Speaking Of Labcoats
Seriously, I have multiple labcoat-related items today.
- Project Runway meets webcomics for the second time. Last time it was a puking clown; this time it’s fashionable labcoats put together by a contestant from Season 10 and one of Jorge Cham’s collaborators from The PhD Movie. We will get Tim Gunn to take notice of us yet.
- Unless and until the Project X² ¹ takes off, the most famous lab coat in webcomics will remain that worn by Dante Shepherd, who brought himself to the fore twice today: once because he’s the latest creator to guest star in Jon Rosenberg’s anything-goes sandbox (and does so on a topic near to Rosenberg’s heart, booze), but he’s also making progress on a second strip first mentioned back in January (the title of that post also concerns booze …. COINCIDENCE??).
It appears that the working title of that project will in fact be the final, so look for PhD Unknown to launch sometime this month and the reference to PhDs takes us back to the first item in an ever-deepening spiral of recursion from which there is no escape.
- Except there’s always an escape when there’s something shiny² ³ to look at, such as the latest infodump from the redoubtable Jim Zub on making a career of independent comics. Forget the fact that Zub opted not to include numbers, just look at the graphs showing losses and gains, slowly clawing their way in the direction of profitability.
Actually, ignore everything except for that last graph on the page (helpfully reproduced above, where you see the red area of loss growing inexorably over time until a sharp about-face kicks in at the start of 2012 and a rapid climb towards the magic “break even” point.
That inflection point is from when Zub put Skullkickers online and started driving browsers towards his print collections. Ignore that particular unslippery slope at your peril.
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¹ For once, that’s not a footnote, that’s an exponent. Unless I come up with a second footnote in this piece, in which case we’re in trouble.
² Such as my just-received copy of Benign Kingdom: Spring 2013 which — no kidding — has a gold foil embossment on the cover that’s so shiny that it reflected the afternoon sun into my eyes and made me turn my head, blinking away an afterimage. That’s pretty damn shiny.
³ This time it’s actually a footnote. I trust that you’ve navigated any potential confusion without too much trouble.
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