Okay, been with the furnace guy for much of the day (hourly charges! my heart!), and my dog is very curious why every ten-fifteen minutes I was jogging from the basement to the second floor to reset thermostats. As a result, I haven’t had the time to give the proper consideration to some items that are worth discussing; on the other hand, I will now have reliable heat in my house¹, which is kind of a good thing.

Today gets a skip for domecile-environmental reasons; we’ll talk tomorrow.

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¹ Funnily enough, in order to get my heat working properly, we’re having to look at a major repair on the air conditioning, in the midst of a cold snap in January. It’s been that kind of day.

It’s an incremental kind of day today — additional details here and there, but nothing like the big news we got yesterday. Let’s run down the list.

• Meredith Gran, Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb¹, and the ghost of Ryan North got some recognition from media outlets that may pay no less attention to webcomics than we at Fleen, but it’s not their main focus. Specifically, Comics Alliance called out Gran’s Octopus Pie as one of the best comics of 2012 and The AV Club recognized Paroine, Lamb, and the late North’s work on Adventure Time in a similar fashion. Not much recognition of webcomickers elsewhere in those lists, but I see it less as token webcomics recognition and more of spectacularly talented creators hanging with the best that various comics media have to offer.
• Speaking of the best that various comics media have to offer, Jim Zub dropped some of his hard-earned wisdom (again!) at his blog, this time talking about why there are no overnight successes when dealing with big name comics properties². Highlighting his thesis for those that don’t want to read what’s clearly written:
  

  There’s no open spot waiting for you. You have to earn it. [boldface original]

  … which he highlighted with a quick rundown of a twelve-year process of getting to the point where 2012 could legitimately be called A Big Year For Zub (and 2013 potentially more so).

• Yesterday’s Strip Search news has been edited to add the name of contestant of Tavis Maiden, who was initially overlooked. Also, news came from Loading Ready Run regarding their role in hosting and producing SS, as well as a peek behind the curtains around the judging/elimination process from Mike Krahulik. Underscoring Robert Khoo’s mention of how unexpectedly connected the judges got to some of the art, Krahulik remembered:
  

  We had some no bullshit fights while judging a few of these comics. I remember one night, Robert actually had us all step outside to cool off for a bit after things got especially heated. The winner of this show will get fifteen thousand dollars and the ability to come and work at the Penny Arcade office for one year. So I expected Strip Search would be a life changing experience for the contestants, but I didn’t expect it to be a life changing experience for me.

  Krahulik also mentioned something in passing that caught my eye:

  As mentioned over on the Loading Ready Run site, the bulk of the show has already been filmed.

  Khoo wouldn’t say definitively if the SS filming was complete, or if some number of finalists were still subject to competition — reading between the lines, it appears there may be some filming yet to take place. Could be a final final elimination, or a reunion show, but I imagine we’ll get the skinny soon enough. And despite Hurricane Erika getting to indulge in the greatest cliche of reality shows³, it appears that the selection process really did avoid The Puck Situation. Something tells me when we get down to the ultimate winner/runner-up decision, the runner-up is going to be genuinely happy for the winner.

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¹ It occurs to me that I have not always given Paroline and Lamb their due in noting the success of Adventure Time, having sometimes focused too much on their late, lamented writer. Assuming that the now-exploded North left behind sufficient scripts for them to work on, they should be able to show their work to even greater effect in future issues.

² One ought to note that there may be seemingly meteoric rises in the world of indy/webcomics, but while working for yourself may compress the timeline a bit, you’re still looking at years of honing your craft before suddenly launching that upwards trajectory.

³ In an unused detail from the interview, Khoo noted that sometimes the presence of reality show tropes and cliches is because they work.

We’re less than eighteen hours into 2013 where I am, and already things are off to a fast start.

• Firstly, more news of Strip Search has come to light, including details I couldn’t get Robert Khoo to divulge if his (or, more likely, my) life depended on it. Maki [Edit to add: I’ve discovered that Maki is not uni-named, and is more fully known as Maki Naro; Fleen regrets the deviation from our usual naming conventions], from Sci-ənce dropped news that he was a participant, that production took place in December, and that the other eleven creators vying for the top prize were Lexxy Douglass, Amy Falcone, Ty Halley, Alex Hobbs, Abby Howard, Monica Ray, Katie Rice, Mackenzie Schubert, Nick Trujillo, and “Hurricane” Erika Moen.

  [Edit to add: Missed one! I took my list from Naro’s posting, and did not notice that there were only ten names listed rather than eleven; Naro initially omitted Tavis Maiden, and I missed his name on Lexxy Douglass’s post. Mr Maiden helpfully contacted me via Twitter to point out the oversight; Fleen regrets the error.]

  Best news: most of these creators aren’t known to me, so I can now get exposed to new talent. Even bester news: the three whose work I am familiar with are really damn good, which gives me confidence in the other nine. Specifically, I’ve had my eye on Douglass’s¹ art blog since she was featured on PA: The Series going through the hiring process; Rice has been tearing it up at Dumm Comics for going on five years, and Moen is basically an unstoppable force of nature. My already-high level of anticipation for SS just went through the roof.

  One last thought — I’m really hoping that Maki didn’t speak out of turn (it is mere days since Khoo wasn’t willing to tell when production took place or who was involved) and as he (Maki) rightly observes:

  Khoo is a very kind, friendly, and utterly terrifying man

  I kid, I kid, Douglass also disclosed her involvement today, but she didn’t make a show of terror so she doesn’t have as good a pull quote. Obviously, the NDA period is over — or Maki and Douglass are dangerously overconfident, not realizing that their doom is nigh.

• Speaking of fast starts, Ryan Estrada has launched the second iteration of The Whole Story (six months after the first), this time on Kickstarter. Since the launch at midnight EST, TWS: Winter 2013 has exceeded the extremely modest US$2500 goal, which had the entire purpose of reimbursing Estrada for the out-of-pocket costs that he fronted to creators and translators; everything that comes in from this point will be split among the creators (of which Estrada is one, meaning he gets a share, but not the entire total going forward).

  Moving TWS to Kickstarter from its earlier distribution site makes sense — it’s easiest to just set the “pay what you want” model to a minimum of a buck, and to add bonus content by exceeding the average amount paid in the prior incarnation, than it is to adjust those pricing structures on the fly. Having a set period of time for the campaign creates a scarcity that wouldn’t exist otherwise for electronic content.

  And holy jeeze, there’s a lot of previously-released and brand-new content available, including KC Green’s latest story comic at the pay-what-you-want level; the bonus level (a paltry thirteen American dollars) includes almost 200 pages of Ryan Andrews comics that bore themselves into your soul and don’t let go plus Green’s magnum opus, The Anime Club. At this point, just call The Whole Story the e-book equivalent of Benign Kingdom.

• Finishing up on the Kickstarter front, at the beginning of December we at Fleen mentioned a Kickstarter from longtime mystery man Eben Burgoon for a project called B-Squad, wherein characters will be killed off by the roll of a die and replaced by others waiting in the wings. Burgoon’s project is four days from completion, and I’m particularly interested in its progress, because it’s the first test of something I learned back in October.

  Some may recall how I shared some information from Kickstarter Director of Community Cindy Au, at the B9 panel at NYCC; specifically, the magic inflection point appears to be 1/3 of goal. If you reach 1/3, you’re extremely likely to succeed, and if you fail, you very likely didn’t approach even 1/3 of goal. As of this writing, Burgoon’s B-Squad is at 39% of goal, with four days to go.

  The projects I’ve had my eyes on since I learned of Au’s thumb-rule haven’t hung around the 1/3 mark for more than a few minutes before racing ahead to success, so I’m curious to see what happens here — a big push to get support and a slide over the line before the campaign closes? Or a statistical outlier? Dare we, as Kickstarter attention-payers, turn Ms Au’s prediction on its head? That could cause the laws of Kickstarter physics to start to fail and create a tear in the fabric of crowdfunding-spacetime, the likes of which not even the ghost of Ryan North could navigate. I’m just saying, if Kickstarter eats itself, we only have ourselves to blame.

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¹ That’s entirely too many “s”es.²

² So is that.³

³ And Guigar.