This page has, for a number of years, noted that the Joe Shuster Awards are perhaps the best-curated of the comics awards — they look at all genres and media, and so long as the creators meet the requirement of being Canadian, they’re good for consideration.

Of particular note is the list of past winners in the category of Webcomics Creator / Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web: Dan Kim, Ryan Sohmer and Lar De Souza, Cameron Stewart, Karl Kerschl, and Emily Carroll (two years running) represent the breadth and depth of Canadian cartooning, and possibly Canadianess itself. And if the Shusters are a bit less spare than they once were, there are still only nine categories, compared to nearly thirty for the Eisners.

This year’s nominations are out, and those singled out for recognition that may be of interest to the webcomics community include:

Fleen congratulates all of the nominees, and notes again the general lack of weak or inexplicable names on the list. The 2013 Joe Shuster Awards/Le Prix Joe Shuster 2013 will be presented not at a convention, but at a gala in Toronto (time/location TBA) on Saturday, 25 August.

Just checking, on account of not matter how often I say that :01 Books are the best, it’s not often enough.

See, I got an envelope in the mail yesterday from :01, a thin one that made me think it was the catalog of upcoming releases ’cause they don’t do books that lack for heft. Instead, I found inside a early pair of excertps of Gene Luen Yang’s forthcoming books, Boxers and Saints, due in September. Together, the two books tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion from opposite viewpoints — the first from the POV young man looking to expel the foreign powers from China, the second from that of a young woman who converted to Catholicism and is much a target for death as any European.

Given the size of the two books (more than 500 pages total), I wasn’t expecting review copies; 16 pages of Boxers form one half of the flip booklet, 16 pages of Saints the other, each tells just enough of a scene to grab the reader and make them want to know more. Both stories are drenched in the supernatural, although it’s not possible to tell from the brief fractions of story how much of that may be metaphorical.

Bao and his fellow Boxers appear to transform themselves into literal gods to fight their enemies; Vibiana the convert has conversations with Joan of Arc¹ that are more detailed than she likely could have learned from the priest that lives in her community. Whatever degree to which these heavenly warriors actually involve themselves in this corner of China circa 1900, Vibiana and Bao believe it to be true.

And in a way, I suspect that what they perceive to be true is true enough; in this fight between nations, and expressions of national will, individual peasant and village folk must have viewed the conflict as being so much larger than themselves, something that could only be explained as a clash of two distinct heavens to determine for good and all who holds sway over China². Yang has melded his own Catholic faith with his Chinese heritage in past works³, so it will be interesting to see how he approaches each of those ancient traditions as warring opponents.

We’ll know soon enough, as it turns out that more than 500 pages in two volumes (plus a deluxe box set) is just slightly more complex than your standard graphic novel, so :01 Book are using the sampler as an early peek until they can send actual books out to their review list this summer. Many thanks to them in advance, and we’ll have more to say about Boxers and Saints when the full copies arrive.

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¹ Who herself had conversations with people that weren’t entirely there.

² If there’s ever an audiobook, Daniel Day-Lewis needs to narrate.

³ Particularly in American Born Chinese, which managed to intersect Journey to the West with the Nativity of Jesus.

Via Robert Khoo’s twitterfeed:

Anyone in Seattle have access to a theatre for a live Stripsearch Finale Screening on June 18th? :)

Okay, looking at the calendar we’ve got the Maki/Lexxy elimination tomorrow, then four more episodes on 7, 11, 14, and 18 June. I had speculated early that there might be a final three approach (there’s ample precedent in the reality competition genre), but given the setup of the Strip Search Thunderdome, it make sense that all eliminations will be two Artists head-to-head, and this schedule reinforces that thought Consider: that gives us time for a social challenge among three competitors (7 June), a competitive challenge for immunity (11 June), an elimination to get us down to two (14 June), and the Big Ready-Set-Art on 18 June.

Now the most important word in Khoo’s tweet is live. In all my conversations with him regarding Strip Search, he’s never definitively answered my question if the winner was chosen during the filming back in December; while there could be an argument that this will merely be a screening of a episode already in the can, I think it’s more likely the case that whoever the final two Stripmonauts might be¹, they’ll be hashing it out in real time in front of an audience (or possibly simulcast, depending on what kind of “theater” we’re talking about). I would expect that the entire thing will be livestreamed, or at least it’d better be if Khoo, et. al., wishes to avoid a pitchfork-wielding mob because you know anybody in said theater is going to be livetweeting the crap out of this showdown.

As brought up by the Katie/Abby dinner with Khoo, Mike Krahulik, and Jerry Holkins at the end of the last episode, there remains the question of what kind of twist² the show’s conclusion may have. While I’ve seen a lot of thought given to the idea of bounced Artists forming a kind of jury (cf: Survivor), the focus of the show has been on the preferences and judgments of Holkins and Krahulik and I don’t see them opening the decision-making process to anybody else — not Khoo, not other trusted PA employees, not Artists. Penny Arcade has always been an expression of the unholy melded ids of Mike and Jerry³ and I wouldn’t expect them to break that habit at this late date.

I imagine that all of the speculation will be cleared up in the next day or so; I intend to keep an eye on the Strip Search news page, Khoo’s tweets, and Seattle performance listings.

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¹ I consider words that Khoo did share back in January: While there will be no way to tell the entire story of what happened in the mansion, there was a natural narrative that emerged during filming. By that standard alone, among the four remaining Artists there are three really compelling narratives:

• Katie starts out wobbly and goes on to dominate the challenges
• Abby starts out under-confident and proves herself a natural
• Lexxy prevails over past instances of coming up just short of the brass ring and finally makes it in the doors of Penny Arcade

Maki — whose work I adore and who also was responsible for the single best visual of the show — doesn’t have the punch to his narrative (last guy standing makes a comeback against super-talented ladies) so I’m afraid he’s not in the final. If I had to guess I’d say it’s Katie vs Abby in the final just because they are unstoppable and Lexxy doesn’t actually have a webcomic yet. But I’ve been wrong on subjective and elimination challenge calls about two thirds of the time so what the hell do I know?

² For example, I don’t consider it entirely beyond the pale that some Creator’s fiat brings back Team AmErika for a joint win.

³ In this model, Khoo forms the ego role, and I’m not sure that there is a super-ego in the mix.

We are on Day Two of at least three days of 91F (33C) weather, the air conditioning is out, and the afternoon sun is just starting to crank up the joules. Somebody kill me, or at least send me a bucket full of cold I can pour on me and my dog. That’s right, I want a bucket of pure, uncut, essence-of-cold. And yes, I’m well aware there’s no such thing as cold, only heat and less heat. What you’re overlooking is the fact that I don’t care so kindly rework the laws of physics and get me some cold, please.

• You know who is, right about now, absolutely horrified by that whole bucket of cold thing? Dante Shepherd, professor of Chemical Engineering, thermodynamicist-at-large, educational innovator, and itinerant webcomicker. Today marks five years of Shepherd’s dailyish Surviving The World¹, and on top of that he’s got some exciting announcements:
  

  Many of you have asked for a collection of STW comics for a while now, so in response, with the help of Topatoco and Make That Thing, sometime next week will see the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to help make STW page-a-day calendars! … [H]ere’s a potential example of the final product.

  Just as many of you have asked for an app for STW for years, so I’m also happy to announce that starting Monday, STW will be available through the Comic Chameleon app!

  What? You want yet one more announcement? OK, OK – based on requests, I’ll bring back recitations² sometime soon, too.

  We at Fleen congratulate Shepherd on his achievements, his future plans, and hopes sincerely he doesn’t apply that mallet to our heads for the whole bucket of cold thing. We at Fleen are very, very sorry.

• In our discussion of Shaenon Garrity’s imminent wrap-up of Narbonic reruns yesterday, we inexcusably neglected to mention that Garrity will still be doing two actively-updating webcomics for the forseeable future. Skin Horse (co-written with Jeffrey Wells) just gets weirder and more loopy as it careens from classic children’s literature reference to classic children’s literature reference³ with no sign of end in sight.

  And although it will be, by design, a limited affair, Garrity’s Monster of the Week has, over the past not-quite-year, brilliantly deconstructed most of the first two seasons of The X-Files, which means two very important things:

  1. Garrity’s got three episodes to the end of season 2 (plus one season-ending recap), and four weeks to her one year anniversary, so let’s call it two seasons per year. At this rate, we’ll get another three and a half years of what is this crap Scully and sexy, sexy Skinner. Also, mites and annoyed Shaenon.
  2. On 19 July, the Friday of SDCC week, we will be Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and on 8 November we will get Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, the two greatest episodes of The X-Files ever and I’ll fight any man-jack that says different.
• The latest episode of Strip Search put the four remaining Artists through contract hell and — spolier alert! — Robert Khoo enjoyed himself entirely too much, cranking the charm, the smarm, and the hostility up to eleven while trying to fast-talk the Artists into thinking that his very sticky contract is a good thing for them because they’re friends. No kidding, I would watch an entire season of Robert doling out the passive aggression.

  But even above its entertainment value, episode #27 is valuable because it emphasized the importance of not letting yourself get screwed, which even veterans can have problems with⁴.

  By coincidence, today also marked the release of the latest posting at Work Made For Hire, which presented a brilliant technique for directing a negotiation on contractual points that everybody who freelances needs to read right now. Key point:

  The difference between what Dylan [Meconis] and I asked Lo was that when Dylan talked to him, he was given the power to make a very specific choice, and both options were something Dylan wanted him to do.

  Guys, I’m not a freelancer and I intend to use “The Babysitting Question” in my life every chance I get from now on. It’s brilliant.

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¹ To be precise, today is StL #1773 and in the past five years there have been 1826 days what with the leap year and all, meaning that Shepherd comes up 53 strips short of “daily”, or just over one missing day every five weeks. I think we can count this as “daily”.

² The recitations, of which there have been 100, are answers to specific questions sent to Shepherd. Since there have been 100 of them, that means he’s really done 1873 updates in 1826 days, or an average of one extra strip every five weeks. So really we can call StL daily-plus.

³ I’m still holding out for some Purple Crayon.

⁴ It may have just been the editing, but in the episode as streamed, only two of the Artists brought up the idea of having a lawyer review the contract, and only one did so right at the beginning to put Robert on notice; I was hoping it would be all four.

Reduxes? Reduxi? Judging from my recollections of mathy terms, I’d most likely go with Reducies. In any event we’ve got two blasts from the past.

• Firstly, since the start of 2007, Shaenon Garrity¹ has been re-running Narbonic with director’s commentary, which process will end in about two days time, as she’s running out of strips to re-run. I’m not sure that she could find enough new to say for a double re-run but I hope that the end of the story doesn’t mean the end of daily Narbonic updates, as I consider it to be as essential to webcomics as I Love Lucy is to TV. Hold on, this is going to be slightly lengthy².

  Back in my college days it was well known that about three weeks into junior year was when the math majors would all become major grumpy-pusses, because they were told it was now their turn to Prove that the multiplicative identity is unique. In other words, they were asked to prove that one (1) is one (1), which always struck everybody who wasn’t a math type to be a waste of several hours of mental effort. What possible purpose could it serve? It was eventually explained to me that this was a sort of votive sacrifice, that if math majors didn’t repeat the ritual every year, math would cease to work.

  From that starting point, I derived the theory that I Love Lucy, having been re-run so very many times, has integrated itself into the very fabric and nature of television to the extent that if — at any moment in time — an episode of I Love Lucy is not being broadcast somewhere in the world, TV will stop working. Now we find ourselves at the end of the second presentation of Narbonic, and I hope that Garrity can whip up a script that will update once a day in perpetuity. The existence of the internet as we know it depends on it.

  Oh, and come Saturday night, make yourself a drink with lots of rum, ice, fruit juices, decorate a a glass with a face on it with a little umbrella or some flowers, and drink it in the general direction of Berkeley, California in Garrity’s honor. I have some good recipes if you need a starting place, but you’re on your own for the umbrella and face-glass.

• Secondly, Little Dee by Christopher Baldwin³ has likewise been running with commentary since it wrapped up a little more more than three years ago (the reruns started three years ago tomorrow). Although Little Dee was reprinted in your choice of four rather spiffy volumes or two rather spiffier anthologies, and despite the fact that the story came to a definite end, Baldwin’s apparently had a hankering to return to the cave and visit with Dee, Ted, Vachel, and Blake. Cue the big announcement:
  

  There will be more Little Dee.

  Penguin/Dial books will be publishing my comic strip “Little Dee” as a 120 page full graphic novel of all new material! I’ll be writing, drawing, and coloring it, and it’s due out in about a year or so. I’m very excited about this, what fun! [large text original]

  Certain things jumped out at me from the announcement, color and all new material being the ones that have me excited, and about a year or so making me all frowny because I want it yesterday. As for what I want plotwise, I see there are roughly three possibilities:

  1. The six year run of Little Dee gets recapped as one continuous story
  2. A particular story (possibly one that was previously untold) from the time Dee spent in the forest gets the book-length treatment
  3. Dee and the Gang reunite, having been apart for the past x years

  With a lesser writer, any of the three could come off poorly — #1 could be rushed (or too familiar to past readers), #2 could come off like trying to recapture the magic of a story that’s over and done, and #3 could read like the epilogue to the last Harry Potter book.

  However, Baldwin spent so long with the characters (and just as importantly, has spent time away from them), and spent so much time establishing them as organic characters who interacted the way they did because of who they were, I have no doubts that he could turn any of the possibilities into one of my favorite books of 2014. Everybody be very patient and calm so that we don’t disturb him and he can get this done quickly, yes? Thank you, and please close the door quietly as you leave.

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¹ High Commissioner Of Tiki In All Its Forms.

² Quelle surprise.

³ May I note that Little Dee is about as polar an opposite of Baldwin’s current-although-approaching-its-finish webcomic Sapcetrawler? Yes, yes I may.

There are two occasions on which I got really, really angry with my parents for inadvertently withholding from me knowledge of people they knew that I would have desperately wanted to know myself. While studying electrical engineering I happened to mention to my father something I’d read in Robert Lucky’ column in IEEE Spectrum. Oh, how’s Bob doing? my father inquired. “Bob?” Bob Lucky. We were in the fraternity together. Still sends us Christmas cards.

I looked at him carefully and said, Robert Lucky, head of communications research at Bell Labs¹, inventor of the adaptive equalizer, future Nobel laureate, the foremost communications engineer of the past thirty years, the man that practically defines the very specific field of study that I concentrate in, the very best possible mentor I could have had for the past three years of school is your fraternity brother and you never mentioned it? Dad shrugged a huh-how-about-that shrug.

It was maybe a year later that that my mother brought up her hidden connection; I’d been sitting in the kitchen when she said, Oh I meant to tell you, because you like cartoons, right? Tish from Garden Club, her son Tom won a Daytime Emmy. “That’s nice, what was it for?” Something called Little Toons, I think. “Little … Little? Wait, you mean Tiny Toons? Tish Ruegger’s son is Tom Ruegger, head of Warner’s animation? That Tom Ruegger?” That’s right, I babysat him back when I was in high school.

I didn’t have an irritated how-could-you-keep-that-from-me reply because I hadn’t ever told my mom that something I had always wanted to do in the back of my mind, but never knew how you could go about it, was voice acting. My time in college radio, writing and performing in radio sketch comedy, had shown that I had some talent for voice work, but how the heck do you even start down that path whether from New Jersey (home) or Indiana (college) without knowing somebody on the inside?

Which brings me (at considerable length) to my point: no such inside-track is needed these days. Want to do voices for animation? Go do that, slap it up on the internet, and if it’s good enough you’ll get noticed by somebody, or you’ll make a fan of somebody who just happens to be making something cool. Which is exactly what happened with Scott Kurtz, as he told us yesterday:

When Doug TenNapel told me he was going to make a “Neverhood style” claymation adventure game and that he wanted me to provide a voice for one of the characters I was very excited. It wasn’t until later that he bothered to mention that I would have to contribute “voice acting” alongside Mike J. Nelson (MST3K/Riff Trax), Rob (Animaniacs) Paulson, Veronica Belmont, and Jon (Napoleon Dynamite) Heder. Now I’m terrified.

I’m no voice actor. I don’t do voices. But Doug assures me that I’m the right guy for this job, and I already said yes. So I’m going to put on a brave face and fake my way through this thing. *gulp*

I’m going to respectfully disagree with Kurtz on one point — he may say that he’s no voice actor, that he doesn’t do voices, but I think that he’s wrong. Bear with me a moment (as if you haven’t been all along); the way I see it, voice acting falls into roughly three categories:

• The stunt voice actor, commonly seen on big-budget animated films, where it’s clear that the purpose is to get the famous name rather than the right voice for the character. The less said about them, the better.
• The professional voice actors, the ones with a stable of voices that they do, adapting on project after project, honing their craft, whose names are mostly unknown to us. The good ones can hide themselves behind many roles and appear in so many different projects for decades; it’s why the actor that has been in the most movies with the greatest cumulative box office is Frank Welker². I have much respect for the professionals, and from his close work with Dino Andrade on the PvP animated series, I imagine that this is the sort of voice actor that Kurtz is unfavorably comparing himself to.
• The person chosen to do one particular voice because there’s nobody in the world that will do it better; sometimes it’s a famous actor, sometimes it’s somebody who’s not necessarily a household name, sometimes it’s nobody you’ve heard of but who is absolutely perfect for the role in question.

  Pixar has a great track record in this regard (cf: Brad Bird as Edna Mode or Sarah Vowell as Violet Incredible), but the best examples come from a woman you’ve probably never heard of: voice casting director Andrea Romano. She’s why every voice on Warner’s various Batman/Superman/Justice League series was absolutely perfect (cf: Ed Asner as Granny Goodness). I think the reason that Doug TenNapel wants Kurtz on Armikrog is because he falls into this category.

We, however, will only get to hear what character Kurtz is perfect for if Armikrog raises its US$900,000; at more than US$189,000 raised since the project launched yesterday, it seems pretty certain that the goal will be met in the remaining 28 days, but there’s only one way to be sure. Forget the fact that Doug TenNapel is a great comics artist and game designer, forget that Neverhood was a great game. Do it because it’s never a bad thing for creative types to stretch themselves into other avenues of creation³. And do it for all the actors, pros and perfect one-shots alike, who’ve given voice to the characters that you’ve loved.

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¹ Requiscat in pace, Bell Labs. We will not see your like again.

² AKA the only guy that’s ever voiced Fred from Scooby Doo, and nearly 700 other credits.

³ Well, maybe not “never”. Dirk Diggler’s attempt to reinvent himself as a musician, that was pretty dire.

So round about 3:00am¹ today my EMS pager went off (holiday duty, y’all) and I realized while getting ready to head out lights-and-sirens on a chest pain call that I’d been dreaming about Erika Moen choreographing her fellow Strip Search Artists into an (interpretive, classy, educational, and definitely PG-13 rated) pole dance routine designed to teach the lessons imparted in Oh Joy, Sex Toy. This indicates either I am dangerously insane, or I may have discovered the greatest side project for webcomics creators ever. Don’t tell me if it’s the insane one.

• Over the weekend the National Cartoonists Society had their big weekend o’ fun and for the second year recognized excellence in the field of online comics. Although Jon Rosenberg will always be the first person to receive an NCS division award for an online comic, this year the award was split in two, so two more creators can say that they were the first ever honored by the NCS for (respectively) the Long Form and Short Form online comic.

  Long Form went to Vince Dorse for Untold Tales of Bigfoot, which I’ve enjoyed reading since the nominations were announced back in March. Somebody more clever than me described UToB as “Bone-esque” which is pretty high praise, and I’m happy to say that any of the three nominees could have been found a deserving winner, although I was totally pulling for Meredith Gran² ³.

  Over on the Short Form side, Graham Harrop’s Ten Cats won over Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic and Michael McParlane’s Mac; there was some dissatisfaction expressed back in March that these three strips are all associated with GoComics, not independent in the sense of the other six nominees for Online Comics have been over two years, and not representative of that not-really-definable “webcomic aesthetic”. And I’ve been thinking about that.

  The thing is, if (as webcomics boosters have said, and we at Fleen are no exception to this) webcomics should be allowed to compete against whatever you can define (if anything, at the point) not-webcomics, without distinction to medium of distribution, then the three nominees in Short Form make sense — they were chosen for consideration by the NCS jury without consideration to where they came from, and may well be seen as representing a step towards not having “online” as a separate category of the NCS awards.

  Would I prefer to see Girl Genius or The Abominable Charles Christopher up against, say, Fables, Johnny Wander or Girls With Slingshots up against Pearls Before Swine⁴, and Becky Dreistadt dominating the Book Illustration category? Absolutely, and I’ll be certain to get right on that as soon as I’m in charge of the world. In the meantime, progress.

• Speaking of Becky Dreistadt⁵, I confess myself surprised to see that she’s involved in some book Kickstarters that look like they’re going to make goal, but aren’t seeing the big multipliers that history would have indicated. Firstly, the original four B9 Kingdom creators are nine days out from their three themed books collection, Midnight Monsters closing; while they’re on track to make goal, they aren’t going to do the three-to-nine times overfunding that B9 has managed in the past. Similarly, the second volume of The Bear is verging in on goal with eight days to go but won’t hit the nearly five times overfunding of volume one.

  I can’t figure out what the slowness in support is down to. Midnight Monsters is actually a pick-your-favorite collection of three books rather than a single project, and I thought that structure might have driven more support to the project by allowing a super-fan of (say) Evan Dahm who isn’t that fond of (say) KC Green (not that I think any such people actually exist) to back one creator economically rather than decided to forgo because money would have gone to another and made support too expensive. Additionally, the lack of stretch goals may be removing some of the “game” aspect from this campaign.

  But then, The Bear 2 has stretch goals, and two reasonably rabid fan bases behind it (the other supplied by Ryan Sohmer), and it looks like it will make the first stretch but won’t be achieving one after another like the first time out. I wonder if having the two projects are cannibalizing each other by running at the same time rather than being separated by a couple of months? Have we just reached market saturation on gorgeous, high-quality art books?

  In any event, this is neither the time for complacency nor for despair, as I want my damn Midnight Monsters and The Bear 2 books, so kindly go sell some plasma or tell your grandkids that plenty of people get by without insulin for a week and pledge, dadnugget.

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¹ Coincidentally about the same time that the latest episode of Strip Search went live.

² Not that that’s much help; I was also totally pulling for Erika Moen in Strip Search; in my heart, they are both winners.

³ I shouldn’t neglect to note that Pat Lewis was the third nominee, for Muscles Diablo in Where Terror Lurks, which is also terrific.

⁴ And hoo boy, Stephan Pastis may as well start signing himself Susan Lucci, having been nominated six years running for the top NCS award — the eponymous Reuben — and this year losing out to both other nominees in a tie.

⁵ And before I forget, happy belated birthday, Becky.

As national holidays go, Memorial Day is a good one, usually attended by decent weather and cookouts. For those of you celebrating on Monday, I hope it’s fun time for you, and let’s get you into the weekend as quickly as possible.

• I am less concerned about how gruntled Phil Foglio appears in his new, official, pancake-on-the-head portrait than I am about what appears to be a tentacle trying to escape from an Erlenmeyer flask on the windowsill behind him. Oh, and the ghostly image of Kaja Foglio, trapped between dimensions behind him, that’s pretty concerning too. But mostly this just reminds me that you can’t go wrong with a pancake.
• Cranking out the strips until the inevitable cease & desist notice: Park Slope Family Circus by Erin Bradley. Read it while you still can.
• Waaay back in January I mentioned that everybody’s favorite professor, Dante Shepherd, would be launching a new strip this year; Dr Shepherd is on writing duties, Joan Cooke does the pretty pictures, and together they’re telling the stories of graduate students studying cryptozoology in a world with actual monsters and things.

  For months now I’ve been wanting to share with you the art that Shepherd teased me with, of a hapless grad student running from a dragon-creature wearing what by all appearances is an enormous sports bikini. PhD Unknown is now live, will be updating weekly (at least to start), and may strike a more familiar chord in your local doctoral candidate than they’ve ever let on before. Highly recommended.

• Hey, you! Want to get a few zillion comics for almost nothing? To be more specific, more than 1200 The Book of Biff spread across ten collections, and more than 500 Maximumble strips in four collections? Chris Hallbeck is offering all his books as DRM-free PDFs at a price you name yourself, so long as it’s at least a dollar a book. Fourteen books, fourteen bucks (if you’re cheap) comes to nearly 125 comics per dollar, or 0.8 cents per laugh-chuckle.

  If you read one cartoon per day, you’d be at it for four years and nine months before exhausting these strips, meaning it’s the bargain of the (admittedly, still young) century. So how about this: kick in one lousy dollar, get either the Biff or Maximumble book #1, and if you like it (you’ll like it), adjust your purchase price upwards for subsequent volumes to two bucks? Or even three? Have a little pride, you’re not some bizarre cheap-o.

It’s been a miserable couple of days, weather-wise, here in the vast New Jersey hinterlands — heat and humidity more expected in July than May, and my house’s HVAC is having issues. Bleah. If the predictions hold true, we’re in for a couple of days of rain, which ought to break the temperatures if not the humidity, and hopefully climate control will be re-established inside before it gets nasty again; in the meantime, just me and the dog, hangin’ around, being too warm for comfort. Let’s think cool thoughts.

• They always say that you shouldn’t drink booze when you’re over-hot, because it’ll dehydrate you and make you more miserable in the long term; I’m fully prepared to say that “they” can suck it. And while they’re sucking it, those of you in New York City can look forward to the latest attempt by Kristen Siebecker¹ to teach you uncultured heathens dear, dear friends to appreciate wine.

  This iteration of Popping Your Cork will be on 12 June at 6:15pm in Midtown, where she’ll be pairing wines from the Finger Lakes with food from India. Because Kristen appreciates comics and loves us, she’s given us a coupon code for 10% off the cost of the evening: use EMAIL10 at checkout and save a couple of bucks. And just a thought, anybody that went to a couple of these and did a comic about their learning journey? That would be legit fascinating and I would pay to read it.

• The shows will be nonstop from here out to at least the end of the summer. Consider:
  • Phoenix Comicon is already underway, with a healthy representation of webcomickers (and a very helpful webcomics category on the guest list)
  • MCM London starts tomorrow for those of you on the British side of the Atlantic and a stack of comics types in attendance (helpful map from Robin Hoelzemann of Curia Regis here)
  • VanCAF runs Saturday and Sunday, with the cream of the PNW crop making their way across the border, with a cluster of TopatoCo-affiliated creators, some Cloudscapers, a pair of superbros, and many, many more (it looks to be the webcomickiest of the three shows going on this weekend)

  That’s not even considering the fact that Philadelphia Comic Con² hits next weekend, and HeroesCon the weekend after that. Anybody with a moment to catch their breath before San Diego, raise your hand and also I hate you.

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¹ Original showrunner of MoCCA Fest, back in the Puck Building before fires and such.

² Also known as “The Con Formerly Known as Megan Fox Tits Wolverine World”, or hell let’s just call it .

Want to know about a miracle of modern medicine? Megatokyo¹ creator Fred Gallagher has been under treatment for the past several months for a fairly serious heart arrhythmia, the sort that makes the one and only ticker you’ve got work far harder than it should, to push far less blood than it should, and which has the effect of making your life shorter than it should be. The good news is that the right sorts of arrhythmias can be treated by burning out the portions of the heart that are screwing up with lasers². The even better news is that Gallagher got lasered³ last week and is already feeling better.

Speaking as somebody with a mild cardiac arrhythmia of my own (not one that causes damage, but which freaks people out who take my pulse, and which could kill me if somebody ever tried to fix it with drugs), I appreciate Gallagher’s reaction to waking up and finding that his heartbeat just doesn’t feel the same way it has his whole life — it’s the sort of thing that tends to make an impression. Anybody that doesn’t think that, I can change your mind. Hell, I can change your heartbeat right now.

Put your hand on your heart. Take a minute and really get a feel for that ba-dump, ba-dump that’s been there your whole life. Take a deep breath in and savor it. When you’re ready, read the next sentence.

Some day, your heartbeat is going to stop.

Okay, okay, calm down, it ain’t happening today (probably). But that thudding you felt, maybe a skipped beat or two? That’s what Gallagher’s lived with his entire life, until last week. It’s a heartbeat designed to deal with an immediate stressor, like a lion that wants to eat you; it’s not supposed to stay that way for decades at a time. It’ll be months — maybe a year — of medication that’s designed to make his heart relax, take a break, get its strength back before he can be said to be back to normal … but it’s something that can happen. Congratulations to Fred Gallagher, and here’s hoping that you find yourself feeling as good as you were supposed to all this time, except that your stupid heart had to be all stupid and stubborn and stupid again.

• Did we mention that Boulet is doing diary comics of his time in America, without the customary years-long wait to translate from French to English. They’re really awesome.
• As has been established many, many times in the past, I loves me some Digger, and nothing will ever get me to give up the collection of trade reprints on my shelf. Or so I thought:
  

  The downside (and the reason we haven’t done it already) is that hardcover omnibuseseses require a big chunk of cash up front—we’re talking a big print job here, on the order of the Bone omnibus edition, and that does not run cheap…. So, in a couple of weeks, we’ll be Kickstartering!

  Dammit! Now I gotta find room on my shelf, grumble grumble, friggin’ creators giving me what I didn’t know I wanted all along. News on the Kickstarter as soon as it launches.

• This page has been remiss in not mentioning Ian Jones-Quartey (once of RPG World, presently of many things including the voice of Wallow), but he’s fixed that right the hell up. Yesterday, two separate cartoons that he’s involved in — Lakewood Plaza Turbo and Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe (on which he’s the Creative Director) — hit the webs. The Cartoon Network site that hosts ‘em is presently down, but you can see the Steven Universe pilot on YouTube until CN gets their act together.

  I’ve been lucky enough to know Ian since his days at SVA, and ever since his thesis film I’ve been amazed at not just how good an animator he is, but how well he can tell a story in animation. The really great animators aren’t necessarily the ones with the best drafting skills, they’re the ones that can lay out all the pieces and parts, assemble the right talent, get the visuals and sound and voices to meld together into something greater than the sum of its parts.

  The fact that Mr J-Q collaborates so often with Ms Sugar (who may be one of the best two or three animators in the country right now) just magnifies the talents that each of them bring to the table. Keep an eye on everything they touch — it’s going to be gold.

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¹ Which I should have stopped reading long ago because I really can’t follow the story without archive binges of hundreds of strips, but I still drop by every other month or so.

² Actually, there are several different ways of implementing ablative therapy and I don’t know that lasers were used in this case, but it’s the future and lasers are cool. Not that it’s not already cool enough that doctors can thread miniature instrument packages into your heart from blood vessels in your legs without killing you — that’s pretty damn cool, actually.

³ Admit it, you want to be able to say that you’ve been lasered and survived.