Because nobody appreciated a running gag like Mr The Forg Frog. He probably also knows how Fozzie spelled jenglefenz, where I am stuck going the phonetic route.

• Well, maybe? It might be a callback, or a running gag. In any event, in his guest strip for Questionable Content today, Zach Weinersmith has taken the ball lobbed by KB Spangler yesterday and run with it. The mind boggles to think of where this ball — that is to say, ass-rocket — ends up. Could this be the end of brave buttprobe¹ 2015-TAYLER-AWESOME²? We’ll find out tomorrow. Oh, and in case you want the extra gag that Weinersmith includes in his comics — the so-called votey — it’s here.
• Some numbers for you: US$55,368 and 1521; those are, respectively, the total funding and total number of backers for the latest Spike Trotman-helmed anthology, New World. This total comports with the Fleen Funding Formula Mark II predication range of US$55K to US$83K, although just barely. Might have to adjust the formula a bit, but it’ll take more data to do so.

  If you want to add in her earlier anthologies — Smut Peddler 2012, Smut Peddler 2014, and The Sleep of Reason, we can add some more numbers, in my continuing quest to determine exactly how much more popular porn is than non-porn in comics anthologies. To wit: US$268,401 vs US$102,293 and 8000 vs 2913 (funding totals and backer totals for the porn projects and non-porn projects, respectively); these give us porn:non-porn support ratios of 2.62:1 (ponying up the dough) and 2.75:1 (asses in the seats). Oddly, non-porn takes the lead in financial outlay per backer, leading US$35.12 to US$33.96.

  Oh, one more number that needs to be considered here: US$400, which is the bonus that Spike will pay to each of her contributors on New World, per the Iron Circus Comics overfunding model. If you had contributed to each of Spike’s anthologies, she would have paid you an additional three thousand and fifty dollars above the upfront page rates, which ain’t a bad piece of extra change.

  Hey, young/up-and-coming talent! Want to get a guaranteed paycheck, show your best work next to some of the best creators in webcomics, and get more money that you were promised³? If patterns hold true, Spike will be announcing another anthology for next year, very possibly porn-related (requiring at least one woman on each creative team), which would skew to the high end on the popularity and bonus scales.

  Start brainstorming now. Read and follow the submission rules. Bring your A-game. If you don’t get chosen, be gracious in public and ask people you trust to critique your work in private so it’s better next time. It’s a golden opportunity sitting out there for those with the skills and drive to do top-notch work. Before you know it, you’ll be one of those best creators in webcomics that the next cohort of young talent looks up to.

Spam of the day:

My family members all the time say that I am wasting my time here at web, however I know I am getting know-how every day by reading thes fastidious articles.

I think I’m gonna have to go with your family, Sport. Get yourself a better hobby.

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¹ So to speak.

² It’s canon, finally answering the question that had left the public puzzled for weeks.

³ For extra level-up points, spend the bonus buying additional copies of the anthology from Spike at the creator’s rate, sell for even more profit at shows.

Hard to tell, though, with the ongoing disruptions to society that are so unevenly present. Time and the passing of the seasons is muted. We need something to look forward to, something we can hang some anticipation of delight on, and fortunately for you, I’ve got just the thing to point you towards.

Lagies and Jenglefenz, I give you the next keepsake game from Shing Yin Khor:

Do you remember your childhood friend August? You met when she rode her bike into a ditch, right in front of you. Now, she’s lost in time.

Kickstarter in September 2021, live game in February 2022.

Follow to be notified on launch: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shing/remember-august

I will likely not be promoting this much, it’s a small and experimental live game that will land a story told in letters(by me and you, as you’ll write back) in your mailbox over the course of Feb 2022. You can buy that nice pen now, in order to save your friend August.

Done, and done. I believe my last fountain pen purchase was in anticipation of this moment¹. There’s preview images of Save August, and a description that should be landing hard in your brain if you’re anything like me:

the basic outline of it:
– you have to remember your friend, an agent of the Bureau of Time Disruption, to anchor her in present day.
– 8+ letters/misc. ephemera mailed to the player over a month.
– the USPS as a third character, a game about the rhythm of waiting. [emphasis mine]

Khor always comes up with unique mechanics for their games, and a game that is about patience is something that I’m going to get a lot of good from.

The Kickstart isn’t up yet, but the reward tiers have been announced:

I’m going to keep tiers very affordable. The backer tiers will be:

$10 – Live email game and game .pdf.
$20 – Live email game AND mailed game archive booklet
$50-60 – Mailed letters and archive booklet.

Post live-game, digital files will be released for free/PWYW!

The reason I am releasing digital files for free is because I 100% encourage anyone to remount the live game for a friend, by printing/prepping/mailing the game letters to them.

You can get much fancier with this outline than I will be able to with my bulk mail limitations!

That’s Khor in a nutshell — whatever they come up with, however many of us pay them for it, they still want everybody to get the benefits of art and experience. The generosity of spirit is stunning and a big part of why I’m proud to call them a friend. Even when things like this happen.

Save August will be launching on Kickstarter soon; find a good pen and paper, gather some envelopes, decide what stamps you want to use, and practice your handwriting. Think I’ll give my new turquoise ink a go with this one. See you all at the mailbox come February.

Spam of the day:

The waterproof sandals that you will wear all summer long

You’re a bit late there, Champ. Try again in about six months?

_______________
¹ Note to self: get some decent stationery.

No unfying thought or theme, just stuff I saw lately.

• Ngozi Ukazu did us all a favor and posted an old short comic story to The Twitters. Titled Wingman, it could have been inspired by the fact that firefighter gear lockers resemble hockey locker room stalls, or maybe just wondering what an alternate universe Ransom and Holster would be like. Either way, it’s a delight.
• Just about a month back, I noted that Randall Munroe had come up with an awesome explainer of how mRNA vaccines work, on account of he’s a great science communicator. However, I just saw a shared TikTok video that gives Munroe a run for his money with a sixty second documentary on the magic of mRNA vaccines … lagies and jenglefenz, please enjoy the majesty of Fork Hands.
• Hey, I just realized — that same day we talked about the xkcd mRNA vaccine explainer? We also pointed out another bit of quality comics-based sci-comm, from the JKX Comics collective; they had just launched a Kickstarter campaign for their full-color comics compendium on scientific research, Gaining STEAM.

  Well, the end of the campaign is in sight, with just under two days to go as I write this, and I’m pleased to say that Gaining STEAM is sitting about 3.5x goal. A’course, our prediction under the FFF mk2 was for 6x to 9x times goal, which means we maybe have to look back at the assumptions of the FFF mk2 to see why it was so far off. The M in STEAM, after all, stands for mathematics, and clearly our model is off and needs to be iterated to discover what’s lacking¹.

  And I found it — some time back, we at Fleen noted the general inability of the FFF mk2 to predict final outcomes if there’s fewer than ~ 200 pledges in the intial 24-30 hours (which is where the base prediction comes from). In this case, Day 1 had 115 backers, Day 2 another 39, and as of this writing, there’s still only 228 total. A highly motivated but small group of backers all jumped onboard on Day 1 (it funded, after all in 5 hours), making the long tail look like it would be more substantial that it was. My mistake.

  I see that the McDonald Ratio is also off, with a prediction of about $24,000, so we’ll have to make note of the exceptions for future reference: low initial backer count and stealth launches (especially with reserved tiers) will be exempted from predictions.

  But what the heck, it’s still a 200 page comic about basic research, with hundreds of folks ponying up the dough. That’s still worth celebrating, and with most of two days still to go, no telling how strong it might actually finish.

Spam of the day:

Jesiica Phillips wrote: It looks like you’ve misspelled the word “spinny” on your website. I thought you would like to know :). Silly mistakes can ruin your site’s credibility.

Yeah, the word spinny appears three times in the blog’s history, and no conceivable misspellings appear, unless you’re upset about spiny, which was in reference to a hedgehog. Then again, you appear to have misspelled your own name, so pardon me if I don’t take your concerns seriously.

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¹ This is probably more an application of the E in STEAM, engineering, which is all about iteration. The M crowd would more likely come up with a model, spend three days getting it typeset just right in LaTeX, and then promptly resolve to ignore the actual outcome. It’s trivial is the closest thing that mathematicians have to a liturgical prayer.

If there’s one thing that we at Fleen enjoy, it’s a running gag. There’s Ryan North and the running gag that gets revisited every 1000 strips. There’s the Final Fate Of RPG World, which was a running gag before this blog launched in 2005. There was the majesty that was #buttrocket, and our habit here at Fleen of both excessive footnoting and an unrepentant man-crush on Brad Guigar¹.

But I can’t recall anybody taking something so pedestrian, so quotidian as a garden-variety Wondermark bit of random weirdness and spinning it into endless variations on a theme. Gentle readers, I invite you to consider the many variations of Check out my sick elephant!

Sick as in diseased, an emphasis on checking out, sick as in sick humor, sick as in gravely ill², sick as an excuse to work on the multiple meanings of trunk, sick as in falling apart, and a three-fer involving a previously sick elephant that becomes a thicc elephant, and finally provides a dad-joke inversion that I will not dignify with a transcription.

Responding to my fascination/horror at this strip, Wondermark creator David Malki ! promised/threatened more. Should you see him this weekend at XOXO Fest in Portland³, please convey to him my heartiest congratulations/condemnation.

Spam of the day:

We found your next girlfriend today, she is sexy, naughty, pretty and she made a very sexy video message that you need to watch.

So wait, she’s thin but not too thin, has a big rack, hips but not baby-having hips, and is sexy but not in a slutty way?

_______________
¹ He’s dreamy.

² Gravely, I see what you did there.

³ Other webcomics types in attendance or at least walking around: the aforementioned North, Lucy Bellwood, Shing Yin Khor, Erika Moen, Blue Delliquanti, Taneka Stotts, Graham Annable, Lisa Hanawalt, Matt Furie, and MariNaomi.

Numerous other webcomicky (or at least webcomics-adjacent) folk will be across town at Rose City Comic Con, including Matt Bors, Molly Muldoon, Barry Deutsch, Jennie Breeden, Indigo Kelleigh, Kel McDonald, Kerstin La Cross, Kory Bing, Rebecca Hicks, Lucas Elliott, various members of Helioscope and artists associated with Nucleus, for some reason the US Navy, and Katie Lane.

This was going to be a post about the megathread that David Malki ! did on Twitter end of last week, about the benefits of incorporation for self-employed types come tax time. Of course, end of last week was too late for anybody to get in on the tax benefits for this year’s filings, but see the title.

Then he went and turned the 70-plus tweets into a nice writeup, and that was even better. Planning for next year, get on that now I was going to say. Don’t let I’m so sick of taxes, I’ll do it in a couple of months tendencies keep you from getting this done. Make it a to-do item for May! But about three hours ago something bigger popped up. Suitably enough, it also deals with looking at the long term.

Lagies and jenglefenz, allow me to introduce you to Ascend Comics.

Ascend is a new publishing company, courtesy of Der-shing Helmer and Taneka Stotts, dedicated to the proposition that comics are created by all sorts of people, and if you don’t look like the folks that have traditionally been published by the comics world, that doesn’t mean you aren’t making some damn good comics. Not getting where you know you could be? Well, if there’s one thing that Spike Trotman taught us, it’s that you can build a publishing company up into a force of nature if you commit to bringing new voices and new kinds of stories to print. Also, that if you Kickstart anthologies, you can find those voices before anybody else snaps them up.

Ascend is starting off with an impressive bench, too: the Elements anthology (for stories by POC creators, edited by Stotts), The Meek and Mare Internum (webcomics by Helmer), and the Alloy anthology (for stories by mixed-race creators, edited by Helmer and Kiku Hughes, with an assist by Stotts).

At the heart of it, though, is the mutual respect and hard work of Helmer and Stotts; read their respective launch announcements and tell me they aren’t both going to work as hard for each other (and whoever else comes along for the ride), and that’s where the planning comes in.

Ascend is brand new; right now, it’s a platform for two creators and their works, but look at the mission statement right there in their logotype:

Iron Circus started as a way for Spike to make her comics projects, and then here and there she picked up a story for reprint, or an original, or the first of a series. With anthologies under their belts, Stotts and Helmer will have a roster of creators whose works (and work habits) they know; give ’em enough time to find their feet, give them one or two projects to show what they can do in this new structure, and I’ll bet you Five Dollars American Cash Money that they start following the path that Iron Circus blazed¹. Got a story that you think would be a good fit for Ascend? I’m gonna say start polishing your craft now so you’re ready when they make the inevitable announcement down the line.

Better yet, since Iron Circus has shown that distribution works for independent creators and publishers, Ascend will find it a less onerous process to get to that point themselves. It’ll be even easier for the next company after (and so on, until somebody screws the pooch very badly and the business of comics community gets cautious again; that won’t be Ascend, it’ll be somebody with less time in the game and fewer hard-won skills). So if you’re at a slightly differently inclined, or have done the work that Spike, Stotts, and Helmer have done, start planning for what your company is going to look like, and decide what’s going to set you apart from those that are already there.

But above all, start planning. Whatever move you’re going to make — tax wise, working with a publisher, becoming a publisher, whatever — it’s not going to just all in your lap. Want it to work to your favor? Figure out how to get there from where you are now. Fortune favors the bold rather less than it favors the well-prepared.

Spam of the day:

Jenny — Satisfy her like never before (no body)

Oh man, the disembodied, uploaded computer consciousnesses are getting in on the pornspam game. I got this one five times in the past eighteen hours.

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¹ I see them as running parallel paths rather than competitors. It’s gonna be a bunch more indie publishing concerns seeking out new creators and stories before they start getting in each other’s way and threatening each other’s lunch.

Readers of this page will know that I’ve been mocking the spam I get in nearly every post for years now, and it’s only today that I come across one so perfect that it gets a dedicated post. Enjoy this as you are digesting.

Lagies and jenglefenz, I present to you the tactical Christmas stocking:

It doesn’t appear to come with the hatchet, multitool, locking-blade knife, or shotgun shells shown, but the clips and velcro and MOLLE webbing are all there. It’s the ultimate expression of pure, distilled toxic masculinity in pog holiday form!

Since I spoke to you yesterday, two very cool books have been announced for the near term. Let’s do this.

• There’s a huge trend these days for adult coloring books — no Disney Princesses or sparkleponies here, but abstract designs, tattoo art, great Impressionist paintings and suchlike. Also, it was inevitable for there to be adult coloring books, if you take my meaning and I think you do:
  

  Oh shit, I guess we’re officially announcing it today! :D

  Ready for the sexiest adult coloring book? Pre-order OH JOY SEX TOY: THE COLORING BOOK @ErikaMoen @Plustenstrength! http://bit.ly/2iwR8Ab

  Straight from the pages of Oh Joy, Sex Toy by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan, a color-it-yourself collection of very sexy renditions of the Masturbateers doing all the sexy things they do, will be in comics shops on 8 February (just in time for Valentine’s Day!) from Limerence Press (the sexy division of Oni Press). The great thing about the Masturbateers is that they encompass all shapes, sizes, points along the gender spectrum, body types, adult ages, and degrees of physical ability — everybody is sexy in their own way, and I’ll bet that Moen’s artistic choices have meant a lot of people have seen someone that looks like them portrayed as a sexual person for the first time. Inclusion, y’all: it matters.

• As mentioned last week, Tyler Page’s Nothing Better has been overdue for its third print collection for a while, and at long last it’s here. Lagies and jenglefenz, please allow me to present the Kickstarter for Nothing Better: Great Expectations (Part 1)
  

  It’s been 7 years since the last collection came out though I’ve been sitting on this material for almost two years. I’ve been busy with raising a family, freelance work, and publishing another book [Editor: Raised on Ritalin. So it’s time to give fans what they want in print.

  My goal here is modest – Nothing Better has a small but dedicated group of fans who continue to bug me for more of the comic in print and I’d love to give it to them. So I’m only looking to print 300-400 copies of the book to sell online and at conventions. The book is already done – laid out, designed, and everything. I’ll be working with a great local printer here in Minneapolis so the turnaround shouldn’t be too long.

  The combination of the finished book and the modest goal (only US$1000! Remember what Spike said?) means that Page is only running the campaign for 20 days total, with delivery expected in March, mere weeks after the campaign closes. As of press time, he’s at 41.5% of goal, and a lucky couple-hundred people are going to be able to get a hell of a good book before everybody else. Nothing Better really is that good, so get pledging.

  [Obligatory disclaimer: A review of mine is quoted on the Kickstarter page as a blurb; I have not received any offers or rewards for the use of my words. Also, people that are much more famous than me are also much more succinct than me.]

Spam of the day:

Woman sheds 42 lbs. in 30 days with this simple night-time drink

I’m guessing some kind of horrific toxin.

Pretty much everybody in comics is talking about the page rates survey that dropped over the weekend. Some few thoughts:

• This is a very small sample size (60), but as far as I know, the largest published data set on such things so far. It’ll get better as more people share information, but at the moment it must be considered preliminary and not yet fully accurate.
• The survey combines different kinds of pay (work-for-hire vs Image’s more creator-owned approach), which makes the small sample size even more subject to wobbles in the data.
• That being said, holy crap BOOM! does not come off well. Their rates are crap and there are lots of comments indicating the degree to which they pay slowly and randomly. Since their numbers are based on work-for-hire, they may not apply to creator-owned work, but very possibly the (apparently pervasive) late payment issues apply to both sides of the publishing game.

I’ll note that the survey lists Smut Peddler (that is to say, Iron Circus Comics) as a Misc Publisher, at a page rate of US$50 (script + finished art) plus potential for artist bonuses (but not guaranteed). For reference, the four projects that ICC has run under that not-guaranteed bonus plan have paid an additional US$450, US$300, US$1700, and US$400¹ per page, making ICC’s page rate effectively US$350 to US$1750, meaning the least paid ICC rates are comparable to DC/Marvel, and her top rate blows everybody else away [Editor’s note: see below] (the only comparable rate is that of Cards Against Humanity — US$1000/page for art and script — presumably for their comics anthologies in their Holiday Bullshit packages).

[Editor’s note resumes: Okay, I had a bad misinterpretation of ICC’s bonus structure, which was kindly pointed out by Alert Reader N in the comments, and by ICC supremo Spike via email. ICC’s bonus is per-job, not per-page, which makes the effective page rate variable. However, that does raise the ICC rates into the triple-digit range for much of what they’ve published and certainly puts them above some established comic book companies in terms of effective rates, although not on par with The Big Two, as was originally stated.

Fleen apologizes for the error and confusion.]

To date, that’s been limited to anthology work, but since ICC is in open-submission territory for book-length projects, I’ma guess that Spike is going to be writing checks with a crapload more zeros on them than any of the established publishers. Creators that have not bought into the myth that you need to suffer don’t-even-cover-rent jobs to establish your career, take note.

Oh, and those who like the work of creators that aren’t getting screwed on their rates? Iron Circus has a double-header² of Kickstarters coming³ up on 25 January. New smut!

On the off chance that you want to be one of those creators that has pride in their work and wants to be paid fairly for it, time to brush up on your skills! Danielle Corsetto is offering a light version of her illustration class via Patreon at the low, low price of US$20 per month. Folks, that is the greatest bargain in the history of illustration and I urge you to hop on that even if you’re pretty good. You can always learn a trick or two and up your own game by comparing notes and experiences.

Spam of the day:

View Photos of Senior Singles on Match

Okay, what the hell, you are identifying senior as over 45! Is this spam run by the same genius that’s decided to send me Medicare information nearly 20 years early? I’m sending all the prepaid envelopes back with YOU’RE TWO DECADES EARLY, FUCK OFF scrawled across the paperwork in Sharpie. It’s kinda fun, actually.

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¹ For Smut Peddler 2012, The Sleep of Reason, Smut Peddler 2014, and the not yet released New World, respectively.

² You’ll see what I did there.

³ And there.

Readers of this page will have long since recognized the esteem in which we at Fleen hold David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Webcomic and many, many, many other endeavours (especially, for the purposes of this discussion, mezzacotta, about which more momemtarily).

Those in the know will remember that Morgan-Mar (perhaps I should say Doctor Morgan-Mar, as he is part of a proud tradition of STEM PhD-holding webcomickers) does not make comics as anything other than a hobby; he works in optics research for a division of Canon (all the more surprising given that he may be responsible for more pages of webcomics of anybody this side of Andrew Hussie, especially considering mezzacotta, which I promise we’re about to get to). We typically don’t see Morgan-Mar on this side of the Pacific Ocean (or the equator, for that matter), except for his occasional attendance at a scientific conference, which he was coincidentally doing in the immediate past.

When he returned from the annual SIGGRAPH, Morgan-Mar responded to an email that I’d sent him on an unrelated topic (wine, to be specific), and he had some interesting observations about the overlap of the conference and webcomics. I found his experiences to be fascinating and I’m sharing them with you; lagies and jenglefenz¹, please welcome David-Morgan Mar. Yaaaay!

There was a talk by Ozge Samanci (who you’ve mentioned on Fleen: http://fleen.com/archives/2007/10/17/online-comic-webcomic-survey-says/²) titled “Impact of Digital Media on Comics”, which of course I attended. It wasn’t really about webcomics per se, but rather a Scott McCloud-esque survey of what new things the digital presentation format can bring to comics. Looking at my scribbled notes:

Digital media can give 4 things to comics:

• Procedural — you can generate content computationally.
• Participatory — you can interact with the viewer.
• Encyclopaedic — you can segment and categorise ad infinitum.
• Spatial — you can play tricks with the spatial layout.

She showed examples of some comics with looping animations in each frame — each individual animation does not progress the story, it only provides atmosphere for the short segment of time captured in the panel, so it remains a comic rather than becoming a work of animation.

She said in 2014 there are still no true examples of McCloud’s infinite canvas, only approximations which fall short of the true potential. (xkcd came up as an example.) A true infinite canvas comic, she said, would need to be procedurally generated, so you could really scroll *anywhere*. I actually talked to her afterwards about mezzacotta, which is procedurally generated and offers an almost-infinite scope temporally with its archives. She wasn’t aware of it and said she’d include it in future revisions of this talk!

She talked about geocomics — making a comic readable via GPS coordinates, where you physically have to travel to certain locations to see given panels. She mentioned using the digital presentation to provide film-like effects such as panning and zooming for the viewer within a comic panel. She talked about engaging the reader as a character within the comic, letting them interact with the other characters. Or control the presentation of the panels, by allowing the reader to stretch the frame borders, for example.

She concluded by saying that webcomics pretty much haven’t really explored all of the possibilities of the medium yet, and there’s a very long way to go. The problem as she sees it is not the conceptualising, but the executation — you need an artist and a good programmer to collaborate (or be the same person).

After the talk I also mentioned to her my attempt to make a collaborative multi-stream branching comic with Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, and she said the problem with collaborative comics is always lack of participation. (Too true!)³

Anyway, it was plenty of food for thought.

On another minor note, in the interactive exhibitions there was a gadget someone had designed to provide haptic user feedback through an airbrush — to allow the roughest amateurs to paint desired works of art. They let you try the airbrush, and pulled up a stencil on a computer which guided the feedback system. They had a collection of several stencil shapes for people to use, most of them rather anonymous animals shapes, but one of them was a very familiar looking T. rex.

Many thanks to David Morgan-Mar for the info, and for the use of the photos.

Spam of the day:

Is your website about generating traffic from top of the page postings no matter quality with the content when you are ad supported. Things can be extremely starting to heat up since pre-season games are simply weeks away. … Think about the non native one who learns English language but can not utilize it properly and does some hilarious errors which will change the meanings of entire statement.

Believe me, it’s tough to not think about the non native one who learns English language but can not utilize it properly and does some hilarious errors which will change the meanings of entire statement.

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¹ For some reason, I only ever think of that gag when I’m writing about David Morgan-Mar. I don’t know if he’s an especially big fan of The Muppet Show, Harry Belafonte, or Mister The Frog in general, but given that all right-thinking people are, it’s probably pretty likely.

² Editor’s note: want to swell my head way the heck up? Report on something fascinating and relate it to something I wrote. I have such a grin on my face right now.

³ Or perhaps too much; Hussie famously relied upon reader input to determine the action in the next update of Homestuck for a good long while, but ultimately turned away from it due to it being too difficult to tell the story he had in mind. I almost said a logical story, but just as there are different algebras, there are different logics, and Andrew Hussie’s logic does not always resemble our Earth-logic.

The new webcomic by David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) launched today, and it shows great promise. Lagies and jenglefenz, I give you Planet of Hats, a week-by-week recap of Star Trek episodes! One can only hope that Morgan-Mar sticks with the strip after the original 79 episodes, so we can get TNG episodes like Planet of the Joggers.

• It’s been pretty common knowledge for a while that ReedPOP, the folks behind New York Comic Con and C2E2, partners of the various PAXes, and a bunch of other shows, have been planning a second show for New York City, one that actually focuses directly on comics rather than all the extraneous bits that often seem to be crowding the comics parts out of ostensible comic cons.

  But for the life of me, it’s only been in the past couple of days that I’ve really seen much about Special Edition NYC; an actual comics-centered show would be welcome, the North Pavilion of the Javits Center is a sizeable but reasonable space, and it could provide a high-traffic alternative for east coast webcomickers. This is one to watch.

• Kickstarts! On the one hand, the Doug Wright Awards — honoring the best in Canadian cartooning, with honors that are exceedingly well-curated and do not bog down into dozens of overly-specific categories — could use your help holding the annual awards ceremony (in conjunction with TCAF) this May. At present, they’re about 25% of the way to their (very modest) CDN$6150 goal.
• On the other hand, David “It’s!” Wills, creator of the Walky- and Dumbiverses, is (as of this writing) about 14 hours in and 96% of the way to funding the third Dumbing of Age collection. Willis-related Kickstarts are always interesting for the overfunding rewards that include extra comics for everybody.
• On the other other hand, I just thought I’d mention the fact that Smut Peddler 2014 is now over US$80,000, which means an extra US$650 per creator/creator team. Only 25 days to go, which means it’ll almost certainly touch US$100K, eclipsing Smut Peddler 2012, and providing creator bonuses over a thousand dollars. Hooray for porn!