Jeph Jacques, lover of otters¹, everybody. In the non-mustelid corners of Webcomicstan, various news items came out over the weekend, due to the confluence of ECCC, April Fool’s Day, and a spectacularly successful Kickstart. Let’s take them one at a time.

• From Seattle, it’s not news that everybody had a great time and webcomickers generally went home with their merch supplies depleted (in some cases down to zero) and their pockets full of sweet, untraceable cash. Kids everywhere had a great time until they just fell asleep, the dears. But before the weekend was over, exciting news broke from Hurricane Erika about her recently-concluded (and sorely missed) collaboration with Jeff Parker, Bucko.

  Namely, Dark Horse will be publishing Bucko in the fall, giving me an opportunity to get some sweet Moen character art sketched in one of the funniest comics of the new century. Probably you could get a copy sketched in too, it’s just that I’m going to be sure to pester Erika until she relents. Here’s a hint, though — my sketch request will involve something that rhymes with free play.

• If you’re reading xkcd today, make sure you’ve got JavaScript enabled, and keep in mind that it may be a different experience (although it uses the same comic title) as yesterday’s sneak peak. Per the alt text:
  

  Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit — from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your choice of web browser.

  And here I thought it was the little dots that means your band is sufficiently metal. More information about Randall Munroe’s latest experiment can be found on the internet.

• That was quick. Skin Horse creators Shaenon Garrity² and Jeffrey C Wells launched a Kickstarter campaign to print volume three of the increasingly convoluted (and I mean that in the best way) paean to the Oz books and/or devastating simultaneous critique of Men in Black conspiracy theory and the civil service at around midnight, 1 April. Twelve hours later they’d met their goal (a comparatively modest US$4000), leaving a mere 59.5 days to top things up. I’m going to be very interested at seeing what the graph of their contributions looks like once June arrives, but I suspect it’s not going to look anything like those that I examine previously.

  The high-end rewards are very few in number, and much less expensive than the top rewards of creators like Burlew and Stevens, not to mention the rather narrow range of reward tiers (only eight distinct levels, from US$10 to US$250, with the top two tiers limited to a total of 10 people; I rather suspect those went to the first 10 pledgers). Already the graph looks like a Dirac delta function shifted over to the US$20 pricepoint; I suspect that will only increase in the coming two months, leading to a refinement of my Kickstarter rewards model to include these new data.

_______________
¹ Not to be confused with loving Otter and/or her webcomic, which is a totally different thing.

² Nexus, webcomics realities, etc.

I’ve been contacted by a number of people about Scott Kurtz’s comment on yesterday’s NCS nominations story. While I’m touched by the concern, it’s unnecessary. Two of the things I appreciate about Scott are his passion and his complete and utter willingness to let you know where he stands on any issue; it’s not always fun being on the receiving end of those opinions¹, but it’s always instructive. We’ve been over our viewpoints and opinions and I’m happy to announce that I’ve been granted provisional BFF status by Mr Kurtz², subject only to my completing something called “Operation Wigwam Wedgie”, the details of which will be revealed to me at a later date³.

• Speaking of, I’m trusting you saw the mysterious tweets yesterday leading up to the announcement that the first of two guest weeks⁴ at PvP will feature an Axe Cop/LOLBAT team-up⁵. And we all know what’s not on deck for PvP the second week of Kurtz’s absence, so there’s that to look forward to.
• Every year about this time, I note that Canadian comics awards seem to have a much higher ratio of unassailable quality nominees than those in other parts of the world. That’s because every year about this time, the Doug Wright Award nominees are announced, starting the season of comics awards with their bestowal at TCAF in just over a month.

  Anyhoo, the nominations are dominated by Drawn and Quarterly this year, with Kate Beaton up for still more well-deserved recognition for Hark! A Vagrant and Emily Carroll capping off a year where her recognition skyrocketed with a nomination for the Spotlight Award, which recognizes talent deserving of wider recognition (which she surely is).

• For those of you wondering how Rich Stevens was coming along with prepping well over 3500 comics for e-distribution, the answer appears to be, Just fine, thanks:
  

  I hit a bit of a milestone last night– 2,600 comics down, 1,000 to go. The plan to stay on schedule involves being done with this first draft by the end of the week.

  The good news is that somewhere around the 2,000th comic… my wrist evolved like a Pokémon and my carpal tunnel pain seems to have majorly faded. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

  I always said that Stevens was nigh-indestructible; only a world-wide coffee drought can even slow him down. That, or reeeaaaalllly expensive perfume⁶.

_______________
¹ If I only associated with people that agree with me 100% of the time, my circle of friends would be much smaller.

² I’m sorry, Kris Straub, I didn’t want you to have to find out this way, but what Scott and I share is real.

³ Hints have been dropped that the date in question will be 9 April, which by an amazing coincidence is Brad Guigar’s birthday.

⁴ Necessitated by Mr Kurtz’s travel to the far antipodes with former-BFF Mr Straub and sometimes homebrewer Mr Wheaton, despite the fact that it’s well known that everything in Australia wants to kill you. Everything. Godspeed, gentlemen, and watch out for drop bears.

⁵ Not a dream, hoax, imaginary story, etc.

⁶ ‘Cause it’s got a metal head!

I watched Jon Rosenberg’s Kickstarter campaign close just north of US$55,000 and in all-time the sixth highest slot for comics projects¹, and I started wondering if there were anything in common among these high-value webcomic Kickstarts. Waaaay too much number-crunching later, I find there actually is something among the most successful. Caveats ahoy:

1. The sample size is small, being drawn from the most successful and concluded comics Kickstart campaigns
2. I’ve excluded the Womanthology as it’s not the product of singly-identifiable creators, working from an established property
3. I’ve excluded the Order of the Stick campaign for several reasons:
   • The numbers are skewed by the high number of reward categories
   • The numbers within those categories are skewed by highly-variable reward limits (some limits in the range of 100, some in the range of five or six)
   • The numbers are even further skewed by a high incidence of “add on” rewards, where a supporter could get something not offered at their reward by bumping up their pledge by a given amount
4. I wanted to compare against campaigns that were just shy of successful for comparison, but it’s really damn hard to find those; a fairly exhaustive search of failed webcomics campaigns causes me to tend towards the conclusion If you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna fail big
5. To simplify things, I arranged reward levels in broad ranges, since there are no “standard” reward intervals; where you see the number “20” in the graphs, that means “greater than the 10 level to the immediate left, up to and including 20”

All that being said, I did find a fairly interesting commonality among the projects that I ultimately did data entry on:

1. Erfworld Year of the Dwagon — US$84,981 pledged, 1148 supporters, average pledge level US$74.25, 354% of goal achieved
2. Diesel Sweeties eBook-Stravaganza 3000 — US$60,209 pledged, 1520 supporters, average pledge level US$39.61, 2006% of goal achieved
3. Benign Kingdom — US$59,775, 1095 supporters, average pledge level US$54.59, 332% of goal achieved
4. Goats Book IV: Inhuman Resources — US$55,348, 906 supporters, average pledge level US$61.10, 461% of goal achieved

Looking purely at the stated support levels (and there’s no adjustment here for artificial limits on how many of a particular reward were offered, nor for people pledging at an amount “between” official reward levels, there’s not a lot of obvious correlation to be seen:

[click to embiggen]

With some really significant outliers there from Diesel Sweeties. But the curves of each comic’s pledge frequency seemed to be similar (at least, if you’ve spent a bunch of years looking at data), which led me to add some logarithmic trendlines²:

[make with the clicky]

Three of those comics have trendlines that are similar enough to arguably be within the bounds of the margin of error (if not for the fact that the very notion of a margin of error on such a small sample is ludicrous). There’s a real tendency towards buy-in the lower half of the reward structure, and the second quartile is where the real action is. The top rewards look impressive when a couple people plunk down a couple grand each, but they aren’t what’s important. The middle tiers are where you’ll find the make or break point.

The Diesel Sweeties curve is again an outlier, starting higher and decaying more sharply. I didn’t feel like cleaning them up, but random samples of failed Kickstarts from across the comics category revealed a similar pattern — when the greatest number of pledges are at the lowest levels, it’s really tough to make your goals. The only other successful Kickstart I found with a dominant skew to the very lowest end was the Double Fine door-buster, where more than 50% of all backers are at the lowest possible level³. So how do Double Fine and Diesel Sweeties get by on front-loading the low end, and why do so many other campaigns that do the same fail? I see two reasons:

• Sheer numbers The scale really cannot be overstated here. A cursory examination of the top-funded project in each major category revealed that you can take the total number of pledgers for all of those projects together and still not equal the 47,946 people that pledged at the lowest level to Double Fine. But numbers can work against a campaign, since any reward more more tangbile than warm fuzzy feelings will cost a significant amount of time and effort to send to a lot of people, on small margins. That leads us to …
• Free rewards You get the new Double Fine game, which requires no shipping, no handling, and it’s likely Steam will supply the bandwidth. Likewise, the lowest reward for the Diesel Sweeties campaign is a digital download that doesn’t cost Rich Stevens even one trip to the post office. Yeah, sure, bandwidth costs. Peanuts compared the effort and cost of getting anything physical to 490 people.

So that’s what I learned — there’s a sweet spot for rewards in about the US$25 – US$75 range, and unless you’re dealing with a metric crapload of supporters with an essentially free cost to fulfill rewards, don’t try for success on the low end. Also, these numbers are severely lacking in rigor, so if you make your Kickstarter decisions based solely on what I’ve done here without your own research, you’ll get exactly what you deserve, you silly people

_______________
¹ Although that notion is itself a bit nebulous; for example, the Schlock Mercenary boardgame campaign is in a different category, yet clearly owes its mammoth success (third overall in the category, as of this writing) to the underlying webcomic. Then again, the Not Invented Here IT barrier tape campaign (in the Product Design category) doesn’t rely on the webcomic’s familiarity to nearly the same degree. Your mileage will vary.

² Ask Zach Weiner; he’ll do a better job of explaining it than I will.

³ By contrast, Diesel Sweeties had approximately 1/3 of its support at the lowest level that allowed for an actual reward. Erfworld and Benign Kingdom were closer to 1 in 5, and Goats was in the range of 1 in 8. Note that “actual reward” here is taken to be “at least a PDF of the work in question”. Random thanks, postcards, bragging rights, etc., are not considered an actual reward.

Thursdays famously being the day that one just can never get the hang of¹, how about a few things that are readily hangable?

• Questions have arisen in both the comments to yesterday’s post and in my twitterstream regarding exactly when Angela Melick’s Welcome to the Real World goes on sale. Looking back, I can see the source of confusion, as the WTTRW page mentions an on-sale time of 24 March 2012 11:00am PST, but when I looked up Pacific Time to get the offset from GMT, my search gave me the result for PDT, because we’re in Daylight Savings Time now. At least we are in the US; Canada may be a different beast. Also, the countdown timer would appear to zero out at about 11:00 Eastern Daylight Time, not Pacific. So how about we call it “a bit before lunch in Vancouver the day after tomorrow” and decide that’s close enough?
• As long as we’re talking about things timing out, approximately nine hours from now, Jon Rosenberg will know exactly how much work he has to go to as a result of the Goats Kickstarter campaign, but early indications would point to “a lot”, given that he’s now obligated to return to weekly Goats updates. I’m hoping we see some Shazam Twix or Eva Pudenda sooner rather than later. Speaking of sooner rather than later, after this Kickstart wraps up, I’ve got some more musings on the whole idea of Kickstarter.
• Go, look: a mutual interview (or “conversation” as the hep kids call it these days) between Chris Hastings and Ethan Nicolle is up at the Dark Horse website, and it’s damn good. Similarly, what may be the definitive answer to How Do You Break In To … ?² (in this case, comics) has been posted by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and it’s mandatory reading for anybody who wants to move from creative hobbyist to creative professional.
• Events: Scott C has a new exhibit/gallery show coming up, this one paired up with the book release party for East Dragon, West Dragon, at the usual stomping grounds of Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California. Opening reception 14 April, 7:00 – 10:00pm, show running until 6 May, details here or here. For those on the opposite coast on 11 May, the book launch party for John Green and Dave Roman’s Teen Boat at the decidedly unusual stomping grounds of an actual boat. Namely, the Waterfront Barge Museum in New York City, which doesn’t have a street address, it has a pier (Pier 25, at Hudson River Park, in the vicinity of West Street and N. Moore Street). Fun starts on 11 May, 7:00pm, and you can ris-vip at the Facebook event page.

  Also, please note that I could have made any number of Guigar-level puns around words like “launch” or “moor[e]”, or embedded any number of I’m On A Boat mashup videos, and did not. You’re welcome.

_______________
¹ We salute you, Dentarthurdent.

² Short version: it’s not a discrete point in time with a secret handshake that gets you in the door.

Jam: Victorious.

[update March 20, 2012]: FINALLY! FINALLY the paperwork went through! My shop works again! WE ARE GO FOR LAUNCH: MARCH 24 at 11:00 AM PST

PST, for those of you wondering, is GMT-7. In case that’s still too much math, there’s a countdown clock until the very moment that you can purchase Wasted Talent book #2: Welcome to the Real World.

What’s your favorite number? Mine is e, and in honor of this awesomest of numbers (it kicks π’s ass), all numbers in this update will be related to this most lasting legacy of Lenny Euler^e0.

Okay, this has been a more difficult HTML-wrangling job than any post I’ve ever done, with the exception of the review of the first Dinosaur Comics book. Let’s just … let’s not do this again.

Edit to change: the Otter link, because really, the Animal House gag is so old by now.
_______________
^e0 Okay, that’s a disputable claim, given that Euler has more numbers, constants, theorems, formulas, and every other damn thing named after him than anybody else in the history of mathematics. But for my money, if you’re going to remember just one thing about Euler, it’s gonna be e.

^e0.693147181 Unfortunately, Spangler’s site doesn’t do permalinks to blog postings, so click through today if you want to read the bit I’ve quoted from.

^e1.09861229 Disclaimer: I wrote the foreword to her first book collection, so take that into account when judging my recommendation. It’s not like I get any more or anything, but clearly I’m on Team Otter.

That would be the one that says, “Don’t scrape webcomics, and especially don’t try to make money off of them with your scraper.” Yes, yes, I know: Blah blah exposure blah blah they put it in my RSS feed blah blah not charging for the comic charging for the convenience. We’ll leave aside the fact that the creators in question didn’t ask for you to be an intermediary between them and their audience, and even leave the fact that so many of them have released their work under Creative Commons licenses that clearly say No commercial exploitation, Bunky. It’s just a dick move to claim that you’re “supporting the creators”, especially in a world where precisely one (1) person is actually doing aggregation right. Let’s let webcomics fan Chris Hanel have the floor for a moment:

Do you support webcomics? Take this one question survey:

1. Do you take the RSS feed of over 90 webcomics, rip the images, put them in your Android app, and then put your own advertisements next to them in order to make money?

Congratulations: If you said “Yes”, then NO, YOU DO NOT SUPPORT WEBCOMICS.

Hanel raised the flag on the latest scraper with a helpful list of comics being scraped. What kills me in all of these recurring instances of scraping is that the creator always acts all noble and says But I’ll remove your content if you just ask me to! So once again for those at the back that might not have heard: Offering an opt-in is morally defensible; requiring an explicit opt-out from being involved in your scheme is not the approach to take if you want to be seen as helpful. Knock it off.

• Let’s just try to find some good in the world today, yes? On the one hand, congrats to the Little Heart comic for marriage equality; I happened to check their Kickstarter page as they exactly met their funding goal earlier today. Can’t say I’ve ever seen that happen before; if I were the sort who believed in luck, I’d take that as a good omen.

  Lots of talent on the book, and the inimitable Christopher Butcher (founder/showrunner of TCAF, manager of one of the world’s great comic shops, smilin’ face of UDON studios, and appreciator of bizarre Japanese Kit Kats) has contributed a heartfelt intro/foreword, a draft of which is available for your perusal. It’s really good.

• Horrible webcomics pun¹ made, adorable shirt available for purchase six days later; film at eleven.

______________
¹ For once, not attributable to Brad Guigar or David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc)

That sound you hear is merely the damp, disturbing rhonchi¹ that inhabit my lungs. Nevertheless I am again vertical and catching up on the wacky world of webcomickry because I love you people that much.

• Late last week, something new cropped up — on first glance, it looks similar to a webcomics scraper, but it isn’t. Henry Kuo has tread the middle ground between collecting webcomic content in one place, but not overharvesting and costing creators the ad revenue of eyeballs.

  Kuo isn’t profiteering off other people’s work, isn’t stealing bandwidth, and is truly giving people a means to discover and follow webcomics they might not have found otherwise, making him the first person to actually do an unofficial app/site to benefit creators. His logic is nicely laid out here, but you may has well just dive in and enjoy the goodness that is Just The First Frame².

• Following up on a story that broke on a day that was busy with other content: Jim Zub‘s previous announcement of reviving old videogame IP as webcomics has launched, as Sky Kid joins Namco/Bandai properties such as Bravoman, Xevious, and Alien Confidential under the Shifty Look banner.

  To be clear, the four properties (so far) are being comic-ized by both Zub’s UDON studio (Sky Kid and Bravoman), and by the entirely separate Cryptozoic studio (Xevious and Alien Confidential), and Z-Man is only working himself on Sky Kid. Nevertheless, it’s a kick in the nostalgia gland for people of certain ages and habits, and all four comics show a lot of early promise (keeping in mind that they’re each up to about two updates so far). Keep your eyes on ’em, they’re likely to be fun.

• We’ve previously established (in fact, on the same day as Zub’s Shifty Look announcement) that Angela “Jam” Melick is one of my favorite creators because of Reasons³. And we’ve previously established that her second Wasted Talent collection was imminent, which imminence is even more imminent than it was yesterday. That’s because earlier today, she announced that God willin’ and the creek don’t rise⁴, said books will go up for order on this Saturday, 17th March.

  Melick’s run into the usual bumps and interruptions involved in book launch (and judging from some of her hedged statements on her site and Twitter, some more than usual bumps and interruptions were imposed upon her, but parties unknown but upon whom I wish fire and doom), but with any luck this weekend bumps and interruptions will learn that you do not screw with a woman that has her own construction-grade helmet and high-viz vest if you want to remain unscathed. The wrath of an engineer with scathe you right up.

• Finally, Real Life and Comics always interact; they can feed each other, and they can steal from each other, and for those that do them for funsies, it’s important to remember which of those things is the priority. Tony Piro’s been in that dance of priorities for a half-decade with more than 600 Calamities of Nature strips, and today he has to step away:
  

  Today is my last update for Calamities of Nature. And I’ll be perfectly frank about the reasons. My full-time career is in academics, and I need to put everything I have into it if I’m going to have any chance of keeping it that way. As much as I love this comic, I can’t have it taking precious time away from my work. It’s time to move on.

  I’m going to thank Piro for the time he took, for the remarkably clever (in a phsyics geek kind of way) punchlines, for the charts that were illuminating and challenging, and for a point of view that was uniquely his own, even while working in a format that was familiar. You gave us a lot of yourself, and we’ll miss the comics as well as the bits of you that you shared. I suspect that we may see one-offs in the future, but even if that never happens, thanks for what you created.

_______________
¹ At least it isn’t rales. Look ’em up, and give a listen if you dare.

² It’s pretty much exactly what is says on the box.

³ Engineers are a somewhat mysterious tribe, but we are generally a peaceful people.

⁴ As my great-grandmother used to say.

Busy, busy, busy. Please enjoy David Malki ! gettin’ all philosophical in this bitch. For those of you that like word balloons, I prefer the punchline in the extended version.

Also, for those of you that like logistics (guilty!), Rich Burlew is doing everything right with his massively successful Kickstart, providing followup progress reports on the massive job of fulfilling all the pre-orders. Also included in that latest report are breakdowns on failed pledges:

So we’ve gotten the final tally for how many pledges went through, and the total of all pledges that were dropped (due to irresolvable processing errors or the like) added up to just $3954.00 from 61 backers. That represents just 0.32% of our final pledge total, or less than one-third of one percent. That is shockingly low; you’ll remember that I allowed for 5% of all the money pledged to drop out due to complications. So congratulations to you: As a group, you have excellent credit. [emphasis original]

Many thanks to Burlew for being so transparent — he’s setting the standard for future campaigns. And I’m sure that Kickstarter and Amazon ain’t complaining today, either:

We also have the final total for how much we paid to Kickstarter and Amazon in fees: $106,799.87, divided up among the two companies in a way that would require more math to explain than I feel like doing. It does represent 11.71% of my completed pledge totals, which is a little higher than I had counted on (10%). Still, given how much extra I had allowed for dropped pledges, it’s not a problem at all.

Holy cats, that’s a lot. Between this and Double Fine, Kickstarter are off to a really good start this year.

I’m assuming that you’ve seen the latest bit of The Internet directed at Kate Beaton¹; her unwillingness to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous dickishness in silence is commendable in and of itself, but I’m actually more interested in a broader reaction she had. Namely, to reinforce the idea that, despite their general shouty volume and unwillingness to Just Stop It Please, the dicks aren’t in charge, Beaton spent some time on Saturday soliciting for names of and links to webcomics that she could share with her followers. When more came in that could be easily re-tweeted, she put ’em on her Tumblr; there’s more than 150 listed there — some new, some established, all potentially My New Favorite That I Wouldn’t Have Know About Otherwise.

• Speaking of new to me (and maybe to you) webcomics, almost two years ago Danielle Corsetto² pointed me at Space-Time Condominium, “based on a failed Canadian sitcom” about a guy named Griff and all of his parallel-universe alternate self roomies. I hadn’t thought about S-TC since I archive-binged season one, and quite frankly I’m sure I’ve forgotten most of it (though I remember enjoying it, particularly the Griff from the cow dimension). Fortunately, S-TC has gone and published season one in handy book form, which fact I overlooked until I happened to see it on this week’s release list from the always-hip-to-webcomics Midtown Comics. Well done, Griffs.
• Let’s end on what may be a somber note.

  I spoke last week (Friday, to be specific) about how we need to be careful not to overestimate the potential of Kickstarter as [web]comics Next Big Thing. I started digging a bit and have some numbers that you might be interested in. As of this writing, the number of comics projects submitted to Kickstarter is somewhere between 420 and 940. My methodology is as follows, and I’ve got to warn you, it’s inexact.

  I searched Kickstarter for the term “comics” as a literal, but did not go to the “comics” category. This is because the category shows editor’s picks, most-funded, and other called-out projects. The search for the word reveals each project that incorporates the literal string “comics” in its description — not all of which may be actual comics; there were 422 results, at least two of which in my casual examination were not actually comics. Similarly, a search on “comic” as a literal showed 940 results, which likely include the vast majority of the 420, but which I have not attempted to confirm beyond casual skimming.

  Now here’s the fun part. If you look at all the pages of results from those searches (up to twelve projects per page; 79 pages in all for the 940 superset, 36 pages for the 420 subset), all of the successful projects are at the front of the list, and the unsuccessful ones at the end. That made it relatively easy to determine that the number of successfully projects were 543/940 and 243/420, respectively; those ratios are remarkably close to each other: 57.77% vs. 57.86%.

  In any event, it appears that more than four out of ten comics-related Kickstarts fail, and when they do, they frequently really fail. Without getting into names (no need to embarrass anyone), a random sampling of those failed projects revealed results like:

  • 22 backers, US$1013 of US$8500 goal
  • 1 backer, US$10 of US$8500 goal
  • 0 backers, US$0 of US$10,000 goal

  And that’s before we get into active campaigns that likely are going to fail, but haven’t yet, so they’re still listed at the front:

  • 15 backers, US$165 of US$7500 goal, 15 days to go (project approximately six days old)
  • 3 backers, US$210 of US$3000 goal, 19 days to go (project approximately ten days old)
  • 0 backers, US$0 of US$2100 goal, 21 days to go (unknown project age)

  There’s one other project that I’ve been keeping my eye on that looks like it might finish just shy of goal, which is heartbreaking; it’s under two and a half days from completion, sitting at some 85% of goal, but has been trickling one or two supporters for each of the past several days.

  What makes this project interesting to me is its supporter breakdown. Out of not quite 50 backers, a full 45% pledged US$25, which is just enough to get a signed copy of the book. Add in a few more people looking for unsigned copies and you come to 55% of backers, and 61% when you get to the lesser rewards. There’s a few people in the mid-ranges (book + assorted goodies), and then nobody until you get to the very top reward at US$100.

  18% of the backers sit at that mega-support level. I’m left with no possible interpretation other than the creator has a few dozen loyal readers, of whom a portion are willing to get a book. He’s also got close friends and family that really want him to succeed and have put their money where their respective mouths are. I wasn’t watching this project from the beginning, but I’d be willing to bet that they were among the earliest supporters, which could easily have made the project appear more viable than it actually was.

  Also worth remembering: a lot of those successful projects were from long-time established creators with long-time established audiences and they squeaked by with 103% or 104% support. The super–jumbo–mega successes are few and far between, and they’re driven by the people that are already making a living at comics.

  Despite the news making the rounds over the weekend that Kickstarter may disburse more monies this year than the NEA, that does not translate into free money for all [web]comickers who are smart enough to just ask for it. So what’s the lesson here? Same as everything else in business matters — you can’t buy into your own press and think yourself more important than you actually are. Do the work, build the audience up to something substantial, then look at it as a business. There’s no shortcuts.

_______________
¹ More precisely, two separate instances of The Internet were lobbed at Beaton. The first was her finding yet another of her comics posted without attribution (just as common: other people claiming credit over the funny for themselves, having excised references to Beaton). The second, and more vile, was somebody sent Beaton a pornographic representation of herself because That’ll Show Her And Now She’ll Behave As I Want Her To.

² Who’s got me on tenterhooks with her current story-arc; I have a sinking feeling that Hazel really doesn’t realize what thin ice she’s on in her relationship and hope she works it out before things with Zach are really damaged.