The webcomics blog about webcomics

Books, Books, Books

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.

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