A number of things happened Thursday, but I felt like Friday belonged to Joey. I don’t imagine a slight delay in discussion has changed any of these things too much.

• If you aren’t familiar with Horace Greenstein, Scary Owl Lawyer, you damn well should be. Now available in scarier, sound-and-vision form courtesy of Nothing But Flowers.
• New A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible!
• It’s been ten years since the first Child’s Play was announced¹, and in that time its focus has been singular: make life a little easier for sick kids (and their families) via a network of affiliated (now world-wide) hospitals. Announced late last week is the first expansion of the Child’s Play mission, extending the same promise of relief to kids outside of the hospital environment, but in no less miserable straits:
  

  With the holiday season upon us, we wanted to share some exciting news from Child’s Play. Due to the incredible amount of support from gamers around the world, we’ve been working on a new initiative to benefit children and their families in domestic violence facilities.

  Unlike the network of hospitals we serve, domestic violence shelters operate on a much smaller scale and can have specific needs and challenges: Anonymous locations, apartment-style housing, multilingual families, and more.

  Within our pilot program, we have domestic violence facilities that provide emergency housing, long term housing, counseling, legal advocacy, and a variety of youth and family care programs, but there was one unifying factor to each and every one: They’re in need of ways to support, entertain, distract and interact with traumatised youth.

  I’m proud to announce we have selected ten facilities to participate in the pilot program for our domestic violence assistance initiative. Over the past year, we’ve been working to build a custom designed game kiosk, complete with console, TV, and appropriate games.

  As we get feedback and fine-tune the manufacturing and distribution process, we will expand the network to include facilities nationwide.

  PA co-creator Mike Krahulik isn’t the most popular guy in some communities these days; if you can separate the creator from the creation, there’s some good work being done here by a lot of people (not the least Child’s Play coordinator Jamie Dillion) and the good that can be produced here is tangible and much-needed. Just sayin’.

• I’ve been thinking about the Kickstarter scam-backer incident since it broke last week, and while I’m gratified that things came to a quick resolution (tl;dr: Kickstarter revoked the account of the scammer in question), I’ve been wondering what kind of protections could be baked into the Kickstarter ecosystem to discourage such scam attempts in the future. I’m not sure that anything foolproof could be devised² without impairing the the utility of the site, given that disputes of this nature are between a customer (in this case, a scammer), a credit card company, and a merchant (which Kickstarter is not; Kickstarter is a permanent marketplace with a floating roster of merchants).

  Amazon’s not very involved either, given that it’s little more than a credit processing service rather than a merchant. The bank issuing the card is obligated to investigate on behalf of the allegedly aggrieved party³, but it doesn’t want to be stuck with a deadbeat customer and is somewhat incentivized to find in favor of their cardmember because that makes it Somebody Else’s Problem. The Somebody in that SEP is the merchant, who get hit with a chargeback.

  So what to do? For starters, I don’t know what Kickstarter may be planning to deter scammers in the future — although I am confident that they are planning, since this particular cat it out of the bag, and dong nothing means having to spend the time and effort to react to them one at a time — but if I were over there I’d consider at least some of the following:

  • At a campaigner organizer’s request (or maybe automatically), make chargeback investigators aware of past disputes against other campaigns
  • Allow campaigns to approve backers above some threshold dollar value
  • Require backers above some threshold dollar value to provide some amount of their pledge in escrow/bond

  Those last two might work to deter the next guy that’s determined to steal top-value backer rewards; the hassle of dealing with credit card complaints (and the risk of triggering fraud alerts at the credit card companies) might not be worth it if you could “only” steal, say, US$100 worth of stuff as opposed to US$1000. Much to think about, and much to keep an eye on in future.

• Speaking of Kickstarter, and not on the topic of scams — one of the most delightfully thoughtful (or thoughtfully delightful) webcomics is finally getting a proper print collection, and they’re fundraising as we speak. Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell creators Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan would like very much for you to join their eponymous hero on the karmic rollercoaster ride that is his life, and to enjoy the paper-based versions of the laugh-chuckles which can be yours for as little as US$30 (it was US$25, but the early birds beat you to the savings).

  DCIGTH is terrific, funny, heartfelt stuff, and you should get in on this while the getting’s good. Oh, and collectors of comics art: please note that originals from the DCIGTH run are included in reward packages starting at the US$60 level, which is criminally cheap. Also, handmade plushies of Skittles the Manticore, hooray!

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¹ Perhaps appropriately, it started in reaction to what the PA guys perceived as persecuting, dickish behavior on the part of another. You may argue if you wish about the presence or absence of irony in that state of affairs, but it is inarguable that Child’s Play has done a great deal of good for sick kids and their families in the decade since.

² cf: the prevalence of scammers on eBay, who always find exploits within policies that are meant for honest participants. But, like they say, locks are for honest people.

³ Remind me to tell you sometime about the dark days before card swipers and how customers could get screwed by stolen credit cards for weeks until the numbers got into the hands of merchants.

Let me just point you at some things worth seeing.

• I can’t tell if this is a brilliant piece of performance art, or just somebody that needs a good punch — an Indiegogo campaign to fund a Kickstarter campaign. It claims to be in the Comic category, which could be comic as in funny ha ha or as in comics Hard to tell, since at present, they ain’t saying what the Kickstarter campaign would actually be for.
• At least three of the nominees for the Goodreads Best Books of 2013 (Humo[u]r) are webcomics-adjacent. That’s a full 20%, which far outstrips the percentage of webcomics-adjacent books in the wider marketplace. Guess webcomics types are just inherently statistically funnier than everybody else.
• Regarding yesterday’s account of media companies screwing indy creators: I was contacted today by a webcomicker (no names) who related the tale of a friend who was asked to design and produce — that is, pay for — jackets for a major sutdio’s next release in a big-name franchise. Not just work for free, but lay out cash in exchange for a credit as costume designer.

  Last I heard, costumer designer was a job, aka something that people get paid to do, not pay for the privilege of doing. Hey, production goon that thinks this is an acceptable way of dealing with creative people so you might save budget for that hookers-and-coke line item: fuck you. I hate you and everything you stand for¹.

• Let’s end on an up note. My copy of The Bear Volume 2 arrived, and it’s as wonderful as you might expect. Ryan Sohmer again skillfully negotiates between snarktacularity and sincerity, and Becky Dreistadt delivers up the most gorgeous paintings of parent-and-child critters. My favorite is right at the beginning of the book because ahem, greyhound. As Sohmer notes, he’s now got twins at home in addition to the eldest son that inspired the first two Bear books, so hopefully he’s inspired to keep cranking out the parental experiences and gettin’ Becky to keep painting the critters.

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¹ And by that, I mean that you should ideally find yourself in the bleakest of all possible circumstances: pinned underneath a broken snowmobile on the endless, frozen wastes of the Arctic tundra. At night, the ice weasels come.²

² Bleakest possible circumstances devised by Matt Groening a couple of decades ago in the run of Life is Hell, which I miss dearly.

A pair of large media companies sought to use content from independent creators, and the results could not have been more starkly different; let’s take a look, shall we?

• Via a much-retweeted notice on The Twitters came news of the musician NJ White being asked by a TV production company to use his music for free; his response is wonderful (and, unfortunately, an image and not easily copy/pasted, so click on the picture up above to embiggen), but let me type out one brief bit by hand:
  

  Or would you walk into someones home, eat from their bowl, and walk out smiling, saying “So sorry, I’ve no budget for food”? Of course you would not. Because culturally, we classify that as theft….

  Yet you send me this shabby request — give me your property, for free. Just give us what you own, we want it.

  The answer is a resouding, and permanent NO.

  I don’t know White from a hole in the ground, but I’m going to start searching out his music and give it a good (paid for) listen.

• By contrast, Zach Weinersmith had an announcement barely three hours after White’s that turned out far better:
  

  Announcing! SMBC will now also be syndicated on @BuzzFeed ! http://www.buzzfeed.com/smbc/smbc-infographic …

  Buzzfeed, like pretty much all of the big aggregators, has come in for criticism for taking content without attribution or payment, but Weinersmith seems to have worked that out:

  They gave us terms that comported with artistic and business integrity. I was very pleased by the whole experience :)

  [regarding Buzzfeed’s prior habits of not attributing/paying] I dunno about that, but at least in my case they’re giving us the kind of deal I wish were prevalent.

  And may I add, this just shows that sites like Buzzfeed and independent creators can work together. @buzzfeed did it the right way.

  I’m going to take that to mean (and I have no inside information, so this is speculation) that Buzzfeed offered Weinersmith something of value — money, or an equivalent¹ of sufficient value. Appropriately enough, today’s SMBC cartoon, the one that ushers in this ongoing Buzzfeed deal, is in the very Buzzfeed-friendly form of a Top N Things list/infographic (with an art assist from Ross Nover of The System). And because Weinersmith is Weinersmith, it’s a Top N Things list/infographic about how much infographics are worthless. Well done, Mr Weinersmith.

Oddly enough, there were also instances of creators bypassing media gatekeepers to deal directly with audience/other creators, with a goal of obtaining money in the right places.

• On the creator/audience front, Meredith Gran has released another tranche of originals from her (wonderful) six-issue Marceline and the Scream Queens miniseries — all remaining pages are 50% off for a limited time, with prices as criminally low as US$75 in her store.
• Meanwhile, Spike is over the Death Flu that laid her low last month and had the side-effect of delaying the acceptances for the next Smut Peddler. Spike reports more than 370 creators submitted for consideration, far more than could possibly be accommodated in the gig², and is understandably down about having to tell so many people no. Despite what would obviously be a disappointing outcome to nearly everybody involved, she also reports that everybody’s cool about the rejections, which means that a lot of people have been taking the professionalism lessons from the likes of Estrada and Zub seriously.

  My sincere hope is that everybody that didn’t make the cut for SP2104 work their comics skills (and their smut skills, for that matter) hard so that when the next open submission for the next ‘Peddler comes around, it’s an even harder decision to pick out the best. Creators get better at comics, I get better smut — that’s a win-win.

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¹ I’m not saying that the rumors that Weinersmith has a fetish for Bolivian marmosets are true, just that he might find some things more valuable than mere cash.

² The paying gig, we should note; some lucky people are getting paid to draw porn!

Another day, another reason to pay attention to Ryan Estrada, or (as the case may be), two reasons. Firstly, Estrada drops some wisdom on what will get you hired for comics gigs, based on his past history of not only hustling for work, but also from his history of hiring people for his various projects. Secondly, one of those projects, which Estrada has been teasing, is nearing fruition and he was kind enough to share some details with us. Broken Telephone is a story which Estrada has been working on for years, and which will require the services of (at present) 18 webcomickers.

The Kickstarter to launch it will be dropping in the immediate future, but in the meantime Estrada’s given us the skinny on everybody participating: Rachel Dukes, Carolyn Nowak, Brittney Sabo, Kelly Bastow, Irena Freitas, Will Kirkby, Amy T. Falcone, E.A. Denich, Chad Thomas, KC Green, Maya Kern, Amanda LaFreinas, Dan Ciurczak and JR Robinson, Justin Peterson, Tauhid Bondia, Elias Ericson, and Matt Cummings (plus Estrada himself, of course). Oh, and since Estrada’s not a jerk, you know that those collaborators are people that he’s hired, for money, which just reinforces the other aspect of how to get hired for comics gigs: it doesn’t count as hiring if you don’t get money.

• In other news, I was simultaneously thrilled and disappointed to see the announcement that Longshot Saves The Marvel Universe hits tomorrow. Thrilled because it’s going to be hilarious; annoyed because (at the time of this writing) it appears to be announced multiple places that should know better without a writer credit. Well, the writer is Christopher Hastings, as should be obvious to anybody that looks at the bottom of that cover image.
• This morning, I saw a good lesson in double-checking everything, and an even better lesson in treating your readers right. Firstly, Kris Straub: updated the world on the progress of the Broodhollow books. They look great, but there’s a problem:
  

  I opened the package and was knocked over by how beautiful both the softcover and hardcover books are. I felt along the lovely clothbound spine of the hardcover edition… and I realized the manufacturer forgot the red ribbon bookmark.

  Somehow that spec got left off the final quote from a previous one, and after conferring with them, I found out the books were approaching the end of their manufacture process. No chance to correct this.

  So that’s lesson #1: no matter how good your relationship with a vendor, you need to double-check every order, every spec sheet, every everything. But, there’s good news to offset the bad, not least because Straub is — far from his namesake — a stand-up guy:

  Here’s the good news — I also was not charged for the missing ribbons, so I have decided to take that savings — and some of my own money — and have nice dust jackets made for all the hardcovers. You guys at hardcover levels dug deep for the Kickstarter and you have earned my affection and gratitude, so I wanted to make up for the ribbon oversight. [boldface original]

  The bold isn’t the important part; the aside just before the bold is. Straub could have looked for a solution that didn’t cost him out of pocket (I’m wagering that he could have substituted printed bookmarks and satisfied his backers for less than dustcovers), but he wanted to more than make things up to his readers. Straub’s incredible comics makes me read Broodhollow, but knowing that he won’t ever short his readers is what will make me upgrade my book order next time¹. Culturally, webcomics is far more likely to take Straub’s approach here, and each example of doing right by your readers just reinforces that culture.

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¹ Despite the fact that now book one and future books won’t match on my bookshelf. Dammit!

The thing to understand is that Goats will always be in my bookmarks, and since I run a browser that makes it trivially simple to open all the bookmarks in a folder in separate tabs, Goats is always going to be staring me in the face in the morning, be it updated or no.

Today it was updated for the first time in a considerable while, complete with a working link to a new/old strip (more about which in a moment), as after a long hiatus where creator Jon Rosenberg¹ has been concentrating on the many worlds that are the natural outgrowth of the second half of Goats run, it’s coming back. It’s not back just yet, though, so a trip to the Wayback Machine is in order.

The “ten years ago” that Rosenberg mentioned in his tweet was the start of a storyline that introduced a new character that caused the old Goats storylines of beer, silly mayhem, and more beer, to transmogrify into something resembling vaguely-firmish sci-fi, rooted in various many-worlds hypotheses and imminent apocalyptic crunchtimes². A few strips later, Rosenberg introduced such cartoon fancies as color and backgrounds, and a creative swtich closed and he piled weirdness upon weirdness at a rapid pace for a good six and a half years.

Like many artists, Rosenberg is filled with self-loathing, particularly as regarding his own older work; from personal experience, this extends on a sliding scale to about 18 months ago — anything more recent than that is okay, and anything before is utter shit. Thus, I’m not surprised that if you click around a little on the new placeholder page, you’ll find a redrawn version of that ten-years-ago strip which is lookin’ mighty fine³. That generalized dislike of older work also means that I don’t hold out hope that the first six and a half years of Goats will be his first priority. For those wishing a refresher on the early strips, knock yourself out.

• Speaking of websites, the troubles over at Sinfest persisted at various times from about the 30th of October to this morning (at times, even the forums, which had provided a path to comics when the main site was buggered, were unavailable; it appears to be back at the present time, but on the off chance it runs into difficulty again, people have reported good outcomes by browsing to http://143.95.95.99/~sinfest/.
• There’s a nice meditation on one of the advantages of webcomics from Dave Kellett today over at Sheldon:
  

  The single greatest thing I love about webcomics is that you’re not wed to one format, one way of doing things, or one style of communication. So, for example, Sheldon has had lovely character arcs, fun adventure arcs, pokes at literature or pop culture, non sequitorial children’s literature, fake magazines, nods to pre-War comic strips, post-war industrial films, and the surreal.

  Or, as we see today, editorial cartooning. Editorial cartooning that doesn’t require every element of the page to be labeled, even.

• Might be burying the lede a little, but I often put the big news item at the end of the update, so deal with it. News comes to me from the good folks at :01 Books that they’ve locked in Faith Erin Hicks for a three-part graphic novel series, which is good news for everybody that likes good comics.

  The Nameless City will center around the children of conquerors and conquered, looking to reconcile their lives with each other’s culture, and (because you gotta have an overarching obstacle if you’re gonna have a trilogy) foil a conspiracy that threatens all. It’s not going to be out until 2016, so look for serialization to start on the :01 website in two, two and a half years.

  Oh, yeah, and it looks gorgeous. Years in advance, I’m calling it: these books will be must-buys.

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¹ Here’s that disclaimer: I am an internet opnionmonger pretty much entirely because of Jon Rosenberg, who also owns my soul. He gave Fleen its name and domain, has for intervals provided hosting, and has provided more help than I can recount. Keep all of that in mind as you read anything I write about him so nobody feels like I’m trying to pull a fast one, ‘kay?

² The original plan would have tied things into the Mayan Calendrical Endtimes of Aught-Twelve, but other priorities presented themselves.

³ And, since I started writing, more strips have joined it.

Sometimes that’s good, sometimes less so. Let’s take ’em as I found ’em, shall we?

• First up, The Verge describes itself as covering
  

  the intersection of technology, science, art, and culture. Its mission is to offer in-depth reporting and long-form feature stories, breaking news coverage, product information, and community content in a unified and cohesive manner.

  So there’s a bit of pop culture there at the edges, but it’s not the focus. Which is why I was happily surprised to see a fairly comprehensive summary of Achewood, with a particular focus on the recently shopped-around TV series, along with an update of what creator Chris Onstad is up to these days (short version: refining the pitch for round two of trying to get somebody interested). I’m with author of the piece, Adrianne Jeffries, in my puzzlement at the lack of grabbed-up status for an Achewood show. I’m not sure which metric is used to quantify the “top five cable networks” that all took a pass, but I’d have to believe that somebody at [Adult Swim] would be smart enough to snag at least a pilot commitment. Like Ms Jeffries, I await Achewood’s eventual triumph.

• The National Wildlife Federation is the largest private nonprofit organization to focus on conservation education and advocacy, unless I miss my guess; generations of American kids grew up reading NWF’s Ranger Rick magazine, and they’ve got more magazines pitched at older and younger age ranges, along with a mountain of multimedia and broadcast programming. They’re a big deal, and their blog collection is pretty comprehensive in its scope and coverage.

  Yesterday, this Official Big Deal in the world of Nature took some time to talk to webcomics own naturalist, Rosemary Mosco, about her nature-oriented comics, her favorite wildlife environs (bogs and fens), and included some of her best work in the piece. I expect to see a lot more Parts of the Bird and Animals with Misleading Names prints out “in the wild”; now if only we could get some prints of If You Find A Baby Songbird Out Of The Nest into our nation’s schools, kids would be able to help said birds and also be safer from raptor attack. I call that a win-win.

• It’s irregular as all hell (which, let’s be honest, is part of its charm), but Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half is also one of the most straight-to-the-truth-of-the-matter acts of comics ever. Brosh spoke to Mother Jones magazine (the current newstand issue, no less) about her upbringing her, now widely-publicized struggle with depression, and — oh yeah — her new book which releases today. I have feeds for HaaH, I follow Brosh on Twitter, and I entirely missed any hint that Brosh was was compiling and expanding her comics into print form:
  

  This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two”.

  Fifty. Percent. New. Allie Brosh. All at once. Oh, hell yes. I’m gonna just go right ahead and tell you to buy this one sight-unseen.

• Not that outside attention is always good; IP churn-factory/possible fraudulent enterprise Platinum (no link because screw those guys; go read what Heidi Mac has to say about the state of their corporate governance back at the start of the year) got a bad reputation in webcomics circles back in the old days of Aught-Six and Aught-Seven, but their influence persists to the present day, as Megan Rosalarian Gedris can sadly attest:
  

  Right now, Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space is one of the comics Platinum is most proud of. They can show it off to investors as a success that they created, despite not doing a thing with the property except for one small print run 6 years ago. I have not seen a dime from them since 2007. Once the initial 6 issues they commissioned were over in 07, I was “allowed” to keep working on the series, which I did because I enjoyed the characters, but I received no payment. I received no support in any other capacity. I built the comic up by myself and with some gracious help from Hiveworks. Platinum Studios did nothing but hold it back. I had plans for a 4th and 5th arc of the comic, but ended the series this past January when I realized things with Platinum would never get better and as much as I loved these characters, I was being taken advantage of by continuing the series.

  So I have to take it off the internet. I won’t let my work be used to boost the reputation of this slimy company even a little bit. I’d rather see it disappear.

  There’s no good outcome here for Gedris; she’ll see the work of years disappear down the memory hole and likely won’t even have the satisfaction of inconveniencing Platinum (they’ve tied up the rights to so many different IPs, they likely won’t notice one that goes away). The only good comes from the possibility of an object lesson for younger creators, and not one that relates solely to Platinum … there are a lot of people out there that would love to take advantage of you. So let’s go over the key points again:

  1. Contracts offered are starting points, not ending points.
  2. It’s okay to grant a limited license to develop a specific project with clear terms describing rights reversion; it’s not okay for somebody else to say And that’s why we own your entire idea now.
  3. It is not a once-in-a-lifetime chance you have to snag right this very minute; if your work is good, there will be other offers.
  4. Never forget the immortal words of Scott Kurtz: Hire a lawyer. Hire a lawyer. Hire a lawyer.¹ Repeat as many times as it takes to get the idea thoroughly ingrained in your skull.

  Got it? Good. Now pay it forward and make sure everybody else knows these lessons as well.

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¹ Said lawyer’s hotness or Jewishness is up to you.

Some things go exactly as you expect; anybody could have told you when PAXEast registrations went live today, the tickets site (and the hotels site, for that matter) were gonna get hammered like the Obamacare site on launch day. Seems to have sorted itself out, in the sense that much of the registration and hotel inventory are now spoken for. Have fun in Boston, y’all.

• One thing that’s been pretty much constant for a really long damn time is that every morning, there will be a new update at Sinfest. Love it or hate it (or, given that it’s about five different strips in one, love parts and hate other parts), Tatsuya Ishida’s strip is something you can practically set your watch by — checking the archive, the last break in the daily schedule I can find was the several weeks long gap between 14 June and 10 July of 2006. More than 2600 days in an unbroken streak followed until today.

  Not that Ishida (who is quiet and not well-known in webcomics circles) owes us an update or anything — it’s just that when a long-established pattern suddenly changes, it sure as hell catches your eye. Fleen hopes that all is well with Ishida and thanks him for all of the free comics to date, and appreciates him in advance for any that he creates in the future.

• More than seven years of an update streak is a pretty big number, and here’s another: 1,254,120, which readers may recall as the number of United Sates Dollars raised by Rich Burlew in his record-shattering Kickstarter campaign last year¹. I’m bringing Burlew and his campaign up because he emailed me regarding The Lando Effect (as described by Rich Stevens yesterday) and declaring it the reason that said Kickstart became such a huge success:
  

  I just wanted to point out that the Lando Effect that you mentioned in yesterday’s column is exactly what powered my Kickstarter project. The initial pitch included a bonus digital story about the history of a secondary character, and also allowed three backers to buy additional stories about any character they chose that would then be distributed to all backers. As the drive went on, I added more side stories with each goal hit … So, yeah, it absolutely does work, as long as your audience is invested in the series as a whole and the chosen character is compelling enough in their main story appearances to pique interest.

  In case you didn’t have a reason to believe Stevens, Burlew has given you one-point-two million more reasons, and also ascribes to the “side story” model the success of his print collections that pre-date the Kickstart. Just don’t ignore his last line, which we’ll repeat here with a little emphasis added:

  So, yeah, it absolutely does work, as long as your audience is invested in the series as a whole and the chosen character is compelling enough in their main story appearances to pique interest.

  Also, try not to have near-career-ending injuries at any time; if you find yourself on the cusp of having a near-career-ending injury, just imagine Burlew standing a meter or so in front of you, sadly but firmly shaking his head and silently mouthing the word No.

• Finally, it’s Wednesday, and that means it’s Charles Christopher day², and for those of you that have always wondered Hey, Karl Kerschl lives in Montréal, when will we be able to read Charles Christopher in French?, the answer is Real damn soon now, Sparky:
  

  The first volume of The Abominable Charles Christopher has been translated for the French market by my pals at Studio Lounak! It’s their first publication and it’s a beautiful hardcover volume with a spot-gloss on the lettering.

  It’s available through a number of retailers and you can buy it now from werehouse.ca, which also stocks my other books, as well as books by Becky Cloonan, Andy Belanger and Cameron Stewart.

  This is the first of many such volumes, and hopefully more translations!

  Given how non-culturally-specific TACC is, I’m not surprised at all to see that Kerschl’s pushing for translations — there’s a world of people who would read these gorgeous, heartfelt comics in other languages, and I hope that they spread the word far and wide in their respective linguistic communities. My French is extremely spotty³ so I think I’ll give this one a miss, even though it comes with an exclusive bookplate that looks pretty gorgeous.

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¹ Which resulted in a creative-production and fulfillment job that would send most rational people into a fetal ball o’ panic, and give rise to serious thoughts of taking the money and fleeing to a country without an extradition treaty. Burlew continues to make progress (hampered as he was not only by the scope and scale, but also by a near-career-ending injury 13 months ago) and has set the standard for communicating progress made on the many aspects of fulfillment via his brilliantly-designed Workometer.

² Also weekly computer maintenance day, but maybe that’s just me?

³ When traveling, I count myself lucky if I can use the local language to get a train ticket, a hotel room, and a beer. I’ve managed that so far in Czech, French, Dutch, and Japanese, but I only “studied” one of those for four years in high school. Oh, and when I speak French, I have a tendency to drift into other languages, including on one particularly embarrassing occasion outside of Antwerp, tlhIngan Hol.

If you find any broken links or missing photos in posts, do let me know; I think that I’ve got everything fixed for the current calendar year, and will be working my way back through older posts as I encounter them. Yay, hosting! Also, while I’m thinking about it, something about shifting hosting just brings the spammers out in full force — in the past 48 hours I’ve had to clear more spam out of the filters than the previous two weeks; for some reason, they’re really attached to this old post regarding the SPLAT! Symposium back in March 2008. No idea why it’s so attractive to people that really want me to buy fancy shoes.

Okay, it’s late, let’s do this:

• Congrats to Krishna Sadasivam on 15 years of PCs, Weenies, and PC Weenies.
• Big thanks to the USPS for bringing me a copy of Skin Horse book 4 (which continues the tradition of the previous volumes of somehow ramping up the crazy and loopy and the ha-ha to ever-new heights).
• For those of you with RSS feeds, there’s one that you really should be on, courtesy of the very sexy R Stevens; Perpetual Edge Case is not where you go for pixel comics, it’s where you go for philosophical musings when they occur, and when they do they’re full of mad wisdom. I’m going to quote liberally (that is to say, in its entirety, because you need to read it) from the one that dropped yesterday, entitled The Lando Effect:
  

  Free games with in-app purchases are apparently the One True Way to make money off indie games. I can’t find the articles I read that I got that from, so I hope you’ll indulge me for the length of this email.

  The point is that people more easily spend money on stuff inside a game than they do paying a small amount up-front for the game. You’re more likely to buy zombie-fighting upgrades to your Plants or Mighty Eagles for when you get frustrated by Angry Birds than you are to spend $10 for the game itself. (I am the opposite, but what else is new?)

  As someone who’s kinda been doing that with free comics that eventually translate into merchandise sold to 1-2% of readers, that makes a lot of sense to me.

  But what about in-app purchases *inside comics*?

  Let’s take Scott Pilgrim for example. It’s a dumb-kid-hero-quest-romance narrative with a clear line between lost boy and the boss characters he needs to defeat to find love and be a “man”. (I’m being extremely reductionist here.) But what makes the series special are all the side characters. What if such a book came out today for free as a digital series? How would you make a living off it?

  If you were selling it to me, you’d offer the story in a free serialized form with the ability to buy “side quests” to see more of characters like Wallace and Knives and Kim Pine who otherwise just come in and out of Scott’s story. Give me Scott’s story for free but sell me the Mighty Eagle of Kim Pine getting in a bar fight or Wallace going out on dates.

  The Empire Strikes Back is free, but for .99 you get an 8-minute Lando featurette showing a failed romance that ended just before the events of the movie which set him up to make a deal with Darth Vader. Twin Peaks is free, but you can give David Lynch a buck for a monthly webisode about the front desk of the Great Northern hotel or of Audrey Horne ordering pie. Spider-Man comics are free, but for 75 cents, you can follow the villains or Aunt May around for an extra 8 pages of hijinks.

  I wonder if that would work. You put some ads on the free stuff, which folks who buy the extras don’t have to see. You get readers who would never plunk down for the book itself. You get to spend more time with the fan favorites who don’t really advance the main plot. [emphasis original]

  If you don’t already subscribe to what is for all intents and purposes the Rich Stevens Conspiracy-of-One Newsletter, get on that.

That’s it for today and remember, if you need Christian Louboutins, I apparently know about twenty three guys that can set you up.

Update to add: Steven has posted the essay at The Medium.

Well! That was fun! Let’s mention all the things that I wanted to talk about yesterday, yes?

• Because of the interruption, I’m behind on pointing out Spike’s amazing near-24 hour comic on making it in comics (think of it as a very narrowly-scoped version of Poorcraft, only instead of being about life in general, it’s about being a comics artist in particular) and the Kickstarter for Natasha Allegri’s Bee and Puppycat to be made into a series. Both of these things are awesome, and I have practically nothing to add to what was already said (except, perhaps, to note that the US$10,000 limited reward for the Bee & Puppycat Kickstarter was snagged up sometime in the first hour and forty-five minutes).
• Heck I’m even behind on congratulating Gene Luen Yang for Boxers & Saints moving up from the Long List to finalist at the National Book Awards in the category of Young People’s Literature. I noted after the long list announcement that I’d been unable to find any other graphic novels that have been nominated in the history of the NBAs; with this latest (and supremely well-deserved) nod, Yang is certainly the first to repeat for graphic novel recognition. Heck, even getting nominated more than once is rare — Kathi Appelt is nominated this year alongside Yang and was also in 2008, and Rita Williams-Garcia was nominated back-to-back in 2009 and 2010. That’s some pretty rarified company that Yang finds himself in.

Now that I’m caught up, let me get ahead of the curve on two other items I found interesting:

• Lauren Zukauskas does the great Rachael & Penny and opened up orders for a very limited run of her first print collection, which is now unfortunately sold out. However! She is taking pre-orders on a new print run so you can still get in on that. R&P is terrific stuff, so give this one a good look, ‘kay?
• And the always-valuable Jim Zub took the time to share numbers once again (see earlier data here) on how Skullkickers (a critically-lauded, modest-selling indy comic) has finally earned out and become net profitable. It took 23 issues and more than two years, and it’s a very small slice of profit, but it’s profit. If you’re trying to make money on your own in comics, read everything Zub has to say about Skullkickers — it’s the perfect complement to Spike’s comics-lifestyle travelogue.
• Lastly, some good news in a world that seems bound and determined to exploit the crap out of independent creators; from Ryan Estrada (who else?):
  

  If you need a happy ending: I’ll be sending well paying job offers out soon to some artists I found by editing @forexposure_txt

  Suck on that, wannabe exploiters; creators worth working with get paid, with money.

That is to say, here are various things happening near to the world of indy- and webcomics, and you should check them out.

• Jim Zub was kind enough to send me an advance review PDF of his forthcoming Samurai Jack #1 and it is good. How good? Understand that I’m not precious about comics — I don’t do the collecting-for-future-value thing; if it’s not something I want to read again, I don’t keep it. Even though I’ve read it, I’m going to buy a copy of SJ#1 when it drops in three weeks because it’s damn good and people that do good work deserve to be paid for it.
• One of the way you can support people that do good work is to pay them, with money. One of the ways that a lots of comics artists get you to pay them with money is via convention sketching and commissions; you can imagine that it would be an unusual thing for an artist to decide to give up a channel for making money (and thus allowing them to keep their career as an artist), but sometimes it’s for good reasons:
  

  Something I should say in advance of Thoughtbubble next month – I’m no longer doing commissions/sketches of characters that aren’t my own.

  It’s been a long deliberation about this but I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s not really something I enjoy doing.

  And if I’m not enjoying it, I feel like I just rush through it and produce a mediocre piece, which isn’t good for you, or me.

  So, my apologies for anyone who was looking for Batman/Catwoman/etc sketches. I’ll still of course sign stuff.

  I’m aiming to have some nice prints, and hopefully a new sketchbook, and copies of Sin Titulo¹ which I will draw in.

  I’m also going to try and bring some new pieces of my own, drawn and framed, which will be for sale, so you will be able to buy an original. [links, empahsis mine]

  Stewart’s coming at this from exactly the right perspective — trying to make the commission game have value for the fan, while also not being something that puts work into the public view that isn’t his best. It’s laudable, and fans of artists only for their mass-market work will hopefully open up to the idea that there may other things that those favorite artists draw that are just as (more, even) compelling. I’m reminded here of an early NYCC where I watched (Stewart’s onetime studiomate) Karl Kerschl entertain a stream of Flash fans that couldn’t be bothered to take two seconds to look at The Abominable Charles Christopher.

• Speaking of NYCC, let me update our NYCC Webcomics-type Exhibitor List to include Scott C, who will be in the Artists Alley at table N2. I missed him in my trawl of the exhibitor list due to his being identified as Scott Campbell, a name I sometimes forget is his. In any event, Mr C is one of the friendliest guys in all of the comicky arts and you should go see him and buy a print, painting, book, or other tangible expression of his art².
• A’course, it is not just we, the readers of comics, that creators depend on — they must deal with publishers, editors, freelancing, and work-for-hire in varying degrees. It is with that topic in mind that longtime comics creator Kurt Busiek Mark Waid [Editor’s note: How the hell did I mistake those two gentlemen?] wrote to young comics freelancers about dealing with work-for-hire and it’s a must-read for all those that aspire to work in corporate comics:
  

  [I]f you never listen to another word I say, and I talk a lot, please know this: the only one watching out for your future is you.

  Be professional. Be a problem-solver. Be willing to compromise in the face of a solid argument. Be willing to lose sometimes because you’ll learn more that way than you will by always winning. Ultimately, if a client is paying you for your services, he or she has every right to set the specifications, just as you have a right to your integrity. But when people jealous of how you make a living try to rag you with that old truism that every company employee has to eat shit now and then, remind them that you are not an employee. You’re a contractor. You do not receive health benefits, sick days, pensions, vacation time, or any of the other considerations traditional employees receive. Your clients have zero ethical or moral ground to lie to you, to denigrate you, to cheat you, to demand more from you than they’re paying for, to unapologetically walk back on promises or treat you maliciously, or to exploit your need to put food on the table. The good ones won’t. Never trust the bad ones.

  The quality of your work is all that matters. That’s what buys you longevity. [emphasis original]

  There’s much more at the link, and it’s all worth reading.

• Let’s end on an out-of-this-world note. Sure, you can plunk US$39.95 down with a bogus registry to get a pretty certificate that a star was named after you, but the real astronomical brass ring is having the governing body of astronomical names recognize you. Randal Munroe of xkcd now has an actual asteroid named for him, and he does what any good geek would do with that information:
  

  The first thing I did was try to figure out whether 4942 Munroe was big enough to pose a threat to Earth. I was excited to learn that, based on its albedo (brightness), it’s probably about 6-10 kilometers in diameter. That’s comparable in size to the one that killed the dinosaurs—definitely big enough to cause a mass extinction!

  4942 Munroe is described here, and it can be found here. And may I say that although the vast majority of NASA is shut down due to a factional hissyfit in the House of Representatives, these two websites are still up and running and therefore must be essential, QED.

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¹ Sin Titulo is fabulous and yes you can read it for free on the web, but remember what I just said about rewarding good work? Go do that.

² Once again, all about rewarding good work.