So much good stuff today; it’s kind of unexpected for a Monday.

• Hope Larson is one of the very best people working in comics, when she’s not working in filmmaking, that is¹. Her work always feels honest, the kind of honesty you get between close friends who don’t bother to be polite. Today she released an autobiographical account of her life this century told via cameras and lenses, and it’s sticking with me hard. It’s honest. It’s unvarnished. It’s maybe got more questions than answers. It’s really damn good and you should go check out Reframed right damn now.
• You know who else is one of the very best people working in comics? Meredith Gran². She’s got a comics-writing mojo that can turn from slapstick to introspection in a page or two, without ever feeling unrealistic or unearned. She gets her own characters down to their DNA, and chronicles not just who they are, but who they have been and are in the process of becoming, better than anybody else in the business. She understands how to bring up those depths in other peoples characters, too.

  Having proved herself as both an animator [warning: laugh chuckles ahead] and webcomicker, returned to her alma mater, where she’s teaching the next generation of comics creators. In her spare time she has honed her physical presence to the point that she could probably take Tom Richmond in an arm-wrestling match.

  And she did all of that before today, her 30th birthday. Happy Birthday, Mer. You’re the best.

• Contrary to what a casual reader of this page might think from what’s been written so far, there are also dudes that make comics that I like. I know! Weird! And one of them is Eric “Colossal” Feurstein whose Rutabaga: Adventure Chef, is making the leap to print courtesy of Amulet Books. If you’ve got th bloodberries and Pyka palms and other exotic ingredients, Rutabaga’s recipes are the best. And if all you have are the ordinary bits from the local store, they’re still pretty adaptable. To get the lowdown on the best eats in a world of monsters and magic, pre-order Rutabaga: Adventure Chef Book 1.
• Speaking of books, do you like the porn? Of course you do, porn is the best (mathematically proven here), and now that Smut Peddler series wrangler Spike has gotten her Kickstarter pre-orders shipped³, availability has opened up for the general reading public. US$30, softcover, hundreds of pages and more than US$1600 in bonus payments for each contributor/team? Plunk down your cash here.
• We’re approaching the end of the year, and with it we may expect to see lists of what people considered to be the best of 2014. Amazon (yep, that Amazon) chimed in today with a list of the year’s best comics and graphic novels, where one may note contributions from Matthew Inman, Emily Carroll, Gene Luen Yang, and Box Brown, webcomickers (past/present) all. Nicely done.

Spam of the day:

I think that your page can go viral easily, but you must give it initial boost and i know how to do it, just search in google–mundillo traffic increase

Google-pillow? Am I missing something?

________________
¹ And if you haven’t seen her short film, Bitter Orange, or her music video for Did We Live Too Fast for Got A Girl, what are you waiting for?

² Disclaimer: I met Ms Gran when she was still an undergrad — holy crap, about a third of her life ago — and she remains a good friend to this day. Also, she designed our masthead image up top there.

³ Which has the added benefit of providing a mini-academy in Kickstarter costs accounting: shipping costs must be factored in, especially international. Those 400 international shipments (barely 7% of the 5700 backers) accounted for a full quarter of the shipping costs.

So much good stuff today; it/a

Is it a Munchkin, a snake, or a dog/cat hybrid that speaks in song?

• Welp, there’s a project that blew the hell out of the Fleen Funding Formula for Kickstarts; I shouldn’t be surprised that Evan Dahm’s illustrated edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz wound up so far above what the FFF would have called for¹, given that enormous bump near the end of the campaign. Dahm came in at roughly twice the midpoint of my projected range, with a total of US$61,324, or some 408% of goal.

  Take a look at the trendline data from Kicktraq; you just don’t see the long tail skew upwards like that, and in just two days near the end of the campaign, Dahm nearly doubled the number of backers. That bump, by the way, coincided with Kickstarter declaring the book a Pick of the Day, bringing in a horde of new backers. Whatever the reason, more than 1200 people will be getting copies of this sure-to-be-handsome volume in a few months, hooray.

• Speaking of hooray, two new things out there in the aether that you will want to look at. Firstly, the inimitable Jen Wang² has a new webcomic going. More precisely, she’s releasing what looks to be a new graphic novel in chapter-length updates, and the first chapter dropped yesterday (the second will be released when it’s ready, don’t be greedy). Go get in on the ground floor of The White Snake³ now and beat the rush.

  Secondly, as I write this the Cartoon Hangover channel at Youtube is counting down live to the premiere of the Bee & Puppycat series, made possible by viewers like you. We’re at just over five hours remaining (which would make the debut at 8:00pm EST [GMT-5]), and B&P characters are being made out of fondant to decorate cupcakes. Hell, yes.

Spam of the day:

The following are just three examples of why defamation laws are so important; if these cases were never resolved, we may have read much differently of these historic figures.

Honest to dog, I read that quickly in the spam filter and I thought it said defenestration laws and thought it was going to be much more interesting than it turned out to be.

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¹ The FFF would have taken the 24-30 hour trend predicted value (PV) from Kicktraq (US$130K), divided that by 4 (US$32.5K), with a range of +/- PV/20 (US$6.5K), for a final predicted range of US$26K to 39K.

² Who is responsible for one of my favorite original graphic novels ever, Koko Be Good, and more recently an adaptation of a Cory Doctorow story, In Real Life (which I’m still thinking about).

³ Not to be confused with Whitesnake, thank glob. Far too much of the background noise of my college years was taken up with David Coverversion’s hair-metal glam-shouting in the direction of Tawny Kitaen.

Sometimes, the stories just line up.

• Speaking of John Allison’s decision to end the Bad Machinery casefiles, there was a nice demonstration of how deep his comic world does in today’s update of Expecting To Fly. In 1996, young Erin Winters learns that being in Hell is pretty awesome if you’re a kick-ass lady. In 2007, Erin got sucked into Hell and found it wasn’t all looking awesome in skimpy battle armor and beating boys with a sword. Rather, it was honkin’ huge battle armor and beating the snot out of Robot Hitler.

  Alas, ruling Hell can get old and she made her way outwards in 2010, but even escaping from Hell doesn’t make things all the way better. If Hell is other people, what is people not being able to remember you unless they look right at you? Will she ever get to see her family again? Possibly not. And that, my friends, is how you do a callback across two (maybe three) different series.

• Speaking of old strips and re-draws, part one: tomorrow will be the re-release of the one strip that did more than any other to propel me wholesale into the world of webcomics. Tomorrow will be the return of the fabled Frog Rocket Wiener. I’ve mentioned before that the first money I ever spent with a webcomic creator was for a merch pack offered by Owen Dunne in the before-times: a t-shirt, a book, a sketch of Jethro. I think I speak for all when I greet this news with a hearty Clippy.
• Hey, anybody going to be in the lower panhandle of Alaska, say, this weekend? The fine folks behind Alaska Robotics continue their trend of inviting creators north of 48 to talk on topics of interest, and this Friday/Saturday is when Dylan Meconis talks about character design (and since this is Meconis we’re talking about, probably a good mention of worldbuilding as well).

  Best of all, she’ll be sharing a wealth of never-before-seen material for the workshop part of the weekend, and we may see the information shared widely afterwards. I’d drop by, but you know — there’s a whole continent in the way. If you in the PNW and can catch a flight or ferry, I urge you to do so.

• Speaking of old strips and re-draws, part two: in case you ever wondered why it is that Randy Milholland hasn’t released any Something*Positive print collections (I know I was), we now know the answer is bad luck:
  

  Basically, long ago, I lost a lot of the 300dpi master files. I had multiple back-ups, but some ended up corrupted and some, the CDs they were on were destroyed in a move. I did over 330 strips my first year, and I only had about one hundred comics’ master files in a complete form (i.e. laid out with word bubbles, etc.). Just under a third them, I had elements of the master files — characters and backgrounds — but not laid out in strip format (mostly from December to March – I don’t remember why I saved all of those elements to separate files, but am glad I did). Many of these aren’t complete, so elements had to be redrawn, but that’s something.

  The remaining strips, I had nothing for but the web-resolution 72dpi files that are on my site. I considered pushing the 72dpi files to 300dpi and just redoing the text. The comics would be fuzzy but readable, but I got some sample pages and it looked awful. I tried a slew of things (converting to vector and enlarging, filters, and more) – everything looked horrible.

  So what I’ve been doing since for comics I have no master files for is printing the 72dpi comics out, enlarged, and tracing them on a light box — panel by panel — rescanning them, coloring them, and just remaking the entire comic.

  Check out the sample originals and redraws — Milholland’s done an amazing job of recreating his art style from 2001-2002, which is to say he’s probably ground down his teeth to nothing, since they look so very different than his modern style. For me, this is great news … not the ground-down teeth, but the fact that my long wait for a print collection of S*P (the first of many, hopefully) will not have to continue much longer. Soon, my precious, ssssoooonnnnn.

Spam of the day:

Variable weather is one of the few guarantees.

In Juneau, that is definitely true. Dress warm/dry, Dylan!

Hey, remember back at the start of September, when Sisters and Amulet 6 made the New York Times Bestseller List for paperback graphic novels? Good times, a whole nine weeks ago, and Raina Telgemeier and Kazu Kibuishi have been on a near-neverending book tour since.

Let’s consider what’s happened in the weeks since on the NYTBL. By the second week on the list, Sisters and Amulet 6 vaulted to the #1 and #2 slots, where they’ve pretty much sat ever since¹. Smile has been on the list basically forever, and as of the fourth week, it started rising up as people who heard about the new Telgemeier book decided to check out the older one they’d missed. By Week Five, Sisters, Amulet 6, and Smile were #1, 2, and 3, respectively.

By Week Six, the top four books were Sisters, Smile, Amulet 6, and Drama (Telegemeier’s last book, not related to the other two, with more than a year on the list previously). And in the latest New York Times Bestseller List, the tenth since Telgemeier & Kibuishi started their march to dominance, Kibuishi’s first Amulet book gets added in, as readers that have missed the Amulet train have decided to go back to the start and run the series². As Ryan Estrada put it:

Dang, literally half the NY Times GN best seller list is Kazu and Raina.

It won’t end there; there are four more Amulet books, and I’m confident in the belief that at least two of Kibuishi’s back catalog will join book six at any given time, meaning that Telgemeier and Kibuishi will form a majority of this list by themselves. None of which should surprise anybody, given that by all accounts (such as this one by graphic novel superstar Gene Luen Yang), Telgemeier and Kibuishi are rock stars to kids (a significant number of whom are recovering reluctant readers):

The signing was freaking amazing. I’ve never been to a comics signing like it, not even with the Image Comics founders when they were at the height of their fame in the 90’s. Raina did a joint event with the inimitable Kazu Kibuishi, and the entire store was packed with parents and kids holding stacks of Smile and Drama and Sisters and Amulet.

The crowd was so big that the store had to give out little tickets to tell you what signing group you were in. Group #1 got to see Raina and Kazu first, then Group #2, and so on. We were Group #7. Twenty minutes in, I said to my daughter, “I know Raina and her husband Dave. We see each other at least a couple times a year at different book events. We can get her to sign it later, at Comic-Con or something.”

My daughter looked me straight in the eye and pointed to her ragged copy of Sisters. “Daddy, we came to get this book signed.”

And that is why I don’t despair every time somebody moans that kids don’t want to read; put the right book in front of them and they will read holes through the pages. On the off chance you know anybody that would sniff that what Telgemeier and Kibuishi do isn’t “real books”, just wait to see what those kids do if either of them decides to do a mostly-prose-occasional-pictures type of book (like, say, Ursula Vernon, or what’s being done by Zach Weinersmith or Evan Dahm).

Kids want books that they can find themselves in, and that’s what these creators are supplying. The only way that this tide breaks is if Raina or Kazu succumbs to Book Tour Madness. Should you happen across them, feel free to offer quality ice cream and/or booze, and a nice quiet room with a soaking tub for their signing hands.

Spam of the day:

Typically I really don’t master post on information sites, but I would like to declare that this kind of write-up quite forced my family to perform thus! The crafting style have been surprised my family.

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¹ That is to say, Sisters has stayed #1 for the past nine weeks, and Amulet 6 has typically hoved in the #2 or 3 slot, but has dropped as low as #6.

² When the first Amulet released nearly seven years ago, it flew a bit under the radar — possibly due to being released right after Christmas — and never charted. This is the NYTBL debut for The Stonekeeper. Kibuishi started their march to dominance, Kibuishi

• New Emily Carroll comic! Boo!
• What’s better than getting full-size Snickers bars in your treat bag instead of “Fun” size? A successful Kickstart! Case in point: the Unshelved e-books USB drive. Second case in point: a significant bump over the past day or so for Evan Dahm’s illustrated edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  Or even making progress on already-concluded campgaigns, such as the welcome news that Augie and the Green Knight is on the verge of going to press or that the Rachel Peng audiobooks have finished recording and those who have been patiently waiting are getting an extra e-book for their troubles¹.

• Followup! Regarding TopatoCo invoice numbers and how much business they’re doing: David Malki ! (who in addition to his myriad other projects is in charge of communications for TopatoCo) throws some cold hard data into the game:
  

  Like most ecommerce software, TopatoCo’s increments order numbers whenever a new shopping cart is created…. The number references that unique cart whether or not the person actually goes on to check out….

  So, the number of completed sales is less than the difference in invoice numbers, because you have to deduct some number of abandoned carts — I couldn’t say how many that is for TopatoCo in particular, but perhaps about 30% (based on industry averages).

  Good to know, but then there was the announcement from TopatoCo Supreme Leader For Life Jeffrey Rowland that they have definitely passed 500,000 orders, and it seems impossible to have done that with fewer than 500,000 invoice numbers. More on this as we mess with math³.

Okay, get out there, get some candy, and rot the hell out of your teeth.

Spam of the day:

Of course, he follows the scalper’s golden rule — never carry more than 10 tickets at a time. His partner carries most of the tickets and hides in dark lanes awaiting a call from him.

Yes, yes, very clever. The spam is coming in thick these days — up from maybe 3 or 4 a day to 50 or 60. For the love of glob, nobody here wants your fancy sunglasses or footwear.

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¹ Disclaimer: I did a technology test on that e-book for author KB Spangler² to make sure that it looks good on a variety of screen types and resolutions, and I can assure you that Come Bowling With Us is friggin’ gorgeous. As soon as Spangler adds this item to her store, you’re going to want to get it.

² AKA “my buddy Otter”.

&sup3: To wit: do we assume that every invoice number since #500,000 up to 519,348 was abandoned except for mine, and that reported by Alice Bentley? That would seem to be the worst possible case, making for an abandonment rate of 19,436/519,348 or about 3.74%. This requires more thought.

Health and commerce and flying through Atlanta in a couple of hours; Wednesday, in other words.

• This deserves to be quoted at length, because it speaks directly to how capital-A Art impacts capital-L Life, for both creator and audience; Dean Trippe on why the Something Terrible books are behind schedule:
  

  Just a quick note: I’ve had to temporarily stop reading messages and emails from fans of Something Terrible due to emotional health and safety concerns.

  The books are still in progress, and I’m hoping pre-orders continue to make the purchase order larger and my unit cost lower. But it’s been slow going during con season due to the emotional toll hearing so many similarly heartbreaking stories has been taking on me. I think I was better at this in the beginning, when I was mostly getting messages from fellow adults and folks who shared minimal details.

  So please understand: I don’t want to discourage anyone from writing, but it’ll be a little bit before I respond, as I need to stay functional for my family and the folks who rely on me. This year has been amazing, traveling the country and meeting people who needed my story. But while it’s validated every ounce of the small courage I mustered to tell my story, it’s also been fairly overwhelming on a regular basis.

  I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone to hear I have a bit of a Batman complex with this stuff, and feel a strong push to fight through the tough parts to be the shoulder and sometimes the symbol fellow victims need to help them process their own pasts. But while what I present to the world tends to be chipper Adam West or driven Kevin Conroy, the cumulative effect of these stories has left me wallowing in decidedly Frank Miller territory.

  I appreciate your patience as I plot this batboat back on course, and I’m sorry for the delays in getting the ST hardcovers printed. It’s all down to decisions now, but I’m the one who’s been flaking on making them. But I’m dragging my broken back to Nanda Parbat to get my head right again so I can finish this.

  Watch for my signal.

  Anybody that’s met Dean Trippe or seen him at a show in the time since Something Terrible released knows that his Batman Complex is absolutely true; I’ve never seen anybody that wanted to take care of the entire world as much as he does¹ and he is absolutely right to adopt a posture of defense for as long as he finds it necessary. Light the signal when the time is right, we’ll repeat it as needed. Be well, SuperBatDeanMan.

• Because I’m curious: I placed a TopatoCo order yesterday (for volume 8 of Girls With Slingshots, out now!) and I noticed the invoice number on the confirmation page: 519348. Every order I’ve ever placed with TopatoCo has had an increasing invoice number, and I believe that it’s actually serially increasing. Combined with the announcement that they recently passed order #500,000, this would mean nearly 20 thousand orders have gone out in the past few weeks. We’re arguably at the point where year-end holiday (Alliday?) shopping kicks into high gear, and I’m curious as to exactly how much work that is for the Space Potato and his earthly minions.

  So I am going to make a small order at the start of the year, compare invoice numbers, and get my answer. Right now I’m going to estimate it’s somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 orders between now and then.

Spam of the day:

In honor of James Gunn’s Marvel movie masterpiece becoming the highest grossing film of 2014 domestically, and the recent announcement of the upcoming sequel, [site I’m not shilling] knew that now was the time to begin work on showing the world what real space genitals should look like. Gnardians of the Galaxy: 50 Shades of Groot will be written & directed by Lee Roy Myers.

What.

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¹ Which is why I actually look on Trippe as having a big red S on his chest. In my eyes, he’ll always be Superman from issue 10 of All Star Superman. If you haven’t read it for God’s sake go do that and understand why this character inspires despite being so badly bungled by recent movies.

It appears that we’ve managed to get a number of things wrong. Let the self-flagellation begin!

• Whoops. Looks like Jon Rosenberg actually did get fired from the webcomic that he completely and entirely owns, contradicting my conclusions from yesterday. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jon’s replacement, Mr Leonard Stanky:
  

  Hello Twitterverse! I am Leonard Stanky, a dad and a cartoonist! I am taking over the cartoonist duties over at Scenes From The Multiverse.

  You can see my cartoons about The Multiverse every other day starting Wednesday!!! The web site is at http://amultiverse.com < I want to wish @StankyLeonard all the best in his tenure as SFAM’s new cartoonist. Good luck, Leonard! We’re all rooting for you.

  Huh. I figured if anybody would replace Rosenberg so as to minimize disruption, it would be the Klassic Kartoonist known as Kelly. As of this writing, it is unclear if the terms of Rosenberg’s firing and Stanky’s hiring includes a transfer ownership interest in either the strip or my soul. As for the mistaken assertion that Jon Rosenberg would continue as the creator of Scenes From A Multiverse, Fleen regrets the error.

• Double whoops. It appears that I have deleted some recent comments. I can see that comments on at least two recent posts have gone missing, which means almost certainly I did something wrong. If yours is a comment that did go missing, it was not intentional or a judgment on the quality of what you wrote, it was likely me being fumble-fingered. Once again, Fleen regrets the error.
• Triple whoops. I missed the opportunity to talk about something because the combined effect of slow network and trying to get a comment from Rosenberg conspired to keep me from browsing too widely. Just before the weekend, Wacom — maker of the digital drawing tools that every artist working in webcomics as well as non-webcomics uses — announced that it’s putting together an anthology of digital comics.

  Meredith Gran will be joined by Ming Doyle, Giannis Milonogiannis, and a creator to be named later. It’ll be 32 pages long, released sometime in January, and free. I first saw the story over at Comics Alliance, so check with them for further details (it appears the anthology is being wrangled by former CA contributor Caleb Goellner, so it’s likely they’ll get all the news first), but the story’s been popping up all over the place in the past 24 hours or so. For being late to the party, Fleen once again is filled with regrets.

• Hey! Remember that Squirrel Girl series that Ryan North is writing and Erica Henderson is illustrating? You can now read the first two pages of the debut issue, which — fair warning — will leave you humming the Spider-Man theme song all day long. At long last, Fleen regrets nothing.

Spam of the day:

You should not live a life of a laid back person. Come out of your self-built life and start enjoying it by filling colors in it.

Too late! Bwahahahaha.

Your attention please. Please yell if you are paying attention.

• Re: the best thing that you will read today, courtesy of Shaenon Garrity, Queen Of All That Is Rad, a curious and quiet tale regarding how ladies interact with gaming culture. In the event that you think that this is not the best thing that you will (or have) read today, please go back and re-read carefully and I think you will find the source of your error. There are so many wonderful little details in Scores & Scandals that I can’t count them all.
• Re: yesterday’s posting regarding the Chomic Chameleon Chichstarter¹, the campaign launched about an hour ago (as this is being written) and may be found here.
• Re: webcomickers and Adventure Time, there are two big things happening come January. The storied team of Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb will be stepping down from the book that launched BOOM! Studios’ foray into Cartoon Network tie-in comics, Adventure Time.

  By that time, the North/Paroline/Lamb team will have produced 35 issues (or seven arcs + seven one-shot issues) over the space of three years, and have garnered signinificant acclaim, including the stray Eisner Award. Per North, it was a planned exit, with the creative team ready to move on to other projects (at the recent SPX show, Lamb told me that he and Paroline were pitching their own story ideas for new comics).

  Big shoes to fill², but BOOM! have found perhaps the best possible replacements on the book in the personages of Christopher Hastings on words and Zach Sterling on art. Sterling’s no stranger to Adventure Time, having partnered with Danielle Corsetto and Kate Leth on AT original graphic novels, and Hastings is not only a funny guy who knows how to write funny comic books, he’s partnered up with North on several projects and will be able to blend his authorial voice with that of the Toronto Man-Mountain to the point that the transition should be largely seamless.

  This is not to say that Hastings should spend his time on Adventure Time emulating North, merely that it won’t be a jarring shift from one writing style to the next. Honestly, I can’t think of a better team to take over the flagship comic.

• All of that would probably qualify as the best Adventure Time-related news of the month, except for the part where BOOM! also announced that Meredith Gran would be returning to write a second Marceline miniseries. Marceline and the Scream Queens, for me at least, ranks as the definitive exploration of the vampire queen’s personality and nature, and seeing Gran return to the character for six more issues makes me giddy. And that’s before I found out that the new series (titled Marceline Gone Adrift) is essentially the adventures of Marceline and Prubs in space. This time around Gran will be leaving the art duties to Carey Pietsch, whose portfolio gives me great confidence that she’ll do a fantastic job.
• Still not quite done with webcomickers and BOOM! books at the start of 2015. Jim Zub (who else?) had some news to share yesterday:
  

  MUNCHKIN #1 arrives in January from @boomstudios and I’m writing back-up stories. :) @muskrat_john @SJGames

  Oh dear glob. Zub’s not one for excessive mayhem in his gaming comics because he’s mindful that they should be at least vaguely acceptable for all ages, but in the cartoonishly excessive world of Munchkin? And in backup stories, where all the rules are a bit looser? He’s gonna run riot and it’s gonna be hilarious.

• Re: my earlier assessment of what’s going on in Drive. Okay, so the latest update mentions dropships with “interstellars in orbit”, so we don’t know from the visuals here about rings, which was my original contention. But we’ve seen Vinn ships before — no ring. And the possibility of the Vinn getting Continuum technology (which the Makers regard as holy) without the Continuum objecting? I still think we’ve got more than one method of superlight travel, which in the case of the Vinn could have been developed by any of the 14 constituent species. All of which is to say Goddammit Dave, if you kill off Nosh I’m going to be very, very cross with you.

Not spam of the day:
I just wanted to bring to your attention a comment regarding yesterday’s spam of the day:

For the record and from a born spanish speaker: that spam’s line makes absolutely no sense.

Román, thanks for confirming what I suspected. Good to know that spammers are illiterate in more than just English!

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¹ Sorry, couldn’t resist.

² In North’s case, literally … I seem to recall he has something like size 15 feet.

There are several projects that I feel you should pay attention to, in no particular order.

• First of all, recent Atlanta-to-Stumptown transplant Jennie “It’s Not Satanic Porn” Breeden¹ has returned to the Kickstarter well to finish off her doll line; about this time last year she made plush versions of two of the three voices in her head: the Devil Girl and Angel Girl as a stretch goal. The campaign fell just shy of creating the Pretty Princess as a final stretch goal, but people have apparently been hounding her mercilessly, for lo the Pretty Princess Plush now springs fully from Breeden’s skull (like unto Athena from the brow of Zeus), sitting about a third of the way to success with four weeks to go. Completists, take note.
• One may have noticed that I didn’t make a prediction about where the Pretty Princess KS will end up; I’ve come to the conclusion that the Fleen Funding Formula really doesn’t work well with fewer than a couple hundred backers, and the PPKS is in the 130s as we speak. While I think it’s very likely that Breeden’s fanbase (which is loyal in a brutally efficient manner) will not let the campaign falter I cannot predict where the final tally will go. Heck, my ballpark estimate for the Stand Still, Stay Silent book 1 campaign was some US$50K short (in this case, that was about a 40% underestimation), although in my defense it was on Indiegogo and thus didn’t show up on Kicktraq, the basis of the FFF. What I am saying here is congratulations, Minna Sundberg, and I can’t wait to get my copy.
• I can predict where the next campaign will end up, though: very, very high. Gigi DG has also gone to the crowdfunding platform to make a third thing; in this case, a third print collection of the wholly delightful Cucumber Quest. With a launch less than 24 hours ago and more than 500 backers driving the total to nearly 200% of goal with more than a month to go, Ms DG’s US$20K target is likely to hit a 5x to 6x overfunding. Call it US$150K +/- US$25K; given that the last two Kickstarters for CQ books have achieved, respectively, 645% and 627% of goal, I’d say she’s got a pretty good likelihood of her previous readers sticking around.
• For going on two years, Comic Chameleon has been bringing webcomics to the mobile masses with the full support of creators; coincidentally, we’ve seen far fewer scrapers since CC’s beta was announced at the end of 2012 and formally launched (of iOs devices) in May of 2013. At the time, I noted that I’m an Android guy and thus don’t get to share in the phone-based goodness, a situation that economics did not off an easy remedy for.

  Until tomorrow. From Comic Chameleon principal (and erstwhile Alien Loves Predator photochronicler) Bernie Hou:

  The time has come to make Comic Chameleon available for your phone! [O]ur Kickstarter campaign to fund the Android version of our app [is] launching this Thursday

  The sharp-eyed among you may notice some elided content in that quote, which was necessary to chop it into a grammatically sound form because I took out some stuff I wanted to address here. Namely, that Hou (knowing as he did that I’m an Android guy) has sent along an alpha version of the app for me to play with and report back on. Work has kept me from doing so yet today, but I will be doing so at the first opportunity, and given the generally happy reviews of the CC userbase on the iDevice platform(s), I expect it (once the inevitable early bugs are identified and squashed) to make the Googleheads as happy as the Jobsters. Keep your eyes on Kickstrater tomorrow, and let’s get that sumbitch funded.

El spam del día:

Me gusta el artículo, la mente es muy clara, yo también hago eso, gracias.

No es nada.

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¹ Plain ol’ non-Satanic porn by Ms Breeden is another thing altogether (that link is relatively safe for work).

• Welp, she teased us on Friday and now we know that yep, it’s porn, horror, porn, and then sci-fi¹:
  

  New World is a black-and-white sci-fi/fantasy comic anthology set to debut in the spring of 2015. Iron Circus Comics is currently seeking 8–10 submissions with the theme of exploration, colonization, conquest, assimilation, “going native,” appropriation, imperialism, strained relations… essentially, what happens when mutually un-contacted cultures, continents, and species collide. We want your strangest stories about situations where characters are encountering—and having to deal with—the alien.

  But please, let’s not do SF tropes we’ve seen a million times (much like Sleep of Reason banned zombies); Spike mentions the sort of creator whose work you should look to as good examples of the stuff she’s seeking, and dropped names like Evan Dahm and Carla Speed McNeil which means damn I’ma need a copy of New World in six months time or so. Oh, and did I mention the creators she’s already got lined up? In addition to McNeil and Dahm, she’s got Sophie Goldstein, Zach Weinersmith, Abbadon, Adoradora, Evan Palmer², Ezra Claytan Daniels, Matt Howarth, and Michelle Czajkowski already lined up, with an equal number of creators to be added.

  And since this is Spike we’re talking about, she’ll be duplicating the stretch-goals-equals-more-money-for-creators model that’s worked out so very well for Sleep of Reason and both Smut Peddlers. The application form is here and you’ve got until 20 November to get your submissions in.

• Speaking of the Scis and the Fis, it appears that we’re going to get a fairly longform story at Penny Arcade on Tuesdays and Thursdays, dealing with the AI rights in the film noire 1930s that is Automata³. I’ve for a while held the for a while that the P-A lads do their best work in the realm of filthy continuity, and ever since the original Automata and its followup short story, I’ve wanted to see more of this concept.
• Leaving behind the Sci, but still with the Fi: Order of the Stick book five has just been announced for pre-order. This is not a frequent occurrence — the famed OotS Kickstarter blowout of Aught-Twelve was to reprint books thta had previously been printed, not to come up with a new collection. Book five, subtitled Blood Runs in the Family contains all the comics from #673 to #946 — nearly 300 updates (call it five years worth), many of which are the equivalent of multiple pages, resulting in nearly 400 pages of thick, lush, glorious color. Order today, get it in early December for convenient year-end gifting.

[Maybe] Spam of the day:

Seems he successfully explains this away in the next strip! Clever :P

Okay, the thing is, I’m not sure this is spam. There’s no links to knockoff sunglasses and/or boner pills, and the text is reasonably coherent. It’s one of several comments that were submitted in reference to my speculations as to what the heck is going on in Drive right now and could be read as a reaction to that. Except for one thing: Dave Kellett hasn’t released the next strip yet, so the comment is either from the future, or is full of crap. Given that ambiguity, I’m pushing this one — if not fully into the spam category — away from the approved category. If you actually were commenting from the future (will have been commenting from the future? was to be commenting from the future? Man, tenses get all screwed up in discussions like this), drop me an email with the lottery numbers for the next multi-state lottery mondo jackpot and I’ll be happy to reinstate the comment.

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¹ Then presumably more porn.

² Two times the Evans, two times the fun.

³ Not to be confused with the recent feature film of the same name which I understand is not very good.