Firstly, those of you in Seattle for ECCC who will be around on Sunday might be interested in this:

Pitch The Pros At TopatoCo
Room 2AB, 1pm
TopatoCo is the world’s fifth-largest artist-direct indie merch emporium, as well as the publisher of many of your favorite (or soon-to-be-favorite) books, T-shirts, and other nonsense. Do you have the next great TopatoCo product idea, comic series, or get-rich-quick scheme? Holly Post and a panel of TopatoCo artists will listen, nod attentively, then discuss and refine your idea until every shred of viability is squeezed from it like the juice from an orange. Come share any ideas that you want to kill.

Man, that sounds hilarious. I suspect one of those pros might be Ryan North¹, in which case you can ask him what it feels like to be the first webcomics creator to have some of his work make it to the edge of space.

It seems that the University of Cambridge has a group of undergraduates who like to send things into near-orbit. Balloons, rockets, little things like that, with an ultimate goal of achieving orbit for under £1,000. To put that in perspective, the first payload to hit orbit cost a measurable percentage of a superpower’s GDP, and modern “low cost” orbital delivery systems cost in the vicinity of US$8 million a pop. This is not a small thing that the Cambridge University Spaceflight society is attempting. With such grandiose goals in mind, who better to be their passenger than the most grandiose dinosaur known to modern society: T-Rex.

The Squishable iteration of Mr Rex (judging from the images, it appears to actually be a Wee Rex) was lofted to some 27 kilometers altitude, or some 16.8 miles², aboard CUSF’s NOVA 21 balloon launch. Ryan North himself is just about two meters, a bit more if he’s standing on his skateboard. You guys, this Wee Rex traveled a vertical distance equivalent to more than 13,500 Ryan Norths.

T-Rex slipped the surly bonds of earth here at 1:30pm GMT two days ago; by the halfway point of the video (actually time-lapse photography), almost all ground visibility is lost, and the sky quickly shifts to the deep blue-black that is characteristic of staring through atmosphere and into space. There’s some tumbling (presumably starting when the lofting balloon burst) as he makes his way back down, coming finally to rest on his side. The lesson in all of this, of course, is twofold:

1. T-Rex rules every continent and the sky above them
2. All distance measurements should now be expressed in terms of Ryans North

And with that, enjoy the hell out of the weekend.

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¹ The Toronto Man-Mountain.

² For comparison: Mount Everest is some 8.8 km tall, and the Burj Khalifa about 0.890 km.

12:04:14 EDT (approx), I submitted my hotel request for San Diego Comic Con. Last time I was in the wrangle¹, it took me until about 12:06:30, which resulted in absolutely zero communications from the hotel reservation service for more than 72 hours past the promised response window, and no offer of a room for a full week (by which point you’re basically not in the same time zone as the convention center). I’m told that the system was better last year, here’s hoping that it’s better still this year.

Um, all those of you that were doing setup at/traveling to Seattle for Emerald City, hope you aren’t attending SDCC in a van down by the Tijuana border. But even if you do end up in a van, you have an opportunity that I don’t, namely to see what looks like the most topic-random and potentially wacky panel of the year. From Friend o’ Fleen Frank Gibson:

We are doing a panel with Bryan Lee O’Malley, it’s an Oni panel which has a late night talkshow theme, there is a cooking segment. Our lives can be somewhat surreal at the best of times. 7pm, Room 2AB on Friday! [emphasis mine]

Looking forward to seeing you for MoCCA! HOORAY!!!

It’s possible that last sentence was meant only for me, but Frank’s a friendly guy; I’m sure he’s looking forward to seeing you at MoCCA as well. Also, here is where I have to confess that I’ll be missing Sunday at MoCCA because I’ll be at a brunch featuring the musical and drink stylings of Dale DeGroff. Look, I love comics and all, but Dale DeGroff will have booze. Booze what I need.

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¹ Which, to be fair, was 2010, the first year utilizing the present system.

I gotta say, the spam comments that get submitted to Fleen are ever more amusing; I particularly liked this one:

This is in actuality a terrific webpage. written in a very vivid, using the grammar very well, give us to add a lot of fun. This is steering to be the best. Thank you .¹

This is the pledge that we at Fleen make to you: we will write in a very vivid and use the grammar very well so we may give you to add a lot of fun. It’s what every hack webcomics pseudojournalist aspires to do/be.

• Okay! EmCity! Know who’s going? Everybody and their dog — except for me, it seems — will be in transit sometime in the next 24 – 36 hours towards Seattle. A list is included for your convenience below, but for the moment I’d like to focus on one particular element of World + Dog, Mr Brad Guigar², on account of when he travels tomorrow towards the upper-left corner of the country, he’ll be doing so as a man who has rid himself of the shackles of The Man:
  

  Last month, the company announced layoffs, and … was offering a generous buyout to employees who would take a voluntary layoff, and I was accepted as one of those candidates. My last day is today. [emphasis mine]

  I’ve found more than once that people thought that Guigar was already a full-time drain on society webcartoonist, but the fact is that he’s been working for nigh on a decade and a half in the newspaper biz in Philadelphia. Every in-house graphic to explain why we’re eating more beets? Chances are Brad did it.

  Practical upshot: juggling multiple comic strips and editing Webcomics Dot Com all took place in the interstitial time between work, family, and sleep, making Guigar one muthascratchin’ master ninja at time management. One shudders to think what he might accomplish with another eight hours each day.

  Brad’s agreed to an interview about what the transition is like, which we’ll do sometime after this weekend’s con and he’s gotten into the new routine. My one piece of advice for everybody is, If you ever found yourself in Brad Guigar’s way, now’s the time to be somewhere else.

• Off To See The Wizard
  On the main floor, you’ll find Alaska Robotics (booth 216);
  Blank Label with special guest Magnolia Porter (booth 210); Blind Ferret (booth 306); Dylan Meconis and Hurricane Erika (booth 223), next to their Periscope Studiomates (booth 222); Girls With Slingshots and Something*Positive (booth 309); The Mighty, Mighty Halfpixel (booth 102); Hijinks Ensue, Multiplex, and Wasted Talent (booth 307); KaBOOM!, publishers of Adventure Time by Ryan North (booth 402); SMBC (booth 206); Studio Foglio (booth 110); The Oatmeal (booth 705); The First Great and Bountiful TopatoCo Empire, including appearances by Aaron Diaz, Anthony Clark, Ethan & Malachai Nicolle, Chris Hastings, Chris Yates, David Malki !, Jeph Jacques, Jhonen Vasquez, Meredith Gran, Ryan North, Sam Logan, BeckyAndFrank, Tyson Hesse, and Wes & Tony (booths 202 & 203); and Unshelved (booth 206).
• And Your Little Dog, Too!
  Meanwhile, over in Artists Alley, you may find Ben Costa (table P18); David Maguire (table P04); Ed Brisson (table F10); Jim Zub (table C11); Mary Cagle (table H07); and YukoAndAnanth (table A22).

I’m probably missing people. Let me know and I’ll steering to be the best.
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¹ Verbatim, naturally. The dude or lady in question very much wanted you to buy shoes.

² He’s dreamy.

I’ve been contacted by a number of people about Scott Kurtz’s comment on yesterday’s NCS nominations story. While I’m touched by the concern, it’s unnecessary. Two of the things I appreciate about Scott are his passion and his complete and utter willingness to let you know where he stands on any issue; it’s not always fun being on the receiving end of those opinions¹, but it’s always instructive. We’ve been over our viewpoints and opinions and I’m happy to announce that I’ve been granted provisional BFF status by Mr Kurtz², subject only to my completing something called “Operation Wigwam Wedgie”, the details of which will be revealed to me at a later date³.

• Speaking of, I’m trusting you saw the mysterious tweets yesterday leading up to the announcement that the first of two guest weeks⁴ at PvP will feature an Axe Cop/LOLBAT team-up⁵. And we all know what’s not on deck for PvP the second week of Kurtz’s absence, so there’s that to look forward to.
• Every year about this time, I note that Canadian comics awards seem to have a much higher ratio of unassailable quality nominees than those in other parts of the world. That’s because every year about this time, the Doug Wright Award nominees are announced, starting the season of comics awards with their bestowal at TCAF in just over a month.

  Anyhoo, the nominations are dominated by Drawn and Quarterly this year, with Kate Beaton up for still more well-deserved recognition for Hark! A Vagrant and Emily Carroll capping off a year where her recognition skyrocketed with a nomination for the Spotlight Award, which recognizes talent deserving of wider recognition (which she surely is).

• For those of you wondering how Rich Stevens was coming along with prepping well over 3500 comics for e-distribution, the answer appears to be, Just fine, thanks:
  

  I hit a bit of a milestone last night– 2,600 comics down, 1,000 to go. The plan to stay on schedule involves being done with this first draft by the end of the week.

  The good news is that somewhere around the 2,000th comic… my wrist evolved like a Pokémon and my carpal tunnel pain seems to have majorly faded. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

  I always said that Stevens was nigh-indestructible; only a world-wide coffee drought can even slow him down. That, or reeeaaaalllly expensive perfume⁶.

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¹ If I only associated with people that agree with me 100% of the time, my circle of friends would be much smaller.

² I’m sorry, Kris Straub, I didn’t want you to have to find out this way, but what Scott and I share is real.

³ Hints have been dropped that the date in question will be 9 April, which by an amazing coincidence is Brad Guigar’s birthday.

⁴ Necessitated by Mr Kurtz’s travel to the far antipodes with former-BFF Mr Straub and sometimes homebrewer Mr Wheaton, despite the fact that it’s well known that everything in Australia wants to kill you. Everything. Godspeed, gentlemen, and watch out for drop bears.

⁵ Not a dream, hoax, imaginary story, etc.

⁶ ‘Cause it’s got a metal head!

Congrats to Matthew Inman, Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins, and Jon Rosenberg as the first-ever nominees in the Online Comic division of the NCS Awards.

I’m actually kind of limited in how much it would be appropriate for me to say about this topic, since I was involved in the screening process for comics that were then passed to a jury, which determined the three nominees for voting. It’s not possible for committees of this sort to do their work in public so I won’t be talking about any of the discussions we had, except to say that the committee’s unanimous belief was that we should put the best work forward, and when we had doubts as to whether or not a candidate met the (admittedly imperfect) criteria, we passed them along.

With any luck, next year’s award will be better, and the year after that, until the distinction between media is gone and work competes solely on its merits. Like I said back in January, Perfect is the enemy of done, and changes of this magnitude will always happen incrementally. I’m proud to have been part of the first effort to overcome the inertia and get the metaphorical ball rolling.

I watched Jon Rosenberg’s Kickstarter campaign close just north of US$55,000 and in all-time the sixth highest slot for comics projects¹, and I started wondering if there were anything in common among these high-value webcomic Kickstarts. Waaaay too much number-crunching later, I find there actually is something among the most successful. Caveats ahoy:

1. The sample size is small, being drawn from the most successful and concluded comics Kickstart campaigns
2. I’ve excluded the Womanthology as it’s not the product of singly-identifiable creators, working from an established property
3. I’ve excluded the Order of the Stick campaign for several reasons:
   • The numbers are skewed by the high number of reward categories
   • The numbers within those categories are skewed by highly-variable reward limits (some limits in the range of 100, some in the range of five or six)
   • The numbers are even further skewed by a high incidence of “add on” rewards, where a supporter could get something not offered at their reward by bumping up their pledge by a given amount
4. I wanted to compare against campaigns that were just shy of successful for comparison, but it’s really damn hard to find those; a fairly exhaustive search of failed webcomics campaigns causes me to tend towards the conclusion If you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna fail big
5. To simplify things, I arranged reward levels in broad ranges, since there are no “standard” reward intervals; where you see the number “20” in the graphs, that means “greater than the 10 level to the immediate left, up to and including 20”

All that being said, I did find a fairly interesting commonality among the projects that I ultimately did data entry on:

1. Erfworld Year of the Dwagon — US$84,981 pledged, 1148 supporters, average pledge level US$74.25, 354% of goal achieved
2. Diesel Sweeties eBook-Stravaganza 3000 — US$60,209 pledged, 1520 supporters, average pledge level US$39.61, 2006% of goal achieved
3. Benign Kingdom — US$59,775, 1095 supporters, average pledge level US$54.59, 332% of goal achieved
4. Goats Book IV: Inhuman Resources — US$55,348, 906 supporters, average pledge level US$61.10, 461% of goal achieved

Looking purely at the stated support levels (and there’s no adjustment here for artificial limits on how many of a particular reward were offered, nor for people pledging at an amount “between” official reward levels, there’s not a lot of obvious correlation to be seen:

[click to embiggen]

With some really significant outliers there from Diesel Sweeties. But the curves of each comic’s pledge frequency seemed to be similar (at least, if you’ve spent a bunch of years looking at data), which led me to add some logarithmic trendlines²:

[make with the clicky]

Three of those comics have trendlines that are similar enough to arguably be within the bounds of the margin of error (if not for the fact that the very notion of a margin of error on such a small sample is ludicrous). There’s a real tendency towards buy-in the lower half of the reward structure, and the second quartile is where the real action is. The top rewards look impressive when a couple people plunk down a couple grand each, but they aren’t what’s important. The middle tiers are where you’ll find the make or break point.

The Diesel Sweeties curve is again an outlier, starting higher and decaying more sharply. I didn’t feel like cleaning them up, but random samples of failed Kickstarts from across the comics category revealed a similar pattern — when the greatest number of pledges are at the lowest levels, it’s really tough to make your goals. The only other successful Kickstart I found with a dominant skew to the very lowest end was the Double Fine door-buster, where more than 50% of all backers are at the lowest possible level³. So how do Double Fine and Diesel Sweeties get by on front-loading the low end, and why do so many other campaigns that do the same fail? I see two reasons:

• Sheer numbers The scale really cannot be overstated here. A cursory examination of the top-funded project in each major category revealed that you can take the total number of pledgers for all of those projects together and still not equal the 47,946 people that pledged at the lowest level to Double Fine. But numbers can work against a campaign, since any reward more more tangbile than warm fuzzy feelings will cost a significant amount of time and effort to send to a lot of people, on small margins. That leads us to …
• Free rewards You get the new Double Fine game, which requires no shipping, no handling, and it’s likely Steam will supply the bandwidth. Likewise, the lowest reward for the Diesel Sweeties campaign is a digital download that doesn’t cost Rich Stevens even one trip to the post office. Yeah, sure, bandwidth costs. Peanuts compared the effort and cost of getting anything physical to 490 people.

So that’s what I learned — there’s a sweet spot for rewards in about the US$25 – US$75 range, and unless you’re dealing with a metric crapload of supporters with an essentially free cost to fulfill rewards, don’t try for success on the low end. Also, these numbers are severely lacking in rigor, so if you make your Kickstarter decisions based solely on what I’ve done here without your own research, you’ll get exactly what you deserve, you silly people

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¹ Although that notion is itself a bit nebulous; for example, the Schlock Mercenary boardgame campaign is in a different category, yet clearly owes its mammoth success (third overall in the category, as of this writing) to the underlying webcomic. Then again, the Not Invented Here IT barrier tape campaign (in the Product Design category) doesn’t rely on the webcomic’s familiarity to nearly the same degree. Your mileage will vary.

² Ask Zach Weiner; he’ll do a better job of explaining it than I will.

³ By contrast, Diesel Sweeties had approximately 1/3 of its support at the lowest level that allowed for an actual reward. Erfworld and Benign Kingdom were closer to 1 in 5, and Goats was in the range of 1 in 8. Note that “actual reward” here is taken to be “at least a PDF of the work in question”. Random thanks, postcards, bragging rights, etc., are not considered an actual reward.

Thursdays famously being the day that one just can never get the hang of¹, how about a few things that are readily hangable?

• Questions have arisen in both the comments to yesterday’s post and in my twitterstream regarding exactly when Angela Melick’s Welcome to the Real World goes on sale. Looking back, I can see the source of confusion, as the WTTRW page mentions an on-sale time of 24 March 2012 11:00am PST, but when I looked up Pacific Time to get the offset from GMT, my search gave me the result for PDT, because we’re in Daylight Savings Time now. At least we are in the US; Canada may be a different beast. Also, the countdown timer would appear to zero out at about 11:00 Eastern Daylight Time, not Pacific. So how about we call it “a bit before lunch in Vancouver the day after tomorrow” and decide that’s close enough?
• As long as we’re talking about things timing out, approximately nine hours from now, Jon Rosenberg will know exactly how much work he has to go to as a result of the Goats Kickstarter campaign, but early indications would point to “a lot”, given that he’s now obligated to return to weekly Goats updates. I’m hoping we see some Shazam Twix or Eva Pudenda sooner rather than later. Speaking of sooner rather than later, after this Kickstart wraps up, I’ve got some more musings on the whole idea of Kickstarter.
• Go, look: a mutual interview (or “conversation” as the hep kids call it these days) between Chris Hastings and Ethan Nicolle is up at the Dark Horse website, and it’s damn good. Similarly, what may be the definitive answer to How Do You Break In To … ?² (in this case, comics) has been posted by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and it’s mandatory reading for anybody who wants to move from creative hobbyist to creative professional.
• Events: Scott C has a new exhibit/gallery show coming up, this one paired up with the book release party for East Dragon, West Dragon, at the usual stomping grounds of Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California. Opening reception 14 April, 7:00 – 10:00pm, show running until 6 May, details here or here. For those on the opposite coast on 11 May, the book launch party for John Green and Dave Roman’s Teen Boat at the decidedly unusual stomping grounds of an actual boat. Namely, the Waterfront Barge Museum in New York City, which doesn’t have a street address, it has a pier (Pier 25, at Hudson River Park, in the vicinity of West Street and N. Moore Street). Fun starts on 11 May, 7:00pm, and you can ris-vip at the Facebook event page.

  Also, please note that I could have made any number of Guigar-level puns around words like “launch” or “moor[e]”, or embedded any number of I’m On A Boat mashup videos, and did not. You’re welcome.

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¹ We salute you, Dentarthurdent.

² Short version: it’s not a discrete point in time with a secret handshake that gets you in the door.

Jam: Victorious.

[update March 20, 2012]: FINALLY! FINALLY the paperwork went through! My shop works again! WE ARE GO FOR LAUNCH: MARCH 24 at 11:00 AM PST

PST, for those of you wondering, is GMT-7. In case that’s still too much math, there’s a countdown clock until the very moment that you can purchase Wasted Talent book #2: Welcome to the Real World.

It’s too nice a day out for people to be inside reading comics; grab your mobile device and go read them at the park or something. While you’re doing so, please enjoy a few things that you may or may not have full access to.

• Firstly, Brad Guigar¹ got out in front of everybody else (i.e.: he thought to do it) and interviewed Henry Kuo of Just The First Frame for Webcomics Dot Com. A’course, WDC has a paywall, so if you haven’t got a subscription, you don’t get to read more than the abstract. Without going into too much detail and diminishing the value that Guigar provides to his subscribers², I will say that I got the impression Kuo seems to have been caught slightly by surprise by how much his project has captured attention; he comes across as a very humble guy, and determined to make the experience of JTFF better for those that use it.
• The last update of Teaching Baby Paranoia (the occasionally truth-adjacent weekly foray into the corners of history, culture, coincidence, and conspiracy) by suspected apopheniac Bryant Paul Johnson may have gone up more than two years ago, but he hasn’t stopped his comic and comiclike work. For the past few months he’s been working on a project for the Girl Scouts, who have a self-directed Make Your Own Badge program.

  Johnson’s role was to do illustration work, some of which is visible at the dedicated website for MYOB if you have an account. Which I don’t. Because I’m a 44 year old dude with no connection to any Girl Scouts³ who doesn’t want to get put on any lists. But for those of you who can set up access to the site (lookin’ at you, Miss Danielle), there’s a badge design tool that allows girls who have completed requirements to get their individual study recognized in actual, full-color, embroidered form.

• How’s about we close on a topic that everybody can share? The recurring series of Recipe Comix continues on at Saveur, and has been on a bit of a dessert kick lately. How do you feel about chocolate soufflé, rice pudding, and halo-halo? If you didn’t at least silently think that at least one of those sounded delicious, you are lying to yourself.

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¹ He’s dreamy.

² Also his hangers-on; in the interests of full disclosure, he has comped me a WDC subscription.

³ Aside from an unholy love of Thin Mints.

What’s your favorite number? Mine is e, and in honor of this awesomest of numbers (it kicks π’s ass), all numbers in this update will be related to this most lasting legacy of Lenny Euler^e0.

Okay, this has been a more difficult HTML-wrangling job than any post I’ve ever done, with the exception of the review of the first Dinosaur Comics book. Let’s just … let’s not do this again.

Edit to change: the Otter link, because really, the Animal House gag is so old by now.
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^e0 Okay, that’s a disputable claim, given that Euler has more numbers, constants, theorems, formulas, and every other damn thing named after him than anybody else in the history of mathematics. But for my money, if you’re going to remember just one thing about Euler, it’s gonna be e.

^e0.693147181 Unfortunately, Spangler’s site doesn’t do permalinks to blog postings, so click through today if you want to read the bit I’ve quoted from.

^e1.09861229 Disclaimer: I wrote the foreword to her first book collection, so take that into account when judging my recommendation. It’s not like I get any more or anything, but clearly I’m on Team Otter.