The thing about Rich Stevens is, even when he’s just tossing ideas around on Twitter with little to no intention of following up, it’s a hoot and a half to read. As agile as he runs his business¹ (and he’s nothing if not agile), his mind is running faster still, bouncing from brilliant idea to brilliant idea, mining only the barest minority of them and turning them into something beautiful.

Case in point: A rude ashtray begets temporary tattoos and possibly sweatpants. Case in other point: speculation about existing media properties that aren’t making comics leads to genius ideas that would make a million billion dollars. Or maybe “Gumby” is just as fun to say as “smock”: Gumby, Gumby, Gumby, smock.

So as we approach the end of the year, looking forward to our long crawl back into a season of growing things and new possibilities, know that the closest thing to an actual Spark or mad genius is in Western Massachusetts, mainlining robot juice and dreaming up crazy things to do purely because they’ll amuse you and also him. Mostly him². We should all be so lucky.

From the Charity Front:

• Some year, Child’s Play will not raise more money than the previous year … that will not be this year, seeing as how they’re now up over US$3.3 million with plenty of time to clear the US$3.512 million achieved in 2011. To put this in perspective, this will mean that 2012’s total will be more than the cumulative amount raised in Child’s Play’s first five years, and will likely clear US$16 million over the ten year history of the project. Well done Ms Lindsay, Ms Dillon, Messers Holkins, Krahulik, Khoo, and everybody that’s made this possible.
• Far less organized, but no less impactful: Kiva’s Team Webcomics (founded by Ryan North and Zach Weinersmith, who just so happen to have written two of the most successful choosable–path books in history) has lent more than US$321,000 to micro-entrepreneurs around the world, contributing to the bettering of the lives of entire families and villages.
• Somehow we missed checking in on Worldbuilders, the Patrick Rothfuss-run charity that benefits Heifer International, in 2011. That’s a shame, as there’s usually some primo webcomics creators contributing fabulous prizes to be won via the Worldbuilders auctions, lottery, and store.

  Just announced: a slew of webcomicabilia from the recently-held Webcomics Rampage in Austin, plus jam art, books, plushes, prints, and more. Jacques! Watson! Willis! The aforementioned Weinersmith! DenBleyker! Sohmer & DeSouza! Weaver! Corsetto! Melick! Krahulik & Holkins! Casalino! Foglio & Foglio! And introducing Randy Milholland as Chewbacca’s Family.

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¹ And the thing about agility is, you can’t keep it going forever — patterns get engraved, The Right Way of Doing Things becomes The Only Way, and you stop reinventing yourself. Stevens, by contrast, has been a blur of motion for more than a decade because he doesn’t know what he can’t do, therefore he does it.

² In my less-rational moments, I imagine that when Frank Zappa died, his Dada-anarcho tendencies wandered the world until deciding that Stevens was an appropriate host body.

Especially long-time readers of this page may recall that David Malki ! has, on occasion, been referred to on this page (not entirely seriously) as “The Dreamcrusher”, due to his role in rejecting a piece I submitted to the original Machine of Death open call lo these many years past. Crushed I was, all my dreams leaking dream juice because nobody would ever read anything I wrote ever. Sadface.

Well, the day has come to officially recant that particular nickname (though I’ve not used it in a good long while), and that’s because yesterday I did something creative and personally amusing that I never would have without Malki !’s example. Specifically, to aid my wife’s semi-required departmental holiday decorations (theme: Nations of the World; her assigned country: France), I constructed a diorama I like to call The French Revolution Comes To The North Pole, having been inspired by the cardboard-constructed Machine of Death that Malki ! took to conventions in 2011.

For inspiring me achieve an entirely different dream¹ in cardboard and tape and festive wrapping, I thank David Malki !, and apologize for ever characterizing him as somebody who would crush dreams of any sort. Feel free to hum either La Marseillaise or Wind Beneath My Wings if you like.

• Hey, guess who was a bozo and forgot to take photos on Saturday when visiting with Danielle Corsetto, Bill Ellis & Dani O’Brien, and Jamie Noguchi? That means you get to imagine the perfect Kane face when the lid to the mini-cheesecake I brought him got stuck. I’d often wondered how Noguchi manages to draw such incredibly expressive faces, and now I know — he’s constantly making them himself and his brain is translating the feeling of muscle here, skin there, a teensy bit of boiling rage for flavor, and telling his drawing hand what to do. It’s a rare skill, and it serves him well.

  In any event, many thanks to Wild Pig Comics for hosting the creators, and thanks to Corsetto, Noguchi, and Ellis/O’Brien for creating comics that entertain me for free; you should pick up all their books, as they’re quite good.

• Also obtained over the weekend: the post brought me copies of Tiny Kitten Teeth (it has an enormous trim size, and the textured cover stock makes it feel like a storybook from the 1940s) and The Abominable Charles Christopher volume 2 (with its beautiful red flocked cover, a “sketch” of an Asiatic Black Bear² up front, and two of my favorite Charles Christopher strips of all time inside). I am running out of shelf space with all these wonderful comics I’ve gotten, and I suspect that more will be arriving in the next ten days or so. Problems, man.
• With a bit more than three and a half days to go, Ryan North’s TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST is approaching US$375,000 and if it were to stop accumulating money right now it would be the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history by some US$87,000. As it is, I think the Toronto Man-Mountain has a better than even chance of clearing US$400K in the 88 hours left to him (and I’m not the only one), which would make for a truly amazing end product. Well done everybody that’s pledged, and everybody else kindly get to it, as I want to see what that last unlockable goal is.

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¹ Namely, the dream of sticking it to corporate overlords that make it difficult to say no when told you have to go spend money to decorate your desk because Teamwork!.

² Because what Karl Kerschl calls a “sketch” any rational person would call a “finely detailed animal portrait”.

Some of you may have noticed a brouhaha in the web-o-spheres over the past day or two regarding another webcomic scraper by another person that couldn’t be bothered to ask permission from creators before lecturing them how copyright works (his version: I can do what I want because I want to). I didn’t mention it earlier on account of the takedown requests were flying fast and furious and he was at least removing strips from his site (albeit with a lot of whining, as I understand it). Less attention given, the better.

Which is why I do want to mention a webcomic reader (an app this time, for iDevices) that’s Doing It Right. Comic Chameleon is the brainchild of Bernie Hou, creator of Alien Loves Predator, so he knows what a creator wants from an app. He’s contacted other creators and asked permission up front to include their work. Instead of being a glorified browser or RSS reader, the app permits panel-by-panel reading, so there’s actually a functionality value-add there.

Best of all, he’s worked out a revenue-distribution plan so that ads within CC itself end up paying the creators (granted, probably not a lot of money, and divided a bunch of ways, but still — it’s a choice that indicates the app is for their benefit, not his). Look for Comic Chameleon in early 2013, and check out the demo on YouTube.

• There was a very nice comment in yesterday’s posting by a fellow named David Welsh; as is my practice when I see a poster I’m not familiar with, I followed the link to Welsh’s site and found … okay, let me back up for a moment. Something you should know about me is that I cannot even think of certain scenes in stories without getting choked up; any time, any place, they will get to me without fail. Mayday, mayday, India-Golf-Niner-Niner is buddy spiked; It shames the armored cavalry to abandon a courageous warrior. Our squad wishes to ride in support of Princess Nausicaä; Let’s make sure history never forgets the name ‘Enterprise’; Su per man.

  At the top of that list, the top of the top, will always be stories (sometimes just scenes, but more often the entirety of the story) of extreme loyal dogs. I will seriously use this single issue to judge your entire worth as a person; there is something wrong with you, like sociopath wrong, if you can think about Seymour or Hachiko¹ without being moved to your very core.

  Which is a roundabout way of saying, when I followed Welsh’s link, it went to a new (fewer than ten updates) webcomic that he writes, the topic of which is the original loyal-beyond-death dog, Greyfriars Bobby. And just for topping on the heart-tugging, this version of Greyfriars Bobby returns to his master’s grave every night not just to guard it, but to fight supernatural beasties that would threaten all of Edinburgh. Extraordinarily loyal and brave? I’m not made of stone, people — I am in, all the way in.

  I should also mention that art, by Junelle Faye, treads the line between cute and threatening nicely, and hopefully both Welsh and Faye will be able to crank out more strips on a regular basis. Check out Greyfriars, and let the sniffles begin.

• Received at the comic store yesterday: the 300+ page Dr McNinja: Timefist and the concluding issue of Marceline. Two thumbs up for each of them, which requires me to borrow a couple of thumbs.
• Received in the mail when I got home yesterday: Benign Kingdom, Fall 2012, hardcover edition, plus additional goodies. I cannot begin to tell you how gorgeous this book is, and as soon as Danielle, Emmy, Anthony, or Aaron² can point you in the direction of sales, buy it. I suppose you could get the individual art books, but you don’t look like a chump, so get the very handsome hardcover to go with the Spring 2012 edition.
• Expected in the mail any day now, like tomorrow, because I got an email from TopatoCo: Tiny Kitten Teeth. Hell, yes.
• Not expected in the mail anytime soon because of time-sink potential: Either of the Homestuck collections, although I do not know what my deal is on delaying. I should just take the week between Christmas and New Years and binge my way through all 6000+ pages just like the mother of two who is powering her way through and has made it as far as the Midnight Crew intermission.

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¹ Don’t even get me started on service dogs like Endal or Comet.

² The Latin Hobbit-Throb.

Webcomics are beginning, ending, making transitions … it’s an unusually busy end-of-year timeframe, presumably because of the oncoming Blood Wave and Dogstorm and general Superpocalypse. Better get these mentioned before we all expire in terror.

• Goodbye For those that missed the (admittedly soft) announcement, James Kochalka is ending American Elf in an orgy of dental hygiene. But at the same time, the animated SuperF*ckers is off to a good start, which brings us dangerously close to a chorus of the circle of liiiiiife, etc, so let’s just be glad we got as much of American Elf as we did, and watch to see what Kochalka does next. My guess? Something awesome.
• Hello Scott Kurtz has been talking up the work he’s put into developing the soon-to-launch Table Titans for so long, it was easy to think of it arriving at some nebulous point in the future. Well, the future is here, kiddies, with Table Titans dropping on 28 January, with updates as needed to tell the story at a pace that best suits it. Seriously, if you haven’t listened to the latest episode of Webcomics Weekly, there’s a fascinating bit in there about how Kurtz may challenge the long-held idea that regularity trumps almost everything in webcomics — Table Titans may run a variable number of days a week depending on need, interspersing with PvP.

  It’s always interesting to watch the status quo not only get questioned, but actively experimented upon; granted, not everybody has the audience that Kurtz does, and success in such variable scheduling may be restricted to those with the most established audiences¹. Oh, and did I mention the part where Table Titans is teaming up with Wizards of the Coast to not just publish collections, but to treat the storylines as actual playable D&D adventures? That partnership, in an ongoing fashion rather than being a one-off project, looks to be the beginning of anew way of producing creative content beyond the daily strip; watch for more such expansions beyond strippery from other creators in the next couple of years.

• Hello Again Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant was one of the prettiest, most lush webcomics on the scene when it launched in June of last year, and given that the story had (over the next nine months or so) a definite beginning, middle, and end², it was a no-brainer that its 160-odd pages would get collected into a nice, neat, print collection sooner rather than later. My only question was who would land Tony Cliff’s tale of derring-do, and it’s really no surprise who won that particular sweepstakes:
  

  We’re thrilled to be bringing you @TangoCharlie’s DELILAH DIRK as a graphic novel next fall, + here’s the cover! pic.twitter.com/8lBpnW2J

  That would be the estimable :01 Books, for those of you that didn’t follow the link, and it is certain that they will give Cliff’s gorgeous story the treatment it deserves.

Oh, and nearly forgot: TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST has cleared US$300,000 in its Kickstarter and thus will be in colo[u]r. I am nearly afraid to see what happens at US$400K, given a whole ten days still to go.

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¹ Yes, Table Titans is new, but it’s leveraging directly off of more than a dozen years of PvP, and will bring a substantial portion of that audience on day one.

² And yes, Delilah clearly had adventures before we first saw her, and yes, it wrapped with Delilah and Selim clearly heading out for more exciting times … it was still a self-contained story.

Seriously, people — all kinds of mid-week days I’m scrambling for content, and then this gets dumped on me all at once? Do none of you want a weekend?

• Hired! Jim Zub may be the smartest guy working in comics, and working every angle of them — publishing licensed work, writing original creator-owned comics, writing revived videogame IP, and thinking very hard about everything he does. To that we can now add writing for DC, as Jim Zub is taking over Birds of Prey. It’s a pretty high-profile gig, as BoP is regarded as a well-written book (having a long legacy of Gail Simone as chief wordsmith), and not just an IP-parking exercise in stasis. Here’s hoping that he can keep up all his own projects while still working for the bigs; nobody deserves success for all his hard work more, but I confess that I’m more interested in the things that are uniquely Zub than things dreamt up by somebody else getting a Zub spin. The first one is just … Zubbier? Zubesque? Zublike¹, I guess.
• Kickstarted! How did I miss this? Girl Genius is doing a videogame, and with two weeks left in the Kickstarter, they’re up over 500% of goal. More interestingly (since GG fans are pretty rabid and any project related to Agatha Heterodyne was going to be supported to the point of success), this is the first time I’ve seen what appears to be a new cultural evolution of Kickstarter projects, in the form of the Kicking It Forward pledge.

  Short form: people running Kickstarters promise to dedicate no less than 5% of the profits from their campaigns (after costs and fulfillment of their own projects; we’re talking actual profit here, not gross proceeds) to supporting other Kickstarters from other project teams in the future. This is a terrific idea, and puts me in mind of something I saw on Twitter the other day (heck if I can remember who tweeted it originally, sorry); in a nutshell, it was an opinion that people running Kickstarters who have a track record of backing other projects are more likely to see support (at least, from the twitterer in question) than somebody who’s first interaction with the platform is to ask for money. Kickstarter is a terrific tool, a key part of business plans for independent creators of all kinds, but having it be a real community may be where its full potential gets unleashed. I’m very excited by these developments.

• Unmasked! Search the archives of this page for Eben07 or Burgoon and you’ll find many references to a shadowy operative, a peerless spy-type agent and the webcomic he’s produced for a half-decade, and now he’s just gone and made himself all public and every-damn-thing. Eben Burgoon has Kickstarted a new project about an underfunded set of misfit mercenaries sent on deniable missions with a reality-show twist: every mission, somebody will be eliminated, leading to lots of funerals. The B-Squad, as it’s called, sounds like a hoot, so do give a look, yes?
• Speaking of! Kickstarters for the last time today: Ryan North is up over US$275,000 for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST, which means mini-plush Yorick skulls. Something tells me that Ryan North may be in the mood to celebrate come Monday, 17 December for the Third Annual Beguiling/Dinosaur Comics Holiday Party with fun and good times and Ryan and Kate and Joey and a Secret Santa and booze. The party starts at 7:30pm and goes until whenever Paupers Pub is tired of the shirtlessness (Ryan), tomfoolery (Joey), and knife fights (Kate). You’re on your own for bail money.

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¹ Insert your own Being Jim Zubkavich joke here. Zubkavich, Zubkavich? Zubkavich. Zub.

By now you really don’t need me to tell you about Ryan North’s Hamlet-themed Kickstarter, and to reflect that fact I’m not even going to mention the dollar figure presently attached to the campaign. I’m only mentioning it because today’s update featured an illustration by KC Green that included the most casually awesome, entirely nonplussed high-five in history, that’s all. I literally cannot look that that illustration without smiling.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, a new — and very ambitious– one opened today, as the Blind Ferret Fun-Making Concern have launched a campaign with a goal of US$78,000 to put together a documentary series focusing on what conventions are like for your favorite band of misfit Canadians. The filming part is done (you couldn’t squeeze past the BF booth in San Diego without ducking past a very attentive camera crew, which makes me wonder how Sohmer managed bathroom breaks).

  It’s got an interesting rewards structure, too — only five tiers, with pricepoints of US$15, $35, $45, $55, and $2500 (no typo), making the “Executive Producer” reward officially the most pie-in-the-sky Kickstarter offering¹ I’ve ever seen. With just a 30 day turnaround and a high target, BF will need some sustained support to meet goal.

• As promised, Jim Zub is back with a second blogposting on the economics of indy-comic publishing, this time on digital distribution. The one thing I learned almost immediately is that there really isn’t a justification for the commonly-held assumption (and I’ve held it myself²) that a three dollar comic should be much cheaper in digital form because you don’t have to pay the printer!

  Let’s work off a common enough digital price point of 99 cents; take a moment to go back to Zub’s earlier essay on indy comics and look at the pie chart. Does the wedge marked “printer” take up 2/3s of the pie? No? Then you can’t drop the price of a comic from three bucks to 99 cents and keep the same amount of money in your pocket. The slices marked “distributor” and “retailer” which made up about 65% in the print chart are replaced by “ComiXology” and “Apple/Google”, and they make up … about 65% of the digital chart.

  The printer bill does offer a savings of 20-25%, but that means a three dollar comic can come down to maybe $2.25; the 99 cent price point doesn’t work unless you sell three times more copies than at the three dollar mark. Hopefully, Zub will let us in on how both of these channels relate to/drive customers towards trade sales.

• In a similar vein about the economics and realities of being an independent creator, a pair of filmmakers talk about self-distribution when you’re not Louis CK with respect to their documentary, Indie Game: The Movie. The parts that stuck out for me are near the end of the article, making three points that successful webcomickers have made time and time again:
  

  “You have to find your audience and you have to engage them,” Pajot says. “You can’t let them find you.”

  The second major point, Swirsky adds, focuses on a work ethic beyond imagination.
  “There’s no way around it, you have to put in the time and put in the effort. You’re literally building your audience one member at a time and that can lead to something quite powerful.”

  Finally … “No one will work for your film as hard as you work for your film…. It can definitely be augmented through other people but no one will work as hard as you’re going to work.”

  Those looking for the magic bullet/secret formula/hidden handshake that guarantees creative and financial success, there it is. Find your audience, work harder than ever before, and realize that nobody cares about your success more than you, so you have to make it happen.

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¹ In terms of cost and rewards differential from the next-lowest tier.

² Although I do think there’s an argument to be made for first issues in series being very cheap (even free), and for out-of-print collections that are otherwise unobtainable to priced under their original cover prices.

Yeah, we got some stuff for you today, and I’d probably be more enthused about some of these ‘cept for the part where I’m working on a low-grade fever and feeling all blah. FEEL MY ENNUI, DAMN YOU ALL.

• Anagrammatic numbers department: Minimumble strip #250 hit the same day as Maximumble strip #520. Huh.
• Pay what you want department: The entirety of Box Brown’s Bellen is now available as a name-your-price e-book. Neat.
• Take the money and run for the border department: Yuko and Ananth are possibly terrified, maybe appalled by how much money their Kickstarter has raised. And the total keeps going up, increasing their terror and/or appallor proportionally. If they hit US$70K, I fear one or both of them may spontaneously burst.
• Why would you even … no, just no department: Never try to gross out Randy Milholland. Ever.¹
• It’s like a webcomics utility department: David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) has decided to get out of the archive-binge non-biz (on account of it makes no money) known as Archive Binge and has turned the whole shootin’ match over to the folks at Comic Rocket to run. Comic Rocket, as you may know, is a non-evil webcomic aggregator that doesn’t piss off creators², so this makes a great deal of sense. By the way, CR are trying to fund the development of a mobile version of their reading page at IndieGoGo, which might put an end to scrapers once and for all, so give ’em a look, yeah? In the meantime, you can find Archive Binge here.

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¹ Be sure to read the commentary in the bottom gutter.

² That is, make money from them by hotlinking, stripping out news/ads, or screwing with their presentations.

But before the Ryanness begins, a quick thought for a friend: Happy Two Yeariversary, Ro.¹

So! Ryans! Ryan North, that is, as the Kickstarter for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST has cleared US$200,000 (or 1000% of goal) and thus will have a live-action, internet-path-choosing stage adaptation in Busan, Korea, courtesy of Ryan Estrada:

To Be Or Not To Be: The Play Of The Book Of The Play. Shakespeare in Busan is going to transforming this book into a stage performance in South Korea as an incredible improvised play. AND since people all over the world are supporting this project, the performance will be livestreamed worldwide, and when a choice comes up, the entire internet will be able to vote. The play will be directed by webcartoonist and Machine of Death author Ryan Estrada. He feels sorry for his poor stage manager who has to have sets and props ready for thousand of scenes that you might not even choose, but HE KNEW THE RISKS.

Is it insane? ARE WE ALL LITERALLY INSANE?? It is impossible to tell.

Piling on top of that good news, The AV Club loved the heck out of North’s Adventure Time #10 (the choosable-path issue, coincidence!?) and also Meredith Gran’s Marceline and the Scream Queens. Meredith is, the last time I checked, not a Ryan, but reciprocally neither is Ryan a Meredith. They’re all doing terrific work, though, and that’s a cheering thought to take with you to the weekend. See you on Monday.

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¹ Although what’s with all the RTL text on the archive page, Randall? Jeeze.

Those of you that follow Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson in their various endeavours may know that they’re in the midst of a continent-hopping trip that took them from their home base in LA to New York, London, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, and they still have parts of Europe and then Japan to go¹. Those of you that follow them may also know that Becky paints about 300 of her watercolor/gouache paintings a year, which makes for a challenge when so much of your life is taken up with travel, conventions, and suchlike. So it’s good to know that even on vacation, when the muse strikes Becky’s gonna paint the everloving heck out of that muse, and it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the sketchbooks and notebooks full of words and pictures that they’re presently filling will make for one hell of a travel story and I can’t wait to see it.

• Speaking of paintings, I just learned of an art show that I had to share with you. Way back in the long-ago, there was a wonderful webcomic called Patches by the equally wonderful Kelly Vivanco, which went on hiatus at roughly the same time that Vivanco started producing moody, dreamy, whimsical-on-the-verge-of-disturbing paintings².

  If you find yourself in the Greater Los Angeles area on Saturday, you may want to head to Culver City, as Vivanco will be opening the latest solo exhibition of her paintings at Thinkspace, which is found at 6009 Washington Boulevard. The opening reception (read: snacks and booze) runs from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, and the show itself will be up for three weeks.

• Anybody have an eBay account and a sense of justice? Firstly, observe Mary Cagle’s really wonderful Kiwi Blitz, say this page right here, and note the young lady with the hat and the artificial leg. Secondly, this eBay offering, which features a suspiciously similar young lady with a hat and an artificial leg for sale, and which is not offered up by Mary Cagle. Next up, the Report Item page, which requires an eBay account, and where one can (I imagine) notify eBay that Mr or Ms Vinylcustom is violating the rights of an independent creator. Remember the rules, kids: be factual, and be polite.
• Kickstarter roundup: TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST is just over a week into its campaign and closing in on US$200 large³, the Johnny Wander bookstarter needs to think up more stretch goals for its last four days, as it’s blown past the last one. Also, I saw that Neil Gaiman retweeted the Kickstarter twitterfeed, and I said to myself, Self, that sounds familiar:
  

  The beautiful blue businesswoman Gabrielle explodes from Claire’s toilet and informs her she’s pregnant with the new Messiah.

  And indeed it was, which is how I learned that Sister Claire has a Kickstarter going to print the first eight chapters (or roughly 200 pages) of relentlessly cute and just the right amount of blasphemous webcomickry for your reading pleasure. I see that creator Elena Barbarich (or Yamino, if you prefer) has reached about the 86% mark in about three days, meaning she’s statistically certain to make goal⁴ and surpass it. Oh, and obligatory disclaimer: Ms Barbarich, like seemingly half the kids I know in webcomics these days (cf: Gibson, Dreistadt) went to college with my niece, so there’s that.

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¹ Even better, they managed to hop across the Hudson while in New York and visit me and my wife, on account of they are awesome people.

² They’ve always reminded me of fairy tales, at the moment just before everything starts to go seriously wrong.

³ It helps if you read that in the voice of Rodney Dangerfield when he shouts Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!

⁴ Fun fact I learned at the B9 panel at NYCC this year: Cindy Au (Director of Community for Kickstarter) shared some statistical information that included the number 1/3. Projects that fail typically do not get anywhere near goal, and almost never make it even 1/3 of the way to goal; projects that make it to 1/3 of goal almost always go on to meet or exceed goal. Neat!

So Ryan North continues to make all of the money, as To Be Or Not To Be: A Choice-Filled Adventure By Ryan North And Also William Shakespeare Too has, as of this writing, passed the US$132,000 mark, and is rapidly driving the continued economic recovery by itself.

Personally, I’m hoping North will pass the dollars/word ratio of 3.0, which would make the past year’s effort of coming up with some 80,000 words pretty darn worthwhile especially considering that freelance writing gigs are normally measured in pennies per word. Naturally, North doesn’t get to pocket all of the money raised, what with having to produce the books and pay his artists, but it would still be a nice, round target for him.

• Speaking of Kickstartings, this page has had the opportunity in the past to mention the campaigns of one Mr Darren “Dern” Gendron, who doesn’t usually work within the comics sphere on Kickstarter, but who has run some darn successful campaigns, considering that his least overfunded project raised 108% of goal. The others have done, respectively, 117% of goal, a staggering 5015% of goal, and 3385% of goal with about two and a half days to go.

  Big numbers, although to be fair it helps when your goal is in the US$500 to US$1000 range to hit huge percentages like that. But! — and this is a big but — does this mean that Gendron is sitting pretty from the (approximately) US$101,000 he’s raised since September of last year? Funny you should ask, as Gendron’s thrown open his metaphorical kimono to share some numbers on his latest project:

  Right now [approximately three days ago as of this writing — Gary], we’re at 1,101 backers and $32,807.

  After the Kickstarter and Amazon fees, that’s $29,854.

  We have a chart tracking how much has been collected for international shipping fees. That’s a 0-profit area, because every dollar brought in for that goes right back out. Currently, that fund is taking out $3,615. So we’re at $26,239. We’re also budgeting in another $3,888 in current domestic shipping orders, so our subtotal drops to $22,351.

  So then the next big check is production. And lumping together the cards, the chips and the dice, we’re at $19,006 in costs.

  That leaves O [Gendron’s artistic partner, O Abnormal — Gary] and I with $3,345 currently.

  So to round off the numbers somewhat, out of about US$33,000, the creators are left with about US$3300, or ten percent. That number put me in mind of something that Howard Tayler said at SDCC years and years back when this page was just a lil’ baby blog, about how 90% of a book’s cost was going to end up in pockets other than the creator’s; Tayler’s point was to get more of the percentage by taking over other jobs, and on the surface it appears that Gendron’s experience is disproving Tayler’s thesis. Read on, though, and learn about economies of scale:

  We’re pushing to hit $40,000. Because almost all of the high-ticket production items are covered, we’ll probably pull in about $6,000 more from that final $7,200. And we’ll have a good supply of playing cards to sell for the next couple years.

  Catch that? If the high-ticket items are covered and the incremental costs on the lower-priced items come down, you’d get a return of (very roughly) US$9300 out of US$40,000, or comfortably in the 20-25% range for rate of return. One may also note that Gendron includes in those numbers stocking up for future sales, which doesn’t show up as immediate benefit.

  It’s a nice reality check for those considering Kickstarter, seeing one of the repeat users of the platform lay out exactly what the expected return will be (and honestly, I know a lot of small businesses that would be thrilled with a 10% margin). I’m wondering if anybody would be willing to run a Kickstarter with these numbers laid out from the beginning — here’s what I’m asking for, here’s what it will cost, here’s what we’re left with — and update those numbers (as closely as can be approximated) during the run of the project. I think it would serve to demystify the platform a great deal, remove some scales from eyes, and perhaps also to change a few minds about how “rich” project owners are getting from their runaway-success campaigns. In almost all cases, I’m betting it’s a lot closer to break even than to Kiss my ass, bitch! I’ll be at Duane’s!¹.

• It’s more than a year since Rebecca Clements did a charming 24 hour comic/chooseable-path story called Come Inside My Body, and with her recent return to comickin’, Clements has put the you-decide guided tour of her own interior spaces up as a you-decide-on-a-price e-book for instant download.

  Guys, if you’ve ever wondered what all those squishy, squirmy, goopy organs do, this is the ideal time to find out. If you have a gross anatomy exam coming up, this is the best way to study and if your teacher tells you that your views on the spleen are incorrect, you can point out that they are entirely correct and who would know about a Clementine spleen better than Clements anyway? It’s less than any of those human anatomy coloring books and far more amusing.

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¹ In this analogy, everybody wondering where their Kickstarter reward is “bitch” and a bottle-service cabana in Vegas is “Duane’s”.