David Malki ! of Wondermark¹ has provided a button underneath his strip that says This comic in a blog-friendly format which, when clicked, reformats his strip as 2×2 panels in a pop-up. Heck, if he’s gonna provide it, I’m gonna click it. Neat.

• If you haven’t seen the first part of the Strip Search season one finale, what the crap-hell are you waiting for? Katie, Abby, and Maki each brought a fully-fleshed pitch for Mike and Jerry to pore over, and regardless of who wins I want to see all three of these as a part of my regular rotation. Be sure to look over their submissions after watching the episode, because there’s some marvelous work in there².

  Spoiler #1: It’s a three-way showdown for the top prize, as the Artists are given four hours to produce three strips that fit into their new comic concepts.
  Spoiler #2: Holy crap with less than two and a half hours left Katie asks to abandon her Cintiq and start over on paper. Credits roll just as she starts to put pencil to paper, so we all have to wait until 7:30pm PDT (GMT-7) on Tuesday, 18 June to see how it turns out.

  Spoilery speculation: It’s been months since the three-way showdown, which means one of two things is true: either our finalists have been waiting all this time to find out who wins (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not knowing), or they know and haven’t been allowed to say for all this time (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not talking). Here’s to Tuesday when we can all find out what the hell is going on.

• Intriguing Kickstarter of the Day: Darren Gendron has launched a campaign behind a fantasy (specifically, faerie) themed card deck, and recruited some of the best in webcomics artists to do designs. Gendron’s pretty noted for projects with relatively low goals, fast turnarounds, and low cost of basic (physical) rewards as well as pushing into spaces where webcomics don’t usually go (board books, board games, etc.). In this case, if you’re a fan of Obsidian Abnormal, Evan Dahm, Lar deSouza, Yan Gagné and Mary Garren, K Lynn Smith, LJ Lockhart, Sarah Ellerton, or Jamie Noguchi, you could do worse than popping eight or nine bucks to get a small representation of their artwork on a deck of cards that can also be used to fleece your friends at poker.

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¹ And Machine of Death and TopatoCo and a lot more besides.

² Particularly Katie’s, whose children-in-peril story has a Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends vibe that’s making me feel joy in my black, cynical heart.

It’s been a long damn time since the parallel diary comic So Far Apart by Rene Engström and Rasmus Gran has updated, more than nine months¹ in fact. Last week we got a teaser that — yay! — new updates were a-comin’, and today we saw what Engström and Gran have been up to. I think I speak for most readers when I note that I read the Rasmus panels of this long-distance relationship comic first because he’s on the left side of the page, so I think I’m justified in saying while I understand the benefit of surprises and suspense, that was one hell of a buried lede in the last panel, buddy.

As always in SFA, Rene ‘n’ Rasmus often have differing viewpoints one how to share their lives with us: he catches up the high points and jumps to Oh yeah, we’re pregnant, some months into the process and sonograms and such; she focuses on the decision that they should get pregnant and the surprise that it happened as quickly as it did.

I cannot say how happy I am for Engström and Gran; they are not only obviously in love when you meet them, their love is strong enough to survive great distances² as well as terrifyingly complete honesty; there are plenty of episodes of SFA where one or both of them comes off pretty poorly because that is what being in love is really like — you like each other, you fight, you have petty little disagreements that blow up into anger, and (if you’re lucky) you are still in love. To face those frictions that any couple has, multiplied by 1200km, raised to the power of sharing it with all the world? They’ve got to be crazy in love, because merely crazy doesn’t explain all of it.

There are big changes coming soon to their lives (part of the reason for the distance between them was the need to be with their respective kids, and Gran notes in this new update that his eldest son is now an adult) and we’re just on part one of the catching-up. Congratulations to them both, and hooray for adorable little Swedish kidlings.

• Exhibit A: Strong Female Characters, courtesy Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Carly Monardo.
• Exhibit B: Blood-Thirsty Space Smooch Assassins, courtesy Bravest Warriors issue #9. I’m going to attribute the remarkable resemblance to writer Joey Comeau and artist Mike Holmes knowing a good thing when they see it while also respecting the fact that BW is all-ages. This issue also features body-slams and smooches. It’s rad.

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¹ Keep that number in mind.

² Two days hard riding by motorcycle or an overnight train separate their living places in the southern tip and midpoint of Sweden.

The annual Emergency Action Plan refresher [PDF] took place today in my office, which ate up some time and has me slightly in the weeds today. My apologies if this is brief.

• How the heck did CAKE sneak up on me?¹ And why the heck does Chicago Alternative Comics Expo get to misspell its acronym like that?² Regardless, the likes of Sarah Becan, Matt Bors, Box Brown, Anthony Clark, Zac Gorman, Meredith Gran, Lisa Hanawalt, Lucy Knisley, Tom McHenry, Tyler Page, Spike, Jason Viola, and more.
• Speaking of Matt Bors, I understand that he’s now done 1000 comics on the great and the good and venal and the stupid. Sometimes he ruffles the right feathers, sometimes he picks on people I think don’t deserve it, but he’s always got a point of view that makes me think. Well done, Mr Bors.
• As was foretold in the beforetimes, Schlock Mercenary has now achieved 13 years of hard sci-fi adventure, mayhem, and artistic refinements. Oddly, this makes the strip slightly older than creator Howard Tayler, has he has celebrated
  eleven proper birthdays, being one of those 29 February-birthed mutants. But what the heck, he’s done time-travel stories, I’m sure it all makes sense somewhere in this crazy universe. Congratulations, evil twin.

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¹ Many thanks to the TopatoCo blog for reminding me.

² This is not ‘Nam, there are rules, etc.

Thanks very much Ryan North¹ I will never sleep again thanks to today’s Dinosaur Comics. As a quick hint, nobody wants to consider an afterlife full of parasites except for Kelly Weinersmith. Ick.

• Something weird happened today: Cyanide and Happiness appeared in the comics section of more than 650 newspapers worldwide, an occurrence which all reasonable persons would have figured to be damn near impossible. Okay, it’s just one panel, and it’s a pastiche by Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis, and covered by censor bars, but still — just imagine all the people that read newspaper comic strips deciding to do a Google search on Cyanide & Happiness because they figure it can’t be as bad as all that. I can hear the heads exploding from here.
• Well, that was fast — a few weeks back I mentioned that Digger² would be Kickstarting an omnibus edition, which went live after our update yesterday. Surprising absolutely nobody (except possibly Digger creator Ursula Vernon), it completely funded at approximately the thirteen hour mark, and is well on its way to (per the Fleen Rule of Kickstarter Projections) the US$100,000 — US$200,000 range. Yeah, got it, webcomics with built-in audiences overfund their Kickstarts all the time, what’s the big deal?

  The deal is that the Digger campaign may have the most unusual reward ever offered — hand-forged, wombat-sized pickaxes at the $US1000 (!) backer level. Yesterday I was wondering what could be cooler than Dante Shepherd’s mallets and I guess I have my answer, if only because the pickaxes will involve a forge and anvil and metalcrafting. However, somebody really should point John Scalzi toward’s Shepherd’s campaign, as I bet he’d love an even larger Mallet of Loving Correction.

• It’s been a good two months since Saveur has run any recipe comics, which means I guess I should be prodding people more to produce some of them things. I can put you in touch with their digital editor, and it’s my understanding that the checks she cuts for accepted comics cash without problems. In any event, Christopher Bird of Mighty God King (and the writerly half of the stellar Al’Rashad, which improbably keeps getting better) teamed up with Shelli Hay to present a family recipe on his own damn site.

  We’ve never met, but Bird’s always struck me as a reasonable man as well as being chock-full of good comics ideas (although probably the most intriguing comic idea he ever presented was a collaboration), but I have no doubt in my mind that he means it when he says in panel number eight that he will cut you for making unauthorized substitutions. Let the home cook beware.

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¹ Your status as Toronto Man-Mountain and one of the Three Ineffable Avatars of Webcomics (along with Shaenon Garrity and George Rohac) remains unimpeachable, but dang bro you brought the creepy today.

² I loves me some Digger.

There are few things in this life more certain than Death, Taxes, and the fact that Howard Tayler¹ will have a new update to Schlock Mercenary gracing the intertoobz every dang day, come hell or high water; after all, as of the day after tomorrow it will be thirteen years of miss-free updates, so one comes to expect the pattern to continue. So naturally, I thought it was just me when about 07:10 EDT (GMT-4) I saw Schlock Mercenary was erroring out. Then a while later I saw that others were reporting issues and silently thought Not my circus, not my monkeys. It’s been back for some hours, so let’s all site quietly and think stable server thoughts in Tayler’s direction.

New Kickstarters this morning:

• As mentioned recently, Dante Shepherd is doing page-a-day calendars, meaning you can get 365 versions of Shepherd looking at you in all your most private moments for a whole year, like unto some kind of judgmental, pagan deity. At least, that’s what will happen if his funding campaign (presently about one sixth of the way to goal) succeeds over the next four weeks, which looks pretty likely.
• Master anthology-wrangler Spike kicked all sorts of asses with the delightul pornthology Smut Peddler, particularly with respect to the notion of sharing the wealth and paying her contributors ever more as the funding goals were eclipsed, and it was pretty certain that she would apply the same approach to her forthcoming horror anthology, The Sleep of Reason.

  Today it became official: US$20,000 (the goal) will not only ensure the book is printed, but also means a US$50 bonus for each creator/creator team; every additional US$5000 pledged means another US$50 for each creator, with no cap. Last time, it was an extra US$600 in each bonus; I can hardly think of a better use of excess funds than to reward the creators (and goodness, what a list!) that made the thing that people will love. Pledge.

• For those wondering if the show at the Toonseum in conjunction with Reubens Weekend, the one with original art from 60+ years of Reuben winners, would stay up, the answer is yes:
  

  The ToonSeum, Pittsburgh’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art will be exhibiting seven decades’ worth of original art from cartooning’s highest honor, The Reuben Award. The exhibit runs through August 11th 2013.

  I actually got that bit of information a week ago, and I apologize for neglecting it in the meantime. Fortunately, you’ve still got two months to make your way to the riverfront arts district of Pittsburgh and enjoy some rarely-seen treasures.

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¹ My evil twin.

I’d like to start off today with a correction, or a clarification, or whatever’s appropriate when you specualte out loud and it turns out you were totally off base, but since it involves spoilery information I’ma stick it down at the bottom of the page and we can start with something else.

Books! New books! Second volumes, in fact, the both of them!

• There may be no single [web]comics character of the past few years that is as disturbing as Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer (although whatever the hell that is menacing Wadsworth Zane in today’s Broodhollow is rapidly heading for the top spot). In case his mayhem-related office activities (or office-related mayhem activities) aren’t enough to piece your very soul, he also stares at you dead-eyed, menacingly, from the cover of the new collection of Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse, Business Animals, which has just gone up for pre-order.

  Usual disclaimer: Jon got me started in this blog-based opinion-having racket and also he owns my soul. But none of that changes the fact that regardless of whatever bias I might be injecting into this discussion, PZ Frickin’ Myers wrote the foreword, and you can’t do much better than that.

• In a neat bit of self-wanging, Zach Weinersmith managed to hose up his own site by crosslinking SMBC and the Kickstarter campaign for his newest original book, Trial of the Clone 2: Wrath of the Pacifist. Like the original Trial of the Clone, ToTC 2:WotP is a choosable-path comedic story, wherein your character from ToTC has failed upward to being in charge of the galaxy and now must rule; near the end of the first book’s Kickstarter campaign Weinersmith asked if the sequel should follow the protagonist on a Good path or an Evil one, and the consensus was Good.

  While Evil often looks to be more fun, you can’t deny that there’s nothing funnier than to watch somebody attempt to do Good and screw it up (and since the “hero” of ToTC is easily the most inept being in all of time and space, there should be plenty of room for up-screwing).

  In the hours since the book-kick launched, ToTC 2: WotP has cleared 75% of its US$20,000 goal, and reached the first four stretch goals (Weinersmith having pioneered the art of setting goals below the funding goal, building excitement while guaranteeing some outcomes). So far the stretches have all been related to getting more illustrations (by Weinersmith’s longtime collaborator, Chris Jones), but I imagine that there are some interesting goals in store once goal has been met in … oh, I’d say about two hours from now.

Okay, here’s that correction and remember: spoilers ahoy.

• Four days ago I laid out a timeline for the remainder of the season of Strip Search:
  

  Okay, looking at the calendar we’ve got the Maki/Lexxy elimination tomorrow, then four more episodes on 7, 11, 14, and 18 June. I had speculated early that there might be a final three approach (there’s ample precedent in the reality competition genre), but given the setup of the Strip Search Thunderdome, it make sense that all eliminations will be two Artists head-to-head, and this schedule reinforces that thought Consider: that gives us time for a social challenge among three competitors (7 June), a competitive challenge for immunity (11 June), an elimination to get us down to two (14 June), and the Big Ready-Set-Art on 18 June.

  So, yeah, my guess was wrong; as seen in today’s episode of Strip Search, none of that is happening. I should have stuck with my original speculations, since it turns out that by defeating Lexxy on Tuesday, Maki advanced to the Strip Search equivalent of Fashion Week: he and Abby and Katie face no more challenges in the house, are sent home to work up a final challenge for two months, then return to make their pitches.

  The original strips that they develop over eight weeks must include a name, three character bios, six sample strips¹ and a t-shirt design. Judging will be shown in a two-part finale, next Friday (14 June) and the following Tuesday (18 June), which per Robert Khoo will have some live component.

  There is at this point no way to tell which of the three finalists has the edge — each of the three could (and deserves) to win the prize, who wins almost doesn’t matter. While US$15,000 and a year’s embed in the Penny Arcade machine are nothing to sneeze at, the attention that the Artists have garnered, the audience that each of their new comics will have right from the beginning, and the support system that they’ve forged among themselves² means that they’re all winners³. Abby, Katie, Maki, it’s been a hell of a ride that you’ve given us and I just want to thank you for it.

Updated to add: Tickets for the Strip Search finale just went on sale. Tuesday, 18 June at 6:30pm PDT (GMT-7) at the Meydenbauer Center in Seattle. The final three episodes will be played in the theater, with the final episode released to the world at 7:30pm. Oh and on an unrelated note, kudos to the Meydenbauer for keeping ticketing fees to an entirely-reasonable US$1.52; I just bought tickets for Alton Brown’s Tour O’ Fun and I got socked for ten bucks a ticket. Screw you, Ticketmaster.

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¹ It’s gotta be the best six strips I’ve ever written — Abby.

² Everything that the nominal winner learns from their year in the PA offices will absolutely filter out to the other Artists. There’s a precedent for this kind of very fast, very thorough knowledge diffusion, and it’s within Mission Control during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. As Gene Kranz observed, it wasn’t necessary for one flight controller group (or crew) to experience everything themselves, because they worked under the model of What any one of us learns, we all learn and build on.

³ There’s no lose in this. — Maki.

Who’s in the mood for brief items? I sure am!

• Anniversaries can be tricky things. For example, today’s SMBC bears the number 3000, which is an official Big Damn Round Number in the Fleen ordinal system of mathematics. However, Zach Weinersmith has actually done a good deal more than 3000 comics, if you consider his archive.

  For starters, today’s strip is the 2955th of the current series, but then there are 132 comics in the so-called “Classic” SMBC collection (black and white, strip-style comics with actual characters and things) and another five dozen or so that appeared sporadically during the modern age (some during a hiatus in 2003 and 2004, some alongside regular SMBC from 2005 to 2007).

  But what the hell, since at least 2005 it appears that the strip numbers have been going up monotonically, and that makes today as good a day as any to recognize Weinersmith for reaching 3000 strips so everybody feel good for Zach.

• Following up on Erika Moen’s win in the Magic: The Gathering challenge on Strip Search, there was a question at the time as to whether or not Wizards of the Coast would actually be producing said deck, and you may recall that Robert Khoo was unable to comment at the time. Well, wonder no more, as Hurricane Erika shared the news on twitter that the deck is being produced:
  

  We went back to the winner, Erika Moen, and had her finish out her design without the time pressure on the show and finalized an awesome design for a skateboard deck. Now we are excited to announce that attendees to the event can enter for a chance to win a skate deck featuring Erika’s final design by Hooligan!

  More precisely, four decks¹ are being made for the giveaway, and dang do they look sharp². Congrats again to Moen, and thanks to all involved for letting us know how things ultimately turned out.

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¹ I’m guessing at least one of them makes its way to Ebay.

² You can compare Moen’s original design against the final design; it’s pretty impressive how close the colors are given that the original was done with marker rather than computer color-matching against a Pantone standard.

This page has, for a number of years, noted that the Joe Shuster Awards are perhaps the best-curated of the comics awards — they look at all genres and media, and so long as the creators meet the requirement of being Canadian, they’re good for consideration.

Of particular note is the list of past winners in the category of Webcomics Creator / Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web: Dan Kim, Ryan Sohmer and Lar De Souza, Cameron Stewart, Karl Kerschl, and Emily Carroll (two years running) represent the breadth and depth of Canadian cartooning, and possibly Canadianess itself. And if the Shusters are a bit less spare than they once were, there are still only nine categories, compared to nearly thirty for the Eisners.

This year’s nominations are out, and those singled out for recognition that may be of interest to the webcomics community include:

Fleen congratulates all of the nominees, and notes again the general lack of weak or inexplicable names on the list. The 2013 Joe Shuster Awards/Le Prix Joe Shuster 2013 will be presented not at a convention, but at a gala in Toronto (time/location TBA) on Saturday, 25 August.

Just checking, on account of not matter how often I say that :01 Books are the best, it’s not often enough.

See, I got an envelope in the mail yesterday from :01, a thin one that made me think it was the catalog of upcoming releases ’cause they don’t do books that lack for heft. Instead, I found inside a early pair of excertps of Gene Luen Yang’s forthcoming books, Boxers and Saints, due in September. Together, the two books tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion from opposite viewpoints — the first from the POV young man looking to expel the foreign powers from China, the second from that of a young woman who converted to Catholicism and is much a target for death as any European.

Given the size of the two books (more than 500 pages total), I wasn’t expecting review copies; 16 pages of Boxers form one half of the flip booklet, 16 pages of Saints the other, each tells just enough of a scene to grab the reader and make them want to know more. Both stories are drenched in the supernatural, although it’s not possible to tell from the brief fractions of story how much of that may be metaphorical.

Bao and his fellow Boxers appear to transform themselves into literal gods to fight their enemies; Vibiana the convert has conversations with Joan of Arc¹ that are more detailed than she likely could have learned from the priest that lives in her community. Whatever degree to which these heavenly warriors actually involve themselves in this corner of China circa 1900, Vibiana and Bao believe it to be true.

And in a way, I suspect that what they perceive to be true is true enough; in this fight between nations, and expressions of national will, individual peasant and village folk must have viewed the conflict as being so much larger than themselves, something that could only be explained as a clash of two distinct heavens to determine for good and all who holds sway over China². Yang has melded his own Catholic faith with his Chinese heritage in past works³, so it will be interesting to see how he approaches each of those ancient traditions as warring opponents.

We’ll know soon enough, as it turns out that more than 500 pages in two volumes (plus a deluxe box set) is just slightly more complex than your standard graphic novel, so :01 Book are using the sampler as an early peek until they can send actual books out to their review list this summer. Many thanks to them in advance, and we’ll have more to say about Boxers and Saints when the full copies arrive.

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¹ Who herself had conversations with people that weren’t entirely there.

² If there’s ever an audiobook, Daniel Day-Lewis needs to narrate.

³ Particularly in American Born Chinese, which managed to intersect Journey to the West with the Nativity of Jesus.

Via Robert Khoo’s twitterfeed:

Anyone in Seattle have access to a theatre for a live Stripsearch Finale Screening on June 18th? :)

Okay, looking at the calendar we’ve got the Maki/Lexxy elimination tomorrow, then four more episodes on 7, 11, 14, and 18 June. I had speculated early that there might be a final three approach (there’s ample precedent in the reality competition genre), but given the setup of the Strip Search Thunderdome, it make sense that all eliminations will be two Artists head-to-head, and this schedule reinforces that thought Consider: that gives us time for a social challenge among three competitors (7 June), a competitive challenge for immunity (11 June), an elimination to get us down to two (14 June), and the Big Ready-Set-Art on 18 June.

Now the most important word in Khoo’s tweet is live. In all my conversations with him regarding Strip Search, he’s never definitively answered my question if the winner was chosen during the filming back in December; while there could be an argument that this will merely be a screening of a episode already in the can, I think it’s more likely the case that whoever the final two Stripmonauts might be¹, they’ll be hashing it out in real time in front of an audience (or possibly simulcast, depending on what kind of “theater” we’re talking about). I would expect that the entire thing will be livestreamed, or at least it’d better be if Khoo, et. al., wishes to avoid a pitchfork-wielding mob because you know anybody in said theater is going to be livetweeting the crap out of this showdown.

As brought up by the Katie/Abby dinner with Khoo, Mike Krahulik, and Jerry Holkins at the end of the last episode, there remains the question of what kind of twist² the show’s conclusion may have. While I’ve seen a lot of thought given to the idea of bounced Artists forming a kind of jury (cf: Survivor), the focus of the show has been on the preferences and judgments of Holkins and Krahulik and I don’t see them opening the decision-making process to anybody else — not Khoo, not other trusted PA employees, not Artists. Penny Arcade has always been an expression of the unholy melded ids of Mike and Jerry³ and I wouldn’t expect them to break that habit at this late date.

I imagine that all of the speculation will be cleared up in the next day or so; I intend to keep an eye on the Strip Search news page, Khoo’s tweets, and Seattle performance listings.

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¹ I consider words that Khoo did share back in January: While there will be no way to tell the entire story of what happened in the mansion, there was a natural narrative that emerged during filming. By that standard alone, among the four remaining Artists there are three really compelling narratives:

• Katie starts out wobbly and goes on to dominate the challenges
• Abby starts out under-confident and proves herself a natural
• Lexxy prevails over past instances of coming up just short of the brass ring and finally makes it in the doors of Penny Arcade

Maki — whose work I adore and who also was responsible for the single best visual of the show — doesn’t have the punch to his narrative (last guy standing makes a comeback against super-talented ladies) so I’m afraid he’s not in the final. If I had to guess I’d say it’s Katie vs Abby in the final just because they are unstoppable and Lexxy doesn’t actually have a webcomic yet. But I’ve been wrong on subjective and elimination challenge calls about two thirds of the time so what the hell do I know?

² For example, I don’t consider it entirely beyond the pale that some Creator’s fiat brings back Team AmErika for a joint win.

³ In this model, Khoo forms the ego role, and I’m not sure that there is a super-ego in the mix.