I don't really care much for Halloween. I'm not a hater or anything; it's just not my thing.

Halloween when I was a kid was kind of cool. You got an excuse to pretend you were Batman or Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones or whomever, and you got a bucket full of candy. Hard not to love that as a kid.

But somewhere when I got to be around 8 or 9, I started to realize that I really wasn't very good at it. The costuming part of it, I mean. There was always a matter of not wanting to spend a lot of money on a costume you'd wear once, maybe twice. And then there was the matter of being comfortable; the more elaborate the costume, the more uncomfortable it tended to be. The last time I even attempted a costume was 1991, when I was in college and my housemates all wanted to have a big Halloween party. I wore a pair of suede, knee-high boots I already had and a loincloth made of faux fur, carried around a cheap toy sword, and called myself "Shandor From The Village In The North!!!" That was probably my most successful costume, but mostly from the standpoint that it was me walking around almost naked. (Fortunately, it was quite warm that year.)

I understand the attraction of pretending to be someone else when you're a kid. You're still trying to figure out who you are and you can use Halloween as a sanctioned way to try on other roles. But I had a pretty good handle on who I was early on, and didn't feel any need to change identities. That sense of self has strengthened over the years and I have zero desire to pretend to be anyone else. In fact, I was a mildly irked when I first signed on to Second Life and couldn't use my real name as my screen name. I actually really like me, and don't have any interest in being anyone else. Even for one night.

(Semi-related: I have even less interest in trying my hand at cosplay.)

"OK, fine," you might say. "So you don' go to Halloween parties and dress up. You can still hang out at home and pass out candy to the neighbor kids."

My ex-wife insisted that we participate each year and hand out treats to the kids. Primarily out of fear that our house would get egged. I was never keen on getting up to answer the doorbell every few minutes, but I made it a little more tolerable for myself by handing out comics as well. While I did get one or two really good reactions each year ("WOW! Hey, guys! He's passing out comic books!") I didn't get much out of it. Because the youngest kids didn't even know what was going on, the older kids didn't care at all and just wanted free candy, and the ones in the middle didn't seem all that into it either.

Besides, it's not exactly cheap to buy a bunch of candy and/or comics mostly for people you don't know!

When I moved to the Chicago area, the town I moved to started trick or treating at 3:00. Working from downtown Chicago, that would mean I'd need to leave work at around noon in order to get home in time to hand out anything. So it wasn't exactly a high priority. In fact, prior to COVID, I often even made it a point to not even be home during the whole thing and I'd wind up rolling into the driveway around the time trick or treating was formally over.

Tonight, I'll have the lights off, the curtains drawn, and I'll probably be sitting in my library working my way through a way-too-large TO BE READ stack of comic books. But that's just me -- don't let me dissuade you from doing Halloween however suits you. Happy Halloween!

In the wake of Hurricane Melissa, I thought I might run this 1956 government printed pamphlet touting how you could be a good citizen during a natural disaster. The Li'l Abner artwork on the cover is signed by Al Capp, but the interior artwork doesn't look like his. I haven't been able to track down any solid creator information on whose art it actually is.

Yesterday morning, I called up the custom comics page I created so I could read all the webcomics and newspaper strips I wanted in one place, and I found several of the comics were coming up as broken image links. Given that I coded the page myself, and a lot of it is reliant on each creator using a consistent file naming structure, it's not uncommon for a broken image link to show up from time to time. But yesterday, I had a dozen. I first thought there was something that interrupted the page load, so I hit 'refresh' but that just resulted in the exact same thing.

As I looked at things a little more closely, I did notice that all of the comic titles all those broken links belonged to were ones from the GoComics website. So I thought there might be something wrong with their server. When I tried calling up the comic images individually, I'd get a 404 error so I knew it wasn't a server problem at least. Maybe there was a formatting issue that screwed up how the file names were spelled out. Nope, re-typing the file name to match the day before's -- which I know for certain had worked because that's how I read all of them -- resulted in more 404 errors. I did some more checking. 404s for all the individual titles' directories. 404 for the directory all those directories were residing in.

I got a 403 error when I got up to the server level itself, which meant the server was still online. But the 404s meant that those individual files were gone. They didn't change acccess levels, they removed the files and directories entirely.

Thirty years ago, when newspaper syndicates first started putting all their comics online, they did so in a pretty basic fashion. They had a directory for each title, and uploaded each new strip with a file name that was a combination of an abbreviation of the title and the date. They needed to do something structured like that so they could keep all of their work organized and the whole server didn't become a jumbled mess after a week. The problem, though, is that structure was also easy to understand and therefore easy to develop a script for. This mean that just about anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of virtually any coding language could write a script to automatically take that day's comic and drop it into their own website. Which, if you make your money by selling subscriptions to that exact content, means you'll have more people linking to your content for free rather than paying for it.

They eventually realized this, and re-worked their website so that the images presented there were given a randomized file name when it was served to the user. They kept the naming structure internally so they didn't lose that organization, but they had a script that effectively anonymized that for public presentment. This would've been back in the late '90s, I believe.

However, I know they kept the old naming system internally because, back then when I first learned Javascript, someone had posted on some now-long-forgotten-forum a list of all the comics being hosted on a separate server than what was being used on the live site. Given the server domain was "synd.imgsrv.uclick.com" my assumption was that this was used to host images that news outlets could refer to when linking to the comics they were paying syndication rights for. The level of "security" being used by the syndicate itself was simply not telling anyone else that it existed. But someone -- who I presume worked for a newspaper at the time -- shared that info on a forum for the sake of anyone who wanted unpaid access.

My guess is that at some point, the syndicate told newspapers they were going to sunset that server and they gave them a window of a month or so to switch their websites to refer to the new server with anonymized file names. I expect more security was built in, so they needed a password or access key or something. And the newspaper all switched over because readers tend to get vocally upset when they can't read their comics, and there was no way an editor was going to risk that backlash over a stupid tech issue.

Except the syndicate never turned off the old server. Or the script that was copying files to it. It was no doubt set as an automated task, and maybe the programmer who put it together in the first place left; maybe they forgot about it; maybe they got busy with the next project... Eventually, Uclick was fully absorbed by Andrews McMeel's Syndicate in 2009; I'm sure there was a massive staff shakeup and any of the folks who were even still left by then were likely let go. So that old system just kept chugging along in the background, without any institutional knowledge at Andrews McMeel that it even existed.

It would have been pretty inconspicuous. Back then, there would've been few 'hackers' interested enough to do anything with the information. And you couldn't get access to EVERY comic they were running; mostly just well-established strips. So I'm sure most folks who did know about it eventually opted for other methods of getting to those comics. I know I certainly stopped referring to them on at least two separate occasions, and only returned when that new source broke and I'd find myself digging across old code I had written years earlier. So the amount of traffic that server would still be getting would be neglible at most. And as hard drive space has gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, the amount of space these duplicate image files would be taking up relative to their main sites would be rounding error.

So that server has been quietly hosting a slew of comics in the background, available essentially for free to anyone who knew they were there, for the past thirty years. "Hacking" access to those images wasn't even Web 1.0 levels of difficulty, so much so that I'm not even sure it even is considered hacking.

I've long since figured out other ways to get those strips I was reading, so it didn't take long to rework my personal comics page and drop in other sources for everything. And I don't really have a point other than to mark the very end of an era. There's very little in the way of Web 1.0 remnants floating around and still being updated -- the only comics outlier I know at this point is, fittingly, the Zippy the Pinhead website, which creator Bill Griffith still seems to update by hand every day -- and given the state of the world, that's a shame. Because that level of technologicial naivety was charmingly refreshing in an age when every website wants to track everything you do online and you get security alert notices on a daily basis about how this app or that website has been compromised, and all your personal information has found its way to the dark web once again. That that old system had been just doing its thing in the background, largely ignored, for three decades was amazing in its simplicity. RIP to the remnants of the original digital frontiers.

Back in 2020, Frazz creator Jef Mallett noted that he felt somewhat obliged to periodically recognize, within the context of his strip, the fact that none of his characters were wearing masks. It was pointed out in a number of comics around that time that masking the characters made it much more difficult to tell who was doing the talking, and that's why comics largely 'ignored' the pandemic. But to formally recognize and comment on that, in one strip, Mallett had Frazz and Caulfield uncharacteristically break the fourth wall for the day...

Does any of that look familiar? Does it remind anyone of some other comic strip character? Like, perhaps...

Mallett was using the same notation for unintelligble speech that Charles Schulz always used for Woodstock. This type of notation, as far as I know, had not been used outside of Peanuts but with two different strips using it now -- especially with one of them being by Schulz! -- I think it makes it an official comic shorthand and should be ranked up there with grawlixes, lucaflects, and swalloops.

We need an official name for it, though... I first proposed this back in 2020, but I haven't seen it catch, so I'll throw it out to the internet again: how about we call these individual marks that represent unintelligble speech "woodstalks"?

Yesterday, Alan Gardner decided to wade back into a 15-ish year old debate: webcomics versus print comics. He even went back to get some reflections from two of the most vocal debaters, Scott Kurtz and Ted Rall.

Now, before I get into any of my thoughts, let me start with some context for those of you who weren't paying attention to webcomics at all back then. Prior to, say, 2006-2007, webcomics were simply dismissed out of hand by pretty much everyone. Not on the basis of the creativity or talent or anything like that, just that so few people were making a living doing webcomics that the medium was considered little more than a distraction. A hobby at most. There were a handful of people earning a living making webcomics, but it really was just a handful... literally only four or five individuals. They had proved it was possible, though, and that gave a lot of webcomikers hope and a business model template they could actually work from.

The "problem" was that some of these more successful webcomikers were trying to make a space for themselves in more traditional cartooning circles. Many established print cartoonists dismissed webcomikers as talentless amateurs, and they would slag them off by saying they're just cheap t-shirt salesmen and don't actually make any money from making comics.

It was very much an in-group/out-group situation, with print cartoonists not giving a crap in the first place until webcomics started to become a thing in their own right and draw attention/eyeballs away from their own comics. Honestly most webcomikers at the time didn't care one way or another and said, "Whatever, olds. If you can't figure out how the 21st century works, that's your problem. No skin off my nose!" The only ones (like Kurtz) who raised a fuss were looking for validation from professionals that had long aspire to be among. And there were indeed some old school cartoonists (Rina Piccolo and Greg Cravens come to mind) who maybe didn't understand how webcomics worked, but recognized the old newspaper syndication system was dying and that webcomikers were doing something different.

The back and forth lasted about five years until basically even Kurtz gave up trying to convince the old guard that webcomics were a valid profession. I'm pretty sure nobody won over anybody with their arguements, and all it did was make Kurtz and a few others look immature, and the newspaper cartoonists look like old farts yelling about "these kids today" to nobody in particular.

I covered this in much more depth in my Webcomics book if you're interested.

Anyway, back to Gardner. He revisited the topic, now a decade and a half since everybody gave up arguing, and reached out to Kurtz and Rall, as I said. There's a few things of interest I'd like to highlight in their response.

First, Kurtz comes across as much more mature than he was. He admits he was "immature asshole" back then and that his arguements didn't sway anybody. He also acknowledges that the business model he used when he started PvP isn't really viable any longer, and he largely works on graphic novels now because he's unwilling to, with his age, commit to the daily grind of webcomics or newspaper comics. He hints at, but doesn't specify, the exact timing of his getting out of daily webcomics happens to coincide with a massive shift in how the original webcomics business model began failing thanks in part to the rise of ad blockers and automated t-shirt 'shops' that liberally stole creators' designs.

As for Rall, he definitely seems calmer now than he did then, but he still comes across as having an angry "these kids today" mindset. He still seems to think that all but a handful of webcomikers are outright lying about their finances, and that webcomics are functionally impossible to earn a living from. He continues to cite $100,000/year as some kind of baseline for what he seems to consider "making a living" even though the median American income has never cracked $50,000/year. His overall position seems to remain unchanged, and it's only his tone that has tempered a bit.

When I revisited this whole debate while I was researching my Webcomics book, I thought that both Kurtz and Rall were being pretty obstinate and needlessly antagonistic. But, if you were able to read past the attitudes, Kurtz did bring up many valid points, which Rall continually dismissed out-of-hand. And while they both wound up being the faces of the two sides of the 'debate' by being the most vocal and most antagonistic, anyone who chimed in from the sidelines and didn't have an axe to grind seemed to align with Kurtz. Mostly other webcomikers, to be sure, but even several of the newspaper cartoonists. Piccolo and Cravens, as I noted earlier, but Jim Davis and Julie Larson and Bill Amend. They might not have been able to figure out how precisely they could work in a regular webcomics format successfully themselves, but they acknowledged in various way how that was a viable direction for the 21st century.

I recall thinking the "debate" was stupid at the time. Some people were drawing cartoons, posting them online, and earning a living from it. By 2007, when this all first erupted, webcomics was proven to be a viable career option. Not an easy one, certainly, but viable. We had a number of clear examples by that point, Kurtz only being one of many. That anyone would refute that, or deny that those people were professional cartoonists did nothing but highlight the claimant's own fragile ego. It just highlighted people who were scared about where their careers were headed, and that they didn't seem to know -- or even want to know -- what to do about it.

Webcomics are thing. Some people make money at it, some people don't. Some people make enough money at it to earn a living, some people don't. Same with print comics. That it was ever a debate at all stuck me then, as now, as silly.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Personal vs Public Libraries
https://ift.tt/oavqBWU

Kleefeld on Comics: Civil War
https://ift.tt/eN56LEC

Kleefeld on Comics: ComicsPRO Open House
https://ift.tt/rMjIVzX

Kleefeld on Comics: Comic Book WIIFM
https://ift.tt/nP2gYhe

Kleefeld on Comics: What!? or What?!
https://ift.tt/IkBuZQL

I saw the question come up recently... when writing dialogue, which is correct: using a question mark and then an exclamation mark, or using an exclamation mark and then a question mark?

Well, the snarky answer is neither; you should use an interrobang. That's what the accompanying graphic here is. It's literally the two independent marks superimposed on each other specifically to convey both a question and an exclamation. "What‽"

Except that it's pretty hard to read in a lot of situations and not very common, so it would probably confuse more readers than not.

The next answer is question mark/exclamation mark. According to Nate Piekos, that is what Marvel insists on. My guess is that that's because it tends to read more distinctly. A ?! is very much two different, distinct punctuation marks, but !? could be read as a capital P if the kerning is too tight or the ink bleeds a bit or something.

Personally, though, I think printing standards have improved sufficiently that, since we no longer have to worry about the word FLICK any more, why should !? be a concern?

My suggestion -- and what I always do in my writing -- is to use them both, but their specific usage is dependent on the context or situation. Namely, whichever mark comes first is the primary mark and highlights the emphasis of the dialogue. Are we talking about an question that's posed with a lot of energy or excitement, or is it more of an exclamation that happens to be phrased as a question? So, for example...

What!? Why did you do that?!

Here, the speaker isn't actually asking someone to repeat themselves by asking "What?" They're expressing surprise and alarm, using a questioning phrase. Hence, it uses !?

By contrast, "Why did you do that" is an actual question. It continues to have the excitement and alarm of the exclamation, but an answer or response is expected. Thus ?!

To my thinking, you can add one more mark to either if you really want to hammer the point home, but it should always be a duplicate of the first mark. Using the same example...

What!?! Why did you do that?!?

More than three marks is unecessary, however.

A lot of this boils down to context and, indeed, different writers might approach the same phrase a little differently. Maybe they do think "What?" is a legitimate question here, and there's an expected response either to confirm or repeat the questioned statement. But if that is the case, I -- as the reader -- continue following the guidelines above and assume that "What?!" demands an answer whereas "What!?" does not. This adds further clarification to the reader that an interrobang does not. And isn't that usually the point -- to give as much clarity to the reader as possible?