About a year and a half ago, I was contacted by Ronja Jokilampi, who was working on their Masters thesis and had some questions relative to my Webcomics book. I tried to answer them as best as I could -- although I have to admit I didn't have great answers then, and I still don't! But they've been working on their thesis since then and I learned last week that they indeed finished and have received their Master’s in Literary Studies! So first off, congrats to Ronja!

More to the point of my blog, though, the title of the thesis is Paratext in Paradox: Paratextual Elements and Functions in the Webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons. The academic study of webcomics is woefully lacking, generally speaking. One of the reviews of my own book noted, as one of his biggest complaints, that there weren't enough academic references in it... but then went on to add that there simply isn't much to reference in the first place! So it's worth noting when we get a thesis paper on webcomics in any capacity. More interesting, though, is that Ronja focuses in particular on the paratexts of Kill Six Billino Demons. The paratexts are basically all the stuff that's part of a webcomic, but not the comic itself! Everything from the ALT text on the images to the web site's FAQ to even the extra material over on an ancillary site like Patreon. I barely touched on paratexts in my book, doing barely more than citing that webcomics can have more options available that traditional comics. As far as I'm aware, Ronja's thesis is the first study looking expressly at webcomics' paratexts and how they're intergrated (or not) with the main comic.

Here's the paper's abstract...

The thesis analyses how Kill Six Billion Demons uses its paratext to expand the webcomic’s narrative toolkit beyond just the comic. The webcomic paratext is used for directing the comic’s interpretation, presenting both supplemental and primary narratives, creating aesthetic and comedic experiences, and breaking the borders between textual and paratextual spaces to create potent narrative effects. Building on the theoretical bases of Genette’s ‘Paratexts’ and Kleefeld’s ‘Webcomics’, Waites’ idea of paratextual narratives, and the categories of paratextual function introduced by Birke and Christ as well as Gross and Latham, the thesis is the first to create an extensive typology of a webcomic’s paratext. It is also the first piece of academic writing to focus on Kill Six Billion Demons, inviting further research on both the webcomic specifically and digital paratexts in general.

The paratext of Kill Six Billion Demons is shown to be unusually robust and influential to its text. While earlier research has claimed that paratexts function primarily to illustrate the author’s intent over the text’s interpretation to the reader, to assist in navigating the work, and to boost its sales, this analysis reveals further functions that challenge our understanding of the paratext as a solely pragmatic tool. The thesis gives examples of creative paratextual functions that demonstrate how the webcomic author can use the varied paratextual spaces that the webpage’s infinite canvas provides in ways that would be unfeasible in print comics. Paratextual space is used for textual functions and vice versa, creating a formal paradox that has the potential to both challenge and expand our contemporary understanding of the paratextual threshold.

The full thesis is available for download from the Helsinki University Library website under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. If you've got any interest in webcomics, it's well worth the read and gets into a LOT of material that I didn't have the space to touch in my book. (Full disclosure, though: my book is cited several times and Ronja gave me a special thanks at the very end.) I've been saying for literally decades now that we need more journalistic and academic discussions about webcomics, and I think we should all support anyone doing exactly that! Go check out Paratext in Paradox and, if you happen to be working on your own thesis, be sure to make some references to it, so we can continue to spread the good word!

The gent at the right is Mitsumasa Anno, a Japanese author and illustrator of children's book. From Wikipedia...

Anno was best known for wordless picture books featuring small, detailed figures. In the "Journey" books, a tiny character travels through a nation's landscape, densely populated with pictures referencing that country's art, literature, culture, and history. Anno's illustrations are often in pen and ink and watercolor, and occasionally incorporate collage and woodcuts. They are intricately detailed, showing a sense of humor as well as an interest in science, mathematics, and foreign cultures. They frequently incorporate subtle jokes and references.

My dad had several of Anno's books when I was a kid and they were truly impressive. I recall pouring over the fine linework and detail he would put into every page. Despite the stories being entirely wordless, they told very clear and concise tales and, in retrospect, very clear comic work told in an extraordinary manner.

I don't think I've ever seen Anno's name in association with comic book storytelling, and thought I ought to call some attention to his work for those who've never really made the connection between his work and the comic medium. My personal favorites were Anno's Italy, Anno's USA and Anno's Britain. Really masterful work, well worth seeking out.

I've seen a fair amount of general press coverage over the past month or so for a crowd-funding campaign for a new Rat Queens game, based on the comic created by Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch. Mostly the fairly usual "just republishing the press release" stuff, but the occasional interview and side commentary and such as well. Clearly based on some relatively aggressive PR work.

And all of it completely uncritical of the creators.

A quick recap if you're unfamiliar... Wiebe and Upchurch first launched Rat Queens in 2013. It's a sword-and-sorcery fantasy about four loud, raucous, sometimes drunk adventurers. That's part of the appeal -- that it feels like a group of friends sitting around the table playing Dungeons & Dragons. The other part of the appeal is that they're all women, so the whole book plays against the stereotype and showcases a form of female empowerment. It sold reasonably well (for an indie type book) when it launched and it quickly developed a devoted following. However, after about a year, Upchurch was arrested for domestic violence.

This was not a matter up for dispute. His wife had visible injuries, and he admitted his wrong-doing. He was ordered to go through six months of a counseling program by the courts. Wiebe "fired" him from Rat Queens, and got Tess Fowler to take up art duties. This is all a matter of public record.

In 2015, Upchurch solicited an interview with CBR in which he admitted -- using mostly passive, third-party language -- that he committed domestic violence and he was trying to do better. It came across to me like a poor man's "mea culpa tour" in which he would say "I'm sorry" and everything would be forgiven so he could return to his career. Except it was only the one interview, and given that Upchurch himself reached out to initiate it -- specifically with a female interviewer -- and that he never actually apologized for his behavior, it fell very short for me. Even moreso when his wife responded on her own blog citing several instances in the interview in which he said things that were provably untrue or misleading with deliberately no context. Contrary to his claim, she noted he'd had almost no interactions with their kids and certainly hadn't offered any financial support, and he hadn't talked at all about how he'd also cheated on her. Upchurch talked a lot about "moving on" and "doing better" but she saw no evidence of that.

One thing Upchurch was upfront about was that he was hoping to use that interview to get back into comics' good graces and start working again. And what came out indepenently later was that Wiebe had been working to get him back on Rat Queens. Which makes sense conceptually, as they were friends and co-creators of the series, but Wiebe was doing that initially without telling Fowler and -- once she learned about it third-hand and confronted him -- he flatly lied to her about it and only tried to back-peddle his words later when he couldn't otherwise weasel out of the lie. She left the book in digust and sold all of the original artwork for it super-cheaply so she could get rid of it and not have to look at/be reminded of that experience ever again. Probably at the insistence of the publisher, Weibe took a year off to give the book what's listed in Wikipedia as a "soft reboot."

(None of the details about Upchurch are mentioned in the Rat Queens Wikipedia page, by the way. It just says "Upchurch left the book after issue #8." There's more information about Fowler's departure and the 'controversy' there than about Upchurch!)

Now, that was all a decade ago at this point. I can't find any other comics work Upchurch has done in comics since then besides a single Rat Queens special in 2023 and a few covers. Upchurch's two oldest kids are in their 20s now and the youngest from that marriage, I think, must have just graduated high school. I don't know if he re-established regular contact with them, or what their relationships are like today. I presume the divorce papers he seemed unbothered to sign initially eventually made it through the courts, but I have zero clue whether or not the woman he left his wife for is stil in the picture at all.

Could Upchurch have genuinely and sincerely changed since all that went down? Sure, it's possible. I can't find any evidence one way or the other more recent than 2016. Did Weibe learn a lesson about open communications from his debacle with Fowler? I hope so. The original Kickstarter campaign for a Rat Queens game ended in 2021 and, while it hasn't been delivered and the originally contracted manufacturer seems to have gone AWOL, Weibe himself does seem to have at least been relatively consistent in ongoing monthly updates. But in the two years since he said, "I have rescinded the Rat Queens rights from Ox Eye Media and their partners" he hasn't delivered anything for that game either.

People are inherently fallible. We all make mistakes and do/say things we shouldn't. Over the course of ten years or more, one would hope that people would learn lessons from their bad choices though. But simply saying "mistakes were made" without any effort to own up them, much less offer any evidence that you've tried to correct for them does not cut it. It's just lip service offered in lieu of anything substative. Businesses do that kind of bullshit to avoid legal liability; individuals do that kind of bullshit to prop up their pride. Are you willing to wait a decade or more for someone to learn from their mistakes?

I am not as well-versed in underground comix as I probably should be. I became nominally aware of them back in the 1980s, but by that point, they had largely given way to the independents comics movement of that decade. I was little too underage to even get access to any undergrounds until the late '80s at the earliest -- by which point, most of them had fallen to the wayside -- and by the very nature of underground comix, the vast majority of them have never been reprinted or collected since. Some of Robert Crumb's and Harvey Pekar's stuff. Wimmen's Comix got a nice slipcase collection a couple years ago. I've got an artist's edition version of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. But by and large, undergrounds are a lot like Tiajuana Bibles or old school comics fanzines in that you pretty much need to track down the originals if you want to study them.

So in coming to Kim Deitch's How I Make Comics, I'm not overly familiar with his work. Most of what I have read from him are his later comics. But I do know him to have a somewhat surreal sense of humor and storytelling and, as I'm always interested in the creative process when it comes to comics, so I picked this up.

First off, what this book is NOT is a "how to." If you have any ideas or hopes about this being the indie comics version of How To Make Comics the Marvel Way, just chuck those out the window now. It is indeed about how Deitch makes comics, but it's not prescriptive in any way. Well, it's not exactly about how Deitch makes comics generally, it's about how Deitch made this comic specifically. He goes through how he made this exact book and the reader is left to infer that his process would be similar for his other comics. Or, at least, his other comics since the late 1990s after he married artist Pam Butler, whose input he consider vital.

You ever see the music video for Phil Collins' Don't Lose My Number? It goes through Collins meeting with a string of directors and creative types proposing concepts for the Don't Lose My Number video and cycles through vignettes of each concept. Some are trying to tell more of a story, some just relying on unique visuals... but they all take radically different approaches, none of which seem to have any relation to one another. And for as absurd as it is to compare one of the most popular, widely-listened-to musicians of the 1980s to an underground cartoonist, that same basic concept is on display in How I Make Comics.

The story starts with Deitch's recollection of when he was one of the kids in the Peanut Gallery of The Howdy Doody Show and he got into a fight with an eight-year-old Donald Trump. It then shifts to an old newspaper account of a little person who had the script for his play stolen, and he sought retribution by blowing up one of the man's properties. Then there's a story about a circus elephant who had been sold to a zoo and then escaped. People having their souls transferred to tiny Felix the Cat style bodies. A man coerced into robbing a mansion with two "friends" and it turns out to be a house he painted a mural for 20 years earlier. How his mother and father met while hanging out with Forrest Ackerman.

And his wife Pam repeatedly steps in to offer critiques. "This is too bleak." "What is this character's motivation?" "What if they did this instead?"

Some of the ideas get discarded, some get merged, some just shift a bit. It's essentially a walk through Deitch's creative process. The promo copy calls the book "a creatively kaleidoscopic, non-stop exploration of how Deitch’s imagination turns ideas, influences, and irritations into comics in his inimitable style" and while, yes, that is a bit sales pitchy, it's not really inaccurate either. There are a few technical elements included about Deitch's work -- the type of brush he uses, what his desk set-up looks like, etc. -- but those are incidental to his creative process when it comes to this book. Even with my limited knowledge of Deitch's work, How I Make Comics feels very much like it could only have come from him. As I said, this isn't exactly a "how to" and you'll probably be disappointed if you go in expecting that. But if you appreciate Deitch's particular brand of storytelling, this very much fits within his oeuvre and you'll likely find it as entertaining as his other works.

The book came out in hardcover from Fantagraphics in May, so it should be readily available through your favorite bookshop. It retails for $24.99 US.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: The Beast Review
https://ift.tt/nbW2asT

Kleefeld on Comics: What Art Do I Look For?
https://ift.tt/cE2GM7e

Kleefeld on Comics: Concerning Numbers
https://ift.tt/rbF5EaA

Kleefeld on Comics: Seuss Political Cartoons
https://ift.tt/9cXL4YB

Kleefeld on Comics: The Bird's Eye Kids Go Shopping
https://ift.tt/lpeBq0m

You know, I get that some companies think it's a neat idea to make comics to promote themselves. And I get that creators hired to do those comics have a lot of constraints placed on them, not the least of which is trying to make a reasonably coherent and vaguely entertaining story out of absolute drek. But this is right down there with the worst.

Not that you're interested, but that big white box on the bottom of the cover was where a small box of crayons was glued. (You can see some of the residue stained the inside of the cover as well.) The yellow box above/behind the dog on the cover could be used for an individual grocer to put their own name/logo.

It's not uncommon knowledge that Dr. Seuss worked did political cartoons before he became well-known as a children's book author. Most of his cartoons were done during World War II and, not surprisingly, focus on issues surrounding the war. But today, in 2026, many of them are still sadly relevant. I thought today I'd share a small sampling of some that I find still resonate today...