The WordPress upgrade process was — uncharacteristically — a little funky. I’ll make it up to you with some extra-good content on Monday. Enjoy your weekend.

So much goin’ on over at the Twitters. Let’s dig in.

• I’ve been re-reading Lucy Knisley’s Kid Gloves (which releases on Tuesday next, and a review of which is forthcoming) and so I was primed for the announcement of the requisite book tour. Good news for those of you in Chicagoland, Brooklyn, DC, Boston, Nashvile, the Hudson Valley, and Athens, GA: you’ll get to see Knisley between Sunday 24 February and Friday 8 March, with later visits on 22 March, 19 April, and TCAF on 11/12 May.

  Bad news for me: the nearest she’ll be to me is Brooklyn on Tuesday (that’s the day of release, no less!) and I’ll be out of town for work in the other direction that day. Check the dates and times in the art and go see her.

• About ten days ago, we talked about the upcoming event about comics and medical education, and how little information was available at the time. A couple days later they made with the info, but I didn’t notice until today. But here’s the deets we didn’t have before:
  • The event is intended for librarians, health education and outreach professionals, and creators working in graphic medicine.
  • It’s a one-day event, 10 April, starting with registration at coffee at 8:30am and wrapping at 3:30 that afternoon.
  • There’s limited registration space, which can be reserved here.
  • Attendees will be encouraged to make comics during breaks and lunch.
  • Seriously, Cathy Leamy and Danteluke Landherr-Shepherd? Go.
• Gumroad, who have been an invaluable piece of the cartoonist’s infrastructure, have decided that if comics are a big part of your business, it makes sense to make more cartoonists in the future. Enter the Gumroad Creator’s Fund:
  

  We’re going to donate upwards of $50,000 (10% of our profits) to creators and creative projects over the course of 2019. Anyone–including you–can apply. When? Now!

  The application is pretty broad, and there’s not much in the way of the criteria they’re using to evaluate applications, but you know what? I don’t see Patreon doing this. Good for Gumroad.

• Finally: this starts heartwarming, veers into the goofball end of things almost immediately, and ends someplace terrible because Brad Guigar is simultaneously dreamy and horrible.

Spam of the day:

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The thermal conductivity of ceramic is, to quote my old material science professor, shitty, and titanium is too lightweight to hold any heat. Put ’em together and you’ve got the world’s crappiest fry pan.

Want to transform your cooking experience with a pan that is not only free of (booga, booga, scary!) “toxins”, but also supplies a vital nutrient into your diet? Get a godsdamned cast-iron pan, get it hot, throw in cold fat, and cook. It’ll cost you about twenty bucks if you avoid the fancy places, and it will last forever. Fuck outta here with your premium technology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spam of the day:

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

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

Go on, guess. Congrats to Danielle Corsetto, Monica Gallaher, and Mae S Keller of the sixtynineaversary over at Boo! It’s Sex.

And while I’m here, did you see the notice from Tony Millionaire? It’s been a bit more than two years since he announced the end of Maakies, but all things (including ends) come to an endeventually:

MAAKIES DRINKY CROW! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

MAAKIES REDUX! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

MAAKIES! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

DRINKY CROW! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, till then I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

DRINKY WEEKLY! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

MAAKIES REDUX! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

Drinky Crow Weekly! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

My weekly strip! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

Drinky Crow weekly! Coming back in March, multi-platform. Also, I’ll draw your pets, house, people. Contact me http://maakies.com/?page_id=79

That’s a tweet roughly every half hour for the past five hours (as I write this), all of which are accompanied by Millionaire’s pet portraits, which are uncreedably¹ detailed and beautiful. Click ’em all and check out the corgis! Or look at his commission gallery, which is what that link in each tweet leads to.

Details about when in March and what platforms are a bit thin at the moment, but does it matter? Maakies is coming back, we’ll get more Drinky Crow, and I say that’s worth a celebratory dook dook dook from all concerned.

Spam of the day:

Long Edgar: All the end, I thought, and suddenly fate gave me a chance ….

I initially thought this was more boner pill spam, but it appears to be a guaranteed wealth system spam instead. Sorry that you aren’t getting any, Long Edgar!

_______________
¹ RIP Frank Zappa and Ike Willis.

Since we spoke last week, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival has announced a slew of new guests, and I’ve gone through the exhibitor’s list to see who-all is gonna be there. Strap in, there’s a lot to see.

On the Featured International Guest list, TCAF have announced Brazilian twin superstars Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon, Daria Bogdanska, Alexandre Clerisse, Aimee de Jongh, Keiron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Nora Krug, and Jamie McKelvie. The Featured Kids Guests are yet to be announced (apart from the previously-announced Lucy Knisley).

Exhibitors on the floors of the TRC will include Boum, Tony Cliff, Danielle Corsetto, Evan Dahm, Blue Delliquanti, Megan Rose Gedris, Maddi Gonzalez, Meredith Gran, Mike Holmes, Kat Leyh, Sam Logan, Mike Maihack, Phil McAndrew, Rosemary Mosco, Shan Murphy, Maki Naro, Ryan North, Sarah Winifred Searle, Ben Sears, Jason Viola, EK Weaver, Alison Wilgus, David Willis, Tory Woollcott, Sophie Yanow, and the terminally-named Jim Zub¹. The list is being added to, and we’ll let you know of who else we notice from time to time.

And you’ll probably find more people you like by checking out the publishers who’ll be on hand, including Cloudscape Comics, Creators For Creators², :01 Books, Iron Circus Comics, Koyama Press, The Nib, Oni Press, Retrofit Comics, and Shortbox³. As we get word of what creators will be with publishers, we’ll let you know.

As a reminder, TCAF will take place Saturday & Sunday, 11 & 12 May, from 9:00am (Saturday)/10:00am (Sunday) until 5:00pm, at the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street. Attendance is free to all events, but some Junji Ito events will require tickets (details TBA).

Spam of the day:

12,000 “Perfect” Shed Plans only for you

While I do have a moustache that, all modesty aside, is pretty impressive, I am neither Ron Swanson nor Nick Offerman. I have no use for your shed plans.

_______________
¹ Rumo[u]rs that Chip Zdarsky will sneak into TCAF to do violence upon Mr Zub so that he may be the last-named comics artist are unconfirmed at press time.

² Not really a publisher, but they’ll be there and that’s cool.

³ Ditto.

Things that you should dig into and just roll around in for a while, because they’re wonderful.

• Firstly, the queen of Weird Shit Just Happens Around Her, Ursula Vernon, has an adventure in the near future. One may recall that four years back, she was part of a coterie — a cohort, even — of artists that made their way to southern Africa and memorialized their safari in an art book. Welp, she (and they) are at it again, heading to Himalayan end of China, again to report on their sojourn in book form. Back ’em now so that you can see the reports of weirdness that will surely follow.
• Secondly, speaking of China, it’s again the Year Of The Pig. And speaking of pigs (and also Kickstarted books), KC Green did a story about a pig in the Tim’rous Beastie anthology from Iron Circus. That story, A Pig Being Lowered Into Hell In A Bucket, is a deep rumination on the nature of sin and redemption, and what place in the afterlife one may expect, deserve, or demand. It’s a quiet (with occasional yelling) masterpiece, one that deals in capital-T Truths. And because Green is a stellar fellow, you get to read it because he put the whole damn thing online, where a bunch of scrolling suits perfectly the very vertical nature of the story. Go. Read. Strongly consider giving him some money because his work is far more than Dickbutt and This Is Fine, and chances are you’ve only seen the merest fraction of it.
• Thirdly, a new graphic novel by Ananth Hirsh and Tess Stone (who did the really excellent BUZZ! ’bout five years back), coming in 2022 from Random House Graphic. I’m really looking forward to this, if only because Hirsh’s writing is tighter, and Stone’s art is cleaner and stronger, than 2015, and given we won’t see this one for another three and a half years, they’ll both be even better by then. Also, because holy damn is Gina Gagliano locking down talent. The industry press had been full of announcements about acquisitions for release in 2020, but now we’re talking late 2022; by mid-decade, she’ll have pulled RHG into position as a fully equal player to Scholastic and :01 Books — original graphic novels will be neatly divided into those three companies, and everybody else.
• Lastly, just block out a chunk of time this weekend to obsessively click the button here. The complete unpredictability of random Achewood panels has long been appreciated, but to marry that random wisdom with the divinatory power of the tarot? Somebody tell Onstad he can have my money if he prints up an Achewood tarot deck; the chief difficulty would be reducing the thousands of richly deserving candidates to the 78 cards in a standard deck. Heck, I’m saying right now the entire entire Swords suit should be Ramses Luther Smuckles, and there’s half the major arcana that could be represented by Cartilage Head.

  Needless to say, I don’t actually believe in any form of fortune telling, but that three-card collection in the image up top? Almost enough to make me reassess that position.

Spam of the day:

Ultrawatch Z: The World’s Strongest Tactical SmartWatch

Congratulations. I never wanted a smart watch, and now that you’ve gone and gotten tactical bro shit all over it, I want one even less. I swear, I can already hear the tight-throated narration that will be used in your eventual commercial.

Everybody knows that TCAF is one of the highlights of the comics event year, and this year is going to be no exception. They just announced their first tranche of Featured Guests¹ for 2019, and hoo boy is it a lineup of considerable talent.

The first names to catch my eye were Lucy Knisley (whose Kid Gloves I’m presently reading, and which I’ll have a review of in the near future) and Emily Carroll (whose work is always spooky in the best way, just under-your-skin-and-crawling-around dread instead of obvious jump scares). But if you’re talking about scares, there’s maybe one person more associated with horror comics than any other in the world, and that’s Junji Ito. And wouldn’t you know it, TCAF has convinced Ito to make his first North American visit, as well as to design three show posters.

The names kept rolling: Ben Passmore (whose Your Black Friend should be required reading for everybody in America age 14 and up) and Ezra Claytan Daniels, creative partners on the upcoming graphic novel BTTM FDRS, as well as indie comic legends Bill Griffith and Seth.

There’s also a stack of names that are new to me, which is great because I get to learn about their work: Inés Estrada, Gord Hill, Anders Nilsen, Brian Selznik, Vivek Shraya, Ness Lee, and Mark Alan Stamaty.

And because this is TCAF, this is just the beginning; they have yet to mention their other non-North American guests, YA guests, and Kids guests.

TCAF 2019 returns to the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street in The Big Smoke on Saturday, 11 May (9:00am to 5:00pm) and Sunday, 12 May (10:00am to 5:00pm), with a week of exhibits, performances, readings, workshops, parties, and general celebrations of the comic arts leading up to the show. As in past years, look for panel sessions to spill out to various venues around the TRL, and as always, the show is free to attend.

Spam of the day:

Expand Your Wi-Fi Coverage – 300Mbps Wi-Fi Range Extender

Gary, surely the spammers that sent you this aren’t expecting you to believe that they can sell you a gizmo that will make your data into your house faster? Reader, that is exactly what they promise. Hook up their dealie and my fairly pathetic 7Mbps DSL will suddenly be 300Mbps. Yes, they think we’re that stupid.

_______________
¹ I know that URL says 2018, but it’s this year’s guests, promise.

A moment of your time please, for reflection on the achievements of Opportunity, who was meant to operate on the surface of Mars for 90 sols and instead continued for fifteen years, until the announcement today. With batteries well past the point of being able to sustain system requirements, and no response to communications for an extended period of time, NASA called it today. The mission is done.

Some day, humans will expand our permanent presence to the Moon and Mars; when that happens, I hope that significant bits of history like Spirit and Opportunity and the Apollo landing sites are not turned into equivalent of national parks, their artifacts removed to some museum or other. I hope they build domes over them but leave out the atmosphere, keeping them inviolate and preserved as they are forever¹. Put a half-meter diameter hemisphere of plexi over the entire rambling 45km you traveled, let us get close but never obscure a single tread-mark.

It’s cold where you are, and dark, and very far from where you were born. You showed us every meter in stunning detail and we thank you.

Spam of the day:

[BREAKING NEWS] NASA is Freaking Out Over This ultimate free energy

YOU KEEP NASA’S NAME OUT OF YOUR FILTHY, LYING MOUTH.

_______________
¹ Or at least until the Sun swells in its death throes in a few billion years, obliterating these rocks where we spawned.

I had some reservations about today’s topic because there’s tantalizingly little information public, and I couldn’t find any more that what I’m about to share with you — and believe me, I went digging for every possible public avenue. But if there’s one thing that comics are uniquely suited towards, it’s teaching — and some of you are going to want to consider attending an upcoming (but at the moment, mysterious) event. I’ve got some inquiries out there now, and I’ll be sure to update with any additional details that present themselves.

So, the University of Massachusetts Medical School is apparently doing a comics event. The sole mention of it so far is from the New England Region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, which appears to be an endeavour of the National Institutes of Health. There’s nothing at the NNLM/NER webpage and nothing at the UMass Med School web page, but we can tell some things:

• The address given, 55 Lake Ave North Worcester, MA 01655 appears to be for the UMass Memorial Medical Center, which is the first of the entities so listed to have an upcoming events listing.
• Nothing for the date given, 10 April, though.
• Despite the graphic elements shown in the announcement, it doesn’t appear that the likes of Cece Bell, Raina Telgemeier, Brian Fies, or Roz Chast will be there — I’m assuming that they’re there because the comics in question all deal with health, death, and dying.
• But Maki Naro, science communicator via the medium of comics since small times, will be there.
• Despite the name, New England Graphic Medicine ComicCon looks like it will be more an academic event than a con, if only based on the sponsoring organizations. Look for formal talks, not tabling creators.
• So maybe don’t show up in cosplay as your favorite communicable disease; in fact, it may not be open to the public at all, what with it being daytime in the middle of the week.

But I have people that read this page that likely are the intended audience, whether they use comics in a STEM academic setting (hello, Danteluke Landherr-Shepherd), those who use comics as part of medical outreach and education specifically (hello, Cathy Leamy), not to mention librarians of alls trips (particularly academic librarians).

If this sounds like a good way to spend a Wednesday, you might want to start working your professional networks. In the meantime, I’ll let you know what responses I get. With any luck, we’ll be able to get one or more of the folks that attend to tell us what they taught and/or learned.

Spam of the day:

System simple growth well-being running USA by the developer from NASA – specifically made it possible a lot of young people receive impressive amounts!

Curiously, this spam came in both bad English (as seen above) and original Russian text. When Google translated, this section reads:

Simple income system developed in Japan, scientists from NASA – really helped many people to raise little money!

The differences in wording aside, I find the shift from the USA to Japan to be weird. But mostly, I take it as a reminder to watch the Super Karate Monkey Death Car episode of News Radio again. Stephen Root is a treasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spam of the day:

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

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

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

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

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

⁴ Lard. Duh.

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

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