There is an excellent chance that I will spend at least some of the immediate future trying to evade the winter storm that is bearing down on me, and get my ass home where my wife and dog are. If so, this may be the only posting you get for the next day or so. Apologies in advance.

At one point in life, snow was fun, and not the icy harbinger of my doom, and oh look — more on the way. Let’s find that silver lining together, shall we?

• The latest My Space Dark Horse Presents includes a pair of absolute gems by Graham Annable and the Yuko Ota/Ananth Panagariya combo package; both of them are tales of love gone creepy (pay careful attention to the last panel of “Callie Eats Feathers” and tell me you don’t feel a little shiver up your spine). Take that, Valentine’s Day!
• For those of you in the Rochester, NY area, the Rochester Institute of Technology will be hosting a talk (it’s free!) by Nick Gurewitch and Chris Onstad entitled Internet Famous: Comic Time with Nick and Chris. The fun kicks off Wednesday, 10 February at 8:00pm in Webb Auditorium on the campus of RIT.
• Could this be the end of Little Dee? More than five years in the woods with the critters, and she still remembers her old home. There’s still some weeks of story, but this is definitely the endgame.
• Lastly, we brought you word last week of a new CMS for webcomicking being developed by some of the habitués of Webcomics Community. Rob Tracy informs us today that BlkKnight is calling for beta testers willing to give Comic Reef (for use with a PHP/MySQL hosting solution) a whirl. Those interested, please contact Mr (Ms?) Knight, also known as blkknight1007, which is an address to be found within Google’s email. It’s a company.

No spoilers. No spoilers, no spoilers, no spoilers.

Anders Loves Maria wrapped a few hours ago, and I knew that when this day came, however Anders, and Maria, and all the others ended up, Rene Engström would wind up breaking my heart, because I didn’t (still don’t) want to say goodbye to these characters. A little more than two years ago, I wrote:

And that’s where we are, on the cusp of 100 strips, with a pair of protagonists that I feel emotionally drained by. They act so utterly, confusingly, exasperatingly real, that I want to comfort them, scream at them, advise them, and kick their asses. Engström has put me through this wringer, leaving me enraged and empathetic towards her creations at the same time. The last time a character left me this deeply conflicted, he wore a red ski cap and a Speedo (for the record, that’s a very good thing to remind me of); seriously, I halfway believe that Rene Engström is really just a front for Wes Anderson. There is a precedent, after all.

One last thought — I’d emailed Engström earlier in the week that I was possibly going to hold this review to sometime past strip #100; I was waiting for a point of resolution in the story to say, Okay, here’s a good break, jump in. She pointed out that I might be waiting for a while if I was waiting for these latest emotional wounds to close — they aren’t even fully open yet.

And that right there is why I adore this strip — just like real life, there are no clear intervals in the story, there is no upswell of music at the end of the reel, there never will be a neat resolution where everybody gets to go Awwwww.

Nearly 200 strips later, all of those feelings are mangnified. Engström could have made the ending sunshine and lollipops — I’m not sayin’ she did, and I’m not sayin’ she didn’t … no spoilers — and I’d still be on the verge of welling up¹ right now anyway, because I love this work and now it’s over. I could be angry and ask if she set the end of this story in place just so she could touch us and keep us, and the response would be a slightly guilty shift of the eyes before a defiant SO!

She wins this round; this story is over (even as it goes on), and she has more stories to tell, more characters to introduce us to, and I am eager to read them, no matter what emotional sucker-punches await.

Thank you, Rene. Thank you.

_______________
¹ Are you surprised at my tears, sir? Strong men also cry.

Will this be the last time I feel the need to talk about Raina Telgemeier’s stellar new graphic novel, SMILE? Maybe! I mean, there’s the launch party next week at Rocketship in Brooklyn, and it’ll certainly be making the rounds of the awards at shows for the next year or so. But it’s out now, I’ve gorged myself on it, and you should too.

Here’s the deal: I know Raina personally. I met her as an adult, I never knew the sixth-grader who when through a nearly five-year ordeal to repair a busted set of teeth. I know firsthand that things turned out okay, but I still found myself flipping pages in the grips of the story, wondering if it would all turn out okay. I winced with Young Raina, hurt with her, triumphed with her, and around the corners of memory of my own dental dramas, tasted way too much blood with her as I read along.

SMILE is more than the tale of one person, it’s a Hero’s Journey from gangly still-a-kid to almost-adult; the teeth are the hook that the story hangs on, but it’s really about the pain and effort to grow up. It’s telling that at times, Telegemeier draws herself as still looking like her 12 year old self, while her friends seem to already be grown women — have any of us at that age not wondered why we seem not to be as at ease with ourselves, not as grown-up as those around us?

SMILE is also the book that’s destined to put a stake in the heart of Highlights for Children, which has haunted every pediatric dentist’s and orthodontist’s office since the Truman administration. It struck me as awful, ugly, insipid, and insulting when I was 7, and I was desperately convinced that some day, somebody would come up with something better to read while waiting for the guy with the drill to call my name. If there’s anything on this planet that would improve trips to the dentist than a story that says, “Yeah, I was sitting where you are now, I went through the pain, and the headgear, and the teasing, and it turned out okay, promise”, I can’t imagine it.

A few side notes before we wrap up today:

• What The Hell?! Con is scheduled for Greensboro, NC this weekend, but a major storm system looks like it might smack the area, at least peripherally. As NC native Otter puts it:
  

  [P]lease check the main page and the weather reports before you [head to the show]. North Carolina has a Zero Tolerance policy for snow and since a minor dusting of flurries is expected, there’s a chance the convention might be canceled. Check, check, triple-check, and save yourself the gas!

• Good couple of comments in the followup to yesterday’s story of Karl Kerschl’s woes. ComicPress is a terrific product, but as a dominant player, it runs the risk of monocultures everywhere — susceptibility to disease. As Rob Tracy (also mentioned in yesterday’s dispatches) notes, Webcomics Community is working up some ComicPress alternatives, which can only be a good thing.
• Finally, nice pro-tip at Wapsi Square today: when causing a supernatural event, convince the cops that nothing happened by babbling about flying saucers. Works every time!

Karl Kerschl writes to tell us that the malware-distributing hack to The Abominable Charles Christopher is sorted out. He also tells us that he’s received news that a WordPress/ComicPress-targeting hack may be making the rounds. It’s not clear yet how serious this is, but since ComicPress is pretty much the dominant ecosystem for self-hosted webcomics, it would have the potential to really abuse our community.

Like we said before, it’s never a bad time to doublecheck your versions, make sure your backups are current (it’s my understanding that a WordPress XML backup is safe from the risk of accidentally carrying over nastyware), and update anything that needs updating. Many thanks to Kerschl for doing his bit to make this a teachable moment.

Readers of this page know that I love me some Abominable Charles Christopher (no link, as will become clear momentarily); Karl Kerschl’s artwork is sublime, and the story is by turns heartbreaking, poignant, hilarious, and intriguing.

It’s also dangerous right now.

It’s Wednesday, so during a quick break I browsed over to the ACC site to get my chuckle on (successfully, I might note), and after reading the comic, noticed a blogpost from Kerschl that the site had been hacked earlier in the day. Then I noticed a pop-up warning from my virus scanner. Then I pulled the network cable and started researching.

These things change so quickly, it’s impossible to say if Kerschl’s site was seeded with just one variant of nasty, but at least in my case, I got a drive-by infection with what some call “Netsky Spyware Alert” or “Fake Worm”. Did a bit of research (thank you HijackThis) some repair (thank you, LSPFix), and some cleanup (thank you, Malwarebytes), with invaluable reference info from people who hate badware even more than I do. And this is on a machine that uses Opera instead of Internet Explorer, as well as resident rogue blockers.

Anyway, as of this writing, Kerschl is working on cleaning things up with the able assistance of Official Smart Dude and ComicPress creator Tyler Martin. Karl will let us know when it’s safe to go back in the water, and in the meantime, I need your help. I have promised Kerschl my assistance in beating the snot out of the lowlifes that targeted him in this fashion, and I’ll possibly need bail money at some point in the future; you don’t have to send anything now, just if you have a spare five bucks that could go to the cause, we’ll let you know.

Also, please take this opportunity to double-check your own security arrangements, both on your personal machine and any sites that you may have. We will always have those that seek to do us harm, whether for jollies or for padding their own pockets. We will take hits from time to time. But we don’t have to make it easy for them.

Okay, onto the non-suck:

• Achewood in the real world sighting (thanks to longtime buddy/Best Boy at my wedding Brett g Porter for the heads-up): from the NPR jazz blog (“A Blog Supreme”), Patrick Jarenwattananon notes the eerie similarity between Terence Blanchard and Ray Smuckles.
• Andy (I always assumed it was short for “Andrew”, but perhaps it’s for “Android”?) Bell ups the stakes regarding his Android figures, adding the first of the variant profiles, pricing info ($7.25 a pop, with case discounts) and a sale date (Feb 10 online from Dead Zebra, presumably here).
• You may have heard that Heidi MacDonald had announced that her bloggery would be moving from its Publishers Weekly-sponsored home; that’s been accomplished, and one may now find The Beat at its own site. I always like hanging out and comparing notes with Heidi, and we at Fleen wish her all the best as the archives transition continues.
• You may also have heard of Webcomics Community, one of several open fora that launched in the aftermath of the Webcomics Dot Com shift to subscriptions. Rob Tracy, general in-charge guy at WC, sends word of a pretty interesting series of how-to articles, with one of particular interest: Scott Raymond, Ustream system admin, talking on how to do effective streaming presentations. Good stuff.

I see a book-buying trip in my immediate future.

• Are mini-things the new merch trend? Erika Moen made a whole bunch of mini-characters for various webcomickers as fan art, and she’s done all those tentacle-themed sculptures (the anemones are gorgeous, if sadly not for sale). Sean Archer has gotten into the game of pocket art with representations of his own Milo the Cloud. If you’re shy on space, this could entirely be a thing.
• Early news of the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing is drifting in, with Peter Vine now officially first out of the gate with “I’ll be there with my friends” notification. If you head up to Mile End on 27th March (unfortunately, I’ll be at Pax East that weekend; I really have to pencil The Thing in for one of these years) you’ll be seeing the likes of Rose Loughran, Steve Dismukes,and German Erramouspe). As Vine noted:
  

  If Kate Beaton is attending then it must be good.

  Indeed, but there are easily a half-dozen draws at the show just as compelling.

• Webomics and webcomickers (indeed, much of our modern society) appears to orbit the Robot Juice; for those (such as myself) who have never understood the appeal of the The Bean, the world is a lonely and judgemental place that shuns our kind. What of the noble, gentle-steeped leaf of Camellia sinensis? Well, our time has come. Adagio Teas have commissioned Katie Sekelsky (of the twice-weekly SF story Magpie Luck) to produce a new, tea-themed webcomic for their monthly newsletter, Tea Muse. Tea Tales (first installment here, hopefully an easily-accessible archive in the future) provides an illustrated look into some of the quirkier areas of tea’s history; it is both suitably pretty and sufficiently weird for anyone.

Stop happening so much, things! Seriously, since I opened the computer this morning, multiple things have been added to today. For instance, the news that Bill Watterson did an interview, which totally included this exchange:

How soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope?

Immediately. I’m going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.

I think that’s the Cronkite Moment for newspapers. In other happenings:

• It is Hourly Comic Day. John Campbell has been chronicling his hourly existence for the past month, and today everybody else is, too. There’s still time to get in on the deal since (as Campbell affirms) you do not have to be a fancy drawer to do this.
• Even more ambitious than hourly comics? Launching a new webcomic on Hourly Comic Day, which is exactly what Jamie Noguchi did. You might remember Noguchi from some comics as Angry Zen Master and the first story arc of Erfworld, and now he brings you ¥ellow Peril, which I can’t but help think will turn out well. Get in on the ground floor.
• Even more ambitious than launching a new webcomic on Hourly Comic Day? Announcing a contest for a paid webcomic gig on Hourly Comic Day, which is exactly what The Escapist is doing; you might remember The Escapist for the blindingly funny and high-speed video game reviews by Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw, but as near as I can tell, this contest has nothing to do with Croshaw (who has made his opinions of certain webcomics [scroll down] and genres clear). Instead, well, let’s let them tell the big part:
  

  A paid webcomic contract with The Escapist! The winner will then be contacted by The Escapist to negotiate contract obligations. [emphasis mine]

  Please Note
  Regardless of the webcomic that wins, we are looking for someone who is dedicated to creating top level content for The Escapist. In doing so, please be aware that you will be asked to create at least two (2) pieces of content a week, for the negotiated time of the agreement. If you do not feel as though you have this ability at this point in time, we hope you will support the other contestants who are ready to make that commitment and keep us in mind if a time comes when you are able to possibly join our team.

  … which is pretty vague. A term of contract to be negotiated, for a payment to be negotiated, and if you can’t keep up two updates a week for however long, don’t bother. I’d normally tell you to beware hidden terms in something like this (and the full contest details are at that link), but there’s just so little to base a judgement on. Um, hold out for good terms if you win?

• Okay, that’s everything that happened today, which I hope hasn’t knocked from the public consciousness a story that was brewing over the weekend: Mark Siegel, one of the stalwarts at :01 Books (Editorial Director, in fact), has launched a new webcomic and it’s beautiful. Sailor Twain, or the Mermaid in the Hudson is running Monday/Wednesday/Friday (with a healthy launch archive all built up), and features the most gorgeous, soft, charcoal-looking art I can recall. Two men, one mythical creature, and a river with its own dose of mystery collide in 1887. Read this one now.
• As a final followup: Andy Bell’s Android figures? Twelve designs blind-boxed in cases of sixteen, dammit. Pricing and purchase info to be announced later this month, and now I’ve got to clear space on my shelves for all of these and my wife is going to kill me. I knew following Andy down the road into vinyl toys would be my undoing.

Okay, in about 90 minutes I have to drive 200 miles up that little slice of heaven known as I-95; this is gonna be quick, and while you’re at it, pray for Mojo.

• To get back to the question above, I refer you firstly to Exhibit A, and then to Exhibit B. A previously-unheralded genius known as The Yarnmaiden systematically deconstructed the t-shirt, reshaped the formely boxy drape, and remixed it into something completely new. This is one trend that I’d like to see continue.
• Max Huffman’s now no longer the youngest awesome webcomic creator (although the fact that the latest Mocktopus strip features Huffman and his much younger brother is eerily coincidental). Ladles and ginglemiffs, I give you Malachai Nicolle, author of AXE COP, age five (the usual AXE COP site has been hammered so thoroughly in the last 24 hours that it’s essentially dead; try the mirror).

  See, Ethan Nicolle (29) was hanging with brother Malachai (as mentioned, 5), and Malachai started spinning the story of AXE COP. Ethan knew that it had to be made into a comic, and from their play, he has teased out the details of AXE COP, Flute Cop, Dinosaur Soldier, Uni-Baby, and all the rest of the coolest comic creations of this young decade.

  Be sure to check out the video of the writing session. Having thoroughly enjoyed AXE COP episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 0, and 5, I am only left to wonder a) at how good they are, and b) if all of us were that creative at age five and just had it beaten out of us.

There’s going to be a comedy-and-art show going on in NYC tonight, for the benefit of some Haitian relief organizations; there’s some ridiculously talented people attached, so it’s ridiculously sold out, but there’s something you could get in on, were you so inclined. Namely, an art auction that accepts electronic bids. The art above (by the inimitable Scott C., so don’t even think about trying to imit him) will be part of the former, and perhaps the latter (the website appears to be running a little behind), so check back often if you want a chance at it.

One place you’ll definitely have a shot at an original by Mr C. would be his newest gallery show, entitled Everybody, all the time, kicking off in London on 4 March. Take it from me, if you go to the premiere, half the art will be sold out by the opening, so if you suspect you might like to purchase, get in touch with the gallery ahead of time for the show catalog.

• I saw that yesterday, Webcomics Dot Com (subscription required) ran a list of places to send your press releases, and as I’m on that list, I figure a quick pro tip to make those releases more interesting is a good idea. Let’s not forget the basics — you need to tell me up front who you are, what you’re talking about, and where to find it. A couple of quotes that are ready to be cut/pasted are good. Make with the proper punctuation, spelling, an dgrammar, ’cause I ain’t spending no time making yer stuff gooder [that whole sentence: sic].

  But if you can make the press release fit the theme of whatever you’re promoting, that’s good. Case in point:

  A new semester of comics on “pictures I drew in class” has just begun! If you jump in now, you won’t have any make-up work to do later in the semester! You might even get extra credit for checking it out … and don’t worry, the past two years of comics are still online, so you can catch up if you want.

  You can find the comic [here] — and an intro to this semester [here] .

  This webcomic follows fifth-year college student Ali through the excitement of a university education. When she doesn’t pay attention in class, her grades suffer but you win!

  Featured this semester:
  -Wacky adventures in ARCH 3514: Textile Space! Will Ali hurt herself on a sewing machine? Only time will tell!
  -Serious business in REL 4324: Islam & the Modern World. Is Ali going to make it? Maybe!
  -Lots of time for drawing in COMM 3204: Multicultural Communication! Will Ali strangle someone because of the things they say in class? Probably!

  Thanks for checking it out! No Force-Add form required.

  College-experience themed strip, so references to making up work, registration, and semesters in the release. Even without reading Pictures I Drew In Class, I have some idea what the strip is about and whether or not I want to visit it.

• From the completions/new beginnings department, Kevin Moore has wrapped up In Contempt, his self-described experiment of creating a commercially viable political webcomic, which has (in his estimation), Um, not worked out. Bummer, because there were some pretty decent cartoons along the way (with much better art than is usually found in editorial offerings), even if there was a distinct lack of Crying Statues of Liberty and overlabellings in Moore’s work.

  On the other hand, this leaves “Moore” time (ha, ha!) to work on Wanderlost (née Sheldon the Pig), which sports a new storyline (good for jumping on), new website, and perhaps a more frequent update schedule. On balance, a pretty good trade.