She finally did it. There are googly eyes staring at me as I write this. Send help.

Things to keep an eye (so to speak) out for:

• Well done, ghost of Ryan North, you’re officially the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history, more than doubling the second-place contender. Also, what was up with raising more than US$101,000 in the last full day of the campaign? That is nuts and the people that support you, we they are nuts.
• Want to drive yourself crazy? Check out the 19 page preview of Cameron Stewart’s next project, NIRO. Crazy, because now you need to see the rest of the story, and Stewart hasn’t released it yet, ha ha ha¹. 180 degrees removed from the psychological drama of Sin Titulo, NIRO appears to mix some apocalyptic setting here, some unspeakable danger there, and a loner with a moral/religious code trying to do the right thing right about … h’yahhh. NIRO will release as choose-your-price (99 cents or more) digital issues starting early next year, culminating in a print collection.
• Erika Moen has been doing a public service behind the scenes for a good while now, studying to become more knowledgeable about how human sexuality works than anybody this side of the Kinsey Institute for the purposes of putting together a graphic novel that’s an educational resource for teens. It’s slow work, though, and she’s dying to share helpful information with the reading public before 2015. What to do?
  

  I’m thinking I’ll start up a smaller comic to run in the mean time. I’m thinking a sex toy review comic. WOULD YOU READ THAT?

  I am asking everybody reading this now to contact Moen (her Twitterpage should suffice) to say Yes, please, let us see this comic of yours as often as you can produce it!

Several subsets of Alliday will be dropping in the next week or so — whichever things you might celebrate or find comfort in, enjoy the heck out of ’em. We at Fleen will do our best to scrape up news in the coming days, but it may be kind of scarce on the ground.

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¹ If I get driven crazy from the cliffhanger, you’re all coming with me.

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

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

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

From the Charity Front:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s approximately the Fleeniversary ’round these parts; the official announcement of my entrée into semi-abusive opinion-mongering occurred in the old Goats forums on 22 December 2005, but I’d been banking postings as far back as 5 December, and was really into the daily posting routine (even though nobody was reading yet) around the 15th or so. Which is a long way of saying — today is as close to seven years of what the masthead calls The webcomics blog about webcomics as you’re gonna get.

If I’ve got all my dates right, at this time seven years ago Jon Rosenberg¹ was not yet staring down 40 and had never changed a diaper. Seven years ago, people were somewhat more justified in thinking that Yuko Ota was in her early teens. Seven years ago, Jeff Rowland had proved himself unkillable by mere killer spiders and had started the great and vast TopatoCo Empire, even tangling with weird t-shirt company perverts.

So many of the tools and services we take for granted in webcomics were missing; at that time, there was no Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Project Wonderful, or :01 Books. Seven years ago, George Rohac had not yet sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.

Return to Sender had only been on hiatus for a year, TCAF had only started to conquer the world, Commissioner James Gordon Hastings had not been whelped, the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge had been going for less than a year, we had only just met Dan McNinja’s moustache, and the Great Outdoor Fight was still a month away from its stealthy beginnings, and further from its legendary majesty.

Rich Stevens was exactly the same, endless and unchanging, save only he is now married and likes dogs.

They say seven years in is when you get tired of things, but I have to say, I still enjoy the heck out all of this, so I hope you’ll join me as I start Year Eight of working out my thoughts on various matters — mostly webcomics, but no promises — where you can hear them. Also, if you happen to be in north/central New Jersey tomorrow, do drop by to see the webcomickers at Wild Pig Comics from noon to 4:00pm, won’t you?

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¹ Who, Svengali-like, planted the seeds in my head and made them bear the desired brainfruit that I should be writing all of this stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, kids, did you see these dates? Things for you to do and/or celebrate, if you are special enough.

• Special people skill #1: being in or near Brooklyn as the constantly on the move Scott C has a signing for The Great Showdowns this Saturday, 8 December, from 7:00pm to 8:00pm. The fun happens at art boutique The Cotton Candy Machine¹ in Williamsburg, at the corner of Roebling & South First, convenient to the JMZ and L subway lines, as well as the dreaded G train. Also at the signing: prints, posters, and puppets.
• Special people skill #2: being in Bellevue, WA, and having the foresight to buy tickets a week ago for the annual Child’s Play Charity Dinner/Auction, kicking off at 6:30pm tomorrow night at Meydenbauer Center and going until all the money has been raised. Considering that CP2K12 is sitting at US$2.1million before this, their biggest single night of the year, gives considerable support to the notion that they may surpass last year’s crazy generous total of 3.5 literal megabucks.
• Special people skill #3: going back in time two days and wishing Little Gamers a happy internetiversary, having survived twelve years of approximately daily cartoonings. You would, naturally enough, have been met with kindly gratitude for your thoughtfulness a not-unexpected show of hostility an altogether typical reaction from self-styled juvenile delinquent wannabe Mr Madsen, and honestly, would you want anything else? While there, don’t forget to check out the progress meter for the Mongol Rally and maybe kick in a few bucks/northern bucks/aussie fun bucks/kiwi even funner bucks/pounds/euros/kronor? Call it a birthday present.

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¹ Founded by comics superstar Tara McPherson and Bay Area transplant Sean Leonard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two quick items for you today, and it’s not like any of you aren’t suffering from pie coma anyway.

• Thanks to a couple of classes on optical engineering back in my college days, I know a bit about the additive nature of color, but I never really understood how artists see it; enter a nice primer on color (or colour, if you prefer) theory from the artist’s perspective, which I found nicely informative and I hope you do, too.
• Weirdly, Brad Guigar does not entirely depend on punnery for humor (or humour, if you prefer), which was demonstrated when he did a stand-up comedy set back in the springtime. For anybody that got to listen to the recording¹, Guigar’s brad-up comedic stylings are very old school — he’d have killed in the Catskills if only his name were “Shecky”.

  In any event, Brad’s heading back to the microphone and bare stage, and you can check him out yourself if you’re in Philadelphia on Sunday, 9 December. The Bradster will hit the stage of the Helium Comedy Club² at 7:30pm, and please remember to tip your waitress.

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¹ Or watch the video, here.

² Try the veal.

Friend o’ Fleen Rick Marshall did a set of live, on-camera interviews at Long Beach Comic and Horror Con earlier this month the first of which is now available for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to turn your speakers UP, as the little percussion sting at start takes on a Lalo Schifrinesque character when given sufficient volume. Don’t wuss out with little speakers on your laptop, either — give that sucker some bass.

• We’re a little more than two weeks into this year’s Child’s Play holiday campaign which makes it a good time to note that the current take is north of half a million dollars, which if the current giving rate can be maintained will produce a total normally only seen attached to things like Homestuck Kickstarters.

  Though unlike Kickstarters, which see a huge front-loaded effort that then drops off (maybe regaining momentum at the end of the campaign), Child’s Play tends to see week-on-week increases through at least the first half of the campaign, typically peaking around the phenomenally well-funded charity dinner/auction (which this year will be on Thursday, 6 December in Bellevue, WA). Recall that Child’s Play has an unbroken streak (even through the economic meltdown) of increasing totals year-to-year, which means another US$3million need to be raised to keep the tradition alive.

• Speaking of Child’s Play, there’s an entire calendar of events covering the next few weeks, meaning that nearly everybody has a chance to do something that’s simultaneously fund and beneficial and maybe even local. Case in point: my favorite recurring event is Ümloud!, because you really can’t have too many umlauts in your life.

  Having long since grown beyond its conception as some people playing Rock Band in a bar, this year’s Ümloud! will stream the Rock Band fun over the internet, so everybody can enjoy it. Everybody that’s not at the charity auction in Bellevue, that is, as it’s also on 6 December. If you’re catching the fun from home, maybe check out the participating hospital map¹ and find a local beneficiary that you could toss a few bucks? Just sayin’.

• Interesting: a Top 100 Most Important People List (such as you would find this time of year), this time referring to movers and/or shakers in the comics industry. Unsurprisingly, it’s reportedly overwhelmingly male² with the first woman not showing up until slot #29 (Diane Nelson, head of DC Entertainment).

  In fact, all but one of the women are outside the creative end of comics, the one outlier, the single woman deemed important from a creative standpoint being Kate Beaton. While I have to object that no other female creators are worthy of recognition, it’s hard to argue with the influence Beaton’s had, particularly given the very wide swath of attention that she’s earned both inside and outside comics for the past year and a half or so.

  But seriously, no Amanda Conner? Fiona Staples is redefining how beautiful comic art can be with her work on Saga, Carla Speed McNeil is breaking the boundaries of SF work with Finder, Colleen Doran’s Gone to Amerikay has been received with universal acclaim, and Spike Trotman released Poorcraft to fill a niche that nobody else even recognized. Raina Telgemeier continues a multi-year domination of the YA market, and Hope Larson and Meredith Gran are hauling new/young/female readers into comics hand over fist.

  Granted, the list is reportedly focused on who has power within the industry, but if you don’t have comics that people want to read, you don’t have an industry. If you can’t see how these women (and I could name plenty more) are influential on comics today, and especially to keeping comics alive as a vital industry for the coming decades, you’ve got some research to do.

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¹ Which initially centers on North America, yes, but which is scrollable for reasons. Drag ‘er around to other hemispheres, see what you can find!

² On account of the whole thing won’t be revealed until tomorrow, in the inaugural issue of a print companion to the Bleeding Cool website.