Anytime you have to ask yourself Should I be establishing a document trail? is not the easiest of days, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s (briefly) talk webcomics (of course) and Kickstarter (big surprise there).

• Aaron Diaz¹ wrapped up his Kickstarter for The Tomorrow Girl last night with a few surprises:
  • He took the number two slot from Penny Arcade in the Comics section
  • He did not pass the Machine of Death game, which Diaz and David Malki ! both seemed to think would happen
  • He wound up very close to a nice round multiple of US$5000, but came up six dollars short which is the most baffling thing of all — you watch pledge totals go up and down all the time as individuals try to be the one to make a project exactly make goal² or exactly hit a round number
  • Being a generous soul, Diaz has declared that although he finished with US$534,994 he will make good on the stretch goal for US$550K (drawing all the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park according to modern scientific thought) but let’s not kid ourselves, he likes drawing dinosaurs more than he likes breathing

  Well done, Mr Diaz, and thereisnogodspeed on all those stretch goals (and dinosaurs); between this and the MoD game, Make That Thing is going to have one hell of a beta test.

• It’s been a while since we mentioned Super Art Fight, the DC-area premiere competitive improvisatory movable art feast because honestly, we all know the drill by now. SAF shows up in a town (much like a rampaging cycle gang), takes over a bar or show venue or convention session room (again, much like a rampaging cycle gang), and proceeds to art the crap out of a bunch of large drawing boards while music blares and a play-by-play (draw-by-draw?) commentary takes place at a level of enthusiasm slightly greater than than of a match where a pair of luchadors have their masks on the line. Then they blow out of town, property damage and broken hearts in their wake. You kinda have to be there to understand it.

  Until now. [cue appropriate music]

  The best of Super Art Fight’s art (show posters, art from the Wheel of Death, original contributions from competitors) is now being collected into a … I’m sure that book is not a word sufficient to contain what’s inside the covers. Let’s go with “being collected into a” tome over on the ol’ Kickstarter. The producers of Super Art Fight would like it to be known that they are not responsible for pledgers suffering nosebleeds, temporary deafness, hysterical blindness, or mysterious pregnancies, and that if you have an art-boner that lasts more than four hours, consult a physician.

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¹ Tolkien scholar par excellence and paleontology buff with the passion of every single six year old in the world taken together.

² Heck, I gave two bucks to the second Stripped Kickstarter to make it hit exactly goal. I’m not proud of that.

A little behind the times on some things, pretty up to date on others.

• Just a reminder that Lucy Knisley’s Relish will be in stores next week, and that it got the Fleen Seal of Approval and you should totally pick it up. As an appetizer, why not check out Knisley’s collaboration with Erin Meister at Saveur’s Recipe Comix?
• Time for a periodic reminder that you New York area types can drag your silly comic-obsessed asses into adult sophistication with the help of a little wine education, courtesy of Kristen Siebecker¹ and her recurring Popping Your Cork series. The Spring PYC will be Wednesday, 10 April (for all you people maybe hanging around after MoCCA?) at Simple Studios in Midtown. Previous classes have sold out so hurry — and use the code FRIEND10 for a 10% discount.
• One of the hallmarks of Kickstarter is that you can’t solicit for charity, which makes sense — you don’t want to get into a dispute where you wonder if money raised under the pretenses of going (wholly or partially) to charity doesn’t. So Machine of Death impressario David Malki ! didn’t come close to mentioning that he wanted to devote some of the proceeds of the MoD game to the literacy and writing charity, 826LA. From the MoD project update page:
  

  MYSTERY STRETCH GOALS:
  Continue reading this post on the Machine of Death blog!

  And from there, the news that the MoD Squad planned to donate one dollar per game (both physical and PDF) ordered to 826LA, for a total of 10,938 games which rounds up nicely to US$11,000. This was enabled by clearing the US$382,600 level. And as a further act of being an stellar person, Malki ! announced that by clearing 8260 backers, MoD books and games will be donated to 826LA for sale in their shop to support their programs. As if that weren’t enough, there will be 826LA-exclusive MoD game content for purchases of MoD stuff via the 826LA online store starting in June.

  Given that the Machine of Death game is about creative and collaborative storytelling, I can’t think of a better place for their largesse to go — 826LA (and its affiliated programs around the country) may well be responsible for finding the next great storyteller, one that wouldn’t have been nurtured without 826’s help.

  Malki ! also did a vlog interview with Matthew Lesko². I suspect that although the interview was very well managed by Malki ! and conveyed his philosophy of Kickstarting very well, the wrong message may be taken by a percentage of the people that watch it. Lesko’s spent so much time hawking the idea that there is free money out there for the having, and here this guy wound up with half a million dollars, that the people most receptive to Lesko’s message will only hear that number and apply it to the message he’s so well known for.

  This is not an unknown situation in crowdfunding, and while those that watch the video because they know Malki !, or MoD, or Kickstarter in general will likely be more resistant to the siren call of Free! Money!, I sincerely hope that he (Malki !) has put in place good filters on his email, as he’s most likely going to be getting a substantial number of people wanting to know how they can get half a million dollars, too³.

• Oh, and one more thing: new Nicholas Gurewitch cartoon at Boing Boing! Great gag, terrific visual, and Mass Casualty Incident classes will be using that last panel to illustrate what a cluster MCIs can become.

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¹ Sommelier, wife of a comics guy of some note, and original showrunner of MoCCA Fest, the latest iteration of which is approaching rapidly.

² Full disclaimer: I have encountered Lesko twice in person at random — once on the streets of Bethesda, MD and once in New York’s Penn Station. He looked really annoyed at life both times and kinda elbowed me in the ribs semi-accidentally on his way through a tight slalom of people.

³ We at Fleen haven’t done a comprehensive survey, but this is most likely the new contender for the longest, most convoluted sentence in the blog’s history. Yay?

PAXEast kicked off this morning and if I’ve done my timekeeping correctly, a whole passel of Strip Search Artists are, even as I type, on a panel having just watched the second elimination episode with the PAXers on a suitably large screen. Two thoughts:

• These eliminations are starting to get both heartbreaking and heartwarming, as Mike and Jerry clearly are pulling no punched in the judging, yet going out of their way to encourage the Artists in such a way as challenge them to better themselves in their careers. Can’t wait to see when in the season we get to peek in on what’s happening at The Afterlife¹.
• The editing process must have been tougher than the producers estimated in January, when it was predicted that the episodes would track in the 12 – 15 minute range. So far, only one episode has been less than 15 minutes, two between 15 and 20, and the remainder over 20 minutes. Instead of a three-episode day taking the equivalent of 45 minutes (an “hour” of TV minus commercials), it’s going to be closer to a full hour, meaning this show is more content-rich than actual broadcast alternatives.
• Okay, third thing, I lied. Strip Search Artist Monica Ray is crowdfunding her first Phuzzy Comics collection, and the video is alternately hilarious and adorable. Were I not backing Hurricane Erika, I think that Monica would be one of my picks to win the competition, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want her book. Others seem to agree, as she’s a day in and over her goal by a good 20%, with 30 days left to go. If you were at the panel and saw her, I hope you told her, “Gary said hi”.

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¹ The name given by production staff to the house where the eliminated Artists were held until the competition was done. Once again, I am compelled to point out that even when given a specific opportunity to do so, Robert Khoo did not deny that The Afterlife was stocked with booze and hookers of all genders. I wonder how airtight the NDAs actually are….

Jon Rosenberg¹ is in the midst of running a Guest Month at his comic, for the very best of reasons: knuckling down to complete a project that was Kickstarted longer ago than he’d like to admit. For the record, he is behind on that project for an even best-er of reasons: the demands on his time presented by medical circumstances that saw his wife beat the odds on a gestational syndrome that frequently claims the lives of unborn children.

Jon’s twin sons were born tiny, premature to a degree that would have meant certain death only a decade ago. Today they are adorable and healthy, but with developmental challenges that would sap 28 hours a day from people who are not also trying to maintain an independent arts career².

Where was I? Oh, yes: the muse, she is sometimes fickle when you’re trying to work out a physical therapy regimen for toddlers, which means Guest Month frees up the time to produce Goats IV: Inhuman Resources, the progress of which is now kicked into gear; all of this is right and good. However, Jon found a way to make it right-er and good-er this morning with an announcement:

Just received the Goats IV foreword, written by none other than @doctorow himself. I’m at a loss for words. It’s wonderful.

At press time, it was not determined if Cory Doctorow either wrote or delivered the foreword in question while wearing a red cape and goggles, nor if either activity was performed in/by a balloon. It is confirmed that Doctorow’s command of language is absolute:

The words “ferocious headmeat” are employed.

I for one cannot wait to see what follows those two words, and thanks to the generosity of Jon’s colleagues³, I won’t have to wait much longer.

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¹ Full disclosures: Jon is almost entirely responsible for my immersion in webcomics circles, and entirely responsible for the launch of this blog. Also, he owns my soul (I got a dollar for it) and despite his general aversion to being in physical contact or even being closer to me than three postal codes, remains a very good friend.

² He is also regularly beset by idiots in social media that don’t know shit about him or his situation and feel this gives them the right to explain exactly how he is therefore wrong. Seriously, fuck those guys, and especially fuck you, guy that threatened from the far side of the globe to report Jon to child protective services because you didn’t know what the word physiatrist meant.

³ David Willis, Zach Weinersmith, David McGuire, Chris Yates, and William Tallman so far, with more to come.

Spring when all is good and well again and we may venture outside and breathe deep of the outdoors and almost get murdered by a psycho in a van. Best wishes to John Arthur Kelly, aka the three meter tall grumpy guy from Johnny Wander¹. So maybe stay indoors where you won’t get splattered by a sociopath and if you live in New York and need some work done, you can ask the HVAC company that owned the vehicle in question if they’ve identified their employee that tried to kill John, and too bad, guess you won’t use their company after all since they’re harboring a threat and/or menace.

• Some 14 hours after closing (long enough to be confident that all last-minute adjustments were complete), the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter stands complete at US$556,596 and 10,666 backers and holy crap you guys.

  What may be most impressive to me is the number of people willing to back the project at levels that were clearly some kind of Dadaesque statement (show your copy of the game to a goat before shipping: five people paid more than a US$100 premium over a tier where they could get the same stuff without the goats) or merely to screw with creator David Malki ! (one person pledged nearly US$500 to make Malki ! hand-write all the card, which come to more than 900 separate items).

  There’s a word for actions that have little direct bearing on the mechanics of our lives but which create their own emotion (in this case: amusement and schadenfreude, respectively), and that word is Art. It maybe disguised as a card game, but Malki ! used it as a vehicle for something more, I think.².

• In a month and a half, it might be safe to go back outside again, particularly if you rush back inside and the famed Toronto Reference Library for the equally-famed TCAF, which announced some new featured guests yesterday. The one that caught my eye is French [web]comicker Boulet (en Français ici; in English here), who will apparently be making a third appearance on this side of the Atlantic, where he may still have copies of the extremely limited print version of Darkness that will be available at Stumptown³ and MoCCA in the weeks prior.
• We spoke about Howard Tayler (my evil twin), his nearly-concluded Kickstarter campaign, and the value of reining in the stretch goals a few weeks ago, and Tayler is now chiming in on the same topic in what is likely his last update prior to the close of campaign:
  

  Enough With The Stretching

  It looks like you’re going to unlock at least three if not four ship coins.

  Once that happens, I am done designing coins for this project. Why? Because the designs take about a week to hammer on and get right. Four coins right at the end is already a bit of a stretch (ahem) and I want to make sure that I actually ship all of these coins out in April, like I promised to.

  Think about that for a moment. A successful project should ship ON TIME. A wildly successful project should ALSO ship on time, right? I’m reining it in as best I can, and agonizing over every potential slip of schedule. [emphasis and large text original]

  Drop in the obligatory noting that a wise man knows his limitations and gratitude towards whoever taught the youthful Evil Version of Gary From A Parallel Reality the values of both time management and fanatical devotion to promised goals.

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¹ Most of that sentence is a lie; I’ve met John and while he may look enormous next to Yuko, he’s not three meters by any stretch. He is also a delightful person and even the dreaded Punishment Shirt turned out to be not so bad as I’m told Cricket falls asleep in there now. We are very glad to hear that he wasn’t badly injured, and hope that there’s some form of justice for his destroyed bike.

² Also — look at that chart of backers and dollars by day; that’s just amazing to look at. Malki ! broke nearly every single rule on this campaign and when Kickstarter Theory is taught in the MBA programs of the future, this will be Case Study #1.

³ The annual awards of which, by the way, now include a Best Webcomic. Nominations [PDF] accepted until 30 March.

It all seems to be about the green¹ today.

• The first of the Big Four Webcomics Kickstarters of February Aught-Thirteen has wrapped, with the Cyanide & Happiness guys netting just over US$770,000 with a slight upward tick at the end there. For reference, as of this writing the other three of the Big Four are sitting at:
  • Machine of Death: US$454,000
  • Schlock Mercenary: US$115,000
  • Dresden Codak: US$362,000

  For a grand total of 1.701 million dollars American cash money. Granted, there’s Kickstarter² fees and Amazon fees and taxes and all the rest, but the compelling story remains: more money, more value for your backer contribution.

• The ur-example of more value for your backer contribution remains the Choose Your Own Hamlet by the Reconstituted Toronto Man-Mountain, who is even as we speak laying out the book, overseeing the recording of the audiobook, prototyping lil’ plush Yorick skulls, and giving us a sneak peek at one gorgeous map of the choices that can be made, which is itself made too look like Yorick’s skull. Dang, y’all.
• In fact, the only part of the increasing coolness of the Choose Your Own Hamlet that the aforementioned RTM-M³ isn’t responsible for would be the live-action version of Choose Your Own Hamlet, which will have its premiere this weekend in Busan, South Korea, thanks to local director (and webcomickin’ madman) Ryan Estrada. The presentation of To Be or Not To Be (a live, choose-your-own-adventure play) will be this Saturday at 9:00 EDT (GMT-4, or check your local time here) over the internet.

  Sure, the live audience will have the thrill of watching the actors try to manage hundreds of possible story paths, but you at home can do the same thing, and you can vote on those choices that will affect the story. Just don’t make the choices that keep Ophelia in her original, put-upon, depressive, dishrag-type personality because if you do, the text of the book (and presumably the play) will say that you aren’t allowed to be Ophelia for a while.

  The details on To Be or Not To Be (a live, choose-your-own-adventure play) are at Google+ where you can choose to watch the streaming glory and participate. It is in all likelihood the first live play designed for such social media technology and you’ll want to be able to tell your grandkids where you there at the beginning.

• As part of my theme on money, I was going to point you to a situation where a billing mishap left The Adventures of Dr McNinja facing a shutdown later this week, with the possibility of creator Chris Hastings being sent to collections⁴. Fortunately, that all got resolved before I had a chance to say anything about it, so well done McNinja fans. As always, there’s a lesson here, which in this case unfortunately is of the variety that you have to police the people that are (supposed to be) taking your money because if they don’t do so successfully they may make your life miserable.

  I once had a cable company that received the checks I sent them and credited my bill as paid, but never actually cashed them. This went on for six months and only came to a head when I moved house and tried to get my cable disconnected. Then they tried to hit me with hundreds of dollars of “late fees” because I dunno, they lost my checks or something? The fact that I had statements showing that my bills were paid each month didn’t seem to matter until I mentioned involving utility regulators with the state of New Jersey, then they decided to write it off in the interests of keeping a satisfied customer. Then I moved and never used them again THE END.

  Where was I? Oh, yes — it seems stupid to have to follow up with people to make sure they’re actually taking your money (you’d think they were really interested in doing so on their own), but sadly it’s true. You have to be more business type than artist to make it as an independent artist, so take those steps towards due diligence and it will make your life easier in the long run.

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¹ Note for people not in the US: our paper currency is boring, kinda greenish on one side and mostly black on the other. We desperately need somebody from a country that knows how to make pretty cash convince the stick-up-their-asses types in Washington that bills don’t need to be drab.

² How ubiquitous is Kickstarter these days? My sister brought it up the other day, asking me to explain how her friend, a musician, managed to raise US$49,000 to master & press an album and what the crap-hell?

³ Known around the house as Ryan North

⁴ If you don’t happen to know Chris Hastings, you should be aware of two things:

• He is just the nicest guy, even nicer than he appears to be via the internet if you can imagine such a thing
• He is too pretty to be sent to collections, you guys

Long week, so let me just leave you with this still from John Allison’s entirely wonderful Bad Machinery; it’s the end of The Case of the Unwelcome Visitor, and I think it perfectly captures the joy of being young, carefree, and with your friends, without so much as a word. And as long as we’re on the topic, the first Oni Press collection of Bad Machinery drops in twelve days, so get ready to pick that up because this right here? It’s not optional.

Out of context and mostly spoiler-free quotes from Strip Search’s first elimination:

• What is your favorite thing about Hitler?¹
• I know a lot of stuff is changing, are we still releasing the bats at the ten-minute mark?
• We just need you to wait in the car.

In all seriouslness, though, I was struck by how very, very good-natured Alex and Katie were throughout what must have been one of the more stressful times in their lives, and was sorry that there had to be a winner and a loser. Also by one piece that was very, very telling about how Creators Mike & Jerry are approaching the show and the Artists:

What’s interesting is … seeing you copy my mistakes.

That’s a critique that has a lot of sting, but also a tremendous amount of potential to help an Artist improve. It may be that the most interesting part of Strip Search is seeing how all twelve contestants have upped their game in a year or so.

A Girl And Her Fed creator (and Official Fleen Fave) K. Brooke “Otter” Spangler must have had a bit of a frantic month, what with the discovery of forthcoming TV pilot based on a yet-to-be-published YA novel that bear a resemblance to her own strip (and its spin-off digital novel). Lots of people are still contacting her urging Big Dramatic Gestures and Drawing Lines In The Sand and maybe even Cutting A Bitch.

Spangler, however, did the smart thing — talked to her lawyer, made sure to establish that her work has been the earlier instance of Federal agents with chips in their heads (and dick jokes; so, so many dick jokes), and is generally going about this situation the smart way. The TV show may or may not be picked up; the YA series may or may not see print next year; the time to Release The Metaphorical Hounds is not yet here, as she outlines in an interview at Altergamer on copyright and IP in the modern world. It’s a good set of questions/answers, and an even better example of how to be a grown-up in the age of the internet.

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¹ For anybody that ever gets asked that Hitler question? Your go-to answer should be He’s dead.

We’ll be starting out with the happy items before we get to the infuriating stuff at the end. You’ve been warned.

• We’re still most of a month away from the release of Lucy Knisley’s Relish¹, but that’s not to early to make plans to celebrate it when it hits the market. The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco is doing exactly that, having announced an author’s appearance:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum welcomes cartoonist Lucy Knisley on Sunday, April 14, 2013 from 1:00-3:00pm for a discussion and booksigning of her latest release, Relish, published by First Second Books. This event is free and open to the public.

  And heck, let’s mention another upcoming event, featuring a man that probably every comicker born after about 1960 considers a major influence:

  The Cartoon Art Museum and Chuck Jones Center for Creativity will host a special reception for the exhibition, Chuck Jones: Drawing on Imagination on Saturday, March 23, 2013. Special guests include Chuck Jones’ widow, Marian Jones, his daughter, Linda Jones Clough and grandson, Craig Kausen, who is the Chairman of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, as well as other guests from the family and the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Cartoon Art Museum and Chuck Jones Center for Creativity.

  Since that event is a benefit, tickets will cost you US$10 (with an additional US$50 for VIP access). Having spent many, many hours in study of Chuck’s various works, I can tell you without reservation that if I were on the Left Coast I would absolutely be there.

• I’m pretty sure I met the guys behind First Law of Mad Science last October at the 2012 NYCC IDLH experiment; I spent some time on Saturday bringing pizza to hungry webcomickers and although I missed Meredith Gran (who was boothing with FLOMS), I did leave some pizza for creators Mike Isenberg and Oliver Mertz. Nice fellows.

  So nice, in fact, that in order to get the word out regarding the second & third issues of FLOM launching on Comixology, they’re giving away free download codes for the first issue. Just be one of the first 50 people to tweet to them at @FirstLawComic² and you’ll get a redemption code that you can plug in via your Comixology account. That’s it! Free comics!

• Not webcomics, but holy geeze go read it: The irreplaceable John Scalzi has spent the last couple of days eviscerating a contract being offered up by new e-publishing imprints at Random House that is so amazingly bad I can only hope that Random House will release a statement in a week that says, Yeah, sorry, we were totally blitzed on cough syrup when we wrote that. Our bad.

  Hey, TopatoCo? After Make That Thing finds its feet and you’re looking for your next realm to conquer, it seems that e-books needs a publisher that isn’t criminally stupid about how nakedly it’s seeking to exploit authors.

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¹ Which you may recall that we at Fleen found to be a terrific book, and you should definitely go buy it when it releases on 2 April 2013.

² I always thought that the First Law was Ape shall never kill ape, but whatevs.

If I may beg your indulgence, I’d like to do something rare and respond to a comment¹, in large part because it expresses something I’ve seen elsewhere in the past couple of days. To reduce the argument to its most basic form:

Strip Search’s first episode was boring, nothing happened.

Which I think is an unfair critique. True, over sixteen minutes there were no screaming matches, no competition, no disqualifications, and no overt drama. This is exactly what needed to happen, as we’re still in the scene-setting stage of the show. Yes, but reality shows have a well-established set of tropes that we’re all familiar with, so we can jump right into the meat in the first three minutes, right?

Well, not really. The shows that jump straight into competition are ones that have tens, dozens of seasons behind them, with a built-in audience that knows how things are going to go. But look back at those shows when were they new and trying to find that audience — you have to get people to care about the contestants before they can care about the competition, and that’s what Strip Search episode #1 did.

“But Strip Search has a built-in audience already” is the usual counterargument, but it doesn’t, not really. Robert Khoo, among other things, is an inveterate collector of data — he can tell you to two decimal places anything of significance about the statistically typical Penny Arcade reader. And one of the things that he’s alluded to over the years (and it’s borne out by how he’s led the company) is that Penny Arcade, despite outward appearances, isn’t really part of the webcomics sector of the entertainment industry. It’s part of videogames sector.

Khoo could tell you exactly what percentage of PA readers read webcomics widely, but I’m willing to be that the numbers are skewed towards those that read two or three other webcomics and only read Penny Arcade². Heck, I’m all about webcomics and I only knew three of the twelve Artists introduced in episode 1, which would give me little reason to care about 75% of the competition had the others not been introduced properly. Khoo’s also been open about hoping that people who don’t follow webcomics at all³ will hopefully find the competition intriguing.

“But why didn’t anything else happen?” is the other criticism I’m seeing. The answer to this one is even simpler: time. Having run many, many episodes of streaming video, one of the things that Khoo has hard numbers on is how long people will watch TV over the internet and those numbers are clear: fifteen minutes is pushing the outer limits of acceptable to their audience. Khoo’s been consistent in describing Strip Search as aiming for a 10-15 minute running time, which limits how much of a story you can tell without running out of time. Look at it this way: depending on whether the episodes run closer to 10 minutes or 15, that’s three or four episodes equaling the runtime of a broadcast show (once you take out commercials, you’ve got 44 – 46 minutes of content per hour).

We’re just now at the first commercial break; this is the exact time that the introductions should be wrapping up and setting up a sense of anticipation for what comes next⁴. We’re most likely going to see the show run a total of nine or so hours, broken up into approximately 36 episodes each in the vicinity of a quarter-hour. Eleven eliminations will take place across eleven competitions. Three episodes per elimination (setup — competition — judging/elimination/heartfelt goodbyes) gives us 33 epsiodes, with three left over for especially complex or story-rich bits to scatter throughout the season.

Not everything will happen in every episode, nor can it unless Khoo decides to broadcast in 45 minute chunks instead of 15 minute chunks. You aren’t watching episodes of a competition show as you’ve grown accustomed to watching them, you’ve watching segments between commercial breaks. On the one hand, that means there’s fewer commercial breaks per hour than you’d get on broadcast; on the other hand, the breaks are several days long. I’d advise viewers eager for big chunks of action to watch three or four episodes at a time and avoid the Spoilers section of the Strip Search site.

The show may ultimately turn out to be uninteresting, or the personalities of the Artists lacking⁵, or the mechanics of the challenges uncompelling (although given Khoo’s penchant for planning for every possible contingency, I’d bet against it). However, it is way too damn early to declare that Strip Search is not good. Oh, and to answer a specific point in the comment that prompted much more than I’d originally intended to write, if Erika Moen wins, that’s when you’ll see a blog-gasm.

• If there’s any justice in the world, today’s blogging by Bad Machinery creator John Allison⁶ on the state of webcomics and the stressors that may construct post-webcomics will provoke many fertile discussions. I am particularly struck the the strain of human behavior that Allison identifies that seeks to enjoy the attention that comes from sharing creations with the world, but in the manner that is least likely to actually reflect back on the creator. Read it.
• Well played, Rich Burlew, well played. Not only have you come roaring back with eight updates of Order of the Stick in the less than two weeks since we noted your big plot twist, you’ve managed to turn said twist around 180 degrees and make a big surprise into a BIGGER SUPRISINGER⁷ [uh, spoilers]. It’s true, I got ahead of myself in my earlier reading, not waiting for the eyes to turn to little Xs, but you’ve covered that base today. Oh, and the pale skintone that crept in during the strip? Bravo.

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¹ Regular readers of this page will recall my oft-stated dictum to Never read the comments, but obviously I have to keep up on the conversation on my own site. Regular readers may also recall that it’s extremely unusual for me to respond to comments, so take this for what it is — a fleeting occurrence, like sighting an endangered bird in graceful, full-song flight, and treasure it. Or at least check off the box on your Internet Opinionmonger Bingo card.

² I’ve long since come to peace with the idea that I am not Penny Arcade’s target audience, and that they will rarely produce content that’s designed to appeal to me. I’ve never played an MMORPG. I haven’t owned a game console since I was a child and we had an original Atari deck. I buy maybe one game a year, and still haven’t gotten around to Portal 2.

³ There’s a reason that Khoo’s got people involved in Strip Search talking to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal instead of just hack webcomics pseudojournalists, and you can bet at least part of the show’s structure is designed for the people that those stories will bring in.

⁴ The alternative — jumping straight to eliminating people without getting to know them — is certainly possible, but would require a different show. Think about it for a moment: to jump directly into competition without getting to know the contestants, you’ve got no emotional involvement. Why bother getting to know contestant #7 if he’s going to be gone in the first 15 minutes, just give him the loser’s edit and bring on the screaming could work, except for the part where Khoo’s stated clearly that he didn’t staff the show with damaged people that could only bring drama, and the part where he states his clear desire to want to do right by the Artists.

⁵ Although I cannot imagine any circumstances so dire that I won’t stick around long enough to see the context in which Hurricane Erika decided to talk about butt virginity.

⁶ And goodness, are we really just weeks away from the release of Allison’s first proper Bad Machinery collection? I say “proper” because while you can have my copy of A Feral Flag Will Fly when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, I do long for a gloriously colorful presentation of The Case of the Team Spirit.

Also, I should note that March and April are going to be webcomicsarrific at Oni Press, as we will also see the next Penny Arcade collection and two (two!) collections of Double Fine Action Comics.

⁷ Shut up, it is too a word.