I missed the launches of a couple of campaigns while I was at the conference last week, but I’ve since caught up and made some pledges, and figured you might want to as well. But before I do that, an addendum to the note about Raina Telgemeier’s new book announcements from t’other day, because I didn’t specifically call out this detail:

Her April release, Share Your Smile, a how-to guide to telling your own stories, will have an initial print run of 500,000, which will equal the first printing of Ghosts. Her September release, the new autobio Raina story, Guts?

One. Million. Copies.

They’ll sell ’em, too. I’m gonna make a bet, the Toby Ziegler bet, that Graphix already knows when they’ll need to go back to press, and I’ll give you a 50/50 chance it’s before January 2020.

Which is beautiful, if only because the Comicsgater toesuckers whining about the girl-cooties on their manly-man comics can’t conceive of how irrelevant they are. That the comics they want to be the way they always were¹ are a rounding error in the face of the most significant creator of words+pictures, and that the industry has already left them behind. It’s delicious.

• Kickstart! You are probably familiar with the works of one Christopher “Doctor” Hastings, and with the works of one Branson “Not Brandon, dammit” Reese. They’re comedy guys, they’re comics guys, they sport some awesome facial hair², and they’re collaborating on an original graphic novel that you can get in on now:
  

  DRACULAGATE is an all new 130-page graphic novel about a bumbling team of U.S. diplomats opening up international relations with Transylvania, sovereign nation of monsters and undead. It’s like HBO’s VEEP, but with skeletons and ghosts and stuff.

  Which, quite frankly, is exactly the story I wanted from these two fine gentlemen and didn’t even realize it. The Kickstarter video’s a hoot, too. Inexplicably, the funder is a week in and they’re not quite at 40%; in a just world, this would be somewhere around 112% already.

  This book features a diplomatic crisis kicked off by Dracula’s nephew³ killing a beloved Canadian former child star, which I can guaran-damn-tee you is not a combination of words that has ever been conceived of before Reese and Hastings got their brains together. Back this project now because if this one doesn’t fund and I don’t get to read the next 125 pages, the peasants will suffer.

• Kickstart! David Malki !, who has been messing with us re: sick elephants since the end of July (and who has put together the seeds of a nuke-from-orbit delivery of who knows how damn many more in the newest strip⁴), has taken some time away from the world’s longest, most convoluted dad joke to put together the first Wondermark collection in years.

  No sick elephants (or sea lions) in this one, but the origin of eating Cheetos with chopsticks will be in it. It will also be among the most handsome books on your shelf, and the stretch goals are all pretty much identical: more comics, bigger book. With a little more than three weeks to go, Wondermark: Friends You Can Ride On is just under 80% funded, and the presumed success of the campaign on 2 November will leave Malki ! plenty of time to bash together the 2019 calendar refills, which he claims will not be 12 months of sick elephants, but who knows.

• Kickstart! Zach Weinersmith’s in one of his abridging moods — having previously tackled The Bible and All Of Science, he’s now reduced all of Shakespeares sonnets about being very horny down to individual rhyming couplets. Apparently, a lot of them are about Shakespeare getting mad that a dude he was horny for was gettin’ with a lady that Shakespeare was also horny for? That can’t be right, because the Republican Party told me bein’ horny was invented by degenerate hippies at Woodstock and nobody was ever horny except within the bounds of white people matrimony for having babies before then.

  Only one way to find out — get the pocket version of the sonnets, and ace your next high school English test on Shakespearean verse! ANd if that’s not enough to convince you, Weinersmith has also constructed an SMBC collection of strips on the theme of love (mirroring the strip collections on religion and science, which were released in conjunction with the prior abridged volumes), which you can get either with or without the pocket sonnets. I’m not going to say that they’ll make great Valentine’s Day gifts⁵, but they are due to be shipped in February.

Spam of the day:

Take Your Vacation to the Next Level with Private Yacht Charters

You apparently think that I am of a very different socioeconomic tendency than I actually am. We all tell ourselves that the naturally belong on a perfect yacht, on perfect seas, with super hot people of our preferred gender(s) who are perfectly into us, but let’s face it — most of us would be hard pressed to live up to the expectation of yacht rock, much less yacht life. You can’t just make yourself into an Instagram-friendly Russian oligarch’s kid.

_______________
¹ Hint: they never were.

² Rad ‘stache, Branson.

³ Jeremy. His name is Jeremy Dracula.

⁴ Apparently, seven.

⁵ They will totally make the best Valentine’s Day gifts, and practically guarantee that whoever you are horny for (and are not a big ol’ creeper towards) will likewise be inspired to reciprocal horniness, oh yeah.