Having picked up a copy at my local comic shop over the weekend, I was going to tell you what I thought of We Can Fix It today, but then I made the mistake of reading The AV Club and saw that Noel Murray said everything I wanted to, only better:

A clever, poignant twist on the autobio comics format, Jess Fink’s We Can Fix It!: A Time Travel Memoir (Top Shelf) ponders what would happen if the author went back in time to warn her younger selves not to make so many dumb mistakes, whether it be trusting the wrong boy, taking the wrong drug, or acting rudely toward her mother. [...] The result is a book in which Fink treats her own life as a series of loosely connected vignettes, open to different interpretations depending on who she’s become by the time she looks back at them. This isn’t just an effective way to handle autobiography, it’s one with a touching take on the interconnectedness of people’s best and worst moments.

That’s much better than what I was able to come up, which isn’t really a surprise given that Murray is a nationally-regarded culture critic and all. In any event, I’m more than happy to point you towards words that may convince you to read We Can Fix It, as I think it’s something everybody should do. It’s smart and funny and sweet and wise and full of joy and hurt and sexy, sexy time-travel jumpsuits. Give it to the person in your life that needs to be reassured that none of us has all the answers, but that’s okay.

• Hail to our new overlords protectors, I meant protectors. Wes Citti and Tony Wilson, previously best known for making some amazing soup, have decided to branch out into technology and are Kickstarting the entire process. I must say, their campaign to build an orbital death ray is going to throw off my Kickstarter models, what with having backer tiers up to the US$100,000,000,000 level and a total goal that could be expressed as approximately 4% of US GDP.

  Going by the Fleen Fudge Factor for Kickstart predictions¹, Wes and Tony are on track for reaching their second stretch goal. On the other hand, I expect the usual delays in delivering on the promised rewards, so don’t hold your breath that the world will be destroyed until at least six months after the predicted doomsday.

• Readers of this page should be well familiar with Zahra’s Paradise from :01 Books, which launched back in 2010 and saw print eighteen months later; for those who are new around here, it’s the work of semi-anonymous political exiles commenting on life in Iran since the discredited elections of 2009. When the state has taken your child and you’ve finally retrieved his body, what more is there to fight for?

  The thing about elections, even in places where only the vestiges of democracy exist, is that they come around again. Zahra may not be a real person (although her experiences mirror those of far, far too many people in Iran), but that hasn’t stopped her from taking a stand in this election cycle. Vote4Zahra chronicles the story since “the end” as Zahra declares herself a candidate for President and speaks truth to the clerics that hold power in a country made up predominantly of youth eager to engage with the world. Here’s hoping her message makes its way to where it can encourage those who need encouragement.

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¹ Look at the Kicktraq prediction afer two days of funding, and at the trend prediction; most projects will hit somewhere between 1/3 and 1/6 of the prediction.

Vive L’alliance de la bande dessinée. Or more precisely, somebody please tell me where the very talented writers from Comics Alliance [link may not work much longer] end up, since their site (the only comics site I read regularly) got axed by parent company AOL. I really liked CA, I liked the writers, I liked their approach which appreciated comics in all its varied forms (not to mention the respect they gave to webcomics — do a search there for as long as the site is live on “Nedroid” say, or “Jess Fink”). They reveled in the most batshit insane¹ of comics, thought deeply about how comics tell their stories, poked fun at the comics they couldn’t stop reading and always somehow found happiness in a shared legacy of the world’s greatest heroes (and Aquaman).

The fact that those last three links lead to pieces written by the same guy should tell you something. I have no doubt that none of the CA staffers and stringers will have much trouble landing in their next writing gigs (and boy do I hope that they take the Eisner Award that they’re nominated for this year); in the meantime, if you haven’t already, maybe toss a thank you towards the staff of CA as they disperse (hopefully to coalesce together again — like Voltron, they are mightier together than in their constituent parts). And if it won’t get you fired, they’ve already received the ultimate accolade in a pop culture-saturated world: an angry tirade about their fate from a noted friend of comics [NSFW on account of naughty subtitles and oh yeah -- Hitler].

Nevertheless, there is always good news to be found, and little is more regarded as good news in these parts than a new project from Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, this time a book launch party for the Capture Creatures collection. Those with long memories may recall that Capture Creatures launched at the beginning of 2012, with a goal of finishing the 151 painting series, a gallery show, and a book collection in the same year.

Along the way, other things intruded², and the completion of Capture Creatures pushed back to 2013. Good news: the painting are apparently done, since the gallery show will launch in LA on 1 June. And with the completion of the paintings comes the comprehensive book (including the creatures we haven’t seen on the site yet), details of which I am solemnly assured are nearly upon us. We at Fleen will bring you the details as soon as we can, and in the meantime, dibs on whichever creature might be based on the greyhound, if such a thing exists.

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¹ So to speak.

² Dreistadt did more than 300 (!) paintings last year, so I think we can cut her some slack.

Silly me, I didn’t get a screen shot of the parking page that greeted readers of Fleen earlier today as the renewal was making its ways around the world. While the fleen.com email service saw no interruptions, for a few hours I was assured that this page would make a perfect address for auto dealers, auto loans, and all your auto needs. Sadly, people that may have wanted to snag the domain weren’t greeted with the sensitive yet handsome dude, the beautiful yet computer-savvy lady, or the couple that for some reason you just want to slap. Sorry ’bout all that.

• Having dipped her foot¹ into the world of e-self-publishing, A Girl And Her Fed creator K Brooke “Otter” Spangler has been noting some distinct similarities between that world and the earlier, what the heck are we trying to accomplish? days of professional webcomicking, and she’s been kind enough to share her observations with you.

  Having also spanned the world of webcomics self-publishing, and actual-publisher publishing, Otter’s buddy (and Fleen Fave) Ursula Vernon² has her own take of the astonishing Webcomics/SelfPub parallels, and likewise holds forth with useful opinion. They are are pair of sharp ladies and to paraphrase Otter, BUY THEIR BOOKS.

• Oh my, yes, please: Jess Fink’s so very delayed, I thought I might never see it released, can it really be true? time-travel self-makeout epic, We Can Fix It, finally has a release date! Of course, we’ve heard this before (more than three years of hearing it before) but this time it’s certain because Fink has the actual books in her hot little hands, meaning she’ll have them for TCAF in a few weeks. For those of you not going to TCAF, you can exchange money for this book in a variety of places, including by pre-ordering from Top Shelf directly. Go do that now.
• Did somebody say most prestigious awards in comics? The Eisners nominations are out, the superheroes are relatively absent, and webcomickers and their natural allies are well represented. How well represented? Enough so that there’s simply too many names to track down all the web addresses and put the links in the text³. Let’s just take them from the top down, shall we?
  Best Single Issue or One-Shot
  The Mire, by Becky Cloonan (self-published)

  Best New Series
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
  Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (Monkeybrain)

  Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12)
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
  Amulet Book 5: Prince of the Elves, by Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
  Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse, by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos (Archaia)

  Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17)
  Adventure Time: Marceline and the Scream Queens, by Meredith Gran (kaboom!)
  A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, adapted by Hope Larson (FSG)

  Best Humor Publication
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)

  Best Digital Comic
  Ant Comic, by Michael DeForge
  Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
  It Will All Hurt, by Farel Dalrymple
  Our Bloodstained Roof, by Ryan Andrews
  Oyster War, by Ben Towle

  Best Adaptation from Another Medium
  A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, adapted by Hope Larson (FSG)

  Best Graphic Album —- Reprint
  Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson by Mark Siegel (First Second)

  Best Penciller/Inker
  Becky Cloonan, Conan the Barbarian (Dark Horse); The Mire (self-published)
  Colleen Coover, Bandette (Monkeybrain)

  Best Coloring
  Colleen Coover, Bandette (Monkeybrain)

  I’m particularly excited to note the presence of Bandette in the Digital Comic category, but also represented in other categories against print comics. And I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Comics Alliance, Robot Six, and The Comics Reporter have all been nominated as Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism, and they are the homes of such webcomics-friendly folks as Chris Sims, Brigid Alverson, and The Spurge. Best of luck to a very strong and deserving field, and let’s hope that we see such good nominations in future years.

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¹ Up to about the knees, actually.

² We at Fleen loves us some Digger.

³ On account of the fact I am a lazy, lazy man.

That title was “Linkapalooza”, and it featured a photo of Frank Zappa in an Uncle Sam-patterned oversized novelty tophat because at that time that title produced that result in a Google image search. Anyhoo, things to point you towards today.

• James Kochalka may have retired American Elf, but he’s keeping plenty busy what with voicing Grotus in the SuperF*ckers shorts [NSFW, obviously] and starting a new strip for his local newspaper¹, and collaborating with Shmorky on a comic that fits hopes and dreams and malice and loss into one page. What I am basically saying is that you can keep up with all your Kochalka needs by keeping an eye on his Tumblr.
• Jim Zub, one-man living embodiment of the creation/destruction duality that undergirds comics, is back with more of his ongoing series of analyses of how the heck you make it in such a crazy industry. His latest looks back at a year of Skullkickers² running on Keenspot (starts here), which has brought the online reader to the end of the second story arc and just into the first story of the second Tavern Tales collection. It’s a topic that we at Fleen have discussed with Zub more than once over the past year, but seeing numbers puts everything in perspective:
  

  Skullkickers online has garnered just over 5.8 million pageviews and been visited by 272,000+ people over the past 12 months. More than 90 times the number of people who buy our monthly issues have checked out Skullickers online so far. Each month an average of 22,600+ new people come on board the story and the site generates almost 486,000 pageviews. I don’t know how it compares to other webcomics (though I’m sure it’s far lower than a lot of the long running and financially self sufficient sites) but it’s reaching 7-8 times our floppy comic print run worth of new readers every month, building up awareness of the title day by day using content we already had archived and ready to go. [emphasis original]

  That bit about “content we already had archived and ready to go”? That’s Zubese for “free money”.

• Over the years, we at Fleen have been eagerly waiting for Jess Fink’s We Can Fix It, her very sexy time-travel self-makeout story of sexy sexiness. Unfortunately, over the years, We Can Fix It (which has been complete forever, come on guys) has been repeatedly delayed by the publisher, which to be fair, they may have had extremely good reasons for doing. It may be working out for the best, as Top Shelf³ have had Fink go back and make everything even prettier than it was before Also, because she loves you, Fink has posted a seven page preview where Future Jess resolves that make the past as sexy as possible by making out with it. Oh, like you wouldn’t.
• A bare 24 hours since our posting yesterday, and Zach Weinersmith’s newest book collection has gone from about US$40K on Kickstarter to damn near US$110K (as of this writing). He’s burned through twelve more stretch goals, extended the Map Of Mystery twice, and had to space out new goals to increments of US$10K instead of US$5K, because they were being achieved too quickly.

  One may note that Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543 is in the Kickstarter Comics category, and the not-quite-resurrected Ryan North’s To Be Or Not To Be: A Choice-Filled Adventure By Ryan North And Also William Shakespeare Too is in the Publishing category, meaning that Weinersmith cannot break North’s record ’cause different categories. However, looking at their respective backers-and-dollars reports at Kicktraq, one can see that Zach may well hit Ryanesque numbers by the time this is done in — my glob — a month.

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¹ Note for our younger readers: a “newspaper” is a means of distributing information by printing it on multiple sheets of thin paper, folding to a convenient size, and making it available for sale to interested parties. Formerly, they roamed the American landscape in vast herds, but the population has lately dwindled to near-extinction levels.

² Which tends pretty much all the way towards the “destruction” end of the spectrum.

³ Who are all the very best people, and I always make sure to drop by their booth at any show I attend to buy anything I don’t have already, but also just to say hi. Seriously, they’re wonderful.

For those that follow this page to an unhealthy degree (hi, Mom), there was no post on Friday due to traveling, but today is two different holidays in the US and Canada and I’m totally allowed to take off from writing but I am here making up Friday because I love you people.

The reason I was traveling on Friday was to attend a wedding, but that doesn’t do it sufficient justice. Much like how Sherlock Holmes would only refer to Irene Adler as the woman, there is every evidence that this should be forever known as the wedding. In fact, you can all stop getting married now, as there is no chance that you will have more than one of these things at your wedding, much less all of them:

• A karaoke party featuring Kate Beaton and Carly Monardo channelling a murderously angry Cathy berating Heathcliff via the medium of Kate Bush
• A service officiated by Holly Black, with a meditation on the meaning of marriage as provided by Wikipedia¹
• More LEGO^® brand building block miniature figure dudes and ladies than you can shake a stick at; I got the world’s angriest mail carrier
• The Beer of the Gods; that’s its actual name
• Toasts to the happy couple offered by Stan Lee who looked an awful lot like both Chris Hastings and David Malki !; he invented the comical books and also getting married
• Bilingual good wishes sent by the Government of Canada/Gouvernement du Canada, delivered via accredited ambassadors Beaton, Butcher, and North²
• An actual ice cream truck, turning an entire cohort of grown-ass people³ into little kids clamoring for Choco Tacos (it’s like a taco but made out of a Klondike bar) and Shrek bars (it’s like Shrek’s head but made out of cold Shrek’s head)
• Wangs, fire, and possibly wangs on fire
• A brunch where a celebrated artist pelted a teen with handfulls (hand-fulls? handsfull?) of mini marshmallows and also a new cocktail was invented⁴

These are things that happened, and they will not happen again; it was an organic, spontaneous, joyous celebration that will never be equaled. Holly, Jeffrey, you win at getting married, so said we all.

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¹ Citation needed.

² Long live the Queen/Livre le Québec libre.

³ As opposed to grown ass-people

⁴ Agent Paperklip and I accidentally made something delicious. As this happened hard on the heels of a conversation about Tumblr, we named this concoction The Apple Privilege:

I was going to be posting about an amazing comic that Kate Beaton posted yesterday, but it’s been temporarily pulled; it dealt with a death in the small town she’s from, and because it’s in the form of a “comic”, there was concern that some might feel she was making light of the situation. It was as fine a meditation on loss that I’ve ever seen in words-and-pictures, and hopefully it will be back to where you can see it soon. When that time comes, you will most likely be able to find it here.

Instead, let’s talk about Rich Stevens and his latest mad-comics project: a comprehensive, 3000-strip collection of Diesel Sweeties as an e-book, which he announced about 15 minutes ago, and which has already seen the addition of the most disturbing Kickstarter promotion I’ve ever heard of:

(And you better believe I will be adding weird rewards to amuse myself. Only $666 to make me break veg. and eat 1lb. bacon on camera.)

No, wait he’s added one since then:

Blame @jefflowrey for the fact that I just added a KS reward where I give up coffee for a month for $10,000.

Damn you, former Fleen contributer Jeff Lowrey! Why do you want to make Rich commit suicide? But apart from the amusing rewards offered¹, I wanted to draw your attention to this because Rich Gets It, where “It” is the issue of Digital Right Management and locked formats and suchlike:

I care about credit and copyright, and love the idea of selling ebooks, but as long as I am able to work on Diesel Sweeties, I would like payment to be optional. That’s the model which has supported me as my main job since 2003, through boom and recession. That’s the model this comic was designed for and where it’s going to stay.

Those of you who support this project will have free download as well as physical thumb drive options available. You’ll also be ensuring I can afford to make a really thorough ebook and both sell it and offer it as a free download.

I hope you’ll also store this collection and share it with your friends. Remix it for devices that don’t exist, buy a decommissioned missile silo and Apocalypse-proof it, print it out and ask me to sign a twenty-pound stack of paper when you see me at a convention. Once you get a copy, it’s yours. The only copy protection I need is the fact that tomorrow’s comic doesn’t exist yet and my brain’s the only place that bakes that cookie. I only ask that you respect the Creative Commons license and do not use them commercially without permission. [boldface original, large text my emphasis]

That entire last paragraph is pure genius, and that large bit? That’s what I want to beat into the brain of every IP lawyer that buys and bribes Disney an extension to copyright every time it looks like Mickey Mouse might enter the public domain. It’s what I want to tattoo on the inside of Christopher Dodd’s eyelids, so he realizes that creativity doesn’t have to fear piracy if it’s nimble and active instead of trying to hide from the changes in the world.

I may not have the spare cash to get ten copies of Rich’s e-book on thumb drives delivered in person and he makes me coffee², but you can damn well bet that I’m supporting this³. It’s not just an insane pixel-wrangling exercise (that’s Rich’s idea of a fun evening, anyway), it’s a manifesto for the future in 8-bit blocks of color. Get on board, or get out of his way.

By the way, as of this writing, the campaign has been live for one hour and twelve minutes, and Rich has exceeded his $US3000 goal by US$203 already. Keep it going, nerds!

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¹ Particularly check out the US$128, US$256, US$512, US$1024, and US$1701 levels. Update: the US$1701 reward is already claimed. I suspect Ryan North, Dylan Meconis, Jess Fink, or Ferocious J may have been involved.

² US$2600; I don’t drink coffee anyway. But me and Rich are still friends.

³ Possibly at the US$69 level; does “Principal Tyrrell” count as a fictional character?

I don’t have any introductory remarks today; sorry.

• I started out by thinking to myself, No way did Randall Munroe draw 1000 little stick figures for today’s strip, but a very basic eyeballing (counting the stick figures in a small section, and assuming a relatively uniform density) indicates that if he didn’t, he’s within the bounds of experimental error. Then I said to myself, Well at least he didn’t draw references to all of his major recurring characters and most well-known strips, on account of Cory Doctorow’s cape would show up in red. Then I looked closer and saw Cory, in black and white, around the 9:30 position on the first “0″. Haven’t spotted any velociraptors yet, though.
• The thing is, when it comes to who I want to get all squishy with, I am of the same mind as Gerda and have interest only in the ladies¹. So why did Jess Fink’s G+ announcement that she was collaborating on a new artblog full of sexy, sexy dudes [NSFYWP]² for lustful gazing catch my attention? Maybe because I dig on Jess’s art, even when it’s Boners Ahoy!? Maybe because the ladies deserve a place for female gazing? In any event, there’s never a bad time to point out tastefully smutrotica and dammit, Jess always makes the sexy equal parts hot and fun. Can’t wait to see what her Smut Peddler (whose contributions just closed, and so we should see it complete soon) story looks like.
• From the helping out colleagues department: Ms K Brooke “Otter” Spangler has finally gotten her plush production completed, after more than two years of effort and many trying setbacks. The big pile of Mr Speedy clones at Otter’s house much surely be the fuzziest, wuzziest, cutest impromptu sleeping spot on the eastern seaboard, but the important part comes from her summary writeup of the process, which is quoted here at length due to no permalinks:
  

  [H]ere’s the super-brief version: the Speedy plush has been in pre-production for almost 28 months. Most of that was raising capital to fund production. Early last year he almost went to production with a different company. I paid a fairly huge chunk of change to get a prototype made, but poor quality, combined with some rather off-putting communications with this company, made me pull out at the last minute.³

  I began working with a new company back in late September, and cannot recommend them strongly enough.* They have fantastic customer service and they busted their rumps getting him to me in under 3 months. He was supposed to be here for the holidays but there was a lengthy snag getting him across the Canadian border.

  *Webcomic people looking to make their own plush, email me and I’ll talk your ears off (eyeballs out?) about them. [asterisk footnote original, numberic one mine]

  That footnote is what I wanted to draw your attention to; I’ve known a buttload of webcomickers (some of them from Canada, making their unit of measure metric buttloads instead of Imperial) that have tried — some successfully, some not — to get various 3D representations of their characters made, and it’s almost always been a huge headache for them. The fact that one has now found a company that can turn around a design from sketch to prototype to delivery in three months (during the run-up to Alliday, no less), and is willing to share that information? You’ve earned yourself a place in Webcomics Heaven⁴, Otter.

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¹ Hey, ladies.

² Not Safe For Your Work, Probably.

³ Insert your own joke here.

⁴ Which is itself found in the First Circle of Hell, wedged into a somewhat unassuming corner, with a nice garden and decent DSL. There no other place to put them and it’s been ages since they got any fresh Roman orators, so there’s plenty of room.

Regular readers of this page (both of you — hi, Rick; hi, Helen) know that I don’t let Javascript load on my browser without a damn good reason, but when Jess Fink tweets about awesome comics that can only be done online, and they require it? That’s a damn good reason.

Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a take on the old Pied Piper story, but one that achieves a depth (both visually and storywise) that’s almost unique. The art is laid out in different planes, at varying distances from the viewer, and which move at different rates as you scroll from left to right. It would look like a storybook without the Javascript effects, but with it, you become an observer — but not quite a participant — in something that’s not animated in the usual sense of the word, but in the original sense: the scene has been brought to life.

Hobo Lobo is made by Stevan Živadinović, and you can see the progress of the story on his About page; he’s powered through a nominal three pages since 26 Jan 2011, but considering that a “page” consists of as many as 17th multi-field “panels” (which run continuously together, not like the panels you’re used to), the updates every couple days are a pretty impressive feat. Best of all, Živadinović is open to sharing his code which makes this parallax-as-comics possible, so we may see more sites that merit the inclusion of Javascript for actual reasons in the future.

Speaking of Neat Things:

• Shopping for the various end-of-year holidays continues apace, and webcomickers (many of whom derive from these end-of-year sales intangibles like rent) want you to remember to buy stuff from them. But because they’re a collegial bunch, all over the place you’ll find creators that a pointing their readers towards colleagues with neat stuff. You got your neatly-formatted, easy-to-browse version from Mr Willis, your full-of-pictures version from Mr Guigar, your enthusiastic version from Ms Corsetto … basically, start at any of those pages (or from your favorite webcomicker’s front page), follow a link to an esteemed colleague, and you’ll likely find more recommendations to follow. Happy Propping Up of a Tottering Economy with Consumer Spending Holidays!
• The third chapter of Tyler Page’s Raised on Ritalin has released, and hoo boy, it’s a good ‘un. Moving away from the personal history portion of the story for a bit, Page engages in a Larry Gonick-like exploration of brain function, the history of amphetamines, and how Ritalin in particular came to be used for ADD and similar disorders in children (despite the fact that we’re not quite sure how it works). Fascinating stuff, and just the breather necessary before we dive back into Page’s personal story.
• Webcomics readers may recall that Help Desk creator Christopher Wright has, on occasion, been slightly erratic with his timetable. From a starting point in 1996, he’s sometimes gone months or even most of a year between updates. But (and this is a big but), he’s always come back. And when his life permits him to get into the proverbial groove, he knocks down updates like nobody’s business.

  Which is pretty much what he’s been doing since the end of October, cranking out the Monday-to-Friday releases like they were going out of style. As a result, he dropped the 1997th episode of Help Desk today, putting him on track to hit the Big Round Number of 2000 on Friday. As we all know, 2000 updates is the number that separates the adults from the children, and if there are a few more comics to have hit that threshold than back in 2008, it’s still pretty damn impressive.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

• Sunday, I had the pleasure of Eric Colossal & Jess Fink’s company for fun, Thai food, and a quick recap on how her books are doing. It occurs to me: Jess will someday have another sexy book. Oglaf volumes will presumably continue if the first one does well. Top Shelf, TopatoCo, somebody needs to make a discount two-pack. This is something that needs to happen.
• Speaking of sexy comics full of sexy times — new webcomic alert: erstwhile Bad Mile creator Tom Walker (who is not Christopher Baldwin and has nothing to do with Christopher Baldwin, pinky swear) has decided that sci-fi comedy is the genre to be in, and thus has started telling the tales of the SS Myra, wherein there is a spaceship and a promise that things is gonna get porny on Tuesdays from now on.
• Have you noticed that Box Brown is collecting cartoons that he has submitted to and had rejected by the New Yorker? Because he totally is, and some of them are really good; others are really damn good.
• Confidential to MH and KS: congrats. They know why¹.

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¹ Maybe because they got married in the presence of dinosaurs? I used to think that my wedding was a pretty good time, but now I see that it was totally insufficient.

Just because Halloween is over (and the mythical sexy ____ costumes overrunning our once-proud streets fade into the background) for another year doesn’t mean that things can’t still be sexy around here. Let’s sex this place up with sexy sexiness.

• From the sexy twitters of the very sexy Sylvan Migdal:
  

  Hey! This month, all proceeds from Curvy books go to Planned Parenthood. Sexy comics for reproductive rights & health! c.urvy.org

  Curvy, for those of you not in the know, is probably not safe for your work, unless you work on Oglaf or Chester 5000 for your day job, in which case you have won this game we call life. Much respect to Migdal for recognizing that sexy times have consequences, and being prepared for them makes everything sexier.

• Nothing is more sexy than the modern power grid¹, which makes so much else that is sexy possible — and word comes to us this morning that Eastworks, site of TopatoCo, Dumbrella & NEWW, is again part of the early-to-mid 20th century. Internet is still out in that part of Massachusetts, so merch orders are not going out just yet, but the crack staff of TopatoCo can at least stare lovingly at all that stuff that they know somebody wants. Maybe they’ll give it a hug! We also hear that various residents of that corner of Webcomikia are getting their electric back, leading to a 100% improvement in mood, core body temperature, and shower-assisted cleanliness. Hooray for Science!
• Speaking of Science — sexy Science — the new two-volume Narbonic omnibus edition is in Shaenon Garrity’s hands and shipping to those that helped Kickstart it into existence. There will be a book release party at Borderlands Books in San Francisco from 5:00pm to 7:00pm on Saturday, November 19; Garrity is on record as promising cupcakes and wine, presumably from a box.
• Finally, it appears that nobody spent their All Hallow’s Eve dressed as Sexy James Madison, but that’s okay — yesterday saw the release of the Kate Beaton interview at The Sound of Young America, and Jesse Thorn wasn’t about to let that conversation go by without a discussion of the Strong Female Characters². Remember — sexism is over, not sexiness! Different things.

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¹ The only exception to this is Rich Stevens, who is the Platonic Ideal of sexiness.

² Alas, the pure, unbridled sexiness of beach volleyball didn’t seem to come up. Maybe next time.