Then Eve, Being A Force, Laughed At Their Decision

I picked up Mellodillo's gag strip Hilda the 13th recently and basically from the jump I've been trying to figure out a good way to highlight it that isn't just me saying "waow cartooning good". cause the cartooning's real good! expressive and gestural but still really clear, with great sense of strip-based pacing and joke development. it might not update daily but it's exactly the kind of thing that draws me to a daily strip. Oh, and I'm really enjoying the development of the urban fantasy sapphic and witchy setting and its many quirks. Like the appearance of Hilda's mother trapped in her blocky desktop computer:

This specific strip was actually perfect for me, cause it's got such an elegant command of its space and composition. I don't think it comes across as very flashy, but it's the kind of understated control that really impresses me.

Look at the way the "camera" in the scene gradually rotates through the three panels. We start with a head on view, with each character in order of their speech bubbles. Pretty straightforward. The next panel is at something like a 3/4 view (more like 30 degrees or something ,but who's counting). This allows us to focus in getting more detail on Hilda and her mom's expressions. It's a panel where just the two of them have dialogue, so retaining the same shot composition wouldn't make a lot of sense, right? I also just like the shot. It introduces some dynamism to what another strip cartoonist might simplify to a flat composition because that's a bit easier. (If you recall I was similarly wowed by the dynamic compositions in Ted Shearer's Quincy.) Having Hilda at an angle here emphasizes her defensive posture and expression of irritation (and, I'd read, a guilty conscience). And it creates the impression of Mrs G turning to berate Hilda despite the fact that she is, remember, a flat image on a bulky computer screen! There's some real utility in the composition choices.

By the last panel Mellodillo's transitioned us cleanly a full 90 degrees from the first angle, allowing them to once again effectively line the characters up for their dialogue, with Hilda's mom moved to the left so she can more easily set up the punchline exchange. I like that here there's a bit of a zig zag motion through the panel. It's not as straightforward as p1, but that works for me--Hilda's boxed in here by her critics on either side, after all, even if she gets the last word in. Imagine if the composition remained static throughout: the word balloons would have to criss-cross each other awkwardly to accommodate the backward speaking order between Mrs G and Hilda's covenmate Cole. I guess Hilda positioned on the right would more conventionally fit her being the punchline-deliverer but I think the tradeoff to a consistent, static composition adds little and loses lots.

None of this is the kind of flashy weird paneling I tend to highlight, but that's all the more reason for me to do so, I think. It's just good solid technique that's notable precisely because it's meant to work below our direct awareness. Which I suppose makes this a bit like explaining the magic trick, but how else are you going to learn how to cast spells?

don't you care about the real people who suffer from your THEFT? the person selling this paperback on amazon for $200?

This is an increíble thing that happens when trying to follow that subscribe link to the newsletter

yeah I know that's the joke

actually lemme explain the joke cause this is genuinely useful information and probably a ton of people just don't know about this anymore:

So this is what's called an RSS Feed

it looks like a bunch of data code nonsense because that's exactly what it is: a series of big blocks of data that tell you things like: what each of the last [number] of blog posts are, what the title of each is, what the date for each is... and actually I think I serve the entire content of each post through the feed so there's also a bunch of html formatting in there, image files, and so on. for the record, it doesn't look like that for me because I have a plugin (RSS Preview on Firefox) that can take that data and render it like this:

RSS files are just periodically updated documents--text docs, you can write them in notepad if you really wanted to!--that lives at a url on your website. Plug that URL into a "reader" and it'll periodically call my website up and check if there's changes to the data in the feed. if there's a new entry, it'll drop that into your feed and alert you to the fact that I've posted a new article. I've seen a few different claims of what RSS stands for but the one I like is "Really Simple Syndication". because it is really simple! I just have a bulletin board on my site that posts new information, and then your little robot goes around town checking all the bulletin boards and bringing the information back to you. you may instead visualize this as a kobold, army of hypno drone minions, &c, whatever's your fancy.

the best part from my perspective is that I don't need to have your email or deal with your service provider's (probably google's) opaque spam policies. if it's on my feed, you or anyone else can just call up the url whenever you want and find my stuff. it also means I don't have to update at a particular time on a particular day of the week and the feed keeps working months or years between updates, which gives this major major advantages over sticking a website into a bookmark folder somewhere on your browser and just reminding yourself to check it periodically. we have robots (kobolds &c) to do that for us! so, the joke here is that you can "sign up for my substack newsletter" by just... putting a url, into your program of choice, without worrying about whether I'm going to sell your email. it's just one of many things that makes blogs better than substacks.

the big question that I don't have a great answer for is what you do with the url. there's a LOT of readers out there, but there was sort of a collapse of the ecosystem and blogging as a whole after the fuckers at google obliterated Google Reader, which was the eponymous rss reader, from the eponymous google. it's like the fourth worst thing they've done after replacing their own search with LLM slop, monopolizing the ad market, and worst of all discontinuing Google Wave. that said, the fact that the market is quite fragmented is imo an opportunity to play around and find a reader that works for you. I'm using a fork of a fork that you can only get through github that looks like it was programmed in 2006 because it probably originally was, but I also just started parsing my gmail through firefox's email frontend Thunderbird, and that has a web calendar (also like rss--you can read about that here) AND an RSS reader built in, so I want to explore that and see if it's a solid modern alternative. I tend to gravitate towards programs that let me be a power user--because these feeds have a ton of data potentially you can do things like automatically discard, say, news articles with tags you're uninterested in, or move some articles to a particular "inbox" folder to make sure you see them, and a really powerful reader will let you automate that process.

that said if all you want is a simple reader that lives in the cloud and syncs up your webcomic library... there's definitely options for that!

and oh yeah, did I forget to mention? a LOT LOT LOT of webcomics still use RSS. it's actually the biggest thing I use my reader for, and why I'm keeping up with so many more webcomics again.

not that they always make it easy to find. dumbing of age for example has the rss feed aaaaall the way at the bottom:

Kill Six Billion Demons has it right at the top, but you might not recognize it. it's that orange icon at the end that looks sorta like a cartoon radio transmitter:

once again I recommend using the RSS Preview extension, which helpfully adds a little icon to my firefox url bar when it detects a link to an RSS feed. it makes it way way easier to find these things than having to hunt around all over a page for that little orange icon or a link that just says "Subscribe". it's not a perfect tool (I just noticed it doesn't detect the rss feed on Gwyn's blog despite it having a big link at the top of the page saying "RSS"!) but for someone just starting to set up a library it's invaluable imo

oh and fun fact: for a long time substack *was not aware* that if you followed a blog through rss... they were just serving paywalled content directly over the feed. like, I was just casually reading through paywalled articles without a care in the world, right there in my reader. they caught on to their screwup sadly but it was fun while it lasted. and hey, it still works for bypassing all the intrusive ugly bullshit that a substack throws at you when you're reading on their website.

so in a very real way, rss IS a way to subscribe to a substack!

so everyone go out and sign up for my substack newsletter today:

This is an increíble thing that happens when trying to follow that subscribe link to the newsletter

yeah I know that's the joke

actually lemme explain the joke cause this is genuinely useful information and probably a ton of people just don't know about this anymore:

So this is what's called an RSS Feed

it looks like a bunch of data code nonsense because that's exactly what it is: a series of big blocks of data that tell you things like: what each of the last [number] of blog posts are, what the title of each is, what the date for each is... and actually I think I serve the entire content of each post through the feed so there's also a bunch of html formatting in there, image files, and so on. for the record, it doesn't look like that for me because I have a plugin (RSS Preview on Firefox) that can take that data and render it like this:

RSS files are just periodically updated documents--text docs, you can write them in notepad if you really wanted to!--that lives at a url on your website. Plug that URL into a "reader" and it'll periodically call my website up and check if there's changes to the data in the feed. if there's a new entry, it'll drop that into your feed and alert you to the fact that I've posted a new article. I've seen a few different claims of what RSS stands for but the one I like is "Really Simple Syndication". because it is really simple! I just have a bulletin board on my site that posts new information, and then your little robot goes around town checking all the bulletin boards and bringing the information back to you. you may instead visualize this as a kobold, army of hypno drone minions, &c, whatever's your fancy.

the best part from my perspective is that I don't need to have your email or deal with your service provider's (probably google's) opaque spam policies. if it's on my feed, you or anyone else can just call up the url whenever you want and find my stuff. it also means I don't have to update at a particular time on a particular day of the week and the feed keeps working months or years between updates, which gives this major major advantages over sticking a website into a bookmark folder somewhere on your browser and just reminding yourself to check it periodically. we have robots (kobolds &c) to do that for us! so, the joke here is that you can "sign up for my substack newsletter" by just... putting a url, into your program of choice, without worrying about whether I'm going to sell your email. it's just one of many things that makes blogs better than substacks.

the big question that I don't have a great answer for is what you do with the url. there's a LOT of readers out there, but there was sort of a collapse of the ecosystem and blogging as a whole after the fuckers at google obliterated Google Reader, which was the eponymous rss reader, from the eponymous google. it's like the fourth worst thing they've done after replacing their own search with LLM slop, monopolizing the ad market, and worst of all discontinuing Google Wave. that said, the fact that the market is quite fragmented is imo an opportunity to play around and find a reader that works for you. I'm using a fork of a fork that you can only get through github that looks like it was programmed in 2006 because it probably originally was, but I also just started parsing my gmail through firefox's email frontend Thunderbird, and that has a web calendar (also like rss--you can read about that here) AND an RSS reader built in, so I want to explore that and see if it's a solid modern alternative. I tend to gravitate towards programs that let me be a power user--because these feeds have a ton of data potentially you can do things like automatically discard, say, news articles with tags you're uninterested in, or move some articles to a particular "inbox" folder to make sure you see them, and a really powerful reader will let you automate that process.

that said if all you want is a simple reader that lives in the cloud and syncs up your webcomic library... there's definitely options for that!

and oh yeah, did I forget to mention? a LOT LOT LOT of webcomics still use RSS. it's actually the biggest thing I use my reader for, and why I'm keeping up with so many more webcomics again.

not that they always make it easy to find. dumbing of age for example has the rss feed aaaaall the way at the bottom:

Kill Six Billion Demons has it right at the top, but you might not recognize it. it's that orange icon at the end that looks sorta like a cartoon radio transmitter:

once again I recommend using the RSS Preview extension, which helpfully adds a little icon to my firefox url bar when it detects a link to an RSS feed. it makes it way way easier to find these things than having to hunt around all over a page for that little orange icon or a link that just says "Subscribe". it's not a perfect tool (I just noticed it doesn't detect the rss feed on Gwyn's blog despite it having a big link at the top of the page saying "RSS"!) but for someone just starting to set up a library it's invaluable imo

oh and fun fact: for a long time substack *was not aware* that if you followed a blog through rss... they were just serving paywalled content directly over the feed. like, I was just casually reading through paywalled articles without a care in the world, right there in my reader. they caught on to their screwup sadly but it was fun while it lasted. and hey, it still works for bypassing all the intrusive ugly bullshit that a substack throws at you when you're reading on their website.

so in a very real way, rss IS a way to subscribe to a substack!

so everyone go out and sign up for my substack newsletter today: