We at Fleen have long been impressed by the Doug Wright Awards for excellence in English-language Canadian cartooning — the list of categories is mercifully short¹, the nominees are traditionally very strong, and the ceremony is held in conjunction with one of the best shows of the year, TCAF.

To that list, one may now add the fact that this year’s awards program will be hosted by Scott Thompson, best known from roles such as Best Friend of the Time Gate Operator, Tomin the drunk alien ambassador, Pleakley’s Mother, Dusty Gozongas, and various roles on some obscure sketch comedy show in the ’80s.

Thompson actually does have a comics connection, having co-written a graphic novel relating the alternate-world-barbarian-fantasy adventures of the most staid businessman in history, Danny Husk. I foresee an amusing evening full of uplifting frolic and cavortment.

Sticking with Canada in general, and Toronto in particular, word dropped from Ryan North yesterday that the webcomics domination of Cartoon Network-related programming continues apace:

Breehn is doing a Bravest Warriors AMA! He lets drop that @achewood and I are each writing an episode :o

The “Breehn” referenced would be Breehn Burns, the writer/director to whom Bravest Warriors (and Adventure Time) creator Pen Ward entrusted the adventures of the emotion-laden space teens. The remainder of North’s tweet referenced a question posed to Burns if he needed help on writing duties, prompting the reply:

This year we’ve brought several writers to the show, so I’m writing about half the scripts with my co-writer Jason Johnson, and for the rest I’m supervising new writers. Among them are Ryan North who does the [Adventure Time] comics, and Chris Onstad who writes the best web comic in existence, Achewood.

So far as I know, animated shorts is a new area of creative endeavour for both North and Onstad². North, naturally, has a feel for Wardian absurdism, what with the Adventure Time comics being one of the breakout successes of the past year, and he and Onstad have deep reserves of skill in making language dance in their comics³. Usually this is the sort of thing that I would view with cautious optimism, but screw that — this is gonna be great.

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¹ To be precise: three. Namely, Best Book, Best Emerging Talent, and the Pigskin Peters Award (for experimental or transgressive work).

² Although the proposed Achewood cartoon show has certainly given Onstad experience in adapting to animation, not to mention voice acting.

³ As well as the fact that Ryan North used to live with Joey Comeau, who writes the Bravest Warriors comics! Oh man, how deep does this rabbit hole go?

Silly me, I didn’t get a screen shot of the parking page that greeted readers of Fleen earlier today as the renewal was making its ways around the world. While the fleen.com email service saw no interruptions, for a few hours I was assured that this page would make a perfect address for auto dealers, auto loans, and all your auto needs. Sadly, people that may have wanted to snag the domain weren’t greeted with the sensitive yet handsome dude, the beautiful yet computer-savvy lady, or the couple that for some reason you just want to slap. Sorry ’bout all that.

• Having dipped her foot¹ into the world of e-self-publishing, A Girl And Her Fed creator K Brooke “Otter” Spangler has been noting some distinct similarities between that world and the earlier, what the heck are we trying to accomplish? days of professional webcomicking, and she’s been kind enough to share her observations with you.

  Having also spanned the world of webcomics self-publishing, and actual-publisher publishing, Otter’s buddy (and Fleen Fave) Ursula Vernon² has her own take of the astonishing Webcomics/SelfPub parallels, and likewise holds forth with useful opinion. They are are pair of sharp ladies and to paraphrase Otter, BUY THEIR BOOKS.

• Oh my, yes, please: Jess Fink’s so very delayed, I thought I might never see it released, can it really be true? time-travel self-makeout epic, We Can Fix It, finally has a release date! Of course, we’ve heard this before (more than three years of hearing it before) but this time it’s certain because Fink has the actual books in her hot little hands, meaning she’ll have them for TCAF in a few weeks. For those of you not going to TCAF, you can exchange money for this book in a variety of places, including by pre-ordering from Top Shelf directly. Go do that now.
• Did somebody say most prestigious awards in comics? The Eisners nominations are out, the superheroes are relatively absent, and webcomickers and their natural allies are well represented. How well represented? Enough so that there’s simply too many names to track down all the web addresses and put the links in the text³. Let’s just take them from the top down, shall we?
  Best Single Issue or One-Shot
  The Mire, by Becky Cloonan (self-published)

  Best New Series
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
  Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (Monkeybrain)

  Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12)
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
  Amulet Book 5: Prince of the Elves, by Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
  Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse, by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos (Archaia)

  Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17)
  Adventure Time: Marceline and the Scream Queens, by Meredith Gran (kaboom!)
  A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, adapted by Hope Larson (FSG)

  Best Humor Publication
  Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)

  Best Digital Comic
  Ant Comic, by Michael DeForge
  Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
  It Will All Hurt, by Farel Dalrymple
  Our Bloodstained Roof, by Ryan Andrews
  Oyster War, by Ben Towle

  Best Adaptation from Another Medium
  A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, adapted by Hope Larson (FSG)

  Best Graphic Album —- Reprint
  Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson by Mark Siegel (First Second)

  Best Penciller/Inker
  Becky Cloonan, Conan the Barbarian (Dark Horse); The Mire (self-published)
  Colleen Coover, Bandette (Monkeybrain)

  Best Coloring
  Colleen Coover, Bandette (Monkeybrain)

  I’m particularly excited to note the presence of Bandette in the Digital Comic category, but also represented in other categories against print comics. And I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Comics Alliance, Robot Six, and The Comics Reporter have all been nominated as Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism, and they are the homes of such webcomics-friendly folks as Chris Sims, Brigid Alverson, and The Spurge. Best of luck to a very strong and deserving field, and let’s hope that we see such good nominations in future years.

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¹ Up to about the knees, actually.

² We at Fleen loves us some Digger.

³ On account of the fact I am a lazy, lazy man.

No pictures; I’m sure we’ll all muddle through somehow.

If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to answer some questions I got on Twitter last night:

My roommates @beckyandfrank said I should ask you about First Aid classes, in the wake of what is currently happening in boston…

I find myself wanting to be able to help in some manner should I find myself in an emergency situation… I was looking at…

Red Cross classes, but I’m not really certain what the difference is between the certifications and ‘Lay Rescuers’ vs “Pro’…

Is there anything specific you’d recommend?

Gladly, Zach. For those that may have missed my copious references in the past, I hold an EMT certification and am a member of an EMT training faculty in my home state of New Jersey; these are related to the fact that I serve on my town’s volunteer Emergency Medical Service, which is why you’ll find me carrying an 911 pager and ambulance keys on Tuesday nights, every sixth weekend, and rotating holidays.

Before I get to Zach’s answer, I want to note that the emergency services in Boston did a superb job in the face of an act of disgraceful cowardice and evil. They were helped by a bunch of factors — being present on the scene already, having medical tents on-site and staffed, a plethora of bystanders eager to help. All that being said, I was astonished reading the Guardian’s minute-by-minute account of the attack, when they noted at 3:30pm (a mere 40 minutes after the bombs went off) that all victims had been cleared from the scene. That is a goddamn world record for a mass casualty incident¹ and I have never been so proud to wear the Star of Life as I was reading that.

So if, like Zach, you’ve decided to take something terrible as the prompt to try to do some good, what should you do?

First of all, none of what I do in my EMS career is rocket science — anybody can be taught, anybody can do it. The two things that everybody should know are some CPR and some First Aid. Both have a variety of classes associated with them, with reputable standard curricula by bodies such as the Red Cross and the American Heart Association. But which ones to take?

The heart (so to speak) of CPR is simple: air goes in and out, blood goes round and round. Keep that up, and you keep somebody alive. CPR courses are usual described as “civilian” or “lay rescuer” versus “helthcare provider” or “professional”; the difference is the former are intended for bystanders who observe a crisis by chance, and the latter for people in the formal healthcare chain who arrive with equipment.

As far as I’m concerned, you shouldn’t be able to graduate junior high school, get a driver’s license, or have a kid without taking a lay rescuer CPR class (including infant/child CPR) at some time in your life — it’s that simple (two, three hours), and it should be that universal. Don’t worry about a pro-level class unless you’re going to be working in a healthcare setting or on an ambulance. Any level of training these days will teach you to work Automated External Defibrillators, which are pretty simple once you’ve practiced a few times.

The core of first aid is: um, the blood’s coming out, so it’s not going round and round anymore, and this guy seems to be in a lot of pain and getting worse — can we at least stop him getting worse until we can get him to somebody that know how to fix him? It’s where you learn to stop the bleeding and get people to lie still until we can immobilize ‘em and transport ‘em safely to a place of care.

There’s lots of courses ranging from super-basics (generally 5 – 10 hours for the Red Cross First Aid I and II) to First Responder (you can generally ride on an ambulance, under the supervision of EMTs) courses that take about 40 hours, to programs that will lead to a professional track (EMTs, depending on the state, will be in class 200 hours or more and can provide varying degrees of medications and trauma care; paramedics will be in school for two years and can do considerably more).

Having taken some classes (and they’re offered everywhere, check your local community center or Y), what else should you do?

First, regardless of your level of training, your primary obligation is to stay safe. No heroics, if it’s not safe for you to help, get to where you’re safe. As the helmet decorations tell us, you only have one ass to risk and your first duty is to get it home whole and safe.

So it’s safe to do so, what have you got to work with? Whenever I’m in a public place my eyes are scanning for emergency exits, aid stations, AEDs, call boxes and so forth. Lady clutches her chest in front of me and collapses, You go back by the bathrooms, find the box that says AED, bring back the contents, move. You call 911, tell them we’ve got an adult woman down, EMT on scene, now, and then I’ve got my gloves on² and I’m treating. Except for the “EMT” part, anybody can learn to do that.

Because I happen to know that Zach lives in Southern California, I hope he’s taken the time to put together a first aid kit as part of his earthquake preparedness; for that matter, I hope that everybody reading this that isn’t in an earthquake zone has done the same. My jump bag is full of various bandages, tape, a small flashlight, gloves, gloves, more gloves, a pair of cheap safety glasses, ice packs, sterile water, and suchlike³. You can put one together for US$30 or so and keep it stashed in your house or car against need.

If you have the time and inclination, there are Community Emergency Response Teams in nearly every locality of the country; they’ll train you to a First Responder standard, and you’ll be called upon to help in cases of disaster in the jobs that are low risk (rescue is dangerous business, you won’t get that in 40 hours of class) but vital: urban searches, transport of the lightly-injured, keeping people from unsafe zones.

If you want to help out on a more regular basis, volunteer EMS exists in most places, and even if you don’t think you want to ride on an ambulance, they still need help raising money, paying bills, keeping the station clean and operational — auxiliary members are the lifeblood of volunteer agencies.

Back to webcomics tomorrow. And the next time you bump into an EMT, paramedic, firefighter, or cop — the ones running towards the disaster, hoping like hell there isn’t another device waiting to take out the responders — do me a favor and thank them.

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¹ Standard practice is triage alone will take 30 seconds per victim, times more than 140 victims, and must be completed before treatment and transport to definitive care.

² When I’m out, I’ve always got nitrile gloves stashed in a pocket or two. Without gloves, the situation isn’t safe and I will not proceed; remember — if it’s damp or gooey and didn’t come out of you, it’s potentially a disease-ridden death-vector and touching it with your bare skin is suicidal.

³ It’s also got more specialized equipment like a high-vis vest, extrication helmet & gloves, a bag-valve mask, artificial airways, BP cuff, stethoscope, and immobilization collars — things that you need special training to use, so let’s not worry about them for now.

Nine years is a long time in webcomics, and it would not be a slight accompishment to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props. But to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props and 2222 wooden jigsaw puzzles? That’s the work of a creative madman, possibly with a frantic body posture and overly-excited facial expression.

So happy Baffler!versary to Chris Yates, Assistant Dragon Emily, Previous Assistant Dan, Captain Felix, Mensa the Menacer, Box-Head, the POOP sign, and all the other denizens of the Greater Boulder Puzzle Metropolis, and may your sanding fingers never shrivel up and fall off. PS: special 30% off Baffler! sale this week in celebration

• Apparently, MoCCA Fest 2013 isn’t over until the Society of Illustrators says it’s over, and sister, they ain’t said so yet. How else to explain the fact that talks and events associated with this year’s MoCCA are still going on? Case in point: 25 April (that would be ten days from now) at 6:30pm, Boulet (Fr ici, Eng here, and I don’t know how to say “here” in Korean) will teaming up with Gabrielle Bell to talk with the comics-loving public for a few hours, thanks in part to a cultural program organized by the French Embassy.

  An Evening with Bell and Boulet will be held at the Society of Illustrators, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and will run you between US$7 and US$15 depending on whether or not you’re a student, a member of the SoI, or a non-member; tickets and more information here.

• Science cartooning, heck yeah! Rosemary Mosco is one of those people that I can talk to forever about pterosaurs (and oh my goodness, it appears that Witton has a book coming in June, hooray) and bunches of other things as well, but man do I love talkin’ pterosaurs with her. She’s one of them actual scientist-type scientists (such as make we poor engineers look like unrigorous experimentalists), and as part of the Cambridge Science Festival in Cambridge, MA, she’ll be talking on the topic of science cartooning along with Jay Hosler and EJ Barnes.

  Science & Comics will take place at Cambridge’s Main library, from 2:00pm – 4:00pm on Saturday, 20 April, in the lecture hall. Like the vast majority of the CSF events (going on now until Sunday), it’s totally free.

• Two of my favorite creators have been stepped back for a while (and will be for the forseeable future) from their main creator-owned project due to external commitments. One of those (a graphic novel from Oni) has been running in place of their main work and the other was revealed late last week: the reason that I’m not seeing “>Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya’s twice-weekly autobio adventures is, in part, due to them producing an Adventure Time miniseries about PepBut and Cinnamon Bun as noir detectives. Let’s see, midsummer last year was when Meredith Gran’s Marceline and the Scream Queens mini launched to great acclaim, so I have high hopes for this year’s midsummer launch of Adventure Time Candy Capers. Mostly because PepBut rules.

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No footnotes? I … I can’t explain this.

I’ve been wondering when the first really big Strip Search-related splash would be made and last night Lexxy Douglas launched a Kickstarter to get her webcomic started. In the order that they occur to me:

• Less than 90 minutes after launch (and about an hour after the first public tweet), Douglas had cleared her US$7500 goal.
• Reading the campaign pitch the money raised is to let Douglas turn down otherwise-paying work so she has the time to launch the comic; this stands in contrast to most [web]comics-related Kickstarters that are going to succeed, in that a request to make something that nobody’s seen yet generally doesn’t do as well as a request to merchandise something that already has an audience.
• Douglas, of course, has an audience (via social media) and is well integrated with webcomics creators, not to mention the fans she’s garnered in her time on Strip Search. Last night I thought she’d timed the launch of this KS campaign well, given that she was still seeing an uptick in attention from people that felt her elimination from the show was a travesty. #TeamLexxy will be all over this.
• This morning, I think that her timing is absolute fucking genius [A/V mixed with a liberal dose of holy crap!]; seriously Lexxy, that is some Khoo-level strategy you pulled right there. Bravo.
• As of this writing, Ms Douglas is on the cusp of just north of US$21,000 and the Gary’s First Law of Kicktraq Projections has her finishing in the US$50K – 100K range.
• Stretch goals are presently defined up to 50K; better think up a couple more and ones that don’t require physical production/shipping, on account of you’ve already got a couple hundred packages to mail.
• It appears that George helped Of course he did.

Speaking of Kickstarts, what may be the most logistically-challenging [web]comics Kickstart in history¹ is making progress, and dropped some references to a pledge-management system² called BackerKit, which you may as well get used to seeing, as I suspect it will be a standard part of Make That Thing campaigns.

I can’t give you a comparison with the previously-mentioned After The Crowd as I don’t have access yet, but the screencaps and video make it seem roughly equivalent. The one key differentiator that I noticed is that BackerKit appears to give you continuous access to manage your pledge/information, where After The Crowd gave you a time-limited, one-shot access (with the ability to request re-access later if needed).

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¹ Fulfillment will involve the wrangling of literal dozens of webcomickers, wood craftsmen, printers, translators, musicians, delicious adorable kittens, and more.

² It’s only a matter of time before the enterprise software industry reduces that to “PMS”.

Douglas Adams was right¹ — there’s something about Thursdays that’s just off, and Dentarthurdent is not unique in that assessment. Today is probably the Thursdayiest Thursday in some time, too. Let’s see if there might be some news out there that will break through the doldrums.

• I had the good fortune to catch up with both Kate Beaton and Scott C last weekend at MoCCA Fest, and I take it as a sign that both have lots of things going on that neither specifically mentioned that they have a series of events coming up next week in Juneau, Alaska that you can totally attend if you have access to either a boat or a plane. Juneau, y’see, isn’t exactly what you’d call accessible by road unless you’re already there.

  It is, however, breathtakingly beautiful, almost entirely deceptive in its sense of scale², and a surprisingly comics-friendly town. At least, that’s what Scott McCloud and family discovered during the Alaska loop of their year-long book tour which was — goodness! — just about six years ago.

  Anyways, Ms Beaton and Mr C will be guests of Alaska Robotics, with lectures, signings, and workshops from Thursday to Saturday next week. Juneau’s not that large³, so if you can find your way out there, I imagine somebody can point you in the right direction.

• Looking a few weeks into the future, those of you (us) that backed the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter who might have been hoping to get your goods shipped in late April per the original estimates? You’ll be waiting a few weeks longer than originally planned as y’all swamped the foundry:
  

  Sadly, there will be a delay — we did, in fact, swamp the manufacturer. The full coin order will not arrive at Chez Tayler for another 40 days. From there it will take us at least a week to assemble bundles for shipping, and then, sometime in early June, we’ll have a shipping party in which 3,000 packages go out the door, and Sandra and I rack up $30,000 in expenses for postage.

  The delay means that your coins will ship in early June, not late April as previously promised.

  I’m thinking that on the grand spectrum reasons for Kickstarter delays, exhausting the manufacturing capacity of a specialized industry is waaaay over towards the Acceptable end, and I do hope that nobody will be bitching at Howard Tayler⁴ for blowing that particular deadline. We’re into you would only get it faster by violating the laws of physics territory here.

• Looking a little further out, we have a release date for the print collection of Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, namely 27 August. The news prompted a remembrance of something long forgot and a happy discovery: there’s a Delilah Dirk short story in the fifth Flight collection which is substantially the same as Chapter 3 of Turkish Lieutenant. Those of you with both in your collection (or will have, come the end of summer) can do a side-by-side comparison for changes, not that I am for a moment suggesting that you (I) might be a detail-obsessed completionist. Not at all.
• Speaking of detail-obsessed completionists, I’ve been digging deeper into the reconstructed archives of Lore Sjöberg’s Bad Gods, and found another long-forgotten favorite — within the collection of POKE/PEEK mini-animations are five perfectly formed arguments proving the most important collorary to Tyrrell’s First Law Of The Internet⁵: Also, don’t engage with anybody who would read the comments. It’s odd how little some things change in — goodness! — seven years.

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¹ About far more than just Thursdays, in fact.

² Starting out from a park building on what we’d assumed would be a 15 minute or so hike to the Mendenhall Glacier which was right there, we found ourselves turning back after two hours on account of the damn thing was no closer than when we’d started. There was simply no visual cue as to the actual distance, which was weird.

³ Actually, that depends on how you define “large”. The actual urban portion of Juneau is pretty small (about 12 square miles and 17,000 people, and chunks of that are university/state capital land), but if you include all of the “city and borough” land, you’re looking at more than 3200 square miles/32,000 residents (or a bit smaller than Rhode Island and Delaware put together). By contrast, my town runs a relatively compact 2.8 sqare miles, but manages to fit 13,500 people into that space.

⁴ My evil twin.

⁵ Namely, Never read the comments.

Two days ago it was not-yet-spring weather, now all of a sudden it’s late-June weather, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it slice of spring in between. What the hecking heck? And with the imminent doldrums of summer comes the quiet season with not much going on as creators everywhere are seemingly enjoying the warm, nap-prompting weather.

In fact, I’ve got nothing for you other than a response from Robert Khoo regarding my questions regarding the Magic: The Gathering challenge yesterday, which is: Sorry, not at liberty to say! Fair enough.

Since the news is taking a nap today, I suggest we all take the opportunity to do likewise. See you tomorrow.

Spoilers if you haven’t seen the latest episode of Strip Search: the challenge involved doing a Magic: The Gathering-themed deck for a skateboard, and in a scant 90 minutes (scarcely enough time to come up with a preliminary design and ask for client feedback) some remarkably polished work got done. However, there could be only one winner and that for the challenge and that was “Hurricane” Erika Moen¹ and well deserved it was, too.

The only thing in this particular challenge that caught me off guard was the fact that although the challenge was described as work-for-hire and that Wizards of the Coast would be producing the skate deck for giveaway during Vans Warped Tour, Strip Search host Graham Stark did not, as has been traditional, explicitly say that Moen won x-number-of-dollars for her design.

Also, as this is a work based around another company’s IP, the usual rule that “the Artists own everything they produce” may not apply; there’s been a lot of online clamoring for one design or another to be produced as a print (notably Maki’s), and I’ve yet to notice any movement in that direction as of the time of this writing. I’ve reached out to Strip Search executive producer Robert Khoo for comment, and I’ll be sure to let you know what I find out².

In other news, one of the nicest, most modest guys in webcomics, Ryan Pequin, had some big news last night:

Anyway by the way I’m a real-ass storyboard guy on Regular Show now.

I’m actually almost finished my first board but frankly I expect the ground to swallow me whole somehow before I feel like this is official.

You’ll get to see the first episode I worked on in ten months so keep your eyes peeled until then!

Taken as a piece with the other webcomics types working on Cartoon Network-affiliated shows and comics, it certainly seems like webcomics is not just a goal in and of itself, but also a damn fine mechanism for making talent known in other fields.

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¹ Personal pick of this page to win the entire competition since the day that the reality show was announced as a stretch goal to the Penny Arcade Kickstarter.

² Keeping in mind that it may be the only answer he can give is Our arrangements with sponsors don’t allow me to comment on that, which is entirely fair.

Before we get to stories of people that have their act together and those that don’t, I have this one blind item appeared in my mailbox from what appears to be a burner email account and makes the (unsubstantiated, but dang it would be awesome) claim that the Ryan Sohmer/Becky Dreistadt childrens book collaboration,
The Bear, will be launching as a webcomic in the immediate future. I believe that’s what’s called an exclusive, so yay you for hearing about it first.

Onwards. MoCCA Fest 2013 took place over the weekend and I have to say that I noticed a lot of changes this year. The show’s first run (a decade ago) was a smash success as a one-day affair at the Puck Building and immediately shifted to a two-day model in its second year. Alas, 2008 was the last year in that facility, and also the year that a talented group of people left MoCCA’s board to pursue other opportunities¹. Unfortunately, when that group left they took a great deal of institutional experience with them.

Had they all stuck around, moving from the Puck² to the 69th Regiment Armory³ would have been a challenge; with seemingly no experienced showrunners on hand, it was … not good. Panels were planned to start the moment the show started; the doors didn’t open for a full hour and a half after scheduled opening; the city was under significantly cooler temperatures than the prior year, but it was still sweat-drenchingly hot inside the Armory, with almost no air circulation and no air conditioning⁴.

Incremental improvements occurred in 2010-2012 (they could hardly have slipped further), and then MoCCA essentially dissolved and transferred its assets to the Society of Illustrators last year, leaving the question in the air: How would the Society manage MoCCA Fest?

Well, we have the answer now: really damn well. Some of the changes made were seen as both positive and negative (the new drapes behind the tables focused attention and cut down on the echoey acoustics, but also cut down sightlines and may have crowded the exhibitors to an uncomfortable degree), some were masterstrokes (the Society did something that MoCCA never managed — the back end of the hall was draped off into a museum-like exhibition space, with some absolutely marvelous pieces from their collection up for display).

From a logistical standpoint, the new MoCCA featured night-before load-in hours instead of a scramble the morning-of, improved line-handling at the entrance (I’ve never gotten in so quickly), overhead banners to get your bearings, volunteers everywhere I looked, and a return of on-scene food (last seen at the Puck). The only thing that I found would have helped would have been some simple printed placards hanging from the red-draped backdrops to indicated booth name/number.

Johanna Draper Carlson (whom I sadly missed seeing on the floor) declared it the best MoCCA ever, which may or may not be the case (second MoCCA, I met Jeff Smith for the first time; third one, I wound up drinking with Vijaya Iyer, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti and we decided that Alfonso Cuarón should direct all the Harry Potter movies, and also I got the best convention sketch ever), but it’s certainly the best of the Armory Era.

I realize that I haven’t talked a lot about projects from the people I would normally be covering, but mostly they’re between announcements — things will be happening by the end of the year, or next year, or when something presently underway is finished, but not much in the immediate term, which meant that I could talk to them about other things — I got to talk to Lucy Knisley about how great I found Relish, but also how much I was looking forward to her Tanzania Travelogue (spoiler: so much, and the zebra she drew me is adorable). I got to thank George O’Connor for a book he did two years ago because he found something new and balanced and sympathetic to say about the very archetype of a wicked stepmother. I got to talk about Doctor Who companions⁵ with Boulet, touring North America with his entirely brilliant Darkness Noirness

The bit that’s most stuck in my head, though, was talking about the show itself with Darryl Ayo Brathwaite about the show itself, where I think he summed up the new era of MoCCA as well as anybody could: the turnaround will stick in the collective memory of comics longer than the hard years and we’ll likely see an even better show next year, which is a damn good thing because there’s a need for a show like this in the dominant population center of the country. The Society of Illustrators has salvaged the idea of MoCCA Fest, made it into something better, and that’s a pretty damn good thing.

On the far side of the good-bad spectrum, the end of the week brought news of the forthcoming demise of Night Shade Books and with it, a great deal of uncertainty regarding the Girl Genius novels. Not being a lawyer, much less a specialist in IP law, I’m not sure how companies can say We’re going to sell your contract to another company and they’re going to rewrite your contract unilaterally into a form that guarantees you’ll never get another royalty check ever and you’re going to like it, but there you are.

The alternative is for Phil and Kaja Foglio to (with some appropriate degree of politeness, and undoubtedly through their lawyer) to tell Night Shade Books to take a hike⁶, which unfortunately brings up the possibility of the rights to the Girl Genius novels ending up in limbo as bankruptcy⁷ works itself out, a process that literally may never resolve itself.

Barring a change in legal thinking that regards time-limited intellectual property rights (like that to publish books) as automatically reverting to the creator in cases like this, there’s not a hell of a lot that the Foglios can do except to see if the aspiring purchaser of Night Shade’s assets, Skyhorse, is wiling to offer a contract that doesn’t promise a royalty of 10% on net (“on net” means “we can always find a way to accrue costs and make it so the net is zero”). Fortunately, the contracts in question only cover the prose novels, but taking away the ability of a creator to make money from something they thought up and in a way that the contracts didn’t allow for? That right there is some straight-up bitchassedness.

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¹ I have since had conversations with source(s) that I deem reliable that MoCCA was engaged in activities that skirted the edge of “acceptable practice” with respect to deaccessioning, and that the exodus represented a protest against these policies.

² Which retains some exhibition space but judging by a walk-past I coincidentally had a few weekends ago, the ground floor of the Puck is now an REI store.

³ Most recently notable for being the place that the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show rendered logistical aid to the New York National Guard in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

⁴ For the third year in a row, I found myself having to render aid in conjunction with a MoCCA show as heat exhaustion affected an exhibitor; in the last two years of the Puck years, I dealt with an impaired individual on the sidewalk who had toppled over his wheelchair and an exhibitor who suffered a seizure at load-in and bashed his head against the wall. Since then I’m happily 0-for-4 on medical interventions.

⁵ Scroll alllll the way down any of his pages and check out the little Karen Gillan sketch if you want to know why that was a natural topic of conversation.

⁶ Hopefully the Folgios’ lawyer is creative in his wording, like Ken White or Marc Randazzo.

⁷ My entire experience of bankruptcy was once on thereceiving end; I bought furniture from a company that had already started filing under Chapter 7 but not yet announced that fact, continuing to do business that they knew they couldn’t possible make good on. Once they filed, they told me I wouldn’t get my furniture and the money I’d paid them would be considered an asset and as an “unsecured creditor” I’d have to petition the court to get a fraction of it returned. I said fuck that and disputed the charge with my credit card company and had my balance credited in 24 hours. That’s why you don’t make advance purchases with checks, kids.

Seriously, I have multiple labcoat-related items today.

• Project Runway meets webcomics for the second time. Last time it was a puking clown; this time it’s fashionable labcoats put together by a contestant from Season 10 and one of Jorge Cham’s collaborators from The PhD Movie. We will get Tim Gunn to take notice of us yet.
• Unless and until the Project X² ¹ takes off, the most famous lab coat in webcomics will remain that worn by Dante Shepherd, who brought himself to the fore twice today: once because he’s the latest creator to guest star in Jon Rosenberg’s anything-goes sandbox (and does so on a topic near to Rosenberg’s heart, booze), but he’s also making progress on a second strip first mentioned back in January (the title of that post also concerns booze …. COINCIDENCE??).

  It appears that the working title of that project will in fact be the final, so look for PhD Unknown to launch sometime this month and the reference to PhDs takes us back to the first item in an ever-deepening spiral of recursion from which there is no escape.

• Except there’s always an escape when there’s something shiny² ³ to look at, such as the latest infodump from the redoubtable Jim Zub on making a career of independent comics. Forget the fact that Zub opted not to include numbers, just look at the graphs showing losses and gains, slowly clawing their way in the direction of profitability.

  Actually, ignore everything except for that last graph on the page (helpfully reproduced above, where you see the red area of loss growing inexorably over time until a sharp about-face kicks in at the start of 2012 and a rapid climb towards the magic “break even” point.

  That inflection point is from when Zub put Skullkickers online and started driving browsers towards his print collections. Ignore that particular unslippery slope at your peril.

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¹ For once, that’s not a footnote, that’s an exponent. Unless I come up with a second footnote in this piece, in which case we’re in trouble.

² Such as my just-received copy of Benign Kingdom: Spring 2013 which — no kidding — has a gold foil embossment on the cover that’s so shiny that it reflected the afternoon sun into my eyes and made me turn my head, blinking away an afterimage. That’s pretty damn shiny.

³ This time it’s actually a footnote. I trust that you’ve navigated any potential confusion without too much trouble.