If I don’t miss my count, this makes a total of two Team Force Alpha strips in two years. Ironically, this is not the worst update schedule in webcomics.

• News from across the Atlantic: pre-orders soon on the new Planet Karen book. Karen Ellis has put herself out there in her autobio journal, and the strip is one of the really good new voices of the past year or so. You’re not working tomorrow, so take a trawl through the archives; if you like what you see, watch this space for news of the orders opening.
• Speaking of books and preorders, Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots vol 2 is now available. Buy with vol 1 and get a discount! Hey, Danielle, next time you’re in New Jersey, I got an awesome bar to share with you — they make drinks interesting and strong.
• Trust Jennie Breeden to quote Georgia state jurisprudence on a … pressing topic. This made me giggle out loud.
• Finally, nothing to do with webcomics, but this is too funny not to share with you. Happy (non-Canadian) Thanksgiving, everybody.

Confidential to Noz-Eezin’ in the Hudson Valley: I’m six years older, how do you think I feel? Happy Birthday.

I’ve mentioned previously how Freakangels, by Internet Jesus (with illustrator Paul Duffield), reads better by running several weekly installments (each six pages long) together. Know how it reads even better? As a book. Picked up the trade paperback recently, and damn, but Warren Ellis can write. He’s a master of the show-don’t-tell skillset, giving us bits and pieces of a ruined world without every coming straight out and giving us the whole exposition (not that he doesn’t know how to do exposition up a treat).

And in print, some pages work better than on the screen; check out this four page sequence from the story; in the book, the first two images face each other, as does the second pair. Now consider a few additional facts:

• Freakangels follows a near-total four-panel layout; sometimes it’s splash pages, sometimes it’s one above and two below (or vice versa), but it’s nearly always four panels on the page
• That almost completely blank page has a four-panel grid on the other side of the sheet of paper
• The paper is slightly thin

As a result, there’s a subtle ghosting of panel borders and word balloons that show up translucent behind that big block of white. It turns an image of being lost in the totality of the universe into something more haunting — panels and balloons mean the passage of time and conversation in comics, and they’re going on somewhere just past where (or when) you can grab onto them. It may be an accidental artifact of printing on too-thin paper stock, but damn it looks pretty.

So there you are. We’re nearly the same age, Warren Ellis and me, speak the same language, and have had many of the same historical touchstones in our lives, and yet he turned out to be the kind of person that could think up and spin stories that I absolutely adore and I did not. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all those voices rattling around in his head waiting to get out and for his compulsion to spit them out to where I can read them. Now, who wants pie?

Item the First
I got an email request for my mailing address about a week and a half ago; throwing caution to the wind (it’s not that I mind the occasional flaming bag of poop in the mailbox, but I hate it when they come postage due), I supplied it. As a result, many thanks to Chris Hallbeck, who gifted me with a copy of The Book of Biff #3: Fresh Toast, which is notable for two things:

1. Eyebrows! I’m in stark disagreement with Brad Guigar here, who finds them distracting; I’m impressed by how expressive those unholy antennae are on Biff. But since you want to see Biff with the eyebrows gone — check it, Brad.
2. Dittos! Okay, a bunch of you are too young to remember the ditto, which was an earlier form of paper reproduction much used by schools in my youth. The pages used a wet transfer system with a fluid that was heavy on alcohols and volatile chemicals with a distinctive smell.

   If you got one of those faintly purple sheets and it was still damp, you’d sniff it for the lamest, most low-rent high in all of history. The inks used in TBOB#3:FT must have been formulated in an old ditto spirit distillery, ’cause they brought back memories of pop quizzes, #2 pencils, and filmstrips.

So it’s fair to say that TBOB#3:FT had a significant, visceral impact on me, right from the opening pages. I can’t guarantee that your copy will flash you back to a bored and misspent youth, but it’s worth a shot.

Item the Second
The lads at Unshelved have revealed the winners of the 2008 Pimp My Bookcart contest, and the top winners (out of … it looks like nearly 100 entries) are really amazing.

That foodcart looks just like the real thing (although hopefully it lacks the taxi exhaust, caked-on grease, and unkillable mutant strains of pathogens resulting from untold generations of evolution). The fire engine looks better equipped to handle structure fires than some real apparatus I’ve been around. And the Dr Suess model down the page is both delightfully loopy, complete with a cute ‘n’ cheerful librarian driving it¹.

Item the Third
Zuda got a great deal of attention from me in the time between announcement and launch; my views on the service are pretty well-known, and I haven’t spent many brain cycles on it since then (mostly because the viewer is a nightmare of bad interface design, memory bloat, and severely lack the ability to play nice with my browser of choice).

However, I’ve heard nothing but good about several of the stories that have come out of Zuda, and now some of them are getting the dead-tree treatment. Look for High Moon and Bayou to hit the stores in 2009, and let’s hope that they’re such big sellers that the 1% royalty the creators get actually adds up to real money.

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¹ Purchasers of this model are advised that they must supply their own cute ‘n’ cheerful librarian.

Tyler Page’s Nothing Better returns today, and you might say the new semester is better than ever. Ha, I crack myself up sometimes.

• Webcomics Idol is down to five: The Superfogeys, The Book of Biff, Xylia, Newspaper Comic Strip, and Calamities of Nature. Little surprised to see Shi Long Pang out so early, but what are you gonna do? Edit to add: dammit, this is what happens when I try to catch up on things in a 10 minute window. Thanks to Lenny in the comments for setting me straight. On a side note, I’m really enjoying the quality of feedback from the judges this cycle — good, trenchant advice in there.
• David Malki ! did a really good interview with occasional boothmate and once (and future?) webcomicker Nick Gurewitch, but you can’t read it yet. It’ll be in the next PBF book from Dark Horse (due in February), but you can read an excerpt here.
• Lastly, it’s not April Fool’s Day, so I’m forced to take the following from Wes Molbash at face value:
  

  I’ve decided to end YHT.

  This decision was not an easy one, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking it over with my friends and family. 2008 has been a difficult year for me personally, and I believe that now is as a good a time as any to end one project and start working on the next.

  The final “You’ll Have That” strip will be published on Friday, January 2nd, 2009. I hope to tie up as many loose ends as possible over the next two months, and I’ll try my darnedest to post these last strips on time! In February of ‘09 I’ll be launching a new comic feature here at this site.

  Weirdly enough, I don’t think that this is bad news. It’s not a sudden decision, there’s a natural end planned for the strip, and Molebash has clearly found a new project that he’s fired up about — those are all elements that lead to a reinvigorated and even-more creative cartoonist. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

What’s that? Another webcomicker with a Hollywood option? News came yesterday that Agnes Quill by the prolific Dave Roman (with the help of various other creators) has been picked up for development. For those of you new to the game, Dave and his wife Raina Telgemeier are, in addition to scary-talented, two of the nicest people in indy/webcomics you’re ever likely to meet. Between this and the publication pickup of Raina’s SMILE: A Dental Drama, it’s turning out to be a very good year for the kids from Brooklyn Queens dammit I knew that, thanks for the correction, Dave.

But just so we’re all clear, this does not necessarily mean that we’re gonna get an Agnes Quill movie; it means that the producers have negotiated for the right to make such a movie. A’course, Dave gets the financial benefits of that transaction whether or not the movie is ever made (and as has been pointed out before, more than one Hollywood idea-fountain has made a tidy living by not having movies made — options that expire can be resold again and again), so everybody be happy for Dave!

While we’re on the subject, anybody notice this peculiar corinsidence? Word of the Amulet deal came around St Patrick’s Day, Last Blood got announced on April Fool’s Day, and Agnes Quill in the immediate vicinity of Halloween. Look for the next big webcomic/movie deal around Groundhog Day.

• Speaking of Comics Bakery, their frequent convention boothmate (and my EE-knowin’, right-hand-rule-throwin’ brother) Kean Soo sends word that the second Jellaby book (Jellaby: Monster In The City) is now available for pre-order, with a release date and every damn thing. Unfortunately, it’s not until April, but maybe it drops a little bit early? Maybe? In the meantime, enjoy this Jellaby short.
• Finally, in the not quite ten days since the return of webcomics.com under the aegis of the Halpixel lads, there’s been some really good stuff going up. If you haven’t been over there yet, let me recommend particularly Krishna Sadasivam’s practical tips on using ComicPress, Dave Kellett’s interview with Karl Kerschl, and Chris Eliopoulos’s on how you either make comics because you want to, or because you can’t not make them. If the entire community continues to contribute quality material like this, they’re gonna put me out of business and I get to sleep more — sweet.

Hey, did you see this thing over at Octopus Pie where originals are now up for sale? If it’s a strip in the post-digital production period (basically, since August) and you’re the first to hit the buttons, you can have it for 150 clams. If you’re after a strip that’s digital, already sold, or you don’t have that many bivalves, you can get a print of anything for only 25. I made my early holiday purchases — how ’bout you?

Speaking of Octopie, did you notice the style homage over at Bellen earlier in the week? The Boxster is doing his comic in the styles of other webcomics this week and next, leading up to Halloween. A’course, the use of disguises for characters has a long and distinguished history in webcomics. Halloween 2000, anyone?

Finally, I think it’s fair to say that User Friendly doesn’t get much mention in webcomics circles; creator JD Frazer has always seemed to float more in the Linux nerd circles — it’s a classic case of have no general audience appeal. You either live and breathe this stuff and it’s the one bit of cultural ephemera that caters to your tribe, or it’s not for you. There’s a comfortable niche to be occupied being a premiere (or even exclusive) supplier of laugh-chuckles to a tribe — just ask the guys at Unshelved (although a lot more people have direct personal interaction with, and understanding of what is done by, librarians than with the running of an ISP).

But even with a webcomic that exists off to the side (as it were), there are things you have to pay attention to. Case in point: a comprehensive, hardcover, ten-year strip collection. That’s more than 1000 pages (at least, that’s what the ad says … the product description says 1000 strips, but it also says all the cartoons, so I’m believing the page count), and unless it’s on really crappy paper, I’m guessing about 7.5kg of dry weight. If you’re the sort that reads UF (and contrary to what many, even this page, may have said, the strip has improved since it debuted), put on the shelf next to your Far Side or Calvin & Hobbes slipcover editions.

One of my favorite discoveries since I started writing for Fleen was Moresukine, a journal webcomic (named for the beloved notebook it was drawn in) of sheer brilliance by Dirk Schwieger. Finding himself in Tokyo as a translator for a software company, Schwieger issued a challenge — send him tasks to accomplish in Japan, and he would undertake to:

• fulfill these missions;
• in the order they were received;
• regardless of personal interest in the task;
• and draw a comic about each experience

I’ve gone back to Schwieger’s two dozen adventures (which were spaced over a period of six months or so) time and again since then, and now I have in my hands the printed version of Moresukine, which hit the stores this week after a delay of some months (Christopher Butcher noted that the copy he bought from Schwieger at SDCC suffered cropping and printing problems, and speculates that the delay in rollout was to fix these problems). It’s a marvel.

For starters, the physical form of the book is an echo of the Moleskine — a black notebook with the ubiquitous ribbon bookmark (although pasted to the inside of the back cover, not sewn into the binding as in the genuine article), which is a necessity to properly present one of the postings. Schwieger’s journal is faithfully reproduced (minus a few ink smears), complete with the irregularly-spotty blacks in the title block of each new entry — the natural variations from Schwieger’s ink-stamp masthead being pressed into paper.

Especially interesting is the production job of mission #6, Gender, which is presented out of chronological order. In order to preserve the full impact of Schwieger’s visually intricate and interconnected work, Gender was printed on a single sheet and folded over twice. With the story on the hidden inside of this micro-booklet, the outside faces form pages 2 - 4 of mission 8 (Home Story) and page 1 of mission 9 (Para Para). It’s a bit hard to explain, but when you get to Home Story and notice the pages feel thick? Lift up from the bottom and turn the sheet outward on itself, and enjoy Gender. Just be careful folding everything back together again.

Having thoroughly digested Schwieger’s stories as they were posted, I thought that the paperfolding trick would be the only real surprise to be found in the book … it was a pleasure to be proved wrong. A year and a half ago, Schwieger sent his own challenge to ten webcomics creators whose work he enjoys — meet a Japanese person in your home city and have a conversation, then document the encounter in a comic.

Over the next four months, responses came back and Schwieger included them in the back of Moresukine. Even better, I was completely unfamiliar with more than half of the respondents, as they were heavily concentrated in France and Germany. The guest comics ranged from one-pagers from James Kochalka and Ryan North to 8- and 10-page complete stories from the likes of Monsieur le Chien and Marcel Guldemond. There’s a huge variety among artistic approaches and styles in the 10 guests — more than enough to spend days trawling through archives for a new favorite.

In all, it’s a beautiful piece of work, stunningly original, and well worth your investigation. You could just read Moresukine online, but trust me — this is one work of webcomickry where the the weight of a tangible artifact only enhances the experience.

So Raina Telgemeier’s all finished with the Baby-sitters Club series, which means nothing from her for a while, right? Nope! We get SMILE in 2010!

Scholastic has acquired Smile, Raina Telgemeier’s charming coming-of-age memoir written in comic format, currently scheduled for publication in 2010. Smile has been posted as a weekly comic on Telgemeier’s website and is about growing up, dealing with friends and crushes, and the dental drama that ensues after a trip-and-fall mishap.

Better yet? It’s gonna be in COLOR. There’s no part of this that isn’t awesome except for one little detail: the webcomic is basically on hold. Much like Kean Soo’s Jellaby, the conclusion of the story (a good 80 - 90 pages that have yet to appear online) will appear only in print.

On the one hand, that many pages would probably take until 2010 to run (remember, Raina’s got to go back and color the whole thing). On the other hand, I want to read the story, dammit (I already know how it turns out, in that Raina’s smile turned out awesome, but still). So let me just set aside $14.95 now (or whatever we’re using for economic exchanges in 2010 — soup ‘n’ old clothes, perhaps) and start countin’ the days. ONE …

On any other day, this would have been my lead, but oh well: whatever you might have heard of his personal temperment or thought of his various returns from retirement, it’s a safe bet that a solid majority of today’s webcomickers were influenced by Berke Breathed and Bloom County. So it’s a little significant to hear that he’s making Opus grow up for good, and that the ultimate fate of the scrappy penguin will only be revealed online. In other news, today’s installment at GoComics just happens to be the second of two that got me hooked on Breathed’s work way back when. Funny coincidence, innit?

I’m still a little bummed out to learn that Don LaFontaine died yesterday.

• Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars goes up for pre-order today. Remember: everybody that orders a sketched-in edition will directly contribute to Howard Tayler’s crippling hand and wrist pain, so let’s try to find a happy medium that balances Tayler’s health against his financial interests.
• Speaking of books, the mailman just now delivered my copy of Pugs: God’s Little Weirdos, which I will have to enjoy later because the postal service has bound up the package in so much of their industrial-strength tape that I’m presently unable to open the damn thing.
• So it’s reptiles now, Mr Malki !? Verrrrry interesting. Or perverse. One of those two.
• New website for You’ll Have That, as creator Wes Molebash has left publisher Viper Comics. Other projects for the coming year include an amped-up con schedule, a new YHT collection, and a graphic novel. Everybody congratulate Wes!
• In today’s Good Start deparment: Jovian Luck; it’s starting slow, but there’s a definite feel that creator Kyle Sanders has the full story mapped out. This is sci-fi in the Serenity mode, where space is just another place for hard-luck types to try and get by (although what it really reminds me of is an old BBC show called Star Cops, which you have never seen but was quite good).
• Finally, I have neglected the most recent Top Shelf 2.0 offerings, so let me fix that by pointing you towards contributions by Joe Decie (autobio and fiction with “a whole heap of ink wash”) and Kagan MacLeod (a bonus chapter to the self-published Infinite Kung Fu comic book).

Some things you will never get sick of; strand your ass out on a desert island, and they’re what you’ll take with you to keep sane.

For me, the list includes the collected essays of Stephen Jay Gould, Carmina Burana, Perpetuum Mobile, Save It For Later, Watermelon In Easter Hay, In Between Days, Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance, seasons 3 - 5 of The Muppet Show (anybody know where I can find a clip of the “teach yourself to fly” sequence from the Linda Carter episode?), the collected works of Hayao Miyazaki, Brad Bird, and Sir Simon Milligan & Manservant Hecubus, and as of today, The Great Outdoor Fight. Also a boat.

The most obvious challenge in creating this book: the strips collected here ran between 11 January and 30 March, 2006; they ranged from simple two-row strips of genteel conversation to irregular, screen-filling, action-packed behemoths (including Ray ripping a dude’s face off), which seem impossible to fit onto a regular page.

Creator Chris Onstad adapted by working with a page sized to two rows of panels, and chopped the strips into a continuous narrative, resizing where necessary to make it all an orderly grid. An occasional LATER or THE NEXT MORNING caption added allows the narrative to flow in a continuous manner, with almost no hint of the discrete installments that left readers sometimes waiting for three or four days for the next update.

This itself is remarkable, as Onstad has been famously quoted as not planning out his story lines — the characters go where they go, and surprise him as much as the rest of us. But The Great Outdoor Fight functions first and foremost as a complete story, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine that anyone could construct it one day at a time. The only hints that this was the method of creation come from the rising and falling panel counts in the individual online updates, which isn’t perceptible here; a few new, wordless splash pages are all that are necessary to bridge the transistions.

From the seemingly innocuous entrance of Todd (to talk about a genital-themed truck accessory of all things) to the final, somewhat abrupt “FIN”, The Great Outdoor Fight functions as a pure distillation of years of Achewood — the new reader can see the grand themes and histories of the characters coming off the page without a single page of backstory narration. You need not have read since small times to realize that it’s a big deal for Roast Beef to use punctuation. No familiarity with Ray’s scheming ways are required to know that he is not strong, that he is a coward who would desert a dying man. Ramses Luther Smuckles, a mystery to the old Achewood fan and newcomer alike, so perfectly wears his character in a mere ten panels that years later, a single shot of a bumper sticker is all that’s necessary for the reader to know he’s returned.

Onstad rounds out the book with a series of extras that provide the perfect context for this story. From the start of the Fight in 1923 at Ken Crandall’s farm to a selected set of champion biographies (including the cautionary tale of Ty Jessup, enticed into changing his name as a gimmick by an internet startup), to the significance of a black wristband, Onstad gives his creation a weight that’s astonishing.

It’s worth noting that these additions are original, and not taken from the fan Wiki that sprang up in the wake of this strip. Entertaining as that massive (and quickly-created) enterprise is, it’s an ahistorical artifact with only slight relation to Onstad’s world. In a few millenia when they make a weekly brainbox series about The Great Outdoor Fight, the wiki will be the writer’s bible; unfortunately, it will resemble what really happened on the Acres in the same way that Xena: Warrior Princess resembles Thucydides. Appropriately enough, Onstad references this phenomenon in history of the early Fight:

Some had Crandall shooting the victor dead and burning down the barn with all the bodies in it before killing himself; some merely substituted flank steak for the turkey. Penny paperbacks, utter pulp fan-fiction accounts of the event, were widely circulated. There was an illustrated Great Outdoor Fight training manual for children, a weekly radio program recapping the latest rumors, and even a book of Great Outdoor Fight recipes targeted at women.

Some of those recipes are reproduced in the book, by the way; I will be trying the Great Outdoor Delight and the “Dinosaur” Potato Chuds at the first opportunity¹.

Read The Great Outdoor Fight, perhaps most urgently if you are not a fan of Achewood. The characteristics of the strip that keep new readers from casually getting in on the game (and this is a weakness of Achewood — it took me four or five attempts before I really got it) are entirely absent here. The characters, the unique voicings, the utter batshit insanity that’s fully and completely committed to in service of the story are all here. And when you’re done reading it, you will find it is not sass in the main. This is a thing. This is completely a thing and Onstad’s every move is the new tradition

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¹ Although I fear that after the Chuds, I will be forced to quote Roast Beef and for the same reason ask you to excuse a man.