Sometimes, the stars just align and a whole bunch of stuff happens at once; today, for example, the redoubtable¹ Jim Zub sees five different comics from three publishers², including two series premieres. Zub’s an incredibly varied and skilled writer, and while I’ve generally enjoyed his original work best, you know that he’s always going to do a good job with premade IP — it’ll make perfect sense if you don’t know the characters, and have a million deep cuts for those who’re up on all the continuity. Keep him in mind as you visit the shops this week.

Also of note for your pull list today: John Allison’s latest miniseries, Steeple. While not explicitly part of the Tackleverse (it takes place in the far corner of England), there are some offhand references, and anytime Allison gets to write British characters, we’re in for a delight. By Night was terrific, but American characters don’t allow Allison to use all his powers, and with Giant Days about to wrap up for good, we can use something to fill the void. And hey, maybe this will be the latest Allison project to go from miniseries to longer miniseries to ongoing, if we’ve all been good and Father Christmas smiles on us.

• If Kickstarter thought that ditching people involved in the unionization effort³ would blow over quickly, they thought wrong. I really wanted to hear what C Spike Trotman had to say, and she’s unambiguous in her feelings over Twitter way:
  

  Kickstarter is such an inherently democratic platform. Seeing the people currently in charge of it stoop to such transparently anti-democratic measures to deny their staff basic protections is incredibly disappointing.

  And Tyler Moore (one of what we may as well be calling the Kickstarter Three) answered a question that had been going around in a reply to Spike: in addition to the creators petition, there is a second petition for creators, backers, former employees … anybody with a relationship with Kickstarter. I’ve signed this one as Gary Tyrrell, 125 project superbacker, over US$7650 paid to creators, and if you think what the Kickstarter Union is trying to do is worthwhile, I urge you to consider doing likewise.

• That being said, I want to stress one last time that the Kickstarter Union is not, at this time, asking creators to forgo or withdraw projects from the platform, or backers to withhold pledges. So you should note that Spike has a new Kickstart going for the latest Smut Peddler collection. All the usual hallmarks apply — funded quickly, a day or so in, pay raises have been secured for creators and more will surely happen, it’ll appear in your mailbox when promised — along with one surprise.

  See, the collection is themed around the idea of maturity and experience, and tell me that’s not Jeff Goldblum on the cover. It’s totally Jeff Goldblum, and if you can come up with a better way to sell the idea of gettin’ it on with hot, hot older folks, I’d like to hear it. Everybody wants sexytimes with Jeff Goldblum. That’s why the FFF mk2 is predicting a final take of US$56K to US$84K when things wrap up in just over two weeks.

• Lastly, and it was getting to be a bit of a close thing so thank glob for the end-of-campaign bump, it appears that KC Green’s print collection of He Is A Good Boy has funded with just about two days to go. It was an unusually high-goal campaign, featuring reward tiers for physical items above the US$25 most-common-pledge-level-on-Kickstarter, for a smart, sprawling work that is (to be fair) not Green’s most accessible work. I get it, people want Dickbutt and This Is Fine and the easily memeable from Green, but he has these enormous ideas that may take hundreds of pages to see the whole picture, and that’s a challenge.

  But did you notice all the cartoonists that have been supporting Green and pushing this project on the sosh-meeds? They know that if you’re going to have somebody that is untrammeled creativity personified out there doing everything from short gags to massive ruminations on identity and the nature of good/evil, it makes comics as a whole a stronger, more expansive medium.

  Plus it’s a 444 page book. In a pinch, you could defend yourself from an attacker with it, a thought which I think would amuse both Green and Crange the titular Good Boy. I’d say you want to hop in and grab his magnum opus before things close on Friday, but knowing Green, he’s got something bigger, more important, more dense with meaning on deck for next Tuesday which will be his masterwork until the one after that launches. Don’t ever think you’ve seen his best and most important comics, they’re always coming at you sometime the week after next.

Spam of the day:

After only 29 days of mental training activities, her brain scan came up clean!

This is from a spam that claims Big Pharma is suppressing news of a cheap, simple treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Only thing is, the first paper that showed it’s even possible to see the amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s via imaging (instead of postmortem dissection) was published on 2 April of this year.

There is no fucking way that anything resembling treatment has been developed since then. You identity-thieving assholes are playing on the emotions of people who are watching loved ones slip away before their eyes, and you can’t even be bothered come up with a plausible lie. I hope you die in either a single very large fire, or a sufficient number of smaller fires.

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¹ So don’t doubt him unless you’re also willing to redoubt him, buckaroo.

² Okay, so one title is a co-publication of two companies, don’t ruin this.

³ Although, the more I think of it, the more it seems that nearly everybody outside of senior management is in on the unionization effort.