You know, Matt Bors is a damn good cartoonist; I don’t agree with his take on everything, but I like that he’s got a clear POV, a rational, consistent approach, and a habit of kicking up rather than down. I read his stuff and react in about equal measure with

• Heh — you tell ’em Matt
• Huh — I never thought of it that way
• Feh — you’re crazy, Bors

Voiceless fricatives aside, that’s a pretty ideal mix of reactions when dealing with political cartooning. However, I think that Bors may be even better as a cartooning curator/editor, a task he’s had at Cartoon Movement [edit to clarify: Bors is no longer with Cartoon Movement although at the time of this writing he was still listed on the masthead], and more recently at Medium, where he edits comics under the heading of The Nib. Since taking the reins at The Nib in September, he’s been collecting talent and enticing more than a few webcomickers with the opportunity to stretch themselves by playing to a new audience and get exposure paid for their skills. He was kind enough to describe how things are going over at The Nib for me:

Medium hired me as a full time cartoonist and editor in September and I launched The Nib, a collection for political cartoons, comics journalism, non-fiction, and humor in general. I’m going for an eclectic mix and I’m pulling in web cartoonists and people from all over the print world. That means a funny strip by John Martz, a journalistic comic from Susie Cagle, or a comic by Bill Roundy about dating gay men with vaginas.

I’ve been publishing original cartoons from the likes of Rich Stevens, Zach Weiner, Liza Donnelly of The New Yorker, and Brian McFadden of the New York Times. Rich is bi-weekly and Weiner is doing an original cartoon once a month. Scott Bateman is doing charts. Wendy MacNaughton is doing some work for me as is Jen Sorensen.

Josh Neufeld is doing a series on a family bouncing back from Hurricane Sandy. Sarah Glidden’s going to be contributing. Canadian conservative political cartoonist JJ McCullough is doing sprawling op-ed cartoons. Molly Crabapple published an illustrated report of her time covering Guantanamo Bay. Shannon Wheeler, Tom Tomorrow, and Ted Rall are involved. I’m talking to more than a dozen others about contributing.

Asked about working with web-types, Bors said:

I love getting cartoonists to stretch out and do something a bit outside of their normal workload. The strip Rich did on Penny Arcade came about through some back and forth we had about their job listing controversy. We’re always spitballing about topics and I try to just direct his bottomless energy reserves into the best possible comics.

More on that job listing controversy in a moment. Back to Matt:

I have a regular stable of contributors now and that will only be expanding in 2014. I have a substantial budget to do this and you’ll be seeing other names you recognize in coming months.

That’s the most important part to me — not just that comics are being seen as an essential part of a website that’s aiming to be a place for conversation — but that they’re valued enough to pay the creators. Here’s hoping that it becomes the start of a trend online and revives the idea of paying for cartoons in print. Thanks to Matt Bors for taking the time to answer our questions.

Okay, about that job listing. I’ll confess, I’m a bit surprised that this one came in for a fairly large wave o’ comments, considering that previous Penny Arcade job solicitations haven’t, and (to my reading, at least), they’ve all presented the idea that working at PA will involve a hell of a lot of work. It’s maybe because this job is more clearly delineatable into different job functions; many of the criticisms I’ve seen have been in terms of If it’s four jobs, why aren’t you hiring four people?

But honestly, it’s probably more because of the combo of these two lines:

We’re terrible at work-life balance. Although work is pretty much your life, we do our absolute best to make sure that work is as awesome as possible so you at least enjoy each and every day here.

and

Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better.

I’ve seen more than one critique zeroing in on the salary description; if PA runs three trade shows and sells all that merch, why aren’t they paying their people more? Good question, and if you’re the four-function unicorn that could actually fill the job, definitely one that you should ask in salary negotiation. However, as a privately-held company that doesn’t release financials, none of us has any idea how much profit PA derives from the various iterations of PAX¹ or how much margin they make on all that merch. We do know that they carry headcount that is not only not profit-making for the company, but dedicated towards an entirely non-revenue-generating endeavour.

And, this morning, we have information from the guy whose departure in the next couple of months prompted the job opening in the first place. Kenneth Kuan² shared his perspectives on being the Penny Arcade IT Department, and he doesn’t come across as exploited or burned out. There’s going to be a special mix of job skills and temperament that will be able to fill this job, and my suspicion is that person would take the job at almost any pay scale that didn’t require food stamps.

As Kuan points out, different people have different motivations for their work; case in point, while I like my job very much, it’s definitely work and there is a threshold salary below which I wouldn’t be willing to do it. When it comes to blogging, I’m not paid at all and motivated by less tangible things³. When it comes to my work as a volunteer EMT, I’m not only not paid, I drop a significant sum of dosh each year for the privilege of helping the needy (and the abusive drunks, but let’s not go there) (please let’s not go there, I’m riding tonight).

None of which is to say that the PA job posting is off-limits for commentary; Mike and Jerry have built a career around throwing grief where they think it’s deserved, and in the process become both Major Players and Public Figures. That status that makes them legit objects of criticism and/or ridicule, as the situation warrants.

I don’t imagine they’re losing any sleep over this discussion. However (and this applies as well to political cartoonering, bringing us full circle), criticisms and ridicule are always more effective when they’re about what somebody has verifiably done, as opposed to what they are assumed to have done. My gut feeling is that this time, the balance of the critiques are falling towards the latter end of the spectrum.

Now that I’ve doubtless managed to infuriate everybody on all sides of the issue, have a happy Thanksgiving (if you’re in the US) or Thursday (everywhere else) tomorrow. I’ll see you on Friday, provided my blood-pie level doesn’t have me in a coma.

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¹ I’ve worked for various corporations that put on trade shows, exhibitions, conventions, conferences, and the like, and they never turned a profit on such events. The hotels, conference space, event planners — all the external show-running partners — did, but the actual subject of the show would be damn lucky to break even. Point being, none of us knows whether “Three PAXes” appears in the PA ledgers in black ink or red.

² Whom I met briefly in January; nice guy.

³ It’s probably closest to my motivation for spending half my college life on the radio, which I regarded as an opportunity to inflict my musical tastes on (theoretical) listeners in a very modest radius.

It is fast becoming a basic tenet in the world of independent creation that you ignore David Malki ! as your peril. He has his hands in more endeavours than you can easily count, he has stumbled into problems and found solutions that you need not recreate, and he’s generous about sharing his knowledge. Also all those projects take so much time that by my calculations he’s averaging about 37 minutes of sleep a night, meaning by now he’s dangerously insane; definitely you want to keep your eyes on him at all times so he can’t sneak up behind you.

Case in point: in and around all of his own projects, Malki ! took on a gig with Audible UK to promote a new book by Bill Bryson, which became Real True Actual Stories of America (here, and here, and here). Now Malki ! has done animated versions of his Victorian illustrations before, with some paperstock and sticks and suchlike, but for the RTASoA he went and invented a motion-capture technique that allows real-time rendering of virtual performers. Check out the entire behind the scenes video and then come back here.

All done? Here’s a thought for you — one of the last projects that Jim Henson worked on before his untimely death was a motion-capture system for real-time virtual puppeteering. It required an elaborate electromechanical interface and 120 hours of rendering for a 2-minute short. Malki ! has essentially achieved the same thing with some paper, some clothespins and sticks, and a Mac; certainly some of that is down to Moore’s Law and the work done by previous generations of motion-capture development, but a hell of a lot of it is due to Malki ! messing around with an idea that might. just. work.

Not that everything works out so easily. With the long, intercontinental production of the Machine of Death game nearing the endgame, it’s time to make one last attempt to make sure everything goes to where it should:

So now that we’re getting really close to shipping, we sent out an email to all 10,468 people asking if the address we had on file for them was correct, and providing a link to a form they could fill out to correct it if necessary. We used the email addresses we collected from Kickstarter.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but for the sake of data and trivia, here are some of the results, so far, of sending out that mass email at roughly 1pm this afternoon:

• Autoresponses saying “My email address has changed”: 4
• Autoresponses saying “My email address has changed”, but without providing the new address: 1
• “Out of office” autoreplies: 5
• Earthlink anti-spam prove-you’re-human autoreplies: 2
• Non-problem emails just saying “Everything’s fine, you’re doing a great job”: 8
• “I’ll be out of town from x date to y date, can we make a special arrangement”: 5
• “Using such-and-such courier service will cause me a problem, can we make a special arrangement”: 5
• Verifying or confirming something specific in their order: 3
• “I don’t currently have an address so don’t send anything yet”: 2
• “I’m in a different place in my life now, so you know what, don’t send it at all”: 1
• Undeliverable email bouncebacks: 19

[bold original]

So that’s 50 out of more than 10,000, not bad.

Responses to the form submitting a correction to their shipping address (so far, more are coming in every minute): SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN

That is BONKERS. Overnight it will probably top 1,000 people. That’s TEN PERCENT who need to change their shipping address all of a sudden TODAY.

If we hadn’t sent out that email, would 1,000 packages have been returned to us as undeliverable? The thought is terrifying! [bold original]

Oh. Mind you, every single person that replied at the last possible moment that their address had changed has had access to BackerKit since April, and has been occasionally exhorted by Malki ! in project updates to make sure that their addresses were current. And let’s not overlook the likelihood that even the first 50 backers Malki ! recounted could be incredibly hassle-filled and expensive:

then you you send a package overseas and it’s returned to you because the backer moved and then they ask for a refund of their pledge

that is not only a true story, it happened more than once

That would be Sara McHenry and Holly Rowland, logistical geniuses at TopatoCo and Make That Thing. Take this as a lesson, anybody that’s creating a Kickstarter campaign — there are things almost entirely out of your control that could very possibly ruin your attempts to provide a timely delivery to your backers, and eventually drive you as insane. In which case you might be the next person we ignore at our peril.

It’s a time of landmarks and new beginnings.

• Yesterday marked ten years since a fit of annoyance resulted in a an impromptu charity drive that then turned into a repeatable event, a worldwide effort, and a year-round process. The eleventh iteration of Child’s Play is at US$2.5 million dollars and counting which means given the efforts of prior years, the cumulative effect since Mike and Jerry’s decided that radio jock was getting all up in their business is now over US$20 million. The big dinner auction hits in ten days and in advance of that event I’m giving it 50/50 odds that they hit US$25M cumulative by the time 2013 ends.
• On the far side of the longevity divide is a webcomic that launched today, which you are going to want to read. We’ve spoken before of Jeff Smith, indie comics mastercrafter and perhaps nicest guy in the world. We know that BONE and RASL are as different (and excellent!) as two creator-owned comics projects could be and still come from the same mind and hands. We know that Tüki Save The Humans will absolutely be the worthy next step in Smith’s career trajectory, and that today’s prelude and first page are just the start of a ride where none of us can predict the twists and turns.

  On the logistics side, Smith’s wife and publisher, Vijaya Iyer, told me back at SDCC that the plan is to have multiple months worth of updates ready to post at launch, so that Smith’s schedule has plenty of buffer to withstand interruptions and emergencies. Tüki will update MWF for eight weeks to make up a major story arc (or “season”), with downtime between seasons to build up the buffer again.

  Three a week for eight weeks is 24 pages — or about the length of a comic book¹ — which suggests a beginning-middle-end to a story in that period of time unless Smith is feeling really evil and makes us wait out a cliffhanger. The plan right now is for Season Two to start in mid-April 2014, giving Smith time to work on all sorts of projects in and around Tüki, which means more Jeff Smith in general. All right-thinking people should be ready to approve of this plan, along with the thought that an announced start date for Season Two means it’s likely done or nearly so.

  Make no mistake: this is a big shift for Smith, Iyer, and their company, Cartoon Books — they’ve alternately been indie comics publishers, trade publishers, and owners of IP reprinted by major publishing concerns³, but they’ve always been exchanging story for upfront money. Giving away comics and looking to make money on the back end involves a leap of faith that they can still make a living; once Tüki starts producing merch, do remember that fact, please.

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¹ Anybody complaining that Smith should be able to crank out two dozen pages quicker than that should remember that a big part of the difference in the production schedules of BONE and RASL is that the former was all made up in his head², while the latter involved research.

Smith spent a long damn time researching Nikola Tesla, weird physics, and the southwestern desert so that he could get the details right in RASL; with a topic as broad and deep as human migration out Africa, he is without doubt buried deep in continental drift, paleobotany, physical anthropology, primatology, climatology, and likely a dozen other -ologies. Look for the sources of that research to be listed here once he’s got a free moment.

² Granted, there were plenty of influences, and he took a side trip to Nepal to get visual inspirations for some of the architecture and cultural designs of the third arc of BONE. My point is he didn’t have to spend months reading up on subspecies of dragon or the organizational structure of stupid, stupid rat creature tribes.

³ Sometimes more than once. The only thing smarter than Scholastic deciding to reprint the entirety of BONE in trades aimed at the YA market was to reprint it again with Steve Hamaker’s colors added to Smith’s B&W art.

If you don’t know what license fees I’m talking about, see yesterday’s post where we learn that boilerplate approaches to convincing somebody that your endorsement is really, really essential went wrong. Now, hold on to your (metaphorical, physical, doesn’t matter) hat, because it’s about to go extraordinarily, amazingly wrong.

Yesterday we introduced the idea that Ziff Davis (no link for them!) wanted webcomickers to pay a license fee for the privilege of quoting a listicle about their own comics. The creator who shared that email back-and-forth didn’t get around to asking what that license fee might be but another one did, and gave me permission to share the number if I kept his name¹ out of it. Ready? Here it comes:

Apart from the quote “PCMAG Best Webcomics” you can use the following quotes from the feature:

“[removed for anonymity]”

“[removed for anonymity]”

The fees vary depending on if you want to use the logo and quotes on just your website or on all digital media platforms (social media, emails, etc.) The fees are about $1,000 for a feature like this but I am willing to work with you on figuring out a fee that works for you. [bold added for emphasis]

So that’s a cool thousand dollars for the privilege of using a logo and two pull-quotes for a year. Now you know why defender of the realistic sense of artistic worth Ryan Estrada got all incredulous yesterday. I can scarcely believe it myself.

Let’s end on an up note before the weekend, yeah? By the time you do something official and public twice, it becomes a tradition, which means that The Toonseum is well into beloved, longstanding tradition territory, as they’re releasing their fourth edition of Illustration Ale in conjunction with East End Brewing. Two things of note:

• The launch party for Illustration Ale 2013 is at 7:00pm on 5 December, and as is traditional will feature six labels from six Pittsburgh artists.
• This launch is coming months later than expected, as East End Brewing takes some pride in their craft.

By that I mean that the beer was due in August, and the brewmasters made a tough call:

My apologies for the late notice on this, but based on what we’re seeing with the bottles of Illustration Ale we’ve been sampling here, we will not be doing a release at the Toonseum for bottles of this beer as we had planned this Saturday August 3rd.

We had hoped the bottles would come around (which is why this notice is so late in the game), but they just aren’t up to snuff, so we need to make the call to POSTPONE this release, until we can get a re-brew into the tank and subsequently into new bottles.

It’s one thing to have 1,500 bottles of unsaleable hand-bottled beer on our hands, but it’s another to… well, yeah. In all honesty, this is about the only thing we’re thinking about today. But you can’t sell GOOD BEER every day if you aren’t willing to make the decision to pour some not-so-good beer down the drain. It doesn’t make it any easier though.

Well done, East End Brewing, and well done The Toonseum — you’ve chosen your partners well, and I expect to hear that this year’s vintage is spectacular.

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¹ Side note — of the 25 webcomics on the list there are a total of 33 creators if I counted all the creative teams correctly; 7 of them were women, which is less than I would have expected. Where on earth were Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Dorothy Gambrell, Yuko Ota, and Magnolia Porter, just for starters? Okay, Hurricane Erika gets left out because of the sexytimes, fine.

Still, that 21% representation blew away the gender imbalance I noted in their list of best digital comics (that is, regular print comics also available via comiXology and the like). Over there it was ten comics, 14 creators, and the incredibly skilled Fiona Staples the sole lady for a whopping 7% representation. I’m starting to get why so many ridiculously talented comics–making ladies are in the original graphic novel end of the industry, where they seem to be more welcome.

Editor’s note: No photo today, because it would give away the surprise at the end. You understand.

Whew boy, today has kicked my ass. Let’s look at what surprised me in the past day or so.

• Not surprising: Box Brown’ long-percolating biocomic of Andre the Giant earned him some love from CBR for the just-released cover.

  Less expected: Grantland, the bloggy aspect of ESPN’s online empire, did an interview with Brown in advance of the comic’s release. This may be the harbinger of the fabled Jock-Nerd Convergence, as was foretold in the beforetimes by the Truthsayer.

• Not surprising: Big magazine does a listicle of webcomics it likes.

  Pretty damn nervy, actually: after grabbing snippets of comics to run on their site (many of which are licensed as Creative Commons NonCommercial), they then offered the creators the exciting opportunity to quote specific sections of the article to promote themselves, for a modest fee. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s an excerpt from an email sent to one of the creators, in response to the simple question, Are you trying to get me to give you money?

  Hi,

  Thanks for your reply. [other employee] reached out to you because your [comic] was featured in our PCMag.com Best Web Comics story.

  Licensing is not free but to my knowledge you have not used any of our content commercially so no, this is not an attempt to collect money.

  Many companies like to leverage recognition like this to promote their products/services/apps/games/etc. I am here to let you know we can facilitate any needs you have to use this recognition.

  Here are examples of how others have used their recognition from PCMag.com to promote their brands…[link removed]

  If you wish to use our trademarks or quotes to promote [comic] I’m here to help. Use of those trademarks and/or quotes requires licensing which is fee based.

  Regards,

  [name omitted because I’m a nice guy]
  Licensing Manager
  Ziff Davis Inc.

  So to sum: Ziff Davis Inc. makes money by driving clicks via a listicle, then graciously allows the people whose work it is referencing to specifically quote the story title¹, but if they want to actually quote the article, or maybe show a screenshot that might incorporate a ZD logo, they have to pay for the privilege to display it for one year which will in turn promote the magazine that gets the license fee. To quote the creator’s reply to this “generous” offer:

  I can’t decide if Kafka or Orwell wrote this!

  Me neither.

• Completely coincidentally and without any reference to any publisher’s hubris whatsoever: look what I got in the mail today.

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¹ Excerpt from the original pitch letter:

Here are instances where you featured on PCMAG.com. The quotes available for you to license are mentioned in Bold below (this quote can be used with the PCMAG.com logo or text). All license rights are for one year.

Which included the following explanatory boilerplate:

In order to maintain the esteem and integrity surrounding our logos, PCMag and Ziff Davis, Inc. must grant rights and permission prior to the use of any material. Ziff Davis, Inc. makes its content available only subject to the terms of licensing agreement. This is standard with all of our clients and we are vigilant in safeguarding our content for misuse. You currently are permitted, without need for license, to reproduce on your website the headline of an article published on any of our websites, as long as it is not for commercial purposes and is limited to the following use only, as stated in Section 107 of the United States Copyright Law: Criticism, Comment, News reporting, Teaching, Scholarship and Research. However no part of our content, reviews and articles may be used for commercial purposes without a license.

Three of them, in fact.

• Miracle the First: Paul Taylor is the first person in comics history to correctly depict a nasal cannula. That’s the oxygen tube that goes in the nose, as opposed to more high-delivery methods like masks¹. Every. Friggin’. Time. I’ve ever read a comic (book, strip, web, whatever) that featured somebody getting oxygen, they’ve gotten the nasal wrong:
  • it doesn’t shove one tube up one nostril leaving the other empty
  • it doesn’t end in two prongs shoved in the two nostrils, hanging down like some long, hollow booger
  • it doesn’t clip to the nose

  It does exactly what Taylor has drawn: form a closed loop with two prongs in the middle that go in the nostrils, and the tubing itself is draped over the ears and snugged up under the chin to keep everything in place. From today forward, proclaim that there is never reason to get this one wrong again.

• Miracle the Second: Six of the extremely talented and personable folks at Periscope Studio have banded together, like Voltron, to bring justice to the galaxy print up a series of art books, and you can support ’em over at Kickstarter. A pledge of as little as US$5 will get you PDFs of all six books (from Ron Randall, Paul Guinan, David Hahn, Natalie Nourigat, Benjamin Dewey, and Erika Moen — who yesterday survived largely unscathed² a rather scary auto-vs-bike collision that scared the crap out of me from 5000 km away and which we will dub Miracle the Second and a Half). Naturally, higher pledge levels get you physical comics of breathtaking beauty and vision, so make with the pledging.
• Miracle the Third: So yesterday when I went down the list of Thought Bubble attendees, I noted the attendance of Nicholas Gurewitch of the long-hiatused, much-beloved Perry Bible Fellowship and thought to myself, Man, I hope he’s working on something new.

  Ask and ye shall receive: Gurewitch tweet-announced a new animated short that he wrote and directed, featuring death, destruction, and a cameo by one Zachary T Paleozogt. It’s hilarious, but you knew that would be the case.

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¹ Of which there are several types, which we need not go into here.

² I’m giving at least partial credit to the incredible shape that Moen is in due to her pole-based acrobatic skills, and partial credit to the fact that she’s a force of nature and cannot be defeated by mortal instruments.

A couple of quick thoughts for you today, as we careen through space on an improbably-small hunk of rock with an impossibly-narrow band of gases that somehow sustain all the life and — by extension — webcomics that we know to exist in the infinite universe. You know … Tuesday.

• One of the smaller-scale, highly regarded comics shows takes place this weekend in Leeds, UK, as Thought Bubble Comic Con participates in the week-long Thought Bubble Festival. There are symposia and screenings in the festival all this week, and the convention itself at Clarence Dock on Saturday and Sunday. Indy- and web-comicky types in attendance will include John Allison, Kate Beaton, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Jeffrey Brown, Darryl Cunningham, Meredith Gran, Nicholas Gurewitch (!), Olly Moss, Ethan Nicolle, Ramón Pérez, Tom Siddell, Cameron Stewart, and Maris Wicks, in addition to the British Comics Awards. Tell everybody I said hi.
• For those not able to make it to Leeds this weekend, one might make plans to check out Evan Dahm’s new e-book, Lacunæ. The word lacuna (lacunæ is the plural) refers to a gap, missing section (as in text) or silence (as in music); Dahm’s book refers to the latter definition as it’s a collection of 18 “quiet places”, taken from a series of drawings of remote dwellings on remoter islands.

  He shared some of the drawings on Twitter as he worked on them, and they put me in mind of the further corners of Le Guin’s Earthsea, and that’s some damn good company to be in. It’s two bucks for nearly twenty pages of intricate, mood-setting places, and if I don’t see at least one of them stolen for either an album cover or a mural on the side of a van by this time next year, it’s only because we’re too far from the 1970s¹.

• For the past few years, webcomickers have been molding the next generation(s) of comics artists, as diverse creators have presented workshops and lectures at various colleges or taught full-semester programs. To that number we’re about to add one Bradley² J³ Guigar will be teaching at the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia. Lots of predecessors for teaching a class, but this is the bit that I think is unique — Guigar won’t be teaching drawing, or story, or joke writing, he’ll be teaching how to make a living in the arts:
  

  In January, I will be teaching a senior-level course on Arts Entrepreneurship … For a long time now, I’ve argued (sometimes loudly on Webcomics Weekly) that art schools need to do a better job of preparing their students for the Real World they’re being thrust into. And that means an overwhelming probability of freelance work and running a small business centered around one’s craft — not the studio jobs and staff positions that were prevalent decades ago.

  Hint for those Hussian students that end up sitting class with Professor Guigar next semester: he’s got a lot of Dad Jokes, he’s not embarrassed to drop them on you, and if you can make him laugh, you’ll get 30 to 90 seconds to check your email or texts before he’ll be able to continue. I encourage you to learn all you can from him (he really is frighteningly smart), and also to keep track of how many laugh breaks you get out of him before graduation; I’m going to place the over/under at 75, but would be thrilled to hear that I underestimated.

  Oh, and if you’re going to try to bribe him, learn how to make a proper whisky sour. Just sayin’.

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¹ Not necessarily the worst place to be too far from.

² Bradford? Bradmark? Bradbourne? Bradburn? Braddock? Bradon? Bradshaw? Bradwell? Brady?

³ It is my firm belief that the “J” doesn’t stand for anything, but is in reference to Bullwinkle J Moose and Rocket J Squirrel. Whatever the truth of the name, he’s dreamy.

A friend of mine recently told me about how when he was younger, Ender’s Game¹ was his favorite book, and now many years later, his mother had read it and while it wasn’t necessarily her cup of tea, she understood exactly why it was his favorite: Because the hero is a pre-teen that saves the world in space by playing videogames. Oooh, burn, Mom.

Likewise, Richard Feynman will always be my favorite scientist; as a little baby engineer, his famed audiotaped² lectures on physics were considered a marvel of clarity, and then early in my undergraduate career the first of his autobiographical volumes came out³ and we learned something else about Feynman — he screwed around (literally and figuratively) and had fun and lived his life in a way that exemplified the notion that if you weren’t overly concerned with what other people thought about you, it was probably for the best.

He was a complex, brilliant, difficult, charming, obnoxious genius that wanted to know the why and how of everything, a man who at certain points of his life knew things that literally no other human knew, a man who could reduce the most complex concepts in physics to squiggles on a chalkboard, a man who joked and told stories and played in samba bands, a man who got laid a lot. Around 20 years old he was everything I might aspire to be, and it’s one of the great losses of my life that I’ll never get to meet him⁴. He was nowhere near as awesome as his stories made him out to be, probably, but that’s part of the point of telling stories, getting to make yourself look better.

Two years ago he got a really good biographical treatment — certainly not his first — in graphical form, from Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick, published by the good folks at :01 Books. Given the importance of Feynman Diagrams (the aforementioned squiggles) in modern physics, having his story told in slightly squiggly pictures is a natural. It’s hard to think how they might top themselves.

Until now.

Ottaviani and Myrick are taking on the one physicist who may be as influential, as complex, as colorful a character, with as involved and messy a life as Feynman (although he was probably never investigated by the FBI as a possible subversive): Stephen Hawking. And given that Hawking has been locked into his own body for decades, unable to speak for himself, the silent medium of graphic fiction may be the most expressive means of describing the inner thoughts of the man. Oh, and the fact that he’s still alive to talk to doesn’t hurt; that’s not just an abstract possibility, by the way:

Hawking author Jim Ottaviani says, “July 4, 2012 was a good day in physics and for Gordy Kane, Leland and me. Not only was the Higgs boson revealed to the world, but Gordy — a prominent physicist and author of The Particle Garden — won a long-standing $100 bet with his friend Stephen Hawking on whether there even was a Higgs. And in an email letting us know about these things, Gordy and his wife Lois also added an ‘Oh, by the way….’ They told us that Stephen had read and enjoyed our Feynman book (!) and invited us to come to Cambridge and talk about doing a book about him. We didn’t get on a plane that same afternoon, but we did start planning our trip, and this book. Like I said, a good day.”

Hawking is due for release in 2016, and a preview is presently available on Boing Boing. It’s not much compared to the full book, and it’ll likely be different by the release date, but it’s enough for now.

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¹ No link because seriously, screw Orson Scott Card.

² “Tapes” were these things that stored information on long strips of magnetic ribbon. Ask your parents.

³ The sequel was posthumous, and in large part dealt with his role in the Challenger disaster investigation, which also resonated for us. It was January of my freshman year when the associate dean of students Tom Miller (aka your official buddy at Rose-Hulman; by the way, he’s still there and still your buddy despite the fancy VP title and tie) found me and some friends on a couch in the Union building and told us, The Space Shuttle just exploded.

That day, more than any other in our technical education, reinforced the idea that our actions as engineers would have consequences. We wouldn’t know for a long time what had gone wrong, but something had — something was missed, or not anticipated, or done wrong.

⁴ Others on that list: Claude Shannon, Chuck Jones, Jim Henson, Stephen Jay Gould.

I have to wrap up things with the client and then head to the airport, which means I am missing pretty much all the ComfyCon events (which are kicking off about now) for the day. Don’t be like me.

The easiest way to derive some webcomic-related joy out of a ComfyCon-less existence is to obsessively re-read the long-awaited Monster of the Week update dealing with the greatest hour of ’90s television, Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”. I managed to mis-calculate when this would appear by two months and one week on past occasions, but it’s here now motherscratchers, and it’s glorious. Realizing that no one person could do justice to JCFOS, MoW creator Shaenon Garrity has turned curator, inviting thirteen comickers to each take a panel and get to the emotional heart of the episode. Lord Kinbote, Alex Trebek, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Scully’s many great lines, Mulder’s pie rampage, and the bleepin’ sheriff with the bleepin’ vocabulary all get their due. It was worth the wait.

So many Things!

• New Thing! ComfyCon is go!
• New Thing! Kel McDonald’s previously-mentioned African folktales anthology is now on Kickstarter! Kel! Cube! Becky! Faith! A dozen stories that you haven’t seen a thousand times before!
• New Thing! Frank “The Voice Of Wallace The Fish” Gibson will be one of the writers of the new Bee & PuppyCat comics alongside B&P creator Natasha Allegri and the always-awesome Madeleine Flores!
• Thing Wrapping Up! The Bee & PuppyCat series Kickstarter has just wrapped with more than US$870K, meaning nine episodes of cosmic ennui!
• New Thing! Ryan Estrada’s latest comics collection, Broken Telephone, is now live! That is to say, you can now subscribe to all-new digital comics, from nearly 20 artists, arriving every other week for up to a year. To be precise, Estrada’s using the Kickstarter campaign as a funding backbone for his usual Pay What You Want model, with certain funding tiers getting you more and more and more comics, from so many creators, all of whom were paid for their efforts. Rockin’. Go get it.