Changes coming down the pike, Clem, and hard to say where they’re gonna lead.

• Let’s not bury the lede — Jerry Holkins posted a rather startling news update on Friday afternoon, of which the key point was:
  

  But I don’t think I want to “grow my business” anymore; I sort of want to do the opposite. And I’m tired, sick to death, of saying “Maybe Someday” when it comes to the things we really want to make. So, we’re not going to do that anymore. The next year is going to be a pretty big one, one of the biggest yet; it’s the year the previous fifteen have been leading up to in the literal sense but also in other ways. I think they’re going to be “big years” from now on, frankly. And it hurts pretty bad, but I don’t know where PATV as a “channel” for third party shows and The Penny Arcade Report fit into that. We’ll be shutting those things down at the end of this year.

  It may just be a sign that webcomics qua webcomics has finally gotten to an age where something like a fundamental shift of direction can take place and be noticed; plenty of creators make strategic shifts every other month¹, but they affect far fewer people or have fewer visible effects. For an enterprise like Penny Arcade to make such a shift² for essentially philosophical reasons — I suspect it’s not the last we’ll see, but probably also it’ll be a while before another such appears.

  In the meantime, this opens up questions about the future of Blamimations and other Scott & Kris-type productions, not to mention current and future productions from LRR, Mega64, and some pretty damn skilled game journalists. I’d guess that the PATV banner will now be focused solely on what happens inside the walls (so to speak) of Penny Arcade Industries, and that future iterations of Strip Search are no less likely than they were before, but at this point we’ll have to see.

  I would quibble with Holkins on one point though, and that’s that he still will be building his business, but less by incorporating the creations of others, and more by expanding the offerings of his own.

  But it’s time to start making good on some of the promises we’ve made in our work. Recognizing that things like the Pins or The New Kid or Daughters of the Eyrewood or Thornwatch or The Lookouts or Automata deserve every ounce of our resources. Novels and albums, too – all these things that got put off in the interests of Empire. Essentially, we’ve decided to be Penny Arcade.

  This refocusing of effort casts certain decisions in a new light — the expansion of PAX to a third event (and what I’ve interpreted as hints that there may be more in the future), the handing-off of art and writing duties on The Trenches … Holkins gives every impression of having built up his sandbox and now wanting to get to play in it again. I wonder how long he’ll get to before the Empire starts to raise its head again.

• The scope and scale are entirely different, but I can’t help but see parallels in the appeal made by Jon Rosenberg today — he wants to be able to direct more of his energies to the creation of comics, but instead of having too much business to attend to, it’s the unique challenges of children³ and family. The world is in some degree cyclical in its nature, and webcomics is not different in that respect — the Patreon system that Rosenberg is now banking his creative career on is reminiscent of the public broadcasting-model approaches that webcomics returns to on occasion.

  Someday, the pendulum will swing the other way again, and maybe it won’t be necessary. For now, though — if you like his work (and I’m too lazy to type out the obligatory disclaimer re: me and Jon again, but you can read it here), a very small amount of money will make it possible for that work to continue.

• The AV Club, who I think of as being rather trustworthy when it comes to cultural recommendations, is writing about its favorite books of the year today, and in among your Thomases Pynchon and Davids Foster Wallace, one may find a couple of entries from our weird little corner of the cultural conversation. Allie Brosh’s collection of Hyperbole and a Half and the second volume of Machine of Death are both called out as among the year’s best. Well done Ms Brosh, and everybody at MoD.

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¹ Indeed, that agility is one of the great advantages of being an independent creator, where the distance from see an opportunity to decide on a plan of attack to make it happen to all done can be measured in hours. that

² And not in response to a crisis or failure, which is how things of this sort normally go in the business world.

³ And Jon didn’t bring it up, but I will: his situation isn’t helped by the fact that his twin sons (happy and healthy today, thank whatever you thank in these situations) entered the world sooner than would be optimal, after an extraordinarily risky pregnancy. No father on the planet could have been prouder than Jon when the son he was told might never walk on his own did exactly that.

However, these triumphs came at a time when the system for the delivery of healthcare in this country — both to get those boys born, and the extensive needs for physical therapy since — is structured in such a way as to make a situation like this financially ruinous. I don’t know the particulars, but I suspect that if you looked around everything you could see within a 50 meter radius taken together probably doesn’t have as high a dollar value as the medical bills Jon’s family have racked up.

So understand, Jon’s not trying to make comics under the usual constraints of family; he’s trying to make comics under the usual constraints of family and medical debt that likely reaches seven figures, and after more than two years of that unique financial burden, is finally asking for help.

Damn, webcomickers got some patience sometimes. They get an idea, they get plans, and you get to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Check it:

• Earlier this year, Gunnerkrigg Court Tom Siddell did an extra story, taking place between chapters 31 and 32 of his long-running story. Annie in the Forest part one was released in limited quantities through TopatoCo (and then restocked, so you can get one now), and part two was on his table at the recently-concluded Thought Bubble Festival (and is not otherwise available as of this writing). Today, however, Siddell opened a new section of his site for extra stories, and lo and behold — AITFp1 is there for you to read for free, with the second part coming soon.

  It’s a heck of a thing that Siddell’s doing — taking a reasonably pricey item and discounting it down to exactly zero dollars, so if you enjoy watching Annie grow the hell up a bit, do consider dropping a little something towards his ongoing spiders-to-money research. Alternately, you could buy something good from him when he hits MoCCA Festival in April, where he will be tabling alongside Magnolia Porter. In fact, give her lots of money, too, because her comics rule.

• Next up, David Malki ! shares more about the Machine of Death game, shipping mishaps, and farm animals¹, which really just means that it’s a random day of the week. The interesting part comes a little bit further along in the update, wherein we learn:
  

  Some of you may remember the $400,000 stretch goal: “All backers get a MEGA-CRAZY FUN-TIME KIT that includes Wondermark ebooks, the MOD v.1 ebook, free music from our favorite pals, addt’l bonus ebooks …”

  Those “addt’l bonus ebooks” are a Webcomics Pals Ebook Bundle containing over 2,000 pages of comics

  What.

  from artists like Ryan North, Dave Kellett, Chris Hallbeck, Spike, KC Green, Sam Logan, Angela Melick, David Willis, Zach Weinersmith, Jim Zub, K.B. Spangler, R. Stevens, Jon Rosenberg, Christopher Baldwin, and more. I’m paying them a license fee for their ebooks and giving them to you for free. The retail value of this bundle is probably a million zillion dollars.

  Actually, I probably own most of that particular payload of creamy comics goodness, and guessing that the content includes one random book from each of the other creators. If that’s true, then I’d put the value of that bundle at over US$250 if they were physical copies (and that’s not including the Wondermark/MoDv1/music content).

  Even if you paid one dollar at the “JUST THE TIP” level, you’re getting all this content for free. It would take you a hundred years to read all this stuff. The bundle will be ready for download next week. A gift from me to you.

  Know what I’m going to do next week? I’m downloading that entire bolus of entertainment, and I’m going to come back with an actual dollar value so that you know exactly what Malki ! is giving you, and keeping in mind that what he is paying other creators and the value of what you get is probably not going to be covered by the value of the Kickstarter pledges except for the ten people that pledged at the Goat Stare² level and above. Hell, I’m in for the Boxed In level and once you account for the value of the stuff I’m getting, Malki ! is probably out so much money that it would have been cheaper (and certainly less hassle) for him to have never had a Kickstarter and just sent me twenty bucks and we’d call it even.

• Still speaking of Malki !, a Wondermark strip from six and a half years ago got a callback in today’s xkcd. Nice.
• Speaking of six and a half years ago, Christopher Hastings has been holding onto a key, secret plot point for about that long. Attend: the introduction of the Cumberland, Maryland Zombie Defense System and Mayor Chuck Goodrich, astronaut. Add a dash of King Radical, ancient tennis gods, time folds, dimensional portals, alternate Chuck Goodriches with problems with King Radical.

  And all those plot threads paid off today. If Dr McNinja ended on this story, it would stand as a magnificent achievement in long-term storytelling served well by shorter, connected arcs. Fortunately, I think we’re a bit further than that from the end of Dr McNinja, which means that at this point Hastings has nowhere to go but up.

• And that wasn’t even the oldest callback today. Behold, a super-size Achewood that both promises a story arc and calls back to, oh, April of 2002. Damn.

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¹ Just go with it.

² See the bit about farm animals above.

It’s a day for learning things, including the fact that today is Repeal Day¹, the anniversary of the day when the United States ended one of the most stupid experiments in law and social policy in all of human history. The other things I learned all involve comics.

• First thing I learned: Really never underestimate David Malki ! We spoke not long ago about not ignoring his boundless font of creativity, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, honestly. See, I had gotten it into my head that with all that Malki ! had taken on this year, including the logistics of shipping something like a million collated cards², he might give the Wondermark calendar a year off. After all, it’s less than three weeks from Christmas and thus less than four until the new year, when the calendar is most needed.

  Nope. In fact, he’s upped the proverbial ante by also offering a book of the art and verse from the 2008 — 2012 iterations of the calendar, and original art from last year’s Gaxian travelogue edition. As in past years, the calendar is in a limited edition of 250, and there are but 29 pieces of original art from last year’s calendar. The book may or may not be available after the calendars sell out, but for now I’m guessing there’s only 250 copies of that as well. Best jump on that soon if you want in.

• Second thing I learned: The good folks at :01 Books are successful out of all proportion to their size³. Seriously, there’s something like four people involved in the entire acquisitions/editing/production end at the imprint, and they gather accolades for a hefty percentage of their output every year. Latest proof: NPR’s year-end guide to the best of 2013 books has a category for graphic novels & comics, and :01 garnered a full 25% of the recognition.

  It’s worth noting that the :01 Spring and Fall catalogs contain a total of 14 books (I can’t find a copy of their Winter catalog right now, but I’m confident in putting their total releases for the year in the vicinity of 20). There are publishers that drop more graphic novels than that in a month, but it’s all about the quality, not the quantity.

  Oh, and it looks like next year will be just as fun. I just want to publicly thank the :01 crew: Callista, Colleen, Gina, Mark, and anybody else I might be overlooking at the scrappiest, most thoughtful, best damn imprint in the New York publishing scene. Y’all rock.

• Third thing I learned: If I’m reading this announcement correctly, the folks behind the Making Comics podcast are getting ready to launch a repository of comics-making online courses. They’re talking about live courses to start with, aimed at the 10 — 12 year old range to begin with … but if those lessons remain on YouTube, does it matter how old you are if you want to watch ’em?

  As a thing, the Massive Open Online Course is still rapidly changing, and I’m not sure that any number of pre-recorded lessons can replace the experience of working with a skilled instructor who also knows the material inside-out⁴, but this does have the potential of spreading the basics of comics-making far more widely that it has been in the past. It’s worth keeping an eye on.

________________
¹ Actually, I knew that, but I did learn that heavily Mormon Utah was the state that provided the clinching vote to repeal the 18th Amendment so thanks for that one, Utah! Oddly, my own state of New Jersey provided the last vote in favor of ratification of Prohibition, but not until 1922, more than three years after the 18th Amendment was approved and more than two years after the Volstead Act came into force.

² Which logistics, by the way, also involves the container ship developing mechanical problems and having to return to the far side of the Pacific Ocean.

³ Okay, I knew that one, too.

⁴ As some of you know, my day job is teaching for a technology company. For the past decade, an increasing percentage of my course load has been delivered from my home office in a virtual classroom rather than in-person. The advantages to students are numerous — no travel costs being paramount — but there are challenges as well; most important from my perspective is the lack of immediate feedback to me as to how well the students are getting it during lecture.

There are dozens of small cues that an instructor picks up from a student sitting right over there that convey clearly — they understand or I need to do that last bit over in another way — that are severely attenuated over a net connection. There are other logistical concerns as well, especially of the show me what you’re doing right now variety. Those challenges are compounded when the session isn’t live, but pre-recorded. However, any form of instruction is a step up from struggling on your own to the point that you decide I can’t do this.

Understand as we get started here, today I get to share with you hints of things that make me very, very happy. You can assign any kind of assumptions of bias that you like, doesn’t matter. What I am about to share with you is truth.

• Firstly, Christopher Hastings is going to be remembered by history as one of the the great writer/artists of comics. His story sense is amazingly solid, his art is clear and concise, and he’s a professional when he’s working for others. He would rather die than blow a commitment he’s made to somebody else (and if that means that his own stuff gets delayed so that he can make good to an employer, so be it). Oh, and he’s friggin’ hilarious, which is just kind of unfair when you add it to his other good qualities¹.

  For the past month, his Marvel-published miniseries, Longshot Saves The Marvel Universe, has been dialing up the absurdity and mayhem in equal measures, but is only with today’s release of issue #3 that you get to see Hastings at his best. Because today is when you get to see Sad Future Magneto leaving increasingly pathetic voicemails for Charles Xavier. Hastings gave me a rundown on these back at SDCC and no lie, I was rolling. As an added bonus, I’ve been imagining that someday, somehow, real-life besties Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart might be enticed to re-enact what Hastings has written. It would be the best thing.

• For two years now (longer, even), something has kept me going in bad times. One particular thought has sustained me when all seems bleak. And lo, in this season of miracles, the Day of Jubilee has arrived, and on Christmas Day no less, we will all get to see History’s Greatest Monster blow up in space.

  James Ashby, I’m looking at you.

  It’s been a long time since the money was raised, the equipment obtained, occasionally-shirtless James was filmed, all in preparation for Starpocalypse!. Back when the project was first announced, Zach Weiner confirmed for me that the time and funding that would be required for Starpocalypse would all be worth it given the many different was they would get to explode James. In space. Now we are a mere three weeks away from the realization of that dream, and it’s so beautiful.

_______________
¹ Also: impeccable food- and drink-producing skills, and his dog is ridiculous.

Hey. How are you? Good, good. There are some things coming up that you might want to keep an eye on.

• T minus 10 days That’s when the latest iteration of The Whole Story finishes up its Kickstarter campaign, and truth be told, it looks like it might be a squeaker. The last release of The Whole Story handily cleared its goal, but this one is presently predicted to hit around 95% of goal, and that is just heartbreaking for a couple of reasons:
  1. Ryan Estrada is trying something really audacious here, where the main reward is an e-comic sent to you every two weeks, and the stories are interlinked. The hero of the first installment of Broken Telephone (for that is its name) has a villain to defeat, but that villain doesn’t know that he’s the villain — he’s the hero of his own story, which will be the second installment. Each antagonist gets a turn in the spotlight, through an 18 part epic by 19 creators.
  2. Those that go above the bare minimum of one stinking dollar will get more comics, including a 24 page bonus story at the US$18 level, 160 pages of various stories¹ added to your fortnightly subscription at the US$24 level, and a mind-boggling 850 pages from various creators² delivered this month before the Broken Telephone subscription even starts. That would be nearly 1050 pages plus the BT subscription (18 chapters, each 12 – 24 pages, call it 300 or so as a round number), or a whopping 3.3 cents per page.
  3. All the money goes to the artists. Estrada, maybe more than anybody, understands that working for exposure is a vile, filthy lie, so aside from postage costs for some top-tier backers getting originals and such, everything raised goes to pay the people who are drawing the comics. Go take a look at the list of names that Estrada’s posted — I’ll wager that there’s at least one person there whose work you enjoy. That person gets paid if The Whole Story makes goal.

  Do it for the children.

• T minus 15 days The Beguiling’s annual comics-funtimes party will be on Wednesday, 18 December, starting at 7:30pm, mere steps from the famed comic shop at Pauper’s Pub where there will be plentiful adult beverages and webcomics superstars. Kate Beaton! Joey Comeau! Ryan North! The launch of Midas Flesh! And I don’t want to make it sound too enticing, but we have been promised both Surprise Mystery Guests and shenanigans. There will be signings of all their various booklike creations, and a Secret Santa gift exchange.

  Also do this for the children.

• T minus about 90 days, dang Hat tip to Kean Soo who pointed me to an amazing new webcomic, Maralinga 1956, which launched a story of post-apocalyptic survival and monsters about a week ago. Good news: there’s ten pages of very good story there. Bad news: the creators will be updating with ten-page chapters on a quarterly basis, meaning that:
  

  Maralinga will be a 200ish page graphic novel posted in quarterly 10 page installments, so should be wrapping up in around, ulp, 2018.

  I’m annoyed because I want more of this story yesterday, but waiting for few-and-far-between updates in longform stories is nothing new. No RSS, but there is a form to sign up for email notification when Maralinga updates in, I’m guessing late February/early March.

  You’ll have to do this for the children, since children have no concept of in three months.

_________________
¹ Including one of Estrada’s true-life adventures, The Bear From The Bear And The Beach From The Beach, wherein Estrada gets close to the movies and nearly dies a lot.

² Including more true-life adventures in Estradavision and Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible, which is going to appear on a lot of best-of lists this year and awards ballots next year.

Editor’s note: No photo today, because it would give away the surprise at the end. You understand.

Whew boy, today has kicked my ass. Let’s look at what surprised me in the past day or so.

• Not surprising: Box Brown’ long-percolating biocomic of Andre the Giant earned him some love from CBR for the just-released cover.

  Less expected: Grantland, the bloggy aspect of ESPN’s online empire, did an interview with Brown in advance of the comic’s release. This may be the harbinger of the fabled Jock-Nerd Convergence, as was foretold in the beforetimes by the Truthsayer.

• Not surprising: Big magazine does a listicle of webcomics it likes.

  Pretty damn nervy, actually: after grabbing snippets of comics to run on their site (many of which are licensed as Creative Commons NonCommercial), they then offered the creators the exciting opportunity to quote specific sections of the article to promote themselves, for a modest fee. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s an excerpt from an email sent to one of the creators, in response to the simple question, Are you trying to get me to give you money?

  Hi,

  Thanks for your reply. [other employee] reached out to you because your [comic] was featured in our PCMag.com Best Web Comics story.

  Licensing is not free but to my knowledge you have not used any of our content commercially so no, this is not an attempt to collect money.

  Many companies like to leverage recognition like this to promote their products/services/apps/games/etc. I am here to let you know we can facilitate any needs you have to use this recognition.

  Here are examples of how others have used their recognition from PCMag.com to promote their brands…[link removed]

  If you wish to use our trademarks or quotes to promote [comic] I’m here to help. Use of those trademarks and/or quotes requires licensing which is fee based.

  Regards,

  [name omitted because I’m a nice guy]
  Licensing Manager
  Ziff Davis Inc.

  So to sum: Ziff Davis Inc. makes money by driving clicks via a listicle, then graciously allows the people whose work it is referencing to specifically quote the story title¹, but if they want to actually quote the article, or maybe show a screenshot that might incorporate a ZD logo, they have to pay for the privilege to display it for one year which will in turn promote the magazine that gets the license fee. To quote the creator’s reply to this “generous” offer:

  I can’t decide if Kafka or Orwell wrote this!

  Me neither.

• Completely coincidentally and without any reference to any publisher’s hubris whatsoever: look what I got in the mail today.

______________
¹ Excerpt from the original pitch letter:

Here are instances where you featured on PCMAG.com. The quotes available for you to license are mentioned in Bold below (this quote can be used with the PCMAG.com logo or text). All license rights are for one year.

Which included the following explanatory boilerplate:

In order to maintain the esteem and integrity surrounding our logos, PCMag and Ziff Davis, Inc. must grant rights and permission prior to the use of any material. Ziff Davis, Inc. makes its content available only subject to the terms of licensing agreement. This is standard with all of our clients and we are vigilant in safeguarding our content for misuse. You currently are permitted, without need for license, to reproduce on your website the headline of an article published on any of our websites, as long as it is not for commercial purposes and is limited to the following use only, as stated in Section 107 of the United States Copyright Law: Criticism, Comment, News reporting, Teaching, Scholarship and Research. However no part of our content, reviews and articles may be used for commercial purposes without a license.

Three of them, in fact.

• Miracle the First: Paul Taylor is the first person in comics history to correctly depict a nasal cannula. That’s the oxygen tube that goes in the nose, as opposed to more high-delivery methods like masks¹. Every. Friggin’. Time. I’ve ever read a comic (book, strip, web, whatever) that featured somebody getting oxygen, they’ve gotten the nasal wrong:
  • it doesn’t shove one tube up one nostril leaving the other empty
  • it doesn’t end in two prongs shoved in the two nostrils, hanging down like some long, hollow booger
  • it doesn’t clip to the nose

  It does exactly what Taylor has drawn: form a closed loop with two prongs in the middle that go in the nostrils, and the tubing itself is draped over the ears and snugged up under the chin to keep everything in place. From today forward, proclaim that there is never reason to get this one wrong again.

• Miracle the Second: Six of the extremely talented and personable folks at Periscope Studio have banded together, like Voltron, to bring justice to the galaxy print up a series of art books, and you can support ’em over at Kickstarter. A pledge of as little as US$5 will get you PDFs of all six books (from Ron Randall, Paul Guinan, David Hahn, Natalie Nourigat, Benjamin Dewey, and Erika Moen — who yesterday survived largely unscathed² a rather scary auto-vs-bike collision that scared the crap out of me from 5000 km away and which we will dub Miracle the Second and a Half). Naturally, higher pledge levels get you physical comics of breathtaking beauty and vision, so make with the pledging.
• Miracle the Third: So yesterday when I went down the list of Thought Bubble attendees, I noted the attendance of Nicholas Gurewitch of the long-hiatused, much-beloved Perry Bible Fellowship and thought to myself, Man, I hope he’s working on something new.

  Ask and ye shall receive: Gurewitch tweet-announced a new animated short that he wrote and directed, featuring death, destruction, and a cameo by one Zachary T Paleozogt. It’s hilarious, but you knew that would be the case.

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¹ Of which there are several types, which we need not go into here.

² I’m giving at least partial credit to the incredible shape that Moen is in due to her pole-based acrobatic skills, and partial credit to the fact that she’s a force of nature and cannot be defeated by mortal instruments.

A couple of quick thoughts for you today, as we careen through space on an improbably-small hunk of rock with an impossibly-narrow band of gases that somehow sustain all the life and — by extension — webcomics that we know to exist in the infinite universe. You know … Tuesday.

• One of the smaller-scale, highly regarded comics shows takes place this weekend in Leeds, UK, as Thought Bubble Comic Con participates in the week-long Thought Bubble Festival. There are symposia and screenings in the festival all this week, and the convention itself at Clarence Dock on Saturday and Sunday. Indy- and web-comicky types in attendance will include John Allison, Kate Beaton, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Jeffrey Brown, Darryl Cunningham, Meredith Gran, Nicholas Gurewitch (!), Olly Moss, Ethan Nicolle, Ramón Pérez, Tom Siddell, Cameron Stewart, and Maris Wicks, in addition to the British Comics Awards. Tell everybody I said hi.
• For those not able to make it to Leeds this weekend, one might make plans to check out Evan Dahm’s new e-book, Lacunæ. The word lacuna (lacunæ is the plural) refers to a gap, missing section (as in text) or silence (as in music); Dahm’s book refers to the latter definition as it’s a collection of 18 “quiet places”, taken from a series of drawings of remote dwellings on remoter islands.

  He shared some of the drawings on Twitter as he worked on them, and they put me in mind of the further corners of Le Guin’s Earthsea, and that’s some damn good company to be in. It’s two bucks for nearly twenty pages of intricate, mood-setting places, and if I don’t see at least one of them stolen for either an album cover or a mural on the side of a van by this time next year, it’s only because we’re too far from the 1970s¹.

• For the past few years, webcomickers have been molding the next generation(s) of comics artists, as diverse creators have presented workshops and lectures at various colleges or taught full-semester programs. To that number we’re about to add one Bradley² J³ Guigar will be teaching at the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia. Lots of predecessors for teaching a class, but this is the bit that I think is unique — Guigar won’t be teaching drawing, or story, or joke writing, he’ll be teaching how to make a living in the arts:
  

  In January, I will be teaching a senior-level course on Arts Entrepreneurship … For a long time now, I’ve argued (sometimes loudly on Webcomics Weekly) that art schools need to do a better job of preparing their students for the Real World they’re being thrust into. And that means an overwhelming probability of freelance work and running a small business centered around one’s craft — not the studio jobs and staff positions that were prevalent decades ago.

  Hint for those Hussian students that end up sitting class with Professor Guigar next semester: he’s got a lot of Dad Jokes, he’s not embarrassed to drop them on you, and if you can make him laugh, you’ll get 30 to 90 seconds to check your email or texts before he’ll be able to continue. I encourage you to learn all you can from him (he really is frighteningly smart), and also to keep track of how many laugh breaks you get out of him before graduation; I’m going to place the over/under at 75, but would be thrilled to hear that I underestimated.

  Oh, and if you’re going to try to bribe him, learn how to make a proper whisky sour. Just sayin’.

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¹ Not necessarily the worst place to be too far from.

² Bradford? Bradmark? Bradbourne? Bradburn? Braddock? Bradon? Bradshaw? Bradwell? Brady?

³ It is my firm belief that the “J” doesn’t stand for anything, but is in reference to Bullwinkle J Moose and Rocket J Squirrel. Whatever the truth of the name, he’s dreamy.

A friend of mine recently told me about how when he was younger, Ender’s Game¹ was his favorite book, and now many years later, his mother had read it and while it wasn’t necessarily her cup of tea, she understood exactly why it was his favorite: Because the hero is a pre-teen that saves the world in space by playing videogames. Oooh, burn, Mom.

Likewise, Richard Feynman will always be my favorite scientist; as a little baby engineer, his famed audiotaped² lectures on physics were considered a marvel of clarity, and then early in my undergraduate career the first of his autobiographical volumes came out³ and we learned something else about Feynman — he screwed around (literally and figuratively) and had fun and lived his life in a way that exemplified the notion that if you weren’t overly concerned with what other people thought about you, it was probably for the best.

He was a complex, brilliant, difficult, charming, obnoxious genius that wanted to know the why and how of everything, a man who at certain points of his life knew things that literally no other human knew, a man who could reduce the most complex concepts in physics to squiggles on a chalkboard, a man who joked and told stories and played in samba bands, a man who got laid a lot. Around 20 years old he was everything I might aspire to be, and it’s one of the great losses of my life that I’ll never get to meet him⁴. He was nowhere near as awesome as his stories made him out to be, probably, but that’s part of the point of telling stories, getting to make yourself look better.

Two years ago he got a really good biographical treatment — certainly not his first — in graphical form, from Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick, published by the good folks at :01 Books. Given the importance of Feynman Diagrams (the aforementioned squiggles) in modern physics, having his story told in slightly squiggly pictures is a natural. It’s hard to think how they might top themselves.

Until now.

Ottaviani and Myrick are taking on the one physicist who may be as influential, as complex, as colorful a character, with as involved and messy a life as Feynman (although he was probably never investigated by the FBI as a possible subversive): Stephen Hawking. And given that Hawking has been locked into his own body for decades, unable to speak for himself, the silent medium of graphic fiction may be the most expressive means of describing the inner thoughts of the man. Oh, and the fact that he’s still alive to talk to doesn’t hurt; that’s not just an abstract possibility, by the way:

Hawking author Jim Ottaviani says, “July 4, 2012 was a good day in physics and for Gordy Kane, Leland and me. Not only was the Higgs boson revealed to the world, but Gordy — a prominent physicist and author of The Particle Garden — won a long-standing $100 bet with his friend Stephen Hawking on whether there even was a Higgs. And in an email letting us know about these things, Gordy and his wife Lois also added an ‘Oh, by the way….’ They told us that Stephen had read and enjoyed our Feynman book (!) and invited us to come to Cambridge and talk about doing a book about him. We didn’t get on a plane that same afternoon, but we did start planning our trip, and this book. Like I said, a good day.”

Hawking is due for release in 2016, and a preview is presently available on Boing Boing. It’s not much compared to the full book, and it’ll likely be different by the release date, but it’s enough for now.

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¹ No link because seriously, screw Orson Scott Card.

² “Tapes” were these things that stored information on long strips of magnetic ribbon. Ask your parents.

³ The sequel was posthumous, and in large part dealt with his role in the Challenger disaster investigation, which also resonated for us. It was January of my freshman year when the associate dean of students Tom Miller (aka your official buddy at Rose-Hulman; by the way, he’s still there and still your buddy despite the fancy VP title and tie) found me and some friends on a couch in the Union building and told us, The Space Shuttle just exploded.

That day, more than any other in our technical education, reinforced the idea that our actions as engineers would have consequences. We wouldn’t know for a long time what had gone wrong, but something had — something was missed, or not anticipated, or done wrong.

⁴ Others on that list: Claude Shannon, Chuck Jones, Jim Henson, Stephen Jay Gould.

So many Things!

• New Thing! ComfyCon is go!
• New Thing! Kel McDonald’s previously-mentioned African folktales anthology is now on Kickstarter! Kel! Cube! Becky! Faith! A dozen stories that you haven’t seen a thousand times before!
• New Thing! Frank “The Voice Of Wallace The Fish” Gibson will be one of the writers of the new Bee & PuppyCat comics alongside B&P creator Natasha Allegri and the always-awesome Madeleine Flores!
• Thing Wrapping Up! The Bee & PuppyCat series Kickstarter has just wrapped with more than US$870K, meaning nine episodes of cosmic ennui!
• New Thing! Ryan Estrada’s latest comics collection, Broken Telephone, is now live! That is to say, you can now subscribe to all-new digital comics, from nearly 20 artists, arriving every other week for up to a year. To be precise, Estrada’s using the Kickstarter campaign as a funding backbone for his usual Pay What You Want model, with certain funding tiers getting you more and more and more comics, from so many creators, all of whom were paid for their efforts. Rockin’. Go get it.