[Editor’s note: As in the past, these panel recaps are based on notes typed during the session; all discussion is the nearest possible paraphrase, except for direct quotes which will be italicized.]

That is, there are special challenges in doing book series, and Dr Rose Brock of Sam Houston State University in Texas wanted to tease out those challenges with the help of Jenni and Matt Holm, Raina Telgemeier, and Traci Todd, head of children’s publication at Workman; the latter had invaluable insights to offer on the production end of things.

It’s a huge topic, and discussion ranged from What made you want to collaborate? (directed at the Holm siblings; Jenni’s answer: I didn’t have to pay him. Matt’s answer: The [prose] book she was working on featured an older brother who communicated with a younger sister via comics he drew, and I created those cartoons; it wasn’t published until years after the Babymouse series debuted.) to the challenges of starting new series (Jenni again: We were up against a lot of hurdles in 2000, 2001, going to publishers, children’s imprints, trying to convince them to do a comic when they didn’t have an art pipeline, they didn’t know if girls would read them, they didn’t know if bookstores and libraries would buy them.)

Sticking with Team Holm, there was discussion of collaboration (Matt: Jenni does the story in storyboard form, I’ll revise and do thumbnails and send them to Jenni, and she’ll lay them out, figure out how the comic will look. She was a video editor before an author, so it’s like that — I’m shooting raw footage, she’s editing.) and the amount of time it takes to finish a project (Matt: For a traditional graphic novel about 100 pages long, it’s about a year from start to finish, from Jenni starts writing to I turn in the last of the art. We’re almost always working on other projects at the same time. There’s a lot of back and forth. One of the things you learn on a series is you have a lot of organization, we’ve got due dates in 2020, 2021.), a topic which others had perspectives on.

Raina wishes she had a collaborator to trade off with: I write a script in thumbnail, it’s all there but really rough. It can take from a month to two years to get through that stage, especially with autobio — I look through old photos, ask friends and family if they remember specific aspects of what we went through. And then we edit my life. They’ll tell me “Well, we don’t really like the character’s motivation here and I’m like “Well….”.

For those wondering, Raina estimates Smile is about 95% true and Sisters is about 90% true, mostly because dates got changed and cousins excised to keep the story flowing. Her next book, bee tee dubs, [I]s also a memoir, it’ll be a sort of prequel to Smile, which I haven’t really announced before. Then I draw for however long and send it off to my colorist. Scholastic would like it to be a very regular process, but it can take two years, it can take five years.

Keep those production timelines in mind, because Matt noted that the first Babymouse took two years before anybody not named Holm or their editor saw it, so the work was very much in a vacuum. The later volumes, there was some expectation about how things would go, but the first was a tabula rasa. By contrast, Raina started in minicomics and webcomics, where the feedback is fairly immediate; once she started working on Smile, it would be years of working without that feedback process.

It was also a time of having to set reasonable expectations; Scholastic launched their Graphix imprint with BONE by Jeff Smith, a nine-volume epic that was done, all it needed was coloring. Some in Scholastic’s hierarchy took that to mean that any graphic novel series could be produced on a six-month cycle and Raina had to point out that no, adapting the Baby Sitters Club books would take considerably longer, and her original works longer still. It seems obvious to us, but this was a new area for the publisher at the time; as it was, she wound up doing four books on a yearly basis, which is insanely fast.

Speaking of new areas, Raina pretty much invented (as noted by Mark Siegel a couple days ago) the area of middle grade memoir (and I’ll go further and say graphic novel memoir in general), so that led to new questions: How do you determine what you’re willing to tell about your life? As Raina noted, There’s always going to be a limit of this thing will make this other person really uncomfortable. With Smile, my editors looked at the webcomic and said There are too many characters here and for a story about having no friends you have too many friends. She tried to stick as close as possible to the emotional core, and if I have to swap out who actually betrayed me, well, everybody betrays everybody in middle school.

Since editors were brought up, Brock asked Traci Todd about being an editor, and she talked it up with enthusiasm: Being an editor was not a job I realized I could have until I was an editor, so if you feel you can’t be an author or illustrator, it’s quite gratifying. Editors acquire stories they are quite passionate about; they are just as invested as the team creating the book and when you see those pieces start to fall in place, you’re all on the same page, you just know the readers are going to connect with the imagery and the text. Even better, asked her favorite series to work on, she said I haven’t had it yet. I loved the things I worked on [which to date is licensed work] but I’m still waiting for my favorite. That’s the answer of somebody profoundly committed to making the next comic the best that’s ever been.

Quick questions followed, starting with Advice to yourself as a baby creator?¹
Jenni: Don’t do four books the first year.
Matt: Yeah. Desperately try to get regular schedule, don’t stay up too late working, it’s always better to stop and come back. Self-care is huge, thank goodness I had a dog and I had to chop firewood to keep the house heated.
Jenni: It took us years to realize that every book is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and then the series is a megamarathon.
Matt: Say No more often.
Raina: Be a curious person and have interests and make friends with your fellow creators. If you’re a person who is interested in science or the outdoors or politics or society, you won’t burn out all your inspiration after six books. Don’t lock yourself in your room all the time.
Traci: Be brave. As an author I had a book I’d worked on over a decade I was too afraid to share but then I did and now it’s going to be published. Related: be open to feedback and be gracious about the feedback you receive. Anybody giving you feedback wants the best for you and wants your work to be incredible.
Matt: Talking to humans is feedback. Talking on Twitter or Facebook is torture.

What are some of your favorite books that people haven’t discovered?
Jenni: Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol. [all agree]
Matt: The problem is when do we have a chance to read?
RT: Sci-Fu by Yehudi Mercado. A kid DJ in Brooklyn is abducted by aliens and has to defeat them in DJ battle. Gale Galligan used to be my assistant and has taken on the Baby Sitters Club series. She’s very manga influenced, it can be so shoujo, so good.
Traci: There’s a new series I’ve heard of, about a little girl that can see a T-Rex nobody else can see, like Calvin & Hobbes. [Editor’s note: I’ve not been able to identify this series; if you recognize it, please let us know in the comments.]
Raina: The Witch Boy by Molly Ostertag and its sequel, The Hidden Witch.
Jenni: Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett Krosoczka.

Questions from the floor followed. Asked what jobs they wanted when they were kids, the panelists replied:

Jenni: Ballerina, but I got fired from the ballet when I was about four years old.
Matt: I wanted to do this, but this didn’t exist when I was a kid. I wanted to make those books of comics, the collections of daily strips that I didn’t know until I was 10 or 11 that comic strips were out every day.
Raina: I wanted to be trapeze artist, then a farmer. I knew I would wear overalls and a hat; I grew up in the city and I think the thought of having space outdoors was the most exciting thing ever. Then at nine years old I decided to be a comic strip artist. I’ve had zero career aspirations since except to be a cartoonist.
Traci: I wanted to be a writer and thought the only way was to be a journalist, so went to journalism school and hated it.

When you’re writing books and you want to put in people you know, do you have to ask permission?
Matt: Change all the names. When we did Sunny Side Up, it’s fictionalized, it didn’t happen on that timeline, we eliminated two brothers from the family.
Jenni: We changed it a lot. Babymouse, I mean I am Babymouse, he’s Wilson Weasel. Felicia the mean girl is based on a real person but we’ll never say her real name. Make her a cat and she’ll never catch on.
Raina: I wish I had talked to you guys before I started this. I use real names and I make people look like they are and my dad likes to argue with me about that’s not how that happened, that’s not the order it was in. I have both the good side and the bad side about writing about my life, mostly good.
Matt: Don’t put real people’s names in, dedicate it to them.

Are you making more Sunny books?
Jenni: Matt will start drawing the third next week, it’ll be out Fall 2019: Sunny Rolls The Dice.

How do you keep yourselves organized?
Jenni: I scribble out chapters as I go along and keep it on the wall. I use a MacGyvered storyboard; I use Scrivener in my novels, but it’s overkill in graphic novels.
Matt: For Sunny, it’s set in the summer of 1976, so I had to do a ton of visual research — cars, the airport, the clothes, it’s all a giant folder of stuff for me and for our colorist. In terms of series, as we do twenty Babymouse books, I have to go back and make sure I’m doing characters right. I’m constantly going back to my old stuff. I have PDFs of every book when I’m on the road.
Raina: The minute I’m drawing, I lose details. I have blueprints of things like a classroom from all angles, where each kid sits, I’ve been looking at that for six months. I write outlines before thumbnailing, but it gets updated pretty constantly.
Jenni: It’s fun to remember when you see something from the ’70s, like seeing Sunny in the front seat with no seatbelt.
Matt: Photo reference was shocking. I didn’t remember how many people wore plaid pants, everybody all wearing jeans, no girls in dresses …
Traci: I think that’s one of the things an editor has to watch for; I’m constantly making sure kids are wearing bike helmets, seat belts. Memoir’s one thing, but in fiction we want to make sure we aren’t setting a bad example. We have a duty and obligation to readers of the book.

I love that line — a duty and obligation to readers of the book. Readers, all of these people not only want to tell the best story they can, they want you to be the best you can be. That’s why comics (especially middle grade/YA, where so much of the best work is being done) is so great.

_______________
¹ That is, a creator in the baby stage of their career, not somebody who makes baby humans.

[Editor’s note: As in the past, these panel recaps are based on notes typed during the session; all discussion is the nearest possible paraphrase, except for direct quotes which will be italicized.]

I’m going to do something I don’t believe I’ve ever done. I’m going to ask you to go elsewhere (two elsewheres, actually) to figure out what Scott McCloud said in his spotlight presentation on the occasion of 25 years of Understanding Comics. The first thing to do is to track down a copy of the Comic-Con 2018 Souvenir Book, because on pages 140-145, you’ll find the text of the presentation that McCloud did for the opening 10 minutes or so of his session. The essay didn’t offer enough room for pictures, though (I counted 18, if all the cover photos of foreign editions of UC are separate items), so he added a bunch more for his reading of the same material — about 200 in all. Guy knows how to keep things rolling along.

The second thing you need to do (or maybe the first, since the first may be really difficult) is to click on the image up top. Jason Alderman had been unaware of the McCloud session until about 10 minutes before I was going to walk up there; he decided on the fly he needed to go when I mentioned that McCloud would likely talk about his next book, which will be on visual communications (a topic near and dear to Alderman’s heart, and mine). He had his pens, but no suitable sketchbook for his famed sketchnoting. I offered the use of my notebook, which resulted in both the sketchnote above (which you should immediately embiggen) and the fact that I now have an Alderman original sketchnote (muwaa ha ha ha).

Let’s be clear — Alderman and I sat in the same session, in adjoining seats. We both set out to capture the same content in real time. He produced an image, I took down 1205 words, many correctly spelled. What we learned from this is that the old ratio is wrong — a picture is work approximately 1.2 thousand words (and probably 1000 words longer that by the time I finish). Go study that picture; examine it closely, and then you can come back here for some context.

Very well then: in the fall of 1991, during a rare tornado watch in Providence, Rhode Island, McCloud left the basement where he and his wife, Ivy, were huddling for safety when he heard the phone ring. The call was good — Kevin Eastman (of Ninja Turtles fame and lately fortune) was calling to say that his new publishing company, Tundra, was going to publish Understanding Comics.

To date, the book has outlived the publisher by approximately 24.8 years, and has become one of the most required pieces of reading on college campuses, with multiple disciplines using it to teach their stuff. It’s been translated into more than 20 languages. It has killed at least two publishers¹, and has a history intertwined with McCloud’s older daughter², as they were conceived, gestated, and birthed in parallel.

The book is a testament to McCloud’s obsession with how things work (more about that in a few moments), in that he couldn’t just make comics, he had to take them apart to see all that made them unique (particularly, during the Q&A, the fact that comics is the only artistic medium where past, present, and future exist together within human perception; music, movies, TV, plays, all the visual and performing arts depict now, a series of nows, but comics have those panels across time).

A professor who played doubles tennis with Will Eisner arranged an introduction, a job in production at DC happened to be near Books Kinokuniya in Manhattan a half decade before manga really made an impact in its first translations, and 15 years before it exploded into whole bookstore sections. Zot ran at the late Eclipse³ and started getting really good about the time he wanted to be spending time on UC⁴, meaning some of the most humanistic stories of that otherwise grimdark decade were done under duress.

Oh, yeah, and the first graphical web browser came out a few months after UC, which doesn’t mention computers once.

A slow start picked up momentum as the reorders came in, and kept coming; convention appearances became teaching gigs and seminars, symposia and workshops for corporations and academia. And still, it feels like unfinished business: for every project completed, ten more are rolling around in McCloud’s head, but so many readers (both those that read it back then, and those that have never known a world without it) are taking UC’s ideas out for a spin and creating their own takes on his theories.

Qs were chosen by Winter, with As from all three as appropriate; the first dealt with McCloud’s next book, which was the topic of the closing presentation, so we’ll hold discussion until then. Except to say that McCloud noted, The form of the book is a comic, but it doesn’t have “comics” in the name so it’s a big step for me.

A seemingly prosaic question got the best laugh of the hour: when was UC first used in a university setting? McCloud recalls that it was at Michigan State, but isn’t entirely sure of the timing. He once found himself humblebragging about the situation to Neil Gaiman: I remember talking to him, all these colleges are using my book, it’s a big deal and he said “I know, it’s like when all the women that line up at a reading to get their breasts signed” and I’m, “Yeah”. I’ve always found McCloud to be very modest about his accomplishments and the importance of his place in history, and I firmly believe that comes from the core of who he is; this little bit of perspective-setting surely didn’t hurt, though.

Asked about what he thought about the presentations of comics on mobile devices, and the tension between whole-page approaches and panel-to-panel scrolling, Ivy gave him a strict limit with a stern Five minutes. You know that last panel in UC with Sky in Ivy’s arms? She’s talking about how you just finished reading a couple hundred pages of his theories, but she has to listen to it all the time? Yeah, the presentation of comics on mobile interfaces falls into that category, leading McCloud to start with Thank you for the question, Pandora’s Box.

It’s a dilemma, in the literal sense — on the one hand people hate scrolling, but a lot of that comes from technical limitations that have been addressed. Panel-to-panel is more intuitive, making things like a little movie, but see above and how comics aren’t movies, movies are always now and you lose an essential part of comics in this way. But I don’t want to be the guy that insists on purity. Maybe it’s not technically comics by my definition, but are people reading it, are they enjoying it? Somebody invented a form that mutates my model, but it’s enduring.

Nevertheless, the form that accentuates the all-times nature of comics is essential; McCloud noted that Korean webcomics are all scrollers now (and they’ve brought the interface here, cf: Webtoons), and if that’s what they’re reading on phones, if you don’t take advantage, that’s a storytelling challenge (or possibly failure). He clearly had another 3-4 hours of rant in him, but stopped to get in one last question about his inspiration for The Sculptor:

[gesturing to Ivy] She’s my inspiration.

It’s a long-gelling story, one that a 25 year old McCloud started and a much older McCloud finished from a different place of technical, storytelling, and theoretical development. He likes that fact that the book got both a lot of love and a lot of hate, that nobody is indifferent. I achieved at least one of my goals which was to create narrative momentum — a lot of people told me they read a 500 page graphic novel in one sitting and that’s nuts.

And that left enough time for his second presentation, a preview of his next book on visual communications, on his absolute loathing of a plaque next to an elevator in a La Quinta motel in Tennessee and what he learned. It was called In Case Of Fire. This is the plaque, and he shared some of the interpretations of what this meant to people:

• In case of a Goliath attack, hide in a companion cube and get upvoted to safety
• Use chopsticks to remove cooked children from hot oven
• In case of 2 fires, ride the elevator heading to the larger fire

He mentioned the difficulty he had getting information from public websites that are supposed to talk about areas affected by Southern California wildfires, all down to poor formatting, and contrasted with the experiences of Sky (who is functionally blind) and how accessibility is either granted or denied by the choices made. There are no neutral visual decisions, he half-shouted: scale, rotation, hue, saturation, wording, contrast, font, placement, all of them matter. His realization is that it doesn’t matter if you’re blind, or have neurological or language issues, we all have cognitive limits and all of us are served or not by visual design.

He brought up Google results for what the words are meant to convey: In case of fire use stairs, and filtering out the gags, went to work. How does this read for somebody that scans images left to right? An awful lot of people are wandering towards the fire or have simply turned their backs to it, but even those that don’t could be just as easily read as In case of stairs, here’s some fire or Have a pleasant stroll in the vicinity of fire or Skip merrily down some stairs away from fire. Even word choice affects interpretation: use is a bad word in this context.

Anyway, he said, that’ll be like 20 pages of the book.

Lots of things are going to be like 20 pages of the book; we’ve talked about the literal years of research he’s done, about how 90% of what he’s digging into will probably never be shared, but which will give him to context to decide how to prune down and present the key ideas of the 10% that does make it in. He’s evangelical about the topic, noting that Culture has recognized the importance of each and every word, but denies the importance of each and every picture, not to mention how satisfying great visual communications design is — think about the wordless, nested, entirely clear (yet complex) instructions on an airplane emergency evacuation card.

Look for In Case Of Fire: The Elements Of Visual Communication (a title which he hopes invokes Strunk & White, but which will be nowhere near as slim⁵) in the next couple. Come to think of it, he never did say couple what.

Asked in the closing seconds if he got angry at fonts like Papyrus⁶ or Comic Sans⁷, McCloud replied, Comic Sans doesn’t make me angry, fonts don’t make me angry. I look, I say “Wrong”, I change the font. He contrasted the very haphazard nature of Roman characters to the very deliberate and nature of written Korean, concluding Fonts don’t make angry, but they very rarely satisfy me. And he made a recommendation, so you’ll have something to read while waiting for the next couple: I’m Comic Sans, Dammit, (which appears to actually be titled I’m Comic Sans, Asshole, but there were kids present), which ran in McSweeney’s. Kids, maybe hold off on reading it until you’re older.

And with that, the presentation ended with applause, and then he took another hour in the hallway, talking to everybody that had something they wanted to share with him. As a bonus, there was a guy dressed as Sean Connery in Zardoz adjusting his loincloth about 3 meters away, but I don’t think Scott ever noticed; whether it’s researching a book or answering an earnest fan’s question, he is a master of the monofocus.

_______________
¹ In a page full of small images captioned This is not a _____, the logo for Tundra is labeled This is not a publisher. By the time most purchasers of the first edition of 6000 copies read UC, that statement was true. When Denis Kitchen published the second edition through Kitchen Sink Press and had McCloud substitute the KSP logo for Tundra’s, the same thing quickly became true.

DC had their crack at it, with their “bullet” logo substituted in when they were the publisher; one might wonder if the curse shifted from the publisher as a whole to merely their cinematic universe offerings. It’s with HarperCollins now, and they wisely decided to let the DC logo stand.

² Sky, who wasn’t present with Ivy and younger daughter Winter, but had many stories about her shared. She didn’t exist when McCloud drew Ivy holding her on the last page of UC, but preceded the book into this world by approximately two weeks, meaning that last panel isn’t a lie.

³ McCloud’s really got a thing for defunct publishers

⁴ The “Earth stories”, still looked back upon by readers as the highlight of the series.

⁵ He’s mentioned a length of about 250 pages, but he also used that number the first time he told me he was working on The Sculptor, which came in at 496. Given all the research he’s doing, I will not be one bit surprised to see him go significantly long.

⁶ About which, let’s be real, there’s nothing wrong except rampant overuse.

⁷ About which everything is wrong.

There may be nobody in comics and graphic novels more able to predict where it’s headed than Mark Siegel of :01 Books, if only because of the talent that he has fostered: entire imprints are being established around :01 alumni like Gina Gagliano and Collen AF Venable. It was :01 that brought comics into the world of literary awards, it’s :01 that is the sole publisher that cuts across all age ranges (picture books, kids, middle grade, teen/YA, adult) and all topics; the only limitation is that it’s going to be a comic.

So how did we (the expansive we of the entire world o’ comics, not the royal we embodying Siegel alone) get here? I’ve got my own theories, and one of them is that a good deal of :01’s success is predicated on the fact that Siegel takes time for people; he’s never been too busy to talk to me, and if he’s not absolutely delighted to see me, he’s done a damn good job acting like it. During our quick chat before the start of his (rather under-attended) talk at SDCC, we ranged from the tragedy of Last Man getting cut for lack of sales¹ to the dangers of projecting the laptop before verifying what’s visible on the screen². Although the focus was on :01’s place in the evolution of the graphic novel, he did take about a minute to talk about his own creative work — including a quick animated clip promoing the 5 Worlds series that he co-writes; think Miyazaki crossed with Jansson and you won’t be far from the mark.

As you might expect, he talked about the milestones that :01 has been through — starting just as manga was peaking, and as the comics-buying demographic went from 85% male (mostly aging) to 65% female, American Born Chinese getting a National Book Award nomination and the Printz honor (the first comic work for both) in the first year of operation, ramping up from ~20 books a year to ~50 — but also looked at the industry as a whole:

Raina Telgemeier and Scholastic Graphix released Smile and literally started a revolution; middle grade memoir is now the single most successful category in comics. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home runs on Broadway. Nimona is found in the Library of Congress, was also nominated for the National Book Award, will be a feature film, and Noelle Stevenson is now showrunning the She-Ra reboot. This One Summer became the first book to take both the Printz and the Caldecott honors and was the most banned book of 2016³. The March trilogy took every honor under the sun, and the concluding volume won the National Book Award. Spinning is the latest runaway cross-audience hit (hello Eisner award, 2018).

It’s not coincidental that most of those who created the works cited above? Women. There is in any given :01 season a roughly 50-50 split in creators along gender lines, not because :01 is looking specifically for women, but because they’re creating the most interesting work these days, from high-brow to pulpy, young to old, ambitious to goofy, for comics and non-comics readers — by great new voices, and a worldwide talent pool as Siegel put it. The American graphic novel is now doing what Japan did in the 70s, what France did in the 80s and 90s: it’s about any topic, designed for any age, being treated as any other book would be.

The way we got here — where graphic novels form what Siegel calls The New Mainstream — was entirely dependent upon the building blocks of the past. It works like this:

(2006: The New Mainstream)
(2000: The Manga Invasion =====)
(1986: The Graphic Novel ==========)
(1970s: Indy Comics =================)
(1960s: Underground Comics ===============)
(1960: The Silver Age ========================)
(1938: The Golden Age ===========================)

It was much nicer in Siegel’s slide deck, but you get the idea; we can’t get to where we are without having had each of the previous eras. The kids that read Golden Age comics grew up to create the Silver Age. The reaction to mainstream comics and the Comics Code Authority was the genesis of Underground and the Indies, where if you wanted to make a comic you could just make it yourself. The Graphic Novel served those that had read all of the previous stages and wanted something more. The Manga era, coupled with the example of Graphic Novels brought us to the current stage, where librarians and booksellers are as important as individual readers, for a catalog that’s author-driven, not dependent on a single genre or visual style.

At the same time there’s an element not in the diagram, but which Siegel made sure to discuss: webcomics is what indies and zines used to be — a proving ground and place to develop your talent, and spans all the time frames from the birth of the Graphic Novel to today. Take a look at the milestones section above, and realize that pretty much all of those creators came up through webcomics.

But even with this historical confluence, there’s things you have to do to make it all work, and Siegel admitted there is a secret recipe:

1. Brilliant, talented, skilled creators (he used both words, drawing a distinction I think is often lost between talent and skill)
2. Belief in editorial care (editing is not meddling, it’s a support to good storytelling; Siegel described how :01 uses a “story trust”, where people workshop stories, with a shot of Skype call of himself, Gene Yang, and Sam Bosma, working with Vera Brosgol on Be Prepared)
3. Bridging fields, ages, genres, nations (the creators of The Dam Keeper came from Pixar and said We only want to be in the house of Gene Yang; Scott Westerfeld, an established YA writer, got paired up with Alex Puvilland to The Spill Zone; Nidhi Chanani did illustration work before Pashmina; webcomics creators like Gigi DG, Ngozi Ukazu, and Evan Dahm are getting approached to either reprint with :01 or do new originals works)
4. Pushing up, broadening, exploring the medium (the Science Comics will be branching to a history line and a maker line, featuring topics like knitting (!), baking, and car repair)
5. Librarians

This is too large for a parenthetical. Librarians are champions of graphic novels, and they’ve been instrumental in giving them legitimacy. They’ve spent money, they’ve gone from a single shelf to graphic novel sections in each age-specific area in their libraries. I’ve seen the changes since the SPLAT! symposium back in 2008 (cough, largely organized by Gina Gagliano, cough), where libraries had a programming track, maybe the first time that had happened at a comics event, and where the conversations were centered on How can I justify this in my budget? These days it’s about justification, it’s about figuring out how many copies to order to satisfy the waitlist and how long they’ll last before falling apart from use.

That’s it! Simple! Just spend a bunch of time in publishing, a bunch of time in comics, a bunch of time editing, a bunch of time building up your skills and credibility, then figure out all the budgets and promotion and logistics, whether this book is going to have a print run of under 10,000 or over 100,000 … okay, not simple, but not magic either. It’s all about respect for the medium, respect for the creators, respect for the readers.

And librarians. They rock.

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¹ Right at the time of an amazing cliffhanger, too; Siegel says he was convinced that committing to six volumes would have built an audience, but alas, it wasn’t to happen. Then again, they say that Robert Kirkman’s a fan, so maybe some day we’ll get it back.

² A fair amount of my teaching is driven by presentation from my laptop, and I’ve come damn close to having confidential emails shared to my students. There was a very oblique reference to something that Siegel’s been working on nearly as long as :01’s been a company that showed for about two seconds and you’ll not hear the story from me until it’s well and truly announced, but take the lesson, kids: double check everything before screen sharing.

³ Which, Siegel notes, is great for sales because it keeps the books on the radar of buyers. For that matter, those foil stickers on the covers that say PRINTZ or CALDECOTT on them? They mean that about 80,000 librarians will order that book every two years forever. As Siegel noted later, graphic novels can have a slow burn. Unlike monthly comics having to establish high sales immediately or get cancelled (or movies depending largely on opening weekend), graphic novels can ride out a long tail.

There should be a picture here, but it was all blurry so, oh well.

[Editor’s note: As in the past, these panel recaps are based on notes typed during the session; all discussion is the nearest possible paraphrase, except for direct quotes which will be italicized.]

Here’s the thing about panels — lineups change. Things get in the way, or you realize that you agreed to do about three more sessions than a reasonable person could wrangle this week, and maybe you need to step back from two of them. With a good moderator, though, you’d never guess and the panel on Superstars In Children’s Graphic Novels picked up a substitute moderator who is top notch. Or maybe they just didn’t want the world to know that Raina Telgemeier would be slinging the questions, so that kids would come to see the other folks on the panel? Either way, it was a great piece of expectation-management, and a great way to ensure a smooth experience for all¹.

And a good thing, too, because kids? Kids are utterly fearless about what they love. There were two in line who their dad said were normally shy around adults, but they peppered me with questions, wanting to know what I was, why I was coming the panel for, who my favorites were, and do I know ______ ? I’m pretty sure they hit everybody on the dais for autographs and photos afterwards. Those folks (all of whom are published by Scholastic) were, in addition to Raina:

Gale Galligan (who is continuing the Baby Sitters Club graphic novels), Ian Boothby (Eisner winner and contributor to Bongo comics), Molly Ostertag (creator of my favorite book of 2017), Aron Steinke (Eisner winner and 2nd grade teacher), and Jarrett Krosoczka (author and/or illustrator of 25+ books including the Jedi Academy and Lunch Lady series). It was some star power, is what I’m saying.

Raina opened with a two-part question to the entire panel, then tended to follow up ideas with particular creators, and finished her part with a Lightning Round before moving onto Q&A. That two parter was to ask the panelists about books from their own childhoods that had an emotional impact, or made them laugh. There was a general agreement on newspaper comic strips among the panelists (IB: Peanuts, GG: Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side; JK: I’d read the comics page and pretend to understand why some were funny. Yeah, lasagna’s awesome and I hate Mondays too.; MO: I didn’t understand all of The Far Side, but I loved the absurd way that Larson would draw a cow with a face and glasses) regarding laughter, but the emotional impact books ranged all over: Ostertag loved the His Dark Materials series and remembered listening to audiobooks and sobbing w/emotion, happy to be sad. Boothby also found emotion in Peanuts, where all the kids seems to be having a rough time, it was funny but also the kid was bummed out, talked about all his problems, quoted a bible verse, and spoiled Citizen Kane. Linus would bust out a bible verse, but he worshiped the Great Pumpkin.

Krosoczka cited The Mouse And The Motorcycle in particular, and all of Beverly Cleary’s books in general (he revisited them with his daughter last year, and was relieved they still hold up). I had a hamster, always thought he could learn to ride a motorcycle, but he never did. Galligan was a huge fan of the Animorphs series, which started out about teens that can turn into animals and ends up being a story about the horrors of war and I would just sob. Steinke loved Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series, particularly the illustrations — so creepy, they’re challenged and banned in some places. Ostertag chimed in that she loved reading those stories, but was afraid to touch the illustrations afraid they’d come off in her hand.

The second general question was why each of the authors writes for children, and what makes the audience distinctive. Boothby challenged the validity of the question, emphatic that he doesn’t write for kids. I write a story and if I put a swear word in I take it out. He asked if stories like Ratatouille, is for kids, or just all-ages safe and kids jump into the parts that they don’t quite understand yet. As kids, part of your job is to learn and you want things you don’t get; I try to write for all ages, kids are so open, will try something new. Galligan added that Diana Wynne Jones said “I like writing for kids because they’re used to figuring thing out everyday.” For adults, I have to explain it four times for them to get it.

Krosoczka countered that his writing for kids is more driven by the art than the writing — he likes to draw pictures, and books for kids have a lot of pictures. When I was 17 my high school art teacher brought in two picture books, which were beautifully illustrated, and he takes that as the start of his inspiration. Kids are so more ready to accept the reality of this crazy world you create” like having a wacky lunch lady that fights crime with stuff in the elementary cafeteria; the adults, he said, wanted to know how the Lunch Lady’s superhero gadgets worked logically, as if fighting with utensil-based nunchucks could have a logical basis. Steinke cited his love of teaching and reading literature for that age cohort, as well as the idea that stories for that age are short and he can’t see himself working to novel length.

Raina followed up to ask if Steinke’s character Mr Wolf, a 2nd grade teacher, is the character he identifies with, or it’s more the students. Answer: Mr Wolf is 95% me. Obviously, I’m not a wolf, and I don’t wear a tie. I actually got voted at one school “Most likely to dress like a student”. In previous work, Steinke had done an autobio comic strip, but as his work becomes longer in form, the short things that he did as autobio don’t apply as much. But he allows that a lot of things that happen in his books happened to him as a child.

The next question was to Krosoczka whose latest book (Hey, Kiddo), which is pure memoir; it’s a raw story, about growing up with alcoholic grandparents because your mom’s an opioid addict. It means writing for older readers, a switch from the wacky stuff, and getting to spend time loved ones. But there were days when he didn’t want to write or draw another page, comparing it to Harry Potter writing lines that scarred his hand (Right there with you, Jarrett. I feel like we need a support group)

Ostertag was asked about revisiting her characters for a sequel, and how it felt to return to their story. She replied that it gave her the opportunity to let the characters grow, to do more with those that didn’t get enough time in the first book. Characters are seen in discrete moments, but with a sequel or series, those moments all happen at different stages of their lives. Also, I realized I never gave Aster a last name.

The next question went to Boothby, about Sparks, which is dedicated to the real Charlie and August. Do you really have two cats that fight crime in a dog suit? Boothby claims yes — Charlie is very much a dog, comes when called, plays and acts like a dog. August was always a rebel who kept to herself; she was a feral cat rescued from a house fire, very afraid, spent a lot of time under the bed. He dodged the bit about whether or not the brave cat and the scaredy cat actually have a robotic dog suit for crime fighting, but we all got the impression they do. Ostertag observed that she loves basing characterss on pets because they’ve got simpler personalities and when you say this character is based on my cat, my cat won’t get mad at me.

A general question was posed about the differences between licensed and original work, or writing characters you didn’t create. Galligan said the big challenge is that the base level of expectation and trust is different. Nobody can tell me I’ve got the wrong take on characters I invented. Boothby noted the advantages of writing Simpsons comics because everybody reads along in Homer’s voice and they know exactly what to expect from the character. The flip side is that the show is really funny, so you have to create to the same level.

Ostertag’s licensed work hasn’t released yet, but she appreciates getting the room to shape the world in her own stories that she doesn’t have when playing with somebody else’s toys. Krosoczka enjoys the freedom of the Jedi Academy series because they’re not canon; somebody decided in the made-up world of Star Wars, some things are real, and his stuff isn’t. I get to draw and write lines for Yoda which is amazing, but all the others are characters I get to invent. I made a droid that’s on Wookieepedia now!

Galligan got the last of the directed questions, asking about how her relationship with the BSC books changed since she read them herself as a young person. Galligan said the biggest change was she read them originally from the POV of the kid characters, but now that I’m older and grumpier and have paid a bill, she relates to all the chars more wholly, but still has fond memories from childhood. Raina noted that her run on BSC was her only adapted work, and found the process required throwing yourself into somebody else’s head (in this case, Ann M Martin, not a fictional character).

And with that, it was time for the Lightning Round.
Hardest thing to draw!
Krosoczka: Cars.
Steinke: Bikes
Ostertag: Crowds.
Boothby: Horses. Horses driving cars.

Favorite junk food!
Galligan: Shrimp chips.
Boothby: Oreo Double-Stuf, but you take two and make it a Quad-Stuf.
Ostertag: Wonder Bread that you toast and smother in too much butter and cinnamon and have ten of them for breakfast.
Steinke: I use to make this Bisquick dough and other stuff in a bowl in the micro, called it bowl pizza.
Krosoczka: I used to make bread balls, little balls of mushed up Wonder Bread.

Comic character you most want to walk the SDCC floor with!
Krosoczka: Lunch Lady! No, someone dressed as me!
Steinke: Spider-Man.
Ostertag: The flying carpet from Aladdin.
Boothby: Ant Man, so he can shrink all the stuff you buy so it’s easier to carry around. Also, Dr Strange? His cape is basically that carpet from Aladdin.
Galligan: The Flash, so you get Point A, Point B, done.

Most memorable fan interaction!
Galligan: The kind of kid that hands you a book and it’s clearly very lovingly read through.
Boothby: Kids that read in the line, but don’t want to talk to me because they want to keep reading, and I take the book and it’s annoying to them because I sign and draw so they can’t read it during that time. Then they plunk down to keep reading.
Ostertag: There’s a camp in the Bay Area that studies The Witch Boy as part of their curriculum.
Steinke: I met a girl that was going to see the new Jurassic Park movie but started reading my book and came to see me instead.
Krosoczka: In the Fall of 2002, I was just getting started and had a signing at bookstore with nobody there. This kid comes up and slowly reaches up towards me, towards my face, then reached past me to pull Captain Underpants books of the shelf by my head.

Recommend one comic for young readers!
Krosoczka: The Witch Boy!
Ostertag: That’s cheating!
Galligan: Awkward and Brave by Svetlana Chmakova.
Boothby: Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol.
Steinke: You stole mine.
Ostertag: The adaptation of Speak by Emily Carroll. It’s not for kids, it’s older.
Raina: Yotsuba.

Q&A time²! From a kid: What job would you do if you were not an author?
Steinke: I’m a teacher. I’d still be drawing no matter what.
Ostertag: Maybe a chef.
Raina: I’d want to produce you on Food TV.
Boothby: Improv.
Krosoczka: Teaching.
Gale: Working in an office, I’m good with Excel.

At what stage of the creative process do you figure out the audience — will this be for kids, YA, does it develop as you do the story?
Ostertag: When I made The Witch Boy, I thought it would be YA (12+), but my editor determined it was actually a Middle Grade book (8+). They have criteria, and the fact that it’s family oriented and has no romance makes it MG. She suggested aging down the chars a little.
Steinke: It’s important to share the story, don’t keep it to yourself, your friends and family will give the feedback, they’ll tell you where the book goes.

From a kid: What’s your favorite character in one of your books?
Galligan: Claudia. I get to go wild with clothes and style.
Boothby: The narrator of Sparks is a talking litter box, a fancy butler you poop in.
Ostertag: Charlie is not like me, and she’s fun to draw because she’s always making big gestures.
Steinke: Randy is a cat, wears cowboy boots, has a funny personality, and dominates the room.
Krosoczka: My newest book is autobio, so my favorite is my grandmother who cursed like a truck driver who used to be a sailor and smoked two packs a day.

The last question, from a kid, was the old standard about where you get your ideas, but Boothby came up with both a unique answer I’d never heard before, and one that a kid would appreciate: Look at an animal and ask what it would never do, then find a way to make it do that. Well done, Ian Boothby.

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¹ Also well done: the panel room for this session did a great job of scheduling topics that would not necessarily have audience overlap from one to the next, ensuring a good turnover of seats. Not many people hung around after an academic look at Mary Shelley’s work, and not many children’s graphic novel fans stuck around to see Shannon Wheeler talk about Too Much Coffee Man.

² It took some time to get some questions; as I noted, multiple kids in the room had their noses buried in books and didn’t look like they wanted to be interrupted. Awesome.

[Editor’s note: As in the past, these panel recaps are based on notes typed during the session; all discussion is the nearest possible paraphrase, except for direct quotes which will be italicized.]

What do you get when you combine a comics festival co-founder, a former competitive figure skater, a composer/computer scientist, and a manager of teen library services? A wide-ranging discussion on the nature of YA books, on account of those four people are, respectively, Jen Wang, Tillie Walden, Scott Westerfeld, and moderator Candice Mack.

With a small panel, Mack was able to address most questions to each of the panelists, and had them start out with a quick description of their latest or next graphic novels; Walden and Wang spoke of Spinning and The Prince And The Dressmaker, while Westerfeld mentioned his upcoming sequel to last year’s The Spill Zone, titled The Broken Vow (both illustrated by Alex Puvilland). For three such different books, certain common themes were described by the creators. We’ll come back to that idea in a bit.

Given the very different stories, Mack asked about the focus that each chose for their stories, and the process of coming to that series of decisions. Walden very nearly denied that such a process exists, indicating that for her the important thing is an intuition about the story she wants to tell; specifically, the sustained effort of making a graphic novel is such that she needs to find something to hold her interest for the whole time it will take me to make the goddamn book.

With reference to the critically and popularly acclaimed Spinning, Walden declared that one day she woke up and thought Shit I need to make a comic for class. I was an ice skater, I can make a comic about that! The story she could tell fit that particular need rather than being one she was burning to tell, despite the topic being that which had dominated her life more than anything else for a dozen years.

Westerfeld found his inspiration in place: the Spill Zone books take place in a post-low grade apocalyptic Poughkeepsie, and he’d learned about the history of the town while attending Vassar. Despite being very wealthy for a period of town and not falling into the traditional Rust Belt, Poughkeepsie is a post-industrial town that’s fallen from its glories. In this case, it was the center of the very lucrative trade in ice for New York City, until the invention of refrigeration dealt a blow in the early 20th century, from which the city has not yet recovered. The nostalgia that’s bred into the city and its residents appealed to him, as did his stint as an urban explorer, making his way through once grand/now abandoned buildings, filled with mysterious traces of the people that lived there. It’s basically the plot of The Spill Zone, minus the otherworldly horrors that killed everybody.

Wang said she had a couple of different ideas floating, specifically an idea for a story about sewing, or possibly someone whose superpower was sewing. The transformation quality to making clothes captured her imagination (despite claiming to have no skills in the arts), which provided a handy metaphor for the transformation that her main characters go through.

We’ll continue with Wang’s answer in a moment, but remember that bit about all three stories having common themes? Transformation was a key one, whether it’s the transformation of gender, the transformation of self via single-minded dedication (coupled with the transformation to somebody who doesn’t do that anymore¹), or the sudden transformation of a city and its unlucky inhabitants. I’d remark later that I couldn’t think of three more different books that I’d read in the past year, but they all had that piece in common, along with nostalgia and finding identity. At the very least, Westerfeld would later argue, the finding identity part is the ur-theme of YA.

Back to Wang’s answer, she also cited a desire to do something in the Disney mold, meaning the transformation would be more personal than superheroic, and provide the basis for (hopefully) a fun, light story. The Disney angle led to the setting (post Industrial Revolution, pre-modern), a time of change (horse carriages and department stores, mass produced sewing machines, and as Westerfeld observed, an aristocracy that’s moving from old fashioned to irrelevant).

That led to a discussion on their main characters, and the degree to which they were designed to be directly familiar to YA readers. Westerfeld had a story with a protagonist that could have been any age, but bringing her down to late teens/early 20s and making her suddenly responsible for a younger sibling let him explore another dimension of leaving youth. As he noted, adulthood gets thrust on younger people depending on economics and place; Poughkeepsie’s already a place of melancholy/nostalgia thrust on residents at a young age, and the disaster added another layer of nostalgia not for the rich past, but for the time just a bit ago before the city was swallowed by monsters and extradimensional horrors.

Walden, by contrast, never set out to do YA, but wound up there by virtue of her experience. When I was 17, my characters were 17 year old girls; publishers, however, do care about who stories are pitched to, and she realized how much she enjoyed working in the category of teens and children, coming of age, but ending up there was accidental. Wang also fell into YA by accident, where TPATD‘s characters were initially adults. Aging them down to teens allowed a story of big feelings, discovering things for the first time. Her only concern was Is it weird that the prince is expected to get married really young?” and the others agreed that it served to show how quickly life changes at that age.

Westerfeld pointed out that’s one of the key aspects of teendom is everything is SO BIG: a bad day when you’re a teenager is the end of the world, a good day is the best thing ever. Walden emphasized the speed, a time of life when big things happen one right after another; Westerfeld added some historical context to point out that you used to co from childhood straight to adulthood, heading into the factory or mines at 10, 12, maybe 15. The transitional stage between childhood and adulthood is a recent invention: The word teenager is only from 1948. We’re still working it out as a culture.

Less philosophical concerns rounded out the session. Mack wondered about work habits, and all three discussed the importance of routine. Westerfeld has the act of writing down to muscle memory, in that he writes every morning in the same space, in the same chair, at the same time, after the same breakfast. Walden’s had a lot of airport lounges and hotel desks in her writing experience over the past year, but at home in LA she’s found a co-working space to be a help: it’s got A/C in a warm climate, and you can leave your stuff when you go to lunch, as opposed to working in the local coffee shop.

Wang offered the routine was more present in her drawing time than her writing time, which prompted Westerfeld (who doesn’t draw) to ask if the drawing imposes consistency on their work — a predictable amount of output (Wang: by the time I draw, I know where the story is supposed to go and can steer it), the opportunity to fix writing in the drawing (Wang and Walden: Oh, yeah). Walden described drawing as the reward — she says she can’t write dialogue, but drawing speech bubbles makes her hear the words that characters will use. Westerfeld found all of this to be NUTS, but described a somewhat similar back-and-forth with Puvilland (a non-native English speaker, he approaches the story with different timing or beats that Westerfeld scripts, leading to new ways of looking at the story and what it needs to accomplish).

Mack asked each what the strangest thing they’d ever done for research was; Wang learned to play World Of Warcraft when adapting Cory Doctorow’s In Real Life to a graphic novel. Walden learned to drive stick because she had a character that did and had no idea how to draw their hands. Westerfeld didn’t have an answer himself, but mentioned that Holly Black once had herself thrown in a car trunk and driven around to determine what it was like; I’ve never done anything like that, so I guess I’m not that into research, he concluded.

A brief Q&A asked about desire to get into animation (all three: not really), and if there was a particular YA work that had an impact on their work. Westerfeld said that YA category didn’t really exist when he was grown up, but he gravitated to the sci-fi section; his most influential books were Dune and Charlotte’s Web. Walden loved Roald Dahl until he became problematic: My mom was “Tillie, he’s anti-semitic and we’re Jewish” and I’m WHAT. And Wang found her prime YA years more occupied with manga and anime, but at and earlier stage devoured Brian Jacques’s Redwall series.

None of them could say that YA had an influence on their work, but meaning the ur-themes of transformation and finding yourself were less inculcated in them, and more self-developed alongside the YA tradition. I’m going to bet in another 20 years, some future YA authors will have answers to the same question that much directly credit Wang, Walden, and Westerfeld.

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¹ Which led to a hilarious exchange between Westerfeld and Walden:

SW: What makes Spinning really sad is walking away from something you committed so much to.
TW: I KNOW.
SW: You can see it from the beginning, and it makes everything that’s brutal about getting up at 4:00am not worth it. I, Tonya has a happier ending!

Okay so our Friends To The North celebrated their big holiday already, and we here in ‘Merika won’t until tomorrow, but the holiday doldrums are well upon us. Not much going on, but there is one thing to keep an eye out for in the coming weeks:

On July 17 we’re Kickstarting The Nib Magazine, a 100 page print quarterly. The first four issues — Death, Family, Empire and Scams — have been in the works all year and we will hit send to the printer the second it’s funded.

All new comics every issue — journalism, strips, Nib crew, Intercept journalists, names from mainstream comics. I can’t wait to drop who is on board.

That from The Nib editor and driving force Matt Bors, who’s shepherded the editorial/reportage comics site from (intermittently neglected) Medium section to big-ass book to recurring calendar to animated series, the contributors to which keep showing up in consideration of various awards.

You’ve got two weeks notice. Be prepared.

And I just realized that I haven’t discussed this year’s Eisner nominations, on account of they came out while I was at Camp. As we’ve seen in the past forever or so, the distinctions between Best Digital Comic and Best Webcomic are confusing and/or confused, and which are described as:

For the Best Digital Comic category, works must be longform — that is, comparable to comic books or graphic novels in storytelling or length. Webcomics similar to daily newspaper strips, for example, would not be eligible. Digital comics should have a unique URL, be part of a webcomics site, or otherwise stand alone (not be part of a blog, for instance).

So webcomics are defined by what they aren’t rather than by what they are, but for the most part they’ve come to largely be creator-owned work without publisher gatekeeping (although there are a couple of fascinating exceptions in the Best Webcomic Category. This year’s nominees are:

Best Digital Comic

• Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (Monkeybrain/comiXology)
• Barrier, by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin (Panel Syndicate)
• The Carpet Merchant of Konstaniniyya, by Reimena Yee (reimenayee.com/the-carpet-merchant)
• Contact High, by James F. Wright and Josh Eckert (gumroad.com/l/YnxSm)
• Harvey Kurtzman’s Marley’s Ghost, by Harvey Kurtzman, Josh O’Neill, Shannon Wheeler, and Gideon Kendall (comiXology Originals/Kitchen, Lind & Associates)
• Quince, by Sebastian Kadlecik, Kit Steinkellner, and Emma Steinkellner, translated by Valeria Tranier (Fanbase Press/comiXology)

Best Webcomic

• Awaiting a Wave, by Dale Carpenter and Nate Powell, features.weather.com/us-climate-change/arkansas (The Weather Channel Digital)
• Brothers Bond, by Kevin Grevioux and Ryan Benjamin, www.webtoons.com/en/action/brothers-bond/list?title_no=1191 (LINE Webtoon)
• Dispatch from a Sanctuary City, by Mike Dawson, https://thenib.com/dispatch-from-a-sanctuary-city (The Nib)
• The Tea Dragon Society, by Katie O’Neill, teadragonsociety.com (Oni Press)
• Welcome to the New World, by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/26/opinion/sunday/welcome-to-the-new-world.html (New York Times Sunday Review)

I’ll go out on a limb and say that Carpenter & Powell, and Halpern & Sloan were doing Work For Hire; I’ll also note that O’Neill’s The Tea Dragon Society is functionally indistinct from what the Eisners call a Digital Comic — to the extent that she and it are also nominated in the category of Best Publication for Kids (ages 9–12).

Outside the immediately applicable categories, you’ll find Giant Days (John Allison, Max Sarin, and Liz Fleming) nominated as Best Continuing Series, Spinning (Tillie Walden) in both Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17) and Best Reality-Based Work, What Is Left (Rosemary Valero-O’Connell) in both Best Single Issue/One-Shot and Best Coloring, and Elements: Fire (edited by Taneka Stotts) in Best Anthology¹.

The Eisner Awards will be presented on Friday, 20 July, as part of San Diego Comic Con. Best of luck to all the nominees.

Spam of the day:

Only here the choice of young girls for every unique guy and completely free! They are wettest slaves, they will and want implement everything you command !

I’ve often wondered if there was some way to make Russian mail-order bride spam not the ickiest thing in the spam filters, and … ick. Just ick.

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¹ Presumably, if it wins, Stotts will have Shing Yin Khor devise some means of breaking up the statue into components that can be distributed to the contributors.

It’s late, there’s lots to talk about, onwards.

• Today marks ten years and 3547 strips from Lucas Landherr, or Dante Shepherd, or whatever he calls himself, the beardy chemical engineering guy with the chalkboard over at Surviving The World. Here is where I’d ordinarily wish the strip and creator many years of continued success, but that would be pointless. As previously announced, tomorrow will be the final strip for STW; when Landshep started, he was a doctoral student, and ten years later he’s a father twice over, a beloved faculty member at Northeastern University, and recognized as one of the most innovative teachers of engineering in the country.

  I’m not going to say that it’s because of webcomics, but I’m pretty sure the guy will tell you that having a creative¹ outlet is crucial for getting through the rigors of nerd school; for me it was being on the radio, for Dantecus, it’s horrible puns and chalk dust, raptor impressions, and Peanuts dances. He tried to keep his weirdo side on the downlow for a while after he got the teaching gig, but the students found him and embraced him. They’ve taken his weirdness and multiplied it, and will coincidentally take his other lessons out to their careers (and possibly their own students).

  It’s a significant legacy, and if you find it inspirational in the slightest², a reminder that tomorrow also marks the end of the Kickstart for the one and only STW print collection. Landherr (for that is his proper name) has future comics and future lessons in him, and it’s time to turn the page on the present³ project in favor of what comes next. Make your chalk always be the dust-free variety may the erasers always clap clean, and may you never lose the lab coat and Red Sox cap, Dr Landherr. Thanks for all the laugh-chuckles along the way.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, did you see that Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan broke all their previous records in funding the all-educational strips collection of Oh Joy, Sex Toy, titled Drawn To Sex? And that the just about 3000 backers blew through the nice-thousand funding level, and the US$80085 funding level, and ponied up a total of 85,793 damn dollars (American)?

  Congrats to Nolan and Moen — it must feel great to know that five years in, you’re more necessary and more appreciated than ever. Celebrate tonight, be remember that tomorrow you’ve got to produce a book that will blow (heh, heh) everybody’s socks off. Seeing as how you’ve done that repeatedly, I think you’ll manage it again this time.

• Speaking of blowing socks off, did you see that Molly Ostertag released a cover for the sequel to last year’s The Witch Boy, a book which I was not shy about declaring my favorite book (not just favorite graphic novel) of 2017? And that you can pre-order it now? The Hidden Witch releases on 30 October, just in time for Halloween, and it looks like we get a lot more of Charlie in this one. Set aside cash and space on the shelf now, this one is going to be great.
• Speaking of going to be great, we have the promised name of the new kids imprint at Macmillan, the one where Colleen AF Venable will be determining the look of things as the Creative Director. In her words, Odd Dot is Run by weirdos, making fun non-fiction for kids, and they’ve announced their first tranche of releases: the Tinker Active series of workbooks on STEM topics, Code This Game, aimed at teaching tweens to make videogames, and One More Wheel (written by Venable herself), a counting board book with a spinning wheel on the cover.

  If you’re at BEA (running in New York at the Javits, through tomorrow), look up Odd Dot at booth 2444 and give Venable a high five (or a hug, if she’s amenable) for me. I couldn’t be happier for all she’s done and is yet to do.

Spam of the day:

My name is Orko

What.

and we are a Video Content creation solution that helps businesses create videos easily. I would like to invite you to please review how you can easily produce quality videos to show or communicate more about Fleen.

Why is He-Man’s faceless dipshit sidekick trying to sell me on content (ew, ick) creation solutions?

_______________
¹ Or weird, if you prefer

² I find it hell of inspirational, even though Shepland insists on cleaving to an objectively inferior form of engineering. Electrical rules, chemical is stinky and gloopy and sometimes glowing green.

³ Want to creep him out? Stare him in the eye and in an overly enthusiastic voice ask the one word question, Presents? Trust me on this.

I feel I should say that one of the neatest things that Pat Race did with respect to the Mini-Con this year was to have his little logo bear redrawn by an indigenous artist in a traditional style; it’s a small thing, but it’s meaningful. Not sure it would have fit on the cookies, though.

I also feel I should say that if you can start your day (a very busy one, packing up your hotel room an delivering them to a U-Haul; setting up, conducting, and tearing down a convention; traveling to a campsite) by having tea and yogurt parfaits with a pair of very skilled (and colorfully coiffed) creators, you should do it; it even better if one of them can tell you all about power tools and her plans to construct a killer Halloween haunted house.

Thus fortified for the day, we made our way to the Juneau Arts & Culture Center on a somewhat overcast, somewhat brisk day. The weather was fortunate — last year Mini-Con feel on the first really gorgeous day of the year, sending a large portion of Juneauites into the Great Outdoors for recreation; a slightly blah day increased the turnout in our corner of the Great Indoors.

Speaking of which, if you ever get the chance to exhibit at Mini-Con, take it; the JACC features a nice green room away from the con floor for when you’re feeling like you need a break or a snack. If you really need isolation for a little while, there’s even a recording studio, so there’s a place that completely soundproof to hide from the hurly burly. Setup ran smoothly (it is, after all, a small space), and the Snack Castle rose once again under the watchful stewardship of Jason Alderman.

It occurs to me I didn’t mention Snack Castle last year, and neglected to take any pictures of it either year … Alderman, tasked with running the snack sales, built a castle out of scrap cardboard. It had turrets, battlements, crenelations, murder holes, and a working drawbridge. This year, there was talk of converting it to a Snack Mastaba¹, in honor of the Egyptian pyramid precursor that Spike taught us about the prior night at the library. Alderman kept all who would have sacked the Snack Castle at bay and oversaw peaceful trade, save for when he was sketchnoting (more on that below).

In addition to the vendors on the floor and the regular signings at the Alaska Robotics table, there was a steady stream of programming across the road in the meeting rooms of public broadcaster KTOO. Jon Klassen, Michaela Goade, and Andy Runton spoke about making children’s books; Ben Hatke and Lucy Bellwood argued over whether longbows (bows!) or tall ships (boats!) are better²; Molly Ostertag, Spike, and Ryan North talked about achieving social change in (and via) comics.

Raina Telgemeier and Vera Brosgol talked about their autobio comics; Georgina Hayns and Jeremy Spake talked about puppet fabrication; Dik Pose and Tony Cliff MacGuyvered together a Mac, a webcam, and a chair to make a stop-motion animation rig; Molly Lewis lead a uke jam session; unstructured hangout sessions were held where attendees drew (with Ostertag and Dylan Meconis), talked publishing (with Spike David Malki !, and Anne Bean), wrote songs (with Seth Boyer and Marian Call), drew some more (with Hatke and Scott C), and talked writing (with North and Molly Muldoon). What I’m saying is, if there was some aspect of creativity that struck your fancy, you either got to listen to very accomplished people talk about it, or got to hang with them and do it; it’s a very street-level kind of convention.

And in the middle of it all, a platter magically appeared in the green room, filled with local jerky and salmon spread and crab dip. And lo, the cartoonists did descend upon it, scooping great swaths up into their hungry maws. Weirdly, the amount of crab dip never seemed to diminish, but instead fed them all. And they left the green room saying A miracle occurred here.

Okay, probably not and I don’t really like crab, but I’m assured that the dip was delicious.

Back on the floor, Raina spent well over her allotted hour doing portrait sketches in support of a local bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day; her line eventually was cleared, and a bunch of kids went home with pictures of themselves all Raina-style. Dylan Meconis was doing watercolors of pets and OCs, because she’s been that kid wandering the con floor, working up the nerve to approach a creator, and will always pay back the kindness she was shown. Story times were held in the local branch of the library, with Klassen, C, and Brosgol reading from their books to assembled families.

And then it was time to break down, load up, and head out to the Camp; there were intros, and kids (both Ben & Anna Hatke and David and Nikki Rice Malki ! brought offspring, who were both remarkably even-tempered and delightful for being 3 and 1 years of age, respectively), and dogs (many skritches were had by Pippin and Brio and Nova). Gear was packed out to cabins, a light dinner was had, and Camp chef de cuisine Jeste Burton³ let us all know that she had a requirement — about which more later. The last bits of structure for the evening involved the Science Fair — people formed into impromptu groups, and then giving a topic on which to produce an informative poster. Don’t call it an icebreaker, don’t call it a teambuilding exercise, call it an excuse to get weird with new friends and very possibly the contents of the booze table.

Come to think of it, the act of physically creating things outside the typical comics wheelhouse would become a theme for the weekend, with a heavy dive into the fabric arts to start. But we’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Pictures:

The JACC main hall is not very large; think the combo auditorium/gym in a typical elementary school. The meeting rooms at KTOO for panel talks (Childrens Books with Goade, Klassen, Runton from left; Lucy “Boats” Bellwood and Ben “Bows” Hatke locked in intellectual combat) and hangouts (Malki ! and Spike on publishing) were very comfortable.

The exodus of exhibitors made their way to the U-Haul to move stuff to Camp; this was a considerable improvement on last year’s transport, where the last 5-6 rows of the bus were taken up with luggage and people were crammed in. Look at the spacious luxury! A mere 45 minutes later these smiling folks would be taking stuff to their cabins and deciding what to do in the coming days.

Did you want to learn about shoes? Or perhaps the duct tape that might hold shoes together? How about berries, or the door that leads to the stairs that leads to underground. Sure some of those other projects might have had “better composition” or “prettier art” or “actual facts”, but did any of them have rats running around on a corpse in a murder hole that’s populated by godsdamned mole people? I think we all know which one was best.

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¹ Just a big ol’ pile of cardboard, with the actual for-sale snacks buried in a secret chamber far underneath; customers would be forced to plunder the sugary tomb.

² Hire these two to liven up any panel discussion. They play off each other beautifully.

³ Who managed approximately 1000 meals with a dozen different dietary restrictions and preferences, and the help of two or three civilians on any particular prep or cleanup; the woman is a marvel. And I would commit actual crimes to get pan full of the sticky buns she made for breakfast.

You’re a monster, Zach Weinersmith, a monster for today’s strip (trimmed above so as not to give away the punchline). And the extra gag (or votey, as the cool kids call it) was even more cruel.

It’s all so mean, in fact, that all I can do today is present my occasional Clearing Of The Spams in lieu of anything else that might require me to feel joy, damn you. It’s impossible for me to note that today is the release date of Vera Brosgol’s superlative Be Prepared, or that today’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy [NSFW, obvs] contained a nice little namecheck of ComicLab with Brad Guigar and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett¹. Nope, it’s nothing but spams today, thanks ZACH.

PS: Yeah, okay, it’s not like you haven’t warned us before.

Spams of the day:

But as for the mystery of what happened to Australia’s megafauna, Price said: “The reality is that we just don’t have that much information.”

This eventually shifts around to the topic of knockoff NBA jersey available for bulk purchase from China. It’s kind of impressive, really.

The persons shown in photographs in this email may not necessarily be actual users of loveswans.com

Well, yeah, seeing as how it’s women in the photo and not swans.

The persons shown in photographs in this email may not necessarily be actual users of asiacharm.com

And another thing, as long we’re doing boilerplate disclaimers and what claim to be unsubscribe addresses — are you in fact located in Inverness, Scotland, or Madison, South Dakota? Because you use both addresses in all your spams, and South Dakota is not exactly known as a place you can get good single malt, golf courses by dramatic seaside cliffs, or fog-enshrouded moors. Make up your mind, already!

Nude selfies of women you most likely know are available for you to view

Those women are not nude. Do you get how words work?

Chase Finance

I get the feeling this is a setup for a joke. Is your finance running? Well, you better catch it!

Ever heard of Medical Bill Sharing? See if you qualify!
Christian Healthcare is a community of devout Christians helping each other out with unfortunate healthcare burdens. It is flexible, compliant with the Affordable care act, and provides a proper sense of community

Yeah, lemme stop you there. One, your cost-sharing model seem to shortchange people right when they need help the most (especially if the folks reviewing claims decide the claimants aren’t righteous enough). Two, you aren’t an insurance plan, and you replicate many of the drawbacks that the Affordable Care Act meant to deal with. Third, do you know that you’ve got the same opt-out address as the mail order bride folks up above?

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¹ Persevere. You gotta scroll down a ways before you find the plug (so to speak).

We are going to talk about some cool things today, but could anything be cooler than watching Bill Freakin’ Watterson return to the Sunday comics page, even just for one day? We’ve seen him draw in the slightly recent past with the poster for STRIPPED, but to see Calvin again, to see Watterson dinosaurs again, to see something even better than the legendary Tyrannosaurus Rexes in F-14s¹ ², and to see him playing with Opus the gosh-danged penguin.

With a Trump joke.

Look, if it turns out that Breathed just got Watterson to okay the use of Calvin, but that he didn’t draw the lil’ guy again, don’t tell me. Breathed’s done C&H references for a couple of April Foolses now, but the earlier ones didn’t have that spark, that hint of Wattersonian goodness. We all need to find joy where we can.

• Speaking of finding joy, please enjoy Pénélope Bagieu on the effect of a participation trophy that she didn’t know was a participation trophy, leading to a lifetime of assuming she could do stuff. Which means, naturally, that she can.

  The Teddy Bear Effect is a pure delight. Go read it in anticipation of meeting Ms Bagieu at MoCCA this weekend and telling her how hard she rocks³.

• On any other day, this photo would be up top, but you know how it goes. Just a few books that have shown up here at the Fleenplex — Lucy Bellwood’s 100 Demon Dialogues is a delight through and through, and I’ll have to work up proper reviews for the tenth (!) book in The Olympians by George O’Connor (I say this every time, but this one’s my new favorite) and the first graphic novel from Vera Brosgol since Anya’s Ghost (thanks to :01 Books for the latter two books).

  Suffice it to say that I’ll be carting Brosgol’s and Bellwood’s books (I, uh, got five copies of 100DD so I could give ’em away to people that need them) out to Juneau and Comics Camp later this month, so I can get them signed. I’ll be coming home with more copies of Be Prepared as well, as I’ve got nieces who will love it and they can’t have my copy, it’s mine.

  But what’s the large book taking up all the space? Oh, nothing, just the first college text ever to talk about the entire history of illustration from cave paintings to Cintiqs. Years ago, the lead editor went looking for somebody to write 500 words on webcomics and Scott McCloud sent her my way.

  It was remarkably hard to get down that far, not lose sight of what a big topic was being addressed, and still sound like me (special thanks to KB Spangler, who smacked me upside the head about the latter point; that’s why she’s an excellent editor and you should hire her). But there it is, years later. My essay got split up and folded into a series of digital illustration topics, and my name might have gotten left off the contributor’s list, but it’s totally in the errata and will be in the next edition!

  Look, like I said above, we need to find joy, etc, and I personally look forward to a job interview in the unspecified future and some tech recruiter asks about the line on my CV that says I contributed to History Of Illustration. This is completely a thing and I’m taking joy from it.

Spam of the day:

Is Your Husband Getting Calls Day and Night?

No?

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¹ Leading to an excitable kid to exclaim This is so cool and a jaded tiger to mutter This is so stupid.

² None of which, as far as I know, were T-Rex, in that they didn’t appear to be shouting Frig! Frig! I don’t know how to fly! Friiiiiiiig!

³ Correct answer: So hard.