If there are three guys in webcomics that could be said to resemble each other, it’s probably Zach Weinersmith, Boulet, and Scott C. It’s something about the way they all draw themselves as scruffy. And, as chance would have it, all three of these scruffy gentlemen are in the news today.

• As of about half an hour ago, Messers Weinersmith and Boulet were still in an AMA over at Reddit that started at noon, eastern time (meaning that one or both of them were answering questions for more than three and a half hours); they were talking about their storybook, Augie and the Green Knight. There’s lots of great Qs and As all the way through, but for my money you can’t beat this particular exchange about two hours in:
  

  Draw yourselves each other like one of your French girls, please? A sketch would be more than sufficient.
  Edit: figured this would be more fun.

  The results are … about what you’d expect, given that cartoonists are suspect under the best of circumstances, and generally horrible to each other. It was beautiful. Truly.

  This is also a good time to note that as the AMA was kicking off, Augie crossed the eight days remaining mark; it’s been a while since they crossed a stretch goal and there are still some unreached. It’s already inside the lower bounds of the (admittedly wide margin-of-error) FFF prediction; if it reaches the midpoint of US$400,000 (a bit more optimistic than Kicktraq’s model), it will be the #4 all-time most funded publishing project and the most-funded children’s book.

• Scruffy guy #3, Scott C, has a new gallery show about to launch; the third exhibition of Great Showdowns (can a book be far behind?) will be unveiled at Gallery 1988 in LA on 11 July¹. If you think you’d like to buy Showdowns originals, you have a fair chance to do so since they won’t go up for sale until the day after the opening — contact Gallery 1988 to get on the preview list, and you’ll be able to see the works being shown, then try to buy your favorites when they go up for sale online the next day. You’ll get your art some time after the show goes down on 2 August, and from personal experience I can tell you that Gallery 1988 do an outstanding job of packaging and shipping art.
• You know who does webcomics and is the opposite of scruffy? Chris Yates. I have to assume that having a beard is a hazard around all the power tools he uses to make Baffler!s. But Gary, I hear you cry, Chris Yates doesn’t do webcomics any more! He retired Reprographics ten months ago to make short films on YouTube! You even wrote about it! Yeah, turns out that once you get cartooning in you, it’s hard to shake:
  

  Hello! So it turns out I really miss making comics, so I’m going to make them again on a regular basis.

  Working on Nothing But Flowers was a really interesting experiment, but I think I’m probably better suited to making weird diary comics and wooden puzzles than attempting to be the next big YouTube sensation.

  The plan is I will post at least one comic each week and try to break some bad shortcut habits. No more automatic Cutout filter at 50% and no more fonts are the first to go. I’m calling this current effort “In Medias Res” which emphasizes just pulling a few moments from real conversations and keeping things concise.

  So happy to be back and hope you stick around!

  For simplicity I’m going to keep the link over there to the right marked Reprographics, but for at least the time being the (very different from photocomics) content that Yates puts up will go under the name In Media Res. The first one is up now, and it looks really nice.

Hi there! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a group of volunteers and starting a new initiative in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us beneficial information to work on.

You’re starting an initiative in the community to talk about webcomics? Neat. Let me know how that works out for you.

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¹ As luck would have it, I’ll be flying through LA a couple of days later, but my connection times won’t permit me to see anything beyond the bounds of LAX. Booooo.

How’s everybody doing today? Nice weekend? Having a good one? Good, good.

• Know what I respect as a reason for doing anything? Honestly, truly respect, I’m completely not being snarky here? An arbitrary, meaningful only to yourself, completely petty I’ll show them all! achievement.

  Like, say, blogging about webcomics when my entire initial motivation for doing so has been overturned about three full times since I started because goddammit, I said I was going to blog regularly and that’s just what I’m gonna do. There are others out there that write better, have more developed insight, or actually get paid for the writing they do, but I’ve been doing this for eight and a half years and I’ll keep going out of spite if necessary.

  Not that this is about me.

  Rather, Greg Dean found a bit of inspiration in a completely arbitrary milestone — drawing and posting more strips than the legendary Bill Watterson — and now he’s achieved that milestone. I doubt that three thousand, one hundred and sixty-one comics will ever catch on in the same way that big round numbers have, but it’s got to feel good all the same.

• The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter is down to single-digit days at this point¹; the US$1 million original goal was obliterated on the first day, and the stretch goal of US$5 million looks pretty doable at this point in the long tail. I just wanted to point something out in the latest update to the project.

  A reward item that’s fairly unique² is a 2015 calendar, to be illustrated by the artists behind Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and tons of your favorite comics and childrens books. Traditionally, there are twelve months in a (non-lunar) calendar, and six of the artists have been named so far: Mary GrandPré (illustrator of the North American editions of Harry Potter before Kazu Kibuishi), Brett Helquist (illustrator of the Lemony Snicket books), and four webcomickers: Mike Krahulik, Chris Eliolpoulos, Katie Cook, and Mike Maihack.

  It makes sense that the comics side is represented by webcomickers, as they are mostly young enough to have grown up on Reading Rainbow, and are getting to the point of having kids themselves. They’re each donating the art for the calendar as well as five prints for inclusion in high-dollar-value reward tiers. It’s not known who will illustrate the remaining six months yet, because they’ll be picked via a an open contest after the Kickstarter is done.

  I know that we at Fleen have more than once urged creators to not participate in art contests where the prize is you get to give away your art for free, but you know what? There’s an exception to every rule, and for the Don’t vie for the opportunity to give away your art for exposure rule³ that would be But it’s okay if LeVar Burton is asking you to help kids learn to love reading.

  The Burton Exception is pretty damn narrow, and I think that’s probably for the best. Anyway, start brainstorming ideas; webcomickers with kids in your lives, this could be the best shot you ever have for them to respect you. And if the calendar goes over large, maybe there will be more of them in future years.

Spam of the day:

Hey, I think your blog might be having browser compatibility issues. When I look at your blog in Firefox, it looks fine but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping.

Man, fuck Internet Explorer.

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¹ In fact, while I was typing that paragraph, it rolled over from nine days remaining to eight days remaining.

² It’s only directly included in two reward tiers, one at US$30, and again at US$175 with some other items. But it’s available as an add-on to any pledge for US$25 per calendar.

³ I think I’ll just shorthand it as the Stevens Rule, for the very quotable Rich Stevens observation: People die of exposure.
,

Hoo boy, when Dr Dante Shepherd posted to Twitter last night about the hate mail that today’s Surviving the World would bring, he wasn’t kidding. Because — professor that he is — he’s laid out the rhetorical equivalent of a chemical reaction that describes freedom on one side, lives on the other, and asks if the two parts are actually in balance.

Just … just read the whole thing, and then take five minutes to think about what he’s actually saying before you decide he’s an enemy of freedom and needs to die, okay? To quote my favorite line from one of my favorite movies on the topic of freedom, Well, in all my years I ain’t never heard, seen nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. Hell yeah! I’m for debating anything. His position is that the freedom that some demand requires (as does all freedom) a sacrifice that is being paid by others who don’t have the chance to object; if you’re going to contact him in high dudgeon, answer that point.

On decidedly lighter notes:

• I smell crossover! The latest storyline at Not Invented Here is about to collide with Unshelved, which isn’t totally surprising given that a) they’re both written by Bill Barnes, and b) NIH launched with an explicit acknowledgment that it and Unshelved share a reality. To the book depository!
• Promised Kickstarter updates: the Oh Joy, Sex Toy print collection and Girls With Slingshots book tour campaigns wrapped up last night, with totals of US$69,270¹ and US$36,676 respectively. In both cases, they fell within the margin of error of the original FFF, but not the new, stil-under-development FFFmk2. Nobody said that it would be easy to reduce something as complex as Kickstarter funding to a simple calculation, but I shall persist.

  But let’s not lose fact of the important part: Danielle Corsetto and Erika Moen will both be giving considerably more money to guest artists than they would have otherwise, and both demolished their original goals (GWS: 367% of goal OJST: 385% of goal), and that’s worth celebrating in any circumstances. Well done, ladies, now get your ass on the road/get bare asses in print!

Spam of the day:

Ralph Lauren is definitely an outline to the American dream: the long grass, antique crystal , the name Marble horse . His product , no matter whether clothing or furniture , deciding on perfume or containers, have focused on the top of the class customers yearning for an ideal life .

I don’t know; I’ve always found Ralph Lauren to be kind of schizophrenic, yo-yoing back and forth between cowboy kitsch and snooty aristocratic aesthetics. I guess they both feature lots of horsies.

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¹ Damn you, anonymous donor that gave US$1 at the last minute and ruined the US$69,269 total!

3am EMT calls, I will never — eight years into this game — get used to you. Particularly not 3am working structure fires. Doubly particularly not 3am working structure fires where I also get rained on while also getting swarmed by flying ants that are attracted to all the bright lights. Hey, people that smoke carelessly and pitch your still-burning butts into the bushes next to your front porch? Next time wait another 45 minutes and the rain will obviate the need to get my ass out of bed¹.

• Kickstarter wrap-ups: a month ago I noted the launched of the book-kickers for Strong Female Protagonist and Evil, Inc Volume 8 wherein I noted that the former looked like a fast success and the latter an outlier. Looking at the daily data, SFP followed the standard curve of strong start, long tail, and trend upward in the closing days; EIv8, on the other hand, was much wobblier, and featured both zero-dollar and negative-dollar days before finishing strongly.

  Accordingly, the FFF was pretty on-mark for SFP (actual: US$60,974; predicted: $US63,000 +/- US$21,000, just about precisely in the middle of the range), but EIv8 was predicted to run US$7.5K (under goal) to US$15K, and finished with US$15,150 (outside the range). I think the key difference was the just over 200 backers for EIv8 vs nearly 2000 for SFP; as I’ve mentioned previously, sample sizes of less than 500 are pretty much useless, so I think the FFF will have to be modified². We will make this into a science yet!

• Speaking of books, two months ago I was hoping that Minna Sundberg could find somebody to distribute her very large print collection of A Red Tail’s Dream from this side of the Atlantic Ocean. It’ll still be an expensive (and worth every penny, it’s gorgeous inside) book, but the shipping could hopefully be reduced. Ask and ye shall receive:
  

  A note to possible book wanters in the USA though: Hiveworks (that comic thing I’m part of) is in the process of opening up a collective online store for all the member comics, and you will be able to buy signed copies of “A Redtail’s Dream” from over there instead. Since it’s based in the US, the delivery time will be just a few days instead of a few weeks, and it’s also possible that it might be a little bit cheaper. The aimed launch date is sometime late next month, so if you’re on the fence of buying a copy or still saving up it might be worth waiting for that. :3 *End info*

  This particular book-wanter is glad he didn’t wait because that would have been months more of book wanting instead of book having, but the possibility of buying stuff from Sundberg as well as (oh, let’s see) the aforementioned Corsetto and Moen, Jim Zub, a stack of Strip Searchmonauts, David Willis, Ronnie Filyaw, Mary Cagle, Diana Nock, Jamie Noguchi, David McGuire, Audra Furuichi and Scott Yoshinaga, Bill Ellis and Dani O’Brien, and many, many more from one place with one shipping charge? Enticing.

Spam of the day:

Do you mind if I quote a few of your posts as long as I provide credit and sources back to your website? My blog site is in the exact same area of interest as yours and my visitors would certainly benefit from some of the information you present here.

I hate to nit-pick, but it appears that your “blog” is devoted to shilling knockoffs of designer sunglasses. So sure, quote away!

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¹ I must be sleep-deprived — I’m not usually loopy enough to use words like obviate.

² For those that care, the current Fleen Funding Formula is to take the Kicktraq trend figure at the 24-30 hour mark, and predict that the final number will be between 1/6 and 1/3 of that predicted value (or, put another way, PV/4 +/- PV/12). I think for FFF mark 2, I’ll tighten up the range a bit: make it PV/4 +/- PV/20, but only for campaigns that show at least 200 backers in that initial period. For lesser backer counts, I think the formulas break down and won’t be reliable.

We’ll see tomorrow how this works against the Oh Joy, Sex Toy (original prediction: US$97.5 +/- US$32.5K; FFFmk2: US$97.5K +/- US$19.5K) and Slingshot Across America (original prediction: not made, but would have been US$52.5K +/- US$17.5K; FFFmk2: US$52.5K +/- US$10.5K).

Yep, as I suspected when I first heard a week back¹, Anthony Clark and KC Green have themselves a winner in BACK. We know almost nothing at this point, despite eight pages of backstory², except that there’s a grave, and somebody crawling out of it in a bad mood, and maybe some witches? I’m counting down the hours until next Wednesday and the two pages that will come with it

If the world were to end (in much the way it appears to have done in BACK) and I could choose just one webcomicker to let into my apocalypse shelter, there’s an excellent chance that it would be Randy Milholland. He is one of the kindest, most genuine people I’ve ever met (in comics or out), scary looking (good for keeping away mutants), and excellent (and funny!) conversationalist, and he’s got enough meat on his bones to keep a skinny dude like me going for a month, easy.

I kid because I love, and also because Randy (of all people) will appreciate the sentiment. So it gives me great pleasure that today is a significant day for him:

Ten years of self employment. Eep.

For those that don’t remember, a good 18 months before this here crime against blogging launched, Milholland was working a fairly miserable (in the soul-killing sense as well as the crappy pay sense) day job, and some people were bitching publicly that he wasn’t providing his free entertainments to them often enough. Milholland issued a challenge in the form of a one-time only fundraiser: if readers donated a total of US$24,000 — an amount equivalent to a year’s salary — he’d quit his job and do the comic full time.

His goal and deadline were met, and as a result not a week goes by that somebody doesn’t throw the fundraiser in his face in an attempt to “prove” that he “owes” them more comics than he’s presently providing for free³. Oh, yeah, and those of us who aren’t entitled pricks have gotten about 2500 comics out of the deal, so if you’re one of those people bitching at Randy, please stop.

Now I honestly don’t recall if kicked a few bucks to Milholland ten years back or not, but I do remember that the fundraiser got me a nice conversation which led to my first interactions with Randy. In 2004, the Harvey Awards were given out in conjunction with MoCCA Fest, and I happened to be seated at a table before the speechifying when a lanky gentleman with a truly impressive nest of hair threw a leather jacket over the back of the chair next to me and held out his hand. Hi, he said, I’m Neil.

I looked Mr Gaiman square in the eye and said You certainly are and I don’t remember much after that until his keynote.⁴ He mentioned the wave of creators that were existing outside of publishing companies and dealing directly with their audiences, holding Milholland’s fundraiser success earlier that week as an example.

When Gaiman returned to the table, I leaned over to ask him if he’d followed Something Positive before Milholland started making news for his funding challenge and he confirmed that he enjoyed the strip a great deal. At my request, he sketched on and autographed the evening’s program to Randy, which I mailed to him later. This was before Randy and I had ever met, and once we knew each other the look on his face when he put Gary from the internet together with Gary who sent me the Gaiman sketch was a moment I’ll treasure.⁵

⁴ Not quite true; I remember that as he was looking over his notes for his keynote speech, Gaiman discovered that two pages in the middle were missing and asked if anybody had a pen. I did, and in about 15 minutes he recreated enough of what he wanted to say that I couldn’t tell where the replacement content was in the talk. Man’s a genius.

⁵ Also treasured: the placecard that Gaiman left on the table after the meal, which is in my possession and an heirloom of my house. No, I’m not a crazed stalker, why would you ask?/a

It is too late for you to get an Artist Edition of Angela Melick’s third Wasted Talent collection, Cubicle Warrior. Here are several statements that occur to me regarding that previous sentence and related facts:

• Sucks to be you, Bunky. Maybe you can pick up the regular book and get Melick to sketch in it at one of her infrequent convention appearances.
• Those appearances may infrequent due to the fact that Melick spends a lot of this volume full of horrible diseases, and conventions are not only a pain to get to, they are incubators of plague. Perhaps she should take the same precautions she took in advance of her honeymoon trip before wandering over to a convention center full o’ fans.
• There has never been a more misleading webcomic title than “Wasted Talent”. Nothing about Melick’s talents in either comicking or the day job (as a design engineer) is wasted. For that matter, neither of those areas of endeavour are dependent on some innate talent that she had — they’re dependent on her skill, which was earned through a hell of a lot of work.
• The lead time on producing a book are significant; the comics in this collection include the time when Melick was finishing and shipping her first book. It occurs to me that the last time I saw Melick in person was NEWW 2 in November of 2010; since that time she’s achieved her PEng license, shifted employers (to avoid the inevitable), released her second book, seen that job evaporate, landed another job that calls for awesomeness, and continued to explain exactly what engineers are to an unsuspecting world.
• Despite a general stigma in the culture (and definitely in the profession), Melick’s been open about dealing with anxiety and depression. While those comics may look lighthearted (and they are), keep in mind they are years old, and with the distance of time (and a greater degree of acceptance in the culture and profession) Melick’s been forthcoming about how the truth behind the humo[u]r in her comic end-notes.

  It’s because of people taking a public stand that the misconceptions of depression, anxiety, and other mental illness will finally be swept away. It’s brave and honest and she has my utmost respect.

• Also: moustaches. Respect.

So: brave chronicler of her own life, ambassador between the engineering tribe¹ and those that don’t quite get us, designer of sustainable technologies to lessen the impact we have on our world, and actual student of longsword fighting² … Angela Melick is basically my hero, and if you don’t follow her adventures there isn’t enough awesomeness in your life.

Spam of the day:

I’m really enjoying the design and layout of your site. It’s a very easy on the eyes which makes it much more pleasant for me to come here and visit more often. Did you hire out a developer to create your theme? Exceptional work!

WordPress theme by Jon Rosenberg, all backend WordPress wrangling by Philip Hofer, both of whom I recommend without reservation. Pay them money to do stuff for you.

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¹ Right-hand rule, fool.

² As a result of Melick’s portrayal of longsword practice, I’ve found myself looking for such classes near me. Oh and what’s this? A sister school here in New Jersey that offers classes in drawing and sheathing the traditional Japanese sword, and executing the perfect cut? If I get sucked into iaido, it’s because of you, Jam.

A number of Kickstarts to follow up on today. Let’s take a look, shall we?

• We’ve just reached the midpoint of Augie and the Green Knight’s campaign, and is flirting with US$260,000 in funding. At this point in their 30-day campaigns, To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure was sitting about US$250,000 (43% of an eventual US$581K) and The Tomorrow Girl was about US$320,000 (or 61% of an eventual US$535K). I chose those two projects for comparison because of the similar level of popularity of their creators, and the similarity of the project: a pure book in fancy packaging (like TTG) that spawned lots of related-media spinoffs (like TBoNTB).

  Assuming a similar trajectory, AatGK is about 52% +/- 9% of its way to final total, putting it in the range of US$498K +/- let’s call it US$45K. Given my original prediction was US$400K +/- US$134K, we certainly seem to be heading for the high end of that range, and the 3rd or 4th most-funded publishing project¹ of all time (and probably the #1 children’s book).

  Oh, yeah, and the audiobook is going to be narrated by Ellen McClain, a factor which isn’t actually juicing the total. See, author Zach Weinersmith and Breadpig have decided that all supporters of any reward (that’s US$10 and up) will get the audiobook. Had they required supporters to get a physical reward (US$25 and up), I’m pretty sure you would have seen a majority of the nearly 700 bottom-tier backers upping their pledges by US$15 each — but Weinersmith isn’t in this for the money. He just wants to get a story with a kick-ass heroine out into as many hands as possible.

• Finishing soon: Danielle Corsetto’s summer tour funding, and Hurricane Erika’s book-kicker, both of whom are about three days from finishing, both of whom are getting into the end-of-campaign uptick, and both of whom at this point are applying pretty much every extra dollar to other people.

  Thanks to their backers, Corsetto (as of this writing) is paying each of her guest artists an extra US$100 per strip while she’s on tour, and Moen (ditto) is bumping her guest artists (future and — crucially — also past guest artists) to US$90 per page (the average strip being 4-5 pages). Both ladies are at their top of their respective games, both of them deserve your support for their own work, and both of them deserve it even more because they’re supporting other creators in a tangible, food-and-rent fashion.

• Long since finished, but you can still get in on the Kickstart backing because they’re nice guys: the Christopher Hastings-inspired card game of ninja combat and awesomeness is about to start shipping, meaning you have mere days left to pre-order at the same pricepoints and bundles as the original Kickstart. You might not have gotten your act together last November, but now your can get KS-exclusive rewards because they think you’re still pretty cool.
• Not Kickstarter-related, but worth your attention in its own terrifying way: Paradox Space, the official place for official works set in the Homestuck offical extended universe, has finally gotten around to a Sweet Bro and Hell Of Jeff story. The madness descends once again, this time springing from the fertile, febrile imagination of KC Green, a match so perfect that it defies imagination. Dear readers: Summer Sea Fun is the last comic you need ever read.

Spam of the day:

aspect each in the costs for that mortgage, particularly when it is possible to find unnecessary service fees apart from the fascination. [sic throughout]

Apart from the fascination? Is the fascination not enough for you?

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¹ That Planet Money shirt is still not publishing, and screw squirrels anyway.

Ian Jones-Quartey is an old friend of this page; we at Fleen have followed him since before there was a Fleen, even before mention of his first webcomic didn’t cause him to threaten to delay its return by a month. We have bar-crawled with him, attended weddings with him, discussed tacos with him, and been generally impressed to hell and back with him.

All that history just got reset; today is the first day of Anno Jones-Quartey, a new calendar marked by the time that Ian JQ dropped some serious wisdom:

[Tumblr question]: Being that you’re an industry expert, I was hoping if there were any tips or advice you can give to an aspiring Animation Series creator. Any lessons you’ve learned from working in the industry from so many years. What advice would you give yourself if you were starting out trying to get you’re animation picked up by a major network?

[Answer]:Yeah I have a big piece of advice! Stop “aspiring”!!!!! Your aspirations end now!!!!

YES YOU! DON’T WAIT! START NOW! [emphasis original]

Jones-Quartey goes on for some length, and every bit of it is worth reading and absorbing, whatever field of creative endeavour you may find yourself in. If you can read through the entire thing and not feel compelled to murder Aspiration in favor of Doing, then you weren’t ever going to Do anyway. Well done, Mr JQ; if nothing else you’ve prompted me to get off my ass about a particular project I’ve been kicking around for way too damn long.

• No note, no celebration, just another strip (the 5114th if my math is correct): 14 years of Schlock Mercenary from my evil twin, who has come a considerable way from Day One (or Day Minus 5114, BJ-Q). Thanks for all the laughs and mayhem, Howard.
• As many suspected might happen, STRIPPED will be showing at San Diego Comic Con on Friday night:
  

  Cool! @strippedfilm will be screening at the official San Diego Comic-Con Film Festival, Friday July 25th. Join us if you’re at SDCC!

  I’ve seen it a bunch of times now, but I think I want to see it on a large screen surrounded by people.

• Oh, nuthin’, just an awesome Bee & Puppycat by Becky Dreistadt, no big deal.

Advance warning: almost no chance of a posting tomorrow, as I have to get up stupid-early for a cross-continent flight that will occupy me pretty much all day. Enjoy the weekend.

They’ve been considered since time immemorial, by every culture that encountered them, as the craftiest, trickiest, least trustworthy of all living things¹; born deceivers, masters of untruths and illusions, foxes manage to deal with their reputation via the simple expedient of not really giving a shit what you think of them. They define reality on their own terms, and screw you if you don’t like it². It’s possible that they grow out of it eventually, and it’s only the very young of their kind that are responsible for the popular image of wreaking havoc (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not).

• So imagine how devastating it must be to love one of them. Not merely be manipulated into falling for a fox, but to truly, deeply, madly love one. What would you do to keep that most capricious of creatures yours and yours alone? Terrible things, things that would never have occurred to you otherwise, things that leave a hole in your soul, and perhaps the world around you. Things — and this is the worst part — things that the fox doesn’t make you do, but things that you decided to do on your own. Things with consequences.

  Nobody understands the delicate balance of the world, and the consequences that come about from disturbing it too greatly — like Emily Carroll. Her fairy tales, whether they take place in the far-off long-ago or the here-and-now, show us the menace, the darkness that comes of wanting things too much, acting too rashly, and giving in to your worst impulses.

  The fox at the heart of The Hole The Fox Did Make (released today and stop whatever you are doing right goddamn now and go read it) is barely a presence; in his absence — in the aftermath of loving a fox — there are consequences a’plenty, and lessons to be learned. Chief among them: when a fox whispers in your ears with honeyed words, don’t pay too much heed, for foxes are capricious and care little for the pain they leave in their wake.

• You know who will never listen to the honeyed words of foxes? Bunnies. Know who draws a lot of bunnies these days? Dave Roman. And finally, Dave Roman pointed me to a tweet this morning by Eric Orchard that is relevant to the idea of foxes:
  

  Fox & Duck, my new webcomic is now up! http://foxandduck.tumblr.com/page/2

  There’s not much to Fox & Duck so far — a header and first-chapter splash illustration, a first page that leaves a marvelous, moody impression of dark magics (but not too dark), perhaps a curse or two. The fox and the duck haven’t made any appearances yet, but it appears that this fox is doing his best to get the duck back to a normal ducky state, wherein he doesn’t breathe fire or have devil horns. That would be reasonably un-foxlike behavior, and I for one am intrigued by this heterodox idea of what foxes are, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

• Okay, I’m really stretching the theme for the day, but don’t you think that Boulet looks a little like a fox? That red hair, and artists are all tricky, and I’d like to think that foxes have a French accent. Anyway, Boulet’s got a great little video talking about Augie and the Green Knight, with an even faster version of the sped-up watercolor video from the other day. Oh, and like all foxes, Boulet has a fib or two, but he gets caught out rather too easily to be a good fox. I’m torn as to whether or not I should encourage him to practice that or not.

Spam of the day:

Can’t find any. I think a fox stole it. So, uh, thanks I guess.
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¹ Although I would argue that squirrels are definitely the biggest assholes in the forest animal métier.

² Trenchant, dry observation about how they are perhaps the perfect symbol for eponymous “news” organization.

Sometimes I’m late to noticing things, sometimes it’s others that could have been a little more prompt, and sometimes there’s entirely rational procrastination involved. Let’s party.

• Interesting idea that I finally saw — a multi-creator Patreon, essentially, where one creator-of-record is gathering the funds to pay contributors to an e-magazine. Worlds Without Master takes as its primary topic sword-and-sorcery short stories, with a particular focus on the common-as-dirt barely-distinguishable-from-the-villagers adventurer. No World-Saving Wielders of the Gods Will, no Promised Ones or Prophecy-Fulfillers.

  I noticed the campaign because the first four issues of WWM feature lots of creators, but the only one to show up in each issue (other than project supremo Epidiah Ravachol) is Bryant Paul Johnson (of the now sadly-concluded Teaching Baby Paranoia), who’s contributing an ongoing comic called Oh, The Beating Drum. Interesting idea, I’ll be looking to see if others adopt this masthead-slash-bullpen approach to Patreonage.

• Also a few days behind the curve: I see that Andrews & McMeel — the big-time publishing arm of Universal Press Syndicate and publisher of Matthew Inman’s Oatmeal collections — is now offering mini e-books of various comics. For the most part, these are syndicated-type comics (Marmaduke! Luann!), but I notice some less-mainstream offerings, including Skin Horse by Shaenon Garrity and C Jeffrey Wells and Savage Chickens by Doug Savage. In the case of Skin Horse they are single story arcs, and if memory serves they are from different print collections, which means you can’t just grab a couple e-minis at three bucks a pop as a replacement for a proper print collection.
• I think that The AV Club may have fallen prey to a situation I’ve often found myself in — a story that is timely gets pushed for space, just until tomorrow, then the next week, then later still; by the time it runs it’s not really timely any more, but when it means that you get a really nice writeup of the first two Bad Machinery collections, I can abide a little lateness. It’s also hard to argue with their conclusion: Anyone not reading [Bad Machinery] is missing out on one of the great achievements in contemporary comics.
• David Malki !, as this page has noted in the past, is a man of ideas; perhaps too many ideas, or at least ideas that Man Was Not Meant To Dabble With. I am not saying that he made a poor choice in offering to hand-write every card in a copy of the Machine of Death game for a single backer willing to cough up US$488; I am saying that perhaps making that support tier available before knowing how many stretch goals would be met, how many additional creators would be contributing cards, was perhaps just a wee bit optimistic.

  Because the total number of cards he became obligated to hand-write turned out to be 960, and he understandably did not drop everything in his life to do that. But now he has, and you can watch as he gets hours and hours and hours into a process that he seems bound and determined to accomplish in one session. Will he succeed? Only the next video will tell.

• It can’t really be late if the announcements just came out, can it? In case you hadn’t seen them, two awesome projects will be materializing soon. On the one hand, Anthony Clark and KC Green will be collaborating on a new webcomic, and I never knew how much I wanted this until the word went out yesterday:

  It’s called BACK!!! It’s a western fantasy story about the end of the world. Anthony is on art duties and I’m writing it and helping design characters. I also did the little drawing on the top, but Anthony has got the rest covered.

  BACK goes live on 18 June, with an instant archive of pages, followed by two more each Wednesday. I am taking the very unusual step of adding this to the blogroll before it even launches because you know it’s going to be that good.

  And just a bit later — 26 August to be precise — we will finally get the sixth volume of Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series. The books were delayed by Kibuishi’s rather serious illness last year, but now he’s back in form, and promising the conclusion of some of the story arcs that have been building over the past few years (though not all of them, certainly, as Amulet is scheduled to run ten books). Watch the official announcement from Kibuishi here.

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