Couple of stories that just won’t die today.

• Welp, everybody is still talking about Scott McCloud today (not that that’s any surprise), and lots of people have been talking to McCloud, but I doubt that Scott enjoyed any of those interviews as much as the one that went live at Playboy (mostly SFW, surprisingly) since it was conducted by his wife/muse, Ivy Ratafia. It’s a great read and gives you an idea just how damn in love these two crazy kids are.

  I’m going to quote my favorite part — Ivy has asked Scott to describe the character of Meg, who is about 70% Ivy and then follows up with what could be a marriage-killer of a question:

  IVY: And now the reciprocal. You have to describe me.
  SCOTT: You’re shorter than she is, probably by a good four inches —
  IVY: Haha! Okay, I’m going to interrupt you here, because the question I wanted to ask was, why is Meg taller than me?
  SCOTT: Because when I have the two of them in frame I can’t do the same kind of physical theater without pulling back the camera. I can’t do close-ups of the two of them talking. If I was a better cartoonist; if I was smart enough and practiced enough to get interesting compositions out of the height difference; maybe it could’ve worked. But, I’m just not good enough. So I made her only a half-head shorter.

  IVY: This really bothers me.
  SCOTT: I know!
  IVY: Short people unite! We have problems!
  SCOTT: I know, I know. We should be celebrating shortness. But no, I didn’t have the chops for it because I was still teaching myself how to be a better figure artist. So the real answer is because I suck. Is that okay?

  For the record, Scott does not suck. Also for the record, I picked up a copy of The Sculptor in hardcover and the spot color used throughout (Pantone 653, in case you were wondering) is a bit darker than that used in the advanced review copies, and it does give everything a bit more structure and depth. Also, the page numbering is different by two, in case you weren’t fascinated enough by the minutiae of publication details.

• Following up on yesterday’s discussion of the newly-gamified Exploding Kittens Kickstarter, some rules have been posted to determine which photos of various things will count towards the achievements. Notably, the hashtag #update9 needs to be in the photo (along with the text of the tweet, along with the hashtage #explodingkittens, so everybody with old pics of themselves with goats, sorry.

  Likewise, there have been a couple of photos posted of people with cat ears, but the requirement is that a single photo contain 10 (or 50, or 100) people wearing cat ears. Solos don’t cut it here. On the “plus” side at least two of the requisite five photos involving weaponized back hair¹ have been posted so that’s all … well, it’s not right, but it’s something.

Spam of the day:

https://bft.usu.edu/[redacted]

Hmmm, your message consists solely of a link. usu.edu is Utah State University, and it appears that the bft stands for Big File Transfer. So somebody’s using the academic site to distribute who knows what? I’ma pass on clicking that one, Bunky. You understand.

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¹ Insert that mumbling, horrified noise that Sideshow Bob makes just after getting smacked with a rake.

A little advice for you — if you go to a talk by Scott McCloud in a city known to have a hefty cartoonist presence, don’t be surprised when a cartoonist you know shows up. Even better, don’t be a half face-blind bozo and stare directly at Raina Telgemeier for like 30 seconds as she smiles wider and wider wondering how long it’s going to take you to realize it’s her. Not that I would know, of course.

• Once my brain finally worked out that I was, in fact, looking at somebody I knew, it woke the hell up and I was able to determine that the room also contained Mark Siegel, Callista Brill, and Gina Gagliano of :01 Books (logical, as they’re the publisher), as well as Judy Hansen (McCloud’s agent, as well as much of indy/webcomics, a woman with whom I enjoy discussing Belgian beer), and the incomparable Brooke Gladstone of NPR’s On The Media (whom I’d never met before, but because of a well-timed pledge to WNYC, she crocheted me a winter hat that I was wearing and was able to thank her for).

  McCloud and Entertainment Weekly’s Tim Leong spoke for about 45 minutes and took questions for about the same — the underlying theme was creativity and the process of creation and how McCloud had to write Making Comics to teach himself what he needed to learn¹ so that he could actually produce The Sculptor (an idea which had been kicking around his brain since he was 17 or so). No quotes to offer (I was listening instead of taking notes) except for this one:

  By 2024, comics is going to be a majority-female industry

  By which he means both creators and readers (and thinks in the art schools, we’ve already exceeded parity). Here’s hoping.

  Speaking of hope, one thing that gave me a great deal of hope about the evening, comics, and society in general. Waiting in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, I noticed a cluster of West Point cadets in their distinctive grey uniforms, along with some active-duty Army officers in dress blues; I wondered at the time what program they were there for (92Y does many cultural programs on any given day, as well as being a full Y-style gym).

  They disappeared from the lobby about 20 minutes before we were let into the auditorium. During the seating period, though, I noticed them come into the auditorium and take seats, and Ivy McCloud mentioned that they’d been meeting with Scott; they were in town with professors and staff officers because they’re reading V for Vendetta and Watchmen as part of a literature class.

  After the talk, while waiting in the signing line, my friend Brett and I started talking with an earnest (and serious, and very young) second-year cadet named Fred and a major (alas, I didn’t catch her name) that he was standing with. They were both thrilled to be there, and I never thought I’d be talking comics in that particular company and context. Fred didn’t say explicitly he was also drawing comics², but he did mention at one point he’d wondered if there was some way to surgically remove about half the little finger of his left hand and fit a prosthetic eraser there for convenience.

  Knowing that somebody so unstereotypically military will be commissioned an officer and become part of the Army leadership structure in a little more than two years makes me hopeful. Knowing that somebody (likely multiple somebodies) on the faculty of the most traditional of Army institutions looks towards comics (Alan Moore comics, no less) to shape the minds of Fred and his fellow cadets (about a third of whom at the talk were young women — a little longer to get to parity there) is likewise a comforting thought. All in all, a damn good evening. If you have the opportunity to see McCloud on his book tour, do so.

• Here’s the thing that you don’t see a lot in Kickstarters: tying stretch goals to thing that happen outside of the campaign itself. We saw it in the campaign for Dr McNinja’s Legendary Showdown back in October 2013, when 2500 Facebook likes or hashtag tweets meant bonus content in the game. See how that worked? You didn’t have to get one more person to pony up one more dollar, but you had to spread the word. Clever.

  Naturally, the phenomenally successful campaign for Exploding Kittens (as of this writing: nearly 135,000 backers, the most in Kickstarter history, and more than $US5.3 million pledged, #7 highest total and closing in on #6) has finally added a series of stretch goals, but mostly not related directly to the campaign itself. Instead, there are a series of achievements based on things like how many backers, percent overfunding, Facebook likes, and public stunts. As of right now, fifteen of them have been achieved, and the stretch goals will be unlocked when 20 or 30 of the ‘cheevos are met.

  They’ve gamified Kickstarter. It doesn’t matter which five achievements are met to reach the 20 goal, just whichever get piled up first. And yeah, it may be near impossible to achieve all 30 goals³, but they’ve made the last two weeks of the campaign pretty damn fun to watch. Heck, if they get the Ellen or GRRM things to happen (see footnotes), this project could break into mainstream consciousness. Well done, Exploding Kittens team.

• Per today’s newsbox at Dinosaur Comics: the previously-mentioned game version of To Be Or Not To Be now has a release date, and it’s, oh, today. Go get it.

Spam of the day:
Nothing in particular today, except to note that something about the recent posting referencing Larry Gonick is attracting spam like nobody’s business. So far today, I’ve cleared more than 50 largely-identical submissions (consisting mostly of question marks) from that thing. I have to figure out how their algorithms work so I can avoid doing whatever caused this flood. Yeesh.

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¹ This reminds me a great deal of Minna Sundberg wanting to create Stand Still, Stay Silent but feeling her skills weren’t up to the task, so she instead created the 556 page A Redtail’s Dream first to teach herself what she needed to know.

² Unsurprisingly, they don’t have art majors at West Point; if I remember correctly, about 70% of the student major in some form of engineering, and obviously all cadets study military science.

³ They include things like 10,000 and 100,000 Twitter followers or 100,000 Facebook likes — trivial, given the number of supporters. But they also include things like Get @Ellen [Degeneres] to tweet “A Butt Tuba” is a palindrome and Get George RR Martin to tweet “I use Pantene Pro-V on my beard, because vitamins”.

For the record, I think the following goals are going to be met fairly easily:

• 150,000 backers (they’re above 134K)
• 10,000 Twitter followers (already met: @gameofkittens is now at 19.8K)
• 100,000 Twitter followers (doesn’t require even all of the backers click on “follow”)
• 100,000 Facebook likes (no idea how may they have, I don’t have Facebook)
• Get @wilw[heaton] to tweet all cats should wear underpants (will probably happen as soon as Wheaton is back from the JoCo cruise)
• Post 25 pics of a beardcat (a cat crawling out of a dude’s beard)
• Post 25 pics of a potatocat (a cat with legs tucked under, looking like a furry potato)
• Post 25 selfies with goats

The others, involving things like group photos of people wearing cat ears, and pictures of “weaponized back hair” (I don’t want to know), as well as the Ellen and GRRM things will be trickier. Since they aren’t saying what we’ll get if all 30 achievements are hit, it’s hard to say how hard people will work on the goal.

See, I thought today was going to be all about Scott McCloud’s previously-announced interview in The AV Club, but then a bunch of other stuff happened, some of it literally historic. Let’s dive in.

• We’ll start with McCloud, who is all over the damn place these days, what with The Sculptor¹ coming out tomorrow and all. With any luck, I’ll get a chance to congratulate him in person either before or after his talk at the 92nd Street Y tomorrow night. McCloud’s conversation with Oliver Sava (who writes really well on comics) takes as its starting point a collection of seven comics works that deal with artistic expression and frustration. It was a really great conversation before McCloud got to what I thought was the most significant part:
  

  Well, I suppose this would be a good time to offer my mea culpa that this list I picked for you is a bit of a sausage fest. I could have included some works by women artists that might have fit the theme, but I wasn’t sure that I could talk about them very well without a good re-reading. Lynda Barry’s What It Is would have been a really good addition. But I just didn’t have time to re-read everything, and that one would have required a re-read at least. But I think that probably the single most important trend right now is the coming army of girls reading all-ages comics who will be moving into the industry. And I think within about eight or so years, we’ll have a majority female industry. I think there’s going to be a massive shift in terms of who writes comics and who reads comics. So again, sorry that these are a bunch of guys in this list. That was a matter of circumstance. A lot of my favorite comics happen to be by women but — This One Summer, for example — not about an artist. So I was out of luck. I love that book.

• Nice timing from McCloud, because this morning the American Library Association, as is its custom during its midwinter gathering, announced its literary awards, and This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki was recognized in two separate categories.

  Before we get too far into this, I should note that most of the ALA-associated awards have two tiers: the actual “award” or “medal” itself², and a number of “honor” books in the category. The honor books are not a case of it’s-an-honor-just-to-be-nominated; going through the lists of winners for the past few years, it is entirely credible to me that the appropriate jury selects a short list of equally-worthy books, chooses one at random as “the” winner and designates the others as the honor selections — they’re that good.

  So: This One Summer was announced as one of four Honor Books for the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults. And then a little later, it was named as one of six Honor Books for the freakin’ Randolph Caldecott Medal — you know, one of two literary awards you’ve ever heard of — for the most distinguished American picture book for children.

  Please note that no graphic novel has ever been recognized for the Caldecott before today, nor for the just-as-famous John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature (that would be the other one you’ve heard of). So I’m not exaggerating when I saw it was an historic occasion, especially when you consider that a few minutes after the Tamakis made history, El Deafo by CeCe Bell also made history when it was named one of two Newbery Honor Books. Today was the day that graphic novels were recognized as the best of the best in children’s books. That’s a pretty damn good day for comics.

• Oh yeah, and it’s also Saint Groundhog’s Day (the day that I consider to be the start of my relationship with my wife), which means that yesterday was the latest birthday of Dinosaur Comics. For twelve years now, Ryan North has relentlessly seeking to answer the question How many different blocks of text can be fitted to exactly the same six panels of art?, the answer to which is apparently Goin’ on 2800.

  It is also-also fully-official launch day for the all-new You Damn Kid³, the strips since September being the result of a retooling and soft launch. And speaking of returns, after a lengthy hiatus (necessary for multiple very good reasons), we even have a new Help Desk today, which tells you everything you need to know about this year’s technological buzzphrase. Like I said, busy day.

Spam of the day:

Bardzo dobra publikacja. Dzi?kuje za to Pa?stwu!

I am told that this is Polish for Very good publication. Today for shoes to you a!, which I believe may be a reference to the longrunning and well-beloved webcomic No Shoes For Tuesday (sorry, I meant Brak Buty na wtorek).

________________
¹ My review here; it’s a masterpiece and I’ll be buying a copy tomorrow, since apparently there’s a small but crucial difference in the color palette. So all those glowing reviews you’ve been seeing? We’ve been seeing a version of the book that McCloud considers inferior and lacking the impact of the final revision.

² Which appears to generally go to just one book, although the wording implies that there may be multiple winners.

³ Longtime readers may recall that my love for YDK is complete, and it will always be part of the blogroll because no matter how long Owen Dunne may step away from the strip, he will always come back. Recall also that the very first webcomics purchase I ever made was a combo-pack of YDK’s print collection, a sketch of Jethro, and a shirt proclaiming itself to be the home of the Frog Rocket Wiener.

Since then I have sunk an amount of money into webcomics merch and art that I am frankly terrified to total up, as my heirs and assigns may seek to take away my ability to make my own financial decisions because clearly I am not rational. This is all Dunne’s fault.

Two items today, one long and one short.

• Know what I really like about webcomickers?

  When presented with the opportunity to seek out creative partners for a new project, they pay. Consider the vast amounts of money doled out by your Spikes, or Erikas Moen, who are in the habit of retroactively paying artists bonuses, or your Ryans North, who regard increasing income primarily as a reason to hire more artists. Consider the vitriol among webcomickers inspired by the quotes that Ryan Estrada mines for the @forexposure_txt twitterfeed.

  So it gives me great pleasure to point out another project announcement, one that pays money (probably). Welcome to the world of research grants with your guide, Dante Shepherd:

  This is what I want to do. I want to make science comics. And I want to pay artists to make them.

  I’m currently applying for a grant to help these visual students learn. While the overall grant isn’t for a ton of money in comparison to the usual research grants, it would be enough to pay artists for at least 60 pages of work. These 60 pages would be spread across several disciplines — certainly Chemical Engineering, with it being my background, but also Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Biology, and more — and would ideally be a springboard for us to be able to continue adding to the comic education in future years as well.

  And as part of this grant, we would also involve Art and Design students to further their education, too. It’d be as expansive as we can make it for the funds provided to us.

  This is where I’m opening it up to you and any other artists out there for involvement. We need to show that we have actual professional artists interested and willing to participate in the grant. The work would be collaborative to some extent — the engineering researchers, the art and design researchers, and artists all working together to develop optimal scripts and layouts for learning — and you would be paid for your work based on the pages you produce.

  I know that sounds a little convoluted, so let me summarize: the money doesn’t exist yet, and in order to get the money, artists are needed to say that they would be interested in doing the work. If the money doesn’t come through (and writing grants is not a guarantee of success²), then you don’t do the work. It’s more than a little chasing-your-own-tail, what with needing people willing to do the work, not knowing if they’ll actually be called upon to do it, but without that first step nothing will happen.

  So if you’re interested, if you think you could help teach complex STEM principles in comics form, if you’re willing to to show your past work to help convince the grant committee, drop an email to danteshepherd who has taken out a Google email account.

• In other news, we’ve previously mentioned that the annual MoCCA Fest will be shifting venues to Center 548, and it appears that the new locale is just a mite too small to accommodate panels. Not to fear, as the Society of Illustrators (parent organization to MoCCA) have obtained two dedicated rooms at the nearby (and gorgeous) High Line Hotel, a brief walk of perhaps four minutes. Also, you know what you get with hotels that you don’t get other places? Lobby bars. Just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

prepared dishes that you would come to expect from an iron chef, because it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. Wasn’t worth

Iron Chefs are always worth it.

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¹ Larry Gonick has taught more people about more different things using cartoons than anybody else I can think of. As previously noted, pretty much everything I know about the history of China is due to his comics.

I became an electrical engineer specializing in communication systems and information theory at least in part because I had a copy of the 1983 edition of The Cartoon Guide to Computer Science (since retitled) back in high school and learned about Turing, Shannon, and other giants of the field. Hell, I stole his AND and OR truth tables on the statements P: The pig has spots and Q: The pig is glad when I was teaching computer logic early in my career. The lesson was worth it just for the PorQ? joke.

² Although the relatively low cost of paying some artists to produce comics compared to — let’s say, building a multi million dollar materials-research lab — help the odds. If you’ve got ten grand left over in your funding and here are fourteen unmet grants looking for multiple millions and one over there looking for eight grand, that becomes a no-brainer.

Everything I talk about today, I noticed first on Twitter.

• Let’s get the rapidly-changing one out of the way first. Yesterday, Matthew Inman dropped a hint that something would be happening today:
  

  Here’s a little sneak peek of a project I’ve been working on. It launches tomorrow. I am so excited I might hurl!

  … with an accompanying illustration of what appeared to be a card game. At 1:23pm EST he updated us:

  BIG FANCY ANNOUNCEMENT: I helped create a card game and it’s called Exploding Kittens www.explodingkittens.com

  That link went to a product page with a link to a Kickstarter. Four minutes later it became certain that this project would not require 30 days to fund out:

  WE JUST HIT OUR GOAL! $10k in 8 minutes

  I first made it to the Kickstarter at approximately the 17 minute mark, when the total was above US$65,0000. Refreshing a few minutes later, it was north of US$70K. As of writing the first draft of this sentence (38 minutes into the project’s history), Exploding Kittens has raised US$133,745 and is jumping every time the page refreshes.

  I’ll hop back there as I’m putting the final polish on this posting to see where it’s at, but right now I’m calling it: an hour in this game will raise more money than Operation BearLove Good, Cancer Bad, and I’m not exactly sure how long it will take to surpass the funding on Operation Let’s Build A Goddamned Tesla Museum, but I am certain it will do so. Come back tomorrow and we’ll see what the FFF says at the 24 hour mark.

• Katie Lane, lawyer extraordinaire to the creative community, shares a lot of information with you about how to conduct your creative business. For example, today she let us know about the value of having policies, even if it’s just you¹. My favorite bit was how having policies can aid in negotiation:
  

  Here’s a cool trick: next time a client asks you if you’d be willing to do something you really don’t want to do, instead of saying “I’d rather not” or “I don’t want to,” say, “I can’t; my company has a policy against [thing you don’t want to do].”

  Clients hear wiggle room in “I’d rather not” or “I don’t want to.” But with a policy they hear a rule, a line in the sand, they hear “no.”

  Clients are more likely to respect your boundaries if they look like boundaries they’re already used to following. Most companies have policies and most of your clients have polices. Those polices are there to make the company work better and your clients understand that; your clients are used to following policies. And they’re used to having to make a very strong argument to justify working around a policy.

  Lane shares ideas like this multiple times a month over at her site, much of it for free at her blog, but this is also part of her livelihood. So I’m pleased to note that she’ll be offering more advice on the subject of gettin’ paid in online class sessions in the coming weeks. Way I look at it, if spending a couple hundred bucks and a couple hours (and possibly springing for the one-on-one consult) gets you paid on just one job that wasn’t ponying up the dough, you’ve come out ahead. Twenty spots only, and may I mention other classes and workshops she teaches in person? Why yes, I may.

• Thought Bubble is one of those shows I know I’m going to have to visit eventually, it’s just that there’s this ocean in the way². Fortunately, the redoubtable Danielle Corsetto retweeted the TB folks earlier today, alerting me to the fact that the first videos of their Sketching Spotlight are now online. The videos in question feature Corsetto, Boulet, Emily Carroll, and Babs Tarr, moderated by Pete Doherty.

  The first video is here, and focuses on Corsetto. Carroll is the subject of the second, Tarr the third, and Boulet the fourth; they range from 15 to 20 minutes of drawing, with an extra 10 minutes of discussion at the end. They’re great fun!

• Okay, wrapping this up. It’s 2:39pm EST, the Exploding Kittenstarter has been up for 1 hour and 20 minutes, and it’s presently at US$292,217. So, yeah, 70 grand past BearLove and more than 20% of the way to Goddamned Tesla Museum. Yikes.
• Postscript: I just noticed that sometime in that first hour and twenty, all 200 slots of the limited US$100 tier and all 5 of the limited $500 tier were snapped up. Also, in the first minutes since the total is over US$317K, and more than 8200 backers. We could be looking at an all-time record, folks.

Spam of the day:

Carry on the superb works guys I have incorporated you guys to my blogroll. I think it’ll improve the value of my site :)

Given that your site appears to deal with the removal of tree stumps, I kind of doubt that.

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¹ It’s better to set these policies for yourself than have them imposed on you. My friend da9ve (not a typo) had a consultancy that consisted of just him, but the state of Indiana required him to adopt a sexual harassment policy so that if he ever sexually harassed himself at work, Indiana would sue him to recover damages. Fortunately, da9ve was never subjected to a hostile work environment by himself, so he never had to file a complaint on himself or get sued by himself to make restitution to himself.

² I was actually hoping for that thing where Google Maps tells you to swim so many thousands of kilometers and then resume your journey on land, but no luck.

So end of last week, I noticed a retweet from Sohmer, Ryan Sohmer, and thought huh. He’s got plans, Sohmer does, and is typically thinking three steps ahead, and if he is going to take one of his comics into print as floppies, he’s thought of all the angles. Not much else about Looking For Group teaming up with Dynamite crossed my radar over the weekend, so this morning I went looking and it seems that Dynamite hasn’t heard they’re doing this book yet.

Which is odd, because there’s an announcement from Blind Ferret today, and Bleeding Cool has previews (including a Becky Dreistadt variant cover), and Sohmer himself weighed in today on the whys and wherefores. Then again, Dynamite doesn’t seem to have updated their News page (as of this writing) since August of last year, so at least it’s not a slight specifically against our neighbors to the north.

• Another case of the news getting ahead of the newsmakers: while there’s nothing at the SPX site as of this writing, Heidi Mac has the lowdown on the non-curated end of SPX registration — it launches on 1 February and will surely be oversubscribed:
  

  WHAT TO EXPECT OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
  1. SPX 2015 invitees will hear from us before the end of January. Tables associated with any invitations not accepted will be rolled over into the lottery pool.
  2. The SPX 2015 table lottery will run from February 1 to February 15, 2015 (at midnight eastern time). We’ll widely advertise the lottery opening and, at that time, provide access to an online form to enter the lottery.
  3. After entering the lottery, you’ll receive your lottery number. Don’t lose it! Just kidding. We’ll keep a copy and notify you either way if you win.
  4. All lottery entries will be reviewed by SPX. What are we reviewing them for? SPX is a showcase for independent comics. If it will not be clear to us that you make such things we reserve the right to remove your lottery entry. If we contact you to follow up with your registration, we appreciate your help in letting us know more about your work.
  5. Upon conclusion of our review, we’ll notify the lottery winners for 2015 (yay!). You’ll have a reasonable window of time to pay for your requested table space.
  6. We’ll also maintain a wait list (based on the next 50 potential lottery winners). Tables that are not paid for in a timely manner or are subsequently cancelled will be offered to members of the wait list in turn.

  There’s also a detailed bit on the lottery process which is rather lengthy, so I’ll just send you over to The Beat for the deal. Short form, there’s a sorted list of randomly-assigned six-digit numbers, and they’ll assign booths based on the list in either ascending or descending order based on a computerized coin flip.

• Today marks 250 pages of Stand Still, Stay Silent which is really rather impressive considering that since the 1 November 2013 launch, there have only been 444 days. There have been a couple of 2- or 3-week hiatuses as Minna Sundberg did things like mail out a few thousand hardcovers, put together another hardcover, and move between countries.

  That brings us to somewhere around 400 days of the strip’s existence that one could reasonably expect Sundberg to be working (and includes weekends, holidays and such, because we all know that cartoonists are automatons that don’t observe such niceties) meaning that more than 2 days out of every 3 she’s delivered a full page, in color, with incredible detail. Also humor, pathos, creeping horror, and linguistics.

  What I am saying here is that she has been working at a furious pace (on her own, no less) to produce a ripping good read, my favorite of the past year, and you should be paying attention because it’s damn good. If you don’t read it, start your archive trawl now while it’s still practicable.

• On the off chance you don’t yet appreciate what one creator can do on their own, consider the most recent update from Boulet: it’s beautiful, highly evocative of mood, more than a little melancholy, and utilizes the “web” part of “webcomics” exactly as it should be used. The little bits of motion enhance rather than detract, and put to shame every half-assed “motion comic” that uses motion just for the sake of using it.

  For other examples of Boulet utilizing limited motion and infinite canvas, see Game Over, Our Toyota Was Fantastic, and The Long Journey; in each case, the technological elements in service to the story rather than the other way around. The man is a treasure, and that’s before you take into account his acknowledgment of the power of moustachery.

Spam of the day:

I was curious if you ever thought of changing the page layout of your site?

No. Next!

We’ll talk about what webcomickers are up to in a moment, but first I want to address an email I got about 20 minutes ago (as I write the first draft of this). It appears that Emerald City Comicon has been bought out by ReedPOP, showrunners of New York Comic Con, the PAX family of shows, C2E2, and more high-draw conventions dealing with everything from Star Wars to sweaty dick punching.

ECCC has had a reputation for a few things — extremely rapid growth, and the personal touch of show founder Jim Demonakos, who’s kept the focus of the show squarely on the comics side of the equation. Put bluntly, there are not a lot of big “comics” shows (and EmCity is going to be somewhere in the 70 – 80K attendance range this year) that don’t actually focus on TV, movies, wrestling, or other aspects of nerd culture.

It can’t be easy running a show that big, and I have no reason to criticize Demonakos for turning to ReedPOP to provide showrunning services; I only hope (and it’s not clear from the press release I received) that the team and focus that were developed under Demonakos are retained. I know a lot of webcomickers that look to ECCC as one of their best shows of the year, and if it goes the way of NYCC and C2E2 (with their far lesser emphasis on the comics end), that would be a hard blow. The full press release is below the cut, so you can read and interpret it for yourself.

• KC Green may have wrapped up Gunshow, but he’s got plenty of other outlets for his comics, and he added a new one yesterday. US Gamer has added a weekly videogame-themed comic from Green known as Cheats n’ Beatums, the first of which you can read here. Maybe. It might be my choice of browser, it might be my choice of security settings, but the comic did not render on the page for me, instead substituting an image placeholder.

  Clicking on the placeholder gave me an error in opening a secure connection, but editing the URL from https: to http: did the trick. I’m not sure I would have gone to so much trouble for anybody else, but I got my reward: Green’s first Cn’B showed us why Mario always wins … he cheats.

• Readers of this page may recall that Kate Beaton is the best. So it was no small amount of happy-making to see her announce this morning that D&Q have announced her next comic collection; Step Aside, Pops will be released in September, and will no doubt put the fear of Victorian-era velocipeditriennes (velocipeditrixes? velocipeditrices?) into the fear of bowler-hatted men everywhere.

  For added fun times, Beaton spoke to the Los Angeles Times; I only wish they had asked if any of her Kate-goes-home-to-Nova Scotia-and-we-see-lots-of-her-mom comics (aka momics) will be included. I sure hope so. As I’ve said in the past — and I stand by this — you could burn down all of San Diego Comic Con and everybody inside, but if we got daily momics it would be a fair trade.

Spam of the day:

The 500 Euro note makes it much easier to smuggle cash out of Europe. After the police officer conducted his investigation he informed me that the manager’s signature wasn’t an original signature.

While I stand second to no man in my appreciation of sweet, sweet, untraceable cash, I think that perhaps you have misapprehended the focus of this blog.

(more…)

Every once in a while, you get a comic that just couldn’t be done on paper, and Meredith Gran delivered one to wrap up the latest Octopus Pie story arc. The act of scrolling through the very tall image and the fact that there’s more and more space between the panels to control your sense of the passage of time are giving Chapter Four of Understanding Comics a boner¹ without falling into an infinite canvas-for-the-sake-of-infinite canvas circle jerk². Even if you’ve never read Octopus Pie before, click through that header image, scroll on down, read the (nearly wordless!) story, and tell me you don’t know exactly what’s going on. I double dog dare you.

• It is always a good thing when new dinosaur comics³ make the rounds, and Bird and Moon creator Rosemary Mosco partnered up with David Orr to bring us a beaut. For everybody that feels a little guilty — raises hand — for thinking that Chris Pratt riding a motorcycle in the midst of a pack of trained raptors is pretty cool despite the fact that they (the raptors) have no feathers, Mosco and Orr have the balm to soothe your conscience. Hooray for feathers!
• From Katie Lane, your unofficial source for legal advice that you aren’t paying for⁴, has a New Year’s resolution for you, with a handy walkthrough to make good: how to register your copyrights and why you should bother. Bottom line: you’re even more protected with a formally-registered copyright than an implied one.
• Kickstarter is changing payment processors, and it looks like it’s going to be transparent process, except for the check-out. Right now, I get shunted to an Amazon page and punch in my password, then just approve the details. I’m guessing that with Stripe I’ll either have to provide name/address/credit card details each time, or start a new account.

  I’m kind of curious about seeing if I cancel a pledge on a campaign that I’m presently supporting and then immediately re-pledge, if it’ll shunt me to the new process? In fact, I have such a campaign (supported just prior to the change announcement), but I’m afraid if I cancel, I may cause the creator [warning: link Not Safe For Anyone, seriously] to freak out a little (which is probably reason enough to do the experiment by itself).

  In the interests of full disclosure, I have both a hand-stapled, illustrate-it-yourself minicomic of Inspector Pancakes and a PDF review copy, both presented to me by author Karla Pacheco; the ARC is better, because it’s got illustrations (by Maren Marmulla) and a series of fabulous pin-ups by the likes of Kate Leth, Becky Dreistadt, Anthony Clark, Jeph Jacques, Lauren Jordan, Matt Cummings, and Leia Weathington, and they are pretty.

• For those wondering, Child’s Play continues the streak of beating each year’s total:
  

  2003: $250,000
  2004: $310,000
  2005: $605,000
  2006: $1,024,000
  2007: $1,300,000
  2008: $1,434,377
  2009: $1,780,870
  2010: $2,294,317
  2011: $3,512,345
  2012: $5,085,761
  2013: $7,600,000
  2014: $8,430,000
  To date: $33,626,670

  That’s as of 5 January 2015, which we’ll call the end of the season.

  Of course, looking at the main CP page, the counter is still incrementing twice a minute or more, and as of this writing is sitting at $34,947,208 or more than 1 point 3 million dollars since Monday. Taking bets now — assuming calendar year 2015 starts at the 5 Jan total, will this be the year to top ten million?

Spam of the day:

I think one of your ads caused my web browser to resize, you may well want to put that on your blacklist.

I think that’s pretty unlikely.

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¹ Yes, yes, that was a little rude, I apologize.

² That too; sorry.

³ Not to be confused with Dinosaur Comics; the near-ubiquity of The Toronto Man-Mountain aside, the two are not synonymous.

⁴ This means that she is not your lawyer, the advice is general, and you should consult a legal professional before taking any action, as your circumstances will vary. If you are paying her and she is your lawyer, the congratulations — she’s the best you could have in your corner unless Hammurabi, Learned Hand, and Richard Posner all have a kid together.

Deadlines are wonderful things — they focus the mind, and anybody that says they don’t screw around until the last possible moment before deadline is dangerously self-deluded. I, uh, may have heard that somewhere, not that I’d know. Nope. Not me.

Society of Illustrators and the second iteration of the Comic & Cartoon Art Annual and how the deadline for submission in all categories (several of which track neatly with webcomics) would be (was, now) yesterday. Well, good news, procrastinators! Deadline’s been extended to this Friday, 9 January.
• As long as we’re talking about juried processes involving the comics and cartoon arts, there was this bit from the twitterfeed of National Cartoonists Society president Tom Richmond:
  

  NCS Divisional Reuben Awards Submission Call http://wp.me/pcEqc-4Vo

  In other words, time for my annual reminder that webcomics are represented by two awards, long form and short form, and if you want to be considered you should follow that link and decide which category you fall into. One might also note that a number of you reading this may also fall into other categories, particularly the Comic Books (Ryan, Shelli, and Braden ought to really be submitting for Adventure Time, as should Noelle et. al. for Lumberjanes) and Graphic Novels (Box, Emily, Raina, Gene & Sonny, and Kazu, just off the top of my head).

  As in past years, I’ll be part of Richmond’s advisory committee, making sure that the best webcomics don’t get overlooked from consideration, so if there’s something that you feel I should bring to the membership’s attention, let me know. Please note that the deadline for submission is 15 February, which is sooner than you think.

• Speaking of the NCS awards, last year’s winner for On-Line Comics — Long Form, Jeff Smith¹, has returned from hiatus with the latest chapter of Tüki Save The Humans (that would be number three) kicking off yesterday. Tüki hasn’t run as frequently as was originally planned¹, and the site has had growing pains, but you know what? Free Jeff Smith comics delivered to me by magic internet lasers are good under any circumstances.

  Oh, right, deadline … deadline … okay, Tüki’s been in that fight with Big Ugly there since midway through the last chapter, and I’d say that one or the other one is gonna be dead soon. Considering it’s Tüki’s book, my money is on Toothless to be the one with his ass on the line.

Spam of the day:

Thank you for your helping hand.

You’re welcome. I pride myself on being a helpful kind of guy.

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¹ As was explained to me by Cartoon Books publisher and all-around nerd-wrangling badass Vijaya Iyer, Tüki was to run M-W-F for eight weeks, then take two months off, then on to the next chapter. Instead, we’re averaging about two chapters a year. Please don’t take this as a criticism of Smith and Iyer; I love them both to death, I love the story, and if that’s the pace that they can deliver the free webcomic at while maintaining their paying work, then I am happy for it.

• Back: KC Green ran one last Gunshow to say goodbye, and we should remind you that he is retiring one comic, not from the comics game. His adaptation of Pinocchio is top-notch, his collaboration with Anthony Clark, BACK, makes Wednesdays a joy, and you can keep up with his other comings and goings fairly easily at his main site. Thanks for 900 pages of funny, touching, sometimes heartbreaking comics, KC. You remain one of the most fearless creators working today. Also, I just now realized that KC does the comic called BACK and I gave this paragraph the heading of Back and that was totally unintentional. I’m a little tired today.
• Forward: The future of comics depends on bringing new readers into the fold, not just trying to appeal to an ever-shrinking cohort of lifelong¹ fanboys. Those readers have — rightly! — an expectation that they should be able to see themselves in the comics they read²; as I wrote in a piece that will hopefully see print in the coming year, there’s a sense of I’ve never seen comics about an experience like mine before and it’s damn well time I did. The future of comics is increasingly going to be determined by women and girls. As I’ve long said, nobody embodies that trend more than Raina Telgemeier, and it’s so apparent that no less an embodiment of established authority than the Wall Street Journal agrees. 2014 was the Year of Raina, but I suspect that future years will make 2014 look merely okay by comparison.
• Back: Readers may recall my placement of an order with TopatoCo back in October, number 519348 to be precise. You may also recall the notice last week regarding the rate at which TopatoCo shipped merch in the first two weeks of December. As I threatened to do in October, I placed an order (for John Allison’s Giant Days three-pack) yesterday, the last day of the year, close enough to the very end of the year as makes no difference and noted the order number: 545856. What can we learn from this?

  Some 26500 orders were placed between the end of October and the end of December, which one may reasonably conclude is the TopatoCo busy season. In just one quarter of that time, more than 15000 items were shipped; even accounting for the fact that some orders surely would have been cancelled, you’ve still got between 26.5K and let’s say 60K items (15K in two weeks, extrapolated out to two months) which is a tremendous lot of business, and good news for all involved. Take a moment to thank the merch elves of TopatoCo, much as I did with my end-of-order special instructions³.

• Forward: There are creative couples in comics where it’s pretty impossible to think of one half without thinking of the other as well — Raina Telgemeier is surely pushed to make even better comics (and pushes in return) thanks to the good fortune of being married to Dave Roman. Other power couples exist: Chris and Carly, Yuko and Ananth, Shelli and Braden, Ryan and Joey, and, of course, Mer and Mike. That last pair up and made it official last night, to which I can only say congratulations. Draw, love, laugh, and if Heidi and Ella can reach some kind of détente, there’s nothing the two of you can’t accomplish. Hooray!

Spam of the day:

BY USING OUR FAMILY, YOU CARRY OUT FULL RESPONSIBILITY DATA THESE MATERIALS AND MAY INDEMNIFY US AS WELL AS DAMAGES IT MAY BE INCURRED.

Is this some kind of cult thing? Because you have to tell me if you’re a cult.

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¹ That is, cape-obsessed.

² And, increasingly, create.

³ The drink referenced in that image was originally constructed for the Pineapple Maki contest, but since it looks like that’s not going to happen I have released it into the wild for all to enjoy.