I first met Matt Lubchansky at NYCC a couple years ago via the kind introduction of one Jon Rosenberg¹ and have followed the various comics that he produces since. Much as I like the laugh-chuckles of Please Listen To Me, I find that his collaborations are even better and he’s got a doozy of a collaboration with Mallory Ortberg today. I wasn’t familiar with The Toast, where said collaboration is running today, so thanks to Hey Pais’s Sara McHenry for the pointer.

With that buildup concluded, please go check out Tips For Improving Street Harassment because it’s really smart, really funny, and makes you wistfully sigh If only.

• To be honest, I don’t check in on Lubchansky as often as I should; something about the number of hours in the day. Likewise, I also don’t check in on the many, many comics projects of John Troutman as often as I should, but this time I think we can attribute it to the sheer amount of output, given that he’s working at least two and a half comics presently and (if I have my sums correct) has done at least a half dozen others in the past.

  That and a half comic would be Lit Brick, which updates “whenever”; it’s out of this comic about literature that Troutman has spun a story of Carol, twin sister of Jesus². Or rather, is looking to spin that story, provided it gets Kickstarted; as mentioned in part one of our Tavis Maiden interview, pre-funding webcomics is becoming a thing, although you’d be hard pressed to find a creator with a longer track record than Troutman.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, it appears to be doll season in the crowdfunding corners of comicdom. On the cute and cuddly side, you’ve got Jennie Breeden looking to plushify her Devil Girl alter-ego. Right now she’s funded plus a bit with most of a month to go but if the campaign hits a 200% funding level, it will unlock a matching Angel Girl plush; this means that you can act out your own crises of conscience with little Jennies acting as your personal shoulder devil/angel.
• On the holy crap is that gorgeous side, longtime creator Jill Thompson is looking to translate her Scary Godmother character (star of comics, books, and the occasional animated special) into a fully-articulated fashion doll. You know how sometimes things that are clearly toys have labels that state This is totally not a toy it’s an adult collectible not intended for kids because it is soooo adult really because it’s got small parts that could cause choking?

  Yeah, this isn’t that, this damn well is an exemplar of dollmakers craft, the sort that requires US$40,000 steel molds, custom textiles, custom accessory fabrication, and suchlike. But whoo boy, is it pretty. It’s an ambitious project, one that will require US$150,000 to come to fruition; about a third of the way through the funding period, it’s about 35% funded, so that’s good so far. It’s definitely not a general-audience, impulse-click kind of thing, so signal-boosting is probably not going to make a huge difference.

  But one thing might: check out Thompson’s profile on Kickstarter; unlike a lot of people who come to crowdfunding for the first time when they are looking for cash Thompson backed fifty projects before launching her first. Anybody wondering is she was high-balling her project requirements or trying for an easy payday, her history of backing creative projects in others would suggest otherwise.

• I can’t finish this post without some connection to Jim Zub³, so let me cast your memory back to last month when Mr Zub was kind enough to talk to me about current and future projects and in particular how he called out his Skullkickers collaborator Edwin Huang for some praise. Huang’s work has been getting widely noticed and he’s getting to be in demand, so what better time to put out an art book focusing on his style and character designs?

  The Rogues Gallery is up at Kickstarter and the fact that it’s cleared goal means that it’s functionally up for pre-order at this point; going higher on the total funds will mean improvements like more guest artists and fancy gloss on the cover, so if you like Huang’s work, now’s the time to make the book better. And seriously, 100+ page full-color hardcover art book for as little as US$25? Bargain of the year.

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¹ Who, as a reminder, owns my soul and keeps it in his wallet. Not my first choice of soul repository, not when there are nice temperature- and humidity-controlled boxes for valuables available, maybe resting on a nice mantelpiece, but I guess that’s the lesson here. You sells your soul for a dollar, you takes your chances that it’ll get sat and/or farted on daily.

² Yep, that Jesus; this particular comic chosen because What’s up, Lamb of Hosts? will never not be hilarious to me.

³ I, uh, may have signed a document to that effect.

So there was a tweet earlier today from Oni Press supremo James Lucas Jones to the effect that :01 Books associate marketing manager Gina Gagliano is the absolute best, to which I responded This is mathematically provable. Before I had a chance to crunch the numbers, Ms Gagliano obviated any need for me to do so, as today’s mail brought review copies of Derek Kirk Kim [Edit to add: and Les McClaine]’s Tune: Still Life and Paul Pope’s Battling Boy.

But that’s not all, because she also sent along a matted print of Battling Boy and a T-Rex, to which I can only say, Thanks Gina, and sorry T-Rex, you are no longer the awesomest dinosaur in the world of comics. It’s gonna take some time to savor these books, so look for reviews of Battling Boy and Tune: Still Life in the coming weeks.

• Speaking of the twitters, does everybody remember about a month back, when some Scandinavian webcomics types hit the road for a casual drive to Mongolia? By the next day they were hanging in the vicinity of Prague; in the four weeks since the occasional tweet and approximate location update on their progress map assured us they were still alive and unconsumed by feral animals, although details were scarce on the blog. There were four or five days of updates through to about Romania, then a jump forward to 28 July in Uzbekistan, then nothing for two weeks.

  Last night (around 8:30pm GMT-4) however, the tweetstorm began:

  http://fms.ws/DPLFh Ulanbataar?

  The position map actually put them on the outskirts of Ulanbataar, Mongolia’s capital. Some eleven hours later:

  Finally made it to Ulaanbataar!!! Boom! First shower since Russia!

  Finish line kit, we f’ing made it!! Now, three days of fun in UN, and handing in the car tomorrow :)… instagram.com/p/dCHlYXEN96/

  We had to tow the UNO the last 350k, and recharge the battery every 40 minutes. Adventure!!… instagram.com/p/dCH9PMkN-e/

  Amazing camp has been had, waking up with this view…. najs. #teamventure #mongolrally instagram.com/p/dCIKcZkN-m/

  Finish line steak! :D @ Blue Sky Tower instagram.com/p/dCIjuYEN–/

  Finish line champagne. #mongolrally #teamventure #abataarworld instagram.com/p/dCQ7BYkN4F/

  That was followed by a posting of the first videos from the trip, and presumably a hearty period of sleep. Congratulations to the members of Team Venture for the safe conclusion of their adventure, along with the hope that they picked up some good drinking stories and maybe an interesting scar or two.

  Expect to hear more details about the adventures had along the way, and the wagers on who the next webcomics-related team will be to brave the Mongol Rally starts … now! I’m calling dibs on a team made up of Jon Rosenberg, Paul Southworth, and any other webcomickers with three small children, just for the relative opportunity to catch up on sleep that bribing ex-Soviet border guards and dodging bears would offer.

• For those looking for a comics-related adventure that involves slightly less death defiance, may I recommend Columbus, Ohio in November? The triennial Festival of Cartoon Art¹ will by coincidence be occurring about the same time as the grand opening of a new facility at the Festival’s home, the Billy Ireland Carton Library and Museum at Ohio State University.

  As a result, this year’s iteration of the FCA should be one of the best in memory, with a murderer’s row of speaking talent, an impressive-as-all-hell program schedule, and a registration cost of seventy-five bucks. Considering that registration is capped in range of hundreds², not tens of thousands, if you attend you’ll be in immediate proximity to some of the greatest creators and commenters on comics alive.

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¹ The last occurrence of which featured Dave Kellett’s address on the changing nature of comics and a stack of interviews that eventually made it into STRIPPED. Which, why look, will be screened for FCA attendees.

² Specifically, 275. At any major comics convention, there are more than 275 Homestucks waiting in line to get Andrew Hussie’s autograph.

Lagies and jenglefens, I have at long last my copy of To Be Or Not To Be A Chooseable-Path Adventure by Ryan North, William Shakespeare, and YOU (hereafter TBoNTB). While I understand that it is necessary that somebody be the last to have their book go in the mail (especially when there are more than 14,000 books to be sent), but given that shipping started a month ago I’ve been quietly getting more and more desperate for my copy.

I am just saying, had I opted to buy a copy of TBoNTB in San Diego, I could have gotten it signed by Brandon Bird, Tony Cliff, Evan Dahm, Lar DeSouza, Aaron Diaz, Becky Dreistadt, Meredith Gran, Christopher Hastings, Tyson Hesse¹, Mike Holmes, Andrew Hussie, Matthew Inman, Dave Kellett, Kazu Kibuishi, Braden Lamb, Sam Logan, David Malki !, Dylan Meconis, Carly Monardo, Ethan Nicolle, Shelli Paroline, Jon Rosenberg, Jeffrey Rowland, Andy Runton, Kris Straub, Zach Weinersmith, and Jim Zub, which would have been a modest headstart considering there are more than 40 other artists who contributed. But I didn’t and now I have years of artist-chasing to get the entire thing signed and that is okay Ryan we cool we can still be pals.

Instead of dwelling on it, I riffled the pages to a random story end illustration (by Faith Erin Hicks on page 582) and it is now my goal to read through TBoNTB however many times it takes to end up on that page. Spoiler alert, it features Ophelia doing something awesome but does not require her to stab hell of dudes. I also expect to find the book even more delightful than I did last year when Ryan North asked me to proof a not-quite-complete version of TBoNTB.

Oh, and according to the copyright page up front (I’m the guy that reads the copyright page), somewhere in TBoNTB will be found the lyrics to Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang which I note came out in 1979 which means that Ryan North has never lived in a world without Rapper’s Delight. I think this is the exact situation that Willie Shakes was describing when he wrote O, brave new world that has such tight rhymes in’t!.

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¹ Who also illustrated the copy of Poor Yorick which I also received.

Although the best rule one can follow on the internet is Never Read The Comments, I find it for somewhat obvious reasons useful to go through those at this site. The post from Tuesday of this week attracted some comments that caught my eye, not only for their length, but for the mention of something that’s been on my mind a fair bit. Responding to my commentary on his latest Kickstarter, the probable cover identity that self-identifies as Eben Burgoon discussed his logic for resubmitting an initially-unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign; here’s the important part:

I really fundamentally looked over the Kickstarter last time and rethought my plan of attack. The main thing –- hire Lauren as the artist and do so with my own pocket money so that my goal was far more reachable. She’s an incredible talent, deserves to be paid for her hard work, and if I am going to ask the internet for money to help see this work to it’s end –- I sure as hell better pony up too.

The Lauren referred to would be Lauren Monardo, a colleague via the Brainfood Comics project, and creator of several comics that aren’t really accessible on the web right now¹. Monardo’s credentials (which are excellent) aren’t the point here — the important part is the bit about deserves to be paid for her hard work and I sure as hell better pony up too.

Burgoon’s regard for his artist made me happy, particularly because I’ve spent entirely too much time reading Ryan Estrada’s For Exposure twitterfeed and watching his dramatic re-creations of people that don’t think artists should be paid. Hopefully (although in truth, I hold out very little hope for this), the bozos who have provided Estrada with so much material will look at Burgoon’s example and realize that their pathological short-sightedness is not the only way to approach making comics.

• Speaking of art having value, there are times when you can get away with not paying a creative collaborator — when said collaborator finds value in something other than up-front cash², or volunteers to work for free, or is dead and the work is out of copyright. That last one doesn’t come up too much, but may do in the not-too-distant future.

  Evan Dahm (whose work you should be familiar with, seeing as he’s put a few thousand pages of it out there for you to enjoy for free) has of late been noodling around with images inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; that would be the original Wizard, the novel by L Frank Baum, adapted a few million times³ since it was first published in the dawning days of the twentieth century.

  Many people have taken their artistic whacks at the Oz milieu since W W Denslow’s original illustrations, notably the work being done presently by Skottie Young for the Baum novel adaptations being published by Marvel. Dahm isn’t talking about doing a sketchbook though, or an adaptation; he’s thinking bigger:

  My name is Evan Dahm and I would like to illustrate and publish an edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was published in 1900 and is now in the public domain. I like it a lot and I think I can illustrate it in a way that works with the story and has a visual character that’s distinct from other interpretations.

  I can’t recall anything like this happening previously. There was an edition of Huckleberry Finn with racist language softened a few years back (which prompted an emulation with the n-word replaced with robot), and there have been some pretty beautiful comics editions of classic works (Kipling seems to be a favorite there), but I can’t recall somebody producing a new edition of a prose work to do their own spin on illustrations.

  And what illustrations! Dahm’s new Baum-sketchbook Tumblsite is full of promise as he starts what will likely be a lengthy project; he’s set ground rules for himself that guarantee that it’ll be years before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum with illustrations by Evan Dahm sees print. However long the wait, I’m ready to grab a copy.

• Also speaking of art having value, here’s an emergency commission announcement from Dean Trippe. whose MacBook had a crisis and requires replacement as soon as possible. If you like Trippe’s meld of clean line and capes, he’s declared an impromptu convention complete with bargain pricing for superheroic inked drawings. DeanCon lasts through the weekend, so get your requests in now while you can.

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¹ The Slightly Askew Adventures of Inspector Ham & Eggs leads to a dead page, the Brainfood Comics page has a bunch of unreadable symbol placeholders and a Call of Duty 2 ad, and may be somebody squatting on Monardo’s former domain.

² Possibly an ownership stake.

³ Sadly, a Google search for “wizard of oz” puts Baum’s novel (the first of 14 in the Oz series) sixth behind various references to the 1939 film, although some of those are because one of three surviving Munchkin actors died at the age of 89.

As noted last week, A Softer World launched a Kickstarter campaign and released their 999th update, leaving everybody (or at least me) wondering what Emily and Joey would cook up for strip #1000.

Wonder no more.

What initially appeared (to me, at least) as a double-size update has been growing over the past few hours:

We are updating the 1000th comic all day! It’s like a story! A whole big STORY! *passes out* PS KICKSTARTER

As of this writing, it’s eleven rows tall, and each time another strip is added the alt-text changes with it. I suspect that there may be meaning — even a parallel story — there, all those yellow pop-ups will be lost in time, like tears in rain.¹

• There’s been a foofaraw in the writerly corners of blogistan for a couple of days, as a posting credited to the VP of the Horror Writers Association (and on the HWA Los Angeles chapter blog) purported to divide the world into professional writers and — gasp! — hobbyists, and succeeded mostly in pissing off a great number of professional writers. As is often the case, I find the John Scalzi (who is not the only writer I follow that scored only 1/10 on the quiz, far below the 8/10 necessary for validation) may have put it best:
  

  Here’s the actual quiz for knowing whether you are a pro writer or not:

  1. Are you getting paid to write?

  If the answer here is “yes,” then congratulations, you’re a professional writer!

  Okay, that’s Scalzi in snippy mode; he made an even better point a bit further down:

  The problem with [HWA VP’s]² quiz is that it confuses process for end result. Her quiz is about process, and presumably her process — what she thinks is necessary for one to do in order to produce the work that create the end result of making money as a writer. But process isn’t end result, otherwise in this case I wouldn’t be a professional writer, which I clearly and obviously am.

  Confusing process and result here is not a good thing. It confuses writers who are hungry to know what “being professional” means. The things [HWA VP] describes can lead to being a pro writer, but it’s not the only path, or a guaranteed one, not by a long shot. In this respect this quiz defeats its own purpose — it offers no indication about whether one actually is a professional writer, only whether one has jumped through the process hoops that one single writer believes are important to become a pro. [emphasis original]

  This thought of process vs status has been on my mind a fair bit; I don’t think that I’m letting any cats out of any bags to say that Brad Guigar asked me to do a first read on The Webcomics Handbook³, and I find it suffused with a tone of Topic A: Okay, here’s how I do it, and this works for me; you may find a variation on this that works better, or a way that’s completely different and that’s cool. What matters is what you produce. and how few absolutes there are. Maybe Guigar should send a copy care of the HWA.

• Speaking of what you produce, readers may recall that international mystery man Eben Burgoon of Eben 07 launched a Kickstart for a side project called B-Squad back in December, one which didn’t fund very well, and was ultimately unsuccessful. Like others before him, Burgoon has opted to resubmit the B-Squad, a technique that is rarely successful.⁴

  Unlike those others before him, Burgoon is capable of learning from his mistakes: he’s redone his project scope (reducing a US$8000 goal to US$3000), tinkered with his stretch goals, and borrowed successful ideas from other projects (case in point: challenge coins). As a result, he’s much more likely to succeed the second time around.

  In a domain where success is too often assumed to be inevitable, it’s natural for Kickstart campaign owners to look towards successes as things to emulate. These might be your own previous projects (such as Bill Barnes, Paul Southworth, and Jeff Zugale funding the second Not Invented here collection), or they may rely on accumulated name recognition and goodwill (say, Tavis Maiden taking a boost from Strip Search to launch a new strip, much like his fellow Artists have done). It’s rare to see somebody adjust approaches after a stumble rather than just have a hissy fit⁵ about it. Here’s hoping that Burgoon is the start of a trend.

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¹ Rutger Hauer is the man.

² I’ve taken the name because it’s pretty obvious in the posting, and because I suspect that the VP in question is taking a fair amount of shit today for the pretty significant overreach in the original article. I just don’t feel like piling on right now, as I’m presuming that the mistake was one of execution and not intent. Should reports come about that no, the execution matched the intent that that’s actually the viewpoint being promulgated, I may reconsider this notion.

³ Spoiler alert: it’s very good.

⁴ No names, but seriously I’ve seen Kickstarts that failed to raise even ten bucks resubmitted with nothing changed expecting a different result.

⁵ Again, no names, but remember the guy whose project failed to fund and he changed the video into an obscenity-laden screed about how the world didn’t deserve his genius ideas? That was great.

We told you a few weeks ago about Kazu Kibuishi and his commission to redo the covers for the Harry Potter books; he made the trip to New York for the final image unveiling (and to meet readers and fans). The cover images for the seven books, plus the slipcase and spine art, can be seen at the Scholastic website, alongside the original Mary GrandPré illustrations. They’re beautiful, choose iconic moments from the story to choose, and typically depict Harry in a state of acting rather than a state of being, if you take my meaning.

But it’s a picture in a tweet that makes me really appreciate the work that Kibuishi’s done.

You may recall from our discussion that he proposed doing back cover images as well as front covers, and Scholastic agreed; the back cover for Sorcerer’s Stone was shared a few hours ago and it took my breath away. The close up figures and faces of Harry and his parents could be neighbors to Emily and Navin, it’s so in line with his style; at the same time, it’s unmistakably Harry, Lily and James Potter, their postures and body language conveying all that the longtime (or first time, for that matter) reader knows (or will know) about that family.

As it turns out, I recently passed my hardcovers of the Potter books onto a niece and nephew who weren’t yet born when the books finished; I may need to pick up the boxed set when it releases just to have the visuals in my home.

Further recognition:

• Jeph Jacques hit the Big Round Number (strip count) of 2500 on Monday, and today he hit the Big Round Number (years) of 10 today, in the midst of a story arc that I think he could spend a year or so on without it getting boring¹. It’s been a long, long journey for Jacques from strip number one, with the requisite drama and upheaval both in-strip and in real life. Here’s hoping for exactly as many more Big Round Numbers (strips and years) as he finds he has to share².
• Speaking of Jacques, one of the things that impresses me about him is his desire to be creative in multiple media; while the comic is what gets the attention, I have the feeling he could happily compose and record music for Deathmøle pretty much forever. Likewise, the very funny Chris Hastings is never one to rest on his laurels, stretching out to the lighthearted side of comics writing for Marvel with Deadpool and the recently-announced Longshot miniseries³.

  He’s also, for most of the past year, been studying improv, which I feel has only sharpened his comedic instincts, and for the first time he feels he’s ready to share his new skills with the public at large. If you’re in Manhattan tonight, Hastings and his team will be in the improv competition known as INSPIRADO.

  It’s okay, I didn’t know that was either, but he explained it to me a while back. Two teams compete to perform comedy based around challenges taken from the letters I N S P I R A D and O, and it’s possibly — likely, even — that the word is not completed due to failures of one or both teams. If I recall his explanation correctly, the O stands for Oh shit as the challenge becomes impossibly hard, and it’s rare that a team reaches ultimate victory. We at Fleen join all right-thinking people in wishing Hastings and his team the best of luck, and we would totally be there if not for this stupid day job.

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¹ Namely, the state of artificial intelligence in his world. Specifically, he’s dealing with the concept of robot offense and robot punishment, which is downright fascinating.

² Also butts.

³ Hastings shared with me some of what he’s doing in that miniseries, and even as a not-particularly-familiar-with-Marvel reader, it sounds frickin’ hilarious.

Guys, all my free time has been spent getting caught up on work from my two weeks away from work, so I’ve only found a little bit of news to share with you. The mad geniuses at Make That Thing have teamed up with the madder geniuses at A Softer World to Kickstart the fourth ASW collection, Let’s Do Something Wrong. Said campaign went up yesterday just late enough to not include it in my Kickstarter musings, it’s halfway to goal, and somewhere a bird-decorated photographer and a chess-playing maniac sit confident in the knowledge that they’ll get to make this book.

Miscellaneous things I noticed in conjunction with this campaign:

• It is spare, almost spartan, in the reward structures, and the lack of announced stretch goals: you can get a PDF version of the new book, the new book in softcover or hardcover, in some combination of new plus prior books, and two tightly limited “experiential” rewards — Joey and Emily include you in the strip; Joey and Emily do a commentary track for your favorite movie. MTT knows how much it would suck to fall behind on delivering product, especially given recent high-attention KS flameouts, and so is limiting the campaign to what they can absolutely deliver on time. Bravo.
• Today’s ASW is strip #999, so this is a perfect time to announce a print collection.
• Going back to MTT for just a moment, I noticed that since their soft launch in/around the Machine of Death Game, this is the sixth project they’ve been involved with (the MoD Game, the Dresden Codak collection, the Surviving The World calendars) or directly owned as project creator (the Boxer Hockey frogs, the Sam & Fuzzy omnibus¹). Six projects in six months is pretty impressive, and with a total funding of nearly US$1.3 million, I can’t wait to see what they can do when they’re fully ramped up.

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¹ Technically, that one’s by Make That Thing of Vancouver, BC instead of Make That Thing of Easthampton, MA. It’s the same people. Also, I saw the blanks for the S&F omni at San Diego; Sam Logan was getting a bicep workout just lifting the damn things. They’re huge.

That is, the first day back to work following an awesome vacation (thanks again, Portland!) kind of sucks. I’m buried beneath a pile of things that showed up while I was gone with an absolute deadline of three days ago, and my only refuge is webcomics.

• Let’s start with some Big Round Numbers! Anybody that’s read this page for any amount of time should know by now that I loves me some A Girl And Her Fed by the inestimably awesome K Brooke “Otter” Spangler. Today, Ms Spangler hits the Big Round Number of 1000 strips, on Saturday she announced the general availability of her first pulp¹ e-book spinoff from AGAHF, The Russians Came Knocking², and yesterday was her birthday. Everybody feel good for Otter!
• Know who else has a Big Round Number today? Jeph Jacques, one of the literal giants³ of our weird little medium has hit 2500 updates at Questionable Content. Oh, and you know who went to college with Jeph Jacques? K Brooke “Otter” Spangler, that’s who. Small world.
• I mentioned to you last week that Christopher Baldwin’s Spacetrawler — which is barreling towards a conclusion that we knew from the first would be tragic — is presently Kickstarting its third (and final) print collection. What I want to mention to you today is that Baldwin is a clever, clever man. As the story is reaching its end, as we are waiting for the gut-punch that we know could happen at any time, Baldwin gives us a tease of today’s strip and directs us to the Kickstarter page to get the rest of it.

  I expect that the strip link will not show the redirect forever (once the campaign’s done, there’ll be no need), and this isn’t something that just anybody could get away with (Baldwin has not messed with his audience before so they aren’t feeling messed with, and it’s a serial story with a lot of stickiness so they will click through to Kickstarter), so it’s copied up top so you can see what being just a little bit — the right little bit — of evil looks like.

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¹ That is, action/adventure with the sexytimes left in. Regular AGAHF fans will recognize plenty of sexytimes have been implied, but the written word’s inclusion of such allows for both more and less detail at the same time. Look, Otter’s a damn smart writer who has a damn good handle on these characters, and she’s funny as all hell. Go buy the e-book.

² Starring Josh; if you don’t know Josh, he’s awesome, a total man-whore, and awesome some more. Also, the references to squirrels as vermin that must be exterminated make Otter my best friend ever.

³ Seriously, he and Ryan North could totally dress up for Halloween as one of the big fights from Pacific Rim; I’ll leave it to you to determine which should be the ravening monster from another dimension and which one of them has little dudes all up inside.

One of the things that I now recall speaking with Christopher Butcher about on Friday night over copious drinks was the forthcoming plan for a dual book launch for Ryan North (and Wm Shakespeare, and you)’s new book, To Be or Not To Be, and also This Is How You Die, edited by Ryan North, Matt Bennardo and David Malki !.

My recall was prompted by the good Mr North, who announced that the then-nebulous details are now solid: The Beguiling, the world-class comic store managed by Butcher, will host the Choose Your Own Launch Party this coming Monday, 29 July, from 7:00pm to 10:00pm in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Two venues, side by side, will host the two books, and you can choose which is more worthy by your presence and participation.

On the North side of the party, you can engage in choose-your-own live readings from the book and Shakespeare rap battles! On the Malki ! side¹, you can get a completely accurate prediction of how you will die and play a game which is absolutely, positively, legally not Pictionary with MoD cards.

Kickstarts!

• We have one that’s been teased for a while from the intrepid Amy T Falcone to launch her new comic, Clique Refresh, and which — in the way of Strip Search alumni — funded out almost immediately. It’s a new trend being seen in Kickstarter, pre-funding webcomics and their content for a period of time (typically a year), and hopefully seeing content at the end of that time in print.

  I think that this leap of faith approach to webcomics can work where the creator is a known quantity with work you can see, looking to make a change in project (always a risky prospect, one that may lose you audience). In this way, it’s in contrast from a stack of failed dead-tree-floppy comics that tried to Kickstart completely unknown creators with no body of work to judge by.

  Hopefully, the latter won’t try to emulate people like Abby Howard, Maki Naro, and Ms T Falcone, because while I may (have) backed people that have given me comics and want to shift to other comics, I will likely never back somebody that promises that their very first comic will be super awesome you guys even though I’ve never written one before and I haven’t found an artist yet, trust me.

• On the more traditional approach to Kickstarting — here’s a production of something physical from material already produced — allow me to point you to Christopher Baldwin’s third (and final, sniff) volume of Spacetrawler (getting a head start on the finishing up of the strip, which is rapidly approaching), and Tom Dell’Aringa’s comprehensive omnibus, collecting the full five year run of his comic in a reworked, single-story format. If you’re going to back just one surprisingly deep comedic sci-fi webcomic collection that takes place in space, you’re screwed Bunky, because there’s two here that deserve your attention.

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¹ You have no idea how badly I want there to be a hip-hop rivalry between “northside” and “malki!side”.

Yesterday was the day that I discovered that porn starlet Tera Patrick (who is apparently a cousin by marriage to a guy I ride EMS with) is signing on the show floor. Go Team Central Jersey.

• Speaking of porn, Smut Peddler impressario Spike confirmed for me that there will be a new edition of the sexytime comics anthology next year, possibly in the spring, maybe in the summer. After that, it looks like alternating porn and not-porn anthologies, with the next not-porn project in 2015, probably on the theme of fantasy, and much like The Sleep of Reason will be restricted to no cliches: TSoR said no vampires, no werewolves, no zombies, and Untitled Fantasy Anthology will say no elves, no dwarves, no Tolkien analogs. In a decade or so of alternating anthologies, we should be able to finally quantify how much people like porn compared to other entertainments.
• Speaking of forthcoming print projects, I got to speak to Evan Dahm about his first Vattu collection, The Name and the Mark; Dahm’s happy to report that the book is at the printers, and well on the way to release in October. In fact, he’ll have a limited number of books to debut at SPX alongside his Midnight Monsters collaboration with Yuko Ota, The Exquisite Beast. SPX is a good book-buying crowd, and having debuts ought to drive a lot of commerce for Dahm, so that’s all right.
• Speaking of Yuko, she and Ananth Panagariya got a nice mention at the Adventure Time Comics panel, seeing as how their Candy Capers miniseries launched last week; BOOM! editor Shannon Watters gave us a some advance details of the next couple of issues, as Peppermint Butler pairs up characters as the new heroes of the Candy Kingdom in Finn & Jake’s absence. The next issue will feature Tree Trunks and Marceline as partners, and the issue after that will partner up Lumpy Space Princess (!) and Lemongrab (!!).

  The bulk of the panel was a discussion of the creative process of Braden Lamb, Shellie Paroline, Ryan North, and Meredith Gran, their approaches to all-ages comics, and their best jobs at doing the voices in live readings. North, Paroline, and Lamb were of course fresh off their Eisner win, so it’s no surprise that in a room that allowed 500, there were few empty seats, and the audience was predominantly there for the current panel, not squatting in the room for some later panel; the wealth of cosplay (especially on younger kids) was proof of this.

  Watters also let us know that there will be another Adventure Time graphic novel penned by Danielle Corsetto and drawn by Zach Sterling; the theme of the series is pretty quickly becoming princesses go on adventures, as the new book will feature LSP facing trials (maybe) and tribulations (possibly) and saving the world (probably not). But hey — one of the messages of Adventure Time is that we can all be more than we appear initially, even spoiled princesses from Lumpy Space.

  In the main Adventure Time comics, the next issue will wrap up the current story arc (it features Jake stuck in a dream existence with a stretchy-powers Finn!), and the one after that will be a Princess Bubblegum-centered story. Peebles stories often feature her need to control and manage everything (from her kingdom to the fundamental forces of physics) and how her messing with Things That Should Not Be Messed With have consequences, but they aren’t usually taken past the end of the episode.

  Prubs is a genius, but she also pretty damn irresponsible with her mad science and her creations are idiotically dangerous as often as they’re helpful. In this new story, PB goes off the rails and actually has to deal with one of these things that she’s responsible for rather than foisting it off on Finn and Jake.

  The Q&A section had time for ten questions, and the first was from a boy maybe ten years old that wanted to know if Ryan knew about a webcomic called Homestuck and does he use it for inspiration?, particularly because of one Homestuck-referencing quote that North snuck into a recent issue. He was apparently unaware that Ryan and Andrew Hussie are credit card bros, and Ryan told the young gentleman that Everything I write is Homestuck fan-fiction. The seriousness of the exchange was honestly charming, as was the number of kids in the audience that had brought binders full of their Adventure Time-themed drawings, eager to show them to the comics creators.

  After the session I got a chance to chat with Braden Lamb, where we immediately fell to talking about Kitty Hawk, his long-hiatused adventure webcomic project with Vincent LaBate. On the one hand, Lamb would love to get back to Kitty Hawk, on the other other, BOOM! projects keep him busy to the point that an ongoing webcomic isn’t practical. A complete story might be a possiblity, but with the releases of stories like Delilah Dirk and Lady Sabre, the market may be a bit crowded, even for a story that predated the others.

  We also spoke about the challenges that Lamb and Paroline had producing the Choose Your Own Adventure Time issue that North penned a while back, making the choices easy for kids to follow, but not so obvious that you could cheat your way to the desired outcome; it probably helped a lot that North has some experience writing such stories, but the best contributor to the success of that issue was probably Lamb’s choice to do some color-coding. Future artists/writers of such stories, take note.

• Speaking of Andrew Hussie, I saw the initial start of the ShiftyLook panel referenced yesterday, and I owe the SDCC showrunners an apology. I very much doubted that the maximum capacity of 170 in room 28DE would be sufficient for the presumed crowd o’ Homestucks that would descend upon Hussie like unto a tsunami, and it turned out that they fit just fine; there was a minimal line outside the room prior to the panel, but a pretty healthy population of fantrolls were already in there for the prior panel¹.

  The panel discussed the Zach Weinersmith²/Dave Shabet collaboration (interactive DigDug), the previously-announced Andrew Hussie-penned MMO (NAMCO High, available pre-holiday, 2015), and the Kris Straub/Scott Kurtz Mappy series (first episode goes live tomorrow).

• Speaking of room 28DE, it would later host the STRIPPED panel, which managed to fill the room despite being scheduled at the late hour of 7:00pm, against large media screenings, ramp-up to industry parties, and pre-Masquerade prep. I have nearly 1500 words of notes that need to be whipped into shape, so let’s put that off for another post. But speaking of STRIPPED, yesterday I learned that co-director Fred Schroeder’s agent is from my town, despite his currently agenting in the nearly polar opposite of LA. Go Team Central Jersey.

Below the cut, the best cosplay photos of the day: Simon Petrikov and Hello Randy.

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