A number of Kickstarts to follow up on today. Let’s take a look, shall we?

• We’ve just reached the midpoint of Augie and the Green Knight’s campaign, and is flirting with US$260,000 in funding. At this point in their 30-day campaigns, To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure was sitting about US$250,000 (43% of an eventual US$581K) and The Tomorrow Girl was about US$320,000 (or 61% of an eventual US$535K). I chose those two projects for comparison because of the similar level of popularity of their creators, and the similarity of the project: a pure book in fancy packaging (like TTG) that spawned lots of related-media spinoffs (like TBoNTB).

  Assuming a similar trajectory, AatGK is about 52% +/- 9% of its way to final total, putting it in the range of US$498K +/- let’s call it US$45K. Given my original prediction was US$400K +/- US$134K, we certainly seem to be heading for the high end of that range, and the 3rd or 4th most-funded publishing project¹ of all time (and probably the #1 children’s book).

  Oh, yeah, and the audiobook is going to be narrated by Ellen McClain, a factor which isn’t actually juicing the total. See, author Zach Weinersmith and Breadpig have decided that all supporters of any reward (that’s US$10 and up) will get the audiobook. Had they required supporters to get a physical reward (US$25 and up), I’m pretty sure you would have seen a majority of the nearly 700 bottom-tier backers upping their pledges by US$15 each — but Weinersmith isn’t in this for the money. He just wants to get a story with a kick-ass heroine out into as many hands as possible.

• Finishing soon: Danielle Corsetto’s summer tour funding, and Hurricane Erika’s book-kicker, both of whom are about three days from finishing, both of whom are getting into the end-of-campaign uptick, and both of whom at this point are applying pretty much every extra dollar to other people.

  Thanks to their backers, Corsetto (as of this writing) is paying each of her guest artists an extra US$100 per strip while she’s on tour, and Moen (ditto) is bumping her guest artists (future and — crucially — also past guest artists) to US$90 per page (the average strip being 4-5 pages). Both ladies are at their top of their respective games, both of them deserve your support for their own work, and both of them deserve it even more because they’re supporting other creators in a tangible, food-and-rent fashion.

• Long since finished, but you can still get in on the Kickstart backing because they’re nice guys: the Christopher Hastings-inspired card game of ninja combat and awesomeness is about to start shipping, meaning you have mere days left to pre-order at the same pricepoints and bundles as the original Kickstart. You might not have gotten your act together last November, but now your can get KS-exclusive rewards because they think you’re still pretty cool.
• Not Kickstarter-related, but worth your attention in its own terrifying way: Paradox Space, the official place for official works set in the Homestuck offical extended universe, has finally gotten around to a Sweet Bro and Hell Of Jeff story. The madness descends once again, this time springing from the fertile, febrile imagination of KC Green, a match so perfect that it defies imagination. Dear readers: Summer Sea Fun is the last comic you need ever read.

Spam of the day:

aspect each in the costs for that mortgage, particularly when it is possible to find unnecessary service fees apart from the fascination. [sic throughout]

Apart from the fascination? Is the fascination not enough for you?

_______________
¹ That Planet Money shirt is still not publishing, and screw squirrels anyway.

Ian Jones-Quartey is an old friend of this page; we at Fleen have followed him since before there was a Fleen, even before mention of his first webcomic didn’t cause him to threaten to delay its return by a month. We have bar-crawled with him, attended weddings with him, discussed tacos with him, and been generally impressed to hell and back with him.

All that history just got reset; today is the first day of Anno Jones-Quartey, a new calendar marked by the time that Ian JQ dropped some serious wisdom:

[Tumblr question]: Being that you’re an industry expert, I was hoping if there were any tips or advice you can give to an aspiring Animation Series creator. Any lessons you’ve learned from working in the industry from so many years. What advice would you give yourself if you were starting out trying to get you’re animation picked up by a major network?

[Answer]:Yeah I have a big piece of advice! Stop “aspiring”!!!!! Your aspirations end now!!!!

YES YOU! DON’T WAIT! START NOW! [emphasis original]

Jones-Quartey goes on for some length, and every bit of it is worth reading and absorbing, whatever field of creative endeavour you may find yourself in. If you can read through the entire thing and not feel compelled to murder Aspiration in favor of Doing, then you weren’t ever going to Do anyway. Well done, Mr JQ; if nothing else you’ve prompted me to get off my ass about a particular project I’ve been kicking around for way too damn long.

• No note, no celebration, just another strip (the 5114th if my math is correct): 14 years of Schlock Mercenary from my evil twin, who has come a considerable way from Day One (or Day Minus 5114, BJ-Q). Thanks for all the laughs and mayhem, Howard.
• As many suspected might happen, STRIPPED will be showing at San Diego Comic Con on Friday night:
  

  Cool! @strippedfilm will be screening at the official San Diego Comic-Con Film Festival, Friday July 25th. Join us if you’re at SDCC!

  I’ve seen it a bunch of times now, but I think I want to see it on a large screen surrounded by people.

• Oh, nuthin’, just an awesome Bee & Puppycat by Becky Dreistadt, no big deal.

Advance warning: almost no chance of a posting tomorrow, as I have to get up stupid-early for a cross-continent flight that will occupy me pretty much all day. Enjoy the weekend.

They’ve been considered since time immemorial, by every culture that encountered them, as the craftiest, trickiest, least trustworthy of all living things¹; born deceivers, masters of untruths and illusions, foxes manage to deal with their reputation via the simple expedient of not really giving a shit what you think of them. They define reality on their own terms, and screw you if you don’t like it². It’s possible that they grow out of it eventually, and it’s only the very young of their kind that are responsible for the popular image of wreaking havoc (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not).

• So imagine how devastating it must be to love one of them. Not merely be manipulated into falling for a fox, but to truly, deeply, madly love one. What would you do to keep that most capricious of creatures yours and yours alone? Terrible things, things that would never have occurred to you otherwise, things that leave a hole in your soul, and perhaps the world around you. Things — and this is the worst part — things that the fox doesn’t make you do, but things that you decided to do on your own. Things with consequences.

  Nobody understands the delicate balance of the world, and the consequences that come about from disturbing it too greatly — like Emily Carroll. Her fairy tales, whether they take place in the far-off long-ago or the here-and-now, show us the menace, the darkness that comes of wanting things too much, acting too rashly, and giving in to your worst impulses.

  The fox at the heart of The Hole The Fox Did Make (released today and stop whatever you are doing right goddamn now and go read it) is barely a presence; in his absence — in the aftermath of loving a fox — there are consequences a’plenty, and lessons to be learned. Chief among them: when a fox whispers in your ears with honeyed words, don’t pay too much heed, for foxes are capricious and care little for the pain they leave in their wake.

• You know who will never listen to the honeyed words of foxes? Bunnies. Know who draws a lot of bunnies these days? Dave Roman. And finally, Dave Roman pointed me to a tweet this morning by Eric Orchard that is relevant to the idea of foxes:
  

  Fox & Duck, my new webcomic is now up! http://foxandduck.tumblr.com/page/2

  There’s not much to Fox & Duck so far — a header and first-chapter splash illustration, a first page that leaves a marvelous, moody impression of dark magics (but not too dark), perhaps a curse or two. The fox and the duck haven’t made any appearances yet, but it appears that this fox is doing his best to get the duck back to a normal ducky state, wherein he doesn’t breathe fire or have devil horns. That would be reasonably un-foxlike behavior, and I for one am intrigued by this heterodox idea of what foxes are, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

• Okay, I’m really stretching the theme for the day, but don’t you think that Boulet looks a little like a fox? That red hair, and artists are all tricky, and I’d like to think that foxes have a French accent. Anyway, Boulet’s got a great little video talking about Augie and the Green Knight, with an even faster version of the sped-up watercolor video from the other day. Oh, and like all foxes, Boulet has a fib or two, but he gets caught out rather too easily to be a good fox. I’m torn as to whether or not I should encourage him to practice that or not.

Spam of the day:

Can’t find any. I think a fox stole it. So, uh, thanks I guess.
________________
¹ Although I would argue that squirrels are definitely the biggest assholes in the forest animal métier.

² Trenchant, dry observation about how they are perhaps the perfect symbol for eponymous “news” organization.

Sometimes I’m late to noticing things, sometimes it’s others that could have been a little more prompt, and sometimes there’s entirely rational procrastination involved. Let’s party.

• Interesting idea that I finally saw — a multi-creator Patreon, essentially, where one creator-of-record is gathering the funds to pay contributors to an e-magazine. Worlds Without Master takes as its primary topic sword-and-sorcery short stories, with a particular focus on the common-as-dirt barely-distinguishable-from-the-villagers adventurer. No World-Saving Wielders of the Gods Will, no Promised Ones or Prophecy-Fulfillers.

  I noticed the campaign because the first four issues of WWM feature lots of creators, but the only one to show up in each issue (other than project supremo Epidiah Ravachol) is Bryant Paul Johnson (of the now sadly-concluded Teaching Baby Paranoia), who’s contributing an ongoing comic called Oh, The Beating Drum. Interesting idea, I’ll be looking to see if others adopt this masthead-slash-bullpen approach to Patreonage.

• Also a few days behind the curve: I see that Andrews & McMeel — the big-time publishing arm of Universal Press Syndicate and publisher of Matthew Inman’s Oatmeal collections — is now offering mini e-books of various comics. For the most part, these are syndicated-type comics (Marmaduke! Luann!), but I notice some less-mainstream offerings, including Skin Horse by Shaenon Garrity and C Jeffrey Wells and Savage Chickens by Doug Savage. In the case of Skin Horse they are single story arcs, and if memory serves they are from different print collections, which means you can’t just grab a couple e-minis at three bucks a pop as a replacement for a proper print collection.
• I think that The AV Club may have fallen prey to a situation I’ve often found myself in — a story that is timely gets pushed for space, just until tomorrow, then the next week, then later still; by the time it runs it’s not really timely any more, but when it means that you get a really nice writeup of the first two Bad Machinery collections, I can abide a little lateness. It’s also hard to argue with their conclusion: Anyone not reading [Bad Machinery] is missing out on one of the great achievements in contemporary comics.
• David Malki !, as this page has noted in the past, is a man of ideas; perhaps too many ideas, or at least ideas that Man Was Not Meant To Dabble With. I am not saying that he made a poor choice in offering to hand-write every card in a copy of the Machine of Death game for a single backer willing to cough up US$488; I am saying that perhaps making that support tier available before knowing how many stretch goals would be met, how many additional creators would be contributing cards, was perhaps just a wee bit optimistic.

  Because the total number of cards he became obligated to hand-write turned out to be 960, and he understandably did not drop everything in his life to do that. But now he has, and you can watch as he gets hours and hours and hours into a process that he seems bound and determined to accomplish in one session. Will he succeed? Only the next video will tell.

• It can’t really be late if the announcements just came out, can it? In case you hadn’t seen them, two awesome projects will be materializing soon. On the one hand, Anthony Clark and KC Green will be collaborating on a new webcomic, and I never knew how much I wanted this until the word went out yesterday:

  It’s called BACK!!! It’s a western fantasy story about the end of the world. Anthony is on art duties and I’m writing it and helping design characters. I also did the little drawing on the top, but Anthony has got the rest covered.

  BACK goes live on 18 June, with an instant archive of pages, followed by two more each Wednesday. I am taking the very unusual step of adding this to the blogroll before it even launches because you know it’s going to be that good.

  And just a bit later — 26 August to be precise — we will finally get the sixth volume of Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series. The books were delayed by Kibuishi’s rather serious illness last year, but now he’s back in form, and promising the conclusion of some of the story arcs that have been building over the past few years (though not all of them, certainly, as Amulet is scheduled to run ten books). Watch the official announcement from Kibuishi here.

Spam of the day:

league of legends chinese cosplay

That’s almost a sentence, but not quite.

You wouldn’t think so, but it is — that’s the number of pieces in the latest Baffler! from Chris Yates, the 3000th in the series. Five layers deep, colors all but indistinguishable from layer to layer, it’s a work of art. Serious enquiries only, please.

Other Big Round Numbers to note:

• If I’ve followed the news a’right, today marks the 4000th strip at Unshelved. That’s a lot of stories from the library (what, didn’t you know that every single Unshelved strip, including the most horrifying ones, are completely true and taken directly from writer Gene Ambaum’s life?). Congrats to the webcomics power duo of Ambaum and Bill Barnes, and here’s to another 4000.
• Hey, know what’s almost the same as 4000 strips? 400. What? It’s only one digit different. Anyways, fans of the Greatest Superhero Ever will want to make a special effort to see what Wonderella’s up to on Saturday, as that will be strip #400. I bet she jumps hella high and also yells at Hitlerlla and maybe also teaches a lesson. It’s what superheroes do.

Not big round numbers:

• Boulet paints the iconic image from Augie and the Green Knight in only five and a half minutes (with a little help from YouTube).
• Huh, accidentally called it: last time I mentioned Jeph Jacques it was also in proximity to Augie and the Green Knight, where I speculated that the second strip (which his burgeoning Patreon would prompt) might deal with the concept of AI rights in his QC-verse. Looks like he’s not waiting for the as-yet unnamed second strip to tackle some of those issues, as today’s QC reveals. This is going to be good.

Spam of the day:

fleen.com, with region cricket, a well known fact their co-workers may state in order to as well as bemoan within equivalent amounts.

I spend a tidy sum to spray for region crickets, so I’ll thank you not to imply we have them.

It’s been described as outdated, and the webcomics-centric RSSPect even closed its doors recently, but RSS is still worth the very minimal effort it takes to subscribe to a feed or check it once a day. Why, without RSS, I don’t know how many people would have known about the imminent return of Tüki Save The Humans.

What’s that? You didn’t know that Tüki was coming back from hiatus¹? Well, let me point you towards the announcement, which I received via RSS:

The wait is almost over!
Season Two of Tüki Save the Humans is set to kick off here on boneville on Monday afternoon, June 9th! We are also working on a Social Media campaign that will widen our presence on the web! Thanks to all our readers for the support on our recently won, Rueben Award [for online strip — long form]! [emphasis original]

Okay, you might have seen that if you’d been in the habit of checking the Boneville blog, but otherwise you probably wouldn’t have known, as I haven’t seen the announcement anywhere else yet. So do Smith a favor, and spread the word — Tüki is back, and that can only be a good thing.

Speaking of RSS feeds, I’m not the only one that feels fondly about them — the redoubtable R Stevens likes ’em so much, he wears his heart on² his sleeve, or at least his chest. Alas, the RSS shirt design is being retired to make room for new stuff³, so it’s on sale now for US$15 while they last. The technology persists even while the shirt needs must go, but given the quality of shirts that Stevens (and everybody else that sources from Brunetto) vends, it’ll last roughly forever, or at least until RSS gets replaced by DBS (Direct Brain Syndication, which won’t be creepy at all).

Spam of the day:

fleen.com, recommend which you reply simply by discussing a location regarding development, yet swiftly increase everything you already are carrying out to be able to improve in which talent.

The robot uprising has come, and they’re starting with blogspam.

________________
¹ The original plan was that Tüki would run in 24-page chapters, one page a day, three days a week, taking two months. Then, there would be a two month hiatus to prep up the next chapter. By that schedule, we should have seen the launch of chapter two in April, and just been wrapping it up about now. A’course, some of the time between the end of chapter one and April was taken up retooling the website, which was pretty necessary.

Please note, I am not criticizing Jeff Smith for not following the original plan. The man can produce his comics on whatever damn schedule he feels like and I’ll be there to read it, and come next month, to buy the reprint of the first issue. Fortunately, reading things on whatever schedule may come is really easy, because RSS feed.

² <sigh> Yes, yes, Hurrr … he said heart-on. You’re very clever.

³ Quote from the announcement that Stevens sent out via — you guessed it — RSS.

Before we start, a quick note — next week work will take me to the Left Coast, and in particular to a client where I may have extremely limited access to … well, anything, really. It’s a Bring your passport if you want to make it past Security kind of place, although I’ve been assured that I will most likely be permitted to make bathroom trips unescorted¹. Bottom line, expect late and/or minimal posting next week.

• I see that Dante Shepherd will be braving the den of Reddit for an Ask Me Anything tomorrow morning at 10:00am. I’m not on the Reddit, but I did recall that you can see who’s upcoming for AMAs² and I took a peek — turns out that Shepherd’s not the only webcomicker due to take on all comers. A few hours from now (sorry for the late notice), Box Brown will be doing the AMA thang at 4:20pm EST.

  The timing makes me think that Maureen Dowd’s now-infamous column may come up in conversation, along with hopefully lots of questions about André The Giant: The Life and Legend. Drop by and say hi! And ask Dante about his preposterous claim that velociraptors would never square dance. I’m calling bullshit on that one.

• Final update on the Cuttings Kickstart: US$73,264, meaning that they overran the Stretch Goal list and will in fact be adding 64 pages to the book. Also overrunning the Stretch Goal list (it’s missing at least one, maybe two disclosed goals if the US$10K interval holds): Augie and the Green Knight. Just a reminder, this project has blown through funding and more than a dozen stretch goals in three days, or a grand total of 10% of its campaign run time. At this point, I’m giving Augie a 50/50 chance to make it to To Be Or Not To Be territory.

  Put another way, Augie is (as of this writing) already the 12th most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history. For reference, at this point in its campaign, TBONTB had raised about two thirds as much as Augie has, with approximately the same number of backers. Yeah, calling it: Augie breaks into Top 5 in the Publishing category, and if Weinersmith can keep up the interest with stretch goals, may well challenge for the top spot.

Spam of the day:

your doing such amazing things

It’s good to be loved.

_______________
¹ Don’t laugh; I knew a guy that worked for a Three-Letter Agency in the vicinity of Washington, DC. Contractors at his site not only had to be escorted everywhere beyond the bounds of the cubicle they were working in, during those travels they had to carry a “squawker” — a device which emitted an obnoxious beeping sound that meant Somebody is being escorted, if you can hear this stop talking about secret things.

He had a cube near the bathroom and hated the squawker because it was guaranteed to interrupt him every five minutes and so he tried to force all contractors to have a single coordinated bathroom break per day. In case you’ve ever wondered what could make somebody so psychologically damaged as to spy on their fellow citizen indiscriminately, it was probably having to listen to a squawker all day long.

² As of this writing, Shepherd is not listed, but I’m sure that’s just a matter of the page needing a refresh.

You Damn Kid! was maybe not the first webcomic I followed, but it was the first that I got a reprint collection for, and the first that I got a sketch from, and there will never be a day that I don’t think that the frog rocket wiener is the funniest damn thing ever. I don’t care how many times he’s gone on hiatus, I know that Owen Dunne — like King Arthur before him — will always return in our time of greatest need. And apparently that time will be the first of September.

• This page has been of the opinion that one of the better-curated comics awards programs out there would be the Joe Shuster Awards; perhaps it’s because of a reasonable number of categories, perhaps because of its tight focus on Canadian creators¹, perhaps because Canada produces an outsize crop of really talented writers and artists. This year’s nominees have been announced, and it’s the usual distinct lack of wondering How the hell did that get nominated?

  Webcomickers (past and present) getting nods from the Shusters include Ed Brisson (various titles for Image and Marvel) and Ryan North (Adventure Time) as Writer/Scénariste, Stuart Immonen (two different X-Men series) and Chip Zdarsky (Sex Criminals) for Artist/Dessinateur, Faith Erin Hicks both solo (The Adventures of Superhero Girl) and with J Torres (Bigfoot Boy vol 2) for The Dragon Award (Comics for Kids)/Le Prix Dragon (Bandes Dessinées pour Enfants), and the Cloudscape Comic Collective (Waterlogged: Tales from the Seventh Sea) for the Gene Day Award (Self-Publishers)/Prix Gene Day (Auto-éditeurs).

  The actual award for Webcomics Creator/Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web is the usual strong lineup featuring Attila Adorjany, Jayd Aït-Kaci (with Christina Strain), Olivier Carpentier and Gautier Langevin, Emily Carroll, Kadi Fedoruk, Canaan Grall, Dakota McFadzean, and Ty Templeton (half of whom are repeat nominees, meaning they’re keeping up quality work over the long term).

  What I love about the Shuster nods for Webcomics/Bandes Dessinées Web is that I always learn about something good that I hadn’t been reading — they really do dig for outstanding work. That said, I think that Emily Carroll will take her third win in three nominations (2011, 2012), but any of the nominees are worthy of recognition. Time and date of the announcement of the winners will be announced later.

• This page has also long been of the opinion that there’s possibly no single creator working in more different story styles than Dave Roman. While almost always working in an all-ages (or at least YA) mode, his stories have run the gamut from SF school stories to spooky mystery, from be-true-to-yourself character studies (with boats) to fantasy. And sometimes, he just opts for maximum adorableness, as in the case of the Cupcake Helicopter The Great Bunny Migration minis.

  The latter has now spawned a new ongoing webcomic in the form of Starbunny, Inc, which launched today with a time jump and corporate intrigue, leading one to suspect that this won’t be just adorable bunnies and having fun all day with their galactic milkshake industry. You can bet there will be twists and turns (but not too twisty or scary), and the good-hearted will win out in the end (but not too easily) over the mean bullies (maybe those birds? they suck), who just might be convinced to change their ways.

  So grab a little one that you want to introduce to comics — if you don’t want to be see reading it by yourself — and follow along together as Blue tries to find his place in a galaxy that doesn’t know what to do with a lactose-intolerant bunny. OMG I just read that last line back to myself and I almost squealed, it’s so adorable.

Spam of the day:

FIFA coins

The filters were actually empty until just after I hit Publish, but the spammers came through. A little terse (that’s the entirety of the message), but beautiful in its own way.
________________
¹ Non-Canadians working on a comic don’t disqualify it from consideration, but you will see things like a nominated anthology listed as by [Canadian] and [Canadian] (with various non-Canadian artists).

Thanks, Top Men! Now, where to start, where to start?

• How about here? I should have pointed you towards a short (really short, like less than 1500 words short) story by Ursula Vernon from last November, because it’s excellent (as is pretty much all her writing) and also an excellent example of what her story-voice is like. I remember dragging my wife to the computer and making her read it, so there’s that.

  But now there’s a Disney-revisionist movie playing, and Lauren Davis at io9 remembered Vernon’s story, and then The AV Club noticed it, and what kind of Vernon superfan would I be if I didn’t signal boost a little? If you like The Sea Witch Sets The Record Straight, read Digger, and the Dragonbreath series, and everything else that she’s written, and thank me later.

• Speaking of people you should be reading under all circumstances: Hope Larson. I believe that the record is clear that I hold Larson as perhaps the best creator of graphic novels (original and adaptations) working in English today, but it’s been some time since she had a webcomic. The Secret Friend Society (once the home of Larson’s Salamander Dream, and Kean Soo’s Jellaby) has long since shuttered its doors, leaving no place for a between-books dose of Larson’s magic.

  Until now:

  I wrote the script for Solo last year. This story has been in my brain, in one incarnation or another, since mid-2012, and I’m ready for it to go out into the world. I’ll be drawing the pages and slapping them up online the moment the ink’s dry, raw and fresh and full of mistakes. And full of swear words—the subject matter is fairly tame, but it’s not a kids’ comic.

  I won’t be adhering to any sort of update schedule and I currently have no plans to publish Solo with a book or comics publisher, but I will put together a permanent website as soon as possible.

  Just bookmark it and check it regularly, yeah? It’ll be just about guaranteed the best thing you read any day that it updates.

• Kickstarter news: less than 20 hours to go, and less than US$200 from adding yet another 8-page extension to Cuttings by Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya. For the record, if that stretch goal is made (it will be), that will make more than 50 extra pages of art in the book; if the usual last-day bump reaches the next stretch goal after (that’s another US$5000), it’ll be more than 60 extra pages added to what was original going to be a 72 page book. Added value for extra funding — that’s how you do it.
• Kickstarter news: Somewhere around the 24 hour mark, Zach Weinersmith’s campaign for Augie and the Green Knight crossed the US$100,000 mark, knocking down stretch goals faster than Weinersmith can update. At present, though, there will be an additional five art pieces in the book, which now has a ribbon bookmark, will be made available to libraries, and recorded as an audiobook.

  Oh, and if you’re in a support tier that gets art prints along with your book(s), you now are getting five of those instead of two. Per the FFF, AatGK is headed to a finish of US$400K +/- US$134K. So, plenty of room for more improvements to come. How many extra Boulet paintings can this book hold? I’m hoping for at least 25 in all.

• Kickstarter news: Speaking of US$100,000, that’s the goal line for Jorge Cham’s newest campaign. That’s a hell of a total, but considering that it’s intended to make a sequel to 2012’s The PhD Movie, that’s kind of a bargain. The first movie was funded by Cham and his cohorts, but since it’s apparent that there’s now an audience for the film (screenings have been held more than 500 universities and research centers, including Antarctica), why not spread around the costs? Better yet, the more money raised, the more of The PHD Movie 2: Still in Grad School you’ll get, as every dollar above goal will go into lengthening the film.

  It’s currently sitting at just under 15% of goal after about eight hours, so it appears the only question is how long the movie will actually be: raise enough and you could force Cham to make the Berlin Alexanderplatz of grad school narratives. In case you’re worried that might kill him, don’t — dude went through grad school, he’s used to never-ending, frustrating, wondering-if-it’s-all-worth-it undertakings that last for years.

Spam of the day:

With the site outage, not much got caught up in the filters. So sad! The spammers might be moving on to sites that have a higher uptime.

Some days, there’s just no ambiguity about what image goes at the top of the page.

• In case you haven’t seen it in the roughly 105 minutes (as I write this) since the Kickstarter went live, Zach Weinersmith and Boulet have collaborated on more than just the foreword and one strip from Weinersmith’s French-language strip collection last week; they’re producing an illustrated children’s story, about a young girl named Augie who insists on treating the fantasy world she finds herself in with a sense of scientific rigor.

  Augie and the Green Knight is a retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight, only with a Weinersmithian sensibility instead of a medieval romantic one. Oh, and Boulet’s illustrations will surely outclass those of any of the monastic illuminators of bygone days, and every copy of Augie will be a hardcover book rather than hand-inscribed on vellum. And this one probably has more Baba Yaga than the original.

  Amazingly, that hardcover will only set you back US$25, for some 20,000 words and at least 10 watercolor illustrations; exceeding the base goal of US$30K will result in more illustrations — and seeing as how Weinersmith has only revealed the US$35K and US$40K stretch goals, there will presumably be the opportunity for many more.

  The only question in my mind is, When I get my two-book bundle¹, which lucky niece or nephew gets the other copy? Oh, and naturally, How quickly will this campaign make goal, and how much will it raise total? At current rates, I expect to see goal reached before the four-hour mark, and by this time tomorrow I may have a decent estimate of the final total.

  [Edit to add: it was actually a bit less than three hours. Good job, Zach!]

• You don’t have a specific goal or period of time for Patreon campaigns, but sometimes you can pick an arbitrary milestone goal and see if it hits in a reasonable amount of time. Also, with webcomics Patreons thick on the ground² I haven’t been mentioning them much since the first few to launch earlier this year. But sometimes, something catches my eye and that makes a mention almost obligatory; case in point: Jeph Jacques has, since launching his Patreon overnight, made it roughly two thirds of the way to making a second strip:
  

  A WHOLE NEW COMIC OH MY GOSH
  $3,000 per month
  WHOA WHOA WHOA WHAAAAT

  Yes, it’s true. If we meet this goal, I will start publishing an all-new comic strip along side QC in the fall of 2014. This is something I’ve been thinking about for years, and Patreon can make this happen

  Now that caught my attention, because for a creator whose work appears pretty obvious on the surface (group of friends in a particular time and place and their lives via music and coffee and hangouts and sometimes makeouts), he’s got some fairly deep currents that don’t get addressed except in passing. Now I don’t know that Jacques’s second strip will take place in the QC-iverse³, but if it does, he could do some pretty interesting storytelling about the one fantastical element of his stories that’s just taken as a given by his characters: the presence of fully-developed, widespread Artificial Intelligence.

  He’s hinted at all kinds of story hooks, including (with the return of May in the current story arc) the idea of Robot Jail. How did AIs become recognized? How did they achieve any degree of civil rights and personal autonomy? Can they vote? In a criminal justice system, can you distinguish between the physical manifestation and the intelligence behind it? That’s a story setting that could have a very different tone than his usual work, and perhaps start a good old fashioned Webcomics Feud:

  I was looking at these aspects of AI and Transcendence when you were just making hipster jokes! Aaron Diaz might shout, Go find you own niche and leave the cyborg girls to me!

  The air crackled with Super-Saiyan energy as Jeph rose up to his full, nearly-two meter height. Just because some of us measure panel drawing times in hours instead of weeks, he growled.

  Oh, it is on! bellowed Diaz. Nearby, Randy watched with feverish anticipation as the titanic clash began, ready to hinder or help as the mood struck him. Soon, he crooned to the half-feral cat sitting in his lap, it will be our time.⁴

  Huh. I think I finally figured out why people write fan fiction. I wonder if they’ll kiss⁵.

Spam of the day:

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Any traffic this website gets is undoubtedly more than it deserves.

________________
¹ One regular hardcover, one super-deluxe foil-embossed cloth-covered.

² And, at present, no good means of searching within a category. I know that Patreon’s brand new and still evolving but if the word Comics shows up as a link, it should take me to a page of all the different campaigns tagged as Comics, not to one particular campaign. I have no doubt that functionality will debut soon (because clearly, the people behind Patreon aren’t idiots), and I expect uptake of the platform to increase with that feature in place.

³ Yes, I said will; at this point, it’s just a matter of time.

⁴ If anybody gets the urge to draw this scene, I will pay you a dollar.

⁵ Note to self — next time you get the urge to make a funny, try not to pick a giant man (with a giant dog), a martial-arts expert, and a man with a scary hobo beard who eats internet punks for afternoon tea as your targets.