I mean, the dog’s keeping me company so that’s all right, but I could use another 18 hours or so of sleep. Yet your insatiable desire for webcomics and webcomics-adjacent news demands my consciousness, damn you.

• Speaking of dogs and under the weather, I need to mention Andy Runton for a moment. It is established, scientific fact that Runton is the sweetest guy on the planet, and also that he has spent significant effort in the past helping others through their medical challenges. See those watercolors he did to raise money for neurofibromatosis? They feature his pooches. One of whom, Gable, is doing poorly:
  

  … Gable stopped using his back legs. We rushed him back to the specialist and I’m so glad we did. Gable needed emergency surgery to help his back. He suffered something called IVDD, losing multiple discs in his spine.

  He made it through surgery and even recovered most of his ability to walk over the next 3 months. Unfortunately he suffered another injury to his spine on February 2nd. Nothing major happened. He just didn’t want to stand up when it was time for bed. We were hoping he just needed some pain meds but he needed a second back surgery.

  Andy’s an independent cartoonist; the Owly books have been out of print for a shamefully long time, and although Scholastic is reissuing them (in color!) and following the existing five with a new sixth book¹, that doesn’t even start until next year. So maybe help the sweetest guy as he’s doing right by an adorable pupper? I’m in and I hope you join me.

• Speaking of sweet things, did you know that at the Ig Nobel prize ceremony, there is a small girl named Miss Sweetie Poo who will — if an acceptance speech goes on too long — repeatedly declare Please stop, I’m bored at the laureates? Because there is. And this has what, exactly to do with webcomics?

  Enter Zach Weinersmith, and his Bad Ad-Hoc Hypothesis Festival in London, on 16 March:

  Brought together at Imperial College for the first time on the same date — the London stop of the Ig Nobel Awards Tour Show, and the London Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses.

  Both shows will take place in the Great Hall of Imperial College, in the Sherfield Building (number 20 on this map). The Ig Nobel show will start at 15:00 (doors open from 14:00) and will finish by 17:00. There will then be an intermission. BAHFest will start at 19:00, (doors open from 18:00) and will finish by 21:00. After the show, the bar downstairs from the venue will be open for attendees, and there will be a book signing with several of our judges and speakers. Books can be bought in advance when checking-out through Eventbrite, and a limited number will be available to buy on the day.

  Tickets at this link ranging £9 (one show only, student) to £80 (both shows, plus dinner with both sets of performers between the shows), with Imperial College students able to purchase tickets through their student union. If you’ll be in Blighty at the time, get tickets — there will be laugh-chuckles aplenty.

Spam of the day:

THE “ASSAULT BAG” IS YOUR EVERYDAY TACTICAL BACKPACK – GET 1 FREE!

This might have gone over better if you hadn’t sent it the same day that McSweeney’s posted this.

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¹ Runton told me about this last year at Comics Camp, but I promised not to reveal it before the official announcement. Somehow, I neglected to write about it here, which is deeply embarrassing.

Sick.

See you tomorrow. Maybe.

Wonderful things happening today. Best brace yourself.

• It’s been more than a dozen years — not much more than a month after this blog started, in fact — since I called for an illustrated guide to Warner Bros cartoon sight gags. Think of the very elaborate Rube Goldberg last minute of Bully For Bugs or the Friz Freleng Multidoor Gag¹. In fact, think of the Multidoor Gag now, because KC Green and Anthony Clark clearly did in today’s BACK and went further to provide the explanation we’ve been waiting for since 1944: room tunnels. Give ‘er a read and you’ll find yourself smiling.
• Unlooked for and yet very welcome: Randall Munroe is doing his third anciliary xkcd book², following up What If? and Thing Explainer. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems is described as:
  

  [T]he world’s least useful self-help book. It describes how to cross a river by removing all the water, outlines some of the many uses for lava around the home, and teaches you how to use experimental military research to ensure that your friends will never again ask you to help them move.

  Want.

  I was worried that there might be overlap with Ryan North’s similarly-titled How To Invent Everything, but North’s book doesn’t feature even one method of messing with your friends. Here’s hoping How To includes advice on how to get out of holes. It will be available on 3 September in the US, Canada, UK, the Commonwealth, Germany, and Holland, and 20 October in Sweden, for US$28, CAN$37, €16, £17 (subject to Brexit upheaval), SEK141, and unknown amounts of Aussie [and Kiwi] Fun Bucks.

• Hey, you know who rules? Shing Yin Khor (shown here at the bottom margin). She does amazing art, amazing installations, amazing prints, amazing experiences, and knows more about Paul Bunyan Muffler Men than you, guaranteed. She’s also been named a Kickstarter Thought Leader for 2019, joining Zainab Akhtar³ as representatives of the world of comics to Kickstarter’s list of Official Smart People.

  Keep an eye on Khor as she shares more of her special skills for building community; while you’re at it, her latest Kickstart — for art postcards of weird critters — runs another ten days. Time to hop on that.

Spam of the day:

Here’s why mental decline isn’t your fault

I know that I’m never serious in ripping on spammers, but this is completely serious: mental decline is never your fault, and fuck anybody that says that it is.

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¹ Which I referred to back then as Five Doors, but I was mistaken. In my defense, there were not YouTube clips of the gag in question to check my memory against, and now there are

² xkcd: volume 0 being a collection of strips, not Munroe being Munroe in the wonderfully weird ways he does.

³ Oliver Sava at The AV Club is the only writer on comics that I think is as insightful and enjoyable to read as Akhtar, and there’s not a better curator anywhere in English language comics.

Always remember: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

Oh, Internet Jesus, are you ever at a loss for words? Let’s see what webcomics has in store for Horny Werewolf Day.

• If you’re going to keep the Horny in Horny Werewolf Day, you could do far worse than keeping an eye on Oh Joy, Sex Toy, where chroniclers of all things sexy Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan are dealingn with the efforts of working on two books by sharing the love:
  

  Next week we’ve got another cute porny guest comic (I know right, a lot of horny ones in a row, just in time for Valentines — it’s just how it turned out I swear)

  And then just after they’ve got a signing of Drawn To Sex at the Seattle outpost of Babeland:

  Meet illustrators and authors Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan as they talk about sex and the first installment of their educational book series, Drawn to Sex: The Basics.

  Erika and Matthew have spent years learning, talking, and creating informative comics about all aspects of sex. Using comics, jokes, and frank communication, they’re here to demystify the world of sex and answer your questions—including ones you might not even know you had! Enjoy complimentary bubbly, 10% off shopping and a chance to win a copy of their new book.

  That’s Friday, 15 February, from 7:00pm to 8:00pm, at 707 East Pike Street in Seattle.

• You know where you might find actual horny werewolves? In the Iron Circus anthology of sexy times plus beasties, My Monster Boyfriend, that’s where! And if you don’t have a copy handy, you can get one on sales between now and HWD. From IC Supremo C Spike Trotman:
  

  Happy February, everybody! It’s time for a Valentine’s Day sale! From now until February 15th, we’re offering 25% off cover price on all our romance and erotica titles!
  Just use coupon code JewelledDynamo at check out, and the discount will be applied to all applicable items in your cart.

  Applicable titles are Crossplay, Iris and Angel: Two, The Less Than Epic Adventures Of TJ And Amal, Five Years Ago And Three Thousand Miles Away, Kung Fu Hustlers, Whisper Grass, Letters For Lucardo, Smut Peddler: 2012 Edition, Smut Peddler: 2014 Edition, Smut Peddler Presents: My Monster Boyfriend, and Yes, Roya.

  You can find all of them in the NSFW section of the Iron Circus Store, along with How To Smoke A Weed (not romance/erotica) and Iris And Angel: One (listed at zero dollars for the PDF, so how much of a discount do you want?).

Spam of the day:

This official President DONALD J. TRUMP COMMEMORATIVE COIN

Nope. Stopping you right there. Today’s post is a celebration of horniness, not antihorniness. Shoo.

New stuff arriving, old stuff going away, and a new direction or two. Oh and apropos of nothing, the people that make IT infrastructure decisions for my employer are sociopaths that have no regard for their end users¹. But let’s focus on webcomics!

• New Stuff: George — Mister Rohac, if you’re nasty — knows more than one or maybe no dudes in a million about the logistics and business of getting stuff made and managing projects with respect to the independent creative professional. He’s gathered up a lot of his accumulated wisdom in one easy-to-read Google Doc and shared it publicly because he loves you. There’s more to come, but even if another word is never added, there’s seven pages of goodness there including names of vendors that he’s used so as to save you flailing about. George is a national treasure.
• Old Stuff: There’s little in webcomics with the depth and breadth of worldbuilding and interconnectedness to match John Allison’s Tackleverse. From 1998 on, Allison’s been giving us stories of the mundane and the weird, across a variety of aesthetic styles, predominantly solo but also partnering with top-notch artistic talent (particularly on the Giant Days comics from BOOM!, issue 47 of which is out this week, and which gets better month after month). Alas, there are only so many hours in a day, and that means Things Are Going To Change. Specifically, the return to the beginning of the Tacklfordillion is coming to a close:
  

  Sorry to say, this is the last comic of the current run. I’m about to start work on a (completely new, non-SGR) print project that I will be writing and drawing, which means new webcomics are off the cards for the forseeable future. I have plans for more Bobbins stories following on from this, but I don’t know when I’ll be back, so your best bet is to subscribe to the mailing list for updates.

  You can subscribe on the comic page linked above, or you can read his Tinyletter missives by following his Twitterfeed, or you can go old school and hit the RSS. Things may be to be continued for the moment, but I wager they’ll be back.

• New Direction: There is probably no longer-running, more consistent webcomicker who has never even tried to make comics a career than David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc), he of many comics. Specifically, his employer has prompted him to make a leap after 16+ years:
  

  My employer has informed me that my job is being declared redundant. My last day of paid employment is 4 March. I’m looking at this as an opportunity rather than a setback. My plan is to take about 6 months off work, and spend the equivalent of full-time working hours doing creative things — making comics, writing, photography, making videos, etc. — and ramping up my efforts to market them and try to make a living income off them. If after 6 months I feel comfortable that I can make enough from my creative work, then I will continue — if not, then it’ll be time to look for another job.

  As part of this effort, I’ve already moved Irregular Webcomic! from 4-a-week to a slightly more “full time” schedule of new comics on Monday-Friday. Coming soon there will be announcements of new projects that I’ll be ramping up over the next few weeks. Importantly, if this is to continue, I’ll be looking for your support. I’ll be pushing Patreon as a way to support me, producing merchandise for sale, and may also consider some other things like Google Ads.

  [That newsbox doesn’t appear to have a permalink, but for now it’s on the main page of Irregular Webcomic, if you scroll down.]

  There is probably nobody that approaches creativity with such enthusiastic abandon as Morgan-Mar; he gets an idea for a comic, he jumps in with both feet, and does it until it reaches a natural ending point or maybe never. And he doesn’t make it easy on himself — comics that require constructing and re-constructing LEGO sets, with 18 interlocking story threads? Learning to draw and doing a weekly comic as a way to measure his skill progress? He’s living proof that it’s not a lack of ideas that holds back creation, it’s a lack of time to act on the ideas.

  I recommend you make the time worthwhile. He’s got his two (so far) books up at TopatoCo’s Internet Thingporium, and there will be more to come. You’ve got six months to convince him to let all those ideas run riot, or he goes back to Dayjoblandia, and there actually are going to be positions open for a PhD astrophysicist that’s involved in the international standards for digital photography. He can go back to meetings and conferences like that, people. Don’t let him slip through your fingers.

• Miscellaneous: Lucas Landherr (the mild-mannered college professor and alter ego of deranged chalkvenger Dante Shepherd) is 36 years old today. Also a PhD, he’s establishing new modes of using comics in STEM education, and also turning chemical engineering exams into a means to channel his inner Gonzo The Great. He’s also just one of the best people. Everybody wish him a happy birthday because damn, dude deserves it.

Spam of the day:

Give your dog’s mouth the attention it deserves with DogDentist and save a TON of money in vet bills.

While watching my dog stagger around tripping balls after getting anesthetized for dental treatment is hilarious, it’s really much simpler to brush her teeth. Plus, her toothpaste tastes like chicken!

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¹ Did I say that out loud?

Hey, everybody! It’s February 1st, and you all know what that means — it’s Saint Groundhog’s Day Eve! Okay, it’s also Hourly Comic Day and we’ll get to that presently.

• Today is also-also the day that KC Green wraps He Is A Good Boy after 300+ multipage updates of spiral time and inner journeys. Crange may not be a good boy (he’s certainly not the greatest god-damn boy you’ll ever meet), he’s kind of a dick and pretty much inertia personified. But after seeing all the variations, all the Crange, all the Emersons, all the quantum-variant versions of himself, he found a way to start over with some peace, a way to exit the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth, which I’m pretty sure makes him a buddha.

  The big finish starts here. If it’s too weird for you, maybe check out a recent one-shot at The Nib wherein a squirrel gets his comeuppance. None of those acorns are Crange. At least, they probably aren’t.

• Right! Hourly Comic Day! You know the drill, you make a comic that expresses what you did in each hour of the day, ideally within that hour. There’s more of them out there today than a reasonable person can count, but I’ll get you started with ones that I particularly enjoyed: Tony Breed, Carly Monardo, Jeph Jacques, Jean Wei, Haley Boros, Meredith Gran, Colleen Frakes, Abby Howard, Dean Trippe, Christopher Baldwin, Shing Yin Khor, and Lucas Landherr are all on Twitter; Danielle Corsetto opted for Instagram, and there’s a zillion on Tumblr (I’m not on Tumblr).

  But for my money, the best single hourly comic was the first posting from Magnolia Porter, because her comic for 6-7am doubles as that you ten years ago vs you today thing that was going around two weeks back. Oh, and happy day after your birthday, Mags; you rock.

Spam of the day:

Never eat THIS after 7:00 pm (triggers heart attack)

Man, now I’m going to be all paranoid when it’s time to shift the clocks. Does the heart attack food know about Daylight Savings? Or time zones?

First, for many, many people reading this, stay warm. It is dangerous out there.

Second, a bunch of creators you follow live in areas that are deadly cold right now. Many more live places that are merely a hell of a lot colder than they should be, even if those places are not imminent hazards. Which means that i a couple weeks, they’re going to be getting utility bills that cover this period of frigid temperatures.

And you’re going to be seeing things like Uh, got my heating bill and it’s about triple what a normal month would be. Here’s {stuff in my store | commissions open | a pay-my-bill sale | my Patreon | my Ko-Fi | whatever} all over the damn place.

If you can afford it, help ’em out. It’s not a matter of poor planning when what’s hit this week is literally unprecedented, and do you want your favorite creators being able to create, or scrambling to keep the lights on in late February? Thought so.

Again — stay warm. Less than two months to the equinox.

Spam of the day:

– Welcome Gary, Need a Tax Debt Hero?

Oh great, it’s tax scam season¹.

_______________
¹ Said in the same tone of voice that Lily Tomlin used in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse when she muttered. Oh great, it’s Liv. That line killed me.

Ever see something that is tailor-made for you, something that speaks to your very existence, and yet you know that you just can’t? Glenn Fleishman has dropped such a thing in my lap.

I may have mentioned, once or twice, that I am fascinated by type. When traveling in the Low Countries on vacation years ago, I made it a point to include Antwerp on the itinerary solely so that I could visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum, where a guy named Christophe Plantin worked with typefaces designed by Claude Garamond whose beauty have not been exceeded in the past half-millennium. His son in law Jan Moretus (and his descendants) kept the type foundry/printing company going, a place so key to the history of the written word in the modern world that it’s now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Fleishman’s looked at the history of type, and noticed that while there are well-established and stable museums like the Plantin-Moretus, much of the historical artifacts of moveable type are in collections that have tenuous funding and may end up inaccessible to scholars, artists, and craftspeople in the future. Or hell, one fire could destroy a significant portion of the world’s history of type.

To distribute things of historical import and beauty, to ensure that examples of the craft are spread far and wide, to help guarantee that a single loss will not be crippling Fleishman has designed a mini museum of type, with historical artifacts as well as newly-commissioned examples of type in various materials.

There will be up to 100 iterations of this museum (with 60 on offer at Kickstarter, no two exactly alike), each packaged into a box approximately 15x15x30cm, with a letterpress book acting as the docent to the museum. It’s a tremendous amount of work, several labors of love, and will go for US$1000 and it’s a godsdammned bargain and I just can’t justify it but I very much want to spend a long time exploring one.

Which is not to say that I won’t be getting in on the campaign.

I was probably in college by the time I remembered an incident from when I was very young — four or five, maybe. My grandfather took me to his place of work one day, in Lower Manhattan. He sat me on his lap at a big metal machine with many keys on it, in a vast, clattering, too-warm room. He pressed my fingers down on keys one at a time — G A R … — and after a bit pulled a large lever.

There was some noise, and then in a little tray, a piece of metal 10 or 12cm long, warm to the touch. I could make out the letters which spelled my name, but they were wrong … backwards. He showed me how I could press the backwards letters onto an ink pad, then onto paper and see my name spelled out, with one L slightly too high.

I didn’t realize at the time that Linotype was a thing, or that it was a thing on its way out. I didn’t understand what the advent of hot metal typesetting would mean to printing and publishing. I was mildly upset when I lost that slug of type in a move a few years later, and very upset once I got older and realized what I’d lost.

But Fleishman’s thought of me personally, it seems. At the US$100 level, 500 people will get a freshly-cast slug of Linotype, with any brief text that they want. I can feel my grandfather nodding at me across nearly five decades, telling me that it won’t be the one he made me, but maybe just as good¹. If I bump up to US$200, I can also get the letterpress guide that will go with the museums.

There is nothing practical about any of this; nobody is going to letterpress anything out of the scattered artifacts in these museums. It’s instead an act of optimism, of preservation, drawing a line in the sand and saying this is our history, it’s significant, join me and preserve it². That act of safekeeping is itself Art.

The Tiny Type Museum and Time Capsule will be fundraising for the next 29 days. The ten early-bird museums have be snagged up, and as of this writing 49/50 of the full price copies remain available. It’s the sort of thing that only the well-off or obsessed can back, so I’m not suggesting that you pledge. But spread the word — something tells me that galleries and museums, letterpress operations and design firms might well want to take a look. I have to imagine that the folks over at Blambot would be interested. This is something that needs to succeed.

Spam of the day:

This method is something mechanics have used for years when you give them your old dead batteries. But now you can do this too because of this new video.

Jumper cables. You’re describing jumper cables.

_______________
¹ He’s also shaking his head wondering how a two-word slug could be valued at a hundo. From throwaway cheap to significant expense in a generation and a half — Linotype machines used to be commonplace, now they’re cranky rarities that artisans keep in working order because they can.

But you know what? If that’s the cost to subsidize the rest of the endeavour, it’s worth it.

² Which is remarkably similar to the discussions I had with the gallery director when I first started collecting Chuck Jones animation art. I absolutely believe I hold those images — Rikki Tikki Tavi and Kotick, Mowgli and Shere Khan, the Grinch and Max, the Dot and the Line — in trust for the future. Little slices of something larger, 1/24th second each, to be cared for and kept safe so that we don’t forget them.

I mean, not as bad as a bunch of you, stuck in record cold air temps and windchills. Stay warm, stay safe, see you tomorrow.

The American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards have beenhanded out, and Fleen wishes to extend congratulations to all the winners. Of interest to readers of this page, Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please!: #Hockey is one of five finalists for the William C Morris YA Debut Award; over at YALSA’s Award For Excellence In Nonfiction, three of the five finalists carry the text written and illustrated by on the cover, indicating the unique ability of comics to convey complex stories.

Now, a quick bit of quibbling: the Morris award is presented to a book published by a first-time author writing for teens and celebrating impressive new voices in young adult literature, and Ukazu produced three self-published books prior to C,P:#H, which is itself a compilation of her first two self-published books¹. It’s a bit discouraging that the books don’t “count” until an imprint associated with one of the big publishing corporations gets a hold of it².

The idea of debut and first-time is frequently stretched at awards time in all sorts of media (including all over the place in books, music, movies, and comics), and I don’t mean that Ukazu should have been excluded — it’s just I’d like to see acknowledgment that the work was just as good when people did it on their own as when it went through the editorial departments of some very large companies. Congratulations to everybody that got good news out of Seattle this morning — you’re going good work.

Speaking of good work, please keep an eye on Abby Howard at Twitter this week — she’s doing a series of demon drawings, with originals up for sale at Etsy. Howard, of course, draws the hell (so to speak) out of spooky stuff, and she starts things off with a stellar rendition of The Adversary. I expect things will be suitably scarifying for the rest of the week³.

Spam of the day:

in the the video above you will find 2 new ways to make your PACKAGE look BIGGER and last longer In the 12 hrs we are deleting it!

I think they’re saying that they’re going to delete the video, not my package, but you never know.

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¹ Okay, third one is shipping soon.

² Unlike, say, American Born Chinese or SMILE, which existed in printed form as minicomics prior to their book book publication, Ukazu had actual gosh-darned books out there and for sale. Only thing is that they may not have had an ISBN and bar code.

³ Depending on your view of domestic animals, she may have done so just an hour later