Things are happening quickly. History barrels on.

• Following up on the Tumblrpocalypse (Tumblrgeddon?) from t’other day, I’m seeing a lot of posts indicating utterly nonsensical this is adult content !!!!11one!! judgments from Tumblr’s algorithms. For a representative sample of how bad those naked people- and smut-identifying tools are, let’s look at just one set of flagged images, from Yuko Ota:
  

  a cool compilation of posts that were flagged by tumblr for containing pornography

  Included are a photo of the cover of her Offhand art book, a photo of the cover of Our Cats Are More Famous Than us, two update teasers from Barbarous, a picture of a gargoyle and mutant bird Maw, and the Maw plushie.

  What the hell, Tumblr? And this is just one creator, with a relatively short thread of WTH. I’ve seen literally hundreds of entirely inoffensive images that are about to be purged to heck and back because the entire class of content that Tumblr built its growth on is now officially icky¹. As people are grabbing up their Tumblr contents to preserve them, they are also looking for new places to keep all that stuff for display.

  Various Mastodon and Ello proponents are out there, but C Spike Trotman is pointing folks towards Pillowfort³, which as of this writing is experiencing stability issues to the massive land-rush. Under The Ink is keeping a running list of NSFW webcomics and creators, so that everybody can find stuff when it all settles again.

• Another intriguing possibility? PornHub:
  

  Tumblrs: Pornhub welcomes you with open arms. Join our amazing community of millions Curators: Customize your personal feed, create playlists, generate gifs and more Creators: Upload videos, photos, gifs & share text posts to a massive audience. Earn revenue on your content.

  Turns out they’ve always allowed non-video content, and they are probably the site least likely to ever decide that hosting naked people and smut is beneath them, so there’s that. Gonna get tripped by a lot of nanny filters, though.

• And for those of you not dealing with the Tumblr thing today, here’s another surprise: Larry Gonick — indie cartoonist since small times; I first read his Cartoon Guide To Computer Science 35 years ago in high school, which is where I first learned about Claude Shannon, whose wisdom I have built my life around — is having a sale.

  Including originals.

  Time to get me a unicycling engineer that teaches me about Boolean logic.

Spam of the day:

Take part in a simple survey and get a guaranteed prize

I see no reason that your email — translated from the original Russian — should make me hesitant to click on your surely-innocent link.

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¹ I’m told² that in addition to the tsunami of inappropriately-flagged images, a bunch of people are loading their formerly SFW Tumblr with as much hardcore porn as they can, figuring that if they’re gonna be flagged/shut down, they may as well earn it. Well done, I say.

² I don’t have a Tumblr account and so cannot verify.

³ She’d know, she’s the publisher of lots of quality smut. A peddler, you might almost say.

It’s going to take a bit before that title makes sense.

This Friday, the Cartoon Art Museum hosts a screening for a movie with an unusual history. The Folks Behind The Funnies is about newspaper strip artists, and it takes a look at a lot of familiar — which is to say, old — names: Chris Browne, Bil Keane, Mell Lazrus, Mort Walker, and Scott Adams are prominently featured. But Gary, I hear you cry, aren’t most of those dudes dead or clinically insane? Yep, and there’s a reason beyond the mortality of all living things and the fact that we live in the worst timeline.

The Folks Behind The Funnies was originally co-produced as a national PBS documentary on the history of the comic strips, looking broadly at comic strips from the 1950s to the present. Principal photography started in May 2003. In October of that year, the film’s director/producer, Nicholas Armington passed away in an accident. The project was left dormant until 2015 when Sari Armington (Nicholas’s widow and business partner) revived the footage.

Okay, so it’s fifteen years old, which might explain why the only creators on the list that haven’t been syndicated since before the 90s are Darby Conley, Patrick McDonnell, Stepahn Pastis, and Hillary Price. Maybe a few others, I haven’t memorized everybody’s resume. There’s twenty one folks there in all, and Olivia Jaimes ain’t one of them.

But the amusing part of it all? Two of the creators listed have parentheticals after their names, one of which is:

Cathy Guisewiste, Cathy (retired)

Which I thought was a bit weird, as I don’t think she was retired during principal photography, although she certainly is now. If current working status is the criterion, then folks like Walker, Keane, and Lazarus¹ should be marked as deceased. But the real kicker? The one that I wanted to bring to your attention?

Lynn Johnston, For Better Or For Worse (Canadian)

Yep, being Canadian or retired is worthy of note, being dead less so. That just amuses me.

The Folks Behind The Funnies by Sari Armington premieres at CAM on Friday, 7 December 2018 at 6:30pm. Tickets are available online on Eventbrite and, possibly at the door if seats remain. As of this writing, just under 100 tickets remain available.

Spam of the day:

Welcome to Boxwoodmeans.com. Your user registration is activated. We appreciate your business and look forward to supporting your collateral valuation needs.

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly have no idea what they are selling.

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¹ Irony!

Check out a trailer for The Folks Behind the Funnies here.

Hey, you see that image up top? Go click it, if you haven’t seen it — it’s the latest episode of the irregularly-released Hell’s Kitchen Movie Club, wherein writer Alex de Campi wonders what it would be like if Frank “The Punisher” Castle and Bucky “Half Of Stucky” Barnes hung out occasionally for movie night. This is the Hanukkah Special, wherein we meet some of Buck’s family on the first night and it’s fantastic.

The story is both touching and hilarious, the art (from Ted Brandt, Ro Stein, and Dee Cunniffe, is beautiful, and de Campi includes a piece of advice that I don’t recall seeing elsewhere:

Lettering some of your own work helps a lot, so you’re better able to “see” the letters on the page. (Also doing a lettering script once the art is in.)

Because de Campi not only wrote it, she lettered it. Obviously, single-creator webcomics are lettered by the writer, but if you’re only writing? Taking this step to make sure the words really do what you mean them to do is very, very smart.

• By the way, de Campi notes that you can see a higher-resolution version on Tumblr, at least for the moment. And Tumblr, it seems, has decided that it doesn’t really want to be in business any longer. In case you didn’t click through, it appears that Tumblr is banning adult content from 17 December, which it defines as real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, unless they decide that it’s classy enough to pass muster today (breastfeeding, works of art).

  No promises about what they decide is classy enough tomorrow; those definitions are loose enough to drive a truck — filled, no doubt, with human porn, furries gettin’ it on, and the traditional shitting dick nipples — through, and basically provide cover for whatever they want to no longer be associated with. Is it because they’re for sale, or got a new investor, or a payment processor doesn’t like teh nudez, or they just got sick of being banned from the various app stores? Who knows. They’re going to say that they only mean to get right of the child porn¹, but it seems to me they could get rid of that without discarding the rest.

  Consensus is this is going to kill fandom Tumblr, which is likely going to kill Tumblr as a whole. If your comic, or your blog, or whatever is hosted solely on Tumblr, time to find alternatives that you control, because the next TOS change doesn’t have to be about naughty bits, it could be about anything.

• If you’re outraged enough over Tumblr to want to Do Something, may I suggest another path for your ire? The Indie Comics Eleven are still deep in the lawsuit brought by Cody Pickrodt, with various responses and counter-responses to the (in my non-lawyerly opinion, bullshit) claims therein occurring in the recent past; The Comics Journal has a rundown. My reading of the situation is there’s at least three respondents that have a good chance of being dismissed from the action, but the fight will continue on as Pickrodt — raise your hand if you ever heard of him before this — continues to insist that his reputation and business prospects have been fatally damaged to the tune of US$2.5million².

  Which is to say that the need to fund the defense for Pickrodt’s targets continues, and you can contribute to their legal bills via the SPX-established Go Fund Me. There’s an estimated US$37,000 or so still needed to keep legal ruination away.

• Lastly, I was going to point out that Dustin Harbin — who, near as I can tell, is universally beloved — had put up a funding request for surgery for his dog, but a few hours ago he noted that the campaign had fully funded in half a day. Still, if you’ve ever enjoyed Harbin’s work (and I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that you have), maybe hit up his store? Paying for the surgery is one thing, having the financial cushion to take a little time off and spoil a Very Good Boy would be useful.

Spam of the day:

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Oh, yes, you are absolutely from Google™. For certain.

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¹ Pretend I bothered to track down the Helen Lovejoy GIF here. You know the one.

² Real talk here — I’ve been a ridiculously highly-paid technical professional for transnational computing corporations for more than 20 damn years, and my total earnings in that time do not add up to two-point-five mil. Pickrodt has a very high opinion of his earning potential.

Re: this.

Bunch of my students this week work for a CBP contractor and I feel a whole lot better about the entire immigration shitshow. When you can’t figure out that a user account must be CREATED before it can be USED, I don’t think the deportation machine is running at peak efficiency.

I had my lunch stolen fixing their fuckups and we’re not going to finish this class and I am ready to murder. Dog is doing her best to calm me. See you on Monday.

This one takes a little while to roll around to webcomics. Stay with me, people.

You may be familiar with Pat Rothfuss — fantasy author, comic book collaborator, comic strip character, D&D enthusiast, and general beardo¹. He also raises a metric shit-ton² of money for good works every holiday season through his charity, Worldbuilders. This time of year, he ceaselessly wrangles other creative folk to run auctions, merch availabilities, lotteries and such; he’ll even commit himself to doing you a service, Godfather style

The chief beneficiary of all of Rothfuss’s efforts via WB is Heifer International, who alleviate poverty and hunger around the world by matching up those in need with livestock — cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, bees — and veterinary knowledge & tools. As of this writing, Rothfuss has raised 92% of a US$400K goal for the year, with a bit more than eleven days left; not that reaching the goal will ever stop him until the timer runs out. He’s north of US$7.4 million raised over the past decade, which adds up to a lot of livestock.

Okay, I told you all that so I could tell you this: Rothfuss has done (and convinced others to do) damn near everything weird thing under the sun, in promotion of Heifer. But he’s never written a guest strip for a sex education webcomic:

Hey so, one of Pat’s stretch goals is writing a comic for OJST with his NotW characters =D You all should help make this happen =D

I’m not sure if those are smiley faces in the tweet from Oh Joy, Sex Toy creator Matthew Nolan, or very short dicks. But I do know that Rothfuss’s Name Of The Wind (aka The Kingkiller Chronicles … the last book of which is perpetually pending) features some sex. Like, whole sequences of prime fuckomancy. I have no idea what he might write that was illuminating and educating, or who he might get to illustrate it, but I suddenly want to read it as badly as Nolan does. Only one way to make that happen.

Spam of the day:

Take a Dip Into Style

I cannot express the degree to which I am not in the market for ladies swimwear.

_______________
¹ I know that I once commented on the Twitterfeed of my evil twin re: a picture of him and a magnificiently bearded Rothfuss, that should Rothfuss and Randy Milholland ever meet, it would be Beardaggedon. Their beards would tangle, fight, and love fiercely. Can’t find it now, dammit.

² Equal to 2.54 imperial shit-tons.

The time when hopefully-smart people tell us what the best things of the year were; a couple of well-curated lists have hit in the last day or so, and I thought I should point out some of the recognition that webcomics (and the webcomics-adjacent) have earned.

• There are very few writers on comics (of all types) working in English that are as good as Oliver Sava at The AV Club; even better, Sava has an eye for talent and has sought out others that have interesting, smart perspectives on comics and gives them plenty of space to write. He’s joined on the 2018 list of best comics by Caitlin Rosenberg, who nearly always has something to point out that I’d missed in whatever we both read.

  Giant Days (by John Allison, Max Sarin, and Whitney Cogar) continued its run of excellence, so no surprise to see a little love for the Tackleverse. Print (or reprint) runs of On A Sunbeam (by Tillie Walden) and Rice Boy (by Evan Dahm) also get nods — they’re both still available in their entirety online, but this is the year that :01 Books and Iron Circus, respectively, pushed the stories wide. Finally, they note that the single best strip — heck, the single best panel — of 2018 can be summed up in three words: Sluggo is lit, from the revamped Nancy by pseudonymous webcomicker Olivia Jaimes, who’s made the comics page safe for weirdness again.

• NPR, meanwhile, has produced a deeply curated list of the best books of 2018, and as usual they include a healthy selection of words+pictures; close to 10% of this year’s recommendations could be called comics. Like On A Sunbeam and Rice Boy, you can find much of the comics that went into Check Please!: Book One (by Ngozi Ukazu) and Your Black Friend (by Ben Passmore) online; the print editions of both are surely spreading their reach, though.

  I’m on record as being deeply conflicted about Jen Wang’s The Prince And The Dressmaker, but I’m not going to say that the NPR reviewer’s delight is misplaced or wrong — we all get from books what we get¹. Other books from onetime or sometime webcomickers include Vera Brosgol’s delightful and cringey Be Prepared, Lisa Hanawalt’s Coyote Doggirl, and Luisa — Now And Then, adapted by the invaluable Mariko Tamaki.

  Finally, in the realm of pure literature, you get some love for the only book that will let you jumpstart an entire civilization if stranded in the past, How To Invent Everything, by Ryan North (illustrations by Lucy Bellwood). Fun fact! According to North, one of the key technologies for your civilization is non-sucky numbers², which seems a random thing for me to mention here for no reason at all, but I sure did that.

• Hey, you know what you can do with non-sucky numbers? Measure stuff and calculate ratios! And you know what the greatest ratio in the world is? North, building on the work of Karla Pacheco, gifted us with such a ratio just today:
  

  Big Cow was photographed next to Small Cows. So how does Knickers compare to REGULAR cows?? Well @THEKarlaPacheco is slightly taller than a standard Holstein, and since I am slightly taller than Big Cow, the ratio between Big Cow and a regular cow is about… THIS

  Pacheco, I should note, has made a habit of being photographed with taller people — because pretty much everybody is — including, sometimes, much taller people like the Northesque Jeph Jacques. And North, I should note, has made a habit of being photographed with shorter people — because pretty much everybody is — including, sometimes, much shorter people like the Pachecoesque Shin Ying Khor. It is now my goal to measure as many comics folk as possible against one of these Big Cow/Small Cow metersticks, for science. Moo.

Spam of the day:

Target customers directly with email marketing tactics

a) No. b) Your email domain is duderenata.com, which sounds … wrong. Like cinemarama or perhaps Estradarama, but with duders?

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¹ However, I stand by my contention that Molly Ostertag’s The Witch Boy covered much of the same topical ground with more subtlety and honesty. It was released in 2017, so it’s not on the list. The sequel is, if anything, even better, but both books suffered from releasing at the end of October, too late for inclusion in lists that must have already been under construction.

² The others being verbal language, written language, the scientific method, and a calorie surplus.

Instead, why don’t you take a moment to enjoy the fine wares of Jon Rosenberg, cartoonist, soulkeeper, bon vivant, and my co-birthdayist? Buy something at his store! Support his Patreon, especially at the US$30 tier, where you get to argue with him on Twitter.

And if you’ve already argued with him on Twitter, pay him the thirty bucks, cheapskate.

Happy Birthday, you magnificent, cranky bastard. Hope it’s a great one.

Welp, it’s Cyber Monday, and there are sales o’ plenty, as well as some not-sales, but nifty merch nonetheless. It’s not all cybers, though.

For instance, Jamie Noguchi woke up today to find that he’s in the Washington Post, particularly in a story about Super Art Fight, the perpetually-bizarre art head-to-head where he’s a regular and oft-champion. It’s behind a paywall, so maybe you wait until the end of the week to read it, or maybe you could give the richest guy in the world a few bucks and subscribe.

To my mind, though, the big thing to check out is the reaction to a piece that hit Twitter over the weekend that argued indie comics shows are blatantly unfair to new creators, exploiting them to benefit big name guests. I’m not linking to the original here, because I think there’s a lot of subtlety in the position that is poorly suited to Twitter, and don’t want to cause the original poster any grief or pile-ons. The reactions that I’m going to point you towards have been measured, respectful, and thoughtful. Unsurprisingly, they’re from Jim Zub and C Spike Trotman.

Zub, as he frequently does, talks about the work and preparation that all aspects of a creative career require. The key part, I think was his conclusion:

At almost every show I see at least one a new creator who has spent a ridiculous amount of money, assuming their huge banner and flashy booth will provide them the big splash they need to ‘break in’, not realizing that these creative fields are a marathon, not a sprint.

Spike also emphasizes the skills one must develop to pick out which shows to attend, and the importance of right-sizing both your expectations and your career growth, but more importantly she pointed out that those starting creators have resources they can call on, like the Creators 4 Creators grant, which just so happens to be accepting applications.

And, not wanting to hash things out on Twitter, Shing Yin Khor decided to cut through the noise and just do something about it:

I don’t like having opinions on the internet much anymore. My opinion on the convention table cost issue is that we should try to create ways to make them accessible for those who need it most. Anyway, I’ve created a small microgrant ($200 x5) program.

You are eligible if: 1. You are a comics creator accepted to or intending to apply to exhibit at a 2019 show. 2. You have exhibited at fewer than 3 conventions or zinefests. 3. You do not have a published work with a major indie or traditional publisher (anthology work is fine).

It is intended for newer members of the comics community who need a bit of extra help to exhibit at conventions, zine fests or festivals. It can be used for costs associated with travel, lodging, tabling, and creating books and merch.

It’s an easy form. It should take less than 15mins to fill out if you have already been giving thought to exhibiting. This is a small thing. What’s gonna happen is that I’m gonna sit down with some trusted people in late December, and then PayPal or Venmo 5 good people.

And, because comics is full of awesome people, there’s been a knock-on effect:

It has only been 15 mins, but the number of microgrants we can actually offer thanks to some good people, is now 8! I don’t want to collect money (I don’t have the resources to organize it), but if you’d like to sponsor a grant and be matched with a recipient in Dec, lemme know.

You hear the woman — if you’ve got a spare bit of cash and want to help a just-beginning creator, let her know.

Spam of the day:

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Okay, bonus points for sending this one from Japan, spammers. Don’t usually see that.

I’m thankful that she’s developing indoors manners at a prodigious rate, and is settling into the house nicely. If you’ve ever thought Hey, know what I need around here? A good dog!, there’s going to be a huge number of pointy girls and boys that needs homes because Florida banned dog racing. You can find an adoption group near you here.

I’m also thankful that Randy Milholland has revived one of my favorite hiatused comics projects, Super Stupor, at least for today and tomorrow. It’s been a bit more than six years since we got a Super Stupor strip, and going on seven since we saw any of the semi-regular characters.

For those that haven’t read the strips, they’re an easily-managed archive dive from the first, the four comics are the best cape books of the past decade — really! — and they dismantle the tropes of super heroes in ways that Alan Moore and Warren Ellis hadn’t even considered. At least I don’t remember either Watchmen or Nextwave inverting the Women In Refrigerators thing.

They might have had super-powered dick-punching, I’d have to check.

But seriously, the entire strip is terrific, and Punchline may be my favorite costumed hero, because for all the extraordinary rudeness, there’s a tremendous amount of heart to him (especially in Super Stupor issue #2). Same for Eyesore, and Big Killhuna, and Rumble Bee, and Archangela, and, and, and…. Milholland’s always had a knack for making his characters people in addition to vectors for jokes, and he makes the most of it here.

Okay, probably that’s it until Monday (I have holiday duty on Thursday, so it’s gonna be a bit hectic around here). We might not see each other until then, but I’m thankful for you, too. Most of you. One or two, not so much; you know what you did.

Spam of the day:

We did check your website and it is not on the first page of Google.

Then I guess you’re searching for the wrong term.

When I saw the email from the good folks at the Cartoon Art Museum, I knew I had to talk about it. After, a story about why I had to talk about it.

Mark your calendars for a celebration with the Chuck Jones Gallery special guests and the Cartoon Art Museum as we ring in the holidays with a spotlight of original artwork from How the Grinch Stole Christmas showcased as part of our Treasury of Animation exhibition.

The Grinch, and not that Cumberbatch-associated abomination that somebody felt the need to make. When will people learn that the 26 minute original, starring Boris Karloff, June Foray, and Thurl Ravenscroft is definitive, and needs no reinterpretation? Particularly not a 90 minute long 3D animated version, but at least it’s got to be better than the previous abomination.

Ahem. It’ll be a week from Saturday, 1 December, at 6:00pm for US$8 advance/US$10 at the door, with CAM members free with RSVP. You’ll get to marvel at original artwork until 9:00pm, and I’ll wager there will be at least some cocoa and cookies (although probably not Who-pudding or roast beast). But there is one piece of artwork that won’t be there. It’s at the top of this post, or more accurately, a photo of it is at the top of this post.

Because it — the original it — hangs on my wall.

I mentioned a story, and here it is — at least, the short verion. When I got this piece from Chuck Jones’s gallery in Santa Fe more than 20 years ago, the gallery director told me about a previous customer who knew he wanted a Grinch cel, but wasn’t sure which one. He went flipping through the entire collection, skipping over such highly sought-after cels as full-body Grinches and horned Grinches¹. Suddenly, he stopped, pointing to one of the cels of the Grinch and Max on top of Mount Crumpit, and said That one².

She wondered about the choice — it’s a distant shot of the Grinch and Max, the sled is really the focal point, but wrapped it up. Finally she asked about his choice. He explained (and this is thirdhand, so don’t take this as a direct quote) I’m an aerospace engineer and I love this scene. If we assume the Grinch is about human sized — five and half, six feet — then those clumps of snow are falling correctly. They’re accelerating downwards at 32 feet per second squared. Chuck Jones didn’t have to get that detail right but he did, and it’s always stuck with me.

For all the lumpy, stretchable, rubber-limbed implausibility of Grinches and Maxes, for all the ways that the laws of physics were stretched to the breaking point throughout the story, Chuck Jones knew that at the moment of tension he had to make it feel intuitively correct and let us spend all our brain cycles on the danger and not have even a single fleeting nanosecond of whatever the physical world equivalent of the uncanny valley is.

That’s why there no need for any of the reimaginings or reboots. That’s why I’ll never admit that the Grinch has ever been portrayed by anything other than a single book and a cartoon from 1966. That’s why, if you’re in the Bay Area Saturday next, you should drop in and let us know how it feels to have your heart grow three sizes.

Spam of the day:

Based on the French play Cyrano de Bergerac STARRING JAKE SHORT, SARAH FISHER, BOOBOO STEWART, AND DANNY TREJO

Unless Danny Trejo is playing Roxanne, I ain’t interested. And screw you, PR shop, for having no unsubscribe link in your email, that’s why you end up in spam folder.

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¹ Me, I knew I wanted a Grinch-and-Max. Even in the 90s, damn few of those were still available.

² Not necessarily this exact cel, but one very similar to it, as we will shortly see.