Let’s talk Kickstarts for a moment, yes?

• Up first, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has started the campaign for the second Drive hardcover, and it’s burning up the charts.

  Well, kinda. It’s true that the funding is (as of this writing) at nearly US$34,000 of a US$25,000 goal, and LArDK only announced it about six hours ago. But! LArDK is also known for giving his Patreon backers first crack at things, so there’s every chance that it was up for a period of time before we got word. Which is to say, the early soft launch messes with the FFF mk2, so no predictions on how it will do. It doesn’t even show up in Kicktraq yet.

  Regardless, the strip is great¹, the books are pretty (and are offered in a more-affordable softcover from the get-go this time), and I’m hoping when fulfillment time comes around, I’ll be able to add on the Drive Corps challenge coin, on account of I don’t need the rest of the non-book stuff in the tiers that feature it.

  Like the first time around, stretch goals will mean including the Tales From The Drive guest stories² and likely fancifications of the books — spot gloss, ribbon bookmarks, embosses, etc. But the appeal is really the story, which is probably hitting the 50% mark by the end of Act 2. You’ve got a month to get in on it, and best of luck to LArDK!

• Secondly, we’re down to the final hours on the latest Smut Peddler collection, just over 26 hours to go as of this writing, and US$402 from a fifteenth stretch goal³.

  Each stretch goal means an additional five bucks per page to the creators. Fifteen times five is 75 smackeroos, and if you’re putting together a ten page story or so? Not chump change. It also means that each creator will be paid twice what they originally contracted for. Only Iron Circus Supreme Leader For Life C Spike Trotman knows exactly what the breakdown on her various anthology costs have been, and what percentage of the more than a million dollars she’s Kickstarted has gone to creator bonuses.

  But if I were a betting man? I’d say a third. Aside from the recognition that creators have gotten from appearing in such a high-profile project, apart from the cases of books they can sell themselves, aside from the work that they’ve gotten as a result, it is all but certain that Spike has introduced a sum well into the six figures to the indie comics community. That makes an impact in a rent and groceries for dozens of creators.

  There’s a lot of talk from terrible wannabe creators who, in between shitting on other people, are now bragging about how they’re remaking the industry. Aside from the fact that I’ve been reading self-published comics as far back as my high school days (that would be the first Reagan Administration), nothing these dipshits claims to be doing is going to have the impact on the industry that Spike’s had by following a simple formula:

  Find work you want to publish
  Pay people for it
  Pay them more when it’s a success.

  Have fun playing catch-up, dipshits. Y’aint getting in front of the black lady from Chicago and those who’ve been smart enough to learn from (and work with) her instead of trying to pretend she never existed. Smut Peddler: Sex Machine finishes funding around 5:00pm CDT tomorrow, 29 August. Get in now or miss out.

Spam of the day:

Studies performed at leading universities around the world revealed that tinnitus is actually a brain problem that destroys the auditory cortex. tinnitus doesn’t fry just the auditory cortex. It sends ripples out across the entire brain which over-stimulates neurons. This leads tinnitus sufferers to develop life-threatening diseases such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, diabetes, hypertension and even cancer.

You might have stuck the landing on the brave researcher reveals what they don’t want you to know bullshit if you’d stopped after dementia — that would have still been bullshit but still vaguely related to brain things — but over-stimulated neurons don’t cause diabetes, hypertension, and cancer. And if it’s not an ear problem, why does my mild tinnitus manifest when I undergo pressure changes, and largely resolve when I perform the Valsalva maneuver (not to be confused with the Jendrassik maneuver)? But no, you reached too far and clowned yourself. Sucks to be you.

_______________
¹ And yes, the campaign features a blurb by me, as did the back cover to Act 1. I never agree to receive anything of value for that blurb, and although LArDK sent me a copy of the Act 1 hardcover, it was after I’d received my copy from the last Kickstart. The extra copy had some adventures, but eventually wound up given to my local library. I’ve already backed Act 2 at the hardcover level. I think that’s all the disclaiming that’s needed.

² For which LArDK pays top-tier industry rates. Like, Marvel-and-DC page rates; one creator told me that their contribution was the single best-paying job of their freelance career, which now includes high-profile graphic ovel gigs and multiple Eisner nominations. More on page rates momentarily.

³ I’m pretty sure with the usual last-day bump, stretch goal sixteen will happen. And that’s in just two weeks of funding.

First up, the nominations hit in the last hour or so, and Fleen congratulates not only the nominees for Outstanding Online Comic, but also the web-type folks who are peppered throughout the other categories. OOC first, then:

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal (originally on Instagram, now most easily read on Webtoon), The Wolves Outside by Jesse England, A Fire Story by Brian Fies, Lara Croft Was My Family by Carta Monir, and A Part of Me is Still Unknown by Meg O’Shea. I’m not familiar with England’s work, and I know I’ve read Dhaliwal’s but don’t recall all the details; I remember reading Fies’s, Monir’s, and O’Shea’s and am pleased to see them here.

Other nominations of note include Say It With Noodles: On Learning To Speak The Language Of Food by the Sawdust Bear/Space Gnome/Paul Bunyan fetishist, Shing Yin Khor (for Outstanding Minicomic and How The Best Hunter In The Village Met Her Death by Molly Ostertag (who is having such a good year) for Outstanding Story, both of which appeared online originally, but which will be available from their respective creators at SPX on 15-16 September at the Bethesda North Marriott.

Right, books:

• If you’ve got a kid in the house, they undoubtedly know Gene Yang already; if they’re even a little geeky, they’ve probably been reading the Secret Coders series by Yang (words) and Mike Holmes (pictures), which wraps up with its sixth installment in a few weeks.

  Along the way they’ve followed the story of Hopper, Eni (whose name turns out to be … no, no, you’ll just have to wait) and Josh as they’ve learned some fairly sophisticated programming in LOGO¹, solved a mystery, and dealt with … let us say a romance of many dimensions. Highly recommended for the budding problems solver in your orbit, and since book 6 (Monsters & Modules) doesn’t drop until 2 October, you’ve got time for them to make their way through the first five books².

• And another book, one that you can read, I’ma say in the next week, week and a half. Longtime readers of this page know that I am fully, 100% in the tank for KB “Otter” Spangler’s A Girl And Her Fed, and particularly the associated novels. I mentioned AGAHF last week, in conjunction with a turning point in the story, and Spangler’s got more to say on the topic today (I’m linking to the crosspost at her writing blog, because the comic’s newsposts don’t have permalinks), and especially about the book in question:
  

  In fact, the next Hope Blackwell book comes out this week! It’s the story of what happened after Thomas Paine showed up in Mare’s kitchen and told her about the Afterlife. There are chupacabras.

  I’m not naming the novel in question because Spangler hasn’t released the title publicly, but she did let me read an advance copy and if you are a fan of words, you’ll find something here to love. Yes, monsters, and yes what happens when a nun with very proper sensibilities butts head with an ADHD-afflicted narrator with a potty mouth. There’s odd bits of history that really happened, and the most intelligent person in the world is an asshole for shits and giggles, and trustfund ghost-hunter wannabes.

  But mostly it’s a story about trauma. About the hurts — some physical, some not — that we shove down and try to forget, and how they come screaming back to the surface when our defenses are down. You can laugh and deflect and delay, but trauma finds a way. You have to grow through it, and Spangler’s subjected her characters to more growth — kicking and screaming, in most cases — than anybody this side of Randy Milholland or Meredith Gran.

  Spangler doesn’t always have a lot of sympathy for her characters, but there’s empathy in spades. She specializes in damaged, quasi-terrible people doing the right thing despite the costs, people who have no fucks left to give but plenty of damns³. Plus, we send each other Sharktopuses. Anybody that you can send a Sharktopus to is by definition a quality person.

  Title To Be Revealed: A Hope Blackwell Novel releases sometime this week, maybe next — there’s cover artwork to be finished, final passes on the various e-book encodings to do, all the last minute stuff. When it’s out, you can find it on Spangler’s book page for a ridiculously reasonable sum, and I’m sure she’ll make mention in her tweets.

Spam of the day:

Dear Gary, You are invited to attend Passionflix’s World Premiere of New York Times bestselling author K. Bromberg’s Driven series [date redacted]. [In attendance will be] Tosca Musk ?(Passionflix co-founder, director), Maye Musk (COVERGIRL® supermodel)

Not really my beat, but FYI, that director and supermodel in attendance? They are, respectively, Elon Musk’s sister and mom. I just found that interesting.

_______________
¹ And really, it’s less about the coding language and more about learning to think in a problem-solving manner. The language could have been entirely made up and it would have had just as much impact.

² As always, thanks to the fine folks at :01 Books for the review copy.

³ Hat tip for that turn of phrase to Helen Rosner, whose brilliance at Twitter is surpassed only by her brilliance at The New Yorker.

It looks like this, plus a bunch more. Here’s the latest from Rosemary Mosco, Faith Erin Hicks, Gene Yang and Mike Holmes, Tillie Walden, Ngozi Ukazu, Gigi DG, and more. That’s not to mention the books I’ve already got from Drew Weing, Tony Cliff, Jerzy Drozd … and all of that is only from :01 Books. I’ve also got the new boo from David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc), Minna Sundberg, and more.

What I am saying here is two-fold:

1. Expect a lot of book reviews for the next while.
2. There is no way to keep up with this pace.

I read a bit of commentary from about TV not long ago — I can’t remember where, but it was probably from either The AV Club or Film Crit Hulk¹ — that noted with the many, many original series on broadcast, cable, and streaming, it becomes literally impossible to not only watch all of it, it’s impossible to even watch just the good stuff. I would suggest that comics and graphic novels are in the same place.

Which is why the persistent presence of bad-faith actors who insist that comics are in dire need of protection from those who would sarcastic-air-quotes ruin them is baffling. I have got literally thousands of pages of backlog to get through, and these dipshits are worried that somebody who’s less cis-male, less straight, less melanin-deprived than them will get a chance to write something? So much so that they have to try to silence and ostracize those that they perceive as standing in their way?

I’ve spent most of the time that this blog has existed working from a POV of celebrating work I think should be seen rather than giving brainspace to work I dislike. I think you can count the number of negative reviews I’ve run on one hand. But I’ve also spent the the past year and a half going on record against terrible people who think the world is bettered by shitting on anybody different from them, and while a lot of that has been critiques of those in power, I don’t see any reason to sleep on those who are trying to climb their way to positions of power.

So this is on the record: the disingenously named “Diversity And Comics”, the inexcusable sealioning Comicsgate crusaders², the excreble individuals like Ethan van Sciver and Cody Pickrodt (no links on any of them, look ’em up if you haven’t heard about their deals) have already failed. The vision for comics that they want has already been swept away. If they’d just kept making, buying, and reading the comics they like in silence, none of us would have ever noticed their absence from our discussion because there’s so much left over for us once they isolate themselves in their own corner of the culture.

But that’s the point of all their noise. It’s not that we have this cornucopia of work, big enough for anybody to find something that they love, it’s that they can’t just ignore stuff that isn’t for them. It’s that they can’t tell us, no you are only allowed to read and like what I like and it’s driving them bonkers. They can stand anything except not being the center of attention.

Well, congrats, fuckboys. You’ve got our attention, now you get our scorn and dismissal and contempt, but some day you may work all the way up to our pity. You’ll excuse me if I don’t spend any more cycles on you, but as you can see, I’ve got comics to read.

Spam of the day:

your Garbage Disposal repairers are covered (And then some!)

Man, I love it when repairers are covered, but I don’t actually own a garbage disposal. Is that a problem?

_______________
¹ Yes, yes, I said TV and Hulk mostly talks about film, but Hulk is also a deeply insightul writer about all kinds of media, including the single finest piece of GN analysis I’ve ever read, on Hope Larson’s adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time.

And for those who prefer FCH to both write in all-caps and Hulk-speak, may I recommend HULK WATCH EAT, PRAY, LOVE FOR YOU ASSHOLES, which would be the best piece of movie writing since Roger Ebert died, except Ebert was still alive when it was written?

² That almost makes them sound like a small-town high school sports team, but is way too grandiose for what they’ve accomplished. I imagine they’ve got a banner out front that reads Home Of The Brigading Sockpuppets.

Instead, I get to make my way home from the Navy base I’ve been on all week; a Navy base in the center of Pennsylvania, not even on a river or lake. I don’t makes ’em up, folks, I just reports ’em.

In the meantime, please enjoy the news that Comic Chameleon — the mobile webcomics aggregator that actually works with and pays creators — has updated. You can history of CC by searching on chameleon and browsing back through six or so years of posts; my favorite part was when creator Bernie Hou was able to provide Danielle Corsetto with all the alt-text for Girls With Slingshots following a site hack¹.

Anyway, those using Comic Chameleon on iOS have a new version (with Android hopefully on the way), with improvements and fixes. If it’s been a while since you fired it up, give it another try. Then come back here and read Scott McCloud’s thoughts on comics navigation online/on mobile and just contemplate the nature of comics for a while. I’ll be driving home while you do.

Spam of the day:

Good afternoon. It’s hard for me to navigate the site, could you help me find it? Here, little place, I have everything I need written on the plate here is the link. I really look forward to hearing from you. Bill Rogers [link redacted]

Is it Bill Rogers, or is it Alfred Plono, which is who the post claims to be from? Try harder, spammer scum.

_______________
¹ Reminder: back up your stuff in multiple, mutually-separated places. Test your backups. Document your process.

Editor’s note: Using book reviews here at Fleen are marked with copious spoiler warnings, but not this one. The book in discussion (and its prequel) are so convoluted (and I mean that in a good way — convolution is part of the story and its visuals) that to given enough detail to be spoilers would make this review about 23 times longer than it is.

So no spoilers, except the bit about the creepy doll, but come on — it’s a horror story. There’s got to be a creepy doll in there somewhere.

What do you do when your town — your world growing up, and to some degree the rest of the world in any event — is broken? Not metaphorically, actually broken by the intrusion of another dimension into our own. Scott Westerfeld used the horror underlying the destruction of Poughkeepsie, NY (and to a lesser degree, a village in North Korea) to explore the idea of nostalgia getting the better of us in last year’s Spill Zone (illustrated in a jumpy, almost schizophrenic energy by Alex Puvilland), where things within The Zone are defined by how they used to look and their present wrongness.

So what happens when it’s possible to communicate with the entities that have taken up residence in our world, post-Spill? What happens when humans become (I’ve been trying to think of another way to put this and I just can’t) cross-pollinated with the substance of that other world that broke into ours? What happens when you learn that the (relatively contained) apocalypse that destroyed your town and took your parents and upended your life wasn’t some cosmic accident, but the consequence of otherworldly politics and a little girl’s desire to help?

Spill Zone: The Broken Vow is what happens. It’s the intersection of disaster, grief, memory, art, family squabbles, and a dash of geopolitics thrown in for good measure. It’s what happens when good intentions meet bad outcomes, where being unable to let go of pain becomes an act of rebellion, sustenance, and creation all at the same time. Where the kindest thing that can happen is to cut loose the past, and to (maybe) save your own world by (maybe) forcibly upending another. Where the act of observation¹ can force physics to obey their usual rules again.

There’s a creepy doll in it, too, and it may or may not be entirely evil. A better word is probably indifferent, or possibly subject to a system of morality so distinct from our own that terms like good and evil don’t really pertain.

But strands that were frayed can be joined together again; chaos can have order imposed again, and if the acts that precipitate the closing of the breach between worlds resemble the acts that caused the breach in the first place, well, it’s nice to have a bit of symmetry again. When you’ve had a reality foisted on you that insists that 1 + 1 = giant slavering cat from Hell, the predictability of laser rangefinder + missile + time = boom is a relief sometimes.

Fleen thanks :01 Books for the review copy. Spill Zone: The Broken Vow by Scott Westerfeld (words) and Alex Puvilland (pictures) is available now wherever books are sold, and is highly recommended for readers that dig on horror movies, but maybe not younger folk that get hell of creeped out and can’t sleep.

Spam of the day:

Gary, An Announcement of EPIC Proportions!

It’s a PR blurb that involves the videogame producer that’s named Epic, I get it. That’s not a lame pun at all.

_______________
¹ Observation at a distance, in a clear-eyed manner, via mechanisms that both document things as they are and provide no rose-colored visions to look upon with nostalgia. Not letting go of How Things Used To Be is the cause of a lot of misery for characters from both worlds².

² By both worlds, I meant Poughkeepsie and the other world that crashed into it, but given the North Korea is so different from Poughkeepsie, I may as well have said all three worlds.

I held off on my holy shit!s for more than a week, because I know some folks like to read their story strips in bigger chunks. Want to talk long games? Meet Jeffrey C Wells and Shaenon Garrity. Meet the payoff that has been hinted at as far back as February of 2009, with the first solid details arriving 13 months later.

It had been speculated as far back as the beginning (at the end of 2007) that the main characters of Skin Horse map to the main characters of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, but the final confirmation didn’t hit until two and a half weeks ago. There are others, but to find them to link would require trawling all of the colors strips in the archive, and they start just about exactly five years back and I’m not made of time, people.

So there’s the Wizard, the Man Behind The Curtain, giving gifts to the main characters: pins to the Scarecrow, liquid courage to the Cowardly Lion, a heart to the Tin Woodsman, a balloon to Dorothy. And nine days ago, Wells and Garrity laid all their cards on the table — the Wizard of the Emerald City was Ari Green (aka Ira Rosenkranz, aka Violet Bee, aka Dr Ao¹, aka Goldbug … there may have been indigo and orange aliases in there at some point). The idea was there baked into the strip from its genesis and nobody caught on. In a world chock-full of whackjobs that trawl the internet for the most tenuous evidence to support their pet conspiracy theory, nobody caught on.

With the reveal not only of the Big Bad, but the fact that there actually is a Big Bad, it feels like Skin Horse is moving its pieces into a late-game configuration. Having seen how Garrity treats the big curtain-drop in the past, I’d say we have at least six months to go.

And whenever it does finish, we get to see what they do next. Hooray!

My name is Randy and I was looking at a few different sites online and came across your site fleen.com. I must say – your website is very impressive. I found your website on the first page of the Search Engine.

I really want to know what term you used to find me on the first page of Search Engine. I can never get Search Engine to return the stuff I want.

_______________
¹ Japanese for blue.

I am in a network-restricted location (one that also involves many large men with guns determining if I make it past the front gate or not), so this (and, for that matter, other posts this week probably) will be brief.

There’s a pair of webcomics coming up to ending points, and it’s fascinating to see both threads of story (sometimes years in the making) come together, hinting at the conclusion. For starters, A Girl And Her Fed has been telling a complex story about individual and societal freedom for a decade or so, with a five-year jump between Act One and Act Two. Act Two wrapped up its penultimate chapter today, with all the pieces in place for a resolution of the long-running Big Bad story¹. A’course, chapters at AGAHF run 100-200 strips, so we’re a good ways from the wrap up.

What makes the progression especially interesting is creator KB Spangler has been filling the five-year story gap between Acts One and Two with a two series of novels (five so far, sixth coming soon), each written from the POV of a major character. The strip and the books are independent, but there are definite connections; there’s a fairly major spoiler about what happens to a pair of characters in the novels in a strip, for instance. Telling a story in multiple directions, from multiple starting and stopping points, in multiple media is a neat trick and it’s going to be fun to watch Spangler pull it all off.

At the same time, KC Green’s He Is A Good Boy is hurtling towards a conclusion. It started out as a seemingly unrelated series of weird tales about an acorn named Crange, and sometimes a grasshopper named Emerson, but each of them seemed to die a bunch and then just continue with their adventures. Cartoon logic, in other words — the end of a story resets reality and starts over again.

But there were … things that hinted that Crange was part of something bigger. Characters disappearing and returning, talking about things that Crange didn’t know (and, frankly, didn’t give any fucks about). Circles and spirals and the literal God and The Devil came and went, and then it all blew up:

Green hadn’t just been goofing with us. There are many Cranges (Crange?) and Emersons on parallel realities, and a mechanism for gathering them togther. Now most of the Crange and most of the Emersons are dead. The society that the Emersons have built are somehow dependent on the Crange, almost as a harvestable resource. And there’s the oldest Emerson and the First Crange, a swollen god that the Emersons have built their world around. It’s Green, so it’ll be wonderfully weird (and weirdly wonderful) as it concludes, and the actual ending will absolutely come out of left field. There’s 280 pages of sometimes slow burning story (and sometimes wildly conflagrating firestorm) to get caught up on so that the big finish² makes sense. Get readin’.

Spam of the day:

SJ Ren Faire- Aug 4-5 & Folsom Ren Faire- Sept 2018 – Joi the fun

I’m not sure why I’m getting renfair invites from mid- to northern California. Anybody want to joi some fun?

_______________
¹ Big Bad in Act One was an irritation, then an antagonist, and ultimately revealed as a mastermind planner. She escaped. She’s burned her allies but has a big trump card (a proverbial ticking bomb in her back pocket) and is on the run but not out.

² Green prefers denouement.

This post has almost nothing to do with webcomics. Almost, mind you. We spoke about comics at one point during lunch, which if either of us were seeking to deduct the cost of the meal on our taxes, would have surely satisfied the relevant requirement.

I get ahead of myself, though. That picture up above is of Garies Tyrrell. Longtime readers of this page may recall the Garies t-shirt discovered by Evan Dahm, Yuko Ota, and Ananth Hirsh, and the wisdom derived from it. You may even remember Evan Dahm wearing the Garies t-shirt in direct proximity to myself at New England Webcomics Weekend 2, making for even more Garies.

But today, I had to distinct pleasure of having lunch with the gentleman seen above, who m I had never previously met in person. His name is Gary Tyrrell, which he both spells (that’s rare) and pronounces (even rarer) the same way I do. There are others out there, other Garies², but to date this is the greatest concentration of Garies in general (and Garies Tyrrell¹ in particular) yet seen. Only if Dahm could have been persuaded to lend me the shirt could there have been more Garies, but I was afraid to try. Some things are Not Meant To Be.

And the best thing about there being another Gary, one who is approximately my age (at least, we attended college in the same decade), who also trained as an engineer, who also is on the record as liking beer and being from the East Coast, from a family of six children, and nerdy by nature? Google confusion. It’s been some time since I had to apply for a job, but when the next prospective employer goes to look for either of us, they won’t know if it’s Gary Tyrrell or Gary Tyrrell that they found. Sweet, sweet plausible deniability.

Thanks very much for your indulgence, and we’ll be back to topics that are more directly related to webcomics next week.

Spam of the day:

The lowest cost way to cool off this summer is right here. Enjoy cold air with a press of a button This weekend will have record high heat. This device will keep fresh and cool. VERY limited stock order yours now

An air conditioner. You’re describing an air conditioner. We’ve had them for 120 years (Carrier’s electrical units), and precursors for nearly 200 years (Faraday’s ammonia experiments), more than 250 years (Ben Franklin’s experiments), more than 1200 years (Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, who had water-driven fans and fountains), or nearly 2000 years (human-powered rotary fan A/C in the Han Dynasty).

_______________
¹ Gary Tyrrells? Garies Tyrrells?

² Including a Gary Tyrrell in the UK whose car dealer sends me warranty information; a Gary Tyrrell in Ireland, where the vehicle registration authority sends me his renewal notices; a Gary Tyrrell in Australia, whose supermarket sends me coupons; a Gary Tyrrell in Scranton, whose business partners send me proposals and contracts; and a Gary Tyrrell in Southern California whose tire dealer sends me receipts. The Gary Tyrrell of the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band trombone section (pictured above, right) is the only one who doesn’t think that my email address is his email address.

The Adventure Zone: Here Be Gerblins is maybe the book that is least for me that I’ve ever looked forward to. I believe that I’ve mentioned that I don’t listen to any of the McElroy-related media empire — not because I’m not interested, but because I know that I would get sucked into listening to every. single. damn. one. they do, or are associated with. Every month or so I can go by YouTube and see which bits are attracting all the new animatics, and I quite enjoyed their guest turn on Bubble, but that’s as far as I can go. I have work, people.

But TAZ:HBG has brought me right up to the precipice. If I fall into a McElhole, it’s because of this book.

Which is weird, because it shouldn’t have worked. A story made up on the fly (and remade) by four different people (brothers Justin, Travis, Griffin, and dad Clint), and adapted to story form by two (Clint and artist Carey Pietsch) should be a mess. Griffin surely knows the pain of every dungeon master who’s ever lived as the players derail everything you’ve planned and go off in a million directions … and when those players are known for digressive goofery and several thousand tangents per second? There’s no way to get a single, coherent narrative from that starting point.

Except they do. Credit to Griffin for clearly having an idea of where he wanted the story to go and accounting for all the fuckery his family could throw at it. Further credit to Clint and Pietsch for finding a way to pare down to that story, while still coming up with means to include the best fourth-wall breaks, character introductions, scene shifts, and the flavor of the gaming sessions¹. It’s straddled the line between playing a game and what the lives of the collectively-created characters are like in the game rather nicely.

But that’s not why you should read the book. You should read the book for one exchange, during the last of the increasingly-difficult boss battles, when who the McElroys are comes through. They’ve spent 200 pages playing characters who are willing to tolerate each other, but who range between self-regard, self-delusion, self-interest, and self-aggrandizement.

Magnus (human, fighter, played by Travis) is cocksure, rushes in without thinking, and generally makes things worse. Taako (elf, wizard, played by Justin) full of himself, not above a bit of thievery, and generally makes things worse. Merle (dwarf, cleric, played by Clint) is grouchy, doesn’t like his family or the mission, and generally makes things worse.

Then the Big Bad threatens a town that they don’t care about at all. Taako’s fled to a place of marginal safety and for once, Magnus hesitates.

Magnus: I’m not leaving with all these people here!!
Merle: Magnus … you can’t save everybody.
Magnus: Maybe not — but that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

And there it is. Despite playing a blundering jerk for hours and hours, Travis can’t help but find a place to inject the fundamental decency for which the McElroy boys are known. It’s going to cost Magnus his life, it’s going to derail the game (and the podcast series)², and Travis’s dad reacts the only way he can.

Merle: Well … shit.

And then they’re off, transformed from adventurers to heroes. Even Taako finds a way to to care — despite insisting that he doesn’t care — and act to help Magnus and Merle. They’ll still be jerks, they’ll still try to scam their way through life, but they’ve turned a corner without really intending to. Griffin may have set the conditions that made it possible, but when Magnus, Merle, and Taako could have cut and run, Travis, Clint, and Justin decided that they wouldn’t.

It would be a hard thing for one author to pull off — heck, it’s taken masters of character growth like Randy Milholland and Meredith Gran hundreds of strips over years to accomplish such redemptive arcs — and four people working occasionally in parallel (but just as often at cross) purposes pulled it off in the space of a minute. Pietsch conveyed the entire thing in three pages, and the centerpiece, that emotional turn from Magnus and Merle in three panels.

And that’s why this book that isn’t for me, one that I looked forward to from a remove, was ultimately worth it. Because in and around all the goofs and sniping and shit-talking and messing with the DM and each other, little grace notes pervade. You can be a bit of a dick, and still want to save the helpless. It’s a hell of a message.

Oh, and the whole thing with the sshhkxxx? That’s one great story hook you came up with, Griffin. Nice one.

Spam of the day:

100’S celebs and artists like Ms. Hudson are eating this fruit every day. With this amazing fruit your body will enter Ketosis without changing diets or gym you can lose 4lbs a day

Okay, EMT hat on here — ketosis is your body’s metabolic mechanism to desperately attempt to keep your brain alive when you’re starving it of glucose. It is not a means to — as the subject line of this spam promised — get abs.

_______________
¹ My favorites, in no particular order:

• DM Griffin appears in inset panels when he interacts with the story; on his first appearance, the players panic and he has to calm them.
• Scrolls appear to introduce new characters and their defining abilities.
• What must have been wildly looping, heavily descriptive role-playing (Well, I say ______. Okay then, I say _____ in response, and suck it!) is constructed into naturalish dialogue.
• Running gags about game mechanics appear, as do repeated hints by Clint about popular songs; at first, the boys mock him out of character, but by the end, they’re referencing Oklahoma and The Girl From Ipanema in-character and it works.

² Unless Griffin can make with the DM magic, fudging rules and consequences to keep the story going that is.

See that? That’s a stack of review copies from :01 Books, who remain the best folks in whatever cohort or clade you care to name. Summer convention season, a ramping-up to a 50 book/year release schedule, and the shifting of people to cover Gina Gagliano’s former responsibilities allowed a backlog to develop for a bit, but now I’ve got ’em, I’m gonna read ’em, and I’m gonna let you know what I think of ’em. Speculation: they’re great.

For those not on the reviewer list for a top-flight publisher, there’s still ways to dive into the wonder of an amazing graphic novel. For instance, those on the West Coast in general, and the Bay Area in particular, have the opportunity to look at the making of one of the more acclaimed books of the past year: The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui.

The story of her life as a refugee and immigrant, and the effects of those times on her life, is getting the spotlight treatment by the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco; as part of CAM’s Emerging Artist Showcase, a selection of Bui’s original artwork will go on display on 30 August (two weeks from tomorrow, as I write this) and remain until mid-January.

At the same time, The Best We Could Do is the San Francisco Public Library’s One City One Book selection for 2018, with discussion groups, exhibits, and author events to come in October. Even if you can’t make it to CAM, if you’re from the Bay Area, you probably aren’t too far from a library, and can get in on the reading, experiencing, and learning.

Spam of the day:

In Less Than 20 Minutes, You Can Cover Your Families Future

Families, plural? How did you know? Yes, I need to cover my family’s future, and also the future of my secret families in other cities that nobody knows about!