Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence

$In the meantime, you can ask questions at the Nerd of Advice tumblr. Man, those lenses have a high index of refraction.$

Holy cats, the network is slow today. Granted, I’ve been in various locales for work for the past couple of weeks that had unusually fast network speeds, but this is just painful. I’ll just assume it’s to make up for the fact that it’s a gorgeous, unseasonably warm day for November in New York City, which presumably means the End Times are just around the corner because everybody knows that November is supposed to be pretty dank and miserable. Interesting times, my friends.

Hopefully, when Ragnarök hits, we’ll all at least have a good idea what the most polite way to steal dwindling foodstocks from our neighbors might be, as Holly Post and Sara McHenry’s new podcast will be able to tell us. With less than a day to go, A Nerd Of Advice slipped over the line and reached its fundraising goal yesterday, ensuring that I’ll be able to leave tasteful thank-you cards on the graves of my enemies in the depths of the fimbulvetr. Well done, Sara and Holly!
Speaking of Kickstarting, there’s another project to commend to you that launched over the weekend. Kel McDonald is putting together a comics anthology devoted to fairy tales, and if you’ve ever read this page before, you know I loves me some fairy tales. If nothing else, look at that lineup of talent that McDonald’s got arranged, revel in the fact that the chief purpose of this anthology’s fundraising is to pay the contributors, and consider that most of the creators are already putting finishing touches on their efforts. This is not gonna be a project that finishes far off in limbo, and it’s going to be pretty.
Eventually I’m going to get to the point where the Sunday annotation of David Morgan-Mar¹ has been recommended to you so many times that you just click over there without me telling you it’s worth your time. Monday will come, you’ll be reading Fleen, and like Pavlov’s dog you will automatically click over to Irregular Webcomic².
This time, it’s advice for anybody that’s ever asked him how to make a webcomic, and it strikes me as significant that a pretty damn successful webcomicker who never had any intention of making money (to the point that there’s not even advertising to offset hosting costs at IW) has largely the same advice that you’d get from somebody who’s made the webcomic his job.

Apart from the technical advice, Morgan-Mar produces three most-important ideas:
1. Don’t start a webcomic expecting to make any money. Do it because you want to make comics and will do it even if it takes you time and effort for no reward whatsoever.
2. More importantly, don’t expect everyone to love your work.
3. [M]ost importantly of all, decide how often you are going to update your comic and stick to your advertised update schedule. [emphasis original]
I can’t disagree with any of them.
I also imagine some day Kate Beaton will stop being noticed by significant media; today’s noticer: The frickin’ Economist, newsweekly of record for the most important people in the world. Yikes.

² Or drooling; presumably the drool will cause a short in your keyboard that brings up the IW page.

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