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: Light at the end of the tunnel time, folks — nearly back to regular access, and in the meantime, we can enjoy the most batshit insane stunt I’ve ever pulled.

People on the internet: What business brought you here? I stayed up all night working on a draft of a new book based on the Structured Query Language for databases! That’s because, some days, I take an envelope out of the box and I PUSH IT. I notice you are leaving! Could my conversational stylings be partially to blame?? Hah hah, I guess I was being kind of silly! any event in which I was embarrassed is now non-canon. I’ve also retroconned my name to be “Mister Awesome”, by the way!

It occurs to me… Today is a good day I think to talk about DINOSAUR COMICS Your whole family is made out of meat, an allegorical comic and comic allegory Dude! It’s SO GOOD. Holy crap yes! I was like, “Aaaaaahhhh!” “HELLO T-REX” What is the attraction to this structure of humour? I think this is very symbolic for… something! Is it a metaphor? My friend, I am simply asking the questions that need to be asked!

Here is a hypothetical situation: T-REX AS CULTURAL CRITIC: maybe he’s got this weird fetishistic cultural interest in inefficient, repressive institutions. You were raised on fairy tales, where there were no moral grey areas, where good and bad were clear, where there was never any real doubt over which side would win in the end! That’s a pretty crazy theory! Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof! Imagine my dismay at coming to such a realization!

What are you saying that’s original? The thought DID cross my mind! I have surprised even myself! Argh! So frustrated! Well, this has been quite the anagnorisis (a moment of recognition or discovery)! To summarize: Fuuuuck I’m screwed! I’m pooched, man! I’m pooched! Being pooched is akin to being screwed! C’est vraiment incroyable, ça! I must guard against such self-absorption in the future! I GUESS THERE IS A LESSON HERE FOR US ALL!

Why are you so interested in this, anyway? Seriously everyone! How come? However, that will be more than enough excitement for me! Any final comments, T-Rex? T-REX AND HIS WACKY DINOSAUR FRIENDS Five stars! Are you jealous of my mutant dinosaur powers? T-REX WINS! Wooo! I declare: high fives all around! FINALLY: HUGS AND KISSES! Aww! Come’ere you!

Editor’s note: Set the Wayback Machine for March of 2006, as we have a bit of fun with Cryptostraubian apophenia.

More of the discussion on syndication coming soon, folks.

But first, with a apologies to whichever lit-crit school it is that declares authorial intent irrelevant (I never learned those things; I went to nerd school), I draw your attention to today’s Starslip Crisis. Clearly, Kristofer Straub is taking the opportunity to kick T Campbell while he’s hurting and should be enjoying himself.

Proof: The character’s a southern “colonel”, and T went to college in Virginia, which is in the South. The character is a discusser of indie arts, that’s webcomics and indy comics. He’s named Samuel Q Breckenridge, which can be anagrammed to A BRICK DE MENSE REQ GUL: a brick de [French for "of"] Mense [typo of MENSA, T is a member] req[ires] gul[libility]. Clearly, an attack on T. For the sake of all that’s holy, look at the man’s tie — all he’s missing is an ascot that spells out “Campbell”!

It all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Editor’s note: Still with the lack of regular access? Yep. But let’s dip the ladle of recollection into the bucket of history once again, as a young Gary first meets Chris Hastings and they talk of The Great Outdoor Fight.

So I was talking with a guy at the Andy Bell opening because he was wearing a Great Outdoor Fight shirt. “Nice shirt,” I said. “Thanks,” he replied, “What do you think is going to happen next?”

In truth, I told him, I had no idea. Everything we know, the entire storied legend of the Great Outdoor Fight, has been revealed in little pieces since Mrs Smuckles let slip a choice tidbit over Rib-eye and Chablis less than two months ago. And it’s always dangerous to predict what Chris Onstad is thinking; the only prediction I would make is that he would take the story in a completely unexpected direction. Ergo: The Jeeps. Like every other aspect of the Great Outdoor Fight (too big a fight to be constrained by acronym or abbreviation), this is new to us, but not to Roast Beef.

Ray, in his ignorance, is more than willing to face The Jeeps … or is that the real reason at all? Does he not appreciate the dangers that they face? Hard to believe, since Beef has filled him in; could he possibly be sincere in his defiant bellow:

Man, fuck those guys! The hell they’re gonna say how this Fight is won! BRING ON THE JEEPS, GOD DAMN YOU!

Ray, of all people, is trying to rebel against the system instead of gaming it or weaseling for advantage. He’s taking something like a principled stand here, maybe only because he doesn’t realize the import of The Jeeps. Beef, of all people, might be pushed by sheer terror to putting a major beatdown on Ray rather than face The Jeeps (and to save Ray’s life, but will he recognize that?). Or, given that it’s Achewood and death is malleable (especially where Beef is concerned), and the fact that keys are being passed around, maybe we see two more grave markers southeast of the Acres.

“Why should the Fight get to say how the Fight is won or lost! Become the ruling body, dude!” is no less impressive than “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” “Beat your best friend since small times ’til he can’t crawl, see or cry … or Death” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but it looks like Hobson had nothing on Beef’s Choice.

Editor’s note: Gary’s lack of regular internet access continues, so please enjoy a dip into the past. This one is about a heinous crime visited upon webcomics by a villain of the first order (a fact only confirmed by his enormous height, looming over decent folk and webcomickers like a malevolent mountain). In fact, since this piece was first written in early 2007, the problem has only gotten worse. Do the math. Follow the trail. The end is coming.

Editor’s note: Gary’s away from regular internet access just now, so enjoy this dip into the Fleen archives. It’s an early piece of writing he thinks was pretty neat, and with the recent return of the comic in question from hiatus, somewhat timely.

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.

I guess this is a pre-release review since I don’t see it in his store, but Andy Bell has a new book out called Do Not Eat!, and that’s some damn good advice.

The book contains quality reproductions of various Creatures, some prints, six postcards, and photos of some toy projects and art shows (including my favorite of all of Bell’s work) from the last two years or so; those that suffered corrective orthodontics in their youth may want to skip the photos of Darth Headgear.

But ultimately, these are all old works … collected in convenient form, yes, but where is the new, the novel? As it turns out, right up front in the foreword, which features a recipe for Berry Gravy Bell:

Place [an] apple in Andy [Bell]’s mouth to silence any screams. Fine dice the [1/2 pound prime Andrew Bell -- leg meat or upper back] then place in a mixing bowl with the other ingredients and mash together into a thin, bloody paste.

Sounds scrummy! At New York Comic Con, some compatriots and I took the opportunity on Sunday morning (when Bell was moving a little slowly) to quietly examine the available cuts and made plans to try out Berry Gravy Bell at our first chance. Andy tried to dissuade us, claiming that he was stringy and tasteless, but he’s just being modest. Grab a copy of DNE and begin your explorations of Andy Bell today. Bon appétit!

We at Fleen have been writing about How To Make Webcomics since it was announced at SDCC last summer; after multiple readings (and waiting for a time when we knew we needed postings in the bank), we’re ready to tell you how well the book meets its own goals (from the back cover): everything you need to know to make, post and profit from your own online comics.

Answer: pretty damn well.

With four authors on the book, it would be easy for the individual POVs to be lost, but the HalfPixel Crewe have done well — both by dividing the chapters between them, and by feeling free to drop in commentary in chapters written by another. While this leads to a slightly disjointed presentation (they don’t all use the same formatting, and with each chapter primarily overseen by one person, there are more typos than one would like), it does serve to keep the tone of the book as one of a conversation.

The authors are also to be commended for the division of topics along natural boundaries — Dave Kellett’s business past shows when he talks about audience interaction and monetizing comics; Brad Guigar’s many years of convention showing inform his practical tips for conventions (and give the reader a game they can play — find Guigar at a convention, and see if he’s following his own rules … if he’s not, he owes you a donut¹); and Kris Straub’s technical background nicely supplements his chapters on website design and the ugly details inherent in making comics your job (legal niceties, protecting your IP, etc.).

For me, though, the biggest surprise came in Kurtz’s chapters on characters and writing; I’ve been around enough [web]cartoonists for a long enough period of time to know that drawing is a learned, practiced skill, but never thought about the writing of a comic strip in those terms. All of the funny people I’ve known in my life have always seemed to be that way naturally, and the idea that you can learn to write funny — although obvious in retrospect — was somewhat revelatory to me. Along with the chapters listed above, Kurtz’s presentation on character and writing constitute a Strunk & White for the aspiring webcomicker.

But that does leave a few weaknesses to be resolved if there’s ever a second edition, most notably in chapters 3 and 4. And although the chapters are on very different topics (Formatting, and Image Preparation, respectively), the weaknesses all fall neatly into one category: examples, or the lack thereof.

At the start of the Formatting chapter, Straub looks at different layouts used in [web]comics (single panel, horizontal strip, full page), but oddly chose to illustrate each one with a graphic that featured the same aspect ratio. The “single panel” example was essentially a horizontal strip with the interior panel borders missing, and the “full page” was a horizontal strip with more than the usual number of panels. Similarly, a really helpful discussion of word balloon (and balloon tail) placement lacked a visual, and the chapter (which was essentially about artistic/visual decisions) abruptly transitioned to a discussion of schedule in the last two pages. Granted, there may be nothing as important as a committed schedule, and there may not be a better place to discuss it than the Formatting chapter, but … jarring.

Similarly, Guigar’s chapter on Image Preparation (essentially, Photoshop tips ‘n’ tricks) had the requisite mess o’ screencaptures, but the choice of what got displayed was somewhat baffling. A seemingly-terrific discussion about adjusting levels (and I don’t mean to sound snarky here … I don’t know Photoshop at all, so much of this went over my head) featured many shots of the dialog boxes that controlled the levels, and none of sample art showing the outcome of the commands. I’m willing to say that this chapter wasn’t for me, but I have to think that a newbie creator with a computer that runs Photoshop s l o w l y might want to see some visuals indicating what the described techniques would do before committing to sitting down and trying it out.

But I’ll be fair about this — I learned in Guigar’s chapter on “Books” that only certain page counts are practical for a strong binding, and there may not have been room to add space-consuming pictures to satisfy my desire for examples. And honestly, if the worst that I can say about the book is that I wanted it to show me more precisely what it was describing, that’s not a bad problem to have. It hooked me thoroughly and left me wanting more from the lads. In fact, I was so happy with the book overall, I won’t even mention page 149 where Guigar implies that page 10 in your book will be followed by page 10 again, then page 12. Nope, not me.

So let’s summarize — I wanted a bit more detail (or a different focus of detail, if you will) in a pair of early chapters, and the rest left me hungry for more from the HalfPixelites. My only concern with the book now is finding the opportunity to get all the creators to scribble in it, as I’m not going to Emerald City or San Diego this year, but that needn’t stop you. If you see any of the Gang of Four, be sure to say howdy, buy a book, and thank them for sharing so much insight and information — whatever profit they see from the sales of HTMW will certainly not make up for the increased competition they see from new creators who read it and take its lessons to heart.

And I have a feeling that’s exactly the way they want it.

_______________
¹ Not really.

Editor’s note: Today’s the first day of our two week festival of canned content; we at Fleen thank you for your patience in these trying times. To help make up for it, here’s a doozy: Christopher Wright took at look at the writeups of the Threat or Menace? panel and ideas started perkin’ around. Please enjoy.

I was thinking about your panel (Webcomics: Threat or Menace?) the other day — mostly musing about the crap that the professional webcartoonists have been taking from the professional justcartoonists — and it occurred to me that everyone is wrong.

Webcomics: Threat and Menace. There you are.

The fundamental point I think everyone is missing nowadays is that it’s harder for professionals to make money doing what they do because the barrier to entry in those fields has been drastically lowered, if not utterly obliterated, by advances in technology over the last twenty years.

Consider that it is possible, right now, for someone to spend about $1,000.00 and set up a studio in their home that is as good as or equal to the recording equipment that was used to record the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course in order to make an album as good as a Beatles album you still have to have the skill of the Beatles and George Martin, but the tools are there for a comparatively minimal investment. And you can spend less and still get something that sounds good depending on what you’re going for.

And that’s just in the music world. In terms of print publishing it’s even easier.

Once upon a time you needed complicated machines to mass publish. In the 80’s this started to change because the personal computer allowed you to do all the typesetting, which used to be something that required equipment that cost thousands of dollars — with PageMaker and other similar programs you only had to shell out $800-900 or so. And as time went on the software got cheaper (not PageMaker — I refer you to my general opinions about the Computer Industry as to why — but these days you can download a program called Scribus that will do most of that for free, and you can even alter and recompile the source code if you are so inclined).

But there were still two other barriers to entry: mass production and distribution. You still had to go to a printer, and you still had to get people to buy it — or at the very least, to read it — once you were
done. And the most effective ways of doing this were through publishers, because they had the capital to most efficiently create large volumes of hardcopy to market and sell.

Enter the World Wide Web.

Suddenly anyone who logs on and buys web hosting has a distribution medium comparatively equal to everyone else who logs on and buys web hosting. All that’s required is to get people to come to your site and look at your content. There it is. And while these days the main focus of that kind of publishing seems to be monetizing that content, at the very root of it, the content is a form of communication.

And the plain and simple fact of the matter is that any jackass can use the web to say their piece in whatever form they like. I am solidly, unflinchingly, unapologetically proof of that. I can’t draw, have never been able to draw, and don’t forsee any time in the future where I suddenly uncover hitherto untapped veins of drawing talent that spurs the quality of my art to unparalleled heights … and yet I am a webcartoonist and have been one for 12 years. I decided to start a webcomic because in my opinion the medium was better suited to what I wanted to say (the webzine already had funny editorials — I thought a comic would have more editorial punch) and it worked well enough to give me little reason to stop doing it.

Justcartoonists dislike webcartoonists because webcartoonists are doing more work to make less money and therefore devaluing their product. Some professional webcartoonists, in turn, are more than a little annoyed by us amateurs because we’re not really trying to make any money at all, which makes it harder for them because they’re competing with people who are saying “just come on and have a look!” And I know for a fact that there are people out there in the webcomicking community who fervently wish that a great swath of people doing webcomics would just STOP, so that some standard of quality control and self-respectability can be put in place.

But the sad and simple truth is that the internet is a communications medium, not a professional publishing for profit medium, which means that there’s not a damn thing any of them can do about it. The unwashed masses have a chance to have their say, show their drawings, record their music and film their movies, and the only effect it can have is to drag the professionals down due to saturation alone.

While I don’t begrudge people actually earning a living off of any of this — in fact, I’m very happy to know that people do, and I hope that they manage to continue doing it — there’s a bigger picture that makes that harder than it used to be. The idea of the “Web as the new public commons” is old hat and has been turned into one of those trite catchphrases spouted by people who want to appear like they know what they’re talking about, but it’s still fundamentally true: it is easier to access ideas, discussions, plans and collaborations on the web (and the internet as a whole) than in any other medium, and that is far more important to me than whether I can retire by 40 on t-shirt sales and ad revenue alone. Of course this new public commons is a treacherous place: along with the clear-sighted eloquent visionaries thoughtfully discussing serious and important ideas you also have weird-smelling twitchy guys with Tourette’s Syndrome who spout off about aliens injecting beetles into their ears at night while they sleep, and people who are trying to actually make money are going to have to fight through ALL of that noise, battle idealists and cranks and loud-mouthed know-it-alls, and then some in order to make a buck. There are professionals who consider this grossly unfair. Me, I consider it a necessary component of a healthy, functioning republic, which is probably why there’s so much resistance to the idea.

In short, the fundamental element of publishing is communication, and the web opens up communication to everyone. Therefore: Threat and Menace, with no apologies.