Thanks, Top Men! Now, where to start, where to start?

• How about here? I should have pointed you towards a short (really short, like less than 1500 words short) story by Ursula Vernon from last November, because it’s excellent (as is pretty much all her writing) and also an excellent example of what her story-voice is like. I remember dragging my wife to the computer and making her read it, so there’s that.

  But now there’s a Disney-revisionist movie playing, and Lauren Davis at io9 remembered Vernon’s story, and then The AV Club noticed it, and what kind of Vernon superfan would I be if I didn’t signal boost a little? If you like The Sea Witch Sets The Record Straight, read Digger, and the Dragonbreath series, and everything else that she’s written, and thank me later.

• Speaking of people you should be reading under all circumstances: Hope Larson. I believe that the record is clear that I hold Larson as perhaps the best creator of graphic novels (original and adaptations) working in English today, but it’s been some time since she had a webcomic. The Secret Friend Society (once the home of Larson’s Salamander Dream, and Kean Soo’s Jellaby) has long since shuttered its doors, leaving no place for a between-books dose of Larson’s magic.

  Until now:

  I wrote the script for Solo last year. This story has been in my brain, in one incarnation or another, since mid-2012, and I’m ready for it to go out into the world. I’ll be drawing the pages and slapping them up online the moment the ink’s dry, raw and fresh and full of mistakes. And full of swear words—the subject matter is fairly tame, but it’s not a kids’ comic.

  I won’t be adhering to any sort of update schedule and I currently have no plans to publish Solo with a book or comics publisher, but I will put together a permanent website as soon as possible.

  Just bookmark it and check it regularly, yeah? It’ll be just about guaranteed the best thing you read any day that it updates.

• Kickstarter news: less than 20 hours to go, and less than US$200 from adding yet another 8-page extension to Cuttings by Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya. For the record, if that stretch goal is made (it will be), that will make more than 50 extra pages of art in the book; if the usual last-day bump reaches the next stretch goal after (that’s another US$5000), it’ll be more than 60 extra pages added to what was original going to be a 72 page book. Added value for extra funding — that’s how you do it.
• Kickstarter news: Somewhere around the 24 hour mark, Zach Weinersmith’s campaign for Augie and the Green Knight crossed the US$100,000 mark, knocking down stretch goals faster than Weinersmith can update. At present, though, there will be an additional five art pieces in the book, which now has a ribbon bookmark, will be made available to libraries, and recorded as an audiobook.

  Oh, and if you’re in a support tier that gets art prints along with your book(s), you now are getting five of those instead of two. Per the FFF, AatGK is headed to a finish of US$400K +/- US$134K. So, plenty of room for more improvements to come. How many extra Boulet paintings can this book hold? I’m hoping for at least 25 in all.

• Kickstarter news: Speaking of US$100,000, that’s the goal line for Jorge Cham’s newest campaign. That’s a hell of a total, but considering that it’s intended to make a sequel to 2012’s The PhD Movie, that’s kind of a bargain. The first movie was funded by Cham and his cohorts, but since it’s apparent that there’s now an audience for the film (screenings have been held more than 500 universities and research centers, including Antarctica), why not spread around the costs? Better yet, the more money raised, the more of The PHD Movie 2: Still in Grad School you’ll get, as every dollar above goal will go into lengthening the film.

  It’s currently sitting at just under 15% of goal after about eight hours, so it appears the only question is how long the movie will actually be: raise enough and you could force Cham to make the Berlin Alexanderplatz of grad school narratives. In case you’re worried that might kill him, don’t — dude went through grad school, he’s used to never-ending, frustrating, wondering-if-it’s-all-worth-it undertakings that last for years.

Spam of the day:

With the site outage, not much got caught up in the filters. So sad! The spammers might be moving on to sites that have a higher uptime.