Which is not to say that I cannot think of anything to talk about today; there are things worth mentioning seemingly everywhere.

• For starters, I’m working up that SDCC 2015 floor map and will get to it later in the week; we’ll also run the traditional guide to panels that relate to webcomics and the webcomics-adjacent. However, I would like to note that comics supercouple Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier are among the Special Guests of the show. That’s not super-surprising, but I just liked the screencap that Roman provided, where they’re in the same row as comics raconteur extraordinaire Mark Evanier and Greatest Living Pure Cartoonist¹ Sergio Aragonés.

  This would also be a good time to note that other webcomicky Special Guests include Allie Brosh, Katie Cook, Matt Inman, Scott McCloud, and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

• Matt Bors promised us that The Nib contraction wouldn’t mean the last of his attentions, and this afternoon brought word of some of his new direction:
  

  Introducing The Response, a new collective of cartoonists of color discussing race, class, gender and culture. https://medium.com/the-response

  The Nib retains its focus on [p]olitical cartoons, comics journalism, humor and non-fiction, and The Response appears to trade the relatively large rotating roster for a tighter group as a [c]artoonist collective on race, class, gender and culture. I can’t help but notice that at least Bors and Keith Knight are were regular contributors at The Nib², leading me to wonder if Bors managed to secure Medium’s funding for something that may become Nib’s sequel/successor down the line.

• Jon Rosenberg³ is one of the first wave of webcomickers, and he didn’t get to stay in the game by turning down opportunities to pry every single potential eyeball towards his work. Come the cool weather, that pool of potential eyeballs is going to go up:
  

  I just got the official okay to let you guys in on a little secret. Goats and SFAM are both going to be running at @gocomics this fall!

  Specifically, the end-stage Goats of The Infinite Pendergast Cycle, starting at the end of 2003, continuing for some 1100 strips, and returning from interruption in the near- to mid-term, it appears. Goats will be joined by SFAM classics, which I’m interpreting to mean the strips Rosenberg likes best, or possibly those that don’t require the GoComics readers to be familiar with the voting mechanism that SFAM launched with, which continued for a couple of years.

  This move makes sense for Jon (and anybody else that can swing such a deal, as Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett did last week with Drive) — if you have a back catalog of material to post, it literally costs you nothing to send files to GoComics for posting. More importantly, for serialized strips like Goats and Drive, if somebody reads the first dozen or so strips and then realizes that there are literally hundreds more available for reading right now instead of at whatever pace they’re getting doled out, that has the potential for some massive archive binges as they catch up to the current point in the story.

  Here’s hoping that Rosenberg and LARDK (and everybody else) have worked out some good ad placements and keep the links to their Patreons nice and prominent. I’m honestly not sure of how many people will make the leap/binge, but every one is a help. Goats launches on GoComics on 19 October, and SFAM on 28 September.

Spam of the day:

Truly programming is nothing but it’s a logic, if you obtain grip on it afterward you are the professional else nothing.
Legendario.

Every word of this is true. I am nothing if not legendario.

_______________
¹ Seriously, take the work ethic of Rich Stevens, the prolific output of Tezuka, the craft of Stan Sakai, the appeal across genres of a combined Jeff Smith, Terry Moore, and Carla Speed McNeil, the pure humor of the Foglios, the longevity of Sparky, the hustle of Spike Trotman, and the peer regard of Miyazaki or Watterson, and you’ve about equalled Sergio.

² I didn’t recognize other names, but I see that three of them — Chris Kindred, Whit Taylor, Ronald Wimberly — had pieces at The Nib that I remember. I wasn’t familiar with Shing Yin Khor, but after reading this piece by her, I want to read more.

³ My first friend in webcomics, official owner of my soul, and generally awesome grumpy dude who is awaiting old age so he can officially yell at youth to quiet the hell down, goddammmit.

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

• A couple of people that I follow have mentioned the lack of tools for creators to use in analyzing their Patreon campaigns; of late, I’ve seen people mention a third-party, public-data tool (much like Kicktraq, which I could dig around in all day), but I didn’t see the appeal until Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett told me to check it out. Silly me, I thought that Graphtreaon would only be of use to creators and not have a cornucopia of fascinating data.

  For example, I now know that the top-funded Patreon campaign is pulling in more than US$32,000/month, that if you want to make a mountain of money on the platform, you should be making adult videogames, be Amanda Palmer, or have a massive comics audience (Jeph Jacques and Zach Weinersmith are, respectively, the #26 and and #27 highest-funded creators … outpacing one of Patreon’s own founders, as it turns out; for reference, Alex Woolfson, Tracy Butler, and Tom Siddell are the other comics creators in the Top 50)¹.

  There’s a pretty heavy overlap between the most-backed campaigns and most-funded campaigns, too (with the same project sitting at the top of both lists). I’d love to see a scattergraph of funding rank vs patron count rank and see how closely they correlate (note to self: break out the spreadsheet next week), but I’m seeing a lot of the same names, just in a somewhat jumbled order. Anyway, if you like looking at data, all of this is neat, and we at Fleen thank LARDK² for pointing us as our new toy.

• Speaking of toys, I see from around the web that the floor map for SDCC 2015 has been released³, meaning it’s time to play around with the interactive version of said map. I’ll go through it in the coming week and put together the usual guide to where you can find webcomickers in the wild if you’re going this year.
• BOOM! Studios continues their mining of webcomics creators and properties for their BOOM! Box line of comics (where one finds things like Midas Flesh, Lumberjanes, and Giant Days); this time, they’ve gone to Tyson Hesse of Boxer Hockey to revive his old project Diesel. Given that Boxer Hockey hasn’t updated for a while and as a result its story is incomplete, it’ll be a treat to see Hesse get the opportunity to finish a story without other commitments impinging on his time (he’s been doing comic work — especially Sonic and MegaMan related — all over the damn place; yay for his bank account, but I want to see his stories).

  Diesel will launch in September for a four-issue miniseries, and I’ll note that BOOM! Box minis have a habit of getting extended, so maybe we’ll see more down the line.

Spam of the day:

There is a big chance to go viral.

Man, I hope not; antivirals are expensive.

_______________
¹ Then again, two pieces of human garbage that spent time insulting the crap out of each other before possibly making nice are n the Top 30 with a really high per-backer average, so please don’t conflate dollar figures with quality.

² Oooooh, that’s an unfortunate acronym. Yikes.

³ In past years, I got such news from the press releases, which I didn’t get, which I guess finally answers my question of whether or not I was ever renewed on my credentials. I think that means last year was my last SDCC.

It’s a bit of a roundup today, folks.

• See! For those of you in Pittsburgh-adjacent areas, the ToonSeum is running a Little Nemo exhibit through 28 June; specifically, an exhibit of tribute and inspired-by works by some of the great contemporary comics artists, taken from the award-winning anthology Nemo, from Locust Moon Press. If I were on the correct side of Pennsylvania, I’d drop in just to see what Carla Speed McNeil was doing with Slumberland as inspiration.
• Do! Update your links and feeds for regular Nib contributors who are now scattered to the nine vectors. Thanks to alert reader Craig L, we now have GoComics (ugh, but you gotta take what you can get) links for Brian McFadden, Shannon Wheeler, Jen Sorenson, Matt Bors, and Gemma Correll’s Four Eyes strips. Also, a link to Correll’s Tumblr, which supports RSS. Many thanks, Craig!
• See! A list of exhibitors at this weekend’s Special Edition NYC, the comics-centric comics show that’s in its second year as an adjunct to the much larger (and not all that comics-focused) New York Comic Con. I’ve actually heard good things about SENYC, about it being on a more humane scale than the megashows, and how the roster of guest and programming are blessedly free of wrestlers, videogame marketers, and TV shills. In any event, circumstances outside my control have conspired to keep me from being able to attend last year or this year, but you should go if you’re in town, because there’s going to be a healthy webcomics (and webcomics-adjacent) presence, including TopatoCo and Periscope creators.

  On the floor, you’ll find the likes of Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Brad Guigar, Brandon Bird, Chris Giarrusso, Dean Haspiel, Dylan Meconis¹, some combination of Mike Isenberg, Oliver Mertz, Daniel Lapham, and Jeff McComsey, Jeph Jacques, Jim Zub², Karl Kerschl, Kate Leth, Lucy Bellwood, Meredith Gran (Sunday only), Molly Ostertag, Phil Foglio, Ramón Pérez, and more! Heck, there’s even a Webcomics Fans meetup on the schedule.

  Speaking of schedules, webcomickers are going to be all over the Freelance Like A Rock Star panel (Saturday, 3:45pm, Theater 2, featuring Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire³), and Creating Comics: The Real Stories (Sunday, 2:30pm, Theater 1). Zub will be on three panels in case you can’t get enough of him — and honestly, how could you?

• Do! Make a note for about February, to send me an email yelling at me to clear my weekend for Special Edition next year, on account of I’m clearly missing out. Thanks for that.

Spam of the day:
Okay not quoting from this one. Unlike the PR email I got yesterday that was wildly inappropriate for this blog, I got an email that was relevant, but put me off for a different reason. Namely, the subject line was A desperate attempt to get your eyeballs on my shameless self-promotion.

Don’t do that. Not the self-promotion part, not the shameless part, but the desperate part. You shouldn’t be desperate to get my attention — you have something that you want me to cover? Let me know. I’ll cover it, or I won’t, but anybody that you want to pay attention to your work can smell desperation (even when you don’t state it outright) from 1.61km away, and it’s not an attractive smell. Being desperate to get my attention is like telling somebody This is my work but it sucks, I’m terrible. STOP DOING THAT.

I am not naming the person(s) that sent my that email. I’ll cover them in the coming days/weeks, or I won’t, and if I do I won’t ever say that they’re the offender(s) in this situation. I’m not going to hold this subject line against them, I’ll cover them (or not) based on the quality and newsworthiness of what I find … but seriously, don’t do that.

_______________
¹ Dylan Meconis is going to be on my coast and I’m going to miss seeing her! This is killing me.

² Who is in the middle of this list instead of the end, thanks to SENYC listing creators by first name.

³ Dylan Meconis and Katie Lane are going to be on my coast and I’m going to miss seeing them! I’m already dead.

• Alison Wilgus, one of the new invitees to TopatoCon, was kind enough to drop a comment on yesterday’s post to let us know that there are still more new invitees to TopatoCon that we at Fleen missed.

  Aatmaja Pandya, Maki Naro, Matt Lubchansky, and Olivia Stephens are added to the list, the full version of which sits below the cut. Thanks for the info, Alison!

• Also yesterday, TopatoCon invitee Dante Shepherd¹ let us know that his second great creative work, one that’s been under development for most of the past year, has launched:
  

  Holy hark. I’m a Dad. Again.

  Hey, world! Meet Torpedo! She’s 6lb 7oz and she’s utterly awesome.

  My ChemE dept just sent out an announcement that the baby arrived. They announced that her name truly is “Torpedo”. So that’s delightful.

  Torpedo, welcome to the world. It’s kind of loud and noisy and bright right now, but that’ll settle down soon enough. It’s also kind of stupid and cruel at times, but I think that if you follow your dad’s lead, it’ll become less so; if everybody followed your dad’s lead, it’d be cleared up before you’re old enough to read this. In any event, it’s the best world we have right now, and the only one we can offer you, so we’ll try not to mess it up too bad before we turn it over to you.

  Best of luck to you and your big sister Cannonball (senior henchman); she’ll help you learn your way around the important things in life, like your dad’s lab coat, his Red Sox cap, the junior faculty, and the chalkboard in the spooky basement. Remember not to eat the chalk, no matter how delicious it looks. Try to give your parents the occasional full night’s sleep and they’ll love you more than you ever thought possible.

  Oh, and maybe give your dad a break at feeding time? He’s not as tasty and nutritious as you might have hoped.

  Torpedo and mother The Swede are reportedly doing well; best wishes to everybody at STW Headquarters.

Spam of the day:

It is no secret that a boost in confidence and having a positive self-image can contribute to a woman’s over all well being but the majority of women do not have cosmetic surgery for anyone other than themselves.

Are … are you negging me?

_______________
¹ A pseudonym for mild-mannered professor of chemical engineering Bruce Wayne.

(more…)

We’ll do good news first, okay?

• It’s been a while since the last update to the TopatoCon exhibitor list, but what with applications being closed, we can add a series of new creators to the expected roster. You may recall that five weeks back the list sat at:

  KC Green
  Jeph Jacques
  Jess Fink
  Tom Siddell
  Rosemary Mosco
  Kate Leth
  Anthony Clark
  Christopher Hastings
  Danielle Corsetto
  David Malki !
  Dante Shepherd

  Judging from the various tweets that went out yesterday (predominantly from the creators themselves; TopatoCon has retweeted them, but hasn’t provided a definitive list so far — probably because communications are still ongoing, and this is only for tabling creators, not presenters or podcasters or gamerunners), we may confidently add (in no particular order):

  Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson
  Michael Rapa
  Mildred Louis
  Sara Goetter
  Jon Rosenberg
  Karla Pacheco¹
  RJ Lake
  Spike
  Allison Shabet
  Lauren Jordan
  Joshua AC Newman
  Magnolia Porter
  Alison Wilgus
  Shoona Browning
  Randy Millholland
  Brian Lee
  Skullmandible
  David Willis
  Kori Michele
  Hannah McGill
  Blue Delliquanti
  Evan Dahm
  Molly Ostertag

  Thirty-four tables, thirty-five people if I’ve counted correctly. That’s a bit more than half of the 70 exhibitor limit that Holly Rowland told us about two months back, and I’ve seen indications of four creators on the waitlist, with others undoubtedly out there. How many more webcomic-type creators we get, how many podcasters, game builders, and other creative types is presently unknown, but will hopefully be revealed in the near future. For now, it looks like the last weekend in September is gonna rule.

• In other news, the first indication I had that things might be awry was a fairly direct tweet from the very sexy R Stevens:
  

  Today only! My last regular comic on @medium : BATTLE OF THE OLDEST https://thenib.com/battle-of-the-oldest-21843559d267 …

  I’d seen chatter in the infosphere about a change of focus at Medium, without specific indications how it would affect The Nib, and it appears that the effects are going to be significant:

  Assistant editor Eleri Mai Harris was let go a few weeks ago, the first warning sign, and now the cartoonists who were syndicated on the site, such as Tom Tomorrow and Ruben Bolling, as indicating they they will not appear there any more.

  It’s been only three months since Nib editor Matt Bors was ramping up the talent pool, and honestly not that long since the whole thing started. Everybody that wondered how long the money would keep going out when Medium didn’t seem to be making any, we may have our answer. We’ll have to see what the next week or so brings, but it won’t be the same excellent resource is was, dammit.

Spam of the day:

If you are to lazy to write unique articles everyday you should search in google for:

Yes, that’s it — tell the guy that’s written maybe 2500 articles over nine and a half years that’s he’s lazy. I’m sure to buy your product and/or service!

______________
¹ And may Glob have mercy on that place where a soul would be in a regular person.

• Every year, I resolve to remember the cluster of webcomicker birthdays that occurs at the end of May; since I’m already well into the missed the start and try to remember next year, bozo phase, I’ll point out that today is the co-birthday of Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman, as if they could be any more adorable together. Additionally, it is Becky Dreistadt’s birthday, yesterday was Holly Rowland’s, and about three-four days back was Jeffrey Rowland’s¹.

  So happy [recent, in some cases] births-day, Jeffrey, Holly, Raina, Dave, and Becky! You are all awesome people.

• Speaking of birthdays, I think I’ve got the upcoming birthdays of my youngest niece and nephew covered; I received over the weekend my copies (one to keep, one to give away) of Evan Dahm’s² Wonderful Wizard of Oz adaptation, and with any luck the next couple of weeks will bring my copies (one to keep, one to give away) of Zach Weinersmith and Boulet’s³ Augie and the Green Knight.

  Here is my question: given those two books, which would you give to the younger sister, and which to the older brother? I’m leaning towards Oz for the older brother (as he’s just about old enough to read it for himself) and Augie for the younger sister (as she’d need either one read to her, and Augie’s such a kick-ass hero and it’s never too early to start that habit in nieces).

  I imagine that they’ll both end up reading (or having read to them) both books, I’m just wondering if anybody out there who’s maybe read the PDF backer copy of Augie or Oz has a definite idea of age ranges. Help me out, peoples, and make a couple of little kid birthdays happier.

Spam of the day:

Shed 25lbs of bellyfat for bikini season,

You really sent this to the wrong person; to get rid of 25 pounds from my abdomen, you’d have to remove at least four major organs.

_______________
¹ Not so weird that such a cluster occurred; at one point in the past, there were three separate people (me being one of them) on my EMS agency with the same birthday; it’s just a matter of time until you get these coincidences and duplications.

Heck, some day I’m going to start a business with another Gary Tyrrell just so we can confuse people that call up the main phone line. Can I speak to Gary Tyrrell? Which one? The one that went to nerd school. Which one? The one that likes beer. Which one? The one that pronounces his last name like “Ferrell”. Which one? The trombone guy? Please hold for Mr Tyrrell.

² Who, by the by, yesterday started rerunning his seminal series Rice Boy with commentary over at Tumblr. Read it again for the first time!

³ Who, by the by, will be having his French-language books released in English, starting next April and continuing for the next half-dozen years or so. Goo news for those of us who can’t get enough Boulet.

Since we spoke last, good news has come in from opposite sides of the country, and on this holiday (for those of you in the US, at least), I figured some good news would be just the thing.

• Firstly, late Friday afternoon brought word that the Cartoon Art Museum has received a reprieve on their loss of location due to the kindness of their landlord (who have been working with CAM to resolve their rent issues longer than was generally known):
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum is delighted to announce that their month-to-month tenancy at 655 Mission Street has been extended through September 2015. Their current landlord, Brad Bernheim of Coast Counties Property Management, and Matthew Cuevas of Cappa & Graham, Inc., a San Francisco event management company, made this extension possible.

  … CAM’s lease was up a few years ago, and it has been functioning on a month-to-month since then. “We knew that we could not sustain our location as the economy skyrocketed and have been looking for a more long term space for a while,” says Executive Director, Summerlea Kashar.

  “I was really touched when Cappa and Graham came to me with the offer to help extend our current term in our location, even just for a few months. For all of the businesses that feel like the economy and the landlords have been pricing us out, it was heartwarming to hear that Matt and Brad were willing to support us,” remarked Kashar.

  Good news indeed, and from the sounds of it the landlords have gone out of their way to support CAM; the press release noted that their lease actually elapsed several years ago, and they had been accommodated¹ on month-to-month basis since. Congratulations to CAM for getting three months more for keep their collections and programs in the public eye before being forced into what will hopefully be a brief hiatus.

• Meanwhile, on Saturday night in Washington, DC, the National Cartoonists Society’s 69th Annual Reuben Awards were given out, and while I wasn’t able to be there, Brigid Alverson was on hand to let us know about the awards as they were given out. Most relevant to this page, I for once saw the two nominees I was rooting for take the division awards for Online Comics — Short Form and Online Comics — Long Form.

  In the Short Form category, Danielle Corsetto won for Girls With Slingshots, and was on hand to receive the plaque. In the Long Form category, Minna Sundberg won for Stand Still, Stay Silent, and was in Finland instead of DC but that’s okay.

  I’ve mentioned my involvement in the NCS online comics division awards in the past; I’m not going to go into either the comics that were presented by the advisory committee to the jury for selection of the final three nominees, or which comics I specifically nominated, but I will say this: Sundberg and Corsetto didn’t just win, they were selected to move onto the voting round against the best webcomics we could find, and then they captivated the electorate².

  To put it another way: an organization with a significant percentage of its membership in the 80+ age range chose the short form webcomic based on a lesbian wedding storyline and a long form webcomic where a major plot point is the divergence of Scandinavian languages. I don’t know about you, but to me that says that generational distance aside, cartoonists recognize great cartoonists.

  Congratulations, Danielle Corsetto and Minna Sundberg — I can’t wait to see what you each come up with tomorrow.

hi!,I love your writing so a lot! proportion we keep up a correspondence more about ykur post on AOL? I

This is probably going to sound terribly elitist of me, but I try not to have any correspondence on AOL.

_______________
¹ So to speak.

² Each nominee’s work was represented by a selection of twelve strips — either sent along with their nomination paperwork, or compiled by a committee member that nominated them. I’ll share that of the comics I placed in nomination, I did my best to end on a cliffhanger, and I’m confident that I caused some archive binges.

Briefly, as I promised: the original art from Planet of Hats episode #51, Patterns of Force, by David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc), shared with you now that the colo[u]red strip is up. Click to embiggen.

If my memory serves me right¹, this will be the fourth time that the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival has graced the jewel of the Pacific Northwest, and by all accounts it’s getting better with each year that goes by.

The venue in Yaletown is open and inviting (and this year, VanCAF expands into two of the spaces, up from prior years), the guest and exhibitor lists are deep and varied, and attendance is free. We may have TCAF to thank for pioneering this kind of comics show, but VanCAF has quickly grown into its own unique thing. Congrats to the showrunners, the exhibitors, and the attendees, all of whom have collaborated to build the show up.

Speaking of guests, those of webcomicky nature that you’ll find in Vancouver this weekend will include Matt Bors, Ed Brisson, Zac Gorman, Jeph Jacques, and David Malki !.

They’ll be joined by exhibitors including Lucy Bellwood, Kory Bing, Boum, Jennie Breeden, Tony Cliff, Joey Comeau & Emily Horne², Blue Delliquanti, Jeff Ellis, Cat Farris, Christianne Goudreau, Hazel & Bell, Abby Howard, Amanda Lafrenais, Steve LeCouilliard, Sam Logan, Kel McDonald, Dylan Meconis, Angela Melick, and Erika Moen, Sfé Monster.

That’s right, every exhibitor has a name that falls in the first half of that alphabet, nobody at all from the N-Z range.

Okay, fine — but if my fingers fall off after adding Maki Naro³, Gabrielle Ng, Karla Pacheco, Alina Pete, Doug Savage, Mackenzie Schubert, Katie & Steve Shanahan, Anise Shaw, Spencer Soares, Kat Verhoeven, and Alison Wilgus to the list, it’s on your head.

Also please note some twenty hours of programming and , starting with a book launch on Friday night, and including discussions on the art of editing comics, the realm of all-ages comics, the realm of some-ages comics (the ones with butts and boobs and weiners), the art of self-promotion, and the sheer laugh-chuckles of competitive quick-draw improvisation. Also, for some reason, this atrocity, filled with the work of multiple terrible people; this one should be a hoot.

Spam of the day:

The company main business is further process the petrochemical production, with 8 production lines of ten-thousand-ton capacity for C9 and C10 separators, thermal & cold polymerization petroleum resin, petroleum naphthalene, tar and thousand-ton capacit

True story: my credit card company once called me up to ask if I’d placed an order for US$7000 of industrial solvents, to be delivered to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Kansas. No, I replied, on account of I’m not a meth cook. That was what they figured, and I had a new credit card three days later. Presumably, that chemical supplier is the one that passed my contact info onto this one; at least the petrochemical industry is marginally less sleazy than the meth trade, so I’m attracting a somewhat better class of environmentally-destructive supplier these days.

______________
¹ Now I have the urge to bite into a pepper. Thanks for that, Chairman Kaga.

² Whose Kickstarter for the definitive collection of A Softer World is kicking loads of ass: nearly 500% of goal and twelve days yet to go.

³ Speaking of whom, Naro was one of two creators whose traffic growth data was shared by Hiveworks CEO Joseph Stillwell last night/today. I’m a sucker for this sort of information, and Stillwell is one of those people whose analysis you ignore at your peril.

The other creator, by the way, is Minna Sundberg, whose growth is hell of impressive. Sundberg, as a reminder, will be paying attention to the NCS Reubens gala in Washington DC this weekend, where she’s up for the NCS Division Award for Online — Long Form.

Hey, everybody! ‘Dja miss me? It’s going to take a day or two to get fully back into the swing of things, so today is mostly about me getting caught up on things that happened while I was gone.

• Going furthest back you may or may not have noticed that Jillian Tamaki did an interview with The AV Club about SuperMutant Magic Academy, This One Summer¹, her episodes of Adventure Time, and more. It’s a great conversation and I recommend it to you if you hadn’t seen it before.
• Howard Tayler² has been running a fairly massive Kickstart for an RPG to be set in his Schlockiverse for the past month or so; the management of expectations and stretch goal announcements have done well to make the traditional last-week bump in backers and pledges into more of a last fortnight, as well as causing that rarest of things on the Long Tail: an uptick in funding predictions.

  As I write this line, the Planet Mercenary campaign will be wrapping up in about five minutes, somewhere in the vicinity of US$350,000 (or 777% of goal)³. For reference, the Fleen Funding Formula Mark 2 would have predicted a whopping US$206K — US$309K which he’s handily exceeded. Well done, Tayler and partners, and enjoy the massive pile of creative output that you’ll be engaging in for the next year or so.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, Spike Trotman launched her latest on Friday; as mentioned in the before times, she continues to alternate anthology topics, with a Smut Peddler followed by a specific genre, followed by more porn, and then another genre. It’s Sci Fi’s turn, and New World (specifically dealing with the topic of cultures coming into contact/conflict) is off to a rousing start.

  From launch on Friday to nowish, it’s reached 102% of the US$20,000 goal, meaning we’re now into the Iron Circus Comics Overfunding Bonus Plan: every contributor (or contributor team) just earned a US$50 bonus on top of the page rate they’re already been paid with another US$50 for each additional US$5000 on the campaign. For references, the bonuses paid for Smut Peddler 2012, The Sleep of Reason, and Smut Peddler 2014 were US$650, US$300, and US$1700 (!), respectively.

  In any event, four weeks left to make Spike write as large a check as possible to her incredibly skilled list of contributors; given the FFFmk2 prediction of somewhere between US$55K and US$83K, would be on the order of US$400 to US$650 a pop (which would be in line with the bonuses pad for TSOR and further proving the point that porn is innately more popular than anything else). This is why people want to work on Spike’s books — she pays, then she pays more.

• Finally, Zubday — that regularly-occurring holiday that happens every Wednesday when there’s a new Jim Zub comic (or two, or more) on the stands — comes early this week. That’s because today is Zubday Prime, aka Zub’s birthday. Early reports are that Zub is spending the day much like any other: planning to take over the world writing and editing and merchandising and designing and generally making comics. In other words, a good day. Happy Zubday, everybody.

Spam of the day:

send 10,000 blog comments Fee just $ 100
send 100,000 blog comments Fee just $ 800
send 200,000 blog comments Fee just $ 1200

Yes, please, let me give you money to make the percentage of my life spent on crap comment pruning even greater than it already is.

_______________
¹ Which — goodness! — is a year old now. Time sure does fly.

² My evil twin, etc.

³ Actual total: 5,312 backers for a total of US$348,641, or 775% of a US$45,000 goal.

I believe that I mentioned recently that David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc and semi-pro Mr Bean impersonator) very kindly offered me my choice of original strips from Planet of Hats and how I chose the ur-“Planet Of” episode of old-school Trek: Patterns Of Force, aka Planet Of The Nazis. Well, my friends, that strip successfully wended its way from distant ‘Straya to deepest New Jersey, and I have learned a few things:

• Morgan-Mar works at a fairly standard size — the four-row, twelve-panel strip took up two sheets of drawing paper, approximately letter/A4 size.
• Morgan-Mar does not screw around when it comes to protecting art — the two sheets of art paper were sandwiched in two sheets of plain paper, which in turn were sandwiched in what appears to be the carefully-excised cardstock-and-vinyl covers of a three-ring binder, which package was bound up by five strips of duct tape. The end times could come and that artwork would have survived all the vagaries of Armageddon.
• I’ll share a visual once the original strip runs so as not to steal Morgan-Mar’s thunder; today’s update at Planet of Hats is Return to Tomorrow, which means Patterns of Force is next. However, Morgan-Mar also announced today that he’s skipping next week as he’ll be on vacation, so it’ll be another week.

All of which leads to one inevitable conclusion: Morgan-Mar will be away next week and I now know his home address. The opportunities for mischief boggle the mind!

I think the best would be if I broke into his house and photographed myself covered in all his LEGO bricks, American Beauty style. The fact that he also knows my home address doesn’t really bother me since the only thing here to photograph himself covered with is one very lazy greyhound.

While I’m making my way Down Under on my errand of chaos, here’s what everybody else in webcomics will be doing:

• Approximately half of them will be going to TCAF, where the fun at the Toronto Reference Library starts on Saturday, but where comic-related events are already happening around town. The other half of webcomics will be there next year; they have to alternate because the TRL can only contain so many awesome folks at once.
• Brad Guigar¹, it’s been previously established, will be spending the weekend at his home-town Megan Fox Tits Wolverine show, where he hope that people will not be confused by the proximity of his booth and that of Mr Burt Reynolds. Brad’s prepared a little guide to help you keep them straight.
• Those few who won’t be at TCAF this year, planning on being at TCAF next year, or trying to tell the difference between one of the sexiest men in American history and Burt Reynolds will be checking out some numbers: there are Kickstarts for Oh Joy Sex Toy and A Softer World to consider², both of which are well on their way to meeting or exceeding the previous (successful) Kickstarts for each creator team, respectively.

  A final bit of math: what are the odds that Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan could get Emily Horne & Joey Comeau to do one last ASW next year as an OJST guest comic? That would be the very, very best, but I put it at maybe one in seven. Or, for the ultimate guest strip, make sure there’s some LEGO models in the photos, and whatever kind of sexy business is happening in the main field of vision? Over to the side is laughing Brad Guigar, approving of the hijinks all you wacky kids are getting up to. I’ll put that at one in several million, but I can dream, can’t I?

Spam of the day:

Personalised Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star comes already framed.

Unless it comes with an original horned Grinch on the back side, I ain’t interested.

_______________
¹ Rebel, loner, heartbreaker.

² They each funded out in less than a day and meet the criteria for Fleen Funding Formula predictions (>= 200 backers in that first 24 hours), so let’s call it US$84K to US$126K for OJST and US$136K to US$204K for ASW.