Brian “Box” Brown (or Trip-B as he was known in his brief, but well-regarded, gangsta rap career) has released a new webcomic yea upon the internets, Everything Dies. A continuation of/supplement to his print comics of the same name (note to self: must buy issue #3, and #4 is due out soon), Everything Dies concerns itself primarily with The Big Questions of Life, Death, Religion, Faith, ans Suchlike.

On launch day alone, Brown has three stories (each more than 10 pages long) on mortality (i.e.: how he wants his funeral to go), public exhibitions of religious fervor (i.e.: an incomplete Jesus-themed theme park in Arkansas), and the (non-)existence of God (i.e.: what would constitute definitive proof of such).

And, in case a bigger justification for the title of Everything Dies were needed, Brown today wraps up his long-running series, Bellen!, the only way possible: a final declaration of identity and purpose.

• Con season still has a few last hurrahs before it wraps for the year, and two of them are coming up quickly: Intervention and SPX kick off in just over 10 days, and programming info is now available. Intervention’s got more than 75 panels, plus gaming and separate-registration-required workshops, covering a lot of ground.

  If you were, as I was, perhaps a little surprised to see multiple sessions that amount to Gettin’ Laid (Dating Advice from Hot Geeky Chicks, Sex Farm: A D00DZ Guide to Getting Chicks Through Nerdy Enterprise), well, there are plenty to balance it out on the more serious side (Act Locally, Promote Globally: A Conversation with Molly Crabapple, Copyrights for Artists, The Economies of Small Scale, and Revenue Streams: How to Make Ten-Tenths of a Living look particularly promising). Descriptions here, schedules here.

  By contrast, SPX has never been heavy on the programming, preferring to give attendees plenty of time to schmooze and talk with creators (and minimize the chance that you’ll have to decided between panels). You’ve got something kicking off pretty much every half hour, staggered between two rooms (Brookside Conference Room at the top of the hour, and White Flint Ampitheatre at the bottom), with pretty much a laser-like focus on indy comics and their creators.

  Particularly good-looking descriptions include Comics and Worldbuilding (panelists include Evan Dahm, Liz Baillie, Aaron Diaz, Carla Speed McNeil, and Spike Trotman), Telling Stories (with Heidi MacDonald, Meredith Gran, Roger Langridge, and Jon Lewis), and Kate Beaton and Julia Wertz in Conversation (with special guest Dustin Harbin). Descriptions, times, and locations here.

Quick bits:

• Reality TV meets vampires meets furries meets cyberpunk meets book one of The Last Res0rt.
• New twist on the superhero tropes: with mondo-powered beings flying around every damn way, somebody’s going to have to handle the PR and marketing, and that’s where The Hero Business comes in. Of course, who is more evil and venal? The nominal villains, or the skeezy marketing types working for the heroes? Episode 1 done, episode 2 coming soon.
• Launching tomorrow: the all-new home of In Maps & Legends, which had been running on Zuda when Zuda closed up shop.

Got a link in the mail to the preview of an e-book by DJ Coffman. This isn’t a review, since I a) don’t have the entire book in front of me; b) wouldn’t have had to time read it properly since it launched yesterday, and c) it’s not even remotely aimed at me. Ca$h for Cartoonists is bright, colorful, has a busy, eye-grabbing (almost advertising-like … and if there’s one thing ad guys knows, it’s how to hold eyeballs) design, and (as befits an e-book) up-to-the-second. For instance, you can get a discount on website hosting with a code provided in the introductory section, something that would be all but impossible with a traditional ink-and-paper presentation.

The chapters are pretty specific (“Spot Illustration”, “Digital Caricatures”, and “ACEO (Art Cards)” are the first three), and are presented in a detailed, relentlessly upbeat tone. There’s not enough in the preview to see if any of the full book ramps back a bit from the enthusiasm (Here’s how you can do this!) to something perhaps a bit more realistic (Here’s how I did this, you should be able to make it work similarly, but keep in mind that it’s a different economic climate and your mileages of persistence, luck, and talent will vary.), which I hope does happen.

All those copies of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (or more recently, all the How to Draw Manga books) led to an awful lot of starry-eyed kids who were certain that success was imminent; some lost interest or found other dreams, some wound up bitter, and they didn’t have an easily identifiable and accessible author to blame their lack of success on. Here’s the risky bit for Coffman:

A VERY SPECIAL OFFER! For a limited time when you buy the full edition of my ebook, I’m going to make myself available to you for the ?rst 30 days as a Personal Cartooning Career Coach… or Comic Coach… or, well I really don’t have a fancy title for this service, but if you draw comics or cartoons and want to personally pick my brain, or if you’re feeling stuck and need inspired… this is the deal for you!

Why be coached by me? I’ve done just about everything you can do in the cartooning business, from newspaper syndication to full blown super hero comics with a big hollywood producer. Not only have I had a ton of success with my skills, but I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way which I learned from and can pass a lot of knowledge on to you.

ONE MORE THING… You’ll have a chance to get on the AWESOME LIST. What is it? A special email newsletter for buyers of the full edition only, which basically assures this book will never end! I’ll send you updated ways to earn more money with your cartoons and illustrations as they become available. [emphasis original]

I hope that those starry-eyed kids don’t take Coffman’s enthusiasm for a promise, and really hope they don’t read over the most important part of that quote:

I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way

Let’s cut that down one more time for those in the back:

I’ve also failed many times

No book will keep you from having your own failures, starry-eyed kids! Keep that very important bit of perspective in mind while you peruse the lessons! $47 to download, going up to $97 after September 30.

• Speaking of $47, if you had that much to spend but don’t want Coffman’s book, you could get the 2-day VIP package for NEWW 2 and have $2 left over to buy a refreshing beverage. Plain ol’ non-VIP passes are $10, and one-day passes $6, for those that can live without the special-edition NEWW2 Sharpie (not sure I can).
• Speaking of books, Chris Eliopolous pulled a fast one on me with this morning’s tweet:
  

  The book. http://www.miserylovessherman.com/2010/08/26/the-book/

  I can’t be the only one that got his hopes up that this would be another Misery Loves Sherman collection, can I?

The Ignatz nominees were announced earlier today, and I found the honorees for Outstanding Online Comic to be … odd. Maybe more than other comics awards, the Ignatzes vary widely in character from year to year, but like other named-year awards, they’ve pretty much always looked at work for the year before the award: the 2009 award honored work primarily done in 2008, the ‘08 award for work in ‘07, and so forth.

This year, however, they seem pretty determined that the 2010 award will honor work done in 2010 (which isn’t quite 2/3 done yet). Consider the nominees:

• John Callahan’s Callahan Online is a now-frozen two-week archive of Callahan’s panel gag toons. Frozen, because he died at the end of last month, so anybody looking to examine his work will have those ten panel gags to judge and not much else. Hate to say it, but this feels like an Oh crap, did we honor him while he was alive? afterthought.
• Sarah Becan’s I Think You’re Saucesome is a diary comic that focuses on weight loss. It’s got a taste of Bellen!, here, a bit of Kinokofry there, and reminds me a lot of Stop Paying Attention, so that’s okay. Lots of updates (between 3 and 6 new strips a week), but it only began on March 1st of this year.
• Stephen Gilpin’s The Lesttrygonians features an archive going back to 1998 (!), but only 21 of those strips (weekly, from April of this year) are more recent than October 2000. It’s nice stuff, between a half- and full-page each week, but it’s a small amount of work in a short amount of time; the decade-long hiatus means the older stuff could barely be considered the same strip.
• David King’s Reliable Comics is a bit tougher to parse, temporally speaking — he posted a series of strips done in 2007-2008 between Dec 2009 and Feb 2010. February to April he posted strips from 2009, and since April work done this year, for a total of 26 “recent” strips.
• Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 began at the end of November 2009, and is currently in progress. Of the nominees, it appears to be the only one that features a traditional story, with a beginning, middle, and end; tonally, it feels a lot like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison.

None of this is meant to say That strip shouldn’t win/even be nominated because it’s ____ !; if the jury decided that the best comics work of the past year is heavily skewed towards the past five months, then that’s their call. I just can’t recall any award iteration that took the year quite so literally. I won’t be at SPX so I don’t get to vote, but I like (and this may be a side effect of having the fullest bodies of work to judge) Dawson and Becan quite a lot.

• Speaking of time, Amulet Book 3: The Cloud Searchers is out in two weeks!
• You may have heard that Our Kate (Beaton, that is … look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, son) is about to decamp from Canada for a period of time and hunker down in Brooklyn for a spell. Not content to see what a change of venue will do to her creative side (whenever she travels, she gets a bunch of really good comics from it), Beaton’s decided that she’s going to celebrate her new home by working for the good of others.

  Specifically, she’s joined up with a team of comics types to participate in the 2010 Run for Congo Women (New York, 5K, 25 September), with monies raised going to Women for Women International. Team Comics has their fundraising page here, and they could use your help. Hop to it, people, and Kate, next time I see you I owe you a tasty beverage for being a Damn Good Person.

Quick things!

• John Campbell had an art show. Here are pictures of the art show. Saddening!
• Dave Kellett, Keith Knight, and David Malki ! tried to spell words for charity. Here is the story of how famous and/or beautiful people are favored in our society. Shocking!
• TCAF 2011 applications now being accepted. Right-thinking people regard this as a good thing. Woo!
• The original may have been a hoax, but it’s still comics. Whiteboardery!
• Jeff Zugale did an analysis of “print” vs “web” business models for comics, and found that the “web” model has always been in use. It’s behind the subscription wall at Webcomics Dot Com which is a shame because this needs to be part of the broader conversation. Mayhap the newly vacationed Brad Guigar could be convinced to make this one a freebie?

Longer thing!

At the time I was writing yesterday’s update, I did not yet know what was waiting in my mailbox: a gifted copy of We Are The Engineers by Angela Melick. Considering that the book was announced as pre-order on the 11th and arrived from across an international border (and a weekend!) on the 16th, how could I not read it immediately?

A confession — since I met Ms Melick at NEWW last year, I’ve been a faithful reader of Wasted Talent, but I never read back far enough into the archives to cover her college years, when the inspired-by-life strip began (an aside: were this a movie, it would be touted as based on the incredible true story; since Melick as an engineer, it’s probably best described as slapped a linear approximation transform on what actually happened because crap on a stick, have you seen how messy the real data were?).

Turns out that I needn’t have felt guilty about it, as Melick has gone back to redraw the “best of” several hundred strips and distill down the period when she was still cartooning with improvised materials in margins (again, engineer) into her much cleaner and accomplished current style.

I have often remarked on how Melick (and Kean Soo, for that matter) and I share a bond of common experience. It doesn’t matter that it was different times, different countries, or different disciplines — engineers are an odd folk, and we get each other. Being part of an overworked, high-achieving minority within a much larger university was Melick’s experience, whereas I was part of a high-achieving, overworked, all-nerd school across town from a much larger (but entirely unrelated) university. She studied physical stuff, and I the more intangible (ECE511, I still remember you). UBC engineers built an artificial pond to throw people into, we had the natural variety. A decade and a half of technological and cultural change (not to mention a Y chromosome) separate her experiences from mine, and still — every page of WATE resonates like I was there alongside her.

But here’s the thing — much as engineers like to hold ourselves apart (it’s a comfort to us, having long ago realized we could have had a lot more fun and sex in college if we had picked easier majors), we really aren’t that much different from anybody else¹.

The experience of being a student engineer puts a certain sharp relief on certain aspects of college (our experiences were probably more math-intensive than most), but everybody remembers studying too long, working projects too hard, praying for a curve to kick in and rescue everything. Everybody remembers looking down on another major and wondering how they had it so easy, or a first job and wondering if you’d ever get the hang of things. Everybody had idiot traditions and the revered history of those that came before you.

Whatever your experience of working too hard with others sharing the same goal, you’ll find your memories coming back after reading WATE. It took Proust seven books and a cookie to provoke this kind of involuntary recall, and he didn’t even have one psychotic squirrel in there, so screw him; you won’t be able to write a senior thesis around WATE, but you’ll have a hell of a lot of fun reading it.
_______________
¹ Nah, we totally are.

New Jess Fink site! She said “poop”!

• Okay, this is the sort of story that changes quickly, so by the time you read this it may no longer be an issue. There’s a new webcomic-reading application over in the iPhone/iPad apps store, by one Mr or Ms Reilly Watson. Unlike the last one of these that made a splash in the community, this app does not appear to be a simple RSS feed aggregator — it appears to pull comics from the creator’s site, present it outside of their preferred context, costing the creators bandwidth and advertising revenue (I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, so my apologies if I’m wrong on this one). One more time for those in the back: RSS readers = cool, scrapers = not cool.

  Mr or Ms Watson might particularly want to pay attention to a bit from Robert Khoo at the SDCC Webcomics Lightning Round, as it bears repeating:

  Question: Going back to people taking your content, were you aware of how you have to protect your work always, and is that likely to change?
  Khoo: It’s very complicated, and would take a lot more than twenty seconds to answer properly; we aggressively protect ourselves from people trying to make money off our marks, otherwise we see it as a form of community enabling.[emphasis original]

  And lookee there — Mr or Ms Watson mentions Penny Arcade as one of the ‘popular comics’ included (although I must point out in the service of snark that Mr or Ms Watson seems to have farmed support for the app out to Canadian Google), which means that Mr or Ms Watson is indeed making money off that mark.

  Quick hint to Mr or Ms Watson and all who might follow in his or her footsteps: the Patent and Trademark Office maintains a simple trademark search which shows exactly who owns what. I’ll also point out that trademark owners have an obligation to defend their marks, and that registration means that violators are subject to treble damages. That would be the case here even if the app is just an RSS aggregator, since it’s advertising on a name and identity owned by somebody else. If the app in question is a scraper, Mr or Ms Watson should prepare to share out revenue to the creators who are going to be demanding compensation.

• Oh hecka yeah — Angela Melick, aka Jam, aka Spike Without Dreads, aka my right hand rule homie, has done the crazy and redrawn a bunch of her Wasted Talent college-era strips in order to put her first book together. We Are The Engineers debuts at Anime Evolution this weekend, and goes up for pre-order on the 13th for artists editions, with actual online sales on 18 September.

  For everybody that ever wondered what the crap was going on in the head of the engineers that they know and (let’s be honest — only sometimes) love, Melick is your translator. We’re definitely a breed apart, and she’s our ambassador to the world of people that don’t subscribe to the notion If it ain’t broke, break it and see if you can make it better! We are an oft-misunderstood people, and may consider WATE as a field guide to our mysterious ways.

• Finally, because a few people have been asking — I’m not going to be able to make it to SPX and/or Intervention next month; unfortunately, I’ve got a little too much going on this autumn, and will save my away from home time for NEWW. On the upside, most everybody I would see in Bethesda will be in Easthampton in November, so that’s all right.

  For those of you that are heading to Maryland, Casey Roberson wants you to know that there are hotel bargains o’plenty in the immediate area of the two shows, including a place called Legacy Hotel in Rockville (less than 2 miles from SPX) with single-bed rooms for $68/night. Please note that we at Fleen are not travel service and make no claims about the quality of accommodations. Then again, you could probably get cut by a murderous drifter just as easily at an expensive hotel as a cheap one, so may as well save a few bucks.

For those of you wondering, MoCCA Art Fest 2011 (9 and 10 April, at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan) tables are almost available [PDF]. There were a couple years there where applications were only accepted by mail and by hand, and local cartoonists pretty much shut out everybody else, but the note here says:

Registrations will be accepted on a first come, first served basis beginning August 10th by fax (212-254-3590), mail (594 Broadway, ste. 401, New York, NY 10012), email (exhibitors@moccany.org), and in person.

… which ought to equalize things nicely. It was pretty well-run this year compared to last (with a rookie crew of show-runners and unseasonable heat turning 2009 into a sweaty mess), but since I don’t exhibit you’ll have to decide for yourselves if the table costs (below the cut) are worth it.

• Speaking of time-sensitive opportunities, we’re just four days away from Jenny Everywhere Day 2010. In case you’ve forgotten (it has been nearly a year since we mentioned her), Ms Everywhere is:
  

  [A]n open source character created in 2001 by Steven Wintle and the members of the Barbalith forums. She’s free to use by anyone in any capacity they see fit.

  Jenny exists in all realities at the same time and her powers stem from an ability to “Shift” herself and others from one reality to another. Her exact powers/limitations within any given story are up to the people working on it.

  The two things that make her “Jenny Everywhere” are her goggles and her scarf. Every other aspect to her design (including race, body type, hair color, eye color, number of limbs, etc.) are completely up for grabs and fall under the discretion of the creator.

  Create your own interpretation of Jenny Everywhere, and submit on or before the 13th to be part of the fun.

• News in the webcomics-publishing sphere: Chris and Kyle Bolton of SMASH have signed a deal to have Season One of their webcomic published by Candlewick Press (who appear to be new to the comics game, but have quite a catalog of kids and YA books).

  SMASH has a loose-limbed, gleefully frenetic style to the art (not unlike Skottie Young’s work on the OZ adaptations at Marvel) and a breakneck pace to the story, as befits a 10 year old that suddenly finds himself all supered-up. Best of all, with publication (date TBA) all arranged, the Boltons have time to get SMASH season two underway, with serialization starting next month.

• Finally, is there no limit to the depths to which he will sink? Two geekly pursuits stretched and squashed into a four-word pun that strains language to the breaking point? Brad Guigar is a bad man. A very bad man.

(more…)

Long week, cocktails still hours away. Let’s do this.

• Gather ’round children, and let me tell you a story. First, there was the idea, then the dream. Dinosaur Comics posited the idea of a machine that could tell you how you would die, and David Malki !, Ryan North, and Matthew Bennardo had the dream of collecting stories inspired by that machine.

  The dream had a name: Machine of Death, an anthology of stories about the machine and how it affected people, illustrated by webcomicdom’s finest, released as print book, audiobook, and Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 licensed PDF.

  The stories were selected (so few stories, crushing the dreams of more than 600 aspirants [and now you know why David Malki ! is known to this day as The Dreamcrusher, children]), the illustrators obtained, and then … nothing.

  Until now.

  After a long year of excitement, disappointment, renewed excitement, continued disappointment, thickheadedness, obstinacy and relief, we are pleased to announce that Machine of Death will be officially released this October by Bearstache Books, the boutique printing arm of Wondermark Enterprises.

  So that’s all right, then.

• Lotta guest strips flying through the aether to give the aforementioned Ryan North a break for his upcoming troth-plighting (Happy third night of RyanAndJennyMas, everybody), including today’s by the aforementioned Dreamcrusher. But these are not your only shots at guest strips, whoa no. For instance, Wes Molebash is the sort to plan ahead for disaster, and has issued an open call for Max vs Max guest strippage:
  

  Send your guest strips to me at wes (at) maxvsmax (dot) com and use Guest Strip Submission as the subject. If you do not use Guest Strip Submission as the subject, then it is likely your submission will get buried in my inbox never to be seen again.

  Save your comics as .PNG or .GIF files and make sure they are 980 pixels wide. I don’t care how tall they are. They can be black-and-white, color, grayscale . . . whatever. Draw my comic the way YOU would draw my comic.

  I don’t really care what you write about or what characters you feature. I do ask that you keep it fairly clean (PG or PG-13).

  I’m not sure when these strips will run. They may get published at the end of the month during my wedding week, or I may save them for a later date. You may want to keep that in mind during your writing process.

  Please include any links and pertinent information about your blog/comic strip/website in the body of your email. I want to send you some link love for helping me out, and I won’t be able to do that if you don’t give me a URL.

  Man, everybody’s getting married. Maybe I should do that sometime.

• Is there anything that can’t catch fire with a Kickstarter crowd? Described by its own creator as a “combination of really cute and slightly oogy”, the PuppyCow plush has hit about 1/3 of goal in four days. If you always wanted an abomination of nature craftded “seven inches tall and featur[ing] udders made out of a fake leather material”, now’s your chance.
• Time’s running out to send some last minute good wishes to Steven Cloud before he drops himself into a war zone for the sheer beardiness of it. Rall will be sending out updates via Stephanie McMillan, so follow her on Twitter or watch this page for important news. Honestly, I hope there isn’t any — no news means that Cloudy, Bors, and Rall are alive, fed, and not too uncomfortable, and I wish nothing less than the most boring trip ever for them.

Could it possibly be too early to congratulate Ryan North and Jenn Klug on their upcoming (this weekend) nuptials? No, it could not possibly. In fact, Ryan is such a large man, I suspect that each year will require several days of congratulations on either side of the actual date to adequately express ones appreciation of said marriage. Happy first night of RyanAndJennyMas, everybody.

Also, there will be rad Dinosaur Comics guest strips for a while, such as the above standout by John Allison.

• Breaking news! David Malki ! and Dave Kellett, in accordance with ancient Dave Law (and that community service thing they got slapped with) are raising money for 826 Valencia’s Los Angeles chapter, 826LA. They are doing so by competing in a spelling bee that allows teams to cheat based on how much money they raise. I’ll let Mr Malki ! explain:
  

  [I]t takes place August 14 in Santa Monica, CA. Keith, Dave Kellett and I are on a team called “The Sweaty Hams,” because we are all men and, well, sometimes things happen. We’re somewhat late-comers to the fundraising game, so we are trying to raise pledges to buy “cheats” so we can be competitive in the event!

  Cheats include passing on a difficult word, buying immunity after spelling a word wrong, swapping places with another team member, and other non-officially-endorsed-by-the-American-Spelling-Association deviousnesses. (See how I used a word that’s probably not in their official lexicon?) We only get cheats — and thus, a fighting chance against the other teams with loads of cheats — if we raise money! 826LA is a volunteer-based organization that helps kids in a number of remarkable and wonderful ways. Will you please help our team with a donation?

  The event is less than two weeks away and thanks to rudderless team leadership we are entering the fundraising race way at the back of the pack. PLEASE DO NOT LET US FAIL IN THIS

  AS WE DO MOST EVERYTHING ELSE [emphasis original]

  Guys, I’m going to be honest here. Neither David nor Dave is necessarily “down” enough with your arbitrary “rules” to spell words “correctly” and if they bomb at this competition it will look bad for webcomics as a whole. They are going to need all the help they can get to keep from embarrassing you personally; even getting a simple one-letter hint costs a hundred smackers, and something tells me they’re going to rely on the Invent-A-Word ploy ($1500 each) a lot. A couple bucks now could save a lot of heartache later.

• New Octopus Pie after Meredith Gran’s book-tour hiatus, and even better — there will be more every Monday-Wednesday-Friday! Also, her studiomate (and Latin Heartthrob) Aaron Diaz has the results of the Dresden Codak Reenactment Contest, meaning it’s been a hell of a productive time at Dunning-Kreger Solutions, Ltd.

I’ve largely completed my SDCC acquired media binge. Selected two-sentence reviews follow:

• Flight 7: Prepare to have your mind blown as Michel Gagné’s Rex folds back on itself recursively, with captions connecting to the next part of the story, found in Flight 2. The rest is simply wonderful, with Kazu Kibuishi adhering most closely to the now largely-forgotten theme suggested by the series title.
• Family Man: Dylan Meconis is very, very good with the art, very, very complete with the footnotes, and very, very evil to leave us on the cliffhanger she did. Give her your attention and money.
• SMBC Theater Goes To Hell: This DVD collection of sketches goes out of its way to convince me that Zach Weiner and James Ashby are the rudest, foulest, and generally worst people in the world, and succeeds. So I guess that’s good for them?
• Koko Be Good Not actually obtained in San Diego because Gina Gagliano assured me a complimentary review copy would be waiting for me at home and it was. Jen Wang’s story of finding out that what you think you want isn’t always what you really want has been haunting me, and is easily the best thing I’ve read since Tracy White’s How I Made It To Eighteen; highest recommendation, obtain on day-of-release if you enjoy things that are awesome.

Edit to clarify: the SMBC Theater DVD was given to me by the creators, and to add previously-missed links.

Let’s start with the fun stuff.

• Do you like free booze? Sure, we all do.¹ Good news for you, Sparky — Dave Kellett has worked his magic and (yet again) lined up a free booze sponsor for his latest book launch party. Those of you lucky enough to be in the vicinity of Beverly Hills can check out the latest Sheldon and Drive collections, and pound down completely free tequila until the very fancy people eject you from the venue, and possibly the city limits. If you’re found two days later in a tub full o’ ice missing a kidney, don’t blame Dave; tequila must be treated with respect.
• Heard on the premiere business-information program of these shores on Monday afternoon: a story on policing internet behavior and a reference to the Greater Internet uh, Jerkwad, Theory. Heard on the same program Tuesday afternoon, a belated recognition of the authors of said theory. Dunno if Mike and Jerry listen to Marketplace or not, but this is as close as you can get to an official imprimatur from the business community that They Matter.
• Speaking of commerce, Andy Bell sold literally a thousand of his Android toys at San Diego, and only via careful rationing did they last to almost lunchtime on Saturday. For those of you not lucky enough to score some, the newest resupply is due up at the Dead Zebra site in the next week or two.
• Guess what I’m getting: Dr McNinja Boy Scout patches! The Potomac Council is selling its leftovers, details of which can be found here. If you’re interested I’d email sooner rather than later, but it’s one very nice woman named Susan that’s taking care of this sudden influx of attention, so be polite and patient with her. Also, she’s trying to keep track of order requests, addresses, and payment info, which is much simpler if you reply to her emails instead of starting new ones with each exchange.

Okay, time to get serious. Go read this piece at The Comics Journal on censorship in Sweden, then come back. For those of you who are contrary and don’t feel like reading, it concerns an established, long-respected manga translator who was convicted in June on the charge of possessing child pornography, for having on his computer a few dozen scanned manga pages related to translation projects. The pictures were deemed to be “of a sexual nature” and to depict “characters under the age of 18″. Woo, pedophile off the streets, we can all sleep better at night, forces of decency triumph.

Maybe.

Nobody knows how explicit the pictures (again, not photos, not anything that actually depicts any living person, much less a child) might be because it’s illegal for them to be seen by anybody, and therefore we have only the prosecutor’s word to go on. And here’s the kicker:

In Sweden, all images – be it photos, movies, animations or drawings – depicting what one can understand to be a child (i.e. under the age of 18) in a sexual situation, are regarded as child pornography, since the legislators agreed on using the word “image” instead of “photo” in the law. The ban does not apply to text, though, only images.

This law has been active for almost a decade, but this ruling is the first one ever in Sweden where drawn images have been deemed child pornography in a court of law, and it might thus create a precedent. This could have far-reaching consequences for comics, both for artists and readers. Serious depictions of abuse, autobiographical stories of sexual debut, or simply children without clothes on, may now be classified as child pornography. [emphasis added]

We’ll neglect for the moment the fact that the age of consent in Sweden is 15, and that it’s impossible to decide if a cartoon character that’s meant to be an adult is “too young-looking”. Instead, let’s concentrate on this:

One major problem is the fact that since it is illegal to even look at images like these, the images that were the grounds for the conviction cannot be shown anywhere. This leads to a Catch-22 situation where it is virtually impossible for anyone to decide whether something is illegal or not.

Until this gets settled? You probably shouldn’t read Rene Engström’s highly-regarded work within the geographical boundaries of Sweden, since Johan and Tina might have been underage, Little Shit might look too young, and diary comics of bathing your kids are obviously criminal in nature.

Those links don’t work, because as much as we know that none of those things described is wrong in any way, somebody out there is screaming Won’t you please think of the children? and might make things difficult for Rene and I won’t make it any easier for them to start their witch-hunt. The fact that I need to think in those terms really pisses me off.
_______________
¹ For maximum impact, read that line in the voice of Informercial Sally Struthers.

Friday. Last day off work of vacation, weekend a-comin’. Let’s do this.

• Re: Penny Arcade’s PATV season one finale. Wow. Just watch it.
• Re: Skin Horse book2 pre-order on Kickstarter ends in 23 hours (as of this writing). Hint: the minimum pledge that will get you a physical book (which includes a sketch) actually works out about the same as what you’d pay for a non-sketch edition of the book once you take shipping and handling into account.
• Re: The unique ability of comics to reach audiences (particularly those underserved by traditional media); sometimes this approach provokes a WHAT reaction that may undermine the intended message, but sometimes it works really well. For an example of the latter, may I refer you to Adrean Clark’s Eight Ways To Be Deaf?

  Originally run as a B&W webcomic, 8 Ways is now fully colored and available as an e-book, with print coming next month. This is how you teach somebody about your culture, cause, or goal — organically, with a bit of humor, and remembering that people are people. Over-the-top cliched demonization? That just gets you laughed at. Not “with”. At.

• Re: Missed it entirely. Blank It, the webcomic forced to be creative by trapping its only characters in an infinite, featureless plane, has shaken things up first by constraining the characters, then by transferring the cast to the opposite of the infinite, featureless plane: the interior of a box. Interesting.