested to see what the final version looks like when it comes out. In the meantime, you can make plans to catch up with Brown on his book tour, which technically started last weekend at C2E2.

Spam of the day:

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See, I saw a couple of tweets here and there about something that looked interesting and I filed them in the “write about this” pile. Then I got an email from the PR guy at the responsible company, talking about how awesome this is. Got it, I thought, I really do want to write about this Then I got another email from one of the creators in question, also urging me to check things out. It’s a tactical PR exchange of a scale and depth that you’d normally associate with a Disney, or possible a mid-sized authoritarian regime¹.

If it weren’t all involving Jim Zub, I’d start to feel a bit put upon.

But as readers of this page know, I have great respect for Zub and his very generous nature, sharing more about how the comics business works with newbies² than anybody else I can think of. In superhero terms, he has the proportional strength and knowledge-sharing of three men.

And hey, I’d been thinking about mentioning his latest observation re: what sales looks like on creator-owned projects when he dropped a graph about the sales of the trade of his Pat Rothfuss collab on a two-IP crossoverganza, Rick & Morty vs Dungeons & Dragons. Spoiler: sometimes working in somebody else’s IP backyard means you sell a metric squatload of books.

Anyways, today Zub (and comiXology) would much like you to know about a new book, dropping today with no advance leaks or hints:

This morning, comiXology Originals announced and launched STONE STAR, my new creator-owned comic! Yup, we just pulled off a bit of a Beyoncé Drop, cutting through pre-hype and ordering hassles by making the announcement our simultaneous launch.

Anybody else, I’d say maybe they forgot or decided the promo budget was looking thin, but comiXology always has a plan, and being part of Amazon means they’ve got essentially unlimited promo resources. Zub, characteristically, shifted the attention from himself and onto his collaborators immediately. Like, before even describing the book:

Artist Max Dunbar (my phenomenal collaborator on Dungeons & Dragons: Legends Of Baldur’s Gate and the Champions in Weirdworld story), colorist Espen Grundetjern, letterer Marshall Dillon, and I have been working on this series in secret, building the characters and story while juggling our other projects, getting prepared for this surprise announcement and release.

The story? Sounds pretty cool, actually:

Stone Star is a mobile asteroid where entertainment abounds, and competition and celebrity are intertwined. Gladiators fight to find their fortune, but there are other secrets lurking beneath the surface as a new season of competition begins. It’s space-fantasy with modern-day sports entertainment that follows the story of Dail, a teenage thief pulled into the arena who has to decide where his loyalties lie.

The series launches today with a US$2.99 price point for issue #1, or free with Amazon Prime Reading, Kindle Unlimited, or comiXology Unlimited; I’ve made my opinions known about books in the Amazon ecosystem previously, so I figured I’d be waiting to see if there was ever a print run that can’t be depublished for whatever reason, and godsdammit, Zub went and sent me a review PDF of the first issue.

It’s good. It’s real good. Characters³, setting, conflict, stakes all established and waiting to pay off after the requisite last-page cliffhanger. I’m still holding out for that print copy, but I’m going to be paying attention to this one instead just waiting for it to pop back up on my radar.

If you’re inclined to work with e-comics, I’d suggest getting in on Stone Star now. Alternately, Zub and Dunbar have just been announced as surprise guests at Wondercon this weekend, so if you’re in Anaheim, drop by booth 2151 to say hi.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ But I repeat myself.

² In essence, creating competitors for himself down the line.

³ There just a bit of the late, lamented Leave It To Chance in the character designs. I’ve been waiting twenty years in case issue #14 of that ever drops, so that just a bit of resemblance is hitting me in the nostalgia gland.

And we all know that when I talk about the Bay Area, there’s just one thing that could mean: party at Shaenon Garrity’s backyard tiki hut! something cool is happening at the Cartoon Art Museum.

As it has in past years, CAM is participating in a museum exchange bonanza, where memberships at one cultural institution are honored at all of them, thus allowing people to see more cool stuff than they’d ordinarily be able to. This year, Member For A Day (taking place on 14 April, that’s a Sunday) will allow CAM members to take in:

• Asian Art Museum
• Berkeley Art Museum And Pacific Film Archive
• Contemporary Jewish Museum
• Fine Arts Museums Of San Francisco (the deYoung is in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion Of Honor is in Lincoln Park)
• Museum Of African Diaspora
• Museum Of Craft And Design
• Oakland Museum Of California
• San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art
• UC Botanical Garden At Berkeley
• The Walt Disney Family Museum

Note that there may be surcharges for special exhibits at FAMSF and the Oakland Museum Of California.

Importantly, the presence of some of the premier museum of not just the area, but of the country (SFMOMA is world class, MOAD is a Smithsonian affiliate) means that CAM is an equal, a legitimate home of scholarship and culture. I find that something that should be repeated every once in a while, as comics still get regarded as unimportant, or lesser — neither art nor literature. I mean, we all saw this on Twitter, right?

My daughter said her LA teacher has officially banned graphic novels from his class. She then asked me to find bags so she could bring hers to school so she can lend them out. A story right from one of @AlanGratz or @allisonvarnes books. #rebellibrarian #banthisbook

Kudos to both mom (for raising a daughter that wants to read and recognizes good reading doesn’t require a particular form) and daughter (who will be running a clandestine library out of her locker — I’m pretty sure this makes her a booklegger in the Leibowitzian sense). Who knows? Maybe the thrill of the illicit will entice a reluctant reader or two even moreso than some graphic novels would have on their own (and GNs are a tremendous tool for getting reluctant readers to engage with books) and it’ll be a net positive.

Mostly, though, that teacher (and some who are cheering him for making kids read “real books”) need to understand — comics are part of the culture and an equal to any other art. Maybe we can encourage that guy to visit San Francisco to see for himself if he needs traditional arbiters of worthiness to give him permission to let kids read what they want.

Spam of the day:
\\ Gay Union News //
Apparently, I’m in the union and didn’t realize it. Are there dues?

With EmCity and C2E2¹ behind us, there’s a stretch of festival-type comics shows in April and May², to be found in Chicago², Toronto, and Vancouver. They’re all respected institutions, and they kick off each year in New York with MoCCA Fest.

And if there’s one thing that tends to happen with festival-type events, it’s that organization and details can happen late in the game. Some are super organized³ and down to a science, some we’ll get programming the week of and updates to the exhibitors list almost up to the day of. What I’m saying here is, please remember as we move into festival season that any information we present now, there will probably be updates and addenda in the weeks to come.

All of which is to say, I saw somebody on the Twitters over the weekend remarking that the MoCCA exhibitor’s list was mostly illustrators and not comics folk, but I think that’s just a function of which names are posted to date. As I write this, there’s about 125 entries on the list, with many longtime MoCCA vets not listed (yet), and a typical MoCCA floorplan offering easily twice that many tables. There’s also the fact that some larger exhibitors (such as :01 Books) will have many creators rotating in and out, not to mention the TBA main signing table

So with the caveat that this list will certainly grow over the next couple o’ weeks, if you head to the Metropolitan West event space (West 46th between 11th and 12th, across the street from the USS Intrepid) on Saturday 6 April (11:00am to 7:00pm) or Sunday 7 April (11:00am to 6:00pm) and pay your ten bucks (eighteen for a weekend pass), you’ll get to see Aatmaja Pandya and Alison Wilgus sharing space at table F217, Sara Varon at table D156a, and an unknown number of folks associated with :01 Books at table E162, and likewise some number of folks associated with Czap Books at table H253b. The food court is damn good, too.

There will be more! [Editor’s note: Case in point, there was just an announcement from Iron Circus that they’ll be there.] And just because I don’t recognize a lot of the names on the current exhibitor’s list, that’s not a bad thing! I’ve learned about more new people I want to follow at MoCCA than at any other show, even in the disastrous post-Puck, whole-exec-board-quit, somebody-forgot-to-get-cash-registers-so-they-could-take-money-for-passes, Society of Illustrators-hadn’t-stepped-in-yet years. I expect this year will be no different. So keep an eye on the show page, keep an eye on this page, and if you have plans for MoCCA that haven’t made it onto the official site yet, drop me a line and I’ll share the news.

Spam of the day:

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_______________
¹ Which, also being a Reed!Pop show, is pretty similar in a lot of respects to ECCC, just a week or two later; for my money, CAKE is the webcomicky show in the Windy City.

² Okay, technically CAKE is in June but it’s the 1st and 2nd. Close enough, dammit.

³ Lookin’ at TCAF here, who have information up earlier than pretty much any other show of the year, festival-type, massive pop culture type, or gym-scale one day longbox vendor events. This is because Chris Butcher is not only an organizational machine, he has spent the past decade-plus training everybody that works on TCAF to be the same. Institutional memory and capability are real things, and to be prized when you have them.

We’ll catch up on Monday, ‘kay?

Man, you can learn a lot from the Twitters. Sometimes, you learn that an idea you had is already in motion. Sometimes you learn that an idea that nobody had makes perfect sense.

• I swear, when I wrote a week ago about the new line of civic engagement graphic novels from :01 Books and how they should pick up Zach Weinersmith, I didn’t know they already had:
  

  Check out the exclusive cover and excerpt reveal of #OpenBorders by @bryan_caplan and @ZachWeiner, on @PasteMagazine! This nonfiction graphic novel on immigration comes this fall, and is available for pre-order now!

  Weinersmith’s been talking to me forever about the graphic novel he’s been working on that argues in favor of open borders; I think the first time we talked about it here was a good eighteen months ago. In all that time, he never let on it was with :01, but honestly I should have guessed. And today, we have a cover reveal and street date, courtesy of Paste¹ magazine: Open Borders: The Science And Ethics Of Immigration, and 29 October.

  There’s a six page preview over there, too, which quickly establishes the central thesis of the book: that wholly unrestricted immigration is not only an economic good, but also morally necessary. I’m calling the over/under on the number of angry, early morning “executive time” tweets about the book on or around the release at … let’s say four.

• There’s a thing I never knew I needed — that anybody needed — and in retrospect it appears bloody obvious. Jeph Jacques has made a habit of purchasing … unique URLs to redirect to his comic², which is no new thing in webcomics. Jeffrey Rowland showed me a list of all the domains he owned once, and it was a thing of demented beauty; Rich Stevens collects domains like an early ’90s kid collected pogs.

  But Jacques makes use of his redirects, linking them when a new comic goes up; I don’t think he’s used questionablecontent.net in more than a year; on the one hand, most of his aliases are much shorter, and on the other, the fact that a massive, worldwide technological infrastructure was constructed just to allow dildo.pizza to exist is funny all by itself.

  But let’s face it — a gag can only take you so far, and some of those exotic TLDs have noncompetitive registrars; at some point, you gotta cut your losses or find a way to pay for your hobby:

  I have the best URLs in the business, and now you can have a sweet fuckin’ print of them thanks to @topatoco https://topatoco.com/collections/jeph-jacques/products/qc-urls-print …

  This is, I believe, the first poster that needs to possibly come with annual updates. Hey, Jeph, have you considered that? This could be an annual subscription item.

Spam of the day:

Teaching Communication Skills in the Age of Video Content

You know that I teach for a living, right? Fuck outta here with your one-click styling, automatic translation in over 120 languages and instant resizing of videos.

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¹ And hot dang, can I just express my admiration for a moment of how the folks at :01 have taken the let’s promote our forthcoming graphic novel game from sending the exclusive to The Beat or CBR and raised it to the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Paste? It sends a message not just about their own offerings when you can say a new graphic novel is not just of interest to the comics world, it is and should be part of the general culture.

² And sometimes just to have. Remember walmart.horse?