Hey, everybody! ‘Dja miss me? It’s going to take a day or two to get fully back into the swing of things, so today is mostly about me getting caught up on things that happened while I was gone.

• Going furthest back you may or may not have noticed that Jillian Tamaki did an interview with The AV Club about SuperMutant Magic Academy, This One Summer¹, her episodes of Adventure Time, and more. It’s a great conversation and I recommend it to you if you hadn’t seen it before.
• Howard Tayler² has been running a fairly massive Kickstart for an RPG to be set in his Schlockiverse for the past month or so; the management of expectations and stretch goal announcements have done well to make the traditional last-week bump in backers and pledges into more of a last fortnight, as well as causing that rarest of things on the Long Tail: an uptick in funding predictions.

  As I write this line, the Planet Mercenary campaign will be wrapping up in about five minutes, somewhere in the vicinity of US$350,000 (or 777% of goal)³. For reference, the Fleen Funding Formula Mark 2 would have predicted a whopping US$206K — US$309K which he’s handily exceeded. Well done, Tayler and partners, and enjoy the massive pile of creative output that you’ll be engaging in for the next year or so.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, Spike Trotman launched her latest on Friday; as mentioned in the before times, she continues to alternate anthology topics, with a Smut Peddler followed by a specific genre, followed by more porn, and then another genre. It’s Sci Fi’s turn, and New World (specifically dealing with the topic of cultures coming into contact/conflict) is off to a rousing start.

  From launch on Friday to nowish, it’s reached 102% of the US$20,000 goal, meaning we’re now into the Iron Circus Comics Overfunding Bonus Plan: every contributor (or contributor team) just earned a US$50 bonus on top of the page rate they’re already been paid with another US$50 for each additional US$5000 on the campaign. For references, the bonuses paid for Smut Peddler 2012, The Sleep of Reason, and Smut Peddler 2014 were US$650, US$300, and US$1700 (!), respectively.

  In any event, four weeks left to make Spike write as large a check as possible to her incredibly skilled list of contributors; given the FFFmk2 prediction of somewhere between US$55K and US$83K, would be on the order of US$400 to US$650 a pop (which would be in line with the bonuses pad for TSOR and further proving the point that porn is innately more popular than anything else). This is why people want to work on Spike’s books — she pays, then she pays more.

• Finally, Zubday — that regularly-occurring holiday that happens every Wednesday when there’s a new Jim Zub comic (or two, or more) on the stands — comes early this week. That’s because today is Zubday Prime, aka Zub’s birthday. Early reports are that Zub is spending the day much like any other: planning to take over the world writing and editing and merchandising and designing and generally making comics. In other words, a good day. Happy Zubday, everybody.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Which — goodness! — is a year old now. Time sure does fly.

² My evil twin, etc.

³ Actual total: 5,312 backers for a total of US$348,641, or 775% of a US$45,000 goal.