Things That Should Be On Your Radar Right Now
No time to dilly-dally, we’ve got items to discuss.
Item! The recent unpleasantness is now well behind us, and Skin Horse is back! We return to our heroes as they navigate an imaginary, more-Vegas-than-Vegas dreamscape in the small, self-centered universe that is the imagination of Baron Mistycorn, former Disneyesque mascot and all-around dick.
In a strip where characters have had a real opportunity to breathe and grow into better people (looking at you, Nick¹), it’s almost refreshing to know that BM is still the same up-his-own-ass jerk that he started as, and I look forward to him being humbled by whatever he’s gotten himself into for about four seconds before he’s back to his old, jerkwad self.
Item! John Allison’s been the custodian of an ever-expanding archive of comics going back to the time when the Y2K problem was still a couple years away from crisis. Alas, it appears that the depth of his comics trove has caught up with what conventional technology can do:
The old Scary Go Round site has been running a near 20-year old CMS that can go no further. Getting thousands of legacy comics onto a new one won’t be easy. An attempt to move it to WordPress/ComicEasel collapsed under the weight of my three-headed archive.
That update from Allison last Friday, along with directions as to where you can find his works online:
You can read the Bad Machinery archive on GoComics (the enhanced version with all the extra book pages) and I’ll organise a page where you can sort all the chapters easily.
… along with an opportunity to give him money:
I’m assembling PDF collections of the “New Bobbins” stories. $3 and up Patreon subscribers will get these as part of their subscription, just keep an eye on my Patreon page.
Otherwise, you can pay what you want for them on my Gumroad. I’ll try to put a PDF up every week – the first is up now. There are four collections — A Magical Pink Being (Amy is pregnant), Out Of The Woods (Shelley and Tim cause a great local disaster), End Of The Road (wrapping up the Erin Winters/Eustace Boyce comics) and Hard Yards (the epic wrap-up).
They each feature a new essay and notes.
Note that what you want has a floor of £1, which is exceedingly generous on Allison’s part, given that PDFs of full SGR collections are going for £2.50 and up (which is criminally underpriced, but the books are somewhat old at this point). I plan on picking them up at my usual PWYW rate of US$0.10/page, which would be about four bucks, which I’ll probably just round up to £3 for each of the Bobbins collections. And, since I prefer reading comics on paper, should these ever see print I’ll just buy them again. They’re that good.
Item! Let this be your general reminder that tomorrow is Tüki Day, when Jeff Smith launches his third creator-owned comic series on Kickstarter with Tüki: Fight For Fire (and, later, Tüki: Fight For Family) releasing in conjunction with BONE’s 30th anniversary. You don’t want to miss it.
Spam of the day:
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren Wir gewähren Darlehen in Höhe von 10.000,00 € bis 5 Mio. € mit einem Zinssatz von 2%
I’m sorry, when I read German in a spam, I go into a frothing rage much like Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Please take your concatenated devil language elsewhere.
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¹ Whose character arc I’ve just now realized is a pretty good parallel to that of Mike Dowden over at Something*Positive. Randy Milholland and Shaenon Garrity/Jeffrey C Wells are giving me hope that emotionally stunted manchildren can, with the right influences, become capable of empathy and grow into the sort of person that is a good partner worthy of love.
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