First off, a final update on the Randy Queen/Escher Girls circumstances of the past couple of days: Ami Angelwings first posted a bit of good news:

Since yesterday, I’ve had private contact with Randy Queen. He’s apologized to me & I’ve accepted it. He is withdrawing the DMCA complaints.

Tumblr has yet to restore the content, and I hope they will soon.

I am also making sure that the DMCA complaints will not count against EG or the Tumblr users that submitted content to EG that was removed.

That’s pretty much the best possible resolution, and kudos to Queen for stepping up and acting in a way that showed he really was serious about making amends. But then Ms Angelwings took it a step further and became perhaps the classiest person in the history of Tumblr, and possibly the internet:

I consider the matter over, and I wish Randy Queen well. Please spread this around if you also spread the initial controversy.

If you’re a media outlet that’s been following this story, please update that he has apologized to me personally & withdrawn the takedowns.

And that I accept his apology, am checking with Tumblr to make sure the content is restored, & consider the situation resolved.

I know sometimes the controversy gets a lot of play & ppl miss the retraction/resolution, and I want to make sure that doesn’t happen. :)

A full statement regarding the resolution (including the fact that Tumblr wasn’t quite so quick to remove content without notice as was previously thought) can be found here. Here’s hoping that the next time a dispute of this nature crops up, people can act with a modicum of the patience and maturity that Ami Angelwings (and, eventually, Randy Queen) showed over the past couple of days.

Let’s follow up a story that turned out good with one that started good, ‘kay? There’s a new Humble Bundle in town, one of the occasional ones that is webcomic-heavy; rather than reprint collections of online work this one contains a stack o’ comic books by webcomics creators.

To wit: the present Humble Books Bundle is sponsored by BOOM! Studios, and they are using webcomics-related books as a premium reward. So for the next (as of this writing, not quite thirteen days) you can get nine different BOOM! title (39 issues in all, including the complete runs of Imagine Agents, Curse, and Hit) in digital form for any contribution amount at all.

If you contribute more than the average of all contributions (as of this writing US$9.96), you also unlock six more titles (36 more issues, including the complete run of Six-Gun Gorilla and Hacktivist) with more to be added later. And if you contribute more than US$15, you unlock the Webcomics Bonanza:

• Issues 1-4 of Bravest Warriors (Joey Comeau, words; Mike Holmes, pictures)
• Issues 1-2 of Bee and Puppycat (Garrett Jackson & Natasha Allegri, words; Natasha Allegri, pictures)
• Issues 1-4 of Lumberjanes (Grace Ellis & Noelle Stevenson, words; Brooke Allen, pictures)
• Issues 1-8 (the complete run) of The Midas Flesh (Ryan ‘Muscles’ North, words; Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb,¹ pictures)

Put another way, I happen to have issues 1-8 of The Midas Flesh right here, for which I paid US$3.99 (plus tax) apiece, a total of more than US$34². If you donate the requisite fifteen bucks, you’ll get the the entire series for less than half of what I paid (okay, digital rather than physical copies, but that just means you don’t have to find shelf space for ’em, and they’re DRM free), plus another 85 issues of comics for free.

That’s an average of just over sixteen cents per issue spread across the 93 issues, meaning it doesn’t matter if you hate an entire run — it’s beyond cheap and you can spread around the donation between the creators and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. If you missed the Ryan Northiest story of all time, this is the perfect time to grab onto it and support a great cause at the same time. Well done, BOOM! and Humble Bundle, Inc.

Spam of the day:

Sailboats and horses might be mandatory just to have to some objectives.

Dude³, if you’re keeping a horse on your sailboat, you are going to get exactly what you deserve.

______________
¹ Who were lucky/foolish enough to buy a house earlier this week; congratulations/condolences to them on this major life achievement/neverending nightmare.

² I bought them in various states as I travelled for work, so I can’t be more specific than that, sorry. this one contains a stack o, and Ryan

³ Or lady-dude, to be inclusive, but let’s face it — ladies have too many brains to expect spam like this to actually work so it’s totally a dude.