Know what sucks? Getting caught up at work after being sick and letting things slack for a day or two, on top of feeling like I spread my sickness to half my co-workers. Actually, a few of them have probably spread past sicknesses to me, so I guess it all works out in the end. Let’s get caught up together.

• Remember K-9Lives, the short film née webcomic? Got some news on that front from creator Doug Wilson:
  

  K-9Lives: Episode2 has recently been released online to co-inside with the second book collection from the series entitled K-9Lives: Clue Clucks Clan. [Editorial aside: Ooog, not so sure about that title, Doug]

  This second animated episode of the adventures of a dog/cat conjoined odd couple follows the success of the first which played at festivals such as the Marbella International Film Festival where it was awarded runner up for best animation. Douglas will be attending Bristol Small Press Expo in May, and all items are available online through his website.

  [Wilson] is also writing and drawing a graphic novel, The Von Spleen Experiment.

• Mixed media, indeed: Franklin Einspruch travels the country, and does a webcomic about the experience in the form of the poetic, verging on infinite canvas paintings known as The Moon Fell On Me. Oftentimes they’re about the journey (example: the prettiest anybody’s ever made the New Jersey Turnpike at I-70), and oftentimes it’s about food and/or foodstuffs. That was good enough for Public Radio Kitchen (an online space for public radio fans with a food passion, via WBUR in Boston) to have a chat with him on the subject of food and art. Neat stuff.
• I’m assuming at this point, you all know about Anthony Clark, aka Nedroid, right? Colorist of Dr McNinja, creator of Beartato and Reginald, painter of robots and dinosaurs? He also does some awesome collaborations with Emmy Cicierega (usually on LiveJournal under the nom de plume of Laserpony Studios), and it’s Emmy I wanted to point you to. She’s doing awesome retro art of a lady named Doris, and you need to check them out. Doris: prim and proper, and aware of what the haps are. Somebody pay this woman many dollars to keep creating this stuff.

This cold has taken up residence in my brain and I’m exhausted. You get links, I get today wrapped up as quick as possible and go home to sleep.

• Launch party for Box Brown’s Everything Dies — Friday, 6:00 to 9:00pm in Philadelphia.
• Lengthy Scott McCloud interview/profile/discussion. Good stuff there.
• Wes Molebash’s entire run of his new strip, Max vs Max, on display in Chillicothe, Ohio for the month of March. Get your coffee while you read the comics.
• Dave Kellett Gloria Calderón Kellett in the Israeli equivalent of The Economist on their two-artists-in-the-family bargain. Original comic strip for the story here (if you read Hebrew), and English version here.
• Almost time for DayQuil. I thought you’d want to know.

For those that didn’t see Tim Tylor’s comment in yesterday’s post, there’s an arguably happy ending to the Hot Topic/Kawaii Not dust-up:

About Hot Topic: All Kawaii Not merchandise there is OFFICIAL – and is good news for me and Kawaii Not. Turns out there was a miscommunication issue between me and my licensing company, but that has all been settled. So the bottom line? If you buy Kawaii Not at Hot Topic, you support me and the craziness! Hooray!

Yay for Megan Murphy; I still say that Hot Topic needs to clean its procurement process the hell up.

• It’s specifically for days like this that I don’t require people who make things I like (or people I know personally, for that matter) to get along with each other — I can like them separately just fine. If Gabe & Tycho’s take is that Jesse Thorn is likely a serial killer, I can live with that. Heck, Rene Engström can’t stand Radio Lab (although I don’t think she’d accuse Jad & Robert of having heads in their fridge). I can be the one guy that likes webcomics and public radio, that’s cool. In fairness, Jesse’s take on the PA situation is here.
• Overdue public thanks: the fine people (mostly, Gina Gagliano) at :01 have put me on their review copies distribution list, and I am being presented with more fine graphic novels than I can keep up with. Recurring themes: plucky teen girls, World War II, awesome cover designs by Colleen AF Venable, and a number of webcomics-related artists doing fantastic work. Proper reviews to be worked up.
• Know what just turned five years old? The Daily Grind Ironman Challenge; five years on, and seven webcomickers are still in the running for more than a thousand bucks. Literal updating machines have been out of the running for more than four years, and the last challenger to fall by the wayside did so more than ten months ago. How long can they last? How long can this madness continue?
• As long as we’re acknowledging longevity, congrats to David Malki ! on 600 installments of Wondermark, with one of those optical illusion deals that never works for me. DAMMIT.

Neatest thing I came across over the weekend: a collection of various [web]comickers, what they actually look like, and how they draw themselves. There are a couple of notable absences, particularly my favorite — the always-jolly Jon Rosenberg and his somewhat angry avatar. Then again, you get the likes of Rene Engström, Hurricane Erika, James Kochalka, and Meredith Gran. The best real-person likenesses ever aren’t there, but that’s because I’m not a cartoonist, I just get drawn by them occasionally. Be sure to read through the comments for KC Green, the Penny Arcade guys, Mitch Clem, John Allison, and more!

• Happy birthday wishes goin’ out today to Superosity (the strip, not creator Chris Crosby, which is eleven years old today) and Howard Tayler (the creator of Schlock Mercenary, not the strip, who’s 10 1/2, given that he was born on 29 February 1968 and the 29th hasn’t yet occurred eleven times since). Superosity has missed like one update out of 4000+, and as far as I know, Howard’s gotten up every day since he was born, which is a pretty amazing unbroken string of updates, matched only by every other early-middle-age dude out there (“Hi”). By the same token, happy 400th stripperversary to Twisted Musings, and sorry that you had to get mentioned the same day as Superosity, which makes everything else look new by comparison.
• No new word on the latest Hot Topic situation, but it’s getting some pretty wide press — The Consumerist is now reporting on the Kawaii Not button case. Seriously, it’s time to hold their feet to the fire and demand better sourcing practices from these bozos. Feel free to let them know how much they suck.
• Finally, a quick bookmark update for y’all — Dirk Tiede’s Paradigm Shift has just launched a new website, so if you’re in the habit of checking WebcomicsNation for it, you’ll want to follow the new link. Particularly if you want into on Tiede’s new book announcement this spring.

The fact that Hot Topic was so quick to remove the ripping-off-Vera-Brosgol shirt is apparently less because they want to be a good corporate citizen, and more because they’re getting so damn much practice. This is 15 hours old because I wasn’t checkin’ email or Twitter last night:

Crap. Hot Topic is selling buttons with my art without my permission. http://bit.ly/bQw8Hl http://bit.ly/aHM7PB

You can punch in those links for proof if you want; I’m not linking to Hot Topic any more, except for pages that allow you to contact people in their corporate structure. People like Jim McGinty, primary contact for Investor Relations at Hot Topic. We need to stop asking Hot Topic what they’re going to do about the theft of single pieces of art, and ask what the hell they’re going to do to ensure that they stop stealing art in the first damn place. Seriously, this requires a change in their business practices, and I think we need to keep pestering until they get that message.

Note to self: Park cars at the street end of the long-ass driveway prior to snowstorms. Dumbass. Also, ow my back.

• Box Brown’s Everything Dies now up for ordering.
• See this? It’s the Blank Label homepage. Once it had a more-than-passing resemblance to the main title screen of The Brady Bunch, with characters from nine different creators there. Then the Halfpixel guys left, and of late Paul Taylor wandered away, and now we find a general jumbling of the roster. Gone: Greg Dean and Howard Taylor. Still there: David Willis and Steve Troop Added: Spike and Kel McDonald.

  I’ve spoken to several of the principals, and they report that this shift in membership is just the way that their respective businesses have developed; no animosity reported, there won’t be throwdowns on the show floor at conventions. Picking up McDonald in the aftermath of the Keenquake seems logical, as does the addition of Spike (given that she’s been a member of Bomb Shelter, Love Shack, and as many as fourteen other collectives, some of which don’t exist yet).

  In fact, the only loser in all of this is me, as I no longer have one convenient page to read so many comics on. I now must click between multiple tabs and subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, which as any reasonable person know, is practically the same as living under a fascist dictatorship. Clicks! On tabs! This does not fit well with my busy lifestyle! Also, I fear change.¹

• Update: Cheyenne Wright is much better than he was previously reported to be. In the words of Kaja Foglio:
  

  [I]t appears that what he has is some weird virus that only imitates the symptoms of congestive heart failure.

  So that’s definitely the good news of the good news/bad news pairing. The bad news would be the costs associated with finding out that Wright’s heart isn’t failing, toward which end the previously-mentioned fundraiser is still on.

• Finally, KC Green threw us a massive update to the Anime Club saga today. How massive? How about 173 panels worth? No permalink yet, but dang that’s good stuff, and now’s the time to get caught up, because it promises in the last panel — To Be Concluded.

_______________
¹ Not really. Congratulations to all involved.

Via Vera Brosgol’s twitter:

I heard back from Hot Topic and the shirt is going down by tomorrow and will be pulled from stores. Woohoo!

Well done.

Yeah, so I get to go bust my back and turn my feet into soakers, so this is gonna be short.

• Erika Moen once got an indescribably awesome birthday gift from Vera Brosgol. Hot Topic, who have pulled this shit repeatedly, are selling a t-shirt with artwork blatantly stolen from Moen’s birthday gift. Let’s jump to the punchline, shall we?
  

  Blah blah, independent design shop, blah blah, we didn’t know, blah blah, they’re responsible for not being thieves, blah blah, we promise we won’t do it again.

  In the past, I’ve counseled politeness in communicating with the corporate behemoth, letting them know as gently as possible that they were engaged in the most outrageous thefts, and thanking them when they stopped doing it. Yeah, fuck that.

  Here’s the phone number for Jim McGinty, primary contact for Investor Relations at Hot Topic. That puts him further up the food chain than the blameless 800-number operators, and it’s always awesome when you want something done to pester the people that spend their time sucking up to mutual fund managers on an expense account, not being told that their company is screwing up badly in public. My guess is after the 20th call, some serious hell is going to get raised. Go forth and ask if Hot Topic intends to live up to its Standards of Business Ethics [PDF] sometime this century.

• In happier news, Chris Sims is part of a joint undertaking that brings some new webcomickry to these shores. Why does Sims get special attention on a day of launch, with but one strip in the archive? Because Chris Sims is the sort of funny that can be summed up in two words: haunted vagina (do I really need to say that link is only marginally safe for anything, much less work?). I look forward to Awesome Hospital with great anticipation.

You know when we don’t get blizzards? September. I long for September. And just in case September is too boring, what with the lack of white death from the skies, there’s a new con on the horizon that looks to be of particular interest to those of you reading this — think one part NEWW, one part ROFLCon, and one part trade show, if the not-quite professional society that Brad Guigar is building at Webcomics Dot Com were to escalate to face-to-face seminars.

It’s called Intervention. The goal here is to focus on those that make their art (whatever form that may take) and/or living via Internettery. And since getting a new con off the ground is an act of utmost optimism mixed with desperation, you really want a whirlwind of energy driving the whole damn thing; fortunately, anybody that’s ever spent time around sometimes webcomicker/sometimes glamazon Onezumi has spent the next ten minutes trying to catch their breath, so that’s good.

And since the programming track has an emphasis on the How do I make this work? aspects of Internettery, it’s a good thing that Oni’s married to Harknell, who keeps a number of webcomics hosted and happy and knows whereof he speaks. In particular, I’m told that the Web Development Track will feature real-time tutorials — walk-into-a-room-and-two-hours-later, new-website-configured-with-CMS-and-comics-updating type tutorials (with an equivalent spin to the Art track).

Oni & Hark had a pretty long run on con staff with Katsucon before spinning off to roll their own, and it’s my understanding they’ve got the help of a lot of experienced show-runners, so that’s good. Nevertheless there has to be a special challenge in any new show, and this one looks to come down to time and location: Intervention will run September 10 – 12 at the Hilton in Rockville, Maryland, or about 1.8km and zero hours from SPX the same weekend.

This is either going to make getting the audience in tricky at best, or create a reinforcing feedback loop as people make their way up and down Rockville Pike between the two shows. With Intervention’s emphasis on electronic, and SPX’s on print, it might actually provide a nice complement, as perhaps the after-hours programming at Intervention (plans are for round-the-clock programming) will. Might the two shows mesh well together? They might, rabbit, they might.

• In other (sadder) news, Cheyenne Wright, colorist of Girl Genius, has fallen ill, and it doesn’t look great right now; we’ll let Kaja Foglio take up the tale:

  The doctors are not yet sure what’s wrong, but it’s actually sounding fairly alarming. We’re quite worried.

  I will be setting up a fund-raiser (yes, probably more wallpapers, to start with) to help out with the medical bills. Freelance artists are, after all, notorious for their lack of health insurance. (Of course, if you just can’t wait for me to post those wallpapers, you can always send money directly to Cheyenne’s PayPal address).

  So, yeah. If the pool of webcomickers and freelance artists could get organized in one place with enough names for it to form a viable population for a health insurer to want to provide policies, that would be awesome. In the meantime, click back one page from that link and see what a difference color makes.

• For anybody that’s ever doubted that Lore Sjöberg is a comedic genius, I have four words for you: depeleted uranium beholder statue. Alternately: The Cyborg Name Decoder, which Lore has now ported to the iPhone and is available for your amusements. I don’t have an iPhone, but dang if this kinda doesn’t make me want one.

Everybody read the interview by Rick Marshall Will and Holly with Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins over at MTV Splash Page? It’s a good ‘un. I particularly liked this bit:

MTV: While “Penny Arcade” has certainly evolved over time, one thing you’ve never really embraced is a pay model for the comics — something we’re starting to see more of around the webcomic landscape as more publishers move to the digital world. Why have you avoided the subscription model or other types of pay-for-content systems?

HOLKINS: I consider that a political discussion, and we don’t really traffic in politics generally. As somebody who’s followed webcomics as you have, you know how strenuous those arguments about pay become. For us, I would take it a step before that and say that we think a webcomic is a freely available comic.

We think that’s one of the things that defines a webcomic. It can’t just be that it’s on the web — though that’s the term we have and it makes sense. For us, a webcomic is a comic that is freely available, with an author who is a real person, and who is accessible to the consumers of their work. I would say those are tenets that we think are inextricable from webcomics.

KRAHULIK: As soon as you put up a pay barrier, you really limit the number of people who are going to be willing to look at your work. As “Penny Arcade” was growing, I don’t think we were ever in the position where we wanted to limit the number of people who could look at the comic. That always seemed like a bad idea.

A’course, we’re no closer to a single definition of webcomic that everybody will agree upon; my working definition is probably closer to that espoused above than any other I’ve seen, although I’m not sure that I’d make an absolute requirement of freely available. It’s too nice a day (as it rains upon the just and un-just alike) for political discussions, manifestos, and the like. One day we’ll have to have a summit of all interested parties whereupon such things are decided once and for all (until the beer runs out and we instantly fall into squabbling factions full of muderous intent — which is pretty much the same state as before the beer).

• In other news, I got a nice package in the mail from Tom Dell’aringa, who you probably know best from Marooned. This was a minicomic — so mini, in fact, that the envelope was sized such that it could have been mistaken for a tasteful greeting card from a respectable publisher of such. Inside was a copy of Rag The Viking: The Cubicles of Valhalla, the first joint effort between Dellaringa and Steve Ogden, newly released by their nascent WishTales Publishing Studio.

  It’s a clever riff on fantasy that left me not quite sure whether Rag Ragnarsson is indeed a viking trapped in cubicle hell, or merely a guy daydreaming about how much awesomer his ancestors had it. It’s a hoot and a half, and I’m seriously impressed by how much story and character can fit into just sixteen pages. Since RtV:TCoV is listed as the first minicomic from WishTales, I’m looking forward to what others might be coming down the pike. Also whether or not that pike has the head of Rag’s enemy upon it (in the coffee room, over by the artificial sweetener).

• Stray thought for the day: Scott Kurtz notes that Scripps is looking to dump United Media Licensing (the story is a little vague, but it appears the sale does not include the related United Feature Syndicate, but UML definitely includes licensing rights to a bunch of comic strips). Since Kurtz is singlehandedly killing newspapers, it makes sense that Ryan Sohmer suggested that he and Kurtz buy up the corpse (at press time, it has not yet been determined if their aim is revivification or desecration).

  The real punchline here — in another three to five years, the economics might actually make such a thing possible.