Actually, there’s not really a trick here. There’s a new Abby Howard spooooky comic for Halloween, which is definitely a treat. The conclusion of the story is less trick than whooo-boy, that’s gonna be some nasty globs of flesh and gore, so I guess we should have used the title Nasty Globs Of Flesh And Gore Or Treat, but it doesn’t really scan, does it?

I may be getting ahead of myself.

Ms Howard does some of the very best black-and-white comics around, with an especial emphasis on the creepy. Sometimes the creepy is muted by the funny, sometimes it’s really horryifying, but she always finds something to set the prickles up the back of your neck. Of late, both Junior Scientist Power Hour and The Last Halloween have been scarce on updates, owing to the work she’s doing on the sequel(s) to Dinosaur Empire, but she’s remedied that with her new short story, The Door In The Kitchen.

The eponymous door is based on a real one (scroll down), for which there is a precedent — The Grudge Hole that contains 80s Tom Hanks is based on an actual feature in a previous Howard domicile. I suspect that 80s Tom Hanks didn’t really live in her bedroom, and I also suspect that there’s not really a creepy monster living behind a door behind a fridge in Howard’s kitchen, but you never know.

What makes The Door In The Kitchen so effective are the ways that Howard breaks the normal rules of (scary) comics. Having survived an initial brush with the beastie, Our Heroine spends a sleepless, fearful night at a friend’s house (completely standard). She returns expecting everything will be fine in daylight, but finds said beastie still here (still normal), but when her improvised attempts at driving it away prove fruitless, she decides (and I quote) I’ll deal with this later.

This should have resulted in immediate, karmic death, but instead she spends a sleepless night on the couch in a single panel on an all-black page, simultaneously breaking the standard rhythm of scary stories and comics.

I’ll spare you any spoilers for what happens in the remainder of the story, except to note that Howard’s observation that people can get used to anything if it’s more convenient is spot on, and her use of black and white serves the story’s mood in a way that few other creators manage with a Technicolor palette. To say nothing of the beastie’s design — a few lines, mostly hidden, plenty to project your own fears onto.

Howard’s up there with Emily Carroll when it comes to drawing short to medium-length creepy stories, and pretty much in her own class when it comes to longform. Read The Door In The Kitchen once the sun goes down … if you dare.

Spam of the day:

Well, hey there! Young and energetic cutie here looking to continue exploring my wild side with a new man.
Are you available to meet this week or next for drinks and see if we click? I only use this site for hookups so if that’s not your thing it’s no problem..

Oh, right, I’m going to accept an invite for anonymous sex from “SqrtnAmy16” on Halloween. I’m absolutely certain to get murdered and/or mutilated in this scenario.

Oh, man! Manafort and Gates indicted, Papadopoulos pled guilty and has been cooperating for months, and I got my copies of Soonish and the abridged versions of both the Bible and all of science! It’s a day full of presents!

There will be a proper review of Soonish coming, err, soonish; I was lucky enough to read a copy of the manuscript late in the editing process, but that was a year ago and I want to see what the final version is like.

In the meantime, please note that David Malki ! is doing his thing again, which in this case is defined as making something cool and unique with the tools at his disposal. Longtime readers of this page may recall that the tools at Malki !’s disposal incorporate extensive wood- and metal-working capabilities, up to and including lasers.

Taking a page from a popular piece of his convention merch (cork coasters in geeky designs), Malki ! apparently asked himself What if I made geeky designs in laminated wood, larger, suitable for display on horizontal surfaces or wall hanging? The logical answer being, ART:

Framed artwork made with lasers! Each piece is hand-assembled in our Los Angeles workshop. The square ones are 12×12″ and the rectangular ones are 11×17″ These lighthearted designs will brighten any room AND listen to your troubles without complaint. And because they’re made of resin laminate (assembled from cut-out shapes of different colors and textures), they’ll stay bright and colorful for at least 200 years, or so the manufacturer says. Why would they lie? [emphasis original]

Wall Buddies, as they are named, represent key underlying character traits that we all posses: Memory (represented by a floppy disk¹), Hunger (a pizza), Proficiency (a Nintendo controller), Strategy (a chessboard²), Synthesis (a cassette tape), Patience (a Tetris game, with the long piece about to drop in perfectly), Improvisation (a d20), and Productivity (the happy poop emoji).

Each goes for US$40 in the Kickstarter (with multiples available), as well as the opportunity to hang out in a laser-equipped shop and make your own. The campaign runs just about another month, and the exceedingly modest goal of US$2650 is already 35.5% funded. These sorts of projects tend to be short runs for Malki !, so if you don’t get in now, there probably won’t be a lot left over for purchase via other channels³.

Okay! That’s it! Now to engage in a bit of political schadenfreude, read some funny and enlightening books, and (oh, yeah), do my actual job. Stupid job.

Spam of the day:

Anabelle wants to invite you to a great site

Anabelle is pretty excited to tell me about Ashley, who apparently is super hot and wants to have hot sex with me because it would be hot. But more interesting is that domain that Anabelle is mailing from: pleasantgiftsfromsanta.com. Apparently, Santa is a pimp.

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¹ Floppy disks are an obsolete computer storage format, kids. Know your history!

² Not an actual chessboard, the image of a chessboard, with a game in progress.

³ Similarly, the annual Wondermark calendar inserts, which will probably go up for order/Kickstart about the time this campaign closes.

One recap, three things coming up, then the weekend.

Spam of the day:

FaceRig releases fun Halloween avatars and multiuser tech

I have no idea what any of this means, and the attached press release doesn’t really tell me. Weird.

_______________
¹ To clarify: Mark Witton does amazing art and is an actual working paleontologist, with a scientific and artistisc focus centering on pterosaurs. Great artist, but not a cartoonist. No stories.

² Quit snickering, this is serious.

Karl Kerschl is a busy guy. He was a key contributor to DC’s Gotham Academy (recently wrapped), and has spent much of the past year on a creator-owned Image book, Isola, which is getting ready to debut. And the first rule of independent creators is that paying work with a steady check comes before labo[u]r of love that may pay off in acclaim now and print collections later.

Thus, the Einser-winning and always wonderful The Abominable Charles Christopher has been back-burnered for a while. July 2014 saw the last of the regular, weekly updates, which was followed by a series of guest strips for the remainder of the the year.

May and June of 2016 were good to us, featuring a resumption of weekly updates, notably including the last time we saw our nominal hero and self-appointed sidekick.

Then weekly became monthly but it didn’t matter, because Kerschl deftly blended forest critter side-stories (including the funniest of the running arcs — the hapless bird constantly freaking out over the state of his marriage) with more serious arcs that merged back into the apocalyptic plot (Vivol! Corruption on the force!).

And now, back to the Apocalyptica. It doesn’t matter that it’s been a year since the last update, or sixteen months since we saw the nasty here — the story is just as compelling, the art just as gorgeous, and all of the players waiting to take up their appointed roles again.

This is why we follow Twitterfeeds, and why RSS is still a valuable technology (so, uh, get on that, Tumblr). Take this time to get caught up on the story (I’d recommend from when Luga really started digging into the Sissi Skunk case) and fall in love with the strip all over again.

Oh, heck, who am I kidding. Go all the way back to Squirrel Chew¹. You won’t regret it.

Spam of the day:

Stan Lee’s L.A. Comic Con Teams with WOW – Women of Wrestling to Present First Ever Fandom Experience in a Pro Wrestling Ring

Is it just me, or is it maybe time to appoint a conservator to keep Stan Lee from attaching his name to the worst friggin’ ideas ever? I mean, after he and Kirby split, Kirby went on to create amazing stuff and Stan went on to create … yeah. Stripperella, this thing, and the motivation for Fake Stan Lee. Not a whole lot else.

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¹ The history of which may be found here.

No hobbits, though. At least, I don’t think so.

On Saturday, 28 October (that would be this coming Saturday, the day after the day after tomorrow), after two years vagabonding in the wilderness, the Cartoon Art Museum will open the doors of its new home:

The Cartoon Art Museum will be open for business on Saturday morning, October 28, from 11am to 5pm!

That new home will be 781 Beach Street, on the famed Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. And what better way to reopen a San Francisco institution than by holding a retrospective of another San Francisco institution?

The new @cartoonart Museum re-opens this weekend with a retrospective of my work! San Francisco, we are so lucky to have this institution!

Raina Telgemeier retrospective, muthascratchers! And not just Raina, but also a tribute to Mike Freakin’ Mignola’s Hellboy, and an art showcase of another Bay Area stalwart, Nidhi Chanani¹. Raina’s already had a walkthrough and looks really happy with how things turned out.

Not that that’s any surprise, to be frank. Curator Andrew Farago has been guiding CAM’s programs for the past decade or so, and even in the two years that it lacked any space to call its own, he was producing compelling events in conjunction with plenty of other cultural institutions in San Francisco. I would find it difficult to believe that he would choose now to put forth anything other than the very best that CAM can muster.

And CAM’s very best is very, very good, y’all. Anybody in the Bay Area that doesn’t check this out, you’re dead to me. And anybody that loves cartoons, do me a solid and consider dropping CAM a few bucks, yeah? They’ve earned it.

Spam of the day:

Visa

Yes, incomprehensible block of Cyrillic letters, I completely believe that you are an important notice about my Visa card. Totally.

_______________
¹ Who will be in Seattle in support of her new book, Pashmina. Pretty sure she’ll hop over to CAM as soon as she’s home to see her stuff all blowed up on the walls, though. No idea if Mignola will be around.

I swear that title actually means something in context.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith were at Strand Boooks in Manhattan last night, kicking off their monthlong book tour in support of Soonish. For those of you that don’t want to read, the talk was recorded for C-SPAN and will appear as part of their books series in a couple weeks, and Zach did a solo interview with ABC today that that went over many of the same points. Everybody else, onwards.

Here’s the thing about Soonish that you should know — it was a joint effort that played to both authors strengths (Kelly: scientific interviewing and bibliographies; Zach: wide and deep self-taught curiosity about nerd stuff and also dick jokes), that would have absolutely destroyed a lesser marriage.

Each of the topics that they examined took a solid month of research and writing and interviewing and doublechecking — and keep in mind that they did the full workup on more than the ten technologies that made it into the final book¹. Much of it took place while Kelly was particularly busy². There were Nobel laureates to talk to, agents and editors to keep happy, and a looming deadline.

For those that are interested in the mechanics of making the book and their working process, they’ll be recording a podcast on that topics in New York City tonight, but the short version is (per Zach) For any task, somebody has to be in charge. It doesn’t matter who, and it switched back and forth for each chapter, but somebody has to be the one that make the decision to alter direction, kill the project, take responsibility. That, and recognizing it’s not personal, is how they got through the process.

But when you get to write a book about all the ways that things that look great (spaceflight for US$500/kg instead of US$20,000!) will actually kill us in foreseen (whoever gets it first can just hang out in orbit with a bunch of tungsten rods that they drop onto Earth with the force of nuclear bombs!) or unforeseen ways (and in order to do it, you have to have perfect understanding of the weather patterns of the globe, predict them with 100% accuracy into the future, and build a 100,000 km long chain of carbon atoms with exactly zero of them out of place or it all fails spectacularly!), that process has its perks.

That’s before they get to how humanity will voluntarily let itself be slaughtered by robots in exchange for cheap cookies, or just the reassurance that the robot is trying hard to help while the smoke and toxic gases are getting closer. As a species, we are often not very smart, which means maybe we shouldn’t be allowing people to create their own viruses for fun and profit?

And what do you do when people will inevitably engage in acts like hate crimes in augmented reality, while doing nothing in actual real reality? Then Pokémon Go came along and planted Pokestops at the Holocaust Museum and the sites of concentration camps, and we saw how maybe we haven’t anticipated all the outcomes just yet. I’m not saying that we’re good at planning for unexpected contingencies, but we’re at least starting to get used to the idea that we haven’t thought of all the side effects in our whiz-bang future tech utopias. Like Kelly said, Nintendo did the right thing because … well, you know.

Highlights:

• The very nice woman that owns the Strand introduced Kelly and Zach, but pretty obviously was not familiar with the work of the Whiner-Schmidts.
• There were multiple questions about SMBC comics and how Kelly looks grumpy in them, which I should really dispel. Kelly is one of the bubbliest, most excited to share knowledge, funniest people you’ll ever meet. Okay, so she doesn’t get the whole single-use unlubricated monocle thing³, but she is no more the scowling cartoon than Zach is the feral, unclothed crazy person he draws himself as (although, on second thought …).
• Since Zach got a couple of solo questions about his work, I asked one to Kelly: Favorite parasite and why? After taking a moment to reassure the audience that studying parasites is her actual job and she’s not just a weirdo, she proudly recounted the story of the parasitoid — it must kill its host to complete the reproductive cycle — that her team discovered. Eudurus set, the Crypt-Keeper Wasp, is a remarkably nasty piece of work and Kelly positively shines when describing it.
• Asked about what they’re working on next, Kelly mentioned getting back to her day job research, and Zach mentioned that he’s teamed up with economist Brian Caplan to illustrate a graphic novel that argues the economic benefits of immigration.

Soonish is available in bookstores everywhere. The book tour continues apace.

Spam of the day:

SqrtnAmy16 wants to know if you’re free this week

No lie, I am running around like an alligator on fire this week. Thanks, though!

_______________
¹ They started with 50, but at book length, that didn’t allow any more depth than a mildly amusing Wikipedia article. They chopped down to 25, then 11, eliminating topics that rely too much on magic, or unrealistic economics, or are so far advanced that minor incremental changes will get us there.

The eleventh was quantum computing, which they abandoned late in the game for not being able to do a sufficiently good job explaining it. The longest surviving chapter in Soonish is ~10,000 words, and QC had more than 30,000 that didn’t do justice and would have only grown further in time and word count. Ten’s a good round number anyway.

² Asked in the Q&A how they dealt with news breaking that disrupted what they’d already written — which happened with both Cheap Spaceflight (thanks, Elon Musk!) and Augmented Reality (thanks, Pokémon Go!) — Kelly responded, I’d say drinking, but I was pregnant while we were writing it.

³ You’re buying them in 25 packs! Why? How? I didn’t mention it to her afterwards, but I did in fact make use of such a monocle to look dapper as fuck at my niece’s wedding.

It was yesterday afternoon when C Spike Trotman — who is on top of things to the degree that I suspect she has a hidden neural jack someplace — tweeted the alarm:

…wait did patreon just ban porn

There’s a flurry of discussion, which I’ll let you examine; suffice it to say that on first read, This Seemed Bad:

Fuck, more than a few people just went from +$10k a month in steady income to NOTHING if this is true. How do you not puke yourself to death

My initial suspicion anytime something porn related gets the heave-ho is that the credit card companies and/or PayPal are at the heart of it, but the vagueness around Patreon’s move seemed disturbing. Fortunately, there are people in the community one may rely upon to explain things with insight and careful analysis, and in the intersection of webcomics and business systems, we have George.

His report was based on primary documents from Patreon and a bit of informed suspicion. This is good stuff, so I’m quoting at length:

Okay gonna talk about the changes to patreon stuff real quick since I see a lot of people losing their minds…

Let’s start with links to their community post – https://patreonhq.com/checking-in-on-our-commitments-to-creators-about-trust-and-safety-8793a53c3cae … and then the guidelines – https://t.co/CrQjy2JNMy

This has been the looming threat as its use as a webcam sub service started growing – https://t.co/ZznhyDk3Xw

The problem doesn’t come down to prudish attitudes, it comes down to credit card processors, and they most certainly finally cracked down.

…

So to go back to patreon in particular – the language they use in their updated guidelines is clear by way of wink and nudge.

If you’re an artist there’s a few full nos – “glorification of sexual violence which includes bestiality, rape, and child exploitation”

If you were selling cam subs or modeling shots – you are out of luck. This is actually similar to Kickstarter’s policy. Art ok? ppl no.

…

So yeah, if you’re drawing smut, flag your patreon adult, keep it all patrons only, & don’t cross the few guides.

And if you cry vague… They’re more specific than kickstarter’s which just say “pornographic content” period. https://www.kickstarter.com/rules/prohibited?ref=rules …

And that hasn’t stopped a whole wave of people from running anthologies, graphic novels, and other books and pins and what have you on it.

Which makes it sound much more like Patreon got rid of people who were less using the platform as a creative funding mechanism, and more for a straight payment processor to get around restrictions from the financial industry. This reading is much closer to Patreon got rid of people stretching rules to the breaking point specifically so it could keep the people well in-bounds.

But is it a danger? I asked Brad Guigar, who as we all know has been making a tidy living from the smut-friendly corners of Patreon for some time now. Here’s what he said on the record:

Patreon’s rules disallowing things like incest, rape, bestiality, and child exploitation don’t really effect [sic] me. My stuff doesn’t go into those areas. The bigger takeaway, for me, was Patreon seems to be taking great pains to accommodate folks who are creating adult content. And that’s huge.

At least, for now. Because a couple of days after I spoke to Guigar about his experiences with Patreon and the cartoon naughties (and goodness, that was just about exactly two years ago!), the world reminded us that nothing is static with respect to how much respect adult content can get in payment channels. To somewhat self-indulgently quote myself from that piece:

We think of webcomics has having evaded gatekeepers, and on a content/editorial basis, it absolutely has. But in trying to make that independent effort a proper business, one must engage in a system that is entirely one-sided. Run afoul of one person at Chase or Bank of America and you’re frozen out; they’ll never take on a major corporate creator of inferior smut (cable and dish companies make a lot of damn money off of naughty pay-per-view; so does every hotel chain other than Hilton, who are weaning themselves off the grumble flicks), but they’ll freeze out anybody that attracts enough attention from a loud enough pressure group.

… With the continued concentration of information services into the hands of fewer and fewer providers, the possibility of getting strong-armed by somebody that doesn’t like your personal aesthetic is something we’re going to have to be increasingly cognizant of. [emphasis original]

Which is why the real lesson of Patreon’s moves yesterday is not the panic we saw in some quarters, or even the modest optimism of Rohac and Guigar: it’s the recognition that Patreon’s support of adult content is 99.44% good for now, but that could change drastically at any time.

The time to start brainstorming the backup plan to Patreon is now, before the disaster strikes. Maybe it never does, in which case hooray. Maybe you draw a line in the sand that says If these ____ changes occur, that’s when I start to transition to _____. Maybe you see the writing on the wall and get in on another channel (partially or fully) well in advance. Revisit your analysis (when you file quarterly taxes is probably a good time) and don’t let external decisions make you go from income to no income without a backup plan.

Do it for the children.

Spam of the day:

Prevent anymore memory loss with these simple steps

The accompanying photo appears to be somebody fondling a beef heart, which is honestly less worrying that what I figured would be involved. These sort of things usually involve horrors like shoving coffee grounds up your urethra or whatever.

Particularly, the bit that says:

Customs policies vary wildly and unpredictably from country to country. You should contact your local customs office for further information; please do not complain to us as we have little to no control over your government’s policies (for now). Customs clearance procedures can sometimes create delivery delays beyond what we originally estimate.

At least, I think that’s the relevant passage. One may recall that waaaay back in May, thanks to the generosity of Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, I was able to give away a copy of the gorgeous first hardcover collection of DRIVE. The winner, a person named Mario, happens to hail from Portugal, which meant that the arrival of the package would happen potentially never. Today, it was delivered.

To my doorstep.

That’s it up at the top of the page¹. I think the stickers on the box mean that it sat at Portuguese customs until they got tired of looking at it/decided not to deliver it, and it was sent back across the ocean to me. Thanks for not stealing it, Portuguese customs/mail officials, that was very nice of you! Suggestions as to what I should do with it are now being cheerfully accepted, but I think that I am not going to try shipping it across the planet again. Mario, and I’m sorry that you didn’t get the book, sorry that it cost US$22.50, 162 days, and probably 15 hours total flight time to end up back where it started. I tried hard.

• I try hard, by coincidence, is how Ryan North signed my copy of Happy Dog the Happy Dog, along with a little hand-drawn doodle of T-Rex. It’s adorable. It’s also a segue, as I note that today is the birthday of Ryan North, and also of John Allison. Webcomics is lucky to have two such excellent gentlemen in it, and we at Fleen wish to offer the very best returns of the day to Messers Allison and North, with the expectations of many more to come.
• Speaking of happy dogs, the fine folks at :01 Books have sent me a copy of the latest addition to their Science Comics series, Dogs: From Predator To Protector by Andy Hirsch.

  It’s a great read, and it’s a heck of a way to teach tweens (and up) not only about pooches, but a goodly amount of evolution and genetics — we’re talking meiosis, DNA base pairs, Punnett squares, alleles, and dominance, people. Darwin’s in there, but he actually is less of a focus than Gregor Mendel and Dmitry Belyaev.

  Add into that a good discussion of dog senses, dog behavior, and dog BALL! BALL! BALL! communication modes, and you’ve got a pretty excellent primer into what’s probably the second-greatest thing accomplished by humanity as a whole³. Dogs is available at bookstores everywhere on Tuesday, 31 October.

Spam of the day:

GRAND_FUCK_AUTO It doesn’t get more fun than this – Play Now

I don’t even want to know.

_______________
¹ At last, I think it is — I haven’t opened the box to see if maybe it’s half a blender instead².

² I checked, not a blender. In fact, it is a copy of the DRIVE hardcover, in perfect condition.

³ I still give the #1 slot to the eradication of smallpox.

It’s time again for MICE — the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, held at University Hall of Lesley University in Cambridge, MA — and that means there’s gonna be indie/webcomickers in attendance. Let’s see what’s up.

First of all, there some really cool programming to see. On Saturday, you’ve got:

• Braden Lamb teaching a workshop on comic making, from 11:00am to noon (Lesley Room)
• Cathy Leamy talking about comics and medicine, also from 11:00am to noon (amphitheater)
• Dirk Tiede talking character and pacing, from 12:30pm to 1:30 pm (Lesley Room)
• The Iron Cartoonist competition will feature contestants like Abby Howard and judges like Mark Siegel, also from 12:30pm to 1:30pm (amphitheater)
• Kazu Kibuishi running a workshop on comic creation, from 2:30pm to 3:30pm (Lunder Arts Center)
• Evan Dahm moderates a discussion on worldbuilding, from 5:00pm to 6:00pm (amphitheater)

And then on Sunday, you’ve got:

• Melanie Gillman, Blue Dellaquanti, and others discussing, from 11:30amm to noon:30pm (amphitheater)
• Jason Shiga talking about interactive comics, from noon to 1:00pm (Eliot Room)
• Whit Taylor will be among those discussing the intersection of the personal and political in comics, from 1:00pm to 2:00pm (amphitheater)
• Sophie Yanow will be talking about autobio comics, from 1:30pm to 2:30pm (Eliot Room)

Bonus: every session will have ASL interpretation available!

In addition to the folks already mentioned, creators present¹ will include Alexander Danner, Alison Wilgus, Kori Michele, Luke Howard (B), Luke Howard (J), Maki Naro, Matt Lubchansky, Penina Gal, Rosemary Vallero-O’Connell, and Zack Giallongo. And, since it’s in her neighborhood and all, I imagine my good friend Brigid Alverson will be wandering the floor and committing acts of journalism. Tell her I said hi!

Best of all, MICE falls squarely into the expo/festival model of show, and all events are free and open to the public; doors are open 10:00am to 6:00pm on Saturday, and 11:00am to 5:00pm on Sunday. Cambridge is well-served by public transit, with the Porter Square MTA stop maybe 100 meters up Massachusetts Avenue.

They’ve also got one of the most well thought-out anti-harassment codes I’ve ever seen, with staff members trained in Bystander Intervention. I hope that it’s not needed, but it’s great to see a staff that knows not just what they’re supposed to do, but how to do so in a manner that doesn’t make the initial offense worse. Bravo.

Spam of the day:

I am Asma al-Assad, the wife of Bashar Hafez al-Assad of Syria

Yeah, no.

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¹ And, speaking purely from a selfish POV, many thanks to the MICE organizers for placing the exhibitors in a simple alphabetical list, with pictures, names, affiliations, and clickable links to their websites on a simple HTML page. No pop-ups, no pages you have to click through to in order to verify who you’re talking about, just plain info in plain sight. Thank you.

But before we get to the newsy type deals, allow me to offer props to Randall Munroe for today’s xkcd, wherein he anticipated my critique in the alt-text. Of course Munroe knew about the Great Boston Molasses Flood, as famously catalogued by Milk and Cheese. Of course. It’s comforting, in a way, to have it proved that you are not cleverer (or at least more well-versed in obscure historical trivia) than Randall Munroe.

• Soonish debuted yesterday, and although I don’t have my copy yet (it will be coming soonish in fulfillment of Zach Weinermsith’s Kickstarter Gold project), I’m eagerly counting down the days. Not just until I get to read the book in physical form, but also to see Kelly and Zach Weinersmith on their book tour next Monday evening; it’s been years since I’ve seen Zach, so this’ll be fun.

  Also fun: hearing Weinersmith & Weinersmith get five minutes of precious airtime on the nation’s premiere daily economic issues program, Marketplace. It brought into relief how much of technology is really dependent on finding an economic niche it can exploit, which did not occur to me when I had the chance to read through a late pre-final copy of the book last year.

  Give it a listen, get your copy of Soonish, and don’t forget to use the entire situation spice up your sex life: The Marketplace Interview — listen to the mellifluous voice of Kai Ryssdal through your radio, touch him on the penis.

• As of this writing, we’re about 2.5 hours out from the end of the Kickstarter for the omnibus edition of Girls With Slingshots, which has been running for the past month. Apart from giving us a new case study to re-evaluate the validity of the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II and the McDonald Ratio, it’s significant for a couple of other reasons:
  • For the past week or so, it’s been the all-time highest funding Iron Circus project, dethroning the 2014 edition of Smut Peddler.
  • It is currently a little above US$250,000.
  • It thus contributed to the fact that Iron Circus has now raised, across 14 projects, more than one million US damn dollars.

  This is why anybody in indie/webcomics with their head screwed on straight is listening to Spike; it’s why Kickstarter basically adopted her as an evangelist¹. And we’re up more than US$3000 in the time it took me to do the math in the footnotes.

• One of these days, I want to be so accomplished that when I change jobs, it makes the industry press; then again, when it comes to webcomics hack pseudojournalism, I pretty much am the industry press, so I guess I’ll let you know.

  But today, that distinction belongs to three colleagues at Workman Publishing who are hopping ship to Macmillan to start a new imprint in the children’s book group; they include publisher Daniel Nayeri, editorial director Nathalie Le Du, and art director Collen AF Venable — onetime designer at :01 Books (the majority of their entire catalog still designed by Venable, despite her being gone for three years), one time Fluff In Brooklyn webcomicker, and force of nature in book design.

  Being an art director recognized by the publishing industry for the revolutionary things you’re doing for kid books is great. Getting in on the ground floor of a new imprint, able to put your philosophies into practice as guiding principles? Even better.

  The as-yet unnamed new imprint is, I’m confident, going to do amazing things. And, in one of those cases of things coming full circle, Venable will now be returning to Macmillan, which is the parent company of :01, and doubtless see her old co-conspirators around the halls. Congrats to her and her esteemed colleagues, and I can’t wait to see what they do.

Oh, and with 86 minutes to go? GWS is above US$256,000. Yowza.

Spam of the day:

Bouquets for less bucks

No offense, guys, but the visual design of the graphics in this spam is very mid-80s, and reminds me of a newspaper ad I saw back in college for a luv-ya bookay. It was painful.

________________
¹ And let’s consider that of the seven Kickstarter Thought Leaders, there are as of today 35 projects to their names (one of which was unsuccessful), raising a total of approximately² US$3.7 million.

Spike’s responsible for more than US$1 million of that, and 14 of 35 projects. She’s the second-most successful of the creators, beaten only by a three-project design shop (representing two of the seven) that raises US$300K to US$700K on beautiful, pricey art objects.

² Approximately because the GWS campaign is still open, and two of the other Thought Leaders are reported in foreign currencies.