Today’s a travel day, the next two days are a tight-turnaround client gig, so posting may be brief or absent. Do try to muddle on.

I missed most of a story as it was blowing up, but I’m pretty well caught up today; here are some base facts to get started from:

First, Zainab Akhtar is one of the best writers in comics, period. She runs a site that’s like this on in that it’s an individual effort, and unlike it in that she gets well-deserved Eisner nominations. Also, I’ve never had to step back from public commentary because the combination of being a woman, brown, and Muslim made comics writing an invitation to abuse. Also, I do not have a Patreon that you should definitely support. She is smart, incisive, and sees things from perspectives that would never occur to me. She’s on my list of people I need to meet to thank in person for her work.

Second, the Lakes International Comics Art Festival is about to happen in the Lakes District of the UK. We at Fleen mentioned it in reference to a partnership with TCAF, but that was the extent of my real awareness of the show, until late last week.

Akhtar made an observation on Twitter about the guest lineup at Lakes — it’s overwhelmingly white (about 85%, by my count). Not news, she noted that fact years ago. The Lakes Twitter account responded by blocking, then unblocking Akhtar, and somewhere in there somebody with access to the account unleashed a pretty vile attack on her which appears to have been deleted, but screenshots are forever¹.

What the person(s) in charge of the Lakes Twitter account don’t seem to understand is that when you represent an organization, criticisms are not personal; responding as an organization requires finesse and care and actually listening to criticisms and answering them calmly. Responding with attacks doesn’t win you points, and will almost certainly damage your brand. And if you continue to treat an institutional critique like a personal attack (it wasn’t) and act like you’re still fourteen years old, you create a reputational damage that can kill your event.

This morning, John Allison announced that he is withdrawing from participating in LICAF (as of this writing, he is still listed on the guest page); I don’t imagine they’ll be able to get him back in the future. It’s a principled stand, and one that will likely cost Allison economically (and possibly the esteem of terrible people, but I don’t think he cares about that part too much; this is just one reason why he’s a great person). I’m expecting to see more guests pull out between now and Friday, which is going to keep the story going and may kill the Festival as long as it remains under its current leadership.

Please note that a fair number of the confirmed guests are international, and regardless of how they feel about management’s behavior they may be contractually obliged to attend. Likewise, I don’t have any criticism for people who choose to attend LICAF this year (having made plans and arranged their lives and purchased passes), but I will be very interested to see how many of both groups are willing to return next year.

And the pushback isn’t limited to guests; at least one exhibitor has emailed the show to say that she’s withdrawing, and this is just as impportant. Lydia Wysocki paid for the privilege of tabling, and may or may not get her fee back. She’s offering to help the LICAF showrunners improve their ways, and I sincerely they (or, more likely, whoever comes in to try to salvage things next year) takes her up on it². We are way past the time when somebody says Hey, here is something that’s happened that you aren’t noticing and reacting dismissively can be accepted. Time for LICAF to grow up.

Spam of the day:

Book Your River Cruise Vacation

Well, they aren’t sending me a pitch that’s specifically calling me a senior citizen, so that’s something.

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¹ I was particularly puzzled by the claims that Akhtar has some kind of grudge against the show from 2014. Her 2014 writeup was largely positive, but she noted the overwhelmingly pale nature of the show and concluded it wasn’t for her. If that’s what the LICAF tweeter regards as a grudge, they are in desperate need of a fainting couch.

² In the meantime, follow her links and get familiar with her work.

So it’s nearly the weekend and who the hell knows what’s happening in the world at large (much less the world of [web]comics). Let’s focus on some happy thoughts.

• Tillie Walden has been having a heck of time the past twelve months. At SPX last year she took two Ignatzen, then she launched her first webcomic, then the buzz started building for her debut graphic novel (which turned out to be brilliant), and she’s been guesting and paneling at seemingly every prestigious comics show in CY 2017. Not bad for having just turned 21.

  For those that thought said webcomic was great and also thought that there should be a way to reward Walden for it, your moment has come:

  We’re SO EXCITED to be publishing the amazing @TillieWalden’s graphic novel ON A SUNBEAM next year!

  Makes perfect sense; :01 Books are already Walden’s publisher on Spinning, and :01 head Mark Siegel is very open about wanting his imprint to be the sort of place that keeps the well-fitting creators around forever. And given the lead times on book production¹, this is an incredibly tight turnaround — no more than 15 months from now. I know of books at :01 that were announced last year for Fall of 2019.

  (And side note from the announcement embedded in the tweet: Seth Fishman — no relation to Desmond — is rapidly becoming one of the two or three most important people in the comics publishing world, representing some of the best in indie/webcomics³ in between writing his own books. Heck of a nice guy, too.)

  So congrats to Walden, congrats to :01, and congrats to everybody that will get to read On A Sunbeam on paper. The next 3 to 15 months can’t come quickly enough.

• And for those looking forward seven months or so, applications for the 2018 iteration of VanCAF are now available. Saturday and Sunday, 19 and 20 May at the Roundhouse with guests TBA, but VanCAF has had one of the best exhibitor curations of recent years, so I’m entirely confident the lineup will be great.

  Applications are open until 31 October, and note that they give priority to comics artists (as opposed to illustrators/animators/other artists) with new works debuting at or around the show, who represent all the communities of Vancouver and around. PNW, this is one of your moments to shine.

Okay, I’m out for the weekend, and quick note that I’ll be traveling for work on Monday, so maybe no post. If you’re in Canada, Happy Thanksgiving.

Spam of the day:

Up to $100 Off and Free Shipping

This spam was for glasses and I’ll give ’em this — the image that they used is pretty much exactly the frame of my glasses, just in black instead of silver. Still think I’ll stick with my Warbys, though.

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¹ I’m pretty sure every time I’ve check the publication info on a book from :01, it’s indicated that it’s printed in Dongguan City, Guangdong province in China. Printing in China means there’s necessarily a boatload² of time taken up in shipping and customs before stateside distribution can begin.

² I’m so sorry.

³ Kate Beaton, Randall Munroe, the Weinersmiths, Abby Howard, Ryan North, and more.

It’s been a long, long time since Providence blessed us with a running gag of this nature. Many, many years ago, a young lad (goodness, still in high school) named Ian Jones-Quartey did a damn fun webcomic called RPG World. Then one day, he stopped. People asked him about it a great deal at conventions and on panels after he transitioned to his animation career, where he’s worked on series like The Venture Brothers, Steven Universe, and OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes. He joked that every time somebody asked him about when RPG World was coming back, he would delay its return by a month.

I abused that promise, eventually offering a bounty of a dollar for anybody that would ask him, watching the expected return get pushed later and later. Alas, all good things, etc:

here’s the final RPG World comic from OK KO! more info: https://tmblr.co/Zgt2lx2QfJJZR

Here’s the most important bits of the very interesting, very satisfying story behind the comic:

A recent episode of my show OK KO!, A Hero’s Fate is a fully-absorbed finale of my old comic RPG World. RPG World was a comic that I made when I was a teenager(Starting in August 2000). A lot of people ended up liking the comic and I was a little too young to take that fact seriously. I never finished the comic’s story because… I was a flighty teenager and I ended up going to animation school.

Originally the story wasn’t going to have any specific call-outs to the comic but the storyboard team for the episode, Ryann Shannon and Parker Simmons crafted a narrative around Hero and KO learning to value the people in their lives AND their heroic ambitions.

Ryann created an epilogue to the episode which showed Hero returning to comic form to finish his story. I felt very embarrassed by this but it made so much sense in the storyss context. I leaned into it and using her rough version as a guide, drew the full ending page myself. I rummaged thru my supplies and broke out the same set of pens I used to ink the comic with, and scanned it on my same old scanner.

The whole thing has ended up being very cathartic. Knowing that Hero and Cherry will live on in endless worldwide repeats of this episode is mindblowing.

The story of RPG World proper ended in the middle of the story in July of 2005, or just about six months before I started blogging. A series of short interludes followed. The last real update was in June of 2007. And the RPG World page at Keenspot now lists the page above as the final, canon update.

It’s done. The running gag that’s been a running gag since before I started blogging is done. OK KO! got a great episode, RPG World got a finish, and Jones-Quartey got to revisit the story that lil’ baby Ian cut his teeth on. All in all, not back for a Thursday, and more than twenty years earlier than expected.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m behind on my watching of OK KO! and I need to remedy that.

Spam of the day:

Fergies new trick to weight-loss!

I’m really not the person to be advertised to by invoking Fergie. I firmly agreed with Nathan Rabin when he described the Black Eyed Peas as essentially a four-person advertising agency flimsily masquerading as a pop group. Think of them as the distinguished firm of Hologram Man, Meth Lady, The Other Guy, and The Other Other Guy, Inc.

Hey. As predicted, today is sucking. Post tomorrow, when synapses that have the bandwidth to do more than just keep me upright.

PS: Know who’s great? Dylan Meconis, for many reasons other than her reply this morning. If you’re in San Antonio, Texas, she’s giving a talk called Blink and You’ll See It: Form and Story in Today’s Graphic Novels at Chapman Center’s Great Hall, on the campus of Trinity University. Go listen and get smarter at 7:00pm tonight, and give her a high five for me.

NYCC is upon us, and although this is the second year they’ve decided I shouldn’t be granted press access (although they’ve been awful free about spreading my email address around as if I were accredited press, not that I am bitter), it appears to be a better year for webcomics types at the show than in recent years. It used to be full of of the New York/east coast webcomics crowd, then almost all of them were driven out in favor of such comics-associated brands as Chevrolet, but this year’s not bad.

The Guests of the show include a bunch of familiar names, but don’t actually list their Artist Alley addresses; for that, you have to go to the show floor guide and scroll through until you find ’em, which is annoying. Others aren’t in AA but are on panels, yet their panel schedules are listed as Coming Soon. Given that the show starts in two days, that’s cutting things a bit close. Anyway, Guests include Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota¹ (fresh off their Ignatz win, N2), Carey Pietsch (Friday panels only), Emi Lenox (Thursday to Saturday only, K24), Erica Henderson, K15), Kate Leth (K16), Molly Ostertag (couldn’t find a booth assignment, try :01 Books), Ngozi Ukazu (N1), Pénélope Bagieu² (Thur/Fri only, no booth assignment, try :01 Books), and Tessa Stone (N1).

In addition, you’ve got the Blind Ferret folks (taking bets on which Broadway shows Sohmer goes to see when he’s not at 1728), the Cyanide & Happiness folks (2247), Evan Dahm (I6), First Law Of Mad Science (1050), Kel McDonald (I5), and Scott C (G28). Publishers that will likely have webcomics types in attendance at various times include BOOM! (1828), :01 Books (2239), and Oni Press (2028).

I know that Jim Zub will be wandering the show like a vagabond samurai, without a booth. Finally, lawyer to the independent creative community Katie Lane³ will be part of the NYCC Continuing Legal Education series, as part of the panel for Beyond the Printed Page: An Overview of Licensing Comic Book Properties to the Film, Television, and Merchandising Industries⁴, on Sunday morning. Not gonna bother with the details, since it’s an extra hundred bucks and only of interest if you’re a lawyer. And it’s pretty likely that I missed people that should be listed, so be sure to drop me a line to fix that, or if you want to hang out away from the Javits Center (aka The Worst Convention Center In The World).

Spam of the day:

Microsoft flight simulator x gold edition

Man, even back in the day of the first IBM PC, I couldn’t ever keep those planes in the air. Thank you for reminding me of my manifest failures.

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¹ I always list them as Yuko and Ananth, but today I’m switchin’ it up. Also, if you go looking for them in the exhibitor list, you’ll find Johnny Wander and Ananth Hirsch [sic], no mention of Yuko.

² Thanks to the sharp eyes of FSFCPL, we also know that Bagieu, Zep, and Julia Wertz will be at Columbia University’s Butler Library tomorrow, Wednesday 4 October, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm talking about DIY careers in comics.

³ Light-ning Law-yer!!

⁴ I guess lawyers get paid by the word as well as the hour.

Okay, this is my fault: I dropped the ball on pushing the Hispanic Federation’s UNIDOS campaign for hurricane relief after I launched my matching campaign last week. Jon Rosenberg’s medical fundraiser¹ hit just after and distracted me, as did the general state of the world being awful. Regardless, we didn’t get as much as we might have otherwise (then again, having four matching fundraisers this year, plus helping Alec Rosenberg to walk without pain, means that we may all be feeling collectively tapped out).

Nevertheless, you came through. Backers (all of whom elected to remain anonymous) donated and I rounded up my match to US$500. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. For reference, this brings the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund to a total of US$9275 of matches, plus another US$375 from my employer. Between you and me, that’s nearly twenty thousand damn dollars from fans of webcomics to help and defend those that need it. Thank you all.

In other, less immediately financial news:

• We wrote last week of the return of Christopher “Doctor” Hastings to webcomickin’, and he had one more surprise for us. Turns out the five comics we saw last week are not related to each other at all, but were each the launching point for a separate story:
  

  Here are my FIVE new weekly comics!

  Mon: Magical Merlin
  Tue: Queen of Clubs
  Wed: Asimov’s Laws
  Thu: Karate Sewer Gator
  Fri: Woodsman!

  Magical Merlin is naturally a wizard; Queen of Clubs looks to be a domestic sitcom; Asimov’s Laws features Inventor Dad and wacky maker mishaps; Karate Sewer Gator is intrigue involving punks, dope, and the eponymous gator; and Woodsman! so far is heavy on camping mishaps at the hands of bears. Friggin’ bears. One or more of them is sure to tickle your fancy.

• Did I mention that my wife quit her job last year to go back to school for a good old-fashioned re-careering? Because she totally did. Which is why last night, I was helping her study the geological time scale, from the Hadean eon (formation of the Earth to ~ 3.6 billion years ago) through to the modern day (we’re in the tail end of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era, of the Phanerozoic eon, starting a paltry 2 million years ago). At the conclusion of the study session², I passed her my copy of Abby Howard’s Dinosaur Empire and told her just to read that. All the life before dinosaurs back to the pre-Cambrian, and all the life since the K-T extinction event have all sucked rocks compared to dinosaurs³.

  As noted when I reviewed Dinosaur Empire, that book is listed as the first volume in a series called Earth Before Us, but it wasn’t clear who might be making subsequent books.

  Wonder no more.

  Hey, folks! Just to let you know where I’ve been all month, I’ve been hard at work on the pencils for book 2 in the Earth Before Us series~

  So this is why I haven’t been updating. Sorry for all the waiting you’ve had to do, and thank you for your patience!

  Speaking for myself, this is great news. Sure, I like getting free comics from Abby Howard, but getting more ancient critter books? Maybe the Oligocene, aka The Age Of Horns? Or the Devonian, aka The Age Of Fish? Heck, let her take a shot at the Cambrian explosion and all the protofish and sea scorpions and weird-ass spiral shell squid. I’m so in, and ready to give her money in exchange for books 2 through infinity.

Spam of the day:

Jane Seymour explains how Crepe Erase can help you look as young as you feel.

I feel about sixteen most days, and if you ditch the random grey in my hair and the moustache, I still look it. Do I win?

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¹ Which, as I write this five days later, is sitting just north of 93% of goal. You are all amazing.

² And that’s why the writers of Doctor Who screwed up in the Third Doctor era, because they were described as having dinosaurs, but the Silurian Period was over a good 160, 170 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared in the Triassic period. I’m not sure her professor will appreciate my nerdrage.

³ Not sure what the academic appreciation of that opinion would be, either. Don’t care. Dinosaurs are the best.

Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin has been busy, and we’re the better for it. It’s been about a year and a half since he introduced Fleen readers to Maliki, which is typical of French autobioish webcomics — not necessarily true to life, possibly exaggerated to the point of riduculousness in search of the funny. Really, nearly the entire French webcomics community would feel right at home in Jeffrey Rowland’s reality.

And if there’s one thing that FSFCP loves as much as introducing we New World types to French webcomics, it’s digging down into how things are made. With that in mind, he sought Chloé and Sergane, who are contributing the English translations of Maliki. Take ‘er away, FSFCPL!

Fleen thanks FSFCPL, Chloé, and Sergane. If you haven’t been reading Maliki, check it out.

Spam of the day:

20% Off Skid Steer Asphalt and Concrete Tools

I keep getting special offers for heavy roadwork machinery and honestly? I kind of love it.

I first met Shing Yin Khor over the summer at San Diego Comic Con; I was most familiar with her work at The Nib, and I really, really love what she does with watercolor. She’s super cool in person, too.

Earlier today, she tweeted out a short story, 20 pages across five tweets and I can’t stop reading it.

Desert Walk is about finding peace and solace in empty places; away from noise and other people and the ghosts you carry with you, and especially away from the one that hurt you. The hurt isn’t emotional or metaphorical in this story (or, I should probably say isn’t just emotional or metaphorical), it’s the hurt of trauma and assault.

There’s solitude and desert sounds, bugs and bunnies, a digression on how strength and hardness are different things, in minerals and porcelain and people. How things can be broken and repaired and how sometimes the repair is beautiful and sometimes it’s worse than the damage. There’s memory and the contemplation of forgiveness, and the cleansing power of hate applied in due measure.

It’s beautiful. It’s haunting. It’s little bits of life shared from the edges, and we read and know that the horrors that we imagine from the oblique references are not as terrible as the reality. It’ll just take a few minutes to read Desert Walk, then a few more to read it again, then more as you fall into individual pages, the details singing across your eyes, and then read it again from the middle, jumping back and forth.

It’s a poem in pictures, a step inside somebody else’s skin for as long as you can’t stop reading it.

Spam of the day:

You’ve Received a Bass Pro Shops Reward – Details Inside

Now I know for certain that you don’t have any idea who I am.

Those that read this page know that I’m basically in the embloggenation game solely because of Jon Rosenberg; he persuaded me to start (for his own nefarious purposes), he hosts this page and provides assistance when things break, and he once bought my soul for a dollar. We’ve got a history, is what I’m saying.

We haven’t had regular Thursday night beer since about the time his daughter was born; she’s a full person, nearly double-digits in years if not already. It’s been thanks to electronic means of contact that I’ve kept in contact since, and particularly watched Jon and his wife Amy deal with a series of terrifying medical challenges — their twin boys were the result of a especially high-risk pregnancy, that beat some very long odds to produce two alive children. The cost was a literal multi-million dollar medical bill, and a case of cerebral palsy for one of them.

As CP cases go, it’s far from the worst you could have, and Alec has already defied expectations by learning to walk when that was doubtful. But the misfiring nerves that make that such a challenge for him will not behave on their own, which will lead to a lifetime of struggle to maintain that ability. That struggle will impair him in many other ways; bluntly, if you have to spend half your conscious brain cycles on putting your feet where they belong, there’s not so many left over for everything else. His physical condition will deteriorate, and it’ll be much tougher for him to achieve educationally.

So imagine for a moment — three kids, including twins with a medical bill that you’ll never pay off, one of whom has needed special therapy for the entire six years of his life. It would break the highest dual-income couples I know, and we all know that while Jon’s cartooning is great, it’s not a seven-figure income gig. Any reasonable person would crumble in the face of the challenge, or optionally fake their death and light out for the territories.

Jon has thrived at being a father, and especially at being a special needs father. I don’t think he would have told you he ever thought he could do it, but that’s what capital-L Life handed him, so he dug down and did what needed to be done. The scotch helps. Anybody that’s ever bitched in his direction about the frequency of his updates, eat a sack of something deeply unpleasant; he’s taking care of his family first.

For the past year, Jon and Amy have been exploring an option that will give Alec a shot at avoiding the worst that CP has in store for him; it’s a surgery (best applied before kids turn seven) that will shave out the spinal nerves that send garbage signals to his legs. It’ll require a year of intensive therapy to learn to walk all over again, but when he does, Alec won’t face the continued degeneration that would be a certainty otherwise. They’ve got insurance, but it won’t pay for the follow-on care that’s necessary.

So Jon’s launched a campaign to raise the money — US$65,000 — that’s needed to give Alec a shot at a more normal life. In the (as of this writing) 14 hours since it went live, people have very generously donated more than US$14,000. That’s amazing, and I love you for it.

I hate that it has to happen.

I hate that with insurance, a family that’s employed has to make decisions like Does our son get to live a normal life, or do none of the kids go to college? I hate that an insurance plan would cover a surgery of this nature, but not the follow-on care that prevents it from being a waste; the money spent now will not only spare Alec disability and pain for a lifetime, it will prevent later costs associated with his condition. Did I mention that Amy’s job, the source of the insurance in question, is with a medical insurance corporation? Even their own aren’t cared for. It’s unworthy of a wealthy society, and the sooner we get back to the idea of medical care being a nonprofit endeavour, the better.

Jon’s going to be away for a while; Alec gets his nerves trimmed at the start of November, and it’ll be Jon’s new job to get him to and from rehab, to work with him through the toughest year of his young life¹. Comics can wait until that’s done. He’ll let us know how things are going, and with any luck in less than a year he’ll have a video on Twitter of Alec racing his brother and sister across the lawn and we can all have a good cry and know it was worth it.

Then we roll up our sleeves and make it so that the most fundamental needs — food, water, shelter, healthcare — are not subject to a godsdamned libertarian myth of self-sufficiency and are instead recognized as the human rights that they are.

If you can be generous now, please do so. If you can be loud and insistent later, please do so. But let’s stop this crap where people get healthcare based on how wide their social circle is, or how sympathetic their stories are². For the moment though, it’s all we’ve got. We’re all we’ve got.

Spam of the day:

Find the best treatment options for specific cancers

Why do I have a feeling that this will lead me back to GoFundMe?

_______________
¹ Arguably, he’s already past the toughest year — odds were not good that Alec would be born alive, and he managed that.

² Not to mention moralistic gatekeeping. I loathe GoFundMe, for doing things like preventing seriously ill sex workers from raising money to save their lives, because platform rules don’t allow GFM to be used to support pornography. And if they cure their illness/injury, then they could be alive enough to make porn. Fuck GoFundMe in the ear-hole, but only after my donation is processed.

It’s been a bleak year, not helped by the fact that just prior to the initiation of the worst timeline, Christopher Hastings wrapped up The Adventures Of Dr McNinja, depriving us of an increasingly deep (not to mention deeply weird, in the best sense of the word) webcomic after eleven and a half years.

Those of us that buy Gwenpool have kept up with his current comics work (and you guys, it is so good, playing with the nature of comic book reality in very smart, very innovative ways), but that’s once a month. We’ve needed a regular fix from ol’ Doc Hastings. Wait, what’s this?

Oh gosh, what is this: @hastingsfunnies

Hello, I am drawing webcomics again. More info to come. @hastingsfunnies

It seems that Ol’ Doc Hastings has heard our pleas and decided to get back into webcomicking. It further seems that he’s chosen Twitter as a distribution venue, rather that having a website or even a Tumblr. Innnteresting as Bugs Bunny might say. I’m particularly wondering how the idea of an archive will be implemented.

Since that first tweet yesterday, it’s two updates for two days, leading one to hope that there will be many comics from Hastings, and they will (I suspect) start to tie together. A wizard¹ puzzles over a spell; an old couple halfway flirts; it screams scene set-up without giving anything away. Of course, Hastings is very, very good at making seemingly offhand remarks pay off much later (sometimes a decade or more), so I just know that these characters are Up To Something, we just don’t know what yet.

Based on his long career of great comics, @hastingsfunnies gets added to the blogroll without the customary proving period; I have complete faith that Ol’ Doc Hastings will keep us coming back for the next installment for the next forever.

Spam of the day:

Get Your Mobility Back

Godsdammit, spammers, I am not in the market for a knock-off Rascal™ brand mobility scooter. I get around on my own two feet just fine. It’s Tuesday, which means tonight is EMS duty night, which means I’ll probably be carrying a large person down the stairs, even!

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¹ Aside: Does anybody draw crazy eyebrows as good as Christopher Hastings?

No. No, they do not.