Man, I love it when creators send me the logical next part of the story. Makes my life easier. One may recall (if one wishes) my discussion of Michael Jonathan, his minicomic Quail: The Song of the Blackbird EP, and the plan to get music produced to accompany said minicomic. Did I say plan? I meant totally completed project, as the music to accompany Quail is now complete and available to all and sundry. Jonathan has this to say about the tunes:

The album that syncs with this comic (and my new Quail comic “Rope”) released today! You can listen to the entire album for free at the bandcamp site and download track 2 “Breath of Searing Gecko” for free as well.

The bandcamp site is http://gambelcovey.bandcamp.com/ — Gambel Covey is my band that worked on this, made up of actor/comedian Chris Yule and illustrator/girlfriend Nan Lawson.

I worked super hard on it and I’m EXTREMELY proud of how it turned out.

And well Jonathan might be; he provided a download of the full song package to me and I’ve given the tunes a good listen, which range from pretty damn credible bluegrass (Song of Blackbird) to almost Pomplamooseian, verging-on-preciouscore folk (the aforementioned Breath of Searing Gecko). Can I also say that it’s awesome that when you download your songs and/or comic and/or prints, the button on the screen says Gimme? Like the music, it’s just so unapologetic in its enthusiasm. GREAT FUN WOULD LISTEN AGAIN.

• Also on the followup front, DJ Coffman weighed in on the Drunk Duck situation via Fleen’s patented ActionCOMMENTS™ ‘tother day, and in case you didn’t see it, it was pretty useful stuff:
  

  I got a lot of emails last week about this, primarily because I encouraged a lot of creators starting out to use DrunkDuck back when I was cheerleader. For the people having problems I rewrote my “How To Host Your Own Webcomic” article and posted it here.

  Although every situation is unique and you can’t just follow a checklist and expect it to work in all circumstances, Coffman’s put together a pretty damn comprehensive guide that will get you about 97% of the way to hosting comics on your own, from buying your domain to changing DNS to setting up WordPress and plugins. In contravention of Tyrrell’s First Law of the Internet, the comments at Coffman’s guide are useful and informative, so give ’em a read.

• Not followup, but as long as we’re talking infrastructure, let me mention Karmacritic. It’s a new tool for creators to get feedback on their work, but much like some commenting systems (especially those derived from the Slashdot model), it implements a karma mechanism to try to weed out the unthinking and promote the helpful. From creator Marco Leon:
  

  I created a site where creators can submit their work and get feedback. That’s been done before, oh, only a hundred times? But the twist here it this: this community doesn’t vote on the submissions themselves; instead we vote on the feedback given to those submissions. If you give useful feedback, you get karma points. And submissions are sorted in the front page by karma points. You see? In other words: any creator who invests some time helping other creators with useful comments or advice, will get rewarded with more prominence for his own work.

  If that sounds complex, the whole thing is explained with pics over here. Karmacritic is not for profit; I’m paying for the bandwidth out of my own pocket, and I just hope it helps people. Sometimes all we need is a few words, and we go from there for miles.

  I’ll confess that I didn’t get Leon’s explanation at first, but the pictures cleared up my misconceptions in short order. If you’re just starting out and haven’t developed a network of trusted peers to give you feedback, Karmacritic can quite possibly give you that first set of critiques that kicks you in the direction of developing your skills. Maybe? It’s a mechanism to receive feedback, but all critiques ultimately are useful or not depending on what the receiver is willing to hear and act on.

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What? No footnotes? I must be slipping.