Check out this fundraiser for The Sequential Artists Workshop; a great new school to be built in Gainesville, Florida, under the direction of Tom Hart. Definitely a worthy cause.

I wish I could have had Tom as a teacher when I was starting out. With your support, others will finally get the chance to be taught by Tom and other great teachers in the coming years.

Note: The campaign at Indiegogo is similar to Kickstarter, but with the important difference that all your contributions are tax-deductible.

Speaking of experimental comics, Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a cleverly designed multi-plane side-scroller by Stevan Živadinović that most of you can probably view without any technical hiccups.

I like the multi-plane effect. Full-out 3D could also work for scrollers like this of course. The key is in maintaining the work’s identity as a still life; even though navigating through it might be filled with dynamic motion.

[link suggested both on Twitter and in yesterday’s comments]

Meanwhile, Dylan Horrocks has details on Darkest Day, a benefit book for the victims of the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake which can be purchased here.

That’s it for this week. See you all Monday!

I mentioned Dash Shaw’s film project last summer when a teaser trailer went up. Now’s our opportunity to help support the film via Kickstarter.

The Ruined Cast is co-produced by John Cameron Mitchell who used Shaw’s artwork to great effect when directing the recent feature Rabbit Hole (which I liked A LOT, by the way, and highly recommend along with Mitchell’s other great films).

One of the things I like the most about this pitch, apart from the fact that The Wormworld Saga looks really nice on the iPad, is that it wouldn’t have made any sense just a few short years ago.

This scene is moving fast, People.

Yup. I’m totally going to be a part of this.

A fun project for a great cause.

Thanks to all the great students who came out for this weekend’s workshop at LAAFA! You guys were a joy to work with.

A couple of benefit comics out there this week: Panels for Primates (promoting primaterescue.org) and this call for submissions for an anthology to help promote anti-bullying awareness.

I like this handy round-up of UK artists. Anyone want to attempt it with other countries and create single portal?

This is medical wrap-up week, with two or three procedures planned to hopefully put both my kidney stone and arterial fall-out to rest. Wish me luck.

New York based Raina Telgemeier recently blogged some adorable photos of school and library visits she did here in California on behalf of the terrific “dental drama” Smile. I defy anyone to read the post and not smile just as widely as Raina and her growing family of young readers.

Reading it drove home for me again (see previous post) what an enormous opportunity every cartoonist has to translate their own experiences and interests into comics and find or even create new readers, based on the subject of that work.

One reader emailed me from a Therapy Center simply because she’d heard there was a comic explaining Crohn’s Disease (there is; it was a 24-hour comic by Tom Humberstone who suffers from the condition). Crohn’s disease affects between 400,000 and 600,000 people in North America alone (thanks, Wikipedia). Why the Hell WASN’T there a comic about Crohn’s disease until now??

Whole markets can be created out of thin air when the right subject strikes. Gan Golan (one of my 2003 seminar students at MIT) made a name for himself collaborating on the political parody Good Night Bush in ’08. Now he’s now teamed up with several other great talents to create Unemployed Man and he’s had no trouble getting coverage on CNN and a zillion other press outlets—not because of some surge in interest in the comics artform—but because Gan and co-creator Erich Origen have zeroed in on a topic with a potential target audience in the millions.

The beauty of this kind of outreach is that it only adds to the base of comics readers, and rarely do these efforts cannibalize each other. Barry Deutsch’s fantastic orthodox Jewish adventure Hereville isn’t competing for readers with the Bertrand Russell stories in Logicomix, or with XKCD, or with Persepolis. Each one is its own little community of readers, some of whom may have never read a comic before, but ALL of whom are now one comic deeper into this medium we’d all like to see grow.

Are you a cartoonist?

Are you passonate about something? Anything?

Are there others that share your passion?

Do those “others” number in the thousands?

Tens of thousands?

Millions?

Some Friday Odds and Ends…

Came across this oilspot by the mailboxes Wednesday. Thanks, humanity, nature, and entropy. Good job there.

Here’s a great cause: Tom Hart (one of my all-time favorite people in the comics universe) is creating a new comics workshop in Gainesville, FL. Here’s your chance to help get it off to a great start!

Here’s a cool sidescroller with some nice art. (link via John Patten)

And finally: Heads up, Stanford University! Looks like I’ll be heading your way on Thursday November 18. More details shortly.

Have a great weekend.

Here’s a good stemwinder by Cory Doctorow from earlier this year (via Dirk) on the many complex ways copyright control legislation and information access are at war.

A lot of people in comics—writers, artists, publishers—are pinning their hopes on legal protections and new walled gardens like App Stores to restore some sense of stability and control to what looks increasingly like the same leaky boat scenario that’s affecting other creative fields.

It’s important, though, to consider the many ways that the “remedy” being proposed and implemented is far worse than the “disease” of widespread sharing.

I’ve always hoped that a culture of willing buyers and willing sellers, however small, can continue to emerge alongside file-sharing. But the key word was always willing; a concept increasingly at odds with the world Cory is rightly warning us about.

Whoops. Kind of overdid it in the comments section for Thursday’s post (see my long comment near the bottom for an explanation).

Ah, democracy…

Ivy always liked Jackson best in the Hall of Presidents. What a wiseguy.