I can’t reveal that.

Aaron Diaz is full of ideas, and it pains him when he can’t share with you an idea that’s not ready for inclusion in Dresden Codak. Concrete plans about books, sure; dinosaurs, he’s all over that conversation. But questions regarding the nature of science/speculative fiction that might reveal where he’s going with his current story arc, Dark Science? That’s where he draws the line. So let’s focus on what he will discuss.

Firstly, there is a Dresden Codak book in the works, which he hopes will be out for Christmas¹. So far, so good, people do books of their webcomics literally every week. But this book is from the man that puts minute detail into single “pages” that keep scrolling on and on, and that requires space. When I first met Diaz, he was musing about putting together a book for Hob, and I speculated it might require a size approaching that of a coffee table book. We chuckled.

Yeah, so the new book might have to be trimmed down by 15% or so, but right now he’s looking at a 17×23 inch treatment. In color. Hardcover. Covering from the first introduction of Kim (presumably this story) and every subsequent story prior to Dark Science (he didn’t say if the guest week that immediately preceded DS would be included), including all of Hob. I remarked the only book he could work on that would require more space would be a collection of Moebius tribute art, which caused an eye twinkle and a terse, “Don’t tempt me.”²

It is worth noting that while having this conversation, his exhibitor’s wristband was configured in a möbius strip, which he incessantly traced with his fingers. That prompted a discussion of spatial mathematics, which led to a discussion of the philosophy of science, and how he believes he’s on a unique track with Dark Science.

Some of what he said is pretty obvious: it’s about a third done (the last update fairly screams “end of first act reveal”). It’s in tribute to Metropolis. Ayn Rand is in for some mockery in Act II (which he described as “intense”) and Act III (“surreal”). The key concept of Dark Science hasn’t been revealed yet, but as far as he can tell, it’s not an idea that’s been done before in SF:

It’s not a “go here, get this, bring it back, fix the problem” kind of story. Hob was about having different points of view with respect to the unknown, Dark Science is about science, the philosophy of science, what it’s for.

That’s when I asked him if he was using “science” as a verb and not a noun, and that brings us back to his inability to reveal things up there at the top. Between now and us learning what he can’t reveal at this time, we’ve got four or five years, a hardcover (at least one), and a lot of days besotted by the newest discoveries in maniraptor locomotion and neck structures. The world comes rushing at Diaz, and comics are how he does science to it. Pretty, pretty science.

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¹ Perhaps noting his update schedule, Diaz did not specify Christmas of which year.

² I continued to tempt him; while deep in a conversation about how coelurosaurs invaded every ecological niche, I remarked how I’d love to see him do a book containing the likes of the enormous Charles R Knight murals of dinosaurs that have been mainstays at natural history museums for half a century.

Knight worked from the best paleontological information of his times, and Diaz would certainly work from the state of today’s art, meaning feathers everywhere. “I want to see your take on pterosaurs,” I said. He got that twinkle again and muttered, “Ooooh. I could … you’re giving me an idea.”

On any other day, Wondermark’s ninth anniversary or my delight at seeing the expanding white zone/shrinking grey zone over to the right of today’s xkcd might have been top item of discussion, but instead we have to go back to the Kickstarter well again.

• Yeah, yeah, new Kickstarters, funding achieved in less than 22 hours with a month to go, the usual. Except there’s something quite novel about the Kickstarter for Smut Peddler (which has been A Thing for about 18 months now), and it’s a lede that’s halfway buried:
  

  This pre-order event will determine the bonuses of SP’s authors. They’ve already been paid for their contributions, but the more money this Kickstarter makes, the more money they get. [emphasis original]

  Actually, make that a couple of novel things: first, that the artists have been paid; second that they’ve been paid up front, before a single book is sold; third, that they will be paid more based on how successful the Kickstart is.

  If the Kickstarter reaches $20,000, each contributor/team gets an extra $50.00.
  If the Kickstarter reaches $25,000, each contributor/team gets an extra $100.00. [emphasis original]

  … and so on. Every US$5000 raised increases the payments to the creators by fifty bucks, on up to infinity. If Smut Peddler breaks into the ranks of the most successful comics projects (call it 50 large), each creator is looking at the original pay scale (US$50/page, per the original call for submissions) possibly doubling or tripling. And since these pre-ordered copies are being fulfilled against a known, public total pledge amount, there’s no need to delve into elaborate accounting or wonder exactly how royalties are being calculated¹.

  Also, it’s full of naked people gettin’ it on.

• At the opposite end of the spectrum, Tiny Kitten Teeth. Not to imply that Becky Dreistadt hasn’t ever drawn people gettin’ it on², it’s just not what one associates with her bright, colorful, sunny-dispositioned style. For those that want to see more of that style, TKT are heading down the print version route, with a handsome hardcover in the works featuring with big pages to suit the detail in the original watercolor/gouache pages.

  In addition to the book itself, Dreistadt (and partner/writing collaborator Frank Gibson) are offering patches, pins, prints, paintings, the usual enticements and holy crap original pages:

  Measuring in at 11×16 inches, few people outside of our close friends have ever seen original pages until now. You will be the only person other than us to own one. We don’t envision selling a page again for quite some time. These pages take days to complete and we are yet to part with one since we started, over 3 years ago!

  Translation: it would be only slightly trickier to get your hands on an original BONE or Calvin and Hobbes page than an original Tiny Kitten Teeth page. I think that the description is meant to convey that only one TKT page is up for grabs, but right now the Kickstarter doesn’t show it as a limited reward, so maybe more than one are available? One way to find out, my friends, and it’s gonna cost you US$1250 (which is entirely reasonable, given that is it certain that Becky Dreistadt will be listed in the annals of animation next to Mary Blair, Frank ‘n’ Ollie, Chuck Jones, Eric Goldberg, Andreas Deja, Richard Williams, and other giants of the field)³.

  Or, actually, I could pretend I’m some kind of journalist and just ask Frank and Becky about their intent, and it turns out it was intended as a limited reward, one person only, and now shows as such on the campaign page. Race for the prize begins: now.

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¹ Not that SP honcho Spike would try to screw the contributors to this publishing venture; I bring it up only to contrast with the traditional publisher/creator relationship, where the right to examine books and determine whether or not the degree to which you were getting screwed was seen as a major concession on the part of publishers/producers/studios/labels/etc.

² Or is incapable of doing so; after all, she’s a cartoonist, and the first place slow-time-at-the-con-table jam sketches go is to the naughty side of the equation.

³ Look ’em up, you should already know their names and significance if you’re the sort of person that hangs out here.

Nearly halfway through, and my first read on the Skin Horse 3 Kickstart is largely holding true — nearly 60% of all pledgers are holding at the $20 level, which remains the quantum unit of money. In another month after the campaign closes (and perhaps just after NCS weekend¹, where I may have a chance to talk to Shaenon Garrity about it) I’ll be very interested to look at the final distribution, particularly given the inclusion of one item that I’d previously disregarded in Kickstarter analyses: the unlocked reward. My Grand Unified Kickstarter Theory is moving ever-further away from completion.

Oh, and in the interests of complete disclosure, I am quoted² on the Kickstarter page, but I’ve had no communication with the creators of Skin Horse and my thoughts here have not been influenced by any offers or promises. Although I am very glad to see that Ms Garrity has chosen an appropriate funding level for giving away original art; in the past (if my memory serves me correctly), originals have been thrown in at purchase points as low as US$50 which is just crazypants.

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¹ Did I mention that the NCS have graciously offered me the opportunity to attend their get-together so I can see who actually wins the first division award for webcomickry? They did, and for the same cost as members, which was quite kind. Gonna be an expensive weekend (not to mention that it’s Las Vegas), but it’s something I figure I ought to do once.

² At least I think I am — those words sound like something I’d write, but this Gary Tyrell fellow that’s quoted spells his last name wrong.

My brain’s all over the place today. It started when I saw that my alma mater had announced one of the modern world’s greatest engineers, Dean Kamen, as commencement speaker. It’s hard to imagine a better match, and the video¹ of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology’s president making the announcement was clever and funny. A few hours later, an announcement was made that the same man (who had shepherded the Rose-Hulman back from a couple of directionless years) had collapsed and died.

I never met President Matt Branam, but he did impressive things in the various stages of his career and had an open-door, first-name basis with the student body. I have no doubt he was as indispensable to the current students of Rose-Hulman as President Sam Hulbert was when I studied there. My best wishes to President Branam’s family and friends.

Briefly, then, as my heart’s not entirely in it:

• MoCCA Festival returns to the Lexington Armory next weekend, with lots of webcomics people exhibiting and/or panelling.
• I think a lot of us think that Cucumber Quest was one of the most impressive webcomic debuts of the past year, and not creator Gigi DG is ready to print up the first two chapters. Requisite Kickstarter over here, off to a damn good start².
• Scott Kurtz is back from the Far Antipodes and dropping some opinion about Mark Waid’s announcement of a new webcomics-model³ portal called Thrillbent. Kurtz thinks that the entry of a big-name print-comics-books creator like Waid into webcomics offers the possibility of a threat to existing webcomickers if other big names follow. I’m not so sure; Kurtz follows print comics much closer than a lot of us, I suspect — I recognize Waid’s name from Kingdom Come, but couldn’t have told you what else he’d worked on in the past ten years — and may be overestimating the degree to which big name may act as a disruptor.

  The key question is, if they start making money/careers out of the webcomics model, are they doing so by cannibalizing the existing spend-on-webcomics audience, or will they be bringing along those that already follow them. To tie it to the last item, how many people that are itching to buy Cucumber Quest in print are eager to give Waid money for his webcomics offerings and vice versa? Right now, I suspect (but hard data from which to draw proper conclusions is years off) there will be some intermingling and peeling-off of audience members, but that for the most part the Venn Diagram of Mr Waid and Ms DG’s readers will hell of look like an eight. There will likely be a few especially broad-minded readers (and I think that Kurtz will be one) sitting in that narrow overlap in the middle. Ask me again in 2017 what’s going to happen in 2014.

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¹ Since pulled.

² As of this writing, more than 100% of goal in the first few hours, and a month to go.

³ That is, give away content on the front end, monetize on the back end.

So today’s Sinfest (following on from yesterday’s, and the ongoing storyline of a zombie looking for story time) really caught my eye because of the last panel and the characterization of elections as a choose-your-own-adventure story writ large. It’s a great metaphor, and it resonates with me because I’ve been reading a CYOA for the past couple of hours.

As people who read his comics or his twitterfeed may have gathered, Zach Weiner is working on a CYOA¹ style story, and he was kind enough to give me a preview of the work in progress. As it’s not due for release for some months, I won’t be discussing specifics here, but I will talk about some generalities:

• It’s hilarious. Despite some gratuitous jokes at the expense of one of my chosen tribes, all is forgiven because Weiner has brought his absurdist take to the tropes of Star Wars, Star Trek, the Hero’s Journey, and porn. In other words, it’s like you’re living inside an SMBC strip while Weiner’s on a particularly creative laugh-generating bender.
• It’s long². I must have made a couple of hundred choices, zig-zagging along a story path so convoluted that the time-honored CYOA trick of deciding you don’t like how your chances look and backtracking two or three choices to start down another path was pretty immediately useless.
• It’s hard³. For those of you that have followed the micro-CYOA doodles at the top and bottom of the pages of Weiner’s SMBC print collection, those are a cakewalk compared to how tricky this one is. In part, it’s because Weiner has inverted a lot of expectations and your best chances to win involve ________ __ __ _____ ___________. But even once you realize that, it’s rarely obvious which choice will do that most effectively.
• It’s damn near complete. It’s still getting polished up with respect to events that aren’t just based on reader choice (like whether or not you win fights), and illustrations (by the great Chris Jones) are still to be added (I can think of at least a dozen scenes where Jones’s work will make hilarious things hilarious squared), but the narrative path is solid and well-designed.

I’m sure that somebody has done serious research on the theoretical structure of CYOA branching paths, and I’m equally certain that this project is better for Weiner’s well-known predilection for self-taught math. The fact that all of that can be combined with a story that includes the concept of “essential _______s”⁶. Price not set yet, but when this debuts at San Diego, it’ll be worth every penny.

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¹ I should probably note that as far as I can tell, various people have copyright on terms like “Choose Your Own Adventure” and “Pick Your Path”, but since terms like “interactive fiction” are so unwieldy, I’m sticking with CYOA as a generic description which is what everybody calls the damn things anyway.

² That’s what she said.

³ Insert⁴ your own joke about “hard” here, it’ll fit right into⁵ the storyline.

⁴ Insert your own joke about “insertion” here.

⁵ Insert your own joke about “fitting right in” … oh, hell, you get the idea. Lotta sophomoric sex jokes, in the very best sense of the term.

⁶ No spoilers, dammit, but it’s a throw-away joke that left me in awe.

Sorry, no unifying theme today, just a bunch of stuff I found to be neat.

• First and foremost, congratulations to Dante Shepherd of Surviving The World, his lovely wife theSwede, and new infant daughter Cannonball. Expect a brief interruption in lecture, meaning the last of Shepherd’s lessons (until guest lecturers take up the slack) will be this fetus-themed installment with one heck of a disturbing facial expression.
• As has become somewhat traditional in recent years among those that do comics in webform as well as print, Dave Kellett has opted to make it easy for Eisner voters to sample the material for which he is nominated in the category of Best Humor Publication. So if you’ve got network, and 24MB of drive space, and a PDF reader (please for the love of Glob, not Adobe Acrobat), point yourself over to here and grab a copy of Coffee: It’s What’s For Dinner.

  Those with long memories may recall that Kellett’s previous themed collection, Literature: Unsuccessfully Competing Against TV Since 1953, was nominated in the same category last year, but Coffee is sure to succeed where Literature sadly fell short. This is because Coffee has a secret wow factor, in the form of commentary by me mixed in with the Great Coffee Cup Lid Challenge of Aught-Seven. For truly as it is written, if Fleen be with you, who can stand against you?¹

• Machine of Death 2 details? Yes, please! David Malki ! shares with us all today the titles of the stories contained in MoD 2 (title pending), along with a smattering of the creators that will be doing chapter art and comic strips. There’s even statistics, because if there’s one thing that MoD makes me think of almost as much as the stories, it’s the data². In all, writers in 46 different countries submitted stories², overwhelmingly from the US and Canada.

  Put another way, it’s 1958 stories from 1705 different writers, along with 151 art portfolio submissions from twelve countries. Some of the stories won’t fit in the book, but the Mod Squad have plans for them, never fear. Most interesting to me — even more interesting that the fact that apparently Rebecca Black⁴ has a story in the new collection — is the fact that seven creators (counting Malki ! and fellow editors Ryan North & Matthew Bennardo) are returning from Volume One, so if you liked the first one, this bodes well for you.

• New from TopatoCo, five (count ’em, five) books are slated for Spring release, including new collections of A Softer World, Three Panel Soul, Dinosaur Comics⁵. MS Paint Adeventures⁶, and muthascratchin’ Three. Word. Phrase. My guess is that these will be debuting at TCAF (mostly because last week they announced that they’re debuting at TCAF), possibly along with the must-have con season accessory, delivered in a chariot fit for the gods themselves.

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¹ Don’t answer that.

² Some of you will find it sad that I mean that literally and sincerely — the numbers and behind-the-scenes accounts that Malki !, et. al., have shared with the process of producing MoD material is beyond value.

³ Malki ! claimed 44 countries, but I counted 46. Or 47, if you count Antarctica, which isn’t on the list but totally should be.

⁴ Apparently, she knows all about death.

⁵ Continuing the secret book-title code that I totally know because Ryan told me.

⁶ Specifically, Homestuck, volume 2, which many said couldn’t possible be translated to book form without violating the laws of space and time.

Yep, Benign Kingdom hardcover, in today’s mail. I also got a copy of Evan Dahm’s individual book in softcover which I might be tempted to give away on account of it’s all in the hardcover, but there’s a place inside for a monster-huge sketch and MoCCA is just two weeks away, so … maybe. Also, the hardcover has a friggin’ ribbon bookmark, an innovation in comics previously seen only in things as nice as the BONE hardcover. What I am basically saying here is that the four creator teams and George kicked at least twelve separate asses in the production of these art books and you should all buy them all. The end.

Except, no, not the end, because — in a spectacular act of lede-burying — I have not yet told you that Meredith Gran will be the latest creator¹ to take a whack at comics dealing with the Land of Ooo, as she produces a new Adventure Time spin-off miniseries starring Marceline the Vampire Queen and Princess Bubblegum and their band. Bleeding Cool got the launch story, but Gran has graciously agreed to an interview with me, and we’ll be bringing that to you as soon as her schedule permits.

If you’re paying attention to calendars you might have noticed that yesterday was 15 April, meaning the long-awaited launch of The PhD Movie is now available for you via streaming and optional download.

Don’t use that link, though. Use this one. It takes you to the same movie, the same ability to download, but it does so for 50% off, meaning that you can watch a feature-length movie that Jorge Cham and his cohorts put together with tremendous time and expense for five dollars (American). Seriously, we are into Louis CK territory here, with nothing standing between the creator and the audience but an entirely nominal sum of money.

In the absolute worst case, you don’t enjoy a movie for a couple of hours, it costs you and everybody around you a total of five bucks², and since you’re watching it at home instead of in a theater³, you can get completely drunk while watching if you want. Hell, since an actual theater probably costs like twelve dollars and you have to drive to it, you’re actually saving money to find out you don’t like the movie. Anything less negative than that counts as a triumph, and still only costs a fiver.

And if you totally love it (or know anybody in grad school, who will surely love it), you can get the DVD version for US$17 plus shipping, which is still less than this week’s craptacular Hollywood releases. That’s what they call a win-win-win in the movie biz, so you’d best get jumping if you want your share of the winning.

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¹ I have literally lost track of how many webcomics people have a hand in the Adventure Time comics now, but the list includes Ryan North, Braden Lamb, Scott C, Mike Krahulic, Becky-n-Frank, Elena Barbarich, Emily Carroll, James Kochalka, and Lucy Knisley so far.

² So you get one less 1200 calorie drink at Starbucks this week, which maybe isn’t such a bad idea when you think about it.

³ Adding insult to injury, the theater is probably full of the sort of people that you find in theaters these days — the sort determined to make the moviegoing process as miserable as possible.

According to that unimpeachable source, Brad Guigar is 43 years old today. In honor of the Bradmastide season, we will feature an interview with Brad tomorrow, provided I can figure out how to work the digression about the Great Unmedicated Bipolar Pumpkin into thing without it looking like we’re both a pair of loonballs and/or drunk. No promises. In the meantime, how about some other happenings from around our corner of comics?

• The Hugo Award nominations hit over the weekend, with an odd shift in the universe of sci-fi awardsdom; that faint silence you hear is the lack of a nomination for the fine folks at Studio Foglio, whose work on Girl Genius has literally owned the Best Graphic Story category in all the prior years of its existence. The Foglios graciously decline nominations this year, leading to the following slate:
  • Digger, by Ursula Vernon
  • Fables Vol 15: Rose Red by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham
  • Locke & Key Volume 4, Keys to the Kingdom written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez
  • Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication written and illustrated by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton
  • The Unwritten (Volume 4): Leviathan written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross

  Two webcomics, three comic book collections; let’s address Schlock Mercenary first. There was an … unfortunate comment left at The Beat¹ that decried Howard Tayler’s inclusion on the list and stated he was only nominated because he was “whoring” (that’s a quote) his audience to get nominations. Leaving aside the rather obvious flaw in the logic², one should note that Tayler did ask his audience to support a number of eligible works by other creators. Of the works Tayler was advocating for, he was involved in two and not involved in five, and one of the two he worked on got nominated³. If he’s whoring, he’s the least effective whore ever.

  Not content to impugn the quality of Mr Tayler’s work, the commenter went on to idly speculate that Ursula Vernon engaged in similar, whorey practices. Leaving aside the well-documented fact that I loves me some Digger, ten seconds with Google would show that while Ms Vernon has spent the (roughly) one year since Digger wrapped writing frequently about her garden, interesting birds, amphibians gettin’ on in her garden, oversized turkeys (both free-ranging out by the back fence and in the roaster for Thanksgiving), mulch, mulch, and more mulch, and spoofs of Regency romance novels complete with ninjas, not once did she ask for consideration in any awards.

  Look. We all have our favorites. We all think our taste is impeccable. We all love what we love⁴. But before you accuse a creator (of whom you are barely aware) in a manner that is unseemly at best and incredibly dickish at worst, perhaps just a smidgen of due diligence? Awesome.

• Rounding out the nominations in Best Fan Artist, we find that Randall Munroe is again recognized. It’s a weird category, but as long as Randall keeps cranking out things that make me think like today’s update, I don’t have any problems with him being nominated for everything up to and including Science Cartoon Pope⁵.
• Not related to the Hugo Awards, but within the realms of engineering: Angela Melick is having a launch party for her second book in Downtown Vancouver on Saturday, 14 April. It’s in a bar, which can only mean fun times. And the very next day, Jorge Cham’s The PhD Movie goes on sale, with a newly announced five percent of profits going to support Endeavor College Prep in East Los Angeles. Proof positive that engineers are the best people? Possibly.

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¹ I’m not calling out the commenter by name; while his words were rash and unwarranted, I’m more interested in taking the behavior to task than the person.

² Namely, that if Tayler were capable of whoring himself so effectively, I’m sure his wife would prefer he use his whorish powers to bring in some money for things like groceries and mortgage payments, rather than a small statue of a rocket. It’s a very nice small statue of a rocket, but I’m pretty sure the local Food o Rama would prefer cash.

³ He also shares a nomination (along with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Jordan Sanderson) for the Writing Excuses podcast in the Best Related Work category, but did not advocate for it as far as I can find in a cursory search.

⁴ C.f.: previous graf, where I loves me some Digger.

⁵ Rest of the nominees in no particular order: Aaron Diaz, Zach Weiner, Dante Shepherd, Tony Piro, David Morgan-Mar, and Darryl Cunningham. Honorable mention to Jon Rosenberg for Cartoon Neil DeGrasse Tyson With A Jetpack.

So the Eisner nominees got announced the other day, and I was pleasantly surprised to see some of the work that was recognized, along with unpleasantly surprised to see some of what was omitted. In other words, a completely typical year. Let’s start with the nominees for Best Digital Comic, which we will recall are:

[O]pen to any new, professionally produced long-form original comics work posted online in 2011. Webcomics must have a unique domain name or be part of a larger comics community to be considered. The work must be online-exclusive for a significant period prior to being collected in print form.

That would be represented this year by:

• Bahrain by Josh Neufeld
• Battlepug by Mike Norton
• Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant by Tony Cliff
• Outfoxed by Dylan Meconis
• Sarah and the Seed by Ryan Andrews

They are, respectively, a piece of comics journalism (16 pages), a serialized fantasy story (ongoing), a serialized adventure story (wrapped at 118 pages, second story forthcoming), a fairy tale from the POV of the participants (22 pages), and a macabre story reminiscent of Momotaro (5 infinite canvas installments, equivalent to approximately 100 pages). Bahrain is the only one new to me.

The nominees provide a nice glimpse into both the the strength and the weakness of the category — there’s an incredible variety of work, but it’s just as hard to decide what the requirement of “long-form” means. Serialized ongoing story? Check. Done-in-one? Check. Seemingly anything that’s not a continuity-light gag strip or single panels would qualify, but there’s still a conceptual difficulty in seeing works that are five to ten times longer than others in the same category. Still, if I have my questions about things that might have been nominated (top of my list: anything Emily Carroll did in 2011), it’s entirely down to preference; there’s nothing on this slate to be embarrassed about.

Speaking of missing, I understand that the nominations are mostly drawn from submissions sent in by the creators themselves (or their publishers), but I’m wondering about some things that were left out. While the submission policies don’t explicitly say that the judges can include overlooked works that weren’t submitted, I have to believe that such discretion wouldn’t be frowned upon either¹. All this to say, no nomination for Hark! A Vagrant for either Best Humor Publication or Best Graphic Album — Reprint? Kate Beaton was everywhere in 2011 (and deservedly so), inarguably one of the two or three biggest stories in comics², and likely the one that reached the most people outside our rather insular community. Her absence is baffling.

That being said, having been on the inside of an awards process this year — and having taken some lumps for it — I can say with certainty that I have much more sympathy for Jackie Estrada and the Eisner committee than at any prior point in my life. It’s an imperfect set of nominations, because no process for choosing and no people involved in that process can be perfect. I trust that everybody involved did the best they could with honest intentions. Nor could I be annoyed with any nominations list that includes the likes of Dave Kellett (for Best Humor Publication), Colleen AF Venable (Best Publication for Kids (ages 8–12)), or Vera Brosgol³ (Best Publication for Young Adults (Ages 12-17)). Congratulations and good luck to all the nominees.

• In other news, Brad Guigar has taken an idea and run it in a new direction. Rich Stevens messed around with releasing a month or so of Diesel Sweeties strips as an e-book (mostly to play around with iBooks Author), which Guigar is also doing right now with Evil, Inc., but with a twist. Brad’s download lets you see into the future. The entire month of April’s storyline (and please recall that today is only the sixth day of April) is packaged up and can be yours for a buck and a half.

  I’ve seen webcomics collections hit print with a few strips at the end still to run online, but I can’t recall such an example of sneak peak access before. Approximately 24 hours after announcing the deal, Guigar found the response strong enough that he’ll be repeating in May, and hints at further developments. For those wondering what he would do with all that extra time, Kicking his buffer in the ass appears to have been at the top of the list.

• Jeph Jacques is heading to the entirely classy environs of Yale University on Thursday, 12 April, for a Master’s Tea, which (as noted previously) is a Big Damn Deal. Not noted in print previously — but believe me I noted the crap hell out of it privately — Yale does a really terrible job of providing any public information about said Teas. We’re six days out and the only schedule I can find only goes up to the 10th. There are many colleges at Yale, and this tea might not be held at Pierson, or maybe it will?

  Basically if you want to go, I’d advise hanging around the Pioneer Valley on Thursday morning until you see a large man with tats and piercings and a Great Pyrenees headed south towards New Haven, and follow him.

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¹ The guidelines do say that the judges could add, modify, or delete entire categories (and it’s my understanding that happened this year), which to me is a much broader power than merely including additional works for consideration.

² NB: not just comic books.

³ I told you Anya’s Ghost was the best comics of the year. Also, disclaimer: stuff that I wrote appears in Kellett’s book.

Who likes numbers? Sure, we all do, but what numbers should we talk about?

• From the wilds of the Pacific Northwest comes the news that Penny Arcade are shifting publishers, with Oni Press getting the nod this time. On the one hand, this shift¹ could lead some to wonder if Mike and Jerry are capable of forming long-lasting bonds of commitment. It’s not you, baby, they tell Random House imprint Del Rey, it’s us. Alas, the trail of broken hearts is long, with other exes in their history, but considering one of them was a vanity press that screwed Jerry and Mike sideways, maybe a little fear of commitment is a good thing.

  On the other hand, Oni Press means that they’re getting the love and attention of a good man — the best man — in the person of George Rohac. Besides shepherding the Benign Kingdom project to Kickstarter superstar statues, George is a man who cannot be destroyed except that he returns under his own power. His smiles last through anything, and good thing too for us all. He reserves his hatred for forces of nature and his punchings for problems². And Yuko. What I am saying is that Penny Arcade are likely in good hands.

• I think I can be forgiven for missing the date (especially seeing as how the creator missed it as well), but Help Desk turned sixteen years old on three days ago. Granted, a chunk of that history was in print, or subject to occasionally-lengthy hiatuses (hiati?), but it’s been there in one form or another, finding new variations on the theme for 2065 comics³ and counting. Happy (belated) birthday to Help Desk, and happy stripperversary to Christopher Wright.

  Edit to correct: As Mr Wight points out in the comments, Help Desk was never in print and I am an idiot; it was originally published as part of an online magazine. Fleen regrets the error.

• If there were only 72 websites in the world that you should pay attention to in 2012, what would #61 (alphabetically) be? TopatoCo. From the Maximum PC list/declaration/manifesto:
  

  Topatoco Web artists make our lives better by publishing their work on the web for free. You can make sure your favorite artist has food, shelter, online access, ink, paper, and other necessities of life by shopping at Topatoco; buy T-shirts, books, coffee cups, and lots of other art-emblazoned goodies.

  All of which are valid points, but which I think might miss the most wonderful thing about TopatoCo — the customer service experience, which is snarky, informative, timely, and offers the opportunity to interact with members of the Great and Bountiful TopatoCo Empire in curious and wonderful ways. Well done, you crazy, magnificent bastards.

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¹ By my count, this would make Oni the fourth publisher of Penny Arcade books, but I’ll have to check my bookshelf when I get home.

² Which wisely decide it’s a good time to be elsewhere.

³ Which is equivalent to one comic every 2.83 days on average across the total time period.