Very cold. Right now, it’s warmer in traditionally blizzard-swept regions like the Dakotas than it is here in New Jersey. My dog has gone completely lethargic¹. The only joy in life comes across the laser-etched wires of the internet, and that will have to sustain us until Spring comes, or we are devoured by ice weasels.

• It was around the first of December of last year that the implications of the European Union tax-harmonization changes going into effect on 1 January 2015 (aka VATMOSS) first broke into the consciousness of webcomickers (as well as others selling e-goods on the internet). Uncertainty about the ability to comply with the requirements² led most creators on both sides of the Atlantic to decide that they would have no choice but to suspend sales to EU residents.

  However, I’m seeing word from more than one creator (KB Spangler, who was among the first to raise the VATMOSS alarm, as well as Jon Rosenberg) that Gumroad — a very popular mechanism for selling things like e-goods — is going to be addressing the VATMOSS headaches:

  Just got an email from @gumroad addressing changes because of #VATMOSS. Still reading over the terms but looks solid. Thanks, guys!

  Looks like @gumroad is changing their policy and they’re going to handle all the VAT bullshit on their end. Good. End of story.

  Gumroad’s announcement is here, with the critical piece being:

  We are tackling VAT in the same way. Going forward, this is what creators on Gumroad need to do to properly handle VAT for their digital products:

  Go back to making awesome stuff.

  In other words, we’re on it. Gumroad will collect VAT as required and remit it to the EU. You won’t need to fill out any forms, register for anything, or send anything out. Your (EU-based) customers, will see (and pay) the added VAT on their purchases.

  . . .

  These changes were neither easy nor cheap, but it was crucial to us to make this as smooth and invisible as possible. Handling VAT will cost us approximately 1% of each transaction. We’ve decided it is important to absorb that cost so there will be no change to our 5% + 25¢ fee.

  [emphasis original]

  I don’t use Gumroad to distribute anything so it’s likely that Spangler, Rosenberg, et. al., are getting additional details, but from the outside this looks like Gumroad has just given their clients a hell of a good reason to stay loyal to them, and once word spreads will likely be picking up new business. And as long as that’s one tax-related headache out of the way, how about you check out Brad Guigar’s guide to US sales tax over at Webcomics Dot Com; Guigar has kindly unlocked the subscription requirement for this post, so you can read the whole thing.

• Horrible weather and taxes! Can’t you come up with anything pleasant today, Gary? How about a new Perry Bible Fellowship strip, which has just been added to the main PBF site after sitting on Twitter for a couple of hours. Some things to note here:
  1. This is the sixth of the six new strips that Gurewitch announced a few weeks back
  2. Holy [fill in the blank] this thing is gorgeous; Gurewitch gets so much mileage out of his cartoony style (as in these recent examples) that I sometimes forget just how accomplished an artist he is
  3. It’s pretty much a perfect joke; there is nothing to add, nothing to trim away nothing that could make it better

  Go read it; we don’t know when we’ll get more.

• As a followup to KC Green announcing that Pinocchio would get an irregular schedule to allow him to work on other things, something really quite nice. And disturbing. Nice and disturbing. Green was a contributor to The Sleep of Reason, and he’s shared his contribution to that anthology with us. I AM SICK is based on the church Green attended as a child and is a profoundly unsettling story (not unlike his earlier The Dog’s Sins), and reinforces my belief that self-contained longform stories are where Green really shines. Go read it, but maybe be careful being around anybody with flu-like symptoms afterwards.

Spam of the day:

[incoherent string of placeholder symbols ]

Thanks, and while I’m sure that your selection of mail-order brides is excellent, you seem to be mistaking me for somebody who buys into MRA theories of gender roles and that makes you terrible. Please go be a garbage person elsewhere.

________________
¹ Although, given that he’s a greyhound, that’s not unusual.

² In that a scheme designed to get large vendors like Amazon to pay up their fair share of VAT was going to whack mostly small vendors who couldn’t possibly meet the regulatory data-gathering and retention requirements, and there was no lower threshold of sales to trigger the compliance requirement.

It’s a good time to be Matt Bors. His plans for The Nib keep expanding, and he’s got a talk coming up at the Cartoon Arts Museum that those of you in the Bay Area may be interested in. Let’s get specific.

On the Nib front, I’ve been very impressed with the breadth of talent, frequency of updates, and reach that Bors has achieved in the not quite eighteen months since he took the reins in September of 2013. Best of all, he’s got a budget and he’s not afraid to use it; paying gigs for cartoonists are pretty sparse on the ground outside of The New Yorker, so having another place for both recurring and occasional contributors is heartening.

Speaking of which, Bors mentioned some shifts to the lineup the other day; nothing earth-shattering, we get R Stevens on Thursdays and Gemma Correll (whose work I didn’t know before she started placing cartoons at The Nib, and who is simply terrific) on Mondays now. Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Jen Sorensen and Erika Moen shift around as well (to Tuesdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays, and Wednesdays, respectively). Kate Leth will now be chiming in monthly, and he’s ramped up the cartoon journalism, with a half-dozen longer pieces in the pipeline this month alone.

And speaking of “monthly” and “months”, the Nib-produced Calendar of Obscure Holidays may have sold exclusively via pre-order but Bors has you covered. Go here for the first two months of the year (January and National Fetish Day is by Erika Moen; February and National Shut-In Visitation Day is by Matt Lubchansky), with the promise of more as the year progresses.

Finally, Bors will be part of a panel discussion (with the aforementioned Bolling, Tomorrow, and Mark Fiore) at CAM one week from today, 19 February 2015, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. It’s in conjunction with CAM’s current showcase on political cartooning, Slinging Satire, and will cost you five measly bucks¹ (free for members), so get on that if you’re in San Francisco next Thursday.

Spam of the day:

Olha, eu não vou discutir com você.

I am sorry, I do not speak Portuguese, so perhaps your attempts at selling things I don’t want would be better made elsewhere.

_______________
¹ It’s a figure of speech. Please, no actual measles-infected fivers and vaccinate your damn kids you anti-science freaks.

Apropos of nothing, there is apparently a DJ-type guy named Diplo (I’d never heard of him before) who has apparently lifted art from Rebecca Mock, and when called on it proved himself to be human garbage. Just putting that out there.

• I believe that I’m on record as finding Scott C’s work whimsical and wonderful, and I particularly love how he can made anything adorable. Consider: instead of the lifeless reanimated husks of Zombie In Love scaring the bejabbers out of its very young intended audience, it is charming and happy-making. That’s a heck of a trick to pull off, and one that should not be limited to 32 pages. Luckily, it no longer is:
  

  You’ve already seen the book, but here is an official announcement for the new Zombie in Love 2 +1!

  Ready to read something adorable?

  Mortimer and Mildred are back with the sequel book called Zombie in Love 2 +1! It follows the young couple as they journey into parenthood! A brand new human baby is left on their doorstep and they must learn to care for him. They discover quickly that human babies are not into zombie stuff. Parenthood can be a struggle normally, so you can imagine how tough it is for these two zombie parents to care for a human baby. I mean, just imagine! And guess what? All your other friends are in this book, the zombie dog, the worms, even a new zombie cat. You’ll probably love it.

  I’ma go out on a limb and guess that Mr C is right and you probably will love it. I still can’t get over that line about shrieking lullabies.

• I wasn’t going to mention the whole Scribd thing for a couple of reasons:
  1. I have never trusted media that I don’t own¹, although I suppose a library access via subscription model is much less likely to hit my paranoia than the pay for it and download stuff that we can take if we want model
  2. I am innately suspicious of sites that offer no functionality unless I enable JavaScript²; seriously, you can’t so much as read a description of Scribd’s comics offerings without allowing scripting
  3. I’m not that interested in the vast back catalogs of print comics when there are so many good new comics (in print and not) coming out now
  4. I absolutely despise this whole tech industry thing of making up a word by randomly leaving out an letter; I’m not on Tumblr, either

  But gosh darnit, it seems like there are webcomics angles to consider, one of which is possibly why I haven’t been able to enjoy one of my favorite webcomics for months and months:

  At last I can reveal what I’ve been doing the past few months: curating the amazing new comics section at @Scribd!

  This is mixed news for me. One the one hand, I am not going to be a subScribder to this service for the reasons listed above. On the other hand Shaenon Garrity has pointed me to some damn good comics in the past, on account of our tastes track each other by about 70%, meaning I can innately trust her and she’ll still surprise me with stuff I wouldn’t have looked at before. Her palette for completely bonkers off the wall concepts (like, say, a 26 volume manga fighting series about the cut-throat world of competitive bread baking) is unmatched and has brought me much pleasure. Not buying into Scribd means I may be missing out on stuff I’d really like.

  But mostly importantly, I’d figured that Shaenon Garrity’s stellar X-Files recap comics were on hiatus still due to the challenges of raising her new son; it seems she’s been at work for a chunk of time, which means that now that Scribd’s comics service has launched, she might be able to get back to Mulder³ and Scully and Skinner’s Righteous Fists of Rage. Here’s hoping, at least.

• Actually, one other reason to maybe hold back on Scribd, this one from the keenest mind in webcomics:
  

  Warning: Do NOT sign up for Scribd for its comics if you have a Kindle Fire! Every title I clicked so far is “not available for this device”

  Which is odd, considering that Scribd supports the Kindle Fire, albeit with a specific installation. Anyway, Kindle Fire owners emptor, I guess.

  Update to add: Brad Guigar has retracted his caution.

• For those of you that keep track of these things, a card game that nobody has played yet is on the verge of raising US$6 million and having 150,000 backers and is now the fifth most-funded project in Kickstarter’s history. With eight days to go, it seems certain to move into the #4 slot. Yikes.

Spam of the day:

Hello. And Bye.

Not much to add, really.

_______________
¹ And yes, this means that I don’t have Netflix.

² Which, in terms of widespread crappy technology that opens up my computer to drive-by infections, is second only to Flash.

³ As I am finishing this post, David Duchovny is coming on the radio, being introduced by Leonard Lopate as I type this sentence. Spooooky.

Today is going much better, thanks for asking; let’s jump right into it, yes? We’ve got some news to catch up on.

• Over the weekend, Ursula Vernon (and longtime readers will recall that I loves me some Digger) tweeted something that jumped out at me:
  

  So hey, a whole bunch of artists (me included!) are headed to Botswana and we want to make a travel journal about it! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1729864809/expanding-horizons-artists-journey-to-africa

  She’d mentioned in passing the upcoming photo safari¹ in a LiveJournal post, but the fact that she’s going with other artists, and that they want to bring the experience back, is terrific news. The Kickstarter to fund the production of the journal (note that the trip is paid for; you aren’t contributing for somebody to take a vacation, but to see what they experienced) has already funded out, so now it’s just a matter of how nice a travelogue you want, and how nice it gets (stretch goals have already lengthened the book by 10 pages and will likely add a signed bookplate).

  I hadn’t heard of the other contributors to the project (looking at the avatars of the campaign backers, this appears to be primarily attracting people of the anthro persuasion), but looking through the campaign page, there’s some damn nice artwork there. If you hear the word furry and have a negative reaction, get over it — a travelogue is about living the experiences of another, and anybody can have those experiences (but damn few can do a good job of sharing them).

• Kris Straub’s been relatively quiet on the comics front, what with having a new small human being at home to care for, and getting Broodhollow’s latest story arc ready for print. What? It’s ready?
  

  Now the story continues in the second book of the series, Angleworm. Zane has settled into everyday life in Broodhollow, but is plagued by unsettling nightmares. When a tragedy strikes the town in the dead of winter, Zane is left wondering how far he’s willing to go to end his nightmares once and for all …

  Broodhollow is one of the most engrossing, engaging, unsettling webcomics out there, and the first collection was a handsome, dense bundle of story which is crying out for a companion volume on your shelf. The fact that it’s crying out is a little disturbing, but so far it hasn’t shown any actual malice, so I suppose it’s safe to get the second book. Maybe? Look, if your bookshelf starts weeping blood or promising you rewards for setting fires you can reconsider, but otherwise this is a must-have. Unsurprisingly, Broodhollow Book 2: Angleworm has reached nearly 200% of goal since it launched yesterday, so once again your only decision is which reward package you want.

• There are webcomickers that work hard, and there are webcomickers that work fast, but for my money if you want to combine the two, you have to look to Lars Brown. Just last May he was running the Kickstarter campaign for the second collection of his comic, Penultimate Quest. In July, he was gracious enough to gift me a copy of the first book² at SDCC.

  Since then, PQvol2 has printed and fulfilled (last custom rewards went out in September), and he’s continued making the comic, which means that PQvol3 (the end of the story) is funding now for delivery in July (he’s gotta finish up the story, after all). Three volumes covering three years of comics in such a short time? A dissection of the endless dungeon crawl trope, mixed with explorations of religion, philosophy, and Moroccan food? As sure a thing for delivery on the promised date as you can find in webcomics these days? Yes, yes, and yes. Brown’s looking for a very modest US$4500, and is about 70% of the way with three weeks to go; let’s make this happen.

• Not quite a Kickstart, but worth mentioning: Christopher Baldwin’s made a lot of webcomics, from the acclaimed Bruno and the justly-beloved Little Dee to the sci-fi humor/pathos projects of Spacetrawler and One Way³, Yontengu (writing only), and the just-launched and still-plot-establishing Anna Galactic. This is not about any of those comics; it’s about how Baldwin will be making them:
  

  So, I have a lot to announce!

  I’m about to embark on an indefinitely long journey, moving from place to place every month, around the country, making a portable storage unit out of my car, and using airbnb.com for all my stays.

  (graphic version here)

  Baldwin’s going to be supporting his peripatetic (Estradaian, almost) approach to comics in a variety of ways: there’s an Indiegogo campaign with art rewards and his Patreon, but also various ways to buy his wares, two of which have expiration dates:

  Little Dee Originals won’t be on sale for however long I’m on the road (your last day, February 25). So, if you want to purchase any of the archive strips, and help support the launching of my journeying, it might be a while before they’re available again.

  Little Dee b&w collections! As you may know, I have completed the full-color Little Dee graphic novel (totally new story!) for Penguin/Dial books. It is due out this summer, at which point (according to contract) the Little Dee b&w collections, which you know and love, will have to be made unavailable. So, make sure to make purchases before this summer. And what better time than now, to help launch my travels

  I have a number of Little Dee originals and have long been of the opinion that they are criminally underpriced; as for the collections, I can’t imagine my bookshelf without them. If you’ve ever thought about purchasing either of these things, get in now while the getting’s good. Also, let’s see what an unsettled existence does to Baldwin’s creativity; I suspect it will be getting a significant jolt.

• Final bit, and it’s not about ways for you to spend money; KC Green’s adaptation of Pinocchio — which is simply delightful — hit the quarter-done mark on Friday. Yesterday a schedule change was announced:
  

  Hey there friends. Pinocchio is a weird big story, and while I want to finish it just to prove something to myself, I don’t want to continue doing it right now. I need to work on something more in line with how I’m feeling. So I’ll come back to Pinocchio when I can. I’ll post whole chapters when they’re done, but it’s no longer going to be on a scheduled update.

  I am entirely in favor of this; a comic that’s being done just for the sake of doing it isn’t going to be as good as one that’s being done because the creator is really feeling it. Furthermore, Pinocchio is a weird big story (I’d never read the original, and the pacing is distinctly different from stories written in more modern times) and I’ve frequently gone back a dozen or more updates to see how scenes are playing out; seeing whole chapters at a time is going to be a better reading experience, I suspect. The RSS feed is here in case you’re worried about missing chapters when they go up. And as always, I can’t wait to see what Green does next, because the dude just keeps getting better.

Spam of the day:

Anyway if you come from the China or Finland, there are going to be certain native assortment of this awesome cue sport.

I’m not sure that this spam was actually trying to suck me into any purchase or action; I think it honestly wanted me to know about the history and brilliance of billiards. Odd.

_______________
¹ Safari operators have adopted the notion of a goal being to see “big five” game animals: lions, elephants, rhinos, cape buffalo, and leopards. I’d have thought giraffes and zebras would be in there too, or maybe some kind of bouncy antelopes, but the original list involved those animals considered most challenging (read: dangerous) to hunt on foot.

I believe that Ursula Vernon will not give a great goddamn about seeing any of those mammals, as long as she can add ten or twenty birds to her Life List. According to reliable witnesses, when Vernon sees a bird while engaged in ordinary activity like, say, driving a car, she becomes monomaniacally focused to the point that others, say, passengers in said car, have noted AAAAAHHHHH! You’ll kill us all!

² From a Kickstarter that ran for two weeks in March of 2013, and was fulfilled in April. Man’s a machine.

³ Both finished, and judging from some of the comments here at Fleen, not liked as much. I liked ’em just fine.

Long story, not worth going into, just now raising my head up from a technical issue so no post today. Mea culpa.

Spam of the day:
No spam, but new policy regarding comments. I’ve noticed that a small percentage of posts just seem to get hammered with spam (recent examples here and here) while most are not; from now on once I notice that a post is spamophiliac, it will have its comments turned off.

It’s already the policy to turn off comments on a post after 15 days (made necessary because spammers discovered this post after it turned a year old and it became a hotspot), so this isn’t an enormous change. If you come across a locked post that you want to comment on, you can always email me (that would be gary) at the domain you are presently at.

You know, I was going to be talking about how the upcoming Emerald City Comic Con has been announcing special guest from the world of web- and indy comics left and right.

I was going to point out that as of today, their site includes such names as Lucy Bellwood, Brandon Bird, Terry Blas, Ed Brisson, Katie Cook, Danielle Corsetto, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Chris Eliopoulos, Madéleine Flores, Kaja & Phil Foglio, Zac Gorman, Brad Guigar, Tyson Hesse, Matt Inman, Jeph Jacques, Dave

<inhale>

Kellett, Lucy Knisley, Scott Kurtz, Kate Leth, Sam Logan, David Malki !, Kel McDonald, Carla Speed McNeil, Dylan Meconis, Randy Milholland, Erika Moen, Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, Andy Runton, Noelle Stevenson, Cameron Stewart, and the inescapable Jim Zub. And that’s just who I noticed on my first pass through the still-growing list.

Alas, I won’t be telling you about that, because of the huge, encouraging news that came out of (of all places) DC Comics: as part of a massive revamping of their line that largely walks back the New 52 nonsense, they’re bringing on a host of talent and releasing a stack of books that cover a far wider range of story and readership niches (while still staying firmly in Capeland) than we’ve seen before. Oh, and they’ve picked one of the very best of web- and indy comics to take over one of the highest profile gigs in all comics:

I’m working on Superman with the inimitable JOHN ROMITA JR! Our first issue comes out in June!

Thinking back to Gene Yang’s on-stage conversation with Scott McCloud in San Diego last year, one may recall that he resumed a light load of teaching at the high school level, meaning he just because the first cool high school computer science teacher in recorded history.

I am so excited about this, I am actually going to add a Superman book to my pull list, but if there is not at least one piece of deep red lacquerware featuring prominently in the plot line, I will be sorely disappointed. Yang (and his longtime colorist collaborator, Lark Pien) always made those look so good; yeah, he’s writing this book instead of drawing it, but he can get some lacquer in there.

Alas, it appears that we’ll be losing the webcomickiest comic book DC publishes: Batman ’66 (one of exactly three DC books I buy, the other two being the Karl Kerschl-drawn Gotham Academy and the Cameron Stewart-cowritten Batgirl) doesn’t survive the shakeup, but on the bright side we’ll be getting a Section Eight miniseries. Somewhere, Randy Milholland is very, very happy at the thought of defenestrations and dogweldings and the power of perversion. As are we all.

Spam of the day:

Thank you; while I am an engineer, I don’t need any boots right now, and anyway I prefer to buy shoes in person rather than via mail order.

Couple of stories that just won’t die today.

• Welp, everybody is still talking about Scott McCloud today (not that that’s any surprise), and lots of people have been talking to McCloud, but I doubt that Scott enjoyed any of those interviews as much as the one that went live at Playboy (mostly SFW, surprisingly) since it was conducted by his wife/muse, Ivy Ratafia. It’s a great read and gives you an idea just how damn in love these two crazy kids are.

  I’m going to quote my favorite part — Ivy has asked Scott to describe the character of Meg, who is about 70% Ivy and then follows up with what could be a marriage-killer of a question:

  IVY: And now the reciprocal. You have to describe me.
  SCOTT: You’re shorter than she is, probably by a good four inches —
  IVY: Haha! Okay, I’m going to interrupt you here, because the question I wanted to ask was, why is Meg taller than me?
  SCOTT: Because when I have the two of them in frame I can’t do the same kind of physical theater without pulling back the camera. I can’t do close-ups of the two of them talking. If I was a better cartoonist; if I was smart enough and practiced enough to get interesting compositions out of the height difference; maybe it could’ve worked. But, I’m just not good enough. So I made her only a half-head shorter.

  IVY: This really bothers me.
  SCOTT: I know!
  IVY: Short people unite! We have problems!
  SCOTT: I know, I know. We should be celebrating shortness. But no, I didn’t have the chops for it because I was still teaching myself how to be a better figure artist. So the real answer is because I suck. Is that okay?

  For the record, Scott does not suck. Also for the record, I picked up a copy of The Sculptor in hardcover and the spot color used throughout (Pantone 653, in case you were wondering) is a bit darker than that used in the advanced review copies, and it does give everything a bit more structure and depth. Also, the page numbering is different by two, in case you weren’t fascinated enough by the minutiae of publication details.

• Following up on yesterday’s discussion of the newly-gamified Exploding Kittens Kickstarter, some rules have been posted to determine which photos of various things will count towards the achievements. Notably, the hashtag #update9 needs to be in the photo (along with the text of the tweet, along with the hashtage #explodingkittens, so everybody with old pics of themselves with goats, sorry.

  Likewise, there have been a couple of photos posted of people with cat ears, but the requirement is that a single photo contain 10 (or 50, or 100) people wearing cat ears. Solos don’t cut it here. On the “plus” side at least two of the requisite five photos involving weaponized back hair¹ have been posted so that’s all … well, it’s not right, but it’s something.

Spam of the day:

https://bft.usu.edu/[redacted]

Hmmm, your message consists solely of a link. usu.edu is Utah State University, and it appears that the bft stands for Big File Transfer. So somebody’s using the academic site to distribute who knows what? I’ma pass on clicking that one, Bunky. You understand.

_______________
¹ Insert that mumbling, horrified noise that Sideshow Bob makes just after getting smacked with a rake.

A little advice for you — if you go to a talk by Scott McCloud in a city known to have a hefty cartoonist presence, don’t be surprised when a cartoonist you know shows up. Even better, don’t be a half face-blind bozo and stare directly at Raina Telgemeier for like 30 seconds as she smiles wider and wider wondering how long it’s going to take you to realize it’s her. Not that I would know, of course.

• Once my brain finally worked out that I was, in fact, looking at somebody I knew, it woke the hell up and I was able to determine that the room also contained Mark Siegel, Callista Brill, and Gina Gagliano of :01 Books (logical, as they’re the publisher), as well as Judy Hansen (McCloud’s agent, as well as much of indy/webcomics, a woman with whom I enjoy discussing Belgian beer), and the incomparable Brooke Gladstone of NPR’s On The Media (whom I’d never met before, but because of a well-timed pledge to WNYC, she crocheted me a winter hat that I was wearing and was able to thank her for).

  McCloud and Entertainment Weekly’s Tim Leong spoke for about 45 minutes and took questions for about the same — the underlying theme was creativity and the process of creation and how McCloud had to write Making Comics to teach himself what he needed to learn¹ so that he could actually produce The Sculptor (an idea which had been kicking around his brain since he was 17 or so). No quotes to offer (I was listening instead of taking notes) except for this one:

  By 2024, comics is going to be a majority-female industry

  By which he means both creators and readers (and thinks in the art schools, we’ve already exceeded parity). Here’s hoping.

  Speaking of hope, one thing that gave me a great deal of hope about the evening, comics, and society in general. Waiting in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, I noticed a cluster of West Point cadets in their distinctive grey uniforms, along with some active-duty Army officers in dress blues; I wondered at the time what program they were there for (92Y does many cultural programs on any given day, as well as being a full Y-style gym).

  They disappeared from the lobby about 20 minutes before we were let into the auditorium. During the seating period, though, I noticed them come into the auditorium and take seats, and Ivy McCloud mentioned that they’d been meeting with Scott; they were in town with professors and staff officers because they’re reading V for Vendetta and Watchmen as part of a literature class.

  After the talk, while waiting in the signing line, my friend Brett and I started talking with an earnest (and serious, and very young) second-year cadet named Fred and a major (alas, I didn’t catch her name) that he was standing with. They were both thrilled to be there, and I never thought I’d be talking comics in that particular company and context. Fred didn’t say explicitly he was also drawing comics², but he did mention at one point he’d wondered if there was some way to surgically remove about half the little finger of his left hand and fit a prosthetic eraser there for convenience.

  Knowing that somebody so unstereotypically military will be commissioned an officer and become part of the Army leadership structure in a little more than two years makes me hopeful. Knowing that somebody (likely multiple somebodies) on the faculty of the most traditional of Army institutions looks towards comics (Alan Moore comics, no less) to shape the minds of Fred and his fellow cadets (about a third of whom at the talk were young women — a little longer to get to parity there) is likewise a comforting thought. All in all, a damn good evening. If you have the opportunity to see McCloud on his book tour, do so.

• Here’s the thing that you don’t see a lot in Kickstarters: tying stretch goals to thing that happen outside of the campaign itself. We saw it in the campaign for Dr McNinja’s Legendary Showdown back in October 2013, when 2500 Facebook likes or hashtag tweets meant bonus content in the game. See how that worked? You didn’t have to get one more person to pony up one more dollar, but you had to spread the word. Clever.

  Naturally, the phenomenally successful campaign for Exploding Kittens (as of this writing: nearly 135,000 backers, the most in Kickstarter history, and more than $US5.3 million pledged, #7 highest total and closing in on #6) has finally added a series of stretch goals, but mostly not related directly to the campaign itself. Instead, there are a series of achievements based on things like how many backers, percent overfunding, Facebook likes, and public stunts. As of right now, fifteen of them have been achieved, and the stretch goals will be unlocked when 20 or 30 of the ‘cheevos are met.

  They’ve gamified Kickstarter. It doesn’t matter which five achievements are met to reach the 20 goal, just whichever get piled up first. And yeah, it may be near impossible to achieve all 30 goals³, but they’ve made the last two weeks of the campaign pretty damn fun to watch. Heck, if they get the Ellen or GRRM things to happen (see footnotes), this project could break into mainstream consciousness. Well done, Exploding Kittens team.

• Per today’s newsbox at Dinosaur Comics: the previously-mentioned game version of To Be Or Not To Be now has a release date, and it’s, oh, today. Go get it.

Spam of the day:
Nothing in particular today, except to note that something about the recent posting referencing Larry Gonick is attracting spam like nobody’s business. So far today, I’ve cleared more than 50 largely-identical submissions (consisting mostly of question marks) from that thing. I have to figure out how their algorithms work so I can avoid doing whatever caused this flood. Yeesh.

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¹ This reminds me a great deal of Minna Sundberg wanting to create Stand Still, Stay Silent but feeling her skills weren’t up to the task, so she instead created the 556 page A Redtail’s Dream first to teach herself what she needed to know.

² Unsurprisingly, they don’t have art majors at West Point; if I remember correctly, about 70% of the student major in some form of engineering, and obviously all cadets study military science.

³ They include things like 10,000 and 100,000 Twitter followers or 100,000 Facebook likes — trivial, given the number of supporters. But they also include things like Get @Ellen [Degeneres] to tweet “A Butt Tuba” is a palindrome and Get George RR Martin to tweet “I use Pantene Pro-V on my beard, because vitamins”.

For the record, I think the following goals are going to be met fairly easily:

• 150,000 backers (they’re above 134K)
• 10,000 Twitter followers (already met: @gameofkittens is now at 19.8K)
• 100,000 Twitter followers (doesn’t require even all of the backers click on “follow”)
• 100,000 Facebook likes (no idea how may they have, I don’t have Facebook)
• Get @wilw[heaton] to tweet all cats should wear underpants (will probably happen as soon as Wheaton is back from the JoCo cruise)
• Post 25 pics of a beardcat (a cat crawling out of a dude’s beard)
• Post 25 pics of a potatocat (a cat with legs tucked under, looking like a furry potato)
• Post 25 selfies with goats

The others, involving things like group photos of people wearing cat ears, and pictures of “weaponized back hair” (I don’t want to know), as well as the Ellen and GRRM things will be trickier. Since they aren’t saying what we’ll get if all 30 achievements are hit, it’s hard to say how hard people will work on the goal.

Departures and arrivals, signs and portents all up in this thing today.

• I took it as a good sign back in 2013 when he told me that before the first issue of Samurai Jack hit the stands, it had been extended from a five-issue miniseries to ten issues. It was better news still when it became a fifteen issue series, and then twenty. It was revealing to see how he alternated between five-part stories and shorter stories in five-issue chunks, and since he never knew when the the five-issue extensions would end he made sure that every fifth issue would come to a conclusion that could serve as a series finish.

  Good plan, as it turns out:

  We launched pretty strong, strong enough that our five issue mini-series was almost immediately bumped up to “ongoing” status, but we’ve hit a point in the natural single issue sales attrition cycle where IDW isn’t guaranteed to see profitability on #21-25 so they decided to end it at #20 and make sure we weren’t cut off midway through a story line. I absolutely respect that and appreciate the heads up so we could make our last issue extra special.

  Read the whole thing; Zub remains the classiest guy in comics (in addition to the hardest-working, having put to bed 1000 pages of comic script last year), without an ounce of irritation for his publishers; it’s sad, but it’s business, and he’s got plenty of further outlets for his creativity (this year we’ll see Samurai Jack, Skullkickers, Munchkin, Baldur’s Gate, Wayward, Conan/Red Sonja, and who know how many other projects).

  Best of all, he can stand proud of his work, having written for a well-beloved character so well that the only reaction I’ve seen to the news of the series wrap-up is Aw man, that’s a bummer. So well done, Mr Zub — we’ll miss Samurai Jack, but now there’s room in your schedule for another one of those myriad of ideas you’re just waiting to unleash on us. I’ll call that a fair trade.

• As may have been mentioned on this page once or twice in the past today is the day that Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor comes out, and all indications are that people are eager for it. My feelings on the book are on the record, and I am looking forward to McCloud’s talk this evening in New York City. But could I — could everyone who’s read the book and universally loved it — be wrong about this book and its place in McCloud’s oeuvre?

  Nope, and here’s why: when I got dressed this morning, without any planning or prep on my part, I picked a t-shirt from the top of the stack and my not-quite-awake brain didn’t register which one it was until I started to write this post. I swear I’m telling the truth, and if people are allowed to believe that a lucky jersey or pair of socks is enough to help their favorite team win a big game, I’m allowed to believe that a shirt will herald the success of this book.

Spam of the day:

Hello. And Bye.

Good timing, anonymous crap-merchant. Good timing.

See, I thought today was going to be all about Scott McCloud’s previously-announced interview in The AV Club, but then a bunch of other stuff happened, some of it literally historic. Let’s dive in.

• We’ll start with McCloud, who is all over the damn place these days, what with The Sculptor¹ coming out tomorrow and all. With any luck, I’ll get a chance to congratulate him in person either before or after his talk at the 92nd Street Y tomorrow night. McCloud’s conversation with Oliver Sava (who writes really well on comics) takes as its starting point a collection of seven comics works that deal with artistic expression and frustration. It was a really great conversation before McCloud got to what I thought was the most significant part:
  

  Well, I suppose this would be a good time to offer my mea culpa that this list I picked for you is a bit of a sausage fest. I could have included some works by women artists that might have fit the theme, but I wasn’t sure that I could talk about them very well without a good re-reading. Lynda Barry’s What It Is would have been a really good addition. But I just didn’t have time to re-read everything, and that one would have required a re-read at least. But I think that probably the single most important trend right now is the coming army of girls reading all-ages comics who will be moving into the industry. And I think within about eight or so years, we’ll have a majority female industry. I think there’s going to be a massive shift in terms of who writes comics and who reads comics. So again, sorry that these are a bunch of guys in this list. That was a matter of circumstance. A lot of my favorite comics happen to be by women but — This One Summer, for example — not about an artist. So I was out of luck. I love that book.

• Nice timing from McCloud, because this morning the American Library Association, as is its custom during its midwinter gathering, announced its literary awards, and This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki was recognized in two separate categories.

  Before we get too far into this, I should note that most of the ALA-associated awards have two tiers: the actual “award” or “medal” itself², and a number of “honor” books in the category. The honor books are not a case of it’s-an-honor-just-to-be-nominated; going through the lists of winners for the past few years, it is entirely credible to me that the appropriate jury selects a short list of equally-worthy books, chooses one at random as “the” winner and designates the others as the honor selections — they’re that good.

  So: This One Summer was announced as one of four Honor Books for the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults. And then a little later, it was named as one of six Honor Books for the freakin’ Randolph Caldecott Medal — you know, one of two literary awards you’ve ever heard of — for the most distinguished American picture book for children.

  Please note that no graphic novel has ever been recognized for the Caldecott before today, nor for the just-as-famous John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature (that would be the other one you’ve heard of). So I’m not exaggerating when I saw it was an historic occasion, especially when you consider that a few minutes after the Tamakis made history, El Deafo by CeCe Bell also made history when it was named one of two Newbery Honor Books. Today was the day that graphic novels were recognized as the best of the best in children’s books. That’s a pretty damn good day for comics.

• Oh yeah, and it’s also Saint Groundhog’s Day (the day that I consider to be the start of my relationship with my wife), which means that yesterday was the latest birthday of Dinosaur Comics. For twelve years now, Ryan North has relentlessly seeking to answer the question How many different blocks of text can be fitted to exactly the same six panels of art?, the answer to which is apparently Goin’ on 2800.

  It is also-also fully-official launch day for the all-new You Damn Kid³, the strips since September being the result of a retooling and soft launch. And speaking of returns, after a lengthy hiatus (necessary for multiple very good reasons), we even have a new Help Desk today, which tells you everything you need to know about this year’s technological buzzphrase. Like I said, busy day.

Spam of the day:

Bardzo dobra publikacja. Dzi?kuje za to Pa?stwu!

I am told that this is Polish for Very good publication. Today for shoes to you a!, which I believe may be a reference to the longrunning and well-beloved webcomic No Shoes For Tuesday (sorry, I meant Brak Buty na wtorek).

________________
¹ My review here; it’s a masterpiece and I’ll be buying a copy tomorrow, since apparently there’s a small but crucial difference in the color palette. So all those glowing reviews you’ve been seeing? We’ve been seeing a version of the book that McCloud considers inferior and lacking the impact of the final revision.

² Which appears to generally go to just one book, although the wording implies that there may be multiple winners.

³ Longtime readers may recall that my love for YDK is complete, and it will always be part of the blogroll because no matter how long Owen Dunne may step away from the strip, he will always come back. Recall also that the very first webcomics purchase I ever made was a combo-pack of YDK’s print collection, a sketch of Jethro, and a shirt proclaiming itself to be the home of the Frog Rocket Wiener.

Since then I have sunk an amount of money into webcomics merch and art that I am frankly terrified to total up, as my heirs and assigns may seek to take away my ability to make my own financial decisions because clearly I am not rational. This is all Dunne’s fault.