It’s a richly illustrated prose book telling, for like the second time ever, the origin of Captain Tacolicious.

Fatter than a speeding bullet, more hungier than a locomotive, able to eat foot-long hoagies in a single bite: It’s a gyro! It’s shawarma kabob! No, it’s Captain Tacolicious!

Have you ever wondered how Captain Tacolicious got his incredible taco powers in the first place? Find out for the first time in this richly illustrated volume.

Once, he was just a normal guy, working a normal job. Yeah, his roommate was a shapeshifting Buddhist monk, but even he spent most of his time playing X-Box, at least until the all-you-can-eat taco shop opened up.

Soon, our hero is thrust into a world of spandex, sentient Asparagus and he even fights a giant turtle monster in the third act.

This story contains over a hundred pages of complete insanity and more than seventy bizarre illustrations and drawings by beauty-contest winning artist Joey Peters.

Now there’s only one question left…

Are you gonna eat that?

You can buy it in Print or Kindle Format, or from other fine ebook retailers, such as Barnes and Noble or Smashwords

Straight up, that’s exactly what’s happened, if you replace Viking Press with DC Comics, Thomas Pynchon with Alan Moore and “Gravity’s Rainbow” with “Watchmen”. Oh, and replace Stephen King with that little whore JMS.

I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since it was announced. I as pissed to begin with. I wondered if I would grow less angry as time went on. Nope. Didn’t happen. If anything, I’ve gotten more enraged.

No. I will not be buying “Before Watchmen”—in fact, I will not be buying anything from DC Comics for a good long time. This isn’t a boycott, strictly, I just can’t morally justify giving these idiots money, especially when there’s publishers which are not terrible out there (like say… Dark Horse. They’ve done nothing but make good business and art decisions for the last few years).

The thing that made “Watchmen” unique among other comic books is that it was created as a piece of literature. It’s art. The vast majority of comics are conceived as disposable entertainment. Maybe a half dozen books put out by Marvel and DC combined have any literary pretensions at all, and that’s probably an overstatement by an order of magnitude. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, except that most of them are written for dumb, homophobic, misogynistic sperg lords, but even in these late, dark days of the Second Shit Age a few flecks of corn have floated to the surface.

But basically my objection to the majority of DC’s outputs that reading them makes me feel stupid. I don’t mean that they’re above my reading level—god forbid. There are infants who are too smart for the majority of DC Comics’ publications.

With these books DC Comics is straight up saying “We think our readership is composed entirely of idiots”.Yeah, you’ve got “Animal Man” and um er ah… “Wonder Woman” is sometimes good, I guess. Action Comics—almost forgot that one, and I shouldn’t. The last issue featured a parallel universe Superman stolen by a money-crazed corporation and becoming an insane monster. Oh, and I was really looking forward to China Mieville’s “Dial H for Hero”, but here’s the thing.

I feel like a dickhead giving them money.

With “Before Watchmen” it feels like they’re saying “Hey comic book creators and readers—FUCK YOU! You’re stupid enough to buy this shit!”

It’s fair enough that DC Comics views the content they own as something to be mined mercilessly. They own it. They can do what they want with it (though to be fair, DC Comics stole “Watchmen” from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and if they lawyered up this wouldn’t have happened). But they don’t understand where the popularity of these works stem from.

With “Watchmen” it’s popularity comes from the inherent quality of the work and the fact that it’s finite—complete in one volume. Vanishingly few comics can say that.

As far as creators go—DC did at least try to throw their “A” talent at this. No Grant Morrison—that’s probably because he has too much self respect to throw some lipstick on Rorschach and call it a day. I think Darwyn Cooke is pretty badly overrated, but at least he’s better than James Robinson. Azarello will swing for the fences, but he’s so far back in the batting box that even if he connects (unlikely) the ball won’t go much past the infield. JMS…he’s the only one of the creators that I haven’t lost respect for… because I never had any to begin with. As far as the artists are concerned, they’re all good. Better than Dave Gibbons, though his art was perfectly suited to “Watchmen”.

This is all just another pathetic marketing gimmick, just like the New 52. Comic books can be so much more. I’m sick of this bullshit.

I want to believe in comics as a medium and an artform. So DC Comics—I’m dropping all my books from you. No more Animal Man. No more Action Comics.

And I beg you all, gentle readers—you don’t have to go so far. Just don’t give them money for “Before Watchmen”.

And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll want to reward companies that get it—companies that can balance art and commodity. So buy a bunch of stuff from Dark Horse. And if you want to see what the New 52 should have been (dusting off lame old characters and making them good) you should hunt down the Awesome Relaunch books. Just look for the Rob Liefeld covers—I know, I know. But he doesn’t actually have anything to do with the interior content and the good covers have probably already been bought up.

You can feel it in the air–a reboot’s coming. Soon, the tides of history will reshuffle in an effort to make things easier to comprehend for “new” readers and only one man can stop it: Captain Tacolicious.

Yes, that’s right. Captain Tacolicious, who was transformed by a freak taco accident into a paragon of culinary virtue, will set off for the space outside time to stop this insideous continuity wave. But can he succeed? Or will everything he’s ever done be erased to appeal to people who don’t exist?
Find out in Captain Tacolicious: In 3D, in September 2012!

To give a bit more background, this is going to be a full color minicomic that will debut at MICE, the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo in September. I’m shooting to have a deluxe pop-up book edition, but we’ll see if I can make that work. I hope so.

Friday:
Elseworlds and What Ifs (7:00PM)
Batman through the Ages (8:30PM)

Saturday:
Webcomics 101 (11:30AM)
Comics Reading (2:30PM)

Sunday:
Creating Minicomics (2:30PM)
How to Write a Comic (7:00PM)

Hope to see you all at the Chronicles of Gor orgies and Star Trek themed binge drinking!

The Last Boy on Earth

For the duration of January I’m making The Last Boy on Earth free from Smashwords with coupon code MJ96G . My ebooks on Smashwords are available in just about every format imaginable.

Other ebooks

Starship Victory: Season 1.1/3 (Collection)

$2.99
Amazon
Smashwords

Space diseases, burned out cinder worlds, star gods, card games… the Starship Victory is on a mission to explore the strangest sector of the galaxy. Join them for the first four adventures.
In “The Last Boy on Earth” the Victory discovers a burned out cinder world. In “The Fairer Sex” the ship is infected with the most terrible disease of all: womanhood. Chief Golem enters a card tournament to win his brother’s brain in “Welcome to Earth-Vegas”. And in the final adventure in this compilation Chief Hayes faces off against a Viking world attempting to commit suicide.
These adventures constitute the first third of Starship Victory Season 1.

Starship Victory: Twilight of the Gods

$.99
Amazon
Smashwords

The Starship Victory is back again, this time investigating Earth-763, a Viking world. Sick of centuries of war, the residents of the planet have decided to destroy their own moon, and in so doing bring about Ragnarok: the Twilight of the Gods. Now the Victory races against time to find out how they could destroy their moon and if they can stop them in time.

 

Starship Victory: Welcome to Earth-Vegas

$.99
Amazon
Smashwords

The android engineer of the Starship Victory gets an invitation to a card tournament on the famous Earth-Vegas. Normally he’d ignore such spam, except that the grand prize is his brother’s brain. The only problem is that Golem’s never heard of this card game before. Meanwhile, the Victory herself gets caught up in a race against a starship with an experimental engine.

 

Starship Victory: The Fairer Sex

$.99
Amazon
Smashwords

Lieutenant Colonel Elorg races against time to stop a terrifying plague from overtaking Earth-57 and the ship. Normally, this would be up to Doctor Mustaff’s job, but the collusion of medicine and science have left a pathogen that can only be stopped by the crew’s resident cyborg.

Oh, did I say what the plague is in the first place? It’s womanhood.

 

Starship Victory: The Last Boy on Earth

$.99
Amazon
Smashwords

It was just an other work shift for the Starship Victory. Scout some planets. Check the technology level of a local civilization. Stuff they could do in their sleep cycles. Except the world they’re set to explore is a burned out cinder of coal and there’s an incredibly powerful entity coming up hard and fast on the ship. Can this strange crew discover the truth behind what happened to the planet in this, the first episode of the Starship Victory?

Free from Smashwords with coupon code MJ96G

Perdition Lost

$2.99
Amazon
Smashwords

Pete died and went to Hell ten years ago, but now that the Devil’s quit his job maybe it’s time for a change. So, along with his best friend, the demon Dante, they break out of Hell and return to Earth.
Their attempts to escape responsibility are short lived, of course, and soon they’re dragged kicking and screaming into infernal politics. Soon they find themselves interrogating eldritch abominations beyond imagination, immortal alchemists and even the Holy Ghost Pirate. Will Dante and Pete ever get all this crap squared away and get a chance to rest?

Starship Victory is probably my longest running unfinished project. Other things I’ve done have been longer lasting (Captain Tacolicious comes to mind) but none have had a clear beginning, middle and end and I’ve started them without completing them. If you’ve been watching Tacolicious.net you’d know that I just rebooted Starship Victory once again, hopefully for the last time.

This post might be interesting to you if you’ve just read one of the Starship Victory stories on Amazon or Smashwords and want some more context. Or I just want to read my own words.

//Rebooting the Reboot. . .

Starship Victory was born ages ago as a script I wrote for a blatant Star Trek parody. The key characters are all there, or at least Colonel Dart and Elorg, but the idea wasn’t fully formed. I’ve posted the original script here and I’ll probably include it in the back-matter in either the Season 1.1 or 1.2 collections.

It was a year or two before I revisited those characters. In the interim Star Trek Enterprise and the last TNG movie crashed and burned. The Trek franchise seemed dead in the water, so I amused myself by coming up with ways to take it back to basics. How to make Star Trek into something I would want to see.

Pretty quickly I realized I’d put too much work into this idea and Brahma knows Paramount wouldn’t have published my final version. I guess I could have written fan fiction or something but that’s out of character for me. And that’s when I decided to combine my ideas with the kernel left by my original Starship Victory script…

//Starship Victory, Version 1.0

The current form of Starship Victory is at least in theory pretty close to my original plan. I crafted an outline of twelve episodic chapters that tie together. My original idea was to publish it online chapter by chapter and whore it out to Star Trek fan forums.
The first story I wrote for this ended up being (in my opinion) kind of a turd. I made a few other attempts but ultimately even after a few passes I couldn’t make something that I wanted to read. My first pass was too drowned in Star Trek fan porn, with me dredging up explanations for how Captain Kirk got to the center of the galaxy in that one episode of the animated series and Star Trek V and other such inane crap. I couldn’t manage it well enough, so on the back burner it went.

//Outbound and Beyond

A couple years ago my main man Roho was putting together an anthology of ongoing science fiction comics (Outbound. Issue three should be coming soon). I hurled myself into my work and tried to complete it before the deadline. I condensed my outline, slammed it down and fit it into twelve pages and got to work. I missed the deadline by like a week, but I was still proud of myself. And over the next few months I completed a couple more episodes and decided to publish them as minicomics and online. This is probably the format the most people are aware of. You can read them here.

It still felt like I wasn’t exploring everything I wanted to, and somewhere along the line I started Attack of the Super-Wizards. That, especially given that it was the bulk of my sales at cons and hits online, gave itself priority over Starship Victory.

//A Flirtation with eBooks

About six months back I began experimenting with ebooks. First I made a version Kindle of one of my minicomics (Clockwork Soldier… I don’t have many left so I haven’t put them online yet. Maybe some day). The process seemed easy enough, even if you didn’t have 100% control of the final product. I did a mockup of the first Starship Victory story.

I didn’t want to flood the market with tons of half-baked comics. I may try again some day, especially with the Kindle Fire and Nook Color opening up new possibilities, but for now I’m not worrying about the comics for ebook readers market. It’ll take a few years to mature.
Regardless, I know a few people who’ve made at least some money by self-publishing on the Amazon and Smashwords stores and that’s interested me enough to give it a shot. I had a bit of free time last month, so I tried a novelization of the first Starship Victory story: The Last Boy on Earth.

The result, I feel, is a big step up from every previous version of the Starship Victory stories. While it wears it’s references on it’s sleeve it’s not drowning in them, the story is reasonably stand alone, it’s weird, and most important for me, it’s fun.

//Onward into the Future. . .

And since uploading it to the various stores, Starship Victory has outstripped Perdition Lost in sales. I can’t know for certain if that will hold out against the other stuff I’ve been hoarding on my hard-drive, but from what I’ve read about the ebook market I expect it will.
Next week I’m publishing The Fairer Sex. This one is a bigger departure from the comic that inspired it, but I feel it’s for the better. The basic premise remains the same, Elorg fights against time for a cure to the most terrifying disease of all: womanhood.
Next month I should have Welcome to Earth-Vegas ready, hopefully before Arisia.

And I’ve already stated work on a prequel novella, which sets up the political situation of the Galactic Union and also has space zombies.
At the very least, I’m going to get as far as four short stories, which I’ll then collect as Starship Victory Season 1.1. I hope it’ll prove successful enough to inspire me to finish all of season one, if not the other seasons I have vague plans for.

//news($COMICS);

Starting Friday December 9th, Super Wizard.net will be taken over by FANTOMAH SAVES CHRISTMAS. This holiday comic, written by Joey Peters and illustrated by Donna Martinez, will update Monday through Friday while World’s Greatest Lumberjack takes a brief hiatus. But don’t worry, World’s Greatest Lumberjack will return with Chapter 2 on January 2nd.

//news($EBOOKS);

The Amazon Kindle is getting really pervasive, so I think it’s time to use all those big, fat, text documents sitting on my hard drive into ebooks.

//PERDITION LOST: The Adventures of Dante and Pete

Pete’s a dead guy in Hell. Dante’s his demon best friend. And together they escape.

Before long they get sucked right into infernal politics. Sin sends the two off to bring the Devil back to Hell. Along the way they meet eldritch monstrocities beyond human understanding, immortal alchemists, angels, and other figures from Christian and other forms of mythology.

Perdition Lost is the first novel I ever wrote, way back when I was a young man. It’s been sitting on my hard drive for at least ten years. Two months ago, when I decided to dip my toes into the ebook market, it was the obvious choice. It’s fast paced, fun, and available on Amazon and Smashwords for $.99, at least for now. Get it while it’s cheap.

Buy at Amazon// Smashwords

//STARSHIP VICTORY. . . SEASON 1, EPISODE 1

Starship. Mission of Exploration. You know the drill. The Starship Victory is on a twelve episode journey to explore an exceptionally bizarre galaxy.

The Victory is on a routine mission to catalog the development of Earth-235, only they find the world a burned out cinder. They try to nano-invert the tachyon flow and other science words, but this provides no answers, at least until they’re confronted by a little boy. The sole survivor of his world, he brings up many questions. Can the Victory’s crew discover what’s happened before the boy throws a tantrum and destroys the galaxy?

This has got to be at least the third reboot of Starship Victory. The last version was a comic but the version before that was a novel. But my hand to the goddess, I’m gonna finish it this time. Or at least, get four stories in.

But at Amazon.

//news($CONVENTIONS);

This weekend I’m going to be at the Comicazi Craft Fair at the VFW Hall in Davis Square, Somerville MA, representing the Boston Comics Roundtable. In the past it’s been a relatively subdued show, so if you want to come by and talk for goddess knows how long you’re welcome to it.

And in January I’m going to be appearing at Arisia. It’s Boston’s fan run sci-fi convention. According to my main man Jaime I’m going to be on at least three panels. Probably more.

//.PLAN FILE

Mostly, I’m working on ebook stuff. I’m working on World’s Greatest Lumberjack. I’m hoping the holiday comic will give me something of a buffer again. I’ve been too busy with my prose stuff to keep too far ahead right now.

I’m dangerously close to finishing Starship Victory, Season 1, Episode 2: The Fairer Sex. Expect it to be up on Amazon in a couple weeks. After that, expect Episode 3: Leaving Earth-Vegas just before Arisia.

Meanwhile, I’m gonna start editing another book that is in many ways a thematic sequel to Perdition Lost, Moonlight Massacres. It follows the story of a werewolf who decides that if he needs to rampage and eat people, he might as well point himself in the general direction of people who deserve to be eaten. There’s also vampires and hoodoo priests. I don’t think it’ll take as much work as Perdition Lost. I hope to have it on Amazon and Smashwords before Arisia.

Illustrator’s the go to solution for mainstream comic book lettering. Often independent artists hand letter their work, but if you want to emulate the look of those garish men in spandex punching each other you at least need some sort of vector art program. I’m going to teach you the basics of the free solution: Inkscape.

When I first started using the program I had to teach myself how to use it. The program itself is very useful, even if it does have a lot of rough edges. There are a few comics lettering tutorials people have posted, but all of them have left out a bunch of information I consider vital.

First things first, I’m going to warn you about a couple things. Inkscape assumes all raster images it imports are 90 dpi (or dots per inch). And the other problem is that Inkscape only exports PNG files. Both of these can create issues if you want to print your files. But there are solutions. I’ll get to them in a little bit.

Here’s the layout of Inkscape. The first thing you want to do is load up your comic page. Here’s an example from Big Red Christmas, the holiday comic I did with my wife last year.

Caption Blocks

Next up select the Text Tool and figure out where you’re going to put your text. With the text tool selected, one of the top toolbars will transform into a text widget. From here you can control the font, letter size, alignment and a couple other things.

This isn’t a design tutorial, so I won’t tell you what fonts to use (other than don’t use Comic Sans, for the love of Eris) and I won’t tell you what font size to use either. For me, I figure out what I’m trying to do. Is this character a superhero? From what era? Or is he a barbarian warrior? Then I trawl Blambot for an appropriate font. I might need to go off into the wilds of the free font websites, but thar be dragons. If I had some extra money I’d spring for some Comicraft fonts. But I’m using Inkscape, so I’m doing my best to avoid pay options.

And as for sizing? Figure out what your final size is going to be and make sure whatever size you select will be readable at that size.

Now, it’s time to use that text tool. With it selected you will draw a cursor wherever inside your image you click. From there you can add any text you like, complete with line breaks wherever you want.

One feature that comes in extra handy at times is the Text Tool Box. It’s available through the Text->Text and Font menu, or as a button on the top bar.

This gives you a few more options than the top bar. Mainly, it gives you access to line spacing, which can be vitally important if you’re using a font not originally created for comics.

Let’s turn these into caption blocks. First, click the rectangle tool from the toolbar. This will create a bare bones rectangle wherever you click->drag it.

Whoops. It looks like I accidentally covered over my original lettering!

Luckily, there’s a solution. You can raise or lower all the objects in an Inkscape file two ways. You can hit the dropdown menu with Object->Raise/Lower. I use the Page Up/Page Down, which use the same function. Lower the selected box until it lowers itself below the text like this:

Now the text is readable, but it doesn’t quite look complete. Hit Object->Fill & Stroke to bring up a menu to alter your box’s properties. The “Stroke” in this case is the outline around your object. The “Fill” is everything inside the stroke. Play with the options however you like. I’m here to teach you the basics, not elaborate theory.

Here’s what I came up with.

That looks okay, but I’ll use this opportunity to teach you something else that might become useful.

Create another box in the empty space of the caption block. Select both blocks at the same time. You do this the same way you would in any program. Use the select tool and hold down the shift key, then click both objects.

Now click on Path Menu at the top. This gives you a bunch of exciting options, the most useful are Union and Difference. Use Path->Difference (or the Ctrl - keyboard shortcut). What this does is it takes the two objects and carves out a space from the older object using the shape of the newer object. The result looks like this:

What ever am I going to do with that other text, though? Let me put another box under it.

I’m not covering the entirety of the text because I’m gonna show you a few things.

Pay special attention to the handles at the edges of the box. Let me show you something else that’s useful. Drag the circle downward.

Now I’m going to Edit->Duplicate or Ctrl D the box and move it around so that covers under the rest of the text.

Be careful when reshaping objects with a stroke. The stroke will get refigured each time relative to how you’re altering the shape. I’ve nudged it so little it’s not obvious. But anyway, I’ve now shaped the block around the rest of the text. Next I’m going to Path->Union AKA Ctrl +. This takes the two boxes and merges them together and you get this:

Using these techniques you can create all the basic effects that you’ll see in caption blocks in comics.

Word Balloons

Now let’s move onto something a little bit more complicated and hands on. Let’s start off by laying down
some more text and putting an oval underneath it. The Oval Tool is a couple clicks below the Rectangle Tool. You should be able to figure this out for yourself.

The first thing you will want to do is hit Path->Object to Path. What this does is take the oval object you just created and it transforms it into a primitive object. The next thing you’ll want to do is select the Paths and Nodes tool.

This will show you a bit more of how Inkscape (and any vector art program) runs under the hood. All the objects you’ve created, all the boxes and even the text, are created from points in your page. These points have mathematical functions that tell Inkscape how to connect them. This shows how the oval object works. Click on the handles and play with them a little to get a feel for how this stuff works.

Once you’re done playing undo all your changes and go back to the original state.

Edit->Select All (or Ctrl A) to select all the points in the current object, then click the Insert New Nodes button on the top menu.

This creates a new point in exact middle of all the other points. Play with these points until they look less goofy.

Now you’ve got to add the balloon tail. Select the Pen Tool.

Once you click, the Pen Tool will create raw points with lines connecting them. Once you’ve created the points you want then you double click to create an open shape, or you can create a closed shape by double clicking on the handle that shows up where you first clicked.

I’m going to create an angle pointing out from the balloon roughly at Stardust, so I can create the most basic balloon tail.

Next I select one of the lines and click the Curve button up top.

Play with the handles until you get a shape you like.

With that done you can Path->Union (or Ctrl +) the balloon and tail together, resulting in this:

By now you should have a good grasp on the basics. Let me apply a bit more theory. Here’s a new word balloon.

Note how the balloon overlaps the panel border and Fantomah’s wrist. I select the pen tool and create closed shapes around where I want to clip the word balloon.

I Path->Difference these shapes and voila. Now the balloon fits the panel borders better and appears to slide under Fantomah’s wrist.

I’ve shown you pretty much everything you’re going to need to utilize most of the functions in Inkscape for lettering comics. There’s one last thing I have to show you; how to export your finished image.

When you’re done hit File->Export Bitmap. That will bring up this dialog.

Now here come the two issues I warned you about at the beginning. Inkscape treats all images as if they’re 90 dpi and it can only export PNG images. If you’re exporting for the internet you’re fine. You might want to convert the image to another format or play with the color space, but the PNG format can hold as much information as any other web format, so it’s a good place to start.

If you’re getting ready for print, though, this can be an issue. Fortunately you don’t have to export a bitmap image and Inkscape can natively save itself to about fifty million formats.

See?

I haven’t actually used this method and I suspect it will still save the image at 90 dpi, but that can be surmounted by importing it into another program, the obvious choice for me would be Open Office Draw because it’s also Open Source, and alter the print resolution before sending it on.

Or you could export everything but the base image and overlay it onto the original image at the appropriate resolution if you really wanted to.

With that in mind, Inkscape is still an incredibly useful tool, and it’s free. You can’t beat that price.

Now go read Super Wizard and Garry: The Legend Continues, two comics I extensively use Inkscape on.

Copyright’s a hell of an issue. There’s an obvious need for it, but as it exists today it only benefits large companies and the copyright cartels. The MPAA and RIAA can choke on an ocean of syphilitic cock. Individual artists don’t have the time or money to fight for their art or hire armies of lawyers to do it for them.

And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is. Everything I put online is licensed under some elaborate Creative Commons license. I won’t sue anybody for using my versions of Fletcher Hanks’ already public domain characters. More than that, I’m dropping everything I publish into the public domain twenty years after its’ first publication. Technically I haven’t publicly stated this before, but I’m not dropping anything on tacolicious.net to the public domain until March 2026, so I’ve got time to figure out the logistics. And obviously that wouldn’t work out for any work for hire I do.

But copyright term reform, while hugely needed, isn’t the point behind this blog post. This is about how to beat piracy.

There’s been a bunch of hubub about this recently. Specifically about the objectively horrible internet blacklist bill. Colleen Doran came out in favor of it, which is really weird because she has a grasp on beating piracy. The government doesn’t understand the internet and I sure as hell don’t want them violating due process of law to try and fight pirates. That’s a real “terrorists win” situation. But Ms. Doran’s essay caused ripples through the blog-o-podcasting-sphere. Most have supported her because artists do deserve money for their work, but not everybody is in her favor. But so far the criticism of Ms. Doran’s position has basically boiled down to “BLAH BLAH GAY SPACE HOMO COMIC GAY BAD I LOVE DOWNLOADIN SHIT”. I feel like I can do better.

This is a reaction against Colleen Doran’s essay. Not every pirated work would equate to a sale. Hell. Most pirates don’t even read the shit they download. And I can’t imagine Torrent Sites being that expensive to run, nor all that profitable either. Most of them are run just because the dogmatic pirate who runs them has access to a box they can run it off.

An outright offensive will not work. The cleverest digital rights management will be cracked. Suing grandmas for their grand children’s indiscretions is a PR disaster. And try to fight 4chan? Your website will tumble offline for weeks and I hope you like answering phone calls asking for Battletoads, because you will be for at least as long as its lulzy.

To defeat your enemy you must first know them. There are three main types of pirates distributing material online.

The first type are the dogmatic pirates. They will download anything and everything to fill every byte on their hard drives for fun. They keep their PS3′s intentionally crippled so they can run ripped software and dick around with homebrews. They’ll run a game through a USB port from their computer to their Wii,even though it will take twenty minutes to load every single thing. There are millions of them. Many live outside the US’s jurisdiction. And they have too much time on their hands. They are legion. They do not forgive. They do not forget.

So don’t waste your energy fighting dogmatic pirates. Even if by some miracle you stop them from downloading your art at Demonoid they still won’t spend money on it. They will only spend money on something they can hold in their hands. Physical objects. They won’t spend money on ideas. There’s nothing to win by fighting them.

But what’s worse is that if you try to fight them they’ll get pissed off and pirate your art on general principal. They’ll post it far and wide across the internet. It’s a localized version of the Streisand Effect. The most recent and obvious instance of this happening would be Anonymous’ war with Scientology, which has lead to Scientology’s secret holy documents being posted on dozens of torrent sites, on Rapidshare, and every newsgroup. Their secret doctrines were spread everywhere. All that (and worse) because the Scientologists decided to try and fight piracy.

You have nothing to gain from fighting dogmatic pirates. I’m not just some crazy copylefty. I’ve been immersed in internet culture long enough to understand how it works.

But they’re not the only pirates. There’s the second class: the casual pirates. For them if there’s some impediment that prevents easy legitimate access to the work of art they’ll happily grab a torrent or google for a Rapidshare.

I’ve got “Flex Mentallo” and “Miracleman” cbr’s sitting on my harddrive. Both these books can’t be reprinted thanks to some elaborate dumbass rights issues. “Miracleman” is a pretty straightforward example of copyright abuse by a borderline retarded third party who had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the work, but who bought a company that didn’t even have rights to it so… copyright law can be kinda stupid. The issues preventing reprints of “Flex Mentallo” are even more complicated and stupid, but not necessarily a problem inherent of copyright. Charles Atlas’ heirs are litigious cunts. Copyright isn’t the only thing that needs reform.

But I’m getting off topic again. There’s a lot of angles on this I want to play. If I could walk a few blocks down the street and buy these books at my local comic book store I’d have already done it. The only way I can obtain them legitimately is to spend a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Fuck that. And even then, The Beard, Big Neil G and G Mo won’t see a dime from me.
I’m a casual pirate, so I know how they think. And here’s the thing: almost everybody who uses the internet has pirated something.

It comes down to ease of access. The only way you can fight casual pirates is with convenience. There’s no point in pirating “Penny Arcade” or “Gunnerkrigg Court”. They’re already available online and easy to navigate. And I’ve no doubt the number of people pirating “A Distant Soil” has dropped like a rock since Colleen Doran began putting it online.
Nowadays its a pain in the ass to get an account at a decent torrent site. You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove you’re not a fed or lawyer and that you’ll keep a decent upload to download ratio. So, after hitting critical mass in the early days of bittorrent, now there’s some roadblocks to jump for piracy. So there’s an opening. And even so, the vast majority of casual pirates will prefer to support the artist, if its not much harder than piracy.

So make it easier to access your content. Put it up online. That won’t make you money directly, but you’ll recoup at least some readers from the casual pirates. Sell it through the Kindle. Nook. App store. Whatever the hell Google calls the Android version of the App Store. Comixology. Everywhere. Unlike the readers on the general internet (I’ll get to them in a few paragraphs) readers on cell phones and tablet’s are willing to spend money on content. The dream of micropayments has kinda come true. Of course, it’s hardly mature…

Here’s a tactic developed ages ago and popularized by DVD makers in recent years intent on capturing big fans. It’s been expanded dramatically recently and I don’t see it slowing down:  Special editions.

I own a big stack of Criterion DVDs. This is because I’m a big fan of various directors, and sometimes its just worth paying double, triple, quadruple the price so that you can hear Hunter S. Thompson drunkenly rave about the apocalypse or see Brock Sampson’s swinging man meat. One of my best casual pirate pals spent like a hundred and fifty dollars on the big “In Rainbows” box set, complete with pointless vinyl record and bottle of Thom Yorke spooge, all because even though he downloaded all their albums, he still wants to support Radiohead. Comic publishers are pushing out deluxe hard covers and “Absolute Editions” now. If you have an established fan base it won’t put gas in the oven but it’ll provide a nice holiday bonus every once in a while.

This next little aside is pretty damned far off topic and very much aimed at the cartoonists out there. It’s very hard to make money directly on the internet. The internet was popularized by Unix neckbeards and Discordians, both people in favor of Kopyleft. On top of that for years there just wasn’t an easy system to directly pay websites token ammounts. That’s changing with the advent of smart phones and tablets, but the computer internet remains a rites reversed paradise.

Just about every successful webcomic follows the same basic formula.

1. Give out content for free. I know that seems crazy to you print people, but for us native internet people it’s just obvious. I can’t think of any successful non-porn comics behind a pay wall.
2. Build a community. You don’t need a forum or even user comments, but you have to engage your audience. Let them know who you are. Make yourself feel like their friend. And if you’re shameless, find a community that already exists but doesn’t have a comic for themselves, and make that comic.
3. Reach out to other cartoonists. Do guest strips for other vaguely similar comics. Talk with people on forums. Around this time you can probably get away with Project Wonderful ads and maybe they’ll pay the five dollars a month for your web hosting.
4. Now, once you have a sizable fan base, you can finally start making money. And the way you do this is swag: t-shirts, prints, that sort of thing. Bonus pages. Donations can be very powerful if you’re shameless. Collected editions of your comics don’t have a high enough margin to pay the rent on their own, usually.

But I’m getting a little off topic. And there are exceptions to all this, like porn. But that’s another story entirely.

There’s one last type of pirate that nobody is going to try and defend. They are the commercial pirates and luckily, while they’re actively making money on your hard work, they’re the only type of pirate that can be directly engaged.

There’s a big controversy bubbling about the various scanlation sites. Before that it was the brouhaha about HTML Comics. The scanlation sites exist because the rights owners want to control their content too tightly. There’s a certain strong element in the manga/anime community who want to read everything the exact second it comes out. So, if you introduce a publishing delay you’re inevitably leading yourself to piracy. Dogmatic pirates will spread scans and translate stuff just for the internet fame. Some unscrupulous character created a solution for the casual pirates in this obvious market.

The same thing happens every time a US studio decides to wait three months for no reason to release a movie in Europe or Australia.

They way to work against these sites is to preempt them. Already, legit scanlation sites are popping up, licensing manga on spec and promising future profits to their crowdsourced translators. The casual pirates who just can’t wait to read the latest Naruto will gradually migrate to these legit sites and they’ll build up good will among the weeaboo community by hiring their own. The scanlation sites will be reduced to rubble by this, not armies of sararimen lawyers.

Porn movie creators are employing a similar tactic to bleed money off the various Porn Tubes, albeit in the opposite direction. Demand a cut off the top so you won’t lawyer the fuck out of them. Because they’re clearly in the wrong. If they have any business sense they’ll sheepishly admit they’re wrong and give you a cut. Its easier, you can’t bleed money from a smoking hole in the ground.

Even in the far off artist’s utopia free from corporate interference and the muscle of the copyright cartels they couldn’t survive. Their only legal defense is existing in a nation that the copyright holder doesn’t live in. Functionally they’re in a slightly better position because most artists are poor and can’t afford to fight. But sooner or later somebody with deep pockets and a grudge, perhaps a lovable curmudgeon like Harlan Ellison, or perhaps a swarm of cartoonists pooling their resources, will come along and lawyer them to death.

Commercial pirates are not the many headed Hydra that the dogmatic pirates represent and they’re not as lazy, cheap or careless as the casual pirates. And since they’re essentially milking the hard work of the dogmatic pirates they won’t get any help decentralizing.

What have we learned? Make it easier and more convenient to access your content legitimately. Give the people who might pirate your work no reason to bother.

The state of the modern world respects copyright much less than just a few years ago. The Computer Age moves faster than the law can keep up. And I’m very antsy about the government’s willingness to drop due process of law just because the MPAA and RIAA tell them to.

But that doesn’t matter, because once you let go of your preconceived notions about the automatic price of your content you can beat the pirates who might actually give you money. And making a living off your art? That’s always been a motherfucker. But now is the first time you don’t need to be backed by deep pockets. It’s conceivable to make it completely on your own.

So good luck.

Just about everyone’s reaction to the story is “that one food I know about is freaky! Wouldn’t it be freaky if everything you listed in the story is real food!” But all the insane foods I listed were real. And some of them weren’t even that strange (grasshopper tacos, I’m looking at you). But to help my curious friends, I’m posting annotations of my story.

Page 1

Panel 1: “Rotting cod jerky treated with drain cleaner.”

Lutefisk. Though to be fair, evidently being treated with lye renders it into horrible fish jelly from Hell. Not really jerky after that.

Panel 3: “Boiled duck foetus.”

Balut. Boiled duck fetus accurately describes the whole affair.

Panel 5: “Delicious fruit that smells like a thousand dead homeless people.”

The namesake of the story– Durian. It’s a strange Asian fruit. Out of the horribly disgusting foods listed, this is one of like three or four I’ve actually eaten. It’s not that I’m a wuss, but Civet Coffee and Bird’s Nest Soup are just out of my price range. But at any rate, being dragged halfway across the world dredged out the Durian’s famous stench. I don’t think I got the full experience. Its “regal” custard taste also didn’t impress me too much.

Panel 7: “Coffee brewed from weasel faeces”.

Civet Coffee. Out of everything in the story, this is the food item I want most desperately to drink. But I don’t have hundreds of dollars to blow on elaborate gourmet coffee.

Page 2

Hakarl is naturally toxic shark meat treated with iron age science to make it edible. Why the hell was this invented in the first place!?

Page 4

Panel 1: “Rotten Egg buried in a ditch for six weeks.”

Thousand Year Egg. Yes. People do that.

Panel 2: “Spoiled horse’s milk.”

Airag. Mongolians go crazy for that stuff.

Panel 3: “A turkey… stuffed with a duck… stuffed with a chicken.”

Come on. Everybody knows Turducken by now, right?

Panel 4: “Human placenta.”

It started as a joke during the 70′s, as near as I can figure, but some humorless bastards have actually done it.

Panel 5: “Cheese filled with maggots. Intentionally.”

Casu Marzu. An elaborate gimmick cheese made in Italy where you use maggots as a time keeping mechanism.

Panel 6: “Diseased corn.”

Corn smut. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Much less fun than regular smut.

Panel 7: “Horse sashimi.”

Evidently horse meat tastes like delicious, lean steer. But horses are cool animals so we can’t eat them.

Panel 8: “Bird’s nest soup.”

I don’t think this one is that surprising. But maybe that’s because I’ve been dragged to obscure restaurants in Chinatown periodically since I was a young lad. That’s exactly its name, too.

Page 5

Panel 3: “Grasshopper tacos”.

This one’s pretty straight forward. I’d definitely try it, if only Boston had some good Mexican restaurants.

Panel 4: “Loaf made from pig scrap.”

Here’s a secret look into the artistic process. Initially I was going to make this panel scrapple (It’s every part of the pig, except the oink!) but decided when I sat down to draw it Spam was funnier. Also, I’ve partaken of both these quasi-pork-byproducts and (much to nobody’s surprise) Scrapple beats Spam in every taste test ever.

Page 6

Panel 4: Who is that mysterious man I spy? Could it be? Yes! It is! It’s America’s favorite food asshole, Anthony Bourdain! Honestly, I only slid him into this story because my wife’s a massive fanboy. And, well, anybody who discusses William Burroughs at length of national TV is my hero.

Page 7:

Yes. Ortolan Bunting is a real thing. Yes. It’s prepared that way. And yes, you have to wear a napkin on your head to hide from god.

Ortolan Bunting is a real thing.

Page 9

Panel 6: “Just be glad we’re not turning your buddy into Long Pig Gumbo.”

I’m pretty sure calling human meat “long pig” was a joke. The only time I’ve seen it used “seriously” was in Transmetropolitan, and even there, it was very much tongue-in-cheek (and also vat grown, cruelty free meat). It’s not that cannibalism doesn’t exist. It’s just not widespread. And it’s not called “long pig”.

Page 10

I should have included chicken fingers. Take that, picky eaters!

For those of you out there completely unfamiliar with the above story, it’s featured in “Leftovers of the Living Dead”, which should be available is all kinds of Boston comic book shops soon, if it isn’t there already.