Rich Stevens’ decision to end the print version of Diesel Sweeties has been the mouse that didn’t roar — very little comment other than “good luck” is to be found in the blogosphere, and unlike earlier incidences of cartoonists leaving semi-syndication, there’s been almost no followup questioning. Those that love [web]comics seem to be collectively shrugging, Huh. Guess that makes perfect sense. Still, if you have questions for Rich, send ‘em in and he’ll answer them.

Look what’s coming my way; as cool as the POOP sign is, I think we all know where Mr Yates’s true genius lies. Speaking of Playground Ghostlies, David Malki ! would like you to remember that tomorrow is when Beards of our Forefathers hits your local comic shop.

Speaking of beards and other facial hair, this is the greatest headline since April 15, 1983.

For those of you distraught over Banished! being in black and white for past while, new colorist Vincent Rogers is on board and the comic is re-running the formerly B&W strips with a fresh coat of paint. You can now be officially un-distraught. Then again, Ryan Smith’s other comic, Funny Farm ends in August after nine or so years. I guess that means you can be re-distraught.

I hadn’t heard of Dribble For Kids before, but I’ve recently learned that creator Nick Nitro got robbed of his computer, which included his hi-res artwork for future print use. Thus, two items:

1. Two words: Off. Site. Trust me on this, I’m an IT guy in the day job. If you even think about the possibility of webcomics becoming more than a casual hobby, invest in something removable and then remove it from the vicinity of your originals. Hell, opening a mess of Gmail accounts under fake names and using the almost 7GB in each one works as a quick-and-dirty solution.
2. If the thought of off-site backups never occurred to you before today, you owe Nick like $5 for saving your ass in the event of future loss. Coincidentally, he’s got a sketch-art drive running now: $5 towards replacing the compy gets you art suitable for any application from the finest of museums to the door of the neighbor’s fridge.

Hooray, lappy problems, averaging 30 - 35 minutes between bluescreens, so this is gonna be fast.

Unshelved’s new book, Frequently Asked Questions, arrived in the mail yesterday. Very amusing, although I can’t in good consicence give it a proper review since Gene & Bill got me to contribute some content to their reprinting of the famed Coffee Cup Lid Challenge of Aught Seven. It was a great deal of fun working with the guys, and I got to use the words “Proustian madeleine” in reference to this comic strip. Now you’ll just have to go buy the book to see what the fuss is about.

Speaking of fuss, Webcomics Iron Man Ryan Estrada made it to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro with a medium-high amount of it sometime last week. Altitude sickness is nothing to joke about, but I have to confess that reading Ryan’s account of barfing every 30 yards or so elicited equal amounts of sympathy and mild amusement (in a schadenfreudistic fit of God I’m glad that wasn’t me). On the other hand, isn’t Iron Man supposed to be rich? Apparently, Estrada’s bank didn’t get the memo:

Both the day before I left up Kilimanjaro, and the day I got back, I spent a whole day walking between ATMs trying to find one that worked. But each time, it would say “cannot contact your bank” or “timed out”.

Guess who just found out that every single time he tried an ATM, it withdrew a couple hundred bucks from his account, but didn’t give him cash???

Guess who just lost the last thousand bucks he had on faulty bank machines?

IT’S ME!

Faulty, or a massive conspiracy against the wide-ranging Ryan? You decide, and maybe PayPal him a few bucks?

I also went to MoCCA this year (though not for day two and so missed the evacuation, fire trucks, and other such things), in part to table with the Trees and Hills folks and to hype our newest anthology, and in part to debut my new minicomic. (Weirdly, despite the 95+ degree heat, I also sold some monster hats.) But it’s also starting to be the only time of year when I see other comics folks; I haven’t been to SPX for quite a while and I have yet to brave anything comics-related on the West Coast. So it’s been tough for me to catch up with ongoing comics projects.

MoCCA is also usually fairly overwhelming for me; there’s a whole lot of stuff in a fairly little space, and I get distracted too easily. I also found myself this year ferrying home a small army of brightly painted wooden ghosts (okay, I work in a cubicle. These will help.), as well as some incredible mini posters by Rosemary Mosco, who’s got to be one of those folks everyone knows and loves and forgot to tell me about. (Of course, when I went to look at her site I thought, “Ah! Right! Birds for bulbs!“). Usually I end up with a fair amount of minis; this year I found that I had an awful lot of accessories.

And though I have a list of items I want to write about in coming weeks, ranging from L. Nichols’ Jumbly Junkery (in their print forms, the most recent issues of Jumbly Junkery have really extraordinary covers) to Colleen Frakes’ new Tragic Relief collection (Xeric powered!), I wanted to mention the Boston Comics Roundtable (which I know about mostly because of Matt Reidsma and Cathy Leamy, both of whom have comics available online and will be in the next issue) new anthology, Inbound. It’s this amazing-looking book, with catchy cover art and some compelling stories inside; many of the folks involved, like Dan Mazur, are webcomics artists in their own right, and it’s interesting to see them working in print. It’s a nice a little book, and a little different from what we usually see (or write about it) over here at Fleen, and I think it’s worth tracking down.

First of all, congratulations to Tyler Page, a regular exhibitor at MoCCA, who skipped for a very good reason — his wife Cori gave birth the day before the show. We at Fleen wish the family all the best and hope to see the little one at all future MoCCAs.

From the Books Department:

• Ryan North reports he’s working on the next Dinosaur Comics book; instead of the ‘best of’ approach he took in YWFIMOOM, this one will be the full run of strips from 2006. There will be a secret naming convention to Dinosaur Comics books from here on out, which you may try to unravel by purchasing all future volumes. Look for it to be released sometime next year.
• Cat Garza looked very happy behind a dwindling pile of the Secrets and Lies anthology he edited. He had every right to be considering the large number of contributors and tight production schedule (he only solicited for contributions a week after last Fall’s SPX). Cat’s a sterling gentleman, and I was pleased to make his acquaintance.
• David Malki ! saw great success from the debut of Beards of Our Forefathers, and is presently working on volume 2 of Dispatches From Wondermark Manor for release next month in San Diego. Look for Malki ! to shift his merchandise operations to Topatoco in the near term, leading to exciting stuff-bundle opportunities.
• Also debuting at MoCCA was Chris Yates’s Set it to Awesome, which is an astoundingly heavy book, what with the glossy full-color photos on every page. To this reporter’s eye, it outsold everything on the show floor except for POOP signs.
• Meredith Gran sold out of pretty much everything she brought, and is preparing for San Diego by sending the second Octopus Pie book to press in the next week. After that, we at Fleen hear plans of animations from Ms Gran.
• Also sold out: Spike’s went home without a single copy of Templar, AZ Book 1 left, and took plenty of pre-orders for the forthcoming Book 2. I pre-ordered mine back when there was snow on the ground — it’s got Reagan on the cover!
• Hope Larson does the coolest book customization ever — buy a copy of her thoroughly charming Chiggers, and she’ll take off the dust cover and paint directly onto the pigment-thirsty hard cover.
• Kean Soo’s Jellaby sketchbook is incredibly cute, yet Soo himself is a right-hand-rule-throwin’ badass. After the Jellaby story finishes in next year’s graphic novel, look for a third volume of short stories.

Not books:

• Andy Bell’s latest toy, The Giver, should be on a boat from far shores about now, making availability at San Diego a possibility (I suppose it depends on if Customs wants to be cooperative or not).
• Rosemary Mosco is thoroughly delightful, selling me her very last paleontology-themed alphabet print; we spoke widely over sophisticated adult-type beverages about things that are extinct and the people that study them.

Webcomickers seen at the show, in addition to the above, included Jon Rosenberg, Rich Stevens, Jeff Rowland, Sam Brown, Jeph Jacques, Chris Hastings, Alexander Danner, Dave Roman, Raina Telgemeier (who reports the with her last Babysitters Club book about to be released, she is looking forward to receiving hate mail from people upset about her treatment of the X-Men instead of her treatment of Kristy, Stacie, et. al.), Randall Munroe, Ryan Sias, Dirk Tiede, Shaenon Garrity, Danielle Corsetto, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and MoCCA curator-extraordinaire Jen Babcock.

Overheard in casual conversation:

Kean Soo, on Ryan North — I have dirt on the Man-Mountain.
Ryan North, in sad confirmation — I have made some bad decisions.

Photos tomorrow.

Not really webcomics per se, but sorta: I was just going to quietly revel in the awfulness of the now-infamous new Tokyopop contracts, but I don’t need to because Bryan Lee O’Malley’s already done so. More on the general topic of giving away your IP from the Halfpixellians in Webcomics Weekly #34.

And if you are going to work for essentially free, wouldn’t you rather it be for a good cause? Michael Rouse-Deane is looking for artists (who aren’t already working with him) to contribute to the Guest Strip Project’s big charity push:

Basically, I’m after 31 artists that ain’t on my list so far to do stand-alone strips for August as the GSP is having a huge month donation drive trying to gain money.

So I’m asking the artists to do strips during July for me that are stand-alone and don’t relate to any of the storylines we’ve had, and that the whole month is gonna be filled with artists and people visiting the site every day and hopefully donating to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Books!

• Andrew Bell’s Do Not Eat! is now available to those that haven’t fortunate (?) enough to be in near proximity to Andrew Bell. Please, share the tender back meat.
• I’m not sure how Paul Taylor manages to draw in a style that comes across as so light-hearted and fun, yet also satisfies every cheesecake fan that wants to be serviced. Whoof — that sounded sketchier than I intended, which I guess is okay, because Taylor’s just released a sketchbook of Wapsi Square mystery girl Monica. Non-repro blue never looked so good.

First and foremost, why did my wedding invitation not look like this? Dibs on the Helpolax!

• Transplant Comics has added Stendec by Cory Osterberg; it’s a weekly black and white gag strip. Also over at Transplant, Adam York Gregory of The Flowfield Unity has just released his second print collection. What makes this one special is … let’s allow Gregory to tell us himself:
  

  I worked as a typesetter and designer for a publishing house for a while, and I know how to set books, but using a couple of the POD services I found that whilst 90% of the time the end product was fine, there would be a few occasions where the printers would mess up — lost pages, bad cropping, someone else’s book appearing in the middle of mine — and since the books are sent directly without me, or apparently anyone else checking them, the first I would hear is when I received an email from a disappointed customer.

  That’s just not on. At least by hand making the book [emphasis Fleen's] I get to approve every copy. I use a traditional method, stitching the pages into sections (or signatures) and combining them before I add the cover.

  There was a time with these sort of comics when you knew that the person drawing them had very likely stapled your copy together … there is a contact link right there … and I wanted to go one further, I wanted to make each book an individual.

  It just seems to fit the ethos of my comic, the whole hand-drawn ideal translated reasonably well on the web, but in the process I lost something when turning it back into a book. Now, I’ve corrected that.

  Editorial note here — looking at the price of the hand-made book, it is somehow comparable to POD pricing. Well done, Adam York Gregory!

• Recent round numbers: Real Life has 2000 strips under its belt, and Arthur, King of Time and Space has reached four years. Congrats!
• And finally, Cat Garza wants you to know that his latest project (editing the Secrets & Lies anthology) will release at MoCCA in two weeks, in the vicinity of table C27. Old school comics guys, webcomickers, students from the CCS. Drop by and give it a good look-see!

Me, I’m getting an early start on it.

• As an official mover/shaker in the world of webcomics, I hereby declare Shelly Winters to be the muse of New Jersey. She’s a ginger goddess of wisdom, and all of us who aren’t dead inside love her. If you need a place to stay, Shelley, we have a guest room.
• Why did I not see this until just now? Dirk Schwieger’s brilliant little journal webcomic reprinted in a replica Moleskine (the city notebooks are awesome)? OH CRAP YES.
• Missed it: Several webcomics I read have such a dense and important plot that I leave them to build up 10 - 20 updates and read them in chunks; Shi Long Pang is one, and Rice Boy another. With the climax quickly building, I was on a break and so missed that it wrapped up on Wednesday. I doubt I’ll have time to sit down and re-read all 439 pages from beginning to end in one session, but that’s really what it deserves. Give it a good read-through and if you aren’t sniffling a little at the end, we can’t be friends. Special thanks to alert reader “Hmpf” for letting me know.
• Finally, if Matt Boyd keeps cranking out articles like this one, I’ll have to reconsider my current No, I’m not going to visit a pop-culture trivia quiz site, ever stance. Dammit, Matt — I like that stance.

First up, a quick note from the Energizer Bunny of webcomicdom — Kevin & Kell, which has as good a claim on the title of “oldest continuing webcomic” as any contender I’m aware of, is releasing its thirteenth book next month. If, as they say, half of success is just showing up every day, Bill Holbrook’s a pretty damn successful guy. More details here.

Down to business. Recently received in my email:

Øyvind Thorsby wrote:
Hitmen For Destiny has reached 100 strips.

Short and to the point, I like that. A webcomic I’d not heard of, that’s good. And non-English character in the name? Gold. That was almost as far as I got, because Hitmen For Destiny is, sad to say, damn ugly. Not merely primitive in its art, but really, really, eye-hurtingly painful. Holy Assmaster I thought, it’s User Friendly with freakin’ big heads.

But we’ve talked about this before — the question of whether or not writing alone is enough to carry a strip. We’ve considered situations where the art is as minimal as will get the idea across, or deliberately taken out of the equation, but this is a case of Can writing save a strip where the art is just bad?

I think it might. There’s a clever idea serving at the core of Hitmen For Destiny — a pair of cadaverous (and in at least one case, otherwordly) goons work for Destiny (the proverbial Destiny — the anthropomorphic personification of What Will Be) making sure that prophecies come true, by killing anything that might get in the way. That’s a really interesting idea, but you have to sort of tease it out; it’s not explicitly presented to you. Along the way, a quite normal young lady gets thrown into a mix of prophecy fulfillment (even if she doesn’t realize it), leading to a cavalcade of bizarre monsters and absurd situations.

But balance that against the fact that Hitmen For Destiny contains an installment titled In which my throat inflation fetishist readers are catered for. Be warned: that link contains exactly what it promises.

Despite the visuals (and even if you didn’t click on that link, it’s in your head now — I had to see it, you have to see it, too) there’s a gleeful tone to the batshit insanity of it all, and even if 100 strips later the art hasn’t significantly improved from the first strip, damn if I couldn’t say I was curious to see what happened next. The story meanders, and the central conceit of an army of goons making sure Things Happen is only rarely addressed, but I wanted to see just what kind of whackjobbery Thorsby would come up with next.

If nothing else, a series of three different sets of antagonists fighting out in three-and-a-half different places in a house (there’s these portals, see, and they skitter around, and … nevermind, just read it yourself), with quick cuts from one confrontation to another, and space becoming not just where the action takes place, but an active component of the scene — it’s obvious that Thorsby is really trying to show us something that we haven’t seen before, and if the visuals don’t match up to the concept, I’m finding myself not entirely caring about the visuals. Except for the throat-inflation thing. That’s just — ew.

So I’m back. I’m also pretty ass-draggy and two weeks behind what you reprobates have been up to, so this is gonna be quick.

Spike is takin’ pre-orders for the second volume of Templar, AZ. You, not being the enemy of all that is good in life, want the second volume of Templar, AZ. You will obtain it now by clicking here. Keep in mind that until the pre-orders roll in it’s not going to press which means I can’t get my copy so move, people.

Editor’s note: Hey, popping up for a minute here to say dammit, looks like pre-written scheduled entries strip out the links and alt-text from the pix. You can get TAODMV2SS from the Raptor Bandit Industries store at Topatoco, and HTMW from any of the four creators. DNE is not available yet, but you can eventually get it from The Creatures In My Head. Links to be fixed in all posts when the time presents itself, and Fleen apologizes for the inconvenience.

All that you need to know about The Adventures of Dr McNinja, Volume 2 — Surgical Strike by Chris Hastings and Kent Archer (cover by the unreasonably talented Carly Monardo, with a bonus story by Benito Cereno) is that it features all of the following:

• A child menaced by otherworldly monsters
• Not one, not two, but three ninjas on fire
• A gorilla and a raptor fighting over hot dogs
• The most awesome ninja in the world gaining authority by means of his moustache
• Death, maître d’ of the afterlife
• Hos that die, because that is one of a handful of things that hos do (bonus story only)
• A clearly expressed desire by the hero to grab the villain by his ponytail then twirl him around a few times and let go so he flies off and lands on a pile of something sharp or something that explodes or even just off a cliff (all but one of these happens)

Plus more face kicks, explosions, and beatdowns than you can count. This book is made of pure awesome. The only way it could be made better is if the paper stock were slightly thicker, as the comic does feature some pretty substantial black fills, and there was a little bit of bleed-through.

This does not matter in the long run. If there were any more kicking and things blowing up in this book, it would have to be written by Warren Ellis.