An old friend of mine recently shared some of his youngest's morning doodles with me. Apparently, his daughter has taken to doing some drawing before leaving for school. Mostly for her own amusement, so many of them get discarded or forgotten without anyone seeing them, but her dad has managed to catch some of them. Evidently, the doodles have taken a turn lately to comics.

The art, as you can tell, isn't spectacular and the writing is a bit hard to decipher in places, but that's largely due to the speed with which she cranks these out. In case you can't tell, those "T" shaped things in panel 14 are flashlights, which are converted into overheard lighting for the bar in panel 17. The story itself here is a little odd but, like I said, it's for her own amusement.

But here's the one that really caught my attention.

Again, the art and lettering is hurried, but the pacing of this is fantastic. I was about the highlight that second tier as a prime way to put punch to the punchline, but really the whole piece is spaced out very well. Despite the rushed execution, she still took time to linger on discrete moments in the strip. Breaking the dialogue between panels 2 and 3, the totally silent panel 5, the punishment reiteration in panel 6... brilliant pacing, I think.

There's a lesson here that a lot of professional cartoonists could take to heart, I think!

• Phil Normand talks about "Tarzan and the Ben Day Men" -- the folks who made the production process of of Sunday funnies happen.
  
• Somebody is putting together a reality show focusing on furries. Since the casting call expressly says, "the freakier the better", I have to imagine this going nowhere but downhill.
• Josh Finney writes "another column about women in comics." It includes an interview with an actual, for-real woman who worked for years in comics retailing.
  

I don't recall when I started reading Adam Huber's Bug Martini. Certainly not as long as it's been around, but plenty long enough to get a feel for Huber's style of humor and sense of timing. I'm opting to write a review of it, in part, to figure out why I've been enjoying it.

Don't get me wrong! It's not like it's a bad comic or woefully unfunny. But it doesn't have a lot of the hallmarks I typically gravitate towards in comics.

As you can see, Huber's art style here is pretty simple. The figures are barely more than stick figures, and backgrounds are almost non-existent. And he sticks to the same four panel structure pretty consistently. Despite all that, Huber manages to evoke a lot of nuance and style out a relatively few number of lines.

The jokes and comedy are funny. Generally not falling-out-of-your-chair-laughing funny, but more than a few steps up the comedy scale from your average newspaper comic. Interestingly, he does seem to evoke the set-up/punchline format of most gag strips, but at the same time utilizes the single panel gag style in (nearly) every panel.

As I sit and think about, I suppose it's that last part that stands out most for me. Each strip is almost a series of independent gags that still follow in a narrative sequence. In effect, he's using more of a set-up/punchline/punchline/punchline format. Part of why I like Bill Waterson and Bill Amend's comics is because they frequently have a second punchline after the main punchline, and Huber emulates that after a fashion here.

Huber also stands out by not really having an easy hook. I'd be hard-pressed to give you a "what's the strip about" that didn't go on for a while, despite having a regular format and style of humor.

And there's also not much in the way of money-making going on. He's got his originals for sale, but no books or tchotchkes. Not even a donation button. He's been around long enough, and seems to have enough of a fan-base that he could try making some bucks from this, but as far as I can tell, he's just putting these out there for his own amusement as much as anything.

It's not a comic that hits you over the head with "hey, wow, this is really amazing; I need to share this with everybody" -- it's pretty understated, probably due in large part to the art style. But it's consistently funny. And in a way that you don't really see anywhere else. Huber's is one of the few comics I can count on to make me smile five days a week, and that is very much appreciated and I sit down for work still shaking out the cobwebs.

We're living in an age when many of the comic creators who helped define the industry are dying. Coupled with the global village we now live in, word of their deaths spreads almost instaneously and the news sites and blogs are filled with remembrances and honorariums and such. And I always feel uncomfortable and awkward and ashamed.

The death of Nick Cardy is, sadly, just the latest news of a creator whose never-ending battle ultimately did end. Like so many other great creators whose works I grew up on, I never met Cardy. He was largely retired by the time I started going to conventions at all, so there wasn't much demand for him as a guest, and my own travel limitations (namely, budget) meant that I never had the opportunity to get to a show where he did attend. So I have no heart-warming memories of encounters with him to share here, just like I have no memories of so many other great comic creators.

Cardy also stands out as one of those guys who I always meant to get around to learning more about, but never did before his passing. I've had his biography in my cart at Amazon for probably a year now but I kept putting off buying it in favor of other books that seemed more important at the time. So now I feel like a schmuck because I can't say anything about him that you can't just as readily find on Wikipedia.

I'm left with an appreciation of his work. Yet here again, what am I going to say that hasn't been said by dozens of others? How many professional comic artists were inspired by Cardy's work, and studied it more stridenly? Aren't they a better judge of his linework and composition? Aren't they better able to speak to his work's nuances and subtleties? What can I say that they aren't saying better?

The comic industry is a very, very large place and it seems that no matter how much I learn about it, the death of a great like Nick Cardy inevitably puts in perspective just how small we all are by comparison.I could spend all day every day studying up on all these great artists and genres and styles, and I would still come up woefully short. That's how grand this industry is, and it's terrible that it takes the death of someone like Cardy to really put that in clear relief.

You may have seen news recently about Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey's Kickstarter project to reprint Nelvana of the Northern Lights, Canada's first superheroine. I've known of Nelvana for a few years now, but hadn't seen any full-length stories, so I was eager to see the project successful. (Which it was.)

Interestingly, just as that Kickstarter was finishing up, I go notification of two more projects. A graphic biography of Frederick Douglass by Audran Guerard and a print edition of Xeric-winning creator Jonathon Dalton's webcomic, A Mad Tea-Party. The interesting part is tht both Guerard and Dalton are both Canadian.

Well, I suppose that they're Canadian isn't that interesting in and of itself. After all, there are something like 35 million other Canadians out there. But it's interesting that the Kickstarter projects that are coming to my attention now are primarily from Canadians. Of course, a fair amount of that has to do with Kickstarter recently opening its gates to Canada. Before now, Canadians couldn't start a Kickstarter project, so I suppose that some of this has to do with folks who've been itching to run a Kickstarter but haven't been able to. What we're seeing is perhaps the result of something of a backlog.

But! That's not to say anything regarding these projects' quality! No doubt some are going to be quite good, and some not so much. Some will undoubtedly make their goals, and some will fall short. But as Kickstarter has proved to be a stable and note-worthy way to launch a new project over the past few years, it stands to reason that people outside the United States want in on the game.

I've said here repeatedly that I'm a sucker for Xeric books and I already have Dalton's Lords of Death and Life, doubly proving to me that he can craft a great story. So backing A Mad Tea-Party seems pretty obvious. I'm not familiar with Guerard's work, but I do really like non-fiction comics, especially when they highlight significantly different perspectives than ones I grew up with. Guerard certainly displays talent with watercolors (which, being a media that I am absolutely rubbish with, I have a deep appreciation of) so I'm willing to pledge some money towards him to see his Douglass project completed as well.

But what I'll be on the lookout for are more Canadian-based comics projects that focus on those differing perspectives. Do I want to see a Canadian do another superhero story? Not especially. I want to see creators show me what sets Canada apart from the U.S.? I heard a year or so back that there was some confusion over what constituted a "Canadian identity" beyond "America Lite". Let's see if some more Canadian creators step up and show us what you've got!
 

The S.O. and I spent the day running errands of the "an hour and some away from the home" variety today. We knew we were going to be in the neighborhood of one of her cousins, and said we'd pop in to say hi. As it turns out, we had a very weak turnout for Halloween this year (between us getting home late and it raining all day) so we had buckets of treats left over, so the S.O. thought we should take some of them over for her cousin's kids.

As I went through my collection of comics-to-give-away-at-Halloween that I could include in the care package (you all have a selection of comics that you hand out on Halloween, right?) I found a short run of Guardians of the Galaxy. Now, one of these kids is too young to read, but the other is 11 and kind-of interested in comics but hasn't really had any opportunities to be nudged into comics fandom properly. That is, he's generally aware of comics, but primarily through the movies and what he sees online.

With that in mind, I deliberately choose several issues that A) strung together in a single story and B) have a movie in the works. While the GotG movie is common knowledge among Marvel fans, I think it's still pretty far under the radar for most people. But by introdcuing him to the comic here in advance, I can predipose him to the idea and get him excited earlier on for the comics. Especially since the movie features a cast largely different than most incarnations of the team, I expect he'll have less of an issue than if he really liked the movie, only to find out the line-up different in many of the comics.

I'm probably way over-thinking this, but that's my comic story for today. I gave a kid some comics -- which he eagerly dove into, I might add -- and I'd like to think it will encourage him in the direction of fandom.

Two bits of comics news came out this week involving heading from New York City out to the west coast. DC announced that they'll be formally moving all of their comics offices from downtown New York to Burbank, California in 2015. A couple of days later, Marvel announced that Mark Waid will be writing a Daredevil story in which the character takes a road trip from his home in Hell's Kitchen to San Francisco. It's the latter of those two announcements that strikes me as bigger and more significant in the grand scheme of things.

Let me start by saying, for the folks currently working in the DC offices, that move is a HUGE deal. They're basically looking at either upending their whole life, dragging their family out to the other side of the country, and disgarding much of the social support network. Or they're out on the street looking for a new job in an not-really-great-economy using a skill set that might not directly translate anywhere outside the comic industry. So for those people, yes, this is absolutely a big deal and I don't want to discount that at all. I wish them all the very best, and I hope DC does provide them with some good options for either relocating or walking away with a nice severange package.

But in terms of the overall industry? I don't see that huge a change. As has been rightfully pointed out elsewhere, many of the freelancers actually creating the books are all over the country as it is, so they won't change their processes at all. Jack Kirby moved out to Thousand Oaks back in the late 1960s, and produced comics from there that he sent back to both Marvel and DC. Today, creators don't even have to change the addresses they're sending material to since it's all done digitally. The biggest issue might be a day or two of server downtime while DC's IT group re-locates parts of their internal network, but I suspect even that will be largely invisible to everyone.

But still, why is a story about a fictional road trip more important?

Well, it's not so much the comic story that's important (obviously) but the whys and hows of its rollout. See, this is NOT about Marvel doing another story that's being delivered digitally. Both Marvel and DC have done stories like that in the past, and have some on the market currently. But the difference here is that we're talking about Daredevil.

With Marvel and DC's other efforts, their digital books were addendums to their printed ones. You could still read the adventures of Batman or Wolverine in their printed form; the digital stories were just something else. Something in addition to the printed ones. If you just really liked Wolverine, you could still get a printed copy of new Wolverine stories every month and never see the digital ones. There were both print and digital outlets available.

But the monthly printed Daredevil book was just announced as being canceled. And, unlike Wolverine and Batman, the character doesn't regularly appear in any other title. If you want to read about the character on a regular basis, you have exactly one choice. By cancelling the printed book, and then launching a digital one, Marvel is able to continue producing Daredevil stories but still only giving readers one choice. If you want new Daredevil, you HAVE to buy it digitally. And that is why this is significant.

What Marvel is doing here is a big test. They're testing to see how many of those old school print readers will migrate over to digital reading. As others have also pointed out around this endeavor, there's historically not a lot of overlap between print and digital readers. And Marvel is trying to push some hard numbers against that. Does a reader's preference in format trump his/her interest in the character or story? What is more important: that I read Daredevil every month or that I read pulped wood comics from Marvel every month? That's the question Marvel is trying to answer with this.

And, to extrapolate a bit further, if this is successful (and I don't know how Marvel might be defining success here) what does that suggest for their broader publishing strategy? If they get 90% of their print readers on board with a digital format, they might migrate ALL of their titles to digital only. After all, they'll keep nearly the same readership levels but drop their operating costs exponentially since they wouldn't have to pay for paper, printing, distribution, etc. Which would mean more profits! And what company doesn't want that?

(For the record, I think a 90% conversion is wildly optimistic! I don't think they'll get nearly that. But I think it's safe to say that, if they got that kind of conversion rate, Marvel would undoubtedly deem this a success.)

And before you start thinking I'm going all doomsday scenario here with the demise of comic shops and such, I don't think Marvel would switch all of their titles in one fell swoop. If they were smart, what they'd do is convert one title at a time to digital only. Then, after readers of a title got used to reading it digitally -- say, after 9-12 months -- then they could reintroduce the title in a printed form as well, bringing back the readers who were more staunch in their refusal to take up digital comics. So now they're back to the same, or even higher readership, with a greater majority of them reading digitially. That is, more profitably.

I think the business implications here could be enormous if this goes well for them.