The thing about webcomics and webcomicky people? Always doing new stuff. Let’s see what some longtime creators are up to.

• Item! Jamie Noguchi has been away from Yellow Peril for a while, thanks to the demands of a young human in his household and the freelancer’s life. We got some really cool George Takei biocomics out of the hiatus, so that’s okay. And it appears that behind the scenes, Noguchi has been working on something related to his one true love.

  I speak, naturally, of tokusatsu, the Japanese entertainment genre featuring rubbersuit monsters and overly dramatic young people saving the world with giant robots, karate, motorbikes, and possibly Spider-man. Noguchi knows his way around tokusatsu, with a series of videos explaining what’s up with the various Rider- and Ranger-type series.

  And the new project? Well, we have to wait another week or so:

  Alright! There we go! And starting September 1, you’ll see what this dumb thing is all about! #tokutember

  I suspect this will be better than the time a pair of puppets slap-fought each other in a train-themed Ranger series.

• Item! Meredith Gran may have wrapped Octopus Pie but that doesn’t mean she’s idle. What would you most like to see from her? If you said a point and click adventure game, it’s your lucky day:
  

  a few weeks ago I started working on a point + click adventure game, my first attempt at such a thing. it’s going to be my next project!

  it’s so nebulous right now that I’m having trouble formally announcing things. I’m not fundraising at this time – just developing

  but I will be updating patreon soon with info about it. at this time I’m really just looking for a sustained income so I can focus on it

• Item! Not only is Vera Brosgol’s new book about to drop, it appears her last graphic novel — the stellar Anya’s Ghost — is going to get the screen treatment:
  

  Soooo here’s a thing!

  The quoted treat leads to a Deadline Hollywood story about the production of the feature film, with shooting set to begin later this year. Everybody feel good for Vera, and wave to her as she sets off for a life of Hollywood glamour.

• Item! Any day that Anthony Clark posts pretty much anything — a comic, a sketch, a picture of a cool dog he met that day — is, by definition, better than a day without Anthony Clark posting anything. What with his wizard-a-day series for 2017 (posted today: #235, Badminton Wizard), there’s been plenty of days better than there otherwise would have been in an otherwise terrible year. And if any of those wizards particularly catches your fancy, but you don’t want to scroll back through a lengthy Twitter thread, there’s now a Wizard Gallery! And you can buy prints of your favorite wizards through TopatoCo!

Spam of the day:

Isabella (91) Don’t Miss To Checkout My~Private~Profile, Hot Photos Inside

It’s possible that the (91) is just indicating that this is the 91st Isabella to send me an allegedly sexy spam, but it’s also possible that (91) is meant to be an age, which makes the similar spam from Leanna (3) especially icky.

Still ramping back up into what’s happening in webcomics these days. I expect it’ll be a while before I’m fully caught up.

Erika Moen & Matt Nolan’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy is very nearly always educational for me. I learn about things that people do in ways that I do not that sound awesome. I learn about things that people do or like that have no interest for me, but which makes me more empathetic — just ’cause I’m not into it, don’t mean it’s a bad thing is a lesson we can all stand to learn. But best of all (for me) are the sexual health lessons, because I almost always learn something useful.

Today, I learned something that in retrospective is blindingly obvious, but which had never been taught to me or occurred to me before. I happened to have a reasonably complete and comprehensive sex education experience when I was in high school — it was the mid 80s, AIDS was poorly understood, and at least my school district decided to respond with the best, most up to date information possible. None of this abstinence-only nonsense — here’s methods of birth control and STI prevention, here’s the odds they work as intended, here’s the ways you can mess up using them and cause bad outcomes. In retrospective, it was great.

There was also a really good anatomical component each year (starting back in fifth grade, as I recall), and one of my teachers being a breast cancer survivor, there was a no-bullshit discussion of self-exams with absolutely no snickering tolerated from the male portion of the class. This is how you catch things as early as possible; this is how you keep from dying was her message. But we never got the message that came near the end of today’s update, where Moen’s character delivers this exhortation:

So get familiar with your funbags (or where they used to be) and keep an eye out for anything that looks or feels unusual for them! [emphasis mine]

or where they used to be encompasses both survivors who’ve had mastectomies and those undergoing gender transition. Trans* issues wouldn’t have been taught to me back in the mid 80s because it just wasn’t a topic of discussion; the gradual increase in trans* visibility means that where they used to be is perfectly logical¹. It’s actually the concept of survivors and recurrence that caught me flat-footed. We were taught you lost your breasts to cancer and that was it; you might get other cancers in the future, but not breast cancer again.

It’s a sobering thought, delivered in an almost offhand manner. It’s made me think a lot. It’s a hell of an accomplishment for six words. And that’s why I love what Moen and Nolan are doing, week after week.

Spam of the day:

HURRY_UP! Online dating that is worth your time.

The partially-clothed young woman pictured in this spam has been Photoshopped to render her incapable of fitting her breasts into a mammogram scanner without the aid of industrial sedatives and a forklift. Reminding myself about the bit above re: just ’cause I’m not into it but jeeze. I’m surprised anybody thinks she can stand upright.

_______________
¹ In the notes below the strip, there’s also links and resources not only for assigned-male-at-birth transwomen, but also cisgender males. Fun fact, a small (but measurable) fraction of breast cancer cases are in cis-men, which often are not caught until disastrously late because they don’t do self-exams or get mammograms. Heck, most penis-havers can’t be bothered to do self-checks for testicular cancer, so they really aren’t checking their manly pecs for breast cancer. Once again, knowledge to the rescue.

On account of I do the majority of my blog writing in midafternoon, and against all past historical precedent, it’s clear skies for today’s solar eclipse. I needed to ease back in anyway, so let’s do this briefly, yeah? Since I’ve been gone, there have been two things I noticed in my greatly-reduced webcomics-attention-paying:

• Ugly Hill! Oh good glob, Ugly Hill! There’s nothing at that link, and even the Wayback Machine has most all of the art missing, but Paul Southworth has brought it back via his Patreon:
  

  ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m re-releasing “Ugly Hill” from the beginning for $5 Patreon subscribers starting Monday, 8/7/17! https://www.patreon.com/southworth

  Add this to the recent revival of Lake Gary and we’re getting what all that is good and right in the world tells us we deserve: hideous Southworthian creatures behaving terribly. And it will go on forever; at five updates a week, it may take four or five years to get through the entirety of Ugly Hill.

• The latest Iron Circus anthology sent out its call for submissions. FTL, Y’all takes as its theme the prompt of a cheap faster-than-light drive — like two hundred dollars cheap — and asks for stories of the situations that result. As readers of this page will recall Iron Circus Benevolent Dictator For Life Spike Trotman runs successful projects that pay (including, historically, bonuses based on how the Kickstarts go), but that she does not suffer fools gladly.

  Got a great idea for the anthology you want considered? Great! Read the damn FAQ first so you don’t waste your time. Then read the damn submission guidelines so you don’t waste Spike’s time, or that of project editor Amanda Lefrenais. I can pretty much promise you that the best looking and most original story in the known universe will be kicked to the reject pile if you don’t follow the guidelines. Submissions close 15 September, and contributors will be announced 15 October.

Okay, time to observe the majesty of the universe.

Spam of the day:

Partner_of_Credit_One_Bank
Find Your Perfect Credit Card!

Wow. They claim to be Credit One Bank in the images included in the email, but can’t bring themselves to maintain that fiction in the return address. They’re really just a partner of Credit One Bank! (they’re not)

William “Bill” Pierce died in his sleep over the weekend; he was as welcoming of the moustached goofball that married his baby girl as ever I could have hoped during the 25-plus years I knew him.

I don’t believe we get an existence after this one, but I’m pretty sure he did, and I’m certain the thought of resuming a certain acquaintance brought him great comfort over the past sixteen months.

I’ll be gone the next little while. Take care of each other while I’m away, yeah?

[Editor’s note: The inestimable Gina Gagliano at :01 Books sent a review copy of Tillie Walden’s Spinning that I received just after San Deigo Comic Con, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s due for release in about a month’s time (12 September, to be precise), and I normally wait until the ten-days-to-two-weeks prior to run a review of a forthcoming book.

But heck, Kirkus and Junior Library Guild and Publishers Weekly have had theirs out for weeks now¹, about the same time Walden was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly. So early or not, I’m diving in. Needless to say, you may find spoilers ahead.]

I find myself with thoughts that so completely mirror an earlier book that I feel compelled to quote some of what I wrote three years back:

[I]t’s a story that hurts in a real, tangible, maybe-necessary-maybe-not way. I suspect that if I’d been an almost-teen girl at any point in my life, it would ache and resonate even more. Getting to the truths below the surface of the One Summer in question is like having to peel away a bandage and finally let the healing of the wound below finish up.

That was in reference to This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki; I’m years further from being anything resembling an almost-teen girl, but Spinning is helping me understand what that point in life (and the half-dozen years since) are like. Which is not to say that it’s the same story, not at all.

Spinning is autobiographical, it’s telling a story that bumps up to just a few years ago in Walden’s life (the book functionally ends when she’s 16 or so; she’s just recently turned 21), and it works in a hazy, dreamlike, spare fashion (some pages entirely lack panel borders, with huge swaths of white space and widely-separated blocks of text and images making the moment hang

in

the

air

forever) to act less as memoir², and more to serve as an emtion-delivery mechanism. 400 pages of Walden’s personal history digested, I can’t tell you more than the broadest outline of when things happened to her.

Although presented linearly, I’m left with an impression of Walden’s life that’s more akin to the skating diagrams shown during the first instance of her testing to determine her competition level — swoops and swirls, crossing her own path, which suddenly disappears and reappears further along after a jump.

The curlicue patterns in the ice may as well be her life’s path: intense shyness and dissatisfaction followed by a cross-country move; solitary nature exacerbated by having to adjust to a new home, new school, new teammates and rivals, and even a new vocabulary of skating³. All of which were eclipsed by the effort of dealing with the fact that she’s gay and wondering if she’ll ever be allowed to love somebody openly.

That lack of straight-line storytelling leads to a potentially unreliable narration — there’s just enough sketches of a schoolgirl bully to wonder what really happened (and when), for instance — which is not a drawback. Walden indicates in her afterword that she intentionally did not seek out any reference material, photos, or recollections of others in making the book, preferring to get to an essential truth over a literal one. This is maybe the greatest storytelling strength in Spinning.

I may not have a clear understanding of what point in Walden’s life the Skate Moms at the rink — Walden’s own mother is shown as variously distant, disinterested in her skating career, and complaining of its costs — decided to be total bitches to her about paying for rink time, but I am acutely aware of the depth and breadth of how that incident — and the others in her life — made her feel.

Some of those feelings were imposed on her, some of those feelings propelled her or paralyzed her, some of those feelings that she may never have shared before this book. The emotional charge is such that, more than once, I was left gasping after a too-long period of not breathing, not daring to disturb a years-and-miles distant Walden in a moment of crisis.

I used the word dreamlike earlier, and the more I think on it, the more I think it’s the most precise word to use. Spinning⁴ leaves you in that same state as you’re in when waking from a dream and everything is bright and perfectly detailed in that moment before it fades, leaving impressions. It’s a story where you don’t start at the beginning and move to the end; you start at an arbitrary point and then you get dragged in and filled in on the bits you need when necessary. I won’t tell you everything, the story whispers, just true things.

Spinning is transformative. It the story of one person, with just enough true things to make its points, some of them related to skating but most of them not. It requires you to open yourself up to the truth of being Tillie Walden, at the expense of not being solely you, just a little. Take the leap, find yourself in other shoes (err, skates), and you’ll be different for having invited in somebody else’s truth for a short while.

Spam of the day:

Need Medigap?

What sets this scam for fake Medicare coverage for senior citizens apart from others of its ilk is the photo embedded. A guy that’s meant to look like a go-getter of a senior, with a don’t screw with me, medical-industrial complex look on his face instead looks like a bald, poorly dressed, constipated Larry Bud Melman.

_______________
¹ As of this writing, there are 33 reviews on Goodreads.

² That is, a recounting of these are the things that happened at these points in my life.

³ New Jersey, where Walden lived until the end of fifth grade, and Texas, where she moved, belonged to different competitive organizations with different standards and criteria.

⁴ As well as her critically-lauded webcomic, On A Sunbeam.

In the week since I declared a return of the Six-F, I’ve had a gratifying response from readers (and friends of readers, and friends of friends of readers …) who have sent me their receipts from donating to The Trevor Project to support LGBTQ youth in crisis.

Thankfully, the week has seen a broad swath of society push back against the sloppy, steamy tweets of the man inexplicably elected to the presidency, and his pathetic little tantrum against some of the most vulnerable Americans seems to have stalled. I believe with all my heart that’s because people are willing to say No and back it up with the money to fight this unrelenting assholery.

Last time around, The Trevor Project saw US$305 in reader donations over two months, rounded up to US$500 for the match, because Round Numbers are good. This time, in only a week’s time, you donated US$420 — exactly one weedsworth, no way that’s a coincidence — which I will be rounding up to the classiest of all class money amounts: We lookin’ at a six hundo.

One other thing: I neglected this time to contact donors and get explicit directions on how to identify them in this post so I will only be using two names (one included explicit directions on how to be identified, the other self-identified on social media); the others are going to be listed by initials, but anybody that donated can contact me and I’ll update the list.

Thank you then, to (in no particular order) LP, DH, LB, MV, MC, Marian Call and her LA concertgoers, and Pierre Lebeaupin. The donation is being made in the name of Donald Trump, so that he can be sent a nice thank you card for sparking some good to offset the monumental damage that he’s done.

Spam of the day:

Visit the 20th Largest Island on Earth!

I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but that’s probably not how I would describe Ireland when spamming people with fake travel resources. Just sayin’.

Namely, I was reading Abby Howard’s new graphic novel, Dinosaur Empire!¹. For those that are looking for a quick verdict: thumbs up. Waaaayyy up. Like, all the thumbs in the vicinity. If you in the near future hear about a vicious criminal attacking random people and hacking off their thumbs, it’s only because I need those thumbs to make them go up to indicate the degree to which this book is good.

Slightly longer version: Howard’s crafted a story around a broad topic (the entire history of dinosaurs and similar extinct critters which were not dinosaurs — spanning a range of 140 million years or so — without reducing it to bare facts. There’s a plot to it, as Ronnie (who scored a 0 on her fifth-grade dinosaurs quiz, and has until tomorrow to take it again or suffer a damaged academic future) learns (reluctantly at first, then with increasing interest) all about the evolution and extinction of archosaurs, sea reptiles, flying reptiles, mammals, plants, insects, and dinosaurs.

She’s disinterested at first — just skip ahead to the T rex, please! — but Ms Lernin wins her over. Ms Lernin is the eccentric (that means weirdo) former paleontologist that lives down the road (and who bears a striking resemblance to Howard herself) with a recycling bin that’s bigger on the inside and lets her travel to different points in time and space². By cycling through the various eras of the Mesozoic, Ronnie watches evolution in action and learns about ecological niches, convergent evolution, the phylogenetic tree, continental drift, global weather patterns, how large herbivores with armor probably means there’s large predators around, and feathers.

Glorious, colorful feathers, from early late Triassic protofeather fluff to fully–plumed nonavian dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous. We didn’t always know about warm-blooded feathered dinos, Ms Lernin tells us³, but that’s one of the joys of paleontology — we’re always figuring stuff out. There’s a joy of discovery that suffuses the entire book: new species to discover, new relationships to figure out, new behaviors to determine, and that fact that anything from cat-sized crocodylomorphs to the first snake can be considered cute (and in many cases, soft and fluffy).

The variety of creatures will engage readers of the target age group (and anybody that’s every been a member of the target age group, which let’s call 8-12 years old), and the repeated lessons told at each time period will subtly reinforce complex ideas. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is probably the best introductory, full-breadth book for teaching kids about dinosaurs and dinosaur-like animals.

Now give me your thumbs.

Spam of the day:

Dear Coffee-Drinker #2324,
As a thank you for your years of loyalty to Starbucks, we’re giving you a coupon for 5 complimentary-cups of Starbucks Cofee(Venti-Sized Cups Only)

I don’t drink coffee.

_______________
¹ Which is listed as volume 1 of the Earth Before Us series, but I can’t find anything on the publisher’s page to indicate what the subsequent books in the series would be: topic, publication schedule, creative team, nada.

It appears that Ms Howard will have a Reddit AMA on Monday, 7 August at noon EDT. Maybe somebody can ask her?

² Asked how this is possible, she shrugs and says Let’s just call it Science Magic. Science Magic also keeps Ms Lernin and Ronnie from drowning, dying from falls, getting squished, or eaten (but still requires them to run from wasps). Hooray for Science Magic!

³ And she points out some desert-dwelling varieties lost the need for feathers even after they evolved.

Well, I guess time continues forward at a rate of one minute per minute after all. Today being the first of the month, let me remind you that you have until 11:59pm EDT tomorrow, 2 August 2017, to email me a copy of your donation receipt to The Trevor Project, which I will match. Last time we raised US$500 in matching funds (rounded up from US$305) and I’d like to exceed that if at all possible this time around.

As of now, we’re at US$360 in receipts sent. If I could make a suggestion? All of the super cool Kickstarts that you’re backing right now? Pick one, and donate an amount equal to just the shipping charge. If just one out of every ten of you did that, we’d be into the thousands of dollars and my budget for the next month will be happily blown. I know that Fleen readers are, in general, the sort of people that would make Mr Rogers proud and happy. I know you’ve got this.

• I didn’t know how much I wanted a Jess Fink guest comic at Oh Joy, Sex Toy until I saw it. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled as broadly as when I got to the panel that said, quote, SO you want to draw DOWNTOWN KISSES, followed by art tips to make oral sexytimes look better. Thanks, Jess, Erika, and Matt!
• I confess, Chris Yates not boothing with Dumbrella for the comics shows the past couple of years means that I haven’t kept as close an eye on his Baffler! puzzles as I should. He just released a tranche of new ones, bringing the total number of brain-numbers up to three thousand, nine hundred and thirty-six. As Big Round Numbers tend to bring out Yates’s most extravagant work, look for the imminent Baffler! #4000 to feature about a dozen levels, multiple sub-puzzles, and a solving time measured in fortnights.
• TCAF remains one of the very best shows on the continent, and it’s never too early to start planning for May 2018. News went out today by means of the Twitter machine that applications will be open starting Monday, 14 August, until the end of October. My experience? Lots more people want to exhibit than the Toronto Reference Library can accommodate, so get your applications in early is my advice. Sign up for their newsletter if you need a reminder to check out the process rules come Monday after next.

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to make a bookstore run to pick up Abby Howard’s new dinosaur book, Dinosaur Empire!, which releases today. Heck, yeah.

Spam of the day:

Can’t see tiny buttons? Get a senior phone

I’ma tell you exactly what I told the Medicaid scammer that called yesterday, thinking me much older than I am: I can see a church by daylight. Besides, aren’t there enlarged button dialer apps for all the phones now?

Hey there, how was your weekend? My wife learned how to make sauerkraut and we understand that it’s nearly past the fartsmelly stage of fermentation. Here’s some other things that have been going on of late.

Spam of the day:

Steven Never Knew His Secretary Could Swallow (true story)

Steven was under the impression that she suffered from a lifelong disability, requiring feeding via a cannula implanted directly into her GI tract.

_______________
¹ Released under her alias T Kingfisher, which identity she uses for writings that are not strictly for kids. The books she releases as Ursula Vernon feature more hamsters and shrews and not much real danger.

Shit is bananas these days, so let’s just step back and have some wisdom from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin on the most hated part of modern computing. It relates to bandes dessinées web, promise.

Good stuff as always, but I have a quibble with one bit — I am less convinced that FSFCPL that no one will want to run vulnerable software, given that there’s plenty of vulnerable, unpatched, unsupported, deprecated, end-of-lifed, and otherwise completely insecure crap out there right now. I suspect that we’ll see Flash persisting for years and never quite going entirely away. But the sooner, the better.

Spam of the day:

These women are willing to do anything at all that you can ever imagine!

Awesome. I’d like the winning Powerball jackpot numbers and a removal of incompetent vandals from the federal government.