Comics Camp had people that don’t make comics; there was a lawyer¹, filmmakers, and four of us that decided as Camp was breaking up that we were the non-comics-creating enabling types². Then there were the ones that I think even the comics creators looked upon as opening themselves up to artistic critique in a way that was almost incomprehensible; say what you will, you don’t normally create comics in real time in front of people³.

But the musicians, they’re putting all they have out on display and the feedback is immediate … you either grab the audience and they’re with you or you don’t and they aren’t. It’s a special kind of public vulnerability.

Fortunately, the musicians we had at Camp are all mad-skilled seasoned pros; I’ve come to think of them as a gang of master performers — a Five Man Band that’s been through Rule 63 and doesn’t care about the traditional labels — able to pull off any musical caper you choose to throw at them. I’m giving them their own writeup primarily because of the Monday night sing-along that broke out late, but this will involve performances (planned and otherwise) from throughout the weekend. If you like, you should go look up the work of Seth Boyer, Marian Call, The Doubleclicks, and Molly Lewis. I’ll wait.

I knew Seth Boyer primarily for his collaborations with Call; he’s played guitar in every one of her performances that I’ve seen, but a lot of people know him because a year and a half ago, he did the near-impossible by making All Star by Smashmouth into a legitimately touching song with the help of a grand piano. Like all of his performances that I like best, it’s tinged with sadness and sincerity; even as you convince yourself that it’s going to be played for laughs you find yourself getting swept up in emotional depth you didn’t think was present.

Sure, it’s funny to think of a big beardy guy in a Gone Squatchin’ trucker hat to be singing the most famous I want song of all time, and yeah it starts off with a giggle or two, but Boyer means it all — every bit of longing, every bit of vulnerability. It was a guitar in his hands and the first lines of All Star were almost too soft to notice, then people began to gather and musicians stood next to him, and a few dozen voices rose together on the chorus, following where this bear of a man led. He’s The Emotional Center and he doesn’t care if you believe he looks the part or not.

In a world where the economics and public perceptions of various styles of music were about 87° out of phase with this one, Marian Call would be singing in music halls and opera houses, her crystal-clear voice cutting through arias and Richard Thompsonesque story songs alike, acoustically perfect spaces resonating every note and typewriter clack. In a world that’s 0° out of phase with this one, the people that book music halls and opera houses for some reason look askance at songs about the influx of cruise ship tourists into coastal Alaskan towns, covers of Homestar Runner tunes, and tributes to Shark Week.

That last one’s stuck particularly in my brain, because it demonstrated the other thing I’ve noticed about Call besides her eclectic musicality — her clear vision of where she wants a song to go and how it should be received and engaged by her audience. During Shark Week at the Mini-Con concert (around about 50:30 or so), Call found the precise degree of encouragement necessary to get a somewhat laid back crowd to indulge in (her words) a little bit of bloodlust, please. The song doesn’t work without that enthusiasm, so she made it happen by force of will.

The attention to detail touches everything from her music (notes and wordplay equally) and its message⁴ to the data resulting from a world-wide hashtag she created; the logistics of a performance and minor Camp hiccups all get jumped on and resolved before anybody realizes she was there. In our musical gang, she’s The Fixer.

Molly Lewis is a paradox; happiness and sadness flow from her songs and performances very nearly simultaneously. Ten years ago she put a video up on YouTube of the most improbable ukulele cover the world had seen: Britney Spears’s Toxic, which has since become a mainstay of her concerts; the performance matches her bouncy, joyous approach to music. But in her hands any song under the sun — an examination of Lincoln’s assassination, say — can turn from goofball to melancholy in the space of a heartbeat.

Or, for that matter, she can turn from one song to another and back almost before you’ve realized it⁵, and turn language on its head in service of a gag, pun, or just for the sheer joy of it. Oh, and she has minions now, with at least three or four members of the Republic of the Uke-raine plucking away on strings at any given time. Without question they would follow her anywhere, their marching songs (somewhat jangly, somewhat frantic) the last thing you hear come the revolution. With the quick shifts and reversals — in tone, topic, word choice, everything — it’s clear that Lewis fills the role of The Acrobat.

The Webber sisters — Angela and Aubrey, collectively The Doubleclicks — are quiet until it’s time to not be quiet, reserved until it’s time to color outside the lines, using their natural camouflage until it’s time to show just a bit of teeth and menace. As far as potentially merciless predators go, they’re also extremely considerate cabin-mates, AAAA++ would bunk with again. There’s hidden depths there, in the songs and in the performances, that I think don’t always get their due recognition.

A typical Doubleclicks song will feature themes of awkwardness, introversion, empathy, trying to fit in; if we were all just a little bit better, just a little bit nicer, they tell us, we’d all be collectively a hell of a lot happier. But there’s a spine of steel beneath the calls for kindness — rejection of their desire for basic civility will not result in begging for acceptance, but a quiet, unwavering, very polite screw you. That’s when Angela, who looks like the lady you drop your kid off with at daycare, fixes you with her glare and lets you know exactly what she thinks of as the appropriate response to the challenges of everyday life:

be yourself
count on your inner strength
find your people
hunt the weak

She means it, too.

And the whole time, Aubrey’s been unobtrusively forcing you to reevaluate everything you thought you knew about live music performances; her cello fills in behind every voice and instrument, lending depth and character and elevating the whole, and she does it all on the fly. It’s not a flashy role, the cellist is pretty much never the one at the front of the stage soaking up the love from the groupies; her solid-body cello⁶ kept her from moving around much, tethered as it was to a power outlet so that it could be amplified.

But.

Remember that video up above of Molly Lewis playing Toxic? Sounds great, but what if it sounded even better? Once Lewis started playing on Monday night I watched Aubrey wait a moment, find the chords she wanted, and start to play every other part of that song; it was everything that some insane Swedish pop song producer knows will never be noticed in the video or the single or the remix or the concert performance, but without which it just won’t sound right.

I watched her do that with a dozen other songs, too, extemporaneous fills flowing in ways that you see late at night in jazz clubs but which you don’t usually see in the bowed instruments. And with a prompting of two words from Marian Call — Power Ballad! — she did it during the performance of the brainstormed musical on Sunday night.

Call had come up with the tune she wanted to sing a few minutes earlier; a few scribbled chords were shown to Boyer so he could strum along. Because of the power cord’s length, Aubrey wasn’t able to see those quick notes and so she paused, she listened, and she created a counterpoint⁷ that somewhere caused an insane Swedish pop song producer to quietly mutter helvete. The Webbers round out our Musical Caper Gang as The Muscle and The Improviser⁸.

We’re coming to the end, but for now (someplace, forever) there’s still a dozen and a half nerdy voices singing along to Smashmouth and Britney, Bowie and The Beatles, Savage Garden and Jimmy Eat World, the Crystal Gems and Simon & Garfunkel, led by a musical Voltron that combines to something magical.

Photos

• If memory serves, I’ve now seen Seth Boyer play guitar for Marian Call in Juneau, San Diego, and two or three times on streaming concerts. It’s a delight every time.
• Unfortunately, I didn’t get any shots of either The Doubleclicks’s or Molly Lewis’s sets at the Mini-Con concert. Marian & Seth brought ’em back up to join in on the songs.
• She got the bloodlust going; before her entreaty, maybe five people were doing the chomp, chomp bit. After, it was everybody but the camera operators.
• The shirt reads I’M FAT LET’S PARTY, and there was a sign taped to his back but you kind of had to be there.
• That cello was one of the most beautiful mixes of form and function I’ve ever seen. It goes in my personal museum of design alongside the Zippo lighter, the Fender Strat, and the the Swiss Army Officer’s Knife (the basic two blades, two tools model).
• Superheroes. From Mockingbird #8, written by Chelsea Cain, pencils by Kate Niemczyk, colors by Rachelle Rosenberg, letters by Joe Caramagna, cameos by nearly everybody.

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¹ Light-ning LAW-yer!

² There was a put-your-hands-in and raise ’em up going Whoa cheer and everything.

³ Even Kazu Kibuishi & Lucas Elliott’s livedrawing was solely illustration; there wasn’t a full story being told.

⁴ Take a listen to her latest album, if you haven’t. Pay particular attention to the song order.

⁵ Her performance of Toxic at music night suddenly shifted on the chorus to Love Shack just long enough to register with the crowd, then back again.

⁶ A beautiful instrument that can be played standing, and also she very kindly did not murder me when I mentioned I’d love to take it apart to see how it worked.

⁷ My knowledge of music theory is thin at best; I think I’m using the word I want to.

⁸ Which, as it turns out, isn’t too far off the roles they played in their appearance in an Eisner-nominated comic. Serendipity!

Monday.

Monday was probably the most deep and meaningful day of Comics Camp, but much of it is going to go unremarked upon; this was the day when the assurance that everything was solely for the ears of those present allowed people to open up and discuss things that would not be discussed in public. Plans for future things that may change radically between now and an indefinite then were also tossed around at length. Money was talked about frankly. You weren’t there, my pen was largely still; them’s the breaks.

Certain aspects, however, have had public components, so you get to be pointed in various directions.

Andy McMillan, one of the two Andys behind XOXO Festival, is working on a new project: The Liberty Foundation. Its purpose will be to support independent artists by providing both funding and the tools to turn their artistic practices into sustainable, ongoing businesses; the precise mechanisms by which this will be achieved are still in development, but McMillan will be sharing when he’s ready via Twitter. If you found the Creators For Creators grant of interest, I’d advise you to keep an eye on The Liberty Foundation.

Katie Lane has been mentioned on this page more than once, and she held a Q&A session¹ where anybody with a question about where the law intersects with the arts could get informal advice. Key word there, informal; while Lane is a lawyer, with few exceptions she is not your lawyer and as such was not providing specific legal advice². She did talk generally a good deal about intellectual property, the importance of getting things in writing, and the value of treating legal negotiations as an opportunity to understand the opposing side and come to a place of mutual benefit.

That last bit really struck me; Lane isn’t out to win, she’s out to find a solution that is beneficial to all involved — if only because an agreement that makes everybody happy is less likely to be (expensively!) fought over later. If I lived in Oregon, she’d be my lawyer for everything.

She’s also damn good at explaining things in terms anybody can understand, as when she used a Capri Sun pouch and two water bottles to illustrate the differences between sole proprietorships, LLCs, S-corporations, and C-corporations³. Asked about the one thing to look for in a contract that should be of greatest interest (or ring the loudest bells by its absence), she cited clear terms regarding what rights are assigned and termination of those assignments.

There was ice cream at lunch: spruce-tip in a vanilla base, and blueberry with lemon curd. They were great.

Kate Beaton and Vera Brosgol talked about childrens books. I was most startled by the number of revisions that an oversized book can go through, including the number of versions where King Baby was very much an unlikeable jerk. It takes a lot of work to tread that line where your characters are likable yet interesting. For Brosgol’s case, she noted the value of having characters in your books shout, because when you read to kids they all get to shout, too. She also had her own editorial struggles, especially with respect to word choice; no matter, little kids now know the words samovar and wormhole.

Lucy Bellwood (Adventure Cartoonist!) has been rather open in public about her finances of late (case in point, from earlier this week), and so led a frank discussion on money⁴. You get the same advice that others shared: there are resources out there to improve financial literacy, like Oh My Dollar and Bad With Money, and services that can help you stay on the right side of money issues, like Tax Jar.

Not being a freelancer and having had the advantage of a decades-long professional career, I got a variety of new perspectives on what fiscal reality is like for those who haven’t followed my particular trajectory. Everybody had something to contribute, though, from the just-starting creators being assured that damn near everything is deductible (including Comics Camp, which is professional development if anything is) to my advice regarding credit cards⁵. Also: advice regarding crowdfunding, not getting screwed by clients that want to slow-walk paying you, and the value of learning from those that went before you (cf: Spike’s Kickstarter comic, Erika & Matt’s book Numberwangs [NSFW]).

In keeping with the theme, Pat Race and Aaron Suring talked about the process of developing the idea of Comics Camp, and the development of financial resources that allowed them to make it a reality. The amount of effort they went to put this thing on — twice now! — without bankrupting themselves is pretty damn impressive. They should turn it into a case study on financing arts support and take it on the road as a seminar (with a modest, but realistic registration fee; they shouldn’t be bearing all the costs of making the arts community smarter by themselves).

Dinner was followed up by Katie And Ryan’s Very Serious Talk About Being Funny, with everybody’s favourite Canadians; Beaton and North had run the session at Mini-Con on Saturday, but they talked more about their personal philosophies of humour. Beaton credits writing laugh-chuckles as making her more empathetic, while acknowledging that finding something that makes her laugh prompts her to immediately destroy that joy by picking it apart like a gross sponge. North noted that comedy is one of the two easiest genres to write in, because if you’re doing it right there’s an immediate physical reaction⁶; you can’t make others laugh if you don’t first make yourself laugh.

Then they made us do worksheets. New Yorker cartoons with the captions erased (it would be cheating to fill them all in with Christ, what an asshole), comic strips with the last panel missing (including a series of Cathy strips where you were not allowed to simply write ACK!). It was a tough exercise, and even tougher to come up with something original; there were huge thematic and wording overlaps in the New Yorker captions among those present.

There was a photo op for all the self-identified bearded Campers and short presentations hosted by McMillan — titled Presentations By People Who Didn’t Have Presentations Talky People Shut Up Time — for any topics not covered elsewhen at Camp. This included a fast five minutes from Molly Lewis on Bullet Journaling that I suspect has led more than one Camper down a hole of special pens and washi tape⁷.

During that time I was tapped on the shoulder by Seth Boyer who said he’d heard I mix good cocktails; I gave him something I’d been working on that weekend called the Aurora Georgealis and it prompted a spontaneous Wow! of appreciation that made me feel like I belonged among the artists and creators.

For those of you wanting to make your own, it’s derived from your basic sour:

1 oz liquor
1 oz citrus
1 oz simple syrup

Shake, strain, garnish as desired.

By choosing an appropriate citrus to match the spirit, you have almost infinite flexibility. The liquor I chose was an aged dark rum; earlier in the weekend the citrus was blood orange, but tonight I was using the last of the breakfast juice, which was a combo of orange, peach, and mango. Because it was a bit sweet, I cut back the juice to 3/4 oz and added several squeezes of lime. The simple syrup had been previously dressed with two airline bottles of white rum, lime juice, lime zest, and vanilla, making an impromptu falernum. The name was inspired by Georgina Hayns, whose enthusiasm for the borealis was matched only by her enthusiasm for helping me perfect the recipe.

And then, before everybody slipped away, the music started. I realize that I’m over 1500 words in already and so I’m going to talk about the impromptu singalong and the musicians of Camp in their own post. They deserve it.

Photos
Not so many today; turns out that sitting around talking about serious topics isn’t that interesting, visually speaking.

• Lessons from Vera and Kate: If you’re going to remember one thing when writing for kids who may be reading for themselves or may be read to, it’s that kids are smart. They’ll find the hidden jokes on the page, or the goat that follows the old lady from the mountain to the moon. Not talking down to kids also means not talking down to the adults that read to them, so avoid the fake, pseudo-Suessian rhythms that are going to sound awful when read aloud.

  Also: farts are always funny.

• Two people that present as very nearly effortlessly funny, Katie & Ryan will tell you at length that funny is a muscle that must be trained and exercised.
• I could only come up with three captions, all of which were substantially identical to multiple other people. That means I’m either as funny as professional cartoonists, or I’m astonishingly unoriginal.
• What I was working with. It was fun.

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¹ Titled Lightning Lawyer! You have to sing it, though, for full effect: Light-ning LAW-yer! As a matter of fact, if you’re ever around Lane in person and her name is said out loud, you are obligated to sing it.

² Specific legal advice is not offered in public, and you pay for it.

³ I’ve made my living for a quarter-century by teaching technical topics, mostly by means of creative analogy. This was the best I’ve ever seen.

⁴ Which she introduced (with characteristic enthusiasm) as Money! You want it! What is it? How do you get it? And how can you keep it?

⁵ Three rules: 1. Always pay them off every month; 2. Never accept an offer that’s blind-mailed to you; 3. Don’t pay for the privilege of carrying a card.

That last one I amended in conversation with fellow camper Tara, who was wondering about the Alaska Air miles-earning credit card, but which carries an annual fee. If you can keep to Rule 1 and you get enough miles or other benefits (like free checked bags) to offset the fee, that’s fine. I was thinking more along the lines of the Amex Platinum offer I got in the mail this week, which offers me the exclusive prestige of Platinum (ugh) for the trivial cost of $450 per year. Screw that.

And, full disclaimer, under the assumption that I’m going to any future Comics Camp that will have me, I went and looked at the Alaska Air credit card and figured that it makes sense financially for me (especially after I discovered they fly nonstop from Newark to San Diego, with First Class on Alaska only about $200 more than steerage on United).

⁶ The other is erotica. Ladies.

⁷ Don’t ask.

I’ll be honest; Sunday started a bit stressfully for me; Pat Race had asked me to give a presentation on the history of webcomics, and I was in absolute terror it would devolve immediately into uselessness:

Hey, Ryan North? Remember when you pranked Wikipedia about chickens? That was great. And Kate Beaton, you did a comic where a duck said “Aw yiss”. That was great, too.

And to be honest, I have to this day little memory of what I actually said. I have notes, mind you, that say things like The first webcomics are about as easily identified as the first jazz or punk songs and (double-underlined) Algonquin Roundtablesque!!

I remember my main thesis being that webcomics (aside from being a useless term, but we haven’t come up with a better one yet) is less a medium of distribution and more of an attitude: creator ownership, minimal gatekeeping, merchandising on the back end for scrappy entrepreneurship. It’s an attitude whose technical and business rules are constantly changing, and whose only constant is the ease of collaboration. Not just between cartoonists, either; I remember this bit:

So one day I leave my offices at Bryant Park in Manhattan, and as I walk by the southern end of Times Square, I noticed a full-sized billboard advertising W00tstock 2.0; it’s portraits of a former child actor/writer, an SFX goofball that blows things up for science, a pair of internet musicians/pirate fetishists, and it’s all been done 8-bit style by a quasireclusive pixelsmith.

If Dorthy Parker got drunk with fewer writers and more sculptors, aviatrixes, and telegraphers you’d approximate the degree of cross-media collaboration you have going on now. Instead, you’ve got Marian [Call] including NASA mission controllers in her shows and Molly Lewis gets hired by quasi-respectable party game designers to write a Christmas song about a Hawai’ian goddess with a flying vagina¹ because why the hell not.

Shortly after that, I shifted away from talking and turned it into a discussion session, getting people to share what they saw webcomics as, where they started, what their experiences were; considering that the room contained the likes of Kazu Kibuishi and Ryan North, it seemed a pretty good course to follow. Fortunately, the invaluable Jason Alderman did his thing and sketch-noted the session²; if you follow his twitter, you’ve seen these before when he attends sessions at various conferences. He doesn’t just take notes, he renders the speakers and finds their key points in real time, turning them into the most beautiful recaps imaginable. When you meet him, demand to look through his notebook, because you will very quickly get smarter on a wide variety of topics.

It was a good time; people went out of their way to thank me for the discussion later, and having the first time slot meant I was able to relax for the remainder of Camp … thanks, Pat! Even better, I got to see the next session, where Jeremy Spake and Georgina Hayns (mentioned yesterday) brought out the puppets and armature they’d shown at the Mini-Con, and really got down to details with us. For 90 glorious minutes we learned about fabrication, the CNC and 3D printing techniques used to construct the puppets³, and had our minds blown by the intricate details. Much more about this down in the photos section. Let me just leave you with a quick thought, though — when the stop-motion needs to look especially smooth, there are variant puppets with multiple limbs or whatever so that, say, an arm can be in multiple places at the same time. It’s the stop-motion equivalent of smear animation.

At lunch, I learned just how different life in Alaska can be; Sarah told me about living on an island approximately 100 km west of Juneau, where a fortunate quirk of geography allows a straight line of sight to a cell tower that provides enough internet to permit a freelancer’s life. She consults on land use and conservation policy, mixed with teaching art and movement. The nearest neighbors are 5 km away, and overwintering is a matter of personal choice and preparation. If the apocalypse ever comes, I want to convince her that I’d somehow be useful to her because she represents my best chance at survival.

Figure drawing took up a chunk of the afternoon, as did various project noodlings. Alderman brought along a little hand-cranked music box mechanism and a set of paper sheets that could be punched with holes to specify what notes would be played; think a very small player piano⁴. Call punched one of her songs into a strip and then wondered if it was possible to turn that into a Moebius song. Turns out it was, and the very quiet music became nicely amplified if the mechanism was held firmly against the body of one of the many camp ukuleles. Did I mention that there were 40 ukes delivered to Camp, leading many to take up the instrument? Because that happened.

Raina Telgemeier taught about how to present and get paid to do so; Tony Cliff showed how to snazz up those presentations with fancy flying transitions. Dinner featured the most nutritious cut of steak, and my turn at clean-up meant I missed much of the most significant session of the weekend as Cliff convened the Pacific Order of Onomatopoeia Professionals First Annual Regional Terminology Summit⁵ to decide once and for all how to spell certain sounds in comics. Suggestions were gathered, voting was conducted⁶, and Cliff released the final results [PDF] a couple of days ago. Comics creators, please note that the results linked to are definitive, official, and must be used as shown on pain of looking very foolish.

The last program of the night was the most insanely creative thing I’ve ever been involved in, but I’m going to be purposefully vague; as I mentioned at the start of these recaps, some things that took place at Comics Camp can — should? may? — only exist in the context of the time and place they took place. To delve into them too deeply is to rob them of meaning.

So it was as we gathered to create a musical — a main character was brainstormed, the introductory, “I Want”, villain, and emotional turning point songs were outlined, and we broke into four groups to actually write the damn things. I will show you in the photos section some wisdom from Marian Call, who shared her process for getting that first line of a song written; I think her technique applies to nearly any creative endeavour. Ultimately, I contributed two titles⁷ and one good line⁸.

Just about an hour from the start of the exercise, The Doubleclicks started playing the first song and the others followed as quickly as one musician could sit down and the next stand up. I am being completely honest with you when I tell you that more than one of them has been rattling around in my brain near continuously ever since; they are legitimately that sticky. Surprising everybody and nobody, there was a Hamilton-style rap from Pat Race.

I called it early that night, and so it wasn’t until the next morning I learned the anticipated northern lights were thwarted by cloud cover, but Ben Hatke mitigated the disappointment by teaching people how to breathe fire. In case you ever wondered what mineral oil tastes like, about half the Campers can tell you.

Photos

• Along with everything else, Jason Alderman’s handwriting is extraordinarily neat. Sketchnotes of my talk on the history of modern [web]comics.
• To start our deep dive in the Laika’s finest, let me note that it’s possible to take a photo where just about everybody’s eyes are closed. From left: Jeremy, Kubo, Kubo’s internal armature, Beetle, George, Monkey, Sarah, Kazu.
• The puppets all start with an internal armature; here you have a full-dressed Kubo and his internal structure. You can’t see it but it’s got tensioning screws for each and every joint except for the fingers and the jaw. The fingers don’t have metal inside (too small), but are fully poseable. The jaw isn’t jointed, but implied by the shape of the face plates.
• Okay: faces. They each consist of an upper half and a lower half; they allow for different mouth positions and expressions, and they pop right off. High strength miniature magnets hold the plates in place, and each piece is inscribed with a unique serial number describing exactly what it is. Popping off just the upper face gives access to the eyes and eyelids, which can be individually positioned however you like. Here’s a better shot of the upper and lower eyelids.
• With the face plates in place, seams are still potentially visible — as here, in the bridge of Kubo’s nose — which are removed digitally. George mentioned that on Coraline, Henry Selick argued strongly to leave the seams in, as an acknowledgment of the physical nature of the stop motion creative process.
• The models themselves hide access points for tensioning their armatures, and connection sockets for when the model must be supported externally due to posing; in Kubo or Monkey, it’s under clothing or fur. In Beetle, there are little pop-off panels and bits of cloth where joints meet. Monkey’s fur is made from a four-way stretch fabric which has been impregnated with a silicone; it stays where you pose it. Kubo’s hair is human hair, likewise laced with silicone for posing.
• I’ve over-lit this shot so you can get a good look at the clothing; Hayns said that cloth is a particular challenge because it doesn’t look right at scale without significant effort.
• Everything on these models is poseable. Beetle’s six limbs can move widely enough to draw his bow, for instance. It’s not a different model or a different bow. We were all very careful in positioning the models, despite the fact that they’re meant to stand up to significant wear and rough handling. There’s just so much care in their construction, we couldn’t treat them cavalierly; they are legitimate works of art and the highest craftsmanship.
• Figure drawing; the fellow providing that rock-solid five minute pose (!) is Khail Ballard, and you should read his stuff. Ballard also played the lead in that night’s musical.
• You thought I was kidding about the ukes, didn’t you?
• Voting underway in the wake of the POoOP FARTS debate.
• How to get to that first line, by Marian Call. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

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¹ The fact that I got to nod at Molly Lewis while saying that last part is a highlight of my life.

² Bonus: preliminary sketches of the library kickoff show!

³ Of which there are potentially dozens of each character — and each animator has a precise preference about how much tension there is in the articulation, which presents design challenges you can scarcely conceive of.

⁴ A discussion of which led to me holding forth on one of my favorite topics — how Hedy Lamarr used player-piano rolls to defeat the Axis in World War II and at the same time invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum, which makes your cell phone possible.

⁵ I’ll wait.

⁶ While I did not make any spelling suggestions, I did exercise my voting rights.

⁷ The “I Want” song, Proof, and the villain song, Sweet, Sweet Untraceable Cash.

⁸ Near the end of the first verse of Proof; the music for that song was all Marian Call, the remainder of the lyrics were by her, North, Telgemeier, and Hollis Kitchin, who runs the best bra shop in Juneau. Other groups were headed up by the Webber sisters, Lewis, and Seth Boyer.

The thing about Pat Race is, he’s been bringing creators to Juneau to meet local fans and generally be available in a place not on the general tour circuit for years; the oldest story I’ve written on the topic was from April of 2013, and I’m pretty sure he was well into the habit by then. Small wonder, then that Friday of Camp Weekend would feature all of the invited guests (and anybody else with a clever enough hook — Jason Alderman wound up teaching kids how to make pop-ups from bits of paper and glue) heading out into the public schools to bring their insights to students.

It was an all-day affair, with creators being driven all over, from start of day until end, averaging two different sessions each. As a result, it was possible to run into people pretty much all day long, either waiting to make their way to a school, or coming back from one, or in some other in-between state. I wound up having breakfast with a rotating cast of creative types¹ and then hanging about the AK Robotics offices with Katie Lane — who had some contracts to work on, which for her is a legitimately fun morning — for a bit before grabbing a nap. Lunch meant tacos and then an impromptu vibe settled among the Camp folks in downtown — there’s a glacier in Juneau, and by gum we were going to see it.

Eventually, three taxiloads (taxis-load?) of us were deposited in the parking lot of the Visitors Center of the Mendenhall Glacier in the Tongass National Forest and we started out for the big hunk of ice across the sandy beach. Here’s the thing about Mendenhall, because I’ve been there before: you have no idea how far away it is. There’s no scale, and after walking for 30 or 45 or 60 minutes, you may have come significantly closer to, say, a waterfall on the way, but the glacier itself is no closer and no larger. It is still impossibly far away, and it’s getting time to head back to town (some of us had obligations to help with prep for the library event that night), and anyway, what are those tracks in the sand?

Bear. Definitely bear, except for the ones that were clearly wolf. They probably don’t feel like coming out in daylight, and there’s a good 300-400 meters of clear land in all directions so nothing can sneak up on you², but still … finding bear tracks is an excellent way to focus your mind on the general topic of being elsewhere.

The library event would involve all of the musicians, and ten or so of the comics folks, each getting five or ten minutes to play, or tell a story, or demonstrate an aspect of their work; I was asked to help make sure each knew when to make their way to the microphone, and to ensure that their presentations (if any) were loaded. It was a terrific success, with the standouts being Jason Caffoe’s demonstration of exactly how much his colors add to Kazu Kibuishi’s inks³, Ben Hatke’s reading of Nobody Likes A Goblin with all the voices, and Lucas Elliott’s series of mer-men portraits, ending with a loving tribute to Pat Race and Aaron Suring.

Breakdown was followed by a trip to Fred Meyer for camp essentials like earplugs, cocoa, and hand warmers, and then back to downtown where Race had arranged a party at Juneau’s about-to-open distillery (about two weeks from the time of this writing) for Moscow Mules and much good conversation. If you get into Juneau, it’s right across the street from the Baranof Hotel, and the wallpaper is both distractingly random and oddly beautiful. It’s going to be the PDX carpet of southeastern Alaska.

The gin, by the bye, is excellent and hasn’t been proofed yet, so on the night it was somewhat north of Navy Strength; the distillers are passionate about their craft and attentive to detail (I walked by four days later and they noticed me, grinning and waving), and they are going to be making some excellent stuff. But four time zones and strong gin make for a tired Gary, with an early start to the mini-con the next day.

Photos

• Friday started out foggy; view of downtown Juneau from my hotel room.
• Ravens act like they own the place, but tell me that spread of feathers isn’t gorgeous.
• The Mendenhall Glacier, I’m told, is significantly smaller than in the past. But after 45 minutes of walking, it is still impossibly large, impossibly far away.
• Probably just a cub, but still further across than my size 8.5 shoes.
• Lucy Bellwood (adventure cartoonist!) and Lucas Elliott illustrate the welcome sign. Fun fact, Pat Race’s mom has been a librarian in the Juneau system for decades, and parents bring their kids to storytime with her because she’s the one that read to them when they were kids.
• The library crowd required the back wall of the room to be retracted (the track is where the green section of the side wall ends) in order to set up all the chairs necessary.
• Ben Hatke, when there is enough room, ends readings by doing backflips. Sadly, there wasn’t enough room.
• Jason Caffoe with a fairly finished set of Amulet inks, and the corresponding colored image. There weren’t really any inks to speak of to guide him in this skyscape. The degree to which he is a full partner in Kibuishi’s work cannot be overstated.
• Lucas Elliott with his rendition of MerAaron and MerPat. It’s a thing of beauty.

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¹ Including a lengthy discussion with Ryan North as to whether or not a complex document like a college thesis could be written entirely in emoji. I contended you could, drawing an analogy to Chinese ideograms. He argued that emoji don’t necessarily have specific agreed-upon word meanings. I countered that ideograms could change meaning or pronunciation depending on context.

He landed the decisive blow in pointing out that different vendors draw different symbols with the same Unicode address, so you don’t have the uniformity necessary. We both agreed that it’s simultaneously a tragedy and awesome that Unicode’s language specification is never going to be finished at least in part because it has to deal with petitions for inclusion from the likes of the Klingon Language Institute. Ryan’s always a rad dude to talk to.

² Except ravens.

³ To the extent that sometimes he’s given a two-page spread with the instruction Give me a floating city in the sky or Make this mountain look treacherous and not much else. Sometimes it comes together in a single image, sometimes there’s multiple revisions to get exactly what both of them want.

So Unshelved wrapped not quite two weeks back, and if there’s one thing both nature and webcomics abhor, it’s a vacuum. You can’t have the world go on without a daily (mostly) library comic written by a librarian, not while Gene Ambaum is drawing breath, by glob! Thus, Unshelved finished on Friday the 11the, and on Monday the 14th Ambaum and Chris Hallbeck launched Library Comic¹.

It’s not Unshelved. It’s a completely new comic written by the same guy, and drawn by the same guy that did the last significant chunk of Unshelved. It’s set in a library, it features overworked, underfunded library staff including cranky reference types, nerdy types, childrens librarian types, all interacting with patrons. None of this is in any way familiar or what you have seen before. These are not the librarians you’re looking for. Move along.

Okay, look, it’s a workplace; there’s only so many character archetypes you get in any workplace, much less one as specific as a library. Is Martin the Mirror Universe Collen? Is Dewey reborn in Esther, Mel in Lucy, or Tamara in Laura? No, no, maybe. Look, Ronald D Moore took the grittiness and moral ambiguity of Deep Space Nine and mapped it to another set of pre-existing characters and ideas to produce Battlestar Galactica; similar themes, similar tropes, in service of a different story. Same deal here.

Ambaum will have ideas from the day job for approximately forever, and Hallbeck will infuse these characters with their own quirks; the are professionals, dammit, and as long as a community (that would be librarians) is looking to see their lives and experiences in comic form, A&H are going to meet that need². And given that libraries are meeting so many needs in so many communities, giving the selfless people that work in them their own laugh-chuckles seems like a pretty fair tradeoff.

NB: This will likely be the last posting of the week; I’ll be in transit or in a pie coma for the next several days, in observance of American Thanksgiving. If you celebrate (or don’t; lookin’ at you, CANADA), please go safely and enjoy the respite (from life, from me, from whatever).

Spam of the day:

Let’s talk!

Over the past few months the written-in-Portuguese, originating-from-Russia spam claiming to be from a frustrated woman neglected by her husband who wants sexytimes from me has undergone a slight but noticeable change: the age of the fake woman in question has been adjusted downwards from 47 years, to 37 years, and now to 27 years. Spammers, no 27 year old woman has ever been referred to as a MILF, just a suggestion. Oh, yeah, and the woman in the photo is maybe 23, so there’s that, too.

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¹ Whoa, guys, don’t give away the story with the title! Spoilers!

² The fact that said community temperamentally inclined to buying a metric squatload of books I’m sure has no bearing whatsoever on the choice of topic and audience.

I promise, it will eventually become clear why I have a picture of Frank and Ike up top, but if you’re expecting a quote from Thing-Fish, you’re probably on the right track.

• Let’s go to David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator), who notes in the comments yesterday that he’s also blocked from accessing Oh Joy, Sex Toy [NSFW if your work sucks], on the basis of “Pornography”. It’s not an accurate basis, but if you’re gonna block stuff, porn makes more sense than education.

  Morgan-Mar speculates further than his test may have resulted in a black mark on his personnel record, but due to good fortune, it probably only counts as 90% of a black mark, as he’s now only 90% of an employee¹:

  1a. My Patreon campaign has reached the significant milestone of $700 per month. I set this up as a goal to enable me to reduce my salaried working hours from 10 to 9 days per fortnight, freeing up a full day every 2 weeks to make more comics and do other creative activities. The first immediate effect is a doubling of new Irregular Webcomic! output, from 2 strips to 4 strips a week. I have a business trip last week of September, so this change will take effect from Monday 3 October. Thank you to all the patrons who have enabled this!

  1b. To help enable the change to 4 new strips a week and mesh with my time away on the business trip, IWC’s new strip schedule will change from Sunday/Thursday to Monday/Thursday for the week 25 Sep-1 Oct, and then to Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri beginning on Monday 3 October. Other days will be reruns with new commentary.

  Congratulations to Morgan-Mar, and to all that have helped him to make more comics.

• Meanwhile, a long-awaited pair of books is on the horizon, as Danielle Corsetto announced Girls With Slingshots Books 9 and 10, bringing the longrunning webcomic (currently in recolored reruns with director’s commentary) to a conclusion in print. Please note the unusually tight turnaround — there are but ten days to raise the oddly-specific amount of US$10,934. The short duration is so that Corsetto can hopefully get the books to people in time for the holidays.
• As long as we’re at Kickstarter, the campaign for book 2 of Check, Please! is tearing up the site, with more than 2000 backers and US$180,000 pledged in a bit more than 24 hours. The Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II would have us believe that Ngozi Ukazu would reap on the order of US$750K +/- US$150K, but I notice something here that tends to give the formula a bit of trouble:

  There was an enormous first-day surge, and then a tremendous drop-off to day 2 … the same thing happened with the This Is Fine plush, which led to an overestimation. While there’s certainly a history of KS campaigns dropping off after the first day, pent-up demand of this sort tends to skew the math. I’ma wait to see what the McDonald Ratio says after tomorrow and decide if the FFF mk2 needs tweaking, but heck if I won’t be thrilled if Check, Please! actually hits the 750 large.

• Elsewhere on the web, Larry El Santo Cruz has been absent from Webcomics Overlook for about forever, but he’s back! An account of the Blerch Run in Seattle on Sunday, an analysis of Webcomics: Still A Thing? yesterday, and a piece on webcomics, webtoons, and phones today. It’s the middle one I want to talk about.

  El Santo’s a smart guy, and if he’s musing on if webcomics is still a meaningful term, I’m all ears. I got pulled up short, though, when he concluded his comparison of webcomics against its nearest competitors (newspaper strips once, memes now) with this description:

  Webcomics exist in that nebulous undefined region between passing fad and real art, with aspiring artists edging toward the latter. But… due to the market reality, most webcomics are not the best in either field. Too good to be a meme, not got enough to be art.

  I get what he’s trying to say, but to say that webcomics are not got [sic] enough to be art is, at best, short-sighted. To pull up merely the most recent examples of webcomics embodying art — and here, I’m defining that as the ability to convey point of view and emotion, not merely the visual component — consider two Achewoods and one Schlock Mercenary of current vintage.

  Everything you need to know about Ray, Cornelius, and Téodor is encapsulated in that wordplay; the depth of character is staggering, whether you’ve ever visited Achewood before or not. And I’d challenge you to find a bit of dialogue that expresses the costs of soldiering — a topic that is overlooked far too easily while we engage in prominent displays of support for the troops — more succinctly or with deeper understanding than that discussion between an uplifted polar bear, a four-armed alien, and a sociopathic amorphous blob with a sudden attack of conscience. To paraphrase the immortal Ike Willis, I got yo art hangin’, boy².

  Which is me being overly wordy in saying: we settled this a long time ago. Webcomics are comics. Comics are art. The transitive closure is left as an exercise for the reader, as is my instruction that you all bookmark The Webcomics Overlook and pay attention to El Santo.

• Hey, the next Science Comic from Dantecus Shepherr is up, this one dealing with the refrigeration cycle; per the note at the bottom of the comic, the artwork for this one (and the rest of the series) will be part of a gallery show in Belfast, Maine from Friday. Shepherr will be there, so drop in and say howdy to him in the actual art gallery because webomics are art, goddammit.

Spam of the day:

SeniorSoulmates — ???r??R?l?t??n??????t?rt??With a Date

Please do not send me spam for senior citizen dating. I’m not that old, and the hidden control characters in your text make me suspect you’re looking not for old people to get laid, but for old people to steal from with evil embedded code. Drop dead.

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¹ Morgan-Mar’s newsbox isn’t directly linkable, so I have copied all the relevant text.

² ‘long wit a two-week supply of IGNINT McNUGGET, de breakfast o’ champiums!

Some days, there’s nothing but good news. Let’s be happy together.

• I don’t know if you saw this yesterday, but Hope Larson (who is one of like four creators¹ whose new project I will buy blind at the comic store) has given comic creators everywhere a gift:
  

  If you want to write comics but aren’t sure how to start, I’ve uploaded the script for Goldie Vance #1 (for free): https://gumroad.com/l/nPdQZ

  You’ve got a hankering to write comics, but aren’t sure how to make that work? Larson’s sharing a complete script, which you can compare against the final issue for like three bucks in the recent issues bins at your local comic shop (or event better, by pre-ordering the first trade, on account of once you read the first issue, you won’t want to stop). And she’s clear about something: this is not the way to write a comic, but it is a way to do so, and a pretty successful one at that, because Goldie Vance is a damn good book.

  There’s not a lot of creators that make it to a measure of accomplishment and see that the most important thing they can do in their careers is to make it easier for the next generation of creators to follow in their footsteps; if nothing else, making younger creators better is going to create competition in the future, so it’s an act of both confidence² and altruism together.

• It is long standing policy at this blog that while many creators are great at what they do, or even unsurpassed at some particular aspect of comics, only one is best with no qualifiers. Kate Beaton is best, you guys. On the off chance I haven’t mentioned it enough recently, her second childrens book, King Baby, is out next Tuesday and now is your shot to pre-order it. It’s charming as hell, I have two copies on order so I can give them to my nieces who have each recently had their first kids (one back in March, one just a few weeks ago — instant cousins!) on account of they aren’t getting the copy that Kate gave me in San Diego because it’s mine.

  Today’s the best possible day to reinforce Beaton’s bestness with that pre-order, by the way, seeing as how today is her birthday. Do you love everything she’s given us, for free, for years and years now? Do you — as all right thinking folk do — know in your heart that nothing is better than Beaton’s comics about her visits home to see family, starring her Mom & Dad? Do you want her to be able to keep making these things? Well, people gotta eat, and since she steadfastly refuses to charge for the Momics, buying her books is the best insurance that she’ll keep delighting us — and again, I must stress this next bit — for free.

  Oh, and keep an eye on TopatoCo, on account of your Fat Pony Plush is about to get a friend. Even if your budget doesn’t allow even small purchases, at the least join with me now: Happy Birthday, Kate, and thank you. You are best.

Spam of the day:

Hi How are you? I must confess that you’re a nice looking gentle man in your Facebook picture.. Are you married?, Can we be friends?????

I’m fine. I don’t have a Facebook account so I fear you’re confusing me with somebody else, but thank you all the same. I am, thank you for asking. Sure, why not?

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¹ The others: Jim Zub, Carla Speed McNeil, Terry Moore. Coincidentally, like Larson, they tell very different stories — format, tone, topic, genre — from project to project.

² Besides, no matter how good the next generation gets at comics, they won’t match Larson at both comics and making ice cream. She’s a flavorbending madwoman.

I’m in a much better mood, and things have happened that allow me to write considerably more than I would have otherwise. Let’s do this.

Recent Past! Yesterday marked eighteen damn years of Jerkcity, which I freely admit is a bit too unstructured for me, but for which I will always be grateful because it was my introduction to Rands, who in real life has taught me more than I can recall about the industry I work in, the people that inhabit it, and how to interact with them. Also, bags and pens. He’s smart like that.

Past, Present and Future! Josh Fruhlinger wrote a book which I enjoyed a great deal, and he has very kindly opened the metaphorical kimono to share data regarding it. The Enthusiast was funded via Kickstarter, and Fruhlinger has done a detailed post on how the money got spent, which anybody considering a crowdfunded project should consider to be a valuable look at what to expect. Read carefully and absorb.

Today! One year ago, Ryan North did the most Ryan North thing possible when he got stuck in a hole and got out by treating it as a text adventure game with all of Twitter as the controlling player. It’s well known that there are no holidays in August, with some countries resorting to making up arbitrary “bank holidays” to make the month less suicidally depressing, so may I suggest that from now on, 18 August¹ be known as Northole Day? We can celebrate by walking our dogs with umbrellas and seeking out holes. Somebody tell David Malki ! to include it in the list of holiday’s for next year’s perpetual calendar.

Also Today! I got my copy of Chester 5000 XYV: Isabelle & George. I will never not love Jess Fink for her ability to mix together real emotion, real pretty pictures, and really hot, hot sexytimes in one story. I think I understand the whole Stucky thing now.

Next Month! It’s just four weeks until SPX rolls around (sadly, I won’t be able to make it, as it will fall in the middle of back-to-back weeks where work sends me to Minnesota), and the Ignatz Awards nominees have been announced. I first saw the slate over at Comics Worth Reading, so props to Johanna Draper Carlson for being on the story early.

What I found especially interesting is the jury members: Tony Breed, Summer Pierre, Keiler Roberts, C Spike Trotman, and JT Most²; There’s a lot of web-first art from these creators, and unsurprisingly the category for Outstanding Online Comic is super strong:

• A Cartoonist’s Diary by Rina Ayuyang
• Just Doing My Job by Gynnis Fawkes
• Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran
• A Small Revolution by Samantha “Boum” Leriche-Gionet
• Vattu by Evan Dahm

That’s an impressively wide range of styles, topics, and presentations, and really no bad choices there.

Other nominees that hail from the wide world o’ webcomics include Melanie Gillman (As The Crow Flies) for Outstanding Comic; Jason Shiga (Demon) and Keiler Robert (Powdered Milk), and various contributors to the Isaac Cates-edited Cartozia Tales for Outstanding Series; Lisa Hanawalt (Hot Dog Taste Test) for Outstanding Graphic Novel; Kate Beaton (Step Aside, Pops), and various contributors to the Sfé R Monster & Taneka Stotts-edited Beyond: The Queer Sci Fi and Fantasy Anthology for Outstanding Anthology Or Collection.

Uniquely, the Ignatzes (Ignatzen?) are voted on by the attendees of SPX, with the votes quickly tallied between end of exhibit hours and the start of the awards ceremony on Saturday, 17 September. Best of luck to all the nominees.

Spam of the day:

30??nimals Surprised By Their Owners Coming Home Sooner

Cute, but why is the same address in Romania sending me pictures of animals, pictures of Asian women, pictures of beautiful vistas, and pictures of “unbelievable fails”?

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¹ No shifting to a Monday or Friday for a long weekend, it has to fall on the 18th.

² I’m not familiar with Most and I’m finding it impossible to Google them, as all the responses refer to Justin Timberlake and headlines like Is this JT’s most awesome video ever?.

It’s sort of like how the one person I’d be interested is finding from high school, my old physical lab partner, is un-Googleable, because her name closely matches the nickname of an old aircraft carrier and all matches are for sailor reunions. Her sister is also un-Googleable, as her name matches too closely with DC superhero Robin. They’ve achieved the dream: no digital footprint thanks to a favorable signal-to-noise ratio.

The music forms more of a background statement than an omnipresent cavalcade of reggaeton airhorns, so that’s all right. Let’s talk about Saturday, a day that began and ended with Furiosa.

The first one I met walking into the Kate Beaton Spotlight panel — an excellent costuming job, really great fabrication all around. The second one sat talking to a friend in the bar where I ate dinner, and I wasn’t sure if it was the same Furiosa as this morning. I noticed that Furiosa #2 had an even greater reason to draw inspiration from the character than Furiosa #1; namely, she has no lower left arm, with only empty space between the three struts that connected the elbow cup to the hand. I didn’t ask for a photo in the bar, but I complimented her on the quality of her costuming and left it at that. It wasn’t the only time today that a cosplayer incorporated a physical challenge into the costume, and I’ve been thinking a lot about that today, but we’ll come back to cosplay later.

As has been noted, last night Kate Beaton won her first Eisner Award — it’s honestly a bit shocking it took this long — in the category of Best Humour Publication¹ … a first for a woman working alone. She spoke with Hilary Chute, professor of English at Northeastern University, and if the nature of a Spotlight panel means that a fair amount of information will have been conveyed in prior years, remember that for somebody, today was the first time they saw Beaton and learned her story.

Namely, second of four daughters (but one played hockey so Dad figured that was okay) in rural Nova Scotia, where if you were interested in something you dove in hard and honed your skill, both because there was little else to do, but also because you were likely the only one in your class of 23 kids to be interested in history and drawing and being the funny one in class. The downside is that once you reached the wider world outside of rural Nova Scotia, you might well find that the best drawer and teller of jokes back home might not be as good as all the others you’d meet.

The path of that sounds cool took Beaton to Mount Allison University and a course of study in history and anthropology, with a desire to make comics for the school paper profoundly mixed with a sense of shyness that kept her from making regular submissions until her third year². Her humour column actually provided the impetus to start writing comics for publication — they were already in the margins of her class notes, a useful review device if nothing else — which led to a feeling of power. When you’re on a campus of 2000 or so students, the one thing they all read in the paper is the comics page and hearing them laugh in the dining hall can be downright intoxicating.

Timing and luck played into Beaton’s ascent, graduating just about the time that Facebook launched and photo albums (which might contain comics) became one of the earliest features. Working in a museum in Vancouver with Emily Horne, who encouraged her to put up a website. Making the acquaintance of Ryan Pequin, who encouraged her to get a LiveJournal. Breaking just about the time that TopatoCo launched, and hearing that she could send in shirt designs and never have to handle the logistics of merchandise sales (That sounds just like printing money!). Having a dedicated audience that’s ready to follow you as you do comics about a variety of topics, one that’s more interested in the creator than genre or form.

There was also a sense of deliberation and planning to her plan to be a cartoonist; two years in the oil sands of Alberta cleared her college debt and socked away ten grand to fund the new career, which worked despite the intensely solitary and random work patterns. A strip of a smoking cursing Wonder Woman is in the bag, but the reward for finishing a comic is another empty page that needs filling. Meanwhile, there’s literature and history that needs to be read an contextualized: anything that happens never exists on its own; there’s changes in attitude and scholarship, conversations that take place an shift over time and need to be understood in order to get to the nugget, the core idea about whatever that’s caught your fancy. Now there’s a structure where a joke can be constructed and edited down to the key idea, and then, you just draw a bunch of farts.

Okay, not really, but there is a unique idiom, both visual and textual, in Beaton’s work, that sticks out and sometimes sticks around to mutate into a part of the internet’s common DNA. It can be as simple as being stuck for ideas and drawing renderings of, say, a Nancy Drew cover from the ’40s and then wondering What happens in the book based just on the cover?

Looking forward, Beaton is now working on a full-length graphic novel of her time in the oil sands; like a lot of Atlantic Canadians working in isolated places with only primary industries, the oil sands had a compelling attraction — here was a place with jobs, with the potential for money, at a remove from the elite, educated, liberal, artistic world. Stories and profiles of the oil sands don’t represent it well, especially treating the working class nature of the work and environs in a superficial and judgmental way; her book will look at issues of politics, gender roles, economy, environmental concerns, politics, and especially class; there are stories of what it’s like to live and work in such a place, stories that need telling, stories that different from Beaton’s usual work but which have to get out.

That book is going to be a hell of a thing, especially given that Beaton’s artwork (scribbly; bad) is strong on gesture and expression; maybe somebody else could educate the reader more, but Beaton’s going to be able to show us from the inside what it’s like to be there. Her unique style doesn’t do everything you can do in comics, but doesn’t need to; her strengths make for comics that feel honest and unmediated, in a way that unmistakeably hers and hers alone. She may count the likes of Searle and Yeoman as artistic influences, she make go back to Leacock to remind herself what’s funny, but in the end somebody’s got to draw the googly eyes in a way that conveys the joke, and there’s nobody that can do that they way she does.

There’s lots more, of course, but there’s only so much time to talk and then they’re shooing you from the room, but because Kate Beaton is Kate Beaton, she wrangles all the cosplayers to take a photo with her in the hallway purely because it’s a fun thing to do. She is, as I may have remarked in the past, The Best.

Speaking of cosplay, the day started with Dr Sidney “New Jersey” Zweibel of the famed Hong Kong Cavaliers, progressed pretty quickly to a captive Mad Max (the young woman’s Segway was for mobility purposes, but the sense of her zooming at you in a terrifying, out of control fashion gave a real theatrical effect), and then careened wildly to King Of The Beach Joker³. Funniest costume was either Master Chef or Dr Krieger and his holographic girlfriend (they can legally marry in New York!); the most badass characters were women that can shoot down TIE fighters, kill you for messing up her forest, or just eat your planet, so watch it.

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¹ In honour of Ms Beaton, we will endeavour to use Canadian spelling in this post.

² Beaton did make one submission in her first year, by stuffing it unsigned into the submissions box and running.

³ Complete with Cesar Romero-style moustache under the pancake makeup.

It is now, I suppose, early Saturday morning; I’ve just been to Space Time with Marian Call, David Malki !, Seth Boyer, Joseph Scrimshaw, and people who’ve driven rovers on another damn planet. It was great. But it appears that, courtesy of The Magicians, I’m not going to be getting to sleep anytime soon, so I may as well do a recap of (mostly) today (and a bit of yesterday)¹.

• There was an announcement that Molly Ostertag of Strong Female Protagonist will be doing an original graphic novel with Scholastic in 2018. Ostertag’s work is great, so this is welcome news.
• Kate Beaton, Lisa Hanawalt, and Emily Carroll (with Abraham Riesman moderating, from left) spoke about working in the short form, but the panel itself was kind of indicative of the topic — question asked, answer (frequently very funny — ask Hanawalt about how toucans eat, or Beaton about grackle fecal sacs, or Carroll about how she uses Twitter), but not much a through line that makes for an interesting read. I could tell you Hey, remember that thing Kate said? That was great but that’s not an entertaining thing for either of us. Some things, you just have to be there.
• I spent a good deal of time trying to get into interview slots with Hope Larson and Gene Yang but the very patient and friendly ladies running publicity and press relations for DC were unable to accommodate me². And honestly, when you hear that your last shot at a possible cancellation is gone when Evan Narcisse (writing this weekend for io9) shows up for his appointment, you can’t be mad; that guy can write, and he’s only gotten better since I first met him at the SPLAT! symposium all those years ago. In fact you should go read whatever it is he’s written from his interview with Yang.

  It worked out, though, since Larson happened to see me in the press holding area and invited me to meet up with her after a signing. While she was answering a question that involved her current work in comparison to Yang’s, he happened to walk by and after they caught up, he apologized for not being able to take another interview at DC and invited me to meet up with him after a signing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the best people in the world are in comics. I’m bashing those interviews into shape and will run them as soon as I can.

• Cosplay got off to a slow start on Thursday, but still produced such gems as a woman re-enacting all of Finding Dory by herself, an exuberant Kamala Khan, Sexy Darth Plague Doctor, and a pre-tragic Simon Petrikov. Friday’s deepest cut was probably Izabel and The Brand from Saga, but my favorite was probably the pair of ladies who asked themselves What if 1950s Jackie Kennedy had played every villain on Batman?. Cleverest was probably Finn Squared, with best verisimilitude going to Miss Tina Belcher (she did the groan) or the Marceline/Marshall Lee combo. Add in Matt the Radar Technician and Lurch, and you’ve got a full slate of quality costumage.

  Not shown: the Slutty BB-8, Lingerie Leia, and the many Baby-8s that I saw; the former were kind of gross, and the latter adorable, but I’m not asking parents if I can take a picture of their infant dressed as a droid because I am not a huge creeper.

• And as I scan Heidi Mac’s twitterfeed, I see that Kate Beaton took the Eisner for Humor (Step Aside, Pops) and Matthew Inman the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award for his work in promoting and fundraising for a goddamned Tesla museum. I take these as signs that all is right in the universe, and even if the DJ hasn’t had enough yet two floors down, I’m heading for bed. More tomorrow.

Creators who autographed my copy of Romeo and/or Juliet since I last mentioned it:

Kate Beaton, who in a massive irony, was signing just the other side of a curtain from the living embodiment of Strong Female Characters, the Suicide Girls.

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¹ At Space Time tonight, both Raina Telgemeier and Pat Race had things to say about my plentiful use of both parentheses and footnotes, so these are for them.

² Not that I am complaining! Briana, Alison, and especially Charlotte were wonderful and great at their jobs. I hope that they got enough time to eat a granola bar at some point in the day because they were running flat out.