Oh, man! Manafort and Gates indicted, Papadopoulos pled guilty and has been cooperating for months, and I got my copies of Soonish and the abridged versions of both the Bible and all of science! It’s a day full of presents!

There will be a proper review of Soonish coming, err, soonish; I was lucky enough to read a copy of the manuscript late in the editing process, but that was a year ago and I want to see what the final version is like.

In the meantime, please note that David Malki ! is doing his thing again, which in this case is defined as making something cool and unique with the tools at his disposal. Longtime readers of this page may recall that the tools at Malki !’s disposal incorporate extensive wood- and metal-working capabilities, up to and including lasers.

Taking a page from a popular piece of his convention merch (cork coasters in geeky designs), Malki ! apparently asked himself What if I made geeky designs in laminated wood, larger, suitable for display on horizontal surfaces or wall hanging? The logical answer being, ART:

Framed artwork made with lasers! Each piece is hand-assembled in our Los Angeles workshop. The square ones are 12×12″ and the rectangular ones are 11×17″ These lighthearted designs will brighten any room AND listen to your troubles without complaint. And because they’re made of resin laminate (assembled from cut-out shapes of different colors and textures), they’ll stay bright and colorful for at least 200 years, or so the manufacturer says. Why would they lie? [emphasis original]

Wall Buddies, as they are named, represent key underlying character traits that we all posses: Memory (represented by a floppy disk¹), Hunger (a pizza), Proficiency (a Nintendo controller), Strategy (a chessboard²), Synthesis (a cassette tape), Patience (a Tetris game, with the long piece about to drop in perfectly), Improvisation (a d20), and Productivity (the happy poop emoji).

Each goes for US$40 in the Kickstarter (with multiples available), as well as the opportunity to hang out in a laser-equipped shop and make your own. The campaign runs just about another month, and the exceedingly modest goal of US$2650 is already 35.5% funded. These sorts of projects tend to be short runs for Malki !, so if you don’t get in now, there probably won’t be a lot left over for purchase via other channels³.

Okay! That’s it! Now to engage in a bit of political schadenfreude, read some funny and enlightening books, and (oh, yeah), do my actual job. Stupid job.

Spam of the day:

Anabelle wants to invite you to a great site

Anabelle is pretty excited to tell me about Ashley, who apparently is super hot and wants to have hot sex with me because it would be hot. But more interesting is that domain that Anabelle is mailing from: pleasantgiftsfromsanta.com. Apparently, Santa is a pimp.

_______________
¹ Floppy disks are an obsolete computer storage format, kids. Know your history!

² Not an actual chessboard, the image of a chessboard, with a game in progress.

³ Similarly, the annual Wondermark calendar inserts, which will probably go up for order/Kickstart about the time this campaign closes.

One recap, three things coming up, then the weekend.

Spam of the day:

FaceRig releases fun Halloween avatars and multiuser tech

I have no idea what any of this means, and the attached press release doesn’t really tell me. Weird.

_______________
¹ To clarify: Mark Witton does amazing art and is an actual working paleontologist, with a scientific and artistisc focus centering on pterosaurs. Great artist, but not a cartoonist. No stories.

² Quit snickering, this is serious.

I swear that title actually means something in context.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith were at Strand Boooks in Manhattan last night, kicking off their monthlong book tour in support of Soonish. For those of you that don’t want to read, the talk was recorded for C-SPAN and will appear as part of their books series in a couple weeks, and Zach did a solo interview with ABC today that that went over many of the same points. Everybody else, onwards.

Here’s the thing about Soonish that you should know — it was a joint effort that played to both authors strengths (Kelly: scientific interviewing and bibliographies; Zach: wide and deep self-taught curiosity about nerd stuff and also dick jokes), that would have absolutely destroyed a lesser marriage.

Each of the topics that they examined took a solid month of research and writing and interviewing and doublechecking — and keep in mind that they did the full workup on more than the ten technologies that made it into the final book¹. Much of it took place while Kelly was particularly busy². There were Nobel laureates to talk to, agents and editors to keep happy, and a looming deadline.

For those that are interested in the mechanics of making the book and their working process, they’ll be recording a podcast on that topics in New York City tonight, but the short version is (per Zach) For any task, somebody has to be in charge. It doesn’t matter who, and it switched back and forth for each chapter, but somebody has to be the one that make the decision to alter direction, kill the project, take responsibility. That, and recognizing it’s not personal, is how they got through the process.

But when you get to write a book about all the ways that things that look great (spaceflight for US$500/kg instead of US$20,000!) will actually kill us in foreseen (whoever gets it first can just hang out in orbit with a bunch of tungsten rods that they drop onto Earth with the force of nuclear bombs!) or unforeseen ways (and in order to do it, you have to have perfect understanding of the weather patterns of the globe, predict them with 100% accuracy into the future, and build a 100,000 km long chain of carbon atoms with exactly zero of them out of place or it all fails spectacularly!), that process has its perks.

That’s before they get to how humanity will voluntarily let itself be slaughtered by robots in exchange for cheap cookies, or just the reassurance that the robot is trying hard to help while the smoke and toxic gases are getting closer. As a species, we are often not very smart, which means maybe we shouldn’t be allowing people to create their own viruses for fun and profit?

And what do you do when people will inevitably engage in acts like hate crimes in augmented reality, while doing nothing in actual real reality? Then Pokémon Go came along and planted Pokestops at the Holocaust Museum and the sites of concentration camps, and we saw how maybe we haven’t anticipated all the outcomes just yet. I’m not saying that we’re good at planning for unexpected contingencies, but we’re at least starting to get used to the idea that we haven’t thought of all the side effects in our whiz-bang future tech utopias. Like Kelly said, Nintendo did the right thing because … well, you know.

Highlights:

• The very nice woman that owns the Strand introduced Kelly and Zach, but pretty obviously was not familiar with the work of the Whiner-Schmidts.
• There were multiple questions about SMBC comics and how Kelly looks grumpy in them, which I should really dispel. Kelly is one of the bubbliest, most excited to share knowledge, funniest people you’ll ever meet. Okay, so she doesn’t get the whole single-use unlubricated monocle thing³, but she is no more the scowling cartoon than Zach is the feral, unclothed crazy person he draws himself as (although, on second thought …).
• Since Zach got a couple of solo questions about his work, I asked one to Kelly: Favorite parasite and why? After taking a moment to reassure the audience that studying parasites is her actual job and she’s not just a weirdo, she proudly recounted the story of the parasitoid — it must kill its host to complete the reproductive cycle — that her team discovered. Eudurus set, the Crypt-Keeper Wasp, is a remarkably nasty piece of work and Kelly positively shines when describing it.
• Asked about what they’re working on next, Kelly mentioned getting back to her day job research, and Zach mentioned that he’s teamed up with economist Brian Caplan to illustrate a graphic novel that argues the economic benefits of immigration.

Soonish is available in bookstores everywhere. The book tour continues apace.

Spam of the day:

SqrtnAmy16 wants to know if you’re free this week

No lie, I am running around like an alligator on fire this week. Thanks, though!

_______________
¹ They started with 50, but at book length, that didn’t allow any more depth than a mildly amusing Wikipedia article. They chopped down to 25, then 11, eliminating topics that rely too much on magic, or unrealistic economics, or are so far advanced that minor incremental changes will get us there.

The eleventh was quantum computing, which they abandoned late in the game for not being able to do a sufficiently good job explaining it. The longest surviving chapter in Soonish is ~10,000 words, and QC had more than 30,000 that didn’t do justice and would have only grown further in time and word count. Ten’s a good round number anyway.

² Asked in the Q&A how they dealt with news breaking that disrupted what they’d already written — which happened with both Cheap Spaceflight (thanks, Elon Musk!) and Augmented Reality (thanks, Pokémon Go!) — Kelly responded, I’d say drinking, but I was pregnant while we were writing it.

³ You’re buying them in 25 packs! Why? How? I didn’t mention it to her afterwards, but I did in fact make use of such a monocle to look dapper as fuck at my niece’s wedding.

Particularly, the bit that says:

Customs policies vary wildly and unpredictably from country to country. You should contact your local customs office for further information; please do not complain to us as we have little to no control over your government’s policies (for now). Customs clearance procedures can sometimes create delivery delays beyond what we originally estimate.

At least, I think that’s the relevant passage. One may recall that waaaay back in May, thanks to the generosity of Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, I was able to give away a copy of the gorgeous first hardcover collection of DRIVE. The winner, a person named Mario, happens to hail from Portugal, which meant that the arrival of the package would happen potentially never. Today, it was delivered.

To my doorstep.

That’s it up at the top of the page¹. I think the stickers on the box mean that it sat at Portuguese customs until they got tired of looking at it/decided not to deliver it, and it was sent back across the ocean to me. Thanks for not stealing it, Portuguese customs/mail officials, that was very nice of you! Suggestions as to what I should do with it are now being cheerfully accepted, but I think that I am not going to try shipping it across the planet again. Mario, and I’m sorry that you didn’t get the book, sorry that it cost US$22.50, 162 days, and probably 15 hours total flight time to end up back where it started. I tried hard.

• I try hard, by coincidence, is how Ryan North signed my copy of Happy Dog the Happy Dog, along with a little hand-drawn doodle of T-Rex. It’s adorable. It’s also a segue, as I note that today is the birthday of Ryan North, and also of John Allison. Webcomics is lucky to have two such excellent gentlemen in it, and we at Fleen wish to offer the very best returns of the day to Messers Allison and North, with the expectations of many more to come.
• Speaking of happy dogs, the fine folks at :01 Books have sent me a copy of the latest addition to their Science Comics series, Dogs: From Predator To Protector by Andy Hirsch.

  It’s a great read, and it’s a heck of a way to teach tweens (and up) not only about pooches, but a goodly amount of evolution and genetics — we’re talking meiosis, DNA base pairs, Punnett squares, alleles, and dominance, people. Darwin’s in there, but he actually is less of a focus than Gregor Mendel and Dmitry Belyaev.

  Add into that a good discussion of dog senses, dog behavior, and dog BALL! BALL! BALL! communication modes, and you’ve got a pretty excellent primer into what’s probably the second-greatest thing accomplished by humanity as a whole³. Dogs is available at bookstores everywhere on Tuesday, 31 October.

Spam of the day:

GRAND_FUCK_AUTO It doesn’t get more fun than this – Play Now

I don’t even want to know.

_______________
¹ At last, I think it is — I haven’t opened the box to see if maybe it’s half a blender instead².

² I checked, not a blender. In fact, it is a copy of the DRIVE hardcover, in perfect condition.

³ I still give the #1 slot to the eradication of smallpox.

But before we get to the newsy type deals, allow me to offer props to Randall Munroe for today’s xkcd, wherein he anticipated my critique in the alt-text. Of course Munroe knew about the Great Boston Molasses Flood, as famously catalogued by Milk and Cheese. Of course. It’s comforting, in a way, to have it proved that you are not cleverer (or at least more well-versed in obscure historical trivia) than Randall Munroe.

• Soonish debuted yesterday, and although I don’t have my copy yet (it will be coming soonish in fulfillment of Zach Weinermsith’s Kickstarter Gold project), I’m eagerly counting down the days. Not just until I get to read the book in physical form, but also to see Kelly and Zach Weinersmith on their book tour next Monday evening; it’s been years since I’ve seen Zach, so this’ll be fun.

  Also fun: hearing Weinersmith & Weinersmith get five minutes of precious airtime on the nation’s premiere daily economic issues program, Marketplace. It brought into relief how much of technology is really dependent on finding an economic niche it can exploit, which did not occur to me when I had the chance to read through a late pre-final copy of the book last year.

  Give it a listen, get your copy of Soonish, and don’t forget to use the entire situation spice up your sex life: The Marketplace Interview — listen to the mellifluous voice of Kai Ryssdal through your radio, touch him on the penis.

• As of this writing, we’re about 2.5 hours out from the end of the Kickstarter for the omnibus edition of Girls With Slingshots, which has been running for the past month. Apart from giving us a new case study to re-evaluate the validity of the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II and the McDonald Ratio, it’s significant for a couple of other reasons:
  • For the past week or so, it’s been the all-time highest funding Iron Circus project, dethroning the 2014 edition of Smut Peddler.
  • It is currently a little above US$250,000.
  • It thus contributed to the fact that Iron Circus has now raised, across 14 projects, more than one million US damn dollars.

  This is why anybody in indie/webcomics with their head screwed on straight is listening to Spike; it’s why Kickstarter basically adopted her as an evangelist¹. And we’re up more than US$3000 in the time it took me to do the math in the footnotes.

• One of these days, I want to be so accomplished that when I change jobs, it makes the industry press; then again, when it comes to webcomics hack pseudojournalism, I pretty much am the industry press, so I guess I’ll let you know.

  But today, that distinction belongs to three colleagues at Workman Publishing who are hopping ship to Macmillan to start a new imprint in the children’s book group; they include publisher Daniel Nayeri, editorial director Nathalie Le Du, and art director Collen AF Venable — onetime designer at :01 Books (the majority of their entire catalog still designed by Venable, despite her being gone for three years), one time Fluff In Brooklyn webcomicker, and force of nature in book design.

  Being an art director recognized by the publishing industry for the revolutionary things you’re doing for kid books is great. Getting in on the ground floor of a new imprint, able to put your philosophies into practice as guiding principles? Even better.

  The as-yet unnamed new imprint is, I’m confident, going to do amazing things. And, in one of those cases of things coming full circle, Venable will now be returning to Macmillan, which is the parent company of :01, and doubtless see her old co-conspirators around the halls. Congrats to her and her esteemed colleagues, and I can’t wait to see what they do.

Oh, and with 86 minutes to go? GWS is above US$256,000. Yowza.

Spam of the day:

Bouquets for less bucks

No offense, guys, but the visual design of the graphics in this spam is very mid-80s, and reminds me of a newspaper ad I saw back in college for a luv-ya bookay. It was painful.

________________
¹ And let’s consider that of the seven Kickstarter Thought Leaders, there are as of today 35 projects to their names (one of which was unsuccessful), raising a total of approximately² US$3.7 million.

Spike’s responsible for more than US$1 million of that, and 14 of 35 projects. She’s the second-most successful of the creators, beaten only by a three-project design shop (representing two of the seven) that raises US$300K to US$700K on beautiful, pricey art objects.

² Approximately because the GWS campaign is still open, and two of the other Thought Leaders are reported in foreign currencies.

Middle age, is a weighty phrase — it can mean that extended time of your life when you see perhaps fewer days ahead than behind, and definitely feel the bleh aspects of keeping a human body working. Side effects may include increased torpor and or stamina-lack, baldness, and desperate displays of how youthful and cool you are¹. Or it could refer to that broad swath of time between the general decline of accomplished empire, and the resurgent renaissance as society gets its learning on again.

Or it can refer to the intersection of the two, vis-a-vis the webcomic of the same name by Steve Conley². Conley was kind enough to send me a copy of the first print collection of The Middle Age (30 or so strips plus bonuses) — a slim, squarebound volume, it occupies the middle ground between mini-comic and a printed-overseas-year’s-worth collection. If you’re looking for an introduction to a comic that you don’t now, it’s the perfect balance of economy (of cash and time) and ephemerality, the sort of thing that’s perfectly supported by Patreons.

And it was a necessary introduction, on account of The Middle Age escaped my notice until Conley emailed to ask if I’d be at SPX; there’s a lot of webcomics out there, and even a longtime creator starting one can escape my notice more easily than I’d like to admit. And I admit it, because doing so lets me make up for my oversight; this is a fun comic.

The nominal hero (Sir Quimp of Grawlix) and the nominal MacGuffin (Maledicta! The Blade of Woe!) are pretty quickly reversed in roles — Maledicta runs circles around Quimp, berating the largely well-meaning but hapless knight at every turn, and taking control of his body when unconscious to deal out truly horrifying amounts of death. It’s gotta sting for Quimp to be reduced to bit player in his own life by an inanimate (but evil and intelligent) chunk of metal, but it’s also perfectly in character.

But for me, the inversion (clever), the pacing (brisk), the gags (full of earned funny) aren’t what grabbed me about The Middle Age; it’s the language. Grawlix isn’t a nonsense word (well, it is, but it has a meaning); it’s the spiral symbol in word balloons that represents naughty words … and Quimp’s speech is full of grawlix after he meets Maledicta.

Then there’s that name: maledicta, I am assured by Google, translates from Latin as malicious. But break it down a little — male means poorly, badly; dicta means called but is not far removed from dictum (saying, speech, something said). It’s just this side of bad + words, which of course are disguised by grawlix. Ironically, Maledicta doesn’t utter so much as one naughty word in Book One, while Quimp is reduced to it on multiple occasions as they meet, establish their respective stories, and head off (at the end of the book) to the town of Gaffe.

I am beginning to sense a theme³.

Those wishing to explore said theme further, the second book is currently in pre-orders, shipping in the next two weeks or so. For those even more impatient to revel in the word games, Conley updates The Middle Age on Mondays.

Spam of the day:

CELEBRATE THE HOLIDAYS WITH YOUR FAVORITE TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX INSPIRED GIFTS

What.

________________
¹ I, by contrast, have a full and lush head of hair, am vigorous, and have always been this cool and relevant. Why, yes, I am about to turn 50, thank you.

² Whose Astounding Space Thrills I was enjoying back in the Dawn Age of webcomics, some 20 years back. Which might make both Conley and me middle aged if not rapidly approaching decrepit.

³ Previous wielders of Maledicta include Gwaethbfnl the Unpronounceable and Lord Snitbag the Poorly Named. And just to pile on, a Google search tells me that quimp(s) are graphical elements in a maledicta balloon to represent obscenities, resembling the planet Saturn (which kettle-shaped Quimp kind of does).

The same reference calls out jarns and nittles, but definitions are sadly lacking, but Quimp’s surcoat contains an embroidered design with all the curseword symbols represented.

Let’s finish up the week with a word from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. He starts with a bit of news, digresses into the fine points of French IP law, and bring it back around to the potential for better access in the future. Take it away, FSFCPL!

Last week, Maliki became an internationally published comic series. Indeed, on October 5th Ediciones Babylon¹ released Maliki: Blog in Spain in Spanish …

… I sense you are disappointed.

It is clear that we at Fleen would be most thrilled to cover the news of Maliki being published stateside, but sometimes events don’t happen in any expected or logical order: contacted about the genesis of this project, Team Maliki stated that [t]he publisher stumbled upon Maliki, then the Maliki BLOG, and simply contacted [them] to know if [they] would be OK for a Spanish version. In other words, an opportunity they were happy with presented itself, and they took it.

It is, nevertheless, an important development, and a first: the first time a French webcomic is published outside a French-speaking country without having first gone through a traditional publisher for the French edition. This means Team Maliki directly manages their international rights, no middleman.

Financially, it matters, but less than you’d think: even when a publisher manages the international rights and sublicenses them to foreign publishers, royalties have to be paid to the author whichever the edition, by French law. For instance, the rightsholders for Astérix once successfully sued their French publisher who played fast and loose with this rule for foreign editions, and given the international reach of Astérix, I can not even begin to imagine what the damages must have been like.

However, when it comes to control, especially creative and quality control, it changes everything: French creators often have very limited control over foreign editions, with sometimes disappointing results. But if there is one thing we know about webcartoonists, it is that they insist on being in control, and Team Maliki were in a position to make sure it was a product they could be proud of. Moreover, they were able to seed a Spanish version of their site with translations provided by the publisher, and while only a sampling is present at the moment, all the infrastructure is in place to produce them all: note the third flag that appeared for e.g. The Creepy Old Guy.

But the most important lesson is this: it can be made to work out. There is no reason for foreign publishers not to treat directly with creators who still have all their rights, and the latter will usually be more than happy to have someone else handle promotion in a market unknown to them as well as translation (not everyone can summon a translation dream team out of their communities, at least not for every language): the proof is in the pudding.

As always, we are grateful to FSFCPL for keeping us up on the development in bandes dessinées web, and hope that this prompts some of our stateside publishers to look to creators on the continent when next trawling for good reprint projects.

Pourriel du jour:

Irina Shayk is without question heating up the summer season on the quilt pertaining to saying!

Translation: they can manage it for a webcomic or graphic novel, at least try with the spams, yes?

________________
¹ Who, incidentally, also publish Lucky Penny in Spain, including a nice interview with Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (English version at the bottom of the page).

Okay, I didn’t really miss it, but with the travel and all, this is the first chance I’ve had to write about the fact that Homestuck is getting an annotated print treatment from Viz:

Viz had some interesting announcements at their NYCC panel. And this is the biggest: a new print edition of Homestuck, Andrew Hussie’s cult webcomic/interactive experience. The strip has already had print collections from Hussie, but the new editions will be very extensive, with animated content rendered as frames on the printed page. And commentary on EVERY page by Hussie.

Which raises some questions:

• How will these be different from the previously-published TopatoCo¹ collections?
• What kind of production challenges will have to be met, particularly in the later acts of the story, where animations/music sometimes went on for 12 – 15 minutes?
• Is this happening too late? Homestuck was the fandom that grew crazy big, but which has definitely faded from view.
• Will this include Sweet Bro And Hella Jeff? I’m not sure the existing edition can be improved upon in any fashion.

It’s that third question that keeps coming back to me. The time for this was a year and a half ago, when Homestuck was concluding (or, even better, for the printing to have begun in earnest during one of the long hiatuses, and for it to have been well underway at the time of the big finish). A comprehensive program like this needed to be in place in the era when Jeffrey Rowland could lead a parade of literally hundreds of Homestucks across the floor of San Diego Comic Con; they would have dropped the cash to pre-order the entire run without thinking about it.

But, publishing being publishing, the announcement is that in April, a full two years after the strip wrapped, the first two chapters of Homestuck will hit print in a combined volume. Which, by my count of pages in the archive, amounts to a bit less than 10% of the full run — so how long before the War And Peace of the 21st century is concluded in print?

Like I said, a lot of questions, but it appears that Viz believes they’re in it for the long haul — http://homestuck.com now exists as a clearinghouse of all things Homestuck, and if you look at the very bottom of the page, it reads

Joint ventures, man. Takes forever to wind those things down, especially when they’re building new stuff:

WPG [What Pumpkin Games, publisher of Hiveswap] and Homestuck, Inc. (Homestuck) also announced a strategic partnership with VIZ Media to develop a comprehensive array of additional entertainment content and licensed merchandise based on the HOMESTUCK universe, including both the original web comic and the HIVESWAP game series.

Viz is banking Homestuck never going away, and becoming a perpetual IP. And hell, if any webcomic can do it, the weird little story that could will be the one that does.

Spam of the day:
This is too long, I have to show you a screenshot:

And that, kids, is why you set your email client to disallow HTML emails.

_______________
¹ Which have author’s notes on each page, but the first two of the three volumes are sold out.

So it’s nearly the weekend and who the hell knows what’s happening in the world at large (much less the world of [web]comics). Let’s focus on some happy thoughts.

• Tillie Walden has been having a heck of time the past twelve months. At SPX last year she took two Ignatzen, then she launched her first webcomic, then the buzz started building for her debut graphic novel (which turned out to be brilliant), and she’s been guesting and paneling at seemingly every prestigious comics show in CY 2017. Not bad for having just turned 21.

  For those that thought said webcomic was great and also thought that there should be a way to reward Walden for it, your moment has come:

  We’re SO EXCITED to be publishing the amazing @TillieWalden’s graphic novel ON A SUNBEAM next year!

  Makes perfect sense; :01 Books are already Walden’s publisher on Spinning, and :01 head Mark Siegel is very open about wanting his imprint to be the sort of place that keeps the well-fitting creators around forever. And given the lead times on book production¹, this is an incredibly tight turnaround — no more than 15 months from now. I know of books at :01 that were announced last year for Fall of 2019.

  (And side note from the announcement embedded in the tweet: Seth Fishman — no relation to Desmond — is rapidly becoming one of the two or three most important people in the comics publishing world, representing some of the best in indie/webcomics³ in between writing his own books. Heck of a nice guy, too.)

  So congrats to Walden, congrats to :01, and congrats to everybody that will get to read On A Sunbeam on paper. The next 3 to 15 months can’t come quickly enough.

• And for those looking forward seven months or so, applications for the 2018 iteration of VanCAF are now available. Saturday and Sunday, 19 and 20 May at the Roundhouse with guests TBA, but VanCAF has had one of the best exhibitor curations of recent years, so I’m entirely confident the lineup will be great.

  Applications are open until 31 October, and note that they give priority to comics artists (as opposed to illustrators/animators/other artists) with new works debuting at or around the show, who represent all the communities of Vancouver and around. PNW, this is one of your moments to shine.

Okay, I’m out for the weekend, and quick note that I’ll be traveling for work on Monday, so maybe no post. If you’re in Canada, Happy Thanksgiving.

Spam of the day:

Up to $100 Off and Free Shipping

This spam was for glasses and I’ll give ’em this — the image that they used is pretty much exactly the frame of my glasses, just in black instead of silver. Still think I’ll stick with my Warbys, though.

_______________
¹ I’m pretty sure every time I’ve check the publication info on a book from :01, it’s indicated that it’s printed in Dongguan City, Guangdong province in China. Printing in China means there’s necessarily a boatload² of time taken up in shipping and customs before stateside distribution can begin.

² I’m so sorry.

³ Kate Beaton, Randall Munroe, the Weinersmiths, Abby Howard, Ryan North, and more.

Okay, this is my fault: I dropped the ball on pushing the Hispanic Federation’s UNIDOS campaign for hurricane relief after I launched my matching campaign last week. Jon Rosenberg’s medical fundraiser¹ hit just after and distracted me, as did the general state of the world being awful. Regardless, we didn’t get as much as we might have otherwise (then again, having four matching fundraisers this year, plus helping Alec Rosenberg to walk without pain, means that we may all be feeling collectively tapped out).

Nevertheless, you came through. Backers (all of whom elected to remain anonymous) donated and I rounded up my match to US$500. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. For reference, this brings the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund to a total of US$9275 of matches, plus another US$375 from my employer. Between you and me, that’s nearly twenty thousand damn dollars from fans of webcomics to help and defend those that need it. Thank you all.

In other, less immediately financial news:

• We wrote last week of the return of Christopher “Doctor” Hastings to webcomickin’, and he had one more surprise for us. Turns out the five comics we saw last week are not related to each other at all, but were each the launching point for a separate story:
  

  Here are my FIVE new weekly comics!

  Mon: Magical Merlin
  Tue: Queen of Clubs
  Wed: Asimov’s Laws
  Thu: Karate Sewer Gator
  Fri: Woodsman!

  Magical Merlin is naturally a wizard; Queen of Clubs looks to be a domestic sitcom; Asimov’s Laws features Inventor Dad and wacky maker mishaps; Karate Sewer Gator is intrigue involving punks, dope, and the eponymous gator; and Woodsman! so far is heavy on camping mishaps at the hands of bears. Friggin’ bears. One or more of them is sure to tickle your fancy.

• Did I mention that my wife quit her job last year to go back to school for a good old-fashioned re-careering? Because she totally did. Which is why last night, I was helping her study the geological time scale, from the Hadean eon (formation of the Earth to ~ 3.6 billion years ago) through to the modern day (we’re in the tail end of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era, of the Phanerozoic eon, starting a paltry 2 million years ago). At the conclusion of the study session², I passed her my copy of Abby Howard’s Dinosaur Empire and told her just to read that. All the life before dinosaurs back to the pre-Cambrian, and all the life since the K-T extinction event have all sucked rocks compared to dinosaurs³.

  As noted when I reviewed Dinosaur Empire, that book is listed as the first volume in a series called Earth Before Us, but it wasn’t clear who might be making subsequent books.

  Wonder no more.

  Hey, folks! Just to let you know where I’ve been all month, I’ve been hard at work on the pencils for book 2 in the Earth Before Us series~

  So this is why I haven’t been updating. Sorry for all the waiting you’ve had to do, and thank you for your patience!

  Speaking for myself, this is great news. Sure, I like getting free comics from Abby Howard, but getting more ancient critter books? Maybe the Oligocene, aka The Age Of Horns? Or the Devonian, aka The Age Of Fish? Heck, let her take a shot at the Cambrian explosion and all the protofish and sea scorpions and weird-ass spiral shell squid. I’m so in, and ready to give her money in exchange for books 2 through infinity.

Spam of the day:

Jane Seymour explains how Crepe Erase can help you look as young as you feel.

I feel about sixteen most days, and if you ditch the random grey in my hair and the moustache, I still look it. Do I win?

_______________
¹ Which, as I write this five days later, is sitting just north of 93% of goal. You are all amazing.

² And that’s why the writers of Doctor Who screwed up in the Third Doctor era, because they were described as having dinosaurs, but the Silurian Period was over a good 160, 170 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared in the Triassic period. I’m not sure her professor will appreciate my nerdrage.

³ Not sure what the academic appreciation of that opinion would be, either. Don’t care. Dinosaurs are the best.