Oh my goodness you people have never heard of long holiday weekends, have you? When you consider that :01 Books managed to place three (out of ten) books on the New York Times softcover graphic novel bestseller list (including the #1 slot to Ben Hatke’s The Return of Zita the Spacegirl, This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki at #7, and André The Giant by Box Brown in position #9), that’s pretty damn impressive¹, and that’s just where we’re starting today.

• Anybody that reads this page will have seen Poorcraft mentioned more than once; it was an early webcomics Kickstarter (a full four and a half years ago, raising US$13,000 for a comics project was nigh-unheard of), and it’s been mentioned time and again for its clear, lucid advice for making it suck less to not have a lot of money. You can buy a copy for US$10, a scratch-and-dent copy for US$5 (a classic Poorcraft strategy), or a PDF for US$5, but if you were in desperate need of Poorcraft’s lessons and couldn’t even scrape up a spare fiver, what were you to do?

  Be patient, basically, and see your patience pay off: Poorcraft (the book) is now Poorcraft (the webcomic), with daily updates from now until the entire thing is posted:

  Poorcraft was Kickstarted in 2009 and completed in 2012. And now, I’m posting the whole thing online for everyone to enjoy. I’ll be updating it every day with a new page, until the entire comic’s been posted. Where applicable, I’ll also be adding author’s comments and updates here in the text section.

  This should take a few months. About five, to be exact.

  Kudos to Spike for sharing the wealth, so to speak.

• I first noticed via the twitterfeed of Maki Naro a link to Tumblr that shared the news: Zach Weinersmith has released his latest collection of SMBC strips in French, and he’s got the incomparable Boulet to provide a preface, as well as to illustrate one of the pages in the book.

  And because Boulet is very, very kind to we whose command of French is less than complete, you can read his contribution both en Français and in English. I’m glad these two creators seem to have buried their differences and hope to see them work together more in the future.

• Jeff Smith won a pretty big award over the weekend, and I’m honestly a little conflicted about it. I want to be very careful about this, partly because I stand second to no man in my admiration of Smith’s body of work (I hold him to be analogous to what the Japanese would call a Living National Treasure), partly because he’s always been gracious to me in person², and partly because I’m a part of the process that led to Tüki being nominated for the NCS Online — Long Form division award. Understand that I congratulate him most sincerely and I would begrudge that gentleman nothing in this life, but I think he got the wrong award.

  I think that the NCS membership voted him a lifetime achievement award instead of an award for the quality of work in a single year. Tüki Save The Humans has, to date, published 26 pages (chapter two is yet to start after the post-chapter one hiatus), with perhaps a third of them actually in calendar year 2013. I’m pretty sure that Smith would be the first to say that he’s only gotten started and the best work on Tüki is still to come.

  Much like Steve Purcell’s Eisner win, I think I would not have these misgivings if Tüki had run all year, or if it had won out over work that was of poor quality — but anybody that would characterize Family Man, Dicebox, or Red’s Planet in such terms would be thoroughly mistaken.

  Did Smith benefit from name recognition? Undoubtedly. Would it be easier for the NCS voting membership to look at a work with fewer updates from the start of a story, instead of one with dozens of updates and a storyline stretching back years? Almost certainly. Does it take anything away from a career to say I lost an award to Jeff Smith? At the risk of cliche, that’s a nomination that’s an honor by itself. But I do think that this result undervalues the potential of Smith’s future work as well as the present work of his co-nominees Dylan Meconis, Jenn Manley Lee, and Eddie Pittman.

  Of course, the purpose of the NCS Awards is not to reward my personal preferences (although they did with the selection of Ryan Pagelow’s Buni, which was my favorite of the three nominees in the Online — Short Form division), but for the the membership of the NCS to recognize what they think is the best work in a given discipline. A few short years ago we would not be having this discussion at all, as online comics were not considered by the NCS, with the members of that organization the worse off for their narrower focus. In just those few short years they’ve been exposed to — and recognized — work that is incredibly different from the vast majority of what the NCS honored for the majority of its existence, and that in and of itself is worthy of celebration.

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¹ Especially when one considers that :01 is essentially a four-person operation, and typically puts out fewer than two dozen books a year. Quality over quantity, my friends.

² We are far from hanging-out-on-a-Wednesday-night buddies, but for more than a decade now Jeff Smith has taken the time to greet me and ask how I’m doing on the infrequent occasions when we see each other, and it would kill me to repay that kindness with discourtesy.

Quick logistics note: tomorrow I will be trying to wrap up work and get on a plane home on the starting afternoon of a long holiday weekend — surely there’s no way that could turn out poorly! — and as such will likely not have time to update. Carry on, think of England, and I’ll be back soon enough.

• A webcomic that I’ve been enjoying (typically in large chunks rather than smaller updates) is Brennan Lee Mulligan & Molly Ostertag’s Strong Female Protagonist, a series that knows that actual Strong Female Characters don’t adhere to traditional comic book definitions of strong. Alison’s a college student, a reluctant superhero, and doesn’t know anything with certainty other than the fact that Life has more problems than can be solved by beating them up.

  It’s a cracking good read, and if you also prefer to read it in chunks, the first four chapters (some 200+ pages) are getting the requisite print collection, via the requisite Kickstarter. Launched two days ago, it’s sitting at some 250% of its (very modest) US$8000 goal, and if the FFF holds true, we’re looking at about US$42K to US$84K as a total. That means that Ostertag and Mulligan will have to come up with some new stretch goals, as right now they top out at US$25K and at this rate they’ll hit that by the end of the weekend.

• Speaking of predicted finishes, Oh Joy, Sex Toy hit its goal in about 18 hours, and the FFF leads me to estimate a final total between US$65K and US$130K, meaning the guest artists are going to be getting a nice bump to their pagerates. Hooray for smut!

  Along the same lines, it might not be possible to pull a FFF calculation for Evil Inc volume 8 because so far the trend trace is falling outside the usual parameters: it went up from day one to day two, and unusually, the one-sixth-to-one-third ratio is (partly) falling outside the bounds of success. I think I have to declare this one an outlier, but if it weren’t, it’s projected finish would be between US$7500 and US$15,000¹.

• Welcome news to all who’ve been wondering where the next Benign Kingdom projects would lead. All of the principals have been busy with other projects, but reports of the brand’s diminishment appear to have been premature. Via B9er Evan Dahm, this notice at the Kingdom Tumblr:
  

  Benign Kingdom is getting moving on some COOL NEW STUFF, and the first item of that stuff is a pair of screen printed posters by Becky Dreistadt and myself. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be putting updates on our progress!

  Go check out the roughs and tell me that isn’t gorgeous. You can’t, you liar.

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¹ Or a ratio of porn (Oh Joy, Sex Toy) to not-porn (Evil Inc volume 8) of 8.6667:1. The Smut Peddler 2014:Sleep of Reason ratio was only 2.8599:1, which also makes me think that EIv8 is skewed in this early campaign. That’s just too big a differential for how much people like porn (yes, such a statement can be made). Conclusion: I’m still at least 50 projects away from assigning a decent confidence level to the Fleen Funding Formula.

I am never going to get tired of that panel. Never.

• And luckily, Erika Moen launching a BookKicker for the first collection of Oh Joy, Sex Toy means that I get to share that little slice o’ heaven from yesterday’s strip with you. It’s the sweetness of Erika’s surprise, the ordinariness of Matt’s question that warms my oh so cynical heart.

  Okay, that and the sexytimes. Gotta love the sexytimes, which is why all people who aren’t embarrassed to love sexytimes should be picking up a copy of the book and revisit the first year’s adventures of Erika, Matt, various guest strippers¹, and the Masturbateers. Oh Joy, Sex Toy puts the fun back in sex, in a smart way that makes you happier and more educated for the journey. Plus the fact that at various reward levels you can get original art, or even drawn into the comic having sexy, sexy sex.

  Plus, because Hurricane Erika is awesome, her stretch goals involve paying her guest artists higher rates, and she’s making the payment bump retroactive. This is not just a woman that wants you to have awesome sex, she wants to support her fellow creators. That right there is worth your support. Just, you know, not from the work computer is all.

• Considerably fewer people are going to be having sex (at least, not the same way(s) as in OJ,ST) in the pages of Brad Guigar’s latest Evil, Inc collection, also conveniently being Kicked, but that’s not to say it’s not a sexy project. In fact, one could say that anything Brad Guigar does is sexy². By now you know the deal: Brad redesigns the four-panel, gag-each-day updates to read continuously and turn a strip into not merely a collection, but something more. He’s also offering the opportunity to draw you into his strip, but if you grab that reward, you’ll probably have less sex than if you got drawn into Erika’s, but you’ll possibly be more heroic with Brad.

  I’m dancing around the full story of E,Iv8 a little, but that’s because it’s disclosure time — Brad asked for feedback on his Kickstarter’s reward levels before launch, and I provided some. I don’t mind telling you his project is running, but I do feel it’s possibly a conflict of interest for me to hype it too much (although I will say that the reward levels as they stand now are very, very well designed to give you — the loyal reader! — the maximum possible reward, and you’re welcome). All that being said, I wouldn’t have brought up the campaign at all if it weren’t newsworthy, so there you are.

• The AV Club has hit two recent :01 Books releases in their latest comics review roundup (you’ll have to scroll down a little), and I’m pleased to see that they enjoyed Box Brown’s Andre The Giant and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer as much as I did. They’ve got some really nice insights that come at both books from somewhat different angles than I did, so if you haven’t read either yet, there’s more evidence that you should. And as always, thanks to Gina Gagliano and everybody at :01 for sending me advance copies of so very many very good books.

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¹ I can’t quite recall, but I believe in one case a guest literally a stripper in the usual sense of the word.

² For the second time in two days: Ladies.

How’s everybody doing? I’m doing good, thanks for asking.

• STRIPPED comes to iTunes Canada tomorrow, and just like it made a run at #1 in Documentaries in the US last month, filmmakers Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are going to try to repeat the feat in the Great White North. If you live north of 49 and haven’t see the film yet, tomorrow’s a good day.
• Not to be confused with the Great White North, some time back a webcomicker by the name of Lars Brown did a two-volume story via Oni called North World and it was pretty great. I mention this because Brown has continued to make some not-your-typical sword-and-sorcery comics by the name of Penultimate Quest, and it’s time to get the second volume of PQ printed. Enter the requisite Kickstarter campaign, which has just under two weeks and just under 10% to go. Brown’s the real deal, making comics with heart, and realistic relationships, and frustrations at your lot in life, and swords. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like, please consider backing PQ2.
• Speaking of real deals that do swords and comics with heart, Jim Zub is launching a new creator-owned story (his first since Baldy and Shorty started kicking skulls in 2010; as Zub has stated, we’re on the next-to-last story arc of their adventures) in August, to be titled Wayward; if I may be permitted a moment of pure opinion, Zub’s stuff gets an automatic blind buy from me. Some of it may not turn out to be for me, but the man’s stellar hits-to-misses ratio means it’s worth plunking down four bucks to find out even if it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.

  Wayward, for the record, sounds like the finest of green tea, whisked by a senior geisha in a formal ceremony:

  Rori Lane is an outsider by nature, but moving to Tokyo to live with her single Mom has only exacerbated her weirdness. She’s feeling out of sorts, worried about fitting in and, as if that wasn’t enough, strange things are beginning to happen. Glowing symbols and patterns are starting to appear before her eyes… and she’s the only one who seems to notice.

  “Wayward is a coming of age story filled with mystery and emotion. It’s also an ass-kicking joy ride with teenagers beating the hell out of Japanese mythological monsters,” said Zub. “Steve and I built this series from the ground up to play to both our strengths. I can’t wait for people to see what we have planned.”

  In WAYWARD a group of teens living in Tokyo find a common bond in manifesting strange, supernatural abilities. As they begin to unravel the mystery behind their powers and their common source they’re drawn into a war with the vestiges of Japan’s monstrous mythic past.

  Buffy meets Spirited Away, anybody? You can bet that I’ll be finding Zub at SDCC in July and dragging as much info out of him as I can.

• Speaking of Zub, even if I weren’t blind-buying all his work I’d still pick up the next Schlock Mercenary collection (featuring a short story by Zub), which is now up for pre-order. The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse story arc set up much of late-period Schlock’s story development, was nominated for a Hugo Award, and is available in standard (US$20) and sketch (US$30) editions. For that you’ll get 160 pages of full-color mayhem, the bonus Zub-penned story, and a deep sense of personal peace and tranquility¹.

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¹ They say that the grave is very tranquil.

Every time I read about something that Max Temkin does, I’m impressed; yesterday he may have set the bar impossibly high for future impressions, though.

Let me back up a little.

Temkin is one of the creators of Cards Against Humanity, the party game for horrible people. In his spare time, Temkin has been involved in things like the Twelve Days of Holiday Bullshit sampler pack of joy, one day of which involved Temkin and R Stevens wrangling two dozen webcomickers to produce a Funnies Section for the modern age¹. More recently, he teamed up with Kris Straub to bring PWNMEAL (the extreeeeme gaming oatmeal) to PAX East. What I’m saying is, Temkin is all about surprising people with unexpected things that will bring them joy.

Now you may recall that about three months ago, John Campbell hit a very bad place in life and engaged in behavior that caused a lot of concern for Campbell’s immediate safety². Specifically, Campbell announced publicly that unfulfilled Kickstarter pledges for Sad Picture For Children would never be fulfilled, and that inquiries would result in books being destroyed.

That’s not the sort of place that you bounce back from in twelve weeks or so, but Campbell has been showing signs of improvement, with a backers-only announcement at the end of April titled If you’d like a book you can have one. Most recently, Temkin³ appears to have successfully reached out to Campbell and … well, read it yourself:

An update from Max Temkin

Hello! My name is Max Temkin. I’m a designer from Chicago.

I am a great fan of John Campbell’s work and a backer of Sad Pictures for Children, and it’s been really hard for me to see this amazing book create so much trouble for both John and its backers.

Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to John about helping to close out this project, and I’ve agreed to take over the project and fulfill the remaining books to backers. On Monday, I picked up the remaining 100 books from John’s apartment, and I’m going to work with you to distribute them fairly to people who haven’t gotten their project rewards yet.

In just a moment, you’ll receive a backer-only update with a link to a form to fill out if you didn’t get your copy of Sad Pictures for Children. We’ll do this on the honor system; there are only 100 books left, so please only fill out the survey if you didn’t get yours.

To close out this project quickly, I’m going to pay out of pocket to deliver the remaining books. All I would ask of you in return is to continue to support John’s art in the future, and continue to take risks on Kickstarter to help make new art.

Thanks for your patience, and I look forward to getting the rest of these books out to you,

– Max

P.S. I will do my best to keep up with Kickstarter backer comments, but if you need to reach me quickly with any questions or comments, I am @MaxTemkin on Twitter, my email is max.temkin@gmail.com, you can text me at (312) 857-[removed to prevent spam harvesting]. [emphasis, links original]

I don’t know that you could ever say it often enough: Max Temkin is one of the good ones. Here’s hoping that recognizing the value in distributing the remaining books is the corner that Campbell needed to turn to get back to a good place, and that a trend of improving safety and stability (mental and physical) is the result.

In lighter news, Drive is back and Dave Kellett is taunting his readers for not picking up the “hiding in plain sight” secret in today’s update. Dammit, Dave — you have a critically-lauded movie and you get all sassy.

I have some ideas about this strip, but I don’t want to spoiler anything, so I’ve placed it below the cut, below the footnotes. Drivenauts, have at it.

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¹ Another involved giving $US100,000 to various small projects that affected the lives of more than 38,000 students across the country.

² And, this being the internet, more than a little shit-flinging and casual cruelty. You know who you were.

³ Who worked with Campbell on a comic for the aforementioned Twelve Days.

(more…)

These days, there are people I think of when I think of Kickstarter — people who have run campaigns and made them work, people who are thinking of new ways to put Kickstarter to productive use, people who don’t pooch the fulfillment phase even while hitting significantly high dollar totals. In terms of Machiavellian planning skills, sheer numbers of campaigns (my estimate: at least 30), and enormous dollar figures (estimated lifetime total: US$3.9 million), you’ve got George.

But in terms of a close-to-the-ground, it’s-my-content-sitting-in-my-living-room approach to Kickstarter, it’s hard to beat the experiences of one C Spike Trotman. She’s a successful Kickstarter-er and she’s been hit up for her secret knowledge so often that she announced a while back she was just gonna do a PDF comic of how to run a Kickstarter and not have to deal with the constant queries. Individual pages of the project were shared to Tumblr over time, but other projects (including a Kickstarter for Sumt Peddler 2014: Peddle Harder¹) intervened.

Until today. I’ve just read Let’s Kickstart a Comic (And Not Screw It Up), and while it seems like a bunch of common sense to anybody that’s been eyes-open and paying attention for the past couple of years, the benefits of having all that common sense in one place are undeniable, especially since it’s only five bucks for all this wisdom. Thinking about doing a Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding campaign), especially one for comics? Do your homework (i.e.: buy this comic) first so we ain’t got to hear you complain later how you didn’t know it would be this hard. It’ll still be that hard, but at least you’ll know that going in.

In other news:

• Yep, it worked: Elon Musk is susceptible to comics.
• Bradley J² Guigar and Chris Giarrusso hit the comics shops tomorrow with the first collection of Tales from the Con.
• Christopher “Doc” Hastings and Anthony Clark absolutely killed it today. I can’t think of the last time I laughed so hard at a webcomic.
• TED talks are often a bit … let’s say somewhere between extremely optimistic and let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Then you have the ones that are just neat for the sake of being neat, such as Randall Munroe and answering unanswerable questions with the power of very approximate math.

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¹ Electric Smutalloo? The Smut Strikes Back? Indiana Jones and the Temple of Smut?

² The J stands for Jay.

I’ve finally gotten around to fixing the fact that my main PC was running a now-dead operating system and getting a more modern one on there.

• Lesson #1: This is the last Windows system I’ll ever install¹. Holy glob, “no direct update” from the most popular O/S you’ve ever made? Are you high,e very single person in Redmond, Washington?
• Lesson #2: Repopulating my feeds, getting my apps installed again², and figuring out why iTunes is pooching my podcasts is a project that will take more than a weekend.
• Lesson #3: You are never done applying fresh updates and patches. This disc of Windows 7 was pressed in the past few months, it should not need more than a hundred damn patches.
• Lesson #4: But if you have to do all this crap (instead of keeping up on what’s happening at TCAF), dual-booting to make the old data easily accessible is marginally less painful than any of the Microsoft-supplied alternatives.

So here’s what I know about webcomics today:

• TCAF was awesome. Just check out the Twitterfeed of anybody that was there, and you will quickly come to the conclusion that the only problems TCAF has is the over-abundance of situations that require a high-five, potentially leaving your high-fiving hand sore. Plus, there was a last-minute (literally, in the last hour before show wrap-up) unannounced Ryan North/Randall Munroe panel & signing, and George was sighted on the grounds of the Toronto Reference Library with something he should never, ever have: puppets of Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, meaning he now has his own private Yuko & Ananth. If you ever meet “Yuko” or “Ananth” at a convention and George is hovering nearby, maybe check for a healthy skin color, un-felty hair, and a pulse, just sayin’.
• Time’s almost up for comics professionals to nominate worthy works for this year’s Harvey Awards. How about we make sure that the utterly inexplicable absence of Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible from the Eisner ballots isn’t repeated at the Harveys?

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¹ I am already in talks with these fine nerds.

² I haven’t even gone near getting Steam migrated yet. If I lose my cheevos, I’ma be pissed.

Oh my goodness I’m not sure which of these surprises I should share first. Coin flip! Okay!

• Raina Telgemeier — previously noted on this page (and all other pages that matter) as one of our cartooning national treasures — graphic novelist par excellence and 100-week New York Times bestselling author, must have gotten a thrill this morning on seeing some respect thrown her way by that most establishment of all cultural endeavours, the syndicated comics page.

  Smile got some love from Mark Tatulli¹ Heart of the City strip for today², and given the setup of Heart and her mom arguing about whether graphic novels count as book books, may continue to have its praises sung for the next day or so. I’m guessing that Telgemeier has got to be feeling pretty great right about now.

• About ten months ago, in the dead of the night, the greatest thing known to mankind up to that time was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. I speak, naturally of Tom McHenry’s Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery, which laid bare essential lessons about the nature of life, and horses, and the importance of mastering your horse. I’m proud to say that I joined the ranks of Horse Masters, and I have the bleeding stump of a little finger³ to prove it.

  Literally and without any exaggeration whatsoever, life could not be any better than when one is horse-mastering.

  Until now, at least for those going to TCAF this weekend, for McHenry has been busy:

  In case you missed it last night, this is a thing that exists for TCAF

  3 glow in the dark buttons, a completely unnecessary full-color instruction manual, the whole game on a horse-shaped USB drive.

  All in this stylish #HorseMaster box: pic.twitter.com/8FNsDIzMGV

  Then I wept, for I am not going to TCAF. But then McHenry assuaged my grief⁴:

  Ordering info for non-TCAF goers will come soon!

  And there was much rejoicing, and the pupae of horses everywhere did swell with quickening tendrils, waiting for the day they could ripen, and escape, and feed.

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¹ Tatulli actually does two strips and while Heart of the City is pretty okay, his silent and subversive Liō may be the most brilliant thing left in syndication.

² That link may go away in the future, so please enjoy the permanently-linked version at the top of this page.

³ Not to mention a drug habit, criminal record, and seared-in memories of too many teeth in a gaping maw to go along with it. These are the prices of ascending to the political and social elite.

⁴ And coincidentally probably removed the need on my part to physically harm one or more of the friends that would go to TCAF, for a true Horse Master would let nothing stand in his or her way of obtaining this treasure; not family, not friendship, not blood. Oh glob, so much blood.

Before we get to some things that are happening in the various places, one piece of catching-up: remember what I said about big items yesterday? I missed one: Anthony Clark has a new sketchbook up for sale that clocks in at nearly 400 pages. It’s pay-what-you want, with a minimum that’s less than a dollar per hundred pages, available at Gumroad and/or Sellfy.

• The Society of Illustrators may have finished up with the actual festival aspects of this year’s MoCCA Fest, but that doesn’t mean that all MoCCA-related activities have ceased until next spring. One may recall that SoI instituted an awards program for work appearing at MoCCA Fest, and the winners are the subject of an exhibit that opened in the Society’s second floor gallery last night and runs through the 24th. Along with the exhibit, two other things are happening:
  

  All materials chosen in the jury’s initial survey will be acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the MoCCA Arts Festival collection, to be expanded annually.

  A Happy Hour and Celebration will take place in the third floor Hall of Fame Dining Room on May 21st beginning at 5pm. A $5 cover charge will go towards the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Fund.

• Oh, and if you’re in New York City on 15 May, there’s a lecture/reception/signing for Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer. Short review (of a copy graciously sent to my by Gina Gagliano at :01 Books): it’s a story that hurts in a real, tangible, maybe-necessary-maybe-not way. I suspect that if I’d been an almost-teen girl at any point in my life, it would ache and resonate even more. Getting to the truths below the surface of the One Summer in question is like having to peel away a bandage and finally let the healing of the wound below finish up.
• Tangentially related, I don’t know if anybody ever looks at the member’s bulletin board section of the SoI website, but you know what I noticed there today? Job listings. Anybody want to head up the Sequential Arts department at SCAD? They’re looking. Brad Guigar, this is your chance to not just teach arts entrepreneurship, but to remake an entire generation of comics kids in your own image. Your boisterous, eternally-laughing image.
• There’s other stuff going on this month in other cities, but let’s just make today about New York and call it good. Original MoCCA showrunner Kristen Siebecker once again breaks out the booze and education for the latest iteration of Popping Your Cork. This time it’s Thursday, 29 May at 6:30pm in Chelsea for a look at wines from around the US. It’s twenty five bucks to register, but because you are reading this page and Kristen likes us, she’s given us a discount code good for 15% off the tuition; just type in FRIEND10 when checking out, and enjoy the fruit of the vine.

Topic, scope, scale, ambition — everything I see today is ambitious and/or large.

• The first actual human-human primate, not one of the near-humans that are scattered in our evolutionary past, and the very first one to take it in mind to leave Africa behind and seek out the larger world? Ambitious. Large story eventually (if not quite yet), and it’s from living master of the comics form, Jeff Smith. We’ve spoken of Tüki Save The Humans before, but now those of you inclined to support creators that give you free entertainment can do so — the first issue of Tüki is solicited for a July release, the first Jeff Smith comic in pert-near two years. It may be playing out slow, but it’s thoroughly and entirely a Jeff Smith story, and that means it’s damn good.
• Nearly 2700 color comics, a sprawling cast, and storylines that go to weird places taking all the damn time they need¹? Huge. Such a story needs sizable book collections, and with 900 strips in each of the first three reprint volumes, Jeph Jacques² could have kept pattern for the fourth Questionable Content collection, but instead he went bigger. Only 200 comics this time, but printed half-a-comic to a page, QC volume 4 clocks in at 560 friggin’ pages while keeping the US$18 price point. Watch for the earlier volumes to eventually be reprinted into this form factor, leading obsessive completists (damn you, Jeph!) to have to buy them over again.
• Know what’s even friggin’ huger than Jeph Jacques (both personally, and as a body of work), André “The Giant” Rousimoff, most famous professional wrestler of all times and subject of Box Brown’s André The Giant: The Life and Legend, a book which I greatly enjoyed. You can enjoy it now too, as today is launch day for Mr Brown and Mr The Giant, or at least check out the starred review from Kirkus.
• I’m not sure that anybody has engaged in more expansive worldbuilding than Evan Dahm, whose Overside stories now comprise thousands of pages of comics, tens of thousands of years of history, and story locations sweeping from continent to continent, culture to culture, and alphabet to alphabet. And now, because he loves you, Dahm is sharing a good chunk of the miscellany related to Overside — promotional art, illustrations, sketches, things that fit into the existing stories and things no doubt meant for future stories, extensive commentary, eight years worth in all — and put it into one massive art book at Gumroad on a pay-what-you-want (five dollar minimum) basis.

  And just in case you’re the sort to think that five bucks is too much to pay for just about 100 pages, kindly forgo your next dead-tree comic which is probably priced between three and five bucks for 22 to 26 pages, plus ads. That one piece of a massive, linewide crossover that will change everything!!³ will be forgotten in a fortnight; Overside has a way of sticking with you.

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¹ Holy crap, was Marigold’s Hermione and Ginny fanfic really 900 strips ago? Damn, son.

² Himself a giant of a man.

³ No it won’t.