It is a Fleen Stylebook requirement that titles be rendered with initial capitals in all circumstances, excepting circumstances where it would violate personal pronouns; for example, if we had cause to reference writer bell hooks, we would utilize her preferred lack of capitals.

The only other exception is what we at Fleen refer to as the Roast Beef Rule, wherein quotes of Roast Beef Kazenzakis will follow his typical orthography; if there was a way to make the title font 11% smaller today, I would. Today’s title is not only a direct quote from Mr Kazenzakis, it also links directly to one thing I’m going to tell you, and neatly describes my emotional state regarding the other.

• The latter first: Meredith Gran announced earlier today that from Monday next (that would be the 19th of March), Octopus Pie will be rerunning daily with author’s commentary. Given what’s likely to be a lot of heads-down work on Perfect Tides, time when we might not see a lot of visible work from Ms Gran, this is welcome news. Even better, we get to fall in love with Octopie again (and for some of you lucky people, for the first time).

  By my count, there are the equivalent of 1026 pages to Octopus Pie, although many of them are meant to be seen all at once; let’s be conservative and say that you will probably get 900 updates (give or take) out of the reruns. That gives us daily Octopie until roughly [American] Labor Day in 2020; we’ll be able to ride out the statutory length of the Trump/Pence administration¹ with the daily example of Eve, Hanna, and the weirdest parts of Brooklyn in your 20s as our coping buddies. You always knew exactly what we’d need, Mer.

• The former second: Roast Beef is, naturally, the heart and soul of Achewood, and there is Achewood news from creator Chris Onstad:
  

  Every few years, I ask for a little donation to help cover Achewood server costs. Thank you sincerely for your support! To give: http://bit.ly/2oZ1z4G

  The archives are voluminous, and judging solely by my own frequent trips, subject to enormous traffic even today, some 15 months after the most recent (and potentially last) update. I’d say that as long as we can dip back in to relive a particularly favorite bit of Achewood nostalgia, Onstad’s more than earned the occasional couple of bucks.

  As a thank you, Onstad invites all who donate to go wild with the downloading of whatever you like from the PDF library. If that’s not your deal, may I suggest making a purchase from the gallery? It was my good fortune to be able to snatch up the portrait of Ramses Luther Smuckles before someone else did … it’s more beautiful in person than you can imagine. There’s plenty of original art, and gorgeous silkscreens for your perusal. The store works, too.

Spam of the day:

Did Jesus “Heal the Masses” Using Specialized Medical Marijuana Oils

I’ma go out on a limb and say no.

_______________
¹ Although with any luck, we’ll be well down the line of succession by then.

I’ve got a plane to catch in a couple of hours, so we’re keeping this brief (yet, as always, meaningful).

• John Allison, as all right-thinking folk know, writes fabulous stories. The Tackleverse that started with Bobbins and continues through Bad Machinery (all found via ScaryGoRound.com, with a branching off into Giant Days (found in your local comics shop) are exquisitely written. Whether drawing himself or paired up with the right collaborator, Allison’s mastery of character and farcical situations is second to none. So what to do when you’ve gone office comedy, bizarre slice of life, mystery kids, and college years stories?

  How about branching off into a new, unrelated setting for new characters and a new story type?

  Coming in June, Allison will write — and Christine Larsen will draw — By Night, a 12-issue miniseries (then again, Giant Days started as a miniseries as well), which he describes as combin[ing] my love of Fringe, The X-Files, Jon Ronson documentaries and long reads about the collapse of post-industrial Western society over at CBR. I’m going to preemptively call this one a must-buy, and we’ll all find out exactly how good it is on the 13th of June.

• Gotta go back most of a year for this one: Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett gifted us with a copy of the hardcover of Drive volume 1, which I had already purchased via Kickstarter. Having a spare copy, I decided to give it away to one lucky reader, who turned out to be Mario, from Lisboa, Portugal. Off I mailed it, with the obligatory joke (ho, ho!) about it disappearing into the depths of Customs.

  I think you know what happens next. The book made it to Portugal in a matter of days, sat around in Customs waiting for Mario to come claim it (who was supposed to intuit this fact through the aether), and was then returned to me some five months later. Mario and I corresponded and I offered to try again, but he very graciously suggested he look into the relevant postal policies before resubmitting the book to the tender mercies of systems beyond the ken of mere mortals. Having been at that for some time, he’s come a conclusion:

  It’s not worth another attempt. He suggested I try to sell it to try to recover some of the money you have lost with the shipping or maybe gift it to someone else, or donate it to a library, whatever you feel is the best option, which I find to be pretty generous on his part.

  I’m not going to sell it, and I’m not going to run another giveaway on this particular book — it’s got the scent of my home now, and it will undoubtedly try to return, like one of those dog-and-cat pairings you see in the movies about returning home after great journeys. But I will be donating it to my local library (under Mario’s name, naturally), so that it can be seen by many people and they can grow to love the story as much as we do.

  So do me a favor, everybody — give Mario a quick nod of appreciation, maybe a hat-tip in the general direction of Portugal, and be glad that webcomics breeds such kind-hearted people. Take that, Universal Postal Union! And read Drive, it’s really good.

Spam of the day:

Toenail Fungus Code

Of all the emails I’ve ever received — spam or otherwise — where I NOPEd on clicking the link that says Display images below, this is the very NOPEiest. Nope, nope, nope, nnnnnoooope.

Let’s just jump to the heart of it:

When I was a kid I wanted to be a pro baseball player or comic artist. I chose the 2nd option and never thought the roads could somehow meet! On Aug 19th, the @Mariners will celebrate Amulet Day. Enjoy a day at the ballpark and get a T-shirt! Link here: http://www.mariners.com/amulet

That, of course, is Kazu Kibuishi, who is one of the most accomplished (and simultaneously most fundamentally decent) folks in comics, and who is a damn rockstar to middle grades librarians and their patrons. The Amulet series has been a favorite here at the Fleenplex ever since book one (ten years! It’s been more than ten years!), and the anticipation for book 8 (of 9) is at a fever pitch in classrooms and libraries across the nation — 25 September, classrooms and libraries, that’s when you’ll get it¹.

And now he gets to have an entire professional baseball game dedicated to him. I’ll be honest, because I know just a little bit about what that’s like², I can pretty well predict that Kibuishi will be outwardly calm and collected (because he pretty much always is), but inwardly? He’s going to be just as excited as all his fans are when they get the chance to meet him.

Amulet Day with the Seattle Mariners (vs the LA Dodgers) will be Sunday, 19 August; game time is 1:10pm, with tickets purchased by 17 August (5:00pm local time) good for a special Amulet t-shirt when you bring your stub to section 339 by the end of the third inning. Get your tickets here and be sure to enter the promo code AMULET so you’ll be seated with all the other Amulet fans.

Update to the latest F-Six campaign: We’re at US$100 of donations to be matched. You’ve got just under two weeks to help send a message about gun control.

Spam of the day:

Fans Love You

You know who else loves me? Ladies.

_______________
¹ Sometime around dawn on the 26th, the demands to know when book 9 will be out will waft far and wide o’er this great land.

² The local minor league team had a game dedicated to my EMS agency one Saturday night; we got cheered when we assembled on the edge of the field by maybe 2000 people and it was kind of thrilling.

So there’s room in this world for disagreement about what policies should be implemented, what ideas are best, and everybody agrees that all viewpoints are equally valid, right?

Yeah, no. There’s stuff out there with only one side that has anything resembling rational reality attached to it, and any other sides filled with arrant bullshit.

Case in point: on the one hand, you have the collection of white supremacists, would-be fascists, bigots, small-minded turdmongers, intellectually inbred CHUDs, and sterling examples of human evolution that make up the so-called alt-right. They’re wrong. Whatever it is they’re talking about, they’re wrong. On the off chance that they are, in some particular case, in a narrow technical sense, not wrong, it is certain that they are using that momentary blip of not-wrongness to argue something worthy of contempt in bad faith, with the sole goal of moving the Overton Window.

On the other hand, you have Matt Furie, creator of Pepe the Frog.

Furie’s run afoul of dipshit brigade’s re-appropriation of Pepe to stand in for their hateful message for some time. He tried to disavow them, he tried to ignore them, he killed off Pepe to prevent his misuse, he did his best to reclaim Pepe’s innocence. Finally, out of fucks to give, he struck back at their monetization of Pepe in service to their hateful message and got himself a lawyer.

The first to fall was a onetime public school principal self-publishing an anti-Muslim children’s book with a knockoff Pepe. C&Ds went out to a purported studly guy who rambles incoherently from his in-law’s pool house/basement when not running from his own words on NPR, a very punchable Nazi, and various online vendors of infringing t-shirts.

Now he’s taking on the Big Gun, the sine qua non of batshittery and conspiracy theory shouting:

The lawsuit pinpoints one poster in particular as a source of copyright infringement. The poster features Pepe alongside InfoWars founder Alex Jones, President Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Roger Stone and others with the text “MAGA,” short for Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Furie, represented by attorney Rebecca Girolamo at Wilmer Cutler, says he didn’t authorize such use of Pepe. He alleges the poster is being sold by InfoWars in its online store.

Requisite disclaimer that I am not a lawyer, but this seems to be a fairly clear cut case of copyright infringement; there’s no transformation of Pepe in the image (seen here, at The AV Club), no use of him in a satirical fashion, or to comment on broader matters — he’s simply included because the MAGA crowd likes him. Given his less than successful record in the legal sphere, I’d think that Jones would not want to set himself up for another loss, but he doesn’t seem to have that degree of self-awareness. Jones responds here, but it’s not written and I don’t like you enough to watch an Alex Jones video.

Fleen wishes Furie the best of luck, and holds every confidence that if this does go to trial, Jones will find a way to disgrace himself again in spectacular fashion. Here’s hoping that any compensation Furie is owed will be paid in actual money, and not in leftover stock of overpriced, overhyped, weird-ass snake-oil.

Spam of the day:

2017 Solar Program Now Available in Your Area

Okay, 1) I received this on the 27th of February, so you’re a bit late for 2017, and 2) stay the hell out of my “area”.

By he, I naturally mean Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who sent along an unlooked-for update on what’s happening in France, on a day where I’m being subjected to thundersnow. Wet, heavy, needs-to-be-cleared gods-damned thundersnow. Thundersnow that has already caused Pénélope Bagieu’s book tour appearance in Philadelphia tonight to cancel. In other words, he has anticipated my hour of need and delivered unto us an interesting occurrence (and subsequent lessons learned) from Le Monde du Bandes Dessinées Web. Onwards …

What can you do when you’ve committed yourself to fai[re] un truc de fou (do[ing] something crazy) in a stretch goal?

You probably remember our coverage of the launch of Maliki’s Tipeee campaign and our followup interview, and it’s been going strong ever since.

One interesting aspect is that, given that Tipeee enables one-off contributions, this means each month is the start of a new crowdfunding campaign; of course, it does not reset to zero at the start of the month, rather at the amount of recurring contributions, but otherwise each month is different from the next: the illustrated print changes from month to month, which results in the total at the end of the month fluctuating, sometimes dipping to about 9000 €, but generally reaching the 10,000 € stretch goal, and once reaching up to about 13,000 €.

For January, the illustration Maliki unveiled was not only of a fan-favorite character, but was also the counterpart of an illustration created a few years ago; and while I am not up to date on my Maliki lore, I believe they represent an important event in the backstory of these characters.

As soon as the illustration was unveiled, the counters went crazy. Starting from about 8700 € at the time, the total quickly reached the 10,000 € stretch goal, and then after a few more hours went over the previous record. But it did not stop there. Remember from the interview the mention of the ludicrous stretch goal, the one that was never meant to be reached?

It was cleared (at 15,000 €) with time to spare, and the total ended up at 17,000 €.

While the description of that stretch goal varied before, for the last few months it had simply read je fais un truc de fou (I do something crazy). And now it was as if the contributors had collectively dared Maliki OK, now do something crazy. Oh no.

Understandably, Team Maliki asked for a bit of time in order to come up with something suitably crazy, even taking suggestions from contributors. And last week, they eventually unveiled it in a special broadcast¹: they are going to sponsor an animal shelter called le radeau des animaux through various means: immediate contributions so that they may complete their facilities, but also ongoing money support, illustration work (e.g.: visual identity), etc.

I think we can draw a few lessons here:

• To borrow from C Spike Trotman, doing fan art may provide short term success², but building up your IP will result in readers supporting you more in the ways that eventually matter.
• Stretch goals end up building on each other: that month the 10,000 € stretch goal was for getting the previous illustration in the diptych along with the new one at no additional cost, which made subscribing to the cheetah pledge level (where you get that month’s illustration) an even more attractive option, resulting in more contributions coming. In fact, there being a new illustration for the month is itself a stretch goal, though at 5000 €, it is reached every month.
• This all went down during the same day (31st of January), in eight hours, from about 16:00 to 23:59 CET. When you have a good connection with your audience, support can come very fast.
• Do not tempt fate in a crowdfunding campaign, because you never know how far contributors will go and make you live up to your commitments.

Pourriel du jour:

http://enjoy.phonefurry.com

At the risk of kinkshaming, nnnnnoooooppppe.

_______________
¹ The broadcast also included live watercolor drawings, live play of antique games, and Maine Coon licking action³, so that readers could get something, too.

² Though I have to admit to sometimes buying one of their fan art illustrations. What can I say, I am weak.

³ Gary here; get your minds out of the gutter, people. Also, FSFCPL informs me the cats are at 2:08:41 in the video

The thing about comics these days is, the division between webcomcis and just comics is pretty much notional. Creators shift between the two distribution media, and the sorts of stories that work well in one are increasingly found in the other. Nothing reflects this as much as the annual Cartoonist Studio Prize (now in its sixth incarnation) from Slate and the Center For Cartoon Studies.

From the beginning, it’s been a simple arrangement: ten nominees for the best print comic of the prior year, ten for the best webcomic, notable connoisseurs acting as a panel to select the contenders. Even more than past years, the CSP for 2017 reveals that the most interesting comics are being done by women; eight of the print nominees and half of the webcomics nominees are women.

This year’s nominees for best print comic are:
The Academic Hour by Keren Katz, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, Boundless by Jillian Tamaki, Breath, Plucked from Heaven (collected in Elements: Fire) by Shivana Sookdeo, Gaylord Phoenix No. 7 by Edie Fake, Language Barrier by Hannah K. Lee, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, One More Year by Simon Hanselmann, Tenements, Towers & Trash by Julia Wertz, and You & A Bike & A Road by Eleanor Davis. One may note that the Elements anthology is shot through with webcomickers, that Julia Wertz made her mark with her autobio webcomics, and Tamaki is no stranger either.

The nominees for best webcomic of the year are:
A Fire Story by Brian Fies, Agents Of The Realm by Mildred Louis, A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance by Ted Closson, Leaving Richard’s Valley by Michael DeForge, Neighbors by Christina Tran, The Price of Acceptance by Sarah Winifred Searle, Reported Missing by Eleri Harris, Somebody Told Me by Jesse England, Whose Free Speech? by Ben Passmore, and Wonderlust by Diana Nock. I may note that The Nib continues to be recognized for the general excellence of its work in what can generally be called editorial/reportage comics, with four of the ten nominees (Closson’s, Searle’s, Harris’s, and Passmore’s) originating there.

I’m notoriously bad at predictions, but what the heck? There’s not a weak contender on the list, and several are already recognized as sitting at the top of various best-of lists. Over in the print world I’m going to nock out Davis only because she won the category last year; Tamaki, Hanselmann, and Ferris have been the recipients of a lot of attention for the past year, and Wertz’s collection is more recent but was eagerly anticipated. I’m guessing one of those four takes it.

On the webcomics side I’m eliminating Tran because she also won the category last year, then it gets a lot more difficult. Fies and DeForge are longtime respected creators, Closson’s work is both enlightening and enragingly current, and there may be nobody expressing the frustrations of Being Black In America as well as Passmore. Louis is delivering a great story twice a week for years, which is a longevity and sheer volume not present in a lot of the nominees.

But Eleri Harris’s six-part examination of a murder investigation/conviction in Tasmania, one to which she has a personal connection, one that may be the result of bungled police work — it’s unique. It’s Serial season one in comics form. I don’t get a say, but it’s my pick.

The Cartoonist Studio Prize awards will be announced on 31 March; winners receive US$1000 (which, frankly, more comics prizes should emulate … a fancy trophy — or brick — is nice, but so is sweet, sweet untraceable cash).

Spam of the day:

Your Account Has Been Hacked Call Now
We Have Detected Unusual Activity With Your Gmail Account
From IP: 33.124.12.1 Geo Location Found: Eastern Russia
If This Was Not You Please Call the Google Support Team
(Be at your computer)
1 855-321-5611

I see that Gmail support now sends its notifications from @xsbizbermbhdty.com, four hours before the claimed unusual activity time, and to my presumably-compromised account, rather than the recovery email they have on record. It would be a shame if people called that number and wasted their time (I can’t any more; they hang up as soon as they see my number).

Once upon a time, I didn’t have a favorite book designer, but that’s cool; I imagine almost everybody who’s ever lived didn’t know enough about book designers existing to have a favorite, and of those that remain, 99% just say Chip Kidd by reflex. But it was hard not to notice the work that Colleen AF Venable¹ did on the first hundred or so titles that :01 Books put out, and pretty soon I was paying close attention.

I remember complimenting her on the design of Anya’s Ghost and her face lighting up; much like the famous story of Chuck Jones and his artists stealing time from a Road Runner short to have enough animator-hours to make What’s Opera, Doc?, Venable had fought for the budget to give Anya’s Ghost both an embossing (sections of the cover sunken below the normal plane) and debossing (same deal, in reverse)², but couldn’t find a way to stretch the funds to include spot gloss.

I learned in that conversation that you can judge books by their covers, that the willingness of a publisher to spend money and design time reflects their confidence in the ability to earn back the expense, but also the degree to which they want to make it stand out because they believe that what’s inside is important. Which brings us to Brazen (book design by the very capable Danielle Ceccolini, who succeeded Venable at :01, with Chris Dickey).

:01 must think the world of Pénélope Bagieu’s latest, because the cover features embossing, debossing, locations of both kinds of bossing given spot gloss, and a rough (almost flocked) texture to the rest of the cover, all arranged in an unbelievably complex pattern that must have taken roughly forever to design, do test prints of, and finally approve. It’s a marvel.

And what the hell — the inside is more than worthy of the love lavished on the cover.

In her trademark style that sits midway between Kate Beaton and Larry Gonick, Bagieu tells the story of 29³ remarkable women who changed the world in large ways and small. Women that you possibly learned about before (Nellie Bly, inventor of investigative reporting; Josephine Baker, endless champion of equality; Temple Grandin, translator between the worlds of humans and animals), and some you might have known based on your personal interests (Hedy Lamarr, revered in my discipline for her invention of spread-spectrum signal encoding; The Shaggs, reluctant pop stars; Mae Jemison, who is so impossibly broad in her spectrum of interests and expertises that she’s normally reduced to the single word astronaut⁴).

Then there are the ones you’d never have know about, women who showed up every damn day and did the work to save a lighthouse (Giorgina Reid), run off invaders (Nzinga), hold a country together (Wu Zeitan), stop women dying in childbirth (Agnodice), and forcing a nation to come to peace (Leymah Gbowee). Betty Davis is sometimes remembered as one of Miles Davis’s second wife, but she was Beyonce and Rihanna thirty years before that was allowed (Jimi Hendrix knew how good she was, and Prince spent years trying to meet her). Jesselyn Radack fought the overreaches of the security state when the US government declared her an enemy, and continues fighting for transparency today. Sonita Alizadeh fled the fate of a trafficked marriage in Afghanistan to become an advocate against childhood marriage for girls — and a rap star.

Some died for what they believed in. Josephina van Gorkum married in defiance of the religious norms of nineteenth century Holland and built a tombstone to carry on her defiance after her death. Maria Teresa, Minerva, and Patria Mirabal, Las Miraposas, fought the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic until they were murdered on the orders of the dictator Trujillo. Katia Krafft (and her husband/scientific, Maurice) studied volcanoes up and close, codifying knowledge that has saved the lives of thousands, until they were killed in a lava flow in Japan.

The lover of modern art (Peggy Guggenheim) and the warband leader (Lozen), the athlete (Annette Kellerman, Cheryl Bridges) and the actress (Margaret Hamilton) are equally honored. No one’s story is more important than that of unashamed bearded lady Clémentine Delait, explorer Delia Akeley, cartoonist Tove Jansson, transgender trailblazer Christine Jorgenson, utopian Thérèse Clerc, revolutionary and suffragist Naziq al-Abid, or promoter of formal crime forensics Frances Glessner Lee.

And to back it all up, Bagieu provides a list of thirty more women — dancers, pirates, samurai, groupies, painters, poets, reporters, photographers, teachers, and more. I long to read her take on Aisha Bakari Gombi, Hunter of Antelopes and Boko Haram Militants, Laskarina Bouloulina, Admiral, Ship Builder, and Harem Liberator, and Margaret Hamilton (the other Margaret Hamilton, Computer Scientist of the Apollo Space Program⁵). I want to see what she’s got to say about Rosalind Franklin, Ching Shih, and Grace Hopper.

She’s got other stories that she wants to tell for now, some will probably be biography again (like her stellar California Dreaming) and some fiction (like her equally stellar Exquisite Corpse); I’ll read everything she puts on paper and suggest you do as well. Only do me a favor — don’t skip the last story in the book, a brief two-pager about a girl born in Paris in 1982, who dreamed about selling her drawings and becoming Queen of America. She’s doing quite well on the first, and if the second is out of reach, she’s living a pretty cool life in New York City, listening to rock music, drawing what she wants to, and playing drums just because. I think she’s going to go places.

Brazen releases tomorrow, 6 March, and Pénélope Bagieu will be marking the occasion with an eight-city book tour. Fleen thanks Gina Gagliano — who has a staff to help her now! — for the review copy provided.

Spam of the day:

Is Your Wife Getting Calls Late at Night?

Dear dudes who are spamming me about a creepy phone spying app, if anybody woke my wife with a late-night call they had better be dying or she will kill them for interrupting her sleep. So, no.

_______________
¹ AF being her actual middle initials, and not the internet-born linguistic intensifier.

² The cover of the book is a tactile delight.

³ As recently noted, one entry was left out of the North American edition due to a need to keep the book YA-friendly.

⁴ She also is (or has been) a chemical engineer, physician, speaker of Russian and Swahili, student of sub-Sarahan politics and dance, Peace Corp medical officer, CDC vaccine researcher, science camp director, sci-fi geek, guest star on Star Trek: The Next Generation, college professor, poker shark, and LEGO minifig in the Women of NASA set I have.

⁵ Who is also a LEGO minifig.

• You may recall that Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson (hereinafter, Becky and Frank; anybody caught using the portmanteau Frecky will be beaten) have a new collection of their Capture Creatures comic out now, and will be doing a launch event tomorrow in suburban LA. But did you know that they’ve expanded the art series?

  Capture Creatures was (obvs) based on the 151 original Pokémon, and Dreistadt did 151 paintings of the 151 creatures. Of course, there are waaaay more Pokémon these days, and Becky & Frank decided what’s good for Nintendo is good for them. Thus, earlier this week they revealed Capture Creature #152, joined since by #153, #154, and #155. I’d keep an eye on their Tumblr and the Capture Creatures tag if you don’t want to miss out.

• We at Fleen have been big fans of Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s ongoing exploration of all thing human sexuality, Oh Joy, Sex Toy. More than just a review of happy-making devices, it’s presented scads of terribly useful (and more important, truthful) information about what human sexuality is like; for waaaay too many there no organized sex education in their personal experience, and as such Moen & Nolan may be one of the better resources they have to answer questions like What’s going on? Am I normal? Why is this happening? What do I do now? And now it’s getting a little easier:
  

  Oh my gosh you guys, we have some AMAZING news to share with you. We’ve been keeping it hush-hush but now that ECCC is hitting (which we’re working – check out the info here!), both Limerence Press and OJST are finally able to talk about it! We are making a PURELY SEX EDUCATION OJST COLLECTION! It’s called DRAWN TO SEX!!!!

  No jack-off sleeves. No subjective lube comparisons. No reviews of porn sites¹. This is all about the facts, and as Nolan says, dad jokes. Some of those facts will be biological in nature (ex: contraception methods, anatomical development), some will be about paraphilias or identities (ex: furries, the gender spectrum), some will be about practices that enhance sexual pleasure (ex: piercing, pegging); you can get a sense of it by browsing the comics that are tagged as educational.

  As with their prior collections, Drawn To Sex will Kickstart then be placed into wide distribution by Limerence Press; look for the funding campaign in mid-May.

• Speaking of education, schools, and crowdfunding, the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund is back on. There’s kids out there that want nothing more than for nobody else to join their club — school shooting survivor — and have had to reset the counter on the big __ DAYS SINCE THE LAST SCHOOL SHOOTING tote board three times in three days.

  They’re calling BS on the idea that we can’t do anything about this. They’re right. Between now and 20 March, I will match your donations to either the funding campaigns for the national March For Our Lives in DC, or the local march in Parkland, Florida; I’m setting an initial cap of US$5000, but I’ll go higher if you show me that you care about this. Get giving.

  Oh, and one other thing — attempts to argue the necessity or futility of gun control in the comments will be met with extreme prejudice. My house, my rules. Go peddle your murdertoy fondling fetish elsewhere.

Spam of the day:

sissy boy outlet amsterdam chastity belt india fuck for free videos bra designs how to do makeup video jerk off instru wholesale mens clothing loving older men

This spam I received today probably overlaps with the Drawn To Sex table of contents to at significant degree.

_______________
¹ But I’ll bet my bottom² dollar that there will be Anal Safety Snails³.

² See what I did there?

³ Fun fact: Moen has admitted that when she first named the Anal Safety Snails, she didn’t realize the acronym would be ASS.

Panel programming at ECCC, which starts in about two hours as I write this, is extensive. I’m getting a non-formatted version of today’s events up now, which will be cleaned up and added to with content from later days, just so it’s available.

I, uh, might have forgotten there are no days between 28 February and 1 March this year.

Thursday Programming
Great Graphic Novels for Kids
10:15am — 11:15am, Seattle Public Library Level 4 — Room 2
Vera Brosgol, Melanie Gillman, and Shelli Paroline repping webcomics, Gene Ambaum repping webcomics and libraries, and Mairgrhead Scott along to up the awesome quotient.

LGBTQ Graphic Novels: Book Talks
12:45pm — 1:45pm, Seattle Public Library Level 4 — Room 2
Between them, Ngozi Ukazu, Blue Delliquanti, and Jen Wang have some of the most different presentations of LGBTQ characters and stories. Listen to what they’ve got to tell you.

How To Run an Anthology and Not Screw It Up
1:30pm — 2:30pm, WSCC 604
Kel McDonald, Spike Trotman, Der-shing Helmer, Melanie Gilman, and Isabelle Melançon have been involved in more anthology pages than you. They are your anthology Yoda. Hey, have you noticed that there’s a clear majority of women on these panels that tell you what the future will be like? There’s a reason for that.

The World of Webcomics: How to Make Art (and Money) on the Internet
1:30pm — 2:30p, TCC L3 — Room 5
A real Sophie’s Choice here, but at least ECCC has webcomics panels done by people who do webcomics. Yuko & Ananth, Tess Stone, Erika Moen, Ari Yarwood, Sarah Graley.

Doing a Great Graphic Novel Program at Your Library
1:45pm — 2:45pm, Seattle Public Library Level 4 — Room 1
I never knew Sophie had three kids. Vera Brosgol again with MK Reed, and Dawn Rutherford. Lotta great programming at the library.

Cyanide & Happiness Waste Your Time
4:00pm — 5:00pm, WSCC 611
There may be dick jokes. Dave McElfatrick and Kris Wilson.

First Second Books: The Decade in Graphic Novels
4:30pm — 5:30pm, Seattle Public Library Microsoft Auditorium
Mark Siegel has built a small empire of the best in graphic literature. Dude knows what’s up.

Friday through Sunday to come.

Friday Programming
My First Graphic Novel: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Publishing
11:00am — noon, TCC L3 — Room 5
Nilah Magruder, Ru Xu, Robin Herrera, Nidhi Chanani, and more talk about what they learned about making that first graphic novel. I bet there’s a learning curve.

Speak: The Graphic Novel
1:30pm — 2:30pm, WSCC 603 — Writers Block Presented by PRH
It’s the story of adaptation, as the YA novel gets the graphic novel treatment; includes author Laurie Halse Anderson, illustrator Emily Carroll, and all-around smart person Laura Hudson.

How To Be a Con Artist — Making a Living Doing What You Love
1:30pm — 2:30pm, TCC L3 — Room 1
Look, I don’t want to say that cons eat the weak and leave destruction in their wake, but more than one creator has been broken by them; if you want to learn the lessons before that happens, listen to some crowd-hardened veterans like Shing Yin Khor, Jessica Hebert, and Kory Bing. No conventional¹ weapon can kill them.

Kid’s Comics!
2:45pm — 3:45pm, WSCC 604
Vera Brosgol! Nidhi Chanani! Robin Robinson! MK Reed! Jen Wang! All ages is where it’s at, man.

Gender Identity: Understanding Through Art
4:00pm — 5:00pm, WSCC 604
Jen Wang can just hang out in the room between sessions, because she’ll be here to talk about gender diversity, as represented in comics. This reaches those desperately in need of seeing people like themselves, and serves to educate those with no experience as to what the challenges (and rewards!) of the gender spectrum are like. She’ll be joined by
Melanie Gillman, Gina Gagliano (the secret heart of :01 Books), and more.

Boats and Boners: A Fireside Chat with Lucy Bellwood and Erika Moen
6:15pm — 7:15pm, TCC L3 — Room 2
This will be exactly what it says. Hurricane Erika is a force of nature, Lucy Bellwood (adventure cartoonist!) can weather any storm. But maybe don’t bring your kids to this one? Because where Moen goes, there are boners. Hella boners.

Saturday Programming
2 Updates A Week: Structuring Narrative for Webcomics
1:30pm — 2:30pm, WSCC 3A
This is not a topic I’ve seen given panel time before. I’d love to see what Megan Lavey-Heaton, Audrey Redpath, Isabelle Melançon, and Myisha Haynes have to say.

Sunday Programming
The Lost in Wikipedia Game Show!
3:45pm — 4:45pm, TCC L3 — Room 3
I’m just going to quote the description on this one:

Ever fallen down a Wikipedia hole? Clicking from article to article until you forget where you came from? Come watch us trap our panelists deep within the Wiki web and make them race to navigate their way back out to freedom.

Contestants Dylan Meconis, Trin Garritano, James L Sutter, and Dave Kellett are some of the most wickedly funny people I know (well, I don’t know Sutter, but the others certainly are), and host by David Malki ! is possibly the only person that could wrangle them simultaneously. Still around on Sunday afternoon? Have some laugh-chuckles before teardown.

Spam of the day:

[translated from Russian] Your payment is processed Get additional information

Okay, somebody told the Russian Mafia that Andrew Carnegie was a wealthy philanthropist who gave away a shit-ton of money, and therefore would it incline me to trust them with my identity if they claimed to be him in this email. Unfortunately, they forgot to mention that his name isn’t spelled Carnagie, and that he’s been dead for nearly 99 years. Zombie Andrew Carnagie wants to eat my wallet along with my brains.

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¹ I’m so sorry.

The Emerald City Comic Con kicks off tomorrow (with Thursday a full day for the first time, and long days on the show floor); the question hanging in the air is how everybody’s large-but-not-too-large, still comics-centric comic show will do now that founder Jim Demonakos is no longer associated and Reed POP is fully in charge. There were grumbles last year, and this year could be make or break for the show’s reputation as friendly to all corners of [web]comics.

But still, hard to argue when your Comic Guests contain the likes of Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota, Erica Henderson, Jim Zub, Kate Leth, Unca Ryan and Unca Lar, Lucy Bellwood, Melanie Gillman, Ngozi Ukazu, Ryan North, Taneka Stotts, and Tess Stone (and more comics people listed under Literary Guests, like Emily Carroll, Jen Wang, Kazu Kibuishi, and Vera Brosgol). True, there’s 180 invited comics guests (and a hundred-plus Literary and Entertainment guests), but that’s still a pretty good chunk of representation. More than you’d get at any other four-day major show, at least.

For the most part, those guests will be found in the Artists Alley, along with the likes of Ben Costa, Braden Lamb and Shelli Paroline¹, the gang from Helioscope (your Bellswood, your Meconii, and all the rest of their artistic cohort), Jakface McGee, K Lynn Smith, Ru Xu, Der-Shing Helmer, Tee Franklin, Tom Parkinson-Morgan (aka Abbadon), and Trungles.

Over on the main floor, you’ll be able to catch up with Pat, Aaron, and the rest of the Alaska Robotics² crew (booth 204), Kel McDonald (booth 208), the Cyanide & Happiness crowd (booth 722), Nidhi Chanani (booth 409), Los Professores Foglio (booth 118), Hiveworks (booth 1502), Iron Circus Comics (book 212), Uncas Lar & Sohmer and their merry band of quasireprobates (booth 110), Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett (booth 1116), and the various associates of TopatoCo (which this time around will include Jeph Jacques, Sam Logan, David Malki !, Danielle Corsetto, Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan, Alina Pete, Abby Howard, Catie Donnelly, Tyson Hesse, and Brandon Bird, all on the luxurious skybridge).

All told, it’s more webcomickers in closer proximity than at SDCC or any other large con. They’re well represented in the programming tracks, too, which we’ll make mention of tomorrow.

Confidential to MG: Congratulations! This is going to be great.

Spam of the day:

Upgrade to a Balance Transfer Credit Card

I believe we dispensed with this nonsense yesterday, but I confess your company name caught my eye. NoseRoseMedia is a new player in the sphere of consumer credit, but no doubt poised for great things.

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¹ Speaking of, did everybody see the announcement that the Adventure Time comic series is coming to an end with issue #75? And that past contributors — like original writer Ryan North, original artists Paroline & Lamb, and North’s successor Christopher Hastings — are coming back for that final issue, in a get the band back together type deal? Because that’s happening.

² Pat, Aaron, and the rest are awesome people! If you are an awesome person in comics, you should go talk to them, particularly about Comics Camp, which is for awesome people. Many of the people mentioned on this page will be there. There will also be s’mores.