Every once in a while, you get a comic that just couldn’t be done on paper, and Meredith Gran delivered one to wrap up the latest Octopus Pie story arc. The act of scrolling through the very tall image and the fact that there’s more and more space between the panels to control your sense of the passage of time are giving Chapter Four of Understanding Comics a boner¹ without falling into an infinite canvas-for-the-sake-of-infinite canvas circle jerk². Even if you’ve never read Octopus Pie before, click through that header image, scroll on down, read the (nearly wordless!) story, and tell me you don’t know exactly what’s going on. I double dog dare you.

• It is always a good thing when new dinosaur comics³ make the rounds, and Bird and Moon creator Rosemary Mosco partnered up with David Orr to bring us a beaut. For everybody that feels a little guilty — raises hand — for thinking that Chris Pratt riding a motorcycle in the midst of a pack of trained raptors is pretty cool despite the fact that they (the raptors) have no feathers, Mosco and Orr have the balm to soothe your conscience. Hooray for feathers!
• From Katie Lane, your unofficial source for legal advice that you aren’t paying for⁴, has a New Year’s resolution for you, with a handy walkthrough to make good: how to register your copyrights and why you should bother. Bottom line: you’re even more protected with a formally-registered copyright than an implied one.
• Kickstarter is changing payment processors, and it looks like it’s going to be transparent process, except for the check-out. Right now, I get shunted to an Amazon page and punch in my password, then just approve the details. I’m guessing that with Stripe I’ll either have to provide name/address/credit card details each time, or start a new account.

  I’m kind of curious about seeing if I cancel a pledge on a campaign that I’m presently supporting and then immediately re-pledge, if it’ll shunt me to the new process? In fact, I have such a campaign (supported just prior to the change announcement), but I’m afraid if I cancel, I may cause the creator [warning: link Not Safe For Anyone, seriously] to freak out a little (which is probably reason enough to do the experiment by itself).

  In the interests of full disclosure, I have both a hand-stapled, illustrate-it-yourself minicomic of Inspector Pancakes and a PDF review copy, both presented to me by author Karla Pacheco; the ARC is better, because it’s got illustrations (by Maren Marmulla) and a series of fabulous pin-ups by the likes of Kate Leth, Becky Dreistadt, Anthony Clark, Jeph Jacques, Lauren Jordan, Matt Cummings, and Leia Weathington, and they are pretty.

• For those wondering, Child’s Play continues the streak of beating each year’s total:
  

  2003: $250,000
  2004: $310,000
  2005: $605,000
  2006: $1,024,000
  2007: $1,300,000
  2008: $1,434,377
  2009: $1,780,870
  2010: $2,294,317
  2011: $3,512,345
  2012: $5,085,761
  2013: $7,600,000
  2014: $8,430,000
  To date: $33,626,670

  That’s as of 5 January 2015, which we’ll call the end of the season.

  Of course, looking at the main CP page, the counter is still incrementing twice a minute or more, and as of this writing is sitting at $34,947,208 or more than 1 point 3 million dollars since Monday. Taking bets now — assuming calendar year 2015 starts at the 5 Jan total, will this be the year to top ten million?

Spam of the day:

I think one of your ads caused my web browser to resize, you may well want to put that on your blacklist.

I think that’s pretty unlikely.

_________________
¹ Yes, yes, that was a little rude, I apologize.

² That too; sorry.

³ Not to be confused with Dinosaur Comics; the near-ubiquity of The Toronto Man-Mountain aside, the two are not synonymous.

⁴ This means that she is not your lawyer, the advice is general, and you should consult a legal professional before taking any action, as your circumstances will vary. If you are paying her and she is your lawyer, the congratulations — she’s the best you could have in your corner unless Hammurabi, Learned Hand, and Richard Posner all have a kid together.