Of course once the working day is done, there’s a good six inches of heavy snow at home that needs clearing. Yikes.

• Back: Makeshift Miracle. Yay.
• Coming soon: Wasted Talent book 3. Do not step to Jam, she will slash you.
• Won’t somebody please think of the children: Ryan North and David Malki! are at loggerheads. Heavens preserve us.
• Time jump resolved: 90 years.
• Anybody that’s been in comics — creating or reading — learns pretty quickly that there’s possibly no creator more respected and beloved than Stan Sakai, creator of Usagi Yojimbo. Sakai has meticulously researched and presented Japan during the Shogun’s peace, with dress, social standings, customs, culture, and conflict all presented with the highest standards of accuracy¹ — and if the characters who inhabit this feudal Japan are all anthropomorphic animals, well, that’s okay.

  Nobody draws panels and action sequences that are as easy to follow as Sakai, nobody has as fluid and organic a line as Sakai, nobody has kept an independent creation going for per-near thirty years with the consistency and quality that Sakai has. It should go without saying that in person, he is the most gracious and kindly of people; he is like a beloved uncle to entire convention halls.

  Unfortunately, Sakai has had some horrible months of late; his wife, Sharon, has been struggling with a severe illness that has depleted their insurance, and just before the new year his infant grandson died in his sleep. A benefit to defray the medical costs has been set up through the Cartoonist Art Professional Society, and last week Dark Horse announced a 30th anniversary tribute book to Usagi Yojimbo, all proceeds to benefit the Sakais.

  If you’re a creator and can contribute art to the CAPS project (which will be auctioned), please do so. If you want to contribute to the Dark Horse book, please do so.

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¹ Did use knowledge of Tokugawa-era Japan gleaned from Usagi Yojimbo when touring Osaka to make a tour guide wonder how the hell I knew about the hollyhock crest and the relative power centers of Edo, Kyoto, and clan centers? Maaaaybe.

Anybody reading this on the other side of the Atlantic from me? Or just immensely wealthy? Some things to keep an eye out for.

• Firstly, the annual Festival de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême is getting ready to kick off again, and while my high school French is a little rusty, I’m pretty sure that it starts on Thursday (30 January) and runs until Sunday (Saint Groundhog’s Day). There’s literally no way for me to look for all the names that might be there — Angoulême is enormous, with more than 200,000 attendees each year, and 6000 to 7000 pros there to meet them.

  It adds up to more than five times the population of the host city, and takes over much of the public space. To put this in scale, for San Diego Comic Con to be as large in absolute terms, it would have to roughly double attendance; for it to be as large in relative terms, some five million people would have to descend on the city.

  Doing a quick scan of the creator present (okay, I cheated and used the English site; creators listed along with publisher/booth-owner name, which will give you locations here), one finds indy-, euro-, and web-comickers like Derf Backderf, Frank Santoro, and Dash Shaw (with Ca Et La), Scott Campbell (with Cambourakis), Boulet and Lewis Trondheim (with Delacourt Delcourt [per Pierre’s correction in the comments; merci, M Lebeaupin]), Alison Bechdel and Joost Swarte (with Denoel Graphic), Alec Longstreth(with L’Employe du Moi — Belgique Wallonie Bruxelle), Bannister (with Glenat), Ben Hatke and Mo Willems (with Rue de Sèvres), and literally thousands more whose names I missed or whose work I’m not familiar with.

  Scott Campbell, by the way, will be there to promote and sign Les Grands Duels du Cinéma, which activity he will continue in Paris from Tuesday the 4th to Sunday the 9th at various venues.

• As long as we’re in France, let’s move up the Channel a bit until we come to Belgium, and Ghent (I loved visiting Ghent, particularly the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb at St Bavo’s Cathedral¹ and the fortress known as The Gravensteen²), where local animation studio GridFX is making a number of interesting projects. But lots of medium-sized cities have local animation studios, and lots of them are making interesting projects (even if few of those interesting projects have the cachet of, say, The Triplets of Belleville).

  GridFX caught my eye because partway down the story — almost in passing — was a bit that mentioned they were the studio that snagged Michel Gagné’s The Saga of Rex, as presented in a half-dozen installments over the run of Flight. Gagné will be directing himself, which will probably turn out pretty damn well considering he’s directed four shorts, and has an extensive resume including some of the best animated films of the past two decades³. Here’s hoping that when Rex is done, it will be seen in more than the occasional arthouse.

• Finally, let’s finish across the icy North Sea, where it appears that the Machine of Death co-editors have been sidelining as Norwegian contract killers. Because that’s normal.

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¹ I am possibly the least religious person you will ever meet, and this painting damn near made me believe in the whole High Church, early Renaissance conception of God and Christ and all their saints. It’s that transcendent, and all I could think looking upon it was Human hands made this, somehow.

² Designed by a Spanish king to establish his claim to Ghent specifically by looking as menacing as possible. From the row of guildhalls on the opposite side of the canal, it looks like the backdrop for a death metal music video, even in bright sunlight.

But then you look behind you at those guildhalls, and the cafes and bars and people enjoying a damn good beer and you think Okay, you can be badass all you want on that side of the water; we’re good over here. What I am saying is along with Bruges and Antwerp, I love the crap out of Ghent and find it a wonderful place to be.

³ Visual effects animation: The Iron Giant; animation on the tasting sequence: Ratatouille; special effects consultant: The Incredibles; development artist: Brave. For those that look back on them fondly, there’s also credits on Space Jam and Star Wars: Clone Wars, but I never saw them.

I was already going to be writing about Kickstarter campaigns when Scott Kurtz made a damn good observation on Twitter:

It’s interesting to follow “pay me to make a webcomic” Kickstarter campaigns, and 6 months to a year later, see who actually DID anything.

The first thought I had was Man, Scott’s very possibly talking about personal friends and acquaintances in that statement; I hope they don’t get mad at him. My second thought was, No, actually, I hope they’re smart enough to take his observation to heart. I suppose that’s why when I have (rarely) backed a Kickstarter that’s designed to launch a comic; I’m always looking for something concrete up front (which, if I get it, tends to bode well for an actually-regular webcomic).

The Last Halloween? I got some pins and a recipe for Sadness Brownies¹. Sufficiently Remarkable? Digital goods, including an audio recording of creator Maki Naro telling a terrible joke. Those were all I convinced myself I was ever going to get, and not only did I get them, but both comics are updating according to schedule, pretty much².

Others … haven’t done so well, either at launching at the promised time³, or at keeping updates coming; I really don’t want to get into names, mostly because for any that I might mention, there were probably three others that weren’t even on my radar. Not that I have much reason to complain about campaigns that I didn’t back (I’ve cut waaaay back on my Kickstarter habit in the past few months), but it’s something to always keep in the back of your mind — Does this project owner convince me that he or she will be able to get/keep their act together?

Let’s talk about some Kickstarts that I have confidence will be made good on in a timely fashion, then:

• Update! Dean Trippe’s magnificent, haunting, win-all-the-awards Something Terrible has six days to go; it’s a little under US$35,000 (of a US$6400 goal) at this writing, and closing in on the US$36K stretch goal of an added epilogue and fancier book design. He’s dead in the middle of the Fleen Predicted Total, but I would be happy to have underestimated this one.
• Update! My buddy Otter’s wonderful, funny, tense novels-to-audiobooks project is over goal, approaching the stretch goal where we can get the audiobooks on a cool USB drive, and pushing towards the stretch goal where Braille conversions (and donations to libraries serving the visually-impaired) happen. It’d be cool to get bonus stories and challenge coins but let’s get that Braille conversion done, yeah? Little more than three weeks for that to happen.
• New Kickstarter! Jesse Thorn, impressario of the Maximum Fun empire, wants to have a conference of independent creators in LA later this year, and that’s going to cost some US$120,000. Aside from the fact that Thorn’s various podcasts have given props to webcomics on numerous occasions (and that MaxFun’s merch is handled by TopatoCo), one of the keynote speakers at the Make Your Thing conference (for that is its name) will be webcomics own Kate Beaton. She may be branching out into other areas of creativity, but comics about history and literature and her younger self will always be where she started.

  And crap, look at the other people gonna be there: Jay Allison, Jane Espenson, Chris Gethard, Merlin Mann, Vernon Reid (!), and John Vanderslice were just the names that jumped out at me the most. Word is trickling out, which is why MYT is currently sitting at 2% of goal, with a predicted finish around 65%, but we’re only three hours in and I hope to see that much higher by this time tomorrow.

  This one deserves some traction, but I fear that the relatively high price points for the campaign — US$25: stickers, thank you email, update announcements; US$100: add video access to the conference and a t-shirt; US$400: add a ticket to the conference and gift bag — are going to be a sticking point. For a three-day professional-type conference US$400 is actually pretty realistic, but how many small-scale creators are going to be able to drop four hundo (plus travel expenses)? I hope this one makes goal, but ask me again in a couple days if it will.

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¹ Which might be the bestest brownies I’ve ever had. Well done, TLH creator Abby Howard!

² Within experimental error, given year-end family obligations, technical issues, etc.

³ Granted, Kickstarter has a long and hallowed history of things not happening when they were supposed to, but there’s a lot less lead time involved in getting a website up and running, even a rudimentary one and getting stuff made by vendors on the other side of the world then shipped to me so I can ship it to you (even before you encounter completely unpredictable events like ships turning back when partway across the Pacific).

Sometimes,you just need something that was amazing and hasn’t been seen for a while to be public and prominent again.

• I don’t believe that I have written on this page before about a trip I took to Belgium and Holland maybe … fifteen years ago? Sounds about right. While in Brussels, my wife and I visited the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée, and in and around all the Hergé exhibits (the whole town is a celebration of Tintin), and the other great Eurocomics (around the corner from my hotel was a mural of Blake et Mortimer that took up the entire side of a building¹), was one small piece of art that was clearly the centerpiece of the entire museum.

  Gertie.

  One precious, thin to the point of near-transparency original image (not even a “cel”, as this predated the use of celluloid for animation) from Gertie the Dinosaur, drawn by Winsor McCay nearly a century earlier. Much of what we recognize as comics, and maybe the entire idea of animation, derives from McCay and Gertie the Dinosaur. Heck, it’s a marvel that any of the film still exists, given how little of the silent film era was preserved. But Gertie has never been entirely forgotten, and she’s getting her due courtesy of The Toonseum for her one hundredth birthday:

  Gertie toured the vaudeville circuit in 1914 along with creator Winsor McCay in a unique show combining a live on stage performance and animation. The show wowed audiences, and left them bewildered at what was dubbed one of the great wonders! That vaudeville circuit would have brought both McCay and Gertie to one of Pittsburgh’s many theaters. Now almost 100 years later Gertie returns to Pittsburgh.

  On February 8th, kids can come watch Gertie in action on the screen again and learn about the world’s first of film’s dazzling dinosaurs. Gertie will also be showing off some of her classic cartoon friends on screen as the ToonSeum kicks off our year-long Century of Animation.

  Gertie screens at 1:15pm, followed by quick classes in cartooning and flip-book making, and the dinosaur part also gets its due attention:

  In addition you can explore Gertie’s dinosaur friends including T-rex, Apatosaurus, Velociraptor, and many more from Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Enjoy activities such as measuring teeth and claws, dino foot print stamping, and much more.

  The Carnegie Natural History Center’s Dippy the Dinosaur will be celebrating his 150th Birthday later this year, so look for other events with Gertie and Dippy coming up soon. (It has long been rumored that Dippy and Gertie are an item!) The event runs from 1pm-3:30pm on February 8th at 1pm at the ToonSeum. The cost is $8.00 per child (general admission) and $3.00 per child (members). Adults are free.

  Personally, I think that Gertie might be related to Professor Science, and the velociraptor mentioned may actually be Utahraptor going incognito; naturally, there is only one T-Rex.

• You know what kinda looks like a dinosaur, but not really, but kind of? Jellaby. Okay, J’s a monster, what with the tiny little horns and wings and all, but work with me here. Because this lets me keep to the theme of welcome returns and the subtheme of dinosaurs and announce that after too long a time out of print, Jellaby volume 1 is coming back:
  

  OMG you guys! JELLABY v.1 is coming back into print! This is awesome news! Yay @CapstoneConnect & @keansoo!!! -kjc

  At least in Canada? Amazon’s US site doesn’t recognize the book, but their Canadian site claims it released last week, even though it appears to not be releasing until March? Look, it’s got a new subtitle, a new cover, and a new foreword by Kazu Kibuishi, so find every kid that you know and get them a copy (even if you have to import it from Our Friends To The North) because Jellaby is great.

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¹ I gather that there is more than one in Brussels.

Well! That was a fun couple of days, including two separate airports that just did not want me to leave their premises and threw every possible obstacle in my way. Now let’s never speak of the last 48 hours again.

• Catching up! My buddy Otter — or more properly, KB “Otter” Spangler — of A Girl And Her Fed has launched her first Kickstarter campaign, to take her first novel (released last year) and her next novel (to be released in about six weeks) recorded as audiobooks. On casual inspection this would seem an odd project, since wouldn’t you just make that a stretch goal of the Kickstarter for the books themselves?

  In this case, no, because a) the books weren’t Kickstarted, they were just released on her own; and b) the protagonist of Digital Divide and Maker Space is blind, and releasing them as audiobooks is outreach to an audience that wouldn’t otherwise be able to connect to a relatable character. In fact, one of the stretch goals will be to convert the books to Braille and donate copies to libraries that serve the visually impaired, so this is maybe less about help me make a cool thing and more about help me extend this cool thing to people who tend not to get as many cool things in a form they can access.

  We’re not quite 48 hours in (like, 12 minutes shy of 48 hours as I write this) and we’re sitting around 95% of goal; per the venerable F^3 calculation, this project should finish up somewhere between 200% and 400% of its modest US$7000 goal. Go support it, and enjoy the project video, which is a puppet show¹.

• Catching up! Some new comics launching over at ShiftyLook, with some veteran creators taking a whack at videogame characters that have … shall we say thin? … plots. Shannon Campbell and Sam Logan are breathing life into Tower of Babel, which is essentially a Jenga-in-reverse puzzler/platformer. Meanwhile Team Nice Wizard (aka Ryan North, Christopher Hastings, and Anthony Clark) are fleshing out the story of Dig Dug.
• Catching up! Box Brown’s Retrofit Comics started as a limited-duration project to publish comics for a year. Then it became an ongoing imprint. Brown himself spent a lot of time working up André the Giant² for much of the past two years, but as that project’s all done but the shipping at this point, he’s back to his publisher role with a vengeance:
  

  After only publishing 7 books in 2013, we ARE BACK to a 12-comics-a-year schedule! In 2014 we’ll be releasing comics from these HOT comics artists!

  Which you can click through to see; I just wanted to stress that this is not a funding announcement, this is an availability-of-subscriptions announcement. These comics are getting published, the only questions are how many, and will you get them or not.

Whew, I think that’s everything I needed to get caught up on. Fortunately, nothing going on in comics today except for the surprise announcement that Scott McCloud is an android. Reached for comment, McCloud responded Of course not, I am a completely alive human, beep, null set. You heard it here first.

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¹ No sign of Spinal Tap, who presumably made off with the audio equipment for the puppet show as the sound levels are bit low. You’ll want to bring the volume up on your computer for all the puppety goodness.

² No lie, this looks to be premier work of André the Giant scholarship; I’m not into professional wrestling³, but like everybody, I know (and have a fond spot for) André the Giant.

³ By which I mean I had a brief period of watching in late junior high school. If I understand my wrestling history right, this was when what is now the WWE was moving from a mostly Northeast base into a wider national profile, pre-Hulkamania. Anyway, my knowledge of pro wrestling is from 30+ years ago, aside from some bored Saturdays watching GLOW⁴ in college.

⁴ That would be the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, because come on, watching Amy the Farmer’s Daughter getting beat down by Matilda the Hun until her [Amy’s] little brother Timmy pulls himself from his hospital bed and makes his way ringside on crutches to inspire her [again, Amy] to defeat her evil rival? That’s gold, from the time of two-reel 1930s melodramas⁵ to the first epic battle between Morimoto and Flay on Iron Chef. Heck, I’m pretty sure that the kid cheering on Morimoto actually was named Timmy!

⁵ By the way, I experimented with the construction 1930s two-reel melodramas before rewriting. I heard on the radio last week (or maybe it was an episode of Judge John Hodgman that there are certain rules of grammar that aren’t taught, but which we instinctively absorb; for instance, you wouldn’t say the red big car instead of the big red car. If anybody knows the name for this phenomenon, I’d love to hear it. Ryan North, I’m looking at you.

Footnotes, everybody!

It is now a trend that when an X-Files episode I really remember comes up for treatment in Monster of the Week, it is presented at an arm’s length distance. Not that I necessarily mind in the case of Home, because watching other people freak out at it is awesome, too.

• On top of yesterday’s pre-congrats to Dante Shepherd for 2000 strips, one must also today congratulate David Willis for nine years of Shortpacked!¹, which also marks some sixteen and a half years of continuous Walkyverse continuity. Too bad it’s only going for one more year. Say what?
  

  Shortpacked! is nine years old today!

  When it turns ten, it will cease regular updates.

  That is simultaneously the most respectable admission of devotion to Big Round Numbers, the kindliest advance notice to fans of changes coming down the pike, and the clearest-eyed discussion of why to wrap up a project — namely, the ability to keep on top of primary source material in the face of personal changes in life:

  Maggie and I sort of wanted kids eventually ourselves, and so this was something I hadn’t considered. I mean, writing Shortpacked! without a growing toy collection or the funds or time to watch movies or basically spend all day on the Internet getting mad at dumb people? How is that possible? It isn’t.

  Rather than not put into the strip what he feels it deserves, Willis has been for years now transitioning his chief efforts to Dumbing of Age, a far more autobiographical work; Dumbing of Age starting in the autumn of 2010, as the Shortpacked threads started to resolve. We’ve been in a transition point for his creative efforts for at least the past four years, we just didn’t know all of his intent:

  I figured Shortpacked! would end whenever that kid happened. I didn’t want to leave my characters hanging, so starting in 2010 I immediately started wrapping things up one by one. I gave Amber closure with her father. I gave Amber and Mike a happy ending together. I got Robin and Leslie back together (as was always the plan). I got Ethan the hell away from retail.

  That right there? That’s a masterclass in creative planning. Kudos to Willis for finding a creative outlet that he can be invested in, for doing what was necessary to bring it to the point of financial stability, and for giving his readers plenty of notice that the Walkyverse will be wrapping up at the age of about seventeen and a half².

• Hey, look what I got in: books! It’s been a good two days at the ol’ Fleenplex mailbox. Thanks to Gina at :01 Books for The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, Hidden, and The Undertaking of Lily Chen, and to Bill Barnes for Upgrade Path; their generosity is much appreciated. To receive four such very different books serves to remind me just how broad and deep this medium called comics is. Look for reviews as I have the opportunity to give ’em all a good, thorough reading.
• Quick note: work will be taking me to the Upper Midwest at the start of next week, and as a result my opportunities to update during the day may be scarce. Brief and/or delayed postings may be the result, and we trust that you won’t be too broken up about it. As always, should disaster befall me during my travels, I call upon all of you to avenge my blood.

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¹ Which, if the strip ids are consecutive, would also be the 2002nd Shortpacked! update, wowsers.

² Ironically, about the age that all his characters were when he launched Roomies! all those years ago.

Editor’s note: Ordinarily I’d have an image of the front cover of the book here, but since that’s how Ben Costa’s bio at the back of the book describes him, I had to design a business card for him. I think it’s at least as good as Chen Guangbiao’s.

This past week I picked up a copy of Ben Costa’s Pàng, The Wandering Shàolín Monk: Winter Worm, Summer Grass, the second collection of his story of Shì Lóng Pàng, a rather doughy and unimpressive monk trying to a) stay alive; b) stay true to his monastic ways; c) find his lost brothers, in whichever order makes the most sense right now. He may not feel himself a very righteous Buddhist, but given the way that he bounces from crisis to crisis — enemies becoming friends and friends enemies — and somehow finding his path as life buffets him Pàng would make a hell of a Daoist (just don’t tell him that).

There’s actually not much I can tell you about PTWSM:WWSG‘s story if you haven’t read at least some of Pàng’s earlier adventures: the period of Chinese history he occupies was laid out in the early pages of Vol 1, the history and legend of Shàolín (and the political context in which these were developed) was presented immersively and resists any quick summary. I can tell you that Costa has done his homework … if your understanding of Gōngfu was developed from watching Black Belt Theater on channel 11 out of New York on Saturday afternoon in the ’70s (as mine was), there are details here that are far deeper than secret techniques and impressive martial arts moves.

Costa’s art is on the thick-lined cartoony side, but it fits the story well; characters are instantly distinguished by silhouette, posture, and color palette, and lengthy visual sequences are always easy to follow. Costa’s especially good at environments, with rain, afternoon sunlight, murky hut interiors, fog, mud, and the dark of shadowed forests (as opposed to the dark of gloomy night) all adding extensively to the mood of the story.

One quick note — the story of Pàng is on pause at the moment, as he wants to develop the third part of the story completely before starting to put pages up at his website. In the meantime, the Supreme Ultimate Chancellor has been busy, working on a fantasy graphic novel¹ in the meantime. This means it’s the perfect time to get caught up with the more than 350 pages in Pàng’s journey.

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¹ Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Cube, more info available here. And can I say that I love Costa’s titles? Awesome stuff.

I just have a few brief items for you today; sorry, they can’t all be 800 words paeans to new comics that I’ve fallen in love with.

But heck, since we just mentioned Stand Still, Stay Silent, I’ll note that about the time I was discovering Minna Sundberg’s new (and magnificent) comic epic, SSSS was joining up with Hiveworks. Yesterday while reading the latest online rerun of Skullkickers, I noticed a blogposting that Jim Zub had that day shifted his hosting to Hiveworks. Thinking back about a month prior, Maki Naro announced that Sufficiently Remarkable had joined up with … Hiveworks.

Earlier in the year, they chalked up business agreements with Oh Joy, Sex Toy, Girls With Slingshots, Yellow Peril, Gastrophobia, Nemu*Nemu, Girl Genius, Dumbing of Age, Shortpacked! … the list is too extensive to go into here. Which made me think that something I said in a year-end interview with Tom Spurgeon¹, when I thought I was reaching a bit in speculating how quickly Hiveworks could grow.

Turns out they’re growing faster than I thought possible, and providing support in the form of advertising cash money and more to creators. Frankly, I’m astonished how quickly it’s grown as well as how broad the offerings from its clients and affiliates are. At this point, the chief hazard I see for them isn’t survival, it’s growing too large and too quickly; here’s hoping that principals Joseph Stillwell and Isabelle Melan¸on can scale their abilities as the roster grows.

• There’s a nice review of Midas Flesh #1 by Ryan North (words) and Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb (pictures) up at The AV Club today; if it’s a little less gushingly positive than some of the reviews that page has given this creative team, well, it’s a first issue, new characters and story concept, and it’s clear that North dropped into the story quickly, knowing he’s got another half-dozen issues to fill in the gaps. It’s really good, you guys. Plus it’s got a space suit-wearing Utahraptor who needs glasses, what more could you ask for?²
• Quick! Anybody in/around Berkeley, California today? You have a few hours yet to make it over to the Central Library, where Gene Luen Yang will be discussing Boxers and Saints at 6:30pm tonight. About seven hours, to be precise, as I write this. Get goin’.

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¹ Which, uh, I promised I would link when it went live and then didn’t. Look, I just saved you reading 9000 words of me– even though the The Spurge made me sound very smart — over your holidays, you’re welcome.

² Well, I could ask for an explanation how a Utahraptor gets into a space suit without shredding it to rags with his razor-sharp death-claws, but I presume that’s coming around issue 4 or 5.

I have a few things that are coming up, things that you might want to keep an eye on, even.

• For people in … almost any corner of North America, actually, Danielle Corsetto has announced the initial outline of her Girls With Slingshots 10th Anniversary Cross-Continent Road Trip, taking place through most of July and August. More dates and locations are coming, and don’t forget that she’ll be in wildest Kenilworth, NJ for a signing at Wild Pig Comics this Saturday, 18 January, from noon to 5:00pm. Be there or miss out.
• The Hugo Awards nominations are open for those that are associated with this year’s WorldCon in London, UK. The rules surrounding who can nominate and who can vote are somewhat complex when speaking of the Hugos, so please read through all the details here; as often happens at this time of year, a number of people associated with webcomics are eligible, either in the Best Graphic Story category¹, or in other writing categories. My evil twin has put together a list of works he thinks worthy of consideration, both his own and others, for your consideration, and it looks both solid and comprehensive.

  If I might make my own additions to the list, the WSFS constitution states the Hugos are for works of science fiction and fantasy, which I think is broad enough to incorporate Kris Straub’s first Broodhollow collection, Curious Little Thing. For those of you that argue that the WSFS rules don’t say anything about horror, there have been plenty of Lovecraft-inspired works nominated for and awarded Hugos in the past, so deal with it. In the inarguably fantasy-compliant domain Minna Sundberg’s A Redtail’s Dream finished in 2013. Also published in 2013: K Brooke “Otter” Spangler’s AGAHF tie-in novel, Digital Divide, which is a cracking good modern-SF thriller. Anybody eligible to nominate, please give them a read if you’re able.

• And in keeping with the looking theme today, best wishes to Irregular Webcomic creator David Morgan-Mar², who shared with us yesterday the fact that he’s currently waiting out an annoying (but hopefully temporary) condition with his left eye. The fact that Morgan-Mar of all people would have a problem with his vision sits somewhere pretty high up on the irony scale, given that he put his PhD in physics to work in research related to image processing and machine vision, and this his 3000+ plus LEGO®™©^etc-based comics required the mechanical vision of a camera in order to be shared with the world. Yeah, comics are a visual medium, it just seems to me that in Morgan-Mar’s case, everything he touches is a bit extra visual, if you take my meaning.

  Anyway. Take care of those eyes, don’t strain yourself on the research necessary for your Sunday explorations of the history of science (more than 100 of those now, in addition to nearly 3200 comics prior to that point), and if you get any more cool photos of the interior of your own retina, do share because damn, that was neat. Those wishing to share in my get-well sentiments, Dr Morgan-Mar can be reached on Twitter, or at his personal site.

• One last bit — I am now especially looking forward to Something Terrible, as it’s passed the stretch goal to achieve hardcovers. Awesome.

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¹ This will be the first year of the BGS’s five-year existence in which Howard Tayler will definitely not be among the nominees, given he didn’t complete a story-arc of Schlock Mercenary in calendar 2013.

² Quick question: are there any other webcomics creators with an Erd#337;s-Bacon number? Morgan-Marr’s is 6, which is pretty damn impressive. Even more impressive, he has an Erd#337;s-Bacon-Sabbath number (something achieved by only 37 people in the history of the world) of 16, although that site overestimates his Bacon number by 3, giving him a likely EBS# of 13. Damn.

Just something to keep in mind as best you can. Let’s finish this up and send y’all off for a weekend of, hopefully, kindness.

• Today marks 14 years of Sam Brown’s Exploding Dog. It’s tough enough to keep comics going with characters (except for Red Robot #C-63) and plots, but to rely upon short phrases from your readers to drive the artwork? That’s a crazy monster-level of daring and skill right there. Happy anniversary, Sam.
• Following up on our earlier mention of Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible Kickstarter, the totals have passed 300% of goal, but that’s not good enough. You may recall that we discussed the possibility of hardcovers for ST, and Trippe has announced that the physical books will get hard covers at US$22,000 and as of this writing the total is at … US$19,535, with a little more than three weeks to go. Let’s get on that, people — the quality of your reward will leap if you can convince just a few more people to join in.
• As long as we’re on Kickstarter, I’ll mention the campaign for Rod Salm’s first Death At Your Door collection. We’ve mentioned DAYD on occasion over the past few years, but I confess that I missed the Kickstarter going up a couple of days ago. Fortunately, Mr Salm for dropping a note in the comments to let me know so thanks for that and mea culpa.

  One should note that the DAYD campaign has set an extremely modest goal of CDN$700, meaning that the usual Fleen Fudge Factor may not apply — but just in case it does, the F³ is presently predicting a final total of CDN$700 to CDN$1400, or 100% to 200% of goal. Everybody feel good for Rod Salm!

Okay, that’s it. Be kind.