What? Vacation weeks are over? Everybody’s back to work? Well, crap. Fine.

• A few days back (Friday, to be precise), Dean Trippe launched a Kickstarter to print his beautiful, unsparing, painful, and ultimately uplifting Something Terrible. Some people that launch day doubted that Trippe would meet goal over 30 days¹, but those of us that know Trippe’s work knew better.

  Now it’s absolutely true that you can get a copy of Something Terrible for a buck via Sellfy, so why would you back a Kickstarter where the support tiers go to hundreds of dollars? Glad you asked.

  1. Starting at US$5, you get a revised, expanded version of Something Terrible; actually expanded is a weak term, since it’s twice the size of the original.
  2. Starting and US$10, physical rewards come into play, including various sized prints of the splash image You’ll Be Safe Here from the end of Something Terrible.
  3. Sometime today Trippe is getting cost estimates for bumping the print version of Something Terrible to hardcover.
  4. He’s also added a support tier for ten copies, pitched at comic shops and bookstores.

  Now bear with me here, and keep in mind that I’m just spitballing, but what if we combine item #3 with item #4? Hardcover means durability; mass sales means lots of copies; those two items together means libraries and schools can get in on this, and people who really need to read this story (who wouldn’t otherwise) get that opportunity.

  I’ve had my PDF copy for months; I would have backed this campaign regardless; the fact that Trippe brought up hardcovers means I’m upping my pledge because the higher this goes, the greater chance that somebody who needs this book gets to read it. Trippe’s as much as hero as any of the characters he turned to for example and solace; helping him now is closest I can come to making sure his cape is clean and pressed.

• We’ve mentioned Matt Bors and his curatorial efforts at The Nib previously; I love the fact that he’s been seeking out a wide cross-section of [web]cartoonists and paying them American cash money to put their comics up. When we spoke, he included this on the topic of his talent roster:
  

  I have a regular stable of contributors now and that will only be expanding in 2014. I have a substantial budget to do this and you’ll be seeing other names you recognize in coming months.

  Today we found out what his substantial budget is getting him (and us): Fifteen regular cartoonists, three different ones every Monday through Friday. Additional longer-form comics journalism and auto-bio on a weekly basis. Names like Stevens, Weinersmith, Tomorrow, Moen, and Pequin are on the daily list, the likes of Wertz, Neufeld,and Knight will be contributing monthly, and creators such as Bellwood, Delliquanti, Glidden, and Rosenberg are on deck for later in the year.

  Bors, modestly, describes this as A good start, which just makes me excited to see what other shoes he’s going to drop. In the meantime, make The Nib part of your daily reading habit.

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¹ Case in point: a Kickstarter-tracking site called Sidekick gave Trippe a 7% chance of success when he was 8 hours in and 2/3 of the way to goal, which tells me that their algorithms are seriously off. They’ve since decided that yeah, he’ll succeed, so thanks for that, Sidekick!

Meanwhile, the Fleen Fudge Factor (take the Kicktraq trend target at the 24-30 hour mark, and the final total will most likely be one-sixth to one-third of that value) puts Trippe with a likely final total in the range of 3.6x to 7.2x of goal, or about US$23,000 to US$46,000. Heck, he’s more than halfway to the lower bound of that range in three days, with a mere 27 days to go.