We’ve got a confluence of comicking anniversaries (and anniversary-like events) going on just now, so let’s run ’em down.

• First up, the person whose work I’ve been reading longest without actually ever meeting in person is possibly Christopher Wright of Help Desk. It’s been around forever, although punctuated with numerous (and sometimes lengthy) periods of hiatus¹, and remains my favorite editorial comment on the world of computer vendors and technical trends. And when I say forever, I mean it:
  

  There were a few comic strips posted in online bulletin boards like CompuServe² (that’s where Kevin & Kell came from). A web magazine ought to have one too! After a few conversations with my father, where we traded horror stories of trying to get tech support to actually address the problems we were having, I made an off-the-cuff comment that it seemed like Help Desks were actually trained to convince the customer that the problem is their own fault instead of a product defect, and suddenly I realized I had a Theme.

  I created a few comics and sent them to Trevor Smith. He generally liked the idea, though he was wary about posting images that were as large as 13k (in 1996, 13k was a huge freaking file). But on March 31, 1996, the very first Help Desk was posted on line, in the archives section of OS/2 eZine. When the April edition came out, it actually appeared as a link on the front page.

  Heady days! They won’t last forever, though:

  That said, Help Desk is definitely winding down. I’m not ending it tomorrow or anything, but there’s not much chance it going 40 years. The computer industry isn’t nearly as much fun to make fun of as it used to be, because most of the relevant jokes involve courtrooms and lawyers and while the jokes aren’t bad the reality is depressing.

  …

  [A]nd anyway I’ve developed other interests: I’m much better writer than I ever was as a cartoonist, and this whole storytelling thing is awfully compelling, so I’m pretty sure as time goes on there will be more and more of that and less and less of clipart comics about Evil Computer Demons.

  All good things come to an end; it was worth it if only for Clippy³ getting cloned and various iterations going on perpetual tequila benders and/or murderous blood harvests.

• And as long as we’re talking about things coming to an end, we’ve mentioned that Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie (which keeps getting better and weirder and more magical-realist I mean have you seen the last half–dozen updates?) is in the end stages. Pretty much every character has gotten their own story arc (some more than others — Marigold and Jane have become far more key to the story than I would have guessed when either was introduced) except for Manuel, and he wouldn’t stand still long enough for you to watch him anyway.

  But over on her Tumblr, Gran took some time to talk about her theory of endings and why they matter:

  My worst case scenario would be that it DOESN’T end. If it was one for the webcomic graveyard.

  You know that end. Frozen in time on its final page, that unremarkable page that neither resolves nor provokes. The page that perfectly encapsulates an artist’s final gasping shred of interest. The drawings on par with everything you’ve ever seen. The layouts woefully consistent. The facial expressions of characters you loved, eyes dead, lightly singed into your mind like a former desktop or lockscreen. Like a poster from your childhood bedroom that you see on Google Images once in a while.
  …
  That’s why when the OP cast is redesigned in hideous 3D and sings “Livin’ La Vida Loca” on the final page, I’ll feel I’ve done things right.

  I love that woman, I love her work, and I’m taking bets right now as to whether or not she actually does what she threatens for the final page. I’m putting the odds at 8:5 in favor.

• We’ve previously mentioned that KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed will be running commentary on old strips three times weekly starting Monday, in recognition that she’s been at this for ten years and all. Today, she let us in on some of her plans [she doesn’t do permalinks on her strip’s newsposts]:
  

  Anyhow. Beginning Monday, there’ll be the usual Big Anniversary Sale in the store, and I’ll be running the comics from the beginning with author commentary at agirlandherfed.tumblr.com. This should be fun! I love yelling at Past Me. She was a dick. [emphasis original]

  I hope that her yelling is restricted to things like Why did I decide to draw this thing that I hated drawing and now I’ve been drawing it for a decade, because honestly? She’s as far from being a dick as I can imagine, and Past Her was no different. She did have a wicked sense of humor, though.

• Lastly, the reason that I’m here talking to some number of people on the internet is that one day Jon Rosenberg suggested it over beers and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Jon’s also been at this webcomics thing for a long time:
  

  Friday is my 19th anniversary in comics. Fuck, I’m getting old.

  Bah. I just turned grunkle for the second time last week, so I don’t want to hear it, youngster. Also, happy strippingversary, you magnificent bastard.

Spam of the day:

Moving? See how Verizon makes it easier.

A) I’m not moving, and 2) The only thing Verizon makes is my inevitable death seem preferable to trying to get them to get this shit together and fix my fucking landline.

_______________
¹ Similar to the other serious contender for the longest/never met title: Owen Dunne of You Damn Kid! and other fine comics.

² Ask your parents, or click here.

³ Don’t ask your parents, the wounds are still too fresh.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: And that was it. Speculations range from the Ruling Body to signature panini presses to Gyne-Lotrimin; Lyle is actually fairly coherent; Philippe introduces himself in case he was forgotten. There will be one day’s breathing space before he launches on his own adventure to the Transfer Station, the brave little guy.

So what I’m learning this morning is the degree to which searching for a hashtag at Twitter is hit-and-miss; the website will give you different results depending on whether you’re logged in or not, and will provide only a fraction of results regardless. I bring this up because the Twittersphere hashtag #webcomics is exploding right now as creators post an eye-catching image and follow its instructions. Normally, I don’t embed images in the middle of the post but I feel I should in this case; here you go:

Using the Twitter client on my phone (that would be TweetCaster) and scrolling back, I seem to have a fairly complete history of the rapid (and accelerating) use of the image + tag combo (#webcomics by itself, naturally, predates today). It appears that the first use of the combo was by Taneka Stotts who posted about Full Circle at 09:56am EDT¹. The next half hour or so saw a few more creators hop on the bandwagon (along with copious retweets), then things started to really pick up.

A bit less than an hour after Stotts kicked the whole thing off, Kate Ashwin of Widdershins noted that it had become a great tool for discovering new comics, elevator-pitch style. It’s not like nobody’s heard of, say, Questionable Content by now, but if you hadn’t, wouldn’t you want to read it based on the five words description?

butts butts butts butts robots http://www.ass.golf #webcomics

I’m a little disappointed that Jacques left out the fairly obvious #buttrocket reference, but those were guest strips.

So there’s your task for today — find a Twitter client that doesn’t abbreviate hashtag searches and go looking. I’m guessing that anybody that can do a good job of condensing the essence of their comic into just five words can write pretty well in other contexts². If you find a new favorite, do be sure to share it with the rest of us.

Spam of the day:

Spring Specials on Roofing Installation

Why, as it turns out I am in the preliminary stages of getting some roof work done. I think that I’ll definitely use the services of an anonymous email from a bogus return address with warnings all over the page in Gmail, instead of talking to the contractor that’s done all the home repair/renovations on my house since I moved it. It just makes sense!

______________
¹ I presume that the Five Words image is also her work; if anybody can confirm this (or provide an instance of earlier use), please let me know.

² Case in point, my perennial favorite A Girl And Her Fed was condensed down to Haunted X-Files with dick jokes which is just poetry.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; after the booze and pizza and crazy bread, Beef and Ray make the long trip home from Wasco to 62 Achewood Court. After getting zero (Beef) or a minor fraction of 8.504 lbs (Ray) of solids across three days in the Acres, I imagine Our Heroes gorged themselves heartily. I would guess that decision was pretty contributory to Beef’s ultimate reflection on what The Fight meant¹.

Things are happening today, my friends. Things!

• Firstly, and I expect that you all know this by now but I would be remiss, but Homestuck updated for the first time since July last night. Woo!
• Secondly, the much-anticipated Kickstart for Irregular Webcomic’s first print collection hit in the early-morning hours (if you’re in the Western hemisphere, at least). Some twelve hours later it’s just shy of 19% of the way to goal, with 29 and a half days to go. One notable thing to point out is that although IW creator David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) is Australian, the book is being handled by the folks at Make That Thing in *hampton, MA, USA, which leads to the ironically awful situation that Morgan-Mar needs to charge some $31 (Australian) to ship books to his fans across town.

  This is such a terrible thing that he’s actually set the shipping costs for “rest of the world” (basically everyplace that isn’t US/Canada) to AU$28, meaning he’s going to take a loss of AU$3 (about US$2.25) for each order back to his own country. To make up for this, he’s introduced a special backer tier for US/Canada fans only (about 80% of his readership) that adds one slim Aussie Fun Buck to the regular price of the book reward:

  THE BOOK+POSTAGE GOODWILL (US/Canada only): A copy of the print collection book + a PDF digital copy. The extra dollar is your goodwill to help offset postage costs for non-North American buyers.

  I’m pleased to note that as of this writing, 22 US/Canada backers have opted to kick in the extra Australian dollar (about 75 cents, US; 1 buck, Canada) to help subsidize purchasers elsewhere. Nicely done, all.

• Thirdly, today is the launch day for the first two of First Second’s new line of educational graphic novels, namely Science Comics: Dinsoaurs, Fossils and Feathers and Science Comics: Coral Reefs, Cities of the Ocean. When I got my review copies in the mail a while back (the usual voluminous thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 Books), the attached info sheet said they would be releasing in April, but that was subsequently moved up and caught me by surprise.

  Thus I’ve not read Coral Reefs to the degree that would allow a proper review, but I can talk about it generally. It’s by Maris Wicks, and it’s about marine biology (which happens to be her day job and all) and it’s got the same effortlessly informative style as her previous Primates and the recent Human Body Theater. It’s great.

  But of course I’ve read Dinosaurs more thoroughly. It’s about dinosaurs, people, and I firmly adhere to Charlie It’s always a good day for dinosaur news! Pierce’s dictum regarding the terrible lizards: Dinosaurs existed then to make us happy today.

  It’s by MK Reed and Joe Flood, who previously collaborated on :01’s The Cute Girl Network (which was about dating in Brooklyn among the underemployed and undermotivated — it’s a hoot and a half). It’s pitched directly at kids just starting their serious independent learning about dinosaurs (say, 10 years old), and as such there were a few things that may need to be explained to the younger reader to avoid confusion.

  1. Nonlinearity; kids may not be aware of the device that says Oh hey, that thing we told you before? Not so much in telling a story. There are end notes (without indications in the text that notes exist, which actually simplifies things — they can go back and re-read the sections that get elaborated on) and a recurring motif that works well after you notice it: every once in a while there’s a page that talks about what was known at a particular point in time from the POV of that point in time². It’s really neat, but kids may need some coaching to put themselves not just in somebody else’s brain, but at a different point in history to appreciate what’s being presented.
  2. Editing oversights; at one point, the classic explanation of the two divisions of dinosaurs by hip type — the “bird hipped” ornithischians and the “lizard hipped” saurischians — is illustrated in classic fashion by pointing out the pubis bone pointing backwards (ornithischians) or downwards (saurischians). To make it clearer, a sample pelvis is shown, with the pubis in yellow for the saurischia and green for the ornithischia.

     Then, on the next page, the bones are drawn in place on a variety of dinosaurs with the colors reversed. The ornithischians suddenly get a yellow pubis and the saurischians green, which caused me to stop reading to figure out why I was confused. There’s also a bit of text late in the book that’s supposed to say that dinosaurs lived 250 – 65 million years ago, but actually says 25,065 million years ago. Whoops.

  3. Art trumping facts; The very first page of the book contains the caption For 165 million years, dinosaurs walked the Earth, with herds of ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, some non-specific sauropods, and a couple of large carnosaurs out looking for snacks. Overhead, some pterosaurs float lazily. So far, so good.

     The next two pages are the splash pages, with captions that read And flew. And swam., with a very active scene of aerial and aquatic beasties. There’s pterosaurs, archelons, plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs, mosasaurs, none of which are dinosaurs, argh (look ’em up).

     Yes, this is me being pedantic, and yes, they walk back and let the reader known that long dead + reptile-looking does not always equal dinosaur, and yes, the overall theme of the book is about how we have spent a few hundred years learning what dinosaurs were by replacing earlier conceptions with newer ideas.

     But if you’re going to be working in an educational context, you can’t make this big a mischaracterization in the opening pages because the kids will eat you alive for this kind of mistake³.

  All of which just means you’ll have to explain literary devices and editing and artistic choices to the kids that read this book. They’ll get it, kids are smart. Use it as a way to bring up the fact that we’re constantly learning and correcting ourselves, such as when we all had to learn that there were no Brontosaurs, only Apatosaurs. Except for this note on the last story page of the book:

  A lengthy reexamination of the different species of Apatosaurus lead researchers to conclude that there were enough differences to make Brontosaurus its own genus again, weeks before this book was due at the printer.

  Fact: Brontosaurus is now MK and Joe’s least favorite dinosaur.

  None of which is any reason not to run out and get this book immediately. It gives props to a series of early dinoscholars who have traditionally been overlooked (especially women), rightly notes that Richard Own was a complete dick to everybody, and handles the frankly hilarious topic of dinopoops with exactly the dignity and gravity they deserve.

  Plus feathers everywhere. Cool.

Spam of the day:

Science Proves Biblical-Cure – Atheists Stunned

This particular atheist will be stunned when the Bible gets the value of pi more accurate than three. No wonder Solomon had to import architects from Tyre to build his palace.

_______________
¹ I ain’t pooped in five days. Excuse a man.

² I’ll have to quote some to make it clear:

In the year 1800 …
The Earth is 6006 years old.
Dinosaurs are known as monsters.
They lived a few thousand years ago.
They disappeared because of Noah’s flood.
There are no examples of dinosaurs living at this time.
We are certain about all of this.

In the year 1854 …
The Earth is 400,000 years old.
Dinosaurs are known as extinct reptiles.
They lived a hundreds of thousands years ago.
They disappeared for unknown reasons.
There are no examples of dinosaurs living today.
We are certain about all of this.

In the year 1920 …
The Earth is as much as 400 million years old.
Dinosaurs are known as extinct reptiles.
They lived 3 million years ago.
They disappeared because they lost the survival of the fittest.
There are no examples of dinosaurs living today.
We are certain about all this.

³ I still remember standing in the dinosaur halls of the Royal Ontario Museum close to 25 years ago when a small girl came tearing around the corner and stopped dead to look at a model looming over us. She was maybe six years old, absolutely adorable, and her mother asked What’s that one, honey? Is it a plant eater?

She shot back with all the conviction in the world Mom, it’s a Parasaurolophus. She was right, and her pronunciation was dead on. If today she’s reading Dinosuars to her six year old, she’s going to stop on pages 2 and 3 and have the same argh moment I did.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Uncle George, and we discover that although Ray dug down deep to find he truly was Blood of Champion, he was ready to bribe his way out of the Fight the minute it became necessary (or at least attempt to). Ray contains multitudes.

We’re heading east today, to the continent of universal health care — that would be most of the rest of the world, Gary — and borderless borders — a contradiction in terms! — and ancient wines, beers, and cheeses¹. Europe!

• Our first stop is in France, cradle of so many of the arts (comics not the least of them) and home of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. One may recall that about a month ago I mentioned that Stela — the new mobile comics delivery platform — was getting a lot of attention and precisely zero release on Android, so I wasn’t able to offer up anything resembling a review.

  But! FSFCPL is in the iDevice fold, and Stela has recently released a French version, and he’s shared some thoughts on it for you. Key takeaway points:

  [O]nce you use it it becomes clear Stela’s purpose is to publish comics that embrace the 5 centimeters (that’s about 2 inches, for the metrically-challenged) width of today’s smartphone screens.

  That’s good, but Lebeaupin notes that Stela is really designed for handsets; viewing comics on an iPad means the comics are just scaled up, which makes for funnily huge lettering.

  These are comics that are native to that world: the panels are only as wide as the screen (nary a vertical gutter in sight) and can only extend vertically, but they can do so as much as desired because they are read by vertical scrolling. A panel may not necessarily fit on a screen (at least on an iPhone 5/5S/SE; I haven’t checked on the larger models)! An iPhone 5 screenful is a common size, but most of these comics have widely varying panels sizes, and anyway have conversations for instance that extend over multiple screenfuls: they don’t follow a pattern of identically-sized pages. The result is a very fluid flow and a reading experience that is meant to be fast. [emphasis mine]

  Bolded because I think that’s probably the most important selling point of Stela, however it should be balanced against another discovery:

  [I]mages are loaded dynamically and present a spinner if your scroll too fast before they have had time to load, as is traditional in iPhone apps: prioritize the flow, even if that means betraying some implementation realitie

  And some of the decisions (both technical and economic) are a bit bewildering:

  The comics are updated chapter by chapter (which make for checkpoints as well); the economic model is that the first chapter of each story is free, and you can get a subscription (using Apple’s in-app subscription system) to read after that. It is a single subscription global to the app, not per-series, so it works a bit like an anthology series. Comics are always loaded from the network, which bothers me a little: there is no way to preload while on WiFi to avoid eating into your phone data allotment, and no way to read at all if you are off the network. iPod Touches exist, you know. [emphasis mine]

  And depending on your inclination, those might be the dealbreakers right there — let your subscription lapse and you have nothing to show for it — as you’re only given access to what you’re reading right now. Stela is less a comics app than a comics rental platform; those that like to own their media (digital or otherwise), take note. And as always, thanks to FSFCPL for his review.

• A bit futher east and north then, to the land of sauna and tango and linguistic anomalies — I’m speaking naturally of Finland — and Minna Sundberg. We at Fleen have been big fans of Ms Sundberg’s since we saw the crowdfunding campaign for the very pretty book of her first comic, and that regard has only grown since she launched her ongoing magnum opus, Stand Still, Stay Silent. Readers of this page will recall the fact that SSSS took the NCS Division Award for Online Comics — Long Form last May.

  And she’s been cranking out between three and five full pages a week (along with the odd interchapter hiatus of ten days or so) 879 days since November of 2013 — 500 pages in total as of today — making her one of the most productive cartoonists working right now. A page of comics written, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered in less than two days for nearly two and a half years? Sundberg is an unstoppable comics machine, and shows every sign of reaching Sergio Aragonés levels of speed and skill while still in her mid-20s. I can’t wait to see what she’s like in another decade.

  Happy Big Round Number Day, Ms Sundberg. Your work is great and you should feel great.

Spam of the day:

Implant-Providers

Damn it, I told you people I neither need nor want breast implants!

Dental Implants You Can Afford

Oh. I’d say Never mind but I don’t need dental implants either. Gots all ma teeths, don’t need fangs or tusks or anything like that.

______________
¹ Now we’re talking.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; we may imagine Beef and Ray tearing down the road, not yet able to form words.

MoCCA Fest is next weekend, and I’ll be seeing you there, yes? For those who’ve missed the new, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival (presented by the Society of Illustrators) is off tow its third venue in as many years (and its fourth overall), but the SoI folks know how to put on a show and I suspect this one will be as good as the last few, which keep getting subtly better. We’ve seen news about the venue, the show poster, the Guests of Honor, and the programming, so let’s talk about exhibitors that will be there. As usual, I’ve probably missed a few, so let me know of any necessary corrections.

• Time was, MoCCA attracted an exhibitor pool that was heavily concentrated on New York (particularly Brookyln), with a lot of indie and webcartoonists in the mix; longtimers include the likes of Evan Dahm (table I276), Dean Haspiel (A112), Josh Neufeld (same), and Sylvan Migdal (H261, who I must have met at maybe the second MoCCA Fest ever).
• A lot of the original cohort has come and gone, but there are newer indie and webcartoonists (many of them from Brooklyn) who’ll be there, including Rachel Dukes (I268), Jenn Jordan (H261), Aatmaja Pandya (F214), Carey Pietsch (F207), and Alison Wilgus (G231). Heck, some of their generation have become bona fide superstars like the omnipresent Noelle Stevenson (C135).
• Also present since small times have been a strong mix of publishers — Abrams Books (G235/236), Fantagraphics (C136-139), :01 Books (D144), Pantheon (E158/159) — and institutions — Center for Cartoon Studies (E174/175), Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (E160-163), Parsons (J283/284), SVA (A118/119), Syracuse University (E166/167) — dedicated to the craft and perpetuation of comics.
• And one of my favorite parts of MoCCA Fest has been its turnover; there’s always somebody new showing up, with stuff that looks interesting that I haven’t seen before. This year I’ll particularly be on the lookout for Olga Andreyeva (J291), Azure (D146), Alisa Harris (G231), and Ken Wong (I266). I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this list (and the one up above of the newer generation of Brooklynites and allies) is overwhelmingly made up of women; I suspect it will not be too many years before a show like this one has to have a panel that asks what it’s like to be a dude making comics.

Lastly, for any that have energy left over after a first day that’s likely to be packed full, SoI are sponsoring an afterparty/awards ceremony from 7:00pm to 11:00pm on Saturday night, although you need to be an exhibitor, volunteer, Guest of Honor, or otherwise VIP to get in. Fun starts with free beer from Flying Dog Brewery until it runs out (cash bar afterwards) and a small plates buffet; the MoCCA Fest Awards of Excellence ceremony starts at 8:00pm.

Keep in mind that the SoI dates from a time when a skilled trade like illustrators could purchase a fancy-ass building for their headquarters, and they’ve got a century’s worth of neat stuff on display. If you can go, I’d encourage you to do so; if you can’t, I’ll see you on the floor.

Spam of the day:

topkitchenremodeling Gorgeous Kitchens – Check it out.

No comment.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: The Fight is done, The Acres are ruined. There will either be no winner in 2006, or co-winners; the Ruling Body has had their rules upended along with their infrastructure. All that is left is a rapidly receding plume of smoke in a rearview mirror.

We’re nearly there. We’re nearly finished. There is only the travel home and the hero’s welcome and the wind down; except there was no wind down.

Something changed in Chris Onstad after The Great Outdoor Fight; he’d been on a hot streak of classic stories for a couple of years, but the Fight was a different thing altogether, and any of the stories came after would have ranked with the very best of the strip but for their immediate predecessor. Let’s break it down:

• The Great Outdoor Fight — 11 Jan to 30 March; 43 strips

One intercalary strip on 3 April

• The Couch Saga (incuding Ebay Platinum Reserve) — 5 April to 16 May; 21 strips

One intercalary strip on 17 May

• Magic Underpants — 18 May to 7 June; 10 strips plus 2 pages from Beef’s zine
• The Badass Games — 8 June to 23 June; 8 strips

That’s a pretty much unbroken string of six months of stone fucks (as Ray would say), and then got followed up with the introduction of the Mexican Magical Realism Camera which came back two months later to propel:

• Ray’s Mexican Magical Realism Adventure — 21 September to 25 October; 17 strips, plus 4 unrelated strips sprinkled in

And then at the end of the year, you get:

• Mr Band — 11 December to 22 January; 21 strips, plus one unrelated

That’s the better part of a year of sheer brilliance, a run that wouldn’t be matched again (although a year and a half later you did get Cornelius’s New Laptop followed by Greeting Cards For Guys followed by Beef And Molly’s Wedding).

Those 120 strips made Achewood a deeper, weirder place, laying down ideas that have persisted for the ensuing decade. Until the Fight, high points were shorter arcs or single strips (I’m looking at you, The Bead Shop), or scattered over time (Beef Goes To The Moon ran from June to September of 2002, but was interspersed with many unrelated strips).

Not that Achewood was a fallow strip before the Fight, or after Mr Band, but this was the period when everything was firing on all cylinders and five years worth of excellence got crammed into one year. It was the best, weirdest time, and though we could see that something was changing even as it was happening, it’s only with the distance of years that we can see how much changed.

Without Achewood in January 2006 to January 2007, a lost of subsequent webcomics just don’t happen; the fact that Fight itself contains approximately as many strips as the entire run of Achewood for the past five years should serve to tell us only one thing: we were incredibly lucky to get that story and the year that followed it. And if every subsequent day has not always lived up to the new tradition, we will always have those 43 morsels of perfection.

Plus, and I don’t know if you noticed, but Ray ripped a guy’s face off.

Spam of the day:

Re:

Best regards,
Cedric Atizado

That was oddly efficient.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: In case you were wondering what happens when metals kiss and fuel turns lively, Ray and Beef are ready to demonstrate for you. One hopes that all the dudes (you know it’s dudes) up in Tower One got away without too much hurt, but honestly that is what they get for thinking Beef would just stand around with his butt on the back of his body.

Let’s talk about some books, shall we?

• Since we spoke yesterday, Girl Genius: The City of Lightning has funded out and I will not be offering a prediction on its total. For one, while it met the criteria for the FFFmk2, that calculation would have placed GG:TCOL somewhere around US$95K +/- 19K and the book is already over the lower bound of that range as of this writing.

  Secondly, look at the daily data: steady, high funding for three days (in both dollars and backers), then BAM. Fourth day is significantly up in terms of both, before the fifth day (presently ongoing) looks like the first three. It’s not following the usual pattern of high initial response, long tail, and (presumably) a spike up in the last few days.

  The fourth day data may be explained by the fact that the Foglios sent out a notice of this KS to backers of the last one yesterday … three days into the campaign. They have a history of soft launching and not laying on the promotion for a couple of days, and damn if it doesn’t work for them.

  The per-backer dollar figure is right in line with the last two Girl Genius books, the lesser of which managed more than twice as many backers as TCOL has so far; with 20 days to go and no signs yet of a drop off, look for this one to at least double from its current totals.

• I don’t believe that I mentioned that I got my copies of Lucky Penny (Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh) and Junior Scientist Power Hour: Volume One (Abby Howard) in the past little while, in fulfillment of their respective Kickstarts. Each is exactly as promised, and better than reading online.

  In the case of Lucky Penny, important plot points are much easier to catch when they are 15 minutes back in reading time, rather than months ago at two pages per week. In the case of JSPH, it’s a matter of editorial pruning, and the fact that maybe my favorite Abby Howard strip¹ is right at the beginning of the book and easy to find.

  Both are highly recommended; look for Lucky Penny at your nearest comic book store or book books store, and maybe Howard will put JSPH in her store at some point in the future so you don’t need to feel like a chump if you missed out on backing the project.

• I’m not certain how I missed this one², but I see that the most charmingly cynical (or cynically charming) comic on the webs is getting ready to print its first collection:
  

  YES, that’s correct! Me and Anthony are gettin the first volume of BACK ready for ya. Cover done by our best boy John Keogh @tomselleck69

  The first book contains the entirety of the prologue to chapter 4. It’s almost 200 pages! It’s crazy! We also got letterer Britt Wilson to letter each chapter title, only seen in the archives on the site. Book also contains a bunch of sketches from Anthony AND myself (KC) from before the story began to little notes about characters or pages I’d send to Anthony.

  That, naturally, is the voice of KC Green, speaking for himself and Anthony Clark about BACK, which all right-thinking folk know is damn terrific. The announcement, by the way, is not a call for funding — the books are already at the printer, and with luck with premiere at TCAF in seven weeks time, and then on the TopatoCo Merchateria, HECK OF YES.

• And a bare two weeks after TCAF will be the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo — CAKE for short — and there we should see the debut of Evan Dahm’s second volume of Vattu³ as well as a very Dahmian deck of playing cards. I suspect that both will be found in Dahm’s TopatoCo Boutiquery shortly thereafter.

Spam of the day:

Make Your Phone Your New Fax Machine

You think that I have a need for a fax machine in 2016? That’s so cute.

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¹ Of course, I have a greyhound who does this, which may explain how Spoons on a quest through the Ass Realm is somehow only my second favorite.

² Actually, I do — I overlooked the link on the comic page (which only updates once a week), which links to a Tumblr, which is not a platform I subscribe to. Thus, it would be easy to miss for two weeks but that’s still on me.

³ And bang on time; estimated delivery on the book was listed as May, and CAKE is in May.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I think it rests in the heart of every person — some deeply, some closer to the surface — the desire (if not always the opportunity, or the inclination) to make the metals kiss and the fuel turn lively. This time it is Ray that has the plan, and he has set Beef down and pointed him in the direction of victory.

• There’s probably no indie creator with as recognizable a style that can be put to as many different contexts as Sophie Goldstein. Her artwork is slightly cartoony, and in the bright, colorful expression that you had in Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell you got the world’s cutest Apocalypse with a subtle, existential melancholy underneath. The environmental degradation of The Oven made use of her tendencies towards stark iamges.

  Her sense of blocky color is at its most Kochalkaesque in The Good Wife, providing a startling contrast with the body horror of the plot. Comics as different as Strands and Coyote clearly come from the same artist — and the very cynical undercurrent of the stories from the same writer — but have very different feels. Everything she does is at once the same and different.

  And most same and different of them all is House of Women, the first part of which garnered Goldstein an Ignatz Award in 2014, and the second part of which has been recently released in Goldstein’s store She was kind enough to send me a PDF copy recently and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

  Because that same style — that simple, clear style, no more lines than are absolutely necessary — is working overtime in House of Women, tackling such themes as colonization, homogenization, appropriation, gender (the males we see may as well be separate species from their corresponding females), and the breakdown of a sororal religious order as women lose the roles they chose for themselves (maiden, mother, and crone are there, but so is a fourth, a combination of the other three) and find themselves at odds.

  At first it seems to have a dim view of the titular Women — they land on a planet with the express purpose of capital-c Civilizing the poor, benighted, unenlightened, stupid natives for the benefit of their Empire — blundering about, sure of the rightness of their cause. The local advance agent — a male from Back Home, but alien in his own way — seems to be more in tune with the local planet and its natives, but he’s exploitative in his own way.

  The Women, in turn, are motivated by such noble impulses as Seeking Knowledge, Duty, Sacrifice, and Kindness, but not all those impulses turn out to be benevolent. Meanwhile, their notions of What Is Right clash against the implacable reality of biology on their alien world to tragic ends.

  Everybody’s convinced that they’re doing the best most sensible thing possible in whatever circumstances present themselves, and that’s the cause of all the troubles — nobody’s asking Do you need help? when Here’s what you need to do is available as an alternative. There’s greater tragedy coming in Part III, no doubt, and while some of it is beyond anybody’s control, a great deal is down to thinking that frontiers and other cultures are things to be messed about with. It’s an affecting, lingering read.

• For those of you that missed the news, the newest Girl Genius book collection — The City of Lightning¹ — has gone up for pre-order on Kickstarter; as of this writing, more than 800 backers have contributed in the past three days, bringing the project to bout 75% of its US$70,000 goal. Which, granted, it a heck of a lot of money, but Kaja & Phil Foglio put together heck of beautiful books, on heavy paper, with eye-popping color (by Cheyenne Wright) on every page, and plenty of extras. Given that they historically see 3000-4000 backers, expect this one to go to the 2.5x to 3x funding level over the next three weeks.

  And look, this is the fifteenth Girl Genius collection², plus all the other print collections that the Foglios have done over the past couple decades, so they know this game. The art will be done (the strips in question ran from January to November of last year), the production work will be submitted on time, and the finished product will be in your (my) hands on time in July. The only reason not to pledge now is because you expect to see Professoressa & Professor Foglio some time after July and want the visceral thrill of handing them money in person. Me, my luggage is gonna be full enough at San Diego, so I’m pledgin’ now.m There, I just pledged.

• If I were to name one person that I never would have met but for this blog, one person who I cannot imagine at this date being absent from my life, it would be KB “Otter” Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed. I discovered her strip in the summer of 2006 and got hooked pretty instantly; one AGAHF collection³, four tie-in novels, multiple minicomics, several terroristic threats against my person and sanity, numerous Thin Mints, and one trampling by her bear-sized dog later, Spangler and I are great friends.

  Oh yeah, her comic and her novels are stronger than ever. So there’s nothing for it but a retrospective:

  The comic will be ten years old in April! What better time to start releasing the archives on tumblr with occasional snide remarks?

  Keep in mind that Spangler’s art has come a long way in ten years, and that she’s done multiple passes at old strips to improve the art from its original state, but that her redos stop just shy of 100 strips in so pretty quickly we’ll be back to the no-eyes style that I still think of fondly (albeit with occasional snide remarks of my own). S’gonna be fun.

• Oh, and did I mention up top that it’s Sophie Goldstein’s birthday today? And that to celebrate, she’s letting original pages from The Oven go for US$85 each, domestic shipping included? It’s her first sale of originals in years, so check out what’s still up for grabs before you miss out.

Spam of the day:

While we don’t know what the smitten Instagram star will wear on her big day

I know, I know, context is for the weak, but trust me — that sentence made absolutely zero additional sense in context.

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¹ You didn’t think sparks were going to stop at mere Light, did you?

² In fact, there is a backer level that will get you all fifteen books if you’ve slacked off until now.

³ Disclaimer: I wrote the foreword.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray shows surprising ingenuity in a moment of crisis, takes action, and surprises the hell out of Beef (who until now has been the master planner and anticipator of every possible outcome). We are all surprised.

We have mentioned on this page, some few times, that The Nib will be returning from the dead and taking up residence in the First Look Media family (home of The Intercept, amongst other sites). Nib generalissimo Matt Bors has managed to re-obtain the services of Eleri Harris Matt Lubchansky to help on the editorial side, and they’d like to get your pitches even if you aren’t named Matt:

We’re looking to publish the absolute best journalism, political satire and non-fiction comics, ones that grapple with the big issues of the day and the ones that haven’t been given enough attention?—?subjects that could benefit from coverage in comics form and touch on politics and culture in interesting ways.

Take a look back at the sort of work that The Nib published before its hiatus, and you’ll have an idea of what they’re looking for now: meticulous reporting that evokes righteous outrage; voices speaking on topics normally whispered because tradition and etiquette have demanded it; facts that you never learned in school; history as it’s happening; debunking of myths that kill.

And, because Matt, Eleri, and Matt were too polite to say in that post: they pay. Get opinionated, get irritated, don’t forget to be funny. And because Bors, Harris, and Lubchansky¹ are serious about having a wide variety of points of view, they’ll no doubt be including work from people that drive you (or at least me) up the wall and make you wonder Couldn’t they have written that check to somebody not worthless?

Good.

Because as much as creators like _______ and _________² piss me the hell off, I’m glad to see them on The Nib and hate-read them. It keeps me sharp to pick apart crappy arguments. It challenges me to make my own beliefs more logically coherent and truer to reality. And, as a friend of mine pointed out years ago when Pat Fucking Buchanan was running for president, it’s better to have your opponents in plain sight where you can keep an eye on them³ instead of letting them fester in the dark, unminded and up to who knows what.

Did I mention that they pay? Because they pay. Read the entire call so you know what they’re looking for and don’t waste their time, then contact them with pitches at thenib, which may be found at firstlook, a damn fine .organization.

Also, let me recommend that Matt Inman to do something in the vein of his Trump Armband for The Nib, because damn.

Spam of the day:

Lost in a tangle of bodies, two bad things happened to Arizona in the Pac 12 semifinals

I don’t know what any of that means, but it sounds hot.

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¹ Not a law firm, but maybe it should be.

² No names, I’m trying to stay positive here, but assume that I hate whoever you hate and we’ll be besties.

³ Which is why I am — and you’ll never hear me use these words in any other context — grateful for Donald Trump’s current run for the White House. Because he is dragging out into the light a lot of people I should be keeping an eye on, most of whom work for him. And because if we want to have a better world, we need to keep an eye on those who would fracture it for their own short-term self-interest.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: The Jeeps.

Ray faces an impossible situation, and forced to choose between beating Beef to the point of crippling him and facing his own death, he chooses defiance. This is the spark of greatness that was in him all along, and we have no idea if he can make good on it, or if he will live down to his approved cowardice. But for now, the ruling body (which is still in lowercase, note) had better watch its collective ass.