Sometimes I’m late to noticing things, sometimes it’s others that could have been a little more prompt, and sometimes there’s entirely rational procrastination involved. Let’s party.

• Interesting idea that I finally saw — a multi-creator Patreon, essentially, where one creator-of-record is gathering the funds to pay contributors to an e-magazine. Worlds Without Master takes as its primary topic sword-and-sorcery short stories, with a particular focus on the common-as-dirt barely-distinguishable-from-the-villagers adventurer. No World-Saving Wielders of the Gods Will, no Promised Ones or Prophecy-Fulfillers.

  I noticed the campaign because the first four issues of WWM feature lots of creators, but the only one to show up in each issue (other than project supremo Epidiah Ravachol) is Bryant Paul Johnson (of the now sadly-concluded Teaching Baby Paranoia), who’s contributing an ongoing comic called Oh, The Beating Drum. Interesting idea, I’ll be looking to see if others adopt this masthead-slash-bullpen approach to Patreonage.

• Also a few days behind the curve: I see that Andrews & McMeel — the big-time publishing arm of Universal Press Syndicate and publisher of Matthew Inman’s Oatmeal collections — is now offering mini e-books of various comics. For the most part, these are syndicated-type comics (Marmaduke! Luann!), but I notice some less-mainstream offerings, including Skin Horse by Shaenon Garrity and C Jeffrey Wells and Savage Chickens by Doug Savage. In the case of Skin Horse they are single story arcs, and if memory serves they are from different print collections, which means you can’t just grab a couple e-minis at three bucks a pop as a replacement for a proper print collection.
• I think that The AV Club may have fallen prey to a situation I’ve often found myself in — a story that is timely gets pushed for space, just until tomorrow, then the next week, then later still; by the time it runs it’s not really timely any more, but when it means that you get a really nice writeup of the first two Bad Machinery collections, I can abide a little lateness. It’s also hard to argue with their conclusion: Anyone not reading [Bad Machinery] is missing out on one of the great achievements in contemporary comics.
• David Malki !, as this page has noted in the past, is a man of ideas; perhaps too many ideas, or at least ideas that Man Was Not Meant To Dabble With. I am not saying that he made a poor choice in offering to hand-write every card in a copy of the Machine of Death game for a single backer willing to cough up US$488; I am saying that perhaps making that support tier available before knowing how many stretch goals would be met, how many additional creators would be contributing cards, was perhaps just a wee bit optimistic.

  Because the total number of cards he became obligated to hand-write turned out to be 960, and he understandably did not drop everything in his life to do that. But now he has, and you can watch as he gets hours and hours and hours into a process that he seems bound and determined to accomplish in one session. Will he succeed? Only the next video will tell.

• It can’t really be late if the announcements just came out, can it? In case you hadn’t seen them, two awesome projects will be materializing soon. On the one hand, Anthony Clark and KC Green will be collaborating on a new webcomic, and I never knew how much I wanted this until the word went out yesterday:

  It’s called BACK!!! It’s a western fantasy story about the end of the world. Anthony is on art duties and I’m writing it and helping design characters. I also did the little drawing on the top, but Anthony has got the rest covered.

  BACK goes live on 18 June, with an instant archive of pages, followed by two more each Wednesday. I am taking the very unusual step of adding this to the blogroll before it even launches because you know it’s going to be that good.

  And just a bit later — 26 August to be precise — we will finally get the sixth volume of Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series. The books were delayed by Kibuishi’s rather serious illness last year, but now he’s back in form, and promising the conclusion of some of the story arcs that have been building over the past few years (though not all of them, certainly, as Amulet is scheduled to run ten books). Watch the official announcement from Kibuishi here.

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That’s almost a sentence, but not quite.