The webcomics blog about webcomics

Can’t Blame Morgan-Mar For Today

Again with the weeds, and tonight’s EMS duty night, so no chance of getting ahead. It’s almost like work takes up the whole day!

Items of note:

  • Benign Kingdom does the most beautiful art books in webcomics, and they are inexplicably at 70% funded with 7 days to go on the latest iteration of their art. Compare to earlier efforts, ranging from 121% to 937% of goal and ask yourself if you want this to be the project that fails. There’s loads of unproven creators biting off more than they can chew (or have the IP right for) to make up the approximately 50% of projects that fail. Let’s not see people who can actually fulfill wither on the vine.
  • Speaking of B9, one of the contributors this time around is Meredith Gran, and this is your periodic reminder that she continues to kill it on Octopus Pie, particularly with the quiet moments of self-revelation. This is one is so good, says so much in so few words (and fills in loads of characterization between the cracks of the last half-decade of story without ever resorting to exposition) that killing it seems too mild. Gran is laying waste to entire civilizations and salting the earth for all times lest enemies rise up to challenge her eternal rule.
  • Dante Shepherd¹ continues to spend that grant money in productive ways to teach large, complicated engineering ideas. See, I was an electrical engineer² in college, so what I know about chemists is that their building always had beakers that smelled funny, and what I know about the chemical engineers (such as Shepherd) is their building always had 500 liter tanks that smelled funny.

    So basically I am ignorant of what went on in those enormous arrays of pipes in the high-bay lab and now I know a bit more, thanks to him and Matt Lubchansky. Also cookies are involved somehow?

  • Speaking of [web]comics making their way through the development cycle of Hollywood, I see that Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet has taken one more step towards realization with the news that the executive producer of the current Star Trek TV efforts is taking over the scripting. Also I see that the reports are that Amulet was to star Will Smith’s kids, but now it’s not … did we know that? I’m not sure we knew that.
  • Let us finish, as is often the case, in the northern reaches of Webcomickia, which is to say, Canada. Ryan North has shared the news that his and Erica Henderson’s Squirrel Girl has new merch in the wild, and also the less-happy news Howard The Duck (written by fellow Torontonian Chip Zdarsky, drawn by Joe Quinones) will be coming to an end soon. It’s a shame, and I hope it doesn’t presage more cancellations of comics that are actually, you know, fun.

    At least we have some more good news from Canada, as it seems Blind Ferret is hiring. Supremo Ryan Sohmer is vocal about the often-dismal pay scales in comics, so you can bet the salary on this one doesn’t fall in the category of crap job you take to build up experience while eating ramen.


Spam of the day:

A sure-fire way to get richer …

Make regular deposits into an index fund that you leave the hell alone for 20-30 years? Oh, sorry, I see — fake gold futures from a crazy person that believes the Federal Reserve is illegal and that random punctuation in your name means you don’t have to pay taxes. Silly me.

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¹ Professor, bon vivant, man about town.

² AKA the best kind of engineer. Shepherd would probably dispute that, but I think we can agree that at least we aren’t civil engineers, ew.

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