Let’s see what some folks are up to, yeah?

• Magnolia Porter is one of the people you really should know. Her comics are great, and she’s just the nicest, most adorable person ever. Nobody doesn’t love her and if they do, screw them. I was a bit bummed to see that Monster Pulse is on hiatus this week — but not excessively, she doesn’t work for me, I will accept her offer of free entertainment at whatever schedule she finds appropriate — but then she turned around and more than made up for it with a new comic, a whole chapter’s worth dropped all at once.

  Sensitive Soul is, not to put too fine a point on it, manga. The heroine ranges wildly between sweetness & light and white-hot fury. The mysteriously hunky stranger is instantly loathed, then she decides he his the titular sensitive soul and must be redeemed/pursued. It’s only a matter of time before Dottie (the main character) starts going gooey over the fact that Cal-sempai smiled at her.

  None of this is meant as critique. Porter is clearly having the time of her life telling her story in well-established patterns, and it’s a hoot¹. She’ll release Sensitive Soul in chunks as she’s able, which will be made easier if you care to download the chapters on a pay-what-you-want basis (minimum: one measly buck).

• The pay-what-you-want model is definitely attractive to creators whose revenues in advertising aren’t pulling in what they used to (so many ad blockers, so many reposts to Reddit or Imgur or Tumblr or other mis-spelled services), and can’t ride out the considerable wait between books and the chance to recoup some living expenses. There’s a nice explication of the whole changing model for pro webcomickers presented by Chris Hallbeck on Twitter today:
  

  Back when I first started making comics on the internet everyone came to my website to see them. Now people read my comics in many different ways. Instagram, tumblr, twitter, Facebook, mobile apps and many others I probably haven’t heard about yet. I think this is great! I want as many people as possible to read my comics the way they want. The only hitch is this is my full time job and the way I support my family. My main source of income is through the ads displayed on my websites. Now that people’s reading habits are changing, my ability to buy food and pay bills is shrinking.

  That’s the text for the first four panels, in case you’re disinclined to click the link. The last two panels introduce Hallbeck’s fans to the other mainstay of income in a world of reader casualness and ad blockage — Patreon. Hallbeck’s hardly the first webcomicker to try to get his reader base (which is incredibly variable — a widely retumbled comic could hit 40 or 50 thousand eyeballs, but few of those could be called regular readers), but he’s probably the first to have this note on his Patreon:

  Want more now? If you become a patron to Chris Hallbeck, you’ll immediately get access to as many as 714 patron-only posts.

  Seven hundred and fourteen? That’s crazy. And if even 1% of those Tumblrinos decides to kick a buck a month to Hallbeck (and that’s a pretty crappy return rate), he’ll more than replace declining ad revenue. Here’s hoping for a pretty crappy return rate instead of an extremely crappy one.

• Ryan North announced a new comics project, but I think I’ma give this one a pass; it’ll take the form of a 2-page backup story in a limited run series that I really don’t care about, but hopefully they’ll sell the completed story in some form down the line.

  It sounds really good, though, so Marvel came pretty close to getting me to spring for five issues about Inhumans, but four bucks an issue is too much to ask when I’m only there for two pages. Inhumans: Once And Future Kings starts in August, and if it’s the sort of thing you might be interested in, North’s backups featuring LOCKJAW, canine master of time and space! [emphasis original] ought to push you over the edge.

  Seriously, though — make this a one-shot with some of Hannah Blumenreich’s Spidey stories and I’ll pay cash money so fast it’ll make your head spin.

Spam of the day:

Grace Jones [incomprehensible Cyrillic text]

Yeah, don’t think that Grace Jones — the most fabulous person alive — is spamming me in Russian. Try harder.

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¹ Also a hoot: a hidden Achewood gag, which I hope Porter turns into a habit. That golden action is so crunchy.