Things I did today:

• Drew the last two portraits for the sponsors page of the Rita book and laid out the title/publisher info/dedication pages.
• Wrote a brief appreciation of “Homestuck” as outsider art.
• Got some e-mail telling me that I didn’t make the cut for the first round of contestant selection for the Penny Arcade “Strip Search” project.
• Bought a ten-pack of ISBNs and put one on the back of the Rita book. Wondered if this is why the previous thing happened.
• Went to an aikido class and really sucked in the same interesting way I did when starting burlesque. Pretty soon I’m gonna have trouble properly expressing kismesissitude when Rik visits unless I start passing a bit of it on to him.

I was originally intending to do one little tweak to the book cover – I have to adjust the spine width to match what the printer says it should be – then send it off to the printer for the first proof, but after running part of the way to aikido class, then rolling around for an hour and walking back, I’m PRETTY POOPED and think I’m just gonna curl up wit the iPad and the last episode of the previous season of Doctor Who.

Also here is the appreciation of Homestuck, cut and paste from the reply I made on a comics creator forum elsewhere after a thread about the Homestuck RPG Kickstarter passing its $700k goal in a little more than 24 hours showed up:

Andrew Hussie deserves an Eisner for what he’s doing with the format. And not a “best digital comic” ghetto Eisner, either.

I read the whole archive in a couple of days when I first ran across it sometime last year. When the trolls showed up and started flooding the text blocks with l33tsp33k, I very quickly started skimming. Hard. I can’t really say I know more than the broad outlines of it any more. Especially after he introduced another set of four kids playing the game, who are maybe the ancestors of the first four we met, maybe their clone-parents, maybe I don’t know what. And then there’s the crappy webcomic one of the characters in the strip makes, that occasionally comments on recent or forthcoming events. It is a big sprawling mess that I simply don’t have the time to really decode.

I’m not even entirely sure it’s a good story. Given that it’s deliberately modeled after the terrible stories found in adventure games, I’m not even sure I can apply the normal standards of “good” and “bad” writing.

But then again, the rhythms I use in some parts of my own comic are directly influenced by the way Hussie uses big blocks of instant message exchange; there’s an immediacy to short bits of it that really feels fresh and modern.

I don’t know if he’s done a lot of thinking about the traditional craft of comics. He keeps the words and pictures largely separate. He never really does what you’d call “panel layouts”. Just a couple drawings, possibly slightly-animated, one after the other. It’s outsider comics. But it is definitely comics, more so than most attempts by people who’re highly educated in the craft of comics to play with animation and sound and interactivity.

I keep coming back to see what crazy thing Hussie’s going to do next.

If you are interested in the formal concerns at all, you owe it to yourself to read Homestuck. All of it. Online, over a few weekends. Immerse yourself in it and experience its completely alien rhythms. Consider it research, if you must. Because Hussie is doing something completely different and it is something that works.

I had a look at the history of the Hugo for Best Graphic Novel today. It’s a young category; last night was only the fourth one handed out. It’s been surrounded by some controversy, what with the Foglios walking away with it for all of the first three years it’s been available.

Winners are in bold, works available for free on the web are in italics.

2012: Digger, Fables: Rose Red, Locke & Key v.4, Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication, The Unwritten v.4

2011: Girl Genius v.10, Fables: Witches, Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, Grandville Mon Amour, The Unwritten v.2

2010: Girl Genius v.9, Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, Fables: The Dark Ages, Captain Britain and M13 v3, Schlock Mercenary: TheLongshoremen of the Apocalypse

2009: Girl Genius v.8, Serenity: Better Days, Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle, Fables: War and Pieces, Y The Last Man, v.10, Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic

Now, four years is not much to be going on. But this is interesting. Stuff available for free on the web (that is not Schlock Mercenary) is dominating these awards. In 2010, Girl Genius beat out a Batman book written by Neil frickin’ Gaiman, for crying out loud. And 90% of fandom seems to have serious squeegasms over everything that man’s involved in. Tiny little self-publishers are beating out stuff from major publishers.

One can also call into question the validity of the Hugos in general – they’re only voted on by people who hit up that year’s Worldcon; this year there were all of 1101 ballots, only 339 of which voted on graphic novels.

But the question that immediately comes to mind is: do these books win because they happen to have an intersection of their fan-base with people who can afford to do Worldcon? Or do they win because the whole damn thing is available online, for free, so voters who might not have ever walked into a comic shop over the year can read them and form an opinion?

Hugo voters, these days, can get a digital copy of SOME of the stuff up for awards – this article about the 2012 package said it included “all of the [textual] fiction categories, plus Best Professional Artist, with the rest to be added over the next few days”. I’ll have to ask a friend who did vote if they eventually added copes of all the GNs – I’m suspecting that the webcomic model of “put the whole thing online for free” versus the traditional model of “fight digital copies tooth and nail” may be a serious advantage when it comes to an award given based on popular vote.

(That advantage doesn’t exist when it comes to juried awards like the Eisners or the Rubes, since they operate around being sent a couple dozen copies for the whole jury to read. And put web publishers off in a little digital ghetto anyway.)

It will be very interesting to see what the 2013 Hugo GNs look like. If the field is 3-4 traditional books, the latest Schlock, and some other webcomic, I would be EXTREMELY hard-pressed with this kind of history to bet on anything but “the webcomic that is not Schlock”.

EDIT. Hmmm, I just received word that no, the Hugo juror digital packet DOES contain copies of all the GNs. So I guess that the Foglios and Ursula are JUST THAT AWESOME. So much for that narrative about the new world kicking the ass of the old.

* omgomgomg one of MY PEERS has a FRICKING HUGO ASDFGHJASDFGHASDFG. Ahem.

** Looking at Schlock’s site and trying to figure out where each collection begins and ends makes me want to add handy “Book 1” “Book 2” links to Rita.

I was in my bedroom. In my dream it was HUGE and luxurious – I think it was about a hundred feet long, with a raised, carpeted conversation pit in one side, huge windows, really not something I’d allocate as a bedroom IRL.

I went outside into the hall. The floor was layers of peeling tiles; the lower layers were once bright and jolly patterns full of licensed properties for kids. It was pretty creepy. I poked at a pay phone right above a big peeling patch, which I didn’t want to stand over, then went back into my bedroom. I noticed a door right next to the one to that hall, that should have just been another way from the bedroom to the hall, but didn’t exist in the hall. So I opened it… and discovered ANOTHER bedroom that I’d never noticed in all the time I’d been living here. It was moodily lit and lavishly furnished already, with plush couches, a table with pretty knick-knacks on it, and a high, squat window that seemed to look out over Los Angeles in the evening. Gorgeous, twilight, purple, and intimate. Curving walls. Very sensuous. I thought seriously about starting to sleep in this one instead! I wasn’t sure about that little window, though. I’d want more light, really.

I went back into the giant bedroom and sat down on a cushioned bench that was built in beneath the big window. Which looked out upon sun-dappled trees. I detected motion out of the corner of my eye, and noticed that behind the nearest trees, everything was whirling in circular kaleidoscopic patterns. This was pretty unsettling. I looked away and there was an iPad on the bench beside me. Its display was dark, with bright text on it; I couldn’t read the text. It left complicated trails in my retina as I tried to make sense of it, that seemed to have a physical presence – some of them sprawled out of the display area and kind of writhed on the cushions. I managed to make out one word on it: “Agas”. Which I was quite sure was a proper name.

Meanwhile, outside, the kaleidoscopic skies had gone red.

I woke up.

(that name on the iPad may have been something different, that’s the best I can remember it. Half-awake I was convinced I’d seen an anagram of it as the name of some demon in the Goetia, and that there was some kind of deal I was offered and turned down.)

MAJOR congratulations to Ursula Vernon for her Hugo!

And curses to whatever copyright-policing bot denied me the chance to see her squeal about it live because it decided the snippets of a few episodes of Doctor Who that were up two awards before meant Worldcon’s Ustream account should be banned.

So there’s this guy who passed through some of the same art archives as I did, way back in the nineties. Christopher Snowdon, aka Radd. Since 2004, he’s been doing this comic called “Attack of the Flying Spud” – it’s a loving parody of basically every Japanese space battle cartoon of the eighties. It’s also really beautiful to look at, with really nice muted Photoshop colors over pencils, which make the explosions all the more intense.

It’s also, finally, finished. The last page went up yesterday. Go read it. It’s 128 pages long and a fairly quick read, although it can be a lot slower if you stop to ogle some of the densely-drawn machines.