I promise, it will eventually become clear why I have a picture of Frank and Ike up top, but if you’re expecting a quote from Thing-Fish, you’re probably on the right track.

• Let’s go to David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator), who notes in the comments yesterday that he’s also blocked from accessing Oh Joy, Sex Toy [NSFW if your work sucks], on the basis of “Pornography”. It’s not an accurate basis, but if you’re gonna block stuff, porn makes more sense than education.

  Morgan-Mar speculates further than his test may have resulted in a black mark on his personnel record, but due to good fortune, it probably only counts as 90% of a black mark, as he’s now only 90% of an employee¹:

  1a. My Patreon campaign has reached the significant milestone of $700 per month. I set this up as a goal to enable me to reduce my salaried working hours from 10 to 9 days per fortnight, freeing up a full day every 2 weeks to make more comics and do other creative activities. The first immediate effect is a doubling of new Irregular Webcomic! output, from 2 strips to 4 strips a week. I have a business trip last week of September, so this change will take effect from Monday 3 October. Thank you to all the patrons who have enabled this!

  1b. To help enable the change to 4 new strips a week and mesh with my time away on the business trip, IWC’s new strip schedule will change from Sunday/Thursday to Monday/Thursday for the week 25 Sep-1 Oct, and then to Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri beginning on Monday 3 October. Other days will be reruns with new commentary.

  Congratulations to Morgan-Mar, and to all that have helped him to make more comics.

• Meanwhile, a long-awaited pair of books is on the horizon, as Danielle Corsetto announced Girls With Slingshots Books 9 and 10, bringing the longrunning webcomic (currently in recolored reruns with director’s commentary) to a conclusion in print. Please note the unusually tight turnaround — there are but ten days to raise the oddly-specific amount of US$10,934. The short duration is so that Corsetto can hopefully get the books to people in time for the holidays.
• As long as we’re at Kickstarter, the campaign for book 2 of Check, Please! is tearing up the site, with more than 2000 backers and US$180,000 pledged in a bit more than 24 hours. The Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II would have us believe that Ngozi Ukazu would reap on the order of US$750K +/- US$150K, but I notice something here that tends to give the formula a bit of trouble:

  There was an enormous first-day surge, and then a tremendous drop-off to day 2 … the same thing happened with the This Is Fine plush, which led to an overestimation. While there’s certainly a history of KS campaigns dropping off after the first day, pent-up demand of this sort tends to skew the math. I’ma wait to see what the McDonald Ratio says after tomorrow and decide if the FFF mk2 needs tweaking, but heck if I won’t be thrilled if Check, Please! actually hits the 750 large.

• Elsewhere on the web, Larry El Santo Cruz has been absent from Webcomics Overlook for about forever, but he’s back! An account of the Blerch Run in Seattle on Sunday, an analysis of Webcomics: Still A Thing? yesterday, and a piece on webcomics, webtoons, and phones today. It’s the middle one I want to talk about.

  El Santo’s a smart guy, and if he’s musing on if webcomics is still a meaningful term, I’m all ears. I got pulled up short, though, when he concluded his comparison of webcomics against its nearest competitors (newspaper strips once, memes now) with this description:

  Webcomics exist in that nebulous undefined region between passing fad and real art, with aspiring artists edging toward the latter. But… due to the market reality, most webcomics are not the best in either field. Too good to be a meme, not got enough to be art.

  I get what he’s trying to say, but to say that webcomics are not got [sic] enough to be art is, at best, short-sighted. To pull up merely the most recent examples of webcomics embodying art — and here, I’m defining that as the ability to convey point of view and emotion, not merely the visual component — consider two Achewoods and one Schlock Mercenary of current vintage.

  Everything you need to know about Ray, Cornelius, and Téodor is encapsulated in that wordplay; the depth of character is staggering, whether you’ve ever visited Achewood before or not. And I’d challenge you to find a bit of dialogue that expresses the costs of soldiering — a topic that is overlooked far too easily while we engage in prominent displays of support for the troops — more succinctly or with deeper understanding than that discussion between an uplifted polar bear, a four-armed alien, and a sociopathic amorphous blob with a sudden attack of conscience. To paraphrase the immortal Ike Willis, I got yo art hangin’, boy².

  Which is me being overly wordy in saying: we settled this a long time ago. Webcomics are comics. Comics are art. The transitive closure is left as an exercise for the reader, as is my instruction that you all bookmark The Webcomics Overlook and pay attention to El Santo.

• Hey, the next Science Comic from Dantecus Shepherr is up, this one dealing with the refrigeration cycle; per the note at the bottom of the comic, the artwork for this one (and the rest of the series) will be part of a gallery show in Belfast, Maine from Friday. Shepherr will be there, so drop in and say howdy to him in the actual art gallery because webomics are art, goddammit.

Spam of the day:

SeniorSoulmates — ???r??R?l?t??n??????t?rt??With a Date

Please do not send me spam for senior citizen dating. I’m not that old, and the hidden control characters in your text make me suspect you’re looking not for old people to get laid, but for old people to steal from with evil embedded code. Drop dead.

_______________
¹ Morgan-Mar’s newsbox isn’t directly linkable, so I have copied all the relevant text.

² ‘long wit a two-week supply of IGNINT McNUGGET, de breakfast o’ champiums!