I bet I can write and format the snot out of this thing off-line, but posting may be inconvenient for a bit. Of course, by the time you read this, those problems will be resolved, yes?

• Dylan Meconis is, in no particular order, an awesomely talented artist, creator of kick-ass comics, and a little short on cash today. Her need is your opportunity, as originals go on sale at her Esty shop. Love that dog walking watercolor — are those Doggles on the chihuahua?
• If you were wondering what Platinum were going to do with that cash infusion, here’s one hint (thanks to algeya for the heads-up): merch on-demand store.
  

  Los Angeles, CA – January X, 2010 – Platinum Studios, Inc. (OTCBB: PDOS), an entertainment company that controls an international library of more than 5,600 comic book characters which it adapts, produces and licenses for all forms of media, and ezprints, Inc., a provider of personalized product and related technology solutions, have partnered to create a revolutionary merchandise creation and fulfillment program for Platinum’s leading webcomics portal, DrunkDuck.

  This new program will allow users of DrunkDuck to choose art from the site, design their own products, and order merchandise from a storefront integrated directly into the popular webcomics portal. Comic creators on the site will be able to earn money from merchandising their creations on the same website that they are currently publishing their work. Artists and creators who opt in will be earning money from every sale related to their work.

  There’s a lot more of the PR-ese in the full announcement, and not much detail on exactly what the store will offer, but it sounds like an in-house version of CafePress (anybody with first-hand knowledge, please chime in with details). Personally, I find the dateline of the press release to be the most amusing thing that Platinum’s done forever. January X, 2010 will surely join 20X6 in the pantheon of great, imaginary dates.

• New series of interviews with the creators of longform webcomics over at Growly Beast; if you want to talk about your project, I suspect that Ange Story wants to hear from you.
• Fresh off the big hoo-ha over notorious anti-gay campaigner (and occasional writer) Orson Scott Card getting tapped to write a comics adaptation of a famously gay-friendly videogame (good summary of the issue from Chris Butcher here), comes more Card-related news. John Lustig writes:
  

  I’m holding a contest for fans to guest write one of my Last Kiss comics with writer Orson Scott Card.

  Details are here; I’m going to suggest that every gay and gay-rights-friendly comics creator out there enter the contest, because if you win, you might be able to make Card’s head explode from proximity (no matter how slight) to your gayness/gay-acceptingness. Do it for the children.

• Last word today — guest post on hand-lettering up at Webcomics Dot Com from Chris Eliopoulos (of Misery Loves Sherman fame); Eliopoulos letters about every other comic on the stands today, and stands in the company of amazing letterers like Klein and Sim (yes, Sim is all kinds of wacky, but you can’t deny that he’s one of the most expressive letterers in the history of comics), so this is one tutorial worth your attention. WDC is subscriber-only, but a few more tutorials of this kind and that $30/year may become a no-brainer.

You need to read that title out loud, in the voice of a newsreel announcer; click the picture for an example and then try to get that voice out of your head. When you’re done listening to the news of yesteryear, stick around YouTube for a moment and check out the video trailer for Raina Telgemeier’s SMILE, which is due for release so soon that I can barely stand it. Yes, I keep bringing this book up. No, I’m not going to apologize. It’s terrific and the world must know.

• As long as we’re playing with A/V capabilities, let’s take a listen to a podcast: The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe is a creature after my own heart — ruthlessly rational, determined to shine the light of reason on pseduo-science of all sorts, and not above a bit of snarkiness in the pursuit of those goals. Show #236 features Jon Rosenberg, who’s been known to address skeptical audiences from time to time … something about writing a webcomic that settled the answer of the existence of God definitively by having two characters eat him. It’s a pretty general-purpose interview, not so much about the webcomic, more about science, influences, and Rosenberg’s worldview. Jon, for his part, comes across as reasonably normal, which makes me wonder how much he drank from the bottle of Scotch Baio prior to the interview.
• Got a double dose of Scott Kurtz news for you — in about two weeks time, those of you in NoCal will have two opportunities to see him do the formal talk thing, at a pair of fairly prestigious venues. To start, he’ll be at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco on Thursday, 11 February from 7:00 to 9:00pm for a talk and signing. It’s free, but it’s a museum, and the suggested donation of $5.00 isn’t going to break you. Give ‘em $10 if you can.

  Two days later, Kurtz will head up to Santa Rosa and the Schulz Museum; that would be the museum devoted to Charles ‘Sparky’ Schulz, the most wildly successful, influential, and vaguely depressing strip cartoonist the world has ever known. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this is about the most exciting possible invitation for any working cartoonist.

  On Saturday, 13 February, Kurtz will be speaking and teaching. The fun kicks off at 10:00am with a 1.5 hour Master Class for Adults, then continues as Kurtz becomes the latest Cartoonist-in-Residence; he’ll be talking from 1:00pm with meet/greet and signing to follow. The Master Class requires registration and a fee, which can be arranged by calling (707) 284-1263. For the general presentation, ten bucks gets you in the door, five if you’re a kid.

• Oh yeah, then there’s this: the Android (Operating System) Android (mascot). Andy Bell first dropped hints to me about these guys way back at SDCC 2009, and I’ve been anxiously waiting to see how they would turn out. Answer: Awesome. As the owner of an Android phone, I want one.

I gots stuff to take care of, so let’s do this.

• Want a free copy of SMILE? There’s a giveaway in progress, which holds out the possibility of a free book in exchange for the story of your most embarrassing dental experience. You’ve got just over a month to get your entries in, so make ‘em good.
• Little Dee is busting out all the old one-shot characters; I expect that this buildup to the end will encompass everyone who’s ever appeared in the strip. As long as we get more Rogues, I’ll be happy.
• Speaking of Little, Little Gamers now ha an iPhone app for you to download and enjoy; perhaps this will convince the authors of webcomics-scrapers that they should knock it the hell off.
• Myth Adventures occupied a fair amount of my mindspace from my early high school years, and the Phil Foglio-adapted comic version was one of my earliest regular purchases. Like Buck Godot before it, Myth Adventures will be running 3 pages a week at Foglio’s website (starting here), but with eight issues to get through, it’ll take a couple years to get through the whole thing, so it you enjoy it, might I point out that you can short-circuit the excruciating wait and just buy the whole damn thing in one go? Why yes, I might.
• Finally, I have a new goal in life: to find circumstances where I can legitimately use the phrase homeopathic blow job in casual conversation. Chris Onstad, he tasks me.

Things which you would do well to note.

• Evan Dahm’s done some amazing webcomicking over the years. Anybody that hasn’t taken the time to appreciate Rice Boy is lacking a key component in their education of the medium. Now counting Rice Boy, and Order of Tales, and various shorter works, Dahm yesterday finished his 1000th page of comics. You can decide for yourself if #1000 was the last page of Order of Tales chapter 11, or perhaps the last page of the latest short story, entitled The Jewel of Brambool. Any way you count it, it’s some gorgeous work, and with 1000 pages to get through, you archive bingers have a bit of work in front of you.
• Events! Dallas Webcomics Expo 2010 will be August 21st (in Dallas, oddly enough), Webcomics Weekend 2010 will be November 6th & 7th (back at Eastworks, naturally), and there will be a new hotel show (to my knowledge, not yet named) in New Jersey in May, which looks to be attracting a number of webcomics types. More on that last one when there’s an official announcement.
• And from Krishna Sadasivam, news of a more conference-type gathering: UP! Fair is a brand new conference specifically for independent sequential artists and publishers. The conference will be held on November 19th and 20th in Lexington, Kentucky. From their website:
  

  We’re thrilled to announce that November 20, 2010 will mark the first annual UP! Fair at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky!

  This fair will be a free public event designed to celebrate independent creators, their works, and their philosophy. More than anyone else in creative industries, they are the ones who push the boundaries of their mediums, explore and invent new business models, and the most willing to share their knowledge and expertise.

  At this time, Up!Fair plans to feature an exhibition floor, hands-on workshops and demos for the public, and pro-level workshops for creators. Guest list, programming schedule, exhibitors registration are yet to come, but there’s a handy RSS feed for keeping up to date. Those wondering if such an ambitious undertaking can be successfully pulled, off, check the About page, where you’ll find veterans of undertakings like Sugary Serials and the Art & Story podcast. Lotta knowledge, and with a bit of luck and organizational skills, lot of benefit for attendees.

Everybody saw how the American Library Association announced the Caldecott, Newbery, and Printz awards yesterday, right? Today the Young Adult Library Services Association of the ALA announced their annual list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens. There’s the requisite Huh moments to be found, but on the Top Ten list, one may find two items from the realm of webcomickry: Tom Siddell’s Gunnerkrigg Court Volume 1: Orientation, and Jeremy Love’s Bayou. Toss in a mention on the main list of the Dave Roman/Raina Telgemeier-scripted X-Men: Misfits 1 and you’ve got a pretty respectable showing. Well done, all.

So. Dave Kellett. Ignore the weapons-grade punnery that pervaded his strip earlier in the week, he’s got something good to talk about; two things, in fact.

• Thing the First: Dave’s lovely and talented wife, Gloria Calder&oaute;n Kellett is an actress, screenwriter, and playwright of no mean talent; on Monday, she’ll be reviving her show Skirts & Flirts in LA for One Night Only to benefit the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. Both Kelletts are in the show, along with a considerable number of their severely talented friends. Tickets are twenty bucks, and if you’re of legal age you get free vodka. I saw the show when it ran in New York, and it were damn funny. Go.
• Thing the Second: Dave can talk well. That seems like a minor thing, I mean most everybody manages that on their own, but what I mean is that he has one of those moderately rare brains that allows one to organize thoughts, put them into a compelling order, and make them sound interesting on the fly, which is a pretty neat trick. If you read this page, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard Dave on a majority of the Halfpixel Webcomics Weekly podcasts (now on indefinite hiatus), but hearing him go one-on-one is a different beast altogether. Tom Racine of Tall Tales Radio did exactly that, sitting down with Kellett for a lengthy, rambling (but not random) podcast interview. It’s worth a good listen.

Just now noticed, and worth a read right now now now: Great, by Ryan Armand, who gave us the sublimely beautiful Minus. Starts here, hit “next” 58 times until you’re caught up.

Daisy Owl, friend to moustachery everywhere.

• Okay, this sucks: Kean Soo’s most famous work, the award-winning Jellaby, is losing half its presence in print. For reasons beyond our Earth Logic, Disney-Hyperion are yanking Jellaby volume 1 from print:
  

  It was, I presume, a financial decision on the part of my publisher, Disney-Hyperion, even though the book has been a modest success by comic standards (more than 18,000 copies sold over the span of 21 months), and had been slowly picking up readers as time went on. Having Jellaby off the shelves does create an unfortunate situation, however — the second book, Jellaby: Monster in the City, is the conclusion of the story that runs through both books, and by removing the availability of the first book, Monster in the City is in danger of leading a shortened life as well, being a now- incomplete second half to a two-part story.

  Now, I’m no publishing mogul, but it seems to me that if you have something that sells, then making more means you can sell more. So yeah, terrific logic there, Disney-Hyperion. Heckuva job. Bottom line, if you want a copy of this utterly charming book, better grab it now. Those of you that plan on having children some day, get a copy or two now and lay them down like fine wine for your progeny to enjoy in the future.

• How about some good news that relates to our Northerly Friends? The Toronto Comics Art Festival has had a reputation for being one of the best shows on the circuit, and 2010 marks the move from biannual to annual occurrences. Furthermore, the exhibitors list has been released, with the guests forming a veritable who’s who of our chosen artform. In addition to Mr Soo, in no particular order, you got yer Spike, yer Doc Hastings, yer John Campbell, and yer KC Green.

  Want more? You also have Graham Annable, Kate Beaton, Box Brown, Danielle Corsetto, Joey Comeau & Emily Horne, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Rene Engström, Meredith Gran, Chris Hallbeck, Andrew Hussie, Jeph Jacques, Lucy Knisley, Sam Logan, Davids Malki ! and Maguire, Dylan Meconis, Hurricane Erika, The Toronto Man-Mountain, Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, Dave Roman & Raina Telgemeier, Jon Rosenberg, Jeff Rowland & the TopatoCo crüe, Rich Stevens, and Jim Zubkavich, plus about a million others that I’ve no doubt missed on the list.

  Whew. My travel plans for the spring aren’t entirely set yet (there’s this pretty awesome out-of-state post-wedding party-up later in May), but I hope to attend TCAF if only to say howdy to all the incredible talent that will be attending. But whether I make it there or not, if you’re not doing anything much, much cooler on May 8th & 9th, the Toronto Reference Library will be the place to be.

Also, Wonderella. The rest of us have to work today. Yay?

• Looks like ten years of near-daily updates has provided a chance to start afresh over at Sinfest. Slick is slicker, the Devil is more devilish, and I hope that tomorrow things will be back to normal, because if this is a reboot and I have to wait nine years to see more progress on the Fuschia/Criminy romance (which started just over a year ago), I’ma get pissed.
• [Editor's note: this item edited to correct dates; thanks to Jeff Carter for correcting us!]

  Comics start and comics finish — Boxcar Astronaut will hit 150 weekly installments and the end of its storyline yesterday on Sunday. Backyard adventures only last as long as the summer, and next spring the games will be different. Very Calvin & Hobbes feeling to the wrap-up, and at 150 strips, it’s the perfect size for an archive trawl over pizza tonight.

Newish strips that I’ve been looking over, and perhaps you should too:

• The Optimist, which has a pretty strong sense of design and virtually zero archives at the moment. However, creator Tom Pappalardo has about two decades of cartoonin’ in him, so it’s not your usual two-update-nonwonder; Pappalardo also worked on Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot! for a couple years. Big possible downside right now — no sequential archive; you can look up strips by tag, but not browse by date. Weirdly enough, this is a design decision on the part of the creator:
  

  Many (but not all) of the WTF strips can be viewed on this site in a deliberately hard-to-navigate manner, so as to encourage you to purchase the book collection instead. Ha! Suck it!

  So … yeah. We’ll let you know how that last part works out.

• If it went on hiatus and got retooled, it’s new, right? Scooter and Ferret by Georgia Ball launched in 2004, ran until 2008, when it was retooled for a chance at newspaper syndication, and now is back:
  

  [F]ollowing the antics of a bad-tempered Ferret, his dim-witted buddy Scooter and his superficial best friend Maridee. Scooter and Ferret is available 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

  Which sounds okay enough, but what interests me is what an established strip, after a year off and retooling, would look like. A lot of self-editing can take place in a hiatus, and a much stronger strip could emerge. Unfortuantely, the website is having technical difficulties at the moment, so as soon as it’s back we’ll look at it a bit more closely. But seriously — taking time off and coming back? Intriguing.

Whoof — the dry air here in the northeast is playing merry hell with my sinuses, and I can only hope to get to the end of this post without another sudden onset of epistaxis.

• I’m gonna start with a quick mini-review, as I got my copy of Tyler Page’s Nothing Better volume 2: Into the Wild. I know that I said months ago that this was going to be my next purchase, but I’m apparently a challenge to buy gifts for; it was requested that I ramp back my purchases and make desired volumes known such that some might appear in festive wrappings one December morn. Afterwards, I resumed my buying and now I have copies of most of the things I would have otherwise bought earlier for myself, including this one.

  It’s good, you guys. Really good. On the heels of volume one, Kat and Jane are moving from at-odds unwilling roomies to friends, as the freshman year slips from Halloweento Christmas). I’m particularly impressed by how Page treats the storyline of Jane’s new college boyfriend, Ryan — at times, both she and he are too quick to jump to jealous conclusions over innocent interactions, which was handled with far more subtlety that one usually finds in fiction. These three pages could easily have turned (in less skilled hands) into a Very Special Episode on the dangers of controlling boyfriends, low self-esteem, abusive relationships, or whatever. In fact, Page made sure to present the vulnerability one feels in a new relationship as equally likely on the part of both people.

  As the book wraps up, none of the principal characters are who they were at the beginning (except for Trish and Victoria, the total bitches that live on Kat & Jane’s floor), but it never feels contrived or artificial how they’ve changed. They’re growing, more rapidly and awkwardly than they will at any other time in their lives, and we get to watch it happen. With any luck, Volume 3 (currently serializing) will show us more of Darby (with his puppylike crush on Jane) and Gene (with his creepily menacing Jesus-freak vibe).

• Also new this week — my copy of Skin Horse volume 1, with free art! Now when I talked about the free art aspect to the book (until the end of the month, so hurry), I mentioned in an offhand manner one or two strips that I thought were extra-neato. What with Shaenon Garrity being in the middle of moving house and explicitly stating that the art would be random, I gave it no further thought. Then I opened the package, which despite the prominent DO NOT BEND warning, somebody had valiantly tried to mutilate. Miracle of miracles, the art and book were perfectly intact, and it just so happened that my strip was one of my aforementioned favorites. This is why Shaenon Garrity is the Radness Queen of the Universe (or at least the East Bay).
• As long as we’re mentioning Her Radness, she emailed to let you know about something interesting at a site she edits:
  

  This is seriously cool. John Barber’s new webcomic, Outside Infinity, has just joined the Modern Tales lineup. As you may or may not recall, John’s previous webcomic, “Vicious Souvenirs,” one of the first interactive Flash-based comics, was part of the Modern Tales launch lineup way back in the day. Then John went off to work for this place called Marvel Comics. But now he’s back with a new, non-Flash-based series, and I’ve got him on Modern Tales.

  John describes Outside Infinity as “the sort-of true story of a guy who discovers the mathematical proof of the existence of black holes … while dying on of an incurable disease on the losing side of Russian front in World War I.”

  There is pretty much nothing in that description that isn’t really awesome.

• Last bit, then the weekend: Phil Foglio writes the best press releases:
  

  The comic book site Comic Book Resources just put up a list of The 30 Most Important Comics Of The Decade. Some reasonable picks. However I’m writing to say that one of their choices was Girl Genius, so you can see that they are indeed serious & responsible journalists. It also behooves me to mention that 3 other webcomics made their list, a respectable percentage over all. The others are: Penny Arcade, Achewood, and MegaTokyo. We salute our fellow webcomic creators.

  “But Gary,” I hear you cry, “that looks nothing like what I’ve been told by reliable sources (including yourself) what a proper press release should look like! How do I get to write something like that and have you run it?”

  Simple. Go back in time thirty years and be as consistently funny as Phil up to the present day, and I’ll run any dang thing you write.

Let’s rewind about 24 hours, shall we? A good chunk of yesterday’s post wasn’t up to standard; in part, it was me explaining my thoughts poorly, in part it was a poor choice of words. Let’s take them one at a time.

In response to my discussion of Webcomics Dot Com subscribers getting a discount on tables at C2E2, where I went on a digression of how another con had some pretty hefty charges above and beyond table space, Scott Kurtz wrote the following:

Gary,

I’m sorry things cost money.

-Scott

Which only makes sense if I failed to make my thoughts as clear as I should. I tied unforseen expenses at one Reed show to the story of discounts at another Reed show; I swear it made sense in my head as a general lesson on “reading the fine print”, because four years into the history of NYCC, I am still seeing exhibitors surprised that they had to pay extra for things like tables and chairs.

I want to stress that I don’t know if this is Reed’s charge or union charges at the venue, but it really doesn’t matter, since I wasn’t effective at drawing a distinction between the specifics ($60 discount!) vs the general (as always, make sure you know what you’re getting for your money, at any show, anywhere, put on by anybody, ever). In any event, Brad Guigar clarified in a comment that my concerns were unfounded. For everybody that was confused by the almost completely random train of thought, mea culpa.

Secondly, I realized that a reference I made to Guigar’s efforts with the new WDC was likely to be misinterpreted, in large part because Larry Cruz did a much better job coming to the same conclusion. I wrote:

I’ll be very intrigued if Guigar manages to line up similar sponsorship/discount packages for his subscribers. If he does, he’s just one eco-friendly tote bag away from duplicating the model of public broadcasting across the country.

Where Cruz far more clearly wrote:

I come to the sudden realization that Guigar and company are trying to transform webcomics.com from a casual blog to a professional trade organization like the Society of Automotive Engineers … except for online comics. You’ve got your seminars (online), inside information, and contacts with vendors for a yearly fee. All that’s missing is your own laminated ID card identifying you as a member.

It’s that “tote bag” line that got me into trouble. As a long-time member (not “donor”) of public radio, I know that while the tote bag is the most visible symbol of support, the greater side benefits of giving money to my local NPR station is a wide variety of discounts and benefits negotiated for me — memberships and admissions to all sorts of cultural groups and events are mine for the asking.

But from my position as insider, I forgot that most people don’t give to their local NPR or PBS station, and likely would see the “tote bag” as the only benefit … and as we all know, tote bags are pretty cheap to make, and you gotta give far more than their fair market value to get one shipped to you.

This could (and likely did) leave the distinct impression that the discount that Guigar & Co. lined up to C2E2 was being described as low-value, when what I meant to express was WDC lacks only that visible symbol, with the high-value members-only benefits already in place. Again, my bad.

Looking back on how badly I pooched that story, I’m reflecting on what it is I’m trying to accomplish with this blog. I’ve long described myself as a “hack webcomics pseudo-journalist”, precisely because I’m not a journalist at all. Yet, that tagline up there on the title bar makes reference to the “Webcomics Action News Team”, and clearly that’s not the case. A previous tagline invited you to “Enjoy Our Semi-Abusive Opinion-Mongering”, which isn’t quite my goal either (but certainly it’s catchy). For the record, my wife liked the recently-retired “Try Our Thick, Creamy Shakes”, which might actually be the most accurate description of what to expect here.

In any event, with the possible exception of the day in 2006 that I hit “Publish” instead of “Save Draft” and put a half-finished set of notes up for a couple hours, yesterday’s posting was probably the least successful I’ve ever put into the aether. Like everything else, it stays up, but I’ll be adding a link from that posting to this one shortly, so that anybody that wanders through the archives can get a fuller sense of what should have been said.

In closing, I’d just like to add one thing: In case you were wondering, the onomatopoeiae FAP FAP FAP and FAAP FAAP FAAP do not mean the same thing. Please kids, search the internet for definitions carefully.

Edit to add: Dave Kellett has changed the “FAAP” sound effect in that strip to “PAAP”. Doesn’t really sound like a duck’s wing, but honestly it’s probably for the best.

Editor’s Note: The post below is preserved in its original, clumsy, only marginally useful form. A pretty extensive clarification may be found here.

From Ladies Love Cool Brad, news about why Webcomics Dot Com might be worth the thirty bucks:

Subscribers to Webcomics.com are eligible to get tables in the Webcomics Pavilion area of the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) for a special creators’ discount of 15%, or $60 off the list price of $400.

Guigar later clarified on his twitterfeed that the tables in question are 2′ x 8′ and are not in the Artists Alley — they are in the webcomics area¹. This … this is interesting. I’ll be very intrigued if Guigar manages to line up similar sponsorship/discount packages for his subscribers. If he does, he’s just one eco-friendly tote bag away from duplicating the model of public broadcasting across the country.

In other news, we mentioned the success of Girl Genius in the online poll at The Washington Post’s comics blog search for Best Comic of the Decade. Having see the Foglios run away with the victory, there’s now an open call for nominations for Best Webcomic of the Past Decade. Curiously, nobody has mentioned Hark A Vagrant or MS Paint Adventures yet. Perhaps one of you should remedy that.

_______________
¹ Keep in mind that C2E2 is run by Reed Exhibitions, the people behind the New York Comic Con, and the forthcoming Pax East; it’s the NYCC show that prompts me to mention this. I don’t know if it’s Reed, or just union rules at the Javits Center, but the table space there notoriously included only the space.

If you want, say, an actual table, a chair, or something plugged into an electric jack, you need to contract separately for such at rates that sit somewhere between extortion and science fiction. More than one exhibitor at NYCC was seen to buy cheap tables and chairs at local big-box stores and abandon them after the show, and still pay less money than rental would have been.