Gina Gagliano and Colleen AF Venable may be my two favorite people right now. Today’s mail brought pre-release copies of both Boxers and Saints by Gene Leun Yang, 500-odd pages of comic goodness from one of the finest creators of our times, with much of the logistics of :01 Books bringing these volumes to print (and to my hands) landing squarely on Gagliano’s skilled shoulders.

The cover design is by Venable, and as much as I’ve praised her work previously¹, she’s blown away all previous efforts with these handsome, matching volumes — the covers sit in opposition to each other: substituting red for blue, dark for white, male for female, left for right; the place where they match is in the rage expressed on the faces of their respective protagonists. I. Can’t. Wait.

• We spoke last week about Brad Guigar² and his Kickstarter for a sequel to How To Make Webcomics; he was playing coy at that time about stretch goals, but on Friday after we at Fleen went to press, he announced two of them:
  • At US$12,500 (original goal was $10K), a new podcast would be launched where Guigar interviews interesting people in Webcomicistan
  • At US$15,000, a new episode of Webcomics Weekly

  Those first goal got met before I could tell you that the first guest lined up for the interview podcast would be George³; a little while ago the second goal was met, so it looks like we’ll get another WW. And Guigar’s updated his stretch goals again:

  • At US$17,500 (original goal was $10K), Webcomics Confidential (the new podcast) gets Zach Weinersmith for episode #2
  • At US$20,000, a second new episode of Webcomics Weekly

  I see a pattern developing here. I can’t speak for Brad, but every person that ever said, When does Webcomics Weekly come back? now appears to have a clear pathway to ensure that it does: chuck Five Large into the pot and that’s another episode, plus an episode of Webcomics Confidential. You got three and a half weeks to see how many you can get in the bank.

• Bunch of things happening this summer at the Cartoon Arts Museum for those of you in San Francisco:
  • Summer classes in cartooning for parents and kids! Wednesday 3 July and 7 August, on four different topics for just ten bucks a head.
  • This Saturday, 29 June, a free all-ages workshop entitled Where Do Toons Come From? with Robert Gordon, a Chicago- and Paris-based architecture & design educator and avid cartoonist. Bring your sketchbook and favorite pens!

  Bay Area peeps, be sure to let the rest of us know how these sessions go; they look like a blast.

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¹ And I realize that it’s an unusual thing to have a favorite book designer, but there you go.

² The handsomest man in webcomics. Grrrrowl!

³ Rohac, that is, he of the single name and Plans.

Every so often I get reminded of that time, when Randy Milholland got sick of people who bitched that the free entertainment he offered wasn’t on a regular enough schedule to suit them, and challenged them to put their money where their mouths were. I suspect that said schedule-bitchers never ponied up a dime, but enough people that did want to support Milholland did, which led Milholland to quit the day job and make free comics for our entertainment for a living.

I’m reminded of it this time because tomorrow marks nine years since Uncle Randy walked away from a crappy job and into that free, no-pants paradise that is modern webcomickry¹. Happy Nineiversary, Randy, and thanks for not murdering any of the schedule-bitchers² because incarceration would really mess up your update schedule.

• Today’s really awesome Kickstarter launch is by Evan Dahm, who is funding the first book of his third Overside saga, Vattu: The Name and The Mark. Clocking in at 270 pages, V:TNaTM forms a nicely self-contained story while still forming just the beginning of a much larger story (I’d estimate that by the time it’s done, Vattu will run 1500 – 2000 pages in all, so maybe six to eight collections this size?). In the five hours since launch (as this is being written), Dahm’s at some 97% of goal, which means he’s going to hit the only stretch goal announced so far:
  

  If it makes goal within the first day (by 10 am EST Tuesday), I will include a Kickstarter-exclusive small print with all physical rewards.

  Evan? You might want to think up some more stretch goals, on account of you’ve still got … 20 days and 19 hours, more or less, and I think you might go just a bit over goal.

• Are you a fan of awesome things? One would hope so, as that’s pretty much the focus we at Fleen have. Hope Larson, in addition to creating some of the finest [web]comics of the past decade or so, has over the past year dipped her toes into film-making, and her first efforts are now available for you to sample. Bitter Orange, Larson’s screenwriting and directorial debut, is now streaming, and it comes with an endorsement from no less than the finest writer on movies presently working in the English language.

  I speak, naturally, of Film Crit Hulk, whose observations on film are always a delight, and who gets Larson’s work like few others. Seriously, every time I write about one of Larson’s new books, I know that I won’t be a fraction as insightful or erudite as Hulk.³ But honestly? The best part of Bitter Orange comes at the very end of the credits; no easter eggs here, just a line that says:

  COPYRIGHT © MMXIII HOPE LARSON

  She thought up a story, she found a way to make it in her medium of choice, and now she owns it. In the wake of a damn-near internet-wide fight about whether or not large corporations can farm out their IP to movie-makers that may or may not understand what makes characters special, having a creator in charge of their vision is always worth celebrating.

• On Friday I speculated as to whether or not the Strip Search finalists knew who had won yet. Today, I noticed a tweet from Abby Howard in advance of tomorrow night’s finale screening/streaming:
  

  This is going to be my first non-stressful flight to Seattle! There’s no mystery or fear or uncertainty awaiting ONLY FRIENDSHIP #FRIENDSHIP

  Interpret how you will, and be ready to watch the whole thing come to a crescendo at 7:30pm PDT tomorrow, 18 June 2013.

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¹ Note to casual readers: no part of comicking is entirely paradisiacal, but the no-pants thing is frequently true.

² That we know of, and if you were tried by a jury of your actual, no-pants peers, not only would they not convict, they’d send you home with a medal.

³ To say nothing of my pathetic, puny smashing skills.

David Malki ! of Wondermark¹ has provided a button underneath his strip that says This comic in a blog-friendly format which, when clicked, reformats his strip as 2×2 panels in a pop-up. Heck, if he’s gonna provide it, I’m gonna click it. Neat.

• If you haven’t seen the first part of the Strip Search season one finale, what the crap-hell are you waiting for? Katie, Abby, and Maki each brought a fully-fleshed pitch for Mike and Jerry to pore over, and regardless of who wins I want to see all three of these as a part of my regular rotation. Be sure to look over their submissions after watching the episode, because there’s some marvelous work in there².

  Spoiler #1: It’s a three-way showdown for the top prize, as the Artists are given four hours to produce three strips that fit into their new comic concepts.
  Spoiler #2: Holy crap with less than two and a half hours left Katie asks to abandon her Cintiq and start over on paper. Credits roll just as she starts to put pencil to paper, so we all have to wait until 7:30pm PDT (GMT-7) on Tuesday, 18 June to see how it turns out.

  Spoilery speculation: It’s been months since the three-way showdown, which means one of two things is true: either our finalists have been waiting all this time to find out who wins (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not knowing), or they know and haven’t been allowed to say for all this time (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not talking). Here’s to Tuesday when we can all find out what the hell is going on.

• Intriguing Kickstarter of the Day: Darren Gendron has launched a campaign behind a fantasy (specifically, faerie) themed card deck, and recruited some of the best in webcomics artists to do designs. Gendron’s pretty noted for projects with relatively low goals, fast turnarounds, and low cost of basic (physical) rewards as well as pushing into spaces where webcomics don’t usually go (board books, board games, etc.). In this case, if you’re a fan of Obsidian Abnormal, Evan Dahm, Lar deSouza, Yan Gagné and Mary Garren, K Lynn Smith, LJ Lockhart, Sarah Ellerton, or Jamie Noguchi, you could do worse than popping eight or nine bucks to get a small representation of their artwork on a deck of cards that can also be used to fleece your friends at poker.

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¹ And Machine of Death and TopatoCo and a lot more besides.

² Particularly Katie’s, whose children-in-peril story has a Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends vibe that’s making me feel joy in my black, cynical heart.

The annual Emergency Action Plan refresher [PDF] took place today in my office, which ate up some time and has me slightly in the weeds today. My apologies if this is brief.

• How the heck did CAKE sneak up on me?¹ And why the heck does Chicago Alternative Comics Expo get to misspell its acronym like that?² Regardless, the likes of Sarah Becan, Matt Bors, Box Brown, Anthony Clark, Zac Gorman, Meredith Gran, Lisa Hanawalt, Lucy Knisley, Tom McHenry, Tyler Page, Spike, Jason Viola, and more.
• Speaking of Matt Bors, I understand that he’s now done 1000 comics on the great and the good and venal and the stupid. Sometimes he ruffles the right feathers, sometimes he picks on people I think don’t deserve it, but he’s always got a point of view that makes me think. Well done, Mr Bors.
• As was foretold in the beforetimes, Schlock Mercenary has now achieved 13 years of hard sci-fi adventure, mayhem, and artistic refinements. Oddly, this makes the strip slightly older than creator Howard Tayler, has he has celebrated
  eleven proper birthdays, being one of those 29 February-birthed mutants. But what the heck, he’s done time-travel stories, I’m sure it all makes sense somewhere in this crazy universe. Congratulations, evil twin.

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¹ Many thanks to the TopatoCo blog for reminding me.

² This is not ‘Nam, there are rules, etc.

I’d like to start off today with a correction, or a clarification, or whatever’s appropriate when you specualte out loud and it turns out you were totally off base, but since it involves spoilery information I’ma stick it down at the bottom of the page and we can start with something else.

Books! New books! Second volumes, in fact, the both of them!

• There may be no single [web]comics character of the past few years that is as disturbing as Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer (although whatever the hell that is menacing Wadsworth Zane in today’s Broodhollow is rapidly heading for the top spot). In case his mayhem-related office activities (or office-related mayhem activities) aren’t enough to piece your very soul, he also stares at you dead-eyed, menacingly, from the cover of the new collection of Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse, Business Animals, which has just gone up for pre-order.

  Usual disclaimer: Jon got me started in this blog-based opinion-having racket and also he owns my soul. But none of that changes the fact that regardless of whatever bias I might be injecting into this discussion, PZ Frickin’ Myers wrote the foreword, and you can’t do much better than that.

• In a neat bit of self-wanging, Zach Weinersmith managed to hose up his own site by crosslinking SMBC and the Kickstarter campaign for his newest original book, Trial of the Clone 2: Wrath of the Pacifist. Like the original Trial of the Clone, ToTC 2:WotP is a choosable-path comedic story, wherein your character from ToTC has failed upward to being in charge of the galaxy and now must rule; near the end of the first book’s Kickstarter campaign Weinersmith asked if the sequel should follow the protagonist on a Good path or an Evil one, and the consensus was Good.

  While Evil often looks to be more fun, you can’t deny that there’s nothing funnier than to watch somebody attempt to do Good and screw it up (and since the “hero” of ToTC is easily the most inept being in all of time and space, there should be plenty of room for up-screwing).

  In the hours since the book-kick launched, ToTC 2: WotP has cleared 75% of its US$20,000 goal, and reached the first four stretch goals (Weinersmith having pioneered the art of setting goals below the funding goal, building excitement while guaranteeing some outcomes). So far the stretches have all been related to getting more illustrations (by Weinersmith’s longtime collaborator, Chris Jones), but I imagine that there are some interesting goals in store once goal has been met in … oh, I’d say about two hours from now.

Okay, here’s that correction and remember: spoilers ahoy.

• Four days ago I laid out a timeline for the remainder of the season of Strip Search:
  

  Okay, looking at the calendar we’ve got the Maki/Lexxy elimination tomorrow, then four more episodes on 7, 11, 14, and 18 June. I had speculated early that there might be a final three approach (there’s ample precedent in the reality competition genre), but given the setup of the Strip Search Thunderdome, it make sense that all eliminations will be two Artists head-to-head, and this schedule reinforces that thought Consider: that gives us time for a social challenge among three competitors (7 June), a competitive challenge for immunity (11 June), an elimination to get us down to two (14 June), and the Big Ready-Set-Art on 18 June.

  So, yeah, my guess was wrong; as seen in today’s episode of Strip Search, none of that is happening. I should have stuck with my original speculations, since it turns out that by defeating Lexxy on Tuesday, Maki advanced to the Strip Search equivalent of Fashion Week: he and Abby and Katie face no more challenges in the house, are sent home to work up a final challenge for two months, then return to make their pitches.

  The original strips that they develop over eight weeks must include a name, three character bios, six sample strips¹ and a t-shirt design. Judging will be shown in a two-part finale, next Friday (14 June) and the following Tuesday (18 June), which per Robert Khoo will have some live component.

  There is at this point no way to tell which of the three finalists has the edge — each of the three could (and deserves) to win the prize, who wins almost doesn’t matter. While US$15,000 and a year’s embed in the Penny Arcade machine are nothing to sneeze at, the attention that the Artists have garnered, the audience that each of their new comics will have right from the beginning, and the support system that they’ve forged among themselves² means that they’re all winners³. Abby, Katie, Maki, it’s been a hell of a ride that you’ve given us and I just want to thank you for it.

Updated to add: Tickets for the Strip Search finale just went on sale. Tuesday, 18 June at 6:30pm PDT (GMT-7) at the Meydenbauer Center in Seattle. The final three episodes will be played in the theater, with the final episode released to the world at 7:30pm. Oh and on an unrelated note, kudos to the Meydenbauer for keeping ticketing fees to an entirely-reasonable US$1.52; I just bought tickets for Alton Brown’s Tour O’ Fun and I got socked for ten bucks a ticket. Screw you, Ticketmaster.

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¹ It’s gotta be the best six strips I’ve ever written — Abby.

² Everything that the nominal winner learns from their year in the PA offices will absolutely filter out to the other Artists. There’s a precedent for this kind of very fast, very thorough knowledge diffusion, and it’s within Mission Control during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. As Gene Kranz observed, it wasn’t necessary for one flight controller group (or crew) to experience everything themselves, because they worked under the model of What any one of us learns, we all learn and build on.

³ There’s no lose in this. — Maki.

Who’s in the mood for brief items? I sure am!

• Anniversaries can be tricky things. For example, today’s SMBC bears the number 3000, which is an official Big Damn Round Number in the Fleen ordinal system of mathematics. However, Zach Weinersmith has actually done a good deal more than 3000 comics, if you consider his archive.

  For starters, today’s strip is the 2955th of the current series, but then there are 132 comics in the so-called “Classic” SMBC collection (black and white, strip-style comics with actual characters and things) and another five dozen or so that appeared sporadically during the modern age (some during a hiatus in 2003 and 2004, some alongside regular SMBC from 2005 to 2007).

  But what the hell, since at least 2005 it appears that the strip numbers have been going up monotonically, and that makes today as good a day as any to recognize Weinersmith for reaching 3000 strips so everybody feel good for Zach.

• Following up on Erika Moen’s win in the Magic: The Gathering challenge on Strip Search, there was a question at the time as to whether or not Wizards of the Coast would actually be producing said deck, and you may recall that Robert Khoo was unable to comment at the time. Well, wonder no more, as Hurricane Erika shared the news on twitter that the deck is being produced:
  

  We went back to the winner, Erika Moen, and had her finish out her design without the time pressure on the show and finalized an awesome design for a skateboard deck. Now we are excited to announce that attendees to the event can enter for a chance to win a skate deck featuring Erika’s final design by Hooligan!

  More precisely, four decks¹ are being made for the giveaway, and dang do they look sharp². Congrats again to Moen, and thanks to all involved for letting us know how things ultimately turned out.

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¹ I’m guessing at least one of them makes its way to Ebay.

² You can compare Moen’s original design against the final design; it’s pretty impressive how close the colors are given that the original was done with marker rather than computer color-matching against a Pantone standard.

This page has, for a number of years, noted that the Joe Shuster Awards are perhaps the best-curated of the comics awards — they look at all genres and media, and so long as the creators meet the requirement of being Canadian, they’re good for consideration.

Of particular note is the list of past winners in the category of Webcomics Creator / Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web: Dan Kim, Ryan Sohmer and Lar De Souza, Cameron Stewart, Karl Kerschl, and Emily Carroll (two years running) represent the breadth and depth of Canadian cartooning, and possibly Canadianess itself. And if the Shusters are a bit less spare than they once were, there are still only nine categories, compared to nearly thirty for the Eisners.

This year’s nominations are out, and those singled out for recognition that may be of interest to the webcomics community include:

Fleen congratulates all of the nominees, and notes again the general lack of weak or inexplicable names on the list. The 2013 Joe Shuster Awards/Le Prix Joe Shuster 2013 will be presented not at a convention, but at a gala in Toronto (time/location TBA) on Saturday, 25 August.

So round about 3:00am¹ today my EMS pager went off (holiday duty, y’all) and I realized while getting ready to head out lights-and-sirens on a chest pain call that I’d been dreaming about Erika Moen choreographing her fellow Strip Search Artists into an (interpretive, classy, educational, and definitely PG-13 rated) pole dance routine designed to teach the lessons imparted in Oh Joy, Sex Toy. This indicates either I am dangerously insane, or I may have discovered the greatest side project for webcomics creators ever. Don’t tell me if it’s the insane one.

• Over the weekend the National Cartoonists Society had their big weekend o’ fun and for the second year recognized excellence in the field of online comics. Although Jon Rosenberg will always be the first person to receive an NCS division award for an online comic, this year the award was split in two, so two more creators can say that they were the first ever honored by the NCS for (respectively) the Long Form and Short Form online comic.

  Long Form went to Vince Dorse for Untold Tales of Bigfoot, which I’ve enjoyed reading since the nominations were announced back in March. Somebody more clever than me described UToB as “Bone-esque” which is pretty high praise, and I’m happy to say that any of the three nominees could have been found a deserving winner, although I was totally pulling for Meredith Gran² ³.

  Over on the Short Form side, Graham Harrop’s Ten Cats won over Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic and Michael McParlane’s Mac; there was some dissatisfaction expressed back in March that these three strips are all associated with GoComics, not independent in the sense of the other six nominees for Online Comics have been over two years, and not representative of that not-really-definable “webcomic aesthetic”. And I’ve been thinking about that.

  The thing is, if (as webcomics boosters have said, and we at Fleen are no exception to this) webcomics should be allowed to compete against whatever you can define (if anything, at the point) not-webcomics, without distinction to medium of distribution, then the three nominees in Short Form make sense — they were chosen for consideration by the NCS jury without consideration to where they came from, and may well be seen as representing a step towards not having “online” as a separate category of the NCS awards.

  Would I prefer to see Girl Genius or The Abominable Charles Christopher up against, say, Fables, Johnny Wander or Girls With Slingshots up against Pearls Before Swine⁴, and Becky Dreistadt dominating the Book Illustration category? Absolutely, and I’ll be certain to get right on that as soon as I’m in charge of the world. In the meantime, progress.

• Speaking of Becky Dreistadt⁵, I confess myself surprised to see that she’s involved in some book Kickstarters that look like they’re going to make goal, but aren’t seeing the big multipliers that history would have indicated. Firstly, the original four B9 Kingdom creators are nine days out from their three themed books collection, Midnight Monsters closing; while they’re on track to make goal, they aren’t going to do the three-to-nine times overfunding that B9 has managed in the past. Similarly, the second volume of The Bear is verging in on goal with eight days to go but won’t hit the nearly five times overfunding of volume one.

  I can’t figure out what the slowness in support is down to. Midnight Monsters is actually a pick-your-favorite collection of three books rather than a single project, and I thought that structure might have driven more support to the project by allowing a super-fan of (say) Evan Dahm who isn’t that fond of (say) KC Green (not that I think any such people actually exist) to back one creator economically rather than decided to forgo because money would have gone to another and made support too expensive. Additionally, the lack of stretch goals may be removing some of the “game” aspect from this campaign.

  But then, The Bear 2 has stretch goals, and two reasonably rabid fan bases behind it (the other supplied by Ryan Sohmer), and it looks like it will make the first stretch but won’t be achieving one after another like the first time out. I wonder if having the two projects are cannibalizing each other by running at the same time rather than being separated by a couple of months? Have we just reached market saturation on gorgeous, high-quality art books?

  In any event, this is neither the time for complacency nor for despair, as I want my damn Midnight Monsters and The Bear 2 books, so kindly go sell some plasma or tell your grandkids that plenty of people get by without insulin for a week and pledge, dadnugget.

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¹ Coincidentally about the same time that the latest episode of Strip Search went live.

² Not that that’s much help; I was also totally pulling for Erika Moen in Strip Search; in my heart, they are both winners.

³ I shouldn’t neglect to note that Pat Lewis was the third nominee, for Muscles Diablo in Where Terror Lurks, which is also terrific.

⁴ And hoo boy, Stephan Pastis may as well start signing himself Susan Lucci, having been nominated six years running for the top NCS award — the eponymous Reuben — and this year losing out to both other nominees in a tie.

⁵ And before I forget, happy belated birthday, Becky.

It’s been a miserable couple of days, weather-wise, here in the vast New Jersey hinterlands — heat and humidity more expected in July than May, and my house’s HVAC is having issues. Bleah. If the predictions hold true, we’re in for a couple of days of rain, which ought to break the temperatures if not the humidity, and hopefully climate control will be re-established inside before it gets nasty again; in the meantime, just me and the dog, hangin’ around, being too warm for comfort. Let’s think cool thoughts.

• They always say that you shouldn’t drink booze when you’re over-hot, because it’ll dehydrate you and make you more miserable in the long term; I’m fully prepared to say that “they” can suck it. And while they’re sucking it, those of you in New York City can look forward to the latest attempt by Kristen Siebecker¹ to teach you uncultured heathens dear, dear friends to appreciate wine.

  This iteration of Popping Your Cork will be on 12 June at 6:15pm in Midtown, where she’ll be pairing wines from the Finger Lakes with food from India. Because Kristen appreciates comics and loves us, she’s given us a coupon code for 10% off the cost of the evening: use EMAIL10 at checkout and save a couple of bucks. And just a thought, anybody that went to a couple of these and did a comic about their learning journey? That would be legit fascinating and I would pay to read it.

• The shows will be nonstop from here out to at least the end of the summer. Consider:
  • Phoenix Comicon is already underway, with a healthy representation of webcomickers (and a very helpful webcomics category on the guest list)
  • MCM London starts tomorrow for those of you on the British side of the Atlantic and a stack of comics types in attendance (helpful map from Robin Hoelzemann of Curia Regis here)
  • VanCAF runs Saturday and Sunday, with the cream of the PNW crop making their way across the border, with a cluster of TopatoCo-affiliated creators, some Cloudscapers, a pair of superbros, and many, many more (it looks to be the webcomickiest of the three shows going on this weekend)

  That’s not even considering the fact that Philadelphia Comic Con² hits next weekend, and HeroesCon the weekend after that. Anybody with a moment to catch their breath before San Diego, raise your hand and also I hate you.

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¹ Original showrunner of MoCCA Fest, back in the Puck Building before fires and such.

² Also known as “The Con Formerly Known as Megan Fox Tits Wolverine World”, or hell let’s just call it .

Dare we hope? And just in time for FunkyWatch May?

• I already knew I was going to tell you today about the launch of the Skin Horse Book 4 Kickstarter once I saw some late-night tweets on Friday about it going live over the weekend; as I believe this page has established, I likes me some Skin Horse. What I didn’t expect was to find myself quoted in the Kickstarter video. I gotta confess, even having been asked to provide quotes, blurbs, forwards, and the like a fair number of times, it’s a little thrill every time I see that somebody might actually care for my opinion-mongerings. Although, ahem.

  I shouldn’t get snarky, not when Jeffrey Wells and Shaenon Garrity¹ entertain me so wonderfully for free six days a week, when they offer up original art as a supporter reward², and when backers get the opportunity to attend a freakin’ TIKI PARTY at the tiki shack that Ms Garrity has had built in her backyard for the express purpose of gettin’ messed up on fruity drinks in mugs with faces on them. I’m pretty sure that no other webcomicker has ever allowed a prize of Come get drunk at my house which means you will know where I live, meaning that Ms Garrity is either slightly foolhardy, trusts absolutely in her fanbase, or has mysterious Funk Queen powers that protect her from all harm. I’m betting on that third one.

• Merch alert for those going to Phoenix Comicon this weekend: Andrew Hussie’s legion of devoted fans³ are about to discover the majesty that is the Chris Yates handmade puzzle line as a collection of GOD TIER BAFFLER!s is placed on sale and promptly sells out ten minutes later. If you make it past the Homestucks to the rest of the TopatoCo table, tell ’em I said hi.
• Speaking of TopatoCo, KC Green won’t be there, presumably because he’s busy scripting new Regular Show comics in the wake of the success of issue #1. Let’s put this in perspective: the highest-selling comic of April 2013 had something like 132,000 copies sold, and that was Batman. Green has put a new comic, aimed at kids, at fully half the sales of the marquee book of the most-recognized character in the country. That never happens. Everybody feel good for KC, or Mr Green if you’re nasty.

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¹ Funk Queen of Everything That Will Survive When All East Of The San Andreas Drops Into The Atlantic.

² Now at the entirely more-appropriate US$100 backer level; previous efforts by Ms Garrity have criminally undervalued her originals.

³ Or Elite Shock Troops of the Forthcoming Purification, take your pick.