Friend o’ Fleen and all-around good guy Rick Marshall went and got hisself hitched over the weekend, and thanks to the magic of the Twitters, we got to share some of the good times; for my part, I’m not going to make the usual lame joke regarding Rick’s name in honor of this Very Special Occasion (but when he gets back from his honeymoon — Jet Blue willing — we’re back to business as usual). Congratulations, Rick & Jessica, and I sincerely hope you don’t see this until you’re back from whatever tropical paradise hosts the next two weeks of sun, relaxation, and industrial-grade fruity drinks with weapons-grade little umbrellas in ’em.

• Last week, I made mention (via the delightful Colleen AF Venable) that :01 Books was starting its own webcomics group (or, since they are a publishing concern, I supposed “imprint” might be more appropriate). Ms Venable is back with more information on To Be Continued…:
  

  To Be Continued… or TBC… is what we’re calling our new webcomics serials. So far the list includes Sailor Twain by our very own Mark Siegel, Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil, and Derek Kirk Kim’s Tune (which he’s posting once a week on his journal).

  All of these serials are leading up to a finished published :01 books. Mark and I started TBC… as an experiment of sorts, determined to prove that webcomics won’t hurt the sale of final books but rather the opposite: gaining a much wider spread of readers than we ever would with spine-out books buried in the sea of other spine-out books. If this experiment works out you can be sure we’ll be publishing more of our books this way, serializing them online as we go along.

  There’s really no part of that plan that isn’t awesome — but if we (as a reading public) want to see more books treated this way, we need to make sure that Venable & Siegel have the solid sales numbers to show their bosses that they were right in their gamble. Read these comics online, and if you like them, buy them. As a side note, I expect that any success that :01 Books has in this experiment may lead other publishers to follow suit — everybody bemoans the death of publishing, but I think there’s a future in this curatorial role that can’t ever be diminished. If you drown in a sea of potential webcomics reads (as I do, with all the suggestions sent to me), knowing that somebody at :01 Books (or TopatoCo, or similar future endeavours) thought enough of a creator to deal with them? That goes to the top of my “to read” list.

• Regular readers of this page know that I dig just about everything done by Shaenon Garrity, aka Radness Queen West of the Rockies, and I especially dig me some Skin Horse. Said strip is now coming up on Book 2, and rather than taking the pre-order route, Garrity (and co-creator Jeffrey C. Wells) have opted to Kickstart the project, with the end result that it’s (as of this writing) 121% funded after 48 hours.

  Holy.

  Crap.

  Even more impressive than the speed of the response? Not one pledge is for the minimum of $10; the most common pledge amount (44 out of 72) is for $20, and enough people have pledged more that the average amount is over $50. I think we’ve got enough empirical evidence at this point to definitively describe when Kickstarter is going to be successful — namely, when you’ve got a mountain of dedicated fans who would’ve bought the product anyway, and who get a visceral thrill about being part of the process that enables the product’s delivery into their hot little hands. If you’re wondering if Kickstarting is for you, ask yourself if your audience falls into that category.

• Last thoughts for the day — the Eagle Awards are the main British honor for comics work, and they have both a category for Favourite Web-Based Comic (waaaay down there at the bottom) and a popular vote. If you were so inclined, you can chime in for Freak Angels, Order of the Stick, PvP, Sin Titulo, or xkcd.